"Very Practical Ethics"

New from Oxford University Press: Very Practical Ethics: Engaging Everyday Moral Questions by David Benatar.

About the book, from the publisher:

In Very Practical Ethics David Benatar discusses some of the moral problems that ordinary people face in their everyday lives. These are not moral problems that arise only in extraordinary circumstances, nor those which are confronted only by select people in their professional or public roles; rather, they are problems that most people face on a daily basis. They are “very practical” issues, both because of their ubiquity, and because individuals are usually able to act on their decisions.

Among these very practical questions: When is sex morally permissible? What duties does an individual have regarding the environment? When may we engage in practices such as smoking that might cause discomfort or increase the risk of harm to others? How extensive are our duties to assist the world's poor and others in dire need of help? Is it morally permissible to consume animals and their products? When is language prejudicial? Is it wrong to swear? How should we address and refer to others? When, if ever, is controversial humour morally permissible? Is it always wrong to bullshit, or to fail to call out the bullshit of others? When should we forgive--or not forgive?

Written accessibly and covering topics not often discussed by moral philosophers, Very Practical Ethics will be of interest to students and other readers who care about how we might resolve the kinds of ethical issues we all face every day.

The Page 99 Test: The Human Predicament.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Catholics in America"

New from Oxford University Press: Catholics in America: A Social Portrait by Lisa A. Keister.

About the book, from the publisher:

More than 20 percent of Americans are Catholic, and overall membership in the Catholic Church has remained relatively steady even as increasing numbers of people claim no religious affiliation. The rising prominence of Catholics in important leadership positions and critical demographic changes to the US population that have been mirrored in the Church have brought the Catholic Church and its members into public conversations, bringing renewed attention to the country's single largest religious organization. Yet misperceptions about who Catholics are today, their religious beliefs and practices, and their attitudes regarding important political and social issues are pervasive.

Catholics in America provides a contemporary social portrait of this large, increasingly influential group that clarifies who Catholics are and what they really believe. Lisa Keister, a sociologist with decades of experience studying Americans' social and economic behaviors and attitudes, draws on extensive empirical evidence to uncover the real story of today's Catholics. She offers a fresh, new glimpse into the reality of the family behaviors, work and economic status, and beliefs of Catholics. She pays particular attention to differences between those who have left, joined, and stayed with the Church, and she documents important--sometimes dramatic--differences among Catholics that may define the Church in coming decades.

The presence of Catholics in the country's highest positions and their voice in critical national conversations about issues such as abortion testify to the significance of their beliefs and attitudes. Catholics in America will be an important guide for anyone wanting to understand the personal and religious foundations of today's Catholics.

The Page 99 Test: Faith and Money.

--Marshal Zeringue

"The Ecosystem of Exile Politics"

New from Cornell University Press: The Ecosystem of Exile Politics: Why Proximity and Precarity Matter for Bhutan's Homeland Activists by Susan Banki.

About the book, from the publisher:

The Ecosystem of Exile Politics relays the events in Bhutan that led to the exodus of one-sixth of the population, and then recounts the activism by Bhutan's refugee diaspora that followed in response. Susan Banki asserts that activism functions like a physical ecosystem, in which hubs of activism in different locations interact to pressure the home country.

For Bhutan's refugee mobilizers, physical proximity offers advantages in Nepal and India, where organizing protests, lobbying, and collecting information about government abuse in Bhutan is aided by being close to the homeland. But in an ecosystem of exile politics, proximity is both a boon and a bane. Sites proximate to Bhutan can be spaces of risk and disempowerment, and refugee activists rarely secure legal, political, and social protection. While distant diasporas in the Global North may not be in precarious situations, they cannot tap into the advantages of proximity. In examining these phenomena, The Ecosystem of Exile Politics adds to theoretical understandings of exile politics and to empirical research on Bhutan and its refugee population.

--Marshal Zeringue

"The Life and Death of Ryan White"

New from the University of North Carolina Press: The Life and Death of Ryan White: AIDS and Inequality in America by Paul M. Renfro.

About the book, from the publisher:

In the 1980s, as HIV/AIDS ravaged queer communities and communities of color in the United States and beyond, a straight white teenager named Ryan White emerged as the face of the epidemic. Diagnosed with hemophilia at birth, Ryan contracted HIV through contaminated blood products. In 1985, he became a household name after he was barred from attending his Indiana middle school. As Ryan appeared on nightly news broadcasts and graced the covers of popular magazines, he was embraced by music icons and well-known athletes, achieving a curious kind of stardom. Analyzing his struggle and celebrity, Paul M. Renfro's powerful biography grapples with the contested meanings of Ryan's life, death, and afterlives.

