The death penalty has inspired controversy for centuries. Raising questions regarding capital punishment rather than answering them, "Questioning Capital Punishment" offers the footing needed to allow for more informed consideration and analysis of these controversies. Acker edits judicial decisions that have addressed constitutional challenges to capital punishment and its administration in the United States and uses complementary materials to offer historical, empirical, and normative perspectives about death penalty policies and practices. This book is ideal for upper-level undergraduate and graduate classes in criminal justice.

This book features opening arguments followed by two rounds of reply between two moral philosophers on opposing sides of the abortion debate. In the opening essays, Kate Greasley and Christopher Kaczor lay out what they take to be the best case for and against abortion rights. In the ensuing dialogue, they engage with each other's arguments and each responds to criticisms fielded by the other. Their conversational argument explores such fundamental questions as: what gives a person the right to life? Is abortion bad for women? What is the difference between abortion and infanticide? Underpinned by philosophical reasoning and methodology, this book provides opposing and clearly structured perspectives on a highly emotive and controversial issue. The result gives readers a window into how moral philosophers argue about the contentious issue of abortion rights, and an in-depth analysis of the compelling arguments on both sides.

The use of animals in research has always been surrounded by ethical controversy. This book provides an overview of the central ethical issues focusing on the interconnectedness of science, law and ethics. It aims to make theoretical ethical reasoning understandable to non-ethicists and provide tools to improve ethical decision making on animal research. It focuses on good scientific practice, the 3Rs (replacement, reduction and refinement), ethical theories applied to specific cases and an overview of regulatory issues. The book is co-authored by experts in animal research, animal welfare, social sciences, law and ethics, and provides both animal researchers and members of animal ethics committees with knowledge that can facilitate their work and communication with stakeholders and the public. The book is written to provide knowledge, not to argue a certain position, and is intended to be used in training that aims to fulfil EU Directive 2010/63/EU.

The Rights Turn in Conservative Christian Politics documents a recent, fundamental change in American politics with the waning of Christian America. Rather than conservatives emphasizing morality and liberals emphasizing rights, both sides now wield rights arguments as potent weapons to win political and legal battles and build grassroots support. Lewis documents this change on the right, focusing primarily on evangelical politics. Using extensive historical and survey data that compares evangelical advocacy and evangelical public opinion, Lewis explains how the prototypical culture war issue - abortion - motivated the conservative rights turn over the past half century, serving as a springboard for rights learning and increased conservative advocacy in other arenas. Challenging the way we think about the culture wars, Lewis documents how rights claims are used to thwart liberal rights claims, as well as to provide protection for evangelicals, whose cultural positions are increasingly in the minority; they have also allowed evangelical elites to justify controversial advocacy positions to their base and to engage more easily in broad rights claiming in new or expanded political arenas, from health care to capital punishment.

Examining the evidence from Belgium - one of only five countries where euthanasia is practised legally - an international panel of experts considers the implications of legalised euthanasia and assisted suicide. Looking at the issue from an international perspective, the authors have written an invaluable in-depth analysis of the ethical aspects of this complex area. The discussion forms a solid foundation for informed debate about assisted dying. With contributors from a broad range of disciplines, this book is ideal for students, academics, legislators and anyone interested in legal, medical, social and philosophical ethics. A vital and timely examination of a growing phenomenon and one of the most challenging ethical questions of our time.

Controversies in Digital Ethics explores ethical frameworks within digital culture. Through a combination of theoretical examination and specific case studies, the essays in this volume provide a vigorous examination of ethics in a highly individualistic and mediated world. Focusing on specific controversies-privacy, surveillance, identity politics, participatory culture-the authors in this volume provide a roadmap for navigating the thorny ethical issues in new media. Paul Booth and Amber Davisson bring together multiple writers working from different theoretical traditions to represent the multiplicity of ethics in the 21st century. Each essay has been chosen to focus on a particular issue in contemporary ethical thinking in order to both facilitate classroom discussion and further scholarship in digital media ethics. Accessible for students, but with a robust analysis providing contemporary scholarship in media ethics, this collection unites theory, case studies, and practice within one volume.

Enemy Of The People is the first definitive account of Zuma’s catastrophic misrule, offering eyewitness descriptions and cogent analysis of how South Africa was brought to its knees – and how a nation fought back.

When Jacob Zuma took over the leadership of the ANC one muggy Polokwane evening in December 2007, he inherited a country where GDP was growing by more than 6% per annum, a party enjoying the support of two-thirds of the electorate, and a unified tripartite alliance. Today, South Africa is caught in the grip of a patronage network, the economy is floundering and the ANC is staring down the barrel of a defeat at the 2019 general elections. How did we get here?

