bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Regret, Agency, and Responsibility
Authors: McQueen Paddy
Published: February 2024

This chapter examines the scope of the things that we should regret. It provides a detailed analysis of Bernard William’s account of “agent-regret”, in which he asserts that it is appropriate to regret things that we do unintentionally, if they result in unwelcome outcomes. Rejecting Williams’s view, it argues that we should only regret the things that we do intentionally. It then explores how events can be described in ways that assign greater or lesser agency to people. Discussing real-life cases of accidental killers, it argues that we should avoid describing events so that they suggest or assert that a person intended to do, or is responsible for, things that happen to us. It ends with a discussion of regret as form of apology. It denies that regret can be justified on basis of its role in apologizing to someone.
Abortion and Regret
Authors: McQueen Paddy
Published: February 2024

This chapter criticises the use of abortion regret within the campaign against abortion. It documents how it has become a central part of the anti-abortion movement, despite all reliable studies showing that very few women regret choosing to have an abortion. It also considers the normative significance that abortion regret may have for women considering an abortion. It argues that women should not invoke abortion regret as a reason against having an abortion and that coming to regret an abortion need not show that the decision was the wrong one. It also shows that being glad that one did not have an abortion does not show that the decision to keep the child was the best one, or that having chosen to have an abortion would have been the wrong one. Thus, it severs how a woman may later feel from whether or not she should have an abortion.
Microaggressions in Medicine
Authors: Freeman Lauren , Stewart Heather
Published: February 2024

Guided by diverse patient testimonies and case studies, Microaggressions in Medicine focuses on harms experienced by patients marginalized on the basis of race, gender, sexual orientation, body size, and disability. It amplifies their voices, stories, and experiences, which have too often been excluded from mainstream bioethical, medical, and popular discussions. The novel account advanced in this book illustrates that microaggressions in medicine are not rare, but frequent in the healthcare experiences of marginalized patients. Nevertheless, it can help patients better understand and make sense of their experiences. It can also help current and future healthcare professionals recognize the serious and enduring consequences that microaggressions have on their patients. Finally, it offers practical strategies for healthcare professionals to reduce microaggressions in their practices. Microaggressions in Medicine demonstrates that the harms of microaggressions are anything but micro. It argues that healthcare professionals have a moral obligation to prevent them as much as possible. The ultimate goal of the book is to help increase health equity. It aims to make a positive difference in the lives of members of marginalized patients as they interact with medical institutions and practitioners. It also aims to support healthcare professionals in modifying their practices to ensure that they are always providing high-quality, patient-centered care to all patients.
Extending the Reach of Maternal Health Practice into New Zones of Transformation with the Framework for Aligning Sectors
Authors: Lanford Daniel , Minyard Karen , Alderman Leigh , Hemming Japera , Parker Christopher , Adimu Tanisa Foxworth
Published: February 2024

In the United States, maternal health outcomes have been steadily worsening for three decades. At the same time, maternal health inequities have increased, with people of color tending to have worse outcomes. While changes in healthcare and public health are important for reversing these trends, practitioners and researchers are increasingly recognizing the need for change in a much wider range of areas that ultimately affect maternal health. Drawing on the Framework for Aligning Sectors, this chapter identifies four maternal health zones of transformation that provide practitioners opportunities to rethink their practice and extend their work into new areas beyond traditional healthcare and public health services. Example opportunities are provided for each zone of transformation. Four case examples are also presented, each highlighting ways that maternal health practitioners can extend the reach of their work into a new zone of transformation.
A Community Approach to Addressing Inequities in Maternal Health
Authors: McDaniel Deidre , Garcia Valerie Newsome , Chustz Karen , Sulley Saanie , Frazier Deborah , Brown Haywood
Published: February 2024

The National Health Start Association (NHSA) Alliance for Innovation on Maternal Health Community Care Initiative (AIM CCI) is an initiative that aims to help communities build a clinical–community integration model for addressing preventable maternal morbidity and mortality, particularly among Black and Indigenous women and birthing people. A clinical-community collaborative lead by strong leaders is key to implementing the activities of NHSA AIM CCI. This chapter provides an overview of one community’s efforts to establish such a collaborative, using a co-leadership model to leverage resources to address inequities in maternal morbidity and mortality. We describe the city of New Orleans AIM CCI Collaborative, highlighting some of the unique aspects of their program. We also discuss lessons learned including importance of using a framework, like collective impact, to establish a common goal and data sharing between various local partner organizations.
Using and Improving Maternal Health Data to Achieve Equity
Authors: Yates Lindsey
Published: February 2024

