Social Media Ethics

An exploration of everything Kant's philosophy can teach us about being the best people we can be, from using our human reasoning to its fullest potential to being affably drunk at dinner parties.

When does liberty matter? It is often thought that personal liberty is always valuable and that it has a unique intrinsic value. In The Limits of Liberty, philosopher Sarah Conly argues that it is much less valuable than traditionally believed. Conly posits that liberties that bring good things have value, but liberties that bring bad consequences have no value. This means that in many cases where liberty has been valued, we are mistaken. Restrictions on certain liberties are more acceptable than commonly thought.

In this thought-provoking book, Tobias Leenaert leaves well-trodden animal advocacy paths and takes a fresh look at the strategies, objectives, and communication of the vegan and animal rights movement. He argues that, given our present situation, with entire societies dependent on using animals, we need a very pragmatic approach. How to Create a Vegan World contains many valuable ideas and insights for both budding advocates for animals and seasoned activists, organizational leaders, and even entrepreneurs.

In The Price of Justice, Goldfarb uses powerful testimonies, media evidence, and first-hand expertise from working in the Justice Department as a longtime public interest lawyer to reveal how both the criminal and civil justice systems fail to serve lower and middle-class citizens and makes an undeniable case for the profound justice reform that is so desperately needed. Goldfarb asks that we examine closely a legal system that has become largely pay-to-play, benefiting the administrators and those wealthy citizens who can afford to “lawyer up”.

How is society being reshaped by the continued diffusion and increasing centrality of the internet in everyday life and work? Society and the Internet provides key information for students, scholars, and those interested in understanding the interactions of the Internet and society. This multidisciplinary collection of theoretically and empirically anchored chapters addresses the big questions about one of the most significant technological transformations of this century, through a diversity of data, methods, theories, and approaches.

Just like the meteor that likely precipitated the end of the dinosaurs, social media is having a monumental impact on the world's economy; a change so dramatic that it has created a new business era. Welcome... to the Social Age. What does the Social Age mean for your business? Containing stories, analysis of real-world scenarios, and indispensable guidance, A World Gone Social gives you the tools and information you need to survive - and thrive - in a business climate in which customers hold all the cards...

On the Genealogy of Morality (The Genealogy of Morals) is an 1887 book by German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche. It consists of a preface and three interrelated essays that expand and follow through on concepts Nietzsche sketched out in Beyond Good and Evil. The three essays trace episodes in the evolution of moral concepts with a view to confronting moral prejudices, specifically those of Christianity and Judaism. Some Nietzsche scholars consider Genealogy to be a work of sustained brilliance and power as well as his masterpiece.

The world is changing so fast that it's hard to know how to think about what we ought to do. David Edmonds has put together a philosophical task force to get to grips with these challenges. Twenty-nine philosophers present provocative and engaging pieces about aspects of life today, and life tomorrow—birth and death, health and medicine, brain and body, personal relationships, wrongdoing and justice, the internet, animals, and the environment. The future won't look the same when you've finished this book.

Bad Things addresses various philosophical questions about the nature and moral relevance of harm. The most basic question is this: under what conditions does an event harm a given individual? Neil Feit focuses primarily on the metaphysics of harm, and he both defends and extends the counterfactual comparative account of harm. On this account, in its most basic form, an act or event harms an individual provided that she would have been better off if it had not occurred.

This book explores the nature and essential role of hope in human life under conditions of oppression. Oppression is often a threat and damage to hope, yet many members of oppressed groups, including prominent activists pursuing a more just world, find hope valuable and even essential to their personal and political lives. Katie Stockdale offers a unique evaluative framework for hope that captures its intrinsic value, the rationality and morality of hope, and ultimately how we can hope well in the non-ideal world we share.

Suffering, in one form or another, is present in all of our lives. But why do we suffer? On one reading, this is a question about the causes of physical and emotional suffering. On another, it is a question about whether suffering has a point or purpose or value. In this groundbreaking book, Michael Brady argues that suffering is vital for the development of virtue, and hence for us to live happy or flourishing lives.

