Two online courses 9 WEEKS OF WORK

Ethics in Context

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Ethics in Context

The Art of Dealing with Serious Questions

Gernot Bohme

Translated by Edmund Jephcott

Polity

Copyright © this translation Polity Press 2001 First published in Germany as Gernot Biihme, Ethik im Kontext: iiber den Umgang mit ernsten Fragen, © Suhrkamp Verlag Frankfurt am Main 1997

First published in 2001 by Polity Press in association with Blackwell Publishers Ltd.

Published with the assistance of the Max-Himmelheber Stiftung and the Professor Dr Alfred Schmid Stiftung.

Editorial office: Polity Press 65 Bridge Street Cambridge CB2 1 UR, UK

Published in the USA by Blackwell Publishers Inc. 350 Main Street Malden, MA 02148, USA

Marketing and production: Blackwell Publishers Ltd 108 Cowley Road Oxford OX4 1JF, UK

All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purposes of criticism and review, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher.

Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher's prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data B6hme, Gernot.

[Ethick im Kontext. English]

Ethics in context: the art of dealing with serious questions / Gernot B6hme ; translated by Edmund Jephcott.

p.cm.

Includes index. ISBN 0-7456-2638-6-ISBN 0-7456-2639-4 (pbk.) 1. Applied ethics. I. Title.

BJ1l25 .B6413 2001 170-dc21

Typeset in 10.5 on 12 pt Palatino by SetSystems Ltd, Saffron Walden, Essex Printed in Great Britain by MPG Books Ltd, Bodmin, Cornwall

This book is printed on acid-free paper.

2001021634

Contents

Acknowledgements vii

Introduction

From a Critique to a New Approach: Serious Questions

Themes of Ethics II

2 The Context of Moral Living and Argumentation 23

The State of Civilization 23

Our Historical Background 34

Basic Moral Ideas 48

Human Rights, Fundamental Rights 59

3 The Moral Life 74

Skills for Moral Living 74

Being-human-well 88

Play and Seriousness 101

4 Moral Argumentation 115

Moral Questions Concerning External Nature 115

Moral Questions Concerning the Nature We Ourselves Are 131

Moral Problems in Dealing with Foreigners 148

5 Summary 163

Notes 167

Index 177

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cknowledgements

This book evolved from a series of lectures on ethics I gave at the Technische Universitat Darmstadt in the Winter Semester 1995/96. My thanks are due to my audience and students for the extensive discussions I had with them. I would also like to thank Professor Heidrun Abromeit, Darmstadt, Professor Adalbert Podlech, Darm­ stadt, Professor T. Maruyama, Kyoto, and Dr Christoph Rehmann, Basel, for their criticism and helpful comments on individual chapters.

We are not concerned to know what goodness is but how to become good men, since otherwise our enquiry would be useless.

Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, II, 1 103b 27-9