Includes bibliographical references (pages 192-238) and index.

Moral stress, distress, and injury -- I. An ethnography of ethics : Ethics, geography, and mapping: the failure of the simple -- The tobacco problem -- The morals in the map: stress and distress -- II. Cultural realities: ethics, values, and morals : Mapping poverty: ethics and morals -- An educational example -- Mapping justice as transportation -- Ethics and transplantation -- III. Moral communities and their members : The ethics of scale, the scale of distress -- It's ... complex. In Ethics in Everyday Places, ethicist and geographer Tom Koch considers what happens when, as he puts it, "you do everything right but know you've done something wrong." The resulting moral stress and injury, he argues, are pervasive in modern Western society. Koch makes his argument "from the ground up," from the perspective of average persons, and through a revealing series of maps in which issues of ethics and morality are embedded. The book begins with a general grounding in both moral stress and mapping as a means of investigation. The author then examines the ethical dilemmas of mapmakers and others in the popular media and the sciences, including graphic artists, journalists, researchers, and social scientists. Koch expands from the particular to the general, from mapmaker and journalist to the readers of maps and news. He explores the moral stress and injury in educational funding, poverty, and income inequality ("Why aren't we angry that one in eight fellow citizens lives in federally certified poverty?"), transportation modeling (seen in the iconic map of the London transit system and the hidden realities of exclusion), and U.S. graft organ transplantation. This uniquely interdisciplinary work rewrites our understanding of the nature of moral stress, distress and injury, and ethics in modern life. Written accessibly and engagingly, it transforms how we think of ethics-personal and professional-amid the often conflicting moral injunctions across modern society. -- Provided by publisher.