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.

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.

As discussions about the roles played by information in economic, political, and social arenas continue to evolve, the need for an intellectual primer on information ethics that also functions as a solid working casebook for LIS students and professionals has never been more urgent. This text, written by a stellar group of ethics scholars and contributors from around the globe, expertly fills that need. Organized into twelve chapters, making it ideal for use by instructors, this volume from editors Burgess and Knox: thoroughly covers principles and concepts in information ethics, as well as the history of ethics in the information professions; examines human rights, information access, privacy, discourse, intellectual property, censorship, data and cybersecurity ethics, intercultural Information ethics, and global digital citizenship and responsibility; synthesizes the philosophical underpinnings of these key subjects with abundant primary source material to provide historical context along with timely and relevant case studies; features contributions from John M. Budd, Paul T. Jaeger, Rachel Fischer, Margaret Zimmerman, Kathrine A. Henderson, Peter Darch, Michael Zimmer, and Masooda Bashir, among others; and offers a special concluding chapter by Amelia Gibson that explores emerging issues in information ethics, including discussions ranging from the ethics of social media and social movements to AI decision making. This important survey will be a key text for LIS students and an essential reference work for practitioners.

Information, communication and automation technology (ICAT) ethics is the branch of applied ethics and technoethics which investigates the social and ethical issues of the integrated multidisciplinary ICAT field in the broad sense that includes all kinds of automated systems through the use of ICT and computer based systems (autonomous control systems, communication systems, software agents, robotic systems, etc.)This book involves 11 timely contributed chapters that cover a wide spectrum of topics in the ICAT ethics field. These topics include fundamental ethics concepts, ICAT ontology and history, ethics in storytelling for business intelligence, AI and human potential, ethics and social impact of automation, ICAT professional ethics and codes of ethics, ethics of IoT, human-AI moral gap, scientific and ethical problems of computer-model based mischaracterization of serious human threats as low risk situations, social and existential issues of dynamic modernity in ICAT, and role of technoethics for the fulfillment of humankind perfection.The study of ICAT ethics will help scientists and engineers to see why and how to avoid computer, communication, and automation technology abuse, and will make them behave as ethically responsible professionals. ICAT ethical perspectives are permanently in transition as technological advances move to novel unseen ICAT areas. ICAT ethics attempts to reveal the ethical dimensions of ICAT systems, and proposes proper ethical rules and principles based on traditional and modern ethical theories, that guide novel advancements towards moral/ethical practices that benefit the society.The book provides a rich source of information that can be profitably used by graduate students and researchers on ICAT moral philosophy, ethics, and social impact in our digital era.

It's the moment of your death. There's a magic button. Do you delete your entire online legacy? Or do you keep it - and leave the choice for someone else? USER NOT FOUND is about our digital lives after we die. Dante or Die's play, created with pioneering theatre-artist Chris Goode, is inspired by a Guardian article by Caroline Twigg about dealing with her late husband's digital afterlife. In the play Terry becomes responsible for the online legacy of his partner - he is flooded with condolence texts and messages about his partner's death, and then has to decide what to keep and what to delete. The performance was originally developed with creative technologists Marmelo, and was performed in a cafe, where the audience share Terry's story through smartphones and headphones. In this format the play was performed in cafes across the country, including at the 2018 Edinburgh Fringe. The audience become a fly-on-the-wall to peer into the life of a man who is faced with keeping or deleting. A story of contemporary grief unfolds through this intimate, funny performance that gently interrogates our need for connection. "With his tender script, [Goode] hands us each the weight of the internet and asks how we get closure in a world where nothing ever switches off." The Guardian.

