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Radio, Morality, & Culture
Britain, Canada, and the United States, 1919 - 1945
Robert S. Fortner
Southern Illinois University Press, 2005

Radio, Morality, and Culture: Britain, Canada, and the United States, 1919–1945 examines the moral controversies surrounding radio’s development during its formative years. In comparing the fledgling medium in Great Britain, Canada, and the United States, Robert S. Fortner documents how the church failed to participate in radio’s moral development and instead engaged in internecine warfare over issues of legitimacy and orthodoxy.

The church was arguing about theological turf and dealing with internal disputes while radio policy was being developed and communications history was being written. Fortner reveals how the church, doomed to play little more than a bit part in the future of radio, eventually lost its voice altogether in the continuing development of electronic media. Fortner effectively synthesizes cultural history and theory, communication studies, and the role religious organizations played in shaping the content and character of early radio. Geared to scholars of history, communications, and theology, Radio, Morality, and Culture provides a useful resource for research, scholarship, and public policy.

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Radioactive Ghosts
Gabriele Schwab
University of Minnesota Press, 2020

A pioneering examination of nuclear trauma, the continuing and new nuclear peril, and the subjectivities they generate

Amid resurgent calls for widespread nuclear energy and “limited nuclear war,” the populations that must live with the consequences of these decisions are increasingly insecure. The nuclear peril combined with the looming threat of climate change means that we are seeing the formation of a new kind of subjectivity: humans who are in a position of perpetual ontological insecurity. In Radioactive Ghosts, Gabriele Schwab articulates a vision of these “nuclear subjectivities” that we all live with.

Focusing on the legacies of the Manhattan Project, Hiroshima, and nuclear energy politics, Radioactive Ghosts takes us on a tour of the little-seen sides of our nuclear world. Examining devastating uranium mining on Native lands, nuclear sacrifice zones, the catastrophic accidents at Chernobyl and Fukushima, and the formation of a new transspecies ethics, Schwab shows how individuals threatened with extinction are creating new adaptations, defenses, and communal spaces. Ranging from personal accounts of experiences with radiation to in-depth readings of literature, film, art, and scholarly works, Schwab gives us a complex, idiosyncratic, and personal analysis of one of the most overlooked issues of our time.

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Rational Fog
Science and Technology in Modern War
M. Susan Lindee
Harvard University Press, 2020

A thought-provoking examination of the intersections of knowledge and violence, and the quandaries and costs of modern, technoscientific warfare.

Science and violence converge in modern warfare. While the finest minds of the twentieth century have improved human life, they have also produced human injury. They engineered radar, developed electronic computers, and helped mass produce penicillin all in the context of military mobilization. Scientists also developed chemical weapons, atomic bombs, and psychological warfare strategies.

Rational Fog explores the quandary of scientific and technological productivity in an era of perpetual war. Science is, at its foundation, an international endeavor oriented toward advancing human welfare. At the same time, it has been nationalistic and militaristic in times of crisis and conflict. As our weapons have become more powerful, scientists have struggled to reconcile these tensions, engaging in heated debates over the problems inherent in exploiting science for military purposes. M. Susan Lindee examines this interplay between science and state violence and takes stock of researchers’ efforts to respond. Many scientists who wanted to distance their work from killing have found it difficult and have succumbed to the exigencies of war. Indeed, Lindee notes that scientists who otherwise oppose violence have sometimes been swept up in the spirit of militarism when war breaks out.

From the first uses of the gun to the mass production of DDT and the twenty-first-century battlefield of the mind, the science of war has achieved remarkable things at great human cost. Rational Fog reminds us that, for scientists and for us all, moral costs sometimes mount alongside technological and scientific advances.

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Rationing Sanity
Ethical Issues in Managed Mental Health Care
James Lindemann Nelson, Editor
Georgetown University Press, 2003

Mental illness is the poor, and somehow "damaged," cousin to physical ailments in the eyes of too many in our society. Compare the difference in how people would respond to someone who had fallen and broken their leg on the street, to how most react to those mentally ill among us, on those same streets, who spend their winters on steam grates and forage for food in dumpsters. Rationing Sanity is a provocative analysis of the mental health care system in the United States, dealing with issues of justice and access to mental health care.

