Terrible Virtue

In the spirit of The Paris Wife and Loving Frank, the provocative and compelling story of one of the most fascinating and influential figures of the twentieth century: Margaret Sanger, the founder of Planned Parenthood—an indomitable woman who, more than any other, and at great personal cost, shaped the sexual landscape we inhabit today. The daughter of a hard-drinking, smooth-tongued free thinker and a mother worn down by thirteen children, Margaret Sanger vowed her life would be different. Trained as a nurse, she fought for social justice beside labor organizers, anarchists, socialists, and other progressives, eventually channeling her energy to one singular cause: legalizing contraception. It was a battle that would pit her against puritanical, patriarchal lawmakers, send her to prison again and again, force her to flee to England, and ultimately change the lives of women across the country and around the world. This complex enigmatic revolutionary was at once vain and charismatic, generous and ruthless, sexually impulsive and coolly calculating—a competitive, self-centered woman who championed all women, a conflicted mother who suffered the worst tragedy a parent can experience. From opening the first illegal birth control clinic in America in 1916 through the founding of Planned Parenthood to the arrival of the Pill in the 1960s, Margaret Sanger sacrificed two husbands, three children, and scores of lovers in her fight for sexual equality and freedom. With cameos by such legendary figures as Emma Goldman, John Reed, Big Bill Haywood, H. G. Wells, and the love of Margaret’s life, Havelock Ellis, this richly imagined portrait of a larger-than-life woman is at once sympathetic to her suffering and unsparing of her faults. Deeply insightful, Terrible Virtue is Margaret Sanger’s story as she herself might have told it.

Why do billions of people readily embrace belief in the virtue of religious faith? Explore the virtues we value and seek to uphold, and discover the role religion and politics play in our beliefs concerning virtue. Our virtuous aims lie at the heart of our manner of examining and method of questioning what we hold to be true concerning the world and religious faith. VIRTUE presents an opportunity for readers to examine religious faith and its measure while it lays bare our desires for and pursuit of virtue. From a position of clarity concerning our manner of thinking and beliefs, the focus on virtue is directed toward universal virtues we can embrace, value, and pursue in our daily living for the benefits they bestow. Where your virtue lies will shock your faith and will challenge you to embrace yourself and others in a better way.

Virtue ethics has emerged from a rich history, in which both Aristotle and Aquinas have played an important role, to become one of the fastest-growing fields in contemporary ethics. In this volume of newly commissioned essays, leading moral philosophers offer a comprehensive overview of virtue ethics. They examine the theoretical structure of virtue ethics and its place in contemporary moral theory and other topics discussed include the history of virtue-based approaches to ethics, what makes these approaches distinctive, what they can say about specific practical issues and where we can expect them to go in the future. This Companion will be useful to students of virtue ethics and the history of ethics and to others who want to understand how virtue ethics is changing the face of contemporary moral philosophy.

This book explores curiosity from a normative epistemological viewpoint. Taking into account recent developments in the psychology of curiosity, as well as research on the nature and motivation of scientific inquiry, Miščević identifies curiosity as a positive and vital character trait. Key topics covered include: · Curiosity as a subject in the history of philosophy · Curiosity as a possible ethical virtue · The importance of curiosity about oneself · Whether curiosity is good in itself or only as a means to an end (e.g. in the pursuit of truth). The book begins with a brief historical overview, before turning to the nature of curiosity from both a psychological and philosophical viewpoint. Curiosity is revealed as a crucial instrument in the advancement of science and wisdom, as well as within the wider picture of meaningful human life. Miščević skilfully defends the idea that curiosity motivates and organises our cognitive abilities, playing the central role in our cognitive lives.

Professionals, it is said, have no use for simple lists of virtues and vices. The complexities and constraints of professional roles create peculiar moral demands on the people who occupy them, and traits that are vices in ordinary life are praised as virtues in the context of professional roles. Should this disturb us, or is it naive to presume that things should be otherwise? Taking medical and legal practice as key examples, Justin Oakley and Dean Cocking develop a rigorous articulation and defence of virtue ethics, contrasting it with other types of character-based ethical theories and showing that it offers a promising new approach to the ethics of professional roles. They provide insights into the central notions of professional detachment, professional integrity, and moral character in professional life, and demonstrate how a virtue-based approach can help us better understand what ethical professional-client relationships would be like.

This volume brings together a selection of Rosalind Hursthouse's essays on Aristotle, virtue ethics, and social philosophy. These articles provide valuable context and clarification for much of her more famous work while drawing attention to new avenues of philosophical investigation that Hursthouse pursued. Hursthouse's work played an integral role in establishing virtue ethics as a distinctive approach in ethical theory. This collection includes essays on the development of virtue in children, what the Aristotelian practically wise person knows, how virtue ethicists can inform discussions about environmental and animal ethics, what the starting point for virtue politics should be in a contemporary political context, and how human nature and ethical naturalism could provide the foundation for a virtue ethical system.

Julia Annas offers a new account of virtue and happiness as central ethical ideas. She argues that exercising a virtue involves practical reasoning of the kind we find in someone exercising an everyday practical skill, such as farming, building, or playing the piano. This helps us to see virtue as part of an agent's happiness or flourishing.

An ambitious study of the making of the professional middle class in the Anglophone world from c.1870 to 2008.