Download or read book Moralizing Technology written by Peter-Paul Verbeek and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2011-12-01 with total page 195 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Technology permeates nearly every aspect of our daily lives. Cars enable us to travel long distances, mobile phones help us to communicate, and medical devices make it possible to detect and cure diseases. But these aids to existence are not simply neutral instruments: they give shape to what we do and how we experience the world. And because technology plays such an active role in shaping our daily actions and decisions, it is crucial, Peter-Paul Verbeek argues, that we consider the moral dimension of technology. Moralizing Technology offers exactly that: an in-depth study of the ethical dilemmas and moral issues surrounding the interaction of humans and technology. Drawing from Heidegger and Foucault, as well as from philosophers of technology such as Don Ihde and Bruno Latour, Peter-Paul Verbeek locates morality not just in the human users of technology but in the interaction between us and our machines. Verbeek cites concrete examples, including some from his own life, and compellingly argues for the morality of things. Rich and multifaceted, and sure to be controversial, Moralizing Technology will force us all to consider the virtue of new inventions and to rethink the rightness of the products we use every day.
Download or read book Explaining Morality written by Steve Ash and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2022-03-30 with total page 175 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Adopting a critical realist approach to morality, this book considers morality as an aspect of social reality, enquiring into the nature of moral agency and asking whether we can legitimately argue for a specific moral position and whether moral positions can be understood to apply universally. Drawing on the thought of Bhaskar, Collier and Sayer, it explores a series of ontological questions about morality, shedding light on the ways in which critical realism can be used to address them, ultimately responding to the question of whether critical realism and the moral theories that have been produced through its use can provide an explanation of morality as a feature of reality. Through a synthesis of realist thought, the author develops a comprehensive theoretical understanding of morality that can be tested for its explanatory power through subsequent practical research. As such, it will appeal to scholars of philosophy and social science with interests in critical realism, ontology and meta-ethics.
Download or read book Morality for Humans written by Mark Johnson and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2015-09-04 with total page 274 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “A welcome renewal and defense of John Dewey's ethical naturalism, which Johnson claims is the only morality ‘fit for actual human beings.’” —Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews What is the difference between right and wrong? This is no easy question to answer, yet we constantly try to make it so, frequently appealing to absolutes, whether drawn from God, universal reason, or societal authority. Combining cognitive science with a pragmatist philosophical framework, Mark Johnson argues that appealing solely to absolute principles is not only scientifically unsound but even morally suspect. He shows that the standards for the kinds of people we should be and how we should treat one another are frequently subject to change. Taking context into consideration, he offers a nuanced, naturalistic view of ethics that sees us creatively adapt our standards according to given needs, emerging problems, and social interactions. Ethical naturalism is not just a revamped form of relativism. Indeed, Johnson attempts to overcome the absolutist-versus-relativist impasse that has been one of the most intractable problems in the history of philosophy. Much of our moral thought, he shows, is automatic and intuitive, gut feelings that we attempt to justify with rational analysis and argument. However, good moral deliberation is not limited to intuitive judgments supported after the fact by reasoning. Johnson points out a crucial third element: we imagine how our decisions will play out, how we or the world would change with each action we might take. Plumbing this imaginative dimension of moral reasoning, he provides a psychologically sophisticated view of moral problem solving, one perfectly suited for the embodied, culturally embedded, and ever-developing human creatures that we are.
Download or read book Selfishness and Selflessness written by Linda L. Layne and published by Berghahn Books. This book was released on 2020-04-09 with total page 313 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: We are said to be suffering a narcissism epidemic when the need for collective action seems more pressing than ever. The traits of Selfishness and selflessness address the ‘proper’ and ‘improper’ relationship between one’s self and others. The work they do during periods of social instability and cultural change is probed in this original, interdisciplinary collection. Contributions range from an examination of how these concepts animated the eighteenth-century anti-slavery campaigners to a dissection of the way middle-class mothers’ experiences illustrate gendered struggles over how much and to whom one is morally obliged to give.
