While Nozick and his sympathizers assume there is a widespread anti-hedonist intuition to prefer reality to an experience machine, hedonists have marshalled empirical evidence that shows such an assumption to be unfounded. Results of several experience machine variants indicate there is no widespread anti-hedonist intuition. From these findings, hedonists claim Nozick's argument fails as an objection to hedonism. This article suggests the argument surrounding experience machines has been misconceived. Rather than eliciting intuitions about what is prudentially valuable, these intuitive judgements (...) are instead calculations about prudential pay-offs and trade-offs. This position can help explain the divergence of intuitions people have about experience machines. (shrink)

Purpose: to characterize ethics course content, structure, resources, pedagogic methods, and opinions among academic administrators and course directors at U.S. medical schools. Method: An online questionnaire addressed to academic deans and ethics course directors identified by medical school websites was emailed to 157 Association of American Medical Colleges member medical schools in two successive waves in early 2022. Descriptive statistics were utilized to summarize responses. Results: Representatives from 61 (39%) schools responded. Thirty-two (52%) respondents were course directors; 26 (43%) were (...) deans of academic affairs, medical education, or curriculum; and 3 with other roles also completed the survey (5%). All 61 schools reported some form of formal ethics education during the first year of medical school, with most (n = 54, 89%) reporting a formal mandatory introductory course during preclinical education. Schools primarily utilized lecture and small-group teaching methods. Knowledge-based examinations, attendance, and participation were most commonly used for assessment. A large majority regarded ethics as equally or more important than other foundational courses, but fewer (n = 37, 60%) provided faculty training for teaching ethics. Conclusions: Despite a response rate of 39 percent, the authors conclude that medical schools include ethics in their curricula in small-group and lecture formats with heterogeneity regarding content taught. Preclinical curricular redesigns must innovate and implement best practices for ensuring sound delivery of ethics content in future curricula. Additional large-scale research is necessary to determine said best practices. (shrink)

Volume 20, Issue 8, August 2020, Page 123-125.

This study identified the influences of maternal socio-demographic and antenatal factors on stillbirths and neonatal deaths in New South Wales, Australia. Bivariate and multivariate analyses were used to explore the association of selected antenatal and maternal characteristics with stillbirths and neonatal deaths. The findings of this study showed that stillbirths and neonatal deaths significantly varied by infant sex, maternal age, Aboriginality, maternal country of birth, socioeconomic status, parity, maternal smoking behaviour during pregnancy, maternal diabetes mellitus, maternal hypertension, antenatal care, plurality (...) of birth, low birth weight, place of birth, delivery type, maternal deaths and small gestational age. First-born infants, twins and infants born to teenage mothers, Aboriginal mothers, those who smoked during the pregnancy and those of lower socioeconomic status were at increased risk of stillbirths and neonatal deaths. The most common causes of stillbirths were conditions originating in the perinatal period: intrauterine hypoxia and asphyxia. Congenital malformations, including deformities and chromosomal abnormalities, and disorders related to slow fetal growth, short gestation and low birth weight were the most common causes of neonatal deaths. The findings indicate that very low birth weight (less than 2000 g) contributed 75·6% of the population-attributable risks to stillbirths and 59·4% to neonatal deaths. Low gestational age (less than 32 weeks) accounted for 77·7% of stillbirths and 87·9% of neonatal deaths. The findings of this study suggest that in order to reduce stillbirths and neonatal deaths, it is essential to include strategies to predict and prevent prematurity and low birth weight, and that there is a need to focus on anti-smoking campaigns during pregnancy, optimizing antenatal care and other healthcare programmes targeted at the socially disadvantaged populations identified in this study. (shrink)

The prevailing normative model of contemporary journalism, drawn primarily from a liberal enlightenment tradition emphasizing universal notions of rights, contributes to what many perceive as a crisis in contemporary journalism; at the least, Kantian models are too "thin" to provide an adequate ethical standard. We consider the extent to which an ethic of care, reconceived to address weaknesses identified in recent scholarly critiques, provides journalists with an alternative framework for moral decision making. We use the concept of unequal ethical pull (...) to rework caring and to promote caring for distant others because caring that remains at the personal level is inadequate as a moral value. We conclude by noting that public journalism and our retooled ethic of care share several important ideals. We suggest a program of mutually beneficial exploration, one that might help today's journalists cultivate the virtue of care as they work toward justice. (shrink)

