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Books > Social sciences > Sociology, social studies > Social issues > Ethical issues & debates
Since the sexual revolution of the 1960s, debates over pornography have raged, and the explosive spread in recent years of sexually explicit images across the Internet has only added more urgency to these disagreements. Politicians, judges, clergy, citizen activists, and academics have weighed in on the issues for decades, complicating notions about what precisely is at stake, and who stands to benefit or be harmed by pornography. This volume takes an unusual but radical approach by analyzing pornography philosophically. Philosophers Andrew Altman and Lori Watson recalibrate debates by viewing pornography from distinctly ethical platforms - namely, does a person's right to produce and consume pornography supersede a person's right to protect herself from something often violent and deeply misogynistic? In a for-and-against format, Altman first argues that there is an individual right to create and view pornographic images, rooted in a basic right to sexual autonomy. Watson counteracts Altman's position by arguing that pornography inherently undermines women's equal status. Central to their disagreement is the question of whether pornography truly harms women enough to justify laws aimed at restricting the production and circulation of such material. Through this debate, the authors address key questions that have dogged both those who support and oppose pornography: What is pornography? What is the difference between the material widely perceived as objectionable and material that is merely erotic or suggestive? Do people have a right to sexual arousal? Does pornography, or some types of it, cause violence against women? How should rights be weighed against consequentialist considerations in deciding what laws and policies ought to be adopted? Bolstered by insights from philosophy and law, the two authors engage in a reasoned examination of questions that cannot be ignored by anyone who takes seriously the values of freedom and equality.
The liberating promise of big data and social media to create more responsive democracies and workplaces is overshadowed by a nightmare of election meddling, privacy invasion, fake news and an exploitative gig economy. Yet, while regressive forces spread disinformation and hate, 'guerrilla democrats' continue to foster hope and connection through digital technologies. This book offers an in-depth analysis of platform-based radical movements, from the online coalitions of voters and activists to the Deliveroo and Uber strikes. Combining cutting edge theories with empirical research, it makes an invaluable contribution to the emerging literature on the relationship between technology and society.
Building on the work of Elinor Ostrom (Governing the Commons) the author examines how the different shared goods of a democratic society are shaped by technology and demonstrates how club goods, common pool resources, and public goods are supported, enhanced, and disrupted by technology. He further argues that as the common good is undermined by different interests, it should be possible to reclaim technology, if the members of the society conclude that they have something in common.
This collection of 13 specially commissioned essays expands a new intellectual terrain for sociology: virtue ethics. Using a variety of religious perspectives, of Catholicism, Protestantism, Hinduism, Quakerism, with considerations of Islam and the New Age, this engaged and topical collection deals with properties of virtue in relation to the person, celibacy, hope, the apocalypse, mourning, and moral ambiguity. It also treats the concept of virtue in response to MacIntyre, Bauman, Weber, Durkheim, and Giddens. It seeks to move sociology past disabling effects of postmodernity.
It seems that just about every new technology that we bring to bear on improving our lives brings with it some downside, side effect or unintended consequence. These issues can pose very real and growing ethical problems for all of us. For example, automated facial recognition can make life easier and safer for us - but it also poses huge issues with regard to privacy, ownership of data and even identity theft. How do we understand and frame these debates, and work out strategies at personal and governmental levels? Technology Is Not Neutral: A Short Guide to Technology Ethics addresses one of today's most pressing problems: how to create and use tools and technologies to maximize benefits and minimize harms? Drawing on the author's experience as a technologist, political risk analyst and historian, the book offers a practical and cross-disciplinary approach that will inspire anyone creating, investing in or regulating technology, and it will empower all readers to better hold technology to account.
