![]() |
![]() |
Your cart is empty |
||
Books > Philosophy > Topics in philosophy > Ethics & moral philosophy
Consisting of an assortment of landmark essays and the best in contemporary scholarship, this anthology delves deeply into the most pressing environmental issues of our times. Articles included in this anthology are distinguished for their relevance to real-life policy making and for their ability to promote rich and lively discussion about controversial matters. In addition, the editors' careful organization of the topics and illuminating section previews keep students focused on the most essential points of current environmental debates.
The second edition of Media ethics in the South African context explores the dynamic and potentially explosive field of media ethics from a South African perspective. Grounded in ethical theory, the public philosophies of communication and media performance norms, this text provides guidelines for the individual's ethical decision making; for both media practitioners and media groups. Cutting edge analysis of the South African normative context under the previous and present political dispensations makes this book essential reading for media policy formulators and students alike. Changes in the normative context are presenting the South African news media in particular, with new challenges.
This revolutionary book empowers its readers by exploring enduring, challenging, and timely philosophical issues in new essays written by expert women philosophers. The book will inspire and entice these philosophers' younger counterparts, curious readers of all genders, and all who support equity in philosophy. If asked to envision a philosopher, people might imagine a bearded man, probably Greek, perhaps in a toga, pontificating about abstract ideas. Or they might think of that same man in the Enlightenment, gripping a quill pen and pouring universal truths onto a page. They may even call to mind a much more modern man, wearing a black sweater and smoking a cigarette in a Paris cafe, expressing existential angst in a new novel or essay. What people are unlikely to picture, though, is a woman. Women have historically been excluded from the discipline of philosophy and remain largely marginalized in contemporary textbooks and anthologies. The under-representation of women in secondary and post-secondary curricula makes it harder for young women to see themselves as future philosophers. In fact, it makes it harder for all people to engage the valuable contributions that women have made and continue to make to intellectual thought. While some progress has been made in building a more inclusive world of philosophy, especially in the last fifty years, important work remains to be done. Philosophy for Girls helps correct the pervasive and problematic omission of women from philosophy. Divided into four sections that connect to major, primary fields in philosophy (metaphysics, epistemology, social and political philosophy, and ethics), this anthology is unique: chapters are all written by women, and each chapter opens with an anecdote about a girl or woman from mythology, history, art, literature, or science to introduce chapter topics. Further, nearly all primary and secondary sources used in the chapters are written by women philosophers. The book is written in a rigorous, academic spirit but in lively and engaging prose, making serious philosophical insights accessible to readers who are new to philosophy. This book appeals to a wide audience. Individual readers will find value in these pages-especially girls and women ages 16-24, as well as university and high school educators and students who want a change from standard anthologies that include few or no women. The book's contributors both represent and map the diverse landscape of philosophy, highlighting its engagement with themes of gender and equity. In doing so, they encourage philosophers current and future philosophers to explore new territory and further develop the topography of the field. Philosophy for Girls is a rigorous yet accessible entry-point to philosophical contemplation designed to inspire a new generation of philosophers.
This collection of eleven new essays contains the latest developments in analytic feminist philosophy on the topic of pornography. While honoring early feminist work on the subject, it aims to go beyond speech act analyses of pornography and to reshape the philosophical discourse that surrounds pornography. A rich feminist literature on pornography has emerged since the 1980s, with Rae Langton's speech act theoretic analysis dominating specifically Anglo-American feminist philosophy on pornography. Despite the predominance of this literature, there remain considerable disagreements and precious little agreement on many key issues: What is pornography? Does pornography (as Langton argues) constitute women's subordination and silencing? Does it objectify women in harmful ways? Is pornography authoritative enough to enact women's subordination? Is speech act theory the best way to approach pornography? Given the deep divergences over these questions, the first goal of this collection is to take stock of extant debates in order to clarify key feminist conceptual and political commitments regarding pornography. This volume further aims to go beyond the prevalent speech-acts approach to pornography, and to highlight novel issues in feminist pornography-debates, including the aesthetics of pornography, trans* identities and racialization in pornography, and putatively feminist pornography.
