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Books > Social sciences > Sociology, social studies > Social issues > Ethical issues & debates > General
It is often said that quantum technologies are poised to change the world as we know it, but cutting through the hype, what will quantum technologies actually mean for countries and their citizens? In Law and Policy for the Quantum Age, Chris Jay Hoofnagle and Simson L. Garfinkel explain the genesis of quantum information science (QIS) and the resulting quantum technologies that are most exciting: quantum sensing, computing, and communication. This groundbreaking, timely text explains how quantum technologies work, how countries will likely employ QIS for future national defense and what the legal landscapes will be for these nations, and how companies might (or might not) profit from the technology. Hoofnagle and Garfinkel argue that the consequences of QIS are so profound that we must begin planning for them today. This title is available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.
It is often said that quantum technologies are poised to change the world as we know it, but cutting through the hype, what will quantum technologies actually mean for countries and their citizens? In Law and Policy for the Quantum Age, Chris Jay Hoofnagle and Simson L. Garfinkel explain the genesis of quantum information science (QIS) and the resulting quantum technologies that are most exciting: quantum sensing, computing, and communication. This groundbreaking, timely text explains how quantum technologies work, how countries will likely employ QIS for future national defense and what the legal landscapes will be for these nations, and how companies might (or might not) profit from the technology. Hoofnagle and Garfinkel argue that the consequences of QIS are so profound that we must begin planning for them today. This title is available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.
Speaking from and to the growing movement among academics to become involved with 'socially-engaged' work, this volume presents first-person case studies of attempts to fix serious ethical problems in medical practice and research. It highlights the critical difference between the pundit approach to bioethics and the interventional approach - the talkers and the doers - and points to how abused and damaged the doers often end up. Chapters cover a diverse set of topics, including the troubling influence of for-profit businesses on public health policy, the politics of exposing histories of unjust medical research, the challenges of patient rights' work in sexuality and reproduction, collaborations between NGOs and academics, methods for changing entrenched yet harmful medical practices, engaging public policy through educating governmental leaders, and whistleblowing. The trending interest in the interplay of academia and advocacy and the growing importance of 'socially-engaged' work by academics make this a timely and much-needed resource.
Animal ethics is generating growing interest both within academia and outside it. This book focuses on ethical issues connected to animals who play an extremely important role in human lives: companion animals ("pets"), with a special emphasis on dogs and cats, the animals most often chosen as pets. Companion animals are both vulnerable to and dependent upon us. What responsibilities do we owe to them, especially since we have the power and authority to make literal life-and-death decisions about them? What kinds of relationships should we have with our companion animals? And what might we learn from cats and dogs about the nature and limits of our own morality? The contributors write from a variety of philosophical perspectives, including utilitarianism, care ethics, feminist ethics, phenomenology, and the genealogy of ideas. The eighteen chapters are divided into two sections, to provide a general background to ethical debate about companion animals, followed by a focus on a number of crucial aspects of human relationships to companion animals. The first section discusses the nature of our relationships to companion animals, the foundations of our moral responsibilities to companion animals, what our relationships with companion animals teach us, and whether animals themselves can act ethically. The second part explores some specific ethical issues related to crucial aspects of companion animals' lives-breeding, reproduction, sterilization, cloning, adoption, feeding, training, working, sexual interactions, longevity, dying, and euthanasia.
Where did the regulatory underpinnings for the global drug wars come from? This book is the first fully-focused history of the 1961 UN Single Convention on Narcotic Drugs, the bedrock of the modern multilateral drug control system and the focal point of global drug regulations and prohibitions. Although far from the propagator of the drug wars, the UN enabled the creation of a uniform global legal framework to effectively legalise, or regulate, their pursuit. This book thereby answers the question of where the international legal framework for drug control came from, what state interests informed its development and how complex diplomatic negotiations resulted in the current regulatory system, binding states into an element of global policy uniformity.
What are the implications of caring about the things we research? How does that affect how we research, who we research with and what we do with our results? Proposing what Joan C. Tronto has called a 'paradigm shift' in research thinking, this book invites researchers across disciplines and fields of study to do research that thinks and acts with care. The authors draw on their own and others' experiences of researching, the troubles they encounter and the opportunities generated when research is approached as a caring practice. Care ethics provides a guide, from starting out, designing and conducting projects to thinking about research legacies. It offers a way in which research can help repair harms and promote justice.
