Best/Most Important Books in Ethics of the Past 200 Years
So with over 600 votes, here were the 'top ten':
1. Mill, Utilitarianism (Condorcet winner: wins contests with all other choices)
2. Rawls, A Theory of Justice loses to Mill, Utilitarianism by 247–229
3. Sidgwick, The Methods of Ethics loses to Mill, Utilitarianism by 312–149, loses to Rawls, A Theory of Justice by 313–146
4. Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morality loses to Mill, Utilitarianism by 317–165, loses to Sidgwick, The Methods of Ethics by 221–210
5. Moore, Principia Ethica loses to Mill, Utilitarianism by 364–114, loses to Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morality by 232–211
6. Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil loses to Mill, Utilitarianism by 342–129, loses to Moore, Principia Ethica by 228–205
7. Marx, The 1844 Manuscripts loses to Mill, Utilitarianism by 356–111, loses to Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil by 209–176
8. Williams, Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy loses to Mill, Utilitarianism by 373–77, loses to Marx, The 1844 Manuscripts by 213–178
9. Hegel, Philosophy of Right loses to Mill, Utilitarianism by 347–105, loses to Williams, Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy by 187–185
10. Mackie, Ethics: Inventing Right and Wrong loses to Mill, Utilitarianism by 378–60, loses to Hegel, Philosophy of Right by 194–169
Wildcat2030 wildcat on 21 Aug 11"Slavoj Žižek welcomes the prospect of biogenetic intervention Do we today have an available bioethics? Yes, we do, a bad one: what the Germans call Bindestrich-Ethik, or 'hyphen-ethics', where what gets lost in the hyphenation is ethics as such. The problem is not that a universal ethics is being dissolved into a multitude of specialised ones (bioethics, business ethics, medical ethics and so on) but that particular scientific breakthroughs are immediately set against humanist 'values', leading to complaints that biogenetics, for example, threatens our sense of dignity and autonomy. The main consequence of the current breakthroughs in biogenetics is that natural organisms have become objects open to manipulation. Nature, human and inhuman, is 'desubstantialised', deprived of its impenetrable density, of what Heidegger called 'earth'. If biogenetics is able to reduce the human psyche to an object of manipulation, it is evidence of what Heidegger perceived as the 'danger' inherent in modern technology. By reducing a human being to a natural object whose properties can be altered, what we lose is not (only) humanity but nature itself. In this sense, Francis Fukuyama is right in Our Posthuman Future: the notion of humanity relies on the belief that we possess an inherited 'human nature', that we are born with an unfathomable dimension of ourselves.[*]"