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.

This volume is a reappraisal of the work of Peter Guy Winch (1926 -1997), one of the most important philosophers of the 20th Century. Winch faded into relative obscurity compared to his contemporaries due to a mistaken belief that there are no systematic connections between the different aspects of his work. This volume corrects that presupposition and reintroduces Winch's work to a new generation of scholars. By showing how ethical, political and social issues are interrelated in Winch's work, and by making clear the connections between these issues and themes in metaphysics and the philosophy of mind, the volume demonstrates both the breadth and the unity of Winch's approach. It discusses topics such as ethics, political philosophy, social science, the philosophy of action, the philosophy of mind, metaphysics, and the philosophy of language. Despite this apparent variety of topics, the contributors to the volume share Winch's conviction that the different areas of philosophy are interdependent. As a result, the volume as a whole shows unity in diversity and provides an example of a manner of philosophising in which different approaches and sub-disciplines are placed in dialogue with each other. Peter Guy Winch is most famous for his early work on the philosophy of the social sciences. His On the Idea of a Social Science and its Relation to Philosophy (ISS) generated controversy within both philosophical and social scientific circles. In that work and subsequent publications Winch argued against the presupposition that social relations could be understood using the conceptual tools of the natural sciences. Winch would later describe ISS as a 'young man's book' and would come to regret the reputation it garnered him - a mixture of roughly equal degrees fame and infamy. Alongside his work on the philosophy of social sciences, Winch was an interpreter and exegete of Wittgenstein. He also published a ground-breaking study of the philosophy of Simone Weil, entitled Simone Weil: The Just Balance. Winch also published numerous essays on issues in ethics, political philosophy and the philosophy of religion, and at his death was working on a book manuscript on the problem of political authority.

This book takes the contentious issue of designer babies and argues against the liberal eugenic current of bioethics that commends the logic and choice regimes of selective reproduction. Against conceptions of Procreative Beneficence that trade on a disregard for the gifts of maternal bodies, it seeks to recover a thought of maternal giving and a more hospitable ethic of generational beneficence. Exploring themes of responsibility, gift and natality, the book refigures the experience of reproduction as the site of an ethical response to future generations, where refusal to choose one's children is one virtuous response. The book will appeal to anyone with an interest in reproductive ethics, feminist thought and those seeking principled grounds for resisting the technologies of choosing children.

Journalistic ethics are defined, explored, and analyzed in this comprehensive and timely volume. Topic examples include confidentiality of news sources, the right to privacy, deception of news sources, freedom of the press, the role of the media in shaping public policy, news bias, whistle-blowing and the press, journalistic morality and professional competence, ethical problems in broadcast journalism, social responsibility and magazines, and journalistic ethics and computer technology. Readers can also find summaries of relevant ethical codes, for example, the American Society of Newspaper Editors Code of Ethics and the American Federation of Advertising Principles. A must-have reference source for students, teachers, journalist, and editors.

In his collection George extends the critique of liberalism he expounded in Making Men Moral and also goes beyond it to show how contemporary natural law theory provides a superior way of thinking about basic problems of justice and political morality. It is written with the same combination of stylistic elegance and analytical rigour that distinguished his critical work. Not content merely to defend natural law from its cultural despisers, he deftly turns the tables and deploys the idea to mount a stunning attack on regnant liberal beliefs about such issues as abortion, sexuality, and the place of religion in public life.

Advances in our scientific understanding and technological power in recent decades have dramatically amplified our capacity to intentionally manipulate complex ecological and biological systems. An implication of this is that biological and ecological problems are increasingly understood and approached from an engineering perspective. In environmental contexts, this is exemplified in the pursuits of geoengineering, designer ecosystems, and conservation cloning. In human health contexts, it is exemplified in the development of synthetic biology, bionanotechnology, and human enhancement technologies. Designer Biology: The Ethics of Intensively Engineering Biological and Ecological Systems consists of thirteen chapters (twelve of them original to the collection) that address the ethical issues raised by technological intervention and design across a broad range of biological and ecological systems. Among the technologies addressed are geoengineering, human enhancement, sex selection, genetic modification, and synthetic biology. The aim of the collection is to advance and enrich our understanding of the ethical issues raised by these technologies, as well as to identify general lessons about the ethics of engineering complex biological and ecological systems that can be applied as new technologies and practices emerge. The insights that emerge will be especially valuable to students and scholars of environmental ethics, bioethics, or technology ethics.

