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Talk about indifference plays an important role in the background of debates about fundamental ethical problems, such as global poverty, economic inequality, sexual discrimination and ethnic strife. It is also a subject that contemporary moral philosophy has largely overlooked. The Ethics of Indifference is the first book of its kind to move this important topic to the foreground and subject it to systematic ethical analysis.

What is meant by indifference? What forms can indifference take? Who is indifferent, to what, and in what way? Can indifference be a virtue, or is it always a vice? In this book Hallvard Lillehammer examines the ethics of indifference as it applies to real historical examples, such as attitudes to future generations, large scale immigration, public corruption, state terror, corporate harm, commercial exploitation, gender domination, socal status and self esteem. By showing how certain forms of indifference are both highly dynamic and acutely sensitive their object, Lillehammer argues that some of the very features that make indifference ethically admirable or virtuous in some situations can in other situations make it ethically vicious or wrong. He also describes how the ethics of indifference relates to central issues in moral and political philosophy, such as individual responsibility, the ethics of bystanders and the idea of liberal neutrality.

By drawing extensively on recent work on indifference and detachment in history, sociology and anthropology, this book also brings together existing scholarship on the nature and ethics of indifference across related humanistic disciplines in uniquely original way.