This is a revisionist history of press censorship in the rapidly expanding print culture of the sixteenth century. Professor Clegg establishes the nature and source of the controls, and evaluates their means and effectiveness. The state wanted to control the burgeoning press, but there were difficulties in practice because of the competing and often contradictory interests of the Crown, the Church, and the printing trade. By considering the literary and bibliographical evidence of books actually censored and by placing them in the literary, religious, economic and political culture of the time, Clegg concludes that press control was not a routine nor a consistent mechanism but an individual response to particular texts that the state perceived as dangerous. This will be the standard reference work on Elizabethan press censorship, and is also a history of the Elizabethan state's principal crises.

Currently, humans lack the cognitive and moral capacities to prevent the widespread suffering associated with collective risks, like pandemics, climate change, or even asteroids. In Moral Enhancement and the Public Good, Parker Crutchfield argues for the controversial and initially counterintuitive claim that everyone should be administered a substance that makes us better people. Furthermore, he argues that it should be administered without our knowledge. That is, moral bioenhancement should be both compulsory and covert. Crutchfield demonstrates how our duty to future generations and our epistemic inability to promote the public good highlight the need for compulsory, covert moral bioenhancement. This not only gives us the best chance of preventing widespread suffering, compared to other interventions (or doing nothing), it also best promotes liberty, autonomy, and equality. In a final chapter, Crutchfield addresses the most salient objections to his argument.

After Natalie Maines of The Dixie Chicks expressed her opposition to the Iraq War and President Bush in a country music concert, she was told to "shut up and sing." When NFL player Colin Kaepernick protested police brutality by kneeling during the national anthem, he was applauded by some and demonized by others. Both had their careers irrevocably altered by speaking out for their beliefs. This book examines the ethical issues that arise when famous people speak out on issues often unrelated to the performances that brought those figures to public attention. It analyzes several celebrity speakers-singers Taylor Swift and the Chicks; satirist Jon Stewart; actor Tom Hanks; and athletes Serena Williams, Stephen Curry, Colin Kaepernick, and Naomi Osaka-and demonstrates that justifiable speaking requires celebrity speakers, journalists, and audiences to consider ethical issues regarding platform, intent, and harm. Celebrity speakers must exercise ethical care in a digital world where audiences equate celebrity status with authority and expertise about public issues. Finally, this book considers how people who are not famous can understand their ethical responsibilities for speaking out about public issues in their own spheres of influence.

The right of self-defense is seemingly at odds with the general presupposition that killing is wrong; numerous theories have been put forth over the years that attempt to explain how self-defense is consistent with such a presupposition. In Justified Killing: The Paradox of Self-Defense, Whitley Kaufman argues that none of the leading theories adequately explains why it is permissible even to kill an innocent attacker in self-defense, given the basic moral prohibition against killing the innocent. Kaufman suggests that such an explanation can be found in the traditional Doctrine of Double Effect, according to which self-defense is justified because the intention of the defender is to protect himself rather than harm the attacker. Given this morally legitimate intention, self-defense is permissible against both culpable and innocent aggressors, so long as the force used is both necessary and proportionate. Justified Killing will intrigue in particular those scholars interested in moral and legal philosophy.

Ethics for Environmental Policy reviews recent work in the field of environmental ethics. The text examines ways in which ethical frames of reference and decision principles are invoked in policy debates related to environmental protection, and how the integration of thought regarding conduct ethics and virtue ethics is essential for application of theory to practice. The third edition opens with two new chapters. The first presents an overview of ethical theory with emphasis on the role of ethical analysis and critique in framing debate on contemporary environmental problems. The second addresses issues at the forefront of this debate with emphasis on views and institutional responses to climate change, biodiversity loss, and the volume of pollutants and hazardous waste generated in industrial society. The book explores how the relationship between humans and the natural world has been conceived in various cultural traditions throughout history, followed by an examination of an attitudinal orientation toward nature grounded in respect, humility, gratitude, and responsibility. Positions on the moral status of non-human biotic entities are presented from several theoretical perspectives. The final chapters address issues related to the preservation, protection, and sustainable use of resources and the respective roles played by markets, government, and activist non-governmental organizations.