Zuma first brought to heel his party, Africa’s oldest and most revered liberation movement, subduing and isolating dissidents associated with his predecessor Thabo Mbeki. Then saw the emergence of the tenderpreneur and those attempting to capture the state, as well as a network of family, friends and business associates that has become so deeply embedded that it has, in effect, replaced many parts of government. Zuma opened up the state to industrial-scale levels of corruption, causing irreparable damage to state enterprises, institutions of democracy, and the ANC itself.

But it hasn’t all gone Zuma’s way. Former allies have peeled away. A new era of activism has arisen and outspoken civil servants have stepped forward to join a cross-section of civil society and a robust media. As a divided ANC square off for the elective conference in December, where there is everything to gain or to lose, award-winning journalists Adriaan Basson and Pieter du Toit offer a brilliant and up-to-date account of the Zuma era.

Killing Times begins with the deceptively simple observation-made by Jacques Derrida in his seminars on the topic-that the death penalty mechanically interrupts mortal time by preempting the typical mortal experience of not knowing at what precise moment we will die. Through a broader examination of what constitutes mortal temporality, David Wills proposes that the so-called machinery of death summoned by the death penalty works by exploiting, or perverting, the machinery of time that is already attached to human existence. Time, Wills argues, functions for us in general as a prosthetic technology, but the application of the death penalty represents a new level of prosthetic intervention into what constitutes the human. Killing Times traces the logic of the death penalty across a range of sites. Starting with the legal cases whereby American courts have struggled to articulate what methods of execution constitute "cruel and unusual punishment," Wills goes on to show the ways that technologies of death have themselves evolved in conjunction with ideas of cruelty and instantaneity, from the development of the guillotine and the trap door for hanging, through the firing squad and the electric chair, through today's controversies surrounding lethal injection. Responding to the legal system's repeated recourse to storytelling-prosecutors' and politicians' endless recounting of the horrors of crimes-Wills gives a careful eye to the narrative, even fictive spaces that surround crime and punishment. Many of the controversies surrounding capital punishment, Wills argues, revolve around the complex temporality of the death penalty: how its instant works in conjunction with forms of suspension, or extension of time; how its seeming correlation between egregious crime and painless execution is complicated by a number of different discourses. By pinpointing the temporal technology that marks the death penalty, Wills is able to show capital punishment's expansive reach, tracing the ways it has come to govern not only executions within the judicial system, but also the opposed but linked categories of the suicide bombing and drone warfare. In discussing the temporal technology of death, Wills elaborates the workings both of the terrorist who produces a simultaneity of crime and "punishment" that bypasses judicial process, and of the security state, in whose remote-control killings the time-space coordinates of "justice" are compressed and at the same time disappear into the black hole of secrecy. Grounded in a deep ethical and political commitment to death penalty abolition, Wills's engaging and powerfully argued book pushes the question of capital punishment beyond the confines of legal argument to show how the technology of capital punishment defines and appropriates the instant of death and reconfigures the whole of human mortality.

Perhaps the most explosive issue in South Africa today is the question of land ownership. The central theme in this country’s colonial history is the dispossession of indigenous African societies by white settlers, and current calls for land restitution are based on this loss. Yet popular knowledge of the actual process by which Africans were deprived of their land is remarkably sketchy.

This book recounts an important part of this history, describing how the Khoisan and Xhosa people were dispossessed and subjugated from the time that Europeans first arrived until the end of the Cape Frontier Wars (1779–1878).

The Land Wars traces the unfolding hostilities involving Dutch and British colonial authorities, trekboers and settlers, and the San, Khoikhoin, Xhosa, Mfengu and Thembu people – as well as conflicts within these groups. In the process it describes the loss of land by Africans to successive waves of white settlers as the colonial frontier inexorably advanced. The book does not shy away from controversial issues such as war atrocities on both sides, or the expedient decision of some of the indigenous peoples to fight alongside the colonisers rather than against them.

The Land Wars is an epic story, featuring well-known figures such as Ngqika, Lord Charles Somerset and his son, Henry, Andries Stockenström, Hintsa, Harry Smith, Sandile, Maqoma, Bartle Frere and Sarhili, and events such as the arrival of the 1820 Settlers and the Xhosa cattlekilling. It is essential reading for anyone who wants to understand South Africa’s past and present.

