Mining Morality

Employing “self-sharpening tools” found in the work of theologian and philosopher Bernard Lonergan, Pope Francis’ encyclical Laudato si’, and international law, William P. George brings mining to personal and collective moral awareness by “prospecting for ethics” at selected sites: (1) Butte, Montana, “the Richest Hill on Earth,” once bound to Chuquicamata, Chile, by a company that spanned two continents and nearly owned a state; (2) the tiny island nation of Nauru, called Pleasant Island until it was devastated by phosphate mining and the breaking of a sacred trust by foreign powers; (3) the deep seabed, governed by the United Nations Law of the Sea, a “constitution for the oceans” that regards much of the resource-rich seabed as humankind’s “common heritage”; (4) Africa, with its uranium mines but also its conflicts over what “being nuclear” means in the wake of colonialism, apartheid, and Hiroshima; and (5) mineral-rich asteroids speeding through space where mining rights are contested, even as space entrepreneurs look to become the world’s first trillionaires. George introduces readers to remarkable moral miners––the women of Butte and Chuquicamata, a World Court judge from Sri Lanka, and the Rocket Boys of Coalwood, West Virginia, to name a few––and leads them to consider not only the morality of mining––what’s good and not so good about resource extraction––but also the mining of morality, a venture that Socrates called “the examined life.”

Mining can have negative environmental and social impacts, but can also be responsible. However corporations have little impetus to act responsibly without being held to account by an informed and active public, and by strong institutions and governments which not only create but also enforce legislation. Yet what does such practice look like? This book shows how the concept of responsible mining is based on five key principles or pillars: holistic assessment; ethical relationships; community-based agreements; appropriate boundaries and good governance. Together, these pillars circumscribe global best practice and innovative ideas to catalyse new and improved approaches to a sustainable mining industry. The author argues that these practices are critical to the future viability and social acceptability of the global mining industry and draws on a range of case studies, including from Australia, Canada, Central Asia, Papua New Guinea and west Africa. The role of informed communities, governments and civil societies in holding the industry to account to achieve responsible mining is assessed. The book explains how companies judge what effects they may have on communities and investigates ways to improve the prediction and prevention of such impacts and to provide clearer, more meaningful public communication. It offers alternatives to common ‘corporate social responsibility’ practices in which mining companies adopt roles which are usually the remit of government. Ultimately, it looks to the future, exploring the essential pathways towards responsible mining.

Sam Harris dismantles the most common justification for religious faith--that a moral system cannot be based on science.

This volume deals with the way in which money is symbolically represented in a range of different cultures, from South and South-east Asia, Africa and South America. It is also concerned with the moral evaluation of monetary and commercial exchanges as against exchanges of other kinds. The essays cast radical doubt on many Western assumptions about money: that it is the acid which corrodes community, depersonalises human relationships, and reduces differences of quality to those of mere quantity; that it is the instrument of man's freedom, and so on. Rather than supporting the proposition that money produces easily specifiable changes in world view, the emphasis here is on the way in which existing world views and economic systems give rise to particular ways of representing money. But this highly relativistic conclusion is qualified once we shift the focus from money to the system of exchange as a whole. One rather general pattern that then begins to emerge is of two separate but related transactional orders, the majority of systems making some ideological space for relatively impersonal, competitive and individual acquisitive activity. This implies that even in a non-monetary economy these features are likely to exist within a certain sphere of activity, and that it is therefore misleading to attribute them to money. By so doing, a contrast within cultures is turned into a contrast between cultures, thereby reinforcing the notion that money itself has the power to transform the nature of social relationships.

Examining inequality through the lenses of moral traditions Rising inequality has attracted a great deal of attention in recent years from scholars and politicians, but the moral dimensions of inequality tend to be ignored. Is inequality morally acceptable? Is it morally permissible to allow practices and systems that contribute to inequality? Is there an ethical obligation to try to alleviate inequality, and if so, who is obligated to take that action? This book addresses these and similar questions not through a single lens of morality but through a comparative study of ethical traditions, both secular and religious, Western and non-Western. The moral and political traditions considered are: liberalism, Marxism, natural law, feminism, Buddhism, Judaism, Islam, Christianity, and Confucianism. The types of inequality examined include property, natural resources, products, wealth, income, jobs, and taxation. The editors open the book with an introduction providing information on contemporary dimensions of the problem of economic inequality, and the book concludes with a summary of the perspectives represented. Economic Inequality and Morality is unusual in that it addresses similarities and differences on the questions of inequality within and across moral traditions. Authors of the individual studies answer a common set of topic-related questions, giving the reader a broad perspective on how a broad range of traditions view and respond to inequality.

A landmark volume that explores the interconnected nature of technologies and rhetorical practice Rhetorical Machines addresses new approaches to studying computational processes within the growing field of digital rhetoric. While computational code is often seen as value-neutral and mechanical, this volume explores the underlying, and often unexamined, modes of persuasion this code engages. In so doing, it argues that computation is in fact rife with the values of those who create it and thus has powerful ethical and moral implications. From Socrates’s critique of writing in Plato’s Phaedrus to emerging new media and internet culture, the scholars assembled here provide insight into how computation and rhetoric work together to produce social and cultural effects. This multidisciplinary volume features contributions from scholar-practitioners across the fields of rhetoric, computer science, and writing studies. It is divided into four main sections: “Emergent Machines” examines how technologies and algorithms are framed and entangled in rhetorical processes, “Operational Codes” explores how computational processes are used to achieve rhetorical ends, “Ethical Decisions and Moral Protocols” considers the ethical implications involved in designing software and that software’s impact on computational culture, and the final section includes two scholars’ responses to the preceding chapters. Three of the sections are prefaced by brief conversations with chatbots (autonomous computational agents) addressing some of the primary questions raised in each section. At the heart of these essays is a call for emerging and established scholars in a vast array of fields to reach interdisciplinary understandings of human-machine interactions. This innovative work will be valuable to scholars and students in a variety of disciplines, including but not limited to rhetoric, computer science, writing studies, and the digital humanities.