Drawing on the work of Charles W. Mills and considering the case of reparations to Black Americans, this article defends the “structural turn” in the philosophical reparations scholarship. In the Black American context, the structural turn highlights the structural and institutional operations of a White supremacist political system and a long chronology of state-sponsored injustice, as opposed to enslavement as a standalone historical episode. Here, the question whether distributive justice is more appropriate than reparative justice is particularly pressing, since structural (...) racial inequalities form part of the basis for reparations. Derrick Darby’s pragmatic argument for non-race-specific redistributive policies and Tommie Shelby’s principled defense of distributive justice are both considered, as well as the challenge to the structural turn that comes from Carlton Waterhouse’s argument for reparations for enslavement rather than “legacy of slavery” reparations. (shrink)

Alasia Nuti’s important recent book, Injustice and the Reproduction of History: Structural Inequalities, Gender and Redress, makes many persuasive interventions. Nuti shows how structural injustice theory is enriched by being explicitly historical; in theorizing historical-structural injustice, she lays bare the mechanisms of how the injustices of history reproduce themselves. For Nuti, historical-structural patterns are not only shaped by habitual behaviors that are or appear to be morally permissible, but also by individual wrongdoing and wrongdoing by powerful group agents like states. (...) In this article, I extend Nuti’s rich analysis, focusing on two questions that arise from her theory of historical-structural injustice: Beyond being blameworthy for wrongful acts themselves, are culpable wrongdoers blameworthy for contributing to structural injustice? Does historical moral ignorance mitigate moral responsibility for past injustice? Regarding, I distinguish between the local and societal structural effects of wrongdoing. Though I think this distinction is well-founded, it ultimately leads to tensions with structural injustice theory’s idea of ordinary individuals being blameless for reproducing unjust structures. Regarding, I argue that even though it is natural for the question of historical moral ignorance to arise in considering past wrongdoing, at least in the case of powerful group agents, we should not overlook forms of cruelty which present-day moral concepts are not needed to condemn. (shrink)

After a fatal police shooting in the United States, it is typical for city and police officials to view the family of the deceased through the lens of the law. If the family files a lawsuit, the city and police department consider it their legal right to defend themselves and to treat the plaintiffs as adversaries. However, reparations and the concept of “reparative justice” allow authorities to frame police killings in moral rather than legal terms. When a police officer kills (...) a person who was not liable to this outcome, officials should offer monetary reparations, an apology, and other redress measures to the victim’s family. To make this argument, the article presents a philosophical account of non-liability hailing from self-defense theory, centering the distinction between reasonableness and liability. Reparations provide a non-adversarial alternative to civil litigation after a non-liable person has been killed by a police officer. In cases where the officer nevertheless acted reasonably, “institutional agent-regret” rather than moral responsibility grounds the argument for reparations. Throughout the article, it is argued that there are distinct racial wrongs both when police kill a non-liable black person and when family members of a black victim are treated poorly by officials in the civil litigation process. (shrink)

In analytic political philosophy, it is common to view state-sponsored injustice as the work of a corporate agent. But as I argue, structural injustice theory provides grounds for reassessing the agential approach, producing new insights into state-sponsored injustice. Using the case of eugenic sterilization in the United States, this article proposes a structurally-sensitive conception of state-sponsored injustice with six components: authorization, protection, systemization, execution, enablement, and norm- and belief-influence. Iris Marion Young’s models of responsibility for agential and structural injustice, and (...) the place of state-sponsored injustice with respect to these models, are also discussed. (shrink)

In the United States, police use of force experts often maintain that controversial police shootings where an unarmed person’s hand gesture was interpreted as their “going for a gun” are justifiable. If an officer waits to confirm that a weapon is indeed being pulled from a jacket pocket or waistband, it may be too late to defend against a lethal attack. This article examines police policy norms for self-defense against “uncertain threats” in three contexts: (1) known in-progress violent crimes, (2) (...) interactions with civilians behaving non-aggressively, and (3) interactions with civilians behaving aggressively. It is argued that the context of a known in-progress violent crime gives rise to threat probability-, fairness-, and lesser evil-based reasons for a norm permitting police officers to use lethal force. However, in the contexts of civilians behaving non-aggressively and civilians behaving aggressively, such a norm is not justifiable. In the former case, I introduce two conditions, the Justification condition and the Valuing Civilian Lives condition, which I argue are not presently met. In the latter case, these two conditions again are not met; aggression may moreover be excused or justified due to background injustices around race and the criminal justice system. (shrink)

In the literature on transitional justice, there is disagreement about whether countries like the United States can be characterized as transitional societies. Though it is widely recognized that transitional justice mechanisms such as truth commissions and reparations can be used by Global North nations to address racial injustice, some consider societies to be transitional only when they are undergoing a formal democratic regime change. We conceptualize the political situation of low-income Black communities under the U.S. imprisonment and policing regime in (...) terms of three criteria for identifying transitional contexts: normalized collective and political wrongdoing, pervasive structural inequality, and the failure of the rule of law. That these criteria are met, however, does not necessarily mean that a transition is taking place. Drawing on the American political development and abolition democracy literatures, we discuss what it would mean for the United States to transition out of its present imprisonment and policing regime. A transitional justice perspective shows the importance of not only pushing for truth and reparation, but for an actual transition. (shrink)

Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, Volume 104, Issue 3, Page 728-746, May 2022.

In 2002, the United States federal government created the Healthy Marriage Initiative, a policy that has distributed almost $1 billion in welfare money to marriage education programs. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork in classes for a purposive sample of 20 government-approved marriage education programs and textual analysis of more than 3,000 pages of curricular materials, I analyze how U.S. healthy marriage policy addresses issues of gendered communication and power. This case reveals the limitations of what I call ‘‘interpersonal gender interventions,’’ which (...) obscure how gendered ideologies and inequalities are often maintained through institutionalized practices and state action. Specifically, I argue that by focusing on negotiation, communication, and conflict-resolution strategies—or what marriage educators call “relationship skills”—at the interactional level, state-sponsored marriage education masks persistent institutionalized gender inequalities, namely, latent and hidden forms of marital power. More broadly, I use this case to reveal how interpersonal gender interventions will likely have limited utility if individuals learn to develop more gender-egalitarian beliefs in the absence of institutional changes that enable them to act on these values. (shrink)

The American Journal of Bioethics, Volume 12, Issue 6, Page 50-52, June 2012.

