'Reprogen-ethics and the future of gender' bring together three tightly related topics, which have so far been dealt separately in bioethics: assisted reproduction, enhancing and gender. Part one in this book targets presents policies and legislature of assisted reproduction. Part two focuses on current views of the ethics of PGD and enhancing. Part three tackles the future of gender. Part four deals with artificial wombs and ectogenesis. The aim of this book is to provide a joint perspective in order to get the big picture. Contributors include John Harris, Matti Hairy, Tuija Takala, Soren Holm, David Heyd, Daniel Callahan, James Hughes, Harriet Bradley, Ekaterina Balabanova, Roy Gilbar and others. Some chapters in this book will significantly contribute to the current discussion of the topics at stake; other chapters will start a discussion on issues that have not yet been discussed. 'Reprogen-ethics and the future of gender' will certainly appeal to readers who are interested in any of the intersecting topics of assisted reproduction, genetic enhancing and gender; bioethicists, sociologists, genetic counsellors, gynaecologists, legislators, and students of the relevant disciplines.

Contemporary philosophy is torn between a reliance on the pragmatic meanings of designated objects and a foundation based on formal theory. This book shows that philosophical knowledge, which no more has a terminal state than an infinite set has a last term, advances when the dialectical relationship between the two approaches is synthesized. The choice of designations is intimately related to theory and the form of theory is intimately related to the character of designated objects. The intimate dialectical relationship between theory and meaning is explored in detail in the area of international theory. The recent emphasis on realism rests on a regressive misunderstanding of the dialectical relationship between theory and practice that loses Newton's acute understanding of it, an understanding that underlies the great advances of physics, and that is lost in the contemporary social sciences.

This volume focuses on contemporary Confucianism, and collects essays by famous sinologists such as Guy Alitto, John Makeham, Tse-ki Hon and others. The content is divided into three sections - addressing the "theory" and "practice" of contemporary Confucianism, as well as how the two relate to each other - to provide readers a more meaningful understanding of contemporary Confucianism and Chinese culture. In 1921, at the height of the New Culture Movement's iconoclastic attack on Confucius, Liang Shuming ( ) fatefully predicted that in fact the future world culture would be Confucian. Over the nine decades that followed, Liang's reputation and the fortunes of Confucianism in China rose and fell together. So, readers may be interested in the question whether it is possible that a reconstituted "Confucianism" might yet become China's spiritual mainstream and a major constituent of world culture.

Why do people do evil? How can we learn to do better? Philosophers in the long-standing tradition of 'virtue ethics' argue that we act badly because of shortcomings in our character, and that we can improve by practicing virtues such as courage, honesty, and compassion. Recently, philosophical 'situationists' have issued a profound challenge to this tradition: they argue that anyone can act badly if placed in a sufficiently tempting situation, and that the goal of cultivating good character is misguided and may even be harmful. Rather than encouraging us to pursue the ideal of virtue, these philosophers propose that ethics should instead begin by recognizing the profound limits of human self-knowledge and self-control. This book critically examines the arguments and evidence on each side of this debate, with a special focus on the connections between the philosophical issues and current research in social and personality psychology. Character also includes guides to further reading that will help students deepen their understanding of this essential topic in contemporary ethics.