Susan Parson's new book explores a dimension of human life that has proven to be troublesome in understanding ourselves and disturbing in social relationships and structures. That dimension is gender."The Ethics of Gender "investigates the impact of thinking with gender on modern ethics, and considers the insights that postmodern gender theory might bring to the ethical project. Following Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick's suggestion of the discursive incoherence of gender, the author follows the fault lines of modern humanism that are opened up by the gender critique, in relation to embodiment, subjectivity, and agency. The book investigates the effort to sustain humanism by means of an ethics of difference, of relationality, and of revaluation of nature, in such writers as Martha Nussbaum, Daphne Hampson, Lisa Sowle Cahill, Grace Jantzen, and Luce Irigaray. The central thrust of the book is, however, to understand these as echoes of the Nietzschean cry for redemption, and thus as signs of the failure of post-Enlightenment ethical thinking. With the help of Judith Butler's analyses of coming to matter, of subjection, and of performativity, the book concludes with the possibility of another way of self-understanding and of renewal in theological ethics for our time.
Under current business law, it is already possible to give legal personhood, or a very close surrogate of it, to software systems of any kind (from a simple automated escrow agent to a more hypothetical, truly smart artificial intelligence). This means that, for example, robots could enter into contracts, serve as legal agents, or own property. Ultimately, entire companies could actually be run by non-human agents. This study argues that this is not as scary as it might sound at first. Legal theorist and noted software developer Shawn Bayern argues that autonomous or zero-person organizations offer an opportunity for useful new types of interactions between software and the law. This creative contribution to the theory and practice of law and technology explores the social and political aspects of these new organizational structures and their implications for legal theory.
Under current business law, it is already possible to give legal personhood, or a very close surrogate of it, to software systems of any kind (from a simple automated escrow agent to a more hypothetical, truly smart artificial intelligence). This means that, for example, robots could enter into contracts, serve as legal agents, or own property. Ultimately, entire companies could actually be run by non-human agents. This study argues that this is not as scary as it might sound at first. Legal theorist and noted software developer Shawn Bayern argues that autonomous or zero-person organizations offer an opportunity for useful new types of interactions between software and the law. This creative contribution to the theory and practice of law and technology explores the social and political aspects of these new organizational structures and their implications for legal theory.
How do you decide what is ethically wrong and right? Few people make moral judgments by taking the theory first. Specifically written with the interests, needs, and experience of students in mind, this textbook approaches thinking ethically as you do in real life - by first encountering practical moral problems and then introducing theory to understand and integrate the issues. Built around engaging case studies from news media, court hearings, famous speeches and philosophical writings, each of the 15 chapters: - explains and defines the moral problem dealt with - provides excerpts of readings on all sides of the issue - analyses the problem, using the relevant theory The examples are recognizable ethical problems, including judgments about racism and sexism, controversial debates such as assisted suicide and the death penalty, and contemporary concerns like privacy and technology, corporate responsibility, and the environment. The mission of the book is to assist you to engage in informed, independent, critical thinking and to enable you to enter into ethical discussions in the classroom and beyond. Supported by learning features, including study questions, key quotes, handy definitions and a companion website, this book is essential for any student of moral philosophy.
