Previous edition, 1st, published in 1971.

A key to modern studies of 18th century Western philosophy, the Treatise considers numerous classic philosophical issues, including causation, existence, freedom and necessity and morality. This abridged edition has an introduction which explain's Hume's thought and places it in the context of its times.

:Does social justice lose all application in the condition in which people are morally flawless? The answer, I will argue, is that it does not — justice might still have application. This is one lesson of my broader thesis in this paper, that there is a variety of conditions we would all regard as highly idealistic and unrealistic which are, nevertheless, not beyond justice. The idea of “circumstances of justice” developed especially by Hume and Rawls may seem to point in (...) a more realistic direction, but we can see that this is not so once we distinguish between conditions of need for norms of justice, conditions of their emergence, and conditions of applicability of the standard of justice. Justice, I argue, can have application even in conditions where no mechanism of justice is present or needed, such as the case of internalized motives of justice. (shrink)

One of Hume's most well-known works and a masterpiece of philosophy, A Treatise of Human Nature is indubitably worth taking the time to read.

Christine Korsgaard has become one of the leading interpreters of Kant's moral philosophy. She is identified with a small group of philosophers who are intent on producing a version of Kant's moral philosophy that is at once sensitive to its historical roots while revealing its particular relevance to contemporary problems. She rejects the traditional picture of Kant's ethics as a cold vision of the moral life which emphasises duty at the expense of love and value. Rather, Kant's work is seen (...) as providing a resource for addressing not only the metaphysics of morals, but also for tackling practical questions about personal relations, politics, and everyday human interaction. This collection contains some of the finest current work on Kant's ethics and will command the attention of all those involved in teaching and studying moral theory. (shrink)

Much contemporary egalitarian theorizing is broadly divided between luck egalitarians, such as G. A. Cohen, Richard Arneson, and John Roemer, and relational egalitarians, such as John Rawls, Samuel Scheffler, Josh Cohen, and me. The two camps disagree about how to conceive of equality: as an equal distribution of non-relational goods among individuals, or as a kind of social relation between persons - an equality of authority, status, or standing.This disagreement generates a second, about when unequal distributions of non-relational goods are (...) unjust. Luck egalitarians claim that inequality is unjust when it is accidental: when it is caused by morally arbitrary factors such as circumstances of birth. Relational egalitarians claim that inequality is unjust when it disadvantages people: when it reflects, embodies, or causes inequality of authority, status, or standing. (shrink)

The Concept of Law is one of the most influential texts in English-language jurisprudence. 50 years after its first publication its relevance has not diminished and in this third edition, Leslie Green adds an introduction that places the book in a contemporary context, highlighting key questions about Hart's arguments and outlining the main debates it has prompted in the field. The complete text of the second edition is replicated here, including Hart's Postscript, with fully updated notes to include modern references (...) and further reading. (shrink)

Cover -- Half Title -- Title -- Copyright -- Dedication -- Contents -- Acknowledgments -- 1 Preliminaries -- 1.1 What Normative Ethics Is -- 1.2 What Normative Ethics Is Not -- 1.3 Defending Normative Theories -- 1.4 Factors and Foundations -- PART I FACTORS -- 2 The Good -- 2.1 Promoting the Good -- 2.2 Well-Being -- 2.3 The Total View -- 2.4 Equality -- 2.5 Culpability, Fairness, and Desert -- 2.6 Consequentialism -- 3 Doing Harm -- 3.1 Deontology -- (...) 3.2 Thresholds -- 3.3 The Scope of the Constraint -- 3.4 Doing and Allowing -- 3.5 Intending Harm -- 4 Other Constraints -- 4.1 Lying -- 4.2 Promises -- 4.3 Special Obligations -- 4.4 Conventions -- 4.5 Duties to Oneself -- 5 Further Factors -- 5.1 Demanding Too Much -- 5.2 Options -- 5.3 Rights -- 5.4 Interaction -- PART 2 FOUNDATIONS -- 6 Teleological Foundations -- 6.1 Foundational Theories -- 6.2 Egoism -- 6.3 Virtues -- 6.4 Act Consequentialism -- 6.5 Rules -- 7 Deontological Foundations -- 7.1 Contractarianism -- 7.2 Universalizability -- 7.3 The Ideal Observer -- 7.4 Reflection -- 7.5 Foundational Pluralism -- 7.6 Possibilities -- Suggested Readings -- References -- About the Book and Author -- Index. (shrink)

