Review of Robin Attfield,<i> Ethics</i>: <i>An Overview</i>, London and New York, Continuum (Now Bloomsbury), 2012

doi:10.4236/ojpp.2013.34076

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Open Journal of Philosophy

2013. Vol.3, No.4, 528-530

Published Online November 2013 in SciRes (http://www.scirp.org/journal/ojpp) http://dx.doi.org/10.4236/ojpp.2013.34076

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528

Review of Robin Attfield, Ethics: An Overview, London and

New York, Continuum (Now Bloomsbury), 2012

John Clutterbuck

Freelance Tutor in EFL, Piraeus, Greece

Email: [email protected]

Received October 11th, 2013; r evised November 11th, 2013; accepted November 18th, 2013

tribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the

original work is properly cited.

Attfield’s ethics textbook is a key resource for students of ethics, and covers history of ethics, value-the-

ory, normative ethics, applied ethics, meta-ethics and free-will. Historical sections are used to explain

how stances like virtue ethics and consequentialism came to unfold, and issues of human responsibility to

be debated. Theories of value as supplying reasons for action inform the study of both normative ethics

and meta-ethics. Normative theories are applied to sustainability, medicine, treatment of animals and the

environment, development, and the ethics of war. The companion website will assist instructors and stu-

dents alike, particularly with more challenging topics such as meta-ethics.

Keywords: Ethics; Robin Attfield; Value; Responsibility; Rightness; Virtue; Future Generations; Free

Will

Introduction

This book (Attfield, 2012) covers the whole field of ethics in

outline and six specific areas in particular: history of ethics,

value-theory, normative ethics, applied ethics, meta-ethics, and

issues surrounding responsibility and free-will. It has been

carefully designed for the teachers and students of all countries

where English is spoken, particularly for students of second and

third year undergraduate and magistral levels at university, and

if used together with the accompanying “companion website”

(see below) it will prove invaluable, whether in the role of

textbook or in ancillary reading. It does not claim to be a com-

prehensive treatment of ethics, or an undertaking that would in

any case be out of the question for a work that would fit into

your pocket or handbag, and it explicitly omits important tracts

of the history of ethics and of moral psychology. Besides, it

pays more attention to the analytical tradition in all its varieties

than to the approaches of continental ethicists, but this probably

enhances its clarity and accessibility. (Attfield has previously

written weightier and more comprehensive works on ethics,

including Value, Obligation and Meta-Ethics (Attfield, 1995),

to which frequent cross-references are made in this book for

readers seeking greater breadth or depth of coverage; and that

book remains available from its original publishers, Rodopi of

Amsterdam.) Instead of claiming encyclopedia-like coverage,

Ethics: An Overview focuses on stimulating and ongoing de-

bates, especially ones in applied ethics (ranging from medical

ethics to the ethics of war and peace), and at the same time

provides a good grounding in normative ethical principles and

virtues, and in their status and basis. There again, it also offers

suggestions for ways of taking study further, for example

through the useful study questions and reading lists with which

each of the twenty-eight sections is equipped. In other words, it

encourages students to become their own philosophers.

How the Arguments Unfold

Although the first chapter is entitled “History of Ethics”, it

does not pretend to give a continuous history, but focuses on

the significant contributions of five leading historical fig-

ures—Aristotle, Hobbes, Hume, Kant and John Stuart Mill—to

clarify key themes related to contemporary ethical thinking. A

lifetime’s study and teaching experience has enabled Attfield to

focus on key themes, explain and analyse them in some depth,

and trace lines of development towards contemporary thinking.

For example, the section on Aristotle is used to supply the his-

torical context of virtue ethics, discussed in the chapter on

normative ethics, where the consequentialism of Mill, already

introduced in the opening historical chapter, is further devel-

oped and defended in a manner that takes seriously the good of

nonhuman creatures as well as human well-being.

The second chapter takes three of the key longstan ding themes

of ethics—pleasure, happiness and eudaemonia, or “flourish-

ing”—and discusses them as possible answers to questions of

value-theory and as the bases of theories about the Good Life.

The third chapter on Normative Ethics applies what has

emerged in the second chapter about value to issues of moral

standing, right action and rights. This is where we find discus-

sions of deontology, contractarianism and, as already men-

tioned, consequentialism, and where the strengths and weak-

nesses of virtue ethics also emerge. Recent work on ethics has

given rise to a potentially bewildering proliferation of varieties

of consequentialism—no less than six forms need to be ex-

plained—and Attfield’s book is a reliable guide through the

labyrinth. This allows him to uphold a consequentialism of

practices (social practices such as promise-keeping and truth-

telling), or “practice-consequentialism”, on a basis that is not

confined to human good alone, but which, in line with chapter

two, rests on the good of all living creatures (“biocentrism”: see

J. CLUTTERBUCK

LaFollette (2013)). This approach is likely to resonate with

many readers, particularly those concerned to embrace a theory

sensitive to a broader and ampler environmentalism than one

grounded in the good of our own species and nothing else be-

sides.

