This book, in the main, is devoted to the question of benevolent infanticide. Its primary purpose is to understand what conditions, if any, warrant allowing or inducing the death of a seriously defective infant. More generally, the debate is concerned with two questions: what are the limits of the value of life? And what moral, legal, or other kinds of protection should be provided for the most helpless and vulnerable of all human beings?

Experts from different disciplines present new insights into the subject of ritual homicide in various regions of the ancient world.

Infanticide is one of the most common, yet least understood of all human crimes. Although academic articles document isolated aspects of this problem, a single, unified analysis of infanticide has not been completed until now. In Hardness of Heart/Hardness of Life, Larry Milner provides the first exhaustive survey of infanticide, drawing on historical data from around the world. He then uses this survey as a basis for investigating why infanticide has been present in every form of human society throughout history. Both comprehensive and compelling, this important study will intrigue students of human psychology, social welfare, and child abuse, and will promote further research on this alarmingly overlooked atrocity

This book has two main concerns. The first is to isolate the fundamental issues that must be resolved if one is able to formulate a defensible position on the question of the morality of abortion. The second is to determine the most plausible stand on those issues. The issues are intellectually difficult and many of them have been more or less ignored in public debate on abortion. Tooley argues, however, that plausible answers can be advanced, and that they support a liberal position on the morality of abortion.

In this text, Jeffrey Reiman argues that an overlooked clue to the solution of the moral problem lies in the unusual way in which we value the lives of individual human beings - namely, that we value them irreplaceably. We think it is not only wrong to kill an innocent human child or adult, but that it would not be made right by replacing the dead one with another living one, or even several.

Drawing on philosophical notions of personal identity and the immorality of killing, Jeff McMahan looks at various issues, including abortion, infanticide, the killing of animals, assisted suicide, and euthanasia.

For thirty years, Peter Singer's Practical Ethics has been the classic introduction to applied ethics. For this third edition, the author has revised and updated all the chapters and added a new chapter addressing climate change, one of the most important ethical challenges of our generation. Some of the questions discussed in this book concern our daily lives. Is it ethical to buy luxuries when others do not have enough to eat? Should we buy meat from intensively reared animals? Am I doing something wrong if my carbon footprint is above the global average? Other questions confront us as concerned citizens: equality and discrimination on the grounds of race or sex; abortion, the use of embryos for research and euthanasia; political violence and terrorism; and the preservation of our planet's environment. This book's lucid style and provocative arguments make it an ideal text for university courses and for anyone willing to think about how she or he ought to live.