Rage has become an increasingly prominent affective and political force in contemporary feminist movements. In postsocialist Poland—where feminist resistance has long been sidelined in both national politics and global feminist discourse—rage has emerged as a powerful collective expression that fuses dissent with care, solidarity, and political agency. This article examines how feminist rage has shaped women’s political subjectivity in Poland, particularly in response to the tightening of abortion laws and the broader erosion of democratic norms since 2016. (...) Drawing on the frameworks of “weak resistance” (Ewa Majewska 2019) and “uneventful feminism” (Maria Mayerchyk and Olga Plakhotnik 2021), I analyze rage not only as a form of resistance but also as a creative and transformative affect. The theoretical discussion explores how rage reclaims traditionally feminine traits such as care and tenderness to produce new forms of feminist agency within “affective publics” (Zizi Papacharissi 2014). The article concludes with a case study of Polish women’s street and digital activism from 2016 to 2024, incorporating the author’s firsthand participation to offer a situated, reflexive perspective on the role of rage in contemporary postsocialist feminist struggle. (shrink)

This article develops the concept of 'manufacture of dissent ' and ‘moral outrage networks ’ to examine 'rage bait' and 'anger clicking' as core mechanisms of contemporary digital media economies, arguing that outrage has become a primary driver of visibility, engagement, and profit. Building on the concepts of the ‘manufacture of dissent’ and ‘moral outrage networks’, it shows how the classical logic of propaganda oriented toward silence, conformity, and manufactured consent has been structurally inverted. In platform-based attention economies, dissent (...) is no longer suppressed but actively cultivated, and anger functions as a predictable, extractable resource. The principle that ‘angry people click more’ is analysed not as a psychological curiosity but as an organising rule of digital capitalism, shaping content production, algorithmic ranking, and user behaviour. Rage bait is shown to rely less on plausibility or persuasion than on provocation, exploiting the fact that outrage generates reaction even when claims are openly implausible. Anger clicking converts moral concern into measurable engagement, transforming denunciation, correction, and ridicule into unpaid digital labour. Drawing on research in political communication, social psychology, and the sociology of online harassment, the article demonstrates how anger circulates collectively through networked infrastructures that reward escalation, polarisation, and symbolic conflict. The result is a communicative environment in which truth is economically disadvantaged, outrage is structurally rewarded, and dissent becomes a permanent and profitable output of the media system. Rage bait and anger clicking thus emerge not as pathologies of online culture but as rational adaptations to the incentive structures of platform capitalism. (shrink)

The extreme incidence and prevalence of rage-driven aggression and destructiveness in the United States is without parallel in any other industrialized country in the world. During 2022 alone, there were 647 mass shootings in the U.S. (in each, at least four victims were killed). Unfortunately these many killings comprise only one form of widespread rage in America. This paper seeks to answer why this is happening.

David Estlund has recently asked: how can structural injustice warrant resentment and indignation, given that it cannot fully be traced to culpable conduct? This article answers Estlund’s question. I propose that a social structure is an object that persists through time and is materially constituted by humans in relation. I use accounts of the point of blame to vindicate attitudes of resentment and indignation that target social structures themselves, without necessarily targeting their human constituents.

This paper aims to clear up the epistemology of learning morality from Artificial Moral Advisors (AMAs). We start with a brief consideration of what counts as moral enhancement and consider the risk of deskilling raised by machines that offer moral advice. We then shift focus to the epistemology of moral advice and show when and under what conditions moral advice can lead to enhancement. We argue that people’s motivational dispositions are enhanced by inspiring people to act morally, instead of merely (...) telling them how to act. Drawing upon these insights, we claim that if AMAs are to genuinely enhance people morally, they should be designed as inspiration and not authority machines. In the final section, we evaluate existing AMA models to shed light on which holds the most promise for helping to make users better moral agents. (shrink)

This article develops the concept of 'manufacture of dissent ' and ‘moral outrage networks ’ through a historical and sociological reading of Peter Gay’s The Cultivation of Hatred: The Bourgeois Experience from Victoria to Freud. Using Gay’s analysis of nineteenth-century bourgeois culture as its primary anchor, the article reconstructs a genealogy of anger in which hostility is not treated as a timeless instinct or spontaneous reaction to suffering, but as a socially organised and morally licensed resource. It argues that modern (...) societies learned to manage anger by refining, disguising and redistributing aggression through institutions, rituals, disciplinary practices and emerging media systems. Bourgeois modernity did not suppress hatred; it moralised it, converting aggression into acceptable forms such as righteous indignation, patriotic duty, scientific authority and humanitarian discipline. Through practices ranging from duelling and corporal punishment to penal reform, advice literature and public humour, anger was rendered repeatable, respectable and scalable. Drawing on Hannah Arendt’s insight that rage presupposes blame rather than misfortune, the article shows how anger became detached from immediate injury and sustained instead by narrative, classification and moral alibis. This historical transformation is presented as a decisive precondition for contemporary digital outrage, where anger circulates infrastructurally rather than episodically. By situating present-day moral outrage within a longer genealogy of cultivated hatred, the article reframes digital anger not as a novel pathology but as the latest configuration of a modern emotional technology designed to govern dissent, organise belonging and legitimate power. What is the genealogy of modern collective hatred? (shrink)

With the #MeToo movement and the Women’s Marches behind us, it has become clear that women are angry. This anger is often criticised for being disruptive or uncommunicative, with calm rationality being praised as a superior alternative. In this article, I use the framework of Fricker’s (2007) Epistemic Injustice to examine the communicative disadvantages and merits of what I call feminist anger. I explain how feminist anger can be subject to both testimonial and hermeneutical injustices, but that this does not (...) mean it should not be used to communicate. Importantly, feminist anger can challenge the patriarchal status quo and it can provide an epistemic bridge towards hermeneutical justice. By listening to feminist anger, both our own and others’, we can get one step closer to epistemic equality. (shrink)

What I aim to elucidate in this article is Baldwin's moral psychology of anger in general, and black rage in particular, as seen in his nonfiction. I'll show that Baldwin's thinking is significant for moral psychology and is relevant to important questions at the intersection of philosophy of emotions, race, and social philosophy. It also has pragmatic application to present-day anti-racist struggle. Baldwin's theoretical account of Black rage, I'll argue, (1) dignifies Blacks by centering them as people with (...) agential capacities and (2) provides them with a pragmatic politics of rage that is useful in the fight against white supremacy and racial injustice. (shrink)

