10 thinkers, books, and ideas connected to this field.
Scottish moral philosopher and economist — author of The Wealth of Nations and The Theory of Moral Sentiments — founder of modern economics — whose invisible hand metaphor and division of labor analysis are the foundational concepts of market economics.
Legendary ancient Greek storyteller credited with a body of fables that use animal characters to convey moral lessons, though his historical existence is debated.
Kant's Critique of Practical Reason (1788) establishes the rational foundations of morality and argues for the postulates of practical reason — God, freedom, and immortality.
Elizabeth Anderson is an American philosopher at the University of Michigan known for her democratic equality theory and her critique of markets in reproductive and other personal spheres.
Kant's Groundwork (1785) is the foundational text of deontological ethics, presenting the categorical imperative and the principle that persons must be treated as ends in themselves.
Henry Sidgwick was a Victorian British philosopher who produced in The Methods of Ethics the most rigorous systematic treatment of utilitarian moral philosophy.
Justice: What's the Right Thing to Do? is Michael Sandel's Harvard lecture course on political philosophy, broadcast on PBS and YouTube with over 30 million views worldwide.
British-New Zealand philosopher at Auckland who is one of the leading figures in the virtue ethics revival — whose On Virtue Ethics provides the most careful systematic defense of virtue ethics as a complete moral theory that can address practical ethical questions.
T. M. Scanlon is an American moral philosopher at Harvard whose contractualism grounds morality in principles that no one could reasonably reject.
Adam Smith's 1759 moral philosophy treatise arguing that human moral judgment is grounded in sympathy — the imaginative capacity to put oneself in another's position — and in the device of the 'impartial spectator': judging one's own conduct as a neutral third party would.