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Zusatztext The book is conceptually rich. Any moral philosopher will find much to ponder here ... Pettit is here trying out a novel, multifaceted, and systematic approach to ethics, from which moral philosophers, whether or not they are ultimately persuaded, will have much to learn. Informationen zum Autor Philip Pettit is Laurence Rockefeller University Professor of Politics and Human Values at Princeton University. He is also Professor of Philosophy at the Australian National University. Kinch Hoekstra is Chancellor's Professor of Political Science and Law at University of California, Berkeley. Klappentext To know the nature of any phenomenon or practice, it is often a good idea to learn about how it might have emerged or might have been constructed. The Birth of Ethics offers an account of how morality might have emerged, without any planning, in a society with language but without any properly ethical concepts or practices. The conjectural history that it documents serves a philosophical purpose, for it directs us the role that morality plays in human lifeand the nature of morality that enables it to play that role. Zusammenfassung Imagine a human society, perhaps in pre-history, in which people were generally of a psychological kind with us, had the use of natural language to communicate with one another, but did not have any properly moral concepts in which to exhort one another to meet certain standards and to lodge related claims and complaints. According to The Birth of Ethics, the members of that society would have faced a set of pressures, and made a series of adjustments in response, sufficient to put them within reach of ethical concepts. Without any planning, they would have more or less inevitably evolved a way of using such concepts to articulate desirable patterns of behavior and to hold themselves and one another responsible to those standards. Sooner or later, they would have entered ethical space. While this central claim is developed as a thesis in conjectural history or genealogy, the aim of the exercise is philosophical. Assuming that it explains the emergence of concepts and practices that are more or less equivalent to ours, the story offers us an account of the nature and role of morality. It directs us to the function that ethics plays in human life and alerts us to the character in virtue of which it can serve that function. The emerging view of morality has implications for the standard range of questions in meta-ethics and moral psychology, and enables us to understand why there are divisions in normative ethics like that between consequentialist and Kantian approaches. Inhaltsverzeichnis Editor's Introduction: The View from Erewhon Kinch Hoekstra Introduction: The Guiding Ideas Chapter 1. Reconstructing Morality Chapter 2. Ground Zero Chapter 3. Committing to Others Chapter 4. Committing with Others Chapter 5. Discovering Desirability Chapter 6. Discovering Responsibility Chapter 7. Morality Reconstructed Conclusion: The Claims in Summary Michael Tomasello and Philip Pettit: An Exchange Michael Tomasello and Philip Pettit Commentary on Philip Pettit's The Birth of Ethics Michael Tomasello Reply to Michael Tomasello's Commentary Philip Pettit References Index ...
