This study examines the utility of a public probity-focused approach to understanding citizen disaffection with those in public life. This work shows unequivocally that perceptions of public probity are coherent, substantively meaningful, and, crucially, that they do matter for our understanding of citizen disaffection. In doing so, this book makes a strong case for the importance of deeper and more detailed research into this area. Making use of major, newly available datasets, this study presents new substantive findings about the causes of political perceptions and the consequences of political realities. This book is important reading for students and scholars of public opinion, political corruption and political integrity.

Anthropologists have expressed wariness about the concept of evil even in discussions of morality and ethics, in part because the concept carries its own cultural baggage and theological implications in Euro-American societies. Addressing the problem of evil as a distinctly human phenomenon and a category of ethnographic analysis, this volume shows the usefulness of engaging evil as a descriptor of empirical reality where concepts such as violence, criminality, and hatred fall short of capturing the darkest side of human existence.

This book argues that there is no morality and that people are not morally responsible for what they do. In particular, it argues that what people do is neither right nor wrong and that they are neither praiseworthy nor blameworthy for doing it. Morality and moral responsibility lie at the heart of how we view the world. In our daily life, we feel that people act rightly or wrongly, make the world better or worse, and are virtuous or vicious. These policies are central to our justifying how we see the world and treat others. In this book, the author argues that our views on these matters are false. He presents a series of arguments that threaten to undermine our theoretical and practical worldviews. The philosophical costs of denying moral responsibility and morality are enormous. It does violence to philosophical positions that many people took a lifetime to develop. Worse, it does violence to our everyday view of people. A host of concepts that we rely on daily (praiseworthy, blameworthy, desert, virtue, right, wrong, good, bad, etc.) fail to refer to any property in the world and are thus deeply mistaken. This book is of interest to philosophers, lawyers, and humanities professors as well as people interested in morality, law, religion, and public policy.

This book provides an introduction to the relationship between economics and ethics, explaining why ethics enters economics, how ethics affects individual economic behavior and the interactions of individuals, and how ethics is important in evaluating the performance of economies and of economic policies.

Information technology has provided numerous options to individuals, governments, and corporations around the world. These options demand that choices be made, and such choices often involve ethical decisions. Users must decide, for example, whether certain data should be made available on the Internet, whether the information contained in various databases should be sold to third parties, and whether software developers should be held responsible for social and economic problems that result from their programs. This book provides a rigorous but accessible discussion of some of the major ethical issues concerning computers and information technology. The text gives particular attention to widespread issues concerning intellectual property rights, censorship, and privacy, along with less frequently raised topics, such as ethical worries about image manipulation, virtual reality, and the moral status of intelligent machines and expert systems. Computers and information technology have created numerous options for their users. Individuals, governments, and corporations around the world must decide whether a particular technology or application should be used, how it should be employed, and toward what end. Sometimes such decisions may be based on purely economic or personal considerations. For example, a user might feel more comfortable with a particular word processing software, and a company might decide that a particular spreadsheet package meets all of its needs at a lower cost than competing products. But decisions concerning computer and information technology also involve ethical issues. Companies must determine whether it is an ethically correct objective to save money by replacing workers with technology. Courts and governments must decide whether it is ethical to censor communication on the Internet, or require software developers to have liability for social ills caused by use of their products, or for corporations to collect and sell information about individuals and their habits. This volume provides a rigorous but accessible philosophical examination of ethical issues related to computers as information processing machines. Special attention is given to questions of intellectual property, censorship, and privacy, for these issues are continually raised in the popular press and are central ethical concerns. But the book also considers ethical worries about image manipulation, virtual reality, the use of expert systems, and the moral status of intelligent machines. Some of the moral questions discussed have not yet arisen in practical situations, but these issues should be examined before they become urgent. While many issues have been omitted, the examinations within the text help show how additional ethical concerns may be approached in the future.

What would you do if you suddenly became rich? Michael O'Meara had never asked himself this question. A high school history teacher in Maryland, Michael is content- until, after a freak accident, he unexpectedly finds himself the beneficiary of a million dollars that disrupt his life and leave him questioning everything he had and everything he thought he wanted. "The Extinction of Desire" blends Buddhist philosophy and fiction to maps the course of one man's voyage to uncover the fundamental truths about what is really valuable in life.
An engaging novel that seeks to portray a philosophical depiction of the author's worldview theory
Addresses core topics in philosophy and religion - knowledge, reality, self and others, value-in narrative form
Confronts the place of materialism and instant gratification in our world views
Includes a foreword by Charles Johnson, winner of the American National Book Award for fiction in 1990, for his book "Middle Passage"
Accompanied by a supporting website offering a wealth of additional resources, including discussion points for reading groups and a teachers' guide: www.blackwellpublishing.com/publicphilosophy/boylan

Can the law promote moral values even in pluralistic societies such as the United States? Drawing upon important federal legislation such as the Americans with Disabilities Act, legal scholar and moral theologian Cathleen Kaveny argues that it can. In conversation with thinkers as diverse as Thomas Aquinas, Pope John Paul II, and Joseph Raz, she argues that the law rightly promotes the values of autonomy and solidarity. At the same time, she cautions that wise lawmakers will not enact mandates that are too far out of step with the lived moral values of the actual community. According to Kaveny, the law is best understood as a moral teacher encouraging people to act virtuously, rather than a police officer requiring them to do so. In "Law's Virtues" Kaveny expertly applies this theoretical framework to the controversial moral-legal issues of abortion, genetics, and euthanasia. In addition, she proposes a moral analysis of the act of voting, in dialogue with the election guides issued by the US bishops. Moving beyond the culture wars, this bold and provocative volume proposes a vision of the relationship of law and morality that is realistic without being relativistic and optimistic without being utopian.

