Political Ethics and Public Office

Political Ethics and Public Office

Author: Dennis Frank Thompson

Publisher: Cambridge, Mass. : Harvard University Press

Published: 1987

Total Pages: 286

ISBN-13:

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Are public officials morally justified in threatening violence, engaging in deception, or forcing citizens to act for their own good? Can individual officials be held morally accountable for the wrongs that governments commit? Dennis Thompson addresses these questions by developing a conception of political ethics that respects the demands of both morality and politics. He criticizes conventional conceptions for failing to appreciate the difference democracy makes, and for ascribing responsibility only to isolated leaders or to impersonal organizations. His book seeks to recapture the sense that men and women, acting for us and together with us in a democratic process, make the moral choices that govern our public life.


Multidisciplinary Approaches to Ethics in the Digital Era

Multidisciplinary Approaches to Ethics in the Digital Era

Author: Taskiran, Meliha Nurdan

Publisher: IGI Global

Published: 2021-03-18

Total Pages: 369

ISBN-13: 1799841189

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The digital era has redefined our understanding of ethics as a multi-disciplinary phenomenon. The newness of the internet means it is still highly unregulated, which allows for rampant problems encountered by countless internet users. In order to establish a framework to protect digital citizenship, an academic understanding of online ethics is required. Multidisciplinary Approaches to Ethics in the Digital Era examines the concept of ethics in the digital environment through the framework of digitalization. Covering a broad range of topics including ethics in art, organizational ethics, and civil engineering ethics, this book is ideally designed for media professionals, sociologists, programmers, policymakers, government officials, academicians, researchers, and students.


Public Philosophy

Public Philosophy

Author: Michael J. Sandel

Publisher: Harvard University Press

Published: 2005

Total Pages: 314

ISBN-13: 9780674019287

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In this book, Michael Sandel takes up some of the hotly contested moral and political issues of our time, including affirmative action, assisted suicide, abortion, gay rights, stem cell research, the meaning of toleration and civility, the gap between rich and poor, the role of markets, and the place of religion in public life. He argues that the most prominent ideals in our political life--individual rights and freedom of choice--do not by themselves provide an adequate ethic for a democratic society. Sandel calls for a politics that gives greater emphasis to citizenship, community, and civic virtue, and that grapples more directly with questions of the good life. Liberals often worry that inviting moral and religious argument into the public sphere runs the risk of intolerance and coercion. These essays respond to that concern by showing that substantive moral discourse is not at odds with progressive public purposes, and that a pluralist society need not shrink from engaging the moral and religious convictions that its citizens bring to public life.


Honor in Political and Moral Philosophy

Honor in Political and Moral Philosophy

Author: Peter Olsthoorn

Publisher: State University of New York Press

Published: 2014-12-03

Total Pages: 226

ISBN-13: 1438455488

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In this history of the development of ideas of honor in Western philosophy, Peter Olsthoorn examines what honor is, how its meaning has changed, and whether it can still be of use. Political and moral philosophers from Cicero to John Stuart Mill thought that a sense of honor and concern for our reputation could help us to determine the proper thing to do, and just as important, provide us with the much-needed motive to do it. Today, outside of the military and some other pockets of resistance, the notion of honor has become seriously out of date, while the term itself has almost disappeared from our moral language. Most of us think that people ought to do what is right based on a love for jus-tice rather than from a concern with how we are perceived by others. Wide-ranging and accessible, the book explores the role of honor in not only philosophy but also literature and war to make the case that honor can still play an important role in contemporary life.


Ethics for Adversaries

Ethics for Adversaries

Author: Arthur Isak Applbaum

Publisher: Princeton University Press

Published: 2000-07-10

Total Pages: 286

ISBN-13: 1400822939

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The adversary professions--law, business, and government, among others--typically claim a moral permission to violate persons in ways that, if not for the professional role, would be morally wrong. Lawyers advance bad ends and deceive, business managers exploit and despoil, public officials enforce unjust laws, and doctors keep confidences that, if disclosed, would prevent harm. Ethics for Adversaries is a philosophical inquiry into arguments that are offered to defend seemingly wrongful actions performed by those who occupy what Montaigne called "necessary offices." Applbaum begins by examining the career of Charles-Henri Sanson, who is appointed executioner of Paris by Louis XVI and serves the punitive needs of the ancien régime for decades. Come the French Revolution, the King's Executioner becomes the king's executioner, and he ministers with professional detachment to each defeated political faction throughout the Terror and its aftermath. By exploring one extraordinary role and the arguments that can be offered in its defense, Applbaum raises unsettling doubts about arguments in defense of less sanguinary professions and their practices. To justify harmful acts, adversaries appeal to arguments about the rules of the game, fair play, consent, the social construction of actions and actors, good outcomes in equilibrium, and the legitimate authority of institutions. Applbaum concludes that these arguments are weaker than supposed and do not morally justify much of the violation that professionals and public officials inflict. Institutions and the roles they create ordinarily cannot mint moral permissions to do what otherwise would be morally prohibited.