Drawing on sources as diverse as Supreme Court decisions, nightclub comedy, congressional records, and cultural theory, Obscene Gestures explores the many contradictory vectors of twentieth-century moralist controversies surrounding literary and artistic works from Henry Miller's Tropic of Cancer to those of Toni Morrison, Alice Walker, Kathy Acker, Robert Mapplethorpe, 2 Live Crew, Tony Kushner, and others. Patrick S. Lawrence dives into notorious obscenity debates to reconsider the divergent afterlives of artworks that were challenged or banned over their taboo sexual content to reveal how these controversies affected their critical reception and commercial success in ways that were often determined at least in part by racial, gender, or sexual stereotypes and pernicious ethnographic reading practices. Starting with early postwar touchstone cases and continuing through the civil rights, feminist, and LGBTQ+ movements, Lawrence demonstrates on one level that breaking sexual taboos in literary and cultural works often comes with cultural cachet and increased sales. At the same time, these benefits are distributed unequally, leading to the persistence of exclusive hierarchies and inequalities. Obscene Gestures takes its bearings from recent studies of the role of obscenity in literary history and canon formation during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, extending their insights into the postwar period when broad legal latitude for obscenity was established but when charges of obscenity still carried immense symbolic and political weight. Moreover, the rise of social justice movements around this time provides necessary context for understanding the application of legal precedents, changes in the publishing industry, and the diversification of the canon of American letters. Obscene Gestures, therefore, advances the study of obscenity to include recent developments in the understanding of race, gender, and sexuality while refining our understanding of late-twentieth-century American literature and political culture.
Drawing on sources as diverse as Supreme Court decisions, nightclub comedy, congressional records, and cultural theory, Obscene Gestures explores the many contradictory vectors of twentieth-century moralist controversies surrounding literary and artistic works from Henry Miller's Tropic of Cancer to those of Toni Morrison, Alice Walker, Kathy Acker, Robert Mapplethorpe, 2 Live Crew, Tony Kushner, and others. Patrick S. Lawrence dives into notorious obscenity debates to reconsider the divergent afterlives of artworks that were challenged or banned over their taboo sexual content to reveal how these controversies affected their critical reception and commercial success in ways that were often determined at least in part by racial, gender, or sexual stereotypes and pernicious ethnographic reading practices. Starting with early postwar touchstone cases and continuing through the civil rights, feminist, and LGBTQ+ movements, Lawrence demonstrates on one level that breaking sexual taboos in literary and cultural works often comes with cultural cachet and increased sales. At the same time, these benefits are distributed unequally, leading to the persistence of exclusive hierarchies and inequalities. Obscene Gestures takes its bearings from recent studies of the role of obscenity in literary history and canon formation during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, extending their insights into the postwar period when broad legal latitude for obscenity was established but when charges of obscenity still carried immense symbolic and political weight. Moreover, the rise of social justice movements around this time provides necessary context for understanding the application of legal precedents, changes in the publishing industry, and the diversification of the canon of American letters. Obscene Gestures, therefore, advances the study of obscenity to include recent developments in the understanding of race, gender, and sexuality while refining our understanding of late-twentieth-century American literature and political culture.
The revival of Aristotelian virtue ethics can be seen as a response to the modern problem of disenchantment, that is, the perceived loss of meaning in modernity. However, in Virtue and Meaning, David McPherson contends that the dominant approach still embraces an overly disenchanted view. In a wide-ranging discussion, McPherson argues for a more fully re-enchanted perspective that gives better recognition to the meanings by which we live and after which we seek, and to the fact that human beings are the meaning-seeking animal. In doing so, he defends distinctive accounts of the relationship between virtue and happiness, other-regarding demands, and the significance of linking neo-Aristotelian virtue ethics with a view of the meaning of life and a spiritual life where contemplation has a central role. This book will be valuable for philosophers and other readers who are interested in virtue ethics and the perennial question of the meaning of life.
Artificial Intelligence (AI) is everywhere, yet it causes damage to society in ways that can't be fixed. Instead of helping to address our current crises, AI causes divisions that limit people's life chances, and even suggests fascistic solutions to social problems. This book provides an analysis of AI's deep learning technology and its political effects and traces the ways that it resonates with contemporary political and social currents, from global austerity to the rise of the far right. Dan McQuillan calls for us to resist AI as we know it and restructure it by prioritising the common good over algorithmic optimisation. He sets out an anti-fascist approach to AI that replaces exclusions with caring, proposes people's councils as a way to restructure AI through mutual aid and outlines new mechanisms that would adapt to changing times by supporting collective freedom. Academically rigorous, yet accessible to a socially engaged readership, this unique book will be of interest to all who wish to challenge the social logic of AI by reasserting the importance of the common good.
