Research on Professional Responsibility and Ethics in Accounting publishes high-quality research and cases which focus on the professional responsibilities of accountants and how they deal with the ethical issues they face. Covering timely issues such as social responsibility and ethical judgement, the series brings together a range of articles exploring the professional responsibilities of accountants, codes of conduct which affect them, and securities regulations. Compliance with professional guidelines is judgement-based and the characteristics of the individual, the culture in which they operate, and situations all affect how these guidelines are interpreted and applied, as well as when they might be violated.

This text offers a series of critical commentaries on, and forced encounters between, different thinkers. At stake in this philosophical and psychoanalytical enquiry is the drawing of a series of diagrams of the finite/infinite relation, and the mapping out of the contours for a speculative and pragmatic production of subjectivity.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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?

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?

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.

Chinese and Greco-Roman ethics present highly articulate views on how one should live; both of these traditions remain influential in modern philosophy. The question arises how these traditions can be compared with one another. Comparative ethics is a relatively young discipline, and this volume is a major contribution to the field. Fundamental questions about the nature of comparing ethics are treated in two introductory chapters, followed by chapters on core issues in each of the traditions : harmony, virtue, friendship, knowledge, the relation of ethics to morality, relativism. The volume closes with a number of comparative studies on emotions, being and unity, simplicity and complexity, and prediction.

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.

The Ethical Technologist is an exploration of what it is to be a change agent during this most dynamic period of human history. Hundreds, even thousands of years in the future, the technological advances of the late 20th and 21st Centuries will be recognised in history as a pivotal point in human evolution. Technologists today have the power to do what humans have never before been able to do. But with great power must come responsibility if we are to avoid trouble. Technologists working today are busy creating the future of humanity. We need full awareness of the impact of what we are doing if we are going to create the best future we can. While technology is merely a tool, this book makes the case that the best kind of technology is that which helps people come to a fuller expression of their humanity, their human potential, to help a person become self-actualized. On the other hand, the worst kind of technology dehumanises people, reduces them to a component in a machine, a mere unit of production. Ethical conduct in technology development comes down to a simple, two-part proposition; people must be told what the consequences of using a technology will be and give their informed consent, and secondly, that they must not be harmed by using it. At a personal level, an ethical person has integrity; they are the same person regardless of who they are with, they do not adjust their morals to gain the approval of the people they are currently with. An ethical person is autonomous in the sense that they are the embodiment of right action. They do not need to look outside of themselves to know how to behave. The knowledge is already there inside them. This can only come from careful introspection; this book shows you how. It comes down to being fully aware of what you are thinking and doing every moment, and consciously making choices that will produce beneficial outcomes for yourself and those affected by your actions.

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.

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"