This book demonstrates the importance of a duty-based approach to morality. The dominance of what has been labeled "rights talk" leads to the neglect of duties without corresponding rights (e.g., duties of virtue) and stimulates the proliferation of questionable human rights. Therefore, this book argues for a duty-based perspective on morality in order to, first, salvage duties of virtue, and, second, counter the trend of rights-proliferation by providing some conceptual clarity concerning rights and duties that will enable us to differentiate between genuine and spurious rights-claims. The argument for this duty-based perspective is made by examining two particularly contentious duties: duties to aid the global poor and civic duties. These two duties serve as case studies and are explored from the perspectives of political theory, jurisprudence and moral philosophy. The argument is made that both these duties can only be adequately defined and allocated if we adopt the perspective of duties, as the predominant perspective of rights either does not recognize them to be duties at all or else leaves their content and allocation indefinite. This renewed focus on duties does not wish to diminish the importance of rights. Rather, the duty-based perspective on morality will strengthen human rights discourse by distinguishing more strictly between genuine and inauthentic rights. Furthermore, a duty-based approach enriches our moral landscape by recognizing both duties of justice and duties of virtue. The latter duties are not less important or supererogatory, but function as indispensable complements to the duties prescribed by justice. In this perceptive and exceptionally lucid book, Eric Boot argues that a duty-focused approach to morality will remedy the shortcomings he finds in the standard accounts of human rights. The study tackles staple philosophical topics such as the contrasts between duties of virtue and duties of justice and imperfect and perfect obligations. But more importantly perhaps, it also confronts the practical question of what our human rights duties are and how we ought to act on them. Boot's book is a splendid example of how philosophy can engage and clarify real world problems. Kok-Chor Tan, Department of Philosophy, University of Pennsylvania A lively and enjoyable defence of the importance of our having duties to fellow human beings in severe poverty. At a time when global justice has never been more urgent, this new book sheds much needed light. Thom Brooks, Professor of Law and Government and Head of Durham Law School, Durham University

This book discusses how to deal ethically with people with Fetal Alcohol Spectrum Disorder (FASD) in the police, courts and correctional services. Ethical and legal issues associated with the deficits of individuals with a brain disorders such as FASD are surfacing more and more frequently in criminal proceedings. People with FASD often have not been diagnosed and rarely exhibit any visible evidence of the disorder. It has been argued that this invisible disability puts them in a disadvantaged position in the justice system, since the awareness of this condition is limited. The need to identify and to address FASD more effectively and the many ethical issues this raises within the context of the law is increasingly acknowledged within judicial and legislative branches, as well as in government departments, agencies and community programs that provide services to those with FASD and their caretakers and families. This is the first book to give to elaborate on ethical and legal issues of FASD.

What is the nature of Hell? What role(s) may Hell play in religious, political, or ethical thought? Can Hell be justified? This edited volume addresses these questions and others; drawing philosophers from many approaches and traditions to analyze and examine Hell.

Recent economic development and the financial and economic crisis require a change in our approach to business and finance. This book combines theology, economy and philosophy in order to examine in detail the idea that the functioning of a free market economy depends upon sound cultural and ethical foundations.

The free market is a cultural achievement, not only an economic phenomenon subject to technical rules of trade and exchange. It is an achievement which lives by and depends upon the values and virtues shared by the majority of those who engage in economic activity. It is these values and virtues that we refer to as culture. Trust, credibility, loyalty, diligence, and entrepreneurship are the values inherent in commercial rules and law. But beyond law, there is also the need for ethical convictions and for global solidarity with developing countries. This book offers new ideas for future sustainable development and responds to an increasing need for a new sense of responsibility for the common good in societal institutions and good leadership.

This second companion volume on engineering studies considers engineering practice including contextual analyses of engineering identity, epistemologies and values. Key overlapping questions examine such issues as an engineering identity, engineering self-understandings enacted in the professional world, distinctive characters of engineering knowledge and how engineering science and engineering design interact in practice. Authors bring with them perspectives from their institutional homes in Europe, North America, Australia\ and Asia. The volume includes 24 contributions by more than 30 authors from engineering, the social sciences and the humanities. Additional issues the chapters scrutinize include prominent norms of engineering, how they interact with the values of efficiency or environmental sustainability. A concluding set of articles considers the meaning of context more generally by asking if engineers create their own contexts or are they created by contexts. Taken as a whole, this collection of original scholarly work is unique in its broad, multidisciplinary consideration of the changing character of engineering practice.

