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Zusatztext One of the most significant works of ethics published this decade. Klappentext By sending a few hundred dollars to a group like UNICEF! any well-off person can ensure that fewer poor children die! and that more live reasonably long! worthwhile lives. But even when knowing this! almost all of us send nothing and! among the contributors! most send precious little. What's the moral status of this behavior? To such common cases of letting die! our untutored response is that! while it's not very good! neither is the conduct wrong. How can we best explain this lenient intuitive assessment? In this hard-hitting new book! philosopher Peter Unger argues that! all too often! our moral intuitions about cases are generated not by the basic moral values we hold! but by psychological dispositions that prevent us from reacting in accord with our deep moral commitments. Through a detailed look at how these disorienting tendencies operate! Unger reveals that! on the good morality we already accept! our fatally unhelpful behavior is monstrously wrong. Confronting us with both arresting facts and easily followed instructions for lessening the suffering of youngsters in mortal danger! Living High and Letting Die can help us live the morally decent lives that agree with our wonderfully deep! and deeply wonderful! true moral values. Zusammenfassung Unger argues that our intuitions about ethical cases are generated not by basic moral values, but by certain distracting moral mechanisms that encourage deceptive reactions. He proposes a complex and novel metaethics arguing that we easily generate a lenient or tough context in which to make ethical assessments.
Info autore
Peter Unger is Professor of Philosophy at New York University. He is the author of
Ignorance (OUP 1975, 2002),
Philosophical Relativity (1984, OUP 2002), and
Identity, Consciousness, and Value (OUP 1990).