In Rescuing Humanity, Willem H. Vanderburg reminds us that we have relied on discipline-based approaches for human knowing, doing, and organizing for less than a century. During this brief period, these approaches have become responsible for both our spectacular successes and most of our social and environmental crises. At their roots is a cultural mutation that includes secular religious attitudes that veil the limits of these approaches, leading to their overvaluation. Because their use, especially in science and technology, is primarily built up with mathematics, living entities and systems can be dealt with only as if their "architecture" or "design" is based on the principle of non-contradiction, which is true only for non-living entities. This distortion explains our many crises. Vanderburg begins to explore the limits of discipline-based approaches, which guides the way toward developing complementary ones capable of transcending these limits. It is no different from a carpenter going beyond the limits of his hammer by reaching for other tools. As we grapple with everything from the impacts of social media, the ongoing climate crisis, and divisive political ideologies, Rescuing Humanity reveals that our civilization must learn to do the equivalent if humans and other living things are to continue making earth a home.
Laws subject people who perform sex work to arrest and prosecution. The Compassionate Court? assesses two prostitution diversion programs (PDPs) that offer to "rehabilitate" people arrested for street-based sex work as an alternative to incarceration. However, as the authors show, these PDPs often fail to provide sustainable alternatives to their mandated clients. Participants are subjected to constant surveillance and obligations, which creates a paradox of responsibility in conflict with the system's logic of rescue. Moreover, as the participants often face shame and re-traumatization as a price for services, poverty and other social problems, such as structural oppression, remain in place. The authors of The Compassionate Court? provide case studies of such programs and draw upon interviews and observations conducted over a decade to reveal how participants and professionals perceive court-affiliated PDPs, clients, and staff. Considering the motivations, vision, and goals of these programs as well as their limitations-the inequity and disempowerment of their participants-the authors also present their own changing perspectives on prostitution courts, diversion programs, and criminalization of sex work.
It is a serious mistake to think that all we need for a just world is properly-structured organizations. But it is equally wrong to believe that all we need are virtuous people. Social structures alter people's decisions through the influence of the restrictions and opportunities they present. Does buying a shirt at the local department store create for you some responsibility for the workplace welfare of the women who sewed it half a planet away? Many people interested in justice have claimed so, but without identifying any causal link between consumer and producer, for the simple reason that no single consumer has any perceptible effect on any of those producers. Finn uses a critical realist understanding of social structures to view both the positive and negative effects of the market as a social structure comprising a long chain of causal relations from consumer/clerk to factory manager/seamstress. This causal connection creates a consequent moral responsibility for consumers and society for the destructive effects that markets help to create. Clearly written and engaging, this book is a must-read for scholars involved with these moral issues.
Winner of the British Society of Criminology Annual Book Prize 2022. As the labour market continues to exploit workers by offering precarious, low-paid and temporary jobs, for some duality offers much-needed flexibility and staves off poverty. Based on extensive empirical work, this book illustrates contemporary accounts of individuals taking extraordinary risks to hold jobs in both sex industries and non-sex work employment. It also opens a dialogue about how sex industries are stratified in the UK in terms of race and culture against the backdrop of Brexit. Debunking stereotypes of sex workers and challenging our stigmatisation of them, this book makes an invaluable contribution to discourses about work, society and future policy.
Developed by D. Don Welch during his 28 years of teaching ethics and public policy, the rationale behind "A Guide to Ethics and Public Policy "is to present a comprehensive guide for making policy judgments. Rather than present specific cases that raise moral issues or discuss the role a few concepts play in the moral analysis of policy, this book instead provides a broad framework for the moral evaluation of public policies and policy proposals. This framework is organized around guiding five principles: benefit, effectiveness, fairness, fidelity, and legitimacy. These principles identify the factors that should be taken into account and the issues that should be addressed as citizens address the question of what the United States government should be able to do. Organized by concept, with illustrations and examples frequently interspersed, the book covers both theory and specific issues. " A Guide to Ethics and Public Policy" outlines a comprehensive ethical framework, provides content to the meaning of the five principles that comprise that framework through the use of illustrations and examples, and offers guidance about how to navigate one s way through the conflicts and dilemmas that inevitably result from a serious effort to analyze policies."