This is an innovative contribution to the philosophy of human rights. Considering both legal and philosophical scholarship, the views here bear an importance on the legitimacy of international politics and international law. As a result of more than 10 years of research, this revised edition engages with current debates through the help of new sections. Pluralistic universalism considers that, while formal filtering criteria constitute unavoidable requirements for the production of potentially valid arguments, the exemplarity of judgmental activity, in its turn, provides a pluralistic and retrospective reinterpretation for the fixity of such criteria. While speech formal standards grounds the thinnest possible presuppositions we can make as humans, the discursive exemplarity of judgments defends a notion of validity which is both contextually dependent and "subjectively universal". According to this approach, human rights principles are embedded within our linguistic argumentative practice. It is precisely from the intersubjective and dialogical relation among speakers that we come to reflect upon those same conditions of validity of our arguments. Once translated into national and regional constitutional norms, the discursive validity of exemplar judgments postulates the philosophical necessity for an ideal of legal-constitutional pluralism, challenging all those attempts trying to frustrate both horizontal (state to state) and vertical (supra-national-state-social) on-going debates on human rights. On the first edition of this book: "Claudio Corradetti's book is a thoughtful attempt to find an adequate theoretical foundation for human rights. Its approach is interdisciplinary in nature, drawing on issues in analytical philosophy as well as contemporary political theorists, and the result is a densely argued text aimed at scholars ... ." (Andrew Lambert, Metapsychology Online Reviews, Vol. 14 (3), January, 2010)

Derrida's work is controversial, its interpretation hotly contested. Derrida: Ethics Under Erasure offers a new way of thinking about ethics from a Derridean perspective, linking the most abstract theoretical implications of his writing on deconstruction and on justice and responsibility to representations of the practice of ethical paradoxes in everyday life. The book presents the development of Derrida's thinking on ethics by demonstrating that the ethical was a focus of Derrida's work at every stage of his career. In connecting Derrida's earlier work on language with the ethics implicated in his later work on justice and responsibility, Nicole Anderson traverses literary, linguistic, philosophical and ethical interpretative movements, thus recontextualising Derrida's entire oeuvre for a contemporary readership. She explores the positive ethical implications of Derrida's work for representation and practice and asks the reader to consider how this new ethical reading of Derrida's work might be applied to concrete instances of his or her own ethical experience.

No one looking ahead at the middle of the last century could have foreseen the extent and the importance of the ensuing environmental crises. Now, more than a decade into the next century, no one can ignore it.

A New Environmental Ethics: the Next Millennium for Life on Earth offers clear, powerful, and oftentimes moving thoughts from one of the first and most respected philosophers to write on the environment. Rolston, an early and leading pioneer in studying the moral relationship between humans and the earth, surveys the full spectrum of approaches in the field of environmental ethics. This book, however, is not simply a judicious overview. Instead, it offers critical assessments of contemporary academic accounts and draws on a lifetime of research and experience to suggest an outlook for the future. As a result, this focused, forward-looking analysis will be a necessary complement to any balanced textbook or anthology in environmental ethics, and will teach its readers to be responsible global citizens, and residents of their landscape, helping ensure that the future we have will be the one we wish for.

Awareness of eco-literature has recalled the central ideology of environmentalism - "to think globally and act locally." As this volume shows, various tags of contemporary discourse have emerged, including transnational, cosmopolitan, hybridity, diaspora, and generally cultural. These concerns highlight such global environmental problems as biodiversity, climate change, and developing new forms of interconnectedness with local and regional communities. In this context, contemporary discourse becomes of immediate concern in understanding the environmental crisis. In a way, reading different cultures and experiences can contribute to a contemporary discourse that can facilitate an environmental sensibility and develop a unique ecological approach.

Globalization is reshaping the lives of all the world's people. International Ethics features in depth coverage on topics such as disease and pollution, the authority of national governments, and international trade and global distributive justice. The work opens with a broad overview of the issues and is followed by a chronology of important events and ideas, detailed examinations of particular issues, brief biographies of significant figures, and annotated lists of print and nonprint resources and organizations active in the area. Includes a chronology of important events and ideas Provides biographies of significant figures

Keith Lehrer offers an original philosophical view of principal aspects of the human condition, such as reason, knowledge, wisdom, autonomy, love, consensus, and consciousness. Three unifying ideas run through the book. The first is that what is uniquely human is the capacity for metamental ascent, the ability to consider and evaluate first-order mental states (such as beliefs and desires) that arise naturally within us. A primary function of this metamental ascent is the resolution of personal and interpersonal conflict, essential to such central human goods as wisdom, autonomy, and consensus. The second unifying idea is that we have a system for such reflective evaluation which yields acceptance (in relation to beliefs) or preference (in relation to the objects of desires). The third unifying idea is that there are `keystones' of evaluation in this system: loops of trustworthiness that are themselves supported by the structure that they hold together. Self-trust is the basis of our trustworthiness, on which reason, knowledge, and wisdom are grounded.

