Caregiving, Carebots, and Contagion
Caregiving, Carebots, and Contagion

Author: Michael C. Brannigan

Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield

Published: 2022-02-21

Total Pages: 175

ISBN-13: 1793649197

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Would you want to be cared for by a robot? Michael C. Brannigan’s Caregiving, Carebots, and Contagion explores caring robots’ lifesaving benefits, particularly during contagion, while probing the threat they pose to interpersonal engagement and genuine human caregiving. As our COVID-19 purgatory lingers on, caring robots will join our nursing and healthcare frontlines. Carebots can perform lifesaving tasks to minimize infection, safeguard vulnerable persons, and relieve caregivers of certain burdens. They also spark profound moral and existential questions: What is caring? How will we relate with each other? What does it mean to be human? Underscoring carebots' hands-on benefits, Brannigan also warns us of perils. They can be a dangerous lure in a culture that settles for substitutes and venerates the screen. Alerting us to the threatening prospect of carebots becoming our surrogate for interpersonal connection, he maintains they are not the culprits. The challenge lies in how we relate to them. While they beneficially complement our caregiving, carebots cannot replace human caring. Caring is a fundamentally human act and lies at the heart of ethics. As humans, we have a binding moral responsibility to care for the Other, and genuine caring demands our embodied, human-to-human presence.

Righting Health Policy
Righting Health Policy

Author: D. Robert MacDougall

Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield

Published: 2022-02-23

Total Pages: 245

ISBN-13: 1498589960

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In Righting Health Policy, D. Robert MacDougall argues that bioethics needs but does not have adequate tools for justifying law and policy. Bioethics’ tools are mostly theories about what we owe each other. But justifying laws and policies requires more; at a minimum, it requires tools for explaining the legitimacy of actions intended to control or influence others. It consequently requires political, rather than moral, philosophy. After showing how bioethicists have consistently failed to use tools suitable for achieving their political aims, MacDougall develops an interpretation of Kant’s political philosophy. On this account, the legitimacy of health laws does not derive from the morality of the behaviors they require but derives instead from their role in securing our equal freedom from each other. MacDougall uses this Kantian account to show the importance of political philosophy for bioethics. First, he shows how evaluating kidney markets in terms of the legitimacy of prohibiting sales rather than the morality of selling kidneys reverses the widely accepted view that Kantian philosophy supports legally prohibiting markets. Second, MacDougall argues that an account of political authority is necessary for settling longstanding bioethics debates about the legal and even moral standards that should govern informed consent.

Technology and the Virtues
Technology and the Virtues

Author: Shannon Vallor

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2016

Total Pages: 329

ISBN-13: 019049851X

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New technologies from artificial intelligence to drones, and biomedical enhancement make the future of the human family increasingly hard to predict and protect. This book explores how the philosophical tradition of virtue ethics can help us to cultivate the moral wisdom we need to live wisely and well with emerging technologies.

Post-Automobility Futures
Post-Automobility Futures

Author: Robert Braun

Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield

Published: 2022-03-04

Total Pages: 227

ISBN-13: 1538158868

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This book presents an in-depth phenomenological and deconstructive analysis of the automobility imaginary, which is none other than the mundane automobility reality within which we dwell in everyday life. A successful transition to a post-automobility future will require new ways of thinking about and conceptualizing automobility, one of the most significant and powerful imaginaries of contemporary neo-liberalism. This book offers such a view by reconceptualizing automobility in its entirety as both an imaginary and a dreamscape. In order to address the challenges, externalities and tragedies that automobility has brought upon us, automobility, we argue, must end as we know it.

Ethics Across Cultures
Ethics Across Cultures

Author: Michael Brannigan

Publisher: McGraw-Hill Humanities/Social Sciences/Languages

Published: 2004-10-22

Total Pages: 520

ISBN-13: 9780767424189

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This new text/reader for Introduction to Ethics courses explores the rich ethical traditions of the West and the East.

Animal Rights, Human Wrongs
Animal Rights, Human Wrongs

Author: Tom Regan

Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers

Published: 2003-11-22

Total Pages: 155

ISBN-13: 0742599388

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Regan provides the theoretical framework that grounds a responsible pro-animal rights perspective, and ultimately explores how asking moral questions about other animals can lead to a better understanding of ourselves.

