Social Ethics

Is philosophy obsolete? Are the ancient questions still relevant in the age of cosmology and neuroscience, not to mention crowd-sourcing and cable news? The acclaimed philosopher and novelist Rebecca Newberger Goldstein provides a dazzlingly original plunge into the drama of philosophy, revealing its hidden role in today’s debates on religion, morality, politics, and science.

Listen to this complete and easy-to-follow, explanatory edition of Cicero's On Duties, an unmatched practical guide to conduct.

From the clamor of the evening news to the hush of a judge's courtroom, there is a battle raging for marriage. The implications for society are profound. Yet many people of faith are confused, asking: Is it really that big of a deal?

Revolutionary War officer Nathan Hale, one of America's first spies, said, "Any kind of service necessary to the public good becomes honorable by being necessary." A statue of Hale stands outside CIA headquarters, and the agency often cites his statement as one of its guiding principles. But who decides what is necessary for the public good, and is it really true that any kind of service is permissible for the public good? These questions are at the heart of James M. Olson's book, Fair Play: The Moral Dilemmas of Spying.

The Values Factor shows you how to create a life in which every minute can be inspiring and fulfilling. The first step is to identify what you find most meaningful - the values in life that are most important to you. Once you understand your own unique values and align your life accordingly, you can achieve fulfillment in every aspect of your life: deepening your loving relationships, creating an inspiring career, establishing financial freedom, and tapping into a rich spiritual life.

Today both reality and entertainment crowd our fields of vision with brutal imagery. The pervasiveness of images of torture, horror, and war has all but demolished the 20th-century hope that such imagery might shock us into a less alienated state, or aid in the creation of a just social order. What to do now? When to look, when to turn away? Genre-busting author Maggie Nelson brilliantly navigates this contemporary predicament, with an eye to the question of whether or not focusing on representations of cruelty makes us cruel.

Why do we consider incest wrong, even when it occurs between consenting adults unable to have children? Why are words that gross us out more likely to be deemed "obscene" and denied the protection of the First Amendment? In Objection, psychologists Debra Lieberman and Carlton Patrick examine disgust and its impact on the legal system to show why the things that we find stomach-turning so often become the things that we render unlawful.

Many years of working with the dying showed the authors that certain lessons come up over and over again. Some of these lessons are enormously difficult to master but even the attempts to understand them can be deeply rewarding. Here, in 14 accessible chapters, from the "Lesson of Love" to the "Lesson of Happiness", the authors reveal the truth about our fears, our hopes, our relationships, and above all, about the grandness of who we really are.

'The two foes of human happiness are pain and boredom.' Arthur Schopenhauer (1788-1860) was one of the most influential philosophers of the 19th century because his humanistic, atheistic, if pessimistic views chimed with a new secularism that was emerging from a Western society dominated by religion. Despite his rather forbidding image (and a few outdated views), he is one of the most approachable German philosophers, and this is certainly evident in these two key works, The Wisdom of Life and Counsels and Maxims.

The Art of Worldly Wisdom was written in 1647. It is a collection of 300 maxims on various topics, each elaborated with a commentary. The sayings offer advice and guidance on how to live well, advance socially, and be a better person.

Good, modern, civilized Western men today are expected to think like "citizens of the world" - obligated to everyone and no one. Natural, meaningful tribal connections have been substituted with synthetic, disposable consumer identities. Without a sense of who they are and what group they have a place in, modern men are becoming increasingly detached, disoriented, vulnerable, and ever more easily manipulated.

This audiobook emerges from the urgent need to develop a robust and adaptable ethical framework to guide the development and deployment of AI systems. Through its twelve chapters, we explore various aspects of AI ethics, from privacy and security to fairness and transparency, recognizing that these issues are interconnected and require a holistic approach.

Drawing from ancestral knowledge, as well as her experience as an attorney and activist, Sherri Mitchell addresses some of the most crucial issues of our day—including indigenous land rights, environmental justice, and our collective human survival. Sharing the gifts she has received from the elders of her tribe, the Penobscot Nation, she asks us to look deeply into the illusions we have labeled as truth and which separate us from our higher mind and from one another.

Stoicism is a philosophy, a worldview, and a transformational practice. Throughout the centuries everyone from kings and presidents to Silicone Valley entrepreneurs have drawn inspiration and wisdom from Stoicism. The best way to learn about Stoic philosophy is always to go back to the foundation—the original texts. Three writers form the bedrock of Stoic thought: Marcus Aurelius, a Roman Emperor; Seneca, a playwright and advisor; and Epictetus, a former slave turned philosopher and teacher. Stoic Foundations combines the work of these three pillars of Stoic thought into one essential volume.

The existence of free will - our ability to choose between one course of action and another, to determine our own destiny - is a foundation stone of Western society, dictating our notions of fairness and justice, punishment and reward, our very identity as individuals and humans. But as world-renowned scientist Robert Sapolsky shows, there is not a shred of evidence to suggest that free will exists, even while everything in our biology leads us to believe that it does.

Helena Petrovna Blavatsky is best known as the cofounder of theosophy, which is essentially a selective conflation of Hindu and Buddhist ideas combined with Blavatsky's idiosyncratic system of cosmology. The Voice of the Silence, first published in 1889, is described by the author as "chosen fragments from the Book of the Golden Precepts, for the daily use of disciples".

With liberal democracy embattled, public discourse grown toxic, family life breaking down, and drug abuse and depression on the rise, many fear what the future holds. In Morality, respected faith leader and public intellectual Jonathan Sacks traces today's crisis to our loss of a strong, shared moral code and our elevation of self-interest over the common good.

In Tending the Heart of Virtue, Vigen Guroian illuminates the power of classic tales and their impact on the moral imagination. He demonstrates how these stories teach the virtues through vivid depictions of the struggle between good and evil, while he also unveils components of the good, the true, and the beautiful in plot and character. With clarity and elegance, Guroian reads deeply into the classic stories.

Merchants of Doubt has been praised—and attacked—around the world, for reasons easy to understand. This book tells, with “brutal clarity” (Huffington Post), the disquieting story of how a loose-knit group of high-level scientists and scientific advisers, with deep connections in politics and industry, ran effective campaigns to mislead the public and deny well-established scientific knowledge over four decades.

In this Tenth Anniversary Edition of The Life You Can Save, Peter Singer brings his landmark book up to date. In addition to restating his compelling arguments about how we should respond to extreme poverty, he examines the progress we are making and recounts how the first edition transformed the lives both of audiences and the people they helped. Learn how you can be part of the solution, doing good for others while adding fulfillment to your own life.