Ethics category: 8196 books

The story of the global search for moral truths In this remarkable and groundbreaking book, Kenan Malik explores the history of moral thought as it has developed over three millennia, from Homer’s Greece to Mao’s China, from ancient India to modern America. It tells the stories of the great...

This book challenges the view, common among Western scholars, that precolonial India lacked a tradition of military philosophy. It traces the evolution of theories of warfare in India from the dawn of civilization, focusing on the debate between Dharmayuddha (Just War) and Kutayuddha (Unjust War)...

This collection of essays, inspired by the author's experience teaching ethics to Marine and Navy chaplains during the Iraq War, examines the moral and psychological dilemmas posed by war. The first section deals directly with Dr Peter A. French's teaching experience and the specific challenges posed...

Bioethics is a discipline still not fully explored in spite of its rather remark­ able expansion and sophistication during the past two decades. The prolifer­ ation of courses in bioethics at educational institutions of every description gives testimony to an intense academic interest in its concerns....

How are we to conceive of acts that suddenly expose the injustice of the prevailing order? These acts challenge long-standing hidden or silently tolerated injustices, but as they are unsupported by existing ethical rules they pose a drastic challenge to dominant norms. In Excessive Subjectivity, Dominik...

This book is about learning how to live the good life. Part biography and part philosophical inquiry, it is a fresh, original interpretation of the intellectual world of the largely forgotten, eighteenth-century professor, Adam Ferguson. Although less well-known today than his famous Scottish contemporaries,...

Adorno notoriously asserted that there is no 'right' life in our current social world. This assertion has contributed to the widespread perception that his philosophy has no practical import or coherent ethics, and he is often accused of being too negative. Fabian Freyenhagen reconstructs and defends...

Virtue theory, natural law, deontology, utilitarianism, existentialism: these are the basic moral theories taught in “Ethics,” “History of Philosophy,” and “Introduction to Philosophy” courses throughout the United States. When the American philosopher William James (1842 – 1910) find...

Alice Crary offers a transformative account of moral thought about human beings and animals. Instead of assuming that the world places no demands on our moral imagination, she underscores the urgency of treating the exercise of moral imagination as necessary for arriving at an adequate world-guided understanding of human beings and animals.

Jeffreys explores the spiritual consequences and ethics of modern solitary confinement and emphasizes how solitary confinement damages our spiritual lives. He focuses particularly on how it destroys one's relationship to time and undermines our creativity, and proposes institutional changes in order to mitigate profound damage to prisoners.

The first book-length treatment of James Joyce's work through the lens of Friedrich Nietzsche's thought, Slote argues that the range of styles Joyce deploys has an ethical dimension. This intersection raises questions of epistemology, aesthetics, and the construction of the 'Modern' and will appeal to literary and philosophy scholars.

The literature of Adrienne Rich, Toni Morrison, Ana Castillo, and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie teaches a risky, self-giving way of reading (and being) that brings home the dangers and the possibilities of suffering as an ethical good. Working the thought of feminist theologians and philosophers into an...

In this visionary book, John Raymaker, and Gerald Grudzen with Joe Holland -- pioneering scholars of religion, philosophy and culture -- first try to read the contemporary signs of the times which indicate that late modern civilization and our planet earth are in a crisis and need renewal and reform....

Knowing that we are finite, how can we live to the fullest? Philosopher George Santayana suggested 'spirituality' enables us to enjoy what we have. This book clarifies and extends Santayana's account of spirituality, while suggesting how the detachment of spirituality can relieve human suffering, enrich our lives, and make us better human beings.