Given a rich environment, how do we decide on what information to use? A view of a single entity (e.g., a group of birds) affords many distinct interpretations, including their number, average size, and spatial extent. An enduring challenge for cognition, therefore, is to focus resources on the most relevant evidence for any particular decision. In the present study, subjects completed three tasks—number discrimination, surface area discrimination, and convex hull discrimination—with the same stimulus set, where these three features were orthogonalized. (...) Therefore, only the relevant feature provided consistent evidence for decisions in each task. This allowed us to determine how well humans discriminate each feature dimension and what evidence they relied on to do so. We introduce a novel computational approach that fits both feature precision and feature use. We found that the most relevant feature for each decision is extracted and relied on, with minor contributions from competing features. These results suggest that multiple feature dimensions are separately represented for each attended ensemble of many items and that cognition is efficient at selecting the appropriate evidence for a decision. (shrink)

We report on an unpublished and previously unknown manuscript of John von Neumann and contextualize it within the development of the theory of shock waves and detonations during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Von Neumann studies bombs comprising a primary explosive charge along with explosive booster material. His goal is to calculate the minimal amount of booster needed to create a sustainable detonation, presumably because booster material is often more expensive and more volatile. In service of this goal, he formulates (...) and analyzes a partial differential equation-based model describing a moving shock wave at the interface of detonated and undetonated material. We provide a complete transcription of von Neumann’s work and give our own accompanying explanations and analyses, including the correction of two small errors in his calculations. Today, detonations are typically modeled using a combination of experimental results and numerical simulations particular to the shape and materials of the explosive, as the complex three dimensional dynamics of detonations are analytically intractable. Although von Neumann’s manuscript will not revolutionize our modern understanding of detonations, the document is a valuable historical record of the state of hydrodynamics research during and after World War II. (shrink)

Machery's case against hybrids rests on a principle that is too strong, even by his own lights. And there are likely important generalizations to be made about hybrids, if they do exist. Moreover, even if there were no important generalizations about concepts themselves, the term picks out an important class of entities and should be retained to help guide inquiry.

Recent experimental philosophy arguments have raised trouble for philosophers' reliance on armchair intuitions. One popular line of response has been the expertise defense: philosophers are highly-trained experts, whereas the subjects in the experimental philosophy studies have generally been ordinary undergraduates, and so there's no reason to think philosophers will make the same mistakes. But this deploys a substantive empirical claim, that philosophers' training indeed inculcates sufficient protection from such mistakes. We canvass the psychological literature on expertise, which indicates that people (...) are not generally very good at reckoning who will develop expertise under what circumstances. We consider three promising hypotheses concerning what philosophical expertise might consist in: (i) better conceptual schemata; (ii) mastery of entrenched theories; and (iii) general practical know-how with the entertaining of hypotheticals. On inspection, none seem to provide us with good reason to endorse this key empirical premise of the expertise defense. (shrink)

It has become increasingly popular to respond to experimental philosophy by suggesting that experimental philosophers haven’t been studying the right kind of thing. One version of this kind of response, which we call the reflection defense, involves suggesting both that philosophers are interested only in intuitions that are the product of careful reflection on the details of hypothetical cases and the key concepts involved in those cases, and that these kinds of philosophical intuitions haven’t yet been adequately studied by experimental (...) philosophers. Of course, as a defensivemove, thisworks only if reflective intuitions are immune from the kinds of problematic effects that form the basis of recent experimental challenges to philosophy’s intuition-deploying practices. If they are not immune to these kinds of effects, then the fact that experimental philosophers have not had the right kind of thing in their sights would provide little comfort to folks invested in philosophy’s intuition-deploying practices. Here we provide reasons to worry that even reflective intuitions can display sensitivity to the same kinds of problematic effects, although possibly in slightly different ways. As it turns out, being reflective might sometimes just mean being wrong in a different way. (shrink)

