Download or read book Tragic encounters and ordinary ethics written by Ruth Sheldon and published by Manchester University Press. This book was released on 2016-10-20 with total page 327 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: For over four decades, events in Palestine-Israel have provoked raging conflicts within British universities around issues of free speech, 'extremism', antisemitism and Islamophobia. But why is this conflict so significant for student activists living at such a geographical distance from the region itself? And what role do emotive, polarised communications around Palestine-Israel play in the life of British academic institutions committed to the ideal of free expression? This book draws on original ethnographic research with student activists on different sides of this conflict to initiate a conversation with students, academics and members of the public who are concerned with the transnational politics of Palestine-Israel and with the changing role of the public university. It shows how, in an increasingly globalised world that is shaped by entangled histories of European antisemitism and colonial violence, ethnography can open up ethical responses to questions of justice

Download or read book Ordinary Ethics in China written by Charles Stafford and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2013-08-01 with total page 288 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Drawing on a wide range of anthropological case studies, this book focuses on ordinary ethics in contemporary China. The book examines the kinds of moral and ethical issues that emerge (sometimes almost unnoticed) in the flow of everyday life in Chinese communities. How are schoolchildren judged to be good or bad by their teachers and their peers - and how should a 'bad' student be dealt with? What exactly do children owe their parents, and how should this debt be repaid? Is it morally acceptable to be jealous if one's neighbours suddenly become rich? Should the wrongs of the past be forgotten, e.g. in the interests of communal harmony, or should they be dealt with now? In the case of China, such questions have obviously been shaped by the historical contexts against which they have been posed, and by the weight of various Chinese traditions. But this book approaches them on a human scale. More specifically, it approaches them from an anthropological perspective, based on participation in the flow of everyday life during ethnographic fieldwork in Chinese communities.

Download or read book Four Lectures on Ethics written by Michael Lambek and published by Neuroendocrinology - Masterclass Series. This book was released on 2015 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 4e de couverture: Responding to the challenges from the worlds they study and reflecting critically on their own practice, anthropologists have recently devoted new attention to ethics and morality. This masterclass brings together four of the most eminent scholars working in this field--Michael Lambek, Veena Das, Didier Fassin, and Webb Keane--to discuss, in a lecture format, the way in which anthropology faces contemporary ethical issues and moral problems. Rather than treating ethics as an object or as an isolable domain in moral theory, the authors are interested in grasping how the ethical and the moral emerge from social actions and interactions, how they are related to historical contexts and cultural settings, how they are transformed through their confrontation with the political, and how they are, ultimately, an integral part of life. Contrasting in their perspectives and methods, but developing a lively conversation, this masterclass provides four distinct voices to compose what will be an essential guide for an anthropology of the ethical and the moral in the twenty-first century.

Download or read book The Ordinary Virtues written by Michael Ignatieff and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2017-09-18 with total page 273 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Winner of the Zócalo Book Prize A New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice “Combines powerful moral arguments with superb storytelling.” —New Statesman What moral values do we hold in common? As globalization draws us together economically, are the things we value converging or diverging? These twin questions led Michael Ignatieff to embark on a three-year, eight-nation journey in search of an answer. What we share, he found, are what he calls “ordinary virtues”: tolerance, forgiveness, trust, and resilience. When conflicts break out, these virtues are easily exploited by the politics of fear and exclusion, reserved for one’s own group but denied to others. Yet these ordinary virtues are the key to healing and reconciliation on both a local and global scale. “Makes for illuminating reading.” —Simon Winchester, New York Review of Books “Engaging, articulate and richly descriptive... Ignatieff’s deft histories, vivid sketches and fascinating interviews are the soul of this important book.” —Times Literary Supplement “Deserves praise for wrestling with the devolution of our moral worlds over recent decades.” —Los Angeles Review of Books

