Think The Unthinkable Meaning

Fowler's Concise Dictionary of Modern English Usage

Fowler's Concise Dictionary of Modern English Usage is an invaluable reference work that offers the best advice on English usage. Known in previous editions as the 'Pocket Fowler', this third edition is a descendant of the original 1926 edition of A Dictionary of Modern English Usage by Henry Fowler. Based on the unrivalled evidence and research of the Oxford Languages Programme, the new edition answers your most frequently asked questions about language use. Should you use a split infinitive, or a preposition at the end of a sentence? Is it infer or imply? Who or whom? What are the main differences between British and American English? Over 4,000 entries offer clear recommendations on issues of grammar, pronunciation, spelling, confusable words, and written style. Real examples are drawn from OUP's vast database of classic and contemporary literary sources, newspapers and magazines, and the Internet. Jeremy Butterfield has judiciously revised the text to reflect the English usage practices and con

Pocket Fowler's Modern English Usage

Moral Failure

Moral Failure: On the Impossible Demands of Morality asks what happens when the sense that "I must" collides with the realization that "I can't." Bringing together philosophical and empirical work in moral psychology, Lisa Tessman here examines moral requirements that are non-negotiable and that contravene the principle that "ought implies can." In some cases, it is because two non-negotiable requirements conflict that one of them becomes impossible to satisfy, and yet remains binding. In other cases, performing a particular action may be non-negotiably required -- even if it is impossible -- because not performing the action is unthinkable. After offering both conceptual and empirical explanations of the experience of impossible moral requirements and the ensuing failures to fulfill them, Tessman considers what to make of such experience, and in particular, what role such experience has in the construction of value and of moral authority. According to the constructivist account that the book proposes, some moral requirements can be authoritative even when they are impossible to fulfill. Tessman points out a tendency to not acknowledge the difficulties that impossible moral requirements and unavoidable moral failures create in moral life, and traces this tendency through several different literatures, from scholarship on Holocaust testimony to discussions of ideal and nonideal theory, from theories of supererogation to debates about moral demandingness and to feminist care ethics.