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Religion&Philosophy&Ethics | Inbreeding depression
Inbreeding depression is the reduced biological fitness in a given population as a result of inbreeding, or breeding of related individuals. Population biological fitness refers to an organism's ability to survive and perpetuate its genetic material. Inbreeding depression is often the result of a population bottleneck. In general, the higher the genetic variation or gene pool within a breeding population, the less likely it is to suffer from inbreeding depression.
Inbreeding depression seems to be present in most groups of organisms, but varies across mating systems. Hermaphroditic species often exhibit lower degrees of inbreeding depression than outcrossing species, as repeated generations of selfing is thought to purge deleterious alleles from populations. For example, the outcrossing nematode (roundworm) "Caenorhabditis remanei" has been demonstrated to suffer severely from inbreeding depression, unlike its hermaphroditic relative "C. elegans", which experiences outbreeding depression.
Inbreeding (i.e., breeding between closely related individuals) results in more recessive traits manifesting themselves, as the genomes of pair-mates are more similar. Recessive traits can only occur in an offspring if present in both parents' genomes. The more genetically similar the parents are, the more often recessive traits appear in their offspring. Consequently, the more closely related the breeding pair is, the more homozygous, deleterious genes the offspring may have, resulting in very unfit individuals. For alleles that confer an advantage in the heterozygous and/or homozygous-dominant state, the fitness of the homozygous-recessive state may even be zero (meaning sterile or unviable offspring).
An example of inbreeding depression is shown to the right. In this case, "a" is the recessive allele which has negative effects. In order for the "a" phenotype to become active, the gene must end up as homozygous "aa" because in the geneotype A"a", the A takes dominance over the "a" and the "a" does not have any effect. Due to their reduced phenotypic expression and their consequent reduced selection, recessive genes are, more often than not, detrimental phenotypes by causing the organism to be less fit to its natural environment.
Another mechanism responsible for inbreeding depression is the fitness advantage of heterozygosity, which is known as overdominance. This can lead to reduced fitness of a population with many homozygous genotypes, even if they are not deleterious or recessive. Here, even the dominant alleles result in reduced fitness if present homozygously (see also hybrid vigour).
Currently, it is not known which of the two mechanisms is more prevalent in nature. For practical applications, e.g. in livestock breeding, the former is thought to be more significant – it may yield completely unviable offspring (meaning outright failure of a pedigree), while the latter can only result in relatively reduced fitness.
Natural selection cannot effectively remove all deleterious recessive genes from a population for several reasons. First, deleterious genes arise constantly through mutation within a population. Second, in a population where inbreeding occurs frequently, most offspring will have some deleterious traits, so few will be more fit for survival than the others. Different deleterious traits are extremely unlikely to equally affect reproduction – an especially disadvantageous recessive trait expressed in a homozygous recessive individual is likely to eliminate itself, naturally limiting the expression of its phenotype. Third, recessive deleterious alleles will be "masked" by heterozygosity, and so in a dominant-recessive trait, heterozygotes will not be selected against.
When recessive deleterious alleles occur in the heterozygous state, where their potentially deleterious expression is masked by the corresponding wild-type allele, this masking phenomenon is referred to as complementation (see complementation (genetics)).
In general, sexual reproduction in eukaryotes has two fundamental aspects: genetic recombination during meiosis, and outcrossing. It has been proposed that these two aspects have two natural selective advantages respectively. A proposed adaptive advantage of meiosis is that it facilitates recombinational repair of DNA damages that are otherwise difficult to repair (see DNA repair as the adaptive advantage of meiosis). A proposed adaptive advantage of outcrossing is complementation, which is the masking of deleterious recessive alleles (see hybrid vigor or heterosis). The selective advantage of complementation may largely account for the general avoidance of inbreeding (see kin recognition).
Introducing alleles from a different population can reverse inbreeding depression. Different populations of the same species have different deleterious traits, and therefore their cross breeding will not result in homozygosity at most loci in the offspring. This is known as outbreeding enhancement, practiced by conservation managers and zoo captive breeders to prevent homozygosity.
However, intermixing two different populations can give rise to unfit polygenic traits in outbreeding depression (i.e. yielding offspring which lack the genetic adaptations to specific environmental conditions). These, then, will have a lowered fitness than pure-bred individuals of a particular subspecies that has adapted to its local environment.
The biological effects of inbreeding depression in humans are largely obscured by socioeconomic and cultural influences on reproductive behavior. Studies in human populations have shown that age at marriage, duration of marriage, illiteracy, contraceptive use, and reproductive compensation are the major determinants of apparent fertility, even amongst populations with a high proportion of consanguinous unions. However, several small effects on increased mortality, longer inter-birth intervals and reduced overall productivity have been noted in certain isolated populations.
Charles Darwin was one of the first scientists to demonstrate the effects of inbreeding depression, through numerous experiments on plants. Darwin's wife, Emma, was his first cousin, and he was concerned about the impact of inbreeding on his ten children, three of whom died at age ten or younger; three others had childless long-term marriages.
Whilst inbreeding depression has been found to occur in almost all sufficiently studied species, some taxa, most notably some angiosperms, appear to suffer lower fitness costs than others in inbred populations. Three mechanisms appear to be responsible for this: purging, differences in ploidy, and selection for heterozygosity. It must be cautioned that some studies failing to show an absence of inbreeding depression in certain species can arise from small sample sizes or where the supposedly outbred control group is already suffering inbreeding depression, which frequently occurs in populations that have undergone a recent bottleneck, such as those of the naked mole rat.
Purging selection occurs where the phenotypes of deleterious recessive alleles are exposed through inbreeding, and thus can be selected against. This can lead to such detrimental mutations being removed from the population, and has been demonstrated to occur rapidly where the recessive alleles have a lethal effect. The efficiency of purging will depend on the relationship between the magnitude of the deleterious effect that is unmasked in the homozygotes and the importance of genetic drift, so that purging is weaker for non-lethal than for recessive lethal alleles. For very small populations, drift has a strong influence, which can cause the fixation of sublethal alleles under weak selection. The fixation of a single allele for a specific gene can also reduce fitness where heterozygote advantage was previously present (i.e., where heterozygous individuals have higher fitness than homozygotes of either allele), although this phenomenon seems to make a usually small contribution to inbreeding depression. Although naturally occurring, purging can be important for population survival, deliberately attempting to purge deleterious mutations from a population is not generally recommended as a technique to improve the fitness of captive bred animals.
Many angiosperms (flowering plants) can self-fertilise for several generations and suffer little from inbreeding depression. This is very useful for species which disperse widely and can therefore find themselves growing in a novel environment with no conspecifics present. Polyploidy (having more than two paired sets of each chromosome), which is prevalent in angiosperms, ferns and a select few animal taxa, accounts for this. By having several copies of a chromosome, as opposed to two, homozygosity is less likely to occur in inbred offspring. This means that recessive deleterious alleles are not expressed as frequently as with many copies of a chromosome; it is more likely that at least one will contain a functional allele.
Inbreeding depression has also been found to occur more gradually than predicted in some wild populations, such as in the highly inbred population of Scandinavian wolves. This appears to be due to a selection pressure for more heterozygous individuals, which generally are in better condition and so are more likely to become one of the few animals to breed and produce offspring.
| 2890996 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=2890996 |
Religion&Philosophy&Ethics | Instantiation principle
The instantiation principle or principle of instantiation or principle of exemplification is the concept in metaphysics and logic (first put forward by David Malet Armstrong) that there can be no uninstantiated or unexemplified properties (or universals). In other words, it is impossible for a property to exist which is not had by some object.
Consider a chair. Presumably chairs did not exist 150,000 years ago. Thus, according to the principle of instantiation, the property of being a chair did not exist 150,000 years ago either. Similarly, if all red objects were to suddenly go out of existence, then the property of being red would likewise go out of existence.
To make the principle more plausible in the light of these examples, the existence of properties or universals is not tied to their actual existence now, but to their existence in space-time considered as a whole. Thus, any property which "is", "has been", or "will be" instantiated exists. The property of being red would exist even if all red things were to be destroyed, because it has been instantiated. This broadens the range of properties which exist if the principle is true.
Those who endorse the principle of instantiation are known as "in re" (in thing or in reality) realists or 'immanent realists'.
| 2892645 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=2892645 |
Religion&Philosophy&Ethics | Frugality
Frugality is the quality of being frugal, sparing, thrifty, prudent or economical in the consumption of consumable resources such as food, time or money, and avoiding waste, lavishness or extravagance.
In behavioral science, frugality has been defined as the tendency to acquire goods and services in a restrained manner, and resourceful use of already owned economic goods and services, to achieve a longer term goal.
Common strategies of frugality include the reduction of waste, curbing costly habits, suppressing instant gratification by means of fiscal self-restraint, seeking efficiency, avoiding traps, defying expensive social norms, detecting and avoiding manipulative advertising, embracing cost-free options, using barter, and staying well-informed about local circumstances and both market and product/service realities. Frugality may contribute to health by leading people to avoid products that are both expensive and unhealthy when used to excess. Frugal living is mainly practiced by those who aim to cut expenses, have more money, and get the most they possibly can from their money.
In the context of some belief systems, frugality is a "philosophy" in which one does not trust (or is deeply wary of) "expert" knowledge from commercial markets or corporate cultures, claiming to know what is in the best economic, material, or spiritual interests of the individual.
Different spiritual communities consider frugality to be a virtue or a spiritual discipline. The Religious Society of Friends and the Puritans are examples of such groups. The basic philosophy behind this is the idea that people ought to save money in order to allocate it to more charitable purposes, such as helping others in need.
There are also environmentalists who consider frugality to be a virtue through which humans can make use of their ancestral skills as hunter-gatherers, carrying little and needing little, and finding meaning in nature instead of man-made conventions or religion. Henry David Thoreau expressed a similar philosophy in "Walden", with his zest for self-reliance and minimal possessions while living simply in the woods.
Frugality has been adopted as a strategic imperative by large enterprises as a means of cost reduction through engenderment of a philosophy of careful spending amongst the workforce. Cost reduction is often perceived negatively, be it within a corporate organisation or in society, so inviting each employee to embrace frugality transfers the burden of cost reduction from management to the employee. In doing so, corporations introduce a moral obligation to cost cutting, proposing the notion that careful management of costs is in the company, shareholder and employee's best interests.
| 2894539 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=2894539 |
Religion&Philosophy&Ethics | Securities fraud
Securities fraud, also known as stock fraud and investment fraud, is a deceptive practice in the stock or commodities markets that induces investors to make purchase or sale decisions on the basis of false information, frequently resulting in losses, in violation of securities laws.
Securities fraud can also include outright theft from investors (embezzlement by stockbrokers), stock manipulation, misstatements on a public company's financial reports, and lying to corporate auditors. The term encompasses a wide range of other actions, including insider trading, front running and other illegal acts on the trading floor of a stock or commodity exchange.
Fraud by high level corporate officials became a subject of wide national attention during the early 2000s, as exemplified by corporate officer misconduct at Enron. It became a problem of such scope that the Bush Administration announced what it described as an "aggressive agenda" against corporate fraud. Less widely publicized manifestations continue, such as the securities fraud conviction of Charles E. Johnson Jr., founder of PurchasePro in May 2008. Then-FBI Director Robert Mueller predicted in April 2008 that corporate fraud cases will increase because of the subprime mortgage crisis.
Dummy corporations may be created by fraudsters to create the illusion of being an existing corporation with a similar name. Fraudsters then sell securities in the dummy corporation by misleading the investor into thinking that they are buying shares in the real corporation.
According to enforcement officials of the Securities and Exchange Commission, criminals engage in pump-and-dump schemes, in which false and/or fraudulent information is disseminated in chat rooms, forums, internet boards and via email (spamming), with the purpose of causing a dramatic price increase in thinly traded stocks or stocks of shell companies (the "pump"). In other instances, fraudsters disseminate materially false information about a company in hopes of urging investors to sell their shares so that the stock price plummets.
When the price reaches a certain level, criminals immediately sell off their holdings of those stocks (the "dump"), realizing substantial profits before the stock price falls back to its usual low level. Any buyers of the stock who are unaware of the fraud become victims once the price falls.
The SEC says that Internet fraud resides in several forms:
There are two types of "insider trading". The first is the trading of a corporation's stock or other security by corporate insiders such as officers, key employees, directors, or holders of more than ten percent of the firm's shares. This is generally legal, but there are certain reporting requirements.
The other type of insider trading is the purchase or sale of a security based on material non-public information. This type of trading is illegal in most instances. In illegal insider trading, an insider or a related party trades based on material non-public information obtained during the performance of the insider's duties at the corporation, or otherwise misappropriated.
In microcap fraud, stocks of small companies of under $250 million market capitalization are deceptively promoted, then sold to an unwary public. This type of fraud has been estimated to cost investors $1–3 billion annually. Microcap fraud includes pump and dump schemes involving boiler rooms and scams on the Internet. Many, but not all, microcap stocks involved in frauds are penny stocks, which trade for less than $5 a share.
Many penny stocks, particularly those that sell for fractions of a cent, are thinly traded. They can become the target of stock promoters and manipulators. These manipulators first purchase large quantities of stock, then artificially inflate the share price through false and misleading positive statements. This is referred to as a pump and dump scheme. The pump and dump is a form of microcap stock fraud. In more sophisticated versions of the fraud, individuals or organizations buy millions of shares, then use newsletter websites, chat rooms, stock message boards, press releases, or e-mail blasts to drive up interest in the stock. Very often, the perpetrator will claim to have "inside" information about impending news to persuade the unwitting investor to quickly buy the shares. When buying pressure pushes the share price up, the rise in price entices more people to believe the hype and to buy shares as well. Eventually the manipulators doing the "pumping" end up "dumping" when they sell their holdings. The expanding use of the Internet and personal communication devices has made penny stock scams easier to perpetrate. But it has also drawn high-profile public personalities into the sphere of regulatory oversight. Though not a scam per se, one notable example is rapper 50 Cent's use of Twitter to cause the price of a penny stock (HNHI) to increase dramatically. 50 Cent had previously invested in 30 million shares of the company, and as a result made $8.7 million in profit.
Another example of an activity that skirts the borderline between legitimate promotion and hype is the case of LEXG. Described (but perhaps overstated) as "the biggest stock promotion of all time", Lithium Exploration Group's market capitalization soared to over $350 million, after an extensive direct mail campaign. The promotion drew upon the legitimate growth in production and use of lithium, while touting Lithium Exploration Groups position within that sector. According to the company's December 31, 2010, form 10-Q (filed within months of the direct mail promotion), LEXG was a lithium company without assets. Its revenues and assets at that time were zero. Subsequently, the company did acquire lithium production/exploration properties, and addressed concerns raised in the press.
Penny stock companies often have low liquidity. Investors may encounter difficulty selling their positions after the buying pressure has abated, and the manipulators have fled.
In 2002, a wave of separate but often related accounting scandals became known to the public in the U.S. All of the leading public accounting firms—Arthur Andersen, Deloitte & Touche, Ernst & Young, KPMG, PricewaterhouseCoopers— and others have admitted to or have been charged with negligence to identify and prevent the publication of falsified financial reports by their corporate clients which had the effect of giving a misleading impression of their client companies' financial status. In several cases, the monetary amounts of the fraud involved are in the billions of USD.
Boiler rooms or boiler houses are stock brokerages that put undue pressure on clients to trade using telesales, usually in pursuit of microcap fraud schemes. Some boiler rooms offer clients transactions fraudulently, such as those with an undisclosed profitable relationship to the brokerage. Some 'boiler rooms' are not licensed but may be 'tied agents' of a brokerage house which itself is licensed or not. Securities sold in boiler rooms include commodities and private placements as well as microcap stocks, non-existent, or distressed stock and stock supplied by an intermediary at an undisclosed markup.
A number of major brokerages and mutual fund firms were accused of various deceptive acts that disadvantaged customers. Among them were late trading and market timing. Various SEC rules were enacted to curtail this practice. Bank of America Capital Management was accused by the SEC of having undisclosed arrangements with customers to allow short term trading.
Abusive short selling, including certain types of naked short selling, are also considered securities fraud because they can drive down stock prices. In abusive naked short selling, stock is sold without being borrowed and without any intent to borrow. The practice of spreading false information about stocks, to drive down their prices, is called "short and distort". During the takeover of Bear Stearns by J.P. Morgan Chase in March 2008, reports swirled that shorts were spreading rumors to drive down Bear Stearns' share price. Sen. Christopher Dodd, D-Conn., said this was more than rumors and said, "This is about collusion."
A Ponzi scheme is an investment fund where withdrawals are financed by subsequent investors, rather than profit obtained through investment activities. The largest instance of securities fraud committed by an individual ever is a Ponzi scheme operated by former NASDAQ chairman Bernard Madoff, which caused up to an estimated $64.8 billion in losses depending on which method is used to calculate the losses prior to its collapse.
The Securities Investor Protection Corporation (SIPC) reports that the Federal Trade Commission, FBI, and state securities regulators estimate that investment fraud in the United States ranges from $10–$40 billion annually. Of that number, SIPC estimates that $1–3 Billion is directly attributable to microcap stock fraud. Fraudulent schemes perpetrated in the securities and commodities markets can ultimately have a devastating impact on the viability and operation of these markets.
Class action securities fraud lawsuits rose 43 percent between 2006 and 2007, according to the Stanford Law School Securities Class Action Clearinghouse. During 2006 and 2007, securities fraud class actions were driven by market wide events, such as the 2006 backdating scandal and the 2007 subprime crisis. Securities fraud lawsuits remained below historical averages.
Some manifestations of this white collar crime have become more frequent as the Internet gives criminals greater access to prey. The trading volume in the United States securities and commodities markets, having grown dramatically in the 1990s, has led to an increase in fraud and misconduct by investors, executives, shareholders, and other market participants.
Securities fraud is becoming more complex as the industry develops more complicated investment vehicles. In addition, white collar criminals are expanding the scope of their fraud and are looking outside the United States for new markets, new investors, and banking secrecy havens to hide unjust enrichment.
A study conducted by the New York Stock Exchange in the mid-1990s reveals approximately 51.4 million individuals owned some type of traded stock, while 200 million individuals owned securities indirectly. These same financial markets provide the opportunity for wealth to be obtained and the opportunity for white collar criminals to take advantage of unwary investors.
Recovery of assets from the proceeds of securities fraud is a resource intensive and expensive undertaking because of the cleverness of fraudsters in concealment of assets and money laundering, as well as the tendency of many criminals to be profligate spenders. A victim of securities fraud is usually fortunate to recover any money from the defrauder.
Sometimes the losses caused by securities fraud are difficult to quantify. For example, insider trading is believed to raise the cost of capital for securities issuers, thus decreasing overall economic growth.
Any investor can become a victim, but persons aged fifty years or older are most often victimized, whether as direct purchasers in securities or indirect purchasers through pension funds. Not only do investors lose but so can creditors, taxing authorities, and employees.
Potential perpetrators of securities fraud within a publicly traded firm include any dishonest official within the company who has access to the payroll or financial reports that can be manipulated to:
Enron Corporation exemplifies all five tendencies, and its failure demonstrates the extreme dangers of a culture of corruption within a publicly traded corporation. The rarity of such spectacular failures of a corporation from securities fraud attests to the general reliability of most executives and boards of large corporations. Most spectacular failures of publicly traded companies result from such innocent causes as marketing blunders (Schlitz), an obsolete model of business (Penn Central, Woolworth's), inadequate market share (Studebaker), non-criminal incompetence (Braniff).
Even if the effect of securities fraud is not enough to cause bankruptcy, a lesser level can wipe out holders of common stock because of the leverage of value of shares upon the difference between assets and liabilities. Such fraud has been known as watered stock, analogous to the practice of force-feeding livestock great amounts of water to inflate their weight before sale to dealers.
The regulation and prosecution of securities fraud violations is undertaken on a broad front, involving numerous government agencies and self-regulatory organizations. One method of regulating and restricting a specific type of fraud perpetrated by pump and dump manipulators, is to target the category of stocks most often associated with this scheme. To that end, penny stocks have been the target of heightened enforcement efforts. In the United States, regulators have defined a penny stock as a security that must meet a number of specific standards. The criteria include price, market capitalization, and minimum shareholder equity. Securities traded on a national stock exchange, regardless of price, are exempt from regulatory designation as a penny stock, since it is thought that exchange traded securities are less vulnerable to manipulation. Therefore, CitiGroup (NYSE:C) and other NYSE listed securities which traded below $1.00 during the market downturn of 2008–2009, while properly regarded as "low priced" securities, were not technically "penny stocks". Although penny stock trading in the United States is now primarily controlled through rules and regulations enforced by the United States Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) and the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority (FINRA), the genesis of this control is found in State securities law. The State of Georgia was the first state to codify a comprehensive penny stock securities law. Secretary of State Max Cleland, whose office enforced State securities laws was a principal proponent of the legislation. Representative Chesley V. Morton, the only stockbroker in the Georgia General Assembly at the time, was principal sponsor of the bill in the House of Representatives. Georgia's penny stock law was subsequently challenged in court. However, the law was eventually upheld in U.S. District Court, and the statute became the template for laws enacted in other states. Shortly thereafter, both FINRA and the SEC enacted comprehensive revisions of their penny stock regulations. These regulations proved effective in either closing or greatly restricting broker/dealers, such as Blinder, Robinson & Company, which specialized in the penny stocks sector. Meyer Blinder was jailed for securities fraud in 1992, after the collapse of his firm. However, sanctions under these specific regulations lack an effective means to address pump and dump schemes perpetrated by unregistered groups and individuals.
| 2902209 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=2902209 |
Religion&Philosophy&Ethics | Green brands
Green brands are those brands that consumers associate with environmental conservation and sustainable business practices.
Such brands appeal to consumers who are becoming more aware of the need to protect the environment. A green brand can add a unique selling point to a product and can boost corporate image. However, if a company is found or perceived to overstate its green practices its green brand may be criticised as greenwash.
GreenBrands is also an ecolabel, developed by GreenBrands and SERI(Sustainable Europe Research Institute in Vienna).
Ethical consumerism has led to an increase in green brands. In the food and drinks industry only 5 green brand products were launched in 2002, increasing to 328 in 2007 (Mintel global database).
In the case of consumer brands packaging can be a key element in communicating a green brand. This is because packaging communicates information to the consumer at the point-of-sale, and because of the environmental impact of the packaging itself.
Companies may claim sustainable packaging, recycled and/or recyclable material, or reduce excess packaging. Packaging is of especially high brand importance when the packaging is part of the aesthetic appeal of the product and brand, as in the case of the cosmetics and toiletries sector. Packaging material may have to not only reinforce environmental credentials, but also communicate the high-quality and luxury image of the brand.
In Europe concerns have been raised that consumers might be confused or mislead as a result of a recent increase in green brands. Because green brands can add a unique selling point there is little consistency from brand to brand. In the food and drinks industry it has been observed that companies are reluctant to use existing and widely recognised green logos, such as the mobius loop, because using their own makes the brand more easily distinguishable for the consumer.
In Britain, the Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) warned consumers in mid-2007, that some "green" claims might not be authentic. The ASA stated that green claims have become noticeably more prevalent in advertisement, and has investigated and upheld several complaints regarding "unsubstantiated environmental claims". The ASA Director General has stated that "the ASA needs to see robust evidence to back up any eco-friendly claims".
The ASA in Britain has also raised concerns that as awareness about climate change increase among consumers, the cases of unsubstantiated carbon claims (e.g. carbon emissions and carbon neutral claims) rises. The ASA has upheld a number of complaints against energy companies, including Scottish and Southern Energy car manufacturers, including Toyota, Lexus and Volkswagen, and airlines, including EasyJet, for misleading claims regarding carbon emissions and carbon neutrality.
Recent cases before the British ASA involved environmental claims such as "local". In December 2006 for example the ASA upheld a complaint against Tesco, where the company advertised British products as "local", which the ASA ruled to be misleading because in this particular case the consumers were likely to interpret “local” as referring to their immediate surrounding region.
In August 2008 the British ASA ruled that Shell had misled the public in an advertisement which claimed that a $10bn oil sands project in Alberta, northern Canada, was a "sustainable energy source". The ASA upheld a complaint by the World Wide Fund for Nature about Shell's advert in the Financial Times. Explaining the ruling the ASA stated that "We considered that the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra) best practice guidance on environmental claims stated that green claims should not 'be vague or ambiguous, for instance by simply trying to give a good impression about general concern for the environment. Claims should always avoid the vague use of terms such as 'sustainable', 'green', 'non-polluting' and so on." Furthermore the ASA ruling stated "Defra had made that recommendation because, although 'sustainable' was a widely used term, the lack of a universally agreed definition meant that it was likely to be ambiguous and unclear to consumers. Because we had not seen data that showed how Shell was effectively managing carbon emissions from its oil sands projects in order to limit climate change, we concluded that the ad was misleading"
In the United States the Federal Trade Commission issues the "Green Guides" (last updated 2012) - environmental marketing guidelines. The guidelines give advice on the types of substantiation needed to support environmental claims, and give examples of claims that are to be avoided. The Federal Trade Commission has recognised that these guidelines need updating, as for example they currently contain no guidance on carbon neutrality, or the terms sustainable or renewable. The Green Guides do contain guidance on the term recyclable, recycled and biodegradable.
The marketing and brand building experiences of many American green brands was documented in the book "The Gort Cloud" by Richard Seireeni, 2009. The gort cloud refers to the green community that provides support and a market to green brands.
In recent decades, there has been increasing interest in protecting the environment and sustainability when it comes to the world's markets. Due to global warming and the immense amount of environmental pollution attributed to factory manufacturing, the world has observed the rise in environmental issues (Chen, 2011). In response to society’s concerns, this has seen an increasing number of companies adopting green brands to front environmental responsibility. In turn, products and services of green brands have recently been seen to have a perfectly inelastic demand because people are prepared to support and pay a higher price for a sustainable image (Chen, 2011).
Through a consumer study taken in 1999, it was discovered that environmental issues are ranked above human rights, animal rights and welfare issues (Wheale & Hinton, 2007). This information shows growing consumer demand of companies providing goods and services that preserve the environment and adopt a “green” approach to business. In a similar study, according to Iannuzzi (2011), a compelling global demand for “greener products” was demonstrated by over 60% of all countries studied, further demonstrating the desire of environmentally friendly green brands. In the study, environmental awareness was placed among the most vital product traits that consumers valued when purchasing, along with minimising toxic and hazardous substances, water preservation and recycling (Iannuzzi, 2011). Green brands are ultimately more attractive to a lot of consumers nowadays, and committing to such sustainability is now essential to stay competitive.
Because concern for the environment is now a pivotal element in consumer decision-making, studies have found that the demand for green brands is higher than ever before (Ahmad & Thyagaraj, n.d.). A number of studies have also suggested that such a demand for greener products is due to consumers’ self-expressive benefits. When supporting green brands, customers believe this determines their role in society and as stated by Ahmad and Thyagaraj (n.d.), this gives consumers satisfaction that they are perceived as having an eco-friendly attitude. Various components have been stipulated as effects on conscious consumer behavior such as changing perspectives, awareness of environmental issues and greener products, and people’s perceived environmental contribution in society. Such factors help green brands to segment, define and target their market (Baker, 2003).
An example of companies tackling environmental sustainability is the world’s largest retailer, Walmart. Walmart has undertaken a sustainability strategy that called on their suppliers to supply greener products because they were adamant their customers demanded “more efficient, longer lasting and better performing products” (Iannuzzi, 2011). Being a world-leading retailer, Walmart’s green approach to business has put pressure on other companies to adopt similar practices that consumers are demanding.
The shift towards green brands is a result of numerous factors such as organic products being more accessible, fuel-efficient and eco-friendly automobiles becoming increasingly prevalent, and countless consumers looking to support the environment and portraying a green image (Richards, 2013). The development of the greener approach to living has transferred into marketing and advertising and consumer markets, where enterprises are adopting this movement to attract customers and increase profits (Richards, 2013).
When it comes to marketing strategies of green brands, company officials want to understand the effects of being green has on their company and customers alike. Being a green brand alone differentiates a brand from the outset and opens new market opportunities. The Body Shop is an example of a competitive green brand that succeeds through understanding and providing the consumer demand for eco-friendly products and their sound environmental performance (Baker, 2003). Green brands have also been profitable in niche markets where they can charge exclusive prices because conscious consumers are prepared to pay.
To combine environmental concern into marketing strategy is called ‘green marketing’ where companies use a range of undertakings to satisfy the consumer demand for environmentally friendly products such as revamping advertising, product adjustment, altering production operations, sustainable packaging and of course recycling (Baker, 2003). By doing this, a green brand is creating further value, which is conveyed through their communication strategy (Danciu, 2015).
Green brands looking to secure their sustainable image within consumers minds must establish a philosophy that describes their use of renewable resources, minimising waste, supplying safe goods and services and "giving back to the environment" (Saxena & Khandelwal, 2010). Environmental concerns should also be included in marketing plans. After segmenting the market, green brands can make contact with their target market through implementing strong integrated marketing communications (IMC), which conveys their value proposition to consumers (Saxena & Khandelwal, 2010).
Where a clean and green image is communicated, brands should be associated with environmental claims that are truthful in how their business practices impact on the surrounding environment (Danciu, 2015). Such claims can be relayed through green labeling colour schemes, packaging, and “nature” images through advertisements as well as on the Internet. Consumers need to be wary of greenwashing through marketing strategies that does not reflect any green qualities in the product itself.
Another area of marketing a green brand is making use of functional and emotional strategies to position a brand in consumers’ minds. The functional characteristic approach delivers information on how a brand's products and services are environmentally friendly, which creates brand connections for buyers and powerful cognitive perception of the company (Danciu, 2015). Such information should include a company’s sustainable production process and ecological footprint in relation to its superiority to other competitors. The emotional approach for positioning focuses on emotions and alludes to a brand relationship with nature and the environment (Wang, 2016). It has been found that emotional strategies build brand loyalty very effectively because consumers feel they are helping preserve the environment through supporting sustainably made products (Danciu, 2015). Wang (2016) states that overall, a mixed strategy of using both emotional and functional approaches to market a green brand generates favorable brand relationships and commitment from consumers. It is noteworthy to mention that the most prosperous green brands are affiliated with either “alternative technology or a green corporate philosophy” (Wang, 2016).
| 2903033 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=2903033 |
Religion&Philosophy&Ethics | Trading blows
Trading blows or trading licks is an endurance test in which the participants (usually two boys or young men) take turns, alternating between administering a blow to an opponent and assuming the agreed exposed position (e.g. bending over an object or grabbing the ankles) to endure the next one, using the same implement (e.g. a fraternity paddle), until only the winner can still bring himself to endure the gradually increasing pain in the progressively tormented target part of their anatomy (usually the posterior, in which case it is a form of spanking, or the cheeks), which in the interest of fairness should be covered by a common uniform. This can be anything from regular jeans or pants, underwear, bared (naked) buttocks. As the blows are not given by the same person but by the parties themselves, the strongest-armed one actually has an unfair (but not always decisive) physical advantage.
Such rather macho displays of willpower, restraining the instinct to avoid pain, can serve various purposes, including:
Another game with the same name is often played among boys or young men, where two people agree on a place to hit the other (e.g. the shoulder or chest) and the two take turns trading punches until one person cannot stand the pain any longer. The first person to give up is the loser.
| 2904878 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=2904878 |
Religion&Philosophy&Ethics | Transdisciplinarity
Transdisciplinarity connotes a research strategy that crosses many disciplinary boundaries to create a holistic approach. It applies to research efforts focused on problems that cross the boundaries of two or more disciplines, such as research on effective information systems for biomedical research (see bioinformatics), and can refer to concepts or methods that were originally developed by one discipline, but are now used by several others, such as ethnography, a field research method originally developed in anthropology but now widely used by other disciplines.
The Belmont Forum elaborated that a transdisciplinary approach is enabling inputs and scoping across scientific and non-scientific stakeholder communities and facilitating a systemic way of addressing a challenge. This includes initiatives that support the capacity building required for the successful transdisciplinary formulation and implementation of research actions.
Transdisciplinarity has two common meanings:
In German-speaking countries, "Transdisziplinarität" refers to the integration of diverse forms of research, and includes specific methods for relating knowledge in problem-solving. A 2003 conference held at the University of Göttingen showcased the diverse meanings of multi-, inter- and transdisciplinarity and made suggestions for converging them without eliminating present usages.
When the very nature of a problem is under dispute, transdisciplinarity can help determine the most relevant problems and research questions involved. A first type of question concerns the cause of the present problems and their future development (system knowledge). Another concerns which values and norms can be used to form goals of the problem-solving process (target knowledge). A third relates to how a problematic situation can be transformed and improved (transformation knowledge). Transdisciplinarity requires adequate addressing of the complexity of problems and the diversity of perceptions of them, that abstract and case-specific knowledge are linked, and that practices promote the common good.
Transdisciplinarity arises when participating experts interact in an open discussion and dialogue, giving equal weight to each perspective and relating them to each other. This is difficult because of the overwhelming amount of information involved, and because of incommensurability of specialized languages in each field of expertise. To excel under these conditions, researchers need not only in-depth knowledge and know-how of the disciplines involved, but skills in moderation, mediation, association and transfer.
Transdisciplinarity is also used to signify a unity of knowledge beyond disciplines.
Jean Piaget introduced this usage of the term in 1970, and in 1987, the International Center for Transdisciplinary Research (CIRET) adopted the Charter of Transdisciplinarity at the 1st World Congress of Transdisciplinarity, Convento da Arrabida, Portugal, November 1994.
In the CIRET approach, transdisciplinarity is radically distinct from interdisciplinarity. Interdisciplinarity, like pluridisciplinarity, concerns the transfer of methods from one discipline to another, allowing research to spill over disciplinary boundaries, but staying within the framework of disciplinary research.
As the prefix "trans" indicates, transdisciplinarity concerns that which is at once between the disciplines, across the different disciplines, and beyond each individual discipline. Its goal is the understanding of the present world, of which one of the imperatives is the overarching unity of knowledge.
Another critical defining characteristic of transdisciplinary research is the inclusion of stakeholders in defining research objectives and strategies in order to better incorporate the diffusion of learning produced by the research. Collaboration between stakeholders is deemed essential – not merely at an academic or disciplinary collaboration level, but through active collaboration with people affected by the research and community-based stakeholders. In such a way, transdisciplinary collaboration becomes uniquely capable of engaging with different ways of knowing the world, generating new knowledge, and helping stakeholders understand and incorporate the results or lessons learned by the research.
Transdisciplinarity is defined by Basarab Nicolescu through three methodological postulates: the existence of levels of Reality, the logic of the included middle, and complexity. In the presence of several levels of Reality the space between disciplines and beyond disciplines is full of information. Disciplinary research concerns, at most, one and the same level of Reality; moreover, in most cases, it only concerns fragments of one level of Reality. On the contrary, transdisciplinarity concerns the dynamics engendered by the action of several levels of Reality at once. The discovery of these dynamics necessarily passes through disciplinary knowledge. While not a new discipline or a new superdiscipline, transdisciplinarity is nourished by disciplinary research; in turn, disciplinary research is clarified by transdisciplinary knowledge in a new, fertile way. In this sense, disciplinary and transdisciplinary research are not antagonistic but complementary. As in the case of disciplinarity, transdisciplinary research is not antagonistic but complementary to multidisciplinarity and interdisciplinarity research.
According to Nicolescu, transdisciplinarity is nevertheless radically distinct from multidisciplinarity and interdisciplinarity because of its goal, the understanding of the present world, which cannot be accomplished in the framework of disciplinary research. The goal of multidisciplinarity and interdisciplinarity always remains within the framework of disciplinary research. If transdisciplinarity is often confused with interdisciplinarity or multidisciplinarity (and by the same token, we note that interdisciplinarity is often confused with multidisciplinarity) this is explained in large part by the fact that all three overflow disciplinary boundaries. Advocates maintain this confusion hides the huge potential of transdisciplinarity.
Currently, transdisciplinarity is a consolidated academic field that is giving rise to new applied researches, especially in Latin America and the Caribbean. In this sense, the transdisciplinary and biomimetics research of Javier Collado on Big History represents an ecology of knowledge between scientific knowledge and the ancestral wisdom of native peoples, such as Indigenous peoples in Ecuador. According to Collado, the transdisciplinary methodology applied in the field of Big History seeks to understand the interconnections of the human race with the different levels of reality that co-exist in nature and in the cosmos, and this includes mystical and spiritual experiences, very present in the rituals of shamanism with ayahuasca and other sacred plants. In abstract, the teaching of Big History in universities of Brazil, Ecuador, Colombia, and Argentina implies a transdisciplinary vision that integrates and unifies diverse epistemes that are in, between, and beyond the scientific disciplines, that is, including ancestral wisdom, spirituality, art, emotions, mystical experiences and other dimensions forgotten in the history of science, specially by the positivist approach.
Transdisciplinary education is the education that brings integration of different disciplines in a harmonious manner to construct new knowledge and uplift the leaner to higher domains of cognitive abilities and sustained knowledge and skills. It involve better neural networking for lifelong learning (Sindhya, 2019).https://www.slideshare.net/sindhyaajith/trans-disciplinary-education
Transdisciplinarity can be found in the arts and humanities. For example, the Planetary Collegium seeks "the development of transdisciplinary discourse in the convergence of art, science, technology and consciousness research." The Plasticities Sciences Arts (PSA) research group also develops transdisiciplinary approaches regarding humanities and fundamental sciences relationships as well as the Art & Science field.
Transdisciplinarity can be also found in Global Education. For example, Global Education Magazine, an international journal supported by UNESCO and UNHCR:
"transdisciplinarity represents the capable germ to promote an endogenous development of the evolutionary spirit of internal critical consciousness, where religion and science are complementary. Respect, solidarity and cooperation should be global standards for the entire human development with no boundaries. This requires a radical change in the ontological models of sustainable development, global education and world-society. We must rely on the recognition of a plurality of models, cultures and socio-economical diversification. As well as biodiversity is the way for the emergence of new species, cultural diversity represents the creative potential of world-society."
The range of transdisciplinarity becomes clear when the four central questions of biological research ((1) "causation", (2) "ontogeny," (3) adaptation, (4) phylogeny [after Niko Tinbergen 1963, see also Tinbergen's four questions, cf. Aristotle: Causality / Four Major Causes]) are graphed against distinct levels of analysis (e.g. cell, organ, "individual, group"; [cf. "Laws about the Levels of Complexity" of Nicolai Hartmann 1940/1964, see also Rupert Riedl 1984]):
In this "scheme of transdisciplinarity", all anthropological disciplines (paragraph C in the table of the pdf-file below), their questions (paragraph A: see pdf-file) and results (paragraph B: see pdf-file) can be intertwined and allocated with each other for examples how these aspects go into those little boxes in the matrix, see e.g. the table This chart includes all realms of anthropological research (no one is excluded). It is the starting point for a systematical order for all human sciences, and also a source for a consistent networking and structuring of their results. This "bio-psycho-social" orientation framework is the basis for the development of the "Fundamental Theory of Human Sciences" and for a transdisciplinary consensus. (In this tabulated orientation matrix the questions and reference levels in "italics" are also the subject of the humanities.). Niko Tinbergen was familiar with both conceptual categories (i.e. the four central questions of biological research and the levels of analysis), the tabulation was made by Gerhard Medicus. Certainly, a humanist perspective always involves a transdisciplinary focus. A good and classic example of mixing very different sciences was the work developed by Leibniz in seventeenth-eighteenth centuries in order to create a universal system of justice.
| 2905982 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=2905982 |
Religion&Philosophy&Ethics | Matthew 5:39
Matthew 5:39 is the thirty-ninth verse of the fifth chapter of the Gospel of Matthew in the New Testament and is part of the Sermon on the Mount. This is the second verse of the antithesis on the command: "eye for an eye". In one of the most famous verses in the New Testament, Jesus here rejects revenge and retaliation, instead telling his followers to turn the other cheek.
In the King James Version (KJV) of the Bible the text reads:
<poem>But I say unto you, That ye resist not evil:
but whosoever shall smite thee on thy right
cheek, turn to him the other also.</poem>
The World English Bible (WEB) translates the passage as:
<poem>But I tell you, don't resist him who is evil;
but whoever strikes you on your right
cheek, turn to him the other also.</poem>
This verse opens with the standard "but I say unto you" phrase that heralds a reinterpretation of Mosaic Law. While the Old Testament quote in the previous verse was a reference to retributive punishment, here Jesus uses the word "", which has been seen as far broader. This verse is often presented as advocating radical pacifism.
R. T. France rejects this view. He notes that the word translated as "resist", "anthistemi", has a far more restricted meaning in the original Greek. The word translates more accurately as "do not resist by legal means". Schweizer notes that this is how the word is used in and . To France, and many other scholars, this verse is just one part of a discussion of legal principles, similar to the previous and subsequent verses. The interpretation as a general rule of non-violent resistance is a misunderstanding of the original. For a full discussion of the debate and history of the phrase, see turn the other cheek.
Striking on the right cheek refers to a back-handed slap to the face. In Jesus' time, and still today in the Middle East, such a gesture is one of the highest forms of contempt. According to France, the gesture is a grave insult, not a physical attack, further distancing this verse from one espousing non-violence. Schweizer notes that this might be a reference to , and that this verse might thus be referencing the cheek slap specifically as something used on blasphemers. Jesus' followers might have been subject to these affronts by those who saw them as heretics.
This verse, as with , is vague on evil. It could be interpreted as a reference to the Evil One, i.e. Satan, the general evil of the world, as translated by the KJV, or the evil of specific individuals, as is translated by the WEB. The third interpretation is the one held by most modern scholars.
This verse is partially paralleled in .
| 2907123 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=2907123 |
Religion&Philosophy&Ethics | Biblical courtship
Biblical courtship, also known as Christian courtship is a conservative Christian alternative to dating. It is a response to secular dating culture within various American Christian communities, c. 1985 to present. Motivated by concern for the need of Christian values in contrast to secular dating practices, conservative Christians identified what they saw as key Biblical principles for courtship and romance, and began to disseminate them in the 1980s.
The movement gained widespread exposure following the best-selling response to "I Kissed Dating Goodbye", a popular contemporary treatment of Christian courtship by homeschool student Joshua Harris. Keynote speaker and author Dr. S.M. Davis has developed a unique stand on this philosophy, and his materials have been popular with the homeschool culture since the early 1990s. Proponents of the courtship movement say that it is identified by Biblical principles, rather than particular methods or behavioral practices. These principles have been summarized in by Christina Rogers within the acronym CARE:
A more detailed list of courting ideals include:
| 2908344 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=2908344 |
Religion&Philosophy&Ethics | Triffin dilemma
The Triffin dilemma or Triffin paradox is the conflict of economic interests that arises between short-term domestic and long-term international objectives for countries whose currencies serve as global reserve currencies. This dilemma was identified in the 1960s by Belgian-American economist Robert Triffin, who pointed out that the country whose currency, being the global reserve currency, foreign nations wish to hold, must be willing to supply the world with an extra supply of its currency to fulfill world demand for these foreign exchange reserves, thus leading to a trade deficit.
