bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Empty shelves on the Palatine
Authors: Horsfall Nicholas
Published: November 2020

The whole Aeneid is a meditation on Roman history in which Aeneas’ sufferings lead directly to the altae moenia Romae. The paper summarizes the principal ways in which Virgil sets historical reference within epic narrative. Part of the reason why research hitherto has not come up with any answers to the questions that this paper tries to pose is that Virgil specialists tend to look too closely and exclusively at epic (and sometimes tragic) antecedents. We should perhaps look at two less obvious poetic genres: the literature of prophecy, and aetiological poetry. The Aeneid works, intellectually, as a new kind of epic, formally mythological, but often, in its implications, historical, because it has taken on (and this is the ‘mixing of genres’, never practised so radically or brilliantly elsewhere) a powerful, inspiring element from aetiological poetry.
The unity of Roman Italy
Authors: Horsfall Nicholas
Published: November 2020

Starting from the reproach of Patavinity laid at Livy’s door by Asinius Pollio, this paper examines contemporary thinking about regional anomalies of language in Roman Italy and the ways in which the inhabitants of ancient Italy expressed dislike, disgust, or surprise at the way ‘others’ in the peninsula behaved, or were alleged to behave; tota Italia was a slogan—then as now—if not invalidated, then at least weakened and impugned by numerous inconvenient exceptions and anomalies.
The legionary as his own historian
Authors: Horsfall Nicholas
Published: November 2020

Could you spot a Roman veteran? The hunt described here for his distinguishing features was productive and satisfying, as might actually have been predicted, given the deeply rooted links in Greco-Roman thinking (consider Homer’s Thersites, or Theophrastus’ Characters) between appearance or manners and character or activity. Specific evidence is given here which does seem to suggest that legionaries were enthusiastic storytellers, as in Tibullus 1.10.31f.: ‘So the soldier may tell me his deeds as I drink and draw his camp in the wine.’ Such commonplaces are so common precisely because they really did correspond to daily usage, as any returned veteran, by land or by sea, would naturally have done, and in fact often did, in taverns empire-wide, and so well that historians in the end pick up the result and immortalize it.
The Poetics of Toponymy
Authors: Horsfall Nicholas
Published: November 2020

The influence of place names on memory; their associative forces (with examples drawn from modern writers) and how poets use them. A personal look at poetic use, mainly in English and American poets. Toponymy revealed as a powerful mechanism for communicating poetic love of country and the sounds of that country’s language. Place names in Horace and Virgil and some surprising conclusions to be drawn.
Inscrutability of Reference as a Result of Quine’s Structuralism
Authors: Peregrin Jaroslav
Published: November 2020

In his later writings Quine is increasingly explicit about the fact that his view of language is, in a certain sense, structuralistic. Structuralist interpretations of non-empirical, especially mathematical theories are now commonplace, but this chapter argues that Quine’s thought experiment with radical translation can be interpreted as showing that even empirical theories cannot be anchored in reality so firmly as to evade the same structuralist nature. Therefore, this peculiar form of structuralism extends to all our theories––the terms of all of them are best seen as meaning not definite substances, but nodes in certain structures. Moreover, radical translation shows––or purports to show––that the structure behind any natural language allows for some non-trivial ‘automorphisms’––that mapping the meaning of rabbit on that of undetached rabbit part, provided we make an appropriate remapping of many other meanings, does not change the language. Inscrutability of reference is then only a direct consequence.
Quine’s Deflationary Structuralism
Authors: Gregory Paul A.
Published: November 2020

W. V. Quine undermined and rejected Rudolf Carnap’s metaphysical deflationism, reinstating scientific metaphysics. Despite this, Quine eventually develops his own brand of structuralist metaphysics that is equally though differently deflationary. This chapter traces the development of Quine’s deflationary attitude from the 1950s through to the 1990s. Quine’s early deflationary attitude gains focus with the emergence and prominence of the proxy function argument—objects are merely neutral nodes in theory structures—and deflationary structuralism is the result. The chapter concludes that Quine has been an interesting kind of ontological deflationist from early on, and that the deflationary structuralism that develops during the second half of the twentieth century is an integral and co-evolving part of his overall naturalism.
Quine’s Structural Holism and the Constitutive A Priori
Authors: Sinclair Robert
Published: November 2020

Recent work on the structure of scientific theories has assigned a significant role to a priori principles in the formulation of scientific theories. For example, Michael Friedman has argued that theories possess an asymmetrical structure, with mathematical and logical principles presupposed in the very formulation of empirical laws. He further argues that Quine’s depiction of human knowledge as a ‘web of belief’, cannot capture this structure nor the constitutive role played by a priori principles in enabling the formulation of empirical statements and laws. This chapter argues that properly understood Quine’s ‘structural holism’ can capture this asymmetrical structure of scientific theories, but fails to address Friedman’s concern with constitutive a priori principles as coordinating the abstract mathematical component of scientific theories with sensible experience. However, once this difference is located in their different perspectives on scientific theories, the chapter argues that their views be seen as complementary rather than opposed.
Wilde, Classicism, and Homosexuality in Modern Ireland
Authors: Walshe Eibhear
Published: November 2020