Download or read book Understanding Moral Obligation written by Robert Stern and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2011-12-15 with total page 293 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In many histories of modern ethics, Kant is supposed to have ushered in an anti-realist or constructivist turn by holding that unless we ourselves 'author' or lay down moral norms and values for ourselves, our autonomy as agents will be threatened. In this book, Robert Stern challenges the cogency of this 'argument from autonomy', and claims that Kant never subscribed to it. Rather, it is not value realism but the apparent obligatoriness of morality that really poses a challenge to our autonomy: how can this be accounted for without taking away our freedom? The debate the book focuses on therefore concerns whether this obligatoriness should be located in ourselves (Kant), in others (Hegel) or in God (Kierkegaard). Stern traces the historical dialectic that drove the development of these respective theories, and clearly and sympathetically considers their merits and disadvantages; he concludes by arguing that the choice between them remains open.
Download or read book Understanding Morality written by Wayne Gustave Johnson and published by Wipf and Stock Publishers. This book was released on 2022-02-04 with total page 200 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book explains why moral systems necessarily develop and why they take the various forms that they do. Johnson argues that moral systems are best understood as attempts both to seek out ways of living a fulfilling human life and also to find ways of relating to others who also seek a fulfilling life. Philosophers generally agree that the moral pathway is also the fulfilling pathway. However, the moral pathways advocated and the kind of fulfillments envisioned depend upon beliefs about human nature as well as beliefs about the ultimate nature of things—a worldview. Aristotle, Epicurus, Saint Augustine, and Friedrich Nietzsche, for instance, had radically varying views about what constitutes a fulfilling life. Johnson argues that the moral quest involves properly arbitrating among the often competing wants, needs, and desires pursued by human beings. Not all such wants, needs, and desires can be fulfilled; some must necessarily go unfulfilled. This implies that a vast number of human choices are moral choices. For instance, who eats and who does not? Johnson gives no moral advice. His aim is to show the reader the nature of the moral choices they necessarily make.
Download or read book Knowing Right From Wrong written by Kieran Setiya and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2012-11-29 with total page 184 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Can we have objective knowledge of right and wrong, of how we should live and what there is reason to do? Can it be anything but luck when our beliefs are true? Kieran Setiya confronts these questions in their most compelling and articulate forms, and argues that if there is objective ethical knowledge, human nature is its source.
Download or read book An Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals written by David Hume and published by . This book was released on 1907 with total page 202 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book The Evolution of Morality written by Richard Joyce and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2007-08-24 with total page 285 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Moral thinking pervades our practical lives, but where did this way of thinking come from, and what purpose does it serve? Is it to be explained by environmental pressures on our ancestors a million years ago, or is it a cultural invention of more recent origin? In The Evolution of Morality, Richard Joyce takes up these controversial questions, finding that the evidence supports an innate basis to human morality. As a moral philosopher, Joyce is interested in whether any implications follow from this hypothesis. Might the fact that the human brain has been biologically prepared by natural selection to engage in moral judgment serve in some sense to vindicate this way of thinking—staving off the threat of moral skepticism, or even undergirding some version of moral realism? Or if morality has an adaptive explanation in genetic terms—if it is, as Joyce writes, "just something that helped our ancestors make more babies"—might such an explanation actually undermine morality's central role in our lives? He carefully examines both the evolutionary "vindication of morality" and the evolutionary "debunking of morality," considering the skeptical view more seriously than have others who have treated the subject. Interdisciplinary and combining the latest results from the empirical sciences with philosophical discussion, The Evolution of Morality is one of the few books in this area written from the perspective of moral philosophy. Concise and without technical jargon, the arguments are rigorous but accessible to readers from different academic backgrounds. Joyce discusses complex issues in plain language while advocating subtle and sometimes radical views. The Evolution of Morality lays the philosophical foundations for further research into the biological understanding of human morality.
Download or read book Morality written by Bernard Gert and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 1998 with total page 426 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this final revision of the classic work, the author has produced the fullest and most sophisticated account of this influential theoretical model. Here, he makes clear that morality is an informal system that does not provide unique answers to every moral question but does always limit the range of morally acceptable options, and so explains why some moral disagreements cannot be resolved. The importance placed on the moral ideals also makes clear that the moral rules are only one part of the moral system. A chapter that is devoted to justifying violations of the rules illustrates how the moral rules are embedded in the system and cannot be adequately understood independently of it. The chapter on reasons includes a new account of what makes one reason better than another and elucidates the complex hybrid nature of rationality.