There must be some connection between our deontic notions, rightness and wrongness, and our responsibility notions, praise- and blameworthiness. Yet traditional approaches to each set of concepts tend to take the other set for granted. This book takes an integrated approach to these questions, drawing on both ethics and responsibility theory, and thereby illuminating both sets of concepts. Elinor Mason describes this as 'normative responsibility theory': the primary aim is not to give an account of the conditions of agency, but to give an account of what sort of wrong action makes blame fitting. She presents a pluralistic view of both obligation and blameworthiness, identifying three different ways to be blameworthy, corresponding to different ways of acting wrongly. First, ordinary blameworthiness is essentially connected to subjective wrongness, to acting wrongly by one's own lights. Subjective obligation, and ordinary blame, apply only to those who are within our moral community, who understand and share our value system. By contrast, detached blame can apply even when the agent is outside our moral community, and has no sense that her act is morally wrong. In detached blame, the blame rather than the blameworthiness is fundamental. Finally, agents can take responsibility for some inadvertent wrongs, and thus become responsible. This third sort of blameworthiness, 'extended blameworthiness', applies when the agent understands the objective wrongness of her act, but has no bad will. In such cases, the social context may be such that the agent should take responsibility, and accept ordinary blame from the wronged party.

This book provides an assessment of some ethical implications of increasing life spans. Taking as a starting point the idea that to increase longevity is a form of medical enhancement, it examines the value of living longer; the means for extending life spans; the consequences of greater longevity for the fair distribution of resources and healthcare in particular.

Long claimed to be the dominant conception of practical reason, the Humean theory that reasons for action are instrumental, or explained by desires, is the basis for a range of worries about the objective prescriptivity of morality. As a result, it has come under intense attack in recent decades. A wide variety of arguments have been advanced which purport to show that it is false, or surprisingly, even that it is incoherent. Slaves of the Passions aims to set the record straight, by advancing a version of the Humean theory of reasons which withstands this sophisticated array of objections.
Mark Schroeder defends a radical new view which, if correct, means that the commitments of the Humean theory have been widely misunderstood. Along the way, he raises and addresses questions about the fundamental structure of reasons, the nature of normative explanations, the aims of and challenges facing reductive views in metaethics, the weight of reasons, the nature of desire, moral epistemology, and most importantly, the relationship between agent-relational and agent-neutral reasons for action.

These ten new essays by leading contemporary philosophers constitute the first collective study of a group of British moral philosophers active between the 1870s and 1950s, including Henry Sidgwick, Hastings Rashdall, G.E. Moore, H.A. Prichard, W.D. Ross, and A.C. Ewing. The essays help recover the history of this neglected period: they treat it as a unity, draw out the connections between the thinkers, engage philosophically with their ideas, and in so doing show how much they can contribute to present-day philosophical debates

This volume gives an overview on the currently debated ethical issues regarding advance directives from an international perspective. It focuses on a wider understanding of the known and widely accepted concept of patient self-determination for future situations. Although advance directives have been widely discussed since the 1980s, the ethical bases of advance directives still remain a matter of heated debates. The book aims to contribute to these controversial debates by integrating fundamental ethical issues on advance directives with practical matters of their implementation. Cultural, national and professional differences in how advance directives are understood by health care professions and by patients, as well as in laws and regulations, are pinpointed.

Few ethical issues create as much controversy as invasive experiments on animals. Some scientists claim they are essential for combating major human disease, or detecting human toxins. Others claim the contrary, backed by thousands of patients harmed by pharmaceuticals developed using animal tests. Some claim all experiments are conducted humanely, to high scientific standards. Yet, a wealth of studies have recently revealed that laboratory animals suffer significant stress, which may distort experimental results.
-Where, then, does the truth lie?
-How useful are such experiments in advancing human healthcare?
-How much do animals suffer as a result?
-And do students really need to dissect or experiment on animals?
-What are the effects on their attitudes towards them? Bioethicist and veterinarian Andrew Knight presents more than a decade of ground-breaking scientific research, analysis and experience to provide evidence-based answers to a key question: is animal experimentation ethically justifiable?

