Contemporary Ethical Issues - 9781573926416

This book explores a series of contemporary moral problems from a personalistic perspective influenced by the Scottish philosopher John Macmurray (1892-1976). In many books, articles, and pamphlets spanning fifty years, most notably his Gifford Lectures, "The Form of the Personal", MacMurray developed a robust personalism that emphasises the primacy of persons as rational agents whose self-realisation is achieved in community. Walter G. Jeffko utilises key elements of MacMurray's thought in developing his own viewpoint, and he relates MacMurray's ideas to those of a wide variety of important philosophers, ethicists, and behavioural scientists. In the opening chapter, Jeffko develops a personalistic anthropological and ethical theory within a framework that views the person as a relational and rational agent, reason as the standard of value, and the principle of community as the supreme moral standard. In successive chapters, this theory is applied to such issues as suicide, abortion, euthanasia (including assisted suicide), the death penalty, privacy (including private property and capitalism), the moral treatment of animals, and affirmative action. Jeffko brings logical precision to the study of ethics, blending powerful scholarship with readability.