How do digital platforms govern their users? Existing studies, with their focus on impersonal and procedural modes of governance, have largely neglected to examine the human labor through which platform companies attempt to elicit the consent of their users. This study describes the relationship labor that is systematically excised from many platforms’ accounts of what they do and missing from much of the scholarship on platform governance. Relationship labor is carried out by agents of platform companies who engage in interpersonal (...) communications with a platform’s users in an effort to align diverse users’ activities and preferences with the company’s interests. The authors draw on ethnographic research conducted at AllDone (a for-profit startup that built an online market for local services) and edX (a non-profit startup that partnered with institutions to offer Massive Open Online Courses). The findings leverage variation in organizational contexts to elaborate the common practices and divergent strategies of relationship labor deployed by each platform. Both platforms relied on relationship workers to engage in account management practices aimed at addressing the particular concerns of individual users through interpersonal communications. Relationship workers in each setting also engaged in community management practices that facilitated contact and collaboration among users in pursuit of shared goals. However, our findings show that the relative frequency of relationship workers’ use of account management and community management practices varies with organizational conditions. This difference in strategies also corresponded to different ways of valuing relationship workers and incorporating them into organizational processes. The article demonstrates how variation in organizational context accounts for divergent strategies for governing user participation in digital platforms and for the particular processes through which governance is accomplished and contested. (shrink)

The description for this book, The Conquest of Politics: Liberal Philosophy in Democratic Times, will be forthcoming.

Marshall and colleagues (2024) offer a framework for emergency physicians (EPs) tasked with caring for “resuscitated opioid users”—or patients who have recently overdosed on opioids. This framework...

Regulation must target the financial sector, which often funds and profits from environmentally unsustainable development. In an era of global financial markets, the financial sector has a crucial impact on the state of the environment. The long-standing movement for ethically and socially responsible investment (SRI) has recently begun to advocate environmental standards for financiers. While this movement is gaining more adherents, it has increasingly justified responsible financing as a path to be prosperous, rather than virtuous. This trend partly owes to (...) how financial institutions view their legal responsibilities. The business case motivations that now predominantly drive SRI are not sufficient to make the financial sector a means to sustainable development. Some modest legal reforms to improve the quality and extent of SRI have yet to make a tangible difference. A more ambitious strategy to promote SRI for environmental sustainability is possible, based on reforming the fiduciary duties of financial institutions. Such duties, tied to concrete performance standards, could make financiers invest in more ethically responsible ways. Other collateral reforms to financial markets, including improved corporate environmental reporting, are required to promote sustainability. (shrink)

According to the standard analysis of degree questions, the logical form of a degree question contains a variable that ranges over individual degrees and is bound by the degree question operator how. In contrast with this, we claim that the variable bound by the degree question operator how does not range over individual degrees but over intervals of degrees, by analogy with Schwarzschild and Wilkinson's proposal regarding the semantics of comparative clauses. Not only does the interval-based semantics predict the existence (...) of certain readings that are not predicted under the standard view, it is also able, together with other natural assumptions, to account for the sensitivity of degree questions to negative islands, as well as for the fact, uncovered by Fox and Hackl, that negative islands can be obviated by some properly placed modals. Like Fox and Hackl, we characterize negative island effects as arising from the fact that the relevant question, due to its meaning alone, can never have a maximally informative answer. Contrary to Fox and Hackl, however, we do not need to assume that scales are universally dense, nor that the notion of maximal informativity responsible for negative islands is blind to contextual parameters. (shrink)

Electronic waste is the fastest growing form of waste worldwide, associated with a range of environmental, health, and justice problems. Unfortunately, disposal and recycling are hindered by a tendency of consumers to resist recycling their e-waste. This backlog of un-discarded e-waste poses significant challenges for the future. This paper addresses the reasons why many people might continue to value their technological artifacts and therefore to hoard them, suggesting that many of these common explanations are deficient in some way. It argues (...) instead for a derivative kind of value, here labelled “system value”. Addressing the problem of hoarding by invoking the idea of system value, the authors conjecture, could offer some clarity about how to move forward with more successful e-waste management programs. (shrink)

ABSTRACTSome liberal-cosmopolitan theorists have sought to justify preventive war by proposing new institutions meant to ensure the accurate evaluation of non-imminent threats, and also make any wa...

