Most of us believe that there are limits to the sacrifices that morality can demand of us. We also think that certain types of acts are simply forbidden, even when necessary for promoting the overall good. Here Kagan argues that attempts to defend these sorts of moral limit are inadequate. In thus rejecting two of the most fundamental features of commonsense morality, the book ...(展开全部)

Book Description Ranging over central issues of morals and politics, this book discusses the nature of freedom and authority. It examines the role of value-neutrality, rights, equality, and the prevention of harm in the liberal tradition, and relates them to fundamental moral questions such as the relation of values to social forms, the comparability of values, and the signific...(展开全部)

Moral thinking pervades our practical lives, but where did this way of thinking come from, and what purpose does it serve? Is it to be explained by environmental pressures on our ancestors a million years ago, or is it a cultural invention of more recent origin? In The Evolution of Morality, Richard Joyce takes up these controversial questions, finding that the evidence support...(展开全部)

Joseph Raz (/rɑːz/; Hebrew: יוסף רז; born 21 March 1939) is an Israeli legal, moral and political philosopher. He is one of the most prominent advocates of legal positivism and is well known for his conception of perfectionist liberalism. Raz spent most of his career as a professor of philosophy of law at the University of Oxford associated with Balliol College, and is now a pa...(展开全部)

Born in Mandate Palestine in 1939, Joseph Raz graduated in 1963 from the Hebrew University, Jerusalem, Israel with a Magister Juris (Master of Jurisprudence), summa cum laude. Later, with funds provided by the Hebrew University, Raz pursued a Doctor of Philosophy (DPhil) at Oxford University under the supervision of H. L. A. Hart. This was by no means coincidental; Raz had met ...(展开全部)

"This short but provocative volume...is a fitting testimony to the author's extraordinary, though tragically brief, career as a constitutional scholar, lawyer and teacher. In just a hundred and a half literate pages, we are treated to vintage Bickel insight into every major political issue of the decade, from the civil rights movement, to the Warren Court, through the frenetic...(展开全部)

Moral thinking pervades our practical lives, but where did this way of thinking come from, and what purpose does it serve? Is it to be explained by environmental pressures on our ancestors a million years ago, or is it a cultural invention of more recent origin? In The Evolution of Morality, Richard Joyce takes up these controversial questions, finding that the evidence support...(展开全部)

In The Myth of Morality, Richard Joyce argues that moral discourse is hopelessly flawed. At the heart of ordinary moral judgements is a notion of moral inescapability, or practical authority, which, upon investigation, cannot be reasonably defended. Joyce argues that natural selection is to blame, in that it has provided us with a tendency to invest the world with values that i...(展开全部)

In Impossibility, John D. Barrow--one of our most elegant and accomplished science writers--argues convincingly that there are limits to human discovery, that there are things that are ultimately unknowable, undoable, or unreachable. Barrow first examines the limits of the human mind: our brain evolved to meet the demands of our immediate environment, and much that lies outside...(展开全部)

Barrow, Professor of Astronomy at the University of Sussex, has written a very engaging and even playful book. He attempts to show how certain "laws" governing "Nature" help us to separate the possible from the impossible....Barrow's book enjoyable, informative, and thought provoking.