The use of a national currency, such as the U.S. dollar, as global reserve currency leads to tension between its national and global monetary policy. This is reflected in fundamental imbalances in the balance of payments, specifically the current account, as some goals require an outflow of dollars from the United States, while others require an overall inflow.
Specifically, the Triffin dilemma is usually cited to articulate the problems with the role of the U.S. dollar as the reserve currency under the Bretton Woods system. John Maynard Keynes had anticipated this difficulty and had advocated the use of a global reserve currency called 'Bancor'. Currently the IMF's SDRs are the closest thing to the proposed Bancor but they have not been adopted widely enough to replace the dollar as the global reserve currency.
In the wake of the financial crisis of 2007–2008, the governor of the People's Bank of China explicitly named the reserve currency status of the US dollar as a contributing factor to global savings and investment imbalances that led to the crisis. As such the Triffin Dilemma is related to the Global Savings Glut hypothesis because the dollar's reserve currency role exacerbates the U.S. current account deficit due to heightened demand for dollars.
Due to money flowing out of the country through the Marshall Plan, U.S. military budget and Americans buying foreign goods, the number of U.S. dollars in circulation exceeded the amount of gold that was backing them up in 1959.
By the autumn of 1960, an ounce of gold could be exchanged for $40 in the London market even though the official rate in the United States was $35. This price difference was due to price controls on gold in the US which was fixed by the US government in 1933 following the implementation of Executive Order 6102. In USD terms, the price of gold had not changed in 27 years, but this did not allow true price discovery by the free market. This price was fixed following the enactment of E.O. 6102, where the US government purchased gold from US citizens under threat of fines and/or jail time at a rate of $20.67/oz, then quickly revalued the gold to $35/oz.
The solution to the Triffin dilemma for the United States was to reduce dollars in circulation by cutting the deficit and raising interest rates to attract dollars back into the country. Some economists believed both these tactics, however, would drag the U.S. economy into recession.
In support of the Bretton Woods system and to exert control over the exchange rate of gold, the United States initiated the London Gold Pool and the General Agreements to Borrow (GAB) in 1961 which sustained the system until 1967, when runs on gold and the devaluation of the pound sterling were followed by the demise of the system.
In order to maintain the Bretton Woods system, the U.S. had to run a balance of payments current account deficit to provide liquidity for the conversion of gold into U.S. dollars. With more U.S. dollars in the system than were backed with gold under the Bretton Woods agreement, the U.S. dollar was overvalued. This meant that the United States had less gold as foreign governments started converting U.S. dollars to gold and taking it offshore. Foreign speculators were not a direct part of the gold flow out of the US, as under the Bretton Woods Agreement, only governments could exchange US currency for physical gold. Additionally, while the Bretton Woods Agreement was in place, direct speculation by US citizens who were banned from owning any gold other than jewelry following Executive Order 6102 which was enacted in 1933 by President Franklin D. Roosevelt and enabled the US Government to confiscate all gold coinage, gold certificates, and gold bullion held by any citizen, did not contribute to the price imbalance and arbitrage opportunity via a wide disparity of gold prices between the US and other markets. A price ceiling had been enacted which fixed the price of gold at $35/oz USD following the previously mentioned gold confiscation from US citizens in 1933. As with all price controls, this caused supply and demand imbalances and an arbitrage opportunity which rapidly depleted the United States gold reserves. This led to less gold in the country and caused the US Dollar to become more overvalued, leading to a self-propagating cycle. Furthermore, the US had to run a balance of payments current account surplus to maintain confidence in the U.S. dollar.
As a result, the United States was faced with a dilemma because it is not possible to run a balance of payments current account deficit and surplus at the same time.
In August 1971, President Richard Nixon acknowledged the demise of the Bretton Woods system. He announced that the dollar could no longer be exchanged for gold, which soon became known as the Nixon shock. Although it was announced as a temporary measure, it was to remain in effect. The "gold window" was closed.
In the wake of the financial crisis of 2007–2008, the governor of the People's Bank of China explicitly named the Triffin Dilemma as the root cause of the economic disorder, in a speech titled "Reform the International Monetary System". Zhou Xiaochuan's speech of 29 March 2009 proposed strengthening existing global currency controls, through the IMF.
This would involve a gradual move away from the U.S. dollar as a reserve currency and towards the use of IMF special drawing rights (SDRs) as a global reserve currency.
Zhou argued that part of the reason for the original Bretton Woods system breaking down was the refusal to adopt Keynes' bancor which would have been a special international reserve currency to be used instead of the dollar.
American economists such as Brad DeLong agreed that on almost every point where Keynes was overruled by the Americans during the Bretton Woods negotiations, he was later proved correct by events.
Zhou's proposal attracted much international attention; in a November 2009 article published in "Foreign Affairs" magazine, economist C. Fred Bergsten argued that Zhou's suggestion or a similar change to the International Monetary System would be in the best interests in both the United States and the rest of the world. While Zhou's proposal has not yet been adopted, leaders meeting in April at the 2009 G-20 London summit agreed to allow 250 billion SDRs to be created by the IMF, to be distributed to all IMF members according to each country's voting rights.
On April 13, 2010, the Strategy, Policy and Review Department of the IMF published a comprehensive report examining these aforementioned problems as well as other world reserve currency considerations, recommending that the world adopt a global reserve currency (bancor) and that a global central bank be established to administer such a currency. In this report, the current issues with having a national global reserve currency are addressed. The merits, difficulties and effectiveness of establishing a multi-currency reserve system are weighed against that of the SDRs, or "basket currency" strategy, and those of establishing this new "global reserve currency". A new multilateral framework and "multi-polar system" for managing capital flows and national debts is also called for, but the IMF cautions that it prefers a gradual shift to this new framework, rather than a sudden change.
| 2911169 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=2911169 |
Religion&Philosophy&Ethics | Coronach
A coronach (also written coranich, corrinoch, coranach, cronach, etc.) is the Scottish Gaelic equivalent of the Goll, being the third part of a round of keening, the traditional improvised singing at a death, wake or funeral in the Highlands of Scotland and in Ireland. Though observers have reported hearing such songs in Ireland or in the Scottish Highlands, and melodies have been noted down and printed since the 18th century, audio recordings are rare; not only was the practice dying out or being suppressed through the 19th century, but it was also considered by its practitioners to have been a very personal and spiritual practice, not suitable for performance or recording.
The Scottish border ballad "The Bonny Earl of Murray" is supposedly composed in the tradition of the coronach.
Schubert's Opus 52 No 4 (D 836) set words from Sir Walter Scott's "Lady of the Lake" under the title "Coronach", for female choir with piano accompaniment.
| 2916020 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=2916020 |
Religion&Philosophy&Ethics | Deterritorialization
In anthropology, deterritorialization is the separation of social, cultural and political practices (such as people, objects, languages, or traditions) from a location.
"A Thousand Plateaus" (1980) distinguishes between relative and an absolute deterritorialization. Relative deterritorialization is always accompanied by reterritorialization, while positive absolute deterritorialization is more akin to the construction of a "plane of immanence", akin to Spinoza's ontological constitution of the world. There is also a negative sort of absolute deterritorialization, for example in the subjectivation process ("the face").
The function of deterritorialization is defined as "the movement by which one leaves a territory", also known as a "line of flight". Still, deterritorialization "constitutes and extends" the territory itself.
When referring to culture, anthropologists use the term deterritorialized to refer to a weakening of ties between culture and place. This means the removal of cultural subjects and objects from a certain location in space and time. It implies that certain cultural aspects tend to transcend specific territorial boundaries in a world that consists of things fundamentally in motion.
In the context of cultural globalization, Hernàndez argues that deterritorialization is a cultural feature developed by the "mediatization, migration, and commodification which characterize globalized modernity".
According to the works of Arjun Appadurai, this cultural distancing from the locality, is intensified when people are able to expand and alter their imagination through the mediatization of alien cultural conditions, making this culture of remote origin one of a familiar material. This makes it difficult for a local entity to sustain and retain its own local cultural identity, which also affects the national identity of the region.
From Appadurai's 1990 essay "Disjuncture and Difference": "Deterritorialization, in general, is one of the central forces of the modern world because it brings laboring populations in to the lower-class sectors and spaces of relatively wealthy societies, while sometimes creating exaggerated and intensified senses of criticism or attachment to politics in the home state. Deterritorialization, whether of Hindus, Sikhs, Palestinians, or Ukrainians, is now at the core of a variety of global fundamentalisms, including Islamic and Hindu fundamentalism. In the Hindu case, for example, it is clear that the overseas movement of Indians has been exploited by a variety of interests both within and outside India to create a complicated network of finances and religious identifications, by which the problem of cultural reproduction for Hindus abroad has become tied to the politics of Hindu fundamentalism at home.
At the same time, deterritorialization creates new markets for film companies, art impressions, and travel agencies, which thrive on the end of the deterritorialized population for contact with its homeland. Naturally, these invented homelands, which constitute the mediascapes of deterritorialized groups, can often become sufficiently fantastic and one-sided that they provide the material for new ideoscapes in which ethnic conflicts can begin to erupt." (Appadurai 1990:11–12)
Deterritorialization and reterritorialization exist simultaneously. In Deleuze and Guattari's follow-up to Anti-Oedipus, A Thousand Plateaus, they distinguish between relative deterritorialization, which is always accompanied by reterritorialization, and absolute deterritorialization, which gives rise to a plane of immanence. In both forms of deterritorialization, however, the idea of physical territory remains just that, an idea and reference point.
Mediatization works as a preferential source of deterritorialization, while it becomes a catalyser of other sources of deterritorialization (migrations, tourism, vast shopping centres, and economical transformations). As Tomlinson points out, mediatization is absolutely omnipresent in everyday contemporary cultural experiences, it therefore appears as clearly decisive in deterritorialized cultural experience. The aforementioned experience implies opening up to the world and amplifying cultural horizons through the globalized mass media. This means that globalization transforms the relation between the places where we live and our cultural activities, experiences and identities. Paradoxically, deterritorialization also includes reterritorialized manifestations, which García Canclini defines as "certain relative, partial territorial relocalizations of old and new symbolic productions". According to the concept of glocalization proposed by Robertson, deterritorialization and reterritorialization constitute both sides of the same coin of cultural globalization. Deterritorialization speaks of the loss of the "natural" relation between culture and the social and geographic territories, and describes a deep transformation of the link between our everyday cultural experiences and our configuration as preferably local beings. As Giddens argues, "the very tissue of spatial experience alters, conjoining proximity and distance in ways that have few close parallels in prior ages". Nevertheless, it is very important not to interpret the deterritorialization of localized cultural experiences as an impoverishment of cultural interaction, but as a transformation produced by the impact the growing cultural transnational connections have on the local realm, which means that deterritorialization generates a relativization and a transformation of local cultural experiences, whether it is from the local event itself or by the projection of symbolical shapes from the local event.
Although the process of across-boundaries flow was imbalanced, it cannot be denied that it has profound influence on politics, economics, and culture from every dimension. Although there were imbalanced power presences in different nations, it is undeniable that people will gradually realize that in addition to their own lives around are mutually implicated in the distant shore, but also to reconcile the impact between their lives around and the distant side. That is, the flow process of beyond the boundaries not only the representatives of strengthening interdependence, but also representatives that they both have the cognitive of globalization. It formed an easily comprehensive characteristics about "superterritorial" and "transworld". In other words, the original divide in the territorial boundaries between them have lost some authority, what is the main phenomenon of deterritorialization. Therefore, no matter from what angle to explore globalization, deterritorialization has been a general consensus.
The word "deterritorialization" may have different meanings. Tomlinson had pointed out that many scholars use the vocabulary of deterritorialization to explain the process of globalization, however, there are still some scholars who prefer the use of related words, such as "delocalization" or "displacement". It emphasized different point in the use of different terms, but basically we can understand the meaning of these words that is to understand the transformation between local and cultures of the global modernity. In the text of Tomlinson, however, we found that he uses "deterritorialization" to explain the phenomenon instead of using "delocalization". But we can unearth that "deterritorialization" was more focused on liberating the people from the "local", is a process which no longer just only affected by neighborhood and familiar local, but also deeply influenced by the distant place.
As sociologist Anthony Giddens indicated, the most immediate experience of global modernity, in fact, is we stay in our own familiar environment but feel the feeling of living in different places because of globalization. Say in other words, the local has hardly affected by the distance place, however, under the impact of globalization, distant events made its influence reach into your daily life in the environment, which is the concept of "displacement". Due to the space experiences which were combined with neighboring and distant in people's daily life, it can be said that globalization has fundamentally changed our concept of the space.
However, communication technology may act not only to fill the field of local cultural significance and identity which corroded by deterritorialization, but also to establish global cultural politics. Politics of deterritorialization and the displacement of sociological will lead the struggle between state and nation. One important new feature of global cultural politics, tied to the disjunctive relationships among the various landscapes which proposed by Appadurai, is that state and nation are at each other's throats, and the hyphen that links them is now less an icon of conjuncture than an index of disjuncture.
| 2916335 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=2916335 |
Religion&Philosophy&Ethics | Block scheduling
Block scheduling or blocking is a type of academic scheduling used in schools in the American K-12 system, in which each pupil has fewer classes per day. It is more common in middle and high schools than in primary schools. Each class is scheduled for a longer period of time than normal (e.g. 90 minutes instead of 50). In one form of block scheduling, a single class will meet every day for a number of days, after which another class will take its place. In another form, daily classes rotate through a changing daily cycle.
Blocks offer more concentrated experiences of subjects, with fewer, usually half as many if going through a schedule transfer, classes daily.
Under a traditional American schedule, pupils in a high school will study seven subjects a day for 45 minutes for each day of the week for a semester. There will be two semesters in the year so 14 subjects could be studied. Some pupils will not study all seven subjects. There was great variety as each school board was free to decide the requirement.
Conversion to block scheduling became a relatively widespread trend in the 1990s for middle schools and high schools in the United States. Prior to that, many schools scheduled classes such that a student saw every one of their teachers each day. Classes were approximately 40–60 minutes long, but under block scheduling, they became approximately 90 minutes long.
Many forms of block scheduling were devised.
Also referred to as A/B block scheduling, Odd/Even block scheduling, or Day 1/ Day 2 block scheduling. Students take three to four courses, around 90-120 minutes in length, per day all year long on alternating days resulting in a full six or eight courses per year. An example table of a possible schedule is provided below.
Students take four courses, around 90 minutes in length, every day for the first semester and take four different courses every day for the second semester. This results in a full eight courses taken per year. An example table of a possible schedule is provided below.
Another common block system exists in which students spend up to 100 minutes per class, and earn four credits each semester. Excluding very rare occasions, students at schools using this system take two core classes and two electives per semester. Some schools modify this system further to use one of the mid-day periods for students to take optional year-long classes (usually band) that take half of the period length and take another year-long class during the rest of the period (such as math or journalism). Under such a system most of the classes taken on a year-long basis have all students participating, however it is not uncommon for journalism or yearbook classes to operate under the normal system and only have a few students who leave or arrive halfway through the period. It is also not uncommon for these classes to be scheduled as two credits, and taken both semesters.
Waldorf schools traditionally employ a mixed approach. Certain academic subjects are taught in intensive three to five week blocks known as "main lesson blocks", while other subjects are taught in regularly meeting skills classes.
Within the context of post K-12 establishments, such as in medical school or other intensive university program, a block schedule may mean taking one class at a time, all day, every day, until all of the material is covered. A normal university course might then be completed in three or four weeks of focused effort on a single topic. This is sometimes called "One Course At A Time" ("OCAAT") (see Colorado College and Cornell College). When used as a supplement change instead of the normal schedule, this approach is sometimes called a "mini-mester".
"Where we were able to combine data to produce summary effect sizes, we found that 4 x 4 block scheduling resulted in higher cross subject achievement than traditional schedules. However, the outcome average cross-subject achievement could conceal worsening performance in some subjects and better performance in others."
Some schools have compensated for this by making AP courses last for the entire school year, providing essentially double the instruction time of normal classes, but this results in a dramatic reduction in the number of courses a student can take. Some schools that make AP courses year long offset this by having students always choose a pair of AP courses during class registration. The student will go to the first AP class one day, and the other AP course the next day. Therefore, the student takes the same number of courses as other students, but both AP classes last for the duration of the year.
A systematic review on Block Scheduling was also conducted by Dickson et al. (2010) at the EPPI-Centre which asserts that there is no conclusive evidence to support the introduction of policy guidance on the use of block scheduling in secondary schools in the UK. Although the findings do not indicate that participating in block schedules would produce negative outcomes for pupils across subjects, neither are the positive effects of block scheduling strong enough to recommend their implementation.
Some critics believe that certain subjects suffer from a lack of daily exposure to subject matter and practice that occurs with an A/B block schedule. Courses like mathematics, foreign languages, and music may benefit from daily practice and suffer from a lack thereof.
Block scheduling can result in gaps of a day or days (or even weeks or months in some circumstances) where students are receiving no reinforcement of instruction in a specific subject like math or history, and critics say this results in retention problems and the need for more remedial review. Some observers similarly feel that summer vacation has a similar effect of interrupting the learning and retention process forcing a need to repeat material at the start of a new school year in the Fall.
A University of Virginia study of 8,000 college students found that students who had block scheduling in high school performed worse in university science courses.
Students who miss a block-scheduled day can miss a considerable amount of material in a single subject, possibly making it more difficult to catch up. One way this can be mitigated is by making course material available online, which allows students to catch up outside of school, and another way is by using a flipped classroom system.
Some students are better able to manage their time with nightly homework in every class, while other students do better with larger homework assignments that are spaced out over several days. Some subjects may benefit from daily drills while other subjects may lend themselves to less frequent homework projects. Mid-term transfers between schools with different schedules can be problematic in cases where the schedules are different.
| 2917415 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=2917415 |
Religion&Philosophy&Ethics | Unenumerated rights
Unenumerated rights are legal rights inferred from other rights that are implied by existing laws, such as in written constitutions, but are not themselves expressly coded or "enumerated" among the explicit writ of the law. Alternative terminology sometimes used are: implied rights, natural rights, background rights, and fundamental rights.
Unenumerated rights may become enumerated rights if they necessitate the systematization of positively enumerated rights anywhere laws would become logically incoherent, or could not be adhered to otherwise. Examples of this include federal systems where constituent member constitutions have to be interpreted in relation to their membership in the federal whole, adjudicative of whether authority is rightfully devolved or more rightly federative.
This term may be used loosely to mean any natural or intrinsic rights (such as rights innate to each individual or inherent to mankind) that are without expression or instance of articulation.
Implied rights are the political and civil freedoms that necessarily underlie the actual words of the constitution but are not themselves expressly stated directly in the constitution. Since the 1990s the High Court has discovered rights which are said to be implied by the very structure and textual form of the Constitution. Chief amongst these is an implied right to freedom of communication on political matters, which was first recognised in "Nationwide News Pty Ltd v Wills". In addition, some protections of civil liberties have been the result of the High Court's zealous attempts to safeguard the independence of, and confidence in, the Federal judiciary. A good example of this can be seen in "Kable v Director of Public Prosecutions (NSW)", in which the High Court struck down a criminal law passed by the New South Wales Parliament that was directed at a single named individual in a similar manner to a Bill of attainder. The High Court also inferred a limited right to vote from the text of the Constitution in "Roach v Electoral Commissioner", invalidating legislation that prevented all prisoners from voting.
Article 40.3 of the Irish constitution refers to and accounts for the recognition of unenumerated rights. The Supreme Court is often the main source of such rights, such as the right to bodily integrity, the right to marry and the right to earn a living, among others.
Article 22 of the Constitution of the Republic of China guarantees unenumerated freedoms and rights of the people that are not detrimental to social order or public welfare, now in effect in Taiwan.
In the United States, the Ninth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution protects against federal infringement of unenumerated rights. The text reads:The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people. The Supreme Court of the United States has also interpreted the Fourteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution to protect against state infringement of certain unenumerated rights including, among others, the right to send one's children to private school and the right to marital privacy.
The Supreme Court has found that unenumerated rights include such important rights as the right to travel, the right to vote, and the right to keep personal matters private.
| 2919686 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=2919686 |
Religion&Philosophy&Ethics | David Braine (philosopher)
David Braine (1940 – 17 February 2017) was a British analytic philosopher with interests in analytic Philosophy of religion and Metaphysics, who sought to marry the techniques and insights of analytical philosophy and Phenomenology to the Metaphysics of classical Thomism. His "The Reality of Time and the Existence of God" set out to prove the existence of God from the fact that the world enjoys continuity in time. He argued that nothing in the world could be the cause of this continuity, whence God came into the picture.
His book "The Human Person: Animal and Spirit" attempts to provide a philosophical analysis of human beings which makes life after death possible.
Due to a car accident in 1977, he became paralysed from the chest down. Braine was opposed to the legalisation of euthanasia, and based some of that opposition on his own personal experience of living with a disability.
Braine was an important, if insufficiently well-known, contributor to the renaissance of analytical Philosophy of religion.
______________ (1994) University of Notre Dame Press, paperback edition.
| 2922819 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=2922819 |
Religion&Philosophy&Ethics | Evelyn Fox Keller
Evelyn Fox Keller (born March 20, 1936) is an American physicist, author and feminist. She is currently Professor Emerita of History and Philosophy of Science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Keller's early work concentrated at the intersection of physics and biology. Her subsequent research has focused on the history and philosophy of modern biology and on gender and science.
Born in Jackson Heights, Queens to immigrants from Russia, Keller grew up in Woodside, Queens. She received her B.A. in physics from Brandeis University in 1957 and continued her studies in theoretical physics at Harvard University graduating with a Ph.D. in 1963. She became interested in molecular biology during a visit to Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory while completing her Ph.D. dissertation. Keller has also taught at Northeastern University, Cornell University, University of Maryland, Northwestern University, Princeton University, State University of New York at Purchase, New York University and in the department of rhetoric at the University of California, Berkeley.
In 2007 Keller sat on the USA advisory board of FFIPP (Faculty for Israeli-Palestinian Peace-USA), a network of Palestinian, Israeli, and International faculty, and students, working for an end of the Israeli occupation of Palestinian territories and just peace.
She first encountered feminism as a discipline while attending a conference entitled "Women and the Scientific Profession." At this conference, Erik Erikson and Bruno Bettelheim argued for more women in science based on the invaluable contributions a "specifically female genius" could make to science. Four years later, in 1969, she compiled an array of data on the experiences of women scientists and put together an argument about women in (or out of) science, based on "women's nature." She had been feeling disenchantment from her colleague publishing her team's work and she had not realized the reason behind it until she did her research.
In 1974 Keller taught her first women's studies course. Shortly after, she was invited to give a series of lectures on her work. She had never shared her personal experiences of her story of what it was like for her as a woman becoming a scientist and this lecture marked the beginning of her work as a feminist critic of science. It raised three central questions that marked her research and writing over the next decade.
One of her major works was a contribution to the book "The Gender and Science Reader". Keller's article, entitled "Secrets of God, Nature, and Life" links issues in feminism back to the Scientific Revolution in the 17th Century and the Industrial Revolution in the 18th Century. In this work, she quotes Boyle. "It may seem an ingrateful and unfilial thing to dispute against nature, that is taken by mankind for the common parent of us all. But although it be as undutiful thing, to express a want of respect for an acknowledged parent, yet I know not, why it may not be allowable to question one, that a man looks upon but as a pretend one; and it appear to me, that she is so, I think it my duty to pay my gratitude, not to I know not what, but to that deity, whose wisdom and goodness...designed to make me a man." (pg. 103) By Keller addressing Boyle's quote in this aspect, she alludes to how as soon as questionable aspects are displayed in nature, "nature" becomes "nature" and is then feminine.
Evelyn Fox Keller has documented how the masculine-identified public sphere and the feminine-identified private sphere have structured thinking in two areas of evolutionary biology: population genetics and mathematical ecology. Her concern is to show how the selection process that occurs in the context of discovery limits what we come to know. Keller argues that the assumption that the atomistic individual is the fundamental unit in nature has led population geneticists to omit sexual reproduction from their models. Though the critique of misplaced individualism is nothing new, the gender dynamics Keller reveals are. According to Keller, geneticists treat reproduction as if individuals reproduce themselves, effectively bypassing the complexities of sexual difference, the contingencies of mating, and fertilization. She likens the biologists' atomistic individual to heuristic individual portrayed by mainstream Western political and economic theorists. Keller argues further that biologists use values ascribed to the public sphere of Western culture to depict relations between individuals (while values generally attributed to the private sphere to describe relations are confused to the interior of an individual organism.)
Some scholars who study women in science have criticized the version of gender and science theory that was pioneered by Keller. Ann Hibner Koblitz has argued that Keller's theory fails to account for the great variation among different cultures and time periods. For example, the first generation of women to receive advanced university degrees in Europe were almost entirely in the natural sciences and medicine—in part because those fields at the time were much more welcoming of women than were the humanities. Koblitz and others who are interested in increasing the number of women in science have expressed concern that some of Keller's statements could undermine those efforts, notably the following:
Among the critics of Keller's gender and science theory are the mathematical physicist Mary Beth Ruskai, the former presidents of the Association for Women in Mathematics Lenore Blum and Mary Gray, and gender researchers Pnina Abir-Am and Dorinda Outram.
| 2924842 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=2924842 |
Religion&Philosophy&Ethics | Consent (BDSM)
Consent within BDSM is when a participant gives their permission for certain acts or types of relationships. It bears much in common with the concept of informed consent and is simultaneously a personal, ethical and social issue. It is an issue that attracts much attention within BDSM, resulting in competing models of consent such as Safe, sane and consensual and Risk-aware consensual kink. Observers from outside the BDSM community have also commented on the issue of consent in BDSM, sometimes referring to legal consent which is a separate and largely unrelated matter. However, the presence of explicit consent within BDSM can often have implications for BDSM and the law and, depending on the country the participants are in, may make the differences between being prosecuted or not.
Where an act has been previously consented to, the consent can be terminated at any point, and by any participant, through using a safeword. Within the BDSM community, it is generally considered a high risk activity to engage in BDSM without a safeword. Acts undertaken with a lack of explicit consent may be considered abusive and those who ignore the use of a safeword may be shunned within the BDSM subculture. One study has shown that BDSM negotiations to establish consent consist of four parts covering style of play, body parts, limits and safewords.
Consent is an explicit agreement to acts, terms and conditions. It can be confirmed verbally and/or in writing.
The underlying principle is a classical liberal idea that a person's freedom can be measured by lack of interference with their personal choices. As in classical liberalism, the harm principle comes into play. Consent, within BDSM and some academic schools of thought, is what separates legally actionable harm from legitimate personal freedom.
Informed consent is the idea that consent is offered with sufficient information and understanding of what is being agreed upon. As in larger society, an impairment of mental state or decision making abilities is considered a state in which informed, rational consent cannot be offered. Consent given under coercion and pressure may also not be accepted.
Another concept is contemporaneous consent, which is focused on when consent is offered and how it can be revoked. Legally, if someone says "no", "stop", or any other related things, you are obligated to stop. That is contemporaneous consent. This can conflict with concepts like total power exchange and consensual nonconsent. This is an area of significant conflict within BDSM communities.
Consent is a vital element in all psychological play, and consent can be granted in many ways. Some employ a written form known as a "Dungeon negotiation form"; for others a simple verbal commitment is sufficient. Consent can be limited both in duration and content.
It is not unusual to grant consent only for an hour or for an evening. When a scene lasts for more than a few hours, some might decide to draft a "scene contract" that defines what will happen and who is responsible for what. Some "contracts" can become quite detailed and run for many pages, especially if a scene is to last a weekend or more.
For long term consent, a "Slave Contract" is sometimes used. BDSM "contracts" are "only" agreements between consenting adults and are not legally binding; in fact, the possession of one may be considered illegal in some areas. Slave contracts are simply a way of defining the nature and limits of the relationship. Other couples know each other's likes and dislikes and play accordingly. Such arrangements typically use a safeword, a signal by one or more of the participants that the action in question should either stop or that the session should end completely.
Consensual non-consent, also called meta-consent and blanket consent, is a mutual agreement to be able to act as if consent has been waived. It is an agreement where comprehensive consent is given in advance, with the intent of it being irrevocable under most circumstances. This often occurs without foreknowledge of the exact actions planned.
Consensual non-consent is considered a show of extreme trust and understanding. It is controversial within BDSM circles, even often frowned upon due to concerns about abuse and safety. It is mainly limited to those in Owner/property and 24/7 Master/slave relationships.
In recent years the term has also been used for the practice in play sessions. In the past, the term consensual non-consent was reserved to committed relationships, while the play practice used the umbrella term of edge play. This expanded scope is contentious and the subject of acrimonious debates.
In limited parts of the online BDSM community, "consensual non-consent" is instead used to refer to rape play that includes the use of safe words. This use of the term is commonly frowned upon, especially among total power exchange lifestyle participants. Experienced practitioners of BDSM generally discourage others from using "consensual non-consent" to indicate rape play. This attitude arises from the belief that it is a miscommunication potentially leading to serious and irreparable psychological harm.
Negotiation is a discussion about what is acceptable and what is off limits between partners. It is a crucial element for consent within the BDSM subculture. Negotiation can be formal with a complete checklist of acceptable and unacceptable acts. It can also be informal, or ad-hoc, as part of the regular flow of a relationship. The culture of BDSM encourages a more formalized and explicit process. Clear negotiation for consent is the norm.
Informal negotiation is the process of discovering limits and interests along the way. Things are up for discussion and consent is granted on a case by case basis. However, over time the consent granted typically becomes broader before hitting a plateau. Negotiation in this sense resembles regular vanilla relationship discussions and debates.
Formal negotiation goes through a comprehensive list of questions and disclosures. This can be a broad process, setting out the boundaries for a long-term relationship. It can also be a narrow process that only addresses one or two specific actions, like negotiating for hypnotic trance or a thuddy flogging (that involving broad implements). This is fairly popular with play partner arrangements and "pick up" play in BDSM clubs, as it helps set very clear boundaries.
BDSM communities share a common language of consent. Various models are expressed as acronyms representing differing approaches towards a philosophy of consent.
SSC stands for Safe, Sane, Consensual. It is far and away the most recognizable and popular model of consent in BDSM circles, though not without criticism.
RACK stands for Risk-Aware Consensual Kink. It is the second most popular consent model. It was created to overcome perceived shortcomings of SSC.
PRICK stands for Personal Responsibility In Consensual Kink. It is an alternative to RACK that emphasizes personal responsibility for choices and consequences. It originally was said in 2002 at BDSM Overdrive. It has evolved into Personal Responsibility Informed Consensual Kink.
Other less well known models of consent in BDSM include CCC which stands for Committed, Compassionate, Consensual and the 4 C’s - Caring, Communication, Consent, Caution.
Some activities in BDSM play may be considered to fall under legal definitions of rape, assault or similar crimes or torts, and potentially open participants to prosecution. However, many legal systems include a general defense that activities performed with the victim's consent shall not be considered a crime or a tort. This raises some legal and ethical issues, such as:
These concerns apply not only to BDSM but to every kind of interaction between persons. See Consent (criminal) for the general discussion.
The issue of consent in BDSM has caused a controversy among the BDSM community in some countries, since certain activities, especially those considered to be edgeplay, remain unlawful even when consent has been freely given. In such countries, these activities will always be viewed by law enforcement as unlawful when discovered, even though the activities have been entirely private. The Spanner case in England demonstrates the point, where participants in a consensual mutual BDSM play party were arrested. At all stages of appeal the national and European Court ruled against them on the basis that a person under English law may not give consent to anything more than minor injury.
The March 5th 2007 conviction of Glenn Marcus on counts of sex trafficking and forced labor in renewed much debate on the issue of consent in BDSM, both within and outside the community. In a similar case of an accusation made by a participant that the activities had not been consensual, in April 2007 two UK men were convicted of false imprisonment in a case where a third party who had been treated like a dog asserted the matter had not been consensual.
Interested people may think that private mutual activities should not be the subject of law as a matter of public policy, a view which has some legal backing in the United States from the case of "Lawrence v. Texas" where it was effectively ruled that the state lacked the power to declare an activity illegal purely on the basis of moral opinion. As of February 2019, the law in the UK has been changed to allow for consent to acts that inflict injury.
| 2924982 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=2924982 |
Religion&Philosophy&Ethics | Hyle
In philosophy, hyle (; from ) refers to matter or stuff. It can also be the material cause underlying a change in Aristotelian philosophy. The Greeks originally had no word for matter in general, as opposed to raw material suitable for some specific purpose or other, so Aristotle adapted the word for "wood" to this purpose. The idea that everything physical is made of the same basic substance holds up well under modern science, although it may be thought of more in terms of energy or matter/energy.
Aristotle's concept of "hyle" is the principle that correlates with "eidos" (form) and this can be demonstrated in the way the philosopher described "hyle," saying it is that which receives form or definiteness, that which is formed. Aristotle explained that "By "hyle" I mean that which in itself is neither a particular thing nor of a certain quantity nor assigned to any other of the categories by which being is determined." This means that hyle is brought into existence not due to its being its agent or its own actuality but only when form attaches to it. It has been described as a plenum or a field, a conceptualization that opposed by Democritus' atomistic ontology. It is maintained that the Aristotelian concept should not be understood as a "stuff" since there is, for example, "hyle" that is intellectual as well as sensible "hyle" found in the body.
For Aristotle, "hyle" is composed of four elements - fire, water, air, and earth - but these were not considered pure substances since matter and form exist in a combination of hot, moist, dry, and cold so that everything is united to form the elements.
The Latin equivalent of the "hyle" concept - and later its medieval version - also emerged from Aristotle's notion. The Greek term's Latin equivalent was "silva", which literally meant woodland or forest. However, the Latin thinkers opted for a word that had technical sense instead of the literal meaning so that it became understood as that of which a thing is made but one that remained a substratum with changed form. The word "materia" was chosen instead to indicate a meaning not in handicraft but in the passive role that mother ("mater") plays in conception.
The matter of hyle is closely related to that of substance, in so far as both endure a change in form, or transformation. Aristotle defined primary substance as that which can neither be predicated nor attributed to something else, and he explained the transformation between the four terrestrial elements in terms of an abstract primary matter that underlies each element due to the four combinations of two properties: hot or cold and wet or dry. He stipulated that transformations between opposing elements, where both properties differ, must be analyzed as two discrete steps wherein one of the two properties changes to its contrary while the other remains unchanged (see essence and hylomorphism). For the neo-Aristotelian theorists, a corporeal substance is a hylemorphic composite, which means it is a combination of primary matter and a substantial form.
Modern substance theory differs. For example Kant's "Ding an sich", or "thing in itself", is generally described as whatever is its own cause, or alternatively as a thing whose only property is that it is that thing (or, in other words, that it has only that property). However, this notion is subject to the criticism, as by Nietzsche, that there is no way to "directly" prove the existence of any thing which has no properties, since such a thing could not possibly interact with other things and thus would be unobservable and indeterminate.
On the other hand, we may need to postulate a substance that endures through change in order to explain the nature of change—without an enduring factor that persists through change, there is no change but only a succession of unrelated events. The existence of change is hard to deny, and if we have to postulate something "unobserved" in order to explain what "is" observed, that is a valid "indirect" demonstration (by abductive reasoning). Moreover, something like a prime substance is posited by physics in the form of matter/energy.
| 2929560 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=2929560 |
Religion&Philosophy&Ethics | Émile Durkheim
David Émile Durkheim ( ; 15 April 1858 – 15 November 1917) was a French sociologist. He formally established the academic discipline of sociology and—with Karl Marx and Max Weber—is commonly cited as the principal architect of modern social science.
From his lifetime, much of Durkheim's work would be concerned with how societies could maintain their integrity and coherence in modernity, an era in which traditional social and religious ties are no longer assumed, and in which new social institutions have come into being. His first major sociological work would be (1893; "The Division of Labour in Society"), followed in 1895 by ("The Rules of Sociological Method"), the same year in which Durkheim would set up the first European department of sociology and become France's first professor of sociology. Durkheim's seminal monograph, "Le Suicide" (1897), a study of suicide rates in Catholic and Protestant populations, especially pioneered modern social research, serving to distinguish social science from psychology and political philosophy. The following year, in 1898, he established the journal "L'Année Sociologique". (1912; "The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life") presented a theory of religion, comparing the social and cultural lives of aboriginal and modern societies.
Durkheim would also be deeply preoccupied with the acceptance of sociology as a legitimate science. He refined the positivism originally set forth by Auguste Comte, promoting what could be considered as a form of epistemological realism, as well as the use of the hypothetico-deductive model in social science. For Durkheim, sociology was the science of "institutions", understanding the term in its broader meaning as the "beliefs and modes of behaviour instituted by the collectivity," with its aim being to discover structural social facts. As such, Durkheim was a major proponent of structural functionalism, a foundational perspective in both sociology and anthropology. In his view, social science should be purely holistic, in that sociology should study phenomena attributed to society at large, rather than being limited to the specific actions of individuals.
He remained a dominant force in French intellectual life until his death in 1917, presenting numerous lectures and published works on a variety of topics, including the sociology of knowledge, morality, social stratification, religion, law, education, and deviance. Durkheimian terms such as "collective consciousness" have since entered the popular lexicon.
David Émile Durkheim was born 15 April 1858 in Épinal, Lorraine, France, to Mélanie (Isidor) and Moïse Durkheim, coming into a long lineage of devout French Jews. As his father, grandfather, and great-grandfather had all been rabbis, young Durkheim began his education in a rabbinical school. However, at an early age, he switched schools, deciding not to follow in his family's footsteps. In fact, Durkheim led a completely secular life, whereby much of his work would be dedicated to demonstrating that religious phenomena stemmed from social rather than divine factors. Despite this fact, Durkheim did not sever ties with his family or with the Jewish community. Actually, many of his most prominent collaborators and students were Jewish, some even being blood related. Marcel Mauss, a notable social anthropologist of the prewar era, for instance, was his nephew. One of his nieces, Claudette Bloch (née Raphael), a marine biologist and mother of Maurice Bloch, became a noted anthropologist in her own right.
A precocious student, Durkheim entered the "École Normale Supérieure" (ENS) in 1879, at his third attempt. The entering class that year would be one of the most brilliant of the nineteenth century, as many of his classmates, such as Jean Jaurès and Henri Bergson, would go on to become major figures in France's intellectual history just as well. At the ENS, Durkheim studied under the direction of Numa Denis Fustel de Coulanges, a classicist with a social-scientific outlook, and wrote his Latin dissertation on Montesquieu. At the same time, he read Auguste Comte and Herbert Spencer, whereby Durkheim became interested in a scientific approach to society very early on in his career. This meant the first of many conflicts with the French academic system, which had no social science curriculum at the time. Durkheim found humanistic studies uninteresting, turning his attention from psychology and philosophy to ethics and, eventually, sociology. He obtained his "agrégation" in philosophy in 1882, though finishing next to last in his graduating class owing to serious illness the year before.
The opportunity for Durkheim to receive a major academic appointment in Paris was inhibited by his approach to society. From 1882 to 1887 he taught philosophy at several provincial schools. In 1885 he decided to leave for Germany, where for two years he studied sociology at the universities of Marburg, Berlin and Leipzig. As Durkheim indicated in several essays, it was in Leipzig that he learned to appreciate the value of empiricism and its language of concrete, complex things, in sharp contrast to the more abstract, clear and simple ideas of the Cartesian method. By 1886, as part of his doctoral dissertation, he had completed the draft of his "The Division of Labour in Society", and was working towards establishing the new science of sociology.
Durkheim's period in Germany resulted in the publication of numerous articles on German social science and philosophy; Durkheim was particularly impressed by the work of Wilhelm Wundt. Durkheim's articles gained recognition in France, and he received a teaching appointment in the University of Bordeaux in 1887, where he was to teach the university's first social science course. His official title was , thus he taught both pedagogy and sociology (the latter having never been taught in France before). The appointment of the social scientist to the mostly humanistic faculty was an important sign of changing times and the growing importance and recognition of the social sciences. From this position Durkheim helped reform the French school system, introducing the study of social science in its curriculum. However, his controversial beliefs that religion and morality could be explained in terms purely of social interaction earned him many critics.
Also in 1887, Durkheim married Louise Dreyfus. They would have two children, Marie and André.
The 1890s were a period of remarkable creative output for Durkheim. In 1893, he published "The Division of Labour in Society", his doctoral dissertation and fundamental statement of the nature of human society and its development. Durkheim's interest in social phenomena was spurred on by politics. France's defeat in the Franco-Prussian War led to the fall of the regime of Napoleon III, which was then replaced by the Third Republic. This in turn resulted in a backlash against the new secular and republican rule, as many people considered a vigorously nationalistic approach necessary to rejuvenate France's fading power. Durkheim, a Jew and a staunch supporter of the Third Republic with a sympathy towards socialism, was thus in the political minority, a situation that galvanized him politically. The Dreyfus affair of 1894 only strengthened his activist stance.
In 1895, he published "The Rules of Sociological Method", a manifesto stating what sociology is and how it ought to be done, and founded the first European department of sociology at the University of Bordeaux. In 1898, he founded "L'Année Sociologique", the first French social science journal. Its aim was to publish and publicize the work of what was, by then, a growing number of students and collaborators (this is also the name used to refer to the group of students who developed his sociological program). In 1897, he published "Suicide", a case study that provided an example of what a sociological monograph might look like. Durkheim was one of the pioneers of the use of quantitative methods in criminology, which he used in his study of suicide.
By 1902, Durkheim had finally achieved his goal of attaining a prominent position in Paris when he became the chair of education at the Sorbonne. Durkheim had aimed for the position earlier, but the Parisian faculty took longer to accept what some called "sociological imperialism" and admit social science to their curriculum. He became a full professor (specifically, Professor of the Science of Education) there in 1906, and in 1913 he was named Chair in "Education and Sociology". Because French universities are technically institutions for training secondary school teachers, this position gave Durkheim considerable influence—his lectures were the only ones that were mandatory for the entire student body. Durkheim had much influence over the new generation of teachers; around that time he also served as an advisor to the Ministry of Education. In 1912, he published his last major work, "The Elementary Forms of The Religious Life".
The outbreak of World War I was to have a tragic effect on Durkheim's life. His leftism was always patriotic rather than internationalist, in that he sought a secular, rational form of French life. However, the onset of the war, and the inevitable nationalist propaganda that followed, made it difficult to sustain this already nuanced position. While Durkheim actively worked to support his country in the war, his reluctance to give in to simplistic nationalist fervor (combined with his Jewish background) made him a natural target of the now-ascendant French Right. Even more seriously, the generations of students that Durkheim had trained were now being drafted to serve in the army, many of them perishing in the trenches.
Finally, Durkheim's own son, André, died on the war front in December 1915—a loss from which Durkheim never recovered. Emotionally devastated, Durkheim collapsed of a stroke in Paris on November 15, two years later in 1917. He was buried at the Montparnasse Cemetery in Paris.
