Contingent Future Persons

Author : Professor of Philosophy N Fotion
Publisher :
ISBN 13 : 9789401155670
Total Pages : 228 pages
Book Rating : 4.74/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Contingent Future Persons written by Professor of Philosophy N Fotion and published by . This book was released on 1997-08-31 with total page 228 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume is concerned with how we ought to evaluate the individual and collective actions on which the existence, numbers and identities of future people depend - discussed here as the problem of contingent future persons'. For it seems that those future persons who are brought into existence by such actions cannot benefit from or be harmed by them in any conventional sense. This is a relatively novel problem in ethics and as yet there is simply no consensus on how we ought to evaluate such actions or, indeed, on whether we can. However, the pursuit of a solution to the problem has been interestingly employed by moral philosophers to press the limits of ethics and to urge a reconsideration of the nature and source of value at its most fundamental level. Intended for professional ethicists, policy researchers, and graduate students, this volume explores the theological implications of the problem and advances the investigation of it both in philosophical and in theological terms.

Author : N. Fotion
Publisher : Springer Science & Business Media
ISBN 13 : 9401155666
Total Pages : 234 pages
Book Rating : 4.63/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Contingent Future Persons written by N. Fotion and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2012-12-06 with total page 234 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How ought we evaluate the individual and collective actions on which the existence, numbers and identities of future people depend? In the briefest of terms, this question poses what is addressed here as the problem of contingent future persons, and as such it poses relatively novel challenges for philosophical and theological ethicists. For though it may be counter-intuitive, it seems that those contingent future persons who are actually brought into existence by such actions cannot benefit from or be harmed by these actions in any conventional sense of the terms. This intriguing problem was defined almost three decades ago by Jan Narveson [2], and to date its implications have been explored most exhaustively by Derek Parfit [3] and David Heyd [1]. Nevertheless, as yet there is simply no consensus on how we ought to evaluate such actions or, indeed, on whether we can. Still, the pursuit of a solution to the problem has been interestingly employed by moral philosophers to press the limits of ethics and to urge a reconsideration of the nature and source of value at its most fundamental level. It is thus proving to be a very fruitful investigation, with far-reaching theoretical and practical implications.

Author : Jan Christian Heller
Publisher :
ISBN 13 :
Total Pages : 196 pages
Book Rating : 4.47/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Human Genome Research and the Challenge of Contingent Future Persons written by Jan Christian Heller and published by . This book was released on 1996 with total page 196 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Examining the economic, political, and philosophical issues underlying genetic research, Heller finds that some future people may bear an inordinate share of certain social costs stemming from the Project's biomedical applications. Further, the existence, numbers, and identities of those people will be contingent on decisions made based on this research.

Author : Melinda A. Roberts
Publisher : Springer Science & Business Media
ISBN 13 : 1402056974
Total Pages : 371 pages
Book Rating : 4.70/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Harming Future Persons written by Melinda A. Roberts and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2009-07-31 with total page 371 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Melinda A. Roberts and David T. Wasserman 1 Purpose of this Collection What are our obligations with respect to persons who have not yet, and may not ever, come into existence? Few of us believe that we can wrong those whom we leave out of existence altogether—that is, merely possible persons. We may think as well that the directive to be “fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth” 1 does not hold up to close scrutiny. How can it be wrong to decline to bring ever more people into existence? At the same time, we think we are clearly ob- gated to treat future persons—persons who don’t yet but will exist—in accordance with certain stringent standards. Bringing a person into an existence that is truly awful—not worth having—can be wrong, and so can bringing a person into an existence that is worth having when we had the alternative of bringing that same person into an existence that is substantially better. We may think as well that our obligations with respect to future persons are triggered well before the point at which those persons commence their existence. We think it would be wrong, for example, to choose today to turn the Earth of the future into a miserable place even if the victims of that choice do not yet exist.

