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Books > Social sciences > Sociology, social studies > Social issues > Ethical issues & debates > General
Building on the work of Elinor Ostrom (Governing the Commons) the author examines how the different shared goods of a democratic society are shaped by technology and demonstrates how club goods, common pool resources, and public goods are supported, enhanced, and disrupted by technology. He further argues that as the common good is undermined by different interests, it should be possible to reclaim technology, if the members of the society conclude that they have something in common.
This collection of 13 specially commissioned essays expands a new intellectual terrain for sociology: virtue ethics. Using a variety of religious perspectives, of Catholicism, Protestantism, Hinduism, Quakerism, with considerations of Islam and the New Age, this engaged and topical collection deals with properties of virtue in relation to the person, celibacy, hope, the apocalypse, mourning, and moral ambiguity. It also treats the concept of virtue in response to MacIntyre, Bauman, Weber, Durkheim, and Giddens. It seeks to move sociology past disabling effects of postmodernity.
How can Christians contribute to the debates about climate change and global warming? What ethical criteria do they bring to the conversation? How does the Bible figure in their deliberation? Carol Robb brings together the several dimensions of this one overarching issue of our lifetimes: hers is an ecological ethics in theological perspective, and it integrates economic theory, environmental policy, and most distinctively New Testament studies. Alongside deliberation on scenarios for the future in light of climate change and assessing criteria for ethical policy in this area, she reflects on implications of the New Testament worldview for ethics now. Relating Jesus' life, ministry, and teachings to the resurrection, then probing how Paul and other early followers of Jesus related to the empire, Robb provides a surprisingly fruitful fund of ideas for Christian responsibility in this area.
It is a serious mistake to think that all we need for a just world is properly-structured organizations. But it is equally wrong to believe that all we need are virtuous people. Social structures alter people's decisions through the influence of the restrictions and opportunities they present. Does buying a shirt at the local department store create for you some responsibility for the workplace welfare of the women who sewed it half a planet away? Many people interested in justice have claimed so, but without identifying any causal link between consumer and producer, for the simple reason that no single consumer has any perceptible effect on any of those producers. Finn uses a critical realist understanding of social structures to view both the positive and negative effects of the market as a social structure comprising a long chain of causal relations from consumer/clerk to factory manager/seamstress. This causal connection creates a consequent moral responsibility for consumers and society for the destructive effects that markets help to create. Clearly written and engaging, this book is a must-read for scholars involved with these moral issues.
From the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe's resistance against the Dakota Access pipeline to the Nepalese Newar community's protest of the Fast Track Road Project, Indigenous peoples around the world are standing up and speaking out against global capitalism to protect the land, water, and air. By reminding us of the fundamental importance of placing Indigenous politics, histories, and ontologies at the center of our social movements, Indigenous Resurgence positions environmental justice within historical, social, political, and economic contexts, exploring the troubling relationship between colonial and environmental violence and reframing climate change and environmental degradation through an anticolonial lens.
This book examines the question of what we mean when we talk about life, revealing new insights into what life is, what it does, and why it matters. Jenell Johnson studies arguments on behalf of life-not just of the human or animal variety, but all life. She considers, for example, the Standing Rock Sioux tribe's fight for water, deep ecologists' Earth First! activism, the Voluntary Human Extinction Movement, and astrophysicists' positions on Martian microbes. What she reveals is that this advocacy-vital advocacy-expands our view of what counts as life and shows us what it would mean for the moral standing of human life to be extended to life itself. Including short interviews with celebrated ecological writer Dorion Sagan, former NASA Planetary Protection Officer Catharine Conley, and leading figure in Indigenous and environmental studies Kyle Whyte, Every Living Thing provides a capacious view of life in the natural world. This book is a must-read for anyone interested in biodiversity, bioethics, and the environment.
Developed by D. Don Welch during his 28 years of teaching ethics and public policy, the rationale behind "A Guide to Ethics and Public Policy "is to present a comprehensive guide for making policy judgments. Rather than present specific cases that raise moral issues or discuss the role a few concepts play in the moral analysis of policy, this book instead provides a broad framework for the moral evaluation of public policies and policy proposals. This framework is organized around guiding five principles: benefit, effectiveness, fairness, fidelity, and legitimacy. These principles identify the factors that should be taken into account and the issues that should be addressed as citizens address the question of what the United States government should be able to do. Organized by concept, with illustrations and examples frequently interspersed, the book covers both theory and specific issues. " A Guide to Ethics and Public Policy" outlines a comprehensive ethical framework, provides content to the meaning of the five principles that comprise that framework through the use of illustrations and examples, and offers guidance about how to navigate one s way through the conflicts and dilemmas that inevitably result from a serious effort to analyze policies."
