Books in the Values and Identities: Crossing Philosophical Borders series

Spence develops and applies a normative model based on rationalist and virtue ethics as well as stoic philosophy to assess the impact of technology on wellbeing. Through developing this model, Spence offers a novel and important examination of the benefit of technology to our society as a whole.

Adorno's writings are often the starting point for the teaching of popular music studies, usually passing swiftly on, after concluding that ';he didn't listen to the right jazz' or ';he was a snob'. In this book, using Adorno's aesthetic theory more generally, a viable philosophical approach to the study of idiomatic, non- standard music is constructed. The links between Adorno's work and its Kantian roots are explored, and a more general and inclusive aesthetic constructed, using the utopian and implicitly political elements in each.This book will be of interest to critical theorists and musicologists wishing to build a more engaged practice without the pitfalls of a by now outdated ';postmodern' turn.

This book provides a comprehensive critical account of Taylor's writings, and argues that a close examination of his central concept of "strong evaluation" reveals both the potential of and the tensions in his entire thinking.

This highly original book sheds new light on aspects of incommensurability of values and its implications for ethics and justice. It provides original and innovative analysis of the characteristics of incommensurability in relation to values, and explores the implications of incommensurability for ethics, justice and public decision-making.

This volume represents the first attempt to comprehensively showcase the resources comparative philosophy, and in particular Chinese philosophy, can offer for understanding objectivity and impartiality in the contemporary world.

This book describes what it means to have a normative identity and critically evaluates this kind of identity from the point of view of rational agency.

A metaphysical investigation of money and monetary value, exploring money as a social phenomenon, the metaphysics of financial value, materialism and measurement.

It is widely acknowledged that we have a duty to protect the environment. Yet, current environmental policy discussions demonstrate that fulfilling this in practice is a difficult, complex, and costly task. There are many ethical questions arising from such discussions. Should we care about the environment because it is economically valuable or because nature has intrinsic value? How do we establish an ethical trade-off between our current needs and those of future generations? Should we protect individual species or entire ecosystems instead? What way should we discuss societal values and ideals, or should scientific analysis take precedence within decision making practice? This book aims to tackle some of these thorny sustainability issues and responds to them with a cohesive, original alternative in the form of the precautionary ecosystem health principle (PEHP). It provides a detailed philosophical approach and advocates that a PEHP approach is able to overcome many of these stark and challenging difficulties within sustainability theory and environmental policy.

Virtue as Identity offers a study of how virtue is learned and identity acquired through the selection and internalization of values. A large part of this process is externally imposed through culture. Another, perhaps more important part of the process is the result of individual and collective sensibilities. The book emphasizes the role of emotions and emotional sensibility in our choice of values. The book re-affirms traditional morality as the foundation of our individual and collective identities. The author argues that emotions as well as rational decisions guide the value choices we make and the ideals of character that we presuppose on a political level as much as they do in our private lives. Thus the societies we live in are a reflection of our identities, or the identities of the majority. This opens up radical questions about the identities of the dissenting minorities, the proper concept of a moral or value-community, and the real reach and value of tolerance in modern democracy.

Through fourteen original essays, the book seeks to understand the viability of the notion of sovereignty in a globalized world, thus taking into account the inclusion of a language of rights, limitation and legitimacy. It examines sovereignty using a normative approach.