ObjectiveMost young adults diagnosed with breast or gynecologic cancers experience adverse reproductive or sexual health outcomes due to cancer and its treatment. However, evidence-based interventions that specifically address the RSH concerns of young adult and/or LGBTQ+ survivor couples are lacking. Our goal is to develop a feasible and acceptable couple-based intervention to reduce reproductive and sexual distress experience by young adult breast and gynecologic cancer survivor couples with diverse backgrounds.MethodsWe systematically adapted an empirically supported, theoretically grounded couple-based intervention to address (...) the RSH concerns of young couples coping with breast or gynecologic cancer through integration of stakeholder perspectives. We interviewed 11 couples with a history of breast or gynecologic cancer to review and pretest intervention materials. Three of these couples were invited to review and comment on intervention modifications. Content experts in RSH and dyadic coping, clinicians, and community advisors participated throughout the adaptation process.ResultsFindings confirmed the need for an online, couple-based intervention to support young couples experiencing RSH concerns after breast or gynecologic cancer. Qualitative themes suggested intervention preferences for: A highly flexible intervention that can be tailored to couples’ specific RSH concerns; Active steps to help members of a dyad “get on the same page” in their relationship and family building plans; A specific focus on raising partners’ awareness about how cancer can affect body image and physical intimacy; and Accessible, evidence-based information about RSH for both partners. These results, along with feedback from stakeholders, informed adaptation and finalization of the intervention content and format. The resulting virtual intervention, Opening the Conversation, includes five weekly sessions offering training to couples in communication and dyadic coping skills for addressing RSH concerns.ConclusionThe systematic adaptation process yielded a theory-informed intervention for young adult couples facing breast and gynecological cancers, which will be evaluated in a randomized controlled trial. The long-term goal is to implement and disseminate Opening the Conversation broadly to reach young adult couples with diverse backgrounds who are experiencing RSH concerns in cancer survivorship. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Canada and Pure Land, a New Field and Buddha-Land:Womanists and Buddhists Reading TogetherJennifer LeathReligion, in theory and in praxis, is often a journey through and to territories known and unknown. Sometimes the paths of particular traditions seem to avoid intersection at all costs. Thus, it is no small accomplishment that Womanists and scholars and practitioners of Buddhism, who typically reflect very different demographic groups, have been in dialogue about (...) Buddhist texts. I participated in two dialogues, in 2009 and 2011, which brought together scholars and practitioners of Buddhism and of Womanism, as well as scholars of Black religion more broadly, to read Buddhist texts from our individual and collective scholarly and faith perspectives. These dialogues addressed several challenges facing Womanist scholarship and praxis. The three discussed in this essay are (1) the Christian parameters that continue to constrain much contemporary Womanist discourse, (2) the ways that Womanism negotiates orthopraxy, and (3) the unique ways that Womanist scholarship and practice pursue liberation amid various postmodern conditions. Ultimately, the content and methodology of the Womanist-Buddhist dialogues inspire new ways to approach and mediate among these challenges. Throughout the dialogues, it became increasingly clear that the traditions of Womanism and Buddhism are similar insofar as they trouble the category of religion, while they contribute to the study of religion.I will begin with a brief exegesis that exemplifies one way of reading and weaving Womanism and Buddhism. Next, I will expound upon the three challenges mentioned above. Finally, I will raise some questions and concerns that must inform the ongoing development of Womanist-Buddhist dialogue. In the process, I will invite Womanist and Buddhist scholars to refashion our concepts of journey and destination.Canada and Pure Land: Journeys Toward FreedomAccording to Alice Walker's definition, among other things, a Womanist is: "Traditionally capable, as in: 'Mama, I'm walking to Canada and I'm taking you and a bunch of other slaves with me.' Reply: 'It wouldn't be the first time.'"1 This is important [End Page 57] because it underscores the three-dimensional nature of Womanism: (1) it is rooted in convictions (i.e., faith), not least of which is a commitment to liberation; (2) it is confirmed through praxis (i.e., walking to Canada—and taking others); and (3) it is something about which one may write (i.e., scholarship). It is also important because it establishes the significance of distinct and intersecting "movements": through space, place, time, and social position. Walking to Canada refers to movement from the Southern slave territories of the United States to the Northern free territories of Canada (i.e., movement through space, from one place to another). "Walking to Canada" is both ideological and pragmatic; it reinterprets the antebellum objective of migrating toward freedom for various postbellum times and conditions (i.e., movement through time). It is an ongoing journey from slavery to freedom (i.e., movement from one social position to another). Walker asserts that although our "Canada" may change, the quest for freedom, for oneself and one's community, remains the objective for Womanists and Womanism.In order to draw the reader's attention to Canada and to journeys toward freedom, Walker presents a dialogue between a child and mother. This exchange clearly establishes the identity of the first speaker, who indicates her plan to head to Canada, and to bring her "Mama" and other slaves with her, as a Womanist—a mother's child with womanish behaviors. However, her womanish/Womanist identity depends upon "Mama's" reply: "It wouldn't be the first time." In other words, the child's identity as a Womanist is fully realized in the process of dialogue.Although certain expressions of the relationship between land and freedom are unique to Womanism, the relationship between land and individual and collective freedom is not, of course, a Womanist invention. During one of the Womanist-Buddhist dialogues in which I participated, we discussed this relationship as we read The Sūtra of Contemplation on the Buddha of Immeasurable Life, from the Pure Land tradition of Mahāyāna Buddhism. In this sutra, Ajātasatru imprisons his father, King Bimbisāra, whose power and... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Written on the Body, Written by the SensesJennifer L. Hansen"Explore me," you said and I collected my ropes, flasks and maps, expecting to be back home soon. I dropped into the mass of you and I cannot find the way out. Sometimes I think I'm free, coughed up like Jonah from the whale, but then I turn a corner and recognize myself again. Myself in your skin, myself lodged (...) in your bones, myself floating in the cavities that decorate every surgeon's wall. That is how I know you. You are what I know.1Ever since Plato wished to banish the poets from the republic (Republic 607b2),2 philosophy has stood in a vexed relationship to literature. There seem to be at least three reasons for philosophy's traditional contempt for literature as a reliable means to truth: (a) because literature engages the passions of a reader, it may cloud the reader's ability to deliberate calmly and rationally about any given account of how things really are; (b) literature most commonly deals with the particular and concrete and therefore cannot claim to a more general or universal truth, and; (c) literature is too open-ended and ambiguous in its meaning, which, again, obstructs the reader's view of how things really are. Though the writer is imitating the world, is holding up a mirror to it—a speculum mundi—literature's images are mere appearances.Philosophy, on the contrary, aims for a kind of "transcendental vision." Either philosophy looks beyond the particular appearances of things in the world to find the one structure which unites all instances of the thing, or philosophy claims that the structure of each object is supplied by consciousness, which then delimits and bounds each object, and places it in space and time so that the scientist can better dissect, measure, and catalogue it. That is, either philosophers, in the [End Page 365] tradition of Parmenides, aim to find the one in the many—as Socrates explains in the Republic "we are accustomed to assuming one Form in each case for the many particulars" (596a4–5)—or as in Kant's Copernican revolutionary thinking, consciousness renders the object of experience a knowable thing.While this transcendental vision proves quite useful for the scientist who deals with the empirical, it proves less useful where the task would be to conceptualize what is not a possible object of experience. While the scientist can indeed dissect and probe the body to understand how it functions, the scientist is less likely to discover what it means for a body to love, or to be free. In the "The Antinomy of Pure Reason" in the first Critique, Kant, in fact, left us with a choice about what philosophy's true object should be: either we restrict philosophy to the empirical world and its logic, or we pursue metaphysical questions about God or Freedom which cannot be grasped.3 On pain of contradiction, we cannot have both. In chapter three of the Transcendental Doctrine Judgment, "The Ground of the Distinction of all Objects in General into Phenomena and Noumena," Kant uses a wonderful metaphor to illustrate the dangers of Pure Reason venturing into metaphysical questions, and thereby employing the categories beyond the empirical: "This domain is an island, enclosed by nature itself with unalterable limits. It is the land of truth—enchanting name!