There is a growing awareness among researchers in the humanities and social sciences of the rhetorical force of mathematical discourse-whether in regard to gerrymandering, facial recognition technologies, or racial biases in algorithmic automation. This book proposes a novel way to engage with and understand mathematics via a theoretical framework that highlights how math transforms the social-material world. In this study, G. Mitchell Reyes applies contemporary rhetorical analysis to mathematical discourse, calling into question the commonly held view that math equals truth. Examining mathematics in historical context, Reyes traces its development from Plato's teaching about abstract numbers to Euclidian geometry and the emergence of calculus and infinitesimals, imaginary numbers, and algorithms. This history reveals that mathematical innovation has always relied on rhetorical practices of making meaning, such as analogy, metaphor, and invention. Far from expressing truth hidden deep in reality, mathematics is dynamic and evolving, shaping reality and our experience of it. By bringing mathematics back down to the material-social world, Reyes makes it possible for scholars of the rhetoric and sociology of science, technology, and math to collaborate with mathematicians themselves in order to better understand our material world and public culture.

Male sex work generates sales in excess of one billion dollars annually in the United States. Recent sex scandals involving prominent leaders and government shutdowns of escort websites have focused attention on this business, but despite the attention that comes when these scandals break, we know very little about how the market works. Economics, Sexuality, and Male Sex Work is the first economic analysis of male sex work. Competition, the role of information, pricing strategies and other economic features of male sex work are analyzed using the most comprehensive data available. Sex work is also social behavior, however, and this book shows how the social aspects of gay sexuality influence the economic properties of the market. Concepts like desire, masculinity and sexual stereotypes affect how sex workers compete for clients, who practices safer sex, and how sex workers present themselves to clients to differentiate them from the competition.

Male sex work generates sales in excess of one billion dollars annually in the United States. Recent sex scandals involving prominent leaders and government shutdowns of escort websites have focused attention on this business, but despite the attention that comes when these scandals break, we know very little about how the market works. Economics, Sexuality, and Male Sex Work is the first economic analysis of male sex work. Competition, the role of information, pricing strategies and other economic features of male sex work are analyzed using the most comprehensive data available. Sex work is also social behavior, however, and this book shows how the social aspects of gay sexuality influence the economic properties of the market. Concepts like desire, masculinity and sexual stereotypes affect how sex workers compete for clients, who practices safer sex, and how sex workers present themselves to clients to differentiate them from the competition.

As concern grows over the environmental costs and ethical implications of intensive factory farming, an increasing number of us are embracing diets and lifestyles free from animal products. Has the time now arrived for us all to reject the exploitation of animals completely and become vegan? Would adopting a wholly plant-based diet be beneficial for our health? How would a majority vegan population affect the global economy and the planet? Does it make any sense to go flexitarian or vegetarian? Molly Watson explores the history, rationale and impact of veganism on an individual, social and global level, and assesses the effects of a mass change in diet on our environment, the economy and our health.

Table of Contents

Introduction, The Evolution of Veganism, Why Go Vegan Today?, The Challenges of Veganism, A Vegan Planet, Conclusion.

Jennifer Doudna, the world-famous scientist behind CRISPR, `one of the most monumental discoveries in biology' (New York Times), describes its power to reshape the future of all life and warns of its use. A handful of discoveries have changed the course of human history. This book is about the most recent and potentially the most powerful and dangerous of them all. It is an invention that allows us to rewrite the genetic code that shapes and controls all living beings with astonishing accuracy and ease. Thanks to it, the dreams of genetic manipulation have become a stark reality: the power to cure disease and alleviate suffering, to create new sources of food and energy, as well as to re-design any species, including humans, for our own ends. Jennifer Doudna is the co-inventor of this technology, known as CRISPR, and a scientist of worldwide renown. Writing with fellow researcher Samuel Sternberg, here she provides the definitive account of her discovery, explaining how this wondrous invention works and what it is capable of. A Crack In Creation also asks us to consider what our new-found power means: how do we enjoy its unprecedented benefits while avoiding its equally unprecedented dangers? As Doudna argues, every member of our species is implicated in the answers to these questions. Somehow we must consider and act together. The future of humankind - and of all life on Earth - is at stake. This book is an essential guide to the path that now lies ahead.

Pornography, Indigeneity and Neocolonialism examines how pornography operates as a representational system that authenticates settler colonies, focussing on American and Australian examples to reveal how pornography encodes whiteness, pleasure, colonisation and Indigeneity. This is the first text to use decolonial and queer theory to examine the role of pornography in America and Australia, as part of a network of neocolonial strategies that "naturalise" occupation. It is also the first study to focus on Indigenous people in pornography, providing a framework for understanding explicit representations of First Nations peoples. Pornography, Indigeneity and Neocolonialism defines the characteristics of heterosexual pornography in settler colonies, exposing how the landscape is presented as both exotic and domestic - a land of taboo pleasures that is tamed and occupied by and through white bodies. Examining the absence of Indigenous porn actors and arguing against the hypervisual fetishising of Black bodies that dominates racialised porn discourse, the book places this absence within the context of legal, political and military neocolonial Indigenous elimination strategies. This book will be of key interest to researchers and students studying porn studies, media and film studies, critical race studies and whiteness studies.

