bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
The Buildup to Detonation in 1968
Authors: Demshuk Andrew
Published: October 2017

The final progression toward demolishing the University Church in 1968 reveals a regime that not only veiled the whole affair in secrecy, but strove to more effectively terrify and divide its opponents through vain promises and active intimidation. But the State had underestimated public resilience. Using a lively and diverse series of protest letters, interview transcripts, and on-site accounts, the coming pages exhibit how pending demolition of Leipzig’s University Church prompted the largest case of unrest in East German history between the 1953 Uprising and 1989 Revolution. Fear of the public ultimately prompted frantic preparations toward demolition in mere days, leading to even greater trauma and loss.
Ethics Settings for Autonomous Vehicles
Authors: Millar Jason
Published: October 2017

This chapter explores the underlying arguments for and against designing ethics settings into autonomous vehicles. I begin by offering a definition of “ethics setting” and by discussing how designers and engineers embed ethics settings in technology. I then provide an overview of some of the ethics settings that are currently embedded in vehicles and some that are proposed or foreseeable in emerging autonomous vehicle technology. I also discuss the various ethical considerations that have been raised in response to each kind of ethics setting. After describing the landscape of ethics settings and related ethical issues that accompany them, I raise three questions that must be answered by those designing ethics settings into autonomous vehicles. I conclude by providing some considerations that can help engineers, designers, and policymakers answer them in practice.
Skilled Perception, Authenticity, and the Case Against Automation
Authors: Zoller David
Published: October 2017

It is common to argue that doing things ourselves, using our skills, is more “authentic” than allowing automation to do things for us. Yet what this means or why it is desirable is rarely explained. Here I discuss the value of skill in terms of the effect that the widespread automation of skills—from driving to cooking—would have on our perceptual lives. The phenomenological tradition has long held that to have a skill is not just to have a productive capability; more than that, skill enables me to perceive elements and aspects of the world that are inaccessible to the unskilled. Automating my skills thus amounts to losing the ability to see and know certain “niches” of reality. By showing that skill, and the determinacy of perception that it brings us, is linked to some clearly recognizable human goods, I show that the potential loss of perceptual skill through automation is worthy of moral consideration.
Robot Friends for Autistic Children
Authors: Elder Alexis
Published: October 2017

Robots seem to have great therapeutic value for patients with autism spectrum disorders. But their usefulness derives from a potentially problematic source: their appealingly friendly presence, which can lead patients to think of them as friends, or even to prefer their companionship to that of human beings. In this chapter, an analogy between false friends and counterfeit currency is leveraged to explore a potential moral hazard posed by these therapeutic robots. An objection from the subjective nature of the value of friendship is raised, and refuted by an appeal to the importance of cultivating social capabilities. I conclude that the moral hazard can be mitigated by careful design and responsible use, and that these therapies offer genuine promise. But I argue that we must tread with caution when using robots in therapeutic applications where the appearance of friendship is liable to arise.
The Internet of Things and Dual Layers of Ethical Concern
Authors: Henschke Adam
Published: October 2017

The internet of things (IoT), where objects can communicate with each other in a way that affects the physical world, will likely have a great impact on people and society at large. Like a massively distributed set of robots, its effects will be felt on both physical and information realms. After describing key elements of the IoT, this chapter summarizes major ethical concerns. For the physical layer, the primary ethical concerns center on safety, while the informational layer’s primary concerns are about controlling information. Given the two layers’ distinct ethical concerns, we face a problem of moral pluralism—which of these layers should take priority? Recognizing this pluralism, the chapter argues that designers, policymakers, and users not only must not pay attention to both layers, but may also have to prioritize one layer over the other.
Artificial Intelligence and the Ethics of Self-Learning Robots
Authors: Vallor Shannon , Bekey George A.
Published: October 2017

The convergence of robotics technology with the science of artificial intelligence is rapidly enabling the development of robots that emulate a wide range of intelligent human behaviors. Recent advances in machine learning techniques have produced artificial agents that can acquire highly complex skills formerly thought to be the exclusive province of human intelligence. These developments raise a host of new ethical concerns about the responsible design, manufacture, and use of robots enabled with artificial intelligence—particularly those equipped with self-learning capacities. While the potential benefits of self-learning robots are immense, their potential dangers are equally serious. While some warn of a future where AI escapes the control of its human creators or even turns against us, this chapter focuses on other, far less cinematic risks of AI that are much nearer to hand, requiring immediate study and action by technologists, lawmakers, and other stakeholders.
Resisting Arrest
Authors: Hornby Louise
Published: October 2017

