Contemporary Moral Dilemmas: For Further Reading
 
 

 
 
 

Here are some interesting and fun-to-read books related to a few of the topics discussed in class. None of these is required or expected for the course, but if you are curious about a topic and would like to explore it some more, these are some fun places to start.

Applied ethics:

Rethinking Life and Death: The Collapse of Our Traditional Ethics by Peter Singer, (New York, NY: St. Martin's Press, 1995)

Living High and Letting Die by Peter Unger, (New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 1996) - about our economic obligations to others

Morality and the Law ed. by Richard Wasserstrom, (Belmont, CA: Wadsworth, 1971) - classic debate over the relationship of morality to the law

Making Mortal Choices by Hugo Adam Bedau, (Oxford University Press, 1997) - applies a variety of moral principles to three cases of life and death

Theoretical Ethics:

The Blackwell Guide to Ethical Theory, ed. by Hugh LaFollette, (Oxford, UK: Blackwell, 2000) - a useful survey of different ethical theories

"If God Is Dead, Is Everything Permitted?" by Elizabeth Anderson, in The Portable Atheist, ed. by Christopher Hitchens, (Cambridge, MA: Da Capo Press, 2007)

Utilitarianism: For and Against by J. J. C. Smart and Bernard Williams, (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1973) - a classic discussion of the difficulties with Utilitarianism