Democracy is emerging as the political system of choice throughout the world. Peoples now freed from the shackles of totalitarian systems seek to share the benefits made possible by democracy in its "home bases" in North America and Western Europe. Yet, paradoxically, in the last decade liberal democracy has been subjected to an onslaught of criticism from thinkers at its "home bases". Criticisms of democracy have been informed by scholarship in feminism, postmodernism and communitarianism as well as the revived interest in applying ethics to public policy. These criticisms raise important questions about the traditional values - liberalism, neutrality or equality, autonomy, and human rights - thought to justify democracy. They also raise questions about the success of democratic systems in promoting alternative values and in protecting lifestyles not desired by majorities. This anthology contains essays by authors at the forefront of the controversy as well as by acute observers of the processes by which "democratic" public policy is formed. The essays include criticisms of democratic theory and practice, defences of liberalism (the set of values often thought to ground democracy), calls for major revisions of democratic institutions and practices, and recommendations for new ways of understanding our rights and responsibilities as members of democratic communities.

Certain films seem to encapsulate perfectly the often abstract ethical situations that confront the media, from truth-telling and sensationalism to corporate control and social responsibility. Using these movies--including "Ace in the Hole," "All the President's Men," "Network," and "Twelve Angry Men"--as texts, authors Howard Good and Michael Dillon demonstrate that, when properly framed and contextualized, movies can be a powerful lens through which to examine media practices.

Moreover, cinema can present human moral conduct for evaluation and analysis more effectively than a traditional case study can. By presenting ethical dilemmas and theories within a dramatic framework, "Media Ethics Goes to the Movies" offers a unique perspective on what it means for media professionals to be both technically competent and morally informed.

With the world as our classroom and each of us a student, what lessons are we learning? The status quo often shifts from honesty and integrity to the systematic economic decay and moral bankrupting of our society. Unfortunately, the consequences of our actions are now only viewed as acceptable inconveniences, and that is only when the misdeeds are discovered. Mistakes are made and our social and economic environment has provided the diversion of excuses for making the wrong decisions sufferable. One of the greatest life lessons I adopted into my everyday work ethic came from my teacher and mentor in high school, who once told me, "An excuse, no matter how valid a reason it might be, is still.an excuse." The path to ethical renewal starts with one step, one person. Learning how to think must be paramount to learning what to think, and each person must think independently. Take a moment.and consider your Ethics Everyday.

In consequence of significant social, political, economic, and demographic changes several wildlife species are currently growing in numbers and recolonizing Europe. While this is rightly hailed as a success of the environmental movement, the return of wildlife brings its own issues. As the animals arrive in the places we inhabit, we are learning anew that life with wild nature is not easy, especially when the accumulated cultural knowledge and experience pertaining to such coexistence have been all but lost. This book provides a hermeneutic study of the ways we come to understand the troubling impacts of wildlife by exploring and critically discussing the meanings of 'ecological discomforts'. Thus, it begins the work of rebuilding the culture of coexistence. The cases presented in this book range from crocodile attacks to mice infestations, and their analysis consequently builds up an ethics that sees wildlife as active participants in the shaping of human moral and existential reality. This book is of interest not only to environmental philosophers, who will find here an original contribution to the established ethical discussions, but also to wildlife managers, and even to those members of the public who themselves struggle to make sense of encounters with their new wild neighbors.

We are often faced with choices that involve the weighing of people's lives against each other, or the weighing of lives against other good things. These are choices both for individuals and for societies. A person who is terminally ill may have to choose between palliative care and more aggressive treatment, which will give her a longer life but at some cost in suffering. We have to choose between the convenience to ourselves of road and air travel, and the lives of the future people who will be killed by the global warming we cause, through violent weather, tropical disease, and heat waves. We also make choices that affect how many lives there will be in the future: as individuals we choose how many children to have, and societies choose tax policies that influence people's choices about having children. These are all problems of weighing lives. How should we weigh lives? Weighing Lives develops a theoretical basis for answering this practical question. It extends the work and methods of Broome's earlier book Weighing Goods to cover the questions of life and death. Difficult problems come up in the process. In particular, Weighing Lives tackles the well-recognized, awkward problems of the ethics of population. It carefully examines the common intuition that adding people to the population is ethically neutral - neither a good nor a bad thing - but eventually concludes this intuition cannot be fitted into a coherent theory of value. In the course of its argument, Weighing Lives examines many of the issues of contemporary moral theory: the nature of consequentialism and teleology; the transitivity, continuity, and vagueness of betterness; the quantitative conception of wellbeing; the notion of a life worth living; the badness of death; and others. This is a work of philosophy, but one of its distinctive features is that it adopts some of the precise methods of economic theory (without introducing complex mathematics). Not only philosophers, but also economists and political theorists concerned with the practical question of valuing life, should find the book's conclusions highly significant to their work.

