Aimed at undergraduates, Contemporary Ethics presupposes little or no familiarity with ethics and is written in a clear and engaging style. It provides students with a sympathetic but critical guide to utilitarianism, explaining its different forms and exploring the debates it has spawned. The book leads students through a number of current issues in contemporary ethics that are connected to controversies over and within utilitarianism. At the same time, it uses utilitarianism to introduce students to ethics as a subject. In these ways, the book is not only a guide to utilitarianism, but also an introduction to some standard problems of ethics and to several important topics in contemporary ethical theory.

William H. Shaw is Professor of Philosophy and Chair of the Philosophy Department at San Jose State University. The author of Business Ethics, Moore on Right and Wrong, and Marx's Theory of History, he was a Fulbright fellow at the University of Zimbabwe and a von Humboldt fellow at the Freie Universitä Berlin.