Data are a fundamental part of any playbook, including this one. The purpose of this section is to provide an overview of the landscape of US maternal health data and highlight opportunities to change how we collect and analyze that data. This section is written for anyone who wants to use or access US maternal health data. The authors of the chapters in this section cover a variety of topics: a description of existing sources of maternal health data; the strengths and challenges of using some metrics to define maternal health; novel, justice-centered methods for collecting and analyzing data, such as Indigenous research methods, qualitative data methods; and culturally responsive evaluation.
Using Narrative Medicine and Longitudinal Qualitative Research to Examine Maternal Health Outcomes
Authors: Bozkurt Burcu
Published: February 2024

Novel qualitative methods like narrative medicine and longitudinal qualitative research can help us better understand the conditions and contexts that underlie maternal outcomes. Such approaches can add invaluable depth to our understanding of people and their lived experiences. This chapter briefly reviews what qualitative methods are, how to develop appropriate research questions with these techniques, and how to design and implement a study that uses the qualitative approaches. It highlights relevant examples of research studies for both methodologies and, where appropriate, describes an ongoing study that uses longitudinal qualitative methods to examine how the postpartum experiences of Black women in North Carolina change across time.
The Role of Local Health Departments in Women’s Health and the Opportunity to Improve Rural Maternal Health Outcomes
Authors: Harrison Lisa Macon , Kenney Abigail
Published: February 2024

This chapter illustrates the need for prenatal and specialty care for high-risk individuals in maternity care deserts and ways that this problem can be fixed. One of the best ways to begin to address this problem is to focus on women’s health through the lifespan, not just during pregnancy, but before and after pregnancy as well. These services include family planning (FP), routine exams, mental health, substance use screening and treatment, and oral health. Regardless of whether the agency provides full-scale primary care, the opportunity to connect a patient to all the services needed in a community to be healthy is available at this critical entry point. In rural and medically underserved areas in particular, FP, maternal health, and child health, if offered together, can contribute to improved health outcomes for individuals and families—especially when mental health services and care management are available in the same location for ease of access.
Conclusion
Authors: Wright Almeda M.
Published: February 2024

The conclusion offers a first-person reflection on a contemporary gathering of African American educators known as SIEC (or Sisters in Education Circle). The core values of SIEC reflect and bring together common threads of each of the radical activist educators explored in the earlier chapters of the book. The conclusion also centers educator, Cynthia Dillard’s admonition that remembering is essential to the current and future work of Black educators. Remembering, according to Dillard, includes looking forward and backward, to engage cultural memories and to produce new space in which we all might live more fully. Thus, in the conclusion Wright underscores how remembering the individual and collective lives of Black radical activist, religious educators opens ways for new generations of Black radical activist, religious educators to reimagine their purposes and efforts at creating positive change.
To the Ends of the Earth
Authors: Schulz Raimund J.
Published: February 2024

This book is the first modern history of ancient discovery in over a century, ranging from the Mediterranean Bronze Age to the third century ce. It is also a sweeping history of all Eurasia through the prism of trade, travel, and politics. Its chapters trace the pathways and periods of ancient discovery by sea and land, from the Baltic to China, from the steppes of southern Russia to the Sahara, understanding them not as isolated actions but within their political, military, economic, and cultural contexts. It explains why adventurers, traders, colonizers, generals, and envoys set out time and again to explore new horizons, the intentions that guided them, and the consequences their discoveries drew in their wake. Consequently, this book presents a complex narrative of how 1,000 years of exploration and cultural contact influenced the rise and growth of ancient anthropology, ethnography, geography, and sciences, which to this day constitute key elements of Western knowledge. The last part of the book demonstrates how the experiences and knowledge of ancient seafarers and geographers contributed to the departure of Europeans across the oceans in the early-modern period.
Introduction, or, An American in Carthage
Authors: Schulz Raimund J.
Published: February 2024

Beginning in the Bronze Age, intrepid explorers set sail for unknown shores of the Mediterranean, the Atlantic, and the southern and eastern oceans. At the same time, traders and caravans traversed the Sahara and the Eurasian steppes. The great civilizations of the ancient world, from China and India to the Near East and Greece, Rome, and central Europe thus gradually became linked by both land and sea. Driven by a desire for material gain, wanderlust, curiosity, and often fierce rivalry, the ancients acquired a knowledge of the world that would hardly be surpassed until Columbus crossed the Atlantic a thousand years later.
A World on the Move
Authors: Schulz Raimund J.
Published: February 2024

Ancient exploration relied on foundations that were laid between 1300 and 700 bce. The Egyptian pharaohs led expeditions to faraway countries like the legendary Land of Punt. The Mycenaeans sailed from Greece to Italy and perhaps even to Spain and into the Black Sea, while the turmoils of the late Bronze Age brought the Sea Peoples to the Levant. From here, Phoenicians opened sea routes across the Mediterranean and possibly around Africa to Spain. The Euboeans adopted the knowledge of these seafarers and intensified their connections to Italy. Many of the experiences of these mariners were preserved in the stories and songs from which Homer drew the material for his epics. Odysseus is the prototype of the dauntless discoverer who returns, richly rewarded, at the end. His adventures reflect the experiences with diverse cultures made by seafarers on their travels to the limits of the known world.
Finer Granularities
Authors: Nakra Teresa M.
Published: February 2024

