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Books > Social sciences > Sociology, social studies > Social issues > Ethical issues & debates
This annotated document collection surveys the history and evolution of laws and attitudes regarding free speech and censorship in the United States, with a special emphasis on contemporary events and controversies related to the First Amendment. The United States' collective understanding of First Amendment freedoms was formed by more than 200 years of tensions between the power of word and the power of the government. During that time, major laws and legal decisions defined the circumstances and degree to which personal expression could be rightfully expressed-and rightfully limited. This struggle to define the parameters of free speech continues today. Vibrant and passionate debates about First Amendment limitations once inspired by the dissemination of birth control information now address such issues as kneeling during the national anthem, removing controversial books from public libraries, attempts by the Trump administration to discredit the press, and disseminating false or hateful information through social media platforms. By exploring diverse examples of censorship victories and triumphs of free expression, readers will better understand the enormous impact of First Amendment freedoms on American society. Chronological history of important milestones, documents, and events that have shaped the nation's understanding of freedom of speech/press and censorship, as well as the limitations of each Primary source selection that illuminates the importance of First Amendment freedoms as critical elements of democracy in the United States Informative, authoritative, and balanced introductory headnotes for each primary source to help readers understand the context in which they were created Readers Guide to Related Documents and sidebars
Is suicide ever rationally or morally justified? A host of suicide related matters are explored in this timely collection of essays that clarifies the battle-lines of public debate surrounding this intense and painful topic. This classic volume has been updated and expanded with ten new selections, making it one of the most complete works available on the subject.
The actual and potential conflict between America's three prominent generations the under 35 Generation X, the over 35 Baby Boomers, and the over 65 Elderly seems more pronounced each year due to financial burdens, social concerns, and political agendas. Xers are perceived as being disaffected from society, apathetic, and politically unsavvy. They live in an environment of ultra-uncertainty and tremendous expectations. Were the Boomers the last generation to make it, and will the demands of the elderly deny the twenty-somethings their future? A powerful, yet quite varied voting bloc, Baby Boomers have families now and they are in a bind. Many can't afford to send the kids to college; they worry about their retirement needs; and they wonder if they will bare the burden of caring for their ageing parents. The size of the elderly population is exploding and will further increase as Boomers age. The elderly are politically active and tend to be more conservative. Many elders feel they are being squeezed out of society by generations who don't appreciate their contributions but only see the costs of Social Security and medical care increasing to enormous levels.
What is our goal: equal opportunity or equality of result? The debate rages on. The November 5, 1996 decision by voters in California to eliminate most forms of state sanctioned affirmative action ignited a civil rights debate that sent shock waves across the country. The vote had critics celebrating the dawn of a new era of equal rights, while opponents warned of school and workplace discrimination without the protective blanket of affirmative action. The question of racial equality has inspired new debate today, reminiscent of the conflicts of the 1960s. Again we ask ourselves: Is affirmative action necessary to maintain equal labor practices, school desegregation plans, and broad social standards of racial equality? Does affirmative action or laws to roll it back go against the idea of equality itself? Should race play an important role in college admissions and corporate hiring? Is affirmative action a poison instead of a cure? For some, it depends on how the term is defined. These and other questions are debated in this highly charged collection of essays by a distinguished group of politicians, philosophers, educators, and others including Tom Beauchamp, Ward Connerly, Ronald Dworkin, Stanley Fish, Lyndon Johnson, Nicholas LeMann, Louis Pojman, George Sher, Thomas Sowell, Shelby Steele, Judith Jarvis Thomson, Richard Wasserstrom, Cornell West, and Steven Yates. Included also are important legal decisions bearing on affirmative action.
