'Young People and Social Media: Contemporary Children's Digital Culture' explores the practices, relationships, consequences, benefits, and outcomes of children's experiences with, on, and through social media by bringing together a vast array of different ideas about childhood, youth, and young people's lives. These ideas are drawn from scholars working in a variety of disciplines, and rather than just describing the social construction of childhood or an understanding of children's lives, this collection seeks to encapsulate not only how young people exist (...) on social media but also how their physical lives are impacted by their presence on social media.One of the aims of this volume in exploring youth interaction with social media is to unpack the structuring of digital technologies in terms of how young people access the technology to use it as a means of communication, a platform for identification, and a tool for participation in their larger social world. During longstanding and continued experience in the broad field of youth and digital culture, we have come to realize that not only is the subject matter increasing in importance at an immeasurable rate, but the amount of textbooks and/or edited collections has lagged behind considerably. There is a lack of sources that fully encapsulate the canon of texts for the discipline or the rich diversity and complexity of overlapping subject areas that create the fertile ground for studying young people's lives and culture. The editors hope that this text will occupy some of that void and act as a catalyst for future interdisciplinary collections.'Young People and Social Media: Contemporary Children's Digital Culture' will appeal to undergraduate students studying Child and Youth Studies and-given the interdisciplinary nature of the collection- scholars, researchers and students at all levels working in anthropology, psychology, sociology, communication studies, cultural studies, media studies, education, and human rights, among others. Practitioners in these fields will also find this collection of particular interest. (shrink)

Poverty is a complex subject in traditional African cultures. It is the lack of provision to satisfy the basic human needs of the population. The prosperity gospel as part of Pentecostal Christianity, with origins in the United States of America, presents itself as a new model for poverty eradication. Pentecostal Christianity and the proliferation of Pentecostal churches in Africa, many of whom are adherents of prosperity theology over a period of more than three decades, have not translated to a more (...) prosperous continent, and sub-Saharan Africa is still notably one of the poorest regions of the world. Poverty is a concept with many dimensions that attempts to ascertain the varying degrees of deprivation experienced by populations, individually or collectively. However, certain subjective and sometimes arbitrary interpretations of biblical texts on prosperity as the basis for prosperity theology have encouraged capitalist impulses that often supplant the pursuit of spiritual advantages, leading instead to an increase in crimes including robbery, financial fraud, kidnapping, ritual killings and many other social vices. This article examines the different perspectives of the prosperity gospel, the biblical sources and interpretations used as well as its interpretation of poverty. It shows how prosperity theology, with its own interpretation of poverty, erodes the valuable indigenous resources available to fight poverty within African religious communities, which emphasise community, positive family attachments, social support networks, moral values and accountability, and it examines the implications this has for socio-economic development in Africa. Contribution: This article challenges the theology of prosperity that characterises Pentecostal Christianity and is pervasive in Africa. It contributes to the discourse on how the challenges of poverty require the more community-centred approaches that traditional African values offer as against the self-centredness and greed promoted by the prosperity theology. (shrink)

We review the psychological literature on the organization of valence, discussing theoretical perspectives that favor a single dimension of valence, multiple valence dimensions, and positivity and negativity as dynamic and flexible properties of mental experience that are contingent upon context. Turning to the neuroscience literature that spans three levels of analysis, we discuss how positivity and negativity can be represented in the brain. We show that the evidence points toward both separable and overlapping brain systems that support affective processes depending (...) on the level of resolution studied. We move from large-scale brain networks that underlie generalized processing, to functionally specific subcircuits, finally to intraregional neuronal distributions, where the organization and interaction across levels allow for multiple types of valence and mixed evaluations. (shrink)