In Ethics for a Broken World : Imagining Philosophy after Catastrophe, Tim Mulgan applies a number of influential moral and political theories to a “broken world ”: a world of environmental catastrophe in which resources are insufficient to meet everyone’s basic needs. This paper shows that John Rawls’ conception of justice as fairness has very different implications for a broken world than Mulgan suggests it does. §1 briefly summarizes Rawls’ conception of justice, including how Rawls uses a hypothetical model – (...) the “original position” – to argue for principles of justice. §2 explains how Mulgan uses a variation of Rawls’ original position – a broken original position – to argue that justice as fairness requires a “fair survival lottery” in a broken world. §3 shows that the parties to a broken original position have reasons not to agree to such a survival lottery. §4 then shows that Mulgan’s argument hangs upon a false assumption: that there are no viable options to adopt in a broken world besides some kind of survival lottery. Finally, §5 shows that the parties to a broken original position would instead rationally agree to a scheme of equal rights and opportunities to earn or forfeit shares of scarce resources on the basis of each person’s comparative contribution to human survival. (shrink)

Theorists have long debated whether John Rawls’ conception of justice as fairness can be extended to nonideal (i.e. unjust) social and political conditions, and if so, what the proper way of extending it is. This paper argues that in order to properly extend justice as fairness to nonideal conditions, Rawls’ most famous innovation – the original position – must be reconceived in the form of a “nonideal original position.” I begin by providing a new analysis of the ideal/nonideal theory distinction (...) within Rawls’ theoretical framework. I then systematically construct a nonideal original position, showing that although its parties must have Rawls’ principles of ideal justice and priority relations as background aims, the parties should be entirely free to weigh those aims against whatever burdens and benefits they might face under nonideal conditions. Next, I show that the parties ought to aim to secure for themselves a special class of nonideal primary goods: all-purpose goods similar to Rawls’ original primary goods, but which in this case are all-purpose goods individuals might use to (A) promote Rawlsian ideals under nonideal conditions, (B) weigh Rawls’ principles of ideal justice and priority relations against whatever burdens and benefits they might face under nonideal conditions, and (C) effectively pursue their most favored weighting thereof. I then defend a provisional list of nonideal primary goods which include opportunities to participate effectively in equitable and inclusive grassroots reform movements guided by a series of substantive aims. Finally, I briefly speculate on how the parties to the nonideal original position might deliberate to principles of nonideal justice for distributing nonideal primary goods, suggesting that those goods should be distributed in proportion to unjust disadvantage. (shrink)

This article starts by identifying the phenomena that Hume thought to explain the need, hence utility, of a rudimentary system of property. Then, and prominently, it considers Hume’s arguments for believing that only a system of private property is justifiable. Hume argues that only in a society with adequate but not absolute abundance and altruism does property have a point or purpose. Property’s basic job, then, is that of addressing conflict and disagreement among persons of limited altruism and means, and (...) so property’s primary purpose is regulative and adjudicative. This point is not disturbed by fluctuations in altruism or the extent of abundance that might result from differing social arrangements. Thus Hume’s explanation of property is logically separable from the question of what kind of system of ownership is justifiable. This raises the central topic of the paper: Does Hume provide arguments showing not only that a system of private property is justifiable but that only such a system will suffice to avoid a condition of chaos and savagery? As argued here, while Hume’s arguments to this conclusion repay careful consideration, they fail and to show that only a system of ownership dominated by private property is justifiable. (shrink)

One of the central debates within contemporary Anglo-American political philosophy concerns how to formulate an egalitarian theory of distributive justice which gives coherent expression to egalitarian convictions and withstands the most powerful anti-egalitarian objections. This book brings together many of the key contributions to that debate by some of the world’s leading political philosophers: Richard Arneson, G.A. Cohen, Ronald Dworkin, Thomas Nagel, Derek Parfit, John Rawls, T.M. Scanlon, and Larry Temkin.

David Hume famously states, in his A Treatise of Human Nature, “that ’tis only from the selfishness and confin’d generosity of men, along with the scanty provision nature has made for his wants, that justice derives its origin”.1 This is Hume’s summary of the conditions under which the very idea of rules of justice makes practical sense, and he effectively repeats it in the Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals.2 To put it briefly at the outset, Hume’s point is simply (...) this: if there was either a superabundance or drastic scarcity of resources, or if everyone were either completely and unfailingly virtuous or completely and unfailingly wicked, we would not need rules. (shrink)

