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- Verified Buyer
Although this book is accessible to a popular audience, it has obvious academic merit. The authors thoroughly search-out all perspectives in this new field (i.e. it has a huge bibliography) and treat each perspective with skillful fairness. It both establishes itself as the authoritative reference, framing the issues for the new field of machine ethics, and establishes the credibility of the field as an academic pursuit. Good libraries ought to have this book.This book was not intended as an introduction to ethics, but it is the book I would be inclined to assign as an ethics textbook. It covers an introduction to ethics, of course, but also covers material in related disciplines (psychology, economics, etc.), and gets technical about where our society assumes ethical faculties. It forces the reader to think about how ethics work, rather than just express opinions about contemporary moral issues, and is probably the very best book in existence for giving readers an appreciation for the ways the field of ethics will have to grow in the near future.