Despite the Gothic’s much-discussed resurgence in mainstream American culture, the role the late 2000s financial crisis played in sustaining this renaissance has garnered insufficient critical attention. This article finds the Gothic tradition deployed in contemporary American narrative film to explore the impact of economic crisis and threat, and especially masculine anxieties about a perceived incapacity of men and fathers to protect vulnerable families and homes. Variously invoking the American and Southern Gothics, Take Shelter and Winter’s Bone represent how the domestic-everyday (...) was made unfamiliar, unsettling and threatening in the face of metaphorical and real economic crisis and disorder. The films’ explicit engagement with contemporary American economic malaise and instability thus illustrates the Gothic’s continued capacity to lay bare historical and cultural moments of national crisis. Illuminating culturally persistent anxieties about the American male condition, Take Shelter and Winter’s Bone materially evoke the Gothic tradition’s ability to scrutinize otherwise unspeakable national anxieties about male capacity to protect home and family, including through a focus on economic-cultural “white Otherness.” The article further asserts the significance of prominent female assumption of the protective role, yet finds that, rather than individuating the experience of financial crisis on failed men, both films deftly declare its systemic, whole-of-society basis. In so doing, the Gothic sensibility of pervasive anxiety and dread in Take Shelter and Winter’s Bone disrupts dominant national discursive tendencies to revivify American institutions of traditional masculinity, family and home in the wakes of 9/11 and the recession. (shrink)

Glen Stassen has approached his life and work "as if Jesus mattered," and this new collection of essays in his honor demonstrates that the contributors share that commitment, each in her or his own way. Ethics as if Jesus Mattered will introduce Stassen's work to a new generation, advance dialogue and debate in Christian ethics, and inspire more faithful discipleship just as it honors one whom the contributors consider a mentor.

Eighteen Christian theologians and ethicists offer a rich engagement with the theological ethics of Glen Stassen (1936-2014).

What is forgiveness? When is it appropriate? Is it to be earned or can it be freely given? Is it a passion we cannot control, or something we choose to do? Glen Pettigrove explores the relationship between forgiving, understanding, and loving. He examines the significance of character for the debate, and revives the long-neglected virtue of grace.

Why do political philosophers shy away from politics? Glen Newey offers a challenging and original critique of liberalism, the dominant political philosophy of our time, tackling such key issues as state legitimacy, value-pluralism, neutrality, the nature of politics, public reason, and morality in politics. Analyzing major liberal theorists, Newey argues that liberalism bypasses politics because it ignores or misunderstands human motivation, and elevates academic systembuilding over political realities of conflict and power.

Toleration is becoming an increasingly questioned issue in modern democratic and multicultural societies and is debated within the academic disciplines of politics, history and cultural and literary studies. In this book Glen Newey systematically analyses toleration in relation to broader issues in meta-ethical theory and offers a new, rigorous philosophical theory of toleration as a virtue. A wide range of questions in ethical theory is addressed, including ethical responsibility, character and virtue, the nature of reasons for action, the acts/omissions (...) doctrine, and the nature of normativity itself. This analysis offers a new understanding of the limits of moral theory, and reveals problems with understanding toleration philosophically and with implementing it politically. As a unique contribution to the toleration debate, this book will be of importance to all those with an interest in political theory, philosophy and ethics.* An original and highly sophisticated analysis of toleration* Unique in applying toleration to meta-ethical theory* Covers a broad range of questions in ethical theory* Toleration is a key issue in political theory and also outside the academy - issues of censorship and political correctness, etc. remain strongly to the fore. (shrink)

Political disputes over toleration are endemic, while toleration as a political value seems opposed to those of civic equality, neutrality and sometimes democracy. Toleration in Political Conflict sets out to understand toleration as both politically awkward and indispensable. The book exposes the incoherence of Rawlsian reasonable pluralist justifications of toleration, and shows that toleration cannot be fully reconciled with liberal political values. While raison d'état concerns very often overshadow debates over toleration, these debates – for example about terrorism – need (...) not be framed as a conflict between toleration and security. Framing them in this way tends to obscure objectionable behaviour by tolerators themselves, and their reliance on asymmetric power. Glen Newey concludes by sketching a picture of politics as dependent on free speech which, he argues, is entailed by the demands of free association. That in turn suggests that questions of toleration are inescapable within the conditions of politics itself. (shrink)