Mexico is at the center of the global battle over abortion. In 2007, a watershed reform legalized the procedure in the national capital, making it one of just three places across Latin America where it was permitted at the time. Abortion care is now available on demand and free of cost through a pioneering program of the Mexico City Ministry of Health, which has served hundreds of thousands of women. At the same time, abortion laws have grown harsher in several states outside the capital as part of a coordinated national backlash. In this book, Elyse Ona Singer argues that while pregnant women in Mexico today have options that were unavailable just over a decade ago, they are also subject to the expanded reach of the Mexican state and the Catholic Church over their bodies and reproductive lives. By analyzing the moral politics of clinical encounters in Mexico City's public abortion program, Lawful Sins offers a critical account of the relationship among reproductive rights, gendered citizenship, and public healthcare. With timely insights on global struggles for reproductive justice, Singer reorients prevailing perspectives that approach abortion rights as a hallmark of women's citizenship in liberal societies.
Mexico is at the center of the global battle over abortion. In 2007, a watershed reform legalized the procedure in the national capital, making it one of just three places across Latin America where it was permitted at the time. Abortion care is now available on demand and free of cost through a pioneering program of the Mexico City Ministry of Health, which has served hundreds of thousands of women. At the same time, abortion laws have grown harsher in several states outside the capital as part of a coordinated national backlash. In this book, Elyse Ona Singer argues that while pregnant women in Mexico today have options that were unavailable just over a decade ago, they are also subject to the expanded reach of the Mexican state and the Catholic Church over their bodies and reproductive lives. By analyzing the moral politics of clinical encounters in Mexico City's public abortion program, Lawful Sins offers a critical account of the relationship among reproductive rights, gendered citizenship, and public healthcare. With timely insights on global struggles for reproductive justice, Singer reorients prevailing perspectives that approach abortion rights as a hallmark of women's citizenship in liberal societies.
The nationally recognized credit-by-exam DSST (R) program helps students earn college credits for learning acquired outside the traditional classroom such as; learning from on-the-job training, reading, or independent study. DSST (R) tests offer students a cost-effective, time-saving way to use the knowledge they've acquired outside of the classroom to accomplish their education goals. Peterson's (R) Master the (TM) DSST (R) Ethics in America Exam provides a general overview of the subjects students will encounter on the exam such as ethical religious traditions and analysis in various relationships, embryonic stem-cell research, euthanasia, affirmative action, and capital punishment. This valuable resource includes: Diagnostic pre-test with detailed answer explanations Assessment Grid designed to help identify areas that need focus Subject Matter Review proving a general overview of the subjects, followed by a review of the relevant topics and terminology covered on the exam Post-test offering 60 questions all with detailed answer explanations Key information about the DSST (R) such as, what to expect on test day and how to register and prepare for the DSST (R)
The world population is growing, yet we continue to pursue higher levels of well-being, and as a result, increasing energy demands and the destructive effects of climate change are just two of many major threats that we face. Engineers play an indispensable role in addressing these challenges, and whether they recognize it or not, in doing so they will inevitably encounter a whole range of ethical choices and dilemmas. This book examines and explains the ethical issues in engineering, showing how they affect assessment, design, sustainability, and globalization, and explores many recent examples including the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster, Dieselgate, 'naked scanners' at airports, and biofuel production. Detailed but accessible, the book will enable advanced engineering students and professional engineers to better identify and address the ethical problems in their practice.
The world population is growing, yet we continue to pursue higher levels of well-being, and as a result, increasing energy demands and the destructive effects of climate change are just two of many major threats that we face. Engineers play an indispensable role in addressing these challenges, and whether they recognize it or not, in doing so they will inevitably encounter a whole range of ethical choices and dilemmas. This book examines and explains the ethical issues in engineering, showing how they affect assessment, design, sustainability, and globalization, and explores many recent examples including the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster, Dieselgate, 'naked scanners' at airports, and biofuel production. Detailed but accessible, the book will enable advanced engineering students and professional engineers to better identify and address the ethical problems in their practice.
