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Books > Social sciences > Sociology, social studies > Social issues > Ethical issues & debates
Drawing on such process thinkers as Whitehead, Deleuze and Stengers, Innovation and Biomedicine develops a powerful framework for the analysis of Biomedical Innovation. With its sustained focus on the Pre-Exposure Prophylactic pill (PrEP) for the prevention of HIV infection, the volume explores the ethical, medical and political elements entailed in the pill's testing through offshore randomized control trials (RCTs). To this end, the key concept of 'eventuation' is elaborated and deployed in the scrutiny of the 'gold standard' status of RCTs, the role of ethics in RCTs, and the enactment of the PrEP pill as a singular entity. Further, the authors engage with affective, topological and virtual dimensions to show how PrEP's eventuation also allows for new scientific and ethical questions to be crafted. Innovation and Biomedicine is a major contribution to science and technology studies, medical sociology, and the multi-disciplinary study of HIV.
The hatred of drugs, according to the author, is the axis of politics that has fundamentally shifted the nation's policy format--from the progressive orientation that dominated from from the time of Roosevelt to the Sixties, to the punitive orientation that emerged during the Nixon presidency and continues to this day. This triumph of the political use of drug hate is simultaneously a disaster in policy consequences as it corrupts the criminal justice system, exacerbates class inequality, drains public resources, and denies the public their Constitutional heritage. Sadofsky Baggins shows that the political success of the domestic war has overwhelmed the policy failure in the nation's deliberations. The War on Drugs is politically successful because it serves traditional racial antagonisms, media need for theater, religious needs for piety and denunciation of sinful pleasures, and maintains conservative coalition politics by emphasizing punishment over progress toward social justice. This book recognizes the need to reassess the War on Drugs as a necessary step toward national healing and future policy development. Recent popular movements and initiatives, as well as the failure of some politicians to benefit from deploying drug hate rhetoric, are considered as the opening of such an awakening. Sadofsky Baggins treats the War on Drugs as the epic of politics and civilization in our time. This book continues his efforts to explain how well-meaning citizens and manipulative politicans and institutions construct laws that miserably fail in their intended purpose and harm the nation in significant unintended ways. This book is of interest to concerned citizens as well as scholars, researchers, and policy makers involved with legal, drug, and political issues.
Throughout history, states have tried to create the perfect combatant with superhuman physical and cognitive features that are akin to those of comic book superheroes. However, the current innovations have nothing to do with the ones from the past and their development goes beyond a simple technological perspective. On the contrary, they are raising the prospect of a human enhancement revolution that will change the ways with which future wars will be fought and may even profoundly alter the foundations upon which our modern societies are built on. This book, which discusses the full ethical implications of these new technologies, is a unique contribution for students and scholars who care about the morality of warfare. -- .
In Media and Law: Between Free Speech and Censorship, Mathieu Deflem and Derek M.D Silva have gathered an interdisciplinary team of leading experts to make a valuable contribution to the existing literature. This volume explores free speech and the control thereof from both a political as well as cultural lens. These topics have once again moved center stage in scholarly as well as popular discussions on what must, should, and should not be said in the public sphere of ideas, opinions, and tastes. In a world of alternative facts, fake news, gender politics, company self-censorship, edited art, hate speech, and career-ending tweets, the chapters in this volume make a timely contribution.
