front cover of Making Good
Making Good
How Young People Cope with Moral Dilemmas at Work
Wendy Fischman, Becca Solomon, Deborah Schutte, and Howard Gardner
Harvard University Press, 2005

You're young, ambitious, entering the field of your dreams; you're on your own, the competition is fierce--and then you see your chance: the big story, the big role, the big discovery. But you'll have to cut a few corners, bend the rules, cheat a bit. What choices will you make?

After studying more than a hundred young people launching their careers, these longtime researchers of "good work"--work that is both skillful and honorable--find unsettling answers. Although young workers know what it takes to do good work, they don't always feel they can follow the ethical route. "Later, when I'm successful," is their implicit promise.

Making Good explores the choices confronting young workers who join the ranks of three dynamic professions--journalism, science, and acting--and looks at how the novices navigate moral dilemmas posed by a demanding, frequently lonely, professional life. The authors also uncover striking comparisons between these young professionals and the veterans in their fields--most notably, older workers recall inspiring models and mentors, while today's beginners see themselves as on their own. With extensive insights into how young workers view their respective domains, the nature of their ambitions, the sacrifices they are willing to make, and the lines they are prepared to cross, this study will prove instructive to young employees and employers alike, as well as to those who wish to understand the shifting moral and social character of the working world.

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Making Matters
Craft, Ethics, and New Materialist Rhetorics
Leigh Gruwell
Utah State University Press, 2022
Craft is a process-oriented practice that takes seriously the relationships between bodies—both human and nonhuman—and makes apparent how these relationships are mired in and informed by power structures. Making Matters introduces craft agency, a feminist vision of new materialist rhetorics that enables scholars to identify how power circulates and sometimes stagnates within assemblages of actors and provides tools to rectify that uneven distribution.
 
To recast new materialist rhetorics as inherently crafty, Leigh Gruwell historicizes and locates the concept of craft both within rhetorical history as well as in the disciplinary history of writing studies. Her investigation centers on three specific case studies: craftivism, the fibercraft website Ravelry, and the 2017 Women’s March. These instances all highlight how a material, ecological understanding of rhetorical agency can enact political change.
 
Craft agency models how we humans might work with and alongside things—nonhuman, sometimes digital, sometimes material—to create more equitable relationships. Making Matters argues that craft is a useful starting point for addressing criticisms of new materialist rhetorics not only because doing so places rhetorical action as a product of complex relationships between a network of human and nonhuman actors, but also because it does so with an explicitly activist agenda that positions the body itself as a material interface.
 
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The Making of the Unborn Patient
A Social Anatomy of Fetal Surgery
Casper, Monica J
Rutgers University Press, 1998
Winner of the 1998 C. Wright Mills Award from the Society for the Study of Social Problems

It is now possible for physicians to recognize that a pregnant woman's fetus is facing life-threatening problems, perform surgery on the fetus, and if it survives, return it to the woman's uterus to finish gestation. Although fetal surgery has existed in various forms for three decades, it is only just beginning to capture the public's imagination. These still largely experimental procedures raise all types of medical, political and ethical questions. Who is the patient? What are the technical difficulties involved in fetal surgery? How do reproductive politics seep into the operating room, and how do medical definitions and meanings flow out of medicine and into other social spheres? How are ethical issues defined in this practice and who defines them? Is fetal surgery the kind of medicine we want? What is involved in reframing fetal surgery as a women's health issue, rather than simply a pediatric concern? In this ethnographic study of the social, cultural and historical aspects of fetal surgery, Monica Casper addresses these questions. The Making of the Unborn Patient examines two important and connected events of the second half of the 20th century: the emergence of fetal surgery as a new medical specialty and the debut of the unborn patient.
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Making Sense of Science
Separating Substance from Spin
Cornelia Dean
Harvard University Press, 2017

A Los Angeles Times Book Prize Finalist

Most of us learn about science from media coverage, and anyone seeking factual information on climate change, vaccine safety, genetically modified foods, or the dangers of peanut allergies has to sift through an avalanche of bogus assertions, misinformation, and carefully packaged spin. Cornelia Dean draws on thirty years of experience as a science reporter at the New York Times to expose the tricks that handicap readers with little background in science. She reveals how activists, business spokespersons, religious leaders, and talk show hosts influence the way science is reported and describes the conflicts of interest that color research. At a time when facts are under daily assault, Making Sense of Science seeks to equip nonscientists with a set of critical tools to evaluate the claims and controversies that shape our lives.

Making Sense of Science explains how to decide who is an expert, how to understand data, what you need to do to read science and figure out whether someone is lying to you… If science leaves you with a headache trying to figure out what’s true, what it all means and who to trust, Dean’s book is a great place to start.”
Casper Star-Tribune

“Fascinating… Its mission is to help nonscientists evaluate scientific claims, with much attention paid to studies related to health.”
Seattle Times

“This engaging book offers non-scientists the tools to connect with and evaluate science, and for scientists it is a timely call to action for effective communication.”
Times Higher Education

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Manly Writing
Gender, Rhetoric and the Rise of Compostion
Miriam Brody
Southern Illinois University Press, 1993

In this critical history of the gendered politics of rhetoric and the rise of composition, Miriam Brody argues that nothing about words or their arrangement is innately gendered. Yet since the English Enlightenment, teachers have encouraged their students to admire and imitate "manly" writing, writing that is plain, forceful, cogent, and true. Similarly, students have been enjoined to avoid so-called effeminate or feminine writing—writing characterized as vague, unorganized, ornate, and deceitful.