In "The Rules of Sociological Method" (1895), Durkheim expressed his will to establish a method that would guarantee sociology's truly scientific character. One of the questions raised concerns the objectivity of the sociologist: how may one study an object that, from the very beginning, conditions and relates to the observer? According to Durkheim, observation must be as impartial and impersonal as possible, even though a "perfectly objective observation" in this sense may never be attained. A social fact must always be studied according to its relation with other social facts, never according to the individual who studies it. Sociology should therefore privilege comparison rather than the study of singular independent facts.
Durkheim sought to create one of the first rigorous scientific approaches to social phenomena. Along with Herbert Spencer, he was one of the first people to explain the existence and quality of different parts of a society by reference to what function they served in maintaining the quotidian (i.e. by how they make society "work"). He also agreed with Spencer's organic analogy, comparing society to a living organism. Thus his work is sometimes seen as a precursor to functionalism. Durkheim also insisted that society was more than the sum of its parts.
Unlike his contemporaries Ferdinand Tönnies and Max Weber, he did not focus on what motivates the actions of individuals (an approach associated with methodological individualism), but rather on the study of "social facts".
During his university studies at the ENS, Durkheim was influenced by two neo-Kantian scholars: Charles Bernard Renouvier and Émile Boutroux. The principles Durkheim absorbed from them included rationalism, scientific study of morality, anti-utilitarianism, and secular education. His methodology was influenced by Numa Denis Fustel de Coulanges, a supporter of the scientific method.
A fundamental influence on Durkheim's thought was the sociological positivism of Auguste Comte, who effectively sought to extend and apply the scientific method found in the natural sciences to the social sciences. According to Comte, a true social science should stress empirical facts, as well as induce general scientific laws from the relationship among these facts. There were many points on which Durkheim agreed with the positivist thesis:
A second influence on Durkheim's view of society beyond Comte's positivism was the epistemological outlook called "social realism". Although he never explicitly exposed it, Durkheim adopted a realist perspective in order to demonstrate the existence of social realities outside the individual and to show that these realities existed in the form of the objective relations of society. As an epistemology of science, "realism" can be defined as a perspective that takes as its central point of departure the view that external social realities exist in the outer world and that these realities are independent of the individual's perception of them.
This view opposes other predominant philosophical perspectives such as empiricism and positivism. Empiricists, like David Hume, had argued that all realities in the outside world are products of human sense perception, thus all realities are merely perceived: they do not exist independently of our perceptions, and have no causal power in themselves. Comte's positivism went a step further by claiming that scientific laws could be deduced from empirical observations. Going beyond this, Durkheim claimed that sociology would not only discover "apparent" laws, but would be able to discover the "inherent nature" of society.
Scholars also debate the exact influence of Jewish thought on Durkheim's work. The answer remains uncertain; some scholars have argued that Durkheim's thought is a form of secularized Jewish thought, while others argue that proving the existence of a direct influence of Jewish thought on Durkheim's achievements is difficult or impossible.
Throughout his career, Durkheim was concerned primarily with three goals. First, to establish sociology as a new academic discipline. Second, to analyse how societies could maintain their integrity and coherence in the modern era, when things such as shared religious and ethnic background could no longer be assumed. To that end he wrote much about the effect of laws, religion, education and similar forces on society and social integration. Lastly, Durkheim was concerned with the practical implications of scientific knowledge. The importance of social integration is expressed throughout Durkheim's work:
Durkheim authored some of the most programmatic statements on what sociology is and how it should be practiced. His concern was to establish sociology as a science. Arguing for a place for sociology among other sciences, he wrote, "sociology is, then, not an auxiliary of any other science; it is itself a distinct and autonomous science."
To give sociology a place in the academic world and to ensure that it is a legitimate science, it must have an object that is clear and distinct from philosophy or psychology, and its own methodology. He argued that "there is in every society a certain group of phenomena which may be differentiated from those studied by the other natural sciences."
A fundamental aim of sociology is to discover structural "social facts". The establishment of sociology as an independent, recognized academic discipline is among Durkheim's largest and most lasting legacies. Within sociology, his work has significantly influenced structuralism or structural functionalism.
Durkheim's work revolved around the study of social facts, a term he coined to describe phenomena that have an existence in and of themselves, are not bound to the actions of individuals, but have a coercive influence upon them. Durkheim argued that social facts have, "sui generis", an independent existence greater and more objective than the actions of the individuals that compose society. Only such social facts can explain the observed social phenomena. Being exterior to the individual person, social facts may thus also exercise coercive power on the various people composing society, as it can sometimes be observed in the case of formal laws and regulations, but also in situations implying the presence of informal rules, such as religious rituals or family norms. Unlike the facts studied in natural sciences, a "social" fact thus refers to a specific category of phenomena: "the determining cause of a social fact must be sought among the antecedent social facts and not among the states of the individual consciousness."
Such facts are endowed with a power of coercion, by reason of which they may control individual behaviors. According to Durkheim, these phenomena cannot be reduced to biological or psychological grounds. Social facts can be material (i.e. physical objects) or immaterial (i.e. meanings, sentiments, etc.). Though the latter cannot be seen or touched, they are external and coercive, thus becoming real and gaining "facticity". Physical objects, too, can represent both material and immaterial social facts. For example, a flag is a physical social fact that is often ingrained with various immaterial social facts (e.g. its meaning and importance).
Many social facts, however, have no material form. Even the most "individualistic" or "subjective" phenomena, such as love, freedom, or suicide, would be regarded by Durkheim as "objective" social facts. Individuals composing society do not directly cause suicide: suicide, as a social fact, exists independently in society, and is caused by other social facts—such as rules governing behavior and group attachment—whether an individual likes it or not. Whether a person "leaves" a society does not alter the "fact" that this society will "still contain" suicides. Suicide, like other immaterial social facts, exists independently of the will of an individual, cannot be eliminated, and is as influential—coercive—as physical laws like gravity. Sociology's task therefore consists of discovering the qualities and characteristics of such social facts, which can be discovered through a quantitative or experimental approach (Durkheim extensively relied on statistics).
Regarding the society itself, like social institutions in general, Durkheim saw it as a set of social facts. Even more than "what society is," Durkheim was interested in answering "how is a society created" and "what holds a society together." In "The Division of Labour in Society", Durkheim attempts to answer the latter question.
Durkheim assumes that humans are inherently egoistic, while "collective consciousness" (i.e. norms, beliefs, and values) forms the moral basis of the society, resulting in social integration. "Collective consciousness" is therefore of key importance to the society; its requisite function without which the society cannot survive. This consciousness produces the society and holds it together, while, at the same time, individuals produce collective consciousness through their interactions. Through collective consciousness human beings become aware of one another as social beings, not just animals.The totality of beliefs and sentiments common to the average members of a society forms a determinate system with a life of its own. It can be termed the collective or common consciousness.In particular, the emotional part of the collective consciousness overrides our egoism: as we are emotionally bound to culture, we act socially because we recognize it is the responsible, moral way to act. A key to forming society is social interaction, and Durkheim believes that human beings, when in a group, will inevitably act in such a way that a society is formed.
Groups, when interacting, create their own culture and attach powerful emotions to it, thus making "culture" another key social fact. Durkheim would be one of the first scholars to consider the question of culture so intensely. Durkheim was interested in cultural diversity, and how the existence of diversity nonetheless fails to destroy a society. To that, Durkheim answered that any apparent cultural diversity is overridden by a larger, common, and more generalized cultural system, and the law.
In a socio-evolutionary approach, Durkheim described the evolution of societies from mechanical solidarity to organic solidarity (one rising from mutual need). As the societies become more complex, evolving from mechanical to organic solidarity, the division of labour is counteracting and replacing collective consciousness. In the simpler societies, people are connected to others due to personal ties and traditions; in the larger, modern society they are connected due to increased reliance on others with regard to them performing their specialized tasks needed for the modern, highly complex society to survive. In mechanical solidarity, people are self-sufficient, there is little integration and thus there is the need for use of force and repression to keep society together. Also, in such societies, people have much fewer options in life. In organic solidarity, people are much more integrated and interdependent and specialization and cooperation is extensive. Progress from mechanical to organic solidarity is based first on population growth and increasing population density, second on increasing "morality density" (development of more complex social interactions) and thirdly, on the increasing specialization in workplace. One of the ways mechanical and organic societies differ is the function of law: in mechanical society the law is focused on its punitive aspect, and aims to reinforce the cohesion of the community, often by making the punishment public and extreme; whereas in the organic society the law focuses on repairing the damage done and is more focused on individuals than the community.
One of the main features of the modern, organic society is the importance, sacredness even, given to the concept—social fact—of the individual. The individual, rather than the collective, becomes the focus of rights and responsibilities, the center of public and private rituals holding the society together—a function once performed by the religion. To stress the importance of this concept, Durkheim talked of the "cult of the individual":Thus very far from there being the antagonism between the individual and society which is often claimed, moral individualism, the cult of the individual, is in fact the product of society itself. It is society that instituted it and made of man the god whose servant it is.Durkheim saw the population density and growth as key factors in the evolution of the societies and advent of modernity. As the number of people in a given area increase, so does the number of interactions, and the society becomes more complex. Growing competition between the more numerous people also leads to further division of labour. In time, the importance of the state, the law and the individual increases, while that of the religion and moral solidarity decreases.
In another example of evolution of culture, Durkheim pointed to fashion, although in this case he noted a more cyclical phenomenon. According to Durkheim, fashion serves to differentiate between lower classes and upper classes, but because lower classes want to look like the upper classes, they will eventually adapt the upper class fashion, depreciating it, and forcing the upper class to adopt a new fashion.
As the society, Durkheim noted there are several possible pathologies that could lead to a breakdown of social integration and disintegration of the society: the two most important ones are "anomie" and "forced division of labour"; lesser ones include the lack of coordination and suicide. To Durkheim, anomie refers to a lack of social norms; where too rapid of population growth reduces the amount of interaction between various groups, which in turn leads to a breakdown of understanding (i.e. norms, values, etc.). Forced division of labour, on the other hand, refers to a situation in which those who hold power, driven by their desire for profit (greed), results in people doing work that they are unsuited for. Such people are unhappy, and their desire to change the system can destabilize the society.
Durkheim's views on crime were a departure from conventional notions. He believed that crime is "bound up with the fundamental conditions of all social life" and serves a social function. He states that crime implies "not only that the way remains open to necessary changes but that in certain cases it directly prepares these changes." Examining the trial of Socrates, he argues that "his crime, namely, the independence of his thought, rendered a service not only to humanity but to his country" as "it served to prepare a new morality and faith that the Athenians needed." As such, his crime "was a useful prelude to reforms." In this sense, he saw crime as being able to release certain social tensions and so have a cleansing or purging effect in society.
The authority which the moral conscience enjoys must not be excessive; otherwise, no-one would dare to criticize it, and it would too easily congeal into an immutable form. To make progress, individual originality must be able to express itself…[even] the originality of the criminal…shall also be possible.
Durkheim thought deviance to be an essential component of a functional society. He believed that deviance had three possible effects on society:
Durkheim's thoughts on deviance contributed to Robert Merton's Strain Theory.
In "Suicide" (1897), Durkheim explores the differing suicide rates among Protestants and Catholics, arguing that stronger social control among Catholics results in lower suicide rates. According to Durkheim, Catholic society has normal levels of integration while Protestant society has low levels. Overall, Durkheim treated suicide as a social fact, explaining variations in its rate on a macro level, considering society-scale phenomena such as lack of connections between people (group attachment) and lack of regulations of behavior, rather than individuals' feelings and motivations.
Durkheim believed there was more to suicide than extremely personal individual life circumstances: for example, a loss of a job, divorce, or bankruptcy. Instead, he took suicide and explained it as a social fact instead of a result of one's circumstances. Durkheim believed that suicide was an instance of social deviance. Social deviance being any transgression of socially established norms.
He created a normative theory of suicide focusing on the conditions of group life. Proposing four different types of suicide, which include "egoistic", "altruistic", "anomic", and "fatalistic", Durkheim began his theory by plotting social regulation on the x-axis of his chart, and social integration on the y-axis:
This study has been extensively discussed by later scholars and several major criticisms have emerged. First, Durkheim took most of his data from earlier researchers, notably Adolph Wagner and Henry Morselli, who were much more careful in generalizing from their own data. Second, later researchers found that the Protestant–Catholic differences in suicide seemed to be limited to German-speaking Europe and thus may have always been the spurious reflection of other factors. Durkheim's study of suicide has been criticized as an example of the logical error termed the ecological fallacy. However, diverging views have contested whether Durkheim's work really contained an ecological fallacy. More recent authors such as Berk (2006) have also questioned the micro–macro relations underlying Durkheim's work. Some, such as Inkeles (1959), Johnson (1965), and Gibbs (1968), have claimed that Durkheim's only intent was to explain suicide "sociologically" within a holistic perspective, emphasizing that "he intended his theory to explain variation among social environments in the incidence of suicide, not the suicides of particular individuals."
Despite its limitations, Durkheim's work on suicide has influenced proponents of control theory, and is often mentioned as a classic sociological study. The book pioneered modern social research and served to distinguish social science from psychology and political philosophy.
In "The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life" (1912), Durkheim's first purpose was to identify the social origin and function of religion as he felt that religion was a source of camaraderie and solidarity. His second purpose was to identify links between certain religions in different cultures, finding a common denominator. He wanted to understand the empirical, social aspect of religion that is common to all religions and goes beyond the concepts of spirituality and God.
Durkheim defined religion as: "a unified system of beliefs and practices relative to sacred things, i.e., things set apart and forbidden—beliefs and practices which unite in one single moral community called a Church, all those who adhere to them."In this definition, Durkheim avoids references to supernatural or God. Durkheim argued that the concept of supernatural is relatively new, tied to the development of science and separation of supernatural—that which cannot be rationally explained—from natural, that which can. Thus, according to Durkheim, for early humans, everything was supernatural. Similarly, he points out that religions that give little importance to the concept of god exist, such as Buddhism, where the Four Noble Truths are much more important than any individual deity. With that, Durkheim argues, we are left with the following three concepts:
Out of those three concepts, Durkheim focused on the sacred, noting that it is at the very core of a religion:They are only collective forces hypostasized, that is to say, moral forces; they are made up of the ideas and sentiments awakened in us by the spectacle of society, and not of sensations coming from the physical world.Durkheim saw religion as the most fundamental social institution of humankind, and one that gave rise to other social forms. It was the religion that gave humanity the strongest sense of collective consciousness. Durkheim saw the religion as a force that emerged in the early hunter and gatherer societies, as the emotions collective effervescence run high in the growing groups, forcing them to act in a new ways, and giving them a sense of some hidden force driving them. Over time, as emotions became symbolized and interactions ritualized, religion became more organized, giving a rise to the division between the sacred and the profane. However, Durkheim also believed that religion was becoming less important, as it was being gradually superseded by science and the cult of an individual.Thus there is something eternal in religion which is destined to survive all the particular symbols in which religious thought has successively enveloped itself.However, even if the religion was losing its importance for Durkheim, it still laid the foundation of modern society and the interactions that governed it. And despite the advent of alternative forces, Durkheim argued that no replacement for the force of religion had yet been created. He expressed his doubt about modernity, seeing the modern times as "a period of transition and moral mediocrity."
Durkheim also argued that our primary categories for understanding the world have their origins in religion. It is religion, Durkheim writes, that gave rise to most if not all other social constructs, including the larger society. Durkheim argued that categories are produced by the society, and thus are collective creations. Thus as people create societies, they also create categories, but at the same time, they do so unconsciously, and the categories are prior to any individual's experience. In this way Durkheim attempted to bridge the divide between seeing categories as constructed out of human experience and as logically prior to that experience. Our understanding of the world is shaped by social facts; for example the notion of time is defined by being measured through a calendar, which in turn was created to allow us to keep track of our social gatherings and rituals; those in turn on their most basic level originated from religion. In the end, even the most logical and rational pursuit of science can trace its origins to religion. Durkheim states that, "Religion gave birth to all that is essential in the society.
In his work, Durkheim focused on "totemism", the religion of the Aboriginal Australians and Native Americans. Durkheim saw this religion as the most ancient religion, and focused on it as he believed its simplicity would ease the discussion of the essential elements of religion. As such, he wrote:Now the totem is the flag of the clan. It is therefore natural that the impressions aroused by the clan in individual minds—impressions of dependence and of increased vitality—should fix themselves to the idea of the totem rather than that of the clan: for the clan is too complex a reality to be represented clearly in all its complex unity by such rudimentary intelligences.Durkheim's work on religion was criticized on both empirical and theoretical grounds by specialists in the field. The most important critique came from Durkheim's contemporary, Arnold van Gennep, an expert on religion and ritual, and also on Australian belief systems. Van Gennep argued that Durkheim's views of primitive peoples and simple societies were "entirely erroneous". Van Gennep further argued that Durkheim demonstrated a lack of critical stance towards his sources, collected by traders and priests, naively accepting their veracity, and that Durkheim interpreted freely from dubious data. At the conceptual level, van Gennep pointed out Durkheim's tendency to press ethnography into a prefabricated theoretical scheme.
Despite such critiques, Durkheim's work on religion has been widely praised for its theoretical insight and whose arguments and propositions, according to Robert Alun Jones, "have stimulated the interest and excitement of several generations of sociologists irrespective of theoretical 'school' or field of specialization."
While Durkheim's work deals with a number of subjects, including suicide, the family, social structures, and social institutions, a large part of his work deals with the sociology of knowledge.
While publishing short articles on the subject earlier in his career, Durkheim's definitive statement concerning the sociology of knowledge comes in his 1912 "magnum opus", "The Elementary Forms of Religious Life". This book has as its goal not only the elucidation of the social origins and function of religion, but also the social origins and impact of society on language and logical thought. Durkheim worked largely out of a Kantian framework and sought to understand how the concepts and categories of logical thought could arise out of social life. He argued, for example, that the categories of space and time were not "a priori". Rather, the category of space depends on a society's social grouping and geographical use of space, and a group's social rhythm that determines our understanding of time. In this Durkheim sought to combine elements of rationalism and empiricism, arguing that certain aspects of logical thought common to all humans did exist, but that they were products of collective life (thus contradicting the "tabula rasa" empiricist understanding whereby categories are acquired by individual experience alone), and that they were not universal "a" "prioris" (as Kant argued) since the content of the categories differed from society to society.
Another key elements to Durkheim's theory of knowledge outlined in "Elementary Forms" is the concept of ("collective representations"). ' are the symbols and images that come to represent the ideas, beliefs, and values elaborated by a collectivity and are not reducible to individual constituents. They can include words, slogans, ideas, or any number of material items that can serve as a symbol, such as a cross, a rock, a temple, a feather etc. As Durkheim elaborates, ' are created through intense social interaction and are products of collective activity. As such, these representations have the particular, and somewhat contradictory, aspect that they exist externally to the individual—since they are created and controlled not by the individual but by society as a whole—yet, simultaneously within each individual of the society, by virtue of that individual's participation within society.
Arguably the most important "" is language, which according to Durkheim is a product of collective action. And because language is a collective action, language contains within it a history of accumulated knowledge and experience that no individual would be capable of creating on their own:If concepts were only general ideas, they would not enrich knowledge a great deal, for, as we have already pointed out, the general contains nothing more than the particular. But if before all else they are collective representations, they add to that which we can learn by our own personal experience all that wisdom and science which the group has accumulated in the course of centuries. Thinking by concepts, is not merely seeing reality on its most general side, but it is projecting a light upon the sensation which illuminates it, penetrates it and transforms it.As such, language, as a social product, literally structures and shapes our experience of reality. This discursive approach to language and society would be developed by later French philosophers, such as Michel Foucault.
Durkheim defines morality as "a system of rules for conduct." His analysis of morality is strongly marked by Immanuel Kant and his notion of duty. While Durkheim was influenced by Kant, he was highly critical of aspects of the latter's moral theory and developed his own positions.
Durkheim agrees with Kant that within morality, there is an element of obligation, "a moral authority which, by manifesting itself in certain precepts particularly important to it, confers upon [moral rules] an obligatory character." Morality tells us how to act from a position of superiority. There exists a certain, pre-established moral norm to which we must conform. It is through this view that Durkheim makes a first critique of Kant in saying that moral duties originate in society, and are not to be found in some universal moral concept such as the categorical imperative. Durkheim also argues that morality is characterized not just by this obligation, but is also something that is desired by the individual. The individual believes that by adhering to morality, they are serving the common Good, and for this reason, the individual submits voluntarily to the moral commandment.
However, in order to accomplish its aims, morality must be legitimate in the eyes of those to whom it speaks. As Durkheim argues, this moral authority is primarily to be located in religion, which is why in any religion one finds a code of morality. For Durkheim, it is only society that has the resources, the respect, and the power to cultivate within an individual both the obligatory and the desirous aspects of morality.
Durkheim has had an important impact on the development of anthropology and sociology as disciplines. The establishment of sociology as an independent, recognized academic discipline, in particular, is among Durkheim's largest and most lasting legacies. Within sociology, his work has significantly influenced structuralism, or structural functionalism. Scholars inspired by Durkheim include Marcel Mauss, Maurice Halbwachs, Célestin Bouglé, Gustave Belot, Alfred Radcliffe-Brown, Talcott Parsons, Robert K. Merton, Jean Piaget, Claude Lévi-Strauss, Ferdinand de Saussure, Michel Foucault, Clifford Geertz, Peter Berger, social reformer Patrick Hunout, and others.
More recently, Durkheim has influenced sociologists such as Steven Lukes, Robert N. Bellah, and Pierre Bourdieu. His description of "collective consciousness" also deeply influenced the Turkish nationalism of Ziya Gökalp, the founding father of Turkish sociology. Randall Collins has developed a theory of what he calls "interaction ritual chains", a synthesis of Durkheim's work on religion with that of Erving Goffman's micro-sociology. Goffman himself was also deeply influenced by Durkheim in his development of the "interaction order".
Outside of sociology, Durkheim has influenced philosophers, including Henri Bergson and Emmanuel Levinas, and his ideas can be identified, inexplicitly, in the work of certain structuralist theorists of the 1960s, such as Alain Badiou, Louis Althusser, and Michel Foucault.
Much of Durkheim's work remains unacknowledged in philosophy, despite its direct relevance. As proof, one can look to John Searle, whose book, "The Construction of Social Reality", elaborates a theory of social facts and collective representations that Searle believed to be a landmark work that would bridge the gap between analytic and continental philosophy. Neil Gross, however, demonstrates how Searle's views on society are more or less a reconstitution of Durkheim's theories of social facts, social institutions, collective representations, and the like. Searle's ideas are thus open to the same criticisms as Durkheim's. Searle responded by arguing that Durkheim's work was worse than he had originally believed, and, admitting that he had not read much of Durkheim's work: "Because Durkheim’s account seemed so impoverished I did not read any further in his work." Stephen Lukes, however, responded to Searle's reply to Gross, refuting, point by point, the allegations that Searle makes against Durkheim, essentially upholding the argument of Gross, that Searle's work bears great resemblance to that of Durkheim's. Lukes attributes Searle's miscomprehension of Durkheim's work to the fact that Searle, quite simply, never read Durkheim.
Margaret Gilbert, a contemporary British philosopher of social phenomena, has offered a close, sympathetic reading of Durkheim's discussion of social facts in chapter 1 and the prefaces of "The Rules of Sociological Method". In her 1989 book, "On Social Facts"—the title of which may represent an homage to Durkheim, alluding to his ""—Gilbert argues that some of his statements that may seem to be philosophically untenable are important and fruitful.
Published posthumously
| 38218 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=38218 |
Religion&Philosophy&Ethics | Plotinus
Plotinus (; , "Plōtinos"; – 270) was a major Hellenistic philosopher who lived in Roman Egypt. In his philosophy, described in the "Enneads", there are three principles: the One, the Intellect, and the Soul. His teacher was Ammonius Saccas, who was of the Platonic tradition. Historians of the 19th century invented the term Neoplatonism and applied it to Plotinus and his philosophy, which was influential during Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages. Much of the biographical information about Plotinus comes from Porphyry's preface to his edition of Plotinus' "Enneads". His metaphysical writings have inspired centuries of Pagan, Jewish, Christian, Gnostic, and Islamic metaphysicians and mystics, including developing precepts that influence mainstream theological concepts within religions, such as his work on duality of the One in two metaphysical states. This concept is similar to the Christian notion of Jesus being both god and man, a foundational idea in Christian theology.
Porphyry reported that Plotinus was 66 years old when he died in 270, the second year of the reign of the emperor Claudius II, thus giving us the year of his teacher's birth as around 205. Eunapius reported that Plotinus was born in the Deltaic Lycopolis in Egypt, which has led to speculations that he may have been either native Egyptian, Hellenized Egyptian, Roman, or Greek.
Plotinus had an inherent distrust of materiality (an attitude common to Platonism), holding to the view that phenomena were a poor image or mimicry (mimesis) of something "higher and intelligible" (VI.I) which was the "truer part of genuine Being". This distrust extended to the body, including his own; it is reported by Porphyry that at one point he refused to have his portrait painted, presumably for much the same reasons of dislike. Likewise Plotinus never discussed his ancestry, childhood, or his place or date of birth. From all accounts his personal and social life exhibited the highest moral and spiritual standards.
Plotinus took up the study of philosophy at the age of twenty-seven, around the year 232, and travelled to Alexandria to study. There he was dissatisfied with every teacher he encountered until an acquaintance suggested he listen to the ideas of Ammonius Saccas. Upon hearing Ammonius lecture, he declared to his friend, "this was the man I was looking for," and began to study intently under his new instructor. Besides Ammonius, Plotinus was also influenced by the works of Alexander of Aphrodisias, Numenius, and various Stoics.
After spending the next eleven years in Alexandria, he then decided, at the age of around 38, to investigate the philosophical teachings of the Persian philosophers and the Indian philosophers. In the pursuit of this endeavor he left Alexandria and joined the army of Gordian III as it marched on Persia. However, the campaign was a failure, and on Gordian's eventual death Plotinus found himself abandoned in a hostile land, and only with difficulty found his way back to safety in Antioch.
At the age of forty, during the reign of Philip the Arab, he came to Rome, where he stayed for most of the remainder of his life. There he attracted a number of students. His innermost circle included Porphyry, Amelius Gentilianus of Tuscany, the Senator Castricius Firmus, and Eustochius of Alexandria, a doctor who devoted himself to learning from Plotinus and attending to him until his death. Other students included: Zethos, an Arab by ancestry who died before Plotinus, leaving him a legacy and some land; Zoticus, a critic and poet; Paulinus, a doctor of Scythopolis; and Serapion from Alexandria. He had students amongst the Roman Senate beside Castricius, such as Marcellus Orontius, Sabinillus, and Rogantianus. Women were also numbered amongst his students, including Gemina, in whose house he lived during his residence in Rome, and her daughter, also Gemina; and Amphiclea, the wife of Ariston the son of Iamblichus. Finally, Plotinus was a correspondent of the philosopher Cassius Longinus.
While in Rome Plotinus also gained the respect of the Emperor Gallienus and his wife Salonina. At one point Plotinus attempted to interest Gallienus in rebuilding an abandoned settlement in Campania, known as the 'City of Philosophers', where the inhabitants would live under the constitution set out in Plato's "Laws". An Imperial subsidy was never granted, for reasons unknown to Porphyry, who reports the incident.
Porphyry subsequently went to live in Sicily, where word reached him that his former teacher had died. The philosopher spent his final days in seclusion on an estate in Campania which his friend Zethos had bequeathed him. According to the account of Eustochius, who attended him at the end, Plotinus' final words were: "Try to raise the divine in yourselves to the divine in the all." Eustochius records that a snake crept under the bed where Plotinus lay, and slipped away through a hole in the wall; at the same moment the philosopher died.
Plotinus wrote the essays that became the "Enneads" (from Greek "ἐννέα" (ennéa), or group of nine) over a period of several years from "ca." 253 until a few months before his death seventeen years later. Porphyry makes note that the "Enneads", before being compiled and arranged by himself, were merely the enormous collection of notes and essays which Plotinus used in his lectures and debates, rather than a formal book. Plotinus was unable to revise his own work due to his poor eyesight, yet his writings required extensive editing, according to Porphyry: his master's handwriting was atrocious, he did not properly separate his words, and he cared little for niceties of spelling. Plotinus intensely disliked the editorial process, and turned the task to Porphyry, who not only polished them but put them into the arrangement we now have.
Plotinus taught that there is a supreme, totally transcendent "One", containing no division, multiplicity, or distinction; beyond all categories of being and non-being. His "One" "cannot be any existing thing", nor is it merely the sum of all things (compare the Stoic doctrine of disbelief in non-material existence), but "is prior to all existents". Plotinus identified his "One" with the concept of 'Good' and the principle of 'Beauty'. (I.6.9)
His "One" concept encompassed thinker and object. Even the self-contemplating intelligence (the noesis of the nous) must contain duality. "Once you have uttered 'The Good,' add no further thought: by any addition, and in proportion to that addition, you introduce a deficiency." (III.8.11) Plotinus denies sentience, self-awareness or any other action ("ergon") to the One (τὸ Ἕν, "to En"; V.6.6). Rather, if we insist on describing it further, we must call the One a sheer potentiality ("dynamis") without which nothing could exist. (III.8.10) As Plotinus explains in both places and elsewhere (e.g. V.6.3), it is impossible for the One to be Being or a self-aware Creator God. At (V.6.4), Plotinus compared the One to "light", the Divine Intellect/Nous (Νοῦς, "Nous"; first will towards Good) to the "Sun", and lastly the Soul (Ψυχή, "Psyche") to the "Moon" whose light is merely a "derivative conglomeration of light from the 'Sun'". The first light could exist without any celestial body.
The One, being beyond all attributes including being and non-being, is the source of the world—but not through any act of creation, willful or otherwise, since activity cannot be ascribed to the unchangeable, immutable One. Plotinus argues instead that the multiple cannot exist without the simple. The "less perfect" must, of necessity, "emanate", or issue forth, from the "perfect" or "more perfect". Thus, all of "creation" emanates from the One in succeeding stages of lesser and lesser perfection. These stages are not temporally isolated, but occur throughout time as a constant process.
The One is not just an intellectual concept but something that can be experienced, an experience where one goes beyond all multiplicity. Plotinus writes, "We ought not even to say that he will "see", but he will "be" that which he sees, if indeed it is possible any longer to distinguish between seer and seen, and not boldly to affirm that the two are one."
Superficially considered, Plotinus seems to offer an alternative to the orthodox Christian notion of creation "ex nihilo" (out of nothing), although Plotinus never mentions Christianity in any of his works. The metaphysics of emanation (ἀπορροή "aporrhoe" (ΙΙ.3.2) or ἀπόρροια "aporrhoia" (II.3.11)), however, just like the metaphysics of Creation, confirms the absolute transcendence of the One or of the Divine, as the source of the Being of all things that yet remains transcendent of them in its own nature; the One is in no way affected or diminished by these emanations, just as the Christian God in no way is affected by some sort of exterior "nothingness". Plotinus, using a venerable analogy that would become crucial for the (largely Neoplatonic) metaphysics of developed Christian thought, likens the One to the Sun which emanates light indiscriminately without thereby diminishing itself, or reflection in a mirror which in no way diminishes or otherwise alters the object being reflected.
The first emanation is "Nous" (Divine Mind, "Logos", Order, Thought, Reason), identified metaphorically with the Demiurge in Plato's "Timaeus". It is the first Will toward Good. From "Nous" proceeds the World Soul, which Plotinus subdivides into upper and lower, identifying the lower aspect of Soul with nature. From the world soul proceeds individual human souls, and finally, matter, at the lowest level of being and thus the least perfected level of the cosmos. Plotinus asserted the ultimately divine nature of material creation since it ultimately derives from the One, through the mediums of "Nous" and the world soul. It is by the Good or through beauty that we recognize the One, in material things and then in the Forms. (I.6.6 and I.6.9)
The essentially devotional nature of Plotinus' philosophy may be further illustrated by his concept of attaining ecstatic union with the One ("henosis"). Porphyry relates that Plotinus attained such a union four times during the years he knew him. This may be related to enlightenment, liberation, and other concepts of mystical union common to many Eastern and Western traditions.
Authentic human happiness for Plotinus consists of the true human identifying with that which is the best in the universe. Because happiness is beyond anything physical, Plotinus stresses the point that worldly fortune does not control true human happiness, and thus “… there exists no single human being that does not either potentially or effectively possess this thing we hold to constitute happiness.” (Enneads I.4.4) The issue of happiness is one of Plotinus’ greatest imprints on Western thought, as he is one of the first to introduce the idea that eudaimonia (happiness) is attainable only within consciousness.
The true human is an incorporeal contemplative capacity of the soul, and superior to all things corporeal. It then follows that real human happiness is independent of the physical world. Real happiness is, instead, dependent on the metaphysical and authentic human being found in this highest capacity of Reason. “For man, and especially the Proficient, is not the Couplement of Soul and body: the proof is that man can be disengaged from the body and disdain its nominal goods.” (Enneads I.4.14) The human who has achieved happiness will not be bothered by sickness, discomfort, etc., as his focus is on the greatest things. Authentic human happiness is the utilization of the most authentically human capacity of contemplation. Even in daily, physical action, the flourishing human’s “… Act is determined by the higher phase of the Soul.” (Enneads III.4.6) Even in the most dramatic arguments Plotinus considers (if the Proficient is subject to extreme physical torture, for example), he concludes this only strengthens his claim of true happiness being metaphysical, as the truly happy human being would understand that which is being tortured is merely a body, not the conscious self, and happiness could persist.
Plotinus offers a comprehensive description of his conception of a person who has achieved eudaimonia. “The perfect life” involves a man who commands reason and contemplation. (Enneads I.4.4) A happy person will not sway between happy and sad, as many of Plotinus' contemporaries believed. Stoics, for example, question the ability of someone to be happy (presupposing happiness is contemplation) if they are mentally incapacitated or even asleep. Plotinus disregards this claim, as the soul and true human do not sleep or even exist in time, nor will a living human who has achieved eudaimonia suddenly stop using its greatest, most authentic capacity just because of the body’s discomfort in the physical realm. “… The Proficient’s will is set always and only inward.” (Enneads I.4.11)
Overall, happiness for Plotinus is "... a flight from this world's ways and things." (Theaet. 176) and a focus on the highest, i.e. Forms and the One.
Henosis is the word for mystical "oneness", "union", or "unity" in classical Greek. In Platonism, and especially Neoplatonism, the goal of henosis is union with what is fundamental in reality: the One (τὸ Ἕν), the Source, or Monad.
As is specified in the writings of Plotinus on henology, one can reach a state of tabula rasa, a blank state where the individual may grasp or merge with The One. This absolute simplicity means that the nous or the person is then dissolved, completely absorbed back into the Monad. Here within the "Enneads" of Plotinus the Monad can be referred to as the Good above the demiurge. The Monad or dunamis (force) is of one singular expression (the will or the one which is the good); all is contained in the Monad and the Monad is all (pantheism). All division is reconciled in the one; the final stage before reaching singularity, called duality (dyad), is completely reconciled in the Monad, Source or One (see monism). As the one source or substance of all things, the Monad is all encompassing. As infinite and indeterminate all is reconciled in the dunamis or one. It is the demiurge or second emanation that is the nous in Plotinus. It is the demiurge (creator, action, energy) or nous that "perceives" and therefore causes the force (potential or One) to manifest as energy, or the dyad called the material world. Nous as being; being and perception (intellect) manifest what is called soul (World Soul).
Henosis for Plotinus was defined in his works as a reversing of the ontological process of consciousness via meditation (in the Western mind to uncontemplate) toward no thought (Nous or demiurge) and no division (dyad) within the individual (being). Plotinus words his teachings to reconcile not only Plato with Aristotle but also various World religions that he had personal contact with during his various travels. Plotinus' works have an ascetic character in that they reject matter as an illusion (non-existent). Matter was strictly treated as immanent, with matter as essential to its being, having no true or transcendential character or essence, substance or ousia (οὐσία). This approach is called philosophical Idealism.
For several centuries after the Protestant Reformation, Neo-Platonism was condemned as a decadent and 'oriental' distortion of Platonism. In a famous 1929 essay, E. R. Dodds showed that key conceptions of Neo-Platonism could be traced from their origin in Plato's dialogues, through his immediate followers (e.g., Speusippus) and the Neo-Pythagoreans, to Plotinus and the Neo-Platonists. Thus Plotinus' philosophy was, he argued, 'not the starting-point of Neo-Platonism but its intellectual culmination.' Further research reinforced this view and by 1954 Merlan could say 'The present tendency is toward bridging rather than widening the gap separating Platonism from Neo-Platonism.'
Since the 1950s, the Tübingen School of Plato interpretation has argued that the so-called 'unwritten doctrines' of Plato debated by Aristotle and the Early Academy strongly resemble Plotinus's metaphysics. In this case, the Neo-Platonic reading of Plato would be, at least in this central area, historically justified. This implies that Neo-Platonism is less of an innovation than it appears without the recognition of Plato's unwritten doctrines. Advocates of the Tübingen School emphasize this advantage of their interpretation. They see Plotinus as advancing a tradition of thought begun by Plato himself. Plotinus's metaphysics, at least in broad outline, was therefore already familiar to the first generation of Plato's students. This confirms Plotinus' own view, for he considered himself not the inventor of a system but the faithful interpreter of Plato's doctrines.
At least two modern conferences within Hellenic philosophy fields of study have been held in order to address what Plotinus stated in his tract "Against the Gnostics" and to whom he was addressing it, in order to separate and clarify the events and persons involved in the origin of the term "Gnostic". From the dialogue, it appears that the word had an origin in the Platonic and Hellenistic tradition long before the group calling themselves "Gnostics"—or the group covered under the modern term "Gnosticism"—ever appeared. It would seem that this shift from Platonic to Gnostic usage has led many people to confusion. The strategy of sectarians taking Greek terms from philosophical contexts and re-applying them to religious contexts was popular in Christianity, the Cult of Isis and other ancient religious contexts including Hermetic ones (see Alexander of Abonutichus for an example).
According to A. H. Armstrong, Plotinus and the Neoplatonists viewed Gnosticism as a form of heresy or sectarianism to the Pythagorean and Platonic philosophy of the Mediterranean and Middle East. Also according to Armstrong, Plotinus accused them of using senseless jargon and being overly dramatic and insolent in their distortion of Plato's ontology."
Armstrong argues that Plotinus attacks his opponents as untraditional, irrational and immoral and arrogant. Armstrong believed that Plotinus also attacks them as elitist and blasphemous to Plato for the Gnostics despising the material world and its maker.
For decades, Armstrong's was the only translation available of Plotinus. For this reason, his claims were authoritative. However, a modern translation by Lloyd P. Gerson doesn't necessarily support all of Armstrong's views. Unlike Armstrong, Gerson didn't find Plotinus to be so vitriolic against the Gnostics. According to Gerson:
Plotinus seems to direct his attacks at a very specific sect of Gnostics, most notably a sect of Christian Gnostics that held anti-polytheistic and anti-daemon views, and that preached salvation was possible without struggle. At one point, Plotinus makes clear that his major grudge is the way Gnostics 'misused' Plato's teachings, and not their own teachings themselves:
The Neoplatonic movement (though Plotinus would have simply referred to himself as a philosopher of Plato) seems to be motivated by the desire of Plotinus to revive the pagan philosophical tradition. Plotinus was not claiming to innovate with the "Enneads", but to clarify aspects of the works of Plato that he considered misrepresented or misunderstood. Plotinus does not claim to be an innovator, but rather a communicator of a tradition. Plotinus referred to tradition as a way to interpret Plato's intentions. Because the teachings of Plato were for members of the academy rather than the general public, it was easy for outsiders to misunderstand Plato's meaning. However, Plotinus attempted to clarify how the philosophers of the academy had not arrived at the same conclusions (such as misotheism or dystheism of the creator God as an answer to the problem of evil) as the targets of his criticism.
Plotinus seems to be one of the first to argue against the still popular notion of causal astrology. In the late tractate 2.3, "Are the stars causes?", Plotinus makes the argument that specific stars influencing one's fortune (a common Hellenistic theme) attributes irrationality to a perfect universe, and invites moral depravity. He does, however, claim the stars and planets are ensouled, as witnessed by their movement.
The emperor Julian the Apostate was deeply influenced by Neoplatonism, as was Hypatia of Alexandria. Neoplatonism influenced many Christians as well, including Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite. St. Augustine, though often referred to as a "Platonist," acquired his Platonist philosophy through the mediation of the Neoplatonist teachings of Plotinus.
Plotinus' philosophy had an influence on the development of Christian theology. In "A History of Western Philosophy", philosopher Bertrand Russell wrote that:
The Eastern Orthodox position on "energy," for example, is often contrasted with the position of the Roman Catholic Church, and in part this is attributed to varying interpretations of Aristotle and Plotinus, either through Thomas Aquinas for the Roman Catholics or Gregory Palamas for the Orthodox Christians.
Neoplatonism and the ideas of Plotinus influenced medieval Islam as well, since the Sunni Abbasids fused Greek concepts into sponsored state texts, and found great influence amongst the Ismaili Shia and Persian philosophers as well, such as Muhammad al-Nasafi and Abu Yaqub Sijistani. By the 11th century, Neoplatonism was adopted by the Fatimid state of Egypt, and taught by their da'i. Neoplatonism was brought to the Fatimid court by Hamid al-Din al-Kirmani, although his teachings differed from Nasafi and Sijistani, who were more aligned with the original teachings of Plotinus. The teachings of Kirmani in turn influenced philosophers such as Nasir Khusraw of Persia.
As with Islam and Christianity, Neoplatonism in general and Plotinus in particular influenced speculative thought. Notable thinkers expressing Neoplatonist themes are Solomon ibn Gabirol (Latin: Avicebron) and Moses ben Maimon (Latin: Maimonides). As with Islam and Christianity, apophatic theology and the privative nature of evil are two prominent themes that such thinkers picked up from either Plotinus or his successors.
In the Renaissance the philosopher Marsilio Ficino set up an Academy under the patronage of Cosimo de Medici in Florence, mirroring that of Plato. His work was of great importance in reconciling the philosophy of Plato directly with Christianity. One of his most distinguished pupils was Pico della Mirandola, author of "An Oration On the Dignity of Man".
In England, Plotinus was the cardinal influence on the 17th-century school of the Cambridge Platonists, and on numerous writers from Samuel Taylor Coleridge to W. B. Yeats and Kathleen Raine.
Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan and Ananda Coomaraswamy used the writing of Plotinus in their own texts as a superlative elaboration upon Indian monism, specifically Upanishadic and Advaita Vedantic thought. Coomaraswamy has compared Plotinus' teachings to the Hindu school of Advaita Vedanta ("advaita" meaning "not two" or "non-dual").
Advaita Vedanta and Neoplatonism have been compared by J. F. Staal, Frederick Copleston, Aldo Magris and Mario Piantelli, Radhakrishnan, Gwen Griffith-Dickson, and John Y. Fenton.
The joint influence of Advaitin and Neoplatonic ideas on Ralph Waldo Emerson was considered by Dale Riepe in 1967.
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Religion&Philosophy&Ethics | Epicureanism
Epicureanism is a system of philosophy founded around 307 BC based upon the teachings of the ancient Greek philosopher Epicurus. Epicureanism was originally a challenge to Platonism. Later its main opponent became Stoicism.