"A most welcome contribution to the burgeoning field of Deaf
Studies. The book performs a vital service to readers by providing
them with a comprehensive collection of sources that narrate the
struggles, accomplishments and aspirations of our nation's deaf
community." "This is one of those marvelous initiatives that, when you see
it, leads you to say, 'Why didn't I think of that?' A very valuable
resource not only for the growing numbers of students in Deaf
Studies but for everyone who seeks to understand the world of
culturally Deaf people."" "A landmark in the history of Deaf studies. Bragg has assembled
an astonishingly balanced selection of historical sources, personal
memoirs, and critical essays to give readers a rich and varied
panaroma of perspectives." To many who hear, the deaf world is as foreign as a country never visited. Deaf World thus concerns itself less with the perspectives of the hearing and more with what Deaf people themselves think and do. Editor Lois Bragg asserts that English is for many signing people a second, infrequently used language and that Deaf culture is the socially transmitted pattern of behavior, values, beliefs, and expression of those who use American Sign Language. She has assembled an astonishing array of historical sources, political writings, and personal memoirs, from classic 19th-century manifestos to contemporary policy papers, on everything from eugenics to speech and lipreading, theright to work and marry, and the never-ending controversy over separation vs. social integration. At the heart of many of the selections lies the belief that Deaf Americans have long constituted an internal colony of sorts in the United States. While not attempting to speak for Deaf people en masse, this ambitious platform anthology places the Deaf on center stage, offering them an opportunity to represent the world--theirs as well as the hearing world--from a Deaf perspective. For Deaf readers, the book will be welcomed as a gift, both a companion to be savored and, as often, an opponent to be engaged and debated. And for the hearing, it serves as an unprecedented guide to a world and a culture so often overlooked. Comprising a judicious mix of published pieces and original essays solicited specifically for this volume, Deaf World marks a major contribution.
This collection explores whether and how religious and secular worldviews and political ideologies held by scientists, citizens, decision-makers and politicians influence science as practiced and understood today. Contributors explore the social and scientific repercussions of 'customizing' science to fit the needs and interests of various groups.
On the lapse of the Licensing Act in 1695, Thomas Macaulay wrote in his History of England, 'English literature was emancipated, and emancipated for ever, from the control of the government'. It's certainly true that the system of prior restraint enshrined in this Restoration measure was now at an end, at least for print. Yet the same cannot be said of government control, which came to operate instead by means of post-publication retribution, not pre-publication licensing, notably for the common-law offence of seditious libel. For many of the authors affected, from Defoe to Cobbett, this new regime was a greater constraint on expression than the old, not least for its alarming unpredictability, and for the spectacular punishment-the pillory-that was sometimes entailed. Yet we may also see the constraint as an energizing force. Throughout the eighteenth century and into the Romantic period, writers developed and refined ingenious techniques for communicating dissident or otherwise contentious meanings while rendering the meanings deniable. As a work of both history and criticism, this book traces the rise and fall of seditious libel prosecution, and with it the theatre of the pillory, while arguing that the period's characteristic forms of literary complexity-ambiguity, ellipsis, indirection, irony-may be traced to the persistence of censorship in the post-licensing world. The argument proceeds through case studies of major poets and prose writers including Dryden, Defoe, Pope, Fielding, Johnson, and Southey, and also calls attention to numerous little-known satires and libels across the extended period.
Would it be cool to see woolly mammoth alive one day? Disappeared species have always fascinated the human mind. A new discussion of using genomic technologies to reverse extinction and to help in conservation has been sparked. This volume studies the question philosophically. The collection consists of an introduction, epilogue and nine new articles written by philosophers. The intended readership consists of academic philosophers, ecologists and others interested in conservation biology.
From Viagra to in vitro fertilization, new technologies are rapidly changing the global face of reproductive health. They are far from neutral: religious, cultural, social, and legal contexts condition their global transfer. The way a society interprets and adopts (or rejects) a new technology reveals a great deal about the relationship between bodies and the body politic. Reproductive health technologies are often particularly controversial because of their potential to reconfigure kinship relationships, sexual mores, gender roles, and the way life is conceptualized. This collection of original ethnographic research spans the region from Morocco and Tunisia to Israel and Iran and covers a wide range of technologies, including emergency contraception, medication abortion, gamete donation, hymenoplasty, erectile dysfunction, and gender transformation.
