This study investigated the relationships among oppositional defiant attitudes, moral reasoning, moral value evaluation and self-reported delinquent behaviour in adolescents (N = 351, MAGE = 13.8 years, SDAGE = 1.1). Of particular interest were the moderating effects of age, educational environment and gender on the relationship between moral reasoning and delinquency. The results indicate that oppositional defiance was a strong positive correlate of delinquent behaviour, particularly in late adolescence. Furthermore, moral reasoning was modestly and negatively related to delinquency, but only (...) for males. No moderating effects for educational environment were observed. Moreover, moral value evaluation was uncorrelated with delinquent behaviour when controlling for other sociomoral processes. These findings invite further research on the relationship between attitudes and behaviour, with respect to causal links and practical applications within behavioural interventions. (shrink)

As the use of algorithmic decision‐making becomes more commonplace, so too does the worry that these algorithms are often inscrutable and our use of them is a threat to our agency. Since we do not understand why an inscrutable process recommends one option over another, we lose our ability to judge whether the guidance is appropriate and are vulnerable to being led astray. In response, I claim that a process being inscrutable does not automatically make its guidance inappropriate. This phenomenon (...) is not restricted to algorithms, and there are many social processes which we should conform to but are similarly unable to judge for ourselves. I provide a framework for how we can depend on inscrutable processes by introducing a distinction between knowing conformity (where I understand what justifies the guidance) from mere conformity (where I merely do what I am told) and showing how mere conformity is often positively valuable because it allows for extended processes that in turn allow us to accomplish more than we could on our own. This is in effect a division of deliberative labour, which I argue is something commonplace but not often recognised, of which algorithmic guidance can be an example. (shrink)

Calling Citizens to a Moral Way of Life: A Dutch Example of Moralized Politics This article offers a sociological analysis of the moral revisions that accompany welfare state reforms in the Netherlands. It is argued that Dutch welfare state reforms after the Cold War rely on moral discourses in particular and moral language in general to legitimize and effectuate policy measures. The Dutch reformers have been pursuing a set of strategies of moralization designed to adjust the Dutch welfare state to (...) the new, post-Cold War situation, in which social policies are redesigned to support the operation of global markets. This article seeks to show how this "moral revision" has been taking place by consulting data sources provided by Dutch media, policy documents, council reports, advices, speeches, and newspaper interviews. This implies that special attention is paid to the rhetoric, language, tones, symbolism, metaphors and moral images used and propagated by moral revisionists, elites and media, their definitions of the prevailing moral situation and of the desired one, their formulation of desired values and norms and the ways in which moral panics are aroused. Three recent Dutch policy innovations, namely the national debate on norms and values, the Charter Responsible Citizenship and the family policy memorandum, are interpreted as political strategies to re-engineer the new morality that can sustain a reformed state. (shrink)

Hierdie boek is n inleiding tot moderne denkrigtings wat alle fasette van die staat betref. Dit verduidelik die verbintenis tussen die huidige proses van staatsvorming in Suid-Afrika en die tradisionele faktore wat dit elders in die w reld aangehelp het.

Nigeria is indeed a typical pluralistic society with innumerable differences in culture, ethnicity, tribe, religion, and class. Yet there exists in Nigeria certain dominant cultures, ethnic nationalities, religions, and classes. In some parts of the country the influence of a dominant culture or ethnic group is more pronounced than in others. This paper is therefore an attempt to look into our pluralism and see how it can enhance the development and promotion of democracy in the country. This paper will address (...) this topic by considering a working definition of democracy and how it is understood and applied in Nigeria; the ethnoreligious politics in Nigeria; postmodernism, democracy, and pluralism in Nigerian society; and the role of religious leaders in the survival of democracy in Nigeria. (shrink)

n this thesis I describe how conventions specify how to put normative principles into practice. I identify a class of recurring situations where there are some given normative principles in effect, but they underdetermine what each individual should do, and what is best for an individual depends on what others do. I demonstrate that in such cases, whenever the community develops a response that repeatedly brings them to as good an outcome as is available according to their principles, that response (...) is a Lewisian convention where the benefit of an outcome to each individual is measured by the extent to which it conforms to the principles they subscribe to. Since these conventions are constrained by the normative principles, I call them limited conventions. They are supplements to the principles, and are ineradicably involved in moral action insofar as the abovementioned cases of moral underdetermination are in play. That has the consequence that in these cases the only reliable way to follow your principles is to follow the relevant conventions. As examples of this mechanism I offer a conventionalist analysis of authority, such that the commands of an authority is normative when they instantiate a limited convention, and of the variation in understandings of virtue and vice across societies, such that the evaluative vocabulary of each society is a set of different limited conventions about how to express in word and deed the evaluative points of the virtues and vices in question. Finally, I discuss how conventions and similar forms of guidance provide a way for individuals to participate in their community’s moral life without having a full understanding of the principles that underlie it, or even if they are profoundly ignorant or outright mistaken about the demands of morality. (shrink)

There is not as much resistance to COVID-19 mitigation as there seems, but there are structural features that make resistance seem worse than it is. Here we describe two ways that the problem seeming to be worse than it is can make it worse. First, visible hesitation to implement COVID-19 responses signals to the wider society that mitigation measures may not succeed, which undermines people’s conditional willingness to join in on those efforts. Second, our evaluations of others’ willingness to implement (...) these measures are informed by our attempts to mind-read them. Yet attempts to mind-read groups often mislead us, because groups invariably act from diverse motives whereas mind-reading works best when identifying relatively stable and consistent motivations. This means that a small minority of people refusing to implement measures can have an outsized prominence that prompts mind-reading to diagnose widespread hesitation. These two factors form a feedback loop with each other: we see some people’s hesitation, which prompts us to mind-read other people as being more uncertain about the responses than they actually are, which undermines our confidence in the responses, which in turn encourages others to mind-read this hesitation, which further undermines confidence. (shrink)

Obwohl sie durch das Werk von MoNTESQUIEU erst auf die praktische Staatskunst von Einfluss geworden ist, so ist doch die Lehre der drei Staatsfunktionen schon von sehr altem Datum. Die Spuren einer Einteilung der Staatsaufgabe kann man bereits 1 bei ARISTOTELES finden. Er unterscheidet in der Politica ) drei Elemente. Das Verhältnis dieser die Staatsaufgabe konstituierenden Elemente ist verschieden und charakteristisch für den Regierungs typus, und ARISTOTELES hält es für die Pflicht des Gesetzgebers, eines und das andre so anzuordnen, wie (...) es sich für jede Gemein schaft passt. Man kann dann nach ARISTOTELES unterscheiden, erstens die beratende Funktion, welche die autoritative Beschluss fassung über Krieg und Frieden, das Schliessen oder Brechen von Bündnissen, die Verfassung von Gesetzen, das Treffen von Ent scheidungen über 'Todesstrafe, Verbannung und Konfiskation, sowie die Anstellung von Magistraten umfasst. Daneben nennt ARISTOTELES die vollziehende Funktion der Obrigkeit und die richterliche Funktion. 2 JEAN BoDIN ) kommt bei der Analysierung der Souveränität zu fünf Elementen, nämlich Gesetzgebung, Entscheidung über Krieg und Frieden, Ernennung von Beamten, Rechtsprechung und Begnadigung. (shrink)

The aim of this paper is to investigate the transition in natural science from the search for the essence of matter to the search for the laws to which matter is subject. Starting about 1600, this transition meant a change of perspective, the introduction of a new metaphysical view of the world. A scientific worldview has at least four components, its ontology, epistemology, logic and heuristic, which I shall discuss with respect to the idea of natural law.

Objectivity in the sciences is a much-touted yet problematic concept. It is sometimes held up as characterising scientific knowledge, yet operational definitions are diverse and call for such paradoxical genius as the ability to see without a perspective, to predict repeatability, to elicit nature’s own self-revelation, or to discern the structure of reality with inerrancy. Here we propose a positive and general definition of objectivity based on work in the Reformational philosophy tradition. We recognise a suite of relation-frames–ways in which (...) things function and relate to each other, which can be analytically distinguished in the process of conceptual abstraction. These relation-frames also ground the diverse aspects of scientific analysis within which relationships and properties may be abstracted from entities and systems. We argue that objectivity can be understood as characteristic of representations that attempt to portray a subject in an earlier relation-frame than that in which it characteristically functions. In short, objectivity is projection. This proposal is exemplified from mathematics and the natural sciences and some possible objections to it are considered, as well as its extension to the social sciences. (shrink)

The aim of this article is to provide a discussion of scholarly ‘crisis of modernity’ discourses that have developed in the field of social philosophy. Re-visiting past and present discourses can be illuminating in at least three ways: it can reveal the broader picture of the present financialized and technologized world and the rise of financial technologies; it can provide scholars with new vocabularies, concepts, and metaphors to comprehend present-day phenomena and developments; and it can reveal the variety of commitments (...) that are possible, today, too. This article starts with a discussion of the original ‘crisis of modernity’ discourses, in which the clashing arguments of Comte and Tocqueville are featured, and a discussion of a second ‘crisis of modernity’ that developed in the context of the ‘Great Depression.’ A third ‘crisis of modernity’ discourse emerged in the wake of the financial crises of the 1970s. Such crises are still ongoing and discussed within the boundaries of the third ‘crisis of modernity’ discourse. How financial technologies do and do not fit within this third discourse is discussed in the remainder of this article. (shrink)

Nietzsche's ethics is basically an ethics of virtue. In his own unique way, and in accordance with his extra-moral view of life, Nietzsche recovers and re-appropriates certain virtues – notably pagan, aristocratic virtues – as part of his project to reconceptualise (‘rehabilitate') the virtues in terms of virtù (virtuosity and vitality), to which he also refers as his ‘moraline-free' conception of the virtues. The virtue of generosity (in the sense of magnanimity) plays a central role in Nietzschean ethics. According to (...) Nietzsche, the truly noble or virtuous person is one who lives beyond resentment and feelings of remorse and guilt. He lives his life from the fullness and plenitude of his own being and what he is able to bestow on others. Nietzsche seeks to rekindle and rehabilitate the aristocratic ‘pathos of distance' as the true origin of ethical life. This pathos of distance basically emanates from self-respect: ‘The noble soul has reverence for itself' (1974b: §287). For Nietzsche, this means that one should realize the greatest multiplicity of drives and form-giving forces in oneself, in the most tension-fraught but ‘controlled' manner. This control, this imposing a form on oneself without neglecting the multiplicity in oneself, is a creative, artistic activity. Nietzsche also refers to this as a process of transforming the self into a work of art, of giving style to one's own existence. Thus we free ourselves from guilt, resentment and the rage against contingency. It is of the utmost importance for Nietzsche that one should attain satisfaction with oneself, for ‘only then is a human being at all tolerable to behold. Whoever is dissatisfied with himself is continually ready for revenge, and we others will be his victims, if only by having to endure his ugly sight.' (1974a: §290). To attain satisfaction with oneself ultimately means to affirm life in its totality. This implies a life beyond resentment, i.e. a life that is characterised by generosity or magnanimity ( megalopsychia, magnanimitas ), which is for Nietzsche the ‘crown' of all the virtues. South African Journal of Philosophy Vol. 26 (1) 2007: pp. 17-30. (shrink)

Starting with D. Scott's work on the mathematical foundations of programming language semantics, interest in topology has grown up in theoretical computer science, under the slogan `open sets are semidecidable properties'. But whereas on effectively given Scott domains all such properties are also open, this is no longer true in general. In this paper a characterization of effectively given topological spaces is presented that says which semidecidable sets are open. This result has important consequences. Not only follows the classical Rice-Shapiro (...) Theorem and its generalization to effectively given Scott domains, but also a recursion theoretic characterization of the canonical topology of effectively given metric spaces. Moreover, it implies some well known theorems on the effective continuity of effective operators such as P. Young and the author's general result which in its turn entails the theorems by Myhill-Shepherdson, Kreisel-Lacombe-Shoenfield and Ceĭtin-Moschovakis, and a result by Eršov and Berger which says that the hereditarily effective operations coincide with the hereditarily effective total continuous functionals on the natural numbers. (shrink)

The aim of this article is to reconstruct and pinpoint the peculiarities of Ismail Kadare’s idea of Europe. Kadare’s idea of Europe, it is argued, differs from the ideas of Europe embraced or presumed by intellectuals like Paul Valéry, Georg Simmel, Danilo Kiš, Václav Havel, Adam Michnik, or Milan Kundera, or from that of the European Union. For Kadare it is literature rather than the polis or its particular ideology that is the guardian of European values. Thus the European legacy, (...) in his view, is primarily Homeric rather than Socratic. I suggest first that the persecution of writers and the repression of literature in totalitarian regimes underlies Kadare’s idea of Europe. I then further characterize Kadare’s theme of persecution as a dialectic between regime and culture. Finally, I reconstruct Kadare’s narrative of Albania’s “return to Europe” as the struggle for recognizing Albania as the birthplace of European culture. (shrink)

On 25 May 2020, Officer Derek Chauvin asphyxiated George Floyd in Minneapolis — a murder that was captured in a confronting nine-minute bystander video that set off a firestorm of activity on online social networks, in the streets of the United States, and even worldwide. These protests captured the collective rage, dissatisfaction, and resentment personally and vicariously experienced towards the widespread systematic injustice and mistreatment of African Americans by police and vigilantes. The scale of these protests, both online and in (...) the streets, has been estimated to have far exceeded the civil rights marches of the 1960s (Buchanan et al. 2020). Considering the widespread extent of these protests, our research aims to analyse conflictual intergroup moral dynamics in terms of the reactive attitudes expressed by distinct online communities on Twitter. This paper examines the extent to which the Strawsonian (1962) reactive attitudes framework is applicable to the Twitter discourse around the Black Lives Matter protests reignited by the murder of George Floyd. In particular, we argue that the Strawsonian framework is inadequate to understand a range of prevalent attitudes expressed in this discourse — attitudes that we call reactionary as opposed to merely reactive. Reactionary attitudes include counter-indignation on behalf of the accused rather than Strawsonian indignation on behalf of the victim of a moral wrong. We document the expression of such attitudes among the right-wing participants in the online discourse about the Black Lives Matter movement. (shrink)

The different behaviour of total and partial numberings with respect to the reducibility preorder is investigated. Partial numberings appear quite naturally in computability studies for topological spaces. The degrees of partial numberings form a distributive lattice which in the case of an infinite numbered set is neither complete nor contains a least element. Friedberg numberings are no longer minimal in this situation. Indeed, there is an infinite descending chain of non-equivalent Friedberg numberings below every given numbering, as well as an (...) uncountable antichain. (shrink)

This article takes it cue from John Dewey and his views on the interrelationship between democracy and education. The basic premise is that education and democracy are inextricably linked and that in a free society the link is severed only at our peril. Education must be both public and democratic if we wish to preserve our democracy's public spaces. We should resist calls for ‘excellence’ if this means educating only ‘the best’ and excluding those most likely to fail. On the (...) other hand, we should likewise resist the tendency to jettison excellence (or just plain competence) in the name of educational equality. (shrink)

Nietzsche's philosophy of life-affirmation and perspectivism is often charged with skeptical relativism and a seemingly unsurmountable problem of self-referentiality that necessarily leads to a “performative contradiction” (Habermas). While the charge of skeptical relativism can be easily dismissed, the problem of self-reference is a much more complicated affair. After discussing certain aspects of Nietzsche's perspectivism, and particularly those texts in which he explicitly deals with the issue of self-referentiality, I come to the conclusion that Nietzsche's various judgements and his perspectivism can (...) be sustained without succumbing to the charge of self-referential inconsistency. S. Afr. J. Philos. Vol.22(4) 2003: 348-360. (shrink)

(2006). Performativity and self-revelation as key concepts in Hannah Arendt's ethic of virtue. South African Journal of Philosophy: Vol. 25, No. 3, pp. 189-205.

(2006). Performativity and self-revelation as key concepts in Hannah Arendt's ethic of virtue. South African Journal of Philosophy: Vol. 25, No. 3, pp. 189-205.

Max Weber's concept of the iron cage has become a byword in the scholarly world since the publication in 1930 of Talcott Parsons' translation of The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism . What is less well-known is that Jules Verne had earlier used the iron cage metaphor in Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea (1869) to reveal the paradoxes of modernity. Roland Barthes criticized Verne's vision of modernity as bourgeois and positivistic, pointing out his narrow-minded enthusiasm for futuristic (...) technology. In this essay, I argue that Verne's originality lies precisely in his equivocal attitude towards modernity with its high technology. Verne, I suggest, does not reject technological modernity, but by dissecting it he reveals its propelling forces, high demands and price. He shows that the Enlightenment's Rule of Reason is, in the end, governed by the ancient passions of fear, bitterness and the thirst for revenge. It is this combination that makes the human condition tragic. Verne's Homeric imagination creates an epic hero—Captain Nemo—who personifies the remarkable alliance of modern science and ancient heroism. (shrink)

This article provides an application of Alvin Gouldner's dialectic between Romanticism and Classicism to the constitutional process of European identity formation. Gouldner introduced his dialectical sociology in a critical attempt to destroy compulsive identification with any fixed idea of order. In an attempt to destroy compulsive identification with any Romantic or classical idea of Europe, this article shows how Europe's identity, as it has been represented in the Constitutional Treaty (CT), as well as in sociological works, is being shaped by (...) predominant Romantic and classic thought structures and social movements. The central argument is that the dialectic between Romanticism and Classicism in Europe is most clearly observed in the debates about democracy, human rights and rule of law — the classical values that constitute the EU's entry criteria. (shrink)

First Published in 2004. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

In the past two decades, public sociologists have sought to revive what C. Wright Mills called a 'democratic society of publics'. The publics that such sociologists promote are intellectual ones that resemble Socratic dialogues in which people search for the good order. Nietzsche criticizes such publics for their plebeian character and introduces an alternative type of publics: aesthetic publics. Rather than Socratic dialogues, the art of tragedy is the model of such publics. In this article it is argued that the (...) art of tragedy sheds a different light on the concept of publics and can only enrich the sociological discipline. (shrink)

Effective inseparability of pairs of sets is an important notion in logic and computer science. We study the effective inseparability of sets which appear as index sets of subsets of an effectively given topological T0-space and discuss its consequences. It is shown that for two disjoint subsets X and Y of the space one can effectively find a witness that the index set of X cannot be separated from the index set of Y by a recursively enumerable set, if X (...) intersects the topological closure of an effectively enumerable subset of Y. As a consequence of a more general parametric inseparability result a theorem of Rice-Shapiro type is obtained. Moreover, under some additional requirements it follows that nonopen subsets have productive index sets. This implies a generalized Rice theorem: Connected spaces have only trivial completely recursive subsets. As application some decision problems in computable analysis and domain theory are studied. It follows that the complement of the halting problem can be reduced to the problem to decide of a number whether it is a computable irrational. The same is true for the problems to decide whether two numbers are equal, whether one is not greater than the other, and whether a number is equal to a given number. In the case of an effectively given continuous complete partial order the complexity of the last problem depends on whether the given element is the smallest element, in which case the complement of the halting problem is reducible to it, whether it is a base element and maximal, then the decision problem is recursively isomorphic to the halting problem, or whether it is none of these. In this case, both the halting problem and its complement are reducible to the problem. The same is true in nontrivial cases for the problems whether an element belongs to the basis, whether two elements of the partial order are equal, or whether one approximates the other. In general, for any nonempty proper subset of the partial order either the halting problem or its complement can be reduced to the membership problem of the subset. (shrink)

