Results by title
33 books match the query 'Social ethics'
A Deeper Freedom
Liberal Democracy as an Everyday MoralityCharles W. Anderson
University of Wisconsin Press, 2002
Today those who believe in liberal democracy must reexamine and reaffirm their commitments. Here, Charles Anderson probes our urgent concerns and questions. Even those who believe that liberal democracy is the best form of government may think that liberal individualism leads to selfishness, permissiveness, and irresponsibility. Many would teach a cultural or religious counter-ethic to offset the excesses of freedom.
Grounding his view in classic philosophic and religious ideals, Anderson argues that a deeper vision of individuality and freedom can lead to both a sound public philosophy and a worthy personal ethic. In the same way that we as humans try to understand our place in nature and the cosmos, Anderson seeks to understand how we, as unique individuals, can understand our place among our fellow humans. Beginning with friendship and love, he extends his inquiry to the relationships of teaching, community, work, and democracy. Anderson shows how the natural desire of free people to find meaning in relationships with one another can lead to depth and fullness both in private and public life.
A Fatal Drifting Apart
Democratic Social Knowledge and Chicago ReformLaura M. Westhoff
The Ohio State University Press, 2007
A Fatal Drifting Apart: Democratic Social Knowledge and Chicago Reform explores the efforts of diverse groups within Chicago during the Progressive Era. This backdrop of industrialization, emerging classes, and ethnic and racial pluralism frequently riven with class conflict set the stage on which Chicago reformers took up the seemingly impossible challenge of enacting democracy. Laura M. Westhoff examines historic events and well-known individuals of the period and brings them together in an unusual framework that offers a new perspective on the reorientation of knowledge, civic identity, and democratic culture at the dawn of the twentieth century, which she terms democratic social knowledge. The book raises important questions that continue to resonate: In a democracy, who has the power to define social problems and offer solutions, and whose experience and knowledge are seen as legitimate?
Alterity Politics
Ethics and Performative SubjectivityJeffrey T. Nealon
Duke University Press, 1998
While discussing the work of others who have refused to thematize difference in terms of the possibility or impossibility of sameness—Levinas, Butler, Derrida, Foucault, Deleuze, Guattari, Zizek, Jameson, Heidegger, Bakhtin—Nealon argues that ethics is constituted as inexorable affirmative response to different identities, not through an inability to understand or totalize the other. Alterity Politics combines this theoretical itinerary with crucial discussions of specific and diverse sites of literary and cultural production—the work of William S. Burroughs, Amiri Baraka, Andy Warhol, Ishmael Reed, Rush Limbaugh, and Vincent Van Gogh—along with analyses of the social formation of subjects as found in identity politics, and in multicultural and whiteness studies. In the process, Nealon takes on a wide variety of issues including white male anger, the ethical questions raised by drug addiction, the nature of literary meaning, and the concept of “becoming-black.”
In seeking to build an ethical structure around poststructuralist discourse and to revitalize the applied use of theoretical concepts to notions of performative identity, Alterity Politics marks a decisive intervention in literary theory, cultural studies, twentieth-century philosophy, and performance studies.
Altruism, Morality, and Economic Theory
Edmund S. Phelps
Russell Sage Foundation, 1975
At the Heart of the State
The Moral World of InstitutionsDidier Fassin, et al.
Pluto Press, 2015
The state is often regarded as an abstract and neutral bureaucratic entity. Against this common sense idea, At the Heart of the State argues that it is also a concrete and situated reality, embodied in the work of its agents and inscribed in the issues of its time.
The result of a five-year investigation conducted by ten scholars, this book describes and analyses the police, the court system, the prison apparatus, the social services, and mental health facilities in France. Combining genealogy and ethnography, its authors show that these state institutions do not simply implement laws, rules and procedures: they mobilise values and affects, judgements and emotions. In other words, they reflect the morality of the state.
Of immense interest to both social scientists and political theorists, this work will make an important contribution to the ever expanding literature on the contemporary state.
Caring and Doing for Others
Social Responsibility in the Domains of Family, Work, and CommunityEdited by Alice S. Rossi
University of Chicago Press, 2001
The book explores the extent to which adults contribute time to caregiving, social support, and financial assistance to family members; the time given to volunteer work and financial contributions to various causes, charities, and organizations; and how these contributions are affected by job obligations. A major focus is on age and gender differences, which shows midlife to be a transitional time when civic activities increase as family obligations decline. All told, the study adds a hopeful new voice to the overwhelmingly negative debate about the current state of our civic and social lives.
