bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
m6A-express: uncovering complex and condition-specific m6A regulation of gene expression
Authors: Zhang Teng , Zhang Shao-Wu , Zhang Song-Yao , Gao Shou-Jiang , Chen Yidong , Huang Yufei
Published: August 2021

N6-methyladenosine (m6A) is the most abundant form of mRNA modification and controls many aspects of RNA metabolism including gene expression. However, the mechanisms by which m6A regulates cell- and condition-specific gene expression are still poorly understood, partly due to a lack of tools capable of identifying m6A sites that regulate gene expression under different conditions. Here we develop m6A-express, the first algorithm for predicting condition-specific m6A regulation of gene expression (m6A-reg-exp) from limited methylated RNA immunoprecipitation sequencing (MeRIP-seq) data. Comprehensive evaluations of m6A-express using simulated and real data demonstrated its high prediction specificity and sensitivity. When only a few MeRIP-seq samples may be available for the cellular or treatment conditions, m6A-express is particularly more robust than the log-linear model. Using m6A-express, we reported that m6A writers, METTL3 and METTL14, competitively regulate the transcriptional processes by mediating m6A-reg-exp of different genes in Hela cells. In contrast, METTL3 induces different m6A-reg-exp of a distinct group of genes in HepG2 cells to regulate protein functions and stress-related processes. We further uncovered unique m6A-reg-exp patterns in human brain and intestine tissues, which are enriched in organ-specific processes. This study demonstrates the effectiveness of m6A-express in predicting condition-specific m6A-reg-exp and highlights the complex, condition-specific nature of m6A-regulation of gene expression.
Codon usage and protein length-dependent feedback from translation elongation regulates translation initiation and elongation speed
Authors: Lyu Xueliang , Yang Qian , Zhao Fangzhou , Liu Yi
Published: August 2021

Essential cellular functions require efficient production of many large proteins but synthesis of large proteins encounters many obstacles in cells. Translational control is mostly known to be regulated at the initiation step. Whether translation elongation process can feedback to regulate initiation efficiency is unclear. Codon usage bias, a universal feature of all genomes, plays an important role in determining gene expression levels. Here, we discovered that there is a conserved but codon usage-dependent genome-wide negative correlation between protein abundance and CDS length. The codon usage effects on protein expression and ribosome flux on mRNAs are influenced by CDS length; optimal codon usage preferentially promotes production of large proteins. Translation of mRNAs with long CDS and non-optimal codon usage preferentially induces phosphorylation of initiation factor eIF2α, which inhibits translation initiation efficiency. Deletion of the eIF2α kinase CPC-3 (GCN2 homolog) in Neurospora preferentially up-regulates large proteins encoded by non-optimal codons. Surprisingly, CPC-3 also inhibits translation elongation rate in a codon usage and CDS length-dependent manner, resulting in slow elongation rates for long CDS mRNAs. Together, these results revealed a codon usage and CDS length-dependent feedback mechanism from translation elongation to regulate both translation initiation and elongation kinetics.
Absolute and Relative Smokeless Tobacco Product Risk Perceptions: Developing and Validating New Measures that are Up-to-Snuff
Authors: O’Brien Erin Keely , Baig Sabeeh A , Persoskie Alexander
Published: August 2021

Introduction

Tobacco risk perceptions impact behavior. Our 2018 systematic review of tobacco risk perception measures found no measures of smokeless tobacco (ST) risk perceptions with demonstrated validity and complete consistency with tobacco researcher recommendations (e.g. specifying use frequency). This study develops such measures to assess seven specific risk perceptions of market-leading ST products: absolute health and addiction risks, health and addiction risks relative to cigarettes, pregnancy health risks relative to cigarettes, health risks relative to nicotine replacement therapy, and health risks relative to tobacco cessation.

Methods and Results

We fielded 64 items assessing risk perceptions associated with tobacco in an online survey experiment (N = 2754) that tested effects of exposing participants to a modified risk claim on a leading ST product. Through reliability and validity analyses, we reduced this to 35 items representing seven constructs. Exploratory factor analyses indicated single-factor solutions for all but two constructs: absolute health risk and health risk relative to cigarettes, which were each represented by two-factors (respiratory and oral risks). Participants perceived respiratory risks differently than oral risks: a modified risk claim reduced ST relative respiratory risk perceptions but increased ST perceived oral risks.

Conclusions

Absolute and relative risk perceptions were each represented by two factors that behaved differently, underscoring the utility of assessing respiratory and oral risk perceptions separately. These measures of seven risk perception constructs demonstrated some validity and can be used to assess perceptions of ST risk in future research, such as postmarket surveillance of tobacco products authorized for marketing by FDA.