How should a decent society, affluent but facing many serious calls on its resources, best care for citizens afflicted with severe and persistent mental illnesses? James Lindemann Nelson brings together, for the first time, scholars of the ethics of mental health care and top managed care policy analysts to address this crucial problem. Rationing Sanity integrates those perspectives with the thoughtful practice-based experience of physicians well versed in the actual care of people with emotional and behavioral problems. Over a period of years, the contributors met face-to-face to engage each other on the ethics of managed mental health care—the result is a unique, collaborative effort that provides a wealth of important new insights on not only how Americans can readjust their attitudes toward the mentally ill—but also how we may find more just and humane treatment for those afflicted.

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Reader as Accomplice
Narrative Ethics in Dostoevsky and Nabokov
Alexander Spektor
Northwestern University Press, 2021

Reader as Accomplice: Narrative Ethics in Dostoevsky and Nabokov argues that Fyodor Dostoevsky and Vladimir Nabokov seek to affect the moral imagination of their readers by linking morally laden plots to the ethical questions raised by narrative fiction at the formal level. By doing so, these two authors ask us to consider and respond to the ethical demands that narrative acts of representation and interpretation place on authors and readers.

Using the lens of narrative ethics, Alexander Spektor brings to light the important, previously unexplored correspondences between Dostoevsky and Nabokov. Ultimately, he argues for a productive comparison of how each writer investigates the ethical costs of narrating oneself and others. He also explores the power dynamics between author, character, narrator, and reader. In his readings of such texts as “The Meek One” and The Idiot by Dostoevsky and Bend Sinister and Despair by Nabokov, Spektor demonstrates that these authors incite the reader’s sense of ethics by exposing the risks but also the possibilities of narrative fiction.

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Reckless Legislation
How Legislators Ignore the Consitution
Bamberger, Michael A.
Rutgers University Press, 1999

Article 6 of the U.S. Constitution requires that every U.S. Senator and Representative, as well as all members of any state legislature, take an oath or affirmation to support the Constitution. Legislators, after all, must accept the basic principles embodied in the Constitution and Bill of Rights when interpreting questions of law. The only way to change these principles is through amendments to the Constitution. But in an increasing number of cases, contends Michael A, Bamberger, our legislators are knowingly abdicating their responsibility to uphold the Constitution. Instead of considering the constitutionality of legislation, they vote for what is politically expedient and popular, leaving it to the courts to determine the legality of their actions. Bamberger argues that legislators have a duty to consider constitutionality and not “pass the buck” to the judiciary regardless of political pressures or even well-meaning intentions to achieve desirable policy objectives.

Reckless Legislation examines legislative consideration and avoidance of issues of constitutionality through a number of examples: the regulation of the Internet by Congress and two state legislatures; the reliance by legislatures of Minneapolis, Indianapolis, and Tennessee on “experts” to justify passage of unconstitutional laws; the repeated passage of unconstitutional laws in New York and Missouri relating, respectively, to religion and abortion to wear down the courts and the opposition; and the efforts by Congress to reverse Supreme Court decisions believed by it to be incorrect or harmful.

Bamberger urges legislators to avoid the political motives that lead to “reckless legislation,” recommending that they “make full use of the full panoply of available support services . . . for a better and deeper knowledge of the issues raised.”

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Recognizing Public Value
Mark H. Moore
Harvard University Press, 2013

Mark H. Moore’s now classic Creating Public Value offered advice to public managers about how to create public value. But that book left a key question unresolved: how could one recognize (in an accounting sense) when public value had been created? Here, Moore closes the gap by setting forth a philosophy of performance measurement that will help public managers name, observe, and sometimes count the value they produce, whether in education, public health, safety, crime prevention, housing, or other areas. Blending case studies with theory, he argues that private sector models built on customer satisfaction and the bottom line cannot be transferred to government agencies. The Public Value Account (PVA), which Moore develops as an alternative, outlines the values that citizens want to see produced by, and reflected in, agency operations. These include the achievement of collectively defined missions, the fairness with which agencies operate, and the satisfaction of clients and other stake-holders.

But strategic public managers also have to imagine and execute strategies that sustain or increase the value they create into the future. To help public managers with that task, Moore offers a Public Value Scorecard that focuses on the actions necessary to build legitimacy and support for the envisioned value, and on the innovations that have to be made in existing operational capacity.

