Articles by Gary Gutting

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Can Torture Ever Be Moral?
Gary Gutting and Jeff McMahan – The New York Times, 2 Feb 2015

My interviewee is Jeff McMahan, White’s Professor of Moral Philosophy at the University of Oxford. He is the author of “The Ethics of Killing.” — Gary Gutting

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Is Our Patriotism Moral?
Gary Gutting – The New York Times, 9 Jul 2012

At the beginning of Plato’s “Republic,” Socrates asks what justice (doing the morally right thing) is, and Polemarchus replies that it’s helping your friends and harming your enemies. Moral behavior was the way you treated those in your “in-group,” as opposed to outsiders. Socrates questioned this ethical exclusivism that led most major moral philosophers (for example, Mill and Kant) to conclude that morality required an impartial, universal viewpoint that treated all human beings as equals.

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