Desert and Virtue


Book Description

Desert and Virtue: A Theory of Intrinsic Value presents a comprehensive examination of desert and what makes people deserve things. Stephen Kershnar demonstrates how desert relates to virtue, good deeds, moral responsibility, and personal change and growth through the life process. He persuasively argues that desert is a function that relates well-being, intrinsic value, and a "ground," which is defined as a person's character or act.




The Geometry of Desert


Book Description

The Geometry of Desert explores the hidden complexity of moral desert. Using graphs to illustrate and contrast alternative views, it carefully investigates the various ways in which the value of an outcome varies when people get (or fail to get) what they deserve.




Desert and Justice


Book Description

Serena Olsaretti brings together new essays by leading moral and political philosophers on the nature of desert and justice, their relations with each other and with other values. Does justice require that individuals get what they deserve? What exactly is involved in giving people what they deserve? Does treating people as responsible agents require that we make room for desert in the economic sphere, as well as in the attribution of moral praise and blame and in the dispensing of punishment? How does respecting desert square with considerations of equality? Does desert, like justice, have a comparative aspect? These are questions of great practical as well as theoretical importance: this book is unique in offering a sustained examination of them from various perspectives.




Virtuous Emotions


Book Description

Many people are drawn towards virtue ethics because of the central place it gives to emotions in the good life. Yet it may seem odd to evaluate emotions as virtuous or non-virtuous, for how can we be held responsible for those powerful feelings that simply engulf us? And how can education help us to manage our emotional lives? The aim of this book is to offer readers a new Aristotelian analysis and moral justification of a number of emotions that Aristotle did not mention (awe, grief, and jealousy), or relegated, at best, to the level of the semi-virtuous (shame), or made disparaging remarks about (gratitude), or rejected explicitly (pity, understood as pain at another person's deserved bad fortune). Kristján Kristjánsson argues that there are good Aristotelian reasons for understanding those emotions either as virtuous or as indirectly conducive to virtue. Virtuous Emotions begins with an overview of Aristotle's ideas on the nature of emotions and of emotional value, and concludes with an account of Aristotelian emotion education.




After Virtue


Book Description

Highly controversial when it was first published in 1981, Alasdair MacIntyre's After Virtue has since established itself as a landmark work in contemporary moral philosophy. In this book, MacIntyre sought to address a crisis in moral language that he traced back to a European Enlightenment that had made the formulation of moral principles increasingly difficult. In the search for a way out of this impasse, MacIntyre returns to an earlier strand of ethical thinking, that of Aristotle, who emphasised the importance of 'virtue' to the ethical life. More than thirty years after its original publication, After Virtue remains a work that is impossible to ignore for anyone interested in our understanding of ethics and morality today.




What Do We Deserve?


Book Description

Much of contemporary social and political theory has reduced the concept of desert to a minor role. The work of John Rawls is the prime example. Recently some philosophers have argued that the notion merits a more central place in social and political theory. This reader brings togetheropposing positions and arguments, thus stimulating debate over the meaning and significance of desert in contemporary thought. The book includes eight classical and twenty-two contemporary readings on the concept.




Virtues and Their Vices


Book Description

A comprehensive philosophical treatment of the virtues and their competing vices. The first four sections focus on historical classes of virtue: the cardinal virtues, the capital vices and the corrective virtues, intellectual virtues, and the theological virtues. A final section discusses the role of virtue theory in a number of disciplines.




Keeping Balance


Book Description

What is desert? The aim of this book is to give an analysis of this notion. Starting from Feinberg's seminal paper, the argument goes on to Chisholm, 18th-century British Rationalism, and Kant, who developed the concept of propriety that is the foundation of the concept of desert and the key to understanding it. Beyond the analysis, the concept of desert is applied to two problems of moral philosophy, punishment and moral residue, that can be solved only by means of this notion. Desert is an indispensable moral concept we do well to understand clearly and to incorporate into our moral practice.




The Oxford Handbook of Distributive Justice


Book Description

Distributive justice has come to the fore in political philosophy: how should we arrange our social and economic institutions so as to distribute benefits and burdens fairly? Thirty-eight leading figures from philosophy and political theory present specially written critical assessments of the key issues in this flourishing area of research.




A Theory of Justice


Book Description

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 reissue makes the first edition once again available for scholars and serious students of Rawls's work.