There have been many heroes and victims in the battle to abolish the death penalty, and Marie Deans fits into both of those categories. A South Carolina native who yearned to be a fiction writer, Marie was thrust by a combination of circumstances-including the murder of her beloved mother-in-law-into a world much stranger than fiction, a world in which minorities and the poor were selected to be sacrificed to what Supreme Court Justice Harry Blackmun called the ""machinery of death."" Marie found herself fighting to bring justice to the legal process and to bring humanity not only to prisoners on death row but to the guards and wardens as well. During Marie's time as a death penalty opponent in South Carolina and Virginia, she experienced the highs of helping exonerate the innocent and the lows of standing death watch in the death house with thirty-four condemned men.

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 preparation for its 2019-2022 Country Partnership Framework with South Africa, the World Bank Group has drafted a Systematic Country Diagnostic (SCD) which forms the basis of this book. Its aim is to strengthen understanding of the constraints in achieving two goals in South Africa: to eliminate poverty by 2030, and to boost shared prosperity. These goals are enshrined in South Africa’s Vision 2030 in the National Development Plan.

This book is the result of consultations and conversations with key government departments, the National Planning Commission, the private sector, academics and trade unions. It identifies five broad policy priorities: to build South Africa’s skills base; to reduce the highly skewed distribution of land and productive assets; to increase competitiveness and the country’s participation in global and regional value chains; to overcome apartheid spatial patterns; and to increase the country’s strategic adaptation to climate change. The key obstacle to growth that has been identified is ‘the legacy of exclusion’.

Undoing this is a long-term process, but renewed commitment by the political leadership to strengthen institutions and rebuild the social contract present an enormous opportunity in achieving progress towards South Africa’s Vision 2030.

Romantic love presents some of life's most challenging questions. Can we choose who to love? Is romantic love rational? Can we love more than one person at a time? And can we make ourselves fall out of love? In On Romantic Love, Berit Brogaard attempts to get to the bottom of love's many contradictions. This short book, informed by both historical and cutting edge philosophy, psychology, and neuroscience, combines a new theory of romantic love with entertaining anecdotes from real life and accessible explanations of the neuroscience underlying our wildest passions. Against the grain, Brogaard argues that love is an emotion; that it can be, at turns, both rational and irrational; and that it can be manifested in degrees. We can love one person more than another and we can love a person a little or a lot or not at all. And love isn't even always something we consciously feel. However, love - like other emotions, both conscious and not - is subject to rational control, and falling in or out of it can be a deliberate choice. This engaging and innovative look at a universal topic, featuring original line drawings by illustrator Gareth Southwell, illuminates the processes behind heartbreak, obsession, jealousy, attachment, and more.

Sexuality is a basic feature of human life. Gender, sexual and romantic attraction, sexual excitement, and sexual desire and fantasies all move in various degrees through our daily awareness. However, despite this pervasiveness, there is much disagreement surrounding the nature of such things and experiences. This book explores just these issues in an attempt to get clear about this enigmatic aspect of our existence. Through a series of interrelated essays, internationally acclaimed philosopher James Giles takes the reader on a fascinating journey to the depths of experiential, social, biological, and evolutionary aspects of sexual life. Presenting his arguments and ideas in a clear and easy to follow language, Giles criticizes several popular views, clearing the way for his own unique vision of human sexuality. Often controversial, always engaging, these pages will prove to be absorbing reading for anyone who has ever pondered the nature of sexuality and why it fills our lives in the way it does.

Justice, Mercy, and Caprice is a work of criminal justice history that speaks to the gradual emergence of a more humane Irish state. It is a close examination of the decision to grant clemency to men and women sentenced to death between the end of the civil war in 1923 and the abolition of capital punishment in 1990. Frequently, the decision to deflect the law from its course was an attempt to introduce a measure of justice to a system where the mandatory death sentence for murder caused predictable unfairness and undue harshness. In some instances the decision to spare a life sprang from merciful motivations. In others it was capricious, depending on factors that should have had no place in the government's decision-making calculus. The custodial careers of those whose lives were spared repay scrutiny. Women tended to serve relatively short periods in prison but were often transferred to a religious institution where their confinement continued, occasionally for life. Men, by contrast, served longer in prison but were discharged directly to the community. Political offenders were either executed hastily or, when the threat of capital punishment had passed, incarcerated for extravagant periods. This book addresses issues that are of continuing relevance for countries that employ capital punishment. It will appeal to scholars with an interest in criminal justice history, executive discretion, and death penalty studies, as well as being a useful resource for students of penology.

