Thinking Ethics

Cosmopolitanism

Good review in Globalethics.org on Prof. Kwame Anthony Appiah's new book entitled "Cosmopolitanism: Ethics in a World of Strangers".  Prof. Appiah tries to define some values which should be universal - like obligations to others beyond the family circle, and taking seriously the value of a human life. And goes into distinctions between benign and malign forms of universalism. If the world is a global village, we are going to need discussions like this.

New book on Enron

New book out on "Enron and world finance - a case study in ethics", at Palgrave Macmillan. Edited by Paul H. Dembinski, Carole Lager, Andrew Cornford and Jean-Michel Bonvin. more

The Ethics of Influence

A new publication from IBE (Institute of Business Ethics) called The Ethics of Influence: Political Donations and Lobbying (by David Lascelles, available from June 9) tries to answer the question: should companies seek to influence government policy and political outcomes ? If so, what are the ethical and business issues they should consider when making political donations and lobbying government ?

Thinking Ethics - the book

Although the official launch date is June 6 in the book stores, Profile Books has sent me several cartons of them, and I must say that the cover is rather attractive and that I do find the book interesting (but I must confess that I am hardly objective). Check out the blurb on the Profile website (you can order from Amazon from the Profile link) and see a picture of the cover. The main chapters deal with ethics and consciousness; ethics and knowledge; ethics and performance; ethics and disobedience; and ethics in real time.

Technology in society

I love this book: John Seely Brown and Paul Duguid, The Social Life of Information. It's one of the best books about technology and society I've read and I return to the essays it contains regularly. Seely Brown is (was?) Director of Xerox's legendary PARC and Duguid works in the faculty of Social and Cultural Studies at Berkeley. Their book is a reassertion of human values, a profoundly anti-reductive, anti techno-centric (but pro technology) appeal for sanity in technology planning and discourse. Sophisticated, inspiring and properly ethical stuff. Incidentally, Seely Brown and Duguid provided the best argument I saw against Bill Joy's nanotech hysteria (picked up by Crichton in Prey) in an essay called Don't Count Society Out. I can't find Don't Count Society Out online but I did find this long and beautifully argued reply to Joy: Coevolution as a constraint: How society tempers technological trajectories at Seely Brown's web site.

EthicsWeb Bookstore

In case you have not yet found this site, check out the EthicsWeb Bookstore at www.ethicsweb.ca/books/  - they claim they are "probably the world's largest on-line ethics bookstore".

neuroethics

In May, 2002 more than 150 neuroscientists, bioethicists, doctors of psychiatry and psychology, philosophers, and professors of laws and public policy participated in a landmark conference in San Francisco, Neuroethics: Mapping the Field. The conference was sponsored by the Dana Foundation.

At the conference the term neuroethics was defined as the study of the ethical, legal and social questions arising when scientific findings about the brain are carried into medical practice, legal interpretations, and health and social policy.

They came out with a very interesting and readable book, accessible through

www.dana.org/books/press/neuroethics/