Author: Joseph Mendola File Type: pdf In Goodness and Justice, Joseph Mendola develops a unified moral theory that defends the hedonism of classical utilitarianism while evading utilitarianisms familiar difficulties by two modifications. His theory incorporates a new form of consequentialism. When, as is common, someone is engaged in conflicting group acts, it requires that one perform the role in that group that is most beneficent. The theory holds that overall value is distribution-sensitive, ceding maximum weight to the well-being of the worst-off sections of sentient lives. It is properly congruent with commonsense intuition and required by the true metaphysics of value, by the unconstituted natural good found in our world.

Author: Nigel Baker File Type: pdf The cathedral city of Hereford is one of the best-kept historical secrets of the Welsh Marches. Although its Anglo-Saxon development is well known from a series of classic excavations in the 1960s and 70s, what is less widely known is that the city boasts an astonishingly well-preserved medieval plan and contains some of the earliest houses still in everyday use anywhere in England. Three leading authorities on the buildings of the English Midlands have joined forces combining detailed archaeological surveys, primary historical research, and topographical analysis to examine 24 of the most important buildings, from the great hall of the Bishops Palace of c.1190, to the first surviving brick town-house of c.1690. Fully illustrated with photographs, historic maps, and explanatory diagrams, the case-studies include canonical and mercantile hall-houses of the Middle Ages, mansions, commercial premises, and simple suburban dwellings of the early modern period. Owners and builders are identified from documentary sources wherever possible, from the Bishop of Hereford and the medieval cathedral canons, through civic office-holding merchant dynasties, to minor tradesmen otherwise known only for their brushes with the law.**About the AuthorNigel Baker is a freelance archaeologist specialising in historic towns and has previously published books on Worcester and Gloucester, and Shrewsbury. He worked for Herefordshire Council for eight years and is an Honorary Research Fellow of the School of Geography and Earth Sciences, University of Birmingham. Pat Hughes has 40 years experience in documentary research, studying the background to historic houses, townscapes, and landscapes across the Midlands and the west of England she is particularly interested in the insights provided by documents in interpreting standing buildings and archaeological sites. Richard K Morriss is a freelance archaeologist and author specializing in buildings, transport, and industry, and lives in south-west Shropshire. For eight years he was Assistant Director of the City of Hereford Archaeological Unit he is presently the archaeological consultant to four cathedrals, including Hereford.

Author: Andrew Meier File Type: mobi Andrews Meier riveting portrait of Chechnya, a land ravaged by indescribable carnage, enables us to understand the origins of this brutal conflict like no other recent work. The barbaric, terrorist siege in the summer of 2004 that resulted in the deaths of hundreds of innocent children in Beslan did not begin either there or in the take-over of a Moscow theatre in 2002. As Andrew Meier explains in this utterly compelling account, the most recent Chechen war actually broke out on New Years Eve in 1994 when Boris Yeltsin sent hundreds of tanks to the center of the city of Grozny in an effort to quell popular demands for independence from Russia. Six years later, Meier, braving great personal danger, traveled to the scene of one of the largest civilian massacres carried out by Russian troops, reporting on the carnage in which over 60 Chechen civiliansincluding a pregnant woman and many elderlywere brutally slaughtered in one of the wars most horrific mop-up operations. Days after a Chechen woman became the conflicts first female suicide bomber, Meier visited this war-torn province, encountering, among others, kidnappers, Wahhabi Islamists aligned with the Taliban, and a stream of Russian mothers arriving at the morgue to identify their fallen soldier sons. Chechnya is Meiers stunning report from a region where the death toll has already exceeded 100,000 people, and a book that attempts to comprehend what compels men to shoot children in the back. **From Publishers Weekly Meier was Times Moscow correspondent from 1996 to 2001, during which time Grozny, the capital of Chechnya, was reduced to rubble. This compact summary of the wars fought there (one under Yeltsin, one under Putin) inevitably makes grim reading. It is packed with firsthand reportage that draws one in immediately, but Meier also provides a running history lesson various Caucasian nationalities converted to Islam in the 17th century were brutally conquered by the Russians in the 19th deported under Stalin and returned to their homelands under Khrushchev and suppressed when attempting autonomy. Even with Meiers careful tracing, the full motivations for both sides of the recent wars are still not fully comprehensible, although there is some finger-pointing at Wahhabi Islam, and the links between the Chechens and various Islamic terrorist groups are disquieting. The Russian military, however, is shown as the epitome of savagery and ineptness, with deliberate massacres of civilians and destruction of Grozny. Meier has procured more interviews with victims than with the Russian brass or rank and file, but the final sense is of a situation more the Russians making than anyone elses. No matter where the pieces eventually fall, as a work of summary historical analysis mixed with quick-hit war reportage, the book fills an important gap. Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. Review Andrew Meier is a truly penetrating eyewitness. -- Robert Conquest, author of The Great Terror** Describes not only the politics and the morality of the war, but what it feels like to be there. -- Anne Applebaum, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Gulag** If President Bush were to read Meier on Chechnya, he would gain a priceless education about Putins Russia. -- Zbigniew Brzezinski Meiers passion is for the victims...and he works hard to get their stories, sometimes at great risk to himself. -- Robert Legvold, Foreign Affairs** The best work of Russian reportage since the fall of communism. -- Simon Sebag-Montefiore, author of Stalin The Court of the Red Tsar**

Author: Perry Anderson File Type: pdf