Blame is fascinating yet elusive, and it is both of these things because it is so complex. It seems to have a cognitive aspect (the belief that someone has done wrong, perhaps), but it also seems to have an emotional aspect (resentment at being disrespected, perhaps). And then of course there is the outside-of-the-head aspect of blame, which manifests itself in rebukes and reprimands, accusations and distrust, cold shoulders and estrangement. Still, accounts of blame that identify it (...) with beliefs or emotions seem inadequate. In this paper I draw on the work of Harry Frankfurt to suggest an alternative account, according to which blame most centrally involves changes in the structure of the will. (shrink)

We evaluate people all the time for a wide variety of activities. We blame them for miscalculations, uninspired art, and committing crimes. We praise them for detailed brushwork, a superb pass, and their acts of kindness. We accomplish things, from solving crosswords to mastering guitar solos. We bungle our endeavors, whether this is letting a friend down or burning dinner. Sometimes these deeds are morally significant, but many times they are not. Simply Responsible defends the radical proposal that the (...) blameworthy artist is responsible in just the same way that the blameworthy thief is. We can be responsible for all kinds of different activities, from lip-synching to long division, from murders to meringues, but the relation involved, what author Matt King calls the basic responsibility relation, is the same in every case. We are responsible for the things we do first, then blameworthy or praiseworthy for having done them in light of whether they're good or bad, according to a variety of standards. Why is this a radical proposal? Firstly, because so much of the contemporary literature on moral responsibility has moralized its nature. According to most accounts, moral responsibility is either a special species of responsibility or else depends on moralized capacities. In contrast, King argues that we get a more complete and unifying picture of responsible agency from a more general theory of responsibility. Secondly, the proposal is radical due to its drastic simplicity. King foregoes many of the complications that feature in other accounts of responsibility, arguing that we can make do with less demanding theoretical elements. (shrink)

Deep learning AI systems have proven a wide capacity to take over human-related activities such as car driving, medical diagnosing, or elderly care, often displaying behaviour with unpredictable consequences, including negative ones. This has raised the question whether highly autonomous AI may qualify as morally responsible agents. In this article, we develop a set of four conditions that an entity needs to meet in order to be ascribed moral responsibility, by drawing on Aristotelian ethics and contemporary philosophical research. We encode (...) these conditions and generate a flowchart that we call the Moral Responsibility Test. This test can be used as a tool both to evaluate whether an entity is a morally responsible agent and to inform human moral decision-making over the influencing variables of the context of action. We apply the test to the case of Artificial Moral Advisors and conclude that this form of AI cannot qualify as morally responsible agents. We further discuss the implications for the use of AMAs as moral enhancement and show that using AMAs to offload human responsibility is inadequate. We argue instead that AMAs could morally enhance users if they are interpreted as enablers for moral knowledge of the contextual variables surrounding human moral decision-making, with the implication that such a use might actually enlarge human moral responsibility. (shrink)

Much has been written lately about cases in which blame of the blameworthy is nonetheless inappropriate because of facts about the blamer. Meddlesome and hypocritical cases are standard examples. Perhaps the matter is none of my business or I am guilty of the same sort of offense, so though the target is surely blameworthy, my blame would be objectionable. In this paper, I defend a novel explanation of what goes wrong with such blame, in a way that (...) draws the cases together. In brief, I argue that blaming is essentially an attentive activity, and that, consequently, meddlesome and hypocritical blamers are attending to the wrong things. (shrink)

This paper looks at judgments of guilt in the face of alleged wrong-doing, be it in public or in private discourse. Its concern is not the truth of such judgments, although the complexity and contestability of such claims will be stressed. The topic, instead, is what sort of activities we are engaged in, when we make our judgments on others' conduct. To examine judging as an activity it focuses on a series of problems that can occur when we blame (...) others. On analysis, we see that these problems take the form of performative contradictions, so that the ostensible purposes of assigning guilt to others are undermined.There is clear evidence from social psychology that blame is especially frequently and inappropriately attributed to individuals in modern Western societies. On the other hand, it has often been observed how suspicious we are about the activity of judging – thus a widespread perception that a refusal to judge is somehow virtuous. My suggestion is that the sheer difficulty of attributions of responsibility, in the face of a complex and often arbitrary moral reality, frequently defeats us. This leads to a characteristic set of distortions when we blame, so that it is no surprise that we have become suspicious of all blaming activities. (shrink)

This paper starts by introducing a tripartite conception of responsibility for health consisting of a moral agent having moral responsibilities and being held responsible, that is blamed, for failing to meet them and proceeds to a brief discussion of the nature of the blame, noting difficulties in agency and obligation when the concept is applied to health‐threatening behaviours. Insights about the obligations that we hold people to and the extent of their moral agency are revealed by interrogating our blaming (...) behavior, and to facilitate this, my own blaming attitudes and actions are analysed in respect of an imagined adult son who seeks thrills by jumping from a pier into the sea, an activity common around coastlines and intended to be analogous in varying degrees to a range of health‐threatening behaviours. I consider my responses to this imagined act in relation to some features of moralism, the excess of morality, concluding that blame can be justified when it is proportionate and within interpersonal relationships. There is evidence that some nurses hold negative blaming attitudes towards groups of patients considered to have caused or contributed to their illness, but this is not justified, not only because of impaired agency, but also because if there is responsibility for health, associated obligations are owed to those who share our lives, and it is those people who are entitled to hold individuals responsible. Nurses who hold negative blaming attitudes towards groups of patients are invited to identify the status of moral agency, the precise natures of their (failed) obligations, and of the patient–nurse relationship. It is concluded that reflection on these matters and the difference between justified blame and moralism demonstrates that blaming behaviour in the context of professional health care is built on nothing stronger than prejudice. (shrink)

Functionalist accounts of blame have been rising in popularity. Proponents of the approach claim that, by defining blame in terms of its function or functions, their account has the advantage of being able to accommodate a wide range of attitudes and activities as blame; but their opponents question the extensional and explanatory adequacy of such accounts. This paper contributes to this burgeoning literature by presenting new challenges to the existing functionalist accounts. The fundamental problem, I shall argue, (...) lies in the fact that they all focus on using functions to define blame as a type of practice, but this strategy fails to pick out a unique moral-psychological type and does not offer a complete set of extension-determining criteria for the concept of blame. This amounts to a serious theoretical disadvantage. I consider various responses to the challenges throughout the paper, concluding that the best reply available to the functionalist theorist involves using functions to directly define blame tokens. (shrink)