In the United States roughly 2 million people are incarcerated;
billions of animals are held captive (and then killed) in the food
industry every year; hundreds of thousands of animals are kept in
laboratories; thousands are in zoos and aquaria; millions of "pets"
are captive in our homes. Surprisingly, despite the rich ethical
questions it raises, very little philosophical attention has been
paid to questions raised by captivity.
Does a consumer who bought a shirt made in another nation bear any moral responsibility when the women who sewed that shirt die in a factory fire or in the collapse of the building? Many have asserted, without explanation, that because markets cause harms to distant others, consumers bear moral responsibility for those harms. But traditional moral analysis of individual decisions is unable to sustain this argument. Distant Harms, Distant Markets presents a careful analysis of moral complicity in markets, employing resources from sociology, Christian history, feminism, legal theory, and Catholic moral theology today. Because of its individualistic methods, mainstream economics as a discipline is not equipped to understand the causality entailed in the long chains of social relationships that make up the market. Critical realist sociology, however, has addressed the character and functioning of social structures, an analysis that can helpfully be applied to the market. The True Wealth of Nations research project of the Institute for Advanced Catholic Studies brought together an international group of sociologists, economists, moral theologians, and others to describe these causal relationships and articulate how Catholic social thought can use these insights to more fully address issues of economic ethics in the twenty-first century. The result was this interdisciplinary volume of essays, which explores the causal and moral responsibilities that consumers bear for the harms that markets cause to distant others.
Kai Draper begins his book with the assumption that individual rights exist and stand as moral obstacles to the pursuit of national no less than personal interests. That assumption might seem to demand a pacifist rejection of war, for any sustained war effort requires military operations that predictably kill many noncombatants as "collateral damage," and presumably at least most noncombatants have a right not to be killed. Yet Draper ends with the conclusion that sometimes recourse to war is justified. In making his argument, he relies on the insights of John Locke to develop and defend a framework of rights to serve as the foundation for a new just war theory. Notably missing from that framework is any doctrine of double effect. Most just war theorists rely on that doctrine to justify injuring and killing innocent bystanders, but Draper argues that various prominent formulations of the doctrine are either untenable or irrelevant to the ethics of war. Ultimately he offers a single principle for assessing whether recourse to war would be justified. He also explores in some detail the issue of how to distinguish discriminate from indiscriminate violence in war, arguing that some but not all noncombatants are liable to attack.
Our modern-day word for sympathy is derived from the classical Greek word for fellow-feeling. Both in the vernacular as well as in the various specialist literatures within philosophy, psychology, neuroscience, economics, and history, "sympathy" and "empathy" are routinely conflated. In practice, they are also used to refer to a large variety of complex, all-too-familiar social phenomena: for example, simultaneous yawning or the giggles. Moreover, sympathy is invoked to address problems associated with social dislocation and political conflict. It is, then, turned into a vehicle toward generating harmony among otherwise isolated individuals and a way for them to fit into a larger whole, be it society and the universe. This volume offers a historical overview of some of the most significant attempts to come to grips with sympathy in Western thought from Plato to experimental economics. The contributors are leading scholars in philosophy, classics, history, economics, comparative literature, and political science. Sympathy is originally developed in Stoic thought. It was also taken up by Plotinus and Galen. There are original contributed chapters on each of these historical moments. Use for the concept was re-discovered in the Renaissance. And the volume has original chapters not just on medical and philosophical Renaissance interest in sympathy, but also on the role of antipathy in Shakespeare and the significance of sympathy in music theory. Inspired by the influence of Spinoza, sympathy plays a central role in the great moral psychologies of, say, Anne Conway, Leibniz, Hume, Adam Smith, and Sophie De Grouchy during the eighteenth century. The volume should offers an introduction to key background concept that is often overlooked in many of the most important philosophies of the early modern period. About a century ago the idea of Einfuhlung (or empathy) was developed in theoretical philosophy, then applied in practical philosophy and the newly emerging scientific disciplines of psychology. Moreover, recent economists have rediscovered sympathy in part experimentally and, in part by careful re-reading of the classics of the field.
