The ethics of identity Appiah, Anthony
2005., 20100628, 2010, 2005, 2023-10-03, 2007-02-09, 20050101, Letnik:
132
eBook
Race, ethnicity, nationality, religion, gender, sexuality: in the past couple of decades, a great deal of attention has been paid to such collective identities. They clamor for recognition and ...respect, sometimes at the expense of other things we value. But to what extent do "identities" constrain our freedom, our ability to make an individual life, and to what extent do they enable our individuality? In this beautifully written work, renowned philosopher and African Studies scholar Kwame Anthony Appiah draws on thinkers through the ages and across the globe to explore such questions.
Moral laboratories Mattingly, Cheryl
2014., 20141003, 2014, 2014-10-03
eBook
Moral Laboratoriesis an engaging ethnography and a groundbreaking foray into the anthropology of morality. It takes us on a journey into the lives of African American families caring for children ...with serious chronic medical conditions, and it foregrounds the uncertainty that affects their struggles for a good life. Challenging depictions of moral transformation as possible only in moments of breakdown or in radical breaches from the ordinary, it offers a compelling portrait of the transformative powers embedded in day-to-day existence. From soccer fields to dinner tables, the everyday emerges as a moral laboratory for reshaping moral life. Cheryl Mattingly offers vivid and heart-wrenching stories to elaborate a first-person ethical framework, forcefully showing the limits of third-person renderings of morality.
How did marriage come to be seen as the foundation and guarantee of social stability in Third Republic France? In Sexing the Citizen , Judith Surkis shows how masculine sexuality became central to ...the making of a republican social order. Marriage, Surkis argues, affirmed the citizen's masculinity, while also containing and controlling his desires. This ideal offered a specific response to the problems—individualism, democratization, and rapid technological and social change—associated with France's modernity. This rich, wide-ranging cultural and intellectual history provides important new insights into how concerns about sexuality shaped the Third Republic's pedagogical projects. Educators, political reformers, novelists, academics, and medical professionals enshrined marriage as the key to eliminating the risks of social and sexual deviance posed by men-especially adolescents, bachelors, bureaucrats, soldiers, and colonial subjects. Debates on education reform and venereal disease reveal how seriously the social policies of the Third Republic took the need to control the unstable aspects of male sexuality. Surkis's compelling analyses of republican moral philosophy and Emile Durkheim's sociology illustrate the cultural weight of these concerns and provide an original account of modern French thinking about society. More broadly, Sexing the Citizen illuminates how sexual norms continue to shape the meaning of citizenship.
Adam Smith is the best known among economists for his book, The Wealth of Nations, often viewed as the keystone of modern economic thought. For many he has become associated with a quasi-libertarian ...laissez-faire philosophy. Others, often heterodox economists and social philosophers, on the contrary, focus on Smith's Theory of Moral Sentiments, and explore his moral theory. There has been a long debate about the relationship or lack thereof between these, his two great works. This work treats these dimensions of Smith's work as elements in a seamless moral philosophical vision, demonstrating the integrated nature of these works and Smith's other writings. This book weaves Smith into a constructive critique of modern economic analysis (engaging along the way the work of Nobel Laureates Gary Becker, Amarty Sen, Douglass North, and James Buchanan) and builds bridges between that discourse and the other social sciences.
In this book, William Talbott builds on the work of J.S. Mill, John Rawls, and Jürgen Habermas to develop a new equilibrium model for moral reasoning, in which moral reasoning is primarily bottom-up, ...from judgments about particular actual and hypothetical cases to norms or principles that best explain the particular judgments. Employing the equilibrium model, Talbott builds on the work of John Rawls, Amartya Sen, and Henry Shue to explain how, over the course of history, human beings have learned to adopt a distinctively moral standpoint from which it is possible to make reliable, though not infallible, universal judgments of right and wrong. He explains how this distinctively moral standpoint has led to the discovery of the moral importance of nine basic human rights. The book is constructed around pivotal examples. Talbott uses the example of Bartolomé de Las Casas and his opposition to the Spanish colonists’ treatment of the American natives in the 16th century to illustrate the possibility of attaining a universal moral standpoint. He uses the example of the development of women's rights as a microcosm of the development of basic human rights. He argues that assertions of basic human rights are almost always a response to oppressive norms justified by self-reinforcing paternalism. Talbott uses examples from Marxist dictatorships to show the importance of basic human rights in solving what he refers to as the reliable feedback problem and the appropriate responsiveness problem for governments. He uses Sen’s research on famines and psychological research on the ultimatum game and other related games to explain how individual fairness judgments from the moral standpoint make rights-respecting democracies self-improving self-regulating systems that become more just over time. Undoubtedly, the most controversial issue raised by the claim of universal human rights is the issue of moral relativism. How can the advocate of universal rights avoid being a moral imperialist? In this book, Talbott shows how to defend basic individual rights from a universal moral point of view that is not imperialistic. Talbott avoids moral imperialism, first, by insisting that all of us, himself included, have moral blindspots and that we usually depend on others to help us to identify those blindspots; second, by emphasizing the importance of avoiding moral paternalism. In the book, Talbott develops a new consequentialist account of the importance of the basic human rights, which he employs to augment the more familiar nonconsequentialist accounts.
What moral standards ought nation-states abide by when selecting immigration policies? Peter Higgins argues that immigration policies can only be judged by considering the inequalities that are ...produced by the institutions – such as gender, race and class – that constitute our social world. He challenges conventional positions on immigration justice, including the view that states have a right to choose whatever immigration policies they like, or that all immigration restrictions ought to be eliminated and borders opened. Rather than suggesting one absolute solution, Higgins argues that a unique set of immigration policies will be just for each country. He concludes with concrete recommendations for policymaking.
Addresses almost all contentious moral issues - from gay marriage to abortion and affirmative action - which raise difficult questions about the justification of moral beliefs. The questions lead to ...fundamental issues about the nature of morality, language, metaphysics, justification, and knowledge.
