Problem-Based Ethics: A New Approach to the Application of Moral Theory

As a broad critique and invitation to reframe the study of ethics, Problem-Based Ethics welcomes scholars and students across disciplines to engage with ethics as a way to explore pervasive questions of our society and human existence.

Stepping back from the intricacies of theory and from heated political debates, Samuel Kahn’s synthesis of the study of ethics asks readers to consider even the most contentious of topics like abortion, capital punishment, and euthanasia from their most basic questions. This approach reveals opportunities for more nuanced and evolving ethical positions. It also promotes a culture of civility too often destroyed in politicized debates in scholarly and popular forums.

The book covers standard issues in metaethics, normative ethics, and applied ethics, such as the objectivism/subjectivism debate, the consequentialism/deontology/virtue ethics/ethics of care debate, and the abortion debate. It also introduces more advanced issues such as distributive justice and environmental ethics, as well as less standard questions often of interest to laypeople and students, such as whether crime can be eliminated.

Samuel J. M. Kahn is professor and chair of the department of philosophy at Indiana University, Indianapolis. He is author of Kant’s Theory of Conscience and Kant, Ought Implies Can, the Principle of Alternate Possibilities, and Happiness.