In “Moral Sciences”, as the study of modern philosophy has

long been called at Cambridge University, where I found my-

self studying during the 1960s, the field of ethics plays a

prominent role, as this name would suggest. At that time, the

study of practical applications of ethics was in abeyance, at

least in the Anglo-Saxon world, but, as Attfield explains, events

like the Vietnam War and concerns such as those of Rachel

Carson’s Silent Spring (Carson, 1962) restored applied ethics to

the kind of centrality in ethics that it used to enjoy in the days

of Kant and of Mill. The ordinary general reader, through

looking at the interesting fourth chapter of this book on “Ap-

plied Ethics”, would discover a brief outline of how and why

ethics has again come to be understood as a practical as well as

a theoretical undertaking across the last four decades of the

twentieth century and the early decades of the twenty-first, and

in some measure as the kind of aid to practical decision-making

conjured up by phrases such as “Moral Sciences”. The chapter

covers six major areas: intergenerational and population ethics,

medical ethics, animal ethics, development ethics, environ-

mental ethics (see also Attfield, 2003), and the ethics of war.

(Business ethics is sadly omitted, although Attfield has written

on the ethics of work and employment elsewhere (Attfield,

2001)). This chapter in particular is accessible and easy for the

general reader to grasp and benefit from, even for those not

taking degrees in philosophy or ethics. However, a rather

greater commitment to the serious study of philosophy proper is

needed to deal with the detailed and rigorous analysis of con-

cepts and theories present in some of the other sections. But

nothing less is to be expected of students who have chosen to

study philosophy and for whose needs this book is designed.

Since the days of Socrates, philosophy has never been an easy

option, and this book reflects the challenges implicit in its study,

as well as a helping hand along the road to addressing those

challenges.

After treating Applied Ethics the focus moves on to Meta-

Ethics, and to cognitivism, realism and competing theories.

Some teachers and courses may prefer to skip this more chal-

lenging chapter. But in doing so they will miss much of the fun

of doing moral philosophy. For example, does language about

what ought to be done collapse when it fails to motivate, and

should it be replaced with ought-language which is less de-

manding? The section on “internalism” and “externalism” guide s

the reader past numerous pitfalls and man-traps and towards

some tenable answers, adopting elements of both of these op-

posed stances or positions, despite their apparently intractable

opposition. And this approach turns out to cohere with the ac-

count given in this chapter of what there is reason to do, and

why we ought to do what morality commends. Even meta-

ethics, it turns out, can prove rewarding.

The final chapter, which concerns issues surrounding Free

Will and Responsibility, is given a historical structure, enabling

the reader to discover how awareness of the problem of human

freedom first dawned, and later developed in recognizable ways

with a clear continuity from this ancient awareness right

through to the present. The first section returns us to Aristotle,

with his admirable analysis of deliberation and of choice, and

then to the Hellenistic philosophers Epicurus, who noticed the

problem just mentioned and attempted to solve it, and the Sto-

ics, who struggled against all-comers in their efforts to recon-

cile their ethics and their determinism. Subsequent sections

concern early modern debates involving Hobbes, Hume, Kant

and Thomas Reid, all seeking to understand how human free-

dom can co-habit with laws of nature, and then the debates of

the more recent period, when Darwinian evolution came on the

scene, and later quantum indeterminacy as well, and depict the

attempts of Patrick Nowell-Smith, to give a compatibilist inter-

pretation to “could have done otherwise”, well-rebutted, as

Attfield argues, by the counter-analysis of J.L. Austin. Com-

patibilism claims that belief in human freedom and determinism

are compatible, but is itself found to generate insuperable prob-

lems. The final section indicates implications of even more

recent thought, including Mary Midgley’s exposition (Midgley,

1994) of how mammalian evolution prepares the way for the

kind of contextually constrained freedom necessary for ethical

decision-making, and thus for the presuppositions of ethical

discourse.

