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Books > Social sciences > Sociology, social studies > Social issues > Ethical issues & debates > General
Disagreement is, for better or worse, pervasive in our society. Not only do we form beliefs that differ from those around us, but increasingly we have platforms and opportunities to voice those disagreements and make them public. In light of the public nature of many of our most important disagreements, a key question emerges: How does public disagreement affect what we know? This volume collects original essays from a number of prominent scholars-including Catherine Elgin, Sanford Goldberg, Jennifer Lackey, Michael Patrick Lynch, and Duncan Pritchard, among others-to address this question in its diverse forms. The book is organized by thematic sections, in which individual chapters address the epistemic, ethical, and political dimensions of dissent. The individual contributions address important issues such as the value of disagreement, the nature of conversational disagreement, when dissent is epistemically rational, when one is obligated to voice disagreement or to object, the relation of silence and resistance to dissent, and when political dissent is justified. Voicing Dissent offers a new approach to the study of disagreement that will appeal to social epistemologists and ethicists interested in this growing area of epistemology.
Winner, 2019 Outstanding Book Award, given by the American Society of Criminology's Division of Policing Section The first in-depth history and analysis of a much-abused policing policy No policing tactic has been more controversial than "stop and frisk," whereby police officers stop, question and frisk ordinary citizens, who they may view as potential suspects, on the streets. As Michael White and Hank Fradella show in Stop and Frisk, the first authoritative history and analysis of this tactic, there is a disconnect between our everyday understanding and the historical and legal foundations for this policing strategy. First ruled constitutional in 1968, stop and frisk would go on to become a central tactic of modern day policing, particularly by the New York City Police Department. By 2011 the NYPD recorded 685,000 'stop-question-and-frisk' interactions with citizens; yet, in 2013, a landmark decision ruled that the police had over- and mis-used this tactic. Stop and Frisk tells the story of how and why this happened, and offers ways that police departments can better serve their citizens. They also offer a convincing argument that stop and frisk did not contribute as greatly to the drop in New York's crime rates as many proponents, like former NYPD Police Commissioner Ray Kelly and Mayor Michael Bloomberg, have argued. While much of the book focuses on the NYPD's use of stop and frisk, examples are also shown from police departments around the country, including Philadelphia, Baltimore, Chicago, Newark and Detroit. White and Fradella argue that not only does stop and frisk have a legal place in 21st-century policing but also that it can be judiciously used to help deter crime in a way that respects the rights and needs of citizens. They also offer insight into the history of racial injustice that has all too often been a feature of American policing's history and propose concrete strategies that every police department can follow to improve the way they police. A hard-hitting yet nuanced analysis, Stop and Frisk shows how the tactic can be a just act of policing and, in turn, shows how to police in the best interest of citizens.
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.
The continuous evolution of internet and related social media technologies and platforms have opened up vast new means for communication, socialization, expression, and collaboration. They also have provided new resources for researchers seeking to explore, observe, and measure human opinions, activities, and interactions. However, those using the internet and social media for research - and those tasked with facilitating and monitoring ethical research such as ethical review boards - are confronted with a continuously expanding set of ethical dilemmas. Internet Research Ethics for the Social Age: New Challenges, Cases, and Contexts directly engages with these discussions and debates, and stimulates new ways to think about - and work towards resolving - the novel ethical dilemmas we face as internet and social media-based research continues to evolve. The chapters in this book - from an esteemed collection of global scholars and researchers - offer extensive reflection about current internet research ethics and suggest some important reframings of well-known concepts such as justice, privacy, consent, and research validity, as well as providing concrete case studies and emerging research contexts to learn from.