Debating civilisations offers an up-to-date evaluation of the re-emerging field of civilisational analysis, tracing its main currents and comparing it to rival paradigms such as Marxism, globalisation theory and postcolonial sociology. The book suggests that civilisational analysis offers an alternative approach to understanding globalisation, one that focuses on the dense engagement of societies, cultures, empires and civilisations in human history. Building on Castoriadis's theory of social imaginaries, it argues that civilisations are best understood as the products of routine contacts and connections carried out by anonymous actors over the course of long periods of time. It illustrates this argument through case studies of modern Japan, the Pacific and post-Conquest Latin America (including the revival of indigenous civilisations), exploring discourses of civilisation outside the West within the context of growing Western imperial power. -- .

For some legal philosophers, if a law is procedurally correct, enacted in ways constitutionally recognised and agreed upon, then the content is of no significance. It is a "good" law, no matter what it does or justifies. The question of one's consent or opposition to any particular law is extraneous to the legality and is regarded merely as a political matter. The assumption is that a certain procedure and logic in law creation has taken place, and the law can be altered by a change in political leaders in a subsequent political election. However, this view and assumption obscure an uncomfortable fact. Some laws can be "bad" or "immoral." Critical legal theory suggests that there are often two (or more) sets of laws, and it makes no difference if Lady Justice is blindfolded or not. Laws change in the process of history, in part, because societal norms change. As common understandings of morality evolve, law adapts itself to the new moral environment. Norms can change slowly or rapidly, even within a lifetime. This book examines both social and legal norms and theories of how they are both created. Christine M. Hassenstab investigates how laws on sterilization, birth control and abortion were created, by focusing on the act of legislation; how the law was driven by scientific and social norms during the first and closing decades of the 20th century in the USA (especially in the state of Indiana) and Norway. The primary focus of Body Law and the Body of Law is the sociology of law and how and why the law changes. The author develops the notion "body law" for reproductive policies and uses sociological theories to untie the various strands of social history and legal history and looks at two cases of legislation. The book is divided in to two main sections. The first examines eugenic laws in the USA state of Indiana and Norway during the first decades of 20th century. The second part is about the birth control and abortion debate in both countries throughout the late 1960s and 1970s. Christine M. Hassenstab is a lawyer and sociologist. She served as a criminal defense attorney for 15 years (1987-2001) in Seattle, Washington. Currently, she is an adviser in the EU Grants Office at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology in Trondheim, Norway.

It has long been acknowledged that the death penalty in the United States of America has been shaped by the country's history of slavery and racial violence, but this book considers the lesser-explored relationship between the two practices' respective abolitionist movements. The book explains how the historical and conceptual links between slavery and capital punishment have both helped and hindered efforts to end capital punishment. The comparative study also sheds light on the nature of such efforts, and offers lessons for how death penalty abolitionism should proceed in future. Using the history of slavery and abolition, it is argued that anti-death penalty efforts should be premised on the ideologies of the radical slavery abolitionists.

Stem cell research has been a problematic endeavour. For the past twenty years it has attracted moral controversies in both the public and the professional sphere. The research involves not only laboratories, clinics and people, but ethics, industries, jurisprudence, and markets. Today it contributes to the development of new therapies and affects increasingly many social arenas. The matrix approach introduced in this book offers a new understanding of this science in its relation to society. The contributions are multidisciplinary and intersectional, illustrating how agency and influence between science and society go both ways. Conceptually, this volume presents a situated and reflexive approach for philosophy and sociology of the life sciences. The practices that are part of stem cell research are dispersed, and the concepts that tie them together are tenuous; there are persistent problems with the validation of findings, and the ontology of the stem cell is elusive. The array of applications shapes a growing bioeconomy that is dependent on patient donations of tissues and embryos, consumers, and industrial support. In this volume it is argued that this research now denotes not a specific field but a flexible web of intersecting practices, discourses, and agencies. To capture significant parts of this complex reality, this book presents recent findings from researchers, who have studied in-depth aspects of this matrix of stem cell research. This volume presents state-of-the-art examinations from senior and junior scholars in disciplines from humanities and laboratory research to various social sciences, highlighting particular normative and epistemological intersections. The book will appeal to scholars as well as wider audiences interested in developments in life science and society interactions. The novel matrix approach and the accessible case studies make this an excellent resource for science and society courses.