Such advice, part of what Brody terms the hidden curriculum, has served the interests of discourse communities as various as the early Enlightenment Royal Society in seventeenth-century London (by urging a clear and masculine style for the work of science) and the land-grant universities of nineteenth-century America (by claiming that the work of writing was similar to clearing the land and pushing back the frontier). Brody’s discussion in fact becomes a social history of canonical rhetorical essays and important late Enlightenment, nineteenth-century, and early modern school texts. She points out that in their advice to writers even the Strunks and Whites and Peter Elbows of more recent times have extolled masculine virtues and urged control over invasive and problematic feminine qualities.

Brody’s book not only clarifies rhetoric’s inheritance and transformation of the classical ideal of manliness, it also is the first critical work to explore the ideological significance of gendered imagery and to interpret in light of this imagery rhetorical essays and hard-to-locate early composition texts against a background of previously unpublished archival materials.

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The Market as God
Harvey Cox
Harvard University Press, 2016

“Essential and thoroughly engaging…Harvey Cox’s ingenious sense of how market theology has developed a scripture, a liturgy, and sophisticated apologetics allow us to see old challenges in a remarkably fresh light.”
—E. J. Dionne, Jr.


We have fallen in thrall to the theology of supply and demand. According to its acolytes, the Market is omniscient, omnipotent, and omnipresent. It can raise nations and ruin households, and comes complete with its own doctrines, prophets, and evangelical zeal. Harvey Cox brings this theology out of the shadows, demonstrating that the way the world economy operates is shaped by a global system of values that can be best understood as a religion.

Drawing on biblical sources and the work of social scientists, Cox points to many parallels between the development of Christianity and the Market economy. It is only by understanding how the Market reached its “divine” status that can we hope to restore it to its proper place as servant of humanity.

“Cox argues that…we are now imprisoned by the dictates of a false god that we ourselves have created. We need to break free and reclaim our humanity.”
Forbes

“Cox clears the space for a new generation of Christians to begin to develop a more public and egalitarian politics.”
The Nation

[more]

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Meat!
A Transnational Analysis
Sushmita Chatterjee and Banu Subramaniam, editors
Duke University Press, 2021
What is meat? Is it simply food to consume, or a metaphor for our own bodies? Can “bloody” vegan burgers, petri dish beef, live animals, or human milk be categorized as meat? In pursuing these questions, the contributors to Meat! trace the shifting boundaries of the meanings of meat across time, geography, and cultures. In studies of chicken, fish, milk, barbecue, fake meat, animal sacrifice, cannibalism, exotic meat, frozen meat, and other manifestations of meat, they highlight meat's entanglements with race, gender, sexuality, and disability. From the imperial politics embedded in labeling canned white tuna as “the chicken of the sea” to the relationship between beef bans, yoga, and bodily purity in Hindu nationalist politics, the contributors demonstrate how meat is an ideal vantage point from which to better understand transnational circuits of power and ideology as well as the histories of colonialism, ableism, and sexism.

Contributors. Neel Ahuja, Irina Aristarkhova, Sushmita Chatterjee, Mel Y. Chen, Kim Q. Hall, Jennifer A. Hamilton, Anita Mannur, Elspeth Probyn, Parama Roy, Banu Subramaniam, Angela Willey, Psyche Williams-Forson
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Media and Values
Intimate Transgressions in a Changing Moral and Cultural Landscape
David E. Morrison, Matthew Kieran, Michael Svennevig and Sarah Ventress
Intellect Books, 2007
Media and Values investigates the moral performance of the media. Based on an exhaustive number of focus groups, surveys, and interviews with senior media staffers in the United Kingdom and Europe, this book charts the changing status of the media as a moral voice. The authors argue that television has lost the authority to espouse a single vision of the proper way to live, and instead reflects the norms of a variety of social groups.  This groundbreaking volume addresses the lack of moral certainty reflected both in television programs and their audiences.
 
“There are great riches here: from the interviews with senior media executives . . . to the discussion of popular television culture's celebration of celebrity.”—John Lloyd, Prospect
 
“This profoundly original and learned book creatively illuminates citizens’ moral reasoning about the media, culture, and government. A tour de force of nuanced interdisciplinary scholarship, Media & Values offers wide-ranging insights into the responsibilities of the communication industry, the justifications and consequences of telecoms regulation—and the nature of the good society itself.”—Robert M. Entman, J. B. and M. C. Shapiro Professor of Media & Public Affairs, George Washington University
 
“This is a very important book—a ‘must read.’ The intellectual scope is astonishing: the problem it addresses is quite crucial—namely the moral incoherence of the contemporary world and the way that this shows up in empirical research into individual attitudes/opinions/tastes/judgements. It is clearly a cumulative critical reassessment of the implications of research going back to the sixties. It’s original, powerful, thoughtful and spot-on as a diagnosis of the times and the very real issues we confront today. A major piece of work.”—Paddy Scannell, Department of Communication Studies, University of Michigan
 
 
 
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Medical Research for Hire
The Political Economy of Pharmaceutical Clinical Trials
Fisher, Jill A
Rutgers University Press, 2008
Today, more than 75 percent of pharmaceutical drug trials in the United States are being conducted in the private sector. Once the sole province of academic researchers, these important studies are now being outsourced to non-academic physicians.