By placing its professional expertise in the service of maintaining the democratic values of free expression and pluralism, American librarianship not only defended its professional autonomy in the area of book selection, but also developed an ideology of intellectual freedom and claimed its defense as a central jurisdiction. This volume charts the library profession's journey from the adoption of the 1939 Library's Bill of Rights to the 1969 development of the Freedom to Read Foundation. It identifies external events that posed threats to intellectual freedom and traces the ALA's response to those threats, particularly librarians' activities and discourse, and the motives and effectiveness of leaders responsible for forging the ALA's response. Much of the data is drawn from the three most widely circulated library periodicals - "American Library Association Bulletin," "Wilson Library Bulletin," and "Library Journal" - that chronicle the debates that took place during the period. More importantly, the study makes extensive use of primary archival sources, state library journals, library school bulletins, and interviews. These sources reveal that by setting its professional expertise in the service of the democratic values of free expression and pluralism, American librarianship embarked on an odyssey of self-definition, through which it has carved out and defended its professional jurisdiction.
Increasingly, consumers in North America and Europe see their purchasing as a way to express to the commercial world their concerns about trade justice, the environment and similar issues. This ethical consumption has attracted growing attention in the press and among academics. Extending beyond the growing body of scholarly work on the topic in several ways, this volume focuses primarily on consumers rather than producers and commodity chains. It presents cases from a variety of European countries and is concerned with a wide range of objects and types of ethical consumption, not simply the usual tropical foodstuffs, trade justice and the system of fair trade. Contributors situate ethical consumption within different contexts, from common Western assumptions about economy and society, to the operation of ethical-consumption commerce, to the ways that people's ethical consumption can affect and be affected by their social situation. By locating consumers and their practices in the social and economic contexts in which they exist and that their ethical consumption affects, this volume presents a compelling interrogation of the rhetoric and assumptions of ethical consumption.
This dictionary provides fast and easy access to terms in areas such as: legal, judicial and court proceedings; law enforcement, police and military training; chemical essentials and chemical precursors; natural, synthetic and designer drugs; banking and money laundering. It also presents some related terminology for environmental, medical, psychological, social and economic matters. The dictionary includes a large number of jargon terms, and explanations of these have been provided in some cases, in order to ensure better understanding. This work is an indispensable tool for conference interpreters, court interpreters, translators and social workers.
The study of censorship is important not because we are shocked by the contents of a book or because a complaint about a work offends our sensibilities, but rather because this conflict between powerful opposing forces in society can threaten its foundations and ideals. Conflict exists because reasonable individuals in our society disagree as to what defines the limitations of creativity and expression, and who should decide when those boundaries ahve been overstepped. These issues are addressed in detail in this important and timely new survey.
While procreation is ubiquitous, attention to the ethical issues involved in creating children is relatively rare. In Debating Procreation, David Benatar and David Wasserman take opposing views on this important question. David Benatar argues for the anti-natalist view that it is always wrong to bring new people into existence. He argues that coming into existence is always a serious harm and that even if it were not always so, the risk of serious harm is sufficiently great to make procreation wrong. In addition to these "philanthropic" arguments, he advances the "misanthropic" one that because humans are so defective and cause vast amounts of harm, it is wrong to create more of them. David Wasserman defends procreation against the anti-natalist challenge. He outlines a variety of moderate pro-natalist positions, which all see procreation as often permissible but never required. After criticizing the main anti-natalist arguments, he reviews those pronatalist positions. He argues that constraints on procreation are best understood in terms of the role morality of prospective parents, considers different views of that role morality, and argues for one that imposes only limited constraints based on the well-being of the future child. He then argues that the expected good of a future child and of the parent-child relationship can provide a strong justification for procreation in the face of expected adversities without giving individuals any moral reason to procreate
The globalization of trade, investment, and finance continues apace. Many have benefited from this, but deep inequalities persist. This book argues that the interconnections established by globalization make possible a critique of its inequality. For those who take seriously human dignity, equality is a basic presumption of social institutions.
In this study of Bernard Mandeville's A Modest Defence of Publick Stews , Irwin Primer breaks new ground by arguing that in addition to being an advocation for the establishment of state-regulated houses of prostitution, Mandeville's writing is also a highly polished work of literature.