In Better than Human?, noted bioethicist Allen Buchanan grapples with the ethical dilemmas of the medical revolution now upon us. Biomedical enhancements, he writes, can make us smarter, have better memories, be stronger, quicker, have more stamina, live much longer, be more resistant to disease and to the frailties of aging, and enjoy richer emotional lives. They can even improve our character, or at least strengthen our powers of self-control. In spite of the benefits that biomedical enhancements may bring, many people instinctively reject them. Some worry that we will lose something important-our appreciation for what we have or what makes human beings distinctively valuable. To think clearly about enhancement, Buchanan argues, we have to acknowledge that nature is a mixed bag and that our species has many "design flaws". We should be open to the possibility of becoming better than human, while never underestimating the risk that our attempts to improve may backfire.
In 1996, the Argentine government authorized the use of genetically modified (GM), herbicide-resistance soybean seeds. By the mid-2000s, GM soybeans were cultivated on more than half of the arable land in Argentina and represented one-fourth of the country's exports. While this agricultural boom has benefitted agribusiness companies and fed tax revenues, it also has a dark side: it has accelerated the deforestation of native forests, prompted the eviction of indigenous and peasant families, and spurred episodes of contamination. In Soybeans and Power, Pablo Lapegna investigates the ways in which rural populations have coped with GM soybean expansion in Argentina. Based on over a decade of ethnographic research, Lapegna reveals that many communities initially resisted, yet ultimately adapted to the new agricultural technologies forced upon them by public officials. However, rather than painting the decline of the protests in an exclusively negative light, Lapegna argues that the farmers played an active role in their own demobilization, switching to tactics of negotiation and accommodation in order to maneuver the situation to their advantage. Lapegna offers a rare, on the ground glimpse into the life cycle of a social movement, from mobilization and protest to demobilization and resigned acceptance. Through the case study of Argentina, a major player in the use and export of GM crops, Soybeans and Power gives voice to the communities most adversely affected by GM technology, as well as the strategies that they have enacted in order to survive.
View the Table of Contents Read the Introduction. "Historians of medicine and technology will find this book an
interesting introduction to a highly politicized and novel area of
scholarship. This work should inspire research projects into more
diverse and less categorized areas of disability." "With this work, Longmore and Umansky offer historians,
sociologists and other readers intrigued by this area of
scholarship an opportunity to understand disabilities as broader
and more complex than a single, generic and primarily medical
category." "The essays introduce into the historical record a diverse group
of people whose views and experiences have been largely excluded,
challenge conventional notions of bodily integrity, and represent
an important new subfield in American history from which we can
expect rich and exciting innovation." "The fifteen essays contained in it are thorough, wide-ranging
and convincing in their interpretations. . . . This is a powerful
contribution to the emancipatory efforts of disabled activists and
one that historians should seek to encourage. For this, Longmore
and Umansky's collection should be strongly commended." "The New Disability History: American Perspectives is a truly
groundbreaking volume and is well-deserving of the praise heaped on
its back cover." The essays show us that disability has a place in various parts
of our history. While there is an enormous diversity of disability,
the collection of essays reminds us of how comparable social perils
recur across various disability groups andthroughout their
particular histories." Disability has always been a preoccupation of American society and culture. From antebellum debates about qualification for citizenship to current controversies over access and "reasonable accommodations," disability has been present, in penumbra if not in print, on virtually every page of American history. Yet historians have only recently begun the deep excavation necessary to retrieve lives shrouded in religious, then medical, and always deep-seated cultural, misunderstanding. This volume opens up disability's hidden history. In these pages, a North Carolina Youth finds his identity as a deaf Southerner challenged in Civil War-era New York. Deaf community leaders ardently defend sign language in early 20th century America. The mythic Helen Keller and the long-forgotten American Blind People's higher Education and General Improvement Association each struggle to shape public and private roles for blind Americans. White and black disabled World War I and II veterans contest public policies and cultural values to claim their citizenship rights. Neurasthenic Alice James and injured turn-of-the-century railroadmen grapple with the interplay of disability and gender. Progressive-era "rehabilitationists" fashion programs to make "crippled" children economically productive and socially valid, and two Depression-era fathers murder their sons as public opinion blames the boys' mothers for having cherished the lads' lives. These and many other figures lead readers through hospital-schools, courtrooms, advocacy journals, and beyond to discover disability's past. Coupling empirical evidence with the interdisciplinary toolsand insights of disability studies, the book explores the complex meanings of disability as identity and cultural signifier in American history. Table of Contents
Zygmunt Bauman's powerful and persuasive study of the postmodern perspective on ethics is particularly welcome. For Bauman the great issues of ethics have lost none of their topicality: they simply need to be seen, and dealt with, in a wholly new way. Our era, he suggests, may actually represent a dawning, rather than a twilight, for ethics.
