Book picks similar to
Human Conduct: Problems of Ethics by John Hospers


philosophy
ethics
philosophy-scholars
libertarianism

Vice & Virtue in Everyday Life: Introductory Readings in Ethics


Christina Hoff Sommers - 1985
    Instructors appreciate it for its philosophical breadth and seriousness. Students welcome the engaging topics and irresistible readings. VICE AND VIRTUE IN EVERYDAY LIFE provides students with a lively selection of classical and contemporary readings on pressing matters of personal and social morality. The text includes an overview of seminal ethical theories, as well as a unique set of stimulating articles on matters of social responsibility, personal integrity and individual virtue. While the readings consistently represent different points of view, the book maintains a strong sense of the importance of avoiding cruelty and practicing kindness in a well-lived life.

Why Can't We Be Good?


Jacob Needleman - 2007
    The respected philosopher and author of The American Soul embarks on his most gripping and broadly appealing work, asking the ultimate question of human nature: Why do we repeatedly violate our most deeply held values and beliefs?

How To Be Right… in a World Gone Wrong


James O'Brien - 2018
    But what makes James’s daily LBC show such essential listening – and has made James a standout social media star – is the careful way he punctures their assumptions and dismantles their arguments live on air, every single morning.In How To Be Right, James provides a hilarious and invigorating guide to talking to people with faulty opinions. With chapters on every lightning-rod issue, James shows how people have been fooled into thinking the way they do, and in each case outlines the key questions to ask to reveal fallacies, inconsistencies and double standards.If you ever get cornered by ardent Brexiteers, Daily Mail disciples or little England patriots, this book is your conversation survival guide.‘I have had a ringside seat as a significant swathe of the British population was persuaded that their failures were the fault of foreigners, that unisex lavatories threatened their peace of mind and that ‘all Muslims’ must somehow apologise for terror attacks by extremists. I have tried to dissuade them and sometimes succeeded… The challenge is to distinguish sharply between the people who told lies and the people whose only offence was to believe them.’James O’Brien

Be Good: How to Navigate the Ethics of Everything


Randy Cohen - 2012
    Organized thematically in an easy-to-navigate Q&A format, and featuring line illustrations throughout, this amusing and engaging book challenges readers to think about how they would (or should) respond when faced with everyday moral challenges, from sex and love to religion, technology, and much more. Sure to ignite brain cells and spark healthy debate, Be Good is a book to refer to again and again.

On Virtue Ethics


Rosalind Hursthouse - 1999
    Rosalind Hursthouse, who has made notable contributions to this development, here presents a full exposition and defense of her neo-Aristotelian version of virtue ethics. She shows howvirtue ethics can provide guidance for action, illuminate moral dilemmas, and bring out the moral significance of the emotions.

Deepak Chopra's The Angel is Near


Deepak Chopra - 2000
    Now, the author of Ageless Body, Timeless Mind, The Seven Spiritual Laws of Success, and the Way of the Wizard, creates an extraordinary fiction series built on his insights into the divine. With gripping storytelling power, The Angel is Near plunges us into a modern, globe-spanning thriller of epic proportions. Instead of guns and bombs, the weapons in this novel are far more powerful: good and evil. And at stake is the very future of humankind....Unleashes a saga of courage, terror and revelationIn a burned out village in Kosovo, two soldiers are struck down by a flash of blinding light...In New York state, a doctor runs to help a stricken neighbor, only to be charged with the bloody murder of the man he came to save...In a Nevada laboratory, a cynical scientist analyzes a bizarre life form-and discovers the impossible...All the around the world the fabric of reality is unraveling. Scientists scramble to understand it. Ordinary people confront bizarre, terrifying phenomena. And an American doctor named Michael Aulden stands at ground zero in a war of the body, mind and soul-as humankind must choose between the goodness that has always been ours, or the evil that has found a home on earth...Deepak Chopra's The Angel Is Near

In the Heart of Life: A Restless Soul, a Search for Meaning, and a Bond That Death Couldn't Break


Kathy Eldon - 2013
    Diving into this tumultuous new world as a journalist and writer, she embraced the energy and creativity of Kenyans, both black and white. But her world collapsed when her twenty-two-year-old son, Dan—an artist and photojournalist on assignment for Reuters—was stoned to death by an angry mob in Somalia, killed by the very people he was trying to help. Kathy's journey through this tragic loss was deeply spiritual as she discovered that, in many ways, Dan was still ever-present in her life.This gripping international saga includes a passionate love, a dangerous coup in Kenya, and a compelling glimpse into a woman on the brink of self-discovery. After her son's murder, Kathy began to publish his art, which gained popularity worldwide and—together with her daughter, Amy—launched a global foundation celebrating Dan's work as a creative activist. Throughout Kathy's exploration of profound tragedy, we find the secrets to not only surviving, but being truly, gloriously alive.