This multidisciplinary volume investigates different abortion and reproductive practices across time, space, geography, national boundaries, and cultures. The authors specialize in the reproductive politics of Australia, Bolivia, Cameroon, France, 'German East Africa,' Ireland, Japan, Sweden, South Africa, the United States, and Zanzibar, with historical focuses on the pre-modern era, nineteenth and twentieth centuries, as well as the present day. This timely work complicates the many histories and ongoing politics of abortion by exploring the conditions in which women have been forced to make these life-altering decisions.
From the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe's resistance against the Dakota Access pipeline to the Nepalese Newar community's protest of the Fast Track Road Project, Indigenous peoples around the world are standing up and speaking out against global capitalism to protect the land, water, and air. By reminding us of the fundamental importance of placing Indigenous politics, histories, and ontologies at the center of our social movements, Indigenous Resurgence positions environmental justice within historical, social, political, and economic contexts, exploring the troubling relationship between colonial and environmental violence and reframing climate change and environmental degradation through an anticolonial lens.
People often believe that we can overcome the profound environmental and climate crises we face by smart systems, green innovations and more recycling. However, the quest for complex technological solutions, which rely on increasingly exotic and scarce materials, makes this unlikely. A best-seller in France, this English language edition introduces readers to an alternative perspective on how we should be marshalling our resources to preserve the planet and secure our future. Bihouix skilfully goes against the grain to argue that 'high' technology will not solve global problems and envisages a different approach to build a more resilient and sustainable society.
From the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe's resistance against the Dakota Access pipeline to the Nepalese Newar community's protest of the Fast Track Road Project, Indigenous peoples around the world are standing up and speaking out against global capitalism to protect the land, water, and air. By reminding us of the fundamental importance of placing Indigenous politics, histories, and ontologies at the center of our social movements, Indigenous Resurgence positions environmental justice within historical, social, political, and economic contexts, exploring the troubling relationship between colonial and environmental violence and reframing climate change and environmental degradation through an anticolonial lens.
Rae Langton here draws together her ground-breaking work on pornography and objectification, and shows how both involve a kind of solipsism, a failure to treat women as fully human. She argues that pornography is a speech act that subordinates and silences women, and that, given certain liberal principles, women have rights against it. She explores the traditional Kantian idea that there is something wrong with treating a person as a thing, and highlights an additional epistemological dimension to objectification: it is through a kind of self-fulfilling projection of beliefs about women as subordinate that women are treated as things. These controversial essays include three new pieces written especially for the volume. They will make stimulating reading for anyone interested in feminism's dialogue with moral and political philosophy.
A powerful portrait of the greatest humanitarian emergency of our time, from the director of Human Flow In the course of making Human Flow, his epic feature documentary about the global refugee crisis, the artist Ai Weiwei and his collaborators interviewed more than 600 refugees, aid workers, politicians, activists, doctors, and local authorities in twenty-three countries around the world. A handful of those interviews were included in the film. This book presents one hundred of these conversations in their entirety, providing compelling first-person stories of the lives of those affected by the crisis and those on the front lines of working to address its immense challenges. Speaking in their own words, refugees give voice to their experiences of migrating across borders, living in refugee camps, and struggling to rebuild their lives in unfamiliar and uncertain surroundings. They talk about the dire circumstances that drove them to migrate, whether war, famine, or persecution; and their hopes and fears for the future. A wide range of related voices provides context for the historical evolution of this crisis, the challenges for regions and states, and the options for moving forward. Complete with photographs taken by Ai Weiwei while filming Human Flow, this book provides a powerful, personal, and moving account of the most urgent humanitarian crisis of our time.
The black heart of human exploitation and the brave few seeking change A child is sold for sex every ten miles on Brazil's BR-116 motorway. This 2,700-mile road is "The Highway to Hell" for the thousands of children, some as young as nine, who are trapped in sophisticated child prostitution rackets organized by businessmen and politicians. An experienced journalist, Matt Roper has witnessed the extent of the trafficking firsthand. Highway to Hell documents his journey on this road. He meets the girls and hears their stories; he interviews truck drivers, pimps, brothel owners, and traffickers; and talks to the brave souls who are trying to make a difference. Part documentary, part personal memoir, Matt honestly shares his struggles to understand what his Christian faith has to say about the things he encounters and how God wants him to respond.
