"The work is on an important topic that has been oft debated but rarely systematically studied – the political, cultural, and moral effects of distant news coverage of suffering. [The book] is extremely well steeped in the relevant literature, including semiotics, discourse analysis, meda and social theory and makes a fresh methodological contribution by looking at the codes and formats of news about suffering. It has a fresh vision and answer to some of the stickiest moral and media problems of (...) our time … and deserves to find its place among important books about the moral aspects of media and society in our times." —John D. Peters, F. Wendell Miller Distinguished Professor, University of Ohio This book is about the relationship between the spectators in countries of the west, and the distant sufferer on the television screen; the sufferer in Somalia, Nigeria, Bangladesh, India, Indonesia, but also from New York and Washington DC. How do we relate to television images of the distant sufferer? The question touches on the ethical role of the media in public life today. They address the issue of whether the media can cultivate a disposition of care for and engagement with the far away other; whether television can create a global public with a sense of social responsibility towards the distant sufferer. (shrink)

Though there has been much debate about whether Abelard's ethics are dangerously subjective or surprisingly absolutist, one thing is unanimous: they are intentionalist. The goal of this article is to parse out what should be meant by this claim, distancing his ethical account from the popular Kantian appraisal. Though much of the secondary literature on Abelard likens him to Kant, I argue that this is mistaken. For Abelard, an agent's intentions are informed by their affections—whether carnal or spiritual. This becomes (...) clear when contextualizing Abelard's use of intentio with a view to his Commentary on Romans. Using the account of intention I suggest—one nuanced by Abelard's own theological commitments and biblical exegesis—it will be clear that Abelard's ethics is not a case for the moral neutrality of the passions nor an ethic of pure reason. (shrink)

The criticism that voluntary codes of conduct are ineffective can be met by giving greater centrality to human rights in such codes. Provided the human rights obligations of multinational corporations are interpreted as moral obligations specifically tailored to the situation of multinational corporations, this could serve to bring powerful moral force to bear on MNCs and could provide a legitimating basis for NGO monitoring and persuasion. Approached in this way the human rights obligations of MNCs can be taken to include (...) support for political as well as economic rights. This will go some way towards filling the regulatory gap created by the difficulty of controlling the activities of corporations operating globally. However, such a proposal will require a measure of ‘meta-regulation’ whereby the operations of MNCs are legally required to be sufficiently transparent to create the conditions for effective external moral scrutiny. (shrink)

Recent advances in machine learning methods have created opportunities to eliminate unfairness from algorithmic decision making. Multiple computational techniques (i.e., algorithmic fairness criteria) have arisen out of this work. Yet, urgent questions remain about the perceived fairness of these criteria and in which situations organizations should use them. In this paper, we seek to gain insight into these questions by exploring fairness perceptions of five algorithmic criteria. We focus on two key dimensions of fairness evaluations: distributive fairness and procedural fairness. (...) We shed light on variation in the potential for different algorithmic criteria to facilitate distributive fairness. Subsequently, we discuss procedural fairness and provide a framework for understanding how algorithmic criteria relate to essential aspects of this construct, which helps to identify when a specific criterion is suitable. From a practical standpoint, we encourage organizations to recognize that managing fairness in machine learning systems is complex, and that adopting a blind or one-size-fits-all mentality toward algorithmic criteria will surely damage people’s attitudes and trust in automated technology. Instead, firms should carefully consider the subtle yet significant differences between these technical solutions. (shrink)

Machine learning algorithms bring out an under-appreciated puzzle of discrimination, namely figuring out when a decision made on the basis of a factor correlated with race is a decision made on the basis of race. I argue that prevailing approaches, which are based on identifying and then distinguishing among causal effects of race, in their metaphysical timidity, fail to get off the ground. I suggest, instead, that adopting a constructivist theory of race answers this puzzle in a principled manner. On (...) what I call a “thick constructivist” account of race, to be raced is to be socially positioned in the way indicated by a certain set of statistical regularities on the basis of particular phenotypical traits. A thick constructivist sees that acting on the basis of correlations that constitute race qua social position just is acting on the basis of race, because races just are social positions that subject their member individuals to a particular matrix of social relations that define the raced position. This conclusion has considerable ramifications for our understanding of discrimination, algorithms and beyond. (shrink)

Science and the originality of life -- Christian facticity -- Grasping life as a topic -- Ruinance -- The retrieval of history -- Facticity and ontology -- Factical speaking -- Rhetoric -- Sophistry.

