Research Catalog

Title

Contemporary ethical issues : a personalist perspective / Walter G. Jeffko.

Author

Jeffko, Walter G.

Publication

Amherst, New York : Prometheus Books, 2013.

Items in the Library & Off-site

Details

Description

509 pages; 24 cm

Summary

Blending powerful scholarship with readability, this newly revised third edition explores a series of compelling moral problem from a personalist perspective influenced by the Scottish philosopher John Macmurray (1891-1976). In many publications spanning fifty years, Mucmurray developed a robust personalism that emphasizes the primacy of persons as rational agents. In his view, self-realization is achieved in a community where justice and individual rights are respected. Walter G. Jeffko utilizes key elements of Macmurray's thought in developing his own philosophical viewpoint, and he relates Macmurray's ideas to those of a wide variety of important philosophers, ethicists, and other notable thinkers, including ecologists and war theorists. New to this third edition is an essay on the moral treatment of civilians in war, including a rigorous critique of Michael Walzer's "supreme emergency" and the communitarianism that grounds it. Many recent Supreme Court decisions are evaluated, as is the threat to our democracy posed by unlimited sums of money in politics, the growing inequality of wealth and income, and the rise of political extremism on the right and its threat to women's rights. Book jacket.

Subject

• Ethical problems
• Personalism

Bibliography (note)

• Includes bibliographical references (pages 463-482) and index.

Processing Action (note)

• committed to retain

Contents

Person, reason, and value -- Moral value, intentionality, and community -- Suicide and the right to die -- Abortion, personhood, and community -- Euthanasia : a reinterpretation -- The death penalty and purposes of punishment -- Privacy, private property, and justice -- The personalist society, community, and justice -- The moral treatment of animals -- Affirmative action and justice -- Community and the environmental crisis -- The moral treatment of civilians in war : a personalist theory.

ISBN

• 9781616147310 (pbk. : alk. paper)
• 1616147318 (pbk. : alk. paper)
• 9781616147324 (ebook) (canceled/invalid)

LCCN

^^2013002221

OCLC

• 818738022
• SCSB-12387263

Owning Institutions

Harvard Library