Download or read book Moral Figures written by Alexandra Widmer and published by University of Toronto Press. This book was released on 2023-02-27 with total page 208 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the early twentieth century, people in the southwestern Pacific nation of Vanuatu experienced rapid population decline, while in the early twenty-first century, they experienced rapid population growth. From colonial governance to postcolonial sovereignty, Moral Figures shows that despite attempts to govern population size and birth, reproduction in Vanuatu continues to exceed bureaucratic economization through Ni-Vanuatu insistence on Indigenous relationalities. Through Alexandra Widmer’s examination of how reproduction is made public, she demonstrates how population sciences have a naturalized focus on women’s fertility and privileged issues of wage labour over women’s land access, as well as broader social relations of reproduction. Widmer draws on oral histories with retired village midwives and massage healers on the changes to care for pregnancy and birth, as well as ethnographic research in a village outside the capital of Port Vila. Locating the Pacific Islands in global histories of demographic science and the medicalization of birth, the book presents archival material in a way that emphasizes bureaucratic practices in how colonial documents attempted to render Indigenous relationalities of reproduction governable. While demographic imaginaries and biomedical practices increasingly frame fertility control as an investment in the reproductive health of individual bodies, the Ni-Vanuatu worlds presented in Moral Figures show that relationships between people, land, knowledge, kin, and care make reproduction a distributed and assisted process.
Download or read book Educating Moral People written by Nel Noddings and published by . This book was released on 2002 with total page 170 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this collection of essential essays, Nel Noddings examines alternatives to prevailing models of character education - a sympathetic approach based on an ethic of care. Covering both stories in the classroom and controversial issues in education, Noddings describes the similarities and differences between character education and care ethics...examines how moral education might be infused throughout the curriculum...and calls for greater cooperation across fields and more attention to the practical problems of everyday teaching.
Download or read book Moral Disengagement written by Albert Bandura and published by Macmillan Higher Education. This book was released on 2015-12-23 with total page 547 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How do otherwise considerate human beings do cruel things and still live in peace with themselves? Drawing on his agentic theory, Dr. Bandura provides a definitive exposition of the psychosocial mechanism by which people selectively disengage their moral self-sanctions from their harmful conduct. They do so by sanctifying their harmful behavior as serving worthy causes; they absolve themselves of blame for the harm they cause by displacement and diffusion of responsibility; they minimize or deny the harmful effects of their actions; and they dehumanize those they maltreat and blame them for bringing the suffering on themselves. Dr. Bandura’s theory of moral disengagement is uniquely broad in scope. Theories of morality focus almost exclusively at the individual level. He insightfully extends the disengagement of morality to the social-system level through which wide-spread inhumanities are perpetrated. In so doing, he offers enlightening new perspectives on some of the most provocative issues of our time, addressing: Moral disengagement in all aspects of the death penalty—from public policy debates, to jury decisions, to the processes of execution The social and moral justifications of major industries—including gun manufacturers, the entertainment industry, tobacco companies, and the world of "too big to fail" finance Moral disengagement in terrorism, and how terrorists rationalize the use of violence as a means of social change Climate change denial, and the strenuous efforts by some to dispute the overwhelming scientific consensus affirming the impact of human behavior on the environment "Al Bandura is the most cited individual in the history of psychology for the depth, breadth and originality of his ideas and writings. Now with his ground-breaking new contribution, Moral Disengagement, his reach extends not only to teachers and students but also to the general public --making them aware of everyday evils in many spheres of daily life that must be counteracted by mindful moral engagement." ----Phil Zimbardo, Ph.D. Author, The Lucifer Effect; President, The Heroic Imagination Project "The authoritative statement by the world’s most-cited living psychologist, laying out his influential theory. Plunge into these fascinating historical and modern case studies of moral disengagement—morality tales for all time, illuminated by the psychology of how people do harm to themselves and others."-- Susan T. Fiske, Psychology and Public Affairs, Princeton University ‘If you have wondered why good people do bad things, and even terrible and horrible things, then this is the only book you ever will have to read." ----Robert J. Sternberg, Professor of Human Development, Cornell University "Dr. Albert Bandura is one of the great behavioral scientists of our time. His superb contributions include a deep analysis of human morality, its fundamental importance and the complexity of its development." ----David A. Hamburg, MD, Visiting Scholar, American Association for the Advancement of Science; DeWitt Wallace Distinguished Scholar, Weill Cornell Medical College; President Emeritus, Carnegie Corporation of New York
Download or read book The Righteous Mind written by Jonathan Haidt and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2013-02-12 with total page 530 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • The acclaimed social psychologist challenges conventional thinking about morality, politics, and religion in a way that speaks to conservatives and liberals alike—a “landmark contribution to humanity’s understanding of itself” (The New York Times Book Review). Drawing on his twenty-five years of groundbreaking research on moral psychology, Jonathan Haidt shows how moral judgments arise not from reason but from gut feelings. He shows why liberals, conservatives, and libertarians have such different intuitions about right and wrong, and he shows why each side is actually right about many of its central concerns. In this subtle yet accessible book, Haidt gives you the key to understanding the miracle of human cooperation, as well as the curse of our eternal divisions and conflicts. If you’re ready to trade in anger for understanding, read The Righteous Mind.
