Edited by Gerhard Ernst and Jan-Christoph Heilinger

The notion of "human rights" is widely used in political and moral debates. The core idea, that all human beings have some inalienable basic rights, is appealing and has an important practical function: It allows moral criticism of various wrongs and calls for action in order to prevent them. The articles in this collection take up a tension between the wide political use of human rights claims and some intellectual skepticism about them. In particular, three major issues call for clarification: the questions of how to justify human rights, how to determine their scope and the corresponding obligations, and how to overcome the tension between universal normative claims and particular moralities.

Berlin/Boston: De Gruyter, 2011. 273p.

By Frauke Albersmeier

What is moral progress? Are we striving for moral progress when we seek to "make the world a better place"? What connects the different ways in which moral agents, their actions, and the world can become morally better? This book proposes an explication of the abstract concept of moral progress and explores its relation to our moral lives.

Berlin/Boston, De Gruyter, 2022. 257p.

USED BOOK. MAY CONTAIN MARK-UP

By John Leale

“'Saint,' said a boy as they were having a walk together. 'If you went home andfound that a bad man was in your house, what would you do about it?'

'I would try to make friends with him,' replied the saint.

'Yes, but supposing that he didn't want to make friends with you, what would you do then?” asked the boy.

'I would go on trying to make friends with him,' said the saint.

'Yes, but supposing he stamped his foot and thumped the table with his fist, and said: "Saint, I won't be friends with you." What would you do then?*

'I would ask the Good Lord what I ought to do.'

…..

London. The Epworth Press. 1957. 104p.

By G. J. Warnock

From the introduction: “The aim of this essay is to provide a compendious survey of moral philosophy in English since about the beginning of the present century. Fortunately, the tale that thus falls to be told is not in outline excessively complex, and can be seen as a quite intelligible sequence of distinguishable episodes……It will be found that my critical discussions of the major doc­trines to be surveyed are (I fear) somewhat uniformly hostile; and I have brought in, in the later pages of my essay, perhaps more controversial matter than would ordinarily be looked for in a mainly expository review. But I would defend this, if I had to, as lying in the nature of the case. For the case is, I believe, that the successive orthodoxies of moral philosophy in English in the present century have been, notwithstanding the often admirable acumen of their authors, remarkably barren. Certain questions about the nature and the basis of moral judgment which have been regarded, at least in the past, as centrally important have not only not been examined in recent theories; those theories have seemed deliberately to hold that, on those questions, there is nothing whatever that can usefully be said….”

Macmillan St. Martin’s Press. 1867. 88p.