Anime is exploding on the worldwide stage! Anime has been a staple in Japan for decades, strongly connected to manga. So why has anime become a worldwide sensation? A cursory explanation is the explosion of online streaming services specializing in anime, like Funimation and Crunchyroll. Even more general streaming services like Netflix and Amazon have gotten in on the game. Anime is exotic to Western eyes and culture. That is one of the reasons anime has gained worldwide popularity. This strange (...) aesthetic draws the audience in only to find it is deeper and more sophisticated than its surface appearance. Japan is an honor and shame culture. Anime provides a platform to discuss “universal” problems facing human beings. It does so in an amazing variety of ways and subgenres, and often with a sense of humor. The themes, characters, stories, plotlines, and development are often complex. This makes anime a deep well of philosophical, metaphysical, and religious ideas for analysis. International scholars are represented in this book. There is a diversity of perspectives on a diversity of anime, themes, content, and analysis. It hopes to delve deeper into the complex world of anime and demonstrate why it deserves the respect of scholars and the public alike. (shrink)

Many will readily acknowledge there being rights of humans which trump the rights of states. Thus, these rights are aptly labeled ‘Human Rights,’ by which we may measure and admonish state-conduct. However, in contemporary Human Rights discourse, there is an emerging strand of thought in the academy that is Anti-Human Rights. To understand the foundations of Anti-Human Rights discourse, and to address the arguments that have been put forth, I analyze and incorporate the works of John O. Nelson, Raymond Geuss, (...) Wendy Brown, and Slavoj Žižek. Based on the same, I argue that the core arguments to these assertions are unpersuasive. I attempt at viewing Human Rights justification in different terms, and, to argue for the legitimacy of Human Rights while abandoning the search for justifications in nature, U.S. Foreign Policy, or Neo-Marxist views. (shrink)

Based on a qualitative study, this paper explores how United States public health professionals view and think about the existing U.S. healthcare system, while also allowing these study participants to imagine new ways of structuring and practicing public health. Using semi-structured qualitative interviews, I show how public health professionals engage with the concept of “the social” and their personal experiences with public health to question the status quo. By giving public health professionals space in which to imagine changes and different (...) ways of practicing public health, I demonstrate the effectiveness of imagination as a capacity that public health professionals possess to take the lead in creating the changes they hope for. (shrink)

This study examines the effects of nationality (U.S. vs. China) and personal values on managers’ responses to the Perceived Role of Ethics and Social Responsibility (PRESOR) scale. Evidence that China’s transition to a socialist market economy has led to widespread business corruption, led us to hypothesize that People’s Republic of China (PRC) managers would believe less strongly in the importance of ethical and socially responsible business conduct. We also hypothesized that after controlling for national differences, managers’ personal values (more specifically, (...) self-transcendence values) would have a significant impact on PRESOR responses. The hypotheses were tested using a sample of practicing managers enrolled in part-time MBA programs in the two countries. The results indicate that nationality did not have a consistent impact on PRESOR responses. After controlling for national differences, self-transcendence values had a significant positive impact on two of the three PRESOR dimensions. Conservation values such as conformity and tradition also had a significant association with certain dimensions of the PRESOR scale. (shrink)

Recent critics of the Roberts Court chide it for its lack of regard for precedent. Fred Schauer faults these critics for erroneously assuming that a rule of stare decisis formerly played a significant role in the Supreme Court's decision-making. In fact, it has long played only a rare and weak role in the Court's work. Nonetheless, according to Schauer, the critics are to be thanked for invigorating a needed debate about the importance of "stability, consistency, settlement, reliance, notice, and predictability" (...) in the Court's decisions. This article argues that Schauer exaggerates the weakness of stare decisis in the Court's practices; and that his call for a public debate on the merits of the norm of stare decisis can only weaken it. (shrink)

In [4], Kunen used iterated ultrapowers to show that ifUis a normalκ-complete nontrivial ultrafilter on a cardinalκthenL[U], the class of sets constructive fromU, has only the ultrafilterU∩L[U] and this ultrafilter depends only onκ. In this paper we extend Kunen's methods to arbitrary sequencesUof ultrafilters and obtain generalizations of these results. In particular we answer Problem 1 of Kunen and Paris [5] which asks whether the number of ultrafilters onκcan be intermediate between 1 and 22κ. If there is a normalκ-complete ultrafilterUonκsuch (...) that {α <κ: α is measurable} ∈Uthen there is an inner model with exactly two normal ultrafilters onκ, and ifκis super-compact then there are inner models havingκ+ +,κ+or any cardinal less than or equal toκnormal ultrafilters.These methods also show that several properties ofLwhich had been shown to hold forL[U] also hold forL[U]: using an idea of Silver we show that inL[U] the generalized continuum hypothesis is true, there is a Souslin tree, and there is awell-ordering of the reals. In addition we generalize a result of Kunen to characterize the countaby complete ultrafilters ofL[U]. (shrink)

