Through the Moral Maze

Through the Moral Maze

Author: Robert Kane

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2017-07-12

Total Pages: 243

ISBN-13: 1315480034

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"On the ... issue of our pluralistic age -- whether we can continue to believe in absolute value -- Robert Kane has written the most helpful discussion I know. It is clear, cogent, and above all, convincing". -- Huston Smith, author of The World's Religions


Moral Mazes

Moral Mazes

Author: Robert Jackall

Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA

Published: 2010

Total Pages: 310

ISBN-13: 0199729883

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This updated edition of a classic study of ethics in business presents an eye-opening account of how corporate managers think the world works, and how big organizations shape moral consciousness. Robert Jackall takes the reader inside a topsy-turvy world where hard work does not necessarily lead to success, but sharp talk, self-promotion, powerful patrons, and sheer luck might. This edition includes a new foreword linking the themes of Moral Mazes to the financial tsunami that engulfed the world economy in 2008.


More Harm than Good?

More Harm than Good?

Author: Edzard Ernst

Publisher: Springer

Published: 2018-01-11

Total Pages: 240

ISBN-13: 3319699415

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This book reveals the numerous ways in which moral, ethical and legal principles are being violated by those who provide, recommend or sell ‘complementary and alternative medicine’ (CAM). The book analyses both academic literature and internet sources that promote CAM. Additionally the book presents a number of brief scenarios, both hypothetical and real-life, about individuals who use CAM or who fall prey to ethically dubious CAM practitioners. The events and conundrums described in these scenarios could happen to almost anyone. Professor emeritus of complementary medicine Edzard Ernst together with bioethicist Kevin Smith provide a thorough and authoritative ethical analysis of a range of CAM modalities, including acupuncture, chiropractic, herbalism, and homeopathy. This book could and should interest all medical professionals who have contact to complementary medicine and will be an invaluable reference for patients deliberating which course of treatment to adopt.


Sorting Out Ethics

Sorting Out Ethics

Author: R. M. Hare

Publisher: Clarendon Press

Published: 1997-11-13

Total Pages: 202

ISBN-13: 0191519197

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R. M. Hare writes in his Preface: 'I offer this taxonomy of ethical theories to all those who are lost in the moral maze, including many of my philosophical colleagues. They are lost because, like most of those who hold forth on moral questions in the media, they have no map of the maze. This is has been my aim to provide.' Sorting Out Ethics is a characteristically lucid and lively survey of rival ethical theories by one of the most influential moral philosophers of the century. It also constitutes a definitive summary of Hare's own fundamental ethical position.


Animal Ethics

Animal Ethics

Author: Robert Garner

Publisher: Polity

Published: 2005-09-02

Total Pages: 204

ISBN-13: 9780745630793

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This book is an attempt to lead the way through the moral maze that is our relationship with nonhuman animals. Written by an author with an established reputation in this field, the book takes the reader step by step through the main parameters of the debate, demonstrating at each turn the different positions adopted. In the second part of the book, the implications of holding each position for the ethical permissibility of what is done to animals - in laboratories, farms, the home and the wild - are explained. Garner starts by asking whether animals have any moral standing before moving on to assess exactly what degree of moral status ought to be accorded to them. It is suggested that whilst animals should not be granted the same moral status as humans, they are worthy of greater moral consideration than the orthodox animal welfare position allows. As a result, it is suggested that many of the ways we currently treat animals are morally illegitimate. In the final chapter, the issue of political praxis is tackled. How are reforms to the ways in which animals are treated to be achieved? This book suggests that currently dominant debates about insider status and direct action are less important than the question of agency. That is, the important question is not what is done to change the way animals are treated as much as whom is to be mobilised to join the cause. Students of philosophy, politics and environmental issues will find this an essential textbook.


The Moral Foundations of Politics

The Moral Foundations of Politics

Author: Ian Shapiro

Publisher: Yale University Press

Published: 2012-10-30

Total Pages: 303

ISBN-13: 0300189753

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When do governments merit our allegiance, and when should they be denied it? Ian Shapiro explores this most enduring of political dilemmas in this innovative and engaging book. Building on his highly popular Yale courses, Professor Shapiro evaluates the main contending accounts of the sources of political legitimacy. Starting with theorists of the Enlightenment, he examines the arguments put forward by utilitarians, Marxists, and theorists of the social contract. Next he turns to the anti-Enlightenment tradition that stretches from Edmund Burke to contemporary post-modernists. In the last part of the book Shapiro examines partisans and critics of democracy from Plato’s time until our own. He concludes with an assessment of democracy’s strengths and limitations as the font of political legitimacy. The book offers a lucid and accessible introduction to urgent ongoing conversations about the sources of political allegiance.


