In the helping professions, codes of ethics and decision-making models have been the primary vehicles for determining what constitutes ethical practice. These strategies are insufficient since they assume that shared meanings exist and that the contradictory universal principles of codes can be reconciled. Also, these tools do not emphasize the significance of context for ethical practice. This book takes a new critical theoretical approach, which involves exploring how social workers construct what is ’ethical’ in their work, especially when they are positioned at the intersection of multiple paradoxes, including that of two opposing responsibilities in society: namely, to care for others but also to prevent others from harm. The book is built on narratives from actual front-line workers and therefore is more applicable and grounded for practitioners and students, offering many suggestions for sound practice. It illustrates that an understanding of ethics differs from worker to worker and is heavily influenced by context, workers’ values, and what they take up as the primary discourses that frame their perceptions of the profession. While recognizing the oppressive potential of social work, the book is rooted in a perspective that ethical practice can contribute to a more socially just society.

Contemporary Western war is represented as enacting the West's ability and responsibility to help make the world a better place for others, in particular to protect them from oppression and serious human rights abuses. That is, war has become permissible again, indeed even required, as ethical war. At the same time, however, Western war kills and destroys. This creates a paradox: Western war risks killing those it proposes to protect. This book examines how we have responded to this dilemma and challenges the vision of ethical war itself, exploring how the commitment to ethics shapes the practice of war and indeed how practices come, in turn, to shape what is considered ethical in war. The book closely examines particular practices of warfare, such as targeting, the use of cultural knowledge, and ethics training for soldiers. What emerges is that instead of constraining violence, the commitment to ethics enables and enhances it. The book argues that the production of ethical war relies on an impossible but obscured separation between ethics and politics, that is, the problematic politics of ethics, and reflects on the need to make decisions at the limit of ethics.

This book integrates studies on the thought of Bernard de Mandeville and other philosophers and historians of Modern Thought. The chapters reflect a rethinking of Mandeville’s legacy and, together, present a comprehensive approach to Mandeville’s work. The book is published on the occasion of the 300 years that have passed since the publication of the Fable of the Bees. Bernard de Mandeville disassembled the dichotomies of traditional moral thinking to show that the outcomes of the social action emerge as new, non-intentional effects from the combination of moral opposites, vice and virtue, in such a form that they lose their moral significance. The work of this great writer, philosopher and physician is interwoven with an awareness of the paradoxical nature of modern society and the challenges that this recognition brings to an adequate perspective on the historical world of modernity.

"This volume of essays is dedicated to George Soros in honor of his seventieth birthday. In their various fields of work the authors, who come from the interconnected worlds of academe, politics, and business, have each made an active contribution to the growth of the huge philanthropic empire built by Soros." "The editors chose the title The Paradoxes of Unintended Consequences to encourage contributors to adopt a dialogical approach. The title also refers to the case of Giordano Bruno, itself a telling example of paradox. Burnt at the stake 400 years ago for heresy, Bruno's views were probably far more illiberal and undemocratic than the views of those who condemned him. The editors' aim was to show that any complex social process or political attempt to change people's lives will inevitably have unintended consequences, usually of a paradoxical nature. These consequences should force us to reconsider our original theory."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved

Two centuries after Carl von Clausewitz wrote On War, it lines the shelves of military colleges around the world and even showed up in an Al Qaeda hideout. Though it has shaped much of the common parlance on the subject, On War is perceived by many as a “metaphysical fog,” widely known but hardly read. In War as Paradox, Youri Cormier lifts the fog on this iconic work by explaining its philosophical underpinnings. Building up a genealogy of dialectical war theory and integrating Hegel with Clausewitz as a co-founders of the method, Cormier uncovers a common logic that shaped the fighting doctrines and ethics of modern war. He explains how Hegel and Clausewitz converged on method, but nonetheless arrived at opposite ethics and military doctrines. Ultimately, Cormier seeks out the limits to dialectical war theory and explores the greater paradoxes the method reveals: can so-called “rational” theories of war hold up under the pressures of irrational propositions, such as lone-wolf attacks, the circular logic of a “war to end all wars,” or the apparent folly of mutually assured destruction? Since the Second World War, commentators have described war as obsolete. War as Paradox argues that dialectical war theory may be the key to understanding why, despite this, it continues.

The first book to explore the deep influence of modern science on Locke's moral and political philosophy.