One of the greatest and most joyful challenges of adult life is to develop skills that make the people around us better off with us than without us. Integrity is a key part of that challenge. We are social animals, aiming not simply to trade but to make a place for ourselves in a community. You don’t want to have to pretend that you feel proud of fooling your customers into believing you could be trusted.The ethical question is: how do people have to live in order to make the world...

This volume collects thirteen of David Schmidtz's essays on the question of what it takes to live a good life, given that we live in a social and natural world. Part One defends a non-maximizing conception of rational choice, explains how even ultimate goals can be rationally chosen, defends the rationality of concern and regard for others (even to the point of being willing to die for a cause), and explains why decision theory is necessarily incomplete as a tool for addressing such issues...

Is moral philosophy more foundational than political theory? It is often assumed to be. David Schmidtz argues that the reverse is true: the question of how to live in a community is more fundamental than questions about how to live. This book questions whether we are getting to the foundations of human morality when we ignore contingent features of communities in which political animals live. Schmidtz disputes the idea that reflection on how to live needs to begin with timeless axioms. Rat...

Do our lives have meaning? Should we create more people? Is death bad? Should we commit suicide? Would it be better to be immortal? Should we be optimistic or pessimistic? Since Life, Death, and Meaning: Key Philosophical Readings on the Big Questions first appeared, David Benatar's distinctive anthology designed to introduce students to the key existential questions of philosophy has won a devoted following among users in a variety of upper-level and even introductory courses.

Libertarians often bill their theory as an alternative to both the traditional Left and Right. The Routledge Handbook of Libertarianism helps readers fully examine this alternative without preaching it to them, exploring the contours of libertarian (sometimes also called classical liberal) thinking on justice, institutions, interpersonal ethics, government, and political economy. The 31 chapters--all written specifically for this volume--are organized into five parts. Par...

Debating Education puts two leading scholars in conversation with each other on the subject of education-specifically, what role, if any, markets should play in policy reform. David Schmidtz and Harry Brighouse each advance nuanced arguments and respond to each other, presenting contrasting views on education as a public good. Schmidtz argues on behalf of a market-driven approach, making the case that educational opportunities do not need to be equal in order to be good. The ideal...

Do our lives have meaning? Should we create more people? Is death bad? Should we commit suicide? Would it be better to be immortal? Should we be optimistic or pessimistic? Since Life, Death, and Meaning: Key Philosophical Readings on the Big Questions first appeared, David Benatar's distinctive anthology designed to introduce students to the key existential questions of philosophy has won a devoted following among users in a variety of upper-level and even introductory courses.

We speak of being 'free' to speak our minds, free to go to college, free to move about; we can be cancer-free, debt-free, worry-free, or free from doubt. The concept of freedom (and relatedly the notion of liberty) is ubiquitous but not everyone agrees what the term means, and the philosophical analysis of freedom that has grown over the last two decades has revealed it to be a complex notion whose meaning is dependent on the context. The Oxford Handbook of Freedom will c...

Is moral philosophy more foundational than political theory? It is often assumed to be. David Schmidtz argues that the reverse is true: the question of how to live in a community is more fundamental than questions about how to live. This book questions whether we are getting to the foundations of human morality when we ignore contingent features of communities in which political animals live.Schmidtz contends that theorizing about how to live together should take its cue from conte...

Yascha Mounk shows why a focus on personal responsibility is wrong and counterproductive: it distracts us from the larger economic forces determining aggregate outcomes, ignores what we owe fellow citizens regardless of their choices, and blinds us to key values such as the desire to live in a society of equals. In this book he proposes a remedy.

This volume brings together distinguished philosophers with interdisciplinary expertise to show how the resources of philosophy can be employed in the tasks of evaluating economics and fostering policy debates. Contributors offer analyses of basic ideas in economics, such as the notion of efficiency, "economic man", incentives, self-interest, and utility maximization. They discuss key concepts in political theory such as desert, compensation, autonomy, equality, consent or fairness. The bo...

This book surveys the leading modern theories of property - Lockean, libertarian, utilitarian/law-and-economics, personhood, Kantian and human flourishing - and then applies those theories to concrete contexts in which property issues have been especially controversial. These include redistribution, the right to exclude, regulatory takings, eminent domain and intellectual property. The book highlights the Aristotelian human flourishing theory of property, providing the most comprehensive a...