This book presents an interdisciplinary approach to definition of torture by bringing together behavioral science and international law perspectives on torture. It is a collaborative effort by a group of prominent scholars of behavioral sciences, international law, human rights, and public health with internationally recognized expertise and authority in their field. It represents a first ever attempt to explore the scientific basis of legal understanding of torture and inform international law on various definitional issues by proposing a sound theory- and empirical-evidence-based psychological formulation of torture. Drawing on scientific evidence from the editor's 30 years of systematic research on torture, it proposes a learning theory formulation of torture based on the concept of helplessness under the control of others and offers an assessment methodology that can reduce the element of subjectivity in legal judgments in individual cases. It also demonstrates how this formulation can help understand the nature and severity of ill-treatments in different contexts, such as domestic violence and adverse conditions of penal confinement. Through a learning theory analysis of "enhanced interrogation techniques," it demonstrates not only why these techniques constitute torture but also how they help us understand the contextual defining characteristic of torture in general. The proposed formulation implies a broader concept of torture than previously understood, provides scientific and moral justification for the evolving trends in international law towards a broader coverage of ill-treatments in contexts beyond official custody and points to new directions of expansion of the concept. With a focus on the concepts of shame and humiliation and their evolutionary origin, the book explains why inhuman or degrading treatments can cause as much pain or suffering as physical torture. Although treatment issues are not covered, the book sheds light on potentially effective treatment approaches by offering important insights into psychology of torture.

From Viagra to in vitro fertilization, new technologies are rapidly changing the global face of reproductive health. They are far from neutral: religious, cultural, social, and legal contexts condition their global transfer. The way a society interprets and adopts (or rejects) a new technology reveals a great deal about the relationship between bodies and the body politic. Reproductive health technologies are often particularly controversial because of their potential to reconfigure kinship relationships, sexual mores, gender roles, and the way life is conceptualized. This collection of original ethnographic research spans the region from Morocco and Tunisia to Israel and Iran and covers a wide range of technologies, including emergency contraception, medication abortion, gamete donation, hymenoplasty, erectile dysfunction, and gender transformation.

From Viagra to in vitro fertilization, new technologies are rapidly changing the global face of reproductive health. They are far from neutral: religious, cultural, social, and legal contexts condition their global transfer. The way a society interprets and adopts (or rejects) a new technology reveals a great deal about the relationship between bodies and the body politic. Reproductive health technologies are often particularly controversial because of their potential to reconfigure kinship relationships, sexual mores, gender roles, and the way life is conceptualized. This collection of original ethnographic research spans the region from Morocco and Tunisia to Israel and Iran and covers a wide range of technologies, including emergency contraception, medication abortion, gamete donation, hymenoplasty, erectile dysfunction, and gender transformation.

There have been many heroes and victims in the battle to abolish the death penalty, and Marie Deans fits into both of those categories. A South Carolina native who yearned to be a fiction writer, Marie was thrust by a combination of circumstances-including the murder of her beloved mother-in-law-into a world much stranger than fiction, a world in which minorities and the poor were selected to be sacrificed to what Supreme Court Justice Harry Blackmun called the ""machinery of death."" Marie found herself fighting to bring justice to the legal process and to bring humanity not only to prisoners on death row but to the guards and wardens as well. During Marie's time as a death penalty opponent in South Carolina and Virginia, she experienced the highs of helping exonerate the innocent and the lows of standing death watch in the death house with thirty-four condemned men.