In the past few decades, scholars have offered positive, normative, and most recently, interpretive theories of contract law. These theories have proceeded primarily (indeed, necessarily) from deontological and consequentialist premises. In A Theory of Contract Law: Empirical Understandings and Moral Psychology, Professor Peter A. Alces confronts the leading interpretive theories of contract and demonstrates their interpretive doctrinal failures. Professor Alces presents the leading canonical cases that inform the extant theories of Contract law in both their historical and transactional contexts and, argues that moral psychology provides a better explanation for the contract doctrine than do alternative comprehensive interpretive approaches.

This is a reproduction of a book published before 1923. This book may have occasional imperfections such as missing or blurred pages, poor pictures, errant marks, etc. that were either part of the original artifact, or were introduced by the scanning process. We believe this work is culturally important, and despite the imperfections, have elected to bring it back into print as part of our continuing commitment to the preservation of printed works worldwide. We appreciate your understanding of the imperfections in the preservation process, and hope you enjoy this valuable book.

A classic work in the field of practical and professional ethics, this collection of nine essays by English philosopher and educator Henry Sidgwick (1838-1900) was first published in 1898 and forms a vital complement to Sidgwick's major treatise on moral theory, The Methods of Ethics. Reissued here as Volume One in a new series sponsored by the Association for Practical and Professional Ethics, the book is composed chiefly of addresses to members of two ethical societies that Sidgwick helped to found in Cambridge and London in the 1880s. Clear, taut, and lively, these essays demonstrate the compassion and calm reasonableness that Sidgwick brought to all his writings.
As Sidgwick explains in his opening essay, the societies he addressed aimed to allow academics, professionals, and others to pursue joint efforts at reaching "some results of value for practical guidance and life." Sidgwick hoped that members might discuss such questions as when, if ever, public officials might be justified in lying or in breaking promises, whether scientists could legitimately inflict suffering on animals for research purposes, when nations might have just cause in going to war, and a score of other issues of ethics in public and private life still debated a century later.
This valuable reissue returns Practical Ethics to its rightful place in Sidgwick's oeuvre. Noted ethicist Sissela Bok provides a superb Introduction, ranging over the course of Sidgwick's life and career and underscoring the relevance of Practical Ethics to contemporary debate. She writes: "Practical Ethics, the last book that Henry Sidgwick published before his death in 1900, contains the distillation of a lifetime of reflectionon ethics and on what it would take for ethical debate to be 'really of use in the solution of practical questions.'" This rich, engaging work is essential reading for all concerned with the relationship between ethical theory and. practice, and with the questions that have driven the study of professional ethics in recent years.

Does human well-being consist in pleasure, the satisfaction of desires, or some set of goods such as knowledge, friendship, and accomplishment? Does being moral contribute to well-being, and is there a conflict between people's self-interest and the moral demands on them? Are the values of well-being and of morality measurable? Are such values objective? What is the relation between such values and the natural world? And how much can philosophical theory help us in our answers to these and similar questions? Issues such as these provide the focus for much of the work of James Griffin, White's Professor of Moral Philosophy at Oxford, in whose honour Well-Being and Morality has been prepared. They are also among the main topics of these fourteen new essays by an international array of leading philosophers. Professor Griffin himself provides a further discussion of central themes in his thought, specially written in response to contributions to this volume.

In the wake of massive injustice, how can justice be achieved and peace restored? Is it possible to find a universal standard that will work for people of diverse and often conflicting religious, cultural, and philosophical backgrounds? In Just and Unjust Peace, Daniel Philpott offers an innovative and hopeful response to these questions. He challenges the approach to peace-building that dominates the United Nations, western governments, and the human rights community. While he shares their commitments to human rights and democracy, Philpott argues that these values alone cannot redress the wounds caused by war, genocide, and dictatorship. Both justice and the effective restoration of political order call for a more holistic, restorative approach. Philpott answers that call by proposing a form of political reconciliation that is deeply rooted in three religious traditions--Christianity, Islam, and Judaism--as well as the restorative justice movement. These traditions offer the fullest expressions of the core concepts of justice, mercy, and peace.By adapting these ancient concepts to modern constitutional democracy and international norms, Philpott crafts an ethic that has widespread appeal and offers real hope for the restoration of justice in fractured communities. From the roots of these traditions, Philpott develops six practices--building just institutions and relations between states, acknowledgment, reparations, restorative punishment, apology and, most important, forgiveness--which he then applies to real cases, identifying how each practice redresses a unique set of wounds. Focusing on places as varied as Bosnia, Iraq, South Africa, Germany, Sierra Leone, Timor-Leste, Chile and many others--and drawing upon the actual experience of victims and perpetrators--Just and Unjust Peace offers a fresh approach to the age-old problem of restoring justice in the aftermath of widespread injustice.

