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  1. Animal Liberation.Peter Singer (ed.) - 1977 - Avon Books.
    Since its original publication in 1975, this groundbreaking work has awakened millions of concerned men and women to the shocking abuse of animals everywhere--inspiring a worldwide movement to eliminate much of the cruel and unnecessary laboratory animal experimentation of years past. In this newly revised and expanded edition, author Peter Singer exposes the chilling realities of today's "factory farms" and product-testing procedures--offering sound, humane solutions to what has become a profound environmental and social as well as moral issue. An important (...)
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  • Creating Capabilities: The Human Development Approach.Martha C. Nussbaum - 2011 - Harvard University Press.
    In this critique, Martha Nussbaum argues that our dominant theories of development have given us policies that ignore our most basic human needs for dignity and self-respect.
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  • The Secret of Our Success: How Culture Is Driving Human Evolution, Domesticating Our Species, and Making Us Smarter.J. Henrich - 2016 - Princeton University Press.
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  • (1 other version)After Virtue.A. MacIntyre - 1981 - Tijdschrift Voor Filosofie 46 (1):169-171.
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  • (2 other versions)Modern Moral Philosophy.G. E. M. Anscombe - 1958 - Philosophy 33 (124):1 - 19.
    The author presents and defends three theses: (1) "the first is that it is not profitable for us at present to do moral philosophy; that should be laid aside at any rate until we have an adequate philosophy of psychology." (2) "the second is that the concepts of obligation, And duty... And of what is morally right and wrong, And of the moral sense of 'ought', Ought to be jettisoned if this is psychologically possible...." (3) "the third thesis is that (...)
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  • A Natural History of Human Morality.Michael Tomasello (ed.) - 2014 - Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press.
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  • The ethical project.Philip Kitcher - 2011 - Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
    Instead of conceiving ethical commands as divine revelations or as the discoveries of brilliant thinkers, we should see our ethical practices as evolving over tens of thousands of years, as members of our species have worked out how to live together and prosper. Here, Kitcher elaborates his radical vision of this millennia-long ethical project.
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  • (1 other version)Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy.Bernard Williams - 1985 - Ethics 97 (4):821-833.
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  • Moral realism.Peter Railton - 1986 - Philosophical Review 95 (2):163-207.
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  • The Righteous Mind: Why Good People are Divided by Politics and Religion.Jonathan Haidt - unknown
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  • Animal Liberation.Bill Puka & Peter Singer - 1977 - Philosophical Review 86 (4):557.
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  • (1 other version)Practical Ethics.Peter Singer - 1979 - Philosophy 56 (216):267-268.
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  • Morality, Competition, and the Firm: The Market Failures Approach to Business Ethics.Joseph Heath (ed.) - 2014 - New York: Oup Usa.
    In four new and nine previously published essays, Joseph Heath provides a compelling new framework for thinking about the moral obligations of economic actors. The "market failures" approach to business ethics that he develops provides the basis for a unified theory of business ethics, corporate law, economic regulation, and the welfare state.
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  • The expanding circle: ethics, evolution, and moral progress.Peter Singer - 2011 - Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
    What is ethics? Where do moral standards come from? Are they based on emotions, reason, or some innate sense of right and wrong? For many scientists, the key lies entirely in biology---especially in Darwinian theories of evolution and self-preservation. But if evolution is a struggle for survival, why are we still capable of altruism? In his classic study The Expanding Circle, Peter Singer argues that altruism began as a genetically based drive to protect one's kin and community members but has (...)
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  • A liberal realist answer to debunking skeptics: the empirical case for realism.Michael Huemer - 2016 - Philosophical Studies 173 (7):1983-2010.
    Debunking skeptics claim that our moral beliefs are formed by processes unsuited to identifying objective facts, such as emotions inculcated by our genes and culture; therefore, they say, even if there are objective moral facts, we probably don’t know them. I argue that the debunking skeptics cannot explain the pervasive trend toward liberalization of values over human history, and that the best explanation is the realist’s: humanity is becoming increasingly liberal because liberalism is the objectively correct moral stance.
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  • The Emotional Dog and Its Rational Tail: A Social Intuitionist Approach to Moral Judgment.Jonathan Haidt - 2001 - Psychological Review 108 (4):814-834.