Danielle D'Souza Gill, in a pathbreaking new book, blows the lid off the abortion debate, which is radically different than it was when the Supreme Court issued its landmark ruling of Roe v. Wade in 1973. Technology has transformed the landscape and allowed people to see development in the womb. Ultrasound has rendered many old assumptions about abortion obsolete. The Democratic Left has become radicalized on abortion. It is no longer a necessary evil, but a positive good. Consequently, the Left has legitimized a form of mass killing in this country that dwarfs the deaths caused by cancer, smoking, homicide, terrorism, and war. Writing with freshness, intelligence, and insight, Danielle explores the contours of the debate, taking into account new ideas, new technology, and new laws and putting forth a new vision for a life-affirming society. In Socratic style, Danielle builds her case in response to the strongest contentions of the pro-choice camp. She engages their most powerful arguments head-on, carefully examines them, and then dismantles them. The result is a pro-life argument so persuasive that it will reach into the heart of the most hardened opponent. While it is a heartbreaking book, it is in the end inspiring. No matter what you believe about abortion, this book will educate, astonish, and deeply move you. It may move you to a position different from what you now hold. If you read one book about abortion, make it this one, The Choice: The Abortion Divide in America.

It isn't enough to celebrate the death penalty's demise. We must learn from it. When Henry McCollum was condemned to death in 1984 in rural North Carolina, death sentences were commonplace. In 2014, DNA tests set McCollum free. By then, death sentences were as rare as lethal lightning strikes. To most observers this national trend came as a surprise. What changed? Brandon Garrett hand-collected and analyzed national data, looking for causes and implications of this turnaround. End of Its Rope explains what he found, and why the story of who killed the death penalty, and how, can be the catalyst for criminal justice reform. No single factor put the death penalty on the road to extinction, Garrett concludes. Death row exonerations fostered rising awareness of errors in death penalty cases, at the same time that a decline in murder rates eroded law-and-order arguments. Defense lawyers radically improved how they litigate death cases when given adequate resources. More troubling, many states replaced the death penalty with what amounts to a virtual death sentence-life without possibility of parole. Today, the death penalty hangs on in a few scattered counties where prosecutors cling to entrenched habits and patterns of racial bias. The failed death penalty experiment teaches us how inept lawyering, overzealous prosecution, race discrimination, wrongful convictions, and excessive punishments undermine the pursuit of justice. Garrett makes a strong closing case for what a future criminal justice system might look like if these injustices were remedied.

Worldwide, over 75 million people are involuntarily childless, a devastating experience for many with significant consequences for the social and psychological well-being of women in particular. Despite greater levels of infertility and strong cultural meanings attached to having children, little attention has been paid politically or academically to the needs of minority ethnic women and men. This groundbreaking volume is the first to highlight the ways in which diverse ethnic, cultural and religious identities impact upon understandings of technological solutions for infertility and associated treatment experiences within Western societies. It offers a corrective to the dominance of the narratives of hegemonic groups in infertility research. The collection begins with a discussion of fertility prevalence and access to treatment for minorities in the West and considers some of the key methodological challenges for social research on ethnicity and infertility. Drawing on primary research from the US, the UK, Eire, Germany, the Netherlands and Australia, the book then turns the spotlight onto the ways in which minority status and cultural and religious mores might impact on the experience of infertility and assisted reproductive technologies. It argues that more equitable access to culturally competent assisted conception services should be an essential component of a transformatory politics of infertility.

Vice was one of the primary shared interests of the global community at the turn of the twentieth century. Anti-vice activists worked to combat noxious substances such as alcohol, drugs and cigarettes, and 'immoral' sexual activities such as prostitution. Nearly all of these activists approached the issue of vice by expressing worries about the body, its physical health, and functionality. By situating anti-vice politics in their broader historical contexts, Global Anti-Vice Activism, 1890-1950 sheds fresh light on the initiatives of various actors, organizations and institutions which have previously been treated primarily within national and regional boundaries. Looking at anti-vice policy from both social and cultural historical perspectives, it illuminates the centrality of regulating vice in imperial and national modernization projects. The contributors argue that vice and vice regulation constitute an ideal topic for global history, because they bridge the gap between discourse and practice, and state and civil society.

