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Added by: Deryn Mair ThomasAbstract:
In this paper I introduce my work in ethics, inviting others to draw on my approach to address the ethical issues that concern them. I set up the Centre for Ethical Philosophy at Durham University in 2007 to plug a puzzling gap in philosophical work to help us help the world. In 1. I set out ethical philosophy. In 2. I consider some implications, for example, that to do good we must pay much more attention to the beings around us, less to ourselves. In 3. I consider the implications for how we should think about war and peace. In 4. I draw out some implications for good political practice. In 5. I consider objections and conclude.
Reader, Soran. Making Pacifism Plausible2000, Journal of Applied Philosophy 17 (2):169–180-
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Added by: Deryn Mair ThomasAbstract:
The ethics of war is a minefield. It is a morass of conceptual unclarity, contentious assumptions, impassioned arguments, unexploded myths, and the injured defenders of indistinct positions. My aim is to help to make the minefield (conceptually) safe, and to assist that most vulnerable party to the dispute, the pacifist. In this paper I explore the possibility that, farfrom being naive or outlandish, pacifism might follow from a widely-held and fundamental intuition about the moral status of persons [hereafter MSP]. In Section 1 I describe MSP, and suggest how we might draw implications from it about the ethics of war. In Section 2, I argue that a ‘presumption of war-ism’ has distorted debate in the ethics of war: to arrive at a balanced view, we need distinguish two sets of moral questions. First, can the development and maintenance of the means to make war be justified? Second, can the use of those means ever be justified? I sketch some strategies which might be developed in addressing the first question, concentrating on what MSP suggests might be wrong with setting up a war-machine, and with being or employing a soldier. In Section 3, I argue that even if considerations from Section 2 are insufficient to establish that we must dismantle our war-machines, facts about war which conflict with MSP do establish that we must never use them.
Comment: In the essay, Reader engages with a broad range of contemporary philosophical literature on the nature and justifications for pacifism. As a result, the paper (and her arguments) offer a useful survey of the literature at the time of publication, and therefore may offer an interesting addition to courses on the philosophy and justification of war more generally. Given that this paper was published in 2000, it may also enhance discussions in political theory courses studying the early 2000s war on terror and conflicts in the Middle East.
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Reader, Soran. Ethical Necessities
2011, Philosophy 86 (4):589-607
Comment: In this paper, Reader outlines her work in ethics conducted at the Centre for Ethical Philosophy at Durham in the late 2010s. While one should look to some of her other papers (also available on the DRL) for the in-depth, detailed working out of her need-based ethical theory, this paper discusses some of the implications of that theory for pacificism, political action, and the rest of academic philosophy.