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.

Media Dictatorship: How Schools and Educators Can Defend Freedom of Speech outlines how the American media amasses enormous power and uses it to control every aspect of the people's lives-including schools, elections, science, and freedom of thought. Even churches, supposedly answerable to God only, are now being influenced and controlled by media. This book discusses the devastating consequences of such control on democracy and our civilization, and then offers suggestions on what can be done to identify media propaganda and defend freedom of speech. The school system has always been the first line of defense for patriotism and democracy. It is important for teachers to understand the consequences of a powerful media that does not tolerate diversity of thought. This book will encourage teachers to cultivate independence of thought among students. School administrators, too, have a responsibility to ensure that school campuses are sanctuaries of freedom of thought where leaders of tomorrow are taught to be tolerant of opposing views. In the larger public, outside the school campus, Media Dictatorship will spur a robust debate about the kind of media that can help nurture our democracy and civilization.

Explores the politics and practice of programs that foster moral thinking and civic responsibility?highlighting the acclaimed and controversial Facing History and Ourselves (FHAO) curriculum, which uses study of the Holocaust to help students reflect on issues of racism, violence, intolerance, and prejudice.

Rather than providing a global solution to the problem of abortion -to abort or not to abort-this volume sheds light on different but equally critical dimensions of abortion in global debate and practice. The aim is to elaborate on different value systems and policies in order to empower individuals to make well-informed decisions about abortion guided by moral reflection. The twenty one chapters of this volume are written by distinguished scholars in each of the religious and non-religious schools of thought, offering an exhaustive survey of the differing religious and legal views on abortion within the international community. The contributors present authoritative discussions in favor of or against abortion based on their perspectives and practices. As a result, the content of this book provides a foundational platform for better understanding, meaningful dialogue, and tolerance on a social issue which has divided individuals, philosophers, theologians, policy makers, and legislators within and across societies for centuries.

Pornography in a Free Society deals with what has been called the "civil war over smut." The past two decades have been high seasons for pornography commissions. They were appointed in the United States in 1968, in Great Britain in 1977, in Canada in 1985, and in the United States again in 1985. In the United States, the report of the first commission was denounced as a pornographer's charter and that of the second as a reflection of the moral militancy of the Reagan counterrevolution. The authors look at the problems of pornography in a broader perspective than that of partisan political debate. They explain why it has become so controversial and divisive an issue in Western nations in recent decades. They discuss the radical feminist challenge to pornography and the question of pornography and children. Considering likely future developments, the authors argue that the furor over pornography and the appointment of commissions are part of a "ceremony of adjustment" to widespread availability of sexually explicit material and they predict less social concern about pornography as time passes. Franklin E. Zimring is Professor of Law and Director of the Earl Warren Legal Institute. Gordon Hawkins is Senior Fellow, Earl Warren Legal Institute at the University of California, Berkeley. Together they have written Capital Punishment and the American Agenda (1986), and The Citizen's Guide to Gun Control (1987).

This book examines the intersection and interplay between Progressive-Era rhetoric regarding commercialized vice and the realities of prostitution in early-twentieth-century Philadelphia. Arguing that any study of commercial sexual vice in a historical context is difficult given the paucity of evidence, this work instead focuses on reformers' construction of a cultural view of prostitution, which Adams argues was based more upon their perceptions of the trade than on reality itself. Looking at the urban core of the city, Progressive reformers saw vice, immorality, and decay-but as they frequently had little face-to-face interaction with prostitutes plying their trade, they were forced to construct culturally fueled archetypes to explain what they believed they saw. Ultimately, reformers in Philadelphia were battling against a rhetorical creation of their own design, and any study of anti-vice reform in the early twentieth century tells us more about the relationship between activists and the government than it does about vice itself.

This book explores issues raised by past and present practices of animal enhancement in terms of their means and their goals, clarifies conceptual issues and identifies lessons that can be learned about enhancement practices, as they concern both animals and humans.