An assortment of kinds of attacks and aggressive behaviors toward artificial intelligence (AI)-enhanced robots has recently emerged. This paper explores questions of how the human emotions and motivations involved in attacks of robots are being framed as well as how the incidents are presented in social media and traditional broadcast channels. The paper analyzes how robots are construed as the “other” in many contexts, often akin to the perspectives of “machine wreckers” of past centuries. It argues that focuses on the (...) emotions and motivations of robot attackers can be useful in mitigating anti-robot activities. “Hate crime” or “hate incident” characterizations of some anti-robot efforts should be utilized in discourse as well as some future legislative efforts. Hate crime framings can aid in identifying generalized antagonism and antipathy toward robots as autonomous and intelligent entities in the context of antirobot attacks. Human self-defense may become a critical issue in some anti-robot attacks, especially when apparently malfunctioning robots are involved. Attacks of robots present individuals with vicarious opportunities to participate in anti-robot activity and also potentially elicit other aggressive, copycat actions as videos and narrative accounts are shared via social media as well as personal networks. (shrink)

Building on Kant’s text, I develop and defend an account of a specific kind of anger, which Kant calls “aesthetically sublime rage”. Unlike other kinds of anger, aesthetically sublime rage does not play a motivational function for the subject throughout the time she is feeling rage. Because of this, aesthetically sublime rage escapes the problems that anger has when it motivates one to act. Despite not playing such a direct motivational function, aesthetically sublime rage can (...) have an indirect motivational role that is future-directed. As such, it can help the subject achieve and realize moral ends in the future, when the rage subsides and proper reflection is more likely to be achieved. Indeed, the experience of aesthetically sublime rage a) can help the subject realize that she cares about pursuing moral progress; b) can spark in her critical inquiry about what such progress should entail; c) can prepare her to value something against her self-centered interest. (shrink)

Cherry builds the case for rage that boomed in Audre Lorde’s verse and prose. The Case for Rage delivers a systematic vindication of anger’s essential role in anti-racist struggle, where moral and productive anti-racist anger is named ‘Lordean rage’ after the poet, activist and teacher. The book is incredibly timely, offering the thorough investigation of political anger called for following the extensive uptake of the Black Lives Matter movement during the pandemic. The pandemic has, I think, made (...) this book particularly timely for two reasons: first, for starkly revealing (again) which lives are on the front lines and which are least valued, and secondly, for shutting down most of the distractions that could occupy the time and minds of potential allies. With the world (especially of the privileged) at a standstill, those gripped by profound outrage at the murders of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor were starved for ways to divert or subdue their anger. Many anguished about what to do with their rage. Cherry provides the answer. By combining philosophical rigour with accessible prose Cherry appeals to both ‘academic and activist, the philosopher and citizen’ (pp. 7-8), delivering a methodical treatment of anger that is apt to change not just how we think about the emotion but what we do with it. (shrink)

Transitional justice theorizing has the tendency to smuggle in an over-reliance on dualities: one’s resentment can give rise to either vengeance or forgiveness, but not both; one can either be fueled by anger or by the hope of progress, but not both; and so on. This dualistic way of thinking replicates the kinds of false dichotomies that hamstring other societal movements, among them the struggle against racism. Drawing on Myisha Cherry’s case for so-called ‘Lordean rage’ within the context of (...) the anti-racist movement, I make the case that transitional justice in general would be well-served by centering the transformative power of emotion (even and especially when that emotion defies oversimplified and strict categorization). (shrink)

Sloterdijk proposes to go beyond ressentiment (to transform current capitalism to gift-giving motivational type of system in order to achieve self-esteem and provide it to others and to everything) as the solution to the constant world history of paranoia and revenge. That, or repeating the old, the same, and the criminal! Nietzsches's hopes about it (overmen) is a cession to modernity (another great narrative, yet another ultimate kind of the will to power, or freedom) and is contrary to his main (...) idea of eternal recurrence of the same, so I'm less optimistic. (shrink)

This article theorises ‘the morality of anger’ within the framework of manufacture of dissent and moral outrage networks , arguing that anger’s ethical status cannot be assessed as a private psychological state once it becomes infrastructural, amplified, and monetised. Classical condemnations of anger, from Seneca’s image of anger as madness to Martha Nussbaum’s critique of retributive ‘payback’ thinking, treat anger as morally suspect because it tends to imagine compensation through another’s suffering. Yet rehabilitative traditions, from Aristotle’s doctrine of fitting anger (...) to contemporary defences of righteous anger in response to structural injustice, insist that anger can be a condition of dignity, recognition, and moral repair. The article resolves this tension by shifting the unit of analysis from individual anger to networked anger. In digital publics, the boundary between justified anger and arrogant status-anger becomes systematically blurred: status anxiety is reframed as injury, grievance is aestheticised as virtue, and indignation is rewarded as a performance of belonging. Drawing on relational and pluralist accounts, the article treats anger as behaviourally pluripotent, capable of motivating communication, withdrawal, reconciliation, or retaliation depending on social cues and institutional constraints. In outrage-driven media ecologies, those constraints are stripped away and replaced by engagement incentives, so anger is selected for portability, intensity, and punitive clarity rather than proportion, truth, or repair. The article therefore distinguishes moral anger as ethical work from outrage as moral fuel. Moral anger retains value when it remains accountable to truth, proportionality, and the possibility of recognition, and when it is disciplined by compassion understood as agape rather than weaponised into hatred. Outrage networks, by contrast, convert anger into a renewable resource for attention extraction, stabilising communities through shared enemies and escalating moral certainty without increasing responsibility. The central claim is that anger is structurally necessary to moral life, yet morally dangerous when engineered as infrastructure: the ethical task is not to abolish anger but to recover the conditions under which it can still point beyond punishment toward repair, restraint, and civic coexistence. (shrink)

Environmental studies is a highly interdisciplinary field of inquiry, involving philosophers, ecologists, biologists, sociologists, activists, historians and professionals in public and private environmental organizations. It comes with no surprise, then, that the follow-up to Nelson and Callicott’s original anthology The Great Wilderness Debate (1998) features essays from authors in a broad array of disciplines. While there is considerable overlap between the two volumes, this new version offers forty-one essays, five of which are new additions, organized into four sections. What constitutes (...) wilderness? Is wilderness real or social constructed? What kinds of values are served—recreational, aesthetic, scientific, or others—by protecting wild areas? While many commentators trace these questions back to an exchange in the 1990s between two environmental ethicists, J. Baird Callicott and Holmes Rolston III, the debate over the wilderness idea actually has older roots. At least in the U.S. context, it travels back in time to the earliest part of the twentieth-century, when the American public, politicians and ecologists were pressed to justify why wilderness areas should be set aside in a new National Park system. Since then, the fundamental question fuelling the ‘Great Wilderness Debate’ is whether what is being preserved is actually wilderness. Is there such a thing or place as wilderness, that is, a quintessentially non-human or wild setting untainted by human influence? If so, why do we believe such areas deserve protection? (shrink)