City of Dignity
Christianity, Liberalism, and the Making of Global Los AngelesSean T. Dempsey
University of Chicago Press, 2023
Contemporary Los Angeles is commonly seen as an American bulwark of progressive secular politics, a place that values immigration, equity, diversity, and human rights. But what accounts for the city’s embrace of such staunchly liberal values, which are more hotly contested in other parts of the country? The answer, Sean Dempsey reveals, lies not with those frequent targets of credit and blame—Democrats in Hollywood—but instead with liberal Protestants and other steadfast religious organizations of the postwar era.
As the Religious Right movement emerged in the 1970s, progressive religious activists quietly began promoting an ethical vision that made waves worldwide but saw the largest impact in its place of origin: metropolitan Los Angeles. At the center of this vision lay the concept of human dignity—entwining the integral importance of political and expressive freedom with the moral sanctity of the human condition—which suffused all of the political values that arose from it, whether tolerance, diversity, or equality of opportunity. The work of these religious organizations birthed such phenomena as the Sanctuary Movement—which provided safe haven for refugees fleeing conflict-torn Central America—and advocacy for the homeless, both of which became increasingly fraught issues amid the rising tides of neoliberalism and conservatism. City of Dignity explores how these interwoven spiritual and theological strands found common ground—and made common impacts—in the humanitarian ecosystem of one of America’s largest and most dynamic metro areas.
Community and Progress in Kant's Moral Philosophy
Kate A. Moran
Catholic University of America Press, 2012
Complaint
Grievance among FriendsAvital Ronell
University of Illinois Press, 2018
Avital Ronell considers how literature and philosophy treat bellyachers, wailers, and grumps—and the complaints they lavish on the rest of us. Combining her trademark jazzy panache with a fearless range of readings, Ronell opens a dialogue with readers that discusses thinkers with whom she has directly engaged. Beginning with Hamlet, and with a candid awareness of her own experiences, Ronell proceeds to show how complaining is aggravated, distracted, stifled, and transformed. She moves on to the exemplary complaints of Friedrich Nietzsche, Hannah Arendt, and Barbara Johnson and examines the complaint-riven history of deconstruction.
Infused with the author’s trademark wit, Complaint takes friends, colleagues, and all of us on a courageous philosophical journey.
Democracy and Social Ethics
Jane Addams
University of Illinois Press, 2001
In this, Addams's earliest book on ethics--presented here with a substantial introduction by Charlene Haddock Seigfried--she reflects on the factors that hinder the ability of all members of society to determine their own well-being. Observing relationships between charitable workers and their clients, between factory owners and their employers, and between household employers and their servants, she identifies sources of friction and shows how conceiving of democracy as a social obligation can lead to new, mutually beneficial lines of conduct. She also considers the proper education of workers, struggles between parents and their adult daughters over conflicting family and social claims, and the merging of politics with the daily lives of constituents.
"The sphere of morals is the sphere of action," Addams proclaims. It is not enough to believe passively in the innate dignity of all human beings. Rather, one must work daily to root out racial, gender, class, and other prejudices from personal relationships.
Deviance and Medicalization
From Badness to SicknessPeter Conrad and Joseph W. Schneider
Temple University Press, 1992
Duty to Respond
Mass Crime, Denial, and Collective ResponsibilityNenad Dimitrijevic
Central European University Press, 2011
Ethical Issues in Contemporary Society
John Howie
Southern Illinois University Press, 1995
In this volume of Leys Lectures, the third collection of Wayne Leys Memorial Lectures, six distinguished essayists demonstrate the relevance of ethics to contemporary concerns by constructively exploring major ethical issues deeply embedded in our society.
The essays, written by noted scholars Tom Regan, Carol C. Gould, James Rachels, James P. Sterba, Louis P. Pojman, and David L. Norton, focus on issues of feminism, the exploitation of animals, economic injustice, racial prejudice, naive moral relativism, and the failure of public education.
Tom Regan and Louis P. Pojman both address the issue of animal rights. Regan directs his attention to an ethic-of-care feminism, which contends that the ideology of male superiority—not only to women but to all creatures—must be destroyed. By means of a "consistency argument," he extends ethic-of-care feminism to the treatment of animals, insisting that we must not permit to be done to animals "in the name of science" what we would not allow to be done to human beings. Pojman, on the other hand, addresses the question of animal rights through a critical analysis of seven theories of the moral status of animals, arguing that while animals have no natural "rights" since they are unable to enter into contracts, they do deserve to be treated kindly. In his view, much animal research could be abandoned without significant loss.
