[.ca] Goodness and Advice (ISBN 0691114730)

From Amazon.com:
Goodness and Advice has the delightful feel of a many-sided conversation. Editor Amy Gutmann contributes an introduction, and there are four commentaries in addition to philosopher Judith Jarvis Thomson's centerpieces ("Goodness" and "Advice"), as well as Thomson's response to the commentators. Thomson has perfected the argument by analogy. Her examples, which can sometimes seem apropos of nothing, have earned a reputation for their aesthetic and logical strength. In her skilled hands, when a fictional fellow named Alfred rings a doorbell, he unleashes a swarm of stinging ethical questions: "We may suppose that Alfred's pressing the doorbell caused many other events to occur.... More generally, for a person to act is for a battery of events to occur ... for a person to act is for the world to go in a way that it otherwise would not." Thus, Thomson expertly immerses the reader in the sea of moral philosophy. Thomson's writing here emerged from her Tanner Lectures on Human Values at the University Center for Human Values at Princeton University. The commentary voices of Philip Fisher, Martha C. Nussbaum, J.B. Schneewind, and Barbara Herrnstein Smith add grist to Thomson's mill. Her work in this volume centers on a critique of ethical consequentialism (the view that an action's ethical worth is determined by its consequences) and a draft of a theory about what people ought to do. Thomson's ineluctable reasoning makes for good philosophy that is enlivened by her penchant for hypothetical examples. --Eric de Place

a peculiar book:
There is a rather peculiar book. Thompson's main goal is to criticize consequentialism but it appears that most consequentialists don't even accept the consequentialism that is her target, namely some kind of view that says we should promote *goodness simpliciter*, NOT goodness for sentient beings, goodness for persons, other states that are intrinsically good or whatever. Thompson has an odd target and even if she refutes it, it's not clear what difference it makes to most other consequentialist theories. (Thompson's view seems like it could be classified as a consequentialism anyway). Four people give comments on Thompson's main text but two of them are't even philosophers (I think they are from English departments!??). Nussbaum's comments interesting though. Some of Thompson's articles on these topics are a bit better than this book. I'd recommend checking them out first.