Arthur Isak Applbaum is Professor of Ethics and Public Policy at Harvard University's John F. Kennedy School of Government and Director of Graduate Fellowships in the Harvard University Center for Ethics and the Professions. The adversary professions--law, business, and government, among others--typically claim a moral permission to violate persons in ways that, if not for the professional role, would be morally wrong. Lawyers advance bad ends and...

One of the theological classics of the twentieth century, Niebuhr's Moral Man and Immoral Society argues that using moral persuasion and shaming to affect the behavior of such collectives as corporations and nation states is fruitless, as these groups will inevitably seek to promote only their self-interest. He calls for a realistic assessment of group behavior and enumerates how individual morality can mitigate social immorality. This edition includes...

A trolley is careering out of control. Up ahead are five workers; on a spur to the right stands a lone individual. You, a bystander, happen to be standing next to a switch that could divert the trolley, which would save the five, but sacrifice the one-do you pull it? Or say you're watching from an overpass. The only way to save the workers is to drop a heavy object in the trolley's path. And you're standing next to a really fat man…. This ethical...

"In this translation of the Nicomachean Ethics, readers are free to thread their own way through Aristotle's arguments without adventitious signposts such as section-headings, frequent paragraphing, and numbering of points. For those who want additional guidance, or who desire to check their own interpretation against that of another, a line-by-line commentary is provided, attending more to how Aristotle's thinking works at each step than to criticism...

The 18th century German philosopher Immanuel Kant is widely considered as one the most important figures in modern philosophy. His fundamental arguments with regard to the fields of metaphysics, epistemology, ethics, political philosophy, and aesthetics, have been highly influential and form the basis for much of contemporary thought upon the subjects with which he was concerned. Kant believed that there were fundamental concepts that structured human...

By his own admission never one to duck a good fight, Stanley Hauerwas has in the past three decades established himself as one of our most important and most disputatious theologians. With A Better Hope, he concentrates on the constructive case for the truth and power of the church and its faith, "since Christians cannot afford to let ourselves be defined by what we are against. Whatever or whomever we are against, we are so only because God has given...

Many of the earliest books, particularly those dating back to the 1900s and before, are now extremely scarce and increasingly expensive. We are republishing these classic works in affordable, high quality, modern editions, using the original text and artwork.

Ethics is a subject about which there has been and still is an immense amount of difference of opinion, in spite of all the time and labour which have been devoted to the study of it. There are indeed certain matters about which there is not much disagreement. Almost everybody is agreed that certain kinds of actions ought, as a general rule, to be avoided and that under certain circumstances, which constantly recur, it is, as a general rule, better...

"In Ethics in the Real World, Singer shows that he is also a master at dissecting important current events in a few hundred words. In this book of brief essays, he applies his controversial ways of thinking to issues like climate change, extreme poverty, animals, abortion, euthanasia, human genetic selection, sports doping, the sale of kidneys, the ethics of high-priced art, and ways of increasing happiness. Singer asks whether chimpanzees are people,...

"There have been spectacular villains in business that have received a great deal of attention in recent years, such as Elizabeth Holmes, Adam Neumann, and the Sackler family. All of them were supported to varying extents by others who were integral to their rise and fall, what business psychologist Max Bazerman calls "a cast of complicitors." Did those others know the extent they were contributing to unethical behaviour? How responsible were they...