India was a pioneer in legalizing induced abortion, or Medical Termination of Pregnancy (MTP) in 1971. Yet, after three decades, morbidity and mortality due to unsafe abortion remain a serious problem. There is little public debate on the issue despite several national campaigns on safe motherhood. Instead, discussion on abortion has mainly centred around declining sex ratio, sex-selective abortion, and the proliferation of abortion clinics in urban areas. Adding to the problem is that abortion continues to be a sensitive, private matter, often with ethical/moral/religious connotations that sets it apart from other reproductive health-seeking behaviour. This book fills a gap in our understanding of the ground realities with respect to induced abortion in India to create an evidence-based body of knowledge. Using both quantitative and qualitative research methods, the case studies show why and under what circumstances women seek abortion and the quality of services available to them. They also explore inter-generational differences in attitudes and practices, the perceptions and selection of providers, female-selective abortion, and informal abortion practitioners. Among other issues, the contributors show that strong preference for sons, availability of modern techniques for diagnostic tests, widespread acceptance of the small family norm, and heavy reliance on female sterilisation as the primary method of contraception lead women to abort unwanted pregnancies. A book that goes beyond the smokescreen of data and regulations to unravel the human story behind elective abortion, it will be of interest to those studying health, public policy, and gender, apart from the general reader.
This handbook discusses 33 nations in terms of abortion's legal status, development of the policy, availability of contraception and abortion services, abortion rates, fertility trends, and the demographic/socioeconomic profiles of affected women. The amount of data consolidated in one volume is prodigious, providing information not readily available in any other single source. . . . In terms of policies and data, the book is excellent. "Library Journal" This unique work assembles in a single volume data from several continents on the general pattern of legal activity pertaining to abortion, as well as service delivery, the incidence of abortion, and the profile of aborting women. Each of the thirty-three essays in the Handbook surveys in depth the historical development of abortion policy; the role of the medical profession, news media, religious and women's organizations, and other groups in legislative enactments; and demographic data concerning women who seek abortions. Also dealt with are the relation between abortion, fertility behavior, and family planning policy and programs; the incidence of, complications from, and morbidity as a result of illegal abortions; and abortion research.
Janet Jackson's infamous 'wardrobe malfunction' at the 2004 Superbowl precipitated a nation-wide controversy. To judge by the hysterical reaction, one would think that nothing so shocking had ever been seen on television. Yet, remarkably, during the conservative 1950s, similar breast-baring accidents on television (by Faye Emerson and Jayne Mansfield) raised barely a stir. Is America on the verge of another puritanical era? Is this new Puritanism the result of something more than just concerns for public decency? First Amendment and emerging technology specialist, Frederick S Lane examines America's changing attitudes toward decency and the politics of decency in this timely book. He takes a strong and unequivocal position that it is inappropriate and dangerous for the government to try to regulate morality. He accuses religious conservatives of starting 'decency wars' for motives no more noble than profit and political gain. As Lane astutely points out, such controversies generate a flood of books, speeches, and syndicated radio and television programs. More importantly, they fill the coffers of conservative politicians and 'non-profits'.;Lane first sets the stage for the current controversy by reviewing the history of the decency debate from the invention of the camera as the catalyst for public decency concerns, through the mixing of morality and politics by the Moral Majority and the Christian Coalition, to the recent activist stance by the Federal Communications Commission against perceived indecency. He spells out strategies for combating the rising influence of the Religious Right's puritanical ploys by emphasising that decency standards are a private and personal responsibility, not a matter of law enforcement. He asserts that we must continuously educate the public regarding the ruinous effects of government censorship, watered-down textbooks, and homophobia. Moreover, he stresses the supreme importance of supporting existing and new organisations to counteract the propaganda from groups like the Christian Coalition and Focus on the Family. Including interviews with politicians, religious leaders, entertainers, and other individuals across the spectrum of American culture, this compelling book is essential reading for understanding one of the most fiercely debated social issues of the American nation.
Managing identity through biometric technology has become a routine and ubiquitous practice in recent years. From border control and asylum regulation to the management of social services and medical records, various fields are increasingly deploying biometric systems as a means of identity verification and authentication. The scope and nature of these systems are raising a host of concerns regarding the intensification of surveillance practices and the reduction of identity to a series of bio-data and algorithms.By analysing biometric systems as a biopolitical practice within the domain of borders, immigration and citizenship management, this book interrogates what is at stake in the merging of the body and technology for security and governance purposes. It draws on a number of critical theories, philosophies and empirical examples, offering a multi-level and timely analysis of the socio-political and ethical implications of biometric identity systems.