Free Will, Moral Responsibility, and the Desire to Be a God
Free Will, Moral Responsibility, and the Desire to Be a God

Author: Bruce N. Waller

Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield

Published: 2020-09-04

Total Pages: 188

ISBN-13: 1793632650

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Free Will, Moral Responsibility, and the Desire to be a God explores the hidden corridors of the moral responsibility system to discover why that system is so widely accepted and passionately defended. The moral responsibility system has obvious charms: it provides justification for our powerful strike-back motives, transforms selfishness into the virtuous defense of our justly deserved special benefits, draws a radical distinction between humans and the other species we exploit, and protects our nonconscious belief in a just world. Those charms notwithstanding, the resilience and endurance of the moral responsibility system indicates a hidden force that not only binds together the pieces of the system but also motivates our stubborn devotion to that system. That hidden force is a nonconscious desire to be a god: a desire that afflicts both believers and atheists, and that is almost universally denied (Nietzsche being a special exception). That desire can be found throughout the history of philosophy, from Aristotle to the present. It is also manifested in myths and a variety of religious practices and teachings. The breadth, power and harm of nonconscious “apotheosis aspiration” is the focus of this study.

Engineering Perfection
Engineering Perfection

Author: Elyse Purcell

Publisher:

Published: 2021

Total Pages: 0

ISBN-13: 9781793624130

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What do we owe our future children? How do advances in biomedical science bear on these obligations? How do capitalist incentives distort their execution? Advances in biotechnologies for human enhancement and designer babies appear to offer us new hope to control the fragility of human living. Some philosophers have argued that we have a moral imperative to use them, especially to eliminate disabilities. Elyse Purcell offers an opposing view, one guided by existential insights and Marxist reflections. Engineering Perfection: Solidarity, Disability, and Well-being explores the effect global capitalism may have on the selection of traits for our future children and how the commercialization of these technologies may lead to the elimination of bodily diversity. Although philosophers have addressed the possible widening between the haves and have-nots, this book considers the role oppression and exploitation may play in enhancing bodies for profit. As a challenge to the global economy of debility, Purcell proposes the Solidarity view, which embraces human vulnerability and embodied difference. By reflecting on facets of the human condition, the Solidarity view challenges us to reject our conception of the good life as human perfection, and instead reconceive of the good as one's self-realization through the interdependent mutual recognition and co-belonging with others.

Humans and Robots
Humans and Robots

Author: Sven Nyholm

Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield

Published: 2020-03-09

Total Pages: 237

ISBN-13: 1786612283

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Can robots perform actions, make decisions, collaborate with humans, be our friends, perhaps fall in love, or potentially harm us? Even before these things truly happen, ethical and philosophical questions already arise. The reason is that we humans have a tendency to spontaneously attribute minds and “agency” to anything even remotely humanlike. Moreover, some people already say that robots should be our companions and have rights. Others say that robots should be slaves. This book tackles emerging ethical issues about human beings, robots, and agency head on. It explores the ethics of creating robots that are, or appear to be, decision-making agents. From military robots to self-driving cars to care robots or even sex robots equipped with artificial intelligence: how should we interpret the apparent agency of such robots? This book argues that we need to explore how human beings can best coordinate and collaborate with robots in responsible ways. It investigates ethically important differences between human agency and robot agency to work towards an ethics of responsible human-robot interaction.

Earthcare
Earthcare

Author: David Clowney

Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield

Published: 2009

Total Pages: 737

ISBN-13: 0742560465

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This anthology, designed for use in undergraduate courses in environmental ethics, includes new and classic readings by leading writers in the field, full-length case studies, and many short discussion cases. Introductions and discussion questions are provided for all the essays, with each chapter introduced by a summary of the issues and appropriate philosophic, historical and scientific background. Exploring ethical theory, environmental ethics, science and the environmental movement, Earthcare also offers suggestions for students on how to think about ethics and the environment. Through many worldviews, religions and philosophical perspectives, this collection grapples with environmental ethics issues from valuing nature, concerns about the atmosphere, water, land, animals, and human population as well as the interlocking and often problematic interests of business, consumption, energy and sustainability. This book also features examples of a wide variety of environmentally engaged individuals, giving students a way of seeing the connections between the material studied and what they themselves might accomplish.