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Books > Social sciences > Sociology, social studies > Social issues > Ethical issues & debates > General
Christine M. Korsgaard presents a compelling new view of humans'
moral relationships to the other animals. She defends the claim
that we are obligated to treat all sentient beings as what Kant
called "ends-in-themselves". Drawing on a theory of the good
derived from Aristotle, she offers an explanation of why animals
are the sorts of beings for whom things can be good or bad. She
then turns to Kant's argument for the value of humanity to show
that rationality commits us to claiming the standing of
ends-in-ourselves, in two senses. Kant argued that as autonomous
beings, we claim to be ends-in-ourselves when we claim the standing
to make laws for ourselves and each other. Korsgaard argues that as
beings who have a good, we also claim to be ends-in-ourselves when
we take the things that are good for us to be good absolutely and
so worthy of pursuit. The first claim commits us to joining with
other autonomous beings in relations of moral reciprocity. The
second claim commits us to treating the good of every sentient
creature as something of absolute importance. Korsgaard argues that
human beings are not more important than the other animals, that
our moral nature does not make us superior to the other animals,
and that our unique capacities do not make us better off than the
other animals. She criticizes the "marginal cases" argument and
advances a new view of moral standing as attaching to the atemporal
subjects of lives. She criticizes Kant's own view that our duties
to animals are indirect, and offers a non-utilitarian account of
the relation between pleasure and the good. She also addresses a
number of directly practical questions: whether we have the right
to eat animals, experiment on them, make them work for us and fight
in our wars, and keep them as pets; and how to understand the wrong
that we do when we cause a species to go extinct.
In Rescuing Humanity, Willem H. Vanderburg reminds us that we have
relied on discipline-based approaches for human knowing, doing, and
organizing for less than a century. During this brief period, these
approaches have become responsible for both our spectacular
successes and most of our social and environmental crises. At their
roots is a cultural mutation that includes secular religious
attitudes that veil the limits of these approaches, leading to
their overvaluation. Because their use, especially in science and
technology, is primarily built up with mathematics, living entities
and systems can be dealt with only as if their "architecture" or
"design" is based on the principle of non-contradiction, which is
true only for non-living entities. This distortion explains our
many crises. Vanderburg begins to explore the limits of
discipline-based approaches, which guides the way toward developing
complementary ones capable of transcending these limits. It is no
different from a carpenter going beyond the limits of his hammer by
reaching for other tools. As we grapple with everything from the
impacts of social media, the ongoing climate crisis, and divisive
political ideologies, Rescuing Humanity reveals that our
civilization must learn to do the equivalent if humans and other
living things are to continue making earth a home.
In our brave new world of Big Tech, work is automated and money
melts into air. What comes next as the global capitalist edifice
crumbles? Slavoj Zizek shows how the answer is already stealing
into sight, like a thief in broad daylight. What we must do is wake
up and see it. 'In a world determined to crush hope of radical
change, where moral corruption poses as pragmatism and systemic
oppression as the new freedom, Slavoj Zizek's excellent new book
serves humanity in a way that only authentic philosophy can' Yanis
Varoufakis 'The Elvis of cultural theory' New Statesman 'Master of
the counterintuitive observation' New Yorker
Contemporary liberal thinkers commonly suppose that there is something in principle unjust about the legal prohibition of putatively victimless immoralities. Against the prevailing liberal view, Robert P. George defends the proposition that `moral laws' can play a legitimate, if subsidiary, role in preserving the `moral ecology' of the cultural environment in which people make the morally significant choices by which they form their characters and influence, for good or ill, the moral lives of others. George shows that a defence of morals legislation is fully compatible with a `pluralistic perfectionist' political theory of civil liberties and public morality.
Before 1850, all legal executions in the South were performed
before crowds that could number in the thousands; the last legal
public execution was in 1936. This study focuses on the shift from
public executions to ones behind barriers, situating that change
within our understandings of lynching and competing visions of
justice and religion. Intended to shame and intimidate, public
executions after the Civil War had quite a different effect on
southern Black communities. Crowds typically consisting of as many
Black people as white behaved like congregations before a macabre
pulpit, led in prayer and song by a Black minister on the scaffold.
Black criminals often proclaimed their innocence and almost always
their salvation. This turned the proceedings into public,
mixed-race and mixed-gender celebrations of Black religious
authority and devotion. In response, southern states rewrote their
laws to eliminate these crowds and this Black authority, ultimately
turning to electrocutions in the bowels of state penitentiaries. In
just the same era when a wave of lynchings crested around the turn
of the twentieth century, states transformed the ways that the
South's white-dominated governments controlled legal capital
punishment, making executions into private affairs witnessed only
by white people.
