I argue that our traditional conception of the duties imposed by human rights is unable to acknowledge the nature of many contemporary human rights violations. The traditional conception is based on a broadly deontological view according to which human rights impose primarily negative and perfect duties, and these duties are held to be specific prohibitions on certain kinds of actions . I argue that given this conception of the nature of the duties imposed by human rights, not only claims to (...) aid, but in addition, claims against many of the most serious and prevalent contemporary active harms will not count as genuine human rights claims. These harms increasingly result from extremely complex causal chains involving the behaviour of a huge number of agents, few or none of whom can be singled out as responsible for a serious harm to any specific victim. Institutional structures can have just as central a role to play in specifying and allocating responsibility for fulfilling many of the negative duties imposed by human rights as the positive duties. These structures can therefore be equally important in the realisation of both kinds of rights. Before the necessary institutional reforms have taken place, both kinds of rights are equally genuine, and ground the imperative of justice to reform existing social institutions. (shrink)

We intuitively think and talk about health care as a human right. Moreover, we tend to talk about health in the language of basic rights or human rights without a clear sense of what such rights mean, let alone whose duty it is to fulfill them. Additionally, in the care ethics literature, we tend to think of a dividing line between care and justice. In this dissertation I aim to draw care and justice together in what I call care justice. (...) To attend to care justice requires the reconceptualization of the value and practice of health care, and of the moral communities in which we enact care and justice. First, I argue for a strong right to health care, though not to health. Second, I argue that health care includes much more than mere medical care. On this account health care is special for the practices of care it values and communicates. Third, I establish a theoretical framework for why, and importantly how, health care entails other forms of care: social, economic and political. My approach engages a complicity framework to rethink moral community formation and participation, and the rights and responsibilities of individuals as participants in a collective moral community. I argue that it is within communities of membership, which I define as ethical homes, that we have duties to and expectations from others. The moral community as complicit ethical home provides a way to reimagine individual shared responsibility within moral communities, and particularly regarding responsibility for practices of care. (shrink)

Four-month-old infants can perceive bimodally speciiied events. They respond to relationships between the optic and acoustic stimulation that carries information about an object. Infants can do this by detecting the temporal synchrony of an object’s sounds and its optically specified impacts. They are sensitive both to the common tempo and to the simultaneity of such sounds and visible impacts. These findings support the view that intermodal perception depends at least in part on the detection of invariant relationships in patterns of (...) light and sound. (shrink)

A series of experiments investigated the effect of speakers’ language, accent, and race on children’s social preferences. When presented with photographs and voice recordings of novel children, 5-year-old children chose to be friends with native speakers of their native language rather than foreign-language or foreign-accented speakers. These preferences were not exclusively due to the intelligibility of the speech, as children found the accented speech to be comprehensible, and did not make social distinctions between foreign-accented and foreign-language speakers. Finally, children chose (...) same-race children as friends when the target children were silent, but they chose other-race children with a native accent when accent was pitted against race. A control experiment provided evidence that children’s privileging of accent over race was not due to the relative familiarity of each dimension. The results, discussed in an evolutionary framework, suggest that children preferentially evaluate others along dimensions that distinguished social groups in prehistoric human societies. (shrink)

Mature representations of number are built on a core system of numerical representation that connects to spatial representations in the form of a ‘mental number line’. The core number system is functional in early infancy, but little is known about the origins of the mapping of numbers onto space. Here we show that preverbal infants transfer the discrimination of an ordered series of numerosities to the discrimination of an ordered series of line lengths. Moreover, infants construct relationships between individual numbers (...) and line lengths that vary positively, but not between numbers and lengths that vary inversely. These findings provide evidence for an early developing predisposition to relate representations of numerical magnitude and spatial length. A central foundation of mathematics, science and technology therefore emerges prior to experience with language, symbol systems, or measurement devices. (shrink)

Suicide is a major problem in the United States, with the number of suicides annually exceeding the number of homicides by 10,000. Many studies have examined the relationship between media coverage of suicides and the suicide rate. This article reviews literature on imitative suicide and discusses implications of suicide stories on people in crisis. In addition, it explores the options for suicide coverage and gives suggestions for more ethical coverage that could save people's lives, rather than reinforcing suicide as an (...) option. (shrink)

For Humean atomists, cosmic contents supervene on a spatiotemporal mosaic of modally insulated, freely recombinable local qualities. One piecemeal subspecies of Humean atomism promises more than global supervenience—somehow or other—on a separable base; it constrains how exactly elemental inputs yield everything else. Roughly, the distribution of basic local qualities across elements in one part of our cosmos metaphysically suffices for the complete local physical state of that part: anything sharing this part’s basic elemental decoration should share its more complete contents, (...) regardless of what may be happening elsewhere. On a non-piecemeal alternative, derivative contents can be recognizably local to, or manifest within, one part of our cosmos while reflecting some more global elemental base. To develop this alternative, non-piecemeal Humeans can borrow inspiration from some critics of Humean supervenience, who already distinguish a broader notion of locality from strict Humean intrinsicality. (shrink)