This chapter explores how Irish writers since Oscar Wilde have invoked Hellenism when faced with public exposure of their homosexuality. Wilde is seen both as a dissident against England and, for gay writers, a champion and liberator. For James Joyce, Wilde was a figure of defiance and a fellow exile. Patrick Pearse never mentions Wilde, but seems to have been drawn to his sensibility in the parallels he suggests between ancient Greek and Irish masculinity. The writings of Brendan Behan are no less permeated by Wilde’s Hellenism. Following the decriminalization of homosexuality in Ireland, affiliation with Wilde could be openly acknowledged, as in Jamie O’Neill’s At Swim, Two Boys (2001), where Wilde is an iconic symbol of both homosexuality and patriotic rebellion. Controversy has been reframed, however, through media associations of Hellenism with paedophilia, and has embroiled politician David Norris and Irish-language poet Cathal Ó Searcaigh.
The Politics of Neoclassicism in Belfast and Dublin
Authors: O’Neill Suzanne
Published: November 2020

This chapter offers a comparative analysis of the divergent histories and symbolic associations of the neoclassical Stormont and General Post Office buildings, in Belfast and Dublin respectively. Completed in 1932, the Northern Irish Parliament buildings at Stormont were constructed as a bastion of unionism, designed according to the imperial neoclassical vision of Sir Arnold Thornely, but influenced by the idiosyncratic ideas of Sir James Craig, who is also buried on site in a manner analogous to classicizing hero cult. The General Post Office in Dublin, by contrast, although a colonial building in its 1818 origin, has become one of the most iconic representations of Irish independence as the headquarters of the 1916 Rising. Despite being bombed by British forces during the Rising, it has since been restored and divested of its colonial symbolism.
The Classical Themes of Irish Coinage, 1928–2002
Authors: Morris Christine
Published: November 2020

This chapter traces the conceptualization and subsequent legacy, through the lens of social biography, of the classically inspired Irish coinage of the new independent Irish state. Under the direction of W. B. Yeats as Chairman of the Coinage Committee, seven artists were invited to submit designs adhering to the guidelines and suggestions of the committee, including photographs of classical coinage depicting animals. Percy Metcalfe won the commission with a design for a new coinage that was radical in omitting any figurehead, and thus also unlike the former British currency. After receiving critical international acclaim, the coins had a significant impact both in inspiring other currencies globally and in being affectionately memorialized in Ireland, after the introduction of the euro, through the poetry of Seamus Heaney and the sculpture of Carolyn Mullholland.
The Archive of Fear
Authors: Zwarg Christina
Published: November 2020

Not about Haiti but about the haunting power of its revolution, The Archive of Fear explores the traumatic force field that continued to inflect U.S. discussions of slavery and abolition both before and after the Civil War, sometimes with surprising intensity and endurance. Focusing on U.S. slavery and its aftermath in the nineteenth century, it challenges the long-assumed distinction between psychological and cultural-historical theories of trauma, discovering a virtual dialogue between three central U.S. writers and Sigmund Freud concerning the traumatic response of slavery’s perpetrators. To do so, it shows how trauma theory before Freud first involves a return to an overlap between crisis, insurrection, and mesmerism found in the work of Frederick Douglass, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and W. E. B. Du Bois. Mesmer’s “crisis state” has long been read as the precursor to hypnosis, the tool Freud famously rejected when he created psychoanalysis. But the story of what was lost to trauma theory when Freud adopted the “talk cure” can be told through cultural disruptions of New World slavery, especially after mesmerism arrived in Saint Domingue where its implication in the Haitian revolution in both reality and fantasy had an impact on the history of emancipation in the United States. The Archive of Fear argues that a strain of trauma theory and practice comes alive in the temporal and spatial disruptions of New World slavery—and that key elements of that theory still inform the infrastructure of race relations today. Reviewing trauma theory through its pre-Freudian roots—especially as the alarm of slavery’s perpetrators relates to the temporal patterns of Mesmer’s “crisis state”—widens our sense of the affective atmospheres through which emancipation had to be sought. And it illuminates the fugitive approach Douglass, Stowe, and Du Bois devised to confront and defuse the archive of fear still blocking full emancipation today.
Introduction
Authors: Zwarg Christina
Published: November 2020

