This book is an autobiographical meditation on the way in which the world's population has been transformed into a society of refugees and emigres seeking -indeed, demanding- an alternative way of political belonging. Focusing on the interregnum we have precariously occupied since the end of World War II-and especially after 9/11- it constitutes a series of genealogical chapters that trace the author's journey from his experience as a prisoner of war in Nazi Germany to the horrific fire-bombing of Dresden in February 1945. In doing so, it explores his search for an intellectual vocation adequate to the dislocating epiphany he experienced in bearing witness to these traumatising events. Having subsequently lost faith in the logic of belonging perpetuated by the nation-state, Spanos charts how he began to look in the rubble of that zero zone for an alternative way of belonging: one in which the old binary -whose imperative was based on the violence of the Friend/enemy opposition- was replaced by a paradoxical loving strife that enriched rather than negated the potential of each side. The chapters in this book trace this errant vocational itinerary, from the author's early undergraduate engagement with Kierkegaard and Heidegger to Cornel West, moving from that disclosive occasion in the zero zone to this present moment.

Responsibility, Complexity, and Abortion: Toward a New Image of Ethical Thought draws from feminist theory, post-structuralist theory, and complexity theory to develop a new set of ethical concepts for broaching the thinking challenges that attend the experience of unwanted pregnancy. Author Karen Houle does not only argue for these concepts; she enacts a method for working with them, a method that brackets the tendency to take positions and to think that position-taking is what ethical analysis involves. This book thus provides concrete evidence of a theoretically-grounded, compassionate way that people in all walks of life, academic or otherwise, could come to a better understanding of, and more complex relationship to, difficult ethical issues. On the one hand, this is a meta-ethical book about how people can conceive and communicate moral ideas in ways that are more constructive than position-taking; on the other hand, it is also a book about abortion. It testifies from a first-person female perspective about the life-long complexity that attends fertility, sexuality and reproduction. But it does not do so in order to ratify abortion as a woman's issue or a private matter or as feminist work. Rather, its aim is to excavate the ethical richness of the situation of unwanted pregnancy showing that it connects to everyone, affects everyone, and thus gives everyone something unique and new to think.

In this interdisciplinary volume, Heinze and a diverse group of senior scholars explore global ethics through sustainability, justice, and security. They address topics within these categories based on recent world events (BP oil spill, 'War on Terror', UN Climate Conference, for example) with an eye toward reconciling the interests of states and other global power-holders with those of individual human beings and global society as a whole.
Using a variety of techniques and approaches, including applied ethics, constructivist social science, normative political theory, and field research and narrative approaches, Justice, Sustainability, and Security not only enhances our knowledge of these issues, but it teases out their moral dimensions and offers prescriptions for how governments and global actors might craft their policies to better consider their effects on the global human condition. The volume thus seeks to illustrate the interplay between the 'theory' and 'practice' of global ethics.

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.

Science and the End of Ethics examines some of the most important positive and negative implications that science has for ethics. On the basis of strong scientific reasons for abandoning traditional notions of right and wrong, it endorses a new ethical approach that focuses on achieving some of the key practical goals shared by ethicists.

This book explores the economic institutions that determine the nature of animal lives as systematically exploited objects traded in a market economy. It examines human roles and choice in the system, including the economic logic of agriculture, experimentation, and animal ownership, and analyses the marginalization of ethical action in the economic system. Animals and the Economy demonstrates that individual consumers and farmers are often left with few truly animal-friendly choices. Ethical participants in the economy must either face down an array of institutional barriers, or exit mainstream markets entirely. This book argues that these issues are not necessary elements of a market system, and evaluates a number of policy changes that could improve the lives of animals in the context of a market economy.

This book brings together the debate concerning personal identity (in metaphysics) and central topics in biomedical ethics (conception of birth and death; autonomy, living wills and paternalism). Based on a metaphysical account of personal identity in the sense of persistence and conditions for human beings, conceptions for beginning of life, and death are developed. Based on a biographical account of personality, normative questions concerning autonomy, euthanasia, living wills and medical paternalism are dealt with. By these means the book shows that "personal identity" has different meanings which have to be distinguished so that human persistence and personality can be used to deal with central questions in biomedical ethics.