As Renfro argues, Ryan's fight to attend school forced the American public to reckon with prevailing misconceptions about the AIDS epidemic. Yet his story also reinforced the hierarchies at the heart of the AIDS crisis. Because the "innocent" Ryan had contracted HIV "through no fault of his own," as many put it, his story was sometimes used to blame presumably "guilty" populations for spreading the virus. Reexamining Ryan's story through this lens, Renfro reveals how the consequences of this stigma continue to pervade policy and cultural understandings of HIV/AIDS today.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Bombing to Provoke"

New from Oxford University Press: Bombing to Provoke: Rockets, Missiles, and Drones as Instruments of Fear and Coercion by Jaganath Sankaran.

About the book, from the publisher:

The rapid proliferation and growing sophistication of aerospace weapons--rockets, missiles, and drones--have altered the landscape of warfare. The influence of these weapons on the battlefield is felt profoundly, yet the mechanism of coercion by which these weapons alter the will of the adversary is poorly understood.

In Bombing to Provoke, Jaganath Sankaran argues that it is not what these aerospace weapons physically do but what they prompt the target state to do in response that matters for understanding their coercive effect. By threatening a chemical, biological, or nuclear strike or demonstrating the ability to bombard the target's economic and political core repeatedly, aerospace weapons coerce by weaponizing fear and triggering a sense of defenselessness. Sankaran provides a series of historical and current case studies to show how these fears amplify the political vulnerabilities of the target state, coercing it to divert substantial military resources away from other vital missions to redress the threat. This scenario is playing out in real time right now in both the Russo-Ukraine and Israel-Gaza theaters, both of which are seeing barrages of cross-border missile and rocket fire aimed at weakening the target's resolve.

For anyone seeking to understand why states at war in the age of aerospace weapon warfare operate and react in the ways that they do, this book's methodical dissection of the strategic rationale behind these weapons makes it necessary reading.

--Marshal Zeringue

"The Sexual Economy of Capitalism"

New from Stanford University Press: The Sexual Economy of Capitalism by Noam Yuran.

About the book, from the publisher:

Economics has long modeled its theories on bakers and butchers rather than husbands, wives, lovers, and prostitutes. This book argues that exchanges involving sex and intimacy, far from being external or exceptional in relation to the workings of the economy, come closest to the reality of capitalist money. Undertaking an inquiry into the sexual economy of capitalism, Noam Yuran analyzes the erotic and gendered meanings that suffuse basic economic concepts, from money to the commodity. It is not entirely true, Yuran shows, that in capitalism everything has its price. In fact, the category of things money cannot buy, including love, forms a central axis around which capitalist economic life is organized. It is inscribed on goods and economic motivations and conduct, and distinguishes capitalism from precapitalist economies in which marriage was an exchange and wives were owned. In conversation with psychoanalysis, feminist theory, and the heterodox tradition of economic thought, this book maps the erotic dimension of capitalism onto concrete economic questions around money, goods, private property, and capital. Yuran offers readers a powerful understanding of capitalism in its unique articulation of love, sex, and money.

Noam Yuran is Senior Lecturer in the Graduate Program in Science, Technology and Society at Bar-Ilan University. He is the author of What Money Wants: An Economy of Desire (2014).

--Marshal Zeringue

"Birth in Times of Despair"

New from NYU Press: Birth in Times of Despair: Reproductive Violence on the US-Mexico Border by Carina Heckert.

About the book, from the publisher:

Explores forms of maternal harm stemming from US policies on the US-Mexico border

In El Paso, Texas, the racist undertones of anti-immigrant sentiment have contributed to various forms of violence in the region, including the 2019 mass shooting that was the deadliest attack on Latinos in US history. As the community continued to mourn this tragedy, the COVID-19 pandemic unleashed yet another set of economic, social, and public health catastrophes that were disproportionately felt within the border region.

In Birth in Times of Despair, Carina Heckert traces women’s emotional experiences of pregnancy, birth, and the postpartum period in the midst of a series of longstanding and ongoing crises in the US-Mexico border region. Drawing from interviews, surveys, and medical records of women who gave birth during an intense period of sociopolitical crisis, she examines how limited access to health care, inhumane immigration policies, and exposure to an array of harmful social environmental circumstances serve as sources of intense harm for pregnant and recently pregnant women. In so doing, Heckert reveals how these experiences serve as a profound critique of policies that continue to fail to protect women and their families. She concludes with suggestions for practical, humane, and urgent policy changes to alleviate the needless suffering of this vulnerable group.