The practice of appealing to esoteric intuitions, long standard in analytic philosophy, has recently fallen on hard times. Various recent empirical results have suggested that philosophers are not currently able to distinguish good intuitions from bad. This paper evaluates one possible type of approach to this problematic methodological situation: calibration. Both critiquing and building on an argument from Robert Cummins, the paper explores what possible avenues may exist for the calibration of philosophical intuitions. It is argued that no good options (...) are currently available, but leaves open the real possibility of such a calibration in the future. (shrink)

A small but growing body of philosophically informed survey work calls into question whether the value-free ideal is a dominant viewpoint among scientists. However, the survey instruments in used in these studies have important limitations. Previous work has also made little headway in developing hypotheses that might predict or explain differing views about the value-free ideal among scientists. In this article, we review previous survey work on this topic, describe an improved survey instrument, report results from an initial administration of (...) it that strengthen and refine previous results, and develop two hypotheses that may account for gender effects found in the data. (shrink)

The purpose of this research is to examine the effect of two organizational variables, budget goal difficulty and promotion availability, on employee fraud. Limited research shows that difficult, specific goals result in more unethical behavior than general goals :422–432, 2004). We predict that goal difficulty and promotion availability will interact to affect employee fraud. Specifically, we contend that the availability of promotions will have little, if any, effect on employee fraud under easy goals but have a substantial effect on fraud (...) under extremely difficult goals. To test this prediction, we use an experiment in which participants play the role of production employees. All participants are assigned cost goals and are responsible for reporting costs to the organization. Information asymmetry exists such that the organization is unable to assess whether costs have been reported accurately, and any overstatement of costs directly increases the employee’s compensation at the expense of the organization. The results of our experiment support the prediction, even though the cost goal is not tied to current period compensation. Our results have implications for academics and practitioners concerned with factors that affect fraud in organizations. (shrink)

Political corruption imposes substantial costs on shareholders in the U.S. Yet, we understand little about the basic factors that exacerbate or mitigate the value consequences of political corruption. Using federal corruption convictions data, we find that firm-level economic rents and monitoring mechanisms moderate the negative relation between corruption and firm value. The value consequences of political corruption are exacerbated for firms operating in low-rent product markets and mitigated for firms subject to external monitoring by state governments or monitoring induced by (...) disclosure transparency. Our results should inform managers and policymakers of the tradeoffs imposed on firms operating in politically corrupt districts. (shrink)

The anticipated social capabilities of robots may allow them to serve in authority roles as part of human-machine teams. To date, it is unclear if, and to what extent, human team members will comply with requests from their robotic teammates, and how such compliance compares to requests from human teammates. This research examined how the human-likeness and physical embodiment of a robot affect compliance to a robot's request to perseverate utilizing a novel task paradigm. Across a set of two studies, (...) participants performed a visual search task while receiving ambiguous performance feedback. Compliance was evaluated when the participant requested to stop the task and the coach urged the participant to keep practicing multiple times. In the first study, the coach was either physically co-located with the participant or located remotely via a live-video. Coach type varied in human-likeness and included either a real human, a Nao robot, or a modified Roomba robot. The second study expanded on the first by including a Baxter robot as a coach and replicated the findings in a different sample population with a strict chain of command culture. Results from both studies showed that participants comply with the requests of a robot for up to 11 min. Compliance is less than to a human and embodiment and human-likeness on had weak effects on compliance. (shrink)

Because of the growing debate concerning the nature of Soviet-type societies, a symposium-review was organized around two important recent books on the subject. The following are discussions of either one or both of the following volumes: Ferenc Feher, Agnes Heller, Gyorgy Markus, Dictatorship over Needs, St. Martin's Press (New York, 1983). Victor Zaslavsky, The Neo-Stalinist State: Class, Ethnicity and Consensus in Soviet Society, M.E. Sharpe, Inc. (New York, 1982). In social analysis, effective explanations alternate “thick description” with “thin description” Zaslavsky's (...) The Neo-Stalinist State and Feher's, Heller's and Markus’ Dictatorship over Needs, can be seen to track “actually existine socialism” down the respective paths of “thick” and “think” analysis. (shrink)

Uncertainty replaces the conviction that rationality may be founded, ultimately. Comments on and exemplified by Zygmunt Bauman's "Intimations of postmodernity" (1992), the Quality-of-life discussion (Nussbaum & Senn (eds.) 1993) and "reflexive modernization" (Ulrich Beck, 1994). Uncertainty as a principle leads to the "imperative of responsibility" (Hans Jonas, 1984).

