Though the literature on the topic has been slim, several recent commentators have identified a close affinity between the philosophical project of Giorgio Agamben, as articulated in his Homo Sacer series, and René Girard's theory of mimetic rivalry with its resolution through sacrificial scapegoating.1 Both are theories of social unity made possible through highly ritualized forms of exclusion. Girard's work posits desire and its conflictual consequences as the ultimate ground for all social systems, while Agamben views the same systems with (...) an eye toward the maintenance of sovereign power. Agamben begins his study with an obscure figure of Roman law, the "sacred man," who is excluded from the laws of both the... (shrink)

This paper examines Irish campaigns for condom access in the early 1990s. Against the backdrop of the AIDS crisis, activists campaigned against a law which would not allow condoms to be sold from ordinary commercial spaces or vending machines, and restricted sale to young people. Advancing a conception of ‘transformative illegality’, we show that illegal action was fundamental to the eventual legalisation of commercial condom sale. However, rather than foregrounding illegal condom sale as a mode of spectacular direct action, we (...) show that tactics of illegal sale in the 1990s built on 20 years of everyday illegal sale within the Irish family planning movement. Everyday illegal sale was a long-term world-making practice, which gradually transformed condoms’ legal meanings, eventually enabling new forms of provocative and irreverent protest. Condoms ‘became legal’ when the state recognised modes of condom sale, gradually built up over many years and publicised in direct action and in the courts. (shrink)

The Repeal campaign articulated new and transformative relationships between law, reproduction and the political in Ireland. During the campaign, ordinary people took ownership of and participated in mutual teaching and critique of law on a wide scale. Art, along these lines, was often used to document and archive the injustices worked by the 8th Amendment. However, art also became a means of imagining law otherwise. In this piece, I use Jacques Rancière’s work on the relationship between aesthetics and politics to (...) analyse artistic contributions to feminist legal discourses associated with Repeal. (shrink)

Centralised, compliance-focused approaches to research ethics have been normalised in practice. In this paper, we argue that the dominance of such systems has been driven by neoliberal approaches to governance, where the focus on controlling and individualising risk has led to an overemphasis of decontextualised ethical principles and the conflation of ethical requirements with the documentation of ‘informed consent’. Using a UK-based case study, involving a point-of-care-genetic test as an illustration, we argue that rather than ensuring ethical practice such compliance-focused (...) approaches may obstruct valuable research. We call for an approach that encourages researchers and research communities—including regulators, ethics committees, funders and publishers of academic research—to acquire skills to make morally appropriate decisions, and not base decision-making solely on compliance with prescriptive regulations. We call this ‘ethical preparedness’ and outline how a research ethics system might make space for this approach. (shrink)

The representation theorems of expected utility theory show that having certain types of preferences is both necessary and sufficient for being representable as having subjective probabilities. However, unless the expected utility framework is simply assumed, such preferences are also consistent with being representable as having degrees of belief that do not obey the laws of probability. This fact shows that being representable as having subjective probabilities is not necessarily the same as having subjective probabilities. Probabilism can be defended on the (...) basis of the representation theorems only if attributions of degrees of belief are understood either antirealistically or purely qualitatively, or if the representation theorems are supplemented by arguments based on other considerations (simplicity, consilience, and so on) that single out the representation of a person as having subjective probabilities as the only true representation of the mental state of any person whose preferences conform to the axioms of expected utility theory. (shrink)

Can a bomb ever be "clean"? Are we relieved to be warned that there will be an " odor " when once we were told that something would "stink"? Or, to put it another way, when is a euphemism a mark of good taste and when is it a sign of verbal obfuscation? To answer such questions, D.J. Enright invited sixteen distinguished writers to ponder and explore the ubiquitous phenomenon of euphemism. The result is a delightful and provocative collection (...) that not only includes general reflections on euphemism and its history but also treats such specific categories as sex, death, and other natural functions; politics; the language of the great Christian texts; euphamisms spoken to and by children; the law; medicine; office life; and the jargon of official spokesmen, military communiques, and tyrants. Such writers as Diane Johnson, Robert Nisbet, John Gross, Robert Burchfield, and Joseph Epstein bring a variety of perspectives and sensibilities to bear on these topics. Because euphemisms are so intimate and integral to our thinking, any study of them is bound to throw light on the human condition, both past and present. In these essays, humor jostles horror and the homely alternates with the farfetched. Taken together they form an eloquent and often amusing testament to the richness of the subject. About the Author: D.J. Enright is a noted English poet and critic. He recently compiled and edited The Oxford Book of Death. (shrink)