With its comprehensive portrait of the abysmal physical and mental health outcomes pregnant women face within the border region, Birth in Times of Despair expands our understanding of how obstetric violence is enhanced by the structural violence of the state, and unveils the urgency to ameliorate the harm caused by current immigration policies.

--Marshal Zeringue

"One National Family"

New from Johns Hopkins University Press: One National Family: Texas, Mexico, and the Making of the Modern United States, 1820–1867 by Sarah K. M. Rodríguez.

About the book, from the publisher:

A fascinating new history of Texas that emphasizes the importance of Mexico's political culture in attracting US settlers and Texas's unique role in the nation-building efforts of both Mexico and the United States.

Why did tens of thousands of Anglo settlers renounce their US citizenship and declare their loyalty to another country by migrating to the Mexican Republic of Texas between 1821 and 1836? In One National Family, Sarah K. M. Rodríguez challenges traditional assumptions about early North American history to draw new conclusions about the comparative power, viability, and nation-building of Mexico and the United States. Drawing from archival research in both countries, Rodríguez highlights a profound political irony at the core of US expansion―that it was spurred by US weakness and Mexican viability.

Rodríguez argues that Mexican federalism, long blamed for the country's disintegration and instability, was precisely what attracted thousands of US immigrants to Mexican Texas. Mexico's comparatively weak fiscal structure, ample land, and commitment to dual sovereignty made it an appealing alternative to the thousands of US agrarians who were disillusioned with the United States' political and economic centralization.

Yet if Mexico's political system was its strength in the 1820s, it would be the source of conflict and secession by the 1830s. Both Mexico and the United States confronted the limitations of federalism in their respective journeys from loosely confederated republics to consolidated, modern nation-states. But precisely because of its traumatic territorial losses in the mid-nineteenth century, Mexico embraced the characteristics of modern liberal democracy―majoritarianism, territorial sovereignty, and racial equality―far sooner than the United States did.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Beyond the Law's Reach?"

New from Oxford University Press: Beyond the Law's Reach?: Powerful Criminals, Foreign Entanglement, and Justice in the Shadow of Violence by Shmuel Nili.

About the book, from the publisher:

Beyond the Law's Reach? argues that fundamental assumptions in contemporary political philosophy need to be rethought in the face of pervasive political violence. At an applied level, Nili develops this claim by delving into a series of specific controversies, all revolving around affluent democracies' policy responses to the threat of pervasive violence abroad. Examples include the ethics of giving refuge to beleaguered autocrats to avert civil war in their country, the ethics of prosecuting foreign officials who have colluded with drug cartels, and the admission of oligarchs who acquired their riches by distorting their country's rule of law.

At a more theoretical level, the book shows that the moral principles needed to adjudicate these particular controversies can illuminate broader issues in normative political theory. These range from the philosophy of criminal punishment, through the relationship between the law's letter and its spirit, to the general plausibility of certain moral theories (and meta-theories) as public policy guides. Ranging from influential theories of justice to some of the hardest moral dilemmas facing communities and leaders struggling with the shadow of violence, this book explores the difficult circumstances in which we must aside not just the assumption of a stable liberal democracy, but even the dream of a clear path towards such democracy.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Border of Water and Ice"

New from Cornell University Press: Border of Water and Ice: The Yalu River and Japan's Empire in Korea and Manchuria by Joseph A. Seeley.

About the book, from the publisher:

Border of Water and Ice explores the significance of the Yalu River as a strategic border between Korea and Manchuria (Northeast China) during a period of Japanese imperial expansion into the region. The Yalu's seasonal patterns of freezing, thawing, and flooding shaped colonial efforts to control who and what could cross the border. Joseph A. Seeley shows how the unpredictable movements of water, ice, timber-cutters, anti-Japanese guerrillas, smugglers, and other borderland actors also spilled outside the bounds set by Japanese colonizers, even as imperial border-making reinforced Japan's wider political and economic power.

Drawing on archival sources in Japanese, Korean, Chinese, and English, Seeley tells the story of the river and the imperial border haphazardly imposed on its surface from 1905 to 1945 to show how rivers and other nonhuman actors play an active role in border creation and maintenance. Emphasizing the tenuous, environmentally contingent nature of imperial border governance, Border of Water and Ice argues for the importance of understanding history across the different seasons.

--Marshal Zeringue