When a government in a democracy acts in our name, are we, as citizens, responsible for those acts? What if the government commits a moral crime? The protestor's slogan--"Not in our name!"--testifies to the need to separate ourselves from the wrongs of our leaders. Yet the idea that individual citizens might bear a special responsibility for political wrongdoing is deeply puzzling for ordinary morality and leading theories of democracy. In Our Name explains how citizens may be morally exposed to the failures of their representatives and state institutions, and how complicity is the professional hazard of democratic citizenship. Confronting the ethical challenges that citizens are faced with in a self-governing democracy, Eric Beerbohm proposes institutional remedies for dealing with them. Beerbohm questions prevailing theories of democracy for failing to account for our dual position as both citizens and subjects. Showing that the obligation to participate in the democratic process is even greater when we risk serving as accomplices to wrongdoing, Beerbohm argues for a distinctive division of labor between citizens and their representatives that charges lawmakers with the responsibility of incorporating their constituents' moral principles into their reasoning about policy. Grappling with the practical issues of democratic decision making, In Our Name engages with political science, law, and psychology to envision mechanisms for citizens seeking to avoid democratic complicity.
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.
This provocative, lucidly written reconstruction of utilitarianism focuses on the practical constraints involved in ethical choice: information may be inadequate, and understanding of causes and effects may be limited. Good decision making may be especially constrained if other people are closely involved in determining an outcome. Hardin demonstrates that many of these structural issues can and should be distinguished from the thornier problems of utilitarian value theory, and he is able to show what kinds of moral conclusions we can reach within the limits of reason.
There is presumably a trend toward depoliticization of character education as character educators claim to teach universal values and engage in community-based decision making. However, as Tianlong Yu argues in this book, under the umbrella of universality, character educators define virtues based on neo-conservative ideologies. In the name of community, they trivialize issues of gender, race, class, and culture and promote the interests of dominant social groups. In the Name of Morality: Character Education and Political Control traces the historical origins of character education and stimulates readers to look critically into the social interests, power relations, and political agendas that have shaped the character education movement in the United States. This challenging, yet engaging, book reaffirms the crucial relationship between moral education and politics. It is a must-read for anyone who is concerned about students' character building and moral education in schools.
What does pleasure have to do with morality? What role, if any, should intuition have in the formation of moral theory? If something is ‘simulated’, can it be immoral? This accessible and wide-ranging textbook explores these questions and many more. Key ideas in the fields of normative ethics, metaethics and applied ethics are explained rigorously and systematically, with a vivid writing style that enlivens the topics with energy and wit. Individual theories are discussed in detail in the first part of the book, before these positions are applied to a wide range of contemporary situations including business ethics, sexual ethics, and the acceptability of eating animals. A wealth of real-life examples, set out with depth and care, illuminate the complexities of different ethical approaches while conveying their modern-day relevance. This concise and highly engaging resource is tailored to the Ethics components of AQA Philosophy and OCR Religious Studies, with a clear and practical layout that includes end-of-chapter summaries, key terms, and common mistakes to avoid. It should also be of practical use for those teaching Philosophy as part of the International Baccalaureate. Ethics for A-Level is of particular value to students and teachers, but Fisher and Dimmock’s precise and scholarly approach will appeal to anyone seeking a rigorous and lively introduction to the challenging subject of ethics. Tailored to the Ethics components of AQA Philosophy and OCR Religious Studies.
