425 books match the query 'Ethics' and 15 start with f

cover of Face/On: Face Transplants and the Ethics of the Other

Face/On

Face Transplants and the Ethics of the Other

Sharrona Pearl

University of Chicago Press, 2017

Are our identities attached to our faces? If so, what happens when the face connected to the self is gone forever—or replaced? In Face/On, Sharrona Pearl investigates the stakes for changing the face–and the changing stakes for the face—in both contemporary society and the sciences.
 
The first comprehensive cultural study of face transplant surgery, Face/On reveals our true relationships to faces and facelessness, explains the significance we place on facial manipulation, and decodes how we understand loss, reconstruction, and transplantation of the face. To achieve this, Pearl draws on a vast array of sources: bioethical and medical reports, newspaper and television coverage, performances by pop culture icons, hospital records, personal interviews, films, and military files. She argues that we are on the cusp of a new ethics, in an opportune moment for reframing essentialist ideas about appearance in favor of a more expansive form of interpersonal interaction. Accessibly written and respectfully illustrated, Face/On offers a new perspective on face transplant surgery as a way to consider the self and its representation as constantly present and evolving. Highly interdisciplinary, this study will appeal to anyone wishing to know more about critical interventions into recent medicine, makeover culture, and the beauty industry.
 
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cover of Fashion and Ethics: Critical Studies in Fashion and Beauty, Volume II

Fashion and Ethics

Critical Studies in Fashion and Beauty, Volume II

Edited by Efrat Tseëlon

Intellect Books, 2014

Fashion and Ethics focuses on issues of power, social positioning, and practices among creators, producers, practitioners, wearers, and consumers of fashion. With a special emphasis on the moral fabric of clothing, contributors to the book offer a critique of some of the fundamental assumptions of ethical fashion and expose how products are often framed as fair trade in order to relieve consumers' guilt.

With essays that problematize issues such as ethical fashion’s self-appointed morality, the first-world notion that the environment should take priority over human development, the conflict between business profit and ethics, the unintended agendas involved in consuming green cosmetics or ethical culinary trends, and the discursive strategies of denial of the extreme cruelty in the procurement of animal skin and fur for use in fashion, Fashion and Ethics applies its uncompromising scrutiny to all areas of fashion. Throughout, the volume forces readers to confront the question: Does ethical fashion go deep enough into challenging unethical behavior or is it just a charade of good intentions?
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cover of Fidel's Ethics of Violence: The Moral Dimension of the Political Thought of Fidel Castro

Fidel's Ethics of Violence

The Moral Dimension of the Political Thought of Fidel Castro

Dayan Jayatilleka

Pluto Press, 2007

Fidel Castro's most original contribution to revolutionary and radical thought has been his development of an explicit ethical position on one of the most controversial issues of our time: violence. This book explores the evolution of Castro's political thinking - and in particular how he philosophically reconciles violence, political power and morality.

This book makes a timely intervention into the question of Castro's historical role and contribution. The author argues that Castro's doctrine of armed struggle is the logical development of his idea of the ethical liberation fighter. At its core is an unremitting emphasis on the ethical use of violence.
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cover of Finite Perfection: Reflections on Virtue

Finite Perfection

Reflections on Virtue

Michael A. Weinstein

University of Massachusetts Press, 1985

A contemporary account of how virtue can have significance in a world that has lost the certainty of common and collective meanings.

Finite Perfection: Reflections on Virtue is a work of political philosophy and ethical theory in which Michael A. Weinstein develops a rigorous and original account of virtue grounded in the existentialist tradition rather than in classical metaphysics or theology. The book's title captures its central philosophical tension: where classical and religious traditions have often located virtue in relation to an infinite, divine, or transcendent standard of perfection, Weinstein insists on taking seriously the finitude of the human condition—the irreducible limits of time, mortality, and embodied existence—and asking what excellence and virtue can mean for beings who are, by nature, incomplete and bounded.

Weinstein's approach is rooted in the concept of the self-possessed individual—a person who has achieved a kind of integrity and mastery over themselves not through escape from finitude, but through honest acknowledgment and creative embrace of it. Virtue, on this view, is not a transcendence of human limitation but a perfecting of what is possible within it: the best a finite being can be. This framework draws productively on the existentialist tradition (particularly its emphasis on authenticity, self-creation, and the confrontation with mortality), while also engaging with the Aristotelian tradition of virtue ethics and the Nietzschean understanding of self-overcoming. 