According to Jill A. Fisher, this major change in the way medical research is performed is the outcome of two problems in U.S. health care: decreasing revenue for physicians and decreasing access to treatment for patients. As physicians report diminishing income due to restrictive relationships with insurers, increasing malpractice insurance premiums, and inflated overhead costs to operate private practices, they are attracted to pharmaceutical contract research for its lucrative return. Clinical trials also provide limited medical access to individuals who have no or inadequate health insurance because they offer "free" doctors' visits, diagnostic tests, and medications to participants. Focusing on the professional roles of those involved, as well as key research practices, Fisher assesses the risks and advantages for physicians and patients alike when pharmaceutical drug studies are used as an alternative to standard medical care.

A volume in the Critical Issues in Health and Medicine series, edited by Rima D. Apple and Janet Golden

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Metaliterate Learning for the Post-Truth World
Thomas P. Mackey
American Library Association, 2018

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Money, Morals, and Manners
The Culture of the French and the American Upper-Middle Class
Michèle Lamont
University of Chicago Press, 1992
Drawing on remarkably frank, in-depth interviews with 160 successful men in the United States and France, Michèle Lamont provides a rare and revealing collective portrait of the upper-middle class—the managers, professionals, entrepreneurs, and experts at the center of power in society. Her book is a subtle, textured description of how these men define the values and attitudes they consider essential in separating themselves—and their class—from everyone else.

Money, Morals, and Manners is an ambitious and sophisticated attempt to illuminate the nature of social class in modern society. For all those who downplay the importance of unequal social groups, it will be a revelation.

"A powerful, cogent study that will provide an elevated basis for debates in the sociology of culture for years to come."—David Gartman, American Journal of Sociology

"A major accomplishment! Combining cultural analysis and comparative approach with a splendid literary style, this book significantly broadens the understanding of stratification and inequality. . . . This book will provoke debate, inspire research, and serve as a model for many years to come."—R. Granfield, Choice

"This is an exceptionally fine piece of work, a splendid example of the sociologist's craft."—Lewis Coser, Boston College

[more]

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Monitoring the Movies
The Fight over Film Censorship in Early Twentieth-Century Urban America
By Jennifer Fronc
University of Texas Press, 2017

As movies took the country by storm in the early twentieth century, Americans argued fiercely about whether municipal or state authorities should step in to control what people could watch when they went to movie theaters, which seemed to be springing up on every corner. Many who opposed the governmental regulation of film conceded that some entity—boards populated by trusted civic leaders, for example—needed to safeguard the public good. The National Board of Review of Motion Pictures (NB), a civic group founded in New York City in 1909, emerged as a national cultural chaperon well suited to protect this emerging form of expression from state incursions.

Using the National Board’s extensive files, Monitoring the Movies offers the first full-length study of the NB and its campaign against motion-picture censorship. Jennifer Fronc traces the NB’s Progressive-era founding in New York; its evolving set of “standards” for directors, producers, municipal officers, and citizens; its “city plan,” which called on citizens to report screenings of condemned movies to local officials; and the spread of the NB’s influence into the urban South. Ultimately, Monitoring the Movies shows how Americans grappled with the issues that arose alongside the powerful new medium of film: the extent of the right to produce and consume images and the proper scope of government control over what citizens can see and show.

[more]

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The Moral Austerity of Environmental Decision Making
Sustainability, Democracy, and Normative Argument in Policy and Law
John Martin Gillroy and Joe Bowersox, eds.
Duke University Press, 2002
In The Moral Austerity of Environmental Decision Making a group of prominent environmental ethicists, policy analysts, political theorists, and legal experts challenges the dominating influence of market principles and assumptions on the formulation of environmental policy. Emphasizing the concept of sustainability and the centrality of moral deliberation to democracy, they examine the possibilities for a wider variety of moral principles to play an active role in defining “good” environmental decisions. If environmental policy is to be responsible to humanity and to nature in the twenty-first century, they argue, it is imperative that the discourse acknowledge and integrate additional normative assumptions and principles other than those endorsed by the market paradigm.
The contributors search for these assumptions and principles in short arguments and debates over the role of science, social justice, instrumental value, and intrinsic value in contemporary environmental policy. In their discussion of moral alternatives to enrich environmental decision making and in their search for a less austere and more robust role for normative discourse in practical policy making, they analyze a series of original case studies that deal with environmental sustainability and natural resources policy including pollution, land use, environmental law, globalism, and public lands. The unique structure of the book—which features the core contributors responding in a discourse format to the central chapters’ essays and debates—helps to highlight the role personal and public values play in democratic decision making generally and in the field of environmental politics specifically.

