They've been listening for longer than you think. A new history reveals how-and why. Wiretapping is nearly as old as electronic communications. Telegraph operators intercepted enemy messages during the Civil War. Law enforcement agencies were listening to private telephone calls as early as 1895. Communications firms have assisted government eavesdropping programs since the early twentieth century-and they have spied on their own customers too. Such breaches of privacy once provoked outrage, but today most Americans have resigned themselves to constant electronic monitoring. How did we get from there to here? In The Listeners, Brian Hochman shows how the wiretap evolved from a specialized intelligence-gathering tool to a mundane fact of life. He explores the origins of wiretapping in military campaigns and criminal confidence games and tracks the use of telephone taps in the US government's wars on alcohol, communism, terrorism, and crime. While high-profile eavesdropping scandals fueled public debates about national security, crime control, and the rights and liberties of individuals, wiretapping became a routine surveillance tactic for private businesses and police agencies alike. From wayward lovers to foreign spies, from private detectives to public officials, and from the silver screen to the Supreme Court, The Listeners traces the long and surprising history of wiretapping and electronic eavesdropping in the United States. Along the way, Brian Hochman considers how earlier generations of Americans confronted threats to privacy that now seem more urgent than ever.

Social work ethics provide practitioners with guidance on how to promote social work values such as respect, social justice, human relationships, service, competence, and integrity. Students entering the profession need to develop a real-world understanding of how to apply these values in practice while also managing the dilemmas that arise when social workers, clients, and others encounter conflicting values and ethical obligations. Ethics and Values in Social Work offers a comprehensive set of teaching and learning materials to help students develop the knowledge, self-awareness, and critical thinking skills required to handle values and ethical issues in all levels of practice-individual, family, group, organization, community, and social policy. BSW and MSW students will particularly appreciate how complex ethical obligations and theories have been translated into plain language. Additionally, the comprehensive set of case examples and exercises provides realistic scenarios to develop critical thinking and problem solving skills across a range of practice situations.

Part of the popular BERA/SAGE Research Methods in Education series, this is the first book to specifically focus on the ethics of Education research. Drawn from the authors' experiences in the UK, Australia and mainland Europe and with contributions from across the globe, this clear and accessible book includes a wide range of examples The authors show how to: identify ethical issues which may arise with any research project gain informed consent provide information in the right way to participants present and disseminate findings in line with ethical guidelines All researchers, irrespective of whether they are postgraduate students, practising teachers or seasoned academics, will find this book extremely valuable for its rigorous and critical discussion of theory and its strong practical focus. Rachel Brooks is Professor of Sociology and Head of the Sociology Department at the University of Surrey, UK. Kitty te Riele is Principal Research Fellow in the Victoria Institute for Education, Diversity and Lifelong Learning, at Victoria University in Australia. Meg Maguire is Professor of Sociology of Education at King's College London.

What does community mean, exactly? In this inter-disciplinary study, Elizabeth Ann Duclos-Orsello takes seriously the concept of community as an object of historical analysis. Focusing on St. Paul, Minnesota, from 1900 to 1920, Modern Bonds explores the diverse ways that its people renegotiated private and public affiliations during a period of modernization. The book examines a wide range of subjects and materials, including photographs from an African American family, fictional depictions of middle-class women, built environments that created enclaves of immigrants, and public festivals designed to unite all citizens. As Duclos-Orsello demonstrates, it was in this period that a complex set of activities, policies, and practices led to new understandings of community that continue to shape life today.

This book responds to a growing academic interest in theorizing care and care work in the early childhood education and care (ECEC) sector. The contributors theorize a new feminist ethics of care in everyday early childhood practice, revealing its complexities and importance. Drawing on feminist theories and philosophies, the chapter authors show how the caring practices of early childhood educators involve values, emotions, decision-making, action and work. Using cutting-edge theory, authors address the social locations and the inclusion and exclusion of both care givers and care receivers. With contributions from Belgium, Canada, New Zealand, the UK and the USA, the volume brings together early childhood studies, sociology, psychology, philosophy and critical disability studies to offer diverse perspectives on feminist ethics of care in early childhood practice and its possibilities and dangers.

Christian discourse on sexuality, spirituality, and ethics has continued to evolve since this book's first edition was published in 1994. This updated and expanded anthology featuring more than thirty contemporary essays includes more theologians and ethicists of color and addresses issues such as the intersection of race/racism and sexuality, transgender identity, same-sex marriage, and reproductive health and justice.

