Glen Stassen has approached his life and work "as if Jesus mattered," and this new collection of essays in his honor demonstrates that the contributors share that commitment, each in her or his own way. Ethics as if Jesus Mattered will introduce Stassen's work to a new generation, advance dialogue and debate in Christian ethics, and inspire more faithful discipleship just as it honors one whom the contributors consider a mentor.

Eighteen Christian theologians and ethicists offer a rich engagement with the theological ethics of Glen Stassen (1936-2014).

Consistent with the idea that business ethics is a form of applied ethics, many virtue ethicists make use of an extant (pure) moral philosophy framework, namely, one developed by Alasdair MacIntyre. In doing so, these authors have refined MacIntyre’s work, but have never really challenged it. In here questioning, and developing an alternative to, the MacIntyrean orthdoxy, I illustrate the merit of business ethicists adopting a broader philosophical perspective focused on constructing (new) theory. More specifically—and in referring to action sports (...) (e.g., mountain biking, snowboarding)—I propose that an external good motive is not only much more consistent with virtuous practical excellence than MacIntyreans acknowledge, but that such a motive is fundamental to identifying and explaining how practices can be deliberately created (by businesses). Consequently, and in stark contrast with MacIntyre’s deeply pessimistic outlook on modern business and society, I propose that those who value practices might celebrate our current era. (shrink)

The authors refute Harris’s criticism of the work of NICE and in turn criticise his description of the institute’s positionHarris’s recent editorial,1It’s not NICE to discriminate, is long on both polemic and invective but short on scholarship. He offers nothing to illuminate the debate about allocating health care in circumstances of finite resources; he has no understanding of the quality adjusted life year and its use in health economic evaluation; and he makes ill researched, unsubstantiated charges against the institute and (...) its advisory bodies.ALLOCATING HEALTHCARE RESOURCESThe British National Health Service , like every other healthcare system in the world, has finite resources. How the NHS’s budget should be most appropriately allocated is a very specific example of the more general problem of distributive justice.2The NHS, with its requirement3 to provide all care that is “necessary and appropriate”, was founded with an egalitarian purpose. Yet despite its laudable emphasis on fairness, the implementation of the NHS’s egalitarian approach remains uncertain. What is necessary? What is appropriate? How should the tensions between the service’s egalitarian aspirations, and the need to provide health care from finite resources, be resolved? On what principles should these allocative decisions be made?Utilitarianism, with its goal to maximise overall good, is another approach. Yet experience with the original Oregon plan demonstrated that, when rigidly applied, it can yield solutions that most find unacceptable—for example, tooth capping taking precedence over emergency appendectomy.4 Moreover, some versions of utilitarianism can allow the interests of minorities to be overridden by the majority; and it has next to nothing to offer in eradicating health inequalities.There is no single, broadly accepted, theory of distributive justice …. (shrink)

ABSTRACT:I here advance a critical research agenda for the political perspective of corporate social responsibility (Political CSR). I argue that whilst the ‘Political’ CSR literature is notable for both its conceptual novelty and practical importance, its development has been hamstrung by four ambiguities, conflations and/or oversights. More positively, I argue that ‘Political’ CSR should be conceived as one potentialformof globalization, and not as aconsequenceof ‘globalization’; that contemporary Western MNCs should be presumed to engage in CSR for instrumental reasons; that ‘Political’ (...) CSR should be associated with a corresponding ‘political’ model of corporate governance; and that both a ‘Rawlsian’ and ‘Habermasian’ perspective of Political CSR are different from ‘Political’ CSR. In concluding, I use these four critiques to identify a number of areas within which increasingly robust and sophisticated positive and normative theories of Political CSR are required. (shrink)

Little attention has been paid to the importance of social media in the corporate social responsibility (CSR) literature. This deficit is redressed in the present paper through utilizing the notion of ‘citizenship arenas’ to identify three dynamics in social media-augmented corporate–society relations. First, we note that social media-augmented ‘corporate arenas of citizenship’ are constructed by individual corporations in an effort to address CSR issues of specific importance thereto, and are populated by individual citizens as well as (functional/formally organized) stakeholders. Second, (...) we highlight that, within social media-augmented ‘public arenas of citizenship’, individual citizens are empowered, relative to corporations and their (functional/formally organized) stakeholders, when it comes to creating, debating, and publicizing, CSR-relevant issues. Third, we posit that information and communication technology corporations possess specific, and potentially very important, capacities, when it comes to creating, or helping construct, public arenas of citizenship from within which individual citizens can influence their broader political–economic environment. Following this, we discuss how social media can contribute to ‘dysfunctions’ as well as ‘progressions’ in corporate–society relations, and conclude with a number of suggestions for future research. (shrink)

This paper gives an account of the differences between polar and alternative questions, as well as an account of the division of labor between compositional semantics and pragmatics in interpreting these types of questions. Alternative questions involve a strong exhaustivity presupposition for the mentioned alternatives. We derive this compositionally from the meaning of the final falling tone and its interaction with the pragmatics of questioning in discourse. Alternative questions are exhaustive in two ways: they exhaust the space of epistemic possibilities, (...) as well as the space of discourse possibilities (the Question Under Discussion). In contrast, we propose that polar questions are the opposite: they present just one alternative that is necessarily non-exhaustive. The account explains a range of response patterns to alternative and polar questions, as well as differences and similarities between the two types of questions. (shrink)

Google is a complex and complicated political beast with a significant, and often confusing, interest, in copyright matters. On one hand, for example, Google is widely accused of profiting from piracy. On the other, Google routinely complies with what is rapidly approaching a billion copyright takedown requests annually. In the present article, Foucault, neo-Gramscians, and Deleuze and Guattari are utilized to help construct a 32 dispositive analysis framework that overlaps three dispositive modalities and perspectives. In applying the framework to the (...) Google–copyright relationship, the article shows how Google was “born political”: in that it was, and still is, disposed by an apparatus comprised of copyright laws, Silicon Valley culture, and broad advances in digitization. Moreover, the article shows how Google continuously acts where “politics is born”: as it significantly shapes copyright considerations by disposing of human and organizational phenomena through articulations and assemblages. (shrink)

Etzioni has recently proposed that the success of Internet enabled commerce is surprising due to what I label the “trust in strangers” problem. In here responding to Etzioni, I argue that the “trust in strangers” problem effectively dissolves once it is recognized that current manifestations of Internet commerce are not associated with high levels of anonymity, but rather, with high levels of surveillance. In doing so, I first outline how data capitalism and security considerations have contributed to Internet surveillance being (...) close to ubiquitous. Following this, I differentiate between three types of surveillance—i.e. top-down, bottom-up, networked—that many people who digitally connect rely upon. In concluding, I emphasize my basic argument. Namely, that it is “trust in surveillance”, rather than “trust in strangers”, that supports current manifestations of commerce online. (shrink)

Why do political philosophers shy away from politics? Glen Newey offers a challenging and original critique of liberalism, the dominant political philosophy of our time, tackling such key issues as state legitimacy, value-pluralism, neutrality, the nature of politics, public reason, and morality in politics. Analyzing major liberal theorists, Newey argues that liberalism bypasses politics because it ignores or misunderstands human motivation, and elevates academic systembuilding over political realities of conflict and power.

What is forgiveness? When is it appropriate? Is it to be earned or can it be freely given? Is it a passion we cannot control, or something we choose to do? Glen Pettigrove explores the relationship between forgiving, understanding, and loving. He examines the significance of character for the debate, and revives the long-neglected virtue of grace.

Industrial emissions of greenhouse gases are significant contributors to climate change, which poses a grave threat to social and economic systems. Our understanding of what might drive firms to reduce their emissions of these gases, however, is incomplete, and it is not clear that the knowledge gained from other environmental issues will readily apply to these emissions. We argue and find that indicators of environmental injustice previously shown to relate to toxic pollutants, for example, are poor predictors of greenhouse gas (...) emissions. Instead, we show that the degree of belief in and concern about climate change in a local community is a significant predictor of the facility’s rate of emission improvements. Furthermore, we find that beliefs at both the facility and headquarter communities influence emission reduction, and that those effects are substitutes for each other. (shrink)

Upon first studying Capital, I believed, as have most Marxists I have known, that the answer to the question posed in the title of this article was obvious. After all, Marx declared that surplus labour is “extorted from the immediate producer, the worker,” and capitalist accumulation involves “the theft of alien labour time.” He also insisted that capitalists “extort” surplus value and divide amongst themselves “the loot of other people’s labour,” so that the wage exchange, in spite of its equality, (...) is “only the age-old dodge of every conqueror who buys commodities from the conquered with the money he has robbed them of.”. (shrink)

Toleration is becoming an increasingly questioned issue in modern democratic and multicultural societies and is debated within the academic disciplines of politics, history and cultural and literary studies. In this book Glen Newey systematically analyses toleration in relation to broader issues in meta-ethical theory and offers a new, rigorous philosophical theory of toleration as a virtue. A wide range of questions in ethical theory is addressed, including ethical responsibility, character and virtue, the nature of reasons for action, the acts/omissions (...) doctrine, and the nature of normativity itself. This analysis offers a new understanding of the limits of moral theory, and reveals problems with understanding toleration philosophically and with implementing it politically. As a unique contribution to the toleration debate, this book will be of importance to all those with an interest in political theory, philosophy and ethics.* An original and highly sophisticated analysis of toleration* Unique in applying toleration to meta-ethical theory* Covers a broad range of questions in ethical theory* Toleration is a key issue in political theory and also outside the academy - issues of censorship and political correctness, etc. remain strongly to the fore. (shrink)

Political disputes over toleration are endemic, while toleration as a political value seems opposed to those of civic equality, neutrality and sometimes democracy. Toleration in Political Conflict sets out to understand toleration as both politically awkward and indispensable. The book exposes the incoherence of Rawlsian reasonable pluralist justifications of toleration, and shows that toleration cannot be fully reconciled with liberal political values. While raison d'état concerns very often overshadow debates over toleration, these debates – for example about terrorism – need (...) not be framed as a conflict between toleration and security. Framing them in this way tends to obscure objectionable behaviour by tolerators themselves, and their reliance on asymmetric power. Glen Newey concludes by sketching a picture of politics as dependent on free speech which, he argues, is entailed by the demands of free association. That in turn suggests that questions of toleration are inescapable within the conditions of politics itself. (shrink)

All recent memory theories of hippocampal function have incorporated the idea that the hippocampus is required to process items only of some qualitatively specifiahle kind, and is not required to process items of some complementary set. In contrast, it is now proposed that the hippocampus is needed to process stimuli of all kinds, but only when there is a need to associate those stimuli with other events that are temporally discontiguous. In order to form or use temporally discontiguous associations, it (...) is essential to maintain some memory of the first component until the second component has occurred. When the temporal gap to he spanned is small, and the number of items to be temporarily retained is low, a limited-capacity, short-term store is sufficient to allow associations to be formed. Such a store is presumed to operate in parallel with the hippocampus in normal animals. Hippocampal damage disrupts a much higher-capacity store that has a slower decay rate, and so leaves animals with only a very limited ability to form temporally discontiguous associations. Hippocampal damage, however, is not held to affect the long-term storage of associations of any kind, if they can be formed. Analyses of both new and existing data are presented to show that by classifying tasks in terms of the need to use a temporary memory store to retain temporally discontiguous information one can cut right across existing classifications as well as achieve a better fit to the data. The hippocampus thus seems best described as a high-capacity, intermediate-term memory store. (shrink)

Virtue ethics is currently one of three major approaches in normative ethics. It may, initially, be identified as the one that emphasizes the virtues, or moral character, in contrast to the approach that emphasizes duties or rules (deontology) or that emphasizes the consequences of actions (consequentialism). Suppose it is obvious that someone in need should be helped. A utilitarian will point to the fact that the consequences of doing so will maximize well-being, a deontologist to the fact that, in doing (...) so the agent will be acting in accordance with a moral rule such as “Do unto others as you would be done by” and a virtue ethicist to the fact that helping the person would be charitable or benevolent. (shrink)

Despite the Gothic’s much-discussed resurgence in mainstream American culture, the role the late 2000s financial crisis played in sustaining this renaissance has garnered insufficient critical attention. This article finds the Gothic tradition deployed in contemporary American narrative film to explore the impact of economic crisis and threat, and especially masculine anxieties about a perceived incapacity of men and fathers to protect vulnerable families and homes. Variously invoking the American and Southern Gothics, Take Shelter and Winter’s Bone represent how the domestic-everyday (...) was made unfamiliar, unsettling and threatening in the face of metaphorical and real economic crisis and disorder. The films’ explicit engagement with contemporary American economic malaise and instability thus illustrates the Gothic’s continued capacity to lay bare historical and cultural moments of national crisis. Illuminating culturally persistent anxieties about the American male condition, Take Shelter and Winter’s Bone materially evoke the Gothic tradition’s ability to scrutinize otherwise unspeakable national anxieties about male capacity to protect home and family, including through a focus on economic-cultural “white Otherness.” The article further asserts the significance of prominent female assumption of the protective role, yet finds that, rather than individuating the experience of financial crisis on failed men, both films deftly declare its systemic, whole-of-society basis. In so doing, the Gothic sensibility of pervasive anxiety and dread in Take Shelter and Winter’s Bone disrupts dominant national discursive tendencies to revivify American institutions of traditional masculinity, family and home in the wakes of 9/11 and the recession. (shrink)

Democratic politicians face pressures unknown to the prerogative rulers of the early modern period when toleration was first formulated as a political ideal. These pressures are less often expressed as demands by groups or individuals for the permission of practices they dislike than for their restraint or outright prohibition; tolerant dispositions are less politically clamorous. The executive structure of toleration as a virtue, together with the ‘fact of reasonable pluralism’, make conflicts over toleration peculiarly intractable. Political conflicts are apt to (...) take the form of mutual allegations ofintolerance; indeed, the problem of ‘tolerating the intolerant’, far from being a marginal case, is central to the theory and practice of toleration. Toleration thus exemplifies a category mistake committed in much contemporary political theory, particularly in its contractualist versions: the threshold of the political lies precisely where rational agreement proves impossible. The main prospects for democratic toleration are thus pre-emptive. The main way in which this can happen is by cultivating executive dispositions: in other words, encouraging people to detach themselves from strong evaluative commitments, so that toleration does not become politically contentious to start with. But this involves losses as well as gains. The gains in civil harmony and peace are obvious. The cost for tolerant political actors is alienation from what they have good reason to value. (shrink)

On e recent change in the Society of Professional journalists Code of Ethics emphasizes that journalists should consider minimizing harm to society. This emphnsis follows more than a decade of thinking by educators who have called for teaching journalism students moral philosophy and moral reasoning decision making models-models that generally examine potential harm that surrounds newsroom decisions. This study, a quasi-experiment, examines pretest and posttest results of 210 students in 9 sections of n mass media ethics class taught over 6 (...) different semesters. After taking the course, which emphasized moral reasoning, students were more likely to make decisions that minimized harm, while gaining certainty in their answers. Diflerences between news-editorial and public relntions students are noted. Essays written by the students support the finding that education in moral reasoning can be effective in the development ofstudent journalists and their sense ofresponsibility to society. (shrink)

Ambition is a curiously neglected topic in ethics. It isn’t that philosophers have not discussed it. Plato, Aristotle, Seneca, Aquinas, Machiavelli, Harrington, Locke, Rousseau, Smith, Santayana and a number of others have discussed ambition. But it has seldom received more than a few paragraphs worth of analysis, in spite of the fact that ambition plays a central role in Western politics (one cannot be elected without it), and in spite of the fact that Machiavelli, Harrington, Locke and Rousseau each considered (...) it to be among the greatest threats to political security. The aim of this paper is to provide a long overdue analysis of ambition. The first part of the paper explores what ambition is. The second seeks to answer the question, “Is ambition a virtue or a vice?”. (shrink)

This paper explores the relation between understanding and forgiving. A number of people have argued against the old adage that to understand is to forgive, for in many instances understanding leads to excusing rather than forgiving. Nonetheless, there is an interesting connection to be found between forgiving and understanding. I identify three ways in which understanding can lead to forgiveness ofunexcused wrongdoing: It can do so by changing our interpretation of the actor, by changing our interpretation of the action, and (...) by engaging self-Iove. (shrink)

Central to the argument of the book are Charles Taylor's perspectives on authenticity and expressivism, which the author reads as a radical reworking of our understanding of being in the world and a starting point for rethinking the way individuals and communities ought to be dealing politically with ecological crises. Glen Lehman uses Taylor's work on liberalism, interpretivism and socialism to construct a bridge between democratic, ethical and ecological perspectives. The bridge developed involves a fusion between liberal and interpretivist (...) ideas, establishing a common ground through which different values are addressed. Such a fusion of perspectives acts in a spirit that moderates the dominant anthropocentric attitude toward the natural environment"--From publisher's website. (shrink)

Most clinicians and mental health practitioners are reluctant to work with people with dangerous and severe personality disorders because they believe there is nothing that mental health services can offer. Dangerous and severe personality disorder also signals a diagnosis which is problematic morally. Moral philosophy has not found an adequate way of dealing with personality disorders. This paper explores the question: What makes a person morally responsible for his actions and what is a legitimate mitigating factor? How do psychiatric nurses (...) working with this client group understand the awful things some clients do? What concepts do they need, if they are to know how to explain and how to react? It is suggested that dangerous and severe personality disorder is best regarded as a moral category, framed in terms of goodness, badness, obligation and other ethical concepts. It seems plausible that in important ways the dangerous and severe personality disordered client does not understand morality or understands it differently. The peculiar position of the dangerous and severe personality disordered individual in our system of moral responsibility stems from his apparent inability to see the importance of the interests of others. It might be more helpful to regard personality disordered clients as we do children: partially but not fully reasonable for their actions. We might regard the dangerous and severe personality disordered client responsible for those actions which he most clearly understands, such as causing others physical pain, but not for those with which he is only superficially engaged, such as causing emotional pain. The paper concludes by suggesting that the dangerous and severe personality disordered individual does not fit easily into any conventional moral category, be it criminal, patient, animal or child, and thus an assessment of his moral accountability must take into consideration his special circumstances. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Just and Unjust Peace: An Ethic of Political Reconciliation by Daniel PhilpottGlen StassenJust and Unjust Peace: An Ethic of Political Reconciliation Daniel Philpott New York: Oxford University Press, 2012. 365pp. $29.95Just and Unjust Peace deals with an important question: What does a holistic framework of justice consist of in the wake of its massive despoliation? The wounds of political injustice include the following: violation of the victim’s human (...) rights, harms to the victim’s person, the victim’s ignorance of the source and circumstances of political injustices, the lack of acknowledgment of the suffering, the standing victory of the wrongdoer’s political injustice, and harm to the person of the wrongdoer. In such situations, Philpott argues, “what the government and community withhold is... an acknowledgment not only that a victim has rights but also that his rights were violated and that he suffered because of this violation” (37).The definition of justice in this context of wounds is reconciliation. It “encompasses peace settlements, human rights, democracy, and other key goals of negative and positive peace [as well as]... a broad restoration of right relationship involving a multiplicity of practices that each redress wounds of injustice in a particular way” (48–49).Daniel Philpott affirms peace as human rights, equality, and the rule of law, plus actors and institutions like the United Nations that spread this justice. He presents a fair summary of contending positions on human rights and works to develop overlapping agreement. “What is most essential to right relationship in the political order is human rights, their popular legitimacy, and their corresponding virtues” (55). But also, “It is in redressing wrong conduct—the other dimension of justice—that political reconciliation becomes far more distinctive” (55). This requires a deeper understanding of just peacemaking with restorative justice based in Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, and in insightful assessment of the burgeoning practices of truth commissions and restorative justice in the transitions from dictatorship to democracy.Philpott’s “rooted reason” invites different religions to speak from their depths but also encourages them to speak with reasons that can convince in public discourse (18, 20). Envisioning the incorporation of reconciliation into the modern state “is the life’s work of Rabbi Marc Gopin. In today’s Middle East, [End Page 211] Gopin argues, Jews as well as Christians and Muslims cannot afford to ignore the peacebuilding potential of traditional religious concepts” (132). Philpott also exhibits sensitive understanding of Islam, asking, “Do Islamic texts and traditions contain the materials for the construction of the ethic of political reconciliation that I am proposing? Can Muslims, on the basis of their religious convictions, join in an overlapping consensus on such an ethic?” His answer is a clear yes (153).He identifies and assesses six practices of a politics of reconciliation. The first involves building socially just institutions and relations between states: “Since 1974, some ninety societies... have sought to replace dictatorships with democracies.... A similarly intense global wave of peace operations sponsored by the United Nations... has sought to foster human rights and democratic institutions in states that have seen civil war” (175–76). The second has to do with the practices of political acknowledgment of wrongs: “Human rights are the standard that gives truth commissions and other public forms of acknowledgment form and direction” (188). The third pertains to reparations, with attention to the ongoing effects of historical injustices for descendants (195 and 201). The fourth addresses judicial punishment: “In practicing judicial punishment, a state redresses the violation of the victim’s rights insofar as it expresses, reaffirms, and thereby strengthens human rights as the legally valid values of its realm or of relations between it and another state” (237). The fifth is apology: “Like all of the other practices, apologies performed in political contexts have grown in frequency” (198). Finally, there is forgiveness. “Political injustices harm victims by robbing them of their agency and of their ability to pursue their own and others’ flourishing.... Forgiveness... re-empowers the victim as agent... [and liberates] from anger and resentment” and can also lead to recognition of the victim’s suffering, and to mutual respect for human rights (266–68... (shrink)

Abstract In 2006, the Turkish Harun Yahya Enterprise published and distributed thousands of copies of its anti‐evolutionary text Atlas of Creation to educational institutes in the West. Although this was little more than a publicity stunt, it resulted in Harun Yahya becoming a mainstay in discussions about creationism in Europe. Although Yahya is often presented as the “go to” representative of European Muslim perceptions of evolution, one would be hard pressed to find the literature about Islamic creationism in Europe that (...) does not engage in a discussion of Harun Yahya. However, little evidence exists to support the notion that Harun Yahya warrants such extensive attention, or that Harun Yahya has a substantive influence among European Muslims. This article will explore existing claims about the popularity of Harun Yahya, before drawing on recent research into Muslim perceptions of evolution to argue that Harun Yahya is relatively unknown among Muslims, at least in the British context, and is not influential even among those who are familiar with his work. (shrink)

This paper provides an analysis of a 1991 survey of the views of a stratified random sample of 1,105 Ontario farmers. Factor analysis, Kruskal—Wallis one-way ANOVA, chi-square and correlations were used to identify differences in farmers' attitudes toward rural environmental issues as a function of their demographic and farm characteristics. Younger, well-educated farmers, especially if female, were most concerned about the seriousness of rural environmental degradation. The largest operators expressed the greatest support for the use of agricultural chemicals, were most (...) opposed to government conservation regulations and were least environmentally oriented. Such differences between Australian and Ontario farmers as the former's greater cautiousness about governmental regulation and receptivity to the Green Movement are a function of differing demographic and farm characteristics between Australia and Ontario. (shrink)

Giovanni Bianchini’s fifteenth-century Tabulae primi mobilis is a collection of 50 pages of canons and 100 pages of tables of spherical astronomy and mathematical astrology, beginning with a treatment of the conversion of stellar coordinates from ecliptic to equatorial. His new method corrects a long-standing error made by a number of his antecedents, and with his tables the computations are much more efficient than in Ptolemy’s Almagest. The completely novel structure of Bianchini’s tables, here and in his Tabulae magistrales, was (...) taken over by Regiomontanus in the latter’s Tabulae directionum. One of the tables Regiomontanus imported from Bianchini contains the first appearance of the tangent function in Latin Europe, which both used as an auxiliary quantity for the calculation of stellar coordinates. (shrink)

A thorough appreciation of the Whiteheadian subjectivist principle necessitates both a doctrine of panexperientialism as well as a metaphysical perspectivism. Employing a dialectical analysis of these two, this article argues that reality—as understood by the Whiteheadian term “actual world”—is largely misunderstood. Far from representing a singular concrete world, reality is multiplicitous and subject-dependent. As a result of this and the core tenet of process metaphysics—that all existents can be understood as event—it is argued that human language, as its own species (...) of event, interacts with reality in the same way all other events do, and as such must be considered genuinely ontologically creative. (shrink)

On rationalist infallibilism, a wide range of both (i) analytic and (ii) synthetic a priori propositions can be infallibly justified (or absolutely warranted), i.e., justified to a degree that entails their truth and precludes their falsity. Though rationalist infallibilism is indisputably running its course, adherence to at least one of the two species of infallible a priori justification refuses to disappear from mainstream epistemology. Among others, Putnam (1978) still professes the a priori infallibility of some category (i) propositions, while Burge (...) (1986, 1988, 1996) and Lewis (1996) have recently affirmed the a priori infallibility of some category (ii) propositions. In this paper, I take aim at rationalist infallibilism by calling into question the a priori infallibility of both analytic and synthetic propositions. The upshot will be twofold: first, rationalist infallibilism unsurprisingly emerges as a defective epistemological doctrine, and second, more importantly, the case for the a priori infallibility of one or both categories of propositions turns out to lack cogency. (shrink)

ABSTRACT In virtually every corner of ethics—including discussions of value, practical reasoning, moral psychology, and justice—it is common for theorists to suggest that our actions, attitudes, or emotions should be proportional to the degree of value present in the objects or events to which they are responding. I argue that there is a fundamental problem with these approaches: they overlook the character of the agent and what it adds to the equation. I show that a commitment to proportionality is at (...) odds with both ordinary and admirable instances of love, ambition, and forgiveness. To make room for disproportional attitudes and actions, I introduce a novel account of virtue and its relation to value. (shrink)

This paper examines how good management can repair fractured relationships within organisations, addressing problems that if left unattended will threaten the future existence of many of these companies. It analyses why there is a mood for change in management thinking, and what direction that change can take. Part of the challenge is how managers can best satisfy the objectives of corporate social responsibility initiatives, and repair organisational and fractured community relationships. A possible role for management is to examine alternative ways (...) of thinking about the potential benefits for the organisation that can be achieved by enhancing employee relationships. In this regard, this paper offers strategies to examine management’s adverse affects on workers’ life-plans. The art of interpretation is used to expose how bureaucratic logic ignores workers’ rights and potentially damages the corporation’s longevity. Interpretation, as opposed to procedure, suggests that organisations are not simply profit mechanisms, but active and dynamic civil societies. By better understanding the facilitating processes of administrative and management thinking, it is possible that we can develop alternative strategies that empower individuals to circumvent the negative consequences of instrumental rationality and enable them to act more responsibly in the public interest. (shrink)

Over the last 30 years, the self-determination efforts and objectives of Indigenous peoples in Canada have increasingly been cast in the language of ‘recognition’ — recognition of cultural distinctiveness, recognition of an inherent right to self-government, recognition of state treaty obligations, and so on. In addition, the last 15 years have witnessed a proliferation of theoretical work aimed at fleshing out the ethical, legal and political significance of these types of claims. Subsequently, ‘recognition’ has now come to occupy a central (...) place in our efforts to comprehend what is at stake in contestations over identity and difference in colonial contexts more generally. In this paper, I employ Frantz Fanon's critique of Hegel's master–slave dialectic to challenge the now hegemonic assumption that the structure of domination that frames Indigenous–state relations in Canada can be undermined via a liberal politics of recognition. Against this assumption, I argue that instead of ushering in an era of peaceful coexistence grounded on the Hegelian ideal of reciprocity, the contemporary politics of recognition promises to reproduce the very configurations of colonial power that Indigenous demands for recognition have historically sought to transcend. (shrink)

The Island of Rottnest is commonly known to Noongar people as Wadjemup, “place across the river” or from its colonial connections the “Isle of Spirits”. Rottnest is located approximately 18 km off the coast of Western Australia, near Fremantle, and is world-renowned as a tourism precinct. The island’s hidden history of Aboriginal incarceration, dispossession and death within the Panopticon-inspired Quod prison is less well known. Foucault is eminently known for his theories around panopticism, at least by any student of cultural (...) and critical theory in the last few decades. Foucault’s based on the 18th-century social reformer Jeremy Bentham’s idea that prisoners could be controlled and reformed by creating the illusion that they were at all times under surveillance. This paper investigates the Panopticon’s influence on one of the oldest cultures in the world – Australian Aboriginals in the western state of the continent – who were, from 1864, incarcerated in a Panopticon-influenced building referred to as the Quod. The incarceration dehumanized, dispossessed and colonized proud people. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:The Church for the World: A Theology of Public Witness by Jennifer McBrideGlen StassenThe Church for the World: A Theology of Public Witness Jennifer McBride New York: Oxford University Press, 2012. 310 pp. $74.00Jennifer McBride offers the brilliant proposal that Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s theme of repentance is the right ingredient for our pluralistic and democratic context, which needs a nontriumphal Christian witness. [End Page 199]My focus on confession and (...) repentance as a nontriumphal public witness is aimed... mostly at white Protestants who benefit in countless recognized and unrecognized ways from being part of the dominant culture, because this reflects my own social location and the churches and para-church groups in which I was raised. Bonhoeffer writes... from a position of social power and privilege and argues from that place that the acknowledgment of guilt is definitive for the church. My theology of public witness defines the church as the body called to repentance—as the body called, in the words of Bonhoeffer, to accept guilt or take responsibility for social sin.(9)McBride shows that “repentance” carries various connotations in Bonhoeffer’s writings. In Discipleship, he “links metanoia with the church’s conformation to the crucified Christ (a prevalent theme throughout his theology).” In Ethics, he links “repentance to the church’s this-worldly activity when he defines the church’s repentance as preparing this ‘penultimate’ world for its redemptive transformation.” In Letters and Papers from Prison, he defines metanoia as “living completely in” this world’s tasks, questions, successes and failures, experiences, and perplexities, taking seriously the suffering of God in the world (14). “As the acceptance of divine judgment, repentance participates in the unfolding of redemption. Thus, it is... energized by hope for the world and humanity, animated by joyful expectation as much as lament, and oriented toward future transformation as much as past and present sin” (107). Interpreting repentance through the person of Christ directly challenges the common understanding that repentance primarily concerns one’s individual standing before God; instead, as participation in Christ, repentance constitutes existence for others. Her interpretation is far richer and more insightful than I can represent in a short review.McBride bases her argument on three dimensions of Bonhoeffer’s theology: Christology, this-worldliness, and ecclesiology (12). By “Christology,” she is pointing to “nothing other than the crucified Christ who accepts responsibility for sin” (139). By “this-worldliness,” we can also point to Christology, in Bonhoeffer’s incarnational theme of entering into the full dimensions of human life. McBride’s ecclesiology urges “that the church’s presence in public life be conformed to Christ’s mode of being in the world” (54).In his Ethics (134–45) Bonhoeffer wrote a profound confession of his own, the churches’ and nation’s guilt that was taken up by some churches and church groups after the war’s end, and then by President Richard von Weizsäcker and Chancellor Willy Brandt. This public repentance has been the key to healing within Germany and in its relation with other nations.McBride credits Larry Rasmussen and John de Gruchy for inspiring us to develop new implications of Bonhoeffer’s theological ethics for our different contexts. So she goes “beyond Bonhoeffer with Bonhoeffer.” [End Page 200]McBride appreciates the pioneering work of Christine Schliesser, Everyone Who Acts Responsibly Becomes Guilty, for noticing that Bonhoeffer’s central concept of “acceptance of guilt has not been examined systematically by previous scholars.” She goes beyond Schliesser, emphasizing that as public witness, the church’s confession unto repentance consists of communal, more than individual, acceptance of guilt—“especially the myriad social/structural evils of our political, social, and economic systems.” She appreciates Stanley Hauerwas’s emphasis on ecclesiology but urges him to develop a theology of public witness that communicates that Christ and the church are for, not against, the world, with its pluralistic, not monolithic, culture. She appreciates Jim Wallis’s Call to Conversion, “a clear, detailed, and theologically sophisticated appeal for ecclesial conversion, especially in regard to poverty and war,” but criticizes God’s Politics for being insufficiently theological. She concludes with an ethnographic study of two emerging churches, Eleuthero in Maine... (shrink)

In our Age of Interaction, we need a historically based method for validating our ethics as standing on solid ground. Applying such a method to historical test times such as the Third Reich, the US Civil Rights Movement, and others, indicates that an ethic of incarnational discipleship, trinitarianly interpreted, passes the test. But this requires an interpretation of Jesus' Sermon on the Mount that corrects idealist interpretations, and points instead to realistic practices of deliverance. A new paradigm for interpreting the (...) Sermon on the Mount is demonstrated, with fourteen grace-based transforming initiatives of realistic deliverance from vicious cycles. A hermeneutic of analogical imagination is advocated for relating Jesus' practices in his context to effective practices of deliverance in our historical context. This points to realistic practices of just peacemaking that are effective in preventing wars and creating conditions that lead toward peace — and therefore are realistic for social ethics. (shrink)