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Books > Social sciences > Sociology, social studies > Social issues > Ethical issues & debates > General
Twentieth Anniversary Edition with a new preface and afterword From
the removal of Confederate monuments in New Orleans in the spring
of 2017 to the violent aftermath of the white nationalist march on
the Robert E. Lee monument in Charlottesville later that summer,
debates and conflicts over the memorialization of Confederate
"heroes" have stormed to the forefront of popular American
political and cultural discourse. In Written in Stone Sanford
Levinson considers the tangled responses to controversial monuments
and commemorations while examining how those with political power
configure public spaces in ways that shape public memory and
politics. Paying particular attention to the American South, though
drawing examples as well from elsewhere in the United States and
throughout the world, Levinson shows how the social and legal
arguments regarding the display, construction, modification, and
destruction of public monuments mark the seemingly endless
confrontation over the symbolism attached to public space. This
twentieth anniversary edition of Written in Stone includes a new
preface and an extensive afterword that takes account of recent
events in cities, schools and universities, and public spaces
throughout the United States and elsewhere. Twenty years on,
Levinson's work is more timely and relevant than ever.
We all assume we know what life is, but the more scientists learn
about the living world - from protocells to brains, from zygotes to
pandemic viruses - the harder they find it to define exactly what
it is and what it isn't. What is life? In this riveting and
thought-provoking book, Carl Zimmer explores the question by
journeying to the edges of life in every direction, from viruses to
computer intelligence, from its origins on earth to the search for
extra-terrestrial life and the strange experiments that have
attempted to recreate life from scratch in the lab. The question is
not only a scientific issue; it hangs over some of society's most
charged conflicts - whether a fertilized egg is a living person,
for example, and when we ought to declare a person legally dead.
Whether he is handling pythons or searching for hibernating bats,
Zimmer investigates life in its most unfamiliar forms. He tries his
own hand at evolving life in a test tube with unnerving results,
explores our cultural obsession with Dr. Frankestein's monster and
how Coleridge came to believe the whole universe was alive. The
result is an entirely gripping exploration of one of the most
crucial questions of all: the meaning of life.
A rape victim charges that pornography caused her attacker to
become a sex offender. A lesbian mother fights for custody of her
child. A transsexual pilot is fired by a commercial airline after
undergoing sex change and sues for sex discrimination. A homosexual
is denied employment because of sexual orientation. A woman argues
that her criminal behavior should be excused because she suffers
from premenstrual syndrome. The law has much to say about sexual
behavior, but what it says is rarely influenced by the findings of
social science research over recent decades. This book focuses for
the first time on the dynamic interplay between sexual science and
legal decisionmaking. Reflecting the author's wide experience as a
respected sex researcher, expert witness, and lawyer, Sexual
Science and the Law provides valuable insights into some of the
most controversial social and sexual topics of our time. Drawing on
an exhaustive knowledge of the relevant research and citing
extensively from case law and court transcripts, Richard Green
demonstrates how the work of sexual science could bring about a
transformation in jurisprudence, informing the courts in their
deliberations on issues such as sexual privacy, homosexuality,
prostitution, abortion, pornography, and sexual abuse. In each case
he considers, Green shows how the law has been shaped by social
science or impoverished by reliance on conjecture and received
wisdom. He examines the role of sexual science in legal
controversy, its analysis of human motivation and behavior, and its
use by the courts in determining the relative weight to be given
the desires of the individual, the standards of society, and the
power of the state in limiting sexual autonomy. Unprecedented in
its portrayal of sexuality in a legal context, this scholarly but
readable book will interest and educate professional and layperson
alike-those lawyers, judges, sex educators, therapists, patients,
and citizens who find themselves standing nonplussed at the meeting
place of morality and behavior.
A bold and accessible argument for the moral and political value of
literature in rightless times. The obvious humanity of books would
seem to make literature and human rights natural allies. But what
is the real connection between literature and human rights? In this
short polemical book, Lyndsey Stonebridge shows how the history of
human rights owes much to the creative imagining of writers. Yet,
she argues, it is not enough to claim that literature is the
empathetic wing of the human rights movement. At a time when human
rights are so blatantly under attack, the writers we need how are
the political truthtellers, the bold callers out of easy sympathy
and comfortable platitudes.
