» The Right Thing To Do: Basic Readings in Moral Philosophy

The Right Thing To Do: Basic Readings in Moral Philosophy Reviews

Customer Rating:
Summary: Textbook
Comment: This book is part of my required textbooks for school. It's very informative and interesting.

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Customer Rating:
Summary: The Right Thing To Do: Basic Readings in Moral Philosophy
Comment: I ordered this book for a college class. A classmate of mine discovered that her book was missing pages. I checked my book and found the same problem. Apparently the publisher did not perform a quality check on their books. Pages 90-127 are missing from this book.

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Customer Rating:
Summary: Insensitive and biased, or brilliant?
Comment: Natalia's response makes one wonder whether she herself was perhaps among the unfortunate babies born without a brain. Yes, if there were no other human beings in the world other than this one brainless baby, maybe I would keep the brainless baby around to help comfort me by reminding me of the lost human species. However, in fact there are lots of other human beings, most of whom have brains, so in reality there's no need to keep brainless babies around as pets.

Natalia also seems to be unaware of what a brain is. Brainless babies do not experience pain or anguish. (Nor do they experience pleasure.) Without a brain, 'you' have no experiences of any kind, no beliefs, no desires, and you don't care about anything to any degree. It's just a body lying in a hospital bed. There's no such thing as being insensitive to such a thing, any more than you can be insensitive to a rock.

If it's true that every object, including pebbles on the beach, has something to teach, then I'd rather learn from the rocks, which you don't have to expend thousands of dollars in medical bills to support.

I don't know about the previous editions of this book, but the present edition is really not biased, unless in the sense of being biased towards rationality and quality. In the case of issues where there is significant debate in moral philosophy, there are articles explaining both sides (e.g., abortion). In some cases, there's only one article (e.g., on homosexuality), but these are the issues where there is almost no disagreement in the field, and you'd have to scrape the bottom of the barrel, admitting really low-quality pieces, if you insisted on having an opposing article.

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Customer Rating:
Summary: Unhelpful and Biased
Comment: I used Rachel's text for my students in an undergraduate course in Ethics, and was extremely disappointed and frustrated. Rachels freely promotes his political views and concerns by mean of his narrow selection of primary texts, and thereby curtails effective classroom discussion.

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Customer Rating:
Summary: re: Natalia's critique
Comment: DISCLAIMER: The 4 rating is a not-so-random guess, as I haven't read the whole book yet, but had to put a number down in order to give this critique of Natalia's post. As soon as I bought this book, I read the section on Infanticide, which Natalia so poorly criticized. Natalia's criticism is so poor that you don't even need to read the article to critique her criticism, but I thought I would read it first in case anyone thought differently. She basically argues that even in cases where the baby is a 'vegetable', that it's still good to keep him or her alive because of the benefits they will serve to others. Is there a less compassionate and more selfish position possible than this? I've read a few articles from this book, mainly essays by professional philosophers who give at least strong, if not compelling, arguments for their positions. Rachels himself is good philosopher, specifically a good ethicist, so I recommend him for the strength of his arguments and the lucidity of his writing.

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