—surrounded by a wide and stormy ocean, the native home of illusion, where many a fog bank and many a swiftly melting iceberg give the deceptive appearance of farther shores, deluding the adventurous seafarer ever anew with empty hopes, and engaging him in enterprises which he can never abandon and yet is unable to carry to completion" (CR, 257). If we allow ourselves to be allured by the deceptive appearance of farther shores, then we are not engaged in philosophy, but speculation or mysticism. We cannot provide an account for such knowledge in universal terms, in arguments, in logic. And yet, as Kant himself very well knew, these are questions that we are, as humans, compelled to raise. At the outset of the Transcendental Dialectic, Kant makes clear that reason will ineluctably be led... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Commentary on “Psychopathy, Other-Regarding Moral Beliefs, and Responsibility”Jennifer Radden (bio)Fields’s line of reasoning may be summarized, though to do so is to lose much that is nice, and important, in the details. He begins by distinguishing the kind of disorder we are dealing with. Psychopathy is a personality disorder: an unchanging, trait-based condition, not a mental disease or illness. Then he asks why we might judge the presence (...) of psychopathy to vitiate moral and legal responsibility, and answers that psychopathy must reflect some kind of disability. It has been hypothesized (by Duff) that this disability concerns moral understanding, but Fields offers an alternative account. Rather than lacking moral understanding, he argues, the psychopath is disabled in that he cannot form other-regarding moral beliefs. A very convincing argument is then made to persuade us that such a disability would—or should—constitute an excuse.Much of this reasoning is unassailable, and Fields’s careful and systematic approach is impressive. Yet I am left with a lingering concern. He has not convinced me that the psychopath is incapable of forming instead of merely disinclined to form the required sort of moral beliefs. And rather than furthering or supporting his incapacity explanation, Cleckley’s example of Milt undermines it.Maybe the example of Milt’s callousness is the place to start, although whether this is as strong an example as Fields and Cleckley seem to think of psychopathy, is questionable. It is a rather underdescribed example, certainly. We are told that this is the unvarying pattern of Milt’s behavior. Indeed, it has to be to fit the clinical definition of psychopathy as a trait-based character disorder rather than a short-lived “out of character” response. And yet Milt has reached driving age and his mother is still naive enough to expect he’ll pick her up! We need to know more. If mother hasn’t grasped Milt’s dispositional traits yet, why not? Perhaps these traits are not so unvarying and entrenched after all. Or mother is colluding, or denying? Perhaps the understanding between mother and son contained meanings not apparent in the bald clinical description provided by Cleckley. There may be more to this story than meets the eye.So I’m not sure that the example successfully illustrates the clinical definition of psychopathy. But let’s say it does. If we accept the story as we are told it, there remains a gap in the reasoning. That Milt lacks the capacity to form such (other regarding) beliefs, and to harbor guilt feelings as Fields asserts, would explain his irresponsible [End Page 287] behavior—why he “so easily gives way to whims, even though he knows that to do so is to leave his mother... stranded”(p. 33).An incapacity to form other-regarding beliefs may explain this behavior, true. But so equally might being someone given to whims. After all Milt might just have the personality trait, also long established and unchanging, that he gives in to whims more often than most. This is what people sometimes mean when they attribute impulsiveness. And impulsiveness is not only a rather common trait; as it happens it is also one associated with this particular disorder (among others).Fields recognizes the type of explanation which refers to the presence of an unthought out impulse to act, a whim explanation. But he fails to give this kind of explanation its due, using it only selectively and arbitrarily. If, as Field establishes, it is more coherent to think that Milt’s initial offer to his mother was a matter of whim—rather than evidence of the other-regarding belief that one ought to concern oneself with the welfare of one’s parents—then there is no reason to suppose that his failure to follow through and pick her up was not also a whim. This second whim represents an equally satisfactory (simple, plausible, explanatory, not ad hoc ) explanation: Milt might have come to pick up his mum but he whimfully chose not to.And this is a separate and distinct explanation from the one Fields proposes in terms of incapacity. A whim is not (immediate) evidence of incapacity... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Ethics & the Environment 7.1 (2002) 147-153 [Access article in PDF] Book Review Rattling the Cage: Toward Legal Rights for Animals Rattling the Cage: Toward Legal Rights for Animals Steven M. Wise. Foreward by Jane Goodall. Cambridge, Mass.: Perseus Books, 2000. pp. 384. US $17.50. ISBN 0-7382-0437-4 (Paperback) "Ancient philosophers claimed that all nonhuman animals had been designed and placed on this earth just for human beings. Ancient jurists (...) declared that law had been created just for human beings. Although philosophy and science have long since recanted, the law has not." Steven M. Wise, Rattling the Cage, p. 4. Readers of this journal are well-versed in the myriad ways in which nonhuman animals are harmfully exploited at the hands of human beings—from battery hens and veal calves to mass-produced pigs; from Pennsylvania pigeon shoots to canned hunts on Texas ranches; from rodeos to roadside zoos; from LD-50 toxicity tests on rats and Draize eye tests on rabbits to head trauma and infectious disease experimentation on primates. Despite other sticking points, it is by now uncontroversial among [End Page 147] nonanthropocentric theorists that, in utilitarian terms, the benefits to humans of the above practices fall far short of justifying the harms they cause to their nonhuman victims or, in deontological terms, that they violate the rights of creatures with inherent value. Indeed, these arguments are so well-rehearsed and so widely regarded as compelling that it no longer seems particularly bold to predict that if reason ever prevails over tradition and prejudice, the future will look back on this generation's treatment of our fellow creatures with the same kind of shame and condemnation with which European Americans regard our slaveholding past.More sobering but equally familiar is the observation that decisive arguments for the gross immorality of existing practices will bring about neither their elimination nor significant reform as long as the presumed legitimacy of human exploitation of nonhuman beings remains entrenched in both popular consciousness and economic, political, and legal institutions. In the interests of chipping away at popular apathy, academics should no doubt go on repeating the well-worn arguments against speciesism in classrooms, popular venues, and professional research. But in a world structured far more directly by the interests of a powerful few than by the values of the many, this consciousness-raising strategy properly plays at most a supporting role to the even more vital project of challenging and ultimately restructuring the institutions that sanction and carry out these injustices. In short, what nonhuman animals need from ethically sensitive intellectuals is not just rational argument, but effective legal and political action.One of the main institutional obstacles to progress in this area is undoubtedly the legal relegation of animals to property status—which is why Steve M. Wise's Rattling the Cage: Toward Legal Rights for Animals is such an important book. Wise teaches animal rights law at Harvard, Vermont, and John Marshall Law Schools and has spent more than twenty years fighting for animals in the legal system; his book displays the bittersweet fruit of that experience. The tenor throughout is a mixture of conviction in the justice of his cause—which cannot but sustain a vision of its eventual success—together with the frustration and determined patience borne from decades of butting up against an utterly implacable wall. An eloquent foreword by Jane Goodall, together with Wise's own harrowing first chapter, describe the nightmarish existences imposed on our nearest nonhuman relatives, the chimpanzees and bonobos, for the sake of science, entertainment, and profit—nightmares enabled by a legal system that [End Page 148] treats all nonhumans as mere things. An engaging storyteller with a synthetic conception of the history of ideas, Wise unearths the origins of this conception of animals in the Great Chain of Being, demonstrates its defeat by Darwinian science, and builds piece by piece a case—drawing heavily on research into animal consciousness—for extending legal rights at least to chimpanzees and bonobos.The substantive theses of this case are, first, that the denial of... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Ethics & the Environment 7.1 (2002) 147-153 [Access article in PDF] Book Review Rattling the Cage: Toward Legal Rights for Animals Rattling the Cage: Toward Legal Rights for Animals Steven M. Wise. Foreward by Jane Goodall. Cambridge, Mass.: Perseus Books, 2000. pp. 384. US $17.50. ISBN 0-7382-0437-4 (Paperback) "Ancient philosophers claimed that all nonhuman animals had been designed and placed on this earth just for human beings. Ancient jurists (...) declared that law had been created just for human beings. Although philosophy and science have long since recanted, the law has not." Steven M. Wise, Rattling the Cage, p. 4. Readers of this journal are well-versed in the myriad ways in which nonhuman animals are harmfully exploited at the hands of human beings—from battery hens and veal calves to mass-produced pigs; from Pennsylvania pigeon shoots to canned hunts on Texas ranches; from rodeos to roadside zoos; from LD-50 toxicity tests on rats and Draize eye tests on rabbits to head trauma and infectious disease experimentation on primates. Despite other sticking points, it is by now uncontroversial among [End Page 147] nonanthropocentric theorists that, in utilitarian terms, the benefits to humans of the above practices fall far short of justifying the harms they cause to their nonhuman victims or, in deontological terms, that they violate the rights of creatures with inherent value. Indeed, these arguments are so well-rehearsed and so widely regarded as compelling that it no longer seems particularly bold to predict that if reason ever prevails over tradition and prejudice, the future will look back on this generation's treatment of our fellow creatures with the same kind of shame and condemnation with which European Americans regard our slaveholding past.More sobering but equally familiar is the observation that decisive arguments for the gross immorality of existing practices will bring about neither their elimination nor significant reform as long as the presumed legitimacy of human exploitation of nonhuman beings remains entrenched in both popular consciousness and economic, political, and legal institutions. In the interests of chipping away at popular apathy, academics should no doubt go on repeating the well-worn arguments against speciesism in classrooms, popular venues, and professional research. But in a world structured far more directly by the interests of a powerful few than by the values of the many, this consciousness-raising strategy properly plays at most a supporting role to the even more vital project of challenging and ultimately restructuring the institutions that sanction and carry out these injustices. In short, what nonhuman animals need from ethically sensitive intellectuals is not just rational argument, but effective legal and political action.One of the main institutional obstacles to progress in this area is undoubtedly the legal relegation of animals to property status—which is why Steve M. Wise's Rattling the Cage: Toward Legal Rights for Animals is such an important book. Wise teaches animal rights law at Harvard, Vermont, and John Marshall Law Schools and has spent more than twenty years fighting for animals in the legal system; his book displays the bittersweet fruit of that experience. The tenor throughout is a mixture of conviction in the justice of his cause—which cannot but sustain a vision of its eventual success—together with the frustration and determined patience borne from decades of butting up against an utterly implacable wall. An eloquent foreword by Jane Goodall, together with Wise's own harrowing first chapter, describe the nightmarish existences imposed on our nearest nonhuman relatives, the chimpanzees and bonobos, for the sake of science, entertainment, and profit—nightmares enabled by a legal system that [End Page 148] treats all nonhumans as mere things. An engaging storyteller with a synthetic conception of the history of ideas, Wise unearths the origins of this conception of animals in the Great Chain of Being, demonstrates its defeat by Darwinian science, and builds piece by piece a case—drawing heavily on research into animal consciousness—for extending legal rights at least to chimpanzees and bonobos.The substantive theses of this case are, first, that the denial of... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:David Hume: A Dissertation on the Passions; The Natural History of ReligionJennifer A. HerdtTom L. Beauchamp, ed. David Hume: A Dissertation on the Passions; The Natural History of Religion. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2007. Pp. cxxxv + 317. ISBN 978-0-19-925188-9, cloth, $150. ISBN 978-0-19-957574-9, Paper, $45.The present volume is the fifth out of eight total projected for the Clarendon Edition of the Works of David Hume. Its editor, Tom (...) Beauchamp, is one of the general editors of the Clarendon Hume, together with David Fate Norton and M. A. Stewart. Beauchamp served as the editor for the Clarendon editions of An Enquiry concerning the Principle of Morals (1998) and An Enquiry concerning Human Understanding (2000), both of which have garnered critical acclaim. Like the previous volumes, this new edition of A Dissertation on the Passions and The Natural History of Religion has been prepared with erudition and meticulous attention to detail. It becomes without question the definitive critical edition of these texts.The volume begins with a superb editorial introduction, giving a detailed account of the publication history of the two texts included in the volume, including an overview of contemporary reviews and a note explaining how the various editions of the texts were collated and the text prepared. These are followed by the texts of A Dissertation on the Passions and The Natural History of Religion, together comprising eighty-seven pages. The edition includes both line and paragraph numbers for easy reference. A section titled “Editor’s Annotations” extends to nearly the same length and offers not only definitions of obscure terms, translations of non-English quotations, and explanations of references that are incomplete or unclear but also identification of related material elsewhere in Hume’s corpus and information on the broader intellectual context of Hume’s thought. A subsequent “Editorial Appendix” gives a detailed account of the decisions made in arriving at the critical text, which is based primarily on the 1772 edition (the final edition made during Hume’s lifetime) but which does make some departures, in both orthography and punctuation, from Hume’s original. The “Editorial Appendix” also includes a register of all non-systematic editorial changes and all substantive variants among successive editions of the texts. The “Editorial Appendix” is followed by an essay on the intellectual background of both A Dissertation on the Passions and The Natural History of Religion, a “Biographical Appendix” with brief biographies of all the persons mentioned by Hume in the two dissertations, a bibliography of works cited by either Hume or the editor, and a short-title index of Hume’s own references. The volume concludes with Hume’s index, compiled for the 1758 edition of Essays and Treatises on Several Subjects, followed by the editor’s index.The two texts comprising this volume are two of the Four Dissertations published by Hume in 1757. A Dissertation on the Passions was for the most part extracted [End Page 233] from Book 2 of A Treatise of Human Nature. Thus, its publication completed Hume’s project of reworking the material from the Treatise into a more essayistic style, a project Hume had commenced with Philosophical Essays concerning Human Understanding (in 1748, reworking Book 1 of the Treatise) and An Enquiry concerning the Principles of Morals (in 1751, reworking Book 3). The fact that Hume left A Dissertation on the Passions for last suggests that he regarded it as less central to his own original philosophical contribution than the other two. This impression is reinforced by the fact that he refers to it in “My Own Life” simply as one of “some other small pieces” published with The Natural History of Religion (xxvii), as well as by the fact that while Books 1 and 3 were completely re-written, nearly three-quarters of A Dissertation on the Passions was taken verbatim from Book 2 of the Treatise (li). One of the great merits of the present edition is the inclusion of a section devoted to presenting, in parallel columns, all Treatise passages preserved in A Dissertation on the Passions, thereby facilitating an easy comparison of the two texts.Scholars of Hume... (shrink)

