When a liberal-democratic state signs a treaty or wages a war, does its whole polity do those things? In this article, we approach this question via the recent social ontological literature on collective agency. We provide arguments that it does and that it does not. The arguments are presented via three considerations: the polity's control over what the state does; the polity's unity; and the influence of individual polity members. We suggest that the answer to our question differs for different (...) liberal-democratic states and depends on two underlying considerations: the amount of discretion held by the state's officeholders; the extent to which the democratic procedure is deliberative rather than aggregative. (shrink)

Doctors form an essential part of an effective response to the COVID-19 pandemic. We argue they have a duty to participate in pandemic response due to their special skills, but these skills vary between different doctors, and their duties are constrained by other competing rights. We conclude that while doctors should be encouraged to meet the demand for medical aid in the pandemic, those who make the sacrifices and increased efforts are owed reciprocal obligations in return. When reciprocal obligations are (...) not met, doctors are further justified in opting out of specific tasks, as long as this is proportionate to the unmet obligation. (shrink)

Plausibly, only moral agents can bear action-demanding duties. Not all groups are moral agents. This places constraints on which groups can bear action-demanding duties. Moreover, if such duties imply ability then moral agents – of both the individual and group varieties – can only bear duties over actions they are able to perform. I tease out the implications of this for duties over group actions, and argue that groups in many instances cannot bear these duties. This is because only groups (...) with the right kind of structure – groups I call ‘collectives’ – have the agency to bear action-demanding duties. Yet neither can individuals bear these duties, assuming that individuals cannot perform group actions and that duty implies ability. This appears to leave us at a loss when assigning duties to perform some group actions. I argue we can solve this problem by assigning collectivization duties to individuals – duties to form a collective that then incurs a duty over the action. I give criteria for when individuals have collectivization duties and discuss the demands these duties place on their bearers. (shrink)

This article argues that the ‘Third Way’ philosophy that has been adopted by centre-left parties throughout Europe and the United States provides the conceptual framework to analyse contemporary postfeminism and its contentious micro-politics that emerges out of personal and daily gender-based struggles. The notion of a postfeminist micro-politics complicates the critical perception of postfeminism as a depoliticized and anti-feminist backlash and offers a dynamic model of political action that takes into account the multiple agency positions of individuals today. Postfeminism and (...) the politics it endorses differ from emergent political movements such as third wave feminism in that they are not founded on second wave feminist theory and activism. Instead, postfeminist politics adopts a Third Way perspective to reconcile a number of conflicting concerns, from feminist calls for female equality and theoretical debates on anti-essentialism to the consumerist demands of capitalist society. These controversial new junctures are examined by paying particular attention to postfeminism’s female sexual agent who becomes the ‘entrepreneur’ of her own image, buying into standardized femininities while also seeking to resignify their meanings. In particular, the article discusses the paradoxical possibilities of ‘active consumption’ and ‘fashion feminism’ whereby women endeavour to achieve empowerment by exerting their consumer agency and using their bodies as political tools within the parameters of a capitalist economy. (shrink)

Contrapower sexual harassment occurs when the target of harassment possesses greater formal organizational power than the perpetrator. Traditional conceptualizations of power underlying sexual harassment have either focused on location within organizational hierarchies or sociocultural status differences between men and women. We suggest the utility of simultaneously considering the influence of gender, race, and class on power dynamics at organizational, sociocultural, and interpersonal or individual levels. Using qualitative data obtained from 8 focus groups, 20 interviews, and 1 in-depth case study, we (...) examine how gender, race, and class influence varied sources of power available to perpetrators and targets in workplace contrapower situations. We argue that the exploration of the dynamics involved in contrapower sexual harassment can illuminate broader processes of doing gender and power in the workplace. (shrink)

Individuals sometimes pass their duties on to collectives, which is one way in which collectives can come to have duties. The collective discharges its duties by acting through its members, which involves distributing duties back out to individuals. Individuals put duties in and get (transformed) duties out. In this paper we consider whether (and if so, to what extent) this general account can make sense of states' duties. Do some of the duties we typically take states to have come from (...) individuals having passed on certain individual duties? There are complications: states can discharge their duties by contracting fulfilment out to non-members; states seem able to dissolve the duties of non-members; and some of states' duties are not derived in this way. We demonstrate that these complicate, but do not undermine, the general account and its application to states. And the application has an interesting upshot: by asking which individuals robustly participate in this process of duty transfer-and-transformation with a given state, we can begin to get a grip on who counts as a member of that state. (shrink)