Mesmerism first arrived in the northern hemisphere through Haiti, and the link between mesmerism and slave insurrection that Douglass and Stowe revive before the Civil War is part of the fugitive archive of modernity. Because mesmerism is important to the early history of psychoanalysis, its affiliation with insurrection widens the psychic horizon to include the crisis triggered by the “impossible demands” of emancipation. Recognition of that enduring sense of crisis unites the work of Douglass, Stowe, and Du Bois and opens to view the environmental power shaping early trauma theory. Hegel believed that the transmission of affect at the center of the mesmeric crisis could supersede normal channels of communication while Douglass and Stowe found such relays alternately promising and threatening for democratic practice. Significantly, the temporal dimensions of Mesmer’s crisis state allowed for an extended recalibration of the ongoing moment, or “the future in the present.”
“More than Lynched”
Authors: Zwarg Christina
Published: November 2020

Reading John Brown together with Black Reconstruction, Chapter 3 exposes the join of psychological and material concerns that Du Bois learns from Douglass. The anarchistic energy that Du Bois adopts to describe Brown is best articulated in Walter Benjamin’s early essay “On Violence.” As Judith Butler has argued, Benjamin borrowed the idea of the general strike from Georges Sorel to theorize a destructive power that is ironically pitched at violence itself. Such an idea matches the mesmeric notion of the “crisis state”: structurally it has a homeopathic dimension where an anticipated violence is reproduced to unmoor and undo its terror. Douglass shows his understanding of this unique destructive power when he expresses ambivalence about Brown’s invitation to join the raid on Harper’s Ferry, something Du Bois highlights by dwelling on the attention Douglass gives to Shields Green, the man who decided to “go down with the old man.”
Postlude
Authors: Zwarg Christina
Published: November 2020

Du Bois borrows the idea of the interrupted lecture to develop his case study of Andrew Johnson in Black Reconstruction. Johnson represents the type of man that John Brown did not expect to find in the slave-holding world: someone who began his political career by hating the aristocrats responsible for slavery. Du Bois finds a potential for cross-racial alliance in a famous Tennessee lecture where Johnson is interrupted and hailed as a “Moses” of the color line. Even though the record of the lecture also exhibits traces of Johnson’s well-known racial prejudice, Du Bois momentarily suspends judgment in an effort to invite his reader into an anarchic space. Johnson would later perversely brag to Douglass about this stunning encounter but Du Bois rehearses Johnson’s positive response to the demands of his audience in order to challenge his reader to “demand the impossible” for themselves: the black reconstruction of democracy.
Corporate Governance of Financial Corporations
Authors: Chiu Iris H-Y
Published: November 2020

This chapter critically discusses the relevance of conventional corporate governance paradigms for financial corporations, especially in the wake of the global financial crisis. Many banks that had apparently good systems of corporate governance according to conventional standards were financially impaired and criticised for having engaged in unchecked excessive risk-taking. Post-crisis reforms, especially those relating to regulation in the United Kingdom and the European Union, took the approach of directly regulating aspects of bank corporate governance including board responsibility, internal control functions, and bankers’ remuneration. However, these approaches are not extended to the general corporate sector as there are unique financial and incentive structures at financial corporations justifying such approaches, and the regulated financial corporations pose issues of systemic risk and public interest. The distinct regulatory regimes however still sit uneasily with conventional norms of shareholder-centred corporate governance, and this issue remains unresolved.
The Governance of International Organisations
Authors: Cannon Cecilia , Biersteker Thomas
Published: November 2020

International organisations (IOs) are central players in the architecture of global governance—from international peace and security to global economic governance, humanitarian assistance, and sustainable development. They draw on their expertise and the legitimacy they derive from their global or regional representativeness to facilitate international cooperation to address collective challenges. In this chapter, we examine the means and mechanisms through which IOs are governed. We begin with an introduction to IOs, focusing on the three foundational bodies that constitute the governance components of most IOs: member states, secretariats, and executive boards. We examine oversight and accountability mechanisms and consider four governance design features that vary across IOs: their mandate, financing, decision-making, and engagement with non-state actors. Finally, we reflect on some of the contemporary governance challenges IOs face today and describe different ways they are adapting and reforming to address some of the challenges.
Government Role and Public Spending
Authors: Tanzi Vito
Published: November 2020

This chapter considers two polar cases in the role of government: Laissez faire and central planning. Past experiences with central planning, its difficulties and its influence, are discussed. The chapter looks at the role of the state during periods of laissez faire and the influence of Adam Smith. Low spending and low taxes characterize laissez faire policies. Economists put their trust in evolution and progress. The chapter then goes on to anaylze how the role of the state changed in the twentieth century and the new functions of stabilization and redistribution. The Industrial Revolution had a major impact on the role of the state in the nineeenth century, and in the twentieth, after World War Two, many states saw a growth in taxation and public spending. Finally the chapter considers whether more public spending leads to more social welfare
Why the Normative and Positive Roles of Governments Differ
Authors: Tanzi Vito
Published: November 2020