Implications

This study develops and validates publicly available measures of seven smokeless tobacco risk perception constructs: absolute health and addiction risks, health and addiction risks relative to cigarettes, pregnancy health risks relative to cigarettes, health risks relative to nicotine replacement therapy, and health risks relative to tobacco cessation. This study suggests that for both absolute and relative risk perceptions, risks of respiratory and oral health effects should be assessed separately, because these risk perceptions may be impacted differently by modified risk claims, and are differentially related to smokeless tobacco beliefs, use intentions, and current use.
For some, luck matters more: the impact of the great recession on the early careers of graduates from different socio-economic backgrounds*
Authors: Del Bono Emilia , Morando Greta
Published: August 2021

This article uses variation in unemployment caused by the 2008 UK recession to analyse socio-economic gaps in graduate outcomes. Our data come from a survey that collects information on several cohorts of students from all English universities and reports their destinations at 6 months after graduation. The results show that, when graduating in a recession, students from less advantaged family backgrounds are more likely to become unemployed, to work part-time, and to earn less than students from more advantaged families. There is evidence that professional networks established while at university are important in explaining some of these socio-economic gaps in outcomes.
Utopia's Discontents
Authors: Hillis Faith
Published: August 2021

In the years before the 1917 revolution, exiles who had fled the Russian empire created large and boisterous Russian colonies across Western and Central Europe. Centers of radical activity in the heart of bourgeois cities, these émigré settlements evolved into revolutionary social experiments in their own right. Feminists, nationalist activists, and Jewish intellectuals seeking to liberate and uplift populations oppressed by the tsarist regime treated the colonies as utopian communities, creating new networks, institutions, and cultural practices that reflected their values. Prefiguring the ideal world of freedom and universal fraternity of which radicals dreamed, émigré communities played a crucial role in defining the Russian revolutionary tradition and transforming it into praxis. The dreams born in the colonies also influenced their European host societies, informing international debates about the meaning of freedom on both the left and the right. But if the utopian visions forged in exile inspired populations far and wide, they developed a tendency to evolve in unexpected directions. Colony residents’ efforts to transform the world unwittingly produced explosive discontents that proved no less consequential than their revolutionary dreams.
The Other Communards
Authors: Hillis Faith
Published: August 2021

This chapter examines the first decades of emigration in the 1830s and 1840s, in which Polish patriots and Russian intellectuals predominated. It then turns to the first Russian colony, which formed in Zurich in the 1860s thanks to the arrival of several hundred students from the Russian empire. It shows how residents of the Zurich colony transformed the abstract, utopian ideas of the first generation of exiles into concrete praxis expressed through experiments in collective living, practices of women’s liberation and ethnic inclusion, and the creation of new institutions such as libraries. The new model of revolutionary living that emerged in Zurich would become a template for future exile experiments and would profoundly affect revolutionary culture at large.
The Low-Church Idea of a University
Authors: Marsden George M.
Published: August 2021

William Rainey Harper, founder of the University of Chicago, was an accomplished biblical scholar who convinced John D. Rockefeller Sr. that Baptists needed a great university. While Harper emphasized Christian character, chapel, community, and Christian dimensions in teaching, he was also an efficiency expert who was later accused, as by Upton Sinclair and Thorsten Veblen, of building a university too much beholden to business interests. Amos Alonzo Stagg saw football as contributing to building character and community. In Harper’s “low-church idea of a university,” America was his parish. Sociology, as represented by Albion Small, was presented as a Christian and democratic moral enterprise and can be seen as a last flowering of moral philosophy. John Dewey, who had abandoned earlier Christian faith, exemplifies how a broadly Christian moral heritage might blend with democratic ideals.
The Fundamentalist Menace
Authors: Marsden George M.
Published: August 2021

Nothing did more to strengthen determination for academic freedom than the fundamentalist attacks of the 1920s. In opposition to Darwinian evolution, fundamentalists found an issue that combined their alarm over the secular direction of modern culture, their reverence for the Bible, and populist appeals. William Jennings Bryan was especially effective in promoting these concerns. A number of states, especially in the South, adopted legislation banning teaching of evolution in schools. States became focal points for controversy. That is illustrated at the University of North Carolina, where, after a major controversy, antievolution forces did not prevail. Bryan helped trivialize the issue with his populist appeals at the Scopes Trial. The antievolutionist argument that if Christianity was not taught in schools, then neither should anti-Christianity be, effective earlier against Jefferson, pointed to the problem in the twentieth century of maintaining a bland blend of Christian and secular thought.
A Church with the Soul of a Nation
Authors: Marsden George M.
Published: August 2021