This volume contains the proceedings of the 10th International Symposium on Circumcision, Genital Integrity, and Human Rights. Authors are international experts in their fields, and the book contains the most up-to-date information on the issue of genital cutting of infants and children from medical, legal, bioethical, and human rights perspectives.
Providing a unique critical perspective to debates on slavery, this book brings the literature on transatlantic slavery into dialogue with research on informal sector labour, child labour, migration, debt, prisoners, and sex work in the contemporary world in order to challenge popular and policy discourse on modern slavery.
Very little in the American way of life functions adequately under surveillance. Democracy itself may be at mortal risk due to the loss of privacy and the increase in surveillance. Examining challenges in a wide range of contexts, this book investigates and critically examines our systems of data management, including the ways that data are collected, exchanged, analyzed, and re-purposed. The volume calls for re-establishing personal privacy as a societal norm and priority, requiring action on the part of everyone at personal, societal, business, and governmental levels. Because new media products and services are professionally designed and implemented to be frictionless and highly rewarding, change is difficult and solutions are not easy. This volume provides insight into challenges and recommended solutions.
In Rationality and Ritual, internationally renowned expert Brian Wynne offers a profound analysis of science and technology policymaking. By focusing on an episode of major importance in Britain's nuclear history - the Windscale Inquiry, a public hearing about the future of fuel reprocessing - he offers a powerful critique of such judicial procedures and the underlying assumptions of the rationalist approach. This second edition makes available again this classic and still very relevant work. Debates about nuclear power have come to the fore once again. Yet we still do not have adequate ways to make decisions or frame policy deliberation on these big issues, involving true public debate, rather than ritualistic processes in which the rules and scope of the debate are presumed and imposed by those in authority. The perspectives in this book are as significant and original as they were when it was written. The new edition contains a substantial introduction by the author reflecting on changes (and lack of) in the intervening years and introducing new themes, relevant to today's world of big science and technology, that can be drawn out of the original text. A new foreword by Gordon MacKerron, an expert on energy and nuclear policy, sets this seminal work in the context of contemporary nuclear and related big technology debates.
Some of our most fundamental moral rules are violated by the practices of torture and war. If one examines the concrete forms these practices take, can the exceptions to the rules necessary to either torture or war be justified? Fighting Hurt brings together key essays by Henry Shue on the issue of torture, and relatedly, the moral challenges surrounding the initiation and conduct of war, and features a new introduction outlining the argument of the essays, putting them into context, and describing how and in what ways his position has modified over time. The first six chapters marshal arguments that have been refined over 35 years for the conclusion that torture can never be justified in any actual circumstances whatsoever. The practice of torture has nothing significant in common with the ticking bomb scenario often used in its defence, and weak U.S. statutes have loop-holes for psychological torture of the kind now favoured by CIA in the 'war against terrorism'. The other sixteen chapters maintain that for as long as wars are in fact fought, it is morally urgent to limit specific destructive practices that cannot be prohibited. Two possible exceptions to the UN Charter's prohibition on all but defensive wars, humanitarian military intervention and preventive war to eliminate WMD, are evaluated; and one possible exception to the principle of discrimination, Michael Walzer's 'supreme emergency', is sharply criticized. Two other fundamental issues about the rules for the conduct of war receive extensive controversial treatment. The first is the rules to limit the bombing of dual-use infrastructure, with a focus on alternative interpretations of the principle of proportionality that limits 'collateral damage'. The second is the moral status of the laws of war as embodied in International Humanitarian Law. It is argued that the current philosophical critique of IHL by Jeff McMahan focused on individual moral liability to attack is an intellectual dead-end and that the morally best rules are international laws that are the same for all fighters. Examining real cases, including U.S. bombing of Iraq in 1991, the Clinton Administration decision not to intervene in the 1994 Rwandan genocide, NATO bombing of Serbia in 1999, and CIA torture after 9/11 and its alternatives, this book is highly accessible to general readers who are interested in the ethical status of American political life, especially foreign policy.
