Download or read book Life Liberty and the Defense of Dignity written by Leon Kass and published by Encounter Books. This book was released on 2002 with total page 323 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book grapples with the moral meaning of the new biomedical technologies now threatening to take us back to the future envisioned by Aldous Huxley in "Brave New World". In a series of meditations on cloning, embryo research, the sale of organs, and the assault on mortality itself, Kass questions the wisdom of trying to break down the natural boundaries given us and to remake the human body into an instrument of our will.
Download or read book Human Dignity Education and Political Society written by James Greenaway and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2020-07-07 with total page 253 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A life of liberty and responsibility does not just happen, but requires a particular kind of education, one that aims at both a growth of the human soul and an enrichment of political society in justice and the common good. This we call a liberal education. Forgetfulness of liberty is also a forgetfulness of the multi-dimensional nature of the human person, and a diminution of political life. Keeping in mind what can be lost when liberal education is lost, this volume makes the case for recovering what is perennially noble and good in the liberal arts, and why the liberal arts always have a role to play in human flourishing. Each of the authors herein focuses on the connection of three primary themes: human dignity, liberal education, and political society. Intentionally rooted in the hub that joins the three themes, each author seeks to unfold the contemporary significance of that hub. As a whole, the volume explores how the three themes are crucial to each other: how they illuminate each other, how they need each other, and how the loss of one jeopardizes the wellbeing of the others. In individual chapters, the authors engage various relevant aspects of liberal education. As a result, the volume is organized into three parts: Liberal Education and a Life Well Lived; Thinkers on Dignity and Education in History; Contemporary Topics in Dignity and Education. As education is increasingly channeled into an ever more narrow focus on technical specialization, and measured against professional success, students themselves face a maelstrom of campus politics and competing political orthodoxies. These are among the issues that tend to militate against the operative liberty of the student to think and to speak as a person. This edited collection is offered as an invitation to think again about the liberal arts in order to recover the meaning of education as the authentic pursuit of the good life or eudemonia.
Download or read book Human Dignity and Bioethics written by and published by U.S. Independent Agencies and Commissions. This book was released on 2008 with total page 588 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Contains a collection of essays exploring human dignity and bioethics, a concept crucial to today's discourse in law and ethics in general and in bioethics in particular.
Download or read book The Cambridge Handbook of Human Dignity written by Marcus Düwell and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2014-04-10 with total page 1130 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This introduction to human dignity explores the history of the notion from antiquity to the nineteenth century, and the way in which dignity is conceptualised in non-Western contexts. Building on this, it addresses a range of systematic conceptualisations, considers the theoretical and legal conditions for human dignity as a useful notion and analyses a number of philosophical and conceptual approaches to dignity. Finally, the book introduces current debates, paying particular attention to the legal implementation, human rights, justice and conflicts, medicine and bioethics, and provides an explicit systematic framework for discussing human dignity. Adopting a wide range of perspectives and taking into account numerous cultures and contexts, this handbook is a valuable resource for students, scholars and professionals working in philosophy, law, history and theology.
Download or read book Leading a Worthy Life written by Leon R. Kass and published by Encounter Books. This book was released on 2020-06-09 with total page 345 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Most American young people, like their ancestors, harbor desires for a worthy life: a life of meaning, a life that makes sense. But they are increasingly confused about what such a life might look like, and how they might, in the present age, be able to live one. With a once confident culture no longer offering authoritative guidance, the young are now at sea—regarding work, family, religion, and civic identity. The true, the good, and the beautiful have few defenders, and the higher cynicism mocks any innocent love of wisdom or love of country. We are supercompetent regarding efficiency and convenience; we are at a loss regarding what it’s all for. Yet because the old orthodoxies have crumbled, our “interesting time” paradoxically offers genuine opportunities for renewal and growth. The old Socratic question “How to live?” suddenly commands serious attention. Young Americans, if liberated from the prevailing cynicism, will readily embrace weighty questions and undertake serious quests for a flourishing life. All they (and we) need is encouragement. This book provides that necessary encouragement by illuminating crucial—and still available—aspects of a worthy life, and by defending them against their enemies. With chapters on love, family, and friendship; human excellence and human dignity; teaching, learning, and truth; and the great human aspirations of Western civilization, it offers help to both secular and religious readers, to people who are looking on their own for meaning and to people who are looking to deepen what they have been taught or to square it with the spirit of our times.