After the French Revolution, the codification movement led to the introduction of the Dutch Civil Code and the Commercial Code of 1838. These codifications were generally regarded as the bedrock of a dogmatic system in which little space was left for customs and customary law. Mercantile jurists, such as Holtius and Levy, were opponents of the legalistic approach of the new codifications. They tried to separate mercantile law from civil law in order to protect mercantile law from excessive legalistic influences. (...) According to them, mercantile law was characterised by internationality, custom as its main source of law, continuity through an extended mercantile legal history and by good faith and mutual trust between the merchants. Out of these, the historicity and homogeneity of a strong community of merchants are particularly in line with a traditional and conservative view on society. Holtius and Levy, however, had little in common with their Christian-conservative contemporaries. On the one hand, they rather seemed to foreshadow the kind of liberal-conservatism as expressed by Hayek during the 20th century. On the other hand, their ideas have much in common with different lex mercatoria –traditions developed by authors as Goldman and Schmitthoff. On the aspects of historicity and internationality Holtius and Levy seem to have much in common with Hayek whereas concerning communality and the legal nature of customary law there are more similarities with the lex mercatoria-traditions. (shrink)

In examples like the total recursive functions or the computable real numbers the canonical indexings are only partial maps. It is even impossible in these cases to find an equivalent total numbering. We consider effectively given topological T 0 -spaces and study the problem in which cases the canonical numberings of such spaces can be totalized, i.e., have an equivalent total indexing. Moreover, we show under very natural assumptions that such spaces can effectively and effectively homeomorphically be embedded into a (...) totally indexed algebraic partial order that is closed under the operation of taking least upper bounds of enumerable directed subsets. (shrink)

Intellectual humility (IH) is often conceived as the recognition of, and appropriate response to, your own intellectual limitations. As far as we are aware, only a handful of studies look at interventions to increase IH – e.g. through journalling – and no study so far explores the extent to which having high or low IH can be predicted. This paper uses machine learning and natural language processing techniques to develop a predictive model for IH and identify top terms and features (...) that indicate degrees of IH. We trained our classifier on the dataset from an existing psychological study on IH, where participants were asked to journal their experiences with handling social conflicts over 30 days. We used Logistic Regression (LR) to train a classifier and the Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count (LIWC) dictionaries for feature selection, picking out a range of word categories relevant to interpersonal relationships. Our results show that people who differ on IH do in fact systematically express themselves in different ways, including through expression of emotions (i.e., positive, negative, and specifically anger, anxiety, sadness, as well as the use of swear words), use of pronouns (i.e., first person, second person, and third person) and time orientation (i.e., past, present, and future tenses). We discuss the importance of these findings for IH and the value of using such techniques for similar psychological studies, as well as some ethical concerns and limitations with the use of such semi-automated classifications. (shrink)

If one wants to compute with infinite objects like real numbers or data streams, continuity is a necessary requirement: better and better (finite) approximations of the input are transformed into better and better (finite) approximations of the output. In case the objects are constructively generated, they can be represented by a finite description of the generating procedure. By effectively transforming such descriptions for the generation of the input (respectively, their codes) into (the code of) a description for the generation of (...) the output another type of computable operation is obtained. Such operations are also called effective. The relationship of both classes of operations has always been a question of great interest. In this paper the setting is extended to the case of multifunctions. Various ways of coding (indexing) sets are discussed and their relationship is investigated. Moreover, effective versions of several continuity notions for multifunctions are introduced. For each of these notions an indexing system for sets is exhibited so that the multifunctions that are effective with respect to this indexing system are exactly the multifunction which are effectively continuous with respect to the continuity notion under consideration. Mostly, in addition to being effective the multifunctions need also possess certain witnessing functions. Important special cases are discussed where such witnessing functions always exist. (shrink)

Published in honor of Victor L. Selivanov, the 17 articles collected in this volume inform on the latest developments in computability theory and its applications in computable analysis; descriptive set theory and topology; and the theory of omega-languages; as well as non-classical logics, such as temporal logic and paraconsistent logic. This volume will be of interest to mathematicians and logicians, as well as theoretical computer scientists.