bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Animals in Roman Religion
Authors: MacKinnon Michael
Published: June 2023

Much has been written about the role of animals in Greco-Roman religion. Arguments surrounding the symbolism inherent in animal sacrifice and the social and political functions these actions served, as well as debates about the secular/sacred nature of meat consumption in antiquity dominate the bulk of this scholarship. Less attention, however, has been placed upon the seemingly practical and economic side to animal sacrifice and ritual. What types of animals were used, and how did this vary among public and private ritual ventures? What costs were involved in maintaining, selecting, acquiring, transporting, processing, and ultimately sacrificing animal victims? Who bore these expenses, and how might these be negotiated among different individuals or networks? How did such costs balance, or otherwise compare, with the ‘benefits’ (be these, tangible/intangible; social/spiritual) that accrued from animal sacrifice? This chapter explores these components through an integrated assessment of ancient textual, iconographical, and zooarchaeological evidence for animal sacrifice in Roman antiquity, with particular focus upon the Mediterranean context. Data reveal relatively cost-effective decisions often underscored the choice of animal sacrificed or dictated the actions involved in feasting upon the victim (in sacrifices involving feasting), or in interring the victim (in some burial and funerary contexts). Pigs and domestic fowl often were central among familial-sponsored rituals, even in areas where cattle or sheep and goats might be more plentiful or important as regards to husbandry and dietary aspects. Larger livestock were typically selected at public events. Finally, the seemingly unremunerative nature of animal burial, notably in the case of whole livestock or cuts of meat that might otherwise be consumed, need not be labelled as such when a broader spectrum of practical and economic factors is considered.
Guilds and Gods
Authors: Verboven Koenraad
Published: June 2023

Scholars have often stressed—and rightly so—that all Greco-Roman voluntary associations, including the so-called ‘professional’ ones, were religious. But this can be said of every social group in the ancient world. It does not tell us much about the role of religion to associations formed on the basis of common occupations and expressing their identity through occupational markers. Nilson (1957) famously argued that for ancient private associations religion was merely a pretext for throwing a party. MacMullen joined him in this idea: ‘if piety counted for much, conviviality counted for more’ (MacMullen 1974a: 71–87). Harlan (2013:45), on the other hand, strongly emphasized ‘the importance of honouring gods and goddesses within associations of all types’. In his view ‘all types of associations served a variety of interdependent social, cultic, and funerary functions for their members.…(that) helped to provide members with a sense of belonging and identity’. While no one doubts the importance of sociability and ‘convivialité’ for ancient private associations, or the strength of their members religious convictions and feelings of awe towards the gods and divine powers, scholars since the 1990s have also stressed the utilitarian aspects of occupation based associations in the Roman world from the Late Republic to Late Antiquity. Guild members had material interests to defend and their associations served that purpose. Conversely, public authorities (imperial and local) used guilds to facilitate tax levying and public contracts. Occupational associations connected middling groups to urban institutions and thereby integrated non-elite citizens in urban society. That raises the question of how useful religion was for collegia and in what ways. Based on the ‘Ghent Database of Roman Guilds and Occupation-Based Communities’, this chapter explores religious practices by professional collegia as integrative strategies to express and claim a place in public society, and investigates religious practices as exclusive strategies to strengthen bonds between members and distinguish them from outsiders.
Basic Blame and Basic Praise
Authors: King Matt
Published: June 2023

This chapter defends an account of what the blameworthy and praiseworthy are worthy of: basic blame and basic praise. Given the wide variety of responses that one finds under the heading of “blame,” the chapter adopts a two-fold strategy. First, isolate a minimal core content that all instances of blame share. Fundamentally, blame is a negative appraisal of someone in light of their responsibility for a bad thing done. Second, sharply distinguish between blame itself (the thing the blameworthy are worthy of) and a fuller set of responses that often involve such blame. The diverse set of behaviors, emotions, and attitudes that often accompany blame can be understood as blaming behaviors: elements of the practices that orbit blame, manifesting, expressing, or otherwise involving blame, without being identical to blame itself. Thus, a unified view about blame (and praise) across moral and non-moral domains that won’t fall victim to the usual difficult cases emerges. The chapter also considers various objections that basic blame is too insubstantial to account for the supposed force or depth of moral blame.
Beyond Basic Responsibility
Authors: King Matt
Published: June 2023

