A pithy work of philosophical anthropology that explores why humans find moral orders in natural orders. Why have human beings, in many different cultures and epochs, looked to nature as a source of norms for human behavior From ancient India and ancient Greece, medieval France and Enlightenment America, up to the latest controversies over gay marriage and cloning, natural orders have been enli…
Here, Bruce Waller launches a spirited attack on a system that is profoundly entrenched in our society and its institutions deeply rooted in our emotions, and vigorously defended by philosophers from ancient times to the present.OCLC-licensed vendor bibliographic record.
This title presents a proposal that the cognitive processes that make us moral agents are partially constituted by features of our external environments.OCLC-licensed vendor bibliographic record.
Originally published: 2001.In this book Joseph Heath brings Jurgen Habermas's theory of communicative action into dialogue with the most sophisticated articulation of the instrumental conception of practical rationality-modern rational choice theory. Heath begins with an overview of Habermas's action theory and his critique of decision and game theory. He then offers an alternative to Habermas'…
A physician/philosopher uses anecdotes, historical narrative, and philosophical concepts to draw a moral portrait of the doctor-patient relationship."My mission is to analyze medicines ethical structure. I do so as both a physician and a philosopher. Of my two voices, it is the latter that is informed by the former ... As a physician I have sought professional solutions to the frustrations of f…
Bioethics emerged in the 1960s from a conviction that physicians and researchers needed the guidance of philosophers in handling the issues raised by technological advances in medicine. It blossomed as a response to the perceived doctor-knows-best paternalism of the traditional medical ethic and today plays a critical role in health policies and treatment decisions. Bioethics claimed to offer a…
Predictions about global climate change have produced both stark scenarios of environmental catastrophe and purportedly pragmatic ideas about adaptation. This book takes a different perspective exploring the idea that the challenge of adapting to global climate change is fundamentally an ethical one.OCLC-licensed vendor bibliographic record.
The transformative potential of genetic and cybernetic technologies to enhance human capabilities is most often either rejected on moral and prudential grounds or hailed as the future salvation of humanity. In this book, Nicholas Agar offers a more nuanced view, making a case for moderate human enhancement -- improvements to attributes and abilities that do not significantly exceed what is curr…
How developing a more expansive, non-formal conception of reason produces richer ethical understandings of human situations, explored and illustrated with many real examples.OCLC-licensed vendor bibliographic record.
Legal texts have been with us since the dawn of human history. Beginning in 1953, life too became textual. The discovery of the structure of DNA made it possible to represent the basic matter of life with permutations and combinations of four letters of the alphabet, A, T, C, and G. Since then, the biological and legal conceptions of life have been in constant, mutually constitutive interplay -…