Views on Humans
While Focusing on Current Prison Abuses

The unfolding scandal over the alleged abuse of prisoners in Iraq and Afghanistan has raised a number of questions about human nature, ethics, human rights and justice. In light of this Anthropology News invited a series of commentaries focusing on different professional and disciplinary perspectives and ideas about humanity.

Particularly we asked anthropologists, historians, psychologists, sociologists, lawyers, philosophers, army and NGO professionals to examine their core assumptions about what motivates human beings; what shapes and changes our behaviors; what our values and ultimate “goods” should be (for example, diversity, order, prosperity, virtue, loyalty, equality, security); how we should ideally organize and govern ourselves to achieve and share these “goods” and values; and how we might understand and learn from particularly complex examples of wrong-doing.

Anthropology News Commentaries / News Reports /
Additional Perspectives / Additional Resources