In the Theological-Political Treatise, published in 1670, Spinoza asked why people “fight for their servitude as if for salvation.” In doing so, he foregrounded the affective dimension of despotism, putting forward the idea that servitude is not just passively endured but passionately strived for—something people want and will. Three hundred years later, Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari repeated this formula in Anti-Oedipus, arguing that it was the central question of political philosophy. They read Spinoza through Wilhelm Reich, stating that (...) the astonishing thing is that “those who are exploited are not continually out on strike.” In doing so they shifted the political question from domination to exploitation. Following Deleuze and Guattari, I argue for an updated version of the question, asking why people fight for exploitation as if it were rebellion. Asking this question involves reexamining the way in which the critique of religion is the antechamber of the critique of political economy in Marx, and is the thread connecting Spinoza to Marx. Finally, I argue that reframing the question in terms of rebellion and exploitation is useful in making sense of contemporary forms of right populism that present themselves as rebellion, but actually deepen the domination of capitalism over our lives. (shrink)

The lack of public support for climate change policies and refusals to vaccinate children are just two alarming illustrations of the impacts of dissent about scientific claims. Dissent can lead to confusion, false beliefs, and widespread public doubt about highly justified scientific evidence. Even more dangerously, it has begun to corrode the very authority of scientific consensus and knowledge. Deployed aggressively and to political ends, some dissent can intimidate scientists, stymie research, and lead both the public and policymakers to oppose (...) important public policies firmly rooted in science. -/- To criticize dissent is, however, a fraught exercise. Skepticism and fearless debate are key to the scientific process, making it both vital and incredibly difficult to characterize and identify dissent that is problematic in its approach and consequences. Indeed, as de Melo-Martín and Intemann show, the criteria commonly proposed as means of identifying inappropriate dissent are flawed and the strategies generally recommended to tackle such dissent are not only ineffective but could even make the situation worse. -/- The Fight Against Doubt proposes that progress on this front can best be achieved by enhancing the trustworthiness of the scientific community and by being more realistic about the limits of science when it comes to policymaking. It shows that a richer understanding of the context in which science operates is needed to disarm problematic dissent and those who deploy it. This, the authors argue, is the best way forward, rather than diagnosing the many instances of wrong-headed dissent. (shrink)

Contemporary critics of the administrative state are right to highlight the dangers of vesting too much power in a centralized bureaucracy removed from popular oversight and accountability. Too often neglected in this literature, however, are the dangers of vesting too little power in a centralized state, which enables dominant groups to further expand their social and economic advantages through decentralized means. This article seeks to synthesize these concerns, understanding them as reflecting the same underlying danger of state capture. It then (...) articulates a set of heuristics for the design of public and administrative institutions, which aim at minimizing the risks of capture from both public and private sources. By following these heuristics, it claims, we can successfully employ the administrative state as a weapon against concentrated private power, rather than allowing it to serve as a tool of dominant groups. (shrink)

When Black Feminist Thought by Patricia Hill Collins was published in 1990, reviewers called it "remarkable", "rich and valuable", and proclaimed, "with the publication of this book, Black feminism has moved to a new level". Now, in Fighting Words, Collins expands and extends the discussion of the "outsider within" presented in her earlier work, investigating how effectively Black feminist thought confronts the injustices African American women currently face. Collins takes on a broad range of issues -- poverty, mothering, white supremacy (...) and Afrocentrism, the resegregation of American society by race and class, the ideas of Sojourner Truth and how they can serve as a springboard for more liberating social theory. Contrasting social theories that support unjust power relations of race, class, gender, and nation with those that challenge inequalities, Collins investigates why some ideas are granted the status of "theory" while others remain "thought". "It is not that elites produce theory while everyone else produces mere thought", she writes. "Rather, elites possess the power to legitimate the knowledge that they define as theory as being universal, normative, and ideal". Collins argues that because African American women and other historically oppressed groups seek economic and social justice, their social theories may emphasize themes and work from assumptions that are different from those of mainstream American society, generating new angles of vision on injustice. Collins also puts such oppositional social theory to the test: while the words of these theories may challenge injustice, do the ideas make a difference in the lives of the people they claim to represent? Throughout,Collins provides an essential understanding of how "outsiders" resist mainstream perspectives, and what the mainstream can learn from such "outsiders". Historically situated yet transcending the specific, Fighting Words provides a new interpretive framework for both thinking through and overcoming social injustice. (shrink)

Digital sovereignty, and the question of who ultimately controls AI seems, at first glance, to be an issue that concerns only specialists, politicians and corporate entities. And yet the fight for who will win digital sovereignty has far-reaching societal implications. Drawing on five case studies, the paper argues that digital sovereignty affects everyone, whether digital users or not, and makes the case for a hybrid system of control which has the potential to offer full democratic legitimacy as well as (...) innovative flexibility. (shrink)

The aim of this chapter is to analyze the movie Fight Club, directed by David Fincher, written by Jim Uhls, and first released in the fall of 1999. The movie is based on the homonym novel by Chuck Palahniuk, published in 1996. I will argue that Fight Club is to be understood in primarily existentialist, nonethical, and nonevidential terms, showing the struggle felt by each and every one of us to find a convincing answer to the question of (...) what (if anything) counts as an authentic life that is worth living. Moreover, I will argue that the movie does not merely illustrate the struggle and the existential angst it engenders; it also advances, if not strictly speaking a theoretical answer grounded in an indisputable philosophical reasoning, then at least a practical way to face it. It is only after positively endorsing the claim that absolutely nothing (whatever it may be) externally imposed on a person can give their life ultimate meaning that a person is free to engage in a conscious, laborious, and exhausting attempt at self-affirmation, a full and positive endorsement of one’s own authenticity. (shrink)

The Ultimate Fighting Championship broadcasts Mixed Martial Arts fights in over 149 countries to nearly a billion households worldwide. In 2013, the UFC signed the first ever female fighter Ronda ‘Rowdy’ Rousey. In this essay, I argue that women’s participation in the UFC challenges traditional stereotypes of female physical passivity and Iris Marion Young’s claims about feminine spatiality. However, at the same time, UFC culture emphasizes traditional sexist views of femininity and submissiveness. In order to analyze how gender is constructed (...) in the UFC, theories on women’s lived body experiences through participation in MMA are explored. Brian Pronger’s homosocial and homophobia framework is also applied to the phallocentric discourse that is part of the UFC. (shrink)

In both the Laches (191d-e) and the Laws (1.633c-d, 1.634a-b, and 1. 635d), Plato has his protagonist defend the claim that courage (andreia) is not simply a matter of resisting pain and fear but about overcoming pleasure and desire as well. In this paper, I argue that Plato took the expansive view of courage seriously and that there are several reasons why we should too.

This article integrates previously missing components of government quality into the governance-piracy nexus in exploring governance mechanisms by which global obligations for the treatment of IPRs are effectively transmitted from international to the national level in the battle against piracy. It assesses the best governance tools in the fight against piracy and upholding of intellectual property rights (IPRs). The instrumentality of IPR laws (treaties) in tackling piracy through good governance mechanisms is also examined. Findings demonstrate that: (1) while all (...) governance tools under consideration significantly decrease the incidence of piracy, corruption-control is the most effective weapon; (2) but for voice and accountability, political stability and democracy, IPR laws (treaties) are instrumental in tackling piracy through government quality dynamics of rule of law, regulation quality, government effectiveness, corruption-control, and press freedom. Hence, the need for a policy approach most conducive to expanding development is to implement an integrated system of both IPRs and corollary good governance policies. Moreover, our findings support the relevance of good governance measures in developing countries wishing to complement their emerging IPR regimes. (shrink)

War is almost always conducted with various restrictions in the form of rules, rituals, and taboos. Many of the norms that regulate warfare can be found in the tradition of just war. This tradition seeks to provide a middle ground between an unrealistic (at least for politicians) pacifism that does not even allow war in self-defence and a too realistic realism that claims there is no place for ethics in war. The tradition of just war does not have the force (...) of law; it provides, above all, a vocabulary to discuss war in moral terms. At the same time, the tradition does have an impact: it forms the basis of humanitarian law and the Geneva Conventions. Just like with laws, it is recognised here that imperfect adherence to these principles does not necessarily diminish their validity. Most proponents of the tradition believe that the principles of just war, even though some date back centuries, are sufficiently general to be applicable to contemporary conflicts, such as the Russo-Ukrainian War. If we apply the norms of the just war tradition to the current situation in Ukraine, we see that Russia is waging an unjust war in an unjust manner. (shrink)

Our study contributes to the ongoing debate about women’s rights and religious feminism. The context for analysis of women’s experiences is the “Women of the Wall” who have been struggling for the past 30 years for their right to practice their spiritual rituals (praying at the Western Wall) in a hegemonic and masculine arena. We suggest that the “Women of the Wall” and their battle for spiritual equality threaten the hegemonic masculinity. Moreover, this feminist battle expands the feminist revolution and (...) the fights for women’s equality to the religious arena which is dominated by the hegemonic masculinity. The implementation of the Listening Guide, a feminist methodology, assists us in uncovering various voices, representing different aspects of the experiences of the “Women of the Wall” in a conflict zone. These narratives reveal juxtapositions of feelings of competence, determination and vulnerability and shed light on the women’s struggle for gender equality in a hegemonic masculine domain. (shrink)

Some of our most fundamental moral rules are violated by the practices of torture and war. If one examines the concrete forms these practices take, can the exceptions to the rules necessary to either torture or war be justified? Fighting Hurt brings together key essays by Henry Shue on the issue of torture, and relatedly, the moral challenges surrounding the initiation and conduct of war, and features a new introduction outlining the argument of the essays, putting them into context, and (...) describing how and in what ways his position has modified over time. The first six chapters marshal arguments that have been refined over 35 years for the conclusion that torture can never be justified in any actual circumstances whatsoever. The practice of torture has nothing significant in common with the ticking bomb scenario often used in its defence, and weak U.S. statutes have loop-holes for psychological torture of the kind now favoured by CIA in the 'war against terrorism'. The other sixteen chapters maintain that for as long as wars are in fact fought, it is morally urgent to limit specific destructive practices that cannot be prohibited. Two possible exceptions to the UN Charter's prohibition on all but defensive wars, humanitarian military intervention and preventive war to eliminate WMD, are evaluated; and one possible exception to the principle of discrimination, Michael Walzer's 'supreme emergency', is sharply criticized. Two other fundamental issues about the rules for the conduct of war receive extensive controversial treatment. The first is the rules to limit the bombing of dual-use infrastructure, with a focus on alternative interpretations of the principle of proportionality that limits 'collateral damage'. The second is the moral status of the laws of war as embodied in International Humanitarian Law. It is argued that the current philosophical critique of IHL by Jeff McMahan focused on individual moral liability to attack is an intellectual dead-end and that the morally best rules are international laws that are the same for all fighters.Examining real cases, including U.S. bombing of Iraq in 1991, the Clinton Administration decision not to intervene in the 1994 Rwandan genocide, NATO bombing of Serbia in 1999, and CIA torture after 9/11 and its alternatives, this book is highly accessible to general readers who are interested in the ethical status of American political life, especially foreign policy. (shrink)

The wake of the financial crisis has inspired hopes for dramatic change and stirred visions of capitalism’s terminal collapse. Yet capitalism is not on its deathbed, utopia is not in our future, and revolution is not in the cards. In Capitalism on Edge, Albena Azmanova demonstrates that radical progressive change is still attainable, but it must come from an unexpected direction. Azmanova’s new critique of capitalism focuses on the competitive pursuit of profit rather than on forms of ownership and patterns (...) of wealth distribution. She contends that neoliberal capitalism has mutated into a new form—precarity capitalism—marked by the emergence of a precarious multitude. Widespread economic insecurity ails the 99 percent across differences in income, education, and professional occupation; it is the underlying cause of such diverse hardships as work-related stress and chronic unemployment. In response, Azmanova calls for forging a broad alliance of strange bedfellows whose discontent would challenge not only capitalism’s unfair outcomes but also the drive for profit at its core. To achieve this synthesis, progressive forces need to go beyond the old ideological certitudes of, on the left, fighting inequality and, on the right, increasing competition. Azmanova details reforms that would enable a dramatic transformation of the current system without a revolutionary break. An iconoclastic critique of left orthodoxy, Capitalism on Edge confronts the intellectual and political impasses of our time to discern a new path of emancipation. (shrink)

In this paper, I explore a noted empirical link between regret and insomnia. Drawing on Brian O’Shaughnessy analysis of wakeful consciousness, I sketch three candidate ways of excavating a conceptual connection. Regret involves a certain kind of temporal orientation that, for O’Shaughnessy, only the state of wakefulness makes possible. Regret involves mental activity – it is productive of and precipitates patterns of counterfactual thought and imagining. Further, picking up a cue from Bernard Williams’ celebrated conception of agent-regret in ‘Moral Luck’, (...) sometimes the mental activity that occurs in regret is affective and expressive – as I argue, it is expressive of the wish that things were otherwise were satisfied now. Finally, I take up the puzzle as to why occurrent regret is not merely incompatible with sleep – insofar as it necessitates wakefulness - but may preclude falling asleep and I offer a tentative solution, focusing on the self-conscious character of occurrent regret. (shrink)

This article examines the ways in which Bruce Nauman’s art installations provoke audience experiences analogous to those felt during traumatic events. A central assertion of the present study is that the looping mechanisms of Nauman’s video artworks produce a theoretical stilling of the moving image that is reflective of the fight-flight-or-freeze response to a highly charged incident, which often entails a temporal shift as time appears to slow to a halt. Whereas in the past, the human response to acute (...) stress was typically prompted by a physical threat in the natural environment, today an evolutionary misfire occurs when this survival mechanism becomes prompted instead during everyday situations. Throughout human history, the experience of viewing an artwork has developed into an act of aesthetic appreciation involving a search for meaning. However, in this case, the sensory overload triggered by Nauman’s artwork purposefully impedes neuroprocessing, highlighting the adverse effects of mediation saturation in contemporary society; therefore, a stilling of the moving image in essence functions as a biological adaptation strategy in an attempt to come to terms with the puzzling nature of these artworks. By applying French philosopher Roland Barthes’s theories of the image, this article expands Barthes’s thought from the image to the performative as a reflection of human adaptation to technological advancement. (shrink)

In study 1, the time when aggressive fighting involving 8 and 11 year‐old children took place was examined by means of direct playground observations during lunch‐time recess. There was a tendency, significant in the younger group, for there to have been more fights in the last quarter of recess. In study 2, the causes of fights, the sex of the participants, the proportion of fights that were escalated by other children joining in in a non‐conciliatory way, and the proportion in (...) which children intervened to stop the fights were investigated, again by means of direct playground observations. The most common causes of fights were disputes over some aspect of a rule‐governed game, teasing, retaliations to accidental hurt/injury, and to a lesser extent disputes over space. Most of the fights that were observed involved boys only , and only a minority involved boys and girls or just girls . Most fights were not escalated by other children and most fights did not involve attempts to stop them by other children. In study 3, interview data concerning children's views on fighting are reported. Many children expressed generally negative attitudes towards fighting, and there appeared to be several common ‘barriers’ that deterred children from participating. On the other hand, some children also articulated reasons why they sometimes felt it was necessary to fight. The significance of the results from the three studies for managing children's aggressive behaviour in schools is discussed. (shrink)

This study examines the efficiency of tools for fighting software piracy in the conditional distributions of software piracy. Our paper examines software piracy in 99 countries over the period 1994–2010, using contemporary and non-contemporary quantile regressions. The intuition for modelling distributions contingent on existing levels of software piracy is that the effectiveness of tools against piracy may consistently decrease or increase simultaneously with the increasing levels of software piracy. Hence, blanket policies against software piracy are unlikely to succeed unless they (...) are contingent on initial levels of software piracy and tailored differently across countries with low, medium and high levels of software piracy. Our findings indicate that GDP per capita, research and development expenditure, main intellectual property laws, multilateral treaties, bilateral treaties, World Intellectual Property Organisation treaties, money supply and respect for the rule of law have negative effects on software piracy. Equitably distributed wealth reduces software piracy, and the tendency not to indulge in software piracy because of equitably distributed wealth increases with the increasing software piracy levels. Hence, the negative degree of responsiveness of software piracy to changes in income levels is an increasing function of software piracy. Moreover, the relationships between policy instruments and software piracy display various patterns: U-shape, Kuznets-shape, S-shape and negative thresholds. A negative threshold represents negative estimates with the increasing negative magnitude throughout the conditional distributions of software piracy. We also discuss the policy implications of our study. (shrink)

Resumo Visto por uma lente existencial, o filme Fight Club impele-nos a criar um autêntico self. Porém, também nos adverte que a criação de um autêntico self é algo que só podemos fazer por nós mesmos. A definitiva ironia no filme Fight Club é que, num esforço por rejeitar a sociedade e cultivar a individualidade, as pessoas acabam por se conformar a um culto e aos seus ditames. A lição é que a autenticidade é frágil, facilmente esmagada e (...) facilmente rendida. No final do filme, o protagonista, oferece-nos esperança, ainda que seja para nos tornarmos auto-conscientes e lutar contra as forças que nos procuram subjugar. Palavras-chave : autenticidade, consumismo, existencialismo, Fight Club, Nietzsche, vícioViewed through an existential lens, Fight Club urges us to create an authentic self, but it also cautions us that the creation of an authentic self is something we can only do for ourselves. The ultimate irony in Fight Club is that in an effort to reject society and cultivate individuality, people end up conforming to a cult and its dictates. The clear lesson is that authenticity is fragile, easily crushed and easily surrendered. By the end of the movie, the protagonist at least offers us hope, though, that we can become self-aware and fight back against the forces that seek to subjugate us. Keywords : addiction, authenticity, consumerism, existentialism, Fight Club, Nietzsche. (shrink)

There are a plethora of issues within higher education which continually reinforce aspects of inequality and discrimination. These particular issues are aligned to institutionally racist struc...

Whereas civil discourse is usually thought to be about defusing conflict, this essay argues it may be fruitfully thought of as fighting honorably for what we believe. Thus agonistic honor, which conceives of rightness in terms of fair and respectful contest for status, will be an especially important virtue in contexts—from classrooms to courtrooms to pluralistic democracies in general—where conflict is inevitable and desirable. To motivate this claim, I take a Hobbesian approach. I begin with a rational reconstruction of honor (...) patterned after Hobbes’ rational reconstruction of justice, and imagine honor-equivalents of “rational” individuals in a “state of nature.” I then describe a multi-stage process that culminates in honorable contests among a natural aristocracy. The lessons from this exercise apply to the question of civil discourse: while the "standard model" of civil discourse aims at resolving disagreement by downplaying rivalry and ego, the more realistic agonistic model harnesses these factors to make our civil debates more culturally sustainable. (shrink)

100 years ago, the editors of the Journal of Educational Psychology conducted one of the most famous studies of experts’ conceptions of human intelligence. This was reason enough to prompt the question where we stand today with making sense of “intelligence”. In this paper, we argue that we should overcome our anthropocentrism and appreciate the wonders of intelligence in nonhuman and nonbiological animals instead. For that reason, we study two cases of octopus intelligence and intelligence in machine learning systems to (...) embrace the notion of intelligence as a non-unitary faculty with pluralistic forms. Furthermore, we derive lessons for advancing our human self-understanding. (shrink)

Solar radiation management (SRM) has been proposed as a means of mitigating climate change. Although SRM poses new risks, it is sometimes proposed as the ‘lesser evil’. I consider how research and implementation of SRM could be regulated, drawing on what I call a ‘precautionary checklist’, which includes consideration of the longer term political implications of technical change. Particular attention is given to the moral hazard of ‘regulatory drift’, in which strong initial regulation softens through complacency, deliberate deregulation (‘regulatory gift’) (...) and the limited constituency of people with the skills to regulate (‘thin markets’). I propose the strengthening of civil society groups to keep regulators in check. (shrink)

One of the starting assumptions in the debate over the ethical status of animals is that someone who is committed to reducing animal suffering should not eat meat. Steven Davis has recently advanced a novel criticism of this view. He argues that individuals who are committed to reducing animal suffering should not adopt a vegetarian or vegan diet, as Tom Regan an other animal rights advocates claim, but one containing free-range beef. To make his case Davis highlights an overlooked form (...) of animal harm, that done to field animals in crop production. Yet while Davis's argument is ingenious and thought-provoking, it is not a successful challenge to vegetarianism and veganism's status as the diets that most advance animal rights. Scientific studies of crop production that Davis draws on document two different forms of harm done to field animals: those that are directly killed by harvesting equipment and those that are killed by other animals. Once this distinction is made explicit, the degree to which such studies pose a problem for animal protection theory considerably weakens. Davis also overlooks philosophically significant forms of harm to human beings that are present in beef production but not crop harvesting. Finally, he bases his argument on the controversial assumption that there is no difference between deliberate and accidental killing - either of animals or people. Although these problems defeat Davis's attempt to offer an immanent critique of Regan's animal rights position, his analysis does have important dietary ramifications that animal advocates should take into account. (shrink)

Corruption continues to represent a tenacious challenge to internationally active companies. According to prevailing international anti-corruption standards, a company can be held criminally liable if it does not put all necessary and reasonable organizational measures in place to prevent corruption. The regular training of employees is considered one of the most effective ways to prevent corruption. Employee training is considered helpful in efforts to minimize the risk of employees becoming involved in corrupt behavior. With this idea in mind and building (...) on the fraud triangle model and neutralization theory, this paper examines whether business professionals who have undergone anti-corruption training are more likely to reject prevailing justifications of corrupt practices than are those who have not undergone such training. The empirical analysis in this paper is based on regression models using data obtained from a unique dataset that includes 200 business professionals. The findings provide evidence that training is positively linked to the likelihood of rejecting justifications of corruption. However, the research also suggests that methods of training must become more specific in order to tackle challenging questions regarding the gray areas of ethics and compliance. (shrink)

According to the German Embryo Protection Act, PGD has been banned in Germany since 1990; one reason is the legislature’s avoiding to insert a revision clause regarding medical advance into the law. The ruling of the German Federal Court of Justice of July 2010 shows the problems resulting out of this approach and declares PGD to be permitted in certain cases. The article discusses the necessity for, as well as the problems of, an interdisciplinary dialogue in the field of reproductive (...) medicine. (shrink)

In the 1970s policy making in the Netherlands took place in sectoral networks, consisting of professional interest groups and like minded civil servants, advisory councils, MPs and departmental ministers. In this article the author examines whether such a sectoral policy network still exists in Dutch health care by comparing past and present data on the background of civil servants, mp’s and departmental ministers. Next she describes the political fight against the health care sectoral network, which has gone on for (...) decades. She concludes that the health care sectoral network has been severely weakened, although it remains to be seen whether this will lead to a substantial reduction of health care costs, which was one of the main reasons why politicians fought against sectoral interests in the first place. (shrink)

ABSTRACT Capitalism on Edge aims to redraw the terms of analysis of the so-called democratic capitalism and sketches a political agenda for emancipating society of its grip. This symposium reflects critically on Azmanova’s book and challenges her arguments on methodological, thematic, and substantive grounds. Azar Dakwar introduces the book’s claims and wonders about the nature of the anti-capitalistic agency Azmanova’s ascribes to the precariat. David Ingram worries about Azmanova’s deposing of “economic democracy” and the impact of which on the prospect (...) of radical change she advocates. William Callison casts doubt over the empirical plausibility of Azmanova’s vision of crisis-free transition out of democratic capitalism. Eilat Maoz interrogates Azmanova’s emancipatory project from the historical standpoint of (de)colonization and global imperialism. In her reply to these criticisms, Azmanova accepts some and parries others, while bringing their points closer to her anti-capitalist vision. (shrink)

Fake news has been the focus of debate, especially since the election of Donald Trump (2016), and remains a topic of concern in democratic countries worldwide, given (a) their threat to democratic systems and (b) the difficulty in detecting them. Despite the deployment of sophisticated computational systems to identify fake news, as well as the streamlining of fact-checking methods, appropriate fake news detection mechanisms have not yet been found. In fact, technological approaches are likely to be inefficient, given that fake (...) news are based mostly on partisanship and identity politics, and not necessarily on outright deception. However, as disinformation is inherently expressed linguistically, this is a privileged room for forensic linguistic analysis. This article builds upon a forensic linguistic analysis of fake news pieces published in English and in Portuguese, which were collected since 2019 from acknowledged fake news outlets. The preliminary empirical analysis reveals that fake news pieces employ particular linguistic features, e.g. at the levels of typography, orthography and spelling, and morphosyntax. The systematic identification of these features, which will allow mapping linguistic resources and patterns used in those contexts, contributes to scholarship, not only by enabling a streamlined development of computational detection systems, but more importantly by permitting the forensic linguistics expert to assist criminal investigations and give evidence in court. (shrink)

This essay distinguishes between honor-typical and authoritarian behavior in humans and animals. Whereas authoritarianism concerns hierarchies coordinated by control and obedience, honor concerns rankings of prestige determined by fair contests. Honor-typical behavior is identifiable in non-human species, and is to be expected in polygynous species with non-resource-based mating systems. This picture lends further support to an increasingly popular psychological theory that sees morality as constituted by a variety of moral systems. If moral cognition is pluralistic in this way, then the (...) question of moral agency is better considered in terms of particular moral modes, one of which will be “honor-agency.” The universal principles of honorable conduct suggest a handful of criteria for counting as an honorable agent (human or otherwise), and these criteria can be specified without commitment to any particular account of what it takes to be an agent in general. (shrink)

This chapter contains sections titled: Humor and Disengagement Humor as Play Laughter as a Play Signal.

: Eponymic honor is a common form of professional recognition in economics, as it is in other sciences. There also seems to be convincing evidence that individuals exposed to economic theory behave less cooperatively and more self-interestedly than individuals who have not been exposed to such economic ideas. Taken together these two facts would seem to suggest that the history of economic thought would be a history of rather contentious priority fights. If economists generally behave in self-interested and non-cooperative ways, (...) and having your name attached to a particular result serves one’s professional self-interest, then economists should be quick to fight for these eponymic honors. This means that economists should be continually involved in sordid disputes about who does, and who does not, get credit for various economic discoveries. The paradox is that such priority fights do not exist in economics. The paper examines absence of such disputes from a Mertonian perspective. (shrink)

Since the concept of “nudge” was introduced in 2008 by Thaler and Sunstein, proposing that small interventions based on changes in choice architectures can alter people’s behavior and make it easier for them to achieve their desired goals, the application in public policy of behavioral economics has gained significant attention. This has led to the emergence of different types of policies based on behavioral insights, which have been used in a variety of areas, including health or finance, with the goal (...) of promoting well-being and addressing social and economic issues. After providing a basic theoretical background as a frame of reference to understand gender violence, this study explores the use of tools from the field of behavioral economics as it is applied in public policy. Regulatory (paternalistic) and non-regulatory (libertarian) interventions based on behavioral insights will be considered: nudges, boosts, shoves, budges, or sludge audits, are examined as potential interventions to use in matters related to this type of violence. After evaluating these behavioral policy instruments and their potential effectiveness, the limitations of the behavioral perspective are recognized, and the need for a multifaceted approach to combating gender violence is acknowledged. The article concludes by arguing that public policies addressing gender violence should not only utilize behavioral tools but should also incorporate strategies related to education, legislation, and social norms. (shrink)

Scientific disputes about how often different processes or patterns occur are relative frequency controversies. These controversies occur across the sciences. In some areas—especially biology—they are even the dominant mode of dispute. Yet they depart from the standard picture of what a scientific controversy is like. In fact, standard philosophical accounts of scientific controversies suggest that relative frequency controversies are irrational or lacking in epistemic value. This is because standard philosophical accounts of scientific controversies often assume that in order to be (...) rational, a scientific controversy must reach a resolution and be about a scientifically interesting question. Relative frequency controversies rarely reach a resolution, however, and some scientists and philosophers are skeptical that these controversies center on scientifically interesting questions. In this paper, I provide a novel account of the epistemic contribution that relative frequency controversies make to science. I show that these controversies are rational in the sense of furthering the epistemic aims of the scientific communities in which they occur. They do this despite rarely reaching a resolution, and independent of whether the controversies are about scientifically interesting questions. This means that assumptions and about what is required for a controversy to be rational are wrong. Controversies do not need to reach a resolution in order to be rational. And they do not need to be about anything scientifically interesting in order to make valuable epistemic contributions to science. (shrink)

The traditional characterization of Charles Darwin as a strong advocate of physiological experimentation on animals was posited in Richard French’s Antivivisection and medical science in Victorian England, where French portrayed him as a soldier in Thomas Huxley’s efforts to preserve anatomical experimentation on animals unfettered by government regulation. That interpretation relied too much on, inter alia, Huxley’s own description of the legislative battles of 1875, and shared many historians’ propensity to foster a legacy of Darwin as a leader among a (...) new wave of scientists, even where personal interests might indicate a conflicting story. Animal rights issues concerned more than mere science for Darwin, however, and where debates over other scientific issues failed to inspire Darwin to become publicly active, he readily joined the battle over vivisection, helping to draft legislation which, in many ways, was more protective of animal rights than even the bills proposed by his friend and anti-vivisectionist, Frances Power Cobbe. Darwin may not have officially joined Cobbe’s side in the fight, but personal correspondence of the period between 1870 and 1875 reveals a man whose first interest was to protect animals from inhumane treatment, and second to protect the reputations of those men and physiologists who were his friends, and who he believed incapable of inhumane acts. On this latter point he and Cobbe never did reach agreement, but they certainly agreed on the humane treatment of animals, and the need to proscribe various forms of animal experimentation. (shrink)

We are re-issuing Ren Jiyu's article, "Fight Hard to Advance the Marxist Study of Religion," in order to commemorate his major achievements in establishing the Chinese Society of Atheism and starting up the publication Science and Atheism. Ren was accused of using the term "religion," during the criticism of Gang of Four, not in the sense of a figure of speech, but as "truly perceiving" the cult of the individual "as a new sort of religion." He also faced the (...) accusation that "the slogans, which urged people to ‘criticize religious theism’* and ‘vigorously propagate atheism,’ put forward as a means of ‘sweeping out religion,’ were equally absurd." The accusations leveled at the article landed atheist propaganda in a very difficult position. Thirty years have elapsed since then. The experience or lessons of the last thirty years with regard to both theism and atheism can and should be summarized. And if these are to be summarized, this article is a starting point. As regards this article, we only have two statements to make here: First, the article clearly pointed out that Lin Biao and the Gang of Four "were neither religious believers nor theists, nor did they openly propagate religious theism." And second, it is true that the article advocated criticism of religious theism and vigorous propaganda of atheism, but it did not stand for "sweeping out religion." [2009, Editors of Science and Atheism]. (shrink)