Download or read book Scarlet A written by Katie Watson and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2018-01-02 with total page 297 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Winner of the NCTE George Orwell Award for Distinguished Contribution to Honesty and Clarity in Public Language Although Roe v. Wade identified abortion as a constitutional right in1973, it still bears stigma--a proverbial scarlet A. Millions of Americans have participated in or benefited from an abortion, but few want to reveal that they have done so. Approximately one in five pregnancies in the US ends in abortion. Why is something so common, which has been legal so long, still a source of shame and secrecy? Why is it so regularly debated by politicians, and so seldom divulged from friend to friend? This book explores the personal stigma that prevents many from sharing their abortion experiences with friends and family in private conversation, and the structural stigma that keeps it that way. In public discussion, both proponents and opponents of abortion's legality tend to focus on extraordinary cases. This tendency keeps the national debate polarized and contentious, and keeps our focus on the cases that occur the least. Professor Katie Watson focuses instead on the cases that happen the most, which she calls "ordinary abortion." Scarlet A gives the reflective reader a more accurate impression of what the majority of American abortion practice really looks like. It explains how our silence around private experience has distorted public opinion, and how including both ordinary abortion and abortion ethics could make our public exchanges more fruitful. In Scarlet A, Watson wisely and respectfully navigates one of the most divisive topics in contemporary life. This book explains the law of abortion, challenges the toxic politics that make it a public football and private secret, offers tools for more productive private exchanges, and leads the way to a more robust public discussion of abortion ethics. Scarlet A combines storytelling and statistics to bring the story of ordinary abortion out of the shadows, painting a rich, rarely seen picture of how patients and doctors currently think and act, and ultimately inviting readers to tell their own stories and draw their own conclusions. The paperback edition includes a new preface by the author addressing new cultural developments in abortion discourse and new legal threats to reproductive rights, and updated statistics throughout.

Download or read book The Ethics of Ordinary Technology written by Michel Puech and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-04-28 with total page 241 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Technology is even more than our world, our form of life, our civilization. Technology interacts with the world to change it. Philosophers need to seriously address the fluidity of a smartphone interface, the efficiency of a Dyson vacuum cleaner, or the familiar noise of an antique vacuum cleaner. Beyond their phenomenological description, the emotional experience acquires moral significance and in some cases even supplies ethical resources for the self. If we leave this dimension of modern experience unaddressed, we may miss something of value in contemporary life. Combining European humanism, Anglophone pragmatism, and Asian traditions, Michel Puech pleads for an "ethical turn" in the way we understand and address technological issues in modern day society. Puech argues that the question of "power" is what needs to be reconsidered today. In doing so, he provides a three-tier distinction of power: power to modify the outer world (our first-intention method in any case: technology); power over other humans (our enduring obsession: politics and domination); power over oneself (ethics and wisdom).

Download or read book The Role Ethics of Epictetus written by Brian E. Johnson and published by Lexington Books. This book was released on 2013-12-04 with total page 218 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Role Ethics of Epictetus: Stoicism in Ordinary Life offers an original interpretation of Epictetus’s ethics and how he bases his ethics on an appeal to our roles in life. Epictetus believes that every individual is the bearer of many roles from sibling to citizen and that individuals are morally good if they fulfill the obligations associated with these roles. To understand Epictetus’s account of roles, scholars have often mistakenly looked backwards to Cicero’s earlier and more schematic account of roles. However, for Cicero, roles are merely a tool in the service of the virtue of decorum where decorum is one of the four canonical virtues—prudence, justice, greatness of spirit, and decorum. In contrast, Epictetus sets those virtues aside and offers roles as a complete ethical theory that does the work of those canonical virtues. This book elucidates the unique features of Epictetus’s role based ethics. First, individuals have many roles and these roles are substantial enough that they may conflict. Second, although Epictetus is often taken to have only a sparse theory of appropriate action (or “duty” in older translations), Brian E. Johnson examines the criteria by which appropriate action is measured in order to demonstrate that Epictetus does have an account of appropriate action and that it is grounded in his account of roles. Finally, Epictetus downplays the Stoic ideal of the sage and replaces that figure with role-bound individuals who are supposed to inspire each of us to meet the challenges of our own roles. Instead of looking to sages, who have a perfect knowledge and action that we must imitate, Epictetus’s new ethical heroes are those we do not imitate in terms of knowledge or action, but simply in the way they approach the challenges of their roles. The analysis found in The Role Ethics of Epictetus will be of great value both to students and scholars of ancient philosophy, ethics and moral philosophy, history, classics, and theology, and to the educated reader who admires Epictetus.