From the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe's resistance against the Dakota Access pipeline to the Nepalese Newar community's protest of the Fast Track Road Project, Indigenous peoples around the world are standing up and speaking out against global capitalism to protect the land, water, and air. By reminding us of the fundamental importance of placing Indigenous politics, histories, and ontologies at the center of our social movements, Indigenous Resurgence positions environmental justice within historical, social, political, and economic contexts, exploring the troubling relationship between colonial and environmental violence and reframing climate change and environmental degradation through an anticolonial lens.
While previous research in educational administration has focused on how to combat students' tardiness, absenteeism, and disciplinary problems, only a few studies have focused on teachers' withdrawal behaviors, such as absenteeism and the intent to leave. This book takes a unique organizational approach towards understanding the concept of ethics in educational systems. It provides a global perspective and connects theory and praxis through team-based simulations, case studies and scenarios. It also allows researchers, educators and teachers, and educational leaders and administrators around the world to understand how they can develop an ethical culture in their schools. This understanding can encourage the development and assimilation of a code of ethics for teachers and educators and the creation of a policy of intervention that can help to minimize teachers' withdrawal behaviors. In this way, the author presents an integrative approach towards creating a positive learning environment for teachers and students.
New York Times Bestseller How far are Americans willing to go to force each other to fall in line? According to the establishment media, the intelligentsia, and our political chattering class, the greatest threat to American freedom lies in right-wing authoritarianism. We've heard that some 75 million Americans who voted for Donald Trump represent the rise of American fascism; that conservatives have allowed authoritarianism to bloom in their midst, creating a grave danger for the republic. But what if the true authoritarian threat to America doesn't come from the political right, but from the supposedly anti-fascist left? There are certainly totalitarians on the political right. But statistically, they represent a fringe movement with little institutional clout. The authoritarian left, meanwhile, is ascendant in nearly every area of American life. A small number of leftists-college-educated, coastal, and uncompromising-have not just taken over the Democratic Party but our corporations, our universities, our scientific establishment, our cultural institutions. And they have used their newfound power to silence their opposition. The authoritarian Left is aggressively insistent that everyone must conform to its values, demanding submission and conformity. The dogmatic Left is obsessed with putting people in categories and changing human nature. Everyone who opposes it must be destroyed. Ben Shapiro looks at everything from pop culture to the Frankfurt school, social media to the Founding Fathers, to explain the origins of our turn to tyranny, and why so many seem blind to it. More than a catalog of bad actors and intemperate acts, The Authoritarian Moment lays bare the intolerance and rigidity creeping into all American ideology - and prescribes the solution to ending the authoritarianism that threatens our future.
While much has been written on illicit drug use, policy, and drugs' relationship to crime, this study examines the drug war as most Americans have experienced it--through mass-mediated rhetoric: presidential drug war declarations, news stories and hype, public service announcements, and the like. Such rhetoric influences public opinion about illegal drugs, drug users, presidents, and the drug war itself. And according to this author, such rhetoric is also used as a public relations campaign designed to increase the popularity of government officials and to assure quiescence regarding particular policy programs. This study demonstrates the underestimated influence of rhetoric, political uses of public relations and the powerful influence they have on public opinion and the policy process.
The book makes theoretical and empirical contributions to recent debates on hybrid forms of peace and 'post-liberal' peace. In applying concepts of power, hybridity and resistance, and providing different kinds of hybridity and resistance to explore post-conflict peacebuilding in Sierra Leone, the author makes an original contribution to existing literature by providing various ways in which power can be exercised not just between locals and internationals, but also among locals themselves and the nature of peace that is produced. This volume provides various ways in which hybridity and resistance can be manifested. A more rigorous development of these concepts not only offers a better understanding of the nature of these concepts, but also helps us to distinguish forms of hybridity and resistance that are emancipatory or transformatory from those that result in people accommodating themselves to their situation. This book is an invaluable resource for scholars and students of peacebuilding, peace and conflict studies, International Relations and African Studies, and practitioners of peacebuilding and post-conflict reconstruction.
Life and health sciences and biomedical studies have developed rapidly over the last few decades raising previously unanticipated ethical concerns and questions. New and emerging technologies require novel approaches, protocols and raised awareness to ensure adequate levels of biosecurity and biosafety as well as the implementation of special measures to prevent their potential misuse or dual use. This volume brings together an international collection of prominent ethics experts in health and life sciences, with the aim of providing clear and comprehensive guidelines for the establishment of efficient ethical strategies related to current and emerging biotechnologies and health research. Important current topics in research ethics including CRISPR-Cas9 technologies, gene editing, 'big data' in healthcare and life sciences, nutrition in medicine among other topics have found their place in this volume. In addition, the volume discusses the prospects for the implementation of an international unification of ethical standards in life sciences.