Download or read book The Road to Character written by David Brooks and published by Random House. This book was released on 2015-04-14 with total page 321 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: #1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • David Brooks challenges us to rebalance the scales between the focus on external success—“résumé virtues”—and our core principles. NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY THE ECONOMIST With the wisdom, humor, curiosity, and sharp insights that have brought millions of readers to his New York Times column and his previous bestsellers, David Brooks has consistently illuminated our daily lives in surprising and original ways. In The Social Animal, he explored the neuroscience of human connection and how we can flourish together. Now, in The Road to Character, he focuses on the deeper values that should inform our lives. Looking to some of the world’s greatest thinkers and inspiring leaders, Brooks explores how, through internal struggle and a sense of their own limitations, they have built a strong inner character. Labor activist Frances Perkins understood the need to suppress parts of herself so that she could be an instrument in a larger cause. Dwight Eisenhower organized his life not around impulsive self-expression but considered self-restraint. Dorothy Day, a devout Catholic convert and champion of the poor, learned as a young woman the vocabulary of simplicity and surrender. Civil rights pioneers A. Philip Randolph and Bayard Rustin learned reticence and the logic of self-discipline, the need to distrust oneself even while waging a noble crusade. Blending psychology, politics, spirituality, and confessional, The Road to Character provides an opportunity for us to rethink our priorities, and strive to build rich inner lives marked by humility and moral depth. “Joy,” David Brooks writes, “is a byproduct experienced by people who are aiming for something else. But it comes.” Praise for The Road to Character “A hyper-readable, lucid, often richly detailed human story.”—The New York Times Book Review “This profound and eloquent book is written with moral urgency and philosophical elegance.”—Andrew Solomon, author of Far from the Tree and The Noonday Demon “A powerful, haunting book that works its way beneath your skin.”—The Guardian “Original and eye-opening . . . Brooks is a normative version of Malcolm Gladwell, culling from a wide array of scientists and thinkers to weave an idea bigger than the sum of its parts.”—USA Today
Download or read book The Limits of Moral Authority written by Dale Dorsey and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2016-04-21 with total page 368 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Dale Dorsey considers one of the most fundamental questions in philosophical ethics: to what extent do the demands of morality have normative authority over us and our lives? Must we conform to moral requirements? Most who have addressed this question have treated the normative significance of morality as simply a fact to be explained. But Dorsey argues that this traditional assumption is misguided. According to Dorsey, not only are we not required to conform to moral demands, conforming to morality's demands will not always even be normatively permissible---moral behavior can be (quite literally) wrong. This view is significant not only for understanding the content and force of the moral point of view, but also for understanding the basic elements of how one ought to live.
Download or read book Heroes Saints and Ordinary Morality written by Andrew Michael Flescher and published by Georgetown University Press. This book was released on 2003-11-25 with total page 360 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Most of us are content to see ourselves as ordinary people—unique in ways, talented in others, but still among the ranks of ordinary mortals. Andrew Flescher probes our contented state by asking important questions: How should "ordinary" people respond when others need our help, whether the situation is a crisis, or something less? Do we have a responsibility, an obligation, to go that extra mile, to act above and beyond the call of duty? Or should we leave the braver responses to those who are somehow different than we are: better somehow, "heroes," or "saints?" Traditional approaches to ethics have suggested there is a sharp distinction between ordinary people and those called heroes and saints; between duties and acts of supererogation (going beyond the expected). Flescher seeks to undo these standard dichotomies by looking at the lives and actions of certain historical figures—Holocaust rescuers, Martin Luther King, Jr., Dorothy Day, among others—who appear to be extraordinary but were, in fact, ordinary people. Heroes, Saints, and Ordinary Morality shifts the way we regard ourselves in relationship to those we admire from afar—it asks us not only to admire, but to emulate as well—further, it challenges us to actively seek the acquisition of virtue as seen in the lives of heroes and saints, to learn from them, a dynamic aspect of ethical behavior that goes beyond the mere avoidance of wrongdoing. Andrew Flescher sets a stage where we need to think and act, calling us to lead lives of self-examination—even if that should sometimes provoke discomfort. He asks that we strive to emulate those we admire and therefore allow ourselves to grow morally, and spiritually. It is then that the individual develops a deeper altruistic sense of self—a state that allows us to respond as the heroes of our own lives, and therefore in the lives of others, when times and circumstance demand that of us.