Controversies in Digital Ethics explores ethical frameworks within digital culture. Through a combination of theoretical examination and specific case studies, the essays in this volume provide a vigorous examination of ethics in a highly individualistic and mediated world. Focusing on specific controversies-privacy, surveillance, identity politics, participatory culture-the authors in this volume provide a roadmap for navigating the thorny ethical issues in new media. Paul Booth and Amber Davisson bring together multiple writers working from different theoretical traditions to represent the multiplicity of ethics in the 21st century. Each essay has been chosen to focus on a particular issue in contemporary ethical thinking in order to both facilitate classroom discussion and further scholarship in digital media ethics. Accessible for students, but with a robust analysis providing contemporary scholarship in media ethics, this collection unites theory, case studies, and practice within one volume.

Radical Discipleship engages the structural evils of homelessness, mass incarceration, and capital punishment, arguing that to be faithful to the gospel, Christians must become disciples of, not simply believers in, Jesus. Jennifer McBride argues that disciples must work to overcome the social evils that bar beloved community. Unfolding the social and political character of the good news, the book organically connects liturgy with activism and theological reflection enabling a radical discipleship that takes seriously the Jesus of the Gospels.

Women from remarkably diverse religious, social, and political backgrounds made up the rank-and-file of anti-abortion activism. Empowered by--yet in many cases scared of--the changes wrought by feminism, they founded grassroots groups, developed now-familiar strategies and tactics, and gave voice to the movement's moral and political dimensions. Drawing on oral histories and interviews with prominent figures, Karissa Haugeberg examines American women 's fight against abortion. Beginning in the 1960s, she looks at Marjory Mecklenburg's attempt to shift the attention of anti-abortion leaders from the rights of fetuses to the needs of pregnant women. Moving forward she traces the grassroots work of Catholic women, including Juli Loesch and Joan Andrews, and their encounters with the influx of evangelicals into the movement. She also looks at the activism of evangelical Protestant Shelley Shannon, a prominent pro-life extremist of the 1990s. Throughout, Haugeberg explores important questions such as the ways people fused religious conviction with partisan politics, activists' rationalizations for lethal violence, and how women claimed space within an unshakably patriarchal movement.

Anne M. Blankenship's study of Christianity in the infamous campswhere Japanese Americans were incarcerated during World War II yieldsinsights both far-reaching and timely. While most Japanese Americansmaintained their traditional identities as Buddhists, a sizeable minorityidentified as Christian, and a number of church leaders sought to ministerto them in the camps. Blankenship shows how church leaders were forced toassess the ethics and pragmatism of fighting against or acquiescing to whatthey clearly perceived, even in the midst of a national crisis, as an unjustsocial system. These religious activists became acutely aware of the impact ofgovernment, as well as church, policies that targeted ordinary Americans ofdiverse ethnicities. Going through the doors of the camp churches and delving deeply intothe religious experiences of the incarcerated and the faithful who aidedthem, Blankenship argues that the incarceration period introduced newsocial and legal approaches for Christians of all stripes to challenge the constitutionalityof government policies on race and civil rights. She also showshow the camp experience nourished the roots of an Asian American liberationtheology that sprouted in the sixties and seventies.

According to the World Health Organization, one-third of the global population lacks access to essential medicines. Should pharmaceutical companies be ethically or legally responsible for providing affordable medicines for these people, even though they live outside of profitable markets? Can the private sector be held accountable for protecting human beings' right to health? This thought-provoking interdisciplinary collection grapples with corporate responsibility for the provision of medicines in low- and middle-income countries. The book begins with an examination of human rights, norms, and ethics in relation to the private sector, moving to consider the tensions between pharmaceutical companies' social and business duties. Broad examinations of global conditions are complemented by case studies illustrating different approaches for addressing corporate conduct. Access to Medicines as a Human Right identifies innovative solutions applicable in both global and domestic forums, making it a valuable resource for the vast field of scholars, legal practitioners, and policymakers who must confront this challenging issue.