This collection of original essays brings a dramatically different perspective to bear on the contemporary 'crisis of journalism'. Rather than seeing technological and economic change as the primary causes of current anxieties, The Crisis of Journalism Reconsidered draws attention to the role played by the cultural commitments of journalism itself. Linking these professional ethics to the democratic aspirations of the broader societies in which journalists ply their craft, it examines how the new technologies are being shaped to sustain value commitments rather than undermining them. Recent technological change and the economic upheaval it has produced are coded by social meanings. It is this cultural framework that actually transforms these 'objective' changes into a crisis. The book argues that cultural codes not only trigger sharp anxiety about technological and economic changes, but provide pathways to control them, so that the democratic practices of independent journalism can be sustained in new forms.

'Lucid, informed and persuasive' Evening Standard 'Thought-provoking' Daily Mail 'An extraordinary book' Nicholas Evans, author of The Horse Whisperer The history of humanity's relationship with other species is baffling. Without animals there would be no us. We are all fellow travellers on the same evolutionary journey. By charting the love-hate story of people and animals, from their first acquaintance in deep prehistory to the present and beyond, Richard Girling reveals how and where our attitudes towards animals began - and how they have persisted, been warped and become magnified ever since. In dazzling prose, The Longest Story tells of the cumulative influence of theologians, writers, artists, warriors, philosophers, farmers, activists and scientists across the centuries, now locking us into debates on farming, extinction, animal rights, pets, experiments and religion. 'Essential reading' Philip Lymbery, CEO of Compassion in World Farming and author of Farmageddon

The robot population is rising on Earth and other planets. (Mars is inhabited entirely by robots.) As robots slip into more domains of human life-from the operating room to the bedroom-they take on our morally important tasks and decisions, as well as create new risks from psychological to physical. This makes it all the more urgent to study their ethical, legal, and policy impacts. To help the robotics industry and broader society, we need to not only press ahead on a wide range of issues, but also identify new ones emerging as quickly as the field is evolving. For instance, where military robots had received much attention in the past (and are still controversial today), this volume looks toward autonomous cars here as an important case study that cuts across diverse issues, from liability to psychology to trust and more. And because robotics feeds into and is fed by AI, the Internet of Things, and other cognate fields, robot ethics must also reach into those domains, too. Expanding these discussions also means listening to new voices; robot ethics is no longer the concern of a handful of scholars. Experts from different academic disciplines and geographical areas are now playing vital roles in shaping ethical, legal, and policy discussions worldwide. So, for a more complete study, the editors of this volume look beyond the usual suspects for the latest thinking. Many of the views as represented in this cutting-edge volume are provocative-but also what we need to push forward in unfamiliar territory.

He presided over 61,000 abortions--one of which was suffered by his then-girlfriend--and directed the largest abortion clinic in the world. He had helped to legalize abortion in the first place.
One day, he had a change of heart. One day, he found God.
At the drop of a hat, an abortion doctor renounced his profession--and his atheism--for pro-life advocacy and Christianity.
In the most shocking revelations ever expressed in an autobiography, one man unveils his entire life story, detailing countless events--from his gruesome abortion procedures to his conversion and involvement in "The Silent Scream."
Discover one man's incredible journey from death to life in Bernard Nathanson's "The Hand of God."

Taking Rites Seriously is about how religious beliefs and religious believers are assessed by judges and legal scholars and are sometimes mischaracterized and misunderstood by those who are critical of the influence of religion in politics or in the formation of law. Covering three general topics - reason and motive, dignity and personhood, nature and sex - philosopher and legal theorist Francis J. Beckwith carefully addresses several contentious legal and cultural questions over which religious and non-religious citizens often disagree: the rationality of religious belief, religiously motivated legislation, human dignity in bioethics, abortion and embryonic stem cell research, reproductive rights and religious liberty, evolutionary theory, and the nature of marriage. In the process, he responds to some well-known critics of public faith - including Brian Leiter, Steven Pinker, Suzanna Sherry, Ronald Dworkin, John Rawls, and Richard Dawkins - as well as to some religiously conservative critics of secularism, such as the advocates for intelligent design.

When it first appeared in 1979, the Williams Report on Obscenity and Film Censorship provoked strong reactions. The practical issues and political principles examined are of continuing interest and remain a crucial point of reference for discussions on obscenity and censorship. Presented in a fresh series livery for the twenty-first century, and with a specially commissioned preface written by Onora O'Neill, illuminating its continuing importance and relevance to philosophical enquiry, this abridged edition of Bernard Williams's Report presents all the main findings and arguments of the full report, central to which is the application of Mill's 'harm principle' and the conclusion that restrictions are out of place where no harm can be reasonably thought to be done.