Overview
- Editors:
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Hans W. Gottinger
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University of Bielefeld, Bielefeld, Germany
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Werner Leinfellner
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University of Nebraska, Lincoln, USA
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About this book
Ethics, as one of the most respectable disciplines of philosophy, has undergone a drastic and revolutionary change in recent time. There are three main trends of this development. The first trend can be described as a tendency towards a rigorous formal and analytical language. This means simply that ethics has created beside its own formalized set theoretical language a variety of new formalized, logical and mathemati cal methods and concepts. Thus ethics has become a formalized meta or epidiscipline which is going to replace the traditional concepts, principles and ethical methods in the realm of social sciences. It is clear that a formalized form of ethics can be used more easily in social, economic and political theories if there are ethical conflicts to be solved. This first trend can be regarded as a conditio sine qua non for application in, and imposing ethical solutions on, social scientific theories. The second trend may be characterized as an association- or unification-tendency of a formalized and analytical ethics with decision theory. Decision theory as a new interdiscipline of social sciences is actually an assemblage of a variety of subtheories such as value-utility theory, game theory, collective decision theory, etc. Harsanyi has called this complex of subtheories a general theory of human behavior. Analytical or formal ethics is actually using this general theory of human behavior as a vehicle simply because this theory deals from the beginning with conflict solution, i. e.
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Table of contents (17 chapters)
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Special Topics in Social Choice
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Back Matter
Pages 321-330
Editors and Affiliations
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University of Bielefeld, Bielefeld, Germany
Hans W. Gottinger
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University of Nebraska, Lincoln, USA
Werner Leinfellner