Foreword by Alexandra Stoddard, author of Living a Beautiful Life: 500 Ways to Add Elegance, Order, Beauty and Joy to Every Day of Your Life. "Often we come to a point in our lives when we dispense with thetrivial and tire of ordinary superficialities," writes Peter MegargeeBrown in Figure It Out: A Guide to Wisdom. Here he has collected someof the most profound statements of all time, and gathered them intotopical sections reflecting the depth of the thinker behind the triallawyer. Sprinkled with his comments on the quotations he has carefullyselected over many years, sparkling anecdotes and essays complementthe quotations and provide a complete and thought-provoking portraitof each subject. Brown leads you through the great subjects mankind has grappledwith since the beginning-spirituality, love, life, death, friendship-and offers much more-his appraisal of the complexities of character, writing, history, memory, privacy, travel-drawing on the wisdom ofgreat philosophers including Aristotle, Hillel, Voltaire and Hegel, Supreme Court Justices Oliver Wendell Holmes, Benjamin Cardozo andJoseph Story, the late Tony Snow, writers such as George Bernard Shaw, Ayn Rand, Maureen Dowd and Malachy McCourt, politicians WinstonChurchill and Theodore Roosevelt, painter Henri Matisse and architectFrank Lloyd Wright. A collection that can be read cover-to-cover or flipped throughfor a moment of illumination, Figure It Out: A Guide to Wisdom willentertain and enlighten seekers of truth. Turn to this treasury forinspiration, as Alexandra Stoddard says in the Foreword, "Whether youare a reader, a writer, a historian, a philosopher, or a speaker atimportant events-even making a toast-this personal selection willdelight you, uplift you, and help you to Figure It Out." Peter Megargee Brown began his legal career as assistant counselto John Marshall Harlan on the New York State Crime Commission. AfterMr. Harlan was appointed to the United States Supreme Court, Mr. Brownwent on to become chief litigator for the New York firm of Cadwalader, Wickersham & Taft. In 1982, he founded his own law firm in New York, Brown & Seymour. He is a Past President of the Federal Bar Council anda Fellow of the American College of Trial Lawyers. He is the author ofnumerous books, including The Art of Questioning: Thirty Maxims ofCross Examination. He was educated at Yale College and Yale Law Schooland lives with his wife, the designer and author Alexandra Stoddard, in Stonington, Ct. The Peter Megargee Brown Papers, the legal papers of the author, comprising 303 bound volumes of his principal law suits over 50 yearsof practice in the United States Supreme Court and Appellate Courts, are available for the use of students and scholars and can be found inthe "Manuscripts and Archives" section of the Yale University Library.

This is the final work of the distinguished philosopher Paul Ziff, whose earlier books include Understanding Understanding, Philosophical Turnings, and Semantic Analysis. It is carefully crafted and written in numbered paragraphs rather than chapters, in style of the later Wittgenstein. The work concerns morality, rationality, symbolism and imagery.
In the words of the author: "The primary thesis of this essay is that, although there are many different and conflicting moralities, both here in America and throughout the world, some of them can be criticized and rejected on rational grounds. There are other moralities that one can personally reject, but they cannot be criticized on rational grounds. The same is true of the various values and priorities that different people have. Some are open to criticism on rational grounds; others are not open to such criticism." His conclusion is: "Symbolism and imagery constitute the real and only basis of the moralities that I have endeavored to characterize here, my own morality and that of others. But the most fundamental image of all of my morality is that which is created by an appreciation of life, all life."

Rapid advances in cognitive neuroscience and converging technologies have led to a vigorous debate over cognitive enhancement. This book outlines the ethical and social issues, but goes on to focus on the policy dimensions, which until now have received much less attention. As the economic, social and personal stakes involved with cognitive enhancement are so high, and the advances in knowledge so swift, we are likely to see increasing demands for government involvement in cognitive enhancement techniques. The book therefore places these techniques in a political context and brings the subsequent considerations and divisions to the forefront of the debate, situating their resolution within the milieu of interest group politics. The book will provide a starting point from which readers can develop a balanced policy framework for addressing such concerns.

Ever since Harts The Concept of Law, legal philosophers agree that the practice of law-applying officials is a fundamental aspect of law. Yet there is a huge disagreement on the nature of this practice. Is it a conventional practice? Is it like the practice that takes place, more generally, when there is a social rule in a group? Does it share the nature of collective intentional action? The book explores the main responses to these questions, and claims that they fail on two main counts: current theories do not explain officials beliefs that they are under a duty qua members of an institution, and they do not explain officials disagreement about the content of these institutional duties. Based on a particular theory of collective action, the author elaborates then an account of certain institutions, and claims that the practice is an institutional practice of sorts. This would explain officials beliefs in institutional duties, and officials disagreement about those duties.

The book should be of interest to legal philosophers, but also to those concerned with group and social action theories and, more generally, with the nature of institutions."

What does it mean to say that imagination plays a role in moral reasoning, and what are the theoretical and practical implications? Engaging with three traditions in moral theory and confronting them with three contexts of moral practice, this book offers a more comprehensive framework to think about these questions. The author develops an argument about the relation between imagination and principles that moves beyond competition metaphors and center-periphery schemas. He shows that both cooperate and are equally necessary to cope with moral problems, and combines insights of different theories and disciplines to explore how this works in practice.