    Research on moral judgment has been dominated by rationalist models, in which moral judgment is thought to be caused by moral reasoning. The author gives 4 reasons for considering the hypothesis that moral reasoning does not cause moral judgment; rather, moral reasoning is usually a post hoc construction, generated after a judgment has been reached. The social intuitionist model is presented as an alternative to rationalist models. The model is a social model in that it deemphasizes the private reasoning done (...)
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  • Non‐Relative Virtues: An Aristotelian Approach.Martha Craven Nussbaum - 1988 - Midwest Studies in Philosophy 13 (1):32-53.
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  • (2 other versions)Moral enhancement.Thomas Douglas - 2008 - Journal of Applied Philosophy 25 (3):228-245.
    Opponents of biomedical enhancement often claim that, even if such enhancement would benefit the enhanced, it would harm others. But this objection looks unpersuasive when the enhancement in question is a moral enhancement — an enhancement that will expectably leave the enhanced person with morally better motives than she had previously. In this article I (1) describe one type of psychological alteration that would plausibly qualify as a moral enhancement, (2) argue that we will, in the medium-term future, probably be (...)
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  • (2 other versions)Modern Moral Philosophy.G. E. M. Anscombe - 1997 - In Roger Crisp & Michael Slote (eds.), Virtue Ethics. Oxford University Press.
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  • Explaining historical moral convergence: the empirical case against realist intuitionism.Jeroen Hopster - 2020 - Philosophical Studies 177 (5):1255-1273.
    Over the course of human history there appears to have been a global shift in moral values towards a broadly ‘liberal’ orientation. Huemer argues that this shift better accords with a realist than an antirealist metaethics: it is best explained by the discovery of mind-independent truths through intuition. In this article I argue, contra Huemer, that the historical data are better explained assuming the truth of moral antirealism. Realism does not fit the data as well as Huemer suggests, whereas antirealists (...)
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  • A debunking explanation for moral progress.Nathan Cofnas - 2020 - Philosophical Studies 177 (11):3171-3191.
    According to “debunking arguments,” our moral beliefs are explained by evolutionary and cultural processes that do not track objective, mind-independent moral truth. Therefore (the debunkers say) we ought to be skeptics about moral realism. Huemer counters that “moral progress”—the cross-cultural convergence on liberalism—cannot be explained by debunking arguments. According to him, the best explanation for this phenomenon is that people have come to recognize the objective correctness of liberalism. Although Huemer may be the first philosopher to make this explicit empirical (...)
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  • The Possibility of an Ongoing Moral Catastrophe.Evan G. Williams - 2015 - Ethical Theory and Moral Practice 18 (5):971-982.
    This article gives two arguments for believing that our society is unknowingly guilty of serious, large-scale wrongdoing. First is an inductive argument: most other societies, in history and in the world today, have been unknowingly guilty of serious wrongdoing, so ours probably is too. Second is a disjunctive argument: there are a large number of distinct ways in which our practices could turn out to be horribly wrong, so even if no particular hypothesized moral mistake strikes us as very likely, (...)
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  • Moral Progress and Human Agency.Michele M. Moody-Adams - 2017 - Ethical Theory and Moral Practice 20 (1):153-168.
    The idea of moral progress is a necessary presupposition of action for beings like us. We must believe that moral progress is possible and that it might have been realized in human experience, if we are to be confident that continued human action can have any morally constructive point. I discuss the implications of this truth for moral psychology. I also show that once we understand the complex nature and the complicated social sources of moral progress, we will appreciate why (...)
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  • The dynamics of moral progress.Julia Hermann - 2019 - Ratio 32 (4):300-311.
    Assuming that there is moral progress, and assuming that the abolition of slavery is an example of it, how does moral progress occur? Is it mainly driven by specific individuals who have gained new moral insights, or by changes in the socio‐economic and epistemic conditions in which agents morally judge the norms and practices of their society, and act upon these judgements? In this paper, I argue that moral progress is a complex process in which changes at the level of (...)
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  • The Limits of Evolutionary Explanations of Morality and Their Implications for Moral Progress.Allen Buchanan & Russell Powell - 2015 - Ethics 126 (1):37-67.
