Goodness and Advice: (The University Center for Human Values Series)

Goodness and Advice has the delightful feel of a many-sided conversation. Editor Amy Gutmann contributes an introduction, and there are four commentaries in addition to philosopher Judith Jarvis Thomson's centerpieces ("Goodness" and "Advice"), as well as Thomson's response to the commentators. Thomson has perfected the argument by analogy. Her examples, which can sometimes seem apropos of nothing, have earned a reputation for their aesthetic and logical strength. In her skilled hands, when a fictional fellow named Alfred rings a doorbell, he unleashes a swarm of stinging ethical questions: "We may suppose that Alfred's pressing the doorbell caused many other events to occur.... More generally, for a person to act is for a battery of events to occur ... for a person to act is for the world to go in a way that it otherwise would not." Thus, Thomson expertly immerses the reader in the sea of moral philosophy.

Thomson's writing here emerged from her Tanner Lectures on Human Values at the University Center for Human Values at Princeton University. The commentary voices of Philip Fisher, Martha C. Nussbaum, J.B. Schneewind, and Barbara Herrnstein Smith add grist to Thomson's mill. Her work in this volume centers on a critique of ethical consequentialism (the view that an action's ethical worth is determined by its consequences) and a draft of a theory about what people ought to do. Thomson's ineluctable reasoning makes for good philosophy that is enlivened by her penchant for hypothetical examples. --Eric de Place