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17Making Sense of Human Rights: Philosophical Reflections on the Universal Declaration of Human RightsPhilosophical Books 30 (1): 54-56. 1987.
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111Aristotle on Virtue: Wrong, Wrong, and WrongIn Julia Peters (ed.), Aristotelian Ethics in Contemporary Perspective, Routledge. pp. 9-26. 2012.In his chapter ‘Aristotle on Virtue: Wrong, Wrong, and Wrong’, Thomas Hurka advances penetrating criticisms of some of the core theses of the Aristotelian approach to virtue. Hurka challenges the Aristotelian tendency to blur the distinction between the good and the right by making the virtues, which are constitutive of a person’s goodness, objects of praise or blame. He puts into question the Aristotelian doctrine of the mean and the idea that vice can always be explained in terms of either exc…Read more
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44Liability and Just CauseEthics and International Affairs 21 (2): 199-218. 2007.This paper is a response to Jeff McMahan's "Just Cause for War". It defends a more permissive, and more traditional view of just war liability against McMahan's claims.
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The Grasshopper: Games, Life and UtopiaBroadview Press. 2005.In the mid twentieth century the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein famously asserted that games are indefinable; there are no common threads that link them all. "Nonsense," says the sensible Bernard Suits: "playing a game is a voluntary attempt to overcome unnecessary obstacles." The short book Suits wrote demonstrating precisely that is as playful as it is insightful, as stimulating as it is delightful. Suits not only argues that games can be meaningfully defined; he also suggests that playing ga…Read more
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182Sidgwick on Consequentialism and Deontology: A CritiqueUtilitas 26 (2): 129-152. 2014.InThe Methods of EthicsHenry Sidgwick argued against deontology and for consequentialism. More specifically, he stated four conditions for self-evident moral truth and argued that, whereas no deontological principles satisfy all four conditions, the principles that generate consequentialism do. This article argues that both his critique of deontology and his defence of consequentialism fail, largely for the same reason: that he did not clearly grasp the concept W. D. Ross later introduced of a p…Read more
Toronto, Ontario, Canada
Areas of Interest
Normative Ethics |
Social and Political Philosophy |
20th Century Philosophy |