David Boonin presents a new account of the non-identity problem: a puzzle about our obligations to people who do not yet exist. Our actions sometimes have an effect not only on the quality of life that people will enjoy in the future, but on which particular people will exist in the future to enjoy it. In cases where this is so, the combination of certain assumptions that most people seem to accept can yield conclusions that most people seem to reject. The non-identity problem has important implications both for ethical theory and for a number of topics in applied ethics, including controversial issues in bioethics, environmental ethics and disability ethics. It has been the subject of a great deal of discussion for nearly four decades, but this is the first book-length study devoted exclusively to its examination. Boonin begins by explaining what the problem is, why the problem matters, and what criteria a solution to the problem must satisfy in order to count as a successful one. He then provides a critical survey of the solutions to the problem that have thus far been proposed in the sizeable literature that the problem has generated and concludes by developing and defending an unorthodox alternative solution, one that differs fundamentally from virtually every other available approach.
This volume brings together essays - three of them previously unpublished - on the epistemology, ethics, and politics of memory by the late feminist philosopher Sue Campbell. The essays in Part I diagnose contemporary skepticism about personal memory, and develop an account of good remembering that is better suited to contemporary (reconstructive) theories of memory. Campbell argues that being faithful to the past requires both accuracy and integrity, and is both an epistemic and an ethical achievement. The essays in Part II focus on the activities and practices through which we explore and negotiate the shared significance of our different recollections of the past, and the importance of sharing memory for constituting our identities. Views about self, identity, relation, and responsibility (all influenced by traditions in feminist philosophy) are examined through the lens of Campbell's relational conception of memory. She argues that remaining faithful to our past sometimes requires us to re-negotiate the boundaries between ourselves and the collectives to which we belong. In Part III, Campbell uses her relational theory of memory to address the challenges of sharing memory and renewing selves in contexts that are fractured by moral and political difference, especially those arising from a history of injustice and oppression. She engages in detail Canada's Indian Residential Schools Truth and Reconciliation Commission, where survivor memories have the potential to illuminate the significance of the past for a shared future. The study of memory brings together philosophers, psychologists, historians, anthropologists, legal theorists, and political theorists and activists. Sue Campbell demonstrates a singular ability to put these many different areas of scholarship and activism into fruitful conversation with each other while also adding an original and powerful voice to the discussion.
It is far more common nowadays to see references to the afterlife-angels playing harps, demons brandishing pitchforks, God among heavenly clouds, the fires of hell-in New Yorker cartoons than in serious Christian theological scholarship. Speculation about death and the afterlife seems to embarrass many of America's less-evangelical theologians, yet as Greg Garrett shows, popular culture in the U.S. has found rich ground for creative expression in what happens to us after death. The rock music of U2, Iron Maiden, and AC/DC, the storylines of TV's Lost, South Park, and Fantasy Island, the implied theology in films such as The Corpse Bride, Ghost, and Field of Dreams, the heavenly half-light of Thomas Kinkade's popular paintings, and the supernatural landscape of ghosts, shades, and waystations in the Harry Potter novels all speak to our hopes and fears about what comes next. Greg Garrett scrutinizes a wide array of cultural productions to find the stories being told about what awaits us: depictions of heaven, hell, and purgatory, angels, demons, and ghosts, all offering at least an implied theology of life after death. The citizens of the imagined afterlife, whether in heaven, hell, on earth, or in between, are telling us about what awaits us, at once shaping and reflecting our deeply held-if sometimes inchoate-beliefs. They teach us about reward and punishment, about divine assistance in this life, about diabolical interference, and about other ways of being after we die. Especially fascinating are the frequent appearances of purgatory, limbo, and other in-between places. Such beliefs are dismissed by the Protestant majority, and quietly disparaged even by many Catholics. Yet many pop culture narratives represent departed souls who must earn some sort of redemption, complete some unfinished task, before passing on. Garrett's incisive analysis sheds new light on what popular culture can tell us about the startlingly sharp divide between what modern people profess to believe and what they truly hope to find after death.
There is growing evidence from the science of human behavior that our everyday, folk understanding of ourselves as conscious, rational, responsible agents may be radically mistaken. The science, some argue, recommends a view of conscious agency as merely epiphenomenal: an impotent accompaniment to the whirring unconscious machinery (the inner zombie) that prepares, decides and causes our behavior. The new essays in this volume display and explore this radical claim, revisiting the folk concept of the responsible agent after abandoning the image of a central executive, and "decomposing" the notion of the conscious will into multiple interlocking aspects and functions. Part 1 of this volume provides an overview of the scientific research that has been taken to support "the zombie challenge." In part 2, contributors explore the phenomenology of agency and what it is like to be the author of one's own actions. Part 3 then explores different strategies for using the science and phenomenology of human agency to respond to the zombie challenge. Questions explored include: what distinguishes automatic behavior and voluntary action? What, if anything, does consciousness contribute to the voluntary control of behavior? What does the science of human behavior really tell us about the nature of self-control?