Using his scorecard, Moore evaluates the real-world management strategies of such former public managers as D.C. Mayor Anthony Williams, NYPD Commissioner William Bratton, and Commissioner of the Minnesota Department of Revenue John James.

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Recommended Principles to Guide Academy-Industry Relationships
American Association of University Professors
University of Illinois Press, 2014
The reputation of a college or institution depends upon the integrity of its faculty and administration. Though budgets are important, ethics are vital, and a host of new ethical problems now beset higher education. From MOOCS and intellectual property rights to drug industry payments and conflicts of interest, this book offers AAUP policy language and best practices to deal with all the campus-wide challenges of today's corporate university:
 
• Preserving the integrity of research and public respect for higher education
• Eliminating and managing individual and institutional financial conflicts of interest
• Maintaining unbiased hiring and recruitment policies
• Establishing grievance procedures and due process rights for faculty, graduate students, and academic professionals
• Mastering the complications of negotiations over patents and copyright
• Assuring the ethics of research involving human subjects.
 
In a time of dynamic change Recommended Principles to Guide Academy-Industry Relationships offers an indispensable and authoritative guide to sustaining integrity and tradition while achieving great things in twenty-first century academia.
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Reconsidering Intellectual Disability
L'Arche, Medical Ethics, and Christian Friendship
Jason Reimer Greig
Georgetown University Press, 2016

Drawing on the controversial case of “Ashley X,” a girl with severe developmental disabilities who received interventionist medical treatment to limit her growth and keep her body forever small—a procedure now known as the “Ashley Treatment”—Reconsidering Intellectual Disability explores important questions at the intersection of disability theory, Christian moral theology, and bioethics.

What are the biomedical boundaries of acceptable treatment for those not able to give informed consent? Who gets to decide when a patient cannot communicate their desires and needs? Should we accept the dominance of a form of medicine that identifies those with intellectual impairments as pathological objects in need of the normalizing bodily manipulations of technological medicine?

In a critical exploration of contemporary disability theory, Jason Reimer Greig contends that L'Arche, a federation of faith communities made up of people with and without intellectual disabilities, provides an alternative response to the predominant bioethical worldview that sees disability as a problem to be solved. Reconsidering Intellectual Disability shows how a focus on Christian theological tradition’s moral thinking and practice of friendship with God offers a way to free not only people with intellectual disabilities but all people from the objectifying gaze of modern medicine. L'Arche draws inspiration from Jesus's solidarity with the "least of these" and a commitment to Christian friendship that sees people with profound cognitive disabilities not as anomalous objects of pity but as fellow friends of God. This vital act of social recognition opens the way to understanding the disabled not as objects to be fixed but as teachers whose lives can transform others and open a new way of being human.

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Recovering the Nation's Body
Cultural Memory, Medicine, and the Politics of Redemption
Linda F Hogle
Rutgers University Press, 1999

The body is both a site for medical practice and a source of therapeutic and scientific tools. As such, there are a variety of meanings ascribed to the body which both affect and are affected by cultural, economic, political and legal complexities. In order to access and use body parts, Linda F. Hogle states, transformative scientific and  cultural processes are brought into play. Nowhere is this more evident than present-day Germany, where the spectre of Nazi medical experimentation still plays a large role  in national policies governing the use of body parts and the way these policies are put into practice.  In their efforts to be perceived as not repeating atrocities of the past, German medical practitioners and policy-makers reformulate ideas of bodily violation.  To further confuse the issue, the reunification of East and West Germany has engendered new questions about the relationship between individuals’ bodies, science, and the state.

Hogle shows how “universal” medicine is reinterpreted through the lens of national and transnational politics and history, using comparative examples from her research in the United. States.  Recovering the Nation’s Body is the first book to analyze the actual practices involved in procuring human tissue, and the first to examine how the German past and the unique present-day situation within the European Union are key in understanding the form that medical practices take within various contexts.