This paper explores three questions: (1) Why should Certified Public Accountants (CPAs), as a group, adhere to their code of ethics? (2) Why should an individual CPA adhere to the code? (3) Of what significance are the answers to these questions in regards to possible changes in the accounting curriculum and the CPA profession's present concern for self-regulation through quality control reviews? The paper concludes that all college accounting majors should be required to take an ethics course and that the (...) current quality review program should be mandatory, not voluntary. (shrink)

Maker (philosophy, Clemson U.) contends that Hegel's philosophy is not consummately foundational and absolutist, but rather a nonfoundational philosophy which incorporates some contemporary criticisms of foundationalism without abandoning ...

"We hold these truths to be self-evident..." So begins the U.S. Declaration of Independence. What follows those words is a ringing endorsement of universal rights, but it is far from self-evident. Why did the authors claim that it was? William Talbott suggests that they were trapped by a presupposition of Enlightenment philosophy: That there was only one way to rationally justify universal truths, by proving them from self-evident premises. With the benefit of hindsight, it is clear that the authors (...) of the U.S. Declaration had no infallible source of moral truth. For example, many of the authors of the Declaration of Independence endorsed slavery. The wrongness of slavery was not self-evident; it was a moral discovery. In this book, William Talbott builds on the work of John Rawls, Jurgen Habermas, J.S. Mill, Amartya Sen, and Henry Shue to explain how, over the course of history, human beings have learned how to adopt a distinctively moral point of view from which it is possible to make universal, though not infallible, judgments of right and wrong. He explains how this distinctively moral point of view has led to the discovery of the moral importance of nine basic rights. Undoubtedly, the most controversial issue raised by the claim of universal rights is the issue of moral relativism. How can the advocate of universal rights avoid being a moral imperialist? In this book, Talbott shows how to defend basic individual rights from a universal moral point of view that is neither imperialistic nor relativistic. Talbott avoids moral imperialism by insisting that all of us, himself included, have moral blindspots and that we usually depend on others to help us to identify those blindspots. Talbott's book speaks to not only debates on human rights but to broader issues of moral and cultural relativism, and will interest a broad range of readers. (shrink)

There can be no doubt about the value of Frege's contributions to the philosophy of mathematics. First, he invented quantification theory and this was the first step toward making precise the notion of a purely logical deduction. Secondly, he was the first to publish a logical analysis of the ancestral R* of a relation R, which yields a definition of R* in second-order logic.1 Only a narrow and arid conception of philosophy would exclude these two achievements. Thirdly and very importantly, (...) the discussion in §§58-60 of the G r u n d l a g e n defends a conception of mathematical existence, to be found in Cantor (1883) and later in the writings of Dedekind and Hilbert, by basing it upon considerations about meaning which have general application, outside mathematics.2.. (shrink)

Članak je kritičko preispitivanje krize u vladavini zakona u kontekstu suvremene politike u SAD. Tekst navodi neke primjere američke nacionalne i vanjske politike u svezi s tzv. ‘kultom demokracije’. Članak je podijeljen na dva dijela. Prvi se dio bavi izvješćem, koje se bavi, redom, službenim odnosima SAD prema međunarodnom zakonodavstvu; zatim prema moći institucije predsjedništva; te glede uloge Vrhovnoga Suda. Drugi dio ispituje neke filozofijske implikacije američke politike, a u svezi s pitanjima demokracije i vladavine zakona.

It is difficult for prioritarians to explain the degree to which justice requires redress for misfortune in a way that avoids imposing unreasonably high costs on more advantaged individuals whilst also economising on intuitionist appeals to judgment. An appeal to hypothetical insurance may be able to solve the problems of cost and judgment more successfully, and can also be defended from critics who claim that resource egalitarianism is best understood to favour the ex post elimination of envy over individual endowments.u.

For much of 2021, allocating the scarce supply of Covid‐19 vaccines was the world's most pressing bioethical challenge, and similar challenges may recur for novel therapies and future vaccines. In the United States, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP) identified three fundamental ethical principles to guide the process: maximize benefits, promote justice, and mitigate health inequities. We argue that critical components of the recommended protocol were internally inconsistent with these principles. Specifically, the ACIP (...) violated its principles by recommending overly broad health care worker priority in phase 1a, using being at least seventy‐five years of age as the only criterion to identify individuals at high risk of death from Covid‐19 during phase 1b, failing to recommend place‐based vaccine distribution, and implicitly endorsing first‐come, first‐served allocation. More rigorous empirical work and the development of a complete ethical framework that recognizes trade‐offs between principles may have prevented these mistakes and saved lives. (shrink)

This book is the culmination of almost forty years of writing and thinking about speech acts and the use theory of meaning. Chapter 1 sets out and defends a version of the Austin-Searle trichotomy of a sentential act, i.e., uttering a sentence or surrogate, an illocutionary act, i.e., uttering a sentence with a certain "content" as reported by indirect speech, and a perlocutionary act, i.e., producing an effect on an audience by an utterance. Chapter 2 poses the question: what condition (...) C will turn an SA into an IA: F? Perhaps adding a perlocutionary intention to the effect that "U asserts that p only if U utters p with the intention of getting H to believe that p" will meet condition C. Alston argues, contra Schiffer, that it will not. Chapter 3 objects to Searle's analysis of sincere and non-defective promising, on the one hand, because there are too many ways a promise can be defective and, on the other hand, because some of Searle's conditions are not necessary for promising simpliciter. Alston proposes. (shrink)

The question I want to pursue here is one that I have lifted from Harry Frankfurt’s recent surprising best-selling book, On Bullshit, in which he asks why there is so much bullshit today in Western cultures like the U. S. The scope of Frankfurt’s charge was deliberately broad. It’s not just that people bullshit about how much money they make or how important their jobs are, but that public discourse about just any topic of consequence in American culture is filled (...) with, one is even tempted to say consists of, such unseemly speech. Such is the case, I want to claim here, about public discourse about sport in the print and visual media, in everyday life, and even, as I will shortly comment upon, in so-called academic and civic forums. So I don’t think it is a stretch at all, nor do I believe Frankfurtwould regard it as such, to include sport among the topics about which bullshit abounds. He might, however, quibble with my claim that the preponderance of bullshit in and outside of sport circles has mainly to do with the incursion of the market into most of the social practices that people hold dear in our culture. This despite the fact that Frankfurt does recognize that one primary reason why bullshit dominates so much of our contemporary discourse is that people are frequently called upon to speak about things that exceed their grasp, their knowledge of the subject. What he seems not to appreciate in this regard, however, is that one especially important reason why people’s grasp of what they say and do leaves much to be desired is because more often than not it is market actors that are doing all the talking here, whether the topic be sports, or politics, or even science. And the reason they are doing all the talking is the same reason they are mostly responsible for what actually goes on in these disparate spheres, namely, they hold and control the purse strings. So I’m persuaded, more than Frankfurt apparently is, that it is because the money-changers dominate sports, as I have insinuated they dominate most everything else, that what gets said in and about sports is mostly bullshit. Convincing you that I’m right about this will be my aim today, and that’s no bullshit, I think. (shrink)

Abstract: Receptivity is a foundational concept in the analysis of causation given in Gregg Rosenberg’s A Place for Consciousness and it enters, directly or indirectly, into the definitions of a host of other terms in the book. This commentary raises a problem (which I call “the triviality problem”) about how we are to understand receptivity. Search for a solution proceeds by examination of several contexts in which the concept of receptivity is used. Although a satisfactory solution remains elusive, it is (...) hoped that making the problem clear will lead to its eventual resolution. (shrink)

Expressing emotion is considered essential in the U.S. business communication tradition; however, its importance is uncertain beyond the U.S., and more specifically, in Chinese business contexts. This study explores emotion in U.S. and Chinese business communication through the analyses of attitude markers in the shareholders’ letters of U.S. and mainland Chinese corporations. The analyses reveal that while emotion is embedded in the discourse of companies from both cultural models, its expression is more frequent and intense in the U.S. texts. The (...) observed dissimilarities are discussed in terms of underlying sociocultural factors. Implications arise for the teaching and learning of business communication which are still largely defined by U.S. approaches. With the rising prominence of mainland Chinese corporations worldwide, the findings provide strong evidence for students and professionals to understand Chinese as well as U.S. rhetorical styles in business communication in order to be better prepared for the global business environment. (shrink)

In this essay I review John Dewey’s pragmatism from the perspective of environmental social theory. Dewey’s clarification of aesthetics, values, experience, and the natural world are useful to contemporary environmentalism. His work represents a precedent for critical, anti-dualistic social philosophy in the U. S., and usefully clarifies the relationship of humans to the “material world.” Dewey’s conception ofvalues, politics, and experience suggests that these elements may be combined in ways congenial to environmental thought.

Model-theoretic 1-types overa given first-order theory T may be construed as natural metalogical miniatures of G. W. Leibniz' ``complete individual notions'', ``substances'' or ``substantial forms''. This analogy prompts this essay's modal semantics for an essentiallyundecidable first-order theory T, in which one quantifies over such ``substances'' in a boolean universe V(C), where C is the completion of the Lindenbaum-algebra of T.More precisely, one can define recursively a set-theoretic translate of formulae νNϕ of formulae ν of a normal modal theory Tm based (...) on T, such that the counterpart `ξi' of a the modal variable `xi' of L(Tm) in this translation-scheme ranges over elements of V(C) that are 1-types of T with value 1 (sometimes called `definite' C-valued 1-types of T).The article's basic completeness-result (2.13) then establishes that ϕvarphi; is a theorem of Tm iff [[νN(ϕ) is aconsequenceof νN(Tm) for each extension N of T which is a subtheory of the canonical generic theory (ultrafilter) u]] = 1 – or equivalently, that Tm is consistent iff[[there is anextension N of T such that N is a subtheory of the canonical generic theory u, and νN(ϕ) for all ϕ in Tm]] > 0.The proof of thiscompleteness-result also shows that an N which provides a countermodel for a modally unprovable ϕ – or equivalently, a closed set in the Stone space St(T) in the sense of V(C) – is intertranslatable with an `accessibility'-relation of a closely related Kripke-semantics whose `worlds' are generic extensions of an initial universe V via C.This interrelation providesa fairly precise rationale for the semantics' recourse to C-valued structures, and exhibits a sense in which the boolean-valued context is sharp. (shrink)

Korey focuses on the U.S. delegation to the Commission on Security and Cooperation in Europe and credits the success of the Helsinki Accord to U.S. adroit negotiation strategies, beginning with the Carter administration.

Medical-legal partnership (MLP) embeds attorneys and paralegals into care delivery to help clinicians address root causes of health inequities. Notwithstanding decades of favorable outcomes, MLP is not as well-known as might be expected. In this essay, the authors explore ways in which strategic alignment of legal services with healthcare services in terms of professionalism, information collection and sharing, and financing might help the MLP movement become a more widespread, sustainable model for holistic care delivery.

The practice of modern craniomaxillofacial surgery has been defined by emergent technologies allowing for the acquisition, storage, utilization, and transfer of massive amounts of sensitive and identifiable patient data. This alone has thrust providers into an unlikely and unprecedented role as the stewards of vast databases of digital information. This data powers the potent surgical tool of virtual surgical planning, a method by which craniomaxillofacial surgeons plan and simulate procedural outcomes in a digital environment. Further complicating this new terrain is (...) the involvement of third‐party contractors—a necessary presence in bringing raw data to bear in the office, virtual space, and operating room. The individual privileges and responsibilities of patients, providers, and vendors towards data are situated within the most recent U.S. court rulings and regulations. This paper offers guidance for overseeing the safe and responsible transfer to third‐party contractors, and provides suggestions for negotiating the trinary relationship between physicians, their patients, and the vendors offering this transformative technology. (shrink)

