Both communitarianism and casuistry have sought to restore ethics as a practical science—the former by incorporating various traditions into a shared definition of the common good, the latter by considering the circumstances of each situation through critical reasoning.
Mark G. Kuczewski analyzes the origins and methods of these two approaches and forges from them a new unified approach. This approach takes the communitarian notion of the person as its starting point but also relies upon the narrative and analogical tools of case-based reasoning. He separates out the rhetoric that is incongruent with the Aristotelian aspirations of each method to show that the two are complementary, and that consensus can emerge from fragmentation.
He then applies his resulting method to three major problems in bioethics: the difficulties that the issue of personal identity poses for advance directives, the role of the family in medical decision making, and the refusal of treatment because of religious beliefs. He analyzes the need to assume a communitarian notion of the person as a starting point for the application of casuistic insights.
Combining theoretical, practical, and scholarly insights, this book will be of interest to philosophers, political and social scientists, and bioethicists.
An ambitious look at rhetoric and psychosis that explores how communities form when society collapses
American society seems to have fractured. Common touchpoints of authority have receded in recent decades and beliefs that were once taboo are now openly shared, from neo-Nazism to occultism to conspiracy thinking. In this book, Calum Lister Matheson goes beyond the fraying of contemporary American culture to ask how splinter communities form in our current media environment, what keeps them together, and what they build from the ruins of shared language.
In his stirring exploration of how people communicate when old forms of authority and meaning collapse, Matheson examines far-flung groups that have departed the mainstream—Sandy Hook deniers, Appalachian serpent handlers, pro-anorexia bloggers, incels, transvestigators, pseudoscientific reactionaries, and more—and finds unexpected similarities among their many differences. Key among their parallels is the insistence that the symbols shared by each community represent a hidden truth that cannot be questioned or interpreted but is revealed through signs—words, images, videos, and texts. By documenting American fringe cultures, extremism, and the social functions of language, this book rethinks concepts like irony, psychosis, propriety, and what it means to be normal in weird times.
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