Some writings by Epicurus have survived. Some scholars consider the epic poem "De rerum natura" (Latin for "On the Nature of Things") by Lucretius to present in one unified work the core arguments and theories of Epicureanism. Many of the scrolls unearthed at the Villa of the Papyri at Herculaneum are Epicurean texts. At least some are thought to have belonged to the Epicurean philosopher Philodemus.
Epicurus was an atomic materialist, following in the steps of Democritus. His materialism led him to a general attack on superstition and divine intervention. Following the Cyrenaic philosopher Aristippus, Epicurus believed that the greatest good was to seek modest, sustainable pleasure in the form of a state of ataraxia (tranquility and freedom from fear) and aponia (the absence of bodily pain) through knowledge of the workings of the world and limiting desires. The combination of these two states constitutes happiness in its highest form. Correspondingly, Epicurus and his followers shunned politics because it could lead to frustrations and ambitions which can directly conflict with the Epicurean pursuit for peace of mind and virtues.
Although Epicureanism is a form of hedonism insofar as it declares pleasure to be its sole intrinsic goal, the concept that the absence of pain and fear constitutes the greatest pleasure, and its advocacy of a simple life, make it very different from "hedonism" as colloquially understood.
Epicureanism flourished in the Late Hellenistic era and during the Roman era, and many Epicurean communities were established, such as those in Antiochia, Alexandria, Rhodes, and Herculaneum. By the late 3rd Century CE Epicureanism all but died out, being opposed by other philosophies (mainly Neoplatonism) that were now in the ascendant. Interest in Epicureanism was resurrected in the Age of Enlightenment and continues in the modern era.
In Mytilene, the capital of the island Lesbos, and then in Lampsacus, Epicurus taught and gained followers. In Athens, Epicurus bought a property for his school called "Garden", later the name of Epicurus' school. Its members included Hermarchus, Idomeneus, Colotes, Polyaenus, and Metrodorus. Epicurus emphasized friendship as an important ingredient of happiness, and the school seems to have been a moderately ascetic community which rejected the political limelight of Athenian philosophy. They were fairly cosmopolitan by Athenian standards, including women and slaves. Some members were also vegetarians as, from slender evidence, Epicurus did not eat meat, although no prohibition against eating meat was made.
The school's popularity grew and it became, along with Stoicism, Platonism, Peripateticism, and Pyrrhonism, one of the dominant schools of Hellenistic philosophy, lasting strongly through the later Roman Empire. Another major source of information is the Roman politician and philosopher Cicero, although he was highly critical, denouncing the Epicureans as unbridled hedonists, devoid of a sense of virtue and duty, and guilty of withdrawing from public life. Another ancient source is Diogenes of Oenoanda, who composed a large inscription at Oenoanda in Lycia.
Deciphered carbonized scrolls obtained from the library at the Villa of the Papyri in Herculaneum contain a large number of works by Philodemus, a late Hellenistic Epicurean, and Epicurus himself, attesting to the school's enduring popularity. Diogenes reports slanderous stories, circulated by Epicurus' opponents. With growing dominance of Neoplatonism and Peripateticism, and later, Christianity, Epicureanism declined. By the late third century CE, there was little trace of its existence. The early Christian writer Lactantius criticizes Epicurus at several points throughout his "Divine Institutes". In Dante Alighieri's "Divine Comedy", the Epicureans are depicted as heretics suffering in the sixth circle of hell. In fact, Epicurus appears to represent the ultimate heresy. The word for a heretic in the Talmudic literature is "Apiqoros" ().
In the 17th century, the French Franciscan priest, scientist and philosopher Pierre Gassendi wrote two books forcefully reviving Epicureanism. Shortly thereafter, and clearly influenced by Gassendi, Walter Charleton published several works on Epicureanism in English. Attacks by Christians continued, most forcefully by the Cambridge Platonists.
In the early modern period, scientists adopted atomist theories, while materialist philosophers embraced Epicurus' hedonist ethics and restated his objections to natural teleology.
Epicureanism argued that pleasure was the chief good in life. Hence, Epicurus advocated living in such a way as to derive the greatest amount of pleasure possible during one's lifetime, yet doing so moderately in order to avoid the suffering incurred by overindulgence in such pleasure. Emphasis was placed on pleasures of the mind rather than on physical pleasures. Unnecessary and, especially, artificially produced desires were to be suppressed. Since the political life could give rise to desires that could disturb virtue and one's peace of mind, such as a lust for power or a desire for fame, participation in politics was discouraged. Further, Epicurus sought to eliminate the fear of the gods and of death, seeing those two fears as chief causes of strife in life. Epicurus actively recommended against passionate love, and believed it best to avoid marriage altogether. He viewed recreational sex as a natural, but not necessary desire that should be generally avoided.
The Epicurean understanding of justice was inherently self-interested. Justice was deemed good because it was seen as mutually beneficial. Individuals would not act unjustly even if the act was initially unnoticed because of possibly being caught and punished. Both punishment and fear of punishment would cause a person disturbance and prevent them from being happy.
Epicurus laid great emphasis on developing friendships as the basis of a satisfying life.
While the pursuit of pleasure formed the focal point of the philosophy, this was largely directed to the "static pleasures" of minimizing pain, anxiety and suffering. In fact, Epicurus referred to life as a "bitter gift".
Epicureanism rejects immortality. It believes in the soul, but suggests that the soul is mortal and material, just like the body. Epicurus rejected any possibility of an afterlife, while still contending that one need not fear death: "Death is nothing to us; for that which is dissolved, is without sensation, and that which lacks sensation is nothing to us." From this doctrine arose the Epicurean Epitaph: "Non fui, fui, non sum, non curo" ("I was not; I was; I am not; I do not care"), which is inscribed on the gravestones of his followers and seen on many ancient gravestones of the Roman Empire. This quotation is often used today at humanist funerals.
Epicureanism bases its ethics on a hedonistic set of values. In the most basic sense, Epicureans see pleasure as the purpose of life. As evidence for this, Epicureans say that nature seems to command us to avoid pain, and they point out that all animals try to avoid pain as much as possible. Epicureans had a very specific understanding of what the greatest pleasure was, and the focus of their ethics was on the avoidance of pain rather than seeking out pleasure.
Epicureanism divided pleasure into two broad categories: "pleasures of the body" and "pleasures of the mind".
The Epicureans further divided each of these types of pleasures into two categories: "kinetic pleasure" and "katastematic pleasure".
From this understanding, Epicureans concluded that the greatest pleasure a person could reach was the complete removal of all pain, both physical and mental. The ultimate goal then of Epicurean ethics was to reach a state of "aponia" and "ataraxia". In order to do this an Epicurean had to control their desires, because desire itself was seen as painful. Not only will controlling one's desires bring about "aponia", as one will rarely suffer from not being physically satisfied, but controlling one's desires will also help to bring about "ataraxia" because one will not be anxious about becoming discomforted since one would have so few desires anyway.
Epicurus distinguishes three kinds of desires: the natural and necessary, the natural but not necessary, and those that are neither natural nor necessary.
If one follows only natural and necessary desires, then, according to Epicurus, one would be able to reach "aponia" and "ataraxia" and thereby the highest form of happiness.
Epicurus was also an early thinker to develop the notion of justice as a social contract. He defined justice as an agreement made by people not to harm each other. The point of living in a society with laws and punishments is to be protected from harm so that one is free to pursue happiness. Because of this, laws that do not contribute to promoting human happiness are not just. He gave his own unique version of the ethic of reciprocity, which differs from other formulations by emphasizing minimizing harm and maximizing happiness for oneself and others:"It is impossible to live a pleasant life without living wisely and well and justly, and it is impossible to live wisely and well and justly without living a pleasant life."
Epicureanism incorporated a relatively full account of the social contract theory, and in part attempts to address issues with the society described in Plato's "Republic". The social contract theory established by Epicureanism is based on mutual agreement, not divine decree.
Epicurean ideas on politics disagree with other philosophical traditions, namely the Stoic, Platonist and Aristotelian traditions. To Epicureans all our social relations are a matter of how we perceive each other, of customs and traditions. No one is inherently of higher value or meant to dominate another. That is because there is no metaphysical basis for the superiority of one kind of person, all people are made of the same atomic material and are thus naturally equal. Epicureans also discourage political participation and other involvement in politics. However Epicureans are not apolitical, it is possible that some political association could be seen as beneficial by some Epicureans. Some political associations could lead to certain benefits to the individual that would help to maximize pleasure and avoid physical or mental distress.
The avoidance or freedom from hardship and fear is ideal to the Epicureans. While this avoidance or freedom could conceivably be achieved through political means it was insisted by Epicurus that involvement in politics would not release one from fear and he advised against a life of politics. Epicurus also discouraged contributing to political society by starting a family, as the benefits of a wife and children are outweighed by the trouble brought about by having a family. Instead Epicurus encouraged a formation of a community of friends outside the traditional political state. This community of virtuous friends would focus on internal affairs and justice.
However, Epicureanism is adaptable to circumstance as is the Epicurean approach to politics. The same approaches will not always work in protection from pain and fear. In some situations it will be more beneficial to have a family and in other situations it will be more beneficial to participate in politics. It is ultimately up to the Epicurean to analyze their circumstance and take whatever action befits the situation.
Epicureanism does not deny the existence of the gods; rather it denies their involvement in the world. According to Epicureanism, the gods do not interfere with human lives or the rest of the universe in any way. The manner in which the Epicurean gods exist is still disputed. Some scholars say that Epicureanism believes that the gods exist outside the mind as material objects (the realist position), while others assert that the gods only exist in our minds as ideals (the idealist position). The realist position holds that Epicureans understand the gods as existing as physical and immortal beings made of atoms that reside somewhere in reality. However, the gods are completely separate from the rest of reality; they are uninterested in it, play no role in it, and remain completely undisturbed by it. Instead, the gods live in what is called the "metakosmia", or the space between worlds. Contrarily, the idealist position holds that Epicurus did not actually conceive of the gods as existing in reality. Rather, Epicurus is said to have viewed the gods as just idealized forms of the best human life, and it is thought that the gods were emblematic of the life one should aspire towards. The debate between these two positions was revived by A. A. Long and David Sedley in their 1987 book, "The Hellenistic Philosophers", in which the two argued in favor of the idealist position. While a scholarly consensus has yet to be reached, the realist position remains the prevailing viewpoint at this time.
Epicureanism also offered arguments against the existence of the gods in the manner proposed by other belief systems. The "Riddle of Epicurus", or "Problem of evil", is a famous argument against the existence of an all-powerful and providential God or gods. As recorded by Lactantius:
This type of "trilemma" argument (God is omnipotent, God is good, but Evil exists) was one favoured by the ancient Greek skeptics, and this argument may have been wrongly attributed to Epicurus by Lactantius, who, from his Christian perspective, regarded Epicurus as an atheist. According to Reinhold F. Glei, it is settled that the argument of theodicy is from an academical source which is not only not Epicurean, but even anti-Epicurean. The earliest extant version of this "trilemma" appears in the writings of the Pyrrhonist philosopher Sextus Empiricus.
Parallels may be drawn to Jainism and Buddhism, which similarly emphasize a lack of divine interference and aspects of its atomism. Epicureanism also resembles Buddhism in its temperateness, including the belief that great excess leads to great dissatisfaction.
Epicurean physics held that the entire universe consisted of two things: matter and void. Matter is made up of atoms, which are tiny bodies that have only the unchanging qualities of shape, size, and weight. Atoms were felt to be unchanging because the Epicureans believed that the world was ordered and that changes had to have specific and consistent sources, e.g. a plant species only grows from a seed of the same species.
Epicurus holds that there must be an infinite supply of atoms, although only a finite number of types of atoms, as well as an infinite amount of void. Epicurus explains this position in his letter to Herodotus:Moreover, the sum of things is unlimited both by reason of the multitude of the atoms and the extent of the void. For if the void were infinite and bodies finite, the bodies would not have stayed anywhere but would have been dispersed in their course through the infinite void, not having any supports or counterchecks to send them back on their upward rebound. Again, if the void were finite, the infinity of bodies would not have anywhere to be.Because of the infinite supply of atoms, there are an infinite amount of worlds, or "cosmoi". Some of these worlds could be vastly different than our own, some quite similar, and all of the worlds were separated from each other by vast areas of void ("metakosmia").
Epicureanism states that atoms are unable to be broken down into any smaller parts, and Epicureans offered multiple arguments to support this position. Epicureans argue that because void is necessary for matter to move, anything which consists of both void and matter can be broken down, while if something contains no void then it has no way to break apart because no part of the substance could be broken down into a smaller subsection of the substance. They also argued that in order for the universe to persist, what it is ultimately made up of must not be able to be changed or else the universe would be essentially destroyed.
Atoms are constantly moving in one of four different ways. Atoms can simply collide with each other and then bounce off of each other. When joined with each other and forming a larger object, atoms can vibrate as they collide into each other while still maintaining the overall shape of the larger object. When not prevented by other atoms, all atoms move at the same speed naturally downwards in relation to the rest world. This downwards motion is natural for atoms; however, as their fourth means of motion, atoms can at times randomly swerve out of their usual downwards path. This swerving motion is what allowed for the creation of the universe, since as more and more atoms swerved and collided with each other, objects were able to take shape as the atoms joined together. Without the swerve, the atoms would never have interacted with each other, and simply continued to move downwards at the same speed.
Epicurus also felt that the swerve was what accounted for humanity's free will. If it were not for the swerve, humans would be subject to a never-ending chain of cause and effect. This was a point which Epicureans often used to criticize Democritus' atomic theory.
Epicureans believed that senses also relied on atoms. Every object was continually emitting particles from itself that would then interact with the observer. All sensations, such as sight, smell, or sound, relied on these particles. While the atoms that were emitted did not have the qualities that the senses were perceiving, the manner in which they were emitted caused the observer to experience those sensations, e.g. red particles were not themselves red but were emitted in a manner that caused the viewer to experience the color red. The atoms are not perceived individually, but rather as a continuous sensation because of how quickly they move.
Epicurean philosophy employs an empirical epistemology. The Epicureans believed that all sense perceptions were true, and that errors arise in how we judge those perceptions. When we form judgments about things ("hupolepsis"), they can be verified and corrected through further sensory information. For example, if someone sees a tower from far away that appears to be round, and upon approaching the tower they see that it is actually square, they would come to realize that their original judgement was wrong and correct their wrong opinion.
Epicurus is said to have proposed three criteria of truth: sensations ("aisthêsis"), preconceptions ("prolepsis"), and feelings ("pathê"). A fourth criterion called "presentational applications of the mind" ("phantastikai epibolai tês dianoias") was said to have been added by later Epicureans. These criteria formed the method through which Epicureans thought we gained knowledge.
Since Epicureans thought that sensations could not deceive, sensations are the first and main criterion of truth for Epicureans. Even in cases where sensory input seems to mislead, the input itself is true and the error arises from our judgments about the input. For example, when one places a straight oar in the water, it appears bent. The Epicurean would argue that image of the oar, that is the atoms traveling from the oar to the observer's eyes, have been shifted and thus really do arrive at the observer's eyes in the shape of a bent oar. The observer makes the error in assuming that the image he or she receives correctly represents the oar and has not been distorted in some way. In order to not make erroneous judgments about perceivable things and instead verify one's judgment, Epicureans believed that one needed to obtain "clear vision" ("enargeia") of the perceivable thing by closer examination. This acted as a justification for one's judgements about the thing being perceived. "Enargeia" is characterized as sensation of an object that has been unchanged by judgments or opinions and is a clear and direct perception of that object.
An individual's preconceptions are his or her concepts of what things are, e.g. what someone's idea of a horse is, and these concepts are formed in a person's mind through sensory input over time. When the word that relates to the preconception is used, these preconceptions are summoned up by the mind into the person's thoughts. It is through our preconceptions that we are able to make judgments about the things that we perceive. Preconceptions were also used by Epicureans to avoid the paradox proposed by Plato in the "Meno" regarding learning. Plato argues that learning requires us to already have knowledge of what we are learning, or else we would be unable to recognize when we had successfully learned the information. Preconceptions, Epicureans argue, provide individuals with that pre-knowledge required for learning.
Our feelings or emotions ("pathê") are how we perceive pleasure and pain. They are analogous to sensations in that they are a means of perception, but they perceive our internal state as opposed to external things. According to Diogenes Laertius, feelings are how we determine our actions. If something is pleasurable, we pursue that thing, and if something is painful, we avoid that thing.
The idea of "presentational applications of the mind" is an explanation for how we can discuss and inquire about things we cannot directly perceive. We receive impressions of such things directly in our minds, instead of perceiving them through other senses. The concept of "presentational applications of the mind" may have been introduced to explain how we learn about things that we cannot directly perceive, such as the gods.
Tetrapharmakos, or "The four-part cure", is Philodemus of Gadara's basic guideline as to how to live the happiest possible life, based on the first four of Epicurus' Principal Doctrines. This poetic doctrine was handed down by an anonymous Epicurean who summed up Epicurus' philosophy on happiness in four simple lines:
One of the earliest Roman writers espousing Epicureanism was Amafinius. Other adherents to the teachings of Epicurus included the poet Horace, whose famous statement "Carpe Diem" ("Seize the Day") illustrates the philosophy, as well as Lucretius, who wrote the poem "De rerum natura" about the tenets of the philosophy. The poet Virgil was another prominent Epicurean (see Lucretius for further details). The Epicurean philosopher Philodemus of Gadara, until the 18th century only known as a poet of minor importance, rose to prominence as most of his work along with other Epicurean material was discovered in the Villa of the Papyri. In the second century CE, comedian Lucian of Samosata and wealthy promoter of philosophy Diogenes of Oenoanda were prominent Epicureans.
Julius Caesar leaned considerably toward Epicureanism, which e.g. led to his plea against the death sentence during the trial against Catiline, during the Catiline conspiracy where he spoke out against the Stoic Cato. His father-in-law, Lucius Calpurnius Piso Caesoninus was also an adept of the school.
In modern times Thomas Jefferson referred to himself as an Epicurean:If I had time I would add to my little book the Greek, Latin and French texts, in columns side by side. And I wish I could subjoin a translation of Gassendi's Syntagma of the doctrines of Epicurus, which, notwithstanding the calumnies of the Stoics and caricatures of Cicero, is the most rational system remaining of the philosophy of the ancients, as frugal of vicious indulgence, and fruitful of virtue as the hyperbolical extravagances of his rival sects.Other modern-day Epicureans were Gassendi, Walter Charleton, François Bernier, Saint-Evremond, Ninon de l'Enclos, Denis Diderot, Frances Wright and Jeremy Bentham.
Christopher Hitchens referred to himself as an Epicurean. In France, where perfumer/restaurateur Gérald Ghislain refers to himself as an Epicurean, Michel Onfray is developing a post-modern approach to Epicureanism. In his recent book titled "The Swerve", Stephen Greenblatt identified himself as strongly sympathetic to Epicureanism and Lucretius. Humanistic Judaism as a denomination also claims the Epicurean label.
In modern popular usage, an Epicurean is a connoisseur of the arts of life and the refinements of sensual pleasures; "Epicureanism" implies a love or knowledgeable enjoyment especially of good food and drink.
Because Epicureanism posits that pleasure is the ultimate good ("telos"), it has been commonly misunderstood since ancient times as a doctrine that advocates the partaking in fleeting pleasures such as sexual excess and decadent food. This is not the case. Epicurus regarded "ataraxia" (tranquility, freedom from fear) and "aponia" (absence of pain) as the height of happiness. He also considered prudence an important virtue and perceived excess and overindulgence to be contrary to the attainment of ataraxia and aponia.
Epicurus preferred "the good", and "even wisdom and culture", to the "pleasure of the stomach". While twentieth-century commentary has generally sought to diminish this and related quotations, the consistency of the lower-case epicureanism of meals with Epicurean materialism overall has more recently been explained.
While Epicurus sought moderation at meals, he was also not averse to moderation in moderation, that is, to occasional luxury. Called "The Garden" for being based in what would have been a kitchen garden, his community also became known for its feasts of the twentieth (of the Greek month).
Francis Bacon wrote an apothegm related to Epicureanism:
There was an Epicurean vaunted, that divers of other sects of philosophers did after turn Epicureans, but there was never any Epicurean that turned to any other sect. Whereupon a philosopher that was of another sect, said; The reason was plain, for that cocks may be made capons, but capons could never be made cocks.
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Religion&Philosophy&Ethics | Nature versus nurture
The nature versus nurture debate involves whether human behavior is determined by the environment, either prenatal or during a person's life, or by a person's genes. The alliterative expression "nature and nurture" in English has been in use since at least the Elizabethan period and goes back to medieval French.
The combination of the two concepts as complementary is ancient (Greek: ). Nature is what we think of as pre-wiring and is influenced by genetic inheritance and other biological factors. Nurture is generally taken as the influence of external factors after conception e.g. the product of exposure, experience and learning on an individual.
The phrase in its modern sense was popularized by the English Victorian polymath Francis Galton, the modern founder of eugenics and behavioral genetics, discussing the influence of heredity and environment on social advancement. Galton was influenced by the book "On the Origin of Species" written by his half-cousin, Charles Darwin.
The view that humans acquire all or almost all their behavioral traits from "nurture" was termed "tabula rasa" ("blank slate") by John Locke in 1690. A "blank slate view" in human developmental psychology, one that assumes that human behavioral traits develop almost exclusively from environmental influences (sometimes termed "blank-slatism"), was widely held during much of the 20th century.
The debate between "blank-slate" denial of the influence of heritability, and the view admitting both environmental and heritable traits, has often been cast in terms of nature "versus" nurture. These two conflicting approaches to human development were at the core of an ideological dispute over research agendas throughout the second half of the 20th century. As both "nature" and "nurture" factors were found to contribute substantially, often in an inextricable manner, such views were seen as naive or outdated by most scholars of human development by the 2000s.
The strong dichotomy of nature "versus" nurture has thus been claimed to have limited relevance in some fields of research. Close feedback loops have been found in which "nature" and "nurture" influence one another constantly, as seen in self-domestication. In ecology and behavioral genetics, researchers think nurture has an essential influence on nature. Similarly in other fields, the dividing line between an inherited and an acquired trait becomes unclear, as in epigenetics or fetal development.
John Locke's "An Essay Concerning Human Understanding" (1690) is often cited as the foundational document of the "blank slate" view. Locke was criticizing René Descartes's claim of an innate idea of God universal to humanity.
Locke's view was harshly criticized in his own time. Anthony Ashley-Cooper, 3rd Earl of Shaftesbury, complained that by denying the possibility of any innate ideas,
Locke "threw all order and virtue out of the world", leading to total moral relativism.
Locke's was not the predominant view in the 19th century, which on the contrary tended to focus on "instinct".
Leda Cosmides and John Tooby noted that William James (1842–1910) argued that humans have "more" instincts than animals, and that greater freedom of action is the result of having more psychological instincts, not fewer.
The question of "innate ideas" or "instincts" were of some importance in the discussion of free will in moral philosophy. In 18th-century philosophy, this was cast in terms of "innate ideas" establishing the presence of a universal virtue, prerequisite for objective morals. In the 20th century, this argument was in a way inverted, as some philosophers now argued that the evolutionary origins of human behavioral traits forces us to concede that there is no foundation for ethics (J. L. Mackie), while others treat ethics as a field in complete isolation from evolutionary considerations (Thomas Nagel).
In the early 20th century, there was an increased interest in the role of the environment, as a reaction to the strong focus on pure heredity in the wake of the triumphal success of Darwin's theory of evolution.
During this time, the social sciences developed as the project of studying the influence of culture in clean isolation from questions related to "biology".
Franz Boas's "The Mind of Primitive Man" (1911) established a program that would dominate American anthropology for the next fifteen years. In this study he established that in any given population, biology, language, material and symbolic culture, are autonomous; that each is an equally important dimension of human nature, but that no one of these dimensions is reducible to another.
The tool of twin studies was developed as a research design intended to exclude all confounders based on inherited behavioral traits. Such studies are designed to decompose the variability of a given trait in a given population into a genetic and an environmental component.
John B. Watson in the 1920s and 1930s established the school of purist behaviorism that would become dominant over the following decades. Watson is often said to have been convinced of the complete dominance of cultural influence over anything that heredity might contribute, based on the following quote which is frequently repeated without context:
The last sentence of the above quote is frequently omitted, leading to confusion about Watson's position.
During the 1940s to 1960s, Ashley Montagu was a notable proponent of this purist form of behaviorism which allowed no contribution from heredity whatsoever:
In 1951, Calvin Hall suggested that the dichotomy opposing nature to nurture is ultimately fruitless.
Robert Ardrey in the 1960s argued for innate attributes of human nature, especially concerning territoriality, in the widely read "African Genesis" (1961) and "The Territorial Imperative". Desmond Morris in "The Naked Ape" (1967) expressed similar views.
Organised opposition to Montagu's kind of purist "blank-slatism" began to pick up in the 1970s, notably led by E. O. Wilson ("On Human Nature" 1979).
Twin studies established that there was, in many cases, a significant heritable component.
These results did not in any way point to overwhelming contribution of heritable factors, with heritability typically ranging around 40% to 50%, so that the controversy may not be cast in terms of purist behaviorism vs. purist nativism. Rather, it was purist behaviorism which was gradually replaced by the now-predominant view that both kinds of factors usually contribute to a given trait, anecdotally phrased by Donald Hebb as an answer to the question "which, nature or nurture, contributes more to personality?" by asking in response, "Which contributes more to the area of a rectangle, its length or its width?"
In a comparable avenue of research, anthropologist Donald Brown in the 1980s surveyed hundreds of anthropological studies from around the world and collected a set of cultural universals. He identified approximately 150 such features, coming to the conclusion there is indeed a "universal human nature", and that these features point to what that universal human nature is.
At the height of the controversy, during the 1970s to 1980s, the debate was highly ideologised. In "" (1984), Richard Lewontin, Steven Rose and Leon Kamin criticise "genetic determinism" from a Marxist framework, arguing that "Science is the ultimate legitimator of bourgeois ideology ... If biological determinism is a weapon in the struggle between classes, then the universities are weapons factories, and their teaching and research faculties are the engineers, designers, and production workers." The debate thus shifted away from whether heritable traits exist to whether it was politically or ethically permissible to admit their existence. The authors deny this, requesting that evolutionary inclinations be discarded in ethical and political discussions regardless of whether they exist or not.
Heritability studies became much easier to perform, and hence much more numerous, with the advances of genetic studies during the 1990s. By the late 1990s, an overwhelming amount of evidence had accumulated that amounts to a refutation of the extreme forms of "blank-slatism" advocated by Watson or Montagu.
This revised state of affairs was summarized in books aimed at a popular audience from the late 1990s. In "" (1998), Judith Rich Harris was heralded by Steven Pinker as a book that "will come to be seen as a turning point in the history of psychology".
but Harris was criticized for exaggerating the point of "parental upbringing seems to matter less than previously thought" to the implication that "parents do not matter".
The situation as it presented itself by the end of the 20th century was summarized in "" (2002) by Steven Pinker. The book became a best-seller, and was instrumental in bringing to the attention of a wider public the paradigm shift away from the behaviourist purism of the 1940s to 1970s that had taken place over the preceding decades. Pinker portrays the adherence to pure blank-slatism as an ideological dogma linked to two other dogmas found in the dominant view of human nature in the 20th century, which he termed "noble savage" (in the sense that people are born good and corrupted by bad influence) and
"ghost in the machine" (in the sense that there is a human soul capable of moral choices completely detached from biology). Pinker argues that all three dogmas were held onto for an extended period even in the face of evidence because they were seen as "desirable" in the sense that if any human trait is purely conditioned by culture, any undesired trait (such as crime or aggression) may be engineered away by purely cultural (political means). Pinker focuses on reasons he assumes were responsible for unduly repressing evidence to the contrary, notably the fear of (imagined or projected) political or ideological consequences.
It is important to note that the term "heritability" refers only to the degree of genetic variation between people on a trait. It does not refer to the degree to which a trait of a particular individual is due to environmental or genetic factors. The traits of an individual are always a complex interweaving of both. For an individual, even strongly genetically influenced, or "obligate" traits, such as eye color, assume the inputs of a typical environment during ontogenetic development (e.g., certain ranges of temperatures, oxygen levels, etc.).
In contrast, the "heritability index" statistically quantifies the extent to which variation "between individuals" on a trait is due to variation in the genes those individuals carry. In animals where breeding and environments can be controlled experimentally, heritability can be determined relatively easily. Such experiments would be unethical for human research. This problem can be overcome by finding existing populations of humans that reflect the experimental setting the researcher wishes to create.
One way to determine the contribution of genes and environment to a trait is to study twins. In one kind of study, identical twins reared apart are compared to randomly selected pairs of people. The twins share identical genes, but different family environments. Twins reared apart are not assigned at random to foster or adoptive parents. In another kind of twin study, identical twins reared together (who share family environment and genes) are compared to fraternal twins reared together (who also share family environment but only share half their genes). Another condition that permits the disassociation of genes and environment is adoption. In one kind of adoption study, biological siblings reared together (who share the same family environment and half their genes) are compared to adoptive siblings (who share their family environment but none of their genes).
In many cases, it has been found that genes make a substantial contribution, including psychological traits such as intelligence and personality. Yet heritability may differ in other circumstances, for instance environmental deprivation. Examples of low, medium, and high heritability traits include:
Twin and adoption studies have their methodological limits. For example, both are limited to the range of environments and genes which they sample. Almost all of these studies are conducted in Western, first-world countries, and therefore cannot be extrapolated globally to include poorer, non-western populations. Additionally, both types of studies depend on particular assumptions, such as the equal environments assumption in the case of twin studies, and the lack of pre-adoptive effects in the case of adoption studies.
Since the definition of "nature" in this context is tied to "heritability", the definition of "nurture" has necessarily become very wide, including any type of causality that is not heritable. The term has thus moved away from its original connotation of "cultural influences" to include all effects of the environment, including; indeed, a substantial source of environmental input to human nature may arise from stochastic variations in prenatal development and is thus in no sense of the term "cultural".
Heritability refers to the origins of differences between people. Individual development, even of highly heritable traits, such as eye color, depends on a range of environmental factors, from the other genes in the organism, to physical variables such as temperature, oxygen levels etc. during its development or ontogenesis.
The variability of trait can be meaningfully spoken of as being due in certain proportions to genetic differences ("nature"), or environments ("nurture"). For highly penetrant Mendelian genetic disorders such as Huntington's disease virtually all the incidence of the disease is due to genetic differences. Huntington's animal models live much longer or shorter lives depending on how they are cared for .
At the other extreme, traits such as native language are environmentally determined: linguists have found that any child (if capable of learning a language at all) can learn any human language with equal facility. With virtually all biological and psychological traits, however, genes and environment work in concert, communicating back and forth to create the individual.
At a molecular level, genes interact with signals from other genes and from the environment. While there are many thousands of single-gene-locus traits, so-called complex traits are due to the additive effects of many (often hundreds) of small gene effects. A good example of this is height, where variance appears to be spread across many hundreds of loci.
Extreme genetic or environmental conditions can predominate in rare circumstances—if a child is born mute due to a genetic mutation, it will not learn to speak any language regardless of the environment; similarly, someone who is practically certain to eventually develop Huntington's disease according to their genotype may die in an unrelated accident (an environmental event) long before the disease will manifest itself.
Steven Pinker likewise described several examples:
When traits are determined by a complex interaction of genotype and environment it is possible to measure the heritability of a trait within a population. However, many non-scientists who encounter a report of a trait having a certain percentage heritability imagine non-interactional, additive contributions of genes and environment to the trait. As an analogy, some laypeople may think of the degree of a trait being made up of two "buckets," genes and environment, each able to hold a certain capacity of the trait. But even for intermediate heritabilities, a trait is always shaped by both genetic dispositions and the environments in which people develop, merely with greater and lesser plasticities associated with these heritability measures.
Heritability measures always refer to the degree of "variation between individuals in a population". That is, as these statistics cannot be applied at the level of the individual, it would be incorrect to say that while the heritability index of personality is about 0.6, 60% of one's personality is obtained from one's parents and 40% from the environment. To help to understand this, imagine that all humans were genetic clones. The heritability index for all traits would be zero (all variability between clonal individuals must be due to environmental factors). And, contrary to erroneous interpretations of the heritability index, as societies become more egalitarian (everyone has more similar experiences) the heritability index goes up (as environments become more similar, variability between individuals is due more to genetic factors).
One should also take into account the fact that the variables of heritability and environmentality are not precise and vary within a chosen population and across cultures. It would be more accurate to state that the degree of heritability and environmentality is measured in its reference to a particular phenotype in a chosen group of a population in a given period of time. The accuracy of the calculations is further hindered by the number of coefficients taken into consideration, age being one such variable. The display of the influence of heritability and environmentality differs drastically across age groups: the older the studied age is, the more noticeable the heritability factor becomes, the younger the test subjects are, the more likely it is to show signs of strong influence of the environmental factors.
Some have pointed out that environmental inputs affect the expression of genes (see the article on epigenetics). This is one explanation of how environment can influence the extent to which a genetic disposition will actually manifest. The interactions of genes with environment, called gene–environment interactions, are another component of the nature–nurture debate. A classic example of gene–environment interaction is the ability of a diet low in the amino acid phenylalanine to partially suppress the genetic disease phenylketonuria. Yet another complication to the nature–nurture debate is the existence of gene–environment correlations. These correlations indicate that individuals with certain genotypes are more likely to find themselves in certain environments. Thus, it appears that genes can shape (the selection or creation of) environments. Even using experiments like those described above, it can be very difficult to determine convincingly the relative contribution of genes and environment.
A study conducted by T. J. Bouchard, Jr. showed data that has been evidence for the importance of genes when testing middle-aged twins reared together and reared apart. The results shown have been important evidence against the importance of environment when determining, happiness, for example. In the Minnesota study of twins reared apart, it was actually found that there was higher correlation for monozygotic twins reared apart (0.52)than monozygotic twins reared together (0.44). Also, highlighting the importance of genes, these correlations found much higher correlation among monozygotic than dizygotic twins that had a correlation of 0.08 when reared together and −0.02 when reared apart.
The social pre-wiring hypothesis refers to the ontogeny of social interaction. Also informally referred to as, "wired to be social." The theory questions whether there is a propensity to socially oriented action already present "before" birth. Research in the theory concludes that newborns are born into the world with a unique genetic wiring to be social.
Circumstantial evidence supporting the social pre-wiring hypothesis can be revealed when examining newborns' behavior. Newborns, not even hours after birth, have been found to display a preparedness for social interaction. This preparedness is expressed in ways such as their imitation of facial gestures. This observed behavior cannot be contributed to any current form of socialization or social construction. Rather, newborns most likely inherit to some extent social behavior and identity through genetics.
Principal evidence of this theory is uncovered by examining twin pregnancies. The main argument is, if there are social behaviors that are inherited and developed before birth, then one should expect twin foetuses to engage in some form of social interaction before they are born. Thus, ten foetuses were analyzed over a period of time using ultrasound techniques. Using kinematic analysis, the results of the experiment were that the twin foetuses would interact with each other for longer periods and more often as the pregnancies went on. Researchers were able to conclude that the performance of movements between the co-twins were not accidental but specifically aimed.
The social pre-wiring hypothesis was proved correct, "The central advance of this study is the demonstration that 'social actions' are already performed in the second trimester of gestation. Starting from the 14th week of gestation twin foetuses plan and execute movements specifically aimed at the co-twin. These findings force us to predate the emergence of social behavior: when the context enables it, as in the case of twin foetuses, other-directed actions are not only possible but predominant over self-directed actions.".
Traits may be considered to be adaptations (such as the umbilical cord), byproducts of adaptations (the belly button) or due to random variation (convex or concave belly button shape).
An alternative to contrasting nature and nurture focuses on "obligate vs. facultative" adaptations. Adaptations may be generally more obligate (robust in the face of typical environmental variation) or more facultative (sensitive to typical environmental variation). For example, the rewarding sweet taste of sugar and the pain of bodily injury are obligate psychological adaptations—typical environmental variability during development does not much affect their operation. On the other hand, facultative adaptations are somewhat like "if-then" statements. An example of a facultative psychological adaptation may be adult attachment style. The attachment style of adults, (for example, a "secure attachment style," the propensity to develop close, trusting bonds with others) is proposed to be conditional on whether an individual's early childhood caregivers could be trusted to provide reliable assistance and attention. An example of a facultative physiological adaptation is tanning of skin on exposure to sunlight (to prevent skin damage). Facultative social adaptation have also been proposed. For example, whether a society is warlike or peaceful has been proposed to be conditional on how much collective threat that society is experiencing .
Quantitative studies of heritable traits throw light on the question.
Developmental genetic analysis examines the effects of genes over the course of a human lifespan. Early studies of intelligence, which mostly examined young children, found that heritability measured 40–50%. Subsequent developmental genetic analyses found that variance attributable to additive environmental effects is less apparent in older individuals, with estimated heritability of IQ increasing in adulthood.
Multivariate genetic analysis examines the genetic contribution to several traits that vary together. For example, multivariate genetic analysis has demonstrated that the genetic determinants of all specific cognitive abilities (e.g., memory, spatial reasoning, processing speed) overlap greatly, such that the genes associated with any specific cognitive ability will affect all others. Similarly, multivariate genetic analysis has found that genes that affect scholastic achievement completely overlap with the genes that affect cognitive ability.
Extremes analysis examines the link between normal and pathological traits. For example, it is hypothesized that a given behavioral disorder may represent an extreme of a continuous distribution of a normal behavior and hence an extreme of a continuous distribution of genetic and environmental variation. Depression, phobias, and reading disabilities have been examined in this context.
For a few highly heritable traits, studies have identified loci associated with variance in that trait, for instance in some individuals with schizophrenia.
Through studies of identical twins separated at birth, one-third of their creative thinking abilities come from genetics and two-thirds come from learning. Research suggests that between 37 and 42 percent of the explained variance can be attributed to genetic factors. The learning primarily comes in the form of human capital transfers of entrepreneurial skills through parental role modeling. Other findings agree that the key to innovative entrepreneurial success comes from environmental factors and working “10,000 hours” to gain mastery in entrepreneurial skills.
Evidence from behavioral genetic research suggests that family environmental factors may have an effect upon childhood IQ, accounting for up to a quarter of the variance. The American Psychological Association's report "" (1995) states that there is no doubt that normal child development requires a certain minimum level of responsible care. Here, environment is playing a role in what is believed to be fully genetic (intelligence) but it was found that severely deprived, neglectful, or abusive environments have highly negative effects on many aspects of children's intellect development. Beyond that minimum, however, the role of family experience is in serious dispute. On the other hand, by late adolescence this correlation disappears, such that adoptive siblings no longer have similar IQ scores.
Moreover, adoption studies indicate that, by adulthood, adoptive siblings are no more similar in IQ than strangers (IQ correlation near zero), while full siblings show an IQ correlation of 0.6. Twin studies reinforce this pattern: monozygotic (identical) twins raised separately are highly similar in IQ (0.74), more so than dizygotic (fraternal) twins raised together (0.6) and much more than adoptive siblings (~0.0). Recent adoption studies also found that supportive parents can have a positive effect on the development of their children.
Personality is a frequently cited example of a heritable trait that has been studied in twins and adoptees using behavioral genetic study designs. The most famous categorical organization of heritable personality traits were defined in the 1970s by two research teams led by Paul Costa & Robert R. McCrae and Warren Norman & Lewis Goldberg in which they had people rate their personalities on 1000+ dimensions they then narrowed these down into ""The Big Five"" factors of personality—openness, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness, and neuroticism. The close genetic relationship between positive personality traits and, for example, our happiness traits are the mirror images of comorbidity in psychopathology. These personality factors were consistent across cultures, and many studies have also tested the heritability of these traits.
Identical twins reared apart are far more similar in personality than randomly selected pairs of people. Likewise, identical twins are more similar than fraternal twins. Also, biological siblings are more similar in personality than adoptive siblings. Each observation suggests that personality is heritable to a certain extent. A supporting article had focused on the heritability of personality (which is estimated to be around 50% for subjective well-being) in which a study was conducted using a representative sample of 973 twin pairs to test the heritable differences in subjective well-being which were found to be fully accounted for by the genetic model of the Five-Factor Model’s personality domains. However, these same study designs allow for the examination of environment as well as genes.
Adoption studies also directly measure the strength of shared family effects. Adopted siblings share only family environment. Most adoption studies indicate that by adulthood the personalities of adopted siblings are little or no more similar than random pairs of strangers. This would mean that shared family effects on personality are zero by adulthood.
In the case of personality traits, non-shared environmental effects are often found to out-weigh shared environmental effects. That is, environmental effects that are typically thought to be life-shaping (such as family life) may have less of an impact than non-shared effects, which are harder to identify. One possible source of non-shared effects is the environment of pre-natal development. Random variations in the genetic program of development may be a substantial source of non-shared environment. These results suggest that "nurture" may not be the predominant factor in "environment". Environment and our situations, do in fact impact our lives, but not the way in which we would typically react to these environmental factors. We are preset with personality traits that are the basis for how we would react to situations. An example would be how extraverted prisoners become less happy than introverted prisoners and would react to their incarceration more negatively due to their preset extraverted personality. Behavioral genes are somewhat proven to exist when we take a look at fraternal twins. When fraternal twins are reared apart, they show the same similarities in behavior and response as if they have been reared together.
The relationship between personality and people's own well-being is influenced and mediated by genes (Weiss, Bates, & Luciano, 2008). There has been found to be a stable set point for happiness that is characteristic of the individual (largely determined by the individual's genes). Happiness fluctuates around that setpoint (again, genetically determined) based on whether good things or bad things are happening to us ("nurture"), but only fluctuates in small magnitude in a normal human. The midpoint of these fluctuations is determined by the "great genetic lottery" that people are born with, which leads them to conclude that how happy they may feel at the moment or over time is simply due to the luck of the draw, or gene. This fluctuation was also not due to educational attainment, which only accounted for less than 2% of the variance in well-being for women, and less than 1% of the variance for men.
They consider that the individualities measured together with personality tests remain steady throughout an individual’s lifespan. They further believe that human beings may refine their forms or personality but can never change them entirely. Darwin's Theory of Evolution steered naturalists such as George Williams and William Hamilton to the concept of personality evolution. They suggested that physical organs and also personality is a product of natural selection.
With the advent of genomic sequencing, it has become possible to search for and identify specific gene polymorphisms that affect traits such as IQ and personality. These techniques work by tracking the association of differences in a trait of interest with differences in specific molecular markers or functional variants. An example of a visible human trait for which the precise genetic basis of differences are relatively well known is eye color.
When discussing the significant role of genetic heritability in relation to one's level of happiness, it has been found that from 44% to 52% of the variance in one's well-being is associated with genetic variation. Based on the retest of smaller samples of twins studies after 4,5, and 10 years, it is estimated that the heritability of the genetic stable component of subjective well-being approaches 80%. Other studies that have found that genes are a large influence in the variance found in happiness measures, exactly around 35–50%.
In contrast to views developed in 1960s that gender identity is primarily learned (which led to policy-based surgical sex changed in children such as David Reimer), genomics has provided solid evidence that both sex and gender identities are primarily influenced by genes:
In their attempts to locate the genes responsible for configuring certain phenotypes, researches resort to two different techniques.
Linkage study facilitates the process of determining a specific location in which a gene of interest is located. This methodology is applied only among individuals that are related and does not serve to pinpoint specific genes. It does, however, narrow down the area of search, making it easier to locate one or several genes in the genome which constitute a specific trait.
Association studies, on the other hand, are more hypothetic and seek to verify whether a particular genetic variable really influences the phenotype of interest. In association studies it is more common to use case-control approach, comparing the subject with relatively higher or lower hereditary determinants with the control subject.
| 39807 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=39807 |
Religion&Philosophy&Ethics | Bullshit
Bullshit (also bullcrap) is a common English expletive which may be shortened to the euphemism bull or the initialism B.S. In British English, "bollocks" is a comparable expletive. It is mostly a slang term and a profanity which means "nonsense", especially as a rebuke in response to communication or actions viewed as deceptive, misleading, disingenuous, unfair or false. As with many expletives, the term can be used as an interjection, or as many other parts of speech, and can carry a wide variety of meanings. A person who communicates nonsense on a given subject may be referred to as a "bullshit artist".
In philosophy and psychology of cognition the term "bullshit" is sometimes used to specifically refer to statements produced without particular concern of truth, to distinguish from a deliberate, manipulative lie intended to subvert the truth.
While the word is generally used in a deprecatory sense, it may imply a measure of respect for language skills or frivolity, among various other benign usages. In philosophy, Harry Frankfurt, among others, analyzed the concept of "bullshit" as related to, but distinct from, lying.
As an exclamation, "Bullshit!" conveys a measure of dissatisfaction with something or someone, but this usage need not be a comment on the truth of the matter.
"Bull", meaning nonsense, dates from the 17th century, while the term "bullshit" has been used as early as 1915 in British and American slang, and came into popular usage only during World War II. The word "bull" itself may have derived from the Old French "bole" meaning "fraud, deceit". The term "horseshit" is a near synonym. An occasionally used South African English equivalent, though more common in Australian slang, is "bull dust".
The earliest attestation mentioned by the "Concise Oxford English Dictionary" is in fact T. S. Eliot, who between 1910 and 1916 wrote an early poem to which he gave the title "The Triumph of Bullshit", written in the form of a ballade. The word bullshit does not appear in the text of the poem, and Eliot himself never published the poem.
As to earlier etymology the "Oxford English Dictionary" cites "bull" with the meaning "trivial, insincere, untruthful talk or writing, nonsense". It describes this usage as being of unknown origin, but notes that in Old French, the word could mean "boul, boule, bole fraud, deceit, trickery; mod. Icel bull 'nonsense'; also ME bull BUL 'falsehood', and BULL verb, to befool, mock, cheat."
Although there is no confirmed etymological connection, these older meanings are synonymous with the modern expression "bull", generally considered and used as a contraction of "bullshit".
Another proposal, according to the lexicographer Eric Partridge, is that the term was popularized by the Australian and New Zealand troops from about 1916 arriving at the front during World War I. Partridge claims that the British commanding officers placed emphasis on "bull"; that is, attention to appearances, even when it was a hindrance to waging war. The foreign Diggers allegedly ridiculed the British by calling it bullshit.
In George Orwell's "Down and Out in Paris and London", Orwell writes that the insult bullshit stems from Bolshevik, and the association with communists is the source of the words insult.
"Bullshit" is commonly used to describe statements made by people more concerned with the response of the audience than in truth and accuracy, such as goal-oriented statements made in the field of politics or advertising. On one prominent occasion, the word itself was part of a controversial advertisement. During the 1980 U.S. presidential campaign, the Citizens Party candidate Barry Commoner ran a radio advertisement that began with an actor exclaiming: "Bullshit! Carter, Reagan and Anderson, it's all bullshit!" NBC refused to run the advertisement because of its use of the expletive, but Commoner's campaign successfully appealed to the Federal Communications Commission to allow the advertisement to run unedited.
In his essay "On Bullshit" (originally written in 1986, and published as a monograph in 2005), philosopher Harry Frankfurt of Princeton University characterizes bullshit as a form of falsehood distinct from lying. The liar, Frankfurt holds, knows and cares about the truth, but deliberately sets out to mislead instead of telling the truth. The "bullshitter", on the other hand, does not care about the truth and is only seeking to impress:
Frankfurt connects this analysis of bullshit with Ludwig Wittgenstein's disdain of "non-sense" talk, and with the popular concept of a "bull session" in which speakers may try out unusual views without commitment. He fixes the blame for the prevalence of "bullshit" in modern society upon anti-realism and upon the growing frequency of situations in which people are expected to speak or have opinions without appropriate knowledge of the subject matter.
Several political commentators have seen that Frankfurt's concept of bullshit provides insights into political campaigns. Gerald Cohen, in "Deeper into Bullshit", contrasted the kind of "bullshit" Frankfurt describes with a different sort: nonsense discourse presented as sense. Cohen points out that this sort of bullshit can be produced either accidentally or deliberately. While some writers do deliberately produce bullshit, a person can also aim at sense and produce nonsense by mistake; or a person deceived by a piece of bullshit can repeat it innocently, without intent to deceive others.
Cohen gives the example of Alan Sokal's "Transgressing the Boundaries" as a piece of "deliberate" bullshit. Sokal's aim in creating it, however, was to show that the "postmodernist" editors who accepted his paper for publication could not distinguish nonsense from sense, and thereby by implication that their field was "bullshit".
Outside of the academic world, among natural speakers of North American English, as an interjection or adjective, "bullshit" conveys general displeasure, an objection to, or points to unfairness within, some state of affairs. This colloquial usage of "bullshit", which began in the 20th century, designates another's discourse to be rubbish or nonsense.
In the colloquial English of the Boston, Massachusetts area, "bullshit" can be used as an adjective to communicate that one is angry or upset, for example, "I was wicked bullshit after someone parked in my spot".
| 40484 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=40484 |
Religion&Philosophy&Ethics | Communications deception
In telecommunication, the term communications deception has the following meanings:
| 40918 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=40918 |
Religion&Philosophy&Ethics | Electronic deception
In telecommunication, the term electronic deception means the deliberate radiation, reradiation, alteration, suppression, absorption, denial, enhancement, or reflection of electromagnetic energy in a manner intended to convey misleading information and to deny valid information to an enemy or to enemy electronics-dependent weapons.
Among the types of electronic deception are:
| 41100 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=41100 |
Religion&Philosophy&Ethics | Fail-safe
In engineering, a fail-safe is a design feature or practice that in the event of a specific type of failure, inherently responds in a way that will cause no or minimal harm to other equipment, to the environment or to people. Unlike inherent safety to a particular hazard, a system being "fail-safe" does not mean that failure is impossible or improbable, but rather that the system's design prevents or mitigates unsafe consequences of the system's failure. That is, if and when a "fail-safe" system fails, it remains at least as safe as it was before the failure. Since many types of failure are possible, failure mode and effects analysis is used to examine failure situations and recommend safety design and procedures.
Some systems can never be made fail-safe, as continuous availability is needed. Redundancy, fault tolerance, or recovery procedures are used for these situations (e.g. multiple independently controlled and fuel-fed engines).
Examples include:
Examples include:
As well as physical devices and systems fail-safe procedures can be created so that if a procedure is not carried out or carried out incorrectly no dangerous action results.
For example:
Fail-safe (foolproof) devices are also known as "poka-yoke" devices. "Poka-yoke", a Japanese term, was coined by Shigeo Shingo, a quality expert. "Safe to fail" refers to civil engineering designs such as the Room for the River project in Netherlands and the Thames Estuary 2100 Plan which incorporate flexible adaptation strategies or climate change adaptation which provide for, and limit, damage, should severe events such as 500-year floods occur.
"Fail-safe" and "fail-secure" are distinct concepts. "Fail-safe" means that a device will not endanger lives or property when it fails. "Fail-secure," also called "fail-closed," means that access or data will not fall into the wrong hands in a security failure. Sometimes the approaches suggest opposite solutions. For example, if a building catches fire, fail-safe systems would unlock doors to ensure quick escape and allow firefighters inside, while fail-secure would lock doors to prevent unauthorized access to the building.
The opposite of "fail-closed" is called "fail-open".
Fail active operational can be installed on systems that have a high degree of redundancy so that a single failure of any part of the system can be tolerated (fail active operational) and a second failure can be detected – at which point the system will turn itself off (uncouple, fail passive). One way of accomplishing this is to have three identical systems installed, and a control logic which detects discrepancies. An example for this are many aircraft systems, among them inertial navigation systems and Pitot tubes.
| 41136 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=41136 |
Religion&Philosophy&Ethics | IP address spoofing
In computer networking, IP address spoofing or IP spoofing is the creation of Internet Protocol (IP) packets with a false source IP address, for the purpose of impersonating another computing system.
The basic protocol for sending data over the Internet network and many other computer networks is the Internet Protocol (IP). The protocol specifies that each IP packet must have a header which contains (among other things) the IP address of the sender of the packet. The source IP address is normally the address that the packet was sent from, but the sender's address in the header can be altered, so that to the recipient it appears that the packet came from another source.
The protocol requires the receiving computer to send back a response to the source IP address, so that spoofing is mainly used when the sender can anticipate the network response or does not care about the response.
The source IP address provides only limited information about the sender. It may provide general information on the region, city and town when on the packet was sent. It does not provide information on the identity of the sender or the computer being used.
IP address spoofing involving the use of a trusted IP address can be used by network intruders to overcome network security measures, such as authentication based on IP addresses. This type of attack is most effective where trust relationships exist between machines. For example, it is common on some corporate networks to have internal systems trust each other, so that users can log in without a username or password provided they are connecting from another machine on the internal network (and so must already be logged in). By spoofing a connection from a trusted machine, an attacker on the same network may be able to access the target machine without authentication.
IP address spoofing is most frequently used in denial-of-service attacks, where the objective is to flood the target with an overwhelming volume of traffic, and the attacker does not care about receiving responses to the attack packets. Packets with spoofed IP addresses are more difficult to filter since each spoofed packet appears to come from a different address, and they hide the true source of the attack. Denial of service attacks that use spoofing typically randomly choose addresses from the entire IP address space, though more sophisticated spoofing mechanisms might avoid unroutable addresses or unused portions of the IP address space. The proliferation of large botnets makes spoofing less important in denial of service attacks, but attackers typically have spoofing available as a tool, if they want to use it, so defenses against denial-of-service attacks that rely on the validity of the source IP address in attack packets might have trouble with spoofed packets. Backscatter, a technique used to observe denial-of-service attack activity in the Internet, relies on attackers' use of IP spoofing for its effectiveness.
The use of packets with a false source IP address is not always evidence of malicious intent. For example, in performance testing of websites, hundreds or even thousands of "vusers" (virtual users) may be created, each executing a test script against the website under test, in order to simulate what will happen when the system goes "live" and a large number of users log in on at once.
Since each user will normally have its own IP address, commercial testing products (such as HP LoadRunner, WebLOAD, and others) can use IP spoofing, allowing each user its own "return address" as well.
Configuration and services that are vulnerable to IP spoofing:
Packet filtering is one defense against IP spoofing attacks. The gateway to a network usually performs ingress filtering, which is blocking of packets from outside the network with a source address inside the network. This prevents an outside attacker spoofing the address of an internal machine. Ideally the gateway would also perform egress filtering on outgoing packets, which is blocking of packets from inside the network with a source address that is not inside. This prevents an attacker within the network performing filtering from launching IP spoofing attacks against external machines.
It is also recommended to design network protocols and services so that they do not rely on the source IP address for authentication.
Some upper layer protocols provide their own defense against IP spoofing attacks. For example, Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) uses sequence numbers negotiated with the remote machine to ensure that arriving packets are part of an established connection. Since the attacker normally cannot see any reply packets, the sequence number must be guessed in order to hijack the connection. The poor implementation in many older operating systems and network devices, however, means that TCP sequence numbers can be predicted.
The term spoofing is also sometimes used to refer to "header forgery", the insertion of false or misleading information in e-mail or netnews headers. Falsified headers are used to mislead the recipient, or network applications, as to the origin of a message. This is a common technique of spammers and sporgers, who wish to conceal the origin of their messages to avoid being tracked.
| 41284 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=41284 |
Religion&Philosophy&Ethics | Reason
Reason is the capacity of consciously making sense of things, applying logic, and adapting or justifying practices, institutions, and beliefs based on new or existing information. It is closely associated with such characteristically human activities as philosophy, science, language, mathematics, and art, and is normally considered to be a distinguishing ability possessed by humans.
Reason, or an aspect of it, is sometimes referred to as rationality.
Reasoning is associated with thinking, cognition, and intellect. The field of logic studies ways in which humans reason formally through argument. Reasoning may be subdivided into forms of logical reasoning (forms associated with the strict sense): deductive reasoning, inductive reasoning, abductive reasoning; and other modes of reasoning considered more informal, such as intuitive reasoning and verbal reasoning. Along these lines, a distinction is often drawn between logical, discursive reasoning (reason proper), and intuitive reasoning, in which the reasoning process through intuition—however valid—may tend toward the personal and the subjectively opaque. In some social and political settings logical and intuitive modes of reasoning may clash, while in other contexts intuition and formal reason are seen as complementary rather than adversarial. For example, in mathematics, intuition is often necessary for the creative processes involved with arriving at a formal proof, arguably the most difficult of formal reasoning tasks.
Reasoning, like habit or intuition, is one of the ways by which thinking moves from one idea to a related idea. For example, reasoning is the means by which rational individuals understand sensory information from their environments, or conceptualize abstract dichotomies such as cause and effect, truth and falsehood, or ideas regarding notions of good or evil. Reasoning, as a part of executive decision making, is also closely identified with the ability to self-consciously change, in terms of goals, beliefs, attitudes, traditions, and institutions, and therefore with the capacity for freedom and self-determination.
In contrast to the use of "reason" as an abstract noun, a reason is a consideration given which either explains or justifies events, phenomena, or behavior. Reasons justify decisions, reasons support explanations of natural phenomena; reasons can be given to explain the actions (conduct) of individuals.
Using reason, or reasoning, can also be described more plainly as providing good, or the best, reasons. For example, when evaluating a moral decision, "morality is, at the very least, the effort to guide one's conduct by "reason"—that is, doing what there are the best reasons for doing—while giving equal [and impartial] weight to the interests of all those affected by what one does."
Psychologists and cognitive scientists have attempted to study and explain how people reason, e.g. which cognitive and neural processes are engaged, and how cultural factors affect the inferences that people draw. The field of automated reasoning studies how reasoning may or may not be modeled computationally. Animal psychology considers the question of whether animals other than humans can reason.
In the English language and other modern European languages, "reason", and related words, represent words which have always been used to translate Latin and classical Greek terms in the sense of their philosophical usage.
The earliest major philosophers to publish in English, such as Francis Bacon, Thomas Hobbes, and John Locke also routinely wrote in Latin and French, and compared their terms to Greek, treating the words ""logos"", ""ratio"", ""raison"" and "reason" as interchangeable. The meaning of the word "reason" in senses such as "human reason" also overlaps to a large extent with "rationality" and the adjective of "reason" in philosophical contexts is normally "rational", rather than "reasoned" or "reasonable". Some philosophers, Thomas Hobbes for example, also used the word "ratiocination" as a synonym for "reasoning".
The proposal that reason gives humanity a special position in nature has been argued to be a defining characteristic of western philosophy and later western modern science, starting with classical Greece. Philosophy can be described as a way of life based upon reason, and in the other direction reason has been one of the major subjects of philosophical discussion since ancient times. Reason is often said to be reflexive, or "self-correcting", and the critique of reason has been a persistent theme in philosophy. It has been defined in different ways, at different times, by different thinkers about human nature.
For many classical philosophers, nature was understood teleologically, meaning that every type of thing had a definitive purpose which fit within a natural order that was itself understood to have aims. Perhaps starting with Pythagoras or Heraclitus, the cosmos is even said to have reason. Reason, by this account, is not just one characteristic that humans happen to have, and that influences happiness amongst other characteristics. Reason was considered of higher stature than other characteristics of human nature, such as sociability, because it is something humans share with nature itself, linking an apparently immortal part of the human mind with the divine order of the cosmos itself. Within the human mind or soul ("psyche"), reason was described by Plato as being the natural monarch which should rule over the other parts, such as spiritedness ("thumos") and the passions. Aristotle, Plato's student, defined human beings as rational animals, emphasizing reason as a characteristic of human nature. He "defined" the highest human happiness or well being ("eudaimonia") as a life which is lived consistently, excellently and completely in accordance with reason.
The conclusions to be drawn from the discussions of Aristotle and Plato on this matter are amongst the most debated in the history of philosophy. But teleological accounts such as Aristotle's were highly influential for those who attempt to explain reason in a way which is consistent with monotheism and the immortality and divinity of the human soul. For example, in the neo-platonist account of Plotinus, the cosmos has one soul, which is the seat of all reason, and the souls of all individual humans are part of this soul. Reason is for Plotinus both the provider of form to material things, and the light which brings individuals souls back into line with their source. Such neo-Platonist accounts of the rational part of the human soul were standard amongst medieval Islamic philosophers, and under this influence, mainly via Averroes, came to be debated seriously in Europe until well into the renaissance, and they remain important in Iranian philosophy.
The early modern era was marked by a number of significant changes in the understanding of reason, starting in Europe. One of the most important of these changes involved a change in the metaphysical understanding of human beings. Scientists and philosophers began to question the teleological understanding of the world. Nature was no longer assumed to be human-like, with its own aims or reason, and human nature was no longer assumed to work according to anything other than the same "laws of nature" which affect inanimate things. This new understanding eventually displaced the previous world view that derived from a spiritual understanding of the universe.
Accordingly, in the 17th century, René Descartes explicitly rejected the traditional notion of humans as "rational animals", suggesting instead that they are nothing more than "thinking things" along the lines of other "things" in nature. Any grounds of knowledge outside that understanding was, therefore, subject to doubt.
In his search for a foundation of all possible knowledge, Descartes deliberately decided to throw into doubt "all" knowledge – "except" that of the mind itself in the process of thinking:
At this time I admit nothing that is not necessarily true. I am therefore precisely nothing but a thinking thing; that is a mind, or intellect, or understanding, or reason – words of whose meanings I was previously ignorant.
This eventually became known as epistemological or "subject-centred" reason, because it is based on the "knowing subject", who perceives the rest of the world and itself as a set of objects to be studied, and successfully mastered by applying the knowledge accumulated through such study. Breaking with tradition and many thinkers after him, Descartes explicitly did not divide the incorporeal soul into parts, such as reason and intellect, describing them as one indivisible incorporeal entity.
A contemporary of Descartes, Thomas Hobbes described reason as a broader version of "addition and subtraction" which is not limited to numbers. This understanding of reason is sometimes termed "calculative" reason. Similar to Descartes, Hobbes asserted that "No discourse whatsoever, can end in absolute knowledge of fact, past, or to come" but that "sense and memory" is absolute knowledge.
In the late 17th century, through the 18th century, John Locke and David Hume developed Descartes' line of thought still further. Hume took it in an especially skeptical direction, proposing that there could be no possibility of deducing relationships of cause and effect, and therefore no knowledge is based on reasoning alone, even if it seems otherwise.
Hume famously remarked that, "We speak not strictly and philosophically when we talk of the combat of passion and of reason. Reason is, and ought only to be the slave of the passions, and can never pretend to any other office than to serve and obey them." Hume also took his definition of reason to unorthodox extremes by arguing, unlike his predecessors, that human reason is not qualitatively different from either simply conceiving individual ideas, or from judgments associating two ideas, and that "reason is nothing but a wonderful and unintelligible instinct in our souls, which carries us along a certain train of ideas, and endows them with particular qualities, according to their particular situations and relations." It followed from this that animals have reason, only much less complex than human reason.
In the 18th century, Immanuel Kant attempted to show that Hume was wrong by demonstrating that a "transcendental" self, or "I", was a necessary condition of all experience. Therefore, suggested Kant, on the basis of such a self, it is in fact possible to reason both about the conditions and limits of human knowledge. And so long as these limits are respected, reason can be the vehicle of morality, justice, aesthetics, theories of knowledge (epistemology), and understanding.
In the formulation of Kant, who wrote some of the most influential modern treatises on the subject, the great achievement of reason () is that it is able to exercise a kind of universal law-making. Kant was able therefore to reformulate the basis of moral-practical, theoretical and aesthetic reasoning, on "universal" laws.
Here practical reasoning is the self-legislating or self-governing formulation of universal norms, and theoretical reasoning the way humans posit universal laws of nature.
Under practical reason, the moral autonomy or freedom of human beings depends on their ability to behave according to laws that are given to them by the proper exercise of that reason. This contrasted with earlier forms of morality, which depended on religious understanding and interpretation, or nature for their substance.
According to Kant, in a free society each individual must be able to pursue their goals however they see fit, so long as their actions conform to principles given by reason. He formulated such a principle, called the "categorical imperative", which would justify an action only if it could be universalized:
Act only according to that maxim whereby you can, at the same time, will that it should become a universal law.
In contrast to Hume then, Kant insists that reason itself (German "Vernunft") has natural ends itself, the solution to the metaphysical problems, especially the discovery of the foundations of morality. Kant claimed that this problem could be solved with his "transcendental logic" which unlike normal logic is not just an instrument, which can be used indifferently, as it was for Aristotle, but a theoretical science in its own right and the basis of all the others.
According to Jürgen Habermas, the "substantive unity" of reason has dissolved in modern times, such that it can no longer answer the question "How should I live?" Instead, the unity of reason has to be strictly formal, or "procedural". He thus described reason as a group of three autonomous spheres (on the model of Kant's three critiques):
For Habermas, these three spheres are the domain of experts, and therefore need to be mediated with the "lifeworld" by philosophers. In drawing such a picture of reason, Habermas hoped to demonstrate that the substantive unity of reason, which in pre-modern societies had been able to answer questions about the good life, could be made up for by the unity of reason's formalizable procedures.
Hamann, Herder, Kant, Hegel, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Heidegger, Foucault, Rorty, and many other philosophers have contributed to a debate about what reason means, or ought to mean. Some, like Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, and Rorty, are skeptical about subject-centred, universal, or instrumental reason, and even skeptical toward reason as a whole. Others, including Hegel, believe that it has obscured the importance of intersubjectivity, or "spirit" in human life, and attempt to reconstruct a model of what reason should be.
Some thinkers, e.g. Foucault, believe there are other "forms" of reason, neglected but essential to modern life, and to our understanding of what it means to live a life according to reason.
In the last several decades, a number of proposals have been made to "re-orient" this critique of reason, or to recognize the "other voices" or "new departments" of reason:
For example, in opposition to subject-centred reason, Habermas has proposed a model of communicative reason that sees it as an essentially cooperative activity, based on the fact of linguistic intersubjectivity.
Nikolas Kompridis has proposed a widely encompassing view of reason as "that ensemble of practices that contributes to the opening and preserving of openness" in human affairs, and a focus on reason's possibilities for social change.
The philosopher Charles Taylor, influenced by the 20th century German philosopher Martin Heidegger, has proposed that reason ought to include the faculty of disclosure, which is tied to the way we make sense of things in everyday life, as a new "department" of reason.
In the essay "What is Enlightenment?", Michel Foucault proposed a concept of critique based on Kant's distinction between "private" and "public" uses of reason. This distinction, as suggested, has two dimensions:
The terms "logic" or "logical" are sometimes used as if they were identical with the term "reason" or with the concept of being "rational", or sometimes logic is seen as the most pure or the defining form of reason. For example in modern economics, rational choice is assumed to equate to logically consistent choice.
Reason and logic can however be thought of as distinct, although logic is one important aspect of reason. Author Douglas Hofstadter, in "Gödel, Escher, Bach", characterizes the distinction in this way. Logic is done inside a system while reason is done outside the system by such methods as skipping steps, working backward, drawing diagrams, looking at examples, or seeing what happens if you change the rules of the system.
Reason is a type of thought, and the word "logic" involves the attempt to describe rules or norms by which reasoning operates, so that orderly reasoning can be taught. The oldest surviving writing to explicitly consider the rules by which reason operates are the works of the Greek philosopher Aristotle, especially "Prior Analysis" and "Posterior Analysis". Although the Ancient Greeks had no separate word for logic as distinct from language and reason, Aristotle's newly coined word "syllogism" ("syllogismos") identified logic clearly for the first time as a distinct field of study. When Aristotle referred to "the logical" ("hē logikē"), he was referring more broadly to rational thought.
As pointed out by philosophers such as Hobbes, Locke and Hume, some animals are also clearly capable of a type of "associative thinking", even to the extent of associating causes and effects. A dog once kicked, can learn how to recognize the warning signs and avoid being kicked in the future, but this does not mean the dog has reason in any strict sense of the word. It also does not mean that humans acting on the basis of experience or habit are using their reason.
Human reason requires more than being able to associate two ideas, even if those two ideas might be described by a reasoning human as a cause and an effect, perceptions of smoke, for example, and memories of fire. For reason to be involved, the association of smoke and the fire would have to be thought through in a way which can be explained, for example as cause and effect. In the explanation of Locke, for example, reason requires the mental use of a third idea in order to make this comparison by use of syllogism.
More generally, reason in the strict sense requires the ability to create and manipulate a system of symbols, as well as indices and icons, according to Charles Sanders Peirce, the symbols having only a nominal, though habitual, connection to either smoke or fire. One example of such a system of artificial symbols and signs is language.
The connection of reason to symbolic thinking has been expressed in different ways by philosophers. Thomas Hobbes described the creation of "Markes, or Notes of remembrance" ("Leviathan" Ch. 4) as "speech". He used the word "speech" as an English version of the Greek word "logos" so that speech did not need to be communicated. When communicated, such speech becomes language, and the marks or notes or remembrance are called "Signes" by Hobbes. Going further back, although Aristotle is a source of the idea that only humans have reason ("logos"), he does mention that animals with imagination, for whom sense perceptions can persist, come closest to having something like reasoning and "nous", and even uses the word "logos" in one place to describe the distinctions which animals can perceive in such cases.
Reason and imagination rely on similar mental processes. Imagination is not only found in humans. Aristotle, for example, stated that "phantasia" (imagination: that which can hold images or "phantasmata") and "phronein" (a type of thinking that can judge and understand in some sense) also exist in some animals. According to him, both are related to the primary perceptive ability of animals, which gathers the perceptions of different senses and defines the order of the things that are perceived without distinguishing universals, and without deliberation or "logos". But this is not yet reason, because human imagination is different.
The recent modern writings of Terrence Deacon and Merlin Donald, writing about the origin of language, also connect reason connected to not only language, but also mimesis. More specifically they describe the ability to create language as part of an internal modeling of reality specific to humankind. Other results are consciousness, and imagination or fantasy. In contrast, modern proponents of a genetic predisposition to language itself include Noam Chomsky and Steven Pinker, to whom Donald and Deacon can be contrasted.
As reason is symbolic thinking, and peculiarly human, then this implies that humans have a special ability to maintain a clear consciousness of the distinctness of "icons" or images and the real things they represent. Starting with a modern author, Merlin Donald writes
A dog might perceive the "meaning" of a fight that was realistically play-acted by humans, but it could not reconstruct the message or distinguish the representation from its referent (a real fight). [...] Trained apes are able to make this distinction; young children make this distinction early – hence, their effortless distinction between play-acting an event and the event itself
In classical descriptions, an equivalent description of this mental faculty is "eikasia", in the philosophy of Plato. This is the ability to perceive whether a perception is an image of something else, related somehow but not the same, and therefore allows humans to perceive that a dream or memory or a reflection in a mirror is not reality as such. What Klein refers to as "dianoetic eikasia" is the "eikasia" concerned specifically with thinking and mental images, such as those mental symbols, icons, "signes", and marks discussed above as definitive of reason. Explaining reason from this direction: human thinking is special in the way that we often understand visible things as if they were themselves images of our intelligible "objects of thought" as "foundations" ("hypothēses" in Ancient Greek). This thinking ("dianoia") is "...an activity which consists in making the vast and diffuse jungle of the visible world depend on a plurality of more 'precise' "noēta"".
Both Merlin Donald and the Socratic authors such as Plato and Aristotle emphasize the importance of "mimesis", often translated as "imitation" or "representation". Donald writes
Imitation is found especially in monkeys and apes [... but ...] Mimesis is fundamentally different from imitation and mimicry in that it involves the invention of intentional representations. [...] Mimesis is not absolutely tied to external communication.
"Mimēsis" is a concept, now popular again in academic discussion, that was particularly prevalent in Plato's works, and within Aristotle, it is discussed mainly in the "Poetics". In Michael Davis's account of the theory of man in this work.
It is the distinctive feature of human action, that whenever we choose what we do, we imagine an action for ourselves as though we were inspecting it from the outside. Intentions are nothing more than imagined actions, internalizings of the external. All action is therefore imitation of action; it is poetic...
Donald like Plato (and Aristotle, especially in "On Memory and Recollection"), emphasizes the peculiarity in humans of voluntary initiation of a search through one's mental world. The ancient Greek "anamnēsis", normally translated as "recollection" was opposed to "mneme" or "memory". Memory, shared with some animals, requires a consciousness not only of what happened in the past, but also "that" something happened in the past, which is in other words a kind of "eikasia" "...but nothing except man is able to recollect." Recollection is a deliberate effort to search for and recapture something once known. Klein writes that, "To become aware of our having forgotten something means to begin recollecting." Donald calls the same thing "autocueing", which he explains as follows: "Mimetic acts are reproducible on the basis of internal, self-generated cues. This permits voluntary recall of mimetic representations, without the aid of external cues – probably the earliest form of representational "thinking"."
In a celebrated paper in modern times, the fantasy author and philologist J.R.R. Tolkien wrote in his essay "On Fairy Stories" that the terms "fantasy" and "enchantment" are connected to not only "...the satisfaction of certain primordial human desires..." but also "...the origin of language and of the mind".
Looking at logical categorizations of different types of reasoning the traditional main division made in philosophy is between deductive reasoning and inductive reasoning. Formal logic has been described as "the science of deduction". The study of inductive reasoning is generally carried out within the field known as informal logic or critical thinking.
A subdivision of Philosophy is Logic. Logic is the study of reasoning. Deduction is a form of reasoning in which a conclusion follows necessarily from the stated premises. A deduction is also the conclusion reached by a deductive reasoning process. One classic example of deductive reasoning is that found in syllogisms like the following:
The reasoning in this argument is valid, because there is no way in which the premises, 1 and 2, could be true and the conclusion, 3, be false.
Induction is a form of inference producing propositions about unobserved objects or types, either specifically or generally, based on previous observation. It is used to ascribe properties or relations to objects or types based on previous observations or experiences, or to formulate general statements or laws based on limited observations of recurring phenomenal patterns.
Inductive reasoning contrasts strongly with deductive reasoning in that, even in the best, or strongest, cases of inductive reasoning, the truth of the premises does not guarantee the truth of the conclusion. Instead, the conclusion of an inductive argument follows with some degree of probability. Relatedly, the conclusion of an inductive argument contains more information than is already contained in the premises. Thus, this method of reasoning is ampliative.
A classic example of inductive reasoning comes from the empiricist David Hume:
Analogical reasoning is a form of inductive reasoning from a particular to a particular. It is often used in case-based reasoning, especially legal reasoning. An example follows:
Analogical reasoning is a weaker form of inductive reasoning from a single example, because inductive reasoning typically uses a large number of examples to reason from the particular to the general. Analogical reasoning often leads to wrong conclusions. For example:
Abductive reasoning, or argument to the best explanation, is a form of reasoning that doesn't fit in deductive or inductive, since it starts with incomplete set of observations and proceeds with likely possible explanations so the conclusion in an abductive argument does not follow with certainty from its premises and concerns something unobserved. What distinguishes abduction from the other forms of reasoning is an attempt to favour one conclusion above others, by subjective judgement or attempting to falsify alternative explanations or by demonstrating the likelihood of the favoured conclusion, given a set of more or less disputable assumptions. For example, when a patient displays certain symptoms, there might be various possible causes, but one of these is preferred above others as being more probable.
Flawed reasoning in arguments is known as fallacious reasoning. Bad reasoning within arguments can be because it commits either a formal fallacy or an informal fallacy.
Formal fallacies occur when there is a problem with the form, or structure, of the argument. The word "formal" refers to this link to the "form" of the argument. An argument that contains a formal fallacy will always be invalid.
An informal fallacy is an error in reasoning that occurs due to a problem with the "content", rather than mere "structure", of the argument.
Philosophy is sometimes described as a life of reason, with normal human reason pursued in a more consistent and dedicated way than usual. Two categories of problem concerning reason have long been discussed by philosophers concerning reason, essentially being reasonings about reasoning itself as a human aim, or philosophizing about philosophizing. The first question is concerning whether we can be confident that reason can achieve knowledge of truth better than other ways of trying to achieve such knowledge. The other question is whether a life of reason, a life that aims to be guided by reason, can be expected to achieve a happy life more so than other ways of life (whether such a life of reason results in knowledge or not).
Since classical times a question has remained constant in philosophical debate (which is sometimes seen as a conflict between movements called Platonism and Aristotelianism) concerning the role of reason in confirming truth. People use logic, deduction, and induction, to reach conclusions they think are true. Conclusions reached in this way are considered, according to Aristotle, more certain than sense perceptions on their own. On the other hand, if such reasoned conclusions are only built originally upon a foundation of sense perceptions, then, our most logical conclusions can never be said to be certain because they are built upon the very same fallible perceptions they seek to better.
This leads to the question of what types of first principles, or starting points of reasoning, are available for someone seeking to come to true conclusions. In Greek, "first principles" are "archai", "starting points", and the faculty used to perceive them is sometimes referred to in Aristotle and Plato as "nous" which was close in meaning to "awareness" or "consciousness".
Empiricism (sometimes associated with Aristotle but more correctly associated with British philosophers such as John Locke and David Hume, as well as their ancient equivalents such as Democritus) asserts that sensory impressions are the only available starting points for reasoning and attempting to attain truth. This approach always leads to the controversial conclusion that absolute knowledge is not attainable. Idealism, (associated with Plato and his school), claims that there is a "higher" reality, from which certain people can directly arrive at truth without needing to rely only upon the senses, and that this higher reality is therefore the primary source of truth.
Philosophers such as Plato, Aristotle, Al-Farabi, Avicenna, Averroes, Maimonides, Aquinas and Hegel are sometimes said to have argued that reason must be fixed and discoverable—perhaps by dialectic, analysis, or study. In the vision of these thinkers, reason is divine or at least has divine attributes. Such an approach allowed religious philosophers such as Thomas Aquinas and Étienne Gilson to try to show that reason and revelation are compatible. According to Hegel, "...the only thought which Philosophy brings with it to the contemplation of History, is the simple conception of reason; that reason is the Sovereign of the World; that the history of the world, therefore, presents us with a rational process."
Since the 17th century rationalists, reason has often been taken to be a subjective faculty, or rather the unaided ability (pure reason) to form concepts. For Descartes, Spinoza and Leibniz, this was associated with mathematics. Kant attempted to show that pure reason could form concepts (time and space) that are the conditions of experience. Kant made his argument in opposition to Hume, who denied that reason had any role to play in experience.
After Plato and Aristotle, western literature often treated reason as being the faculty that trained the passions and appetites. Stoic philosophy by contrast considered all passions undesirable. After the critiques of reason in the early Enlightenment the appetites were rarely discussed or conflated with the passions. Some Enlightenment camps took after the Stoics to say Reason should oppose Passion rather than order it, while others like the Romantics believed that Passion displaces Reason, as in the maxim "follow your heart".
Reason has been seen as a slave, or judge, of the passions, notably in the work of David Hume, and more recently of Freud. Reasoning which claims that the object of a desire is demanded by logic alone is called "rationalization".
Rousseau first proposed, in his second "Discourse", that reason and political life is not natural and possibly harmful to mankind. He asked what really can be said about what is natural to mankind. What, other than reason and civil society, "best suits his constitution"? Rousseau saw "two principles prior to reason" in human nature. First we hold an intense interest in our own well-being. Secondly we object to the suffering or death of any sentient being, especially one like ourselves. These two passions lead us to desire more than we could achieve. We become dependent upon each other, and on relationships of authority and obedience. This effectively puts the human race into slavery. Rousseau says that he almost dares to assert that nature does not destine men to be healthy. According to Velkley, "Rousseau outlines certain programs of rational self-correction, most notably the political legislation of the "Contrat Social" and the moral education in "". All the same, Rousseau understands such corrections to be only ameliorations of an essentially unsatisfactory condition, that of socially and intellectually corrupted humanity."
This quandary presented by Rousseau led to Kant's new way of justifying reason as freedom to create good and evil. These therefore are not to be blamed on nature or God. In various ways, German Idealism after Kant, and major later figures such Nietzsche, Bergson, Husserl, Scheler, and Heidegger, remain preoccupied with problems coming from the metaphysical demands or "urges" of "reason". The influence of Rousseau and these later writers is also large upon art and politics. Many writers (such as Nikos Kazantzakis) extol passion and disparage reason. In politics modern nationalism comes from Rousseau's argument that rationalist cosmopolitanism brings man ever further from his natural state.
Another view on reason and emotion was proposed in the 1994 book titled "Descartes' Error" by Antonio Damasio. In it, Damasio presents the "Somatic Marker Hypothesis" which states that emotions guide behavior and decision-making. Damasio argues that these somatic markers (known collectively as "gut feelings") are "intuitive signals" that direct our decision making processes in a certain way that cannot be solved with rationality alone. Damasio further argues that rationality requires emotional input in order to function.
There are many religious traditions, some of which are explicitly fideist and others of which claim varying degrees of rationalism. Secular critics sometimes accuse all religious adherents of irrationality, since they claim such adherents are guilty of ignoring, suppressing, or forbidding some kinds of reasoning concerning some subjects (such as religious dogmas, moral taboos, etc.). Though the theologies and religions such as classical monotheism typically do not claim to be irrational, there is often a perceived conflict or tension between faith and tradition on the one hand, and reason on the other, as potentially competing sources of wisdom, law and truth.
Religious adherents sometimes respond by arguing that faith and reason can be reconciled, or have different non-overlapping domains, or that critics engage in a similar kind of irrationalism:
Some commentators have claimed that Western civilization can be almost defined by its serious testing of the limits of tension between "unaided" reason and faith in "revealed" truths—figuratively summarized as Athens and Jerusalem, respectively. Leo Strauss spoke of a "Greater West" that included all areas under the influence of the tension between Greek rationalism and Abrahamic revelation, including the Muslim lands. He was particularly influenced by the great Muslim philosopher Al-Farabi. To consider to what extent Eastern philosophy might have partaken of these important tensions, Strauss thought it best to consider whether dharma or tao may be equivalent to Nature (by which we mean "physis" in Greek). According to Strauss the beginning of philosophy involved the "discovery or invention of nature" and the "pre-philosophical equivalent of nature" was supplied by "such notions as 'custom' or 'ways, which appear to be "really universal in all times and places". The philosophical concept of nature or natures as a way of understanding "archai" (first principles of knowledge) brought about a peculiar tension between reasoning on the one hand, and tradition or faith on the other.
Although there is this special history of debate concerning reason and faith in the Islamic, Christian and Jewish traditions, the pursuit of reason is sometimes argued to be compatible with the other practice of other religions of a different nature, such as Hinduism, because they do not define their tenets in such an absolute way.
Aristotle famously described reason (with language) as a part of human nature, which means that it is best for humans to live "politically" meaning in communities of about the size and type of a small city state ("polis" in Greek). For example...
It is clear, then, that a human being is more of a political ["politikon" = of the "polis"] animal ["zōion"] than is any bee or than any of those animals that live in herds. For nature, as we say, makes nothing in vain, and humans are the only animals who possess reasoned speech ["logos"]. Voice, of course, serves to indicate what is painful and pleasant; that is why it is also found in other animals, because their nature has reached the point where they can perceive what is painful and pleasant and express these to each other. But speech ["logos"] serves to make plain what is advantageous and harmful and so also what is just and unjust. For it is a peculiarity of humans, in contrast to the other animals, to have perception of good and bad, just and unjust, and the like; and the community in these things makes a household or city ["polis"]. [...] By nature, then, the drive for such a community exists in everyone, but the first to set one up is responsible for things of very great goodness. For as humans are the best of all animals when perfected, so they are the worst when divorced from law and right. The reason is that injustice is most difficult to deal with when furnished with weapons, and the weapons a human being has are meant by nature to go along with prudence and virtue, but it is only too possible to turn them to contrary uses. Consequently, if a human being lacks virtue, he is the most unholy and savage thing, and when it comes to sex and food, the worst. But justice is something political [to do with the "polis"], for right is the arrangement of the political community, and right is discrimination of what is just. (Aristotle's Politics 1253a 1.2. Peter Simpson's translation, with Greek terms inserted in square brackets.)
The concept of human nature being fixed in this way, implied, in other words, that we can define what type of community is always best for people. This argument has remained a central argument in all political, ethical and moral thinking since then, and has become especially controversial since firstly Rousseau's Second Discourse, and secondly, the Theory of Evolution. Already in Aristotle there was an awareness that the "polis" had not always existed and had needed to be invented or developed by humans themselves. The household came first, and the first villages and cities were just extensions of that, with the first cities being run as if they were still families with Kings acting like fathers.
Friendship ["philia"] seems to prevail [in] man and woman according to nature ["kata phusin"]; for people are by nature ["tēi phusei"] pairing ["sunduastikon"] more than political ["politikon" = of the "polis"], in as much as the household ["oikos"] is prior ["proteron" = earlier] and more necessary than the "polis" and making children is more common ["koinoteron"] with the animals. In the other animals, community ["koinōnia"] goes no further than this, but people live together ["sumoikousin"] not only for the sake of making children, but also for the things for life; for from the start the functions ["erga"] are divided, and are different [for] man and woman. Thus they supply each other, putting their own into the common ["eis to koinon"]. It is for these [reasons] that both utility ["chrēsimon"] and pleasure ["hēdu"] seem to be found in this kind of friendship. (Nicomachean Ethics, VIII.12.1162a. Rough literal translation with Greek terms shown in square brackets.)
Rousseau in his Second Discourse finally took the shocking step of claiming that this traditional account has things in reverse: with reason, language and rationally organized communities all having developed over a long period of time merely as a result of the fact that some habits of cooperation were found to solve certain types of problems, and that once such cooperation became more important, it forced people to develop increasingly complex cooperation—often only to defend themselves from each other.
In other words, according to Rousseau, reason, language and rational community did not arise because of any conscious decision or plan by humans or gods, nor because of any pre-existing human nature. As a result, he claimed, living together in rationally organized communities like modern humans is a development with many negative aspects compared to the original state of man as an ape. If anything is specifically human in this theory, it is the flexibility and adaptability of humans. This view of the animal origins of distinctive human characteristics later received support from Charles Darwin's Theory of Evolution.
The two competing theories concerning the origins of reason are relevant to political and ethical thought because, according to the Aristotelian theory, a best way of living together exists independently of historical circumstances. According to Rousseau, we should even doubt that reason, language and politics are a good thing, as opposed to being simply the best option given the particular course of events that lead to today. Rousseau's theory, that human nature is malleable rather than fixed, is often taken to imply, for example by Karl Marx, a wider range of possible ways of living together than traditionally known.
However, while Rousseau's initial impact encouraged bloody revolutions against traditional politics, including both the French Revolution and the Russian Revolution, his own conclusions about the best forms of community seem to have been remarkably classical, in favor of city-states such as Geneva, and rural living.
Scientific research into reasoning is carried out within the fields of psychology and cognitive science. Psychologists attempt to determine whether or not people are capable of rational thought in a number of different circumstances.
Assessing how well someone engages in reasoning is the project of determining the extent to which the person is rational or acts rationally. It is a key research question in the psychology of reasoning. Rationality is often divided into its respective theoretical and practical counterparts.
Experimental cognitive psychologists carry out research on reasoning behaviour. Such research may focus, for example, on how people perform on tests of reasoning such as intelligence or IQ tests, or on how well people's reasoning matches ideals set by logic (see, for example, the Wason test). Experiments examine how people make inferences from conditionals e.g., "If A then B" and how they make inferences about alternatives, e.g., "A or else B". They test whether people can make valid deductions about spatial and temporal relations, e.g., "A is to the left of B", or "A happens after B", and about quantified assertions, e.g., "All the A are B". Experiments investigate how people make inferences about factual situations, hypothetical possibilities, probabilities, and counterfactual situations.
Developmental psychologists investigate the development of reasoning from birth to adulthood. Piaget's theory of cognitive development was the first complete theory of reasoning development. Subsequently, several alternative theories were proposed, including the neo-Piagetian theories of cognitive development.
The biological functioning of the brain is studied by neurophysiologists and neuropsychologists. Research in this area includes research into the structure and function of normally functioning brains, and of damaged or otherwise unusual brains. In addition to carrying out research into reasoning, some psychologists, for example, clinical psychologists and psychotherapists work to alter people's reasoning habits when they are unhelpful.
In artificial intelligence and computer science, scientists study and use automated reasoning for diverse applications including automated theorem proving the formal semantics of programming languages, and formal specification in software engineering.
Meta-reasoning is reasoning about reasoning. In computer science, a system performs meta-reasoning when it is reasoning about its own operation. This requires a programming language capable of reflection, the ability to observe and modify its own structure and behaviour.
A species could benefit greatly from better abilities to reason about, predict and understand the world. French social and cognitive scientists Dan Sperber and Hugo Mercier argue that there could have been other forces driving the evolution of reason. They point out that reasoning is very difficult for humans to do effectively, and that it is hard for individuals to doubt their own beliefs (confirmation bias). Reasoning is most effective when it is done as a collective – as demonstrated by the success of projects like science. They suggest that there are not just individual, but group selection pressures at play. Any group that managed to find ways of reasoning effectively would reap benefits for all its members, increasing their fitness. This could also help explain why humans, according to Sperber, are not optimized to reason effectively alone. Their argumentative theory of reasoning claims that reason may have more to do with winning arguments than with the search for the truth.
| 42446 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=42446 |
Religion&Philosophy&Ethics | Serial killer
A serial killer is typically a person who murders three or more people, usually in service of abnormal psychological gratification, with the murders taking place over more than a month and including a significant period of time between them. While most authorities set a threshold of three murders, others extend it to four or lessen it to two.
Although psychological gratification is the usual motive for serial killing, and most serial killings involve sexual contact with the victim, the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) states that the motives of serial killers can include anger, thrill-seeking, financial gain, and attention seeking. The murders may be attempted or completed in a similar fashion. The victims may have something in common, for example, demographic profile, appearance, gender or race. A serial killer is neither a mass murderer, nor a spree killer, although there may be conceptual overlaps between serial killers and spree killers.
The English term and concept of "serial killer" are commonly attributed to former FBI Special agent Robert Ressler who used the term "serial homicide" in 1974 in a lecture at Police Staff Academy in Bramshill, Hampshire, England, United Kingdom. Author Ann Rule postulates in her book Kiss Me, Kill Me (2004), that the English-language credit for coining the term goes to LAPD detective Pierce Brooks, who created the Violent Criminal Apprehension Program (ViCAP) system in 1985. There is ample evidence the term was used in Europe and the United States earlier.
The German term and concept were coined by criminologist Ernst Gennat, who described Peter Kürten as a ' ('serial-murderer') in his article "" (1930). The earliest usage attested of the specific term "serial killer" listed in the "Oxford English Dictionary" was from a 1960s German film article written by Siegfried Kracauer, about the German expressionist film "M" (1931), portraying a pedophilic '.
In his book, "" (2004), criminal justice historian Peter Vronsky notes that while Ressler might have coined the English term "serial homicide" within the law in 1974, the terms "serial murder" and "serial murderer" appear in John Brophy's book "The Meaning of Murder" (1966). The Washington DC newspaper "Evening Star", in a 1967 review of the book: This use of ""serial" killer" to paraphrase Brophy's "serial murderer" does not appear to have been influential at the time.
In his more recent study, Vronsky states that the term "serial killing" first entered into broader American popular usage when published in "The New York Times" in the spring of 1981, to describe Atlanta serial killer Wayne Williams. Subsequently, throughout the 1980s, the term was used again in the pages of "The New York Times", one of the major national news publication of the United States, on 233 occasions. By the end of the 1990s, the use of the term had increased to 2,514 instances in the paper.
When defining serial killers, researchers generally use "three or more murders" as the baseline, considering it sufficient to provide a pattern without being overly restrictive. Independent of the number of murders, they need to have been committed at different times, and are usually committed in different places. The lack of a cooling-off period (a significant break between the murders) marks the difference between a spree killer and a serial killer. The category has, however, been found to be of no real value to law enforcement, because of definitional problems relating to the concept of a "cooling-off period". Cases of extended bouts of sequential killings over periods of weeks or months with no apparent "cooling off period" or "return to normality" have caused some experts to suggest a hybrid category of "spree-serial killer".
The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) defines serial killing as "a series of two or more murders, committed as separate events, usually, but not always, by one offender acting alone". In 2005, the FBI hosted a multi-disciplinary symposium in San Antonio, Texas, which brought together 135 experts on serial murder from a variety of fields and specialties with the goal of identifying the commonalities of knowledge regarding serial murder. The group also settled on a definition of serial murder which FBI investigators widely accept as their standard: "The unlawful killing of two or more victims by the same offender(s) in separate events". The definition does not consider the motivation for killing nor define a cooling-off period.
Historical criminologists have suggested that there may have been serial murders throughout history, but specific cases were not adequately recorded. Some sources suggest that legends such as werewolves and vampires were inspired by medieval serial killers. In Africa, there have been periodic outbreaks of murder by "Lion" and "Leopard men".
Liu Pengli of China, nephew of the Han Emperor Jing, was made Prince of Jidong in the sixth year of the middle period of Jing's reign (144 BC). According to the Chinese historian Sima Qian, he would "go out on marauding expeditions with 20 or 30 slaves or with young men who were in hiding from the law, murdering people and seizing their belongings for sheer sport". Although many of his subjects knew about these murders, it was not until the 29th year of his reign that the son of one of his victims finally sent a report to the Emperor. Eventually, it was discovered that he had murdered at least 100 people. The officials of the court requested that Liu Pengli be executed; however, the emperor could not bear to have his own nephew killed, so Liu Pengli was made a commoner and banished.
In the 15th century, one of the wealthiest men in Europe and a former companion-in-arms of Joan of Arc, Gilles de Rais, sexually assaulted and killed peasant children, mainly boys, whom he had abducted from the surrounding villages and had taken to his castle. It is estimated that his victims numbered between 140 and 800. The Hungarian aristocrat Elizabeth Báthory, born into one of the wealthiest families in Transylvania, allegedly tortured and killed as many as 650 girls and young women before her arrest in 1610.
Members of the Thuggee cult in India may have murdered a million people between 1740 and 1840. Thug Behram, a member of the cult, may have murdered as many as 931 victims.
In his 1886 book, "Psychopathia Sexualis", psychiatrist Richard von Krafft-Ebing noted a case of a serial murderer in the 1870s, a Frenchman named Eusebius Pieydagnelle who had a sexual obsession with blood and confessed to murdering six people.
The unidentified killer Jack the Ripper, who has been called the first modern serial killer, killed at least five women, and possibly more, in London in 1888. He was the subject of a massive manhunt and investigation by the Metropolitan Police, during which many modern criminal investigation techniques were pioneered. A large team of policemen conducted house-to-house inquiries, forensic material was collected and suspects were identified and traced. Police surgeon Thomas Bond assembled one of the earliest character profiles of the offender.
The Ripper murders also marked an important watershed in the treatment of crime by journalists. While not the first serial killer in history, Jack the Ripper's case was the first to create a worldwide media frenzy. The dramatic murders of financially destitute women in the midst of the wealth of London focused the media's attention on the plight of the urban poor and gained coverage worldwide. Jack the Ripper has also been called the most infamous serial killer of all time, and his legend has spawned hundreds of theories on his real identity and many works of fiction.
H. H. Holmes was one of the first documented modern serial killers in the United States, responsible for the death of at least nine victims in the early 1890s. The case gained notoriety and wide publicity through possibly sensationalized accounts in William Randolph Hearst's newspapers. At the same time in France, Joseph Vacher became known as "The French Ripper" after killing and mutilating 11 women and children. He was executed in 1898 after confessing to his crimes.
76% of all known serial killers in the 20th century were from the United States.
Some commonly found characteristics of serial killers include the following:
There are exceptions to these criteria, however. For example, Harold Shipman was a successful professional (a General Practitioner working for the NHS). He was considered a pillar of the local community; he even won a professional award for a children's asthma clinic and was interviewed by Granada Television's "World in Action" on ITV. Dennis Nilsen was an ex-soldier turned civil servant and trade unionist who had no previous criminal record when arrested. Neither was known to have exhibited many of the tell-tale signs. Vlado Taneski, a crime reporter, was a career journalist who was caught after a series of articles he wrote gave clues that he had murdered people. Russell Williams was a successful and respected career Royal Canadian Air Force Colonel who was convicted of murdering two women, along with fetish burglaries and rapes.
Many serial killers have faced similar problems in their childhood development. Hickey's Trauma Control Model explains how early childhood trauma can set the child up for deviant behavior in adulthood; the child's environment (either their parents or society) is the dominant factor determining whether or not the child's behavior escalates into homicidal activity.
Family, or lack thereof, is the most prominent part of a child's development because it is what the child can identify with on a regular basis. "The serial killer is no different from any other individual who is instigated to seek approval from parents, sexual partners, or others." This need for approval is what influences children to attempt to develop social relationships with their family and peers. "The quality of their attachments to parents and other members of the family is critical to how these children relate to and value other members of society."
Wilson and Seaman (1990) conducted a study on incarcerated serial killers, and what they concluded was the most influential factor that contributed to their homicidal activity. Almost all of the serial killers in the study had experienced some sort of environmental problems during their childhood, such as a broken home caused by divorce, or a lack of a parental figure to discipline the child. Nearly half of the serial killers had experienced some type of physical or sexual abuse, and more of them had experienced emotional neglect.
When a parent has a drug or alcohol problem, the attention in the household is on the parents rather than the child. This neglect of the child leads to the lowering of their self-esteem and helps develop a fantasy world in which they are in control. Hickey's Trauma Control Model supports how the neglect from parents can facilitate deviant behavior, especially if the child sees substance abuse in action. This then leads to disposition (the inability to attach), which can further lead to homicidal behavior, unless the child finds a way to develop substantial relationships and fight the label they receive. If a child receives no support from anyone, then he or she is unlikely to recover from the traumatic event in a positive way. As stated by E. E. Maccoby, "the family has continued to be seen as a major—perhaps "the" major—arena for socialization".
There have been recent studies looking into the possibility that an abnormality with one's chromosomes could be the trigger for serial killers. Two serial killers, Bobby Joe Long and Richard Speck, came to attention for reported chromosomal abnormalities. Long had an extra X chromosome. Speck was erroneously reported to have an extra Y chromosome; in fact, his karyotype was performed twice and was normal each time. Hellen Morrison, an American forensic psychiatrist, said in an interview that while researchers have not identified a specific causal gene, the fact that the majority of serial killers are male leads researchers to believe there is "a change associated with the male chromosome make up".
Children who do not have the power to control the mistreatment they suffer sometimes create a new reality to which they can escape. This new reality becomes their fantasy that they have total control of and becomes part of their daily existence. In this fantasy world, their emotional development is guided and maintained. According to Garrison (1996), "the child becomes sociopathic because the normal development of the concepts of right and wrong and empathy towards others is retarded because the child's emotional and social development occurs within his self-centered fantasies. A person can do no wrong in his own world and the pain of others is of no consequence when the purpose of the fantasy world is to satisfy the needs of one person" (Garrison, 1996). Boundaries between fantasy and reality are lost and fantasies turn to dominance, control, sexual conquest, and violence, eventually leading to murder. Fantasy can lead to the first step in the process of a dissociative state, which, in the words of Stephen Giannangelo, "allows the serial killer to leave the stream of consciousness for what is, to him, a better place".
Criminologist Jose Sanchez reports, "the young criminal you see today is more detached from his victim, more ready to hurt or kill ... The lack of empathy for their victims among young criminals is just one symptom of a problem that afflicts the whole society." Lorenzo Carcaterra, author of "Gangster" (2001), explains how potential criminals are labeled by society, which can then lead to their offspring also developing in the same way through the cycle of violence. The ability for serial killers to appreciate the mental life of others is severely compromised, presumably leading to their dehumanization of others.
This process may be considered an expression of the intersubjectivity associated with a cognitive deficit regarding the capability to make sharp distinctions between other people and inanimate objects. For these individuals, objects can appear to possess animistic or humanistic power while people are perceived as objects. Before he was executed, serial killer Ted Bundy stated media violence and pornography had stimulated and increased his need to commit homicide, although this statement was made during last-ditch efforts to appeal his death sentence. However, correlation is not causation (a disturbed physiological disposition, psychosis, lack of socialization, or aggressiveness may contribute to both fantasy creation and serial killing without fantasy creation generally contributing to serial killing for instance). There are exceptions to the typical fantasy patterns of serial killers, as in the case of Dennis Rader, who was a loving family man and the leader of his church.
The FBI's "Crime Classification Manual" places serial killers into three categories: "organized", "disorganized", and "mixed" (i.e., offenders who exhibit organized and disorganized characteristics). Some killers descend from being organized into disorganized as their killings continue, as in the case of psychological decompensation or overconfidence due to having evaded capture, or vice versa, as when a previously disorganized killer identifies one or more specific aspects of the act of killing as his/her source of gratification and develops a "modus operandi" structured around those.
Organized serial killers often plan their crimes methodically, usually abducting victims, killing them in one place and disposing of them in another. They often lure the victims with ploys appealing to their sense of sympathy. Others specifically target prostitutes, who are likely to go voluntarily with a stranger. These killers maintain a high degree of control over the crime scene and usually have a solid knowledge of forensic science that enables them to cover their tracks, such as burying the body or weighing it down and sinking it in a river. They follow their crimes in the news media carefully and often take pride in their actions as if it were all a grand project.
Often, organized killers have social and other interpersonal skills sufficient to enable them to develop both personal and romantic relationships, friends and lovers and sometimes even attract and maintain a spouse and sustain a family including children. Among serial killers, those of this type are in the event of their capture most likely to be described by acquaintances as kind and unlikely to hurt anyone. Ted Bundy and John Wayne Gacy are examples of organized serial killers. In general, the IQs of organized serial killers tend to be near normal range, with a mean of 94.7. Organized nonsocial offenders tend to be on the higher end of the average, with a mean IQ of 99.2.
Disorganized serial killers are usually far more impulsive, often committing their murders with a random weapon available at the time, and usually do not attempt to hide the body. They are likely to be unemployed, a loner, or both, with very few friends. They often turn out to have a history of mental illness, and their modus operandi (M.O.) or lack thereof is often marked by excessive violence and sometimes necrophilia or sexual violence. Disorganized serial killers have been found to have a slightly lower mean IQ than organized serial killers, at 92.8.
Some people with a pathological interest in the power of life and death tend to be attracted to medical professions or acquiring such a job. These kinds of killers are sometimes referred to as "angels of death" or angels of mercy. Medical professionals will kill their patients for money, for a sense of sadistic pleasure, for a belief that they are "easing" the patient's pain, or simply "because they can". Perhaps the most prolific of these was the British doctor Harold Shipman. Another such killer was nurse Jane Toppan, who admitted during her murder trial that she was sexually aroused by death. She would administer a drug mixture to patients she chose as her victims, lie in bed with them and hold them close to her body as they died.
Another medical professional serial killer is Genene Jones. It is believed she killed 11 to 46 infants and children while working at Bexar County Medical Center Hospital in San Antonio, Texas. She is currently serving a 99-year sentence for the murder of Chelsea McClellan and the attempted murder of Rolando Santos, and became eligible for parole in 2017 due to a law in Texas at the time of her sentencing to reduce prison overcrowding. A similar case occurred in Britain in 1991, where nurse Beverley Allitt killed four children at the hospital where she worked, attempted to kill three more, and injured a further six over the course of two months.
A 21st-century example is Canadian nurse Elizabeth Wettlaufer who murdered elderly patients in the nursing homes where she worked.
Female serial killers are rare compared to their male counterparts. Sources suggest that female serial killers represented less than one in every six known serial murderers in the United States between 1800 and 2004 (64 females from a total of 416 known offenders), or that around 15% of U.S. serial killers have been women, with a collective number of victims between 427 and 612. The authors of "Lethal Ladies", Amanda L. Farrell, Robert D. Keppel, and Victoria B. Titterington, state that "the Justice Department indicated 36 female serial killers have been active over the course of the last century." According to "The Journal of Forensic Psychiatry & Psychology", there is evidence that 16% of all serial killers are women.
Kelleher and Kelleher (1998) created several categories to describe female serial killers. They used the classifications of "", "angel of death", "sexual predator", "revenge", "profit or crime", "team killer", "question of sanity", "unexplained", and "unsolved". In using these categories, they observed that most women fell into the categories of the black widow or team killer. Although motivations for female serial killers can include attention seeking, addiction, or the result of psychopathological behavioral factors, female serial killers are commonly categorized as murdering men for material gain, usually being emotionally close to their victims, and generally needing to have a relationship with the victim, hence the traditional cultural image of the "black widow". In describing murderer Stacey Castor, forensic psychiatrist James Knoll offered a psychological perspective on what defines a "black widow" type. In simple terms, he described it as a woman who kills two or more husbands or lovers for material gain. Although Castor was not officially defined as a serial killer, it is likely that she would have killed again.
The methods that female serial killers use for murder are frequently covert or low-profile, such as murder by poison (the preferred choice for killing). Other methods used by female serial killers include shootings (used by 20%), suffocation (16%), stabbing (11%), and drowning (5%). They commit killings in specific places, such as their home or a health-care facility, or at different locations within the same city or state. A notable exception to the typical characteristics of female serial killers is Aileen Wuornos, who killed outdoors instead of at home, used a gun instead of poison, killed strangers instead of friends or family, and killed for personal gratification. One "analysis of 86 female serial killers from the United States found that the victims tended to be spouses, children or the elderly". Other studies indicate that since 1975, increasingly strangers are marginally the most preferred victim of female serial killers, or that only 26% of female serial killers kill for material gain only. Sources state that each killer will have her own proclivities, needs and triggers. A review of the published literature on female serial murder stated that "sexual or sadistic motives are believed to be extremely rare in female serial murderers, and psychopathic traits and histories of childhood abuse have been consistently reported in these women."
A study by Eric W. Hickey (2010) of 64 female serial killers in the United States indicated that sexual activity was one of several motives in 10% of the cases, enjoyment in 11% and control in 14% and that 51% of all U.S. female serial killers murdered at least one woman and 31% murdered at least one child. In other cases, women have been involved as an accomplice with a male serial killer as a part of a serial killing team. A 2015 study published in "The Journal of Forensic Psychiatry & Psychology" found that the most common motive for female serial killers was for financial gain and almost 40% of them had experienced some sort of mental illness.
Peter Vronsky in "Female Serial Killers" (2007) maintains that female serial killers today often kill for the same reason males do: as a means of expressing rage and control. He suggests that sometimes the theft of the victims' property by the female "black widow" type serial killer appears to be for material gain, but really is akin to a male serial killer's collecting of totems (souvenirs) from the victim as a way of exerting continued control over the victim and reliving it. By contrast, Hickey states that although popular perception sees "black widow" female serial killers as something of the Victorian past, in his statistical study of female serial killer cases reported in the United States since 1826, approximately 75% occurred since 1950.
The most prolific female serial killer in all of history is allegedly Elizabeth Báthory. Countess Elizabeth Báthory de Ecsed (Báthory Erzsébet in Hungarian, August 7, 1560 – August 21, 1614) was a countess from the renowned Báthory family. Before her husband's death, Elizabeth took great pleasure in torturing the staff, by jamming pins under the servant's fingernails or stripping servants and throwing them into the snow. After her husband's death, she and four collaborators were accused of torturing and killing hundreds of girls and young women, with one witness attributing to them over 600 victims, though the number for which they were convicted was 80. Elizabeth herself was neither tried nor convicted. In 1610, however, she was imprisoned in the Csejte Castle, where she remained bricked in a set of rooms until her death four years later.
A 2010 article by Perri and Lichtenwald addressed some of the misperceptions concerning female criminality. In the article, Perri and Lichtenwald analyze the current research regarding female psychopathy, including case studies of female psychopathic killers featuring Münchausen syndrome by proxy, cesarean section homicide, fraud detection homicide, female kill teams, and a female serial killer.
Juvenile serial killers are rare. There are three main categories that juvenile serial killers can fit into: primary, maturing, and secondary killers. There have been studies done to compare and contrast these three groups and to discover similarities and differences between them. Although these types of serial killers are less common, oftentimes adult serial killers may make their debut at an early age and it can be an opportunity for researchers to study what factors brought about the behavior. Though it is rare, the youngest felon on death row is in fact, a juvenile serial killer named Harvey Miguel Robinson.
The racial demographics regarding serial killers are often subject to debate. In the United States, the majority of reported and investigated serial killers are white males, from a lower-to-middle-class background, usually in their late 20s to early 30s. However, there are African American, Asian, and Hispanic (of any race) serial killers as well, and, according to the FBI, based on percentages of the U.S. population, whites are not more likely than other races to be serial killers. Criminal profiler Pat Brown says serial killers are usually reported as white because serial killers usually target victims of their own race, and argues the media typically focuses on "All-American" white and pretty female victims who were the targets of white male offenders; that crimes among minority offenders in urban communities, where crime rates are higher, are under-investigated; and that minority serial killers likely exist at the same ratios as white serial killers for the population. She believes that the myth that serial killers are always white might have become "truth" in some research fields due to the over-reporting of white serial killers in the media.
According to some sources, the percentage of serial killers who are African American is estimated to be between 13% and 22%. Another study has shown that 16% of serial killers are African American, what author Maurice Godwin describes as a "sizeable portion". A 2014 Radford/FGCU Serial Killer Database annual statistics report indicated that for the decades 1900–2010, the percentage of white serial killers was 52.1% while the percentage of African American serial killers was 40.3%.
In a 2005 article Anthony Walsh, professor of criminal justice at Boise State University, argued a review of post-WWII serial killings in America finds that the prevalence of minority serial killers has typically been drastically underestimated in both professional research literature and the mass media. As a paradigmatic case of this media double standard, Walsh cites news reporting on white killer Gary Heidnik and African-American killer Harrison Graham. Both men were residents of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania; both imprisoned, tortured, and killed several women; and both were arrested only months apart in 1987. "Heidnik received widespread national attention, became the subject of books and television shows, and served as a model for the fictitious Buffalo Bill in "Silence of the Lambs"", writes Walsh, while "Graham received virtually no media attention outside of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, despite having been convicted of four more murders than Heidnik".
There is not much research about serial homicide in non-Western countries, or outside the U.S.
In one study of serial homicide in South Africa, many patterns were similar to established patterns in the U.S., with some exceptions: no offenders were female, offenders were lower educated than in the U.S., and both victims and offenders were predominantly black.
Beverley Allitt of London England, a nurse showing symptoms of Munchausen syndrome claimed 4 young lives and attempted to kill 9 others.
The motives of serial killers are generally placed into four categories: "visionary", "mission-oriented", "hedonistic", and "power or control"; however, the motives of any given killer may display considerable overlap among these categories.
Visionary serial killers suffer from psychotic breaks with reality, sometimes believing they are another person or are compelled to murder by entities such as the Devil or God. The two most common subgroups are "demon mandated" and "God mandated".
Herbert Mullin believed the American casualties in the Vietnam War were preventing California from experiencing the Big One. As the war wound down, Mullin claimed his father instructed him via telepathy to raise the number of "human sacrifices to nature" to delay a catastrophic earthquake that would plunge California into the ocean. David Berkowitz ("Son of Sam") may also be an example of a visionary serial killer, having claimed a demon transmitted orders through his neighbor's dog and instructed him to commit murder. Berkowitz later described those claims as a hoax, as originally concluded by psychiatrist David Abrahamsen.
Mission-oriented killers typically justify their acts as "ridding the world" of certain types of people perceived as undesirable, such as the homeless, ex-cons, homosexuals, drug users, prostitutes, or people of different ethnicity or religion; however, they are generally not psychotic. Some see themselves as attempting to change society, often to cure a societal ill.
This type of serial killer seeks thrills and derives pleasure from killing, seeing people as expendable means to this goal. Forensic psychologists have identified three subtypes of the hedonistic killer: "lust", "thrill", and "comfort".
Sex is the primary motive of lust killers, whether or not the victims are dead, and fantasy plays a large role in their killings. Their sexual gratification depends on the amount of torture and mutilation they perform on their victims. The sexual serial murderer has a psychological need to have absolute control, dominance, and power over their victims, and the infliction of torture, pain, and ultimately death is used in an attempt to fulfill their need. They usually use weapons that require close contact with the victims, such as knives or hands. As lust killers continue with their murders, the time between killings decreases or the required level of stimulation increases, sometimes both.
Kenneth Bianchi, one of the "Hillside Stranglers", murdered women and girls of different ages, races, and appearance because his sexual urges required different types of stimulation and increasing intensity. Jeffrey Dahmer searched for his perfect fantasy lover—beautiful, submissive and eternal. As his desire increased, he experimented with drugs, alcohol, and exotic sex. His increasing need for stimulation was demonstrated by the dismemberment of victims, whose heads and genitals he preserved, and by his attempts to create a "living zombie" under his control (by pouring acid into a hole drilled into the victim's skull).
Dahmer once said, "Lust played a big part of it. Control and lust. Once it happened the first time, it just seemed like it had control of my life from there on in. The killing was just a means to an end. That was the least satisfactory part. I didn't enjoy doing that. That's why I tried to create living zombies with … acid and the drill." He further elaborated on this, also saying, "I wanted to see if it was possible to make—again, it sounds really gross—uh, zombies, people that would not have a will of their own, but would follow my instructions without resistance. So after that, I started using the drilling technique." He experimented with cannibalism to "ensure his victims would always be a part of him".
The primary motive of a thrill killer is to induce pain or terror in their victims, which provides stimulation and excitement for the killer. They seek the adrenaline rush provided by hunting and killing victims. Thrill killers murder only for the kill; usually, the attack is not prolonged, and there is no sexual aspect. Usually, the victims are strangers, although the killer may have followed them for a period of time. Thrill killers can abstain from killing for long periods of time and become more successful at killing as they refine their murder methods. Many attempt to commit the perfect crime and believe they will not be caught.
Robert Hansen took his victims to a secluded area, where he would let them loose and then hunt and kill them. In one of his letters to San Francisco Bay Area newspapers in San Francisco, California, the Zodiac Killer wrote "[killing] gives me the most thrilling experience it is even better than getting your rocks off with a girl". Carl Watts was described by a surviving victim as "excited and hyper and clappin' and just making noises like he was excited, that this was gonna be fun" during the 1982 attack. Slashing, stabbing, hanging, drowning, asphyxiating, and strangling were among the ways Watts killed.
Material gain and a comfortable lifestyle are the primary motives of comfort killers. Usually, the victims are family members and close acquaintances. After a murder, a comfort killer will usually wait for a period of time before killing again to allow any suspicions by family or authorities to subside. They often use poison, most notably arsenic, to kill their victims. Female serial killers are often comfort killers, although not all comfort killers are female.
Dorothea Puente killed her tenants for their Social Security checks and buried them in the backyard of her home. H. H. Holmes killed for insurance and business profits. Professional killers ("hitmen") may also be considered comfort serial killers. Richard Kuklinski charged tens of thousands of dollars for a "hit", earning enough money to support his family in a middle-class lifestyle (Bruno, 1993).
Some, like Puente and Holmes, may be involved in or have previous convictions for theft, fraud, non-payment of debts, embezzlement and other crimes of a similar nature. Dorothea Puente was finally arrested on a parole violation, having been on parole for a previous fraud conviction.
In 2016, the oldest prosecution and conviction of a suspected serial killer (Felix Vail) took place in Louisiana. He was convicted of murder 54 years after his wife's death in 1962, which had originally been ruled an accidental drowning, and which occurred only months after Vail took out two life insurance policies on her. He is a suspect in the disappearances of two other women – his girlfriend in 1973 and his second wife in 1984. The prosecutors were allowed to present evidence of the two disappearances under the Doctrine of chances.
The main objective for this type of serial killer is to gain and exert power over their victim. Such killers are sometimes abused as children, leaving them with feelings of powerlessness and inadequacy as adults. Many power- or control-motivated killers sexually abuse their victims, but they differ from hedonistic killers in that rape is not motivated by lust (as it would be with a lust murder) but as simply another form of dominating the victim. Ted Bundy is an example of a power/control-oriented serial killer. He traveled around the United States seeking women to control.
Many serial killers claim that a violent culture influenced them to commit murders. During his final interview, Ted Bundy stated that hardcore pornography was responsible for his actions. Others idolise figures for their deeds or perceived vigilante justice, such as Peter Kürten, who idolized Jack the Ripper, or John Wayne Gacy and Ed Kemper, who both idolized the actor John Wayne.
Killers who have a strong desire for fame or to be renowned for their actions desire media attention as a way of validating and spreading their crimes; fear is also a component here, as some serial killers enjoy causing fear. An example is Dennis Rader, who sought attention from the press during his murder spree.
Many movies, books, and documentaries have been created, detailing serial killers' lives and crimes. For example, the biographical film "Ted Bundy" (2002) focuses on serial killer Ted Bundy's personal life in college, leading up to his execution, and "Dahmer" (2002) tells the story of Jeffrey Dahmer.
Serial killers are also portrayed in fictional media, oftentimes as having substantial intelligence and looking for difficult targets, despite the contradiction with the psychological profile of serial killers.
Theories for why certain people commit serial murder have been advanced. Some theorists believe the reasons are biological, suggesting serial killers are born, not made, and that their violent behavior is a result of abnormal brain activity. Holmes and Holmes believe that "until a reliable sample can be obtained and tested, there is no scientific statement that can be made concerning the exact role of biology as a determining factor of a serial killer personality."
The "Fractured Identity Syndrome" (FIS) is a merging of Charles Cooley's "looking glass self" and Erving Goffman's "virtual" and "actual social identity" theories. The FIS suggests a social event, or series of events, during one's childhood or adolescence results in a fracturing of the personality of the serial killer. The term "fracture" is defined as a small breakage of the personality which is often not visible to the outside world and is only felt by the killer.
"Social Process Theory" has also been suggested as an explanation for serial murder. Social process theory states that offenders may turn to crime due to peer pressure, family and friends. Criminal behavior is a process of interaction with social institutions, in which everyone has the potential for criminal behavior. A lack of family structure and identity could also be a cause leading to serial murder traits. A child used as a scapegoat will be deprived of their capacity to feel guilt. Displaced anger could result in animal torture, as identified in the Macdonald triad, and a further lack of basic identity.
The "military theory" has been proposed as an explanation for why serial murderers kill, as some serial murderers have served in the military or related fields. According to Castle and Hensley, 7% of the serial killers studied had military experience. This figure may be a proportional under-representation when compared to the number of military veterans in a nation's total population. For example, according to the United States census for the year 2000, military veterans comprised 12.7% of the U.S. population; in England, it was estimated in 2007 that military veterans comprised 9.1% of the population. Though by contrast, about 2.5% of the population of Canada in 2006 consisted of military veterans.
There are two theories that can be used to study the correlation between serial killing and military training: "Applied learning theory" states that serial killing can be learned. The military is training for higher kill rates from servicemen while training the soldiers to be desensitized to taking a human life. "Social learning theory" can be used when soldiers get praised and accommodated for killing. They learn or believe that they learn, that it is acceptable to kill because they were praised for it in the military. Serial killers want accreditation for the work that they have done.
In both military and serial killing, the offender or the soldier may become desensitized to killing as well as compartmentalized; the soldiers do not see enemy personnel as "human" and neither do serial killers see their victims as humans. The theories do not imply that military institutions make a deliberate effort to produce serial killers; to the contrary, all military personnel are trained to recognize when, where, and against whom it is appropriate to use deadly force, which starts with the basic "Law of Land Warfare", taught during the initial training phase, and may include more stringent policies for military personnel in law enforcement or security. They are also taught ethics in basic training.
In 2008, the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) published a handbook titled "Serial Murder" which was the product of a symposium held in 2005 to bring together the many issues surrounding serial murder, including its investigation.
According to the FBI, identifying one, or multiple, murders as being the work of a serial killer is the first challenge an investigation faces, especially if the victim(s) come from a marginalized or high-risk population and is normally linked through forensic or behavioral evidence (FBI 2008). Should the cases cross multiple jurisdictions, the law enforcement system in the United States is fragmented and thus not configured to detect multiple similar murders across a large geographic area (Egger 1998). The FBI suggests utilizing databases and increasing interdepartmental communication. Keppel (1989) suggests holding multi-jurisdictional conferences regularly to compare cases giving departments a greater chance to detect linked cases and overcome linkage blindness.
One such collaboration, the "Radford/FGCU Serial Killer Database Project" was proposed at the 2012 FDIAI Annual Conference. Utilizing Radford's Serial Killer Database as a starting point, the new collaboration, hosted by FGCU Justice Studies, has invited and is working in conjunction with other universities to maintain and expand the scope of the database to also include spree and mass murders. Utilizing over 170 data points, multiple-murderer methodology and victimology; researchers and Law Enforcement Agencies can build case studies and statistical profiles to further research the "Who, What, Why and How" of these types of crimes.
Leadership, or administration, should play a small or virtually non-existent role in the actual investigation past assigning knowledgeable or experienced homicide investigators to lead positions. The administration's role is not to run the investigation but to establish and reaffirm the primary goal of catching the serial killer, as well as provide support for the investigators. The FBI (2008) suggests completing Memorandums of Understanding to facilitate support and commitment of resources from different jurisdictions to an investigation. Egger (1998) takes this one step further and suggests completing mutual aid pacts, which are written agreements to provide support to each other in a time of need, with surrounding jurisdictions. Doing this in advance would save time and resources that could be used on the investigation.
Organization of the structure of an investigation is key to its success, as demonstrated by the investigation of Gary Ridgway, the Green River Killer. Once a serial murder case was established, a task force was created to track down and arrest the offender. Over the course of the investigation, for various reasons, the task force's organization was radically changed and reorganized multiple times – at one point including more than 50 full-time personnel, and at another, only a single investigator. Eventually, what led to the end of the investigation was a conference of 25 detectives organized to share ideas to solve the case.
The FBI handbook provides a description of how a task force should be organized but offers no additional options on how to structure the investigation. While it appears advantageous to have a full-time staff assigned to a serial murder investigation, it can become prohibitively expensive. For example, the Green River Task Force cost upwards of $2 million per year, and as was witnessed with the Green River Killer investigation, other strategies can prevail where a task force fails.
A common strategy, already employed by many departments for other reasons, is the conference, in which departments get together and focus on a specific set of topics. With serial murders, the focus is typically on unsolved cases, with evidence thought to be related to the case at hand.
Similar to a conference is an information clearing-house in which a jurisdiction with a suspected serial murder case collects all of its evidence and actively seeks data which may be related from other jurisdictions. By collecting all of the related information into one place, they provide a central point in which it can be organized and easily accessed by other jurisdictions working toward the goal of arresting an offender and ending the murders.
Already mentioned was the task force, FBI 2008, Keppel 1989 which provides for a flexible, organized, framework for jurisdictions depending on the needs of the investigation. Unfortunately due to the need to commit resources (manpower, money, equipment, etc.) for long periods of time it can be an unsustainable option.
In the case of the investigation of Aileen Wournos, the Marion County Sheriff coordinated multiple agencies without any written or formal agreement. While not a specific strategy for a serial murder investigation, this is certainly a best practice in so far as the agencies were able to work easily together toward a common goal.
Finally, once a serial murder investigation has been identified, the use of an FBI Rapid Response Team can assist both experienced and inexperienced jurisdictions in setting up a task force. This is completed by organizing and delegating jobs, by compiling and analyzing clues, and by establishing communication between the parties involved.
During the course of a serial murder investigation, it may become necessary to call in additional resources; the FBI defines this as Resource Augmentation. Within the structure of a task force, the addition of a resource should be thought of as either long term or short term. If the task force's framework is expanded to include the new resource, then it should be permanent and not removed. For short term needs, such as setting up roadblocks or canvassing a neighborhood, additional resources should be called in on a short-term basis. The decision of whether resources are needed short or long term should be left to the lead investigator and facilitated by the administration (FBI 2008).
The confusion and counter productiveness created by changing the structure of a task force mid investigation is illustrated by the way the Green River Task Force's staffing and structure was changed multiple times throughout the investigation. This made an already complicated situation more difficult, resulting in the delay or loss of information, which allowed Ridgeway to continue killing (Guillen 2007). The FBI model does not take into account that permanently expanding a task force, or investigative structure, may not be possible due to cost or personnel availability. Egger (1998) offers several alternative strategies including; using investigative consultants, or experienced staff to augment an investigative team. Not all departments have investigators experienced in serial murder and by temporarily bringing in consultants, they can educate a department to a level of competence then step out. This would reduce the initially established framework of the investigation team and save the department the cost of retaining the consultants until the conclusion of the investigation.
The FBI handbook (2008) and Keppel (1989) both stress communication as paramount. The difference is that the FBI handbook (2008) concentrates primarily on communication within a task force while Keppel (1989) makes getting information out to and allowing information to be passed back from patrol officers a priority. The FBI handbook (2008) suggests having daily e-mail or in-person briefings for all staff involved in the investigation and providing periodic summary briefings to patrol officer and managers. Looking back on a majority of serial murderer arrests, most are exercised by patrol officers in the course of their everyday duties and unrelated to the ongoing serial murder investigation (Egger 1998, Keppel 1989).
Keppel (1989) provides examples of Larry Eyler, who was arrested during a traffic stop for a parking violation, and Ted Bundy, who was arrested during a traffic stop for operating a stolen vehicle. In each case, it was uniformed officers, not directly involved in the investigation, who knew what to look for and took the direct action that stopped the killer. By providing up to date (as opposed to periodic) briefings and information to officers on the street the chances of catching a serial killer, or finding solid leads, are increased.
A serial murder investigation generates staggering amounts of data, all of which needs to be reviewed and analyzed. A standardized method of documenting and distributing information must be established and investigators must be allowed time to complete reports while investigating leads and at the end of a shift (FBI 2008). When the mechanism for data management is insufficient, leads are not only lost or buried but the investigation can be hindered and new information can become difficult to obtain or become corrupted.
During the Green River Killer investigation, reporters would often find and interview possible victims or witnesses ahead of investigators. The understaffed investigation was unable to keep up the information flow, which prevented them from promptly responding to leads. To make matters worse, investigators believed that the journalists, untrained in interviewing victims or witnesses of crimes, would corrupt the information and result in unreliable leads (Guillen 2007).
Notorious and infamous serial killers number in the hundreds and a subculture revolves around their legacies. That subculture includes the collection, sale, and display of serial killer memorabilia, dubbed "murderabilia" by one of the best-known opponents of collectors of serial killer remnants, Andrew Kahan. He is the director of the Mayor's Crime Victims Office in Houston and is backed by the families of murder victims and "Son of Sam laws" existing in some states that prevent murderers from profiting from the publicity generated by their crimes.
Such memorabilia includes the paintings, writings, and poems of these killers. Recently, marketing has capitalized even more upon interest in serial killers with the rise of various merchandise such as trading cards, action figures, and books such as "The Serial Killer Files: The Who, What, Where, How, and Why of the World's Most Terrifying Murderers" by Harold Schechter, and "The A-Z Encyclopedia of Serial Killers" by Schecter and David Everitt. Some serial killers attain celebrity status in the way they acquire fans and may have previous personal possessions auctioned off on websites like eBay. A few examples of this are Ed Gein's 150-pound stolen gravestone and Bobby Joe Long's sunglasses.
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Religion&Philosophy&Ethics | Gender role
A gender role, also known as a sex role, is a social role encompassing a range of behaviors and attitudes that are generally considered acceptable, appropriate, or desirable for people based on their biological or perceived sex. Gender roles are usually centered on conceptions of masculinity and femininity, although there are exceptions and variations. The specifics regarding these gendered expectations may vary substantially among cultures, while other characteristics may be common throughout a range of cultures. There is ongoing debate as to what extent gender roles and their variations are biologically determined, and to what extent they are socially constructed.
Various groups, most notably the feminist movements, have led efforts to change aspects of prevailing gender roles that they believe are oppressive or inaccurate.
The term "gender role" was first used by John Money and colleagues in 1954, during the course of his study of intersex individuals, to describe the manners in which these individuals expressed their status as a male or female in a situation where no clear biological assignment existed.
The World Health Organization (WHO) defines gender roles as "socially constructed roles, behaviors, activities and attributes that a given society considers appropriate for men and women". Debate continues as to what extent gender and gender roles are socially constructed (i.e. non-biologically influenced), and to what extent "socially constructed" may be considered synonymous with "arbitrary" or "malleable". Therefore, a concise authoritative definition of gender roles or gender itself is elusive.
In the sociology of gender, the process whereby an individual learns and acquires a gender role in society is termed "gender socialization".
Gender roles are culturally specific, and while most cultures distinguish only two (boy and girl or man and woman), others recognize more. Androgyny, for example, has been proposed as a third gender. Androgynous is simply a person with qualities pertaining to both the male and female gender. Other societies have claimed to identify more than five genders, and some non-Western societies have three genders – man, woman, and third gender. Some individuals (not necessarily being from such a culture) identify with no gender at all.
Many transgender people reject the idea that they are a separate third gender, and identify simply as men or women. However, biological differences between (some) trans women and cisgender women have historically been treated as relevant in certain contexts, especially those where biological traits may yield an unfair advantage such as sport.
Gender "role," which refers to the cultural expectations as understood by gender classification, is not the same thing as gender identity, which refers to the internal sense of one's own gender, whether or not it aligns with categories offered by societal norms. The point at which these internalized gender identities become externalized into a set of expectations is the genesis of a gender role.
Some theories – which are collectively termed "social construction" theories – claim that gender behavior is mostly due to social conventions, although opposing theories disagree, such as theories in evolutionary psychology.
Most children learn to categorize themselves by gender by the age of three. From birth, in the course of gender socialization, children learn gender stereotypes and roles from their parents and environment. In a traditional view, males learn to manipulate their physical and social environment through physical strength or dexterity, while girls learn to present themselves as objects to be viewed. Social constructionists state, for example, that gender-segregated children's activities create the appearance that gender differences in behavior reflect an essential nature of male and female behavior.
As an aspect of role theory, gender role theory "treats these differing distributions of women and men into roles as the primary origin of sex-differentiated social behavior, their impact on behavior is mediated by psychological and social processes." According to Gilbert Herdt, gender roles arose from correspondent inference, meaning that general labour division was extended to gender roles.
Gender roles are considered by social constructionists to be hierarchical, and are characterized as a male-advantaged gender hierarchy. The term patriarchy, according to researcher Andrew Cherlin, defines "a social order based on the domination of women by men, especially in agricultural societies".
According to Eagly et al., the consequences of gender roles and stereotypes are sex-typed social behavior because roles and stereotypes are both socially shared descriptive norms and prescriptive norms.
Judith Butler, in works such as "Gender Trouble" and "Undoing Gender", contends that being female is not "natural" and that it appears natural only through repeated performances of gender; these performances in turn, reproduce and define the traditional categories of sex and/or gender.
Working in the United States, Talcott Parsons developed a model of the nuclear family in 1955, which at that place and time was the prevalent family structure. It compared a strictly traditional view of gender roles (from an industrial-age American perspective) with a more liberal view. The Parsons model was used to contrast and illustrate extreme positions on gender roles.
However, these structured positions become less a liberal-individualist society, and the actual behavior of individuals is usually somewhere between these poles. According to the interactionist approach, roles (including gender roles) are not fixed but are constantly negotiated between individuals. In North America and southern South America, this is the most common approach among families whose business is agriculture.
Gender roles can influence all kinds of behaviors, such as choice of clothing, choice of work and personal relationships, e.g., parental status (See also Sociology of fatherhood).
Geert Hofstede, a Dutch researcher and social psychologist who dedicated himself to the study of culture, sees culture as "broad patterns of thinking, feeling and acting" in a society In Hofstede's view, masculinity and femininity differ in the social roles that are associated with the biological fact of the existence of the two sexes: masculinity and femininity refer to the dominant sex role pattern in the vast majority of both traditional and modern societies, males being more assertive and females more nurturing.
Femininity creates a society of overlapping gender roles, where "both men and women are supposed to be modest, tender, and concerned with the quality of life."
Masculinity creates a society of clearly distinct gender roles, where men should "be assertive, tough, and focused on material success," while women should "be more modest, tender, and concerned with the quality of life."
Hofstede's "Feminine and Masculine Culture Dimensions" states:
Masculine cultures expect men to be assertive, ambitious and competitive, to strive for material success, and to respect whatever is big, strong, and fast. Masculine cultures expect women to serve and care for the non-material quality of life, for children and for the weak. Feminine cultures, on the other hand, define relatively overlapping social roles for the sexes, in which, in particular, men need not be ambitious or competitive but may go for a different quality of life than material success; men may respect whatever is small, weak, and slow.
In feminine cultures, modesty and relationships are important characteristics. This differs from in masculine cultures, where self-enhancement leads to self-esteem. Masculine cultures are individualistic, and feminine cultures are more collective because of the significance of personal relationships.
'The dominant values in a masculine society are achievement and success; the dominant values in a feminine society are caring for others and quality of life'.
"In the 1950s, John Money, along with colleagues took up the study of intersex individuals, who, Money realized 'would provide invaluable material for the comparative study for bodily form and physiology, rearing, and psychosexual orientation'." "Money and his colleagues used their own studies to state in the extreme what these days seems extraordinary for its complete denial of the notion of natural inclination."
They concluded that gonads, hormones, and chromosomes did not automatically determine a child's gender role. Among the many terms he coined was "gender role" which he defined in a seminal 1955 paper as "all those things that a person says or does to disclose himself or herself as having the status of boy or man, girl or woman."
In recent years, the majority of Money's theories regarding the importance of socialization in the determination of gender have come under intense criticism, especially in connection with the inaccurate reporting of success in the "John/Joan" case, later revealed to be David Reimer.
West and Zimmerman developed an interactionist perspective on gender beyond its construction as "roles." For them, gender is "the product of social doings of some sort...undertaken by men and women whose competence as members of society is hostage to its production". They argue that the use of "role" to describe gender expectations conceals the production of gender through everyday activities. Furthermore, roles are situated identities, such as "nurse" and "student," developed as the situation demands while gender is a master identity with no specific site or organizational context. For them, "conceptualizing gender as a role makes it difficult to assess its influence on other roles and reduces its explanatory usefulness in discussions of power and inequality". West and Zimmerman consider gender an individual production that reflects and constructs interactional and institutional gender expectations.
Historically, gender roles have been largely attributed to biological differences in men and women. One hypothesis attributes differences in gender roles to evolution. The sociobiology view argues that men's fitness is increased by being aggressive, allowing them to compete with other men for access to females, as well as by being sexually promiscuous and trying to father as many children as possible. Women are benefited by bonding with infants and caring for children. Sociobiologists argue that these roles are evolutionary and led to the establishment of traditional gender roles with women in the domestic sphere and men dominant in every other area.
Although research indicates that biology plays a role in gendered behavior, the extent of this and its effects on gender roles are less clear. Another hypothesis attributed differences in gender roles to prenatal exposure to hormones. Early research examining the effect of biology on gender roles by John Money and Anke Ehrhardt primarily focused on girls with congenital adrenal hyperplasia (CAH), resulting in higher-than-normal prenatal exposure to androgens. While these girls were described as exhibiting tomboy-like behavior, were less interested in dolls, and less likely to make-believe as parents, a number of methodological problems with the studies have been identified.
Sociologist Linda L. Lindsey critiqued the notion that gender roles are a result of prenatal hormone exposure, saying that while hormones may explain sex differences like sexual orientation and gender identity, they "cannot account for gender differences in other roles such as nurturing, love, and criminal behavior". By contrast, some research indicates that both neurobiological and social risk factors can interact in a way that predisposes one to engaging in criminal behavior (including juvenile delinquency).
With regard to gender stereotypes, the societal roles and differences in power between men and women are much more strongly indicated than is a biological component.
Ideas of appropriate behavior according to gender vary among cultures and era, although some aspects receive more widespread attention than others. In the "World Values Survey", responders were asked if they thought that wage work should be restricted to only men in the case of shortage in jobs: in Iceland the proportion that agreed with the proposition was 3.6%; while in Egypt it was 94.9%.
Attitudes have also varied historically, for example, in Europe, during the Middle Ages, women were commonly associated with roles related to medicine and healing. Because of the rise of witch-hunts across Europe and the institutionalization of medicine, these roles became exclusively associated with men but in the last few decades these roles have become largely gender-neutral in Western society.
Vern Bullough stated that homosexual communities are generally more tolerant of switching gender roles. For instance, someone with a masculine voice, a five o'clock shadow (or a fuller beard), an Adam's apple, wearing a woman's dress and high heels, carrying a purse would most likely draw ridicule or other unfriendly attention in ordinary social contexts.
Because the dominant class sees this form of gender expression as unacceptable, inappropriate, or perhaps threatening, these individuals are significantly more likely to experience discrimination and harassment both in their personal lives and from their employer, according to a 2011 report from the Center for American Progress.
Gender roles may be a means through which one expresses their gender identity, but they may also be employed as a means of exerting social control, and individuals may experience negative social consequences for violating them.
Different religious and cultural groups within one country may have different norms that they attempt to "police" within their own group, including gender norms.
"I Corinthians," 11:14 and 15 indicates that it is inappropriate for a man to wear his hair long, and good for a woman to wear her hair long.
The roles of women in Christianity can vary considerably today as they have varied historically since the first century New Testament church. This is especially true in marriage and in formal ministry positions within certain Christian denominations, churches, and parachurch organizations.
Many leadership roles in the organized church have been restricted to males. In the Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox churches, only men may serve as priests or deacons; only males serve in senior leadership positions such as pope, patriarch, and bishop. Women may serve as abbesses. Most mainstream Protestant denominations are beginning to relax their longstanding constraints on ordaining women to be ministers, though some large groups are tightening their constraints in reaction. Charismatic and Pentecostal churches have embraced the ordination of women since their founding.
Christian traditions that officially recognize "saints", as persons of exceptional holiness of life having attained the beatific vision (heaven), do list women in that group. Most prominent is Mary, mother of Jesus who is highly revered throughout Christianity, particularly in the Catholic and Orthodox churches where she is considered the "Theotokos", i.e. "Mother of God", the son born of her, Jesus, being God Incarnate, that is, both God and Man.
Women prominent in Christianity have included contemporaries of Jesus, subsequent theologians, abbesses, mystics, doctors of the church, founders of religious orders, military leaders, monarchs and martyrs, evidencing the variety of roles played by women within the life of Christianity. Paul the Apostle held women in high regard and worthy of prominent positions in the church, though he was careful not to encourage disregard for the New Testament household codes, also known as New Testament Domestic Codes or "Haustafelen", of Greco-Roman law in the first century.
According to Dhami and Sheikh, gender roles in Muslim countries are centered on the importance of the family unit, which is viewed as the basis of a balanced and healthy society. Islamic views on gender roles and family are traditionally conservative.
Many Muslim-majority countries, most prominently Saudi Arabia, have interpretations of religious doctrine regarding gender roles embedded in their laws. In the United Arab Emirates, non-Muslim Western women can wear crop tops, whereas Muslim women are expected to dress much more modestly, due to the injunction on women in Islam to dress modestly at all times when in public. In some Muslim countries, these differences are sometimes even codified in law.
In some Muslim-majority countries, however, even non-Muslim women are expected to follow Muslim female gender norms and Islamic law to a certain extent, such as by covering their hair. This norm may sometimes be objected to by women visiting from other countries - but they may nevertheless decide to comply on pragmatic grounds, in the interests of their own safety. For example, in Egypt, women who do not dress "modestly" - whether they are Muslims or not - may be perceived to be akin to prostitutes by men.
Muhammad described the high status of mothers in both of the major hadith Collections (Bukhari and Muslim). One famous account is:
Hindu deities are more ambiguously gendered than deities of other world religions, such as Christianity, Islam, and others. This informs female and males relations, and informs how the differences between males and females are understood However, in a religious cosmology like Hinduism, which prominently features female and androgynous deities, some gender transgression is allowed. This group is known as the hijras, and has a long tradition of performing in important rituals, such as the birth of sons and weddings. Despite this allowance for transgression, Hindu cultural traditions portray women in contradictory ways. On one hand, women's fertility is given great value, and on the other, female sexuality is depicted as potentially dangerous and destructive.
Marriage is an institution that influences gender roles, inequality, and change. In the United States, gender roles are communicated by the media, social interaction, and language. Through these platforms society has influenced individuals to fulfill the stereotypical gender roles within a heterosexual marriage starting out at a young age. Although traditionally, society claims that roles within a heterosexual marriage should be decided based on one's biological sex, today individuals are determining their own roles for themselves, ultimately creating equal partnerships.
In the U.S., marriage roles are generally decided based on gender. For approximately the past seven decades, heterosexual marriage roles have been defined for men and women based on society's expectations and the influence of the media. Men and women are typically associated with certain social roles dependent upon the personality traits associated with those roles. Traditionally, the role of the homemaker is associated with a woman and the role of a breadwinner is associated with a male.
In the U.S., single men are outnumbered by single women at a ratio of 100 single women to 86 single men, though never-married men over the age of 15 outnumber women by a 5:4 ratio (33.9% to 27.3%) according to the 2006 U.S. Census American Community Survey. The results are varied between age groups, with 118 single men per 100 single women in their 20s, versus 33 single men to 100 single women over 65.
The numbers also vary between countries. For example, China has many more young men than young women, and this disparity is expected to increase. In regions with recent conflict such as Chechnya, women greatly outnumber men.
In a cross-cultural study by David Buss, men and women were asked to rank the importance of certain traits in a long term partner. Both men and women ranked "kindness" and "intelligence" as the two most important factors. Men valued beauty and youth more highly than women, while women valued financial and social status more highly than men.
In today's society, media saturates nearly every aspect of one's life. It seems inevitable for society to be influenced by the media and what it is portraying. Roles are gendered, meaning that both males and females are viewed and treated differently according to their biological sex, and because gendered roles are learned, the media has a direct impact on individuals. Thinking about the way in which couples act on romantic television shows or movies and the way women are portrayed as passive in magazine ads, reveals a lot about how gender roles are viewed in society and in heterosexual marriages. Traditional gendered roles view the man as a “pro-creator, a protector, and a provider,” and the woman as “pretty and polite but not too aggressive, not too outspoken and not too smart.” Media aids in society conforming to these traditional gendered views. People learn through imitation and social-interaction both in the physical world and through the media; television, magazines, advertisements, newspapers, the Internet, etc. Michael Messner argues that "gendered interactions, structure, and cultural meanings are intertwined, in both mutually reinforcing and contradictory ways."
Television's influence on society, specifically the influence of television advertisements, is shown in studies such as that of Jörg Matthes, Michael Prieler, and Karoline Adam. Their study into television advertising has shown that women are much more likely to be shown in a setting in the home compared to men. The study also shows that women are shown much less in work-like settings. This underrepresentation in television advertising is seen in many countries around the world but is very present in developed countries. In another study in the "Journal of Social Psychology," many television advertisements in countries around the world are seen targeting women at different times of the day than men. Advertisements for products directed towards female viewers are shown during the day on weekdays, while products for men are shown during weekends. The same article shows that a study on adults and television media has also seen that the more television adults watch, the more likely they are to believe or support the gender roles that are illustrated. The support of the presented gender stereotypes can lead to a negative view of feminism or sexual aggression.
It has been presented in the journal article by Emerald Group Publishing Limited that adolescent girls have been effected by the stereotypical view of women in media. Girls feel pressured and stressed to achieve a particular appearance and there have been highly worrying consequences for the young girls if they fail to achieve this look. These consequences have ranged from anxiety to eating disorders. Young girls in an experiment of this journal article describe pictures on women in advertisements as unrealistic and fake. They are dressed in little and revealing clothing which sexualised the women and expose their thin figures, that are gazed upon by the public, creating an issue with stereotyping in the media.
It has also been presented that children are affected by gender roles in the media. Children's preferences in television characters are most likely to be to characters of the same gender. Because children favor characters of the same gender, the characteristics of the character are also looked to by children. In another journal article by Emerald Group Publishing Limited, the underrepresentation of women in children's television shows between 1930 and 1960 is examined. While studies between 1960 and 1990 show an increase in the representation of women in television, studies conducted between 1990 and 2005, a time when women were considered to be equal to men by some, show no change in the representation of women in children's television shows. Women, being underrepresented in children's television shows, are also often portrayed as married or in a relationship, while men are more likely to be single. This reoccurring theme in relationship status can be reflected in the ideals of children that only see this type of representation.
Gendered roles in heterosexual marriages are learned through imitation. People learn what society views as appropriate gender behaviors from imitating the repetition of actions by one's role-model or parent of the same biological sex. Imitation in the physical world that impacts one's gendered roles often comes from role-modeling parents, peers, teachers, and other significant figures in one's life. In a marriage, oftentimes each person's gendered roles are determined by their parents. If the wife grew up imitating the actions of traditional parents, and the husband non-traditional parents, their views on marital roles would be different. One way people can acquire these stereotypical roles through a reward and punishment system. When a little girl imitates her mother by performing the traditional domestic duties she is often rewarded by being told she is doing a good job. Nontraditionally, if a little boy was performing the same tasks he would more likely be punished due to acting feminine. Because society holds these expected roles for men and women within a marriage, it creates a mold for children to follow.
Over the years, gender roles have continued to change and have a significant impact on the institution of marriage. Gender roles can be defined as the behaviors, values, and attitudes that a society considers appropriate for both male and female. Traditionally, men and women had completely opposing roles, men were seen as the provider for the family and women were seen as the caretakers of both the home and the family. However, in today's society the division of roles are starting to blur. More and more individuals are adapting non-traditional gender roles into their marriage in order to share responsibilities. This revolutionary view on gender roles seeks out equality between sexes. In today's society it is more likely that a man and woman are both providers for their family. More and more women are entering the workforce while more men are contributing to household duties.
After around the year 1980, divorce rates in the United States stabilized. Scholars in the area of sociology explain that this stabilization was due to several factors including, but not limited to, the shift in gender roles. The attitude concerning the shift in gender roles can be classified into two perspectives: traditional and egalitarian. Traditional attitudes uphold designated responsibilities for the sexes- wives raise the children and keep the home nice, and men are the breadwinners. Egalitarian attitudes uphold responsibilities being carried out equally by both sexes- wives and husbands are both breadwinners and they both take part in raising the children and keeping the home nice. Over the past 40 years, attitudes in marriages have become more egalitarian. Two studies carried out in the early 2000s have shown strong correlation between egalitarian attitudes and happiness and satisfaction in marriage, which scholars believe lead to stabilization in divorce rates. The results of a 2006 study performed by Gayle Kaufman, a professor of sociology, indicated that those who hold egalitarian attitudes report significantly higher levels of marital happiness than those with more traditional attitudes. Another study executed by Will Marshall in 2008 had results showing that relationships with better quality involve people with more egalitarian beliefs. It has been assumed by Danielle J. Lindemann, a sociologist who studies gender, sexuality, the family, and culture, that the shift in gender roles and egalitarian attitudes have resulted in marriage stability due to tasks being carried out by both partners, such as working late-nights and picking up ill children from school. Although the gap in gender roles still exists, roles have become less gendered and more equal in marriages compared to how they were traditionally.
Throughout history spouses have been charged with certain societal functions. With the rise of the New World came the expected roles that each spouse was to carry out specifically. Husbands were typically working farmers - the providers. Wives typically cared for the home and the children. However, the roles are now changing, and even reversing.
Societies can change such that the gender roles rapidly change. The 21st century has seen a shift in gender roles due to multiple factors such as new family structures, education, media, and several others. A 2003 survey by the Bureau of Labor Statistics indicated that about 1/3 of wives earn more than their husbands.
With the importance of education emphasized nationwide, and the access of college degrees (online, for example), women have begun furthering their education. Women have also started to get more involved in recreation activities such as sports, which in the past were regarded to be for men. Family structures are changing, and the number of single-mother or single-father households is increasing. Fathers are also becoming more involved with raising their children, instead of the responsibility resting solely with the mother.
According to the Pew Research Center, the number of stay-at-home fathers in the US nearly doubled in the period from 1989 to 2012, from 1.1 million to 2.0 million. This trend appears to be mirrored in a number of countries including the UK, Canada and Sweden. However, Pew also found that, at least in the US, public opinion in general appears to show a substantial bias toward favoring a mother as a care-taker versus a father, regardless of any shift in actual roles each plays.
Gender equality allows gender roles to become less distinct and according to Donnalyn Pompper, is the reason "men no longer own breadwinning identities and, like women, their bodies are objectified in mass media images." The LGBT rights movement has played a role increasing pro-gay attitudes, which according to Brian McNair, are expressed by many metrosexual men.
Besides North America and Europe, there are other regions whose gender roles are also changing. In Asia, Hong Kong is very close to the USA because the female surgeons in these societies are focused heavily on home life, whereas Japan is focused more on work life. After a female surgeon gives birth in Hong Kong, she wants to cut her work schedule down, but keeps working full time (60-80 hours per week). Similar to Hong Kong, Japanese surgeons still work long hours, but they try to rearrange their schedule so they can be at home more (end up working less than 60 hours). Although all three places have women working advanced jobs, the female surgeons in the USA and Hong Kong feel more gender equality at home where they have equal, if not more control of their families, and Japanese surgeons feel the men are still in control. A big change was seen in Hong Kong because the wives used to deal with a bad marriage. Now, Chinese wives have been divorcing their husbands when they feel unhappy with their marriage, and are stable financially. This makes the wife seem more in control of her own life, instead of letting her husband control her. Other places, such as Singapore and Taipei are also seeing changes in gender roles. In many societies, but especially Singapore and Taipei, women have more jobs that have a leadership position (ie. A doctor or manager), and fewer jobs as a regular worker (ie. A clerk or salesperson). The males in Singapore also have more leadership roles, but they have more lower level jobs too. In the past, the women would get the lower level jobs, and the men would get all the leadership positions. There is an increase of male unemployment in Singapore, Taipei, and Hong Kong, so the women are having to work more in order to support their families. In the past, the males were usually the ones supporting the family. In India, the women are married young, and are expected to run the household, even if they did not finish school. It is seen as shameful if a woman has to work outside of the house in order to help support the family. Many women are starting jewelry businesses inside their house and have their own bank account because of it. Middle aged women are now able to work without being shameful because they are no longer child bearing.
According to Professor Lei Chang, gender attitudes within the domains of work and domestic roles, can be measured using a cross-cultural gender role attitudes test. Psychological processes of the East have historically been analysed using Western models (or "instruments") that have been translated, which potentially, is a more far-reaching process than linguistic translation. Some North American instruments for assessing gender role attitudes include:
Through such tests, it is known that American southerners exhibit less egalitarian gender views than their northern counterparts, demonstrating that gender views are inevitably affected by an individual's culture. This also may differ among compatriots whose 'cultures' are a few hundred miles apart.
Although existing studies have generally focused on gender views or attitudes that are work-related, there has so far not been a study on specific domestic roles. Supporting Hofstede's 1980 findings, that "high masculinity cultures are associated with low percentages of women holding professional and technical employment", test values for work-related egalitarianism were lower for Chinese than for Americans. This is supported by the proportion of women that held professional jobs in China (far less than that of America), the data clearly indicating the limitations on opportunities open to women in contemporary Eastern society. In contrast, there was no difference between the viewpoint of Chinese and Americans regarding domestic gender roles.
A study by Richard Bagozzi, Nancy Wong and Youjae Yi, examines the interaction between culture and gender that produces distinct patterns of association between positive and negative emotions. The United States was considered a more 'independence-based culture', while China was considered 'interdependence-based'. In the US people tend to experience emotions in terms of opposition whereas in China, they do so in dialectical terms (i.e., those of logical argumentation and contradictory forces). The study continued with sets of psychological tests among university students in Beijing and in Michigan. The fundamental goals of the research were to show that "gender differences in emotions are adaptive for the differing roles that males and females play in the culture". The evidence for differences in gender role was found during the socialization in work experiment, proving that "women are socialized to be more expressive of their feelings and to show this to a greater extent in facial expressions and gestures, as well as by verbal means". The study extended to the biological characteristics of both gender groups — for a higher association between PA and NA hormones in memory for women, the cultural patterns became more evident for women than for men.
Gender communication is viewed as a form of intercultural communication; and gender is both an influence on and a product of communication.
Communication plays a large role in the process in which people become male or female because each gender is taught different linguistic practices. Gender is dictated by society through expectations of behavior and appearances, and then is shared from one person to another, by the process of communication. Gender does not create communication, communication creates gender.
For example, females are often more expressive and intuitive in their communication, but males tend to be instrumental and competitive. In addition, there are differences in accepted communication behaviors for males and females. To improve communication between genders, people who identify as either male or female must understand the differences between each gender.
As found by Cara Tigue (McMaster University in Hamilton, Canada) the importance of powerful vocal delivery for women could not be underestimated, as famously described in accounts of Margaret Thatcher's years in power.)
Hall published an observational study on nonverbal gender differences and discussed the cultural reasons for these differences. In her study, she noted women smile and laugh more and have a better understanding of nonverbal cues. She believed women were encouraged to be more emotionally expressive in their language, causing them to be more developed in nonverbal communication.
Men, on the other hand, were taught to be less expressive, to suppress their emotions, and to be less nonverbally active in communication and more sporadic in their use of nonverbal cues. Most studies researching nonverbal communication described women as being more expressively and judgmentally accurate in nonverbal communication when it was linked to emotional expression; other nonverbal expressions were similar or the same for both genders.
McQuiston and Morris also noted a major difference in men and women's nonverbal communication. They found that men tend to show body language linked to dominance, like eye contact and interpersonal distance, more than women.
According to author Julia Wood, there are distinct communication 'cultures' for women and men in the US. She believes that in addition to female and male communication cultures, there are also specific communication cultures for African Americans, older people, Native Americans, gay men, lesbians, and people with disabilities. According to Wood, it is generally thought that biological sex is behind the distinct ways of communicating, but in her opinion the root of these differences is "gender".
Maltz and Broker's research suggested that the games children play may contribute to socializing children into masculine and feminine gender roles: for example, girls being encouraged to play "house" may promotes stereotypically feminine traits, and may promote interpersonal relationships as playing house does not necessarily have fixed rules or objectives; boys tended to play more competitive and adversarial team sports with structured, predetermined goals and a range of confined strategies.
Metts, et al. explain that sexual desire is linked to emotions and communicative expression. Communication is central in expressing sexual desire and 'complicated emotional states', and is also the 'mechanism for negotiating the relationship implications of sexual activity and emotional meanings'.
Gender differences appear to exist in communicating sexual desire, for example, masculine people are generally perceived to be more interested in sex than feminine people, and research suggests that masculine people are more likely than feminine people to express their sexual interest.
This may be greatly affected by masculine people being less inhibited by social norms for expressing their desire, being more aware of their sexual desire or succumbing to the expectation of their gender culture. When feminine people employ tactics to show their sexual desire, they are typically more indirect in nature. On the other hand, it is known masculinity is associated with aggressive behavior in all mammals, and most likely explains at least part of the fact that masculine people are more likely to express their sexual interest. This is known as the Challenge hypothesis.
Various studies show different communication strategies with a feminine person refusing a masculine person's sexual interest. Some research, like that of Murnen, show that when feminine people offer refusals, the refusals are verbal and typically direct. When masculine people do not comply with this refusal, feminine people offer stronger and more direct refusals. However, research from Perper and Weis showed that rejection includes acts of avoidance, creating distractions, making excuses, departure, hinting, arguments to delay, etc. These differences in refusal communication techniques are just one example of the importance of communicative competence for both masculine and feminine gender cultures.
A 1992 study tested gender stereotypes and labeling within young children in the United States. Fagot "et al." divided this into two different studies, the first investigated how children identified the differences between gender labels of boys and girls, the second study looked at both gender labeling and stereotyping in the relationship of mother and child.
Within the first study, 23 children between the ages of 2 and 7 underwent a series of gender labeling and gender stereotyping tests consisting of showing the children either pictures of males and females or objects such as a hammer or a broom then identifying or labeling those to a certain gender. The results of these tests showed that children under 3 years could make gender-stereotypic associations.
The second study looked at gender labelling and stereotyping in the relationship of mother and child using three separate methods. The first consisted of identifying gender labeling and stereotyping, essentially the same method as the first study. The second consisted of behavioral observations, which looked at ten-minute play sessions with mother and child using gender specific toys.
The third was a series of questionnaires such as an "Attitude Toward Women Scale", "Personal Attributes Questionnaire", and "Schaefer and Edgerton Scale" which looked at the family values of the mother.
The results of these studies showed the same as the first study with regards to labelling and stereotyping.
They also identified in the second method that the mothers positive reactions and responses to same-sex or opposite-sex toys played a role in how children identified them. Within the third method the results found that the mothers of the children who passed the "Gender Labeling Test", had more traditional family values. These two studies, conducted by Beverly I. Fagot, Mar D. Leinbach and Cherie O'Boyle, showed that gender stereotyping and labeling is acquired at a very young age, and that social interactions and associations play a large role in how genders are identified.
Virginia Woolf, in the 1920s, made the point: 'It is obvious that the values of women differ very often from the values which have been made by the other sex. Yet it is the masculine values that prevail' remade sixty years later by psychologist Carol Gilligan who used it to show that psychological tests of maturity have generally been based on masculine parameters, and so tended to show that women were less 'mature'. Gilligan countered this in her ground-breaking work, "In a Different Voice", holding that maturity in women is shown in terms of different, but equally important, human values.
Gender stereotypes are extremely common in society. One of the reasons this may be is simply because it is easier on the brain to stereotype (see Heuristics).
The brain has limited perceptual and memory systems, so it categorizes information into fewer and simpler units which allows for more efficient information processing. Gender stereotypes appear to have an effect at an early age. In one study, the effects of gender stereotypes on children's mathematical abilities were tested. In this study of American children between the ages of six and ten, it was found that the children, as early as the second grade, demonstrated the gender stereotype that mathematics is a 'boy's subject'. This may show that the mathematical self-belief is influenced before the age in which there are discernible differences in mathematical achievement.
According to the 1972 study by Jean Lipman-Blumen, women who grew up following traditional gender roles from childhood were less likely to want to be highly educated while women brought up with the view that men and women are equal were more likely to want higher education. This result indicates that gender roles that have been passed down traditionally can influence stereotypes about gender.
In a later study, Deaux and her colleagues (1984) found that most people think women are "more" "nurturant", but "less self-assertive" than men. and that this belief is indicated universally, but that this awareness is related to women's "role". To put it another way, women do not have an "inherently" nurturant personality, rather that a nurturing personality is acquired by whoever happens to be doing the housework.
In a study of gender stereotypes by Jacobs (1991) it was found that parents' stereotypes interact with the sex of their child to directly influence the parents' beliefs about the child's abilities. In turn, parents' beliefs about their child directly influence their child's self-perceptions, and both the parents' stereotypes and the child's self-perceptions influence the child's performance.
Stereotype threat is being at risk of confirming, as self-characteristic, a negative stereotype about one's group. In the case of gender it is the implicit belief in gender stereotype that women perform worse than men in mathematics, which is proposed to lead to lower performance by women.
A review article of stereotype threat research (2012) relating to the relationship between gender and mathematical abilities concluded "that although stereotype threat may affect some women, the existing state of knowledge does not support the current level of enthusiasm for this [as a] mechanism underlying the gender gap in mathematics".
In 2018, Jolien A. van Breen and colleagues conducted research into subliminal gender stereotyping. Researchers took participants through a fictional Moral Choice Dilemma Task, which consisted of eight scenarios "in which sacrificing one person can save several others of unspecified gender... In four scenarios, participants are asked to sacrifice a man to save several others (of unspecified gender), and in four other scenarios they are asked to sacrifice a woman." The results showed that women who identified as feminists were more willing to 'sacrifice' men than women who did not identify as feminists. "If a person wanted to counteract that and ‘level the playing field’, that can be done either by boosting women or by downgrading men”, said van Breen. “So I think that this effect on evaluations of men arises because our participants are trying to achieve an underlying aim: counteracting gender stereotypes."
Gender stereotypes can disadvantage women during the hiring process. It is one explanation for the lack of women in key organizational positions.
Management and similar leader positions are often perceived to be "masculine" in type, meaning they are assumed to require aggressiveness, competitiveness, strength and independence. These traits do not line up with the perceived traditional female gender role stereotype. (This is often referred to as the "lack of fit" model which describes the dynamics of the gender bias.) Therefore, the perception that women do not possess these "masculine" qualities, limits their ability to be hired or promoted into managerial positions.
One's performance at work is also evaluated based on one's gender. If a female and a male worker show the same performance, the implications of that performance vary depending on the person's gender and on who observes the performance; if a man performs exceedingly well he is perceived as driven or goal-oriented and generally seen in a positive light while a woman showing a similar performance is often described using adjectives with negative connotations.
Female performance is therefore not evaluated neutrally or unbiased and stereotyped in ways to deem their equivalent levels and quality of work as instead of lesser value.
Consequently, that gender stereotype filter leads to a lack of fair evaluation and, in turn, to fewer women occupying higher paying positions. Gender stereotypes contain women at certain, lower levels; getting trapped within the glass ceiling. While the number of women in the workforce occupying management positions is slowly increasing, women currently fill only 2.5% of the higher managerial positions in the United States. The fact that most women are being allocated to occupations that pay less, is often cited as a contributor to the existing gender pay gap.
In relation to white women, women of color are disproportionally affected by the negative influence their gender has on their chances in the labor market. In 2005, women held only 14.7% of Fortune 500 board seats with 79% of them being white and 21% being women of color. This difference is understood through intersectionality, a term describing the multiple and intersecting oppressions and individual might experience. Activists during second-wave feminism have also used the term "horizontal oppressions" to describe this phenomenon. It has also been suggested that women of color in addition to the glass ceiling, face a "concrete wall" or a "sticky floor" to better visualize the barriers.
Liberal feminist theory states that due to these systemic factors of oppression and discrimination, women are often deprived of equal work experiences because they are not provided equal opportunities on the basis of legal rights. Liberal feminists further propose that an end needs to be put to discrimination based on gender through legal means, leading to equality and major economic redistributions.
While activists have tried calling on Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 to provide an equal hiring and promotional process, that practice has had limited success. The pay gap between men and women is slowly closing. Women make approximately 21% less than her male counterpart according to the Department of Labor. This number varies by age, race, and other perceived attributes of hiring agents. A proposed step towards solving the problem of the gender pay gap and the unequal work opportunities is the ratification of the Equal Rights Amendment which would constitutionally guarantee equal rights for women. This is hoped to end gender-based discrimination and provide equal opportunities for women.
If a woman "does" act according to female stereotypes, she is likely to receive backlash for not being competent enough; if she does "not" act according to the stereotypes connected to her gender and behaves more androgynous, or even masculine, it is likely to cause backlash through third-party punishment or further job discrimination. Therefore, women are expected to behave in a way that aligns with female gender stereotypes while these stereotypes are simultaneously used to justify their lack of success in an economic context, putting women in the workforce in a precarious, "double bind" situation. A proposed step to relieve women from this issue is the above-mentioned ratification of the Equal Rights Amendment, as it would legally further gender equality and prohibit gender-based discrimination regardless if a woman is acting according to female gender stereotypes or in defiance of them.
Rosabeth Moss Kanter identified four types of stereotypes given to professional women via the media. The four stereotypes are, iron maiden, pet, mother, and seductress/sex object. Iron maiden refers to women who are deemed to display too many masculine traits and not enough feminine traits according to her audience. This leads audiences to question the trustworthiness of an iron maiden, because she is seen as strategically playing the field to appease voters. The pet stereotype is given to women who are identified as helpmates, cheerleaders, or mascots, which then leads the audience to see these women as naive or weak and unable to lead without a man's help. If a professional woman is seen as a mother, she is more likely to be seen as compassionate and caring, but also has the capacity to be shrew, punishing, and scolding. Additionally, it is possible for her leadership abilities to be called into question due to perceived conflicts with her maternal responsibilities. The fourth stereotype, seductress, is assigned to women who speak and act rather femininely, or have been victims of sexual harassment. The media tends to focus on the seductress woman's sex appeal and physical appearance in opposition to her policy stances and rhetoric.
A proposed step to relieve women from that double bind is the above-mentioned ratification of the Equal Rights Amendment, as it would further legal gender equality and prohibit gender-based discrimination, regardless if a woman is acting according to female gender stereotypes or in defiance of them.
Gender stereotypes and roles can also be supported implicitly. Implicit stereotypes are the unconscious influence of attitudes a person may or may not be aware that they hold. A person is influenced by these attitudes even though they are not aware. Gender stereotypes can also be held in this manner.
These implicit stereotypes can often be demonstrated by the Implicit-association test (IAT).
One example of an implicit gender stereotype is that males are seen as better at mathematics than females. It has been found that men have stronger positive associations with mathematics than women, while women have stronger negative associations with mathematics and the more strongly a woman associates herself with the female gender identity, the more negative her association with mathematics.
These associations have been disputed for their biological connection to gender and have been attributed to social forces that perpetuate stereotypes such as aforementioned stereotype that men are better at mathematics than women.
This particular stereotype has been found in American children as early as second grade.
The same test with Singaporean children found that the strength of their mathematics-gender stereotype and their gender identity predicted the association between individuals and mathematical ability.
It has been shown that this stereotype also reflects mathematical performance: a study was done on the worldwide scale and it was found that the strength of this mathematics-gender stereotype in varying countries correlates with 8th graders' scores on the TIMSS, a standardized math and science achievement test that is given worldwide. The results were controlled for general gender inequality and yet were still significant.
An example of gender stereotypes assumes those of the male gender are more 'tech savvy' and happier working online, however, a study done by Hargittai & Shafer, shows that many women also typically have lower self-perceived abilities when it comes to use of the World Wide Web and online navigation skills. Because this stereotype is so well known many women assume they lack such technical skills when in reality, the gap in technological skill level between men and women is significantly less than many women assume.
In the journal article written by Elizabeth Behm-Morawitz video games have been guilty of using sexualised female characters, who wear revealing clothing with an 'ideal' figure. It has been shown, female gamers can experience lower self-efficacy when playing a game with a sexualized female character. Women have been stereotyped in online games and have shown to be quite sexist in their appearance. It has been shown these kind of character appearances have influenced peoples' beliefs about gender capabilities by assigning certain qualities to the male and female characters in different games.
The concept of gender inequality is often perceived as something that is non-existent within the online community, because of the anonymity possible online. Remote or home-working greatly reduces the volume of information one individual gives another compared to face-to-face encounters, providing fewer opportunities for unequal treatment but it seems real-world notions of power and privilege are being duplicated: people who choose to take up different identities (avatars) in the online world are (still) routinely discriminated against, evident in online gaming where users are able to create their own characters. This freedom allows the user to create characters and identities with a different appearance than their own in reality, essentially allowing them to create a new identity, confirming regardless of actual gender those who are perceived to be female are treated differently because of their on-line gender identity.
In marked contrast to the traditional male-dominated stereotype a study shows that 52% of the gaming audience is made up of women and a minority of gaming characters are women. Only 12% of game designers in Britain and 3% of all programmers are women.
Despite the growing number of women who partake in online communities, and the anonymous space provided by the Internet, issues such as gender inequality, the issue has simply been transplanted into the online world.
Even though the number of women running for elected office has increased over the last decades, they still only make up 20% of U.S. senators, 19.4% of U.S. congressional representatives and 24% of statewide executives. Additionally, many of these political campaigns appear to focus on the aggressiveness of the female candidate which is often still perceived as a masculine trait. Therefore, female candidates are running based on gender-opposing stereotypes because that predicts higher likelihood of success than appearing to be a stereotypical woman.
Elections of increasing numbers of women into office serves as a basis for many scholars to claim that voters are not biased towards a candidate's gender. However, it has been shown that female politicians are perceived as only being superior when it comes to handling women's rights and poverty, whereas male politicians are perceived to be better at dealing with crime and foreign affairs. That view lines up with the most common gender stereotypes.
It has also been predicted that gender does only highly matter for female candidates that have not been politically established. These predictions apply further to established candidates, stating that gender would not be a defining factor for their campaign or the focal point of media coverage. This has been disproven by multiple scholars, often based on Hillary Clinton's multiple campaigns for the office of President of the United States.
Additionally, when voters don't have a lot of information about a female candidate, they are likely to view her as being a stereotypical woman which they often take as a basis for not electing her because they consider typical male qualities as being crucial for someone holding a political office.
Throughout the 20th century, women in the United States saw a dramatic shift in social and professional aspirations and norms. Following the Women's Suffrage Movement of the late-nineteenth century, which resulted in the passage of the Nineteenth Amendment allowing women to vote, and in combination with conflicts in Europe, WWI and WWII, women found themselves shifted into the industrial workforce. During this time, women were expected to take up industrial jobs and support the troops abroad through the means of domestic industry. Moving from "homemakers" and "caregivers", women were now factory workers and "breadwinners" for the family.
However, after the war, men returned home to the United States and women, again, saw a shift in social and professional dynamics. With the reuniting of the nuclear family, the ideals of American Suburbia boomed. Throughout the 1950s and 1960s, middle-class families moved in droves from urban living into newly developed single-family homes on former farmland just outside major cities. Thus established what many modern critics describe as the "private sphere". Though frequently sold and idealized as “perfect living”, many women had difficulty adjusting to the new “private sphere.” Writer Betty Friedan described this discontent as “the feminine mystique.” The “mystique” was derived from women equipped with the knowledge, skills, and aspirations of the workforce, the “public sphere”, who felt compelled whether socially or morally to devote themselves to the home and family.
One major concern of feminism, is that women occupy lower-ranking job positions than men, and do most of the housework. A recent (October 2009) report from the Center for American Progress, "The Shriver Report: A Woman's Nation Changes Everything" tells us that women now make up 48% of the US workforce and "mothers are breadwinners or co-breadwinners in a majority of families" (63.3%, see figure 2, page 19 of the Executive Summary of The Shriver Report).
Another recent article in "The New York Times" indicates that young women today are closing the pay gap. Luisita Lopez Torregrosa has noted, "Women are ahead of men in education (last year, 55 percent of U.S. college graduates were female). And a study shows that in most U.S. cities, single, childless women under 30 are making an average of 8 percent more money than their male counterparts, with Atlanta and Miami in the lead at 20 percent.". While this study concerned American cities, a global trend is developing, and has now been termed "the reverse gender gap."
Feminist theory generally defines gender as a social construct that includes ideologies governing feminine/masculine (female/male) appearances, actions, and behaviors. An example of these gender roles would be that males were supposed to be the educated breadwinners of the family, and occupiers of the public sphere whereas, the female's duty was to be a homemaker, take care of her husband and children, and occupy the private sphere. According to contemporary gender role ideology, gender roles are continuously changing. This can be seen in Londa Schiebinger's "Has Feminism Changed Science", in which she states, "Gendered characteristics - typically masculine or feminine behaviors, interests, or values-are not innate, nor are they arbitrary. They are formed by historical circumstances. They can also change with historical circumstances."
One example of the contemporary definition of gender was depicted in Sally Shuttleworth’s "Female Circulation" in which the, “abasement of the woman, reducing her from an active participant in the labor market to the passive bodily existence to be controlled by male expertise is indicative of the ways in which the ideological deployment of gender roles operated to facilitate and sustain the changing structure of familial and market relations in Victorian England.” In other words, this shows what it meant to grow up into the roles (gender roles) of a female in Victorian England, which transitioned from being a homemaker to being a working woman and then back to being passive and inferior to males. In conclusion, gender roles in the contemporary sex gender model are socially constructed, always changing, and do not really exist since, they are ideologies that society constructs in order for various benefits at various times in history.
The men's rights movement (MRM) is a part of the larger men's movement. It branched off from the men's liberation movement in the early-1970s. The men's rights movement is made up of a variety of groups and individuals who are concerned about what they consider to be issues of male disadvantage, discrimination and oppression. The movement focuses on issues in numerous areas of society (including family law, parenting, reproduction, domestic violence) and government services (including education, compulsory military service, social safety nets, and health policies) that they believe discriminate against men.