Climate change impacts-more heat, drought, extreme rainfall, and stronger storms-have already harmed communities around the globe. Even if the world could cut its carbon emissions to zero tomorrow, further significant global climate change is now inevitable. Although we cannot tell with certainty how much average global temperatures will rise, we do know that the warming we have experienced to date has caused significant losses, and that the failure to prepare for the consequences of further warming may prove to be staggering. Building a Resilient Tomorrow does not dwell on overhyped descriptions of apocalyptic climate scenarios, nor does it travel down well-trodden paths surrounding the politics of reducing carbon emissions. Instead, it starts with two central facts: climate impacts will continue to occur, and we can make changes now to mitigate their effects. While squarely confronting the scale of the risks we face, this pragmatic guide focuses on solutions-some gradual and some more revolutionary-currently being deployed around the globe. Each chapter presents a thematic lesson for decision-makers and engaged citizens to consider, outlining replicable successes and identifying provocative recommendations to strengthen climate resilience. Between animated discussions of ideas as wide-ranging as managed retreat from coastal hot-zones to biological approaches for resurgent climate-related disease threats, Alice Hill and Leonardo Martinez-Diaz draw on their personal experiences as senior officials in the Obama Administration to tell behind-the-scenes stories of what it really takes to advance progress on these issues. The narrative is dotted with tales of on-the-ground citizenry, from small-town mayors and bankers to generals and engineers, who are chipping away at financial disincentives and bureaucratic hurdles to prepare for life on a warmer planet. For readers exhausted by today's paralyzing debates on yearly "fluke" storms or the existence of climate change, Building a Resilient Tomorrow offers better ways to manage the risks in a warming planet, even as we work to limit global temperature rise.

"Icons of Life" tells the engrossing and provocative story of an early twentieth-century undertaking, the Carnegie Institution of Washington's project to collect thousands of embryos for scientific study. Lynn M. Morgan blends social analysis, sleuthing, and humor to trace the history of specimen collecting. In the process, she illuminates how a hundred-year-old scientific endeavor continues to be felt in today's fraught arena of maternal and fetal politics. Until the embryo collecting project - which she follows from the Johns Hopkins anatomy department, through Baltimore foundling homes, and all the way to China - most people had no idea what human embryos looked like. But by the 1950s, modern citizens saw in embryos an image of 'ourselves unborn', and embryology had developed a biologically based story about how we came to be. Morgan explains how dead specimens paradoxically became icons of life, how embryos were generated as social artifacts separate from pregnant women, and how a fetus thwarted Gertrude Stein's medical career. By resurrecting a nearly forgotten scientific project, Morgan sheds light on the roots of a modern origin story and raises the still controversial issue of how we decide what embryos mean.

Is social media changing who we are? We assume social media is only a tool for our modern day communications and interactions, but is it quietly changing our identities and how we see the world and one another? Our current debate about the human behaviors behind social media misses the important effects these social networking technologies are having on our sense of shared morality and rationality. There has been much concern about the loss of privacy and anonymity in the Information Age, but little attention has been paid to the consequences and effects of social media and the behavior they engender on the Internet. In order to understand how social media influences our morality, Lisa S. Nelson suggests a new methodological approach to social media and its effect on society. Instead of beginning with the assumption that we control our use of social media, this book considers how the phenomenological effects of social media influences our actions, decisions, and, ultimately, who we are and who we become. This important study will inform a new direction in policy and legal regulation for these increasingly important technologies.

Contemporary Western war is represented as enacting the West's ability and responsibility to help make the world a better place for others, in particular to protect them from oppression and serious human rights abuses. That is, war has become permissible again, indeed even required, as ethical war. At the same time, however, Western war kills and destroys. This creates a paradox: Western war risks killing those it proposes to protect. This book examines how we have responded to this dilemma and challenges the vision of ethical war itself, exploring how the commitment to ethics shapes the practice of war and indeed how practices come, in turn, to shape what is considered ethical in war. The book closely examines particular practices of warfare, such as targeting, the use of cultural knowledge, and ethics training for soldiers. What emerges is that instead of constraining violence, the commitment to ethics enables and enhances it. The book argues that the production of ethical war relies on an impossible but obscured separation between ethics and politics, that is, the problematic politics of ethics, and reflects on the need to make decisions at the limit of ethics.

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.