ABSTRACT:I here advance a critical research agenda for the political perspective of corporate social responsibility (Political CSR). I argue that whilst the ‘Political’ CSR literature is notable for both its conceptual novelty and practical importance, its development has been hamstrung by four ambiguities, conflations and/or oversights. More positively, I argue that ‘Political’ CSR should be conceived as one potentialformof globalization, and not as aconsequenceof ‘globalization’; that contemporary Western MNCs should be presumed to engage in CSR for instrumental reasons; that ‘Political’ (...) CSR should be associated with a corresponding ‘political’ model of corporate governance; and that both a ‘Rawlsian’ and ‘Habermasian’ perspective of Political CSR are different from ‘Political’ CSR. In concluding, I use these four critiques to identify a number of areas within which increasingly robust and sophisticated positive and normative theories of Political CSR are required. (shrink)

ABSTRACT In virtually every corner of ethics—including discussions of value, practical reasoning, moral psychology, and justice—it is common for theorists to suggest that our actions, attitudes, or emotions should be proportional to the degree of value present in the objects or events to which they are responding. I argue that there is a fundamental problem with these approaches: they overlook the character of the agent and what it adds to the equation. I show that a commitment to proportionality is at (...) odds with both ordinary and admirable instances of love, ambition, and forgiveness. To make room for disproportional attitudes and actions, I introduce a novel account of virtue and its relation to value. (shrink)

If asked to generate a list of virtues, most people would not include meekness. So it is surprising that Hume not only deems it a virtue, but one whose 'tendency to the good of society no one can doubt of.' After explaining what Hume and his contemporaries meant by "meekness", the paper proceeds to argue that meekness is a virtue we, too, should endorse.

Assesses Merleau-Ponty’s contribution to ethics as calling for a poetic interplay between perception and imagination, and between silence and solidarity, that reveals our place in the world, and our obligations to ourselves and others. Before his death in 1961, Merleau-Ponty worried about what he saw as humanity’s increasingly self-enclosed and manipulative way of experiencing self, others, and the world—the consequences of which remain apparent in our destructive inability to connect with others within and across cultures. In Merleau-Ponty and the Face (...) of the World, Glen A. Mazis provides an overall consideration of Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy that brings out what he sees as a corrective prescription for ethical reorientation that is fundamental to Merleau-Ponty’s thought. Mazis begins by analyzing the key role that silence plays for Merleau-Ponty as a positive, powerful presence rather than a lack or emptiness, and then builds on this to explore the ethical significance of the face-to-face encounter in his thought as one of solidarity rather than obligation. In the last part of the book, Mazis traces the development of what he calls “physiognomic imagination” in Merleau-Ponty’s work. This understanding of imagination is not fancy or make-believe, but rather brings out the depths of perceptual meaning and leads to an appreciation of poetic language as the key to revitalizing both ethics and ontology. Drawing on Merleau-Ponty’s published works, lecture notes, unpublished writings, and the work of many phenomenologists and Merleau-Ponty scholars, Mazis also offers incisive readings of Merleau-Ponty’s work as it relates to that of Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, Gaston Bachelard, and Emmanuel Levinas. (shrink)

In the philosophical literature on forgiveness it is almost universally assumed that only the victim of a wrong has the standing to forgive. This paper challenges that assumption and argues for the possibility of meaningful second- and third-party forgiveness.

Little attention has been paid to the importance of social media in the corporate social responsibility (CSR) literature. This deficit is redressed in the present paper through utilizing the notion of ‘citizenship arenas’ to identify three dynamics in social media-augmented corporate–society relations. First, we note that social media-augmented ‘corporate arenas of citizenship’ are constructed by individual corporations in an effort to address CSR issues of specific importance thereto, and are populated by individual citizens as well as (functional/formally organized) stakeholders. Second, (...) we highlight that, within social media-augmented ‘public arenas of citizenship’, individual citizens are empowered, relative to corporations and their (functional/formally organized) stakeholders, when it comes to creating, debating, and publicizing, CSR-relevant issues. Third, we posit that information and communication technology corporations possess specific, and potentially very important, capacities, when it comes to creating, or helping construct, public arenas of citizenship from within which individual citizens can influence their broader political–economic environment. Following this, we discuss how social media can contribute to ‘dysfunctions’ as well as ‘progressions’ in corporate–society relations, and conclude with a number of suggestions for future research. (shrink)

Google is a complex and complicated political beast with a significant, and often confusing, interest, in copyright matters. On one hand, for example, Google is widely accused of profiting from piracy. On the other, Google routinely complies with what is rapidly approaching a billion copyright takedown requests annually. In the present article, Foucault, neo-Gramscians, and Deleuze and Guattari are utilized to help construct a 32 dispositive analysis framework that overlaps three dispositive modalities and perspectives. In applying the framework to the (...) Google–copyright relationship, the article shows how Google was “born political”: in that it was, and still is, disposed by an apparatus comprised of copyright laws, Silicon Valley culture, and broad advances in digitization. Moreover, the article shows how Google continuously acts where “politics is born”: as it significantly shapes copyright considerations by disposing of human and organizational phenomena through articulations and assemblages. (shrink)

Over the last 30 years, the self-determination efforts and objectives of Indigenous peoples in Canada have increasingly been cast in the language of ‘recognition’ — recognition of cultural distinctiveness, recognition of an inherent right to self-government, recognition of state treaty obligations, and so on. In addition, the last 15 years have witnessed a proliferation of theoretical work aimed at fleshing out the ethical, legal and political significance of these types of claims. Subsequently, ‘recognition’ has now come to occupy a central (...) place in our efforts to comprehend what is at stake in contestations over identity and difference in colonial contexts more generally. In this paper, I employ Frantz Fanon's critique of Hegel's master–slave dialectic to challenge the now hegemonic assumption that the structure of domination that frames Indigenous–state relations in Canada can be undermined via a liberal politics of recognition. Against this assumption, I argue that instead of ushering in an era of peaceful coexistence grounded on the Hegelian ideal of reciprocity, the contemporary politics of recognition promises to reproduce the very configurations of colonial power that Indigenous demands for recognition have historically sought to transcend. (shrink)

Thomas Hurka, Simon Keller, and Julia Annas have recently argued that virtue ethics is self-effacing. I contend that these arguments are rooted in a mistaken understanding of the role that ideal agency and agent flourishing (should) play in virtue ethics. I then show how a virtue ethical theory can avoid the charge of self-effacement and why it is important that it do so.

Etzioni has recently proposed that the success of Internet enabled commerce is surprising due to what I label the “trust in strangers” problem. In here responding to Etzioni, I argue that the “trust in strangers” problem effectively dissolves once it is recognized that current manifestations of Internet commerce are not associated with high levels of anonymity, but rather, with high levels of surveillance. In doing so, I first outline how data capitalism and security considerations have contributed to Internet surveillance being (...) close to ubiquitous. Following this, I differentiate between three types of surveillance—i.e. top-down, bottom-up, networked—that many people who digitally connect rely upon. In concluding, I emphasize my basic argument. Namely, that it is “trust in surveillance”, rather than “trust in strangers”, that supports current manifestations of commerce online. (shrink)

1. This is the second in a two-part investigation of the relationship between virtue and value. It focuses principally on two questions that part 1 [Pettigrove 2022] left readers asking.1 First, is...

This article is on political normativity. It urges scepticism about attempts to reduce political normativity to morality. Modern liberalism leaves a question about how far morality can be accommodated by the form of normativity characteristic of politics. The article casts doubt on whether individual moral norms carry over to collective, for example, political, action, and whether the former ‘trump’ other kinds of reasons in politics. It then sketches an alternative view of politics as an irreducibly collective enterprise. Reasons for acting (...) politically, including the understandings on which perceptions of legitimacy rest, are largely artefacts of the political culture and thus only marginally subject to generic conditions of validity: this is true in particular of liberal acceptability-conditions. Thus legitimacy, though not a redundant notion, must be geared to local political norms. (shrink)

Although theorists disagree about precisely how to characterize the link between anger and moral judgment, that they are linked is routinely taken for granted in contemporary metaethics and philosophy of emotion. One problem with this assumption is that it ignores virtues like patience, which thinkers as different as Cassian, Śāntideva, and Maimonides have argued are characteristic of mature moral agents. The patient neither experience nor plan to experience anger in response to (at least some) wrongs. Nevertheless, we argue, they remain (...) capable of judging such actions to be wrong. This indicates that a different account of the relationship between anger and moral judgment is required. We conclude by proposing one such account, showing how a metaethicist who was more attentive to the normative ethics of anger might set about reconstructing her position. (shrink)

The paper responds to those who argue that it is morally objectionable to forgive the unapologetic. I argue that it is both possible and permissible to forgive the unapologetic. Along the way the analysis sheds light on the relationship between forgiveness and trust, condonation, self-respect, punishment, justice and apology.

Earthbodies describes how our bodies are open circuits to a sensual magic and planetary care that when closed off leads to disastrous detours, such as illness, ...

What are we doing when we say "I forgive you"? This paper employs Austin's notion of illocutionary force to analyze three different kinds of acts in which we might engage when saying "I forgive you." We might use it (1) to disclose an emotional condition, (2) to declare a debt cancelled, or (3) to commit ourselves to a future course of action. I suggest that the forgiving utterances we seek possess qualities of both the first and the third types of (...) speech-acts. (shrink)

This book explores the nitty-gritty details of particular virtues. Most of the virtues discussed--ambition, cheerfulness, creativity, magnificence, pride, wit, wonder--have been almost wholly neglected by contemporary ethicists.

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.

Hobbes is one of the most important figures in the history of ideas and political thought and his book _Leviathan_ is widely recognized as one of the greatest works of political philosophy. In this _GuideBook_ Glen Newey offers a balanced guide to this key text that explores both its historical and philosophical aspects. The author introduces: the relevance of Hobbes' ideas to modern political thought the major interpretations of _Leviathan_ Hobbes' life and the background of _Leviathan_ _The Routledge Philosophy (...) GuideBook to Hobbes and Leviathan_ is the ideal introduction for students who wish to understand more about this important philosopher and this classic work of philosophy. (shrink)

This wide-ranging work explores what the emotions, "if approached on their own terms," can tell us about our world and our selves. By doing so sensitively, it fills a missing space in Western philosophy, literary theory and psychology, in which the emotions are seen for the first time as the primary way of understanding experience through the depth of the sensual-perceptual, rather than as mere handmaidens to reason or biology. The work weaves together diverse philosophical and literary works, from Merleau-Ponty (...) to Melville, Duras to James, contrasts Eastern and Western perspectives, and arrives at a new vision of reality as "becoming" and philosophy as "fragile ontology.". (shrink)

Der Autor blickt auf seine dreißigjährige Erfahrung mit der Behandlung, Evaluierung und Konsultation in mehr als 300 Fällen sexueller Grenzverletzungen zurück. Er schildert, dass seine ehedem optimistische Beurteilung der Möglichkeit, solche Übergriffe zu verhindern, angesichts der durchgängigen Selbsttäuschung von Analytikern und Therapeuten einer eher pessimistischen Sicht gewichen ist. Seine Einsichten in die Idiosynkrasien der Über-Ich-Aktivität und in die Fähigkeit, ethische Erwägungen anders zu beurteilen, wenn sie nicht auf andere, sondern auf sich selbst bezogen werden, haben ihn bewogen, seine einstmalige Kategorisierung (...) übergriffiger Behandler zu revidieren. Abschließend erläutert er, welchen Beitrag Gruppenphänomene in analytischen Organisationen seiner Ansicht nach zur Entwicklung von sexuellen Grenzverletzungen ­leisten. (shrink)

Virtue ethics is currently one of three major approaches in normative ethics. It may, initially, be identified as the one that emphasizes the virtues, or moral character, in contrast to the approach that emphasizes duties or rules (deontology) or that emphasizes the consequences of actions (consequentialism). Suppose it is obvious that someone in need should be helped. A utilitarian will point to the fact that the consequences of doing so will maximize well-being, a deontologist to the fact that, in doing (...) so the agent will be acting in accordance with a moral rule such as “Do unto others as you would be done by” and a virtue ethicist to the fact that helping the person would be charitable or benevolent. (shrink)

The paper addresses the question of the appropriateness of a Congressional apology for American slavery. After offering an account of what an apology entails, I consider the claim that today's Congress fails to stand in the right relation to the guilt of American slavery to apologize for it. I argue that, while the current Congress and the constituency it represents do not bear a guilt that would permit it to apologize FOR slavery, it has inherited a guilt RELATED TO slavery (...) for which it is appropriate for it to apologize. (shrink)

Democratic politicians face pressures unknown to the prerogative rulers of the early modern period when toleration was first formulated as a political ideal. These pressures are less often expressed as demands by groups or individuals for the permission of practices they dislike than for their restraint or outright prohibition; tolerant dispositions are less politically clamorous. The executive structure of toleration as a virtue, together with the ‘fact of reasonable pluralism’, make conflicts over toleration peculiarly intractable. Political conflicts are apt to (...) take the form of mutual allegations ofintolerance; indeed, the problem of ‘tolerating the intolerant’, far from being a marginal case, is central to the theory and practice of toleration. Toleration thus exemplifies a category mistake committed in much contemporary political theory, particularly in its contractualist versions: the threshold of the political lies precisely where rational agreement proves impossible. The main prospects for democratic toleration are thus pre-emptive. The main way in which this can happen is by cultivating executive dispositions: in other words, encouraging people to detach themselves from strong evaluative commitments, so that toleration does not become politically contentious to start with. But this involves losses as well as gains. The gains in civil harmony and peace are obvious. The cost for tolerant political actors is alienation from what they have good reason to value. (shrink)

Philosophical discussions of apologies have focused on apologizing for wrong actions. Such a focus overlooks an important dimension of moral failures, namely, failures of character. However, when one attempts to revise the standard account of apology to make room for failures of character, two objections emerge. The first is rooted in the psychology of shame. The second stems from the purported social function of apologies. This paper responds to these objections and, in so doing, sheds further light both on why (...) we apologize (when we are in the wrong) and on why we accept apologies (when others are). (shrink)

On rationalist infallibilism, a wide range of both (i) analytic and (ii) synthetic a priori propositions can be infallibly justified (or absolutely warranted), i.e., justified to a degree that entails their truth and precludes their falsity. Though rationalist infallibilism is indisputably running its course, adherence to at least one of the two species of infallible a priori justification refuses to disappear from mainstream epistemology. Among others, Putnam (1978) still professes the a priori infallibility of some category (i) propositions, while Burge (...) (1986, 1988, 1996) and Lewis (1996) have recently affirmed the a priori infallibility of some category (ii) propositions. In this paper, I take aim at rationalist infallibilism by calling into question the a priori infallibility of both analytic and synthetic propositions. The upshot will be twofold: first, rationalist infallibilism unsurprisingly emerges as a defective epistemological doctrine, and second, more importantly, the case for the a priori infallibility of one or both categories of propositions turns out to lack cogency. (shrink)

McBride, Glen As humanists, we seek to understand our world, without a need to seek guidance from culture. When we humans first began to speak, we quickly discovered the need for questions if we were to understand each other. Then came other questions, thousands of them. There were storms and hail, drought and gales, beloved dead parents came to one's dreams, from where? Always someone asked 'Why? Did those parents still exist somewhere? Answers were found by our ancestors.

McBride, Glen Culture' and 'society' are words we use very loosely. We can find their exact meaning in dictionaries but usually don't, as the context of our sentences provides the information we need in our conversations. We know our societies are the huge group of people living in our city or nation. Our culture is the large range of behaviour we have learned in our society. It includes our food preferences, ways of dressing, our ceremonies for weddings and births (...) and the laws that structure our world, everything that we know from growing up in our family and society. (shrink)

McBride, Glen I was brought up a good Anglican boy by two non-religious parents. My mother was probably an incipient feminist. I knew my father better but never heard him discuss anything religious. At 19, I arrived in England, a bookworm in the RAAF and discovered George Bernard Shaw in perhaps the most exciting mind-opening time of my life. He introduced me to the word 'agnostic' and made it clear that no one had anything worth saying for or against (...) god and its existence. He convinced me - as I'm sure he had many others. I immediately pronounced myself agnostic and in the almost seventy years since, have never found a reason to change that decision. (shrink)

Ambition is a curiously neglected topic in ethics. It isn’t that philosophers have not discussed it. Plato, Aristotle, Seneca, Aquinas, Machiavelli, Harrington, Locke, Rousseau, Smith, Santayana and a number of others have discussed ambition. But it has seldom received more than a few paragraphs worth of analysis, in spite of the fact that ambition plays a central role in Western politics (one cannot be elected without it), and in spite of the fact that Machiavelli, Harrington, Locke and Rousseau each considered (...) it to be among the greatest threats to political security. The aim of this paper is to provide a long overdue analysis of ambition. The first part of the paper explores what ambition is. The second seeks to answer the question, “Is ambition a virtue or a vice?”. (shrink)

This paper outlines what we call a network model of collective emotions. Drawing upon this model, we explore the significance of collective emotions in the Palestine-Israel conflict. We highlight some of the ways in which collective shame, in particular, has contributed to the evolution of this conflict. And we consider some of the obstacles that shame and the pride-restoring narratives to which it gave birth pose to the conflict’s resolution.

Most contemporary variants of virtue ethics have a neo-Aristotelian timbre. However, standing alongside the neo-Aristotelians are a number of others playing similar tunes on different instruments. This chapter highlights the four most important virtue ethical alternatives to the dominant neo-Aristotelian chorus. These are Michael Slote’s agent-based approach, Linda Zagzebski’s exemplarism, Christine Swanton’s target-centered theory, and Robert Merrihew Adams’s neo-Platonic account. What these four approaches showcase is the range of possible theoretical structures available to virtue ethicists. A virtue ethicist might attempt (...) to define other normative qualities like goodness or rightness in terms of virtuous traits. But she need not. Instead, she might develop a theory in which virtue is fundamental but other normative qualities obey a logic that is at least partially independent of virtue. This chapter draws attention to an exciting range of possibilities for virtue ethics that both critics and advocates alike will want to explore. (shrink)

The paper explores the possibility of collectives forgiving and being forgiven. The first half of the paper articulates and amends Hannah Arendt’s account of forgiveness of and by individuals. The second half raises several objections to the possibility of extending this account to forgiveness of and by collectives. In reply, I argue that collectives can have emotions, be guilty, and meet other necessary conditions for forgiving or being forgiven. However, I explain why, even though collective forgiveness is possible, it may, (...) nonetheless, prove dissatisfying. (shrink)

Abstract In 2006, the Turkish Harun Yahya Enterprise published and distributed thousands of copies of its anti‐evolutionary text Atlas of Creation to educational institutes in the West. Although this was little more than a publicity stunt, it resulted in Harun Yahya becoming a mainstay in discussions about creationism in Europe. Although Yahya is often presented as the “go to” representative of European Muslim perceptions of evolution, one would be hard pressed to find the literature about Islamic creationism in Europe that (...) does not engage in a discussion of Harun Yahya. However, little evidence exists to support the notion that Harun Yahya warrants such extensive attention, or that Harun Yahya has a substantive influence among European Muslims. This article will explore existing claims about the popularity of Harun Yahya, before drawing on recent research into Muslim perceptions of evolution to argue that Harun Yahya is relatively unknown among Muslims, at least in the British context, and is not influential even among those who are familiar with his work. (shrink)