Hope and Other Superpowers: A Life-Affirming, Love-Defending, Butt-Kicking, World-Saving Manifesto


John Pavlovitz - 2018
    It’s exhausting to give a damn these days, isn’t it? Perhaps you’re feeling anguished about what you see on the news or in your social media timeline, or by your personal circumstances, and are paralyzed waiting for political or religious leaders, or celebrities, to rescue us from it all. But what if you didn’t have to wait for someone else? What if you could be the hero? This book—a spirited call to action—shows you how. In these pages, John offers a path away from the vitriol and toward com­passion, and a plan to transform our burdens into dreams and our outrage into activism. Drawing from lessons of beloved fictional superheroes, John shows us how to identify our origin story, build protective suits of armor, guard against our personal kryptonite, and vanquish our villains. He also identifies ten specific “superpowers” that we can enlist to make our lives and our world better. Along the way, he shares inspiring anecdotes and profiles about ordinary people who saw a gap in the world in empathy or kindness or gratitude and decided to fill it. Hope and Other Superpowers is an invitation to anyone hoping to be the kind of person the world so desperately needs—the kind who can save it. In other words: it’s an invitation to you.

How to be a Leader (The School of Life Book 3)


Martin Bjergegaard - 2016
    This is the idea at the heart of this thoughtful book on leadership. Popular culture feeds us images of the square-jawed, strong-armed leader - charismatic, powerful, decisive - but the truth is, with the right amount of self-knowledge and authenticity, anyone can be a good leader, even those who don't fit the stereotype.There are countless courses and books available on leadership technique, decision-making and public speaking, but How to Be a Leader aims to give you the tools to understand and bring out your own leadership style. With an in-depth look at what it really means to lead, and the difference between being a manager and being a leader, How to Be a Leader invites you to explore - and accept - the unique leader in you.

Passion of Command


B.P. McCoy - 2012
    McCoy, USMCIf you read one book in your lifetime on the warrior culture, this is that book. Active-duty Marine Colonel B. P. McCoy expertly relates his innermost thoughts and feelings, drawing on his mastery of personal leadership. Colonel McCoy understands the intangibles that make up our modern-day warriors, those young Americans on whom we place so much responsibility when we send them into harm's way.The author begins with the institutional design that leads some to believe that because of a manifestation of the American culture in which we're taught to kill from a young age through the use of video games, the task of a warrior would somehow be easily executed, based solely on these inequities. To the contrary, Colonel McCoy points out that the battlefield commander is hampered by the societal digression and the simple fact that young Americans can point a video weapon and kill, never feeling the true effects or suffering associated with actual combat. He explains that our culture is not that of predator, but more of prey. Through examples, he concludes that the American society places grave consequence on the taking of a human life, while we still require our young to bear arms against our enemies and to extinguish life. Only through superb training, conducted by passionate leaders, do our young Americans become moral warriors.Colonel McCoy describes the total cost of combat and the price paid by all who choose to become warriors. By pointing to positive training examples and keying on the effects of situational training—battle drills—conducted prior to and during combat, he successfully trained his Marines and developed the proper habits that would be the difference between life and death during combat. He directed his Marines to become "experts in the application of violence," without sacrificing their humanity. In the book, it became clear that he found the combination that allowed his men to achieve tactical superiority in every aspect.The essence of war is violence and the act of killing legitimate human targets without hesitation. To accomplish this, he instituted meaningful training and used his refined principles as a human being to guide him in the leadership and administration on the moral code that rules the field of battle. He is the perfect example of all that we hold dear in our warrior culture. He loved his men, showed them the right way through his personal example, guided his actions with passion and relayed his feelings to his men completely. He is quick to note his own shortcomings and how he overcame them and was the inspiration to the team that triumphed when all Marines survived the day.Emotionally riveting, The Passion of Command provides inside information into the warrior culture and allows one to grasp the complexities when hardening the mind, body, and spirit for the rigors of combat. Most find it difficult to communicate the human effects of combat to people who have never experienced the harsh realities associated with actually engaging an enemy. Colonel McCoy doesn't have that problem. He has opened the door and let the reader in

