Advances in science and technology have created a plethora of medical therapies in various forms including drugs, devices, and equipment. Many of these therapies are not curative, however, and patients sometimes find themselves being more burdened than benefited by them. These situations result in ethical dilemmas for which the bioethicist is sometimes consulted to resolve. Using philosophical principles of maximizing good, minimizing harm, being just, and respecting the values of others, the bioethicist counsels patients, families, and hospital personnel, sometimes functioning (...) as advocate, arbitrator, negotiator, mediator, and teacher. (shrink)

Advances in science and technology have created a plethora of medical therapies in various forms including drugs, devices, and equipment. Many of these therapies are not curative, however, and patients sometimes find themselves being more burdened than benefited by them. These situations result in ethical dilemmas for which the bioethicist is sometimes consulted to resolve. Using philosophical principles of maximizing good, minimizing harm, being just, and respecting the values of others, the bioethicist counsels patients, families, and hospital personnel, sometimes functioning (...) as advocate, arbitrator, negotiator, mediator, and teacher. (shrink)

We investigated whether (a) people positively reevaluate the characters of recently dead others and (b) supernatural primes concerning an ambient dead agent serve to curb selfish intentions. In Study 1, participants made trait attributions to three strangers depicted in photographs; one week later, they returned to do the same but were informed that one of the strangers had died over the weekend. Participants rated the decedent target more favorably after learning of his death whereas ratings for the control targets remained (...) unchanged between sessions. This effect was especially pronounced for traits dealing with the decedent’s prosocial tendencies (e.g., ethical, kind). In Study 2, a content analysis of obituaries revealed a similar emphasis on decedents’ prosocial attributes over other personality dimensions (e.g., achievement-relatedness, social skills). Finally, in Study 3, participants who were told of an alleged ghost in the laboratory were less likely to cheat on a competitive task than those who did not receive this supernatural prime. The findings are interpreted as evidence suggestive of adaptive design. (shrink)

In this paper we analyze results from 114 face-to-face qualitative interviews of people who had evacuated from the New Orleans area in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, interviews that were completed within weeks of the 2005 storm in most cases. Our goal was to understand the role information and knowledge played in people's decisions to leave the area. Contrary to the conventional wisdom underlying many disaster communication studies, we found that our interviewees almost always had extensive storm-related information (...) from a variety of sources, including media reports and (in many cases) other background knowledge gleaned from experiences with previous storms, often from interpersonal sources. However, consistent with a theme in communication research that has been identifiable since at least the 1940s, interpersonal communication networks were most often what ultimately caused these individuals to act on this information, and therefore those with “weak ties” (a concept borrowed from sociology) to the broader “mainstream” community may have been disadvantaged, slower to leave, and thus more vulnerable to the storm's main effects. From our evidence, the end result was less a function of discrimination as it was one of differential activation of a relevant social network. These results argue for the rejection of a “deficit model” that assumes varied reactions to natural disaster result from some kind of an information deficiency, and remind us that behavior under such circumstances is the result of a process of collective behavior, not only individual cognition. (shrink)

In this paper we analyze results from 114 face-to-face qualitative interviews of people who had evacuated from the New Orleans area in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, interviews that were completed within weeks of the 2005 storm in most cases. Our goal was to understand the role information and knowledge played in people's decisions to leave the area. Contrary to the conventional wisdom underlying many disaster communication studies, we found that our interviewees almost always had extensive storm-related information (...) from a variety of sources, including media reports and other background knowledge gleaned from experiences with previous storms, often from interpersonal sources. However, consistent with a theme in communication research that has been identifiable since at least the 1940s, interpersonal communication networks were most often what ultimately caused these individuals to act on this information, and therefore those with “weak ties” to the broader “mainstream” community may have been disadvantaged, slower to leave, and thus more vulnerable to the storm's main effects. From our evidence, the end result was less a function of discrimination as it was one of differential activation of a relevant social network. These results argue for the rejection of a “deficit model” that assumes varied reactions to natural disaster result from some kind of an information deficiency, and remind us that behavior under such circumstances is the result of a process of collective behavior, not only individual cognition. (shrink)

Hurricane Katrina offered a revealing snapshot of the historical vulnerability that New Orleans and Gulf Coast residents have long experienced and continue to face. In particular, population groups with special health needs—those suffering from debilitating chronic diseases—were among those most at risk during the storm. Focusing specifically on diabetic evacuees during and after Katrina, this essay examines how the lack of planning during the disaster led to diminished access to dialysis as well as poor food and inadequate insulin management (...) in evacuation shelters. In so doing, it underscores the strong links between disasters and public health concerns such as elevated risks for complications, emergency room visits, hospitalizations, and reduced life expectancy for individuals with diabetes. As the case of Katrina powerfully illustrates, populations suffering from chronic diseases like diabetes suffer disproportionately from disasters and other disruptive events. (shrink)

The images of human suffering from New Orleans in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina remain seared in our nation's collective memory. More than 8 years on, the city and its African-American population still have not recovered fully. This reality highlights an important truth: the disturbances that accompany climate change will first and foremost affect minority communities, many of whom are economically disadvantaged. This paper: (1) describes how Hurricane Katrina, an example of the type of natural disaster that will (...) become more prevalent with intensifying climate change, has impacted the black community of New Orleans; (2) explores the notion that African Americans, in the midst of racial oppression, have developed a unique and powerful brand of environmental thought that has much to contribute to mainstream environmentalism; and (3) argues that the voice of the black community, which has a vested interest in climate outcomes, is critically needed in today's climate debate. (shrink)

On August 29, 2005, the worst natural disaster in the history of the United States devastated the city of New Orleans and the Gulf Coast of Louisiana and Mississippi. Like many others in America and around the world, Chris McLaughlin watched the tragedy of Katrina unfold on a television screen from the comfort of her living room on Cape Cod in Massachusetts. In the devastation afterwards, almost 2,000 people and an estimated 250,000 animals had perished. Miraculously, many pets did (...) manage to survive. But in the months that followed the hurricane, thousands of them were fending for themselves in the ruins of devastated neighborhoods. They roamed the streets in feral packs or struck out alone. Their plight triggered a grassroots rescue effort unlike any this country had ever seen, and while relief organizations such as the Red Cross were tending to the human survivors, and movie stars and celebrities were airlifting food and endorsing seven-figure checks, a much smaller and meagerly funded effort was underway to save the four-legged victims. With no prior experience in disaster response and no real grasp of the hell that awaited them, scores of animal lovers, including McLaughlin, made their way to the Gulf Coast to help in any way they could. Including photos from four-time Pulitzer Prize-winning photojournalist Carol Guzy, Mississippi Barking spans the course of two years as McLaughlin and others ventured into the wreckage of the Gulf Coast to rescue the animals left behind. McLaughlin tells the moving stories of the people she met along the way, both those who lost everything to the hurricane and those working beside her rescuing and transporting animals away from the neglected, derelict conditions in which they barely survived. Within this story of tragedy and cruelty, suffering and ignorance, Mississippi Barking also bears witness to selfless acts of bravery and compassion, and the beauty and heroics of those who risked everything to save the animals that could not save themselves. (shrink)

This article uses a 36-million word corpus of news reporting on Hurricane Katrina in the United States to explore how computer-based methods can help researchers to investigate the construction of newsworthiness. It makes use of Bednarek and Caple’s discursive approach to the analysis of news values, and is both exploratory and evaluative in nature. One aim is to test and evaluate the integration of corpus techniques in applying discursive news values analysis. We employ and evaluate corpus techniques that have (...) not been tested previously in relation to the large-scale analysis of news values. These techniques include tagged lemma frequencies, collocation, key part-of-speech tags and key semantic tags. A secondary aim is to gain insights into how a specific happening – Hurricane Katrina – was linguistically constructed as newsworthy in major American news media outlets, thus also making a contribution to ecolinguistics. (shrink)

