Contemporary Ethical Issues: A Personal Perspective

This insightful series of essays explores contemporary ethical problems from a personalist perspective influenced by the Scottish philosopher John Macmurray (1891-1976). In many books, articles, and other publications spanning fifty years, most notably his Gifford Lectures, "The Form of the Personal," Macmurray developed a robust personalism that emphasizes the primacy of persons as rational agents whose self-realization is achieved in community. Walter G. Jeffko utilizes key elements of Macmurray's thought in developing his own viewpoint; and he relates Macmurray's ideas to those of a wide variety of important philosophers, ethicists, and behavioral scientists.

In the first two chapters Jeffko develops a personalist anthropological and ethical theory within a framework that views the person as a communicative and rational agent, reason as the standard of value, and the principle of community as the supreme ethical standard. In successive chapters, this theory is applied to the issues of suicide, abortion, embryonic stem-cell research, euthanasia (including assisted suicide), the death penalty, privacy (including private property and capitalism), Rawl’s theory of political liberalism, same-sex marriage, the moral treatment of animals, affirmative action, and environmental problems.

Jeffko connects ethics with logic in a lucid style that blends scholarship with readability. This is a fresh and absorbing examination of the key ethical dilemmas of our time.