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24Drawing Morals: Essays in Ethical TheoryOup Usa. 2011.This volume contains selected essays in moral and political philosophy by Thomas Hurka. The essays address a wide variety of topics, from the well-rounded life and the value of playing games to proportionality in war and the ethics of nationalism. They also share a common aim: to illuminate the surprising richness and subtlety of our everyday moral thought by revealing its underlying structure, which they often do by representing that structure on graphs. More specifically, the essays all give w…Read more
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525PerfectionismOxford University Press. 1993.Perfectionism is one of the leading moral views of the Western tradition, defended by Plato, Aristotle, Aquinas, Leibniz, Hegel, Marx, Nietzsche, and Green. Defined broadly, it holds that what is right is whatever most promotes certain objective human goods such as knowledge, achievement, and deep personal relations. Defined more narrowly, it identifies these goods by reference to human nature, so the human good consistsin developing the properties fundamental to human beings. If it is fundament…Read more
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90Underivative duty: Prichard on moral obligation: Thomas HurkaSocial Philosophy and Policy 27 (2): 111-134. 2010.This paper examines H.A. Prichard's defense of the view that moral duty is underivative, as reflected in his argument that it is a mistake to ask “Why ought I to do what I morally ought?”, because the only possible answer is “Because you morally ought to.” This view was shared by other philosophers of Prichard's period, from Henry Sidgwick through A.C. Ewing, but Prichard stated it most forcefully and defended it best. The paper distinguishes three stages in Prichard's argument: one appealing to…Read more
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41Creation and abortion: a study in moral and legal philosophyJournal of Medical Ethics 20 (2): 121-122. 1994.
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68The Rejection of Consequentialism Samuel Scheffler Don Mills: Oxford University Press, 1982. Pp. viii, 129Dialogue 23 (1): 165-167. 1984.
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135Asymmetries In ValueNoûs 44 (2): 199-223. 2010.Values typically come in pairs. Most obviously, there are the pairs of an intrinsic good and its contrasting intrinsic evil, such as pleasure and pain, virtue and vice, and desert and undesert, or getting what one deserves and getting its opposite. But in more complex cases there can be contrasting pairs with the same value. Thus, virtue has the positive form of benevolent pleasure in another’s pleasure and the negative form of compassionate pain for his pain, while desert has the positive form …Read more
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91Moore's moral philosophyStanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. 2021.G.E. Moore's Principia Ethica of 1903 is often considered a revolutionary work that set a new agenda for 20 th-century ethics. This historical view is hard to sustain, however. In metaethics Moore's non naturalist position was close to that defended by Henry Sidgwick and other late..
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Intrinsic valueIn D. Borchert (ed.), Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Macmillan Reference. pp. 4--719. 2006.
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34Self-Interest, Altruism, and VirtueSocial Philosophy and Policy 14 (1): 286. 1997.My topic in this essay is the comparative moral value of self-interest and altruism. I take self-interest to consist in a positive attitude toward one's own good and altruism to consist in a similar attitude toward the good of others, and I assess these attitudes within a general theory of the intrinsic value of attitudes toward goods and evils. The first two sections of the essay apply this theory in a simple form, one that treats self-interest and altruism symmetrically. The third section exam…Read more
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212The Grasshopper: Games, Life and UtopiaBroadview Press. 1978.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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74On Audi's Marriage of Ross and KantIn Mark Timmons, John Greco & Alfred R. Mele (eds.), Rationality and the Good: Critical Essays on the Ethics and Epistemology of Robert Audi, Oxford University Press. pp. 64-72. 2007.As its title suggests, Robert Audi’s The Good in the Right1 defends an intuitionist moral view like W.D. Ross’s in The Right and the Good. Ross was an intuitionist, first, in metaethics, where he held that there are self-evident moral truths that can be known by intuition. But he was also an intuitionist in the different sense used in normative ethics, since he held that there are irreducibly many such truths. Some concern the intrinsic goods, which are in turn plural, so there are prima facie d…Read more
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1Book Review: Sher, Beyond Neutrality (review)In Stephen Everson (ed.), Ethics, Cambridge University Press. pp. 109--190. 1998.
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203The justification of national partialityIn Jeff McMahan & Robert McKim (eds.), The Morality of Nationalism, Oxford Unversity Press. pp. 139-57. 1997.The moral issues about nationalism arise from the character of nationalism as a form of partiality. Nationalists care more about their own nation and its members than about other nations and their members; in that way nationalists are partial to their own national group. The question, then, is whether this national partiality is morally justified or, on the contrary, whether everyone ought to care impartially about all members of all nations. As Jeff McMahan emphasizes in [another chapter of the…Read more
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23Sumner on Natural RightsDialogue 28 (1): 117-. 1989.I am pleased to participate in this joint Critical Notice, in part because it is an opportunity to pay a debt of gratitude. Thirteen years ago, as a Toronto undergraduate with interests in things like Hegelian metaphysics, I enrolled in an ethics seminar with Wayne Sumner. I had not done any ethics before, and took this course largely because I thought I ought to. But it turned out to be the best course of my undergraduate career, and permanently changed my philosophical interests. Having learne…Read more
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104Vices as Higher-Level EvilsUtilitas 13 (2): 195-212. 2001.This paper sketches an account of the intrinsic goodness of virtue and intrinsic evil of vice that can fit within a consequentialist framework. This treats the virtues and vices as higher-level intrinsic values, ones that consist in, respectively, appropriate and inappropriate attitudes to other, lower-level values. After presenting the main general features of the account, the paper illustrates its strengths by showing how it illuminates a series of particular vices. In the course of doing so, …Read more
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298Games and the goodProceedings of the Aristotelian Society 106 (1): 217-235. 2006.Using Bernard Suits’s brilliant analysis (contra Wittgenstein) of playing a game, this paper examines the intrinsic value of game-playing. It argues that two elements in Suits’s analysis make success in games difficult, which is one ground of value, while a third involves choosing a good activity for the property that makes it good, which is a further ground. The paper concludes by arguing that game-playing is the paradigm modern (Marx, Nietzsche) as against classical (Aristotle) value: since it…Read more
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277Value and friendship: A more subtle viewUtilitas 18 (3): 232-242. 2006.T. M. Scanlon has cited the value of friendship in arguing against a ‘teleological’ view of value which says that value inheres only in states of affairs and demands only that we promote it. This article argues that, whatever the teleological view's final merits, the case against it cannot be made on the basis of friendship. The view can capture Scanlon's claims about friendship if it holds, as it can consistently with its basic ideas, that (i) friendship is a higher-level good consisting in app…Read more
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Areas of Interest
Normative Ethics |
Social and Political Philosophy |
20th Century Philosophy |