The word "blame" and the concept of blame are commonly used by both laymen and philosophers. The latter refer to it frequently in the controversies surrounding desert and in controversies surrounding determinism. Some of the brouhaha in each of the above controversies is generated because the disputants use the word "blame" in different ways. One who attacks blame may, in reality, be attacking the practice of settled disapproval; on the other hand, a disputant who defends (...) class='Hi'>blame may merely be defending blame-as-holding-morally responsible. Hence, the two disputants "never meet." Worse, they seem unable to see why they never meet. Since they both write and speak the same word , they assume that they are speaking the same thing. ;We show that such an assumption is unwarranted. We show that the concept of blame variously refers to: causal identification, juding , holding morally responsible, and disapproval . Sudden disapproval means disapproval felt; settled disapproval means disapproval expressed. ;To show that blaming is not the same as condemning, censuring, rebuking, etc., we analyze blame vis-a-vis cognate concepts. Then, to show the wide range of understandings concerning blame, we outline and describe eight representative and historical views. Some of these views become especially prominent in our analysis of desert blame v. utilitarian blame and in our analysis of determinism vis-a-vis blame. ;One's "attitude of blaming" does not convey a singular, easy-to-identify attitude or series of responses. To show this, we spell out the differences in blaming-attitudes. We suggest that popular blame seems to be a blaming-attitude which allows or encourages expressions of condemnation. For this type of blame, there is no justification, we argue. In, "P blames A for untoward act X," P may feel disapproval toward act X, thus feel disapproval toward A because of X. This is non-controversial. Yet, how one expresses that blaming-attitude is significant. ; P may control and channel his feelings of disapproval and express them in such a way as to seek proper redress and ultimately help A. This, we argue, is an appropriate blaming-attitude. Or, P may use the occasion of untoward act X to unleash vengeance and hate on A. Such an action, we argue, is no part of blaming; it has nothing to do with holding a person morally responsible or with voluntariness and free-will. Such an action, we argue, would be better labelled as "condemning." ;We show how these blame distinctions relate to the issue of desert and to the issue of determinism. We show that attempts to relate determinism to any kind of blaming activity are difficult because the thesis of determinism is ambiguous. We also show that, all problems considered, desert blame is to be preferred over utilitarian blame. (shrink)

Many organisations in rich countries actively recruit health workers from poor countries. Critics object to this recruitment on the grounds that it has harmful consequences and that it encourages health workers to violate obligations to their compatriots. Against these critics, I argue that the active recruitment of health workers from low-income countries is morally permissible. The available evidence suggests that the emigration of health workers does not in general have harmful effects on health outcomes. In addition, health workers can (...) immigrate to rich countries and also satisfy their obligations to their compatriots. It is consequently unjustified to blame or sanction organisations that actively recruit health workers. (shrink)

This paper examines the planning, execution, and closure of the US–Korea Cooperative Ecological Survey project in the Korean Demilitarized Zone in the 1960s. In this period, the U.S. National Academy of Sciences initiated bilateral scientific cooperation between the NAS and similar organizations in developing countries along the line of the developmental turn of U.S. foreign assistance. Working closely with the NAS, U.S. conservationists used this scheme to introduce nature conservation practices and the discipline of ecosystem ecology to developing countries. In (...) this context, by way of the NAS’s Pacific Science Board, two countries’ biologists initiated the preliminary cooperative project in the DMZ in 1966. Korean and U.S. scientists soon began to realize that their collaboration was marked by dissonance. The U.S. side attributed the cooperation failure to Korean culture while the Korean side criticized the unequal structure of their cooperation. Joining the global historiography of Cold War scientific collaboration, this paper pays particular attention to the intermediaries of the collaborative project and their rivalry. It argues that political struggles revolving around the position of go-betweens – as what I call knowledge brokers – on the recipient side provoked contestation between American and Korean scientists. The contention between the two sides played out in the collaboration coming to an end, albeit partially. Throughout this analysis, this study suggests paying more serious attention to the politics of scientific exchange among actors on the recipient side as an outset from which to analyze the heterogeneity of the Korean side without losing sight of their active role in the building process of American hegemony. (shrink)

Do persons from disadvantaged backgrounds deserve as much blame for their immoral or criminal acts as persons who have had all the advantages? Many liberals feel inclined to say ‘no.’ After all, there is a high correlation between criminal activity and a disadvantaged background; indeed, it might fairly be said that poverty breeds crime. Taken in its most obvious direction, however, this line of argument has dangerous deterministic implications. The price of diminished blame is diminished responsibility. We absolve (...) the disadvantaged by portraying them as persons with a diminished capacity for free action. In the extreme case, we view them as victims of circumstance, utterly unable to act other than they do. Thus is born the demeaning parentalism of the worst sort of liberal social worker.Still, there is something correct in the liberal impulse to deny or diminish blame in at least many of these cases for something like the reason that the liberal offers. The task of this paper is to explain what is right about it. More generally, I want to show how we can take a person’s background into account in judging her for her acts without falling into total or partial determinism. In other words, my task is to establish that diminished blame is compatible with full freedom and responsibility. Roughly, I shall argue that we cannot blame someone for her acts if they are permitted or required by moral conclusions that are rational for someone in her position to reach. (shrink)

Populist attributions of blame have important effects on citizens’ attitudes, cognitions, emotions, and behaviors. Extending previous studies that have mostly looked at populist messages blaming political elites, we use an online survey experiment (N = 805) to investigate the effects of blaming different elitist actors in populist and non-populist ways: (1) political elites, (2) corporate elites, (3) scientific elites, and (4) a combination of these elites. We compare mere causal responsibility attribution to populist blame attributions that highlight a (...) central opposition between “pure ordinary people” and “corrupt elites” to tease out the specific effect of populist rhetoric. Results suggest that populist messages blaming all elites have stronger effects than isolated cues. Furthermore, populist blame attribution leads to more negative perceptions of the elites than non-populist blame attribution. The finding that populist frames can – under some conditions – activate negative perceptions toward different elites is alarming in times of declining trust in societal institutions, and calls for a more encompassing understanding of populists’ scapegoats. (shrink)

We extend attribution and stakeholder theory in the context of crisis reputation management by examining differences in stakeholder perceptions in the form of organization-related blame. We presented eight stakeholder groups with factual information surrounding the Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill and asked them to indicate the extent to which they blamed the leaders and organizations associated with the event. Stakeholders also completed a survey assessing their attribution styles. Results indicated that perceptions of blame were affected by the interaction of (...) stakeholder role (i.e., active vs. passive) with attribution style (i.e., optimistic vs. pessimistic). Our results suggest that organizational leaders’ understanding of their stakeholders may be an important aspect in managing stakeholders’ sensemaking during crises. (shrink)