Download or read book Human Dignity written by George Kateb and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2011-05-03 with total page 257 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: We often speak of the dignity owed to a person. And dignity is a word that regularly appears in political speeches. Charters are promulgated in its name, and appeals to it are made when people all over the world struggle to achieve their rights. But what exactly is dignity? When one person physically assaults another, we feel the wrong demands immediate condemnation and legal sanction. Whereas when one person humiliates or thoughtlessly makes use of another, we recognize the wrong and hope for a remedy, but the social response is less clear. The injury itself may be hard to quantify. Given our concern with human dignity, it is odd that it has received comparatively little scrutiny. Here, George Kateb asks what human dignity is and why it matters for the claim to rights. He proposes that dignity is an “existential” value that pertains to the identity of a person as a human being. To injure or even to try to efface someone’s dignity is to treat that person as not human or less than human—as a thing or instrument or subhuman creature. Kateb does not limit the notion of dignity to individuals but extends it to the human species. The dignity of the human species rests on our uniqueness among all other species. In the book’s concluding section, he argues that despite the ravages we have inflicted on it, nature would be worse off without humanity. The supremely fitting task of humanity can be seen as a “stewardship” of nature. This secular defense of human dignity—the first book-length attempt of its kind—crowns the career of a distinguished political thinker.
Download or read book The Future of Human Nature written by Jürgen Habermas and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2014-10-15 with total page 121 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Recent developments in biotechnology and genetic research are raising complex ethical questions concerning the legitimate scope and limits of genetic intervention. As we begin to contemplate the possibility of intervening in the human genome to prevent diseases, we cannot help but feel that the human species might soon be able to take its biological evolution in its own hands. ‘Playing God’ is the metaphor commonly used for this self-transformation of the species, which, it seems, might soon be within our grasp. In this important new book, Jürgen Habermas – the most influential philosopher and social thinker in Germany today – takes up the question of genetic engineering and its ethical implications and subjects it to careful philosophical scrutiny. His analysis is guided by the view that genetic manipulation is bound up with the identity and self-understanding of the species. We cannot rule out the possibility that knowledge of one’s own hereditary factors may prove to be restrictive for the choice of an individual’s way of life and may undermine the symmetrical relations between free and equal human beings. In the concluding chapter – which was delivered as a lecture on receiving the Peace Prize of the German Book Trade for 2001 – Habermas broadens the discussion to examine the tension between science and religion in the modern world, a tension which exploded, with such tragic violence, on September 11th.
Download or read book The Hungry Soul written by Leon Kass and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 1999-05 with total page 276 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Originally published: New York: Free Press; Toronto: Maxwell Macmillan Canada; New York: Maxwell Macmillan International, c1994. With new foreword.
Download or read book Liberty for All written by Andrew T. Walker and published by Brazos Press. This book was released on 2021-05-04 with total page 272 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Christians are often thought of as defending only their own religious interests in the public square. They are viewed as worrying exclusively about the erosion of their freedom to assemble and to follow their convictions, while not seeming as concerned about publicly defending the rights of Muslims, Hindus, Jews, and atheists to do the same. Andrew T. Walker, an emerging Southern Baptist public theologian, argues for a robust Christian ethic of religious liberty that helps the church defend religious freedom for everyone in a pluralistic society. Whether explicitly religious or not, says Walker, every person is striving to make sense of his or her life. The Christian foundations of religious freedom provide a framework for how Christians can navigate deep religious difference in a secular age. As we practice religious liberty for our neighbors, we can find civility and commonality amid disagreement, further the church's engagement in the public square, and become the strongest defenders of religious liberty for all. Foreword by noted Princeton scholar Robert P. George.
