Kategoria BISAC: Philosophy >> Ethics & Moral Philosophy

Were the perpetrators of the 9/11 attacks courageous "freedom fighters" or despicable terrorist murderers? These opposing characterizations reveal in extreme form the incompatibility between different moral visions that underlie many conflicts in the world today, conflicts that challenge us to consider how moral disputes may be resolved. Eschewing the resort to universal moral principles favored by traditional Anglo-American analytic philosophy, Joseph Margolis sets out to sketch an alternative approach that accepts the lack of any neutral ground or privileged normative perspective for...

Taking Jean Giraudoux's play The Madwoman of Chaillot as its starting point, this book seeks a way out of the dilemma that confronts those who feel that any nonrelativistic moral theory requires some metaphysical foundation but cannot see how a foundations position can be persuasively defended.

Nancy Holland draws on the work of Heidegger and Derrida to formulate a concept of appropriate action that can address both extraordinary ethical problems within a particular cultural tradition and moral conflict between different cultures. Her feminist reappropriations of the concept...

This book is an inquiry into the extent to which human relationships are foundational in morality. J. Kellenberger seeks to discover, first, how relationships between persons, and ultimately the relationship that each person has to each person by virtue of being a person, underlie the various traditional components of morality--obligation, virtue, justice, rights, and moral goods--and, second, how relationship morality is more fully consonant with our moral experience than other forms of human morality.

Kellenberger traces the implications of relationship morality for an...

This volume is a thematic study in legal history that uses past and present landmark court cases to analyze the legal and historical development of moral regulatory policies in America and resulting debates. Using a critical variable approach, the book demonstrates how different elements of the legal process have historically influenced the litigation of various moral issues. Five moral policies are included: abortion, sodomy, pornography, criminal insanity, and the death penalty. The book's framework for analysis uses examples from English legal history and links them to American cases,...

Promoting care, a sense of personal responsibility for the welfare of others, is one of society's primary moral challenges. A caring society is one in which care penetrates all major social institutions including the family, schools, places of work, and worship. The purpose of this book is to present pragmatic guidelines for individuals and groups who want to enhance the caring quality of the social institutions in which they participate. The authors propose principles whereby care can be infused in routine contexts and give real-life examples to illustrate how they have been successfully...

Promoting care, a sense of personal responsibility for the welfare of others, is one of society's primary moral challenges. A caring society is one in which care penetrates all major social institutions including the family, schools, places of work, and worship. The purpose of this book is to present pragmatic guidelines for individuals and groups who want to enhance the caring quality of the social institutions in which they participate. The authors propose principles whereby care can be infused in routine contexts and give real-life examples to illustrate how they have been successfully...

Does life have meaning if one rejects belief in God? This book responds affirmatively to that question. Paul Kurtz, America's leading secular humanist, provides a powerful defense of the humanist alternative, rejecting both religious spirituality and nihilism. In this inspirational book, Kurtz outlines the basic virtues of the secular humanist outlook. These virtues include courage, not simply to be or to survive, but to overcome and become; that is, to fulfill our highest aspirations and ideals in the face of obstacles. The two other virtues Kurtz identifies are...

"The Last Choice" establishes that preemptive suicide in advanced age can be rational: that it can make good sense to evade age-related personal diminishment even at the cost of good time left. Criteria are provided to help determine whether soundly reasoned, cogently motivated, and prudently timed self-destruction can be in one's interests late in life. In our time suicide and assisted suicide are being increasingly tolerated as ways to escape unendurable mental or physical suffering, but it isn't widely accepted that suicide may be a rational choice before the onset of such suffering....

The rampant illnesses of our society--including the disintegration of the family, the degradation of the environment, unlimited commercialism, and unrelenting stress--are familiar to us all. For the first time, Stephen Bertman attempts to explain these disparate, overwhelmingly negative phenomena with a single, unifying principle: that the accelerated pace of American society is eroding the essence of our most fundamental values. In 1970, Alvin Toffler identified a psycho-biological disease he called future shock caused by too much change in too short a time. Now Bertman daringly diagnoses...

Genocide--the deliberate destruction, usually through mass murder, of an ethnic, racial or religious group--is the ultimate crime against humanity. Drawing upon a wide variety of disciplines, this study assesses ways to prevent this crime. While most books about genocide focus on the history of a particular event, such as the Holocaust, or compare case studies to derive empirical theories, this book outlines many practical aspects of genocide prevention.

Heidenrich covers a broad spectrum of expert opinions, from Stanley Hoffmann to Henry Kissinger, as well as political opinions...

Krantz provides a defense of traditional, human-centered ethics against Peter Singer's ethical theory. Singer favors a Copernican revolution in ethics because he thinks our traditional ethics has collapsed under pressure from medical technology and from advances in the biological understanding of our fellow animals. For nearly thirty years he has argued that the boundaries of the human lifespan and of the human species are so unclear that we must abandon our views that human beings have a special dignity and that the taking of innocent human life is always wrong.

Against this Krantz...

Has the mainstream media been careless in reporting on the issue of euthanasia? As the Right to Die and Physician Assisted Suicide movements gather steam, the national media have been too quick to perpetuate and focus on the medical and legal overtones of death. The ethical, religious, and philosophical dimensions of our increased acceptance of euthanizing the aged, infirm, and disabled are often neglected. Gailey argues that the press's failure to enrich public discourse may well erode its trustworthiness in the public's eye.

Using abundant examples from analysis of elite, mainstream...

Most readers of Spinoza treat him as a pure metaphysician, a grim determinist, or a stoic moralist, but none of these descriptions captures the author of the Ethics, argues Steven B. Smith in this intriguing book. Offering a new reading of Spinoza's masterpiece, Smith asserts that the Ethics is a celebration of human freedom and its attendant joys and responsibilities and should be placed among the great founding documents of the Enlightenment.

Two aspects of Smith's book distinguish it from other studies. It treats the famous "geometrical method" of the Ethics as...