Policing is a highly pragmatic occupation. It is designed to achieve the important social ends of peacekeeping and public safety, and is empowered to do so using means that are ordinarily seen as problematic; that is, the use of force, deception, and invasions of privacy, along with considerable discretion. It is often suggested that the ends of policing justify the use of otherwise problematic means, but do they? This book explores this question from a philosophical perspective. The relationship between ends and means has a long and contested history both in moral/practical reasoning and public policy. Looking at this history through the lens of policing, criminal justice philosopher John Kleinig explores the dialectic of ends and means (whether the ends justify the means, or whether the ends never justify the means) and offers a new, sharpened perspective on police ethics. After tracing the various ways in which ends and means may be construed, the book surveys a series of increasingly concrete issues, focusing especially on those that arise in policing contexts. The competing moral demands made by ends and means culminate in considerations of noble cause corruption, dirty hands theory, lesser degradations (such as tear gas, tasers, chokeholds, and so on), and finally, those means deemed impermissible by the majority in Western culture, such as torture.

This book refutes the 21st-century zeitgeist that views advancing technology as an unambiguous social good, and examines the effects of this uncritical acceptance and dependence. It argues that technology has become the new religion for the digital age, and that elevating technology to the status of deity serves as a mechanism to allow for the denial of problems created by reliance upon machines. From the release of toxins into the environment to the unsustainable energy demands of the modern era, technological dependence and overreach are driving humanity to the brink of extinction. Despite these problems, existential issues such as artificial intelligence, and the proliferation of nuclear weapons, there is an unwavering belief in the ability of technology, particularly any device labeled "smart," to create a perfect future while denying the history of unmet promises and unintended consequences of technological innovation. In this book, the psychological underpinnings of these beliefs are explored from both a clinical and cognitive perspective. In addition, it critiques the social and economic forces that maintain our reliance on, or addiction to, technology, and examines the ethical and security issues associated with the control of advanced technology.

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aAt a troubling time in history when a conservative majority on the US Supreme Court has called into question the constitutional protection of women's health and equality, this book comes none too soon. The Reproductive Rights Reader gives us a uniquely comprehensive and useful collection of the major court decisions, legal briefs and scholarly commentaries on the searing debates about reproductive politics in US public discourse over the past 40 years. And it does so not only through the lenses of the law, science and public health but also with a clear focus on the critical dimensions of gender, race, class, sexuality, poverty, social exclusion and social justice. It is an absolutely indispensable resource.a
--Rosalind P. Petchesky, author of "Abortion and Womanas Choice"

aPowerful and provocative, The Reproductive Rights Reader explodes the stale debate over the constitutional legitimacy of "Roe v. Wade" by bringing critical perspectives of race, gender and class to the question of women's control over their reproductive lives. Taking seriously issues of substantive equality, this volume is essential reading for all those interested in human rights and social justice.a
--Nancy Northup, President, Center for Reproductive Rights, and Lecturer-in-Law, Columbia Law School

aThis type of anthology bridges the sciences and humanities and narrows the divide between these two broad areas of study.a
--Martha Chamallas, Moritz College of Law, The Ohio State University

Since the passage of "Roe v. Wade," the debate over reproductive rights has dominated Americaas courts, legislatures, and streets. The contributors to TheReproductive Rights Reader embrace reproductive justice for all women, but challenge mainstream legal and political solutions based on protecting free choice via neutral governmental policies, which frequently ignore or jeopardize the interests of women of color and the poor. Instead, the pieces in this interdisciplinary book -- including both legal cases and articles by legal scholars, historians, sociologists, political scientists and others -- favor a critical analysis that addresses the concrete material conditions that limit choices, the role of law and social policy in creating those conditions, and the gendered power dynamics that inform and are reinforced by the regulation of human reproduction.

The selections demonstrate that the right to choice isnat an automatic guarantee of reproductive justice and gender equality; to truly achieve this ideal it is essential to recognize the complexity of womenas reproductive experiences and needs. Divided into four sections, the book examines feminist critiques of medical knowledge and practice; and the legal regulation of pregnancy termination, conception and child-bearing, and behavior during pregnancy.

Since World War II, abortion policies have remained remarkably varied across European nations, with struggles over abortion rights at the forefront of national politics. This volume analyses European abortion governance and explores how social movements, political groups, and individuals use protests and resistance to influence abortion policy. Drawing on case studies from Italy, Spain, Norway, Poland, Romania, Russia, Sweden, Switzerland, the United Kingdom and the European Union, it analyses the strategies and discourses of groups seeking to liberalise or restrict reproductive rights. It also illuminates the ways that reproductive rights politics intersect with demographic anxieties, as well as the rising nationalisms and xenophobia related to austerity policies, mass migration and the recent terrorist attacks in Europe.

