Heather Widdows

How looking beautiful has become a moral imperative in today’s world The demand to be beautiful is increasingly important in today's visual and virtual culture. Rightly or wrongly, being perfect has become an ethical ideal to live by, and according to which we judge ourselves good or bad, a success or a failure. Perfect Me explores the changing nature of the beauty ideal, showing how it is more dominant, more demanding, and more global than ever before. Heather Widdows argues that our perception of the self is changing. More and more, we locate the self in the body--not just our actual, flawed bodies but our transforming and imagined ones. As this happens, we further embrace the beauty ideal. Nobody is firm enough, thin enough, smooth enough, or buff enough—not without significant effort and cosmetic intervention. And as more demanding practices become the norm, more will be required of us, and the beauty ideal will be harder and harder to resist. If you have ever felt the urge to "make the best of yourself" or worried that you were "letting yourself go," this book explains why. Perfect Me examines how the beauty ideal has come to define how we see ourselves and others and how we structure our daily practices—and how it enthralls us with promises of the good life that are dubious at best. Perfect Me demonstrates that we must first recognize the ethical nature of the beauty ideal if we are ever to address its harms.

Perfect Me

Nicola Smith

This book provides a distinctive multi-disciplinary contribution to debates about global justice and global ethics addresses issues including human rights, the environment, health, labour, peace-building and political participation, and sexuality.

Global Social Justice

Herjeet Marway

Chapter 4 of this book is open access under a CC BY 4.0 license via link.springer.com. This edited collection explores the agency of women who do violence and have violence done to them. Topics covered include rape, pornography, prostitution, suicide bombing and domestic violence. The volume contributes to the philosophical and theoretical debate, as well as offering practical, social and political responses to the issues examined.

The Agency of Victims and Perpetrators

Women and Violence

Global ethics addresses some of the most pressing ethical concerns today, including rogue states, torture, scarce resources, poverty, migration, consumption, global trade, medical tourism, and humanitarian intervention. It is both topical and important. How we resolve (or fail to resolve) the dilemmas of global ethics shapes how we understand ourselves, our relationships with each other and the social and political frameworks of governance now and into the future. This is seen most clearly in the case of climate change, where our actions now determine the environment our grandchildren will inherit, but it is also the case in other areas as our decisions about what it is permissible for humans beings to do to each other determines the type of beings we are. This book, suitable for course use, introduces students to the theory and practice of global ethics, ranging over issues in global governance and citizenship, poverty and development, war and terrorism, bioethics, environmental and climate ethics and gender justice.

An Introduction

Global Ethics

Darrel Moellendorf

Global ethics focuses on the most pressing contemporary ethical issues - poverty, global trade, terrorism, torture, pollution, climate change and the management of scarce recourses. It draws on moral and political philosophy, political and social science, empirical research, and real-world policy and activism. The Routledge Handbook of Global Ethics is an outstanding reference source to the key topics, problems and debates in this exciting subject, presenting an authoritative overview of the most significant issues and ideas in global ethics. The 31 chapters by a team of international contributors are structured into six key parts: normative theory conflict and violence poverty and development economic justice bioethics and health justice environment and climate ethics. Covering the theoretical and practical aspects of global ethics as well as policy, The Routledge Handbook of Philosophy of Global Ethics provides a benchmark for the study of global ethics to date, as well as outlining future developments. It will prove an invaluable reference for policy-makers, and is essential reading for students and researchers in philosophy, international relations, political science, environmental and development studies and human rights law.

The Routledge Handbook of Global Ethics

Chapter 4 of this book is open access under a CC BY license. This edited collection explores the agency of women who do violence and have violence done to them. Topics covered include rape, pornography, prostitution, suicide bombing and domestic violence. The volume contributes to the philosophical and theoretical debate, as well as offering practical, social and political responses to the issues examined.

Iris Murdoch's moral philosophy, although highly influential in 20th century moral theory, is somewhat unsystematic and inaccessible. In this work Widdows outlines the moral vision of Iris Murdoch in its entirety and draws out the implications of her thought for the contemporary ethical debate, discussing such aspects of Murdoch's work as the influence of Plato on her conception of The Good, the reality of the human moral experience, the attainment of knowledge of moral values and how art and religion inform the living of the moral life. Examining all of Murdoch's contributions to moral philosophy from her short papers to Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals, Heather Widdows provides an accessible and systematised account of Murdoch's moral concepts and offers a clear and critical exposition of her thought. By clarifying Murdoch's central themes, core ideas and her picture of the moral life, this book enables her work to be more easily understood and so utilised in current debates.

Heather Widdows

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