The concept of liquid modernity proposed by Zygmunt Bauman suggests a rapidly changing order that undermines all notions of durability. It implies a sense of rootlessness to all forms of social construction. In the field of development, such a concept challenges the meaning of modernization as an effort to establish long lasting structures. By applying this concept to development, it is possible to address the nuances of social change in terms of the interplay between the solid and liquid aspects (...) of modernization. (shrink)

Cadernos Zygmunt Bauman – C-ZB se estabelece como um periódico que tem por objetivo discutir com clareza e sinceridade as questões humanas a partir da visão do sociólogo polonês Zygmunt Bauman. Em sua primeira Edição v. 1, n. 1 (2011) o C-ZB aborda três pontos de grande importância. O primeiro artigo: “A História estilhaçada: tradições e usos do passado no diálogo entre Zygmunt Bauman e Hannah Arendt”. Outro momento pode ser apreciado com a leitura do artigo “O (...) individualismo como estratégia de cuidado de si na sociedade de consumo”. E finalmente todos poderão conferir no artigo “Consumismo como fuga simbólica do real”. Cadernos Zygmunt Bauman - C-ZB establishes itself as a journal that aims to discuss with clarity and sincerity human affairs from the perspective of Polish sociologist Zygmunt Bauman. In its first edition v. 1, n. 1 (2011) C-ZB addresses three points of great importance. The first article, "The History shattered: traditions and customs of the past in the dialogue between Zygmunt Bauman and Hannah Arendt. " Another moment is apparent from reading the article "Individualism as a strategy for self care in a consumer society. " And finally everyone to check the article "Consumerism as a symbolic escape from reality. ". (shrink)

The authors argue that an urgent leadership issue has arisen which is strongly, but not favorably, influencing our professional culture--a hostility toward religion and its correct expressions within the military. Setting aside the role of Chaplains as a separate issue, the focus here is on the role religion may play in the moral character of individual soldiers--especially leaders--and how their personal morality, faith-based or not, is to be integrated with their profession's ethic so they can serve in all cases "without (...) reservation" as their oath requires. Related products: Expeditionary Culture Field Guide: Latvia can be found here: https: //bookstore.gpo.gov/products/sku/008-000-01225-3 Expeditionary Culture Field Guide: Turkey can be found here: https: //bookstore.gpo.gov/products/sku/008-000-01223-7 Expeditionary Culture Field Guide: Lithuania is available here: https: //bookstore.gpo.gov/products/sku/008-000-01224-5 Expeditionary Culture Field Guide: Chad is available here: https: //bookstore.gpo.gov/products/sku/008-000-01226-1 Aspects of Leadership: Ethics, Law and Spirituality is available here: https: //bookstore.gpo.gov/products/sku/008-055-00255-9 Faith and Hope in a War-Torn Land: The US Army Chaplaincy in the Balkans, 1995-2005 eBook available from Google Play eBookstore. Please use ISBN: 9780160872792 to search their platform for this product; Paperback format available here: https: //bookstore.gpo.gov/products/sku/008-029-00440-2. (shrink)