World War II generated concern for restoring values in Western civilization. The Harvard Report of 1945 urged study of the best in the West, including religious texts as one source of such values. The Truman Commission report of 1947, Higher Education for a Democratic Society, added more practical concerns for the new mass higher education. Humanists such as Robert Hutchins were appalled. The postwar era saw a broad religious revival in mainstream higher education, blending broadly Protestant, democratic, and humanistic ideals. Reinhold Niebuhr and other leading scholars provided guidance. The problem, though, was that the liberal Protestant emphasis on freedom tended to undercut any specific religious demands. Senator Joe McCarthy’s anticommunist crusade helped test the extent and limits of freedom. Leading educators often saw Catholics and their schools as too authoritarian. William F. Buckley’s critique of Yale’s claim to be a meaningfully Protestant institution should be understood in this context.
The Twenty-First-Century Postsecular University
Authors: Marsden George M.
Published: August 2021

Many observers agree that twenty-first-century universities have lost their way with respect to the task of providing moral leadership for their students and for the nation. This chapter surveys leading commentators, including Harry Lewis, Anthony Kronman, Andrew Delanco, William Egginton, Jonathan Haidt, and Greg Lukiankoff, on these themes, especially in the decline of the humanities. Many blame the business and economic interests and related careerism that shape most of university education. Still, as John Schmalzbauer and Kathleen A. Mahoney show, religious interests can still be found in many aspects of university life, including study of religion, campus ministries, and personal religious beliefs of many professors and students. Nonetheless, emphases on diversity do not always include religious diversity.
Addressing Moral Confusion
Authors: Brennan Jason , English William , Hasnas John , Jaworski Peter
Published: August 2021

Moral confusion in business ethics and corporate social responsibility often stems from treating ethics and law as if they were the same. Ethics and the law often overlap and sometimes conflict. They are distinct categories. Laws may enforce people’s ethical obligations. But they may also contravene them and require unethical action. Because the law has no independent moral authority, business people are always required to ask themselves whether compliance with the law is the right course of action. When the law prescribes oppressive or unjust conduct, they may have an ethical duty not to obey the law.
The Effect of Incentives
Authors: Brennan Jason , English William , Hasnas John , Jaworski Peter
Published: August 2021

It is useful to model the temptation to act wrongly using the prisoner’s dilemma, one of the most important games in game theory. The prisoner’s dilemma appears to show that the pursuit of self-interest can paradoxically lead to situations in which everyone makes choices they know will undermine their self-interest. However, introducing the possibility of repeated, self-sorting prisoner’s dilemmas with reputation effects reveals something important about the connection between self-interest and morality: We have strong incentives not to cheat because in the long run, we do best by developing the reputation for being honest. However, unfortunately, this also introduces an incentive to exaggerate our moral goodness and to engage in moral grandstanding.
The Effect of Incentives
Authors: Brennan Jason , English William , Hasnas John , Jaworski Peter
Published: August 2021

Diffusion of responsibility refers to the problem that when something is everyone’s job, it in effect ends up being nobody’s job. This explains why many collective problems arise. People face perverse incentives to free ride on others’ actions and not to do their part. As a result, agents often think in short-term rather than long-term ways. Problems such as climate change can be modeled as instances of the tragedy of the commons, one form of a collective action problem that arises due to perverse incentives created by the diffusion of responsibility.
Psychological Factors
Authors: Brennan Jason , English William , Hasnas John , Jaworski Peter
Published: August 2021

Moral psychology indicates that we have a range of quirks which lead otherwise well-meaning people to act badly. These quirks include conformity effects, by which we tend to copy what others do regardless of whether it is good or bad and tend to defer to those we see as authoritative. Framing effects—how a problem is presented—can cause us to change our decisions. We suffer from moral blind spots, in which we fail to notice something is at stake because we act on auto-pilot. Further, the matrix task experiment demonstrates a wide range of external factors predictably modify how honest people are.
Artificial Phronesis
Authors: Sullins John P.
Published: August 2021

Robotics technologies are already impacting the ethical and moral landscape we live in. This chapter looks at the need to develop machines with ethical and moral practical wisdom, a capability we will call artificial phronesis. Phronesis is a skill that most adult humans have to some level, but as of yet no machine has it. It is the ability to think creatively, artfully, and effectively in solving novel ethical and moral problems as they arise. Many of the robots of our imagination display this skill, and this shows that there is a desire to build such machines. This chapter defines the meaning of this new term and the boundaries of which kinds of systems it might apply to.
Becoming a Learning Agile Organization
Authors: Ruyle Kim E. , De Meuse Kenneth P. , Hughley Charles W.
Published: August 2021

“Becoming a Learning Agile Organization” describes the most prevalent cultural attributes and talent management methods of learning agile organizations. Overall, it is shown that the same learning agile attributes on the individual level (e.g., quickly learning from experience; being strategically focused, willing to experiment and take risks; understanding one’s personal strengths and limitations; and being responsive to feedback) transcend to organizations that are highly learning agile. For example, leaders in learning agile organizations tend to be approachable and empathetic, and they promote a high degree of psychological safety that promotes experimentation and learning. Recommendations are provided to promote organizational learning agility by optimizing talent management practices, including talent differentiation, staffing, career management, talent development, and succession planning.
Building Learning Agility Through Psychological Safety
Authors: Stomski Lorraine , Jensen Kelly
Published: August 2021