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Re-Creating Nature
Science, Technology, and Human Values in the Twenty-First Century
James T. Bradley
University of Alabama Press, 2019
An exploration of the moral and ethical implications of new biotechnologies

Many of the ethical issues raised by new technologies have not been widely examined, discussed, or indeed settled. For example, robotics technology challenges the notion of personhood. Should a robot, capable of making what humans would call ethical decisions, be held responsible for those decisions and the resultant actions? Should society reward and punish robots in the same way that it does humans? Likewise, issues of safety, environmental concerns, and distributive justice arise with the increasing acceptance of genetically modified organisms (GMOs) in food production nanotechnology in engineering and medicine, and human gene therapy and enhancement. The problem of dual-use—when a technology can be used both to benefit and to harm—exists with virtually all new technologies but is central in the context of emerging 21st century technologies ranging from artificial intelligence and robotics to human gene-editing and brain-computer interfacing.

In Re-Creating Nature: Science, Technology, and Human Values in the Twenty-First Century, James T. Bradley addresses emerging biotechnologies with prodigious potential to benefit humankind but that are also fraught with ethical consequences. Some actually possess the power to directly alter the evolution of life on earth including human. Specifically, these topics include stem cells, synthetic biology, GMOs in agriculture, nanotechnology, bioterrorism, CRISPR gene-editing technology, three-parent babies, robotics and roboethics, artificial intelligence, and human brain research and neurotechnologies.

Offering clear explanations of these various technologies, a pragmatic presentation of the conundrums involved, and questions that illuminate hypothetical situations, Bradley guides discussions of these and other thorny issues resulting from the development of new biotechnologies. He also highlights the responsibilities of scientists to conduct research in an ethical manner and the responsibilities of nonscientists to become “science literate” in the twenty-first century.
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Refugee Talk
Propositions on Ethics and Aesthetics
Eva
Pluto Press, 2022

An innovative approach to the refugee crisis through a focus on language use, discourse and representation

'A wide-ranging, erudite and multi-faceted analyses of the fundamental problem of who gets to be counted as human' - Kate Evans

What does it mean to be a refugee? What political questions do they raise? Through what political rhetoric is their experiences parsed? The ongoing refugee crisis has sparked all these questions and more.

Refugee Talk uses conversation as a research method and ethical practice to approach the representation of and the discourse about and by the refugee. Though refugees who cross borders are routinely registered, filed, and detained, the individual stories they carry are just as routinely overlooked or ignored. When language itself becomes another border that excludes refugees, the need for a new vocabulary that decriminalizes and re-humanizes the refugee experience asserts itself.

The authors engage theoretically with thinkers from Hannah Arendt to Paolo Freire and Kwame A. Appiah and structure the book around conversations with academics, activists, journalists, and refugee artists and writers. The result is a comprehensive humanities approach that places ethics and aesthetics at its core.

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Replacement Parts
The Ethics of Procuring and Replacing Organs in Humans
Arthur L. Caplan, James J. McCartney, and Daniel Reid, Editors
Georgetown University Press, 2016

In Replacement Parts, internationally recognized bioethicist Arthur L. Caplan and coeditors James J. McCartney and Daniel P. Reid assemble seminal writings from medicine, philosophy, economics, and religion that address the ethical challenges raised by organ transplantation. Caplan's new lead essay explains the shortfalls of present policies. From there, book sections take an interdisciplinary approach to fundamental issues like the determination of death and the dead donor rule; the divisive case of using anencephalic infants as organ donors; the sale of cadaveric or live organs; possible strategies for increasing the number of available organs, including market solutions and the idea of presumed consent; and questions surrounding transplant tourism and "gaming the system" by using the media to gain access to organs.

Timely and balanced, Replacement Parts is a first-of-its-kind collection aimed at surgeons, physicians, nurses, and other professionals involved in this essential lifesaving activity that is often fraught with ethical controversy.

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Reproduction, Globalization, and the State
New Theoretical and Ethnographic Perspectives
Carole H. Browner and Carolyn F. Sargent, eds.
Duke University Press, 2011
Reproduction, Globalization, and the State conceptualizes and puts into practice a global anthropology of reproduction and reproductive health. Leading anthropologists offer new perspectives on how transnational migration and global flows of communications, commodities, and biotechnologies affect the reproductive lives of women and men in diverse societies throughout the world. Based on research in Africa, the Americas, Asia, and Western Europe, their fascinating ethnographies provide insight into reproduction and reproductive health broadly conceived to encompass population control, HIV/AIDS, assisted reproductive technologies, paternity tests, sex work, and humanitarian assistance. The contributors address the methodological challenges of research on globalization, including ways of combining fine-grained ethnography with analyses of large-scale political, economic, and ideological forces. Their essays reveal complex interactions among global and state population policies and politics; public health, human rights, and feminist movements; diverse medical systems; various religious practices, doctrines, and institutions; and intimate relationships and individual aspirations.