Restless Ideas is a lively new textbook of contemporary social theory that speaks directly to the anxious age in which we live today. In addition to providing a highly readable guided tour of major social theories from the mid-20th to the early 21st century, this book is full of dynamic examples that show how these theories may be used to deepen our understanding of current events and of our own life experiences. The emergence of demagogic political leaders like Donald Trump (...) in the USA, Rodrigo Duterte in the Philippines, and Recep Tayyip Erdoğan in Turkey; the rise of religious fundamentalism, terrorism, and political populism; the digital echo-chamber of social media; and the underlying causes of Brexit are only some of the many current social issues that can be framed through contemporary social theories. Similarly, the politics of sexual, racial and ethnic minorities can be analyzed through the prism of theoretical perspectives such as queer theory, standpoint and intersectional theory, postcolonial theory and critical race theory, while the ongoing struggles for gender equality and gender justice can usefully be examined through the generational perspectives of feminist theories. This book sets the stage with a critical discussion of the loaded history of the social theory canon and makes the argument that there has never been a better time than the present to broaden our understanding of our shared global heritage of social theory, to include some of the formerly excluded classics of past social thinkers, and to open the doors to current social thinkers theorizing from the margins. The book traces the modern roots of contemporary social theory back to the works of the early structural functionalists, systems theorists, conflict theorists, symbolic interactionists, ethnomethodologists and sociobiologists, building on and at times inverting the canon with the critical advancements to social theory. Later chapters focus on the current influence of structuration theory, third wave critical theory, postmodernism and poststructuralism, critical race theory, postcolonialism, liquid and late modernity theories, and globalization theories. These perspectives include the works of contemporary social theorists such as Anthony Giddens, Pierre Bourdieu, Juliet Mitchell, Dorothy Smith, Judith Butler, Jean-Francois Lyotard, Jacques Derrida, Jean Baudrillard, Gayatri Spivak, Homi K. Bhabha, Zygmunt Bauman, Slavoj Zizek, Alain Badiou, Jürgen Habermas, Axel Honneth, Nancy Fraser, Manuel Castells and Ulrich Beck. The underlying premise - and the promise - of this book is that social theory has the power to provide us with the skills for more informed observation, analysis, and empathic understanding of social behavior and social interaction. In a word: the value of social theory may be seen in how it can enhance social literacy - by deepening our understanding of the world around us, and by empowering us to become practical theorists in our own lives. (shrink)

The starting point of my analysis is the complexity of contemporary society. Complexity here refers more in particular to social complexity: the type of complexity that emerges from the relationships between human beings and the myriad of options and possibilities that exist in our society. A systems theoretical account of complexity elicits that this 'social abundance' necessitates selections. One way of enabling selections, and hence the reduction of complexity, is the formulation of norms. The central thesis of this account follows (...) from this observation: social complexity is a source of normativity, in the sense that social complexity generates – among others – normativity. Dealing with social complexity requires selections and a considerable range of selections, at their turn, require norms. From a somewhat different angle, we could say that social complexity entails both freedom of choice and force of choice. It is this combination of freedom and force that confronts our society with a profound problem. It translates, so to speak, social complexity into uncertainty: how to deal with all these options and possibilities, how to shape our interactions? An important aspect of the problem is the abundance of colliding heteronymous norms and a simultaneous lack of ethical norms that do not compromise our individual autonomy. The analysis of this ethical state of affairs draws upon the work of Zygmunt Bauman. The paper tentatively seeks to outline the social theoretical requirements of an ethic that takes issue with the uncertainty of choice. (shrink)

Abstract:This study links Homeric and Machiavellian outlooks in Henry James's The Ambassadors. We first relate Lambert Strether's embassy seeking Chad's return to Woollett to what Alexander Pope famously designated the "Embassy to Achilles," i.e., the Achaean effort to induce Achilles's return to battle. Achilles impassionedly rejects the embassy's hypocrisy; he will not be bought. We then find Chad Newsome conspiratorially excluding Strether from the family fortune via intended marriage to Mrs. Newsome. Contrary to Achilles's forthrightness and integrity, (...) class='Hi'>Chad and his Parisian circle adopt a post-Machiavellian ethos of deceit as the norm. (shrink)

In his study Modernity and the Holocaust, Zygmunt Bauman contrasts the hopes and expectations of the modernising world of the nineteenth century with the real outcomes of the twentieth century, where the very conditions of modernity have led to the mass destruction of humanity and of those early hopes for the betterment of humankind. This volume explores the possibilities left to those once modernising societies, not only in terms of the worlds they have constructed but also in discerning the (...) novel conditions which the closure of modernity entails. That closure, in part the completion of industrialisation and the social order that went with it, and in part the dislocation of the kinds of social knowledge used to understand it, has raised profound and disturbing questions about the character of this brave new world and the ways in which its governance and the goal of the good society can be understood. This volume explores some of the current vicissitudes of modernity, especially in relation to the crises of the political, and the political consequences of new technologies. (shrink)

