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While procreation is ubiquitous, attention to the ethical issues involved in creating children is relatively rare. In Debating Procreation, David Benatar and David Wasserman take opposing views on this important question. David Benatar argues for the anti-natalist view that it is always wrong to bring new people into existence. He argues that coming into existence is always a serious harm and that even if it were not always so, the risk of serious harm is sufficiently great to make procreation wrong. In addition to these "philanthropic" arguments, he advances the "misanthropic" one that because humans are so defective and cause vast amounts of harm, it is wrong to create more of them. David ...
In this 2001 volume a group of leading philosophers address some of the basic conceptual, methodological and ethical issues raised by genetic research into criminal behavior. The essays explore the complexities of tracing any genetic influence on criminal, violent or antisocial behavior; the varieties of interpretations to which evidence of such influences is subject; and the relevance of such influences to the moral and legal appraisal of criminal conduct. The distinctive features of this collection are: first, that it advances public discussion while clarifying the debate about genetic research and criminal behavior; second, that it explains scientific controversies about behavioral genetics in lucid, non-technical terms; third, that it demonstrates how the possible findings on genetics and crime bear on fundamental issues of moral and criminal responsibility. The volume will be of particular value to philosophers concerned with applied ethics (especially bioethics), behavioral geneticists, psychologists, legal theorists, and criminologists.
This study brings together two important literatures together in the one volume. One concerns the role of quality assessments in social policy, especially health policy. The second concerns ethical and social issues raised by prenatal testing for disability. Hitherto, these two literatures have had little contact with each other: few scholars have written about both, or have compared the two domains in a systematic way, while people with disabilities and disability scholars are underrepresented in recent discussion on health policy and quality of assessment. This book turns the perspectives of disability scholars on issues that have largely been the province of health methodology, policy and philosophy, while angling philosophical policy analysis on problems that have largely been the province of disability scholarship. This volume will be sought after by bioethicists, philosophers, and specialists in disability studies and healthcare economics.
Melinda A. Roberts and David T. Wasserman 1 Purpose of this Collection What are our obligations with respect to persons who have not yet, and may not ever, come into existence? Few of us believe that we can wrong those whom we leave out of existence altogether—that is, merely possible persons. We may think as well that the directive to be “fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth” 1 does not hold up to close scrutiny. How can it be wrong to decline to bring ever more people into existence? At the same time, we think we are clearly ob- gated to treat future persons—persons who don’t yet but will exist—in accordance with certain stringent standards. Bringing a person into an...
Ryan Wasserman explores a range of fascinating puzzles raised by the possibility of time travel, with entertaining examples from physics, science fiction, and popular culture, and he draws out their implications for our understanding of time, tense, freedom, fatalism, causation, counterfactuals, laws of nature, persistence, change, and mereology.
1.1 Goals 1.1.1 I have two main goals in this book. The first is to give an account of the moral significance of merely possible persons – persons who, relative to a particular 1 circumstance, or possible future or world, could but in fact never do exist. I call that account Variabilism. My second goal is to use Variabilism to begin to address the problem of abortion. 1.1.2 We ought to do the best we can for people. And we consider this obligation to extend to people who are, relative to a world, existing or future. But does it extend to merely possible people as well? And, if it does, then does it extend to making things better for them by way of bringing them into existence? If we say th...
American Motorcyclist magazine, the official journal of the American Motorcyclist Associaton, tells the stories of the people who make motorcycling the sport that it is. It's available monthly to AMA members. Become a part of the largest, most diverse and most enthusiastic group of riders in the country by visiting our website or calling 800-AMA-JOIN.
Metaphysics asks questions about existence: for example, do numbers really exist? Metametaphysics asksquestions about metaphysics: for example, do its questions have determinate answers? If so, are these answers deep and important, or are they merely a matter of how we use words? What is the proper methodology for their resolution? These questions have received a heightened degree of attention lately with new varieties of ontological deflationism and pluralism challenging the kind of realism that has become orthodoxy in contemporary analytic metaphysics.This volume concerns the status and ambitions of metaphysics as a discipline. It brings together many of the central figures in the debate with their most recent work on the semantics, epistemology, and methodology of metaphysics.
This book examines reactions to the Russian Revolution by four little magazines of the teens and twenties (TheLiberator, The Messenger, The Little Review, and TheDial) in order to analyze some of the ways modernist writers negotiate the competing demands of aesthetics, political commitment and race. Re-examining interconnections among such superficially disparate phenomena as the Harlem Renaissance, Greenwich Village bohemianism, modernism and Leftist politics, this book rightly emphasizes the vitality of little magazines and argues for their necessary place in the study of modernism.
Exploring the philosophical foundations of discrimination law as it exists in several jurisdictions, this collection of all new essays bridges the gap between abstract philosophical work on justice and fairness and legal work on specific types of discrimination.