Contributors. Aditya Bharadwaj, Caroline H. Bledsoe, Carole H. Browner, Junjie Chen, Aimee R. Eden, Susan L. Erikson, Didier Fassin, Claudia Lee Williams Fonseca, Ellen Gruenbaum, Matthew Gutmann, Marcia C. Inhorn, Mark B. Padilla, Rayna Rapp, Lisa Ann Richey, Carolyn Sargent, Papa Sow, Cecilia Van Hollen, Linda Whiteford

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Reputation
Studies in the Voluntary Elicitation of Good Conduct
Daniel B. Klein, Editor
University of Michigan Press, 1997
"Tricks and treachery are the practice of fools that have not wit enough to be honest," wrote Benjamin Franklin. This volume explores ways in which the honest establish trust and enjoy good fortune, even without policing. The central mechanism at work is reputation. To work, information about the individual's conduct must be observed, interpreted, recorded, stored, and transmitted. Different forms of "seals of approval" develop to communicate the quality of an individual's reputation to others.
The studies in this volume reveal how vast information systems like Dun & Bradstreet and TRW generate reputation and beneficial exchange, and how brand names, middlemen, and dealers give their own sort of seal of approval. One chapter describes the origins of Underwriters' Laboratories, an organization that sells its inspection services and mark of approval for product safety. Another argues that J. P. Morgan's investment banking service was in large part applying astute judgment in granting the Morgan seal of approval to firms in need of capital. Other, less formal, reputational mechanisms such as gossip, customary law, and written correspondence are also explored. Contexts range from trust among merchants in Medieval Europe, social control in small communities, and good conduct in a vast anonymous society such as our own.
Throughout these broad-ranging studies, the central theme of the volume emerges: in an open, competitive environment, honesty can recruit cleverness to assert itself and to drive out the dishonest. Contributors include Bruce Benson, Harry Chase Brearly, J. Benson De Long, Avner Greif, Benjamin Klein, Keith B. Leffler, Sally Engle Merry, Paul R. Milgrom, J. Wilson Newman, Douglass C. North, Marc Ryser, Adam Smith, Gordon Tullock, and Barry R. Weingast.
Daniel B. Klein is Assistant Professor of Economics, University of California, Irvine.
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Research as More Than Extraction
Knowledge Production and Gender-Based Violence in African Societies
Annie Bunting, Allen Kiconco, Joel Quirk
Ohio University Press, 2023
This volume offers practical, detailed guidance and case studies on how to avoid exacerbating inequalities while researching gender-based violence and other related issues in Africa. Wartime violence and its aftermath present numerous practical, ethical, and political challenges that are especially acute for researchers working on gender-based and sexual violence. Drawing upon applied examples from across the African continent, this volume features unique contributions from researchers and practitioners with decades of experience developing research partnerships, designing and undertaking fieldwork, asking sensitive questions, negotiating access, collecting and evaluating information, and validating results. These are all endeavors that also raise pressing ethical questions, especially in relation to retraumatization, social stigma, and even payment of participants. Ethical and methodological questions cannot be separated from political and institutional considerations. Systems of privilege and marginalization cannot be wished away, so they need to be both interrogated and contested. This is where precedents and power relations established under colonialism and imperialism take center stage. Europeans have been extracting valuable resources from the African continent for centuries. Research into gender-based violence risks being yet another extractive industry. There are times when committed individuals can make valuable contributions to a more equitable future, but funding streams, knowledge hierarchies, and institutional positions continue to have powerful effects. Accordingly, the contributors to this volume also concentrate upon the layered effects of power and position, relationships between researchers, organizations, and communities, and the political economy of knowledge production; this brings into focus questions about how and why information gets generated, for which kinds of audiences, and for whose benefit.
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Research on Human Subjects
Problems of Social Control in Medical Experimentation
Bernard Barber
Russell Sage Foundation, 1973
How are human subjects treated in biomedical research? What are the expressed standards and self-reported behavior of biomedical researchers in regard to what has sometimes been called their "animal of necessity"? What are some of the determinants of the "strict" and "permissive" patterns which describe the standards and behavior of biomedical researchers? These are the important questions asked and answered in Research on Human Subjects. It is a book based on four years of intensive research. Two studies were completed, one on a nationally representative sample of biomedical research institutions, a second on a sample of 350 researchers who actually use human subjects. In their chapters on "the dilemma of science and therapy," the authors look at the tension between the values of humane therapy and discovery in science. They show that the significant minority of researchers who are "permissive" on the issues of informed consent and a favorable risk-benefit ratio are more likely to be those who are "relative failures" in pursuing the science value. Research on Human Subjects also documents the inadequate training that biomedical researchers get in the ethics of research on human subjects not only in medical schools but in their postgraduate training as well. The medical schools pay relatively more attention to the scientific training of their students than they do to the ethical training that should be its essential complement. The local peer review groups that screen research on human subjects in the institutions where it is carried on are another central focus of attention of the research and analysis reported in this book. The peer review groups do a fairly good job but, the authors show, there are various conditions of their relative efficacy which are not met by review groups in many important research institutions. The medical school review groups, for example, have not been outstanding performers with respect to the several conditions of relative efficacy. In the concluding chapter, the authors discuss the general problem of the social responsibilities of powerful professions and make very specific suggestions for policy change and reform for the biomedical research profession and its use of human subjects.
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The Responsible Scientist
John Forge
University of Pittsburgh Press, 2008
When Fat Boy, the first atomic bomb was detonated at Los Alamos, New Mexico in 1945, moral responsibility in science was forever thrust into the forefront of philosophical debate. The culmination of the famed Manhattan Project, which employed many of the world's best scientific minds, was a singular event that signaled a new age of science for power and profit and the monumental responsibility that these actions entailed.

