Purpose– This paper aims to demonstrate that computing social issues courses are often being taught by articulating the social impacts of different computer technologies and then applying moral theories to those impacts. It then argues that that approach has a number of serious drawbacks.Design/methodology/approach– A bibliometric analysis of ETHICOMP papers is carried out. Papers from early in the history of ETHICOMP are compared to recent years, so as to determine if papers are more or less focused on social scientific examinations (...) of issues or on ethical evaluations of impacts of technology. The literature is examined to argue the drawbacks of the impact approach.Findings– Over time, ETHICOMP papers have moved away from social scientific examinations of computing to more philosophic and ethical evaluations of perceived impacts of computing. The impact approach has a number of drawbacks. First, it is based on a technological deterministic style of social explanation that has been in disrepute in the academic social sciences for decades. Second, it uses an algorithmic approach to ethics that simplifies the social complexity and uncertainty that is the reality of socio-technological change.Research limitations/implications– The methodology used in this paper is limited in several ways. The bibliometric analysis only examined five years of ETHICOMP papers, while the literature review focused on published computing education research. It is possible that neither of these forms of evidence reflects actual common teaching practice.Practical implications– It is hoped that the arguments in this paper will convince teaching practitioners to modify the way they are teaching computing social issues courses: that is, the authors hope to convince educators to add more focus on the social context of computing.Originality/value– The use of bibliometric analysis in this area is unique. The paper’s argument is perhaps unusual as well. (shrink)

This paper provides a description of the role of the clinical ethicist as it is generally experienced in Canada. It examines the activities of Canadian ethicists working in healthcare institutions and the way in which their work incorporates more than ethics case consultation. The Canadian Bioethics Society established a Taskforce on Working Conditions for Bioethics (hereafter referred to as the Taskforce), to make recommendations on a number of issues affecting ethicists and to develop a model role description. This essay carefully (...) assesses this model role description. (shrink)

We apply spatialized game theory and multi-agent computational modeling as philosophical tools: (1) for assessing the primary social psychological hypothesis regarding prejudice reduction, and (2) for pursuing a deeper understanding of the basic mechanisms of prejudice reduction.

But in Why I Am Not a Secularist, distinguished political theorist William E. Connolly argues that secularism, although admirable in its pursuit of freedom and diversity, too often undercuts these goals through its narrow and intolerant ...