The Metaphysics of Morals is Kant's major work in applied moral philosophy in which he deals with the basic principles of rights and of virtues. It comprises two parts: the 'Doctrine of Right', which deals with the rights which people have or can acquire, and the 'Doctrine of Virtue', which deals with the virtues they ought to acquire. Mary Gregor's translation, revised for publication in the Cambridge Texts in the History of Philosophy series, is the only complete translation of the (...) whole text, and includes extensive annotation on Kant's difficult and sometimes unfamiliar vocabulary. A new introduction by Roger Sullivan sets the work in its historical and philosophical context. This volume will be of wide interest to students of ethics and of legal and political philosophy. (shrink)

In this article, I analyze the circumstances of justice, that is, the background conditions that are necessary and sufficient for justice to exist between individual parties in society. Contemporary political philosophers almost unanimously accept an account of these circumstances attributed to David Hume. I argue that the conditions of this standard account are neither sufficient nor necessary conditions for justice. In particular, I contend that both a Hobbesian state of nature and a prisoner’s dilemma are cases in which the conditions (...) of the standard account obtain and yet no justice exists between parties. I propose an alternative set of generic circumstances of justice motivated by examples from game theory. Parties are in these generic circumstances with respect to each other when: (1) they are engaged in a conflictual coordination game with multiple strict Nash equilibrium points where, at any of these equilibria, some parties do not receive their greatest payoffs, and (2) they have common knowledge that each party is rational and follows her end of a strict equilibrium where no party receives her greatest payoff. These two conditions reflect the idea that justice requires all parties to make some sacrifices so that others can have more of the goods they need and want. I argue that these generic circumstances are necessary and sufficient conditions for parties to follow generic norms of justice, that is, mutually beneficial practices that require some sacrifices. Key Words: common knowledge • conflictual coordination • correlated equilibrium • moderate selfishness • moderate variable scarcity • rough equality. (shrink)

This chapter delineates two types of ideal theory that are found in Rawls’s corpus of work. The first is ideal-method theory, which is theory constructed using idealizing assumptions that do not directly correspond with the actual world. The second is ideal-content theory, namely criteria for assessing whether something is a perfectly justice institution. The chapter provides an independent justification for both types of theory, arguing that ideal-method theory is valuable within certain parameters; for instance, the idealizing assumption of strict compliance (...) helps to clarify the distinction between distributive and retributive justice. The chapter illuminates the value of ideal-content theory by clarifying and defending Rawls’s claim that nonideal theory depends on ideal-content theory. In particular, it argues that in order to gain a systematic grasp of the more pressing problems of nonideal theory it is plausible to argue that ideal-content theory is necessary. -/- . (shrink)

This book develops some of the most important themes of Sen's works over the last decade. He argues in a rich and subtle approach that we should be concerned with people's capabilities rather than their resources or welfare.

Introduction to the work David Hume described as the best of his many writings.

Imagine living in the future in a world already damaged by humankind, a world where resources are insufficient to meet everyone's basic needs and where a chaotic climate makes life precarious. Then imagine looking back into the past, back to our own time and assessing the ethics of the early twenty-first century. "Ethics for a Broken World" imagines how the future might judge us and how living in a time of global environmental degradation might utterly reshape the politics and ethics (...) of the future. This book is presented as a series of history of philosophy lectures given in the future, studying the classic texts from a past age of affluence, our own time. The central ethical questions of our time are shown to look very different from the perspective of a ruined world. The aim of "Ethics for a Broken" World is to look at our present with the benefit of hindsight - to reimagine contemporary philosophy in an historical context - and to highlight the contingency of our own moral and political ideals. (shrink)

It is a common assumption in ethics that everyone is due equal access to basic human goods. In our modern society, at least since the French Revolution, healthcare is counted along with food, shelter, and security as such a basic good. Anyone suffering from a treatable life-threatening disease can therefore, be seen as having a prima facie claim on medical treatment.

An epistemic account of the circumstances of justice allows one to make three important claims about the Humean and Rawlsian ‘standard account’ of those circumstances. First, and contrary to Hume, the possibility and necessity of justice are rooted not in limited beneficence or confined generosity, but in the epistemic insight that the knowledge relevant to deciding what to do with the fruits of social cooperation is for a variety of reasons uncentralisable. Second, and regardless of whether Rawlsian ethical disagreement is (...) more persuasive as a circumstance of justice than Humean confined generosity, it does not explain the possibility and necessity of justice, for the uncentralisability of social knowledge would be decisive even under conditions of unanimity. Finally, the epistemic account not only shows what the circumstances of justice are but, contra Cohen’s critique of the standard account, also provides at least some guidance as to what justice itself may be. (shrink)

An epistemic account of the circumstances of justice allows one to make three important claims about the Humean and Rawlsian ‘standard account’ of those circumstances. First, and contrary to Hume,...