As immigration, technological change, and globalization reshape the world, journalism plays a central role in shaping how the public adjusts to moral and material upheaval. This, in turn, raises the ethical stakes for journalism. In short, reporters have a choice in the way they tell these stories: They can spread panic and discontent or encourage adaptation and reconciliation. In Murder in Our Midst, Romayne Smith Fullerton and Maggie Jones Patterson compare journalists' crime coverage decisions in North America and select Western European countries as a key to examine culturally constructed concepts like privacy, public, public right to know, and justice. Drawing from sample news coverage, national and international codes of ethics and style guides, and close to 200 personal interviews with news professionals and academics, they highlight differences in crime news reporting practices and emphasize how crime stories both reflect and shape each nation's attitudes in unique ways. Murder in Our Midst is both an empirical look at varying journalistic styles and an ethical evaluation of whether particular story-telling approaches do or do not serve the practice of democracy.
Human beings act together in characteristic ways, and these forms
of shared activity matter to us a great deal. Think of friendship
and love, singing duets, dancing together, and the joys of
conversation. And think about the usefulness of conversation and
how we frequently manage to work together to achieve complex goals,
from building buildings to putting on plays to establishing
important results in the sciences.
Bringing together ecology, evolutionary moral psychology, and environmental ethics, J. Baird Callicott counters the narrative of blame and despair that prevails in contemporary discussions of climate ethics and offers a fresh, more optimistic approach. Whereas other environmental ethicists limit themselves to what Callicott calls Rational Individualism in discussing the problem of climate change only to conclude that, essentially, there is little hope that anything will be done in the face of its "perfect moral storm" (in Stephen Gardiner's words), Callicott refuses to accept this view. Instead, he encourages us to look to the Earth itself, and consider the crisis on grander spatial and temporal scales, as we have failed to in the past. Callicott supports this theory by exploring and enhancing Aldo Leopold's faint sketch of an Earth ethic in "Some Fundamentals of Conservation in the Southwest," a seldom-studied text from the early days of environmental ethics that was written in 1923 but not published until 1979 after the environmental movement gathered strength.
Science is the most reliable means available for understanding the world around us and our place in it. But, since science draws conclusions based on limited empirical evidence, there is always a chance that a scientific inference will be incorrect. That chance, known as inductive risk, is endemic to science. Though inductive risk has always been present in scientific practice, the role of values in responding to it has only recently gained extensive attention from philosophers, scientists, and policy-makers. Exploring Inductive Risk brings together a set of eleven concrete case studies with the goals of illustrating the pervasiveness of inductive risk, assisting scientists and policymakers in responding to it, and moving theoretical discussions of this phenomenon forward. The case studies range over a wide variety of scientific contexts, including the drug approval process, high energy particle physics, dual-use research, climate science, research on gender disparities in employment, clinical trials, and toxicology. The book includes an introductory chapter that provides a conceptual introduction to the topic and a historical overview of the argument that values have an important role to play in responding to inductive risk, as well as a concluding chapter that synthesizes important themes from the book and maps out issues in need of further consideration.
For over thirty years Susan Wolf has been writing about moral and nonmoral values and the relation between them. This volume collects Wolf's most important essays on the topics of morality, love, and meaning, ranging from her classic essay "Moral Saints" to her most recent "The Importance of Love." Wolf's essays warn us against the common tendency to classify values in terms of a dichotomy that contrasts the personal, self-interested, or egoistic with the impersonal, altruistic or moral. On Wolf's view, this tendency ignores or distorts the significance of such values as love, beauty, and truth, and neglects the importance of meaningfulness as a dimension of the good life. These essays show us how a self-conscious recognition of the variety of values leads to new understandings of the point, the content, and the limits of morality and to new ways of thinking about happiness and well-being.