“Building Learning Agility through Psychological Safety” examines psychological safety, a shared belief held by members of a team that it is safe for interpersonal risk-taking and its positive impact on learning agility. This chapter postulates that learning agility is enabled and accelerated by a culture of risk-taking, openness, and experimentation. The chapter also discusses the role of the leader in activating and accelerating team learning. Beyond the intrinsic motivations and learning skills an individual embodies, there is an important role a leader plays in creating the team environment and culture where employees feel empowered to learn by taking risks and trying new skills, practicing, failing fast, reflecting, and learning. By creating a psychologically safe environment, the leader creates the conditions necessary for building and nurturing learning agility.
Cinematic Self-Consciousness in Hitchcock’s Rear Window
Authors: Pippin Robert B.
Published: August 2021

The claim in this chapter is that the “rear window ethics” that Rear Window explicitly raises as a question does not primarily concern the ethics of voyeurism, but the norms of cinematic viewing, and the metaphorical dimensions of the main character’s passive, detached, observational attending. The film is shown to be cinematically self-conscious, to embody a conception of itself that primarily concerns this issue. The connection between such a theme and the romantic plot between James Stewart’s character and Grace Kelly’s is demonstrated. The question posed by Raymond Burr’s character in the finale, “What do you want from me?” is shown to be double-edged, to be an expression of Hitchcock’s demand on the audience, after the film has shown what he expects from the viewer (and rarely receives).
Shoah
Authors: Felman Shoshana
Published: August 2021

This chapter explores the enduring potency of Claude Lanzmann’s film Shoah (1985) for illuminating the nature of event, memory, witnessing, and testimony (testimony to a private and collective trauma). It considers the implications of a film that some view as a documentary—but which this chapter considers, rather, as one of the greatest works of art of our times—a film that, in an unparalleled and paradoxical way, refuses systematically to use any historical, archival footage. The chapter argues that Lanzmann’s work of stark originality is a radically unprecedented cinematic, artistic and philosophical creation, about the witnessing of a shattering historical catastrophe, viewed from the present, that is, from the corporeal and emotional presences of the human beings who were once its protagonists (its executioners, its victims, its bystanders). As the chapter recalibrates our sense of witnessing, of seeing, and of what counts as bearing witness to an unthinkable event, it explores why Lanzmann should be understood himself as an innovative kind of cinematic witness—indeed, as a profoundly philosophical filmmaker, witness in the second degree of a cataclysmic history, whose living corporeality resists becoming simply past.
Motion Picture Narration
Authors: Carroll Noël
Published: August 2021

This chapter opposes the notion of ubiquitous, implicit narration in movie fictions, specifically challenging the position of George Wilson on the matter.
Playing (Safely) with Fire
Authors: Bock Mary Angela
Published: August 2021

This chapter reviews the project’s argument, that social actors struggle over the construction of visual messages in embodied and discursive ways. Digitization has vastly expanded the encoding capabilities of everyday citizens, allowing them to render their expression of democratic voice visible, even as the ethical rules for visual expression are inchoate. The project’s case studies demonstrate the way grounded practices produce representations that support the authority of the criminal justice system, and together they invite three theoretical discussions: (1) on the way visual journalism’s physicality increases its reliance on those in power, (2) on the importance of image indexicality as a discursive affordance in the public sphere, and (3) on the digital public sphere as visual, and participation in this visual public sphere must be considered as an essential human capability. As a whole, the project offers insight into the construction of the criminal justice system’s literal and metaphorical image.
National, European, or Global
Authors: Hesselink Martijn W.
Published: August 2021

This chapter addresses the Europeanization of contract law from a normative perspective: can the Europeanization of contract law be justified? Or are there more convincing reasons why contract law should remain national or become global? Do we perhaps have a moral right to a European civil code? Or, conversely, are we entitled to make our contract law entirely national again? Should the integrity of national legal cultures be respected, or should a (re)nascent European legal culture be fostered? The chapter aims to provide a better explanation of why and how the question of the Europeanization of contract law has been so divisive and why neither the status quo, nor fully undoing the Europeanization of private law, nor indeed a move fast forward towards a European civil code, seem today to be alternatives commanding widespread support.
Binding Force and Remedies
Authors: Hesselink Martijn W.
Published: August 2021

This chapter is dedicated entirely to what may be regarded as the most fundamental political question of contract law, i.e. what justifies the legally binding force of contract law? What business do public institutions have in recognizing and enforcing private agreements? Could a society decide not to enforce contracts and still be sufficiently just? And if indeed a society ought to publicly recognize and enforce contracts, then which remedies should it make available? Leading contemporary political theories differ not only in the answers provided to this most fundamental political question of contract law but also in their respective understandings of the question, in particular on which aspects of it they consider particularly relevant.
Now Is Not the Time
Authors: Lammer Andreas
Published: August 2021