The horror genre has endured a long and controversial success within popular culture. Fraught with accusations pertaining to its alleged ability to harm and corrupt young people and indeed society as a whole, the genre is constantly under pressure to suppress that which has made it so popular to begin with - its ability to frighten and generate discussion about society's darker side. Recognising the circularity of patterns in each generational manifestation of horror censorship, The Myth of Harm draws upon cases such as the Slenderman stabbing and the James Bulger murder amongst many others in order to explore the manner in which horror has been repeatedly cast as a harmful influence upon children at the expense of scrutinising other more complex social issues. Focusing on five major controversies beginning in the 1930's Golden Age of Horror Cinema and ending on a more contemporary note with Cyber-Gothic horror - this book identifies and considers the various myths and false hoods surrounding the genre of horror and question the very motivation behind the proliferation and dissemination of these myths as scapegoats for political and social issues, platforms for "moral entrepreneurs" and tools of hyperbolae for the news industry.

The book presents an important and well known but so far not described episode in the history of banned books in the communist Poland - the activity of the so-called Tatra climbers. They were students and scholars from Warsaw, who initiated a risky cooperation with the centre of Polish political emigration in Paris - Kultura monthly. Inspired by the Prague Spring they tried to develop cooperation between the students from Eastern Bloc countries, smuggled books through the Polish-Slovak border, and gathered texts critical about communist rulers. After a few months, their activity was stopped by the Polish political police. The monograph shows the circumstances and motivations behind this dangerous activity of young people, traces the police investigation against them, and describes the mock trial in 1970.

This book offers a broad overview of public attitudes to the death penalty in India. It examines in detail the progress made by international organizations worldwide in their efforts to abolish the death penalty and provides statistics from various countries that have already abolished it. The book focuses on four main aspects: the excessive cost and poor use of funds; wrongful executions of innocent people; the death penalty's failure as an efficient deterrent; and the alternative sentence of life imprisonment without parole. In closing, the book analyses the current debates on capital punishment around the globe and in the Indian context. Based on public opinion surveys, the book is essential reading for all those interested in India, its government, criminal justice system, and policies on the death penalty and human rights.

In Dershowitz on Killing: How the Law Decides Who Shall Live and Who Shall Die, Alan Dershowitz-New York Times bestselling author and one of America's most respected legal scholars-examines the subjects of death, life, and the law. Alan Dershowitz has been called "one of the most prominent and consistent defenders of civil liberties in America" by Politico and "the nation's most peripatetic civil liberties lawyer and one of its most distinguished defenders of individual rights" by Newsweek. His legal career as a criminal defense lawyer has been deeply involved with death and life decisions. Dershowitz on Killing is a timely examination of issues and questions that are front and center in today's society. Employing a philosophical, moral, religious, and cultural lens to the legal aspects surrounding death and life, Dershowitz elucidates the role of government to determine who shall live and who shall die in declaring wars, ordering executions, authorizing deadly force, permitting or denying abortions, providing or mandating vaccines, controlling climate change, allowing or refusing asylum for endangered migrants, and other life and death rulings. He notes that when the government decides these choices, it is asked to do so by first determining whether a "right" is involved, because rights trump mere interest, just as constitutional restrictions trump legislative and executive actions. Dershowitz on Killing asserts that the rules governing death and life decisions should reflect the irreversibility of death. It is essential reading for anyone interested in or concerned about how these decisions are allocated among state and federal; executive, legislative, and judicial; private and governmental; religious and secular institutions-and how people in a democracy, through the power of the ballot, have the ultimate say in these critical decisions.

All humans laugh. However, there is little agreement about what is appropriate to laugh at. While laughter can unite people by showing how they share values and perspectives, it is also has the power to separate and divide. Humor that "crosses the line" can make people feel excluded and humiliated. This collection of new essays addresses possible ways that moral and ethical lines can be drawn around humor and laughter. What would a Kantian approach to humor look like? Do games create a safe space for profanity and offense? Contributors to this volume work to establish and explain guidelines for thinking about the moral questions that arise when humor and laughter intersect with medicine, gender, race, and politics. Drawing from the work of stand-up comedians, television shows, and ethicists, this volume asserts that we are never just joking.