This article examines how on-air conversations between journalists indicate how US television coverage of a race-related crisis can reflect racial ideology. Using critical discourse analysis, we examined interjournalistic discourse about African Americans in national network and cable news programs that aired after Hurricane Katrina reached New Orleans. While we expected conversational semantic items from conservative Fox News to reflect racial ideology, we also found such discursive elements from politically moderate and progressive news organizations such as CBS, CNN, and MSNBC. (...) These findings are consistent with Anxiety Uncertainty Management theory, which predicts that exposure to stressors in unfamiliar settings causes individuals to think in ethnocentric, dichotomous, stereotypical ways. Our research underscores the impact of white privilege on language, communication, and news production, and the need for cultural competence training to enhance journalists’ ability to discuss racial matters with ease. (shrink)

This case deals with the corporate response to a crisis and the successful evacuation of approximately 900 hotel guests, staff, and family members of staff whowere stranded in the Fairmont New Orleans hotel by Hurricane Katrina. This rescue effort, spearheaded by managers at the sister Fairmont hotel in Dallas, Texas, was completed shortly after 12 a.m. on Friday, September 2, 2005, when the last bus with evacuees pulled into the Dallas Fairmont after making a round trip of more (...) than 1000 miles — and about 64 hours after planning began. This case is particularly significant for lessons that may be derived about crisis management and leadership, and it also raises several interesting ethical issues. The case, which relies on field research plus secondary sources, is appropriate for business ethics and business strategy courses. (shrink)

Neff's gripping images and poignant narratives are the stories that New Orleans citizens told one another - a view of the disaster not captured by the news cameras - and pho.

Hurricane Katrina was one of the worst disasters in United States history. Failures within New Orleans’ engineered hurricane protection system (levees and floodwalls) contributed to the severity of the event and have drawn considerable public attention. In the time since Katrina, forensic investigations have uncovered a range of issues and problems related to the engineering work. In this article, my goal is to distill from these investigations, and the related literature that has accumulated, some overarching macro-ethical issues that (...) are relevant for all engineers. I attempt to frame these issues, using illustrative examples taken from Katrina, in a way that might be of pedagogical use and benefit for engineering educators interested in engaging their students in discussions of engineering ethics, societal impact of engineered systems, engineering design, or related topics. Some of the issues discussed are problems of unanticipated failure modes, faulty assumptions, lack or misuse of information, the importance of resiliency, the effects of time, balancing competing interests, attending to the details of interfaces, the fickleness of risk perception, and how the past constrains the present. (shrink)

Hurricane Katrina was an elemental and a social event. To understand it, you first have to understand the land, the air, the sun, the river and the sea; you have to understand earth, wind, fire and water; you have to understand geomorphology, meteorology, biology, economics, politics, history. You have to understand how they have come together to form, with the peoples of America, Europe and Africa, the historical patterns of life of Louisiana and New Orleans, the bodies politic of (...) the region, bodies you need to study with political physiology. You have to understand what those bodies could do and what they could withstand, and how they intersected the event of the storm. In this paper, simply for the sake of time and space constraints, I will concentrate on New Orleans; the stories of the Mississippi Gulf Coast, or of Saint Bernard, Saint Tammany, and Plaquemines Parishes in Louisiana are complex and dramatic as well. (shrink)

Look inside this book to meet the everyday heroes who found ways to save animals from Hurricane Katrina and the floods that followed.

