Ethics History

Have you ever wondered what the Old Testament - especially the Old Testament law - has to do with your Christian life? You are not alone. Some Christian leaders believe we should cast off the Old Testament now that we have the New. Carmen Joy Imes disagrees. In this warm, accessible volume, Imes takes listeners back to Sinai, the ancient mountain where Israel met their God, and explains the meaning of events there. She argues that we've misunderstood the command about "taking the Lord's name in vain." Instead, Imes says that this command is about "bearing God's name."

In this wide-ranging book, Martha C. Nussbaum, one of our leading public intellectuals, argues that anger is conceptually confused and normatively pernicious. It assumes that the suffering of the wrongdoer restores the thing that was damaged, and it betrays an all-too-lively interest in relative status and humiliation. Studying anger in intimate relationships, casual daily interactions, the workplace, the criminal justice system, and movements for social transformation, Nussbaum shows that anger's core ideas are both infantile and harmful.

The world's best introduction to philosophy, Knowledge, Reality, and Value explains basic philosophical problems in epistemology, metaphysics, and ethics, such as: How can we know about the world outside our minds? Is there a God? Do we have free will? Are there objective values? What distinguishes right actions from wrong actions? The text clearly explains the most important arguments about these things, and it does so a lot less boringly than most books written by professors.

Jonathan Safran Foer spent much of his teenage and college years oscillating between omnivore and vegetarian. But on the brink of fatherhood - facing the prospect of having to make dietary choices on a child's behalf - his casual questioning took on an urgency His quest for answers ultimately required him to visit factory farms in the middle of the night, dissect the emotional ingredients of meals from his childhood, and probe some of his most primal instincts about right and wrong.

From one of the most controversial personalities in the high-tech world comes this rare critique of the narcissism, ignorance and anti-communitarianism of the digital elite and their culture. Until now, the lofty pronouncements of the high-tech gurus and society's obsession with them have seldom...

"It takes an entire lifetime to learn how to die", wrote the Roman Stoic philosopher Seneca (c. 4 BC-65 AD). He counseled readers to "study death always", and took his own advice, returning to the subject again and again in all his writings, yet he never treated it in a complete work. How to Die gathers in one volume, for the first time, Seneca's remarkable meditations on death and dying. Edited and translated by James S. Romm, How to Die reveals a provocative thinker who speaks with a startling frankness about the need to accept death or even, under certain conditions, to seek it out.

Is peace an aberration? The New York Times bestselling author of Paris 1919 offers a provocative view of war as an essential component of humanity. NAMED ONE OF THE TEN BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW “Margaret MacMillan has produced another seminal work. . . . She is...

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER “User-friendly...The Jesuit Guide to (Almost) Everything…helpfully unpacks core precepts like ‘finding God in all things.’” —Time The Jesuit Guide to (Almost) Everything by Father James Martin, SJ (bestselling author of Jesus and Learning to Pray) is a...

The Yurok Tribe and an Indigenous family share a moving multigenerational story of their fight to undam the Klamath river—the largest river restoration project in history—and save the planet. Includes exclusive audio content! The Water Remembers is the story of Indigenous resistance and an...

From the bestselling author of Saving Capitalism and The Common Good, comes an urgent analysis of how the "rigged" systems of American politics and power operate, how this status quo came to be, and how average citizens can enact change. There is a mounting sense that our political-economic...

What is the work ethic? Does it justify policies that promote the wealth and power of the One Percent at workers' expense? Or does it advance policies that promote workers' dignity and standing? Hijacked explores how the history of political economy has been a contest between these two ideas about whom the work ethic is supposed to serve.

“A beautifully written, immaculately researched meditation on the impact of the Prophet Muhammad on the modern world. I loved this book!” —Reza Aslan, author of No God but God and Zealot: The Life and Times of Jesus of Nazareth A six-year-old cries in his mother’s arms as she draws her...

In this sweepingly ambitious overview of World War II, Michael Burleigh combines meticulous scholarship with a remarkable depth of knowledge and an astonishing scope. By exploring the moral sentiments of entire societies and their leaders and how such attitudes changed under the impact of total war, Burleigh presents listeners with a fresh and powerful perspective on a conflict that continues to shape world politics.

The Enchiridion or Manual of Epictetus (Enchiridion is Greek for "that which is held in the hand") is a short manual of Stoic ethical advice. This manual has been carefully adapted in to modern English to allow for easy listening. Enjoy.

In Medical Bondage, Cooper Owens examines a wide range of scientific literature and less formal communications in which gynecologists created and disseminated medical fictions about their patients, such as their belief that black enslaved women could withstand pain better than white "ladies". Even as they were advancing medicine, these doctors were legitimizing, for decades to come, groundless theories related to whiteness and blackness, men and women, and the inferiority of other races or nationalities.

“Laser-cut writing and a stunning intellect. If only every writer made this much beautiful sense.” —Lisa Taddeo, author of Three Women “Amia Srinivasan is an unparalleled and extraordinary writer—no one X-rays an argument, a desire, a contradiction, a defense mechanism quite like her...

From the philosophy of Aristotle and Confucius, to Thomas Aquinas' Summa Theologiae, to the paintings of Raphael, Botticelli, and many more, fascination with the virtues has endured and evolved to fit a wide range of cultural, religious, and philosophical contexts through the centuries. This Very Short Introduction audiobook introduces listeners to the various virtues: the moral virtues, the intellectual virtues, and the theological virtues, as well as the capital vices.

A Barnes & Noble Best History Book of 2025 Four men in a lifeboat. Two weeks without food. One impossible choice that would reshape the boundaries between survival and murder. “A perfect enunciation of the classic philosophical conundrum: can you sacrifice one innocent life to save many?"...

The comprehensive and accurate edition of the Hagakure is a must-have for serious martial artists or fans of samurai and the Bushido code.

Artificial intelligence powers Google's search engine, enables Facebook to target advertising, and allows Alexa and Siri to do their jobs. AI is also behind self-driving cars, predictive policing, and autonomous weapons that can kill without human intervention. These and other AI applications raise complex ethical issues that are the subject of ongoing debate. This volume in the MIT Press Essential Knowledge series offers an accessible synthesis of these issues.