R.M. Hare
Richard Mervyn Hare (21 March 1919 – 29 January 2002), usually cited as R. M. Hare, was a British moral philosopher who held the post of White's Professor of Moral Philosophy at the University of Oxford from 1966 until 1983. He subsequently taught for a number of years at the University of Florida. His meta-ethical theories were influential during the second half of the twentieth century. Hare is best known for his development of prescriptivism as a meta-ethical theory, which he argues is supported by analysis of formal features of moral discourse, and for his defence of preference utilitarianism based on his prescriptivism. Some of Hare's students, such as Brian McGuinness, John Lucas, and Bernard Williams went on to become well-known philosophers. Peter Singer, known for his involvement with the animal liberation movement (who studied Hare's work as an honours student at the University of Melbourne and came to know Hare personally whilst he was an Oxford BPhil grad ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Backwell
Backwell is a village and civil parish in the unitary authority of North Somerset and in 2011 had a population of 4,589. The village lies about southwest of Bristol, south of the A370 to Weston-super-Mare. The parish includes the hamlets of Backwell Common, Backwell Green and Backwell Farleigh, and the districts of Backwell West Town and Downside. Nearby are Nailsea, Flax Bourton, Yatton, Brockley and Barrow Gurney. History Backwell Hillfort between Flax Bourton and Backwell is an Iron Age hill fort. The village has a long history, appearing in the Domesday Book in 1086 with the name 'Bacoile' meaning 'The well back on the hill'. The parish was part of the hundred of Hartcliffe. The lords of the manor from the 12th to 17th centuries were the Rodneys. Walter de Rodney was given the manor for his support of the Empress Matilda against King Stephen. Backwell House is an historic house in the village which was operated as a boutique hotel between 2016 and 2022. Governanc ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Peter Singer
Peter Albert David Singer (born 6 July 1946) is an Australian moral philosopher, currently the Ira W. DeCamp Professor of Bioethics at Princeton University. He specialises in applied ethics and approaches ethical issues from a secular, utilitarian perspective. He is known in particular for his book '' Animal Liberation'' (1975), in which he argues in favour of veganism, and his essay " Famine, Affluence, and Morality", in which he argues in favour of donating to help the global poor. For most of his career, he was a preference utilitarian, but he stated in ''The Point of View of the Universe'' (2014), coauthored with Katarzyna de Lazari-Radek, that he had become a hedonistic utilitarian. On two occasions, Singer served as chair of the philosophy department at Monash University, where he founded its Centre for Human Bioethics. In 1996 he stood unsuccessfully as a Greens candidate for the Australian Senate. In 2004 Singer was recognised as the Australian Humanist of ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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White's Professor Of Moral Philosophy
The White's Chair of Moral Philosophy was endowed in 1621 by Thomas White (c. 1550–1624), Canon of Christ Church as the oldest professorial post in philosophy at the University of Oxford. In 2021, the chair was renamed the Sekyra and White’s Professorship of Moral Philosophy following a gift from the Sekyra Foundation. Under the original agreement, the professorship was to receive a stipend of £100 per annum, along with other payments and emoluments. The chair was not to be held for more than five years, or at the most ten years. In 1673, a practice began of electing one of the proctors, usually the senior, to the office; in course of time the lectures were entirely dropped; and at length the Professorship was so far forgotten, that it was never mentioned in the Oxford Calendar before the year 1831, the practice having continued, with one exception, until February 1829. The professorship was established on a new footing by a statute approved by the Queen in Council in 185 ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Moral Philosophy
Ethics or moral philosophy is a branch of philosophy that "involves systematizing, defending, and recommending concepts of right and wrong behavior".''Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy'' The field of ethics, along with aesthetics, concerns matters of value; these fields comprise the branch of philosophy called axiology. Ethics seeks to resolve questions of human morality by defining concepts such as good and evil, right and wrong, virtue and vice, justice and crime. As a field of intellectual inquiry, moral philosophy is related to the fields of moral psychology, descriptive ethics, and value theory. Three major areas of study within ethics recognized today are: # Meta-ethics, concerning the theoretical meaning and reference of moral propositions, and how their truth values (if any) can be determined; # Normative ethics, concerning the practical means of determining a moral course of action; # Applied ethics, concerning what a person is obligated (or permitted) to do in a s ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Gary Varner
Gary Edward Varner (born March 10, 1957) is an American philosopher specializing in environmental ethics, philosophical questions related to animal rights and animal welfare, and R. M. Hare's two-level utilitarianism. He is a full professor, professor in the department of philosophy at Texas A&M University, and has been based at the university since 1990. He was educated at Arizona State University, the University of Georgia and the University of Wisconsin–Madison; at Madison, where he was supervised by Jon Morline, he wrote one of the first doctoral thesis, doctoral theses on environmental ethics. Varner's first monograph was ''In Nature's Interests?'', which was published by Oxford University Press in 1998. In the book, Varner defended a form of biocentrism (ethics), biocentric individualism, according to which all living entities have morally considerable interests. In Hare's two-level utilitarianism, Varner started a research project in 2001 that looked at animals. The proj ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Aaron Sloman