We take the well-known intuitionistic modal logic of Fischer Servi with semantics in bi-relational Kripke frames, and give the natural extension to topological Kripke frames. Fischer Servi’s two interaction conditions relating the intuitionistic pre-order with the modal accessibility relation generalize to the requirement that the relation and its inverse be lower semi-continuous with respect to the topology. We then investigate the notion of topological bisimulation relations between topological Kripke frames, as introduced by Aiello and van Benthem, and show that their (...) topology-preserving conditions are equivalent to the properties that the inverse relation and the relation are lower semi-continuous with respect to the topologies on the two models. The first main result is that this notion of topological bisimulation yields semantic preservation w.r.t. topological Kripke models for both intuitionistic tense logics, and for their classical companion multi-modal logics in the setting of the Gödel translation. After giving canonical topological Kripke models for the Hilbert-style axiomatizations of the Fischer Servi logic and its classical companion logic, we use the canonical model in a second main result to characterize a Hennessy–Milner class of topological models between any pair of which there is a maximal topological bisimulation that preserve the intuitionistic semantics. (shrink)

The rise to power of Donald Trump has been shocking in many ways. One of these was that it disrupted the preexisting consensus that overt racism would be death to a national political campaign. In this paper, I argue that Trump made use of what I call “racial figleaves”—additional utterances that provide just enough cover to give reassurance to voters who are racially resentful but don’t wish to see themselves as racist. These figleaves also, I argue, play a key role (...) in shifting our norms about what counts as racist: they bring it about that something which would previously have been seen as revealing obvious racism is now seen as the sort of thing that a nonracist might say. This gives them tremendous power to corrupt not just our political discourse but our culture more broadly. (shrink)

