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Books > Social sciences > Sociology, social studies > Social issues > Ethical issues & debates
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.
The shooting of Jean Charles de Menezes at London's Stockwell tube
station in 2005 raised acute issues about the operational practice,
legitimacy, accountability, and policy-making regarding police use
of fatal force. It dramatically exposed a policy - amounting to
"shoot to kill" - which came not from Parliament, but from the
non-statutory ACPO (Association of Chief Police Officers). This
vital and timely book unravels these complex and often
misunderstood matters, and it provides a fresh and much-needed
overview of the UK's firearms practice and policy in a
traditionally "unarmed" police service. Drawing on international
examples of police use-of-force and firearms, it questions how
existing police policy has been made covertly.
Aristocratic Vice examines the outrage against-and attempts to
end-the four vices associated with the aristocracy in
eighteenth-century England: duelling, suicide, adultery, and
gambling. Each of the four, it was commonly believed, owed its
origin to pride. Many felt the law did not go far enough to punish
those perpetrators who were members of the elite. In this exciting
new book, Andrew explores each vice's treatment by the press at the
time and shows how a century of public attacks on aristocratic
vices promoted a sense of "class superiority" among the
soon-to-emerge British middle class. "Donna Andrew continues to
illuminate the mental landscapes of eighteenth-century Britain. . .
. No historian of the period has made greater or more effective use
of the newspaper press as a source for cultural history than she.
This book is evidently the product of a great deal of work and is
likely to stimulate further work."-Joanna Innes, University of
Oxford
A unique contribution to research on feminist care ethics. Drawing
on a wealth of practical experience across eight different
disciplinary fields, the international contributors demonstrate the
significance of care ethics as a transformative way of thinking and
highlight the necessity of thinking about the ethics of care within
policies and practice.
This open access book examines how the social sciences can be
integrated into the praxis of engineering and science, presenting
unique perspectives on the interplay between engineering and social
science. Motivated by the report by the Commission on Humanities
and Social Sciences of the American Association of Arts and
Sciences, which emphasizes the importance of social sciences and
Humanities in technical fields, the essays and papers collected in
this book were presented at the NSF-funded workshop 'Engineering a
Better Future: Interplay between Engineering, Social Sciences and
Innovation', which brought together a singular collection of
people, topics and disciplines. The book is split into three parts:
A. Meeting at the Middle: Challenges to educating at the boundaries
covers experiments in combining engineering education and the
social sciences; B. Engineers Shaping Human Affairs: Investigating
the interaction between social sciences and engineering, including
the cult of innovation, politics of engineering, engineering design
and future of societies; and C. Engineering the Engineers:
Investigates thinking about design with papers on the art and
science of science and engineering practice.
The only thing Hollywood likes more than a good movie is a good
deal. For more than fifty years producers and directors of war and
action movies have been getting a great deal from America's armed
forces by receiving access to billions of dollars worth of military
equipment and personnel for little or no cost. Although this
arrangement considerably lowers a film's budget, the cost in terms
of intellectual freedom can be quite steep. In exchange for access
to sophisticated military hardware and expertise, filmmakers must
agree to censorship from the Pentagon.
As veteran Hollywood journalist David L. Robb shows in this
revealing insider's look into Hollywood's "dirtiest little secret,"
the final product that moviegoers see at the theater is often not
just what the director intends but also what the powers-that-be in
the military want to project about America's armed forces.
Sometimes the censor demands removal of just a few words; other
times whole scenes must be scrapped or completely revised. What
happens if a director refuses the requested changes? Robb quotes a
Pentagon spokesman: "Well I'm taking my toys and I'm going home.
I'm taking my tanks and my troops and my location, and I'm going
home." That can be quite a persuasive threat to a filmmaker trying
to keep his movie within budget.
Robb takes us behind the scenes during the making of many
well-known movies. From The Right Stuff to Top Gun and even Lassie,
the list of movies in which the Pentagon got its way is very long.
Only when a director is determined to spend more money than
necessary to make his own movie without interference, as in the
case of Oliver Stone in the creation of Platoon or Francis Ford
Coppola in Apocalypse Now, is a film released that presents the
director's unalloyed vision.
For anyone who loves movies and cares about freedom of expression,
Operation Hollywood is an engrossing, shocking, and very
entertaining book.
