bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Impacts of Criminal History Enhancements on Prison Bed Needs and Costs
Authors: Frase Richard S. , Roberts Julian V. , Hester Rhys
Published: August 2019

This chapter shows how sentencing data can be used to quantify the substantial fiscal impacts of high-magnitude criminal history enhancements, overall and with respect to the problematic aspects of those enhancements identified and discussed in previous chapters. It uses data from Minnesota and several other states as examples because of the excellent sentencing data available for those states. The chapter first examines the total fiscal impact (added bed needs and costs) that results from the sentence-enhancing effects of criminal history on prison commitment and prison duration decisions. It then quantifies the fiscal impacts of the identified problematic aspects of prior record enhancements: disproportionately severe prison durations imposed on high history offenders, imprisonment of nonviolent offenders recommended for prison solely because of their elevated criminal history scores, imprisonment of aging offenders who are recommended for prison due to their high history scores, and racially disparate sentences that result from criminal history enhancements.
The Not-So-New Southern Racism
Authors: Maxwell Angie , Shields Todd
Published: August 2019

During and after the Civil Rights Movement, GOP leaders capitalized on white racial angst to attract southern white voters. However, in order to do so without alienating Republicans nationwide, the GOP utilized coded language as an end-around of public displays of prejudice and championed an “us vs. them” cosmology. The decline of overt, Old-Fashioned Racism seemed positive, but the decline masked the persistence of white supremacist attitudes so dominant in the South. Since whiteness functions as a vantage point, supremacy can be maintained as long as the gap between whites and an “other” is also maintained. When denigrating minorities publicly was no longer socially acceptable, the GOP manufactured a host of increasingly threatening “others.” These common enemies catalyzed both an elevation of and a clinging to whiteness, which, in turn, preserved the “not-so-new” racial hierarchy key to southern white voters that only relative measures of racial animus can expose.
The Myth of the Gender Gap
Authors: Maxwell Angie , Shields Todd
Published: August 2019

Taking their cue from anti-feminist leader Phyllis Schlafly, the GOP celebrated traditional gender roles and demonized feminism as part of a Long Southern Strategy. The Republican Party dropped the Equal Rights Amendment from its platform in 1980, which many feminists believed would cost the party women voters. When the gender gap emerged during the next election cycle with more women than men voting for Democrats, a myth took hold. However, the gender gap is not universal because anti-feminism and Modern Sexism remain deeply burrowed into southern white identity where they have been reinforced religiously and politicized continually by the GOP. When geography and identity are brought to bear on the myth of the gender gap, it looks remarkably different. Where it does not disappear completely, it is reversed, with southern white women proving more conservative than southern white men and dramatically more so than white American women as a whole.
The Not-So-New Southern Religion
Authors: Maxwell Angie , Shields Todd
Published: August 2019

In an effort to win southern white voters, the GOP embraced the old southern religion turning the church faithful into the party loyal. They did so because in many parts of the South, the church remains the central institution defining, organizing, and politicizing its surrounding community. A “sacred canopy” drapes over the region, where there is a common cosmology that is intractable from southern white identity, including its reverence for white supremacy and patriarchy. In general, as a block, white southerners were more evangelical, Protestant, fundamentalist, and moralist than the rest of the country. The not-so-new southern religiosity satisfies an appetite for certainty, conformity, and even social status. As a means to solidify southern white support, the Long Southern Strategy framed southern white Christianity as under attack and cast the GOP as its protector, the price of which is increased cultural defensiveness, anxiety, fear, and distrust.
Lives on the Line
Authors: Sallaz Jeffrey  J.
Published: August 2019

The call center industry is booming in the Philippines. Around the year 2005, the country overtook India as the world’s “voice capital,” while industry revenues are now the second largest contributor to national GDP. This ethnographic study traces the assemblage of a global market for voice over the past two decades. New information technologies developed during the 1990s and 2000s fed Western firms’ appetite for cheap, English-speaking workers in offshore locales. An initial attempt to build a stable labor market for voice in India failed, owing in large part to gendered norms regarding work and mobility. In the Philippines, in contrast, there is a remarkable affinity between workers and firms. Decades of failed development policies have produced for educated Filipinos a dismaying choice: migrate abroad in search of prosperity or stay at home as an impoverished professional. Offshored call centers, in this context, represent a middle path. Drawing upon case studies of sixty Filipino call center workers and two years of fieldwork in Manila, this book shows how call center jobs allow Filipinos to earn a decent living and stay at home. Filipina women and transgender Filipinos in particular use their voices as strategic resources. Call centers are for them lifelines and lifestyles. Taken as a whole, this study advances debates concerning global capitalism, the future of work, and the lives of those who labor in offshored jobs.
Labor
Authors: Sallaz Jeffrey J.
Published: August 2019

