Ethics and Practical Reasoning

Moral pedagogy and practical ethics.

Online science and engineering ethics (SEE) education can support appropriate goals for SEE and the highly interactive pedagogy that attains those goals. Recent work in moral psychology suggests pedagogical goals for SEE education that are surprisingly similar to goals enunciated by several panels in SEE. Classroom-based interactive study of SEE cases is a suitable method to achieve these goals...

38 Practical Ethics

Much of medieval ethics was practical. Christian spiritual guidance, monastic culture, the regulatory interests of the Church and princes, as well as numerous other factors merged to create a moral framework with a distinct emphasis on application. Because moral and theological guidance were largely intertwined, practical ethics evolved under the guise of pastoral concerns. The subject area of ...

Practical Reasoning and Rationality

Practical reasoning and enkrasia

Akrasia has been traditionally defined as a failure to do what one has most reasons to do, or what one judges that one ought to do (McIntyre 2006; Wedgwood 2007). Traditional conceptions on akrasia take it as a violation of a commitment of the agent: “[for traditional conceptions] an agent who decisively judges it best to A is thereby rationally committed to A-ing, in the sense that (as long as...

The independence of practical ethics.

After criticizing three common conceptions of the relationship between practical ethics and ethical theory, an alternative modeled on Aristotle's conception of the relationship between rhetoric and philosophical ethics is explored. This account is unique in that it neither denigrates the project of searching for an adequate comprehensive ethical theory nor subordinates practical ethics to that ...