The primary aim of this chapter is to better understand how responsible action is connected to our evaluative stances as agents. According to the theory of basic responsibility, agents are guided by their representations such that, when responsible, their actions reveal the things that matter to them. Unlike traditional views, however, the theory understands these cares as being partially constituted by those responsible doings. It is through an agent’s activities that their preferences, priorities, and cares are composed. With this general approach in hand, the chapter argues that similar treatments can be given for assessment of character and attitudes. Character assessments can be understood as more general, cumulative assessments built out of responsible doings. The cruel person is just one who is responsible for many cruel things. Similarly, the chapter argues that agents are not separably responsible for their attitudes. Instead, the sexist is blameworthy due to their sexist activities (which can include mental activities like considering, attending to, endorsing, and so on). The chapter also criticizes a common distinction in the literature between two purported kinds of responsibility (attributability and accountability), reiterating the theory’s commitment to providing a unified view of responsibility.
Foundations
Authors: Stevens Robert
Published: June 2023

The account offered is not simply a description of the law in any particular jurisdiction. Rather it seeks to draw out the kinds of claim that any properly constructed legal system ought to recognise. Before embarking on a careful discussion of the law’s substance, it is necessary to clear the theoretical ground. Claims for restitution are commonly said to be a form of, or justified by, ‘corrective justice’. This idea has been given several different meanings. For the purposes of this work, the most important is that the reasons justifying an obligation owed by one party to another must relate the two parties together. That the defendant is enriched, the plaintiff has suffered a correlative loss, and this was caused by a mistake of the plaintiff cannot suffice because this does not establish any reason of the requisite form. The austere range of reasons sufficient to justify interpersonal obligations is narrower than those that may justify the defences that may excuse the defendant from performance, such as illegal conduct, the defendant’s incapacity, or the expiry of a limitation period. The law may be categorised in a number of different ways, but the most important is by reference to the different kinds of reason that may justify obligations (eg ‘we agreed’, ‘you wronged me’). ‘Unjust enrichment’ fails to provide a reason of the requisite form.
Reversal
Authors: Stevens Robert
Published: June 2023

Where a performance (ie a payment or service) has been received for no reason, or on a conditional basis that has failed, the performance is what ought to be reversed. The payment or service are the subject matter of the claim, not any consequent enrichment the defendant may or may not have. As a matter of law, it rightly does not matter whether the consequent enrichment acquired as a result of the payment or service is higher, or lower, than the value of the service itself. In quantifying a claim for the restitution of the value of a service, therefore, the appropriate measure is its market value, even where the defendant places an idiosyncratic value upon it. Where a claim is brought for the repayment of money, the value of any subsequent use of the payment after it has been made is irrelevant.
Practice
Authors: Stevens Robert
Published: June 2023

The role of mistake, duress, undue influence and other ‘vitiating factors’ in the law of restitution is to show a lack of entitlement to the payment or other performance rendered. This clarifies many otherwise knotty rules, including rescission and avoidance of contracts; the recovery of mistakenly made gifts and other gratuitous transactions; changes in the law; ‘spent’ mistakes; the recovery of ultra vires taxes and other levies under the ‘Woolwich’ principle; corporate mistakes; the necessary causal relation, if any, between these ‘vitiating factors’ and the performance rendered. Although there are recent judicial statements supporting the view that what supports a claim for restitution is the error in the mind of the claimant that led them to enrich the defendant, the rules themselves cannot be understood in this way.
Defences
Authors: Stevens Robert
Published: June 2023

Only by separating out the different kinds of claim for restitution that there are, can the scope and application of the various defences that apply to some, but not all, be understood. A defence, as opposed to a denial, concerns the raising of a new countervailing reason why a claim should fail. The most prominent defence is that of change of position. This defence seeks to ensure that an innocent defendant is not left worse off, but does not apply to several of the claims this work has distinguished. Other defences that apply to some, but not all claims for restitution are passing on, counter-restitution, ministerial receipt, and bona fide purchase. The defences of consent and limitation apply across private law, but here apply in distinct ways.
Conclusion
Authors: Stevens Robert
Published: June 2023

Comparing the common law with civilian jurisdictions, we find the same pattern of a supposed unified doctrine of ‘unjust enrichment’ becoming divided. In all jurisdictions, the law of restitution, when compared with contract law or the law of torts, is a completely different kind of subject from them. It lacks either a formal linking factor (such as the defendant’s enrichment) or a unifying reason justifying the obligation the defendant owes the plaintiff. The conclusion is an uncomfortable one. We cannot simplify or systematise the law(s) of restitution into any single idea of ‘unjust enrichment’. It is not reducible to a simple set of questions. All attempts to do so lead to confusion and error.
Emma’s Devon and Cornwall
Authors: Ford Mark
Published: June 2023

This chapter investigates Emma Hardy’s depictions of her childhood in Devon and her thirteen years in Cornwall as recounted in her memoir Some Recollections and then explores the various poems that Thomas Hardy’s reading of this memoir after her death inspired, in particular ‘During Wind and Rain’. It contrasts Emma’s own somewhat negative responses to Cornwall with the numerous poems in which Hardy poetically transfigures her into the genius loci of the Cornish coast and it considers the influence of Ovid’s Metamorphoses on these poetic portrayals of Emma in her rural seclusion. It also assesses the poems in which Hardy recreates aspects of Emma’s childhood in Plymouth, which are heavily based on her memoir. Finally, it plays off her account of their meeting in Some Recollections with Hardy’s highly charged recreations of his journey to St Juliot on 7 March 1870 in poems such as ‘A Man Was Drawing Near to Me’ and ‘The Wind’s Prophecy’.
A Preface without Any Book
Authors: Ford Mark
Published: June 2023

This chapter considers Hardy’s poetic depictions of the first decade of his marriage to Emma. Poems analysed here include ‘Honeymoon Time at an Inn’, ‘We Sat at the Window’, ‘Once at Swanage’, and ‘Days to Recollect’. Much attention is paid to Emma’s travel diaries and her responses to the streets of Paris, where the couple spent their honeymoon, as well as to the chapters covering these years in Hardy’s autobiography. This chapter explores in detail the tensions that developed between Emma and Hardy’s siblings and parents and discusses her famously outspoken letter to Mary Hardy, in which she extravagantly characterizes Hardy’s mother and sisters as witches. It ends by discussing the various poems relating to the couple’s residence of two years in Sturminster Newton, such as ‘Overlooking the River Stour’, ‘The Musical Box’, and ‘A Two Years’ Idyll’. These were written after Emma’s death and reflect Hardy’s belief that these two years were the happiest of their marriage.
Two Bright-Souled Women
Authors: Ford Mark
Published: June 2023

This chapter is concerned with Hardy’s attempts to incorporate his second wife, Florence (née Dugdale), into the poetic narrative of his life that can be pieced together from his Emma poems. It recounts the friendship that developed between Emma and Florence in the summer of 1910, as well as the tensions that erupted during Florence’s extended stays at Max Gate later that year. It shows how important it was for Hardy to feel that he was doing justice to both ‘bright-souled women’, as he called them in ‘A Poet’, and analyses the peculiar rivalry that he ended up fomenting between his dead first wife and his living second wife. It offers a close reading of the poem ‘A Wistful Lady’ as well as of Hardy’s final extended imaginative composition, the verse play The Famous Tragedy of the Queen of Cornwall, whose two Iseults compete for the attentions of the minstrel hero. The chapter concludes with some reflections on the final poem in ‘Poems of 1912–13’, ‘Where the Picnic Was’, relating the ‘burnt circle’ that the poet mournfully contemplates with the ashes to which bonfires in the garden at Max Gate reduced the majority of Hardy and Emma’s correspondence and most of their notebooks and diaries.
Platform Regulation
Authors: Thomas Pradip Ninan
Published: June 2023

This book explores the theory and practice of platform regulation. Digital platforms, until recently, were left to self-regulate—although a series of scandals from Brexit and the role played by Cambridge Analytica to the manipulation of voters during the Trump presidency highlighted platform culpabilities. Additionally, evidence of the non-payment of taxes by platforms in the jurisdictions in which they operate in and anti-competitive behaviour have led to a global recognition of the power of platforms to evade taxes on corporate income and set political, economic, and other agendas. This volume explores the still nascent attempts to regulate Big Tech including the likes of Google and Facebook Meta by the State and super-States such as the EU. Beginning with chapters on the regulatory moment and the power of platforms, it explores specific cases of platform regulation. This includes separate chapters on the expansive attempts to regulate Big Tech in the European Union (EU) and enable citizen control over their data reflected in the moves to legislate the ‘right to be forgotten’, anti-trust in the United States, the Equalisation Levy in India, and the Digital Platforms Enquiry in Australia and its recommendations that platforms compensate legacy media for publishing content online. Backed by a fulsome exploration of context, geopolitics, platform power, and the attempts by the State to control platforms, this volume also highlights the contradictory role played by the State in both benefiting from and regulating Big Tech. It concludes with a chapter on the challenges and opportunities of platform regulation.
Introduction to Platform Power
Authors: Thomas Pradip Ninan
Published: June 2023

This chapter explores competing theories related to platform regulation. These include those that are broadly opposed to regulation ostensibly because of its potential to stifle innovation and creativity. They have also argued that the ‘old’ regulatory approaches provide inadequate frameworks to deal with the radical nature of search and sociality platforms. The chapter also highlights the contributions made by civil society and those who have argued that platform regulation is a public good and that their involvement lessens ‘risk’ associated with platform control over global data. The chapter highlights two attempts at regulation and the curbing of platform power—the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and the Assembly Bill 5 that was an attempt to reclassify ‘gig’ workers as employees by the government in California. This chapter highlights the sentiment that is expressed across all chapters in the volume that regulation should be seen as a public good.
Attribution and Antigone
Authors: Scodel Ruth
Published: June 2023

This chapter examines how characters in Sophocles’ Antigone understand their own actions and those of others, using both Theory of Mind and the attribution theory of B. Malle, How People Explain Behavior (2006), which attempts a general presentation of how people talk about the reasons and causes of behaviour. Throughout the play, characters try to persuade each other or simply argue, constantly talking about their reasons for their choices and the reasons and traits that they believe motivate others, sometimes speaking hyperbolically so that they distort their actual attributions into statements that they do not believe. The most significant result of an analysis of motive attributions is the sharp disjunction between Antigone’s self-understanding and the interpretations of her by Ismene, Creon, and the elders of the chorus. Because Antigone sets a very low value on her own life, she regards herself as fully rational, while others doubt her sanity.
‘Remember to What Sort of Man You Give this Favour’
Authors: Essen-Fishman Lucy Van
Published: June 2023

This chapter explores the different ways in which different characters in Sophocles’ Ajax remember the hero. Every character, including Ajax himself, looks back at the figure of Ajax as he was before the judgement of the Arms. The memories of the hero which emerge exhibit traits which contemporary cognitive scientists have identified as typical of the workings of memory. Thus different characters’ memories of Ajax are highly subjective. The conflicts of memory which occur throughout the play highlight and intensify conflicts between characters. At the same time, many characters draw upon memory as a source of authority. By looking at the memories of different characters in terms of contemporary ideas about memory, this chapter draws attention to what is at stake when a Sophoclean character performs an act of memory and how differences in memory can indicate the broader differences in perspective which drive the action of the play.
Gorgias’ ἀπάτη, Sophocles’ Electra, and Cognitive Criticism
Authors: Grethlein Jonas
Published: June 2023

This chapter offers a fresh look at the false messenger scene in Sophocles’ Electra through the combined lenses of ancient criticism and cognitive studies. In a first step, it contends that the claims of Gorgias fr. B 23 DK correspond with insights of cognitive accounts of aesthetic experience. In its main part, the chapter reconsiders Electra in the light of Gorgias fr. B 23 DK, suggesting that the false messenger speech stages the entwinement of deception with aesthetic illusion with which Gorgias fr. B 23 DK plays. It is first shown that the messenger speech is geared towards generating a strong aesthetic illusion. Then it is argued that the very devices that serve to engross the theatre audience are simultaneously a means of deception within the play. As pointed out in the conclusion, this association of aesthetics with ethics reveals a specifically ancient approach and sheds light on the limits as well as the benefits of employing cognitive studies in classics.
Generic Expectations and the Interpretation of Attic Tragedy
Authors: Schein Seth L.
Published: June 2023

This chapter considers the usefulness of cognitive work on genre for the literary interpretation of Attic tragedy. It explores how the disappointment and fulfilment of generic expectations can lead audiences and readers to a better understanding of specific plays. First it discusses the notion of ‘genre’, and the work of contemporary cognitivists, especially their emphasis on categorization, and their tendency to elide historical and cultural specificity. Then it discusses audiences’ emotional and intellectual responses to Attic tragedy, with particular focus on the interpretative challenges of Euripides’ Alcestis and Orestes and Sophocles’ Philoctetes. It concludes with a brief assessment of cognitive approaches to categorization and responses from audiences and scholars to the disappointment or fulfilment of expectations as complementary pathways into both the interpretation of Attic tragedy as a genre and of specific plays, and with speculation on how collaboration between scientists and humanists might offer a productive way forward.
Encountering Religious Difference in the City
Authors: Strohl David J.
Published: June 2023

This chapter explores Islamic revivalism in Mumbai from the perspective of Ismaili Muslims, a minority within the city’s minority Shi’a community. Ismailis often face criticism from other Muslims who claim their religious practice deviates from the model of orthopraxy valorized by revivalists. Yet, over the last century, Ismaili leaders have drawn on Islamic modernist and Sufi traditions to encourage community members to renew their commitment to Islamic principles. The chapter analyses everyday social interactions and several instances of religious ‘reform’ to argue that Ismailis incorporate Islamic norms into their tradition in ways that protect its integrity while simultaneously deflecting criticism. It broadens the ethnographic record of Islamic revivalism by considering how groups like the Ismailis—often thought to be marginal to this social process—are actively participating in it. This point is especially evident in Mumbai, where Ismailis’ distinct approaches towards revivalism contribute to the politics of religion in the city.
Towards the Apocalyptic
Authors: Wessler Heinz Werner
Published: June 2023

Bombay/Mumbai has been a primary literary city-space in South Asia from the nineteenth century onwards. Mumbai writing is a repercussion of the metropolitan as an experimental meeting place—and to some extent even melting point—of languages and codes, cultures and religions, traditions and identities in transformation. This chapter tries to identify the religious dimension in metropolitan fiction, providing a survey of relevant writers who publish in Hindi, Urdu, and English. In particular, it focuses on the challenging nature of metropolitan modernity and on the dystopic in two Mumbai novels, namely Sunil Mani’s The City of Devi and Rahman Abbas’s Rohzin. Both novels implicitly and explicitly refer to the language and the imaginary of religion in its manifold forms; both invoke apocalyptic threats and their implications for the individual in love stories woven into complex long fictional narratives.
Time and History in Hegelian Thought and Spirit
Authors: Sedgwick Sally
Published: June 2023