Download or read book Moral Choices written by Scott B. Rae and published by Zondervan. This book was released on 2000 with total page 288 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Rae's "Moral Choices" helps readers navigate the rough waters of today's ethical dilemmas, assisting them in making decisions and judging right from wrong, both as individuals in terms of society. He explores such issues as abortion, reproductive technologies, euthanasia, capital punishment, war and sexuality. Includes a chapter on genetic technologies and human cloning.
Download or read book Do Morals Matter written by Joseph S. Nye and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 2020 with total page 273 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What is the role of ethics in American foreign policy? The Trump Administration has elevated this from a theoretical question to front-page news. Should ethics even play a role, or should we only focus on defending our material interests? In Do Morals Matter? Joseph S. Nye provides a concise yet penetrating analysis of how modern American presidents have-and have not-incorporated ethics into their foreign policy. Nye examines each presidency during theAmerican era post-1945 and scores them on the success they achieved in implementing an ethical foreign policy. Alongside this, he evaluates their leadership qualities, explaining which approaches work and which ones do not.
Download or read book Moral Philosophy in Eighteenth Century Britain written by Colin Heydt and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2018 with total page 299 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A new account of a vital period in the history of ethics, focusing on the content of morality.
Download or read book Exemplarist Moral Theory written by Linda Zagzebski and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2017-02-21 with total page 336 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this book Linda Zagzebski presents an original moral theory based on direct reference to exemplars of goodness, modeled on the Putnam-Kripke theory which revolutionized semantics in the seventies. In Exemplarist Moral Theory, exemplars are identified through the emotion of admiration, which Zagzebski argues is both a motivating emotion and an emotion whose cognitive content permits the mapping of the moral domain around the features of exemplars. Using examples of heroes, saints, and sages, Zagzebski shows how narratives of exemplars and empirical work on the most admirable persons can be incorporated into the theory for both the theoretical purpose of generating a comprehensive theory, and the practical purpose of moral education and self-improvement. All basic moral terms, including "good person," "virtue," "good life," "right act," and "wrong act" are defined by the motives, ends, acts, or judgments of exemplars, or persons like that. The theory also generates an account of moral learning through emulation of exemplars, and Zagzebski defends a principle of the division of moral linguistic labor, which gives certain groups of people in a linguistic community special functions in identifying the extension or moral terms, spreading the stereotype associated with the term through the community, or providing the reasoning supporting judgments using those terms. The theory is therefore semantically externalist in that the meaning of moral terms is determined by features of the world outside the mind of the user, including features of exemplars and features of the social linguistic network linking users of the terms to exemplars. The book ends with suggestions about versions of the theory that are forms of moral realism, including a version that supports the existence of necessary a posteriori truths in ethics.
Download or read book The Structure of Moral Revolutions written by Robert Baker and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2019-11-12 with total page 335 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A theoretical account of moral revolutions, illustrated by historical cases that include the criminalization and decriminalization of abortion and the patient rebellion against medical paternalism. We live in an age of moral revolutions in which the once morally outrageous has become morally acceptable, and the formerly acceptable is now regarded as reprehensible. Attitudes toward same-sex love, for example, and the proper role of women, have undergone paradigm shifts over the last several decades. In this book, Robert Baker argues that these inversions are the product of moral revolutions that follow a pattern similar to that of the scientific revolutions analyzed by Thomas Kuhn in his influential book, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. After laying out the theoretical terrain, Baker develops his argument with examples of moral reversals from the recent and distant past. He describes the revolution, led by the utilitarian philosopher Jeremy Bentham, that transformed the postmortem dissection of human bodies from punitive desecration to civic virtue; the criminalization of abortion in the nineteenth century and its decriminalization in the twentieth century; and the invention of a new bioethics paradigm in the 1970s and 1980s, supporting a patient-led rebellion against medical paternalism. Finally, Baker reflects on moral relativism, arguing that the acceptance of “absolute” moral truths denies us the diversity of moral perspectives that permit us to alter our morality in response to changing environments.
