Invented Moralities

Invented Moralities PDF Author: Jeffrey Weeks
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
ISBN: 0745678351
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 224

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Book Description
This is an important intervention in debates on the family and sexuality, exploring clashes over sexual values and contemporary sexual dilemmas such as AIDS.

Adam Smith's Mistake

Adam Smith's Mistake PDF Author: Kenneth Lux
Publisher: Shambhala Publications
ISBN:
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 252

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Book Description
Adam Smith saw self-interest as the driving motivation of human affairs. Lux traces the failure of societies based on self-interest, from the misery of Charles Dicken's England, through the Great Depression, to the culture of narcissism of the past decade. He shows how Smith, and the economists who followed him, made a fundamental mistake: self-interest by itself leads to social strife, ecological damage, and the abuse of power. By recognizing Smith's mistake, we as a society can move forward to a time when benevalence rather than greed becomes the economic motivation of our society.

The Evolution of Morality

The Evolution of Morality PDF Author: Richard Joyce
Publisher: MIT Press
ISBN: 0262263254
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 285

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Book Description
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.

White Evangelical Racism, Second Edition

White Evangelical Racism, Second Edition PDF Author: Anthea Butler
Publisher: UNC Press Books
ISBN: 1469681536
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 182

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Book Description
The American political scene today is poisonously divided, and the vast majority of white evangelicals play a strikingly unified, powerful role in the disunion. In this clear-eyed, hard-hitting chronicle of American religion and politics, Anthea Butler argues that racism is at the core of conservative evangelical activism and power. Propelled by the benefits of whiteness, white evangelicals used scripture to defend slavery and nurture the Confederacy during the Civil War era. During Reconstruction, they used it to deny the vote to newly emancipated blacks. In the twentieth century, they sided with segregationists in avidly opposing movements for racial equality and civil rights. White evangelicals today, cloaked in a vision of Christian patriarchy and nationhood, form a staunch voting bloc in support of white leadership. Evangelicalism's racial history festers, splits America, and needs a reckoning now. In a new preface to the second edition, Butler takes stock of how the trends she identified have expanded as Donald Trump mounts a third campaign for the presidency, evangelicals celebrate and respond to the overturning of Roe v. Wade, and ferocious backlash against racial equity has injected new venom into evangelicalism's role in American politics.

God and Morality

God and Morality PDF Author: Anne Jeffrey
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9781108469449
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
This Element has two aims. The first is to discuss arguments philosophers have made about the difference God's existence might make to questions of general interest in metaethics. The second is to argue that it is a mistake to think we can get very far in answering these questions by assuming a thin conception of God, and to suggest that exploring the implications of thick theisms for metaethics would be more fruitful.

The Invention of International Relations Theory

The Invention of International Relations Theory PDF Author: Nicolas Guilhot
Publisher: Columbia University Press
ISBN: 0231152671
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 312

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Book Description
The 1954 Conference on Theory, sponsored by the Rockefeller Foundation, featured a 'who's who' of scholars and practitioners debating what would become the foundations of international relations theory. Assembling his own team of experts, the editor revisits a seminal event in the discipline.

Marriage After Modernity

Marriage After Modernity PDF Author: Adrian Thatcher
Publisher: A&C Black
ISBN: 9781850759485
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 346

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Book Description
This book offers nothing less than a new vision for Christian marriage at a time of unprecedented social and theological change. It breaks new ground in drawing on earlier traditions of betrothal and informal marriage in welcoming some forms of pre-marital cohabitation, and provides a new defence of the link between marriage and procreation by sketching a theology of liberation for children. Christian principles for the use of contraception by married and not-yet-married couples are restated, and a comprehensive theology of marriage is worked out, based on re-worked biblical models. Marriage as a Christian sacrament, mutually administered in a lifelong partnership of equals is affirmed. A chapter on divorce brings new light to bear on legitimate theological grounds for 'the parting of the ways'. The question of whether marriage is a heterosexual institution is addressed, and particular attention is paid throughout the book to overcoming the distorting effect of the overwhelming androcentric bias of much Christian thought on marriage, to the experience of wives, and to all those women and men for whom marriage is not their vocation.

The Structure of Moral Revolutions

The Structure of Moral Revolutions PDF Author: Robert Baker
Publisher: MIT Press
ISBN: 0262043084
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 335

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Book Description
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.

Ethics and the Orator

Ethics and the Orator PDF Author: Gary Remer
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 022643916X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 304

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Book Description
Prologue: Quintilian and John of Salisbury in the Ciceronian tradition -- Rhetoric, emotional manipulation, and morality: the contemporary relevance of Cicero vis-a-vis Aristotle -- Political morality, conventional morality, and decorum in Cicero -- Rhetoric as a balancing of ends: Cicero and Machiavelli -- Justus Lipsius, morally acceptable deceit, and prudence in the Ciceronian tradition -- The classical orator as political representative: Cicero and the modern concept of representation -- Deliberative democracy and rhetoric: Cicero, oratory, and conversation

Evolutionary Origins of Morality

Evolutionary Origins of Morality PDF Author: Leonard D. Katz
Publisher: Imprint Academic
ISBN: 9780907845072
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 376

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Book Description
This volume includes four principal papers and a total of 43 peer commentaries on the evolutionary origins of morality.