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This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press's mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1971

This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press's mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1972.

Many practical issues in medical ethics depend on an understanding of the concept of health. The main question is whether it is a purely descriptive or a partly evaluative or normative concept. After posing some puzzles about the concept, the views of C Boorse, who thinks it is descriptive, are discussed and difficulties are found for them. An evaluative treatment is then suggested, and used to shed light on some problems about mental illness and to compare and contrast it with physical illness and with political and other deviancies which are not illnesses.

It is my intention in this paper to highlight the dangers which arise when people appeal to moral intuitions to settle questions in political, and in general in applied, philosophy. But first I want to ask why all or nearly all of us are in favour both of liberty and of equality – why all our intuitions are on their side.In the case of liberty it is easy to understand why. Although philosophers have held diverse theories about the concept of liberty – theories which have been drawn together into two main groups in a famous lecture by Sir Isaiah Berlin – there cannot be much doubt that in the mind of the ordinary man to have liberty (to be free; I shall not distinguish between freedom and liberty) is to be under no constraint in doing what one wants to do. This, at any rate, is a main constituent of the concept of liberty as all of us understand it.Since, therefore, it seems self-evidently true that we want to be able to do what we want, we are bound to want liberty and, in general, to be in favour of it. We want it for ourselves; if we universalize our prescriptions, this constrains us to be in favour of it for others as well. That explains why, if any politician can claim that he is fighting for liberty, he is likely to win a large following.In the case of equality the matter is not so clear cut.

Slavery is defined as a status in society & as a relation to an owner. An imaginary case is presented in which utilitarian arguments could justify slavery. This case, just because it is highly unlikely to occur in the actual world, does not provide an argument against utilitarianism; if it did indeed occur, slavery would be justified, but that is no reason for abandoning our intuitive principle condemning slavery. The adoption of this principle has, in the actual world, a good utilitarian justification; ie, slavery is wrong because, in the world of men as they are, it will almost always cause misery. AA.

THE PHILOSOPHER WISHING TO CONTRIBUTE TO THE SOLUTION OF A PRACTICAL PROBLEM SUCH AS ABORTION SHOULD DEVELOP A THEORY OF MORAL REASONING, BASED ON A STUDY OF THE MORAL CONCEPTS & THEIR LOGICAL PROPERTIES, IN ORDER TO DETERMINE WHICH ARGUMENTS SHOULD BE ACCEPTED. 2 APPROACHES TO ABORTION WHICH HAVE APPEARED UNHELPFUL ARE DISCUSSED: (1) PUTTING THE QUESTION IN TERMS OF THE 'RIGHTS' OF THE FETUS OR THE MOTHER, & (2) ASKING WHETHER THE FETUS IS A PERSON. AN ATTEMPT IS MADE TO PROVIDE A CLEARER IDEA OF HOW TO ANSWER QUESTIONS PERTAINING TO ABORTION. THE MAIN MORAL QUESTION IS THAT THE PREGNANCY, IF NOT TERMINATED, WILL PROBABLY RESULT IN THE BIRTH OF A PERSON. THIS APPROACH TO ABORTION IS BASED ON THE GOLDEN RULE, OR CONCEPTS RESEMBLING IT. HOWEVER, IF THE POTENTIALITY OF PROCREATING HUMAN BEINGS RESULTS IN OBLIGATIONS TO PROCREATE THEM, THEN THE PRINCIPLE MAY FORCE AN EXTREME POSITION NOT ONLY INVOLVING ABORTION BUT CONCERNED WITH CONTRACEPTION & CHASTITY. IN SOME CASES, IE THE POSSIBILITY OF GIVING BIRTH TO A DEFORMED CHILD, THE GOLDEN RULE DOES NOT DIRECTLY HELP THE DECISION. LOGICIANS MAY ARGUE THAT THE FETUS IS ONLY A POTENTIAL PERSON & THUS CANNOT BE IDENTIFIED OR INDIVIDUATED. SYSTEMATIC APPLICATION OF THE CHRISTIAN GOLDEN RULE STATES THAT ABORTION IS GENERALLY WRONG, BUT COUNTERVAILING ARGUMENTS ARE NOT HARD TO FIND. IF ENDING THE PREGNANCY PERMITS THE BEGINNING OF A MORE PROPITIOUS PREGNANCY, IT DOES NOT TAKE MUCH ARGUMENT TO JUSTIFY ABORTION. R. LENT.

This remarkably rich collection of articles focuses on moral questions about war. The essays, originally published in Philosophy & Public Affairs, cover a wide range of topics from several points of view by writers from the fields of political science, philosophy, and law. The discussion of war and moral responsibility falls into three general categories: problems of political and military choice, problems about the relation of an individual to the actions of his government, and more abstract ethical questions as well. The first category includes questions about the ethical and legal aspects of war crimes and the laws of war; about the source of moral restrictions on military methods or goals; and about differences in suitability of conduct which may depend on differences in the nature of the opponent. The second category includes questions about the conditions for responsibility of individual soldiers and civilian officials for war crimes, and about the proper attitude of a government toward potential conscripts who reject its military policies. The third category includes disputes between absolutist, deontological, and utilitarian ethical theories, and deals with questions about the existence of insoluble moral dilemmas