Human cooperation is highly unusual. We live in large groups composed mostly of non-relatives. Evolutionists have proposed a number of explanations for this pattern, including cultural group selection and extensions of more general processes such as reciprocity, kin selection, and multi-level selection acting on genes. Evolutionary processes are consilient; they affect several different empirical domains, such as patterns of behavior and the proximal drivers of that behavior. In this target article, we sketch the evidence from five domains that bear on (...) the explanatory adequacy of cultural group selection and competing hypotheses to explain human cooperation. Does cultural transmission constitute an inheritance system that can evolve in a Darwinian fashion? Are the norms that underpin institutions among the cultural traits so transmitted? Do we observe sufficient variation at the level of groups of considerable size for group selection to be a plausible process? Do human groups compete, and do success and failure in competition depend upon cultural variation? Do we observe adaptations for cooperation in humans that most plausibly arose by cultural group selection? If the answer to one of these questions is “no,” then we must look to other hypotheses. We present evidence, including quantitative evidence, that the answer to all of the questions is “yes” and argue that we must take the cultural group selection hypothesis seriously. If culturally transmitted systems of rules (institutions) that limit individual deviance organize cooperation in human societies, then it is not clear that any extant alternative to cultural group selection can be a complete explanation. (shrink)

Taking up Lemke’s (2000) critical questions of how moments add up to lives and social life, we articulate theoretical and methodological frameworks for _perezhivanie_ and becoming, challenging binaries that splinter entangled flows of _perezhivanie_ into frozen categories. Working from a flat CHAT notion of assemblage to develop an ontology of moments, we stress consequentiality, arguing it emerges in intersections of embodied intensities (not only affective, but also indexical, intra-actional, and historic), the dispersed bio-cultural-historical weight of artifacts and practices, and dialogic (...) resonances across moments. Methodologically, we take an ethico-onto-epistemological perspective to systematically study perezhivanie. The bio-ecological model of rich environments (centered around meaningful complexity, agency, and individual optimization) offers both a key framework for understanding becoming and a design framework for transdisciplinary realizations of ethico-onto-epistemological practice. We illustrate these frameworks with examples from four research projects: a university physics lab group doing and writing an experiment, a former pastor managing bipolar disorder and rejecting faith, a sustained social justice education program at a university, and intersections of aging policies, media representations, and stroke survival in Brazil. Finally, we argue that an ontology of moments centered on consequentiality can illuminate _perezhivanie's_ relationship to becoming and that the model of enriched environments offers metrics to assess and design environments. (shrink)

This set of seven experiments examines reasoning about the inheritance and acquisition of physical properties in preschoolers, undergraduates, and biology experts. Participants (N = 390) received adoption vignettes in which a baby animal was born to one parent but raised by a biologically unrelated parent, and they judged whether the offspring would have the same property as the birth or rearing parent. For each vignette, the animal parents had contrasting values on a physical property dimension (e.g., the birth parent had (...) a short tail; the rearing parent had a long tail). Depending on the condition, the distinct properties had distinct functions (“function-predictive”) were associated with distinct habitats (“habitat-predictive”), or had no implications (“non-predictive”). Undergraduates' bias to view properties as inherited from the birth parent was reduced in the function- and habitat-predictive conditions. This result indicates a purpose-based view of inheritance, whereby animals can acquire properties that serve a purpose in their environment. This stance was not found in experts or preschoolers. We discuss the results in terms of how undergraduates' purpose-based inheritance reasoning develops and relates to larger-scale misconceptions about Darwinian evolutionary processes, and implications for biology education. (shrink)

