Ulteriori informazioni
It is widely agreed that to treat some human beings as less worthy of concern and respect than others is to lose sight of their humanity. But what does this moral blindness amount to? The essays in this volume offer a wide range of competing, yet overlapping, answers to this question. Some essays appeal to distinctively human capacities. Others argue that our obligations to one another are ultimately grounded in self-interest, or certain shared interests, or our natural sociability. This rich selection of proposals encourages us to rethink some of our own deepest assumptions about the moral significance of being human.
Sommario
- Acknowledgements
- List of Contributors
- Introduction
- Sarah Buss
- 1. Decomposing Humanity
- Jon Garthoff
- 2. Do the Ancients See Value in Humanity?
- Richard Bett
- 3. Spinoza's Anti-Humanism: Human Value and Dignity
- Yitzhak Melamed
- 4. Slavery, Freedom, and Human Value in Early Modern Philosophy
- Julia Jorati
- 5. Valuing Humanity in 'Common Life': Grotius and Pufendorf on Equal 'Sociable' Dignity
- Stephen Darwall
- 6. The Dignity of Humanity
- Ralf M. Bader
- 7. Great Beyond All Comparison
- Kenneth Walden
- 8. Fichte on the Value of Rational Agency
- Michelle Kosch
- 9. Explaining the Value of Human Beings
- L. Nandi Theunissen
- 10. Are We of Equal Moral Worth?
- Andrea Sangiovanni
- 11. The Normative Significance of Humanity
- Peter Railton
- 12. Finding the Humean Value in Humean Humanity
- Don Garrett
- 13. Other People
- Kieran Setiya
- 14. Learning from Love: Reasoning, Respect, and the Value of a Person
- Kyla Ebels-Duggan
- 15. The Invention of Value and the Value of Humanity
- Elijah Millgram
- 16. The Human Foundations of our Political Ideals: An Essay on Gandhi's Political Radicalism
- Akeel Bilgrami
- Index
Info autore
Sarah Buss is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Michigan. She is the author of articles on autonomy, moral responsibility, practical rationality, respect for persons, and various issues in ethics, and co-editor of The Contours of Agency: Essays on Themes from Harry Frankfurt (2001).
Nandi Theunissen is Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of Pittsburgh. She works on foundational topics in ethics, with a focus on the nature of value, and is the author of The Value of Humanity (OUP, 2020), as well as essays on Kant's moral philosophy, regress arguments, moral realism, and the nature of well-being.
Riassunto
To treat some human beings as less worthy of concern and respect than others is to lose sight of their humanity. But what does this moral blindness amount to? What are we missing when we fail to appreciate the value of humanity?
The essays in this volume offer a wide range of competing, yet overlapping, answers to these questions. Some essays examine influential views in the history of Western philosophy. In others, philosophers currently working in ethics develop and defend their own views. Some essays appeal to distinctively human capacities. Others argue that our obligations to one another are ultimately grounded in self-interest, or certain shared interests, or our natural sociability. The philosophers featured here disagree about whether the value of human beings depends on the value of anything else. They disagree about how reason and rationality relate to this value, and even about whether we can reason our way to discovering it. This rich selection of proposals encourages us to rethink some of our own deepest assumptions about the moral significance of being human.
Testo aggiuntivo
This book presents major authors addressing a central topic in ethics. The essays range creatively over the value of persons, love and respect, dignity and moral standing, reasons and rights, consent and sovereignty, and a multitude of philosophers important for these topics. These rich and insightful essays—many contributing significantly to the history of ethics—illuminate Kant, as well as earlier figures and later authors as different as Nietzsche and Gandhi.
