Part 4 Summary

There are dozens of concrete moral issues that have rightly attracted the attention of philosophers. It would be impossible to provide coverage of all of these interesting issues, and so this section contains just a small sampling. Here you’ll have a chance to read important philosophical papers on ethical problems concerning poverty, euthanasia, animal rights, the environment, abortion, capital punishment, guns, racism, drug legalization, and copyright law. Many topics have been chosen because of their direct link with one or more of the normative ethical theories that were covered earlier. Others were chosen because of their intrinsic importance or because there was an especially exciting essay on a subject. Because of space limitations all sides of the issue are not usually represented. The hope is that the pieces included here are sufficiently provocative to engage you in the central philosophical task of trying to reconstruct an author’s line of reasoning and then to subject it to critical analysis.