Showing results by publisher "Brilliance Audio" in Ethics & Morality

A pathbreaking neuroscientist reveals how our social instincts turn Me into Us, but turn Us against Them - and what we can do about it. The great dilemma of our shrinking world is simple: never before have those we disagree with been so present in our lives. The more globalization dissolves national borders, the more clearly we see that human beings are deeply divided on moral lines - about everything from tax codes to sexual practices to energy consumption - and that, when we really disagree, our emotions turn positively tribal.

To the modern mind, the idea of honor is outdated, sexist, and barbaric. It evokes Hamilton and Burr and pistols at dawn, not visions of a well-organized society. But for philosopher Tamler Sommers, a sense of honor is essential to living moral lives. In Why Honor Matters, Sommers argues that our collective rejection of honor has come at great cost. Reliant only on Enlightenment liberalism, the United States has become the home of the cowardly, the shameless, the selfish, and the alienated. Properly channeled, honor encourages virtues like courage, integrity, and solidarity.

Marcus Aurelius, one of the great rulers of the Roman Empire, sets forth a series of self-reflective essays intended as a guide for his own self-improvement. Written during the turning points of his life and divided into twelve books, Meditations ponders life’s greatest questions in the author’s search for a meaningful existence. Remarkably, they are no different from the questions we ask ourselves today - from finding happiness to understanding our place in the cosmos. Centuries after Aurelius’s death, Meditations remains a profound source of inspiration.

When you possess a confident outlook, you perform at your highest level. When you believe in yourself, the people you rely on, and something ultimately greater than yourself, you will be able to do what you once thought was impossible. Confidence is a function of lifestyle, driven by a guiding set of principles. Listen to this audiobook and discover what Tim learned from his grandmother Billye - concepts handed down from the masters of motivation.

How did humans, a species of self-centered apes, come to care about others? Since Darwin, scientists have tried to answer this question using evolutionary theory. In The Kindness of Strangers, psychologist Michael E. McCullough shows why they have failed and offers a new explanation instead. From the moment nomadic humans first settled down until the aftermath of the Second World War, our species has confronted repeated crises that we could only survive by changing our behavior. 

When Andrew Shanley realized that his sons, aged 10 and 13, were lacking the integrity and honesty he expected of them, he was shocked. He had believed they shared his values; now he struggled to find a way to teach them ethics before it was too late. Being a golfer with an enduring love of the game, Shanley decided that by teaching his sons golf, he could effectively instruct them in what really matters - how to be men.

On March 13, 1964, Kitty Genovese was brutally beaten and murdered in the street near her apartment, in full view of more than three dozen friends and neighbors - and no one did a thing to stop it. More than thirty-five years after its first publication, Thirty-Eight Witnesses, the true account of what transpired that night in Queens, New York, continues to disturb us. We would like to think that we would step in and do what we could to stop the carnage.

First published in the early days of the Iraq War, Why Are We at War? is an explosive argument about the American quest for empire that still carries weight today. Scrutinizing the Bush administration's words and actions, Mailer unleashes his trademark moral rigor: "Because democracy is noble, it is always endangered.... To assume blithely that we can export democracy into any country we choose can serve paradoxically to encourage more fascism at home and abroad."

A caustic criticism of nearly every philosophic predecessor and a challenge of traditionally held views on right and wrong, Friedrich Nietzsche’s Beyond Good and Evil paved the way for modern philosophical thought. Through nearly three hundred transformative aphorisms, Nietzsche presents a worldview in which neither truth nor morality are absolutes, and where good and evil are not opposites but counterparts that stem from the same desires.