Since the collapse of the Soviet Union, the United States has faced the challenge of reorienting its foreign policy to address post-Cold War conditions. In this new edition of a groundbreaking work -- one of the first to bring critical theory into dialogue with more traditional approaches to international relations -- David Campbell provides a fundamental reappraisal of American foreign policy, with a new epilogue to address current world affairs and the burgeoning focus on culture and identity in the (...) study of international relations. Extending recent debates in international relations, Campbell shows how perceptions of danger and difference work to establish the identity of the United States. He demonstrates how foreign policy, far from being an expression of a given society, constitutes state identity through the interpretation of danger posed by others. Copyright © Libri GmbH. All rights reserved. (shrink)

This article explores how the acceptance of the battered woman syndrome as the explanation for why abusive relationships continue can be understood as a cultural compromise. The syndrome's portrayal of battered women as passive victims resulted in an exclusive definition of who “counts” as a victim. It further emphasized many abused women's weaknesses rather than their resourcefulness and overlooked the plights of a great variety of women in need of help. More important, it placed emphasis on individualized solutions for domestic (...) violence rather than addressing structural inequalities in American society. These issues ultimately led to a critique by other advocates of the battered woman syndrome as an inadequate and flawed explanation for domestic violence. Yet despite its weaknesses, the syndrome allowed advocates the chance to appeal to the larger public and, ultimately, begin the process of alleviating structural inequalities. (shrink)

We take rights to be fundamental to everyday life. Rights are also controversial and hotly debated both in theory and practice. Where do rights come from? Are they invented or discovered? What sort of rights are there and who is entitled to them? In this comprehensive introduction, Tom Campbell introduces and critically examines the key philosophical debates about rights. The first part of the book covers historical and contemporary theories of rights, including the origin and variety of rights and (...) standard justifications of them. He considers challenges to rights from philosophers such as Bentham, Burke and Marx. He also examines different theories of rights, such as natural law, social contract, utilitarian and communitarian theories of rights and the philosophers and political theorists associated with them, such as John Stuart Mill, John Rawls, Robert Nozick and Michael Sandel. The second part of the book explores the role of rights-promoting institutions and critically assesses legal rights and international human rights, including the United Nations. The final part of the book examines how philosophies of rights can be applied to freedom of speech, issues of social welfare and the question of self-determination for certain groups or peoples. _Rights: A Critical Introduction_ is essential reading for anyone new to the subject of rights and any student of political philosophy, politics and law. (shrink)

Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, EarlyView.

Political theorists agree that justice is a fundamental political value but disagree profoundly about its proper analysis and philosophical justification. This substantially revised and updated second edition of Tom Campbell's highly acclaimed and widely used text provides a much-expanded overview of the nature and scope of justice, as well as presenting clear exposition and critiques of the principal contending theorists of most relevance to the contemporary world.