How Do I Save My Honor? is a powerful exploration of individual moral responsibility in a time of war. When individuals conclude that their leaders have violated fundamental ethical principles, what are they to do? Through the compelling personal stories of those in the U.S. and British government and military who struggled with these thorny issues during the war in Iraq, William F. Felice analyzes the degrees of moral responsibility that public officials, soldiers, and private citizens bear for the (...) actions of their governments. Examining the struggles of these contemporary men and women, as well as of historical figures facing similar dilemmas, the author weighs the profound difficulties of overcoming the intense pressures of misguided loyalty, patriotism, and groupthink that predominate during war. (shrink)

Medicine and health are surprisingly separate. In the introduction to his 1963 master work on medical economics, Kenneth Arrow acknowledged that “the subject is the medical-care industry, not health.” In the 50 years that followed, researchers, policymakers, and public health professionals generated valuable and varied insights into health, impacting both behaviors and environments while addressing social determinants and demographic trends. Yet medical care has followed an even steeper upward trajectory, growing rapidly in scientific precision, public esteem, and technical sophistication.As a (...) result, the economic gap between the two domains has widened. The U.S. health care system spends almost $3 trillion annually. Preventive screening and early intervention bridge medical care and health, as do nutrition, behavioral health, aging, and a few other fields. But the money is overwhelmingly in medical care, particularly rescue care for those with acute illnesses or serious complications of chronic disease. (shrink)

Central to the discourse ethics advanced by Jürgen Habermas is a principle of universalization (U) amounting to a dialogical equivalent of Kant's Categorical Imperative. Habermas has proposed that ?U? follows by material implication from two premises: (1) what it means to discuss whether a moral norm ought to be . adopted and (2) what those involved in argumentation must suppose of themselves if they are to consider a consensus they reach as rationally motivated. To date, no satisfactory derivation of ?U? (...) from these two premises has been presented. Thus the present study attempts to show how one can, without begging the question, arrive at ?U? by assuming a suitable explication of these two premises, supplemented with a fairly innocuous assumption about the context of discourse. If the argument is sound, then ?U? brings both deontological and consequentialist intuitions together with a notion of solidarity that requires an intersubjective account of insight. (shrink)

Goodman draws together, in this memoir, his explorations of meaning and coincidence, and his lived experiences of chance, and his professional experiences teaching, writing, and consulting about risk. The book opens by describing the author's life-changing encounter with a Zen Buddhist monk in 1977, over a cup of tea. Returning to his beginnings, Goodman recounts his coming-of-age, from participating the 1960’s U.S. protests and Vietnam-War resistance, to finally settling down in Canada. He describes his role in a supporting, silent vigil (...) around Willard Straight Hall at Cornell University, the night after it had been occupied by protestors, and his later application for Conscientious Objector status, following the U.S. draft lottery in 1969. He reflects on the challenges and changes on his road taken, in his career and personal relationships, and in spiritual searches, to share some insights about the seamless nature of chance, and about seeing a Both/And perspective in life that encourages openness to possibilities. -/- . (shrink)

Since the publication of Gilbert Ryle's book, The Concept of Mind, the distinction between dispositions and occurrences has loomed large in the philosophy of mind. In that enormously influential book Ryle set out to show that much of what passes as mental is best construed as dispositional in character rather than, as traditionally supposed, being made up of private “ghostly” occurrences, ‘happenings, or “episodes.” Many philosophers, including some of Ryle's ablest critics, have accepted the terms of Ryle's contentions. They have (...) either agreed, with respect to certain kinds of mental states, that they are not occurrent because dispositional, or have undertaken to vindicate their occurrent status by showing Ryle's dispositional account to be inadequate. Thus U. T. Place in his essay, “The Concept of Heed,” while agreeing with Ryle's dispositional account of belief; memory, intention, and desire, rejects a similar account of heeding, attention, and consciousness, and defends the traditional account according to which they are construed as distinctive sorts of internal activity. And Terence Penelhum, in “The Logic of Pleasure,” defends an “episode-view” of pleasure as against Ryle's dispositional account. (shrink)

