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The Ethical Project / Philip Kitcher.

By: Material type: TextTextPublisher: Cambridge, MA : Harvard University Press, [2011]Copyright date: ©2014Description: 1 online resource (432 p.) : 2 tablesContent type:
Media type:
Carrier type:
ISBN:
  • 9780674061446
  • 9780674063075
Subject(s): DDC classification:
  • 171/.7 22
LOC classification:
  • BJ1311 .K53 2011eb
Other classification:
  • online - DeGruyter
Online resources: Available additional physical forms:
  • Issued also in print.
Contents:
Frontmatter -- Contents -- Introduction -- Part One. An Analytical History -- Chapter 1. The Springs of Sympathy -- Chapter 2. Normative Guidance -- Chapter 3. Experiments of Living -- Chapter 4. One Thing after Another? -- Part Two. A Metaethical Perspective -- Chapter 5. Troubles with Truth -- Chapter 6. Possibilities of Progress -- Chapter 7. Naturalistic Fallacies? -- Part Three. A Normative Stance -- Chapter 8. Progress, Equality, and the Good -- Chapter 9. Method in Ethics -- Chapter 10. Renewing the Project -- Conclusion -- Acknowledgments -- Index
Summary: Principles of right and wrong guide the lives of almost all human beings, but we often see them as external to ourselves, outside our own control. In a revolutionary approach to the problems of moral philosophy, Philip Kitcher makes a provocative proposal: Instead of conceiving ethical commands as divine revelations or as the discoveries of brilliant thinkers, we should see our ethical practices as evolving over tens of thousands of years, as members of our species have worked out how to live together and prosper. Elaborating this radical new vision, Kitcher shows how the limited altruistic tendencies of our ancestors enabled a fragile social life, how our forebears learned to regulate their interactions with one another, and how human societies eventually grew into forms of previously unimaginable complexity. The most successful of the many millennia-old experiments in how to live, he contends, survive in our values today.Drawing on natural science, social science, and philosophy to develop an approach he calls "pragmatic naturalism," Kitcher reveals the power of an evolving ethics built around a few core principles-including justice and cooperation-but leaving room for a diversity of communities and modes of self-expression. Ethics emerges as a beautifully human phenomenon-permanently unfinished, collectively refined and distorted generation by generation. Our human values, Kitcher shows, can be understood not as a final system but as a project-the ethical project-in which our species has engaged for most of its history, and which has been central to who we are.
Holdings
Item type Current library Call number URL Status Notes Barcode
eBook eBook Biblioteca "Angelicum" Pont. Univ. S.Tommaso d'Aquino Nuvola online online - DeGruyter (Browse shelf(Opens below)) Online access Not for loan (Accesso limitato) Accesso per gli utenti autorizzati / Access for authorized users (dgr)9780674063075

Frontmatter -- Contents -- Introduction -- Part One. An Analytical History -- Chapter 1. The Springs of Sympathy -- Chapter 2. Normative Guidance -- Chapter 3. Experiments of Living -- Chapter 4. One Thing after Another? -- Part Two. A Metaethical Perspective -- Chapter 5. Troubles with Truth -- Chapter 6. Possibilities of Progress -- Chapter 7. Naturalistic Fallacies? -- Part Three. A Normative Stance -- Chapter 8. Progress, Equality, and the Good -- Chapter 9. Method in Ethics -- Chapter 10. Renewing the Project -- Conclusion -- Acknowledgments -- Index

restricted access online access with authorization star

http://purl.org/coar/access_right/c_16ec

Principles of right and wrong guide the lives of almost all human beings, but we often see them as external to ourselves, outside our own control. In a revolutionary approach to the problems of moral philosophy, Philip Kitcher makes a provocative proposal: Instead of conceiving ethical commands as divine revelations or as the discoveries of brilliant thinkers, we should see our ethical practices as evolving over tens of thousands of years, as members of our species have worked out how to live together and prosper. Elaborating this radical new vision, Kitcher shows how the limited altruistic tendencies of our ancestors enabled a fragile social life, how our forebears learned to regulate their interactions with one another, and how human societies eventually grew into forms of previously unimaginable complexity. The most successful of the many millennia-old experiments in how to live, he contends, survive in our values today.Drawing on natural science, social science, and philosophy to develop an approach he calls "pragmatic naturalism," Kitcher reveals the power of an evolving ethics built around a few core principles-including justice and cooperation-but leaving room for a diversity of communities and modes of self-expression. Ethics emerges as a beautifully human phenomenon-permanently unfinished, collectively refined and distorted generation by generation. Our human values, Kitcher shows, can be understood not as a final system but as a project-the ethical project-in which our species has engaged for most of its history, and which has been central to who we are.

Issued also in print.

Mode of access: Internet via World Wide Web.

In English.

Description based on online resource; title from PDF title page (publisher's Web site, viewed 24. Aug 2021)