An Anthropogenic Table of Elements provides a contemporary
rethinking of Dmitri Mendeleev's periodic table of elements,
bringing together "elemental" stories to reflect on everyday life
in the Anthropocene. Concise and engaging, this book provides
stories of scale, toxicity, and temporality that extrapolate on
ideas surrounding ethics, politics, and materiality that are
fundamental to this contemporary moment. Examining elemental
objects and forces, including carbon, mould, cheese, ice, and
viruses, the contributors question what elemental forms are still
waiting to emerge and what political possibilities of justice and
environmental reparation they might usher into the world. Bringing
together anthropologists, historians, and media studies scholars,
this book tests a range of possible ways to tabulate and narrate
the elemental as a way to bring into view fresh discussion on
material constitutions and, thereby, new ethical stances,
responsibilities, and power relations. In doing so, An
Anthropogenic Table of Elements demonstrates through elementality
that even the smallest and humblest stories are capable of powerful
effects and vast journeys across time and space.
As discrete fields of inquiry, rhetoric and mathematics have long
been considered antithetical to each other. That is, if mathematics
explains or describes the phenomena it studies with certainty,
persuasion is not needed. This volume calls into question the view
that mathematics is free of rhetoric. Through nine studies of the
intersections between these two disciplines, Arguing with Numbers
shows that mathematics is in fact deeply rhetorical. Using rhetoric
as a lens to analyze mathematically based arguments in public
policy, political and economic theory, and even literature, the
essays in this volume reveal how mathematics influences the values
and beliefs with which we assess the world and make decisions and
how our worldviews influence the kinds of mathematical instruments
we construct and accept. In addition, contributors examine how
concepts of rhetoric-such as analogy and visuality-have been
employed in mathematical and scientific reasoning, including in the
theorems of mathematical physicists and the geometrical diagramming
of natural scientists. Challenging academic orthodoxy, these
scholars reject a math-equals-truth reduction in favor of a more
constructivist theory of mathematics as dynamic, evolving, and
powerfully persuasive. By bringing these disparate lines of inquiry
into conversation with one another, Arguing with Numbers provides
inspiration to students, established scholars, and anyone inside or
outside rhetorical studies who might be interested in exploring the
intersections between the two disciplines. In addition to the
editors, the contributors to this volume are Catherine Chaput,
Crystal Broch Colombini, Nathan Crick, Michael Dreher, Jeanne
Fahnestock, Andrew C. Jones, Joseph Little, and Edward Schiappa.
Mass Insanity explores the subjects of insane communities, the
clash of identities, and how societies indoctrinate their members
and shape their way of thinking. It uses theories of social,
clinical and forensic psychology to analyse Islam. It explores
Islamic invasions, piracy, slavery, terrorism, female genital
mutilation, rape, suppression of human rights and critical
thinking. It also discusses the decay of Western civilisation and
the arising psychological difficulties. Why do millions of
supposedly sane people endorse the assassination of writers,
cartoonist, and journalists, the suppression of women, the killing
of children, the destruction of art, culture and heritage? Can a
society that includes millions of people lose its mind and how? In
contrast, why would any country allow a group of people to
immigrate, legally and illegally, to its territories to kill its
children, rape its daughters, take its wealth, and destroy its
identity? Why would a community lose the will to defend itself
against an enemy seeking its demise? How could a society stand idly
by and watch its own offspring being slain and raped? Again, are
these healthy societies?
The argument that digitalization fosters economic activity has been
strengthened by the global COVID-19 pandemic. Because digital
technologies are general-purpose technologies that are usable
across a wide variety of economic activities, the gains from
achieving universal coverage of digital services are likely to be
large and shared throughout each economy. However, the Middle East
and North Africa region suffers from a "digital paradox+?: the
region's population uses social media more than expected for its
level of gross domestic product (GDP) per capita but uses the
internet or other digital tools to make payments less than
expected. The Upside of Digital for the Middle East and North
Africa: How Digital Technology Adoption Can Accelerate Growth and
Create Jobs presents evidence that the socioeconomic gains of
digitalizing the economies of the region are huge: GDP per capita
could rise by more than 40 percent; manufacturing revenue per unit
of factors of production could increase by 37 percent; employment
in manufacturing could rise by 7 percent; tourist arrivals could
rise by 70 percent, creating jobs in the hospitality sector;
long-term unemployment rates could fall to negligible levels; and
female labor force participation could double to more than 40
percent. To reap these gains, universal access to digital services
is crucial, as is their widespread use for economic purposes. The
book explores how fast the region could approach universal
coverage, whether targeting the rollout of digital infrastructure
services makes a difference, and what is needed to increase the use
of digital payment tools. The authors find that targeting
underserved populations and areas can accelerate the achievement of
universal access, while fostering competition and improving the
functioning of financial and telecommunications sectors can
encourage the adoption of digital technologies. In addition,
building societal trust in the government and in related
institutions such as banks and financial services is critical for
fostering the increased use of digital payment tools.
