Review of Shannon Sullivan's Good White People.

In this paper I explore white attempts to move toward a proactive position against racism that will amount to more than self-criticism in the following three ways: by assessing the debate within feminism over white women's relation to whiteness; by exploring "white awareness training" methods developed by Judith Katz and the "race traitor" politics developed by Ignatiev and Garvey, and; a case study of white revisionism being currently attempted at the University of Mississippi.

This article responds to Marzia Milazzo's article ‘On white ignorance, white shame, and other pitfalls in critical philosophy of race’, in which Milazzo argues that the concepts white shame, white guilt, white privilege, white habits, white invisibility and white ignorance are pitfalls in the process of decolonisation. Milazzo contends that the way these concepts are theorised in much critical philosophy of race minimises white people's active interest in reproducing the racial (...) status quo. While I agree with Milazzo's critique of white shame and white guilt, I argue that these affective responses are fundamentally different to the remaining concepts. Drawing on critical whiteness studies and agnotology, I argue that white privilege, white invisibility and white ignorance are valuable conceptual tools for revealing white people's active investment in maintaining racial inequality. Whereas Milazzo sees a contradiction between white people's active interest in maintaining racial inequality and concepts like white invisibility and white ignorance, I argue that, correctly theorised, these concepts resolve this apparent contradiction. I contest Milazzo's call to reject white privilege, white invisibility and white ignorance, arguing that these concepts are useful tools in the project of decolonisation. (shrink)

The existence of nonhuman persons would fly in the face of everything our species has believed about its uniqueness for thousands of years. If an “animal” like a dolphin actually has all of the traits of a “person”, that would call for as fundamental, dramatic and unsettling a shift in how we see ourselves as abandoning a geocentric view of the heavens did. In the same way that Earth no longer occupied the centre of the universe, neither would humans. It (...) would also call for a shift in how humans treat dolphins – and, very likely, many other nonhumans. (shrink)

The existence of nonhuman persons would fly in the face of everything our species has believed about its uniqueness for thousands of years. If an “animal” like a dolphin actually has all of the traits of a “person”, that would call for as fundamental, dramatic and unsettling a shift in how we see ourselves as abandoning a geocentric view of the heavens did. In the same way that Earth no longer occupied the centre of the universe, neither would humans. It (...) would also call for a shift in how humans treat dolphins – and, very likely, many other nonhumans. (shrink)

Most guidelines and proposalsfor Internet research ethics are based onregulations for human subjects research. In therelated research, Internet material is viewedas animate and described as people. Humanitiesresearchers have rarely been a part of thedebate about Internet research ethics and thepractices of these scholars have not been takeninto consideration when drafting most of theguidelines. This threatens to limit the kindsof Internet research that can be performed – critical strategies are particularlydiscouraged – and the ways that researchers andother users understand the (...) Internet.Researchers who use human subjects models havenot fully acknowledged computer mediation, theconstructed aspects of Internetrepresentations, and the screen. If we viewInternet material as cultural production thenthe models for Internet research would be ArtHistory and Visual Culture, English andLiterary Studies, Film and Media Studies, Musicand Sound Studies, and Theatre and PerformanceStudies. A more complete integration of theseapproaches into Internet Studies – either as asole investigatory strategy or in tandem withother forms of inquiry – would changeresearchers' ethical questions. It would alsoshow instances in which human subjectsguidelines do not apply to complex Internetmaterial. It is imperative to demonstrate thatInternet material is not people because thisconception makes highly constructed words andimages seem natural and stereotypedrepresentations appear to be real. (shrink)

In "Behavioral Law and Economics: The Assault on Consent, Will, and Dignity," Mark D. White uses the moral philosophy of Immanuel Kant to examine the intersection of economics, psychology, and law known as "behavioral law and economics." Scholars in this relatively new field claim that, because of various cognitive biases and failures, people often make choices that are not in their own interests. The policy implications of this are that public and private organizations, such as the state and (...) employers, can and should design the presentation of options and default choices in order to "steer" people to the decision they would make, were they able to make choices in the absence of their cognitive biases and failures. Such policies are promoted under the name "libertarian paternalism," because choice is not blocked or co-opted, but simply "nudged." White argues that such manipulation of choice is impossible to conduct in people's true interests, and any other goal pursed by policymakers substitutes their own ends, however benevolent they may be, for people's true ends. Normatively, such manipulation should not be conducted because it fails to respect the dignity and autonomy of persons, what some hold to be the central idea in Kant's ethical system, and which serves to protect the individual from coercion, however subtle, from other persons or the state. (shrink)

This article applies Ayn Rand's insights in metaphysics and epistemology to the question What is a corporation? Historically, there have been three main answers: the fictional entity theory, the aggregate theory, and the real entity theory. Drawing principally upon Rand's discussion of the nature of entities in her epistemology workshops, this article proposes a fourth possibility. The preceding theories assume that if a corporation is an entity it must exist as a separate entity. The theory defended in this article challenges (...) this assumption, and considers the implications for the moral and political status of corporations. (shrink)

White's dense article on narrative discusses the ways that different groups of 20th century historians, particularly historical theorists (see pp.8-9), have constructed and deconstructed narrative as a means of communicating history. White himself acknowledges that narrativity challenges the scientific of history, but suggests that narrativity is not only unavoidable, but also offers a form of literary or allegorical truth.\n\nWhite first discusses the critiques of narrative as a means of communication--it focuses too heavily on political players, it is "unscientific," (...) it is inherently limited because narrative itself cannot be objective (although it's authors sometimes claim it to be).\n\nHe then moves on to discuss other, heavily theoretical, takes on why narrative is still useful as a means of historical communication: that narrative works because it performs as a trope which readers can easily recognize from myth and fiction, or, that narrative works because it allows us to transform events from the present to a synthesized past.\n\nWhite's article is difficult to read, but important background for anyone who wants to see what people have said about narrative in the past 100 years--and why it is still important. (shrink)

Respect for autonomy and beneficence are frequently regarded as the two essential principles of medical ethics, and the potential for these two principles to come into conflict is often emphasised as a fundamental problem. On the one hand, we have the value of beneficence, the driving force of medicine, which demands that medical professionals act to protect or promote the wellbeing of patients or research subjects. On the other, we have a principle of respect for autonomy, which demands that we (...) respect the self-regarding decisions of individuals. As well as routinely coming into opposition with the demands of beneficence in medicine, the principle of respect for autonomy in medical ethics is often seen as providing protection against beneficial coercion (i.e. paternalism) in medicine. However, these two values are not as straightforwardly opposed as they may appear on the surface. In fact, the way that we understand autonomy can lead us to implicitly sanction a great deal of paternalistic action, or can smuggle in paternalistic elements under the guise of respect for autonomy. -/- This paper is dedicated to outlining three ways in which the principle of respect for autonomy, depending on how we understand the concept of autonomy, can sanction or smuggle in paternalistic elements. As the specific relationship between respect for autonomy and beneficence will depend on how we conceive of autonomy, I begin by outlining two dominant conceptions of autonomy, both of which have great influence in medical ethics. I then turn to the three ways in which how we understand or employ autonomy can increase or support paternalism: firstly, when we equate respect for autonomy with respect for persons; secondly, when our judgements about what qualifies as an autonomous action contain intersubjective elements; and thirdly, when we expect autonomy to play an instrumental role, that is, when we expect people, when they are acting autonomously, to act in a way that promotes or protects their own wellbeing. I then provide a proposal for how we might work to avoid this. I will suggest that it may be impossible to fully separate paternalistic elements out from judgements about autonomy. Instead, we are better off looking at why we are motivated to use judgements about autonomy as a means of restricting the actions of patients or research subjects. I will argue that this is a result of discomfort about speaking directly about our beneficent motivations in medical ethics. Perhaps we can reduce the incentive to smuggle in these beneficent motivations under the guise of autonomy by talking directly about beneficent motivations in medicine. This will also force us to recognise paternalistic motivations in medicine when they appear, and to justify paternalism where it occurs. (shrink)

The Introductory chapter explains the purpose of the book. To this aim, the chapter contains four subsections: (1)Bring the Past Into the Present, (2)Multiculturalism and Liberal Feminism: Is the Rift Between Them Necessary?, (3)Development of Gender Discourse in Chinese Culture and Thought, (4)Purpose of This Volume and Its Four Main Parts, and (5) What's Next? A Way Forward. Excerpt: "Chinese philosophy, broadly construed, in its varied roots and forms has approximately three thousand years of history, and it continues to exert (...) immense influence on the lives of Chinese people as well as on the world community. Nonetheless, if traditions are not simply to remain as antiquated ideas, they must be able to converse with contemporary readers and address their deepest concerns and longings (Pang-White, 2009b, 2009c, 2011). Premised on the undeniable facts that (1) all persons are embodied and cultural beings and that (2) traditions constitute an essential element of individual identity, it would be a mistake to attempt to eradicate traditions altogether, as certain types of liberal feminists have recommended. Instead, it would be more meaningful to ask: Can we, and how do we, re-read, re-imagine, and reconstruct canonical texts so as to find their new significance in the contemporary world? It is generally agreed that Chinese traditions have had a troubled history in dealing with gender relations—well-known examples include concubinage, foot binding,female infanticide, and so on. For various reasons, Chinese traditions and societies have generally been less enthusiastic in confronting, dialoguing about, and resolving problems of gender disparity. Even though gender studies and feminist theories have populated academic discourse in the West since the 1960s, these topics remain relatively marginalized, often as an afterthought, in Chinese philosophical and cultural discourse. Furthermore, as the growing body of research and our deepened knowledge informs and expands our conception of gender, informed persons must ask themselves how Chinese philosophical traditions would and should engage the LGBT community and their concerns. Gender studies is not and should not be perceived simply as a subject in vogue. Rather, for humanity to flourish in this incredibly interdependent network of reality, it is imperative that we have a better understanding of all members of the human community so as to relate to one another in more inclusive, caring, and just ways. Surely, many of our contemporary concerns and vocabularies are anachronistic in the historical settings of classical texts. However, even within the framework of Western traditions, phrases such as “feminism,” “gender,” and “homosexual” were not part of the existing apparatus of vocabulary until the nineteenth and the twentieth centuries (Jenainati and Groves, 2010). Moreover, with the advancement of . . . ". (shrink)

In this paper the authors argue that the exploration of the nature of needs and rights should begin with the actually existing organization of care and of justice in society. The authors raise two key concerns with this organization: 1) the invisibility of care to some, and 2) the inaccessibility of rights to others. Recent work by care scholars has called attention to the ways the current organization of care work perpetuates the myth of self-sufficiency for some, while reducing others (...) to mere dependents. Law and Society scholars have demonstrated the problems of uneven access to legal remedies within the current organization of the legal system. Addressing these concerns simultaneously reveals both the problems of the current organization of needs and rights as well as illuminating alternative possibilities. The authors argue, first, that a justice perspective, based on rights is inadequate because its presumed universality is belied by the reality of the inaccessibility of rights to many. Second, the authors argue that a care perspective, currently formulated upon the assumption that only some people have needs, is also flawed because its presumed particularity distorts the human experience and subsequent policies. Instead, the authors need to conceive of care in a public way that permits both rights and needs to be understood as applicable to all. The authors propose some initial thoughts about how to create such a public concept of care. (shrink)

A common theme in the historiography of Greek ethics says that modern ethics is characterized by imperative notions such as ‘duty’—and with a Judeo‐Christian notion of imperatives or commands issued by god—whereas ancient ethics supposedly deals mainly with ‘attractive notions such as ‘good’ and ‘virtue’. This thought is often juxtaposed with the idea that imperative notions betoken a conflict between one's duty and one's good, because an imperative seems to be required only to command people to do what they (...) do not wish to do, which is felt to be inappropriate to the supposed eudaimonism of Greek ethics. In fact Greek ethics makes substantial use of imperative notions, and does not attempt to show that attractive notions are more basic or preferable in ethics. (shrink)

This volume presents the first English translation of the complete set of Confucian classic, Four Books for Women, with extensive commentary by the 17th century literati Wang Xiang, and introductions and annotations by translator Ann A. Pang-White. Written by women for women's education, the Confucian Four Books for Women spanned the 1st to the 16th centuries, and encompass Ban Zhao's Lessons for Women, Song Ruoxin's and Song Ruozhao's Analects for Women, Empress Renxiaowen's Teachings for the Inner Court, and Madame (...) Liu's (Chaste Widow Wang's) Short Records of Models for Women. A female counterpart to the famous Sishu (Four Books) compiled by Zhu Xi, Wang Xiang's Nü sishu provides an invaluable look at the long-standing history and evolution of Chinese women's writing, education, identity, and philosophical discourse, along with their struggles and triumphs, across the millennia and numerous Chinese dynasties. Pang-White's new translation brings the authors of the Four Books for Women to life as real, living people, and illustrates why they wrote and how their work empowered women. This volume reveals the history and evolution of Chinese women's writing, education, identity, and philosophical discourse over a span of 1,600 years. (shrink)

A fascinating history of the Ojibwe people at home in the Minnesota landscape through 1950--as told through more than 200 vivid photographs.

Everyone will agree that education ought to prepare young people to lead a meaningful life, but there are different ways in which this notion can be understood. A religious interpretation has to be distinguished from the secular one on which this paper focuses. Meaningfulness in this non-religious sense is a necessary condition of a life of well-being, having to do with the nesting of one’s reasons for action within increasingly pervasive structures of activity and attachment. Sometimes a life can (...) seem meaningless when it is not so in fact. In more extreme cases it may in fact be to some extent meaningless. Equipping young people for a meaningful life is a worthwhile, but not all-important educational aim. Educators should help them not only to see their lives as meaningful but also to lead lives that <are> meaningful. This involves continuous engagement in the nesting of reasons mentioned above. Where autonomy is also an aim, temperamental attunement to possible options – rather than exposure to all possible options – and time to explore them are important considerations. Questions arise here both about social justice and about whether current school curriculum and timetabling arrangements help or hinder pupils in living a meaningful life. (shrink)

In this article, I argue that persons suffering from Body Integrity Identity Disorder (BIID) can give informed consent to surgical measures designed to treat this disorder. This is true even if the surgery seems radical or irrational to most people. The decision to have surgery made by a BIID patient is not necessarily coerced, incompetent or uninformed. If surgery for BIID is offered, there should certainly be a screening process in place to insure informed consent. It is beyond the (...) scope of this work, however, to define all the conditions that should be placed on the availability of surgery. However, I argue, given the similarities between BIID and gender dysphoria and the success of such gatekeeping measures for the surgical treatment of gender dysphoria, it is reasonable that similar conditions be in place for BIID. Once other treatment options are tried and gatekeeping measures satisfied, A BIID patient can give informed consent to radical surgery. (shrink)

A central aim of education has to do with the promotion of the pupil's and other people's well-being. Recent work by John O'Neill locates the strongest justification of the market in an individualistic preference-satisfaction notion of well-being. His own preference for an objective theory of well-being allows us to make a clear separation of educational values from those of the market. Problems in O'Neill's account suggest a third notion of well-being which better supports the separation mentioned.

"Despite a dramatic rise in average income in the last 40 years, people are no happier. Since the millennium personal well-being has recently shot up the political and educational agendas, with schools in the UK even including "Personal Well-being" as a curriculum topic in its own right.This book takes teachers, student teachers and parents step by step through the many facets of well-being, pausing at each step to look at the educational implications for teachers and parents trying to make (...) our children's lives more meaningful. With his renowned talent for distilling the most complex of philosophical arguments into accessible laymen's terms, John White addresses the moral maze of well-being through three distinct parts:Part 1 describes the remarkable growth of interest in children's well-being in the UK since 2000, and suggests that a philosophical look at the concept of well-being is essential, so that teachers and parents can avoid confusion and misunderstanding.Part 2 takes the reader step by step through the intricacies of the concept in a deliberately accessible way with each chapter containing a substantial section showing how the new ideas just introduced can be taken up in education, especially in schools.Part 3 is about the future of education for well-being, pulling together, expanding on home as well as school, discussing the main aims and emphases of an education focussed on personal well-being. The author also looks at how school's traditional practices will have to change, given the new focus on well-beingAs well as looking at educational implications of all these questions step by step, the book concludes with an extensive practical guide for families and schools wanting to realise the new well-being agenda.This short, engaging book takes the reader with little or no background in philosophy into these issues. It is of special interest to teachers and parents, since they are now at the sharp end of the culture change we are now experiencing"-- Provided by publisher. (shrink)

The central subject of Aristotle's ethics is happiness or living well. Most people in his day (as in ours), eager to enjoy life, impressed by worldly success, and fearful of serious loss, believed that happiness depends mainly on fortune in achieving prosperity and avoiding adversity. Aristotle, however, argues that virtuous conduct is the governing factor in living well and attaining happiness. While admitting that neither the blessings not the afflictions of fortune are unimportant, he maintains that the virtuous find (...) life more satisfying than other people do and, with only modest good fortune, they lead happy, enjoyable lives. Combining philological precision with philosophical analysis, the author reconstructs Aristotle's defense of these bold claims. By examining how Aristotle develops his position in response to the prevailing hopes and anxieties of his age, the author shows why Aristotle considers happiness important for ethics and why he thinks it necessary to revise popular and traditional views. Paying close attention throughout to the internalist dimension of Aristotle's approach - his emphasis on how the virtuous view their own lives and actions - the author advances new interpretations of Aristotle's accounts of several major virtues, including temperance, courage, liberality, and 'greatness of soul'. This work sets Aristotle in the broader cultural context of his time, tracing his attemps to accommodate and amend rival views. The author examines literary and historical sources as well as philosophical texts, showing the inherited values and traditional ideals that inform Aristotle's discussions and provide some of the basis for his conclusions. Presupposing no knowledge of Greek or specialized philosophical terminology, the book is designed to be accessible to all students of philosophy or classical antiquity. All quotations from ancient texts are translated. (shrink)

Decision-making capacity (DMC) is normally taken to include (1) understanding (and appreciation); (2) the ability to deliberate or weigh up; and (3) the ability to express a choice. In an article published recently in PPP, Jacinta Tan and her colleagues (2006) suggest that DMC requires also (4) the absence of 'pathological values' (i.e., values that arise from mental disorder). In this paper, I argue that although (1)–(3) might be necessary for DMC, (4) is not necessary (barring cases where pathological values (...) interfere with (1)–(3)). My argument will simply be that (4) fails to be supported by the empirical data provided by Tan et al., which I claim supports the view that people with pathological values do often have DMC. I also consider but reject the claim that pathological values entail incapacity because they are not 'authentic' to the person. I conclude that the absence of pathological values does not constitute an additional element of DMC and that we cannot justify compulsory treatment of people who have (1)–(3), but not (4), on the grounds they lack DMC. (shrink)

Over the past 15 years we have seen the rise of a field of inquiry known as Whiteness Studies. Two of its major tenets are (1) that white identity is socially constructed and functions as a racial norm and (2) that those who occupy the position of white subjectivity exercise ‘white privilege’, which is oppressive to non-whites. However, despite their ubiquitous use of the term ‘norm’, Whiteness Studies theorists rarely give any detailed account of how whiteness serves (...) to normalize. A case is made here that we can only understand how whiteness normalizes if we place the development of white racial subject positions within the context of the development of normalizing biopower that Foucault describes in his work through the 1970s. Once that context is provided, it becomes clear that a larger problem exists in Whiteness Studies, one evident in the use of the concept of ‘white privilege’. Whiteness Studies theorists have not thoroughly critiqued the juridical conception of power that they have inherited from traditional political theory; as a result, they cannot get away from psychological accounts of the origins of racism, even though they usually state very clearly that they believe racism is an institutional phenomenon and racist subject positions are formed within networks of power. If Whiteness Studies is to accomplish both its analytical and its political goals, its theorists need to pay close attention to Foucault’s work on biopower. (shrink)

A policy of “preventive detention” has recently been debated in the British Parliament. Alarmed by the high-profile criminal activities of people suspected of having dangerous severe personality disorder , the government have made clear their intention to “indeterminately but reviewably detain” people with DSPD, after diagnosis by forensic psychiatrists, even if the individuals are yet to commit an offence. Such a policy may improve the safety of the public, but has obvious implications for civil liberties. This essay criticises (...) the morality of the government's intention and rejects the notion that the medical profession could ethically collude with such a policy. (shrink)

Gerben Meynen (2019) invites us to consider the potential ethical implications of what he refers to as “thought apprehension” technology for psychiatric practice, that is, technologies that involve recording brain activity, and using this to infer what people are thinking (or intending, desiring, feeling, etc.). His article is wide-ranging, covering several different ethical principles, various situations psychiatrists might encounter in therapeutic, legal and correctional contexts, and a range of potential incarnations of this technology, some more speculative than others. Although (...) Meynen’s article raises some highly relevant potential implications of some “thought apprehension”-based neurotechnologies, which are certainly worthy of further exploration, I suggest that Meynen’s analysis is beset by two problems. First, some of the technologies that form the focus of his discussion are too speculative, and second, due to the many issues under consideration, some problems are not adequately characterized, relevant ethical principles are misidentified, and valuable literature is not sufficiently engaged with. Consideration of these weaknesses might allow us to better see how to conduct a fruitful analysis of speculative neurotechnologies. (shrink)

When people make judgments about the effects of a perturbation on populations of species in a food web, their judgments exhibit the dissipation effect: a tendency to judge that effects of the perturbation weaken or dissipate as they spread out through the food web from the locus of the perturbation. In the present research evidence for two more phenomena is reported. Terminal locations are points in the food web with just a single connection to the rest of the web. (...) Judged changes tended to be higher for species at terminal locations than for species the same distance from the perturbation but at nonterminal locations. Branches are points in the web where a route splits into two or more routes. Judged changes tended to be lower for species following branching points than for species the same distance from the perturbation but not following branching points. It is proposed that the findings can be explained as effects of a mental model employing concepts of influence and resistance. Under this model a perturbation is a change in energy level at a point in the system that acts as an influence affecting the rest of the system. The basic concepts in this model are domain‐general and on that basis it is predicted that the dissipation effect should be found in judgments of any physical system to which notions of influence and resistance can be applied. (shrink)

In recent decades, a new scientific approach to understand, explain, and predict many features of religion has emerged. The cognitive science of religion has amassed research on the forces that shape the tendency for humans to be religious and on what forms belief takes. It suggests that religion, like language or music, naturally emerges in humans with tractable similarities. This new approach has profound implications for how we understand religion, including why it appears so easily, and why people are (...) willing to fight-and die for it. Yet it is not without its critics, and some fear that scholars are explaining the ineffable mystery of religion away, or by showing that religion is natural proves or disproves the existence of God. An Introduction to the Cognitive Science of Religion offers students and general readers an accessible introduction to the approach, providing an overview of key findings and the debates that shape it. The volume includes a glossary of key terms, and each chapter includes suggestions for further thought and further reading as well as chapter summaries highlighting key points. This book is an indispensable resource for introductory courses on religion and a much-needed option for advanced courses. (shrink)

The article is a critical discussion of the aims behind the teaching of philosophy in British primary schools. It begins by reviewing the recent Special Issue of the Journal of Philosophy of Education Vol 45 Issue 2 2011 on ‘Philosophy for Children in Transition’, so as to see what light this might throw on the topic just mentioned. The result is patchy; many, but not all, of the papers in the Special Issue deal with issues far removed from the classroom. (...) Insights from the more practical papers, especially those working within the legacy of Matthew Lipman, are woven into the ensuing discussion. This describes two overlapping strands of work in primary philosophy, one focusing more than the other on topics familiar in specialised philosophy courses for older people. The article then discusses two kinds of aim behind primary philosophy, one to do with induction into philosophy as a discipline, the other to do with the enhancement of reasoning abilities. It finds both of these problematic. While welcoming more attention to different kinds of reasoning, it does not see this as a reason for teaching philosophy in particular. The article concludes with an account of possible reasons why primary philosophy has become increasingly popular over the last two decades. (shrink)

Beginning with the experience of a white woman's stomach seizing up in fear of a black man, this essay examines some of the ethical and epistemological issues connected to white ignorance. In conversation with Charles Mills on the epistemology of ignorance, I argue that white ignorance primarily operates physiologically, not cognitively. Drawing critically from psychology, neurocardiology, and other medical sciences, I examine some of the biological effects of racism on white people's stomachs and hearts. I (...) argue for a nonideal medical theory focused on improving wellness in a society that systematically has damaged the health of people of color. The essay concludes that to be fully successful, critical philosophy of race must examine not just the financial, legal, political, and other forms of racism, but also its biological and physiological operations. (shrink)

Contemporary political theory has made the question of the “people” a topic of sustained analysis. This article identifies two broad approaches taken—norm-based and contestation-based—and, noting some problems left outstanding, goes on to advance a complementary account centred on partisan practice. It suggests the definition of “the people” is closely bound up in the analysis of political conflict, and that partisans engaged in such conflict play an essential role in constructing and contesting different principled conceptions. The article goes on (...) to show how such an account does not lead to a normatively hollow, purely historical conception of “the people,” but rather highlights the normative importance of practices that, at the minimum, de-naturalise undesirable conceptions of the people and, at their best, give political legitimacy and a representative basis to those one might wish to see prosper. (shrink)

This chapter investigates into what makes Captain America a great role model by describing some of his basic virtues. By looking at how Captain America embodies virtues such as courage and humility, he serves as a role model not only in terms of the virtues themselves but also in how he puts them into practice. The chapter argues that Captain America's supposed “black‐and‐white” ethics weren't simplistic in the 1940s, they are just as applicable now as they were then. One (...) persistent wrong about which Cap expresses righteous indignation is prejudice towards minorities. Captain America's tremendous willingness to sacrifice can be traced to his oversized sense of responsibility. Perseverance is what philosophers call an executive virtue because it helps people follow through on their judgment made in light of their virtues and principles. The virtues described in this chapter are only the ones most commonly attributed to Captain America in the comics. (shrink)

“Men can never be free, because they’re weak, corrupt, worthless and restless. The people believe in authority; they’ve grown tired of waiting for miracle or mystery. Science is their religion; no greater explanation exists for them.” (Cigarette Smoking Man, "Talitha Cumi" The X-Files 3X24).

It is well documented that people with moderate-to-severe traumatic brain injury (TBI) can undergo personality changes, including becoming more impulsive in terms of how they behave. Legal guidance and academic commentary support the view that impulsiveness can render someone decisionally incompetent as defined by English and Welsh law. However, impulsiveness is a trait found within the healthy population. Arguably, impulsiveness is also a trait that gives rise to behaviours that should normally be tolerated even when they cause harm to (...) the person enacting the behaviours. The purpose of this paper is to show why both of these considerations present as significant challenges to the law in England and Wales. (shrink)

After more than three decades of economic reform, is China better off? More importantly, do the Chinese people enjoy a greater sense of well-being? Reflecting on the current state of affairs, Jiwei Ci's Moral China in the Age of Reform is a timely and thought-provoking book.The book is a critique of China's lack of political and moral reform after its economic reform since 1978, detailing Professor Ci's genuine concern for the future of China. His personal experience, as a Chinese (...) who lives and teaches in Hong Kong, lends an additional first-person perspective to a penetrating logical analysis of China's predicament in the postmodern context. In their relentless pursuit of wealth, Ci points out, the people of China... (shrink)

Background: People with traumatic brain injury face a range of mental health challenges during the adjustment process post-injury, but access to treatment can be difficult, particularly for those who live in regional and remote regions. eHealth provides the potential to improve access to evidence-based psychological therapy for people with a severe TBI. The aim of the current study is to assess the efficacy of a psychological intervention delivered via video consulting to reduce psychological distress in people with (...) TBI.Methods: This paper outlines the protocol for a multi-center, three-arm, parallel, non-inferiority randomized controlled trial of an evidence-based manualized psychological intervention, ACT-Adjust. ACT-Adjust provides nine sessions for adults with a moderate to severe TBI experiencing clinical levels of psychological distress. Fifty-six participants referred from Brain Injury Rehabilitation Units across New South Wales and the NSW icare scheme will be randomly allocated to three conditions; video consulting, face-to-face and, a waitlist control.Discussion: This is the first RCT to evaluate the efficacy of a psychological therapy delivered via video consulting for individuals with a moderate to severe TBI.Trial Registration:www.anzctr.org.au, Australian New Zealand Clinical Trials Registry ANZCTRN2619001602112. (shrink)

Do the ethical features of an artwork bear on its aesthetic value? This movie endorses misogyny, that song is a civil rights anthem, the clay constituting this statue was extracted with underpaid labor—are facts like these the proper bases for aesthetic evaluation? I argue that this debate has suffered from a false presupposition: that if the answer is yes (for at least some such ethical features), such considerations feature as pro tanto contributions to an artwork's overall aesthetic value, i.e., as (...) merits or flaws which make something have more or less overall aesthetic value. As the case of ethically laden, aesthetic evaluation makes clear, however, good aesthetic judgement is irreducibly multi-dimensional, e.g., "the movie has an engaging soundtrack, tasteful camera work, and takes a misogynistically prurient perspective on its female lead.'' Such a "non-summative" judgement refuses to reduce those various dimensions of aesthetic value to a single aggregate aesthetic evaluation, like "it's a 6/10" or "it's a pretty good movie!" I defend both the modest claim that such non-summative evaluations are not mistaken and the extremist claim that summative (i.e., unidimensional) aesthetic evaluation is defective by considering other domains of normative assessment in which summing seems inappropriate, notably including evaluations of people's character. (shrink)

Joseph Butler was an Anglican priest and later a bishop who wrote about ethics, religion, and other philosophical themes. He is not well known today. During his lifetime and into the early part of the twentieth century he was better known especially for his major work the Analogy of Religion (1736). Today he is known mostly for his sermons which are interpreted as essays on ethics and for his essay on identity. Butler had a profound effect on J. H. Newman, (...) Matthew Arnold, and W. E. Gladstone and some effect on many other popular, academic, and professional readers. This book is as much about Butler’s sources and his reception as it is about the way he arranged and presented the evidence in the first half of the 18th century. He was a good man and is recognized by the Anglican church as a divine. We have no interest in taking a nostalgic look at a quaint figure in English church history. To those who claim Butler is unknown, that he was “blown out of the water” by John Wesley or Karl Barth, or Cornelius van Til, we can only say Butler is not as well known in the 20th and 21st centuries as in the 19th, but he is certainly not unknown to those who have taken any interest in philosophy, religion, or ethics. Today there has been a revival of interest in Bishop Butler. Our concern is to build and maintain a bridge that will help to keep this momentum. He offers an ethic that is universal and clearly Christian, yet it is based on the nature of man. Kant had a similar project, but in our opinion, Butler makes more compelling arguments. What is of interest to the Christian apologist is Butler’s work in this area. The purpose of this book is to present Butler’s ideas. We believe that his ethics have a universality that is applicable to people of all religious faiths and those that have none. It is common sense way of looking at ethics for everyday interaction. This book is a narrative argument presenting in detail how Butler’s creative arrangement of the evidence served as a bridge between the ancients as known in the Greek, Latin, and Hebrew originals, and the moderns, mostly Anglophone, who constituted Butler’s work environment and his reception in the latter day down to the present. We can hardly expect everyone to agree with Butler on all points, we certainly do not. The point at issue is rather whether he merits a seat at the present-day round table of deliberation on matters pertaining to philosophy, religion, and ethics. (shrink)

We take a tremendous interest in how other people think of us. We have certain expectations of others, concerning how we are to figure in their thought and judgment. And we often feel wronged if those are disappointed. But it is puzzling how others’ beliefs could wrong us. On the one hand, moral considerations don’t bear on the truth of a belief and so seem to be the wrong kind of reasons for belief. On the other hand, truth-directed considerations (...) seem to render moral considerations redundant. In this paper, we argue that to understand the possibility of doxastic wronging, we need to understand beliefs, no less than actions, as ways of relating to one another. In particular, how we take account of what others think and say will depend on whether we take up what P. F. Strawson calls the participant stance toward them. We show how this helps to make sense of an example Miranda Fricker identifies as a case of epistemic injustice. We then use the example to spell out the ethical significance of Tyler Burge’s idea that we have a default entitlement to accept at face value what we receive from a rational source. (shrink)

White, Don The United States Conference of Catholic Bishops in 'Preaching the Mystery of Faith: The Sunday Homily' identified a problem with liturgical preaching in the Catholic Church: 'in survey after survey over the past years, the People of God have called for more powerful and inspiring preaching. A steady diet of tepid or poorly prepared homilies is often cited as a cause for discouragement on the part of the laity and even leading some to turn away from (...) the Church'. Pope Francis in Evangelii Gaudium has referred to the same problem, saying that 'so many concerns have been expressed about this important ministry and we cannot simply ignore them'. (shrink)

What exactly does it mean to “trust your gut”? What use are gut-level insights when a person is attempting to consciously and deliberately navigate life altering decisions, such as those surrounding marriage, divorce, job changes, home buying, etc.? This essay provides a partial answer to those questions by leveraging the account of “emotional bodily feelings” offered in Tom Cochrane’s The Emotional Mind: A Control Theory of Affective States. This essay shows why “trusting your gut” is a reasonably good path to (...) emotional self-awareness in decision-making. The first half of the essay offers an analysis of what many people mean by the colloquial advice to “trust your gut,” at least when they deploy that advice in context of an ongoing dialogue about a friend or family member’s major life-decision. In the second half, this article briefly summarizes Cochrane’s account of emotions and emotional bodily feelings, and spells out how these concepts might be deployed to understand the advice to “trust your gut” as nearly tantamount to saying “pursue emotional self-awareness.”. (shrink)

Wittgenstein's Tractatus contains a wide range of profound insights into the nature of logic and language – insights which will survive the particular theories of the Tractatus and seem to me to mark definitive and unassailable landmarks in our understanding of some of the deepest questions of philosophy. And yet alongside these insights there is a theory of the nature of the relation between language and reality which appears both to be impossible to work out in detail in a way (...) which is completely satisfactory, and to be bizarre and incredible. I am referring to the so-called logical atomism of the Tractatus . The main outlines of this theory at least are clear and familiar: there are elementary propositions which gain their sense from being models of possible states of affairs; such propositions are configurations of names of simple objects, signifying that those simples are analogously configured; every proposition has its sense through being analysable as a truth-functional compound of elementary propositions, thus deriving its sense from the sense of the elementary propositions when this view is taken in conjunction with the idea that the sense of a proposition is completely specified by specifying its truth-conditions. In this way the Tractatus incorporates in its working out a philosophical system analogous to the classical philosophical systems of Leibniz or Spinoza which are regarded by many people, in a sense rightly, as the prehistoric monsters of philosophy which are not to be studied as living organisms, but studied as the curiosities of human thought. And we may here agree that in the end we must simply reject a philosophy which incorporates such features as its postulation of simple eternal objects, or of a possibility of an analysis of a proposition which was presented as a pre-condition for the propositions that we ordinarily utter to make sense, and yet the specific form of which we are unaware of, and so on. (shrink)

Lorenzo Magnani’s Understanding Violence: The Intertwining of Morality, Religion and Violence is a big 23 book. Not big in the sense of page count or prepublication advertisement, but big in the sense of pregnant 24 with potential application. Professor Magnani is explicit in his intentions, “to show how violence is de facto 25 intertwined with morality, and how much violence is hidden, and invisibly or unintentionally performed" 26 (page 273) while confessing a personal motivation, “warning myself (and every reader) that (...) violence is 27 traceable back to my (our) own door.” (page 66) This is not an easy task, given the slippery expanse of his 28 subject, to drag violence out of the shadows, bringing it home to each personal purveyor. But Magnani 29 succeeds, and fruitfully. Understanding Violence deftly exposes violence in its myriad forms from individual 30 aggression to colliding global-historical narratives. It does this by detailing the processes whereby people act 31 from moralities of their own creation, adopting various moral frameworks including those specific to 32 religions, social and political groups, as well as personal constructs, and in terms of which "they engage and 33 disengage both intentionally and unintentionally, in a strict interplay between morality and violence." (page 34 184) Resolving these complex dynamics through simple models and illustrations, Understanding Violence 35 elevates the reader from the forest-for-the-trees perpetual-crisis-blindness symptomatic of the present era, to 36 a position from which personal moral commitments as practical, as necessary, and as the source of hidden 37 violence are clearly visible. Moreover, due to the practicality of Magnani’s demonstrations, it continues in 38 this work long after the text itself is laid back on the shelf. (shrink)

Some people think that the impulse to philosophise begins in early childhood: Gareth Matthews, for instance, in his Philosophy and the Young Child . His book begins ‘TIM , while busily engaged in licking a pot, asked, “Papa, how can we be sure that everything is not a dream?’” ‘Tim's puzzle,’ he tells us, ‘is quintessentially philosophical. Tim has framed a question that calls into doubt a very ordinary notion in such a way as to make us wonder whether (...) we really know something that most of us unquestioningly assume we know.’. (shrink)

The idea of role‐playing makes some people nervous – even some people who play role‐playing games (RPGs). So the idea of immersion is central to understanding how Dungeons Dragons and other aspects of participatory culture work. Phenomenology is a kind of “philosophy of mind” associated with the works of twentieth‐century philosophers Edmund Husserl, Martin Heidegger, Jean‐Paul Sartre, and Maurice Merleau‐Ponty, among others. The domain of phenomenology encompasses the entire range of experiences in the world, paying attention to what (...) Husserl called “intentionality,” or how our consciousness is directed toward particular objects in the world. The fact that this is presented as an atypical approach to play, or at least one that requires some effort, invites us to ask about typical modes of play if visualization of in‐game events is not that mode. This chapter concluded by scratch the surface of a complete phenomenological description of role‐playing. (shrink)

All right, first off I need to disappoint some people who despise reading the fine print on things or just plain love to speed-read only large fonts: this is not only not my last lecture, I m not even retiring anytime soon. So sorry to those of you poised to shout Good riddance to bad rubbish! at the end of this soliloquy. You re going to have to be patient a while longer.

This comprehensive history of German philosophy from its medieval beginnings to near the end of the eighteenth century explores the spirit of German intellectual life and its distinctiveness from that of other countries. Beck devotes whole chapters to four great philosophers -- Nicholas of Cusa, Leibniz, Lessing, and Kant -- and extensively examines many others, including Albertus Magnus, Meister Eckhart, Paracelsus, Kepler, Mendelssohn, Wolff, and Herder. Questioning explanations of philosophy by the racial or ethnic character of its exponents, Beck's conclusion (...) is that German philosophy developed as a series of diverse responses to the historical experiences of the German people. The peculiarities of German philosophy must be viewed in the light of German political problems and educational structures. In particular he stresses the importance of the connections between philosophy and Germany's intellectual, literary, religious, and political history. (shrink)