How does moral change happen? What leads to the overthrow or gradual transformation of moral beliefs, ideals, and values? Change is one of the most striking features of morality, yet it is poorly understood. In this book, Cecilie Eriksen provides an illuminating map of the dynamics, structure, and normativity of moral change. Through eight narratives inspired by the legal domain and in dialogue with modern moral philosophy, Eriksen discusses moral bias, conflict, progress, and revolutions. She develops a context-sensitive understanding of ethics and shows how we can harvest a knowledge of the past that will enable us to build a better future.

In modern democracies, existing moral pluralism conflicts with a commitment to resolve political disputes by way of moral reasoning. Given this fact, how can there be moral resolutions to political disputes and what type of reasoning is appropriate in the public sphere? Fives explores this by closely analysing the work of MacIntyre and Rawls.

In any field whether scientific, business, or social ethics plays a critical role in determining what is acceptable in a particular community and what is considered taboo. The source of these preconditions is often a complex interweaving of tradition and rational thought. Socio-Cybernetic Study of God and the World-System investigates morality in a socio-scientific worldview, examining the epistemology of existence in conjunction with Islamic monotheistic law to generate a world-system that governs action and reaction in the context of a variety of cognitive and social environments. Readers with backgrounds in finance and economics can utilize this book to construct a more thorough theoretical understanding of their societal and professional associations."

Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics is one of the most important ethical treatises ever written, and has had a profound influence on the subsequent development of ethics and moral psychology. This collection of essays, written by both senior and younger scholars in the field, presents a thorough and close examination of the work. The essays address a broad range of issues including the compositional integrity of the Ethics, the nature of desire, the value of emotions, happiness and the virtues. The result is a volume which will challenge and advance the scholarship on the Ethics, establishing new ways of viewing and appreciating the work for all scholars of Aristotle.

Alan H. Goldman presents an original and lucid account of the relationship between philosophy and the novel. In the first part, on philosophy of novels, he defends theories of literary value and interpretation. Literary value, the value of literary works as such, is a species of aesthetic value. Goldman argues that works have aesthetic value when they simultaneously engage all our mental capacities: perceptual, cognitive, imaginative, and emotional. This view contrasts with now prevalent narrower formalist views of literary value. According to it, cognitive engagement with novels includes appreciation of their broad themes and the theses these imply, often moral and hence philosophical theses, which are therefore part of the novels' literary value. Interpretation explains elements of works so as to allow readers maximum appreciation, so as to maximize the literary value of the texts as written. Once more, Goldman's view contrasts with narrower views of literary interpretation, especially those which limit it to uncovering what authors intended. One implication of Goldman's broader view is the possibility of incompatible but equally acceptable interpretations, which he explores through a discussion of rival interpretations of Ernest Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises. Goldman goes on to test the theory of value by explaining the immense appeal of good mystery novels in its terms. The second part of the book, on philosophy in novels, explores themes relating to moral agency-moral development, motivation, and disintegration-in Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice, Mark Twain's Huckleberry Finn, John Irving's The Cider House Rules, and Joseph Conrad's Nostromo. By narrating the course of characters' lives, including their inner lives, over extended periods, these novels allow us to vicariously experience the characters' moral progressions, positive and negative, to learn in a more focused way moral truths, as we do from real life experiences.

Russell Hardin presents a new explication of David Hume's moral and political theory. With Hume, he holds that our normative views can be scientifically explained but they cannot be justified as true. Hume argued for the psychological basis of such views. In particular, he argued for sympathy as the mirroring of the psychological sensations and emotions of others. By placing Hume in the developing tradition of social science, as a strong forerunner of his younger friend Adam Smith, Hardin demonstrates Hume's strong strategic sense, his nascent utilitarianism, his powerful theory of convention as a main source of social and political order, and his recognition of moral and political theory as a single enterprise.

Posthuman Personhood takes up the ethical challenge posed by Francis Fukuyama's work, Our Posthuman Future. Daryl J. Wennemann argues that the traditional concept of personhood may be fruitfully applied to the ethical challenge we face in a posthuman age. He draws upon Wilfrid Sellars' treatment of the concept of a person within "the manifest image of man in the world." Sellars proposed that we develop a stereoscopic view of reality that includes both a scientific understanding of the world and a meaningful place for persons living and acting in the world. Following Mary Anne Warren, Wennemann develops a distinction between two meanings of the term "human," a biological meaning and a moral meaning, and maintains that all (biologically) human beings are persons. But, it is not necessarily the case that all persons must be (biologically) human. After drawing on a contemporary version of Kant's distinction between a theoretical possibility and a real possibility, the book posits that biologically non-human persons like robots, computers, or aliens are a theoretical possibility but that we do not know if they are a real possibility. Finally, Wennemann describes an ethic of self-limitation for the posthuman age.

