Hard feelings

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Alan Page Fiske and Tage Shakti Rai

"What motivates violence? How can good and compassionate people hurt and kill others, or themselves? Why are people much more likely to kill or assault people they know well, rather than strangers? This provocative and radical book shows that people mostly commit violence because they genuinely feel that it is the morally right thing to do. In perpetrators' minds, violence may be the morally necessary and proper way to regulate social relationships according to cultural precepts, precedents and prototypes. These moral motivations apply equally to the violence of the heroes of the Iliad, to parents smacking their child, and many modern murders and everyday acts of violence. Virtuous Violence presents a wide-ranging exploration of violence across different cultures and historical eras, demonstrating how people feel obligated to violently create, sustain, end, and honor social relationships in order to make them right, according to morally motivated cultural ideals"--

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Herbert J. Schlesinger

"Civil society rests on the expectation that (most) people will do what they say they will do, i.e., essentially live up to their explicit or implicit promises. It is amazing then, that so little scientific attention has been given to the act of promising. A great deal of research has been done on the moral development of children, but none of it deals with the ability to make and keep a promise. Developmentally, what makes it possible, cognitively and emotionally for a child to make and then keep a promise? And what compels keeping a promise made with "good" intentions when there is no longer any realistic reason for doing so? How do we know when a promise is serious, one to be taken at face value, and how do we come understand that another is only a polite gesture?" "In Promises, Oaths, and Vows: On the Psychology of Promising, Herbert Schlesinger addresses these questions. He draws on a variety of sources: the literature of moral development in children, the psychotherapy of a patient who regularly broke promises that were unnecessary in the first place, others who were regarded as "promising youngsters" but who did not fulfill their "promise", and still others who feared that if they made a promise, a commitment, or a threat, the utterance would take on a life of its own once made and could never be taken back. He illustrates the breadth of these issues by examining the use of promises, oaths, and vows as organizing themes in classical literature, such as Greek drama and the plays of Shakespeare, as well as the motivating and reifying power of the promise in Western religious traditions."--BOOK JACKET.

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Iain P.D. Morrisson

"Kant and the Role of Pleasure in Moral Action is part of a new wave of interest in Kant's anthropological (that is, psychological) works. Whereas previous commentators have attempted to understand Kant's feeling of respect by studying the relevant textual evidence in isolation, Morrisson illuminates this evidence by determining what Kant's more general theory of action commits him to regarding moral action. After looking at how Kant's treatment of desire and feeling can be reconciled with his famous account of free maxim-based action, Morrisson argues that respect moves us to moral action in a way that is structurally parallel to the way in which nonmoral pleasure motivates nonmoral action."--Jacket.

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Sibylle Berg

Abschiedsbriefe von Frauen, berühmten und weniger berühmten, herausgegeben von einer der bekanntesten Autorinnen Deutschlands - Eine freche, anregende und auch tröstliche Auseinandersetzung mit dem ewigen Thema Liebe