DOI: 10.36347/sjahss.2015.v03i01.034

Pages: 249-251

The role of textbooks includes stimulating wider reading on the part of students. Textbooks on ethics are no exception. My own textbook, Ethics: An Overview, uses several devices to achieve this, including exercises and reading lists. One reviewer, Eric Matthews, writing in Philosophy, recognises its clarity and the care with which it was written, but maintains that a textbook on ethics for university students should focus on case studies rather than on theory. Such an approach, however, would prove cumbersome, requiring multiple case-studies for the pros and cons of theories to be discussed, and would foreseeably fail to tackle questions of meta-ethics which students would be likely to want to have explicitly raised and answered. Approaches opposed to theory are discussed in this textbook, as well as theories, but reasons are given why it is not structured around such approaches. The focus in the textbook on theories makes possible its six sections of applications to applied ethics, concerning future people, medical ethics, animal ethics, environmental ethics, the ethics of development and the ethics of war.