Cultivating Conscience

Cultivating Conscience PDF Author: Lynn Stout
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 140083600X
Category : Law
Languages : en
Pages : 319

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Book Description
How the science of unselfish behavior can promote law, order, and prosperity Contemporary law and public policy often treat human beings as selfish creatures who respond only to punishments and rewards. Yet every day we behave unselfishly—few of us mug the elderly or steal the paper from our neighbor's yard, and many of us go out of our way to help strangers. We nevertheless overlook our own good behavior and fixate on the bad things people do and how we can stop them. In this pathbreaking book, acclaimed law and economics scholar Lynn Stout argues that this focus neglects the crucial role our better impulses could play in society. Rather than lean on the power of greed to shape laws and human behavior, Stout contends that we should rely on the force of conscience. Stout makes the compelling case that conscience is neither a rare nor quirky phenomenon, but a vital force woven into our daily lives. Drawing from social psychology, behavioral economics, and evolutionary biology, Stout demonstrates how social cues—instructions from authorities, ideas about others' selfishness and unselfishness, and beliefs about benefits to others—have a powerful role in triggering unselfish behavior. Stout illustrates how our legal system can use these social cues to craft better laws that encourage more unselfish, ethical behavior in many realms, including politics and business. Stout also shows how our current emphasis on self-interest and incentives may have contributed to the catastrophic political missteps and financial scandals of recent memory by encouraging corrupt and selfish actions, and undermining society's collective moral compass. This book proves that if we care about effective laws and civilized society, the powers of conscience are simply too important for us to ignore.

Cultivating Conscience

Cultivating Conscience PDF Author: Lynn Stout
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 140083600X
Category : Law
Languages : en
Pages : 319

Get Book

Book Description
How the science of unselfish behavior can promote law, order, and prosperity Contemporary law and public policy often treat human beings as selfish creatures who respond only to punishments and rewards. Yet every day we behave unselfishly—few of us mug the elderly or steal the paper from our neighbor's yard, and many of us go out of our way to help strangers. We nevertheless overlook our own good behavior and fixate on the bad things people do and how we can stop them. In this pathbreaking book, acclaimed law and economics scholar Lynn Stout argues that this focus neglects the crucial role our better impulses could play in society. Rather than lean on the power of greed to shape laws and human behavior, Stout contends that we should rely on the force of conscience. Stout makes the compelling case that conscience is neither a rare nor quirky phenomenon, but a vital force woven into our daily lives. Drawing from social psychology, behavioral economics, and evolutionary biology, Stout demonstrates how social cues—instructions from authorities, ideas about others' selfishness and unselfishness, and beliefs about benefits to others—have a powerful role in triggering unselfish behavior. Stout illustrates how our legal system can use these social cues to craft better laws that encourage more unselfish, ethical behavior in many realms, including politics and business. Stout also shows how our current emphasis on self-interest and incentives may have contributed to the catastrophic political missteps and financial scandals of recent memory by encouraging corrupt and selfish actions, and undermining society's collective moral compass. This book proves that if we care about effective laws and civilized society, the powers of conscience are simply too important for us to ignore.

The Conscience of a Liberal

The Conscience of a Liberal PDF Author: Paul Krugman
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
ISBN: 0393067114
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 352

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Book Description
"The most consistent and courageous—and unapologetic—liberal partisan in American journalism." —Michael Tomasky, New York Review of Books In this "clear, provocative" (Boston Globe) New York Times bestseller, Paul Krugman, today's most widely read economist, examines the past eighty years of American history, from the reforms that tamed the harsh inequality of the Gilded Age and the 1920s to the unraveling of that achievement and the reemergence of immense economic and political inequality since the 1970s. Seeking to understand both what happened to middle-class America and what it will take to achieve a "new New Deal," Krugman has created his finest book to date, a "stimulating manifesto" offering "a compelling historical defense of liberalism and a clarion call for Americans to retake control of their economic destiny" (Publishers Weekly). "As Democrats seek a rationale not merely for returning to power, but for fundamentally changing—or changing back—the relationship between America's government and its citizens, Mr. Krugman's arguments will prove vital in the months and years ahead." —Peter Beinart, New York Times

The Nazi Conscience

The Nazi Conscience PDF Author: Claudia Koonz
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 9780674011724
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 376

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Book Description
Koonz’s latest work reveals how racial popularizers developed the infrastructure and rationale for genocide during the so-called normal years before World War II. Challenging conventional assumptions about Hitler, Koonz locates the source of his charisma not in his summons to hate, but in his appeal to the collective virtue of his people, the Volk.

Greed

Greed PDF Author: Melinda Pillsbury-Foster
Publisher: Createspace Independent Publishing Platform
ISBN: 9781499318081
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 380

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Book Description
GREED was first written to warn my fellow Americans that those who tout themselves a NeoCons have no limits to their ambitions and willingness to prey on those who trust them. GREED was a personal story, the characters based on people I knew. I thought the issue was domestic violence. Then I discovered it was much larger and far deeper. How do you place limits on the actions of people who have no conscience? This is the source of all the problems we face today. Today, awareness is growing of the cost psychopaths exact from those of us who understand human decency. For me it was a personal confrontation with the psychopathic which removed all illusions about who is in charge of our lives. Americans believed our freedoms were secure. We were wrong. Using lies, intimidation and the vast resources made available to them by their corporate employers played the Wag the Dog Game, using our trust to begin wars which are only increasing in intensity. Our economy is melting down before our eyes and we have become accustomed to seeing people made homeless through the greed of bankers without conscience. GREED is a true story and in the 2014 version you discover there are solutions.