Do Morals Matter?

Do Morals Matter?

Author: Joseph S. Nye

Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA

Published: 2020

Total Pages: 273

ISBN-13: 0190935960

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What is the role of ethics in American foreign policy? The Trump Administration has elevated this from a theoretical question to front-page news. Should ethics even play a role, or should we only focus on defending our material interests? In Do Morals Matter? Joseph S. Nye provides a concise yet penetrating analysis of how modern American presidents have-and have not-incorporated ethics into their foreign policy. Nye examines each presidency during theAmerican era post-1945 and scores them on the success they achieved in implementing an ethical foreign policy. Alongside this, he evaluates their leadership qualities, explaining which approaches work and which ones do not.


The Ethics of Social Punishment

The Ethics of Social Punishment

Author: Linda Radzik

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2020-11-12

Total Pages: 181

ISBN-13: 1108836062

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This book critically evaluates the way ordinary people enforce morality in everyday life.


What Money Can't Buy

What Money Can't Buy

Author: Michael J. Sandel

Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux

Published: 2012-04-24

Total Pages: 246

ISBN-13: 1429942584

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In What Money Can't Buy, renowned political philosopher Michael J. Sandel rethinks the role that markets and money should play in our society. Should we pay children to read books or to get good grades? Should we put a price on human life to decide how much pollution to allow? Is it ethical to pay people to test risky new drugs or to donate their organs? What about hiring mercenaries to fight our wars, outsourcing inmates to for-profit prisons, auctioning admission to elite universities, or selling citizenship to immigrants willing to pay? In his New York Times bestseller What Money Can't Buy, Michael J. Sandel takes up one of the biggest ethical questions of our time: Isn't there something wrong with a world in which everything is for sale? If so, how can we prevent market values from reaching into spheres of life where they don't belong? What are the moral limits of markets? Over recent decades, market values have crowded out nonmarket norms in almost every aspect of life. Without quite realizing it, Sandel argues, we have drifted from having a market economy to being a market society. In Justice, an international bestseller, Sandel showed himself to be a master at illuminating, with clarity and verve, the hard moral questions we confront in our everyday lives. Now, in What Money Can't Buy, he provokes a debate that's been missing in our market-driven age: What is the proper role of markets in a democratic society, and how can we protect the moral and civic goods that markets do not honor and money cannot buy?


The Ethics of Everyday Life

The Ethics of Everyday Life

Author: Michael C. Banner

Publisher:

Published: 2014

Total Pages: 241

ISBN-13: 0198722060

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Why do we have children and what do we raise them for? Does the proliferation of depictions of suffering in the media enhance, or endanger, compassion? How do we live and die well in the extended periods of debility which old age now threatens? Why and how should we grieve for the dead? And how should we properly remember other grief and grievances? In addressing such questions, the Christian imagination of human life has been powerfully shaped by the imagination of Christ's life Christs conception, birth, suffering, death, and burial have been subjects of profound attention in Christian thought, just as they are moments of special interest and concern in each and every human life. However, they are also sites of contention and controversy, where what it is to be human is discovered, constructed, and contested. Conception, birth, suffering, burial, and death are occasions, in other words, for profound and continuing questioning regarding the meaning of human life, as controversies to do with IVF, abortion, euthanasia, and the use of bodies and body parts post mortem, indicate. In The Ethics of Everyday Life, Michael Banner argues that moral theology must reconceive its nature and tasks if it is not only to articulate its own account of human being, but also to enter into constructive contention with other accounts. In particular, it must be willing to learn from and engage with social anthropology if it is to offer powerful and plausible portrayals of the moral life and answers to the questions which trouble modernity. Drawing in wide-ranging fashion from social anthropology and from Christian thought and practice from many periods, and influenced especially by his engagement in public policy matters including as a member of the UK's Human Tissue Authority, Banner develops the outlines of an everyday ethics, stretching from before the cradle to after the grave.