    Traditional conservative arguments against the possibility of moral progress relied on underevidenced assumptions about the limitations of human nature. Contemporary thinkers have attempted to fill this empirical gap in the conservative argument by appealing to evolutionary science. Such “evoconservative” arguments fail because they overstate the explanatory reach of evolutionary theory. We maintain that no adequate evolutionary explanation has been given for important features of human morality, namely cosmopolitan and other “inclusivist” moral commitments. We attribute these evolutionarily anomalous features to a (...)
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  • The Idea of Moral Progress.Michele M. Moody-Adams - 1999 - Metaphilosophy 30 (3):168-185.
    This paper shows that moral progress is a substantive and plausible idea. Moral progress in belief involves deepening our grasp of existing moral concepts, while moral progress in practices involves realizing deepened moral understandings in behavior or social institutions. Moral insights could not be assimilated or widely disseminated if they involved devising and applying totally new moral concepts. Thus, it is argued, moral failures of past societies cannot be explained by appeal to ignorance of new moral ideas, but must be (...)
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  • Trust, Trade, and Moral Progress.Jonny Anomaly - 2017 - Social Philosophy and Policy 34 (2):89-107.
    Abstract:Trust is important for a variety of social relationships. Trust facilitates trade, which increases prosperity and induces us to interact with people of different backgrounds on terms that benefit all parties. Trade promotes trustworthiness, which enables us to form meaningful as well as mutually beneficial relationships. In what follows, I argue that when we erect institutions that enhance trust and reward people who are worthy of trust, we create the conditions for a certain kind of moral progress.
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  • Toward a Naturalistic Theory of Moral Progress.Allen Buchanan & Russell Powell - 2016 - Ethics 126 (4):983-1014.
    Early liberal theories about the feasibility of moral progress were premised on empirically ungrounded assumptions about human psychology and society. In this article, we develop a richer naturalistic account of the conditions under which one important form of moral progress–the emergence of more “inclusive” moralities–is likely to arise and be sustained. Drawing upon work in evolutionary psychology and social moral epistemology, we argue that “exclusivist” morality is the result of an adaptively plastic response that is sensitive to cues of out-group (...)
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  • Précis: Our Moral Fate: Evolution And The Escape From Tribalism.Allen Buchanan - 2020 - Analyse & Kritik 42 (2):443-448.
    The book uses evolutionary principles to explain tribalism, a way of thinking and acting that divides the world into Us versus Them and achieves cooperation within a group at the expense of erecting insuperable obstacles to cooperation among groups. Tribalism represents political controversies as supreme emergencies in which ordinary moral constraints do not apply and as zero-sum, winner take all contests. Tribalism not only undermines democracy by ruling out compromise, bargaining, and respect for the Other; it also reverses one of (...)
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  • Moral Change: Dynamics, Structure, and Normativity.Cecilie Eriksen - 2020
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  • The Arc of the Moral Universe.Joshua Cohen - 1997 - Philosophy and Public Affairs 26 (2):91-134.
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  • Moral progress.Ruth Macklin - 1977 - Ethics 87 (4):370-382.
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  • Moral Thinking, Fast and Slow.Hanno Sauer - 2018 - New York: Routledge.
    In recent research, dual-process theories of cognition have been the primary model for explaining moral judgment and reasoning. These theories understand moral thinking in terms of two separate domains: one deliberate and analytic, the other quick and instinctive. -/- This book presents a new theory of the philosophy and cognitive science of moral judgment. Hanno Sauer develops and defends an account of "triple-process" moral psychology, arguing that moral thinking and reasoning are only insufficiently understood when described in terms of a (...)
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  • How Moral Facts Cause Moral Progress.Andrés Luco - 2019 - Journal of the American Philosophical Association 5 (4):429-448.
    Morally progressive social changes seem to have taken place with the onset of democratic governance, the abolition of slavery, the rise of gender equality, and other developments. This essay attempts to demonstrate that natural and objective moral facts are a plausible cause of some morally progressive social changes. Since this hypothesis is a version of naturalistic moral realism, I call it the Naturalist-Realist Hypothesis. To support the NRH, I argue that objective moral facts are natural facts pertaining to the impartial (...)
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  • Moral Progress Without Moral Realism.Catherine Wilson - 2010 - Philosophical Papers 39 (1):97-116.