This chapter examines how early filmmakers had to invent what motion looked like on screen, imagining it as distinct from stillness, legibility, or clarity. The images of motion in early film are blurred and impressionistic—ocean waves, clouds of dust, puffs of steam and smoke—which render motion itself a kind of obscurity and reveal how film is itself an ephemeral medium of dust and smoke. The precursor to film’s absent materiality is found in photography’s own representation of motion as blur in Etienne-Jules Marey’s strange late nineteenth-century photographs of smoke fillets and the movements of air. These images, lesser known than his other motion studies, reveal how film casts back to its still antecedent to imagine motion in blurred terms of smoke and dust, even as it resists photographic arrest.
The Instant and the Series
Authors: Hornby Louise
Published: October 2017

This chapter argues that Muybridge’s photographs of human and animal locomotion underwrite a pace for modernism that negotiates the iterative terms of the instant and the series, constructing an account of time that pivots on the accumulation of separated fragments. The chapter brings the form of instantaneous photography to bear on James Joyce’s exploration of sequentiality and pace in Ulysses. The many walks in Joyce’s novel are photographic (what he calls a “discrete succession of images”), and their singular strides point to Charlie Chaplin, the modernist paragon of the jerky walk. Chaplin’s walk is both a cinematic signature and an insistence on photography—more specifically, an insistence on imitating Muybridge’s studies of motion. By making static awkwardness a condition of time and of walking, Joyce’s novel and Chaplin’s mechanized body each read as a product of film yet hold continuity and the cinema at bay by their stilled paces.
Conclusion
Authors: Hornby Louise
Published: October 2017

The conclusion to the book underscores its central preoccupation with stillness’s impossibility, or difficulty. This impossibility or inhuman (objective) aspect of photography has frequently been used as a means to dismiss the medium in favor of representational strategies that more closely mimic human vision. However, the ability to step out of time and out of selfhood is a critical model for the authors, photographers, and filmmakers discussed in the book, and suggests a means to a new understanding of empathy.
Introduction
Authors: Small Mario Luis
Published: October 2017

This book examines the varied and complex factors that affect an individual’s decision to confide in another person. It probes the experiences of a set of graduate students over the course of their first year in their programs and compares them with those of nationally representative populations. The findings show that decisions about whom to turn to when seeking confidants are influenced by the complicated nature of social relationships, as well as the contexts where those relationships take place. The book describes an alternative view of social support, one in which actors are mostly pragmatic in their decisions about expressing vulnerability, and one in which contexts—the institutional spaces where people spend their daily lives—are at least as important as network structure in shaping their decisions.
Weak-Tie Confidants
Authors: Small Mario Luis
Published: October 2017

This chapter examines the “core discussion networks” of graduate students in three departments and shows that, contrary to traditional expectations, many of the ties appear to be weak rather than strong. It considers how the students relate to those they have considered their confidants after six months, and more specifically whether they would as a whole report the same confidants. Three perspectives on the relative importance of network structure versus social interaction are discussed based on the students’ different experiences: the students will keep most confidants, they will drop many of their confidants, or they will drop many confidants but quickly replace them. In general, the students replaced their confidants often.
Beyond Named Confidants
Authors: Small Mario Luis
Published: October 2017

This chapter examines whether the graduate students, when talking about their serious personal worries, actually approached their newly named confidants or stuck, instead, to old ones. Three possible expectations about what the students did are discussed: the students will reserve their serious worries for old confidants, or strong ties; they will approach both old and new confidants, strong and weak ties, with their serious worries; or they will not necessarily reserve their serious worries for either old or new confidants, approaching even people they did not name as confidants. The chapter shows that, when faced with their own most serious worries, the students turned to old named confidants, to new ones, and even to people not named at all.
A Final Word
Authors: Small Mario Luis
Published: October 2017

This book concludes by discussing the impact of technology on how we communicate with our closest friends and family, and especially how we relate to our strong ties. The change in norms is most evident in young people, including the graduate students studied in this book, who now rely on smartphones and the Internet as their primary modes of communication—with their close friends, spouses, and even roommates. As a result of these dynamics, it should have been easier than ever for the students to retain their connections to close confidants in the midst of dramatic life changes. However, this book argues that in spite of what is possible online, the distinctly human elements of interpersonal relations, those that lie beyond the network structure, remain indispensable to understand network behavior.
Phillis Wheatley and the Affairs of State
Authors: Barnard John Levi
Published: October 2017

This chapter considers Phillis Wheatley as a political actor within the context of revolutionary-era Boston, and her political poetry as representative of the genre eighteenth-century readers would have known as the poem on the affairs of state. Within this larger category the chapter identifies two distinct yet related literary modes in Wheatley’s work. The first, her neoclassical poetics of political identification, engages with the revolutionary rhetoric of freedom as a means of linking the struggle of American revolutionaries with that of enslaved people in America. While this poetics of identification is rooted in a sense of optimism linked to the ethos of revolution, Wheatley simultaneously develops a poetics of opposition, which registers a lingering skepticism as to the likelihood of liberation for enslaved and free blacks in post-revolutionary America.
Sizing Up the Beast
Authors: Clasen Mathias
Published: October 2017

Horror fiction has been a legitimate object of academic study for several decades now. There are many competing theoretical approaches to horror and the Gothic, but the most prevalent approaches are seriously flawed. Constructivist approaches, which see horror as a product of historical circumstance, ignore the genre’s psychological and biological underpinnings and its deep history. Horror stretches back in time beyond the Gothic novel through folk tales to earlier oral narratives. Psychoanalytical approaches, which build on Freud’s theories of psychology, are scientifically obsolete and have a distorting effect on the subject matter, reducing horror to representations of psychosexual complexes. The chapter critically discusses existing approaches to horror, as well as horror as an affectively defined genre, and it argues for a consilient, biocultural approach which integrates other viable approaches within a framework based on biology and which builds on current social science.
Fear for Your Life
Authors: Clasen Mathias
Published: October 2017

Why are so many people attracted to horror given its well-documented negative psychological effects, such as increased vigilance and sleep disruptions? In attempting to explain the paradox of horror, this chapter argues that the appetite for horror is an adaptation designed to give us experience with negative emotion at high levels of intensity. Fiction in general provides a framework for emotionally and cognitively engaging simulation at low cost and risk. That is why the human appetite for fiction evolved. Horror specifically gives us vicarious experience with threat scenarios, like nightmares, and prompts us to reflect on important themes while giving us insight into the mechanics of social interactions and psychological processes. Even unrealistic horror stories can give us valuable life lessons and help calibrate our motivational systems.
Monsters Everywhere
Authors: Clasen Mathias
Published: October 2017

The chapter gives an outline of the history of American horror across media, from prehistoric roots to postmodern slasher films and horror videogames. A specifically American literary horror tradition crystallizes in the mid-1800s, with authors such as Edgar Allan Poe, and is developed in the twentieth century by writers including H. P. Lovecraft. In that century, horror films—beginning with Universal’s monster films of the 1930s—became the dominant medium for the genre. Horror became a mainstream genre during the 1970s and 1980s, with the emergence of popular writers like Stephen King and many lucrative film releases. Slasher films dominated the 1980s and were reinvented in a postmodern version in the 1990s. Horror videogames became increasingly popular, offering high levels of immersion and engagement. The chapter shows that horror changes over time, in response to cultural change, but changes within a possibility space constrained by human biology.
Trust No One
Authors: Clasen Mathias
Published: October 2017

Ira Levin’s Rosemary’s Baby (1967) tells the story of a young woman, Rosemary, who is tricked into bearing Satan’s offspring, the Antichrist. This chapter argues that Levin’s famous novel struck a chord with readers because it successfully targets evolved fears of intimate betrayal, contamination of the body, and persecution by metaphysical forces of evil. Rosemary is victimized at the hands of power-crazed individuals using black magic to serve Satanic evil. This story of occultism and evil is set in contemporary Manhattan, in a world where God is dead but Satan is alive and where pleasant surfaces barely cover an abyss of depravity. Absolute evil is real, and it has no trouble finding human collaborators, people who actively and selfishly pursue dominance and power as well as people who passively tolerate evil.
Never Go Swimming Again
Authors: Clasen Mathias
Published: October 2017

Steven Spielberg’s Jaws (1975) terrified audiences through its convincing depiction of shark attacks off the coast of the New England island Amity. A great white shark terrorizes bathers, but local politicians refuse to acknowledge the danger, fearing a drop in tourism. The protagonist, Chief Brody, faces the truth and unselfishly attempts to save his community from the danger. This chapter argues that the power of Jaws to engage and disturb audiences comes from its success in immersing viewers in a primal scenario of predation by a malevolent monster, the shark, which meets the input specifications of evolved anti-predatory mechanisms in the human mind. The monster film compounds the fear of predation with the anxiety of uncertainty and sympathetic fear for protagonists in peril. We never know when the shark will strike, but we are alerted ahead of characters through aesthetic means, such as the film’s soundtrack.
Haunted Houses, Haunted Minds
Authors: Clasen Mathias
Published: October 2017

Stephen King’s The Shining (1977) is one of the most popular horror novels of all time. It tells the story of a family snowed in at a haunted hotel. The father, Jack Torrance, dreams of literary success and succumbs to the evil ghosts and supernatural forces of the hotel, eventually attacking his own family. This chapter argues that the central conflicts of the novel have their roots in human nature, reflecting evolutionarily recurrent adaptive problems of balancing conflicting evolved motives, most crucially motives for dominance versus motives for prosociality, and of surviving the hostile forces of nature. Moreover, the supernatural elements of the novel resonate with evolved cognitive dispositions for magical thinking and metaphysical dualism. The Shining effectively evokes and explores biologically salient conflicts and fears, offering a compellingly hard-nosed but ultimately optimistic perspective on those conflicts and fears.
Hack n’ Slash
Authors: Clasen Mathias
Published: October 2017