Across Africa, mature women have for decades mobilized the power of their nakedness in political protest to shame and punish male adversaries. This insurrectionary nakedness, often called genital cursing, owes its cultural potency to the religious belief that spirits residing in women's bodies can be unleashed to cause misfortune in their targets, including impotence, disease, and death. In Naked Agency, Naminata Diabate analyzes these collective female naked protests in Africa and beyond to broaden understandings of agency and vulnerability. Drawing on myriad cultural texts from social media and film to journalism and fiction, Diabate uncovers how women create spaces of resistance during socio-political duress, including such events as the 2011 protests by Ivoirian women in Cote d'Ivoire and Paris as well as women's disrobing in Soweto to prevent the destruction of their homes. Through the concept of naked agency, Diabate explores fluctuating narratives of power and victimhood to challenge simplistic accounts of African women's helplessness and to show how they exercise political power in the biopolitical era.
Prenatal and preimplantation testing technologies have offered unprecedented access to information about the genetic and congenital makeup of our prospective progeny. Future developments such as preconception testing, noninvasive prenatal testing, and more extensive preimplantation testing promise to increase that access further still. The result may be greater reproductive choice, but it also increases the burden on women and men to avail themselves of these technologies in order to avoid having a child who has a disability. The overwhelming question for legislators has been whether and, if so, how to regulate the use of these technologies in the face of compelling but seemingly contradictory claims about the advancement of reproductive choice and the dangers of eugenic or discriminatory effects. This book examines the evolution of this legislative oversight across a number of jurisdictions and explores the tensions and ambiguities that inform these laws.
Is the Death Penalty Dying? provides a careful analysis of the historical and political conditions that shaped death penalty practice on both sides of the Atlantic from the end of World War II to the twenty-first century. This book examines and assesses what the United States can learn from the European experience with capital punishment, especially the trajectory of abolition in different European nations. As a comparative sociology and history of the present, the book seeks to illuminate the way death penalty systems and their dissolution work, by means of eleven chapters written by an interdisciplinary group of authors from the United States and Europe. This work will help readers see how close the United States is to ending capital punishment and some of the cultural and institutional barriers that stand in the way of abolition.
This book is a comprehensive, empirically-grounded exploration of the relationship between bioethics, culture, and the perspective of being affected. It provides a new outlook on how complex "bioethical" issues become questions of everyday life. The authors focus on two contexts, genetic testing and end-of-life care, to locate and demonstrate emerging themes of responsibility, such as self-responsibility, responsibility for kin, and the responsibility of society. Within these themes, the duty to know versus the right not to know one's genetic fate (in the context of genetic testing), or the sanctity of life versus self-determination (in the context of end of life care) are identified as culturally embedded dilemmas that are very much relevant for lay persons. Furthermore, cultural factors such as religion, history, utopian and dystopian views of biomedical technologies, outlooks on the body and on health/illness, and citizenship are examined. Health issues are increasingly becoming a question of assessing risk and responsibility: How can we better prepare ourselves for the future? We all make such assessments in a way that combines personal inclinations, professional recommendations, and cultural framings. There is still much to be learned about the interplay between these three dimensions.