A compilation of essays dealing with ethnic challenges to the modern nation state and to modernity itself, on philosophical, political and social levels. These issues are examined theoretically and in a number of case studies encompassing three types of states: industrialized, liberal states in Western Europe, settler states in American, Africa and the Middle East, and post colonial states in Asia and Africa. Contributors come from leading universities in Israel, Europe and North America and several academic disciplines.

Spinoza is among the most controversial and asymmetrical thinkers in the tradition and history of modern European philosophy. Since the 17th century, his work has aroused some of the fiercest and most intense polemics in the discipline. From his expulsion from the synagogue and onwards, Spinoza has never ceased to embody the secular, heretical and self-loathing Jew. Ivan Segre, a philosopher and celebrated scholar of the Talmud, discloses the conservative underpinnings that have animated Spinoza's numerable critics and antagonists. Through a close reading of Leo Strauss and several contemporary Jewish thinkers, such as Jean-Claude Milner and Benny Levy (Sartre's last secretary), Spinoza: the Ethics of an Outlaw aptly delineates the common cause of Spinoza's contemporary censors: an explicit hatred of reason and its emancipatory potential. Spinoza's radical heresy lies in his rejection of any and all blind adherence to Biblical Law, and in his plea for the freedom and autonomy of thought. Segre reclaims Spinoza as a faithful interpreter of the revolutionary potential contained within the Old Testament.

New research into human and animal consciousness, a heightened awareness of the methods and consequences of intensive farming, and modern concerns about animal welfare and ecology are among the factors that have made our relationship to animals an area of burning interest in contemporary philosophy. Utilizing methods inspired by Ludwig Wittgenstein, the contributors to this volume explore this area in a variety of ways. Topics discussed include: scientific vs. non-scientific ways of describing human and animal behaviour; the ethics of eating particular animal species; human nature, emotions, and instinctive reactions; responses of wonder towards the natural world; the moral relevance of literature; the concept of dignity; and the question whether non-human animals can use language. This book will be of great value to anyone interested in philosophical and interdisciplinary issues concerning language, ethics and humanity's relation to animals and the natural world.

By sending a few hundred dollars to a group like UNICEF, any well-off person can ensure that fewer poor children die, and that more live reasonably long, worthwhile lives. But even when knowing this, almost all of us send nothing and, among the contributors, most send precious little. What's the moral status of this behavior? To such common cases of letting die, our untutored response is that, while it's not very good, neither is the conduct wrong. How can we best explain this lenient intuitive assessment? In this hard-hitting new book, philosopher Peter Unger argues that, all too often, our moral intuitions about cases are generated not by the basic moral values we hold, but by psychological dispositions that prevent us from reacting in accord with our deep moral commitments. Through a detailed look at how these disorienting tendencies operate, Unger reveals that, on the good morality we already accept, our fatally unhelpful behavior is monstrously wrong. Confronting us with both arresting facts and easily followed instructions for lessening the suffering of youngsters in mortal danger, Living High and Letting Die can help us live the morally decent lives that agree with our wonderfully deep, and deeply wonderful, true moral values.

This book argues against the common view that there are no essential differences between Plato and the Neoplatonist philosopher, Plotinus, on the issues of mysticism, epistemology, and ethics. Beginning by examining the ways in which Plato and Plotinus claim that it is possible to have an ultimate experience that answers the most significant philosophical questions, David J. Yount provides an extended analysis of why we should interpret both philosophers as mystics. The book then moves on to demonstrate that both philosophers share a belief in non-discursive knowledge and the methods to attain it, including dialectic and recollection, and shows that they do not essentially differ on any significant views on ethics. Making extensive use of primary and secondary sources, Plato and Plotinus on Mysticism, Epistemology and Ethics shows the similarities between the thought of these two philosophers on a variety of philosophical questions, such as meditation, divination, wisdom, knowledge, truth, happiness and love.