A thorough exploration of an individual's right to bodily autonomy versus the state's power to regulate and control the bodies of its citizens. The Human Body on Trial asks the basic question: Who's in charge of your body-you or the authorities? Four narrative chapters examine key constitutional questions addressed by the U.S. Supreme Court over the past century concerning the power of the state to regulate the human body, placing the issues in historical context and examining the contemporary legal and medical knowledge that informed each decision. The book focuses on individual cases, such as Jacobson v. Massachusetts (compulsory vaccination), Buck v. Bell (forced sterilization), and Roe v. Wade (abortion), and discusses such controversial issues as AIDS testing and physician-assisted suicide. A special reference section includes court decisions and other primary documents. Timeline of major events in the evolution of the legal right of individual autonomy from the ratification of the 14th Amendment in 1868 to the 2002 ruling in State of Oregon and Peter Rasmussen, et al. v. John Ashcroft regarding implementing Oregon's Death with Dignity Act Excerpts from key legal documents from the Roe v. Wade (1973) decision to the lesser known Skinner v. Oklahoma (1942) ruling by the Supreme Court overturning the mandated sterilization for three-time offenders convicted of certain felonies
Autonomous cars, drones, and electronic surveillance systems are examples of technologies that raise serious ethical issues. In this analytic investigation, Martin Peterson articulates and defends five moral principles for addressing ethical issues related to new and existing technologies: the cost-benefit principle, the precautionary principle, the sustainability principle, the autonomy principle, and the fairness principle. It is primarily the method developed by Peterson for articulating and analyzing the five principles that is novel. He argues that geometric concepts such as points, lines, and planes can be put to work for clarifying the structure and scope of these and other moral principles. This geometric account is based on the Aristotelian dictum that like cases should be treated alike, meaning that the degree of similarity between different cases can be represented as a distance in moral space. The more similar a pair of cases are from a moral point of view, the closer is their location in moral space. A case that lies closer in moral space to a paradigm case for some principle p than to any paradigm for any other principle should be analyzed by applying principle p. The book also presents empirical results from a series of experimental studies in which experts (philosophers) and laypeople (engineering students) have been asked to apply the geometric method to fifteen real-world cases. The empirical findings indicate that experts and laypeople do in fact apply geometrically construed moral principles in roughly, but not exactly, the manner advocates of the geometric method believe they ought to be applied.
From Viagra to in vitro fertilization, new technologies are rapidly changing the global face of reproductive health. They are far from neutral: religious, cultural, social, and legal contexts condition their global transfer. The way a society interprets and adopts (or rejects) a new technology reveals a great deal about the relationship between bodies and the body politic. Reproductive health technologies are often particularly controversial because of their potential to reconfigure kinship relationships, sexual mores, gender roles, and the way life is conceptualized. This collection of original ethnographic research spans the region from Morocco and Tunisia to Israel and Iran and covers a wide range of technologies, including emergency contraception, medication abortion, gamete donation, hymenoplasty, erectile dysfunction, and gender transformation.
This resounding defence of the principles of free expression revisits the 'Satanic Verses' uproar of 1989, as well as subsequent incidents such as the Danish cartoons controversy, to argue that the human right of free speech is by no means so secure that it can be taken for granted.