An interdisciplinary social history, this book examines the major pressures and influences that brought about the remarkable growth of opposition to hunting in twentieth century England. With public opinion consistently deciding from the middle of the century onward that hunting mammals for sport was cruel and unacceptable, it would appear that the controversy over hunting has all but been decided, though hunting yet remains 'at bay'. Based on a range of cultural, social, literary and political sources drawn from a variety of academic disciplines, including history, sociology, geography, psychology and anthropology, The History of Opposition to Blood Sports in Twentieth Century England accounts for the change in our relationship with animals that occurred in the course of the twentieth century, shedding light on the manner in which this resulted in the growth in opposition to hunting and other blood sports. With evidence comprising a mixture of primary and secondary historical sources, together with documentary films, opinion polls, Mass Observation records, political party archives, and the findings of sociologists, political scientists, anthropologists and geographers, this book will appeal to scholars and students across the social sciences and historians with an interest in human-animal relations.
The pilot-less drones, smart bombs and other high-tech weapons on display in recent conflicts are all the outcome of weapons research. However, the kind of scientific and technological endeavour has been around for a long time, producing not only the armaments of Nazi Germany and the atomic bombs dropped on Japan, but the catapults used in ancient Greece and Rome and the assault rifles used by child soldiers in Africa. In this book John Forge examines such weapons research and asks whether it is morally acceptable to undertake such an activity. He argues that it is in fact morally wrong to take part in weapons research as its primary purpose is to produce the means to harm others, and moreover he argues that all attempts to then justify participation in weapons research do not stand up to scrutiny. This book has wide appeal in fields of philosophy and related areas, as well to a more general audience who are puzzled about the rate at which new weapons are accumulated.
In November 1949 D.D.T. Jabavu, the South African politician and professor of African languages at Fort Hare University, set out on a four-month trip to attend the World Pacifist Meeting in India. He wrote an isiXhosa account of his journey which was published in 1951 by Lovedale Press. This new edition republishes the travelogue in the original isiXhosa, with an English translation by the late anthropologist Cecil Wele Manona. The travelogue contains reflections on Jabavu’s social interactions during his travels, and on the conference itself, where he considered what lessons Gandhian principles might yield for South Africans engaged in struggles for freedom and dignity. His commentary on nonviolent resistance, and on the dangers of nationalism and racism, enriches the existing archive of intellectual exchanges between Africa and India from a black South African perspective. The volume includes chapters by the editors that examine the networks of international solidarity – from post-independence India to the anti-colonial struggle in East Africa and the American civil rights movement – which Jabavu helped to strengthen, biographical sketches of Jabavu and of Manona, and an afterword that reflects on the historical and political significance of making African-language texts available to readers across Africa.
The New England Watch and Ward Society provides a new window into the history of the Protestant establishment's prominent role in late nineteenth-century public life and its confrontation with modernity, commercial culture, and cultural pluralism in early twentieth-century America. Elite liberal Protestants, typically considered progressive, urbane, and tolerant, established the Watch and Ward Society in 1878 to suppress literature they deemed obscene, notably including Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass. These self-appointed custodians of Victorian culture enjoyed widespread support from many of New England's most renowned ministers, distinguished college presidents, respected social reformers, and wealthy philanthropists. In the 1880s, the Watch and Ward Society expanded its efforts to regulate public morality by attacking gambling and prostitution. The society not only expressed late nineteenth-century Victorian American values about what constituted "good literature," sexual morality, and public duty, it also embodied Protestants' efforts to promote these values in an increasingly intellectually and culturally diverse society. By 1930, the Watch and Ward Society had suffered a very public fall from grace. Following controversies over the suppression of H.L. Mencken's American Mercury as well as popular novels such as Sinclair Lewis' Elmer Gantry and D.H. Lawrence's Lady Chatterley's Lover, cultural modernists, civil libertarians, and publishers attacked the moral reform movement, ridiculing its leaders' privileged backgrounds, social idealism, and religious commitments. Their critique reshaped the dynamics of Protestant moral reform activity as well as public discourse in subsequent decades. For more than a generation, however, the Watch and Ward Society expressed mainline Protestant attitudes toward literature, gambling, and sexuality.