Download or read book A Companion to Moral Anthropology written by Didier Fassin and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2015-01-20 with total page 672 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A Companion to Moral Anthropology is the first collective consideration of the anthropological dimensions of morals, morality, and ethics. Original essays by international experts explore the various currents, approaches, and issues in this important new discipline, examining topics such as the ethnography of moralities, the study of moral subjectivities, and the exploration of moral economies. Investigates the central legacies of moral anthropology, the formation of moral facts and values, the context of local moralities, and the frontiers between moralities, politics, humanitarianism Features contributions from pioneers in the field of moral anthropology, as well as international experts in related fields such as moral philosophy, moral psychology, evolutionary biology and neuroethics

Download or read book Textures of the Ordinary written by Veena Das and published by Fordham University Press. This book was released on 2020-05-05 with total page 230 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How might we speak of human life amid violence, deprivation, or disease so intrusive as to put the idea of the human into question? How can scholarship and advocacy address new forms of war or the slow, corrosive violence that belie democracy's promise to mitigate human suffering? To Veena Das, the answers to these question lie not in foundational ideas about human nature but in a close attention to the diverse ways in which the natural and the social mutually absorb each other on a daily basis. Textures of the Ordinary shows how anthropology finds a companionship with philosophy in the exploration of everyday life. Based on two decades of ethnographic work among low-income urban families in India, Das shows how the notion of texture aligns ethnography with the anthropological tone in Wittgenstein and Cavell, as well as in literary texts. Das shows that doing anthropology after Wittgenstein does not consist in taking over a new set of terms such as forms of life, language games, or private language from Wittgenstein’s philosophy. Instead, we must learn to see what eludes us in the everyday precisely because it is before our eyes. The book shows different routes of return to the everyday as it is corroded not only by catastrophic events but also by repetitive and routine violence within everyday life itself. As an alternative to normative ethics, this book develops ordinary ethics as attentiveness to the other and as the ability of small acts of care to stand up to horrific violence. Textures of the Ordinary offers a model of thinking in which concepts and experience are shown to be mutually vulnerable. With questions returned to repeatedly throughout the text and over a lifetime, this book is an intellectually intimate invitation into the ordinary, that which is most simple yet most difficult to perceive in our lives.

Download or read book Everyday Ethics written by Michael Lamb and published by Georgetown University Press. This book was released on 2019-10-01 with total page 263 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What might we learn if the study of ethics focused less on hard cases and more on the practices of everyday life? In Everyday Ethics, Michael Lamb and Brian Williams gather some of the world’s leading scholars and practitioners of moral theology (including some GUP authors) to explore that question in dialogue with anthropology and the social sciences. Inspired by the work of Michael Banner, these scholars cross disciplinary boundaries to analyze the ethics of ordinary practices—from eating, learning, and loving thy neighbor to borrowing and spending, using technology, and working in a flexible economy. Along the way, they consider the moral and methodological questions that emerge from this interdisciplinary dialogue and assess the implications for the future of moral theology.

Download or read book Ordinary Ethics in China written by Charles Stafford and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2020-06-07 with total page 238 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Drawing on a wide range of anthropological case studies, this book focuses on ordinary ethics in contemporary China. The book examines the kinds of moral and ethical issues that emerge (sometimes almost unnoticed) in the flow of everyday life in Chinese communities.How are schoolchildren judged to be good or bad by their teachers and their peers - and how should a 'bad' student be dealt with? What exactly do children owe their parents, and how should this debt be repaid? Is it morally acceptable to be jealous if one's neighbours suddenly become rich? Should the wrongs of the past be forgotten, e.g. in the interests of communal harmony, or should they be dealt with now?In the case of China, such questions have obviously been shaped by the historical contexts against which they have been posed, and by the weight of various Chinese traditions. But this book approaches them on a human scale. More specifically, it approaches them from an anthropological perspective, based on participation in the flow of everyday life during ethnographic fieldwork in Chinese communities.

