What if we could have babies without having to bear children, eat meat without killing animals, have the perfect sexual relationship without compromise or choose the time of our painless death?

To find out, Jenny Kleeman has interviewed a sex robot, eaten a priceless lab-grown chicken nugget, watched foetuses growing in plastic bags and attended members-only meetings where people learn how to kill themselves.

Many of the people Kleeman has met say they are finding solutions to problems that have always defined and constricted humankind. But what truly motivates them? What kind of person devotes their life to building a death machine? What kind of customer is desperate to buy an artificially intelligent sex doll – and why? Who is campaigning against these advances, and how are they trying to stop them? And what about the many unintended consequences such inventions will inevitably unleash?

Sex Robots & Vegan Meat is not science fiction. It’s not about what might happen one day – it’s about what is happening right now, and who is making it happen. In the end, it asks a simple question: are we about to change what it means to be human . . . for ever?

Why Are We Yelling is Buster Benson’s essential guide to having more honest and constructive arguments.

Have you ever walked away from an argument and suddenly thought of all the brilliant things you wish you'd said? Do you avoid certain family members and colleagues because of bitter, festering tension that you can't figure out how to address?

Now, finally, there's a solution: a new framework that frees you from the trap of unproductive conflict and pointless arguing forever.

If the threat of raised voices, emotional outbursts, and public discord makes you want to hide under the conference room table, you're not alone. Conflict, or the fear of it, can be exhausting. But as this powerful book argues, conflict doesn't have to be unpleasant. In fact, properly channeled, conflict can be the most valuable tool we have at our disposal for deepening relationships, solving problems, and coming up with new ideas.

As the mastermind behind some of the highest-performing teams at Amazon, Twitter, and Slack, Buster Benson spent decades facilitating hard conversations in stressful environments. In this book, Buster reveals the psychological underpinnings of awkward, unproductive conflict and the critical habits anyone can learn to avoid it. Armed with a deeper understanding of how arguments, you'll be able to:

• Remain confident when you're put on the spot
• Diffuse tense moments with a few strategic questions
• Facilitate creative solutions even when your team has radically different perspectives

Racial and ethnic categories have appeared in recent scientific work in novel ways and in relation to a variety of disciplines: medicine, forensics, population genetics and also developments in popular genealogy. Once again, biology is foregrounded in the discussion of human identity. Of particular importance is the preoccupation with origins and personal discovery and the increasing use of racial and ethnic categories in social policy. This new genetic knowledge, expressed in technology and practice, has the potential to disrupt how race and ethnicity are debated, managed and lived. As such, this volume investigates the ways in which existing social categories are both maintained and transformed at the intersection of the natural (sciences) and the cultural (politics). The contributors include medical researchers, anthropologists, historians of science and sociologists of race relations; together, they explore the new and challenging landscape where biology becomes the stuff of identity.

Intensive animal agriculture wrongs many, many animals. Philosophers have argued, on this basis, that most people in wealthy Western contexts are morally obligated to avoid animal products. This book explains why the author thinks that's mistaken. He reaches this negative conclusion by contending that the major arguments for veganism fail: they don't establish the right sort of connection between producing and eating animal-based foods. Moreover, if they didn't have this problem, then they would have other ones: we wouldn't be obliged to abstain from all animal products, but to eat strange things instead-e.g., roadkill, insects, and things left in dumpsters. On his view, although we have a collective obligation not to farm animals, there is no specific diet that most individuals ought to have. Nevertheless, he does think that some people are obligated to be vegans, but that's because they've joined a movement, or formed a practical identity, that requires that sacrifice. This book argues that there are good reasons to make such a move, albeit not ones strong enough to show that everyone must do likewise.

Reproductive technology allows us to test embryos' genes before deciding whether to transfer them to a woman's uterus. Embryo selection raises many ethical questions but is virtually unregulated in the United States. This comprehensive study considers the ethical, medical, political, and economic aspects of developing appropriate regulation.

When the utility of masks or vaccinations became politicized during the COVID-19 pandemic and lost its mooring in scientific evidence, an already-developing crisis of expertise was exacerbated. Those who believe in consensus science wondered: "How can 'those people' not see the truth?" This book shows that it is not a 'scientific' controversy, but an ideological dispute with 'believers' on both sides. If the advocates for consensus science acknowledge the uncertainties involved, rather than insisting on cold, hard facts, it is possible to open a pathway towards interaction and communication, even persuasion, between world views. As the crisis of expertise continues to be a global issue, this will be an invaluable resource for readers concerned about polarized societies and the distrust of consensus science.