For a new generation of young and educated Filipinos, call center work represents a means to fulfill the Philippine dream. In the megacity of Manila, thousands graduate each year from colleges with degrees in vocational fields such as nursing, accounting, and education. It has long been expected that these graduates would go abroad to work and support their families back home. Those who stayed at home could expect to be impoverished professionals. Call center jobs now allow them to remain in their country yet still achieve the Philippine dream. Correspondence analysis of a sample of sixty Filipino call agents reveals patterned variation in terms of their gender identities, resources, obligations, and aspirations.
The Relativity of Work
Authors: Sallaz Jeffrey J.
Published: August 2019

The case of the call center industry in the Philippines illustrates the relativity of work. Jobs, the author argue, should be evaluated not in relation to some universal standard, but in relation the larger horizon of options and possibilities available to workers. According to this relativistic approach, call center jobs in the Philippines are less digital assembly lines than veritable lifelines. To project the future of these jobs is a difficult task. Automation could render them obsolete. Workers could turn their literal voices into political voice via unionization. This concluding chapter emphasizes how tenuous are the bonds connecting firms and workers, given the fluid nature of contemporary capitalism.
Persons in Islamicate Philosophy from Ibn Sīnā to Sabzavārī
Authors: Shaker Anthony F.
Published: August 2019

The medieval learning tradition brought personhood firmly within the purview of philosophy. As commonplace as the empirical and mathematical sciences were throughout the Islamicate period, however, philosophy did not require the same explanatory intent expected of the positive investigation into phenomena. Person was not the object of experience that personality, individuality, and ego are for modern psychology. Nor was shakhṣ (person, particular) conflated with fard (distinct individual, odd number) or nafs (self, soul), each of which functioned differently in the discourse. This chapter focuses on personhood as part of the inquiry into the question of being, central to which is the archetypal essence—as opposed to biological and other contingent features—of the speaking, thinking, collaborating animal called human. Here, the interlacing of man’s oneness and manifoldness originates in the divine unfolding of knowing and being.
Persons and Moral Status
Authors: Jaworska Agnieszka , Tannenbaum Julie
Published: August 2019

This chapter focuses on moral personhood understood in terms of the notion of moral status. An entity is said to have moral status only if it or its interest matters morally for its own sake. Nonutilitarians tend to think of moral status in terms of entitlements and protections that can conflict with, and sometimes override, doing what would maximize the good and minimize the bad. If moral status comes in degrees, and if there is a status of the highest degree (i.e., full moral status), then moral persons are those with full moral status. After giving a more precise account of it, we assess different views of what it takes to qualify for full moral status (some of which appeal to metaphysical notions of person). We also briefly discuss how metaphysical notions of personhood are put to moral use in utilitarian moral theorizing that eschews the notion of moral personhood.
Secular Humility
Authors: Wielenberg Erik J.
Published: August 2019

If there is no God, should we be humble? If so, what form should our humility take? Here I describe a character trait that (a) merits the title secular humility, (b) is a virtue, (c) has some important similarities with humility as understood in the Christian tradition, and (d) requires neither belief in anything like the God of Judaism, Christianity, or Islam nor the existence of such a deity. After describing secular humility and making the case that it is a virtue, I explain how a person can possess secular humility while at the same time possessing a high degree of self-confidence and achievement. I then address two worries about secular humility: first, a Nietzsche-inspired worry that secular humility is in tension with creativity, and second, the worry that secular humility is an obstacle to overcoming oppression and exploitation.
Political Culture and Values
Authors: Dalton Russell J.
Published: August 2019

A long intellectual tradition links the different historical experiences in Canada and the United States (U.S.) to continuing contrasts in their political cultures. New evidence from contemporary public opinion polls highlights more cultural similarities between nations than differences. In broad value priorities, Canadians and Americans are more similar to each other than to the citizens in most other advanced industrial democracies. Feelings of national identity and trust in government are also strikingly similar across these two nations. The norms of good citizenship are very comparable. And perhaps most surprising of all, images of the appropriate role of government overlap substantially. In short, the rhetoric of cultural differences is less apparent in the reality of public opinion surveys.
Electoral and Party Systems
Authors: Blais André , Bowler Shaun , Grofman Bernard
Published: August 2019

Electoral laws are often regarded as the key factors structuring party competition. Yet, despite having very similar electoral systems, reflecting a shared colonial legacy, the United States (U.S.) and Canada have had very different party systems. For the past 100 years, the U.S. is perhaps the most consistently two-party system among the world’s major democracies, but during this same period Canada has experienced considerable variation in the number of parties represented in Parliament at the national level. This chapter addresses both the causes and consequences of this puzzling divergence in party systems in the two countries. We also compare a number of other features of the two nation’s electoral institutions, including campaign finance rules, rules for constituency boundary drawing, bicameralism, and the mechanism for the selection of the executive, with particular attention to the U.S. Electoral College and its alleged link with two-partyism. We also examine the policy consequences of the divergence in party systems and look at the way in which party competition in the two countries may affect voter turnout.
From Principle to Project
Authors: Millgram Elijah
Published: August 2019

