Moral issues and questions abound in daily life. Media outlets frequently raise awareness of many, such as those concerning individuals’ right to privacy. The same venues seldom, if ever, raise awareness of others, such as moral issues and questions concerning our fantasies. Regardless of the level of publicity various venues afford particular moral matters, most people who become aware of those matters find many interesting and important. A problem most encounter, however, is determining the criteria through which they should approach the moral matters they wish to engage. Ethicists have long sought a moral theory that would provide the desired criteria, but most will grant readily that those efforts have not produced a generally-accepted theory. This book presents the author’s case that a kind of moral liberalism is the theory we should use to engage daily life’s moral matters. The author presents a conception of moral liberalism, argues that it is the best approach to practical morality in a plural society, and applies it to several of morality’s practical matters.

This important new work elaborates and defends an account of the political morality of liberal democracy.

This book joins five key debates in the current theoretical literature that have been largely taking place in isolation and identifies common strands of argument and their shared problems to developed a unified way forward for practice-based political theory.

These provocative and eminently readable essays from Loren Lomasky-fifteen previously published and one new-feature in-depth examinations of central questions in the theory of natural rights and liberal political order. Unlike most philosophical investigations, Rights Angles emphasizes how principles of justice apply under messy, real-world conditions.

In this book, Michael Sandel takes up some of the hotly contested moral and political issues of our time, including affirmative action, assisted suicide, abortion, gay rights, stem cell research, the meaning of toleration and civility, the gap between rich and poor, the role of markets, and the place of religion in public life. He argues that the most prominent ideals in our political life--individual rights and freedom of choice--do not by themselves provide an adequate ethic for a democratic society. Sandel calls for a politics that gives greater emphasis to citizenship, community, and civic virtue, and that grapples more directly with questions of the good life. Liberals often worry that inviting moral and religious argument into the public sphere runs the risk of intolerance and coercion. These essays respond to that concern by showing that substantive moral discourse is not at odds with progressive public purposes, and that a pluralist society need not shrink from engaging the moral and religious convictions that its citizens bring to public life.

At the heart of the current debate over abortion is the question of what is at stake: for the liberal feminist group it is the woman's autonomy over her own body; for the conservative/ pro-life" group it is the life of the fetus itself. Rejecting both of these views as extremes, L W. Sumner opts for a moderate position for which he provides a moral foundation. Originally published in 1981. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

Reconstructing Rawls has one overarching goal: to reclaim Rawls for the Enlightenment—more specifically, the Prussian Enlightenment. Rawls’s so-called political turn in the 1980s, motivated by a newfound interest in pluralism and the accommodation of difference, has been unhealthy for autonomy-based liberalism and has led liberalism more broadly toward cultural relativism, be it in the guise of liberal multiculturalism or critiques of cosmopolitan distributive-justice theories. Robert Taylor believes that it is time to redeem A Theory of Justice’s implicit promise of a universalistic, comprehensive Kantian liberalism. Reconstructing Rawls on Kantian foundations leads to some unorthodox conclusions about justice as fairness, to be sure: for example, it yields a more civic-humanist reading of the priority of political liberty, a more Marxist reading of the priority of fair equality of opportunity, and a more ascetic or antimaterialist reading of the difference principle. It nonetheless leaves us with a theory that is still recognizably Rawlsian and reveals a previously untraveled road out of Theory—a road very different from the one Rawls himself ultimately followed.