A timely and powerful must-read on how the big tech companies are damaging our culture - and what we can do to fight their influence Four titanic corporations are now the most powerful gatekeepers the world has ever known. We shop with Amazon, socialise on Facebook, turn to Apple for entertainment, and rely on Google for information. They have conquered our culture and set us on a path to a world without private contemplation or autonomous thought: a world without mind. In this book, Franklin Foer makes a passionate, deeply informed case for the need to restore our inner lives and reclaim our intellectual culture before it is too late. At stake is nothing less than who we are, and what we will become. It is a message that could not be more timely.

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.

Today's wars leave a crippling legacy of deprivation and suffering, of physical and structural injustice, long after they submit to peaceful resolution. Survivors of war must find ways to live with the stultifying injustices littering their past and haunting their present - acts of discrimination and violence committed before, during and even after conflict.

Confronting the vexed challenge of re-marrying peace with justice out of the morass of war's injustices is the complex but imperative task facing post-conflict societies and the international community today.

Using current examples from conflicts around the world, ranging from Africa and Asia to Latin America and Eastern Europe, it argues for a holistic and integrated approach to justice after conflict. It proposes that we must address all three dimensions of injustice embedded in conflict - symptom, consequence and cause, and that subsequently we must rebuild all three dimensions of justice - legal, rectificatory and distributive, in the aftermath. This timely book explores the difficulties and dilemmas confronted on the ground in restoring these, and concludes with pragmatic recommendations for dealing with such challenges of rebuilding peace with justice after contemporary conflicts.

This well-argued book will prove a valuable resource for students and professionals in the fields of peacebuilding, justice theory, international relations and politics.

Protest has become an everyday part of modern societies, one of the few recognized outlets for voicing and discussing basic moral commitments. Protest movements shape our thinking about social change and human agency. At a time when schools, the media, and even religious institutions offer little guidance for our moral judgments, protest movements have become a central source for providing us with ethical visions and creative ideas. In this book, James Jasper integrates diverse examples of protest, from 19th-century boycotts to recent anti-nuclear, animal-rights, and environmental movements, into an understanding of how social movements operate. He highlights their creativity, not only in forging new morals but in adopting courses of action and inventing organizational forms. The work stresses the role of individuals, both as lone protesters and as key decision-makers, and it emphasizes the open-ended nature of strategic choices as protesters, their opponents, their allies, and the government respond to each other's actions. The book also synthesizes the many concepts developed in recent years as part of the cultural approach to social movements, placing them in context and showing what they mean for other scholarly traditions. Drawing on lengthy interviews, historical materials, surveys, and his own participation in protests, Jasper offers a systematic overview of the field of social movements. He weaves together accounts of large-scale movements with individual biographies, placing the movements in cultural perspective and focusing on individuals' experiences.

Almost Human is the personal story of a charismatic and visionary palaeontologist, a rich and readable narrative about science, exploration, and what it means to be human.

In 2013, Wits University reasearch professor Lee Berger caught wind of a cache of bones in a hard-to-reach underground cave near Johannesburg. He put out a call around the world for collaborators – men and women small and adventurous enough to be able to squeeze through 8-inch tunnels to reach a sunless cave 40 feet underground. With this team of ‘underground astronauts’, Berger made the discovery of a lifetime: hundreds of prehistoric bones, including entire skeletons of at least 15 individuals, all perhaps two million years old. Their features combined those of known pre-hominids with those more human than anything ever before seen in prehistoric remains. Berger's team had discovered an all new species: Homo naledi.

The cave proved to be the richest pre-hominid site ever discovered, full of implications that challenge how we define ourselves as human. Did these ancestors of ours bury their dead? If so, they must have had an awareness of death, a level of self-knowledge: the very characteristic we used to define ourselves as human. Did an equally advanced species inhabit Earth with us, or before us?

Addressing these questions, Berger counters the arguments of those colleagues who have questioned his controversial interpretations and astounding finds.

In bioethics, discussions of justice have tended to focus on questions of fairness in access to health care: is there a right to medical treatment, and how should priorities be set when medical resources are scarce. But health care is only one of many factors that determine the extent to which people live healthy lives, and fairness is not the only consideration in determining whether a health policy is just. In this pathbreaking book, senior bioethicists Powers and Faden confront foundational issues about health and justice. How much inequality in health can a just society tolerate. The audience for the book is scholars and students of bioethics and moral and political philosophy, as well as anyone interested in public health and health policy.

