In early 2020, as the first of many COVID lockdowns began across Australia, a collective of feminist and queer performance scholars and artists embarked on the research project Staging Australian Women’s Lives: Theatre, Feminism and Socially Engaged Art. Our aim was to document contributions of womxn theatre makers, while conducting a feminist analysis of strategies used to deal with gender inequality and oppression, on stage and off. While pivoting to the digital and the virtual, we recognised a need to support (...) womxn theatre makers whose lives and livelihoods are thrown into further precarity by the pandemic. This paper speaks to our commitment to bringing together critical theory, arts practices and everyday life in ethical forms and encounters that make visible, recognise and express care for one another and for the work. (shrink)

Users have adopted a wide range of digital technologies into their communication repertoire. It remains unclear why they adopt multiple forms of communication instead of substituting one medium for another. It also raises the question: What type of need does each of these media fulfill? In the present article, the authors conduct comparative work that examines the gratifications obtained from Facebook with those from instant messaging. This comparison between media allows one to draw conclusions about how different social media fulfill (...) user needs. Data were collected from undergraduate students through a multimethod study based on 77 surveys and 21 interviews. A factor analysis of gratifications obtained from Facebook revealed six key dimensions: pastime, affection, fashion, share problems, sociability, and social information. Comparative analysis showed that Facebook is about having fun and knowing about the social activities occurring in one’s social network, whereas instant messaging is geared more toward relationship maintenance and development. The authors discuss differences in the two technologies and outline a framework based on uses and gratifications theory as to why young people integrate numerous media into their communication habits. (shrink)

Regardless of leaders’ efforts to do the right thing and meet performance expectations, they make mistakes, with possible ramifications for followers’ and leaders’ well-being. Some leaders will apologize following transgressions, which may have positive implications for their followers’ and their own well-being, contingent upon the nature and severity of the transgressions. We examine these relationships in two separate studies. In Study 1, leader apologies had a positive relationship with followers’ psychological well-being and emotional health, and these relationships were moderated by (...) the severity of the transgression. In Study 2, leader apologies had a positive relationship with their own psychological well-being, positive emotional health and authentic pride. In addition, the nature of transgressions moderated the relationship between leader apologies and leaders’ positive emotions and authentic pride, while the severity of transgressions moderated the relationship between leader apologies and their positive emotions, psychological health, and authentic pride. Implications and future research directions are discussed. (shrink)

This article unravels the complex set of financial dealings that are at the heart of the Enron story and follows the story through the highs and lows of Enron share prices. The key players are identified and their roles described. Apart from the financial and accounting issues, the Enron story also raises a wide range of ethical issues including corporate governance, organisational culture and ethical leadership and scrutiny. These are discussed in the article. It might be argued that Enron could (...) never have got away with some of its practices if it had been operating in Europe. The article concludes that this view may be naïve, particularly in the light of recent media disclosures of the UK Labour government's continuing flirtation with business donations. The Enron story raises serious considerations in a whole host of financial, economic, political and ethical areas. As the Enron story continues to unfold, an article of this type can only begin to scratch the surface of some of these issues and to lay them out for further investigation. (shrink)

This article unravels the complex set of financial dealings that are at the heart of the Enron story and follows the story through the highs and lows of Enron share prices. The key players are identified and their roles described. Apart from the financial and accounting issues, the Enron story also raises a wide range of ethical issues including corporate governance, organisational culture and ethical leadership and scrutiny. These are discussed in the article. It might be argued that Enron could (...) never have got away with some of its practices if it had been operating in Europe. The article concludes that this view may be naïve, particularly in the light of recent media disclosures of the UK Labour government's continuing flirtation with business donations. The Enron story raises serious considerations in a whole host of financial, economic, political and ethical areas. As the Enron story continues to unfold, an article of this type can only begin to scratch the surface of some of these issues and to lay them out for further investigation. (shrink)

ABSTRACTEmotion regulation is a topic of great interest due to its relevance to navigating everyday life, as well as its relevance to psychopathology. Recent research indicates that beliefs about t...

Abstract:The Thesmophoriazousai brims with themes of imitation, from its broader tragic parodies to its finer sonic textures. This study uncovers the functions and effects of imitation on the dramatically crucial (but often neglected) verbal level by means of Echo—a bizarre metatheatrical character who embodies the dynamics of mimicking speech and parody. The aural echo is provided as a conceptual frame, illustrating how verbal mimicry functions to both degrade and bolster identity and status in Echo's scene and elsewhere in the play. (...) Echo's speech patterns ultimately serve to perform, manipulate, and expand forms of mimicry in Old Comedy. (shrink)

This paper raises several concerns about vulnerability as an alternative language to conceptualize injustice and politicize its attendant injuries. First, the project of resignifying “vulnerability” by emphasizing its universality and amplifying its generative capacity, I suggest, might dilute perceptions of inequality and muddle important distinctions among specific vulnerabilities, as well as differences between those who are injurable and those who are already injured. Vulnerability scholars, moreover, have yet to elaborate the path from acknowledging constitutive vulnerability to addressing concrete injustices. Second, (...) vulnerability studies respond to, and have been shaped by, debates in the 1980s and 1990s over oppression, identity and agency. This genealogy needs to be acknowledged and evaluated. As I demonstrate, prominent theorists define vulnerability in contradistinction to victimization, adopting neo-liberal formulations of victims and victimhood. Finally, I turn to address the politics of vulnerability. At issue are not simply matters of utility or programmes for implementation, but the fraught relationship among ontology, ethics and politics, which I address through an engagement with Rancière's conception of the political and the case of the Black Lives Matter movement. (shrink)

The conventional approach to international development by civil society—that is, the installation of “Western” programs and institutions by “Western” groups in “underdeveloped” regions—has remained largely unchanged since global poverty reduction, whether for political or social justice motivations, gained prominence in public discourse after World War II. Yet poverty rates, literacy, life expectancy, and unemployment in one of the poorest regions of the world, sub-Saharan Africa, has remained the same if not worsened since the 1970s . And, still, the great Development (...) Project continues: Problems in under-resourced areas are identified by well-meaning people from well-resourced areas, proposals to solve those problems are crafted by project managers and submitted to government and nongovernmental agencies, and successful projects are implemented by other well-meaning people who, for the most part, honestly want to make a difference. This is the system in which Priya seems to .. (shrink)

To 'consequentialise' is to take a putatively non-consequentialist moral theory and show that it is actually just another form of consequentialism. Some have speculated that every moral theory can be consequentialised. If this were so, then consequentialism would be empty; it would have no substantive content. As I argue here, however, this is not so. Beginning with the core consequentialist commitment to 'maximising the good', I formulate a precise definition of consequentialism and demonstrate that, given this definition, several sorts of (...) moral theory resist consequentialisation. My strategy is to decompose consequentialism into three conditions, which I call 'agent neutrality', 'no moral dilemmas', and 'dominance', and then to exhibit some moral theories which violate each of these. (shrink)

This article analyzes a crucial aspect of the #MeToo phenomenon overlooked in all the commentary: the sign under which this activism has been taking place. Our premise is that to comprehend the novel politics that #MeToo incites, we need to understand the political grammar of the sign. #MeToo hails individuals to recognize their serial collectivity and assembles them into a fluid yet cohesive group. Straddling the particular and universal, the sign allows for a range of genres of speaking out and (...) joining in, thereby reconfiguring the possibilities of feminist political assemblage. We begin by providing an overview of the arguments summoned in opposition to #MeToo that have dominated public discourse. Next, we examine #MeToo in the context of debates within feminism, demonstrating how #MeToo addresses enduring tensions over the terms of coalitional politics. Finally, we analyze the sign itself, focusing first on the distinctive grammar #MeToo deploys, and then on the politics it facilitates. We argue that #MeToo allows feminists to grapple with the challenges of difference in innovative ways—not only contextually or with respect to the varying positionalities of individuals assembled under the sign, but also in upholding a continuum of sexual violation. (shrink)

Even before ‘economic precarity’ became the default explanation for the rise of defensive nationalism globally, scholars had already begun returning to ground their work in the economy and material...

Should we allow grave harm to befall one individual so as to prevent minor harms befalling sufficiently many other individuals? This is a question of aggregation. Can many small harms ‘add up’, so that, collectively, they morally outweigh a greater harm? The ‘Close Enough View’ supports a moderate position: aggregation is permissible when, and only when, the conflicting harms are sufficiently similar, or ‘close enough’, to each other. This paper surveys a range of formally precise interpretations of this view, and (...) reveals some of the problems they face. It also proposes a novel interpretation which avoids these problems. (shrink)

Suppose we believe that a property F is coextensive with moral permissibility. F may be, for example, the property of having the best consequences, if we are Consequentialists, or that of conforming to a universalisable maxim, if we are Kantians, and so on. This may raise the following problem. It is plausible that permissibility is “closed under implication”: any act that is implied by a permissible act must itself be permissible. Yet, in some cases, F might not be closed under (...) implication. If that is so, then F cannot be coextensive with permissibility. Maximalism has been proposed as a solution to this problem. A “maximal” act is one not implied by any other act. Maximalism restricts the claim that F is coextensive with permissibility to maximal acts only. A non-maximal act may be permissible without being F if it is implied by a maximal act that is F. The general aim of this paper is to investigate these issues by considering the formal structure of acts, or the “act-implication” relation. Discussions of Maximalism have tended to assume implicitly that acts have structure of some sort, but there has been little careful attention given to this structure. I aim to show that, by thinking about structure, we can provide a stronger defence of Maximalism. (shrink)

Prioritarianism is the view that we ought to give priority to benefiting those who are worse off. Sufficientism, on the other hand, is the view that we ought to give priority to benefiting those who are not sufficiently well off. This paper concerns the relative merits of these two views; in particular, it examines an argument advanced by Roger Crisp to the effect that sufficientism is the superior of the two. My aim is to show that Crisp's argument is unsound. (...) While I concede his objections against the particular prioritarian views that he considers, I propose a different version of prioritarianism that is invulnerable to those objections. (shrink)

This article examines two interrelated themes in the scholarship categorized as ‘new materialism’: first, the aim to undermine the subject/object distinction; second, the proposition that agency exists across the material world. While new materialists, such as Jane Bennett, conceive of their approach as an intervention against the injurious effects of capitalism, I argue that destabilizing the object/subject binary and endowing inanimate objects with vitality and agency is actually a constitutive feature of capitalism itself. To illustrate this point, I turn to (...) Marx’s analysis, providing a queer reading of his theorization of commodities. Revisting Marx’s account of commodity fetishism in tandem with new materialism yields fresh insights into the logics of capitalism, specifically, the manner in which it thrives on concurrently producing and erasing subjectivities, thereby distorting social materiality and material sociality. (shrink)

Ethical descriptivism is the view that all ethical properties are descriptive properties. Frank Jackson has proposed an argument for this view which begins with the premise that the ethical supervenes on the descriptive, any worlds that differ ethically must differ also descriptively. This paper observes that Jackson's argument has a curious structure, taking a linguistic detour between metaphysical starting and ending points, and raises some worries stemming from this. It then proposes an improved version of the argument, which avoids these (...) worries, and responds to some potential objections to this version of the argument. (shrink)

The Second World War put an end to America's historical isolationism. Three American thinkers -- Reinhold Niebuhr, Hans Morgenthau, and Kenneth Waltz -- developed a modern strategic framework that sought to introduce Americans to the harsher realities of international politics. Yet even as the United States began to embrace this new Realism, atomic weaponry threatened to make it absurd. This engrossing story of how the three chief architects of a powerful ideology struggled with the implications of their own creation offers (...) crucial context for contemporary debates about the resort to war and weapons of mass destruction. (shrink)

In Better Never to Have Been, David Benatar argues that existence is always a harm. His argument, in brief, is that this follows from a theory of personal good which we ought to accept because it best explains several ‘asymmetries’. I shall argue here that Benatar's theory suffers from a defect which was already widely known to afflict similar theories, and that the main asymmetry he discusses is better explained in a way which allows that existence is often not a (...) harm. (shrink)

How wrong is it to deceive a person into having sex with you? The common view seems to be that this depends on the nature of the deception. If it involves something very important, such as your identity, then the wrong done is very serious. But if it involves something more trivial, such as your natural hair colour, then the wrong seems less great. Tom Dougherty rejects this view. He argues that sexual deception is always seriously wrong. In this paper, (...) I present a response to Doughterty’s argument. I propose an analysis of the wrongness in deception according to which acts of deception, in sexual relations and elsewhere, may differ in their degree of wrongness, and some may not be seriously wrong. (shrink)

Taking a fundamentally critical approach to the subject of business ethics, this book deals with the traditional material of ethics in business, as well as introducing and surveying some of the most interesting developments in critical ethical theory which have not yet been introduced to the mainstream. Including chapters on different philosophical approaches to ethics, this is a highly structured and clearly written textbook, the first book of its kind on this often neglected aspect of business.

I compare two kinds of holism about values: G.E. Moore's 'organic unities', and Jonathan Dancy's 'value holism'. I propose a simple formal model for representing evaluations of parts and wholes. I then define two conditions, additivism and invariabilism, which together imply a third, atomism. Since atomism is absurd, we must reject one of the former two conditions. This is where Moore and Dancy part company: whereas Moore rejects additivism, Dancy rejects invariabilism. I argue that Moore's view is more plausible. Invariabilism (...) ought to be retained because (a) it eliminates the needless multiplication of values inherent in variable evaluations, and (b) it preserves a certain necessary connection between values and reasons, which Dancy himself endorses. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Going Polyphonic I: With Namita Goswami et al.Alyson Cole and Kyoo LeeThis time around, we go polyphonic.The articles in the next two issues, Vol. 13 and Vol. 14, explore critical questions, paradigm-shifting idseas, and fresh connections arising from the intimately networked fields of intersectional, decolonial, and trans studies today. “Polyphonia,” a term we borrowed from music, is meant to characterize ways in which each piece as in a (...) “note” remains distinctly their own while dialogically and dynamically connected to an evolving ecosystem of ideas and visions in the making. As an umbrella term, it is meant to shelter resonances from each article that speaks directly not only of, but to, theory today by doing it in their own way.In this issue, we are presenting “A Forum on Namita Goswami’s Subjects That Matter.” It consists of seven responses to Goswami’s pioneering work on intersectionality as exemplified by her recent book, Subjects That Matter: Philosophy, Feminism, and Postcolonial Theory (SUNY Press, 2019) as well as the earlier co-edited volume, Why Race and Gender Still Matter: An Intersectional Approach (Routledge, 2014, co-edited by Maeve M. O’Donovan, Namita Goswami, and Lisa Yount). What is polyphonic about this assemblage is its interlocutory structure and orientation: each scholar—Al Frankowski, Falguni Sheth, Jennifer Scuro, Lauren Guilmette, Luce deLire, Russell Ford, and Tyler M. Williams, all coming from different angles, perspectives, and positions—discusses their reading of Goswami on intersectionality while showing how and where their own scholarship meets hers. Goswami, in turn, responds to each response while providing a synthesized account of what she gleans from this choral interaction, what she finds inspiring, as well as challenging. The articles in the next issue, [End Page 1] Vol. 14, following the forum, will virtually continue the music, although not in direct response to Goswami’s work.We hope you will join us in this somewhat experimental virtual symposium that is not even on Zoom. We hope you will join us in thinking that this more literalized model of a “scholarly conversation,” actual and virtual, vitally embodies the very spirit of interdisciplinary, intergenerational, intercontinental intersectionality as a conversation, ongoing intellectual encounters among many of us in various “sub-fields,” for the lack of a better word, that, again literally, cannot be neatly contained in any disciplinary terms, boxes, or territories.The tranScripts section in this issue consists of two entries, the first of which is the fourth installment of Mieke Bal’s Moments of Meaning-Making, J–L. Then we have Margaret Carson’s translation of Juliana González on Remedios Varo.Again, this issue has been a labor of collective love. We would like to thank all the brilliant authors and extraordinarily generous and helpful peer reviewers for this issue, not to mention the ever so resourceful and skillful editorial staff at the press we constantly rely on for expert guidance and feedback, all of whom have been inspirations for us editors. [End Page 2]Copyright © 2024 State University of New York... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Coeditors’ IntroductionRetro III: As We RestartAlyson Cole and Kyoo Leethe covid-19 pandemic drags on, and, as the world is now trying to recover from it by learning to at least live with it better, philoSOPHIA has arrived at the third and final issue of RETRO. The fact that this series ended up being framed by the turbulent temporality of the current pandemic is something that some future editors of (...) philoSOPHIA, too, might find worth remembering.For now, we return to the now-point, as expected. To that end, here we have assembled articles on historical, individual, and gendered stigmas and wounds and traumas, among others, focusing also on their relationships to existential time, namely, present moments that persist.We turn first to the pressing issue presented by “Shackling Pregnant Women: US Prisons, Anti-Blackness, and the Unfinished Project of American Abolition”: Brady Heiner offers a lucid “interpretation of the social meaning of shackling imprisoned pregnant women and its persistence despite widespread normative consensus in favor of its abolition,” a joltingly specific, haunting reminder of how deeply the legacy of slavery is embedded in the US criminal legal system and the ways in which American abolition remains an “unfinished project.”Finally, RETRO III marks an ending and a restart of another kind. As of this issue—or, rather, this volume—philoSOPHIA is transitioning from a biannual to an annual publication schedule. In recent years, the journal has transformed in various ways. In 2018, we adopted a new transContinental approach and, with it, a new subtitle. We have expanded to include different [End Page v] genres, media, and voices, always aiming to reflect on our current moment and rethink persistent feminist philosophical questions from divergent angles. Publishing one volume per year is, we are certain, the best way to sustain this breadth of inquiry and continue deepening our alliances with critical race, disability, literary, media, and queer studies, among other fields. As we restart, readers can expect us to keep pushing boundaries, as we always have, while maintaining the same high quality and standards. This is essentially a change in the journal’s format, not in its substance.Wound/stigma as process also emerged as a key notion in Retro III partly because of our preliminary editorial conversation with Annette-Carina van der Zaag about three years ago, who, in response to our call for proposals on “retro” themes, had proposed an idea of guest editing an issue. Although that plan unfortunately did not materialize as we dealt with various pandemic challenges still faced by so many of us on a daily basis, Annette did write a spirited article while encouraging some other colleagues to explore related ideas, for which we remain grateful. In this piece, “Touching Wounds: On the Fugitivity of Stigma,” which explores stigma’s queer-responsive “transformational energy,” van der Zaag articulates ways of “inhabiting” wounds on three registers—material, affective, and fugitive—as an open-ended, future-embracing pathway beyond identity-bound ontology. Ghalya Saadawi, in turn, in her engagingly autobiographical essay “Critical Incision: Hypochondria, Autotheory, and the Health-Illness Dialectic,” autotheoretically draws out “critical” energy from this critical “illness” of hers, hypochondria, to the effect of destabilizing the temporally linearized and medically coordinated discursive ideals of health and being/living well.Survival, at the end of the day, often requires some literal transcending. A case in point has been movingly portrayed and theorized by Na-Young Lee, a sociologist and justice activist who, in “Multiple Encounters and Reconstructed Identities,” revisits questions of historical trauma and collective stigma. Here, she introduces and reflects on her oral history interviews with Korean “Halmoni Activist-Survivors of Japanese Military Sexual Slavery as Postcolonial Subjects,” with whom she herself continues to fight in solidarity. Focusing on the stories of two foundational figures, “Yun Chung-ok, a leading scholar and activist who, having managed to escape the fate of many other peers, first spoke out about Japanese military sexual slavery, and Kim Bok-dong, a survivor and human rights activist,” Lee shows how “overcoming trauma and reaching out to others continues to drive the redress movement” and how “through mutually constructed identities, activist-survivors broke away from... (shrink)

Philosophical discussions of prioritarianism, the view that we ought to give priority to those who are worse off, have hitherto been almost exclusively focused on cases involving a fixed population. The aim of this paper is to extend the discussion of prioritarianism to encompass also variable populations. I argue that prioritarianism, in its simplest formulation, is not tenable in this area. However, I also propose several revised formulations that, so I argue, show more promise.

Women continue to remain underrepresented in STEM, and this gender disparity is particularly pronounced in leadership positions. Through in-depth, qualitative interviews of 39 women leaders in STEM, we identify common gender microaggressions they experience, and explore how these microaggressions affect their leadership experience and outcomes in the workplace. Our findings highlight five types of gender microaggressions women most often encounter, and how and when these microaggressions occur. We explore the negative impact that microaggressions can have on women’s work identities and (...) how they can trigger a cycle of rumination and self-doubt that may ultimately result in women choosing to leave STEM. Importantly, we surface the interventional and empowering role that allies play in triggering a redemptive sensemaking process that can support women leaders to build resilience and counter the negative effects of microaggressions. (shrink)

Campbell Brown is one of the most recent additions to our faculty. We thought we’d welcome him to the Department with some questions.

How do reasons combine? How is it that several reasons taken together can have a combined weight which exceeds the weight of any one alone? I propose an answer in mereological terms: reasons combine by composing a further, complex reason of which they are parts. Their combined weight is the weight of their combination. I develop a mereological framework, and use this to investigate some structural views about reasons, the main two being "Atomism" and "Holism". Atomism is the view that (...) atomic reasons are fundamental: all reasons reduce to atomic reasons. Holism is the view that whole reasons are fundamental. I argue for Holism, and against Atomism. I also consider whether reasons might be "context-sensitive". (shrink)

The COVID-19 vaccine has been a miraculous, life-saving advance, offering staggering efficacy in adults, and was developed with astonishing speed. The time from sequencing the virus to authorizing the first COVID-19 vaccine was so brisk even the optimists appear close-minded. Yet, simultaneously, United States’ COVID-19 vaccination roll-out and related policies have contained missed opportunities, errors, run counter to evidence-based medicine, and revealed limitations in the judgment of public policymakers. Misplaced utilization, contradictory messaging, and poor deployment in those who would benefit (...) most—the elderly and high-risk—alongside unrealistic messaging, exaggeration, and coercion in those who benefit least—young, healthy Americans—is at the heart. It is important to consider the history of COVID-19 vaccines to identify where we succeeded and where we failed, and the effects that these errors may have more broadly on vaccination hesitancy and routine childhood immunization programs in the decades to come. (shrink)

The ‘No Ought From Is’ principle (or ‘NOFI’) states that a valid argument cannot have both an ethical conclusion and non-ethical premises. Arthur Prior proposed several well-known counterexamples, including the following: Tea-drinking is common in England; therefore, either tea-drinking is common in England or all New Zealanders ought to be shot. My aim in this paper is to defend NOFI against Prior’s counterexamples. I propose two novel interpretations of NOFI and prove that both are true.