The human face is unique among social stimuli in conveying such a variety of different characteristics. A person's identity, sex, race, age, emotional state, focus of attention, facial speech patterns, and attractiveness are all detected and interpreted with relative ease from the face. Humans also display a surprising degree of consistency in the extent to which personality traits, such as trustworthiness and likeability, are attributed to faces. In the past thirty years, face perception has become an area of major interest (...) within psychology, with a rapidly expanding research base. Yet until now, there has been no comprehensive reference work bringing together this ever growing body of research. -/- The Oxford Handbook of Face Perception is the most comprehensive and commanding review of the field ever published. It looks at the functional and neural mechanisms underlying the perception, representation, and interpretation of facial characteristics, such as identity, expression, eye gaze, attractiveness, personality, and race. It examines the development of these processes, their neural correlates in both human and non-human primates, congenital and acquired disorders resulting from their breakdown, and the theoretical and computational frameworks for their underlying mechanisms. With chapters by an international team of leading authorities from the brain sciences, the book is a landmark publication on face perception. -/- For anyone looking for the definitive text on this burgeoning field, this is the essential book. (shrink)
Is evil a distinct moral concept? Or are evil actions just very wrong actions? Some philosophers have argued that evil is a distinct moral concept. These philosophers argue that evil is qualitatively distinct from ordinary wrongdoing. Other philosophers have suggested that evil is only quantitatively distinct from ordinary wrongdoing. On this view, evil is just very wrong. In this paper I argue that evil is qualitatively distinct from ordinary wrongdoing. The first part of the paper is critical. I argue that (...) Luke Russell’s attempt to show that evil is only quantitatively distinct from ordinary wrongdoing fails. Russell’s argument fails because it is based on an implausible criterion for determining whether two concepts are qualitatively distinct. I offer a more plausible criterion and argue that based on this criterion evil and wrongdoing are qualitatively distinct. To help make my case, I sketch a theory of evil which makes a genuinely qualitative distinction between evil and wrongdoing. I argue that we cannot characterize evil as just very wrong on plausible conceptions of evil and wrongdoing. I focus on act-consequentialist, Kantian, and contractarian conceptions of wrongdoing. (shrink)
This paper argues that even the most virtuous people living in affluent Western countries share responsibility for injustices suffered by poor people living in developing countries. The argument of the paper draws on a moral principle that underlies the law of restitution: the principle of unjust enrichment. The paper argues that denizens of affluent Western countries have benefited unjustly from injustices suffered by poor people living in developing countries and that they have a moral responsibility to pay back their unjust (...) gains. (shrink)
In this article I explore background questions with reference to two recent strands in anti-foundationalist theory: Richard Rorty's neo-pragmatism, and Keith Jenkins's postmodernist treatment of historiography. Both approaches seek fresh perspectives on our relationship to history which reject the aspiration towards a perspective positioned at any kind of Archimedean point, beyond the clutches of time and chance. Both might be called 'historicist' in the sense that rather than seeking to play down or to escape the flux of contingency, they seek (...) to embrace it. And both, it seems, seek a kind of 'zero point', as Adorno once called it: a plea to 'forget' the stain of past thinking and experience in order to begin on a new footing.4 They offer forms of therapy; a relief from anxieties to which only bad philosophical habits have made us subject. (shrink)
Liberal theories of justice typically claim that political institutions should be justifiable to those who live under them – whatever their values. The more such values diverge, the greater the challenge of justifiability. Diversity of this kind becomes especially pronounced when the institutions in question are supra-national. Focusing on the case of the European Union, this paper aims to address a basic question: what kinds of value should inform the justification of political institutions facing a plurality of value systems? One (...) route to an answer is provided by John Rawls, who famously distinguishes between comprehensive and political values, and defends the exclusion of the former from the foundations of a political theory of justice. This paper questions the tenability of the Rawlsian solution, and draws attention to an alternative twofold conceptual distinction: that between minimal and non-minimal and between substantive and procedural values. Minimal values are meant to be as independent as possible of controversial conceptions of the good and views of the world, regardless of whether these are comprehensive or purely political. It will be argued that their endorsement may thus further specify the nature of what should be shared in order to justify political institutions in conditions of pluralism. In order to further refine the account of such basis of justification, two variants of minimalism will be presented according to whether they invest substantive or procedural values. Substantive values qualify the property of an outcome; procedural values qualify the property of a procedure. The latter part of the paper consists of a ‘face-off’ between minimal proceduralism and minimal substantivism, considering reasons in favour of the adoption of each. The result, we suggest, is a helpful reorientation of the political dimension of the value debates to which the multiplicity of values amid contemporary European horizons give rise. (shrink)
In this paper I consider the excuse of ignorance as a justification for acting in a way that would otherwise be evil. My aim is to determine when ignorance precludes us from evildoing and when it does not. I use the 9/11 terrorist attack on America as a case study. In particular, I consider whether the 9/11 terrorists were precluded from evildoing because they thought they were doing right and thus were ignorant about the true nature of their actions. The (...) paper begins with a discussion of the nature of evil. I argue that the 9/11 terrorists were not precluded from evildoing by their ignorance because they were largely responsible forbeing ignorant about the true nature of their actions. They were responsible for their ignorance because they evaded acknowledging information that should have revealed to them the evilness of their plans. They were “self-deceptive evildoers.”. (shrink)