Today, the drive for technological advances in areas such as pharmaceuticals, biosciences, communications, and the defense industry channels the vast majority of scientific endeavor into applied research. In The Responsible Scientist, John Forge examines the challenges of social, moral, and legal responsibility faced by today's scientists. Focusing on moral responsibility, Forge argues that scientists have a responsibility not to do work that has harmful outcomes and that they are encouraged to do work that prevents harm. Scientists also have a backward-looking responsibility, whereby they must prevent wrongful outcomes and omissions that they are in a position to foresee.

Forge presents a broad overview of many areas of scientific endeavor, citing the responsibility of corporations, employees, and groups of scientists as judged by the values of science and society's appraisals of actions and outcomes. He maintains that ultimate responsibility lies in the hands of the individual-the responsible scientist-who must exhibit the diligence and foresight to anticipate the use and abuse of his or her work.
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Re
Thinking Europe: Thoughts on Europe: Past, Present and Future
Edited by Mathieu Segers and Yoeri Albrecht
Amsterdam University Press, 2017
What is Europe? This question is ever more pressing, as present day Europe wallows in crisis - its deepest since the process of European integration took off in the 1950s. The current state of affairs sets the stage for this book. It brings together leading international thinkers and scholars of different generations in a feverish quest to better understand Europe's present state.In their essays these authors engage in the paradoxes and puzzles of European identity and culture. They present new answers to the eternal question regarding 'the essence of Europe'.An anthology of influential texts from the making of present-day Europe completes the book as a very European exercise in thinking and re-thinking Europa, its culture, history and present.
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Reuse, Misuse, Abuse
The Ethics of Audiovisual Appropriation in the Digital Era
Jaimie Baron
Rutgers University Press, 2021
In contemporary culture, existing audiovisual recordings are constantly reused and repurposed for various ends, raising questions regarding the ethics of such appropriations, particularly when the recording  depicts actual people and events. Every reuse of a preexisting recording is, on some level, a misuse in that it was not intended or at least anticipated by the original maker, but not all misuses are necessarily unethical. In fact, there are many instances of productive misuse that seem justified. At the same time, there are other instances in which the misuse shades into abuse. Documentary scholars have long engaged with the question of the ethical responsibility of documentary makers in relation to their subjects. But what happens when this responsibility is set at a remove, when the recording already exists for the taking and repurposing? Reuse, Misuse and Abuse surveys a range of contemporary films and videos that appropriate preexisting footage and attempts to theorize their ethical implications.
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Revisiting Race in a Genomic Age
Koenig, Barbara
Rutgers University Press, 2008

With the completion of the sequencing of the human genome in 2001, the debate over the existence of a biological basis for race has been revived. In Revisiting Race in a Genomic Age, interdisciplinary scholars join forces to examine the new social, political, and ethical concerns that are attached to how we think about emerging technologies and their impact on current conceptions of race and identity.