In Works Righteousness, Anna L. Peterson examines the place of practice in contemporary ethical theory. Peterson argues that rather than assuming that pre-established moral ideas guide action, ethicists should acknowledge and explore the relationship between ideas, actions, and results. Both an analysis of alternative models in which practice plays a stronger role and an argument for taking practice more seriously in broad questions of ethics as well as in concrete case studies, Works Righteousness contends that what we do generates and alters our values, just as often as expressed values motivate or guide the ways we act. Peterson here challenges prevailing philosophical and religious theories that ideas are what truly matter, underlining the value of attention to people's concrete experiences and highlighting the relevance of theoretical insights to contemporary social issues such as climate change, euthanasia, and hate speech. Through examinations of pragmatism, Marxism, and religious pacifism, all of which significantly highlight a practice-focused approach, Works Righteousness addresses the way social structures condition moral ideas and actions, the dangers of thinking about moral problems as polarized dilemmas, and the complex mutual shaping of ideas and actions.

While ethics has been an integral part of economics since the days of Adam Smith (if not Aristotle), many modern economists dismiss ethical concerns in favor of increasing formal mathematical and computational methods. But recent financial crises in the real world have reignited discussions of the importance of ethics to economics, including growing calls for a new approach to incorporating moral philosophy in economic theory, practice, and policy. Ironically, it is the ethics of virtue advocated by Aristotle and Adam Smith that may lead to the most promising way to developing an economics that emphasizes the virtues, character, and judgment of the agents it models. In Economics and the Virtues, editors Jennifer A. Baker and Mark D. White have brought together fifteen leading scholars in economics and philosophy to offer fresh perspectives on integrating virtue into economics. The first section covers five major thinkers and schools in the virtue tradition, tracing historical connections and suggesting new areas of cooperation. The second section applies the ethics of virtue to modern economic theory, delving into its current practices and methodology to suggest areas for integration with moral philosophy. Finally, the third section addresses specific topics such as markets, profits, and justice in the context of virtue and vice, offering valuable applications of virtue to economics. With insights that are novel as well as rooted in time-tested ethical thought, Economics and the Virtues will be of interest to economists, philosophers, and other scholars in the social sciences and humanities, as well as professionals and policymakers in the fields of economics and finance, and makes an invaluable contribution to the ongoing discussion over the role of ethics in economics.

This volume collects the best and most influential essays on knowledge, rationality and morality that Stephen Stich has published in the last 40 years. All of the essays are concerned, in one way or another, with the ways in which findings and theories in the cognitive sciences can contribute to, and sometimes reshape traditional philosophical conversations and debates. A central theme in the essays on epistemology and rationality is the philosophical significance of empirical work on human reasoning done by researchers in the "heuristics and biases" tradition, and by their critics in evolutionary psychology. In the essays on morality, a wide range of empirical work is explored, including studies of the psychological foundations of norms, work on the moral / conventional distinction, and empirical attempts to determine whether humans ever act on altruistic motives. Stich was one of the pioneers in the experimental philosophy movement, and work in experimental philosophy plays a prominent role in many of these essays. The volume includes a new introductory essay that offers an overview of the papers and traces the history of how they emerged.

This book presents a number of fundamentally challenging perspectives that have been brought to the fore by the national tests on religious education (RE) in Sweden. It particularly focuses on the content under the heading Ethics. It is common knowledge that many teachers find these parts difficult to handle within RE. Further, ethics is a field that addresses a range of moral and existential issues that are not easily treated. Many of these issues may be said to belong to the philosophical context, in which "eternal questions" are gathered and reflected upon. The first chapters highlight the concepts of ethical competence and critical thinking. In the following chapters the concept of ethical competence is analyzed with regard to teachers' objectives and to students' texts, respectively. These chapters pursue a more practice-related approach and highlight specific challenges identified from both teacher and student perspectives. Next, the book raises the issue of global responsibility. What kind of critical issues arise when handling such matters at school? Further, can contemporary moral philosophers contribute to such a discussion? In turn, the book discusses the role of statistical analyses with regard to national tests, while the closing chapters present international perspectives on the book's main themes and concluding remarks. The book's critical yet constructive approach to issues regarding assessment in ethics education makes a valuable contribution to an ongoing debate among researchers as well as to the everyday communication on testing in schools and classrooms. As such, it will appeal to scholars in ethics education and researchers in the field of assessment, as well as educators and teachers interested and engaged in the task of testing ethics in school contexts where curricular demands for valid and authoritative evaluation may provide important guidelines, but may also pose challenges of their own.