ABSTRACT The aim of the current study was to investigate the effect of forgiveness education on positive psychology variables (empathy, altruism and willingness to forgive) in Iranian adolescents. Two hundred twenty-four (Persian, Azeri, and Kurdish) male and female students in eighth grade participated. Schools were randomly assigned to experimental (N=123) and control (N=101) groups. Measures include the Toronto Empathy Questionnaire, Altruistic Personality Scale, and Willingness to Forgive Scale, administered at pre-test, post-test, and follow-up. The experimental group was presented with 15 (...) weekly sessions of teaching forgiveness programs by classroom teachers. The results showed that the experimental group improved more in degrees of empathy, altruism, and willingness to forgive compared to the control group, and also at follow-up. It seems that forgiveness education programs can contribute to human flourishing with the increase of positive psychology in students, particularly in empathy, altruism, and willingness to forgive. (shrink)

Ayn Rand argued that “selfish” is the correct designation for a person living according to the Objectivist ethics and that selfishness is a virtue. The accuracy of this claim is examined along with the meaning of “selfish,” the wider implications for the Objectivist ethics, and ethics in general. Alternatives to the term are suggested.

Probabilistic coherence is not an absolute requirement of rationality; nevertheless, it is an ideal of rationality with substantive normative import. An idealized rational agent who avoided making implicit logical errors in forming his preferences would be coherent. In response to the challenge, recently made by epistemologists such as Foley and Plantinga, that appeals to ideal rationality render probabilism either irrelevant or implausible, I argue that idealized requirements can be normatively relevant even when the ideals are unattainable, so long as they (...) define a structure that links imperfect and perfect rationality in a way that enables us to make sense of the notion of better approximations to the ideal. I then analyze the notion of approximation to the ideal of coherence by developing a generalized theory of belief functions that allows for incoherence, and showing how such belief functions can be ordered with regard to greater or lesser coherence. (shrink)

Moral elevation is described as a state of positive emotion that includes uplifting feelings, positive views of humanity and a desire to be a better person. Numerous empirical studies have demonstrated that elevation has powerful effects on people’s moral intention and behavior. The next step is to investigate how to maximize the emotion of elevation. According to the evolution of moral elevation research and the theory of moral disgust, we hypothesized that the consequences of moral action would influence moral elevation. (...) The results of two studies in the present research (Study 1: N = 122, average age = 36.96 years; Study 2: N = 232, average age = 23.93 years) demonstrated that moral acts with good consequences were more effective in inducing moral elevation than moral acts with bad consequences. The implications for research and practice are discussed. (shrink)

This article examines the place of forgiveness within the Positive Youth Development (PYD) paradigm. We suggest knowledge of forgiveness can be advanced by understanding it from a developmental perspective. We review research indicating that forgiveness can contribute to positive developmental outcomes during adolescence and we explore theoretical relationships between forgiveness and three important components of the PYD perspective: the development of a moral identity, developmental assets and adolescents as co‐producers of their development. These particular PYD concepts are discussed because of (...) their relation to scholarly work on forgiveness and because they can provide a developmental perspective that may advance our understanding of forgiveness. Finally, we discuss the implications of conceptualising forgiveness from a PYD perspective for research on forgiveness and for forgiveness education. Research implications include examining how youth move from one point in the forgiveness process to the next, investigating forgiveness across transgressors and contexts and exploring individual differences in forgiveness. Implications for education include integrating forgiveness education into youth programmes, developing models of forgiveness and teaching youth strategies to gain self‐awareness and increase intentional action. (shrink)

ABSTRACT The association between prosocial behavior and adolescents’ social class—defined as one’s parents’ position in society assessed in terms of education, income, and occupation status—is far from conclusive and the moderators of the link have not been fully researched. Using data from the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development Study of Early Child Care and Youth Development (NICHD SECCYD) (N = 1,058), this study investigated the association between social class and 5th graders’ prosocial behavior, as well as the (...) moderating roles of maternal sensitivity, positive family emotional expressiveness, teacher-student relationship, and peer support. The current research found that social class was positively associated with adolescents’ prosocial behavior, and the positive association between social class and prosocial behavior was less pronounced for adolescents with higher levels of maternal sensitivity, positive family emotional expressiveness, teacher-student relationship, and peer support than those with lower levels of maternal sensitivity, positive family emotional expressiveness, teacher-student relationship, and peer support. The present findings yield evidence on the negative influence of low social class on adolescents’ prosocial behavior, but this effect would be buffered by supportive and healthy relationships in family and school contexts. (shrink)

This article compares case studies to better understand how third grade teachers, serving low-income (including Title I) schools, adapted their instruction in the midst of a global pandemic to better support their students’ learning about locally-relevant civic issues. Civic perspective-taking components were embedded in the unit design with the aim of building deliberative, inclusive classrooms. The team designed lessons drawing from theories of culturally sustaining pedagogy. Using semi-structured interview data, we examined teachers’ reported thinking and perceptions about students’ needs and (...) their own struggles to deliver purposeful, equitable instruction. Findings indicate that as teachers collaboratively designed the lessons they discussed how to balance relevance and sensitivity in relation to content that mirrored students lived realities. This study advances our understanding of what challenges teachers overcome to integrate culturally-sustaining practices in their social studies instruction. (shrink)

Two first grade teachers were trained in the use of a social cognitive model developed by the present author. The teachers were instructed to use the model in the naturalistic context of the classroom whenever interpersonal difficulties arose in order to increase the students’ levels of interpersonal conceptions and social problem solving abilities. For the first 11 weeks, Class 1 was an experimental condition and Class 2 was a control. After the 11 week period, Class 1 was higher than Class (...) 2 in interpersonal conceptions, social problem solving, and moral judgment, but not in vocabulary. For the next 11 weeks Class 2 started the educational programme and Class 1 continued the programme. At the end of this period, Class 2 was equivalent to Class 1's scores after its first 11 weeks in interpersonal conceptions, social problem solving, and moral judgement. Class 1 maintained its original social cognitive gains. The findings support the model's effectiveness in promoting children's social cognitive development. (shrink)

Within the context of the study of the genetics of language, Chomskian laws of grammar, such as theStructure-dependence Condition and theA over A Condition, may be usefully regarded to have a status similar to that of Mendelian Laws in classical genetics. In both the case of Chomsky's Laws and Mendel's Laws, formal genetic principles are postulated which abstract away from the physical mechanisms involved and in both cases certain apparent counterexamples mirror a more complex underlying genetic organisation.

Due to a widespread belief in mechano-reductionism, most intellectuals reject the idea that nonconscious living beings act toward goals. Proposing otherwise is mostly rejected as unscientific anthropomorphizing or necessitating appeals to a supernatural power. This false dichotomy has stymied biology and its related sciences. Herein, I present a new naturalistic gestalt on the nature of life—one based on facts and evidence. It incorporates Ludwig von Bertalanffy’s and Arthur Koestler’s theories of systems and hierarchies with the ideas of Aristotle, Hans Jonas, (...) and Ayn Rand, to identify fundamental formulations on the nature of life, consciousness, free will, and meaning. (shrink)

Dante lived long before America existed and had no knowledge of the difficult and troublesome history regarding race that has plagued this continent since slavery came to the New World. However, his Divine Comedy can be read as a spiritual journey illustrating the deeply Catholic principle that sin necessitates confession and repentance. In this context, Dante speaks powerfully to the issue of race in America. Nations, like individuals, must reckon with their sins in order to move on to their future (...) in healing and in hope. False arguments that America must recover its “greatness” without a deep and national repentance for the sins of slavery and of racism in general miss the mark spiritually. Just as Dante had to face his own personal sins and failures before moving on from the end of Purgatory into Paradise, America needs to face its sins, both confessing and repenting of them. (shrink)

Name der Zeitschrift: Frühmittelalterliche Studien Jahrgang: 48 Heft: 1 Seiten: 207-236.

Unferth the troublesome þyle, the spokesman of King Hrothgar at Heorot, has seldom rested easily in the annals of Beowulf scholarship. Disputes about his behavior and character were already dividing scholars in the nineteenth century, and the last generation has seen a flurry of conflicting analyses. James Rosier, for example, viewed him as a quarrelsome braggart, Norman Eliason as a “mere jester” and perhaps also scop, and Fred Robinson as a “blustering mean-spirited coward.” Other critics contest virtually every aspect of (...) those readings. More recently, R. D. Fulk in an impressively learned paper has furthered our understanding by showing that Unferth's name does not mean “mar-peace” or “Hun-spirited” but is an authentically early Germanic name and not an allegorical coinage of later Anglo-Saxon times. In the wake of that demonstration, more scholars have tended to endorse a rather positive assessment of Unferth, seeing him as “part of the heroic world's gritty reality” in which a good flyting did not necessarily mean earnest enmity. He may be a “dull foil,” but he is also an honorable, if flawed, man, a leading warrior in Hrothgar's comitatus, and, more certainly now, a “speaker” or “privileged spokesman” for the king. (shrink)

The simulation hypothesis claims that the whole observable universe, including us, is a computer simulation implemented by technologically advanced beings for an unknown purpose. The simulation argument (as I reconstruct it) is an argument for this hypothesis with moderately plausible premises. I develop two lines of objection to the simulation argument. The first takes the form of a structurally similar argument for a conflicting conclusion, the claim that I am a so-called freak observer, formed spontaneously in a quantum or thermodynamic (...) fluctuation rather than through ordinary processes of evolution and growth. The second rejects the basic line of reasoning of both arguments: the sort of evidence they cite is not capable of supporting either the claim that I am a simulant or the claim that I am a freak observer. The evidence that simulants or freak observers exist is not a reason to think that I am one of them. (shrink)

ConclusionThe discussion above indicates that there is some reason for optimism with regard to the project of incorporating logical-mathematical learning within Bayesianism, though it is obvious that there are many difficulties to be overcome. The biggest obstacle in this regard is overcoming the tension that exists between considerations of formal tractability and the desire to avoid demanding too much of rational agents. Jeffrey's solution seems more flexible in this regard than Garber's, but that may very well be because the general (...) mechanisms underlying Jeffrey's rule of reparation have not been specified. In any case, in my view the verdict we should draw with regard to the problem of old evidence is a bit more pessimistic. Jeffrey's and Garber's solutions only address certain aspects of the problem, and thus can only provide partial solutions at best. The basic strategy of using logical-mathematical learning to induce a confirmation event does not completely evade the problem, which reemerges when the required logical-mathematical knowledge becomes old news. Thus, despite the “solutions” that have been offered to date, the problem of old evidence remains a fundamental challenge to the Bayesian point of view. (shrink)

Chinese consumers value the so-called tuji chicken (‘soil + chicken’) as a local, quality type of poultry. Because tu references both local region and the rural countryside, the tu chicken evokes a contrast with modern improved broilers and the globalized poultry industry, and exemplifies a broader ‘quality turn’ in China’s agri-food system. But what precisely makes a chicken tu (‘local’ and ‘earthy’), and how to identify one that is, are more uncertain and contested questions. Building on literature in food studies, (...) anthropology and geography that unpacks the social construction of definitions of local and quality food, this paper argues that struggles over the definition of the tu chicken are closely linked with consumer strategies for authenticating these definitions in practice. Interviews and fieldwork observations with consumers, poultry vendors and farmers in southwestern China show significant variation in how the tu chicken is defined. But in a context where China’s food safety scandals have produced a climate of food distrust, consumers are as interested in techniques of qualifying or evaluating whether or not particular chickens are tu, as they are in contesting or constructing the abstract definition of tu chickens. (shrink)

This paper conceptualizes academic integrity culture as an institutional moral condition constituted through the alignment of regulative–structural arrangements and normative–cognitive expectations across organizational levels. Drawing on the literature on ethical culture and moral order, it develops an account of academic integrity as sustained through the coupling of formal governance structures and informal peer-regulatory processes and reproduced over time through routinized practice and socialization. The paper develops a conceptual measurement model that treats academic integrity institutionalization as a latent construct and specifies (...) its observable indicators. It further articulates a verification logic that clarifies the inferential conditions under which such indicators can support claims of cultural institutionalization. An institutional illustration shows how convergent, longitudinal, and multi-level indicators may be interpreted in relation to processes of stabilization and norm reproduction. The paper concludes by outlining the methodological and ethical implications of treating academic integrity as a cultural property of universities and clarifying the institutional responsibilities that such claims entail. (shrink)

Brings into conversation research in two separate disciplines, offering readers a comprehensive guide to current forgiveness research. Its 42 chapters are divided into five sections: I. Religious Traditions; II. Historic Treatments; III. The Nature of Forgiveness; IV. Normative Issues; V. Empirical Findings.

Australia's Coalition Against Duck Shooting sees duck-shooting as a social problem and as an injustice with moral, legal and environmental consequences. The small animal liberationist group has succeeded in dramatically reducing the numbers of duck shooters in Victoria, which is the home of duck-shooting in Australia. The Coalition's framing work with the public via the electronic media involves three parts: a diagnosis , a prognosis and a motivational frame , all of which construct hunting as a cruel, antisocial blood sport (...) that ought to be banned. In this article, television news bulletins and feature stories from the 1993 and 1994 campaigns are analyzed to show how CADS makes and sustains its claims. In addition to 90 pages of transcripts of news commentaries and descriptive accounts of the visuals, the data include tape-recorded interviews with some of the duck liberationists involved in the campaign. (shrink)

Offers an overview of work on the biology of language - what is sometimes called the "biolinguistic approach." This book focuses on the interplay between variation and the universal properties of language. It provides case studies from the areas of syntactic variation, genetic variation, neurological variation and historical variation.

Pediatric residents experience ethical dilemmas and moral distress during training. Few studies have identified meaningful methods in reducing moral distress in pediatric trainees. The authors aimed to determine how residents perceive ethics case discussions, whether such a program affects trainee ethics knowledge and perceived moral distress, and if residents’ perceived moral distress changes before, during, and after a discussion series. Participants included pediatric residents in a single residency program. Five separate 1-hour sessions were presented over a 5-month period. Each session (...) consisted of a case presentation by a resident developed under the guidance of an ethicist. Multidisciplinary services and content experts were present during sessions. Baseline, postsession, and final surveys were distributed to resident attendees. Open-ended responses were recorded. When comparing baseline and final responses, the only significance was increased preparedness to navigate ethical decisions (p = 0.004). A 10.2% decline was observed in perceived moral distress. An increase in ethics knowledge was observed. Residents favored case-based, multidisciplinary discussions. Residents desire more sessions, time for small-group discussions, and legal insight. Satisfaction was high with 90.7% of respondents feeling better prepared to address ethical concerns. Pediatric trainees desire case-based ethics training that incorporates small-group discussions and insight from multidisciplinary topic experts. (shrink)

The application of evolutionary theory to human behavior has elicited a variety of critiques, some of which charge that this approach expresses or encourages conservative or reactionary political agendas. In a survey of graduate students in psychology, Tybur, Miller, and Gangestad (Human Nature, 18, 313–328, 2007) found that the political attitudes of those who use an evolutionary approach did not differ from those of other psychology grad students. Here, we present results from a directed online survey of a broad sample (...) of graduate students in anthropology that assays political views. We found that evolutionary anthropology graduate students were very liberal in their political beliefs, overwhelmingly voted for a liberal U.S. presidential candidate in the 2008 election, and identified with liberal political parties; in this, they were almost indistinguishable from non-evolutionary anthropology students. Our results contradict the view that evolutionary anthropologists hold conservative or reactionary political views. We discuss some possible reasons for the persistence of this view in terms of the sociology of science. (shrink)