The Practice of Ethics

The ultimate aim of ethics is to improve how people live. Ethics without a view to practice would hardly be worthy of the name. At the same time, ethical thought and action must be informed by something other than intuition and inclination.In this volume, LaFollette shows that ethics, much like medicine, must be an integrated practice informed by insights from philosophy, history, religion, psychology, sociology, law and biology. Using arguments and examples from different a broad range of contemporary issues such as racism, euthanasia, gun control, animal rights, and many other topics, LaFollette creates a coherent narrative that is both theoretically and pragmatically grounded.Timely, relevant and engaging, The Practice of Ethics is an outstanding guide to the burgeoning and often confusing field of applied ethics, and is an excellent companion to LaFollette's authoritative anthology on the topic, Ethics in Practice, third edition (2006).

Hugh LaFollette is Marie and Leslie E. Cole Chair in Ethics, University of South Florida, St. Petersburg. He is author of Personal Relationships: Love, Identity, and Morality (Blackwell, 1995), co-author of Brute Science: The Dilemmas of Animal Experimentation (1996), and editor of several other volumes, including The Blackwell Guide to Ethical Theory (Blackwell, 1999) and Ethics in Practice: An Anthology (third edition, Blackwell, 2007).