What rethinking of democracy in terms of freedom and equality is required by economic justice? Carol C. Gould offers an answer to this question by arguing that economic justice requires that workers control the production process as well as the distribution process. Such justice would provide the basis of "positive freedom" as self-development without ignoring the importance of the absence of constraints.
Taking racial prejudice as his paradigm, James Rachels explores the deeper meaning of prejudice and what equality of treatment involves. Noting the subtlety of prejudicial reasoning, he examines how stereotypes, unconscious bias, and the human tendency toward rationalization make it difficult even for people of good will to prevent prejudice from influencing their actions.
James P. Sterba invites the reader to consider a different and more general problem of how to persuade people to act for moral reasons. To accomplish this aim he shows morality to be a requirement of rationality and "the welfare liberal ideal" (the right to welfare and the right to equal opportunity) to be a fusion of the practical ends of five ideals—liberty, fairness, common good, androgyny, and equality.
For David L. Norton, one of our most pressing problems is the failure of our educational system. The system fails to enable students to make wise "life-shaping" choices involving vocation, marriage, children, and friendship. In order to make good choices, human beings must live and work in an environment that provides experiences that authenticate "personal truths" indispensable to worthy living. These personal truths include direct acquaintance with vocational alternatives and participation in actual service to others.
Collectively, these essays bring into sharp focus the urgent moral issues confronting our society and the need for ongoing discussion and examination of these issues in order to gain deeper understanding of and possible solutions to the problems they present.
Ethical Principles and Practice
John Howie
Southern Illinois University Press, 1987
The second volume in applied ethics based on the distinguished Wayne Leys Memorial Lectureship Series.
With guidelines from legal reasoning, Michael D. Bayles examines “Moral Theory and Application.” Abraham Edel questions “Ethics Applied Or Conduct Enlightened?” The late Warner A. Wick shows in “The Good Person and the Good Society: Some Ideals Foolish and Otherwise” that devotion to ideals need not be either fanaticism or foolishness. John Lachs contends that many public gains are purchased at the cost of individuals being manipulated in “Public Benefit, Private Costs.” James E. Childress in “Gift of Life…” considers ethical issues in obtaining and distributing human organs. Carl Wellman in “Terrorism and Moral Rights” argues that there can be no “rights-based justification” for anti-abortion terrorism.
Ethical Principles for Social Policy
John Howie
Southern Illinois University Press, 1983
Abortion, euthanasia, racism, sexism, paternalism, the rights of children, the population explosion, and the dynamics of economic growth are examined in the light of ethical principles by leading philosophers in order to suggest reasonable judgments.
Originally prepared for the distinguished Wayne Leys Memorial Lecture Series at Southern Illinois University, Carbondale, the essayists have addressed themselves to the most pressing ethical questions being asked today. William K. Frankena, Professor Emeritus, University of Michigan, in “The Ethics of Respect for Life” argues for a qualified view of moral respect for human personality. From his viewpoint it is always prima facie wrong to shorten or prevent human life, but not always actually wrong as other moral conditions may counter the presumed wrong. The late William T. Blackstone in “Zero Population Growth and Zero Economic Growth” contends that justice will require the production of the maximal level of goods to fulfill basic human needs compatible with the avoidance of ecological catastrophe.
Richard Wasserstrom, Professor of Philosophy at the University of California, Santa Cruz, proposes an assimilationist ideal in “Racism, Sexism, and Preferential Treatment.” Gerald Dworkin, Professor of Philosophy at the University of Illinois, Chicago Circle, dares to ask “Is More Choice Better than Less?” Joel Feinberg, Professor of Philosophy at the University of Arizona, in “The Child’s Right to an Open Future,” offers a defense of “rights-in-trust” of children. Tom L. Beauchamp, Professor of Philosophy and Senior Research Scholar at the Kennedy Institute-Center for Bioethics of Georgetown University, considers the paternalism used to justify social policies in the practice of medicine and insists that it invariably involves a conflict between the ethical principles of beneficence and autonomy.
Ethics of Liberation
In the Age of Globalization and ExclusionEnrique Dussel
Duke University Press, 2012
Throughout his career, Dussel has sought to open a space for articulating new possibilities for humanity out of, and in light of, the suffering, dignity, and creative drive of those who have been excluded from Western Modernity and neoliberal rationalism. Grounded in engagement with the oppressed, his thinking has figured prominently in philosophy, political theory, and liberation movements around the world.