Experts on Avicenna’s natural philosophy are in agreement that for Avicenna, time exists as the result of a now which flows and which through its flow produces time. Having been a prominent interpretation of Aristotle’s account of time in the Physics, the theory of the ‘flowing now’ was known to Avicenna from ancient and late ancient commentaries, and is mentioned in his most detailed discussion of time from his seminal work The Cure. It is, however, absent from all his other accounts of time and even within his argumentation in The Cure, there are strong, heretofore neglected reasons to believe that Avicenna ultimately did not adopt this idea. This article provides a full investigation of Avicenna’s theory of the now and investigates its position within the larger context of his temporal theory, arguing—against the current consensus—that for Avicenna, time is not produced by the now through its flow.
On Loving God Contrary to a Divine Command
Authors: Hagedorn Eric W.
Published: August 2021

Among the most widely discussed of William Ockham’s texts on ethics is his Quodlibet III, q. 14. But despite a large literature on this question, there is no consensus on what Ockham’s answer is to the central question raised in it, specifically, what obligations one would have if one were to receive a divine command to not love God. (Surprisingly, there is also little explicit recognition in the literature of this lack of consensus.) Via a close reading of the text, the author argues, contrary to much of the literature, that Ockham believes that if one were given this command, one would be obligated to refrain from loving God and would also be able to fulfill this obligation without any moral wrongdoing. Among other results, this study will help clarify Ockham’s much-discussed claim that loving God is “a necessarily virtuous act.”
Socially Embedded Agency
Authors: Webster Aness Kim
Published: August 2021

This chapter proposes a distinctive kind of agency that can vindicate the agency of members of marginalized groups while accommodating the autonomy-undermining influences of oppression. Socially embedded agency—the locus of which is in the exercise of our ability to negotiate between different social features—is compatible with, and can explain, various phenomena, including double-consciousness and white fragility. Moreover, although socially embedded agency is neither necessary nor sufficient for autonomy, exercising it is practically necessary to achieve autonomy, at least for members of marginalized groups in our non-ideal world. This means that we can also explain why many have thought that there was a tension between autonomy-eroding effects of oppression and the call for respecting the agency of those who are oppressed.
Guilty Confessions
Authors: Tierney Hannah
Published: August 2021

Recent work on blameworthiness has prominently featured discussions of guilt. The philosophers who develop guilt-based views of blameworthiness do an excellent job of attending to the evaluative and affective features of feeling guilty. However, these philosophers have been less attentive to guilt’s characteristic action tendencies and the role admissions of guilt play in our blaming practices. This chapter focuses on the nature of guilty confession and argues that it illuminates an important function of blame that has been overlooked in the recent work on guilt as it relates to blameworthiness: Blame can communicate respect.
Fairness, Sanction, and Condemnation
Authors: Hieronymi Pamela
Published: August 2021

One might be puzzled about what philosophers have in mind when they talk about ‘basic desert,’ ‘true moral responsibility,’ or the ‘condemnatory force’ of moral criticism. In particular, one might be puzzled by its presumed relation to some strong requirement of freedom. The presumption is that, if we are not ‘free’ in some very strong sense, then we are not truly morally responsible and so do not deserve condemnation. But, what is this condemnation and why does it require a strong for of freedom? This chapter responds to this question and offers a new understanding of the presumed relation between a strong form of freedom and a status that might be called ‘condemnation’ or a kind of desert that might be called ‘basic.’
Psychological Health— Te Taha Hinengaro
Authors: Beaumont David
Published: August 2021

The Māori model of health and the importance of thoughts and feelings for Māori. Maslow and the need to feel safe. The significance of adverse childhood experiences and the roots of mental ill health in adults. The Dalai Lama on love and compassion. The New Zealand Government’s 2018 Inquiry into Mental Health and Addiction and New Zealand’s suicide epidemic. The New Zealand government’s first ‘Wellbeing Budget’ (2019). The role of meditation in pain management (and the author’s personal experience thereof). Maladaptive thinking, rumination, and catastrophizing. The author’s personal experience of depression. Antidepressants, or ‘the drug, doctor’? Author’s experience of acceptance and commitment therapy (accept, choose a valued direction, and take action). Mindfulness and the daily practice of meditation. Another look at work and health, especially the notion of good work. The author’s development of a plan for ‘whole life health’ in his practice, and a patient’s testimony.
Spiritual Health—Te Taha Wairua
Authors: Beaumont David
Published: August 2021

