Are contemporary soldiers exploited by the state and society that they defend? More specifically, have America's professional service members disproportionately carried the moral weight of America's war-fighting decisions since the inception of an all-volunteer force? In this volume, Michael J. Robillard and Bradley J. Strawser, who have both served in the military, examine the question of whether and how American soldiers have been exploited in this way. Robillard and Strawser offer an original normative theory of 'moral exploitation'--the notion (...) that persons or groups can be wrongfully exploited by being made to shoulder an excessive amount of moral weight. They make the case that this exploitation accurately describes the relationship between the United States and the members of its military, and offer a thorough and in-depth analysis of some of the exploitative and misleading elements of present-day military recruitment, the moral burdens soldiers often bear, and the stifling effect that a 'Thank You for Your Service' and 'I support the troops' culture has had on serious public engagement about America's ongoing wars. Robillard and Strawser offer a piercing critique of the pernicious divide between military members and the civilians who direct them. They conclude by arguing for several normative and prudential prescriptions to help close this ever-widening fissure between the U.S. and its military, and within the U.S. itself. In so doing, their work gives a much needed and urgent voice to America's soldiers, the other 1%. (shrink)

There have been two recent strands of argument arguing for the pro tanto impermissibility of fully autonomous weapon systems. On Sparrow's view, AWS are impermissible because they generate a morally problematic ‘responsibility gap’. According to Purves et al., AWS are impermissible because moral reasoning is not codifiable and because AWS are incapable of acting for the ‘right’ reasons. I contend that these arguments are flawed and that AWS are not morally problematic in principle. Specifically, I contend that these arguments presuppose (...) an incoherent conception of an AWS as somehow making genuine decisions but not being morally responsible for those very same decisions. Rather than conceiving of AWS in this way, I argue that an AWS is either a socially-constructed institution that has been physically instantiated or it is a genuine agent. If it is the former, then we should treat AWS as we do any other collective action problem. If it is the latter, then we should treat AWS as responsibility-bearers, but also as bearers of rights and/or interests. To reject this disjunction is not only conceptually incoherent but also potentially morally dangerous. (shrink)

ABSTRACTThe profession of arms is distinct from other professions for many reasons. One reason which is not so obvious is that, unlike members of other professions, soldiers may go their entire careers preparing for a day that never arrives. All things considered, we should think this to be a very good thing. For soldiers, however, this can feel somewhat odd, since there is a natural desire to want to feel useful and to see one’s role and purpose find realization. Accordingly, (...) the common soldier is forced to adopt a rather paradoxical mindset, one of longing for peace, and therefore for uselessness, while at the same time longing to be useful, which would entail that there be a war. This latter desire to be useful and to vindicate one’s identity as a soldier can sometimes take on an unhealthy life of its own. The pull of wanting too strongly to live up to a warrior identity, I argue, can sometimes skew a soldier’s ability to assess risk rationally. This article will therefore investigate how a soldier’s c... (shrink)

For it's Tommy this, an' Tommy that, an' "Chuck him out, the brute!"But it's "Saviour of 'is country" when the guns begin to shoot;An' it's Tommy this, an' Tommy that, an' anything you please;An' T...

As concepts, communication and information are very closely related, but they also designate more than their usual conceptual meaning when they are called upon in social theories as well as in philosophical theories about the reality and the truth of social life; information and communication are then designating physical events or event like objects of the observable reality, which will be hereafter described as a procedural ontologization of information. Why do they have this role and how do they play it (...) in contemporary social sciences and philosophy of social sciences? This article questions the scientificity of these concepts in these theoretical contexts. It wants to propose a framework for an epistemology of communication and information that is critical about the cybernetician paradigm in the social sciences. It presents this paradigm’s main features: informational ontology and probabilistic sociality. It offers a critique of this paradigm’s epistemological and methodological pretensions. It finally exposes the basis of an alternative philosophical theory of communication that wants to support the thesis that the cybernetician paradigmatic communication theory is not scientifically productive; and that it cannot be used in social scientific theoretical contexts without being dramatically redesigned and reoriented towards new goals. (shrink)

Ce livre, remarquable d’érudition, regroupe huit articles écrits entre 1990 et 1995, publiés dans différentes revues spécialisées durant la même période, et rassemblés en trois parties en raison des thèmes généraux qui s’en dégagent, soit l’épistémologie des sciences sociales, la théorie et l’analyse politique, et l’éthique. Vu l’espace restreint alloué ici, nous n’en présenterons que la thèse principale en tentant de mettre succinctement en relief quelques-unes de ses implications épistémologiques et méthodologiques.

Michael Robillard and Bradley Strawser’s Outsourcing Duty: The Moral Exploitation of the American Soldier (New York: Oxford University Press, 2022) is outstanding. The arguments in it are important, new, and powerful, and it is extremely well-written. It is accessibly written, including eye-opening personal stories (including the authors’ stories), an interesting array of economic and sociological studies, and colorful illustrative quotes from The Bourne Legacy, The Handmaid’s Tale, and Rudyard Kipling’s poem, Tommy. It also includes colorful-and-caustic comments on the Bush- (...) and Obama-administrations’ decisions regarding going to war and staying at war that nicely highlight what is at stake. In short, the book is a tour de force. (shrink)

This paper critically assesses Edmund Husserl's concept of the ‘life-world’, found in his Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology. We argue that Husserl's phenomenology fails to consider the social and material arrangements that allow subjectivity to emerge in our shared world. We begin by outlining the concept as formulated in Husserl’s Crisis. We then entertain Husserl’s critique by his most famous student, Martin Heidegger. We suggest a reformulation of intersubjectivity, along the lines of Heidegger’s mitdasein, accounts for subjectivity as (...) it emerges in the shared world. Next, we introduce ethnomethodology, pioneered by Harold Garfinkel, which gives sociological support to this argument. Through the ethnomethodological disability studies of A.B. Robillard, we argue that the life-world is not always as democratic as Husserl's philosophy may suggest. This shows the necessity of disability politics. We end by asking what a phenomenology sensitive to this fact might look like, in terms of both disability studies and phenomenological philosophy more generally. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:HUME'S BUNDLES, SELF-CONSCIOUSNESS AND KANT Even if we are inclined to view Hume's attempt to explain ascriptions of personal identity as an abysmal failure, we might still be sympathetic toward his proposal to replace the going substance theory of the nature of mind with his bundle account. Thus we might fault Hume for erecting an unachievably high standard for personal identity, or round on him for excluding bodily criteria (...) 2... from his solution, but nonetheless applaud his spiriting away of the Cartesian soul substance leaving his "true idea of the human mind" (261) as a collection of perceptions in its stead. However, Hume's concern to give an account of the idea of the unity of a human mind in terms of related perceptions has run into notoriously rough sledding, not the least of which is the fact that Hume himself in his Appendix to "Of Personal Identity" seems to abandon his bundle theory in despair. In this paper I shall first be concerned to examine the criticism of his bundle theory which Hume brings forth in the Appendix and explain why I think the core difficulty remains insoluble for Hume. I shall then go on to suggest that the unworkability of Húmete bundle theory is directly tied to his failure to appreciate certain features of the peculiarly first person nature of his question about the make-up of minds. In thus emphasizing the place of the first person voice in my interpretation I am stealing a leaf, if not a chapter, from Kant. But this is as it should be since one of the aims of this essay is to provide an interpretation of Hume's difficulties with his account of the nature of mind which explains part of the reason why 'self-consciousness' (or 'apperception') looms so very large in the Critique of Pure Reason attack upon Hume's type of bundle theory. 60. 1. Hume's Second Thoughts In a burst of self criticism at the Appendix to the section on personal identity, Hume brings forth this objection to his own efforts:...Having thus loosen' d all our particular perceptions, when I proceed to explain the principle of connexion, which binds them together, and makes us attribute to them a real simplicity and identity; I am sensible, that my account is very defective, and that nothing but the seeming evidence of the precedent reasonings cou'd have indue' d me to receive it (635). After additional reflections Hume encapsulates his objection thus:...All my hopes vanish, when I come to explain the principles, that unite our successive perceptions in our thought or consciousness (6SS-6). What is the defect Hume calls to our attention? Notice first that the footnote on page 635 explicitly refers us back to that part of his account Hume considers defective; and when we look back to the text of the Treatise in question, page 260, we find it is precisely there that Hume uses the analogy of a republic to sketch his bundle theory of the unity of mind in terms of the two associative principles, resemblance and causation. So it must somehow be that this account in terms of the associative principles is mistaken. But what then is the mistake? According to Hume it is that he cannot 'explain' the principles which unite the discrete percepts. Now it seems to me there are only two possible things Hume could mean in saying this. He could mean either (1) that the principles which connect the percepts of one mind are instances of the associative principles, but he cannot explain them; or (2) there must be other, non-associative, principles which connect the percepts of a single mind and these he cannot explain. 61. I think we can safely conclude (1) cannot represent Hume's misgivings when he says he is unable to explain the uniting principles of the mental bundles. There is first the fact that he does not call into question his general programme of accounting for the nature of the unity of complex things by the principles of causation, resemblance and contiguity — for example, ships, plants, animals, houses and rivers (e.g. 257f) — but only his... (shrink)

In verse twelve of the Tao Te Ching, Lao Tzu makes a curious claim about the five flavors; namely that they cause people not to taste or that they jade the palate. The five flavors are: sweet, sour, salt, bitter and spicy or hot as in 'heat'. To the Western mind, the claim, 'The five flavors cause them [persons] to not taste,' is counterintuitive; on the contrary, the presence of the five flavors in a dish or in a meal would (...) expand or enhance the senses and the palate, i.e., taste would be augmented by the five flavors. So what is the plausible meaning of the Taoistic claim? To answer this question, I look very briefly at the history of the doctrine of the five flavors and the history of Chinese cuisine. Lao Tzu probably has Confucian feasts in mind in making such a claim, but other interpretations are discussed. (shrink)

In this study, I surveyed students' evaluative perceptions of instructor behavior and their possible influence on academic dishonesty. Slightly over 20% of 1,369 student respondents admitted to academic dishonesty in at least 1 class during 1 term at college. Students who admitted to acts of academic dishonesty had lower overall evaluations of instructor behavior than students who reported not committing academic dishonesty. Implications for student learning and the enhancement of academic integrity in the classroom are discussed.

Commentary with 11 supercommentaries, on Brahmasūtra of Bādarāyaṇa, work on Vedanta philosophy.

Hegel’s basic position so far on the various meanings of evil as necessary and thereby intelligible directly in the development of spirit might be summed up as follows. Evil is always a necessary moment of instability which gives impetus in the movement from various meanings of particularity to various meanings of universality; from the more abstract expression of potential unity and truth to the more actualized notion and unity.