In 1984, Harvard University asked Italo Calvino to deliver the next Charles Eliot Norton Lectures. After working obsessively for a year, Calvino died the day before he was to travel to Boston. Fortunately, Calvino had already written out all but one of the six planned lectures, which were framed as meditations on Lucretius. These are the titles of the five completed lectures: (1) “Lightness,” (2) “Quickness,” (3) “Exactitude,” (4) “Visibility,” (5) “Multiplicity.” The last lecture - worked out but unwritten - (...) was entitled: (6) “Consistency.” These are the names of concepts that fill Deleuze’s oeuvre. Our essay follows the structure of Calvino’s lectures - each section corresponding to each of Calvino’s titles - in order to offer one take on minor ethics. As the title of Calvino’s lectures is Six Memos for the Next Millennium, we now begin A Memorandum for Past Millennia. (shrink)

“Towards the end of a sultry afternoon early in July a young man came out of his little room in Stolyarny Lane and turned and in the direction of Kameny Bridge in central St. Petersburg.”[1] Right then, this young man, a former law student named Rodion Raskolnikov, is caught in an agonizing conversation with himself over whether or not to commit the ultimate crime: to murder an innocent person. Exasperated, wondering what to do with such a weighty decision, he cried (...) aloud, “that’s why I don’t act, because I am always talking. Or perhaps I talk so much just because I can’t act.”[2] On this occasion, he decided not to actualize his thoughts, and so kept on pondering. A little later, as he wandered through the dusty streets of the lively St. Petersburg public market, the young man again relapses into contemplation of the character of his existence, its worth, and its meaning. If he ever did decide to commit such evil, the act would determine what kind of man he is. It is a question of the movement from thought to action... (shrink)

Rousseau’s moral and political philosophy is grounded in a largely overlooked virtue epistemology. This essay reconstructs this epistemology with a particular focus on Rousseau’s conception of how our capacity for sensation might be cultivated to develop the judgment and wisdom that distinguish the developed virtuous agent. It proceeds in three sections. The first section focuses on Rousseau’s conception of the first stage of development, and especially his sensationist claim that all knowledge originates in sensory impressions. The second section examines the (...) maturing agent’s transition from mere sensation to the cultivation of the capacity for judgment, particularly focusing on Rousseau’s account of the agent’s shift from the passive reception of sensory impressions of discrete objects to the active and synthetic processes of comparison and association that give rise to complex ideas and to moral conceptions. The third section turns to Rousseau’s conception of the developed mind, focusing on his claim that the intellectual virtues not only require cultivation but are indispensible to the proper exercise of freedom that distinguishes the fully moral human being. (shrink)

This volume explores Nietzsche's decisive encounter with the ancient philosopher, Epicurus. The collected essays examine many previously unexplored and underappreciated convergences, and investigate how essential Epicurus was to Nietzsche's philosophical project through two interrelated overarching themes: nature and ethics. Uncovering the nature of Nietzsche's reception of, relation to, and movement beyond Epicurus, contributors provide insights into the relationship between suffering, health and philosophy in both thinkers; Nietzsche's stylistic analysis of Epicurus; the ethics of self-cultivation in Nietzsche's Epicureanism; practices of eating (...) and thinking in Nietzsche and Epicurus; the temporality of Epicurean pleasure; the practice of the gay science, and Epicureanism and politics. The essays also provide creative comparisons with the Stoics, Hobbes, Mill, Guyau, Buddhism, and more. Nietzsche and Epicurus offers original and illuminating perspectives on Nietzsche's relation to the Hellenistic thinker, in whom Nietzsche saw the embodiment of the practice of philosophy as an art of existing. (shrink)

Kant’s arguments for the reality of human freedom and the normativity of the moral law continue to inspire work in contemporary moral philosophy. Many prominent ethicists invoke Kant, directly or indirectly, in their efforts to derive the authority of moral requirements from a more basic conception of action, agency, or rationality. But many commentators have detected a deep rift between the _Groundwork for the Metaphysics of Morals_ and the _Critique of Practical Reason_, leaving Kant’s project of justification exposed to conflicting (...) assessments and interpretations. In this major re-reading of Kant, Owen Ware defends the controversial view that Kant’s mature writings on ethics share a unified commitment to the moral law’s primacy. Using both close analysis and historical contextualization, Owen Ware overturns a paradigmatic way of reading Kant’s arguments for morality and freedom, situating them within Kant’s critical methodology at large. The result is a novel understanding of Kant that challenges much of what goes under the banner of Kantian arguments for moral normativity today. (shrink)

This chapter contains section titled: Aristotle Analyzes Imperialism Definitions and History Monarchic Imperialism Natural Superiority? Debating Athenian Imperialism Final Thoughts.

The modern concept of ‘family’ in the United States recognizes many types of social groups as families, a conceptual shift which was largely helped along by advancements in assisted reproductive technologies enabling those formerly unable to biologically reproduce to have children, as well as by social movements aimed at garnering recognition for these emergent nonbiologically related social groups spearheaded by LGBTQ+ and adoption activists. That these social groups are now recognized as types of families is unquestionably an improvement to the (...) concept, though there are still defects in the concept that preclude these nonnuclear families from achieving the same social–ontological status as nuclear families. Drawing from the nascent philosophical field of conceptual engineering, I analyze our current conception of ‘family’ and argue that it is tacitly exclusionary of nonnuclear families, which can be attributed to a combination of widespread genetic essentialism and linguistic practices that unduly cast the nuclear family as a more desirable type of family by emphasizing genetic relatedness as a valuable quality. I then offer proposals to ameliorate these defects, such as educational interventions to reduce genetic essentialism and the introduction of new terminology that does not connote one type of family as being superior to another. In doing so, my hope is to reveal and begin to resolve an overlooked defect in the concept of ‘family’ in order to bolster the movement to view all families as equal. (shrink)

Background While prenatal surgery historically was performed exclusively for lethal conditions, today intrauterine surgery is also performed to decrease postnatal disabilities for non-lethal conditions. We sought to describe physicians' attitudes about prenatal surgery for lethal and non-lethal conditions and to elucidate characteristics associated with these attitudes. Methods Survey of 1200 paediatric surgeons, neonatologists and maternal–fetal medicine specialists. Results Of 1176 eligible physicians, 670 responded. In the setting of a lethal condition for which prenatal surgery would likely result in the child (...) surviving with a severe disability, most respondents either disagreed or strongly disagreed that they would recommend the surgery. Male physicians were twice as likely to recommend surgery for the lethal condition, as were physicians who believe that abortion is morally wrong. Older physicians were less likely to recommend surgery. For non-lethal conditions, most respondents agreed that they would recommend prenatal surgery, even if the surgery increases the risk of prematurity or fetal death. Compared with MFMs, surgeons were less likely to recommend such surgery, as were physicians not affiliated with a fetal centre, and physicians who were religious. Conclusion Physician’s attitudes about prenatal surgery relate to physicians’ beliefs about disability as well as demographic, cultural and religious characteristics. Given the variety of views, parents are likely to receive different recommendations from their doctors about the preferable treatment choice. (shrink)

This chapter contains section titled: The Ancestral Republican “Solutions” The Monarchic “Solution” Plato's “Solutions” Criticizing Contemporary Politics Plato on Rhetoric and Order in the Gorgias The Priority of Reason in City and Soul: Plato's Republic Educating Citizens in the Classical Context Politics and Ethics Philosophical Rulers Platonic Political Philosophy after the Republic.

As an arts-based research approach, poetic enquiry has been theorised and applied recently in the social sciences and in education. In this article, I extend its usage to eco-critical studies of Australian flora and fauna. The Southwest corner of Western Australia affords opportunities to deploy arts-based methodologies, including field poetry, for celebrating the natural heritage of a region of distinguished biodiversity. I suggest that lyric practices in places such as Lesueur National Park and Anstey-Keane Damplands in southern Perth can catalyse (...) embodied engagements with flora. The outcome of these practices is the invocation of the multiple senses— including the proximities of touch and taste—towards senses of place involving physical interactions with plants and their habitats. I will discuss poetic enquiry in relation to the limitations of landscape aesthetics. Visual aesthetic modes tend to frame botanical environments as a succession of images. In contrast, an embodied aesthetics closes visual distance towards sensory intimacies and experiences of ecological processes as sensations. Throughout the article, I use an interlude structure that shifts between theoretical elaborations, narrative vignettes that contextualise the poetic practice, and the poems themselves initiated in the field. A continuum between visuality and multi-sensoriality emerges and potentially deepens human appreciation of flora. Poetic enquiry into flora is a means for exploring this continuum towards an understanding of what intimacy with plants in a place entails. (shrink)

Abstract:This essay follows the recent discourse on two phenomena: the tendency of hegemony to incorporate subversive cultures, and the digital reanimation of prominent dead people. At the intersection of these phenomena lies what we call “cultural necromancy,” a special case of hegemonic incorporation that aesthetically manipulates the physical presence of a deceased figure in the service of power. This essay explores historical analogues to cultural necromancy and how the digital age has accelerated the process through examples ranging from medieval saints (...) to Lenin’s mausoleum to the Tupac hologram. It then examines cultural necromancy’s implications for counterculture and resistance. (shrink)

Hume believes that distinctively moral sentiments can only be felt from a disinterested perspective. While much scholarly attention has been paid to the question of how Hume believes we “correct” our moral sentiments to form a coherent moral language, less has been paid to the question of why we first adopt this disinterested vantage point. Answering this question involves determining what, for Hume, enables our disinterested point of view to influence us despite the fact that the sentiments produced by our (...) parochial vantage points are originally stronger. I term this the “influence question.” I contend that Hume has two answers to this question: one in the Treatise and one in the second Enquiry. While the former is based upon our ability to share sentiments with others via sympathy, the latter holds that our disinterested vantage point enables us to found the “party of humankind” upon the universal principle of humanity. I argue that Hume saw this latter answer as rectifying a certain deficiency in his Treatise explanation and that his later answer supports Hume’s aim of demonstrating that morality is a fundamentally social phenomenon. (shrink)

While it is widely held that normative reflection is an effective means of controlling our emotions, it has proven to be notoriously difficult to provide a plausible model of such control. How could reflection on the normative status of our emotions be a means of controlling them? Higher-order models of reflective control give a special role to higher-order beliefs and judgments about the normative status of our emotions in controlling our emotions, but in doing so claim that higher-order beliefs and (...) judgments have more control over our emotional lives than they in fact have, and fail to explain some of the central features of reflective control. First-order models of reflective control give a special role to first-order evaluative beliefs and perceptions about the objects of our emotions in controlling our emotions, but in doing so fail to explain how normative reflection could be a distinctive means of controlling our emotions at all. In this essay, I defend a model of reflective control which avoids the twin pitfalls of the higher-order and first-order models of reflective control, while learning from them both. I defend a model according to which normative reflection is a means of bringing our emotions under the control of reflective reason, where an emotion’s being under the control of reflective reason is to be understood in terms of its being under the control of one’s first-order evaluative beliefs and perceptions in accordance with one’s reflective commitments. (shrink)

Suffering is a central component of our lives. Our bodies break and become diseased. Our feelings get hurt, loved ones die, our goals are frustrated, our expectations are not met. It is a commonplace to think that suffering is, all and everywhere, bad. But might suffering also be good? If so, in what ways might suffering have positive, as well as negative, value? The papers collected for the this volume are original works by experts in a variety of disciplines that (...) address questions about the nature and value of suffering, its relation to other mental states and capacities, and to vital questions in ethics, theology, and aesthetic. This chapter examines the nature and value of emotions suffering in criminal punishment: what is emotional suffering, and can it be justified as as a form of legal punishment? (shrink)

The author explores disability in K-12 schools where attitudes, beliefs, and practices shape the school culture and influence enduring perceptions about disability among school professionals, students, and their families. Drawing on recent conversations among moral philosophers who view disability as a central feature of human life that has yet to enrich understanding of ourselves and others, the author encourages the practice of reform grounded in a process that begins with a “suspicion of the self” and a willingness to risk the (...) personal. (shrink)

In an essay entitled ‘The Nobility of Sight’, Hans Jonas argues that ‘[s] ince the days of Greek philosophy sight has been recognized as the most excellent of senses’ (Jonas, 1954, p.507). Seeking to account for the historical elevation of vision over other forms of sensory engagement with the world, Jonas contends that ‘[t]he unique distinction of sight consists in what we may call the image performance, where “image” implies three characteristics: (1) simultaneity in the presentation of a manifold; (2) (...) neutralization of the causality of sense-affection; (3) distance in the spatial and mental senses’ (ibid.). In the case of (1), what distinguishes sight from other senses is the fact that it can give us both dynamic and static reality: our eyes can survey a whole field of possible percepts as well as focus directly upon a fixed object (ibid., pp.508–9). In the case of (2), what further marks out vision is that it does not require the perceiver and the object of perception to be directly engaged — the ‘dynamic’ relation between the two is, in Jonas’ words, ‘neutralized’ (ibid., p.514). And in the case of (3), seeing’s inimitability is also guaranteed by its being ‘the only sense in which the advantage lies not in proximity but in distance: the best view is by no means the closest view’ (ibid., pp.517–8). (shrink)

This essay arises out of a concern to understand how categories of racial, ethnic, and cultural difference--particularly between women--have been constructed in the past, in order to explore how these categories continue to be reproduced in more recent political and ideological conflicts. Until very recently, feminist theory relating to the writing of history has tended to emphasize questions of gender and their articulation with class, with the result that issues of "race" have been overlooked.Focusing on ideas about whiteness and the (...) various constructions of white racial identity can offer new avenues of thought and action to those working to understand and dismantle systems of racial domination. The recognition that the lives of women of color are inescapably prescribed by definitions of race as well as gender can also be applied to women who fall into the category "white."This essay argues for a feminist theory of history that inquires into the construction and reproduction of racialized femininities. Focusing on images and ideas about white womanhood produced at particular points in the past, examples from the author's book Beyond the Pale illustrate a range of questions that flow from having a perspective of race, class, and gender. The essay looks briefly at the idea of historical memory, using a discussion of oral history to consider ways in which social memory of Empire is continually affected and transformed by cultural forms in the present.Finally, by taking apart various constructions of white femininity in two narratives of cultural conflict, the essay demonstrates how a historically informed and "antiracist" feminism might intervene differently in debates about contemporary politics. (shrink)

In the last three decades, we in the West have seen nationalism turn from an apparently progressive force, as in Cuba, Vietnam, and many countries in Africa, into a negative force of degenerating chaos, as in Yugoslavia, the Soviet Union, Sri Lanka, and Rwanda. Elsewhere, during the same decades, the record of nationalism has been, or at least been perceived to have been, more mixed, for example in Belgium, Canada, and India. The assessments themselves are uncertain and suspect, however. Maybe (...) nationalism was not so clearly progressive or so clearly retrogressive where we had previously thought it so. Maybe we misjudge its ambivalence elsewhere. Maybe we are not even dealing with the same kind of phenomenon.More generally, we have yet to understand the role of nationalism in two world wars and countless imperialist incursions. We have only the vaguest ideas of its connection to social ideologies and movements like racism, fascism, and Nazism and little understanding of its relevance to economic systems like capitalism and socialism. (shrink)

Mark White has developed a provocative skepticism about antitrust law. I first argue against three claims that are essential to his argument: the state may legitimately constrain or punish only conduct that violates someone’s rights, the market’s purpose is coordinating and maximizing individual autonomy, and property rights should be completely insulated from democratic deliberation. I then sketch a case that persons might have a right to a competitive market. If so, antitrust law does deal with conduct that violates rights. The (...) main thread running throughout the article is that what counts as a legitimate exercise of property rights is dynamic, sensitive to various external conditions, and is the proper object of democratic deliberation. (shrink)