Product Description: To those who invoke them, rights are powerful instruments for settling arguments in favour of the right-holders. But the nature, provenance and justification of rights are uncertain and disputed and there are doubts about whether rights should play a distinctive and fundamental role in moral and political discourse...read more

Product Description: The Signature Series is targeted at the intelligent layman reader and aims to enhance and enrich the readers appreciation of major life events and subjects. Featuring easy-to-read small-format books, the series comprises contributions from leading Asian scholars in diverse fields in the humanities and social sciences such as political science, sociology, economics, geography and the environment, social work, psychology, philosophy and religion...read more

Product Description: John Stuart Mill's essay On Liberty, published in 1859, has had a powerful impact on philosophical and political debates ever since its first appearance. This volume of essays covers the whole range of problems raised in and by the essay, including the concept of liberty, the toleration of diversity, freedom of expression, the value of allowing 'experiments in living', the basis of individual liberty, multiculturalism and the claims of minority cultural groups...read more

Product Description: If ethics encompasses not just a concern for self and family but also for a wider circle of others, what resources do Chinese and Western ethics offer to motivate and guide this expansion of concern? This question is the theme uniting all these essays by leading Chinese and Western philosophers...read more

Product Description: This volume covers many of the most important philosophers and movements of the nineteenth century, including utilitarianism, positivism and pragmatism. (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

Product Description: Considering philosophical theories of punishment in light of both abstract arguments and factual evidence about the effects of punishing offenders, this book links the moral justification of punishment by the state to more general issues concerning the nature of moral disagreements and our obligations to obey the law...read more

This detailed and sympathetic, but not uncritical, study of On Liberty' argues for the general consistency and coherence of Mill's defence of individual liberty, but maintains that there are significant non-utilitarian elements in his arguments.