Discussions of patient-centred care and patient autonomy in bioethics have tended to focus on the decision-making context and the process of obtaining informed consent, leaving open the question of how patients ought to be counselled in the daily maintenance of their health and management of chronic disease. Patient activation is an increasingly prominent counselling approach and measurement tool that aims to improve patients’ confidence and skills in managing their own health conditions. The strategy, which has received little conceptual or ethical (...) analysis, raises important questions about how clinicians ought to foster confidence and a sense of control in their patients without exposing them to blame, stigma and other harms. In this paper, we describe patient activation, discuss its relationship to personal responsibility, autonomy and health disparities, and make recommendations regarding its use and measurement. (shrink)

In this article I explore the multiple and at times conflicting public health and folk discourses which shape breast-feeding practices in Punata, Bolivia. I examine why women may cease to breast-feed despite active efforts made by the healthcare system to promote breast-feeding. Breast-feeding practices are saturated with meaning and circumscribed by time and economic constraints as well as numerous cultural factors. These include conceptualizations of the body, emotions and illnesses that affect infants who are breast-fed, as well as constructions (...) of the mother–infant bond and attitudes about what constitutes ‘good mothering’ and its relationship to gender and class expectations. In this locality, the emotions of lactating women are said to find release through their breast milk and are seen to cause illness in their breast-feeding infants. I explore how mothers accepted, challenged or contested such views, and how they negotiated the politics of blame that emerged regarding who was at fault for their infant's illnesses. I demonstrate how breast-feeding is an embodied experience intrinsically linked to ideas about motherhood and show how the deployment of blame for these illnesses can strategically obfuscate or shed light on the numerous social and economic constraints under which women may find themselves. (shrink)

Before the intervention of the missionaries in Bapedi society, the traditional beliefs, customs and practices, such as traditional healing, circumcision, polygamy, indigenous music and rituals, had a vibrant existence. These practices had been prevalent for centuries before the arrival of Christianity. After the missionaries of all church denominations were welcomed in Bapedi society to establish churches and schools as the main vehicles for the dissemination of European culture, confusion started to build. In this article, I will highlight the reaction of (...) Bapedi people of Sekhukhune district, Limpopo province, South Africa, to the missionary activities of Berlin Mission Society, Germany, from 19 July 1860 to 08 July 2018. The purpose of this study was to explain the conflict or integration of different cultural norms and the missionary influence on the Bapedi indigenous way of life. The questions that I attempt to answer in this article are: how do people understand one another when they do not share a common cultural experience? and who are to blame, the missionaries or the Bapedi people themselves? I address this question by analysing the missionary influence on Bapedi traditional beliefs, customs and practices. Primary data were collected through video recordings of cultural and religious rituals, interviews and observations. Secondary data include publications. It was concluded that in spite of fundamental and multi-consequential changes that Christianity brought about in Bapedi society, a large percentage of Bapedi people, independent churches inclusive, have used and are still following their traditional beliefs, taboos, customs and practices. (shrink)

According to Rettler, there are three types of control that we should consider in relation to the legitimacy of doxastic blame: Intention-based, reason-based, and influence-based control. Rettler argues that among these, influence-based control is the only type of control that is necessary and sufficient for fulfilling the control con-dition required for legitimate doxastic blame. The aim of this short discussion paper is to critically assess Rettler’s view of doxastic con-trol. By doing so, I attempt to defend the reason-responsiveness (...) view from Rettler’s criticism and cast doubt on whether influence-based control has a positive epistemic influence on beliefs. (shrink)

In his Responsibility and the moral sentiments , Wallace develops the idea that we should think of what it is to be morally responsible for an act in terms of norms for holding someone responsible for that act. Smith has recently claimed that Wallace's approach and those like it are 'fundamentally misguided'. She says that such approaches make the mistake of incorporating conditions for 'actively blaming' others into the basic conditions for being responsible, when in fact the conditions for (...) class='Hi'>active blame 'go beyond' the basic conditions. In this essay, I argue that Smith's otherwise illuminating discussion of these 'Normativist' approaches does not undermine them. Specifically, I maintain that being actively blamable by certain persons with the relevant standing is actually constitutive of being responsible for at least some acts. By distinguishing between persons with different sorts of standing, a Normativist approach can avoid Smith's challenge. My larger aim is thus to clarify and defend the Normativist approach. (shrink)

IntroductionStrawsonian theories of moral responsibility, which aim to ground the phenomenon of moral responsibility in our practices of holding one another accountable for our actions, lead us to think more carefully about the content of those practices. Strawson and his followers have done much to explore the significance of the deontic reactive attitudes (resentment, indignation and guilt), which we tend to aim at wrongdoers.P. F. Strawson, "Freedom and Resentment," Proceedings of the British Academy, Vol. 48 (1962). See also, R. Jay (...) Wallace, Responsibility and the Moral Sentiments (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1994); and Stephen Darwall, The Second-Person Standpoint: Morality, Respect and Accountability (Cambridge, MA: Harvard, 2006). In this essay, I am interested in the ways in which we express those attitudes. While it is plausible that experiencing a negative reactive attitude would be permissible in every case of blameworthy wrongdoing, few would agree that verbal .. (shrink)

The roots of much of Western medicine lie in the Christian monastic tradition and its commitment to nonstigmatizing compassionate care throughout the life cycle and to the ideal of empathic personal connection between physicians, patients, and the communities and relationships in which both of these are embedded. In the modern West, these Christianly informed aspects of medicine are increasingly being undercut as medical care becomes ever more specialized, technologized, and depersonalized. At the same time, there exist a variety of efforts (...) to counter these tendencies and to foster a practice of medicine that is more sensitive to the personal, relational, familial, and narrative dimensions of health, illness, and medical care. There are, in particular, considerable numbers of physicians, psychologists, and psychotherapists working at the intersections of biomedical and psychosocial care, of care for individuals and care for families, and of the body and the mind. Given the natural affinity that Christian bioethicists might be expected to have to communitarian, narrative, and family-oriented approaches to health care, it is thus remarkable that there appears to be no work of Christian bioethics that interacts in any discernible way with this psychotherapeutic literature concerning health, illness, families, and the mind-body interface. Instead, Christian bioethicists appear to endorse a narrowly reductionistic biomedical view of health and illness while either ignoring the psychosocial, integrative, and collaborative literature, or actively blaming and shaming those pastors or lay Christians who might have anything to do with psychotherapy or psychosocial care. This is unbecoming and unhelpful. In the fragmented, complex, and potentially dehumanizing world that is modern medical care, those who would think Christianly about the care of the sick cannot afford to despise psychology and psychosocial care. On the contrary, the church needs psychotherapy. In this article, I will thus consider, first, what the state of the conversation is where Christian bioethics and psychosocial and psychotherapeutic care are concerned. I will then turn to some of the principal landmarks in the professional literature concerning psychotherapeutic work with the sick, the disabled, the dying, and the bereaved, particularly as these are considered in contexts that include families and lay and professional caregivers. I will then identify a few opportunities for practical and theological reflection that present themselves in this literature, and will conclude with a few comments on the substance and relationship of salvation and health. (shrink)

