Why we shouldn’t colonize Mars or the Moon, or even vacation thereIf certain business titans, corporations, and governments have their way, humans will someday be living, working, and vacationing in space. This is the much-vaunted New Space Age, and in Lunacy, philosopher Ben Bramble explains why it is a giant mistake. Bramble systematically refutes each of the ten most influential reasons given for this new generation of space exploration (and habitation)...

Utilitarianism directs us to act in ways that impartially maximize welfare or utility or at least aim to do that. Some find this view highly compelling. Others object that it has intuitively repugnant results, that it condones evildoing and injustice, that it is excessively imposing and controlling, that it is alienating, and that it fails to offer meaningful, practical guidance.In this ‘Little Debates’ volume, James Lenman argues that utilitarianism’s directive to improve the whol...

The philosophical study of well-being concerns what makes lives good for their subjects. It is now standard among philosophers to distinguish between two kinds of well-being:· lifetime well-being, i.e., how good a person’s life was for him or her considered as a whole, and· temporal well-being, i.e., how well off someone was, or how they fared, at a particular moment in time (momentary well-being) or over a period of time longer than a moment but ...

A new collection offering provocative and often counterintuitive conclusions on the ethics of meat eating In a world of industralized farming and feed lots, is eating meat ever a morally responsible choice? Is eating organic or free range sufficient to change the moral equation? Is there a moral cost in not eating meat? As billions of animals continue to be raised and killed by human beings for human consumption, affecting the significance and urgency in answering these questions ...

Why we shouldn’t colonize Mars or the Moon, or even vacation thereIf certain business titans, corporations, and governments have their way, humans will someday be living, working, and vacationing in space. This is the much-vaunted New Space Age, and in Lunacy, philosopher Ben Bramble explains why it is a giant mistake. Bramble systematically refutes each of the ten most influential reasons given for this new generation of space exploration (and habitation)...

PANDEMIC ETHICS is a clear and provocative introduction to the ethics of COVID-19 from a leading contemporary moral philosopher. It is suitable for university-level students, academics, and policymakers, as well as the general reader. It is also an original contribution to the emerging literature on this important topic. The author has made it available open access, so that it can be downloaded and read for free by all those who are interested in these issues.Key features include:

The co-author of the internationally bestselling The Rebel Sell brings us "slow politics": promoting slow thought, slow deliberation and slow debate.Over the last twenty years, the political systems of the western world have become increasingly divided--not between right and left but between crazy and non-crazy. Whats more, the crazies seem to be gaining the upper hand. Rational thought cannot prevail in the current social and media environment, where ele...

The groundbreaking and “important” book about animal rights by the author of Ethics in the Real World—including a new preface (Chicago Tribune).First published in 1975, Animal Liberation created a sensation upon its release, shaking the world’s philosophical and animal-protection circles to their cores. Now, forty years later, Peter Singer’s landmark work still looms large as a foundational and canonical text of animal advocacy. Arguing t...

From the age of Darwin to the present day, biologists have been grappling with the origins of our moral sense. Why, if the human instinct to survive and reproduce is "selfish," do people engage in self-sacrifice, and even develop ideas like virtue and shame to justify that altruism? Many theories have been put forth, some emphasizing the role of nepotism, others emphasizing the advantages of reciprocation or group selection effects. But evolutionary anthropologist Christopher Boehm finds e...

This brief and engagingly written book provides a unique introduction to the process of social inquiry and the theoretical and methodological frameworks that support that inquiry, offering a strong foundation in critical thinking that is rooted in the social sciences but maintains relevance across the disciplines.

Do animals have moral rights? If so, what does this mean? What sorts of mental lives do animals have, and how should we understand welfare? By presenting models for understanding animals' moral status and rights, and examining their mental lives and welfare, David DeGrazia explores the implications for how we should treat animals in connection with our diet, zoos, and research. Animal Rights distinguishes itself by combining intellectual rigour with accessibility, offering a disti...

In this compelling volume in the What Everyone Needs to Know® series, Paul Waldau expertly navigates the many heated debates surrounding the complex and controversial animal rights movement. Organized around a series of probing questions, this timely resource offers the most complete, even-handed survey of the animal rights movement available. The book covers the full spectrum of issues, beginning with a clear, highly instructive definition of animal rights. Waldau looks at the di...