Every year at its symposiums, the Croatian philosophical society proves that it wants to and can be in step with current happenings in the world and social needs which open up questions that ask for quick and well thought out an -swers. Such was foremost the symposium during the annual assembly of the Croatian Philosophical Society in 2000 under the titlePhilosophy and Educa-tion. There was also the international symposium held during the 13th Days of Frane Petriæ in Cres, September (...) 20–22, 2004 – under the title Philosophy and Education in Contemporary Society. The focal point of philosophical elabo -rations at the symposiums was one of the hot topics of the contemporary world: education. (shrink)

Diverse and dynamic societies face a problem of social control. Institutions of social control, of which the police are a part, are a necessary part of just and legitimate governance. But in our non-ideal world they are also responsible for injustices of their own. This project raises questions of political philosophy as they apply to the professional police agency. It begins by constructing an inchoate, but mainstream view about just policing, legalism, according to which police power (...) is justified by the criminal code, and just policing is just the faithful enforcement of law. This view is undermined by the practical realities of policing, which involves widespread and unavoidable police discretion. It then develops an account of just and legitimate police discretion, including principles of proportionality, liberal neutrality, and democratic responsiveness. This sheds lights on controversial police tactics, order maintenance initiatives, and community policing strategies. This account also informs the just institutional arrangement of police powers, informing ongoing debates about police reform and abolition. (shrink)

Police officers around the world must often select between equally unappealing, uncertain courses of action in an attempt to achieve the best outcome. Despite the immense importance of such decisions, there remains a lack of understanding in the study of individual differences in police decision-making. Here, using a sample of senior police officers recruited from decision-making training events across the United Kingdom (n = 96), we used the Least-worst Uncertain Choice Inventory For Emergency Responses (LUCIFER) to (...) measure the effect of maximization on both domain-specific (police) and domain-general (military) decisions. In line with a wealth of research on traditional “consumer” decisions, we found that police officers who were “maximizers” found decisions more difficult. Gender and previous military experience also influenced the process of decision-making. Specifically, police officers with military experience took more time to assess the situation but were faster to choose a course of action and commit to it. Female police officers also were slower to assess the situation. As recent events show, the outcomes of police decisions have significant consequences for the public, the officers involved, the police force as a whole, and the wider population, yet psychological research has yet to fully explore the role of individual differences in how such decisions are made. While this study does not seek to identify factors associated with “good” or “better” decision-makers, it provides strong support for the need to factor in perspectives of the individual when creating theory, or applied tools, in support of police decision-making. (shrink)

We examine when and how police officers may avoid costly errors under stress by leveraging theoretical and empirical work on the biopsychosocial (BPS) model of challenge and threat. According to the BPS model, in motivated performance contexts (e.g., test taking, athletics), the evaluation of situational and task demands in relation to one’s perceived resources available to cope with those demands engenders distinct patterns of peripheral physiological responding. Individuals experience more challenge-like states in which blood circulates more efficiently in the (...) periphery when they evaluate their coping resources as meeting or exceeding the task demands. Conversely, individuals experience more threat-like states in which blood circulates less efficiently in the periphery when they view the situation or task demands as exceeding their coping resources. Patterns of response consistent with challenge and threat states have been shown to predict important performance and decision-making outcomes in stressful contexts, and repeated experiences of threat-like patterns of physiological activity are thought to have detrimental effects on long-term cardiovascular health. To date, however, research has not used the biopsychosocial model to understand police decision-making under stress. Here, we review relevant empirical work from the perspective of the BPS model concerning how minority status and power can shape challenge and threat responding and contribute to decision making under stress. We then detail a research agenda aimed at improving the translational value of research being conducted within the BPS model for understanding complex performance and decision making in the real world, including among law enforcement personnel. (shrink)

The rapid growth of Indonesian Heavy Metal music, especially the Death Metal subgenre, since around the turn of the millennium, has been quite remarkable. Indonesia is now numerically the largest scene in the world. Man, the vocalist of Jasad, told the author that the provincial West Javanese city of Bandung had 128 active Death Metal bands as at February 2011. I discuss the cancellation of an April 2012 music festival held in the Bandung hinterland by police halfway through (...) the festival, and explain how and why it took place. Police became nervous and worried about Heavy Metal shows following the deaths of eleven concertgoers, due to a crowd crush, at a Beside album launch in Bandung in 2008. I also analyze the “maternal rage” of a band member’s mother (also a policewoman at the scene) from the perspective of grounded gendered cosmopolitanism. Lastly, a short case study of Sickles, a young band from the religiously-conservative Madura Island, shows the problems that young bands experience plus the type of global underground support which they can attract. (shrink)

Abstract The rapid growth of Indonesian Heavy Metal music, especially the Death Metal subgenre, since around the turn of the millennium, has been quite remarkable. Indonesia is now numerically the largest scene in the world. Man, the vocalist of Jasad, told the author that the provincial West Javanese city of Bandung had 128 active Death Metal bands as at February 2011. This chapter will discuss the cancellation of an April 2012 music festival held in the Bandung hinterland by (...) class='Hi'>police halfway through the festival, and explain how and why it took place. Police became nervous and worried about Heavy Metal shows following the deaths of eleven concertgoers, due to a crowd crush, at a Beside album launch in Bandung in 2008. The chapter analyses the “maternal rage” of a band member’s mother (also a policewoman at the scene) from the perspective of grounded gendered cosmopolitanism. Lastly, a short case study of Sickles, a young band from the religiously-conservative Madura Island, shows the problems that young bands experience plus the type of global underground support which they can attract. (shrink)

Policing in many parts of the world—the United States in particular—has embraced an archetypal model: a conception of the police based on the tenets of individuated archetypes, such as the heroic police “warrior” or “guardian.” Such policing has in part motivated moves to (1) a reallocative model: reallocating societal resources such that the police are no longer needed in society (defunding and abolishing) because reform strategies cannot fix the way societal problems become manifest in (archetypal) policing; (...) and (2) an algorithmic model: subsuming policing into technocratic judgements encoded in algorithms through strategies such as predictive policing (mitigating archetypal bias). This paper begins by considering the normative basis of the relationship between political community and policing. It then examines the justification of reallocative and algorithmic models in light of the relationship between political community and police. Given commitments to the depth and distribution of security—and proscriptions against dehumanizing strategies—the paper concludes that a nonideal-theory priority rule promoting respect for personhood (manifest in community and dignity-promoting policing strategies) is a necessary condition for the justification of the above models. (shrink)

BackgroundLow-stakes crimes related to alcohol and/or drugs are common around the world, but research is lacking on police–suspect interactions of such crimes. A large proportion of these suspects are intoxicated during interrogations, and many may have substance use disorder, making them potentially vulnerable to interrogative pressure.MethodsTo address this lack of knowledge, the taxonomy of interrogation methods framework and a common classification of question types were applied in the coding of written police interrogations. Two archival studies, one pilot (...) and one main study analyzed police interrogations with suspects of alcohol- and drug-related crimes in Sweden.ResultsFor both Study 1 and 2, suspects showed signs of alcohol and/or drug intoxication, hangover or withdrawal in more than 50% of all interrogations. In Study 2, additional coding indicated that suspects displayed signs of substance use disorder in 57% of the interrogations. The main results from both studies revealed a large number of direct questions asked by the police across all interrogations, and relatively little use of the strategic interrogation techniques from the taxonomy of interrogation methods framework. In fact, when it came to interrogation techniques, law enforcement used more confrontational techniques in their interactions with intoxicated suspects compared to sober suspects. Furthermore, suspects displaying signs of substance use disorder were significantly more cooperative and prone to confess than suspects without indicators of substance use disorder.ConclusionAs the first novel study on low-stakes crime interrogations related to alcohol and/or drugs, the present study provides useful information about current Swedish interrogation practices and areas for improvement. The study results indicate that suspects displaying signs of intoxication or substance use disorder may be more vulnerable during police interrogations. This may in turn have the potential to inform the development of new interrogation policies. Due to the novelty of this research, more studies are needed, both on a national and international level, to examine interrogations in low-stakes crimes further. (shrink)

Protecting the people we experiment on --"Inside the black box" : becoming and being IRB members -- Weighing risks and benefits and undue inducement -- Defining research and how good it needs to be -- What to tell subjects : battles over consent forms -- From "nitpicky" to "user-friendly" : inter-IRB variations and their causes -- Federal agencies vs. local IRBs -- The roles of industry -- The local ecologies of institutions -- Trusting vs. policing researchers -- Bad behavior: research (...) integrity -- Researchers abroad : studies in the developing world -- Changing national policies -- Conclusions : other changes. (shrink)

Transnationals operate in what may be called the margins of morality because the historical, cultural, and governmental mores of the world''s nation-states are not uniform. There is a gray area of ethical judgment where the standards of the transnational''s home country differ substantially from those of the host country. Following the argument of institutional theory in providing stability and meaning to social behavior, in matters of moral conduct the transnational is likely to yield to at least four policing authorities: (...) itself, in terms of the integrity of its management and by decision-making that follows its own code of ethics, other corporations within its competitive set, governmental agencies including those of the host country, and public exposure, which includes the media as well as non-governmental agencies such as offshore watchdog groups. The fourth mechanism, public exposure, is thought to be the most effective in policing transnational conduct. (shrink)

In The Ambivalent State Javier Auyero and Katherine Sobering examine the fascinating world of clandestine relationships between police officers and drug dealers in Argentina. Drawing on a unique combination of ethnographic research and hundreds of pages of wiretapped phone conversations, they analyze the inner-workings of police-criminal collusion and how they shape drug markets, policing in poor urban areas, and daily life at the urban margins.

This paper draws from critical data studies and related fields to investigate police officer-involved homicide data for Los Angeles County. We frame police officer-involved homicide data as a rhetorical tool that can reify certain assumptions about the world and extend regimes of power. We highlight the possibility that this type of sensitive civic data can be investigated and employed within local communities through creative practice. Community involvement with data can create a countervailing force to powerful dominant narratives (...) and supplement activist projects that hold local officials accountable for their actions. Our analysis examines four Los Angeles County police officer-involved homicide data sets. First, we provide accounts of the semantics, granularity, scale and transparency of this local data. Then, we describe a “counter data action,” an event that invited members of the community to identify the limits and challenges present in police officer-involved homicide data and to propose new methods for deriving meaning from these indicators and statistics. (shrink)

This article analyses the attempts to promote economic and social development in the Third World through techniques of empowerment and participation. Based on Michel Foucault’s analytics of government - notably the notion of self-technologies - we analyse two empowerment projects for women. We argue, first, that empowerment projects seek to constitute beneficiaries as active and responsible individuals with the ability to take charge of their own lives. Thus, empowerment should be viewed not as a transfer of power to individuals (...) who formerly possessed little or no power, but as a technology seeking to create self-governing and responsible individuals, i.e. modern citizens in the western liberal sense. Second, through the intertwinement of anthropological knowledges and radical action research, knowledge about the local has become an authoritative mode of veridiction (regime of truth) in development interventions. By seeking to instigate and activate ‘local knowledges’, participatory development interventions entail a crucial recasting of the governing of the target population who are now supposed - on the basis of rational decision-making, such as cost-benefit analysis - to freely join the power-loaded game of the active citizen. Third and finally, it is also maintained that the role of the developer (now labelled ‘facilitator’) is profoundly recast. By basing themselves on the subjective involvement of the individual developer, the participatory approaches recast development as an art form that puts at stake the ethical practices of ‘facilitators’ and beneficiaries alike. (shrink)

The Roman Inquisition against Heretical Depravity, also known as the Holy Office, established in 1542, and the Congregation of the Index of Prohibited Books, announced officially in 1572, undertook to protect Italy from ideas and practices that menaced the authority of the Roman Catholic Church in this world and the salvation of its members in the next. This grandiose public-health program required trained and dedicated thought police to receive and evaluate alarms from the public and, when business was (...) bad, to seek out sources of infection themselves. The resultant records of accusations, investigations, trials, condemnations, expurgations, and exceptions, if extant in its entirety, would go far to fill.. (shrink)

Evidence-based medicine, with its evidence hierarchies and emphasis on RCTs, meta-analyses and systematic reviews, sets the model for evidence-based policy almost everywhere, policing no exception. But how closely should policing follow this model? We argue that RCTs can tell you little about what you need to know for real-world practice: will this policy work where and when you implement it? Defending that it will do so takes good theory. For RCTs to play a role in theory development, they must (...) be set into a larger body of knowledge, including local knowledge about the sites of implementation. Unfortunately the standard EBM model generally ignores the other kinds of knowledge needed. An alternative model for evidence-based policing, similar to that of the new movement for ‘EBM+’ and immanent in the practice of realist synthesis, focuses on the arguments that proposed policing policies will work where and when they are implemented and looks for the evidence needed to support those arguments. (shrink)

High levels of police corruption have been a persistent historical tendency in police services throughout the world. While the general area of concern in this book is with police corruption and anti-corruption, the focus is on certain key philosophical and ethical issues that arise for police organisations confronting corruption. On the normative account proffered in this book the principal institutional purpose of policing is the protection of legally enshrined moral rights and the principal institutional anti-corruption (...) arrangement is what is referred to as an integrity system. The latter includes oversight bodies with investigative powers and internal affairs departments as well as specific devices such as early warning indicators, professional reporting mechanisms and integrity tests. Key concepts analysed in the book include corruption, noble cause corruption and collective moral responsibility. The key ethical issues analysed include investigative independence, professional reporting, covert operations and integrity tests. (shrink)

When the threat posed by the digitalization of our lives is debated in our media, the focus is usually on the new phase of capitalism called “surveillance capitalism”: a total digital control over our lives exerted by state agencies and private corporations. However, important as this “surveillance capitalism” is, it is not yet the true game changer; there is a much greater potential for new forms of domination in the prospect of direct brain-machine interface (“wired brain”). First, when our brain (...) is connected to digital machines, we can cause things to happen in reality just by thinking about them; then, my brain is directly connercted to another brain, so that another individual can directly share my experience). Extrapolated to its extreme, wired brain opens up the prospect of what Ray Kurzweil called Singularity, the divine-like global space of shared awareness … Whatever the (dubious, for the time being) scientific status of this idea, it is clear that its realization will affect the basic features of humans as thinking/speaking beings: the eventual rise of Singularity will be apocalyptic in the complex meaning of the term: it will imply the encounter with a truth hidden in our ordinary human existence, i.e., the entrance into a new post-human dimension, which cannot but be experienced as catastrophic, as the end of our world. But will we still be here to experience our immersion into Singularity in any human sense of the term? (shrink)

Body, Community, Language, World, here made available in English for the first time is Patocka's presentation of phenomenology as a living tradition - as a philosophical heritage that requires to be rethought and redirected in light of possibilities that it has itself uncovered. Jan Patocka lived for most of his adult life in Communist Czechoslovakia where he was at times banned from publishing or teaching. Mentor of Vaclav Havel, Patocka defied the regime as one of the spokespersons for Charta (...) 77, and died in 1977, following two months of police interrogation. (shrink)

Essay on philosophical problems with police sting operations and the legal doctrine of entrapment.

Scientific and technological progress might change people’s capabilities or incentives in ways that would destabilize civilization. For example, advances in DIY biohacking tools might make it easy for anybody with basic training in biology to kill millions; novel military technologies could trigger arms races in which whoever strikes first has a decisive advantage; or some economically advantageous process may be invented that produces disastrous negative global externalities that are hard to regulate. This paper introduces the concept of a vulnerable (...) class='Hi'>world: roughly, one in which there is some level of technological development at which civilization almost certainly gets devastated by default, i.e. unless it has exited the “semi-anarchic default condition”. Several counterfactual historical and speculative future vulnerabilities are analyzed and arranged into a typology. A general ability to stabilize a vulnerable world would require greatly amplified capacities for preventive policing and global governance. The vulnerable world hypothesis thus offers a new perspective from which to evaluate the risk-benefit balance of developments towards ubiquitous surveillance or a unipolar world order. (shrink)

Where do we come from? Are we merely a cluster of elementary particles in a gigantic world receptacle? And what does it all mean? In this highly original new book, the philosopher Markus Gabriel challenges our notion of what exists and what it means to exist. He questions the idea that there is a world that encompasses everything like a container life, the universe, and everything else. This all-inclusive being does not exist and cannot exist. For the (...) class='Hi'>world itself is not found in the world. And even when we think about the world, the world about which we think is obviously not identical with the world in which we think. For, as we are thinking about the world, this is only a very small event in the world. Besides this, there are still innumerable other objects and events: rain showers, toothaches and the World Cup. Drawing on the recent history of philosophy, Gabriel asserts that the world cannot exist at all, because it is not found in the world. Yet with the exception of the world, everything else exists; even unicorns on the far side of the moon wearing police uniforms. Revelling in witty thought experiments, word play, and the courage of provocation, Markus Gabriel demonstrates the necessity of a questioning mind and the role that humour can play in coming to terms with the abyss of human existence. (shrink)

Robert Jackall, Street Stories: The World of Police Detectives. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005. 429pp.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Excited DeliriumThe Self-Fulfilling Prophecy of Police BrutalityKathryn Petrozzo (bio)In their timely and pressing piece, Arjun Byju and Phoebe Friesen explore the contentious diagnosis of excited delirium; a syndrome characterized by erratic, aggressive, and “delusional” behavior (2023). Overwhelmingly, this term is used when individuals come in contact with police and/or first responders. Although much attention has been given to debating whether or not this is a “real” diagnosis, (...) the authors want to shift the focus to examining the work that excited delirium is doing in the world, as well as the underlying beliefs guiding it that are perpetuating substantial harm. Drawing significantly on the work of Ian Hacking (1998, 2006) and Sherene Razack (2015), Byju and Friesen explore what kinds of people are being made up by the label of “excited delirium” and the subsequent dehumanization that perpetuates violence towards those in this grouping.Despite the lack of an agreed upon definition, excited delirium tends to frequently group together young Black men and other marginalized people of color, who have a psychiatric history, and those who have taken or are suspected to have taken drugs (Byju & Friezen, 2023). As this is “observed” when individuals come into contact with law enforcement and/or first responders, those who are presumed to be suffering from excited delirium are typically met with physical restraints (chokeholds, hogties, etc.), forced injections of sedatives, and/or taser guns. The violent reactions are often justified not only by this “diagnosis,” but the employment of racial stereotypes; notably, the notion that Black bodies as being less susceptible to pain. As the authors aptly put it:This kind of symptom language helps make up the novel category of a person who suffers from excited delirium: a crazed and inhumane monster, a golem that must be met with unrelenting and superordinate force, who is fated, regardless of interventions, to die a spontaneous death. This paradox, that those with excited delirium are supposedly both too strong and too weak, is at the core of the illness narrative.(2023)It is evident that this label is reinforcing the combination of two harmful stereotypes: the notion that those suffering from severe mental illness occupy a space that is “less than fully human,” and racist stereotyping of Black bodies “superseding human strength.” This perpetuates total dehumanization of the individual, where it is then justified to invoke brutal tactics, as well as signal [End Page 357] to the greater community this is how individuals with mental illnesses and/or belonging to a particular racial group (chiefly, Black men), should be treated. This is despite the fact that those suffering from mental illnesses are significantly more likely to be victims of violent crimes, Black Americans are 3.2 times more likely to be murdered by police, and convergence of these factors (being Black and living with a mental illness) increases likelihood of such fatal interactions (Schwartz & Jahn 2020; Shadravan, Edwards, & Vinson 2021; Stuart, 2003).Although I am in wholehearted support of their account, I take issue with the authors’ conceptualization of excited delirium as non-falsifiable, as well as the notion that diseases, generally, are falsifiable. In an attempt to further criticize the utilization of excited delirium, Byju and Friesen call upon Karl Popper’s falsifiability criterion as a measure for what constitutes as scientific; arguing that excited delirium is not a legitimate scientific concept as it is impossible to falsify. First, I am not convinced that excited delirium is in principle non-falsifiable; as the way in which it’s conceptualized actually appears to be falsifiable. The authors point out that external factors, such as tasing and violent restraints, are clearly the causal explanation, which should in fact, lead one to reject the hypothesis of an excited delirium diagnosis. However, in practice, those who are seeking to exonerate the police/first responders responsible for these deaths, are not accepting this evidence leading them to reject the excited delirium diagnosis, but rather, are crafting an incorrect causal narrative. This is deeply problematic, but it does not necessarily render excited delirium as non-falsifiable. More broadly, I am concerned with the reliance on the falsifiability criterion, which has been widely criticized in the... (shrink)

This article analyzes narratives about encounters between police officers and domestic violence victim/survivors in the context of domestic violence calls. Narratives are sites in which individuals create relationships between themselves and others, oriented around a set of unfolding events. Narrative is a motivated, engaged retelling of prior or anticipated events produced in interaction with others, in a particular context stocked with constraints and affordances. In the process of telling stories, identities emerge. In order to understand the relationship between narrative (...) and identity, I analyze stories told about police interactions with domestic violence victim/survivors from the perspectives of both the police and the victim/survivors. Working empirically with a data set of 48 interviews, I use critical discourse analysis and discourse analysis to analyze the ways both groups narrate domestic violence and confrontations with police officers, the ways they create story worlds stocked with characters, the ways story characters are formed and deployed, and the ways those characters are positioned against/with/by the storyteller, allowing the storyteller’s identity to emerge. This article is an analysis of the relationship between the storyteller and the story world and the storyteller’s process of constructing an/other in order to position in relation to that other. Ultimately, I argue that identity emerges for the storyteller in the way she or he constructs characters in a story and then positions in relation to those characters. (shrink)

The datafication and digitalization of health and medicine has engendered a proliferation of new collaborations between public health institutions and data corporations like Google, Apple, Microsoft and Amazon. Critical perspectives on these new partnerships tend to frame them as an instance of market transgressions by tech giants into the sphere of health and medicine, in line with a “hostile worlds” doctrine that upholds that the borders between market and non-market spheres should be carefully policed. This article seeks to outline the (...) limitations of this common framing for critically understanding the phenomenon of the Googlization of health. In particular, the mobilization of a diversity of non-market value statements in the justification work carried out by actors involved in the Googlization of health indicates the co-presence of additional worlds or spheres in this context, which are not captured by the market vs. non-market dichotomy. It then advances an alternative framework, based on a multiple-sphere ontology that draws on Boltanski and Thevenot’s orders of worth and Michael Walzer’s theory of justice, which I call a normative pragmatics of justice. This framework addresses both the normative deficit in Boltanski and Thevenot’s work and provides an important emphasis on the empirical workings of justice. Finally, I discuss why this framework is better equipped to identify and to address the many risks raised by the Googlization of health and possibly other dimensions of the digitalization and datafication of society. (shrink)

Justice is important, but so is peaceful cooperation. In this article, I argue that if one takes seriously the autonomy of individuals and groups and the fact of moral pluralism, a just system of cooperation cannot guarantee peaceful cooperation in a pluralistic world. As a response to this consideration, I develop a contractarian theory that can secure peace in a pluralistic world of autonomous agents, assuming that the agents who exist in this world expect that peaceful cooperation (...) is the most beneficial form of interaction for them in the long run. The theory specifies the restrictions on the behavior of autonomous individual and collective agents that are indispensable for peaceful cooperation in a pluralistic world. In particular, I argue for the need of (i) a globally valid rule of conflict resolution to settle all intra- and inter-group conflicts that cannot be resolved locally, (ii) a world court to apply this rule in cases where local group authorities are inadequate to do so, and to serve as a final court of appeal, and (iii) a world police to enforce the rule. (shrink)

This chapter contains sections titled: The Serial Killer as Superhero Why Do We Love Dexter? Dexter Morgan: Superhero Dexter and the Viewer Dexter vs. Dexter Dexter's Ethics Dexter's Dark World.

Too much of the debate about how respect for human rights can be advanced on a global basis currently revolves around crisis situations involving so-called mass atrocity crimes and the possibility of addressing abuse through the use of military force. This preoccupation, as understandable as it is, serves to mask much harder questions of how to deal with what might be termed silent and continuous atrocities, such as gross forms of gender or ethnic discrimination or systemic police violence, in (...) ways that are achievable, effective, and sustainable. This more prosaic but ultimately more important quest is often left to, or perhaps expropriated by, international lawyers. Where the politician often finds solace in the deployment of military force, the international lawyer turns instinctively to the creation of a new mechanism of some sort. Those of modest inclination might opt for a committee or perhaps an inquiry procedure. The more ambitious, however, might advocate the establishment of a whole new court. And surely the most “visionary” of such proposals is one calling for the creation of a World Court of Human Rights. A version of this idea was put forward in the 1940s, but garnered no support. The idea has now been revived, in great detail, and with untrammeled ambition, under the auspices of an eminent group of international human rights law specialists. (shrink)

The use of storytelling in the judgment process is based on the necessary assumption that experience and meaning are universal. In place of recognizing legitimate differences in the interpretation of social experience, jurors more often are compelled to regard unfamiliar story elements or dissonant interpretations as signs of guilt. When key elements in a case are anchored in different social worlds, defendants may be found guilty simply by reason of their social experiences and their communication styles. The important question arising (...) from this state of affairs is whether anything can be done to correct biased judgment of trials.Securing access to justice means, at a minimum, recognition for the legitimacy—if not the validity—of one's grievances and aspirations. (shrink)

The policing of checkpoints demands a commitment from the soldier. These commitments are realized, as Robert Cover says of legal judgments, in the flesh of those subject to the policing and of those who police. Such commitments are sometimes difficult to maintain in the face of arbitrary policies and even arbitrary re-locations of checkpoints and borders. Obedience is required, but obedience is not simply an act of acceptance. This article employs a psychoanalytic lens and the work of animation theory (...) to consider how obedience is legitimated in the minds of those who police borders and how practices of humiliation toward civilians at the borders function both to display the uncertainties about the regime’s legitimacy, and to aggressively depict this legitimacy in the flesh of those subject to the borders. This depiction, I argue, employs understandings of time, identity and the question, and these are then employed as techniques of humiliation. These techniques evoke a rhetorical landscape located somewhere between Freud’s discussion of the work of jokes and Scarry’s discussion of torture; between these two points is the promise of a legal world where there are only angels and devils and where these figures are animated in the flesh of both civilian and soldier. (shrink)

Bribery is a complicated, multi-dimensional issue. Upon first glance, most westerners would immediately condemn it as an underhanded, unfair means of gaining an advantage in a competitive or legal situation, and so it is in virtually every case in the westernized world. However, the issue becomes much more complicated in the international context, particularly in developing nations, where giving and accepting bribes is often normal and expected. This paper serves to inform ethical decision-making in situations where the “right choice” (...) is unclear with regards to bribery, primarily for individuals performing aid work in foreign countries with corrupt officials and police officers. In such contexts, a simple offering of food, money, or a small trinket may make the difference between a person being able to accomplish meaningful, life-changing work for the local populace or having that work significantly slowed at best and being thrown out of the country, robbed, or imprisoned in worse cases. The larger scale bribery issues in international business and the laws pertaining to them are also discussed. (shrink)

Climate change confronts us with our most pressing challenges today. The global consensus is clear that human activity is mostly to blame for its harmful effects, but there is disagreement about what should be done. While no shortage of proposals from ecological footprints and the polluter pays principle to adaptation technology and economic reforms, each offers a solution – but is climate change a problem we can solve? In this provocative new book, these popular proposals for ending or overcoming the (...) threat of climate change are shown to offer no easy escape and each rest on an important mistake. Thom Brooks argues that a future environmental catastrophe is an event we can only delay or endure, but not avoid. This raises new ethical questions about how we should think about climate change. How should we reconceive sustainability without a status quo? Why is action more urgent and necessary than previously thought? What can we do to motivate and inspire hope? Many have misunderstood the kind of problem that climate change presents – as well as the daunting challenges we must face and overcome. Climate Change Ethics for an Endangered World is a critical guide on how we can better understand the fragile world around us before it is too late. This innovative book will be of great interest to students and scholars of climate change, climate justice, environmental policy and environmental ethics. "This book offers a rare combination of tough-mindedness, analytic rigor, and passion as it tackles the greatest challenge of our time―climate change. For Brooks, it’s past time to acknowledge that climate change cannot be solved though the careful selection of good polices. Climate change is an unavoidable tragedy that we must endure but may be able to survive. Offering a program that emphasizes flexibility and adaptation, Brooks brings original insights to a debate that too long has been bogged down in wishful thinking and empty scholasticism." Professor Eric Posner, Kirkland & Ellis Distinguished Service Professor of Law at the University of Chicago's Law School. (shrink)

Exploring Practical Knowledge investigates professional practices from a hermeneutic perspective. The book presents, discusses and applies notions such as practical knowledge, practical wisdom, tacit knowledge, and normativity to the professional lifeworld. These contributions focus on both specific practices and more general questions concerning theories and investigations of practice. This volume comes as the result of a cooperation of three research centres: The two Centres for Practical Knowledge in Bodø, Norway and in Södertörn, Sweden, as well as the Research Group Value-Oriented (...) Professionalisation at the University of Applied Sciences in Utrecht, the Netherlands. It offers empirical studies of professionals as well as discussing the underlying theories, approaches and methods of exploring practical knowledge - including the limits to any articulation of these aspects of professional action. In contrast to the objectivist paradigm that otherwise dominates professional studies, each chapter presents central perspectives and possibilities drawing from humanistic and interdiscipkinary research traditions. The book explores professions in a style accessible to scholars and practitioners alike. It is interesting for those studying practices within these professions and for vocational studies in education, social work, health care, police work, journalism, etc. (shrink)

Expectations are high around the world that more research on human genomic variation will improve the utility of “precision medicine” and help address population health disparities through “precision public health”. In large measure, these expectations rest on the premise that researchers will be able to share human DNA samples and genomic data freely and widely across the international scientific community. The human genomics community pioneered polices of early deposit of genomic research data into open databases to facilitate the exchange (...) and use of data during the mapping and sequencing of the human genome in the 1990s, and the success of those policies has made a... (shrink)

This article questions the widespread use of experimental social psychology to understand real-world group disparities. Standard experimental practice is to design studies in which participants make judgments of targets who vary only on the social categories to which they belong. This is typically done under simplified decision landscapes and with untrained decision-makers. For example, to understand racial disparities in police shootings, researchers show pictures of armed and unarmed Black and White men to undergraduates and have them press “shoot” (...) and “don't shoot” buttons. Having demonstrated categorical bias under these conditions, researchers then use such findings to claim that real-world disparities are also due to decision-maker bias. I describe three flaws inherent in this approach, flaws which undermine any direct contribution of experimental studies to explaining group disparities. First, the decision landscapes used in experimental studies lack crucial components present in actual decisions. Second, categorical effects in experimental studies are not interpreted in light of other effects on outcomes, including behavioral differences across groups. Third, there is no systematic testing of whether the contingencies required to produce experimental effects are present in real-world decisions. I apply this analysis to three research topics to illustrate the scope of the problem. I discuss how this research tradition has skewed our understanding of the human mind within and beyond the discipline and how results from experimental studies of bias are generally misunderstood. I conclude by arguing that the current research tradition should be abandoned. (shrink)

Nursing and nursing education face a paradox whereby the world's most trusted profession seems not to trust its own students and practitioners. Much of nursing education has adopted what has been memorably described as the ‘cop shit’ approach. This is the panoply of surveillance, anti‐plagiarism and proctoring technologies that appear to be used more for policing and punishment of an inherently dishonest student body than to develop ethical and scholarly writing among future peers and colleagues. Nurses in practice may (...) experience similar levels of distrust as they face growing micromanagement and control of both their appearance and nursing practice. We propose that these practices of distrust emerge, not from malice, but rather from the omnipresent neoliberalism and managerialism that engulf almost every aspect of health and university life. Neoliberalism's success has been to reformat academia and practice to the point where such ingrained mistrust has become merely a neutral recognition of ‘the real world’. Dismantling nursing and education's ‘cop shit’ culture and replacing it with the trust and respect that the world's most trusted profession is accorded by wider society will not be easy, but it is vital for the future of nursing. (shrink)

In this paper, I analyze multiple aspects of how gender norms pervaded the 2016 election, from the way Clinton and Trump announced their presidency to the way masculinity and femininity were policed throughout the election. Examples include Hillary Clinton, Donald Trump, Barack Obama, and Gary Johnson. I also consider how some women who support Trump reacted to allegations about sexual harassment. The difference between running for President as a man and running for President as a woman makes all the difference (...) in the world. (OPEN ACCESS). (shrink)

In 1968, the Democratic Party of the United States held its convention in Chicago. Thousands of anti-war protestors arrived to picket the democratic process and voice their concerns over the Vietnam War for the upcoming presidential election. With prior knowledge of the coming protests, the Chicago Police Department and city administration expected violence and prepared themselves accordingly. As a result, the convention was plagued all week by violence in the streets as protestors clashed with the police. At the (...) end, the violence was declared be the result of excessive police brutality. Scholarly works on the pre-existing conditions of Chicago that lead to violence have not been fully considered. In looking at the complexity of violent protest, this essay intends to examine the leaders and their intentions – on both sides of the conflict – and determine the causes and impact of one of the most iconic political clashes in twentieth century America. (shrink)

Classicists have long been wary of comparisons, partly for ideological reasons related to the incomparability of ‘the Classical’, partly because of the often problematic basis and limited illumination afforded by such efforts as have been made: the -reception of the work of the Cambridge ritualists — such as J.G. Frazer and Jane Harrison — is a case in point in both respects. Interestingly, even the specifically comparative interests of the much more rigorous projects of the Paris School, at the Centre (...) Louis Gernet, have not had much resonance outside France, notwithstanding the enormous influence of their work concerning purely Greek subject matter. In part, perhaps, this was a result of the shift from Vernant's originally Marxist framework, in which societies were comparable in terms of an evolutionary sociological scheme, to a structuralist one, entailing an emphasis on the uniqueness of different cultural traditions. The emphasis on the uniqueness of the Classical world was only reinforced by post-structuralism and post-modernism, which in their strongest forms suggested that cultures, like languages, were fundamentally incommensurable, and thus not accessible to outsider knowledge, let alone comparable. Indeed, so virulent was the post-structuralist virus that disciplines to which we might have expected to be able to turn for guidance, like comparative religion, are only now recovering the courage ‘to compare religious phenomena, theologies or artefacts outside of footnotes or less heavily policed epilogues’. (shrink)

The values of freedom and equality are at the heart of what it means for liberal states to do justice to their citizens. Yet, when it comes to the question of whether liberal states are capable of realizing the values of freedom and equality while controlling their borders, many philosophers are skeptical that liberalism and existing immigration arrangements can in fact be reconciled. After all, liberal states often deny entrance to prospective immigrants who are fleeing extreme forms of violence. They (...) also often police their borders in ways that are discriminatory and stigmatizing, contributing to a situation where immigrants are treated as morally inferior by society at large. Such practices conflict strongly with any commitment to the values of freedom and equality. -/- Luara Ferracioli here focuses on three key questions regarding the movement of persons across international borders: What gives some residents of a liberal society a right to be considered citizens of that society such that they have a claim to make decisions with regard to its political future? And do citizens of a liberal society have a prima facie right to exclude prospective immigrants despite their commitment to the values of freedom and equality? Finally, if citizens have this prima facie right to exclude prospective immigrants, are there moral requirements regarding how they may exercise it? The book therefore tackles the most pressing philosophical questions that arise from immigration: the questions of who can exercise self-determination, and why they have such a right in the first place. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Crises of Memory and the Second World WarPatrick HenryCrises of Memory and the Second World War, by Susan Rubin Suleiman; x & 286 pp. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2006. $29.95.This excellent study deals widely and deeply with the crises of memory and World War II but generally focuses on France, Vichy and the Holocaust. The author defines a crisis of memory as "a moment of (...) choice and sometimes of predicament or conflict, about remembrance of the past, whether by individuals or by groups" (p. 1). In the crises of memory she examines, "individual self-representation overlaps with... collective self-representation" in such a way that individual remembrance takes on collective significance. In nine rich chapters of textual analysis of mostly self-consciously literary texts, Suleiman deftly analyzes writers from the left and the right, two films of tremendous import, the nature of Holocaust memoirs, experimental writing and the concepts of trauma, amnesia, amnesty, testimony and forgiveness.In the first three chapters, Suleiman studies French memories of the Occupation, the collaborationist Vichy regime and the Resistance from 1945 to the present. These chapters depict the relations between history and memory and highlight the intriguing process of the evolution of public remembrance. Chapter one, "Choosing Our Past," surprises even the most careful reader of Jean-Paul Sartre's plays and novels, for it demonstrates brilliantly that, in several of his very early post-Vichy essays where he conveniently passes over in silence France's collaborationist past—even the major role played by Vichy police in the roundup and deportation of Jews—he helped create, along with de Gaulle and others, the myth of "Resistancialism," the founding myth of the post-Vichy [End Page 204] Period, the idea that all Frenchmen resisted the Nazis. In the words of Pierre Nora, Sartre and de Gaulle were "writing history from the point of view of the future" (p. 17).In chapter two, the author analyzes the 1997 "Aubrac Affair," exposing the problems that the Resistance heroes, Lucie and Raymond Aubrac, encountered when they were suddenly suspected of having betrayed Jean Moulin, whose 1964 enshrinement in the Pantheon is examined in chapter three within the context of the politics of national memory in France. Whereas Moulin's enshrinement marked the apex of the myth of "Resistancialism" in France, the "Aubrac Affair" comes fifty-four years after the betrayal of Jean Moulin and twenty-five years after the myth of "Resistancialism" began to fade. In treating the charges and countercharges in the "Aubrac Affair," which continues to fascinate because it illustrates "the problematic relation between public and private memory, and between history and fantasy in the construction of both an individual and a collective past" (p. 61), Suleiman highlights the problems of narrative verisimilitude and the narrative tendency toward heroic aggrandizement as well as its opposite, the desire to topple heroes.In chapter four, Suleiman studies Marcel Orphuls's Hotel Terminus: The Life and Times of Klaus Barbie, a four-hour documentary of great significance that remains relatively unknown when compared with his earlier film, The Sorrow and the Pity. Barbie was the infamous Nazi war criminal, known as "the Butcher of Lyon," who tortured and deported hundreds of Jews and tortured to death the great French Resistance hero, Jean Moulin. He was extradited from Bolivia to France in 1983 where he was tried for crimes against humanity in 1987. Orphuls's film exposes the conflicted memories and partisanships produced by WWII and the Holocaust in public and private spaces throughout Europe and the Americas. This chapter will undoubtedly convince others of the film's importance. It will certainly convince the reader of Suleiman's ability to read film. She explains in detail Orphuls's method of "dialectical montage" (already evident in The Sorrow and the Pity) whereby he cuts up individual interviews and juxtaposes them with parts of others that often qualify or simply contradict what has been stated. This is why his films are "interactive documentaries" that "force the viewer into uncomfortable subject positions in relation to the material" (p. 87). No voice-over or "voice of God" commentary comes to aid the viewer who is forced to evaluate critically... (shrink)

The Islamic Republic of Iran punishes homosexuality with death but it actively recognizes transsexuality, and partially funds sex change operations. This article aims to examine how this seemingly progressive stance on transsexuality is connected to the IRI's larger oppressive apparatus of gender. It will first provide an overview of the cultural politics of gender and sexuality under the Islamic Republic's rule, and will then discuss the confluence of religious and medical literatures that led the Islamic Republic to adopt its new (...) discourse on transsexuality despite – or perhaps rather because of – its sex/gender politics. The article does not deny that this emerging discourse has been somewhat empowering for those transsexuals who genuinely desire surgical transformation. But empowering as it might have been for such transsexuals, the emerging discourse is still deeply troubling since it systematically regards homosexuality and more generally any sexual or gender non-conformity as unintelligible, perverse, and punishable by law, except for those willing to transform their "wrong bodies." The article will, therefore, demonstrate that the IRI's permission of transsexuality and sex change operations is motivated by a goal that is more about assimilating gender atypical individuals into the heteronormative order than about broadening horizons for sex/gender possibilities. The article ends by discussing how this discourse is making non-surgical trans/multi-gendered identity illegible and illegitimate not only as a publicly recognized possibility, but also with regard to transpersons' own self-perception and self-constitution of their gender and sexual subjectivity. (shrink)

The state is often regarded as an abstract and neutral bureaucratic entity. Against this common sense idea, At the Heart of the State argues that it is also a concrete and situated reality, embodied in the work of its agents and inscribed in the issues of its time. The result of a five-year investigation conducted by ten scholars, this book describes and analyses the police, the court system, the prison apparatus, the social services, and mental health facilities in France. (...) Combining genealogy and ethnography, its authors show that these state institutions do not simply implement laws, rules and procedures: they mobilise values and affects, judgements and emotions. In other words, they reflect the morality of the state. Of immense interest to both social scientists and political theorists, this work will make an important contribution to the ever expanding literature on the contemporary state. (shrink)

The article argues that the growth of religious service provision directed at the Muslim diaspora in Europe has led to greater professionalization and pluralism within the Islam state in Muslim countries. Contemporary Muslim governments have claimed a monopoly over public prayer and religious education and have heavily invested in a network of infrastructure and services – the Islam state. The recent breakthrough of Islamist parties into governments in Turkey and across North Africa poses a challenge to the continued ‘civilian control’ (...) over religion. What will become of the enormous Islamic Affairs ministries that Islamist parties have inherited – the hundreds of thousands of public servants of state Islam across the region, the tens of thousands of mosques and thousands of religious schools? Liberals demand the abolition of the Islam state because it violates the separation of religion and state; Islamists detest it for its repressive qualities. Despite progressive liberalization, governments in the past decade have not sought disestablishment, and have instead increased the resources and policing of state-run religion. I draw on the experience of Muslim governments in the competitive field of state–Islam relations in European countries to explain the modest beginnings of reform of the official religion apparatus in Muslim-majority countries. (shrink)