I argue that, from the liberal perspective, citizens have a pro tanto moral duty to cultivate and maintain a readiness to participate in politics when such an action is called for from the moral perspective—I will call it “the pro tanto duty of political engagement.” It requires a citizen to monitor what the government is doing, evaluate its actions, and learn what she can do to intervene politically. In Section 1, I will discuss some doubts on the pro tanto duty (...) of political engagement. In Section 2, I will describe Alexander Guerrero’s account of culpable ignorance and argue from his account that the pro tanto duty of political engagement is derived from a general moral duty to properly manage one’s morally relevant beliefs. In Section 3, I will argue that to properly assess the moral significance of any government policy or policy proposal, one must learn about the lives and personal values of those who would be affected by the policy. (shrink)

The main purpose of this article is to show that the essence of Mozi’s political theory, namely that a civil state is in its best or ideal condition when each citizen exercises universal care, is more defensible than it is usually thought to be. Doing this will require an exposition of the main features of his theory and occasionally reference arguments and considerations outside of Mozi’s text. We interpret the disagreement between Mozi and his alleged Confucian opponents as a disagreement (...) about the nature of political obligation: Confucians regard political service as a kind of noncontractual role obligation, while Mozi regards it as an obligation derivable from universal and impartial moral principles. (shrink)

Environmental sounds are very helpful in understanding environmental situations and in telling the approach of danger, and sound-imitation words are important expressions to inform such sounds in human communication, especially in Japanese language. In this paper, we design a method to recognize sound-imitation words for environmental sounds. Critical issues in recognizing SIW are how to divide an environmental sound into recognition units and how to resolve representation ambiguity of the sounds. To solve these problems, we designed three-stage procedure that transforms (...) environmental sounds into sound-imitation words, and phoneme group expressions that can represent ambiguous sounds. The three-stage procedure is as follows: a whole waveform is divided into some chunks, the chunks are transformed into sound-imitation syllables by phoneme recognition, a sound-imitation word is constructed from sound-imitation syllables according to the requirements of the Japanese language. Ambiguity problem is that an environmental sound is often recognized differently by different listeners even under the same situation. Phoneme group expressions are new phonemes for environmental sounds, and they can express multiple sound-imitation words by one word. We designed two sets of phoneme groups: ``a set of basic phoneme group'' and ``a set of articulation-based phoneme group'' to absorb the ambiguity. Based on subjective experiments, the set of basic phoneme groups proved more appropriate to represent environmental sounds than the articulation-based one or a set of normal Japaneses phonemes. (shrink)