Corruption, generally defined as the abuse of entrusted power for private gains, has been the growing center of attention of many social scientists since the end of the cold war. Corruption can be seen in different perspectives depending on cultural background and it is defined in many spectrums by different scholars. This book provides current research on the political, economic and social issues of corruption. The first chapter begins with a review of social and political issues of a globalised economy. Chapter two presents a review of the literature on the economics of corruption. Chapter three tackles corruption in politics and public service. Chapter four discusses the procurement market from the macro-perspective and analyses the relationship between level of corruption and selected indicators of the public procurement market. Chapter five studies criminal culpability and economic crisis. Chapter six discusses gendered attitudes towards corruption and experiences with bribery. Chapter seven explores the relationship between corruption and gender inequality in Nicaragua. Chapter eight deals with the influence of multilateral anti-corruption agreements on the regulatory framework in developed countries. Chapter nine identifies the relationship between corruption and the processes of transition in West Balkan countries. Chapter ten explores corruption in the privatised public enterprises using selected privatised institutions. Chapter 11 discusses progress and constraints of civil society anti-corruption initiatives in Uganda. The final chapter analyses three cases of alleged corruption related to genetically modified foods where corruption claims based on ethical-critical logics were confronted with objective-formal counter-arguments.

Did the Gulf War defend moral principle or Western oil interests? Is violent pornography an act of free speech or an act of violence against women? In "Casuistry and Modern Ethics," Richard B. Miller sheds new light on the potential of casuistry--case-based reasoning--for resolving these and other questions of conscience raised by the practical quandaries of modern life.
Rejecting the packaging of moral experience within simple descriptions and inflexible principles, Miller argues instead for identifying and making sense of the ethically salient features of individual cases. Because this practical approach must cope with a diverse array of experiences, Miller draws on a wide variety of diagnostic tools from such fields as philosophy of science, legal reasoning, theology, literary theory, hermeneutics, and moral philosophy.
Opening new avenues for practical reasoning, Miller's interdisciplinary work will challenge scholars who are interested in the intersections of ethics and political philosophy, cultural criticism, and debates about method in religion and morality.

This new introduction to ethics is written for students who are approaching philosophy for the first time. Nuttall focuses on a range of practical and topical questions, using these as a way of drawing the reader into the distinctive methods of philosophical analysis.

The book starts with a discussion of values and judgements and this is developed in later chapters on moral and religious education and punishment. Nuttall then looks at sexual morality, with related chapters on pornography, abortion, foetal research and children. Finally, he examines moral issues surrounding death: suicide, war and euthanasia. Here questions relating to the value and purpose of life are confronted. The issue of animal rights is used as an opportunity to explore the question of rights in general, and the book concludes with a chapter on moral theories.

Clearly written, lively and accessible, "Moral Questions" is an ideal textbook.

This book examines the field of bioethics from an international and regional legal perspective. It focuses on major international law documents such as the United Nations Universal Declaration on Bioethics and Human Rights and UNESCO declarations on human cloning and the human genome. Coverage of regional legal instruments includes the Council of Europe Convention on Human Rights and Biomedicine (the Oviedo Convention) and its Protocols on cloning, transplantation, and research with human beings. Work on surrogacy issues by the Hague Conference on Private International Law is also discussed, as are some African regional legal instruments on biosafety, and stem cell research.

In this account, Colin Renfrew illustrates how the most precious product of archaeology is the information that controlled and well-published excavations can give us about our shared human past. Clandestine and unpublished digging of archaeological sites for gain - ie looting - destroys the context and all hope of providing such information. It is the source of most of the antiquities that appear on the art market today - unprovenanced antiquities, the product of illicit traffic financed, knowingly or not by the collectors and museums that buy them on a no-questions-asked basis. This trade has turned London as well as other international centres into a 'thieves kitchen' where greed triumphs over serious appreciation of the past. Unless a solution is found to this ethical crisis in archaeology, our record of the past will be vastly diminished. This book attempts to lay bare the misunderstanding and hypocrisy that underlies that crisis.

Using an accessible question-and-answer format, this short but focused book tackles themes relating to the etheric - or life - realm. What is etheric technology? What are the impacts of radioactivity and atomic energy? How should we read apocalyptic symptoms in science and society? In a fascinating series of discussions Nick Thomas examines a range of concepts, including: the right and wrong ways to develop an etheric technology; spiritual events in the etheric realm; how the physical world works into the etheric world and vice versa; Rudolf Steiner's 'Strader machine'; the nature of truth and lies; attacks by the adversaries on forces of vitality; and humanity's crossing of the threshold to the spiritual world. His explanations and ideas help to evoke a living picture of a great struggle between forces of good and evil, with the future of humanity and the Earth at stake.