|
Showing 1 - 4 of
4 matches in All Departments
Suicide and Social Justice unites diverse scholarly and social
justice perspectives on the international problem of suicide and
suicidal behavior. With a focus on social justice, the book seeks
to understand the complex interactions between individual and group
experiences with suicidality and various social pathologies,
including inequality, intergenerational poverty, racism, sexism,
and homophobia. Chapters investigate the underlying and often
overlooked connections that link rising rates and disproportionate
concentrations of suicide within specific populations to wider
social, political, and economic conditions. This edited volume
brings diverse scholarly and social justice perspectives to bear on
the problem of suicide and suicidal behavior, equipping researchers
and practitioners with the knowledge they need to fundamentally
rethink suicide and suicide prevention.
Suicide and Social Justice unites diverse scholarly and social
justice perspectives on the international problem of suicide and
suicidal behavior. With a focus on social justice, the book seeks
to understand the complex interactions between individual and group
experiences with suicidality and various social pathologies,
including inequality, intergenerational poverty, racism, sexism,
and homophobia. Chapters investigate the underlying and often
overlooked connections that link rising rates and disproportionate
concentrations of suicide within specific populations to wider
social, political, and economic conditions. This edited volume
brings diverse scholarly and social justice perspectives to bear on
the problem of suicide and suicidal behavior, equipping researchers
and practitioners with the knowledge they need to fundamentally
rethink suicide and suicide prevention.
Historically speaking, our vices, like our virtues, have come in
two basic forms: intellectual and moral. One of the main purposes
of this book is to analyze a set of specifically political vices
that have not been given sufficient attention within political
theory but that nonetheless pose enduring challenges to the
sustainability of free and equitable political relationships of
various kinds. Political vices like hubris, willful blindness, and
recalcitrance are persistent dispositions of character and conduct
that imperil both the functioning of democratic institutions and
the trust that a diverse citizenry has in the ability of those
institutions to secure a just political order of equal moral
standing, reciprocal freedom, and human dignity. Political vices
embody a repudiation of the reciprocal conditions of politics and,
as a consequence of this, they represent a standing challenge to
the principles and values of the mixed political regime we call
liberal-democracy. Mark Button shows how political vices not only
carry out discrete forms of injustice but also facilitate the
habituation in and indifference toward systemic forms of social and
political injustice. They do so through excesses and deficiencies
in human sensory and communicative capacities relating to voice
(hubris), vision (moral blindness), and listening (recalcitrance).
Drawing on a wide range of intellectual resources, including
ancient Greek tragedy, social psychology, moral epistemology, and
democratic theory, Political Vices gives new consideration to a
list of "deadly vices" that contemporary political societies can
neither ignore as a matter of personal "sin" nor publicly disregard
as a matter of mere bad choice, and it provides a democratic
account that outlines how citizens can best contend with our most
troubling political vices without undermining core commitments to
liberalism or pluralism.
In a beautifully written, persuasively argued book, Button offers a
new account of the modern liberal tradition of political thought.
--D. Casson, Choice. ""Button argues that 'contract makes
citizens,' rather than vice versa. He provides no less than a
reexamination of the major texts in social contract
theory--including those of Hobbes, Locke, and Rousseau--emphasizing
the importance within this tradition of a 'transformative' and
deeply educative project. An excellent book: fresh, original,
clearly written and cogently argued, and based on an impressively
wide array of sources. This book deserves a wide readership.""
--Stephen Macedo, Princeton University.The idea of the social
contract has typically been seen in political theory as
legitimating the exercise of governmental power and creating the
moral basis for political order. Mark Button wants to draw our
attention to an equally crucial, but seldom emphasized, role for
the social contract: its educative function in cultivating the
habits and virtues that citizens need to fulfill the promises that
the social contract represents. .In this book, he retells the story
of social contract theory as developed by some of its major
proponents--Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau, and Rawls--highlighting this
constructive feature of the theory in order to show that not only
do citizens make the social contract, but the social contract also
makes citizens. .Button's interest in recovering this theme from
past political theory is not merely historical, however. He means
to resurrect our concern for it so that we can better understand
the political-institutional and cultural-ethical conditions
necessary for balancing individual freedom and common citizenship
in our modern world of moral pluralism. Drawing on the history of
public reason, Button shows how political justification continues
to depend upon an ethics of character formation and why this
matters for citizens today.
|
|