Variations -- On being imprisoned by one's upbringing -- Moral psychologies and moral ecologies -- Bibliographical essay -- First nature -- Classical Chinese sprouts -- Modern moral psychology -- Beyond moral modularity -- Destructive emotions -- Bibliographic essay -- Collisions -- When values collide -- Moral geographies of anger -- Weird anger -- For love's and justice's sake -- Bibliographical essay -- Anthropologies -- Self-variations: philosophical archaeologies -- The content of character.

This book explores the interface between geography, ethics and morality. It considers questions that have haunted the past, are subjects of controversy in the present, and which affect the future. Does distance diminish responsibility? Should we interfere with the lives of those we do not know? Is there a distinction between private and public space? Which values and morals, if any, are absolute, and which cultural, communal or personal? And are universal rights consistent with respect for difference? David Smith shows how these questions play themselves out in politics, planning, development, social and personal relations, the exploitation of resources, and competition for territory. After introducing the essential elements of moral philosophy from Plato to postmodernism, he examines the moral significance of concepts of landscape, location and place, proximity, distance and community, space and territory, justice, and nature. He is concerned above all with the morality people practice, to see how this varies according to geographical context, and to assess the inevitability of its outcomes. His argument is seamlessly interwoven with everyday observation and vividly described case studies: the latter include genocide and rescue during the Holocaust, the conflicts over space between Israeland Palestine and within Israel itself, and the social tensions and aspirations in post-apartheid South Africa. The meaning, possibility and limits of social justice lie at the heart of the book. That geographical context is vital to the understanding of moral practice and ethical theory is its central proposition. The book is clearly and engagingly written. The author has a student readership in mind, but his book will appeal widely to geographers and others involved in planning, development, politics, social theory, and the analysis of the contemporary world.

This book represents a landmark exploration of the common terrain of geography and ethics. Drawing together specially commissioned contributions from distinguished geographers across the UK, North America and Australasia, the place of geography in ethics and of ethics in geography is examined through wide-ranging, thematic chapters. Geography and Ethics is divided into four sections for discussion and exploration of ideas: Ethics and Space; Ethics and Place; Ethics and Nature and Ethics and knowledge, all of which point to the rich interplay between geography and moral philosophy or ethics.

This book delves into the ethical dimension of urban life: how should one live in the city? What constitutes a ‘good’ life under urban condition? Whose gets to live a ‘good’ life, and whose ideas of morality, propriety and ‘good’ prevail? What is the connection between the ‘good’ and the ‘just’ in urban life? Rather than philosophizing the ‘good’ and proper life in cities, the book considers what happens when urban conflicts and urban futures are carried out as conflicts over the good and proper life in cities. It offers an understanding of how ethical discourses, ideals and values are harmonized with material interests of different groups, taking up cases studies about environmental protection, co-housing schemes, political protest, heritage preservation, participatory planning, collaborative art production, and other topics from different eras and parts of the globe. This book offers multidisciplinary insights, ethnographic research and conceptual tools and resources to explore and better understand such conflicts. It questions the ways in which urban ethics draw on tacit moral economies of urban life and the ways in which such moral economies become explicit, political and programmatic. Chapters 1 and 11 of this book are freely available as a downloadable Open Access PDF at http://www.taylorfrancis.com under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives (CC-BY-NC-ND) 4.0 license.

Sam Harris dismantles the most common justification for religious faith--that a moral system cannot be based on science.

Owen Flanagan argues in this book for a more psychologically realistic ethical reflection and spells out the ways in which psychology can enrich moral philosophy. Beginning with a discussion of such “moral saints” as Gandhi, Mother Teresa, and Oskar Schindler, Flanagan charts a middle course between an ethics that is too realistic and socially parochial and one that is too idealistic, giving no weight to our natures.