Ever since its first publication in 1970, Amartya Sen's paper “The Impossibility of a Paretian Liberal” has served as the starting point for almost all discussions of liberty in social choice theory. However, a number of people, myself included, have argued that Sen's theorem rests on a misleading characterization of liberty . In a recent paper, addressed to a philosophical audience, Sen has provided a careful defence of his theorem against this charge. I shall argue that this defence does not (...) work. (shrink)

Our goal in this chapter is to draw on empirical work about preference formation and welfare to propose a distinctive form of paternalism, libertarian in spirit, one that should be acceptable to those who are firmly committed to freedom of choice on grounds of either autonomy or welfare. Indeed, we urge that a kind of ‘libertarian paternalism’ provides a basis for both understanding and rethinking many social practices, including those that deal with worker welfare, consumer protection, and the family.

Citizens of liberal, affluent societies are regularly encouraged to support reforms meant to improve conditions for badly-off people in the developing world. Our economic and political support is solicited for causes such as: banning child labor, implementing universal primary education, closing down sweatshops and brothels, etc. But what if the relevant populations or individuals in the developing world do not support these particular reforms or aid programs? What if they would strongly prefer other reforms and programs, or would rank the (...) various benefits that might be offered differently than seems reasonable to the Western, liberal supporters of these campaigns and organizations? What is the proper liberal response here? I argue that the proper liberal response is to support those programs and reforms that the global poor most value. The bulk of the paper is devoted to arguing against the popular liberal argument which states that we can safely disregard the preferences of the oppressed when they seem very unreasonable because these individuals suffer from “adaptive preferences.” This typically is taken to mean that their preferences are “not their own” in an important sense. I put forward various different proposals for why adaptive preferences can be safely dismissed, but ultimately argue that they are not persuasive. And if it is no longer legitimate to appeal to adaptive preferences as a basis for disregarding what oppressed people want, then I argue that to do so is straightforward paternalism, and so is unjustifiable in all but the most extreme cases. Finally, I argue for the following concrete recommendations: Given that resources are not infinite, we should (1) Support programs that give oppressed people increased access to information, such as access to technology, (2) support those reforms and aid programs that the oppressed themselves regard as most important, with special emphasis on those opportunities for education that they deem valuable, and (3) refrain from supporting coercive policies intended to thwart adaptive preferences. (shrink)

In a paper recently published in this journal, Navin and Largent argue in favour of a type of policy to regulate non-medical exemptions from childhood vaccination which they call ‘Inconvenience’. This policy makes it burdensome for parents to obtain an exemption to child vaccination, for example, by requiring parents to attend immunization education sessions and to complete an application form to receive a waiver. Navin and Largent argue that this policy is preferable to ‘Eliminationism’, i.e. to policies that do not (...) allow non-medical exemptions, because Inconvenience has been shown to maintain exemption rates low while not harming parents by forcing them to do something that goes against their beliefs. We argue that it is at least doubtful that Inconvenience is ethically preferable to Eliminationism: while the latter disregards the value of liberty, Inconvenience disregards the value of fairness in the distribution of the burdens entailed by the preservation of a public good like herd immunity. We propose a variant of Inconvenience, which we call ‘Contribution’, which we think is preferable to the versions of Inconvenience discussed by Navin and Largent in that it successfully strikes a balance between the values of parents’ liberty, fairness and expected utility. (shrink)

Liberty is what libertarians advocate. Both because of the inherent value of human liberty and because of the increasing wealth and welfare it brings to all. They see the aggressive coercion of the state as the main enemy of liberty. The solution is to roll back the state until there is little or no state left. Libertarianism has been rapidly growing since the 1970s. But it is still not commonly understood or even given a proper hearing. However, you will increasingly (...) come across it. Often it will be through state enthusiasts disingenuously claiming to be libertarians . At other times it will be through state enthusiasts attacking libertarianism as an extremist ideology. And very occasionally it will be real libertarians explaining and defending their views. J C Lester is a libertarian philosopher who has been writing about why liberty is preferable to politics for many years. This book contains many of his shorter writings on the subject. These range from the populist to the philosophical. Together they function as a miscellaneous introduction to libertarianism. The various different topics and approaches should give the reader a good cross-reference grasp of the subject. (shrink)

Dworkin's reconciliation of liberty and equality in chapter 3 of 'Sovereign Virtue' presupposes the compossibility of the satisfaction of the envy test and the realization of the principle of abstraction. It is, however, impossible to realize a distribution that is both envy-free and maximally sensitive to plans and preferences. When this conflict between the envy test and the principle of abstraction is brought to light, it will become apparent that Dworkin falls short of a complete reconciliation of liberty and equality.

In “Do Animals have an Interest in Liberty?” Alasdair Cochrane brings some much needed attention to the ethics of animal confinement (2009a). Of particular significance is the question of whether confinement in itself is bad for nonhuman animal (hereafter, animal) well-being. If confinement conditions cause animals to suffer or frustrate their preferences it is safe to assume that liberty or freedom (following Cochrane, I use the terms interchangeably) would be instrumentally good for them. But, what about seemingly benign conditions of (...) confinement in which animals are not suffering or having their preferences frustrated? Is confinement in such cases bad for their well-being? In other words, do animals have an .. (shrink)

In a recent paper published in this journal, Giubilini, Douglas and Savulescu argue that we have given insufficient weight to the moral importance of fairness in our account of the best policies for non-medical exemptions to childhood immunization requirements. They advocate for a type of policy they call Contribution, according to which parents must contribute to important public health goods before their children can receive NMEs to immunization requirements. In this response, we argue that Giubilini, Douglas and Savulescu give insufficient (...) weight to the moral importance parental liberty in ways that count against their preferred type of NMEs policy and threaten public support for mandatory vaccination laws and public health initiatives generally. (shrink)

Aggregation-friendly moral theories such as classical utilitarianism are forced to invest a great deal of ingenuity in damping out and modulating the effects of welfare aggregation. In Mill's treatment, the problem famously appears as the puzzle of how the Principle of Liberty is meant to be compatible with the Principle of Utility, and there have been a great many attempted interpretations of his solution, all, in my view, unsatisfactory. I will first reconstruct Mill's generally unnoticed account of the psychological implementation (...) of higher pleasures; this will allow me to explain what the distinction between higher and lower pleasures was, and how Mill was introduced lexical preference orderings into his theory. Then I will show how the underlying psychological theory permits Mill to argue for the lexical priority of liberty over the goods which liberty allows us to obtain. Finally, I will turn to the Millian considerations omitted from the argument I will have reconstructed. By way of explaining why they are so difficult to accommodate, I will consider why Mill might have abandoned his projected sciences of character. I will take my leave by asking what Mill's failure to turn his implementation analysis of the higher pleasures into an argument expressing the importance of individuality and originality means for us. (shrink)

In post-Wollstonecraft terminology, the rights of woman, like the rights of man, are taken to include freedoms of many kinds – political, religious, social – freedoms enshrined in the French revolutionary generalisation, la liberté. The strength of liberty’s modern political connotations obscures the fact that, in earlier times, the term was freighted with connotations which were deemed socially and publicly unacceptable for womankind. The political claim, that women are entitled to the same freedoms as men, was both subversive of an (...) order where women occupy lower status than men, and it was also insubordinate – to speak out on any issue was, for a woman, to speak out of turn, to be insolent, if not impudent. The first women to proclaim those freedoms as rights broke the bounds not just of social order, but of social convention. My paper examines some of the ways in which pre- Wollstonecraft feminists conceived of ‘liberty’, particularly its political sense, and how their understanding of it fits with their feminism. I shall do so by discussing two figures who come from opposite poles of the political spectrum: Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle, who was a staunch monarchist, and Catharine Macaulay, whose political preference was republican. In this essay, I point out some of the ways in which the ‘feminism’ of each is complicated by the rather different assumptions with which they operated. (shrink)

Resumen La renta básica proporciona a la ciudadanía una autonomía económica que se traduce en una libertad real para conducir sus vidas. Sin embargo, en este artículo defiendo que la renta básica no sería efectiva en situaciones de pobreza donde se generan preferencias adaptativas en las personas. Para mostrarlo analizaré las bases psicológicas del comportamiento de personas con preferencias adaptativas. A continuación, abordaré qué estrategias son las indicadas para revertir la situación de preferencias adaptativas. Implementar estas políticas permitirá que la (...) renta básica pueda empoderar también a los más pobres.Basic income provides citizenship an economic autonomy which is translated in a real liberty to drive their lives. However, in this article I aim to analyze why basic income would not be effective in situations of poverty in which people have “adaptive preferences”. I will analyze the psychological bases of the behavior of persons with adaptive preferences. Then, I will study which strategies are more proper to reverse that situation. This would allow understanding how basic income could empower to the poorest too. (shrink)

How can we establish a political/legal order that in principle does not require the human flourishing of any person or group to be given structured preference over that of any other? Addressing this question as the central problem of political philosophy,_ Norms of Liberty_ offers a new conceptual foundation for political liberalism that takes protecting liberty, understood in terms of individual negative rights, as the primary aim of the political/legal order. Rasmussen and Den Uyl argue for construing individual rights (...) as metanormative principles, directly tied to politics, that are used to establish the political/ legal conditions under which full moral conduct can take place. These they distinguish from normative principles, used to provide guidance for moral conduct within the ambit of normative ethics. This crucial distinction allows them to develop liberalism as a metanormative theory, not a guide for moral conduct. The moral universe need not be minimized or morality grounded in sentiment or contracts to support liberalism, they show. Rather, liberalism can be supported, and many of its internal tensions avoided, with an ethical framework of Aristotelian inspiration—one that understands human flourishing to be an objective, inclusive, individualized, agent-relative, social, and self-directed activity. (shrink)

Addresses the question of whether special preference for friends is morally justified.

In On the People’s Terms, Philip Pettit incorporates the Sieyèsian notion of constituent power into his constitutional theory of non-domination. In this article, I argue that Emmanuel Sieyès’s understanding of liberty precludes such an appropriation. While a republican, his conceptualisation of liberty in the face of commercial society stood apart from theories of civic vigilance, preferring instead to disentangle individuals from politics and maximise what he understood to be their non-political freedoms. Sieyès saw that liberty was heightened through relations of (...) representation and commercial dependency. This conception of liberty was pivotal to the identity of the nation, and so allowed Sieyès to assess forms of collective injustice committed by the French nobility. It also provided the normative foundation of his theory of constituent power. For Sieyès, constituent power guarded against legislative excess in a decidedly minimal sense, intending instead to separate citizens from the political sphere so they were not burdened with ongoing participation or public vigilance. (shrink)

This paper attempts to square libertarian principles with the reality of formal education by asking how far we should and can allow people to do as they wish in educational settings. The major focus is on children in schools, as the concept ‘childhood’ ipso facto implies restrictions on doing as one wishes, and schools as institutions entail inevitable constraints. Children by definition tend to enjoy stronger protection rights but weaker liberty rights than adults. A local preferential calculus is developed as (...) a guide for teachers, suggesting wishes should be granted where feasible and at least welfare neutral. In the case of teachers, employers set the parameters for the feasibility criterion but should also ensure at least welfare neutrality, while students in adult and higher education should be responsible for the feasibility and welfare outcomes of their own choices. (shrink)

When a patient lacks decision-making capacity, then according to standard clinical ethics practice in the United States, the health care team should seek guidance from a surrogate decision-maker, either previously selected by the patient or appointed by the courts. If there are no surrogates willing or able to exercise substituted judgment, then the team is to choose interventions that promote a patient’s best interests. We argue that, even when there is input from a surrogate, patient preferences should be an additional (...) source of guidance for decisions about patients who lack decision-making capacity. (shrink)

Near the end of the long and often convoluted discussion of freedom in the chapter ‘Of Power’ in An Essay concerning Human Understanding, Locke states that in ‘The care of ourselves, that we mistake not imaginary for real happiness, is the necessary foundation of our liberty’. He goes on to explain that ‘we are by the necessity of preferring and pursuing true happiness as our greatest good, obliged to suspend the satisfaction of our desire in particular cases’. Locke then adds (...) that the ability to suspend our desires in particular cases is ‘the hinge on which turns the liberty of intellectual Beings’. Unfortunately, this hinge has proved a serious stumbling block for commentators. After three hundred years, serious scholarly disagreement remains about even the central orientation of Locke’s views on freedom. Locke was aware of the opacity surrounding portions of his discussion of liberty. In letters to several correspondents, he confesses to almost leaving it out of the first edition, fearing that ‘the novelty and subtlety of the matter itself... [would be taken] as the paradoxes of an innovator or the stumblings of an ill-advised wanderer’. As evidence that his worries were not far wrong, Locke adds that amongst his friends, ‘more have entered into discussion with... [me] about this one subject than about all the remaining chapters of the book’. My entry into this controversy will be by way of Leibniz, one of Locke’s earliest and most astute commentators. (shrink)

This paper argues that there are two irreducibly distinct negative concepts of liberty: freedom as non-prevention, and freedom as non-coercion. Contemporary proponents of the negative view, such as Matthew Kramer and Ian Carter, have sought to develop the Hobbesian idea that freedom is essentially a matter of physical non-prevention. Accordingly, they have sought to reduce the freedom-diminishing effect of coercion to that of prevention by arguing that coercive threats function to diminish freedom by preventing people from performing certain combinations of (...) actions. Against this, this paper argues that coercion diminishes people’s freedom in ways that cannot be fully captured in terms of prevention. Focusing on two types of case, those involving coercive threats and those involving coercive preference manipulation, it argues that non-coercion and physical non-prevention are importantly different goods. It concludes that a complete negative account of liberty must draw not only on the (Hobbesian) ‘non-prevention’ strand of the negative tradition but also on its (Hayekian) ‘non-coercion’ strand. (shrink)

Tomasi’s view of social democracy is shown to mischaracterize it as hostile to private economic liberties, which all real-world social democracies guarantee. The supposed Manichean choice between social and market democracy, seen as requiring contrasting accounts of fairness, results from combining Rawls-style idealization of regime types, the Hayekian presumption that social democracies are advancing along the road to serfdom, and tendentious appeal to scant and unconvincing historical evidence. The proposed constitutional protection of ‘thick,’ market-based economic liberties, as favoring both individual (...) self-authorship and fair equality of opportunity, is defended by Tomasi against high-liberal and social democratic views as compatible with what Rawls’s social justice demands, but as their scope expands in the course of the book this fails to convince. Finally it is argued that the ever-expanding reach of the market across all social life, with feedback effects on the formation of preferences, renders questionable Tomasi’s claims that his account of market fairness is neutral with respect to ways of life and that it specifies conditions under which individuals can live lives that are truly their own. (shrink)

In response to crises, people sometimes prioritize fewer specific identifiable victims over many unspecified statistical victims. How other factors can explain this bias remains unclear. So two experiments investigated how complying with public health recommendations during the COVID19 pandemic depended on victim portrayal, reflection, and philosophical beliefs (Total N = 998). Only one experiment found that messaging about individual victims increased compliance compared to messaging about statistical victims—i.e., "flatten the curve" graphs—an effect that was undetected after controlling for other factors. (...) However, messaging about flu (vs. COVID19) indirectly reduced compliance by reducing perceived threat of the pandemic. Nevertheless, moral beliefs predicted compliance better than messaging and reflection in both experiments. The second experiment’s additional measures revealed that religiosity, political preferences, and beliefs about science also predicted compliance. This suggests that flouting public health recommendations may be less about ineffective messaging or reasoning than philosophical differences. (shrink)

Objective Our study sought to (1) describe the practices and preferences of Colombian adolescents in accessing sexual and reproductive health services: accompanied versus alone; (2) compare actual practices with stated preferences; and (3) determine age and gender differences regarding the practice and these stated preferences. -/- Methods 812 participants aged 11–24 years old answered a survey in two Profamilia clinics in the cities of Medellin and Cali in Colombia. A cross-sectional analysis was performed to compare participants’ answers based on the (...) variables of gender and age. -/- Results A quarter of participants visited the clinic alone (25.4%). Females were more likely to go alone in comparison to males (26.3% vs 14.1%; p = 0.031), and older participants went alone more often than younger participants (p < 0.001). Most participants – 72.7% (95 %CI: 69.3–75.9) – expressed a preference in being accompanied to the clinic, and more than 90% had their preferences met. The preferences of older participants were, however, less likely to be met than those of younger participants (p < 0.001), notably, because they predominantly wanted to be accompanied. -/- Conclusion Contemporary public health and bioethics literature advocates in favor of developing health services that better meet the preferences of adolescents. The present research highlights an apparent blind spot related to the role that others (e.g., parents, friends, partners) can or should play in accompanying adolescent patients when they access sexual and reproductive health services. Respecting adolescents’ preferences, and hence their autonomy, is not simply a matter of ensuring freedom from constraints (e.g., their right and ability to go alone). Rather, it should also consider the liberty to choose whether to be accompanied when accessing SHRS and by whom. (shrink)

A claim that certain purely private matters should be beyond the reach of society's laws, moral rules, and other customs is central to the distinctive liberalism of John Stuart Mill. On Liberty, perhaps the most eloquent defense of individual liberty ever written, laments the hostility allegedly displayed in modern mass societies toward “the right of each individual to act [in private matters] as seems good to his judgement and inclinations”. In Mill's view, a free society must design its institutions with (...) due regard for what he terms “individuality.” That is, public authority, whether in the form of law, customary opinion, or economic power, must be self-limiting so that it does not interfere with the rights of individuals to choose as they like with respect to such private concerns as religious faith, reading materials, living companions, and consumption of drugs and alcohol. Individuals and voluntary groups should be permitted to do whatever they prefer within their private spheres even if everyone else in society dislikes what they do, is annoyed by them, and actually chooses not to be around them or to befriend them. (shrink)

ABSTRACTThis paper considers the moral justifiability of military conscription. Philosopher James Pattison has developed a theoretical framework for this purpose that he calls the Moderate Instrumentalist Approach, which assesses forms of military recruitment in light of a weighted comparison of three main factors: military effectiveness, democratic control and proper treatment of military personnel. According to Pattison, all-volunteer force systems are morally preferable by comparing better when it comes to these factors than other systems of military recruitment, notably conscription. However, I (...) argue that Pattison fails to evaluate certain hybrid systems, in particular what I call the Nordic Model of Conscription. I show that there are good reasons to think that such a hybrid system compares just as well or even better than an all-volunteer force, making the Nordic Model of Conscription at least as morally justifiable and arguably also morally preferable. (shrink)

John Harris criticises the European Parliament’s ‘waft in the direction of human rights and human dignity’ and rejects its suggestion that ‘human cloning violates the principle of equality since “it permits a eugenic and racist selection of the human race”’. He argues that, by parity of reasoning, so too do ‘pre-natal and pre-implantation screening, not to mention egg donation, sperm donation, surrogacy, abortion and human preference in choice of partner’. Conflating the techniques mentioned (ie, human cloning, egg donation, etc) (...) with human preference in choice of a partner, he holds that reproductive liberty must be the operative principle in determining what ought to be prohibited by law in the realm of human reproduction. This article challenges his two problematic assumptions. (shrink)

Currently, some philosophers and technicians propose to change the fundamental constitution of Homo sapiens, as by significantly altering the genome, implanting microchips in the brain, and pursuing related techniques. Among these proposals are aspirations to guide humanity’s evolution into new species. Some philosophers have countered that such species alteration is unethical and have proposed international policies to protect species integrity; yet, it remains unclear on what basis such right to species integrity would rest. An answer may come from an unexpected (...) angle of rights issues: Some cultures have indicated that they want no part of our technological culture, preferring to retain their practices. Yet, rights documents do not explicitly establish that any individual has a right to species integrity. Careful interpretation of rights documents nonetheless reveals that such a right to species integrity is implicit. Interpreting these so as to reveal this needed right is also necessary to retain the foundations of rights documents and institutions. Further, acknowledging a right of species integrity could mean, because of practicalities, a limit to the freedom of proponents to implement proposals to manipulate the species. (shrink)

Frederick 2013 (the critique) offers criticisms of the Escape from Leviathan (EfL) theory of libertarian liberty and also of its compatibility with preference-utilitarian welfare and private-property anarchy. This reply to the critique first explains the underlying philosophical problem with libertarian liberty and EfL’s proposed solution. It then goes through the critique in detail showing that it does not grasp the problem or the solution and offers only misrepresentations and unsound criticisms.

ABSTRACT Isaiah Berlin’s ‘Two Concepts of Liberty’ regards both Hobbes and Constant as supporting the negative version. Both took a favourable view of the freedom to live as one pleases. But this shared preference arose from radically different overall philosophies. Hobbes’s support for freedom as ‘the silence of the laws’ reflected his view of happiness as preference-satisfaction. Constant’s support for freedom as a sphere of absolute rights was supplemented by support for active citizenship and connected with belief in (...) ‘perfectibility’ that was itself linked to religion. These theories involve altogether different understandings of the image of an ‘area’ preserved from interference. Berlin takes over from Constant an appeal to human nature without the idea of progress that had supported it. (shrink)

A reconsideration of mill's theory of "higher pleasures," construed as a way of evaluating changes in preferences or character that result from changes in social environment. mill's account is criticized and partly reconstructed in light of modern preference theory, but viewed favorably as an illuminating attempt to address a fundamental problem in moral evaluation of social institutions. mill's advocacy of the higher pleasures is defended in particular against the charge that it is incompatible with his commitment to liberty.

The Zwolinski 2013 "libertarianism and liberty" essays on libertarianism_org are argued to have the following problems: taking libertarianism to be a "commitment" to the view that "liberty is the highest political value" ; examining and rejecting the maximization of liberty without a libertarian theory of liberty; accepting a persuasive sense of "coercion" ; misunderstandingliberty in the work place; conflating, to varying degrees, freedom of action and freedom from aggression and justice/rights/morals; focusing on logically possible clashes instead of practically possible congruence (...) among utility, liberty, and justice – in particular, that "rule (preference-)utilitarianism" fits "rule libertarianism" ; failing to distinguish liberty from license (and power) concerning slavery, and so-called "civil and democratic liberties" (and everything else); the idea that any coherent reference to a quantity of liberty requires precise cardinality; failing to see that the quantity of liberty has an inherently qualitative aspect; misunderstanding property as about limiting freedom; mistaking clashing Hobbesian freedom for non-clashing Lockean liberty; adopting G. A. Cohen's confusion about freedom as the libertarian conception of freedom; assuming the – illogical – epistemology of justification" ; not realizing that both allowing and prohibiting pollution "aggresses" and so "aggressions" need to be minimized; the failure of all six of its reasons for rejecting the non-aggression principle. (shrink)

Human life in contemporary society is extremely complex and there are various external factors that directly affect the realization in the individual ends. In this work I analyze the effects of the global market economy, manifested by a mode of production and distribution of goods and services in the form of a global network of economic relations, which involve people, transnational corporations and political and social institutions in moral sphere of people, affecting their choices and the realization of these choices. (...) Individual freedom can be understand as a freedom to realize our choices in the environment of a global economic market, but it is still problematic in the sense that the choices of goods and services available in this market do not reflect individual choices, but a set of preferences standardized according to the market itself. In this paper I will reflect about the individual freedom in economic globalization pointing from the debate between Pettit and Berlin that social freedom advocated by Republican Petit can be satisfactory for a start. (shrink)

Should "hate speech" be made a criminal offense, or does the First Amendment oblige Americans to permit the use of epithets directed against a person's race, religion, ethnic origin, gender, or sexual preference? Does a campus speech code enhance or degrade democratic values? When the American flag is burned in protest, what rights of free speech are involved? In a lucid and balanced analysis of contemporary court cases dealing with these problems, as well as those of obscenity and workplace (...) harassment, acclaimed First Amendment scholar Kent Greenawalt now addresses a broad general audience of readers interested in the most current free speech issues. (shrink)

The project of public-reason liberalism faces a basic problem: publicly justified principles are typically too abstract and vague to be directly applied to practical political disputes, whereas applicable specifications of these principles are not uniquely publicly justified. One solution could be a legislative procedure that selects one member from the eligible set of inconclusively justified proposals. Yet if liberal principles are too vague to select sufficiently specific legislative proposals, can they, nevertheless, select specific legislative procedures? Based on the work of (...) Gerald Gaus, this article argues that the only candidate for a conclusively justified decision procedure is a majoritarian or otherwise ‘neutral’ democracy. If the justification of democracy requires an equality baseline in the design of political regimes and if justifications for departure from this baseline are subject to reasonable disagreement, a majoritarian design is justified by default. Gaus’s own preference for super-majoritarian procedures is based on disputable specifications of justified liberal principles. These procedures can only be defended as a sectarian preference if the equality baseline is rejected, but then it is not clear how the set of justifiable political regimes can be restricted to full democracies. (shrink)

Should "hate speech" be made a criminal offense, or does the First Amendment oblige Americans to permit the use of epithets directed against a person's race, religion, ethnic origin, gender, or sexual preference? Does a campus speech code enhance or degrade democratic values? When the American flag is burned in protest, what rights of free speech are involved? In a lucid and balanced analysis of contemporary court cases dealing with these problems, as well as those of obscenity and workplace (...) harassment, acclaimed First Amendment scholar Kent Greenawalt now addresses a broad general audience of readers interested in the most current free speech issues. (shrink)

The following exploration of the fundamentals of the Religious Society of Friends called Quakers will focus upon a lesser known tradition of the Quakers, namely that of the "Free Friends of Philadelphia" and their modern progeny, the Free Quakers of Indiana These Free Quakers, as they are called, are those who chose to exercise their free right to follow their conscience in all things, a tradition reaching back to the 18 th century in Philadelphia when a contingent of Friends chose (...) to support the war against Britain. A great deal is known about the programmed and unprogrammed traditions of the Religious Society of Friends, the former electing to have recorded ministers and formalized worship and the latter opting for no clergy and a preference for the mystical tradition of silent worship. Much less is known about the Free Quakers of Revolutionary Pennsylvania and the subsequent modern day Friends, their ideological progeny. In this brief essay, we intend to correct this common oversight in Quaker history. (shrink)

