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A Theory of the Good and the Right
Abstract
What would any rational person believe to be worth wanting or working for? Viewed from the standpoint of ethics and empirical psychology, how would such a person define and explain the morally right and the just?And what system of morals would rational people select as the best for the society? Essential to what is important in traditional philosophical inquiries, these questions and others are pursued in A Theory of the Good and the Right, Richard B. Brandt's now classic work, based on his Oxford lectures.Using a contemporary psychological theory of action and of motivation, Brandt argues that rational people would choose a utilitarian moral code that the purpose of living should be to strive for the greatest good for the largest number of people. He discusses the concept of welfare, the prospects for the interpersonal comparison and measurement of utility, the implications of the relevant form of rule utilitarianism for the theory of distributive justice, and the possibilities of conflict between utilitarian moral codes and the dictates of self-interest.
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Citations
Cited by
Doris, J. M., & The Moral Psychology Research Group (2010) · doi:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199582143.001.0001 · Cited by 227
Responses to catastrophic AGI risk: a survey
Sotala, K., & Yampolskiy, R. V. (2015) · Physica Scripta · doi:10.1088/0031-8949/90/1/018001 · Cited by 121
HAYBRON, D. M. (2001) · Philosophy and Phenomenological Research · doi:10.1111/j.1933-1592.2001.tb00072.x · Cited by 73
Metadata
- Authors
- Brandt, R. B.
- Venue
- Michigan Law Review
- Publisher
- JSTOR
- Published
- 1981-03
- Volume
- 79
- Issue
- 4
- Pages
- 830
- ISSN
- 0026-2234 (ISSN-L)
- OpenAlex
- W2090052903
- Cited by
- 624
- References
- 0
- FWCI
- 76.30
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- closed
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- CoChat. (2026). Citation check: A Theory of the Good and the Right. https://app.cochat.ai/papers/10.2307/1288311
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- Brandt, R. B. (1981). A Theory of the Good and the Right. Michigan Law Review. https://doi.org/10.2307/1288311
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Bibliographic data: Semantic Scholar, OpenAlex, Crossref.
Contains information from the Semantic Scholar Academic Graph Datasets, made available under the ODC Attribution License (ODC-BY 1.0).
Semantic Scholar’s data is described in: Kinney, R., et al. (2023). The Semantic Scholar Open Data Platform. arXiv:2301.10140.
