In this new accessible philosophy of friendship, Mark Vernon links the resources of the philosophical tradition with numerous illustrations from modern culture to ask what friendship is, how it relates to sex, work, politics and spirituality. Unusually, he argues that Plato and Nietzsche, as much as Aristotle and Aelred, should be put centre stage. Their penetrating and occasionally tough insights are invaluable if friendship is to be a full, not merely sentimental, way of life for today.

Black Mirror is a cultural phenomenon. It is a creative and sometimes shocking examination of modern society and the improbable consequences of technological progress. The episodes - typically set in an alternative present, or the near future - usually have a dark and satirical twist that provokes intense question both of the self and society at large. These kind of philosophical provocations are at the very heart of the show. Philosophical reflections on Black Mirror draws upon thinkers such as Friedrich Nietzsche, Pierre Hadot and Michel Foucault to uncover how Black Mirror acts as 'philosophical television' questioning human morality and humanity's vulnerability when faced with the inexorable advance of technology.

The act of thought-thought as an act-would precede the thought thinking or becoming conscious of an act. The notion of act involves a violence essentially: the violence of transitivity, lacking in the transcendence of thought. . . Totality and Infinity The work of Emmanuel Levinas revolves around two preoccupations. First, his philosophical project can be described as the construction of a formal ethics, grounded upon the transcendence of the other human being and a subject's spontaneous responsibility toward that other. Second, Levinas has written extensively on, and as a member of, the cultural and textual life of Judaism. These two concerns are intertwined. Their relation, however, is one of considerable complexity. Levinas' philosophical project stems directly from his situation as a Jewish thinker in the twentieth century and takes its particular form from his study of the Torah and the Talmud. It is, indeed, a hermeneutics of biblical experience. If inspired by Judaism, Levinas' ethics are not eo ipso confessional. What his ethics takes from Judaism, rather, is a particular way of conceiving transcendence and the other human being. It owes to the philosophy of Franz Rosenzweig and Martin Buber a logos of the world and of the holy, which acknowledges their incom mensurability without positing one as fallen and the other as supernal."

Does empathy help us to be moral? The author argues that empathy is often instrumental to meeting the demands of morality as defined by various ethical theories. This multi-faceted work links psychological research on empathy with ethical theory and contemporary trends in moral education.

An important contribution to the burgeoning field of the ethics of recognition, this book examines the contradictions inherent in the very concept of intimacy. Working with a wide variety of philosophical and literary sources, it warns against measuring our relationships against ideal standards, since there is no consummate form of intimacy. After analyzing ten major ways that we aim to establish intimacy with one another, including gift-giving, touching, and fetishes, the book concludes that each fails on its own terms, since intimacy wants something that is impossible. The very concept of intimacy is a superlative one; it aims not just for closeness, but for a closeness beyond closeness. Nevertheless, far from a pessimistic diagnosis of the human condition, this is a meditation on how to live intimately in a world in which intimacy is impossible. Rather than contenting itself with a deconstructive approach, it proposes to treat intimacy dialectically. For all its contradictions, it shows intimacy is central to how we understand ourselves and our relations to others.

Altruism in Cross-Cultural Perspective provides such a scholarly overview, examining the intersection of culture and such topics as evolutionary accounts of altruism and the importance of altruism in ritual and religion. The past decade has seen a proliferation of research on altruism, made possible in part by significant funding from organizations such as the John Templeton Foundation. While significant research has been conducted on biological, social, and individual dimensions of altruism, there has been no attempt to provide an overview of the ways that altruistic behavior and attitudes vary across cultures. The book addresses the methodological challenges of researching altruism across cultures, as well as the ways that altruism is manifest in difficult circumstances. A particular strength of the book is its attention to multiple disciplinary approaches to understanding altruism, with contributors from fields including psychology, anthropology, sociology, biology, communication, philosophy, religious studies, gender studies, and bioethics.

"Looking Beneath the Surface" explores Arab-Islamic and Western perspectives on medical ethical issues: genetic research and treatment, abortion, organ donation, and palliative sedation and euthanasia. The contributions in this volume discuss the state of the (medical) art, the role of laws, counseling, and spiritual counseling in the decision-making process. The different approaches to the ethical issues, ways of moral reasoning, become clear in these contributions, especially the role of tradition for Islam and the importance of autonomy for the West. Beneath the differences, however, the reader will also discover common values, such as the role of dignity and the value of life, and similar practices. Some of the main differences are sociocultural in nature, rather than religious as such. Well-known experts in the fields of medicine and ethics have contributed to this volume from different religious and secular backgrounds. The book offers a carefully written introduction and final chapter on intercultural comparisons. "Looking Beneath the Surface" is more than a collection of writings on issues in medical ethics: it helps the reader to compare different paradigms of accountability and moral reasoning.