Throughout its pages, Weinstein brings his characteristic intellectual breadth to bear, moving across political philosophy, ethics, and social theory to construct an account of virtue that is both philosophically rigorous and deeply humane. 

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cover of First, Do No Harm: Power, Oppression, and Violence in Healthcare

First, Do No Harm

Power, Oppression, and Violence in Healthcare

Edited by Nancy L. Diekelmann

University of Wisconsin Press, 2002

    First, Do No Harm shows how health care professionals, with the best intentions of providing excellent, holistic health care, can nonetheless perpetuate violence against vulnerable patients. The essays investigate the need to rethink contemporary healthcare practices in ways that can bring the art and science of medicine back into sorely needed balance.
    These ground-breaking studies by noted scholars question commonly held assumptions in contemporary healthcare that underlie oppressive power dynamics and even violence for patients and their families. The contributors discuss such topics as women and violence, life-support technologies, and healthcare professionals’ own experiences as patients. First, Do No Harm opens the discourse for reaching new understandings, from reassessing the meaning of "quality of life" to questioning the appropriateness of the very language used by healthcare professionals. It will be welcomed by healthcare workers and by scholars in nursing, medicine, and the allied health sciences.

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cover of For the Sake of Argument: Practical Reasoning, Character, and the Ethics of Belief

For the Sake of Argument

Practical Reasoning, Character, and the Ethics of Belief

Eugene Garver

University of Chicago Press, 2004

What role does reason play in our lives? What role should it play? And are claims to rationality liberating or oppressive? For the Sake of Argument addresses questions such as these to consider the relationship between thought and character. Eugene Garver brings Aristotle's Rhetoric to bear on practical reasoning to show how the value of such thinking emerges when members of communities deliberate together, persuade each other, and are persuaded by each other. That is to say, when they argue.

Garver roots deliberation and persuasion in political friendship instead of a neutral, impersonal framework of justice. Through incisive readings of examples in modern legal and political history, from Brown v. Board of Education to the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission, he demonstrates how acts of deliberation and persuasion foster friendship among individuals, leading to common action amid diversity. In an Aristotelian sense, there is a place for pathos and ethos in rational thought. Passion and character have as pivotal a role in practical reasoning as logic and language.
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cover of Formalism in Ethics and Non-Formal Ethics of Values: A New Attempt toward the Foundation of an Ethical Personalism

Formalism in Ethics and Non-Formal Ethics of Values

A New Attempt toward the Foundation of an Ethical Personalism

Max Scheler

Northwestern University Press, 1973

A lengthy critique of Kant's apriorism precedes discussions on the ethical principles of eudaemonism, utilitarianism, pragmatism, and positivism.
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cover of Four Lectures on Ethics: Anthropological Perspectives

Four Lectures on Ethics

Anthropological Perspectives

Michael Lambek, Veena Das, Didier Fassin, and Webb Keane

HAU, 2015

Anthropology has recently seen a lively interest in the subject of ethics and comparative notions of morality and freedom. This masterclass brings together four of the most eminent anthropologists working in this field—Michael Lambek, Veena Das, Didier Fassin, and Webb Keane—to discuss, via lectures and responses, important topics facing anthropological ethics and the theoretical debates that surround it.
           
The authors explore the ways we understand morality across many different cultural settings, asking questions such as: How do we recognize the ethical in different ethnographic worlds? What constitutes agency and awareness in everyday life? What might an anthropology of ordinary ethics look like? And what happens when ethics approaches the political in both Western and non-Western societies. Contrasting perspectives and methods—and yet in complimentary ways—this masterclass will serve as an essential guide for how an anthropology of ethics can be formulated in the twenty-first century. 
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cover of Fragile Finitude: A Jewish Hermeneutical Theology

Fragile Finitude

A Jewish Hermeneutical Theology

Michael Fishbane

University of Chicago Press, 2021

The world we engage with is a vibrant collage brought to consciousness by language and our creative imagination. It is through the symbolic forms of language that the human world of value is revealed—this is where religious scholar Michael Fishbane dwells in his latest contribution to Jewish thought.