Download or read book Wing to Wing Oar to Oar written by Amy A. Kass and published by . This book was released on 2000 with total page 664 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Despite current concerns for "family values" and the dissolution of marriages, Amy A. and Leon R. Kass see very little attention being paid to what makes for marital success. They argue there are no longer socially prescribed forms of conduct that help guide young men and women in the direction of matrimony; the very concepts of "wooing" and "courting" seem archaic. Yet they see major discontent with the present situation and detect among their students certain longings--for friendship, for wholeness, for a life that is serious and deep, and for associations that are trustworthy and lasting--longings they do not realize could be largely satisfied by marrying well. Wing to Wing, Oar to Oar: Courting and Marrying is an anthology of source readings offered as a response to the contemporary cultural silence surrounding love that leads to marriage. It addresses important questions that emerge not from theory, but from practice: Why marry? Is this love? How can I find and win the right one to marry? What about sex? Why a wedding and the promises of marriage? What can married life be like? Using readings taken mainly from classic texts of Homer, Herodotus, Plato, Aquinas, Erasmus, Shakespeare, Rousseau, Austen, Tolstoy, C.S. Lewis, Miss Manners, and many others, this collection challenges our unexamined opinions, expands our sympathies, elevates our gaze. It offers a higher kind of sex education, one that prepares hearts and minds for romance leading to lasting marriage, and introduces us to possibilities open to human beings in everyday life that may be undreamt of in our current philosophizing. This unapologetically pro-marriage anthology is intended to help young people of marriageable age and their parents think about the meaning, purpose, and virtues of marriage and, especially, about finding the right person with whom to make a life.
Download or read book True Freedom written by Timothy M. Dolan and published by Image. This book was released on 2012-06-19 with total page 45 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: True Freedom On Protecting Human Dignity and Religious Liberty Cardinal Timothy M. Dolan, Archbishop of New York Are American liberties on the endangered species list? In this eBook original, the Archbishop of New York and president of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops issues a plea for all citizens to reject the cynicism of the day and foster a culture in which religious freedom and all human life are infinitely valued. Religion and the dignity of human life are under attack by a variety of threats in the modern world including abortion, infanticide, eugenics, misuse of artificial reproductive technologies, an unjust distribution of economic resources, war, the arms trade, drugs, and human trafficking. What can be done to stop this? Cardinal Timothy Dolan explains the need for all Americans to embrace a new culture rooted in what Blessed John Paul II called the Gospel of Life where the sacredness of all human life, and the freedoms that are their birthright, are upheld, respected and protected by law.
Download or read book Dignity and Destiny written by John F. Kilner and published by Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing. This book was released on 2015-01-08 with total page 414 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Misunderstandings about what it means for humans to be created in God's image have wreaked devastation throughout history -- for example, slavery in the U. S., genocide in Nazi Germany, and the demeaning of women everywhere. In Dignity and Destiny John Kilner explores what the Bible itself teaches about humanity being in God's image. He discusses in detail all of the biblical references to the image of God, interacts extensively with other work on the topic, and documents how misunderstandings of it have been so problematic. People made according to God's image, Kilner says, have a special connection with God and are intended to be a meaningful reflection of him. Because of sin, they don't actually reflect him very well, but Kilner shows why the popular idea that sin has damaged the image of God is mistaken. He also clarifies the biblical difference between being God's image (which Christ is) and being in God's image (which humans are). He explains how humanity's creation and renewal in God's image are central, respectively, to human dignity and destiny. Locating Christ at the center of what God's image means, Kilner charts a constructive way forward and reflects on the tremendously liberating impact that a sound understanding of the image of God can have in the world today.
Download or read book Identity written by Francis Fukuyama and published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. This book was released on 2018-09-11 with total page 240 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The New York Times bestselling author of The Origins of Political Order offers a provocative examination of modern identity politics: its origins, its effects, and what it means for domestic and international affairs of state In 2014, Francis Fukuyama wrote that American institutions were in decay, as the state was progressively captured by powerful interest groups. Two years later, his predictions were borne out by the rise to power of a series of political outsiders whose economic nationalism and authoritarian tendencies threatened to destabilize the entire international order. These populist nationalists seek direct charismatic connection to “the people,” who are usually defined in narrow identity terms that offer an irresistible call to an in-group and exclude large parts of the population as a whole. Demand for recognition of one’s identity is a master concept that unifies much of what is going on in world politics today. The universal recognition on which liberal democracy is based has been increasingly challenged by narrower forms of recognition based on nation, religion, sect, race, ethnicity, or gender, which have resulted in anti-immigrant populism, the upsurge of politicized Islam, the fractious “identity liberalism” of college campuses, and the emergence of white nationalism. Populist nationalism, said to be rooted in economic motivation, actually springs from the demand for recognition and therefore cannot simply be satisfied by economic means. The demand for identity cannot be transcended; we must begin to shape identity in a way that supports rather than undermines democracy. Identity is an urgent and necessary book—a sharp warning that unless we forge a universal understanding of human dignity, we will doom ourselves to continuing conflict.
