Rethinking Moral Status

Rethinking Moral Status PDF Author: Steve Clarke
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0192894072
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 352

Get Book Here

Book Description
Scientific and technological advancements have allowed us to create beings that blur the distinctions between human, non-human animal, and non-biological beings, which challenge our assumptions about moral status. This volume explores our responses to these challenges and reflects on ordinary presuppositions and intuitions about moral status.

Rethinking Moral Status

Rethinking Moral Status PDF Author: Steve Clarke
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0192894072
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 352

Get Book Here

Book Description
Scientific and technological advancements have allowed us to create beings that blur the distinctions between human, non-human animal, and non-biological beings, which challenge our assumptions about moral status. This volume explores our responses to these challenges and reflects on ordinary presuppositions and intuitions about moral status.

Rethinking the Good

Rethinking the Good PDF Author: Larry S. Temkin
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0190233710
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 639

Get Book Here

Book Description
In choosing between moral alternatives -- choosing between various forms of ethical action -- we typically make calculations of the following kind, using the principle of transitivity: A is better than B; B is better than C; therefore A is better than C. Larry Temkin shows is that if we want to continue making plausible judgments, we cannot continue to make these assumptions.

What Is a Person?

What Is a Person? PDF Author: Christian Smith
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 0226765946
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 529

Get Book Here

Book Description
The task of understanding human beings, what we ourselves are, our constitution and condition, is a perennial problem in philosophy and related disciplines. Smith argues here that our understanding of human persons is threatened by technological development and capricious academic theories alike, seeking to deny or relativize the personhood of humanity. Smith's book puts a stake in the ground, in defense of a view of the human that is genuinely humanistic in the traditional sense and capable of sustaining with intellectual coherence things like modern human rights and universal benevolence.

Moral Status

Moral Status PDF Author: Mary Anne Warren
Publisher: Clarendon Press
ISBN: 0191588156
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 278

Get Book Here

Book Description
Mary Anne Warren explores a theoretical question which lies at the heart of practical ethics: what are the criteria for having moral status? In other words, what are the criteria for being an entity towards which people have moral obligations? Some philosophers maintain that there is one intrinsic property—for instance, life, sentience, humanity, or moral agency. Others believe that relational properties, such as belonging to a human community, are more important. In Part I of the book, Warren argues that no single property can serve as the sole criterion for moral status; instead, life, sentience, moral agency, and social and biotic relationships are all relevant, each in a different way. She presents seven basic principles, each focusing on a property that can, in combination with others, legitimately affect an agent's moral obligations towards entities of a given type. In Part II, these principles are applied in an examination of three controversial ethical issues: voluntary euthanasia, abortion

Debating Moral Education

Debating Moral Education PDF Author: Elizabeth Kiss
Publisher: Duke University Press
ISBN: 0822391597
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 364

Get Book Here

Book Description
After decades of marginalization in the secularized twentieth-century academy, moral education has enjoyed a recent resurgence in American higher education, with the establishment of more than 100 ethics centers and programs on campuses across the country. Yet the idea that the university has a civic responsibility to teach its undergraduate students ethics and morality has been met with skepticism, suspicion, and even outright rejection from both inside and outside the academy. In this collection, renowned scholars of philosophy, politics, and religion debate the role of ethics in the university, investigating whether universities should proactively cultivate morality and ethics, what teaching ethics entails, and what moral education should accomplish. The essays quickly open up to broader questions regarding the very purpose of a university education in modern society. Editors Elizabeth Kiss and J. Peter Euben survey the history of ethics in higher education, then engage with provocative recent writings by Stanley Fish in which he argues that universities should not be involved in moral education. Stanley Hauerwas responds, offering a theological perspective on the university’s purpose. Contributors look at the place of politics in moral education; suggest that increasingly diverse, multicultural student bodies are resources for the teaching of ethics; and show how the debate over civic education in public grade-schools provides valuable lessons for higher education. Others reflect on the virtues and character traits that a moral education should foster in students—such as honesty, tolerance, and integrity—and the ways that ethical training formally and informally happens on campuses today, from the classroom to the basketball court. Debating Moral Education is a critical contribution to the ongoing discussion of the role and evolution of ethics education in the modern liberal arts university. Contributors. Lawrence Blum, Romand Coles, J. Peter Euben, Stanley Fish, Michael Allen Gillespie, Ruth W. Grant, Stanley Hauerwas, David A. Hoekema, Elizabeth Kiss, Patchen Markell, Susan Jane McWilliams, Wilson Carey McWilliams, J. Donald Moon, James Bernard Murphy, Noah Pickus, Julie A. Reuben, George Shulman, Elizabeth V. Spelman