This book considers the day-to-day lives of young Muslims on Kenya’s island of Lamu, who live simultaneously on the edge and in the center. At the margins of the national and international economy and of Western notions of modernity, Lamu’s inhabitants nevertheless find themselves the focus of campaigns against Islamic radicalization and of Western touristic imaginations of the untouched and secluded. What does it mean to be young, modern, and Muslim here? How are these denominators imagined and enacted in daily encounters? Documenting the everyday lives of Lamu youth, this ethnography explores how young people negotiate cultural, religious, political, and economic expectations through nuanced deployments of language, dress, and bodily comportment. Hillewaert shows how seemingly mundane practices—how young people greet others, how they walk, dress, and talk—can become tactics in the negotiation of moral personhood. Morality at the Margins traces the shifting meanings and potential ambiguities of such everyday signs—and the dangers of their misconstrual. By examining the uncertainties that underwrite projects of self-fashioning, the book highlights how shifting and scalable discourses of tradition, modernity, secularization, nationalism, and religious piety inform changing notions of moral subjectivity. In elaborating everyday practices of Islamic pluralism, the book shows the ways in which Muslim societies critically engage with change while sustaining a sense of integrity and morality.
"Morality and religion have failed because they are based on duplicity and fantasy. We need something new." This bold statement is the driving force behind Richard Garner's "Beyond Morality." In his book, Garner presents an insightful defense of moral error theory-the idea that our moral thought and discourse is systemically flawed. Establishing his argument with a discerning survey of historical and contemporary moral beliefs from around the world, Garner critically evaluates the plausibility of these beliefs and ultimately finds them wanting. In response, Garner suggests that humanity must "get beyond morality" by rejecting traditional language and thought about good and bad, right and wrong. He encourages readers to adhere to an alternative system of thought: "informed, compassionate amoralism," a blend of compassion, non-duplicity, and clarity of language that Garner believes will nurture our capability for tolerance, creation, and cooperation. By abandoning illusion and learning to listen to others and ourselves, Garner insists that society can and will find harmony. Richard Garner's, "Beyond Morality" delves deep into the thoughts and codes that inform the actions of humanity and offers a solution to the embedded error of these forces. An essential text for students of philosophy, "Beyond Morality" provides a groundwork for improving human action and relationships. Richard Garner is Professor Emeritus of Philosophy at Ohio State University. "One can discern the influence of the moral skeptic upon philosophy for as far back as one can gather any solid evidence at all, yet all too often the skeptical case has been articulated by opponents only with an eye to its refutation. All the more important it is, then, that forms of moral skepticism are sympathetically developed and advocated in the intellectual community. When first published in 1994, "Beyond Morality" was one of very few books that intelligently championed a radical type of moral skepticism; here Garner threw down the gauntlet in a firm, level-headed, and engaging manner. In so doing, he showed amoralism to have many attractions and a rich cultural history. Garner's position remains very much a live option in metaethics, and the importance of "Beyond Morality" has not diminished." -Richard Joyce, Professor of Philosophy, Victoria University of Wellington "This work is a tremendous achievement. The author's erudition is overwhelming, yet it is expressed without overwhelming the reader. He goes easily from modern to ancient thought. Some of the most difficult areas of thought are explored with such clarity that readers unfamiliar with them can grasp them readily. One of the chief virtues of this highly informative book is that it sets the problems of ethics in the context of wider areas of thought and brings them down to earth. Garner's main thesis, referred to as amoralism, is extremely important, not only to philosophy, but to all popular thinking about ethics, both theoretical and applied. He has done a magnificent job defending this important theme. This is a landmark work." -Richard Taylor, Professor Emeritus of Philosophy, University of Rochester "Garner is one of the first philosophers since Nietzsche to take seriously the idea that 'morality' might be nothing more than a sham. . . . In his hands, 'amoralism' turns out to be more appealing and humane than many thinkers' versions of 'morality'!" -James Rachels, Professor of Philosophy, University of Alabama at Birmingham
Using path-breaking discoveries of cognitive science, Mark Johnson argues that humans are fundamentally imaginative moral animals, challenging the view that morality is simply a system of universal laws dictated by reason. According to the Western moral tradition, we make ethical decisions by applying universal laws to concrete situations. But Johnson shows how research in cognitive science undermines this view and reveals that imagination has an essential role in ethical deliberation. Expanding his innovative studies of human reason in Metaphors We Live By and The Body in the Mind, Johnson provides the tools for more practical, realistic, and constructive moral reflection.
