Ethics Since 1900

Summary

For this edition of her well-established book Mary Warnock has made a number of additions, in particular a discussion of Rawl's A Theory of Justice. These bring up to date a well-informed and discriminating account of the main ethical problems discussed in the present century in England, the United States, and France. A number of the writings which deal with these problems, among them those of Moore, Prichard, Ayer, Stevenson, Hare, and Sartre, have been considered and analyzed in some detail. They have been taken in chronological order and have been selected from the many books and articles on moral philosophy as those most likely to be of lasting importance for the subject.

About the Author

Helen Mary Warnock, philosopher, was born in Winchester, England, in 1924. She taught philosophy at Oxford from 1949 to 1966. Because of her books on existentialism, in the 1960s she became a regular philosophy commentator on BBC Radio. She was mistress of Girton College, Cambridge, from 1984 to 1991, and became a Life Peer in 1985 as Baroness Warnock of Weeke.

Mary Warnock is perhaps best known for chairing two national committees of inquiry for Great Britain, each of which published a significant report. The first (1974-1978) reported on the education of handicapped children and young persons, and resulted in Special Educational Needs (1978). The second and most influential inquiry dealt with the ethics of embryos and human fertilization, entitled A Question of Life: The Warnock Report on Human Fertilisation and Embryology (1984, reprinted 1985), which was published six years after the birth of the first test-tube baby. She returned to writing about issues related to the ethics of human reproduction in Making Babies: Is There a Right to Have Children? (2002).