Policies can aim at results that are good for the whole population or policies can be directed at special groups. General policies may help overall but hurt some subsectors, for example free trade that is now under attack because it has hurt some sectors even though it has promoted a higher growth. Economic theory has increasingly moved from policies that help overall to policies that help or hurt particular groups (the elite, the rich, industrial workers). Policies are frequently promoted by the groups that have the greatest political power, often accompaniedby economic power. Policies have become progressively more complex and less easy to understand for average citizens. Smaller groups, especially those with greater economic power find it easier to organize and to push their agenda and policy responds to such pressure. Various kinds of what could be called “termites” have entered the policymaking process. They include the length and the complexity of many laws, making them less transparent to normal citizens and easier to manipulate.
The Political Economy of Fiscal Deficit Reductions
Authors: Tanzi Vito
Published: November 2020

Do policymakers learn from the past mistakes of previous governments or from mistakes made by other countries? Probably not. They mostly learn from their own mistakes. Governments often end up with fiscal deficits and a public debt that are too large. They regularly make pronouncements that they find difficult to satisfy, thus losing credibility. The loss of that credibility makes it difficult for them to introduce the necessary policies. The chapter provides some real life examples. Governments’ control over policymaking is often limited, as is their control over policy instruments. This is an area where principal–agent problems frequently exist.
The Theory versus the Reality of Fiscal Policy
Authors: Tanzi Vito
Published: November 2020

This chapter describes the theory of fiscal policy when fiscal policy was assumed to promote the allocation of resources, stabilization of the economy, and the redistribution of income. The theory had several inputs but those from Nordic European countries were particularly important. The theory stated that there were various objectives to promote and various instruments that could be used to promote those objectives. It also established the system of equations that would relate instruments to objectives in econometric models that became popular in the 1960s. Using a concrete example from a specific country (Italy), the chapter describes how the theory can easily become unrealistic in at least some countries. Some of the main assumptions of the theory are seen to be unrealistic.
Complexity, Corruption, and Tax Evasion
Authors: Tanzi Vito
Published: November 2020

This chapter explores the various links that exist between growing complexity, corruption, and tax evasion. Over the past three decades corruption and tax evasion seem to have increased in many countries. The growing complexity of tax systems that now require thousands of pages of laws and regulations has clearly been a determining factor. Tax laws have become increasingly difficult to interpret and to comply with. This has created an important asymmetry between clever and rich individuals who have the means to hire tax experts to prepare their tax returns and the rest. This asymmetry has also convinced many taxpayers, especially in Anglo-Saxon countries, that their taxes are higher than they actually are. The complexity and its impact on the taxpayers is likely to have been a contributing factors to the growing income inequality that has characterized recent years.
The Elusive Harmony between Government and Market Roles
Authors: Tanzi Vito
Published: November 2020

At any moment in time there ought to be some harmony between the intervention of the state that the market requires (to correct its market failures), and that citizens demand (to promote equity and a desirable income distribution) and the actual government intervention. This chapter argues that such harmony may have existed in the years when laissez faire was in place and was broadly accepted by those who had political power. The harmony became less and less evident in the later decades of the nineteenth century and during the Great Depression. There seemed to have been greater harmony in the 1960s. That harmony went down in the late 1970s and in the 1980s. It might have been partly restored in the 1990s, with a different conception of the role of the state, with less state and more market, at least in some countries. The harmony broke down again with the Great Recession in 2008–10, There is now, once again, a search for a new paradigm that would indicate the existence of a new harmony.
Issues with the Current Uneven Income Distributions
Authors: Tanzi Vito
Published: November 2020

Partly as a result of deregulation, cuts in marginal tax rates, globalization, the rise in importance of intellectual capital (combined with new communications technologies), the reduced power of labour unions, and more trust in the role of the market in determining some large compensations for CEOs, in recent decades there have been important changes in the distribution of incomes. Individuals in the top one, or 0.1 of the income distribution have been appropriating large shares of the growth of total income, while the majority of the population has seen their income stagnate. This has created resentment, and diminishing trust in the market and also in democratic institutions. We may be at a crossroads where, as in the 1920s, something will need to change. Keynes then called for “new knowledge.” The need for new knowledge seems to be equally acute now. That new knowledge should hopefully be “as simple as possible.”
Concluding Thoughts
Authors: Tanzi Vito
Published: November 2020

Growing government role and growing complexity over the years led to growth of crony capitalism, abuses and inequality. This in turn has been leading to growth of populism. Need for simplicity in policies?
Mortgage Foreclosures and Older Americans
Authors: Trawinski Lori A.
Published: November 2020

Economic conditions improved since the 2008–09 mortgage market crisis, and home prices recovered in many areas. Nevertheless, over time, growing numbers of older households have taken on greater mortgage debt than in the past. These families are also carrying mortgage loans into retirement, far more than they did in the past. Foreclosure rates for all loans have decreased to pre-recession levels for borrowers under age 50, while for borrowers age 50+, foreclosure rates in 2017 were higher than in 2007. This means that many older homeowners may face the loss of their homes, despite the fact that the economy improved after the financial crisis.
How Much Should the Poor Save for Retirement? Data and Simulations on Retirement Income Adequacy among Low-earning Households
Authors: Biggs Andrew G.
Published: November 2020

A number of US states have introduced automatic enrollment retirement accounts as a means to raise retirement savings for lower-income households. The presumption is that such households, whose rates of formal retirement saving are low, would benefit from higher saving and higher incomes in retirement. Nevertheless, there has been little explicit analysis of how much lower-income households should save in excess of their social security contributions. There is also little evidence that many current lower-income retirees are unable to maintain their pre-retirement standards of living. To study this issue, this chapter builds a simple model of retirement saving, allowing for the inclusion of social security benefits, different standards of retirement income adequacy, and different assumptions regarding pre- and post-retirement investment returns. Interestingly, low-income retirees express less satisfaction with the adequacy of their retirement incomes than other retirees, but their self-assessed retirement income adequacy has actually increased in recent years. The chapter also shows that, for very low earners, little savings are necessary on top of social security payments.
Household Debt and Aging in Japan
Authors: Horioka Charles Yuji , Niimi Yoko
Published: November 2020

This chapter analyzes the borrowing behavior of Japanese households compared to the other Group of Seven (G7) countries, and it also evaluates patterns by the age of the household head. In Japan, pre-retirees (age 50–59) do not carry high amounts of debt, and their financial health is satisfactory. By contrast, households with a head age 30–39 have taken on sharply more debt holdings in recent years, due partly to the fact that tax breaks for housing purchase, reforms in the housing loan market since the early 2000s, and expansionary monetary policy enabled Japanese households to purchase housing younger than previously. As a consequence, households have become more vulnerable to rising interest rates over time.
Labor in Agriculture
Authors: Martin Philip
Published: November 2020

This chapter explains the two major types of workers employed in agriculture—farmers and their (unpaid) family members, and hired workers. The incomes of farm families are the difference between what they receive for the commodities they sell and the costs of producing them, while the earnings of farm workers reflect the wages they earn per hour, day, or week. The average incomes of farm families are higher than for nonfarm families, while the earnings of farm workers are lower than for nonfarm workers. About 40 percent of the one billion people employed in agriculture around the world are hired workers, and they are generally on the bottom rungs of the labor market in both industrial and developing countries. The share of work done by hired workers rises with economic development as farm production concentrates on fewer and larger farms.
Development and Rural–Urban Migration
Authors: Martin Philip
Published: November 2020

Economic development is associated with rural–urban migration. Low rural wages provide a supply push to move to urban areas, while higher urban wages act as a demand pull attraction. Lewis believed that the marginal productivity of many workers employed in agriculture was near zero, so that workers could leave agriculture and hold down urban wages while the remaining farmers maintained the supply of food, justifying government neglect of agriculture in favor of industry. Todaro emphasized that high urban wages encouraged rural residents to move to cities without guaranteed jobs. Schultz argued that the best government policy was to improve education and health care in rural areas to ensure that rural residents are productive whether they stay in rural areas or move to cities. Most countries agricultural systems obey 80–20 rules: 80 % of farms are small and account for 20% of farm output, while 20% of farms are large and account for 80 % of farm output.
Mexican Farm Labor
Authors: Martin Philip
Published: November 2020

Mexico, like other Spanish colonies in the Americas, developed a haciendas or latifundia system of farming that required local residents to work for large landowners in exchange for housing and food; 2,000 families owned almost 90 percent of Mexico’s rural land on the eve of the revolution that lasted from 1910 to 1917 and gave land to the peasants. Post-revolution labor reform in the 1920s created ejidos, plots of land that could be farmed and transferred to heirs but not sold. The Mexican constitution was changed in the early 1990s to allow ejido land to be rented or sold on the eve of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), loosening ties between rural Mexicans and ejido land and contributing to massive Mexico–US migration between the mid-1990s and the 2008–9 recession. NAFTA also speeded up changes in Mexican agriculture, contributing to the expansion of farms that export fresh fruits and vegetables to the US. Large Mexican farms that export fruits and vegetables to the US rely on a million hired workers, including local residents employed seasonally and internal migrants from poorer areas.
Farm Labor in Other Countries
Authors: Martin Philip
Published: November 2020

Countries with more than 50 percent of their workers employed in agriculture are poor, and countries with fewer than five percent of workers employed in agriculture are rich. The shrinking farm workforces of richer countries are more vulnerable due to rising shares of migrant, guest, and unauthorized workers. Canada, Australia, and New Zealand are immigration countries that confront the challenge of protecting vulnerable workers who do not have secure statuses. Farmers in richer European countries hire migrants from poorer countries, including intra-EU migrants from Central European countries such as Poland and Romania. Brazil is an agricultural powerhouse, the leading exporter of commodities ranging from coffee to sugar, whose farmers rely on migrants from the poorer north and northeastern states. Some Brazilian migrants face harsh conditions, leading to efforts to extirpate modern slavery.
Protecting Farm Workers
Authors: Martin Philip
Published: November 2020

UN agencies develop conventions and recommendations to improve protections for farm workers, governments enact and enforce protective labor laws, and unions and NGOs have developed a variety of strategies to help farm workers. The results are mixed. There are fewer children under 18 employed in agriculture, and almost none employed as hired workers on large export-oriented farms. The major UN labor agency, the ILO, is increasingly aspirational, recommending ever higher labor-protection goals even as many workers lack basic protections, although the ILO played a key role in Bangladeshi garments and Thai seafood to persuade those governments to do more to protect workers in order to preserve jobs in export industries. Trafficking and forced labor raise other issues, including the extent of the problem and the best remedies. Governments, unions, and NGOs are seeking the most effective and durable protection strategies.
Buyers, Consumers, and Farm Workers
Authors: Martin Philip
Published: November 2020

Could buyers of labor-intensive fruits and vegetables do more to protect farm workers? In many rich countries, fewer than five supermarket chains account for most fresh produce sales, giving enormous power to a relative handful of produce buyers if they elect to purchase only from farms that comply with labor laws. The food-safety model shows that buyers can change supplier practices. After contaminated produce sickened and killed consumers and reduced demand and grower prices, major farming associations developed and tested best practices to minimize contamination that were later incorporated into law, so that both private-sector buyers and government agencies enforce food safety protocols. The alternatives to government and buyers, such as NGOs that certify compliant farmers fee, cover a very small share of the fresh produce consumed in rich countries.
Introduction
Authors: Timmons Mark
Published: November 2020

Oxford Studies in Normative Ethics features new work in the field of normative ethical theory. This tenth volume features chapters on the following topics: defending deontology, justice as a personal virtue, willful ignorance and moral responsibility, moral obligation and epistemic risk, the so-called numbers problem in ethics, rule consequentialism, moral worth, respect and rational agency, a Kantian solution to the trolley problem, virtue and character, and the limits of virtue ethics....
Parfit on the Irrelevance of Deontological Distinctions
Authors: Kamm F. M.
Published: November 2020

This chapter concerns Derek Parfit’s discussion in his On What Matters, volume 3 of the irrelevance of deontological distinctions. Parfit begins by expressing his concern that morality will be undermined because practical reason, which tells us all things considered what to do, will often conflict with what we consider to be morally right. Unlike Sidgwick, Parfit does not begin by identifying morality with a part of impartial practical reason but rather with what he considers common sense deontology. Also, unlike Sidgwick, he thinks it is clear that sometimes self-interest (which provides some reason even impartially considered) is overridden by (other) impartial practical reasons (e.g., there is decisive reason to give one’s penny to save millions of other people). This chapter first considers how Parfit thinks one’s practical reason should reconcile concerns about self-sacrifice, pursuing the greater good, and morality. It then considers his use of case-based reasoning to undermine moral principles embodying such distinctions as harming versus not aiding, harming as a mere means versus as a side effect, and redirecting threats (as in the Trolley Problem) versus starting new ones.
Moral Obligation and Epistemic Risk
Authors: King Zoë Johnson , Babic Boris
Published: November 2020

This chapter concernsÂ pernicious predictive inferences: taking someone to be likely to possess a socially disvalued trait based on statistical information about the prevalence of that trait within a social group to which she belongs. Some scholars have argued that pernicious predictive inferences are morally prohibited, but are sometimes epistemically required, leaving us with a tragic conflict between the requirements of epistemic rationality and those of morality. Others have responded by arguing that pernicious predictive inferences are sometimes epistemically prohibited. The present chapter takes a different approach, considering the sort of reluctance to draw pernicious predictive inferences that seems morally praiseworthy and vindicating its epistemic status. We argue that, even on a simple, orthodox Bayesian picture of the requirements of epistemic rationality, agents must consider the costs of error—including the associated moral and political costs—when forming and revising their credences. Our attitudes toward the costs of error determine how “risky” different credences are for us, and our epistemic states are justified in part by our attitudes toward epistemic risk. Thus, reluctance to draw pernicious predictive inferences need not be epistemically irrational, and the apparent conflict between morality and epistemic rationality is typically illusory.
Incomparable Numbers
Authors: Walden Kenneth
Published: November 2020

This chapter presents arguments for two slightly different versions of the thesis that the value of persons is incomparable. Both arguments allege an incompatibility between the demands of a certain kind of practical reasoning and the presuppositions of value comparisons. The significance of these claims is assessed in the context of the “Numbers problem”—the question of whether one morally ought to benefit one group of potential aid recipients rather than another simply because they are greater in number. It is argued that many of the popular approaches to this problem—even ones that avoid the aggregation of personal value—are imperiled by the incomparability theses.
Equal Respect for Rational Agency
Authors: Cholbi Michael
Published: November 2020

Individuals are owed equal respect. But on the basis of what property of individuals are they owed such respect? A popular Kantian answer—rational agency—appears less plausible in light of the growing psychological evidence that human choice is subject to a wide array of biases (framing, laziness, etc.); human beings are neither equal in rational agency nor especially robust rational agents. Defenders of this Kantian answer thus need a non-ideal theory of equal respect for rational agency, one that takes seriously our characteristic deficiencies of practical rationality without junking the niotion that rational agency entitles us to equal respect. This chapter defends an understanding of respect for rational agency wherein the object of such respect is individuals’ aspiration to rationally govern their lives. This understanding of respect for rational agency retains the core notion of respect as a kind of deference, directs respect at persons, has suitably egalitarian implications, and does not require us to deny the aforementioned psychological evidence regarding the infirmities of human rationality.
A Kantian Solution to the Trolley Problem
Authors: Kleingeld Pauline
Published: November 2020

This chapter proposes a solution to the Trolley Problem in terms of the Kantian prohibition on using a person ‘merely as a means.’ A solution of this type seems impossible due to the difficulties it is widely thought to encounter in the scenario known as the Loop case. The chapter offers a conception of ‘using merely as a means’ that explains the morally relevant difference between the classic Bystander and Footbridge cases. It then shows, contrary to the standard view, that a bystander who diverts the trolley in the Loop case need not be using someone ‘merely as a means’ in doing so. This makes it possible to show why the Loop scenario does not undermine the explanation of the salient moral difference between the Bystander and Footbridge cases.
Manifestations of Virtue
Authors: Ali Arden
Published: November 2020

Few philosophers endorse a virtue theory of praiseworthiness. The widespread aversion to any virtue theory of moral worth rests chiefly on a skeptical argument that emphasizes the fact that praiseworthy acts can be performed by people who lack the relevant virtue. This chapter studies this skeptical argument closely. The response from virtue theorists has been to reject the premise of the argument by denying that someone can be fully praiseworthy for an act without possessing the relevant virtue. This chapter claims that this reply is unlikely to succeed. In its place, it argues that the skeptic’s core premise has been misleadingly characterized and used to conceal a questionable inference. The chapter concludes that it is possible for the virtue theory of praiseworthiness to escape the grip of the skeptical argument.
Contracting without Meaning
Authors: Siraganian Lisa
Published: November 2020

How do you know what a corporate person is really intending, whoever exactly that person is? This chapter explores a set of initial answers to this question in philosophies of intention like Elizabeth Anscombe’s, in historical political cartoons of the corporation, in legal theories of contracts, and in Frank Norris’s The Octopus, the influential novel about the railroad colossus known as the Southern Pacific. Together, they fill out the problem of collective social intention both as it was understood around the turn of the twentieth century and how it developed subsequently. Although older accounts of contract appeal to intention (“a meeting of minds”), the corporate form’s lack of inner life and composite quality made such a mind-meeting odd to envision. The difficulty of knowing a corporate person’s meaning raised knotty issues of interpretation, and political cartoons provided a popular attempt to work through these issues. Other thinkers, including law professor Ernst Freund and Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., resolved these problems in their theories of corporate contracts, which introduced a larger concern of how to interpret any of a corporation’s signs. This issue occupied philosophers like Charles Sanders Peirce, and later scholars of contracts such as Arthur Corbin. Ultimately, an attempt to resolve a particular problem of corporate contracts led to a semiological theory committed to the simple literality of signs, in order to negotiate how to live with collective beings without obvious or singular minds.
Incoherent Corporate Speech
Authors: Siraganian Lisa
Published: November 2020

F. Scott Fitzgerald imagines corporate marriage proposals as a promising thought experiment to think through the fundamental incoherence of what was eventually to be known as corporate speech after the U.S. Supreme Court case Citizens United (2010). His autobiographical and underappreciated meditations on the film industry, The Love of the Last Tycoon (1940) and The Pat Hobby Stories (1940–1), tease out corporate expression’s difficulties and possibilities—complications that are typically overlooked in contemporary discussions of corporate speech. In Tycoon, Fitzgerald’s Hollywood executive producer imagines that he can “buy” what is in his screenwriter’s “mind.” His understanding of speech articulates Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.’s theory of contractual meaning and economist Ronald Coase’s literalization of “the marketplace of ideas,” anticipating the Supreme Court’s reasoning in Citizens United. But when that tycoon’s lover treats her multiple Dear John letters to him in the same literal manner—as automatic, repetitive, and commodified—the tycoon senses the flaws in his account of language. After examining Citizens United and related precedents struggling to conceptualize corporate speech, this chapter argues that Fitzgerald’s focus on the problem of repeated action reveals a basic incoherence in theories of corporate speech. Conceiving of ideas as brain content that can be bought and sold, Tycoon’s corporate executive unwittingly stumbles on the essentially impoverished nature of corporate speech as repetitive but not meaningful. Decades before corporate speech had First Amendment protections, Fitzgerald’s late fiction imagined and represented its potential problems.
Emergent Corporate Mind
Authors: Siraganian Lisa
Published: November 2020

A lively debate over “corporate mind” materialized in legal, philosophical, and political scientific guises throughout the first decades of the twentieth century. Legal theorists such as Harold Laski, Jethro Brown, and Frederic Maitland sought to ascribe intentions to mindful corporations to understand why corporations acted as they did and to treat them accordingly; theorists like Morris Cohen, John Salmond, and Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. thought this tactic made no sense. This chapter examines their dispute to argue that Gertrude Stein’s conceptualizing of groups of artists proposed representational solutions both similar to and ultimately divergent from these conceptions of corporate minds. A radical reading of Stein’s revolutionary prose poem, G.M.P. (1912), is offered, supported by archival manuscript evidence. That text ponders the difference between a publicly traded corporation, with its repetitive daily “life” exposed to anyone with a ticker-tape machine, and the creations of a group of painters and poets. Abstracting the art collectivity and giving the movement a name (“G.M.P.”) more typical of publicly traded companies on a stock exchange, Stein registers its divergence from a crowd, a corporate collective, or an individual. Like business entities, aesthetic movements possess emergent properties that are more than the sum of their artist parts; yet art’s immortality differs from a corporation’s life in perpetuity. Offering context for the period’s corporate ideas from various disciplines—political science, jurisprudence, philosophy, psychology—this chapter catches writers thinking through how a corporate group imagines and creates.
Invisible Corporate Man
Authors: Siraganian Lisa
Published: November 2020

The Reconstruction era Fourteenth Amendment (1868) has long been the primary U.S. statutory source for corporate personhood. But for nearly fifty years the story of the rise of corporate personhood rights entwined with the fraught story of legal personhood for African Americans was effectively ignored. This chapter fills a gap in legal and cultural scholarship to begin to address this blind spot, first by analyzing the period’s jurisprudence of the “corporation sole” (a corporation of one person) in contrast to that of African American persons. Drawing together case analysis, discussions of legal formalism, and interpretations of two major novels—George Schuyler’s satirical Black No More (1931) and Ralph Ellison’s acclaimed Invisible Man (1952)—this chapter depicts the legal and literary effects of a half-century’s misconstruing of the Fourteenth Amendment, in which “any person” was defined not to mean any married woman, child, and/or African American person, but, rather, any corporate or white male person. To imagine a less racist world, Schuyler hypothesizes African American rights and freedoms secured by the abstract corporate form and a new scientific technology protected by the laws of intellectual property. Later, Ellison provides a powerful and very different critique of state-sanctioned personhood as irretrievably debased because it is abstract. Both authors expose and challenge through satire and fantasy the obscene, unmentionable inequality between reduced rights for African Americans and human rights for corporate persons.
The Changing Legal Patterns of Anglo-African Relations (1807–40)
Authors: Van Hulle Inge
Published: November 2020

Chapter 1 discusses how, during the first decades of the nineteenth century, the use and creation of legal instruments by British imperial agents in West Africa received a first substantial Western reorientation by the increased resort to treaties. British presence increased in a mostly unplanned and haphazard way and was not geared towards creating a land-based empire but to enlarging Britain’s commercial and humanitarian influence in the region. This development went hand in hand with the introduction of new Western-inspired treaty clauses and the pro-British interpretation of traditional rights and obligations. The first experiments were made with instruments that would become characteristic of Britain’s legal strategies in West Africa: treaties of protection, extraterritoriality, mediation, and coercion.
Benevolent Aggression and Exemplary Violence in West Africa
Authors: Van Hulle Inge
Published: November 2020

Chapter 4 addresses the hitherto neglected topic of colonial war and use of force in West Africa prior to the end of the nineteenth century. It discusses various instances in which force was used in order to acquire or consolidate control by bolstering and enforcing existing legal techniques. Specific attention is awarded to the justifications that underpinned the use of coercive measures and the excessive and exemplary nature of the violence used against African communities. Aggression was presented as having a benevolent character as the justifications to resort to force started from the premise that the British Empire and its representatives were magnanimous and that violence was used for the betterment of the African. Justifications entailed arguments that hinged on so-called racialized necessity, the furthering of a ‘humanitarian agenda’ or were styled as legitimate responses to African wrong-doings.