“An unforgettable nonfiction thriller, expertly reported….A tremendously revealing and twisted ride, where life and death are now mere cold cash commodities.” —Michael Largo, author of Final Exits Award-winning investigative journalist and contributing Wired editor Scott Carney leads readers on a breathtaking journey through the macabre underworld of the global body bazaar, where organs, bones, and even live people are bought and sold on The Red Market. As gripping as CSI and as eye-opening as Mary Roach’s Stiff, Carney’s The Red Market sheds a blazing new light on the disturbing, billion-dollar business of trading in human body parts, bodies, and child trafficking, raising issues and exposing corruptions almost too bizarre and shocking to imagine.
Governing Death, Making Persons tells the story of how economic reforms and changes in the management of death in China have affected the governance of persons. The Chinese Communist Party has sought to channel the funeral industry and death rituals into vehicles for reshaping people into "modern" citizens and subjects. Since the Reform and Opening period and the marketization of state funeral parlors, the Party has promoted personalized funerals in the hope of promoting a market-oriented and individualistic ethos. However, things have not gone as planned. Huwy-min Lucia Liu writes about the funerals she witnessed and the life stories of two kinds of funeral workers: state workers who are quasi-government officials and semilegal private funeral brokers. She shows that end-of-life commemoration in urban China today is characterized by the resilience of social conventions and not a shift toward market economy individualization. Rather than seeing a rise of individualism and the decline of a socialist self, Liu sees the durability of socialist, religious, communal, and relational ideas of self, woven together through creative ritual framings in spite of their contradictions.
With the ending of the strategic certainties of the Cold War, the need for moral clarity over when, where and how to start, conduct and conclude war has never been greater. There has been a recent revival of interest in the just war tradition. But can a medieval theory help us answer twenty-first century security concerns? David Fisher explores how just war thinking can and should be developed to provide such guidance. His in-depth study examines philosophical challenges to just war thinking, including those posed by moral scepticism and relativism. It explores the nature and grounds of moral reasoning; the relation between public and private morality; and how just war teaching needs to be refashioned to provide practical guidance not just to politicians and generals but to ordinary service people. The complexity and difficulty of moral decision-making requires a new ethical approach - here characterised as virtuous consequentialism - that recognises the importance of both the internal quality and external effects of agency; and of the moral principles and virtues needed to enact them. Having reinforced the key tenets of just war thinking, Fisher uses these to address contemporary security issues, including the changing nature of war, military pre-emption and torture, the morality of the Iraq war, and humanitarian intervention. He concludes that the just war tradition provides not only a robust but an indispensable guide to resolve the security challenges of the twenty-first century.
In Moral Desert, Howard Simmons notes that the idea that we deserve to be praised or rewarded for good behavior and blamed or punished when we act badly seems central to everyone's moral deliberation and practices. Simmons subjects this assumption to critical scrutiny. He argues that in a wide range of cases it is almost impossible to know the extent of people's moral responsibility, and indeed that it may be a complete delusion. He attacks the still-popular theory of retributive punishment, with special reference to the views of Peter French and J. Angelo Corlett. Simmons does not conclude that punishment is always unjustified, but insists that any justification should relate to its real world consequences. State punishment should be inflicted according to strict consequentialist precepts, and the author provides systematic principles for determining an appropriate sentence and for deciding when offenders should be excused. He also considers the implications of his views for distributive justice and personal morality.
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.
Despite considerable work the answer to basic questions such as ‘what are our ethics and our moral norms now?’ ‘Have they changed since last year?’, ‘If so why?’ remain surprisingly illusive. This book argues that progress towards answering these questions is possible through a grounded analytical account of the cultivation of ethics and moral norms in social groups, in particular places and times. Departing from the evolutionary theory of why we gain value from pro-social behaviour, we argue that a coherent thread exists for how we do so through evolved social capacities that are united in the pursuit of a Positive Social Identity. Drawing on a unique quantitative dataset from Sierra Leone this book offers a theoretical framework and a preliminary guide to the systematic quantitative analysis of ethics and moral norms and how these may relate to the long term success of organisations. The results directly challenge a ‘one-size-fits-all’, universal understanding of both ethics and moral norms both within and between organisations. The costs and challenges influencing the development of ethics and moral norms and their ultimate conception of pro-sociality vary dramatically according to situation. Nowhere is this more starkly illustrated than between economically developed and developing countries. In analysing the relationship between agency and situation, the role of diversity, conflict, inefficiency and failure to cooperate prove to be essential components of the solution of social dilemmas on which Positive Social Identity depends.
Real Estate Marketing is specifically designed to educate real estate students with the art and science of the real estate marketing profession. The ideal textbook for undergraduate and graduate level classes in business school and professional / continuing education programs in Real Estate, this book will also be of interest to professional real estate entrepreneurs looking to boost their knowledge and improve their marketing techniques. The book is divided into five major parts. Part 1 focuses on introducing students to fundamental concepts of marketing as a business philosophy and strategy. Concepts discussed include strategic analysis, target marketing, and the four elements of the marketing mix: property planning, site selection, pricing of properties, and promotion of properties. Part 2 focuses on personal selling in real estate. Students will learn the exact process and steps involved in representing real estate buyers and sellers. Part 3 focuses on negotiations in real estate. How do effective real estate professionals use negotiation approaches such as collaboration, competition, accommodation, and compromise as a direct function of the situation and personalities involved in either buying or selling real estate properties? Part 4 focuses on human resource management issues such as recruiting and training real estate agents, issues related to performance evaluation, motivation, and compensation, as well as issues related to leadership. Finally, Part 5 focuses on legal and ethical issues in the real estate industry. Students will learn how to address difficult situations and legal/ethical dilemmas by understanding and applying a variety of legal/ethical tests. Students will also become intimately familiar with the industry’s code of ethics.
