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The Point of View of the Universe : Sidgwick and Contemporary Ethics by Katarzyna de Lazari-Radek; Peter Singer is a book available to read on EtoBox.

What is The Point of View of the Universe : Sidgwick and Contemporary Ethics about?

What does the idea of taking 'the point of view of the universe' tell us about ethics? The great nineteenth-century utilitarian Henry Sidgwick used this metaphor to present what he took to be a self-evident moral truth: the good of one individual is of no more importance than the good of any other. Ethical judgments, he held, are objective truths that we can know by reason. The ethical axioms he took to be self-evident provide a foundation for utilitarianism. He supplements this foundation with an argument that nothing except states of consciousness have ultimate value, which led him to hold that pleasure is the only thing that is intrinsically good. Are these claims defensible? Katarzyna de Lazari-Radek and Peter Singer test them against a variety of views held by contemporary writers in ethics, and conclude that they are. This book is therefore a defence of objectivism in ethics, and of hedonistic utilitarianism. The authors also explore, and in most cases support, Sidgwick's views on many other key questions in ethics: how to justify an ethical theory, the significance of an evolutionary explanation of our moral judgments, the choice between preference-utilitarianism and hedonis

Author

Katarzyna de Lazari-Radek; Peter Singer

Publisher

OUP Oxford

Published

2016

Language

EN

ISBN

9780191022432

Subjects

Philosophy, Humanities