A key aspect of transhumanist thought involves the modification or augmentation of human physical and mental capabilities—a form of intervention often encapsulated under the term "enhancement." This article provides an overview of the concept of enhancement, focusing on six major areas in which usages of the term become slippery and controversial: normal or species-typical functioning, therapeutics or healing, natural functioning, human nature, authenticity, and the ambiguity between "more" and "better." I argue that we need to be aware of the tendency (...) to embed the concept of enhancement within stark binary oppositions that seem perfectly reasonable at first glance, but that in fact yield little more than conceptual muddles if they are not handled carefully. (shrink)

In this chapter, we consider ethical and philosophical aspects of trust in the practice of medicine. We focus on trust within the patient-physician relationship, trust and professionalism, and trust in Western (allopathic) institutions of medicine and medical research. Philosophical approaches to trust contain important insights into medicine as an ethical and social practice. In what follows we explain several philosophical approaches and discuss their strengths and weaknesses in this context. We also highlight some relevant empirical work in the section on (...) trust in the institutions of medicine. It is hoped that the approaches discussed here can be extended to nursing and other topics in the philosophy of medicine. (shrink)

The development of highly humanoid sex robots is on the technological horizon. If sex robots are integrated into the legal community as “electronic persons”, the issue of sexual consent arises, which is essential for legally and morally permissible sexual relations between human persons. This paper explores whether it is conceivable, possible, and desirable that humanoid robots should be designed such that they are capable of consenting to sex. We consider reasons for giving both “no” and “yes” answers to these three (...) questions by examining the concept of consent in general, as well as critiques of its adequacy in the domain of sexual ethics; the relationship between consent and free will; and the relationship between consent and consciousness. Additionally we canvass the most influential existing literature on the ethics of sex with robots. (shrink)

William James has long been recognized as a central figure in the American philosophic tradition, and his ideas continue to play a significant role in contemporary thinking. Yet there has never been a comprehensive exploration of the thought of this seminal philosopher and psychologist. In Experiencing William James, renowned scholar James Campbell provides the fuller and more complete analysis that James scholarship has long needed. Commentators typically address only pieces of James's thought or aspects of his vision, often in (...) an attempt to make the task of understanding James seem easier than it is or else to dismiss him as a philosophically unprepared if well-meaning amateur. The isolated nature of these examinations, too often divorced from the original contexts, badly hinders and even distorts their conclusions. Focusing on James's own ideas rather than his critiques of others, and drawing from a wealth of scholarship that includes the completed editions of his writings and correspondence, Experiencing William James provides an invaluable, comprehensive view of James as he participates in and advances the pragmatic spirit that is at the core of American philosophy. Taking the whole of the man's thinking into account, this book offers the richest perspective so far on this great but not fully comprehended intellectual. (shrink)

Micro-phenomenology is an interview and analysis method for investigating subjective experience. As a research tool, it provides detailed descriptions of brief moments of any type of subjective experience and offers techniques for systematically comparing them. In this article, we use an auto-ethnographic approach to present and explore the method. The reader is invited to observe a dialogue between two authors that illustrates and comments on the planning, conducting and analysis of a pilot series of five micro-phenomenological interviews. All these interviews (...) asked experienced researchers of micro-phenomenology to browse their memories to identify one successful and one challenging instance of working with micro-phenomenology. The interview then focused on this reflective task to investigate whether applying the method to itself might reveal quality criteria. The article starts by presenting a shortened and edited version of the first of these interviews. Keeping the dialogue format, we then outline the micro-phenomenological analysis procedure by demonstrating its application to part of this data and corresponding passages of other interviews. We focus on one unexpected finding: interviewed researchers judge the quality of an interview in part based on a connection or contact between interviewer and interviewee. We discuss these results in the context of the means and intentions of the method and suggest avenues for future research. (shrink)

It seems a compelling idea that experience of colour plays some role in our having concepts of the various colours, but in trying to explain the role experience plays the first thing we have to describe is what sort of colour experience matters here. I will argue that the kind of experience that matters is conscious attention to the colours of objects as an aspect of them on which direct intervention is selectively possible. As I will explain this idea, it (...) is a matter of being able to use experience to inform linguistic or conceptual thought about what would happen were there to be various interventions on an object. Against this background, I will review Locke’s fundamental argument that since we can change the colour of an almond by pounding it, there must be an error embodied in our ordinary concepts of colour: there is no such thing as intervening directly on the colour of an object. The analysis I present brings out the force of Locke’s argument. But I will propose a vindication of our commonsense conception of colour as an aspect of objects on which direct intervention is selectively possible. (shrink)

