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 relationship 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. The essays in this collection raise and investigate some of the key issues that arise at the intersection between these two areas of philosophy.