Business ethics raises many important philosophical issues. A first
set of issues concerns the methodology of business ethics. What is
the role of ethical theory in business ethics? To what extent, if
at all, can thinking in business ethics be enhanced by philosophy,
so as to provide real moral guidance? Another set of issues
involves questions regarding markets, capitalism, and economic
justice. There are related concerns about the nature of business
organizations and the responsibilities they have to their members,
owners, and society.
The main task of Tolerance is to reorient discussions in democratic theory so as better to theorize how tolerance can operate as an active force in the context of deep pluralism. The objective is to develop a theory of active tolerance attentive to the many different ways in which societies can become tolerant, and to discuss what might get lost, conceptually as well as politically, if we don't pay attention to how active tolerance subsists within other practices of tolerance. Tolerance exceeds existing accounts, I argue, not because it cannot be domesticated for the purposes of either restraint or benevolence, but because this domestication does not preclude the possibility of another, more active tolerance. Tolerance develops this argument by mobilizing what I call a "sensorial orientation to politics." While a sensorial orientation does not refute the role of reason in democratic politics, it differs from its intellectualist counterpart by arguing that practices of reason-giving include ways of sensing the world, insisting that reason is always-already sensorial. A sensorial orientation, in other words, focuses on the embodied conditions of reasoning, which it takes to be neither completely synergistic nor immediately present, but reliant on representations, images, and memories, which situate sensory input within historically defined regimes of discourse and sensation, and which assume that sentient beings experience the world through both thought and action, mind and body. Theorists discussed in the book include Seneca, Spinoza, Nietzsche, Marcuse, and Merleau-Ponty, together with Descartes, Locke, Kant, Mill, Rawls, Forst, Scanlon, Taylor, Brown, and Connolly. Tolerance draws on a critical consideration of these thinkers in order to shed new light on the role of tolerance in both contemporary democratic theory and contemporary public discourse. The aim is to show how tolerance once again can become a practice of empowerment and pluralization.
In the last fifteen years, there has been significant interest in studying the brain structures involved in moral judgments using novel techniques from neuroscience such as functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). Many people, including a number of philosophers, believe that results from neuroscience have the potential to settle seemingly intractable debates concerning the nature, practice, and reliability of moral judgments. This has led to a flurry of scientific and philosophical activities, resulting in the rapid growth of the new field of moral neuroscience. There is now a vast array of ongoing scientific research devoted towards understanding the neural correlates of moral judgments, accompanied by a large philosophical literature aimed at interpreting and examining the methodology and the results of this research. This is the first volume to take stock of fifteen years of research of this fast-growing field of moral neuroscience and to recommend future directions for research. It features the most up-to-date research in this area, and it presents a wide variety of perspectives on this topic.
In addition to thin concepts like the good, the bad and the ugly, our evaluative thought and talk appeals to thick concepts like the lewd and the rude, the selfish and the cruel, the courageous and the kind - concepts that somehow combine evaluation and non-evaluative description. Thick concepts are almost universally assumed to be inherently evaluative in content, and many philosophers claimed them to have deep and distinctive significance in ethics and metaethics. In this first book-length treatment of thick concepts, Pekka Vayrynen argues that all this is mistaken. Through detailed attention to the language of thick concepts, he defends a novel theory on which the relationship between thick words and evaluation is best explained by general conversational and pragmatic norms. Drawing on general principles in philosophy of language, he argues that many prominent features of thick words and concepts can be explained by general factors that have nothing in particular to do with being evaluative. If evaluation is not essential to the sort of thinking we do with thick concepts, claims for the deep and distinctive significance of the thick are undermined. The Lewd, the Rude and the Nasty is a fresh and innovative treatment of an important topic in moral philosophy and sets a new agenda for future work. It will be essential reading to anyone interested in the analysis and the broader philosophical significance of evaluative and normative language. "Vayrynen presents an extremely well researched, highly innovative, and yet very careful and highly polished treatment of an extremely hot area in philosophy. The book is tightly argued but engagingly written. I would hold it up as a model philosophy monograph. There is no doubt in my mind whatsoever that this book will be widely influential and admired. Indeed, it could easily become a classic." - Brad Hooker, University of Reading "For the past few decades thick concepts have received much attention in metaethical discussions, but Vayrynen's book is the first comprehensive treatment of the subject. Vayrynen skillfully uses tools from philosophy of language in order to sharpen and advance the discussion of thick concepts. The book will be essential reading not only to anyone interested in the specific topic of thick concepts but also to anyone who is concerned with the analysis of normative language generally. It is a very good paradigm of linguistically informed metaethics." - Matti Eklund, Cornell University