Contributors. Joe Bowersox, David Brower, Susan Buck, Celia Campbell-Mohn, John Martin Gillroy, Joel Kassiola, Jan Laitos, William Lowry, Bryan Norton, Robert Paehlke, Barry G. Rabe, Mark Sagoff, Anna K. Schwab, Bob Pepperman Taylor, Jonathan Wiener

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The Moral Authority of Nature
Edited by Lorraine Daston and Fernando Vidal
University of Chicago Press, 2003
For thousands of years, people have used nature to justify their political, moral, and social judgments. Such appeals to the moral authority of nature are still very much with us today, as heated debates over genetically modified organisms and human cloning testify.

The Moral Authority of Nature offers a wide-ranging account of how people have used nature to think about what counts as good, beautiful, just, or valuable. The eighteen essays cover a diverse array of topics, including the connection of cosmic and human orders in ancient Greece, medieval notions of sexual disorder, early modern contexts for categorizing individuals and judging acts as "against nature," race and the origin of humans, ecological economics, and radical feminism. The essays also range widely in time and place, from archaic Greece to early twentieth-century China, medieval Europe to contemporary America.

Scholars from a wide variety of fields will welcome The Moral Authority of Nature, which provides the first sustained historical survey of its topic.

Contributors:
Danielle Allen, Joan Cadden, Lorraine Daston, Fa-ti Fan, Eckhardt Fuchs, Valentin Groebner, Abigail J. Lustig, Gregg Mitman, Michelle Murphy, Katharine Park, Matt Price, Robert N. Proctor, Helmut Puff, Robert J. Richards, Londa Schiebinger, Laura Slatkin, Julia Adeney Thomas, Fernando Vidal
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The Moral Dimensions of Public Policy Choice
Beyond the Market Paradigm
John Martin Gillroy
University of Pittsburgh Press, 1992

Combining philosophy with practical politics, an expanding area of policy studies applies moral precepts, critical principles, and conventional values to collective decisions.  This evolving new approach to policy analysis asserts that the same variety of ethical principles available to the individual are also available to make collective decisions in the public interest and should be used.

Although policy analysis has long been dominated by assumptions originally developed for the examination of markets, such as efficiency, these essays by leading scholars - the best work done in the field over the past three decades - explore alternatives to the “market paradigm” and show how moral discrimination and choice can extend beyond the individual to encompass public decisions.

Chapters by John Martin Gillroy and Maurice Wade review the political philosophies of Immanuel Kant and David Hume as backgrounds for the development of modern concepts of public policy choice.  They present this anthology as a first step in codifying options, arguments, and methods within this important developing area of policy studies.

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Moral Dimensions
Permissibility, Meaning, Blame
T. M. Scanlon
Harvard University Press, 2010

In a clear and elegant style, T. M. Scanlon reframes current philosophical debates as he explores the moral permissibility of an action. Permissibility may seem to depend on the agent’s reasons for performing an action. For example, there seems to be an important moral difference between tactical bombing and a campaign by terrorists—even if the same number of non-combatants are killed—and this difference may seem to lie in the agents’ respective aims. However, Scanlon argues that the apparent dependence of permissibility on the agent’s reasons in such cases is merely a failure to distinguish between two kinds of moral assessment: assessment of the permissibility of an action and assessment of the way an agent decided what to do.

Distinguishing between these two forms of assessment leads Scanlon to an important distinction between the permissibility of an action and its meaning: the significance for others of the agent’s willingness to act in this way. An action’s meaning depends on the agent’s reasons for performing it in a way that its permissibility does not. Blame, he argues, is a response to the meaning of an action rather than its permissibility. This analysis leads to a novel account of the conditions of moral responsibility and to important conclusions about the ethics of blame.

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Moral Ecology of a Forest
The Nature Industry and Maya Post-Conservation
José E. Martínez-Reyes
University of Arizona Press, 2016
Forests are alive, filled with rich, biologically complex life forms and the interrelationships of multiple species and materials. Vulnerable to a host of changing conditions in this global era, forests are in peril as never before. New markets in carbon and environmental services attract speculators. In the name of conservation, such speculators attempt to undermine local land control in these desirable areas.

Moral Ecology of a Forest provides an ethnographic account of conservation politics, particularly the conflict between Western conservation and Mayan ontological ecology. The difficult interactions of the Maya of central Quintana Roo, Mexico, for example, or the Mayan communities of the Sain Ka’an Biosphere, demonstrate the clashing interests with Western biodiversity conservation initiatives. The conflicts within the forest of Quintana Roo represent the outcome of nature in this global era, where the forces of land grabbing, conservation promotion and organizations, and capitalism vie for control of forests and land.

