Books about Morality from Amazon.com

In Morality for Beautiful Girls, Precious Ramotswe, founder and owner of the only detective agency for the concerns of both ladies and others, investigates the alleged poisoning of the brother of an important “Government Man,” and the moral character of the four finalists of the Miss Beauty and Integrity Contest, the winner of which will almost certainly be a contestant for the title of Miss Botswana. Yet her business is having money problems, and when other difficulties arise at her fianc?’s Tlokweng Road Speedy Motors, she discovers the reliable Mr J.L.B. Matekoni is more complicated then he seems..
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Everyone agrees that America is polarized, with ever-hardening positions held by people less and less willing to listen to one another No one agrees on what to do about it. One solution that hasn't yet been tried, say Adam Hamilton, is for thinking persons of faith to model for the rest of the country a richer, more thoughtful conversation on the political, moral, and religious issues that divide us.

Hamilton writes: I don't expect you to agree with everything I've written. I expect that in the future even I won't agree with everything I've written here. The point is not to get you to agree with me, but to encourage you to think about what you believe. In the end I will be inviting those of you who find this book resonates with what you feel is true, to join the movement to pursue a middle way between the left and the right --to make your voices heard-- and to model for our nation and for the church, how we can listen, learn, see truth as multi-sided, and love those with whom we disagree.

Newsweek:
How Would Jesus Choose?
By Lisa Miller April 14, 2008

Adam Hamilton does not call himself pro-choice. He prefers pro-life with a heavy heart. What that means, as he explains in his new book Seeing Gray in a World of Black and White, is that he believes abortion should be available and legal, that there are instances in which it might be necessary and that those instances should be very rare. Further, he says, the abortion debate has been too hot for too long, and that, as a Christian minister, his job is to try to support people no matter what decision they make. As an evangelical megachurch pastor in Kansas, a man educated at Oral Roberts University, Hamilton speaks carefully, aware that he's staking out a controversial position.

Or maybe not. About a third of white evangelicals say that abortion should sometimes or always be legal, according to the Pew Research Center a number that hasn't changed in a decade. In recent election seasons, however, these moderate voices have been drowned out by hard-line shouting on both sides. In the past, an evangelical who might condone abortion in the case of his ailing wife or 14-year-old daughter would never say so in public. Now, the abortion rhetoric has faded somewhat as evangelicals turn their attention to other things: AIDS, the environment, Darfur. In 2004, megapastor Rick Warren announced that abortion was a nonnegotiable for evangelical voters. This year, he's been silent. What's new, then, is not that a pastor like Hamilton would take a softer approach to abortion, but that he would feel comfortable enough to say so from the pulpit and in print.

Hamilton wants pro-choice and pro-life advocates to join forces to reduce the number of abortions and he enumerates seven areas where they could find common ground. Let both sides agree that adequate information about birth control can help prevent pregnancy, he says. And let both sides agree that the longer a pregnancy progresses, the more morally problematic an abortion becomes.

As for his heavy heart, Hamilton comes by it honestly. Seven years ago he received a letter from a parishioner describing her own teenage pregnancy in the years before Roe, the pressure from her parents to abort and her refusal to do so in spite of the cost. That letter was from his mother..
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C.S. Lewis's The Abolition of Man purports to be a book specifically about public education, but its central concerns are broadly political, religious, and philosophical In the best of the book's three essays, "Men Without Chests," Lewis trains his laser-sharp wit on a mid- century English high school text, considering the ramifications of teaching British students to believe in idle relativism, and to reject "the doctrine of objective value, the belief that certain attitudes are really true, and others really false, to the kind of thing the universe is and the kinds of things we are." Lewis calls this doctrine the "Tao," and he spends much of the book explaining why society needs a sense of objective values. The Abolition of Man speaks with astonishing freshness to contemporary debates about morality; and even if Lewis seems a bit too cranky and privileged for his arguments to be swallowed whole, at least his articulation of values seems less ego-driven, and therefore is more useful, than that of current writers such as Bill Bennett and James Dobson. --Michael Joseph Gross.
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The first three books in Alexander MCCall Smith's beloved bestselling series, featuring Mma Precious Ramotswe, the traditionally built, eminently sensible, cunning proprietor of the only ladies' detective agency in Botswana, are now available in a beautifully designed boxed set..
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"It's the animal in us," we often hear when we've been bad. But why not when we're good? Primates and Philosophers tackles this question by exploring the biological foundations of one of humanity's most valued traits: morality

In this provocative book, primatologist Frans de Waal argues that modern-day evolutionary biology takes far too dim a view of the natural world, emphasizing our "selfish" genes. Science has thus exacerbated our reciprocal habits of blaming nature when we act badly and labeling the good things we do as "humane." Seeking the origin of human morality not in evolution but in human culture, science insists that we are moral by choice, not by nature.

Citing remarkable evidence based on his extensive research of primate behavior, de Waal attacks "Veneer Theory," which posits morality as a thin overlay on an otherwise nasty nature. He explains how we evolved from a long line of animals that care for the weak and build cooperation with reciprocal transactions. Drawing on both Darwin and recent scientific advances, de Waal demonstrates a strong continuity between human and animal behavior. In the process, he also probes issues such as anthropomorphism and human responsibilities toward animals.