'Community' is one of those words that feels good: it is good 'to have a community', 'to be in a community'. And 'community' feels good because of the meanings which the word conveys, all of them promising pleasures, and more often than not the kind of pleasures which we would like to experience but seem to miss. 'Community' conveys the image of a warm and comfortable place, like a fireplace at which we warm our hands on a frosty day. Out (...) there, in the street, all sorts of dangers lie in ambush; in here, in the community, we can relax and feel safe. 'Community' stands for the kind of world which we long to inhabit but which is not, regrettably, available to us. Today 'community' is another name for paradise lost - but for a paradise which we still hope to find, as we feverishly search for the roads that may lead us there. But there is a price to be paid for the privilege of being in a community. Community promises security but seems to deprive us of freedom, of the right to be ourselves. Security and freedom are two equally precious and coveted values which could be balanced to some degree, but hardly ever fully reconciled. The tension between security and freedom, and between community and individuality, is unlikely ever to be resolved. We cannot escape the dilemma but we can take stock of the opportunities and the dangers, and at least try to avoid repeating past errors. In this important new book, Zygmunt Bauman takes stock of these opportunities and dangers and, in his distinctive and brilliant fashion, offers a much-needed reappraisal of a concept that has become central to current debates about the nature and future of our societies. (shrink)

Life in Fragments is a continuation of the themes and motifs explored in Zygmunt Bauman's acclaimed study, Postmodern Ethics (Blackwell, 1993).

In this chapter, I make the case for platonic realism, the thesis that there are properties that lack spatial locations. After criticizing the one-over-many argument for realism and Lewis's argument for realism, I endorse a modal argument that derives the existence of platonic properties from considerations involving necessary truth. I then defend this argument from various objections. Finally, I argue that epistemic considerations and considerations of parsimony favor a weak form of platonic realism on which there are platonic properties, but (...) each property could have had an instance, and would have been located in its instances if it had any. (shrink)

This study described the relationships between academic class and student moral sensitivity and reasoning and between curriculum design components for ethics education and student moral sensitivity and reasoning. The data were collected from freshman (n = 506) and senior students (n = 440) in eight baccalaureate nursing programs in South Korea by survey; the survey consisted of the Korean Moral Sensitivity Questionnaire and the Korean Defining Issues Test. The results showed that moral sensitivity scores in patient-oriented care and conflict were (...) higher in senior students than in freshman students. Furthermore, more hours of ethics content were associated with higher principled thinking scores of senior students. Nursing education in South Korea may have an impact on developing student moral sensitivity. Planned ethics content in nursing curricula is necessary to improve moral sensitivity and moral reasoning of students. (shrink)

The special composition question is the question, ‘When do some things compose something?’ The answers to this question in the literature have largely been at odds with common sense, either by allowing that any two things compose something, or by denying the existence of most ordinary composite objects. I propose a new ‘series-style’ answer to the special composition question that accords much more closely with common sense, and I defend this answer from van Inwagen's objections. Specifically, I will argue that (...) the proposed answer entails the transitivity of parthood, that it is non-circular, and that it casts some light on the ancient puzzle about the Ship of Theseus. (shrink)

Moving beyond identity politics while continuing to respect diverse entities and concerns, Whitney A. Bauman builds a planetary politics that better responds to the realities of a pluralistic world. Calling attention to the historical, political, and ecological influences shaping our understanding of nature, religion, humanity, and identity, Bauman collapses the boundaries separating male from female, biology from machine, human from more than human, and religion from science, encouraging readers to embrace hybridity and the inherent fluctuations of an open, (...) evolving global community. As he outlines his planetary ethic, Bauman concurrently develops an environmental ethic of movement that relies not on place but on the daily connections we make across the planet. He shows how both identity politics and environmental ethics fail to realize planetary politics and action, limited as they are by foundational modes of thought that create entire worlds out of their own logic. Introducing a postfoundational vision not rooted in the formal principles of "nature" or "God" and not based in the idea of human exceptionalism, Bauman draws on cutting-edge insights from queer, poststructural, and deconstructive theory and makes a major contribution to the study of religion, science, politics, and ecology. (shrink)