Forests pose living questions. In addition to the ever-thrilling biology of interdependent species, forests raise questions in the sphere of political economy, and thus raise cultural and moral questions. The economic aspects focus on the power dynamics and ideological perspectives over who controls, uses, exploits, or preserves those life forms and landscapes. The cultural and moral issues focus on the symbolic meanings, forms of knowledge, and obligations that people of different backgrounds, ethnicities, and classes have constructed in relation to their lands. The Maya Forest of Quintana Roo is a historically disputed place in which these three questions come together.
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Moral Emotions
Reclaiming the Evidence of the Heart
Anthony J. Steinbock
Northwestern University Press, 2014
Winner, 2015 CSCP Symposium Book Award

Moral Emotions builds upon the philosophical theory of persons begun in Phenomenology and Mysticism and marks a new stage of phenomenology. Author Anthony J. Steinbock finds personhood analyzing key emotions, called moral emotions. Moral Emotions offers a systematic account of the moral emotions, described here as pride, shame, and guilt as emotions of self-givenness; repentance, hope, and despair as emotions of possibility; and trusting, loving, and humility as emotions of otherness.
 
The author argues these reveal basic structures of interpersonal experience. By exhibiting their own kind of cognition and evidence, the moral emotions not only help to clarify the meaning of person, they reveal novel concepts of freedom, critique, and normativity. As such, they are able to engage our contemporary social imaginaries at the impasse of modernity and postmodernity.
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Moral Entanglements
Conserving Birds in Britain and Germany
Stefan Bargheer
University of Chicago Press, 2018
At the center of Stefan Bargheer’s account of bird watching, field ornithology, and nature conservation in Britain and Germany stands the question of how values change over time and how individuals develop moral commitments. Using life history data derived from written narratives and oral histories, Moral Entanglements follows the development of conservation from the point in time at which the greatest declines in bird life took place to the current efforts in large-scale biodiversity conservation and environmental policy within the European Union. While often depicted as the outcome of an environmental revolution that has taken place since the 1960s, Bargheer demonstrates to the contrary that the relevant practices and institutions that shape contemporary conservation have evolved gradually since the early nineteenth century. Moral Entanglements further shows that the practices and institutions in which bird conservation is entangled differ between the two countries. In Britain, birds derived their meaning in the context of the game of bird watching as a leisure activity. Here birds are now, as then, the most popular and best protected taxonomic group of wildlife due to their particularly suitable status as toys in a collecting game, turning nature into a playground. In Germany, by contrast, birds were initially part of the world of work. They were protected as useful economic tools, rendering services of ecological pest control in a system of agricultural production modeled after the factory shop floor. Based on this extensive analysis, Bargheer formulates a sociology of morality informed by a pragmatist theory of value.
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The Moral Meaning of Nature
Nietzsche’s Darwinian Religion and Its Critics
Peter J. Woodford
University of Chicago Press, 2018
What, if anything, does biological evolution tell us about the nature of religion, ethical values, or even the meaning and purpose of life? The Moral Meaning of Nature sheds new light on these enduring questions by examining the significance of an earlier—and unjustly neglected—discussion of Darwin in late nineteenth-century Germany.
 
We start with Friedrich Nietzsche, whose writings staged one of the first confrontations with the Christian tradition using the resources of Darwinian thought. The lebensphilosophie, or “life-philosophy,” that arose from his engagement with evolutionary ideas drew responses from other influential thinkers, including Franz Overbeck, Georg Simmel, and Heinrich Rickert. These critics all offered cogent challenges to Nietzsche’s appropriation of the newly transforming biological sciences, his negotiation between science and religion, and his interpretation of the implications of Darwinian thought. They also each proposed alternative ways of making sense of Nietzsche’s unique question concerning the meaning of biological evolution “for life.” At the heart of the discussion were debates about the relation of facts and values, the place of divine purpose in the understanding of nonhuman and human agency, the concept of life, and the question of whether the sciences could offer resources to satisfy the human urge to discover sources of value in biological processes. The Moral Meaning of Nature focuses on the historical background of these questions, exposing the complex ways in which they recur in contemporary philosophical debate.
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A Moral Military
Sidney Axinn
Temple University Press, 2008

In this new edition of the classic book on the moral conduct of war, Sidney Axinn provides a full-length treatment of the military conventions from a philosophical point of view. Axinn considers these basic ethical questions within the context of the laws of warfare: Should a good soldier ever disobey a direct military order? Are there restrictions on how we fight a war? What is meant by “military honor,” and does it really affect the contemporary soldier? Is human dignity possible under battlefield conditions?

Axinn answers “yes” to these questions. His objective in A Moral Military is to establish a basic framework for moral military action and to assist in analyzing military professional ethics. He argues for the seriousness of the concept of military honor but limits honorable military activity by a strict interpretation of the notion of war crime.

With revisions and expansions throughout, including a new chapter on torture, A Moral Military is an essential guide on the nature of war during a time when the limits of acceptable behavior are being stretched in new directions.