Download or read book Communities of Complicity written by Hans Steinmüller and published by Berghahn Books. This book was released on 2013-03-01 with total page 290 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Everyday life in contemporary rural China is characterized by an increased sense of moral challenge and uncertainty. Ordinary people often find themselves caught between the moral frameworks of capitalism, Maoism and the Chinese tradition. This ethnographic study of the village of Zhongba (in Hubei Province, central China) is an attempt to grasp the ethical reflexivity of everyday life in rural China. Drawing on descriptions of village life, interspersed with targeted theoretical analyses, the author examines how ordinary people construct their own senses of their lives and their futures in everyday activities: building houses, working, celebrating marriages and funerals, gambling and dealing with local government. The villagers confront moral uncertainty; they creatively harmonize public discourse and local practice; and sometimes they resolve incoherence and unease through the use of irony. In so doing, they perform everyday ethics and re-create transient moral communities at a time of massive social dislocation.

Download or read book Ordinary Ethics written by Michael Lambek and published by Fordham Univ Press. This book was released on 2010 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Bringing together ethnographic exposition with philosophical concepts and arguments and effectively transcending subdisciplinary boundaries between cultural and linguistic anthropology, the essays collected in this volume explore the ethical entailments of speech and action and demonstrate the centrality of ethical practice, judgment, reasoning, responsibility, cultivation, commitment, and questioning in social life. Rather than focus on codes of conduct or hot-button issues, they make the cumulative argument that ethics is profoundly 'ordinary', pervasive - and possibly even intrinsic to speech and action. In addition to deepening our understanding of ethics, the volume makes an incisive and necessary intervention in anthropological theory, recasting discussion in ways that force us to rethink such concepts as power, agency, and relativism. Individual chapters consider the place of ethics with respect to conversation and interaction; judgment and responsibility; formality, etiquette, performance, ritual, and law; character and empathy; social boundaries and exclusions; socialization and punishment; and commemoration, history, and living together in peace and war.

Download or read book The Law of Good People written by Yuval Feldman and published by . This book was released on 2018-06-07 with total page 257 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book argues that overcoming people's inability to recognize their own wrongdoing is the most important but regrettably neglected area of the behavioral approach to law.

Download or read book POLITICS OF THE ORDINARY written by S. LAUGIER and published by . This book was released on 2020 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What is an ethics formulated in a "different voice"? This book develops the connection between ordinary language philosophy, represented by Wittgenstein and Austin, and the ethics of care. Care is at once a practical response to specific needs and a sensitivity to the ordinary details of human life that matter. The Ordinary has been variously denied, undervalued, or neglected - not taken into account - in theoretical thought. Such negligence, I propose, has to do with widespread contempt for ordinary life inasmuch as it is domestic and female. The disdain stems from the gendered hierarchy of objects deemed worthy of intellectual research. One important aspect of ordinary language philosophy is its capacity to call our attention to human expressiveness as embodied in women?s voices. It thus provides the basis for a re-definition of philosophy as attention to ordinary life, and care for moral expression. This book proposes nothing less than a paradigm shift in ethics, with a reorientation towards vulnerability and a shift from the "just" to the "important".

Download or read book Ordinary Lives and Grand Schemes written by Samuli Schielke and published by Berghahn Books. This book was released on 2012-06-01 with total page 174 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Everyday practice of religion is complex in its nature, ambivalent and at times contradictory. The task of an anthropology of religious practice is therefore precisely to see how people navigate and make sense of that complexity, and what the significance of religious beliefs and practices in a given setting can be. Rather than putting everyday practice and normative doctrine on different analytical planes, the authors argue that the articulation of religious doctrine is also an everyday practice and must be understood as such.

Download or read book The Common Cause written by Leela Gandhi and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2014-03-19 with total page 253 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Europeans and Americans tend to hold the opinion that democracy is a uniquely Western inheritance, but in The Common Cause, Leela Gandhi recovers stories of an alternate version, describing a transnational history of democracy in the first half of the twentieth century through the lens of ethics in the broad sense of disciplined self-fashioning. Gandhi identifies a shared culture of perfectionism across imperialism, fascism, and liberalism—an ethic that excluded the ordinary and unexceptional. But, she also illuminates an ethic of moral imperfectionism, a set of anticolonial, antifascist practices devoted to ordinariness and abnegation that ranged from doomed mutinies in the Indian military to Mahatma Gandhi’s spiritual discipline. Reframing the way we think about some of the most consequential political events of the era, Gandhi presents moral imperfectionism as the lost tradition of global democratic thought and offers it to us as a key to democracy’s future. In doing so, she defends democracy as a shared art of living on the other side of perfection and mounts a postcolonial appeal for an ethics of becoming common.