Toxic speech inflicts individual and group harm, damaging the social fabric upon which we all depend. To understand and combat the harms of toxic speech, philosophers can learn from epidemiology, while epidemiologists can benefit from lessons of philosophy of language. In medicine and public health, research into remedies for toxins pushes in two directions: individual protections (personal actions, avoidances, preventive or reparative tonics) and collective action (specific policies or widespread “inoculations” through which we seek herd immunity). (...) This paper is the beginning of a project of identifying potential inoculations and antidotes to toxic speech. The essay brings a social practice theory of language, with special reliance on language‐games and inferential roles, into conversation with concepts from the study of biologic toxins. Some speech harms are acute while others are chronic and insidious; they have different methods of delivery, come in variable doses, and not everyone is equally susceptible to the power to harm. I argue that of the many kinds of challenges we might issue against toxic speech, challenging its expressive commitments has the greatest potential to stop the damage. The essay explores the different sorts of protections that inoculations and antidotes might offer against discursive toxins and sketches how to imagine these in the practices that govern our speech. The paper does not make policy recommendations, but an epidemiology of discursive toxicity reveals several kinds of “more speech” that might fight against “bad speech.”. (shrink)

Applying a medical conception of toxicity to speech practices, this paper calls for an epidemiology of discursive toxicity. Toxicity highlights the mechanisms by which speech acts and discursive practices can inflict harm, making sense of claims about harms arising from speech devoid of slurs, epithets, or a narrower class I call ‘deeply derogatory terms.’ Further, it highlights the role of uptake and susceptibility, and so suggests a framework for thinking about damage variation. Toxic effects vary depending (...) on one’s epistemic position, access, and authority. An inferentialist account of discursive practice plus a dynamic view of the power of language games offers tools to analyze the toxic power of speech acts. A simple account of language games helps track changes in our discursive practices. Identifying patterns contributes to an epidemiology of toxic speech, which might include tracking increasing use of derogatory terms, us/them dichotomization, terms of isolation, new essentialisms, and more. Using this framework, I analyze some examples of speech already said to be toxic, working with a rough concept of toxicity as poison. Finally, exploring discursive toxicity pushes us to find ways that certain discursive practices might “inoculate” one to absorbing toxic messages, or less metaphorically, block one’s capacity to make toxic inferences, take deontic stances that foster toxicity, etc. (shrink)

Speech is a major vehicle for enacting and enforcing misogyny, so can counter-speech stop the harms of misogynist speech? This paper starts with a discussion of the nature of misogyny, from Dworkin, MacKinnon, and Frye, up to K. Manne’s new work, here emphasizing the ways that women are attacked or undermined through speech and images. Misogyny becomes toxic when it sharply and steadily limits the life prospects, including daily functioning, of the women it targets. To (...) address the questions of counter-speech, one first needs a robust account of language—it’s power, how it functions, whether it can actually be gainsaid. Once the speech act is issued, can its damage be un-done, or substantially mitigated? To answer this, one must understand the kinds of harms that language achieves, and the kinds of counter-speech available. That is, one needs an understanding of how the speech of misogyny functions, rooted in a theory of how language works. This article offers a brief account of language as a complex set of social practices, which includes the speech of law, and an account of the power and limits of counter-speech. I argue that it is unhelpful to think in terms of free speech vs. censorship. Speech is not completely free, and censorship is a blunt tool. Instead, we should look at the ways that discursive harms are enacted and what kinds of normative changes could minimize the frequency of assault, and which changes might minimize the power of misogyny. (shrink)

This volume looks at the forms and functions of counterspeech as well as what determines its effectiveness and success from multidisciplinary perspectives. Counterspeech is in line with international human rights and freedom of speech and it can be a much more powerful tool against dangerous and toxic speech than blocking and censorship. In the face of online hate speech and disinformation, counterspeech is a tremendously important and timely topic. The book uniquely brings together expertise from a (...) variety of disciplines. It explores linguistic, ethical and legal aspects of counterspeech, looks at the functions and effectiveness of counterspeech from anthropological, practical and sociological perspectives and addresses the question of how we can use modern technological advances to make counterspeech a more instantaneous and efficient option to respond to harmful language online. The greatest benefit of counterspeech lies in the ability to reach bystanders and prevent them from becoming perpetrators themselves. This volume is an excellent opportunity to spread the word about counterspeech, its potential, importance, and future endeavors. This anthology is a great resource for scholars and students of linguistics, philosophy of language, media and communication studies, digital humanities, natural language processing, international human rights law, anthropology and sociology, and interdisciplinary research methods. It is also a valuable source of information for practitioners and anyone who wants to speak up against harmful speech. (shrink)

The paper’s main goal is to compare laws banning hate speech with counterspeech as an effective method of curtailing hate speech. In the first part, the paper discussed three normative justifications for hate speech bans. Firstly, the line of argument developed by critical race theorists that assumes that hate speech leads to the direct harm and violation of individuals’ rights. Secondly, paper examines the Weimar model that rests on the assumption that hate speech can lead (...) to indirect harm to members of vulnerable minorities by creating a toxic environment, which opens the door to discrimination and even violence. Thirdly, the justification which is derived from the idea that such forms of extreme public speech violate the basic values and principles – such as inclusiveness, equality and mutual respect - on which constitutional democracies are built. This approach extends its argument from general values to the status of citizens by arguing that hate speech violates the equal standing of citizens by attempting to exclude certain members of society from the process of democratic deliberation based on their ascriptive characteristics. The second part of the paper looks at counterspeech as an efficient approach to limit harms that arise from hate speech. The author argues that legal bans should be reserved only for the most extreme forms of hateful rhetoric, while counterspeech is a valid option for tackling all other forms of hate speech. (shrink)

This paper considers Tirrell’s analysis of toxic speech using examples epitomising speech that are misleading, outright false, and without compelling justification. They are toxic in polluting and eroding democratic functioning. However, I argue that Tirrell’s two epidemiological models (the common source model exemplified by poisons, and the propagated transmission model that viruses exemplify) fail to make good sense of my examples, which are deeply insidious without being overtly invidious. The limitations of the epidemiological models suggest that (...) toxicity is part of our default form of thinking and talking, rather than being an ‘outside’ pathology like a poison or a virus. (shrink)

As government pressure on major technology companies builds, both firms and legislators are searching for technical solutions to difficult platform governance puzzles such as hate speech and misinformation. Automated hash-matching and predictive machine learning tools – what we define here as algorithmic moderation systems – are increasingly being deployed to conduct content moderation at scale by major platforms for user-generated content such as Facebook, YouTube and Twitter. This article provides an accessible technical primer on how algorithmic moderation works; examines (...) some of the existing automated tools used by major platforms to handle copyright infringement, terrorism and toxic speech; and identifies key political and ethical issues for these systems as the reliance on them grows. Recent events suggest that algorithmic moderation has become necessary to manage growing public expectations for increased platform responsibility, safety and security on the global stage; however, as we demonstrate, these systems remain opaque, unaccountable and poorly understood. Despite the potential promise of algorithms or ‘AI’, we show that even ‘well optimized’ moderation systems could exacerbate, rather than relieve, many existing problems with content policy as enacted by platforms for three main reasons: automated moderation threatens to further increase opacity, making a famously non-transparent set of practices even more difficult to understand or audit, further complicate outstanding issues of fairness and justice in large-scale sociotechnical systems and re-obscure the fundamentally political nature of speech decisions being executed at scale. (shrink)

Toxic speech inflicts damage to mental and physical health. This process can be chronic or acute, temporary or permanent. Understanding how toxic speech inflicts these harms requires both an account of linguistic practices and, because language is inherently social, tools from epidemiology. This paper explores what we can learn from two epidemiological models: a common source model that emphasizes poisons, and a propagated transmission model that better fits contagions like viruses.

In the time of Coronavirus, it is perhaps as good a time as any to comment on the use and abuse of metaphors. One of the worst instances of metaphor abuse-especially given the recent epidemiological crisis-is Lynne Tirrell's notion of toxic speech. In the foregoing reply piece, I analyze Tirrell's metaphor and reveal how it blinds us to the liberating power of public speech. Lynne Tirrell argues that some speech is, borrowing from field of Epidemiology, (...) class='Hi'>toxic in the sense that it harms vulnerable listeners. In this response piece, I summarize the main points of Tirrell's toxic speech argument, map the underlying conceptual metaphor and pose three objections. (shrink)

Journalism in a toxic public sphere. Polluted spheres, eroding democracies -- Journalism, populism, and the problem of democracy -- Extreme populism and journalism -- Detoxing the public sphere. Democratically engaged journalism -- Democratically engaged journalism -- Extremism: hate speech and media harm -- Extremism: patriotism, fake news and objectivity.

Though widely derided by popular psychologists and self-help writers as an emotionally toxic and destructive response, blame has many defenders among contemporary moral philosophers. Blaming wrongdoers has been thought to express deep commitment to moral values and norms, to be intimately bound up with practices of holding others responsible, and to be an important exercise of moral agency. In this paper I push against the grain of such defenses of blame just enough to articulate what seems right in the (...) more popular lines of critique. I distinguish between blame as a reactive attitude and blaming as a speech act, and argue that some disagreement over the value of blame can be explained by the fact that blaming, as a speech act, takes several distinct forms. Critiques of blame, I suggest, properly target what we might call judgmental or strongly verdictive blaming, the sort of blaming that passes judgment on the wrongdoer him- or herself, and treats him or her as deserving of the blamer’s hostile or “punishing” reactions. This kind of blaming, I argue, tends to foreclose engagement in further moral dialogue with wrongdoers, an effect that is particularly destructive in therapeutic contexts. In such contexts, it is often more appropriate—and more constructive—to hold others answerable without blaming them in the strongly verdictive sense. I argue, moreover, that strongly verdictive blame may be similarly destructive outside of straightforwardly therapeutic contexts, and I challenge the idea that there is in any case a sharp or clear dividing line between therapeutic and non-therapeutic responses to wrongdoers. Holding answerable in a non-judgmental mode is a response that may have a therapeutic dimension, but it nonetheless engages a wrongdoer as a moral peer and partner in moral dialogue. This account of non-judgmental answerability, I suggest, captures much of what moral philosophers have taken to be valuable about blame, while accommodating the insights of those who criticize its more toxic forms. (shrink)

Over recent years, the stakes and complexity of online content moderation have been steadily raised, swelling from concerns about personal conflict in smaller communities to worries about effects on public life and democracy. Because of the massive growth in online expressions, automated tools based on machine learning are increasingly used to moderate speech. While ‘design-based governance’ through complex algorithmic techniques has come under intense scrutiny, critical research covering algorithmic content moderation is still rare. To add to our understanding of (...) concrete instances of machine moderation, this article examines Perspective API, a system for the automated detection of ‘toxicity’ developed and run by the Google unit Jigsaw that can be used by websites to help moderate their forums and comment sections. The article proceeds in four steps. First, we present our methodological strategy and the empirical materials we were able to draw on, including interviews, documentation, and GitHub repositories. We then summarize our findings along five axes to identify the various threads Perspective API brings together to deliver a working product. The third section discusses two conflicting organizational logics within the project, paying attention to both critique and what can be learned from the specific case at hand. We conclude by arguing that the opposition between ‘human’ and ‘machine’ in speech moderation obscures the many ways these two come together in concrete systems, and suggest that the way forward requires proactive engagement with the design of technologies as well as the institutions they are embedded in. (shrink)

On August 28, 2008, Michael Marmot, Chair of the Commission on Social Determinants of Health, formally handed over the Commission’s Final Report to Margaret Chan, the Director-General of the World Health Organization, at the Palais des Nations in Geneva. It was a significant moment. Dr. Chan addressed a hall packed with representatives of the world’s communications media in a speech that was remarkably direct. Dr. Chan reiterated the Commission’s position that to improve health and health equity action needs to (...) be taken not just across the health sector but across all social and economic policy areas, and stated, “Social deprivation is not a matter of fate. It is a marker of policy failure.” This was a bold statement from one of the world’s leading diplomats. Policy failure! The phrase echoes the Commission’s assertion that “a toxic combination of poor social policies, unfair economic arrangements and bad politics is killing people on a grand scale.” The Commission’s messages are far reaching. (shrink)

Thinking of the evils of homophobia and what is needed to survive them requires acknowledging a new category of evil besides the evils of individual deeds, social practices and social structures. That further category is evil social environments. Building on the work of Jeremy Waldron on the harm in hate speech, this chapter extends that account to certain hate crimes that, like the written word, send a lingering social message. The cases of four women survivors of homophobia are then (...) examined in relation to such harm. Two who wrote memoirs had been targeted for murder, one in an evil environment, the other in a more positively responsive environment. The remaining two survival stories are less dramatic. But they are important in how they illustrate ordinary challenges faced successfully by lesbians and gay men in emotionally toxic environments, and how, in this sense, those not directly threatened with murder might still be justly regarded as survivors. The chapter concludes with reflections on the meanings of survival and some of the costs of surviving an evil homophobic environment. (shrink)

“How odd I can have all this inside me and to you it’s just words.”The American election of 2016 was, in its vitriol, polarization, and outcome, unlike any in recent memory. This paper addresses and critiques the anti-refugee rhetoric and policies, as well as their uncritical uptake, which developed around the candidacy of Donald Trump. My intent is to examine and confront the fact that some of this election cycle’s cruelest, most violent, and most racist rhetoric was reserved for Syrian (...) refugees, and to consider some possible responses to such speech in the future. This anti-refugee rhetoric, I suggest, both contributed decisively to Donald Trump’s victory and created potentially lasting toxic... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:At the Beginning, There was the MaskFrançoise Vergès (bio)There is a long history to be told about the links between the economy of extractivism and exhaustion, between colonialism, race, capitalism, imperialism, and breathing, which could be summarized as the "struggle against suffocation and for life." Colonialism (slavery and post-slavery), race, and capitalism are all about un-breathing, about the toxicity of social, cultural, sexual and "natural" environments, about silencing, erasing (...) voices, cutting tongues, forbidding speech, fabricating a deadly form of quietude, requiring mute consent to injustices and inequalities. They play on restricting human lungs and on colonizing the lungs of the planet. In their world, one no longer breathes freely, one can no longer finds her voice, one learns to whisper. It is not the whisper of underground resistance, of words circulating from mouth to mouth to signal where is the next refuge, the next sanctuary, the cache for arms, the false papers, the hidden routes of escape and marooning. It is the murmur of someone beaten and tortured until mad with pain, when breathing has become an ordeal.When we say, "We are suffocating" or "The air has become unbreathable!" we are not just talking of polluted air but of the feeling of living in a deleterious and asphyxiating political regime, which involves social censorship and self-censorship. Fear sets in, we only speak in hushed tones. Under such a regime, political order demands civilized speech, disciplined expression; the authorized music is "national," "military," patriarchal, or of a reinvented tradition. The joy must be measured and the words of the songs and public speech be neutral or to the glory of the regime. The authoritarian regime may even appropriate a song of freedom as its hymn, a bitter paradox where the words of freedom are confiscated to justify oppression. The body is corseted, the voice muzzled, the lungs function faintly, they transcribe our feelings in their rhythm, accelerating or slowing down. When songs and cries of freedom nonetheless arise, defying the regime of silencing and un-breathing, they sharply shatter the feeling of physical and psychic suffocation, the feeling that words remain in our throat, that our voice cannot come out. Suddenly, we catch our breath. We respire, inhale, exhale, fill our lungs. And we reconnect [End Page 54] ourselves with the etymological meaning of respire: from Latin re (again) and spirare itself from Latin spiritus "a breathing (respiration, and of the wind), breath; breath of a god," hence "inspiration; breath of life," hence "life," also "disposition, character; high spirit, vigor, courage" (Harper). Life, vigor, and courage, the breathing of the oppressed break down the politics of suffocation."I can't breathe" were the last words of George Floyd, not long before exhaling his last breath. When across the world, during 2020, people were shouting in many languages, "I can't breathe" using all their breath, they were, by the thousands, making their voices heard, rupturing the silencing of racism. "I can't breathe" became a breathing cry. Breathing became resistance. Singing collectively was breathing together. The song soars from thousands of breasts. The human voice, alone or collective carries an emotional force within it, vibrates sensually. But one may say, this has been, and can still be, the expression of fascism, of toxic masculinity and lynching mobs. When is breathing a revolutionary practice then? When we retrace the racial history of suffocation and breathing, of the colonial/ imperialist military noise vs. songs of freedom, of breathing as a politics toward humanizing the world. In other words, when we show how polluted air and noise are central elements in racial and gendered exploitation and how the antiracist struggle against pollution and suffocation is a struggle against racial capitalism. When we learn that recent medical research links air pollution to delayed cognitive development, stunted growth, and reduced lung capacity in children, we understand that the pretense of the universal right to childhood is a lie. Racism condemns Black, Indigenous and Brown children to premature death. According to the World Health Organization, more people are dying every year of polluted air than of any other cause. The role of air pollution in neurodegenerative diseases such as... (shrink)

Hate speech law can be found throughout the world. But it is also the subject of numerous principled arguments, both for and against. These principles invoke a host of morally relevant features and practical considerations . The book develops and then critically examines these various principled arguments. It also attempts to de-homogenize hate speech law into different clusters of laws/regulations/codes that constrain uses of hate speech, so as to facilitate a more nuanced examination of the principled arguments. (...) Finally, it argues that it is morally fitting for judicial and legislative judgments about the overall warrant of hate speech law to reflect principled compromise. Principled compromise is characterized not merely by compromise over matters of principled concern but also by compromise which is itself governed by ideals of moral duty or civic virtue. (shrink)

Inner speech is commonly understood as the conscious experience of a voice within the mind. One recurrent theme in the scientific literature is that the phenomenon involves a representation of overt speech, for example, a representation of phonetic properties that result from a copy of speech instructions that were ultimately suppressed. I propose a larger picture that involves some embodied objects and their misperception. I call it “the Body Error Theory,” or BET for short. BET is a (...) form of illusionism, but the particular version I favor is a cross-modal illusion. Newly described here, my hypothesis is that the experience of inner speech arises from a mix of interoception and audition. Specifically, there is the detection of slight but well-confirmed activities in the speech musculature that occur during inner speech, which helps to transform representations of normal but quiet nonverbal sounds that inevitably occur during inner speech, from breathing to background noise, into a mistaken perception of inner speech. Simply put, activities in the speech musculature mix with sounds to create the appearance of speech sounds, which thus explains the “voice within the mind.” I also show how BET’s cross-modal system fits with standard information processing accounts for speech monitoring and how it accommodates the central insights of leading theories of inner speech. In addition, I show how BET is supported by data from experience-sampling surveys and how it can be empirically tested against its rivals. (shrink)

Much of what we say is never said aloud. It occurs only silently, as inner speech. We chastise, congratulate, joke and cajole, all without making a sound. This distinctively human ability to create public language in the privacy of our own minds is no less remarkable for its familiarity. And yet, until recently, inner speech remained at the periphery of philosophical and psychological theorizing. This essay collection, from an interdisciplinary group of leading philosophers, psychologists, and neuroscientists, displays the (...) rapidly growing interest among researchers in the puzzles surrounding the nature and cognitive role of the inner voice. Questions explored include: the aids and obstacles inner speech presents to self-knowledge; the complex relation it bears to overt speech production and perception; the means by which inner speech can be identified and empirically assessed; its role in generating auditory verbal hallucinations; and its relationship to conceptual thought itself. (shrink)

In an ideal democracy, people from all walks of life would come together to talk meaningfully and respectfully about politics. But we do not live in an ideal democracy. In contemporary democracies, which are marked by deep social divisions, different groups for the most part avoid talking to each other. And when they do talk to each other, their speech often seems to be little more than a vehicle for rage, hatred, and deception. -/- Democratic Speech in Divided (...) Times argues that we should nevertheless not give up on the ideal of democratic public speech. Drawing on the resources of political theory, epistemology, and philosophy of language, this book develops a sustained account of the norms that should govern public discourse in deeply divided circumstances. Should we try to find common ground when we talk to our political opponents, even though they seem unreasonable? Should we refrain from expressing anger, if we want to get things done? How can we use our speech to fight hate speech and disinformation? And is it even possible to speak to 'the other side,' in settings where different groups dislike one another, live apart from one another, and don't know much about one another? By tackling these questions, Lepoutre demonstrates that, when governed by the right set of norms, public speech can be a powerful force for good even amidst profound social divisions. (shrink)

In this book, Carl Cranor utilizes material from ethics, philosophy of law, epidemiology, tort law, regulatory law, and risk assessment to argue that the evidentiary standards for science used in the law to control toxics ought to be ...

This paper aims to clear a path for the thesis that inner speech, in the very languages we speak, is the sole medium of all conceptual thought. First, it is argued that inner speech should not be identified with the auditory imagery of speech. Since they are distinct, there may be many more episodes of inner speech than those that are accompanied by auditory imagery. Second, it is argued that it is not necessary to conceive of (...) linguistic communication as a matter of the speaker’s revealing through words an underlying thought. Rather, acts of speech may be conceived as producing cooperation by intervening on processes of thought that are essentially imagistic. So conceived, the practice of speaking in language may acquire a function wholly internal to the individual, where it adds a layer of coordination to an underlying foundation of imagistic cognition. (shrink)

Introduction : growing up gamer -- Leveling up in life : how meritocracy works in society -- A toxic culture : studying gaming's jerks -- Coding meritocracy: norms of game design and narrative -- Judging skill, from World of warcraft to Kim Kardashian : Hollywood -- Learning from others -- Conclusion : an obligation to do better.

Academics working on military ethics and serving military personnel rarely have opportunities to talk to each other in ways that can inform and illuminate their respective experiences and approaches to the ethics of war. The workshop from which this paper evolved was a rare opportunity to remedy this problem. Our conversations about First Lieutenant (1LT) Portis’s experiences in combat provided a unique chance to explore questions about the relationship between oversight, accountability, and the idea of moral risk in military operations. (...) In this paper, we outline a particular experience of 1LT Portis’s that formed the basis of our discussions, before elucidating the ethical issues this experience raised. In particular, we see 1LT Portis’s experience as, first, illustrative of the problem of moral risk – when military personnel are placed in situations of moral temptation. The problem of moral risk, we propose, is best understood through the framework of the military’s duty of care. Second, we see his experience as highlighting tensions within the dominant moralized warrior model of the military profession. What we call a toxic warrior identity — a distorted form of the moralized warrior identity — can negatively affect the attitudes of military personnel toward rules, policies, procedures, and accountability mechanisms, particularly in relation to non-combat related roles and duties and when leaders must choose between competing bureaucratic demands. We see 1LT Portis’s experience as illustrative of these tensions, yet his experiences also highlight important concerns about the impact of increasing bureaucratic demands on military functioning. In the conclusion, we address the need to balance concerns about toxic warrior identity with legitimate criticisms of overly demanding bureaucracy and suggest avenues for further research on this issue. (shrink)

This is the introductory chapter to the anthology: Inner Speech: New Voices, to be published in fall 2018 by OUP. It gives an overview of current debates in philosophy, psychology, and neuroscience concerning inner speech, and situates the chapters of the volume with respect to those debates.

Constructive leaders highlight elements of motivation to employees to grow in order to achieve goals for their institutions or departments. They do this either through understanding the significance of ethical leadership or servant leadership. However, people who work under toxic environments often have little or no choice but drop their energy levels and be completely demoralised because of the toxicity at their workplace. This includes stories of leaders who ridicule their employees in public, force employees to undergo physical and (...) psychological pains, and promote divisiveness between colleagues. As the article focuses on leadership, and toxic leadership that is destructive not only for the workplace but also for human relationship, it argues for a need of ethical leadership which creates a dynamic relationship and trust between a leader and those led. The article concludes by stating that there is a relationship between ethical leadership and employee performance, and that this is very important for academic institutions.Contribution: Although the article reflects on the notion of leadership and its toxicity in an academic environment, the implications of the outcome are multidisciplinary, as ethical leadership is necessary in all human institutions. (shrink)

Medical and public health professionals recommend wearing face masks to combat the spread of the coronavirus disease of 2019. While the majority of people in the United States support wearing face masks as an effective tool to combat COVID-19, a smaller percentage declared the recommendation by public health agencies as a government imposition and an infringement on personal liberty. Social media play a significant role in amplifying public health issues, whereby a minority against the imposition can speak loudly, perhaps using (...) tactics of verbal aggression taking the form of toxic language. We investigated the role that toxicity plays in the online discourse around wearing face masks. Overall, we found tweets including anti-mask hashtags were significantly more likely to use toxic language, while tweets with pro-mask hashtags were somewhat less toxic with the exception of #WearADamnMask. We conclude that the tensions between these two positions raise doubt and uncertainty around the issue, which make it difficult for health communicators to break through the clutter in order to combat the infodemic. Public health agencies and other governmental institutions should monitor toxicity trends on social media in order to better ascertain prevailing sentiment toward their recommendations and then apply these data-driven insights to refine and adapt their risk communication messaging toward mask wearing, vaccine uptake, and other interventions. (shrink)

The relationship between science, law and justice has become a pressing issue with US Supreme Court decisions beginning with Daubert v. Merrell-Dow Pharmaceutical. How courts review scientific testimony and its foundation before trial can substantially affect the possibility of justice for persons wrongfully injured by exposure to toxic substances. If courts do not review scientific testimony, they will deny one of the parties the possibility of justice. Even if courts review evidence well, the fact and perception of greater judicial (...) scrutiny increases litigation costs and attorney screening of clients. Mistaken review of scientific evidence can decrease citizen access to the law, increase unfortunate incentives for firms not to test their products, lower deterrence for wrongful conduct and harmful products, and decrease the possibility of justice for citizens injured by toxic substances. This book introduces these issues, reveals the relationships that pose problems, and shows how justice can be denied. (shrink)

Academics working on military ethics and serving military personnel rarely have opportunities to talk to each other in ways that can inform and illuminate their respective experiences and approaches to the ethics of war. The workshop from which this paper evolved was a rare opportunity to remedy this problem. Our conversations about First Lieutenant (1LT) Portis’s experiences in combat provided a unique chance to explore questions about the relationship between oversight, accountability, and the idea of moral risk in military operations. (...) In this paper, we outline a particular experience of 1LT Portis’s that formed the basis of our discussions, before elucidating the ethical issues this experience raised. In particular, we see 1LT Portis’s experience as, first, illustrative of the problem of moral risk – when military personnel are placed in situations of moral temptation. The problem of moral risk, we propose, is best understood through the framework of the military’s duty of care. Second, we see his experience as highlighting tensions within the dominant moralized warrior model of the military profession. What we call a toxic warrior identity — a distorted form of the moralized warrior identity — can negatively affect the attitudes of military personnel toward rules, policies, procedures, and accountability mechanisms, particularly in relation to non-combat related roles and duties and when leaders must choose between competing bureaucratic demands. We see 1LT Portis’s experience as illustrative of these tensions, yet his experiences also highlight important concerns about the impact of increasing bureaucratic demands on military functioning. In the conclusion, we address the need to balance concerns about toxic warrior identity with legitimate criticisms of overly demanding bureaucracy and suggest avenues for further research on this issue. (shrink)

Inner speech vs. anendophasia: Questions of information, serendipity, and the mental realm’s connection with nature.

I argue that figurative speech, and irony in particular, presents a deep challenge to the orthodox view about sentence content. The standard view is that sentence contents are, at their core, propositional contents: truth-conditional contents. Moreover, the only component of a sentence’s content that embeds in compound sentences, like belief reports or conditionals, is the propositional content. I argue that a careful analysis of irony shows this view cannot be maintained. Irony is a purely pragmatic form of content that (...) embeds in compound sentences. The standard view cannot account for this fact. I sketch out a speech-act theoretic framework that can. But in accepting this alternative framework we are giving up on the whole idea of an autonomous semantics. (shrink)

University campuses are framed as sexualised spaces marked by high sexual risk-taking behaviour and toxic masculinities that often fuel abusive relationships and sexual violence. More often, the most vulnerable groups, to this violence include sexual minorities, girls and students with disabilities. Drawing on qualitative ethnographic research and semi-structured interviews with students and staff from two universities in Zimbabwe, this article examines how toxic campus ‘cultures’ and campus sexual economies can be transformed and made more inclusive and safer for (...) all students. The study uses Pierre Bourdieu’s theory of practice, especially the field and habitus to understand how toxic masculinities are produced and reproduced on campus, as well as how everyday practice on campus can be instrumentalised to reconfigure coercive sexual practices and toxic masculinities. Although there is a huge body of research on sexual violence in Zimbabwe, very little of this has focused on the prevalence and experiences of this phenomenon within university campus spaces. Therefore, little is known about how students experience, perceive, and navigate sexual violence on campus, as well as institutional responses to sexual violence. Consequently, this study seeks to fill this gap and contribute to the burgeoning scholarship and debates on sexual violence, including coercive sexual practices and heteronormativity in university campus spaces. We seek to contribute to three sustainable development goals, that is goal 3 (good health and well-being), goal 5 (gender quality) and finally goal 10 (reduced inequalities). Contribution: This article foregrounds the ways in which institutions of higher learning respond to sexual violence within the university campus. The key contribution of this article relates to how students’ religious and socio-cultural subjectivities shaped or mediated experiences of and perceptions on sexual violence on campus. Consequently, we assert that the campus religious ‘field’ and students’ spiritual ‘habitus’ had a huge influence on the campus sexual economies.The research contributes to the field of Biblical Theology engaged with Gender Justice, Health and Human Development. (shrink)

I here present two different models of oppressive speech. My interest is not in how speech can cause oppression, but in how speech can actually be an act of oppression. As we shall see, a particular type of speech act, the exercitive, enacts permissibility facts. Since oppressive speech enacts permissibility facts that oppress, speech must be exercitive in order for it to be an act of oppression. In what follows, I distinguish between two sorts (...) of exercitive speech acts (the standard exercitive and the covert exercitive) and I argue that each such exercitive affords a distinct model of oppressive speech. (shrink)

The accumulation of potentially toxic elements (PTEs) has raised public awareness due to harmful contamination to both human and marine creatures. This study was designed to determine the concentration of copper (Cu), zinc (Zn), cadmium (Cd), and nickel (Ni) in the intestine, kidney, muscle, gill, and liver tissues of local commercial edible fish, fourfinger threadfin (Eleutheronema tetradactylum), and black pomfret (Parastromateus niger) collected from Morib (M) and Kuala Selangor (KS). Among the studied PTEs, Cu and Zn were essential elements (...) to regulate body metabolism with certain dosages required while Cd and Ni were considered as non-essential elements that posed chronic and carcinogenic risk. The concentration of PTEs in fish tissue samples was analyzed using flame atomic absorption spectrometry (F-AAS). By comparing the concentration of PTEs in fish tissues as a bioindicator, the environmental risk of Morib was more serious than Kuala Selangor because both fish species collected from Morib resulted in a higher PTEs concentration. For an average 62 kg adult with a fish ingestion rate (FIR) of 0.16 kg/person/day in Malaysia, the estimated weekly intake (EWI) of Cd from the consumption of E. tetradactylum (M: 0.0135 mg/kg; KS: 0.0134 mg/kg) and P. niger (M: 0.0140 mg/kg; KS: 0.0132 mg/kg) had exceeded the provisional tolerable weekly intake (Cd: 0.007 mg/kg) established by the Joint FAO/WHO Expert Committee on Food Additives (JECFA) and oral reference dose (ORD) values of Cd (0.001 mg/kg/day) as provided by the United States Environmental Protection Agency (USEPA) regional screening level, thus it posed chronic risks for daily basis consumption. Besides, the value of the carcinogenic risk of Cd (0.7−3 to 0.8−3) and Ni (0.5−3 to 0.6−3) were in between the acceptable range (10−6 to 10−4) of the health index that indicates a relatively low possibility cancer occurrence to the consumers in both Morib and Kuala Selangor. This study recommended FIR to be 0.80 kg/person/day to reduce the possibility of posing chronic and carcinogenic risks while at the same time obtaining the essential nutrients from the fish. (shrink)

ABSTRACT Dealing primarily with implications rather than foundations, and focusing downstream at the expense of upstream prevention, mainstream bioethics is at a toxic watershed. Through an extended analysis of the Environmental Genome Project (EGP), we offer new tools from the philosophy of science and from critical epidemiology to help bioethics to move ahead. Our aim in this paper is not to resolve the moral and conceptual problems we reveal, but rather to outline ways to prevent such problems from arising (...) in future research. (shrink)

Three negative affective dispositions—anger, anxiety, and depression—are hypothesized to increase physical disease risk and have been the subject of epidemiological studies. However, the overlap among the major negative affective dispositions, and the superordinate construct of trait negative affectivity are only beginning to be tested. Presented here is a narrative review of recent prospective studies that simultaneously tested anger, anxiety, depression, and trait NA as risk factors for cardiac outcomes. Anxiety and depression emerged as independent risk factors for premature heart disease (...) in population studies of persons nominally healthy at baseline, and for recurrence/mortality among patients with existing heart disease. General trait NA also was a cardiac risk factor in population samples. (shrink)

Written in an outstandingly clear and lively style, this 1969 book provokes its readers to rethink issues they may have regarded as long since settled.

The Exchange of Words is a philosophical exploration of human testimony, specifically as a form of intersubjective understanding in which speakers communicate by making themselves accountable for the truth of what they say. This account weaves together themes from philosophy of language, moral psychology, action theory, and epistemology, for a new approach to this basic human phenomenon.

Inner speech is known as the “little voice in the head” or “thinking in words.” It attracts philosophical attention in part because it is a phenomenon where several topics of perennial interest intersect: language, consciousness, thought, imagery, communication, imagination, and self-knowledge all appear to connect in some way or other to the little voice in the head. Specific questions about inner speech that have exercised philosophers include its similarities to, and differences from, outer speech; its relationship to (...) reasoning and conceptual thought; its broader cognitive roles—especially within metacognition and self-knowledge; and the role it can play in explanations of auditory verbal hallucinations and “thought insertion”. (shrink)

What changes when we religiously worship the toxic? In this era of catastrophe, can a cosmic connection be achieved through a cult of pollution? Toxic Temple is an artistic-philosophical quest to understand the current parlous state of the world. We offer our inner contradictions and destructive lusts as objects of worship. We enter wastelands instead of new territory, leaving space for artifacts, expressing solidarity with the factual. We encounter colorful assemblages of things that connect the known cosmos, tread (...) the shaky ground of novel divinity, inhale pungent odors that transport us to the sublime. Garbage dumps are the new temples. In a mania of sadistic composure we breathe in the here and now. Transformative forces are released, free radicals; rituals that expose the chaos that lurks beneath the surface. (shrink)

On November 28, 2009, as part of events marking the twenty-fifth anniversary of the disaster at the Union Carbide plant in Bhopal, gas survivors protested the contents of the report prepared by government scientists that mocked their complaints about contamination. The survivors shifted from the scientific document to a mediated lunch invitation performance, purporting to serve the same chemicals as food that the report had categorized as having no toxic effects. I argue that the lunch spread, consisting of soil (...) and water from the pesticide plant, explicitly front-staged and highlighted the survivor’s forced intimate relationship with such chemicals, in order to reshape public perception of risks from toxins. Chemical matter like sevin tar and naphthol tar bound politicians, scientists, corporations, affected communities, and activists together, as these stakeholders debated the potential effects of toxic substances. This gave rise to an issue-based “chemical public.” Borrowing from such theoretical concepts as “ontologically heterogeneous publics” and “agential realism,” I track the existing and emerging publics related to the disaster and the campaigns led by the International Campaign for Justice in Bhopal advocacy group. (shrink)

In this essay, I explore non-human multispecies interactions in soils polluted by electronic waste and subsequently bioremediated by plants and microbes. I argue that regenerative transformation in polluted soil environments is principally through microbial degradation, a significant process for survival amidst disaster. In doing so, I combine two separate research areas – the materiality of electronic waste and of soils – thus contributing to theorization on the persistent problem of anthropogenically polluted soils. I do so by examining the process of (...) bioremediation, which ties anthropogenic pollution with underground soil processes, notably those that occur at the soil interface surrounding plant roots, the rhizosphere. Using empirical examples from scientific literature on the bioremediation of electronic waste-contaminated soils in China, I demonstrate that degradation, symbiosis, and sequestration are instrumental processes in polluted soils. The micro-scaled perspective of these relational processes and their toxic alterlives contributes to materialist, chemosocial understandings of toxic and polluted environments. (shrink)

In this chapter I show that idealizing assumptions can obscure conversational dynamics because they neglect power differentials that are crucial enablers of the successful performance of some speech acts (see, Sbisà, 2020). I examine how silencing is promoted by conversational norms that would defeasibly entitle linguistic agents to presume that silence indicates acceptance. I focus on Goldberg’s (2020) discussion of these phenomena. Goldberg argues in support of a norm of no silent rejections claiming that silencing is partly the result (...) of the misapplication of this norm. He further defends the view that the norm itself is part of the solution to the problem of silencing. In the chapter I argue that Goldberg is mistaken on these points. Instead, drawing inspiration from Sbisà (2020), I argue that norms of no silent rejection are temporarily enacted by means of speech acts that function as exercitive assertions. (shrink)