There has long been interest in identifying and studying ‘‘successful psychopaths.” This study sampled psychologists with an interest in law, attorneys, and clinical psychology professors to obtain descriptions of individuals considered to be psychopaths who were also successful in their endeavors. The results showed a consistent description across professions and convergence with descriptions of traditional psychopathy, though the successful psychopathy profile had higher scores on conscientiousness, as measured within the five-factor model (FFM). These results are useful in documenting the existence (...) of successful psychopathy, demonstrating the potential benefit of informant methodology, and providing an FFM description that distinguishes successful psychopaths from unsuccessful psychopaths studied more routinely within prison settings. (shrink)

Realist theories of legislative intent can be divided between aggregative theories (on which legislative intent is what some proportion of legislators intend) and common intent theories (on which legislative intent is a unanimous intent among legislators). In this paper, we advance and defend an alternative realist conception of legislative intent: the Rational Unity Account. On this account, the legislature is an agent with a distinctive ‘rational point of view’—a concept we adopt from social ontology. The legislature’s rational point of view (...) is shaped by its procedures and structures, in ways not determined by either a common intention held by legislators or an aggregation of the intentions of legislators. We explain how our view improves on existing accounts. We then apply it to three cases to demonstrate its implications for legal interpretation. Importantly, on the proposed account, legislative intent can depart from what individual legislators think or know. (shrink)

Vices are often attributed to corporations. We hear that casinos are ‘greedy,’ mining companies are ‘ruthless,’ or tobacco companies are ‘dishonest.’ This chapter addresses two questions. First, are such corporate vices reducible to the vices of individual role-bearers? Second, which traits of corporations are properly labelled ‘vices’? The chapter argues that corporate vice is sometimes irreducible to the vices of role-bearers: corporations can be vicious ‘over and above’ the traits of role-bearers. It further argues that different corporations should be held (...) to different standards: what it means for a casino to be ‘vicious’ is different from what it means for a mining company to be ‘vicious,’ for example. (shrink)

Objective This work disentangles moral tolerance from moral relativism and reveals their distinct personological meanings. Both constructs have long been of interest to moral philosophers, moral psychologists, and everyday people, and they may play prominent roles in the feasibility of modern diverse societies. However, they have been criticized as devaluing morality and as producing overly permissive societies. Moreover, although they lack necessary conceptual implications for each other, they are easily (and often) conflated. -/- Method Three studies included nine samples (total (...) N > 3,200, 40%–50% female, Mage = 38–40, 83% white). Participants completed (online) new measures of moral tolerance and moral relativism, along with measures of 40 additional constructs. -/- Results Results reveal robust psychometric quality of the new measures (the Moral Relativism Scale and the Moral Tolerance Scale), demonstrate that the constructs are empirically overlapping but separable, and highlight their distinct personological networks. Moral relativism was associated with liberal political views and a lowered valuing/enacting of moral values. Moral tolerance was weakly associated with liberal political views but was strongly related to a broad range of both liberal and conservative moral values. -/- Conclusion This work yields new tools for investigating moral character, and it reveals the differential meaning of two important moral constructs. (shrink)

This chapter asks whether there is a human right to close personal relationships. It begins by providing a prima facie argument in favour of such a right: humans’ interests in close personal relationships are important, universal, and fundamental. It then explains that there are problems with the distribution, demandingness, and motivation of the correlative duties. The result is that each individual bears a human right only to ‘intimacy consideration’, not to close personal relationships themselves. The chapter then argues that things (...) are different if we conceptualize the right as belonging to groups, rather than to individuals. It is argued that groups of co-intimates have rights that others respect, protect, and promote the group’s intimacy. The duties correlative to such group-held rights do not face the problems of distribution, demandingness, and motivation that plague the individually-held right. Group-held rights in this arena are an important moral and political tool. (shrink)

Many roles are situated within organizations. The occupants of these roles often confront a dilemma between (i) the occupancy conditions, performance conditions, and functions of the role, as bestowed upon the role by the organization’s decision-making procedures, and (ii) the occupancy conditions, performance conditions, and function that the role should ideally have. This chapter argues that this dilemma should be resolved in favour of (ii). Yet this does not require forgoing role-based considerations in favour of extra-role considerations. Instead, we should (...) conceptualize organizationally specified roles as being one token of an underlying role-type. The underlying role-type provides the organizational role-token with its fundamental occupancy conditions, performance conditions, and function. When the token is a poor instance of its type, organizational role-occupants have obligations—grounded in the fundamental aspects of the role—to challenge this. These are role obligations that call upon one to alter one’s role obligations. (shrink)

Theorists of democratic multiculturalism have long-defended individuals’ religious exemptions from generally-applicable laws. Examples include Sikhs being exempt from motorcycle helmet laws, or Jews and Muslims being exempt from humane animal slaughter laws. This paper investigates religious exemptions for organisations. Should organisations ever be granted exemptions from generally-applicable laws in democratic societies, where those exemptions are justified by the organisation’s religion? The paper considers four arguments for this, which respectively rely on: the ‘transferring up’ to organisations of individuals’ claims to autonomy (...) or recognition; organisations’ own claims to autonomy or recognition; organisations’ status in the accountability-community; and organisations’ procedural constraints. The paper concludes that only the last argument works—and then, only with caveats. (shrink)

When an organisation does wrong, each of the members is part of the entity that authored that wrong—or so I shall assume. But it does not follow that each of the members has herself done wrong. Doing wrong, I will assume, results from the combination of two conditions: first, authoring (or being part of the entity that authored) a harm; and second, lacking an excuse for that (part-) authorship. To answer my title question, then, we have to know which members (...) of an organisation have excuses for their part-authorship of an organisation’s wrong. I will argue that members gain excuses for their part-authorship only by using their role in the organisation to signal their disavowal of the organisation’s wrongdoing. The answer to the title question, then, is “all those members who don’t use their role to signal their disavowal of the organisation’s wrongdoing.” In the final section, I apply my proposal to citizens of liberal democratic states. This supports the common-sense intuition that, when such states do wrong, wrong is done by those citizens who support or acquiesce in the wrongful policy. (shrink)

Boyer's cognitive model of ownership, based on cooperation and competition, underscores the importance of studying disagreements in ownership. We argue that exploring the factors that can lead to different perceptions and experiences of ownership will uniquely inform our understanding of legal, psychological, and perceived ownership beliefs.

We present evidence supporting the target article's assertion that while the presentation of base-rate information in a natural frequency format can be helpful in enhancing sensitivity to base rates, method of presentation is not a panacea. Indeed, we review studies demonstrating that when subjects directly experience base rates as natural frequencies in a trial-by-trial setting, they evince large base-rate neglect.

This Introduction offers a conceptualization of the Indo-Pacific, its islands and their place within the history of science. We argue that Indo-Pacific islands present a remarkable combination of social, political and spatial circumstances, which speak to themes that are central to the history of science. Having driven movements of people and represented staging grounds for explorations, expansions and cross-cultural exchanges, these spaces have been at the forefront of historical change. The historiographies of the two oceans have traditionally emphasized indigenous agency (...) while downplaying European historical trajectories, and therefore they provide historians of science with materials and methodologies that promise nuanced portrayals of knowledge production in cross-cultural settings. Rather than unifying the oceans into a cohesive narrative, we seek to uncover the many horizons of Indo-Pacific worlds and pluralize the spaces within which knowledge travelled at specific times, but not at others. Offering a middle plane between the globe and the region, islands are particularly productive sites for such analyses, as they bring to attention both localized kinds of agency and the impacts of colonialism and globalization. This special issue investigates what happens to knowledge within island spaces and demonstrates that even as small strips of land, islands can significantly enhance our understanding of the practices of knowledge making within the broader contours of world history. In bringing to the fore the contributions of actors from across the wider social spectrum and, especially, the interacting roles of indigenous agents and their traditions, Indo-Pacific worlds thus offer exciting new directions for a field which has often been dominated by a focus on European institutions. (shrink)

Open Humanities Press, Living Books About Life Series.

Que serait la philosophie de Platon sans Socrate ou l'écriture des dialogues? Que resterait-il du travail de Montaigne sans le 'maistre des maistres' socratique ou la 'manière' des Essais? Enfin, l'œuvre de Rancière aurait-elle la même teneur sans Joseph Jacotot, figure incontournable de 'maître ignorant'? La pensée de ces trois auteurs n'existe pas indépendamment de ces figures et de ces écritures si particulières. On ne saurait résumer leurs philosophies, par ailleurs très singulières et différentes, à quelques questions, thèses ou concepts, (...) en les amputant de la mise en scène de ces figures de maîtres si frappantes ou de l'invention stylistique qui leur donne corps et redouble, par les choix d'écriture, leurs gestes philosophiques. Ceci reviendrait à les trahir et à s'interdire l'expérience d'un autre rapport au savoir qu'elles nous invitent à vivre, chacune à sa façon. Cet ouvrage étudie comment ces trois philosophes pensent, à travers ces incarnations, leur relation aux savoirs de leur temps et dans quelle mesure les figures et les écritures de maîtres ignorants qu'ils composent et mobilisent dans leurs textes leur permettent de faire expérimenter au lecteur les gestes philosophiques significatifs de ce rapport au savoir."--Page 4 of cover. (shrink)