This book provides a detailed analysis of the economic and political implications of the introduction of Artificial Intelligence and Robotics into the service sector of economies that have so far relied on service jobs to sustain levels of employment. It examines how reliance on coercive measures for enforcing low-paid service work attempts to postpone this third Industrial Revolution, and analyses the struggles that must still take place if we are to achieve a future of freedom and social justice for all. While automation and globalisation have made human solidarities of traditional kinds more difficult to sustain, they have also made new kinds possible. Experiments in social policy, and especially the pilot projects with unconditional Universal Basic Incomes, offer a possible model for a new kind of society. The author argues that it is politics which will determine whether we can achieve these new human solidarities.
By analyzing the cases present in this volume, the editors develop important steps towards a theory of social change that can adequately address the complex realities and intersectionality of identity (race, gender, class, sexuality, nationality) within and among these new movements.
This book is about the philosophy of de-extinction. To make an extinct species 'de-extinct' is to resurrect it by creating new organisms of the same, or similar, appearance and genetics. The book describes current attempts to resurrect three species, the aurochs, woolly mammoth and passenger pigeon. It then investigates two major philosophical questions such projects throw up. These are the Authenticity Question-'will the products of de-extinction be authentic members of the original species?'-and the Ethical Question-'is de-extinction something that should be done?' The book surveys and critically evaluates a raft of arguments for and against the authenticity or de-extinct organisms, and for and against the ethical legitimacy of de-extinction. It concludes, first, that authentic de-extinctions are actually possible, and second, that de-extinction can potentially be ethically legitimate, especially when deployed as part of a 'freeze now and resurrect later' conservation strategy.
Surveillance and the Vanishing Individual is an investigation into the impact of the spread of digital technologies and practices, and especially the wide-spread practice of mass surveillance, on privacy and personhood. The book argues that the quest for prediction, certainty, and control lying at the heart of the state's security apparatus destroys an essential component of human dignity and fundamentally undermines liberalism. The book begins with a discussion of the rise of the digital age and the historical import of this development. Subsequent chapters of the book examine different cultural understandings of privacy, the philosophical discussion of its centrality to human existence, and the form and extent of its legal protection. Lindau explores the reasons behind the rise of mass state surveillance, the modest legal restraints governing its use, and its deployment against activists, protestors, and dissidents and its impact on individuals and on privacy. The book then turns to a discussion of the rise of "surveillance capitalism" and, because this is not just-or even primarily-a U.S. phenomenon, examines the political, social, and other impacts of social media around the world. The book includes a case study discussing the global use of surveillance during the Covid-19 pandemic and the implications of this development before concluding with reflections on the relationship between mass surveillance and liberalism. The book will appeal equally to readers across the social sciences and philosophy, and to students in courses on privacy, surveillance, and democracy. Lindau expertly explores the social, political, and economic consequences of digitization and one of its essential features - the appropriation and "mining" of ever large troves of personal information. The book primarily focuses on the experience of the United States but includes a comparative cross-national and cross-regional analysis and a discussion of the link between different regime types and state surveillance.
From Josh Tickell, one of America's most celebrated documentary filmmakers, comes a "fascinating, easy-to-follow blueprint for how eating in ways that nourish and regenerate the soil can not only help reverse global warming, but also bring greater vitality to our lives" (Wolfgang Puck). "A must read for anyone committed to healing our bodies and our Earth" (Deepak Chopra), Kiss the Ground explains an incredible truth: by changing our diets to a soil-nourishing, regenerative agriculture diet, we can reverse global warming, harvest healthy, abundant food, and eliminate the poisonous substances that are harming our children, pets, bodies, and ultimately our planet. This "richly visual" (Kirkus Reviews) look at the impact of an underappreciated but essential resource-the very ground that feeds us-features fascinating and accessible interviews with celebrity chefs, ranchers, farmers, and top scientists. Kiss the Ground teaches you how to become an agent in humanity's single most important and time-sensitive mission: reverse climate change and effectively save the world-all through the choices you make in how and what to eat. Also a full-length documentary executive produced by Leonardo DiCaprio and narrated by Woody Harrelson, "Kiss the Ground both informs and inspires" (Marianne Williamson, #1 New York Times bestselling author).
