Goodness and Advice
Chapter One
INTRODUCTION by Amy Gutmann
HOW SHOULD we live? What do we owe to other people? How, if at all, do ethical demands and prudential ones differ? Is there any moral difference between our actions (such as killing) and inactions (such as letting die) when each has the same consequences (the loss of a life)? Judith Jarvis Thomson is a contemporary moral philosopher who has not avoided such big questions. At one time or another in her distinguished career, she has addressed each of these questions, and she continues to do so in her 1999-2000 Tanner Lectures on Human Values at the University Center for Human Values at Princeton University.
This book consists of Thomson's revised Tanner Lectures, with commentaries by Philip Fisher, Martha Nussbaum, Jerome Schneewind, and Barbara Herrnstein Smith, along with a reply by Thomson to her commentators. Thomson's arguments show the value-as well as the limits, which all modes of intellectual inquiry have-of trying to answer big moral questions by a scrupulous mode of philosophical inquiry. The commentaries give prominent voice to recurrent claims about the limits of such philosophical inquiry, wh ... read full excerpt from Goodness and Advice ebook