What might a synaesthetic cinema look like? Or, better, what might it sound, smell, taste and feel like? This essay approaches David Lynch's Mulholland Drive as a means of thinking through conceptual but concrete descriptions of synaesthesia not as an artistic device, a metaphor, an historical trend, or a rare clinical condition, but as a way of being in space and time — and being in cinema — that is simultaneously abstract and very real. Lynch's film becomes, as well, an (...) opportunity to think about cinematic spectacle and ‘excess’ in sensorily specific ways. The hallucinatory sensual disjunctions that occur throughout the film reveal a double system of reference: vision and proprioception mutually informing and interrupting one another, in ways that recall Brian Massumi's discussion of topological architecture. Those moments of cinematic, sensory ‘excess’ are sensual reminders of the degree to which vision is entangled with other senses in the experience of cinema. (shrink)

[First Paragraph] Unlike so many other distinctions in philosophy, H P Grice's distinction between what is said and what is implicated has an immediate appeal: undergraduate students readily grasp that one who says 'someone shot my parents' has merely implicated rather than said that he was not the shooter [2]. It seems to capture things that we all really pay attention to in everyday conversation'this is why there are so many people whose entire sense of humour consists of deliberately ignoring (...) implicatures. ('Can you pass the salt?' 'Yes.') Unsurprisingly, it was quickly picked up and put to a wide variety of uses in not only in philosophy but also in linguistics and psychology. What is surprising, however, is that upon close inspection Grice's conception of implicature turns out to be very different from those at work in the literature which has grown out of his original discussion. This would not be much of a criticism of this literature were it not for the fact that discussions of implicature explicitly claim to be using Grice's notion, not some other one inspired by him (generally going so far as to quote one of Grice's characterisations of implicature). This still would not be terribly interesting if the notion Grice was actually carving out had little theoretical or practical utility. But I will argue here that Grice's own notion of implicature, one quite different from the ones most of us have come to work with, is in fact far more interesting and subtle than that which has been attributed to him. (shrink)

By now it goes without saying that cinema is and has always been a synesthetic experience. But what exactly do we mean when we say that? The paper develops a phenomenology of “cinematic synesthesia” that draws upon three recent developments: first, the neuroscientific “neonatal synesthesia hypothesis”; second, Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s lectures on child psychology and translator Talia Welsh’s contextualization of that work within recent developmental psychology; and third, Dylan Trigg’s concept of a “darkened phenomenology” that accounts for the radically “unhuman.” These (...) conceptual lenses are trained on Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining, whose legendary impact stems from its perplexing tangle of the sensory with the cognitive, the unconscious with the conscious, the individual with the collective, and the past with the present. (shrink)

Upward mobility through the path of higher education has been an article of faith for generations of working-class, low-income, and immigrant college students. While we know this path usually entails financial sacrifices and hard work, very little attention has been paid to the deep personal compromises such students have to make as they enter worlds vastly different from their own. Measuring the true cost of higher education for those from disadvantaged backgrounds, Moving Up without Losing Your Way looks at the (...) ethical dilemmas of upward mobility—the broken ties with family and friends, the severed connections with former communities, and the loss of identity—faced by students as they strive to earn a successful place in society. -/- Drawing upon philosophy, social science, personal stories, and interviews, Jennifer Morton reframes the college experience, factoring in not just educational and career opportunities but also essential relationships with family, friends, and community. Finding that student strivers tend to give up the latter for the former, negating their sense of self, Morton seeks to reverse this course. She urges educators to empower students with a new narrative of upward mobility—one that honestly situates ethical costs in historical, social, and economic contexts and that allows students to make informed decisions for themselves. -/- A powerful work with practical implications, Moving Up without Losing Your Way paves a hopeful road so that students might achieve social mobility while retaining their best selves. (shrink)

Categorical perception (CP) refers to how similar things look different depending on whether they are classified as the same category. Many studies demonstrate that adult humans show CP for human emotional faces. It is widely debated whether the effect can be accounted for solely by perceptual differences (structural differences among emotional faces) or whether additional perceiver-based conceptual knowledge is required. In this review, I discuss the phenomenon of CP and key studies showing CP for emotional faces. I then discuss a (...) new model of emotion which highlights how perceptual and conceptual knowledge interact to explain how people see discrete emotions in others’ faces. In doing so, I discuss how language (emotion words included in the paradigm) contribute to CP. (shrink)

One of the most important aspects of Grice’s theory of conversation is the drawing of a borderline between what is said and what is implic- ated. Grice’s views concerning this borderline have been strongly and influentially criticised by relevance theorists. In particular, it has become increasingly widely accepted that Grice’s notion of what is said is too lim- ited, and that pragmatics has a far larger role to play in determining what is said than Grice would have allowed. (See for (...) example Bezuidenhuit 1996; Blakemore 1987; Carston 1991; Recanati 1991, 1993, 2001; Sperber and Wilson 1986; Wilson and Sperber 1981.) In this paper, I argue that the rejection of Grice has moved too swiftly, as a key line of objection which has led to this rejection is flawed. The flaw, we will see, is that relevance theorists rely on a misunderstanding of Grice’s project in his theory of conversation. I am not arguing that Grice’s versions of saying and implicating are right in all details, but simply that certain widespread reasons for rejecting his theory are based on misconceptions. (shrink)

