Ethics

Description

Ethical questions are often associated with practical dilemmas: questions in morality, in other words. This volume, by contrast, asks questions about morality: what it is, and to what it owes its precarious authority over us. The focus on metaethics is sustained throughout, via a wide range of philosophical perspectives. Distinguished luminaries who include R. M. Hare and Bernard Williams address keenly debated issues such as what constitutes morality in politics; the relationship between education and ethical standards; and whether or not morality can indeed be defined at all. As Nikhil Krishnan writes in his elegant Foreword, 'The plain-speaking, essayistic grace of these essays, speaks nevertheless of the possibility of moral philosophy, written with an eye to a listener, very possibly not a professional philosopher, who has the right to say, ''This is all very well, your neat little theory, but it doesn't ring true. Things are more complicated than that.'''

Allen Phillips-Griffiths (1927-2014) was in 1964 appointed Professor of Philosophy at the newly constituted University of Warwick, becoming at that time the youngest philosophy professor in the UK. In 1979 he was made Director of the Royal Institute of Philosophy, a post he held for fifteen years. Nikhil Krishnan is Lecturer in Philosophy at the University of Cambridge and Fellow in Philosophy at Robinson College, Cambridge.