Free speech has been a historically volatile issue in higher education. In recent years, however, there has been a surge of progressive censorship on campus. This wave of censorship has been characterized by the explosive growth of such policies as "trigger warnings" for course materials; "safe spaces" where students are protected from speech they consider harmful or distressing; "micro-aggression" policies that often strongly discourage the use of words that might offend sensitive individuals; new "bias-reporting" programs that consist of different degrees of campus surveillance; the "dis-invitation" of a growing list of speakers, including many in the mainstream of American politics and values; and the prominent "shouting down" or disruption of speakers deemed inconsistent with progressive ideology. Not to be outdone, external forces on the right are now engaging in social media bullying of speakers and teachers whose views upset them. The essays in this collection, written by prominent philosophers, political scientists, sociologists, and legal scholars, examine the issues at the forefront of the crisis of free speech in higher education. The contributors address the broader historical, cultural, legal, and normative contexts of the current crisis, and take care to analyze the role of "due process" in protecting academic freedom and individuals accused of misconduct. Additionally, the volume is unique in that it advances practical remedies to campus censorship, as the editors and many of the contributors have participated in movements to remedy limitations on free speech and open inquiry. The Value and Limits of Academic Speech will educate academic professionals and informed citizens about the phenomenon of progressive censorship and its implications for higher education and the republic.

Disagreement is, for better or worse, pervasive in our society. Not only do we form beliefs that differ from those around us, but increasingly we have platforms and opportunities to voice those disagreements and make them public. In light of the public nature of many of our most important disagreements, a key question emerges: How does public disagreement affect what we know? This volume collects original essays from a number of prominent scholars-including Catherine Elgin, Sanford Goldberg, Jennifer Lackey, Michael Patrick Lynch, and Duncan Pritchard, among others-to address this question in its diverse forms. The book is organized by thematic sections, in which individual chapters address the epistemic, ethical, and political dimensions of dissent. The individual contributions address important issues such as the value of disagreement, the nature of conversational disagreement, when dissent is epistemically rational, when one is obligated to voice disagreement or to object, the relation of silence and resistance to dissent, and when political dissent is justified. Voicing Dissent offers a new approach to the study of disagreement that will appeal to social epistemologists and ethicists interested in this growing area of epistemology.

In the face of limited time and escalating impacts, some scientists and politicians are talking about attempting "grand technological interventions" into the Earth's basic physical and biological systems ("geoengineering") to combat global warming. Early ideas include spraying particles into the stratosphere to block some incoming sunlight, or "enhancing" natural biological systems to withdraw carbon dioxide from the atmosphere at a higher rate. Such technologies are highly speculative and scientific development of them has barely begun. Nevertheless, it is widely recognized that geoengineering raises critical questions about who will control planetary interventions, and what responsibilities they will have. Central to these questions are issues of justice and political legitimacy. For instance, while some claim that climate risks are so severe that geoengineering must be attempted, others insist that the current global order is so unjust that interventions are highly likely to be illegitimate and exacerbate injustice. Such concerns are rarely discussed in the policy arena in any depth, or with academic rigor. Hence, this book gathers contributions from leading voices and rising stars in political philosophy to respond. It is essential reading for anyone puzzled about how geoengineering might promote or thwart the ends of justice in a dramatically changing world. The chapters in this book were originally published in the journals: Ethics, Policy & the Environment and Critical Review of International Social and Political Philosophy.

Contemporary developments in the biosciences associated with new biological possibilities have generated considerable interest among the social sciences, primarily because they challenge our understanding of the relationship between the body, nature, and identity. Regenerative medicine is such a field, and has attracted major commercial, clinical, political and popular interest. It has, however, been subject to very limited social science analysis. This book explores the hype and promise associated with the field, the uneven and often failed commercial exploitation we have seen, and the political, legal and bioethical challenges that developments in the regenerative medicine field produce. It does this at a global level, including analysis of what we are seeing in the US, Europe, China and Australia. The book establishes the meaning, boundaries and likely future development we will see, and asks whether regenerative medicine heralds a new paradigm for medicine itself.

Although they share similar socio-economic and cultural characteristics as well as their recent political histories, Argentina, Chile and Uruguay differ radically in their abortion policies. In this book, Cora Fernandez Anderson examines the role social movements play in abortion reform to show how different interaction patterns with state actors have led to three different policy outcomes: comprehensive abortion reform in Uruguay; moderate abortion reform in Chile; and no legal abortion reform in Argentina. Synthesizing a broad range of literature and drawing on in-depth field and archival research, she analyzes the strength of the campaigns for abortion reform, their relationships with leftist parties in power and the context of Church-state relations to explain this diverging trajectory in policy reform. A masterly analysis of how social movements, the power of institutions and Executive preferences have strong explanatory power, Fighting for Abortion Rights in Latin America is a perfect supplement for classes on gender and global politics.

