My discussion in this paper is divided into three parts. In section I, I discuss some fairly familiar lines of approach to the question how moral considerations may be shown to have rational appeal. In section II, I suggest how our existence as constituents in collective entities might also influence our practical thinking. In section III, I entertain the idea that identification with collectives might displace moral thinking to some degree, and I offer Marx's class theory as a sample of collective identification for the purposes of practical deliberation.

If, for Marx and Marxists, communism would be the most ideal of human societies, this is because it would make possible the maximum use of human and natural resources to the equal benefit of all. This means that, under communism, human beings would ‘realize themselves’. In direct and pointed contrast to capitalism wherein all individuals lead alienated, stunted, and fragmented lives, communism for Marx would provide the preconditions for a flowering, a full and final development of all human potentialities.

Practitioners of disciplines whose problems are debated by moral philosophers regularly complain that the philosophers are engaged in abstract speculation, divorced from ‘real-life’ consequences and responsibilities, that it is the practitioners (doctor, research scientist, politician) who must take the decisions, and that they cannot (and should not) act in accordance with strict abstract logic.

Although Burke, Bentham, Hegel and Marx do not often agree, all criticized certain ethical theories, in particular theories of rights, for being too abstract. The complaint is still popular. It was common in Existentialist and in Wittgensteinian writing that stressed the importance of cases and examples rather than principles for the moral life; it has been prominent in recent Hegelian and Aristotelian flavoured writing, which stresses the importance of the virtues; it is reiterated in discussions that stress the distinctiveness and particularity of moral vicissitudes and query the importance of ethical theory. Recent critics of abstraction are opposed not only to theories of rights, and the Kantian notions with which these are linked, but also to consequentialist ethical theories. The two ethical theories that are most influential in the English-speaking world now both stand accused of being too abstract.

Analytical philosophers, if they are true to their training, never forget the first lesson of analytical philosophy: philosophers have no moral authority.

In so far as analytical philosophers believe this, they find it easy to live with. For them even to assert, let alone successfully lay claim to, moral authority would require, first, hard work of some non-analytical and probably mistaken kind and, secondly, personality traits of leadership or confidence or even charisma, which philosophers may accidentally have but which they are certainly not trained to have and had better not rely upon, while they live by analytical standards. Yet a further reason why analytical philosophers find the denial of their moral authority easy to accept is that they never forget the second lesson of analytical philosophy, either: nobody else has any moral authority.

Applied ethics work seems to me to be of three main kinds. There is participatory work, where a person whose specialism is ethics participates in a process leading to ethical judgments or decisions. And there are two kinds of teaching work where the teaching objective is to make learners better placed to participate in such processes; one kind of teaching work relates to matters which are specific to the future occupation of the learner, the other kind relates to matters which are not specific to it.

I have chosen this title to set myself the task of commenting on the practice of philosophy in the light of my work as a philosopher in a university postgraduate department of war studies. I shall begin with some general remarks on how we are to understand ‘philosophy’, then discuss a neglected one-sidedness in the commentary which philosophers have attempted on such topics as the problems of the nuclear age.

This paper is a small contribution to two large subjects. The first large subject is that of exploitation—what it is for somebody to be exploited, in what ways people can be and are exploited, whether exploitation necessarily involves coercion, what Marx's understanding of exploitation was and whether it was adequate: all these are issues on which I merely touch, at best. My particular concern here is to answer the two questions, whether Marx thought capitalist exploitation unjust and how the answer to that question illuminates Marx's conception of morality in general. The second large subject is that of the nature of morality—whether there are specifically moral values and specifically moral forms of evaluation and criticism, how these relate to our explanatory interests in the same phenomena, what it would be like to abandon the ‘moral point of view’, whether the growth of a scientific understanding of society and ourselves inevitably undermines our confidence in the existence of moral ‘truths’. These again are issues on which I only touch if I mention them at all, but the questions I try to answer are, what does Marx propose to put in the place of moral judgment, and what kind of assessment of the horrors of capitalism does he provide if not a moral assessment?

We have inherited from the history of moral philosophy two very different proposals about how we ought to behave. According to one view, we are required to do what is morally right; on the alternative formulation, we are required to do what we believe to be morally right. Unless these twin demands on our moral decision-making can be made to coincide by definition, it is inevitable that in some cases our beliefs about what is morally right may be mistaken. In such cases, it is not clear what we are morally required to do. Are we obliged to follow our conscience in every situation, i.e. to act according to our moral beliefs, or is it sometimes permissible not to act according to our own moral beliefs?

Although the theme of these papers is ‘Contemporary Moral Problems’ my paper is partly about Aristotelian ideas. I had originally intended to apologize for this, but I find there is no need: many other contributors have found Aristotle to be timelessly relevant, as I myself have.

There is widespread agreement that the most serious and debilitating contemporary social problem in the developed capitalist world is the problem of enforced or involuntary unemployment. The growth in mass unemployment in the 1970s and 80s has produced a renewal of the demand by the labour and trade union movement1 for the implementation of a ‘right to work’; presumably in the belief that the official recognition and legal enforcement of such a right would lead to the increased availability of jobs. This campaigning slogan has sometimes emanated from the most unlikely sources. In his introduction to a published account of the 1971 Upper Clyde Shipbuilders occupation and work-in, entitled The Right to Work, Mr Harold Wilson (then, significantly, in opposition) declared that ‘what the men of the Clyde proclaimed, and what I went to Clydeside to assert, was “the right to work”. And that principle cannot, and must not, be denied.’

I attempt in this paper to do two things: to offer some comments about recent discussions of the suggested institutionalization of surrogacy agreements; and in doing so, to draw attention to a range of considerations which liberals tend to omit from their moral assessments. The main link between these concerns is the idea that what people want is a fundamental justification (other things being equal, of course) for their getting it. I believe that this idea is profoundly mistaken; yet it is an inevitable consequence of a liberal notion of the individual and liberals' extremely limited conception of harm. My intention, then, is to illustrate how unease about a concrete problem—whether or not surrogacy agreements should be institutionalized—might interact with dissatisfaction about liberal individualism to make clearer what the unease consists in and to suggest why liberal individualism is inadequate as a basis for moral philosophy.

In late May 1984, Irish citizens were perturbed to hear that a thirty-one year old man died while participating, as a paid volunteer, in a clinical drug trial at the Institute of Clinical Pharmacology in Dublin. At the inquest, held in September 1984, the State Pathologist, Dr John Harbison, affirmed that the cause of death was the reaction of the trial drug Eproxindine 4/0091 with a major tranquillizer which had been given less than fifteen hours earlier as part of regular treatment for a psychiatric disorder. The mixture of the two drugs, he went on to say, increased their effect by between twenty and thirty times their normal strength, and the volunteer had died of cardiac depression.

The aim of this paper is to expose the unique muddle in which moral philosophy finds itself with regard to genetic engineering. The latter can be essentially defined as the correcting of nature's mistakes at their source, the DNA acid molecule of the gene. I shall discuss the moral nature of genetic engineering with respect to a single issue: the potential harm it may inflict upon the autonomous individual. I shall also consider the distinctions between genetic engineering and other activities affecting human existence, in order to establish that the moral issues presented by genetic engineering are unique to it.

This paper examines the development of the concept of brain death and of the criteria necessary for its recognition. Competing formulations of brain death are assessed and the case for a ‘brainstem’ concept of death is argued. Attention is finally drawn to some of the ethical issues raised by the use of neurological criteria in the diagnosis of human death.