In Fragile Finitude, Fishbane clears new ground for a theological life through a novel reinterpretation of the Book of Job. On this basis, he offers a contemporary engagement with the four classical types of Jewish Scriptural exegesis. The first focuses on worldly experience, the second on communal forms of practice and thought in the rabbinical tradition, the third on personal development, and the fourth on transcendent, cosmic orientations. Through these four modes, Fishbane manages to transform Jewish theology from within, at once reinvigorating a long tradition and moving beyond it. What he offers is nothing short of a way to reorient our lives in relation to the divine and our fellow humans. Written from within the Jewish tradition, Fragile Finitude is intended for readers across the religious spectrum.
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cover of Framing Disease: Studies in Cultural History

Framing Disease

Studies in Cultural History

Rosenberg, Charles E

Rutgers University Press, 1992

"In some ways disease does not exist until we have agreed that it does, by perceiving, naming, and responding to it, " writes Charles E. Rosenberg in his introduction to this stimulating set of essays. Disease is both a biological event and a social phenomenon. Patient, doctor, family, and social institutions—including employers, government, and insurance companies—all find ways to frame the biological event in terms that make sense to them and serve their own ends.

Many diseases discussed here—endstage renal disease, rheumatic fever, parasitic infectious diseases, coronary thrombosis—came to be defined, redefined, and renamed over the course of several centuries. As these essays show, the concept of disease has also been used to frame culturally resonant behaviors: suicide, homosexuality, anorexia nervosa, chronic fatigue syndrome. Disease is also framed by public policy, as the cases of industrial disability and of forensic psychiatry demonstrate. Medical institutions, as managers of people with disease, come to have vested interests in diagnoses, as the histories of facilities to treat tuberculosis or epilepsy reveal. Ultimately, the existence and conquest of disease serves to frame a society's sense of its own "healthiness" and to give direction to social reforms.   

The contributors include Steven J. Peitzman, Peter C. English, John Farley, Christopher Lawrence, Michael MacDonald, Bert Hansen, Joan Jacobs Brumberg, Robert A. Aronowitz, Gerald Markowitz, David Rosner, Janet A. Tighe, Barbara Bates, Ellen Dwyer, John M. Eyler, and Elizabeth Fee. For any student of disease and society, this book is essential, compelling reading.

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cover of Free Women: Ethics and Aesthetics in Twentieth-Century Women's Fiction

Free Women

Ethics and Aesthetics in Twentieth-Century Women's Fiction

Kate Fullbrook

Temple University Press, 1990

"In her lucid and persuasive study, Kate Fullbrook shows bow women writers from Edith Wharton to Toni Morrison have used their fiction to help restructure our ethical landscape. Her book insists on the useful truth that feminism, with its moral centre, has still much to offer the late twentieth century." --Janet Todd, University of East Anglia In this sensitive and incisive study of eleven major twentieth-century women novelists, Kate Fullbrook traces the ethical and aesthetic impulses that have shaped their fiction. The result is a profoundly important way of reading women writers in the light of a new ethics for women. This book captures the sweep of women's literary achievement in the modern period and the impact of the radical new moral principles outlined in their fiction. The novelists included here are Edith Wharton, Willa Cather, Zora Neale Hurston, Gertrude Stein, Virginia Woolf, Dorothy Richardson, Djuna Barnes, Christina Stead, Doris Lessing, Margaret Atwood, and Toni Morrison. Fullbrook treats them not only as major literary figures in their own right but also as part of a tradition of women's writing that has as its project nothing less than an attempt to shift the moral ideas of the modern world. "This is an exciting, original, and informative study of twentieth-century women's fiction. It brings a vast amount of material together, yet manages never to lose or confuse the reader--always there is a clear line of argument. The approach is genuinely interdisciplinary in the best spirit of feminist inquiry and [Fullbrook's] readings are fresh and illuminating. Fullbrook's argument that these women writers restructure the ethical landscape by devising new patterns for measuring moral success or failure is persuasive. Her discussion of the way they rebuild from the philosophical rubble of relativism, the way they intervene at a moment of cultural disjunction to propose alternative futures, is convincing and important." --Gayle Green, Scripps College
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cover of From Dark Night to Gentle Surrender: On the Ethics and Spirituality of Hospice Care

From Dark Night to Gentle Surrender

On the Ethics and Spirituality of Hospice Care

Patricia Kobielus Thompson

University of Scranton Press, 2010

Drawing from her many years of experience as a hospice nurse and her training as a theologian, Patricia Kobielus Thompson offers in The Dark Night of the Soul instruction to those providing care for terminally ill patients. Thompson finds in the poetry and other writings of Spanish mystic Saint John of the Cross a wisdom that she argues will assist caregivers in comforting their patients through the trying times just before death. Though much has been written on Saint John of the Cross, Thompson’s application of these works is wholly new and rooted in deep empathy.

