Kant's only aesthetic work apart from the Critique of Judgment , Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and Sublime gives the reader a sense of the personality and character of its author as he sifts through the range of human responses to the concept of beauty and human manifestations of the beautiful and sublime. Kant was fifty-eight when the first of his great Critical trilogy, the Critique of Pure Reason , was published. Observations offers a view into the mind (...) of the forty-year-old Kant. (shrink)

This paper is an exploration of the vice of misanthropy particularly as it manifests itself in people who love nature. Misanthropy is a hatred and disgust of humans, particularly of a group of humans. I look to wilderness to illustrate the vice of misanthropy. With regard to wilderness, misanthropy functions in three distinct spheres. First, there is misanthropy in the use of wilderness to flee other people. Second, there is misanthropy in the assumption that humans taint the wilderness. Finally, there (...) is misanthropy in the assumption that humans can only relate to nature in a way that is harmful. In the end, we need to avoid misanthropy and its attendant despair. It is important that we see ourselves, not as a determined mass of people, but rather as individual people who are able to create positive change. (shrink)

This paper is an exploration of the vice of misanthropy particularly as it manifests itself in people who love nature. Misanthropy is a hatred and disgust of humans, particularly of a group of humans. I look to wilderness to illustrate the vice of misanthropy. With regard to wilderness, misanthropy functions in three distinct spheres. First, there is misanthropy in the use of wilderness to flee other people. Second, there is misanthropy in the assumption that humans taint the wilderness. Finally, there (...) is misanthropy in the assumption that humans can only relate to nature in a way that is harmful. In the end, we need to avoid misanthropy and its attendant despair. It is important that we see ourselves, not as a determined mass of people, but rather as individual people who are able to create positive change. (shrink)

Moral anti-realism comes in two forms – noncognitivism and the error theory. The noncognitivist says that when we make moral judgments we aren’t even trying to state moral facts. The error theorist says that when we make moral judgments we are making statements about what is objectively good, bad, right, or wrong but, since there are no moral facts, our moral judgments are uniformly false. This development of moral anti-realism was first seriously defended by John Mackie. In this paper I (...) explore a dispute among moral error theorists about how to deal with false moral judgments. The advice of the moral abolitionist is to stop making moral judgments, but the contrary advice of the moral fictionalist is to retain moral language and moral thinking. After clarifying the choice that arises for the moral error theorist, I argue that moral abolitionism has much to recommend it. I discuss Mackie’s defense of moral fictionalism as well as a recent version of the same position offered by Daniel Nolan, Greg Restall, and Caroline West. Then I second some remarks Ian Hinckfuss made in his defense of moral abolitionism and his criticism of “the moral society.” One of the worst things about moral fictionalism is that it undermines our epistemology by promoting a culture of deception. To deal with this problem Richard Joyce offers a “non-assertive” version of moral fictionalism as perhaps the last option for an error theorist who hopes to avoid moral abolitionism. I discuss some of the problems facing that form of moral fictionalism, offer some further reasons for adopting moral abolitionism in our personal lives, and conclude with reasons for thinking that abolishing morality may be an essential step in achieving the goals well-meaning moralists and moral fictionalists have always cherished. (shrink)

Immanuel Kant's Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals ranks alongside Plato's Republic and Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics as one of the most profound and influential works in moral philosophy ever written. In Kant's own words its aim is to search for and establish the supreme principle of morality, the categorical imperative. Kant argues that every human being is an end in himself or herself, never to be used as a means by others, and that moral obligation is an expression of the (...) human capacity for autonomy or self-government. This edition presents the acclaimed translation of the text by Mary Gregor, together with an introduction by Christine M. Korsgaard that examines and explains Kant's argument. (shrink)

Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche (1844-1900) was a German philosopher. His writing included critiques of religion, morality, contemporary culture, philosophy and science, using a distinctive style and displaying a fondness for aphorism. Nietzsche s influence remains substantial within and beyond philosophy, notably in existentialism and postmodernism. He began his career as a philologist before turning to philosophy. At the age of 24 he became Professor of Classical Philology at the University of Basel, but resigned in 1879 due to health problems, which would (...) plague him for most of his life. In 1889 he exhibited symptoms of serious mental illness, living out his remaining years in the care of his mother and sister until his death in 1900. His works include From my Life (1858), On Music (1858), Napoleon III as a President (1862), Free Willand Fate (1862), My Life (1864), The Birth of Tragedy (1872), Richard Wagner in Bayreuth (1876), Human, All-Too-Human (1878), Beyond Good and Evil (1886), The Antichrist (1888) and Ecce Homo (1888). (shrink)

Environmental ethics is the discipline in philosophy that studies the moral relationship of human beings to, and also the value and moral status of, the environment and its nonhuman contents. This entry covers: (1) the challenge of environmental ethics to the anthropocentrism (i.e., humancenteredness) embedded in traditional western ethical thinking; (2) the early development of the discipline in the 1960s and 1970s; (3) the connection of deep ecology, feminist environmental ethics, and social ecology to politics; (4) the attempt to apply (...) traditional ethical theories, including consequentialism, deontology, and virtue ethics, to support contemporary environmental concerns; and (5) the focus of environmental literature on wilderness, and possible future developments of the discipline. (shrink)