John Stuart Mill’s life project is described, and it is argued that his is a best-case project life. The early 19th-century Utilitarian political platform is surveyed, and the problems that would drive its later evolution are identified.
How to Write a Letter of Recommendation
Authors: Millgram Elijah
Published: August 2019

J. S. Mill’s Mental Crisis has been explained by his instrumentalist view of practical rationality, and by his associationist psychology. While the argument is present in his Autobiography, the diagnosis cannot be squared with the three accounts of his recovery that he also gives. What the instrumentalism does explain is Mill’s lifelong need for authority figures.
Logic and the Problem of Necessity
Authors: Millgram Elijah
Published: August 2019

Auguste Comte was an early influence on John Stuart Mill, and Comte’s doctrine of the three phases through which sciences pass (the theological, the metaphysical, and the positive) explain what Mill was attempting to accomplish in his magnum opus, the System of Logic: namely, to move the science of logic to its terminal and ‘positive’ stage. Both Mill’s startling account of deduction and his unremarked solution to the Humean problem of induction were intended to eliminate the notions of necessity or force—in this case, the ‘logical must’—characteristic of a science’s metaphysical stage. Mill’s treatment had a further surprising payoff: his solution to the Problem of Necessity (what today we call the problem of determinism and freedom of the will).
Mill’s Incubus
Authors: Millgram Elijah
Published: August 2019

John Stuart Mill’s solution to the problem of freedom of the will distinguishes determinism from “moral unfreedom”. His psychology predicts that moral unfreedom will be a side-effect of a life built around a single lexical priority. It also predicts that as a morally unfree agent’s likes, dislikes and concerns evolve, his activities will cease to be enjoyable or to matter to him. These predictions jointly underwrite Mill’s understanding of his own "Mental Crisis".
Mill’s Aftermath
Authors: Millgram Elijah
Published: August 2019

Mill’s resolution of his Mental Crisis was to reconceive his Utilitarian life project more flexibly; thus it could accommodate intellectual and emotional change. The resolution was however misconceived, since Mill’s first Mental Crisis was his last: there turned out to be no further dramatic intellectual and emotional changes to accommodate.
The Wrong of Rudeness
Authors: Olberding Amy
Published: August 2019

Being rude is often more gratifying and enjoyable than being polite. Likewise, rudeness can be a more accurate and powerful reflection of how I feel and think. This is especially true in a political environment that can make being polite seem foolish or naive. Civility and ordinary politeness are linked both to big values, such as respect and consideration, and to the fundamentally social nature of human beings. This book explores the powerful temptations to incivility and rudeness, but argues that they should generally be resisted. Drawing on early Chinese philosophers who lived during great political turmoil but nonetheless sought to “mind their manners,” it articulates a way of thinking about politeness that is distinctively social. It takes as a given that we can feel profoundly alienated from others, and that other people can sometimes be truly terrible. Yet because we are social neglecting the social and political courtesies comes at great cost. The book considers not simply why civility and politeness are important, but how. It addresses how small insults can damage social relations, how separation of people into tribes undermines our better interests, and explores how bodily and facial expressions can influence how life with other people goes. It is especially geared toward anyone who feels the temptation of being rude and wishes it were easier to feel otherwise. It seeks to answer a question of great contemporary urgency: When so much of public and social life with others is painful and fractious, why should I be polite?
Introduction
Authors: Riess Jana
Published: August 2019

This introductory chapter provides an overview of the millennial generation of Latter-day Saints in America. There's abundant evidence that young Mormons are often profoundly religious, and that many make great sacrifices to practice their faith, often contributing up to two years of unpaid labor as volunteer missionaries and paying ten percent of their income as tithing. There's another side to this, though, which is that the number of young adults who are leaving Mormonism appears to be rising sharply. Some minority groups such as singles and LGBT members appear to be more vulnerable to leaving Mormonism than those who are married and straight. It is not that these young adults have abandoned belief in God, but that the Church's conservatism on social issues has become an obstacle to their continued participation. This book aims to provide an understanding of who Mormons are, what they believe, and what generational differences may pertain among them.
Social and Political Views among Current and Former Mormons
Authors: Riess Jana
Published: August 2019

This chapter discusses the social and political views among current and former Mormons. Since World War II, Mormons have been recognized for their conservative moral values, staunch patriotism, and commitment to the nuclear family. Those core values are still very much present with older generations of Latter-day Saints, though one sees political dilution among millennials who remain active in the Church; the Next Mormons Survey (NMS) finds that millennial Mormons are more conservative than their non-Mormon millennial peers but more progressive than their Mormon elders. Whether Mormon millennials will veer to the right as they age is unclear; there may be an age effect associated with political views, since conventional wisdom dictates that people tend to become at least slightly more conservative as they grow older. Meanwhile, in the former Mormon population, rather than a dilution of the conservative political agenda, one sees an outright rejection of many parts of it.
Ecosystem Approach
Authors: Mitchell Bruce
Published: August 2019

An ecosystem approach ideally focuses on determining vision, goals, and objectives in order to guide management of the interrelationships between and among relevant biophysical and socioeconomic variables for a specified ecosystem of interest. A distinction between ends and means is important, as too often in resource and environmental management the ecosystem approach is treated as an end in itself, rather than as a means to an end. Various views regarding the ecosystem approach are considered, followed by an examination of comprehensive and integrated interpretations of the ecosystem approach, and applications of the concept with reference to river basin management in Ontario, Canada, coastal management in Trinidad and Tobago, and the water–energy–food nexus. Jeff Lewis’s guest statement examines the experience in applying the ecosystem approach regarding water quality and flood damage reduction by the Red River Basin Commission in Minnesota, North Dakota, and Manitoba.
Social Learning, Learning Organizations, and Adaptive Environmental Management
Authors: Mitchell Bruce
Published: August 2019

As outlined in chapter 1, complexity, uncertainty, and ambiguity present challenges for resource and environmental management. In this chapter, three interrelated responses to deal with surprise, change, and wicked problems are examined: social learning, learning organizations, and adaptive environmental management. The characteristics of social learning and learning organizations are identified and reviewed. Then, basic ideas associated with adaptive environmental management are considered. Experience with applying adaptive environmental management is analyzed with regard to managing fish and wildlife, hydro-electricity production, and flood damage reduction in the Columbia River Basin in the United States. In her guest statement, Beate Ratter analyzes the collaborative approach to protecting the coastline of the EuropeanWalden Sea, shared by the Netherlands, Germany and Denmark.
Implementation
Authors: Mitchell Bruce
Published: August 2019

Policies and plans for resource and environmental management are needed, but if not implemented, or implemented poorly, their value is reduced. Experience suggests that we often struggle to achieve effective implementation. In this chapter, the implementation gap is examined, with the aim being to identify what are known expectations for successful implementation of policies and plans, which obstacles frequently hinder implementation, and what capacity is required for effective implementation. Subsequently, the difference between programmed and adaptive implementation is examined, followed by discussion of the role of different partnership and stakeholder arrangements to facilitate implementation. Detailed case studies of coastal management in Japan and of water policy implementation in the São Paulo state in Brazil provide further insights. Bakti Setiawan and Dwita Rahmi, in their guest statement, review the role of bureaucracy, politics, and leadership in establishing a protected agricultural area in Yogyakarta, Indonesia.
Spotlight
Authors: Swartz David L.
Published: August 2019

This “spotlight” mini-chapter explicates how Pierre Bourdieu conceived of journalism as a struggle for symbolic power. Power is a central organizing feature of journalism and should be analyzed as a field of struggle for truth, or more precisely, for the legitimate right to impose particular viewpoints as newsworthy. The journalistic “field” also competes against other fields, particularly the economic and political fields, for the power to define what is legitimate knowledge for the society as a whole. Within its own field, journalism is bifurcated between two opposing poles: an economic pole (circulation and advertising revenues and audience ratings) and a cultural pole (reasoned commentary, in-depth reporting, the kind of journalism rewarded by the US Pulitzer Prizes); and, according to Bourdieu, it is increasingly dominated by its economic side.
Without the Loving Strains of Commitment
Authors: Lebron Christopher J.
Published: August 2019

What will ensure that persons abide by the moral demands imposed on them by a normative theory of justice? Rawls believed that these demands, which he called “strains of commitment,” will not be betrayed when undertaken by rational agents under reasonable conditions. Christopher Lebron argues that we are not so dependable; facts such as regret, bias, and poor critical judgment are central to the human condition and threaten to undermine the fulfillment of justice. Given the complexity of our moral lives, Lebron argues that love can play an important ethical role in upholding justice. Focusing specifically on racial justice, he brings James Baldwin’s notion of philia into the conversation about strains of commitment and argues that it is a potent resource for achieving stability and a lasting justice. He concludes by discussing the role love can play in bending the arc of the moral universe increasingly toward justice.
Sovereignty and Complex Interdependence
Authors: Sabel Charles
Published: August 2019

Even as democratic sovereignty and globalization are increasingly seen as incompatible in theory, this chapter argues that, in some important realms, they are proving compatible in practice. As tariffs have fallen to negligible levels, trade agreements among rich countries have come to focus on reconciling regulatory differences. In many sectors, novel forms of cooperation have emerged that allow trade partners deliberately to investigate and learn from one another’s practices, eventually recognizing the equivalence of regimes that are not strictly identical—and in the process extending domestic political oversight to relations among states while often heightening domestic accountability. The emergent institutions of regulatory equivalence suggest a practical, if partial, possibility for realizing Kant’s “negative surrogate” or federation of democratic republics, growing incrementally through voluntary association, as a substitute for a global state.
Hardening, 1820–1834
Authors: Balcerski Thomas J.
Published: August 2019

Chapter 2 turns to how Buchanan and King established themselves within the Democratic Party of Andrew Jackson. In both cases, the chapter stresses the roles of intimate male friendships and the Washington boardinghouse, or mess, in developing a cross-sectional, though partisan, approach to their politics. Equally, it looks at important moments of conflict in each man’s life: King’s factional fighting with Democrats in his adopted state of Alabama, where he established a plantation called Chestnut Hill near Selma, and Buchanan’s struggles against the various elements of the Democratic Party of Pennsylvania. It also recounts Buchanan’s experience as the American minister to Russia, highlighting the ways in which his foreign exile connected him to King and prepared him for his future role as senator and secretary of state. These formative experiences served to harden their future political convictions and bespoke the continued need for intimate male friendships in their future endeavors.
The Identity Trap
Authors: Ahuja Amit
Published: August 2019

Ethnic identity, scholars remind us, is only one among the wide repertoire of identities to which an individual has access. Still, the marginalized struggle to break free of a single stigmatized identity. This chapter returns to Dalits’ choice of social identities. It argues Dalits’ ability to adopt new social identities is highly constrained because their social exclusion and material deprivation are self-reinforcing. When Dalits are able to choose alternate social identities, other groups do not recognize these identities. Dalits’ experience with stigma illustrates that it is difficult for a marginalized ethnic group to leverage political equality to remedy social inequality because the social stigma associated with a marginalized ethnic identity changes slowly.
Conclusion: Whither Dalit Politics?
Authors: Ahuja Amit
Published: August 2019

This chapter summarizes the key arguments related to the mobilization of the marginalized. It considers how the experience of Dalit mobilization informs a larger research agenda on democratic mobilization of marginalized groups, ethnic politics, social movements, and political parties. Dalit parties, the chapter reiterates, represent the voice of the marginalized; however, the voice comes at a price: electoral choice. The chapter goes on to argue that the presence or absence of Dalit parties in legislatures is increasingly an incomplete indicator of the vibrancy of Dalit politics, because Dalit politics is taking root in new dimensions of the public sphere: organizations in new sectors, an online Dalit public sphere, and a Dalit diaspora.
West Africa
Authors: Fox Eleanor M. , Bakhoum Mor
Published: August 2019

This chapter details how eight nations of Western Africa—Senegal, Mali, the Ivory Coast, Benin, Togo, Niger, Burkina Faso, and Guinea Bissau—transformed from government-controlled economies to market economies. The French West African states have adopted laws to open markets and protect competition, often at the behest of the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF). However, the project has been set back by political and economic instability, the lack of human and financial capital, and regional preemption of domestic competition law. It is a striking fact that there is virtually no competition law enforcement in French West Africa and no merger control law. The obstacles may ultimately be overcome with focus, leadership, will, and a reset of the institutional environment to allow national law to work hand in hand with regional law.
Eastern and Southern Africa
Authors: Fox Eleanor M. , Bakhoum Mor
Published: August 2019

This chapter focuses on the competition policies of selected countries in Eastern and Southern Africa, specifically Kenya, Namibia, Botswana, Tanzania, Zambia, Zimbabwe, Malawi, and the island of Mauritius. The eastern and southern countries’ competition authorities span a range of functionality, from very high to almost inert. Even the highest functioning competition authorities face severe challenges in terms of financial and human capital, corruption, political pressure to favor government cronies and vested interests, and sometimes war and bankruptcy. Other challenges that competition authorities face concern the privileges of state-owned enterprises (SOEs), corruption through government procurement, and a plethora of not always transparent cross-border restraints. Even though their agendas are crowded by mandatory duties of vetting mergers and authorizing agreements, the best of agencies carve out precious time to identify the most harmful market obstructions and develop strategies to solve them.
The Biology of Experience
Authors: Eisler Riane
Published: August 2019

Biology and experience are not generally seen as connected, yet experience is integral to gene expression, both individually and collectively. Dramatically illustrating how experience can influence whether genetic capacities are expressed or inhibited in humans and other species, this chapter looks at studies showing that our brain circuits, and therefore our abilities and behavior, are strongly shaped by the environment, which for humans is primarily our surrounding culture as mediated by families, education, religion, politics, and economics. Our large-brained species is flexible: we are equipped for destructiveness and creativity, rote conformity and independence, and cruelty and caring. There are many examples of how cultural environments affect the expression of genetic potentials, including fascinating findings from the emerging field of epigenetics showing that these effects can be transmitted from generation to generation; research showing that the brains of people with a background of abuse and violence tend to have lower levels of serotonin, a calming neurotransmitter, and higher levels of cortisol, the major stress hormone; and studies on how chronic or intense stress brings into play hormones such as cortisol, norepinephrine, and epinephrine associated with fight-or-flight responses, including aggressive and other negative behaviors. While highly stressful traditions of domination and violence are still deeply entrenched in many cultures worldwide, there are interventions that can help us build a more secure, just, sustainable, and peaceful world for individuals, families, and communities.
The Original Partnership Societies
Authors: Eisler Riane
Published: August 2019

Mobile foragers—also called nomadic hunter-gatherers—constitute the oldest form of human social organization, predating by far the agricultural revolution of about 10,000 years ago as well as the rise of pastoralists, tribal horticulturalists, chiefdoms, kingdoms, and ancient states. In the debates about the nature of human nature—whether we are more inclined toward war or peace, selfishness or altruism—nomadic forager societies are regularly evoked to draw inferences about human existence “in a state of nature” before the development of civilization. Studies of nomadic forager band societies suggest that humanity’s ancient orientation actually was toward partnership and peace rather than domination and war over the many millennia of human evolution. The main take-home lesson from a careful study of nomadic forager partnership societies—re-enforced by archeological studies, the recent Nordic experience, and other evidence—is that humans are capable of living in egalitarian social systems where neither sex dominates the other, where violence is minimized, and where prosocial cooperation and caring typify social life. This image is not a utopian fantasy but rather a set of potentials, if not inclinations, stemming from our evolutionary heritage. Since partnership behaviors have been essential to survival for the millions of years that humans and their ancestors foraged for a living, the study of archaeology and nomadic forager societies raises an intriguing possibility. Given the long-standing evolutionary legacy of partnership, human minds and dispositions may be especially inclined toward the empathic, caring, egalitarian, prosocial, cooperative behaviors.
Love, Violence, and Socialization in Partnership and Domination Environments
Authors: Eisler Riane
Published: August 2019

We received neurochemical rewards of pleasure when we give or receive empathic love, and seem to have a predisposition against violence. This chapter explores the crucial question of what conditions support rather than inhibit the actualization of these human predispositions. It examines experimental evidence showing that, given a choice, people tend to choose mutual benefit over winning; looks at how socialization for traditional “hypermasculinity” promotes male aggression and the suppression of loving “soft” or “feminine” feelings; and gives examples of cultures with different socialization styles, and hence far less stress and violence. It shows how the socialization of men to equate “real masculinity” with domination and violence deprives both men and women of healthy loving relations based on mutuality and the sharing of pleasure, and is key to imposing and maintaining domination systems, with their chronic fear and violence. It looks at the modern movement away from traditions of domination and its liberating effects, for example, legislation pioneered in Nordic nations that prohibits physical discipline against children in families.
A New Beginning
Authors: Eisler Riane
Published: August 2019

This closing chapter opens with a brief summary of what came before. Across cultures and times, partnership systems and domination systems have affected our brains, actions, relationships, values, customs, and institutions. Over the last centuries, progressive social movements focused on dismantling economic and political domination, but gave scant attention to traditions of domination and violence in parent-child and gender relations, so domination systems keep rebuilding themselves. The rest of the chapter is a call to action. It details how to construct the missing four cornerstones required to support a more equitable, caring, and sustainable partnership future. The first cornerstone is childhood; concrete steps to reduce the staggering rates of abuse and violence against children worldwide are proposed. The second cornerstone is gender; as prerequisites for a better future, actions to change the devaluation of women and the “feminine” are described. The third cornerstone is economics, going beyond capitalism and socialism to meet our environmental, technological, and social challenges by recognizing the enormous value of the essential work of caring for people, starting in early childhood, and caring for nature. The fourth cornerstone consists of narratives and language; here, the Biocultural Partnership-Domination Lens is an essential tool in all areas of life, from education to guiding biotechnology and artificial intelligence in ways that support the expression of our evolutionary predispositions for caring, consciousness, and creativity.
Introduction to Human Flourishing in an Age of Gene Editing
Authors: Parens Erik , Johnston Josephine
Published: August 2019

In 2015, in the journal Science, a highly regarded group of scientists, science policy experts, and ethicists called for a public conversation about the ethical questions raised by a new technology that could be used to alter the genomes of human beings.1 Among these ethical questions were ones regarding safety. Most simply, could the new technology be deployed without posing an unreasonable risk of causing physical harms? The authors of the commentary in ...
The Dismal Fate of Flourishing in Public Policy Bioethics
Authors: Evans John H.
Published: August 2019

The re-emerging debate about human gene editing appears to be limited to whether gene editing will effectively advance the ends, goals, or values of autonomy, beneficence, nonmaleficence, and justice. As is the case for most of contemporary bioethics, what is not being considered is a substantive debate about what our goals should be in gene editing—that is, the debate is not trying to establish an account of human flourishing. The chapter posits that the public would include many other goals in their moral calculus and discusses why it is important to have this broader discussion. Finally, the chapter turns to a sociological explanation for why this debate is “thin” and not “thick,” why it only asks about whether the means of human gene editing maximize certain fixed ends instead of what our ends—our flourishing—should be.
Daoism, Flourishing, and Gene Editing
Authors: Kim Richard
Published: August 2019

Given the potentially powerful effects of gene editing for human lives, it seems reasonable to reflect on the issue from a variety of scientific, moral, cultural, and religious perspectives to help us deploy this technology with a clear eye to all its possible implications. Given the global impact genetic modification will likely have, an inquiry seriously engaging with the values and ideals of non-Western cultures and societies will be helpful to achieve the sort of balanced understanding that will enable a proper evaluation. This chapter examines the account of well-being found in the Daoist classic, the Zhuangzi, and highlights some insights that can be fruitfully explored in the context of the ethics of gene editing. The thesis is that, from the perspective of Zhuangzi’s conception of human flourishing, there are reasons for rejecting the use of genetic modification technology.
Can We Care about Nature?
Authors: Kaebnick Gregory E.
Published: August 2019

The debate about human enhancement turns partly on the view we take about the ideal human relationship to nature, but those views are hard to articulate and are frequently misunderstood. Often, those who raise concerns about human enhancement on grounds of beliefs about the human relationship to nature are seen as holding that human enhancement is simply “against nature” and therefore flatly wrong. But there are alternative ways of describing the ideal human relationship to nature. The belief that enhancement is against nature requires understanding moral values, nature, and the human relationship to nature in rather rigid ways. Alternative ways of understanding those things can lead to a significantly more moderate view—that the concern about nature is not about violating nature but simply about striking a balance between remaking nature or preserving it.
Do More Choices Lead to More Flourishing?
Authors: Iyengar Sheena , Kuman Tucker
Published: August 2019

Innovations in gene editing technology promise to increase the number of choices involved in the creation of future persons. The provision of more choices is commonly perceived as a boon to the individual chooser’s agency and ultimate satisfaction, but decades of work by social psychologists have lent more complexity to this picture, illustrating the ways in which the quality of our decision-making is susceptible to numerous forms of biases, errors, and complications that arise when our choice set is framed in a particular way or significantly expanded. A consideration of these potential consequences can help us better appreciate the stakes of gaining more choices in this highly unique context, suggesting that under certain circumstances more is sometimes less.
“Good Parents” Can Promote Their Own and Their Children’s Flourishing
Authors: Johnston Josephine
Published: August 2019

Advances in genetic technology, including new methods for gene editing, promise to provide parents and prospective parents with more information about and more control over the genetic make-up of their children. Information and control are both highly prized in our culture, and both could offer substantial benefits to parents and children. Yet offers of information and control that promise to benefit children can quickly generate new parental responsibilities, morphing from opportunities to obligations and raising the question whether refusing to use the technologies might one day be considered inconsistent with being a “good parent.” This chapter explores the idea of the good parent and argues that understandings of the good parent must evolve to take parents’ own flourishing into account. Only with this richer understanding of the nature and responsibilities of parenting can we adopt technologies such as gene editing in ways that benefit both parents and children.
Reprogenetic Technologies Between Private Choice and Public Good
Authors: Schermer Maartje
Published: August 2019

Much of the bioethical debate on reproductive and genetic technologies has focused on the potential risks and benefits for individuals. This chapter shifts the focus from the individualistic level towards a societal perspective. It explores how emerging reprogenetic technologies can both thwart and promote the flourishing of communities, and argues that these technologies can contribute to the public good only when certain social conditions and side-constraints are in place—which can sometimes entail influencing or even limiting individual choice. The chapter gives an account of how we should understand ‘the public good’ in this context, including values such as tolerance, inclusion, and solidarity. It explores how reprogenetic technologies can affect the public good, for better or worse. Finally it addresses the forms of governance—regulations, institutional checks and balances—we might deploy with regard to these technologies to ensure they contribute to both individual and collective flourishing.
Women’s Rights as Human Rights
Authors: McLaren Margaret A.
Published: August 2019

