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Abortion Care as Moral Work brings together the voices of abortion providers, abortion counselors, clinic owners, neonatologists, bioethicists, and historians to discuss how and why providing abortion care is moral work. The collection offers voices not usually heard as clinicians talk about their work and their thoughts about life and death. In four subsections--Providers, Clinics, Conscience, and The Fetus--the contributions in this anthology explore the historical context and present-day challenges to the delivery of abortion care. Contributing authors address the motivations that lead abortion providers to offer abortion care, discuss the ways in which anti-abortion regulations have made it increasingly difficult to offer feminist-inspired services, and ponder the status of the fetus and the ethical frameworks supporting abortion care and fetal research. Together these essays provide a feminist moral foundation to reassert that abortion care is moral work.

Abortion Care as Moral Work brings together the voices of abortion providers, abortion counselors, clinic owners, neonatologists, bioethicists, and historians to discuss how and why providing abortion care is moral work. The collection offers voices not usually heard as clinicians talk about their work and their thoughts about life and death. In four subsections--Providers, Clinics, Conscience, and The Fetus--the contributions in this anthology explore the historical context and present-day challenges to the delivery of abortion care. Contributing authors address the motivations that lead abortion providers to offer abortion care, discuss the ways in which anti-abortion regulations have made it increasingly difficult to offer feminist-inspired services, and ponder the status of the fetus and the ethical frameworks supporting abortion care and fetal research. Together these essays provide a feminist moral foundation to reassert that abortion care is moral work.

This volume contains a selection of papers from the 21st annual 'Australian Association for Professional and Applied Ethics' Conference. It addresses the key theme of Political Leadership, Professional Ethics, and the Problem of Dirty Hands. 'Dirty hands' is a somewhat nebulous concept. It may refer to professions whose objectives are so consequential that some ethical violations are considered justifiable. In another sense it might suggest situations where professional obligations might require the performance of deeds that contradict one's own moral beliefs. The term is perhaps most synonymous with political leadership and raises the question: Should leaders ever get their hands dirty? For applied ethicists, recognizing that sometimes there are compelling arguments in favor of certain moral violations is a professional necessity. This volume contains papers on a broad range of issues including discussions of medical ethics, military ethics, domestic political matters, and the very nature of 'professions' themselves. It will be of interest to those interested in politics, as well as those involved in research or training in ethics and professional practice.

An uncommon and intimate account of the lives of two conscientious objectors In the summer of 2013, Suzanne Kesler Rumsey discovered hundreds of letters exchanged between her late grandparents, Miriam and Benjamin Kesler. The letters, written between 1941 and 1946, were filled with typical wartime sentiments: love and longing, anguish at being apart, uncertainty about the war and the country’s future, and attempts at humor to keep their spirits up. What is unusual about their story is that Ben Kesler was not writing from a theater of war. Instead, Ben, a member of the Dunkard Brethren Church, was a conscientious objector. He, along with about 12,000 other men, opted to join the Civilian Public Service (CPS) and contribute to “work of national importance” at one of the 218 CPS camps around the country. In Blessed Are the Peacemakers: Small Histories during World War II, Letter Writing, and Family History Methodology , Rumsey has mined not only her grandparents’ letters but also archival research on CPS camps and historical data from several Mennonite and Brethren archives to recapture the narrative of Ben’s service at two different camps and of Miriam’s struggle to support herself and her husband financially at the young age of seventeen. Ben and Miriam’s life during the war was extraordinarily ordinary, spanning six years of unrecognized and humble work for their country. Ben was not compensated for his work in the camps, and Miriam stayed home and worked as a day laborer, as a live-in maid, as a farmhand, and in the family butcher shop in order to earn enough money to support them both. Small histories like that of her grandparents, Rumsey argues, provide a unique perspective on significant political and historical moments. Blessed Are the Peacemakers also explores the rhetorical functions of letter writing as well as the methodology of family history writing. Ben and Miriam’s letters provide an apt backdrop to examine the genre, a relatively understudied mode of literacy. Rumsey situates the young couple’s correspondence within ars dictaminis , the art of letter writing, granting new insights into the genre and how personal accounts shape our understanding of historical events.

Sharon D. Kennedy-Nolle blends literary history with archival research to assess the significance of Reconstruction literature as a genre. Founded on witness and dream, the pathbreaking work of its writers made an enduring, if at times contradictory, contribution to American literature and history.

Killing a person is in general among the most seriously wrongful forms of action, yet most of us accept that it can be permissible to kill people on a large scale in war. Does morality become more permissive in a state of war? This book argues that conditions in war make no difference to what morality permits and that the justifications for killing people are the same in war as they are in other contexts, such as individual self-defence. This view is radically at odds with the traditional theory of the just war and has implications that challenge common sense views. It implies, for example, that it is wrong to fight in a war that is unjust because it lacks a just cause, that those who fight in a just war are not legitimate targets of attack, and that some civilians may, in principle if not in practice, be morally liable to suffer certain harms in war.