For anyone who has ever wondered about the ethics of killing
animals for food, this is the definitive collection of essays on
the ethical debate. Written by internationally recognized scholars
on both sides of the debate, the provocative articles here compiled
will give vegetarians and meat-eaters a thorough grounding in all
aspects of this controversial issue. After an introduction to the
nature of the debate by editor Steve F. Sapontzis, Daniel
Dombrowski reviews the history of vegetarianism. There follows a
discussion of health issues and what anthropology has to tell us
about human diet. Also included are the classic cases for
vegetarianism from philosophers Peter Singer and Tom Regan, and new
essays rebutting those classic positions from humanists Roger
Scruton and Carl Cohen, among others. Various scholars then examine
religious teachings about eating animals, which are drawn from
Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, as well as Native American and
Eastern traditions. Finally, Carol J. Adams, Deanne Curtin, and Val
Plumwood, among other outstanding advocates, debate the ethics of
eating meat in connection with feminism, environmentalism, and
multiculturalism. Containing virtually a "Who's Who" of
philosophers, social critics, environmentalists, feminists, and
religious scholars who have participated in the vegetarianism
debate over the past quarter century, this outstanding anthology of
expert articles, most of them new, provides the latest thinking on
a subject of increasing public interest.
Tracking the relationship between the theory of press control and
the realities of practicing daily press censorship prior to
publication, this volume on the suppression of dissent in early
modern Europe tackles a topic with many elusive and
under-researched characteristics. Pre-publication censorship was
common in absolutist regimes in Catholic and Protestant countries
alike, but how effective it was in practice remains open to debate.
The Netherlands and England, where critical content segued into
outright lampoonery, were unusual for hard-wired press freedoms
that arose, respectively, from a highly competitive publishing
industry and highly decentralized political institutions. These
nations remained extraordinary exceptions to a rule that, for
example in France, did not end until the revolution of 1789. Here,
the author's European perspective provides a survey of the varying
censorship regulations in European nations, as well as the shifting
meanings of 'freedom of the press'. The analysis opens up
fascinating insights, afforded by careful reading of primary
archival sources, into the reactions of censors confronted with
manuscripts by authors seeking permission to publish. Tortarolo
sets the opinions on censorship of well-known writers, including
Voltaire and Montesquieu, alongside the commentary of anonymous
censors, allowing us to revisit some common views of
eighteenth-century history. How far did these writers, their
reasoning stiffened by Enlightenment values, promote dissident
views of absolutist monarchies in Europe, and what insights did
governments gain from censors' reports into the social tensions
brewing under their rule? These questions will excite dedicated
researchers, graduate students, and discerning lay readers alike.
The UNESCO International Bioethics Committee is an international
body that sets standards in the field of bioethics. This collection
represents the contributions of the IBC to global bioethics. The
IBC is a body of 36 independent experts that follows progress in
the life sciences and its applications in order to ensure respect
for human dignity and freedom. Currently, some of the topics of the
IBC contributions have been discussed in the bioethics literature,
mostly journal articles. However, this is a unique contribution by
the scholars who developed these universal declarations and
reports. The contributors have not only provided a scholarly up to
date discussion of their research topics, but as members of the IBC
they have also discussed specific practical challenges in the
development of such international documents. This book will be
suited to academics within bioethics, health care policy and
international law.
Writers in Brazil and Mexico discovered early on that speculative
fiction provides an ideal platform for addressing the complex
issues of modernity, yet the study of speculative fictions rarely
strays from the United States and England. Cyborgs, Sexuality, and
the Undead: The Body in Mexican and Brazilian Speculative Fiction
expands the traditional purview of speculative fiction in all its
incarnations (science fiction, fantasy, horror) beyond the
traditional Anglo-American context to focus on work produced in
Mexico and Brazil across a historical overview from 1870 to the
present. The book portrays the effects-and ravages-of modernity in
these two nations, addressing its technological, cultural, and
social consequences and their implications for the human body. In
Cyborgs, Sexuality, and the Undead, M. Elizabeth Ginway examines
all these issues from a number of theoretical perspectives, most
importantly through the lens of BolIvar EcheverrIa's "baroque
ethos," which emphasizes the strategies that subaltern populations
may adopt in order to survive and prosper in the face of massive
historical and structural disadvantages. Foucault's concept of
biopolitics is developed in discussion with Roberto Esposito's
concept of immunity and Giorgio Agamben's distinction between
'political life' and 'bare life.' This book will be of interest to
scholars of speculative fiction, as well as Mexicanists and
Brazilianists in history, literary studies, and critical theory.
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