Anthropocentrism and Its Discontents

Anthropocentrism and Its Discontents PDF Author: Gary Steiner
Publisher: University of Pittsburgh Pre
ISBN: 0822970988
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 345

Get Book Here

Book Description
Anthropocentrism and Its Discontents is the first-ever comprehensive examination of views of animals in the history of Western philosophy, from Homeric Greece to the twentieth century. In recent decades, increased interest in this area has been accompanied by scholars' willingness to conceive of animal experience in terms of human mental capacities: consciousness, self-awareness, intention, deliberation, and in some instances, at least limited moral agency. This conception has been facilitated by a shift from behavioral to cognitive ethology (the science of animal behavior), and by attempts to affirm the essential similarities between the psychophysical makeup of human beings and animals. Gary Steiner sketches the terms of the current debates about animals and relates these to their historical antecedents, focusing on both the dominant anthropocentric voices and those recurring voices that instead assert a fundamental kinship relation between human beings and animals. He concludes with a discussion of the problem of balancing the need to recognize a human indebtedness to animals and the natural world with the need to preserve a sense of the uniqueness and dignity of the human individual.

Asian Perspectives on Animal Ethics

Asian Perspectives on Animal Ethics PDF Author: Neil Dalal
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317749952
Category : Pets
Languages : en
Pages : 225

Get Book Here

Book Description
To date, philosophical discussions of animal ethics and Critical Animal Studies have been dominated by Western perspectives and Western thinkers. This book makes a novel contribution to animal ethics in showing the range and richness of ideas offered to these fields by diverse Asian traditions. Asian Perspectives on Animal Ethics is the first of its kind to include the intersection of Asian and European traditions with respect to human and nonhuman relations. Presenting a series of studies focusing on specific Asian traditions, as well as studies that put those traditions in dialogue with Western thinkers, this book looks at Asian philosophical doctrines concerning compassion and nonviolence as these apply to nonhuman animals, as well as the moral rights and status of nonhuman animals in Asian traditions. Using Asian perspectives to explore ontological, ethical and political questions, contributors analyze humanism and post-humanism in Asian and comparative traditions and offer insight into the special ethical relations between humans and other particular species of animals. This book will be of interest to students and scholars of Asian religion and philosophy, as well as to those interested in animal ethics and Critical Animal Studies.

The Limits of Blame

The Limits of Blame PDF Author: Erin I. Kelly
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 0674989414
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 241

Get Book Here

Book Description
Faith in the power and righteousness of retribution has taken over the American criminal justice system. Approaching punishment and responsibility from a philosophical perspective, Erin Kelly challenges the moralism behind harsh treatment of criminal offenders and calls into question our society’s commitment to mass incarceration. The Limits of Blame takes issue with a criminal justice system that aligns legal criteria of guilt with moral criteria of blameworthiness. Many incarcerated people do not meet the criteria of blameworthiness, even when they are guilty of crimes. Kelly underscores the problems of exaggerating what criminal guilt indicates, particularly when it is tied to the illusion that we know how long and in what ways criminals should suffer. Our practice of assigning blame has gone beyond a pragmatic need for protection and a moral need to repudiate harmful acts publicly. It represents a desire for retribution that normalizes excessive punishment. Appreciating the limits of moral blame critically undermines a commonplace rationale for long and brutal punishment practices. Kelly proposes that we abandon our culture of blame and aim at reducing serious crime rather than imposing retribution. Were we to refocus our perspective to fit the relevant moral circumstances and legal criteria, we could endorse a humane, appropriately limited, and more productive approach to criminal justice.

Meaningful Work

Meaningful Work PDF Author: Mike W. Martin
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 019535091X
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 269

Get Book Here

Book Description
As commonly understood, professional ethics consists of shared duties and episodic dilemmas--the responsibilities incumbent on all members of specific professions joined together with the dilemmas that arise when these responsibilities conflict. Martin challenges this "consensus paradigm" as he rethinks professional ethics to include personal commitments and ideals, of which many are not mandatory. Using specific examples from a wide range of professions, including medicine, law, high school teaching, journalism, engineering, and ministry, he explores how personal commitments motivate, guide, and give meaning to work.

Rethinking Incarceration

Rethinking Incarceration PDF Author: Dominique DuBois Gilliard
Publisher: InterVarsity Press
ISBN: 0830887733
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 246

Get Book Here

Book Description
The United States has more people locked up in jails, prisons, and detention centers than any other country in the history of the world. Exploring the history and foundations of mass incarceration, Dominique Gilliard examines Christianity’s role in its evolution and expansion, assessing justice in light of Scripture, and showing how Christians can pursue justice that restores and reconciles.