Based on the Tanner Lectures de Waal delivered at Princeton University's Center for Human Values in 2004, Primates and Philosophers includes responses by the philosophers Peter Singer, Christine M. Korsgaard, and Philip Kitcher and the science writer Robert Wright. They press de Waal to clarify the differences between humans and other animals, yielding a lively debate that will fascinate all those who wonder about the origins and reach of human goodness.

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Moral thinking pervades our practical lives, but where did this way of thinking come from, and what purpose does it serve? Is it to be explained by environmental pressures on our ancestors a million years ago, or is it a cultural invention of more recent origin? In The Evolution of Morality, Richard Joyce takes up these controversial questions, finding that the evidence supports an innate basis to human morality. As a moral philosopher, Joyce is interested in whether any implications follow from this hypothesis. Might the fact that the human brain has been biologically prepared by natural selection to engage in moral judgment serve in some sense to vindicate this way of thinking--staving off the threat of moral skepticism, or even undergirding some version of moral realism? Or if morality has an adaptive explanation in genetic terms--if it is, as Joyce writes, "just something that helped our ancestors make more babies"--might such an explanation actually undermine morality's central role in our lives? He carefully examines both the evolutionary "vindication of morality" and the evolutionary "debunking of morality," considering the skeptical view more seriously than have others who have treated the subject.

Interdisciplinary and combining the latest results from the empirical sciences with philosophical discussion, The Evolution of Morality is one of the few books in this area written from the perspective of moral philosophy. Concise and without technical jargon, the arguments are rigorous but accessible to readers from different academic backgrounds. Joyce discusses complex issues in plain language while advocating subtle and sometimes radical views. The Evolution of Morality lays the philosophical foundations for further research into the biological understanding of human morality..
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For much of the twentieth century, philosophy and science went their separate ways. In moral philosophy, fear of the so-called naturalistic fallacy kept moral philosophers from incorporating developments in biology and psychology. Since the 1990s, however, many philosophers have drawn on recent advances in cognitive psychology, brain science, and evolutionary psychology to inform their work. This collaborative trend is especially strong in moral philosophy, and these three volumes bring together some of the most innovative work by both philosophers and psychologists in this emerging interdisciplinary field.

Contributors to Volume 2:
Fredrik Bjorklund (University of Lund), James Blair (National Institute of Mental Health), Paul Bloomfield (University of Connecticut), Fiery Cushman (Harvard University), Justin D'Arms (Ohio State University), John Deigh (University of Texas at Austin), John Doris (Washington University), Julia Driver (Dartmouth College), Ben Fraser (Australian National University Research School of Social Science), Gerd Gigerenzer (Max Plank Institute), Michael Gill (University of Arizona), Jonathan Haidt (University of Virginia) Marc Hauser (Harvard University), Daniel Jacobson (Bowling Green State University), Joshua Knobe (University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill), Brian Leiter (University of Texas at Austin), Don Loeb (University of Vermont), Ron Mallon (University of Utah), Darcia Narvaez (University of Notre Dame), Shaun Nichols (University of Arizona), Alexandra Plakias (University of Michigan), Jesse Prinz (University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill), Geoffrey Sayre-McCord (University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill), Russ Shafer-Landau (University of Wisconsin), Walter Sinnott-Armstrong (Dartmouth College), Cass Sunstein (University of Chicago), William Tolhurst (University of Northern Illinois), Liane Young (Harvard University)..
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For much of the twentieth century, philosophy and science went their separate ways. In moral philosophy, fear of the so-called naturalistic fallacy kept moral philosophers from incorporating developments in biology and psychology. Since the 1990s, however, many philosophers have drawn on recent advances in cognitive psychology, brain science, and evolutionary psychology to inform their work. This collaborative trend is especially strong in moral philosophy, and these three volumes bring together some of the most innovative work by both philosophers and psychologists in this emerging interdisciplinary field.

Contributors to Volume 3:
Abigail Baird (Vassar College), William Casebeer (Air Force Academy), Cordelia Fine (Monash University), Nathan Fox (University of Maryland), Uta Frith (University College London, Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience), Jordan Grafman (National Institute of Health), Joshua Greene (Harvard University), Catherine Hynes (School of Psychology, University of Queensland), Fatima Azavedo Ignacio (Cognitive Psychology, Instituto Philippe Pinel), Richard Joyce (Australian National University Research School of Social Science), Jerome Kagan (Harvard University) Leonard Katz (Massachusetts Institute of Technology), Kent Kiehl (Yale University), Jeanette Kennett (Center for Applied Philosophy and Public Ethics, Australian National University), Melanie Killen (University of Maryland), Daniel Lapsley (Ball State University), Heidi Maibom (Carleton University), Victoria McGeer (Princeton University), John Mikhail (Georgetown Law School), Jorge Moll (National Institute of Health), Shaun Nichols (University of Arizona), Ricardo de Oliveira-Souza (Universidade do Rio de Janeiro), Adina Roskies (Dartmouth College), Mirella L. M. F. Paiva (National Institutes of Health), Jana Schaich Borg (Olin Neuropsychiatry Research Center, Institute of Living), Katrina Sifferd (Dartmouth College), Walter Sinnott-Armstrong (Dartmouth College), Michael Smith (Princeton University), Mark Timmons (University of Arizona), Frederick de Vignemont (Institut des sciences cognitives, CNRS), Paul Whalen (Dartmouth College), Roland Zahn (National Institute of Health)..
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