After the second World War, a cliché was repeated so often as to provoke, I fear, either yawns or giggles: “our moral sense was lagging behind our technical invention,” i.e., science had, as it were, outstripped morality. In those days, of course, the bogey scientists thought to have left morality behind were physicists, especially those who had made possible the nuclear bomb. A wholly new kind of war weapon did indeed seem to have changed the world and to require a (...) new dimension of moral thought and moral philosophy, if we were not all to be destroyed. (shrink)

This biography illuminates the life and thought of Baroness Mary Warnock, whose active years spanned the second half of the twentieth century, a period during which opportunities for middle-class women rapidly and vastly improved.

Philip Graham’s biography of Baroness Mary Warnock, Mary Warnock. Ethics, Education and Public Policy in Post-War Britain, is a rich and well-researched account of Warnock’s life and work, set agai...

A leader in the modern commentary on ethics and philosophy, Mary Warnock casts a critical eye over her life and times.

A collection celebrating some of the best essays from the Blackwell journals, Bioethics and Developing World Bioethics. Contributors include Helga Kuhse, Michael Selgelid and Baroness Mary Warnock, former Chair of the British Government’s Committee of Inquiry into Human Fertilization and Embryology’s. Traces some of the most important concerns of the 1980s, such as the ethics of euthanasia, reproductive technologies, the allocation of scarce medical resources, surrogate motherhood, through to a range of new issues debated today, particularly in (...) the field of genetics. Includes contributions that are still as hotly debated today as they were 20 years ago and serves as a salutary reminder that free and open discussion is vital to the health of the discipline itself. Includes eight sections comprising some of the journals' best publications in methodological issues, the health care professional-patient relationship, public health ethics, research ethics, genetics, as well as beginning- and end-of-life issues. Will serve the academic bioethicists as well as students of bioethics as an excellent source book. (shrink)

Sir Arthur Stanley Eddington was a key figure in the development of modern astrophysics, who also made important contributions to the philosophy of science and popular science writing. The Arthur Eddington Memorial Trust was set up after his death in order to hold annual lectures on the relationship between scientific thought and aspects of philosophy, religion or ethics. This 2012 collection gathers together six of these lectures, including contributions by Sir Edmund Whittaker, Herbert Dingle, Richard B. Braithwaite, John C. Eccles, (...) Dame Kathleen Lonsdale, and Baroness Mary Warnock, together with Eddington's 1929 Swarthmore Lecture on Science and the Unseen World. A preface written by the Astronomer Royal, Baron Rees of Ludlow, is also included. This is a fascinating book that will be of value to anyone with an interest in the philosophy of science and Eddington's legacy. (shrink)

_Imagination_ is an outstanding contribution to a notoriously elusive and confusing subject. It skillfully interrelates problems in philosophy, the history of ideas and literary theory and criticism, tracing the evolution of the concept of imagination from Hume and Kant in the eighteenth century to Ryle, Sartre and Wittgenstein in the twentieth. She strongly belies that the cultivation of imagination should be the chief aim of education and one of her objectives in writing the book has been to put forward reasons (...) why this is so. Purely philosophical treatment of the concept is shown to be related to its use in the work of Coleridge and Wordsworth, who she considers to be the creators of a new kind of awareness with more than literary implications. The purpose of her historical account is to suggest that the role of imagination in our perception and thought is more pervasive than may at first sight appear, and that the thread she traces is an important link joining apparently different areas of our experience. She argues that imagination is an essential element in both our awareness of the world and our attaching of value to it. (shrink)

Mary Warnock steers a clear path through the web of complex issues underlying the use of new reproductive technologies. She begins by analysing what it means to claim something as a 'right', and goes on to discuss the cases of different groups of people. She also examines the ethical problems faced by particular types of assisted reproduction, including artificial insemination, in-vitro fertilization, and surrogacy, and argues that in the future human cloning may well be a viable and acceptable (...) form of treatment for some types of infertility. (shrink)

Nature and Mortality is a challenging look at some of the major public issues of our time through the eyes of one of our most influential and probing liberal humanists. It is a frank account on where we stand today on such controversial matters as human embryology, genetic engineering, euthanasia and abortion. Warnock's views may seem like a red rag to a bull to some, but her contribution to the debate is always stimulating. Enlivened by autobiographical anecdote and some (...) delicious side-swipes, Nature and Mortality is Mary Warnock at her most perceptive, wise and entertaining. (shrink)

This selection consists of extracts from writings of women concerned solely with the pursuit of abstract ideas, historically contextualized. The texts, for the most part, reflect issues widely debated in their contemporary societies. Extracts from lesser-known writers are also included, providing a diversity of arguments spanning four centuries and including some notable contemporary philosophers.

