IN L'Homme machine La Mettrie at one point discusses the possibility of teaching an ape to speak, and later he suggests that just as the inventor Vaucanson had made a mechanical flute player and a mechanical duck, it might be possible some day for ‘another Prometheus’ to make a mechanical man which could talk.

This article expands upon the notion of ideology as a material phenomenon, usually in the form of institutionalized, taken-for-granted practices. It draws on Herbert Marcuse and related thinkers to conceptualize technological solutions to environmental problems as materialized ideological responses to social-ecological contradictions, which, by concealing these contradictions, reproduce existing social conditions. This article outlines a method of technology assessment as ideology critique that draws attention to: (1) the social determinants of the given technology; (2) whether the technology conceals or masks (...) social-ecological contradictions; (3) whether the technology reproduces existing social conditions; and (4) whether the technology may be used for more rational or emancipatory ends in different social conditions. The examples of solar geoengineering and agricultural biotechnology are examined and it is found that, in each case, these technological solutions conceal social-ecological contradictions and support the current economic system and those benefiting from it, while precluding other alternatives. (shrink)

This edition's postscript includes further reflections on these themes and others, and relates them to recent writings of other philosophers and computer ...

Scholars are increasingly calling for the environmental issues of the industrial agricultural system to be addressed via eventual agroecological system-level transformation. It is critical to identify the barriers to this transition. Drawing from Henke’s theory of “repair,” we explore how farmers participate in the reproduction of the industrial system through “discursive repair,” or arguing for the continuation of the industrial agriculture system. Our empirical case relates to water pollution from nitrogen fertilizer and draws data from a sample of over 150 (...) interviews with row-crop farmers in the midwestern United States. We find that farmers defend this system by denying agriculture’s causal role and proposing the potential for within-system solutions. They perform these defenses by drawing on ideological positions and may be ultimately led to seek system maintenance because they are unable to envision an alternative to the industrial agriculture system. (shrink)

How (Not) to Be Secular is what Jamie Smith calls "your hitchhiker's guide to the present" -- it is both a reading guide to Charles Taylor's monumental work A Secular Age and philosophical guidance on how we might learn to live in our times. Taylor's landmark book A Secular Age (2007) provides a monumental, incisive analysis of what it means to live in the post-Christian present -- a pluralist world of competing beliefs and growing unbelief. Jamie Smith's book is a (...) compact field guide to Taylor's insightful study of the secular, making that very significant but daunting work accessible to a wide array of readers. Even more, though, Smith's How (Not) to Be Secular is a practical philosophical guidebook, a kind of how-to manual on how to live in our secular age. It ultimately offers us an adventure in self-understanding and maps out a way to get our bearings in today's secular culture, no matter who "we" are -- whether believers or skeptics, devout or doubting, self-assured or puzzled and confused. This is a book for any thinking person to chew on. (shrink)

One of the most potent arguments against physician‐assisted death hinges on the worry that people with disabilities will be subtly coerced to accept death prematurely. The argument is flawed. There is nothing new in PAD: the risk of coercion is already present in current policies about end of life care. And to hold that any such risk is too much is tacitly to endorse vitalism and to deny that people with disabilities are capable of choosing authentically.

There is nearly universal agreement that coercion is an evil. Even when it is necessary to avoid a greater evil or to attain some good, it is still a necessary evil. There is also nearly universal agreement that, other things being equal, one ought not to exercise coercion. Here the agreement ends. There is little agreement about just when coercion is justified. More surprisingly, there is little agreement about what coercion is. This latter controversy is more fundamental, and this paper (...) is an attempt to shed some light on it. (shrink)

Although physician‐assisted death can be a great benefit both to those who are terminally ill and those who are not, the risks for patients in these two categories are quite different. For now it is reasonable to make the benefit available only for those near death, and to await better evidence about the risks before making it more broadly available.

This is an extended meditation on ethics in literature across the Senecan corpus. There are two chapters on the Moral Letters, asking how one is to read philosophy or how one can write about being. Moving from the Letters to the Natural Questions and Dialogues, Professor Gunderson explores how authorship works at the level both of the work and of the world, the ethics of seeing, and the question of how one can give up on the here and now (...) and behold instead some other, better ethical sphere. Seneca's tragedies offer words of caution: desire might well subvert reason at its most profound level, or humanity's painful separation from the sublime might be part of some cruel divine plan. The book concludes by considering what, if anything, we are to make of Seneca's efforts to enlighten us. (shrink)

IN L'Homme machine La Mettrie at one point discusses the possibility of teaching an ape to speak, and later he suggests that just as the inventor Vaucanson had made a mechanical flute player and a mechanical duck, it might be possible some day for ‘another Prometheus’ to make a mechanical man which could talk.

We argue that after the passage of a physician assisted death law some inequities in the health care system which prevent people from getting the medical care they need will become reasons for choosing assisted death. This raises the issue of whether there is compelling moral reason to change those inequities after the passage of an assisted death law. We argue that the passage of an assisted death law will not create additional moral reasons for eliminating inequities simply because they (...) become motives for someone to opt for assisted death. We also argue that it is not feasible to eliminate these reasons for opting for assisted death by granting a right to health care because of an intractable scarcity of medical resources. (shrink)

This paper identifies experiential processes through which social structures become taken for granted, termed processes of “structure marginalization”. Passive processes of structure marginalization relegate social structures to the margin of experience without the use of higher-order cognitive acts such as evaluation and reflection. Examples include adapting to social structures via routine and habitual practices, a lack of conscious awareness of the complexity, historical formation, and other details of social structures, and rendering social structures irrelevant when they are unreflectively judged to (...) be of no value for achieving ends. Active processes of structure marginalization reflectively and discursively relegate social structures to marginal consciousness. Examples include the use of naturalistic and necessitarian explanations for the social order that implicitly justify it as inalterable or “just the way things are”, normative justifications for the status quo, and conscious awareness of one’s powerlessness to control social-structural conditions. Active processes of structure marginalization originate in passive processes. The goal of the typology is to explain, at the level of experience, why social structures typically remain unproblematic and unnoticed in everyday life, even during periods of social crisis and change or when existing structures produce harmful effects. (shrink)

It is tempting to argue that Kantian moral philosophy justifies prohibiting both human germ-line genetic engineering and non-therapeutic genetic engineering because they fail to respect human dignity. There are, however, good reasons for resisting this temptation. In fact, Kant’s moral philosophy provides reasons that support genetic engineering—even germ-line and non-therapeutic. This is true of Kant’s imperfect duties to seek one’s own perfection and the happiness of others. It is also true of the categorical imperative. Kant’s moral philosophy does, however, provide (...) limits to justifiable genetic engineering. (shrink)

To make Adorno’s difficult notion of “identity thinking” more amendable to sociological research, this project brings his Negative Dialectics into conversation with Schutz’s theory of typification. When revised with Adorno’s attention to political economy and the pathologies of reification, Schutz’s framework allows for an analysis of identity thinking in everyday life. Both theorists argue that categories of thought: automatically subsume objects for pragmatic yet socially conditioned reasons, are socially formed, transferred, and selected, and suppress particularizing characteristics of objects. Their overlapping (...) arguments are cross-fertilized to propose a critical approach to cognitive sociology that can engage in a form of ideology critique that illuminates forms of thinking that conceal social contradictions. This approach is useful for explaining the “mundane dialectic of enlightenment”: the daily reproduction of unreflective rationalization that breeds irrationality in the form of social domination and environmental harm, a contradiction which finds its ultimate expression in climate change inaction. (shrink)

The human right to health is crucial in the fight against global poverty. Health and an adequate standard of living are intimately connected. Poor health can make it difficult to overcome poverty, and poverty can make it difficult to attain good health. For the human right to health to be effective, however, it must have sufficient content to do the important normative work of rights. In the first part of this paper I give plausible arguments against the very existence of (...) a human right to health based on its lack of content and extend this to other social rights such as the right to adequate income, housing and education. In the second part of the paper I provide a defense of human social rights, including the human right to health, by arguing that these human rights, though abstract, have enough content to function as rights. (shrink)

The debate over whether germ-line genetic engineering is justified on the basis of the consent or presumed consent of future generations is mired in philosophical confusion. Because of this, the principle of informed consent fails to provide a reason to restrict germ-line genetic engineering. Most recent bioethicists ground the consent requirement on individual autonomy. While conceptually coherent, the notion of individual autonomy also fails to provide a reason for prohibiting germ-line genetic engineering. Moreover, it offers little in the way of (...) useful guidance for regulating genetic engineering. I argue, however, that respect for autonomy in the sense of moral agency – the ability to reflect on moral considerations and conform one’s behavior to those reflections – provides a principle that can be used for a nuanced evaluation of proposals for genetic engineering. (shrink)

ExcerptWhat would happiness be that was not measured by the immeasurable grief at what is? For the world is deeply ailing. Theodor Adorno, “Regressions,” Minima Moralia1Unfortunately, for the last half century many critical theorists have disregarded the founder of Critical Theory: Max Horkheimer. In the 1960s, Herbert Marcuse's popularity largely concealed the rest of the Frankfurt School. Today, Horkheimer is seen as a tardy pessimist in the wake of Walter Benjamin2 and, much too often, as a footnote to Theodor Adorno's (...) genius. Even the quintessential statement of the Frankfurt School, Dialectic of Enlightenment, has been…. (shrink)

The Roman arena is often described as an exotic or peripheral institution. Alternatively, it has been seen as a culturally central institution. In this case one traditionally assumes either that the arena is used to pacify the lower classes or that it expresses themes of violence at the heart of Roman society. In the first view the arena's politics are cynical; in the second they are often described as decadent or full of despair. While none of these readings should be (...) neglected, this essay argues that the arena can be examined as a productive institution which helps in the maintenance of Roman social relations from the top to the bottom and from the violent to the banal. When viewed in the light of Louis Althusser's idea of the ideological state apparatus, the arena can be read as political and psychological without recourse to notions of cunning calculation or psychic crisis. The arena is not only normal, but it participates in the production of normativity. This study pays particular attention to the ways in which the arena enables a specific kind of vision of the Roman world. In this vision the Roman nobiles in general and, later, the emperor in particular are reaffirmed as legitimate authorities: the rulers perhaps need the arena more than does the mob. The arena is also a locus at which the relations of domination which subsist between Rome and its subjects and between the sexes are reproduced in both the social and theatrical senses: the arena stages culturally vital spectacles. Indeed the export of the arena into the Roman provinces also entails the exportation of the Roman social structures which the arena serves. The Romanness of the arena is in fact so pervasive that even many of the hostile appraisals of the arena which come to us from antiquity reproduce the hierarchical social vision which the arena enables even as the institution itself is repudiated. Accordingly all representations of the arena need to be read within the logic of the arena itself. The ideology of the arena has no outside. (shrink)

In light of research showing that climate change policy opinions and perceptions of climate change are conditioned by pre-held values, Max Scheler’s axiology, conception of ethos, and sociology of knowledge are revisited. Scheler provides a critical analysis of the values surrounding modern technology’s relation to nature, especially in his assessment of the subordination of life to utility, or, the “ethos of industrialism”. The ethos of industrialism is said to influence the modern understanding of the environment as a machine to be (...) controlled for human aims. Scheler’s phenomenological proto-environmental sociology can contribute to the environmental social sciences in three ways: articulating the axiological basis of human knowledge of the environment; offering new values to consider in future research on the social dimensions of human-nature relations; and a framework for connecting socio-ecological analysis with evaluation, specifically for evaluating different types of technologies based on their relation to the environment. (shrink)

Practical deliberation often involves conditional judgements about what will (likely) happen if certain alternatives are pursued. It is widely assumed that the conditionals useful in deliberation are counterfactual or subjunctive conditionals. Against this, I argue that the conditionals of deliberation are indicatives. Key to the argument is an account of the relation between 'straightforward' future-directed conditionals like ' If the house is not painted, it will soon look quite shabby' and * "w e r e ' ' e d F (...) D C s like ' If the house were not to be painted, it would soon look quite shabby': an account on which both of these types of FDCs are grouped with the indicatives for semantic treatment and on which, while conditionals of both types are properly used in means/ends deliberations, those of the ' were'ed-up variety are especially well suited for that purpose. (shrink)

Gunderson allows that internally propelled programmed devices (Hauser Robots) do act full-bloodedly under aspects but denies this evidences that they really have the mental properties such acts seem to indicate. Rather, given our intuitive conviction that these machines lack consciousness, such performances evidence the dementalizability (contrary to Searle and Hauser both) of full-blooded acts of detecting, calculating, etc., such machines really do (contrary to Searle) perform.