Virtue, Rules, and Justice: Kantian Aspirations - Softcover

this collection has a great deal to offer to a large and diverse audience. ... Most of the book should engage philosophers interested in moral and political philosophy generally. The collection will be especially welcome to the many admirers of Hills own brand of Kantian constructivism or of his distinctive Kantian approach to investigating moral and political problems. (Lara Denis, Social Theory and Practice)

Overall, this book would be a helpful aid for those looking for clear explanations of Kants ethics, situated in relevant secondary literature and contrasted with other ethical theories, and those curious about how we can apply Kants normative ethics to contemporary issues. (Christina Drogalis, Philosophy in Review)

Virtue, Rules, and Justice advances our understanding of core issues in moral philosophy. (Samuel J. Kerstein, Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews)

Thomas E. Hill, Jr., interprets, explains, and extends Kant's moral theory in a series of essays that highlight its relevance to contemporary ethics. The book is divided into four sections. The first three essays cover basic themes: they introduce the major aspects of Kant's ethics; explain different interpretations of the Categorical Imperative; and sketch a 'constructivist' reading of Kantian normative ethics distinct from the Kantian constructivisms of Onora O'Neill and John Rawls. The next section is on virtue, and the essays collected here discuss whether it is a virtue to regard the natural environment as intrinsically valuable, address puzzles about moral weakness, contrast ideas of virtue in Kant's ethics and in 'virtue ethics,' and comment on duties to oneself, second-order duties, and moral motivation in Kant's Doctrine of Virtue. Four essays on moral rules propose human dignity as a guiding value for a system of norms rather than a self-standing test for isolated cases, contrast the Kantian perspectives on moral rules with rule-utilitarianism and then with Jonathan Dancy's moral particularism, and distinguish often-conflated questions about moral relativism. Hill goes on to outline a Kantian position on two central issues. In the last section of the book, three essays on practical questions show how a broadly Kantian theory, if critical of Kant's official theory of law, might re-visit questions about revolution, prison reform, and forcible interventions in other countries for humanitarian purposes. In the final essay, Hill develops the implications of Kant's Doctrine of Virtue for the responsibility of by-standers to oppression.