As cultural, social, political, and historical objects, guns are rich with complex and contested significance. What guns mean, why they matter, and what policies should be undertaken to regulate guns remain issues of vigorous scholarly and public debate. Gun Studies offers fresh research and original perspectives on the contentious issue of firearms in public life. Comprising global, interdisciplinary contributions, this insightful volume examines difficult and timely questions through the lens of: Social practice Marketing and commerce Critical theory Political conflict Public policy Criminology Questions explored include the evolution of American gun culture from recreation to self-protection; the changing dynamics of the pro-gun and pro-regulation movements; the deeply personal role of guns as sources of both injury and security; and the relationship between gun-wielding individuals, the state, and social order in the United States and abroad. In addition to introducing new research, Gun Studies presents reflections by senior scholars on what has been learned over the decades and how gun-related research has influenced public policy and everyday conversations. Offering provocative and often intimate perspectives on how guns influence individuals, social structures, and the state in both dramatic and nuanced ways, Gun Studies will appeal to students and researchers interested in fields such as sociology, political science, legal history, criminology, criminal justice, social policy, armaments industries, and violent crime. It will also appeal to policy makers and all others interested in and concerned about the use of guns.

Although they share similar socio-economic and cultural characteristics as well as their recent political histories, Argentina, Chile and Uruguay differ radically in their abortion policies. In this book, Cora Fernandez Anderson examines the role social movements play in abortion reform to show how different interaction patterns with state actors have led to three different policy outcomes: comprehensive abortion reform in Uruguay; moderate abortion reform in Chile; and no legal abortion reform in Argentina. Synthesizing a broad range of literature and drawing on in-depth field and archival research, she analyzes the strength of the campaigns for abortion reform, their relationships with leftist parties in power and the context of Church-state relations to explain this diverging trajectory in policy reform. A masterly analysis of how social movements, the power of institutions and Executive preferences have strong explanatory power, Fighting for Abortion Rights in Latin America is a perfect supplement for classes on gender and global politics.

This book explores the idea of the prison boundary, identifying where it is located, which processes and performances help construct and animate it, and who takes part in them. Although the relationship between prison and non-prison has garnered academic interest from various disciplines in the last decade, the cultural performance of the boundary has been largely ignored. This book adds to the field by exploring the complexity of the material and symbolic connections that exist between society and carceral space. Drawing on a range of cultural examples including governmental legislation, penal tourism, prisoner work programmes and art by offenders, Jennifer Turner attends to the everyday, practised manifestations and negotiations of the prison boundary. The book reveals how prisoners actively engage with life outside of prison and how members of the public may cross the boundary to the inside. In doing so, it shows the prison boundary to be a complex patchwork of processes, people and parts. The book will be of great interest to scholars and upper-level students of criminology, carceral geography and cultural studies.

Biotechnologies already on the horizon will enable us to be smarter, have better memories, be stronger and quicker, have more stamina, live longer, be more resistant to diseases, and enjoy richer emotional lives. To some of us, these prospects are heartening; to others, they are dreadful. In Beyond Humanity a leading philosopher offers a powerful and controversial exploration of urgent ethical issues concerning human enhancement. These raise enduring questions about what it is to be human, about individuality, about our relationship to nature, and about what sort of society we should strive to have. Allen E. Buchanan urges that the debate about enhancement needs to be informed by a proper understanding of evolutionary biology, which has discredited the simplistic conceptions of human nature used by many opponents of enhancement. He argues that there are powerful reasons for us to embark on the enhancement enterprise, and no objections to enhancement that are sufficient to outweigh them.

What is the role of government in protecting animal welfare? What principles should policy makers draw on as they try to balance animal welfare against human liberty?
Much has been written in recent years on our moral duties towards animals, but scholars and activists alike have neglected the important question of how far the state may go to enforce those duties. Kimberly K. Smith fills that gap by exploring how liberal political principles apply to animal welfare policy. Focusing on animal welfare in the United States, Governing Animals begins with an account of the historical relationship between animals and the development of the American liberal welfare state. It then turns to the central theoretical argument: Some animals (most prominently pets and livestock) may be considered members of the liberal social contract. That conclusion justifies limited state intervention to defend their welfare - even when such intervention may harm human citizens. Taking the analysis further, the study examines whether citizens may enjoy property rights in animals, what those rights entail, how animals may be represented in our political and legal institutions, and what strategies for reform are most compatible with liberal principles. The book takes up several policy issues along the way, from public funding of animal rescue operations to the ethics of livestock production, animal sacrifice, and animal fighting.
Beyond even these specific policy questions, this book asks what sort of liberalism is suitable for the challenges of the twenty-first century. Smith argues that investigating the political morality of our treatment of animals gives us insight into how to design practices and institutions that protect the most vulnerable members of our society, thus making of our shared world a more fitting home for both humans and the nonhumans to which we are so deeply connected.