In Rescuing Humanity, Willem H. Vanderburg reminds us that we have relied on discipline-based approaches for human knowing, doing, and organizing for less than a century. During this brief period, these approaches have become responsible for both our spectacular successes and most of our social and environmental crises. At their roots is a cultural mutation that includes secular religious attitudes that veil the limits of these approaches, leading to their overvaluation. Because their use, especially in science and technology, is primarily built up with mathematics, living entities and systems can be dealt with only as if their "architecture" or "design" is based on the principle of non-contradiction, which is true only for non-living entities. This distortion explains our many crises. Vanderburg begins to explore the limits of discipline-based approaches, which guides the way toward developing complementary ones capable of transcending these limits. It is no different from a carpenter going beyond the limits of his hammer by reaching for other tools. As we grapple with everything from the impacts of social media, the ongoing climate crisis, and divisive political ideologies, Rescuing Humanity reveals that our civilization must learn to do the equivalent if humans and other living things are to continue making earth a home.
The book makes theoretical and empirical contributions to recent debates on hybrid forms of peace and 'post-liberal' peace. In applying concepts of power, hybridity and resistance, and providing different kinds of hybridity and resistance to explore post-conflict peacebuilding in Sierra Leone, the author makes an original contribution to existing literature by providing various ways in which power can be exercised not just between locals and internationals, but also among locals themselves and the nature of peace that is produced. This volume provides various ways in which hybridity and resistance can be manifested. A more rigorous development of these concepts not only offers a better understanding of the nature of these concepts, but also helps us to distinguish forms of hybridity and resistance that are emancipatory or transformatory from those that result in people accommodating themselves to their situation. This book is an invaluable resource for scholars and students of peacebuilding, peace and conflict studies, International Relations and African Studies, and practitioners of peacebuilding and post-conflict reconstruction.
While much has been written on illicit drug use, policy, and drugs' relationship to crime, this study examines the drug war as most Americans have experienced it--through mass-mediated rhetoric: presidential drug war declarations, news stories and hype, public service announcements, and the like. Such rhetoric influences public opinion about illegal drugs, drug users, presidents, and the drug war itself. And according to this author, such rhetoric is also used as a public relations campaign designed to increase the popularity of government officials and to assure quiescence regarding particular policy programs. This study demonstrates the underestimated influence of rhetoric, political uses of public relations and the powerful influence they have on public opinion and the policy process.
The Oxford Handbook of Practical Ethics is a lively and authoritative guide to current thought about ethical issues in all areas of human activity--personal, medical, sexual, social, political, judicial, and international, from the natural world to the world of business. Twenty-eight topics are covered in specially written surveys by leading figures in their fields: each gives an authoritative map of the ethical terrain, explaining how the debate has developed in recent years, engaging critically with the most notable work in the area, and pointing directions for future work. The Handbook will be essential reading, and a fascinating resource of ideas and information, for academics and students across a wide range of disciplines.
By analyzing the cases present in this volume, the editors develop important steps towards a theory of social change that can adequately address the complex realities and intersectionality of identity (race, gender, class, sexuality, nationality) within and among these new movements.
-- Regarded as the seminal collection of studies in the field of sex work, this volume introduces readers to comprehensive and cutting-edge research on commercial sex and sexual economies. - Examines a variety of issues related to sex work, such as prostitution, pornography, sex tourism, escorts, male and female clients through a sociological, political, and legal lens. - The volume offers important scholarship on deviance, as well as on gender, sexuality, crime, and sex work, specifically, making it a highly relevant choice for courses across sociology, criminology & criminal justice, and women's and gender studies disciplines. - The third edition offers new and/or updated writings on "traditional" forms of sexual labour, incl. street prostitution, pornography, and escorting, as well as all new and original contributions on topics of ever-increasing importance in the field: internet facilitation, transgender work, sex workers rights movement, decriminalization and alternative policies, etc. - New chapters offer historical perspectives as well as alternative measures/policies, both of which strengthen the overall context for which the empirically-based chapters are grounded. |
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