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A Moral Military
Sidney Axinn
Temple University Press, 1990
"Sidney Axinn addresses the hardest questions raised by the experience of war and argues his way to clear and forthright answers. His book is a virtuoso display of intellectual energy and moral courage." --Michael Walzer, Institute for Advanced Study Should a good soldier ever disobey a direct military order? Are there restrictions on how we fight a war? What is meant by "military honor," and does it really affect the contemporary soldier? Is human dignity possible under battlefield conditions? Sidney Axinn considers these basic ethical questions within the context of the laws of warfare and answers "yes" to each of these questions. In this study of the conduct of war, he examines actions that are honorable or dishonorable and provides the first full-length treatment of the military conventions from a philosophical point of view. Axinn gives a philosophical analysis of the "Laws of Warfare" as found in the Hague and Geneva Conventions, which have been agreed to by almost every nation in the world. The aims of his study are to establish a basic twentieth-century framework for moral military action and to assist military personnel in analyzing their won professional ethic. Stating that moral reasoning is required by people in military uniform in a wide variety of situations, the author examines the question of the limits of military obedience. Axinn argues for the seriousness of the concept of military honor but limits honorable military activity by a strict interpretation of the notion of war crime. Major chapters deal with military honor, prisoners of war, spying, war crimes, the dirty-hands theory of command, nuclear weapons, terrorism, and covert operations. This philosophical study of the line between honorable and dishonorable military action cautions that in compliance with the war conventions professional military personnel and knowledgeable civilians must not lose their moral nerve nor abandon honor to satisfy immoral political requests. "This is an excellent and long-overdue text on the ethics of the profession of arms. It will be welcomed by both students and instructors due to its straightforward yet entertaining approach to this complex subject. I recommend it highly for both the professional soldier and the citizen concerned with the way his or her country conducts its defense." --LTC John Nugent, USA "In order to make warfare more humane, the [Geneva and the Hague] Conventions require nations to teach their provisions to their entire military and civilian populations. This book is written to promote and achieve that end, to defend the rules of war and to explain the reasons for them. …it goes a long way toward teaching the basic Conventions of war and showing strong reasons for following them." --Choice "An interesting read. If war is immoral, can a war be fought morally? According to Axinn, yes." --Reference and Research Book News
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Moral Minefields
How Sociologists Debate Good Science
Shai M. Dromi and Samuel D. Stabler
University of Chicago Press, 2023
An analysis of the effects of moral debates on sociological research.

Few academic disciplines are as contentious as sociology. Sociologists routinely turn on their peers with fierce criticisms not only of their empirical rigor and theoretical clarity but of their character as well. Yet despite the controversy, scholars manage to engage in thorny debates without being censured. How?
 
In Moral Minefields, Shai M. Dromi and Samuel D. Stabler consider five recent controversial topics in sociology—race and genetics, secularization theory, methodological nationalism, the culture of poverty, and parenting practices—to reveal how moral debates affect the field. Sociologists, they show, tend to respond to moral criticism of scholarly work in one of three ways. While some accept and endorse the criticism, others work out new ways to address these topics that can transcend the criticism, while still others build on the debates to form new, more morally acceptable research.
 
Moral Minefields addresses one of the most prominent questions in contemporary sociological theory: how can sociology contribute to the development of a virtuous society? Rather than suggesting that sociologists adopt a clear paradigm that can guide their research toward neatly defined moral aims, Dromi and Stabler argue that sociologists already largely possess and employ the repertoires to address questions of moral virtue in their research. The conversation thus is moved away from attempts to theorize the moral goods sociologists should support and toward questions about how sociologists manage the plurality of moral positions that present themselves in their studies. Moral diversity within sociology, they show, fosters disciplinary progress. 
 
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Moral Philosophy and Development
The Human Condition in Africa
Tedros Kiros
Ohio University Press, 1992
Although development issues generally have been considered in a framework of economic theory and politics, in this volume Tedros Kiros looks to European ideas of moral philosophy to explain the underdevelopment of Africa and the persistent African food crisis. He draws upon the works of Adam Smith, David Ricardo, Karl Marx and the concepts of hegemony and counter-hegemony. Kiros points out that Africans and Europeans held opposing worldviews upon their initial contact and agrees with those who explain the present condition in Africa partly as the result of European colonialism. In his concluding chapter he develops principles of moral philosophy to guide Africans and others in the future economic development of the African continent.
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Moral Problems in Higher Education
Steven Cahn
Temple University Press, 2011

Moral Problems in Higher Education brings together key essays that explore ethical issues in academia. The editor and contributors-all noted philosophers and educators-consider such topics as academic freedom and tenure, free speech on campus, sexual harassment, preferential student admissions, affirmative action in faculty appointments, and the ideal of a politically neutral university. Chapters address possible restrictions on research because of moral concerns, the structure of peer review, telling the truth to colleagues and students, and concerns raised by intercollegiate athletics.

Cahn selects two key readings in each area to offer a readable introductory guide to these critical subjects for students studying academic ethics and higher education policy. In addition to the selections and a general introduction, Cahn provides study questions for use in the classroom.

Contributors include Scott F. Aikin, Derek Bok, William G. Bowen, Myles Brand, Richard T. DeGeorge, Paul D. Eisenberg, Leslie Pickering Francis, Martin P. Golding, Philip Kitcher, Charles R. Lawrence III, David Lewis, Paul J. Olscamp, Nancy Tuana, David Shatz, George Sher, Robert L. Simon, Robert B. Talisse, Stephan Thernstrom, Abigail Thernstrom, Laurence Thomas, Robert Paul Wolff, and the editor.

