Tag: Ethics

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Motivation Ethics

This is a book about a particular moral theory – motivation ethics – and why we should accept it. But it is also a book about moral theorizing, about how we might compare different structures of moral theory.

In principle we might morally evaluate a range of objects: we might, for example, evaluate what people do – is some action right, wrong, permitted, forbidden, a duty or beyond what is required? Or we might evaluate agents: what is it to be morally heroic, or morally depraved, or highly moral? And, we could evaluate institutions: which ones are just, or morally better, or legitimate?

Most theories focus on one (or two) of these and offer arguments against rivals. What this book does is to step back and ask a different question: of the theories that evaluate one object, are they compatible with an acceptable account of the evaluation of the other objects?

So, for instance, if a moral theory tells us which actions are right and wrong, well can it then be compatible with a theory of what it is to be a morally good or bad or heroic or depraved agent (or deny the need for this)? It seems that this would be an easy task, but the book sets out how this is very difficult for some of our most prominent theories, why this is so, and why a theory based on motivations might be the right answer.

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Affirmation, Care Ethics, and LGBT Identity

In this book, Johnston argues that affirmation is not only encouragement or support, but also the primary mechanism we use to form our identities and create safe spaces. Using the work of feminist care ethics and the thinking of French philosopher Henri Bergson to examine responses to school bullying and abuses faced by LGBT older adults, he provides the theoretical analysis and practical tools LGBT people and their allies need to make all spaces, public and private, spaces in which we can live openly as members of the LGBT community.

With its combination of philosophical theory and on-the-ground activist experience, this text will be useful to anyone interested in philosophy, women’s and gender studies, psychology, aging, geriatrics, and LGBT activism. 

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On Affirmation and Becoming: A Deleuzian Introduction to Nietzsche’s Ethics and Ontology

This book re-explores Friedrich Nietzsche’s “critique of nihilism” through the lenses of Gilles Deleuze. A Deleuzian reading of Nietzsche is motivated by a post-deconstructive style of interpretation, in as much as Deleuze goes beyond, or in between, hermeneutics and deconstruction. The book is not about Deleuze’s reading per se; rather, it is an appraisal of Nietzsche’s “critique of nihilism” using Deleuze’s experimental reading. As such, the book is an experiment in itself, as it shows how to partly gloss Nietzsche’s critique of nihilism through Deleuzian phraseology. The critique of nihilism is the book’s basis for introducing Nietzsche’s ethics and ontology. Appraising Nietzsche’s ethics and ontology amounts to clarifying what Deleuze defines as the movement from the “dogmatic image of thought” to the “new image of thought.” Through this new image of thought, Deleuze makes sense of a Nietzschean counterculture, which is a perspective that resists traditional or representational metaphysics. Deleuze takes the reversal of Platonism, or the transmutation of values, to be the point of departure. By abandoning the old image of thought, we are able to free ourselves from the obscurantism of foundationalist or essentialist thinking. It is only through the transmutation of values that Nietzsche’s ethics of affirmation and ontology of becoming would make sense. Through Deleuze, we are able to avoid reading Nietzsche as a moral philosopher and metaphysician. Rather, we are able to read Nietzsche as one espousing an ethical imperative through the thought of the eternal return and one advocating a theory of existence based on an immanent, as opposed to transcendent, image of the world.