What the Companion Website Adds

The book’s “companion website”

(http://philosophy.attfield.continuumbooks.com) includes en-

dorsements from leading philosophers, and resources for stu-

dents and their teachers. It is here in particular that students are

encouraged to do ethics for themselves. For every section there

are bullet-point summaries, sets of learning objectives and es-

say titles, together with related lists of reading. There are also

powerpoint presentations consisting of slides for the use of

instructors, once again one display for every section. (It would

be quite easy for a bilingual teacher to translate one or more of

these powerpoint displays into their other language; one lec-

turer in a Spanish-speaking country is currently using some of

these materials in this way. It is of course even easier for teach-

ers of English-speaking students to download and use the

powerpoints, if equipped with copies of the book for the sake of

the continuity that it offers and of the availability of the com-

plete argument therein.) For some chapters there are case stud-

ies, charts and, for the section on Aristotle, Multiple Choice

Questions. The various sections of the book and the website

could be used either separately or as part of longer courses, and

could be taken in various orders of succession, according to

local needs and syllabuses. Other books by Attfield, especially

Value, Obligation and Meta-Ethics, used in combination with

the same companion website, could be used to clarify issues

further (including challenging issues such as those of meta-

ethics), and to assist study and written work.

As I have contended above, some sections of this book are

perforce challenging ones. However, instructors who deploy the

resources of the companion website in their teaching, and in

particular its powerpoint displays, will discover how the book’s

themes can be encapsulated in nuggets of illuminating prose,

capable of grabbing the attention of students and inspiring them

to studying the text and some of the suggested further reading.

Taught in this way, even meta-ethics can come alive, and its

importance be recognized.

Conclusion

This book certainly includes some challenging sections, such

as those on meta-ethics, but its various chapters interlock well

into a textbook, eminently usable for a variety of academic

Open Access 529

J. CLUTTERBUCK

Open Access

530

courses on ethics. Besides its uses as a textbook, and it throws

new light on ethics in at least three ways. Firstly, the historical

sections (found in the first and last chapters), illuminate the

origin and development of crucial ideas, and give a much-

needed perspective to the central chapters with their thematic

expositions and arguments. Secondly, the study of moral stand-

ing and of intrinsic value in the second chapter allows the

reader to grasp how normative ethics need not be confined to

the interests of contemporary human beings, but can take into

account the impacts of our actions, our omissions and our poli-

cies on future generations and on non-human species. Thirdly,

the chapter on applied ethics shows how ethicists in six differ-

ent fields have advanced the application of ethical theory to key

fields of practice, and in places itself contributes to that appli-

cation. While the section on medical ethics is a paradigm of

exposition and shows how the theories of the rest of the book

can be related to clinical practice of an ethical kind, the sections

on development ethics and on environmental ethics (perhaps

the fields for which Attfield is best known) bring to the reader’s

attention contributions of his own, buried away in learned

journals or in earlier and longer books.

I am certain that all this excellent material would have been

an enormous help to me as a studen t at Cambridge, and later at

London University, when I was under pressure to understand

ancient Greek philosophers such as Aristotle and their continu-

ing influence, and to deal with complex ideas in later modern

philosophy, such as those of Hume, Kant and Mill. Many of the

debates discussed in this book had not then taken place, but

many of both the historical and the thematic sections of this

book could enlighten students of any decade. Students new to

philosophy, or with limited experience of studying this subject,

often need the kind of assistance available in this volume, espe-

cially when they face deadlines, or are puzzled by perplexing

concepts, theories or arguments. Moreover, even forty years on

from my first forays into philosophy at Cambridge, the material

presented in this book opens up new vistas into this often diffi-

cult and controversial subject. Attfield’s book has been enthu-

siastically received by Mary Midgley and other leading phi-

losophers, such as Dieter Birnbacher (Düsseldorf) and Vittorio

Hösle (Notre Dame, Indiana). In my view it fully dese rves their

enthusiastic welcome.

REFERENCES

Attfield, R. (1995). Value, obligation and meta-ethics. Amsterdam and

Atlanta, GA: Rodopi.

Attfield, R. (2001). Meaningful work and full employment. Reason in

Practice (now Philosophy of Management), 1, 41-48.

Attfield, R. (2003). Environmental ethics. Cambridge: Polity; Malden,

MA: Blackwell.

Attfield, R. (2012). Ethics: An overview. London and New York: Con-

tinuum/Bloomsbury.

Carson, R. (1962). Silent spring. London: Hamish Hamilton.

LaFollette, H. (2013). In t e r n a t i o na l e n c y c l op e d i a o f et h i c s. Indianapolis

and Bognor Regis: Wil ey-Blackwell.

http://dx.doi.org/10.1002/9781444367072

Midgley, M. (1994). The ethical primate: Humans, freedom and moral-

ity. London and New York: Routledge.

http://dx.doi.org/10.4324/9780203287507