Essays explore a range of topics that include drug development and the production of race-based therapeutics, the ways in which genetics could contribute to future health disparities, the social implications of ancestry mapping, and the impact of emerging race and genetics research on public policy and the media.

As genetic research expands its reach, this volume takes an important step toward creating a useful interdisciplinary dialogue about its implications.

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Rhetoric, Technology, and the Virtues
Jared S. Colton
Utah State University Press, 2018
Rhetoric, Technology, and the Virtues offers a framework for theorizing ethics in digital and networked media. While the field of rhetoric and writing studies has traditionally given attention to Plato’s Gorgias and Phaedrus dialogues, this volume updates Aristotle’s basic framework of hexis for the digital age. According to Aristotle, “When men change their hexeis—their dispositions, habits, comportments, and so on, in relation to an activity—they change their thought.”
 
Rhetoric, Technology, and the Virtues argues that virtue ethics supports postmodern criticisms of rational autonomy and universalism while also enabling a discussion of the actual ethical behaviors that digital users form through their particular communicative ends and various rhetorical purposes. Authors Jared Colton and Steve Holmes extend Aristotle’s hexis framework through contemporary virtue ethicists and political theorists whose writing works from a tacit virtue ethics framework. They examine these key theorists through a range of case studies of digital habits of human users, including closed captioning, trolling, sampling, remixing, gamifying for environmental causes, and using social media, alongside a consideration of the ethical habits of nonhuman actors.
 
Tackling a needed topic with clarity and defined organization, Rhetoric, Technology, and the Virtues carefully synthesizes various strands of ethical thinking, convincingly argues that virtue ethics is a viable framework for digital rhetoric, and provides a practical way to assess the changing hexeis encountered across the network of ethical situations in the digital world.
 
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Rhetorical Machines
Writing, Code, and Computational Ethics
Edited by John Jones and Lavinia Hirsu
University of Alabama Press, 2019
A landmark volume that explores the interconnected nature of technologies and rhetorical practice
 
Rhetorical Machines addresses new approaches to studying computational processes within the growing field of digital rhetoric. While computational code is often seen as value-neutral and mechanical, this volume explores the underlying, and often unexamined, modes of persuasion this code engages. In so doing, it argues that computation is in fact rife with the values of those who create it and thus has powerful ethical and moral implications. From Socrates’s critique of writing in Plato’s Phaedrus to emerging new media and internet culture, the scholars assembled here provide insight into how computation and rhetoric work together to produce social and cultural effects.
 
This multidisciplinary volume features contributions from scholar-practitioners across the fields of rhetoric, computer science, and writing studies. It is divided into four main sections: “Emergent Machines” examines how technologies and algorithms are framed and entangled in rhetorical processes, “Operational Codes” explores how computational processes are used to achieve rhetorical ends, “Ethical Decisions and Moral Protocols” considers the ethical implications involved in designing software and that software’s impact on computational culture, and the final section includes two scholars’ responses to the preceding chapters. Three of the sections are prefaced by brief conversations with chatbots (autonomous computational agents) addressing some of the primary questions raised in each section.
 
At the heart of these essays is a call for emerging and established scholars in a vast array of fields to reach interdisciplinary understandings of human-machine interactions. This innovative work will be valuable to scholars and students in a variety of disciplines, including but not limited to rhetoric, computer science, writing studies, and the digital humanities.
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The Right to Die with Dignity
An Argument in Ethics, Medicine, and Law
Cohen-Almagor, Raphael
Rutgers University Press, 2001

There are few issues more divisive than what has become known as “the right to die.” One camp upholds “death with dignity,” regarding the terminally ill as autonomous beings capable of forming their own judgment on the timing and process of dying. The other camp advocates “sanctity of life,” regarding life as intrinsically valuable, and that should be sustained as long as possible. Is there a right answer?