John Carpenter’s Halloween (1978) kicked off the slasher film wave with its disturbing depiction of Michael Myers’s killing spree in a small American town. This chapter argues that Halloween’s emotional and imaginative power has its wellspring in human nature. The film’s horror scenario—the threat of being killed by another human—reflects an evolutionarily ancient hazard, one that has left deep traces in our constitution. Conspecific predation has been a constant danger of social life for millions of years, and the film effectively evokes that danger in a contemporary setting. Halloween gets its power from depicting, and aligning audiences with, likeable and peaceful characters in quiet and safe suburbia, which is suddenly infested with a homicidal agent, Michael Myers, who is simultaneously subhuman and superhuman. Myers became a horror icon because he is a supercharged representation of an ancient danger, a hostile conspecific outside rational reach.
The Future of Horror
Authors: Clasen Mathias
Published: October 2017

This chapter discusses recent and future developments in horror entertainment. It argues that future horror media will give consumers access to a wider range of experiences, some of which are more immersive and much more emotionally powerful than those offered by traditional horror media. The chapter analyzes horror videogames such as Until Dawn (2015), as well as so-called survival horror games such as Amnesia: The Dark Descent (2010), which foster immersion through interaction, and immersive virtual reality, which increases the sense of presence in a frightening computer-generated world. The chapter also analyzes haunted attractions and live-action horror experiences which situate consumers as protagonists in horror stories that unfold around them. Finally, the chapter argues that horror research needs to engage more actively with science, in theory as well as method.
Power, Ambiguity, and Deception
Authors: Shuy Roger W.
Published: October 2017

This chapter reviews the research of social science and linguistics on power, ambiguity, and deception when treated separately at the macro institutional level and at the micro non-institutional level, noting the lack of studies of macro institutional power employed in the same context with micro non-institutional individuals. The characteristics of institutional power, control, authority, domination, reinterpretation, inequality, and persuasion are transparent and non-negotiable in the legal arena, in contrast with their absence for the powerless persons with whom the legal institution interacts. In non-institutional individual contexts these characteristics are often negotiable. When institutional power interacts with individuals who lack that power, the government’s non-negotiable advantage would appear to be transparent, but this is not always true. This outwardly transparent power also can be realized through the use of ambiguity, which can contain deceptiveness. This chapter reprises the research on ambiguity and deception, in the contexts of both law and linguistics.
Police Interviewers Use Deceptive Ambiguity
Authors: Shuy Roger W.
Published: October 2017

This chapter begins with an analysis of the Miranda warning, pointing out the opportunities it provides for creating ambiguity. Following this, the chapter points out the ways police interviewers used ambiguity with juvenile murder suspect Kevin Rogers in Houston, Texas, and juvenile suspect Michael Carter in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. The third case describes the law enforcement interviews with Major Dragan Jokic of the Serbian army during the International Criminal Tribunal of Yugoslavia at The Hague. Major Jokic was accused of abetting genocide during the Srebrenica massacre. In all three cases, analysis demonstrates the ways that these government officials used ambiguity deceptively during their interviews with their suspects. This analysis includes the way the interviewers’ used deceptive ambiguity while presenting the speech events, schemas, agendas, speech acts, conversational strategies, and lexicon and grammar.
Undercover Agents Use Deceptive Ambiguity
Authors: Shuy Roger W.
Published: October 2017

Undercover operations are deceptive by definition. First, the speech event is camouflaged so that the targets believe it is very different from what it really is. This misunderstanding of the speech event creates conflicting schemas, often enabling the agents to manipulate the targets’ agendas, to reinterpret the meaning of the speech acts used by both, to use ambiguous conversational strategies to persuade the targets to agree with the agent’s propositions, and to misinterpret the targets’ words to suit the prosecution’s case. This chapter reprises the FBI undercover investigations of US Senator Harrison A. Williams, automobile manufacturer John Z. DeLorean, and the IRS investigation of an individual taxpayer named Vernon Sligh. It also demonstrates how the undercover agents used deceptive ambiguity in their techniques of producing a misleading record of language evidence that was favorable to the prosecution and unfavorable to the targets.
Human Dignity, Suicide, and Assisting Others to Die
Authors: McMahan Jeff
Published: October 2017

The notion of human dignity is pervasive in political and philosophical discourse, but it can have various different meanings and in some contexts may have little determinate meaning at all. It is often invoked on both sides of the debate about the permissibility of assisting others to die. This chapter canvasses and critically evaluates various ways of understanding the concept human dignity, including that found in the work of Kant and some contemporary Kantians. It is argued that none of these understandings provide the basis for a convincing argument against the permissibility of suicide or of assisting others to die.
Dignity and Assisted Dying
Authors: Cholbi Michael
Published: October 2017