An Introduction to Greek Philosophy


David Roochnik - 2002
    More than 2,500 years later, the issues they pondered continue to challenge, fascinate, and instruct us. Is reality stable and permanent or is it always changing? Are ethical values like justice and courage relative? Or are values "absolute"—simply and forever right and true? What is justice? What is happiness? How shall we best live our lives?An Introduction to Greek Philosophy beckons you to join this eternal discussion. For that is what this subject truly is: a conversation among thinkers that has continued through the centuries and remains accessible to us today. You find it constantly stimulating, sometimes controversial, and nearly always remarkably relevant.A Hunger for Reasons, not Myths or BeliefsProfessor David Roochnik has organized this series of 24 lectures as a "dialectical" approach (the word comes from the Greek dialegesthai: to converse). The philosophers are presented as if they were participating in a conversation. In this way, the course unfolds in a manner similar to the actual development of Greek philosophy.In this course, you study the development of Greek philosophy, meet its major thinkers, and explore the issues and ideas that concerned them. For example the first real philosophers were the Presocratics—literally, the philosophers who lived before Socrates. They included Thales of Miletus (585 B.C.E.–?), Anaximander (610–546), Anaximenes (approx. 550), Xenophanes (approx. 570) and Pythagoras (approx. 570–500).The Presocratics rejected myth and divine inspiration—such as had been embodied in the works of Homer and in Hesiod's creation story, the Theogony—as valid explanations of reality. Instead, they insisted that true understanding always requires a logos, a rational explanation (hence such English words as "psychology" and "biology").The Presocratics were concerned with issues such as identifying the arche or "Being": the thing that is the origin of all other things. They also introduced sophistic relativism, the notion that truth, goodness, and all other values were relative, depending entirely on the person or group that held them. This concept would become a major point of debate for the Greeks and for the ages.Are We Footnotes to Plato?The heroes of this course, and certainly of Greek philosophy, are Plato (429–347 B.C.E.) and his student, Aristotle (384–322 B.C.E.). Unlike the Presocratics, who wrote too little, Plato and Aristotle were prolific authors. Both argued against relativism and instead were staunch objectivists who believed that certain important values were absolutely and universally true. And both left a staggering mark on history.Alfred North Whitehead, the great 20th-century British philosopher, said, "The safest general characterization of the European philosophical tradition is that it consists of a series of footnotes to Plato." In the Middle Ages, Aristotle was held in such high esteem that he was simply known as "the philosopher."Among Plato's many contributions to philosophy is his ingenious device for the examination of ideas: his written dialogues. In them, Plato never uses his own voice. Instead, the dialogues take place among a changing cast of characters, and Socrates is the most notable among them. The effect is to invite us to take part in the conversation and, ultimately, to become philosophers.You study Plato's dialogues as well as his notion of the Forms. This was his response to relativism and proposed that every virtue and value has an absolute and perfect Form, which humans understand even before birth.Greek philosophy can be said to culminate with Aristotle, who wrote treatises on a breathtaking range of subjects. He is said to be the first to view knowledge as being divided into specific disciplines such as biology or astronomy. The university was later modeled on this approach. More than any other philosopher, Aristotle synthesized the views that preceded him.For Aristotle, one value was foremost and was contained in everything, from the tiniest organisms to the phenomena of fire to human beings: purpose. Everything has a purpose that can be recognized and objectively defined, and that gives meaning to life. You explore the details and rationale of Aristotle's teleological—or purposive—world-view, one of the most significant in history.An Invitation to ThinkIn this course, you not only learn about Greek philosophy but, to some extent, how to do it. Professor Roochnik emphasizes that Greek philosophy is ultimately not about facts or answers but about the give-and-take of ideas.By the end of these lectures, you will understand how Greek philosophy still heavily influences our view of life. We live today, Professor Roochnik maintains, at a time that is shaped by Presocratic, relativistic philosophy. Contemporary thinkers, and often the average person, have great difficulty finding objective truth or meaning in life.What have we lost in turning away from the world of Plato and Aristotle—a world where everything has a place and a purpose and life is saturated with value and meaning?On the other hand, what would we lose if we returned to that world?These are a few of the many questions that will give you ample food for thought. For the Greeks, that was the greatest feast of all.

Politics and the Arts: Letter to M. d'Alembert on the Theatre


Jean-Jacques Rousseau - 1960
    Besides containing some of the most sensitive literary criticism ever written (especially of Moli�re), the book is an excellent introduction to the principles of classical political thought. It demonstrates the paradoxes of Rousseau's thought and clearly displays the temperament that led him to repudiate the hopes of the Enlightenment.

Federal Resume Guidebook: Strategies for Writing a Winning Federal Resume


Kathryn K. Troutman - 1997
    This book shows you writing methods to get best qualified, referred to a supervisor, interviewed, and hired! Effectively include KSAs in your resume with accomplishments. Maximize readability with the Outline Format federal resume. Analyze vacancy announcements for keywords. Master the Assessment Questionnaire. Format your USAJOBS federal resume for readability. Includes dozens of sample federal resumes in the Outline Format with KSAs!

Pursuing Christ. Creating Art.: Exploring Life at the Intersection of Faith and Creativity


Gary A. Molander - 2011
    CREATING ART. is written for people who are living in the intersection of the Christian faith, and the creation of art. By their nature, artists look at a life of faith differently, and that unique journey warrants an exploration of what it means to be a Christ-follower and an artist. The book intentionally veers away from tips and techniques and formulas, while concentrating on the journey, the mystery, and the heart.

The Delicate Art of Bureaucracy: Digital Transformation with the Monkey, the Razor, and the Sumo Wrestler


Mark Schwartz - 2020
    Through humor, a healthy dose of history and philosophy, and real-life examples from his days as a government bureaucrat, Schwartz shows IT leaders (and the whole of business) how to master the arts of the Monkey, the Razor, and the Sumo Wrestler to create a lean, learning, and enabling bureaucracy. For anyone frustrated by roadblocks, irritated you can't move fast enough, suffering under the weight of crushing procedures, this book is for you. No matter your role, you need a playbook for bureaucracy. This is it. With this playbook, you can wield bureaucracy as a superpower and bust through it at the same time.