Welcome to our book review site go-pdf.online!
You may have to Search all our reviewed books and magazines, click the sign up button below to create a free account.
Suffering-Focused Ethics
The reduction of suffering deserves special priority. Many ethical views support this claim, yet so far these have not been presented in a single place. Suffering-Focused Ethics provides the most comprehensive presentation of suffering-focused arguments and views to date, including a moral realist case for minimizing extreme suffering. The book then explores the all-important issue of how we can best reduce suffering in practice, and outlines a coherent and pragmatic path forward. "An inspiring book on the world's most important issue. Magnus Vinding makes a compelling case for suffering-focused ethics. Highly recommended." - David Pearce, author of The Hedonistic Imperative and Can Biotechn...
You Are Them
What follows if we reject belief in any kind of non-physical soul and instead fully embrace what we know about the world? The main implication, this book argues, is a naturalization of personal identity and ethics. A radically different way of thinking about ourself. "A precondition of rational behaviour is a basic understanding of the nature of oneself and the world. Any fusion of ethical and decision-theoretic rationality into a seamless package runs counter to some of our deepest intuitions. But 'You Are Them' makes a powerful case. Magnus Vinding's best book to date. Highly recommended." - David Pearce, co-founder of The Neuroethics Foundation, co-founder of World Transhumanist Association / Humanity+, and author of 'The Hedonistic Imperative' and 'The Anti-Speciesist Revolution'.
Speciesism
The aim of this book is to examine our speciesism. This examination consists of two separate parts, where the first part shows why speciesism is unjustifiable, and hence why it must be rejected, while the second part examines the practical implications of this rejection. This latter examination is bound to be far from exhaustive, yet by merely pointing out the most basic and most important implications of the rejection of speciesism, we see more than a few ways in which our behavior and attitudes should change, and change profoundly. "Humans hurt, harm and kill billions of sentient beings. We routinely treat nonhuman animals in ways that would earn the perpetrators a life sentence in prison ...
Anti-Natalism: Rejectionist Philosophy from Buddhism to Benatar
The last few decades seem to have begun what has been called 'the childless revolution'. In developed countries, increasingly people are choosing not to have children. The causes of this 'revolution' are many including the belief that to create a new life is to subject someone unnecessarily, and without their consent, to life's many sufferings including death. This belief and its underlying philosophy is known as anti-natalism. There has been a recent resurgence of this philosophy, with David Benatar's book Better Never To Have Been (2006) as a major catalyst. Anti-natalism can be seen as part of a broader philosophy, described here as Rejectionism, which finds existence -directly or indirec...
What We Owe The Future
The challenges we face are enormous. But we can still secure a positive future for our planet, and for everyone on it. In What We Owe The Future, philosopher William MacAskill persuasively argues for longtermism, the idea that positively influencing the distant future is a moral priority of our time. It isn’t enough to mitigate climate change or avert the next pandemic. We can ensure that civilization would rebound if it collapsed; cultivate value pluralism; and prepare for a planet where the most sophisticated beings are digital and not human. 'Unapologetically optimistic and bracingly realistic, this is the most inspiring book on ‘ethical living’ I’ve ever read.' Oliver Burkeman, Guardian ‘A monumental event.' Rutger Bregman, author of Humankind ‘A book of great daring, clarity, insight and imagination. To be simultaneously so realistic and so optimistic, and always so damn readable… well that is a miracle for which he should be greatly applauded.’ Stephen Fry
Moral Uncertainty
How should we make decisions when we're uncertain about what we ought, morally, to do? Decision-making in the face of fundamental moral uncertainty is underexplored terrain: MacAskill, Bykvist, and Ord argue that there are distinctive norms by which it is governed, and which depend on the nature of one's moral beliefs.
Reflections on Intelligence
A lot of people are talking about "superintelligent AI" these days. But what are they talking about? Indeed, what is "intelligence" in the first place? This question is generally left unanswered, even unasked, in discussions about the perils and promises of artificial intelligence, which tends to make these discussions more confusing than enlightening. More clarity and skepticism about this term "intelligence" is desperately needed. Hence this book. 'Reflections on Intelligence' aims to look deeper into the concept of "intelligence", and to question common assumptions about the phenomenon, or rather phenomena, that we refer to with the word "intelligence". Based on such an examination, it proceeds to criticize some of the views and ideas commonly discussed in relation to the future of artificial intelligence, and to draw some general conclusions about the future of "intelligence".
After Meat
Animals make for terrible technology. The technological use of animals--making food, drugs, clothing, and cosmetics out of animal material--will cease. A cow takes over one year to grow, "wastes" over ninety percent of what it's fed, and cannot be innovated much further. After Meat explains the fundamental limits of animal technology in terms of physics and biology. Replacement technology such as microbial fermentation will surpass those limits. Eventually, we'll have food that is better in every way--in terms of taste, cost, nutrition, resource consumption, and ethics--because we won't use animals to produce it. Along the way, After Meat leads us through a veritable forest of adjacent topics. We wade into evolution and reductivism, broach consciousness and the Multiverse, dive into economics and policy, bounce from weather prediction to the problem of hunger to the morality of eating plants. In sum, we ineluctably conclude that our future has little room for animal technology, and that future will be better for it.
The Elephant in the Brain
Human beings are primates, and primates are political animals. Our brains, therefore, are designed not just to hunt and gather, but also to help us get ahead socially, often via deception and self-deception. But while we may be self-interested schemers, we benefit by pretending otherwise. The less we know about our own ugly motives, the better - and thus we don't like to talk or even think about the extent of our selfishness. This is "the elephant in the brain." Such an introspective taboo makes it hard for us to think clearly about our nature and the explanations for our behavior. The aim of this book, then, is to confront our hidden motives directly - to track down the darker, unexamined c...
Democracy for Realists
Why our belief in government by the people is unrealistic—and what we can do about it Democracy for Realists assails the romantic folk-theory at the heart of contemporary thinking about democratic politics and government, and offers a provocative alternative view grounded in the actual human nature of democratic citizens. Christopher Achen and Larry Bartels deploy a wealth of social-scientific evidence, including ingenious original analyses of topics ranging from abortion politics and budget deficits to the Great Depression and shark attacks, to show that the familiar ideal of thoughtful citizens steering the ship of state from the voting booth is fundamentally misguided. They demonstrate ...