Parents are beginning to realize that deficiencies in ethics and character are becoming a big problem among our nation's children. According to the latest data, lying, cheating, and rampant insensitivity to other people are increasingly common. What can parents do? In this book, ethics expert Rushworth Kidder shows how to customize interventions to a child's age and temperament. He encourages parents not to give up, since what they do can always make a difference, regardless of how long or deep the bad habits of dishonesty may be.

Barbara H. Rosenwein traces our many conflicting ideas about and expressions of anger, taking the story from the Buddha to our own time, from anger's complete rejection to its warm reception. Rosenwein explores how anger has been characterized by gender and race, why it has been tied to violence and how that is often a false connection, how it has figured among the seven deadly sins and yet is considered a virtue, and how its interpretation, once largely the preserve of philosophers and theologians, has been gradually handed over to scientists - with very mixed results.

Wieso enden unsere Meinungsverschiedenheiten in bitteren Fehden, die uns entzweien? Warum können wir nicht mehr gesittet streiten? Woher rührt das peinliche Schweigen in Familien, unter Freunden und Kollegen, sobald es um Politik geht? Ob Coronakrise, Zuwanderung oder Ukrainekrieg: Dass die Gesellschaft wahlweise "polarisiert" oder "gespalten" sei und das Diskussionsklima "vergiftet", hören wir seit Jahren. Doch bisher fehlte eine überzeugende Erklärung dieser verbreiteten Überzeugungen, die nicht einfach solche Floskeln wiederholt.

Without a doubt, Schopenhauer is one of the giants of Western philosophy. He represents a turning point from the quest to define the external world as something apart from our experience to a recognition of our experience as the medium of our world. Philosophy is a discourse, a conversation spread out over centuries that explores and develops different lines of thought. Schopenhauer embodies the moment in Western philosophy where the snake begins to eat its own tail, where the unreasoning insistence upon an external world is finally examined with due criticism and care.

Self-defeating behavior and the damage it can cause constitute a rich and intriguing area of philosophical inquiry. Choosing Well explores the challenges associated with effective choice over time from both theoretical and practical perspectives. Andreou focuses on the challenges raised by cyclic preferences and incomplete preferences, both of which interfere with our ability to neatly order our options and thus make us susceptible to self-defeating patterns of choice which in turn create unacceptable results.

When philosophy professor Adam Briggle moved to Denton, Texas, he had never heard of fracking. Only five years later, he would successfully lead a citizens' initiative to ban hydraulic fracturing in Denton - the first Texas town to challenge the oil and gas industry. On his journey to learn about fracking and its effects, he leaped from the ivory tower into the fray. In beautifully narrated chapters, Briggle brings us to town hall debates and neighborhood meetings where citizens wrestle with issues few fully understand.

In the age of the Web, smartphones, and social networks, every action an organization takes can be exposed and critiqued in real time. If you treat one customer unfairly, produce one shoddy product, or try to gouge one price, the whole world may find out in hours, if not minutes. Don Peppers and Martha Rogers argue that the only sane response to these rising levels of transpar­ency is to protect the interests of customers proac­tively - even if that requires spending extra money in the short run to preserve your reputation and cus­tomer relationships in the long run.

In these 20 short chapters, Karen Casey explores what matters most about loss, unconditional love, security, surrender, powerlessness, peace, strength, and fear. Each chapter touches on how her own commitment to a spiritual path has had the greatest influence on her life’s direction.

As consumers of art, and especially as fans, we have a host of tricky moral question to navigate: do the moral lives of artists affect the aesthetic quality of their work? In Drawing the Line, Erich Hatala Matthes argues that it doesn't matter whether we can separate the art from the artist, because we shouldn't. Matthes argues both that the lives of artists can play an important role in shaping our moral and aesthetic relationship to the artworks that we love and that these same artworks offer us powerful resources for grappling with the immorality of their creators.