After deconstructing the thermodynamic concepts of work and waste, I take up Howard Odum’s idea of energy quality, which tallies the overall amount of energy needed to be dissipated in order to accomplish some work of interest. This was developed from economic considerations that give obvious meaning to the work accomplished. But the energy quality idea can be used to import meaning more generally into Nature. It could be viewed as projecting meaning back from any marked work into preceding energy (...) gradient dissipations that immediately paved the way for it. But any work done by an abiotic dissipative structure, since it would be without positive economic significance, would also be difficult to mark as a starting point for the energy quality calculation. Furthermore, any destructive work as by hurricanes or floods, with negative economic significance, would not seem to merit the quality calculation either. But there has been abiotic work of keen interest to us—that which mediated the origin of life. Some kind of abiotic dissipative structures had to have been the framework that fostered this process, regardless of how it might come to be understood in detail. Since all dissipative structures have the same thermodynamic and informational organization in common, any of them might provide the material context for the origin of something. So we can pick any starting point we wish, and calculate backward what sequence of energy usages would have been necessary to set it up. Given such an open ended project, we could not find an obvious place in any sequence to stop and start the forward the calculation, and so we would need to take it right back to an ultimate beginning, like the insolation of some area, or the outpouring of Earth’s thermal energy. Any energy dissipation might be the beginning of something of importance, and so Nature is as replete with potential meanings as it is with energy gradients. (shrink)

After deconstructing the thermodynamic concepts of work and waste, I take up Howard Odum’s idea of energy quality, which tallies the overall amount of energy needed to be dissipated in order to accomplish some work of interest. This was developed from economic considerations that give obvious meaning to the work accomplished. But the energy quality idea can be used to import meaning more generally into Nature. It could be viewed as projecting meaning back from any marked work into preceding energy (...) gradient dissipations that immediately paved the way for it. But any work done by an abiotic dissipative structure, since it would be without positive economic significance, would also be difficult to mark as a starting point for the energy quality calculation. Furthermore, any destructive work as by hurricanes or floods, with negative economic significance, would not seem to merit the quality calculation either. But there has been abiotic work of keen interest to us—that which mediated the origin of life. Some kind of abiotic dissipative structures had to have been the framework that fostered this process, regardless of how it might come to be understood in detail. Since all dissipative structures have the same thermodynamic and informational organization in common, any of them might provide the material context for the origin of something. So we can pick any starting point we wish, and calculate backward what sequence of energy usages would have been necessary to set it up. Given such an open ended project, we could not find an obvious place in any sequence to stop and start the forward the calculation, and so we would need to take it right back to an ultimate beginning, like the insolation of some area, or the outpouring of Earth’s thermal energy. Any energy dissipation might be the beginning of something of importance, and so Nature is as replete with potential meanings as it is with energy gradients. (shrink)

Although Hurricane Katrina precipitated considerable reflection across various media, a practice crucial to our capacities to apprehend and interpret the disaster has not yet been analyzed as such. I call this practice generative assembly. I don’t mean the events of emergency and political gathering that took place in response to the massive storm and fatal, preventable levee failures—although I will propose connections between different forms of assembly. Instead I mean a kind of documentary practice. That practice, which can be (...) undertaken individually or in collaboration, and sometimes at anonymous remove, involves the work of assembling records and signifiers related to the disaster into particular kinds of media artifacts. Those artifacts— which take shape in formats as varied as comics, photobooks, paintings, films, exhibitions, and multithousand-item online archives—characteristically maintain the active appearance and interactive potential of selection and arrangement. In exhibiting such qualities, or so I will argue, these assembly-based artifacts support various articulable and often highly effective kinds of generativity. And thus, I will further suggest, these artifacts can constitute especially powerful means of intervening in prevailing conditions of representation and remembrance around events of environmental and social violence. Crucially, those material legacies of generative assembly can also fall short, fail, and deceive, and this is especially true of those assemblies that take digital forms. It is my contention, however, that we would be misguided if we thus entirely dismissed such assemblies or if we refused their potential for dissident reuse or generative reassembly. (shrink)

This essay explores the relationships between labour and community formation in order to think through how, where, and when diasporic solidarities are imagined or refused. I draw on ethnographic research among Jamaican women contracted for seasonal work in US hotels to situate diasporic calls and responses in relation to specific contexts and a changing global political economy. I show how global geopolitical shifts not only shape the processes of identity formation and social reproduction, but also condition the perpetuation of notions (...) of nationalized racial hierarchies and ideologies of progress. I also show that hotel workers’ notions of ‘America’ and their commitment to the ‘American Dream’ shapes their subjectivities as migrant workers/consumers and, in their assessment, differentiates them from African-Americans, particularly those most immediately affected by Hurricane Katrina. In doing so, I demonstrate that one of the ideological hegemonies of diaspora is the idea that an individual's capacity to affect their own social mobility and that of their social network always outstrips the ‘locals’ in diasporic elsewheres. (shrink)

The market, not the government, is that last best hope for actual and future potential victims of hurricanes. State subsidies have perverted locational settlement decision-making. They have acted in such a manner as to encourage people to build in more dangerous areas than they otherwise would have. By the government undertaking part of the costs of rebuilding in the aftermath of storms, it has encouraged irrational settlement patterns, which have led, in turn, to needless loss of life and wealth.

Among critical responses to the perceived perils of the industrial food system, the food sovereignty movement offers a vision of radical transformation by demanding the democratic right of peoples “to define their own agriculture and food policies.” At least conceptually, the movement offers a visionary and holistic response to challenges related to human and environmental health and to social and economic well-being. What is still unclear, however, is the extent to which food sovereignty discourses and activism interact with and affect (...) the material and social realities of the frequently low-income communities of color in which they are situated, and whether they help or hinder pre-existing efforts to alleviate hunger, overcome racism, and promote social justice. This research and corresponding paper addresses those questions by examining food justice and food sovereignty activism in the city of New Orleans since Hurricane Katrina as understood by both activists and community members. I argue, using post-Katrina New Orleans as a case study, that food projects initiated and maintained by white exogenous groups on behalf of communities of color risk exacerbating the very systems of privilege and inequality they seek to ameliorate. This paper argues for a re-positioning of food justice activism, which focuses on systemic change through power analyses and the strategic nurturing of interracial alliances directed by people residing in the communities in which projects are situated. (shrink)

Climate change represents a significant challenge to the entire planet and its inhabitants. While few, if any, will be able to escape totally the effects of climate change, it will fall most heavily, at least initially, on the poor, regardless of where they reside. We may observe already possible scenarios. The tragic situation in Darfur may be less an ethnic conflict and more a clash between marginal farmers and herdsmen in an increasingly more arid local climate. More powerful storms on (...) the scale of hurricane Katrina, which affected the poor more than other economic groups, may become commonplace. The alteration of the maple sugar cycle may be a harbinger of stress on the world's flora and fauna that humanity depends upon. Mainstream climatologists have concluded that human behavior, primarily the effects of industrialization, causes human-induced climate change. Left unchecked climate change will have serious consequences for humanity, especially the poor. Business, the primary agent of industrialization, is both the problem and the solution. This paper will apply the ethics of philosophers John Rawls, Robert Nozick, and Aristotle, along with the work of strategist Michael Porter. Understanding how climate change management fits into a firm's strategic opportunity will contribute to the ability of business to develop the technologies and business processes necessary to cope with climate change. The paper will conclude with a brief discussion of GE's Ecomagination program as an example of a promising moral response to climate change. (shrink)

The following essay examines visual representations of hurricane Katrina in popular media in order to show how photography continues to be enlisted in the production of the racial spectacle, the transformation of the plight of people of color into entertainment. The essay also analyzes how such a use of the visual serves to solidify the understanding of people of color by way of a black-white binary that does not do justice to current U.S. demographics. The essay provides a glimpse (...) into the intertwining between the visual and racial thinking. (shrink)

The nuclear disaster that Japan suffered at Fukushima in the months following March 11, 2011 has been compared with other major nuclear disasters, especially, Three Mile Island (1979) and Chernobyl (1986). It is more like Chernobyl in severity, the only other 7 on the International Nuclear Event Scale; more like Three Mile Island in long-term effects. Yet Fukushima is not just another nuclear disaster. In ways important to engineering ethics, it is much more like Katrina’s destruction of New Orleans than (...) like any nuclear disaster. It is (primarily) a consequence of a natural disaster, the enormous earthquake and tsunami that wrecked much of northeast Japan. One lesson of Fukushima, one shared with Katrina, concerns the different roles engineers have at different stages in an engineering project (planning, designing, management, and operations). In the planning stage, engineers seem to have relatively little power to affect certain early large-scale trade-offs between public safety and public welfare. Another lesson may be the importance of not leaving complex technical systems untended. The events that made the disasters at Three Mile Island and Chernobyl inevitable lasted only a few minutes or hours; the events that made the disasters in New Orleans and Fukushima inevitable were spread over several days. Fukushima avoided a more serious disaster because the plants were not abandoned in the way New Orleans was. A third lesson concerns our ideas of heroism, especially our sense that heroism is sometimes one’s duty. An engineer’s duty sometimes includes protecting others from harm even at the risk of the engineer’s life. (shrink)

In this ground-breaking analysis, Terry Moe treats Hurricane Katrina as a natural experiment that offers a rare opportunity to learn about the role of power in the politics of institutional reform. When Katrina hit, it physically destroyed New Orleans' school buildings, but it also destroyed the vested-interest power that had protected the city's abysmal education system from major reform. With the constraints of power lifted, decision makers who had been incremental problem-solvers turned into revolutionaries, creating the most innovative school (...) system in the entire country. The story of New Orleans' path from failure to revolution is fascinating, but, more importantly, it reveals the true role of power, whose full effects normally cannot be observed, because power has a “second face” that is hidden and unobservable. Making use of Katrina's analytic leverage, Moe pulls back the curtain to show that this “second face” has profound consequences that stifle and undermine society's efforts to fix failing institutions. (shrink)

The goal of this paper is to examine the impact of leadership and promotion regulatory focus on employees’ willingness to engage in unethical pro-organizational behavior . Building from a person–situation interactionist perspective, we investigate the interaction of leadership style and how leaders frame messages, as well as test a three-way interaction with promotion focus. Using an experimental design, we found that inspirational and charismatic transformational leaders elicited higher levels of UPB than transactional leaders when the leaders used loss framing, but (...) not gain framing. Furthermore, followers’ promotion regulatory focus moderated this relationship such that the effect held for followers with low promotion focus, but not for individuals with high promotion focus. Our findings extend the understanding of UPB, offer theoretical mechanisms to explain when this behavior occurs, and contribute to leadership theory and research on ethical decision making. (shrink)

In this first-ever history of contemporary liberal theory, Forrester shows how liberal egalitarianism--a set of ideas about justice, equality, obligation, and the state--became dominant, and traces its emergence from the political and ideological context of the postwar United States and Britain.d Britain.

The paper distinguishes between weak and strong epistemic possibility and argues that the notion of strong epistemic possibility is the key to solving some of the most vexing puzzles about the semantics of epistemic modality.

In this chapter, Sifferd analyzes the grounds for moral and legal desert. She bridges the gap between compatibilist accounts of our moral and legal responsibility, and she argues that neither moral nor criminal responsibility demand impossible or superhuman abilities. Sifferd’s capacitarian view of agency embraces our mechanistic natures yet can still ground robust mental causation, a key requirement for criminal culpability. She also notes the ways in which the capacity for reasons-responsiveness is developed and maintained over time, and she claims (...) that diachronic agency can instantiate meaningful self-control and self-formation with moral and legal rules in mind. Sifferd concludes that rapists do in some cases deserve criminal punishment. Her ultimate position is that basic desert is necessary but not sufficient for criminal punishment of rape. (shrink)

In May 2011, more than a decade after the International Association of Athletics Federations (IAAF) and the International Olympic Committee (IOC) abandoned sex testing, they devised new policies in response to the IAAF's treatment of Caster Semenya, the South African runner whose sex was challenged because of her spectacular win and powerful physique that fueled an international frenzy questioning her sex and legitimacy to compete as female. These policies claim that atypically high levels of endogenous testosterone in women (caused by (...) various medical conditions) create an unfair advantage and must be regulated. Against the backdrop of Semenya's case and the scientific and historical complexity of ?gender verification? in elite sports, we question the new policies on three grounds: (1) the underlying scientific assumptions; (2) the policymaking process; and (3) the potential to achieve fairness for female athletes. We find the policies in each of these domains significantly flawed and therefore argue they should be withdrawn. (shrink)

Not all probability ascriptions that appear in scientific theories describe chances. There is a question about whether probability ascriptions in non-fundamental sciences, such as those found in evolutionary biology and statistical mechanics, describe chances in deterministic worlds and about whether there could be any chances in deterministic worlds. Recent debate over whether chance is compatible with determinism has unearthed two strategies for arguing about whether a probability ascription describes chance—that is, to speak metaphorically, two different strategies for figuring out where (...) the chances are: find the chances by focusing on chance’s explanatory role or find the chances by focusing on chance’s predictive role. These two strategies tend to yield conflicting results about where the chances are, and debate over which strategy is appropriate tends to end in stalemate. After discussing these two strategies, I consider a new view of chance’s explanatory role. I argue that one theoretical advantage of this new view is that allows us to make progress on the question of where the chances are by providing a principled way of determining which probability ascriptions describe chances. From the vantage of this new view, the correct application of both strategies involves figuring out where the chances are by figuring out where the probabilistic scientific explanations are and what those explanations are like. (shrink)

This paper proposes a preliminary infrastructure for future philosophical discourse on the virtual, interactive, visual, top layer of the Internet. The paper begins by introducing thoughts on such words as real, virtual, reality, knowledge, and truth. Next, news summaries are provided illustrating some effects from the “real world” on the virtual part of the Internet, and vice versa. Subsequently, nine major categories of Internet variables are identified. Finally, over one hundred questions about the philosophical nature of the virtual part of (...) the Internet are listed and are organized into fourteen categories. (shrink)

This paper proposes a preliminary infrastructure for future philosophical discourse on the virtual, interactive, visual, top layer of the Internet. The paper begins by introducing thoughts on such words as real, virtual, reality, knowledge, and truth. Next, news summaries are provided illustrating some effects from the “real world” on the virtual part of the Internet, and vice versa. Subsequently, nine major categories of Internet variables are identified. Finally, over one hundred questions about the philosophical nature of the virtual part of (...) the Internet are listed and are organized into fourteen categories. (shrink)

Does smoke cause fire or does fire cause smoke? James Woodward’s “Flagpoles anyone? Causal and explanatory asymmetries” argues that various statistical independence relations not only help us to uncover the directions of causal and explanatory relations in our world, but also are the worldly basis of causal and explanatory directions. We raise questions about Woodward’s envisioned epistemology, but our primary focus is on his metaphysics. We argue that any alleged connection between statistical dependence and causal/explanatory direction is contingent, at best. (...) The directions of causal/explanatory relations in our world seem not to depend on the statistical dependence relations in our world. Thus, we doubt that statistical dependence relations are the worldly basis of causal and explanatory directions. (shrink)

In light of recent interest among political theorists in the idea of political realism, Judith Shklar’s liberalism of fear has come to be associated with anti-Rawlsian thought. This paper seeks to show that, on the contrary, Shklar’s specific formulation of political realism, unlike more recent variations, was not motivated by a critique of Rawls. This paper will address three concerns: first, it will show what exactly Shklar’s initial realism was responding to; second, it will consider the implications of this realism (...) for thinking about liberal democracies; third, it will attempt, briefly, in light of this, to make sense of her relationship with Rawls and, in turn, through a comparison with Bernard Williams’s thought, her relationship to anti-Rawlsian political realism. (shrink)