After centuries of neglect, the ethics of food are back with a vengeance. Justice for food workers and small farmers has joined the rising tide of concern over the impact of industrial agriculture on food animals and the broader environment, all while a global epidemic of obesity-related diseases threatens to overwhelm modern health systems. An emerging worldwide social movement has turned to local and organic foods, and struggles to exploit widespread concern over the next wave of genetic engineering or nanotechnologies applied to food. Paul B. Thompson's book applies the rigor of philosophy to key topics in the first comprehensive study explore interconnections hidden deep within this welter of issues. Bringing more than thirty years of experience working closely with farmers, agricultural researchers and food system activists to the topic, he explores the eclipse of food ethics during the rise of nutritional science, and examines the reasons for its sudden re-emergence in the era of diet-based disease. Thompson discusses social injustice in the food systems of developed economies and shows how we have missed the key insights for understanding food ethics in the developing world. His discussions of animal production and the environmental impact of agriculture breaks new ground where most philosophers would least expect it. By emphasizing the integration of these issues, Thompson not only brings a comprehensive philosophical approach to moral issues in the production, processing, distribution, and consumption of food - he introduces a fresh way to think about practical ethics that will have implications in other areas of applied philosophy.
In the last decade, science in the United States has become
increasingly politicized, as government officials have been accused
of manipulating, distorting, subverting, and censoring science for
ideological purposes. Political gamesmanship has played a major
role in many different areas of science, including the debate over
global climate change, embryonic stem cell research, government
funding of research, the FDA's approval process, military
intelligence related to Iraq, research with human subjects, and the
teaching of evolution in public schools.
Terry Pinkard draws on Hegel's central works as well as his lectures on aesthetics, the history of philosophy, and the philosophy of history in this deeply informed and original exploration of Hegel's naturalism. As Pinkard explains, Hegel's version of naturalism was in fact drawn from Aristotelian naturalism: Hegel fused Aristotle's conception of nature with his insistence that the origin and development of philosophy has empirical physics as its presupposition. As a result, Hegel found that, although modern nature must be understood as a whole to be non-purposive, there is nonetheless a place for Aristotelian purposiveness within such nature. Such a naturalism provides the framework for explaining how we are both natural organisms and also practically minded (self-determining, rationally responsive, reason-giving) beings. In arguing for this point, Hegel shows that the kind of self-division which is characteristic of human agency also provides human agents with an updated version of an Aristotelian final end of life. Pinkard treats this conception of the final end of "being at one with oneself" in two parts. The first part focuses on Hegel's account of agency in naturalist terms and how it is that agency requires such a self-division, while the second part explores how Hegel thinks a historical narration is essential for understanding what this kind of self-division has come to require of itself. In making his case, Hegel argues that both the antinomies of philosophical thought and the essential fragmentation of modern life are all not to be understood as overcome in a higher order unity in the "State." On the contrary, Hegel demonstrates that modern institutions do not resolve such tensions any more than a comprehensive philosophical account can resolve them theoretically. The job of modern practices and institutions (and at a reflective level the task of modern philosophy) is to help us understand and live with precisely the unresolvability of these oppositions. Therefore, Pinkard explains, Hegel is not the totality theorist he has been taken to be, nor is he an "identity thinker," a la Adorno. He is an anti-totality thinker. |
![]() ![]() You may like...
Protecting Children in the Age of…
Radha Jagannathan, Michael J Camasso
Hardcover
R2,127
Discovery Miles 21 270
Into A Raging Sea - Great South African…
Tony Weaver, Andrew Ingram
Paperback
![]() R330 Discovery Miles 3 300
Changing Brains - Essays on…
Aaron J. Newman, Giordana Grossi
Paperback
R1,439
Discovery Miles 14 390
Introduction To IFRS - Accounting…
Z. Koppeschaar, J. Rossouw, …
Paperback
Measures for Clinical Practice and…
Kevin Corcoran, Joel Fischer
Hardcover
R3,429
Discovery Miles 34 290
|