Moral bioenhancement, nudge-designed environments, and ambient persuasive technologies may help people behave more consistently with their deeply held moral convictions. Alternatively, they may aid people in overcoming cognitive and affective limitations that prevent them from appreciating a situation’s moral dimensions. Or they may simply make it easier for them to make the morally right choice by helping them to overcome sources of weakness of will. This paper makes two assumptions. First, technologies to improve people’s moral capacities are realizable. Second, such (...) technologies will actually help people get morality right and behave more consistently with whatever the ‘real’ right thing to do turns out to be. The paper then considers whether or not humanity loses anything valuable, particularly opportunities for moral progress, when being moral is made much easier by eliminating difficult moral deliberation and internal moral struggle. Ultimately, the worry that moral struggle has value as a catalyst for moral progress is rejected. Moral progress is understood here as the discovery and application of new values or sensitization to new sources of harm. (shrink)

In this chapter we take stock of some of the complexities of the sprawling field of AI ethics. We consider questions like "what is the proper scope of AI ethics?" And "who counts as an AI ethicist?" At the same time, we flag several potential uses and abuses of AI ethics. These include challenges for the AI ethicist, including what qualifications they should have; the proper place and extent of futuring and speculation in the field; and the dilemmas concerning how (...) we use our public and academic resources. (shrink)

Over the coming century, the accelerating advance of bioenhancement technologies, robotics, and artificial intelligence (AI) may significantly broaden the qualitative range of sentient and intelligent beings. This article proposes a taxonomy of such beings, ranging from modified animals to bioenhanced humans to advanced forms of robots and AI. It divides these diverse beings into three moral and legal categories—animals, persons, and presumed persons—describing the moral attributes and legal rights of each category. In so doing, the article sets forth a framework (...) for extending the concept of personhood well beyond its current boundaries, assigning moral standing to a variety of biological and nonbiological beings. The author concludes that six of the eight subgroups of such beings deserve to be treated as persons or as if they were persons, with full consideration for their presumed interests, rights, obligations, and capabilities for ethically significant agency and patiency. (shrink)

Addiction appears to be a deeply moralized concept. To understand the entwinement of addiction and morality, we briefly discuss the disease model and its alternatives in order to address the following questions: Is the disease model the only path towards a ‘de-moralized’ discourse of addiction? While it is tempting to think that medical language surrounding addiction provides liberation from the moralized language, evidence suggests that this is not necessarily the case. On the other hand non-disease models of addiction may seem (...) to resuscitate problematic forms of the moralization of addiction, including, invoking blame, shame, and the wholesale rejection of addicts as people who have deep character flaws, while ignoring the complex biological and social context of addiction. This is also not necessarily the case. We argue that a deficit in reasons responsiveness as basis for attribution of moral responsibility can be realized by multiple different causes, disease being one, but it also seems likely that alternative accounts of addiction as developed by Flanagan, Lewis, and Levy, may also involve mechanisms, psychological, social, and neurobiological that can diminish reasons responsiveness. It thus seems to us that nondisease models of addiction do not necessarily involve moralization. Hence, a non-stigmatizing approach to recovery can be realized in ways that are consistent with both the disease model and alternative models of addiction. (shrink)

In this chapter we identify three potentially morally problematic behaviours that are common among users of dating and hook-up apps (DHAs) and provide arguments as to why they may or may not be considered (a) in a category of their own, distinct from similar behaviours outside of DHAs; (b) caused or facilitated by affordances and business logic of DHAs; (c) as indeed morally wrong. We also consider ways in which morally problematic behaviours can be anticipated, mitigated, or even prevented by (...) analysis of the ethical and moral dimensions of technologies and their afforded uses. Finally, we offer some possible directions for future work on these topics in particular and on the ethical consequences of DHAs in general. (shrink)

