This book explores what is at stake in our confessional culture. Thomas Docherty examines confessional writings from Augustine to Montaigne and from Sylvia Plath to Derrida, arguing that through all this work runs a philosophical substratum - the conditions under which it is possible to assert a confessional mode - that needs exploration and explication.
Docherty outlines a philosophy of confession that has pertinence for a contemporary political culture based on the notion of 'transparency'. In a postmodern 'transparent society', the self coincides with its self-representations. Such a position is central to the idea of authenticity and truth-telling in confessional writing: it is the basis of saying, truthfully, 'here I take my stand'.
The question is: what other consequences might there be of an assumption of the primacy of transparency? Two areas are examined in detail: the religious and the judicial. Docherty shows that despite the tendency to regard transparency as a general social and ethical good, our contemporary culture of transparency has engendered a society in which autonomy (or the very authority of the subject that proclaims 'I confess') is grounded in guilt, reparation and victimhood.

This book questions how abortion laws can be regulated in a time when abortion rights are still subject to intense debate. It addresses objections to basing abortion law on considerations of moral risk, presents two anti-abortion arguments - the deprivation argument and the substance view - to demonstrate the risk of permitting abortion, and discusses the moral risk of restricting access to abortion when it may unjustifiably harm women. The author also shows how welfare states can address the negative effects of restrictive abortion laws by preventive, mitigative and compensatory measures. This is a thought-provoking and challenging book that will be of great interest to those considering abortion laws across the fields of medical ethics, bioethics, moral philosophy, law and politics.

This book presents the building blocks of Islamic economics as meso-science, offering an in-depth study of the Qur'anic worldview of the monotheistic unity of knowledge, which is the universal and unique message of Tawhid in the Qur'an. This primal ontological premise is formalised in an analytical approach that introduces and unpacks the philosophical concepts of ontology, epistemology, and phenomenology in relation to the Tawhidi methodological worldview. The analysis of Qur'anic logical consistency is then cast in a phenomenological perspective by applying the complete model of the unity of knowledge of the Qur'an in a specific study of the Tawhidi methodological approach to Islamic financial-economic theory. In doing so, it tackles the problems of meso-economics given its socio-scientific holism in world affairs. It hones in on the results of the symbiotic modulation of evolutionary learning processes in the world system of the unity of knowledge and its material embedding across knowledge, and knowledge-induced space and time dimensions. The author poses that Shari'ah is only partial in its scope, and excludes an analytical methodological worldview. Shari'ah is thus cast in the midst of a meso-socio-scientific absence of any appertaining methodology. The book is a landmark work in the conceptual and applied understanding of Tawhid as the methodological worldview of the monotheistic unity of knowledge in the meso-socio-scientific realm of 'everything', particularised to Islamic economics. Adopting an inter-disciplinary view integrating various fields, it challenges pervasive Western academic and institutional thinking in terms of economics. It will be of interest to students and researchers in Islamic economics, religious theory, Islamic philosophy, development studies, and finance.

Experiencing ethics not only refers to being confronted with a situation in which one must choose a course of action; it also makes reference to giving a narrative account of the circumstances and chain of events leading to such crossroads. Between both there is a chasm, a space of indeterminacy into which R. Musil and L. Sterne delve with aesthetic means. Their poetics move in opposite directions, but by following them to their last critical consequences this study reveals a kindred ethical stance. This interpretation sheds light on the ethics revolving around character construction by examining the constraints thwarting any attempt to complete a biographical account or convey a protagonist that led his or her life. Neither Musil nor Sterne posit a narrative agenda that could reach a last chapter or lead to a groundwork determining their ethics. A closer look into their tight-knit prose reveals that both rely on the narrating, on a skill that must be incessantly cultivated through a digressive or essayistic style. Equipped with a vast theoretical repertoire, this approach makes a strong case for a new constellation in comparative literature.