Chapter 5 covers some of the complexities regarding how frequency is converted into pitch. It reviews how systems and methods of tuning help avoid unwanted dissonances during musical performances. Tuning is necessary if more than one note or more than one instrument is playing at a time; advance coordination is required to align intervals. Tuning systems set the exact frequencies for notes and provide a consistent, shared framework that allows instruments and voices to play harmoniously together without needing to negotiate the terms on a case-by-case basis. This chapter will review how to carve up the continuous frequency domain into fixed-pitch stair steps, and investigate two ways to tune or align note frequencies so they sound good together: just intonation and equal temperament.
Case Study: Swiss Banks and Nazi Gold
Authors: Wendel W. Bradley
Published: February 2024

A prestigious New York City law firm accepted the representation of a Swiss bank in litigation over claims by family members of Holocaust victims that the bank had helped the Nazis launder assets. The result was a strong morally based objection by Jewish associates at the firm and ultimately a decision by the firm to limit its representation in a way that avoided challenging the substance of the families’ claims. The incident shows that lawyers do not uniformly rely on the so-called Principle of Nonaccountability to block morally grounded criticism of the decision to represent a particular client. To say lawyers are accountable is not to say they are wrongdoers. Rather, it means they owe an explanation for their decision to represent a client. Two other famous controversies, including John Adams’s representation of British soldiers accused of participating in the Boston Massacre, illustrate the explanations that can be offered.
Philosophical Perspective: Regret and Moral Costs
Authors: Wendel W. Bradley
Published: February 2024

The distinction between permissibility and meaning creates the possibility that a lawyer may be permitted to represent a client but will (or should) do so only with an accompanying sense of regret or reluctance. Two case studies illustrate this phenomenon of moral costs or moral remainders. A further question is what should be done in response to sentiments of regret or reluctance. It may be that a habit of reluctance tends to slow down the rush to wrongdoing. Alternatively, the appreciation of moral costs may lead to some form of apology, atonement, or reparation, or perhaps motivate efforts to reform unjust laws.
The Happy Runner
Authors: Little Sabrina B.
Published: February 2024

There are three dominant models of happiness, two of which are inadequate. This chapter explores all three and their limitations, and it commits to the eudaimonic account, which is Aristotle’s view. This chapter raises the question “What are people for?” It investigates the ways athletics might contribute to, or undermine, a good life. It asks why smiley faces and meeting our running goals both fail to make us happy, and it compares two kinds of lives—the “all-in” runner and the well-rounded athlete. Lastly, this chapter raises a difficult question: Are the ways you currently participate in athletics at odds with a good life in the long term?
Planning Healthy and Sustainable Built Environments
Authors: Vargo Jason
Published: February 2024

Neighborhoods, communities, towns, and cities have important roles to play in addressing climate change. Strategies to reduce greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, conserve natural resources, and build climate resilience equitably offer significant health co-benefits. Addressing the design of the built environment at the scale people regularly experience it can protect the environment and promote healthy lifestyles. At the same time, the built environment can help make green and healthy choices routine. The three case studies in this chapter have demonstrated how communities, focusing on the built environment, can address climate change and improve health for all. The case studies describe the Climate Action Plan in Portland, Oregon; California’s SB1000 law that embeds environmental justice in local land use planning; and the Mariposa Healthy Living Initiative in Denver.
Introduction
Authors: Stratton Hild Elaine
Published: February 2024

The opening section introduces the medieval rituals for the dying and outlines the book’s structure and guiding questions: Which melodies were sung at the end of life? To what extent did the people of different geographic areas and religious institutions maintain their own, “local” versions of deathbed rituals and chants? Why was music given such a prominent position within these liturgies? The Introduction also presents the four manuscripts that provide primary source material for the study. Medieval deathbed rituals engage issues of current interest in academic discourse: the areas of autonomy practiced by women in medieval religious life, the changing and multiple conceptions of the afterlife in the Middle Ages, the relationship of music and text in medieval plainchant, and the differences in religious practices among societal groups, particularly the educated clerics and monastics of elite religious institutions and the laity who lived in rural areas.
Carbon Sinks and Sources on Land
Authors: Kirchman David L.
Published: February 2024

