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paper offers both explication and defence. Standard consequentialism is a theory of decision. It attempts to identify, for any set of alternative options, that which it is right that an agent should..

What determines whether an action is right or wrong? Morality, Rules, and Consequences: A Critical Reader explores for students and researchers the relationship between consequentialist theory and moral rules. Most of the chapters focus on rule consequentialism or on the distinction between act and rule versions of consequentialism. Contributors, among them the leading philosophers in the discipline, suggest ways of assessing whether rule consequentialism could be a satisfactory moral theory. These essays, all of which are previously unpublished, provide students in (...) moral philosophy with essential material and ask key questions on just what the criteria for an adequate moral theory might be. (shrink)

Like many others interested in Derek Parfit’s work, I’ve been awaiting this collection of original essays on Reasons and Persons, having placed an order with my bookstore at least a year before the book was finally published. The delay was due to the editor’s original plan of including Parfit’s responses, a plan that had to be abandoned. Eventually, Jonathan Dancy tells us, Parfit will publish responses to these pieces. And at least one response has already appeared in print, Parfit’s discussion (...) of Mark Johnston’s contribution to the—then forthcoming—Dancy volume. So the bad news is that all of these essays were in their completed form five or six years before the book was published; as a result, the arguments sometimes seem a little bit familiar and, of course, neither profit from nor engage the most recent literature on the topics they address. (shrink)