bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Introduction
Authors: Hartmann Martin
Published: March 2023

The Introduction sketches the central ideas of the study and offers summaries of its five Parts. It distinguishes the book from various quantitative approaches to the problem of inequality. It introduces notions such as empathy gulf, relative feelings, relational democracy, imaginary equality, union of social unions, narrative scenario, and it discusses some methodological questions. The notion of political psychology is introduced. Further, the book’s main aim of delineating various forms of emotional inequality is distinguished from approaches focusing on epistemic inequalities. Miranda Fricker’s reading of To Kill a Mockingbird is analyzed in terms of the emotions structuring many of the conversational exchanges in the novel.
Empathy as Non-Moral Psychological Mechanism
Authors: Hartmann Martin
Published: March 2023

Chapter 1 explains why empathy is important for a study of the emotional impacts of inequality. The growing literature on the topic is selectively discussed, but also sifted for lacunae and shortcomings. Empathy is treated as an imagination-based and active matching of feelings; it contains evaluative judgments concerning the normative appropriateness of observed or contemplated responses to situations. In general terms, the chosen approach follows Adam Smith’s account of sympathy in The Theory of Moral Sentiments. Many recent accounts of empathy, by contrast, offer a conceptually reductive approach to the topic; they thus overlook the various complex conditions that need to exist if empathy is to get off the ground at all. The role that imagination plays in empathy is emphasized. It is suggested that many authors pay lip service to the role of imagination but shy away from studying its implications.
Sympathy and Imagination
Authors: Hartmann Martin
Published: March 2023

David Hume’s concept of sympathy is introduced and discussed. Sympathy is distinguished from being itself a feeling and treated as psychological mechanism. Of particular interest are its close link to our imaginative capacities and its treatment of comparison as the central mental mechanism involved in both sympathy and imagination. Hume introduces imagination as having an unregulated and a regulated variant and embeds both variants in his larger account of psychological association and habit. This account opens up the analysis of imagination to the many “gentle forces” that shape the concrete workings of our associational capacities. Hume, it is suggested, has an intricate theory of the various factors influencing sympathy and its associated feelings such as pride, love, humility, and hatred.
Does the Comparative Urge Disrupt Sympathy?
Authors: Hartmann Martin
Published: March 2023

The relation between sympathy and comparison in David Hume’s A Treatise of Human Nature is further specified in this chapter. The question considered is under what circumstances sympathy is able to break the comparative mode’s spell, and what the effects of this mode are on the sympathizing self. It is suggested that the comparative mode adds positionality, an identifiable emotional default stance, and a competitive outlook to whatever feelings are communicated by the sympathetic process. Sympathy’s effects on us are always modulated by where we stand relative to others, how we feel, and how we relate to others. Thus, how we feel is often determined to a great extent by where we stand relative to others. Sympathy is never naked or pure; it always occurs within a concrete and socially inflected relationship.
Going Along with the Rich and Powerful
Authors: Hartmann Martin
Published: March 2023

This chapter questions interpretations of Adam Smith that treat him as an early proponent of moral egalitarianism. It proves that the impartial spectator, often seen as voice of equal respect, does condone various forms of social inequality. Also, Smith’s notion of sympathy is open to corroborate given structures of inequality; sympathy with the rich and powerful establishes inequality and stabilizes the social system. Sympathy thus becomes the motor of social differentiation. Although, in his more Stoic moments, Smith considers sympathy with the rich and powerful to be illusory, he does provide abundant psychological material to describe this very same sympathy as fully normal, to be expected, and socially and politically functional.
Absolute versus Relative Inequality
Authors: Hartmann Martin
Published: March 2023

The chapter considers the frequently made distinction between absolute and relative standards of inequality. Considering the many facets of the recent egalitarianism debate in political philosophy, the opposition between absolute and relative standards of inequality has not taken center stage. The chapter, however, reveals that this opposition sits at the heart of some of the debate’s most influential positions (David Miller, Elizabeth Anderson, Derek Parfit, Joseph Raz, Harry Frankfurt). By “absolute standards,” authors usually refer to standards whose validity or plausibility does not depend on comparison. “Relative standards,” on the other hand, depend on comparative measures to gain informational value. Whether I am considered wealthy may depend on my society’s general income level. The point of the chapter is that distinguishing between relative and absolute levels of inequality provides the conceptual means for understanding a specific kind of empathy gulf: one I label “conceptually inspired,” but which could also be taken to inspire a firm denial of relationality.
Material Mathematics
Authors: Lambert Kevin
Published: March 2023

Victorian algebra has been described as a kind of “algorithmic mathematics.” That label has not always been meant positively but this chapter proposes embracing it as both useful and accurate. Algorithmic processes are finite and that finitude calls attention to the materials needed to pursue them. The interest here, then, will be in investigating the materiality of Victorian algorithmic mathematics. Perhaps the most substantial material resources Victorian mathematicians needed in order to pursue their work was a library, and how that resource was obtained and used is the chapter’s central concern. It focuses on two Victorian mathematicians, George Boole and Augustus De Morgan, and how they pursued pure mathematics research with books obtained in and through the resources available in and through, respectively, a Mechanics’ Institute and a personal library. The books and materials they assembled are imagined as creating a kind of virtual reality structured by the particular forms of reasoning they contain and the particular mathematical practices and library procedures the mathematicians employed. The chapter shows how Boole and De Morgan thought with their libraries in order to make new algebras and mathematical objects.
Public Health Law in Practice
Authors: Pomeranz Jennifer L. , Merrill Thomas G. , Schroth Kevin R.J.
Published: March 2023

This book is a public health law textbook specifically for U.S. public health practitioners, advocates and students at the undergraduate, master, and doctoral level. It is the only public health law textbook for a public health audience that includes case law and provides practical information on the practice of public health. This book provides necessary background into law as it relates to the practice of public health, including the government’s authority to promote public health through policies and programs, and limitations on the government’s authority to protect public health. The book also addresses specific topics of deep interest and concern to public health readers and provides information on the mechanics of public health policymaking.
Government Authorities
Authors: Pomeranz Jennifer L. , Merrill Thomas G. , Schroth Kevin R. J.
Published: March 2023

This chapter discusses the authorities of the federal and state governments to support public health. The U.S. Constitution granted the federal government specific powers to pass laws that Congress has used to affect public health. Federal public health policymaking has grown through expanded use of its powers to tax and spend and to regulate interstate commerce. The federal regulatory agencies use their expertise to address public health, the environment, and safety. The states, however, continue to have primary responsibility for protecting the health of their inhabitants through their police power. The Constitution reserved this power for the states. Each state enacts laws pursuant to the police power to protect the public health, safety and welfare, and they additionally have an agency that is responsible for protecting public health. The chapter discusses Jacobson v. Massachusetts, an important Supreme Court decision that affirms the right of the states to pass laws that protect public health. The chapter also covers the authorities utilized by local governments.
Tobacco
Authors: Pomeranz Jennifer L. , Merrill Thomas G. , Schroth Kevin R. J.
Published: March 2023

In many ways the success of tobacco control provides a framework for other public health challenges. This chapter describes how tobacco industry strategies led to the creation of the deadliest consumer product in history. As the toll of tobacco use came into focus, litigation was used to reign in the tobacco industry. Although it was largely unsuccessful for decades, persistent efforts and the involvement of the state attorneys generally ultimately culminated in the 1998 Master Settlement Agreement. The chapter describes the history of these litigation strategies and the Food and Drug Administration’s efforts to regulate tobacco use. In 2009, the federal government passed the Family Smoking Prevention and Tobacco Control Act, which changed the regulatory federal framework for tobacco. State and local governments continue to regulate, tax and create innovative methods to address tobacco use. The introduction of electronic cigarettes created a more complex tobacco marketplace and increased challenges for tobacco control.
Opioids
Authors: Pomeranz Jennifer L. , Merrill Thomas G. , Schroth Kevin R. J.
Published: March 2023

Chapter 12 describes the opioid epidemic from several legal perspectives. It defines opioids and explains how opioid use and abuse, including legal and illegal products, have evolved over time. For more than a century, opioids like morphine, heroin, and oxycontin, have been heralded as nonaddictive, painkilling wonder-drugs. Those initial impressions did not pass the test of time. This chapter describes how ongoing opioid litigation resembles, and differs from, previous public health litigation. It also describes drug courts. Finally, this chapter discusses legal challenges faced by safe injection sites designed to minimize risks related to overdose deaths.
Sexual Health and the Law
Authors: Pomeranz Jennifer L. , Merrill Thomas G. , Schroth Kevin R. J.
Published: March 2023

There are a number of legal issues affecting sexual and reproductive health, gender identity, sexual orientation, and transgender health. The law related to these issues is also rapidly evolving and the relevant issues create public health and social justice concerns for people based on their sex, reproductive health, gender expression, sexual orientation, and related identity. Supreme Court cases have shaped individual rights and limitations on government action related to gender, sex, and reproduction in fundamental ways, both for better and for worse in terms of public health and social justice. This first part of this chapter delves into public health law as it relates to abortion, including the Supreme Court’s 2022 decision finding that there is no constitutional right to abortion. The second part of this chapter provides an overview of public health law issues relating to sex, including contraception, HIV criminalization, civil rights, and transgender healthcare coverage.
Geopolitics and Democracy
Authors: Trubowitz Peter , Burgoon Brian
Published: March 2023

A large and widening gap has opened between Western democracies’ international ambitions and their domestic political capacity to support these objectives. Drawing on an array of cross-national data on Western governments, parties, and voters, Geopolitics and Democracy traces this ends-means divide back to decisions that Western governments made after the Cold War. The key decisions were to globalize markets and pool sovereignty at the supranational level, while at the same time reducing social protections and guarantees at home. This combination of foreign and domestic policies succeeded in expanding the Western liberal order in the quarter century after the Cold War, but at the cost of mounting public discontent and political fragmentation within the advanced industrial economies. The analysis reveals the large extent to which domestic support for international engagement during the long East-West geopolitical contest had rested on social protections within the Western democracies. At a time when problems of great power rivalry, spheres of influence, and reactionary nationalism have returned, Geopolitics and Democracy reminds us that the liberal order rose in an age of social democracy as well as Cold War. In the absence of a renewed commitment to those social purposes, Western democracies will struggle to find a collective grand strategy that their domestic publics will support.
Cyber Operations and the De-Escalation of International Crises
Authors: Lonergan Erica D. , Lonergan Shawn W.
Published: March 2023

Chapter 6 considers whether cyber operations can act as accommodative signals and contribute to the de-escalation of international crises by reviewing geopolitical crises with and without cyber operations. Three sets of cases are considered: geopolitical crises during which states used cyber operations as accommodative signals; crises with no evidence of cyber operations; and international crises during which cyber operations signaled resolve rather than accommodation. The cases reviewed in the chapter exhibit variation across the dyads in terms of the participants involved, the specific type of event that triggered the crisis, and the type of cyber behavior, if any, observed. In particular, comparing crises with and without cyber operations helps to assess whether states see cyber operations as potential signaling tools. Altogether, the six cases provide granularity in terms of how states may see different types of cyber operations as serving varying signaling purposes, illustrating the characteristics of cyber operations as signals of accommodation versus resolve. They also suggest the conditions under which accommodative cyber signaling is more likely to be observed: in crisis where leaders strive to balance nationalist domestic sentiments while avoiding actions that would exacerbate the situation and where other forms of private communications may not be as viable.
Plausible Escalation Scenarios for the Future
Authors: Lonergan Erica D. , Lonergan Shawn W.
Published: March 2023

While this book is predominantly focused on the lack of cyber escalation, there is a narrow set of plausible circumstances under which cyber operations could be more likely to exacerbate relations between rivals. Chapter 7 draws on arguments in the literature on inadvertent escalation, particularly the concepts of windows of vulnerability and first strike incentives, and the interdependence of cyberspace with kinetic capabilities to identify specific scenarios that could result in escalation. Specifically, the chapter argues that cyber escalation risks are most salient when cyber operations have an effect on a state’s warfighting capabilities—especially during the course of conflict. In other words, escalation is most likely to take place not through the independent employment of cyber power but, rather, when cyber operations are perceived to affect the use of kinetic military capabilities. The analysis in this chapter is hypothetical, based on scenarios that could conceivably take place between rival states but which have not yet occurred, with a focus on the unintended consequences of perceptions and misperceptions surrounding strategies for force employment and the implications of offensive cyber operations. That said, the highly contingent nature of these scenarios—coupled with the difficulties of cyber operations and their limited effects—strongly suggests caution about drawing overly pessimistic assessments about escalation risks from these scenarios. However, systematically assessing plausible use cases is important for policymaking, especially given their potential consequences.
Behind the Screen
Authors: Shiovitz Brynn W.
Published: March 2023

Introducing a new theory of covert minstrelsy, this book illumines Hollywood’s practice of capitalizing on the Africanist aesthetic at the expense of Black lived experience. The book looks at how and why outdated racial content, and specifically blackface minstrelsy, was not only permitted but in fact thrived during the 1930s and 1940s, despite the rigid motion picture censorship laws enforced during this time. The musicals made during this period show that Hollywood utilized a series of covert “guises” or subterfuges to distract both censors and audiences from seeing the ways they were being fed a nineteenth-century White narrative of Blackness. Drawing on the annals of Hollywood’s most popular and its extremely rare films, Behind the Screen uncovers a half century of blackface application by removing the individual layers of disguise through close analyses of films that paint tap dance, swing, and other predominantly Africanist forms in a negative light. The book goes beneath the image of recognizable White performers, exploring the high cost of their onscreen representational politic. The book also recuperates the stories of several of the Black artists whose labor was abused during the choreographic and filming process. Behind the Screen recovers the visibility of Black artists whose names Hollywood omitted from the credits and whose identities America has written out of the national narrative.
With a Glory Be
Authors: Shiovitz Brynn W.
Published: March 2023

Storylines that relied on overblown racial caricature had mostly disappeared by the end of 1934. What remained was a strong use of the citational guise in the form of “Black heaven,” a subset of covert minstrelsy I refer to as the Gabriel variation. Chapter 5 returns to both the sonic and citational guises, examining a general shift in attitude toward syncopated rhythms and the significance of blacksound when offered in a “holy” context. Beginning in 1934, Hollywood’s White stars began flirting with an increasingly popular swing aesthetic, one that had hitherto been tied to the devil and been subject to unforgiving censorship laws. To circumvent the Code, directors utilized two primary strategies: the first was to cast Black actors and White actors in blackface within a White conception of Black heaven that not only housed dozens of minstrel caricatures but also foregrounded these fictions in a swing aesthetic. The Gabriel variation allowed Hollywood to sidestep many of the rules surrounding racial representation while simultaneously pulling “hot” rhythms out of the depths of hell. The second circumvention was to use a swing-inspired scene or film that would encode a classic primitivist framework—often using brownface—into its overarching narrative. This chapter tracks how, during the Code’s most unforgiving period, the transit narrative functioned in the background to help establish a racial in-between-ness or “safe” exoticism, and to assist in the passage of swing from the audibly Black to the visibly White.
Youthsites
Authors: Fitzsimmons Frey Heather , Sefton-Green Julian , Poyntz Stuart R.
Published: March 2023

This book is an original study of youth organizations in London, Toronto, and Vancouver that represent a burgeoning global sector of creative and cultural learning for socially marginalized young people. The book is also about a sector that is not recognized as such—organizations that do not like being institutionalized, forms of education that exist outside the mainstream, types of aesthetic expression that often go unrecognized, and opportunities for socially marginalized young people who are frequently denied them. Rooted in the history of community arts movements from the 1970s, YouthSites or the non-formal youth arts learning sector is now part of cities throughout the world. Technological change, shifts in educational discourses, changes in policy rhetorics, including a turn away from traditional public institutions, and a corresponding decline in confidence and funding of formal public schooling have all impacted the growth of youth arts organizations. Yet, there are currently no systematic studies of the history, structure, and development of this sector. This book fills this gap and is the first book to develop an internationally comparative, evidence-based, structural analysis of the development of the youth arts sector. Based on an original 4-year study examining the history, priorities, and tensions within this sector between 1995 and 2015, this book explores the new creative transition routes, organizations, and people who help young people become creators, citizens, or just themselves at a time when support for young people seems to be perilously fragile or at risk.
Young People’s Experiences of YouthSites
Authors: Poyntz Stuart R. , Sefton-Green Julian , Frey Heather Fitzsimmons
Published: March 2023

YouthSites do not exist because of government mandates, laws about education, or because of city-sponsored anticrime or health and wellness initiatives, although those may certainly influence organizations. YouthSites exist because of the young people who participate in them, and so this chapter turns a spotlight on them. The chapter explores what matters to YouthSites participants. Why do thousands of young people voluntarily spend their time at YouthSites, choosing to explore creative energy, hone skills, and develop relationships there and not somewhere else? This chapter discusses the affective experiences and reflective responses that speak to why youth arts organizations have become an essential aspect of urban infrastructures for youth and why so many young people value their experiences at YouthSites.
Making a Claim for Authentic Learning amid Changing Education Ecosystems
Authors: Poyntz Stuart R. , Sefton-Green Julian , Frey Heather Fitzsimmons
Published: March 2023

This section introduction discusses the key aims of the chapters in this section and locates this work in relation to histories of community arts from the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s, as well as key research about youth arts organizations in the United States. The chapters in this section draw in more detail on some of the theory and scholarship investigating the arts, education, youth participation, leadership, and governance. In this section, the case is made that constructing YouthSites as a field is still an ongoing project, so it is perhaps not surprising that earlier traditions of scholarship have tended to focus on domains more as they relate to mainstream fields, institutions, and sectors.
Fractal Patterns Out of Chaos in Ridley Scott’s Alien, Prometheus, and Covenant
Authors: Evans Carrie Lynn
Published: March 2023

Ridley Scott, director of Alien (1979), returned to the franchise thirty years later with the prequels Prometheus (2012) and Alien: Covenant (2017), which further examine the origin and evolution of the lethal xenomorph. This chapter reads the trilogy through the lens of chaos theory as applied metaphorically to literature. The fractal pattern of themes that emerges from this approach allows a better apprehension of their multi-layered and refractional interconnections, culminating in the character arc of the genocidal android David. Connecting David’s development to this pattern is important as it provides the fuller context within which his character should be interpreted. The pattern here is that each film sets up and problematizes a familiar binary related to creation, then establishes a pattern of iteration with increasing complication, such that the thematic structure constitutes a metaphor of fractal geometry. Alien deals with the simplest binary, between male and female, subverting their typical presentations and roles. Prometheus interrogates the ideologies of religion-science and nature-technology as binary pairs, suggesting that their competing approaches to creation and knowledge suffer from over-simplified dichotomous thinking. Alien: Covenant builds on these themes and develops the fractal pattern of the xenomorph’s evolution; David’s character arc highlights the moral relativism inherent in creation. The horror of Scott’s Alien trilogy arises from the notion that the universe outside the relatively safe confines of human order is chaotic, violent, and terrifying; yet, despite Scott’s dark and utilitarian view of the universe, order persists, including humanity’s tenacious pursuit of moral ideals.
Hissing in the Air Vents
Authors: Martens Reuben
Published: March 2023

This chapter considers the 2014 survival horror game Alien: Isolation as a node of transmedial relationships within the larger narrative universe of the Alien franchise. It argues that Alien: Isolation forms its own transmedial “narrative-verse” within the larger franchise, which can expand as well as renew one’s existing knowledge and understanding of the franchise itself and consequently offer a more pleasurable experience of the related transmedial narratives. This also complicates conventional notions of adaptation and remake within the context of transmedial franchises. In a second, related, move, this chapter questions whether players who have never interacted with the Alien franchise would be able to achieve a successful horror gaming experience, arguing for the importance and recognition of transmedia storytelling as a key factor for making such success.
Astronomers
Authors: Hargittai Magdolna
Published: March 2023

Astronomy was the earliest science in which women’s participation has been recorded. Enheduanna, the Mesopotamian priestess, monitored the stars around 2350 bce, and Hypathia in the fourth century is especially famous. Women astronomers—such as Sophia Brahe, Maria Cunitz, Elisabetha Hevelius, Maria Margaretha Kirch, and Caroline Herschel—often worked alongside husbands or brothers. Succeeding generations were more independent; of them, Mary Somerville, Maria Mitchell, Williamina Fleming, and Nancy Grace Roman are mentioned. Vera C. Rubin had revolutionary ideas about the black holes whose real significance is recognized today. Jocelyn Bell Burnell helped in the discovery of pulsars, for which her professor received the Nobel Prize. France A. Cordova was elevated to various top administrative positions. The astronomer Andrea M. Ghez received a share of the physics Nobel Prize for her work on black holes.
Crystallographers
Authors: Hargittai Magdolna
Published: March 2023

X-ray crystallography, with relatively quick experiments, voluminous calculations, and a friendly atmosphere, has been a popular field for women scientists. They have made seminal discoveries. Kathleen Lonsdale was a pioneer in studying fundamental molecules. Dorothy Hodgkin, mother of four, won the Nobel Prize for determining the structure of complex biological systems. Rosalind Franklin suffered from disadvantageous treatment of female scientists but made decisive contributions toward uncovering the double helix of DNA. The work of Isabella Karle was at the Nobel Prize level and provides another example of having children and being at the top of science. Ada Yonath worked her way through unfriendly circumstances, and her perseverance earned her a Nobel Prize. Two unusual achievements signified the creation of data banks, another led to the most beautiful photographs of quasicrystals, and yet another to the utilization of M. C. Escher’s unusual art for crystallography education.
Chemists and Biochemists
Authors: Hargittai Magdolna
Published: March 2023

Five of the 15 scientists introduced in this chapter received the Nobel Prize, two of them sharing with their husbands. Ida Noddack’s career was controversial for favors she received from the Nazi regime; she may have co-discovered a new element and anticipated nuclear fission. Gertrude Elion helped in the discovery of new drugs, relying on new principles of drug discovery. Elena Galpern’s computations anticipated the beautiful new molecule buckminsterfullerene, C60, whose actual discovery later brought Nobel recognition to others. Jennifer Doudna and Emmanuelle Charpentier received the Nobel Prize for developing a method of great utility for genome editing. Katalin Karikó is another example of perseverance; following many frustrating years of failure and lacking proper support, she became a pioneer of the COVID-19 vaccine, saving many millions of lives. Carolyn R. Bertozzi is the latest Nobel laureate whose innovation has made possible to produce new substances inside of the living system.
Biologists and Biomedical Scientists
Authors: Hargittai Magdolna
Published: March 2023

Biology and biomedical research have traditionally been welcoming areas for female scientists, yet perseverance was often a prerequisite of success in addition to talent and hard work. Of the 13 scientists mentioned here, 8 became Nobel laureates. Barbara McClintock earned the Nobel Prize for discoveries in genetics that for many years had been ignored. Rita Levi-Montalcini’s Nobel Prize was for the discovery of a growth factor, Christiane Nusslein-Volhard’s for her work in developmental biology, Linda Buck’s for olfactory receptors, Françoise Barré-Sinoussi’s for co-discovering HIV, Elizabeth Blackburn and Carol Greider’s for discoveries from their telomere and telomerase experiments, and May-Britt Moser’s for her work to understand the “GPS” of the human brain. Despite the tragic fate of her two scientist husbands persecuted by the inhuman Soviet regime, Zinaida Ermoleva became the decisive force in producing penicillin in the Soviet Union. Frances Kelsey saved the health of many newborn babies by meticulously and bravely examining the effects of thalidomide. Anne McLaren was a pioneer of human in vitro fertilization and excelled also in discussing its ethical and political aspects.
Ecologists
Authors: Hargittai Magdolna
Published: March 2023

Ecology is about the study, protection, and preservation of our environment. Female scholars and thinkers, as well as activists, have been at the forefront of ecology for decades. Most of the related activities have a close relationship with one or more of the science branches discussed in previous chapters, often with chemistry. Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring was very influential in shaping the modern environmental movement. Miriam Rothschild was arguably the most famous entomologist. Natural products chemistry has offered great possibilities for curing diseases, as shown by the achievements of the Nobel laureate Youyou Tu and others. Jane Goodall has been not only a great primatologist and anthropologist but also a great role model for many in valuing and working for nature.
Reflections
Authors: Zeitoun Mark
Published: March 2023

This book calls for us to develop an informed ethos of respect for water, and for ourselves. It counts on readers to reflect on the intimate relationship we have developed with water, because the stakes are high. Water has qualities which make it nourishing, cleansing, and unifying. But we pump aquifers dry, contaminate lakes, and fight over rivers, and far too often in far too many places use and abuse water at will. Cases from all over the world and especially from western Asia detail how the lure of profit defeats scientific counsel to use water sustainably, how chauvinist ideologies lead (with monotonous predictability) to inequality, and how the violent logic of war both victimises and weaponises water. What we do with water whilst it is in our hands mirrors our behaviour to each other, the book argues, and that reversing the desecration begins with understanding water in a new way.
Beneath the Surface
Authors: Zeitoun Mark
Published: March 2023

The Introduction lays out the reasons why reflecting on water is crucial for society to progress. It examines how water can nourish, cleanse, or unify, and juxtaposes these essential qualities with much more material ones. It makes the case that the way we pollute water or use it to deprive or divide others reflects forces within us that otherwise lay unquestioned. The dissonance is presented as a paradox whose explanations frame the rest of the book: our understanding of water is constricted by narrow utilitarian thinking. We mythologise water as we ignore the political and economic forces which drive decisions over water use. Water gets treated like a commodity, a means towards profit, an item of national and international political agendas and of war.
Competing for Local Authority
Authors: Offutt Stephen
Published: March 2023

Three groups most want to influence community culture and events in El Salvador’s lower-class neighborhoods: evangelicals, gangs, and the police. Evangelicals and gangs are community “insiders” and use grassroots approaches to social organization (patrimonies) to establish authority. Police are community “outsiders” and draw authority from the state. In the gang/evangelical relationship, gangs threaten and use violence against pastors and other evangelicals to increase their territorial control. Pastors use their moral authority to reduce the likelihood of violence against themselves and other evangelicals, and to draw youths away from gang influence. Evangelical/police relations are characterized by low levels of direct interaction, evangelicals’ general sense of submission to the police, and high levels of evangelical distrust for the police. Gang/police relations are especially violent, as their objectives and strategies are most similar. Especially for evangelicals and gangs, such competition is one dimension of a broader set of complicated relational dynamics.
Unusual Alliances in Community Governance
Authors: Offutt Stephen
Published: March 2023

Evangelicals and gangs sometimes collaborate to provide a (distorted and ad hoc) form of community governance in lower-class Salvadoran communities. Collaboration occurs across several areas of governance. Both groups provide protection for community members and establish and enforce community rules. Evangelicals and gangs sometimes interface to provide judicial services, including resolving community disputes and determining appropriate punishment for those who violate gang rules. Evangelicals more exclusively produce and distribute public goods, especially in education and health care, that fill gaps left by failing state institutions. How can evangelicals co-govern with gangs, whom they believe are perpetrators of evil? Evangelicals and gangs both introduce moral logics, or assertions of how things ought to be, into community discourse. These logics often do not match behavior, but they nonetheless allow values to be shared and mutually understood. Moral logics resonate across groups in part because the groups share a religious cosmology.
Economic Engagements
Authors: Offutt Stephen
Published: March 2023

Economic exchanges occur between evangelicals and gang members in local economies. These include impersonal transactions, gang exploitation of evangelicals, “win-win” arrangements between evangelicals and gangs, and economic initiatives by both groups that are intended to empower, or at least to avoid harming, the other party. These types of economic exchanges vary in the way they impact the daily lives, meaning systems, and well-being of evangelicals. Congregations facing a gang’s extortion demand, for example, must carefully consider the moral and practical consequences of their response. An evangelical selling a popsicle to a fourteen-year-old gang member navigates less weighty issues. The popsicle sale nonetheless matters: such routine interactions help to normalize relationships between evangelicals and gangs. Indeed, because the four different types of economic exchanges contrast sharply, they must all be taken into account to gain a fuller picture of economic relations between evangelicals and gang members.
Just Policing
Authors: Monaghan Jake
Published: March 2023

Diverse and dynamic societies face a problem of social control. Institutions of social control, of which the police are a part, are a necessary part of just and legitimate governance. But in our non-ideal world they are also responsible for injustices of their own. This project raises questions of political philosophy as they apply to the professional police agency. It begins by constructing an inchoate, but mainstream view about just policing, legalism, according to which police power is justified by the criminal code, and just policing is just the faithful enforcement of law. This view is undermined by the practical realities of policing, which involves widespread and unavoidable police discretion. It then develops an account of just and legitimate police discretion, including principles of proportionality, liberal neutrality, and democratic responsiveness. This sheds lights on controversial police tactics, order maintenance initiatives, and community policing strategies. This account also informs the just institutional arrangement of police powers, informing ongoing debates about police reform and abolition.
Legitimacy Risks and the Separation of Police Powers
Authors: Monaghan Jake
Published: March 2023

This chapter argues that police must exercise their discretion to avoid high legitimacy-risk policing. Police discretion is unavoidable, so a theory of just policing requires involves an account of just police discretion. But in practice, people tend to meet the expectations of their role. Part of what makes policing a moral morass is the lack of clarity over the policing role. The questions unanswered by the criminal code also leave the police role underspecified. This chapter argues for the importance of using rules and defined roles to organize our social lives. Then it makes the case for a separation of executive, police powers. This is in service of developing a framework for understanding the risks to just and legitimate policing. Understanding the various risks and how they interact motivates conceptual and institutional boundaries for police power.
The Form of Police Agencies
Authors: Monaghan Jake
Published: March 2023

The way police exercise their power depends in part on their incentives and agency structure. This chapter argues that the form of police agencies is essential for just and legitimate policing, and for guiding officers to minimize legitimacy risks. The argument begins with a diagnosis of the injustices of criminal patrol: the structure of police agencies contributed to the blending of high-legitimacy-risk police goals and tactics. The multifunctional, generalist nature of the police agency and the patrol officer enabled a plurality of officers to take up an unjust operational style. Not only are preventive patrol and criminal investigation distinct political powers, we also have reason to make finer distinctions according to legitimacy-risk profiles. The rise of criminal patrol motivates institutional boundaries to prevent the exercise of criminal patrol powers. The chapter concludes with a discussion of agency reform informed by the author’s account of just policing.
The Two Faces of Democracy
Authors: Scudder Mary F. , White Stephen K.
Published: March 2023

The democratic imagination is facing significant challenges. These challenges involve not only deep philosophical questions about the core values of democracy but also pressing practical issues related to how we should understand and confront the rise of right-wing authoritarian populism. What should our stance be as defenders of democratic life? The two most prominent efforts to orient us here are the deliberative and agonistic models of democracy. The former emphasizes reasoned discussion, but some worry that this exclusive focus overlooks structures of injustice that distort civil deliberation. The latter prioritizes contestation and conflict, but its proponents struggle to explain why this prime orientation to defeating political opponents will not also corrode our commitment to normative democratic restraints, like fairness. This book develops an understanding of the moral core of democracy. In doing so, it illuminates how these two faces of democratic life, the deliberative and agonistic, each has a significant, but constrained, role to play in a more capacious comprehension of what our democratic commitments require of us. The “communicative model” of democracy proposed here provides better grounds for facing the challenges of contemporary antidemocratic movements than either the deliberative or agonistic models alone.
The Agonistic Face
Authors: Scudder Mary F. , White Stephen K.
Published: March 2023

Agonism, the view that politics is essentially about conflict, has become quite prominent in scholarly discussions and in real-world politics. Carl Schmitt, the German legal theorist who popularized this idea in the 1920s, presented a picture of unrelenting struggle of “friends” and “enemies.” But his followers today are surprisingly unclear about how one prevents such an ontological-existential starting point from persistently trumping basic democratic norms. The former threatens to continually imperialize the latter. The chapter criticizes such “imperial agonism” and considers a more promising variant called “tempered agonism.” But even here, problems remain regarding how well its affirmation of agonism aligns with core values of democracy. This discussion helps show the need for a better way of understanding the crucial, but limited, place of agonism within democratic life.
Re-envisioning the Core of Democracy
Authors: Scudder Mary F. , White Stephen K.
Published: March 2023