Rarely discussed in courses on ethics is the topic of excuses, but in McDowell's view, excuses offer the most illuminating way to understand the true nature of ethical problems in the professions. He looks at excuses that professionals give when accused of acting unethically, and asks, when are they valid and when not? Problems of professional ethics are really problems of compliance, he argues, not ignorance of expectations. The study of excuses can help us understand what these problems are and offer insights into ways to solve them. Banks maintains too that our ethical expectations may need overhauling, given substantial changes that have occurred in how professionals do their work today. They can be easily persuaded that what they are doing is not unethical; it depends on the excuses they give themselves as well as others. Professionals know what's expected of them, but social and economic pressures make compliance difficult. Professionals in all fields, who struggle to be both successful and ethical, will find the book challenging, provocative, and yet sympathetic and reassuring too. It will also be an important resource for graduate students in courses exploring the relationship between business and ethics.

Excuses may be ways of avoiding professional responsibility, says McDowell, but they may also be the way in which general ethical principles are adapted to particular contexts. They may also indicate that ethical codes need to be reformulated to adapt to changes in how professional services are delivered. Specialization, urbanization and the systematic breakdown in community relationships, the globalization of the economy, system, and market pressures for success--for all these reasons, professionals today face problems much different from those faced by their counterparts earlier in the century. Excuses also raise the problem of whether any system of voluntary compliance, like professional ethics, can function when the decision on whether an excuse is valid or invalid rests with the actor, who can rationalize almost any self-interested action he or she might take. McDowell explores these issues and others in a fresh, readable style, with numerous anecdotal examples, and with evidence from many sources that the crisis is real and demands quick but lasting remedies.

Mass Moralizing: Marketing and Moral Storytelling examines the narratives of today's brand marketing, which largely focuses on creating an emotional attachment to a brand rather than directly promoting a product's qualities or features. Phil Hopkins explores these narratives' influence on how we think about ourselves and our moral possibilities, our cultural ideas about morality, and our relations to each other. He closely studies the relationship between three interrelated dynamics: the power of narrative in the construction of identity and world, the truth-telling pretenses of mass marketing, and the growth of moralizing as the primary moral discourse practice in contemporary consumer culture. Mass Moralizing scrutinizes the way marketing speaks to us in explicitly moralistic terms, significantly influencing how we think about ourselves and our moral possibilities.

Fairness and Futurity: Essays on Environmental Sustainability and Social Justice brings together leading international figures in political theory and sociology, as well as representatives from the political community, to consider the normative issues at stake in the relationship between environmental sustainability and social justice. It raises important questions and sets out to provide the answers. If future generations are owed justice, what should we bequeath them? Is `sustainability' an appropriate medium for environmentalists to express their demands? Is environmental protection compatible with intra-generational justice? Is environmental sustainability a luxury when social peace has broken down? These essays emerged from three intensive seminars that involved participants in constant re-evaluations of their work, and which bought three distinct groups-environmental theorists, `mainstream' political theorists, and policy community members-into fruitful contact. In particular, the attempt to involve `mainstream' theorists in environmental questions, and to encourage environmentalists to use intellectual resources of political theory, should be highlighted.

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?

This book presents an alternative theory of globalization that derives not from the dominant perspective of the West, from which this process emerged, but from the critical vantage point of the Third World, which has borne the heaviest burdens of globalization. It offers a critical and uniquely first-hand perspective that is lacking not only from the apologists of Western hegemony, but from most scholars writing against this hegemony from within the globalizing world. Renowned throughout Latin America and parts of Europe, the author, Brazilian geographer Milton Santos, has long been for the most part inaccessible to the English-speaking world. Only one of his books, The Shared Space: The Two Circuits of the Urban Economy in Underdeveloped Countries, published in 1975, has been translated into English; nevertheless, the works of Santos's most important phase, from the 1980s until his death in 2001, have remained unavailable to English readers. With the translation of Toward an Other Globalization, one of the last works published in Santos's lifetime, this situation has finally been rectified. In this book, Santos argues that we must consider globalization in three different senses: globalization as a fable (the world as globalizing agents make us believe), as perversity (the world as it is presently, in the throes of globalization), and as possibility (the world as it could be). What emerges from the analysis of these three senses is an alternative theory of globalization rooted in the perspective of the so-called Global South. Santos concludes his text with a message that is optimistic, but in no way nai ve. What he offers instead is a revolutionary optimism and, indeed, an other globalization.

