This symposium on Monique Deveaux’s Poverty, Solidarity, and Poor-Led Social Movements includes commentaries by Sally Matthews, Renante D. Pilapil, Violetta Igneski, and Wouter Peeters, with a reply from Deveaux. The book makes the case that normative thinking about poverty should engage closely with the aims, insights, and actions of poor-led organizations and social movements. Challenging conventional framings of poverty by moral philosophers, Deveaux argues that chronic poverty is centrally about the subordination and dispossession of the poor – not mere (...) needs scarcity. To exclude people living in poverty from shaping antipoverty solutions is therefore to perpetuate their social-political domination and epistemic oppression. Deveaux’s book explains what a political reframing of poverty looks like from the vantage point of several poor-led organizations and social movements, using concrete examples from across the globe, and argues for political responsibility for solidarity with those movements. (shrink)

This paper aims to clarify the status of capability in Sen’s idea of justice. Sen’s name is so widely associated with the concept of capability that commentators often assume that his contribution to the study of justice amounts to a capability theory, albeit underdeveloped. We argue that such a reading is misleading. Taking Sen’s reticence about operationalization seriously, we show that his contribution is inconsistent with a capability theory. Instead, we defend the idea that the capability approach plays a heuristic (...) role: capability is a step in his argument against alternative materials, but is not meant as a definitive end. Sen defends a critical perspective primarily to encourage public reasoning and respect for agency as regards the definition of what should count in the evaluation of social states. (shrink)

Despite the recent explosion of philosophical literature on forgiveness, relatively few theorists have addressed the possibility of un-forgiving someone for a moral violation. And among those who have addressed the question, “Can we un-forgive?” we find little consensus. In this paper, I consider whether and in what sense forgiveness is rescindable, retractable, or otherwise reversible. In other words, I consider what it might mean to say that a victim who forgave her offender for a particular act of wrongdoing later un-forgave (...) that individual for the very same act. Examining the possibility of un-forgiving positions us to gain richer understandings of both forgiveness and the complexity of navigating moral relationships more broadly. (shrink)

This book, now open-access from OUP, develops a normative theory of political responsibility for solidarity with poor populations by engaging closely with empirical studies of poor-led social movements in the Global South. Monique Deveaux rejects familiar ethical framings of problems of poverty and inequality by arguing that normative thinking about antipoverty remedies needs to engage closely with the aims, insights, and actions of “pro-poor,” poor-led social movements. Defending the idea of a political responsibility for solidarity, nonpoor outsiders—individuals, institutions, and (...) states—can help to advance a transformative anti-poverty agenda only by supporting the efforts of these movements. (shrink)

Concepts for sustainable bioeconomy systems are gradually replacing the ones on linear product chains. The reason is that continuously expanding linear chain activities are considered to contribute to climate change, reduced biodiversity, over-exploitation of resources, food insecurity, and the double burden of disease. Are sustainable bioeconomy systems a guarantee for a healthy planet? If yes, why, when, and how? In literature, different sustainability indicators have been presented to shed light on this complicated question. Due to high degrees of complexity and (...) interactions of actors in bioeconomy systems, trade-offs and non-linear outcomes became apparent. This fueled the debates about the normative dimensions of the bioeconomy. In particular, the behavior of actors and the utilization of products do not seem to be harmonized according to the environmental, social, and economic pillars of sustainability. Potential conflicts require a new conceptual framework that is here introduced. It consists of a ‘sustainability’ cylinder captured between an inner-cylinder, representing order, and an outer-cylinder for chaos, based on the laws of physics and complex adaptive systems. Such a framework permits (bioeconomy) systems to propagate in the sustainability zone only if they follow helical pathways serving as the new norms. Helices are a combination of two sinusoidal patterns. The first represents here the sustainable behavior of interacting actors and the second the balanced usage of resources and products. The latter counteracts current growth discourses. The applicability of the conceptual cylinder framework is positively verified via 9 cases in Europe, which encompass social-organizational and product-technological innovations. –. (shrink)

Baselines are commonly used to enable harm identification. The temporal, the counterfactual and the duty-based normative baselines are the most prominent. Each of these captures an aspect of common conceptions of what it is to harm and be harmed. However, each baseline also fails to deliver workable identifications of harm when presented with certain types of case. Problematic cases are found readily in childhood, a venue in which harm identification is often called for. Without a reliable means of identifying harm (...) in childhood, harm cannot properly play a central role in normative assessments of parental practices and state intervention. This paper presents childhood cases in which the prominent baselines fail and offers an alternative: the interest-based normative baseline. Should the interest-based normative baseline replace its rivals and reign supreme? I argue not, presenting a case for maintaining a suite of baselines for use in varying contexts. (shrink)

We often use the term “attachment” to describe our emotional connectedness to objects in the world. We become attached to our careers, to our homes, to certain ideas, and perhaps most importantly, to other people. Interestingly, despite its import and ubiquity in our everyday lives, the topic of attachment per se has been largely ignored in the philosophy literature. I address this lacuna by identifying attachment as a rich “mode of mattering” that can help to inform certain aspects of agency (...) and emotion. First, drawing on insights from Ancient stoicism and developmental and clinical psychology, I suggest that the relevant form of attachment involves a felt need for its object and a particular relationship between the object and the attached agent’s sense of security. I then argue that these features serve to distinguish the attitude from the more philosophically familiar notion of caring. Finally, I show that recognizing this form of attachment as a distinct mode of mattering has important implications for understanding grief. (shrink)

It is not uncommon for philosophers to name disinterestedness, or some like feature, as an essential characteristic of love. Such theorists claim that in genuine love, one’s concern for her beloved must be non-instrumental, non-egocentric, or even selfless. These views prompt the question, “What, if any, positive role might self-interestedness play in genuine love?” In this paper, I argue that attachment, an attitude marked primarily by self-focused emotions and emotional predispositions, helps constitute the meaning and import of at least some (...) kinds of adult reciprocal love. In this way, attachment represents a type of self-interestedness that not only contributes positively to such relationships but is also essential to them. (shrink)

Increasing privacy concerns are arising from expanding use of aggregated personal information in health practices. Conversely, in light of the promising benefits of data driven healthcare, privacy...

In the present research we investigated gender-specific beliefs about emotional behaviour. In Study 1, 180 respondents rated the extent to which they agreed with different types of beliefs (prescriptive, descriptive, stereotypical, and contra-stereotypical) regarding the emotional behaviour of men and women. As anticipated, respondents agreed more with descriptive than with prescriptive beliefs, and more with stereotypical than with contra-stereotypical beliefs. However, respondents agreed more with stereotypical beliefs about the emotional behaviour of women than with those about men. These results were (...) replicated in Study 2 with a sample of 75 students and 80 nonstudents. In Study 3, a sample of 279 respondents rated the extent of agreement with the same items, this time with respect to then own emotional behaviour. A similar pattern of results was obtained, although agreement rates were higher than in Study 1 and 2. (shrink)

The term “emotional practices” is gaining currency in the historical study of emotions. This essay discusses the theoretical and methodological implications of this concept. A definition of emotion informed by practice theory promises to bridge persistent dichotomies with which historians of emotion grapple, such as body and mind, structure and agency, as well as expression and experience. Practice theory emphasizes the importance of habituation and social context and is thus consistent with, and could enrich, psychological models of situated, distributed, and (...) embodied cognition and their approaches to the study of emotion.It is suggested here that practices not only generate emotions, but that emotions themselves can be viewed as a practical engagement with the world. Conceiving of emotions as practices means understanding them as emerging from bodily dispositions conditioned by a social context, which always has cultural and historical specificity. Emotion-as-practice is bound up with and dependent on “emotional practices,” defined here as practices involving the self , language, material artifacts, the environment, and other people. Drawing on Pierre Bourdieu's concept of habitus, the essay emphasizes that the body is not a static, timeless, universal foundation that produces ahistorical emotional arousal, but is itself socially situated, adaptive, trained, plastic, and thus historical. Four kinds of emotional practices that make use of the capacities of a body trained by specific social settings and power relations are sketched out—mobilizing, naming, communicating, and regulating emotion—as are consequences for method in historical research. (shrink)

Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, Volume 104, Issue 2, Page 474-488, March 2022.

Monique Lanoix | : Over three decades ago, Carol Gilligan’s seminal book In a Different Voice provided feminist theorists with a powerful new approach to address the shortcomings of traditional moral theories. With a focus on concrete situations, an ethics of care can attend to the specifics of moral dilemmas that might otherwise be glossed over. As feminist reflection on moral and political philosophizing has progressed, another challenge has emerged. Recent feminist scholarship proposes non-ideal theories as preferable action-guiding theories. (...) In this paper, I examine Kittay’s call for a version of care ethics as a naturalized ethics that comes from lived experience, in order to draw out the salient characteristics of the caring agent. This allows me to show how Kittay’s key assertion that “we are all some mother’s child” resonates with Ricoeur’s framing of self-esteem, which is, in turn, anchored on a notion of solicitude. Secondly, I make the case that care ethics can benefit from Ricoeur’s little ethics as it helps buttress the goal of good caring practices. Finally, care ethics, with its emphasis on the universality of care needs, helps to strengthen the central role of solicitude for the political sphere. | : Il y a plus de trente ans, le livre fondateur de Carol Gilligan, In a Different Voice, fournissait aux théoriciennes féministes une nouvelle approche permettant d’affiner la critique des théories morales traditionnelles, particulièrement en ce qui concerne leur universalisme. Focalisant sur les situations concrètes, l’éthique du care chez Gilligan permet de recentrer l’attention sur les spécificités d’un dilemme moral qui, autrement, risquent de rester dans l’ombre. La réflexion féministe en philosophie morale et politique a progressé depuis, s’attelant à de nouveaux défis. La recherche récente suggère qu’une théorie morale non idéale est préférable aux théories dites idéalistes. Dans cet article, j’examine l’éthique du care selon Eva Feder Kittay, soit à titre d’éthique naturalisée, afin de mettre en relief les caractéristiques saillantes de l’agent.e caring. Cela me permettra ensuite de montrer comment l’affirmation clé de Kittay selon laquelle « nous sommes tou.te.s l’enfant d’une mère » fait écho à la pensée ricoeurienne de l’estime de soi qui est, en retour, ancrée dans la notion de sollicitude. Deuxièmement, je soutiens que la « petite éthique » ricoeurienne peut enrichir les éthiques du care, précisément en ce qui a trait au telos du care. Ce faisant, les éthiques du care, qui placent l’accent sur l’universalité des besoins en cette matière, pourront mieux ancrer la sollicitude dans la sphère politique. (shrink)

Abstract : This introduction to a special issue on "Normes and normativity" emphasizes the difficulties and challenges of distinguishing between a positive approach and a normative approach to norms in economics. Collective life is organized by norms, however the mere fact that they regularly influence behaviours does not imply their desirability. A strict description of norms may require consideration of ethical issues, which may be reported by different methods; choosing among norms however is an activity of a fundamentally normative nature, (...) which questions the legitimacy of decisions and evaluations. The very possibility of a demarcation between is and ought is not straightforward. In welfare economics in particular, the standard approaches that aim to avoid value judgements (welfarism) or to isolate them (axiomatics) can be problematic. To conclude, we present the four articles in the special issue meant to illustrate these issues regarding the nature, knowledge, value of norms and the positive-normative distinction. -/- Résumé : Cette introduction à un dossier thématique sur le thème "Normes et normativité" insiste sur les difficultés et les enjeux de la distinction entre les approches positives et normatives des normes en économie. La vie collective est organisée par des normes, mais qu’elles ordonnent les comportements dans les faits n’impliquent pas qu’elles soient désirables. Une stricte description des normes peut nécessiter de prendre en compte les questions éthiques, lesquelles peuvent être traduites par différentes méthodes ; choisir les normes en revanche est une activité de nature fondamentalement normative, qui interroge la légitimité des décisions et des évaluations. La possibilité même de démarcation entre positif et normatif ne va pas de soi : en particulier en économie du bien-être, les approches standards qui visent à éviter les jugements de valeur (le welfarisme) ou à les isoler (l’axiomatique) peuvent s’avérer problématiques. Pour conclure, nous présentons les quatre articles du numéro qui illustrent ces questionnements relatifs à la nature, la connaissance, la valeur des normes et la distinction entre normatif et positif. (shrink)

Data from the Kipsigis of Kenya are used to test two models for how parents invest in offspring, the Trivers-Willard and local resource competition/enhancement hypotheses. Investment is measured as age-specific survival, educational success, marital arrangements, and some components of property inheritance, permitting an evaluation of how biases persist or alter over the period of dependence. Changes through time in such biases are also examined. Despite stronger effects of wealth on the reproductive success of men than women, the survival of sons (...) and daughters is not related to parental wealth. However, a Trivers-Willard effect characterizes educational investment: poor families show a greater concern for daughters’ (vis-à-vis sons’) schooling than do rich families, a trend that has increased over time. In regard to models of local resource competition and enhancement, men’s reproductive success decreases with number of brothers and increases with number of sisters; this pattern of competition with same-sex sibs and cooperation with opposite-sex sibs is not found among women. As predicted from these observations, parents show reduced investment in sons with a large number of brothers, and increased investment in sons with a large number of sisters. By contrast, investment in daughters is entirely unaffected by number of sisters and is influenced only in subtle ways by number of brothers. Levels of investment in relation to sibship size (irrespective of siblings’ sex) are highest for younger children of large sib sets.Discussion of the results in relation to those from other studies leads to three conclusions. First, predictive models for how investment biases vary across societies must consider a broad range of socioecological factors constraining parental options and payoffs. Second, the timing of investment biases within societies will be affected by the value of children and the costs of parental investment. Third, measures of investment appropriate for between-sex and between-class comparisons need careful attention. Each of these issues is brought to bear on the question of why, in contrast to so many other parts of the world, sex preferences are so muted in Africa. (shrink)

In post-Fordist economies, the nature of laboring activities can no longer be subsumed under a Taylorized model of labor, and the service sector now constitutes a larger share of the market. For Maurizio Lazzarato, Michael Hardt, Antonio Negri, and other theorists in the post-Marxist tradition, labor has changed from a commodity-producing activity to one that does not produce a material object. For these authors, this new type of labor is immaterial labor and entails communicative acts as well as added worker (...) agency. This paper reflects on this new paradigm of labor by examining the paid practices of care defined as the activities performed by individuals who have a mandate to help another adult accomplish the tasks of self-care. Because care workers take care of other bodies, care labor exemplifies an embodied practice. I make use of the corporeality of care to put forward the notion of thin and thick embodiment in order to examine critically the meaning of immaterial labor and to support my claim that immaterial labor, as conceptualized by Hardt and Negri, erases both the materiality and relationality of care labor. Furthermore, typifying care labor as immaterial only serves to maintain its marginalized status.Care Assistant. Required to work within a private residential center to assist nursing staff. Experience desirable, qualifications an advantage, but caring and understanding more important than either. Must have good English to understand instructions and be co-operative to work in a friendly team environment (Toynbee 2007, 220). (shrink)

In the contemporary philosophical literature, the topic of security has been largely neglected, and this is especially true of the affect of security. In what follows, I aim to nudge the affect of security toward the philosophical foreground by offering a basic analysis of this attitude. Specifically, I sketch an account on which the affect of security is helpfully construed as a feeling of confidence in one’s ability to competently and effectively exercise one’s agency. Security, so construed, is an affective (...) attitude toward one’s agency that both admits of affect regulation and plays a crucial meta-affective regulatory role in facilitating and modulating other affective dispositions and occurrent emotions. Examining this attitude can help to illuminate both the phenomenology and motivational structure of agency and the nature of certain emotions. (shrink)

“Agent-centered” approaches to global poverty insist that effective arguments for poverty reduction must specify the concrete duties of particular duty-bearers. This article takes up a recent, influential, version of this view, Thomas Pogge’s human rights-based argument for global economic reforms to reduce chronic deprivation. While signaling a welcome shift from the diffuse allocation of responsibilities common to much philosophical writing on poverty, I argue that Pogge’s approach too readily assigns to powerful institutions in the global North the role of devising (...) and directing anti-poverty initiatives. In so doing, he overlooks the agency—actual and potential—of the poor themselves, as evidenced by poor-led political movements and poor-centered, participatory models of poverty reduction in development theory and practice. While agent-oriented approaches are right to focus our attention on structures that cause poverty, they ought not to assume that the powerful agents responsible for these are the only—or most appropriate—agents to lead the way to poverty reduction. Just as development organizations working in the global South have come to recognize that the participation of poor communities is critical to the success of development strategies, so should normative theorists writing about global injustice acknowledge the importance of the poor as active agents in poverty reduction efforts. (shrink)

“Agent-centered” approaches to global poverty insist that effective arguments for poverty reduction must specify the concrete duties of particular duty-bearers. This article takes up a recent, influential, version of this view, Thomas Pogge’s human rights-based argument for global economic reforms to reduce chronic deprivation. While signaling a welcome shift from the diffuse allocation of responsibilities common to much philosophical writing on poverty, I argue that Pogge’s approach too readily assigns to powerful institutions in the global North the role of devising (...) and directing anti-poverty initiatives. In so doing, he overlooks the agency—actual and potential—of the poor themselves, as evidenced by poor-led political movements and poor-centered, participatory models of poverty reduction in development theory and practice. While agent-oriented approaches are right to focus our attention on structures that cause poverty, they ought not to assume that the powerful agents responsible for these are the only—or most appropriate—agents to lead the way to poverty reduction. Just as development organizations working in the global South have come to recognize that the participation of poor communities is critical to the success of development strategies, so should normative theorists writing about global injustice acknowledge the importance of the poor as active agents in poverty reduction efforts. (shrink)

Monique Roelofs offers a pathbreaking systematic model of the field of address and puts it to work in the arts, critical theory, and social life. She shows how address props up finely hewn modalities of relationality, agency, and normativity. Address exceeds a one-on-one pairing of cultural productions with their audiences. As ardently energizing tiny slippages and snippets as fueling larger impulses in the society, it activates and reaestheticizes registers of race, gender, class, coloniality, and cosmopolitanism. In readings of writers (...) and artists ranging from Julio Cortázar to Jamaica Kincaid and from Martha Rosler to Pope.L, Roelofs demonstrates the centrality of address to freedom and a critical political aesthetics. Under the banner of a unified concept of address, Hume, Kant, and Foucault strike up conversations with Benjamin, Barthes, Althusser, Fanon, Anzaldúa, and Butler. Drawing on a wide array of artistic and theoretical sources and challenging disciplinary boundaries, the book illuminates address's significance to cultural existence and to our reflexive aesthetic engagement in it. (shrink)

This article develops a sociology of worth that blurs the traditional disciplinary divide between economic value and social values. Through ethnographic study of a new media startup in Manhattan's Silicon Alley, we examine how a new firm in an emerging industry negotiates an uncertain environment where metrics gauging performance remain illusive as the industry itself gropes toward a clearer definition of its content and contours. Faced with complex foresight horizons, new media firms must develop an organizational capacity for learning, innovation, (...) and flexible adaptation to constantly changing requirements. We examine how the clash of evaluative criteria guiding the work of cross-disciplinary project teams becomes a source for innovation and a resource for learning when deliberation across evaluative principles is combined with an organizational and administrative structure that relies on lateral accountability. (shrink)

How should liberal democratic states respond to cultural practices and arrangements that run afoul of liberal norms and laws? This article argues for a reframing of the challenges posed by traditional or nonliberal cultural minorities. The author suggests that viewed from up close, such dilemmas are revealed to be primarily intracultural rather than intercultural conflicts, and reflect the political and practical interests of factions of communities much more than deep moral differences. Using the example of the reform of customary marriage (...) laws in post-apartheid South Africa, this article makes the case for a more pragmatic, politically focused approach to resolving conflicts of culture that it is argued is both more democratic and effective than alternatives recently advanced by liberals and deliberative democracy theorists. (shrink)

: This essay examines the citizen's apparent agelessness that is foundational to liberal democratic theories. By engaging the notion of citizenship rights, Lanoix challenges this assumed perpetual adulthood and argues for a new way of conceptualizing the citizen. The broader notion of citizen as cohabitant allows for the changing relationship a citizen will have with her citizenship rights and accommodates individuals who are not self-governing but who, nonetheless, share a democratic space.

Surrealism in North Africa and Western Asia : crossings and encounters -- Multiple surrealisms -- Surrealist encounters.

L’adoption en Polynésie repose encore sur des fondements culturels, même si la procédure de celle-ci s’inscrit dans la loi française. Sans mystère des origines, l’enfant se sait faa’amu dans la tradition polynésienne. Il sait qu’il est donné, confié à une autre famille et le système de parenté détermine sa place. Cette parenté sociale apparaît comme une règle fondatrice. L’adoption en Polynésie s’inscrit également dans un accord des volontés privées, de ce fait elle se nomme pour deux années « délégation d’autorité (...) parentale ». Ce n’est que secondairement que sera prononcée soit l’adoption simple, soit l’adoption plénière. La question des difficultés liées particulièrement à l’adoption demeure ouverte. (shrink)

Romain Gary était lié au souvenir de sa mère par une dette de vie infinie qu’il qualifiait de « manger froid ». On trouve trace de cette dette de vie à la fois dans les épisodes de sa vie et dans le contenu de certaines de ses œuvres signées soit Gary soir Ajar. L’auteure de ce texte, qui nous fait voyager entre Gary et sa propre observation des angoisses humaines, parcourt les divers modes d’expression pour tenter de régler la dette, (...) que l’on soit femme (qui peut s’en acquitter provisoirement en donnant naissance à un enfant) ou homme. (shrink)

This paper brings together a most fascinating and under-examined body of early New World writing that belong to a genre of writing I call “the torture narrative” with the insights of Marshall McLuhan in order to offer a way of thinking about body parts, especially hands, teeth, tongues, and eyeballs, and their extensions through technologies such as alphabets, manuscripts, books, and weapons. At its core are questions about the nature and effects of the changes wrought by the early-Gutenberg era—a period (...) characterized by vast scientific and technical discoveries, rising nationalisms, explorations, and conquests—in the New World. Rather than explore the ways an early New World print culture reflects or distorts discrete historical or ethnographic facts about colonial contact, I want to probe the ways the torture narrative speaks to the conditions of speaking and writing, and therefore to the discursive and textual production of the New World subject and New World space. My inquiry seeks to understand both the violence in, and the violence of, representation at founding historical moments, but its relevance far exceeds Renaissance or American studies. At stake in this discussion is an appreciation of a mode of intellectual inquiry that is attentive to the relationship between media technologies and the social worlds they reflect and transform. (shrink)

Felt necessity, or the phenomenon of experiencing some person or object as a felt need, plays important roles in structuring human agency. Philosophical treatments of the relationship between agency and felt necessity have tended to focus on appetitive needs and necessities arising from a particular type of care. I argue that we have much to gain by considering a third underexplored variety of felt necessity that I call “attachment necessity.” Attachment necessity has its own distinct parts to play in structuring (...) agency, and like its more familiar relatives, it can also illuminate important aspects of addiction and love. (shrink)

Addiction and certain varieties of interpersonal attachment share strikingly similar psycho-behavioral structures. Neuroscientists, psychologists, and philosophers have often adduced such similarities between addiction and attachment to argue that many typical cases of romantic love represent addictions to one’s partner and thus might be appropriate candidates for medical treatment. In this paper, I argue for the relatively neglected thesis that some paradigmatic cases of addiction are aptly characterized as emotional attachments to their objects. This has implications for how we should understand (...) the nature of addiction and for the ethics of attachment more broadly. (shrink)

The idea that we need our beloveds has a rich and longstanding history in classic literature, pop culture, social sciences, and of course, philosophical treatments of love. Yet on little reflection, the idea that one needs one’s beloved is as puzzling as it is familiar. In what, if any sense, do we really need our beloveds? And insofar as we do need them, is this feature of love something to be celebrated or lamented? In the relevant philosophical literature, there are (...) various ways of understanding the type(s) of psychological need internal to love and whether and how the necessity in question contributes to love’s value. In this chapter, I survey and critically analyze several accounts of felt necessity in love and advocate for a philosophically neglected perspective on the nature and value of needing our beloveds. (shrink)

In 2017 and 2018, the English courts were asked to decide whether continued life‐sustaining treatment was in the best interests of three infants: Charlie Gard, Alfie Evans and Isaiah Haastrup. Each infant had sustained catastrophic, irrecoverable brain damage. Dignity played an important role in the best interests assessments reached by the Family division of the High Court in each case. Multiple conceptions of dignity circulate, with potentially conflicting implications for infants such as Charlie, Alfie and Isaiah. The judgements do not (...) explicate the conceptions of dignity upon which they rely. This article reconstructs the conceptions of dignity invoked in these judgements, finding that a broadly Kantian, agential conception dominates, under which human dignity requires the prospect of agency. This conception is situated within the broader body of thought on dignity, and the potentially adverse implications of applying the reconstructed conception in best interests assessments for infants with severely restricted consciousness are discussed. (shrink)

Historically, video games featuring content perceived as excessively violent have drawn moral criticism from an indignant (and sometimes, morally outraged) public. Defenders of violent video games have insisted that such criticisms are unwarranted, as committing acts of virtual violence against computer-controlled characters – no matter how heinous or cruel those actions would be if performed in real life – harm no actual people. In this paper, I present and critically analyze key aspects of this debate. I argue that while many (...) ethical objections to playing violent video games seem to miss their marks, there is sufficient reason to take modest steps in order to address the concerns that theorists have raised. (shrink)

Un nouveau discours politique prétend restaurer le peuple dans sa dignité en s’attaquant aux timides réformes multiculturalistes de ces dernières années. Une nouvelle séparation sociale est revendiquée en termes ethnoculturels, notamment dans le domaine scolaire, pour faire réapparaître les distances sociales qui ne peuvent plus être parlées en termes de classes.

This essay examines the citizen's apparent agelessness that is foundational to liberal democratic theories. By engaging the notion of citizenship rights, Lanoix challenges this assumed perpetual adulthood and argues for a new way of conceptualizing the citizen. The broader notion of citizen as cohabitant allows for the changing relationship a citizen will have with her citizenship rights and accommodates individuals who are not self-governing but who, nonetheless, share a democratic space.

Xenotransplantation pits clinical research ethics against public health needs because recipients must undergo long-term, perhaps life-long, surveillance for infectious diseases. This surveillance requirement is effectively an abrogation of the right to withdraw from a clinical trial. Ulysses contracts, which are advance directives for future care, may be an ethical mechanism by which to balance public health needs against limitation of individual rights.

Dans cet ouvrage, Monique Lauret retrace l'histoire du mouvement psychanalytique en Chine qui ne cesse de croître depuis les années 1980, analyse l'influence de la pensée chinoise sur la théorisation de Lacan, et établit des passerelles entre pensée chinoise et psychanalyse. Il existe un passage inattendu entre pensée chinoise et psychanalyse autour de la question de l'humanisation et du rêve. Lacan s'intéressa en particulier à trois notions de la philosophie chinoise: la nature, le désir et la sagesse (discernement). Il (...) reprit les concepts clés de Mencius, fils spirituel de Confucius: le Xing (nature ou sexuel) et le Ming (décret du Ciel ou destin) à partir desquels il conçut la nature de l'être parlant soumis aux lois du Ciel, c'est-à-dire celles de son désir et de sa jouissance. Il porta aussi un regard neuf sur la langue et l'écriture idéographique chinoises: il y découvrit un système de signifiance révélant le mécanisme subtil de l'inconscient structuré comme écriture, ce qui lui permit d'approfondir les concepts de jouissance, d'identification et de Trait unaire. Enfin, il dénonça l'effondrement de la ' sagesse ' de l'humanité à l'origine de nos maux contemporains: une précipitation dans la haine et l'archaïque, la haine étant le plus puissant vecteur de la pulsion de mort. Par ce dialogue entre deux pensées civilisationnelles qui défendent l'idée que l'homme ne peut être humain que dans sa relation à l'autre, cet ouvrage propose une position de discernement face à l'essor de la révolution techno-numérique et au malaise dans la civilisation. (shrink)

Psychologists often characterize the infant’s attachment to her primary caregiver as love. Philosophical accounts of love, however, tend to speak against this possibility. Love is typically thought to require sophisticated cognitive capacities that infants do not possess. Nevertheless, there are important similarities between the infant-primary caregiver bond and mature love, and the former is commonly thought to play an important role in one’s capacity for the latter. In this work, I examine the relationship between the infant-primary caregiver bond and love. (...) I argue that while these very early attachments do not represent genuine love, a fuller understanding of them can inform extant philosophical views of love. (shrink)