Aaron Sloman is a philosopher and researcher on artificial intelligence and cognitive science. He held the Chair in Artificial Intelligence and Cognitive Science at the School of Computer Science at the University of Birmingham, and before that a chair with the same title at the University of Sussex. Since retiring he is Honorary Professor of Artificial Intelligence and Cognitive Science at Birmingham. He has published widely on philosophy of mathematics, epistemology, cognitive science, and artificial intelligence; he also collaborated widely, e.g. with biologist Jackie Chappell on the evolution of intelligence. Early life and education Sloman was born in 1936, in the town of Que Que (now called Kwe Kwe), in what was then Southern Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe). His parents were Lithuanian Jews who emigrated to Southern Rhodesia around the turn of the century. Sloman describes himself as an atheist. He went to school in Cape Town between 1948 and 1953, then earned a degree in Mathema ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Derek Parfit
Derek Antony Parfit (; 11 December 1942 – 1 or 2 January 2017) was a British philosopher who specialised in personal identity, rationality, and ethics. He is widely considered one of the most important and influential moral philosophers of the late 20th and early 21st centuries. Parfit rose to prominence in 1971 with the publication of his first paper, "Personal Identity". His first book, ''Reasons and Persons'' (1984), has been described as the most significant work of moral philosophy since the 1800s. His second book, ''On What Matters'' (2011), was widely circulated and discussed for many years before its publication. For his entire academic career, Parfit worked at Oxford University, where he was an Emeritus Senior Research Fellow at All Souls College at the time of his death. He was also a visiting professor of philosophy at Harvard University, New York University, and Rutgers University. He was awarded the 2014 Rolf Schock Prize "for his groundbreaking contributions c ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Allan Gibbard
Allan may refer to: People * Allan (name), a given name and surname, including list of people and characters with this name * Allan (footballer, born 1984) (Allan Barreto da Silva), Brazilian football striker * Allan (footballer, born 1989) (Allan dos Santos Natividade), Brazilian football forward * Allan (footballer, born 1991) (Allan Marques Loureiro), Brazilian football midfielder * Allan (footballer, born 1994) (Allan Christian de Almeida), Brazilian football midfielder * Allan (footballer, born 1997) (Allan Rodrigues de Souza), Brazilian football midfielder Places * Allan, Queensland, Australia * Allan, Saskatchewan, Canada * Allan, the Allaine river's lower course, in France * Allan, Drôme, town in France * Allan, Iran (other), places in Iran Other uses * Allan, a Clan Grant split (or sept) * Ahlawat or Allan, an ethnic clan in India * ''Allan'', a 1966 film directed by Donald Shebib * "Allan" (song), a 1988 song recorded by the French artist Mylène Farmer ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Universal Prescriptivism
Universal prescriptivism (often simply called prescriptivism) is the meta-ethical view that claims that, rather than expressing propositions, ethical sentences function similarly to imperatives which are universalizable—whoever makes a moral judgment is committed to the same judgment in any situation where the same relevant facts pertain. This makes prescriptivism a universalist form of non-cognitivism. Prescriptivism stands in opposition to other forms of non-cognitivism (such as emotivism and quasi-realism), as well as to all forms of cognitivism (including both moral realism and ethical subjectivism). Since prescriptivism was introduced by philosopher R. M. Hare in his 1952 book ''The Language of Morals'', it has been compared to emotivism and to the categorical imperative of Immanuel Kant. Unlike Kant, however, Hare does not invoke universalizability as a test of moral permissibility. Instead, he sees it as a consistency requirement that is built into the logic of m ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Two-level Utilitarianism
Two-level utilitarianism is a Utilitarianism, utilitarian theory of ethics developed by R. M. Hare. According to the theory, a person's moral decisions should be based on a set of moral rules, except in certain rare situations where it is more appropriate to engage in a 'critical' level of moral reasoning. Consequentialism, Consequentialists believe that an action is right if it produces the best possible state of affairs. Traditional utilitarianism (act utilitarianism) treats this as a claim that people should try to ensure that their actions maximize overall happiness or pleasure. Two-level utilitarianism is virtually a synthesis of the opposing doctrines of act utilitarianism and rule utilitarianism. Act utilitarianism states that in all cases the morally right action is the one which produces the most happiness, whereas rule utilitarianism states that the morally right action is the one that is in accordance with a moral rule whose general observance would create the most happin ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Preference Utilitarianism
Preference utilitarianism (also known as preferentialism) is a form of utilitarianism in contemporary philosophy. It is distinct from original utilitarianism in that it values actions that fulfill the most ''personal interests'', as opposed to actions that generate the most pleasure. Overview Unlike classical utilitarianism, in which right actions are defined as those that maximize pleasure and minimize pain, preference utilitarianism entails promoting actions that fulfil the interests (preferences) of those beings involved.Peter Singer, ''Practical Ethics'', 2011, p. 13 The beings may be rational, that is to say, their interests may be carefully selected based on future projections, but this is not compulsory; here "beings" extends to all sentient beings, even those living solely in the present (that is, those without the intellectual capacity to contemplate long-term needs or consequences). Since what is good and right depends solely on individual preferences, there can be noth ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Moral Particularism
Moral particularism is a theory in meta-ethics that runs counter to the idea that moral actions can be determined by applying universal moral principles. It states that there is no set of moral principles that can be applied to every situation, making it an idea appealing to the causal nature of morally challenging situations. Moral judgements are said to be determined by factors of relevance with the consideration of a particular context. A moral particularist, for example, would argue that homicide cannot be judged to be morally wrong until all the morally relevant facts are known. While this stands in stark contrast to other prominent moral theories, such as deontology, consequentialism, and virtue ethics, it finds its way into jurisprudence, with the idea of justifiable homicide, for instance. In this case, the morally relevant facts are based on context rather than principle. Critics would argue that even in this case, the principle still informs morally right action. History ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |