Rather than focusing on political and legal debates surrounding attempts to determine if and when genocidal rape has taken place in a particular setting, this essay turns instead to a crucial, yet neglected area of inquiry: the moral significance of genocidal rape, and more specifically, the nature of the harms that constitute the culpable wrongdoing that genocidal rape represents. In contrast to standard philosophical accounts, which tend to employ an individualistic framework, this essay offers a situated understanding of harm that (...) features the importance of interdependence and relationality and that conceptualizes harms as embodied and contextual. The paper ultimately reveals what is distinctive about this particular crime of sexual violence by exploring the logic of genocidal rape: genocidal rape involves the harm of forced self-betrayal unleashed relationally, causing victims as representatives of their group to participate inadvertently in the destruction of that group. (shrink)

Martin Gustafsson and Richard Sørli. The Philosophy of J. L. Austin. Oxford. Oxford University Press, 2011. ISBN: 9780199219759 Reviewed by Claudia Bianchi.

What distinguishes evils from ordinary wrongs? Is hatred a necessarily evil? Are some evils unforgivable? Are there evils we should tolerate? What can make evils hard to recognize? Are evils inevitable? How can we best respond to and live with evils? Claudia Card offers a secular theory of evil that responds to these questions and more. Evils, according to her theory, have two fundamental components. One component is reasonably foreseeable intolerable harm -- harm that makes a life indecent and (...) impossible or that makes a death indecent. The other component is culpable wrongdoing. Atrocities, such as genocides, slavery, war rape, torture, and severe child abuse, are Card's paradigms because in them these key elements are writ large. Atrocities deserve more attention than secular philosophers have so far paid them. They are distinguished from ordinary wrongs not by the psychological states of evildoers but by the seriousness of the harm that is done. Evildoers need not be sadistic:they may simply be negligent or unscrupulous in pursuing their goals. Card's theory represents a compromise between classic utilitarian and stoic alternatives (including Kant's theory of radical evil). Utilitarians tend to reduce evils to their harms; Stoics tend to reduce evils to the wickedness of perpetrators: Card accepts neither reduction. She also responds to Nietzsche's challenges about the worth of the concept of evil, and she uses her theory to argue that evils are more important than merely unjust inequalities. She applies the theory in explorations of war rape and violence against intimates. She also takes up what Primo Levi called "the gray zone", where victims become complicit in perpetrating on others evils that threaten to engulf themselves. While most past accounts of evil have focused on perpetrators, Card begins instead from the position of the victims, but then considers more generally how to respond to -- and live with -- evils, as victims, as perpetrators, and as those who have become both. (shrink)

The recent economic crisis as well as other disasters such as the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico or the nuclear disaster in Japan has fanned calls for leaders who do not deny responsibility, hide information, and deceive others, but rather lead with authenticity and integrity. In this article, we empirically investigate the concept of authentic leadership. Specifically, we examine the antecedents and individual as well as group-level outcomes of authentic leadership in business (Study 1; n = 306) as (...) well as research organizations (Study 2; n = 105). Findings reveal leader self-knowledge and self-consistency as antecedents of authentic leadership and followers’ satisfaction with supervisor, organizational commitment, and extra-effort as well as perceived team effectiveness as outcomes. The relations between authentic leadership and followers’ work-related attitudes as well as perceived team effectiveness are mediated by perceived predictability of the leader, a particular facet of trust. We discuss the implications of our findings for theory and practice and provide suggestions for advancing theory and research on authentic leadership in the future. (shrink)

In Aristotle's Ethics as First Philosophy Claudia Baracchi demonstrates the indissoluble links between practical and theoretical wisdom in Aristotle's thinking. Referring to a broad range of texts from the Aristotelian corpus, Baracchi shows how the theoretical is always informed by a set of practices, and specifically, how one's encounter with phenomena, the world, or nature in the broadest sense, is always a matter of ethos. Such a 'modern' intimation can, thus, be found at the heart of Greek thought. Baracchi's (...) book opens the way for a comprehensively reconfigured approach to classical Greek philosophy. (shrink)

In this contribution to philosophical ethics, Claudia Card revisits the theory of evil developed in her earlier book The Atrocity Paradigm, and expands it to consider collectively perpetrated and collectively suffered atrocities. Redefining evil as a secular concept and focusing on the inexcusability - rather than the culpability - of atrocities, Card examines the tension between responding to evils and preserving humanitarian values. This stimulating and often provocative book contends that understanding the evils in terrorism, torture and genocide enables (...) us to recognise similar evils in everyday life: daily life under oppressive regimes and in racist environments; violence against women, including in the home; violence and executions in prisons; hate crimes; and violence against animals. Card analyses torture, terrorism and genocide in the light of recent atrocities, considering whether there can be moral justifications for terrorism and torture, and providing conceptual tools to distinguish genocide from non-genocidal mass slaughter. (shrink)

Marilyn Frye's first book, The Politics of Reality: Essays in Feminist Theory, presents nine philosophical lectures: four on women's subordination, four on resistance and rebellion, one on revolution. Its approach combines a lesbian perspective with analytical philosophy of language. The major contributions of the book are its analysis of oppression, highly suggestive discussions of the roles of attention in knowledge and ignorance and in arrogance and love, a defense of political separatism not based on female supremacism, and a development of (...) the idea of lesbian epistemology. Its proposal for resisting White racism will be controversial. Its treatment of gay rights is not balanced by an acknowledgement that drag queens, like "totaled women," are products of oppression, not simply of intolerance. The most philosophically problematic aspect of the book is its analysis of coercion and of the roles of coercion in women's subordination. This creates an unresolved tension with the positive message of the second half of the book. Despite this difficulty, these essays are an outstanding contribution to contemporary feminist theory. (shrink)

Global health conditions are marked by inequities due mostly to poverty and lack of access to healthcare services. In a Pandemic setting, Mayan Communities in the Quintana Roo State in Mexico are a good example of how these disparities are exacerbated. First, they may have difficulty in adhering to directives to stay home from work because of the nature of their job, and the necessity to work, their living conditions are marked by crowding and sometimes lack of basic sanitation. Other (...) susceptibilities generally considered are the underlying host factors and medical conditions that may increase the risk of disease or of complications of disease. In general, our native communities experience a high degree of socio-economic marginalization and are at disproportionate risk in public health emergencies, becoming even more vulnerable during this global pandemic, owing to factors such as their lack of access to effective monitoring and early-warning systems, and adequate health and social services. (shrink)

The dynamic organisational processes in businesses dilute the boundaries between the individual, organisational, and societal drivers of corporate philanthropy. This creates a complex framework in which charitable project selection occurs. Using the example of European tour operators, this study investigates the mechanisms through which companies invest in charitable projects in overseas destinations. Inextricably linked to this is the increasing contestation by local communities as to how they are able to engage effectively with tourism in order to realise the benefits tourism (...) development can bring. This research furthers such debates by exploring the processes through which tour operators facilitate community development through charitable giving. Findings show, with no formal frameworks in existence, project selection depends upon emergent strategies that connect the professional with the personal, with trust being positioned as a central driver of these informal processes. Discretionary responsibilities are reworked through business leaders’ commitment to responsible business practises and the ethical subjectivity guiding these processes. (shrink)

This article considers the question ‘What makes hope rational?’ We take Adrienne Martin’s recent incorporation analysis of hope as representative of a tradition that views the rationality of hope as a matter of instrumental reasons. Against this tradition, we argue that an important subset of hope, ‘fundamental hope’, is not governed by instrumental rationality. Rather, people have reason to endorse or reject such hope in virtue of the contribution of the relevant attitudes to the integrity of their practical identity, which (...) makes the relevant hope not instrumentally but intrinsically valuable. This argument also allows for a new analysis of the reasons people have to abandon hope and for a better understanding of non-fundamental, ‘prosaic’ hopes. (shrink)

Simone de Beauvoir was a philosopher and writer of notable range and influence whose work is central to feminist theory, French existentialism, and contemporary moral and social philosophy. The essays in this 2003 volume examine all the major aspects of her thought, including her views on issues such as the role of biology, sexuality and sexual difference, and evil, the influence on her work of Heidegger, Sartre, Merleau-Ponty, Husserl, and others, and the philosophical significance of her memoirs and fiction. New (...) readers and nonspecialists will find this the most convenient and accessible guide to Beauvoir currently available. Advanced students and specialists will find a conspectus of recent developments in the interpretation of Beauvoir. (shrink)

This essay argues that current advocacy of lesbian and gay rights to legal marriage and parenthood insufficiently criticizes both marriage and motherhood as they are currently practiced and structured by Northern legal institutions. Instead we would do better not to let the State define our intimate unions and parenting would be improved if the power presently concentrated in the hands of one or two guardians were diluted and distributed through an appropriately concerned community.

Many scholars in the area of citizenship education take deliberative approaches to democracy, especially as put forward by John Rawls, as their point of departure. From there, they explore how students’ capacity for political and/or moral reasoning can be fostered. Recent work by political theorist Chantal Mouffe, however, questions some of the central tenets of deliberative conceptions of democracy. In the paper I first explain the central differences between Mouffe’s and Rawls’s conceptions of democracy and politics. To this end I (...) take Eamonn Callan’s Creating Citizens as an example of Rawlsian political education and focus on the role of conflict and disagreement in his account. I then address three areas in which political education would need to change if it were to accept Mouffe’s critiques of deliberative approaches to democracy and her proposal for an agonistic public sphere. The first area is the education of political emotions; the second is fostering an understanding of the difference between the moral and the political; the third is developing an awareness of the historical and contemporary political projects of the “left” and “right.” I propose that a radical democratic citizenship education would be an education of political adversaries. (shrink)

BackgroundScientists engaged in global health research are increasingly faced with barriers to access and use of human tissues from the developing world communities where much of their research is targeted. In part, the problem can be traced to distrust of researchers from affluent countries, given the history of 'scientific-imperialism' and 'biocolonialism' reflected in past well publicized cases of exploitation of research participants from low to middle income countries.DiscussionTo a considerable extent, the failure to adequately engage host communities, the opacity of (...) informed consent, and the lack of fair benefit-sharing have played a significant role in eroding trust. These ethical considerations are central to biomedical research in low to middle income countries and failure to attend to them can inadvertently contribute to exploitation and erode trust. A 'tissue trust' may be a plausible means for enabling access to human tissues for research in a manner that is responsive to the ethical challenges considered.SummaryPreventing exploitation and restoring trust while simultaneously promoting global health research calls for innovative approaches to human tissues research. A tissue trust can reduce the risk of exploitation and promote host capacity as a key benefit. (shrink)

Rawls saw need for non-ideal theory also within society but never developed that project. In this chapter, Card suggests that the non-ideal part of Rawls’ Law of Peoples can be a resource for thinking about responding to evils when the subject is not state-centered. It is plausible that defense against great evils other than those of aggressive states should be governed by analogues of scruples that Rawlsian well-ordered societies observe in defending themselves against outlaw states. This essay explores those hypotheses (...) in relation to women’s self-defense and mutual defense against evils of misogyny, the term feminists apply to the most deeply hostile environments of and attitudes toward women and girls and to the cruelest wrongs to them/us, regardless whether perpetrators harbor feelings of hatred. It extrapolates and adapts to this case values, concepts, and methods from Rawls’s life’s work, especially his writing on war. (shrink)

I review Amy Allen's Book: The End of Progress: Decolonizing the Normative Foundations of Critical Theory (2016) as part of a Review Symposium: -/- In her latest book, The End of Progress, Amy Allen embarks on an ambitious and much needed project: to decolonize contemporary Frankfurt School critical theory. As with all of her books, this is an exceptionally well-written and well-argued book. Allen strives to avoid making assertions without backing them up via close and careful textual reading of the (...) thinkers she engages with. In what follows I will state why this book makes a central contribution to contemporary critical theory (in the wider sense), after which I pose a few questions. These questions are not meant to prove that there are any serious problems with her argumentation. Rather, they are meant in the spirit of dialogue and to allow her to further elaborate her work for the audience... (shrink)

BackgroundDecisions about withdrawal of life support for infants have given rise to legal battles between physicians and parents creating intense media attention. It is unclear how we should evaluate when life is no longer worth living for an infant. Public attitudes towards treatment withdrawal and the role of parents in situations of disagreement have not previously been assessed.MethodsAn online survey was conducted with a sample of the UK public to assess public views about the benefit of life in hypothetical cases (...) similar to real cases heard by the UK courts. We then evaluated these public views in comparison with existing ethical frameworks for decision-making.ResultsOne hundred and thirty participants completed the survey. The majority agreed that an infant’s life may have no benefit when well-being falls below a critical level. Decisions to withdraw treatment were positively associated with the importance of use of medical resources, the infant’s ability to have emotional relationships, and mental abilities. Up to 50% of participants in each case believed it was permissible to either continue or withdraw treatment.ConclusionDespite the controversy, our findings indicate that in the most severe cases, most people agree that life is not worth living for a profoundly disabled infant. Our survey found wide acceptance of at least the permissibility of withdrawal of treatment across a range of cases, though also a reluctance to overrule parents’ decisions. These findings may be useful when constructing guidelines for clinical practice. (shrink)

Book Description\n\nIn Aristotle's Ethics as First Philosophy, Claudia Baracchi demonstrates\nthe indissoluble links between practical and theoretical wisdom in\nAristotle's thinking. Baracchi shows how the theoretical is always\ninformed by a set of practices, and, specifically, how one's encounter\nwith phenomena, the world, or nature in the broadest sense, is always\na matter of ethos. \n\nAbout the Author\n\nClaudia Baracchi is a Professor of Moral Philosophy at the Universit...\ndi Milano-Bicocca, Italy and the author of Of Myth, Life, and War\nin Plato's Republic.

Conducting large multi-site research within universities highlights inconsistencies between universities in approaches, requirements and responses of research ethics committees. Within the context of a social science research study, we attempted to obtain ethical approval from 101 universities across England to recruit students for a short online survey. We received varied responses from research ethics committees of different universities with the steps to obtaining ethics approval ranging from those that only required proof of approval from our home institution, to universities that (...) facilitated fast-track applications to those that required a full ethics review. Some universities also completely refused. After contacting all 101 universities in England, 60 universities gave clearance to our study. In this article, we present the different approaches universities adopted in response to our application to sample from students in their institution. We consider a number of conceptual and ethical issues pertinent to considering ethics approval for researchers from other universities in England and critically discuss three possible models of ethics governance that would cover all universities in England. (shrink)

Ethical behavior — the conscious attempt to act in accordance with an individually-owned morality — is the product of an advanced stage of the maturing process. Three models of ethical growth derived from research in human development are applied to issues of business ethics.

ZusammenfassungDie Uterustransplantation ermöglicht Frauen mit einer absoluten uterinen Infertilität eine Schwangerschaft mit biologisch eigenem Kind. Das neuartige experimentelle Verfahren wirft eine Reihe von ethischen Fragen auf. Ziel dieses Artikels ist es, relevante ethische Problemkonstellationen im Kontext der Uterustransplantation überblickshaft darzulegen und kritisch zu diskutieren. Als systematischer Rahmen der Darstellung dienen die vier Prinzipien der Medizinethik Autonomie, Nicht-Schaden, Wohltun und Gerechtigkeit nach Beauchamp und Childress. Nach eingehender ethischer Betrachtung plädieren die Autorinnen mit Blick auf die Akkumulation schwerwiegender ethischer Probleme für die (...) Notwendigkeit einer grundlegenden und umfassenden ethischen Debatte über Uterustransplantation. Ausgangspunkt einer solchen Debatte muss eine kritische Reflexion des normativen Stellenwerts des Leidens an einem unerfüllten Kinderwunsch sein. (shrink)

The Beginnings of Nietzsche's Theory of Language is concerned with the years 1865 through Winter/Spring 1870-71. Four texts of Nietzsche's, "Vom Ursprung der Sprache", "Zur Teleologie", "Zu Schopenhauer", and "Anschauung Notes", are translated into English and interpreted from the perspective of Nietzsche's developing theory of language. An examination of the major influences of Schopenhauer, Kant, Eduard von Hartmann, and Frederick A. Lange are pursued. ;Theory, in this work, does not assume that it is possible to take a position of authority (...) or truth in the interpretation of texts, rather that interpretation of texts constitutes an attempt to uncover a discursive practice, to describe a discourse-object. The method used is Nietzsche's method of genealogy, which follows the formation of discourse, at once scattered, discontinuous, and regular and analyzes the process of rarefaction, consolidation and unification in that discourse. Genealogy is exegesis in Nietzsche's sense of it as rumination, as the slow, repetitive, gray activity of deciphering what is documented. Major genealogical nodes or elements of Nietzsche's beginning theory of language are used and reused in different contexts throughout the work, resulting in a cumulative effect which explores specific elements in Nietzsche's thinking about language. ;This work offers five major contributions to Nietzsche studies: a detailed introduction of the significant influence of Eduard von Hartmann upon Nietzsche's thinking; a comprehensive look at the influence of Lange's History of Materialism upon Nietzsche's beginning theory of language; a thorough analysis of "Zur Teleologie" and "Zu Schopenhauer" in the overall contexts of Nietzsche's thinking with regard to metaphysics and teleology; the gathering together and interpretation into a world view of the "Anschauung Notes"; and a close examination of Nietzsche's breaking away from Schopenhauer as it takes place before the publication of The Birth of Tragedy. ;Nietzsche's primary contributions to a theory of language in these beginning years are three: the adoption of the role of the unconscious instincts in the origins and ongoing production of language; the assertion that unconscious thought processes are a precondition for conscious thought; an examination of the relationships of language to epistemology, which results in the recognition of the limits of language as an instrument of truth, but a realization of the inestimable value and force of its symbolic and figurative aspects, aspects necessitated by the very nature of language itself. (shrink)

Statements such as “X is beautiful but I don’t like how it looks” or “I like how X looks but it is not beautiful” sound contradictory. How contradictory they sound might however depend on the object X and on the aesthetic adjective being used (“beautiful”, “elegant”, “dynamic”, etc.). In our study, the first sentence was estimated to be more contradictory than the latter: If we describe something as beautiful, we often intend to evaluate its appearance, whereas it is less counterintuitive (...) to appreciate an appearance without finding it beautiful. Furthermore, statements including “beautiful” appeared more contradictory than those including “elegant” and “dynamic”, pointing to its greater evaluative component. When related to artworks, sentences could appear less contradictory due to readers’ consideration of the divergence between conventional beauty and art-related sensory pleasures that can even include negative valence. Such ambivalence might be more frequent in art-objects than in other artefacts. Indeed, in our study, sentences referring to artworks were estimated to be less contradictory compared to sentences referring to other artefacts. Meanwhile, an additional small group of graphic design students showed a less clear difference between art-related and non-art-related sentences. We discuss the potential influence of art experience and interest as well as theoretical and methodological challenges like the conceptualization of beauty. (shrink)

The paper explores the relationship of happiness and critique. It is a reflection on a decade of being trained in and practicing philosophical critique. It is a reflection on experiences I had during teaching on social justice, inclusion and diversity; and it is a reflection on the on-going debate on negative vs. affirmative forms of critique within feminist philosophy. It is also an exercise in imagining a transformation of our critical practices, where the embrace of more affirmative modes of critique (...) does not entail overlooking or turning a blind eye to the barriers that unjustly restrain some movements and allow for others' privileges to persist. I suggest that a diffractive approach to critique would allow for joyfully interchanging and alternating appropriate modes of debunking, of being the killjoy against sedimentations that weigh some of us down, with other modes of critique which allow us to augment and lift up examples of already on-going structural change. (shrink)

I. Foundations of semantics 1. Meaning in linguistics 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. Introduction Truth Compositionality Context and discourse Meaning in contemporary ...

There is widespread agreement that an adequate understanding of the nature of science is a critical component of scientific literacy and a major goal in science education. However, we still do not know many specific details regarding how students and teachers learn particular aspects of NOS and what are the most important feature traits of instruction. In this context, the main objective of this review is to analyze articles from nine main science education journals that consider the teaching of NOS (...) to K-12 students, pre-service, and in-service science teachers in search of patterns in teaching and learning NOS. After reviewing 52 studies in nine journals that included data regarding participants’ views of NOS before and after an intervention, the main findings were as follows: some aspects of NOS are easier to learn than others, and subjective aspects of NOS and “the scientific method” seemed to be difficult for participants to understand; the interventions most frequently lasted 5 to 8 weeks for students, one semester for pre-service teachers, and 1 year for experienced teachers; and most of the interventions incorporated both decontextualized and contextualized activities. Given the substantial diversity in the methods and intervention designs used and the variables studied, it was not possible to infer a pattern of more-effective NOS teaching strategies from the reviewed studies. Future investigation should focus on disentangling whether a difference exists between the easy and difficult aspects of learning NOS and formulating a theoretical explanation for distinguishing the two types of aspects and assessing the effectiveness of different kinds of courses and strategies. (shrink)

From the editor: On behalf of the editors of FPQ, I thank our colleagues for providing us their public addresses at the Celebration of Life of Professor Claudia Falconer Card of the University of Wisconsin-Madison, who died on Saturday, September 12, 2015. Claudia Card was the author of over one hundred articles and books, key works of moral and feminist philosophy including Confronting Evils: Terrorism, Torture, Genocide, The Atrocity Paradigm: A Theory of Evil, and The Unnatural Lottery: Character (...) and Moral Luck. She was the president of the Central division of the APA 2010-2011, which she often described as her favorite division of the APA. She earned her BA from UW-Madison, and her PhD in 1969 from Harvard University, as the advisee of John Rawls, whom she spoke of with affection as one of the most sensitive and generous of philosophers. I remain grateful to Claudia for being the sort of philosopher who helped her students, colleagues, and readers to confront our responsibilities, and the responsibilities of others, as she lived her own philosophy of taking responsibility for one’s own identity. K.J. Norlock. (shrink)

Radical personal and systemic social transformation is urgently needed to address world-wide violence and inequality, pervasive moral confusion and corruption, and the rapid, unprecedented global destruction of our environment. Recent years have seen an embrace of intersubjectivity within discourse on educational transformation within academia and the public sphere. As well, there has been a turn toward contemplative education initiatives within North American schools, colleges and universities. This article contends that these turns might benefit from openness to the ontologies, epistemologies, and (...) ethics of the ‘wisdom traditions’ from which many contemplative practices are drawn. To illustrate this point, we discuss the value of intercultural philosophy of education, and introduce Eastern philosophical ideas, specifically, the Shambhala Buddhist notion of the nondual ground and wisdom of basic goodness and related teachings. We detail how awareness of basic goodness and its holistic expression in the ground, path, and fruition of Shambhala teachings can open vital questions regarding intersubjectivity, challenge and reinvigorate aspects of current engagements with contemplative practices, and provide significant insights and educational paths for transformational endeavours in neoliberal times. Informed by our learning from Shambhala, we conclude with a deepened understanding of intercultural philosophy of education. (shrink)