Henry S. Richardson | |
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Born | Henry Shattuck Richardson 1955 (age 68–69) United States |
Education | Harvard University (BA, JD, MPP) |
Spouse | Mary E. Challinor |
Institutions | Kennedy Institute of Ethics Georgetown University |
Thesis | Rational deliberation of ends (1986) |
Doctoral advisor | John Rawls |
Main interests | Practical reasoning, moral reasoning and bioethics |
Henry Shattuck Richardson (born 1955) [1] [2] is an American philosopher, author, and professor of philosophy at Georgetown University, where he is also a senior research scholar at the Kennedy Institute of Ethics. [3] [4]
Richardson is the son of Anne Richardson, who was once the chair of Reading is Fundamental, and the politician and lawyer Elliot Richardson, who served as United States Secretary of Defense, Attorney General, and Secretary of Commerce. [5]
Richardson graduated magna cum laude from Harvard University with a Bachelor of Arts degree in 1977. He then received a J.D. from Harvard Law School and an M.P.P. from the John F. Kennedy School of Government (supervised by Martha Nussbaum), both in 1981. In 1986, Richardson received his Ph.D. in Philosophy from Harvard University under the supervision of John Rawls; his thesis was titled Rational deliberation of ends. [3] [1]
Richardson's main work has centred on practical reasoning. His first book, Practical Reasoning about Final Ends, [6] focused on individual reasoning, whilst his second book, Democratic Autonomy: Public Reasoning about the Ends of Policy, [7] which won the Herbert A. Simon Best Book Award in Public Administration, [8] and the David Easton Award in the Foundations of Political Theory, [9] dealt with collective reasoning.
In addition to working on practical reasoning and moral and political philosophy, Richardson has written on bioethics. He has twice been a visiting scholar at the Department of Bioethics at the (U.S.) National Institutes of Health.
From 2008 to 2018, he was the Editor of the academic journal Ethics . [10] From 2010 to 2013, through his work as a member of the World Commission on the Ethics of Scientific Knowledge and Technology (COMEST), he has acted as an advisor to the Director General of UNESCO on ethical issues relating to science and technology. [3] [4]
In September 2014 Richardson began a two-year tenure as president of the Human Development and Capability Association (HDCA). [11] He was succeeded by the economist Ravi Kanbur. [12] From 2014 to 2017, he served as one of two "coordinating lead authors" on the orienting normative chapter of the three-volume report of the International Panel of Social Progress, [13] Rethinking Society for the 21st Century. [14]
In 2019, Richardson was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship. [15]
Applied ethics is the practical aspect of moral considerations. It is ethics with respect to real-world actions and their moral considerations in private and public life, the professions, health, technology, law, and leadership. For example, bioethics is concerned with identifying the best approach to moral issues in the life sciences, such as euthanasia, the allocation of scarce health resources, or the use of human embryos in research. Environmental ethics is concerned with ecological issues such as the responsibility of government and corporations to clean up pollution. Business ethics includes the duties of whistleblowers to the public and to their employers.
Casuistry is a process of reasoning that seeks to resolve moral problems by extracting or extending abstract rules from a particular case, and reapplying those rules to new instances. This method occurs in applied ethics and jurisprudence. The term is also used pejoratively to criticise the use of clever but unsound reasoning, especially in relation to ethical questions. It has been defined as follows:
Study of cases of conscience and a method of solving conflicts of obligations by applying general principles of ethics, religion, and moral theology to particular and concrete cases of human conduct. This frequently demands an extensive knowledge of natural law and equity, civil law, ecclesiastical precepts, and an exceptional skill in interpreting these various norms of conduct....
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Ethics is the branch of philosophy that examines right and wrong moral behavior, moral concepts and moral language. Ethics or moral philosophy is a branch of philosophy that "involves systematizing, defending, and recommending concepts of right and wrong behavior". The field of ethics, along with aesthetics, concerns matters of value, and thus comprises the branch of philosophy called axiology.
Pragmatic ethics is a theory of normative philosophical ethics and meta-ethics. Ethical pragmatists such as John Dewey believe that some societies have progressed morally in much the way they have attained progress in science. Scientists can pursue inquiry into the truth of a hypothesis and accept the hypothesis, in the sense that they act as though the hypothesis were true; nonetheless, they think that future generations can advance science, and thus future generations can refine or replace their accepted hypotheses. Similarly, ethical pragmatists think that norms, principles, and moral criteria are likely to be improved as a result of inquiry.
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