In Ethics of Liberation, Dussel provides a comprehensive world history of ethics, demonstrating that our most fundamental moral and ethical traditions did not emerge in ancient Greece and develop through modern European and North American thought. The obscured and ignored origins of Modernity lie outside the Western tradition. Ethics of Liberation is a monumental rethinking of the history, origins, and aims of ethics. It is a critical reorientation of ethical theory.
Fugitive Thought
Prison Movements, Race, And The Meaning Of JusticeMichael Hames-Garcia
University of Minnesota Press, 2004
Looks to the philosophy and experience of prisoners to reinvigorate our concepts of justice, solidarity, and freedom
In Fugitive Thought, Michael Hames-García argues that writings by prisoners are instances of practical social theory that seek to transform the world. Unlike other authors who have studied prisons or legal theory, Hames-García views prisoners as political and social thinkers whose ideas are as valuable as those of lawyers and philosophers.
As key moral terms like “justice,” “solidarity,” and “freedom” have come under suspicion in the post–Civil Rights era, political discussions on the Left have reached an impasse. Fugitive Thought reexamines and reinvigorates these concepts through a fresh approach to philosophies of justice and freedom, combining the study of legal theory and of prison literature to show how the critiques and moral visions of dissidents and participants in prison movements can contribute to the shaping and realization of workable ethical conceptions. Fugitive Thought focuses on writings by black and Latina/o lawyers and prisoners to flesh out the philosophical underpinnings of ethical claims within legal theory and prison activism.
Jane Addams's Evolutionary Theorizing
Constructing “Democracy and Social Ethics”Marilyn Fischer
University of Chicago Press, 2019
Examining essays Addams wrote in the 1890s and showing how they were revised for Democracy and Social Ethics, Fischer draws from philosophy, history, literature, rhetoric, and more to uncover the array of social evolutionary thought Addams engaged with in her texts—from British socialist writings on the evolution of democracy to British and German anthropological accounts of the evolution of morality. By excavating Addams’s evolutionary reasoning and rhetorical strategies, Fischer reveals the depth, subtlety, and richness of Addams’s thought.
Lectures on Ethics, 1900 - 1901
John DeweyDonald F. Koch
Southern Illinois University Press, 1991
In Lectures on Ethics, 1900–1901,Donald F. Koch supplies the only extant complete transcription of the annual three-course sequence on ethics John Dewey gave at the University of Chicago.
In his introduction Koch argues that these lectures offer the best systematic, overall introduction to Dewey’s approach to moral philosophy and are the only account showing the unity of his views in nearly all phases of ethical inquiry. These lectures are the only work by Dewey to set forth a complete theory of moral language. They offer a clear illustration of the central methodological questions in the development of a pragmatic instrumentalist ethic and the actual working out of the instrumentalist approach as distinct from simply presenting it as a conclusion.
Moral Politics
How Liberals and Conservatives Think, Second EditionGeorge Lakoff
University of Chicago Press, 2002
Moral Politics
How Liberals and Conservatives Think, Third EditionGeorge Lakoff
University of Chicago Press, 2016
Lakoff reveals radically different but remarkably consistent conceptions of morality on both the left and right. Moral worldviews, like most deep ways of understanding the world, are unconscious—part of our “hard-wired” brain circuitry. When confronted with facts that don’t fit our moral worldview, our brains work automatically and unconsciously to ignore or reject these facts, and it takes extraordinary openness and awareness of this phenomenon to pay critical attention to the vast number of facts we are presented with each day. For this new edition, Lakoff has added a new preface and afterword, extending his observations to major ideological conflicts since the book's original publication, from the Affordable Care Act to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the recent financial crisis, and the effects of global warming. One might have hoped such massive changes would bring people together, but the reverse has actually happened; the divide between liberals and conservatives has become stronger and more virulent.
To have any hope of bringing mutual respect to the current social and political divide, we need to clearly understand the problem and make it part of our contemporary public discourse. Moral Politics offers a much-needed wake-up call to both the left and the right.
Moral Politics
What Conservatives Know That Liberals Don'tGeorge Lakoff
University of Chicago Press, 1996
Morality & Imagination
Yi-Fu Tuan
University of Wisconsin Press, 1989
Morality within the Limits of Reason
Russell Hardin
University of Chicago Press, 1988
Reading Patristic Texts on Social Ethics
Issues and Challenges for the Twenty-First CenturyJohan Leemans
Catholic University of America Press, 2011
Regulating Confusion
Samuel Johnson and the CrowdThomas Reinert
Duke University Press, 1996
Ambivalent about the disruption, confusion, perplexity, and boundless variety apparent in the London of his day, Johnson was committed to the conventions of moral reflection but also troubled by the pressure to adopt the perspective of the crowd and the language of social theory. Regulating Confusion explores the consequences of his ambivalence and his attempt to order the chaos. It discusses his critique of moral generalizations, concept of moral reflection as a symbolic gesture, and account of what happens to the notion of character when individuals, having lost the support of moral convention, become faces in a crowd. Reflecting generally on the relationship between skepticism and political ideology, Reinert also discusses Johnson’s political skepticism and the forms of speculation and action it authorized.