We present the findings of a worldwide survey that was administered to business ethic scholars to better understand journal quality within the business ethics academic community. Based upon the data from the survey, we provide a ranking of the top 10 business ethics journals. We then provide a comparison of business ethics journals to other mainstream management journals in terms of journal quality. The results of the study suggest that, within the business ethics academic community, many scholars prefer to publish (...) in the top business ethics academic journals over other mainstream management journals. Furthermore, the results of the study suggest that within the business ethics academic field there are two dominant academic communities: one in Europe and one in North America. Each of these academic communities has its own preferred publication outlets, suggesting a potentially problematic bifurcation of business ethics scholarship. (shrink)

Introduction : points of departure -- A genealogy of the Christian colonial mindset : ex nihilo from disputed beginnings to orthodox origins -- Ex nihilo and the origin of an empire -- Ex nihilo, erasure and discovery? -- The cogito, ex nihilo, and the legacy of John Locke -- The creation ex nihilo of terra nullius lands : omnipotent nations and the logic of global-colonization -- From epistemologies of domination to grounded thinking -- Opening words about God onto creatio continua (...) -- Creatio continua "all the way down": a post-colonial, planetary understanding of continuing creation -- Conclusion : a brief thought after. (shrink)

Abstract:This essay performs an anticolonial and poetic methodology of combining Black and Native feminists' deconstruction of metaphor and metaphysics in order to argue for the centrality of colonial metaphor to colonial metaphysics. I combine their analyses of the separate gendered metaphors of Blackness and Indianness and the centrality of these metaphors to the development of a global metaphysics as well as the transference of the terms of metaphysics to whiteness. I then apply this method of combined terms and readings to (...) white colonial writing that compares Black and Native America, which transforms both communities not only into individually potent, gendered metaphors but into an essential poetic pairing, a poetic couplet. Drawing on the work of Black and Native feminists, I further argue that when we take this paired model to evaluate the political concerns of Black and Native America, we come to a more complete and global understanding and refutation of whiteness. The creation, connection, and comparison of the gendered metaphors and archetypical figures of the "African Slave" and "Indian Savage" are important to each other and to the creation of a Western conception of the globe. Colonialism uses gender to compound metaphor's ability to create, by combining metaphors of gender with metaphors of race and colonialism to develop new symbolic amalgamations. This gestalt of metaphors comes together in order to create a fictive European metaphysics used to ameliorate white fears of the diversity of life on planet Earth and to satisfy white desires to control it. In this coupled metaphoric form, Blackness and Indianness are not connected by analogy but by the open-ended cut, the caesura, of poetry and the violence of slavery and conquest. I offer this anticolonial and poetic pairing as a model for political imagining between Black and Native theory. (shrink)

Modern analytical political philosophy—characterized most notably by the work of John Rawls—has had very little to say about how punishment in particular and criminal law more generally might be justified. This is a puzzling omission, as punishment can be seen as the most serious use of coercive state power and therefore the one in greatest need of philosophical justification. With the idea of filling this gap, this chapter analyzes several major political theories of recent decades and examines how criminal justice (...) might fit into their thought. After discussing the various political theories of libertarianism, liberalism, communitarianism, Marxism, and republicanism, I offer a limited defense of one such theory, Rawls’s “political liberalism,” as offering a suitable way to approach issues of criminal justice and punishment in modern society. More broadly, my chapter invites political philosophers to speak more often and more specifically about how criminal justice fits within their theories. (shrink)

In this paper, we investigate a large-scale financial statement fraud to better understand the process by which individuals are recruited to participate in financial statement fraud schemes. The case reveals that perpetrators often use power to recruit others to participate in fraudulent acts. To illustrate how power is used, we propose a model, based upon the classical French and Raven taxonomy of power, that explains how one individual influences another individual to participate in financial statement fraud. We also provide propositions (...) for future research. (shrink)