19 thoughts on “Can anyone explain this?”

  1. Maybe this absurdly inappropriate cover expresses the irony in the very act of scholars/experts analyzing the concept of MORALITY by people who claim mastery of this most elusive of human universal values…………..ESPECIALLY in today’s world which obviously operates on cynicism toward morality as well as on pure greed……….!?!?!?

  3. I’d love to know how it got like this. Was it the publisher, who just hired some dumb tech startup that randomly paired women in underwear and boom titles using a computer program? That’s my guess, anyway.

  4. This is the result of a particularly strange business model that has become pervasive in the past decade.

    Basically, a computer program is set up that:

    (a) Harvests public domain texts, which could be anything from Wikipedia articles to (in this case) out of copyright old books, probably taken off Project Gutenberg.

    (b) Generates a cover for them (Similar to TSM’s suggestion above, but with absolutely no human involvement).

    (c) Submits them to iTunes or Amazon or whatever. (If it’s submitted as a printed work rather than an e-book and someone actually orders a copy, it’s printed on demand.)

    It’s all done automatically by a computer program, that produces thousands upon thousands of these books.

  5. to Johan Palme: You’re probably right…..this is how it is now…….Yikes!!! it’s frightening to watch our world being dominated by robots!!!

  6. Although I think Johan Palme is right, but maybe there is even more: The original cover was refused because it violated Apple’s decency guidelines. So the sexist algorithm replaced the unclean word “kant” by a stock image.

  7. I looked up the publisher on iTunes, and it appeared that their other items for sale all had much more appropriate covers, and they appeared to not be chosen at random (e.g., recipes/food and chef)

  10. There’s a review by WD in Philosophy and Literature (82) which gives Notre Dame as his affiliation.

    Is he one of those for whom a religious life was too much?

  11. It might be a good idea to warn people not to look at Anne’s link posted above if they are using their work computers. Some US Unis would frown on that pic on a work hardrive.

  12. Yes, definitely NSFW. The rest of the material on that site is absolutely worse. It is literally full of pornographic images.

  14. mm & philodaria: many thanks. I’m adding above to the warning. I’m also wondering whether we learn from this that one has no control over associations with one’s name that someone can create with links.

  18. The author has been dead for 210 years and therefore is in little position to object to the cover. The choice of cover illustration might well be related to the fact that in contemporary English usage, “morals” is closely associated with sexual morality in particular (“ethics,” however, is not), which to a philosophically uninitiated book-cover designer might, sadly, have been the only salient aspect of the book’s title. Still, pretty appalling. (And whoa, WTF?!!! re. that Willis Domingo website link–taking Derridean tactics too far, methinks!)

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