Ethics and Culture – serie

All humans laugh. However, there is little agreement about what is appropriate to laugh at. While laughter can unite people by showing how they share values and perspectives, it also has the power to separate and divide. Humor that "crosses the line" can make people feel excluded and humiliated. This collection of new essays addresses possible ways that moral and ethical lines can be drawn around humor and laughter. What would a Kantian approach to humor look like? Do games create a safe space for profanity and offense? Contributors to this volume work to establish and explain guidelines for thinking about the moral questions that arise when humor and laughter intersect with medicine, gender, race, and politics. Drawing from the work of stand-up comedians, television shows, and ethicists, this volume asserts that we are never just joking.

The present era of economic devastation, legacies of colonization and imperialism, climate change and habitat loss, calls for a new understanding of ethics. These essays on otherness, responsibility and hospitality raise urgent questions. Contributors range from the prominent--including Levinas, Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida and Giorgio Agamben--to recent theorists such as Judith Butler, Enrique Dussell and Rosi Braidotti. The essays emphasize the always vulnerable status of a radically different Other, even as they question what responsibility to that Other might mean.

After Natalie Maines of The Dixie Chicks expressed her opposition to the Iraq War and President Bush in a country music concert, she was told to "shut up and sing." When NFL player Colin Kaepernick protested police brutality by kneeling during the national anthem, he was applauded by some and demonized by others. Both had their careers irrevocably altered by speaking out for their beliefs. This book examines the ethical issues that arise when famous people speak out on issues often unrelated to the performances that brought those figures to public attention. It analyzes several celebrity speakers--singers Taylor Swift and the Chicks; satirist Jon Stewart; actor Tom Hanks; and athletes Serena Williams, Stephen Curry, Colin Kaepernick, and Naomi Osaka--and demonstrates that justifiable speaking requires celebrity speakers, journalists, and audiences to consider ethical issues regarding platform, intent, and harm. Celebrity speakers must exercise ethical care in a digital world where audiences equate celebrity status with authority and expertise about public issues. Finally, this book considers how people who are not famous can understand their ethical responsibilities for speaking out about public issues in their own spheres of influence.

We are living through a time when the extinction of humanity itself looms on our generational horizon. While technological approaches to climate mitigation are admirable, our current ecological crisis results ultimately from an inherited, unexamined concept of selfhood, one standing in reciprocal relation to our misconceived view of nature. Regardless of our concept of nature--conservation, preservation, exploitation, or aesthetic/spiritual appreciation--the received idea that our self exists inside our skull engenders an unexamined assumption that nature is "out there," with historically devastating results for us all.This book explores three new ways of thinking about the interrelation of ourselves and "nature": Merleau-Ponty's notion of embodiment, the connection between enactivism and affordances, and object-oriented ontology. These approaches to selfhood reorder our moral obligations: what are our responsibilities to ourselves, our children, and nature itself? An embodied ethic based on empathy, one compatible with object-oriented ontology that incorporates panpsychism, and one derived from the social imaginary can provide an ethic that transcends supposed cultural biases and offers a new way of confronting climate change. To meet contemporary environmental challenges, we need to change our minds about our minds.