Cases of akratic behavior are generally seen as paradigmatic depictions of the knowledge-action gap (Darnell et al 2019): we know what we should do, we judge that we should do it, yet we often fail to act according to our knowledge. In recent decades attention has been given to a particular instance of akratic behavior, which is that of “inverse akrasia”, where the agent possesses faulty moral knowledge but fails to act accordingly, thus ending up doing the right thing. In (...) particular, two literary examples are considered as exemplifying this kind of akratic situation: Huckleberry Finn (Arpaly & Schroeder 1999, Arpaly 2000, Hursthouse 1999, Kleist 2009, Holton manuscript) and Neoptolemus as understood by Aristotle (NE; Arpaly & Schroeder 1999). In this paper I will argue that those of Neoptolemus and Huck Finn are not cases of inverse akrasia (Holton manuscript) but are much better explained as instances of what Williams (1993) called “moral incapacity”. In particular, the reason why they fail to act according to their original judgments is due to a lack of motivation to act accordingly, which is grounded in their moral self-identities (Blasi 1984; Vigani 2016). The paper will unfold as follows: I will, first, argue that neither Neoptolemus nor Huck Finn show akratic behavior; thus, they cannot be legitimately labeled as “inverse akratics” (par 1.); then, I will argue that they act the way they do notwithstanding their faulty judgments because they are effectively motivated to do so. Such motivation originates in their moral self-identities and is experienced through the threat of self-betrayal (par 2); finally, I will argue that when an agent is motivated to act in a way that is integral with her moral self-identity, acting otherwise is experienced as something one cannot ultimately do; that is, as a moral incapacity (par 3). This “cannot” is neither a metaphor for an “I shouldn’t”, nor an instance of what has been recently labeled a “moral impossibility” (Caprioglio Panizza 2020, 2021), since it does not arise from the normative force of deontic judgments, and it is neither physically nor psychologically impossible for the agent to act otherwise. (shrink)

We study the two model-theoretic concepts of weak saturation and weak amalgamation property in the context of accessible categories. We relate these two concepts providing sufficient conditions for existence and uniqueness of weakly saturated objects of an accessible category ${\cal K}$. We discuss the implications of this fact in classical model theory.

While both men and women work out in contemporary gyms, popular conceptions of the gym as a masculine institution continue. The authors examine organizational processes within a chain of women-only gyms to explore whether and how these processes have feminized the historically masculine gym. They examine the physical setting and equipment, the established procedures for customers' use of machines, and the interactional styles of employees as components of the organization's structure. They argue that the organization's use of technology and labor (...) mobilizes customers' participation in a feminized organizational culture of nonjudgmental and noncompetitive sociability. Organizational processes create a context that fosters gendered interactions and identities among customers. The organizational context calls gendered behavior into play such that the performance is naturalized. The processes outlined may occur in other cases of organizational recoding and suggest ways that transposable gender practices may change the gender coding of an institution yet leave gender hierarchies intact. (shrink)

The visibility of environmental problems and the increasing awareness of associated consequences have made environmental issues salient in Zambia. The purpose of this study was to investigate correlations between the social and psychological influences affecting college students in Zambia, and the behaviours perceived by them to be appropriately environmentally friendly. The underlying social and psychological factors that would determine individuals' attitudinal responses toward appropriate environmental behaviour were assessed. The study attempted to measure behavioural tendencies towards environmental conservation. Behaviour involving energy (...) and water conservation (EW) was consistently rated as the most important, and appropriate category of environmental behaviour, whereas social and political action (SP) was viewed as the least favourable behaviour according to the respondents in Zambia. The respondents who were older in the graduate level of the study and had frequently contact with environmental education activities and courses were more likely to hold positive behavioural tendencies toward environmental conservation in general. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:594 Feminist Studies 41, no. 3. © 2015 by Feminist Studies, Inc. Liberty Walther Barnes and Christin L. Munsch The Paradoxical Privilege of Men and Masculinity in Institutional Review Boards In the 1939 Hollywood classic The Wizard of Oz, the great wizard admonishes Dorothy and her friends to “pay no attention to that man behind the curtain.” Dorothy and company turn to see a man standing before a large (...) control panel operating the smoke, holographic image, and voice of the great wizard. Realizing he has been discovered, the man gives up manipulating the switches and the nebulous wizard vanishes.1 Hegemonic masculinity is analogous to the “all-powerful” wizard.2 In order to maintain its grandeur, power, and mystique, the mechanics of masculine ideology—as well as the social actors who participate in its reproduction —must be kept hidden.3 A crucial aim of feminist research is to 1. The Wizard of Oz, directed by Victor Fleming (Culver City, CA: Metro-Goldwyn -Mayer, 1939). 2. See R. W. Connell, Masculinities: Knowledge, Power and Social Change (Berkeley : University of California Press, 1995); R. W. Connell and James W. Messerschmidt, “Hegemonic Masculinity: Rethinking the Concept,” Gender & Society 19 (2005): 829–61; Michael Kaufman, “Me, Feminism, and Men’s Contradictory Experiences of Power,” in Theorizing Masculinities, ed. Harry Brod and Michael Kaufman (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications, 1994), 142– 63; and Michael S. Kimmel, “Masculinity as Homophobia: Fear, Shame, and Silence in the Construction of Gender Identity” in Brod and Kaufman, Theorizing Masculinities, 119–42. 3. Michael Flood and Bob Pease, “Undoing Men’s Privilege and Advancing Gender Equality in Public Sector Institutions,” Policy and Society 24, no. 4 (2005): 119–38; Allan G. Johnson, The Gender Knot: Unraveling Liberty Walther Barnes and Christin L. Munsch 595 pull back the curtain on men’s lives and masculine institutions in order to demystify socially constructed masculinities, particularly in their most powerful forms. As early feminist scholars note, male privilege renders women’s lives invisible.4 But male privilege renders aspects of men’s lives invisible, too. In this article we highlight how institutional review boards (IRBs) in universities and hospitals erect barriers to research that render particular aspects of men’s lives invisible. We draw on our experiences of submitting ten applications for a series of methodologically diverse studies of masculinity to eight IRBs. First, we argue that, despite their original function of protecting subordinated groups, IRBs are gendered institutions in which members base their decisions on culturally dominant, normative images of women and men. We show how this results in the stringent protection of male research participants, the safeguarding of participants’ personal masculinity, and the shielding of men’s lives from social inquiry. Second, we argue that IRBs are gendering institutions. Our experiences reveal how the privileging and protection of masculinity results in mandatory protocol modifications that idealize hegemonic masculinity. These modifications require researcher-participant interactions that socialize men to engage in gender “appropriate” behavior and reify gendered expectations. Third, our experiences reveal the ways in which IRBs protect the institution itself and privilege the universities, hospitals, and (predominantly male) medical doctors they represent. Consequently, the ways they reproduce social inequality remain impervious to academic inquiry. IRBS AS GENDERED AND GENDERING INSTITUTIONS Every university and hospital in the United States where human research is conducted houses a human research protections program, or IRB, to oversee academic research. Universities with hospitals typically our Patriarchal Legacy (Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, 1997); Michael Kimmel, Guyland: The Perilous World Where Boys Become Men (New York: Harper Collins, 2008). 4. Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, trans. Howard M. Parshley (New York: Knopf, 1951); Sandra Harding, The Science Question in Feminism (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1986); Dorothy E. Smith, “Women’s Perspective as a Radical Critique of Sociology,” in Feminist Perspectives on Social Research, ed. Sharlene N. Hesse-Biber and Michelle L. Yaiser (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004), 84–96. 596 Liberty Walther Barnes and Christin L. Munsch maintain two types of IRB committees: a social-behavioral committee that oversees studies in the social sciences, and a biomedical committee to supervise clinical drug trials, experimental medical treatments, and tissue and blood research. The duty of the... (shrink)

Nell’estate del 1944 alcuni membri del Sonderkommando di Auschwitz, il “comando speciale” composto da prigionieri costretti al più infame dei lavori, quello nelle camere a gas e nei crematori, riescono a strappare quattro fotografie a quella terribile realtà. In due delle quattro foto si vedono i cadaveri ammassati a bruciare, in un’altra, delle donne nude correre, spinte verso le camere a gas, mentre nell’ultima distinguiamo appena dei rami. Ma c’è molto altro in queste foto, dalle quali Did...

The object of this research is gentleness, a construct maybe not treated enough in the literature, but just in the area of the so called Positive Psychology. And precisely from his representative Martin Seligman, the inspiration for the construction of a questionnaire and of a specific hypothesis has been born, including the use of a precise terminology. In general terms, maybe the most interesting result lies in the fact of having found a correlation between the various items, therefore between the (...) various constructs, in accordance with the idea of gentleness proposed as a synergy of “quality”. This idea has also been supported from recent research in which has emerged a very tight bond between optimism and a particular character trait that is extroversion. Being placed at a higher, transcendental level, the “gift of oneself” could become the “jump of quality” to fulfil ourselves in the relation with the other. (shrink)