Being Elizabethan

Being Elizabethan PDF Author: Norman Jones
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
ISBN: 1119168244
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 368

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Book Description
Captures the worldviews, concerns, joys, and experiences of people living through the cultural changes in the second half of the sixteenth century and the early seventeenth century, Shakespeare’s age. Elizabethans lived through a time of cultural collapse and rejuvenation as the impacts of globalization, the religious Reformation, economic and scientific revolutions, wars, and religious dissent forced them to reformulate their ideas of God, nation, society and self. This well-written, accessible book depicting how Elizabethans perceived reality and acted on their perceptions illustrates Elizabethan life, offering readers well-told stories about the Elizabethan people and the world around them. It defines the older ideas of pre-Elizabethan culture and shows how they were shattered and replaced by a new culture based on the emergence of individual conscience. The book posits that post-Reformation English culture, emphasizing the internalization of religious certainties, embraced skepticism in ways that valued individualism over older communal values. Being Elizabethan portrays how people’s lives were shaped and changed by the tension between a received belief in divine stability and new, destabilizing, ideas about physical and metaphysical truth. It begins with a chapter that examines how idealized virtues in a divinely governed universe were encapsulated in funeral sermons and epitaphs, exploring how they perceived the Divine Order. Other chapters discuss Elizabethan social stations, community, economics, self-expression, and more. Illustrates how early modern culture was born by exposing readers to events, artistic expressions, and personal experiences Provides an understanding of Elizabethan people by summarizing momentous events with which they grew up Appeals to students, scholars, and laymen interested in history and literature of the Elizabethan era Shows how a new cultural era, the age of Shakespeare, grew from collapsing late Medieval worldviews. Being Elizabethan is a captivating read for anyone interested in early modern English culture and society. It is an excellent source of information for those studying Tudor and early Stuart history and/or literature.

Money, Blood and Conscience

Money, Blood and Conscience PDF Author: Steinman
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780692854174
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 256

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Book Description
"Money, Blood and Conscience" is a novel about Ethiopia's recent democracy revolution. Written by an American adviser to the rebellion, it portrays the fight by the world's poorest for food and justice, drawing the reader into a magnificent and heartbreaking crusade for human dignity.

The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind

The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind PDF Author: Julian Jaynes
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
ISBN: 0547527543
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 580

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Book Description
National Book Award Finalist: “This man’s ideas may be the most influential, not to say controversial, of the second half of the twentieth century.”—Columbus Dispatch At the heart of this classic, seminal book is Julian Jaynes's still-controversial thesis that human consciousness did not begin far back in animal evolution but instead is a learned process that came about only three thousand years ago and is still developing. The implications of this revolutionary scientific paradigm extend into virtually every aspect of our psychology, our history and culture, our religion—and indeed our future. “Don’t be put off by the academic title of Julian Jaynes’s The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind. Its prose is always lucid and often lyrical…he unfolds his case with the utmost intellectual rigor.”—The New York Times “When Julian Jaynes . . . speculates that until late in the twentieth millennium BC men had no consciousness but were automatically obeying the voices of the gods, we are astounded but compelled to follow this remarkable thesis.”—John Updike, The New Yorker “He is as startling as Freud was in The Interpretation of Dreams, and Jaynes is equally as adept at forcing a new view of known human behavior.”—American Journal of Psychiatry

The Condition of England

The Condition of England PDF Author: C.F.G. Masterman
Publisher: Faber & Faber
ISBN: 0571286836
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 193

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Book Description
The Condition of England was first published in 1909. Faber Finds are reissuing it to celebrate its one hundredth anniversary. Although copies are now hard to come by, it was a success on first publication running quickly into six editions. It has often been likened to Matthew Arnold's Culture and Anarchy though it is more sombre. Charles Masterman, who was in the Liberal Government when he wrote this, provides a penetrating, sceptical and unsettling anatomy of Edwardian England, seeing beneath the imperial splendour a society 'fissured into unnatural plenitude on the one hand and ... an unnatural privation on the other'. This remains a work of acute social analysis.

Greed and Good

Greed and Good PDF Author: Sam Pizzigati
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers
ISBN:
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 696

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Book Description
Should we care that wealth in the United States is unequally distributed ” and getting more so every year? Should we worry that America's most wealthy, in just a generation, have more than doubled their share of the nation's wealth?Our nation's highest leaders certainly don't think so. They either ignore, or dismiss, the huge gaps in income and wealth that divide us. But these gaps, author Sam Pizzigati shows in his compelling new book, are undermining nearly every aspect of our lives, from our health to our happiness, from our professions to our pastimes, from our arts to our Earth.Greed and Good both reveals the horrific price we pay for tolerating inequality and dissects the case for greed, the old saws that apologists for inequality regularly trot out to justify the mammoth concentrations of wealth that tower all around us. These concentrations, Greed and Good argues, can and must be cut down to democratic size. And Greed and Good, in clear-headed and fascinating prose, even shows how.

Piers Plowman

Piers Plowman PDF Author: William Langland
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
ISBN: 9780192836465
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 420

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Book Description
This new translation of the B-text is provided with an Introduction and extensive Notes which place the work in its contemporary setting and offer a full interpretative commentary on the poem.