Situated at the intersection of animal studies and literary theory, this book explores the remarkable and subtly pervasive web of animal imagery, metaphors, and concepts in the work of the Jewish-Italian writer, chemist, and Holocaust survivor Primo Levi (1919-1987). Relatively unexamined by scholars, the complex and extensive animal imagery Levi employed in his literary works offers new insights into the aesthetical and ethical function of testimony, as well as an original perspective on contemporary debates surrounding human-animal relationships and posthumanism. The three main sections that compose the book mirror Levi's approach to non-human animals and animality: from an unquestionable bio-ethical origin ("Suffering"); through an investigation of the relationships between writing, technology, and animality ("Techne"); to a creative intellectual project in which literary animals both counterbalance the inevitable suffering of all creatures, and suggest a transformative image of interspecific community ("Creation").

This edited volume presents an overview of cutting-edge research areas within digital ethics as defined by the Digital Ethics Lab of the University of Oxford. It identifies new challenges and opportunities of influence in setting the research agenda in the field. The yearbook presents research on the following topics: conceptual metaphor theory, cybersecurity governance, cyber conflicts, anthropomorphism in AI, digital technologies for mental healthcare, data ethics in the asylum process, AI's legitimacy and democratic deficit, digital afterlife industry, automatic prayer bots, foresight analysis and the future of AI. This volume appeals to students, researchers and professionals.

Is life without parole the perfect compromise to the death penalty? Or is it as ethically fraught as capital punishment? This comprehensive, interdisciplinary anthology treats life without parole as "the new death penalty." Editors Charles J. Ogletree, Jr. and Austin Sarat bring together original work by prominent scholars in an effort to better understand the growth of life without parole and its social, cultural, political, and legal meanings. What justifies the turn to life imprisonment? How should we understand the fact that this penalty is used disproportionately against racial minorities? What are the most promising avenues for limiting, reforming, or eliminating life without parole sentences in the United States? Contributors explore the structure of life without parole sentences and the impact they have on prisoners, where the penalty fits in modern theories of punishment, and prospects for (as well as challenges to) reform.

This book is available as open access through the Bloomsbury Open Access programme and is available on www.bloomsburycollections.com. For Hannah Arendt, friendship had political relevance and importance. The essence of friendship, she believed, consisted in discourse, and it is only through discourse, she argued, that the world is rendered humane. This book explores some of the key ideas in Hannah Arendt's work through a study of four lifelong friendships -- with Heinrich Blucher, Martin Heidegger, Karl Jaspers and Mary McCarthy. The book draws on correspondence from both sides, illuminating our understanding of the social contexts within which Arendt's thinking developed and was clarified. It offers a cultural history of ideas: shedding light on two core ideas in Arendt - of 'plurality' and 'promise', and on how those particular ideas emerged through a particular set of relationships, at a significant moment in the history of the West. This book offers an original and accessible 'way in' to Arendt's work for students and scholars of politics, philosophy, intellectual history and literature.

In light of new biomedical technologies, such as artificial reproduction, stem cell research, genetic selection and design, the question of what we owe to future persons-and unborn life more generally-is as contested as ever. In A Theory of Unborn Life: From Abortion to Genetic Manipulation, author Anja J. Karnein provides a novel theory that shows how our commitments to persons can help us make sense of our obligations to unborn life. We should treat embryos that will develop into persons in anticipation of these persons. But how viable is this theory? Moreover, what does it mean to treat embryos in anticipation of the future persons they will develop into? Exploring the attractiveness of this approach for Germany and the U.S. - two countries with very different legal approaches to valuing unborn life-Karnein comes to startling conclusions to some of today's greatest ethical and legal debates. Under Karnein's theory, abortion and stem cell research are legitimate, since embryos that do not have mothers willing to continue to assist their growth have no way of developing into persons. However, Karnein also contends that where the health of embryos is threatened by third parties or even by the women carrying them, embryos need to be treated with the same care due to the children that emerge from them. In the case of genetic manipulation, it is important to respect future persons like our contemporaries, respecting their independence as individuals as well as the way they enter this world without modification. Genetic interventions are therefore only legitimate for insuring that future persons have the necessary physical and mental endowment to lead independent lives so as to be protected from being dominated by their contemporaries. Evincing polarization and dogma, Karnein's clean, philosophically-driven analysis provides a sound ethical foundation for the interpretation of any variety of legal dilemmas surrounding unborn life.