Ethical Reporting of Sensitive Topics explores the underlying complexities that journalists may face when covering difficult news stories. Reporting on issues such as suicide, sexual abuse, or migration is a skill that is often glossed over in a journalist's education. By combining theory and practice, this collection will correct this oversight and give journalists the expertise and understanding to report on these subjects responsibly and ethically. Contributors to this volume are an international group of journalists-turned- academics, who share their first-hand experiences and unique professional insight into best ethical journalistic practice for reporting on sensitive topics. Drawing from a range of case studies, contributors discuss the most appropriate approach to, for example, describing a shooter who has killed a group of schoolchildren or interviewing someone who has lost everything in a natural disaster. Readers are invited to consider factors which have the potential to influence the reporting of these sorts of topics, including bias, sensationalism, conflict of interest, grief, vulnerability, and ignorance of one's own privilege. Ethical Reporting of Sensitive Topics aims to support all journalists, from students of journalism and individuals encountering a newsroom for the first time, to those veteran journalists or specialist journalists who seek to better their reporting skills.

Millions of us suffer from addiction, including psychiatrist and recovering alcoholic Carl Erik Fisher. But where does this centuries-old behaviour come from and how should we treat it? As a young doctor, Carl Erik Fisher came face to face with his own addiction crisis, one that nearly cost him everything. Now, in The Urge, he investigates the history of this condition; how we have struggled to define, treat, and control it; and how broader understanding and compassion could change people's lives. The Urge is at once an eye-opening history of ideas, a riveting personal story of addiction and recovery, and a clinician's urgent call for a more expansive, nuanced view of one of society's most intractable challenges.

The shooting of Jean Charles de Menezes at London's Stockwell tube station in 2005 raised acute issues about the operational practice, legitimacy, accountability, and policy-making regarding police use of fatal force. It dramatically exposed a policy - amounting to "shoot to kill" - which came not from Parliament, but from the non-statutory ACPO (Association of Chief Police Officers). This vital and timely book unravels these complex and often misunderstood matters, and it provides a fresh and much-needed overview of the UK's firearms practice and policy in a traditionally "unarmed" police service. Drawing on international examples of police use-of-force and firearms, it questions how existing police policy has been made covertly.

As first responders to public problems, administrators must survey situations, identify solutions, and occasionally make executive decisions that are binding upon the government as a whole. The ability for administrators to assert claims that orient the government in a particular direction is not only powerful, but it can also be problematic and even dangerous. For administrators, the tension between moving in a spirited way, and remaining sensible, is a problem of how to exercise one's discretion, especially in the U.S. context, which demands that both be considered and actualized. In dealing with these competing expectations, Chad B. Newswander analyzes how administrators can incorporate executive, legislative, and judicial tendencies to help them handle the problem of discretion. Expanding the thinking of the constitutional school of public administration thought, Administrative Ethics and Executive Decisions is a theoretically grounded and empirically rich study of how administrators incorporate a constitutional ethos to handle the problem of discretion.

Strategies or decisions aimed at affecting, in a manner considered to be positive, the genetic heritage of a child in the context of human reproduction are increasingly being accepted in contemporary society. As a result, unnerving similarities between earlier selection ideology so central to the discredited eugenic regimes of the 20th century and those now on offer suggest that a new era of eugenics has dawned. The time is ripe, therefore, for considering and evaluating from an ethical perspective both current and future selection practices. This inter-disciplinary volume blends research from embryology, genetics, philosophy, sociology, psychology, and history. In so doing, it constructs a thorough picture of the procedures emerging from today's reproductive developments, including a rigorous ethical argumentation concerning the possible advantages and risks related to the new eugenics.

Calum MacKellar is Director of Research of the Scottish Council on Human Bioethics, Edinburgh, and Visiting Professor of Bioethics at St Mary's University College, London, UK.

Christopher Bechtel holds a degree in philosophy and is a Research Fellow with the Scottish Council on Human Bioethics, Edinburgh, UK.