We apply Carol Gilligan's distinction between a "male" mode of moral reasoning, focussed on justice, and a "female" mode, focussed on caring, to the reading of literature. Martha Nussbaum suggests that certain novels are works of moral philosophy. We argue that what Nussbaum sees as the special ethical contribution of such novels is in fact training in the stereotypically female mode of moral concern. We show this kind of training is appropriate to all readers of these novels, not just to (...) women. Finally, we explore what else is involved in distinctively feminist readings of traditional novels. (shrink)

The "Dark Side" of Humour. An Analysis of Subversive Humour in Workplace Emails Although a substantial amount of research has investigated the various functions of humour in a workplace context, electronic means of communication have largely been ignored. This is particularly surprising since electronic communication in the workplace is increasingly gaining significance. This seems to be especially true for email, which in many workplaces is the preferred medium for communicating transactional as well as relational topics. Drawing on a corpus of (...) about 100 emails collected in an academic setting, we explore how humour is used in workplace emails. Our specific focus is on subversive humour, which often functions as a tool to express frustration and dissent, and ultimately to challenge existing power relations. Our analysis illustrates that subversive humour is an excellent means to make fun of established and normative workplace practices by exaggerating and ridiculing them, and to re-define organisational reality by offering alternative interpretations. These functions of subversive humour appear to be particularly useful for those in relatively powerful positions: by employing humour to convey critical and potentially threatening messages in acceptable ways, the senders manage to express their dissent and frustration with the wider organisational system while, at the same time, escaping the scrutiny of the very organisation that they are symbolically challenging. (shrink)

The Dark Posthuman: Dehumanization, Technology, and the Atlantic World explores how liberal humanism first enlivened, racialized, and gendered global cartographies, and how memory, ancestry, expression, and other aspects of social identity founded in its theories and practices made for the advent of the category of the posthuman through the dimensions of cultural, geographic, political, social, and scientific classification. The posthuman is very much the product of world-building narratives that have their beginnings in the commercial franchise and are fundamentally rooted in (...) science, governance, and economics around the hegemonic appropriation of environments and commodification of bodies that initially fuelled white settler life worlds and continue to be operational in the way we conceive of these worlds as continuous ontological formations. The want has always been for ownership of any of these dimensions of being without regard to condition, to not remain stranded as the subsidiary of another's being, to another's claim to humanity, and finally, to escape the suffocating confines of an instrumental ontology that suggests a subcategory of humanity without rights onto itself. The Dark Posthuman distinguishes the posthuman's place within both the liberal and neoliberal imaginary and reveals how its appearance first entrenched itself through the avarice of English settler colonialism, and subsequently, through the paranoia of American slavery. This same figure of the posthuman played a crucial role in the functional adaptation of Cold War behavioural cybernetics, and thereafter, in the fetishization of technology within the era of global financialization. The shadowing of this arrangement during and beyond the long duration of humanity's domination of this world becomes the structural web work of this book. Stephanie Polsky is an interdisciplinary writer and academic working in the areas of Media Studies and Visual Culture. Her work explores the confluence of power around race and gender as technologies of governance. She has lectured widely in media and cultural studies, critical theory, and visual culture at a number of prestigious institutions including Goldsmiths University, Regent's University London, University of Greenwich, and Winchester School of Art. Most recently she has worked at California College of the Arts in Critical Studies and Diversity Studies. She holds a PhD in Visual Cultures from Goldsmiths, University of London and an MA in Media Studies from the University of Sussex. Her books include The End of the Future: Governing Consequence in the Age of Digital Sovereignty (Academica Press, 2019), Ignoble Displacement: Dispossessed Capital in Neo-Dickensian London (Zero Books, 2015), and Walter Benjamin's Transit: A Destructive Tour of Modernity (Academica Press, 2009). (shrink)