Between 1941 and 1945, the Second World War changed the physical and moral geographies of Bengal, an important base for the British government. In 1943, a man-made famine resulted in the death of about four million peasants. The Bengal Famine has been the subject of intense scrutiny in terms of establishing the moral culpability of the colonial government and its provincial collaborators. This article revisits the wartime period and the famine as a moment of historical and social transformation. By examining the Anti-Fascist Writers’ and Artists’ Association’s engagement with fascism, I argue that a new form of Bengali subjectivity emerged, one that recognized itself as part of a global collective, premised on its being forced to participate in the Second World War. I explore how this predicament led to reflection on the intellectual legacies of colonialism, including the promises of Enlightenment and the fraught universality of literature itself. By analysing selected works, I show how the Bengal Famine represented a moment of moral collapse that implicated both the imperial centres of power and the local colonial bourgeois class. A left-leaning intelligentsia had to struggle to find a language through which to express the inexpressible realities, local and global, of this genocide. What emerged was a tortured literature of complicity and conscience that decentred the peasantry. I argue that the historiographical problem of ‘peasant passivity’ is intrinsically tied to the literary and cultural production of the time, which made the peasant a symbol of social disintegration and moral transformation for the bourgeois middle class.

InConscientious Objectors in Israel, Erica Weiss examines the lives of Israelis who have refused to perform military service for reasons of conscience. Based on long-term fieldwork, this ethnography chronicles the personal experiences of two generations of Jewish conscientious objectors as they grapple with the pressure of justifying their actions to the Israeli state and society-often suffering severe social and legal consequences, including imprisonment.While most scholarly work has considered the causes of animosity and violence in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict,Conscientious Objectors in Israelexamines how and under what circumstances one is able to refuse to commit acts of violence in the midst of that conflict. By exploring the social life of conscientious dissent, Weiss exposes the tension within liberal citizenship between the protection of individual rights and obligations of self-sacrifice. While conscience is a strong cultural claim, military refusal directly challenges Israeli state sovereignty. Weiss explores conscience as a political entity that sits precariously outside the jurisdictional bounds of state power. Through the lens of Israeli conscientious objection, Weiss looks at the nature of contemporary citizenship, examining how the expectations of sacrifice shape the politics of both consent and dissent. In doing so, she exposes the sacrificial logic of the modern nation-state and demonstrates how personal crises of conscience can play out on the geopolitical stage.

This article provides a reappraisal of the first earl of Shaftesbury (1621–83) and challenges his reputation as an unprincipled politician. Conversely, it is argued that Shaftesbury's opposition to both Cromwell during the Protectorate and Charles II in the Restoration was guided by a resolute ‘conscience’. While there was certainly elasticity in his conduct, Shaftesbury was very much the product of a political education framed during the Civil War and Commonwealth eras. The article explicitly demonstrates through an exposition of his activity and thought in the 1650s and 1670s that four guiding values remained consistent in his career. Both periods were shaped by concerns over political and religious tyranny by an overbearing executive and a threat to ‘lives, liberty, and property’ from the ruler, the church, and the army. Shaftesbury's significance lies in the aristocratic constitutionalism he believed offered a restraint to encroachment by the executive and the people in government. Relying upon long-established traditions that positioned the nobility as an independent bridle against arbitrary government, Shaftesbury suggested a forward-thinking vision of elite rule supported by the people. In clarifying Shaftesbury's values, the article rejects interpretations of him as a republican, Neo-Harringtonian, or a believer in popular government (democracy).

This study explores the interplay between the right to life, right to development, bodily autonomy and freedom of conscience, and demonstrates how these factors collectively shape the concept of freedom of consciousness and simultaneously lead to increased access to altered states of consciousness, cognitive liberty, freedom of development, and the peak experiences that Abraham Maslow researched. Second chapter delves into the intersection of human rights and drug policy, specifically examining the implications of the War on Drugs on individual freedoms. It argues that the War on Drugs has led to a violation of fundamental human rights, including cognitive liberty, bodily autonomy, and the right to life. Through an analysis of international human rights law and case studies from around the world, the paper demonstrates how drug-related crimes have resulted in mass incarceration, violence, and human rights abuses. It also explores decriminalization of drug use, end of War on Drugs and criminalization of its’ crimes. The research results provide insights into the interrelation between these three concepts, shedding light on how they intersect and influence each other and in context of War on Drugs hostile environment. Findings also suggest that the War on Drugs has resulted in a significant violation of fundamental human rights.