Barbara Herman argues for a radical shift in the way we perceive Kant's ethics. She convincingly reinterprets the key texts, at once allowing Kant to mean what he says while showing that what Kant says makes good moral sense. She urges us to abandon the tradition that describes Kantian ethics as a deontology, a moral system of rules of duty. She finds the central idea of Kantian ethics not in duty but in practical rationality as a norm of unconditioned goodness. This book both clarifies Kant's own theory and adds programmatic vitality to modern moral philosophy.

What is moral thought and what kinds of demands does it impose? Alice Crary’s Beyond Moral Judgment claims that even the most perceptive contemporary answers to these questions offer no more than partial illumination, owing to an overly narrow focus on judgments that apply moral concepts (for example, “good,” “wrong,” “selfish,” “courageous”) and a corresponding failure to register that moral thinking includes more than such judgments. Drawing on what she describes as widely misinterpreted lines of thought in the writings of Wittgenstein and J. L. Austin, Crary argues that language is an inherently moral acquisition and that any stretch of thought, without regard to whether it uses moral concepts, may express the moral outlook encoded in a person’s modes of speech. She challenges us to overcome our fixation on moral judgments and direct attention to responses that animate all our individual linguistic habits. Her argument incorporates insights from McDowell, Wiggins, Diamond, Cavell, and Murdoch and integrates a rich set of examples from feminist theory as well as from literature, including works by Jane Austen, E. M. Forster, Tolstoy, Henry James, and Theodor Fontane. The result is a powerful case for transforming our understanding of the difficulty of moral reflection and of the scope of our ethical concerns.

First Published in 1999. Readers will find in this book no direct analysis of child morality as it is practised in home and school life or in children's societies. It is the moral judgment that we propose to investigate, not moral behaviour or sentiments. With this aim in view, a large number of children from the Geneva and Neuchatel schools were questioned and held conversations with them, similar to those we had had before on their conception of the world and of causality. The present volume contains the results of these conversations.

This work was originally issued as a two-volume set, published in 1987 and 1988. It constitutes a definitive presentation of the system of classifying moral judgment built up by Lawrence Kolberg and his associates over a period of twenty years. Researchers in human development and education around the world, many of whom have worked with interim versions of the system - indeed, all those seriously interested in understanding the development of moral judgment - will find it a useful and accessible resource. Volume 2 includes the scoring systems for three alternate, functionally equivalent forms of Kohlberg's moral judgment interview.

This fascinating new book examines diversity in moral judgements, drawing on recent work in social, personality, and evolutionary psychology, reviewing the factors that influence the moral judgments people make. Why do reasonable people so often disagree when drawing distinctions between what is morally right and wrong? Even when individuals agree in their moral pronouncements, they may employ different standards, different comparative processes, or entirely disparate criteria in their judgments. Examining the sources of this variety, the author expertly explores morality using ethics position theory, alongside other theoretical perspectives in moral psychology, and shows how it can relate to contemporary social issues from abortion to premarital sex to human rights. Also featuring a chapter on applied contexts, using the theory of ethics positions to gain insights into the moral choices and actions of individuals, groups, and organizations in educational, research, political, medical, and business settings, the book offers answers that apply across individuals, communities, and cultures. Investigating the relationship between people’s personal moral philosophies and their ethical thoughts, emotions, and actions, this is fascinating reading for students and academics from psychology and philosophy and anyone interested in morality and ethics.

How many times do we hear the statement 'It's not for me to judge'? It conveys one of the most popular ideas of our time: that to make judgements of others is essentially wrong. In this classic text, the renowned moral philosopher Mary Midgely turns a spotlight on the ever popular stance in society that we should not make moral judgements on others. Guiding the reader through the diverse approaches to this complex subject, she interrogates our strong beliefs about such things as the value of freedom that underlie our scepticism about making moral judgements. She shows how the question of whether or not we can make these judgements must inevitably affect our attitudes not only to the law and its institutions but also to events that occur in our daily lives, and suggests that mistrust of moral judgements may be making life even harder for us than it would be otherwise. The texts and philosophers discussed range from Nietzsche and Sartre to P.D. James and the Bhagavad Gita. The Bloomsbury Revelations edition includes a new preface from the author.

Public Address and Moral Judgment offers a critical look at the ways in which public address can enact moral codes, articulate moral judgments, and manifest ethical tensions. Each chapter carefully examines specific examples of public address for their moral dimensions, exploring how public address functions to articulate and express the ethical tensions of its time and context. The contributors highlight important and often different ways that public address works to expose problematics in ethical tensions--problematics of language and imagery, metaphor and character, genre and definition. The authors are also mindful of the tenuous relationship that exists between rhetoric and morality, between situated public address and a society's ethical foundations. The essays in Public Address and Moral Judgment, on topics ranging from WWII propaganda to the civil rights rhetoric of President George H. W. Bush to the photographs from the Abu Ghraib prison, consider the powerful role of public discourse in the constitution of a moral code for the American people.