Law-enforcement agencies are increasingly able to leverage crime statistics to make risk predictions for particular individuals, employing a form of inference that some condemn as violating the right to be “treated as an individual.” I suggest that the right encodes agents’ entitlement to a fair distribution of the burdens and benefits of the rule of law. Rather than precluding statistical prediction, it requires that citizens be able to anticipate which variables will be used as predictors and act intentionally to avoid (...) them. Furthermore, it condemns reliance on various indexes of distributive injustice, or unchosen properties, as evidence of law-breaking. (shrink)

A ‘vestigial social practice' is a norm, convention, or social behavior that persists even when few endorse it or its original justifying rationale. Begby (2021) explores social explanations for the persistence of prejudice, arguing that even if we all privately disavow a stereotype, we might nevertheless continue acting as if it is true because we believe that others expect us to. Meanwhile the persistence of the practice provides something like implicit testimonial evidence for the prejudice that would justify it, making (...) it rational for members of the next generation to acquire the corresponding prejudiced beliefs. This paper distinguishes between three different types of vestigial social practice in terms of the underlying explanatory mechanisms, and argues that the persistence of prejudicial social stereotypes is most tightly linked not to others’ beliefs or expectations, but to the ways that material infrastructure constrains options shapes social outcomes. Given that, the persistence of a practice only provides grounds to infer that most people endorse the corresponding prejudiced belief only if we are in a position to dismiss relevant alternative explanations. (shrink)

The current behavioral consultation case demonstrates how functional behavioral assessment (FBA) data, basic and applied research, teacher preferences, and contextual variables contribute to the decision making process when developing classroom intervention procedures. A male, African-American, fifth-grade general education student was initially referred for his inappropriate vocalizations duringtime designated for independent seatwork. FBA data suggested that this behavior was being reinforced with teacher attention. Additional data showed that he was failing to complete his assignments. An intervention was implemented where the student (...) was given assignments one a time. He was instructed to solicit teacher attention and his next assignment after completing each assignment. Analysis ofteacher ratings for inappropriate vocalizations and assignment performance data suggest that the intervention was effective in increasing assignment completion and decreasing inappropriate verbalizations. Discussion focuses on how the various data playa role in the development and implementation of classroom intervention procedures. (shrink)

As the “War on Terror” continues, the national myth of veteran-as-hero has given way to a narrative shorthand of veteran-as-villain. Films and television shows depicting the reintegration of veterans tend to focus on the struggle and alienation from the homefront that veterans feel upon their return. In contrast, comedy television portrayals such as One Day at a Time and You’re the Worst, both of which slowly but successfully reintegrate their central veteran characters, do so narratively by shifting their characters’ veteran (...) status from their defining feature to one aspect of their past. Ultimately, I argue that the process of reintegration is one paralleled in the rehumanization that these comedy television portrayals permit, ultimately offering hope that reintegration, while not easy, is possible. (shrink)

My review of Ike Kamphof’s “Webcams to Save Nature: Online Space as Affective and Ethical Space” focuses on the question how the engagement of the spectator of the described websites is temporally structured and how the discrepancy between the instantaneity of affective response and the duration of moral engagement is solved. I propose to draw on Alexander Nehamas’ philosophy of beauty as an in-between, bringing affect and ethics closer together.

In Spoils of War, a diverse group of distinguished contributors suggest that acts of aggression resulting from the racism and sexism inherent in social institutions can be viewed as a sort of "war," experienced daily by women of color.

Présentation du numéro spécial de la revue Philosophiques à la mémoire de Joseph Nicolas Kaufmann (1941-2002).

The author discusses the ways in which she finds the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center protocol for procuring organs from "non-heart-beating cadaver donors" medically and morally questionable and irreverent. She also identifies some of the factors that contributed to the composition of this troubling protocol, and to its institutional approval.

They have watched, as insiders, the first fumbling attempts to transplant kidneys, then hearts, then live‐donated lobes of liver and lung. Now the two sociologists most closely identified with organ transplantation have concluded that they must leave the field.

This article examines gay men’s efforts to break into the exclusive traditional fraternity institution by adopting the hegemonic model on their own terms. The authors examined to what extent members of a national gay fraternity, Delta Lambda Phi challenged or modified the entrenched fraternity culture that was hostile to homosexuals and whether they resisted or reproduced hegemonic masculinity in their efforts to redefine the meaning of college fraternities. This research examines gay fraternities in relation to two dimensions of hegemonic masculinity. (...) The authors explore how members of gay fraternities negotiated their stigmatized status among other men—that is, within the internal dimension of hegemonic masculinity. They explore the external dimension of hegemonic masculinity by analyzing how gay brothers, as men, related to all women. The authors further examine the connection between these two hegemonic dimensions and provide evidence showing how these two dimensions are coupled or disjointed. (shrink)

“Bioethics is not just Bioethics.” This is the aphoristic way in which I have recurrently expressed my historical and social perspective on the significance of bioethics, whose import I regard as extending beyond the emergence, development, and establishment of an intellectual field that is primarily concerned with advances in biology and medicine, their relationship to illness and health, and their ethical concomitants. In my view, although they are expressed through the medium of medicine, some of the value and belief questions (...) with which bioethics has been preoccupied since its inception are connected with broad and deep moral issues that are integral to what the illustrious French sociologist Émile Durkheim... (shrink)

Aesthetics and Environment: Variations on a Theme is collection of essays that lends emphasis to, and in some cases sheds new light on, Arnold Berleant's distinctive approach to aesthetic theory. T...

Recent global efforts of the United States and England to withdraw from international institutions, along with recent challenges to human rights courts from Poland and Hungary, have been described as part of a growing global populist backlash against the liberal international order. Several scholars have even identified the recent threat of mass withdrawal of African states from the International Criminal Court (ICC) as part of this global populist backlash. Are the African challenges to the ICC part of a global populist (...) movement developing in Africa? More fundamentally, how are the African challenges to the ICC examples of populism, if at all? In this paper, I show that, while there is considerable overlap between the strategies used by particular African leaders to challenge the ICC and those typically considered populist, as well as a discernible thin populist ideology to sustain them, there is insufficient evidence of a larger anti-ICC populist movement in Africa. Although Africa is not as united against the ICC as the populist narrative suggests, the recent challenges to the Court from Africa pose a significant challenge to the Court, as the institution is still in the early stages of building its legitimacy. (shrink)

In this article, I contribute to the debate between two philosophical traditions—the Kantian and the Aristotelian—on the requirements of criminal responsibility and the grounds for excuse by taking this debate to a new context: international criminal law. After laying out broadly Kantian and Aristotelian conceptions of criminal responsibility, I defend a quasi-Aristotelian conception, which affords a central role to moral development, and especially to the development of moral perception, for international criminal law. I show than an implication of this view (...) is that persons who are substantially and non-culpably limited in their capacity for ordinary moral perception warrant an excuse for engaging in unlawful conduct. I identify a particular set of conditions that trigger this excuse, and then I systematically examine it as applied to the controversial case of former-child-soldier-turned leader of the Lord’s Resistance Army, Dominic Ongwen, who is currently at trial at the International Criminal Court. (shrink)

In the expanding repertoire of practices designed to increase the supply of organs for transplantation, non-heart-beating cadaver organ donation has generated an ongoing debate in the literature. The continuing stream of articles is disquieting in part because it documents a troubling "trial-and-error ethics" approach to the formulation of organ procurement policy, and because it raises serious questions about the reasons that the development of this policy is being mediated by published communication. In the light of concerns about the implicit support (...) and credibility that professional publications give to organ procurement policies, restraint in publishing articles about non-heart-beating organ donation as well as in devising such policies is strongly advocated. (shrink)

This paper examines whether American parents legally violate their children’s privacy rights when they share embarrassing images of their children on social media without their children’s consent. My inquiry is motivated by recent reports that French authorities have warned French parents that they could face fines and imprisonment for such conduct, if their children sue them once their children turn 18. Where French privacy law is grounded in respect for dignity, thereby explaining the French concerns for parental “over-sharing,” I show (...) that there are three major legal roadblocks for such a case to succeed in US law. First, US privacy tort law largely only protects a person’s image where the person has a commercial interest in his or her image. Secondly, privacy tort laws are subject to constitutional constraints respecting the freedom of speech and press. Third, American courts are reluctant to erode parental authority, except in cases where extraordinary threats to children’s welfare exist. I argue that while existing privacy law in the US is inadequate to offer children legal remedy if their parents share their embarrassing images of them without their consent, the dignity-based concerns of the French should not be neglected. I consider a recent proposal to protect children’s privacy by extending to them the “right to be forgotten” online, but I identify problems in this proposal, and argue it is not a panacea to the over-sharing problem. I conclude by emphasizing our shared social responsibilities to protect children by teaching them about the importance of respecting one another’s privacy and dignity in the online context, and by setting examples as responsible users of internet technologies. (shrink)

Twelve narratives written by surgeons on ethical decision-making are analyzed in this commentary. Several major themes in their narratives are discussed: the preponderance of end-of-life issues; the struggle to be inclusively empathetic, even under emotionally alienating circumstances; social justice; and the disagreement among colleagues about how to deal with patients in situations of medical uncertainty. The commentary not only discusses the areas of stress that the surgeons identify in their accounts. It also highlights phenomena and themes that are missing from (...) them, and calls for more work to be done gathering stories from surgeons to explore and explain the “gaps” in this narrative collection. (shrink)

Parents concerned with what goes on when they leave their children at home under the care of someone else might wonder whether or not they should invest in video surveillance equipment. Such technology has become readily available and is relatively inexpensive, but is it morally permissible to use this sort of technology to monitor the care of one's children?

Sydney Shoemaker has gone to great lengths to defend a repre-sentationalist view of phenomenal character, and yet he describes this view as breaking with standard representationalism in two ways. First, he thinks his representationalist position is consis- tent with the possibility of spectrum inversion, and second, he thinks there are qualia. Thus, we can think of his position in the qualia debate as moderate representationalism (or, equally, moderate qualia realism) by taking up some middle ground be- tween these two major (...) camps. This \moderate" view faces several problems. Here I will very briey explain Shoemaker's represen- tationalist account of spectrum inversion in which he appeals to the existence of a certain sort of subjective property of objects, namely, what he calls appearance properties (formerly he called these phenomenal properties). I will argue that an alternative ver- sion of representationalism provides a more plausible explanation of both inversion-type scenarios and Shoemaker's color constancy case, which he uses to motivate the existence of these subjective properties, without positing appearance properties at all. (shrink)