what makes a property intrinsic? What exactly does the intrinsic/extrinsic distinction rest upon, and how can we reasonably justify this distinction? These questions bear great importance on central debates in such diverse philosophical fields as ethics (What is the nature of intrinsic value?), philosophy of mind (Does mental content supervene on internal bodily features?), epistemology (Can intrinsic duplicates differ in the justification of their beliefs?) and philosophy of science (Do the causal powers of an object depend on its extrinsic features?) - to only name a few. Given the central relevance of the intrinsic/extrinsic distinction to philosophical research, a collection of pertinent essays on the topic is an essential addition to the literature. It helps to identify more clearly the problems and arguments that are at stake. The anthology provides a comprehensive overview of central facets of the debates, including both crucial earlier and important new contributions by leading philosophers. As such it constitutes an indispensable component of any serious study of the topic.

Marchetti offers a revisionist account of James's contribution to moral thought in the light of his pragmatic conception of philosophical activity. He sketches a composite picture of a Jamesian approach to ethics revolving around the key notion and practice of a therapeutic critique of one's ordinary moral convictions and style of moral reasoning.

This volume focuses on controversial issues that stem from Philippa Foot's later writings on natural goodness which are at the center of contemporary discussions of virtue ethics. The chapters address questions about how Foot relates judgments of moral goodness to human nature, how Foot understands happiness, and addresses objections to her framework from the perspective of empirical biology. The volume will be of value to any student or scholar with an interest in virtue ethics and analytic moral philosophy.

The study of altruism, morality, and social solidarity is an emerging field of scholarship and research in sociology. This handbook will function as a foundational source for this subject matter and field, and as an impetus to its further development.

The nine original essays collected in this volume explore the themes of philosophical progress, ultimate explanation, the metaphysics of free will, and the relation of sciences and religion. These essays exemplify Nicholas Rescher's characteristic mode of combining historical perspectives with analytical elucidation on philosophically contested issues and utilize this methodology to address some of the salient problems of the field.

Pragmatist philosopher William James has long been deemed a dubious guide to ethical reasoning. This book overturns such thinking, demonstrating the coherence of James's efforts to develop a flexible but rigorous framework for individuals and societies seeking freedom, meaning, and justice in a world of interdependence, uncertainty, and change.

Americans deserve honest government. This text addresses the need for a comprehensive statement of ethical behavior for public officials and employees at every level of government. Recognizing the need for legal reforms that focus mainly on campaign contributions, the authors examine the broader question of how we should measure the routine, day-to-day ethics of men and women in public service. By focussing more on attitudes and practices, the authors suggest that the highest standard of both ethics and competence should be demanded of all our public servants. The book identifies situations in which officials ought to act cautiously and presents the ethical rules that should be applied to each situation.

The text presents a philosophy of public service and then moves to particular situations to which this philosophy must be applied: campaign finance; the campaign itself; behavior of elected officials, appointed officials, and public employees; the role of lobbyists; compensation for public servants; moving to and from the public and private sectors; ethical guidelines for lawyers and judges; the private lives of public servants; and enforcement of ethics. The final chapter discusses the sometimes competing forces of ethics and competency. Ethical guidelines are gathered in the appendix and serve as a useful starting point for ethics in any public service setting. The combination of persuasive and thought-provoking proposals for governmental ethics reform along with practical guidelines on how to maintain the highest possible standards of ethical conduct makes this an important text for students in ethics and government courses, as well as an imperative reading for public officials, whether elected, appointed, or career.

THE SUNDAY TIMES BESTSELLER 'Unapologetically optimistic and bracingly realistic, this is the most inspiring book on 'ethical living' I've ever read.' Oliver Burkeman, Guardian 'A monumental event.' Rutger Bregman, author of Humankind 'A book of great daring, clarity, insight and imagination. To be simultaneously so realistic and so optimistic, and always so damn readable... well that is a miracle for which he should be greatly applauded.' Stephen Fry Humanity is in its infancy. Our future could last for millions of years - or it could end tomorrow. Astonishing numbers of people could lead lives of great happiness or unimaginable suffering, or never live at all, depending on what we choose to do today. As we approach a critical juncture in our history, we can make profound moral decisions about how humanity's course plays out. We can create positive change on behalf of future generations, to prevent the use of catastrophic weapons and maintain peace between the world's great powers. We can improve our moral values, navigating the rise of AI and climate change more fairly for generations to come. The challenges we face are enormous. But so is the influence we have. If we choose wisely, our distant descendants will look back on us fondly, knowing we did everything we could to give them a world that is beautiful and just.