Existentialism enjoyed great popularity in the 1940s and 1950s, and has probably had a greater impact upon literature than any other kind of philosophy. The common interest which unites Existentialist philosophers is their interest in human freedom. Readers of Existentialist philosophy are being asked, not merely to contemplate the nature of freedom, but to experience freedom, and to practise it. In this survey, Mary Warnock begins by considering the ethical origins of Existentialism, with particular reference to Kierkegaard and (...) Nietzsche, and outlines the importance of a systematic account of man's connection with the world as expounded by Husserl. She discusses at length the common interests and ancestry of Existentialism in the works of Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, and Sartre, and offers some conclusions about the current nature and future of this committed and practical philosophy. This revised edition includes a postscript reviewing the status of Existentialism in the 1990s, and has a thoroughly updated bibliography. (shrink)

Everybody recognizes that most of the problems in medical ethics arise, these days, from innovations in medical technology. We would not have had to lay down laws or ethical guidelines about assisted reproduction had it not been for the new technology of in vitro fertilization, which produced the first IVF baby in 1978. We would not be currently anxious about the ethics of possible human cloning, had it not been for the production in Edinburgh of Dolly, the lamb whose birth (...) resulted from the removal of a mammary gland cell from an adult sheep. So the question is whether there is some research into developing technology that is too dangerous, that will lead to consequences too dramatic for humanity, for the research itself to be permitted. Should there be control over what technological innovation should be permitted? (shrink)

Though religious belief may be the foundation for private morality and therefore supply such morality with inviolable principles, it has no such role in the case of public policy-making, even where the policy is concerned with matters agreed to be matters of morality. It could have such a role only if the certainty of the principles supplied by religion were generally shared, or were held themselves to be enforceable by law (i.e. in a theocratic state).

Some argue that genetic engineering and other scientific practices are morally wrong because they are ‘unnatural’. Prince Charles took this line in his 2000 Reith Lecture. But as Mary Warnock here points out, attempts to justify the moral condemnation of a practice on the grounds that it is ‘contrary to nature’ are notoriously difficult to sustain.

Debates the difficult moral issues of today such as abortion and euthanasia. Explores the nature of ethics and how we make moral decisions.

Including three of his most famous and important essays, _Utilitarianism_, _On Liberty_, and _Essay on Bentham_, along with formative selections from Jeremy Bentham and John Austin, this volume provides a uniquely perspicuous view of Mill's ethical and political thought. Contains Mill's most famous and influential works, _Utilitarianism_ and _On Liberty_ as well as his important _Essay on Bentham._ Uses the 1871 edition of _Utilitarianism_, the last to be published in Mill's lifetime. Includes selections from Bentham and John Austin, the two (...) thinkers who most influenced Mill. Introduction written by Mary Warnock, a highly respected figure in 20th-century ethics in her own right. Provides an extensive, up-to-date bibliography with the best scholarship on Mill, Bentham and Utilitarianism. (shrink)

All religion and much philosophy has been concerned with the contrast between the ephemeral and the eternal. Human beings have always sought ways to overcome time, and to prove that death is not the end. This book consists then in an exploration of certain closely related ideas: personal identity, time, history and our commitment to the future, and the role of imagination in life.

This book, first published in 1965, is a critical exposition of the philosophical doctrines of Jean-Paul Sartre. His contribution to ethical and political theory, and to metaphysics and ontology, is reviewed against the background of German idealism and phenomenology, and his arguments are presented clearly so that readers may assess their philosophical value in their own right.

A powerful argument that religious and theological issues should have no place in public morality issues such as euthanasia, assisted suicide, and abortion.

Easeful Death sets out straightforwardly the arguments for and against the legalization of assisted suicide and euthanasia. Exploring the philosophical and legal debates as well as the medical practicalities of this sensitive issue, the authors ultimately conclude that the law should embrace a more compassionate approach to assisted dying.