In this book the author argues that the Falasifa, the Philosophers of the Islamic Golden Age, are usefully interpreted through the prism of the contemporary, western ethics of belief. He contends that their position amounts to what he calls 'Moderate Evidentialism' - that only for the epistemic elite what one ought to believe is determined by one's evidence. The author makes the case that the Falasifa's position is well argued, ingeniously circumvents issues in the epistemology of testimony, and is well worth taking seriously in the contemporary debate. He reasons that this is especially the case since the position has salutary consequences for how to respond to the sceptic, and for how we are to conceive of extremist belief.

In this book, authors from a wide interdisciplinary spectrum discuss the issue of care. The book covers both philosophical and therapeutic studies and contains a three-pronged approach to discussing the concepts of care: vulnerability, otherness, and therapy. Above all, it is a matter of combining, in a plural form, a path with multiple theoretical and conceptual bifurcations, but which always point to an observation of society from the perspective of human vulnerability.

In this book the broad, interdisciplinary theory of Triune Ethics Meta-theory is explored to demonstrate how it explains the different patterns of morality seen in the world today. It describes how human morality develops dynamically from experience in early life and it proposes that the methods in which humans are raised bring about tendencies towards self-protective or open-hearted social relations. When the life course follows evolutionary systems, then prosocial, open-hearted capacities develop but when the life course goes against evolutionary systems it should not be a surprise that self-focused values and behaviors develop such as violent tribalism, self aggrandizement and a binary orientation to others (dominance or submission). Many humans alive today exhibit impaired capacities in comparison to humans from small-band hunter-gatherer societies, the type of society that represents 99% of humanity's history. TEM is rooted in ethical naturalism and points out how to optimize human moral development through the lifespan-toward the ethics of engagement and communal imagination.

Ethics of Spying: A Reader for the Intelligence Professional, Volume 2 picks up where the first book ended, but, with a twist. The book begins with an historical perspective of the expectations of moral and ethical conduct of personnel working in intelligence. In a previously classified memo from 1941 and a report from 1954, the reader gets a sense of both the history and perception of what was expected of professional conduct as viewed from government officials. The first half of this book seeks to define an intelligence professional, while the second half of the book seeks to utilize various theoretical and practical perspectives. The richness of this publication is aided by the international views of its authors, which hail from Israel, the United Kingdom, Switzerland, and the United States, among others. These prominent scholars explore ethics through the intelligence cycle and how ethics is evolving and viewed in a post-9/11 world. The book concludes with a survey on ethical conduct by interrogators, a brief history of intelligence reform, and a bibliography on this subject. The history and international perspectives provided in this book lay the foundation for further study in this increasingly prominent field of interdisciplinary study.

Democracy is emerging as the political system of choice throughout the world. Peoples now freed from the shackles of totalitarian systems seek to share the benefits made possible by democracy in its "home bases" in North America and Western Europe. Yet, paradoxically, in the last decade liberal democracy has been subjected to an onslaught of criticism from thinkers at its "home bases". Criticisms of democracy have been informed by scholarship in feminism, postmodernism and communitarianism as well as the revived interest in applying ethics to public policy. These criticisms raise important questions about the traditional values - liberalism, neutrality or equality, autonomy, and human rights - thought to justify democracy. They also raise questions about the success of democratic systems in promoting alternative values and in protecting lifestyles not desired by majorities. This anthology contains essays by authors at the forefront of the controversy as well as by acute observers of the processes by which "democratic" public policy is formed. The essays include criticisms of democratic theory and practice, defences of liberalism (the set of values often thought to ground democracy), calls for major revisions of democratic institutions and practices, and recommendations for new ways of understanding our rights and responsibilities as members of democratic communities.

Certain films seem to encapsulate perfectly the often abstract ethical situations that confront the media, from truth-telling and sensationalism to corporate control and social responsibility. Using these movies--including "Ace in the Hole," "All the President's Men," "Network," and "Twelve Angry Men"--as texts, authors Howard Good and Michael Dillon demonstrate that, when properly framed and contextualized, movies can be a powerful lens through which to examine media practices.