Kant's Groundwork for the Metaphysics of Morals, first published in 1785, is still one of the most widely read and influential works of moral philosophy. This Broadview edition combines a newly revised version of T.K. Abbott's respected translation with material crucial for placing the Groundwork in the context of Kant's broader moral thought. A varied selection of other ethical writings by Kant on subjects including our moral duties, fundamental principles of justice, the concept of happiness, and the relation of morality to religion are included, along with important criticisms of Kant's ethics by Fichte, Schiller, Hegel, and Sidgwick.

This book discusses outcomes of a study by the National Institute of Mental Health, Czech Republic, examining moral integrity in the post-communist Czech-speaking environment. Chapters map the history of the Euro-Atlantic ethical disciplines from moral philosophy and psychology to evolutionary neuroscience and socio-biology. The authors emphasize the biological and social conditionality of ethics and call for greater differentiation of both research and applied psychological standards in today's globalised world. Using a non-European ethical system - Theravada Buddhism - as a case study, the authors explore the differences in English and Czech interpretations of the religion. They analyse cognitive styles and language as central variables in formatting and interpreting moral values, with important consequences for cultural transferability of psychological instruments. This book will appeal to academics and other specialists in psychology, psychiatry, sociology and related fields, as well as to readers interested in the psychology of ethics.

This book presents a novel proposal for establishing justice and social harmony in the aftermath of genocide. It argues that justice should be determined by the victims of genocide rather than a detached legal system, since such a form of justice is more consistent with a socially grounded ethics, with a democracy that privileges citizen decision-making, and with human rights. The book covers the Holocaust; genocides in Argentina, South Africa, Rwanda, Latin America, and Australia, as well as crimes against humanity in Italy and France. From show trials to state- enforced forgiveness, the book examines various methods that have been used since 1945 to punish the individuals and groups responsible for genocide and how they have ultimately failed to deliver true justice to the victims. The only way to end this failure, the book points out, is to return justice to the victims. This simple proposition; however, challenges the Enlightenment tradition of Western law which was built on the refusal to allow victims to determine the measure of justice. That would amount, according to Bacon, Hegel, and Kant to a revenge system and bring social chaos. But, as this book points out, forgiveness is only something victims can give, no-one can demand it. In order to establish a lasting peace, it is necessary to re-examine the philosophical and theoretical refusal to return justice to the victims. The engaging argument put forth in this book can help deliver true justice and re-establish international social harmony in the aftermath of genocide. Genocide is ubiquitous in the modern, global world. It's understanding is highly relevant for the understanding of specific and perpetuating challenges in migration. Genocide forces the migration of millions to avoid crimes against humanity. When they flee war zones they bring their fears, hates, and misery with them. So migration research must engage fully with the experience of genocide, its human conseque nces and the ethical dilemmas it poses to all societies. Not to do so, will make it more difficult to understand and live with newcomers and to achieve some sort of harmony in host countries, as well as those which are centers of genocide.

This new book by Michael Slote argues that Western philosophy on the whole has overemphasized rational control and autonomy at the expense of the important countervailing value and virtue of receptivity. Recently the ideas of caring and empathy have received a great deal of philosophical and public attention, but both these notions rest on the deeper and broader value of receptivity, and in From Enlightenment to Receptivity, Slote seeks to show that we need to focus more on receptivity if we are to attain a more balanced sense and understanding of what is important to us.
Beginning with a critique of Enlightenment thinking that calls into question its denial of any central role to considerations of emotion and empathy, he goes on to show how a greater emphasis on these factors and on the receptivity that underlies them can give us a more realistic, balanced, and sensitive understanding of our core ethical and epistemological values. This means rejecting post-modernism's blanket rejection of reason and of compelling real values and recognizing, rather, that receptivity should play a major role in how we lead our lives as individuals, in how we relate to nature, in how we acquire knowledge about the world, and in how we relate morally and politically with others.

The author presents a new philosophical theory according to which we need intuitions and emotions in order to have objective moral knowledge, which is called affectual intuitionism. Affectual Intuitionism combines ethical intuitionism with a cognitive theory of emotions.

