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Author: Bruce K. Friesen
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 9401795517
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 90
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Book Description
This volume offers a comprehensible account of the development and evolution of moral systems. It seeks to answer the following questions: If morals are eternal and unchanging, why have the world’s dominant religious moral systems been around for no more than a mere six thousand of the two hundred thousand years of modern human existence? What explains the many and varied moral systems across the globe today? How can we account for the significant change in moral values in one place in less than 100 years’ time? Using examples from classical civilizations, the book demonstrates how increasing diversity compromises a moral system’s ability to account for and integrate larger populations into a single social unit. This environmental stress is not relieved until a broader, more abstract moral system is adopted by a social system. This new system provides a sense of belonging and purpose for more people, motivating them to engage in prosocial (or moral) acts and refrain from socially disruptive selfish acts. The current human rights paradigm is the world’s first universal, indigenous moral system. Because moral systems can be expected to continue to evolve, this book points to current boundaries of the human rights paradigm and where the next major moral revolution might emerge.
Author: Bruce K. Friesen
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 9401795517
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 90
Get Book Here
Book Description
This volume offers a comprehensible account of the development and evolution of moral systems. It seeks to answer the following questions: If morals are eternal and unchanging, why have the world’s dominant religious moral systems been around for no more than a mere six thousand of the two hundred thousand years of modern human existence? What explains the many and varied moral systems across the globe today? How can we account for the significant change in moral values in one place in less than 100 years’ time? Using examples from classical civilizations, the book demonstrates how increasing diversity compromises a moral system’s ability to account for and integrate larger populations into a single social unit. This environmental stress is not relieved until a broader, more abstract moral system is adopted by a social system. This new system provides a sense of belonging and purpose for more people, motivating them to engage in prosocial (or moral) acts and refrain from socially disruptive selfish acts. The current human rights paradigm is the world’s first universal, indigenous moral system. Because moral systems can be expected to continue to evolve, this book points to current boundaries of the human rights paradigm and where the next major moral revolution might emerge.
Author: Adam Etinson
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0198713258
Category : Human rights
Languages : en
Pages : 519
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Book Description
Over the past decade or so, philosophical speculation about human rights has tended to fall into two streams. On the one hand, there are "Orthodox" theorists, who think of human rights as natural rights: moral rights that we have simply in virtue of being human. On the other hand, there are"Political" theorists, who think of human rights as rights that play a distinctive role, or set of roles, in modern international politics: setting universal standards of political legitimacy, serving as norms of international concern, and/or imposing limits on the exercise of national sovereignty.This edited volume explores this disagreement, its underlying sources, and related issues in the philosophy of human rights. Using the Orthodox-Political debate as a springboard for broader reflection, the volume covers a diverse range of questions about: the relevance of the history of human rightsto their philosophical comprehension; how to properly understand the relationship between human rights morality and law; how to balance the normative character of human rights - their description of an ideal world - with the requirement that they be feasible in the here and now; the role of humanrights in a world shaped by politics and power; and how to reconcile the individualistic and communitarian aspects of human rights.All chapters are accompanied by useful and probing commentaries, which help to create dialogues throughout the entire volume.
Author: John O'Manique
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
ISBN: 9780812237061
Category : Law
Languages : en
Pages : 230
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Book Description
Offers a more benign view than that of Thomas Hobbes and later followers of the origins of the social contract. "A scholarly tour de force that situates the development of justice in relationships, beginning with the foundational human relationships of mother and child."—Riane Eisler, author of The Chalice and the Blade
Author: National Academy of Sciences
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 388
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Book Description
The Arthur M. Sackler Colloquia of the National Academy of Sciences address scientific topics of broad and current interest, cutting across the boundaries of traditional disciplines. Each year, four or five such colloquia are scheduled, typically two days in length and international in scope. Colloquia are organized by a member of the Academy, often with the assistance of an organizing committee, and feature presentations by leading scientists in the field and discussions with a hundred or more researchers with an interest in the topic. Colloquia presentations are recorded and posted on the National Academy of Sciences Sackler colloquia website and published on CD-ROM. These Colloquia are made possible by a generous gift from Mrs. Jill Sackler, in memory of her husband, Arthur M. Sackler.
Author: Samuel Moyn
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 0674256522
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 346
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Book Description
Human rights offer a vision of international justice that today’s idealistic millions hold dear. Yet the very concept on which the movement is based became familiar only a few decades ago when it profoundly reshaped our hopes for an improved humanity. In this pioneering book, Samuel Moyn elevates that extraordinary transformation to center stage and asks what it reveals about the ideal’s troubled present and uncertain future. For some, human rights stretch back to the dawn of Western civilization, the age of the American and French Revolutions, or the post–World War II moment when the Universal Declaration of Human Rights was framed. Revisiting these episodes in a dramatic tour of humanity’s moral history, The Last Utopia shows that it was in the decade after 1968 that human rights began to make sense to broad communities of people as the proper cause of justice. Across eastern and western Europe, as well as throughout the United States and Latin America, human rights crystallized in a few short years as social activism and political rhetoric moved it from the hallways of the United Nations to the global forefront. It was on the ruins of earlier political utopias, Moyn argues, that human rights achieved contemporary prominence. The morality of individual rights substituted for the soiled political dreams of revolutionary communism and nationalism as international law became an alternative to popular struggle and bloody violence. But as the ideal of human rights enters into rival political agendas, it requires more vigilance and scrutiny than when it became the watchword of our hopes.
