This essay analyzes the coherency and reasonableness of legal restrictions against same-sex marriage. The population of focus is transgender individuals and their partners. Focusing on trans-marriage makes clear that the restriction of marriage to one man and one woman is misguided in that the law rests on the assumption that the categories of sex and gender comprise two disjoint, exhaustive, and unambiguous groupings. The primary argument here is not that the restrictions of same-sex marriage are harmful to certain transpersons who (...) participate in legal marriage, although they certainly are, but rather that this legal restriction fails to meet the minimum requirements of any reasonable law. This analysis compares the current marriage restriction and its reliance on the above mentioned false belief with judgments of the Race Classification Appeal Board of Apartheid era South Africa. I employ two actual cases and the legal philosophy of Lon L. Fuller in my argument. (shrink)

The politicization of trans identity—also affecting gender non-binary and gender non-conforming persons—is a form of backlash to the Obergefell ruling and increased LGBTQ equality. This book provides a conceptual analysis and application of the notions of backlash, scapegoating, dog whistling, and virtue signaling.

Shulamith Firestone's Dialectic of Sex: The Case for Feminist Revolution was, upon its original publication, both radicacmen would be freed from the burden of childbirth, in which the nuclear family, gender roles, typical constructions of marriage and parenting are all a thing of the past, still for many seems radical, even forty-five years after its debut in 1970. With Firestone's recent passing, it is a particularly suitable time to reconsider her work in light of the medical, technological, and social changes (...) of the past few decades. Specifically, I wish to argue that the kind of future society that Firestone envisioned, which would be possible only through the use of certain medical technologies, has begun to be actualized within many trans-affirming communities. The greater the recognition of trans identities, trans lives, and trans relationships, the more we will approach the realization of the post-revolutionary society that she describes. In this essay, I consider Firestone's ideas on the issues of biological sex, gender, relationships, and parenthood, after which I will identify how present trans-affirming practices serve to support these Firestonian ideals. (shrink)

This essay is concerned with the means by which individuals, especially in the context of group based harm, reconcile the gross inconsistency inherent in upholding moral standards within one's own group while at the same time rationalizing why such moral standards do not apply to certain others. The term moral taint is employed to describe the undesirable condition of one's character that can result from certain group affiliations or memberships. On this view, the vehicle by which one's character becomes tainted (...) is the intemalization of certain narratives that serve to truncate the moral community and are used in attempts to justify group-based harm. I argue that individuals in some such circumstances need to re-describe both the story of their group and their own personal narrative to begin to take responsibility for group based devaluing practices. (shrink)

This essay is concerned with the means by which individuals, especially in the context of group based harm, reconcile the gross inconsistency inherent in upholding moral standards within one's own group while at the same time rationalizing why such moral standards do not apply to certain others. The term moral taint is employed to describe the undesirable condition of one's character that can result from certain group affiliations or memberships. On this view, the vehicle by which one's character becomes tainted (...) is the intemalization of certain narratives that serve to truncate the moral community and are used in attempts to justify group-based harm. I argue that individuals in some such circumstances need to re-describe both the story of their group and their own personal narrative to begin to take responsibility for group based devaluing practices. (shrink)

The only anthology available on material constitution, this book collects important recent work on well known puzzles in metaphysics and philosophy of mind. The extensive, clearly written introduction helps to make the essays accessible to a wide audience.

The growing trend of required ethics instruction in the business school curriculum has created a need for relevant teaching materials. In response to this need the Journal of Business Ethics is introducing a new case section. This section provides a forum for publishing and accessing a range of materials that can be used in teaching business ethics. This article discusses how business ethics cases can facilitate the development of deductive, inductive and critical reasoning skills.

To date, the value of corporate social responsibility (CSR) activities has primarily been measured through the company’s reputation, with little attention given to exploring whether there are internal influences between CSR and other management practices. We argue that the efficacy of CSR extends beyond a company’s reputation for managing social and environmental concerns; in particular, it can influence other business practices such as risk management. Our results suggest that (a) overall, firms with better CSR performance are more likely to adopt (...) integrated risk management practices and (b) CSR activities that target both primary stakeholders and secondary stakeholders are equally important in facilitating the adoption of such risk management practices. Theoretically, we contribute to the CSR literature by providing a possible mechanism for risk reduction and insurance-like effects of CSR. Practically, we provide managerial implications demonstrating that the efficacy of CSR should not be viewed in isolation of other business practices. (shrink)

On the weekend of July 16–18, 2004, the city of Chicago opened its much touted and thoroughly over-budget Millennium Park along the Lake Michigan shore front. This site may merit the label “people's park” for its open access, but the presence of sponsorship brands, expensive concessions, and the ongoing efforts of fee-charging institutions to move in on the park leave the whole in precarious balance between a public space of recreation in “the city that works” and a playground of affluent (...) consumption. On a less visible site a mile to the west, on the de-industrializing periphery of the central district,…. (shrink)

Varied forms of mobility are rapidly transforming communities across the world. In Africa’s cities and urban peripheries, the results of human movements include ever more diverse sets of new arrivals living alongside longer-term residents as they seek protection, profit, and passage elsewhere. Some move on and others return home, while still others shift within in search of new opportunities or security. In the absence of muscular state institutions or dominant cultural norms, these areas have become estuarial zones in which varied (...) communities of convenience are taking shape. Unlike well-documented urban gateways or ghettos, these communities range from radical forms of exclusion to remarkable modes of accommodation that enable people to extract usufruct rights: to live in but not become fully part of the cities they occupy. Using examples from Maputo, Johannesburg, and Nairobi, this article explores the nature of these estuaries in ways that challenge the conceptual foundations typically informing debates over migrant rights, integration, and the boundaries of belonging. This means eroding clear distinctions between hosts and guests along with a call to reevaluate the relative importance of state institutions and policies. Most fundamentally, it questions new residents’ interests in localized political and social recognition and participation. The article concludes by suggesting the need to reconsider the forms and scale of community through which the newly urbanized claim rights and the nature of the rights they desire. (shrink)

Hume's political economy and his contributions to monetary theory are usually regarded as a minor part of his philosophic output. This paper argues that Hume's monetary ideas can, in fact, be read back into his moral and epistemological concerns so as to give the institution of money a larger significance for Humean social thought. In particular, the possibility of an abstract and entirely fiduciary money, like Hume's notion of sympathy, promises to transcend the entropic logic of representation that otherwise enervates (...) Hume's utilitarian sensationalism. At the same time, Hume's stress upon money as a social convention highlights the importance of _money illusion, and of commercial virtue more generally, as nonrational underpinnings of the capitalist ethos. (edited). (shrink)

An examination of the development of the theory of evolution from the Renaissance to the twentieth century.

Following Rawls, many political liberals hold reasonableness in high regard. Reasonable citizens can disagree, however, and some may find their arguments routinely ignored in elections and legislatures. Should we be troubled by such failures of institutional responsiveness as a matter of justice? The author argues that the expectation of such failures would lead parties in an original position to favor certain classes of institutions over others: A Theory of Justice and Political Liberalism together suggest a particular federal structure to a (...) republic of reasons. (shrink)

As Mormonism comes to the forefront of American culture, some people may be tempted to assume that the past philosophical victories of Christian theism can be equally applied to the version of theism of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints. In this paper I attempt to show that there are differences in the LDS worldview, and in the LDS conception of the Divine Nature that make the problem of evil, both in its logical and probabilistic form, a very (...) live threat to its brand of theism. This paper is a project of ramified natural theology that attempts to demonstrate that Christian theism is in a much better philosophical position than LDS theism with regards to the logical and probabilistic problem of evil. (shrink)

Tracing the unconscious forces at work in the male psyche, the author uses mythology and psychology to show how the development of a feminine "anima" is a vital component in men's emotional maturity.

Educators on all levels will benefit from this book that is dedicated to the importance of learning reasoning skills concurrently with subject matter. Habits of the Mind, written by a thirty-year veteran in the field of education, is ultimately concerned with the total strengthening of education in America through the teaching of logical and critical thinking.

Philosophical naturalism, according to which philosophy is continuous with the natural sciences, has dominated the Western academy for well over a century, but Michael Rea claims that it is without rational foundation. Rea argues compellingly to the surprising conclusion that naturalists are committed to rejecting realism about material objects, materialism, and perhaps realism about other minds.

In 1992, the Canadian Psychiatric Association launched Canada’s first national campaign against mental illness, Mental Illness Awareness Week. I stress that pharmaceutical sponsorship of the first five years of MIAW was integral to shaping the trajectory of the campaign and marks a shift in the way stigma is conceived and resisted in Canada: what was an interpersonal process based on social norms becomes refigured as “self-stigma,” or an individualized process in which lack of information, education, and self-assessment contribute to an (...) inability to consider oneself as at-risk for a disease, condition, or disorder. (shrink)

Alain Finkelkraut has interrogated contemporary Jewish identity in terms of how a Jew reckons with the heavy impact of the Holocaust and in fact with the entire history of the Jewish people. Finkelkraut takes issue with Sartre's 1947 essay, Anti-Semite and Jew, not for its content but the effect that it has had on him. "Let there be no misunderstanding: I am not attacking the book that Sartre wrote on the Jewish problem," asserts the author in a footnote (JI 17, (...) my translation). Instead, he shows how the philosopher aids in the creation of what Finkelkraut terms "the imaginary Jew." He compares this process of fossilization to Genet's treatment in Saint Genet. Finkelkraut's metaphoric language captures the pernicious effects that the public act of naming and thus essentializing can have on a person or group of people. (shrink)