Based on interviews and participatory research, this book explores Thai women's experiences of the global sex trade. Kaoru Aoyama questions the long-standing feminist debate concerning how these women identify themselves: as sex workers, or sex slaves, while also considering the issues of gender, deviance, and migration.

Bioethics tells a heroic story about its origins and purpose. The impetus for its contemporary development can be traced to concern about widespread paternalism in medicine, mistreatment of research subjects used in medical experimentation, and questions about the implication of technological developments in medical practice. Bioethics, then, began as a defender of the interests of patients and the rights of research participants, and understood itself to play an important role as a critic of powerful interests in medicine and medical practice. Autonomy and the Situated Self argues that, as bioethics has become successful, it no longer clearly lives up to these founding ideals, and it offers a critique of the way in which contemporary bioethics has been co-opted by the very institutions it once sought (with good reason) to criticize and transform. In the process, it has become mainstream, moved from occupying the perspective of a critical outsider to enjoying the status of a respected insider, whose primary role is to defend existing institutional arrangements and its own privileged position. The mainstreaming of bioethics has resulted in its domestication: it is at home in the institutions it would once have viewed with skepticism, and a central part of practices it would once have challenged. Contemporary bioethics is increasingly dominated by a conception of autonomy that detaches the value of choice from the value of the things chosen, and the central role occupied by this conception makes it difficult for the bioethicist to make ethical judgments. Consequently, despite its very public successes, contemporary bioethics is largely failing to offer the ethical guidance it purports to be able to provide. In addition to providing a critique, this book offers an alternative framework that is designed to allow bioethicists to address the concerns that led to the creation of bioethics in the first place. This alternative framework is oriented around a conception of autonomy that works within the ethical guidelines provided by a contemporary form of virtue ethics, and which connects the value of autonomous choice to a conception of human flourishing.

Requests for the removal, relocation, and restriction of books-also known as challenges-occur with some frequency in the United States. Book Banning in 21st-Century American Libraries, based on thirteen contemporary book challenge cases in schools and public libraries across the United States argues that understanding contemporary reading practices, especially interpretive strategies, is vital to understanding why people attempt to censor books in schools and public libraries. Previous research on censorship tends to focus on legal frameworks centered on Supreme Court cases, historical case studies, and bibliographies of texts that are targeted for removal or relocation and is often concerned with how censorship occurs. The current project, on the other hand, is focused on the why of censorship and posits that many censorship behaviors and practices, such as challenging books, are intimately tied to the how one understands the practice of reading and its effects on character development and behavior. It discusses reading as a social practice that has changed over time and encompasses different physical modalities and interpretive strategies. In order to understand why people challenge books, it presents a model of how the practice of reading is understood by challengers including "what it means" to read a text, and especially how one constructs the idea of "appropriate" reading materials. The book is based on three different kinds sources. The first consists of documents including requests for reconsideration and letters, obtained via Freedom of Information Act requests to governing bodies, produced in the course of challenge cases. Recordings of book challenge public hearings constitute the second source of data. Finally, the third source of data is interviews with challengers themselves. The book offers a model of the reading practices of challengers. It demonstrates that challengers are particularly influenced by what might be called a literal "common sense" orientation to text wherein there is little room for polysemic interpretation (multiple meanings for text). That is, the meaning of texts is always clear and there is only one avenue for interpretation. This common sense interpretive strategy is coupled with what Cathy Davidson calls "undisciplined imagination" wherein the reader is unable to maintain distance between the events in a text and his or her own response. These reading practices broaden our understanding of why people attempt to censor books in public institutions.

New York and New Jersey maintain almost identical laws dealing with abortion, but the process for developing those laws differed in each state. Courts were heavily involved in New Jersey, whereas most policy decisions came from elected officials in New York. In this book, Parent argues that these differences in the location of policy development in the two states are attributable to early changes that took place either in the courts or the state houses. These early changes set the narrative frame for how abortion was conceptualized in New York and New Jersey respectively, helping to lock in a legal or political outlook that kept development of abortion law and policy within its originating institution. Using the words of judges and justices from state and federal courts as well as lawmakers in the two states over a forty-year period, Parent demonstrates that how policy makers thought and wrote about abortion had a critically important impact on the extent to which courts or elected officials would ultimately create the laws that limited or expanded access to reproductive rights.