    This paper argues that we can acknowledge the existence of moral truths and moral progress without being committed to moral realism. Rather than defending this claim through the more familiar route of the attempted analysis of the ontological commitments of moral claims, I show how moral belief change for the better shares certain features with theoretical progress in the natural sciences. Proponents of the better theory are able to convince their peers that it is formally and empirically superior to its (...)
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  • Correspondence to Reality in Ethics.Mario Brandhorst - 2015 - Philosophical Investigations 38 (3):227-250.
    This paper examines the view of ethical language that Wittgenstein took in later years. It argues that according to this view, ethics falls into place as a part of our natural history, while every sense of the mystical or supernatural that once surrounded it is irrevocably lost. Moreover, Wittgenstein argues that ethical language does not correspond to reality “in the way” in which a physical theory does. I propose an interpretation of this claim that shows how it sets his view (...)
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  • A tale of two processes: On Joseph Henrich’s the secret of our success: How culture is driving human evolution, domesticating our species, and making us smarter.Daniel Kelly & Patrick Hoburg - 2017 - Philosophical Psychology 30 (6):832-848.
    We situate Henrich’s book in the larger research tradition of which it is a part and show how he presents a wide array of recent psychological, physiological, and neurological data as supporting the view that two related but distinct processes have shaped human nature and made us unique: cumulative cultural evolution and culture-driven genetic evolution. We briefly sketch out several ways philosophers might fruitfully engage with this view and note some implications it may have for current philosophic debates in moral (...)
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  • The evolution of moral progress and biomedical moral enhancement.Ingmar Persson & Julian Savulescu - 2019 - Bioethics 33 (7):814-819.
    In The Evolution of Moral Progress Allen Buchanan and Russell Powell advance an evolutionary explanation of moral progress by morality becoming more ‘inclusivist’. We are prepared to accept this explanation as far as it goes, but argue that it fails to explain how morality can become inclusivist in the fuller sense they intend. In fact, it even rules out inclusivism in their intended sense of moral progress, since they believe that human altruism and prosocial attitudes are essentially parochial. We also (...)
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  • Butchering Benevolence Moral Progress beyond the Expanding Circle.Hanno Sauer - 2019 - Ethical Theory and Moral Practice 22 (1):153-167.
    Standard evolutionary explanations seem unable to account for inclusivist shifts that expand the circle of moral concern beyond strategically relevant cooperators. Recently, Allen Buchanan and Russell Powell have argued that this shows that that evolutionary conservatism – the view that our inherited psychology imposes significant feasibility constraints on how much inclusivist moral progress can be achieved – is unjustified. Secondly, they hold that inclusivist gains can be sustained, and exclusivist tendencies curbed, under certain favorable socio-economic conditions. I argue that Buchanan (...)
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  • (2 other versions)Moral Enhancement.Thomas Douglas - 2011 - In Julian Savulescu, Ruud ter Meulen & Guy Kahane (eds.), Enhancing Human Capacities. Blackwell. pp. 465–485.
    The opponents of enhancement do not all set out to defend a common and clearly specified thesis. However, several would either assent or be attracted to the following claim (henceforth, the bioconservative thesis): Even if it were technically possible and legally permissible for people to engage in biomedical enhancement, it would not be morally permissible for them to do so. The scope of this thesis needs to be clarified. This chapter argues that the bioconservative thesis, thus qualified, is false. There (...)
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  • Debunking leftward progress.Michael Huemer - 2019 - Ratio 32 (4):312-324.
    In earlier work, I argued that observed changes in moral values over human history are best explained as cognitive progress: societies tend over the long term to move closer to the objective moral truth. It is also true that, in recent decades, liberal democracies have moved strongly in the direction of greater government regulation and wealth redistribution. Does this mean that extensive regulation and redistribution are objectively good? I argue that the answer is no; these recent trends are importantly different (...)
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  • Social Progress.Philip Kitcher - 2017 - Social Philosophy and Policy 34 (2):46-65.
    Abstract:The concept of social progress I hope to rehabilitate will be local, far from locally complete, and permit only modest extensions; it will be pragmatic rather than teleological. In this way, it will hope to avoid treating the multiplicity of goods as if there were always the possibility of comparing them on a single scale, to abandon the idea of a final state toward which history is tending or should tend, and to substitute piecemeal accomplishments for utopian ends. Its emphasis (...)
