Reconciling Our Aims: In Search of Bases for Ethics
Allan Gibbard
Abstract
This book represents the Berkeley Tanner Lectures given by the ethical theorist, Allan Gibbard. It explores the nature of normative thought and the bases of ethics. The first chapter explores the role of intuitions in moral thinking and offers a way of thinking about the intuitive method of moral inquiry that both places this activity within the natural world and makes sense of it as an indispensable part of our lives as planners. The next two chapters take up the kind of substantive ethical inquiry that was described in the first chapter, asking how we might live together on terms that none o ... More
This book represents the Berkeley Tanner Lectures given by the ethical theorist, Allan Gibbard. It explores the nature of normative thought and the bases of ethics. The first chapter explores the role of intuitions in moral thinking and offers a way of thinking about the intuitive method of moral inquiry that both places this activity within the natural world and makes sense of it as an indispensable part of our lives as planners. The next two chapters take up the kind of substantive ethical inquiry that was described in the first chapter, asking how we might live together on terms that none of us could reasonably reject. Since working at cross purposes loses fruits that might stem from cooperation, the book argues, any consistent ethos that meets this test would be, in a crucial way, utilitarian. It would reconcile our individual aims to establish, in Kant's phrase, a “kingdom of ends.”
Keywords:
normative thought,
ethics,
intuitions,
moral thinking,
intuitive method,
moral inquiry,
ethical inquiry,
cooperation,
utilitarianism,
Kant
Bibliographic Information
| Print publication date: 2008 |
Print ISBN-13: 9780195370423 |
| Published to Oxford Scholarship Online: October 2011 |
DOI:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195370423.001.0001 |