After the civil rights and anti-apartheid struggles, are we truly living in post-racial, post-apartheid societies where the word struggle is now out of place? Do we now truly realize that, as President Obama said, the situation for the Palestinian people is "intolerable"? This book argues that this is not so, and asks, "What has Soweto to do with Ferguson, New York with Cape Town, Baltimore with Ramallah?" With South Africa, the United States, and Palestine as the most immediate points of reference, it seeks to explore the global wave of renewed struggles and nonviolent revolutions led largely by young people and the challenges these pose to prophetic theology and the church. It invites the reader to engage in a trans-Atlantic conversation on freedom, justice, peace, and dignity. These struggles for justice reflect the proposal the book discusses: there are pharaohs on both sides of the blood-red waters. Central to this conversation are the issues of faith and struggles for justice; the call for reconciliation--its possibilities and risks; the challenges of and from youth leadership; prophetic resistance; and the resilient, audacious hope without which no struggle has a future. The book argues that these revolutions will only succeed if they are claimed, embraced, and driven by the people.
Lader spotlights the struggle for abortion rights, discusses the brutal clinic murders in Pensacola and Boston, and argues that RU 486 could markedly reduce clinical abortions by making the termination of a pregnancy a 'private matter'.
Should parents aim to make their children as normal as possible to increase their chances to "fit in"? Are neurological and mental health conditions a part of children's identity and if so, should parents aim to remove or treat these? Should they aim to instill self-control in their children? Should prospective parents take steps to insure that, of all the children they could have, they choose the ones with the best likely start in life? This volume explores all of these questions and more. Against the background of recent findings and expected advances in neuroscience and genetics, the extent and limits of parental responsibility are increasingly unclear. Awareness of the effects of parental choices on children's wellbeing, as well as evolving norms about the moral status of children, have further increased expectations from (prospective) parents to take up and act on their changing responsibilities. The contributors discuss conceptual issues such as the meaning and sources of moral responsibility, normality, treatment, and identity. They also explore more practical issues such as how responsibility for children is practiced in Yoruba culture in Nigeria or how parents and health professionals in Belgium perceive the dilemmas generated by prenatal diagnosis.
"Animals and Social Work" represents a pioneering contribution to the literature of social work ethics and moral philosophy. It advances cogent and detailed arguments for the inclusion of animals within social work's moral framework, arguments that have profound theoretical and practical implications for the discipline and its practitioners.
In order to describe the logic of morality, "contractualist " philosophers have studied how individuals behave when they choose to follow their moral intuitions. These individuals, contractualists note, often act as if they have bargained and thus reached an agreement with others about how to distribute the benefits and burdens of mutual cooperation. Using this observation, such philosophers argue that the purpose of morality is to maximize the benefits of human interaction. The resulting "contract " analogy is both insightful and puzzling. On one hand, it captures the pattern of moral intuitions, thus answering questions about human cooperation: why do humans cooperate? Why should the distribution of benefits be proportionate to each person's contribution? Why should the punishment be proportionate to the crime? Why should the rights be proportionate to the duties? On the other hand, the analogy provides a mere as-if explanation for human cooperation, saying that cooperation is "as if " people have passed a contract-but since they didn't, why should it be so? To evolutionary thinkers, the puzzle of the missing contract is immediately reminiscent of the puzzle of the missing "designer " of life-forms, a puzzle that Darwin's theory of natural selection essentially resolved. Evolutionary and contractualist theory originally intersected at the work of philosophers John Rawls and David Gauthier, who argued that moral judgments are based on a sense of fairness that has been naturally selected. In this book, Nicolas Baumard further explores the theory that morality was originally an adaptation to the biological market of cooperation, an arena in which individuals competed to be selected for cooperative interactions. In this environment, Baumard suggests, the best strategy was to treat others with impartiality and to share the costs and benefits of cooperation in a fair way, so that those who offered less than others were left out of cooperation while those who offered more were exploited by their partners. It is with this evolutionary approach that Baumard ultimately accounts for the specific structure of human morality.