Raphael Cohen-Almagor takes a balanced approach in analyzing this emotionally charged debate, viewing the dispute from public policy and international perspectives. He offers an interdisciplinary, compelling study in medicine, law, religion, and ethics. It is a comprehensive look at the troubling question of whether physician-assisted suicide should be allowed. Cohen-Almagor delineates a distinction between active and passive euthanasia and discusses legal measures that have been invoked in the United States and abroad. He outlines reasons non-blood relatives should be given a role in deciding a patient’s last wishes. As he examines euthanasia policies in the Netherlands and the 1994 Oregon Death with Dignity Act, the author suggests amendments and finally makes a circumscribed plea for voluntary physician-assisted suicide.

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Risks in the Making
Travels in Life Insurance and Genetics
Ine Van Hoyweghen
Amsterdam University Press, 2006
In recent decades, insurance companies, scientists, and public officials have debated the potential use of genetic testing in insurance decisions. With Risks in the Making, Ine van Hoyweghen alters the terms of the debate, moving it from abstract, theoretical grounds to the question of how insurance companies actually work. Through an empirical ethnographic study of life insurance in Belgium, van Hoyweghen reveals fascinating and important details about insurance practices and risk management, underscoring the diversity of insurance markets, underwriting practices, and strategies.
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The Robotic Imaginary
The Human and the Price of Dehumanized Labor
Jennifer Rhee
University of Minnesota Press, 2018

Tracing the connections between human-like robots and AI at the site of dehumanization and exploited labor


The word robot—introduced in Karel Čapek’s 1920 play R.U.R.—derives from rabota, the Czech word for servitude or forced labor. A century later, the play’s dystopian themes of dehumanization and exploited labor are being played out in factories, workplaces, and battlefields. In The Robotic Imaginary, Jennifer Rhee traces the provocative and productive connections of contemporary robots in technology, film, art, and literature. Centered around the twinned processes of anthropomorphization and dehumanization, she analyzes the coevolution of cultural and technological robots and artificial intelligence, arguing that it is through the conceptualization of the human and, more important, the dehumanized that these multiple spheres affect and transform each other.

Drawing on the writings of Alan Turing, Sara Ahmed, and Arlie Russell Hochschild; such films and novels as Her and The Stepford Wives; technologies like Kismet (the pioneering “emotional robot”); and contemporary drone art, this book explores anthropomorphic paradigms in robot design and imagery in ways that often challenge the very grounds on which those paradigms operate in robotics labs and industry. From disembodied, conversational AI and its entanglement with care labor; embodied mobile robots as they intersect with domestic labor; emotional robots impacting affective labor; and armed military drones and artistic responses to drone warfare, The Robotic Imaginary ultimately reveals how the human is made knowable through the design of and discourse on humanoid robots that are, paradoxically, dehumanized. 

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front cover of Run, Spot, Run
Run, Spot, Run
The Ethics of Keeping Pets
Jessica Pierce
University of Chicago Press, 2016
A life shared with pets brings many emotions. We feel love for our companions, certainly, and happiness at the thought that we’re providing them with a safe, healthy life. But there’s another emotion, less often acknowledged, that can be nearly as powerful: guilt. When we see our cats gazing wistfully out the window, or watch a goldfish swim lazy circles in a bowl, we can’t help but wonder: are we doing the right thing, keeping these independent beings locked up, subject to our control? Is keeping pets actually good for the pets themselves?
 
That’s the question that animates Jessica Pierce’s powerful Run, Spot, Run. A lover of pets herself (including, over the years, dogs, cats, fish, rats, hermit crabs, and more), Pierce understands the joys that pets bring us. But she also refuses to deny the ambiguous ethics at the heart of the relationship, and through a mix of personal stories, philosophical reflections, and scientifically informed analyses of animal behavior and natural history, she puts pet-keeping to the test. Is it ethical to keep pets at all? Are some species more suited to the relationship than others? Are there species one should never attempt to own? And are there ways that we can improve our pets’ lives, so that we can be confident that we are giving them as much as they give us?
 
Deeply empathetic, yet rigorous and unflinching in her thinking, Pierce has written a book that is sure to help any pet owner, unsettling assumptions but also giving them the knowledge to build deeper, better relationships with the animals with whom they’ve chosen to share their lives.
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