Author : Rachel Muers
Publisher : Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN 13 : 0567130398
Total Pages : 227 pages
Book Rating : 4.96/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Living for the Future written by Rachel Muers and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2008-10-01 with total page 227 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Our relationship to future generations raises fundamental issues for ethical thought, to which a Christian theological response is both possible and significant. A relationship to future generations is implicitly central to many of today's most public controversies - over environmental protection, genetic research, and the purpose of education, to name but a few; but it has received little explicit or extended consideration. In Living for the Future Rachel Muers argues and seeks to demonstrate that to consider future generations as ethically significant is not simply to extend an existing ethical framework, but to rethink how ethics is done. Doing intergenerationally responsible theology and ethics means paying attention to how people are formed as theological and ethical reasoners (reasoners about the good), how social practices of deliberation about the good are maintained and developed, and how all of this relates to an understanding of the world as the sphere of God's transforming action. In other words, an intergenerationally responsible theological ethics will pay attention to the ethics, and the spirituality, of "ethics" itself. Her account of the ethical relation to future generations centres on three key concepts: "choosing life" (see Deut 30:19); "keeping the sources open"; and "sustaining fruitful contexts". These concepts are developed theologically and in engagement with extra-theological conversations on intergenerational responsibility. She shows how they take up and move beyond concerns expressed in those conversations - for "survival", for the right distribution of resources, and for the maintenance of human values.

Author : Larry May
Publisher : Cambridge University Press
ISBN 13 : 1107121868
Total Pages : 283 pages
Book Rating : 4.67/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Contingent Pacifism written by Larry May and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2015-08-27 with total page 283 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The first major philosophical treatment of contingent pacifism, offering an account of pacifism from the just war tradition.

Author : Kathryn A. Mariner
Publisher : University of California Press
ISBN 13 : 0520299558
Total Pages : 284 pages
Book Rating : 4.59/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Contingent Kinship written by Kathryn A. Mariner and published by University of California Press. This book was released on 2019-04-30 with total page 284 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Based on ethnographic fieldwork at a small Chicago adoption agency specializing in transracial adoption, Contingent Kinship charts the entanglement of institutional structures and ideologies of family, race, and class to argue that adoption is powerfully implicated in the question of who can have a future in the twenty-first-century United States. With a unique focus on the role that social workers and other professionals play in mediating relationships between expectant mothers and prospective adopters, Kathryn A. Mariner develops the concept of “intimate speculation,” a complex assemblage of investment, observation, and anticipation that shapes the adoption process into an elaborate mechanism for creating, dissolving, and exchanging imagined futures. Shifting the emphasis from adoption’s outcome to its conditions of possibility, this insightful ethnography places the practice of domestic adoption within a temporal, economic, and affective framework in order to interrogate the social inequality and power dynamics that render adoption—and the families it produces—possible.

Author : Jesper Ryberg
Publisher : Springer Science & Business Media
ISBN 13 : 1402024738
Total Pages : 261 pages
Book Rating : 4.33/5 ( download)

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Download or read book The Repugnant Conclusion written by Jesper Ryberg and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2007-11-10 with total page 261 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Most people (including moral philosophers), when faced with the fact that some of their cherished moral views lead up to the Repugnant Conclusion, feel that they have to revise their moral outlook. However, it is a moot question as to how this should be done. It is not an easy thing to say how one should avoid the Repugnant Conclusion, without having to face even more serious implications from one's basic moral outlook. Several such attempts are presented in this volume. This is the first volume devoted entirely to the cardinal problem of modern population ethics, known as 'The Repugnant Conclusion'. This book is a must for (moral) philosophers with an interest in population ethics.

Author : Gerhard Bos
Publisher : Routledge
ISBN 13 : 1317351770
Total Pages : 238 pages
Book Rating : 4.71/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Human Rights and Sustainability written by Gerhard Bos and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-02-26 with total page 238 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The history of human rights suggests that individuals should be empowered in their natural, political, political, social and economic vulnerabilities. States within the international arena hold each other responsible for doing just that and support or interfere where necessary. States are to protect these essential human vulnerabilities, even when this is not a matter of self-interest. This function of human rights is recognized in contexts of intervention, genocide, humanitarian aid and development. This book develops the idea of environmental obligations as long-term responsibilities in the context of human rights. It proposes that human rights require recognition that, in the face of unsustainable conduct, future human persons are exposed and vulnerable. It explores the obstacles for long-term responsibilities that human rights law provides at the level of international and national law and challenges the question of whether lifestyle restrictions are enforceable in view of liberties and levels of wellbeing typically seen as protected by human rights. The book will be of interest to postgraduates studying Human Rights, Sustainability, Law and Philosophy.

Author : George Waters Gilbertson
Publisher :
ISBN 13 :
Total Pages : 336 pages
Book Rating : 4.86/5 ( download)

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Download or read book The Balochi Language written by George Waters Gilbertson and published by . This book was released on 1923 with total page 336 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: