The question of violence and how society can emancipate oneself from it has occupied many philosophers. Walter Benjamin attempted to answer this question in 1920 through the notion of divine violence. This idea has recently been resurrected by philosophers such as Jacques Derrida, Jürgen Habermas, Slavoj Žižek and Judith Butler. Divine violence is turned to as a means of emancipating society from systemic oppression and coercive law. However, it is a notion that has been met by (...) major critiques. Most notable is Jacques Derrida’s critique given in Force of Law: The Mystical Foundations of Authority. This article examines Judith Butler’s turn to divine violence in opposition to the critique of divine violence given by Derrida. Butler attempts to merge divine violence and non-violence to create a means of non-violent revolution capable of emancipating society from oppression and coercive law. However, to make this argument, Butler needs to overcome Derrida’s objection that suggests that divine violence is a dangerous notion with the potential to justify horrendous forms of political violence. Does Butler successfully create a non-violent divine violence capable of achieving this desired emancipation? Or does divine violence continue to be a notion with a dangerously destructive potential as Derrida suggests? These are the questions that this article attempts to answer through a detailed examination of both Butler’s and Derrida’s work on divine violence. Ultimately, it is established that divine violence should be jettisoned into the realm of the divine, rather than harnessed for political ends. (shrink)

This paper will bring Žižek’s divine violence as an Act, a means without end, into conversation with Derrida’s divine violence, différance and auto-deconstruction as the impossible possibility of justice. Although Žižek has, in his later works, conceded to his indebtedness to Derrida, there are certain important differences between the two thinkers. The paper will focus on their respective interpretations of divine violence and the link to minimal difference (Žižek) or différance (Derrida). Their respective interpretations of divine (...) violence will be further explored with regards to Derrida’s auto-deconstruction as a kind of Heideggerian Gelassenheit and Žižek’s interpretation of the Lacanian Act. Critchley criticises Žižek for being too Gelassen in his dream of patiently waiting for an absolute, divine, cataclysmic revolutionary act of divine violence. This patient waiting or non-violent violence will be read within the context of Derrida’s auto-deconstruction: a means (an Act/Event) without specific end. The second part of the paper will explore a re-reading or inter-textual reading of John’s Gospel within the context of the above conversation. The reading will specifically focus on the Christ-event, creating an alternative community to the Roman Empire as it transverses the primal fantasy of this empire. This will be translated into the context of the contemporary neo-liberal fantasy, namely John’s alternative Christian community as a community of subjects who enjoy their symptom. As such a community they present a non-violent violent transversion of the primal fantasy of for example neo-liberalism. Such a community could be interpreted as a community of non-action action with an auto-deconstructive ethos: the divine violence of the Christ-event. (shrink)

What does it mean for men to join with women in preventing sexual assault and domestic violence? This book, based on life history interviews with men and women anti-violence activists, illuminates both the promise of men's violence prevention work, as well as the strains and tensions that inhere, both for men as feminist allies, and for the women they work with.

As it emerged in the late twentieth century, Empire promised a new era of global cooperation and stability through a seamless integration of late capitalism and neoliberal technocracy. Premised as an end to history itself, all that was left to accomplish was to tinker at the margins, stimulate corporate enterprise, embrace financialization and technological innovation, and encourage liberal rights and inclusion. As we enter the third decade of the twenty-first century, the narrative fictions sustaining Empire have broadly collapsed at the (...) level of symbolic identification and belief. Empire has entered into a period of global emergency and mutation. Engaging with Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri’s work, this paper considers what might emerge when we read education into the circuitry of Empire’s decay. First, we locate Empire within foundational tensions in modernity, using Kantian philosophy and colonialism as examples, to foreground the idea of education as immanent to historical processes of creativity, resistance, and innovation. Second, we highlight dead-end responses, from space colonization to neo-fascism, as representations of how modes of education circulate to stabilize and contain Empire’s crises, specifically in relation to capitalism, nationalism, and identity. Lastly, the paper develops a political ontology of education after Empire. (shrink)

International criminal tribunals established by the UN Security Council in the 1990s have been widely acclaimed as active participants in the modern system of dynamic criminal justice. One of their best known achievements is the prosecution of rape and sexual assaults. The International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY) and the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR) set an example for other tribunals to follow. By interpreting a variety of international laws, the community of international legal professionals has been (...) able to shift the prevailing understanding of rape and sexual violence away from that of an “unfortunate byproducts of war.” Not only has the epistemic community of legal professionals been able to end impunity for these crimes, but case-law of international tribunals has become a basis for subsequent trials at quasi-international tribunals. Decisions of the tribunals have been instrumental in drafting the Statute of the International Criminal Court and can be regarded as an example of the formation of new international norms by means of judicial decisions. (shrink)

Violence has long been noted to be a fundamental aspect of the human condition. Traditionally, however, philosophical discussions have tended to approach it through the lens of warfare and/or limit it to physical forms. This changed in the twentieth century as the nature and meaning of 'violence' itself became a conceptual problem. Guided by the contention that Walter Benjamin's famous 1921 'Critique of Violence' essay inaugurated this turn to an explicit questioning of violence, this collection brings (...) together an international array of scholars to engage with how subsequent thinkers--Agamben, Arendt, Benjamin, Butler, Castoriadis, Derrida, Fanon, Gramsci, Merleau-Ponty, Sartre, and Schmitt--grappled with the meaning and place of violence. The aim is not to reduce these multiple responses to a singular one, but to highlight the heterogeneous ways in which the concept has been inquired into and the manifold meanings of it that have resulted. To this end, each chapter focuses on a different approach or thinker within twentieth and twenty-first century European philosophy, with many of them tackling the issue through the mediation of other topics and disciplines, including biopolitics, epistemology, ethics, culture, law, politics, and psychoanalysis. As such, the volume will be an invaluable resource for those interested in Critical Theory, Cultural Studies, History of Ideas, Philosophy, Politics, Political Theory, Psychology, and Sociology. (shrink)

Video games are currently available which permit the virtual murder of children. No such games are presently available which permit virtual paedophilia. Does this disparity reflect a morally justifiable position? Focusing solely on different player motivations, I contrast two version of a fictitious game—one permitting the virtual murder of children, the other virtual paedophilia—in order to establish whether the selective prohibition of one activity over the other can be morally justified based on player motivation alone. I conclude that it cannot, (...) for reasons discussed. (shrink)

This paper considers the often-expressed fear that medical research may use children merely as means, and not respect them as ends in themselves – especially insofar as they are deemed less able to consent than adults. The main focus is on large-scale genetic, socio-medical and epidemiological research. The theoretical starting point of the paper is that to be treated as an end in oneself is to be regarded as – and to act as – a participant in cooperative endeavours. (...) This participatory status is certainly connected with individual authority to consent and dissent; and there is no doubt that consent plays an important role when adults participate in many research projects. However, insofar as consent is located within structures of human cooperation, the authority to consent is not a straightforward privilege. Rather, consent is bound up with responsibility for one's choices and commitment to shared terms of cooperation. Given this understanding, it is argued that consent should not be our principal concern when we involve children in research. This is not because of children's (possible) incompetence to consent as such, but rather because children are still learning how to respect and assess the cooperative terms involved in our institutional lives. Instead, our leading concern should be with the terms regulating their involvement in research. Given suitable safeguards, research is one way in which children may learn what it is to bear responsibilities and to act as an end in oneself – that is, to cooperate with others on reasonable terms and for worthy ends. (shrink)

Place mouse over image continent. 2.1 (2012): 36–39. From an ethical and political perspective, people and property can hardly be separated. Indeed, the modern political subject – that is, the individual, the person, the self, the autonomous actor, the rational self-interest maximizer, etc. – has taken shape in and through the elaboration, institutionalization, and enactment of that which rightfully belongs to it. This thread can be traced back perhaps most directly to Locke’s notion that the origin of the political state (...) occurs when people rise above the state of nature by ceding the power to prosecute offenses. The rule of law begins then with a defense of the right to property. People become subjects by adhering to the social contract, which they do by deferring the defense of their own property to the state. In this light, the response of the United States federal government to the financial crisis of 2008 appears to many as a breach of the social contract. The chant “banks got bailed out, we got sold out” states the claim plainly. Why exactly did some subjects (e.g., the banks) have their property defended by the state (i.e., through the variety of programs including TARP, the discount window at the US Federal Reserve, etc.), when other subjects (e.g., homeowners) found themselves without protection of their property rights, forced to default on mortgage debts and face dispossession? Even if the rhetoric about “too big to fail” can be believed, and the collapse of the financial system would lead to negative consequences for people who had little or no connection to the activities that brought it about, such consequences need not call into question the notion that everyone stands equally before the law. To occupy, then, appears as a form of civil disobedience, an intentional, retaliatory breach of the social contract by those who feel that they have lost the support of the state to which they ceded their power as sovereign agents. The visible and the invisible The violation of property rights of people who have recognition, protection and power under the law destabilizes their very status as citizens and tests the limit of democracy. Does the financial system force the dematerialized victimization of individuals? Do people become numbers, or worse still, percentages of unemployed, tranches of defaulted mortgages and foreclosures? Are they perhaps instead disenfranchised prospectively from the privileged position occupied by virtual entities and actors such as those involved in the derivatives markets, always already exiled back into the physical, visible realm? The line of conflict appears to be drawn between invisibility/absence/deferral and visibility/presence/realization. The demonstrators occupy an excess property of those subjects, namely, the banks and financial elite, who did receive recognition and protection under the law. By domesticating this excess property, rendering its invisibility visible within the political economy, the protesters raise a new form of threat to the hegemonic order. To occupy, then, involves a rejection of the order under which the “99%” have been subjected to erasure. The occupation seeks creatively to establish a new means of communication and law for its subjects. In the face of an existing power structure that is increasingly disenfranchising the majority of people while consolidating nodes of power and influence, the “occupation”, or the work of the Occupy movement, involves seizing a space that refuses the rules of the existing, allegedly corrupt sovereign state. This refusal of governance extends even to include a steadfast refusal to articulate a strategy, to formulate a list of demands, to converse with the sovereign power on the grounds of its own conventions, to put forth a leader, to resolve the ambiguity of the movement into a discreet identity, face, or voice. Do these tactics provide a resolution to the problem that was its genesis? Not in such a direct and easily resolved manner, but it remains difficult to imagine a direct and simple resolution to the problematic of the breach of the social contract. The ambiguity of the situation has generated significant interest within the broader populace, though many people sympathetic to the cause appear to be frustrated because the movement has not simply put forward a short list of concrete demands, or even a set of leaders and spokespeople, much less a resolution. And yet, this lack of coherence appears as a resolution of a problem generic to protest movements in the past, where individual leaders can be removed or discredited, and lists of demands can be co-opted by others holding more political power. Meanwhile, the ambiguity has compelled imitations on a global scale, with the Occupy Wall Street participants consciously taking actions that can be replicated by anyone anywhere without significant cost. These actions have taken place not in a peripheral location such as a parking lot in New Jersey, but instead close to the centers of power and governance, adjacent to Wall Street, close to the White House, on college campuses, etc. This spontaneous archipelago of protests becomes an irritant, a negation of the accepted order of protests, but when the protesters themselves move outside of their encampments, they are escorted by the police, constantly monitored and maintained so that a permanent state of paranoid persecution takes hold. To occupy, occupying, occupation – these actions involve a variable degree of danger – are you willing to step into a different space, where the rule of law is unclear and evolving? Are you presenting yourself as a representative of the majority, the 99%? Who has a sense of belonging to the 99%? This previously invisible population becomes a focal point of political power, garners increasing public support, infects the public dialogue. The government recognizes this population by forcing it from the occupied space, removing the element of possession of property. It is at this point of conflict, in the struggle to hold the physical property, where the greatest friction and violence occurs. Scaling the rule of law While occupied, the property calls for a redress of grievances, a restoration of the rule of law. The Occupy movement does not select and put forward individuals or leaders, it puts forward places – the occupied property represents the point of conflict, not the individual. And it is this very property that the government then tries to reclaim. The movement remains faceless, anonymous, uncounted, or rather counted only as a mass, the self-labeled mass of 99%. These spaces are like refugee camps or favelas, but constructed to unite the political life and private life of the protesters. This objective is presented as a tactical necessity, as all other means of protest and communication have failed, leaving only the option of seizing, holding, occupying a property. But to what end, exactly? Can anyone deliberately return to the prior social contract, embrace, affirm, and govern in strict accordance with the earlier relationship to property, following the logic of Locke’s arguments? In this respect, the contemporary crisis indicates a new, transitional phase in the way that property operates, or rather, in the balance between real and virtual value. The roots of the crisis lay in the massive overvaluation of property caused by lax lending practices, as more people were encouraged to borrow more money, which drove up the prices of property. At the same time, these individual properties, these mortgages for homes actual families lived in and worked to support, were bundled into securities that could be bought, sold, and speculated on. The reduction of a physical house or piece of real estate to an almost incalculably small element in an investment vehicle appears as a scaling of the hedge that radically diminishes the value of any individually owned property. Moreover, a number of recently-innovated financial products allow investors to hedge in new ways, to deliberately spread risk around a portfolio in hopes of bringing returns even when the individual mortgage defaults. At the level of the ‘free’ market, these virtual negative valuations are designed to balance the physical positive valuation, though many of the biggest lenders are now being investigated for controlling both sides of this valuation, the positive and the negative, to facilitate both the creation and failure of the investments and to profit from both. The ability to benefit from both the negative and positive value of an investment is a result of a technologically enabled capacity to operate within a complex field. These layered and scaled investment vehicles and the simultaneous negation of their value together represent a commingling of the virtual and physical existence that is both complex and multiple. The valuation of a virtual property has tremendous power to change the valuation of the physical - either injecting it with or depriving it of funds, pumping in or draining life and energy. This situation has roots of its own – the notion of property advanced e.g., throughout the enclosure movement in Britain was, from the outset, an imposition of virtuality (i.e., the concept of law, the institutions associated with ownership, etc.) on the physical reality of land. 1 The difference today is that technological trading platforms combined with innovations within the financial services industry have enabled the reduction of each individual property receiving or losing value in scale to an almost atomic level. In turn, the number of properties held simultaneously and valued as a massive, multiple wholes – i.e., the derivatives market in mortgage-backed securities – is a new phenomenon made possible through the application of similar technologies and institutional structures. And those actors who can trade in these layers of complexity can then profit from the new phase of disassociation of the virtual and the physical – unconcerned with and operating at such a virtual distance from the individual residing physically on a particular piece of real estate that they no longer feel the tug of the physical tying them back to the physical, operating literally as in a video game, in a virtually distanced world. What can or should be done about this situation? Answers lie outside the scope of this current essay, but merit consideration in the near future… NOTE 1) Hernando de Soto has emphasized this dimension by empirically demonstrating its non-existence in many countries in The Mystery of Capital. (shrink)

Despite the importance of engineering and technology in economic, social, and other aspects of our lives what it means to develop as an engineer, and how this is to occur, is not widely discussed. Becoming a Human Engineer explores the moral and ethical challenges of educating engineers through the philosophical lens of personalism, a branch of philosophy that puts the person first, seeing human growth and development as central to good. Building from the philosophy of the 20th century philosopher (...) John Macmurray, this book explores how ethics and education intersect through a continuous cycle of action and reflection. By pulling together disparate and wide-ranging topics across engineering education, several promising areas of future work are identified. Engineering methods and ways of reflection are deeply embedded in engineering education to the extent that they may interfere with becoming a person. A focus on specific knowledges must complement rather than distract from developing the habits of mind necessary for engineers to adapt to a changing world. Providing meaningful experiences and explicitly focusing on developing multiple ways to reflect on these experiences are shown to be critical for the holistic development of engineers as persons. (shrink)

This research employs the Bayesian network modeling approach, and the Markov chain Monte Carlo technique, to learn about the role of lies and violence in teachings of major religions, using a unique dataset extracted from long-standing Vietnamese folktales. The results indicate that, although lying and violent acts augur negative consequences for those who commit them, their associations with core religious values diverge in the final outcome for the folktale characters. Lying that serves a religious mission of either Confucianism or (...) Taoism (but not Buddhism) brings a positive outcome to a character (βT_and_Lie_O= 2.23; βC_and_Lie_O= 1.47; βT_and_Lie_O= 2.23). A violent act committed to serving Buddhist missions results in a happy ending for the committer (βB_and_Viol_O= 2.55). What is highlighted here is a glaring double standard in the interpretation and practice of the three teachings: the very virtuous outcomes being preached, whether that be compassion and meditation in Buddhism, societal order in Confucianism, or natural harmony in Taoism, appear to accommodate two universal vices—violence in Buddhism and lying in the latter two. These findings contribute to a host of studies aimed at making sense of contradictory human behaviors, adding the role of religious teachings in addition to cognition in belief maintenance and motivated reasoning in discounting counterargument. (shrink)

Traditionally, analytic philosophy has been affiliated with a formalist conception of inference which understands reasoning as a process that exploits syntactic properties of natural language according to a set of formal rules that are insensitive to conceptual content. This chapter discusses an alternative approach that takes semantic properties as the underlying forces driving rational inference. Building on Wilfird Sellars’ notion of material inference and analytic tools from cognitive linguistics, I will show how parts of the inferential structure of natural language (...) can be explained in terms of semantic relations between extra-logical concepts. In the end, I will outline a strategy for explicating some of these inference-types using Peter Gärdenfors’ theory of conceptual spaces. (shrink)

This article is concerned with the educational value of raising the human body at school. Drawing inspiration from the work of Giorgio Agamben, I develop a new perspective that explores the possibility of taking the concept of physical education in a literal sense. This is to say that the specific educational content of physical education (in contradistinction to organized sporting life outside school) resides in its concentration on the physical ?as such?. This is not an obvious path to explore, because (...) defenders of physical education as a rule have to compete against the (dualist) prejudice that this discipline is merely an instrument to train the body or to keep it fit, and that it therefore should not be considered as a serious endeavour. Therefore, more often than not, apologists try to justify the relevance of physical education on the very ground that it is a practice that is concerned with something ?beyond? the merely physical that is at stake in movement activity. I argue, however, that this line of thought excludes the possibility of conceiving an alternative approach that relates the concentration on ?entirely physical? activities (as opposed to ?merely physical? activities) to an experience of potentiality. I develop this idea on the basis of an analysis of repetitive, rhythmical and collective body-exercise (e.g. running in a group or basic callisthenics). (shrink)

Many people recognize that governments can play salutary roles in relation to markets by “overseeing” market behavior from “above,” or supplying foundational “rules of the game” from “below.” It is probably no accident that these widely recognized roles also sit comfortably with traditional conceptions of government and market, pursuant to which people tend categorically to distinguish between “public” and “private” spheres of activity. There is a third form of government action that receives less attention than forms and, however, possibly owing (...) in part to its straddling the traditional public/private divide. We call it the “government as market actor” form, whereby government instrumentalities pursue traditionally “public” ends through traditionally “private” means. Inattention to this pervasive form of government action might signal a theoretical blind spot attending the public/private distinction itself. At least as importantly, however, this inattention also denies us a practical opportunity: it prevents our more fully exploiting the government role in question. This Article, part of a larger project, aims to encourage fuller theoretical appreciation and wider practical use of the role we identify. It first offers a provisional taxonomy of recurrent forms that the government market actor role appears to take, affording a wealth of illustrative case studies in so doing. It then envisions additional good that governments might do, simply by extending their market acting roles to spheres in which they have yet to be fully utilized. The Article concludes by suggesting next steps in both theorizing and employing the government market actor role. (shrink)

Participating in a research project on how poor people themselves conceive poverty, I was surprised by the great emphasis our interlocutors put on violence.1 Being exposed to violence in one’s own household and daily life is a prominent and pervasive part of what it means to be poor. Such violence reflects governance failures endemic in developing countries: predatory elites who do not care about their poor compatriots and even profit by driving them off their land or (...) coercing them into exploitative conditions as factory workers, day laborers, domestic servants or sex workers. Small-scale violence and the continual threat thereof—just like the large-scale violence of wars, civil wars and local insurrections—is a terrible burden upon the poor and a grave impediment to efforts to improve their lives. The Sustainable Development Goals must recognize and suitably highlight this reality. (shrink)

The American Journal of Bioethics, Volume 11, Issue 10, Page 6-7, October 2011.

1. Understanding.--2. Purpose.--3. Conciliation.--4. Justice.--5. Justice, science and religion as contributions to civilization.--6. Uniformitarian process under supreme law.

Limited attention has been paid to the potential of tort law to address the harm of sexual violence. Based on interviews with 35 victim-survivors of sexual violence in Iceland, this study asks: How do victim-survivors understand monetary compensation? How can tort law meet victim-survivors’ justice interests? The findings suggest that in addition to the financial risk involved, most participants had ambivalent views towards pursuing and receiving monetary compensation. Many thought that, given their often extensive pecuniary and non-pecuniary losses, (...) it was only fair to receive compensation; but at the same time, they did not want to accept ‘dirty money’ they considered that pursuing monetary compensation could undermine their credibility, and monetary compensation only partially aligned with their ideas about justice. The findings are interpreted in the context of tort law theory, taboo trade-offs and survivor-centred justice. It is suggested that state intervention is needed to better meet victim-survivors’ justice interests. (shrink)

Violence seems to be such that, once it has set in, it is hard to extract. Getting rid of violence appears to require violence. It reproduces only itself. Peace appears but a sheep exposed to predators. If the world were to abruptly become peaceful, it would only await the next Thrasymachus to reimpose tyranny. This sticky nature of violence and how to cope with it are the most potent themes of this much-needed work. It provides a (...) fair though critical overview of the subject of politics and violence through history. Violence and Political Theory examines a judicious selection of political thinkers, from Hobbes and Locke to Gandhi and Ruddick, on their notions of the role of violence in political life. (shrink)

Cyber harassment can have harmful effects on social media users, such as emotional distress and, consequently, withdrawal from social network sites or even life itself. At the same time, users are often upset when network providers intervene and deem such an intrusion an unjust occurrence. This article analyzes how decisions to intervene can be communicated in such a way that users consider them adequate and acceptable. A first experiment shows that informational justice perceptions of social network users depend on the (...) format in which network providers present the decision to intervene. More specifically, if a decision to intervene is presented in the form of a story, as opposed to an analytical rendering of facts and arguments, decisions to intervene prompt more positive informational justice perceptions. A second experiment reveals that when users relate the experience to themselves, narrative transportation increases, which positively affects perceptions of the justice of decisions to intervene. (shrink)

In this paper I question the tendency within some feminist circles to criticise attempts to develop typologies that delineate different feminist theoretical perspectives. I agree that many of the criticisms are valid, but only if typologies are viewed in a particular way. This particular way is when typologies are regarded as ahistorical, all-encompassing entities containing discrete categories that are designed for the once and for all fixing of individuals and their work in one box. Reading Max Weber through Karl Mannheim's (...) work on the sociology of knowledge, I argue that typologies, as ideal-types, are indispensable, socially situated practical tools for measuring similarities, differences and developments in thought within and across time and space. Despite being noted as an “attractive” argument by at least some of those who are otherwise critical of typologies (for example, Liz Stanley and Sue Wise), I believe that the “attractiveness” of this particular position has not been granted serious consideration. (shrink)

Boston: The Boston Book Company, 1913. lxi, 483 pp. Reprinted 1999 by The Lawbook Exchange, Ltd. LCCN 99-23754. ISBN 1-58477-009-0.

Augustine posed two questions that go to the heart of the nature of law. Firstly, what is the difference between a kingdom and a band of robbers? Secondly, is an unjust law a law at all? These two questions force us to consider whether law is simply a means of social control, distinguished from a band of robbers only by its size, or whether law is a social institution justified by its orientation towards justice. The End of Law applies (...) Augustine’s questions to modern legal philosophy as well as offering a critical theory of natural law that draws on Augustine’s ideas. McIlroy argues that such a critical natural law theory is realistic but not cynical about law’s relationship to justice and to violence, can diagnose ways in which law becomes deformed and pathological, and indicates that law is a necessary but insufficient instrument for the pursuit of justice. Positioning an examination of Augustine’s reflections on law in the context of his broader thought, McIlroy presents an alternative approach to natural law theory, drawing from critical theory, postmodern thought, and political theologies in conversation with Augustine. (shrink)

This edited collection explores the problem of violence from the vantage point of meaning. Taking up the ambiguity of the word ‘meaning’, the chapters analyse the manner in which violence affects and in some cases constitutes the meaningful structure of our lifeworld, on individual, social, religious and conceptual levels. The relationship between violence and meaning is multifaceted, and is thus investigated from a variety of different perspectives within the continental tradition of philosophy, including phenomenology, post-structuralism, critical theory (...) and psychoanalysis. Divided into four parts, the volume explores diverging meanings of the concept of violence, as well as transcendent or religious violence- a form of violence that takes place between humanity and the divine world. Going on to investigate instances of immanent and secular violence, which occur at the level of the group, community or society, the book concludes with an exploration of violence and meaning on the individual level: violence at the level of the self, or between particular persons. With its focus on the manifold of relations between violence and meaning, as well as its four part focus on conceptual, transcendent, immanent and individual violence, the book is both multi-directional and multi-layered. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:FROM SACRIFICIAL VIOLENCE TO RESPONSIBILITY: THE EDUCATION OF MOSES IN EXODUS 2-4 Sandor Goodhart Purdue University When toward the end of his life Moses tried to stave off death, God said to him: "Did I tell you to slay the Egyptian?" (Midrash in Plaut 383) I. Education in Plato and Judaism The word "education", of course, comes from the Latin, educare, meaning "to lead out" or "to bring (...) up," and both its Latinate morphology and the semantic value it assumes in English reflect its peculiar history. To "lead out" implies in the first place leadership, which is to say a relationship between one designated as a "leader" and another (or others) designated as the "led." The notion of leadership also entails a movement through which the leader propels the led, namely from a region designated as "inside," to another designated as "outside." Within the Western context, which is to say, within the Western European historical experience which traces itselfback through the romance language speaking countries to Rome and ultimately to Greece, the primary articulator ofthe notion of education we have inherited is, of course, Plato. Although Plato's Republic is nominally about justice, and even more specifically the "just" state, commentators have long pointed out that it is really about education (see, for example, Havelock). How shall the guardians ofthe state that we shall term "just" be educated?, Plato's interlocutors ask themselves. In this regard, of course, Plato was challenging the educational system already in place at the time at the head of which was Homer and the Homeric epics, and substituting for an older oral culture founded on an elaborate system of mnemonics another founded more decisively upon writing and the alphabet. Some have argued that in place of a aural or Sandor Goodhart1 3 hearing-centered culture Plato was inaugurating a visual or video-centric cultural organization, and much work is currently being done in this area (see, for example, Ong). What was Plato's educational solution? It was an appeal, in short, to the true, to the language of reason, and to the realm of the ontological as the context in which the true could be defined. The true, as the phenomenological tradition has taught us, may be regarded as the separation of that which has being from that which does not have being, that which only appears or seems to be from that which truly is. Reason in this context is the method or modality ofthinking by which such difference or distinction between the true and the false becomes articulated. Education may then be said to be the process by which all of this occurs, by which one learns to separate appearances from reality, the true from the false, the reasonable from the unreasonable, and thereby the process by which one avoids slavery. For at bottom the enemy for Plato remains slavery and the goal remains freedom from its ravages. Plato, for one, defines his program in specific opposition to Greek tragedy, which he takes among the species ofmimesis or of mimetic poesis that he cites to be the worst threat to his program of absolute difference. The tragic poets leave us without an antidote, he tells us, to its irresistible seductions. Even the best of us—by which he would certainly include Socrates, who has been educating these young men about the processes of education—go to the theater, follow the theatrical performance with enthusiasm, beat their breasts along with the players, and finally praise as most worthy those playwrights who most enable this enthusiasm to take place. The distinction between the true and the mimetic, between the true and the imitational or representational, between that which has being and that which only shadows being, is always on the verge of collapsing in this context. And as a consequence the only safe state, Plato tells us, is the one that excludes theatrical performance from its premises. There is no place in the present context to develop any further the complicated relationship Plato has with his predecessors, and I have hinted at this relationship elsewhere (see Goodhart 261). Suffice it to say that Plato remains in this regard the master in Western circles ofall... (shrink)

This article discusses the legal concept of excessive use of force by analyzing a particular incident that took place in Israel in the summer of 1997: eighty families, faced with dire housing needs, squatted in vacant apartments in an immigrant absorption center in the town of Mevasseret Zion near Jerusalem. After a period of failed attempts to persuade the families to leave the apartments peacefully, the police moved to evacuate the families, and did so by use of massive force. In (...) the article I describe the violent measures used by the State, and analyze the media portrayal of the squatting and the evacuation. I argue that both these forceful measures and the media portrayal of the squatting and evacuation cumulatively took part in constructing the squatters as criminal deviants rather than political protesters. I claim further that we should understand the concept of use of force not only as a means to achieve certain ends by the state, but also as a mechanism through which the state constructs a social problem and presents it in a manner beneficial to its own interests. Excessive use of force, in this sense, is not just a disproportionate response to a real or perceived threat posed by an individual or group, but a means by which the state fosters a belief that the individual or group present some danger, which must be tackled through the use of a certain level of force. By drawing a line between the legitimate and illegitimate use of force, the state affirms its monopoly on violence, which ultimately can be used to suppress political resistance. (shrink)

I argue in this paper that animal biotechnology constitutes a dangerous ontological collapse between animals and the technical-economic apparatus. By ontological collapse, I mean the elimination of fundamental ontological tensions between embodied subjects and the principles of scientific, technological, and economic rationalization. Biotechnology imposes this collapse in various ways: by genetically “reprogramming” animals to serve as uniform commodities, by abstracting them into data and code, and, in some cases, by literally manipulating their movements with computer technologies. These and other forms (...) of ontological violence not only lead to profound physical suffering for the animals involved, but also distort the phenomenological basis of their existence, especially their perceptual experience and expression of subjective time and space. In subordinating nonhuman animals to the logic of “technological rationality” or “technique,” to borrow Herbert Marcuse and Jacques Ellul’s respective terms, biotechnology perpetuates the productive extermination of animals. Biotech animals are exterminated in the sense of being “drive[n] beyond the boundaries” of meaningful existence and “destroyed completely” or “completely wiped out” as subjects. But they are also exterminated in the sense of being “overproduced” and “overgenerated,” both quantitatively and qualitatively. I go on to argue that the collapse of the ontological is accompanied by a collapse of the ethical. This ethical collapse is characterized by the internalization of the logic of technique and the corresponding failure both within technoscientific culture itself and within some scholarly discourses about biotechnology to evaluate from a genuinely critical vantage point the fundamental ethical issues that animal biotechnology raises. The aim of this paper is to offer an alternative analysis of the ontological and ethical implications of biotechnology from the standpoint of Marcuse and Ellul’s critical theory of technology. To explore other ramifications of animal biotechnology, I draw on Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer’s insights into ideologies of extermination and Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology of embodiment. (shrink)

First published in 1982, Means and Ends in Education explores the contrasts between approaches to teaching where teaching is simply a means to some other end; approaches in which the end determines the means; and approaches in which means and ends are integrated and education serves an intrinsic purpose. The book considers the concept of education and evaluates different processes and techniques of teaching and learning. Divided into three parts, it covers instrumentalist approaches, learner-oriented approaches, and (...) liberal approaches to education. It puts forward differing views as to what the term 'education' means to different professions and in different contexts, and how different approaches result in a very different experience for the recipient. It also discusses the extent to which an evaluation of methods of education and an evaluation of the aims of education are linked. Means and Ends in Education will appeal to those with an interest in the philosophy of education. (shrink)

It is estimated that one in three women experience intimate partner violence (IPV) across the course of their life. The popular uptake of “smart speakers” powered by sophisticated AI means that surveillance of the domestic environment is increasingly possible. Correspondingly, there are various proposals to use smart speakers to detect or report IPV. In this paper, we clarify what might be possible when it comes to combatting IPV using existing or near-term technology and also begin the project of (...) evaluating this project both ethically and politically. We argue that the ethical landscape looks different depending on whether one is considering the decision to develop the technology or the decision to use it once it has been developed. If activists and governments wish to avoid the privatisation of responses to IPV, ubiquitous surveillance of domestic spaces, increasing the risk posed to members of minority communities by police responses to IPV, and the danger that more powerful smart speakers will be co-opted by men to control and abuse women, then they should resist the development of this technology rather than wait until these systems are developed. If it is judged that the moral urgency of IPV justifies exploring what might be possible by developing this technology, even in the face of these risks, then it will be imperative that victim-survivors from a range of demographics, as well as government and non-government stakeholders, are engaged in shaping this technology and the legislation and policies needed to regulate it. (shrink)

Though for the Western political tradition violence is usually deemed merely instrumental, and thus neither essential to, nor constitutive of, the bios politikos, Walter Benjamin ’s “Zur Kritik der Gewalt” [“Critique of Violence,” 1921] and Georges Sorel ’s RØflexions sur la violence [Reflections on Violence, 1908] constitute an exception. 1 In very different ways, both texts put forward a notion of violence which comes to coincide with pure praxis, that is, with pure political action, in (...) great contrast with a political tradition which rather identifies in violence a non-political or anti-political form of action. In Benjamin ’s case, the ambiguity of the term Gewalt is not secondary to the argument: in German, it can mean force, power, might and violence, depending on the context; it reunites thus potestas and violentia in a dialectics that Etienne Balibar values as positive and fructuous. The French violence, on the contrary, presents a univocal connotation, though Sorel, as we will see, redefines it to his own purposes. 3 However, the explanation cannot be limited to the terminology, but must rather be pursued in their notion of praxis. (shrink)

This paper examines the potential pitfalls for academic research associated with goal displacements in the implementation of goals and indicators of research commercialization. We ask why patenting has come to serve as the key policy indicator of innovative capacity and what consequences this has for the organization of academic research. To address these questions, the paper presents a case study from Denmark on, firstly, why and how the 1999 Danish ‘Act on Inventions’ introduced patenting as a central instrument to Danish (...) science policy and, secondly, the effects the Act has had on Danish university organization and research practices. We trace why and how commercialization was introduced as an important objective in Danish science policy since the 1980s. The increased focus on patents is explained as an isomorphic adjustment to an international ‘science policy field,’ manifested in particular through OECD statistics, where patenting has come to serve as a key metric in international rankings. In a second step, we examine what effects the patenting requirements have had on organization and research practice at a Danish university. We show that in practice ‘number of patents’ changed from serving as an indicator of innovative capacity to being a policy goal in itself, thus in effect producing a goal displacement that is potentially damaging for both academic research and innovation capacity of the surrounding society. As a consequence of this goal displacement, active scientists now increasingly engage in patenting primarily as a means to fulfill organizational targets and to increase their ‘fundability,’ rather than to promote commercial applications of their research. In conclusion, we discuss how these unfulfilled policy ambitions have led to a retrospective redefinition of policy goals rather than an adjustment of the actual policy tools. (shrink)

At the heart of Kantian theory lies the prohibition against treating humanity merely as a means. Two of the most influential interpretations of what this means are Wood's and O'Neill's. Drawing on these thinkers' ideas, Kerstein formulates two accounts of what is involved in the idea of treating a person merely as a means: the and accounts. Kerstein's attempt is to show that they are problematic. He introduces his to alleviate the problems they face. I argue that (...) the end-sharing and possible consent accounts are not vulnerable to Kerstein's criticism. However, they both face a shortcoming: they fail to support the Kantian conclusion that the prostitute and the servile person are treated merely as means. Through reconstructing these accounts, I surmount this difficulty. Moreover, my proposal helps Kerstein's own account overcome a problem he admits it has, without the need to resort to consequentialism. (shrink)

The various discussions on morals which have recently appeared in the pages of this journal, like most modern discussions of the subject, have had to concern themselves with two antitheses, between the good and the right, and between duty and interest. As to the first, is the good what it is because it is right, or is right what it is because it is good? Or may the two be distinct, so that what is right is not necessarily good? And (...) if it is not good, is it bad? Or do the right and the good overlap? For the second, the antithesis between duty and interest—“of course,” says one, “the two have nothing to do with one another; the more carefully we keep them apart, the better.” In rare instances, indeed, it will be allowed that my duty may coincide with my interest; but when it does so, it is felt to be shorn of half its worth. If it pays me to tell the truth, what thank have I for all my veracity? (shrink)

From the beginning of the 16th century to the end of the 18th century, there were not less than ten philosophers who focused extensively on Venn’s ostensible analytical diagrams, as noted by modern historians of logic (Venn, Gardner, Baron, Coumet et al.). But what was the reason for early modern philosophers to use logic or analytical diagrams? Among modern historians of logic one can find two theses which are closely connected to each other: M. Gardner states that since the Middle (...) Ages certain logic diagrams were used just in order to teach “dull-witted students”. Therefore, logic diagrams were just a means to an end. According to P. Bernhard, the appreciation of logic diagrams had not started prior to the 1960s, therefore the fact that logic diagrams become an end the point of research arose very late. The paper will focus on the question whether logic resp. analytical diagrams were just means in the history of (early) modern logic or not. In contrast to Gardner, I will argue that logic diagrams were not only used as a tool for “dull-witted students”, but rather as a tool used by didactic reformers in early modern logic. In predating Bernhard’s thesis, I will argue that in the 1820s logic diagrams had already become a value in themselves in Arthur Schopenhauer’s lectures on logic, especially in proof theory. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The Journal of Aesthetic Education 38.1 (2004) 35-52 [Access article in PDF] Means Without End:Production, Reception, and Teaching in Kant's Aesthetics Gary Peters The Work of Art If aesthetics is to have a role within an art school context, it must be able to engage with the work of art as an ongoing and ontologically open productive enterprise. The reception of the artwork as a completed thing or (...) act and the aesthetic judgment necessary to take pleasure in the contemplation of it is largely irrelevant to the day-to-day work of the artist in the studio or onsite. Rarely do the tutor or student stand before a work that could be claimed to have reached completion or achieved what might be called "finality." On the contrary, in most cases an essential aspect of teaching practice is precisely to resist the impending closure of the work through a critical engagement which challenges the student to consider and reconsider the aesthetic possibilities of given forms within a situation of infinite reflection. Given this, it is important at the outset to consider Kant's notion of finality without end. So we may at least observe a finality of form, and trace it in objects — though by reflection only — without resting it on an end....Whenever an end is regarded as a source of delight, it always imports an interest as determining ground of the judgment on the object of pleasure. Hence the judgment of taste cannot rest on any subjective end as its ground. But neither can any representation of an objective end, i.e., of the possibility of the object itself on the principles of final connection, determine the judgment of taste. 1Echoing his famous description of art as "purposiveness without purpose," here the Kantian relation between finality and endlessness turns attention away from the art object, and the objective judgment determined by it, to the reflective process whereby the act of aesthetic judgment has primacy as that which acts upon the pleasure attending finality in the manner [End Page 35] of a tracing to be traced and retraced by the receiver. By thus denying finality an objective end, it is true that Kant removes the specter of desire from his aesthetics. But does this not also remove the originary work of the work of art, its eruptive production prior to reproduction in what might be called the "instant" of its creation outside of the "always already there" of what Jean-François Lyotard calls "aesthetic time?" 2 Indeed, to go further still, Maurice Blanchot famously conceives of the art work as harboring a radical "worklessness," a "neutral" absence that, nevertheless, is essential to its being a work, or its being as a work. 3 Does Kant's nonobjective account of aesthetic experience direct us, ultimately, toward this peculiar ontological neutrality, or does the communicative imperative at the heart of his aesthetics overlook what Blanchot would call the "fascination" of the work as the inscrutable presence of an absence? It is this problematic that weighs heavily upon the reading and teaching of Kant's aesthetics as presented here.In Lessons on the Analytic of the Sublime, Lyotard offers one solution to the problem. For him, reflective judgment is itself productive — "production that exceeds simple reproduction is an a priori condition for aesthetic judgment" (LAS, 67). That is to say, the power of the imagination and the pleasure associated with this power concern respectively the exercise and the registration of a productivity that is crucial for aesthetic reception to be possible. But does this playful enjoyment of our receptive/productive faculties and their beautiful attunement not obscure or distract us from the pure and immediate desire of the aesthetic where the concatenation of work and worklessness, that is to say, of production and reception, within the creative moment demands from the artist an interest in the ownership of, and responsibility for the work, as well as an absolute (one might say obsessive) commitment to the work of art — the labor of the aesthetic... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The Journal of Aesthetic Education 38.1 (2004) 35-52 [Access article in PDF] Means Without End:Production, Reception, and Teaching in Kant's Aesthetics Gary Peters The Work of Art If aesthetics is to have a role within an art school context, it must be able to engage with the work of art as an ongoing and ontologically open productive enterprise. The reception of the artwork as a completed thing or (...) act and the aesthetic judgment necessary to take pleasure in the contemplation of it is largely irrelevant to the day-to-day work of the artist in the studio or onsite. Rarely do the tutor or student stand before a work that could be claimed to have reached completion or achieved what might be called "finality." On the contrary, in most cases an essential aspect of teaching practice is precisely to resist the impending closure of the work through a critical engagement which challenges the student to consider and reconsider the aesthetic possibilities of given forms within a situation of infinite reflection. Given this, it is important at the outset to consider Kant's notion of finality without end. So we may at least observe a finality of form, and trace it in objects — though by reflection only — without resting it on an end....Whenever an end is regarded as a source of delight, it always imports an interest as determining ground of the judgment on the object of pleasure. Hence the judgment of taste cannot rest on any subjective end as its ground. But neither can any representation of an objective end, i.e., of the possibility of the object itself on the principles of final connection, determine the judgment of taste. 1Echoing his famous description of art as "purposiveness without purpose," here the Kantian relation between finality and endlessness turns attention away from the art object, and the objective judgment determined by it, to the reflective process whereby the act of aesthetic judgment has primacy as that which acts upon the pleasure attending finality in the manner [End Page 35] of a tracing to be traced and retraced by the receiver. By thus denying finality an objective end, it is true that Kant removes the specter of desire from his aesthetics. But does this not also remove the originary work of the work of art, its eruptive production prior to reproduction in what might be called the "instant" of its creation outside of the "always already there" of what Jean-François Lyotard calls "aesthetic time?" 2 Indeed, to go further still, Maurice Blanchot famously conceives of the art work as harboring a radical "worklessness," a "neutral" absence that, nevertheless, is essential to its being a work, or its being as a work. 3 Does Kant's nonobjective account of aesthetic experience direct us, ultimately, toward this peculiar ontological neutrality, or does the communicative imperative at the heart of his aesthetics overlook what Blanchot would call the "fascination" of the work as the inscrutable presence of an absence? It is this problematic that weighs heavily upon the reading and teaching of Kant's aesthetics as presented here.In Lessons on the Analytic of the Sublime, Lyotard offers one solution to the problem. For him, reflective judgment is itself productive — "production that exceeds simple reproduction is an a priori condition for aesthetic judgment" (LAS, 67). That is to say, the power of the imagination and the pleasure associated with this power concern respectively the exercise and the registration of a productivity that is crucial for aesthetic reception to be possible. But does this playful enjoyment of our receptive/productive faculties and their beautiful attunement not obscure or distract us from the pure and immediate desire of the aesthetic where the concatenation of work and worklessness, that is to say, of production and reception, within the creative moment demands from the artist an interest in the ownership of, and responsibility for the work, as well as an absolute (one might say obsessive) commitment to the work of art — the labor of the aesthetic... (shrink)

In September 2020, Project South, along with numerous other organizations, released a report detailing abuses in a Georgia Detention Center – including forced hysterectomies. Whatever other factors are at play, one of them is an intrinsic connection between obstetric violence against pregnant migrants and immigration injustice. It is not incidental that these acts – in US detention centers, along the US‐Mexico border, in Colombian hospitals and clinics – are being perpetrated on immigrant bodies. And it is not accidental or (...) random which immigrant bodies are vulnerable to these violations. Understanding and confronting obstetric violence directed at pregnant migrants, though, requires reconceptualizing the nature of obstetric violence itself. In particular, we must recognize that obstetric violence against pregnant Latin American migrants in the United States and Colombia is a type of immigration injustice, a means to perpetrate immigration injustice, and a product of immigration injustice. As such, bioethicists need to collaborate with immigration scholars to resist it.After providing some background on the nature of obstetric violence and some ways it is perpetuated against pregnant migrants in the United States and Colombia, I will give a brief overview of how I conceptualize immigration justice. From there, I explain how this type of obstetric violence constitutes a type of immigration injustice, a means to perpetrate immigration injustice, and a product of immigration injustice. My hope is that this analysis motivates bioethicists throughout the Americas to engage with immigration scholars and activists to confront the issue more forcefully. (shrink)

How is epistemic justification related to knowledge? Is it, as widely thought, constitutive of knowledge? Is it merely a means to knowledge, or merely a means to something else, such as truth? In a recent article in this journal, Hofmann (2005, Synthese, 146(3), 357–369) addresses these questions in attempting to defend an important argument articulated by Sartwell (1992, The Journal of Philosophy, 89(4), 167–180) and reconstructed and criticized by Le Morvan (2002, Erkenntnis: An International Journal of Analytic Philosophy, (...) 56(2), 151–168). This Sartwellian argument purported to show that, since epistemic justification is of merely instrumental value, it is not constitutive of knowledge. In this paper, I argue that Hofmann’s defense of Sartwell fails, but that its failure brings to light some important lessons concerning the nature of justification and its relationship to truth and knowledge. (shrink)

This paper critically interrogates the usefulness of the concept of violence regimes for social politics, social analysis, and social theory. In the first case, violence regimes address and inform politics and policy, that is, social politics, both around various forms of violence, such as gender-based violence, violence against women, anti-lesbian, gay and transgender violence, intimate partner violence, and more widely in terms of social and related policies and practices on violence and anti- (...) class='Hi'>violence. In the second case, violence regimes assist social analysis of the interconnections of different forms and aspects of violence, and relative autonomy from welfare regimes and gender regimes. Third, the violence regime concept engages a wider range of issues in social theory, including the exclusion of the knowledges of the violated, most obviously, but not only, when the voices and experiences of those killed are unheard. The concept directs attention to assumptions made in social theory as incorporating or neglecting violence. More specifically, it highlights the significance of: social effects beyond agency; autotelic ontology, that is, violence as a means and end in itself, and an inequality in itself; the relations of violence, sociality and social relations; violence and power, and the contested boundary between them; and materiality-discursivity in violence and what is to count as violence. These are key issues for both violence studies and social theory more generally. (shrink)

Violence and Messianism looks at how some of the figures of the so-called Renaissance of "Jewish" philosophy between the two world wars - Franz Rosenzweig, Walter Benjamin and Martin Buber - grappled with problems of violence, revolution and war. At once inheriting and breaking with the great historical figures of political philosophy such as Kant and Hegel, they also exerted considerable influence on the next generation of European philosophers, like Lévinas, Derrida and others. This book aims to think (...) through the great conflicts in the past century in the context of the theory of catastrophe and the beginning of new messianic time. Firstly, it is a book about means and ends - that is, about whether good ends can be achieved through bad means. Second, it is a book about time: peace time, war time, time it takes to transfer from war to peace, etc. Is a period of peace simply a time that excludes all violence? How long does it take to establish peace? Building on this, it then discusses whether there is anything that can be called messianic acting. Can we - are we capable of, or allowed to - act violently in order to hasten the arrival of the Messiah and peace? And would we then be in messianic time? Finally, how does this notion of messianism - a name for a sudden and unpredictable event - fit in, for example, with our contemporary understanding of terrorist violence? The book attempts to understand such pressing questions by reconstructing the notions of violence and messianism as they were elaborated by 20th century Jewish political thought. Providing an important contribution to the discussion on terrorism and the relationship between religion and violence, this book will appeal to theorists of terrorism and ethics of war, as well as students and scholars of Philosophy, Jewish studies and religion studies. (shrink)

In this article I am concerned with whether it could be morally significant to distinguish between doing something 'in order to bring about an effect' as opposed to 'doing something because we will bring about an effect'. For example, the Doctrine of Double Effect tells us that we should not act in order to bring about evil, but even if this is true is it perhaps permissible to act only because an evil will thus occur? I discuss these questions in (...) connection with a version of the so-called Trolley Problem known as the Loop Case. I also consider how these questions may bear on whether a rational agent must aim at an event which he believes is causally necessary to achieve an end he pursues. (shrink)

ABSTRACTThis rejoinder represents a final installment in a debate between myself and Paul Gunn over the feasibility and desirability of deliberative democracy. Here I argue that our debate has helped clarify an ambivalence in the literature surrounding the ends and means of deliberative democracy. I specify two ways to understand both ends and means, establish their importance in deliberative theory, and show how they can be combined. I conclude by showing how this systemic view incorporates and overcomes several (...) challenges facing modern democracy, such as the necessity of expert authority, the role of partisanship, and the problem of social complexity. (shrink)

In this article I am concerned with whether it could be morally significant to distinguish between doing something 'in order to bring about an effect' as opposed to 'doing something because we will bring about an effect'. For example, the Doctrine of Double Effect tells us that we should not act in order to bring about evil, but even if this is true is it perhaps permissible to act only because an evil will thus occur? I discuss these questions in (...) connection with a version of the so-called Trolley Problem known as the Loop Case. I also consider how these questions may bear on whether a rational agent must aim at an event which he believes is causally necessary to achieve an end he pursues. (shrink)

In this article I am concerned with whether it could be morally significant to distinguish between doing something 'in order to bring about an effect' as opposed to 'doing something because we will bring about an effect'. For example, the Doctrine of Double Effect tells us that we should not act in order to bring about evil, but even if this is true is it perhaps permissible to act only because an evil will thus occur? I discuss these questions in (...) connection with a version of the so-called Trolley Problem known as the Loop Case. I also consider how these questions may bear on whether a rational agent must aim at an event which he believes is causally necessary to achieve an end he pursues. (shrink)

During the latter half of the twentieth century political realism dominated national and international landscapes. The twenty-first century has seen the rise of neo‐conservatism, what Charles Krauthammer has called “democratic realism” and what others see as a re-birth of Wilsonianism—making the world safe for democracy. Robert M. Gates, U.S. Secretary of Defense, in a speech on Sept. 17, 2007 in Williamsburg, VA, at the World Forum on the Future of Democracy, acknowledged these different strains of current U.S. policy, saying that (...) “once again [people are] talking about the competing impulses in U.S. foreign policy: realism versus idealism, freedom versus security, values versus interests.” These competing concerns—but especially fear about terrorism coupled with asense of retributive justice—have divided much of the world. Nonetheless, it is clear that no matter what terms one gives to domestic and foreign policies, they are all in one way or another mired in the attitude that the end justifies the means, an attitude that will remain both morally and politically bankrupt until such time as people, policies, and programs embrace the concept of principled nonviolence, if not principled nonviolence itself. (shrink)