About the Book

The Routledge Companion to Ethics is an outstanding survey of the whole field of ethics by a distinguished international team of contributors. Over sixty entries are divided into six clear sections:

• The history of ethics
• meta-ethics
• perspectives from outside ethics
• ethical perspectives
• morality
• debates in ethics.

The Companion opens with a comprehensive historical overview of ethics, including entries on Plato, Aristotle, Hume, and Kant, and the origins of ethical thinking in China, India and the Middle East. The second part covers the domain of metaethics, including entries on cognitivism and non-cognitivism, explanation, reasons, moral realism and fictionalism. The third part covers important challenges to ethics from the fields of anthropology, psychology, socio-biology and economics. The fourth and fifth sections cover competing theories of ethics and the nature of morality respectively, with entries on consequentialism, Kantian morality, virtue ethics, relativism, morality and character, evil, responsibility and particularism in ethics amongst many others. A comprehensive final section includes entries on the most important topics and controversies in applied ethics, including rights, justice and distribution, the beginning and end of life, the environment, poverty, war and terrorism.

The Routledge Companion to Ethics is a superb resource for anyone interested in the subject, whether in philosophy or related subjects such as politics, education, or law. Fully indexed and cross-referenced, with helpful further reading sections at the end of each entry, it is ideal for those coming to the field of ethics for the first time as well as readers already familiar with the subject.