If there is no inner model with a cardinal κ such that o(κ) = κ ++ then the set K ∩ H ω 1 is definable over H ω 1 by a Δ 4 formula, and the set $\{J_\alpha[\mathscr{U}]: \alpha of countable initial segments of the core model K = L[U] is definable over H ω 1 by a Π 3 formula. We show that if there is an inner model with infinitely many measurable cardinals then there is a model (...) in which $\{J_\alpha [\mathscr{U}]: \alpha is not definable by any Σ 3 formula, and K ∩ H ω 1 is not definable by any boolean combination of Σ 3 formulas. (shrink)

After the U.S. dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in Japan in 1945, both nations experienced a profound need for a new and encompassing story of what it meant to be Japanese, and to be American, in the permanent nuclear age. This article is a thought experiment to juxtapose the writings and personas of two people who helped their respective societies answer those needs and questions during the early Cold War: Takashi Nagai—medical radiologist, and survivor of the American atomic (...) bombing of Nagasaki, and Albert Wohlstetter—leading American civilian nuclear strategist for the RAND Corporation in the 1950s. Using a combination of mythopeic analysis, biography and illuminative juxtaposition, the study discovers surprising similarities and analogies between the two cases. They each enact and propose interesting variations of sacrificial causalities—claims that human nuclear sacrifices past or promised can bring peace by deterrence now or peace by abolition soon enough. This is an important study now, as both Japan’s nuclear pacifism and the American nuclear umbrella in Northeast Asia are coming under more severe questioning than perhaps ever before. (shrink)

Many controversial issues have come under discussion regarding the recent war in Iraq. The justifications given for the war itself, the way the war was prosecuted, and the handling of the post-war situation have all been hotly contested matters. This paper focuses on an aspect of the war that has not drawn much attention—the decisions made by members of the Iraqi military to either fight or not to fight. From the very beginning of hostilities the United States made concerted efforts, (...) through such methods as e-mails and leaflets dropped from aircraft, to encourage the desertion of Iraqi military personnel. Many Iraqi soldiers followed this advice and surrendered to U.S. forces at the first opportunity; others continue to fight to this day. Were the soldiers that deserted the military or surrendered without a fight morally justified in doing so? This article attempts to answer that question through an examination of such related issues as patriotism, political and moral duties, obligations arising from oaths and promises, and political legitimacy. Though this analysis does not lead to the development of iron-clad rules that definitively resolve the moral issues underlying military desertion, it can help us to get a clearer understanding of these issues and to develop guidelines by which to judge the morality of specific instances of desertion. (shrink)

In 1997 the Tenth Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals ruled that school officials at West High School did not violate Rachel Bauchman's constitutional rights by including Christian religious music as part of its curriculum, or by staging school performances at religious sites. Three philosophical questions are investigated in this paper: whether the performance of religious text constitutes a religious practice, the ways in which instructional and performance context can affect the performance of sacred music, and how music teachers can avoid (...) coercion when teaching religious music. Conclusions suggest that music educators must carefully consider the historical and cultural context of texts utilized in choral music. Certain contemporary devotional texts intended primarily for worship may prove problematic in a classroom setting. In addition, the instructional context in which religious music is presented can greatly impact how students understand the music's significance. Music educators should carefully articulate clear pedagogical reasons for staging performances in houses of worship to avoid the appearance of endorsement, and should refrain from asking students to participate in organized worship services. Finally, music educators should be sensitive to the problems religious texts present to individual students, taking responsibility for facilitating a classroom environment that respects a diversity of viewpoints. (shrink)

If there is no inner model with a cardinal $\kappa$ such that $o = \kappa^{++}$ then the set $K \cap H_{\omega_1}$ is definable over H$_{\omega_1}$ by a $\Delta_4$ formula, and the set $\{J_\alpha[\mathscr{U}] : \alpha < \omega_1\}$ of countable initial segments of the core model $K = L[\mathscr{U}]$ is definable over $H_{\omega_1}$ by a $\Pi_3$ formula. We show that if there is an inner model with infinitely many measurable cardinals then there is a model in which $\{J_\alpha [\mathscr{U}] : \alpha (...) < \omega_1\}$ is not definable by any $\Sigma_3$ formula, and $K \cap H_{\omega_1}$ is not definable by any boolean combination of $\Sigma_3$ formulas. (shrink)