Challenging prevalent psychologizing and humanistic interpretations, Regulating Confusion leaves behind the re-emergent view of Johnson as a reactionary ideologue and presents him in a theoretically sophisticated context. It offers his style of skepticism as a model of poise in the face of confusion about the nature of political truth and personal responsibility and demonstrates his value as a resource for students of culture struggling with contemporary debates about the relationship between literature and politics.
Sharing Responsibility
Larry May
University of Chicago Press, 1992
State-Corporate Crime
Wrongdoing at the Intersection of Business and GovernmentMichalowski, Raymond J
Rutgers University Press, 2006
Despite growing attention to crimes by those in positions of trust, however, violations in business and similar wrongdoing in government are still often treated as fundamentally separate problems. In State-Corporate Crime, Raymond J. Michalowski and Ronald C. Kramer bring together fifteen essays to show that those in positions of political and economic power frequently operate in collaboration, and are often all too willing to sacrifice the well-being of the many for the private profit and political advantage of the few.
Drawing on case studies including the explosion of the space shuttle Challenger, Ford Explorer rollovers, the crash of Valujet flight 592, nuclear weapons production, and war profiteering, the essays bear frank witness to those who have suffered, those who have died, and those who have contributed to the greatest human and environmental devastations of our time. This book is a much needed reminder that the most serious threats to public health, security, and safety are not those petty crimes that appear nightly on local news broadcasts, but rather are those that result from corruption among the wealthiest and most powerful members of society.
The Aware Saga
Civil Society and Public Morality in SingaporeEdited by Terence Chong
National University of Singapore Press, 2011
In this book, academics and public intellectuals examine the AWARE saga within the context of Singapore's civil society, considering the political and historical background and how the issues it raised relate to contemporary societal trends. In addition to documenting a milestone event for Singapore's civil society, the authors offer provocative interpretations that will interest a broad range of readers.
The Bourgeois Virtues
Ethics for an Age of CommerceDeirdre Nansen McCloskey
University of Chicago Press, 2006
McCloskey’s sweeping, charming, and even humorous survey of ethical thought and economic realities—from Plato to Barbara Ehrenreich—overturns every assumption we have about being bourgeois. Can you be virtuous and bourgeois? Do markets improve ethics? Has capitalism made us better as well as richer? Yes, yes, and yes, argues McCloskey, who takes on centuries of capitalism’s critics with her erudition and sheer scope of knowledge. Applying a new tradition of “virtue ethics” to our lives in modern economies, she affirms American capitalism without ignoring its faults and celebrates the bourgeois lives we actually live, without supposing that they must be lives without ethical foundations.
High Noon, Kant, Bill Murray, the modern novel, van Gogh, and of course economics and the economy all come into play in a book that can only be described as a monumental project and a life’s work. The Bourgeois Virtues is nothing less than a dazzling reinterpretation of Western intellectual history, a dead-serious reply to the critics of capitalism—and a surprising page-turner.
The Heart Is a Little to the Left
Essays on Public MoralityWilliam Sloane Coffin
Dartmouth College Press, 2011
Toward Better Problems
New Perspectives on Abortion, Animal Rights, the Environment, and JusticeAnthony Weston
Temple University Press, 1992
Transgression in Korea
Beyond Resistance and ControlEdited by Juhn Ahn
University of Michigan Press, 2018
Transgression in Korea challenges the popular conceptions of transgression as resistance to authority, the collapse of morality, and an attempt at self- empowerment. Examples of transgression from premodern, modern, and contemporary Korea are examined side by side to underscore the possibility of reading transgression in more ways than one. These examples are taken from a devotional screen from medieval Korea, trickster tales from the late Chosŏn period, reports about flesheating humans, newspaper articles about same- sex relationships from colonial Korea, and films about extramarital affairs, wayward youths, and a vengeful vigilante. Bringing together specialists from various disciplines such as history, art history, anthropology, premodern
literature, religion, and fi lm studies, the context- sensitive readings of transgression provided in this book suggest that transgression and authority can be seen as forming something other than an antagonistic relationship.