Morality and Public Policy

✍ Scribed by Clem Henricson

• Publisher: Policy Press
• Year: 2016
• Tongue: English
• Leaves: 153
• Category: Library

✦ Synopsis

With an increasingly bitter secular religious divide, there is a messy, defective relationship between the state and morality in the UK. In response, Morality and Public Policy puts forward proposals to enhance the capacity of public policy to respond more effectively to morality and associated shifts in social mores in different cultural settings. Spanning religion, moral philosophy and scientific understanding of the human condition, this unique book draws together and adds to the latest thinking on morality, its causes, mutations, tensions and common features. It challenges misplaced concepts of ‘moral progress’ and the supremacy of empathy, and puts forward the management of the full span of human impulses - some complementary, some conflicting - as the function of morality with major implications for the interface between morality and public policy.

✦ Table of Contents

MORALITY AND PUBLIC POLICY
Contents
Acknowledgements
Preface
1. Introduction: why we need a better connection between morality and public policy
Background
Aim
Content
2. Moral perspectives to be addressed in an inclusive public policy
Revelatory morality
Systems of moral philosophy with a genesis in rational argument
Commonality
Relativism
A scientific perspective
Overview
3. Synergies and tensions: morality as an accommodation of human impulses in different cultural contexts
Commonality and empathy
Morality holds the reins for multiple emotions
Revelatory systems of morality versus secular moral philosophy
Overview
4. The challenges and benefits of a new role for public policy
Challenges
Benefits
Overview
5. Managing morality: a public policy analytical tool
Questions to be addressed
Duty and aspiration
Interpersonal/existential versus socioeconomic relations
Triggers
Powers
Human rights
Stakeholders
Overview
6. Conclusion
Revelation and rationalism
Commonality
Relativism
Scientific advances
Challenges and benefits
Implementation
Gnawing questions
References
Index