We daily classify actions by their morality and their voluntariness, and beliefs by their rationality. But in light of persistent skepticism about morality, free will, and (to a lesser extent) epistemology, we must ask what justifies us in making these various claims. This book defends a sophisticated version of pragmatism, resting on a novel account of strategy-based (as opposed to act-based) cooperative rationality. It will show that we can give a genuinely pragmatist account of morality and epistemology, while denying that truth is mere usefulness and maintaining the connection between truth and objectivity. The sophisticated pragmatist approach is shown to be particularly fruitful in that we can justify a range of important practices, including our practices of moral and epistemic evaluation, as well as our practice of making judgments regarding free will and moral responsibility.

This comprehensive presentation of Axel Hagerstrom (1868-1939) fills a void in nearly a century of literature, providing both the legal and political scholar and the non-expert reader with a proper introduction to the father of Scandinavian realism. Based on his complete work, including unpublished material and personal correspondence selected exclusively from the Uppsala archives, A Real Mind follows the chronological evolution of Hagerstrom's intellectual enterprise and offers a full account of his thought. The book summarizes Hagerstrom's main arguments while enabling further critical assessment, and tries to answer such questions as: If norms are neither true nor false, how can they be adequately understood on the basis of Hagerstrom's theory of knowledge? Did the founder of the Uppsala school uphold emotivism in moral philosophy? What consequences does such a standpoint have in practical philosophy? Is he really the inspiration behind Scandinavian state absolutism?A Real Mind places the complex web of issues addressed by Hagerstrom within the broader context of 20th century philosophy, stretching from epistemology to ethics. His philosophy of law is examined in the core chapters of the book, with emphasis on the will-theory and the relation between law and power. The narrative is peppered with vignettes from Hagerstrom's life, giving an insightful and highly readable portrayal of a thinker who put his imprint on legal theory. The appendix provides a selected bibliography and a brief synopsis of the major events in his life, both private and intellectual."

In recent decades there has been a great expansion in the number, size and influence of International Non-Governmental Organisations (INGOs) involved in international relief and development. These changes have led to increased scrutiny of such organisations, and this scrutiny, together with increasing reflection by INGOs themselves and their staff on their own practice, has helped to highlight a number of pressing ethical questions such organisations face, such as: should INGOs attempt to provide emergency assistance even when doing so risks helping to fuel further conflict? How should INGOs manage any differences between their values and those of the people they seek to benefit? How open and honest should INGOs be about their own uncertainties and failures?

This book consists of sustained reflections on such questions. It derives from a workshop held at Melbourne University in July 2007 that brought together a group of people - for the most part, reflective practitioners and moral and political philosophers - to discuss such questions. It explores honestly some of the current challenges and dilemmas that INGOs face, and also suggests some new ideas for meeting these challenges. Our hope is that the kind of explicit reflection on the ethical issues INGOs face exemplified in this publication will help to promote a wider debate about these issues, a debate that in turn will help INGO managers and others to make better, wiser, more ethically informed decisions.

The book identifies the specific ethical aspects of sustainability and develops ethical tools to analyze them. It also provides a methodological framework to integrate ethical and scientific analyses of sustainability issues, and explores the notion of a new type of self-reflective inter- and transdisciplinary sustainability research. With this, the book aims to strengthen the overall ability of academics to contribute to the analysis and solution of sustainability issues in an inclusive and integrated way.

Strict liability is a controversial phenomenon in the criminal law because of its potential to convict blameless persons. Offences are said to impose strict liability when, in relation to one or more elements of the actus reus, there is no need for the prosecution to prove a corresponding mens rea or fault element. For example, in the 1986 case of Storkwain, the defendant chemists were convicted of selling controlled medicines without prescription simply upon proof that they had in fact done so. It was irrelevant that they neither knew nor had reason to suspect that the 'prescriptions' they fulfilled were forgeries. Thus strict liability offences have the potential to generate criminal convictions of persons who are morally innocent. Appraising Strict Liability is a collection of original contributions offering the first full-length consideration of the problem of strict liability in the criminal law. The chapters, including European and Anglo-American perspectives, provide a sustained and wide-ranging examination of the fundamental issues. They explore the definition of strict liability; the relationship between strict liability and blame, and its implications for the requirement for culpability in criminal law; the relevance of European and human rights jurisprudence; and the interaction between substantive rules of strict liability and evidential presumptions. The breadth and depth of the contributions combine to present readers with a sophisticated analysis of the place and legitimacy of strict liability in the criminal law.