The alliance in the United States today between cowboy capitalism and evangelical Christianity cannot be understood sufficiently through the categories of efficient causality or ideological analysis. The constituencies fold similar spiritual dispositions into somewhat different ideologies and creeds. Each party then amplifies these dispositions in the other through the media politics of resonance. The ethos infusing the resonance machine is expressed without being articulated. The inability to grasp this political economy separate from the spiritualities infusing it may carry implications for (...) the form a successful countermovement could assume. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Philosophy and Literature 29.2 (2005) 379-393 [Access article in PDF] Love, Self-Deception, and the Moral "Must" Randy Ramal Claremont Graduate University I One significant impact that conceptual relativism has had on current discussions in moral philosophy is the denial of intelligibility to discourses that affirm moral absolutism. The denial is typically based on two allied arguments. The first argument entails that the justification of absolute moral laws and (...) values presupposes the existence of an Archimedean standpoint, but since such viewpoint is unintelligible, a "view from nowhere" as it has been called, then affirming moral absolutism could only be the result of a confused temptation for metaphysical universality and objectivity. The second argument states that since all moral values and concepts are the products of particular cultural-linguistic contexts, it would not make sense to speak of absolute values that have application in other cultural-linguistic contexts.I sympathize with the critical spirit in which this dual argument is made. The unintelligibility of a neutral standpoint and the obvious contextuality of all moral discourses render meaningless any attempt to affirm metaphysically-based moral absolutes. But what this argument fails to acknowledge is that the ordinary language of moral absoluteness is not only infinitely distant from the metaphysical claims to Olympian grounds but also internally related to the absolute moral judgments and principles it invokes. Furthermore, it is doubtful that one could speak at all of moral discourse as needing metaphysical justification. It would not make sense to speak of moral discourse as either needing or not needing metaphysical backing because both notions ignore the ordinary contexts of moral discourse, where the issue of philosophical justification does not arise. The point here is not simply to reject the [End Page 379] metaphysical need for justifying moral discourse but to question the intelligibility of the attempt itself.1In what follows I argue that the ordinary claims to moral absoluteness, be it to give moral advice, to justify personal beliefs and actions, or to judge and criticize the conduct of other people, are perfectly intelligible practices that embody ordinary moral judgments and values. I elucidate the intelligibility of these moral claims by discussing Leo Tolstoy's "The Death of Ivan Ilych," Proust's Remembrance of Things Past, and Ann Beattie's "Learning to Fall." These works, I argue, portray an ethical notion of "need" that expresses natural, and intelligible, affirmations of moral necessity. The context of this affirmation concerns the ethical call to end all self-deception about one's love life.Traditionally, the relationship between love and self-deception has been interpreted to suggest that people often deceive themselves about love in order to fulfill a deep need in them to give meaning to their lives. This interpretation is often invoked to explain, on the one hand, why people who are in love might claim otherwise and, on the other hand, why those who are not in love at all convince themselves of the opposite. Although this interpretation is not philosophical in nature and does not necessarily entail the denial of all discourses of moral necessity, the idea that self-deception fulfils a deep need in people is often invoked as a philosophical explanation of the notion of "need." One example of such philosophical explanation is Martha Nussbaum's Love's Knowledge, where she endorses the traditional interpretation of the relation between love and self-deception through a discussion, among other works, of the above mentioned works by Proust and Beattie.There is no doubt that self-deception, whether in regards to one's love life or other aspects of it, could sometimes arise as a result of a need in people to give their existence some meaningful stability. But this interpretation cannot apply to all cases of love and self deception because the radical plurality of our notions of love prevents such explanatory reductionism. The insistence on this type of reductionism, it seems to me, rests on a common tendency among moral philosophers, Nussbaum included, to read into literature personal ethical views that are not intended by it. The task of the moral philosopher... (shrink)

ブッダとは誰か?仏教とは何か?3・11の震災後の言葉を探して仏教に問いかける―仏教と真剣に向き合う僧侶、研究者との対話を通して、仏教の「新しいいま」が見えてくる。.

In _The Fragility of Things_, eminent theorist William E. Connolly focuses on several self-organizing ecologies that help to constitute our world. These interacting geological, biological, and climate systems, some of which harbor creative capacities, are depreciated by that brand of neoliberalism that confines self-organization to economic markets and equates the latter with impersonal rationality. Neoliberal practice thus fails to address the fragilities it exacerbates. Engaging a diverse range of thinkers, from Friedrich Hayek, Michel Foucault, Hesiod, and Immanuel Kant to (...) Voltaire, Terrence Deacon, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Alfred North Whitehead, Connolly brings the sense of fragility alive as he rethinks the idea of freedom. Urging the Left not to abandon the state but to reclaim it, he also explores scales of politics below and beyond the state. The contemporary response to fragility requires a militant pluralist assemblage composed of those sharing affinities of spirituality across differences of creed, class, gender, sexual orientation, and ethnicity. (shrink)

This study examines the influence of ethical fit on employee attitudes and intentions to turnover. The results of this investigation provides support for the conjecture that ethical work climate is an important variable in the study of person-organization fit. Ethical fit was found to be significantly related to turnover intentions, continuance commitment, and affective commitment, but not to job satisfaction. Results are discussed in regard to some of the affective and cognitive distinctions among satisfaction, commitment, and behavioral intentions.