A practising lawyer is not always aware of the fact that case decisions are more determined by legal doctrine – attitudes of authoritative lawyers and scientific legal discussion of other forms – than by changes in positive law. Regulations of specific case decisions are directly reliant on the ideas and statements of legal discussions – as one of the factors influencing the decisions of the courts. During the twenty years of independence, the form, content and argumentation of the Lithuanian court (...) judgments has fundamentally changed, especially with regard to the understanding of the courts (the judiciary) in terms of how unrestrained they are when interpreting a legal text and making decisions. The judicial discretion to interpret a legal text is treated diversely in various legal traditions and within the scope of the western legal tradition itself. In common law countries, the competence of a judge to deviate from a legal text or to create their own legal framework is treated with much greater understanding. In civil law tradition, the attempts of judges to take over the functions of the legislature are usually considered more critically. Even the representatives of comparative law emphasise that judges in civil law tradition countries tend to call the creation of legal rules differently – mostly as interpretation of the law. The discussion on the power of judges to create law through its interpretation has been taking place everywhere and at all times. Judicial discretion in decision-making is not due to individual factors such as era, social structure, cultural background, but is determined by some other factors that are not easy to identify. The interpretative activity of the courts is also influenced by the prevailing doctrinal regulations of judicial activity. It is the changes of the Lithuanian legal doctrines that could have encouraged the courts to determine the scope of their activity in the direction of its growth. After the restoration of independence, the Lithuanian legal community began an active discussion on whether legal positivism was the correct form of legal understanding. Studies appeared, in which legal positivism was seen exclusively negatively, reminding that it was specifically this legal concept that had eliminated values from law and was likely to be blamed for the ills of humanity such as the Holocaust or genocide. Numerous publications emerged calling judges to be active and reminding them to check every rule of law in accordance with its consistency with the principles of law and to disapply any rule of law that did not meet this requirement. Almost universally, lawyers (and especially the courts) were encouraged to move from mechanical (a priori improper) application of the law to the creative (a priori the best and aspirational) one. The courts were encouraged: they started to freely interpret legal rules, under which the legislature established their competence; although court judgments have become more reasoned, this did not prevent them from applying speculative or ambivalent arguments; criticism could be expressed to courts due to lengthy processes that are, objectively looking, not required, and for low activity in exercising their powers to prevent abuse of law. Respect for the legislature directly responsible for creating legal rules and taking care of legal protection, judicial recognition that a court should deviate from the legal text or otherwise create new rules only when it is objectively inevitable, and lawyers’ societal openness to discussion on various issues – these can become conceptual prerequisites for higher confidence in the courts. (shrink)

In _Vibrant Matter_ the political theorist Jane Bennett, renowned for her work on nature, ethics, and affect, shifts her focus from the human experience of things to things themselves. Bennett argues that political theory needs to do a better job of recognizing the active participation of nonhuman forces in events. Toward that end, she theorizes a “vital materiality” that runs through and across bodies, both human and nonhuman. Bennett explores how political analyses of public events might change were we (...) to acknowledge that agency always emerges as the_ _effect of ad hoc configurations of human and nonhuman forces. She suggests that recognizing that agency is distributed this way, and is not solely the province of humans, might spur the cultivation of a more responsible, ecologically sound politics: a politics less devoted to blaming and condemning individuals than to discerning the web of forces affecting situations and events. Bennett examines the political and theoretical implications of vital materialism through extended discussions of commonplace things and physical phenomena including stem cells, fish oils, electricity, metal, and trash. She reflects on the vital power of material formations such as landfills, which generate lively streams of chemicals, and omega-3 fatty acids, which can transform brain chemistry and mood. Along the way, she engages with the concepts and claims of Spinoza, Nietzsche, Thoreau, Darwin, Adorno, and Deleuze, disclosing a long history of thinking about vibrant matter in Western philosophy, including attempts by Kant, Bergson, and the embryologist Hans Driesch to name the “vital force” inherent in material forms. Bennett concludes by sketching the contours of a “green materialist” ecophilosophy. (shrink)

When a collective is blamed, the responsibility does not escape individuals. Spheres of influence are designed to determine the scale of blame; namely, by proximity and ability to influence a different result. Agents in the respective role types will be responsible upon our examining their extent of influence. Although you may be inclined to say that the responsibility lies with those who have access to policy-making, this doesn't allow for the deviants we expect at appropriate times. Here we are (...) compelled to seek a new moral outlook that maintains our perception of ourself: “what is not worthy of me must not be confused with special requirements of my ‘station and its duties’.”This essay offers a direction to assuage Lewis's fears toward collective responsibility. The challenges to individual responsibility behind such an ascription is complex but need not obliterate it. The delineation of roles by spheres of influence and activity gives some markers to the culpable agents. (shrink)

The counterfactual mental state of negligent criminal activity invites skepticism from those who see mental states as essential to responsibility. Here, I offer a revision of the mental state of criminal negligence, one where the mental state at issue is actual and not merely counterfactual. This revision dissolves the worry raised by the skeptic and helps to explain negligence’s comparatively reduced culpability.

"The great value of the book lies in the manner in which May relates the expansionist urge to the "symbolic" differences emerging between the North and the South. The result is a balanced account that contributes to the efforts of historians to understand the causes of the Civil War."--Journal of American History "The most ambitious effort yet to relate the Caribbean question to the larger picture of southern economic and political anxieties, and to secession. The core of this superbly documented (...) book is a detailed description of expansionist ideology and activities during the 1850s."--Civil War History A path-breaking work when first published in 1973, The Southern Dream remains the standard work on attempts by the South to spread American slavery into the tropics--Cuba, Mexico, and Central America in particular--before the Civil War. Robert May shows that the South's expansionists had no more success than when they tried to extend slavery westward. As one after another of their plots failed, southern imperialists lost hope that their labor system might survive in the Union. Blaming northern Democrats and antislavery Republicans alike for their disappointed dreams, alienated southerners embraced secession as an alternative means to achieving the tropical slave empire that they craved. Had war not erupted at Fort Sumter, Confederates might have attempted to conquer the Caribbean basin. May's book serves as an important reminder that foreign policy cannot be divorced from the writing of American history, even in regard to seemingly domestic matters like the causes of the Civil War. Contending that America's Manifest Destiny became "sectionalized" in the 1850s, he explains why southerners considered Caribbean expansion so important and shows how southerners used their clout in Washington to initiate diplomatic schemes like the notorious Ostend Manifesto and presidential attempts to buy the slaveholding island of Cuba from Spain. He also describes southern filibustering plots against Latin American domains, such as the aborted designs on Mexico of the colorful Knights of the Golden Circle and the actual invasions of Central America by native Tennessean William Walker. Walker struck a major blow for the expansion of slavery when he legalized it during his occupation of Nicaragua. Most important, May relates how Caribbean plots affected American public opinion and ignited sectional friction in congressional debates. May argues that President-elect Abraham Lincoln might have saved the Union in the winter of 1860-61, had he agreed to last minute concessions facilitating slavery's future expansion towards the tropics. May's fascinating and often surprising account internationalized the causes of the Civil War. It should be read by anyone who wishes to understand the complex reasons why Americans came to blows with each other in 1861. This reprinting features a new preface by the author, which addresses the latest research on the Caribbean question. Robert E. May is professor of history at Purdue University. (shrink)