Why is it so important for Hegel to structure his various philosophical works as developmental narratives? It is argued in this work that his motivation is in large part metaphysical. That is, he intends his developmental accounts to demonstrate that human thinking and willing themselves develop. He seeks to convince us that there have been advances in the nature of human thought or reason and in our resulting freedom, and that those advances are somehow fated or necessary. In addition, Hegel’s preoccupation with development conveys his interest in how human reason is anchored in and shaped by its past. A central objective of this book is to specify the extent to which we can accurately attribute to Hegel the view that human reason and the freedom it affords us are indebted for their nature to this temporal order of nature and history.
Hegel’s Fatalism as a Theory of Freedom
Authors: Sedgwick Sally
Published: June 2023

For Hegel, human freedom is a genuinely creative and transformative power; it is more than an expression of our naturally given drives and passions. But although genuinely transformative, our freedom is a power that is nonetheless in and of nature. It is transformative without being transcendent. The author argues that Hegel’s insistence upon the transformative nature of our freedom is compatible with his version of fatalism. His remarks about the “fate” of world history express his endorsement of the premise that history’s course is to a significant extent our fate, that is, up to us. Thanks to our faculty of reason and resulting freedom, we can indeed shape our fate. Hegel is convinced that we can do so, even though he also grants that there is much that is contingent that happens to us.
Coda
Authors: Sedgwick Sally
Published: June 2023

If all our thought is for Hegel temporally conditioned, what are we to make of those passages in which he asserts that it is the business of philosophy to concern itself with the “eternally [ewig]” present? How, too, are we to interpret his claim that, despite its developmental history, Spirit has a certain “immortality [Unsterblichkeit]”? The author offers a few reasons for why Hegel’s treatment of permanence is compatible with his insistence that there is movement or dialectic in everything, even in our most basic thought-forms. There is permanence in the advances of thought and Spirit as least because new forms invariably build upon old ones, upon what came before. In building upon and responding to what came before, new forms not only negate but also preserve what came before. This is the idea behind Hegel’s remark that “[n]othing in the past is lost” to philosophy.
Introduction
Authors: Bognar Greg , Gosseries Axel
Published: June 2023

This book aims to contribute to the essential and timely discussion on age, ageism, population ageing, and public policy. It attempts to demonstrate the breadth of the challenges by covering a wide range of policy areas from health care to old-age support, from democratic participation to education, from family to fiscal policy. It bridges the distance between academia and public life by putting into dialogue fresh philosophical analyses and new specific policy proposals. It approaches familiar issues such as age discrimination, justice between age groups, and democratic participation across the ages from novel perspectives. This introductory chapter provides an overview of the structure of the book and its topics.
Age Discrimination
Authors: Rasmussen Katharina Berndt
Published: June 2023

This chapter examines the moral status of age discrimination by bringing together accounts of the wrongness of discrimination with accounts of the specialness of age (as opposed to, e.g. gender or race). It provides an overview of the main specialness considerations concerning age-based treatment and suggests a taxonomy for different forms of age discrimination. It then relates three influential accounts of the prima facie wrongness of discrimination to this taxonomy. It shows how these accounts differ in their moral assessment of different forms of age discrimination. Finally, it explores different ways in which specialness considerations can affect the prima facie and overall moral status of age-based treatment on these different accounts.
In Defence of Age-Differentiated Paternalism
Authors: Lyngby Pedersen Viki Møller
Published: June 2023

This chapter examines age discrimination from the perspective of age-differentiated paternalism. Many people share the intuition that paternalism is less problematic when applied to children than to the elderly. The chapter examines this intuition by considering not only the dimensions of competence and voluntariness but also the magnitude of the good promoted by paternalistic interventions. While this dual account does not generally challenge common-sense intuitions about paternalism, it introduces additional complexity when evaluating paternalistic interventions in a wide range of cases where age plays a part. The chapter considers many examples, from age-differentiated rules for access to sterilization, through age-differentiated fines for not using a helmet, to age-differentiated prices for cigarettes.
Age Universalism Will Benefit All (Ages)
Authors: Birnbaum Simon , Nelson Kenneth
Published: June 2023

Welfare states differ greatly in the extent to which they provide social protection for various age-related social risks and set different priorities between needs associated with childhood, maturity, and old age. This chapter aims to explore and defend an ideal of age universalism in social insurance, according to which the degree of income replacement should be similar across age-related social risks. The argument suggests pragmatic advantages of age-balanced social insurance, showing that it tends to provide higher levels of income replacement for age-related risks throughout the life cycle and achieve more favourable social outcomes in all age groups, including poverty rates, trust, and subjective well-being.
An Age-Differentiated Tax on Bequests
Authors: Pestieau Pierre , Ponthiere Gregory
Published: June 2023

This chapter presents four arguments supporting an age-differentiated tax on bequests, that is, a tax rate on bequests that is varying with the age of the deceased. The arguments are based on various ethical foundations and lead to an inheritance tax that can be either increasing or decreasing with the age of the deceased. The chapter argues that one of these arguments is more convincing than the three others: the argument supporting a bequest tax increasing with the age of the deceased. The chapter defends age-differentiated taxation on bequests by appealing to considerations of the compensation of unlucky prematurely dead persons in a world of imperfect information.
Epilogue
Authors: Edwards Mark Thomas
Published: June 2023

Lippmann was a lot like William James. He was a public intellectual of remarkable productivity, profound insight, and rhetorical flourish. He was a culture critic beholden to few powerful men, even the ones he loved. Lippmann was also a professional chameleon with so much to say because he thought he had so much to hide. The epilogue offers several concluding reflections about Lippmann, post-Christianity, and the SBNR-RBNS. It uses a review of the Ronald Steel biography to summarize the main points made about Lippmann throughout this book. The epilogue then looks at Lippmann’s post-Christianity through the lens of one “Death of God” theologian. Lippmann’s foreshadowing of the contemporary post-Christian persuasions, the SBNR and RBNS, is addressed. Finally, Lippmann’s legacy as a public intellectual is considered.
Gender Incongruence and Gender Dysphoria in Children and Adolescents
Authors: Giordano Simona
Published: June 2023

What is ‘gender diversity’? And what are ‘gender incongruence’ and ‘gender dysphoria’? This chapter summarizes the clinical descriptions contained in the currently most authoritative clinical guidelines and diagnostic manuals. Gender incongruence and gender dysphoria, it will be suggested here, have three dimensions: psychological, physical, and social, and these three are closely intertwined. This chapter also discusses the findings around the psychosexual outcome of gender diverse children and adolescents. What happens to children and adolescents who are referred for gender incongruence or dysphoria in childhood? Will they later become transgender adults? Or how will their psychosexual trajectory develop? This chapter also discusses the aetiological theories of gender incongruence. There are a number of conceptual and ethical problems that arise in connection with the ‘search for the causes’ of gender dysphoria which will be discussed in this chapter.
The First Stage of Medical Treatment
Authors: Giordano Simona
Published: June 2023

The first stage of medical treatment involves the decision about whether or not to prescribe GnRHa in order to interrupt pubertal development. This chapter provides a brief history of the controversies around puberty suppression and begins to outline and examine the ethical and clinical concerns around provision of this therapy. It offers clarification around the stage in which medical treatment can commence and the eligibility criteria. The main ethical concerns are: suspending puberty is playing God and interfering with nature; gender dysphoria is a social problem, not a medical problem; GnRHa has unknown risks; GnRHA is not reversible treatment; GnRHA is experimental; minors lack capacity to make decisions around their gender. This chapter discusses the first two ethical concerns: medical treatment is playing God, or interfering with a spontaneous natural process, and it is using medicine to address a social problem.
Risks and Benefits of Puberty Suppression
Authors: Giordano Simona
Published: June 2023

One concern about the use of GnRHa relates to the potential risks of this treatment. Some of these risks are ‘medical’ (for example, concerns around the side effect of GnRHa on bone formation); others are not strictly speaking medical—some relate for example to the ability of adolescents to consent to treatment. This chapter summarizes the evidence base for the use of puberty suppression after the onset of puberty, focusing mainly on the literature published since the early 2000s and late 1990s, the time in which ‘blockers’ have been first made available to gender diverse youth. A list of the clinical benefits and risks of GnRHa will be provided. Overall the benefit/risk ratio seems to be significantly in favour of using them, even recognizing the outstanding questions around long-term effects. This chapter proposes that clinicians and families should also consider the risks involved in not prescribing blockers.
Are Trans Children Guinea Pigs?
Authors: Giordano Simona
Published: June 2023

One ethical objection to the suppression of puberty is that the treatment is experimental, and experimenting on children, or using investigational therapies with unclear side effects is by definition ethically problematic (so the argument goes). This chapter examines this concern, trying to clarify what ‘experimental’ means in this context, why these therapies are denoted as ‘experimental’ and what being ‘experimental’ has to do with the ethics of provision. This chapter unpacks the concerns around the allegedly experimental nature of GnRHa and explains why it is inappropriate to consider GnRHa experimental in this area of clinical practice. It also argues that whether or not a medicinal product is experimental is a different issue from the issue of whether it is ethically prescribed.
Can Valid Consent to Medical Treatment Be Given by Gender Diverse Minors?
Authors: Giordano Simona
Published: June 2023

