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Justice (2011)
8.0/10on Open Library
Published
Michael Sandel takes arguments about the right thing to do into the familiar world of prices, promises, and public decisions. Read him when a dispute about fairness feels stuck. His cases make it easier to identify which principle someone is asking everybody else to live by.
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How to Be Perfect (2022)
9.5/10on Open Library
Published
Michael Schur treats the small temptation to do the convenient thing as a legitimate philosophical problem. He brings ideas about character, consequences, and duties into the same conversation, with enough room for the embarrassing ways we fall short of all three.
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Would You Kill the Fat Man? (2015)
Published
David Edmonds follows the trolley problem through variations that can make the same arithmetic feel morally different. It is a compact way to see what a thought experiment can accomplish. Once you change only one feature of a case, you have to explain why that feature matters.
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What We Owe to Each Other (2000)
Published
T. M. Scanlon asks whether you could justify the principle behind an action to the people it affects. His emphasis on what someone could reasonably reject makes this a demanding choice for anyone who wants to understand why a small benefit to many may leave the person bearing the cost with a serious objection.
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The life you can save (2009)
8.0/10on Open Library
Published
Peter Singer begins with the intuition that you would rescue a drowning child at the expense of your clothes. His argument asks how much that intuition should bind you when the people in danger live far away. Read it for the pressure it puts on the line between an admirable donation and an obligation.
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Strangers drowning (2015)
8.5/10on Open Library
Published
Larissa MacFarquhar reports on people who organize their lives around unusually demanding commitments to strangers. By staying with their families and relationships, she makes the book about the people living with those choices as well as the people they help. It pairs well with a more abstract argument for giving.
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Why some things should not be for sale (2008)
Published
Debra Satz asks when the conditions of a sale make a market harmful. Cases involving labor and human organs give her a way to examine who has room to refuse and what a transaction does to the people involved. Choose it when an appeal to consent leaves the circumstances of consent unexplained.
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The ethics of ambiguity (1962)
Published
For Simone de Beauvoir, moral choices begin in a world where our freedom depends in part on what others are free to do. Her account gives weight to situations with limited options. It is especially worth reading when an inspiring appeal to individual choice leaves the people who cannot exercise it out of view.
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The Sovereignty of Good (1967)
Published
Iris Murdoch imagines a mother-in-law who revises the way she sees her daughter-in-law without making a public display of it. The example makes moral attention something you can practice before the moment of action. Read it for a change of mind that starts with noticing the part your own description plays.
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Moral Luck (1982)
Published
Bernard Williams considers how the outcome of a choice can alter the way it looks in hindsight. In the title essay, an imagined Gauguin gambles on an artistic life at a cost to others. The question is what kind of success could justify leaving and which claims it would leave unsettled.
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Ordinary vices (1984)
Published
Judith Shklar examines ordinary vices such as cruelty and hypocrisy, then asks which should concern us most. Giving cruelty priority changes how you weigh a principled person's behavior. The book is particularly sharp on the unpleasant choices that come from living with several imperfect kinds of decency.
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The fragility of goodness (1986)
8.0/10on Open Library
Published
Martha Nussbaum reads Greek tragedy alongside ancient philosophy to ask how much a good life can depend on things outside our control. She gives competing claims their full force in tragic choices. It is the book to reach for when a conflict feels too serious to settle by naming a single virtue.
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Nicomachean Ethics (1558)
7.7/10on Open Library
Published
Aristotle treats character as something formed in practice. His discussion of actions taken under pressure makes room for choices that are voluntary in a crisis and unwanted in any ordinary situation. The example of throwing cargo overboard in a storm gives the distinction a purpose.
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Utilitarianism (1863)
8.4/10on Open Library
Published
John Stuart Mill asks you to judge actions by their consequences for happiness and then makes the idea of happiness itself harder to settle. His distinction between kinds of pleasure gives readers a specific dispute to follow. It also makes a useful starting point for arguing about what would count as a better outcome.
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Groundwork of the metaphysics of morals (1964)
8.0/10on Open Library
Published
Immanuel Kant considers a false promise made to get out of trouble. The question is whether the rule you are making for yourself could also hold for everybody else. His treatment is short and exacting, especially when you want to understand why a good immediate consequence might leave an action objectionable.
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After virtue (1981)
8.0/10on Open Library
Published
Alasdair MacIntyre distinguishes the goods you gain by learning to do something well from rewards you can collect along the way. A child who plays chess for candy lets him show what changes when playing well comes to matter in its own right. Start there if the larger argument about moral traditions feels forbidding.
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Love's labor (1999)
Published
Eva Feder Kittay brings paid and unpaid care into an argument about equality. She asks what support is owed to the people who do the work of meeting someone else's needs. It is a useful book when praise for a caregiver comes more readily than a look at who makes that care possible.
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Entangled empathy (2015)
Published
Lori Gruen makes empathy for animals a matter of learning about their lives and the relationships that tie them to us. This approach gives uncertainty some work to do. Before deciding that an animal needs what would comfort you, consider what that animal's circumstances and ways of living actually demand.
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Being Mortal (2014)
8.9/10on Open Library
Published
Atul Gawande writes about the choices that emerge when medical treatment, living independently, and spending time with people you love can pull in different directions. His accounts of aging and serious illness are useful for the questions they make possible about what a person wants to preserve while receiving care.
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The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks (2010)
Published
Rebecca Skloot follows the use of Henrietta Lacks's cells in research and the family's experience of learning how widely those cells had traveled. Scientific benefit and informed consent come into view through different people's decisions. Read it for the length of time an institution can leave the people it owes an explanation waiting.
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On Immunity: An Inoculation (2015)
8.0/10on Open Library
Published
Eula Biss writes about vaccination through the fears she encounters as a new mother. Her interest in how we talk about immunity gives this essay its reach. A choice that seems to concern a single body also belongs to a network of people who can protect one another or leave one another exposed.
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