In From Back Alley to the Border, Alicia Gutierrez-Romine examines
the history of criminal abortion in California and the role
abortion providers played in exposing and exploiting the faults in
California's anti-abortion statute throughout the twentieth
century. Focused on the women who used this underground network and
the physicians who facilitated it, Gutierrez-Romine describes the
operation of abortion providers from the 1920s through the 1960s,
including regular physicians as well as women and African American
abortionists, and the investigations and trials that surrounded
them. During the 1930s the Pacific Coast Abortion Ring, a large,
coast-wide, and comparatively safe organized abortion syndicate,
became the target of law enforcement agencies, forcing abortions
across the border into Mexico and ushering in an era of Tijuana
"abortion tourism" in the early 1950s. The movement south of the
border ultimately compelled the California Supreme Court to rule
its abortion statute "void for vagueness" in People v. Belous in
1969-four years before Roe v. Wade. Gutierrez-Romine presents the
first book focused on abortion on the West Coast and the border
between the United States and Mexico and provides a new approach to
studying how providers of illegal abortions and their female
clients navigated this underground network.
Organs for Sale is a study of the bioethical question of how to
increase human organ supply. But it is also an inquiry into public
moral deliberation and the relationship between economic worth and
the value systems of a society. Looking closely at human organ
procurement debates, the author offers a critique of neoliberalism
in bioethics and asks what kind of society we truly want. While
society has shown concern over debates surrounding organ
procurement, a better understanding of the rhetoric of advocates
and philosophical underpinnings of the debate might indeed improve
our public moral deliberation in general and organ policy more
specifically. Examining public arguments, this book uses a range of
source material, from medical journals to congressional hearings to
newspaper op-eds, to provide the most up-to-date and thorough
analysis of the topic. Organs for Sale posits that deciding
together on the limits of markets, and on what is and ought to be
for sale, sheds light on the moral fibre of our society and what it
needs to thrive.
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Ethics
(Paperback)
Benedictus De Spinoza
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R421
Discovery Miles 4 210
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Ships in 18 - 22 working days
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By the time that Queen Victoria ascended the throne in 1837, the
list of crimes liable to attract the death penalty had been reduced
to murder, yet the gallows remained a source of controversy in
Victorian Britain and there was growing unease in liberal quarters
surrounding the question of capital punishment. Focusing in part on
the activities of the Society for the Abolition of Capital
Punishment, James Gregory examines abolitionist strategies, leaders
and personnel. He locates the 'gallows question' in an imperial
context and explores the ways in which debates about the gallows
and abolition featured in literature, from poetry to 'novels of
purpose' and popular romances of the underworld. He places the
abolitionist movement within the wider Victorian worlds of
philanthropy, religious orthodoxy and social morality in a study
which will be essential reading for students and researchers of
Victorian history.
Neoliberalism - the doctrine that market exchange is an ethic in
itself, capable of acting as a guide for all human action - has
become dominant in both thought and practice throughout much of the
world since 1970 or so. Its spread has depended upon a
reconstitution of state powers such that privatization, finance,
and market processes are emphasized. State interventions in the
economy are minimized, while the obligations of the state to
provide for the welfare of its citizens are diminished. David
Harvey, author of 'The New Imperialism' and 'The Condition of
Postmodernity', here tells the political-economic story of where
neoliberalization came from and how it proliferated on the world
stage. While Thatcher and Reagan are often cited as primary authors
of this neoliberal turn, Harvey shows how a complex of forces, from
Chile to China and from New York City to Mexico City, have also
played their part. In addition he explores the continuities and
contrasts between neoliberalism of the Clinton sort and the recent
turn towards neoconservative imperialism of George W. Bush.
Finally, through critical engagement with this history, Harvey
constructs a framework not only for analyzing the political and
economic dangers that now surround us, but also for assessing the
prospects for the more socially just alternatives being advocated
by many oppositional movements.
An Open Letters Review Best Book of the Year "One of the finest
books on information security published so far in this
century-easily accessible, tightly argued, superbly well-sourced,
intimidatingly perceptive." -Thomas Rid, author of Active Measures
"The best examination I have read of how increasingly dramatic
developments in cyberspace are defining the 'new normal' of
geopolitics in the digital age. Buchanan...captures the dynamics of
all of this truly brilliantly." -General David Petraeus, former
Director of the CIA and Commander of Coalition Forces in Iraq and
Afghanistan Few national-security threats are as potent-or as
nebulous-as cyber attacks. Ben Buchanan reveals how hackers are
transforming spycraft and statecraft, catching us all in the
crossfire, whether we know it or not. Ever since WarGames, we have
been bracing for the cyberwar to come, conjuring images of
exploding power plants and mass panic. But while cyber attacks are
now disturbingly common, they don't look anything like we thought
they would. Packed with insider information based on interviews,
declassified files, and forensic analysis of company reports, The
Hacker and the State sets aside fantasies of cyber-annihilation to
explore the real geopolitical competition of the digital age.