Weaving together a diverse range of scholarly-activist intersectional voices from around the world, Critical Animal Studies and Activism: International Perspectives on Total Liberation and Intersectionality co-edited by Anthony J. Nocella II and Richard J. White makes a powerful contribution to knowledge and understanding. It is essential reading for environmentalists, animal advocates, social justice organizers, policy-makers, social change-makers, and indeed for all those who care about the future of this planet. This book spans many scholar disciplines and activist social movements, and provides new insights to fundamental debates surrounding inter-species justice, liberation, and democracy. This critical theory for total liberation book expands the understanding of one struggle one fight: for human freedom, for animal rights, and for the liberation of the earth herself. Rooted in a radical praxis, the book argues that those in academia that claim critical animal studies, need to hit the streets with the protesters and the protesters need to join the theoretical conversations. Theory and practice and not binaries, but two pieces of a larger goal. Read this book and use its arguments to take the fight to smash capitalism, oppression, and domination in all its forms!
Addresses the growing concern about journalism ethics in the United States and worldwide. Essays provide insights into the motivations, techniques, and challenges of journalists everywhere.
A major new study of Robert Musil by one of the world's leading Musil scholars. Musil's extraordinary works, the study reveals, emerged from the problem of the "two cultures." The modern era is marked by the separate life of two cultures of understanding, one derived from art and its discourses, the other from science and its practices. This "problem of the two cultures" (as coined by C.P. Snow) describes the difficulty of bringing these distinct ways of understanding the world together. The works of the Austrian author Robert Musil (1930-33) represent the most distinguished treatment of this problem in the modern era. Nevertheless, doubts persist about Musil's true intentions. Did he maintain that the separation between art and science could be resolved? Or did he rise above the problem by advocating a new order of being or "other condition" that would dispense with it altogether? Mehigan's study moves these questions to center stage. He lends new clarity to the debate about Musil's position in regard to the two cultures by shining a light on ethical questions the author ultimately wished to clarify. It is the shape of a hard-won ethics, Mehigan argues, that provides the key to an effective response to the problem of the two cultures - an ethics, in the end, that can only be put forward as a new kind of art. Tim Mehigan is Professor of German and Deputy Director of the Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities at the University of Queensland, Australia.
This volume contributes to the growing literature on the morality of procreation and parenting. About half of the chapters take up questions about the morality of bringing children into existence. They discuss the following questions: Is it wrong to create human life? Is there a connection between the problem of evil and the morality of procreation? Could there be a duty to procreate? How do the environmental harms imposed by procreation affect its moral status? Given these costs, is the value of establishing genetic ties ever significant enough to render procreation morally permissible? And how should government respond to peoples' motives for procreating? The other half of the volume considers moral and political questions about adoption and parenting. One chapter considers whether the choice to become a parent can be rational. The two following chapters take up the regulation of adoption, focusing on whether the special burdens placed on adoptive parents, as compared to biological parents, can be morally justified. The book concludes by considering how we should conceive of adequacy standards in parenting and what resources we owe to children. This collection builds on existing literature by advancing new arguments and novel perspectives on existing debates. It also raises new issues deserving of our attention. As a whole it is sure to generate further philosophical debate on pressing and rich questions surrounding the bearing and rearing of children.
The contemporary psychiatric approach to trauma, encapsulated in the diagnostic category of PTSD, has been criticized for its neglect of the political dimensions involved in the etiology and treatment of trauma. By means of a philosophical and psychoanalytical analysis, the depoliticizing potential of the biomedical approach is tied to a more general 'ethical crisis' in post-traditional societies. Via the work of Lacan, Zizek and Badiou on the act and the event, this book constructs a conceptual framework that revives the ethical and political dimensions of trauma recovery.
The book demonstrates that food safety is a multidisciplinary scientific discipline that is specifically designed to prevent foodborne illness to consumers. It is generally assumed to be an axiom by both nonprofessionals and professionals alike, that the most developed countries, through their intricate and complex standards, formal trainings and inspections, are always capable of providing much safer food items and beverages to consumers as opposed to the lesser developed countries and regions of the world. Clearly, the available data regarding the morbidity and the mortality in different areas of the world confirms that in developing countries, the prevalence and the incidence of presumptive foodborne illness is much greater. However, other factors need to be taken into consideration in this overall picture: First of all, one of the key issues in developing countries appears to be the availability of safe drinking water, a key element in any food safety strategy. Second, the availability of healthcare facilities, care providers, and medicines in different parts of the world makes the consequences of foodborne illness much more important and life threatening in lesser developed countries than in most developed countries. It would be therefore ethnocentric and rather simplistic to state that the margin of improvement in food safety is only directly proportional to thelevel of development of the society or to the level of complexity of any given national or international standard. Besides standards and regulations, humans as a whole have evolved and adapted different strategies to provide and to ensure food and water safety according to their cultural and historical backgrounds. Our goal is to discuss and to compare these strategies in a cross-cultural and technical approach, according to the realities of different socio-economic, ethnical and social heritages. |
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