Practical deliberation consists in thinking about what to do. Such deliberation is deemed rational when it conforms to certain normative requirements. What is often ignored is the role that an agent's context can play in so-called ‘failures’ of rationality. In this paper, I use recent cognitive science research investigating the effects of resource-scarcity on decision-making and cognitive function to argue that context plays an important role in determining which norms should structure an agent's deliberation. This evidence undermines the view that (...) the norms of ‘ideal’ rationality are necessary and universal requirements on deliberation. They are a solution to the problems faced by cognitively limited agents in a context of moderate scarcity. In a context of severe scarcity, the problems faced by cognitively limited agents are different and require deliberation structured by different norms. Agents reason rationally when they use the norms best suited to their context and cognitive capacities. (shrink)

Native women residing in the Subarctic and Arctic are currently struggling for the right to decide whether they will be hospitalized or have a midwife present for the birth of their children. The argument presented in this review paper outlines the cultural and clinical factors in favour of recognizing and legalizing traditional midwifery in the North and critically examines the statistical and safety concerns raised by those arguing against giving Northern Native women an alternative to evacuation from their home communities.

In this paper, I discuss the relationship between bodily experiences in dreams and the sleeping, physical body. I question the popular view that dreaming is a naturally and frequently occurring real-world example of cranial envatment. This view states that dreams are functionally disembodied states: in a majority of dreams, phenomenal experience, including the phenomenology of embodied selfhood, unfolds completely independently of external and peripheral stimuli and outward movement. I advance an alternative and more empirically plausible view of dreams as weakly (...) phenomenally-functionally embodied states. The view predicts that bodily experiences in dreams can be placed on a continuum with bodily illusions in wakefulness. It also acknowledges that there is a high degree of variation across dreams and different sleep stages in the degree of causal coupling between dream imagery, sensory input, and outward motor activity. Furthermore, I use the example of movement sensations in dreams and their relation to outward muscular activity to develop a predictive processing account. I propose that movement sensations in dreams are associated with a basic and developmentally early kind of bodily self-sampling. This account, which affords a central role to active inference, can then be broadened to explain other aspects of self- and world-simulation in dreams. Dreams are world-simulations centered on the self, and important aspects of both self- and world-simulation in dreams are closely linked to bodily self-sampling, including muscular activity, illusory own-body perception, and vestibular orienting in sleep. This is consistent with cognitive accounts of dream generation, in which long-term beliefs and expectations, as well as waking concerns and memories play an important role. What I add to this picture is an emphasis on the real-body basis of dream imagery. This offers a novel perspective on the formation of dream imagery and suggests new lines of research. (shrink)

The paper proposes a minimal definition of dreaming in terms of immersive spatiotemporal hallucination (ISTH) occurring in sleep or during sleep–wake transitions and under the assumption of reportability. I take these conditions to be both necessary and sufficient for dreaming to arise. While empirical research results may, in the future, allow for an extension of the concept of dreaming beyond sleep and possibly even independently of reportability, ISTH is part of any possible extension of this definition and thus is a (...) constitutive condition of dreaming. I also argue that the proposed ISTH model of dreaming, in conjunction with considerations on the epistemic relationship between dreaming and dream reports, raises important questions about the extent to which dreams typically involve a detailed body representation—an assumption that plays an important role in philosophical work on dreaming. As a commonly accepted definition of dreaming is lacking in current dream research, the ISTH model, which integrates conceptual analysis and epistemological considerations with results from empirical research, is an important contribution to this field. By linking dreaming to felt presence, full-body illusions, and autoscopic phenomena such as out-of-body experiences in wakefulness and in the hypnagogic state, the ISTH model of dreaming also helps integrate dream research, both theoretically and experimentally, with the study of other altered states of consciousness involving hallucinations. It makes straightforward and investigable predictions by claiming that all of these experiences have amodal spatiotemporal hallucinations as their common denominator. Finally, it is theoretically relevant for the philosophical discussion on minimal phenomenal selfhood. (shrink)

This paper examines masculinity in relation to the modern tracking shot in Daren Aronofsky's The Wrestler and Derek Cianfrance's The Place Beyond the Pines. These films make prominent use of a particular tracking shot in which the camera floats behind a male character, his head neatly centred in the frame. The camera in these ‘follow-shots’ seems unmistakably but loosely tethered to the character's body. This paper attempts to ascertain the phenomenological nature and critical significance of that relationship, which in recent (...) films expresses the intimate distance and dissonance between mobile cameras, masculinity and the male body in the twenty-first century. (shrink)

Emoji faces, which are ubiquitous in our everyday communication, are thought to resemble human faces and aid emotional communication. Yet, few studies examine whether emojis are perceived as a particular emotion and whether that perception changes based on rendering differences across electronic platforms. The current paper draws upon emotion theory to evaluate whether emoji faces depict anatomical differences that are proposed to differentiate human depictions of emotion. We modified the existing Facial Action Coding System to apply to emoji faces. An (...) equivalent “emoji FACS” rubric allowed us to evaluate two important questions: First, Anatomically, does the same emoji face “look” the same across platforms and versions? Second, Do emoji faces perceived as a particular emotion category resemble the proposed human facial expression for that emotion? To answer these questions, we compared the anatomically based codes for 31 emoji faces across three platforms and two version updates. We then compared those codes to the proposed human facial expression prototype for the emotion perceived within the emoji face. Overall, emoji faces across platforms and versions were not anatomically equivalent. Moreover, the majority of emoji faces did not conform to human facial expressions for an emotion, although the basic anatomical codes were shared among human and emoji faces. Some emotion categories were better predicted by the assortment of anatomical codes than others, with some individual differences among platforms. We discuss theories of emotion that help explain how emoji faces are perceived as an emotion, even when anatomical differences are not always consistent or specific to an emotion. (shrink)

Journal of Political Philosophy, EarlyView.

This article explores the relationship between neoconservative values and neoliberalism in American jurisprudence through a critique of the US Supreme Court’s Hobby Lobby decision. The article uncovers how the Court imposes market-oriented logic on religious expression and in the process spiritualizes economic activity. In this way neoliberal rationality is intertwined with neoconservative values. For example, exercising religion through corporatization can be understood as a neoconservative moderation of the corrupting influence of excessive neoliberal individualism. Finally, while the decision furthers employer control (...) of workers’ reproduction, the Court’s proposed workaround—a direct government contraceptives program—would undermine that control and points to another, more emancipatory response to the problems of neoliberalism. (shrink)

Emotional arousal and negative affect enhance recall of central aspects of an event. However, the role of discrete emotions in selective memory processing is understudied. Undergraduates were asked to recall and rate autobiographical memories of eight emotional events. Details of each memory were rated as central or peripheral to the event. Significance of the event, vividness, reliving and other aspects of remembering were also rated for each memory. Positive affect enhanced recall of peripheral details. Furthermore, the impairment of peripheral recall (...) was greatest in memories of anger, not of fear. Reliving the experience at retrieval was negatively correlated with recall of peripheral details for some emotions (e.g., anger) but not others (e.g., fear), irrespective of similarities in affect and intensity. Within individuals, recall of peripheral details was correlated with less belief in the memory's accuracy and more likelihood to recall the memory from one's own eyes (i.e., a field perspective). (shrink)

Most words in English are ambiguous between different interpretations; words can mean different things in different contexts. We investigate the implications of different types of semantic ambiguity for connectionist models of word recognition. We present a model in which there is competition to activate distributed semantic representations. The model performs well on the task of retrieving the different meanings of ambiguous words, and is able to simulate data reported by Rodd, Gaskell, and Marslen‐Wilson [J. Mem. Lang. 46 (2002) 245] on (...) how semantic ambiguity affects lexical decision performance. In particular, the network shows a disadvantage forwords with multiple unrelated meanings (e.g., bark) that coexists with a benefit for words with multiple related word senses (e.g., twist). The ambiguity disadvantage arises because of interference between the different meanings, while the sense benefit arises because of differences in the structure of the attractor basins formed during learning. Words with few senses develop deep, narrow attractor basins, while words with many senses develop shallow, broad basins. We conclude that the mental representations of word meanings can be modelled as stable states within a high‐dimensional semantic space, and that variations in the meanings of words shape the landscape of this space. (shrink)

Much attention has been given to determining whether an adolescent patient has the capacity to consent to research. This study explores the factors that influence adolescents' decisions to participate in a research study about youth violence and to determine positive or negative feelings elicited by being a research subject. The majority of subjects perceived their decision to participate to be free of coercion, and few felt badly about having participated. However, adolescents who were alone in the room during the assent (...) process were more likely to report that they chose freely to be a research subject. This study may influence the ways physicians communicate with adolescent patients around research assent within a clinical care environment. 1This article was presented at the Annual Meetings of The Pediatric Academic Societies in Baltimore, MD and The Society for Academic Emergency Medicine in Atlanta, GA in May, 2001. (shrink)

There is growing interest in the evolutionary dynamics of molecular genetic pathways and networks, and the extent to which the molecular evolution of a gene depends on its position within a pathway or network, as well as over‐all network topology. Investigations on the relationships between network organization, topological architecture and evolutionary dynamics provide intriguing hints as to how networks evolve. Recent studies also suggest that genetic pathway and network structures may influence the action of evolutionary forces, and may play a (...) role in maintaining phenotypic robustness in organisms. BioEssays 26:479–484, 2004. © 2004 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. (shrink)

This article seeks to address the doctrine of the atonement using both the methodology of philosophical theology as well as the voices of feminist theology. Working primarily with the Christus Victor model and expanding upon Anslem’s framework, contemporary voices in feminist theological scholarship such as Darby Kathleen Ray, Kathryn Tanner, Mary Grey and Carter Heyward will be built upon in order to better further the conversation of the work of the cross.

Abstract: Practical deliberation is deliberation concerning what to do governed by norms on intention (e.g. means-end coherence and consistency), which are taken to be a mark of rational deliberation. According to the theory of practical deliberation I develop in this paper we should think of the norms of rational practical deliberation ecologically: that is, the norms that constitute rational practical deliberation depend on the complex interaction between the psychological capacities of the agent in question and the agent's environment. I argue (...) that this view does a better job of justifying particular norms for practical deliberation than intrinsic or constitutivist theories. Finally, I argue against the Myth Theory of deliberation, which takes there to be no such norms on deliberation. (shrink)

In this article, we examine how white working-class women reimagine gender in the face of social and economic changes that have undermined their ability to perform normative femininity. As blue-collar jobs have disappeared, scholars have posited that white working-class men and women have become increasingly isolated, disconnected from institutions, and hopeless about the future, leading to a culture of despair. Although past literature has examined how working-class white men cope with the inability to perform masculinity through wage-earning and family authority, (...) gender has been undertheorized in these discussions, treating working-class women’s and men’s despair interchangeably. Drawing on 37 in-depth interviews conducted in a former coal-mining town in northeastern Pennsylvania, we identify three overarching strategies that women deploy in their life histories to cope with disruption: embracing pain as an opportunity for self-growth; dispelling shame and striving for equality; and enduring suffering. These strategies allow women to feel hopeful and worthy as they confront enormous challenges, whether starting over following relationship dissolution, learning to be independent from men, or simply surviving hardship for the sake of their children. We explore the implications for recreating gender identity in each strategy and question how different strategies might serve to protect women from, or alternatively solidify, sentiments of despair. (shrink)