The problem of pursuing and achieving justice in a free society involves three different areas of analysis. First, the types of acts that are to be proscribed must be specified. Part of this analysis is methodological, requiring us to settle on the way in which such questions are to be decided. Second, once an offense has been defined, the remedy for its commission must be determined in a manner that is consistent with the theory of justice that defined the criminal (...) act. Finally, the structure of the legal order that will efficiently enforce these principles and at the same time not violate them must be explored. (shrink)

Experts from wine tasters to radiologists to bird watchers have all undergone perceptual learning-long-term changes in perception that result from practice or experience. Philosophers have been discussing such cases for centuries, from the 14th-century Indian philosopher Vedanta Desika to the 18th-century Scottish philosopher Thomas Reid, and into contemporary times. -/- This book uses recent evidence from psychology and neuroscience to show that perceptual learning is genuinely perceptual, rather than post-perceptual. It also offers a taxonomy for classifying cases in the philosophical (...) literature. In some cases, perceptual learning involves changes in how one attends; in other cases, it involves a learned ability to differentiate two properties, or to perceive two properties as unified. Connolly uses this taxonomy to rethink several domains of perception in terms of perceptual learning, including multisensory perception, color perception, and speech perception. -/- As a whole, the book offers a theory of the function of perceptual learning. Perceptual learning embeds into our quick perceptual systems what would be a slower task were it to be done in a controlled, cognitive manner. A novice wine taster drinking a Cabernet Sauvignon might have to think about its features first and then infer the type of wine, while an expert can identify it immediately. This learned ability to immediately identify the wine enables the expert to think about other things like the vineyard or the vintage of the wine. More generally, perceptual learning serves to free up cognitive resources for other tasks. This book offers a comprehensive empirically-informed account, and explores the nature, scope, and theoretical implications of perceptual learning. (shrink)

We welcome Ms Smajdor’s critique into our investigations of expected future tax gains to the state from children conceived by in vitro fertilisation .1 To better inform the JME readership, we wish to correct some misinterpretations of our research by Smajdor, and to highlight some weaknesses of current IVF funding policies.Our investigation sought to establish the long-term net tax contribution from an IVF-conceived child, assuming that the child was average in every respect .2 We conducted this analysis on the basis (...) that IVF, and other assisted reproductive treatments, are unique among all medical interventions—unique in the sense that their success leads to the creation of human life; a life that would not have existed had the technology not been available and accessible to couples willing to undergo treatment. Hence, this method provides us with an opportunity to explore lost tax revenue to the state resulting from children that have not been born due to limited public access to IVF treatments currently observed in the UK and many other countries.In our investigations, the costs of IVF were treated as an investment in human capital with future long-term cost and revenue implications for the state. Our evaluation ignored the many humanistic reasons for offering IVF treatment to infertile couples and concentrated solely on the possible economic benefits.3 The perspective of the analysis was that of the state; hence …. (shrink)

The most recent work toward compiling a comprehensive database of adenosine‐to‐inosine RNA editing events suggests that the potential for RNA editing is much more pervasive than previously thought; indeed, it is manifest in more than 100 million potential editing events located primarily within Alu repeat elements of the human transcriptome. Pairs of inverted Alu repeats are found in a substantial number of human genes, and when transcribed, they form long double‐stranded RNA structures that serve as optimal substrates for RNA editing (...) enzymes. A small subset of edited Alu elements has been shown to exhibit diverse functional roles in the regulation of alternative splicing, miRNA repression, and cis‐regulation of distant RNA editing sites. The low level of editing for the remaining majority may be non‐functional, yet their persistence in the primate genome provides enhanced genomic flexibility that may be required for adaptive evolution. (shrink)

