Science Ethics

What does it mean to be truthful? What role does truth play in our lives? What do we lose if we reject truthfulness? No philosopher is better suited to answer these questions than Bernard Williams. Writing with his characteristic combinationof passion and elegant simplicity, he explores the value of truth and finds it to be both less and more than we might imagine.

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.

When writer Rebecca Giggs encountered a humpback whale stranded on her local beachfront in Australia, she began to wonder how the lives of whales reflect the condition of our oceans. Fathoms: The World in the Whale is “a work of bright and careful genius” (Robert Moor, New York Times best-selling author of On Trails), one that blends natural history, philosophy, and science to explore: How do whales experience ecological change? How has whale culture been both understood and changed by human technology?

When Moral Politics was first published two decades ago, it redefined how Americans think and talk about politics through the lens of cognitive political psychology. Today, George Lakoff's classic text has become all the more relevant, as liberals and conservatives have come to hold even more vigorously opposed views of the world, with the underlying assumptions of their respective worldviews at the level of basic morality.

Divided into short chapters that can be listened to in brief sittings, What Is Stoicism? compiles two millennia of Stoic thought into simple conversational prose.

In Tertium Organum Ouspensky questions the assumptions we have about our world. In relation to our cognition of the world and of ourselves the conditions would be ideal if it were possible to accept nothing as data and regard everything as requiring definition and proof. In other words, it would be best to assume that we know nothing, and take this as our starting point.

The age of human rights has been kindest to the rich. Even as state violations of political rights garnered unprecedented attention due to human rights campaigns, a commitment to material equality disappeared. In its place, market fundamentalism has emerged as the dominant force in national and global economies. In this provocative book, Samuel Moyn analyzes how and why we chose to make human rights our highest ideals while simultaneously neglecting the demands of a broader social and economic justice.

The natural limits of the human body make us vulnerable and therefore dependent, throughout our lives, on others. Yet American law and policy disregard these stubborn facts, with statutes and judicial decisions that presume people to be autonomous, defined by their capacity to choose. As legal scholar O. Carter Snead points out, this individualistic ideology captures important truths about human freedom, but it also means that we have no obligations to each other unless we actively, voluntarily embrace them.

Janet Malcolm delves into the psychopathology of journalism using a strange and unprecedented lawsuit as her larger-than-life example: the lawsuit of Jeffrey MacDonald, a convicted murderer, against Joe McGinniss, the author of Fatal Vision. Examining the always uneasy, sometimes tragic relationship that exists between journalist and subject, Malcolm finds that neither journalist nor subject can avoid the moral impasse that is built into the journalistic situation.

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.

In his dialogues, the Stoic philosopher Seneca outlines his thoughts on how to live in a troubled world. Tutor to the young emperor Nero, Seneca wrote practical philosophical exercises that draw upon contemporary Roman life and illuminate the intellectual concerns of the day. The dialogues also have much to say to the modern listener, as they range widely across subjects such as the shortness of life, tranquility of mind, anger, mercy, happiness, and grief at the loss of a loved one.

In Systems of Survival, Jane Jacobs identifies two distinct moral syndromes—one governing commerce, the other politics—and explores what happens when these two syndromes collide. She looks at business fraud and criminal enterprise, government’s overextended subsidies to agriculture, and transit police who abuse the system the are supposed to enforce, and asks us to consider instances in which snobbery is a virtue and industry a vice.

The third book in Charles Bowden’s “accidental trilogy” that began with Blood Orchid and Blues for Cannibals, Some of the Dead Are Still Breathing attempts to resolve the overarching question: How can a person live a moral life in a culture of death? As humanity moves further into the 21st century, Bowden continues to interrogate our roles in creating the ravaged landscapes and accumulated death that still surround us, as well as his own childhood isolation, his lust for alcohol and women, and his waning hope for a future.

"AI and Healthcare: A Comprehensive Guide" is a groundbreaking exploration of the revolutionary intersection between artificial intelligence and modern medicine. This authoritative volume offers a balanced, thorough, and accessible overview of how AI is transforming every aspect of healthcare, from diagnosis and treatment to drug discovery and patient care.

The Dalai Lama, at his most compassionate and outspoken, here elaborates and deepens his vision for the nonreligious way. Transcending the mere "religion wars", he outlines a system of secular ethics that gives tolerant respect to religion, those that ground ethics in a belief in God and an afterlife, and those that understand good actions as leading to better states of existence in future lives. And yet, with the highest level of spiritual and intellectual authority, the Dalai Lama makes a claim for what he calls a third way.

A lo largo de la historia, algunos libros han cambiado el mundo. Han transformado la manera en que nos vemos a nosotros mismos y a los demás. Han inspirado el debate, la discordia, la guerra y la revolución. Han iluminado, indignado, provocado y consolado. Han enriquecido vidas, y también las han destruido.

Effective altruism is built upon the simple, but profound, idea that living a fully ethical life involves doing the "most good you can do". Such a life requires an unsentimental view of charitable giving: To be a worthy recipient of our support, an organization must be able to demonstrate that it will do more good with our money or our time than other options open to us. Singer introduces us to an array of remarkable people who are restructuring their lives in accordance with these ideas and shows how living altruistically often leads to greater personal fulfillment.

Tao and the Four Pillars of Influence stands apart as a business book. It speaks ancient wisdom to the modern-day leader, while providing practical and tangible actions that lead to high levels of sustainable influence. The book is an easy-to-follow roadmap to creating lasting change in your workplace, community and family, while navigating chaotic and demanding environments.

From an award-winning New York Times investigative reporter comes an outrageous story of greed, corruption, and conspiracy, which left the FBI and Justice Department counting on the cooperation of one man.

When we think about whether we are good people leading a good life, we usually think about actions. Bad people do bad things that hurt others. Good people do good things that help others, and they avoid doing bad things. Simple. But while our actions certainly have consequences, today our inactions have far greater and far graver consequences. Bad actions can result in the suffering of a few or several dozen others; inaction can result in the extreme misery of thousands.