The significance of spiritual health in the Māori model of health. Author notes resistance in secular society to the term ‘spiritual’ and broadens the term to encompass our search for meaning: why we are here, why we exist. Maslow and our esteem needs, notably an acknowledgement of our capacities, achievements, and adequacy, by others and ourselves, to gain a sense of ‘being useful in the world’. The definition of spirituality from the Oxford Textbook of Spirituality in Healthcare as ‘the way people engage with the purpose and meaning of human existence’. Using the framework from acceptance and commitment therapy, the author’s personal experience of defining his personal values. His reflection on his own personal beliefs and his personal journey to self-discovery. The concept of inner child work and its role in existential health and healing. A client’s own experience of finding his inner child. The concept of ‘best me’. Maslow’s theory of motivation. The concept of flourishing and the author’s personal self-assessment. The US psychiatrist Dr M. Scott Peck’s book The Road Less Travelled, and his insight that it takes courage to make tough life decisions. The power of the stories we tell ourselves.
Epilogue
Authors: Beaumont David
Published: August 2021

The author returns to the challenge presented by Ivan Illich in Medical Nemesis, and the concept of iatrogenesis—the inadvertent harm caused by doctors. The dispute over the numbers: is it the third-highest cause of death (after heart disease and cancer)? Or is this an underestimate? Illich’s book should be seen as a call to action. UK GP Dr Marshall Marinker’s response to Illich’s challenge; the flaws in medical training embodied in the unspoken assumptions guiding the clinical behaviour of its teachers. The inherent power imbalance in the doctor–patient consultation. The profession may have misunderstood Illich, but health systems have improved; medical curricula have been rewritten. The role of society in determining how care is provided, and the influence of health systems. New models of practice altering the person–doctor relationship, incorporating self-management (the ‘third way’ of medical practice). The author’s proposed model (the positive health model) empowers patients, as Illich advocated. The role of medical colleges and governments in positive change.
Defensive Harm and Measured Aggression
Authors: Pereboom Derk
Published: August 2021

Chapter 3 concerns how we might justify effectively dealing with those who pose dangerous threats supposing they do not deserve to be harmed. Wrongly posing a threat, by contrast with deserving harm for posing the threat, is proposed as the core condition for what I call robust liability to defensive killing, a liability that agent A has just in case A poses a threat to agent B as a result of which B and third parties are prima facie morally permitted to intentionally kill A to defend B from that threat. A non-retributive measured aggressive stance appropriately facilitates taking defensive action. Such an emotional stance, if it presupposes only that its target wrongly poses a threat, accords with skepticism about free will, and is also better for those called upon to confront injustice than the alternatives.
Religion and Hope
Authors: Pereboom Derk
Published: August 2021

Chapter 7 defends the rationality of hope for humanity on both theistic and non-theistic grounds. Hope is appropriate when our interest lies in an unknown outcome due to factors completely beyond our control, as is the case if our future is rendered inevitable by theological determination or by the past and the laws of nature. Conceptions of divine providence, whether or not they endorse free will, are challenged by moral wrongdoing and natural evil that appear not to be justified by any good to which they contribute. Responses to the problem of evil, e.g. theodicies, are not decisive, but they allow for rational hope that a providential God exists. There is a related hope that is rational on either theistic or atheistic presuppositions, a counterpart of John Dewey’s “common faith,” a faith in the survival and progress of humanity embedded in a thriving natural environment.
Abusive Constitutional Borrowing
Authors: Dixon Rosalind , Landau David
Published: August 2021

We live in a golden age of comparative constitutional law. Liberal democratic ideas have diffused readily around the world, and certain features such as judicial review and constitutional rights are now nearly universal. At the same time, recent years have seen a pronounced trend toward the erosion of democracy. This book argues that the rhetorical triumph of liberal democratic constitutionalism, and the tendency toward democratic retrenchment, are fully consistent phenomena. Legal globalization has a dark side: norms intended to protect and promote liberal democratic constitutionalism can often readily be used to undermine it. Abusive constitutional borrowing involves the appropriation of liberal democratic constitutional designs, concepts, and doctrines to advance authoritarian projects. Some of the most important hallmarks of liberal democratic constitutionalism—including constitutional rights, judicial review, and constituent power—can be turned into powerful instruments to demolish rather than defend democracy. The book offers a wealth of examples, selected both to shed new light on well-known cases such as Hungary, Poland, and Venezuela, as well as to expand discussions by considering contexts such as Cambodia, Rwanda, and Fiji. It also discusses the implications of the phenomenon of abusive constitutional borrowing for those who study and promote liberal democracy and related fields like human rights. It suggests ways in which the construction of norms might be improved to protect against abuse (what we call ‘abuse-proofing’), as well as ways in which monitoring regimes might be more attuned to the threat. Finally, it suggests recasting debates about liberal democracy to emphasize contestation, rather than mimicry.
Democracy and Abusive Constitutional Change
Authors: Dixon Rosalind , Landau David
Published: August 2021