This chapter assesses the human rights framework as a paradigm for global gender justice. First, it examines the gains made by the “women’s rights as human rights” movement; this movement brought issues of sexual and gender violence under the purview of human rights. Next, the chapter argues for the importance of economic and social rights, and supports the indivisibility of legal, political, social, and economic rights. However, some postcolonial feminists challenge the rights framework’s claim to universality, and care ethicists criticize its strong individualism. The chapter proposes that a feminist social justice approach provides a more comprehensive framework for negotiating the complex relationships among gender, class, religious, and racial and ethnic identities and oppression than a human rights framework.
Lex Ferenda: Direct Extraterritoriality
Authors: Blattner Charlotte E.
Published: August 2019

This chapter takes a critical positivist approach to exploring lex ferenda options to protect animals abroad, uncovering new applications of the passive personality principle, the universality principle, and the effects principle. Because the law of jurisdiction developed over centuries without considering animals, it does not meet the specific demands of animal law, conceptually and morally. The author offers a new application of the passive personality principle, arguing that animals should have functional nationality, like ships and corporations, that establishes a jurisdictional link to their home state. On this basis, a state can broadly and unequivocally protect its national animals abroad. The chapter next shows how the universality principle can, in the future, prohibit the most egregious crimes against animals that now escape every state’s jurisdiction (like illegal wildlife trafficking). Finally, arguments for a noneconomic version of the effects principle in animal law are explored.
The Banya . . . Is It Still Necessary?
Authors: Pollock Ethan
Published: August 2019

By the late 1960s, the growth of apartments with indoor plumbing and bathing facilities took the pressure off the state to build banyas. Yet that growth was not universal enough to alleviate the need for banyas altogether. As the utilitarian need for banyas ebbed, the sense of the banya as a crucial meeting place only grew. Stories, films, and memoirs pointed to the banya as a place to escape from the pressures of public life and to reconnect with spiritual and communal identities. By the time the USSR collapsed, the banya was clearly more than just a institution of Soviet hygiene; it was also a symbol of Russian resiliency.
Renormalization Group: From a general concept to numbers
Authors: Zinn-Justin Jean
Published: August 2019

Chapter 5 first recalls the importance of the concept of scale decoupling in physics. It then emphasizes that quantum field theory and the theory of critical phenomena have provided two examples where this concepts fails. To deal with such a situation, a new tool has been invented: the renormalization group. In the framework of effective quantum field theory, a perturbative renormalization group has been formulated. Its implementation has led to the discovery of fixed points as zeros of beta functions, and calculations of critical exponents of a class of macroscopic phase transitions in the form of Wilson–Fisher epsilon or fixed dimension expansions. These expansions being divergent, they could summed by methods based on the Borel transformation and the determination of the large order behaviour of perturbation theory.
Stability of renormalization group fixed points and decay of correlations
Authors: Zinn-Justin Jean
Published: August 2019

Chapter 7 is devoted to a discussion of the renormalization group (RG) flow when the effective field theory that describes universal properties of critical phenomena depends on several coupling constants. The universal properties of a large class of macroscopic phase transitions with short range interactions can be described by statistical field theories involving scalar fields with quartic interactions. The simplest critical systems have an O(N) orthogonal symmetry and, therefore, the corresponding field theory has only one quartic interaction. However, in more general physical systems, the flow of quartic interactions is more complicated. This chapter examines these systems from the RG viewpoint. RG beta functions are shown to generate a gradient flow. Some examples illustrate the notion of emergent symmetry. The local stability of fixed points is related to the value of the scaling field dimension.
O(N) vector model in the ordered phase: Goldstone modes
Authors: Zinn-Justin Jean
Published: August 2019

Chapter 10 examines the case of the spontaneous breaking of a continuous symmetry. When there is spontaneous symmetry breaking, the correlation length diverges at all temperatures in the ordered phase. Physical systems then display universal properties for all temperatures below Tc. This phenomenon is a consequence of the existence of Goldstone modes (massless bosons, in the quantum field theory terminology). Chapter 10 considers a lattice model with O(N) symmetry. In the continuum limit, it leads to the non–linear sigma model. A renormalization group can then be constructed and universal properties can be derived at and near dimension 2 in the framework of dimensional continuation and a d − 2 expansion. In dimension 2, the O(N) symmetric model illustrates asymptotic freedom with symmetry restoration and the Mermin–Wagner–Coleman theorem. In d > 2, a crossover scale appears, between infrared behaviour and critical behaviour.