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)

In Freedom Within Reason, Susan Wolf charts a course between incompatibilism, or the notion that freedom and responsibility require causal and metaphysical independence from the impersonal forces of nature, and compatibilism, or the notion that people are free and responsible as long as their actions are governed by their desires. Wolf argues that some of the forces which are beyond our control are friends to freedom rather than enemies of it, enabling us to see the world for what it is. (...) The freedom we want is not independence from the world, but independence from the forces that prevent us from choosing how to live in the light of a sufficient appreciation of the world. (shrink)

Informed consent is valid only if the person giving it is competent. Although allegedly informed consents are routinely tendered, there are nonetheless serious problems with the concept of competence as it stands. First, conceptual work upon competence is incomplete: the concept is unanalyzed and no logic of competence has been identified. It is thus virtually impossible to reliably discern who is competent. ;Traditional work on competence has explicated three dichotomies from which the necessary conditions for the possibility of competence will (...) be identified, viz., that competence is either a global or a specific notion; is present in varying degrees or in virtue of a threshold; and may or not include appeals to consequences. Past efforts have failed to notice a fourth dichotomy: competence as an affective or cognitive notion. Failure to designate the appropriate arms of these dichotomies is responsible for there being, at present, no reliable test for competence. The inadequacies of a highly regarded particular test for competence, the mental status examination, are examined in light of this failure. ;Competence is located within the rule-governed practice of informed consent. That practice and hence, competence, is justified through a Kantian analysis of respect for persons. This analysis reveals that the logic of competence requires assessment in terms of specific rather than global concerns; degrees of ability rather than a threshold; both cognitive and affective abilities; and no appeal to consequences. ;Based upon the analyses of consent as an example of decision making within the practice of informed consent and of respect for persons, the capacities which jointly comprise competence are identified. These are the capacities to receive, recognize, and retrieve information; to reason about, relate to oneself, and rank options; to choose among alternatives; and, under certain circumstances, to defend one's choice. ;Identification of the logic of competence and explication of and justification for the capacities that comprise competence to consent provide a conceptual foundation for the crucial concept of competence that the informed consent process currently lacks. It should facilitate construction of a test for competence. (shrink)

The basic relationship between people should be care, and the caring life is the highest which humans can live. Unfortunately, care that is not thoughtful slides into illegitimate intrusion on autonomy. Autonomy is a basic good, and we should not abridge it without good reason. On the other hand, it is not the only good. We must sometimes intervene in the lives of others to protect them from grave harms or provide them with important benefits. The reflective person, therefore, needs (...) guidelines for caring. Some contemporary moralists condemn paternalism categorically. This work examines weaknesses in their arguments and proposes new guidelines for paternalism, which it calls "parentalism" to avoid the patriarchal connotations of the old term. Its antiparentalism is more moderate than standard antipaternalism based on an exaggerated respect for autonomy. The work explores implications for both the personal sphere of interactions between individuals, such as friends and family members, and the public sphere of institutions, legislation, and the professional practices. (shrink)

Gianni Vattimo reexamines the roots of modernism and postmodernism in Nietzsche, Benjamin, and Heidegger. Exploring the links between concepts of nihilism and destiny in nineteenth-century humanism, Vattimo follows these trends in aesthetic and scientific theory from Benjamin to Bloch, Ricoeur, and Kuhn.

It is my view that one essential difference between persons and other creatures is to be found in the structure of a person's will. Besides wanting and choosing and being moved to do this or that, men may also want to have certain desires and motives. They are capable of wanting to be different, in their preferences and purposes, from what they are. Many animals appear to have the capacity for what I shall call "first-order desires" or "desires of the (...) first order," which are simply desires to do or not to do one thing or another. No animal other than man, however, appears to have the capacity for reflective self-evaluation that is manifested in the formation of second-order desires. (shrink)

The author of this text argues that the methodological issues in bioethics mirrors the experience of moral pluralism in a secular society. The different methods that have been used in the field reflect the different moral views found in a pluralistic society.