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Books > Social sciences > Sociology, social studies > Social issues > Ethical issues & debates
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.
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.
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.
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.
Astonishingly, the average age of first viewing porn is now 11.5 years for boys, and with the advent of the Internet, it's no surprise that young people are consuming more porn than ever. And, as Gail Dines shows, today's porn is strikingly different from yesterday's "Playboy." As porn culture has become absorbed into pop culture, a new wave of entrepreneurs are creating porn that is even more hard-core, violent, sexist, and racist. Proving that porn desensitizes and actually limits our sexual freedom, Dines argues its omnipresence is a public health concern we can no longer ignore.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
"This exceptional book makes several key contributions to the field
and shows how freedom and anxiety, and the market and morality,
tensely coexist in the business of sex. . . . Kelly's analysis is
conveyed through vivid portraits of the lives of sex workers,
showing that the women involved are neither victims nor heroines
but something else: actors caught between agency and
constraint."--Roger N. Lancaster, author of "The Trouble with
Nature"
'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
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.
Never before have prostitution, strip clubs and pornography been as profitable, widely used or embedded in mainstream culture as they are today. How society should respond to the rise of the sex trade is shaping up to be one of the Twenty-First Century's big questions. Should it be legal to pay for sex? Isn't it a woman's choice whether she strips for money? Could online porn warping the attitudes of a generation of boys? An increasingly popular set of answers maintains that prostitution is just work, porn is fantasy, demand is inevitable; so fully legalise the sex trade and it can be made safe. Kat Banyard contends that these are profoundly dangerous myths. Sexual consent is not a commodity, objectification and abuse are inherent to prostitution, and the sex trade poses a grave threat to the struggle for women's equality. Skilfully weaving together first-hand investigation, interviews and the latest research, Pimp State powerfully argues that sex trade myth-makers will find themselves on the wrong side of history.
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.
'The most important advance of our era. One of the pioneers of the field describes the exciting hunt for the key breakthrough and what it portends for our future' Walter Isaacson World-famous scientist Jennifer Doudna - winner of the 2020 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for creating the revolutionary gene-editing technique CRISPR - explains her discovery, 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. As a result, dreams of genetic manipulation have become a stark reality: the power to cure disease and alleviate suffering, 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. She also asks us to consider what our new-found power means: how do we enjoy its unprecedented benefits while avoiding its equally unprecedented dangers? _________________ PRAISE FOR A CRACK IN CREATION: 'The future is in our hands as never before, and this book explains the stakes like no other' George Lucas 'One of the most PIONEERING women in science . . . Exhilarating' Arianna Huffington 'Thrilling' Adam Rutherford 'An instant classic' Siddhartha Mukherjee
Spatial Justice and Informal Settlements: Integral Urban Projects in the Comunas of Medellin links the discourses of informal urbanism and spatial justice in the context of public space-based governmental programmes to upgrade informal settlements in Latin America. It argues for the importance of combining measures for equity and empowerment with positive recognition, i.e. recognition which is based on valuing the social and material achievements of the settlers as a contribution to urban life and culture in its own right. It presents an inquiry into how public open spaces serve the goal of increasing spatial justice and the quality of life in informal settlements. It provides an in-depth study of the Integral Urban Project (Proyecto Urbano Integral/PUI in Spanish) in Comuna 13, a low-income settlement in Medellin, Colombia. Drawing on extensive fieldwork to understand people's everyday spaces and socio-spatial practices, the book assesses the design, production, use, and management of some of the public open spaces established under the PUI programme. It thus also offers an account of the diversity of everyday open spaces and landscapes in this informal settlement. This book is a valuable contribution to the field of open spaces in informal settlements and spatial justice, especially for scholars, researchers, and graduate students with an interest in urban development and upgrading and related socio-spatial issues in Latin America.
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.
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.
In 1999, General Museveni, Uganda's autocratic leader, ordered police to arrest homosexuals for engaging in behavior he characterized as ""un-African"" and against Biblical teaching. A state-sanctioned campaign of harassment of LGBT people followed. With the approval of sections of Uganda's clergy (and the support of U.S. evangelicals) harsh morality laws were passed against pornography and homosexual acts. The former disproportionately affected urban women, curtailing their freedoms. The latter - known as the ""kill the gays bill"" - called for life imprisonment or capital punishment for homosexuals. The author weaves together a series of vignettes and anecdotes that trace the development of Uganda's morality laws against a backdrop of Machiavellian politics, religious fundamentalism and the human rights struggle of LGBT Ugandans. |
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