Fifth-century Athens is praised as the cradle of democracy and sometimes treated as a potential model for modern political theory or practice. In this daring reassessment of classical Athenian democracy and its significance for the United States today, Loren J. Samons provides ample justification for our founding fathers' distrust of democracy, a form of government they scorned precisely because of their familiarity with classical Athens. How Americans have come to embrace "democracy" in its modern form—and what the positive and (...) negative effects have been—is an important story for all contemporary citizens. Confronting head-on many of the beliefs we hold dear but seldom question, Samons examines Athens's history in the fifth and fourth centuries B.C. in order to test the popular idea that majority rule leads to good government. Challenging many basic assumptions about the character and success of Athenian democracy, _What's Wrong with Democracy? _offers fascinating and accessible discussions of topics including the dangers of the popular vote, Athens's acquisitive foreign policy, the tendency of the state to overspend, the place of religion in Athenian society, and more. Sure to generate controversy, Samons's bold and iconoclastic book finds that democracy has begun to function like an unacknowledged religion in our culture, immune from criticism and dissent, and he asks that we remember the Athenian example and begin to question our uncritical worship of democratic values such as freedom, choice, and diversity. (shrink)

The global city is a contested site of economic innovation and cultural production, as well as profound inequalities of wealth and life chances. These cities, and large cities that aspire to ‘global’ status, are often the point of entry for new immigrants. Yet for political theorists (and indeed many scholars of global institutions), these critical sites of global influence and inequality have not been a significant focus of attention. This is curious. Theorists have wrestled with the nature and demands of (...) global justice, but have for the most part supposed that the debate is between statist and cosmopolitan formulations. Questions of redistribution, immigration, humanitarian obligations, coercion at borders, and territorial rights have correspondingly been cast as either the domain of sovereign territorial states, or of the nascent web of supranational institutions that might bind those states and peoples, morally and legally. Examining some of these issues and arguments through the lens of the global city casts them in a new and informative light, and buttresses an associative turn in thinking about global justice. (shrink)

The standard argument to the conclusion that artificial intelligence (AI) constitutes an existential risk for the human species uses two premises: (1) AI may reach superintelligent levels, at which point we humans lose control (the ‘singularity claim’); (2) Any level of intelligence can go along with any goal (the ‘orthogonality thesis’). We find that the singularity claim requires a notion of ‘general intelligence’, while the orthogonality thesis requires a notion of ‘instrumental intelligence’. If this interpretation is correct, they cannot be (...) joined as premises and the argument for the existential risk of AI turns out invalid. If the interpretation is incorrect and both premises use the same notion of intelligence, then at least one of the premises is false and the orthogonality thesis remains itself orthogonal to the argument to existential risk from AI. In either case, the standard argument for existential risk from AI is not sound.—Having said that, there remains a risk of instrumental AI to cause very significant damage if designed or used badly, though this is not due to superintelligence or a singularity. (shrink)

In antiquity the consensus gentium argument for God’s existence was believed to have merit (cf. Cicero, De Natura Deorum, Book II, sect.2,4), but has been considered blatantly fallacious during more recent times. In this article Bayes’ Theorem is applied to show that the argument is in fact a valid inductive argument. A two hypothesis and a four hypothesis version of the argument are analyzed. Perusal of available statistical evidence suggests that when better worldwide opinion polling data becomes available it will (...) turn out to be sound as well. (shrink)

This book presents the foundations of a liberal individualistic theory of rights, and explains what rights we have and do not have, why we have them, who is and who is not a holder of rights, and the place of rights within the overall structure of morality. The author argues for the moral importance of individual commitments to 'projects', and demonstrates the implications of this for a variety of problems and issues.

University of Virginia, USA, lel3f{at}virginia.edu ' + u + '@' + d + ' '//--> The strategy of this article is to consider republicanism in contrast with liberalism. We focus on three aspects of this contrast: republicanism’s emphasis on ‘social goods’ under various conceptualizations of that category; republicanism’s emphasis on political participation as an essential element of the ‘good life’; and republicanism’s distinctive understanding of freedom (following the lines developed by Pettit). In each case, we are skeptical that what republicanism (...) offers is superior to the liberal alternative and indicate the grounds for that skepticism. Key Words: republicanism • liberalism • social goods • political participation • republican freedom. (shrink)