Author: Richard Alexander
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1351329294
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 488
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Book Description
First published in 1987, this book discusses the life and natural history of moral systems as seen through the eyes of a biologist. The volume offers a comprehensive introspective of the biology of a moral system by examining the evolutionary approach from perspectives of sociobiology and ideology. Morality in relation to conflicts and confluences of interest among humankind are further evaluated, with particular emphasis on the human psyche and the ontogeny of moral behaviour. Philosophical meets biological with insightful commentary on the morality of law and democracy. The book concludes with an epilogue, bibliography and name and subject index. It is clear, concise and contemporary and would be of use to those studying Biology, Philsophy and many other social sciences.
Author: David N. Stamos
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 131725578X
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 306
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Book Description
In this groundbreaking and provocative new book, philosopher of science David N. Stamos challenges the current conceptions of human rights, and argues that the existence of universal human rights is a modern myth. Using an evolutionary analysis to support his claims, Stamos traces the origin of the myth from the English Levellers of 1640s London to our modern day. Theoretical defenses of the belief in human rights are critically examined, including defenses of nonconsensus concepts. In the final chapter Stamos develops a method of naturalized normative ethics, which he then applies to topics routinely dealt with in terms of human rights. In all of this Stamos hopes to show that there is a better way of dealing with matters of ethics and justice, a way that involves applying the whole of our evolved moral being, rather than only parts of it, and that is fiction-free.
Author: Allen Buchanan
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0190868430
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 441
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Book Description
In The Evolution of Moral Progress, Allen Buchanan and Russell Powell resurrect the project of explaining moral progress. They avoid the errors of earlier attempts by drawing on a wide range of disciplines including moral and political philosophy, evolutionary biology, evolutionary psychology, anthropology, history, and sociology. Their focus is on one especially important type of moral progress: gains in inclusivity. They develop a framework to explain progress in inclusivity to also illuminate moral regression--the return to exclusivist and "tribalistic" moral beliefs and attitudes. Buchanan and Powell argue those tribalistic moral responses are not hard-wired by evolution in human nature. Rather, human beings have an evolved "adaptively plastic" capacity for both inclusion and exclusion, depending on environmental conditions. Moral progress in the dimension of inclusivity is possible, but only to the extent that human beings can create environments conducive to extending moral standing to all human beings and even to some animals. Buchanan and Powell take biological evolution seriously, but with a critical eye, while simultaneously recognizing the crucial role of culture in creating environments in which moral progress can occur. The book avoids both biological and cultural determinism. Unlike earlier theories of moral progress, their theory provides a naturalistic account that is grounded in the best empirical work, and unlike earlier theories it does not present moral progress as inevitable or as occurring in definite stages; but rather it recognizes the highly contingent and fragile character of moral improvement.
Author: Gordon Brown
Publisher: Open Book Publishers
ISBN: 1783742216
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 129
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Book Description
The Global Citizenship Commission was convened, under the leadership of former British Prime Minister Gordon Brown and the auspices of NYU’s Global Institute for Advanced Study, to re-examine the spirit and stirring words of The Universal Declaration of Human Rights. The result – this volume – offers a 21st-century commentary on the original document, furthering the work of human rights and illuminating the ideal of global citizenship. What does it mean for each of us to be members of a global community? Since 1948, the Declaration has stood as a beacon and a standard for a better world. Yet the work of making its ideals real is far from over. Hideous and systemic human rights abuses continue to be perpetrated at an alarming rate around the world. Too many people, particularly those in power, are hostile to human rights or indifferent to their claims. Meanwhile, our global interdependence deepens. Bringing together world leaders and thinkers in the fields of politics, ethics, and philosophy, the Commission set out to develop a common understanding of the meaning of global citizenship – one that arises from basic human rights and empowers every individual in the world. This landmark report affirms the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and seeks to renew the 1948 enterprise, and the very ideal of the human family, for our day and generation.
Author: Jack Donnelly
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 9780801487767
Category : Law
Languages : en
Pages : 308
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Book Description
(unseen), $12.95. Donnelly explicates and defends an account of human rights as universal rights. Considering the competing claims of the universality, particularity, and relativity of human rights, he argues that the historical contingency and particularity of human rights is completely compatible with a conception of human rights as universal moral rights, and thus does not require the acceptance of claims of cultural relativism. The book moves between theoretical argument and historical practice. Rigorous and tightly-reasoned, material and perspectives from many disciplines are incorporated. Paper edition Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR
