This essay explores the speech act of dogwhistling (sometimes referred to as ‘using coded language’). Dogwhistles may be overt or covert, and within each of these categories may be intentional or unintentional. Dogwhistles are a powerful form of political speech, allowing people to be manipulated in ways they would resist if the manipulation was carried outmore openly—often drawing on racist attitudes that are consciously rejected. If philosophers focus only on content expressed or otherwise consciously conveyed they may miss (...) what is most powerful and pernicious in the speech of political culture. This essay is a call to start paying attention to these more covert speech acts, and a first attempt at beginning to theorize them. It argues that dogwhistles present a complex and interesting case for the philosopher of language, and explores their implications for democratic politics. (shrink)

Much liberal-democratic thought has concerned itself primarily – even exclusively – with coercive interference in citizens’ lives. But political actors do things – they engage in influential speech, they offer incentives, they mislead other actors, they disrupt the expected functioning of decision-making mechanisms etc. – that fall short of coercion, yet may nonetheless call for normative evaluation and public justification, precisely because they serve to purposively alter citizens’ beliefs, intentions and behaviour. With this article, I explicate a conception of (...) political manipulation to capture this sort of interference, and to distinguish individual manipulation from the manipulation of nonindividual agents like committees, institutions and states. The account, beyond being necessary for further work on the ethics of political manipulation, should prove useful to both normative thinkers interested in power, justice and the ethics of democratic decision-making, and empirical scholars in search of a conceptual apparatus to sharpen their investigations into the exercise of subtle forms of political power. (shrink)

This chapter explores the phenomenon of dehumanization, and how it facilitates violence, in the episode “Men Against Fire.” After exploring the nature, and consequences, of the MASS Implant as a tool to see human beings as literal monsters, we consider some historical and contemporary examples of dehumanization, such as language and propaganda, that functions similarly by stripping away the humanity of marginalized groups. “Men Against Fire” simultaneously serves the function of a historical lesson on the relationship between dehumanization and violence, (...) as well as a cautionary tale in a current society that is already repeating so many of the mistakes that have lead to genocide and mass human rights violations in the past. (shrink)

The expression of emotion works as an argumentative tool in the case of Spanish emigration and its depiction in the media. I have made a comparative analysis of two different political contexts to observe different social parameters at work: the current democratic system and the post-Spanish Civil War dictatorial regime. In both cases, they are exploited by third parties to validate a particular political stance. The analysis made in this work draws on Edwards’ ‘emotion in use’ and the (...) lexical framework within Martin and White’s ‘appraisal model’. The way emigration is emotionally verbalized determines issues such as responsibility. Negative emotion remarks require some agent to be blamed, normally the government for its economic policies, whereas the positive ones have a reinforcement effect and work as a bonding mechanism to the system. Judgment and Affect are found to be interrelated. More specifically, and following Martin and White’s terminology, Affect may work as a graduation instrument in the expression of Judgment. (shrink)

Psychometrics firms such as Cambridge Analytica (CA) and troll factories such as the Internet Research Agency (IRA) have had a significant effect on democratic politics, through narrow targeting of political advertising (CA) and concerted disinformation campaigns on social media (IRA) (U.S. Department of Justice 2019; Select Committee on Intelligence, United States Senate 2019; DiResta et al. 2019). It is natural to think that such activities manipulate individuals and, hence, are wrong. Yet, as some recent cases illustrate, the moral concerns (...) with these activities cannot be reduced simply to the effects they have on individuals. Rather, we will argue, the wrongness of these activities relates to the threats they present to the legitimacy of political orders. This occurs primarily through a mechanism we call “emergent manipulation,” rather than through the sort of manipulation that involves specific individuals. (shrink)

Many philosophical accounts of manipulation are blind to the extent to which actual people fall short of the rational ideal, while prominent accounts in political science are under-inclusive. We offer necessary and sufficient conditions – Suitable Reason and Testimonial Honesty – distinguishing manipulative from non-manipulative influence; develop a ‘hypothetical disclosure test’ to measure the degree of manipulation; and provide further criteria to assess and compare the morality of manipulation across cases. We discuss multiple examples drawn from (...) politics and from public policy with particular attention to recent debates about the ethics and politics of nudge. (shrink)

The author of the article discusses a political discourse of the US president Donald Trump. The political discourse is considered to be a type of discourse based on views and beliefs, the purpose of which is to manipulate the consciousness of the addressee using strategies in order to form certain beliefs. The strategy in this case means the plan of implementation of the communicative task, necessary for effective achievement of the addressee’s goal, realized with the help of certain (...) tactics. The choice of the subject matter is determined by the interest to political communication. The author analyses discourse strategies and markers, stylistic and lexico-grammatical means used as manipulative means in Donald Trump’s Acceptance Speech, Victory Speech, and Inaugural Address. Special attention is given to the strategy of improvement, strategy of enhancement, and strategy for evaluation of alternatives. It is known that presidential public addresses are of great importance, therefore communicative skills of politicians and ability to speak in public play a great role in their political career. The analysis of D. Trump’s presidential discourse has revealed the use of discursive manipulative strategies and manipulative markers, numerous repetitions, calls for joint action, the use of ‘unifying vocabulary‘, slogans, inversion. It is noted that the presidential political discourse is an effective means of manipulating the consciousness of the nation and the formation of its outlook. The author concludes that speech manipulation is a complex phenomenon, the effectiveness of which depends on linguistic, psychological, extralinguistic, and social factors. (shrink)

The research identifies the amount of headline/article discrepancies in the corpora of western and Russian online articles on sensitive political topics. A quarter of the western headlines and nearly half of the Russian headlines distort the publications they introduce. Language means and manipulative strategies employed by different sides vary considerably. Extensive use of expressive language and style variation are seen as leading causes of distortions in the western corpus. The rich imagery used by the authors forms emotional implicatures that (...) affect the reader’s perception of the issue. In contrast, information substitution, subjective modality and selective citations are identified as major causes of distortions in the Russian corpus. Contributors to Russian news outlets rely on general rather than language manipulation strategies, including frequent use of logical fallacies and wrong generalizations. These techniques establish false logical sequences and wrong causative implicatures that compromise objective reporting. The underlying motives of the journalists’ creating false emotional and causative implicatures in the headlines lies beyond the scope of the study; however, it is assumed that intentional change of the information introduced by the headline could be viewed as a covert misinformation attempt. (shrink)

This study presents the particular discursive strategies used by some Arabic newspapers to serve the Islamist fundamentalists’ goals and strengthen their hegemonic ideology in the Middle East. It also describes the move to create and sustain a new wave of Occidentalism, the doctrine of negatively representing the West, a counterpart to Edward Said’s Orientalism, the doctrine of negatively representing the East. Occidentalism is a retaliatory ideological strategy that rebuffs hegemonic Western ideas; it is used by some chauvinistic Arabs trying to (...) create a distorted image of the West in the minds of Middle Easterners. In this paper, I will investigate the negative side of the concept of Occidentalism, as exploited by today’s fanatics in their justification for attacking the West. Some Arabic newspapers contribute to fanaticism through antagonistic rhetoric that glorifies Pan-Arab brotherhood, chauvinistic Arab nationalism, and martyrdom. By glorifying these demagogic mottoes, such newspapers create an ideological polarisation against the West, in that they try to win their readers’ sympathy, control their emotions, and deepen their nostalgic feelings for the great Arab past. (shrink)

Political persuasion can express moral respect. In this article, however, I rely on two psychological assumptions to argue that political persuasion is generally prima facie disrespectful: (1) that we maintain our political beliefs largely for non-epistemic, personal reasons and (2) that our political beliefs are connected to our epistemic esteem. Given those assumptions, a persuader can either ignore the relevant personal reasons, explicitly address them, or implicitly address them. Ignoring those reasons, I argue, constitutes prima facie (...) insensitivity. Explicitly addressing them constitutes a form of prima facie incivility. Finally, implicitly addressing them covertly treats those personal reasons as psychological puppet strings, constituting prima facie objectionable manipulation. This prima facie insensitivity, incivility, and manipulation are each prima facie failures of respect, either for the persuadee’s rationality or for their agency. Political persuasion can sometimes be all-things-considered justified, but these moral hazards can produce reasonable guilt, resentment, and blowback. (shrink)

Algorithmic communications pose several challenges to democracy. The three phenomena of filtering, hypernudging, and microtargeting can have the effect of polarizing an electorate and thus undermine the deliberative potential of a democratic society. Algorithms can spread fake news throughout the society, undermining the epistemic potential that broad participation in democracy is meant to offer. They can pose a threat to political equality in that some people may have the means to make use of algorithmic communications and the sophistication to (...) be immune from attempts at manipulation, while other people are vulnerable to manipulation by those who use these means. My concern here is with the danger that algorithmic communications can pose to political equality, which arises because most citizens must make decisions about what and who to support in democratic politics with only a sparse budget of time, money, and energy. Algorithmic communications such as hypernudging and microtargeting can be a threat to democratic participation when persons are operating in environments that do not conduce to political sophistication. This constitutes a deepening of political inequality. The political sophistication necessary to counter this vulnerability is rooted for many in economic life and it can and ought to be enhanced by changing the terms of economic life. (shrink)

Much scholarship on boundary-making focuses on dyadic relationships between “us” and “them.” Yet the presence of multiple categories within societies allows for complex interactions among more than two potentially relevant groups. To capture this phenomenon and its dynamics better, we develop the concept of leveraging: the strategic manipulation of social distance among three or more constructed groups for political gain. The use of one group as a lever against another may involve stigmatizing or elevating categories of people along (...) boundaries of race, ethnicity, national origin, religion, gender, class, sexual orientation, or other salient social markers. We theorize these processes and identify the motivations of the initiators of leveraging as well as the range of possible responses to it. We use a pair of empirical case studies drawn from contemporary Europe and additional examples from other settings to demonstrate the relevance of the concept. Conceptualizing leveraging both improves our scholarly understanding of group-making processes and offers political actors tools for interpreting and responding to a common set of strategic practices. (shrink)

A significant body of research suggests that self-control and willpower are resources that become depleted as they are exercised. Having to exert self-control and willpower draws down the reservoir of these resources and make subsequent such exercises more difficult. This “ego depletion” renders individuals more susceptible to manipulation by exerting non-rational influences on our choice and conduct. In particular, ego depletion results in later choices being less governable by our powers of self-control and willpower than earlier choices. I draw (...) out three implications of this phenomenon: first, manipulation can exploit ego depletion through the fashioning of social environments that tax willpower or self-control; second, ego depletion undermines the Platonic-Aristotelian picture of character and strength of will; and third, ego depletion needs to be a more central focus of theorists of justice, since it appears to be a significant contributor to poverty and other persistent injustices. (shrink)

Recently there has been interest in examining how language is involved in the phenomenon of ‘manipulation’. This paper suggests that investigators, rather than treating ‘manipulation’ as an entity, should examine how communicators might engage in discursive acts of manipulating. To this end a distinction is made between manipulating information and manipulating people. Examples of both types, taken from the Portuguese Parliamentary Celebration of the April Revolution of 2004, are examined in depth to show how acts of manipulating can (...) be performed in different ways. By focussing on acts, we show that supposed ‘cognitive control’ over the audience's minds is not necessarily involved in manipulating; it is shown how investigators can provide evidence that manipulators act ‘knowingly’ when they mislead. We argue that the study of manipulating, and the distinction between manipulating information and people, provides a critical approach to the topic of political oratory. (shrink)

Are we being manipulated online? If so, is being manipulated by online technologies and algorithmic systems notably different from human forms of manipulation? And what is under threat exactly when people are manipulated online? This volume provides philosophical and conceptual depth to debates in digital ethics about online manipulation. The contributions explore the ramifications of our increasingly consequential interactions with online technologies such as online recommender systems, social media, user-friendly design, micro-targeting, default-settings, gamification, and real-time profiling. The authors (...) in this volume address four broad and interconnected themes: • What is the conceptual nature of online manipulation? And how, methodologically, should the concept be defined? • Does online manipulation threaten autonomy, freedom, and meaning in life, and if so, how? • What are the epistemic, affective, and political harms and risks associated with online manipulation? • What are legal and regulatory perspectives on online manipulation? The Philosophy of Online Manipulation brings these various considerations together to offer philosophically robust answers to critical questions concerning our online interactions with one another and with autonomous systems. It will be of interest to researchers and advanced students working in moral philosophy, digital ethics, philosophy of technology, and the ethics of manipulation. (shrink)

The detection of hate speech and fake news in political discourse is at the same time a crucial necessity for democratic societies and a challenge for several areas of study. However, most of the studies have focused on what is explicitly stated: false article information, language that expresses hatred, derogatory expressions. This paper argues that the explicit dimension of manipulation is only one – and the least problematic – of the risks of political discourse. The language of (...) the unsaid is much more dangerous and incomparably more difficult to detect, hidden in different types of fallacies and inappropriate uses of emotive language. Through a threefold coding scheme based on the instruments of argumentation theory and pragmatics, a corpus of argumentative tweets published by 4 politicians (Matteo Salvini, Donald Trump, Jair Bolsonaro, and Joseph Biden) within 6 months from their taking office (corresponding to the official end of their election campaign) is analyzed, detecting the types of argument, the fallacies, and the uses and misuses of “emotive words.” This coding results in the argumentation profiles of the speakers, which are compared statistically to show their different implicit strategies and deceptive tactics. (shrink)

Disbelief, lies, and manipulations have been objects of scholarly consideration from widely different perspectives: historical, sociological, philosophical, ethical, logical, and pragmatic. In this paper, these notions are re-examined in the framework of a Transactional Discourse Model which operates in terms of the location and relocation of various knowledge items within two sets of knowledge, A and B, representing two interlocators A and B, and two of their subsets Ca and Cb, which constitute the sets of the matters of A's and (...) B's current concern. This approach reveals certain formal features shared by lies, disbelief, and manipulations that indicate that these three types of discourse behavior constitute a deviation from successful interpersonal communication as defined in the proposed model. The model, moreover, enables us to explicitly capture both the similarities and the differences of lies and manipulations with other pragmatic phenomena, such as jokes, impersonating, role-acting, memory failure, politeness expressions, and tact; the comparison suggests that certain modifications of Gricean conversational maxims may be in order. (shrink)

There are emotively powerful words that can modify our judgment, arouse our emotions, and influence our decisions. The purpose of this paper is to provide instruments for analyzing the structure of the reasoning underlying the inferences that they trigger, in order to investigate their reasonableness conditions and their persuasive effect. The analysis of the mechanism of persuasion triggered by such words involves the complex systematic relationship between values, decisions, and emotions, and the reasoning mechanisms that have been investigated under the (...) label of “heuristics.” On the one hand, arguing using ethical words is shown to sometimes involve value-based practical reasoning grounded on evaluative classifications stemming from hierarchies of values and maxims of experience. On the other hand, ethical words provide representations bound to the interlocutor’s experiences and judgments, which trigger specific emotions yielding a particular reaction. This chain of judgments and reactions and the potential fallaciousness thereof can be inquired into by examining the relationship between the heuristic processes of reasoning and the more complex argumentative structure that the use of such words involves. The analysis of the 2013 Italian political campaign and the ad hominem arguments used by the political candidates shows the different strategies and counterstrategies for the manipulation of emotions. (shrink)

In public and political practice, argumentation involves verbal manipulations, which have not been sufficiently studied in modern argumentation theory. This paper proposes to analyse such manipulations as speech acts, by means of the pragmadialectical theory of argumentation.

Positive political theorists typically deny the possibility of collective agents by understanding aggregation problems to imply that groups are not rational decision-makers. This view contrasts with List and Pettit’s view that such problems actually imply the necessity of accounting for collective agents in explanations of group behaviour. In this paper, I explore these conflicting views and ask whether positive political theorists should alter their individualist analyses of groups like legislatures, political parties, and constituent assemblies. I show how (...) we fail to appreciate the significance of strategic voting and agenda control by treating groups as agents. I, therefore, conclude that positive political theorists should cling to their individualist approach and maintain that groups are not agents. (shrink)

I consider problem of questions used with the purpose of manipulating. If one is proficient in the art of asking questions, he/she can manipulate answers to the posed questions. If one does not want to be manipulated by questions, one should manipulate questions themselves. Moreover, I show that questions are not only a tool of gaining new information.

The September 11 attacks on the US dramatized the relationship between media spectacles of terror and the strategy of Islamic Jihadism that employs violent media events to promote its agenda. But US administrations have also used spectacles of terror to promote US military power and geopolitical ends, as is evident in the Gulf war of 1990–1991, the Afghanistan war of fall 2001, and the Iraq war of 2003. In this paper I argue that both Islamic Jihadists and two Bush administrations (...) have deployed spectacles of terror to promote their political agendas; that both deploy Manichean discourses of good and evil which themselves fit into dominant media codes of popular culture; and that both deploy fundamentalist and absolutist discourses. Criticizing the role of the US broadcasting media in presenting the September 11 terror spectacle and subsequent Bush Terror War, I argue against both Islamic terrorism and US militarism, and call for multilateral and global responses to terrorism and rogue regimes. I also argue that the Internet is the best source of information concerning complex events like Terror War, while mainstream US corporate media, especially broadcasting, have become instruments of propaganda for the Bush administration and Pentagon during spectacles of terrorism and war. Finally, I suggest limitations to the politics of the spectacle and argue that the record of the spectacles of Terror War in recent years discloses highly ambiguous, unpredictable, and negative political effects. (shrink)

This book is a philosophical enquiry into the educational consequences of Spinoza’s political theory. Spinoza’s political theory is of particular interest for educational thought as it brings together the normative aims of his ethical theory with his realistic depiction of human psychology and the ramifications of this for successful political governance. As such, this book aims to introduce the reader to Spinoza’s original vision of civic education, as a project that ultimately aims at the ethical flourishing of (...) individuals, while being carefully tailored and adjusted to the natural limitations of human reason. -/- Readers will benefit from a succinct introduction to Spinoza’s political philosophy and from an account of civic education that is based on careful exegetical work. It draws conclusions only hinted at in Spinoza’s own writings. (shrink)

American History X (hereafter AHX) has been accused by numerous critics of a morally dangerous cinematic seduction: using stylish cinematography, editing, and sound, the film manipulates the viewer through glamorizing an immoral and hate-filled neo-nazi protagonist. In addition, there’s the disturbing fact that the film seems to accomplish this manipulation through methods commonly grouped under the category of “fascist aesthetics.” More specifically, AHX promotes its neo-nazi hero through the use of several filmic techniques made famous by Nazi propagandist Leni (...) Riefenstahl. Now most critics admit that, in the end, the film claims to denounce racism and attempts to show us the conversion of the protagonist to the path of righteousness, but they complain that nonetheless the film (perhaps unintentionally) ends up implicitly promoting the immoral worldview it rather superficially professes to reject in its final act. This charge of hypocrisy is connected to another worry: the moral conversion in the film is said to fall flat because the intellectual resources on display to support the character’s racism are not counterbalanced by equally explicit (but superior) arguments for the anti-racist position ultimately embraced by the character. In other words, just as the devil is said to get all the good lines in Milton’s Paradise Lost, in AHX the racists get all the arguments. This has been taken to be a morally problematic flaw of the film. Critics lament that Derek’s conversion seems to result not from relevant logical inferences and valid rational argumentation but from overly simplistic and arguably egoistic insights (e.g., “has anything you've done made your life better?”) combined, perhaps, with a hackneyed cliché (in prison, one of his best friends is a black person!) In this paper I’ll attempt to rebut these charges and defend the film as a powerful, and powerfully moral, work of art. I’ll be suggesting that the seductive techniques employed allow for many viewers a degree of sympathy towards the protagonist that is crucial, both for making that character’s more horrific actions especially unsettling, and also for making his eventual conversion plausible and ultimately compelling. I’ll also argue that the manner in which his conversion is presented is in fact subtler than many critics have allowed: Derek’s transformation is not artificial or implausible but is depicted as resulting from a cumulative series of emotionally powerful life events and personal engagements. It is certainly true that it is not represented in the way some would seemingly have preferred, i.e. as straightforwardly resulting from a process of gradual intellectual improvement in Derek’s reasoning on questions of race and politics. However, I’ll argue that the decidedly emotional basis of his moral evolution is both refreshingly realistic and no hindrance to accepting his conversion as rational. Finally, properly understanding the legitimacy of the emotional foundations of much moral thought will also allow us to appreciate the ways in which our initial worries about this film’s (not insignificant) ability to persuade viewers through the engagement of emotions need not, in itself, be seen as a barrier to endorsing the film as a morally praiseworthy work. (shrink)

The paper presents a compatibilist explanation of why manipulated agents are not responsible for the actions that result from the manipulation. I first show that an agent’s having reason to resent being manipulated into action is a sufficient condition for his not being responsible for that action, and so an adequate explanation of the latter fact in standard cases in which the agent does have reason to resent. I then consider some cases in which, apparently, manipulation is not (...) cause for resentment, and suggest a way of generalizing the original explanation. I also compare the suggested approach with alternatives. (shrink)

“Libertarian paternalism” aims to harness cognitive biases in order to improve prudential decision-making. Some critics have objected that libertarian paternalism is wrongly manipulative. I argue that this objection is mostly unsuccessful. First, I point out that some strategies endorsed by libertarian paternalists can help people to better appreciate reasons. Second, I develop an account of manipulation according to which an agent manipulates her target by worsening the target’s deliberative position. The means of influence defended by libertarian paternalists—for instance, the (...) judicious use of default rules—are not manipulative in this way. (shrink)

Due to the Internet, the traditional media monopoly has been irretrievably broken. Available technologies have created unavailable earlier conditions for personalization and manipulation of information that is generating to the Internet users. It is sharply noticeable with reference to the computer games, media and the potential of Web 2.0, social networking. The freedom of information concerning the social networking seem to be a temporary phenomenon—effectively dominated by the commercialization.

Corporative global media cannot be an instrument of the culture of peace, because they have made widespread individualistic values of the consummative society. Through their symbolic power, they successfully dominate over every sphere of existence of a society: politics, economic life, social ties, national culture, human communication and private life. Traditional media could not be a factor in the promotion and development of culture of peace, simply because they are proponents of corporative economic and political interests. It is in (...) the interest of citizens to counter the activities of “rapacious capitalism” (SCHMIDT 1998), of local comprador political and economic elites, and the practice of robbery of their work; to bridle the proliferation of weapons and acts of aggression. (shrink)

Politics and the Religious Imagination is the product of a group of interdisciplinary scholars each analyzing the connections between religious narratives and the construction of regional and global politics, combining a set of theoretical and philosophic insights with several case studies that represent varied geographies and religious customs. The past decade has seen increasing interest in the links between religion and politics, and this edited volume seeks to take religion seriously as a motivator of action. Few studies have attempted to (...) bring together the multi-disciplinary work in this burgeoning field of study and this work takes a global perspective, using a variety of contexts including East-West relations to analyze the following key themes: the constructive and destructive hermeneutics of religious stories the relevance and importance of religion as a dominant political narrative the rise of new stories among groups as agents of change the way that religious narratives help to define and constrain the Other the manipulation of religious stories for political benefit This work argues that it is insufficient to judge the relationship of religion and politics through mere institutional or quantitative lenses, and this collection proves that while this promise of the narrative part of the social imaginary has been recognized in political theory to a certain extent, its influence in the realm of empirical political science has yet to be fully considered. Combining the work of a wide range of experts, this collection will be of great interests to scholars of politics, philosophy, religious studies, and the literary influence of religion. (shrink)

The purpose of this essay is to revisit the notion of indoctrination in education by providing a summary of the field and highlighting the role of affects and emotions in the aftermath of the ‘affective turn’. It is argued that affective indoctrination—defined as the emotional coercion or manipulation that, arguably, any form of education might use in order to be effective—is likely to invoke harm in students, intentionally or unintentionally. Hence, it is suggested that education theorists and educators in (...) general need not only to acknowledge affective indoctrination as a possible component of all education, but also to explore and take measures how to minimize the extent to which indoctrinal teaching may be facilitated through cultivating certain affects and emotions. Theorizing affective indoctrination can offer new insights into how and why educators and students adopt or resist particular political beliefs (e.g. democracy or fascism). (shrink)

This paper argues that political civility is actually an illusionistic ideal and that, as such, realism counsels that we acknowledge both its promise and peril. Political civility is, I will argue, a tension-filled ideal. We have good normative reasons to strive for and encourage more civil political interactions, as they model our acknowledgement of others as equal citizens and facilitate high-quality democratic problem-solving. But we must simultaneously be attuned to civility’s limitations, its possible pernicious side-effects, and its (...) potential for strategic manipulation and oppressive abuse, particularly in contemporary, pluralistic and heterogeneous societies. (shrink)

Adding to the literature on the feasibility of deliberative democracy, this article catalogs the practices, institutions, and psychological proclivities that have been cited as obstacles to the realization of a deliberative democratic politics. It then makes the case that one of the irremediable obstacles, ideology, is also the the necessary starting point for actual deliberation.

This article examines the critique of deliberative democracy leveled by William Connolly. Drawing on both recent findings in cognitive science as well on Gilles Deleuze's cosmological pluralism, Connolly argues that deliberative democracy, and the contemporary left more generally, is guilty of intellectualism for overlooking the embodied, visceral register of political judgment. Going back to Deleuze and Guattari's A Thousand Plateaus, this article reconstructs the working assumptions of Connolly's critique and argues that it unwittingly leads to an indefensible embrace of (...) manipulation. Against his micropolitics of visceral manipulation, I propose an alternative route for realizing Connolly's politics of agonistic negotiation in the form of a critical theory of the public sphere. (shrink)

Political sociologists have paid closer attention of late to the territoriality of political communities, and have even begun theorizing the theme of territoriality’s legitimation. To date, however, the field has mostly overlooked the topic of maps, the quintessential territorial tool. Thus, we know little regarding maps’ crucial role in shaping modern subjects’ relationship to territory. This article argues that “map-mindedness”—i.e., the effects of map imagery on how subjects experience territory—can be productively theorized by working through the social-scientific concept (...) of “place.” Using a range of modern and contemporary examples, I illustrate how maps can draw on and manipulate political subjects’ experience of place. Maps, I submit, allow political communities to render themselves more place-like, thus bridging the phenomenological distance between these abstract, territorially vast units and their “emplaced” subjects. More specifically, maps solve this “problem of distance” through three ideal-typical processes: 1) they render the political community as a proximate “object in the world”; 2) they present the political community as a body-like target for cathexis and identification; and 3) they mediate the traffic of meaning between the local and the national to produce a multi-scalar sense of place that can be harnessed in the service of the political community. Maps are a potent means of “re-personalizing” politics; their study suggests that territoriality is not only a form of “impersonal rule,” as recent works have observed, but always also implicated in the production of political subjects. (shrink)

A timely contribution from prominent philosophers to the public debate about morality and politics, exploring the fundamental problem of their relation and a string of specific issues. Is political morality more permissive of deception, manipulation and violence? Is there room for morality in international relations? Is patriotism a virtue? What are the moral costs of policies that keep out most of those seeking immigration or asylum? May we use torture in the 'war on terror'? What are the moral (...) hazards of military obedience? (shrink)

Thomas Hobbes denied both that opinion provides access to truth and that it ought to be protected from political manipulation. Hobbes knew that his contempt for opinion put him at odds with the classical tradition of political philosophy. What he could not have known was that it also would put him at odds with modern, liberal democracy, which protects opinions—the opinions of the public—that it cannot invest with truth value.

Rational manipulation is constituted by the following conditions: (i) A aims to persuade B of thesis X; (ii) A holds X to be true and rationally justifiable; (iii) A knows of the existence of evidence, argument or information Y. While Y is not itself misinformation (Y is factually correct), A suspects B might take Y as important evidence for not-X; (iv) A deliberately chooses not to mention Y to B, out of a concern that it could mislead B into (...) believing not-X; and, (v) B has no compelling reason to expect A will avoid mentioning Y in this way. A’s behavior is rational insofar as A aims to use reasons to persuade B to believe a thesis that A holds as true and justified. Yet it is manipulation because A deliberately avoids furnishing B with information that B might regard as relevant, to ensure B arrives at the correct belief. I argue that we have good reason to think that A’s action will be wrongly manipulative because it disrespects B’s consent, epistemic autonomy, and personal autonomy. That said, context is critical, and there are many times evidence is intentionally occluded that are not rational manipulation. Even so, ethical arguers should beware of ambiguous contexts, such as when there are conflicting expectations about argumentation roles and goals. (shrink)

Why is wrong to punish criminals who have been entrapped by the state? The paper begins by presenting some criticisms of existing answers to this question. First, they fail to put the target, or victim, of entrapment at the centre of the moral explanation. Second, they fail to account for the intuitive relation between the reasons not to entrap and the reasons not to punish. Third, they struggle to account for the existence of agent-neutral reasons not to punish entrapped offenders. (...) Lastly, they are ill-equipped to explain why entrapment seems problematic also outside the legal context. In response, the paper develops a novel account of entrapment: the Manipulation Account. According to this, entrapment always involves a particular kind of manipulation (manipulation-by-hidden-intentions) which morally taints punishment. In short, I suggest that both the initial entrapment and the subsequent punishment involve wrongful manipulation. Lastly, the paper presents some untraditional, but ultimately welcoming, implications of the account. (shrink)

This article connects the previously isolated literatures on corporate citizenship and corporate political activity to explain how firms construct political influence in the public sphere. The public engagement of firms as political actors is explored empirically through a discursive analysis of a public debate between the mining industry and the Australian government over a proposed tax. The findings show how the mining industry acted as a corporate citizen concerned about the common good. This, in turn, legitimized corporate (...) political activity, which undermined deliberation about the common good. The findings explain how the public sphere is refeudalized through corporate manipulation of deliberative processes via what we term corporate citizenspeak—simultaneously speaking as corporate citizens and for individual citizens. Corporate citizenspeak illustrates the duplicitous engagement of firms as political actors, claiming political legitimacy while subverting deliberative norms. This contributes to the theoretical development of corporations as political actors by explaining how corporate interests are aggregated to represent the common good and how corporate political activity is employed to dominate the public sphere. This has important implications for understanding how corporations undermine democratic principles. (shrink)

It is widely accepted that political discourse in recent years has become more openly racist and more filled with wildly implausible conspiracy theories. Dogwhistles and Figleaves explores certain ways in which such changes—both of which defied previously settled norms of political speech—have been brought about. Jennifer Saul shows that two linguistic devices, dogwhistles and figleaves, have played a crucial role. Some dogwhistles (such as “88,” used by Nazis online to mean “Heil Hitler”) serve to disguise messages that would (...) otherwise be rejected as unacceptable, allowing them to be transmitted surreptitiously. Other dogwhistles (like the 1988 “Willie Horton” ad) work by influencing people in ways that they are not aware of, and which they would likely reject were they aware. Figleaves (such as “just asking questions”) take messages that could easily be recognized as unacceptable, and provide just enough cover that people become more willing to accept them. Importantly, these work against the background of a divided public. They are particularly effective in influencing people who are conflicted yet malleable—those who don’t want to be racist, for example, but are willing to be convinced that something which seems racist really isn’t. Saul shows how these dogwhistles and figleaves have both exploited and widened existing divisions in society, and normalized racist and conspiracist speech. (shrink)