The New Ethics: A Guided Tour of the Twenty-First Century Moral Landscape

The rules of the game have changed. In our current moral climate, dishonesty seems to have become commonplace in our personal lives, in sports, business, and politics. Innovations in biotechnology that extend life and engineer it, along with surgical options that allow us to change nearly everything, including our gender, pose ethical issues unique to our time. And perhaps the most precious gift of all-our sense of community-lies neglected and abandoned, leaving many feeling much the same way. In this in-depth, thoughtful look at the state of the nation's moral health, prominent ethics professor Anita Allen examines the new world around us and the way we make choices in it. Informed by her experiences as a mother, a teacher, and an African-American woman in a mixed-race marriage, Allen looks at why our weakness so often wins out over what we know we ought to do. She reveals unexpected sources of moral guidance and explains why responsible choice is more crucial now than perhaps at any other time in history. Timely, provocative, and subtly persuasive, The New Ethics empowers Americans-women and men, Democrats and Republicans, multi-culturalists and traditionalists alike-to actively re-engage personal ethics, with eyes wide open, and ears attuned to that 'little voice' we all have inside, when we aren't busy drowning it out.