This book was originally published in 1999. When one or more essential organs failed, the consequence used to be death. However, conventional medicine has developed artificial means of extending life, the most successful of which is transplantation. The most common form of organ to be transplanted is a kidney which will, on average, function for about a decade in its recipient. Organ transplantation as a whole is widely practiced in most countries. However, few can procure enough organs to meet demand. Many people who are suitable for a transplant die without getting one. Many kidney patients can access and stay alive on dialysis until a suitable organ becomes available. However, even here, sufficiency of organs would be beneficial because lesser reliance on dialysis would reduce healthcare costs and be better for patient quality of life. This invaluable book shows that in the light of current practice and attitudes, increasing living donor transplantation (LDT) levels is feasible. It is one of the few works to systematically analyse the ethical and legal issues involved in LDT use in the light of empirical evidence, including new data derived from a unique programme of interviews and questionnaires with transplant professionals, living donors and recipients. Readers are led to an understanding of when LDT is ethically and legally acceptable and to the strong case for using it much more extensively.

Today, it often seems as though Assisted Reproductive Technologies (ARTs) have reached a stage of normalization, at least in some countries and among certain social groups. Apparently some practices - for example in vitro fertilization (IVF) - have become standard worldwide. The contributors to Assisted Reproduction Across Borders argue against normalization as an uncontested overall trend. This volume reflects on the state of the art of ARTs. From feminist perspectives, the contributors focus on contemporary political debates triggered by ARTs. They examine the varying ways in which ARTs are interpreted and practised in different contexts, depending on religious, moral and political approaches. Assisted Reproduction Across Borders embeds feminist analysis of ARTs across a wide variety of countries and cultural contexts, discussing controversial practices such as surrogacy from the perspective of the global South as well as the global North as well as inequalities in terms of access to IVF. This volume will appeal to scholars and students of anthropology, ethnography, philosophy, political science, history, sociology, film studies, media studies, literature, art history, area studies, and interdisciplinary areas such as gender studies, cultural studies, and postcolonial studies.

The Drone Debate offers a thorough investigation of the where, why, how, and when of the U.S.'s use of UAVs. Beginning with a historical overview of the use of drones in warfare, it then addresses whether targeted killing operations are strategically wise, whether they are permissible under international law, and the related ethical issues. It also looks at the political factors behind the use of drones, including domestic and global attitudes toward their use and potential issues of proliferation and escalation. Finally, the use of drones by other countries, such as Israel and China, is examined. Each chapter features a case study that highlights particular incidents and patterns of operation in specific regions, including Yemen, Somalia, Pakistan, and Libya and strike types (signature strikes, personality strikes, etc.).

The protest against meat eating may turn out to be one of the most significant movements of our age. In terms of our relations with animals, it is difficult to think of a more urgent moral problem than the fate of billions of animals killed every year for human consumption. This book argues that vegetarians and vegans are not only protestors, but also moral pioneers. It provides 25 chapters which stimulate further thought, exchange, and reflection on the morality of eating meat. A rich array of philosophical, religious, historical, cultural, and practical approaches challenge our assumptions about animals and how we should relate to them. This book provides global perspectives with insights from 11 countries: US, UK, Germany, France, Belgium, Israel, Austria, the Netherlands, Canada, South Africa, and Sweden. Focusing on food consumption practices, it critically foregrounds and unpacks key ethical rationales that underpin vegetarian and vegan lifestyles. It invites us to revisit our relations with animals as food, and as subjects of exploitation, suggesting that there are substantial moral, economic, and environmental reasons for changing our habits. This timely contribution, edited by two of the leading experts within the field, offers a rich array of interdisciplinary insights on what ethical vegetarianism and veganism means. It will be of great interest to those studying and researching in the fields of animal geography and animal-studies, sociology, food studies and consumption, environmental studies, and cultural studies. This book will be of great appeal to animal protectionists, environmentalists, and humanitarians.

Policing is a highly pragmatic occupation. It is designed to achieve the important social ends of peacekeeping and public safety, and is empowered to do so using means that are ordinarily seen as problematic; that is, the use of force, deception, and invasions of privacy, along with considerable discretion. It is often suggested that the ends of policing justify the use of otherwise problematic means, but do they? This book explores this question from a philosophical perspective. The relationship between ends and means has a long and contested history both in moral/practical reasoning and public policy. Looking at this history through the lens of policing, criminal justice philosopher John Kleinig explores the dialectic of ends and means (whether the ends justify the means, or whether the ends never justify the means) and offers a new, sharpened perspective on police ethics. After tracing the various ways in which ends and means may be construed, the book surveys a series of increasingly concrete issues, focusing especially on those that arise in policing contexts. The competing moral demands made by ends and means culminate in considerations of noble cause corruption, dirty hands theory, lesser degradations (such as tear gas, tasers, chokeholds, and so on), and finally, those means deemed impermissible by the majority in Western culture, such as torture.

