Must privacy and freedom of expression conflict? To witness recent debates in Britain, you might think so. Anything other than self-regulation by the press is met by howls of anguish from journalists across the political spectrum, to the effect that efforts to protect people’s privacy will threaten press freedom, promote self-censorship and prevent the press from fulfilling its vital function of informing the public and keeping a watchful eye on the activities and antics of the powerful.[Brown, 2009, 13 January]1 Effective (...) protections for privacy, from such a perspective, inevitably pose a threat to democratic government via the constraints that they place on the press. Such concerns with privacy must be taken seriously by anyone who cares about democratic government, and the freedom, equality and wellbeing of individuals. But if it is one thing to say that privacy and freedom of expression cannot always be fully protected, it is another to suppose that protections for the one must always come at the expense of the other. After all, the economics of contemporary politics and journalism would seem to be partly responsible for our difficulties in protecting personal privacy while sustaining robust and informative forms of public discourse. [Moore, 2010, 10 -141]2 Most newspapers are loss-making businesses and the need to reduce those losses and, if possible, to turn a profit, make investigative journalism an increasingly expensive proposition as compared to both “comment” and more or less elevated forms of gossip. At the same time, politics has increasingly become the prerogative of a narrow group of people with access to the large sums of money necessary successfully to compete for high office. In those circumstances, the need for critical scrutiny is as important as it is difficult. Revising our ideas about privacy and its protection cannot alone reduce the tensions between freedom of expression and personal privacy typical of our societies, necessary though such revision may be. Moreover, this paper can only touch on some aspects of the ways in which we need to rethink our interests in privacy, in order adequately to reflect people’s diverse interests in freedom of expression, and the important role of a free press to democratic government. Nonetheless, I hope to suggest ways of thinking about people’s claims to privacy which can be generalised fairly readily, and can help us to think constructively about the nature, causes and solutions to some important social and political problems, even if, in its nature, philosophical analysis rarely tells us what to do. More specifically, this paper argues that people are entitled to keep some true facts about themselves to themselves, should they so wish, as a sign of respect for their moral and political status, and in order to protect themselves from being used as a public example in order to educate or to entertain other people. The “outing” - or non-consensual public disclosure - of people’s health records or status, or their sexual behaviour or orientation is usually unjustified, even when its consequences seem to be beneficial. Indeed, the paper claims, the reasons to reject outing, as inconsistent with democratic commitments to freedom and equality, are reasons to insist on the importance of privacy to freedom of expression. While a free press is of the utmost importance to democratic government, it is not identical with the free expression of individuals and, on occasion, the former may have to be constrained in order to protect the latter. [Barendt, 2007, 231]. Hence, the paper concludes, we should distinguish the claims of individuals to publish reports about their lives – even if this necessarily involves revealing the private lives of others – from journalistic claims to publish information about the sex lives of consenting adults. I will start by briefly situating my argument within a democratic approach to privacy, before using the “outing” of Oliver Sipple to examine people’s claims to privacy and their implications for freedom of expression and of the press. I will be assuming that some forms of privacy are legitimate, in order to focus more closely on the question of what information, if any, people may keep to themselves. (shrink)

In this paper, I reinterpret Kant’s Transcendental Analytic as a description of a cognitive architecture. I describe a computer implementation of this architecture, and show how it has been applied to two unsupervised learning tasks. The resulting program is very data efficient, able to learn from a tiny handful of examples. I show how the program achieves data-efficiency: the constraints described in the Analytic of Principles are reinterpreted as strong prior knowledge, constraining the set of possible solutions.

The question has long confounded philosophers and scientists, and it is this so-called explanatory gap between biological life and consciousness that Evan ...

This book is a very practical guide to help managers put their own and their employees' professional values to work. Through real life stories and case studies, the author brings to life and light the ethical challenges that present themselves in corporate and institutional settings. The reader gets to see that ethics lie not only in the big, dramatic defining moments, but in the everyday behaviors of people as they work together in the service of organizational goals. The text is (...) punctuated with summaries, exercises, and opportunities for reflection where the reader has an opportunity to review their own ethical frameworks and to see how these show up in the daily choices they make. Ideas are provided to help managers coach their employees in strategize around ethical issues, how to communicate their views with clarity and conviction, and how to find support in the organization to tackle difficult issues. (shrink)

Léontine Zanta (1878-1942) est la première femme française docteure en philosophie. Transgression symbolique, popularité médiatique, la reconnaissance d'une femme philosophe ne s'était jamais présentée comme telle sous la République. Si son caractère de pionnière résonne comme une évidence, à tel point que la doctoresse inspirera même la jeune Simone de Beauvoir dans son désir d'étudier la philosophie, pourquoi a-t-elle alors été oubliée de nos mémoires? Une enquête intellectuelle, dont cette biographie est le résultat, était donc nécessaire pour nous mettre face (...) à ce destin déroutant. (shrink)

The ethical conduct of research rests largely on researchers, and as such, an understanding of how they perceive and enact their role in research is paramount. However, the literature around ethics and research mostly focuses on researchers’ perception of Research Ethics Boards roles and functions. To fill that gap, we analyzed the perceptions of researchers, REB members, and influential parties about researchers’ role in the ethical conduct of research through discourse analysis. Three discourses emerged: researchers as reflective practitioners, protectors of (...) participants, and technicians. Understanding the commonalities and differences among the discourses may foster a shared and compelling institutional research culture. (shrink)

Critically engages the work of the philosopher Don Ihde.

According to Mathias Risse and Richard Zeckhauser, racial profiling can be justified in a society, such as the contemporary United States, where the legacy of slavery and segregation is found in lesser but, nonetheless, troubling forms of racial inequality. Racial profiling, Risse and Zeckhauser recognize, is often marked by police abuse and the harassment of racial minorities and by the disproportionate use of race in profiling. These, on their view, are unjustified. But, they contend, this does not mean that all (...) forms of racial profiling are unjustified; nor, they claim, need one be indifferent to the harms of racism in order to justify racial profiling. In fact, one of the aims of their paper is to show that racial profiling, suitably understood, “is consistent with support for far-reaching measures to decrease racial inequities and inequality.” Hence, one of their most striking claims, in an original and provocative paper, is that one can endorse racial profiling without being in any way indifferent to the disadvantaged status of racial minorities. In an initial response to these claims, I argued that Risse and Zeckhauser tend to underestimate the harms of racial profiling. I suggested two main reasons why they did so. The first is that they tend to identify the more serious harms associated with profiling with background racism, and therefore to believe that these are not properly attributable to profiling itself. The second reason is that they ignore the ways in which background racism makes even relatively minor harms harder to bear and to justify than would otherwise be the case. Hence, I concluded, racial profiling cannot be a normal part of police practice in a society still struggling with racism, although under very special conditions and with special regulation and compensation in place, it might be justified as an extraordinary police measure. I want to stand by those claims. However, Risse’s response to my arguments persuades me that I misinterpreted his earlier position in one significant respect. So I will start by explaining what interpretive mistake I believe that I made. I will then argue that despite Risse’s patient and careful response to my arguments, my initial concerns with his justification of profiling remain valid. -/- . (shrink)

In what sense is The Right to Sex philosophical? On the one hand, Amia Srinivasan’s philosophical credentials are beyond question; she holds a named professorship in social and political theory at...

Hobbes's relation to the later Aristotelian tradition, in both its scholastic and its humanists variants, has been increasingly explored by scholars. However, on two fundamental points (the naturalness of the city and the use of the matter/form distinction in the political works), there is more to be said in this connection. A close examination of a range of late Renaissance commentaries on Aristotle's Politics shows that they elucidate a picture of pre-civic human nature that had (contrary to Hobbes's implication) much (...) in common with that of Hobbes. Moreover, they deployed the matter-form distinction in their analysis of the city or civitas in ways that are in important respects similar to Hobbes's procedure in De cive and Leviathan . The paper concludes that Hobbes drew on this tradition in multiple ways while at the same time undermining some of its principal conclusions; Hobbes was in no sense an 'Aristotelian' even if his philosophy has substantial debts to Aristotelianism. (shrink)

This paper explores issues of abstraction and space in Sande Zeig's movie The Girl (2001), based on a novella by Monique Wittig, who also co-wrote the script. It argues that, with this movie, Zeig and Wittig strive to re-materialize the lesbian body abstracted by the ‘Straight Mind’ as defined by Wittig in her 1980 essay. The plot revolves around the love affair of two women, the narrator and the Girl (a lesbian painter and a straight B-grade jazz singer), under the (...) oppressive scrutiny of the Man (the Girl's boss). Each part of this paper corresponds to one space where the characters interact: first, it shows how the nightclub stands as a space of transgression for the lesbian subject and how it opens a reflection on temporality as represented by space; then the analysis of the hotel room where the Girl lives and meets the narrator demonstrates how, notably through the use of close-ups in erotic scenes, Zeig redefines abstraction as a new way to envisage the materiality of the lesbian body; finally, in the third part, the discussion on abstraction moves on to the narrator's studio where, through her work as a painter, she also explores abstract representations of the female body. This approach reconciles Wittigian theory with post-modern queer theory, and confirms that the former still offers paths to positive reformulations of modes of relationality through the de-spatialization of gender – de-genderization; the rematerialization of the body outside of heteronormative conventions; and a reconfiguration of human relationships that refuses the inevitability of social and amorous hierarchy, and that shifts the representation of the erotic from possessiveness to disinterested reciprocity. (shrink)

Engagements with Contemporary Literary and Critical Theory is a wide-ranging but accessible introduction that illuminates the field of theory through a variety of useful and relevant examples. Covering all key theories and theorists, this book looks at the relation of theory to form, discourses, subjectivity, media and networks, and environments. Organized thematically, Engagements with Contemporary Literary and Critical Theory illuminates the field by focusing on the concepts and methodologies of key thinkers, while also providing historical introductions that contextualize the latest (...) developments with regard to forms; discourses; subjectivities and embodiments; media, networks, and machines; and animals, affects, objects, and environments. Each chapter includes examples from a canonical novel, a contemporary text, and a new media artefact, while textboxes regularly introduce additional emerging or overlooked theorists of interest. An ideal guide for undergraduates studying literary theory, this book will give readers the background they need to continue their own fruitful explorations of this vibrant field of study. (shrink)

In May 2013 a new Assisted Dying Bill was tabled in the House of Lords and is currently scheduled for a second reading in May 2014. The Bill was informed by the report of the Commission on Assisted Dying which itself was informed by evidence presented by invited experts.

This article argues that people have legitimate interests in privacy that deserve legal protection on democratic principles. It describes the right to privacy as a bundle of rights of personal choice, association and expression and shows that, so described, people have legitimate political interests in privacy. These interests reflect the ways that privacy rights can supplement the protection for people's freedom and equality provided by rights of political choice, association and expression, and can help to make sure that these are, (...) genuinely, democratic. Feminists have often been ambivalent about legal protection for privacy, because privacy rights have, so often, protected the coercion and exploitation of women, and made it difficult to politicise personal forms of injustice. However, attention to the differences between democratic and undemocratic forms of politics can enable us to meet these concerns, and to distinguish a democratic justification of privacy rights from the alternatives. (shrink)

It is time to bring the rich resources of these traditions into the contemporary debate about the nature of self. This volume is the first of its kind.

Character judgments play an important role in our everyday lives. However, decades of empirical research on trait attribution suggest that the cognitive processes that generate these judgments are prone to a number of biases and cognitive distortions. This gives rise to a skeptical worry about the epistemic foundations of everyday characterological beliefs that has deeply disturbing and alienating consequences. In this paper, I argue that this skeptical worry is misplaced: under the appropriate informational conditions, our everyday character-trait judgments are in (...) fact quite trustworthy. I then propose a mindreading-based model of the socio-cognitive processes underlying trait attribution that explains both why these judgments are initially unreliable, and how they eventually become more accurate. (shrink)

Among the processes of canon-formation is the habit of coupling writers; and among the most powerful of couples in the traditional English literary canon is Spenser-and-Milton. Much of my own professional life has probably been determined by my first teaching assignment of 1963, which included “Spenser-and-Milton,” in those days at Toronto a famous cornerstone course carrying the tamp of the stamp of the formidable Renaissance scholar A. S. P. Woodhouse, known affectionately if disrespectfully to his students as Professor Nature-and-Grace. For (...) several years I labored mightily, though neither naturally nor, I suspect, gracefully, on Spenser-and-Milton, sensing all the time that the connections I made, the doctrines I was conveying, lacked persuasion; and no doubt the seed of this essay was sown in those days, although its angle of sight was not then available, obscured on all sides by institutional pillars.When we couple writers we usually imply a criterion of fit or at least explicable mating. While there is nothing to prohibit a merely comparativist curiosity, or coupling in the service of some other agenda, we presumably give greater authority to relationships that imply causality, even, or especially, if causality is defined as the influence of the one writer on the other. Most of such relationships are unidirectional, from the earlier to the later dead, and a plausible coupling requires either the successor’s own testimony that the influence-relation existed, or other evidence that the influence-relation was strong enough to be formative; or, preferably, both. Annabel Patterson, professor of literature and English at Duke University, is the author of Hermogenes and the Renaissance , Marvell and the Civic Crown , Censorship and Interpretation , Pastoral and Ideology: Virgil to Valéry , and Shakespeare and the Popular Voice. (shrink)

Finding Oz tells the remarkable story behind one of the world’s most enduring and best-loved books. Offering profound new insights into the true origins and meaning of L. Frank Baum’s 1900 masterwork, it delves into the personal turmoil and spiritual transformation that fueled Baum’s fantastical parable of the American Dream. Before becoming an impresario of children’s adventure tales, the J. K. Rowling of his age, Baum failed at a series of careers and nearly lost his soul before setting out on (...) a journey of discovery that would lead to the Land of Oz. Drawing on original research, Evan Schwartz debunks popular misconceptions and shows how the people, places, and events in Baum’s life gave birth to his unforgettable images and characters, from the Yellow Brick Road to the Emerald City to the dual view of witches that reflected the life of Baum’s mother-in-law, the radical women’s rights leader Matilda Joslyn Gage. A narrative that sweeps across late-nineteenth-century America, Finding Oz ultimately reveals how failure and heartbreak can sometimes lead to redemption and bliss, and how one individual can ignite the imagination of the entire world. (shrink)

What can philosophy tell us about ethics and public policy? What can the ethics of public policy tell us about philosophy? Those are the questions that Jonathan Wolff addresses in his wonderful little book. At one level, of course, the answer is straightforward – ethics is a branch of philosophy, so philosophy can tell us about the ethics of public policy, understood as a matter of deciding ‘what we should do’ in a manner that is institutionalised and collectively binding. But (...) at another level, as Wolff shows, there is something deeply puzzling about the idea that philosophy can tell us anything very useful about public policy and about the ethical dilemmas that it raises. Those dilemmas arise as a result of political constraints, struggles and resources which generally have little to do with philosophy and, for the most part, rather little to do with ethics. So what, exactly, should philosophers expect from an engagement with public policy? (shrink)

The visual system is known to extract summary representations of visually similar objects which bias the perception of individual objects toward the ensemble average. Although vision plays a large role in guiding action, less is known about whether ensemble representation is informative for action. Motor behavior is tuned to the veridical dimensions of objects and generally considered resistant to perceptual biases. However, when the relevant grasp dimension is not available or is unconstrained, ensemble perception may be informative to behavior by (...) providing gist information about surrounding objects. In the present study, we examined if summary representations of a surrounding ensemble display influenced grip aperture and orientation when participants reached-to-grasp a central circular target which had an explicit size but importantly no explicit orientation that the visuomotor system could selectively attend to. Maximum grip aperture and grip orientation were not biased by ensemble statistics during grasping, although participants were able to perceive and provide manual estimations of the average size and orientation of the ensemble display. Support vector machine classification of ensemble statistics achieved above-chance classification accuracy when trained on kinematic and electromyography data of the perceptual but not grasping conditions, supporting our univariate findings. These results suggest that even along unconstrained grasping dimensions, visually-guided behaviors toward real-world objects are not biased by ensemble processing. (shrink)

The science of genetics is undergoing a paradigm shift. Recent discoveries, including the activity of retrotransposons, the extent of copy number variations, somatic and chromosomal mosaicism, and the nature of the epigenome as a regulator of DNA expressivity, are challenging a series of dogmas concerning the nature of the genome and the relationship between genotype and phenotype. According to three widely held dogmas, DNA is the unchanging template of heredity, is identical in all the cells and tissues of the body, (...) and is the sole agent of inheritance. Rather than being an unchanging template, DNA appears subject to a good deal of environmentally induced change. Instead of identical DNA in all the cells of the body, somatic mosaicism appears to be the normal human condition. And DNA can no longer be considered the sole agent of inheritance. We now know that the epigenome, which regulates gene expressivity, can be inherited via the germline. These developments are particularly significant for behavior genetics for at least three reasons: First, epigenetic regulation, DNA variability, and somatic mosaicism appear to be particularly prevalent in the human brain and probably are involved in much of human behavior; second, they have important implications for the validity of heritability and gene association studies, the methodologies that largely define the discipline of behavior genetics; and third, they appear to play a critical role in development during the perinatal period and, in particular, in enabling phenotypic plasticity in offspring. I examine one of the central claims to emerge from the use of heritability studies in the behavioral sciences, the principle of minimal shared maternal effects, in light of the growing awareness that the maternal perinatal environment is a critical venue for the exercise of adaptive phenotypic plasticity. This consideration has important implications for both developmental and evolutionary biology. (shrink)

In both Metaphysics Γ 4 and 5 Aristotle argues that Protagoras is committed to the view that all contradictions are true. Yet Aristotle’s arguments are not transparent, and later, in Γ 6, he provides Protagoras with a way to escape contradictions. In this paper I try to understand Aristotle’s arguments. After examining a number of possible solutions, I conclude that the best way of explaining them is to (a) recognize that Aristotle is discussing a number of Protagorean opponents, and (b) (...) import another of Protagoras’ views, namely the claim that there are always two logoi opposed to one another. (shrink)

• An adequate conceptual framework is still needed to account for phenomena that (i) have a first-person, subjective-experiential or phenomenal character; (ii) are (usually) reportable and describable (in humans); and (iii) are neurobiologically realized.2 • The conscious subject plays an unavoidable epistemological role in characterizing the explanadum of consciousness through first-person descriptive reports. The experimentalist is then able to link first-person data and third-person data. Yet the generation of first-person data raises difficult epistemological issues about the relation of second-order awareness (...) or meta-awareness to first-order experience (e.g. (shrink)

Introduction i This book is about how we study history, how we research and write about it, and how we read it. In the postmodern age, historians are being ...

ABSTRACTNew Zealanders were presented with the opportunity to change the national flag and opted to retain the current New Zealand flag, despite arguments that it was unable to reflect national identity adequately. This article unpacks the particular version of national identity constructed in discourse in the infographic, Our Nation. Your Choice. which was released prior to the final referendum that determined the outcome of the Flag Consideration Project. We used Fairclough’s critical discourse analysis to examine the discursive construction of national (...) identity by the Flag Consideration Panel that oversaw the process. The authoritative assertion of national identity on behalf of New Zealanders emphasised inclusiveness and unity by acknowledging cultural diversity. Biculturalism was confined to an old understanding of New Zealand identity while the ideology of multiculturalism, not yet officially implemented, was positioned as common-sense. There was a focus on situating New Zealand in a global context to distance New Zealand from colonisation and connection to Britain. The positive, cohesive conceptualisation of New Zealand suggested that the Flag Consideration Project was, in fact, an exercise in re-positioning New Zealand in the global context, in which the national flag would represent the national brand rather than contribute to national identity. (shrink)

Does the wide distribution of political power in democracies, relative to other modes of government, result in better decisions? Specifically, do we have any reason to believe that they are better qualitatively – more reasoned, better supported by the available evidence, more deserving of support – than those which have been made by other means? In order to answer this question we examine the recent effort by Talisse and Misak to show that democracy is epistemically justified. Highlighting the strengths and (...) weaknesses of their arguments, we conclude that the differences between an epistemic conception of democracy and an epistemic justification of democracy are fundamental to determining the relative attractions of different arguments for democracy, and their implications for actual forms of government. -/- . (shrink)

Devrions-nous remplacer les élections par des loteries ? Le célèbre livre de Bernard Manin sur le gouvernement représentatif a appris à beaucoup que les Grecs considéraient les élections comme un moyen aristocratique, et non démocratique, de sélectionner des personnes pour le pouvoir et l'autorité politique, en comparaison avec le tirage au sort, où chacun a une chance égale d'être sélectionné. (Manin 1997) Jusqu'à récemment, cependant, l'idée qu'un engagement envers la démocratie nécessite de remplacer les élections par le tirage au sort (...) a suscité peu d'intérêt parmi les philosophes politiques. (Blondiaux, 2008 ; Courant et Sintomer, 2019) Cela a maintenant changé. (Abizadeh 2020) ( A. Guerrero 2014) (A. Guerrero 2021b ; 2021a) (Landemore 2020) (Owen et Smith 2018) (P.-É. Vandamme et al. 2018). Cet article pose donc la question de savoir si le tirage au sort est plus démocratique que les élections et si, pour cette raison, nous devrions l’utiliser pour compléter ou remplacer les élections ? (shrink)

Must we vote for the common good? This isn’t an easy question to answer, in part because there is so little literature on the ethics of voting and, such as there is, it tends to assume without argument that we must vote for the common good. Indeed, contemporary political philosophers appear to agree that we should vote for the common good even when they disagree about seemingly related matters, such as whether we should be legally required to vote, whether we (...) are entitled to vote secretly rather than openly, or what form of democracy is most morally desirable.1 Such agreement is puzzling, then, given the extensive disagreements that surround it. Hence, the aim of this paper is to consider whether the only morally correct way to vote is to vote for the common good. My hope is that even those who are not persuaded by the answers that I can offer at the moment, will find that the question is less easy to answer than they may have thought, and that the ethics of voting merits more sustained attention than it has received thus far. (shrink)

This is a book about the theory of the city or commonwealth, what would come to be called the state, in early modern natural law discourse. Annabel Brett takes a fresh approach by looking at this political entity from the perspective of its boundaries and those who crossed them. She begins with a classic debate from the Spanish sixteenth century over the political treatment of mendicants, showing how cosmopolitan ideals of porous boundaries could simultaneously justify the freedoms of itinerant (...) beggars and the activities of European colonists in the Indies. She goes on to examine the boundaries of the state in multiple senses, including the fundamental barrier between human beings and animals and the limits of the state in the face of the natural lives of its subjects, as well as territorial frontiers. Drawing on a wide range of authors, Brett reveals how early modern political space was constructed from a complex dynamic of inclusion and exclusion. Throughout, she shows that early modern debates about political boundaries displayed unheralded creativity and virtuosity but were nevertheless vulnerable to innumerable paradoxes, contradictions, and loose ends.Changes of State is a major work of intellectual history that resonates with modern debates about globalization and the transformation of the nation-state. (shrink)