"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.
Hemlock's Cup is the first history of the active euthanasia movement in America, as represented by its most visible proponent, the Hemlock Society. Donald W. Cox traces the growth of the society from its beginnings as a three-person cause to its current world-wide fame. The work of Derek Humphrey, the society's founder, is reviewed and the publicity surrounding Dr. Jack Kevorkian and his controversial "suicide machine" is discussed.
Cox also addresses the Washington and California initiatives to legalize doctor-assisted suicide and the ethical questions they pose. He reflects on the impact of the Quinlan and Cruzan cases to establish the "right to die" for all Americans and he explores the reasons for the delays in enacting living-will laws in various states. In addition, Cox examines the significant connections among AIDS, abortion, and assisted suicide.

The study of literature and the environment evokes and promotes this highly original eco-critical collection and its contributions to evaluating the preservation of nature and human attachment and to situate it at a local, communitarian, or bio-regional level. Revisiting eco-literature can aid our exploration of numerous global issues and challenges through a literary rendition of the natural world in poetry, fiction, and non-fiction. Reflecting on different works will prompt the readers to intensify their search for viable and effective choices and healthy alternatives in a confusing world.

We live in a 'bimoral' society, in which people govern their lives by two contrasting sets of principles. On the one hand there are the principles associated with traditional morality. Although these allow a modicum of self-interest, their emphasis is on our duties and obligations to others: to treat people honestly and with respect, to treat them fairly and without prejudice, to help and care for them when needed, and ultimately, to put their needs above our own. On the other hand there are the principles associated with the entrepreneurial self-interest. These also impose obligations, but of a much more limited kind. Their emphasis is competitive rather than cooperative: to advance our own interests rather than to meet the needs of others. Both sets of principles have always been present in society but in recent years traditional moral authorities have lost much of their force and the morality of self-interest has acquired a much greater social legitimacy, over a much wider field of behaviour, than ever before. The result of this is that in many situations it is no longer at all apparent which set of principles should take precedence. In this book John Hendry traces the cultural and historical origins of the 'bimoral' society and explores the challenges it poses for the world of business and management. The developments that have led to the 'bimoral' society have also led to new, more flexible forms of organizing, which have released people's entrepreneurial energies and significantly enhanced the creative capacities of business. Working within these organizations, however, is fraught with moral tensions as obligations and self-interest conflict and managers are pulled in all sorts of different directions. Managing them successfully poses major new challenges of leadership, and 'moral' management, as the technical problem-solving that previously characterised managerial work is increasingly accomplished by technology and market mechanisms. The key role of management becomes the political and moral one of determining purposes and priorities, reconciling divergent interests, and nurturing trust in interpersonal relationships. Exploring these tensions and challenges, Hendry identifies new issues for contemporary management and puts recognized issues into context. He also explores the challenges posed for a post-traditional society as it seeks to regulate and govern an increasingly powerful and global business sector.

The question "What am I to do?" needs the balance and completion of "What are we to do?" With clarity and insight Jersild addresses the particular need of our time: a great awareness of our interdependence as a world community. The relationship between private and public morality is clarified by exploring such questions as: "What prompts Christians to disagree on moral issues?" "Is there a Christian morality?" and "How are convictions related to decisions?" Using critical incidents or cases to illustrate ethical points, Jersild examines such contemporary issues as euthanasia, employment and one's sense of vocation, homosexuality, and more.

This title explores the implications of our animal origins and posthuman futures for our understanding of our humanity and our relations with other species. "Beyond Human" investigates what it means to call ourselves human beings in relation to both our distant past and our possible futures as a species, and the questions this might raise for our relationship with the myriad species with which we share the planet. Drawing on insights from zoology, theology, cultural studies and aesthetics, an international line-up of contributors explore such topics as our origins as reflected in early cave art in the upper Palaeolithic through to our prospects at the forefront of contemporary biotechnology. In the process, the book positions 'the human' in readiness for what many have characterized as our transhuman or posthuman future. For if our status as rational animals or 'animals that think' has traditionally distinguished us as apparently superior to other species, this distinction has become increasingly problematic. It has come to be seen as based on skills and technologies that do not distinguish us so much as position us as transitional animals. It is the direction and consequences of this transition that is the central concern of "Beyond Human".