In the post-Cold War era, we have lost the clarity that once characterized our vision of international conflict. Foreign affairs are no longer defined solely by the ideological battles fought between capitalism and communism or by the competition between two great nuclear superpowers. That oversimplified view has been replaced by an increasing awareness of the moral and political complexity surrounding international relations.

To help us deal with this new reality, Thomas Pangle and Peter Ahrensdorf provide a critical introduction to the most important conceptions of international justice, spanning 2,500 years of intellectual history from Thucydides and Plato to Morgenthau and Waltz. Their study shows how older traditions of political philosophy remain relevant to current debates in international relations, and how political thinkers through the centuries can help us deepen our understanding of today's stalemate between realism and idealism.

Pangle and Ahrensdorf guide the reader through a sequence of theoretical frameworks for understanding the moral basis of international relations: the cosmopolitan vision of the classical philosophers, the "just war" teachings of medieval theologians, the revolutionary realism of Machiavelli, the Enlightenment idealism of Kant, and the neo-realism of twentieth-century theorists. They clarify the core of each philosopher's conceptions of international relations, examine the appeal of each position, and bring these alternatives into mutually illuminating juxtaposition.

The authors clearly show that appreciating the fundamental questions pursued by these philosophers can help us avoid dogmatism, abstraction, or oversimplification when considering the moral character of international relations. "Justice Among Nations" restores the study of the great works of political theory to its natural place within the discipline of international relations as it retrieves the question of international justice as a major theme of political philosophy. It provides our moral compass with new points of orientation and invites serious readers to grapple with some of the most perplexing issues of our time.

Does nature have intrinsic value? Should we be doing more to save wilderness and ocean ecosystems? What are our duties to future generations of humans? Do animals have rights? This revised edition of "Life Science Ethics" introduces these questions using narrative case studies on genetically modified foods, use of animals in research, nanotechnology, and global climate change, and then explores them in detail using essays written by nationally-recognized experts in the ethics field.

Part I introduces ethics, the relationship of religion to ethics, how we assess ethical arguments, and a method ethicists use to reason about ethical theories. Part II demonstrates the relevance of ethical reasoning to the environment, land, farms, food, biotechnology, genetically modified foods, animals in agriculture and research, climate change, and nanotechnology. Part III presents case studies for the topics found in Part II.

Joseph M. Boyle Jr. has been a major contributor to the development of Catholic bioethics over the past thirty five years. Boyle's contribution has had an impact on philosophers, theologians, and medical practitioners, and his work has in many ways come to be synonymous with analytically rigorous philosophical bioethics done in the Catholic intellectual tradition. Four main themes stand out as central to Boyle's contribution: the sanctity of life and bioethics: Boyle has elaborated a view of the ethics of killing at odds with central tenets of the euthanasia mentality, double effect and bioethics: Boyle is among the pre-eminent defenders of a role for double effect in medical decision making and morality, the right to health care: Boyle has moved beyond the rhetoric of social justice to provide a natural law grounding for a political right to health care; and the role of natural law and the natural law tradition in bioethics: Boyle's arguments have been grounded in a particularly fruitful approach to natural law ethics, the so-called New Natural Law theory. The contributors to BIOETHICS WITH LIBERTY AND JUSTICE: THEMES IN THE WORK OF JOSEPH M. BOYLE discuss, criticize, and in many cases extend the Boyle's advances in these areas with rigor and sophistication. It will be of interest to Catholic and philosophical bioethicists alike.

The purpose of this book is to initiate a new discussion on liberty focusing on the infinite realms of space. The discussion of the nature of liberty and what it means for a human to be free 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 the Earth. The emergence of human space exploration programs in the last 40-50 years raise a fundamental and new question: what will be the future of liberty in space? This book takes the discussion of liberty into the extraterrestrial environment. In this book, new questions will be addressed such as: Can a person be free when the oxygen the individual breathes is the result of a manufacturing process controlled by someone else? Will the interdependence required to survive in the extremities of the extraterrestrial environment destroy individualism? What are the obligations of the individual to the extraterrestrial state? How can we talk of extraterrestrial liberty when everyone is dependent on survival systems?