Offering a new perspective on male prostitution, In the Company of Men employs qualitative methodology to present a real-world view of the issues, both obvious and obscure, surrounding the world's "second-oldest profession." In the Company of Men: Inside the Lives of Male Prostitutes is the only book to document male prostitution from the perspective of a group of men working for a single male escort agency. The in-depth account goes behind the scenes to shed light on the very hidden world of Internet male escorts, their customers, and the niche they inhabit in modern American society. At the same time, it has much to tell us about post-modern identity, culture, and sexuality-and the transformative influence of the Internet on sexual behavior and male prostitution. Through numerous interviews, the book examines the sometimes-dichotomous relationship between the image men convey and the lengths to which they go in order to meet their most private needs. Readers travel down a cyber Sunset Boulevard to see what attracts young men to work as escorts, how an escort agency serves economic and personal goals, and how a community can evolve among the men involved. Field observations from more than 200 contact hours at the agency and with the escorts First-hand accounts and stories from interviews and interactions with men working as male escorts and with managers at their agency
A broadly annotated selected bibliography of monographs, periodical articles, and U.S. government documents on the pro-choice and pro-life question. Materials included were published in the United States between January 1990 and December 1994. This work provides an objective, comprehensive listing of all periodical and monographic publications on pro-choice and pro-life issues published between 1990 and the end of 1994. It includes all materials fitting parameters of research in the ethical, legal, moral, religious, and social arenas. It is a selected bibliography in that it excludes articles dealing with methods of contraception and abortion, clinic bombings, euthanasia, and exclusively medical issues, in favor of items dealing directly with the pro-choice/pro-life debate. Presented in standard Modern Language Association (MLA) bibliographical format, this book is useful to students, scholars, and professionals of librarianship, psychology, sociology, population studies, religion, law, and civil liberties.
After the Nancy Cruzan case was decided by the Supreme Court in 1990, and ultimately resolved by the Courts of the State of Missouri, the decision to withhold or withdraw life-prolonging nutrition and hydration appeared to many to be as noncontroversial as decisions to refuse respirators or dialysis. Even the Catholic Church held that, although there should be a presumption in favor of providing nutrition and hydration, the patient or the patient's surrogate could overrule this presumption, if either believed the treatment was disproportionate or burdensome. The Schiavo case changed all that. Although the decision to remove Terri Schiavo's nutrition and hydration was made by her husband - her legal surrogate - based on his wife's belief that such treatment was disproportionate, Schiavo's immediate family protested so much that the case took years to resolve. It eventually involved all branches of government at both the state and federal levels. The ethical dilemmas that such cases pose continue to stir great controversy. This in-depth examination of these dilemmas provides information and documentation from many perspectives. The editors have included a foreword by Dr. Jay Wolfson, Terri Schiavo's court-appointed guardian ad litem, as well as Dr. Wolfson's report to Gov. Jeb Bush on the case and Gov. Bush's reply; public statements by President George Bush and Senators David Weldon, Rick Santorum, Tom DeLay, Bill Frist, and Barney Frank; statements by the pope and other representatives of the Catholic Church on this issue; plus much medical and legal background material on both precedents to the Schiavo case and its aftermath, including the results of the autopsy report. For anyone wishing an in-depth understanding of these complex ethical issues, issues many of us will have to confront in our own families, this volume is indispensable.
Theatre has often found itself at the centre of recent debates over censorship and the arts, as a result of coverage of events such as the protests against the play "Behzti" and the controversy over "Jerry Springer: The Opera." This book offers the first sustained study of censorship of the British stage from 1968 into the twenty-first century.
Against the backdrop of U.S. drug policy and strategy, this important work, written by an experienced Intelligence and Special Operations Officer and Scholar, peels away the rhetoric to present an insider's view of cocaine trafficking in the Western Hemisphere. From the Huallaga and Chapare Valleys, through the cocaine transit countries to the U.S. border, this book compares and contrasts the enormous success of the traffickers to the monolithic U.S. drug policy that produces no end-game and conceals its failures behind a classified stamp. Drawing on his experience as the Counter Drug Intelligence Team Leader at Los Alamos National Laboratory and as a Black Hat Team member with the U.S. Southern Command, the author approaches drug trafficking from the narcotraficantes point of view to paint a picture that portrays the cocaine industry as it really is. Arguing that it is impossible to stop drugs at their source, the author builds a compelling case for shifting U.S. assets to the southern borders of the United States, through a strategy that causes the traffickers to pass through a series of obstacles designed to slow and impede their operations. Identifying drug trafficking as an examplar of the Gray Area Phenomena--the impact of non-state players and organizations on a post-colonial, multi-tribal world--the author brings a currency to his work using Open Source Intelligence as the vehicle by which the drug trafficking world may be assessed and analyzed. "Sharing the Secrets" offers an Intelligence for the new world disorder that enables decision-makers to recognize and define the new threats and suggests how realistic policy and strategy might be evaluated and re-cast. This work will be of particular interest to policy-makers, law enforcement and Intelligence professionals, and scholars as it opens the book to the right page and provides for the first time the stubborn facts that they may have been neglecting in the war on drugs. "Sharing the Secrets" is a body of descriptive, proscriptive, and prescriptive material that will enable serious public discusion to begin on national drug policy and strategy.