This book departs from conventional bioethics approaches to consider the different moral and political economies involved in the donation and transformation of human organs, gametes, stem cells and breastmilk. Collectively, the authors draw attention to the different values associated with research and therapy on body part and tissue exchange through an examination of altruism, gift and commodity relations. They expertly discuss issues such as the bioethical conundrums around the circulation and use of human biological materials and services as well as their legal and regulatory limits, the economic benefits and health values attributed to various body parts and products, and the matter of immaterial labour and affective relations between donors, recipients and others involved in tissue provision. Based on new empirical research, this interdisciplinary collection of original and timely essays will be of interest to students and researchers in gender and cultural studies, sociology, anthropology, science and technology studies, as well as medical professionals with an interest in health and reproduction.

Ethical Reporting of Sensitive Topics explores the underlying complexities that journalists may face when covering difficult news stories. Reporting on issues such as suicide, sexual abuse, or migration is a skill that is often glossed over in a journalist's education. By combining theory and practice, this collection will correct this oversight and give journalists the expertise and understanding to report on these subjects responsibly and ethically. Contributors to this volume are an international group of journalists-turned- academics, who share their first-hand experiences and unique professional insight into best ethical journalistic practice for reporting on sensitive topics. Drawing from a range of case studies, contributors discuss the most appropriate approach to, for example, describing a shooter who has killed a group of schoolchildren or interviewing someone who has lost everything in a natural disaster. Readers are invited to consider factors which have the potential to influence the reporting of these sorts of topics, including bias, sensationalism, conflict of interest, grief, vulnerability, and ignorance of one's own privilege. Ethical Reporting of Sensitive Topics aims to support all journalists, from students of journalism and individuals encountering a newsroom for the first time, to those veteran journalists or specialist journalists who seek to better their reporting skills.

At the start of the twenty-first century, America is in the midst of a profound national reconsideration of the death penalty. There has been a dramatic decline in the number of people being sentenced to death as well as executed, exonerations have become common, and the number of states abolishing the death penalty is on the rise. The essays featured in The Road to Abolition? track this shift in attitudes toward capital punishment, and consider whether or not the death penalty will ever be abolished in America.

The interdisciplinary group of experts gathered by Charles J. Ogletree Jr., and Austin Sarat ask and attempt to answer the hard questions that need to be addressed if the death penalty is to be abolished. Will the death penalty end only to be replaced with life in prison without parole? Will life without the possibility of parole become, in essence, the new death penalty? For abolitionists, might that be a pyrrhic victory? The contributors discuss how the death penalty might be abolished, with particular emphasis on the current debate over lethal injection as a case study on why and how the elimination of certain forms of execution might provide a model for the larger abolition of the death penalty.

This collection adopts an interdisciplinary approach in order to understand the various factors at work in genocidal processes and their aftermath. The strong emphasis on legal norms, legal concepts and legal measures in other studies fails to consider further significant issues in relation to genocide. This book aims to redress this balance exploring social dynamics and human behaviour as well as the interplay of various psychological, political, sociological, anthropological and historical factors at work in genocidal processes.With contributions from top international scholars, this volume provides an integrated perspective on risk and resilience, acknowledging the importance of mitigating factors in understanding and preventing genocide. It explores a range of issues including the conceptual definition of genocide, the notion of intent, preventive measures, transitional justice, the importance of property, the role of memory, self or national interest and principles of social existence.Genocide, Risk and Resilience aims to cross conceptual, disciplinary and temporal boundaries and in doing so, provides rich insights for scholars from across political science, history, law, philosophy, anthropology and theology.

Ethics for Robots describes and defends a method for designing and evaluating ethics algorithms for autonomous machines, such as self-driving cars and search and rescue drones. Derek Leben argues that such algorithms should be evaluated by how effectively they accomplish the problem of cooperation among self-interested organisms, and therefore, rather than simulating the psychological systems that have evolved to solve this problem, engineers should be tackling the problem itself, taking relevant lessons from our moral psychology. Leben draws on the moral theory of John Rawls, arguing that normative moral theories are attempts to develop optimal solutions to the problem of cooperation. He claims that Rawlsian Contractarianism leads to the 'Maximin' principle - the action that maximizes the minimum value - and that the Maximin principle is the most effective solution to the problem of cooperation. He contrasts the Maximin principle with other principles and shows how they can often produce non-cooperative results. Using real-world examples - such as an autonomous vehicle facing a situation where every action results in harm, home care machines, and autonomous weapons systems - Leben contrasts Rawlsian algorithms with alternatives derived from utilitarianism and natural rights libertarianism. Including chapter summaries and a glossary of technical terms, Ethics for Robots is essential reading for philosophers, engineers, computer scientists, and cognitive scientists working on the problem of ethics for autonomous systems.