This chapter defines abusive constitutional change as an intentional attack on the democratic minimum core, or a minimalist, electorally focused definition of democracy familiar from recent work in law and political science. The advantage of using a yardstick for abuse that is a relatively thin, electoral version of democracy is that it avoids engaging more contestable commitments and thus enjoys a higher degree of global consensus. The chapter also distinguishes democracy from liberalism and explores the complex relationship between the two concepts. There is a theoretical tension between democracy and liberalism, although recent experience has suggested a strong tendency for them to erode together. Finally, the chapter explains the main forms of abusive constitutional change—formal constitutional amendment and replacement, sub-constitutional change through the passage of new legislation, and informal methods of change such as judicial reinterpretation. Most recent experiences with democratic erosion rely on a broad mix of these methods.
The Technology of Articulation
Authors: Morrison Benedict
Published: August 2021

This chapter explores the use of collage structures in Peter Greenaway’s The Pillow Book (1996), in which the use of intermedia, comprising different types of image and text, results in ever more complex configurations that gesture to new technological possibilities. The film places frames within frames, disturbing the linear cause-and-effect logic of sequence. Collage operates in the film as a complicated montage, disrupting linearity and replacing it with overwhelming simultaneity. This articulation results in a semiotic eccentricity in which frames compete for attention. Criticism has often dismissed the film’s central character Nagiko as too insubstantial to hold the pieces of this articulation together, but this is to mistake her function. She is a cipher, and her erotic writing on the skin of others is just one element in an unsutured and indeterminate collage that displaces narrative. Offering skin-deep characterization, the film plays with the proliferating complexities of intermedia.
Moral Status, Person-Affectingness, and Parfit’s No Difference View
Authors: Kamm F. M.
Published: August 2021

This chapter first considers the idea of an entity’s moral status as what it is permissible or impermissible to do to it and examines how its status so understood relates to whether it is sentient, conscious, capable of agency, a subject, or rational. The chapter then considers ways in which the moral status of embryos that will definitely develop into persons differs from the status of those persons. It considers implications of this for the Non-Identity Problem and the so-called No-Difference View about it.
How the Moral Community Evolves
Authors: Powell Rachell , Mikhalevich Irina , Buchanan Allen
Published: August 2021

Moral reasoning is modulated by emotions and other cognitive biases. How do these covert biasing mechanisms shape perceptions of more fundamental moral categories, such as moral standing and moral status (together, “MSS”), out of which specific moral attitudes and behaviors flow? This chapter explains the centrality of MSS to human evolution, and examines several evolved biases that distort MSS ascription. These include tendencies to deny moral standing, or to attribute lower moral status, to beings that elicit feelings of disgust or fear, as well as to those that are perceived as less similar, less attractive, less individualized, and less disposed toward reciprocal cooperation. These adaptive mechanisms may have served human groups well in the evolutionary past, but in the modern world they pose an obstacle to moral progress and play a key role in moral regression. The chapter argues that these biases have also influenced philosophical and scientific research on animal minds. The aim is to develop a richer, biocultural understanding of how conceptions of the moral community evolve.
Day and Night Leisure Routines and Regimes
Authors: MacArthur-Seal Daniel-Joseph
Published: August 2021

The chapter assesses disjunctures between military routines and patterns of leisure and nightlife in the cities of the eastern Mediterranean. Military authorities attempted to control the desires of their subordinates to escape from the confines of the camp through the provision of leisure activities intended to boost military effectiveness. Many servicemen, however, continued their pursuit of pleasure in the nocturnal city, stimulating a flourishing of entertainment venues that came to occupy a major place in the topography of the imagined Levantine city. The chapter finally considers how military time-keeping regimes were extended to the city through the control of licensing hours and lighting in a failed attempt to silence and extinguish the night.
1918–1920
Authors: MacArthur-Seal Daniel-Joseph
Published: August 2021

The sub-chapter traces major military and political developments in the eastern Mediterranean in 1918–1920, beginning with the arrival of British and Allied forces in Istanbul. It sketches out the political debate over the future of the city and wider Ottoman Empire through the series of Allied diplomatic meetings that set out the terms of what would become the Treaty of Sèvres. The chapter also summarises developments in Anatolia following the Greek occupation of Izmir in May 1919, the reaction to which crystalized the emerging nationalist movement in Anatolia, and in southern Russia and the Caucasus, where Bolshevik and White Russian forces competed for control with non-Russian national movements. Finally, it outlines the political debate over the future of Egypt and the impact of the revolution of 1919, one of a growing number of anti-colonial uprisings which Britain was forced to contend with in the period.
‘The Most Valuable National Fund’
Authors: Rybak Jan
Published: August 2021