This book is a must-read for anyone studying and researching the rise and fall of Senator Joseph R. McCarthy and McCarthyism in American political life. Intolerance in America that targets alleged internal subversives controlled by external agents has a storied history that stretches hundreds of years. While the post-World War II "Red Scare" and the emergence of McCarthyism during the 1950s is the era commonly associated with American anticommunism, there was also a "First Red Scare" that occurred in 1919-1920. In both time periods, many Americans feared the radicalism of the left, and some of the most outspoken-like McCarthy-used slander to denounce their political enemies. The result was an atmosphere in which individual rights and liberties were at risk and hysteria prevailed. McCarthyism and the Red Scare: A Reference Guide tracks the rise and fall of Senator Joe McCarthy and the broad pursuit of domestic "Red" subversives in the post-World War II years, and focuses on how American society responded to real and perceived threats from the left during the first decade of the Cold War. Provides an overview of McCarthyism and the postwar Red Scare, relating these mindsets to other waves of domestic persecution Includes 12 relevant historic documents such as the Truman Loyalty Oaths; a transcript of McCarthy's speech in Wheeling, West Virginia; McCarthy's attacks on Acheson and Marshall; Margaret Chase Smith's Statement on Conscience; and the Senate's censure of McCarthy Provides information on the First Red Scare and the emergence of the American fear of the Left and the potential for a revolution Includes 11 short biographies of primary individuals associated with McCarthyism and the Red Scare Presents a chronology of events that threatened or weakened individual rights throughout the 20th century, with a specific focus on the Red Scare periods of 1919-21 and 1945-57 An annotated bibliography includes primary and secondary sources representing the most significant contemporary and scholarly works on the topic
When is the use of force for humanitarian purposes legitimate? The book examines this question through one of the most controversial examples of humanitarian intervention in the post Cold War period: the 1999 NATO intervention in Kosovo. Justifying Violence applies a critical theoretical approach to an interrogation of the communicative practices which underpin claims to legitimacy for the use of force by actors in international politics. Drawing on the theory of communicative ethics, the book develops an innovative conceptual framework which contributes a critical communicative dimension to the question of legitimacy that extends beyond the moral and legal approaches so often applied to the intervention in Kosovo. The empirical application of communicative ethics offers a provocative and nuanced account which contests conventional interpretations of the legitimacy of NATO's intervention. -- .
What happens to journalists who expose uncomfortable truths? How far are journalists prepared to go in order to report a difficult story? "Silenced" provides answers to these questions with the stories of journalists who risked their careers so that the public might be informed. From China, where Jasper Becker, formerly Beijing bureau chief of the South China Morning Post, fought a lonely and unsuccessful battle against owners willing to soften the newspaper's reporting of the Chinese government in the hope of protecting mainland investments, to Zimbabwe where the harsh treatment of the Guardian's Andrew Meldrum led to him being arrested and forcibly deported from the country because he dared criticise President Robert Mugabe, "Silenced" is a forcible reminder of the risks - both personal and financial - accepted by the media on our behalf. In other parts of the world, journalists face more traditional problems. When faced with the threat of censorship, all of these journalists reacted in a similar manner - they chose to report and face the consequences. They decided to place the ethics of journalism above all other considerations.;As such they are proof that press freedom cannot exist without those who are willing to uphold its fundamental principals. "Silenced" is more than a book on the media. It is an expression of the bravery and persistence of journalists everywhere. |
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