Moral philosophy where the stakes are concrete.
11 topics · 21 curated works
No prior grounding assumed.
Our National Parks
John Muir · 1901
Argues wild places have value that has nothing to do with resource extraction and everything to do with what contact with them does to a person, and…
+7 more at this level
Assumes you know the vocabulary.
A Defense of Abortion
Judith Jarvis Thomson · 1971
Grants for the sake of argument that the fetus is a person, and argues a right to life still does not include a right to use another person's body…
+6 more at this level
Primary sources and full treatments.
The Rights of War and Peace
Hugo Grotius · 1625
Argues that even in war there is a law binding all nations regardless of religion, derived from reason rather than scripture, and uses it to…
+5 more at this level
12 of 21 works
John Muir
Argues wild places have value that has nothing to do with resource extraction and everything to do with what contact with them does to a person, and campaigns for their protection on exactly that basis.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Milton Friedman
Argues a corporate executive who spends shareholders' money on social causes rather than legal profit-maximisation is effectively taxing shareholders and employees without their consent, and that this is not the executive's role to do.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Peter Singer
Argues that the capacity to suffer, not species membership, is what entitles a being's interests to equal moral consideration, so a preference for human interests over equal animal suffering is arbitrary in the same way racism and sexism are.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Lukas Meyer
Asks whether people who do not yet exist can hold rights against those alive now, and whether that is even the right question to ask, given the way present choices determine which future people come to exist at all.
link checked 17 Sept 2026UNESCO
States core bioethical principles, human dignity, informed consent, non-discrimination, and benefit-sharing, meant to guide science and medicine policy across member states regardless of local legal tradition.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Gustaf Arrhenius, Jesper Ryberg & Torbjorn Tannsjo
Lays out Parfit's argument that total utilitarianism entails a world of enormous population with lives barely worth living is better than a smaller, much happier one, and surveys why every attempt to avoid this conclusion creates a worse problem elsewhere.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Philip Low, Jaak Panksepp, Diana Reiss, David Edelman, Bruno Van Swinderen & Christof Koch
A group of neuroscientists declares that the neurological substrates generating consciousness are not uniquely human, so many non-human animals, including all mammals and birds, possess the neurological capacity for conscious states.
link failing as of 17 Sept 2026Mark Dimmock & Andrew Fisher
Works through normative ethics, metaethics and a run of applied problems, from euthanasia to eating animals, as a single connected course rather than separate topics, aimed at a reader with no prior philosophy.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Judith Jarvis Thomson
Grants for the sake of argument that the fetus is a person, and argues a right to life still does not include a right to use another person's body without consent, using a thought experiment about a kidnapped violinist to break the assumed link between personhood and a duty to sustain.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Peter Singer
Argues that if we can prevent something very bad at no comparable moral cost we are obliged to, and that distance and the number of other people who could also help make no moral difference.
James Rachels
Argues the moral distinction doctors draw between killing a dying patient and merely letting them die does not hold up, because the same intention and the same outcome are present in both, so the distinction cannot be doing the moral work claimed for it.
R. Edward Freeman & William M. Evan
Argues a corporation's managers hold their position in trust for everyone with a stake in the firm, not just shareholders, and reworks corporate purpose around balancing those competing claims rather than maximising one of them.