In Colors of Veracity, Vera Schwarcz condenses four decades of teaching and scholarship about China to raise fundamental questions about the nature of truth and history. In clear and vivid prose, she addresses contemporary moral dilemmas with a highly personal sense of ethics and aesthetics. Drawing on classical sources in Hebrew and Chinese (as well as several Greek and Japanese texts), Schwarcz brings deep and varied cultural references to bear on the question of truth and falsehood in human consciousness. An attentiveness to connotations and nuance is apparent throughout her work, which redefines both the Jewish understanding of emet (a notion of truth that encompasses authenticity) and the Chinese commitment to zhen (a vision of the real that comprises the innermost sincerity of the seeker's heart-mind). Works of art, from contemporary calligraphy and installations to fake Chinese characters and a Jewish menorah from Roman times, shed light light on the historian's task of giving voice to the dread-filled past. Following in the footsteps of literary scholar Geoffrey Hartman, Schwarcz expands on the "Philomela Project, which calls on historians to find new ways of conveying truth, especially when political authorities are bent on enforcing amnesia of past traumatic events. Truth matters, even if it cannot be mapped in its totality. Veracity is shown again and again to be neither black nor white. Schwarcz' accomplishment is a subtle depiction of "fractured luminosity," which inspires and sustains the moral conviction of those who pursue truth against all odds.

While the importance of consent has been discussed widely over the last few decades, interest in its study has received renewed attention in recent years, particularly regarding medical treatment, clinical research and sexual acts. The Routledge Handbook of the Ethics of Consent is an outstanding reference source to this exciting subject and the first collection of its kind. Comprising over thirty chapters by a team of international contributors, the Handbook is divided into five main parts: * General questions * Normative ethics * Legal theory * Medical ethics * Political philosophy. Within these sections central issues, debates and problems are examined, including: the nature and normative importance of consent, paternalism, exploitation and coercion, privacy, sexual consent, consent and criminal law, informed consent, organ donation, clinical research, and consent theory of political obligation and authority. The Routledge Handbook of the Ethics of Consent is essential reading for students and researchers in moral theory, applied ethics, medical ethics, philosophy of law and political philosophy. This volume will also be very useful for those in related fields, such as political science, law, medicine and social science.

Captivated at a young age by Russia, Marianna Tax Choldin immersed herself as a student at the University of Chicago in that country's language and culture. In her book she describes the tension between her strong commitment to freedom of expression and her growing understanding of Russian and Soviet censorship. Fluent in Russian, she travels widely in post-Soviet Russia, speaking with hundreds of Russians about their own censorship history. She writes of the close friendships she formed in Russia, and reflects on her Jewish roots in the country her family had left behind 100 years earlier.

This book was originally published in 1999. When one or more essential organs failed, the consequence used to be death. However, conventional medicine has developed artificial means of extending life, the most successful of which is transplantation. The most common form of organ to be transplanted is a kidney which will, on average, function for about a decade in its recipient. Organ transplantation as a whole is widely practiced in most countries. However, few can procure enough organs to meet demand. Many people who are suitable for a transplant die without getting one. Many kidney patients can access and stay alive on dialysis until a suitable organ becomes available. However, even here, sufficiency of organs would be beneficial because lesser reliance on dialysis would reduce healthcare costs and be better for patient quality of life. This invaluable book shows that in the light of current practice and attitudes, increasing living donor transplantation (LDT) levels is feasible. It is one of the few works to systematically analyse the ethical and legal issues involved in LDT use in the light of empirical evidence, including new data derived from a unique programme of interviews and questionnaires with transplant professionals, living donors and recipients. Readers are led to an understanding of when LDT is ethically and legally acceptable and to the strong case for using it much more extensively.

Women who came of age in the late twentieth century were raised in the era of choice; they grew up believing that reproductive decision-making is a political right, a responsibility of women living the successes of second wave feminism, and under their control. Contemplating Maternity in an Era of Choice: Explorations into Discourses of Reproduction explores contemporary maternity both within and in light of these late-twentieth century understandings. Employing a variety of feminist communication approaches, the volume's contributors discuss how discourses of choice shape and are shaped by women's identities and experiences as (non)mothers and how those same discourses affect and reflect private practices and public policies related to reproduction and motherhood. Through this process, the contributors illustrate a variety of ways of conducting feminist thinking, research, and practices within the communication discipline. Major sub-disciplines within communication studies are represented here including feminist organizational, interpersonal, rhetorical, critical/cultural, and social movement studies. Whereas many of the previous scholarly investigations into maternity highlight only one aspect or phase of motherhood, Contemplating Maternity in an Era of Choice is unique because it investigates discourses of choice across the arc of maternity and as enacted through various (non)maternal subject positions.