Beyond Choices

Beyond Choices

Author: Miguel Sicart

Publisher: MIT Press

Published: 2013-09-06

Total Pages: 189

ISBN-13: 0262317133

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How computer games can be designed to create ethically relevant experiences for players. Today's blockbuster video games—and their never-ending sequels, sagas, and reboots—provide plenty of excitement in high-resolution but for the most part fail to engage a player's moral imagination. In Beyond Choices, Miguel Sicart calls for a new generation of video and computer games that are ethically relevant by design. In the 1970s, mainstream films—including The Godfather, Apocalypse Now, Raging Bull, and Taxi Driver—filled theaters but also treated their audiences as thinking beings. Why can't mainstream video games have the same moral and aesthetic impact? Sicart argues that it is time for games to claim their place in the cultural landscape as vehicles for ethical reflection. Sicart looks at games in many manifestations: toys, analog games, computer and video games, interactive fictions, commercial entertainments, and independent releases. Drawing on philosophy, design theory, literary studies, aesthetics, and interviews with game developers, Sicart provides a systematic account of how games can be designed to challenge and enrich our moral lives. After discussing such topics as definition of ethical gameplay and the structure of the game as a designed object, Sicart offers a theory of the design of ethical game play. He also analyzes the ethical aspects of game play in a number of current games, including Spec Ops: The Line, Beautiful Escape: Dungeoneer, Fallout New Vegas, and Anna Anthropy's Dys4Ia. Games are designed to evoke specific emotions; games that engage players ethically, Sicart argues, enable us to explore and express our values through play.


Beyond Choices

Beyond Choices

Author: Miguel Sicart

Publisher: MIT Press

Published: 2013-09-06

Total Pages: 189

ISBN-13: 0262019787

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How computer games can be designed to create ethically relevant experiences for players. Today's blockbuster video games—and their never-ending sequels, sagas, and reboots—provide plenty of excitement in high-resolution but for the most part fail to engage a player's moral imagination. In Beyond Choices, Miguel Sicart calls for a new generation of video and computer games that are ethically relevant by design. In the 1970s, mainstream films—including The Godfather, Apocalypse Now, Raging Bull, and Taxi Driver—filled theaters but also treated their audiences as thinking beings. Why can't mainstream video games have the same moral and aesthetic impact? Sicart argues that it is time for games to claim their place in the cultural landscape as vehicles for ethical reflection. Sicart looks at games in many manifestations: toys, analog games, computer and video games, interactive fictions, commercial entertainments, and independent releases. Drawing on philosophy, design theory, literary studies, aesthetics, and interviews with game developers, Sicart provides a systematic account of how games can be designed to challenge and enrich our moral lives. After discussing such topics as definition of ethical gameplay and the structure of the game as a designed object, Sicart offers a theory of the design of ethical game play. He also analyzes the ethical aspects of game play in a number of current games, including Spec Ops: The Line, Beautiful Escape: Dungeoneer, Fallout New Vegas, and Anna Anthropy's Dys4Ia. Games are designed to evoke specific emotions; games that engage players ethically, Sicart argues, enable us to explore and express our values through play.


Beyond Health, Beyond Choice

Beyond Health, Beyond Choice

Author: Paige Hall Smith

Publisher: Rutgers University Press

Published: 2012-08-15

Total Pages: 357

ISBN-13: 0813553164

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Current public health promotion of breastfeeding relies heavily on health messaging and individual behavior change. Women are told that “breast is best” but too little serious attention is given to addressing the many social, economic, and political factors that combine to limit women’s real choice to breastfeed beyond a few days or weeks. The result: women’s, infants’, and public health interests are undermined. Beyond Health, Beyond Choice examines how feminist perspectives can inform public health support for breastfeeding. Written by authors from diverse disciplines, perspectives, and countries, this collection of essays is arranged thematically and considers breastfeeding in relation to public health and health care; work and family; embodiment (specifically breastfeeding in public); economic and ethnic factors; guilt; violence; and commercialization. By examining women’s experiences and bringing feminist insights to bear on a public issue, the editors attempt to reframe the discussion to better inform public health approaches and political action. Doing so can help us recognize the value of breastfeeding for the public’s health and the important productive and reproductive contributions women make to the world.


Beyond Natural Selection

Beyond Natural Selection

Author: Robert G. Wesson

Publisher: MIT Press

Published: 1993

Total Pages: 382

ISBN-13: 9780262731027

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proposes an approach to evolution that is more in harmony with modern science than Darwinism or neo-Darwinism


Policing the Womb

Policing the Womb

Author: Michele Goodwin

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2020-03-12

Total Pages: 339

ISBN-13: 110703017X

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This book tells the real-life horror story of states' abusing laws and infringing on rights to police women and their pregnancies.


