This magisterial work is the first comprehensive study of the ethics of killing, where the moral status of the individual killed is uncertain. Drawing on philosophical notions of personal identity and the immorality of killing, McMahan looks carefully at a host of practical issues, including abortion, infanticide, the killing of animals, assisted suicide, and euthanasia.

The Ethics of Killing: Problems at the Margins of Life

Politics & Social Sciences

McMahan, Jeff

Philosophy

Oxford University Press

The Ethics of Killing: Problems at the Margins of Life (Oxford Ethics Series)

Killing a person is in general among the most seriously wrongful forms of action, yet most of us accept that it can be permissible to kill people on a large scale in war. Does morality become more permissive in a state of war? Jeff McMahan argues that conditions in war make no difference to what morality permits and the justifications for killing people are the same in war as they are in other contexts, such as individual self-defence. This view is radically at odds with the traditional theory of the just war and has implications that challenge common sense views. McMahan argues, for example, that it is wrong to fight in a war that is unjust because it lacks a just cause.

Killing in War (Uehiro Series in Practical Ethics)

Foreign & International Law

Killing a person is in general among the most seriously wrongful forms of action, yet most of us accept that it can be permissible to kill people on a large scale in war. Does morality become more permissive in a state of war? Jeff McMahan argues that conditions in war make no difference to what morality permits and the justifications for killing people are the same in war as they are in other contexts, such as individual self-defence. This view is radically at odds with the traditional theory of the just war and has implications that challenge common sense views. McMahan argues, for example, that it is wrong to fight in a war that is unjust because it lacks a just cause.

Reagan and the World

Analyzes the aims and goals of the Reagan administration's foreign policy, looks at arms control and nuclear proliferation, and discusses U.S. intervention in South America

Biographies & Memoirs

Historical

Monthly Review+press

History

Americas

Analyzes the aims and goals of the Reagan administration's foreign policy, looks at arms control and nuclear proliferation, and discusses U.S. intervention in South America

Reagan and the world: Imperial policy in the new Cold War

Pluto Press

British nuclear weapons: For and against

Junction Books

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Books by McMahan, Jeff