Learn how ethical principles and concepts apply to global environmental problems
This fully updated and expanded textbook gives you new reflections on global environmental issues. It looks at issues ...including climate change, sustainable development and biodiversity preservation, and sensitively addresses global developments such as the Summits at Durban on climate and at Nagoya on biodiversity. Robin Attfield gives an ethical critique of current international environmental problems and negotiations, and explains how international regimes will need to change to be able to cope with global environmental problems.
New for this editionA new chapter on the ethics of climate changeUp-to-date case studies on issues such as Haiti's re-forestation project, food sovereignty and resistance to the Xayaburi DamNew passages on lobbying websites and the Yasuni Reserve in EquadorFind out moreRead the introduction for free now (pdf)Visit Robin Attfield's ResearchGate profile
In our name Beerbohm, Eric
2012., 20120722, 2012, 2012-07-22, 20120101
eBook
When a government in a democracy acts in our name, are we, as citizens, responsible for those acts? What if the government commits a moral crime? The protestor's slogan--"Not in our name!"--testifies ...to the need to separate ourselves from the wrongs of our leaders. Yet the idea that individual citizens might bear a special responsibility for political wrongdoing is deeply puzzling for ordinary morality and leading theories of democracy.In Our Nameexplains how citizens may be morally exposed to the failures of their representatives and state institutions, and how complicity is the professional hazard of democratic citizenship. Confronting the ethical challenges that citizens are faced with in a self-governing democracy, Eric Beerbohm proposes institutional remedies for dealing with them.
Beerbohm questions prevailing theories of democracy for failing to account for our dual position as both citizens and subjects. Showing that the obligation to participate in the democratic process is even greater when we risk serving as accomplices to wrongdoing, Beerbohm argues for a distinctive division of labor between citizens and their representatives that charges lawmakers with the responsibility of incorporating their constituents' moral principles into their reasoning about policy. Grappling with the practical issues of democratic decision making,In Our Nameengages with political science, law, and psychology to envision mechanisms for citizens seeking to avoid democratic complicity.
Contemporary Western war is represented as enacting the West’s ability and responsibility to help make the world a better place for others, in particular to protect them from oppression and serious ...human rights abuses. That is, war has become permissible again, indeed even required, as ethical war. At the same time, however, Western war kills and destroys. This creates a paradox: Western war risks killing those it proposes to protect. This book examines how we have responded to this dilemma and challenges the vision of ethical war itself. That is, it explores how the commitment to ethics shapes the practice of war and indeed how practices come, in turn, to shape what is considered ethical in war. The book closely examines particular practices of warfare, such as targeting, the use of cultural knowledge, and ethics training for soldiers. What emerges is that instead of constraining violence, the commitment to ethics enables and enhances it. The book argues that the production of ethical war relies on an impossible but obscured separation between ethics and politics, that is, a problematic politics of ethics, and reflects on the need to make decisions at the limit of ethics.
Algorithms and Autonomy Rubel, Alan; Castro, Clinton; Pham, Adam
2021, 2021-05-05, 2021-05-20
eBook
Open access
Algorithms influence every facet of modern life. However, delegating important decisions to machines gives rise to deep moral concerns about responsibility, transparency, fairness, and democracy. ...This book examines these concerns by connecting them to the human value of autonomy. This title is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.
Following on from Ethics Education in the Military (eds. Paul Robinson, Nigel de Lee and Don Carrick: Ashgate 2008) which surveyed and critically analyzed the existing theory and practice of ...educating soldiers, sailors and airmen in the ethics of 'old fashioned' warfaring, this volume considers the extent to which such theory and practice is adequate to prepare members of the military to meet the more complex ethical challenges faced when engaging in irregular warfare in the 21st century. In recent years, events in Iraq and Afghanistan have highlighted the requirement that Western military personnel, drawn from the armed forces of many different countries, should behave in an ethical manner at all times. The contributors to this volume come from various disciplinary backgrounds, several are serving or former military officers and most are actively engaged in ethics education. The volume advances theoretical understanding of different approaches to ethics education and provides practical conclusions.
For half a century, cultural production in Colombia has labored under the weight of magical realism—above all, the works of Gabriel García Márquez—where ghosts told stories about the ...country's violent past and warned against a similarly gruesome future.
Decades later, the story of violence in Colombia is no less horrific, but the critical resources of magical realism are depleted. In their wake comes "spectral realism." Juliana Martínez argues that recent Colombian novelists, filmmakers, and artists—from Evelio Rosero and William Vega to Beatriz González and Erika Diettes—share a formal and thematic concern with the spectral but shift the focus from what the ghost is toward what the specter does. These works do not speak of ghosts. Instead, they use the specter to destabilize reality by challenging the authority of human vision and historical chronology.
By introducing the spectral into their work, these artists decommodify well-worn modes of representing violence and create a critical space from which to seek justice for the dead and disappeared. A Colombia-based study, Haunting without Ghosts brings powerful insight to the politics and ethics of spectral aesthetics, relevant for a variety of sociohistorical contexts.
Sarah Bridger examines the ethical debates that tested the U.S. scientific community during the Cold War, and scientists' contributions to military technologies and strategic policymaking, from the ...dawning atomic age through the Strategic Defense Initiative (Star Wars) in the 1980s, which sparked cross-generational opposition among scientists.
This volume examines the ethical issues that arise as a result of national security intelligence collection and analysis. Powerful new technologies enable the collection, communication, and analysis ...of national security data on an unprecedented scale. Data collection now plays a central role in intelligence practice, yet this development raises a host of ethical and national security problems, such as: privacy; autonomy; threats to national security and democracy by foreign states; and accountability for liberal democracies. This volume provides a comprehensive set of in-depth ethical analyses of these problems by combining contributions from both ethics scholars and intelligence practitioners. It provides the reader with a practical understanding of relevant operations, the issues that they raise, and analysis of how responses to these issues can be informed by a commitment to liberal democratic values. This combination of perspectives is crucial in providing an informed appreciation of ethical challenges that is also grounded in the realities of the practice of intelligence. This book will be of great interest to all students of intelligence studies, ethics, security studies, foreign policy, and International Relations.
Walmart is the largest employer in the world. It encompasses nearly 1 percent of the entire American workforce-young adults, parents, formerly incarcerated people, retirees. Walmart also presents one ...possible future of work-Walmartism-in which the arbitrary authority of managers mixes with a hyperrationalized, centrally controlled bureaucracy in ways that curtail workers' ability to control their working conditions and their lives.InWorking for Respect, Adam Reich and Peter Bearman examine how workers make sense of their jobs at places like Walmart in order to consider the nature of contemporary low-wage work, as well as the obstacles and opportunities such workplaces present as sites of struggle for social and economic justice. They describe the life experiences that lead workers to Walmart and analyze the dynamics of the shop floor. As a part of the project, Reich and Bearman matched student activists with a nascent association of current and former Walmart associates: the Organization United for Respect at Walmart (OUR Walmart). They follow the efforts of this new partnership, considering the formation of collective identity and the relationship between social ties and social change. They show why traditional unions have been unable to organize service-sector workers in places like Walmart and offer provocative suggestions for new strategies and directions. Drawing on a wide array of methods, including participant-observation, oral history, big data, and the analysis of social networks,Working for Respectis a sophisticated reconsideration of the modern workplace that makes important contributions to debates on labor and inequality and the centrality of the experience of work in a fair economy.
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