Land plants can consume a lot of atmospheric carbon dioxide, thanks to the nutrients released by soil microbes and through symbiotic relationships with nitrogen-fixing bacteria and mycorrhizal fungi. Microbes are also instrumental in both making and degrading one of the largest carbon stocks on the planet, soil organic matter (SOM). One large part of SOM is the dead remains from microbes, or necromass. Global warming threatens to undo the sequestration of carbon in SOM by stimulating degradation by microbes. The problem is acute for permafrost in the Arctic, which is warming faster than elsewhere on Earth. For now, models project that terrestrial habitats will continue to take up anthropogenic carbon dioxide due to carbon dioxide fertilization, yet many unknowns remain. What is clear is that the size of the terrestrial carbon sink depends in large part on microbes and their response to climate change.
Ideological Adaptations in the Taliban’s Shadow State, 2006–2020
Authors: Jackson Ashley
Published: February 2024

In Chapter 6, Ashley Jackson examines the evolution of Taliban governance. This chapter traces how the Taliban’s ideology evolved from its origins as a movement in the 1990s, through its post-2001 resurrection as an insurgency, and its transformation into a presumptive government-in-waiting by 2020. Specifically, the chapter provides a background on the Taliban and its approach to governance before looking at three fields in which this shadow government has operated and developed: justice, education, and taxation. The chapter showcases the Taliban’s ideological dexterity, considerations between military adaptation and pragmatism in its approach to governance, and maintenance of an image of Islamic purity among its followers and civilians more broadly.
Jamaat-e-Islami
Authors: Ranjha Tehmina Aslam
Published: February 2024

In Chapter 13, Tehmina Aslam Ranjha looks at Jamaat-e-Islami (JI), one of the main religious parties actively involved in Pakistani national politics today, established by Maulana Sayyid Maududi in 1941. Examining their social welfare activism through interviews, Ranjha highlights how JI’s rationale for social welfare work is driven by four themes: as a religious duty; as a mode of engaging the public; as a method to influence ideology of the public; and as part of a political strategy. This chapter explores how JI adopted social welfare provisions as an organizational effort to secure political space.
The Sahwa in Saudi Arabia
Authors: Al-Saud Abdullah
Published: February 2024

In Chapter 15, Abdullah al-Saud examines the history of Al-Sahwa Al-Islamiyyah (the Islamic Awakening) in Saudi Arabia by looking at four key periods of change that influenced both the Sahwa’s focus and priorities as well as the Kingdom’s perception of it. The chapter demonstrates how the political opportunity structure and the continuous search for relevance have been primary concerns driving the Sahwa’s actions and decisions to confront or collaborate with the government during various stages.
Why Moore Matters
Authors: Leite Adam
Published: February 2024

G.E. Moore’s writings on external world skepticism provide a model for the approach developed in this book. This chapter offers an interpretation and preliminary defense of Moore’s aims, his method, and his conception of the relation between the refutation of skepticism and epistemological theorizing. Contemporary interpretations of Moore from John Greco, James Pryor, Tom Kelly, William Lycan, and others are critically discussed in order to bring out key aspects of Moore’s approach. Moore is speaking from a pre-philosophical position. He considers what might be said in favor of skepticism and asks whether there is any reason for him to change his view. Finding none, he rejects skepticism. Any epistemological theorizing is, for him, a downstream inquiry subsequent to this refutation of skepticism. The chapter concludes by characterizing where we would be left if Moore’s approach were successful.
Austin, Dreams, and Skepticism
Authors: Leite Adam
Published: February 2024

J.L. Austin further developed Moore’s distinctive methodological approach. This chapter offers an interpretation and defense of Austin’s response to the dream argument for external world skepticism. Austin argues that we can tell that we are not dreaming, and he appeals to empirical background knowledge to support this claim. This chapter argues that features of ordinary epistemic life highlighted by Austin allow an appeal to empirical knowledge for this purpose. Central aspects of Austin’s view are articulated and initially defended, including the claim that it is unproblematic to appeal to considerations about the world to reject the Dream Scenario, the Evil Demon Hypothesis, and the like. Barry Stroud’s influential version of the dream argument is shown to fail for reasons Austin highlights. Finally, Austin would have good reason to reject any demand for an explanation of our knowledge of the world that does not appeal to knowledge of the world.
Violence as an Intersecting Factor
Authors: Zack Naomi
Published: February 2024

Reform of established institutions has structures for accountability and change. For instance, the “reasonable officer standard” and “police discretion” are judicial rulings that could be changed insofar as they support unjustified police violence, and police departments can reform individually. The US prison system is unbalanced in comparison to the rest of the world and in its disproportional incarceration of minorities. Sudden violence against Jewish Americans, Asian Americans, and school children has no corresponding institution(s) that could be reformed, and they are stand-alone intersections. Jews are vulnerable due to long-lasting stereotypes, and there is a history of discrimination against Asian Americans in the United States. School children are already vulnerable because they have no autonomy apart from parental and official decisions and directions for their behavior.
Intersectional Structures in Higher Education
Authors: Zack Naomi
Published: February 2024

