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Understanding morality and understanding legal, especially judicial, reasoning each require attention to the distinctions between reason and feelings, and between making and doing. In clarifying these, this chapter considers the denial of objective goods by ‘Critical Legal Studies’; the confusion induced by ‘game’ or ‘decision’ or ‘rational choice’ theory's technological understanding of rational choice; and Ronald Dworkin's exaggeration of the determinacy of affirmative moral obligations and oversight of the incommensurability between moral and other kinds of criteria for judgment and choice. Legal system and reasoning exists in a tension between the moral or existential order and the technical order (the third and fourth of the four kinds of order and intellectual discipline). Understanding incommensurability also grounds the acknowledgement of exceptionless moral norms (‘absolutes’) that give legal reasoning its backbone.

This chapter considers whether moral philosophers should accept as part of their moral methodology the study hypothetical cases, such as ticking bomb scenarios, in thinking about torture. In response to the criticism of such scenarios by Albie Sachs, this chapter argues that such cases are useful for thinking about the ethics of torture if their function is properly understood. Such thought experiments are quite typical of moral philosophy in general, and do not necessarily generate objections. Moreover, those who engage in evil actions render themselves liable to torture as a means of prevention or self-defense. Hence this chapter rejects any absolute moral prohibition on torture. Nonetheless, there are pragmatic, consequentialist considerations that can justify an absolute legal prohibition on torture. Such a legal rule would help prevent mistakes and help prevent the torture of the innocent and others not liable to attack on just war theory. An absolute legal prohibition on torture is justified because on balance no more flexible stricture on its use is likely to be as productive of good outcomes.

Xunzi, Mencius, and Confucius are most frequently cited as a necessary context for understanding the “Xing zi mingchu.” This chapter begins the analysis of this broader framework by proposing that elements of both the Daode jing and the Analects are both represented in a hybrid worldview that acknowledges the value of both absolute and relative morality. This broader pre-Qin framework is introduced here and elaborated upon in the next chapter.

This chapter links Kant’s account of human nature to unruly sexual activity and to the consequences of sexual or gendered violence and oppression. I use the account to explore the temptation of engaging in sexual violence and oppression, the damage sexual wrongdoing can do, why and how we can heal from sexual violence, why there are historical patterns to sexual violence and oppression, and why, despite the fact that our sexually loving selves are unruly and have as possible corollaries the strongest of human emotions (passions), we are morally (ethically and legally) responsible for them. This chapter also shows how sexualized wrongdoing can be used as part of violent oppression and atrocities. Additionally, Kant’s accounts of barbarism and of formal and material wrongdoing enable us to describe how human beings can face conditions or situations in which there is no morally good way out, without abandoning Kant’s idea of absolute moral prohibitions.

In Chapter 6, three more categories are scrutinized, each of which again reflects a less sophisticated but appealing form of argument that is often enough deployed in the public sphere to justify terrorist acts either by terrorists themselves or by those who identify with the proclaimed justice of cause for which the terrorist acts are committed. The arguments considered in this chapter are: the argument from collective responsibility; the argument from redistributive justice; and the argument from supreme emergency. As with the attempted justifications in Chapter 5, all three of these attempted justifications raise a more general and very challenging issue about the difficulties of moral philosophizing in the face of absolute moral prohibitions.

The chapter discusses the subject of values and moral judgement. This begins with what is meant by values, and whether or not they can be objective and absolute. The main business of the chapter is to present a philosophical argument about the nature of this area. The argument shows that the existence of a standard which can properly command the allegiance of all free agents can be neither proved nor disproved using the tools of reason and logic. It is argued that the absence of such a standard would tend towards isolation of individuals from one another. Finally, it is pointed out that what people are most drawn to and value highest is not well captured in terms of purely impersonal abstractions. This is a pointer towards the journey beyond atheism. The interplay of reason and faith is then discussed.

Chapter 5 examines four categories of attempted philosophical justification for terrorist acts in certain circumstances. Each one, in different ways, reflects less formal and less carefully articulated views that are proclaimed not only by those who resort to terrorist acts but also by many members of the general public throughout the world, especially when the acts purporting to be justified are committed by their own people or others with whose cause they sympathize. The justifications considered are: utilitarian/consequentialist arguments that may reject the principle of discrimination outright; the argument from self-defense; the tit-for-tat argument; and the argument from the need for a fighting chance. These four attempted justifications raise a more general and very challenging issue about the difficulties of moral philosophizing in the face of absolute moral prohibitions.

This chapter seeks to identify the basic human goods that are the foundational principles of the natural law; a derived set of moral norms that emerge from consideration of the integral directiveness or prescriptivity of those foundational principles; and the implications of these norms for medical practice and medical law as regards four questions. First, how should medical practice and medical law be structured with respect to the intentional taking of human life by members of the medical profession? Second, who, in the clinical setting, has authority for medical decision making, and what standards should guide their decisions? Third, what standards should govern the distribution of health-care resources in society, and do those standards give reasons for thinking, from the natural law standpoint, that there is a ‘right to health care’? Fourth, what concern should be shown in medical practice and medical law for the rights of ‘physician conscience’?