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I, Nausicaa
(Paperback)
Robert Blair Osborn
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Discovery Miles 3 480
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HOW NATURE MATTERS presents an original theory of nature's value
based on part-whole relations. James argues that when natural
things have cultural value, they do not always have it as means to
valuable ends. In many cases, they have value as parts of valuable
wholes - as parts of traditions, for instance, or cultural
identities. James develops his theory by investigating twelve
real-world cases, ranging from the veneration of sacred trees to
the hunting of dugongs. He also analyses some key policy-related
debates and explores various fundamental issues in environmental
philosophy, including the question of whether anything on earth
qualifies as natural. This accessible, engagingly written book will
be essential reading for all those who wish to understand the moral
and metaphysical dimensions of environmental issues.
In 1983-as France struggled with race-based crimes, police
brutality, and public unrest-youths from Venissieux (working-class
suburbs of Lyon) led the March for Equality and Against Racism, the
first national demonstration of its type in France. As Abdellali
Hajjat reveals, the historic March for Equality and Against Racism
symbolized for many the experience of the children of postcolonial
immigrants. Inspired by the May '68 protests, these young
immigrants stood against racist crimes, for equality before the law
and the police, and for basic rights such as the right to work and
housing. Hajjat also considers the divisions that arose from the
march and offers fresh insight into the paradoxes and intricacies
of movements pushing toward sweeping social change. Translated into
English for the first time, The Wretched of France contemplates the
protest's lasting significance in France as well as its impact
within the context of larger and comparable movements for civil
rights, particularly in the US.
As advances in disruptive technologies transform politics and
increase the velocity of information and policy flows worldwide,
the public is being confronted with changes that move faster than
they can comprehend. There is an urgent need to analyze and
communicate the ethical issues of these advancements. In a
perpetually updating digital world, data is becoming the dominant
basis for reality. This new world demands a new approach because
traditional methods are not fit for a non-physical space like the
internet. Applied Ethics in a Digital World provides an analysis of
the ethical questions raised by modern science, technological
advancements, and the fourth industrial revolution and explores how
to harness the speed, accuracy, and power of emerging technologies
in policy research and public engagement to help leaders,
policymakers, and the public understand the impact that these
technologies will have on economies, legal and political systems,
and the way of life. Covering topics such as artificial
intelligence (AI) ethics, digital equity, and translational ethics,
this book is a dynamic resource for policymakers, civil society,
CEOs, ethicists, technologists, security advisors, sociologists,
cyber behavior specialists, criminologists, data scientists, global
governments, students, researchers, professors, academicians, and
professionals.
The notion of surveillance has become increasingly more crucial in
public conversation as new tools of observation are obtained by
many different players. The traditional notion of "overseeing" is
being increasingly replaced by multi-level surveillance where many
different actors, at different levels of hierarchy, from the child
surveilling the parent to the state surveilling its citizens, are
entering the surveillance theater. This creates a unique
surveillance ecosystem where the individual is observed not only as
an analog flesh-and-blood body moving through real spaces such as a
shopping mall, but also tracked as a data point where the volume of
data is perpetually and permanently expanding as the digital life
story is inscribed in the digital spaces. The combined narrative of
the individual is now under surveillance. Modern Day Surveillance
Ecosystem and Impacts on Privacy navigates the reader through an
understanding of the self as a narrative element that is open for
observation and analysis. This book provides a broad-based and
theoretically grounded look at the overall processes of
surveillance in a global system. Covering topics including
commodity, loss of privacy, and big data, this text is essential
for researchers, government officials, policymakers, security
analysts, lawmakers, teachers, professors, graduate and
undergraduate students, practitioners, and academicians interested
in communication, technology, surveillance, privacy, and more.
Why has Egypt, a pioneer of organ transplantation, been reluctant
to pass a national organ transplant law for more than three
decades? This book analyzes the national debate over organ
transplantation in Egypt as it has unfolded during a time of major
social and political transformation - including mounting dissent
against a brutal regime, the privatization of health care, advances
in science, the growing gap between rich and poor, and the Islamic
revival. Sherine Hamdy recasts bioethics as a necessarily political
project as she traces the moral positions of patients in need of
new tissues and organs, doctors uncertain about whether
transplantation is a "good" medical or religious practice, and
Islamic scholars. Her richly narrated study delves into topics
including current definitions of brain death, the authority of
Islamic fatwas, reports about the mismanagement of toxic waste
predisposing the poor to organ failure, the Egyptian black market
in organs, and more. Incorporating insights from a range of
disciplines, "Our Bodies Belong to God" sheds new light on
contemporary Islamic thought, while challenging the presumed divide
between religion and science, and between ethics and politics.
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