Racial segregation in K–12 schools was struck down in 1954. The US civil rights legislation of 1964–1965 outlawed discrimination against women and minorities in employment and higher education admission. But minorities did not have equal access to formal equality of opportunity. Affirmative action grew out of difficulties in legally proving discrimination, and it was about women and non-white minorities who remained excluded. While not the law, affirmative action was legally permitted before public backlash against it as “reverse discrimination.” The US Supreme Court has whittled away affirmative action using standards of strict scrutiny, holding that the government has an interest in higher education integration, but requiring that it be narrowly tailored to restrict uses of race for when other remedies have failed. The result is diversity, the integration of whole units, instead of the affirmation of racial minorities and women admitted to them. Equity has thereby replaced equality as a standard. Equity is an additional balancing factor.
From Right Here to Everywhere
Authors: Billard Thomas J
Published: February 2024

Because digital media allow local stories to circulate through networks that span far beyond local audiences, local issues can spread like wildfire. Thus, social movement organizations that want to control the national conversation on their issues need to maintain influence over local media markets across the country. This chapter analyzes the logics underpinning the National Center for Transgender Equality’s (NCTE) unexpected focus on local and community media. It explores the new strategies NCTE developed to make this work more manageable while disentangling how digital distribution influenced when, why, and how NCTE engaged with local and community media. It pays particular attention to NCTE’s Voices for Trans Equality (VTE) and Families for Trans Equality (FTE) projects, which together established a national network of nearly one thousand “community storytellers” who received media and communication training from NCTE to help them address local crises on the ground on NCTE’s behalf.
Authoritarian Resilience
Authors: Han Enze
Published: February 2024

This chapter provides an overview of three modes of Chinese influence on authoritarian governments in Southeast Asia. The first is China’s explicit support to sustain authoritarian governments such as the military junta in Myanmar. The second mode is that through economic engagement China unintentionally provides performance legitimacy for the authoritarian government in power. By offering aid and investment, China’s injection of capital into Cambodia’s domestic economy, for example, has helped the Cambodian government to improve its domestic rule. The third mode, on the other hand, is that China can also indirectly empower authoritarian governments by setting up an example for how authoritarian governments can make things work, with its stress on economic development and social order. This is the case in Thailand, where the right-wing military government often cites China as its role model, while the government’s supporters encourage further Chinese influence in the country.
Garbage Visionaries
Authors: Berg Anne
Published: February 2024

Chapter 2 focuses on bottom-up initiatives of waste reclamation that first prefigured and later readily merged with state imperatives. The first part of the chapter focuses on the use of urban garbage and sewage as a means of improving wastelands such as wetlands and marshes in the hope of creating arable land. The second example details the development of the Nazi waste-to-pork program that attempted to reverse-engineer kitchen scraps back into bacon by mandating that consumers separate food waste from regular trash and enlisting the National Socialist People’s Welfare (NSV) to raise pigs feasting on garbage. The third example shows that even some of the most extreme aspects of Nazi resource recovery can be traced back to the early 1930s when local administrators tapped institutionalized populations in prisons and mental institutions as a reservoir of labor and moved to remove and retain the dentures of deceased inmates to recover precious metals.
Waste Cycles
Authors: Berg Anne
Published: February 2024

This chapter demonstrates how the concentration camp complex became a crucial component of the regime’s waste management infrastructure, where the disregard for Jews and forced laborers reached its apex. Tracing the development of Nazi camps from extralegal instruments of terror to labor extraction machines, this chapter shows how recycling was at the core of camp and prison labor. Labor shortages characterized the German economy as of 1936, and increasingly, the public sector looked to tap essentially free labor in prisons and camps. By the end of the 1930s, the SS used camp labor to process waste and secondary materials on an industrial scale, building up large-scale recycling conglomerates that used camp labor to process rags and textile wastes, disassemble and sort metal junk, and recycle old shoes. At its most perfidious, SS industries extracted value directly from genocide, forcing Jews to process the material remainders of the “Final Solution.”
Inter-American Human Rights System
Authors: Antoniazzi, Mariela Morales , Piovesan Flávia , Cruz Júlia Cortez da Cunha
Published: February 2024

A holistic analysis of the impact of the Inter-American Human Rights System requires understanding why the System is relevant, its structuring components, and how does it foster structural transformations within member States. This chapter approaches each of these matters, focusing on the institutional, sociopolitical, and cultural drivers of the transformations attributed to the System. It concludes that such transformations stem from the institutional implementation of inter-American standards, the influence over power dynamics to favor human rights-holders, and strengthened human rights cultures. These factors interact and reinforce each other, and their understanding may enable the human rights community to further catalyze the positive impact of the Inter-American System.
Conventionality Control
Authors: Viñas Miriam Lorena Henríquez , Leiva José Ignacio Núñez
Published: February 2024