Hoffman explores worldwide developments in the field of business ethics. The book is unique in that it not only discusses ethical issues faced by transnational corporations, but it also addresses the possibilities for international cooperation after the cold war, as well as regional business ethics issues from around the world. Included in the volume are discussions of business ethics in Africa, Eastern Europe, the Pacific Rim, and North and South America. A variety of issues and cases are contained in the volume including: the BCCI scandal, the IBM-Fujitsu case, intellectual property rights, transnational codes of ethics and theoretical and empirical studies about the moral responsibilities of transnationals, ethics and international law, ethics and development, and business ethics and cultural differences.

The work begins with a brief introduction that summarizes major themes contained in the book. The essays are collected in five sections. Section one contains cases and issues that are unique to regions and nations worldwide. Section two focuses on cases involving ethics and international law. These first two sections include a number of regional studies including ones from Brazil, Chile, Czechoslovakia, Hong Kong, and case studies including the BCCI scandal and the IBM-Fujitsu case. Section three features analyses of ethical issues faced by transnational corporations, for example, their relationship to host nations, their social responsibilities, and ethics programs within transnationals. Section four contains a summary and a debate about the development of transnational codes of business conduct including a discussion of efforts being sponsored by the United Nations. Finally, section five looks into the ethical problems that arise during economic development. Included here are contributions that raise questions about ethics and emerging financial markets, land-use, and the role of multinational corporations. This volume of essays will be an important resource for courses in business ethics, and international law, as well as a useful addition to business, academic, and public libraries.

This book will be of great value to philosophers, gender theorists, literary critics and others engaged with the questions of life's meaning and what a deepened understanding of it looks like. In "Iris Murdoch's Ethics: A Consideration of Her Romantic Vision", Megan Laverty draws upon the tradition of 'Philosophical Romanticism' to account for Murdoch's enigmatical quality and her embrace of paradoxical truths. Laverty's provocative, yet accessible, study analyses Murdoch's version of Kant's Copernican Revolution, the centrality of learning and the sublime to Murdoch's redemptive vision, and Murdoch's understanding of philosophy, imagination, freedom, love and art. Laverty interprets Murdoch's emphasis on humility and attention as a critique of the Romantic emphasis on irony and self-creation. Drawing on a range of literary and philosophical sources, Laverty's study is a testimony to the ongoing significance of Murdoch's contribution to a broad range of contemporary philosophical concerns.

In this work, an internationally-respected authority in military ethics describes a wholly new kind of cyber conflict that has utterly confounded the predictions of earlier experts in information warfare. Comparing this "state-sponsored hacktivism" to the transformative impact of "irregular warfare" in conventional armed conflict, Lucas offers a critique of legal approaches to governance, and outlines a new approach to ethics and "just war" reasoning (grounded in the political philosophies of Alasdair MacIntyre, John Rawls, and Jurgen Habermas) that provides both a framework for understanding these newly-emerging norms of practice for cyber conflict, and the basis for a professional "code of ethics" for the new generation of "cyber warriors."

From the blaming of Princess Diana's death on news photographers to the public apology by CNN over its erroneous Vietnam-nerve-gas story, journalism and the American media in general are being placed under the microscope. The media-now more powerful than ever before due to computer advances, cable television, and the internet-controls our opinions, tastes, and, as some would have us believe, our actions.
But has the media shed its ethics and gotten completely out of control? Has the quest to get the big scoop crippled the news media into believing "first" is better than factual? To whom is the media responsible-the public, the stockholders, the advertisers? Who decides what may "harm" an audience or what is unsuitable for children? Who, if anyone, should regulate the media? How do political agendas play into censorship (the FCC) and funding of the media?
These questions and more are probed in The Media and Morality, a wide-ranging selection of important essays that explores relationships between the media and its diverse audiences, its sponsors, stockholders, governments, and others. The authors attempt to define the obligations of the media in these relationships as well as the risks, benefits, and limits.
In addition to providing up-to-date commentary and opinion on the latest controversial and precedent-setting journalistic developments, this book will help readers toward an ethical analysis of the media in the Information Age.

