In his recent JME article Daniel Restrepo argues that both legal and ethical rules should protect the so-called Naked Soldiers, combatants engaged in activity unrelated to military operations and unaware of the imminent danger threatening them. I criticize this position from several angles. I deny the existence of any link between vulnerability and innocence, and claim ignorance of deadly threats does not give rise to a morally distinguished type of vulnerability. I argue that actions not contributing to the war (...) effort are nevertheless an inherent part of fighting a war, and that combatants do not signal intention to abandon their commitment to the war effort by undertaking these. I show that by granting hors de combat status to Naked Soldiers, we would unjustly disadvantage their opponents and engender significant and manifold practical difficulties that the proponents of the view fail to solve or even anticipate. Finally, I demonstrate that Restrepo’s general project of “making killing in war difficult to legitimately justify” regardless of why, how and by whom the killing is done is incompatible with just war theory’s basic assumptions. That project is in fact pacifist in nature and as such redundant in light of pacifism’s broader and stronger implications. (shrink)

A hallmark of the war on terror is the use of unmanned aerial vehicles, commonly known as drones, to kill terrorists abroad. I argue that the justification for targeted killing is based on the same logic as the justification for killing the Naked Soldier in traditional wars. Since many drone strikes are personal strikes—the targeted killing of known individuals—this seems like a more justifiable attack than one against anonymous soldiers. Yet, I propose there are three problems to this (...) analogy that makes killing the Naked Terrorist—one unaware of the danger he is in—worse than killing the Naked Soldier: First, there is the epistemological problem regarding knowing with some certainty that the targets are indeed terrorists. Second, terrorists do not seem to pose a great enough danger for the necessity claim. Lastly, drones may not be as precise as the US claims they are. (shrink)

The categories of "civilian" or "soldier,” “combatant" or “noncombatant,” are thought to be stable. Yet, the case of the naked soldier taking a bath challenges such stability in a way that illustrates the serious conceptual and normative problems with identifying such social groups.

Robert Graves's First World War story in his autobiography Goodbye to All That, narrating his refusal to kill an enemy soldier bathing naked on the battlefield, has been made famous in the field of military ethics by Michael Walzer in his Just and Unjust Wars. The story raises the issue of whether soldiers should be granted immunity when behaving in an ‘un-warlike’ manner. It also relates to the growing understanding in military ethics that only soldiers who pose a (...) direct threat should be attacked and killed. This paper concludes that the traditional legal understanding that all soldiers are liable to be attacked and to be killed is the stronger argument. (shrink)

In war there is a phenomenon known as the Naked Soldier problem (NS). A combatant discovers a vulnerable enemy combatant who is unable to defend himself and usually unaware of the combatant’s presence. This enemy combatant is not presently engaged in fighting and not threatening the lives of others. While killing the NS is legally permissible, the question I address in this essay is whether or not there can be a moral justification for doing so. I think such (...) a moral justification is lacking, and there are only excuses for killing the NS. In this essay, I distinguish between a justification and an excuse and then I examine four traditional reasons given for the acceptability of killing in war to see if any of them are (a) justifications for killing in war in general and (b) justifications for killing the Naked Soldier, specifically. (shrink)

Though it is legally permissible to kill combatants in war,unless they are rendered hors de combat,the existence of Naked Soldiers raises an important moral question: should combatants kill vulnerable enemy combatants or show mercy towards them? Most philosophers who address this question argue that it is morally permissible to kill the Naked Soldier given the extended notion of self-defense during war. They ground their arguments in a form of collectivism. In this essay, I use Larry May’s argument. (...) He offers an approach that extends the principle of discrimination that would also apply to combatants. Instead of assuming all combatants are de facto dangerous,this approach would allow for nuance in targeting the enemy and showing mercy when enemy combatants clearly pose no danger, in other words, when they are Naked Soldiers. I defend this view against two criticisms: Noam Zohar’s view of armies as complex collectives and Stephen Deakin’s view that a policy that spares Naked Soldiers would be open to abuse. I argue that it is not only morally suspect to kill Naked Soldiers, but also it is within the spirit of both international laws governing war and the just war tradition to offer mercy whenever possible. (shrink)

Not long after the 2001 invasion of Afghanistan, an American citizen was captured by U.S. soldiers on he battlefield carrying a weapon and wearing the dress of a Taliban soldier. Heralded by the news media as the “American Taliban,” he became a spectacle, bound, gagged, naked and blind-folded on a stretcher in a photo taken soon after his capture. The story of how the homeschooled twenty-year-old from a middle-class Northern California family became an enemy combatant in the Afghani (...) desert piqued the popular imagination. After converting to Islam, he went to Yemen, learned Arabic, returned home and then left again to attend a madrassa (or Islamic religious school) before receiving training at an Al-Qaeda training camp in Afghanistan. Some Americans reacted to the young man’s story with wonder; others with loathing. How did this youth stray from the values that most Americans hold dear? In fact, he did not. Similar to Paul Maud’dib who, at the end of Dune Messiah, wandered into the desert a blind holy man, the American Taliban had acted in accordance with values that most American prize: self-reliance, ingenuity, spirituality and practical know-how. It is widely believed that the Fremen culture derives from their religion, Zensunni , an imaginative blending of Zen Buddhism and Sunni Muslim beliefs. However, a closer look reveals that the Fremen (similar to the American Taliban) were shockingly American in their core values. To demonstrate this, I begin by discussing the weirdness of Dune’s Fremen, their religion, customs and lifestyle. Then, I give a brief summary of American philosopher Ralph Waldo Emerson’s famous essay “Self-Reliance” followed by a similar treatment of John Dewey’s notion of democracy as a way of life. The essay returns to paint a clearer picture of the American Fremen and their exhilarating though dangerous faith in jihad as a way of life. (shrink)

Shame is a Jekyll-and-Hyde emotion--it can be morally valuable, but it also has a dark side. Thomason presents a philosophically rigorous and nuanced account of shame that accommodates its harmful and helpful aspects. Thomason argues that despite its obvious drawbacks and moral ambiguity, shame's place in our lives is essential.

The Naked Self explores Søren Kierkegaard's understanding of selfhood by situating his work in relation to central problems in contemporary philosophy of personal identity: the role of memory in selfhood, the relationship between the notional and actual subjects of memory and anticipation, the phenomenology of diachronic self-experience, affective alienation from our past and future, psychological continuity, practical and narrative approaches to identity, and the intelligibility of posthumous survival. By bringing his thought into dialogue with major living and recent philosophers (...) of identity, Stokes reveals Kierkegaard as a philosopher with a significant--if challenging--contribution to make to philosophy of self and identity. (shrink)

The authors argue that an urgent leadership issue has arisen which is strongly, but not favorably, influencing our professional culture--a hostility toward religion and its correct expressions within the military. Setting aside the role of Chaplains as a separate issue, the focus here is on the role religion may play in the moral character of individual soldiers--especially leaders--and how their personal morality, faith-based or not, is to be integrated with their profession's ethic so they can serve in all cases "without (...) reservation" as their oath requires. Related products: Expeditionary Culture Field Guide: Latvia can be found here: https: //bookstore.gpo.gov/products/sku/008-000-01225-3 Expeditionary Culture Field Guide: Turkey can be found here: https: //bookstore.gpo.gov/products/sku/008-000-01223-7 Expeditionary Culture Field Guide: Lithuania is available here: https: //bookstore.gpo.gov/products/sku/008-000-01224-5 Expeditionary Culture Field Guide: Chad is available here: https: //bookstore.gpo.gov/products/sku/008-000-01226-1 Aspects of Leadership: Ethics, Law and Spirituality is available here: https: //bookstore.gpo.gov/products/sku/008-055-00255-9 Faith and Hope in a War-Torn Land: The US Army Chaplaincy in the Balkans, 1995-2005 eBook available from Google Play eBookstore. Please use ISBN: 9780160872792 to search their platform for this product; Paperback format available here: https: //bookstore.gpo.gov/products/sku/008-029-00440-2. (shrink)

이 논문은 〈버닝〉이 궁극적으로 이른바 ‘벌거벗은 생명’이라는 문제의식을 20세기 세 주요 현상학자의 분석틀, 즉 조르조 아감벤의 ‘호모 사케르,’ 한나 아렌트의 ‘탄생성,’ 한스-게오르크 가다머의 ‘예술론’을 통해서 제시하고자 하는 시도이다. 우리 시대의 대표적인 청년층인 종수와 해미는 스펙도 변변치 못해 몸을 쓰는 일을 하며 비정규직을 전전하는 프리터족으로 살아간다. 이들은 자신의 젊음을 의미 없이 ‘버닝’하며 살아가는 것이다. 이창동은 영화 내내 우리 사회가 구조적 폭력에 짓눌리고 배제와 포용의 경계가 불분명한 시대에 봉착했음을 통렬히 보여준다. 급기야 정치적 행위로의 전환을 통해서 종수가 한국형 개츠비의 전형인 벤에 맞서는 장면을 (...) 영화의 마지막 부분에서 롱테이크로 잡아낸다. 영화는 종수가 벤을 ‘버닝’하는 데 집중하기보다는 마침내 소설을 쓸 수 있게 되는 사건을 더 중시한다. 종수가 소설을 쓰게 되는 변화의 순간은 한나 아렌트가 말한 ‘탄생성’이기도 하다. 그럼에도 이창동의 사회 인식이 ‘진지’와 ‘재미’라는 다분히 이원론적 평행구도를 고집함으로써 관객에게 그 어떤 실천의 가능성도 열어놓지 않았다는 점은 안타깝다. 이 연구에서 되물어야 할 질문은 영화에서뿐만 아니라 우리의 현실에서 모든 재미가 감각적 쾌락으로 귀결될 수밖에 없는가에 있다. 결론적으로 이 연구는 재미를 통한 의미의 세계가 충분히 가능하고, 이에 따른 심미적 범주의 즐거움을 누릴 수 있음에도 한국형 개츠비의 방만한 삶을 고발하는 데 역점을 두었다는 점을 비판했다. (shrink)

Naked Science is about contested domains and includes different science cultures: physics, molecular biology, primatology, immunology, ecology, medical environmental, mathematical and navigational domains. While the volume rests on the assumption that science is not autonomous, the book is distinguished by its global perspective. Examining knowledge systems within a planetary frame forces thinking about boundaries that silence or affect knowledge-building. Consideration of ethnoscience and technoscience research within a common framework is overdue for raising questions about deeply held beliefs and assumptions (...) we all carry about scientific knowledge. We need a perspective on how to regard different science traditions because public controversies should not be about a glorified science or a despicable science. Contributors are: Ward Goodenough, Eloisa and Brent Berlin, Colin Scott, Jean Lave, Emily Martin, Troy Duster, Hugh Gusterson, Charles Schwartz, Joan Fujimura, Sharon Traweek, Estellie Smith, Ellen Bielawaski, David Jacobon, Charles Ziegler, Pamela Asquith. (shrink)

У статті здійснюється концептуалізація структури бажання, що властива суспільству спектаклю споживання. Визначається характер репрезентацій різноманіття, рівності, рівновартості, що конституюють сучасного суб’єкта бажання й експонують сингулярність бажання, що спрямоване на частковий об’єкт. Специфіка культури сучасного суспільства, орієнованого на різноманітні способи «самовинаходження» через оприлюднення конструювання особистості, зациклена на тілесності, на винесенні усього тілесного на поверхню. Йдеться про панування дефрагментованих образів, що виробляються за принципами товарної форми через репрезентацію/експонування, що забезпечується розвитком сучасних медіа-технологій. У цій перспективі капіталізоване тіло зводиться до його інструментальності, виробничого (...) потенціалу його частин, що легітимується процесом трансформації сексуальності, який можна спостерігати в сучасному медіа-просторі, в ток-шоу, зокрема Naked Attraction, характерні риси якого розглянуто в статті. Суб’єкт суспільства спектаклю споживання є суб’єктом бажання, яке зосереджується на поверхнях тіла як обгортки, в яку запаковане задоволення. Процес розпаковування постає як такий, що дає насолоду. В делезіанській проєкції такий тип бажання і такий спосіб насолоди тлумачиться як мазохистський, що реалізується в формі договору і, зокрема в «саспенсі» розпаковування/роздягання. В спектаклі споживання йдеться про поступовість бажання, що рухається від органів/частин за логікою розпакування як роздмухування бажання. Фігура суб’єкта бажання/спектаклю/споживання визначається через точки (ро)збіжності: природне/культурне, ціле/часткове, єдине/множинне, інтимне/екстимне. Відтак стверджується, що єдиного цілісного суб’єкта, особистості, яку потрібно відтворювати чи наслідувати, не існує. Натомість є частковість множини, що перебуває в трансформаційному процесі само(ре)презентації. В цьому контексті життя постає як рух від частки до частки, якість яких оцінюється здатністю давати/отримувати, продукувати/споживати, експонувати/споглядати задоволення/насолоду, що розгортається в деконструкцію і трансформацію суб’єкта бажання і зокрема, сексуальності. (shrink)

As the world’s population grows and urbanization continues, the global waste crisis is becoming more severe, especially in developing countries. Without proper waste management, they may encounter various environmental and health risks. Biological technologies are regarded as promising waste management and recycling approaches in developing countries due to their cost-effectiveness and capability to handle diverse waste categories. One prominent technology in this aspect is the vermicomposting of organic waste utilizing the black soldier fly larvae. Nevertheless, significant financial resources are (...) still necessary to advance and expand biological waste treatment, which requires the participation of businesses. By examining waste management companies listed on the Vietnamese stock market, we highlight two challenges that hinder the adoption and scaling of the waste treatment system using black soldier flies and potentially other biological technologies in Vietnam. Specifically, the business regards the environmental services they offer primarily as a means to generate profit rather than as a genuine commitment to environmental preservation, and the values of companies operating in the environmental sector, particularly in waste management, have been significantly undervalued by the Vietnamese investing public. Therefore, we advocate for societal shifts toward the eco-surplus culture and apply the semiconducting principle of monetary and environmental values exchange to address the problem. (shrink)

Robert Sparrow (among others) claims that if an autonomous weapon were to commit a war crime, it would cause harm for which no one could reasonably be blamed. Since no one would bear responsibility for the soldier’s share of killing in such cases, he argues that they would necessarily violate the requirements of jus in bello, and should be prohibited by international law. I argue this view is mistaken and that our moral understanding of war is sufficient to determine (...) blame for any wrongful killing done by autonomous weapons. Analyzing moral responsibility for autonomous weapons starts by recognizing that although they are capable of causing moral consequences, they are neither praiseworthy nor blameworthy in the moral sense. As such, their military role is that of a tool, albeit a rather sophisticated one, and responsibility for their use is roughly analogous to that of existing “smart” weapons. There will likely be some difficulty in managing these systems as they become more intelligent and more prone to unpredicted behavior, but the moral notion of shared responsibility and the legal notion of command responsibility are sufficient to locate responsibility for their use. (shrink)

Child soldiers, who often appear to be both victims and perpetrators, present a vexing moral and legal challenge: how can we protect the rights of children while seeking justice for the victims of war crimes? There has been little stomach, either in domestic or international courts, for prosecuting child soldiers—but neither has this challenge been systematically addressed in international law. Establishing a uniform minimum age of criminal responsibility would be a major step in the right direction; we argue that such (...) a standard ought to be guided by the best evidence from neuropsychology about the development, during childhood and adolescence, of the executive functions that give rise to morally and legally responsible agents. In light of that evidence, which suggests that the brain’s executive functions are still maturing into early adulthood, we recommend a graded structure of culpability for child soldiers. (shrink)

This article examines the ways in which contemporary western cultures have attempted to legitimize certain sites of bodily nakedness (such as communal showers, bathing children and other `public' displays) by maintaining a contextual space or frame which attempts to exclude the sexual. Noting the ways in which that legitimacy has broken down in recent decades, the article suggests that the slippage between the sexual and the naked results from both a breakdown in the `heterosexual matrix' as well as a (...) postmodern crisis of `the context'. (shrink)

In recent years a significant debate has arisen as to whether Kierkegaard offers a version of the “narrative approach” to issues of personal identity and self-constitution. In this paper I do not directly take sides in this debate, but consider instead the applicability of a recent development in the broader literature on narrative identity—the distinction between the temporally-extended “narrative self” and the non-extended “minimal self—to Kierkegaard's work. I argue that such a distinction is both necessary for making sense of Kierkegaard's (...) claim that we are ethically enjoined to become selves, and can indeed be found in Either/Or and the later The Sickness Unto Death . Despite Kierkegaard's Non-Substantialism, each of these texts speaks (somewhat obliquely) of a “naked self” that is separable from the concrete facticity of human being. In both cases, this minimal self is linked to issues of eschatological responsibility; yet the two works develop very different understandings of “eternity” and correspondingly divergent accounts of the temporality of selfhood. This complicates the picture of Kierkegaardian selfhood in interesting ways, taking it beyond both narrativist and more standard neo-Lockean models of what it is to be a self. (shrink)

Only two articles in the past century have attempted reconstructions of this play: Gilbert Norwood in 1930 conjectured a basis in tragic burlesque, specifically a parody of Aeschylus’Edoni, due largely to the presence of Dionysus and a chorus of Babylonians. An entirely different plot was proposed in 1983 by David Welsh, who took as his starting point Herodotus’ account of the fall of Babylon; he thought that the chorus, envisioned as a group of refugees from the Persian empire, reflected the (...) recent arrival in Athens of the grandson of the Persian primarily credited with the capture of Babylon. Though commentators on Aristophanic comedy and politics often affect to be on firm footing about this play, the total dissimilarity of these two reconstructions actually highlights our ignorance. (shrink)

The Naked Self is a great book. It is good Kierkegaard scholarship and an excellent model of bringing history of philosophy to bear on contemporary metaphysics. After a stage-setting introduction, the book has eight main chapters and a conclusion including questions and answers from an imagined interlocutor. Stokes takes the reader from how “Kierkegaard’s phenomenology of self-experience may… be a useful resource for neo-Lockean metaphysics” to a sustained defense that “Kierkegaard himself is playing a different, and altogether more interesting, (...) game”.Stokes’s boldness is evident in his title, which remains mysterious until late in the book. Stokes draws on two key passages... (shrink)

We critically analyze four images of female Paralympians posing nude in ESPN The Magazine’s Body Issue from the years 2009, 2010, 2012, and 2014. Past literature shows that media portrayals of female Paralympians emphasize esthetically pleasing bodies, able-bodied images and asexualization. Weaving’s continuum of sexual objectification was applied to assess the varying degrees of sexual objectification showcased within each image. From a feminist perspective, discourses of heteronormativity and ableism were applied to outline the concerns with female Paralympic representation in The (...) Body Issue. We argue that by normalizing disability and sexual objectification, woman athletes are trivialized. (shrink)

All primates except human beings have thick coats of body hair. This suggests the primate ancestors of human beings likewise had such body hair and that, for some evolutionary reason, lost their body hair. Various theories have been put forward but none is fully adequate. This article presents the “naked love theory.” This theory locates the origin of human hairlessness in the ancestral mother—infant relationship. In this view, hairlessness is ultimately the adaptive consequence of bipedalism. Because of bipedalism, ancestral (...) infants lost their prehensile feet and thus lost the ability to grasp the mother's fur with their feet, as do other primate infants. Early bipedal mothers were thus under pressure to carry the infant. Therefore infants survived only if mothers had a strong desire to hold them. Because of the pleasure of skin-to-skin contact, the desire to hold the infant would have been stronger in mothers possessing a hairless mutation that enabled them to give birth to hairless infants. Survival of these infants would have then been greater than that of hair-covered infants. The hairlessness that began to appear in this context of maternal selection was then reinforced by sexual selection in the male—female sexual relationship. This is because a hairless sexual partner would have enabled the hairless individual to recreate the pleasure of skin-to-skin contact in the mother—infant relationship. This theory then helps to explain the evolutionary origins of romantic love. (shrink)

As the World Anti-Doping Code is up for revision, the paper proposes a framework for reading the Code based on a relatively literal approach and an almost exclusive focus on the ?spirit of sport? as a key element of the Code. The author argues that this single element can contribute to revealing the underlying rationale of the Code, as it serves to justify bans of doping substances and methods, in some cases without recurring to evidence sustaining the claims made. For (...) a substance/method to be banned, the Code requires that two out of three criteria be met: performance enhancement, health risk and the spirit of sport. The paper demonstrates how these provisions link to other parts of the Code, (under the rules of the Code 2009) in the absence of performance-enhancing properties combined with a health risk. The paper draws implications from these findings regarding terminological (im)precision, legal certainty/predictability, transparency/accountability, limits to arbitrary exercise of power and internal/external validity. (shrink)

(2011). CHILD SOLDIERS AND KILLING IN SELF-DEFENCE: CHALLENGING THE ‘MORAL VIEW’ ON KILLING IN WAR. Journal of Military Ethics: Vol. 10, No. 1, pp. 36-51. doi: 10.1080/15027570.2011.561639.

Actionism, Performance and Body Art have produced forms that still provoke in their radicalism and brutality and raise many questions. Regardless of the theme—love, violence, gender, death, sexuality, killing of animals, ritual practices and myths, ecology, criticism of the ideology and so on—they are almost always characterized by an explicit and demonstrative exposure of flesh. The topic of my research is the body as a medium of the human act. Does the body elicit different “corporations of the mind” or does (...) it draw attention to its own complex naked presence and extensionality in every elementary social interaction? Is the body unquantifiable—imponderabilia, unpredictable, and is it spinning out of the generated statistics of the system research? (shrink)

HISTORY HAS IT that the four bright satellites of Jupiter were discovered independently by Galileo and the German astronomer Simon Mayer in the early seventeenth century. These initial glimpses of what we now call the Galilean moons of Jupiter are among the first great revelations to have accrued from pointing the newly invented telescope toward the heavens. Yet, were these men the first to observe Jupiter’s satellites? There have been persistent reports, particularly in the nineteenth century, that these moons can (...) be seen with the naked eye. (shrink)

The aim of this paper is twofold. First, it seeks to demonstrate how Kierkegaard’s deployment of the idea of earnestness can furnish a sort of tonal “unity” to a narrative understanding of the Kierkegaardian self, which gestures toward a solution to the problem of how a narrative self can be unified over time and over a multiplicity of projects and plans. Second, this paper aims to give further richness to the recent work of Patrick Stokes, who argues that the narrative (...) self needs to be supplemented by what he calls a naked self. This paper then argues that because there are these two dimensions to selfhood—the narrative person and the naked self—the Kierkegaardian individual is in a fundamental way not so much a matter of identity as of contradiction or internal tension. (shrink)

This article explores the ways in which naturism articulates a set of relationships between the body and nature. We begin by sketching the histories of some Western naturist movements, tracing their lineage back to 19th-century life reform movements and through into inter-war reorientations of citizenship and morality. We consider the problematic of the naked body's relationship to the erotic (and specifically to the erotics of nature), drawing on some materials on outdoor sex; set alongside this is a discussion of (...) the regenerative use of wilderness in the mythopoetic men's movement. These strands are finally drawn together in order to consider the complex negotiation of discourses of nature, human nature, the natural body and the natural landscape - a negotiation embodied in naturism. (shrink)

Trust in leadership is at all all-time low and the impact on organizational behavior and performance cannot be ignored or denied. As leaders, there is a way for you to reverse this trend. You can decide to establish and sustain trust in the workplace—by getting naked—not in the physical sense, but from the perspective of being authentic and transparent. Earning the trust and loyalty of those you are privileged to lead lays the groundwork for a high performing, motivated, and, (...) engaged culture . . . a definitive competitive advantage. Needless to say, culture is always a reflection of our leadership values and behavior. Through our words, decisions, and behavior, the culture is “sculpted.” In every case, culture is created either by intentional design or by default. If you aspire to make a profound, positive, and sustaining impact on your organization, the hearts and minds of those you lead must be earned. In a world and time where corruption, deceit, and ethical lapses are commonplace, we’ve never had a greater need for trusted, ethical leaders. If you choose to be a trusted leader, you have the opportunity to differentiate yourself and your organization and enjoy a sustainable competitive advantage while making the world a better place. (shrink)

How does one make sense of a naked prophet who walked the streets of Jerusalem for no less than three years? This contribution interpreted the ambulatory naked prophet in Isaiah 20 as a sign-act by means of symbolic interactionism and performative interpretation according to which symbolic or sign-acts are multivalent entities. Isaiah 20 was interpreted as an embodied, multivalent text that invited ongoing appropriation among subsequent audiences while exploring the potential meaning(s) of the initial act within the parameters (...) of text and context. It is presupposed that human beings reinterpret symbolic acts in different subsequent contexts and that a symbolic act should never be reduced to one single (original!) meaning – this reinterpretation process is illustrated by the Septuagint translation of Isaiah 20. Furthermore, the question will be posed how one could interpret and appropriate a disruptive and ‘foolish’ prophetic and symbolic act of public exposure – Isaiah as an ‘agent provocateur’?Contribution: The performative critique of Isaiah 20 drew attention to the neglected multivalent character of the initial sign-act that enabled ongoing appropriations (‘Fortschreibung’) in new contexts of competing power relations. At first the sign-act was relevant for its pre-exilic audience, then for the post-exilic and even later for a Hellenistic audience by means of the Septuagint version. It also illustrated that text interpretation can be a catalyst that unsettles and disrupts power (within and beyond academic and believing communities), even when it is considered folly. (shrink)

The debate about children in art and the surrounding morality started with Bill Henson's photographs of naked pubescent children. It is wider now, extending in several directions. In particular, into freedom of speech , and its association with freedom in art This article explores these issues with particular regard to Hensons photographs; and the application of several of the moral theories to this issue.

Many who think that naked statistical evidence alone is inadequate for a trial verdict think that use of probability is the problem, and something other than probability – knowledge, full belief, causal relations – is the solution. I argue that the issue of whether naked statistical evidence is weak can be formulated within the probabilistic idiom, as the question whether likelihoods or only posterior probabilities should be taken into account in our judgment of a case. This question also (...) identifies a major difference between the Process Reliabilist and Probabilistic Tracking views of knowledge and other concepts. Though both are externalist, and probabilistic, epistemic theories, Tracking does and Process Reliabilism does not put conditions on likelihoods. So Tracking implies that a naked statistic is not adequate evidence about an individual, and does not yield knowledge, whereas the Reliabilist thinks it gives justified belief and knowledge. Not only does the Tracking view imply that naked statistical evidence is insufficient for a verdict, but it gives us resources to explain why, in terms of risk and the special conditions of a trial. (shrink)

Robert Sparrow (among others) claims that if an autonomous weapon were to commit a war crime, it would cause harm for which no one could reasonably be blamed. Since no one would bear responsibility for the soldier’s share of killing in such cases, he argues that they would necessarily violate the requirements of jus in bello, and should be prohibited by international law. I argue this view is mistaken and that our moral understanding of war is sufficient to determine (...) blame for any wrongful killing done by autonomous weapons. Analyzing moral responsibility for autonomous weapons starts by recognizing that although they are capable of causing moral consequences, they are neither praiseworthy nor blameworthy in the moral sense. As such, their military role is that of a tool, albeit a rather sophisticated one, and responsibility for their use is roughly analogous to that of existing “smart” weapons. There will likely be some difficulty in managing these systems as they become more intelligent and more prone to unpredicted behavior, but the moral notion of shared responsibility and the legal notion of command responsibility are sufficient to locate responsibility for their use. (shrink)

The aim of this paper is to elucidate the vital meaning and strategic role that nutrition holds in Claude Bernard’s “biological philosophy”, in the sense Auguste Comte gave to this expression, _i.e._ the theoretical part of biology. I propose that Bernard’s nutritive perspective on life should be thought of as an “interfield” object, following Holmes’ category. Not only does nutrition bridge disciplines like physiology and organic chemistry, as well as levels of inquiry ranging from special physiology to the organism’s total (...) level, including the cell and protoplasm, but it also forms the genetic and structural foundation for Bernard’s two fundamental axioms in general physiology: the necessary complementarity of destruction and creation (1) and the uniformity of this physiological law across all life forms, be it plants or animals (2). Because Bernard’s nutritive theory is a major pivot for the re-ordering of life and its characterization, I argue that it must be located and understood in the scientific and metaphysical context of his time, of which he claims to be the heir and challenger—what I propose to characterize as the “epistemic space” of nutrition, on the background of which Bernard builds his own “logic”. I then set out this _logic of nutrition_, focusing on three interrelated bernardian theses: the establishment of the theory of indirect nutrition as the basis for the notion of “milieu intérieur”; the enduring conception of nutrition as a continuous generation; the emphasis on nutrition as a way of reshaping the form/matter relationship. (shrink)

The Italian thinker Giorgio Agamben has achieved large international recognition since his first book in the homo sacer-project, Homo sacer. Il potere sovrano e la nuda vita, was published in 1995. The project’s basic aim is to try and understand the fundamental relation between man and power, politics and theology, which Agamben gives the name biopolitics. Such a politics, Agamben writes in the introduction, is the very fundamental element of Western metaphysics, “because it occupies the threshold in which the articulation (...) between the living and logos is accomplished.” With relentless stringency scholars and researchers have analysed Agamben’s perhaps most famous concept, naked life, and related it to the history of religion, philosophy of law etc. The philosopher himself never thought that his term naked life would achieve such fame, as he said at a small conference at Iuav. However, what has been given less attention, if any, is the most obvious part in that concept: nudity. This holds the key, nonetheless, to understand Agamben’s thinking, because nudity is that very threshold holding together, as well as separating, life and logos, man and animal. Perhaps this is one of the reasons, if not needs, for Agamben writing a book with the telling title: Nudità. Centre in the present article is to discuss Agamben’s concept of nudity alongside that of naked life in thematizing the term shame which is central in this regard. Furthermore, the attempt to argue in favour of a conceptual use of the metaphor-naked life-shall also be unfolded. (shrink)

Bringing together contributors from philosophy, international relations, security studies, and strategic studies, New Wars and New Soldiers offers a truly interdisciplinary analysis reflective of the nature of modern warfare. This comprehensive approach allows the reader to see the broad scope of modern military ethics, and to understand the numerous questions about modern conflict that require critical scrutiny. Aimed at both military and academic audiences, this paperback will be of significant interest to researchers and students in philosophy, sociology, military and strategic (...) studies, international relations, politics, and security studies, acting as an ideal course text or as supplementary reading. (shrink)

How can we make moral sense of the international humanitarian law doctrine of combatant immunity? The doctrine is morally shocking to many: It holds soldiers on both sides of a war immune from criminal prosecution for their otherwise criminal acts of killing, maiming, destroying property, etc., carried out as part of their country's war effort. That is, soldiers who kill as part of an attack benefit from the immunity just as much as those defending their country. Traditionally, just war theorists (...) have tried to provide situation‐specific arguments to show that soldiers on both sides had a good moral justification for their actions. Recently, self‐styled “revisionist just war theorists” have suggested that the doctrine of combatant immunity is just a convention designed to minimize harm. In this article, I suggest that the moral foundation of the doctrine lies in the status of soldiers as public officials in the service of their country. The reason why we hold them immune from prosecution for their war‐making acts is that such acts are properly thought of as acts of a state, rather than as acts of a particular individual. And the reason why states are immune from prosecution for their acts is one of moral standing: No other state has the moral standing to tell another how to carry out the matters that define its jurisdiction. So as long as a country deems (however implausibly) that it must use force to defend itself from aggression, then it may do what is required to defend itself. No other state has the standing to prohibit such acts or to punish those who carry them out. This argument is rooted in an understanding of how individuals may interact as free and equal under law. It does not aim at the perfection of human action, but it does serve to eliminate the worst forms of tyranny. (shrink)

Responding to Rawls’ pleas in Political Liberalism against appeals to comprehensive doctrines, be they religious or metaphysical, I argue that such constraints are inherently illiberal—and unworkable. Rawls deems political proposals inherently coercive and judges everyone in a democracy a participant in governance—thus, in effect, complicit in state coercion. He seeks to limit the sweep of his exclusionary rule to core questions of rights. But in an individualistic and litigious society like ours it proves hard to draw a firm boundary around (...) issues that raise core (constitutional) questions. The standards Rawls proposes seem oppressive in effect, their likeliest yield, a kind of doublethink, encouraging many citizens to cloak their deepest normative concerns in neutered language. I worry about the means by which Rawls’ ‘overlapping consensus’ might be attained, and about the exclusion (as metaphysical) of policy proposals in behalf of broadly conceived human goods. I find it suppositious in Rawls to presume the innocence of seemingly secular arguments while placing in the stocks the religious appeals critical to many, along with old and new metaphysical arguments that may seek to bridge the gap between religious and secular appeals. (shrink)

If called upon would you fight in a war you thought unjust? This article attempts to explain why the majority of military officers and soldiers when faced with this question do fight despite moral misgivings they may have. I will explain why on one hand officers are morally obligated to refuse unjust orders in jus in bello cases, but on the other hand it can be argued that they are also obligated to follow orders they believe to be unjust concerning (...) jus ad bellum. The war in Iraq has and continues to presents military officers and their soldiers with a particularly difficult moral dilemma. As citizens of a democratic government it is important that we understand why our military officers act in ways that may seem counter to what we believe is right. (shrink)