Changing preferencesis a phenomenonoften invoked but rarely properlyaccounted for. Throughout the history of the social sciences, researchers have come against the possibility that their subjects' preferenceswere affected by the phenomenato be explainedor by otherfactorsnot taken into accountin the explanation.Sporadically, attempts have been made to systematically investigate these in uences, but none of these seems to have had a lasting impact. Today we are still not much further with respect to preference change than we were at the middle of the last century. This anthology hopes to provide a new impulse for research into this important subject. In particular, we have chosen two routes to amplify this impulse. First, we stress the use of modellingtechniquesfamiliar from economicsand decision theory. Instead of constructing complex, all-encompassing theories of preference change, the authors of this volume start with very simple, formal accounts of some possible and hopefully plausible mechanism of preference change. Eventually, these models may nd their way into larger, empirically adequate theories, but at this stage, we think that the most importantwork lies in building structure.Secondly, we stress the importance of interdisciplinary exchange. Only by drawing together experts from different elds can the complex empirical and theoretical issues in the modelling of preference change be adequately investigated.

This book extends the discussion of the nature of freedom and what it means for a human to be free. This question has occupied the minds of thinkers since the Enlightenment. However, without exception, every one of these discussions has focused on the character of liberty on Earth. In this volume the authors explore how people are likely to be governed in space and how that will affect what sort of liberty they experience. Who will control oxygen? How will people maximise freedom of movement in a lethal environment? What sort of political and economic systems can be created in places that will be inherently isolated? These are just a few of the major questions that bear on the topic of extra-terrestrial liberty. During the last forty years an increasing number of nations have developed the capability of launching people into space. The USA, Europe, Russia, China and soon India have human space exploration programs. These developments raise the fundamental question of how are humans to be governed in space. This book follows from a previous volume published in this series which looked at the Meaning of Liberty Beyond the Earth and explored what sort of freedoms could exist in space in a very general way. This new volume focuses on systems of governance and how they will influence which of these sorts of freedoms will become dominant in extra-terrestrial society. The book targets a wide readership covers many groups including: Space policy makers interested in understanding how societies will develop in space and what the policy implications might be for space organisations. Space engineers interested in understanding how social developments in space might influence the way in which infrastructure and space settlements should be designed. Space scientists interested in how scientific developments might influence the social structures of settlements beyond the Earth. Social scientists (political philosophers, ethicists etc) interested in understanding how societies will develop in the future.

Readings in Virtual Research Ethics: Issues and Controversies provides an in-depth look at the emerging field of online research and the corresponding ethical dilemmas associated with it. Issues related to traditional research ethics such as autonomy or respect for persons, justice, and beneficence are extended into the virtual realm and such areas as subject selection and recruitment, informed consent, privacy, ownership of data, and research with minors, among many others are explored in the media and contexts of email surveys and interviews, synchronous chat, virtual ethnography, asynchronous discussion lists, and newsgroups.

In Why It Is Good to be Good, John H. Riker argues that modernity, by undermining traditional religious and metaphysical grounds for moral belief, has left itself no way to explain why it is personally good to be a morally good person. Furthermore, modernity's regnant concept of the self as an independent agent organized around the optimal satisfaction of desires and involved in an intense economic competition with others intensifies the likelihood that modern persons will see morality as a set of limiting constraints that stand in the way of personal advantage and will tend to cheat when they believe there is little likelihood of getting caught. This cheating has begun to severely undermine modernity's economic and social institutions. Riker proposes that Heinz Kohut's psychoanalytic understanding of the self can provide modernity with a naturalistic ground for saying why it is good to be good. Kohut sees the self as a dynamic, unconscious structure which, when coherent and actively engaged with the world, provides the basis for a heightened sense of lively flourishing. The key to the self's development and sustained coherence is the presence of empathically responsive others persons Kohut terms selfobjects. Riker argues that the best way to sustain vitalized selfobject relations in adulthood is by becoming an ethical human being. It is persons who develop the Aristotelian moral virtues empathy for others, a sense of fairness, and a resolute integrity who are best able to engage in the reciprocal selfobject relations that are necessary to maintain self-cohesion and who are most likely to extend empathic ethical concern to those beyond their selfobject matrixes. Riker also explores how Kohut's concept of the self incorporates a number of the most important insights about the self in the history of philosophy, constructs an original meta-psychology that differentiates the ego from the self, re-envisions ethical life on the basis of a psychoanalytically informed view of human nature, explores how pe"

This fascinating and timely volume explores current thinking on vital topics in moral psychology, spanning the diverse disciplines that contribute to the field. Academics from cognitive science, evolutionary biology, anthropology, philosophy, and political science address ongoing and emerging questions aimed at understanding the thought processes and behaviors that underlie our moral codes-and our transgressions. Cross-cutting themes speak to individual, interpersonal, and collective morality in such areas as the development of ethical behavior, responses to violations of rules, moral judgments in the larger discourse, and universal versus specific norms. This wide-angle perspective also highlights the implications of moral psychology research for policy and justice, with cogent viewpoints from: * Philosophy: empiricism and normative questions, moral relativism. * Evolutionary biology: theories of how altruism and moral behavior evolved. * Anthropology: common moral values seen in ethnographies from different countries. * Cognitive and neural sciences: computational models of moral systems and decision-making. * Political science: politics, governance, and moral values in the public sphere. * Advice on moral psychology research-and thoughts about its future-from prominent scholars. With the goal of providing a truly multidisciplinary forum for moral psychology, this volume is sure to spark conversations across disciplines and advance the field as a whole. Sampling the breadth and depth of an equally expansive and transformative field, Moral Psychology: A Multidisciplinary Guide will find an engaged audience among psychologists, philosophers, evolutionary biologists, anthropologists, political scientists, neuroscientists, lawyers, and policymakers, as well as a more general audience interested in better understanding the complexity of moral psychology research.