This chapter proposes that the conventionality control replicates the elements inherent of the judicial exercise: to know, to judge, and to enforce what is judged. Thus, this chapter seeks to extract a broader, more comprehensive conception and precise of the conventionality control; and to articulate the various aspects of this control, emphasizing the jurisdictional nature of the activity of the Inter-American Court of Human Rights and the executor role assigned to national courts. In this way, the chapter proves the national impact of conventionality control, highlighting the less studied area of implementation, enforcement of judgments, and compliance monitoring. The methodology used is based on the jurisprudential review of a limited universe of compliance monitoring resolutions issued by the Inter-American Court up to the year 2019.
Freedom of Expression
Authors: Botero-Marino Catalina
Published: February 2024

The main thesis of this chapter proposes that the Inter-American System has promoted and developed important and novelty standards for the protection of the right to freedom of expression and access of information, some of which have become—or at the very least have the potential to become—what could be called a true Ius Constitutionale Commune en América Latina on the subject. The purpose of this chapter is to explain (1) the supports and challenges of the creation of a Ius Constitutionale Commune en América Latina regarding freedom of expression based on the Inter-American System’s transformative mandate; (2) the most important inter-American standards within the multilevel legal system, such as the special protection of speech involving matters of public interest; the right to access public information; the prohibition against prior censorship and against indirect censorship; and the special protection for those who are threatened or harmed for exercising their right to freedom of expression; and (3) the transformative impact that three of these standards have had in national legal systems: the special protection of public interest speech; the standard regarding the limits of criminal law; and the standard regarding the scope and nature of the right to access public information.
The Moral Imperative of Diversity
Authors: Hebl Mikki , King Eden
Published: February 2024

With the Patagonia company’s mission statement that, “We seek not only to do less harm, but more good” in mind, this chapter articulates the social responsibility argument for diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI). This moral case is based on the principles of fairness and justice—the idea that every employee should have an equal opportunity to gain access, develop, progress, and be productive at work. These social norms, or basic expectations about human interaction, shape the societies in which people live and work. The moral imperative—that DEI is the right, just, and fair thing to do—may in fact be the most effective argument toward social change.
What Can Individual Targets of Discrimination Do?
Authors: Hebl Mikki , King Eden
Published: February 2024

Best evidence and best practice point to a number of strategies through which to change discriminatory actions and structures. One of these paths is that targets of discrimination can act as their own change agents. Although they should not be burdened with the responsibility of creating such change, employees from marginalized backgrounds often wonder how they should best navigate the workplace and may want to be empowered with this information. Emphasizing strategies that do not further jeopardize targets who already experience victimization, this chapter describes a number of personal strategies people can adopt to optimize their workplace experiences and outcomes such as disclosing, providing individuating information, and acknowledging behaviors.
The Presidency
Authors: Tazmini Ghoncheh
Published: February 2024

While the precise role and position of the Iranian presidency within the state system remains a contested issue, no matter how constrained or confined, the office of the president maintains relevance within Iran’s political process, both in principle and in practice. Each Iranian president has brought a signature style to the post and has left a particular stamp on the office. During the tenures of successive presidents of the Islamic Republic, each president has had a distinctive impact on domestic politics and on Iran’s outreach to the international community. What becomes clear is that even within the rigid institutional rubric of the office of the president, political behavior can vary greatly. Iranian political leaders come to office with very distinctive agendas, policy preferences, decision-making styles, political psychologies, and personality traits.
The Irreplaceable Public Sector
Authors: Stein Michael D. , Galea Sandro
Published: February 2024

This chapter addresses the importance of federal leadership in advancing pandemic preparedness and response. The chapter discusses how President Biden’s planned “Build Back Better” investment reflected the necessary scale of such investment by aiming to address a range of key issues, from housing to child care, infrastructure, and public transportation.
The Challenge of Addressing Multiple Crises
Authors: Stein Michael D. , Galea Sandro
Published: February 2024

This chapter addresses the overlapping challenges of the COVID-19 moment. The time of the pandemic was also a time of war and unrest, playing out against a background of global climate change. The chapter argues for the importance of becoming better at dealing with complex, interconnected challenges.
The Necessity of Speaking with Care
Authors: Stein Michael D. , Galea Sandro
Published: February 2024

This chapter addresses the importance of public health authorities speaking thoughtfully, mindful of how words, if spoken carelessly, can be used to justify overreach. During COVID-19, there was such overreach in the actions of some countries that used public health to justify heavy-handed, even authoritarian, policies. This chapter suggests public health has a responsibility to avoid speaking in ways that could be seen as justification for such actions.
Prescription Against Worry
Authors: Stein Michael D. , Galea Sandro
Published: February 2024