The policing of pornography remains the subject of widespread and ongoing controversy. This book provides a history of this policing which is geared towards understanding the current debate. The authors demonstrate that obscenity law cannot be understood negatively as censorship and must instead be seen as part of the positive administration of a particular practice of sexuality. They also argue that pornography itself should be described negatively as a mere representation of real sex but positively as a real practice of sex using representations. This history indicates that obscenity law is not, as liberals claim, a mistaken attempt to police moral ideas, but rather forms part of the legitimate governmental regulation of a problematic social conduct. At the same time it asks whether feminists might not be mistaken in attributing this conduct to the nature of the male imagination.
This thought-provoking reference work explores the evolution of America's heated abortion debate in a selection of over 40 primary documents from the 19th century to the present day. The guide includes not only key laws and court cases that have determined abortion policy, but also political speeches, medical essays, theological writings, newspaper advertisements, magazine articles, and popular books that offer insight into America's changing attitudes towards women, race, the medical field, and the role of government in its citizens' personal lives. Each document is preceded by an introduction and is followed by analysis to help readers understand its significance and historical context. Today abortion is America's most contentious political and religious rallying point. Yet 150 years ago it was a virtual non-issue, quietly performed for centuries by women and mid-wives. What changed? This thought-provoking reference work explores the evolution of America's abortion debate in a balanced selection of over 40 primary documents by doctors, feminists, religious leaders, politicians, extremists, and judges from the 19th century to the present day. This guide not only examines the key laws and court cases, like Roe v. Wade and the Partial Birth Abortion Ban, that have determined abortion policy, but offers insight into America's changing attitudes towards women, race, the medical field, and the role of government in its citizens' personal lives. Memoirs of early abortion providers, excerpts from popular women's self-help books, the complete text of Pope Paul VI's Humanae Vitae, and personal writings from key liberal and conservative figures on both sides of the debate provide a more complete picture of an issue that is deeply personal, deeply divisive, and anything but clear-cut. A straightforward and accessible book, ideal for both students and general readers looking to expand their understanding of one of the most complicated, and still unresolved, issues of our day. Each excerpt is preceded by a brief explanation of its significance and followed by author analysis to help readers understand its implications and the historical context in which is it was written. Readers gain direct access to America's most important legal papers and transcripts on abortion, complimented by a well rounded view of the public beliefs and sentiments that have fueled abortion debates. Suggestions for further reading conclude each chapter, perfect for research or to guide interested readers in their search for material. The front matter includes a Timeline of major events in abortion history, and the back matter, offers a Bibliography of 50 titles on abortion and over 30 Web links. Documents are presented in easy-to-use chronological order, divided into 7 chapters exploring the various eras of the abortion debate. Chapter 1: (19th century) The state's minimal role in abortions, the nascent women's movement, and a medical movement to restrict abortion provision. Chapter 2: (1905 - 1960) America's strictest era of abortion policy. The ideology of motherhood vs. post-suffrage women's desire to control their fertility. Chapter 3: (1965-1971). Voices for decreased abortion restrictions and tragic consequences of illegal abortions. Chapter 4: (1973 - 983) Results of and immediate academic responses to the movement to liberalize abortion policy. Chapter 5: (1984 -1989) The growing role of political parties in abortion politics. Chapter 6: (1991-1996) The movement to protect the fetus. Chapter 7: (2001-2005) Impact of the fetal rights movement and successes in restricting abortion access.
"Mercy killing," "assisting a suicide," "planning your own death,"
and "euthanasia" are once again high-profile issues. Recent popular
referendums have sought to legalize doctor-assisted suicide, while
best-selling books have been published about how to kill yourself.
In short, Americans are searching for more control over their own
mortality.
Future development in the Arctic and Subarctic region requires careful attention to the possible consequences of the development activities themselves, in relation to their environmental, socioeconomic and cultural impacts. A more thorough understanding of the impact of future activities, however, demands the dissemination and confrontation of results from different regions and different scientific traditions. This requires scientific cooperation, not only across disciplines but across border. Primarily it requires both consensus and innovations in regard to methods. This book confronts such differences in approaches and methods in relation to the analysis of socioeconomic and environmental consequences of large-scale mineral and energy development activities in the Arctic and Subarctic, establishing the common ground upon which future research activities can be based. |
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