Publisher Description

Moral thinking pervades our practical lives, but where did this way of thinking come from, and what purpose does it serve? Is it to be explained by environmental pressures on our ancestors a million years ago, or is it a cultural invention of more recent origin? In The Evolution of Morality, Richard Joyce takes up these controversial questions, finding that the evidence supports an innate basis to human morality. As a moral philosopher, Joyce is interested in whether any implications follow from this hypothesis. Might the fact that the human brain has been biologically prepared by natural selection to engage in moral judgment serve in some sense to vindicate this way of thinking—staving off the threat of moral skepticism, or even undergirding some version of moral realism? Or if morality has an adaptive explanation in genetic terms—if it is, as Joyce writes, "just something that helped our ancestors make more babies"—might such an explanation actually undermine morality's central role in our lives? He carefully examines both the evolutionary "vindication of morality" and the evolutionary "debunking of morality," considering the skeptical view more seriously than have others who have treated the subject. Interdisciplinary and combining the latest results from the empirical sciences with philosophical discussion, The Evolution of Morality is one of the few books in this area written from the perspective of moral philosophy. Concise and without technical jargon, the arguments are rigorous but accessible to readers from different academic backgrounds. Joyce discusses complex issues in plain language while advocating subtle and sometimes radical views. The Evolution of Morality lays the philosophical foundations for further research into the biological understanding of human morality.

In The Myth of Morality, Richard Joyce argues that moral discourse is hopelessly flawed. At the heart of ordinary moral judgements is a notion of moral inescapability, or practical authority, which, upon investigation, cannot be reasonably defended. Joyce argues that natural selection is to blame, in that it has provided us with a tendency to invest the world with values that it does not contain, and demands that it does not make. Should we therefore do away with morality, as we did away with other faulty notions such as witches? Possibly not. We may be able to carry on with morality as a 'useful fiction' - allowing it to have a regulative influence on our lives and decisions, perhaps even playing a central role - while not committing ourselves to believing or asserting falsehoods, and thus not being subject to accusations of 'error'.

What if our notions of the nation as a site of belonging, the home as a safe place, or the mother tongue as a means to fluent comprehension did not apply? What if fluency were a hindrance, whilst our differences and contradictions held the keys to radical new ways of knowing? Taking inspiration from the practice of language learning and translation, this book explores the extraordinary creative possibilities, politics, and ethics of adopting a multilingual approach to reading. Its case study, James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake (1939), is a text in equal measures exhilarating and exasperating: an unhinged portrait of European modernist debates on transculturalism and globalisation, here considered on the backdrop of current discourses on migration, race, gender, and neurodiversity. This book offers a fresh perspective on the illuminating, if perplexing, work of a beloved European modernist, whilst posing questions far beyond Joyce: on negotiating difference in an increasingly globalised world; on braving the difficulty of relating across languages and cultures; and ultimately on imagining possible futures where multilingual literature can empower us to read, relate, and conceptualise differently.

The first book-length treatment of James Joyce's work through the lens of Friedrich Nietzsche's thought, Slote argues that the range of styles Joyce deploys has an ethical dimension. This intersection raises questions of epistemology, aesthetics, and the construction of the 'Modern' and will appeal to literary and philosophy scholars.

Constancy and the Ethics of Jane Austen's Mansfield Park offers a rigorous philosophical examination of the novel, the first book-length, close reading to do so.

Inspire Integrity is addicting. It focuses on what it means to live an authentic life. Its chapters encourage people of all ages and circumstances to understand that authentic success comes from the attainment of: (1) a sincere sense of contentment, (2) strong personal relationships, and (3) a solid character. This is much different from worldly success such as excessive wealth, fame and popularity - things which, in and of themselves, do not have the capacity to make a person happy. It is designed to help people look critically at their life, think through their decisions, set priorities and goals, develop a solid character, avoid serious mistakes and discover their true passion in life. It draws on the major ethical frameworks of Aristotle, Mill and Kant as well as the Golden Rule as tools to avoid Benjamin Franklin's warning that people tend to get old too soon and wise too late. It presents a roadmap to accomplish this mission and advocates that each reader start the journey to authentic success now! Inspire Integrity focuses on the story of Cash, the racing greyhound, who is world famous and has won tens of millions of dollars winning races. The biggest race of his life is on the horizon and everyone is there, including the press, to cover history in the making. If he wins the race his owner will receive a million-dollar prize. The night before the race, Cash reveals he's not going to race the next day and that he is retiring completely. Shocked, the owner asks him whether he is hurt, mad at her, or too old? He responds that it's none of those things. In fact, he's been doing a lot of critical thinking about his life and has come to the conclusion that all he's ever done is run around dirt racetracks, and he just cannot do it anymore. He finally understands that those little white rabbits that everyone encourages him to chase day and night aren't even real.

Brivic argues that James Joyce's fiction anticipated Jacques Lacan's idea that the perceivable world is made of language and that Joyce, Lacan, and Žižek all carry forward a psychological and linguistic groundwork for social reform.

Legal and Ethical Issues of Live Streaming explores the potential legal and ethical issues of using live streaming technology, citing that although live streaming has a broadcasting capability, it is not regulated by the Federal Communications Commission, unlike other broadcasting media such as radio or television. Without this regulation, live streaming is opened up for broad use and misuse, including broadcasts of horrifying incidents such as the mass shootings at mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand in 2019, sparking outrage and fear about the technology. Contributors provide a pathway to move forward with ethical and legal use of live streaming by analyzing the wide spectrum of critical issues through the lens of communication, ethics, and law. Scholars of legal studies, ethics, communication, and media studies will find this book particularly useful.

This study examines the representation of marital and extramarital relations in James Joyce's texts, with reference to context and to Joyce's biography. Utell claims that Joyce uses these relations to imagine a different kind of love, one based in a radical acceptance and a rejection of a utilitarian and sexually repressive stance towards marriage.