Download or read book Our Declaration A Reading of the Declaration of Independence in Defense of Equality written by Danielle Allen and published by W. W. Norton & Company. This book was released on 2014-06-23 with total page 320 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Winner of the Francis Parkman Prize, Society of American Historians “A tour de force. . . . No one has ever written a book on the Declaration quite like this one.”—Gordon Wood, New York Review of Books Featured on the front page of the New York Times, Our Declaration is already regarded as a seminal work that reinterprets the promise of American democracy through our founding text. Combining a personal account of teaching the Declaration with a vivid evocation of the colonial world between 1774 and 1777, Allen, a political philosopher renowned for her work on justice and citizenship reveals our nation’s founding text to be an animating force that not only changed the world more than two-hundred years ago, but also still can. Challenging conventional wisdom, she boldly makes the case that the Declaration is a document as much about political equality as about individual liberty. Beautifully illustrated throughout, Our Declaration is an “uncommonly elegant, incisive, and often poetic primer on America’s cardinal text” (David M. Kennedy).
Download or read book Beyond Freedom and Dignity written by B. F. Skinner and published by Hackett Publishing. This book was released on 2002-03-15 with total page 241 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this profound and profoundly controversial work, a landmark of 20th-century thought originally published in 1971, B. F. Skinner makes his definitive statement about humankind and society. Insisting that the problems of the world today can be solved only by dealing much more effectively with human behavior, Skinner argues that our traditional concepts of freedom and dignity must be sharply revised. They have played an important historical role in our struggle against many kinds of tyranny, he acknowledges, but they are now responsible for the futile defense of a presumed free and autonomous individual; they are perpetuating our use of punishment and blocking the development of more effective cultural practices. Basing his arguments on the massive results of the experimental analysis of behavior he pioneered, Skinner rejects traditional explanations of behavior in terms of states of mind, feelings, and other mental attributes in favor of explanations to be sought in the interaction between genetic endowment and personal history. He argues that instead of promoting freedom and dignity as personal attributes, we should direct our attention to the physical and social environments in which people live. It is the environment rather than humankind itself that must be changed if the traditional goals of the struggle for freedom and dignity are to be reached. Beyond Freedom and Dignity urges us to reexamine the ideals we have taken for granted and to consider the possibility of a radically behaviorist approach to human problems--one that has appeared to some incompatible with those ideals, but which envisions the building of a world in which humankind can attain its greatest possible achievements.
Download or read book In Defense of Human Dignity written by Michael D. Greaney and published by Center for Economic and Social Justice. This book was released on 2008 with total page 303 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A compilation of articles previously appearing in Social Justice Review, based on the Four Pillars of an Economically Just Society: 1) Limited economic role for the State, 2) Free and open markets, 3) Restoration of the rights of private property, and 4) Widespread direct ownership of the means of production. The Just Third Way is a holistic program developed by the interfaith Center for Economic and Social Justice ("CESJ") in Arlington, Virginia, USA, in response to the growing disparities of wealth and the failure of today's institutions to meet people's wants and needs in a manner consistent with their essential dignity as human beings. Analyzing the applications of natural law as expressed in Catholic social teaching, the articles demonstrate the universality of the principles underpinning the Just Third Way from the perspective of that particular faith tradition.
Download or read book Liberty Order and Justice written by James McClellan and published by . This book was released on 2000 with total page 664 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This new Liberty Fund edition of James McClellan's classic work on the quest for liberty, order, and justice in England and America includes the author's revisions to the original edition published in 1989 by the Center for Judicial Studies. Unlike most textbooks in American Government, Liberty, Order, and Justice seeks to familiarize the student with the basic principles of the Constitution, and to explain their origin, meaning, and purpose. Particular emphasis is placed on federalism and the separation of powers. These features of the book, together with its extensive and unique historical illustrations, make this new edition of Liberty, Order, and Justice especially suitable for introductory classes in American Government and for high school students in advanced placement courses.