This book presents new findings that deal with different facets of the well-being of children and their relevance to the proper treatment of children. The well-being of children is considered against the background of a wide variety of legal, political, medical, educational and familial perspectives. The book addresses diverse issues from a range of disciplinary perspectives using a variety of methods. It has three major sections with the essays in each section loosely organized about a common general theme. The first section focuses on issues concerning the relation between children's well-being and autonomy or agency. The second section deals with child well-being insofar as the limits of parental authority are concerned. The third section has a more applied orientation and addresses a variety of public policy controversies involving the interpretation of children's well-being.

Americans pride themselves on being an ethical people. They go to church, quote the Bible, erect statues, and discuss morality with abandon. They also trust their government to do the right thing when it comes to delivering legal justice and conducting foreign policy. Trouble is, American foreign policy has yielded some pretty spectacular ethical lapses, and (as 9/11 starkly demonstrated) the world is beginning to notice. Here, Mark Gibney lays out some of the most egregious insults the U.S. has visited upon international law, economic justice, and human rights in recent times. He covers everything from multinational corporations, the first Persian Gulf war, and Guantanamo Bay to American refugee policy, foreign aid, and global environmental degradation. Through all these examples, he exposes the discrepancy between the guise of ethical policy motivation and the reality of situational international ethics or worse. He shows us how we practice 'easy ethics' in an uneasy world, and how it is beginning to catch up with us. Part I concludes with a gallop through the alphabet of countries where the U.S. has engaged in nefarious legal behavior and supported brutal dictatorships everywhere from Argentina to Zaire. Part II offers a cautious 'coda of hope' in exploring recent trends toward public political apology and forgiveness, new U.S. policies toward AIDS in Africa, and renewed civic commitment flowing out of the tragedy of 9/11. Only when the exercise of American ethics becomes as muscular as our use of military force will the United States become the ethical superpower it projects itself to be. And only then will the concert of nations join us in the harmonization of global governance."

What effect does creativity have on individuals, groups and societies, and on the fundamental values on which they base their actions and institutions? What constitutes good and evil, right and wrong, and how does creativity disrupt these beliefs? 'The Ethics of Creativity' brings together an impressive collaboration of thinkers from several countries and disciplines to illuminate the thorny issues that arise when novel ideas and products brought forth by creativity collide with the rules and norms of what we believe to be right or good.

This work is an introductory treatment of issues and options in social and bioethics which center on the end of life. Moreland and Geisler have attempted to simplify and summarize various end-of-life topics without being simplistic or caricaturing different viewpoints, even though the authors' own viewpoints are made perfectly clear. A comprehensive bibliography, glossary, and subject and author index make this a valuable textbook as well as a resource for further study. The major purpose of this book is to make the reader think more clearly and deeply about the important issues discussed between its covers. Beginning the work is an essay that introduces the dilemma of ethical decisions. The following chapters separately discuss the situations of abortion, infanticide, euthanasia, suicide, capital punishment, and war. The discussion concludes with a chapter of practical and theoretical guidance for making ethical decisions. A glossary, subject index, author index, and selected bibliography for each chapter make this a valuable text. This important work will not only appeal to experienced philosophers, but also to students of moral philosophy, theology, and ethics.

This book details possible ethical situations and pitfalls that forensic psychiatric experts would commonly encounter when making a court testimony. Richly illustrated with cases from medicine, psychiatry, and law, this elegantly written volume examines the common moral ground that links these usually separate domains, and relates forensic ethics to larger concepts of morality and justice.

Each chapter can be read independently, so useful to a variety of courses. It presupposes no prior knowledge, so useful for introductory, as well as more advanced, courses. It enables students to progress from practical issues to moral theories. It introduces debates over controversial and topical moral and political issues - drug laws, punishment, civil disobedience, and global poverty. It presents clear and concise examination of key concepts in moral and political theory - liberty, liberty-limiting principles (harm, offence, paternalism, and harmless wrongdoing), rights, equality and social justice.This title provides a clear and concise introduction to moral and political philosophy which critically analyzes arguments about controversial and topical practical issues - drug laws, justifications of punishment, civil disobedience, whether there is a duty to obey the law, and global poverty.

This collection explores the nature and role of ethics within anarchist thought and practice, examining normative, meta-ethical and applied ethical issues through some of the theoretical insights of anarchism. It comprises contributions from international scholars working within the fields of philosophy and political theory.