In the genre of Christian philosophers, Spinoza presents a geometric argument for the necessary existence of God as the one absolute substance underlying all other substance. From the necessity of God's existance, he derives the laws of existence, those of nature, and the ethical principles animating human conduct. In this sweeping volume that covers a wide range of topics from metaphysics, epistemology, and theology, Spinoza addresses the key concepts of freedom, the existence of evil, and the ultimate purpose of humanity.

This book examines key trends in emerging strategic technologies and the implications for geopolitics and human dignity. Al-Rodhan argues that future evolution into transhumans is inevitable. In preparation, the global community is urged to establish strict moral and legal guidelines balancing innovation with the guarantee of dignity for all.

People have strong moral beliefs about right and wrong, yet commonly act contrary to those beliefs. Most of us, at some time or another, have crossed a moral line and yet still view ourselves as moral and have a clean conscience. From intimate relationships to national politics, we define ourselves in large part by how we - and our friends, family, and members of our social groups - draw moral lines around our actions, thoughts, and intentions. While philosophers have weighed in on these issues for thousands of years, social scientists often underplay social life's moral dimension. "Moral Selves, Evil "Selves highlights our individual sense of moral coherence and develops a theory of the development and maintenance of this sense in an ambiguous and complicated social world. By conceptualizing a social psychology of conscience, this book explains how we can properly include individual and societal notions of morality into understanding the self across time and situation.

What is the human heart like? Theologians and philosophers have attempted to address this question, not just in the abstract, but concretely in personal, as well as social and political, dimensions. Patrick Downey explores the biblical writings of Genesis and the Hebrew prophet Jeremiah, the Greek tragedies, Plato, Aristotle, and political philosophers--such as Rousseau, Hobbes, Nietzsche and Rene Girard--to seek answers to this profound question. Recognizing our resistance to know the truth about our own hearts, Downey calls his readers to join with these thinkers in the search for truth and serious self-reflection. Not for the faint of heart, this book courageously addresses the most foundational question of our existence as individuals in community. What is the nature of the human heart and can we, will we, know it?

To comprehensively address the complexities of current socio-ecological problems involved in global environmental change, it is indispiseble to achieve an integration of ecological understanding and ethical values. Contemporary science proposes an inclusive ecosystem concept that recognizes humans as components. Contemporary environmental ethics includes eco-social justice and the realization that as important as biodiversity is cultural diversity, inter-cultural, inter-institutional, and international collaboration requiring a novel approach known as "biocultural "conservation. Right action in confronting the challenges of the 21st century requires science and ethics to be seamlessly integrated. This book resulted from the 14th Cary Conference that brought together leading scholars and practitioners in ecology and environmental philosophy to discuss core terminologies, methods, questions, and practical frameworks for long-term socio-ecological research, education, and decision making.

Two aspects link together the notions of corruption and integrity from an epistemological perspective: the complexity of defining the two notions, and their richness in forms. This volume brings together the perspectives of six disciplines - business, political science, law, philosophy, anthropology and behavioural science - to the debate on integrity and corruption. The main goal is to promote a fruitful interdisciplinary dialogue on complex themes such as integrity and corruption in business and politics. The book investigates possible ways in which corruption and integrity apply to everyday practices, ideas and ideologies, and avoids the stigmatizations and oversimplifications that often plague these fields of research.

In this ground-breaking book, Aristotelian and evolutionary understandings of human social nature are brought together to provide an integrative, psychological account of human ethics. The book emphasizes the profound ways that human identity and action are immersed in an ongoing social world.

This is the first comprehensive handbook in the philosophy of criminal law. It contains seventeen original essays by leading thinkers in the field and covers the field's major topics including limits to criminalization, obscenity and hate speech, blackmail, the law of rape, attempts, accomplice liability, causation, responsibility, justification and excuse, duress, provocation and self-defense, insanity, punishment, the death penalty, mercy, and preventive detention and other alternatives to punishment. It will be an invaluable resource for scholars and students whose research and studies concern philosophical issues in criminal law and criminal law theory.

A distinguished international team of scholars under the editorship of Carlo Natali have collaborated to produce a systematic, chapter-by-chapter study of one of the most influential texts in the history of moral philosophy. The seventh book of Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics discusses weakness of will in its first ten chapters, then turns in the last four chapters to pleasure and its relation to the supreme human good.