This chapter addresses the development and rollout of COVID-19 treatments. These include vaccines and oral antiviral medications. The chapter examines the challenge of getting these medications to populations in need. It also discusses the challenge of testing these medications and developing full side effect profiles in the context of a media ecosystem that does not always make room for nuance.
The Responsibility of Experts
Authors: Stein Michael D. , Galea Sandro
Published: February 2024

This chapter reflects on the elevation of public health’s profile in the media during the COVID-19 pandemic and how the field might not have been quite “ready for primetime.” Suddenly cast in the role of pundit, some in public health offered thoughts in the media that were overly speculative and not fully grounded in data. The chapter suggests the field needs to do better, learning the lessons of the pandemic moment.
The Vaccination Glass Half Full
Authors: Stein Michael D. , Galea Sandro
Published: February 2024

This chapter discusses the challenges that have long characterized vaccination efforts in the United States. The COVID-19 era was not the only time Americans have been resistant to vaccination. Vaccine uptake was even slow in the case of the widely celebrated polio vaccine, a history touched on in this chapter.
A Hard Weight
Authors: Stein Michael D. , Galea Sandro
Published: February 2024

This chapter discusses the challenge of obesity in the United States and how this challenge intersected with the COVID-19 moment. Long a serious health concern linked with a range of comorbidities, obesity did much to create pockets of poor health in the United States that the pandemic exploited. The chapter notes that addressing obesity means addressing the structural drivers of this challenge, including the corporate and political forces that make unhealthy food cheap and ubiquitous.
Balancing Autonomy and Individual Responsibility
Authors: Stein Michael D. , Galea Sandro
Published: February 2024

This chapter addresses the challenge of balancing individual freedom and collective responsibility during COVID-19. This challenge reflects a tension that has long been present in efforts to safeguard the public’s health. The chapter examines this tension through the lens of COVID-19 vaccination and the lessons of that effort.
A Tale of Volition
Authors: Stein Michael D. , Galea Sandro
Published: February 2024

This chapter addresses the psychology of vaccine refusal during the COVID-19 pandemic. The chapter suggests that there is a degree of self-gratification in such refusal, a willfulness reminiscent of the titular character in Herman Melville’s 1853 short story, “Bartleby, the Scrivener.” Taking away the right of refusal through vaccine mandates could well have helped the United States more quickly return to normal, but it would have done so against the grain of this willfulness.
Does Capitalism Violate Rights?
Authors: Sehon Scott R.
Published: February 2024

Many socialists argue that capitalism violates rights, drawing on the traditional Marxist claim that capitalists make profit by extracting surplus value from labor, and that this extraction amounts to unfair exploitation of the position of laborers, and is thus a violation of their rights. The defender of capitalism might agree that that capitalists make profit, at least in part, by paying their workers less than the labor is worth to the capitalist. But the capitalist will claim that there is nothing unfair about this, and that it is not a violation of rights. After setting up the argument in its strongest form, the chapter takes no official position on whether the argument is sound and thus takes no position on whether capitalism violates rights.
Religion, the Secular, and Sacred Value in Counterpublics
Authors: Stauffer Aaron
Published: February 2024

Typically, writers of religion and politics incorporate a distinction between secular and religious groups and then go on to complicate the way that a “religious” group is or is not political. Broad-based community organizing (BBCO) is a social practice that takes place in counterpublics that themselves refuse a neat distinction between religious and secular. This counterpublic framing of BBCO helps make clear the significance of calling BBCO a counterpublic, insofar as it refutes a neat divide between religious and secular, and it helps to accurately illuminate what is really going on with religion, politics, and practice in BBCO constituencies. Centering sacred value in BBCO practices helps revitalize the practice and clarifies the role of theology in a way that helps us see some organizing practices as religious practices.
Market Power and Legal Advantage
Authors: Powers Madison
Published: February 2024

This chapter surveys how pervasive changes in the global political economy recommended by market fundamentalists undermined state capacity for protecting human rights. Dominant market participants were able to rewrite legal rules to their advantage and use their market power to subvert competitive norms. These changes fostered new predatory economic behaviors and accelerated the growth of existing trends, enabling a relatively few actors to capture the bulk of economic rewards of global production and investment and shift economic and environmental burdens and risks onto others, thereby undermining human rights fulfillment. These actors used their enhanced economic position to consolidate market power, evade market discipline, hoard opportunities, and reduce accountability to consumers; avoid political accountability by disempowering democracies while hijacking state and international institutions for private purposes; leverage enhanced capital mobility to game the global system of states; and extract windfall profits from speculative, socially destabilizing, and ecologically destructive capital investments.
Equality Emerges as a Ground for Abortion Rights in and after Dobbs
Authors: Franklin Cary , Siegel Reva
Published: February 2024

Equality as well as liberty arguments can structure the debate about abortion that continues after Dobbs. This chapter draws on case law, history, and common sense to show that principles of equal citizenship require government to protect potential life in different ways today than it has in the past. Equal protection commitments give rise to an anticarceral presumption in regulating abortion. States that respect women as equal citizens do not turn, as a matter of first resort, to measures that rely on coercion when there are numerous less discriminatory and less restrictive ways to protect potential life. Reaching for carceral solutions perpetuates the forms of inequality that are the central concern of sex-based equal protection law. To opt for the maximally coercive approach—forced pregnancy and childbirth—when there are alternative means for enabling families to flourish is neither constitutional nor plausibly characterized as promoting life.
Why Was Roe v. Wade Wrong?
Authors: Mitchell Jonathan F.
Published: February 2024

Critics of Roe have hammered the Court’s opinion for recognizing a supposed right to abortion that lacks a clear textual foundation in the Constitution. Yet Roe was hardly the first time that the Supreme Court imposed a constitutional right that lacks textual support. Roe’s critics have responded by invoking a history-and-tradition test for distinguishing the “good” substantive due process rights from the “bad” ones, but there are many problems with using history and tradition as the touchstone for unenumerated constitutional rights. The Court should instead ask whether the unenumerated rights that it has recognized have textual support in other sources of supreme federal law, such as federal statutes and agency rules. And it should, when possible, invoke those extraconstitutional legal authorities to support the correctness of those substantive due process rulings. Roe has never been federally codified, and so is uniquely indefensible.
Justice Blackmun Got It Right in Roe v. Wade
Authors: Chemerinsky Erwin
Published: February 2024

The premise of the Court’s decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization is that Roe v. Wade was “egregiously wrong” and “exceedingly weak.” This essay says that Justice Harry Blackmun got it exactly right in addressing the three key questions: Are rights of privacy and autonomy protected even if not enumerated in the Constitution? Do laws prohibiting abortion infringe on privacy and autonomy? Does the state have a compelling interest in prohibiting abortions? A close reading of the Court’s opinion in Dobbs reveals that the Court agrees with Justice Blackmun on the first two issues, and it is only its judgment that states can regard the fetus as “potential life” that explains the overruling of Roe. But this decision is based on a religious judgment inappropriate for the Court to make.
Should Gradualism Have Prevailed in Dobbs?
Authors: Re Richard M.
Published: February 2024

Gradualism should have won out in Dobbs. In general, the Supreme Court should not impose massive disruption without first providing notice of its contemplated course of action. Only the chief justice followed that principle, and as a result his decision is the most compelling. By contrast, the majority’s most plausible rationale was steeped in judicial statecraft: the majority claimed that only grand, decisive action could meet the challenge at hand. But by acting in haste, the Court compromised its own deliberative process and prevented the public from adequately preparing for an avulsive shift in the law. The joint dissent’s treatment of precedent was even less persuasive. The dissent’s own uses of precedent demonstrate how readily case law is thrown overboard. So if the majority had reason to moderate, the dissenters did, too—by joining a gradualist opinion like the chief’s.
A Requiem for RoeWhen Property Has No Privacy
Authors: Goodwin Michele Bratcher
Published: February 2024

This eulogy for Roe addresses forced reproduction and pregnancies—the conditions normalized before Roe, during coverture and slavery. Through Roe the Court initiated the work of dismantling its ugly record of affirming harmful laws that tethered women to motherhood. Laws banning women from full participation in society and suffrage are arguably rooted in coverture—the troubling legal theory that women’s identities and legal rights are subsumed within their husbands’ rights. Such laws were never meant to enrich women or to recognize their constitutional personhood, but rather to secure familial harmony for men. It debunks the notion that a woman gained protection from being “under [her husband’s] wing, protection and cover.” It centers the concerns of women, and Black women particularly, by reflecting on Margaret Garner, her escape from slavery, and subsequent trial for murder. It concludes by addressing post-Dobbs risks and harms: the new coverture and New Jane Crow.
The Unraveling
Authors: Minow Martha
Published: February 2024

This chapter explores the implications of the Supreme Court’s revocation of a pregnant person’s right to choose to terminate a pregnancy; specifically, it explores implications for individuals’ right to choose to prevent a pregnancy through the purchase and use of contraceptives. Examining what the justices explicitly stated about the impact of the decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization on access to contraception, what they did not discuss, and what are likely and possible effects of the discussion, the chapter explores the immediate and grave uncertainty and heightened risk not only of unwanted pregnancies but also of job and wage insecurity for many people who can become pregnant as well as jeopardy to public confidence in the courts and law.