Concerns around the ability of the adolescent to request and consent to hormonal treatment include the following: that adolescents are subjected to peer pressure, particularly through social media, and might come to identify as trans when they are not; that material information cannot be provided and hence informed consent is impossible; that adolescents with gender dysphoria are usually affected by mental health concerns, and might lack capacity to consent because of other inherent vulnerabilities, or because they might not suffer genuinely from gender dysphoria; that adolescents may be too young to consent to treatment, and might be unable to appreciate how they might be affected later by potential unfavourable outcomes, such as infertility. Additional reasons why consent might be deemed invalid include: complexity of the decision, emotional involvement of the family, nature of the treatment, possibility of detransitioning, and difficulties in making accurate diagnosis in this case.
Ethical Issues in the Provision of Cross-Sex Hormones
Authors: Giordano Simona
Published: June 2023

Stage 2 treatment refers to gender-affirming (or cross-sex) hormones. Oestrogens and testosterone feminize and masculinize the body, and the effects are partly irreversible. This chapter summarizes the main clinical guidance on provision of cross-sex hormones and then discusses the ethical issues around obtaining informed consent, family involvement and age of access to the treatment. There are problems with age-based thresholds: medical and psychosocial risks, but also problems of social justice and exposure to preventable harm. Ethical decision-making should be informed by a delicate balancing of risks and benefits, with a view of minimizing the most likely and serious harm. An age threshold is inherently ageist and inhibits the possibility to provide patient-centred care. Flexibility in application of clinical guidelines is morally required.
Gender-Affirming Surgery
Authors: Giordano Simona
Published: June 2023

The final stage of treatment involves surgical procedures. The WPATH Standards of Care (7th version) and the Endocrine Society Clinical Practice Guideline both advise that genital surgery should be deferred until adulthood. Both guidelines emphasize that attainment of the legal age of majority should not be taken as a guarantee that the patient has capacity to give informed consent. Instead, it should be regarded as a minimum criterion. At the time this book is being written, the 8th version of the Standards of Care was being prepared for publication, and this new version has eliminated any reference to age. This chapter examines the reasons behind the choice to signal adulthood as an eligibility criterion, and concludes that genital surgery in minors should be carried out when it appears to be in the minors’ interests. Ethical decision-making should encompass broad considerations around the welfare of the individual patient in their own individual circumstances.
Introduction
Authors: Babusiaux Ulrike , Bubb Claire
Published: June 2023

This chapter introduces the section on the rhetorical contexts of law and medicine. It queries to what degree and in what ways their participation in the rhetorical culture of the time shaped the literature and activities of imperial Rome’s legal and medical minds. It begins by briefly addressing the performative, declamatory situation in each field. It then turns to the more nuanced role of rhetoric in the literatures. There, rhetoric functions as a signaling device of the speaker’s educational status and, perhaps more significantly, as a persuasive force. Both medicine and law require a set of agreed-upon principles, yet both lack an incontestable and achievable method of empirical proof. The chapter argues that rhetoric performs a similar role in both fields by filling that gap.
The Weight of Empire
Authors: Iturralde Manuel
Published: June 2023

During the last two decades, Latin American scholars have shown an increasing interest in the region’s crime control fields as an object of study. Nonetheless, the analysis of crime, violence, and social control in Latin America is still marginal in Global North discussions. In the cases that Global North criminologists acknowledge the Global South, it is often depicted as an imperfect realization of universal theories and laws of development. This rhetorical device marshals the assumption that Global South countries are bound to follow the path of Global North societies to reach modernity as a superior stage of development. This setup has cleared the way for the ‘standard’ perspectives and highly punitive penal policies that predominate in Latin American societies. These policies and practices are not simply the reproduction and adaptation of discourses that travel from Global North countries. Instead, they lay roots in a colonial past that is still felt in the present-day realities of many Global South countries through global hierarchical market relations, extreme forms of inequality, injustice, and violence that constitute neocolonial forms of unequal power relations. This chapter focuses on some of the most salient features of Latin American crime control during the last three decades. It discusses how these fields of crime control are deeply connected to Latin American countries’ historical trajectories and the dynamics of colonialism and neocolonialism. The latter is not just a remnant of the past but an acting force that profoundly affects the political economy of Latin American societies.
Carceral Cultures in Contemporary India
Authors: Bandyopadhyay Mahuya
Published: June 2023

chapter discusses the potential for a decolonial criminology by focusing on the contemporary carceral culture in India. It contends that criminological knowledge and the challenges of comprehending criminality, violence, and imprisonment in India are addressed with hegemonic Western concepts and theories. How does one manoeuvre and negotiate the established requirements and infrastructure of a state science? Is the solution to transcend the restrictive limitations of crime prevention and embrace different, culturally sensitive perspectives to develop an understanding of social harm in numerous public and private spaces? In this context, the chapter deconstructs an inherently chaotic carceral culture manifested in prisons and outside through carceral spillovers. It then investigates how conceptions of chaotic sites and everyday lives, as well as the decentring of research questions from their obvious presence and occurrence, can contribute to the study of crime, violence, and incarceration in contemporary India.
‘Muslims Have No Borders, Only Horizons’
Authors: Ghabrial Sarah
Published: June 2023