Christopher Janaway presents a full commentary on Nietzsche's most studied work, On the Genealogy of Morality, and combines close reading of key passages with an overview of Nietzsche's wider aims. Arguing that Nietzsche's goal is to pursue psychological and historical truths concerning the origins of modern moral values, Beyond Selflessness differs from other books on Nietzsche in that it emphasizes the significance of his rhetorical methods as an instrument of persuasion. Nietzsche's outlook is broadly naturalist, but he is critical of typical scientific and philosophical methods for their advocacy of impersonality and suppression of the affects. In contrast to his opponents, Schopenhauer and Paul Ree, who both account for morality in terms of selflessness, Nietzsche believes that our allegiance to a post-Christian morality that centres around selflessness, compassion, guilt, and denial of the instincts is not primarily rational but affective: underlying feelings, often ambivalent and poorly grasped in conscious thought, explain our moral beliefs. The Genealogy is designed to detach the reader from his or her allegiance to morality and prepare for the possibility of new values. In addition to examining how Nietzsche's "perspectivism" holds that one can best understand a topic such as morality through allowing as many of one's feelings as possible to speak about it, Janaway shows that Nietzsche seeks to enable us to "feel differently": his provocation of the reader's affects helps us grasp the affective origins of our attitudes and prepare the way for healthier values such as the affirmation of life (as tested by the thought of eternal return) and the self-satisfaction to be attainedby "giving style to one's character."

John Bricke presents a philosophical study of the theory of mind and morality that David Hume developed in his Treatise of Human Nature and other writings. The chief elements in this theory of mind are Hume's accounts of reasons for action and of the complex interrelations of desire, volition, and affection. On this basis, Professor Bricke lays out and defends Hume's thoroughgoing non-cognitivist theory of moral judgement, and shows that cognitivist and standard sentimentalist readings of Hume are unsatisfactory, as are the usual interpretations of his views on the connections between morality, justice, and convention. Hume rejects any conception of moral beliefs and moral truths. He understands morality in terms of distinctive desires and other sentiments that arise through the correction of sympathy. He represents moral desires as prior to the other moral sentiments. Morality, he holds, in part presupposes conventions for mutual interest; it is not, however, itself a matter of convention. Mind and Morality demonstrates that Hume's sophisticated moral conativism sets a challenge that recent cognitivist theories of moral judgement cannot readily meet, and his subtle treatment of the interplay of morality and convention suggests significant limitations to recent conventionalist and contractarian accounts of morality's content.

In this thought-provoking study, Jack Russell Weinstein suggests the foundations of liberalism can be found in the writings of Adam Smith (1723-1790), a pioneer of modern economic theory and a major figure in the Scottish Enlightenment. While offering an interpretive methodology for approaching Smith's two major works, The Theory of Moral Sentiments and The Wealth of Nations, Weinstein argues against the libertarian interpretation of Smith, emphasizing his philosophies of education and rationality. Weinstein also demonstrates that Smith should be recognized for a prescient theory of pluralism that prefigures current theories of cultural diversity.

This pioneering examination of the nuclear threat, written for both the interested general reader and the student of war and peace issues, blends broad philosophical/theoretical themes and themes in the peace and conflict literature with the results of the authors' extensive survey research in the United States and Europe. While never losing sight of the threat of a nuclear holocaust, authors Lisl Goodman and Lee Ann Hoff argue that it is possible to turn the tide of aggression and destruction and, in the process, create an utterly different human society. They challenge the myth of innate aggression which sees war as inevitable; present a critical examination of the psychodynamic, sociocultural, and political-economic factors which have led to current inaction in the face of the nuclear threat; and investigate the link between the insecurities of life in the nuclear age and the increasing rate of youth suicide, apathy, disengagement, and the general devaluation of life without a secure future.

Divided into three parts, the book begins by analyzing how we got to where we are today. The authors show that clinging to the outdated notion that aggression and violence are inevitable responses to human conflict has led to an abdication of individual responsibility and placed the fate of the planet in the hands of very few individuals. This abdication has led to feelings of powerlessness and desensitization as well as to a denial of the nuclear threat, a syndrome the authors label omnicidal. In Part Two, the authors present findings from several studies conducted in North America and Europe which reveal the pervasiveness of fear, denial, a fatalistic world view, and omnicidal personality patterns. The final section presents social change strategies that can be adopted at the individual, family, and sociopolitical levels to promote peace. The authors place particular emphasis on the pivotal role of childrearing and education patterns that emphasize cooperative behavior and critical thinking about global issues.