This book brings together philosophical, social-theoretical and empirically oriented contributions on the philosophical and socio-theoretical debate on migration and integration, using the instruments of recognition as a normative and social-scientific category. Furthermore, the theoretical and practical implications of recognition theory are reflected through the case of migration. Migration movements, refugees and the associated tensions are phenomena that have become the focus of scientific, political and public debate in recent years. Migrants, in particular refugees, face many injustices and are especially vulnerable, but the right-wing political discourse presents them as threats to social order and stability. This book shows what a critical theory of recognition can contribute to the debate. The book is suitable for researchers in philosophy, social theory and migration research. "A profound examination of how states and societies struggle to recognize migrants as fellow human beings in all their fullness. The contributions are exceptional for combining astute philosophy and social theory with a discussion of actual politics and real lives." Dr. Hugo Slim (Senior Research Fellow at the Blavatnik School of Government, University of Oxford and formerly Head of Policy at the International Committee of the Red Cross) "This impressive and timely volume offers an innovative way of understanding the issues of migration and integration by using a critical theory of recognition. Recognition theory has rich potential for effectively responding to the issues of autonomy, identity, integration, and empowerment that are at the core of the current public debates on mass migration, displacement, and the refugee crisis. By examining the normative and policy implications of recognition as they apply to migration, the book offers a pathbreaking look at the human dimension of the debate." Dr. Helle Porsdam (Professor of Law and Humanities and UNESCO Chair in Cultural Rights University of Copenhagen)

The chapters in this volume recognize that different contexts, sites, and institutional goals will raise different sets of questions and judgements about what constitutes ethical writing instruction, ethical response to written texts, and ethical evaluation of a writers process and products. They do not aim to resolve all the ethical questions that might arise in and about composition classrooms, but they present a panoply of views, arguments, and perspectives on what it means to talk about ethics in the writing classroom and thereby encourage writing teachers to consider the ethical dimensions of their own instructional practices.

Is the way to moral truth through theory? Or do we already know what's right and wrong? Throughout modern history philosophers have tried to construct elaborate moral systems to determine what's right. Recently, however, some have revived the position that we have intuitive knowledge of right and wrong. In this book, David Kaspar introduces and explores the perspective known as 'Intuitionism'. Charting intuitionism's fall in the twentieth century and its recent resurgence, Kaspar looks at the intuitionist approach to the most important topics in ethics, from moral knowledge to intrinsically good moral action. David Kaspar defends intuitionism against criticisms from competing metaethical schools, such as moral nihilism and ethical naturalism. It also takes on normative rivals, such as utilitarianism, Kantianism, and virtue ethics. By consolidating the stronger claims of both early analytic and contemporary intuitionists, Kaspar goes on to make a robust case for a rigorously intuitionist approach to explaining morality. Intuitionism also includes chapter summaries and guides to further reading throughout to help readers explore and master this important school of contemporary ethical thought. This is an ideal resource for undergraduates and postgraduates taking courses in ethics, metaethics and moral philosophy.

This compact and elegant work (equally fitting for both academic as well as the trade audiences) provides a readily accessible and highly readable overview of Bhutan's unique opportunities and challenges; all her prominent environmental legislation, regulatory statutes, ecological customs and practices, both in historic and contemporary terms. At the same time, Bionomics places the ecological context, including a section on animal rights in Bhutan, within the nation's Buddhist spiritual and ethical setting. Historic contextualization accents the book's rich accounting of every national park and scientific reserve, as well as providing up-to-the-minute climate-change related hurdles for the country. Merging the interdisciplinary sciences, engineering and humanities data in a compelling up-to-date portrait of the country, the authors have presented this dramatic compendium against the backdrop of an urgent, global ecological time-frame. It thus becomes clear that the articulated stakes for Bhutan, like her neighboring Himalayan and Indian sub-continental countries (China, India, Bangladesh and Myanmar) are immense, as the Anthropocene epoch unfolds, affecting every living being across the planet. Because Bhutan's two most rewarding revenue streams derive from the sale of hydro-electric power and from tourism, the complexities of modern pressures facing a nation that prides herself on maintaining traditional customs in what has been a uniquely isolated nation are acute.

Our capacity to reshape the future has never been more powerful. Yet our ability to foresee the consequences of what we do has not kept pace. Is the idea that we have responsibilities to future generations therefore meaningful? This book argues that it is, with the aid of a unique reading of the care ethics tradition.