Tracing the conflict of wills and interests among modern nations,
Ben Buchanan reveals little-known details of how China, Russia,
North Korea, Britain, and the United States hack one another in a
relentless struggle for dominance. His analysis moves deftly from
underseas cable taps to underground nuclear sabotage, from
blackouts and data breaches to billion-dollar heists and election
interference. Buchanan brings to life this continuous cycle of
espionage and deception, attack and counterattack, destabilization
and retaliation. He explains why cyber attacks are far less
destructive than we anticipated, far more pervasive, and much
harder to prevent. With little fanfare and far less scrutiny, they
impact our banks, our tech and health systems, our democracy, and
every aspect of our lives. Quietly, insidiously, they have reshaped
our national-security priorities and transformed spycraft and
statecraft. The contest for geopolitical advantage has moved into
cyberspace. The United States and its allies can no longer dominate
the way they once did. The nation that hacks best will triumph.
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Reflections on Hanging
(Paperback)
Arthur Koestler; Preface by Edmond Cahn; Afterword by Sydney Silverman
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R645
R579
Discovery Miles 5 790
Save R66 (10%)
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Reflections on Hanging is a searing indictment of capital
punishment, inspired by its author's own time in the shadow of a
firing squad. During the Spanish Civil War, Arthur Koestler was
held by the Franco regime as a political prisoner, and condemned to
death. He was freed, but only after months of witnessing the fates
of less-fortunate inmates. That experience informs every page of
the book, which was first published in England in 1956, and
followed in 1957 by this American edition. As Koestler ranges
across the history of capital punishment in Britain (with a focus
on hanging), he looks at notable cases and rulings, and portrays
politicians, judges, lawyers, scholars, clergymen, doctors, police,
jailers, prisoners, and others involved in the long debate over the
justness and effectiveness of the death penalty. In Britain,
Reflections on Hanging was part of a concerted, ultimately
successful effort to abolish the death penalty. At that time, in
the forty-eight United States, capital punishment was sanctioned in
forty-two of them, with hanging still practiced in five. This
edition includes a preface and afterword written especially for the
1957 American edition. The preface makes the book relevant to
readers in the U.S.; the afterword overviews the modern-day history
of abolitionist legislation in the British Parliament. Reflections
on Hanging is relentless, biting, and unsparing in its details of
botched and unjust executions. It is a classic work of advocacy for
some of society's most defenseless members, a critique of capital
punishment that is still widely cited, and an enduring work that
presaged such contemporary problems as the sensationalism of crime,
the wrongful condemnation of the innocent and mentally ill, the
callousness of penal systems, and the use of fear to control a
citizenry.
This volume examines the latest scientific and technological
developments likely to shape our post-human future. Using a
multidisciplinary approach, the author argues that we stand at the
precipice of an evolutionary change caused by genetic engineering
and anatomically embedded digital and informational technologies.
The author delves into current scientific initiatives that will
lead to the emergence of super smart individuals with unique
creative capacities. He draws on technology, psychology and
philosophy to consider humans-as-they-are relative to autonomy,
creativity, and their place in a future shared with 'post humans.'
The author discusses the current state of bioethics and technology
law, both which policymakers, beset by a torrent of revolutionary
advances in bioengineering, are attempting to steer. Significantly,
Carvalko addresses why we must both preserve the narratives that
brought us to this moment and continue to express our humanity
through, music, art, and literature, to ensure that, as a uniquely
creative species, we don't simply vanish in the ether of an
evolution brought about by our own technology.
The recent explosion of neuroscience techniques has proved to be
game changing in terms of understanding the healthy brain, and in
the development of neuropsychiatric treatments. One of the key
techniques available to us is functional magnetic resonance imaging
(fMRI), which allows us to examine the human brain non-invasively,
and observe brain activity in real time. Through fMRI, we are
beginning to build a deeper understanding of our thoughts,
motivations, and behaviours. Recent reports that some patients who
have all indications of being in a persistent vegetative state
actually show conscious awareness, and were able to communicate
with researchers, demonstrate perhaps the most remarkable and
dramatic use of fMRI. But this is just the most striking of a
number of areas in which fMRI is being used to 'read minds', albeit
in a very limited way. As neuroscientists unravel the regions of
the brain involved in reward and motivation, and in romantic love,
we are likely to develop the capacity to influence responses such
as love using drugs. fMRI studies have also been used to indicate
that many people who would not regard themselves as racist show a
racial bias in their emotional responses to faces of another racial
group. Meanwhile, the reliability of fMRI as a lie detector in
murder cases is being debated - what if the individual simply
believes, falsely, that he or she committed a murder? Sex, Lies,
and Brain Scans takes readers beyond the media headlines. Barbara
J. Sahakian and Julia Gottwald consider what the technique of fMRI
entails, and what information it can give us, showing which
applications are possible today, and which ones are science
fiction. They also consider the important ethical questions these
techniques raise. Should individuals applying for jobs as teachers
or judges be screened for unconscious racial bias? What if the
manipulation of love using 'love potions' was misused for economic
or military ends? How far will we allow neuroscience to go? It is
time to make up our minds.
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