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Moral Spaces
Rethinking Ethics And World Politics
David Campbell
University of Minnesota Press, 1999

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Moral Stealth
How "Correct Behavior" Insinuates Itself into Psychotherapeutic Practice
Arnold Goldberg
University of Chicago Press, 2007

A psychiatrist writes a letter to a journal explaining his decision to marry a former patient. Another psychiatrist confides that most of his friends are ex-patients. Both practitioners felt they had to defend their behavior, but psychoanalyst Arnold Goldberg couldn’t pinpoint the reason why. What was wrong about the analysts’ actions? 

In Moral Stealth, Goldberg explores and explains that problem of “correct behavior.” He demonstrates that the inflated and official expectations that are part of an analyst’s training—that therapists be universally curious, hopeful, kind, and purposeful, for example—are often of less help than simple empathy amid the ambiguous morality of actual patient interactions. Being a good therapist and being a good person, he argues, are not necessarily the same. 

Drawing on case studies from his own practice and from the experiences of others, as well as on philosophers such as John Dewey, Slavoj Žižek, and Jürgen Habermas, Goldberg breaks new ground and leads the way for therapists to understand the relationship between private morality and clinical practice.

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The Moral Tradition of American Constitutionalism
A Theological Interpretation
H. Jefferson Powell
Duke University Press, 1993
Debate over the relationship between morality and the law characterizes the contemporary discussion of American constitutionalism. Many theorists equate constitutionalism with the social morality of the American community; others deny the existence of such a community and identify constitutionalism simply as the positive law of the state. In this thoughtful and innovative book, H. Jefferson Powell presents a theological interpretation of the connection between constitutionalism and morality.
Powell locates the origins of constitutional law in the Enlightenment attempt to control the violence of the state by subjecting power to reason. He then traces constitutionalism's rapid evolution into a tradition of rational inquiry centered in the practice of adjudication and embodied in a community of lawyers and judges. Finally, Powell shows how the tradition's nineteenth-century presuppositions about the autonomy and rationality of constitutional argument have been undermined in the twentieth century, within the constitutional community itself, by the acceptance of a positivist and "democratic" understanding of law. Powell shows how the continued willingness of the courts to resolve moral questions by invoking "the Constitution" has thrown the constitutional tradition into an epistemological crisis. He critiques the work of many major theorists—John Hart Ely, Bruce Ackerman, Frank Michaelman, Rogers Smith, Michael Perry, Mark Tushnet, Robert Bork, Sanford Levinson—who, he claims, persist in attempting to resolve the crisis by redefining constitutionalism as American social morality.
With reference to Alasdair MacIntyre's concepts of moral tradition and social practice and John Howard Yoder's theological account of the state, Powell places his analysis of current constitutionalism within a contemporary Christian theological critique of Western liberalism. With certain exceptions, Powell concludes, there are theological grounds in the United States to prefer decision making by elected officials to decision by constitutional courts. Despite the controversial implications for judicial practice and legal argument, Powell ultimately argues that the liberal tradition of rational inquiry--American constitutionalism--be renounced by the Christian community in favor of the majoritarian political process.
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Morality & Imagination
Yi-Fu Tuan
University of Wisconsin Press, 1989
Can the individual and society be both moral and imaginative? In Western society the moral person tends to be regarded as either simple and naive or narrow and bigoted. In contrast, the imaginative person is looked on as someone not bound by the customs of the group and therefore likely to be fanciful and out of touch with reality.
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Morality for Humans
Ethical Understanding from the Perspective of Cognitive Science
Mark Johnson
University of Chicago Press, 2014
What is the difference between right and wrong? This is no easy question to answer, yet we constantly try to make it so, frequently appealing to some hidden cache of cut-and-dried absolutes, whether drawn from God, universal reason, or societal authority. Combining cognitive science with a pragmatist philosophical framework in Morality for Humans: Ethical Understanding from the Perspective of Cognitive Science, Mark Johnson argues that appealing solely to absolute principles and values is not only scientifically unsound but even morally suspect. He shows that the standards for the kinds of people we should be and how we should treat one another—which we often think of as universal—are in fact frequently subject to change. And we should be okay with that. Taking context into consideration, he offers a remarkably nuanced, naturalistic view of ethics that sees us creatively adapt our standards according to given needs, emerging problems, and social interactions.
           
Ethical naturalism is not just a revamped form of relativism. Indeed, Johnson attempts to overcome the absolutist-versus-relativist impasse that has been one of the most intractable problems in the history of philosophy. He does so through a careful and inclusive look at the many ways we reason about right and wrong. Much of our moral thought, he shows, is automatic and intuitive, gut feelings that we follow up and attempt to justify with rational analysis and argument. However, good moral deliberation is not limited merely to intuitive judgments supported after the fact by reasoning. Johnson points out a crucial third element: we imagine how our decisions will play out, how we or the world would change with each action we might take. Plumbing this imaginative dimension of moral reasoning, he provides a psychologically sophisticated view of moral problem solving, one perfectly suited for the embodied, culturally embedded, and ever-developing human creatures that we are.
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The Morality of Abortion
Legal and Historical Perspectives
John T. Noonan Jr.
Harvard University Press, 1970

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The Morality of Laughter
F. H. Buckley
University of Michigan Press, 2005
“Bravo! I’ll say nothing funny about it, for it is a
superior piece of work.”
—P. J. O’Rourke

