Contemporary Ethical Issues: A Personalist Perspective

Now in a newly revised fourth edition, Contemporary Ethical Issues explores a series of compelling moral problems from a personalist perspective influenced by the Scottish philosopher John Macmurray (1891-1976). In many publications spanning fifty years, most notably his Gifford Lectures titled The Form of the Personal, Macmurray developed a robust personalism that emphasizes the primacy of persons as rational agents. In his view, self-realization is achieved in community where justice and individual rights are respected. From the background of a liberal Roman Catholic, Walter G. Jeffko utilizes key elements of Macmurray’s thought in developing his own philosophical viewpoint, and he relates Macmurray’s ideas to those of a wide variety of important philosophers, ethicists, and other notable thinkers, including ecologists and war theorists.

The essays in this edition address the topics of the moral treatment of civilians in war (including an extensive moral evaluation of the Iraqi War), recent Supreme Court decisions, the threat to our democracy posed by unlimited sums of money in politics, the growing inequality of wealth and income, and the rise of political extremism on the right and its threat to women’s rights.

New to this edition is the author’s 2015 Harrod Lecture titled, Economic Inequality, Distributive Justice, and Democracy.

Jeffko brings logical precision and a lucid style to the study of ethics, blending powerful scholarship with readability.