How do we know right from wrong, good from bad, help from hindrance, and how can we judge the behaviour of others?

Ethics are the rules and guidelines that we use to make such judgements. Often there are no clear answers, which make this subject both interesting and potentially frustrating. In this book, the authors offer readers the opportunity to develop and express their own opinions in relation to ethics in psychology.

There are many psychological studies that appear to have been harmful or cruel to the people or animals that took part in them. For example, memory researchers carried out studies on a man who had no memory for over forty years, but because he had no memory he was never able to agree to the studies. Is this a reasonable thing to do to someone? Comparative psychologist Harry Harlow found that he could create severe and lasting distress in monkeys by keeping them in social isolation. Is this a reasonable thing to do even if we find out useful things about human distress? If you were able to use psychological techniques to break someone down so that they revealed information that was useful to your government, would you do it? If so, why? If not, why not? These ethical issues are not easy to resolve and the debates continue as we encounter new dilemmas.

This book uses examples from psychological research to look at:

• key ethical issues
• ethical guidelines of psychologists
• socially sensitive research
• ethics in applied psychology
• the use of animals in research

This book is essential reading for undergraduate and pre-undergraduate students of psychology and related subjects such as philosophy and social policy.

An American Dilemma examines the issue of capital punishment in the United States as it conflicts with the nation's obligations under the 1963 Vienna Convention on Consular Relations. In a number of high profile cases, foreign nationals have been executed after being denied their rights under the Vienna Convention. The International Court of Justice has ruled against the United States, but individual states have chosen to defy international law. The Supreme Court has not resolved the question of legal remedies for such breaches.

Nineteenth-century Britain was one of the birthplaces of modern vegetarianism in the west, and was to become a reform movement attracting thousands of people. From the Vegetarian Society's foundation in 1847, men, women and their families abandoned conventional diet for reasons as varied as self-advancement, personal thrift, dissatisfaction with medical orthodoxy and repugnance for animal cruelty. They joined in the pursuit of a perfect society in which food reform combined with causes such as socialism and land reform, stimulated by the concern that carnivorism was in league with alcoholism and bellicosity. James Gregory provides a rich exploration of the movement, with its often colourful and sometimes eccentric leaders and grass-roots supporters. He explores the rich culture of branch associations, competing national societies, proliferating restaurants and food stores and experiments in vegetarian farms and colonies. "Of Victorians and Vegetarians" examines the wider significance of Victorian vegetarians, embracing concerns about gender and class, national identity, race and empire and religious authority. Vegetarianism embodied the Victorians' complicated response to modernity in its hostility to aspects of the industrial world's exploitation of technology, rejecting entrepreneurial attempts to create the foods and substitute artefacts of the future. Hostile, like the associated anti-vivisectionists and anti-vaccinationists, to a new 'priesthood' of scientists, vegetarians defended themselves through the new sciences of nutrition and chemistry. "Of Victorians and Vegetarians" uncovers who the vegetarians were, how they attempted to convert their fellow Britons (and the world beyond) to their 'bloodless diet' and the response of contemporaries in a variety of media and genres. Through a close study of the vegetarian periodicals and organisational archives, extensive biographical research and a broader examination of texts relating to food, dietary reform and allied reform movements, James Gregory provides us with the first fascinating foray into the impact of vegetarianism on the Victorians, the history of animal welfare, reform movements and food history.

This book describes specific, well-know controversies in the genetic modification debate and connects them to deeper philosophical issues in philosophy of technology. It contributes to the current, far-reaching deliberations about the future of food, agriculture and society. Controversies over so-called Genetically Modified Organisms (GMOs) regularly appear in the press. The biotechnology debate has settled into a long-term philosophical dispute. The discussion goes much deeper than the initial empirical questions about whether or not GM food and crops are safe for human consumption or pose environmental harms that dominated news reports. In fact, the implications of this debate extend beyond the sphere of food and agriculture to encompass the general role of science and technology in society. The GM controversy provides an occasion to explore important issues in philosophy of technology. Researchers, teachers and students interested in agricultural biotechnology, philosophy of technology and the future of food and agriculture will find this exploration timely and thought provoking.