“F. H. Buckley’s The Morality of Laughter is at once
a humorous look at serious matters and a serious
book about humor.”
Crisis Magazine

“Buckley has written a . ne and funny book that will
be read with pleasure and instruction.”
First Things

“. . . written elegantly and often wittily. . . .”
National Post

“. . . a fascinating philosophical exposition of
laughter. . . .”
National Review

“. . . at once a wise and highly amusing book.”
Wall Street Journal Online

“. . . a useful reminder that a cheery society is a
healthy one.”
Weekly Standard
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Moralizing Technology
Understanding and Designing the Morality of Things
Peter-Paul Verbeek
University of Chicago Press, 2011
Technology permeates nearly every aspect of our daily lives. Cars enable us to travel long distances, mobile phones help us to communicate, and medical devices make it possible to detect and cure diseases. But these aids to existence are not simply neutral instruments: they give shape to what we do and how we experience the world. And because technology plays such an active role in shaping our daily actions and decisions, it is crucial, Peter-Paul Verbeek argues, that we consider the moral dimension of technology.
 
Moralizing Technology offers exactly that: an in-depth study of the ethical dilemmas and moral issues surrounding the interaction of humans and technology. Drawing from Heidegger and Foucault, as well as from philosophers of technology such as Don Ihde and Bruno Latour, Peter-Paul Verbeek locates morality not just in the human users of technology but in the interaction between us and our machines. Verbeek cites concrete examples, including some from his own life, and compellingly argues for the morality of things. Rich and multifaceted, and sure to be controversial, Moralizing Technology will force us all to consider the virtue of new inventions and to rethink the rightness of the products we use every day.
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Morals, Reason, and Animals
S. Sapontzis
Temple University Press, 1992
"Direct and highly readable.... Sapontzis tries to show that certain differences between humans and animals, including differences in reason, even if they have moral import, do not make the case against animals that many people think they do and do not underwrite many facets of our present treatment of animals." --R. G. Frey, Ethics This book criticizes the common belief that we are entitled to exploit animals for our benefit because they are not as rational as people. After discussing the moral (in)significance of reason in general, the author proceeds to develop a clear, commonsensical conception of what "animal rights" is about and why everyday morality points toward the liberation of animals as the next logical step in Western moral progress. The book evaluates criticisms of animal rights that have appeared in recent philosophical literature and explains the consequences of animal liberation for our diet, science, and treatment of the environment. The issue of animal rights has become of increasing philosophical and popular importance over the past decade. Morals. Reason, and Animals is the first extensive, second-generation contribution to this debate. Focusing exclusively on the fundamental philosophical issues, Sapontzis both undermines the arguments that have been raised against animal rights and constructs a rebuttal that avoids the pitfalls encountered by earlier defenses. "In my opinion only five authors have made a significant philosophical contribution to the endeavor of placing animals in ethical theory: Singer, Frey, Regan, Mary Midgley, and S. F. Sapontzis. [Morals, Reason, and Animals is] an excellent, underappreciated work." --David DeGrazia, Kennedy Institute of Ethics Journal "Sapontzis presents a strong case for including animals in the moral community, and his work is an important and unique contribution to animal rights literature." --The Animals' Agenda "Sapontzis advances a bold and provocative defense for the liberation of animals, arguing that the requirement of rationality--in its morally relevant sense--does not rule out the possibility of extending moral rights to animals.... The views articulated here are original and, at points, controversial...making this an important book. Moreover, the style is extremely clear and readable. Highly recommended." --Choice "In this work, Sapontzis provides a philosophically sophisticated and far-ranging contribution to the current debate on animal liberation.... Given the wide range of arguments, authors, and topics discussed, [this] may be the most comprehensive work to date on animal liberation." --Anthrozois "This is an excellent contribution to the animal rights movement. The author's clear, simple, readable, and often witty style makes the book quite accessible to anyone with serious interest in the field.... Morals, Reason, and Animals is a highly original, creative, and important book." --Bernard Rollin, Colorado State University "This book offers a number of fresh perspectives and stimulating new arguments in a subject area that is dauntingly dense with articles and books [Sapontzis] has managed to present a broad variety of subtle philosophical issues in a clear and forceful manner...." --Thomas Benson, Academic Dean, St. Andrews Presbyterian College
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Musical Ethics and Islam
The Art of Playing the Ney
Banu Senay
University of Illinois Press, 2020
After the establishment of the Turkish Republic, Turkey's secularized society disdained the ney, the Sufi reed flute long associated with Islam. The instrument's remarkable revival in today's cities has inspired the creation of teaching and learning sites that range from private ney studios to cultural and religious associations and from university clubs to mosque organizations.

Banu Şenay documents the years-long training required to become a neyzen—a player of the ney. The process holds a transformative power that invites students to create a new way of living that involves alternative relationships with the self and others, changing perceptions of the city, and a dedication to craftsmanship. Şenay visits reed harvesters and travels from studios to workshops to explore the practical processes of teaching and learning. She also becomes an apprentice ney-player herself, exploring the desire for spirituality that encourages apprentices and masters alike to pursue ney music and its scaffolding of Islamic ethics and belief.

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