Although Kant was generally opposed to suicide, many contemporary ethicists invoke recognizably Kantian notions, including dignity and autonomy, in their defense of assisted dying or “death with dignity.” This chapter sorts out what Kant’s understanding of dignity implies about assisted dying. Kant’s understanding of dignity as rooted in practically rational agency distinguishes his account of dignity as a trait that is universal, unified, equal, and inalienable and that entails a duty of self-preservation as fundamental to respecting rational agency. Nevertheless, Kant’s arguments do not establish an obligation to forego suicide (and hence, an obligation on the part of others not to assist in suicide) in each and every case. Although Kant’s notion of dignity cannot be deployed to defend a broad permission for suicide akin to that favored by the “death with dignity” movement, it also does not entail as restrictive a stance on morally permissible suicide or on assisted dying.
Wilde’s Messy Messianism
Authors: Bateman Benjamin
Published: October 2017

This chapter argues that the formal inconsistency of Oscar Wilde’s epistolary prison autobiography, De Profundis, offers a precarious narrative form suited to the lived interdependency of queer and persecuted persons. Mixing a lofty celebration of Jesus Christ with personal invective against a sometimes hostile world and an ungrateful lover, Wilde imagines a messianic community inclusive of pain, suffering, and negativity. The thought of contemporary psychoanalyst Michael Eigen is used to theorize Wilde’s project as an effort to enact a world that he can survive and that can survive his attacks against it.
Forster’s Queer Invitation
Authors: Bateman Benjamin
Published: October 2017

This chapter probes E. M. Forster’s novel Howards End and its suggestion of a “queer invitation” through which queerness circulates, finds a future, and becomes a name for hospitality waged in the name of survival. In contrast to Louis Althusser’s concept of interpellation, which explains how ideologies produce docile subjects, queer invitations disrupt subjects, interrupt routines, and offer opportunities for alternative identifications and intimacies. When Margaret Schlegel agrees to accompany Ruth Wilcox on an unplanned trip to Howards End, and when Ruth in turn bequeaths her house to Margaret, the two depart from heteronormative convention and create temporalities for the erosion of gender and economic hierarchies.
The Invitation’s Success
Authors: Bateman Benjamin
Published: October 2017

This chapter argues that E. M. Forster’s A Passage to India conceives survival not as an individual and competitive struggle but as a careful succession of creaturely life. As Mrs. Moore cultivates intimate contact with wasps, trees, and bacteria in India, she comes to see her life as both fundamentally intertwined with the lives of other creatures and constituted by organisms that preceded her in time. Thinking survival in collective terms, she breaks with the rigid racial hierarchies of the British Empire and splinters into a multitude of rallying cries for, and echoes of, Indian independence.
Cather’s Survival by Suicide
Authors: Bateman Benjamin
Published: October 2017

This chapter explores how the fiction of American writer Willa Cather, particularly her critically neglected novel Lucy Gayheart and short story “Consequences,” depicts suicide as a way of life. Breaking with the sociological wisdom of both the Progressive era and the present, these texts argue that suicidal practices should not be avoided but, rather, meted out so as to sustain the lives of queer people who experience the desire for self-erasure as a fundamental component of being. The psychoanalytic ruminations of Michael Eigen are used to make the case that space must be afforded in all facets of life to the impulse to throw life away.
When the Cross Met the Lotus
Authors: Tran Anh Q.
Published: October 2017

Chapter 1 considers the Catholic presence in Tonkin and its interaction with Vietnamese religions. It begins by describing the sociopolitical situation of Tonkin as a land of two kings. The chapter then narrates the development of Vietnamese Christianity from its beginning in the Jesuit, Augustinian, and Dominican missions to the eighteenth century. The chapter charts the varied reception of Christianity by the ruling class of Tonkin, and Christianity’s relationship with Confucianism. It ends with a narrative of the protracted Chinese Rites Controversy, describing the attempts to reconcile Catholic dogma with Vietnamese cultural and religious practices, especially regarding those pertaining to filial piety, and a description of the Controversy’s long-lasting effects in Vietnam.
Conclusion
Authors: Tran Anh Q.
Published: October 2017

What has been done is a preliminary attempt to enter into the world of Vietnamese traditional religions through an analysis of a particular Christian text. This study has explored the issues arising from a Christian encounter with Vietnamese culture and religions. What the author claims about the “errors” of the traditional religions of Vietnam reveals more about his view than about the actual beliefs and practices of the adherents of the Three Religions. Despite his limitations, it is possible to test the accuracy of the accounts through a cross-examination of available Chinese and Vietnamese sources. Every recovered bit of information, when used with care, becomes significant in the quest for a more well-rounded understanding of Vietnam’s past.
{p. i}Errors of the Three Religions
Authors: Tran Anh Q.
Published: October 2017

There are three teachings (religions)1 in Annam2: the teachings of ru,3 Laozi, and Śākya[muni].4 Ru-ism [or Confucianism]5 is the way of Confucius, Daoism is the way of Laozi, and Buddhism is the way of Śākyamuni Buddha. These three teachings represent three different paths. During the reign of the Chen kings [in Southern China], King Zhou Gaozu...
The Lurid and Ludic in the Chinese Cultural Revolution
Authors: Weisband Edward
Published: October 2017