BackgroundThis paper discusses the contentious issue of reuse of stored biological samples and data obtained from research participants in past clinical research to answer future ethical and scientifically valid research questions. Many countries have regulations and guidelines that guide the use and exportation of stored biological samples and data. However, there are variations in regulations and guidelines governing the reuse of stored biological samples and data in Sub-Saharan Africa including Malawi.DiscussionThe current research ethics regulations and guidelines in Malawi do not (...) allow indefinite storage and reuse of biological samples and data for future unspecified research. This comes even though the country has managed to answer pertinent research questions using stored biological samples and data. We acknowledge the limited technical expertise and equipment unavailable in Malawi that necessitates exportation of biological samples and data and the genuine concern raised by the regulatory authorities about the possible exploitation of biological samples and data by researchers. We also acknowledge that Malawi does not have bio-banks for storing biological samples and data for future research purposes. This creates room for possible exploitation of biological samples and data collected from research participants in primary research projects in Malawi. However, research ethics committees require completion and approval of material transfer agreements and data transfer agreements for biological samples and data collected for research purposes respectively and this requirement may partly address the concern raised by the regulatory authorities. Our concern though is that there is no such requirement for biological samples and data collected from patients for clinical or diagnostic purposes.SummaryIn conclusion, we propose developing a medical data and material transfer agreement for biological samples and data collected from patients for clinical or diagnostic purposes in both public and private health facilities that may end up in research centers outside Malawi. We also propose revision of the current research ethics regulations and guidelines in Malawi in order to allow secondary use of biological samples and data collected from primary research projects as a way of maximizing the use of collected samples and data. Finally, we call for consultation of all stakeholders within the Malawi research community when regulatory authorities are developing policies that govern research in Malawi. (shrink)

This paper maintains (following Yougrau 1987; 2000 and Hinchliff 1996) that the dead and other former existents count as examples of non-existent objects. If the dead number among the things there are, a further question arises: what is it to be dead—how should the state of being dead be characterised? It is argued that this state should be characterised negatively: the dead are not persons, philosophers etc. They lack any of the (intrinsic) qualities they had while they lived. The only (...) facts involving the dead are facts about the relations they stand in—including the relations they bear to the qualities they formerly instantiated, and the intentional relations they stand in to us. Given an appropriate conception of qualities the dead can be said to be quality-less objects: bare particulars. The ‘Bare Particular Theory’ of individuals, it is argued, is coherent if and only if it concedes that the bare particulars it allows for don’t exist. The account of the dead and other former existents as bare particulars does justice to the misfortune of death, and points the way to a general theory of nonexistent objects. (shrink)

A caged animal in the heart of the city, thousands of miles from its natural habitat, neurotically pacing in its confinement . . . Zoos offer a convenient way to indulge a cultural appetite for novelty and diversion, and to teach us, albeit superficially, about animals. Yet what, conversely, do they tell us about the people who create, maintain, and patronize them, and about animal captivity in general? Rather than foster an appreciation for the lives and attributes of animals, zoos, (...) in Randy Malamud's view, reinforce the idea that we are, by nature, an imperial species: that our power and ingenuity entitles us to violate the natural order by tearing animals from the fabric of their ecosystems and displaying them in an "order" of our own making. In so doing, he argues, zoos not only contribute to the rapid disintegration of our ecosystems, but also deaden our very sensibilities to constraint, spatial disruption, and physical pain. Invoking an array of literary depictions of animals, from Albee's Zoo Story and Virginia Woolf's diaries to the films of Harold Pinter and the poetry of Marianne Moore, Reading Zoos links culture, literature, and nature in an engaging and accessible introduction to environmental ethics, animal rights, cultural critique, and literary representation. (shrink)

I. Introduction Two kinds of remedies have traditionally been employed for breach of contract: legal relief and equitable relief. Legal relief normally takes the form of money damages. Equitable relief normally consists either of specific performance or an injunction – that is, the party in breach may be ordered to perform an act or to refrain from performing an act. In this article I will use a “consent theory of contract” to assess the choice between money damages and specific performance. (...) According to such a theory, contractual obligation is dependent on more fundamental entitlements of the parties and arises as a result of the parties' consent to transfer alienable rights. My thesis will be that the normal rule favoring money damages should be replaced with one that presumptively favors specific performance unless the parties have consented to money damages instead. The principal obstacle to such an approach is the reluctance of courts to specifically enforce contracts for personal services. The philosophical distinction between alienable and inalienable rights bolsters this historical reticence, since a right to personal services may be seen as inalienable. I will then explain why, if the subject matter of a contract for personal services is properly confined to an alienable right to money damages for failure to perform, specific enforcement of such contracts is no longer problematic. Finally, I shall consider whether the subject matter of contracts for corporate services is properly confined to money damages like contracts for personal services, or whether performance of corporate services can be made the subject of a valid rights transfer and judicially compelled in the same manner as contracts for external resources. (shrink)

Over the past two decades, the renowned political theorist William E. Connolly has developed a powerful theory of pluralism as the basis of a territorial politics. In this concise volume, Connolly launches a new defense of pluralism, contending that it has a renewed relevance in light of pressing global and national concerns, including the war in Iraq, the movement for a Palestinian state, and the fight for gay and lesbian rights. Connolly contends that deep, multidimensional pluralism is (...) the best way to promote justice and inclusion without violence. He advocates a deep pluralism—in contrast to shallow, secular pluralism—that helps to create space for different groups to bring their religious faiths into the public realm. This form of deep pluralism extends far beyond faith, encompassing multiple dimensions of social and personal lives, including household organization and sexuality. Connolly looks at pluralism not only in light of faith but also in relation to evil, ethics, relativism, globalization, and sovereignty. In the process, he engages many writers and theorists—among them, Spinoza, William James, Henri Bergson, Marcel Proust, Gilles Deleuze, Giorgio Agamben, Talal Asad, Michael Hardt, and Antonio Negri. _Pluralism_ is the first book in which Connolly explains the relationship between pluralism and the experience of time, and he offers readings of several films that address how time is understood, including _Time Code_, _Far from Heaven_, _Waking Life_, and _The Maltese Falcon_. In this necessary book Connolly brings a compelling, accessible philosophical critique together with his personal commitment to an inclusive political agenda to suggest how we might—and why we must—cultivate pluralism within both society and ourselves. (shrink)

The increasing corporatization of education has served to expose the university as a business—and one with a highly stratified division of labor. In _Chalk Lines_ editor Randy Martin presents twelve essays that confront current challenges facing the academic workforce in U.S. colleges and universities and demonstrate how, like chalk lines, divisions between employees may be creatively redrawn. While tracing the socioeconomic conditions that have led to the present labor situation on campuses, the contributors consider such topics as the political (...) implications of managerialism and the conceptual status of academic labor. They examine the trend toward restructuring and downsizing, the particular plight of the adjunct professor, the growing emphasis on vocational training in the classroom, and union organizing among university faculty, staff, and graduate students. Placing such issues within the context of the history of labor movements as well as governmental initiatives to train a workforce capable of competing in the global economy, _Chalk Lines_ explores how universities have attempted to remake themselves in the image of the corporate sector. Originally published as an issue of _Social Text_, this expanded volume, which includes four new essays, offers a broad view of academic labor in the United States. With its important, timely contribution to debates concerning the future of higher education, _Chalk Lines_ will interest a wide array of academics, administrators, policymakers, and others invested in the state—and fate—of academia. _ Contributors._ Stanley Aronowitz, Jan Currie, Zelda F. Gamson, Emily Hacker, Stefano Harney, Randy Martin, Bart Meyers, David Montgomery, Frederick Moten, Christopher Newfield, Gary Rhoades, Sheila Slaughter, Jeremy Smith, Vincent Tirelli, William Vaughn, Lesley Vidovich, Ira Yankwitt. (shrink)

The problem considered in this chapter emerges from the tension we find when looking at the design and architecture of chatbots on the one hand and their conversational aptitude on the other. In the way that LLM chatbots are designed and built, we have good reason to suppose they don't possess second-order capacities such as intention, belief or knowledge. Yet theories of conversation make great use of second-order capacities of speakers and their audiences to explain how aspects of interaction succeed. (...) As we can all bear witness to now though, at the point of use chatbots appear capable of performing language tasks at a level close to that of humans. This creates a tension when we consider something like, for example, the classic Gricean theory of implicature. On a broad summary of this type of account, to utter p and implicate q requires the reflexive occurrence of an audience supposing a speaker believes that q, and the speaker believing that their audience can determine they believe it when they utter p. So taken at face value, if a chatbot doesn’t have the capacity for belief, then either in their role as speaker or audience, they would not seem capable of either generating or comprehending implicatures. Yet on the surface it does seem that chatbots are capable of dealing with (some) implicatures, and as such it raises questions about how we should then correlate this with what we think occurs in cases of implicature with chatbots. (shrink)

The growing body of whistleblowing literature includes many studies that have attempted to identify the individual level antecedents of whistleblowing behavior. However, cross-cultural differences in perceptions of the ethicality of whistleblowing affect the judgment of whistleblowing intention. This study ascertains how Chinese managers/professionals decide to blow the whistle in terms of their locus of control and subjective judgment regarding the intention of whistleblowing. Hypotheses that are derived from these speculations are tested with data on Chinese managers and professionals. Statistical analysis (...) largely supports the hypotheses, which suggests that an individual''s locus of control does moderate the relationship between ethical judgment and whistleblowing. (shrink)

Freud's core interest in the psyche was the dynamic unconscious: that part of the psyche which is unconscious due to conflict (Freud, 1923/1961 ). Over the course of his career, Freud variously described conflict as an opposition to the discharge of activation (Freud, 1950 ), opposition to psychic activity due to the release of unpleasure (Freud, 1990/1991 ), opposition between the primary principle and the reality principle (Freud, 1911/1963 ), structural conflict between id, ego, and superego (Freud, 1923/1961 ), and (...) ambivalence (Freud, 1912/1963 ). Besides this difficulty of the shifting description of conflict, an underlying question remained the specific shared terrain in which emotions, thoughts, intentions or wishes could come into conflict with one another (the neuronal homolog of conflict), and most especially how they may exist as quantities in opposition within that terrain. Friston's free-energy principle (FEP henceforth) connected to the work of Friston (Friston et al., 2006 ; Friston, 2010 ) has provided the potential for a powerful unifying theory in psychology, neuroscience, and related fields that has been shown to have tremendous consilience with psychoanalytic concepts (Hopkins, 2012 ). Hopkins ( 2016 ), drawing on a formulation by Hobson et al. ( 2014 ), suggests that conflict may be potentially quantifiable as free energy from a FEP perspective. More recently, work by Friston et al. ( 2017a ) has framed the selection of action as a gradient descent of expected free energy under different policies of action. From this perspective, the article describes how conflict could potentially be formalized as a situation where opposing action policies have similar expected free energy, for example between actions driven by competing basic prototype emotion systems as described by Panksepp ( 1998 ). This conflict state may be avoided in the future through updating the relative precision of a particular set of prior beliefs about outcomes: this has the result of tending to favor one of the policies of action over others in future instances, a situation analogous to defense. Through acting as a constraint on the further development of the person, the defensive operation can become entrenched, and resistant to alteration. The implications that this formalization has for psychoanalysis is explored. (shrink)

