The importance of food in our individual lives raises moral questions from the debate over eating animals to the prominence of gourmet cookery in the popular media. Through philosophy, Elizabeth Telfer discusses issues including our obligations to those who are starving; the value of the pleasure of food; food as art; our duties to animals; and the moral virtues of hospitableness and temperance. Elizabeth Telfer shows how much traditional philosophy, from Plato to John Stuart Mill, has to say to illuminate (...) this everyday yet complex subject. (shrink)

Looking at the philosophical issues raised by food this short and accessible book questions the place food should have in our individual lives. It shows how traditional philosophy and its classic texts can illuminate an everyday subject.

The Franklin defence of meat-eating is the claim that meat-eating is morally permissible because animals eat other animals. I examine five versions of this defence. I argue that two versions, claiming respectively that might is right and that animals deserve to be eaten, can easily be dismissed, and that the version based on a claim that God intends us to eat animals is theologically controversial. I go on to show that the two other versions—one claiming that meat-eating is natural, the (...) other that it is inconsistent to condemn human meat-eating without also trying to prevent animals eating other animals—present some difficulties for the moral vegetarian. (shrink)

It is often said that human beings have the ability to plan and choose what to do, can think for themselves and have the freedom and the right to form their own opinions on moral questions. Such claims are sometimes expressed by saying that the human agent is autonomous. In this paper we shall try to disentangle various theses about the autonomy of the agent which the common claims do not always distinguish.

First published in 1980, Caring and Curing is for all those involved in the 'caring professions' - medicine, social work, and the other health and welfare occupations. It is both an introduction to philosophy for the caring professions and a philosophy of those professions. The authors believe that the best way to introduce philosophy is to engage in it, to philosophize, and that the most exciting way to philosophize is to offer a reasoned but controversial point of view on matters (...) to which people are professionally committed. They argue, first, that there is an essential unity of the caring professions in that the concepts of health and welfare are different aspects of a single value judgement as to what sort of life a person should be enabled to live in his society. Secondly, they show the limits of scientific expertise in relation to human behaviour and argue that the education of medical and social workers should include broader humane disciplines to assist them in coping with the problems of ethics and values of all kinds in present-day society. Thus, the discussion introduces the main branches of philosophy and deals with many of the current moral dilemmas in medicine and social work. (shrink)

Originally published in 1969, this book provides a sustained examination of the idea of the individual person as of supreme worth in the language of analytical philosophy. An important contribution to debates in moral philosophy, it will be of use to students in the philosophy of religion and education and to those who are interested in the contribution which philosophical analysis can make to the understanding of traditional moral and political ideas.

Although the theme of these papers is ‘Contemporary Moral Problems’ my paper is partly about Aristotelian ideas. I had originally intended to apologize for this, but I find there is no need: many other contributors have found Aristotle to be timelessly relevant, as I myself have.