Most treatments of the problem of values pinpoint some one relevant area of subject matter and set this up as value proper, or at least as an area that can ...

Integrating personality, behavioral, and cognitive theories of change, the author examines the operations, measurement, and evolution of behavioral and ethical standards that distinguish capitalism from other ideologies.

Defining value as the requiredness of an activity or object, the author describes value experiences and the nature, meaning, development, and function of value on the physical, psychological, and philosophical levels. Bibliogs.

In this work, the author has fashioned out of the logical and linguistic theses of his earlier books a full-scale but readily intelligible account of moral argument.

This classic and controversial book examines the roots of the idea of virtue, diagnoses the reasons for its absence in modern life, and proposes a path for its recovery.

This book is about self-deception and lack of self-control or wishful thinking and acting against one's own better judgement. Steering a course between the skepticism of philosophers, who find the conscious defiance of reason too paradoxical, and the tolerant empiricism of psychologists, it compares the two kinds of irrationality, and relates the conclusions drawn to the views of Freud, cognitive psychologists, and such philosophers as Aristotle, Anscombe, Hare and Davidson.

The task of presenting for explicit view the store of appraisive terms our language affords has been undertaken in the conviction that it will be of interest not only to ethics and other philosophical studies but also to various areas of social science and linguistics. I have principally sought to do justice to the complexities of this vocabulary, the uses to which it is put, and the capacities its use reflects. I have given little thought to whether the inquiry was (...) philosophical and whether it was being conducted in a philosophical manner. Foremost in my thoughts were the tasks that appeared to need doing, among them these: explicit attention was to be given to the vocabulary by means of which we say we commend,judge, appraise, or evaluate subjects and subject matters in our experience; it was to be segregated from other language at least for the purpose of study; the types of appraisive resources that are at hand in a language such as English were to be classified in some convincing and not too artificial manner; and an empirical standpoint was to be developed for a better view of appraisal, evaluation, and judging within the framework of other ways we have of responding to our surround ings such as appetition and emotion on one side and factual registering and theorizing about states of affairs on the other. Such an inquiry has never been undertaken in quite this manner before. (shrink)

Ross, Alf Loar, Brian, Editor.Directives and Norms. New York: Humanities Press, [1967]. ix, 188 pp. Reprint available April 2009 by The Lawbook Exchange, Ltd. ISBN-13: 978-1-58477-961-2. ISBN-10: 1-58477-961-6. Cloth with dust jacket. $65.00 * Reprint of the first American edition. One of the most interesting jurists of the post-World War II era, Ross [1899-1979] was a legal and moral philosopher, scholar of international law and the leading representative of Scandinavian Legal Realism. This book and On Law and Justice (1958) are (...) his principal works. In Directives and Norms Ross asks whether imperatives (or, to use his term, 'directives') are subject to logic in the same way as indicatives. He shows the difference between indicative and directive discourse and explains the concepts 'directive' and 'norm' as they function in the social sciences, especially in the study of law. A contemporary essay in the Modern Law Review (32:544), though critical of this work, was still impressed by its "clear and convincing account" of these processes. (shrink)