Download or read book Understanding Violence written by Lorenzo Magnani and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2011-09-18 with total page 347 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume sets out to give a philosophical “applied” account of violence, engaged with both empirical and theoretical debates in other disciplines such as cognitive science, sociology, psychiatry, anthropology, political theory, evolutionary biology, and theology. The book’s primary thesis is that violence is inescapably intertwined with morality and typically enacted for “moral” reasons. To show this, the book compellingly demonstrates how morality operates to trigger and justify violence and how people, in their violent behaviors, can engage and disengage with discrete moralities. The author’s fundamental account of language, and in particular its normative aspects, is particularly insightful as regards extending the range of what is to be understood as violence beyond the domain of physical harm. By employing concepts such as “coalition enforcement”, “moral bubbles”, “cognitive niches”, “overmoralization”, “military intelligence” and so on, the book aims to spell out how perpetrators and victims of violence systematically disagree about the very nature of violence. The author’s original claim is that disagreement can be understood naturalistically, described by an account of morality informed by evolutionary perspectives as well. This book might help us come to terms with the fact that we are intrinsically “violent beings”. To acknowledge this condition, and our stupefying capacity to inflict harm, is a responsibility we must face up to: such understanding could ultimately be of help in order to achieve a safer ownership of our destinies, by individuating and reinforcing those cognitive firewalls that would prevent violence from always escalating and overflowing.
Download or read book Enquiries Concerning the Human Understanding and Concerning the Principles of Morals written by David Hume and published by . This book was released on 1902 with total page 419 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Enquiry concerning the principles of morals / Hume, David, 1711-1776.
Download or read book The Definition of Morality written by G. Wallace and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2020-07-20 with total page 325 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Originally published in 1970, the papers in this volume discuss the essential and defining characteristics of morality and moral issues and examine how moral views differ from political views, moral beliefs from religious beliefs, and moral judgements from aesthetic judgements. Some of the chapters discuss problems of method and shed light on the complex conditions which any successful definition of morality must satisfy. Taken collectively, these papers reflect he wide variety of approaches adopted by contemporary philosophers.
Download or read book The Emergence of Morality in Young Children written by John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation. Health Sciences Program and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 1987 with total page 378 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How- and when- do children distinguish right from wrong? Several prominent psychologists and a moral philosopher join in these essays to confront this issue and related questions and to clarify the controversies surrounding them. Introducing cross-cultural and cross-disciplinary viewpoints, the resulting volume is a landmark in the study of moral development.
Download or read book Understanding Catholic Morality written by Elizabeth Willems and published by Crossroad. This book was released on 1997 with total page 200 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Grounded in human experience, this accessible introduction to principles in Catholic morality focuses on moral development, not simply the acquisition of learning. The book begins with a historical overview of moral theology and goes on to examine such issues as conscience, freedom, fundamental option, authority, law, sin, and conversion.
Download or read book Morality Within the Limits of Reason written by Russell Hardin and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 1988 with total page 254 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This provocative, lucidly written reconstruction of utilitarianism focuses on the practical constraints involved in ethical choice: information may be inadequate, and understanding of causes and effects may be limited. Good decision making may be especially constrained if other people are closely involved in determining an outcome. Hardin demonstrates that many of these structural issues can and should be distinguished from the thornier problems of utilitarian value theory, and he is able to show what kinds of moral conclusions we can reach within the limits of reason.
Download or read book Code of Ethics for Nurses with Interpretive Statements written by American Nurses Association and published by Nursesbooks.org. This book was released on 2001 with total page 42 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Pamphlet is a succinct statement of the ethical obligations and duties of individuals who enter the nursing profession, the profession's nonnegotiable ethical standard, and an expression of nursing's own understanding of its commitment to society. Provides a framework for nurses to use in ethical analysis and decision-making.