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cover of From Human Dignity to Natural Law: An Introduction

From Human Dignity to Natural Law

An Introduction

Richard Berquist

Catholic University of America Press, 2019

From Human Dignity to Natural Law shows how the whole of the natural law, as understood in the Aristotelian Thomistic tradition, is contained implicitly in human dignity. Human dignity means existing for one’s own good (the common good as well as one’s individual good), and not as a mere means to an alien good. But what is the true human good? This question is answered with a careful analysis of Aristotle’s definition of happiness. The natural law can then be understood as the precepts that guide us in achieving happiness. To show that human dignity is a reality in the nature of things and not a mere human invention, it is necessary to show that human beings exist by nature for the achievement of the properly human good in which happiness is found. This implies finality in nature. Since contemporary natural science does not recognize final causality, the book explains why living things, as least, must exist for a purpose and why the scientific method, as currently understood, is not able to deal with this question. These reflections will also enable us to respond to a common criticism of natural law theory: that it attempts to derive statements of what ought to be from statements about what is. After defining the natural law and relating it to human or positive law, Richard Berquist considers Aquinas’s formulation of the first principle of the natural law. It then discusses the love commandments to love God above all things and to love one’s neighbor as oneself as the first precepts of the natural law. Subsequent chapters are devoted to clarifying and defending natural law precepts concerned with the life issues, with sexual morality and marriage, and with fundamental natural rights. From Human Dignity to Natural Law concludes with a discussion of alternatives to the natural law.
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cover of From Light to Byte: Toward an Ethics of Digital Cinema

From Light to Byte

Toward an Ethics of Digital Cinema

Markos Hadjioannou

University of Minnesota Press, 2012

Cinema has been undergoing a profound technological shift: celluloid film is being replaced by digital media in the production, distribution, and reception of moving images. Concerned with the debate surrounding digital cinema’s ontology and the interrelationship between cinema cultures, From Light to Byte investigates the very idea of change as it is expressed in the current technological transition. Markos Hadjioannou asks what is different in the way digital movies depict the world and engage with the individual and how we might best address the issue of technological shift within media archaeologies.

Hadjioannou turns to the technical basis of the image as his first point of departure, considering the creative and perceptual activities of moviemakers and viewers. Grounded in film history, film theory, and philosophy, he explores how the digital configures its engagement with reality and the individual while simultaneously replaying and destabilizing celluloid’s own structures. He observes that, where film’s photographic foundation encourages an existential association between individual and reality, digital representations are graphic renditions of mathematical codes whose causal relations are more difficult to trace.

Throughout this work Hadjioannou examines how the two technologies set themselves up with reference to reality, physicality, spatiality, and temporality, and he concludes that the question concerning digital cinema is ultimately one of ethical implications—a question, that is, of the individual’s ability to respond to the image of the world.

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cover of Frozen Embryos: A Catholic Moral Evaluation of Embryo Adoption, Cryopreservation, Rehydration & Artifical Wombs

Frozen Embryos

A Catholic Moral Evaluation of Embryo Adoption, Cryopreservation, Rehydration & Artifical Wombs

Irene Alexander

Catholic University of America Press, 2027

In the decades following the rise of in vitro fertilization, hundreds of thousands of human embryos have been cryopreserved and ultimately abandoned, raising urgent and largely unresolved ethical questions. What moral responsibilities are owed to these embryonic human lives, and what courses of action remain open to those seeking to act with integrity in the face of this technological legacy? In this work, Irene Alexander offers a careful and rigorous examination of the ethical possibilities surrounding abandoned frozen embryos. Drawing on philosophical reasoning, theological insight, and contemporary bioethical debate, she evaluates a range of proposed responses, including embryo adoption, indefinite cryopreservation, thawing without transfer, and the emerging prospect of artificial wombs. Each option is assessed not only for its practical implications but also for its coherence with a robust account of human dignity and moral responsibility. Rather than offering simplistic solutions, Alexander clarifies the moral principles at stake, illuminating the tensions between compassion, justice, and the limits of technological intervention. She situates the problem within a broader cultural and scientific context, showing how developments in reproductive technology have outpaced the ethical frameworks needed to guide them. Accessible to educated readers while grounded in serious scholarship, this book provides a much-needed framework for thinking clearly about one of the most complex bioethical dilemmas of our time. It will be of particular interest to scholars, students, and practitioners in bioethics, theology, philosophy, and medicine, as well as to anyone seeking to understand the moral contours of life in an age of unprecedented technological power.
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