Partiality and Impartiality: Morality, Special Relationships, and the Wider World

Issues of impartiality and partiality are a major focus of debate in moral theory. What demands do the needs and interests of others place upon us? Should our personal relationships and commitments have a special place in our moral deliberations? Or, in as much as we are moral, should we be impartial even between our own children and complete strangers? Ten specially written essays by experts in the field offer a variety of perspectives, which will interest readers in both theoretical and practical ethics. A central theme of the volume is whether impartiality and partiality are really opposed dimensions or if they can be harmoniously reconciled in one picture of the good ethical life.


Author: Brian Feltham, John Cottingham
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
Published: 12/30/2010
Pages: 240
Binding Type: Hardcover
Weight: 1.22lbs
Size: 9.21h x 6.14w x 0.63d
ISBN: 9780199579952

About the Author

Brian Feltham was educated at University College London and Oxford, and lectures on political theory at the University of Reading. His research interests include political disagreement and consensus, practical reasoning, and the nature and importance of value beliefs.

John Cottingham has held the Radcliffe Research Fellowship in Philosophy, and has served as Chairman of the British Society for the History of Philosophy, as President of the Mind Association, and as President of the Aristotelian Society. He is (since 1993) Editor of Ratio, the international journal of analytic philosophy. In 2002-4 he was Stanton Lecturer in the Philosophy of Religion at Cambridge University. From 2005-8 he was Director of a three-year research project on Impartiality and Partiality in Ethics at Reading University, funded by the UK Arts and Humanities Research Council; and from 2007-9 he served as President of the British Society for the Philosophy of Religion. He has written a number of influential articles on partiality and impartiality ethics, and his writings on this topic form one of the areas of focus in The Moral Life, a Festschrift on his work, published in 2008, edited by N. Athanassoulis and S. Vice.

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