This is Werner S. Pluhar's translation of Immanuel Kant's Critique of Judgment (Kritik der Urtheilskraft) for Hackett Publications (Indianapolis, Indiana). ISBN 9780872200258 (paperback).

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)

Though the revised edition of A Theory of Justice, published in 1999, is the definitive statement of Rawls's view, so much of the extensive literature on Rawls's theory refers to the first edition.

This long-awaited book sets out the implications of Habermas's theory of communicative action for moral theory. "Discourse ethics" attempts to reconstruct a moral point of view from which normative claims can be impartially judged. The theory of justice it develops replaces Kant's categorical imperative with a procedure of justification based on reasoned agreement among participants in practical discourse.Habermas connects communicative ethics to the theory of social action via an examination of research in the social psychology of moral and interpersonal development. (...) He aims to show that our basic moral intuitions spring from something deeper and more universal than contingent features of our tradition, namely from normative presuppositions of social interaction that belong to the repertoire of competent agents in any society. Jürgen Habermas is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Frankfurt. (shrink)

To later generations, much of the moral philosophy of the twentieth century will look like a struggle to escape from utilitarianism. We seem to succeed in disproving one utilitarian doctrine, only to find ourselves caught in the grip of another. I believe that this is because a basic feature of the consequentialist outlook still pervades and distorts our thinking: the view that the business of morality is to bring something about . Too often, the rest of us have pitched our (...) protests as if we were merely objecting to the utilitarian account of what the moral agent ought to bring about or how he ought to do it. Deontological considerations have been characterized as “side constraints,” as if they were essentially restrictions on ways to realize ends. More importantly, moral philosophers have persistently assumed that the primal scene of morality is a scene in which someone does something to or for someone else. This is the same mistake that children make about another primal scene. The primal scene of morality, I will argue, is not one in which I do something to you or you do something to me, but one in which we do something together. The subject matter of morality is not what we should bring about, but how we should relate to one another. If only Rawls has succeeded in escaping utilitarianism, it is because only Rawls has fully grasped this point. His primal scene, the original position, is one in which a group of people must make a decision together. Their task is to find the reasons they can share. (shrink)

A discussion of T M Scanlon's contractualism as a foundational account of the nature of morality. The article discusses how contractualism provides an account of moral truth and objectivity that is based in an idealization of moral reasoning. It then develops contractualism's account of moral motivation to show how it provides a way to understand obscure but central aspects of Kantian views: the claims that moral reasons are of a special kind, and that moral motives have a basis in practical (...) reason. This account is contrasted with human conceptions of moral motivation, which are argued to be incapable of accounting for the stringency of moral reasons and obligations. (shrink)

This is the text of The Lindley Lecture for 1989, given by David Gauthier, a Canadian philosopher.

This is the text of The Lindley Lecture for 1992, given by Amartya Sen, an Indian philosopher.