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Abstract This paper examines the ethical considerations surrounding intellectual freedom and social responsibility in public libraries (i.e., municipal and public school libraries) in the post-truth era. While libraries serve a crucial role in fostering an informed democracy, recent events have put public libraries, and front-line librarians themselves, in the “hot seat.” This paper examines the implications of recent campaigns for book bans, considerations around public libraries purchasing harmful and anti-science information, as well as political efforts to restrict the types of information public librarians are able to share with the public. Public librarians are professionally trained to value the role libraries serve as an information institution in a democracy; however, we argue that the contemporary ethical dilemmas public librarians face inflicts moral injury and may actively harm the identity central to public librarians’ motivation to serve their communities. The paper concludes with a sobering discussion of how these ethical dilemmas in public libraries might serve as a cautionary tale for bureaucrats working on the front-lines of public service in the post-truth era. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines whether American drone-based targeted killing program represents a fundamentally new challenge to the traditional legal and ethical standards of armed conflict. It argues that the novelty of drones flows less from the technology itself than from the Obama administration's articulation of a presumptive right of anticipatory self-defense, which allows it to strike anywhere in the world where al Qaeda and its allies are present. It highlights five new legal and ethical dimensions to the Obama administration's drones policy, all of which may lower the traditional barriers to the use of force if other actors begin to follow contemporary American practice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]