A Very Bad Wizard, Morality Behind the Curtain

Resumen del libro

In the first edition of A Very Bad Wizard: Morality Behind the Curtain Nine Conversations, philosopher Tamler Sommers talked with an interdisciplinary group of the world's leading researchers from the fields of social psychology, moral philosophy, cognitive science, and primatology all working on the same issue: the origins and workings of morality. Together, these nine interviews pulled back some of the curtain, not only on our moral lives but through Sommers' probing, entertaining, and well informed questions on the way morality traditionally has been studied.

This Second Edition increases the subject matter, adding nine additional interviews and offering features that will make A Very Bad Wizard more useful in undergraduate classrooms. These features include structuring all seventeen chapters around sections and themes familiar in a course in ethics or moral psychology; providing follow-up podcasts for more than half of the interviews, which will delve into certain issues from the conversations in a more informal manner; presenting instructor resources online, such as class notes and topics and questions for class discussion for each interview; including an expanded and annotated reading list with relevant primary sources at the end of each interview. These readings, which also will be listed online with links to URL sites, will supplement the interviews for instructors who use the book as their primary text.

The resulting new publication promises to synthesize and make accessible the latest interdisciplinary research to offer a brand new way to teach philosophical ethics and moral psychology.

Table of Contents:

Part I Moral Origins

Chapter 1: Frans De Waal on human and ape morality

Chapter 2: Chistopher Boehm on the evolution of altruism, shame, and aggression.

Chapter 3: Joseph Henrich on the evolution of norms across culture

Chapter 4: Jonathan Haidt on moral emotions and moral judgments

Part II : Normative Ethics and Social Psychology

Chapter 5: Peter Singer on consequentialism, animal welfare, and our obligations to those in poverty.

Chapter 6: Josh Greene and Liane Young on neuroscience, emotions, and consequentialist and deontological theories.

Chapter 7: Cynthia Freeland on Aristotle and Virtues

Chapter 8: Philip Zimbardo on situationism in moral psychology

Chapter 9: Valerie Tiberius on sentimentalist approaches to normative ethics

Part III: Free Will, Moral Responsibility, and Punishment

Chapter 10: Galen Strawson on the impossibility of moral responsibility

Chapter 11: Susan Wolf on reason-based accounts of freedom and responsibility.

Chapter 12: William Ian Miller on honor, revenge, and punishment.

Chapter 13: Nicola Lacey on criminal responsibility and the politics of criminal justice

Part IV: Metaethics

Chapter 14: Michael Smith on moral realism.

Chapter 15: Michael Ruse on moral skepticism

Chapter 16: Simon Blackburn on expressivist theories in metaethics

Chapter 17: Sarah McGrath on moral disagreement and moral relativism

Chapter 18: Stephen Stich on the role of intuitions in ethics and metaethics.