The Point of View of the Universe

Katarzyna de Lazari-Radek is a Polish utilitarian philosopher, working as an assistant professor at the Institute of Philosophy at the University of Lodz. She received her PhD at the same university. She is the author of several articles in Polish and English on Henry Sidgwick, utilitarianism, bioethics, and philosophy for children. Peter Singer first became well-known internationally after the publication of Animal Liberation in 1975. Since then he has written, co-authored, edited or co-edited more than forty other books, including Practical Ethics, The Expanding Circle, How Are We to Live?, Rethinking Life and Death, The Ethics of What We Eat (with Jim Mason), and The Life You Can Save. He was born in Melbourne, Australia, and educated at the University of Melbourne and the University of Oxford. Since 1999 he has been Ira W. DeCamp Professor of Bioethics in the University Center for Human Values at Princeton University, a position that, since 2005, he has combined with that of Laureate Professor at the University of Melbourne. In 2005 Time magazine named him one of the 100 most influential people in the world, and in 2012, he was made a Companion of the Order of Australia, the nation's highest civic honour.

[The authors]... do something new and worthwhile. They present Sidgwicks most important ideas in an admirably clear and accessible way...And they do a fine job of illuminating connections between ideas discussed by Sidgwick and related ideas in contemporary moral philosophy.

• Preface ; A Biographical Prologue ; 1. Introduction ; 2. Reason and Action ; 3. Intuition and the Morality of Common Sense ; 4. Justification in Ethics ; 5. The Axioms of Ethics ; 6. The Profoundest Problem of Ethics ; 7. The Origins of Ethics and the Unity of Practical Reason ; 8. Ultimate Good, Part I: Perfectionism and Desire Based Theory ; 9. Ultimate Good, Part II: Hedonism ; 10. Rules ; 11. Demandingness ; 12. Distribution ; Conclusion