Moral Tribes

Moral Tribes

Author: Joshua Greene

Publisher: Penguin

Published: 2014-12-30

Total Pages: 434

ISBN-13: 0143126059

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“Surprising and remarkable…Toggling between big ideas, technical details, and his personal intellectual journey, Greene writes a thesis suitable to both airplane reading and PhD seminars.”—The Boston Globe Our brains were designed for tribal life, for getting along with a select group of others (Us) and for fighting off everyone else (Them). But modern times have forced the world’s tribes into a shared space, resulting in epic clashes of values along with unprecedented opportunities. As the world shrinks, the moral lines that divide us become more salient and more puzzling. We fight over everything from tax codes to gay marriage to global warming, and we wonder where, if at all, we can find our common ground. A grand synthesis of neuroscience, psychology, and philosophy, Moral Tribes reveals the underlying causes of modern conflict and lights the way forward. Greene compares the human brain to a dual-mode camera, with point-and-shoot automatic settings (“portrait,” “landscape”) as well as a manual mode. Our point-and-shoot settings are our emotions—efficient, automated programs honed by evolution, culture, and personal experience. The brain’s manual mode is its capacity for deliberate reasoning, which makes our thinking flexible. Point-and-shoot emotions make us social animals, turning Me into Us. But they also make us tribal animals, turning Us against Them. Our tribal emotions make us fight—sometimes with bombs, sometimes with words—often with life-and-death stakes. A major achievement from a rising star in a new scientific field, Moral Tribes will refashion your deepest beliefs about how moral thinking works and how it can work better.


The Maze at Windermere

The Maze at Windermere

Author: Gregory Blake Smith

Publisher: Penguin

Published: 2019-01-22

Total Pages: 371

ISBN-13: 0735221936

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Named one of the best books of 2018 by The Washington Post, The Seattle Times, and The Advocate “Staggeringly brilliant . . . You’ll start The Maze of Windermere with bewilderment, but you’ll close it in awe.” —The Washington Post “Pitch perfect.” —New York Times Book Review When a drunken party guest challenges him to a late-night tennis match, Sandy Allison finds himself unexpectedly entangled in the monied world of Newport, Rhode Island. A former touring pro a little down on his luck, Sandy has nothing to stake against the vintage motorcycle his opponent wagers. But then Alice DuPont—the young heiress to a Newport mansion called Windermere—offers up her diamond necklace. With this reckless wager begins a dazzling narrative odyssey that braids together four centuries of aspiration and adversity in this renowned seaside society capital. A witty and urbane bachelor of the Gilded Age embarks on a high-risk scheme to marry into a fortune; a young Henry James, soon to make his mark on the world, turns himself to his craft with harrowing social consequences; an aristocratic British officer during the American Revolution carries on a courtship that leads to murder; and, in Newport’s earliest days, a tragically orphaned Quaker girl imagines a way forward for herself and the slave girl she has inherited. Gregory Blake Smith weaves these intersecting worlds into a rich, brilliant tapestry. A deftly layered novel of love, ambition, and duplicity, The Maze at Windermere charts a voyage across the ages into the maze of the human heart.


The Idea of the Labyrinth from Classical Antiquity through the Middle Ages

The Idea of the Labyrinth from Classical Antiquity through the Middle Ages

Author: Penelope Reed Doob

Publisher: Cornell University Press

Published: 2019-03-15

Total Pages: 404

ISBN-13: 150173847X

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Ancient and medieval labyrinths embody paradox, according to Penelope Reed Doob. Their structure allows a double perspective—the baffling, fragmented prospect confronting the maze-treader within, and the comprehensive vision available to those without. Mazes simultaneously assert order and chaos, artistry and confusion, articulated clarity and bewildering complexity, perfected pattern and hesitant process. In this handsomely illustrated book, Doob reconstructs from a variety of literary and visual sources the idea of the labyrinth from the classical period through the Middle Ages. Doob first examines several complementary traditions of the maze topos, showing how ancient historical and geographical writings generate metaphors in which the labyrinth signifies admirable complexity, while poetic texts tend to suggest that the labyrinth is a sign of moral duplicity. She then describes two common models of the labyrinth and explores their formal implications: the unicursal model, with no false turnings, found almost universally in the visual arts; and the multicursal model, with blind alleys and dead ends, characteristic of literary texts. This paradigmatic clash between the labyrinths of art and of literature becomes a key to the metaphorical potential of the maze, as Doob's examination of a vast array of materials from the classical period through the Middle Ages suggests. She concludes with linked readings of four "labyrinths of words": Virgil's Aeneid, Boethius' Consolation of Philosophy, Dante's Divine Comedy, and Chaucer's House of Fame, each of which plays with and transforms received ideas of the labyrinth as well as reflecting and responding to aspects of the texts that influenced it. Doob not only provides fresh theoretical and historical perspectives on the labyrinth tradition, but also portrays a complex medieval aesthetic that helps us to approach structurally elaborate early works. Readers in such fields as Classical literature, Medieval Studies, Renaissance Studies, comparative literature, literary theory, art history, and intellectual history will welcome this wide-ranging and illuminating book.