Chapter 5 introduces the book’s conception of the moral core of democracy, wherein both faces of democracy, the agonistic and deliberative, are accorded a crucial, but limited role. Here, we explain the status and validity of such a core and the value of appealing to it in our “post-foundational” world. Explicating democracy’s moral core as an “originary exemplary scene,” we capture our sense of democracy both conceptually and affectively. The turn to scenes, images, and affects, however, may worry some that we are entering the domain of myth in politics. That is alarming to many, given how, in the 20th century, fascism exploited such non-rational appeals. Against that worry, we argue that democracy cannot isolate itself entirely from the domain of myth, and we begin to articulate the idea of a “democratic mythic.”
Nature That Makes Us Human
Authors: Loreau Michel
Published: March 2023

This book seeks to answer two fundamental questions: Why do humans keep destroying nature when science makes it clear that in doing so they risk their own destruction? How can this be stopped, and how can the unity of humans and nature be regained? First, the book shows that the inability of modern society to modify its relationship with nature has its roots in the collective fictions that have gradually shaped it since the Neolithic revolution. The collective fictions that underpin modernity include, in particular, the subject−object duality, the matter−mind duality, the primacy of rationality, and the superiority of the human species over all other living beings. These deeply ingrained fictions prevent people from acting in the word in agreement with their needs and existing knowledge. Second, the book argues that humans have a nature that defines them as a unique species beyond their cultural differences, and this nature is made not only of flesh and bones, but also of a set of fundamental needs. Fundamental needs connect humans with nature spontaneously because they are the manifestation of life in them. They also make it possible to re-establish the unity of body and mind and of the different forms of knowledge and to give the economy a new direction, focused on the development of the human being and of its living environment. Challenging collective fictions and reconnecting with humans’ deepest nature is essential in order to overcome the current ecological crisis and allow life on Earth to flourish.
Introduction
Authors: Loreau Michel
Published: March 2023

This introductory chapter sets the context for the whole book. It briefly mentions the facets of the current global ecological crisis and poses the two fundamental questions the book addresses: Why do we keep destroying nature when science clearly shows that in doing so we risk our own destruction? How can we stop doing so and regain the unity between humans and nature? It argues that the separation between humans and nature is one of the most powerful myths of Western civilization, and that overcoming this duality requires a holistic and integrative approach to human knowledge. Therefore, the book draws on knowledge from a variety of disciplines and approaches, including biology, ecology, physics, psychology, anthropology, economics, history, philosophy, and personal development.
The underside of economic rationality and progress
Authors: Loreau Michel
Published: March 2023

The social and economic order that governs modern society is entirely built on collective fictions. The Homo economicus of modern economics is the transposition of Descartes’s thinking subject to the economic sphere, i.e., the human individual who frees him/herself from the material world in order to assert his/her free will over this material world. Exchange value is the economic expression of this “liberation” of humans from nature because it erases all the natural, objective qualities of commodities and reduces the latter to an abstract social wealth entirely created by humans. But humans are, at the same time, bound hand and foot to an extraordinarily powerful set of collective fictions which distracts them from the satisfaction of their natural needs and leads them into a headlong rush toward the unlimited increase of capital as abstract social wealth.
Journey to the center of the modern world
Authors: Loreau Michel
Published: March 2023

All the core beliefs that underlie modernity converge on the same basic premise, known as anthropocentrism: that humans, through their spiritual power, occupy a central place in the world. Anthropocentrism has been heavily criticized by environmental ethics, but the latter also has important limitations inherited from modernity, in particular its dualistic view of valuation and its emphasis on rationality. These limitations have led to endless debates between utilitarian and non-utilitarian approaches in nature conservation. Fundamental human needs shed new light on human nature that helps to resolve these debates because they place humans within nature without placing them at its center. Humans can take responsibility for their own evaluation of the world without seeing themselves as the center of this world.
Letting nature touch us
Authors: Loreau Michel
Published: March 2023

Building a new relationship between humans and nature requires some radical changes in the worldview inherited from modernity. The most obvious aspect that needs to change is the way we relate to outer nature, i.e., to the living and non-living beings around us. Connection to life is a powerful feeling that responds to one of the most fundamental needs of humans as sentient and empathic mammals. Young children tend to display spontaneous biophilia, but modern education and growing urbanization contribute to increasingly disconnect humans from nature. Modern humans might have a lot to learn from animist hunter-gatherer people who have preserved their spontaneous connection to nature, not in order to take over animism for themselves, but in order to rediscover the general movement of life that flows through them and unites them with all the animate and animate beings around them.