Tschacher and Haken have recently applied a systems-based approach to modeling psychotherapy process in terms of potentially beneficial tendencies toward deterministic as well as chaotic forms of change in the client’s behavioral, cognitive and affective experience during the course of therapy. A chaotic change process refers to a greater exploration of the states that a client can be in, and it may have a potential positive role to play in their development. A distinction is made between on the one hand, (...) specific instances of instability which are due to techniques employed by the therapist, and on the other, a more general instability which is due to the therapeutic relationship, and a key, necessary result of a successful therapeutic alliance. Drawing on Friston’s systems-based model of free energy minimization and predictive coding, it is proposed here that the increase in the instability of a client’s functioning due to therapy can be conceptualized as a reduction in the precisions with which the client’s prior beliefs about themselves and their world, are held. It is shown how a good therapeutic alliance results in the emergence of a new hierarchical level in the client’s generative model of themselves and their relationship with the world. The emergence of this new level of functioning permits the reduction of the precisions of the client’s priors, which allows the client to ‘open up’: to experience thoughts, emotions and experiences they did not have before. It is proposed that this process is a necessary precursor to change due to psychotherapy. A good consilience can be found between this approach to understanding the role of the therapeutic alliance, and the role of epistemic trust in psychotherapy as described by Fonagy and Allison. It is suggested that beneficial forms of instability in clients are an underappreciated influence on psychotherapy process, and thoughts about the implications, as well as situations in which instability may not be beneficial for therapy, are considered. (shrink)

This essay examines lines of connection between disgust, the effect of disciplines upon such intensive appraisals, political action, and the shape of ethical responsiveness. Philosophies that espouse purity in moral ity or politics mask these lines of connection; they thereby disparage the sig nificance of techniques of the self to ethical and political life. Immanuel Kant and Hannah Arendt provide the two main figures through whom these themes are explored. Arendt and Kant are brought into relation with each other through (...) the way each comes to terms with disgust and common sense. Kant's attempt to purify morality draws upon the spontaneity of common sense even more than it does upon a set of transcendental arguments. The Kantian metaphysic of the supersensible and the sensible then authorizes a concept of morality that almost removes the will beyond the reach of disci plines. But aporias he confronts within the will may bring these tactics back in. Arendt, while rising above the command conception of morality pro jected by Kant through her invocation of gratitude for being and appre ciation of new beginnings, reinstates purity in the concept of 'the political'. Arendt's drive to bracket the body - often treated as an assemblage of com pulsive moods and interests - from the realm of ethical and political life also disparages tactics by the self on the self. To challenge the metaphysic of the supersensible and the sensible with a metaphysic of the infrasensible and the sensible is to confirm the nobility of such tactics. The presentation of this alternative perspective calls into question the pretension of many contemporaries to be 'post-metaphysical'; it also helps to show why meta physical pluralism sets a condition for a politics of plurality attuned to the velocity and scope of late-modern life. Key Words: amygdala • Arendt • body • common sense • Deleuze • ethics • Kant • metaphysics • plurality • Spinoza. (shrink)

We have been asked to consider how a "Constitution of Civic Virtue" might contribute to a "good society." To answer this question, we need to have some idea of what a good society might be, and we need to be able to articulate that idea. Certainly, we think we know a good movie when we see it, a good book when we read it, a good argument when we hear it, and a good idea when we have one, but we (...) are not sure we have a handle on what a good society is. Even what we think we know about good books, movies, arguments, and ideas gives us pause. For we are not sure we can always explain why we think a particular movie is good or a book is bad. And even when we can explain it, we find that many people disagree with us about such matters. Indeed, we, at times, even disagree with each other. By this we do not mean to suggest any skepticism about there being such a thing as a good book, a good film, a good wine, a good car, or even a good person. If there is one thing we think we know in this world, it is that there are good persons-quite amazingly good actually. Nor do we mean to deny that there may be such a thing as a good society, though we are not so confident about this. A lot depends on what is meant by those words. Having said this, we will set our skepticism aside and now offer a conception of a good society; but we no more expect everyone to agree with this conception then we expect them to agree with one of us that "The Tao of Steve" was a really good movie. (shrink)

At the beginning of his message for World Mission Sunday 2019 Pope Francis wrote: For the month of October 2019, I have asked that the whole Church revive her missionary awareness and commitment as we commemorate the centenary of the Apostolic Letter Maximum Illud of Pope Benedict XV. Its farsighted and prophetic vision of the apostolate has made me realize once again the importance of renewing the Church's missionary commitment and giving fresh evangelical impulse to her work of preaching and (...) bringing to the world the salvation of Jesus Christ, who died and rose again. (shrink)