Population growth is often blamed for poverty and environmental disaster both globally and locally. Unjustified fears of either excessive population growth or continuous population decline have been identified as a continuing feature of human society. The paper examines the claim of over-population as put by an active campaign for restrictive population policies. It briefly reviews reports on food and environmental sustainability, which show capacity to accommodate UN projections of further population growth. Considering the historical and social context of claims (...) of detrimental impact of population size , the claims appear to be a distraction from population behaviour . Regulation of detrimental behaviour is required for effective reduction of environmental threats and to reduce inequality. (shrink)

Feminists surely cannot be blamed for having one or two differences with a philosopher who compared women to plants in their intellectual powers, denied that they were capable of the higher activities of art, science, and philosophy, and warned that when “women hold the helm of government, the state is at once in jeopardy, because women regulate their actions not by the demands of universality but by arbitrary inclinations and opinions.” Undoubtedly, in some of his texts Hegel made patently ridiculous (...) and offensive statements about women. Nevertheless, it seems to me that in their zeal to attack the prejudice that Hegel on occasion displayed, some feminists have overlooked much of the subtlety of his philosophy. Ignoring the larger context of his arguments, they have instead myopically focussed on particular phrases and moments in his thinking which seem to be easy targets. (shrink)

Compatibilism is the view that moral responsibility is compatible with determinism. Natural compatibilism is the view that in ordinary social cognition, people are compatibilists. Researchers have recently debated whether natural compatibilism is true. This paper presents six experiments (N = 909) that advance this debate. The results provide the best evidence to date for natural compatibilism, avoiding the main methodological problems faced by previous work supporting the view. In response to simple scenarios about familiar activities, people judged that agents had (...) moral responsibilities to perform actions that they were unable to perform (Experiment 1), were morally responsible for unavoidable outcomes (Experiment 2), were to blame for unavoidable outcomes (Experiments 3-4), deserved blame for unavoidable outcomes (Experiment 5), and should suffer consequences for unavoidable outcomes (Experiment 6). These findings advance our understanding of moral psychology and philosophical debates that depend partly on patterns in commonsense morality. (shrink)

Social media technologies are routinely identified as a strong and pervasive threat to digital well-being. Extended screen time sessions, chronic distractions via notifications, and fragmented workflows have all been blamed on how these technologies ruthlessly undermine our ability to exercise quintessential human faculties. One reason SMTs can do this is because they powerfully affect our emotions. Nevertheless, how social media technology affects our emotional life and how these emotions relate to our digital well-being remain unexplored. Remedying this is important because (...) ethical insights into and open the possibility of designing for social media technologies in ways that actively reinforce our digital well-being. In this article, we examine the way social media technologies facilitate online emotions because of emotional affordances. This has important implications for evaluating the ethical implications of today’s social media platforms, as well as for how we design future ones. (shrink)

Open Access: This paper will connect literature on epistemic injustice with literature on victims and perpetrators, to argue that in addition to considering the credibility deficit suffered by many victims, we should also consider the credibility excess accorded to many perpetrators. Epistemic injustice, as discussed by Miranda Fricker, considers ways in which someone might be wronged in their capacity as a knower. Testimonial injustice occurs when there is a credibility deficit as a result of identity-prejudicial stereotypes. However, criticisms of Fricker (...) have pointed out that credibility is part of a more complex system that includes both deficits and excesses. I will use these points to argue that we should look closer at sources of credibility excess in cases of sexual assault. This means that in addition to considering sources of victim blaming by looking at ways in which “ideal” victims are constructed, we also need to consider ways in which “ideal” perpetrators are constructed. (shrink)

Few people, if any, still argue that science in all its aspects is a value-free endeavor. At the very least, values affect decisions about the choice of research problems to investigate and the uses to which the results of research are applied. But what about the actual doing of science? -/- As Science, Values, and Objectivity reveals, the connections and interactions between values and science are quite complex. The essays in this volume identify the crucial values that play a role (...) in science, distinguish some of the criteria that can be used for value identification, and elaborate the conditions for warranting certain values as necessary or central to the very activity of scientific research. -/- Recently, social constructivists have taken the presence of values within the scientific model to question the basis of objectivity. However, the contributors to <I>Science, Values, and Objectivity</I> recognize that such acknowledgment of the role of values does not negate the fact that objects exist in the world. Objects have the power to constrain our actions and thoughts, though the norms for these thoughts lie in the public, social world. -/- Values may be decried or defended, praised or blamed, but in a world that strives for a modicum of reason, values, too, must be reasoned. Critical assessment of the values that play a role in scientific research is as much a part of doing good science as interpreting data. (shrink)

Should the development of pharmacological cognitive enhancers raise worries about doping in cognitively demanding activities? In this paper, we argue against using current evidence relating to enhancement to justify a ban on cognitive enhancers using the example of chess. It is a mistake to assume that enhanced cognitive functioning on psychometric testing is transferable to chess performance because cognitive expertise is highly complex and in large part not merely a function of the sum specific sub-processes. A deeper reason to doubt (...) that pharmacological cognitive enhancers would be as significant in mind sports is the misleading parallel with physical enhancement. We will make the case that cognitive performance is less mechanical in nature than physical performance. We draw lessons from this case example of chess for the regulation of cognitive enhancement more generally in education and the professions. Premature regulation runs the risk of creating a detrimental culture of suspicion that ascribes unwarranted blame. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Hume Studies Volume XXIII, Number 2, November 1997, pp. 195-212 The Moral Self and the Indirect Passions SUSAN M. PURVIANCE David Hume1 and Immanuel Kant are celebrated for their clear-headed rejection of dogmatic metaphysics, Hume for rejecting traditional metaphysical positions on cause and effect, substance, and personal identity, Kant for rejecting all judgments of experience regarding the ultimate ground of objects and their relations, not just judgments of cause (...) and substantiality. Nevertheless, each argues that practical activity is not compromised by the rejection of metaphysical claims that others had taken to be crucial. Kant and Hume thought that political and moral life did not depend upon theoretical knowlege of the nature of the self, free will, or knowledge of the true motives of actions or the character of the agent. Because the grounds of morality and politics were too important to leave to the mercies of speculative metaphysics, each moved their foundations to higher ground, insulating the grounds of practical activity from the threat of metaphysical turmoil and skepticism. Contemporary philosophers have generally followed Hume and Kant in this regard, but often select very different strategies. Some think that the best way to avoid the problems associated with contemporary scientific ontologies is to separate ethics from the factual domain entirely. Some give moral and political language a noncognitivist interpretation, and others have interpreted values as a projection of the passions and affections of the subject or as the constructions of suitably situated practical reasoners.2 At the same time there has been a resurgence of interest in moral realism. Moral realists think that the objectivity of moral discourse, and hence the Susan M. Purviance is at the Department of Philosophy, The University of Toledo, Toledo OH 43606-3390 USA. 196 Susan M. Purviance possibility of moral truth, depend upon the existence of moral facts.3 Moral realists have tended to concentrate on the role of facts in establishing the truth of general moral principles, or the Tightness or moral value of particular individual actions. For moral realists, moral facts are the states of affairs that make general moral principles or particular moral judgments true. Whether these facts are of a naturalistic sort or not, whether they are literally on a par with natural facts, or whether they simply play the same role in practical knowledge that natural facts play in theoretical knowledge, is an open question. Moral realists often are naturalists, like David O. Brink and Jonathan Dancy, but they may be nonnaturalists, like G. E. Moore.4 Ethical naturalism accounts for moral motivation and the cultivation of good character in terms of moral qualities, and many hope to ground it in (or at least show that it is compatible with) the scientific understanding of objects and their relations and qualities. Naturalism is only one option, but realism has received support because it is not clear that antirealists have developed a convincing alternative to the grounding of concepts of moral agency and moral judgment in some sort of moral facts. Questions abound about what it means to ascribe responsibility to a moral self and how we can defend a notion of enduring character. Although moral realists have paid less attention to the ontological status of virtues and character traits than to moral principles, their status is equally important. Here the concern is with the sort of metaphysics of the self thought to be necessary to account for moral agency, responsibility, praise, and blame. I shall argue that there is a class of moral facts that justify or perhaps merely vindicate the ascription of moral powers to agents, and that these are the sorts of facts another sort of theorist is interested in, whereas the states of affairs that make moral judgments true are the sorts of facts that moral realists have been interested in. In order to distinguish this use of moral facts I shall call this sort of theory a Fact of Agency Theory, and it is a version of this theory that can be found in Hume's discussion of the problem of the self and the indirect passions. A realist metaphysics of morals needs to address two questions, the question of the reality of the... (shrink)

This article reflects on the problem of false belief produced by the integrated psychological and algorithmic landscape humans now inhabit. Following the work of scholars such as Lee McIntyre (Post-Truth, MIT Press, 2018) or Cailin O’Connor and James Weatherall (The Misinformation Age: How False Beliefs Spread, Yale University Press, 2019) it combines recent discussions of fake news, post-truth, and science denialism across the disciplines of political science, computer science, sociology, psychology, and the history and philosophy of science that variously address (...) the ineffectiveness, in a digital era, of countering individual falsehoods with facts. Truth and falsehood, it argues, rather than being seen as properties or conditions attached to individual instances of content, should now be seen as collective, performative, and above all persuasive phenomena. They should be practically evaluated as networked systems and mechanisms of sharing in which individually targeted actions are combining with structural tendencies (both human and mechanical) in unprecedented ways. For example, the persuasive agency of apparent consensus (clicks, likes, bots, trolls) is newly important in a fractured environment that only appears to be, but is no longer ‘public’; the control of narratives, labels, and associations is a live, time-sensitive issue, a continuous contest, or ongoing cusp. Taking a social approach to truth yields observations of new relevance; from how current strategies of negative cohesion, blame, and enemy-creation depend crucially on binary ways of constructing the world, to how the offer of identity/community powerfully cooperates with the structural tendencies of algorithm-driven advertiser platforms towards polarisation. Remedies for these machine-learned and psychological tendencies lie in end-user education. So the Arts and Humanities, whether via comparisons with previous historical periods, or via principles of critical thinking and active reading, offer crucial resources to help counter what since 1997 silicon valley executives and scholars have called ‘persuasive technology’ (Fogg in Persuasive Technology: Using Computers to Change What we Think and Do, Morgan Kaufmann, 2003; Hamari et al. (eds) in Persuasive Technology, Springer International Publishing, 2014; Harris in How a Handful of Tech Companies Control Billions of Minds Every Day, 2017; Lanier in Who Owns the Future? Simon & Schuster, 2014 and Ten Arguments for Deleting your Social Media Accounts Right Now, Picador, 2019). The article proposes a paradigm shift in public understandings of this new social environment: from a culture of discovery, where what matters is what exists or is in fact the case, to a culture of iteration, where what matters is what gets repeated. (shrink)

How do hip-hop songs produced from 2017 to 2023 depict and rationalize online fraud? This study examines the depiction of online fraudsters in thirty-three Nigerian hip-hop songs on nine popular streaming platforms such as Spotify, Deezer, iTunes, SoundCloud, Apple Music, and YouTube. Using a directed approach to qualitative content analysis, we coded lyrics based on the moral disengagement mechanism and core themes derived from existing literature. Our findings shed light on how songs (a) justify the fraudulent actions of online fraudsters, (...) (b) blame and dehumanize victims of online romance fraud, (c) glamorize online fraud, and (d) provide insights into prevailing attitudes, indigenous linguistics, and worldviews regarding cybercrime victimization. Specifically, our analysis shows the presence of moral disengagement mechanisms, including "dehumanization," “minimizing own agency,” and "displacement of responsibility." Moreover, we identify core contextual themes pertinent to online fraud in the Nigerian context: (a) "cyber spiritualism" and (b) "the North-South divide." This research underscores the global influence of musicians whose songs are easily accessible on diverse music platforms in trivializing the plight of online fraud victims. We argue that these artists' persuasive messages not only downplay but also satirize the victims' predicaments, thus contributing to the cultural worldviews and dimensions of online fraud. We conclude by underscoring these songs' capacity to actualize, reshape, and actively engage with the narratives of glamorization, justification, spiritualism, colonial legacies, gender dynamics, and societal implications. We recommend that future research endeavors explore non-conventional data sources adept at capturing the intricate fabric of cultural attitudes and dynamics. (shrink)

Reflections about the role of human choice in determining personal health occur in the writings of practitioners and laymen throughout history. The Greek and Roman writers emphasized the effect of life's activities. During the Middle Ages and Renaisance, disease continued to be seen as a consequence of disorder of the bodily humors, which were under the individual's control. The rise of the paternalistic national regimes in Europe produced the view that society had the responsibility to maintain health. Jacksonian egalitarianism led (...) to a reaction against the agressive therapies of established professional experts, a view furthered by the Thomsonian belief that people should wrest control of their health away from orthodox physicians. Among the twentieth century reactions was the movement to urge people to have doctors evaluate laypersons' health. By the 1970s a movement emerged emphasizing again personal responsibility, which, in turn, produced a concern that this was merely "victim-blaming". Views on the role of lay people in determining personal health are heavily influenced by prevailing social, political, and moral climates. Keywords: "responsibility for health: social, personal, or professional?", "causes of illness", "self-reliant health care", historical influences, responsibility for health, "victim-blaming" CiteULike Connotea Del.icio.us What's this? (shrink)

Free will skepticism maintains that what we do, and the way we are, is ultimately the result of factors beyond our control and because of this we are never morally responsible for our actions in the basic desert sense—the sense that would make us truly deserving of praise and blame. In recent years, a number of contemporary philosophers have advanced and defended versions of free will skepticism, including Derk Pereboom (2001, 2014), Galen Strawson (2010), Neil Levy (2011), Bruce Waller (...) (2011, 2015), and myself (Caruso 2012, 2013, forthcoming). Critics, however, often complain that adopting such views would have dire consequences for ourselves, society, morality, meaning, and the law. They fear, for instance, that relinquishing belief in free will and basic desert moral responsibility would leave us unable to adequately deal with criminal behavior, increase anti-social conduct, and undermine meaning in life. -/- In response, free will skeptics argue that life without free will and basic desert moral responsibility would not be as destructive as many people believe (see, e.g., Pereboom 2001, 2014; Waller 2011, 2015; Caruso 2016, forthcoming). According to optimistic skeptics, prospects of finding meaning in life or of sustaining good interpersonal relationships, for instance, would not be threatened. And although retributivism and severe punishment, such as the death penalty, would be ruled out, incapacitation and rehabilitation programs would still be justified (see Pereboom 2001, 2013, 2014; Levy 2012; Caruso 2016; Pereboom and Caruso, forthcoming). In this paper, I attempt to extend this general optimism about the practical implications of free will skepticism to the question of creativity. -/- In Section I, I spell out the question of creativity and explain why it’s relevant to the problem of free will. In Section II, I identify three different conceptions of creativity and explain the practical concerns critics have with free will skepticism. In Section III, I distinguish between three different conceptions of moral responsibility and argue that at least two of them are consistent with free will skepticism. I further contend that forward-looking accounts of moral responsibility, which are perfectly consistent with free will skepticism, can justify calling agents to account for immoral behavior as well as providing encouragement for creative activities since these are important for moral and creative formation and development. I conclude in Section IV by arguing that relinquishing belief in free will and basic desert would not mean the death of creativity or our sense of achievement since important and realistic conceptions of both remain in place. (shrink)

This article explores gender inequities and sexual double standards in teens’ digital image exchange, drawing on a UK qualitative research project on youth ‘sexting’. We develop a critique of ‘postfeminist’ media cultures, suggesting teen ‘sexting’ presents specific age and gender related contradictions: teen girls are called upon to produce particular forms of ‘sexy’ self display, yet face legal repercussions, moral condemnation and ‘slut shaming’ when they do so. We examine the production/circulation of gendered value and sexual morality via teens’ discussions (...) of activities on Facebook and Blackberry. For instance, some boys accumulated ‘ratings’ by possessing and exchanging images of girls’ breasts, which operated as a form of currency and value. Girls, in contrast, largely discussed the taking, sharing or posting of such images as risky, potentially inciting blame and shame around sexual reputation (e.g. being called ‘slut’, ‘slag’ or ‘sket’). The daily negotiations of these new digitally mediated, heterosexualised, classed and raced norms of performing teen feminine and masculine desirability are considered. (shrink)

As artificial intelligence becomes more sophisticated and robots approach autonomous decision-making, debates about how to assign moral responsibility have gained importance, urgency, and sophistication. Answering Stenseke’s (2022a) call for scaffolds that can help us classify views and commitments, we think the current debate space can be represented hierarchically, as answers to key questions. We use the resulting taxonomy of five stances to differentiate—and defend—what is known as the “blank check” proposal. According to this proposal, a person activating a robot could (...) willingly make themselves answerable for whatever events ensue, even if those events stem from the robot’s autonomous decision(s). This blank check solution was originally proposed in the context of automated warfare (Champagne & Tonkens, 2015), but we extend it to cover all robots. We argue that, because moral answerability in the blank check is accepted voluntarily and before bad outcomes are known, it proves superior to alternative ways of assigning blame. We end by highlighting how, in addition to being just, this self-initiated and prospective moral answerability for robot harm provides deterrence that the four other stances cannot match. (shrink)