This book is a translation and celebration of Slovenian politician France Bucar's seminal work. Divided into two parts, the book first contains several studies of Bucar's arguments. As Bucar applied his system theory to a variety of issues, so too the conglomerate of scholars and issues critically assessed is interdisciplinary, ranging from political science and economics, to law and philosophy, as well as to natural sciences. The contributors and the questions of their essays in the edited volume are as follows. Peter Verovsek (University of Sheffield) examines different branches of Critical Theory and classifies Bucar within them. Mark Hamilton (Inter-American Defense College) discusses system dynamics of Bucar's system theory. Urska Velikonja (Georgetown University) applies Bucar's system theory to the question of the ethics, rules, and regulations in financial economics. Finally, Matej Drev (Georgia Institute of Technology) connects Bucar to the issue of artificial intelligence and inequality. The second part is the English translation of Bucar's book At A New Crossroads, which addresses the role of ethics in society. Bucar normatively redefines national identity as the crux of his novel understanding of ethics. Using system theory, he addresses the problems of globalization and governance, presenting a post-modern synthesis of the logic of free flow of capital and global citizenship, with national and cultural identity. Speaking to contemporary society, he shows how society and ethical life are reproduced. Bucar provides the reader with new tools to think about national identity and global politics. Bringing an important work on ethics, government, and identity to an entirely new readership, this book will appeal to a broad academic audience, namely students and practitioners in the fields of economics, social sciences, and humanities.

In his new study, Beyond Atheism, Beyond God, author Philip A. Stahl uses atheism as a rational stepping stone to arrive at an emergent conception of the universe, exposing features that might be described as transcendent.

He presents an impersonal approach to Being that is devoid of any specific religious overtones or affi liations. Each person becomes a quantum-based co-creator in his or her own right, according to physicist Henry Stapp. As such, we are able to thereby see ourselves and our humanity in a new light, as opposed to being merely reactive cogs in a vast mechanical-reductionist machine. Effectively, we emerge as much more than assemblies of molecules.

This volume, the fourth and final entry in Stahl's series on atheism, seeks to arrive at a transcendent concept of being that also surpasses absolutism and naive or dogmatic deity templates. It considers the development of a more realistic, cogent and effective ethics and morality less likely to be exploited by the power mongers or sacred source apologists, and it answers the question of whether God exists-though not in the way one would normally assume.

"Bruce L. Kinzer offers a rich examination of personal and political themes in the life of John Stuart Mill, one of the most influential liberal thinkers of the nineteenth century. By investigating young Mill's formative period and his relations with his father, Harriet Taylor, and Thomas Carlyle, Kinzer casts light on the challenges Mill faced in understanding himself and what he wished to become. Kinzer's political explorations probe issues central to the appreciation of Mill as an engaged political thinker and actor and offers an insightful portrait of a complex and towering figure."--BOOK JACKET.

There are three themed parts to this book: values, ethics and emotions in the first part, epistemology, perception and consciousness in the second part and philosophy of mind and philosophy of language in the third part. Papers in this volume provide links between emotions and values and explore dependency between language, meanings and concepts and topics such as the liar s paradox, reference and metaphor are examined.

This book is the second of a two-volume set that originates in papers presented to Professor Kevin Mulligan, covering the subjects that he contributed to during his career. This volume opens with a paper by Moya, who proposes that there is an asymmetrical relation between the possibility of choice and moral responsibility. The first part of this volume ends with a description of foolishness as insensitivity to the values of knowledge, by Engel. Marconi s article makes three negative claims about relative truth and Sundholm notes shortcomings of the English language for epistemology, amongst other papers. This section ends with a discussion of the term subjective character by Nida-Rumelin, who finds it misleading.

The third part of this volume contains papers exploring topics such as the mind-body problem, whether theory of mind is based on simulation or theory and Kunne shows that the most common analyses of the so-called 'Liar' paradox are wanting. At the end of this section, Rizzi introduces syntactic cartography and illustrates its use in scope-discourse semantics.

This second volume contains twenty nine chapters, written by both high profile and upcoming researchers from across Europe, North America and North Africa.