Despite years of heated social controversy over the use of human embryos in embryonic stem cell research, the caravan of stem cell science continues to proceed at an unrelenting pace all around the world. Bioethics and the Future of Stem Cell Research urges readers to look beyond the embryo debate to a much wider array of ethical issues in basic stem cell science and clinical translational research, including research involving adult and induced pluripotent stem cells. Insoo Hyun offers valuable insights into complex ethical issues ranging from pre-clinical animal studies to clinical trials and stem cell tourism, all presented through a unique blend of philosophy, literature, and the history of science, as well as with Dr. Hyun's extensive practical experiences in international stem cell policy formation. This thoughtful book is an indispensible resource for anyone interested in the science of stem cells and the practical and philosophical elements of research ethics.
In America, in direct response to indefinite delays on the national transplantation waitlists and an inadequate supply of organs, a growing number of terminally ill Americans are turning to international underground markets and coordinators or brokers for organs. Chinese inmates on death-row and the economically disadvantaged in India and Brazil are the often compromised co-participants in the private negotiation process, which occurs outside the legal process - or in the shadows of law. These individuals supply kidneys and other organs for Americans and other Westerners willing to shop and pay in the private process. This book contends that exclusive reliance on the present altruistic tissue and organ procurement processes in the United States is not only rife with problems, but also improvident. The author explores how the altruistic approach leads to a 'black market' of organs being harvested from Third World individuals as well as compelled donations from children and incompetent persons.
Curing systemic inequalities in the criminal justice system is the unfinished business of the Civil Rights movement. No part of that system highlights this truth more than the current implementation of the death penalty. At the Cross tells a story of the relationship between the death penalty and race in American politics that complicates the common belief that individual African Americans, especially poor African Americans, are more subject to the death penalty in criminal cases. The current death penalty regime operates quite differently than it did in the past. The findings of this research demonstrate the the racial inequity in the meting out of death sentences has legal and political externalities that move beyond individual defendants to larger numbers of African Americans. At the Cross looks at the meaning of the death penalty to and for African Americans by using various sites of analysis. Using various sites of analysis, Price shows the connection between criminal justice policies like the death penalty and the political and legal rights of African Americans who are tangentially connected to the criminal justice system through familial and social networks. Drawing on black politics, legal and political theory and narrative analysis, Price utilizes a mixed-method approach that incorporates analysis of media reports, capital jury selection and survey data, as well as original focus group data. As the rates of incarceration trend upward, Black politics scholars have focused on the impact of incarceration on the voting strength of the black community. Local, and even regional, narratives of African American politics and the death penalty expose the fractures in American democracy that foment perceptions of exclusion among blacks.
In recent years, popular media have inundated audiences with sensationalised headlines recounting data breaches, new forms of surveillance and other dangers of our digital age. Despite their regularity, such accounts treat each case as unprecedented and unique. This book proposes a radical rethinking of the history, present and future of our relations with the digital, spatial technologies that increasingly mediate our everyday lives. From smartphones to surveillance cameras, to navigational satellites, these new technologies offer visions of integrated, smooth and efficient societies, even as they directly conflict with the ways users experience them. Recognising the potential for both control and liberation, the authors argue against both acquiescence to and rejection of these technologies. Through intentional use of the very systems that monitor them, activists from Charlottesville to Hong Kong are subverting, resisting and repurposing geographic technologies. Using examples as varied as writings on the first telephones to the experiences of a feminist collective for migrant women in Spain, the authors present a revolution of everyday technologies. In the face of the seemingly inevitable dominance of corporate interests, these technologies allow us to create new spaces of affinity, and a new politics of change. |
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