Moreover, cinema can present human moral conduct for evaluation and analysis more effectively than a traditional case study can. By presenting ethical dilemmas and theories within a dramatic framework, "Media Ethics Goes to the Movies" offers a unique perspective on what it means for media professionals to be both technically competent and morally informed.

Sensitive to the discontinuities in Foucault's thought, neither critical nor slavishly devotional, On the Use and Abuse of Foucault for Politics demonstrates how Foucault is relevant for contemporary democratic theory. Beginning with a discussion of the interrelated ideas of power and resistance, Brent Pickett provides an interpretation of Foucault's political philosophy, including a comprehensive overview of the reasons for various conflicting interpretations, and then explores how well the different "Foucaults" can be used in progressive politics. Accessible and insightful, On the Use and Abuse of Foucault for Politics is valuable for specialists in Foucault and for students of postmodern and democratic theory alike.

This is a reproduction of a book published before 1923. This book may have occasional imperfections such as missing or blurred pages, poor pictures, errant marks, etc. that were either part of the original artifact, or were introduced by the scanning process. We believe this work is culturally important, and despite the imperfections, have elected to bring it back into print as part of our continuing commitment to the preservation of printed works worldwide. We appreciate your understanding of the imperfections in the preservation process, and hope you enjoy this valuable book.

This book captures the quintessence of the author's 20-year career, presenting both unique perspectives and logical arguments. Guided by the Marxist concept of historical materialism, it reveals the function and effect of morality by analyzing and defining the moral domain. Further, it argues that economic development requires moral support by analyzing the inseparable logical connection between economics and morality. Moreover, it investigates moral capital and its route to achieving value multiplication in economic activities, and proposes a practice and evaluation index system for moral capital in enterprises. Combining philosophical analysis and the exploration of practical applications, the book also discusses a basic strategy to help enterprises enrich and manage their moral capital.

This book acknowledges and highlights the moral excellence embedded in black queer practices of family. Taking the lives, narratives, and creative explorations of black queer people seriously, Thelathia Nikki Young brings readers on a journey of new, queer ethical methods that include confrontation, resistance, and imagination. Young asserts that family and its surrounding norms are both microcosms of and foundations for human relationships. She discusses how black queer people are moral subjects whose ethical reflection, lived experience, and embodied action demonstrate valuable moral agency for those of us thinking about liberating and life-giving ways to enact "family." Young posits that black queer people enact moral agency in ways that ought to be understood qua moral agency. Refusing to recognize the examples from this (and any other) community, Young argues, denies us all the learning and moral growth that come from connecting with diverse human experiences. This book investigates how acknowledging and critically engaging with the moral agency within marginalized subjectivities allow us to consider and bear witness to the moral potential in us all.

This book outlines and circumvents two serious problems that appear to attach to Kant's moral philosophy, or more precisely to the model of rational agency that underlies that moral philosophy: the problem of experiential incongruence and the problem of misdirected moral attention. The book's central contention is that both these problems can be sidestepped. In order to demonstrate this, it argues for an entirely novel reading of Kant's views on action and moral motivation. In addressing the two main problems in Kant's moral philosophy, the book explains how the first problem arises because the central elements of Kant's theory of action seem not to square with our lived experience of agency, and moral agency in particular. For example, the idea that moral deliberation invariably takes the form of testing personal policies against the Categorical Imperative seems at odds with the phenomenology of such reasoning, as does the claim that all our actions proceed from explicitly adopted general policies, or maxims. It then goes on to discuss the second problem showing how it is a result of Kant's apparent claim that when an agent acts from duty, her reason for doing so is that her maxim is lawlike. This seems to put the moral agent's attention in the wrong place: on the nature of her own maxims, rather than on the world of other people and morally salient situations. The book shows how its proposed novel reading of Kant's views ultimately paints an unfamiliar but appealing picture of the Kantian good-willed agent as much more embedded in and engaged with the world than has traditionally been supposed.