The first volume of this set has two main themes: metaphysics, especially truth-making and the notion of explanation and the second theme is the history of philosophy with an emphasis on Austrian philosophy."

At the same time that the pace of science and technology has greatly accelerated in recent decades, our legal and ethical oversight mechanisms have become bogged down and slower. This book addresses the growing gap between the pace of science and technology and the lagging responsiveness of legal and ethical oversight society relies on to govern emerging technologies. Whether it be biotechnology, genetic testing, nanotechnology, synthetic biology, computer privacy, autonomous robotics, or any of the other many emerging technologies, new approaches are needed to ensure appropriate and timely regulatory responses. This book documents the problem and offers a toolbox of potential regulatory and governance approaches that might be used to ensure more responsive oversight.

What would any rational person believe to be worth wanting or working for? Viewed from the standpoint of ethics and empirical psychology, how would such a person define and explain the morally right and the just? And what system of morals would rational people select as the best for the society? Essential to what is important in traditional philosophical inquiries, these questions and others are pursued in A Theory of the Good and the Right, Richard B. Brandt's now classic work, based on his Oxford lectures. Using a contemporary psychological theory of action and of motivation, Brandt argues that rational people would choose a utilitarian moral code that the purpose of living should be to strive for the greatest good for the largest number of people. He discusses the concept of welfare, the prospects for the interpersonal comparison and measurement of utility, the implications of the relevant form of rule utilitarianism for the theory of distributive justice, and the possibilities of conflict between utilitarian moral codes and the dictates of self-interest. Readers interested in moral philosophy, psychology, economics, and political theory will find much to ponder here.

Public anger at perceived ethical and legal failures in recent wars has reinforced the importance of understanding military ethics. Ethics, Law and Military Operations is one of the first texts to examine both the ethical and the legal considerations of contemporary military conflict. It adopts a practical approach to explore the ways in which legal and normative issues combine to affect the entire spectrum of military operations, from high-intensity conflict to peacekeeping activities and the provision of humanitarian aid. With an operational perspective in mind, this text delivers accessible frameworks for evaluating and applying fundamental legal and ethical concepts. Written by an international team of military practitioners and academics, this book provides interdisciplinary insights into the major issues facing military decision-makers. The first half of the book explores the ethical and legal underpinnings of warfare. Later chapters use case studies to examine specific issues in the contemporary operating environment.

In the sequel to his fascinating analysis of religion and science, 'What is God?', Loewen proceeds to ask the major question implicit in this previous work; What then is Human? His responses take us on a journey from what has been human and what we are today, and allow us to confront some of our favorite conceptual confusions, including such as those between morals and ethics, modesty and humility, and criticism and critique amongst many others. Along the way he defends Wal-Mart, analyses the Dixie Chicks, suggests we temporarily stop having children while also questioning our motives regarding their nascent sexuality, and tells us how we can share the consciousness of another in bizarre circumstances. Engaging the reader with both philosophical and personal narrative, 'A Modest Society' is a must read for all those concerned with not only the current state of social relations, but of humanity itself.

Hardbound. Volume 5 covers many ethical problems in bioethics from the relevance of the law in making medical decisions, to genetics, and to assisted reproduction. Authors apply ethical theory, meta-ethical theory and valuational perspectives to a variety of ethical issues.

Are C. S. Lewis's major arguments in defense of Christian belief sound? In C. S. Lewis's Christian Apologetics: Pro and Con, defenders and critics of Lewis's apologetics square off and debate the merits of Lewis's arguments from desire, from reason, from morality, the "trilemma" argument for the divinity of Christ, as well as Lewis's response to the problem of evil. By means of these lively, in-depth debates, readers will emerge with a deeper understanding and appreciation of today's most influential Christian apologist.

+ Clearly exposes the most frequent calumnies made against science + Shows how dogmatic religion, the financial interests of certain industries, and opportunistic politicians sometime work in cohort to undermine the public’s trust in science + Acknowledges that science’s most mistaken critics are often skilled communicators, and that effectively defending science requires an equally skilled defense + Shows that while the “Science Wars“ of the 1990s have abated, their effects on some of the methodologies in higher education and the larger population continue + Examines three case studies to clearly illustrate how reliable scientific knowledge is secured: • Eratosthenes’ discovery of the circumference of the earth • Louis Pasteur’s development of anthrax and rabies vaccines • The rapid emergence of scientific consensus regarding continental drift