One of the most profound, deeply affecting questions we face as human beings is the matter of our mortality--and its connection to immortality. Ancient animist ghost cultures, Egyptian mummification, late Jewish hopes of resurrection, Christian eternal salvation, Muslim belief in hell and paradise all spring from a remarkably consistent impulse to tether a triumph over death to our conduct in life.
In After Lives, British scholar John Casey provides a rich historical and philosophical exploration of the world beyond, from the ancient Egyptians to St. Thomas Aquinas, from Martin Luther to modern Mormons. In a lively, wide-ranging discussion, he examines such topics as predestination, purgatory, Spiritualism, the Rapture, Armageddon and current Muslim apocalyptics, as well as the impact of such influences as the New Testament, St. Augustine, Dante, and the Second Vatican Council. Ideas of heaven and hell, Casey argues, illuminate how we understand the ultimate nature of sin, justice, punishment, and our moral sense itself. The concepts of eternal bliss and eternal punishment express--and test--our ideas of good and evil. For example, the ancient Egyptians saw the afterlife as flowing from ma'at, a sense of being in harmony with life, a concept that includes truth, order, justice, and the fundamental law of the universe. "It is an optimistic view of life," he writes. "It is an ethic that connects wisdom with moral goodness." Perhaps just as revealing, Casey finds, are modern secular interpretations of heaven and hell, as he probes the place of goodness, virtue, and happiness in the age of psychology and scientific investigation.
With elegant writing, a magisterial grasp of a vast literary and religious history, and moments of humor and irony, After Lives sheds new light on the question of life, death, and morality in human culture.

Normative ethical theories generally purport to be explanatory-to tell us not just what is good, or what conduct is right, but why. Drawing on both historical and contemporary approaches, Mark Schroeder offers a distinctive picture of how such explanations must work, and of the specific commitments that they incur. According to Schroeder, explanatory moral theories can be perfectly general only if they are reductive, offering accounts of what it is for something to be good, right, or what someone ought to do. So ambitious, highly general normative ethical theorizing is continuous with metaethical inquiry. Moreover, he argues that such explanatory theories face a special challenge in accounting for reasons or obligations that are universally shared, and develops an autonomy-based strategy for meeting this challenge, in the case of requirements of rationality. Explaining the Reasons We Share pulls together over a decade of work by one of the leading figures in contemporary metaethics. One new and ten previously published papers weave together treatments of reasons, reduction, supervenience, instrumental rationality, and legislation, to paint a sharp contrast between two plausible but competing pictures of the nature and limits of moral explanation-one from Cudworth and one indebted to Kant. A substantive new introduction provides a map to reading these essays as a unified argument, and qualifies their conclusions in light of Schroeder's current views. Along with its sister volume, Expressing Our Attitudes, this volume advances the theme that metaethical inquiry is continuous with other areas of philosophy.

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.

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."

As scientists continue to explore how the brain works, using ever more sophisticated technology, it seems likely that new findings will radically alter the traditional understanding of human nature. One aspect of human nature that is already being questioned by recent developments in neuroscience is free will. Do our decisions arise from purely mechanistic processes? Is our feeling of self-control merely an illusion created by our brains? If so, what will become of free will and moral responsibility? These thorny questions and many more are examined with great clarity and insight in this engaging exploration of neuroscience's potential impact on moral responsibility. The author delves into a host of fascinating topics, including:
-the parts of the brain that scientists believe are involved in the exercise of will
-what Parkinson's, Tourette's, and schizophrenia reveal about our ability to control our actions
-whether a future of criminal behavior is determined by brain chemistry
-how self-reflective consciousness may have evolved from a largely deterministic brain
Using illustrative examples from philosophy, mythology, history, and criminology, and with thorough discussions of actual scientific experiments, the author explores the threat of neuroscience to moral responsibility as he attempts to answer the question: Are we truly in control of our actions?

Written for general readers and students, this book provides an accessible and brief metaphysical defense of freedom. James W. Felt, S.J., invites his audience to consider that we are responsible for what we do precisely because we do it freely. His perspective runs counter to the philosophers who argue that the freedom humans feel in their actions is merely an illusion. Felt argues in detail that there are no compelling reasons for thinking we are not free, and very strong ones for thinking that we are. The view that Felt develops parallels that of the French philosopher Henri Bergson (1859-1941). In the course of his analysis, Felt considers determinism, compatibilism, agency, and the problem of evil. Featuring an updated suggested reading list, this clearly and engagingly written introductory work is ideal for the undergraduate classroom.

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.

Ours is a time of unprecedented pessimism regarding the possibility of achieving consensus around moral issues. Christian liturgical practices, which are grounded in a communicative economy of love and mercy, contain wisdom that might be of significant help. What difference might it make if we confessed sin (learned epistemic humility, worked at overcoming self-deception), interceded for others (learned to go beyond empathy to compassion and advocacy for the well-being of all persons, became willing to look beyond the possible for solutions, etc.), and learned from the best homiletical practices how to justify and apply moral positions within an ethic of hospitality and care? Speaking Together focuses on the roles that liturgical practices play in promoting genuinely communicative (understanding-oriented) forms of action and explores how liturgical practices contribute to sincere, multi-perspectival, empathetic, and truth-seeking conversations regarding moral norms in an increasingly pluralistic world. What this means is that our liturgical practices are a way of speaking together and this shapes how we organize and inhabit a shared social life.

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.

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.