Download or read book Beyond Moral Judgment written by Alice Crary and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2009-09-30 with total page 253 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What is moral thought and what kinds of demands does it impose? Alice Crary's book Beyond Moral Judgment claims that even the most perceptive contemporary answers to these questions offer no more than partial illumination, owing to an overly narrow focus on judgments that apply moral concepts (for example, "good," "wrong," "selfish," "courageous") and a corresponding failure to register that moral thinking includes more than such judgments. Drawing on what she describes as widely misinterpreted lines of thought in the writings of Wittgenstein and J. L. Austin, Crary argues that language is an inherently moral acquisition and that any stretch of thought, without regard to whether it uses moral concepts, may express the moral outlook encoded in a person's modes of speech. She challenges us to overcome our fixation on moral judgments and direct attention to responses that animate all our individual linguistic habits. Her argument incorporates insights from McDowell, Wiggins, Diamond, Cavell, and Murdoch and integrates a rich set of examples from feminist theory as well as from literature, including works by Jane Austen, E. M. Forster, Tolstoy, Henry James, and Theodor Fontane. The result is a powerful case for transforming our understanding of the difficulty of moral reflection and of the scope of our ethical concerns.
Download or read book Moral Dilemmas in Real Life written by Ovadia Ezra and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2006-05-26 with total page 205 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Moral Dilemmas in Real Life purports to supply ways of thinking of, perhaps even dealing with, the ins and outs of ethical argument. The world today presents both individuals and communities with situations, which demand moral and ethical deliberations. From the more general issues of universal globalization to the very specific problems of every-day existence encountered by active agents, contemporary life is replete with moral and ethical conundrums. Any thinking person is required, so it seems, to be concerned, involved, or – at the very least – conversant with these issues and this book supplies the wherewithal needed. Applied ethics is that intellectual locale where theory meets praxis. Moral Dilemmas in Real Life is designed to make that meeting point explicit, by presenting a series of issues in well-grounded philosophical formulations. The book begins with the general relation between the individual and society – instilling ethical tension, and even clashes, between the private and the public in our discourse. Going on, from general to specific, it gradually narrows the ethical playing field to touch on medical ethics, the family, and the practice of punishment. In all cases, the book addresses both consensual and conventional social institutions and distortions thereof.
Download or read book Moral Philosophy written by Christian Erk and published by BoD – Books on Demand. This book was released on 2021-10-04 with total page 414 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book is a systematic introduction to moral philosophy (or as it is also called: ethics) that aims at raising its readers’ ethical literacy and competence. Starting from the nature and end of this science it examines the fundamental questions and concepts of ethics. The core chapters familiarise the reader with the elements of a human act, outline how these elements influence the ethical quality of such act and shed light on the standard of morality, i.e. the good. The book furthermore clarifies the concepts of duty, right as well as responsibility and explicates the moral duties and rights of the human person. In doing so it also elucidates the notions of human dignity and the common good. Last but not least, the book contains a range of practical tools that help the reader put ethical theory into practice. The comprehensive appendix contains chapters on the virtues, propositional logic and arguments.
Download or read book Moral Philosophy A Contemporary Introduction written by Daniel R. DeNicola and published by Broadview Press. This book was released on 2018-11-30 with total page 330 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Moral Philosophy: A Contemporary Introduction is a compact yet comprehensive book offering an explication and critique of the major theories that have shaped philosophical ethics. Engaging with both historical and contemporary figures, this book explores the scope, limits, and requirements of morality. DeNicola traces our various attempts to ground morality: in nature, in religion, in culture, in social contracts, and in aspects of the human person such as reason, emotions, caring, and intuition.
Download or read book Mordecai Richler s Imperfect Search for Moral Values written by Shana Rosenblatt Mauer and published by McGill-Queen's Press - MQUP. This book was released on 2022-08-15 with total page 227 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From his debut as a novelist, Mordecai Richler challenged, provoked, enraged, entertained, and surprised readers. Criticizing him for his portrayals of Canada and accusing him of being anti-Jewish, many found his mix of progressive sympathies and illiberal satire confounding but hard to ignore. His novels were too engaging: their subjects crackled with contemporary relevance, and their humour was irresistible. Mordecai Richler’s Imperfect Search for Moral Values is an investigation into Richler’s novels and the conflicting reactions they provoked. Taking into consideration the most prevalent and voluble responses to his novels, Shana Mauer examines the texts themselves and assesses how they stand up to these reactions. She asks whether the backlash was justified, and whether these novels savaged Canada, maligned the Jewish community, disparaged women, mocked gays, and generally despaired of modern life and contemporary culture. As the first study of Richler’s entire corpus, this book considers these issues in the context of a long career – one as consistent as it was varied – in which an ideological discourse often, but not always, evolved. Turning away from impressions, assumptions, and generalizations, many informed by Richler’s non-fiction and on-record comments, Mauer focuses instead on the substance of the novels themselves, finding there a restless search for lasting moral value. Mordecai Richler’s Imperfect Search for Moral Values explores the construction of literary texts that have made Richler one of the most intriguing and successful modern writers, as well as an essential voice in Canadian and Jewish literature in the second half of the twentieth century.