This article relies on two international projects to argue for the existence of a ‘centrarchy’ in the fields of education and technology. Centrarchy denotes a power structure in which power rests with ‘the Centre’. The Centre signifies well-respected departments, top-tiered journals, the best editors, critical reviewers and leading authors; the Periphery denotes anyone else. The Centre has assigned itself the mission of guiding the Periphery out of its underdevelopment. It has served as a proxy for quality scholarship and believes that (...) Periphery’s societies require a saviour. It has ignored the knowledge that has been produced by the Periphery’s researchers. Its ways of researching the world have been internalised and taken for granted by the Periphery’s academics, who have come to see these ways as the natural order and common sense. It has seen the Periphery’s societies as outliers appropriate merely for local case studies, whereas its case studies transcend locality and have universal value. The Centre–Periphery ‘wall’ is unbreachable because of empirically uninspected factors, which are unearthed here. This article, furthermore, shows some academics to be on ‘the periphery of the Periphery’. (shrink)

This paper will examine how the prominent image of the witch in Christian thought during the early modern period emerged from earlier images of the non-Christian Other, Jews and heretics for example. To do so the beliefs surrounding the ―rituals‖ and ―practices‖ of witches seen during the witch-craze of the fifteenth century are compared and contrasted with the images of Others within medieval Christian society. To do so a variety of both primary and secondary scholarship on the persecution of witches, (...) heretics, and Jews during the Middle Ages and the early modern period. (shrink)

Singapore's long-serving People's Action Party government suffered from a major electoral setback in the 2011 general election and subsequent by-elections. The high-growth population policy, underpinned by the influx of migrants and foreign workers, has strongly fuelled the groundswell of public discontent and is commonly perceived to have contributed to widening income disparities, wage stagnation, and cost of living pressures. This article attempts to make sense of the PAP leadership's dogged commitment to the high-growth population policy despite the electoral backlashes and (...) policy criticisms by prominent public intellectuals and others closely connected to the PAP establishment. It considers Singapore's high-growth population policy and widening income disparity within the context of the authoritarian developmental state's shift away from the social compact. The article also examines the impact of widening income inequality and other policy lapses on the legitimacy of the PAP government as the clamor for a renewed social compact based on gathers momentum in the repoliticized polity. (shrink)

This study investigates the relationship between abusive supervision and employee creativity by shedding light on the mediating role of negative affect and the moderating role of interpersonal harmony. Based on affective events theory, it was hypothesized that abusive supervision impacts employees’ negative affect and their creativity. Data from a questionnaire survey of 398 Chinese employee–supervisor dyads were collected and analyzed. The results support our hypotheses, address unexplored theoretical predictions, and suggest that organizations should deal with the factors undermining employees’ emotions (...) to improve their creativity. (shrink)

Digital peddling of fake news is influential to persuasive political participation, with veritable social media platforms. Social media, with their instantaneous and widespread usage, have been exploited by ‘anonymous’ political influencers who fabricate and inundate internet community with unverified and false information. Using van Leeuwen’s Discourse Legitimation approach and insights from Discourse Analysis, this study analyses 120 purposively sampled fake news posts on Whatsapp, Facebook and Twitter, shared during the 2019 general elections in Nigeria. WhatsApp allows for the easy and (...) fast sharing of fake news as it pulled the largest occurrence of legitimation strategies, followed by Facebook. Authorisation is the highest occurring legitimation strategy at 46.6% frequency; this is followed by Moralisation which has 27% and Rationalisation at 26.4%; while Mythopoesis did not feature at all in the sampled data, leaving it at 0%. In particular, expert and role model authority are most often deployed to validate fake news such as the demise and cloning of President Buhari, ruling party’s plan to rig and destabilise the 2019 election, massive corruption in the current administration and imminent ethnic violence. The study argues that these strategies are viable persuasive tools owing to their use of discourse markers like make-believe images, emotive language, appeal to emotions, rational conclusions, hateful comments, verbal indictment and coercive verbs. (shrink)