Ethics beyond Rules

Ethics beyond Rules

Author: Keith D Stanglin

Publisher: Zondervan

Published: 2021-08-17

Total Pages: 254

ISBN-13: 0310120918

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An introduction to ethics that will help Christians rediscover a moral reasoning rooted in Scripture and navigate the ethical crises of our time. How should Christians live? How should we interact with one another? Why do we think the way we do about right and wrong? How should we approach today's complex moral questions? Keith Stanglin realigns our ethical thinking around the central question: What does real love require? applying it to our ethical reasoning on many of the social issues present in today's culture: abortion sexual ethics consumerism technology race and politics Moral evaluation must be based on more than our subjective feelings or the received wisdom or majority opinion of our community. But thinking objectively and reasonably about our ethical commitments is a process that's rarely taught in contemporary education or even in churches. Ethics Beyond Rules is a clear and accessible introduction for thoughtful Christians who want to lead moral lives—who want to define their moral code by firm biblical standards while acknowledging the complex nature of the issues at hand. Stanglin's love-based framework for moral decision-making engages Scripture and the historic Christian faith, giving Christians the tools to clear-mindedly consider the ethical problems of today and the foundation to confront new issues in the years to come.


Beyond Consensus

Beyond Consensus

Author: Richard D. Margerum

Publisher: MIT Press

Published: 2011-08-19

Total Pages: 412

ISBN-13: 0262297728

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An examination of how to move from consensus to implementation using collaborative approaches to natural resource management, urban planning, and environmental policy. Collaborative approaches are increasingly common across a range of governance and policy areas. Single-issue, single-organization solutions often prove ineffective for complex, contentious, and diffuse problems. Collaborative efforts allow cross-jurisdictional governance and policy, involving groups that may operate on different decision-making levels. In Beyond Consensus, Richard Margerum examines the full range of collaborative enterprises in natural resource management, urban planning, and environmental policy. He explains the pros and cons of collaborative approaches, develops methods to test their effectiveness, and identifies ways to improve their implementation and results. Drawing on extensive case studies of collaborations in the United States and Australia, Margerum shows that collaboration is not just about developing a strategy but also about creating and sustaining arrangements that can support collaborative implementation. Margerum outlines a typology of collaborative efforts and a typology of networks to support implementation. He uses these typologies to explain the factors that are likely to make collaborations successful and examines the implications for participants. The rich case studies in Beyond Consensus—which range from watershed management to transportation planning, and include both successes and failures—offer lessons in collaboration that make the book ideal for classroom use. It is also designed to help practitioners evaluate and improve collaborative efforts at any phase. The book's theoretical framework provides scholars with a means to assess the effectiveness of collaborations and explain their ability to achieve results.


Beyond Choice

Beyond Choice

Author: Alexander Sanger

Publisher: PublicAffairs

Published: 2005-07-06

Total Pages: 354

ISBN-13: 1586486136

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Thirty years after Roe v. Wade, the argument between "pro-choicers" and "pro-lifers" has reached stalemate. Pro-choice arguments haven't persuaded a comfortable majority that legal abortion is vital to our society, nor addressed our moral qualms. Younger people are less and less supportive of reproductive rights. Since 1996, state legislatures have enacted nearly 300 pieces of anti-choice legislation. With Roe in jeopardy, International Planned Parenthood Council Chair Alexander Sanger asks a simple but heretical question: How many more pieces of anti-choice legislation will it take to get the pro-choice movement to rethink its approach to the issue? In Beyond Choice Sanger explores the history of the reproductive rights movement to discover how it got stuck in its thinking, and then provides a convincing new argument for the moral rightness of its cause. He shows why it is vital to the health and survival of the human race that couples be able to have children, or not, when they choose; why reproductive rights are just as important to men as to women; and why, in an era of new reproductive technologies, completely unfettered choice is not morally defensible. Beyond Choice is inspiring and important reading for women's rights advocates, opinion leaders, medical ethicists, and anyone concerned to preserve our freedom to reproduce, or not, without government intervention.


Beyond Individual Choice

Beyond Individual Choice

Author: Michael Bacharach

Publisher: Princeton University Press

Published: 2018-06-05

Total Pages: 241

ISBN-13: 0691186316

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Game theory is central to modern understandings of how people deal with problems of coordination and cooperation. Yet, ironically, it cannot give a straightforward explanation of some of the simplest forms of human coordination and cooperation--most famously, that people can use the apparently arbitrary features of "focal points" to solve coordination problems, and that people sometimes cooperate in "prisoner's dilemmas." Addressing a wide readership of economists, sociologists, psychologists, and philosophers, Michael Bacharach here proposes a revision of game theory that resolves these long-standing problems. In the classical tradition of game theory, Bacharach models human beings as rational actors, but he revises the standard definition of rationality to incorporate two major new ideas. He enlarges the model of a game so that it includes the ways agents describe to themselves (or "frame") their decision problems. And he allows the possibility that people reason as members of groups (or "teams"), each taking herself to have reason to perform her component of the combination of actions that best achieves the group's common goal. Bacharach shows that certain tendencies for individuals to engage in team reasoning are consistent with recent findings in social psychology and evolutionary biology. As the culmination of Bacharach's long-standing program of pathbreaking work on the foundations of game theory, this book has been eagerly awaited. Following Bacharach's premature death, Natalie Gold and Robert Sugden edited the unfinished work and added two substantial chapters that allow the book to be read as a coherent whole.