A clear, fresh and accessible introduction to ethics which explores the relationship between Western and Eastern ethical thought and carefully illuminates the difficult issues surrounding cross-cultural ethics and moral thought.

This volume explores how individuals use moral agency to craft the moral dispositions and moral capabilities needed for living well-lived lives. It draws on Eastern and Western philosophical and ethical traditions to formulate and address key issues concerning character development and moral agency. In both Eastern and Western traditions, the complexities of shaping an individual’s moral agency focus on sustained processes of inner self-cultivation. The chapters in this volume highlight the ways in which one is to manage and direct one’s desires and aspirations, and what is to count as the source of guidance for a well-lived life. They engage with key figures and traditions in the history of Eastern and Western philosophy, including Confucian, Buddhist, and Western sources, from Aristotle to Kant. The juxtaposition of sources from the different parts of the world highlights striking similarities and significant contrasts and provides rich conceptual resources for further exploration of these issues. The volume provides a broader, deeper pursuit of central issues of moral psychology and ethics in ways that highlight the inexhaustible resources in these traditions. The focus on character is a way to draw together perspectives on ethical life, theories of human agency, views of fundamental, life-guiding values, and relations between individuals and society and how persons see their place in the world. Moral Agency in Eastern and Western Thought will appeal to scholars and advanced students working on virtue ethics, moral psychology, comparative philosophy, and history of philosophy.

In this book, Tehmina Basit examines the educational, social and career aspirations of adolescent Muslim girls in the context of their present experiences in contemporary Britain. She gathered data for the study over a period of twenty months, mainly by in-depth interviewing. The book portrays adolescence as a period of hope and expectation, rather than a time of stress, confusion and rebellion. The girls are optimistic about the future and, though largely working class, have middle class aspirations which they hope to realize through the mediums of education and careers. Nevertheless, they also want to get married and have children. While the girls’ aspirations are partly being shaped by the views of their parents and teachers, they are not replicating the lives of their parents and teachers. Indeed, they are active participants in shaping their own multiple identities and aspirations by means of a subtle combination of negotiation and persuasion.

The great German novelist Thomas Mann implored readers to resist the persistent and growing militarism of the mid-twentieth century. To whom should we turn for guidance during this current era of global violence, political corruption, economic inequality, and environmental degradation? For more than two millennia, the worldÕs great thinkers have held that the ethically Ògood lifeÓ is the highest purpose of human existence. Renowned political philosopher Fred Dallmayr traces the development of this notion, finding surprising connections among Aristotelian ethics, Abrahamic and Eastern religious traditions, German idealism, and postindustrial social criticism. In Search of the Good Life does not offer a blueprint but rather invites readers on a cross-cultural quest. Along the way, the author discusses the teachings of Aristotle, Confucius, Nicolaus of Cusa, Leibniz, and Schiller, in addition invoking more recent writings of Gadamer and Ricoeur, as guideposts and sources of hope during our troubled times. Among contemporary themes Dallmayr discusses are the role of the classics in education, proper and improper ways of spreading democracy globally, the possibility of transnational citizenship, the problem of politicized evil, and the role of religion in our predominantly secular culture. Dallmayr restores the notion of the good life as a hallmark of personal conduct, civic virtue, and political engagement, and as the road map to enduring peace. In Search of the Good Life seeks to arouse complacent and dispirited citizens, guiding them out of the distractions of shallow amusements and perilous resentments in the direction of mutual learning and civic pedagogyÑa direction that will enable them to impose accountability on political leaders who stray from fundamental ethical standards.

For many of us, the image of the cowboy hero facing off against the villain dominates our memories of the movies. Peter French examines the world of the western, one in which death is annihilation, the culmination of life, and there is nothing else. In that world he finds alternatives to Judeo-Christian traditions that dominate our ethical theories, alternatives that also attack the views of the most prominent ethicists of the past three centuries. More than just a meditation on the portrayal of the good, the bad, and the ugly on the big screen, French's work identifies an attitude toward life that he claims is one of the most distinctive and enduring elements of American culture.

When Richard Nisbett showed an animated underwater scene to his American students, they zeroed in on a big fish swimming among smaller fish. Japanese subjects, on the other hand, made observations about the background environment...and the different "seeings" are a clue to profound underlying cognitive differences between Westerners and East Asians. As Professor Nisbett shows in The Geography of Thought people actually think - and even see - the world differently, because of differing ecologies, social structures, philosophies, and educational systems that date back to ancient Greece and China, and that have survived into the modern world. As a result, East Asian thought is "holistic" - drawn to the perceptual field as a whole, and to relations among objects and events within that field. By comparison to Western modes of reasoning, East Asian thought relies far less on categories, or on formal logic; it is fundamentally dialectic, seeking a "middle way" between opposing thoughts. By contrast, Westerners focus on salient objects or people, use attributes to assign them to categories, and apply rules of formal logic to understand their behaviour.