This article examines the parallels between the work of Stephen King and Fyodor Dostoevsky in their treatment of political radicalism and human destructiveness. Drawing on King's early novels — Rage and The Dead Zone — alongside Dostoevsky's key texts — Demons and The Brothers Karamazov — the essay demonstrates how both authors arrive at remarkably similar literary solutions while investigating the same phenomenon. At the same time, the article reveals a fundamental divide between them: where Dostoevsky finds a supreme (...) moral authority that holds him back from the abyss, King has no such anchor. This difference, rooted in the opposition between a religious and an atheistic worldview, ultimately determines the difference in their artistic outcomes — what is a warning in Dostoevsky becomes an instruction manual in King. (shrink)

Ground is all the rage in contemporary metaphysics. But what is its nature? Some metaphysicians defend what we could call, following Skiles and Trogdon (2021), the inheritance view: it is because constitutive forms of metaphysical explanation are such-and-such that we should believe that ground is so-and-so. However, many putative instances of inheritance are not primarily motivated by scientific considerations. This limitation is harmless if one thinks that ground and science are best kept apart. Contrary to this view, we believe (...) that ground is a highly serviceable tool for investigating metaphysical areas of science. In this paper, we defend a naturalistic version of the inheritance view which takes constitutive scientific explanation as a better guide to ground. After illustrating the approach and its merits, we discuss some implications of the emerging scientific conception for the theory of ground at large. (shrink)

Grounding is all the rage in analytical metaphysics. But here I give three reasons for not appealing to a primitive relation of grounding in formulating physicalism. (1) It probably can't do the key job it would need to do. (2) We don't need it, since we already have realization. (3) It is probably not even consistent with physicalism.

JOURNAL OF THE HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY PRIZE for the best published book in the history of philosophy [Awarded in 2010] _________ [REVIEW] "... Paul Russell has given us a marvelously good book.... [He] offers original and compelling accounts of the irreligious implications of central arguments of the Treatise on an impressive range of topics....it should never again be claimed that the Treatise is largely unconcerned with questions of religion." --- Don Garrett, PHILOSOPHICAL REVIEW [REVIEW] "This is a terrific tome.... Why (...) is this book so important? Quite simply, this is one of the best contextualist studies of Hume's A Treatise of Human Nature ever written. To elaborate a bit, this book provides a unique and fascinating interpretation of the Treatise by relating its structure and content to many of the most influential debates about religion raging at Hume's time.... one of the best books on Hume I have ever read. " - Kevin Meeker, MIND -/- . (shrink)

Ever since the publication of Kripke’s Wittgenstein on Rules and Private Language, there’s been a raging debate in philosophy of language over whether meaning and thought are, in some sense, normative. Most participants in the normativity wars seem to agree that some uses of meaningful expressions are semantically correct while disagreeing over whether this entails anything normative. But what is it to say that a use of an expression is semantically correct? On the so-called orthodox construal, it is to say (...) that it doesn’t result in a factual mistake, that is, in saying or thinking something false. On an alternative construal it is instead to say that it doesn’t result in a distinctively linguistic mistake, that is, in misusing the expression. It is natural to think that these two construals of semantic correctness are simply about different things and not in competition with each other. However, this is not the common view. Instead, several philosophers who subscribe to the orthodox construal have argued that the alternative construal of correctness as use in accordance with meaning doesn’t make any sense, partly because there are no clear cases of linguistic mistakes (Whiting 2016, Wikforss 2001). In this paper I develop and defend the idea that there’s a distinctively linguistic notion of correctness as use in accordance with meaning and argue that there are clear cases of linguistic mistakes. (shrink)

Modal collapse arguments are all the rage in certain philosophical circles as of late. The arguments purport to show that classical theism entails the absurdly fatalistic conclusion that everything exists necessarily. My first aim in this paper is bold: to put an end to action-based modal collapse arguments against classical theism. To accomplish this, I first articulate the ‘Simple Modal Collapse Argument’ and then characterize and defend Tomaszewski’s criticism thereof. Second, I critically examine Mullins’ new modal collapse argument formulated (...) in response to the aforementioned criticism. I argue that Mullins’ new argument does not succeed. Third, I critically examine a powers-based modal collapse argument against classical theism that has received much less attention in the literature. Fourth, I show why God’s being purely actual, as well God’s being identical to each of God’s acts, simply cannot entail modal collapse given indeterministic causation. This, I take it, signals the death of modal collapse arguments. But not all hope is lost for proponents of modal collapse arguments—for the death is a fruitful one insofar as it paves the way for new inquiry into at least two new potential problems for classical theism. Showing this is my paper’s second aim. (shrink)

Tracing the leading role of emotions in the evolution of the mind, a philosopher and a psychologist pair up to reveal how thought and culture owe less to our faculty for reason than to our capacity to feel. Many accounts of the human mind concentrate on the brain’s computational power. Yet, in evolutionary terms, rational cognition emerged only the day before yesterday. For nearly 200 million years before humans developed a capacity to reason, the emotional centers of the brain were (...) hard at work. If we want to properly understand the evolution of the mind, we must explore this more primal capability that we share with other animals: the power to feel. Emotions saturate every thought and perception with the weight of feelings. The Emotional Mind reveals that many of the distinctive behaviors and social structures of our species are best discerned through the lens of emotions. Even the roots of so much that makes us uniquely human—art, mythology, religion—can be traced to feelings of caring, longing, fear, loneliness, awe, rage, lust, playfulness, and more. From prehistoric cave art to the songs of Hank Williams, Stephen T. Asma and Rami Gabriel explore how the evolution of the emotional mind stimulated our species’ cultural expression in all its rich variety. Bringing together insights and data from philosophy, biology, anthropology, neuroscience, and psychology, The Emotional Mind offers a new paradigm for understanding what it is that makes us so unique. (shrink)

This article develops the concept of 'manufacture of dissent ' and ‘moral outrage networks ’ to describe anger as a patterned social force that has been reorganised by digital communication systems into a form of distributed social infrastructure. Drawing on sociological work on anger and emotion, it argues that anger is neither a private disturbance nor a purely spontaneous moral reaction, but a socially produced, socially sanctioned, and unevenly distributed process shaped by status, roles, inequality, and institutional pressure. In networked (...) publics, the article shows, anger is increasingly detached from immediate interaction and reattached to platform-driven cycles of provocation, attribution, display, and reward. This shift produces a public sphere in which low-level irritation becomes continuous, moral interpretation is accelerated, and blame is made readily available through simplified causal stories and symbolic enemies. Anger operates simultaneously as a power emotion and a mechanism of social control: it asserts dominance, signals entitlement, disciplines boundaries, and legitimises punishment, while also arising from perceived powerlessness when harm is judged remediable and blameworthy. By integrating research on social rage, political escalation, and social learning, the article proposes that moral outrage online is best understood as learned behaviour reinforced by metrics, imitation, and network norms. The result is not simply ‘more anger’, but a new architecture of anger in which outrage becomes predictable, reproducible, and strategically valuable for actors and systems that benefit from attention, polarisation, and moral drama. The sociology of anger, the article concludes, must therefore expand beyond roles and institutions to include platforms, algorithmic feedback, and network effects as central determinants of how societies feel, judge, mobilise, and govern dissent. (shrink)

In recent years, online “involuntary celibate” or “incel” communities have been linked to various deadly attacks targeting women. Why do these men react to romantic rejection with not just disappointment, but murderous rage? Feminists have claimed this is because incels desire women as objects or, alternatively, because they feel entitled to women’s attention. I argue that both of these explanatory models are insufficient. They fail to account for incels’ distinctive ambivalence toward women—for their oscillation between obsessive desire and violent (...) hatred. I propose instead that what incels want is a Beauvoirian “Other.” For Beauvoir, when men conceive of women as Others, they represent them as simultaneously human subjects and embodiments of the natural world. Women function then as sui generis entities through which men can experience themselves as praiseworthy heroes, regardless of the quality of their actions. I go on to give an illustrative analysis of Elliot Rodger’s autobiographical manifesto, “My Twisted World.” I show how this Beauvoirian model sheds light on Rodger’s racist and classist attitudes and gives us a better understanding of his ambivalence toward women. It therefore constitutes a powerful and overlooked theoretical alternative to accounts centered on objectification and entitlement. (shrink)

We often have affective responses to fictional events. We feel afraid for Desdemona when Othello approaches her in a murderous rage. We feel disgust toward Iago for orchestrating this tragic event. What mental architecture could explain these affective responses? In this paper I consider the claim that the best explanation of our affective responses to fiction involves imaginative desires. Some theorists argue that accounts that do not invoke imaginative desires imply that consumers of fiction have irrational desires. I argue (...) that there are serious worries about imaginative desires that warrant skepticism about the adequacy of the account. Moreover, it is quite difficult to articulate general principles of rationality for desires, and even according to the most plausible of these possible principles, desires about fiction are not irrational. (shrink)

This article develops the concepts of 'manufacture of dissent ', ‘moral outrage networks ’ , and 'Propaganda 2.1 model' as an analytical framework for understanding power, communication and media control under conditions of platform capitalism. Building on Edward Herman and Noam Chomsky’s classical propaganda model and Christian Fuchs’s formulation of ‘Propaganda 2.0’, the article argues that contemporary propaganda no longer operates primarily through persuasion, ideological coherence or the manufacture of consent. Instead, it functions through the systematic production of dissent and (...) the monetisation of moral outrage as its core economic logic. Propaganda 2.1 describes a media environment in which engagement optimisation displaces truth, meaning and deliberation, and where outrage becomes the most efficient unit of value extraction. The model identifies three interlocking mechanisms: rage-baiting as industrial provocation, semantic banalisation through automated and repetitive content production, and parasociality as simulated intimacy that replaces civic participation with emotional attachment. Together, these mechanisms transform public communication into an infrastructure of affect extraction, where attention is continuously harvested while collective judgement erodes. The article further reframes the classical five-filter model for the digital age, showing how ownership, advertising, sourcing, flak and ideology are reconfigured around engagement metrics, algorithmic governance and emotional volatility. Propaganda 2.1 thus marks a shift from shaping belief to engineering reaction, from public opinion to emotional circulation, and from ideological persuasion to the liquidation of meaning itself. In this environment, dissent is no longer oppositional but systemic, and outrage becomes the dominant technology of power in the digital public sphere. (shrink)

In this article we discuss Forrest Clingerman’s argument for ‘emplacement’ as a framework for environmental hermeneutics alongside his fourfold schema of ecological place, aesthetic place, place of resource, and place of community. Utilizing social science methods, we analyze conceptions of nature as place through semi-structured interviews amongst six groups of UK-based Christian environmentalists. We identify themes of place as (1) love, awe and spirituality; (2) grief and rage; and (3) responsibility, redemption and hope. We discuss each of these categories (...) in depth, arguing that our results can be used fruitfully to critique and extend Clingerman’s philosophy and theology of place. (shrink)

Grounding has become all the rage in recent philosophical work and metaphilosophical discussions. While I agree that the concept of ground marks something useful, I am skeptical about the metaphysical weight many imbue it with, and the picture of ‘worldly layering’ that grounding talk inspires. My skepticism centers around the fact that grounding involves necessitation, combined with reasons for thinking matters of necessity are matters of logical or conceptual (semantic, psychological) relations. I sketch an argument for deflationism about ground (...) based on this sort of deflationism about necessity and essence. I also note that in at least some cases, the considerations supporting modal deflationism directly support deflationism about whatever grounding relations may obtain in these cases. (shrink)

At the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, high hopes were put on digital contact tracing, using mobile phone apps to record and immediately notify contacts when a user reports as infected. Such apps can now be downloaded in many countries, but as second waves of COVID-19 are raging, these apps are playing a less important role than anticipated. We argue that this is because most countries have opted for app configurations that cannot provide a means of rapidly informing users of (...) likely infections while avoiding too many false positive reports. Mathematical modelling suggests that differently configured apps have the potential to do this. These require, however, that some pseudonymised data be stored on a central server, which privacy advocates have cautioned against. We contend that their influential arguments are subject to two fallacies. First, they have tended to one-sidedly focus on the risks that centralised data storage entails for privacy, while paying insufficient attention to the fact that inefficient contact tracing involves ethical risks too. Second, while the envisioned system does entail risks of breaches, such risks are also present in decentralised systems, which have been falsely presented as ‘privacy preserving by design’. When these points are understood, it becomes clear that we must rethink our approach to digital contact tracing in our fight against COVID-19. (shrink)

The nature-nurture debate rages so, one cannot help but wonder why the sides are so vehemently partitioned. What's at stake? It is simply not clear why a great amount of people embrace either one side or the other, but dare not even blow a kiss to the opposite opinion. Prinz does an excellent job of arguing for the nurture position, zeroing in on some of the most preciously held nature arguments including the basis of knowledge, thought, and feelings in experience (...) and cultural values, increasing as a child grows. Most prominent of the nature hypothèses that Prinz takes on may be that of language acquisition and the Chomskyean notion of inborn lingusitic knowledge, via the proposed universal language. He contends that children's language acquisition--even the notion that the supposed inborn language device shuts off somewhere in mid-childhood, meaning most people will not be fully bilingual--need not demand such a natural language faculty in the brain, as general learning strategies can account for language acquisition. His arguments can stimulate both nurturists and naturists. Yet, in the end--realizing how much of the human arise from the genes--one still cannot help wonder why the two debated positions so rally to one flag or the other. (shrink)

The Phenomenology of the Game: Language, Consciousness, and the Ethics of Measure is the twelfth work in the Anatomy of Chaos theoretical cycle, situated between The Aesthetics of Chaos and The Burden of Sight. While the preceding works of the cycle have established the structural mechanics of socio-political systems, the ontology of the Observer, and the ethics of actualization, the present work undertakes a systematic phenomenological investigation of the C-coordinate — consciousness as a structuring function — across six domains: linguistic (...) archaeology, cognitive architecture, emotional experience, epistemology, ethics, and the foundational axiom of the system itself. Part 1 traces the C-coordinate through the deep structures of human language and myth, demonstrating that the opposition between seeing and non-seeing — eidos and a-ides, vidya and avidya — is encoded at the morphological level of the Indo-European language family and reproduced as a semantic pattern across every independently verified tradition examined. The katabasis mythologeme and the Oedipus cycle are analyzed as structural encodings of the Observer's trajectory. The work introduces the concept of structural recurrence to describe these patterns, distinguishing its interpretive framework from the neurolinguistic account (Sweetser, Lakoff) and the Jungian-comparative account (Campbell, Eliade). Part 2 examines the cognitive regime of the Observer under crisis, contrasting the Fusionist's question ("How?") with the Observer's question ("Why?") and documenting this distinction through the real-time records of Marcus Aurelius, Churchill, Havel, and Klemperer. The Fusionist's cognitive regime is characterized as adaptive rather than defective, and both regimes are shown to derive from a single property of the C-coordinate: the capacity to structure. Part 3 develops the emotional phenomenology of the Observer across four inversions — fear and Dread, anger and rage, ordinary joy and Metamorphic Fervor, love and detached accountability — proposing that the Observer's emotional experience is not a variant of the Fusionist's but a categorically distinct set of states for which existing language provides no adequate vocabulary. The term Metamorphic Fervor is introduced, grounded in the Ovidian tradition of purposeful transformation. Part 4 advances the epistemological formula: not everything that is true is real, and not everything that is real is true. The concept of the seeming truth — a functional mirage perceived as permanent from within the epoch that generates it — is developed and distinguished from the predecessors (Foucault, Kuhn) through three additions specific to this cycle: clarity as a distinct epistemological category, phase transitions as the mechanism of change, and radical agnosticism as the resulting epistemic position. A four-cell matrix formalizing the possible relationships between truth and reality is proposed, and the system is subjected to its own epistemological criteria through an honest self-referential examination. Part 5 descends from epistemology to ethics. Conviction is defined as micro-morality — the individual-scale analogue of the group moral code, equally functional and equally subject to expiration. The Fusionist's choice is characterized as selection within a given set without awareness of the stochastic dynamics that the selection may trigger. The Observer's choice is characterized as the choice of measure — the only genuine freedom the system affords. The chapter on responsibility proposes a resolution to Bernard Williams's open problem of moral luck (1976) through a change of ontological foundation: responsibility is proportional to awareness, not to scale of consequences, because scale is a stochastic property of the system while awareness is a property of the agent. Part 6 subjects the entire construction to a stress-test through confrontation with Schopenhauer — identified as the most dangerous opponent because he attacks not a detail but the foundational axiom. The convergences between Schopenhauer's system and the cycle's architecture are acknowledged as structural rather than incidental. The point of divergence — liberation from the game versus return to the battlefield — is examined through three Schopenhauerian attacks (the critique of directionality, the critique of B3, and the substitution of Metron for Mitleid) and three responses. The binary taxonomy of the cycle (Observer/Fusionist) is acknowledged as exhaustive within the system and structurally incapable of accommodating the third position of total refusal. The defence through Metron demonstrates that Schopenhauer's own ethical principle — compassion as metaphysical insight — is violated by the practical consequence of his prescription: inaction in the face of approaching crisis maximizes the suffering of those least equipped to bear it. The work concludes that the cycle's advantage over Schopenhauer is not metaphysical but operational: the system permits action; his does not. (shrink)

This protocol outlines a six-phase framework to transform the entire spectrum of human imagination—**violent, erotic, tender, absurd**—into an antifragile, self-organizing ethical and aesthetic order. Drawing on Ibn Arabi’s Imaginal Realm, Jung’s Active Imagination, Hegelian dialectics, small-world network theory, and Taleb’s antifragility, the EEIP suspends premature moral judgments to fully explore desire’s possibilities, then uses collective processes to guide fantasies toward beauty, mutuality, and sanctity. It tackles the integration of taboo desires, emotional extremes like jealousy, rage, and lust, and ensures (...) a “hacker-proof” morality resistant to narcissistic or cruel distortions. The protocol provides practical tools for psychological healing, communal ritual, embodied philosophy, and a shared lexicon for erotic thought. -/- **Keywords**: Ethical imagination, active imagination, small-world networks, dialectics, embodied cognition, erotic philosophy, antifragility, shared lexicon. (shrink)

I scratch your back, you scratch mine—how must these services relate in order to constitute a quid pro quo exchange? In the ordinary quid pro quo exchange, each party agrees to do their part in order to get the other party to do theirs; each conditions their own willingness to perform on the willingness of the other; and each regards the other as obligated to do their part in light of their agreement. But not all exchanges are ordinary, and a (...) proper analysis is of considerable practical and theoretical significance. In the law alone, quid pro quo figures prominently in a wide range of contexts—civil as well as criminal, public as well as private—and lies at the core of a number of raging controversies concerning official corruption, insider trading, and other matters. This Article offers the first philosophical analysis of quid pro quo exchange in the Anglophone tradition. (shrink)

Traditional ethical theories struggle to explain certain fundamental phenomena: why care intensifies for the dying, why some who encounter suffering become compassionate while others become cruel, and why spite exists as a form of evil. This paper argues that ethics emerges from how consciousness responds to pattern-reality’s fundamental structure of emergence-transience-dissolution. I identify three ethical stances corresponding to three modes of pattern-recognition: (1) The Sublime Ethical Response—loving despite everything, where recognition of universal dissolution intensifies rather than negates care; (2) Passive (...) Evil—indifferent withdrawal from care based on “nothing matters anyway”; and (3) Active Evil (Spite)—deliberately deepening wounds as rage against pattern-reality itself, enacted on vulnerable instances. Good is where we seek to mitigate harm because of the very cost of impermanence. Evil is not mere selfishness but a failed sublime— where compassion is not the response to suffering. The paper suggests how good action is about making actions count now without reference to a time beyond this life. As a felt ethical response arising within an embodied mind on awareness of the cosmos it emerges within. Its dangers and vulnerabilities are the raw material that the mind processes and transcends in imagination. Objectivity is not an external law but the trans-individual reality of a human species-capacity. Finally, I argue that the Anti-Bliss pole is opened not by comfortable philosophy but by a wound imposed by life, and that palimpsest consciousness—memory holding past and present together—makes the sublime one possible response. The ordinary Babbitt- man, the everyday hero, may find the sublime too as life unfolds. Keywords: ethics, sublime, mortality, evil, compassion, pattern-recognition, care, impermanence, spite, temporality, embodiment, moral sense, memory . (shrink)

Colonialism’s legacy in South Africa includes persistent economic inequality which, since the country’s universities charge fees, bars many from higher education, perpetuating the marginalisation of those previously disadvantaged by the apartheid regime. In 2015-6, country-wide unrest raged across university campuses, as students protested the yearly cycle of tuition increases under the slogan #FeesMustFall, demanding “free, decolonised education”. Protests ended in December 2017 when the government announced a sliding-scale payment policy alleviating the economic burden for poorer students. This paper sets the (...) #FMF movement and its twin demands within the context of decoloniality, and argues that while free education has been achieved, imagining and implementing decolonised education for South Africa in an increasingly globalised world is a more challenging, elusive goal. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Hume Studies Volume 30, Number 2, November 2004, pp. 213-236 Pleased and Afflicted: Hume on the Paradox of Tragic Pleasure E. M. DADLEZ How fast can you run? As fast as a leopard. How fast are you going to run? A whistle sounds the order that sends Archie Hamilton and his comrades over the top of the trench to certain death. Racing to circumvent that order and arriving seconds (...) too late, Archie's friend Frank screams in rage and despair. Archie is cut down before he has run twenty yards. Peter Weir's film Gallipoli is a chronicle of the disastrous Dardanelles campaign of the first World War, but it is also a film about racing. Archie is trained by his uncle Jack to run "as fast as a leopard." The film begins as it ends, with Archie sprinting in response to a whistle. Frank is first shown racing after a train, along with friends who are on their way to enlist. Archie and Frank meet while competing in a race, they race in Cairo once they have enlisted, and they finally race death. From the beginning, Archie has been faster; even at the end he is the first to die. And from the beginning he has swept Frank along in his wake, encouraging him, pushing him, inspiring him, and helping him to positions for which he is inadequately qualified. In the end, Archie's compassion and kindness prompt a decision which has grim consequences both for himself and for hundreds of others. Knowing that his friend fears death in the trenches, Archie recommends Frank as a substitute for himself, a designated message runner. But Frank is not fast enough, and falls short by mere seconds which Archie would not have lost. This is what leads to the failure of the one real effort to countermand the fatal charge. E. M. Dadlez is Professor of Humanities and Philosophy, University of Central Oklahoma, Edmond, OK 73034, USA. e-mail: [email protected] 214 E. M. Dadlez I am an emotional wreck by the time the movie is over, though I should admit that most of my tears are the result of sheer rage. Both my dogs exited the room in some haste once I began to shout at the television and the unpardonably dimwitted British officers who sat sipping tea at a comfortable distance as they gave the order for soldiers to commit suicide. But it isn't just the scope of the real human disaster, or the enormity of the blunder, or the pointlessness of the entire enterprise, or even my renewed conviction that stupidity is, in fact, evil, that is so unsettling. The film unnerves with respect to personal as well as global concerns, focusing attention on the chance of vanity's leading one to undertake responsibilities beyond one's competence, the possibility of advancement or security being achievable only at the expense of another, and the realization of how easy it might be to let those things happen. Gallipoli is a sad, disturbing film, and the spectator is grieved and disturbed in the course of watching it. Yet, having said that, I must own to having a copy in my possession, and to having watched it more than once. I recommend it to friends, offering to lend them my videotape. In fact, I press it on them. I say that it is a terrific, rewarding work which they should take the time to see. How is it that I can describe my experience of the film in such glowing terms and at the same time acknowledge the extreme distress I felt in the course of watching it? How can I reconcile the discordant aspects of my experience? David Hume explores some possible answers in his essay "Of Tragedy."1 He begins by calling attention to the paradox of tragic pleasure: It seems an unaccountable pleasure, which the spectators of a well written tragedy receive from sorrow, terror... and other passions, which are in themselves disagreeable and uneasy. The more they are touched and affected, the more are they delighted with the spectacle.... The whole art of the poet is employed in rousing and supporting the compassion and... (shrink)

On 25 May 2020, Officer Derek Chauvin asphyxiated George Floyd in Minneapolis — a murder that was captured in a confronting nine-minute bystander video that set off a firestorm of activity on online social networks, in the streets of the United States, and even worldwide. These protests captured the collective rage, dissatisfaction, and resentment personally and vicariously experienced towards the widespread systematic injustice and mistreatment of African Americans by police and vigilantes. The scale of these protests, both online and (...) in the streets, has been estimated to have far exceeded the civil rights marches of the 1960s (Buchanan et al. 2020). Considering the widespread extent of these protests, our research aims to analyse conflictual intergroup moral dynamics in terms of the reactive attitudes expressed by distinct online communities on Twitter. This paper examines the extent to which the Strawsonian (1962) reactive attitudes framework is applicable to the Twitter discourse around the Black Lives Matter protests reignited by the murder of George Floyd. In particular, we argue that the Strawsonian framework is inadequate to understand a range of prevalent attitudes expressed in this discourse — attitudes that we call reactionary as opposed to merely reactive. Reactionary attitudes include counter-indignation on behalf of the accused rather than Strawsonian indignation on behalf of the victim of a moral wrong. We document the expression of such attitudes among the right-wing participants in the online discourse about the Black Lives Matter movement. (shrink)

I’m often asked why, as a philosopher of science, I study archaeology. Philosophy is so abstract and intellectual, and archaeology is such an earth-bound, data-driven enterprise, what could the connection possibly be? This puzzlement takes a number of different forms. In one memorable exchange in the late 1970s when I was visiting Oxford as a graduate student an elderly don, having inquired politely about my research interests, tartly observed that archaeology isn’t a science, so I couldn’t possibly be writing a (...) dissertation in philosophy of science on archaeology. At job interviews a few years later a standard opening gambit was to ask: “so what’s philosophical about the work you do on archaeology” or, more querulously, “what could possibly be of philosophical interest in archaeology”? And from archaeologists, weary of the “theory wars” that raged through 1980s and 1990s, the standard question was, “What’s the point?! Better to step away from the wrangling about philosophical ‘isms’ and get on with the empirical work that needs doing.”. (shrink)

ABSTRACT In recent years, debates on same-sex marriage and the recognition of transwomen as women have been raging. These debates often seem to revolve around the meaning of, respectively, the word ‘marriage’ and ‘woman’. That such debates should take place might be puzzling. It seems that if debates on gay and transgender rights revolve around the meaning of these words, then those in favor of same-sex marriage and of the recognition of transwomen as women have no room left to maneuver. (...) However, prima facie, the pro – and anti-, in both cases, have genuine disagreements over the meaning of these words: though the analyses of revisionary theorists are revisionary, they are analyses. Sally Haslanger and other philosophers in her wake have appealed to an anti-descriptivist externalist view of meaning to provide the conceptual foundations of this practice of revisionary theorizing: revisionary analyses bring to light what, unbeknownst to us, these words mean. In this paper, I argue that a descriptivist externalist view should be preferred instead. My argument rests on the thesis that what is contested in these debates is the meaning of the words ‘marriage’ and ‘women’ as used in the law. (shrink)

The hadith concerning radha’ah (breastfeeding) in Islam establishes that mahram status (prohibition of marriage) is formed only if five breastfeedings occur before the age of two. However, the hadith regarding Salim al-Mawla Abu Hudhaifah, who was breastfed as an adult and became a mahram, raises a fundamental question: is this an exception that nullifies the general ruling, or is it actually a demonstration of deeper wisdom? This paper proposes an interpretive hypothesis that the Hadith of Salim is not a permissive (...) exception, but rather a demonstration of a wisdom warning that unveils the psychobiological mechanism behind the mahram status of radha’ah. This mechanism works in two directions: (1) Primary effect on the nursing mother (hormonal transformation through oxytocin which creates maternal-filial bonding and prolactin which significantly suppresses sexual function – well-established empirical data from postpartum studies indicate a drastic decrease in libido, vaginal dryness, and dyspareunia in exclusively breastfeeding mothers); and (2) Secondary effect on the adult recipient (limited oral ab- sorption of oxytocin in adults with low bioavailability of 4-11%, although RAGE receptors are effective in infants – status: hypothetical and requires validation). The case of Salim indicates the strength of this mechanism, especially the transformation in the mother which can create relational disorientation (the wife sees the husband as more maternal/child-like, the husband potentially experiences a perceptual shift although the effect is weak). The Sharia protects the institution of marriage by limiting radha’ah to infants (age < 2 years, ≥ 5 feedings) and prohibiting the husband from drinking his wife’s breast milk to prevent bidirectional relational disorientation that could damage marital harmony. Methodological Note: This research is interdisciplinary and interpretive. Biological data on hormonal effects of lactation on nursing mothers are empirically established with strong support from postpartum sexual function literature. However, application to the context of adult recipients of breast milk (the case of Salim) is a hypothetical extrapolation requiring further validation. This pa- per is not a medical claim, but an effort of textual-contextual reconciliation with maqashid and applied science perspectives. (shrink)

Sogo/Gakuryu Ishii is one of the pioneers of the punk/cyberpunk movement in Japanese cinema. Though his style changed throughout his career, his early films have been a great influence to filmmakers around the world. His unique filmic style presents questions, observations and interpretations regarding the role of violence as normalized in the daily lives of heavily marginalized punk youth portrayed in an amplified and stylized cyberpunk Japan. What is so captivating about Ishii's style and motivation is that he was not (...) only a filmmaker interested in making embellished political or social commentary, Ishii was also part of the emerging punk movement in Japan and several musicians of punk rock bands were also involved in his films. My main aim in my inquiry into Ishil's early films involves two parts regarding the same concept. The first is the ethical issues that arise both with portrayal of violence in films as well as the intention of such an endeavor in general. The second part is the way in which violence is made to be part of the film in terms of form and style. This may be interpreted as either glorifying and stylizing violence or showing that violence is nothing but a destructive force that the outcasts of society may not be able to escape. To the last statement Ishii seems to be silent but very active. What I mean by this is that the simplistic plot-lines of his early films are contrasted by heavy punk music, fast editing, constant moving camera and rage, fear and disappointment in the faces of the anti-heroes. (shrink)

It is widely agreed that no theory of contract is fully adequate—all theories face formidable descriptive, normative and conceptual difficulties. Why has contract scholarship failed to produce an acceptable theory of contract law, even after several decades of nuanced and sophisticated theoretical efforts? This Article answers this puzzle by offering a novel meta-theory of contract scholarship that focuses on the aesthetics of various contract theories. An aesthetic commitment, under this understanding, is a pre-theoretical presupposition regarding the form (as opposed to (...) the substance) of legal discourse. The article argues that jurists harbor several different aesthetics and often employ them interchangeably and without noticing. The continuing struggle between different contract theories is isomorphous to the battle of aesthetics that rages in the legal community as a whole. Since there is no meta-aesthetic way to determine which aesthetic construction is correct, contract theories, which are based on different aesthetics, are destined to continue struggling indefinitely. The article explores four leading contract theories—promissory, reliance, economic and pluralistic conceptions of contract—and illustrates the manner each theory’s substantive insights are interwoven with aesthetics commitments, animating and giving the theories their unique character. In so doing, the article shows how the aesthetic point-of-view can better explain these theories’ specific strengths, weaknesses and disagreements, and it grounds its prediction that contract scholarship is not likely to produce a widely accepted theory any time soon. (shrink)

(1) Emotions influence decisions in various ways. In particular, they can induce new intrinsic desires. This mechanism is the topic of this paper. (2) After briefly discussing some rival approaches a new theory of such emotional decisions is presented. (3) The general framework into which this theory is integrated is an expectancy-valence or decision-theoretic model of decision, however with a strict distinction between intrinsic and other desires. (4) The specific part of the theory then explains emotional decisions by non-hedonic emotion-induced (...) intrinsic desires that grow and wane with the respective emotion, e.g. when in rage the desire to destroy or hurt the ‘aggressor’. A general approach to the content of these desires is provided, namely that they take up the values inherent in specific satisfying emotions coupled with the present emotion. (5) Finally, some theoretical consequences and advantages of this theory are shown. (shrink)

The Soul is considered, both for religions and philosophy, to be the immaterial aspect or essence of a human being, conferring individuality and humanity, often considered to be synonymous with the mind or the self. For most theologies, the Soul is further defined as that part of the individual, which partakes of divinity and transcends the body in different explanations. But, regardless of the philosophical background in which a specific theology gives the transcendence of the soul as the source of (...) its everlasting essence – often considered to survive the death of the body –, it is always appraised as a higher existence for which all should fight for. In this regard, all religious beliefs assert that there are many unseen battles aiming to take hold of the human soul, either between divinity and evil, or between worlds, or even between the body and the soul itself. These unseen battles over the human soul raging in the whole world made it the central item of the entire universe, both for the visible and the unseen worlds, an item of which whoever takes possession will also become the ruler of the universe. Through this philosophy, the value of the soul became abysmal, incommensurable, and without resemblance. The point for making such a broad overview of the soul in religious beliefs is the question of whether we can build an interfaith discourse based on the religions’ most debated and valuable issue, soul? Regardless of the variety of religious beliefs on what seems to be the soul, there is always a residual consideration in them that makes the soul more important than the body. This universal impression is due to another belief or instead need of believing that above and beyond this seen, palpable, finite life and the world should exist another one, infinite, transcendent, and available all the same after here. This variety stretches from the minimum impact that soul has on the body, as being the superior essence that inhabitants and enlivens the matter, to the highest impact in which soul has nothing to do with matter[1] and is only ephemeral linked to it, but its existence is not at all limited, defined or depended on the matter [2], or even placed to the extreme, as the very life of the matter thus this seen universe is merely a thought in the soul/mind [3]. In this extensive variety of soul overviews, the emphasis of the soul’s importance gives an inverse significance to the body/matter, from being everything that matters to a thin, dwindle item that has no existence at all outside consciousness. (shrink)

Zuko’s plight illuminates the process of aspiration, including common challenges to the aspirant. As Agnes Callard understands it, aspiration typically involves a “deep change in how one sees and feels and thinks.” And this deep change is often intertwined with a change in what contemporary philosopher Christine Korsgaard calls practical identity, a “description under which you value yourself, . . . under which you find your life to be worth living and your actions to be worth undertaking.” But as Zuko (...) shows, practical identities are complex, sometimes unwieldy, and changes in explicit self-conceptions can take work, time, and perhaps some luck to bring about the deep change one aspires to. Even after he explicitly disavows his past actions, Zuko finds himself reverting to past behaviors, doing things that (on some level) he wishes he would not. These actions frustrate him— “Why am I so bad at being good?”— but they are not mere lapses in judgment. They come naturally and express an identity that Zuko had long embraced and cultivated but is now trying to leave behind. The arc of Zuko’s transformation illustrates the interplay between two dimensions of practical identity. On the one hand, as Korsgaard’s account emphasizes, our explicit self-conceptions and values matter. They guide our actions and shape how we see the world. But Zuko’s struggles suggest that such self-conceptions and aspirations are only part of the story. According to Martin Heidegger’s notion of being-in-the-world, our practical identity depends more on our existential engagement with the world than on our explicit self-conceptions. And these different dimensions of practical identity do not always align. As William Blattner writes, “Some of the most challenging conflicts in our lives arise when who we are existentially engaged in being stands in tension with who we think of ourselves as being.” Zuko is frustrated because, despite consciously trying to change, his being-in-the-world conflicts with his Korsgaardian practical identity. His world is still shaped (residually) by an identity he wants to shed. The way Zuko’s world and actions continue to be shaped by an identity he is trying to leave behind highlights a key difficulty of transformation. Zuko’s desire to prove his worth to his father and his rage have so thoroughly permeated his being-in-the-world that they are second nature. They shape his orientation toward the world and fuel his firebending. For better and worse, his spontaneous actions do not always fall in step with his conscious commitments. The same skills and dispositions Zuko previously cultivated as central to his identity now lead to unwanted actions and keep him from aspired-to actions. To become good in the way he wants, Zuko must not only cultivate the dispositions that will allow his aspired-to identity to become part and parcel of his being-in-the-world, but he must clear out or modify the residual influence of his past identity and related dispositions and values. -/- . (shrink)

Feminists have long argued that emotions have a rightful place in politics. Anger, specifically, is often said to play a crucial role in alerting people to oppression and motivating resistance. The task of this paper is to elaborate these claims and to outline a conception of the political value of anger. In doing so, I argue against the view that anger is valuable if and because it expresses a sound moral judgment. Instead, we should see rage, in the first (...) place, as simply a response to having one’s practical aims in the world thwarted—there need be nothing moral or righteous about this feeling for it to have political potential. Second, unlike those who highlight anger’s connection with love or claims for equal dignity, I emphasise its tendency towards aggression. With this non-moralized conception of anger in hand, we can see how rage reveals practical problems in a way that can spur on a dialectical process of political articulation and organized action. The resulting standpoint from which one can articulate and resist one’s oppression based on one’s rage is not inherent in the experience of anger—rather it needs to be seen as a political achievement in itself. (shrink)

A widespread conception of anger both within and outside academia proposes to interpret it (along with other emotions) as an adaptive response to certain recurrent problems in our evolutionary past, which implies interpreting anger as a discrete, basic, innate and adaptive emotion. In view of the crisis that the Basic Emotions thesis is going through, and taking into account a number of important objections that have been raised to the idea that anger represents a discrete emotion, I will suggest that (...) the definitive abandonment of the concept of anger (and its close relatives, rage and indignation) has important hermeneutical advantages, including the possibility of approaching the problem of the phylogenesis of our sense of justice from a perspective that avoids the rupturist and continuist extremes that rely on a discrete conception of the emotions. (shrink)

In the 1990s , a debate raged across the whole postsocialist world as well as in Western development agencies such as the World Bank about the best approach to the transition from various forms of socialism or communism to a market economy and political democracy. One of the most hotly contested topics was the question of the workplace being organized based on workplace democracy (e.g., various forms of worker ownership) or based on the conventional employer-employee relationship. Well before 1989, many (...) of the socialist countries had started experimenting with various forms of "self-management" operating in more of a market setting, Yugoslavia being the most developed example. Thus one "path to the market" would have been to push those experiments all the way to some Western form of employee ownership or worker cooperatives operating in a full market environment. Alternatively, all these decentralizing experiments could be condemned as "vestiges of communism" to be eradicated by renationalizing all the decentralized firms and then privatizing by some alternative means. (shrink)

Two of the most basic commitments of virtue ethics, both ancient and contemporary, are that virtue is knowledge and that this knowledge is a kind of moral sensitivity that is best understood on the model of perception. On this account, the virtuous agent perceives moral goodness and badness in something like the way we perceive that a smiling person is happy or that a raging bull is dangerous. This is opposed to the more widely held view of moral experience, according (...) to which perception informs us only of nonmoral states of affairs; the specifically moral content of the experience, on this view, comes either from distinct pro or con attitudes toward those states of affairs or from general principles that we apply... (shrink)