The authors of this article contend that traditional corruption, which was largely blamed for the current situation in the Icelandic economy, was perhaps not the most fundamental reason for the ensuing crisis. The weak business culture and a symbiosis of business and politics have actually allowed for the bulk of self-erving and unethical decisions made by the Icelandic business and political elite. In order to illustrate this point, 10 expert interviews have been conducted within the period of 6 months in (...) 2009 to support in-depth research carried out by the authors. The article also discloses questionable business practices that have recently come to the attention of the public both in Iceland and abroad and that ultimately facilitated the downfall of the Icelandic economy. While traditional corruption has probably played its role in this downfall, the measures currently employed to determine its level did not account for various peculiarities of Icelandic society. The article thus argues that there was a high level of corruption in Iceland, but it was outside of the traditional definition. This other corruption has ultimately prevented the government from acting appropriately upon the questionable business practices mentioned above. The article also offers some general recommendations which should be useful to both policy makers and business leaders wishing to engage in business activities in a transparent, ethical manner and learn from the tragic Icelandic experience. Among these recommendations are the necessity to recognize the limitations of current definitions of corruption, as well as a word of caution to commercial enterprises to pay a close attention not only to commonly accepted indices and mainstream reports but also to a country's history, culture, and political environment, prior to making any sort of investment decisions in that country. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Anger in a Perilous Environment:María LugonesMariana Alessandriin a hundred years, maybe our commonsense beliefs about anger will come from a distinguished line of Women of Color like Audre Lorde, bell hooks, and María Lugones, who make a case for listening to our anger instead of stifling it. But our ideas about anger still come from ancient Greek and Roman philosophers. Their stories about how anger works and why it (...) is bad have been dominant throughout history, and they are not kind to angry women in the twenty-first century. They have created a perilous environment for us, existentially speaking, by painting anger as irrational, crazy, and ugly. They have left us no way to handle our anger that does not amount to trying to control, suppress, or eradicate it. In this short paper, I contrast a philosophy of anger left to us by ancient Western philosophy with a contemporary one offered by Latina feminist María Lugones. Lugones offers a philosophy of anger that assumes it has something to teach us about our perilous environment.1Part I: Anger Seen in the LightPlato compared passions like anger to a hard-to-control, hot-blooded, black-skinned horse that must be reined in by the "charioteer" of reason (Phaedrus, ln. 253E). He thought we should use self-control to contain our anger, and he was not alone. The Roman Stoic Seneca, who described anger similarly, once told a story about Plato getting livid (Potegal and Novaco 9–24). Instead of beating one of his slaves, Plato froze, his hand drawn back in striking position. A friend asked Plato what he was doing. "I am making an angry man expiate his crime," Plato replied (Seneca, De Ira, Book III, section 12). Plato's freezing was his way of acknowledging that rage is weakness. Seneca formulated this scene into a principle: the only appropriate time to express anger is when you are not angry. Otherwise, you are a slave to your emotion. [End Page 23]I became angry during quarantine. I had been promised a year without teaching or administrative responsibility, but everything changed when the schools went remote. Since my kids were home anyway, I decided to home-school them. But I found myself becoming angry almost daily, and it was upsetting. To make sense of it, I went back to my philosophical sources.I consulted Epictetus, the Stoic philosopher whose Handbook I used to read every year. For the fifteenth time, he told me that "an uneducated man blames others; a partially educated man blames himself. A fully educated man blames no one" (13). While I could not control my circumstances in 2020—Epictetus granted that I did not have the power to end a pandemic or reopen schools—I could control my bursts of anger. Instead of blaming my spouse and kids for my troubles, I should blame myself for expecting life to be easier. Better yet, I should blame no one and accept the new normal gracefully. I also reread the Meditations of Marcus Aurelius, the second-century Roman emperor and Stoic who believed that yielding to anger is a sign of weakness (Potegal and Novaco 16). Marcus reformulated one of the central tenets of Stoicism: "Disturbance comes only from within—from our own perceptions" (38). His advice? Lower your expectations. Remember that the only person you can change is yourself. To that end, expect people to irritate you daily and you will be ready for it (17). For me, that meant remembering that having kids meant having messes. But expecting a mess did not clean the table every night, load or unload the dishwasher, or vacuum the crumb-riddled floor. Marcus did not send his servants to clean my house. So, I left him for Aristotle.Aristotle's soul was not a charioteer with horses, but it was tripartite: feelings, predispositions, active conditions. Feelings are hard to change, Aristotle thought, so let's not waste too much energy trying. Predispositions just name the likelihood of feeling a particular feeling. Both categories matter, but chiefly because self-knowledge is a philosophical virtue. Mostly, Aristotle urged us to cultivate our "active conditions." Forever a... (shrink)

Aim of the present paper is to provide a formal characterization of various different notions of responsibility within groups of agents (Who did that? Who gets the blame? Who is accountable for that? etc.). To pursue this aim, the papers proposes an organic analysis of organized collective agency by tackling the issues of organizational structure, role enactment, organizational activities, task-division and task-allocation. The result consists in a semantic framework based on dynamic logic in which all these concepts can be (...) represented and in which various notions of responsibility find a formalization. The background motivation of the work consists in those responsibility-related issues which are of particular interest for the theory and development of multi-agent systems. (shrink)

Across the globe, radical conservative political forces and ideas are influencing and even transforming the landscape of international politics. Yet IR is remarkably ill-equipped to understand and engage these new challenges. Unlike political theory or domestic political analyses, conservatism has no distinctive place in the fields’ defining alternatives of realism, liberalism, Marxism, and constructivism. This paper seeks to provide a point of entry for such engagement by bringing together what may seem the most unlikely of partners: critical theory and the (...) New Right. Important parts of today’s New Right represent self-conscious appropriations of Critical themes and thinkers—turning them to self-declared “reactionary” ends. Developing outside the confines of the academy, these forms of thought have woven insights from across Critical theory into new and mobilizing forms of conservative ideology, seeking to link that ideology to social forces that play increasingly active roles in global politics. Our intention here is not to somehow blame Critical perspectives for the ideas of the New Right, either directly or by association. Rather, we seek to show how an engagement with Critical theory helps us understand the New Right, while also demonstrating some of the direct challenges the New Right poses for critical perspectives. (shrink)

Supererogatory acts, those which are praiseworthy but not obligatory, have become a significant topic in contemporary moral philosophy, primarily because morally supererogatory acts have proven difficult to reconcile with other important aspects of normative ethics. However, despite the similarities between ethics and epistemology, epistemic supererogation has received very little attention. In this paper, I aim to further the discussion of supererogation by arguing for the existence of epistemically supererogatory acts and considering the potential implications of their existence. First, I offer (...) a brief account of moral supererogation and how morally supererogatory acts generate a strong intuition that a similar phenomenon should exist in epistemology. Afterward, I argue for the existence of epistemically supererogatory acts by examining five cases where an epistemic activity appears to be epistemically supererogatory. Epistemic supererogation appears to provide the best explanation for our considered judgments about the individuals’ behavior in these different cases. Finally, I consider how epistemic supererogation might impact the contemporary study of epistemology, particularly with regard to how we appraise certain epistemic duties. (shrink)

For generations following the first American Medical Association Code of Ethics in 1847, the relationship between doctors and advertising remained unambiguous—advertising was forbidden. In 1975, however, the Federal Trade Commission accused the profession of “restraint of trade” and legally persuaded doctors to permit advertising amongst their clan. As the 1970s witnessed the relentless burgeoning of healthcare expenditure, physicians accepted the blame for immuring themselves from the natural forces of economics. American physicians were bullied to embrace advertising under the delusion (...) that doctoring—like any trade—would become better and cheaper if incited by competition. Today most American physicians engage in some form of paid advertising, yet it is doubtful that physician advertising has either augmented the quality or diminished the cost of health care. Advertisement has eroded medical professionalism by denying doctors the right to enforce ethical boundaries between themselves and the “let the buyer beware” world of business. And more is at stake than professional status, for the doctor/patient relationship, the cornerstone of medicine, is endangered as physicians continue to cast forth the self interested lure of advertisement.To assume that for over 130 years physicians anathematised advertising for purely ethical reasons would be naive. Sociologist Paul Starr explains that in the early 19th century, no group “embraced the ways of the market as actively as did popularisers, alternative healers, and quacks”.1 Advertisement was perhaps the most successful implement of empirical medicine. So it is no surprise that professional licensed doctors in America grew up with a “distaste and discomfort for advertising”.2 Medical advertisements were especially potent in the self reliant Jacksonian era, which touted health as a do it yourself venture commodified into tonics and one time procedures. To distinguish themselves from the circus of healthcare providers, physicians not only instituted higher educational standards and licensure …. (shrink)