Foodscapes, the ways and places in which human beings interact with food, are dominated by the global agri-food system. In many ways, it has never been easier to access such varieties or quantities of food. Be it in restaurants, supermarkets or local markets, food is often only a quick purchase away from the plate. In spite of that, there are persons who choose to follow alternative paths, moving away from reliance on the conventional system by engaging in practices of food (...) self-reliance. In this paper, using the analytical lenses of behavioural, social innovation and social practice theories, we explore why and how people strive for self-reliance and self-governing their foodscapes. We apply these lenses to data gathered from site visits and in-depth interviews with those engaged in self-reliant practices in Flanders. The practices we encountered range from permaculture to transition towns and illustrate the diverse alternative foodscapes found in Flanders. Our research reveals that while practices—and the people who engage in them—may at first appear distinct, they have commonalities as well, including similar values, needs, goals and more. These diverse elements combine to create, reshape and sustain practices within foodscapes. By further understanding the motivational, biogeophysical and social underpinnings that enable them we reveal a diverse, yet connected, continuum of practices. (shrink)

Couples therapy has long been regarded as one of the most demanding forms of psychotherapy because of the way it challenges therapists to combine the insights of dynamic psychology with the power and clarity of systems dynamics. In this exciting new volume, Gordon Wheeler and Stephanie Backman, couples therapists with broad training and long years of experience, present dramatic new approaches that at last integrate the dynamic/self-organizational and the systemic/behavioral schools of thought. Building on the insights of Gestalt psychology (...) and psychotherapy, the authors show us how a truly phenomenological approach, based on the clients' own experience and goals, holds the key to a dramatic increase in therapeutic power and flexibility. The fifteen engaging chapters demonstrate the application of this approach to issues of intimacy, self-construction, power and abuse, "resistance," growth, and shame - and to such diverse and challenging populations as abuse survivors and their partners, remarried couples, gay and lesbian couples, and couples with "personality" or "character" disorders. In the process, the authors offer a fresh perspective that will serve to re-energize the couples therapist's work in this challenging area. _On Intimate Ground_ contributes new insights to many of the most timely and provocative questions in the field today. (shrink)

What is justice? How do we know justice? How is justice cultivated in society? These are the three questions that guide this critical dialogue with two representatives of the Catholic and Protestant traditions: Karl Barth and Karol Wojtyla/John Paul II. Though the two thought leaders are shaped within divergent theological traditions and historical contexts, they both appeal to Christian anthropology as a starting point for justice. Their explorations into the nature of humanity yield robust new theories of justice that remain (...) relevant for our contemporary era. The third interlocutor brings her own voice fully into the dialogue in the third part of the book in order to address the shortcomings in their theories and build upon their insights, all the while seeking theories of humanity and social justice that result in justice for all persons. --back cover. (shrink)

The goal of this study is to characterize observers’ abilities to detect gradual changes and to explore putative dissociations between conscious experience of change and behavioral adaptation to a changing stimulus. We developed a new experimental paradigm in which, on each trial, participants were shown a dot pattern on the screen. Next, the pattern disappeared and participants had to reproduce it. In some conditions, the target pattern was incrementally rotated over successive trials and participants were either informed or not of (...) this change. We analyzed both awareness of the changes and the dynamics of behavioral adaptation, in a way that makes it possible to assess both variability and accuracy as they change over time. Results indicate a dissociation between change awareness and behavioral adaptation to the changes, and support the notion that unconscious representations of visual stimuli are more precise and detailed than previously suggested. We discuss the implications of these results for theories of change detection. (shrink)

Modern social order is premised on a shared conception of and obedience to a set of defined temporal systems. Time is therefore a powerful tool with which to layer, classify and police the nature of social order. This article explores the relationship between temporality and the social in China’s capital, Beijing. The article draws on observations of Chinese film of the 1990s, the 90th anniversary of the Chinese Communist Party in 2011, and the Chaoyang district beautification campaign, to identify how (...) temporal structures and symbols are traded and manipulated in the pursuit of political rectification and harmony. The article is based on an extended review of Michael Dutton’s recent book, Beijing Time, and refers its new observations to the examples and premises in that book, which are in turn informed by Dutton’s other work on policing and street life in China. (shrink)

This article discusses the Tang Wei incident, which evolved across the first half of 2008, during the run-up to the Olympic Games in Beijing. Tang Wei is a Chinese actress whose breakthrough role in Ang Lee’s film Lust, Caution caused a sensation amongst Chinese audiences. The nudity and sex scenes in the film were explicit, and as such challenged accepted norms in film content. This aspect of the film, combined with the characterization of a national traitor as a heroine, caused (...) deep concern among some parties involved in film regulation and censorship. The argument presented here is that Tang Wei, who was singled out for criticism and upon whom travel and work restraints were placed in the aftermath of the film’s release, was made a scapegoat for the disgust experienced by a masculinist political class when faced with female dissent and sexuality. (shrink)