At the heart of Zionists’ nation-building project was the care and education of Jewish children in East-Central Europe. Young people were particularly affected by the war, often having lost family and home. Zionists saw them as the future of the nation, and the struggle for their well-being and education came to be a key element of their efforts during the war. This chapter shows how Zionists built orphanages and kindergartens, schools, and summer camps, and how these institutions functioned on a day-to day basis. These efforts in particular demonstrate that the war was also a time of great opportunity and experimentation for education activists. They tried to apply new pedagogical theories within their institutions based on their ideas of Jewish childhood and its role in producing upright, nationally conscious Jews who were the future of the nation. Gender relations are particularly key in this context: young women played an ever-increasing role in the movement through their involvement with childcare and education. The war opened up a range of new possibilities for young people, and particularly for young women to attain hitherto unheard-of roles within the Zionist movement. These changing gender and age relations within the Zionist movement mirrored changed relations within the wider society, due to the pressure of the war, and shaped the movement for decades to come.
Genre and Extravagance in the Novel
Authors: Rasula Jed
Published: August 2021

This book addresses an anomaly in the novel as genre: the generic promise to readers—that “reading a novel” is a familiar and repeatable experience—is challenged by the extravagant exceptions to this rule. Furthermore, these exceptions (like Moby-Dick, Ulysses, or To the Lighthouse) are sui generis, hybrid concoctions that cannot be said to be typical novels. The novel, then, as literary form, succeeds by extravagantly disregarding or even disavowing the protocols of its own genre. Examining a number of famous examples from Don Quixote to Nostromo, this book offers an anatomy of exceptions that illustrate the structural role of their exceptionality for the prestige of the novel as literary form.
International Law and Corporate Actors in Deep Seabed Mining
Authors: Dingwall Joanna
Published: August 2021

Corporate participation within deep seabed mining raises unique challenges for international law. Commercial investment by private corporate actors in deep seabed mining is increasing. The deep seabed beyond national jurisdiction (the Area) comprises almost three-quarters of the entire surface area of the oceans, and it is home to an array of prized commodities including valuable metals and rare earth elements. These resources constitute the common heritage of mankind. Acting under the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS), the International Seabed Authority (ISA) is responsible for regulating the Area for the benefit of humanity and granting mining contracts. Although mining activities in the Area remain at the exploration stage, in recent years, there has been a marked growth in investment by private corporate actors, and an increasing impetus towards exploitation. This increasing corporate activity presents challenges, including in relation to matters of common management, benefit sharing, marine environmental protection and investment protection. In part, these challenges stem from the often-contentious role of non-state actors, such as corporations, within the international legal system. A product of its history, the UNCLOS deep seabed regime is an unlikely hybrid of capitalist and communist values, embracing the role of private actors while enshrining principles of resource distribution. As technological advances begin to outstrip legal developments, this study advances the discourse by addressing the extent of any tension between corporate commercial activity in the Area and the achievement of the common heritage of mankind.
Introduction
Authors: Bergmann Michael
Published: August 2021

After concisely highlighting the book’s main themes, this chapter explains why it is important to think about responses to radical skepticism, and provides an overview of the book and its key concepts. First, it identifies three reasons it is worthwhile to devote time to thinking about how best to respond to radical skepticism. These reasons are that it enables us to consider (in a more informed way) our options for dealing with less radical forms of skepticism (e.g. moral or religious skepticism), it affects our stance on a multitude of other positions in epistemology and other subfields in philosophy, and it is intrinsically interesting. Second, this chapter provides a detailed overview of the book’s contents, noting that Part I objects to argument-based resistance to radical skepticism, Part II defends noninferential commonsense epistemic-intuition-based resistance to radical skepticism, and Part III responds to objections to epistemic intuition (on which the approach to skepticism, developed in Part II, heavily relies). Third, it clarifies three key concepts that play an important role in the book—skepticism, justification, and evidence—by distinguishing a variety of understandings of each concept and highlighting the ones that are relevant to the book’s content.
Epistemic Intuition and Experimental Philosophy
Authors: Bergmann Michael
Published: August 2021

This chapter considers the skeptical objection to epistemic intuition that is based on experimental philosophy, which aims to use the methods of cognitive science to conduct experimental investigations of the psychological processes underlying people’s intuitions about central philosophical issues. Section 1 carefully lays out this objection, identifying the crucial premises on which it relies. Section 2 considers how strong this objection needs to be if it is to be successful, arguing that stronger objections are needed if the beliefs the objections are intended to undermine are rationally held with a high degree of confidence (as appears to be the case with the beliefs based on epistemic intuition that are targeted by this objection). Section 3 examines the objection from experimental philosophy in detail, noting that each of its crucial premises faces serious challenges, with the result that it is not strong enough to undermine the intuitionist particularist anti-skeptic’s reliance on epistemic intuitions. Section 4 draws together the various argumentative strands in the book and situates the book’s conclusions in a moderate commonsense tradition that avoids the extremes of both dogmatism and radical skepticism.