Ethics (Oxford Readers)

Arrived quickly and was brand new. Can't fault it at all. I honestly got my money's worth so would recommend it to anyone who needs it for Lectures, Uni, School or anything. If you're just interested in philosophy then yeah...go for it, just know it's very archaic in the language so if you want to explore new things...why not? It's not like you spent a fortune on it =). PLEASE NOTE: I am grading it objectively, i.e. promtness. Neatness. etc... I needed the book for my course so the choice to get the book was not optional.

This is the best introductory to Ethics out there with a wide range of topics covered. It's really easy reading too.

Excellent condition!

Great book - rapid delivery, crazy low price!

This is a very good intro to ethics and meta-ethics. Singer is a good writer and his piece at the beginning is almost worth the price of the book alone. It's more of an overview of the classic texts than a state of the art primer on modern research (e.g. the newest primate studies, psychological / neuroscience based studies, etc.).... then again it was written in 1994. Anyway, a good book if you want to read up on classic texts, but might want to go elsewhere for newer stuff.

Great condition.

Ordered this for my son's college class. The price and shipping time worked for us.

Happy with purchase.

No matter how one feels about Peter Singer as an ethicist, this books shows he's thoroughly incompetent as an editor. I am rather surprised that Oxford University agreed to put its imprint on this volume as an "Oxford Reader." The selections from pivotal ethicists, e.g., Aristotle, Kant, Hume, Bentham, and Sidgwick are ridiculously lowly, inconsequential, or scattered, so "coherence" is lost. Their minor pericopes omit their critical and vital insights; all their important ideas are egregiously overlooked. E.g., Aristotle's doctrine of the mean, eudaimonia, Kant's doctrine of Kingdom of Ends, Categorical Imperative, are just some of the major omissions. Natural law theory doesn't mention the name of Aquinas. The selections that support an evolutionary orientation are a little bit better. The selection from Hume on benevolence is marginal. The essays by Ayer and Wittgenstein are great, but not enough to justify this book. I can't imagine what this book is good for. It certainly fails as an introduction to ethics. It also fails as a current controversy in ethics. It might be used as an intermediate ethics course for some of the pericopes. To say this book is a disappointment is an understatement. Disclaimer: Singer is a utilitarian. I don't know how anyone in the 21st C. can use utilitarianism as an "ethic" much less as a system of "morality." Scheffler, Williams, Nozick, et alia should have put this nonsense to rest, as Stalin, Pol Pot, Mao, and even Hitler were great utilitarians, which is precisely the point. But that aside, I think it skews his editorial judgments as well. For ethics, Aristotle, for morality, Kant, and for benevolence, Smith and Hume. Otherwise, leave the utilitarian calculus for tyrants.