Re-Reasoning Ethics

Re-Reasoning Ethics is one of the most technical and detailed contemporary accounts of ethical naturalism within applied and empirical ethics. It will be useful for researchers doing applied ethics in general and medical ethics in particular, and especially so for those engaged in methodological research at the boundaries of ethics, philosophy, the sciences, and social sciences where interfaces exist between the descriptive and the normative. Although the book is ostensibly a work of moral philosophy, it may also be useful to scholars approaching ethics from the sciences and social sciences, rather than from philosophy.

Alex McKeown, Department of Psychiatry, University of Oxford

The scholarship of this book is sound and the work is original. A little-appreciated feature of bioethics as a field is its long-standing focus on issues of method and justification for practical normative conclusions. This makes bioethics, as a field, at once concerned with the kind of practical ethics questions the authors highlight, and meta-ethical issues about the nature of reasons, deliberation, and justification. Re-Reasoning Ethics provides a refreshingly robust and thorough discussion at both levels of analysis, and contributes a new paradigm and voice to those critical of the 'applied ethics' approach: ethics as design for flourishing.

Clair Morrissey, Associate Professor of Philosophy, Occidental College

The standard framework of formal reasoning based on various principles constitutes an unrealistic, and, thus, uninformative, framework for reasoning and rationality. In Re-Reasoning Ethics, Hoffmaster and Hooker develop a model of nonformal reason, based on judgment, that provides an alternative notion of rationality. This model is developed and applied within philosophy of science and ethics, demonstrating its power and ability to capture genuine reason in human beings, and, thus, its superiority over standard formal models.

Mark H. Bickhard, Henry R. Luce Professor of Cognitive Robotics and the Philosophy of Knowledge, Lehigh University