Challenging the assumption that that the capitalist transformation includes a radical break with the past, this edited volume traces how historically older forms of social inequality are transformed but persist in the present to shape the social structure of contemporary societies in the global South. Each society comprises an interpretation of itself - including the meaning of life, the concept of a human being and the notion of a collective. This volume studies the interpretation that various societies have of themselves. (...) This interpretation is referred to as social ontology. All chapters of the edited volume focus on the relation between social ontology and structures of inequality. They argue that each society comprises several historical layers of social ontology that correspond to layers of inequality, which are referred to as sociocultures. Thereby, the volume explains why and how structures of inequality differ between contemporary collectives in the global South, even though all of them seem to have similar structures, institutions, and economies. The volume is aimed at academics, students and the interested public looking for a novel theorization of social inequality pertaining to collectives in the global South. (shrink)

This introduction argues for the importance of Suárez’s philosophy for historians of medieval philosophy as well as historians of early modern philosophy. It also provides synopses of each of the essays in the volume and a brief biography of Suárez, placing his life and works into some historical context.

We investigated the understanding of causal systems categories—categories defined by common causal structure rather than by common domain content—among college students. We asked students who were either novices or experts in the physical sciences to sort descriptions of real-world phenomena that varied in their causal structure (e.g., negative feedback vs. causal chain) and in their content domain (e.g., economics vs. biology). Our hypothesis was that there would be a shift from domain-based sorting to causal sorting with increasing expertise in the (...) relevant domains. This prediction was borne out: The novice groups sorted primarily by domain and the expert group sorted by causal category. These results suggest that science training facilitates insight about causal structures. (shrink)

In his prose writings, Milton produces a reinvention of the concept of heresy, and subsequently a theological reinvention of the nature of English society. He envisions a Protestant society united by practices of individual piety and by the “heretical imperative” of autonomous choice. While Milton’s account seeks to eliminate the possibilities of religious violence and state persecution, it leads finally to the same impasse as the Lockean theory: the grounding of a right to toleration on subjective piety necessarily excludes those (...) groups who refuse to practice such piety. Nevertheless, Milton’s unique depiction of a society united by practices of heresy ultimately points toward modernity in a way that is even more remarkably prescient than Locke’s influential theory of toleration. (shrink)

Preface -- Amorous overture -- Early love stories -- Joyce's great declaration of love (Ulysses) -- Joyce's co(s)mic love letter (Finnegan's wake) -- An ethics of love?

Introduction. Rest and motion. Stability and progress.--The meaning of justice. The science of values.--The equilibration of interests. Cause and effect. The individual and society. Liberty and government.--Liberty and government. Conclusion.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:29. CONTRARIETY AND CAUSALITY IN HUME Hume's notion of contrariety ranks among the most obscure in his theory of relations. To make matters worse, the puzzling account of contrariety he offers can be shown inconsistent in the following way. The Treatise (T69-82) divides all relations into two disjoint classes - one class containing relations of knowledge (in the strict sense) ascertained by the mere comparison of ideas, the other (...) containing those of probability or 'uncertain knowledge' requiring 'experience' or empirical evidence. Causality is the paradigm of a probability relation - contrariety falls into the class of knowledge relations. Thus unlike causality the discovery of a contrary relation appears to require no experience. Yet in direct contradiction Hume claims that with the exception of existence and non-existence (which are singled out for special attention), all knowledge of contrary relations demands experience: no two ideas are in themselves contrary, except those of existence and non-existence.... All other objects, such as fire and water, heat, and cold, are only found to be contrary from experience, and from the contrariety of their 'causes ' or effects '. (T15) The charge of inconsistency appears inevitable. However, I shall argue that Hume escapes by implicitly operating with two distinct concepts of contrariety: one (which I shall term "logical contrariety") a relation of knowledge, the other (to be called "empirical contrariety") reducible to a peculiar type of causal relation, and therefore a probability relation. To adduce independent grounds for this claim I demonstrate that acceptance of these two concepts is essential if we are to explain why Hume finds 2 it important to place the following restriction on contra- 30. riety (hereafter, R): properly speaking no objects are contrary to each other, but existence an (y exists). And (4) can hardly be said to represent a form of contrariety between existent and non-existent objects. (Indeed paradox of material implication aside, (4) is an analysis of "x causes y".) Therefore to hold R and still maintain some sense of contrariety between existent and non-existent objects, Hume must restrict contrariety to logical contrariety. 32. Hume's own remarks bear out my claim. In the Treatise he recognizes that restricting contrariety to existence and non-existence means treating it as contradiction : the flattest of all contradictions... (is)... that 'tis possible for the same thing both to be and not to be. (T19, my emphasis.)... with contrariety... No one can once doubt but existence and non-existence destroy each other, and are perfectly incompatible and contrary. (T70) And in the Enquiries he interchanges the terms 'contrary' and 'negation' : The contrary of every matter of fact is still possible ; because it can never imply a contradiction... (EU25)... No negation of a fact can involve a contradiction. (EU164) This usage indicates that if? is (logically) contrary to q,? is -q, the negation of q. In this case the conjunction of? and q spells the contradiction (q & -q). The definition of logical contrariety we adopt is the same as the definition of contradiction specialized to existential sentences, so we need not state it. It is sufficient to give as a paradigm the following contradiction: (5)(Mars exists) & - (Mars exists). Here it is the existence of Mars that is logically contrary to the non-existence of Mars and therefore the contrariety restriction R is satisfied. Again it is only the existence and non-existence of the same object that is logically contrary. Empirical contrariety is most clearly defined in terms of the Lewis counterfactual G=>, where 1O' is a monadic predicate, 'e.' and 'e.' represent distinct arbitrary events, and "0(e)" means "event e occurs": 33. 5 Here it is not the existence and non-existence or occurrence (EC) e. is empirically contrary to e. iff 0(e.) D=> ~0(e.)." and non-occurrence of distinct events that gives rise to contrariety. Rather it is the existence or occurrence of one event that is empirically contrary to the existence or occurrence of another. To establish Hume's motivation for framing the condition R in such a way as to identify contrariety with contradiction, I now turn to examine the epistemological ground of the difference between empirical and logical contrariety. The ontological distinction between empirical... (shrink)

Daylight is the primary cue used by circadian clocks to entrain to the day/night cycle so as to synchronize physiological processes with periodic environmental changes induced by Earth rotation.However, the temporal daylight pattern is not the same every day due to erratic weather fluctuations or regular seasonal changes. Then, how do circadian clocks operate properly in varying weather and seasons? In this paper, we discuss the strategy unveiled by recent studies of the circadian clock of Ostreococcus tauri, the smallest free‐living (...) eukaryotic organism. It combines mechanisms controlling light inputs and clock sensitivity, shaping both the dynamics of the core circadian oscillator and its forcing by light so as to ensure stable and precise synchronization in all weather and seasons.Editor's suggested further reading in BioEssays: Another place, another timer: Marine species and the rhythms of life Abstract. (shrink)

COPII coated vesicles bud from an ER domain termed the transitional ER (tER), but the mechanism that clusters COPII vesicles at tER sites is unknown. tER sites are closely associated with early Golgi or pre‐Golgi structures, suggesting that the clustering of nascent COPII vesicles could be achieved by tethering to adjacent membranes. This model challenges the prevailing view that COPII vesicles are clustered by a scaffolding protein at the ER surface. Although Sec16 was proposed to serve as such a scaffolding (...) protein, recent data suggest that rather than organizing COPII into higher‐order structures, Sec16 acts at the level of individual COPII vesicles to regulate COPII turnover. A plausible synthesis is that tER sites are created by tethering to Golgi membranes and are regulated by Sec16. Meanwhile, the COPII vesicles that bud from tER sites are thought to nucleate new Golgi cisternae. Thus, an integrated self‐organization process may generate tER‐Golgi units. (shrink)

The standard economic and ethical case in defense of sweatshops employs the standard of the “welfare of their workers and potential workers” to argue that sweatshop regulations harm the very people they intend to help. Scholars have recently contended that once the benefits and costs are balanced, regulations do, in fact, raise worker welfare. This paper describes the short and long-run tradeoffs associated with sweatshop regulation and then examines how reasonable constructions of measures of “worker welfare” would evaluate these tradeoffs (...) finding that the standard economic and ethical case against sweatshop regulations is well supported. (shrink)

Recent work on consequentialism has revealed it to be more flexible than previously thought. Consequentialists have shown how their theory can accommodate certain features with which it has long been considered incompatible, such as agent-centered constraints. This flexibility is usually thought to work in consequentialism’s favor. I want to cast doubt on this assumption. I begin by putting forward the strongest statement of consequentialism’s flexibility: the claim that, whatever set of intuitions the best nonconsequentialist theory accommodates, we can construct a (...) consequentialist theory that can do the same while still retaining whatever is compelling about consequentialism. I argue that if this is true then most likely the non-consequentialist theory with which we started will turn out to have that same compelling feature. So while this extreme flexibility, if indeed consequentialism has it (a question I leave to the side), makes consequentialism more appealing, it makes non-consequentialism more appealing too. (shrink)

Jacques Ellul is best known for his The Technological Society (1954), which outlines a sociological treatment of Technique; that is, the total technical phenomenon including but extending far beyond machines. Lesser known are Ellul’s theological works, though these relate plainly to the sociological. Of particular relevance to Technique is his theological treatment of civilisation in The Meaning of the City (1970). These two texts stand alone and yet, read together, are mutually illuminating. The present paper will follow this light from (...) the ancient City to the Technique of modernity. This will entail first a focus on four Scriptural cities: Enoch, Resen, Babel, Nineveh. The way will then proceed via a literary route, through Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian, in which the abstractions here discussed are rendered palpable as flesh and blood. This detour will attend to those aspects of war and scalp-hunting which are central to McCarthy’s text, especially in light of the epistemic enterprise of one of modern literature’s most memorable characters: Judge Holden. The relation between the City and Technique will be followed by tracing the metaphysics of inscription which is a corollary to the project of epistemic legibility that underpins the movement of Technique. This enterprise will be understood as a confluence of Babel and Nineveh, a spiritual war that seeks to exclude God by enfolding the totality of existence into a humanly-determined order. The relation between the city, this process of inscription, and the nature of Technique will then be discussed. (shrink)

Previous research (e.g., Horiuchi, Goldsmith, and Inoguchi, 2005) has shown some intriguing patterns of effects of several variables on international public opinion about US foreign policy. But results for the theoretically appealing effects of regime type and post-materialist values have been weak or inconsistent. This paper takes a closer look at the relationship between these two variables and international public opinion about US foreign policy. In particular, international reaction to the wars in Afghanistan (2001) and Iraq (2003) are examined using (...) two major multinational surveys. The conclusions of previous research are largely reinforced: neither regime type nor post-materialist values appears to robustly influence global opinion on these events. Rather, some central interests, including levels of trade with the US and NATO membership, and key socialized factors, including a Muslim population, experience with terrorism, and the exceptional experiences of two states (Israel, Albania) emerge as the most important factors in the models. There is also a consistent backlash effect of security cooperation with the US outside of NATO. A discussion of these preliminary results points to their theoretical implications and their significance for further investigation into the transnational dynamics of public opinion and foreign policy. (shrink)

Recently, extremist ‘populist’ parties have succeeded in obtaining large enough democratic electoral mandates both to legally make substantive changes to the law and constitution and to legally eliminate avenues to challenge their control over the government. Extremists place committed liberal democrats in an awkward position as they work to legally revolutionize their constitutions and turn them into ‘illiberal democracies’. This article analyses political responses to this problem. It argues that the twin phenomena of legal revolution and illiberal democracy reveal a (...) latent tension between the constitutional commitments to democracy and liberalism, that is, the equal chance to have one’s political goals enacted into law and individual basic rights. Political extremists make the latent tension real when they use the procedures of democratic legal change to abrogate constitutional commitments to liberalism, among other things. Although the two commitments normally coexist side by side, exceptional times raise an existential dilemma for liberal democracies: is it constitutional to democratically amend liberalism out of the constitution? After analysing the moral legitimacy of both the democratic and liberal arguments, this article concludes that liberal constitutionalism is constitutive of genuine democracy. In other words, it is unconstitutional to abrogate basic liberal commitments and it is legitimate to adopt constitutional mechanisms to guarantee liberalism – even if it means constraining democracy to do so. This article then situates ‘constrained democracy’ within the liberal current as a way to conceive of and respond to this pressing problem. It concludes by discussing four constitutional mechanisms – inspired by the German Grundgesetz – to guarantee liberalism: unambiguous lexically prior commitment to liberalism, limits on negative majorities, the eternity clause and party bans. It concludes that constrained democracy is an important constitutional guarantee of liberal democracy and that the four mechanisms, among others, are essential to enact constrained democracy. (shrink)

Abstract The debate in the philosophy of perception between direct realists and representationalists should influence the debate in epistemology between internalists and externalists about justification. If direct realists are correct, there are more consciously accessible justifiers for internalists to exploit than externalists think. Internalists can retain their distinctive internalist identity while accepting this widened conception of internalistic justification: even if they welcome the possibility of cognitive access to external facts, their position is still quite distinct from the typical externalist position. (...) To demonstrate this, Alvin Goldman’s critique of internalism is shown to ignore important lessons from the case for direct realism about perception. In particular, it unjustifiably assumes that internalism entails that only facts simultaneous with the justification of a belief can justify the belief. Goldman’s definition of a “justifier” is also inconsistent with the overall guidance conception of epistemology he takes for granted in his critique of internalism. Content Type Journal Article Pages 1-26 DOI 10.1007/s12136-012-0146-4 Authors Benjamin Bayer, Department of Philosophy, Loyola University, New Orleans, 6363 St. Charles Avenue, Box 046, New Orleans, LA 70118, USA Journal Acta Analytica Online ISSN 1874-6349 Print ISSN 0353-5150. (shrink)

Many friends of the category of particularised qualities subscribe to the view that particularised qualities have a unique bearer in which they inhere; no such quality then can inhere in two different entities. But it seems that this idea is flawed, for there are apparent counterexamples. An apple's redness is identical with the redness of its skin, though the apple is distinct from its skin. So it seems that a principle of bearer‐uniqueness has to be modified, maybe by excluding certain (...) unwanted cases. However, I argue that the need of a modification is not a direct consequence of the supposed counterexamples. Their dangerous potential for the principle arises if one takes the genitive in expressions of the form ‘a's F‐ness’ to signify the relation of inherence. I propose an alternative view: The genitive signifies a relation which is indeed closely related to inherence, but which is, contrary to inherence itself, partitive. That is, it may hold between a particularised quality and another entity because it holds between the quality and a part of the entity. If one regards the ontologically interesting relation of inherence as non‐partitive, one can still adhere to an unrestricted principle of bearer‐uniqueness. (shrink)

The modern state is often taken as the only legitimate claimant to the division of the globe. Political theorists offer many theories of territorial rights but tend to agree that the state remains the proper institutional bearer of such rights. This article examines how states became the exclusive bearers of territorial rights by returning to the international theory of the eighteenth-century Prussian jurist Christian Wolff (1679–1754), who wrote in a moment when sovereign states were not the heirs apparent to the (...) globe but competed with other claimants to territorial rights. Despite proposing a radically pluralistic and anti-imperial account of land ownership, Wolff nonetheless paved the way for the state to become the sole bearer of territorial rights. Wolff’s international thought is an illustration of how building a state-centric international order was a double-edged sword: it criticized imperial overreach while also closing the international arena to nonstate forms of collective life. In this process, he offered two distinct ideas of political space: the territorial space of states, and the land ownership tracts of nonstate peoples, including pastoralists and nomads. To Wolff, only states were entitled to full and permanent territorial rights, while nonstate peoples were shut out of the international system, made both de facto and de jure stateless. (shrink)

Ever since Kenneth Goodpaster published his article "On Being Morally Considerable," environmental ethicists have been engaged in a debate over whether animals, plants, and other natural objects matter morally (Goodpaster 1978). Many, if not most, theorists have treated the problem of moral considerability as a problem of status, arguing that earlier ethical positions have unjustifiably given privileged status to one group of beings over others. They have then proceeded in one of two ways. Either they have appealed to intrinsic value (...) and absolute ends, suggesting that there are somehow non-anthropocentric, objective values "out there," outside of human considerations; or they have appealed to subjective or .. (shrink)

Abstract:Designers whose projects are inspired by a community’s unique sense of spatial identity often focus on a site’s observable context, i.e. historic forms and surface aesthetics. Focus on typological components, however, overlooks generative relationships between the phenomenology of place and human energy investment. Recognizing Kubler’s dictum that material history is an observable continuum then, at its most fundamental level, the history of spatial production is the history of energy use. For most of human history, place was a unique socio-cultural expression (...) because it fused energy expenditure with site-specific conditions, including climate, topography and materials. This paper introduces the concept of burden distance, the distance needed to travel to material sources and bring them back from origin points to their place of use. This proposed concept parallels Walter Christaller’s Central Place Theory idea of “range,” but applied in terms phenomenological implications of energy investment and placemaking. Understanding burden distance and its role in placemaking, is an important step in identifying why built environments have a spatial specificity that contributes to mitigate spatial alienation and instead root people to their built environment. (shrink)

The ability to learn the direction of causal relations is critical for understanding and acting in the world. We investigated how children learn causal directionality in situations in which the states of variables are temporally dependent (i.e., autocorrelated). In Experiment 1, children learned about causal direction by comparing the states of one variable before versus after an intervention on another variable. In Experiment 2, children reliably inferred causal directionality merely from observing how two variables change over time; they interpreted Y (...) changing without a change in X as evidence that Y does not influence X. Both of these strategies make sense if one believes the variables to be temporally dependent. We discuss the implications of these results for interpreting previous findings. More broadly, given that many real-world environments are characterized by temporal dependency, these results suggest strategies that children may use to learn the causal structure of their environments. (shrink)

Eight focus groups were conducted in four public hospitals in Madrid to explore healthcare professionals’ perceptions of advance directives in order to improve the understanding of their lack of success among physicians and patients. A purposive sample of sixty healthcare professionals discussed ADs and reasons for their infrequent use. Three main themes were identified: perceptions about their meaning, appraisals of their use in clinical practice, and decision-making about them. Healthcare professionals perceived a lack of clarity about their definition and implementation. (...) There is insufficient awareness of their efficacy in improving the quality of clinical relationships and decision-making, and they are often perceived only as a bureaucratic procedure. Advance directives are not integrated in the clinical practice of Madrid’s healthcare specialist services because their application is exceedingly complex, because of insufficient education about them, and because of lack of procedural clarity. Consequently, healthcare professionals are not aware of how ADs could improve clinical decision-making, of when and for whom their use is appropriate, and of who has responsibility for providing ADs-related information to patients. These circumstances contribute to patients’ lack of interest in completing these documents and to physicians’ sceptical views about their usefulness. (shrink)

In confronting the insalubrious ramifications of globalization, human rights scholars and activists have argued for greater national and international responsibility pursuant to the human right to health. Codified seminally in Article 12 of the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, the right to health proclaims that states bear an obligation to realize the “highest attainable standard” of health for all. However, in pressing for the highest attainable standard for each individual, the right to health has been ineffective in (...) compelling states to address burgeoning inequalities in underlying determinants of health, focusing on individual medical treatments at the expense of public health systems. This article contends that the paradigm of individual health, focused on a right to individual medical care, is incapable of responding to health inequities in a globalized world and thereby hampers efforts to operationalize health rights through public health systems. While the right to health has evolved in international discourse over time, this evolution of the individual right to health cannot address the harmful societal ramifications of economic globalization. Rather than relying solely upon an individual right to medical care, envisioning a collective right to public health – a right applied at the societal level to address underlying determinants of health – would alleviate many of the injurious health inequities of globalization. (shrink)

Principles of Biomedical Ethics, the magnum opus of Tom Beauchamp and James Childress, remains one of the most influential bioethical works developed in the last thirty-five years. It continues to be the subject of vigorous debate in the bioethics literature, having undergone several substantial revisions since the publication of the first edition in 1979. In the seventh edition of Principles, published in 2013, Beauchamp and Childress continue their practice of clarifying, revising, and strengthening their views in response to waves of (...) critics and defenders. In particular, though they have been committed since the first edition of Principles to four equal and prima facie principles—principles of respect for.. (shrink)

Advocacy of an indigenous right to isolation in the Latin American context responds to multiple depredations, above all to plundering by extractivists. Two prominent international instruments declare a human right to indigenous self-isolation and articulate a principle of no contact between indigenous peoples and the non-indigenous majority population: Indigenous Peoples in Voluntary Isolation and Initial Contact in the Americas and Guidelines on the Protection of Indigenous Peoples. In analyzing both, I argue against the notion of a human right to indigenous (...) isolation and for limited, controlled contact between the indigenous peoples and a narrow segment of the larger society. I propose relational human rights as rights that connect people, as rights-bearers, across borders and differences. They would allow for limited outside observation for possible human rights violations within indigenous communities. I then articulate relational human rights of indigenous peoples in voluntary isolation as rights to agency, health, territory, and identity. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Virtue Ethics for the Real World: Improving Character without Idealization by Howard J. CurzerBenjamin HoleCURZER, Howard J. Virtue Ethics for the Real World: Improving Character without Idealization. New York: Routledge, 2023. 272 pp. Cloth, $160.00The development of virtue ethics has been in a lull. This book is a welcome treatise in theory-building, developing a novel Aristotelian approach to virtue ethics that, first, avoids idealization and, second, provides a (...) method for character improvement. It is divided into two parts reflecting these themes.The front matter before the title page brandishes a "No Don Quixotes" sign, warning the reader the following pages are no place for a misguided idealist. Part 1, "Against Idealization," contains six chapters. Chapter 2 argues that idealization is not a useful guide, but an impediment to virtue, since ideals can be misleading, psychologically damaging, and used for nefarious purposes. Chapters 3 through 7 construct a virtue ethical theory without idealization. Idealization may seem central to a virtue-oriented approach to ethics. For example, Rosalind Hursthouse's famous biconditional claims that an act is right if and only if it is what the virtuous person would characteristically do in the same circumstances. By contrast, chapter 3 provides counterexamples separating virtuous action from what the virtuous person would characteristically do, and separating virtuous action from right action. Sacrificing Hursthouse's biconditional is a fundamental change to the way many conceive of Aristotelian virtue ethics, demanding revisions to the rest of the theory. For instance, to address moral dilemmas, chapter 4 defends two psychological mechanisms under which there are virtuous, morally wrong acts that are admirably immoral, and vicious, morally right acts that leave the agent with dirty hands.Chapter 5 provides the grounding for contemporary Aristotelian virtue ethics without idealization, by answering what makes character traits [End Page 541] virtues and what makes acts virtuous. Two-level eudaimonism involves a thin theory, where virtue consists in responding well to different spheres of human activity, and a thick theory, where responding well contributes to the agent's eudaimonia. Since virtuous people may characteristically perform nonvirtuous actions, virtuous actions are not necessarily what virtuous people characteristically do but actions that are endorsed by virtuous people from the perspective of virtue. The "Perspectives Doctrine" claims that virtuous people decide how to respond from the perspective of different virtues, and those perspectives offer incomplete and sometimes incompatible ways of responding. For instance, a temperate person endorsing an action as temperate from the perspective of temperance makes it temperate, but would not make it courageous, and an endorsement from the perspective of courage would not make her action temperate. Agents determine what is virtuous by asking virtuous people to consider, from the perspective of virtue, what should be done; when virtuous people are unavailable, agents can consult philosophers and social scientists who research the responses of virtuous people. Chapter 6 rejects the "Reciprocity of the Virtue Doctrine," which claims possessing one virtue entails possessing the rest, in favor of the "Unevenly Virtuous People Doctrine," on which people can have some but not all of the virtues; character typically improves at different paces in different areas of life. Chapter 7 rejects Philippa Foot's "Corrective Doctrine" of virtue as implausible idealization in favor of a traditionally Aristotelian "Doctrine of the Mean," and argues that the virtues of integrity, forgiveness, tolerance, open-mindedness, and civility are governed by that doctrine.Although character improvement seems to depend on idealization, by striving to achieve some end, part 2's five chapters paint an alternative picture. Chapter 8 defends a medical analogy over competing models philosophers typically employ to understand character improvement, including skill (Aristotle and Julia Annas), stage or path (Aristotle and Wouter Sanderse), self-cultivation (Mengzi), and self-construction (Xunzi) analogies. To improve character, one must look to a fine-grained list of possible character flaws, diagnose deficits in character, and then heal character flaws by employing targeted strategies, including "inculcation strategies, rehabilitation strategies, and strategies to improve society's ethical climate." Character improvement is complex and becomes more so when considering all of the ways one might err. Chapter 9 introduces an Aristotelian model for moral decision-making within each... (shrink)