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  • De-moralization as emancipation: Liberty, progress, and the evolution of invalid moral norms.Allen Buchanan & Russell Powell - 2017 - Social Philosophy and Policy 34 (2):108-135.
    Abstract:Liberal thinkers of the Enlightenment understood that surplus moral constraints, imposed by invalid moral norms, are a serious limitation on liberty. They also recognized that overcoming surplus moral constraints — what we call proper de-moralization — is an important dimension of moral progress. Contemporary philosophical theorists of liberty have largely neglected the threat that surplus moral constraints pose to liberty and the importance of proper de-moralization for human emancipation. This essay examines the phenomena of surplus moral constraints and proper de-moralization, (...)
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  • On Locating Value in Making Moral Progress.Toni Rønnow-Rasmussen - 2015 - Ethical Theory and Moral Practice 20 (1):137-152.
    The endeavour to locate value in moral progress faces various substantive as well as more formal challenges. This paper focuses on challenges of the latter kind. After some preliminaries, Section 3 introduces two general kinds of “evaluative moral progress-claims”, and outlines a possible novel analysis of a descriptive notion of moral progress. While Section 4 discusses certain logical features of betterness in light of recent work in value theory which are pertinent to the notion of moral progress, Sections 5 and (...)
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  • Defence of Cultural Relativism.Seungbae Park - 2011 - Cultura 8 (1):159-170.
    I attempt to rebut the following standard objections against cultural relativism: 1. It is self-defeating for a cultural relativist to take the principle of tolerance as absolute; 2. There are universal moral rules, contrary to what cultural relativism claims; 3. If cultural relativism were true, Hitler’s genocidal actions would be right, social reformers would be wrong to go against their own culture, moral progress would be impossible, and an atrocious crime could be made moral by forming a culture which approves (...)
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  • Moral Progress: an Introduction.Albert W. Musschenga & Gerben Meynen - 2017 - Ethical Theory and Moral Practice 20 (1):3-15.
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  • Towards a new epistemology of moral progress.Patrick Stokes - 2017 - European Journal of Philosophy 25 (4):1824-1843.
    Awareness that moral beliefs and practices have changed across time threatens our confidence in our current moral beliefs: if past moral beliefs turned out to be wrong, how can we be sure ours aren't likewise mistaken? In this paper, I set up four desiderata for a successful theory of moral progress: it must allow us to judge that progress has occurred, avoid the image of increasing correspondence towards ahistorical truthmakers, allow for revision in belief, and yet not be disobligating. Rorty's (...)
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  • Moral Progress for Evolved Rational Creatures.William J. FitzPatrick - 2019 - Analyse & Kritik 41 (2):217-238.
    Allen Buchanan and Russell Powell have developed a rich ‘biocultural theory’ of the nature and causes of moral progress (and regress) for human beings conceived as evolved rational creatures with a nature characterized by ‘adaptive plasticity’. They characterize their theory as a thoroughly naturalistic account of moral progress, while bracketing various questions in moral theory and metaethics in favor of focusing on a certain range of more scientifically tractable questions under some stipulated moral and metaethical assumptions. While I am very (...)
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  • Evolutionary Foundations for a Theory of Moral Progress?Kim Sterelny - 2019 - Analyse & Kritik 41 (2):205-216.
    Buchanan and Powell develop a concept of moral progress, and build a middle-range theory of how moral progress comes about. They argue on the basis of their view of the evolutionary origins of normative thought that further moral progress towards more inclusive moral and political systems is possible. In doing so they rebut a conservative reading of the evolution of normative thought: a reading that regards the hope for inclusive moral systems as utopian. Buchanan and Powell argue that this ‘evoconservative’ (...)
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  • The emotional construction of morals * by Jesse Prinz * oxford university press, 2007. XII + 334 pp. 25.00: Summary. [REVIEW]Jesse Prinz - 2009 - Analysis 69 (4):701-704.
    The Emotional Construction of Morals is a book about moral judgements – the kinds of mental states we might express by sentences such as, ‘It's bad to flash your neighbors’, or ‘You ought not eat your pets’. There are three basic questions that get addressed: what are the psychological states that constitute such judgements? What kinds of properties do such judgements refer to? And, where do these judgements come from? The first question concerns moral psychology, the second metaethics and the (...)
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