This chapter examines the Chinese Cultural Revolution not so much to “explain” why it happened. Rather, it demonstrates the relevance of traditional values and certain child-rearing practices to psychosocial explanations of how mass atrocities were perpetrated. It focuses on the genocide of the Maoist revolution and its dystopian project of peasant collectivization. The Cultural Revolution was political in its imposition of the Communist Party structure throughout China; but it was also socioeconomic and thus essentially about food, its production and distribution at macrolevels of social organization and mobilization. During the Maoist revolution, macabresque transgressions had to be displayed, that is, performed before audiences comprised not only of perpetrators but also of community witnesses. Communal desire for vengeance over whatever was dramatized as “lost” represents a form of motivation relevant to explanations of sadism and its executions in the movement from filial piety to revolutionary shame and rage.
The Quest for the Never-Is
Authors: Weisband Edward
Published: October 2017

This chapter concludes the psychosocial analysis of genocide, mass atrocity, and hate by focusing on the linguistic problematics of state and national legitimacy. The theoretical argument states that when social fantasies devolve into political reifications of nationality or citizenship, hyphenated constructions of collective identity become transformed. The enigmatic signifier of hyphenated legitimacy that binds nation-states is reified; ethnicity becomes essentialized that partakes of necessity and exclusionist purity. Once the enigmatic signifier becomes transformed in this way by forms of psychosocial akrasia, transgressive performative violence in mass atrocity follows in the aftermath. The conclusion of this chapter explores the psychosocial dimensions of political legitimacy and shows how legitimacy is forever subjected to the psychodynamics of lack, loss, and demand for a collective purity in ways that generate a politics of the unreal, over and over again.
Hemispheric Solidarities
Authors: Feinsod Harris
Published: October 2017

This chapter introduces the unlikely roles poets played at the center of hemispheric cultural diplomacy initiatives in 1938–1945, the years when Good Neighbor diplomacy was motivated by a broad antifascist coalition. The chapter discusses major diplomat-poets like William Carlos Williams, Pablo Neruda, Archibald MacLeish, and Langston Hughes, and compares these writers to Puerto Rican poet Julia de Burgos, Ecuadorian Consul General Jorge Carrera Andrade, soldier-poet Lysander Kemp, and others who coalesced around the anthologies, translations, and congresses of Good Neighbor initiatives. Borrowing metaphors of bridging and broadcasting from new infrastructures of hemispheric modernization, and invoking strategies of apostrophic address to an impossibly large hemispheric public, Good Neighbor poetry promoted Popular Front antifascism, but also enabled advocates of decolonial politics, racial democracy, and international feminism.
Questions of Anticommunism
Authors: Feinsod Harris
Published: October 2017

This chapter reveals exchanges among Elizabeth Bishop, Robert Lowell, Derek Walcott, and Heberto Padilla. Bishop’s relation to the Congress for Cultural Freedom (CCF) inflects her Brazil poems, described here not as self-conscious critiques of travel literature but as negotiations of liberal ideas about international class politics and poverty, revealed in elaborate sound patterns. Transfiguring middle-generation formalism, Walcott lyricized his increasingly vexed relation to the hemispheric tours he attended with support from the CCF. Actively influenced by Lowell’s psycho-political stance, Padilla’s critiques of revolutionary Cuba aggravated a crisis of cultural permissiveness in the state bureaucracy known as “the Padilla Affair” after the poet was imprisoned and forced to recite a coerced confession as a condition of his release. Lyric sequences by Bishop, Lowell, Walcott, and Padilla sought new strategies of hemispheric cultural diplomacy by enacting crises of confessional lyric formalism as an aesthetic ideology in service to anticommunist policy.
Blameworthiness and Unwitting Omissions
Authors: Clarke Randolph
Published: October 2017

Some omissions to act are unwitting: the agent isn’t aware that she isn’t doing something that she ought to be doing. Agents can be blameworthy for such omissions. Can they be directly blameworthy, with their blameworthiness for the omission not deriving from their blameworthiness for any other things? This chapter advances an affirmative answer to this question. A view is developed on which both a cognitive and a control condition for direct blameworthiness can be satisfied in a case of unwitting omission. Further, it is argued that even a good-willed agent, one whose values and motivations are what they should be, can be directly blameworthy in such a case.
The Puzzle(s) of Frankfurt-Style Omission Cases
Authors: Sartorio Carolina
Published: October 2017

Can we be morally responsible for omitting to do things that we were not able to do? Although at first sight it appears that we cannot, some have argued that Frankfurt-style omission cases show otherwise. This generates a puzzle that resists an easy solution. This chapter argues that solving this puzzle is like opening a can of worms, in that identifying the right solution to it generates other even more intricate and more interesting puzzles. The chapter then offers some tentative solutions to the puzzles, old and new, but its main goal is to draw attention to the problems, and to uncover the kinds of elements that we would need to solve them.
Responsibility and Omissions
Authors: Fischer John Martin
Published: October 2017

Mark Ravizza and John Martin Fischer have previously offered an account of moral responsibility for omissions. On this account, the conditions for such responsibility are parallel in an important way to the conditions for moral responsibility for actions: that is, neither responsibility for actions nor responsibility for omissions requires access to alternative possibilities. This helps in the semicompatibilist project (i.e., to show that moral responsibility is compatible with causal determinism). This chapter seeks to address some salient critiques of the account proposed by Ravizza and Fischer, especially in recent work by Randolph Clarke, Carolina Sartorio, and Philip Swenson.
Courses of Conduct
Authors: Husak Douglas
Published: October 2017

This chapter begins with an argument nearly everyone will reject as unsound. The chapter rejects it too. What is far less obvious, however, is exactly what is wrong with the argument. Despite skeptical challenges from both sides, the chapter tentatively concludes that the best solution to this problem consists in construing some instances of behavior as a course of conduct rather than as a discrete set of acts and omissions. When behavior consists in a course of conduct, it is a complex that consists in both acts and omissions. Attempts to pigeon-hole such behavior as either an act or an omission without regard to the complex in which both play a part are bound to produce philosophical distortion and normative confusion.
Omissions, Acts, and the Duty to Rescue
Authors: Ferzan Kimberly Kessler
Published: October 2017

In criminal law, if the defendant omits to perform an action, he will typically not be liable unless he is under a duty to act. This chapter argues that the reason that individuals do not generally have a duty to rescue is part and parcel of a broader principle that also applies to acts. The means principle underlies the reason individuals need not act absent a duty, the constraint that their bodies and property may not be appropriated for the general good, and the permissibility of performing actions that allow others to be harmed. This principle also extends to a set of cases that look nothing like omissions: mediated harms, in which an attacker will harm a third party if and only if the defender fights back. Omissions, then, are not special, as the normative principle that underlies the duty requirement exists both when we act and when we omit.
Systematic Government Access to Private-Sector Data
Authors: Rubinstein Ira S. , Nojeim Gregory T. , Lee Ronald D.
Published: October 2017

There has been an increase worldwide in government demands for data held by the private sector. In most countries studied, the publicly accessible law provides an inadequate foundation for systematic access, both from a human rights perspective and at a practical level. Transparency about systematic access remains weak. Access for national security purposes is more sparingly regulated than is access for criminal investigation purposes. Relying on the country reports prepared for this project, this chapter develops both a descriptive framework for comparing national laws on surveillance and government access to data held by the private sector, and a normative framework based on factors derived from constitutional and human rights law. A robust, global debate is needed on the standards for government surveillance, premised on greater transparency about current practices. International human rights law provides a useful framework for that debate.
Regulating Foreign Surveillance through International Law
Authors: Deeks Ashley S.
Published: October 2017

Regulating how governments conduct foreign electronic surveillance against another state’s citizens poses a complex challenge. In the wake of Edward Snowden’s leaks in 2013, the extent to which governments conduct surveillance of foreign state leaders and citizens became strikingly clear. This chapter argues that, although states traditionally have been loath to regulate their intelligence activities using international law, that body of law offers an important avenue by which states can reduce criticisms stemming from human rights and other groups, help set the agenda for the future of foreign surveillance, and respond to foreign and domestic fears that government surveillance is unconstrained. The chapter describes the variety of pressures states face to modulate their foreign surveillance, explains some of the benefits that states may accrue by doing so, and suggests six procedural norms around which certain Western democracies may be able to coalesce.
“Women—The Guardians of Price Control”
Authors: Twarog Emily E. LB.
Published: October 2017

When the Office of Price Administration introduced its wartime rationing program, the Home Front Pledge Campaign, it sought the help of America’s women through mass meetings and then follow-up meetings with local organizations. The OPA believed that its program would succeed only if every woman assumed an individual responsibility to hold prices in line. Chapter 2 explores the ways in which American housewives worked with the Office of Price Administration on wartime price controls; built alliances with a vast array of organizations through their involvement in the national consumer coalition, the Consumer Clearinghouse; and organized national meat boycotts during the post–World War II strike wave.
Organizing in the 1970s
Authors: Twarog Emily E. LB.
Published: October 2017

In 1973, housewives in California launched what would be the last meat boycott of the twentieth century. And, like its predecessors, the 1973 boycott gained national momentum albeit with little political traction now that Peterson had left public life for a job in the private sector as the consumer advisor to the Giant grocery store chain. And in some quarters of the labor movement, activists drew very clear links between the family economy and the stagnation plaguing workers’ wages. The 1973 boycott led to the founding of the National Consumers Congress, a national organization intended to unite consumer organizers. While it was a short-lived organization, it demonstrates the momentum that consumer activism was building. This chapter also reflects on the lost coordinating opportunity between housewives organizing around consumer issues and the women’s movement in the 1970s.
Epilogue
Authors: Twarog Emily E. LB.
Published: October 2017

The election of Ronald Reagan in 1980 encouraged a growing cadre of socially conservative housewives whose agenda focused on conservative social issues that matched the shifting neo-liberal economic ideology that was taking root. These conservative housewives saw themselves in opposition to the elite, politically connected feminists who, they felt, derided their contentment as housewives. As the New Deal vision of state intervention to protect the American standard of living faded, domestic politics 1980s style would be defined by individual over collective needs. The Epilogue is a reflection on the state of food activism in the neo-liberal economy. It considers US as well as global protests and organizing efforts to lower the high cost of food as well as provide access to healthy, affordable foods.
Conclusion
Authors: Jumet Kira D.
Published: October 2017

This chapter summarizes the arguments, discusses them within the context of the literature on protest mobilization, and explains the theoretical implications of the book. It reviews the intersection between the Synthetic Political Opportunity Theory and the Collective Action Research Program, the importance of political opportunity structures, mobilizing structures, and framing processes and how they relate to rational decision-making, and the relationship between structure and emotions in individual decisions to protest or not protest. The chapter examines the political climate in 2016‒2017 under President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, including increased repression and monitoring of social media, and the potential for future political mobilization and protest in Egypt.
Introduction
Authors: Schliesser Eric
Published: October 2017

This chapter introduces some of the key concepts of the monograph. In particular, it shows that Adam Smith is committed to being both a systematic philosopher and a responsible public thinker. It distinguishes among different ways in which Smith is systematic and understood systematicity. It draws on the ideas of David Hume and Bishop Berkeley to contextualize Smith’s views on these subjects. The chapter includes a summary of the book, a brief bibliographic survey, and an account of the methodology of the book.
Social Institutions and Consequentialism
Authors: Schliesser Eric
Published: October 2017

This chapter argues that when it comes to evaluating social institutions, Adam Smith is a particular kind of consequentialist, one who favors the welfare of the working poor. This is illustrated by way of first, the so-called real price, Smith’s central measure of welfare in the Wealth of Nations, and, second, Smith’s proposed progressive tax regime. The chapter also argues that Smith’s consequentialism should be distinguished from utilitarianism. The chapter then turns to a consideration of what might explain Smith’s theoretical bias toward the working poor. It closes with a discussion of the principles that, according to Smith, govern the duties of the legislator and an analysis of Smith’s account of liberty.
Three Invisible Hands
Authors: Schliesser Eric
Published: October 2017

This chapter discusses the three versions of the invisible hand mentioned by Adam Smith in light of each other. It offers detailed contextual analysis in order to argue that Smithian invisible hand processes are not identical to Smithian social explanations. Any given iteration of a Smithian invisible hand process is a relatively short-term process in which an agent produces unintended and, to him or her, unknown consequences. In invisible hand processes the consequences are, in principle, knowable to the right kind of observer (either theoretically informed or by accumulated common sense) at the time. By contrast, Smithian social explanations involve cases where the consequences are visible or knowable only after the fact. Generally they take place over much longer amounts of time than any given invisible hand process. Smithian social explanations can include invisible hand processes as sub-components (or mechanisms) but should not be conflated with these.
A Cheerful Philosophical Life
Authors: Schliesser Eric
Published: October 2017

This chapter uses Adam Smith’s obituary of David Hume, “Letter to Strahan,” published jointly with Hume’s brief autobiography, to explore the rewards and purpose of doing philosophy in a commercial society. Smith thinks that philosophers can enjoy the rewards of friendship in this life and immortality after death if they are benefactors to humanity. For Smith, friendship among equals is the most valuable goal. The argument proceeds by way of an analysis of how Hume and Smith understand magnanimity and vanity in light of the evidence surrounding Smith’s description of Hume’s deathbed scene reading of Lucian’s Dialogues of the Dead.
The Divisible College of International Lawyers
Authors: Roberts Anthea
Published: October 2017

This chapter explores three concepts—difference, dominance, and disruption—that play a central role in comparative international law. In examining the extent to which international law is international in the academies and textbooks of the five permanent members of the UN Security Council, the author makes three arguments. First, international law academics are often subject to differences in their incoming influences and outgoing spheres of influence in ways that reflect and reinforce differences in how they understand and approach international law. Second, actors, materials, and approaches from some states and regions have come to dominate certain transnational flows and forums in ways that make them disproportionately influential in constructing the “international.” Third, existing understandings of the field are likely to be disrupted by factors such as changing geopolitical power that will make it increasingly important for international lawyers to understand the perspectives and approaches of those coming from unlike-minded states.