This chapter broadly sketches a trans-Mediterranean genealogy of ‘border criminality’—defined here as the de-legalization, bureaucratization, racialization, and policing of particular modes of mobility—from the French colonial occupation of Algeria through to the present neocolonial relationship between Europe and the Maghrib. In so doing, it seeks to understand how mobility and illegality inform, rationalize, and reproduce each other in order to sustain continued North–South asymmetries of power and difference. The research objects of this chapter are a set of penal, judicial, and bureaucratic instruments—land sequestration, identity papers, passports, travel permits, house arrests, vagrancy laws, administrative detention, and deportation—which are situated temporally within a disciplinary and governmental continuum. In turn, this chapter’s response to the challenge to ‘decolonize the criminal question’ is informed by the figure of the harraga (‘border burner’ in Maghribi colloquial Arabic), whose sojourns reveal state law to be arbitrary—an inorganic and violently imposed externality—even as they keep alive memories of ancestral geographies and chart possible futures rooted in non-normative epistemologies of justice.
The Coloniality of Justice
Authors: Phoenix Khan Omar
Published: June 2023

This chapter illustrates how colonial-era power dynamics continue to influence judicial decision-making at the pre-trial stage in Brazil to reveal the coloniality of justice. The research responds directly to Aliverti et al.’s (2021) call to ‘decolonize the criminal question’ by exposing and explaining how colonial logics inform contemporary justice mechanisms. In 2015, custody hearings were introduced in Brazil to address concerns over excessive use of pre-trial detention. Despite this move from paper-based decisions to in-person hearings, the use of pre-trial detention remains high, especially for young Black men with low to no income. This research explores why. The chapter begins by discussing the hierarchicalized and bounded nature of citizenship during the Portuguese Empire. It then explores the concept of coloniality and charts how white-supremacist power structures were sustained beyond the abolition of slavery and into the postcolonial period. Thematic analysis of twenty-six interviews with judges, prosecutors, public defenders, and specialists in Rio de Janeiro reveals the white-centred nature of citizenship and how stigmatized spaces are considered criminogenic. Analysis across spatial, temporal, and subjective dimensions suggests that colonial white-supremacist ways of understanding the world have persisted. Inhumane treatment of racialized groups is thus naturalized at an ontological level for judges. The high rates of pre-trial detention can therefore be understood as a product of the coloniality of justice.
Coloniality and Structural Violence in the Criminalization of Black and Indigenous Populations in Brazil
Authors: Rodrigues Santos Hugo Leonardo
Published: June 2023

This chapter examines how the colonial legacy of racialized social stratification in Brazil affects processes of criminalization of black and indigenous populations. To this end, the chapter reflects on the history and the role of Brazilian sociopolitical institutions with regards to the social control of subaltern populations, with an emphasis on the transformations that occurred after the formal abolition of slavery and the adoption of republicanism, in the late nineteenth century. Then, through two examples, the chapter illustrates how structural racism engenders contemporary punitive practices specifically targeting indigenous and black populations. It demonstrates how criminal law provided an authoritarian inclusion of indigenous people within broader society, by means of the application of punishments that disregard their ethnic and cultural characteristics, against the special legislation in place at the time. On the other hand, the chapter observes how Brazilian policing developed in a racially selective manner, which contributes to the recrudescence of the treatment of black people and aggravates the problems of police lethality and mass incarceration, which disproportionately affect this segment of the population. The chapter concludes that the foundation of penal practices upon a colonial rationality favours the naturalization of the subalternity of Brazilian black and indigenous peoples.
Treaties, Laws, and Other Standards
Authors: Kälin Walter
Published: June 2023

This chapter explores the legal sources of the protection of internally displaced persons (IDPs). It describes the key features of the 1998 UN Guiding Principles on Internal Displacement, shows how they have attained universal recognition, and analyses their soft-law character and their relationship with international customary law. The following section discusses the 2006 Great Lakes IDP Protocol and the African Union’s Kampala Convention as African treaty law. Domestic laws and policies on internal displacement and peace agreements have become important sources of law on internal displacement, too. The chapter ends with some thoughts on whether states are obliged to enshrine obligations to assist and protect IDPs in domestic instruments and why they are increasingly ready to accept relevant international standards.