Stem cells and the emerging field of regenerative medicine are at the frontiers of modern medicine. These areas of scientific inquiry suggest that in the future, damaged tissue and organs might be repaired through personalized cell therapy as easily as the body repairs itself, revolutionizing the treatment of numerous diseases. Yet the use of stem cells is fraught with ethical and public policy dilemmas that challenge scientists, clinicians, the public health community, and people of good will everywhere. How shall we deal with these amazing biomedical advances, and how can we talk about potential breakthroughs with both moral and scientific intelligence? This book provides an innovative look at these vexing issues through a series of innovative Socratic dialogues that elucidate key scientific and ethical points in an approachable manner. Addressing the cultural and value issues underlying stem cell research while also educating readers about stem cells' biological function and medical applications, Stem Cell Dialogues features fictional characters engaging in compelling inquiry and debate. Participants investigate the scientific, political, and socioethical dimensions of stem cell science using actual language, analysis, and arguments taken from scientific, philosophical, and popular literature. Each dialogue centers on a specific, recognizable topic, such as the policies implemented by the George W. Bush administration restricting the use of embryonic stem cells; the potential role of stem cells in personalized medicine; the ethics of cloning; and the sale of eggs and embryos. Additionally, speakers debate the use of stem cells to treat paralysis, diabetes, stroke effects, macular degeneration, and cancer. Educational, entertaining, and rigorously researched (with 300 references to scientific literature), Stem Cell Dialogues should be included in any effort to help the public understand the science, ethics, and policy concerns of this promising field.

This book investigates what women enjoy about consuming, and in some cases producing, gay male erotic media-from slashfic, to pornographic texts, to visual pornography-and how this sits within their consumption of erotica and pornography more generally. In addition, it will examine how women's use of gay male erotic media fits in with their perceptions of gender and sexuality. By drawing on a piece of wide-scale mixed methods research that examines these motivations, an original and important volume is presented that serves to explore and contribute to this under-researched area.

Why has Egypt, a pioneer of organ transplantation, been reluctant to pass a national organ transplant law for more than three decades? This book analyzes the national debate over organ transplantation in Egypt as it has unfolded during a time of major social and political transformation - including mounting dissent against a brutal regime, the privatization of health care, advances in science, the growing gap between rich and poor, and the Islamic revival. Sherine Hamdy recasts bioethics as a necessarily political project as she traces the moral positions of patients in need of new tissues and organs, doctors uncertain about whether transplantation is a "good" medical or religious practice, and Islamic scholars. Her richly narrated study delves into topics including current definitions of brain death, the authority of Islamic fatwas, reports about the mismanagement of toxic waste predisposing the poor to organ failure, the Egyptian black market in organs, and more. Incorporating insights from a range of disciplines, "Our Bodies Belong to God" sheds new light on contemporary Islamic thought, while challenging the presumed divide between religion and science, and between ethics and politics.

In 1976, the US Supreme Court ruled in Gregg v. Georgia that the death penalty was constitutional if it complied with certain specific provisions designed to ensure that it was reserved for the 'worst of the worst.' The same court had rejected the death penalty just four years before in the Furman decision because it found that the penalty had been applied in a capricious and arbitrary manner. The 1976 decision ushered in the 'modern' period of the US death penalty, setting the country on a course to execute over 1,400 inmates in the ensuing years, with over 8,000 individuals currently sentenced to die. Now, forty years after the decision, the eminent political scientist Frank Baumgartner along with a team of younger scholars (Marty Davidson, Kaneesha Johnson, Arvind Krishnamurthy, and Colin Wilson) have collaborated to assess the empirical record and provide a definitive account of how the death penalty has been implemented. Each chapter addresses a precise empirical question and provides evidence, not opinion, about whether how the modern death penalty has functioned. They decided to write the book after Justice Breyer issued a dissent in a 2015 death penalty case in which he asked for a full briefing on the constitutionality of the death penalty. In particular, they assess the extent to which the modern death penalty has met the aspirations of Gregg or continues to suffer from the flaws that caused its rejection in Furman. To answer this question, they provide the most comprehensive statistical account yet of the workings of the capital punishment system. Authoritative and pithy, the book is intended for both students in a wide variety of fields, researchers studying the topic, and-not least-the Supreme Court itself.