Time and Ethics

Ethics seeks answers to questions about the moral status of human actions and human lives. Actions and lives are temporal things. Thus, one would think that answers to ethical questions should take some account of their temporal features. And yet, while a number of authors have drawn attention to the relation between time and ethics (Derek Parfit and Thomas Nagel in particular), there has never been a systematic study of the impact of temporal considerations on ethical issues. There is a pressing need for an investigation into how time and ethics impact on each other. This book leads the way in addressing that need. The essays in this collection raise and investigate some of the key issues that arise at the intersection between these two areas of philosophy. Anyone with an interest in ethics, (undergraduates, postgraduates and professional philosophers alike), will have a reason to read this book, as will anyone with an interest in the metaphysics of time, and how it connects with issues in other areas of philosophy.