Algorithms influence every facet of modern life: criminal justice, education, housing, entertainment, elections, social media, news feeds, work... the list goes on. Delegating important decisions to machines, however, gives rise to deep moral concerns about responsibility, transparency, freedom, fairness, and democracy. Algorithms and Autonomy connects these concerns to the core human value of autonomy in the contexts of algorithmic teacher evaluation, risk assessment in criminal sentencing, predictive policing, background checks, news feeds, ride-sharing platforms, social media, and election interference. Using these case studies, the authors provide a better understanding of machine fairness and algorithmic transparency. They explain why interventions in algorithmic systems are necessary to ensure that algorithms are not used to control citizens' participation in politics and undercut democracy. This title is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.
Algorithms influence every facet of modern life: criminal justice, education, housing, entertainment, elections, social media, news feeds, work... the list goes on. Delegating important decisions to machines, however, gives rise to deep moral concerns about responsibility, transparency, freedom, fairness, and democracy. Algorithms and Autonomy connects these concerns to the core human value of autonomy in the contexts of algorithmic teacher evaluation, risk assessment in criminal sentencing, predictive policing, background checks, news feeds, ride-sharing platforms, social media, and election interference. Using these case studies, the authors provide a better understanding of machine fairness and algorithmic transparency. They explain why interventions in algorithmic systems are necessary to ensure that algorithms are not used to control citizens' participation in politics and undercut democracy. This title is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.
In Dockside Reading, Isabel Hofmeyr traces the relationships among print culture, colonialism, and the ocean through the institution of the British colonial Custom House. During the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, dockside customs officials would leaf through publications looking for obscenity, politically objectionable materials, or reprints of British copyrighted works, often dumping these condemned goods into the water. These practices, echoing other colonial imaginaries of the ocean as a space for erasing incriminating evidence of the violence of empire, informed later censorship regimes under apartheid in South Africa. By tracking printed matter from ship to shore, Hofmeyr shows how literary institutions like copyright and censorship were shaped by colonial control of coastal waters. Set in the environmental context of the colonial port city, Dockside Reading explores how imperialism colonizes water. Hofmeyr examines this theme through the concept of hydrocolonialism, which puts together land and sea, empire and environment.
Europe's Border and Surveillance Technologies advances a postcolonial reading of border and surveillance technologies by conceptualizing the present-day European border regime as part of a racial-colonial complex that stretches from the contemporary refugee crisis to the colonial era. From the days of colonial conquest to the economic exploitation under the Mandate System and recent years' interventions in the "Orient," the book provides a longue duree perspective to uncover the unacknowledged legacies that have sedimented into the bureaucratic and technological backbone of the European border regime. Europe's pre-digital colonial history continues to shape the political present and has morphed into EU border technologies, media infrastructure, classification apparatuses, and weaponry. By locating border and surveillance infrastructure between Europe's former colonies and the current migrant crisis, Madoerin lays bare the colonial fabric of late-modern surveillance technologies--the colonial antecedents of today's border apparatuses.
What does it mean to be human? The Bronte novels and poetry are fascinated by what lies at the core - and limits - of the human. The Brontes and the Idea of the Human presents a significant re-evaluation of how Charlotte, Emily, and Anne Bronte each responded to scientific, legal, political, theological, literary, and cultural concerns in ways that redraw the boundaries of the human for the nineteenth century. Proposing innovative modes of approach for the twenty-first century, leading scholars shed light on the relationship between the role of the imagination and new definitions of the human subject. This important interdisciplinary study scrutinises the notion of the embodied human and moves beyond it to explore the force and potential of the mental and imaginative powers for constructions of selfhood, community, spirituality, degradation, cruelty, and ethical behaviour in the nineteenth century and its fictional worlds.
In an era of corporate surveillance, artificial intelligence, deep fakes, genetic modification, automation, and more, law often seems to take a back seat to rampant technological change. To listen to Silicon Valley barons, there's nothing any of us can do about it. In this riveting work, Joshua A. T. Fairfield calls their bluff. He provides a fresh look at law, at what it actually is, how it works, and how we can create the kind of laws that help humans thrive in the face of technological change. He shows that law can keep up with technology because law is a kind of technology - a social technology built by humans out of cooperative fictions like firms, nations, and money. However, to secure the benefits of changing technology for all of us, we need a new kind of law, one that reflects our evolving understanding of how humans use language to cooperate. |
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