bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Physical Education Students
Authors: Martin Jeffrey J.
Published: October 2017

Physical education (PE) is a potentially major site for delivering physical activity (PA) and sporting opportunities to children with disabilities. Most children with disabilities are officially enrolled in inclusive PE classes with mostly able-bodied children. The purpose of this chapter is to review the psychological-oriented research done in adapted PE that speaks to the PE experiences of children with disabilities. Children with disabilities have a wide range of experiences in PE. On the negative end are reports indicating that many children with disabilities are inactive and culled off to the side of the gym or playing field because teachers are unable and unwilling to adapt the activity to include children with various disabilities. Other negative experiences include being teased; children with disabilities are seen as different. In other cases, children with disabilities are simply ignored. On a more encouraging note, children with disabilities have positive experiences and develop sport and PA skills and enjoy the social interactions of other children. Researchers have also investigated the experiences of able-bodied children that occur from interacting with children with impairments.
The Fall of the Patriarchs
Authors: Harford Vargas Jennifer
Published: October 2017

This chapter examines the figure of the patriarch as dictator, analyzing how Cristina García’s King of Cuba interrogates the two main characters’ heteropatriarchal and hypermasculinist hero narratives. They are depicted as foil characters whose many similar character traits foil their imaginations of themselves as polar opposites and reveals their similar investments in the regime of heteropatriarchy; at the same time, the novel foils both characters’ desires to die heroically, thereby demythologizing the celebratory narratives of the revolution and the freedom fighters that have dominated in Cuba and in Miami, respectively. It further demonstrate how the novel incorporates notes, vignettes, and theatrical production to create a resolver aesthetic that captures the creative forms of survival and strategic negotiation of characters who survive amid scarcity on the island. The chapter ends by focusing on marginalized, defiant second-generation Cuban American daughters of the conservative exile generation who are artist figures so as to illuminate an alternative articulation of revolution and art in the service of decolonial critique.
Demolitions and Dread, 1961–1964
Authors: Demshuk Andrew
Published: October 2017

Having learned its lessons in 1960, the State pursued demolitions through the following years without serious architectural competitions or involving the public. Each time the wrecking ball danced through another monument protest letters increased in number and severity, until at last the surprise 1963 toppling of the Baroque Johannis tower, directly east of the University Church, was seen by many to anticipate the destruction of the University Church as foretold in 1960. Extreme letter exchanges unleashed the regime’s open hatred for citizens who failed to correspond to its imagined majority of supporters, and the inconceivable defection of leading authorities from the party line prompted a tightening of top-down control. Although the scale of protest frightened the regime into delaying its plans for some years, engaged citizens rejoiced but were circumspect. For by now they hardly believed anything promised from above, and the regime gave no promises in 1964, only silence.
Liability for Present and Future Robotics Technology
Authors: White Trevor N. , Baum Seth D.
Published: October 2017

Advances in robotics technology are causing major changes in manufacturing, transportation, medicine, and numerous other sectors. While many of these changes are beneficial, some will inevitably lead to harm. Who should be liable when a robot causes harm? This chapter addresses how the law can and should account for robot liability, including robots that exist today and that could potentially be built in the future. Current and near-future robots pose no significant challenge: existing law or minor variations therein can readily handle them. A greater challenge will arise if it becomes possible to build robots that merit legal personhood and thus can be held liable, as well as if future robots can cause major global catastrophe.
Trust and Human–Robot Interactions
Authors: Kirkpatrick Jesse , Hahn Erin N. , Haufler Amy J.
Published: October 2017

The concept of trust can take various forms, from interpersonal trust to institutional trust to trust in oneself or one’s government. As robotic technologies approach autonomy, and in increasing cases achieve it, scholars have turned their attention to the relationship between trust and human–robot interactions. This chapter explores that relationship using a multidisciplinary approach that includes philosophy, law, and neuroscience. The first section explicates the concept of human–robot interaction. The second articulates a normative account of interpersonal trust in service of the third section’s exploration of whether human–robot interactions could approach or achieve interpersonal trust. In answering this question in the affirmative, the fourth section flags some of the potential deleterious consequences of facilitating interpersonal trust in human–robot interactions. The fifth concludes with a call for future scholarship to address the philosophical, empirical, legal, and policy issues related to trust in human–robot interactions.
White Lies on Silver Tongues
Authors: Isaac Alistair M. C. , Bridewell Will
Published: October 2017

It is easy to see that social robots will need the ability to detect and evaluate deceptive speech; otherwise they will be vulnerable to manipulation by malevolent humans. More surprisingly, we argue that effective social robots must also be able to produce deceptive speech. Many forms of technically deceptive speech perform a positive pro-social function, and the social integration of artificial agents will be possible only if they participate in this market of constructive deceit. We demonstrate that a crucial condition for detecting and producing deceptive speech is possession of a theory of mind. Furthermore, strategic reasoning about deception requires identifying a type of goal distinguished by its priority over the norms of conversation, which we call an ulterior motive. We argue that this goal is the appropriate target for ethical evaluation, not the veridicality of speech per se. Consequently, deception-capable robots are compatible with the most prominent programs to ensure that robots behave ethically.
“Who’s Johnny?” Anthropomorphic Framing in Human–Robot Interaction, Integration, and Policy
Authors: Darling Kate
Published: October 2017

People have a tendency to project lifelike qualities onto robots. As we increasingly create spaces where robotic technology interacts with humans, this inclination raises ethical questions about use and policy. An experiment conducted in our lab on human–robot interaction indicates that framing robots through anthropomorphic language (like a personified name or story) can impact how people perceive and treat a robot. This chapter explores the effects of encouraging or discouraging people to anthropomorphize robots through framing. I discuss concerns about anthropomorphizing robotic technology in certain contexts, but I argue that there are also cases where encouraging anthropomorphism is desirable. Because people respond to framing, framing could help to separate these cases.
When Robots Should Do the Wrong Thing
Authors: Talbot Brian , Jenkins Ryan , Purves Duncan
Published: October 2017

In this chapter, we argue that deontological evaluations do not apply to the actions of robots. If robots are not phenomenally conscious, there is good reason to believe they lack the repertoire of mental capacities required for agency. Deontological requirements apply to a thing only if that thing is a moral agent. For this reason, robots should be consequentialists, even if consequentialism is false. We also argue that this does not necessarily make it permissible to create consequentialist robots, if we could instead create perfect deontological robots. But we are not sure about what true moral theory is, about appropriate trade-offs between rights and utilities, or about the ability of robots to obey moral commands reliably. So we argue that specific forms of uncertainty make it permissible, and sometimes obligatory, to create robots with moral views one thinks are false.
Testing the Moral Status of Artificial Beings; or “I’m Going to Ask You Some Questions …”
Authors: LaBossiere Michael
Published: October 2017

While sophisticated artificial beings are still the stuff of science fiction, it is reasonable to address the challenge of determining the moral status of such systems now. Since humans have spent centuries discussing the ethics of humans and animals, a sensible shortcut is to develop tests for matching artificial beings with existing beings and assigning them a corresponding moral status. While there are a multitude of moral theories addressing the matter of status, the focus is on two of the most common types. The first comprises theories based on reason (exemplified by Kant). The second comprises theories based on feeling (exemplified by Mill). Regardless of the actual tests, there will always be room for doubt. To address this, three arguments are presented in favor of the presumption of status, similar to that of the presumption of innocence in the legal system.
Stilling the Subject
Authors: Hornby Louise
Published: October 2017

This chapter considers how photography emerges as an incomplete, iterative form of portraiture against an elusive subject. It looks specifically at Marcel Proust’s definition of modernist portraiture in À la Recherche du Temps Perdu as an incomplete, serial form. The narrator turns repeatedly to photographic tropes of portraiture to try to capture an image of Albertine, the woman he loves. She remains unseeable, her opacity constructed both by still photography and by her suspected lesbianism. The chapter traces lesbian sexuality’s resistance in a number of figures and photographs alongside Proust’s novel, incorporating readings of Alfred Stieglitz’s portraits of Georgia O’Keeffe and concluding with modernism’s most inscrutable female figure, Greta Garbo. The point conveyed is not that photography fails to get at its subject (although this is Proust’s complaint), but that photography makes the subject’s inscrutability and opacity visible as such.
Incompatible Expectations
Authors: Small Mario Luis
Published: October 2017

This chapter suggests that the graduate students sometimes approached weak ties because they were avoiding strong ones, and that the heart of their reservations lay in the possibility of incompatible expectations—in the potential discordance between different roles that those they were close to might expect to perform. It begins by explaining that the students maintained different kinds of strong ties and confided in people with whom they had different kinds of relationships. The former can be classified by their degree of institutional mediation; the latter, by the extent of emotional reciprocity. Institutional mediation introduced additional expectations to a relationship; emotional reciprocity, when it was lacking, created the possibility of ambiguity. Both factors shaped how reluctant students were to approach those to whom they were close when they needed to discuss particular topics.
Relevance and Empathy
Authors: Small Mario Luis
Published: October 2017

This chapter suggests that the graduate students approached weak ties because of a desire to confide in someone who would understand their predicament as they themselves saw it. In other words, they sought people from whom they could expect what psychologists have termed cognitive empathy. Talking to those confidants, even if weakly tied, was often worth the risk. The chapter considers the relation between risk and expectations before discussing how students often justified their motivation to talk to an acquaintance as a function of the topic at hand; this form of trust is what Russell Hardin has described as a “three-part relation,” and philosopher Annette Baier, as a “three-part predicate”: “A trusts B with valued thing C.” It shows that the students commonly found empathy in one of several different forms of similarity, suggesting a mechanism through which homophily operates.
National Monuments and the Residue of History
Authors: Barnard John Levi
Published: October 2017

This chapter explores the tension between the association of the Lincoln Memorial with the civil rights movement and the continued prevalence—during and after the movement itself—of the rhetoric of imperial ruination in African American political discourse and cultural production. The chapter considers this rhetoric in the writings of Amiri Baraka, Nikki Giovanni, and Martin Luther King Jr., before turning to Kara Walker’s art installation A Subtlety. Walker’s sculpture of an African American woman, molded out of refined white sugar in the shape of an Egyptian sphinx, was arguably the most prominent public monument ever constructed to enslaved people in America; but it also aligned with a long tradition through which African American writers and artists have refigured Thomas Jefferson’s exceptional “empire for liberty” as merely another iteration of what Henry Highland Garnet called the “empire of slavery,” inexorably devolving into an “empire of ruin.”
Introduction
Authors: Clasen Mathias
Published: October 2017

Horror entertainment is paradoxically popular. It is one of the most consistently popular genres across media, yet it is designed to make audiences feel bad. An evolutionary perspective, one that builds on recent developments in cognitive and evolutionary psychology, can help explain the genre’s popularity as well as its form and function. This chapter argues that horror fiction is crucially dependent on evolved properties of the human central nervous system and that a nuanced and scientifically valid understanding of horror requires that we take human evolutionary history seriously. Horror targets ancient defense mechanisms in the brain. At the same time, horror changes in response to sociocultural context. Hence, the chapter argues for a biocultural critical approach to horror, one that is sensitive to cultural context as well as evolved psychological underpinnings. The chapter explains the rationale of the book and outlines its structure.
How Horror Works, I
Authors: Clasen Mathias
Published: October 2017

Horror fiction exploits deep-seated psychological mechanisms that evolved over millions of years in response to threats in the environment. As Charles Darwin documented, our species, like all other organisms, evolved in an adaptive relation to our environment. Archaeological and anthropological evidence suggests that human prehistoric existence was more dangerous than life in modern industrialized nations. That dangerous existence has given rise, as studied in evolutionary psychology, to an evolved fear system—since fear is, as H.P. Lovecraft stated, the oldest and strongest emotion—a watchful, hypersensitive set of mechanisms that prompt us to respond strongly to even ambiguous cues of danger. Horror fiction exploits this system by immersing us in fictional worlds that teem with danger, aligning us with characters that face monstrous threats, and evoking in us negative emotions such as fear and anxiety.
The Effects, Frequency, and Power of the Government’s Uses of Deceptive Ambiguity in Criminal Investigations
Authors: Shuy Roger W.
Published: October 2017

This chapter first summarizes the role of deceptive ambiguity in relationship to the legal institution’s need to discover predisposition, intentionality, and voluntariness. It then compares the relative frequency of the government representatives’ uses of deceptive ambiguity found in the six elements of the Inverted Pyramid: speech events, schemas, agendas, speech acts, conversational strategies, and lexical and grammatical language. Finally, it summarizes and compares the uses of deceptive ambiguity by police and prosecutors, when institutional power is strongly evident, with the way deceptive ambiguity is used by three types of cooperating witnesses, when this institutional power is hidden during their undercover interactions with targets.
Dignity and the Case in Favor of Assisted Suicide
Authors: Stoecker Ralf
Published: October 2017

Advocates of legalization of physician-assisted suicide usually argue that it is as matter of respect for human dignity that people get help in ending their lives (1) because the prohibition interferes with a fundamental liberty to conduct life according to one’s own preferences and (2) because sometimes suicide is an appropriate measure to avoid living an undignified life. In this chapter, it is argued that although the first argument is strong, the second argument is misguided. Hence, from an ethical perspective, society should not legally prohibit physician-assisted suicide. Yet, the person him- or herself should not commit suicide either. In particularly, the person should not regard such a suicide as a demand of his or her dignity.
Introduction
Authors: Bateman Benjamin
Published: October 2017

The Introduction argues for a modernist art of queer survival that departs from the selfish competitiveness and compulsory heterosexuality of early twentieth century social Darwinism. As rendered by the literary imaginations of Henry James, Oscar Wilde, E. M. Forster, and Willa Cather, queer survival is collective in nature and builds upon the interdependencies of proximate and precarious lives. This modernist archive is placed in dialogue with Jacques Derrida’s ruminations on hospitality, Judith Butler’s writing on ethics and vulnerability, contemporary psychoanalyst Michael Eigen’s theory of “mutual permeability,” and Lauren Berlant’s concepts of “slow death” and “lateral agency.” The resulting conversation offers a new perspective on modernist subjectivity and a more optimistic understanding of futurity than do reigning paradigms in queer theory.
James’s Animal Encounters
Authors: Bateman Benjamin
Published: October 2017

Henry James’s story “The Beast in the Jungle” is read as a response to the “nature fakers” controversy of the Progressive era. As Teddy Roosevelt and others insisted that nature is a war zone in which animals clash violently, James’s tale probes less aggressive animal behaviors and suggests that social Darwinist ideologies encourage the competitive practices they claim to merely describe. Instructing John Marcher in the pleasures to be found in making himself available to a beast he has been trained to fear, May Bartram functions as an early feminist ecologist who deploys a critique of species exceptionalism and its environmental impacts to undermine patriarchal ambition and to promote a vulnerable version of survival.
Coda
Authors: Bateman Benjamin
Published: October 2017

This conclusion uses a single scene from Willa Cather’s novel The Professor’s House to link sexuality, pain, and the articulation of queer history. It argues that former student Tom Outland, a figure of queer survival’s simultaneous potency and precarity, ultimately teaches Professor Godfrey St. Peter how, by letting go, to love a man and write history. Outland demonstrates how the suffering inherent in queer survival is also the engine of queer narrativity, the means by which queer knowledge and embodiment get articulated and transmitted across generations without the support of traditional kinship circuits and reproductive technologies.
Gods, Heroes, and Ancestors
Authors: Tran Anh Q.
Published: October 2017

Though a minority religion in Vietnam, Christianity has constituted a significant presence in the country since its arrival in the sixteenth century. This translation and analytical study of a 1752 document entitled Tam Giáo Chư Vọng [Errors of the Three Religions] adds to the knowledge of its early history within its cultural and religious contexts. This anonymous manuscript paints a rich picture of the three traditional Vietnamese religions (Tam Giáo), i.e., Confucianism, Buddhism, and Daoism. Aiming at the new converts, the writer describes the “errors” (Chư Vọng) of these traditional beliefs and religious practices and provides an apologetics for the Christian doctrines. Structured as a dialogue between a Christian priest and a Confucian scholar, the work explains and evaluates many religious customs and rituals of eighteenth-century Vietnam—many of which are still in practice today. In addition, it contains a trove of information on the challenges and struggles that Vietnamese Christian converts had to face in following the new faith. Beside its enormous historical value for studies on Vietnamese religions, language, and culture, this manuscript raises contemporary and highly complex issues concerning the encounter between Christianity and other religions, Christian missions, religious pluralism, interreligious dialogue, and the dialogue between Christianity and cultures.
The Errors of Confucianism
Authors: Tran Anh Q.
Published: October 2017

Book 1 starts off from the premise that Confucianism not only teaches the truths; it also contains errors and falsehoods that contradict the holy way of the Lord of Heaven, which is the great and most righteous way that people everywhere must believe and follow to attain peace. Book I invites the Confucian scholar to discuss and analyze with the author the so-called errors that are intermingled with Confucian truths.
{p. 141 (231)}The Errors of Buddhism
Authors: Tran Anh Q.
Published: October 2017

Book 3 begins with the premise that two heterodox ways of Śākyamuni and Laozi use clever words that appear to be true. Buddhism, especially, speaks in this way. Book 3 examines what the author believes to be the errors, false doctrines, magic, and divination practices of Buddhism and strives to teach people how to recognize these deceptions and avoid the tricks that Buddhism uses to mislead people.
The Macabresque
Authors: Weisband Edward
Published: October 2017

This book provides an original interpretation of the emotional psychology and disordered will of perpetrators during episodes of genocide and mass atrocity that have taken place throughout the twentieth century. It focuses on the persistence of staged human violation and lurid degradation as a prelude to the death of victims, who are forced to act out the diabolical fantasies of perpetrators. Explanations of ludic dying derive from a cultural, psychological, and psychosocial examination of the macabresque, the theatrical realm of depraved inhumanity that, as this study shows, invite perpetrators to release demonic drives in satanic desire for sadistic cruelty during genocide and mass atrocity. More broadly this applies during national conflicts involving ideological politics of hate and enemy-making. The macabresque is ever present in genocide and mass atrocity across time, place, and episode. Beyond the horrors of lethality, it is the defining feature of concentration camps and death camps, detention centers, prisons, ghettos, killing fields, and the houses, places of worship, schools, and hospitals converted into hubs for torture and torment. Victims, once trapped, are forced to act out the diabolical fantasies of perpetrators. They undergo crazed but systematic torture, the hellish torments of mutilation and dismemberment, and unspeakable agonies of humiliation and sexual violation. But dramaturgical styles of cruelty vary. Contrasts of performative transgression reveal contrasts in social values, and how cultural assumptions and attitudes influence patterns of degeneracy and defilement in the macabresque.
Introduction
Authors: Weisband Edward
Published: October 2017

This chapter introduces the often ignored problematic in the study of genocide and mass atrocity: why perpetrators demand that their victims suffer before death. The analysis underscores the relationship of culture and self-deception. It thus introduces the notion of performativity in human violation as a function of perpetrator demand for a “truth” that is ideologically desired but functionally unattainable. How are perpetrators, as theorized political subjects, constructed? The answers underscore the influences of desire, envy, and mimetic rivalry. Genocide, mass atrocity, and enemy-making are thus framed by political and social psychology, as well as by psychosocial theory, emphasizing disorders of will, self-deception, and the logics of illogic generated by emotional and psychological disorders of will demonstrated by perpetrator narcissism and sadistic cruelty that demands victims become complicit with their own humiliation.
On the Slippery Tropes of We-ness
Authors: Weisband Edward
Published: October 2017

The performative aesthetics of transgression occur as perpetrators “will” the unwillable desire of the introjected m(Other) experienced in fantasy in modes that include superegotistical enjoyment projected outward in forms of sadistic cruelty. Such macabresque pursuits assume surrogate forms of desire, in surplus cruelty, in the gratuitous sadism of absolute power. Superegotistical desire and its “enjoyment” are sustained by supererogatory reifications that revel in moral masochism and sadistic moralism. This leads to macabresque aesthetics and theatricality of performative transgression since the laws of jouissance, its prohibition and pursuit in substitute forms, must be repeated again and again. This chapter links a Lacanian theory of language to the psychic origins of collective perceptions in mass violence and human violation.
Introduction
Authors: Feinsod Harris
Published: October 2017

The introduction offers a critical history of writings about the “poetry of the Americas,” with emphases on the poetics of Octavio Paz, and on poetry by José Martí, Salomón de la Selva, Charles Olson, Pablo Neruda, and others. It presents a method for understanding this hemispheric literary history in relation to the inequities of the inter-American political system, braiding together hemispheric geopolitics in the Good Neighbor era and the early Cold War with formalist interpretation and “integrationist” ideas of literary community. The introduction defines an “era of inter-American cultural diplomacy” as a literary-historical moment in which the poetry of the Americas invested heavily in the project of critiquing as well as organizing American states, and it closes with synopses of the book’s six chapters, charting the inter-American poetry of World War II, the abandonment of inter-Americanism in the early Cold War, and its reconfigurations and renewals in the 1960s.
The Ruins of Inter-Americanism
Authors: Feinsod Harris
Published: October 2017

During the early Cold War, inter-Americanism often took shape in the genre of postromantic meditations on pre-Columbian ruins. These ruin poems are usually understood as expressions of universal humanism, exercises in postmodern tourism, symptoms of neo-imperial fortune hunting, or preludes to 1970s ethnopoetics. By contrast, the chapter argues that ruin poems galvanized by Pablo Neruda’s “Heights of Macchu Picchu” and Charles Olson’s “The Kingfishers” respond to the rapid demise of the movement for hemispheric democracy. Through their identifications with indigenous civic histories, poets critiqued the collapse of political and cultural inter-Americanism. Moving beyond poets like Neruda and Olson who had previously maintained a formal relation to Good Neighbor diplomacy, it shows how even Allen Ginsberg’s poetic theories developed during sojourns in Mayan Mexico, and the tropes of ruin poetry subtend the “destroyed” generation in “Howl” (1956), as well as poems by writers in his cohort such as Philip Lamantia and Ernesto Cardenal.
Renga and Heteronymy
Authors: Feinsod Harris
Published: October 2017

This chapter uses the backdrop of the myriad international poetry conferences of the 1960s to analyze poetic performances of cosmopolitanism and the discourse of translation. The ethical role of convening poets to perform and translate one another’s works was mainstreamed as a literary idea in service to the maintenance of a peaceful world, so much so that Paz, in the multilingual, collaboratively authored Renga (1971), announced he was living in “the century of translation.” Juxtaposing Renga and Kenneth Koch’s collection of hoax translations “Some South American Poets,” the chapter elucidates how these antithetical authorial modes endorse and critique the tenor of cultural diplomacy under the Pax Americana. Through new forms of critical cosmopolitanism, these works alternately memorialize and parody the midcentury groundswell of poetic inter-Americanism that the book recounts.
Unintentional Omissions
Authors: Sher George
Published: October 2017

Early in my teaching career, I made a mistake about when the academic term began and missed the first few days of a semester. Taking my blameworthiness as given, I use this incident to explore the different ways of explaining why agents can be blamed for unintended omissions. In the course of my discussion, I first criticize the tracing and Attributionist approaches, and then present my own positive view: that the reason I was blameworthy is that my omission was caused by a collection of states and traits whose interaction generally gave rise to reasons-responsive behavior. This approach provides a natural explanation of why a merely local incapacity to respond to a given reason does not exculpate while a global incapacity to respond to reasons does. In so doing, it neatly answers a question that is problematic for other forms of compatibilism.
Unconscious Omissions, Reasonable Expectations, and Responsibility
Authors: Smith Angela M.
Published: October 2017

Unconscious omissions involve failures to act that occur without an agent’s awareness. How, then, do we determine when an agent has “committed” an unconscious omission? The puzzle is to give an account of how an unconscious nondoing can nevertheless be genuinely reflective of a person’s agency, given the apparent absence of any conscious mental state linking the person to that nondoing. Patricia Smith has argued that the key to resolving this puzzle lies in the fact that unconscious omissions involve violations of or deviations from reasonable expectations within a context, and that such violations or deviations are, by definition, “doings” on the part of agents (and thus reflective of their agency). The aim of this chapter is to critically evaluate Smith’s “reasonable expectation” account of unconscious omissions, and to defend an alternative account that locates the agency involved in unconscious omissions in exercises of evaluative judgment.
Omissions, Agency, and Control
Authors: Zimmerman Michael J.
Published: October 2017

This chapter focuses on two questions: How is omission related to action? Are our omissions within our control? Section 5.1 examines the question whether the control that we have over our actions and their consequences may be understood partly in terms of subjunctive conditionals. Section 5.2 examines the question whether the control that we have over our omissions and their consequences may be understood in the same way as the control that we have over our actions and their consequences is to be understood. Section 5.3 discusses the moral and legal significance of the conclusions reached in the preceding sections.
Moral Responsibility for Unwitting Omissions
Authors: Nelkin Dana Kay , Rickless Samuel C.
Published: October 2017

Unwitting omissions pose a challenge for theories of moral responsibility. For common-sense morality holds many unwitting omitters morally responsible for their omissions, even though they appear to lack both awareness and control. People who leave dogs in their car on a hot day or forget to pick something up from the store as they promised seem to be blameworthy. If moral responsibility requires awareness of one’s omission and its moral significance, it appears that the protagonists of these cases are not morally responsible. This chapter considers and rejects a number of influential views on this problem, including a view that grounds responsibility for such omissions in previous exercises of conscious agency, and “Attributionist” views that ground responsibility for such omissions in the value judgments or other aspects of the agents’ selves. The chapter proposes a new tracing view that grounds responsibility for unwitting omissions in past opportunities to avoid them.
The Duty Requirement
Authors: Yaffe Gideon
Published: October 2017

It is hornbook law that a defendant’s guilt for a crime can be predicated on an omission to act only if the defendant was under a legal duty to engage in the omitted act. By contrast, guilt can be predicated on an affirmative action where there is no legal duty to omit the act. This chapter offers a rationale for the Duty Requirement by arguing that it shields from liability a set of wrongdoers who are not criminally culpable for their wrongful behavior. To be criminally culpable is for one’s behavior to manifest a disregard for legal reasons to refrain from that behavior. Since there can be a legal reason to refrain from behavior that includes an omission only if there is a legal reason to engage in the omitted act, people are criminally culpable for omissions only if they have legal reasons to engage in the acts they omit.
Systematic Government Access to Private-Sector Data in Brazil
Authors: Magrani Bruno
Published: October 2017

This chapter describes the ways through which the Brazilian government may have access to personal data in possession of private-sector organizations with a specific focus on identifying the possibility of systematic access. There is no comprehensive data protection legislation in Brazil, but specific and sparse statutes regulate governmental access in areas such as telecommunications, wiretapping, financial data, money laundering, and national intelligence. There have been many conflicting decisions in the judiciary about governmental access to personal data, particularly registration data. In order to address this issue, a statute in 2012 expanded the investigative powers of the police and the Public Prosecutor’s Office, granting them access to registration data regardless of a court order. Brazil’s Internet Bill of Rights from 2014 aims to provide further clarity on some unresolved issues at the same time that it creates new ones.
Systematic Government Access to Private-Sector Data in China
Authors: Wang Zhizheng
Published: October 2017

This chapter focuses on China’s systematic government access to private-sector data. In accordance with facilitating Chinese e-government construction, many laws made for the purpose of state security, public security, censorship, and taxation have granted the Chinese government extensive power of access to private-sector data generated in such businesses as information, finance, trade, travel, entertainment, and so on, operated in China. There are no laws or practices related to governmental systematic access currently found in China. However, this kind of systematic data access will certainly find itself anytime in the future enforcement and ensuing legislation once the Chinese government realizes it is necessary with the evolution of e-government strategy.
Protest Dynamics under the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces Transitional Government
Authors: Jumet Kira D.
Published: October 2017

This chapter explains how changes in political opportunity structures following the 2011 revolutionary protests affected subsequent anti-regime mobilization and the dynamics between the military transitional regime and those who contested it. Through an examination of protest cycles in Egypt 2011–2012, the chapter explores how government violence, repression, and concessions affected individuals’ emotions and their decisions to protest or not protest. The chapter demonstrates that changes in political opportunities created during the 18-day uprising altered repertoires of contention and reconfigured the power relationship between the regime and its opponents. The chapter also claims that particular elements of protest dynamics under the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces (SCAF) led to a relatively quick transition to civilian rule.
The Passions, Rationality, and Reason
Authors: Schliesser Eric
Published: October 2017

This chapter describes the main components of Adam Smith’s theory of the passions. It offers a detailed taxonomy of the passions. In particular, the chapter discusses four kinds of passions: the natural passions, the proto-passions, the intellectual sentiments, and the derived passions. The chapter also explains the way in which Smith thinks about rationality and the role of reason as a so-called active principle. The chapter introduces a concept, environmental rationality, to articulate what Smith means by sound judgment in a particular context. Finally, by drawing on Smith’s account of the proto-passions and his treatment of reason as an active principle, the chapter shows it is a mistake to understand Smith as a moral empiricist, as is commonly done.
From Natural Sentiments to General Rules and Moral Sentiments
Authors: Schliesser Eric
Published: October 2017

This chapter is devoted to explaining the moral significance of what Adam Smith calls the “natural sentiments.” The significance of the natural sentiments is illustrated by their role in extended case studies. They help us understand Smith’s criticism of David Hume’s account of the origin and morality of justice. It turns that Smith’s criticism of Hume is Humean in spirit, and solves conceptual problems left by Hume. This chapter also explains the difference between natural sentiments and moral sentiments. Despite the undeniable significance of feelings in his moral theory, Smith should not be considered a moral-sense theorist.
Virtue
Authors: Schliesser Eric
Published: October 2017

This chapter discusses two features of Adam Smith’s account of virtue. First, it argues that there is a significant tension in Smith’s treatment of virtue. Sometimes Smith writes of virtue as something rare and sometimes he writes of it as something that one can expect to encounter reliable in others. Second, it analyzes Smith’s treatment of the model of moral excellence, “the wise and virtuous” person. It argues that the content of this person’s excellence reveals that this is a practiced judge of character entrusted with the wise enforcement of the law. That is to say, the core of Smith’s theory of virtue grounds the political order. However, Smith recognizes many forms of excellence.
Religion
Authors: Schliesser Eric
Published: October 2017

This chapter discusses two important aspects of Adam Smith’s philosophy of religion. First it treats Smith’s analysis of the relationship between morality and theology. Second while treating Smith as a deist, it focuses on Smith’s political views on religion. It argues that Smith (anticipating Kant) wishes to make religion subordinate to morality. In addition, Smith advocates disestablishment of religion. Smith’s political analysis of religion emphasizes that religions can play a positive role in socializing and monitoring the urban poor. In addition, most of his institutional reforms of religion are designed to prevent the destabilization of public life by religious faction and Christian theology.
Comparing International Law Textbooks and Casebooks
Authors: Roberts Anthea
Published: October 2017

International law textbooks, casebooks and manuals are important to study as they help to reveal how international law is understood, found, and interpreted by the current generation of international lawyers in a particular state and how this conventional wisdom is passed on to the next generation. These books play a significant socializing role in shaping international lawyers’ knowledge of which issues are core, which sources are important, which debates are controversial, which norms are settled, and who and what the leading authorities are. This chapter compares the books that are used to teach international law in the five permanent members of the Security Council. Using case studies (e.g., humanitarian intervention and state sovereignty) and visual representations (e.g., citation patterns of case law), this chapter sheds light on how nationalized, denationalized, and westernized the books from these states are in terms of their substance, sources, and approaches.
Patterns of Difference and Dominance
Authors: Roberts Anthea
Published: October 2017

This chapter examines three implications of these patterns of difference and dominance for the wider field of international law. First, although most legal academies and law schools remain relatively nationalized, there are outliers that are significantly more internationalized than their counterparts. Different academies also evidence different strengths and areas that are ripe for future development. Second, the existence of distinct national or regional communities of international lawyers may result in substantial disconnects developing within the field, such as in debates about Crimea and the South China Sea. Third, some of the patterns of dominance that emerge in the academies and textbooks are replicated elsewhere in the field, including privileging sources and actors from Western states in general, and from the United States, the United Kingdom, and France in particular. Choice of language and the emergence of English as the lingua franca play particularly important roles in this privileging process.
Disruptions Leading to a Competitive World Order
Authors: Roberts Anthea
Published: October 2017

This chapter focuses on how existing patterns of difference and dominance are liable to be disrupted by forces such as technological innovation, changes in domestic political preferences, and shifts in geopolitical power. In particular, global power is shifting from unipolarity to greater multipolarity and from a Western-led era to one marked by greater competition, and increased need for cooperation, among and between Western and non-Western states. As a result, Western states are likely to face more checks and balances in advancing their strategic and normative agendas, and various non-Western states will have greater ability to promote their interests, either singly or collectively. International lawyers need to develop an understanding of the international law approaches of a variety of “unlike-minded” states, as power will be disaggregated among a more diverse group of states. This is relevant in various debates, e.g., over humanitarian intervention, cybersecurity and the law of the sea.
Conclusion
Authors: Cynthia Roberts , Armijo Leslie , Katada Saori
Published: October 2017

The chapter analyzes the prospects for continued BRICS collective financial statecraft. Contrary to initial expectations, the BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa) have hung together by identifying common aversions and pursuing common interests within the existing international order. Their future depends not only on their bargaining power, but also on their ability to overcome domestic impediments to the sustainable economic growth that provides the basis for their international positions. To continue successfully with collective financial statecraft, the members must tackle the so-called middle-income trap, as well as their preferences for informal rules originating from their own institutional weaknesses or regime preferences. This study shows that, in the context of a global power shift, the BRICS club has operated to protect the member countries’ respective policy autonomy, while also advancing their joint voice in global governance. Recently, the BRICS have made concrete institutional gains, giving them expanded outside options to achieve specific objectives in global finance.
Oneness
Authors: Ivanhoe Philip J.
Published: October 2017

At the core of this work lie the oneness hypothesis, which is not a single theory but a family of views found in different forms in a wide variety of disciplines, and its implications for theories of virtue and human happiness. The oneness hypothesis concerns the nature of the world, but it entails a view about the nature of the self and its relationship to other people, creatures, and things. Its core assertion is that we are inextricably intertwined with other people, creatures, and things. The connections the oneness hypothesis advocates are specifically those that conduce to the health, benefit, and improvement of both individuals and the larger wholes of which they are parts. The relational view of the self at the heart of the oneness hypothesis offers an alternative to more individualistic accounts. This new view of the self is a more expansive conception of the self, a self that is less self-centered and instead is seen as intimately connected with other people, creatures, and things. A central claim of this work is that a proper understanding of the underlying oneness of the world will lead one to a greater awareness and appreciation of innate inclinations and resources that when fully developed generate a distinctive set of virtues. A life guided by such virtues enables one to locate oneself within grand natural and social orders that facilitate greater spontaneity, security, and metaphysical comfort, resulting in a special, resilient, and enduring form of happiness.
Oneness with the World
Authors: Ivanhoe Philip J.
Published: October 2017

Chapter 1 looks at traditional robust conceptions of oneness that rely on strong metaphysical claims about the basic nature of all things as the basis for extensive concern for other people, creatures, and things. In particular, it focuses on neo-Confucian conceptions of oneness and their corresponding ethical views. The chapter then considers ways we might separate the plausible moral and prudential implications of such views from their less plausible metaphysical foundations by exploring the general category of expressive oneness and developing Freud’s distinction between illusion and delusion. Roughly, such views all recognize that conceptions of oneness always include an aspirational dimension: an expression of how we choose to see and be in the world. Nevertheless, modern versions of oneness remain consistent with the best science of the day, and some appeal to such in advancing their conceptions of how we are connected to the world.
Oneness and Happiness
Authors: Ivanhoe Philip J.
Published: October 2017

This chapter describes in detail the different yet related conceptions of eudaimonia (flourishing, happiness) found in the writings of Kongzi (Confucius), Zhuangzi (a leading Daoist), and the neo-Confucians, all of which, to varying extents and in different ways, embrace the oneness hypothesis and its characteristic moral imperative to care more extensively and fully for the world. It sketches the form of a modern version of the neo-Confucian account of oneness and explores the implications of such a view for contemporary attempts to describe the sources of human happiness. It makes the case for reading all of the Chinese philosophical conceptions of joy it engages as objective claims in the sense that they are not reducible solely to subjective psychological states and shows, through close and careful readings of the texts, that part of the joy they esteem and promote consists in giving oneself over to some larger project or whole.