The Christian faith holds out the promise of abundant life and yet many writers have exposed the ambiguities experienced from the words used when that faith is expressed or discussed or described. While there are many aspects to this exploration, this article investigates a set of words that are used to and for the divine because the one spoken of as the author of this abundant life is described in terms that limit the possibilities for too many people. This article (...) will draw on insights gained through the use of the discipline of psycholinguistics and extrapolate from these insights to offer a methodology for developing a language that expresses abundant life. (shrink)

Research on human infants, adult nonhuman primates, and children and adults in diverse cultures provides converging evidence for four systems at the foundations of human knowledge. These systems are domain specific and serve to represent both entities in the perceptible world (inanimate manipulable objects and animate agents) and entities that are more abstract (numbers and geometrical forms). Human cognition may be based, as well, on a fifth system for representing social partners and for categorizing the social world into groups. Research (...) on infants and children may contribute both to understanding of these systems and to attempts to overcome misconceptions that they may foster. (shrink)

How does gender affect work rewards for professionals in a state-run economy? Using surveys from physicians in Estonia in 1991, the authors first found that the gender of the physician did not affect the level of formal rewards. However, because the state allocated formal rewards on the basis of professional purity, which was negatively correlated with feminization, specialties that had the greatest proportion of women also had the lowest formal rewards. These findings contrast with the author's findings for the level (...) of informal “black market” rewards. Women were less likely to receive informal rewards than men, especially if they worked in subfields high in professional purity. The authors conclude that the link between professional purity and feminization is critical in explaining pay differences informal work rewards while gender itself is the critical factor in explaining informal reward differences. (shrink)

This response draws on Saba Mahmood's work on Muslim subjectivities in order to consider how Stalnaker's conceptualization of virtue might be applied to non-Confucian sources. I argue that when applied cross-culturally, Stalnaker's revised definition of “skillful virtue” raises normative and metaethical questions about what counts as a skill versus a mere bodily practice, the process by how skill is acquired, and how we can both allow for the ambiguity of skills and continue to make constructive arguments about them.

_Global Discovery Activities_ is a ready-to-use guide that helps students learn and appreciate cultures from around the world. Each section explores a different culture and includes recommendations for children’s books, folk tales, celebrations, games, songs, arts and crafts, and foods. This informative and fun-filled book contains more than 400 activities and 150 full-page reproducible activity sheets. _Global Discovery_ will help your students learn about the cultures of * Africa * Asia * Australia and New Zealand * Canada * Caribbean and (...) other Islands * East Europe * Western Europe * Latin America * North America. (shrink)

'Free will skepticism' refers to a family of views that all take seriously the possibility that human beings lack the control in action - i.e. the free will - required for an agent to be truly deserving of blame and praise, punishment and reward. Critics fear that adopting this view would have harmful consequences for our interpersonal relationships, society, morality, meaning, and laws. Optimistic free will skeptics, on the other hand, respond by arguing that life without free will and so-called (...) basic desert moral responsibility would not be harmful in these ways, and might even be beneficial. This collection addresses the practical implications of free will skepticism for law and society. It contains eleven original essays that provide alternatives to retributive punishment, explore what changes are needed for the criminal justice system, and ask whether we should be optimistic or pessimistic about the real-world implications of free will skepticism. (shrink)

Name der Zeitschrift: Semiotica Jahrgang: 2015 Heft: 207 Seiten: 369-393.

The hexameter poems of Theodore Metochites are perhaps the most determinedly baroque of all Byzantine literary productions to have survived. The tortuous constructions of Metochites' prose rhetoric are transmuted into his rather imprecise concept of the hexameter, with a vocabulary that is ostensibly Homeric but in fact ranges over the whole spectrum of Greek literature, with not a few coinages of his own. The twenty poems, in just over 9,000 lines, were written probably towards the end of his period in (...) high office; several clearly date from the period immediately before his fall from power in 1328, with others written in the years between his return from exile to his beloved monastery of the Chora and his death in 1332. The topics treated by Metochites range from solipsistic musings on his youth and the troubles that afflicted his old age to bombastic funerary memorials. Although the poems are preserved in several manuscripts, it has been demonstrated (by Ihor Ševčenko) that Par.Gr. 1776 stands at the head of the tradition. It is in a format similar to that, for example, of another luxury copy of Metochites' own works, Vindob. Phil. Gr. 95, while the corrections to the verses have been shown to be in the hand of Metochites himself. (shrink)

The eighteenth-century philosopher Francis Hutcheson contends that the morality of an agent's action or character depends on the pleasurable or painful feelings which, through the moral sense, it arouses in an observer. His is the first fully-developed "moral sense" theory in the history of ethics, and there is evidence that David Hume's moral epistemology contains the critical features of such a theory as well. Commentators on the work of these two philosophers have offered widely divergent interpretations of their theories, ranging (...) from emotivist to realist readings. In my dissertation, I examine the conflicting readings and defend my own interpretation. ;I contend that the ordinary emotivist interpretation wrongly treats Hutcheson and Hume as defending theses of mere moral sentiment--where no epistemological status is attached to the pertinent feelings--and that textual evidence militates against this and the moral realist readings . In my view, Hutcheson and Hume postulate a conscious parallel between their conceptions of secondary qualities and the treatment of moral qualities, which renders them moral subjectivists of a "mitigated" sort for whom, in virtue of their reference to standard conditions of perception, moral distinctions are contingent upon the constitution of the normal perceiver. Hume emerges here as a moral cognitivist, holding that moral judgments are beliefs, and as an emotivist of a sort, holding that these beliefs are also feelings. I attempt to reconcile this cognitivist interpretation of Hume with his claim that "ought"-conclusions cannot follow from "is"-premises and with his view that morality is essentially connected to motives. I also exhibit the unexpected differences between Hume's view of motivation and that of Hutcheson, who on my reading has it that moral distinctions and desire are only contingently related. ;Two formidable problems arise for these theories. First, particular true moral evaluations could become false with changes in the normal human perceiver, so that an agent's enduring character could be good at one time and evil at another. Second, the requirements for experiencing approval are not merely contingent as the requirements for experiencing sensations are. Despite these objections, I briefly examine to what extent human feelings may be valuable as a source of moral knowledge. (shrink)

This article explores why women are rarely executed and examines the execution of four women in the Post-Furman Era, focusing on the execution of Karla Faye Tucker.

We trace the use of thermodynamics in meteorology from 1850 to 1900 and show the extent to which physicists initiated important lines of research in the use of thermodynamics in meterology. However, it was not until meteorologists adapted physical arguments to the unique requirements of their data that the full power of thermodynamics was achieved. In tracing these developments we remark upon the boundaries between the sciences in the 19th century and tentatively define the criteria for intellectual independence between one (...) science and the science to which it is indebted for its basic principles. (shrink)

The origins of early German Romanticism and the philosophical contributions of the movement’s most important philosopher.

Out of my normal context, and separated from my usual reference groups, perhaps I need first of all to explain the background from which I speak. As a developmental psychologist whose main research interests are to do with child rearing in the various social environments in which it takes place, I have been particularly concerned with the long-term dialogues that go on between parents and children, in the course of which they commonly come to certain understandings about their mutual tolerances (...) and intolerances, and learn to live together with some regard to these limits. I stress the intersubjective nature of these understandings because I take it as axiomatic that children bring up their parents in the course of parents bringing up their children, even though parents are more powerful in physical terms and marginally more powerful in psychological terms. Secondly, as a child psychologist working clinically with parents and handicapped or problem children, I am also interested in another kind of dialogue: that which takes place between parents and professionals with the child as focus. I am concerned to find ways of making this dialogue as effective as possible, in particular by recognising the differences that inform parental and professional approaches to our common focus, and then using these differences to enable a complementary partnership that builds upon the advantages of each. (shrink)

Apocalypticism has been widely denounced as a framework that devalues the world and its history, funding moral dualism. While this is certainly true of many forms of apocalypticism, it is not an accurate understanding of ancient apocalyptic texts. This article establishes a framework of theological virtue ethics drawn particularly from Herbert McCabe, in which human rationality and Christian morality are understood as political, linguistic, narrative, bodily and sacramental. From within this framework, Anathea Portier-Young’s work is considered, relating early Jewish apocalyptic (...) to trauma theory and describing how these texts narrated socio-political catastrophe in order to open up possibilities of resistance and hope. These considerations point us towards a constructive understanding of apocalyptic imagination and praxis within a political, linguistic, narrative, bodily and sacramental framework. Contemporary employments of Afro-pessimism in Black theology, particularly in J. Kameron Carter, then interrogate the proposed apocalyptic imagination, asking whether Christian apocalyptic praxis can cultivate hope in the face of the catastrophe of modern racism. (shrink)

This essay considers whether the model of conscience operative in Christian ethics, what I call the “reflexive conscience,” is adequate to meet the global moral challenges we face today, problems such as gun violence, climate change, and the Zika virus. Drawing primarily on the work of Willis Jenkins, I argue that conscience has not yet caught up to the scale and interconnectedness of our global moral challenges. A truly “engaged conscience” must be focused not primarily on the self but on (...) the other, and must be active. I conclude by turning to Elisabeth Vasko’s criticisms of the victim/perpetrator binary to suggest that conscience must call us to greater responsibility for the systemic injustices in which particular moral challenges are embedded. (shrink)