Scholars consider the men's rights movement or parts of the movement to be a backlash to feminism. The men's rights movement denies that men are privileged relative to women. The movement is divided into two camps: those who consider men and women to be harmed equally by sexism, and those who view society as endorsing the degradation of men and upholding female privilege.
Men's rights groups have called for male-focused governmental structures to address issues specific to men and boys including education, health, work and marriage. Men's rights groups in India have called for the creation of a Men's Welfare Ministry and a National Commission for Men, as well as the abolition of the National Commission for Women. In the United Kingdom, the creation of a Minister for Men analogous to the existing Minister for Women, have been proposed by David Amess, MP and Lord Northbourne, but were rejected by the government of Tony Blair. In the United States, Warren Farrell heads a commission focused on the creation of a "White House Council on Boys and Men" as a counterpart to the "White House Council on Women and Girls" which was formed in March 2009.
Related to this is the Father's Rights Movement, whose members seek social and political reforms that affect fathers and their children. These individuals contest that societal institutions such as family courts, and laws relating to child custody and child support payments, are gender biased in favor of mothers as the default caregiver. They therefore are systemically discriminatory against males regardless of their actual caregiving ability, because males are typically seen as the bread-winner, and females as the care-giver.
Gender neutrality is the movement to end discrimination of gender altogether in society through means of gender neutral language, the end of sex segregation and other means.
Transgender is the state of one's gender identity or gender expression not matching one's assigned sex. Transgender is independent of sexual orientation; transgender people may identify as heterosexual, homosexual, bisexual, etc.; some may consider conventional sexual orientation labels inadequate or inapplicable to them. The definition of "transgender" includes:
While people self-identify as transgender, the transgender identity umbrella includes sometimes-overlapping categories. These include transsexual; transvestite or cross-dresser; genderqueer; androgyne; and bigender. Usually not included are transvestic fetishists (because it is considered to be a paraphilia rather than gender identification), and drag kings and drag queens, who are performers who cross-dress for the purpose of entertaining. In an interview, celebrity drag queen RuPaul talked about society's ambivalence to the differences in the people who embody these terms. "A friend of mine recently did the "Oprah" show about transgender youth", said RuPaul. "It was obvious that we, as a culture, have a hard time trying to understand the difference between a drag queen, transsexual, and a transgender, yet we find it very easy to know the difference between the American baseball league and the National baseball league, when they are both so similar."
Sexual orientation is defined by the interplay between a person's emotional and physical attraction toward others. Generally, sexual orientation is broken into the three categories: heterosexual, homosexual and bisexual. By basic definition, the term heterosexual is typically used in reference to someone who is attracted to people of the opposite sex, the term homosexual is used to classify people who are attracted to those of the same sex, and the term bisexual is used to identify those who are attracted to both the same and opposite sexes. Sexual orientation can be variously defined based on sexual identity, sexual behavior and sexual attraction. People can fall anywhere on a spectrum from strictly heterosexual to strictly homosexual.
Scientists do not know the exact cause of sexual orientation, but they theorize that it is caused by a complex interplay of genetic, hormonal, and environmental influences, and do not view it as a choice. Although no single theory on the cause of sexual orientation has yet gained widespread support, scientists favor biologically-based theories. There is considerably more evidence supporting nonsocial, biological causes of sexual orientation than social ones, especially for males. There is no substantive evidence which suggests parenting or early childhood experiences play a role with regard to sexual orientation.
An active conflict over the cultural acceptability of non-heterosexuality rages worldwide. The belief or assumption that heterosexual relationships and acts are "normal" is described as heterosexism or in queer theory, heteronormativity. Gender identity and sexual orientation are two separate aspects of individual identity, although they are often mistaken in the media.
Perhaps it is an attempt to reconcile this conflict that leads to a common assumption that one same-sex partner assumes a pseudo-male gender role and the other assumes a pseudo-female role. For a gay male relationship, this might lead to the assumption that the "wife" handled domestic chores, was the receptive sexual partner, adopted effeminate mannerisms, and perhaps even dressed in women's clothing. This assumption is flawed because homosexual couples tend to have more equal roles, and the effeminate behavior of some gay men is usually not adopted consciously, and is often more subtle.
Cohabitating same-sex partners are typically egalitarian when they assign domestic chores. Sometimes these couples assign traditional female responsibilities to one partner and traditional male responsibilities to the other. Same-sex domestic partners challenge traditional gender roles in their division of household responsibilities, and gender roles within homosexual relationships are flexible. For instance, cleaning and cooking, traditionally regarded by many as both female responsibilities, might be assigned to different people. Carrington observed the daily home lives of 52 gay and lesbian couples and found that the length of the work week and level of earning power substantially affected the assignment of housework, regardless of gender or sexuality.
In many cultures, gender roles, especially for men, simultaneously act as an indicator for heterosexuality, and as a boundary of acceptable behavior for straight people. Therefore, lesbians, gay men and bisexual people may be viewed as exempt from some or all components of gender roles or as having different "rules" they are expected to follow by society.
These modified "rules" for lesbian, gay and bisexual people may also be oppressive. Morgan examines the plight of homosexuals seeking asylum from homophobic persecution who have been turned away by US customs for "not being gay enough"; not conforming sufficiently to standard (Western) conceptions of the gender roles occupied by gays and lesbians.
Conversely, heterosexual men and women who are not perceived as being sufficiently masculine or feminine, respectively, may be assumed to be, or suspected to be, homosexual, and persecuted for their perceived homosexuality.
A number of studies conducted since the mid-90s have found direct correlation between a female criminal's ability to conform to gender role stereotypes, particularly murder, and the severity of their sentencing. "...In terms of the social realities of justice in America, the experiences of diverse groups of people in society have contributed to the shaping of the types of criminals and victims that we have had. Like Andersen and Hill Collins (1998: 4) in their discussion of what they refer to as a 'matrix of domination,' we too conceive that class, race, and gender represent "multiple, interlocking levels of domination that stem from the societal configurations of these structural relationships. These patterned actions, in turn, affect [ing] individual consciousness, group interaction, and individual and group access to institutional power and privileges.'" "Patterns of offending by men and by women are notable both for their similarities and for their differences. Both men and women are more heavily involved in minor property and substance abuse offenses than in serious crimes like robbery or murder. However, men offend at much higher rates than women for all crime categories except prostitution. This gender gap in crime is greatest for serious crime and least for mild forms of lawbreaking such as minor property crimes."
The ‘Family Violence Framework’ applies gender dynamics to family violence. “Families are constructed around relationships that involve obligations and responsibilities, but also status and power”. According to Hattery and Smith, when “masculinity and femininity are constructed…to generate these rigid and narrow gender roles, it contributes to a culture of violence against women” “People with more resources are more likely to be abusive towards those without resources”, meaning that the stronger member of the relationship abuses their weaker partner or family member to exert their powerful roles. However, the fight for power and equality remains – “Intimate partner violence in same-sex couples reveals that the rates are similar to those in the heterosexual community”.
| 43094 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=43094 |
Religion&Philosophy&Ethics | Religion and sexuality
The views of religions and religious believers range widely, from giving sex and sexuality a rather negative connotation to believing that sex is the highest expression of the divine. Some religions distinguish between sexual activities that are practised for biological reproduction (sometimes allowed only when in formal marital status and at a certain age) and those practised only for sexual pleasure in evaluating relative morality.
Sexual morality has varied greatly over time and between cultures. A society's sexual norms—standards of sexual conduct—can be linked to religious beliefs, or social and environmental conditions, or all of these. Sexuality and reproduction are fundamental elements in human interaction and societies worldwide. Furthermore, "sexual restriction" is one of the universals of culture peculiar to all human societies.
Accordingly, most religions have seen a need to address the question of a "proper" role for sexuality. Religions have differing codes of sexual morality, which regulate sexual activity or assign normative values to certain sexually charged actions or ideas. Each major religion has developed a moral code covering issues of sexuality, morality, ethics etc. These moral codes seek to regulate the situations that can give rise to sexual interest and to influence people's sexual activities and practices.
In the Bahá'í Faith, sexual relationships are permitted only between a husband and wife. Bahá'u'lláh, the founder of the Bahá'í Faith, forbids extramarital sexual intercourse in his book of laws, the Kitáb-i-Aqdas. The Baha'i consideration of sex is that chastity should be practised by both sexes before marriage because it is commendable ethically and leads to a happy and successful marital life. The Bahá'í Faith recognizes the value of the sex impulse, but judges that its proper expressioin is within the institution of marriage: Baha'is do not believe in suppression of the sex impulse but in its regulation and control.
Paul the Apostle stated in 1 Corinthians that it is good for the unmarried to remain this way, but if they cannot control themselves, they should marry, "To the unmarried and the widows I say that it is well for them to remain unmarried as I am. But if they are not practising self-control, they should marry. For it is better to marry than to be aflame with passion." Importantly, Paul's view of sex is also that it is actually unnecessary for those with certain gifts (presumably "celibacy").
New Testament scholar N. T. Wright asserts that Paul absolutely forbade fornication, irrespective of a new Christian's former cultural practices. Wright notes "If a Corinthian were to say, 'Because I'm a Corinthian, I have always had a string of girl-friends I sleep with, that's part of our culture,' Paul would respond, 'Not now you're a Christian you don't.'... When someone disagreed with Paul's clear rules on immorality or angry disputes, the matters he deals with in Colossians 3.5–10, he is... firm, as we see dramatically in 1 Corinthians 5 and 6. There is no place in the Christian fellowship for such practices and for such a person."
Some have suggested that Paul's treatment of sex was influenced by his conviction that the end of the world was imminent. Under this view, Paul, believing that the world would soon end, took it as a corollary that all earthly concerns, including sex, should hold little interest for Christians. Paul's letters show far greater concern with sexual issues than the gospel writers attributed to Jesus, since Paul was building Christian communities over decades and responding to various issues that arose.
The theologian Lee Gatiss states that "the word 'fornication' has gone out of fashion and is not in common use to describe non-marital sex. However, it is an excellent translation for [the Biblical term] , which basically referred to any kind of sex outside of marriage... This has been contested... but the overwhelming weight of scholarship and all the available evidence from the ancient world points firmly in this direction. 'Flee sexual immorality () and pursue self-control' (cf. 1 Thess 4:1–8) was the straightforward message to Christians in a sex-crazed world."
In early Christianity, reflection on scriptural texts introduced an eschatological hermeneutic to the reading of the Book of Genesis. The Garden of Eden was seen as a normative ideal state to which Christians were to strive; writers linked the future enjoyment of Heaven to the original blessedness of Adam and Eve in their reflections.
The valuation of virginity in the ancient church brought into relief a tension between the Genesis injunction to "be fruitful and multiply" with its understood contextual implication of marriage as a social institution, and the interpretation of the superiority of virginity over marriage, sexual activity and family formation from the Gospel texts Matt 19:11-12, Matt 19:29. One way patristic thinkers tried to harmonize the texts was through the position that there had actually been no sexual intercourse in Eden: on this reading, sex happened after the fall of man and the expulsion from Eden, thus preserving virginity as the perfect state both in the historical Paradise and the anticipated Heaven. John Chrysostom, Gregory of Nyssa, Justin Martyr, Epiphanius of Salamis, and Irenaeus of Lyons all espoused this view:
Prof. John Noonan suggests that "if one asks... where the Christian Fathers derived their notions on marital intercourse – notions which have no express biblical basis – the answer must be, chiefly from the Stoics". He uses texts from Musonius Rufus, Seneca the Younger, and Ocellus Lucanus, tracing works of Clement of Alexandria, Origen and Jerome to the works of these earlier thinkers, particularly as pertaining to the permissible use of the sexual act, which in the Stoic model must be subdued, dispassionate, and justified by its procreative intent.
Augustine of Hippo had a different challenge: to respond to the errors of Manichaeism. The Manichees, according to Augustine, were "opposed to marriage, because they are opposed to procreation which is the purpose of marriage". "The method of contraception practised by these Manichees whom Augustine knew is the use of the sterile period as determined by Greek medicine", which Augustine condemns (this stands in contrast to the contemporarily permitted Catholic use of Natural family planning).
As monastic communities developed, the sexual lives of monks came under scrutiny from two theologians, John Cassian and Caesarius of Arles, who commented on the "vices" of the solitary life. "Their concerns were not with the act of masturbation, but with the monks who vowed chastity. The monks' vow made masturbation an illicit act; the act itself was not considered sinful... In fact... prior to Cassian, masturbation was not considered a sexual offence for anyone."
From the beginning of the thirteenth century, the Catholic Church formally recognized marriage between a freely consenting, baptized man and woman as a sacrament – an outward sign communicating a special gift of God's love. The Council of Florence in 1438 gave this definition, following earlier Church statements in 1208, and declared that sexual union was a special participation in the union of Christ in the Church. However the Puritans, while highly valuing the institution, viewed marriage as a "civil", rather than a "religious" matter, being "under the jurisdiction of the civil courts". This is because they found no biblical precedent for clergy performing marriage ceremonies. Further, marriage was said to be for the "relief of concupiscence" as well as any spiritual purpose.
The Catholic moral theologian Charles E. Curran stated "the fathers of the Church are practically silent on the simple question of masturbation".
The "Catechism of the Catholic Church" teaches that "the flesh is the hinge of salvation". The "Catechism" indicates that sexual relationships in marriage is "a way of imitating in the flesh the Creator's generosity and fecundity" and lists fornication as one of the "offenses against chastity", calling it "an intrinsically and gravely disordered action" because "use of the sexual faculty, for whatever reason, outside of marriage is essentially contrary to its purpose". The "conjugal act" aims "at a deeply personal unity, a unity that, beyond union in one flesh, leads to forming one heart and soul" since the marriage bond is to be a sign of the love between God and humanity.
Pope John Paul II's first major teaching was on the theology of the body, presented in a series of lectures by the same name. Over the course of five years he elucidated a vision of sex that was not only positive and affirming but was about redemption, not condemnation. He taught that by understanding God's plan for physical love we could understand "the meaning of the whole of existence, the meaning of life." He taught that human beings were created by a loving God for a purpose: to be loving persons who freely choose to love, to give themselves as persons who express their self-giving through their bodies. Thus, sexual intercourse between husband and wife is a symbol of their total mutual self-donation.
For John Paul II, "The body, and it alone, is capable of making visible what is invisible: the spiritual and divine." He says there is no other more perfect image of the unity and communion of God in mutual love than the sexual act of a married couple, whereby they give themselves in a total way – exclusively to one another, and up to the end of their lives, and in a fruitfully generous way by participating in the creation of new human beings. Through this perspective, he understands the immorality of extra-marital sex. It falsifies the language of the human body, a language of total love worthy of persons by using the body for selfish ends, thus treating persons as things and objects, rather than dealing with embodied persons with the reverence and love that incarnate spirits deserve. John Paul II stresses that there is great beauty in sexual love when done in harmony with the human values of freely chosen total commitment and self-giving. For him, this sexual love is a form of worship, an experience of the sacred.
Roman Catholics believe that masturbation is a sin.
Nearly all Protestants assert that any and all sex outside of marriage, including that conducted between committed, engaged or cohabiting couples, is the sin of fornication. This rejection of premarital sex includes even the most liberal churches.
Unlike Roman Catholics, Protestants do not disapprove of masturbation due to the lack of a Biblical injunction against the act. Mainstream and conservative Protestants agree masturbation is not a sin, although there are various restrictions, such as making sure it does not lead to use of pornography or looking lustfully at people or mutual masturbation or addiction to the act. It must also not be undertaken in a spirit of defiance against God.
In most Lutheran, Reformed and United churches of the Evangelical Church in Germany and in the Netherlands and Switzerland view homosexuality as a violation of the 7th commandment. In these Lutheran, United and Reformed churches gay ministers are not permitted in ministry and gay couples are not allowed in their churches.
Inside the Lutheran Church of Sweden, the Bishop of Stockholm, Eva Brunne is a lesbian.
The Metropolitan Community Church, also known as the Universal Fellowship of Metropolitan Community Churches, has a specific outreach to lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender families and communities.
The Anglican Church upholds human sexuality as a gift from a loving God designed to be between a man and a woman in a monogamous lifetime union of marriage. It also recognises singleness and dedicated celibacy as Christ-like. It reassures people with same sex attraction they are loved by God and are welcomed as full members of the Body of Christ. The Church leadership has a variety of views in regard to homosexual expression and ordination. Some expressions of sexuality are considered sinful including "promiscuity, prostitution, incest, pornography, paedophilia, predatory sexual behaviour, and sadomasochism (all of which may be heterosexual and homosexual), adultery, violence against wives, and female circumcision". The Church is concerned with pressures on young people to engage sexually and encourages abstinence.
In the Anglican church there is a large discussion over the blessing of gay couples and over tolerance of homosexuality. The discussion is more about the aspect of love between two people of the same sex in a relationship than it is about the sexual aspect of a relationship.
Within the many branches of Mormonism the principal denomination the LDS Church teaches conservative views around sexual ethics in their Law of Chastity which holds that masturbation, pre- and extra-marital sex, and same-sex sexual activity are sins. In the 1800s, however, it was allowed for men to be married to and have children with several women and this was also discontinued in the 1800s.
On various occasions LDS church leaders have taught that members should not masturbate as part of obedience to the LDS law of chastity. The LDS church believes that sex outside of opposite-sex marriage is sinful and that any same-sex sexual activity is a serious sin. God is believed to be in a heterosexual marriage with Heavenly Mother and Mormons believe that opposite-sex marriage is what God wants for all his children. Top LDS church leaders used to teach that attractions to those of the same sex were a sin or disease that could be changed or fixed, but now have no stance on the etiology of homosexuality, and teach that therapy focused on changing sexual orientation is unethical. Lesbian, gay, and bisexual members are, thus, left with the option of attempting to change their sexual orientation, entering a mixed-orientation opposite-sex marriage, or living a celibate lifestyle without any sexual expression (including masturbation).
The LDS church teaches that women's principal role is to raise children. Women who rejected this role as being a domestic woman in the home, were seen as unstable and corrupted. Before 1890 the Mormon leaders taught that polygamy was a way to salvation and many had multiple wives into the early 1900s, and some women practiced polyandry.
The Mormon religion teaches that marriage should be with a man and a woman. The LDS church teaches its members to obey the law of chastity which says that "sexual relations are proper only between a man and a woman who are legally and lawfully wedded as husband and wife". Violations of this code include "adultery, being without natural affection, lustfulness, infidelity, incontinence, filthy communications, impurity, inordinate affection, fornication". The traditional Mormon religion forbids all homosexual behavior, whether it be intra-marriage or extramarital. In Romans 1:24-32, Paul preached to the Romans that homosexual behavior was sinful. In Leviticus 20:13, Moses included in his law that homosexual actions and behaviors were against God's will. In the 1830s, LDS founder Joseph Smith instituted the private practice on polygamy. The practice was defended by the church as a matter of religious freedom. In 1890, the church practice was terminated. Since the termination of polygamy, Mormons have solely believed in marriage between two people, and those two people being a man and a woman. The LDS community states that they still love homosexuals as sons and daughters of the Lord, but if they act upon their inclinations then they are subject to discipline of the church.
While the Unity Church at one point in its history offered prayers for the healing of homosexuality, the church has consistently ordained openly gay ministers, beginning with Ernest C. Wilson, who was ordained as a minister by founder Charles Fillmore, who sent him to a church in Hollywood, California on learning of his orientation.
According to Max Heindel, sex should be only used for procreation. All sexual intercourses intended for pleasure or for any other reason, even within marriage, are sinful against the Holy Spirit.
Islam encourages marriage as a form of religious practice, and considers it as the best form that regulates the sexual relationship of human beings. Quranic verses made it legal for Muslim men to marry women from other Abrahamic religions (i.e. Jews and Christians), provided that the women are faithful (adherent) to their own religious beliefs. Contemporary scholars have upheld this ruling. A Muslim woman, on the other hand, is only allowed to marry a Muslim man because to marry a non-Muslim man would mean that the children would grow up as non-Muslims. A marriage contract between a Muslim woman and a non-Muslim man is traditionally considered illegal and void, and hence legally an adulterous affair. Another reason is to insure that the woman's legal rights are fully recognized in a marriage contract.
Most forms of sexual contact within a marriage are allowed. Sex is considered a pleasurable, even spiritual activity, and a duty. At least one hadith explicitly states that for a married couple to have sex is a good deed rewarded by God. Another hadith suggests that a man should not leave the proverbial bed until the woman is satisfied, a reference many say points to orgasm.
Forbidden sexual contact includes genital contact with a woman while she is menstruating. In such case, other sexual contact (such as kissing and any sexual activity that does not include vaginal contact) is explicitly allowed. Temporary marriage ("Mut'a", marriage designated for a preset period of time) is not allowed by the majority Sunni schools, but is allowed by Shia schools. Debate continues on its validity.
Adultery warrants severe punishment. Pre-marital sex is also considered sinful, albeit less severe. All shari'a laws regulating sexual conduct apply to both men and women equally, apart from those concerning menstruation.
There are dissenting views on the topic of masturbation. While some scholars consider it unlawful and thus prohibited according to Islamic doctrine, others (such as those of the Hanbali doctrine) believe that those who masturbate out of fear of committing fornication or fear for their bodies have done nothing wrong and are not punished if (and only if) they are unable to marry. According to some hadiths however, men are encouraged to fast in order to avoid fornication and tempting oneself with sexual thoughts or conversations with opposite sex outside marriage is strongly discouraged.
In the perspective of traditional Judaism, sex and reproduction are the holiest of acts one can do, the act through which one can imitate God, "The Creator", and in order to preserve its sanctity there are many boundaries and guidelines. Within the boundaries, there are virtually no outright strictures, and it is in fact obligatory. It prohibits sexual relations outside of heterosexual marriage, maintains biblical strictures on relations within marriage including observance of niddah, a prohibition on relations for a period including the menstrual period, and tzniut, requirements of modest dress and behavior. Traditional Judaism views the physical acts of adultery, incest, intentional waste of semen, men having anal sex with men, and male masturbation as grave sins. Judaism permits relatively free divorce, with Orthodox Judaism and Conservative Judaism requiring a religious divorce ceremony for a divorce to be religiously recognized. Worldwide movements in Judaism considered more liberal have rejected Jewish law as binding but rather inspirational and allegorical, so adapted perspectives more consistent with contemporary western general secular culture.
Most of mainstream Judaism does not accept polyamory, although some people consider themselves Jewish and polyamorous. One prominent rabbi who does accept polyamory is Sharon Kleinbaum who was ordained in Reconstructionist Judaism which considers biblical Jewish law as not considered binding, but is treated as a valuable cultural remnant that should be upheld unless there is reason for the contrary. She is the senior rabbi at Congregation Beit Simchat Torah in New York which works independently of any major American Jewish denomination; R Kleinbaum says that polyamory is a choice that does not preclude a Jewishly observant, socially conscious life. Some polyamorous Jews also point to biblical patriarchs having multiple wives and concubines as evidence that polyamorous relationships can be sacred in Judaism. There is an email list dedicated to polyamorous Jews, called "AhavaRaba", which roughly translates to "big love" in Hebrew. (Its name echoes the Ahava rabbah prayer expressing thanks for God's "abundant love".)
Conservative Judaism, consistent with its general view that halakha (Jewish law) is a binding guide to Jewish life but subject to periodic revision by the Rabbinate, has lifted a number of strictures observed by Orthodox Judaism. In particular, in December 2006, Conservative Judaism's Committee on Jewish Law and Standards adopted "responsa" presenting diametrically opposed views on the issue of homosexuality. It adopted an opinion restricting a prior prohibition on homosexual conduct to male-male anal sex only, which it declared to be the only Biblical prohibition, declaring all other prohibitions (e.g. male-male oral sex or lesbian sex) rabbinic, and lifting all rabbinic restrictions based on its interpretation of the Talmudic principle of Kevod HaBriyot ("human dignity"). While declining to develop a form of religious gay marriage, it permitted blessing lesbian and gay unions and ordaining openly lesbian and gay rabbis who agree not to engage in male-male anal sex. It is also a traditionalist opinion, upholding all traditional prohibitions on homosexual activity, also adopted as a majority opinion, The approach permits individual rabbis, congregations, and rabbinical schools to set their own policy on homosexual conduct. It reflects a profound change from a prior blanket prohibition on male homosexual practices. It acknowledges a sharp divergence of views on sexual matters within Conservative Judaism, such that there is no single Conservative Jewish approach to matters of sexuality. Conservative Judaism currently straddles the divide between liberal and traditional opinion on sexual matters within contemporary American society, permitting both views.
Conservative Judaism has maintained on its books a variety of requirements and prohibitions, including a requirement that married women observe the family purity laws and a general prohibition on non-marital heterosexual conduct. The family purity laws require women to be recognized as tumah or niddah during their menstrual period. As a tumah, a woman is to wait 7 days for her menstrual cycle to end and then 7 "clean days" in order to enter the mikveh and begin sexual relations. During this time, it is forbidden to have any type of contact with the niddah, thus anything she touches is not to be touched and no physical contact is permitted. On the same day as the Committee on Jewish Law and Standards released its homosexuality responsa, it released multiple opinions on the subject of niddah including a responsum lifting certain traditional restrictions on husband-wife contact during the niddah period while maintaining a prohibition on sexual relations. The permissive responsum on homosexuality used the Conservative movement's approach to niddah as an analogy for construing the Biblical prohibition against male homosexual conduct narrowly and lifting restrictions it deemed Rabbinic in nature. The responsum indicated it would be making a practical analogy between an approach in which male homosexual couples would be on their honor to refrain from certain acts and its approach to niddah:
The responsum enjoined young people not to be "promiscuous" and to prepare themselves for "traditional marriage" if possible, while not explicitly lifting or re-enforcing any express strictures on non-marital heterosexual conduct.
Even before this responsum, strictures on pre-marital sex had been substantially ignored, even in official circles. For example, when the Jewish Theological Seminary of America proposed enforcing a policy against non-marital cohabitation by rabbinical students in the 1990s, protests by cohabiting rabbinical students resulted in a complete rescission of the policy.
Conservative Judaism formally prohibits interfaith marriage and its standards currently indicate it will expel a rabbi who performs an interfaith marriage. It maintains a variety of formal strictures including a prohibition on making birth announcements in synagogue bulletins for children on non-Jewish mothers and accepting non-Jewish individuals as synagogue members. However, interfaith marriage is relatively widespread among the Conservative laity, and the Conservative movement has recently adapted a policy of being more welcoming of interfaith couples in the hopes of interesting their children in Judaism.
Conservative Judaism, which was for much of the 20th century the largest Jewish denomination in the United States declined sharply in synagogue membership in the United States the 1990s, from 51% of synagogue memberships in 1990 to 33.1% in 2001, with most of the loss going to Orthodox Judaism and most of the rest to Reform. The fracturing in American society of opinion between increasingly liberal and increasingly traditionalist viewpoints on sexual and other issues, as well as the gap between official opinion and general lay practice vis-a-vis the more traditionalist and liberal denominations, may have contributed to the decline.
There are several levels to the observance of physical and personal modesty ("tzniut"), according to Orthodox Judaism, as derived from various sources in "halakha". Observance of these rules varies from aspirational to mandatory to routine across the spectrum of Orthodox stricture and observance.
Orthodox Judaism also maintains a strong prohibition on interfaith sexual relations and marriage. Orthodox Judaism, alone of all the Jewish denominations, retains relatively mild traditional disabilities on divorce, including a Biblical prohibition on a Kohen (priestly descendant of Aaron) marrying a divorcee or a woman who has engaged in certain types of sexual misconduct. An Orthodox bill of divorce is required for a divorce to be recognized.
Reform Judaism, Humanistic Judaism, and Reconstructionist Judaism do not observe or require traditional sexuality rules and have welcomed non-married and homosexual couples and endorsed homosexual commitment ceremonies and marriages.
Reform and Reconstructionist Judaism are more tolerant of interfaith marriage, and many rabbis in both communities will perform one. Humanistic Judaism permits interfaith marriage. Reform, Reconstructionist, and Humanistic Judaism also do not require a religious divorce ceremony separate from a civil divorce.
It has been speculated that the more tolerant attitudes of Reform, Reconstructionist, and Humanistic Judaism towards both sexual diversity and interfaith marriage may have contributed to the rise in their popularity during the 1990s, from about 33% of affiliated households to 38%, passing Conservative Judaism as the largest Jewish denomination in the United States.
The most common formulation of Buddhist ethics are the five precepts and the Noble Eightfold Path, which say that one should neither be attached to nor crave sensual pleasure. These precepts take the form of voluntary, personal undertakings, not divine mandate or instruction.
Of the five precepts, the third vow is to refrain from sex with anothers' spouse, someone under age (namely, those protected by their parents or guardians), and those who have taken vows of religious celibacy. In Chinese Buddhism, the third vow is interpreted as refraining from sex outside marriage.
Buddhist monks and nuns of most traditions are expected to refrain from all sexual activity and the Buddha is said to have admonished his followers to avoid unchastity "as if it were a pit of burning cinders." While laypersons may have sex within marriage, monks may not have sex at all.
Religiously, Hindus begin life at the Brahmacharya or "student" stage, in which they are directed to chastely advance themselves educationally and spiritually to prepare themselves for a life of furthering their "dharma" (societal, occupational, parental, etc. duties) and "karma" (right earthly actions); only once they reach the Grihastya or "householder" stage can they seek "kama" (physical pleasure) and artha (worldly achievement, material prosperity) through marriage and their vocations, respectively.
According the Dharmasastras or the religious legal texts of Hinduism, marriage in Hinduism is an institution for reproduction and thus is naturally limited to heterosexual couples. Furthermore, sex outside of marriage is prohibited. The Manusmriti list 8 types of marriage of which 4 are consensual and encouraged and 4 are non consensual and are discouraged. However, popular practices did not necessarily reflect the religious teachings.
The "Kama Sutra" (Discourse on Kāma) by Vatsayana, widely believed to be just a manual for sexual congress, offers an insight into sexual mores, ethics and societal rules that were prevalent in ancient India. The erotic sculptures of Khajuraho also offer an insight. Abhigyana Shakuntalam, a drama in Sanskrit by Kalidasa, cited as one of the best examples of shringara ras (romance, one of the nine rasas or emotions), talks of the love story of Dushyanta and Shakuntala.
Most Neopagan religions have the theme of fertility (both physical and creative/spiritual) as central to their practices, and as such encourage what they view as a healthy sex life, consensual sex between adults, regardless of gender.
Wicca, like other religions, has adherents with a broad spectrum of views ranging from conservative to liberal. It is a largely nondogmatic religion and has no prohibitions against sexual intercourse outside of marriage or relationships between members of the same sex. The religion's ethics are largely summed up by the Wiccan Rede: "An it harm none, do as thou wilt", which is interpreted by many as allowing and endorsing responsible sexual relationships of all varieties. Specifically in the Wiccan tradition of modern witchcraft, one of the widely accepted pieces of Craft liturgy, the Charge of the Goddess instructs that "...all acts of love and pleasure are [the Goddess'] rituals", giving validity to all forms of sexual activity for Wiccan practitioners.
In the Gardnerian and Alexandrian forms of Wicca, the "Great Rite" is a sex ritual much like the hieros gamos, performed by a priest and priestess who are believed to embody the Wiccan God and Goddess. The Great Rite is almost always performed figuratively using the athame and chalice as symbols of the penis and vagina. The literal form of the ritual is always performed by consenting adults, by a couple who are already lovers and in private. The Great Rite is not seen as an opportunity for casual sex.
LaVeyan Satanism is critical of Abrahamic sexual mores, considering them narrow, restrictive and hypocritical. Sex is viewed as an indulgence, but one that should only be freely entered into with consent. The Eleven Satanic Rules of the Earth only give two instructions regarding sex: "Do not make sexual advances unless you are given the mating signal" and "Do not harm little children", although the latter is much broader and encompasses physical and other abuse. This has always been consistent part of Church of Satan policy since its inception in 1966, as Peter H. Gilmore wrote in an essay supporting same sex marriage:
Satanists are pluralists, accepting gays, lesbians, bisexuals, BDSM, polyamorists, transgender people, and asexuals. In that essay he also stated:
In Chinese mythology, Jiutian Xuannü is the goddess of war, sex, and longevity. She is closely related to Sunü (素女), who is her divine sister. Both their names combined, as "xuansu zhidao" (玄素之道), signify the Daoist arts of the bedchamber. Most books bearing Jiutian Xuannü's name were about warfare, but there were a few books that were specifically about sex. The "Xuannü Jing" (玄女經, "Mysterious Woman Classic") and the "Sunü Jing" (素女經, "Natural Woman Classic"), both dating to the Han dynasty, were handbooks in dialogue form about sex. Texts from the "Xuannü Jing" have been partly incorporated into the Sui dynasty edition of the "Sunü Jing". From the Han dynasty onwards, these handbooks would be familiar to the upper class. On the other side, during the Han dynasty, Wang Chong had criticized the sexual arts as "not only harming the body but infringing upon the nature of man and woman." During the Tang dynasty and earlier periods, Jiutian Xuannü was often associated with the sexual arts. The "Xuannü Jing" remained a familiar work among the literati during the Tang and Sui dynasties. The "Dongxuanzi Fangzhong Shu" (洞玄子房中術, "Bedchamber Arts of the Master of the Grotto Mysteries"), which was likely written by the 7th-century poet Liu Zongyuan, contains explicit descriptions of the sexual arts that was supposedly transmitted from Jiutian Xuannü. The sexual practices, that Jiutian Xuannü supposedly taught, were often compared to alchemy and physiological procedures for prolonging life. In Ge Hong's "Baopu Zi", there's a passage in which Jiutian Xuannü tells Huangdi that sexual techniques are "like the intermingling of water and fire—it can kill or bring new life depending upon whether or not one uses the correct methods."
Tu'er Shen (), The Leveret Spirit is a Chinese Shenist or Taoist deity who manages love and sex between men. His name is often colloquially translated as "Rabbit God". Wei-Ming Temple in the Yonghe District of New Taipei City in Taiwan is dedicated to Tu'er Shen. About 9000 pilgrims visit the temple each year to pray to find a suitable partner. The Wei-ming temple also performs love ceremony for gay couples.
Several UU congregations have undertaken a series of organizational, procedural and practical steps to become acknowledged as a "Welcoming Congregation": a congregation which has taken specific steps to welcome and integrate gay, lesbian, bisexual & transgender (LGBT) members. UU ministers perform same-sex unions and now same-sex marriages where legal (and sometimes when not, as a form of civil protest). On June 29, 1984, the Unitarian Universalists became the first major church "to approve religious blessings on homosexual unions." Unitarian Universalists have been in the forefront of the work to make same-sex marriages legal in their local states and provinces, as well as on the national level. Gay men, bisexuals, and lesbians are also regularly ordained as ministers, and a number of gay, bisexual, and lesbian ministers have, themselves, now become legally married to their partners. In May 2004, Arlington Street Church was the site of the first state-sanctioned same-sex marriage in the United States. The official stance of the UUA is for the legalization of same-sex marriage—"Standing on the Side of Love." In 2004 UU Minister Rev. Debra Haffner of The Religious Institute on Sexual Morality, Justice, and Healing published "An Open Letter on Religious Leaders on Marriage Equality" to affirm same-sex marriage from a multi-faith perspective. In December 2009, Washington, DC Mayor Adrian Fenty signed the bill to legalize same-sex marriage for the District of Columbia in All Souls Church, Unitarian (Washington, D.C.).
Unitarian Universalists for Polyamory Awareness is a group within Unitarian Universalism whose vision is "for Unitarian Universalism to become the first poly-welcoming mainstream religious denomination."
Sex magic is a term for various types of sexual activity used in magical, ritualistic, or otherwise religious and spiritual pursuits found within Western esotericism which is a broad spectrum of spiritual traditions found in Western society, or refers to the collection of the mystical, esoteric knowledge of the Western world.. One practice of sex magic is using the energy of sexual arousal or orgasm with visualization of a desired result. A premise of sex magic is the concept that sexual energy is a potent force that can be harnessed to transcend one's normally perceived reality. The earliest known practical teachings of sex magic in the Western world come from 19th-century American occultist Paschal Beverly Randolph, under the heading of "The Mysteries of Eulis". In the latter part of the 19th century, sexual reformer Ida Craddock published several works dealing with sacred sexuality, most notably "Heavenly Bridegrooms" and "Psychic Wedlock". Aleister Crowley reviewed "Heavenly Bridegrooms" in the pages of his journal "The Equinox", stating that it was:
...one of the most remarkable human documents ever produced, and it should certainly find a regular publisher in book form. The authoress of the MS. claims that she was the wife of an angel. She expounds at the greatest length the philosophy connected with this thesis. Her learning is enormous.
...This book is of incalculable value to every student of occult matters. No Magick library is complete without it.
Aleister Crowley became involved with Theodor Reuss and Ordo Templi Orientis following the publication of "The Book of Lies" between 1912 and 1913. According to Crowley's account, Reuss approached him and accused him of having revealed the innermost (sexual) secret of O.T.O. in one of the cryptic chapters of this book. When it became clear to Reuss that Crowley had done so unintentionally, he initiated Crowley into the IX° (ninth degree) of O.T.O. and appointed him "Sovereign Grand Master General of Ireland, Iona and all the Britains."
While the O.T.O. included, from its inception, the teaching of sex magick in the highest degrees of the Order, when Crowley became head of the Order, he expanded on these teachings and associated them with different degrees as follows:
Professor Hugh Urban, Professor of Comparative Religion at The Ohio State University, noted Crowley's emphasis on sex as "the supreme magical power". According to Crowley:
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Religion&Philosophy&Ethics | Morality
Morality (from ) is the differentiation of intentions, decisions and actions between those that are distinguished as proper and those that are improper. Morality can be a body of standards or principles derived from a code of conduct from a particular philosophy, religion or culture, or it can derive from a standard that a person believes should be universal. Morality may also be specifically synonymous with "goodness" or "rightness".
Moral philosophy includes meta-ethics, which studies abstract issues such as moral ontology and moral epistemology, and normative ethics, which studies more concrete systems of moral decision-making such as deontological ethics and consequentialism. An example of normative ethical philosophy is the Golden Rule, which states that: "One should treat others as one would like others to treat oneself."
Immorality is the active opposition to morality (i.e. opposition to that which is good or right), while amorality is variously defined as an unawareness of, indifference toward, or disbelief in any particular set of moral standards or principles.
Ethics (also known as moral philosophy) is the branch of philosophy which addresses questions of morality. The word "ethics" is "commonly used interchangeably with 'morality', and sometimes it is used more narrowly to mean the moral principles of a particular tradition, group, or individual." Likewise, certain types of ethical theories, especially deontological ethics, sometimes distinguish between ethics and morals: "Although the morality of people and their ethics amounts to the same thing, there is a usage that restricts morality to systems such as that of Immanuel Kant, based on notions such as duty, obligation, and principles of conduct, reserving ethics for the more Aristotelian approach to practical reasoning, based on the notion of a virtue, and generally avoiding the separation of 'moral' considerations from other practical considerations."
In its descriptive sense, "morality" refers to personal or cultural values, codes of conduct or social mores from a society that provides these codes of conduct in which it applies and is accepted by an individual. It does not connote objective claims of right or wrong, but only refers to that which is considered right or wrong. Descriptive ethics is the branch of philosophy which studies morality in this sense.
In its normative sense, "morality" refers to whatever (if anything) is "actually" right or wrong, which may be independent of the values or mores held by any particular peoples or cultures. Normative ethics is the branch of philosophy which studies morality in this sense.
Philosophical theories on the nature and origins of morality (that is, theories of meta-ethics) are broadly divided into two classes:
Some forms of non-cognitivism and ethical subjectivism, while considered anti-realist in the robust sense used here, are considered realist in the sense synonymous with moral universalism. For example, universal prescriptivism is a universalist form of non-cognitivism which claims that morality is derived from reasoning about implied imperatives, and divine command theory and ideal observer theory are universalist forms of ethical subjectivism which claim that morality is derived from the edicts of a god or the hypothetical decrees of a perfectly rational being, respectively.
Celia Green made a distinction between tribal and territorial morality. She characterizes the latter as predominantly negative and proscriptive: it defines a person's territory, including his or her property and dependents, which is not to be damaged or interfered with. Apart from these proscriptions, territorial morality is permissive, allowing the individual whatever behaviour does not interfere with the territory of another. By contrast, tribal morality is prescriptive, imposing the norms of the collective on the individual. These norms will be arbitrary, culturally dependent and 'flexible', whereas territorial morality aims at rules which are universal and absolute, such as Kant's 'categorical imperative' and Geisler's graded absolutism. Green relates the development of territorial morality to the rise of the concept of private property, and the ascendancy of contract over status.
Some observers hold that individuals apply distinct sets of moral rules to people depending on their membership of an "in-group" (the individual and those they believe to be of the same group) or an "out-group" (people not entitled to be treated according to the same rules). Some biologists, anthropologists and evolutionary psychologists believe this in-group/out-group discrimination has evolved because it enhances group survival. This belief has been confirmed by simple computational models of evolution. In simulations this discrimination can result in both unexpected cooperation towards the in-group and irrational hostility towards the out-group. Gary R. Johnson and V.S. Falger have argued that nationalism and patriotism are forms of this in-group/out-group boundary. Jonathan Haidt has noted that experimental observation indicating an in-group criterion provides one moral foundation substantially used by conservatives, but far less so by liberals.
Peterson and Seligman approach the anthropological view looking across cultures, geo-cultural areas and across millennia. They conclude that certain virtues have prevailed in all cultures they examined. The major virtues they identified include "wisdom / knowledge; courage; humanity; justice; temperance; and transcendence". Each of these includes several divisions. For instance "humanity" includes "love", "kindness", and "social intelligence".
Still, others theorize that morality is not always absolute, contending that moral issues often differ along cultural lines. A 2014 PEW research study among several nations illuminates significant cultural differences among issues commonly related to morality, including divorce, extramarital affairs, homosexuality, gambling, abortion, alcohol use, contraceptive use, and premarital sex. Each of the 40 countries in this study has a range of percentages according to what percentage of each country believes the common moral issues are acceptable, unacceptable, or not moral issues at all. Each percentage regarding the significance of the moral issue varies greatly on the culture in which the moral issue is presented.
Advocates of a theory known as moral relativism subscribe to the notion that moral virtues are right or wrong only within the context of a certain standpoint (e.g., cultural community). In other words, what is morally acceptable in one culture may be taboo in another. They further contend that no moral virtue can objectively be proven right or wrong Critics of moral relativism point to historical atrocities such as infanticide, slavery, or genocide as counter arguments, noting the difficulty in accepting these actions simply through cultural lenses.
Fons Trompenaars, author of "Did the Pedestrian Die?", tested members of different cultures with various moral dilemmas. One of these was whether the driver of a car would have his friend, a passenger riding in the car, lie in order to protect the driver from the consequences of driving too fast and hitting a pedestrian. Trompenaars found that different cultures had quite different expectations, from none to definite.
The development of modern morality is a process closely tied to sociocultural evolution. Some evolutionary biologists, particularly sociobiologists, believe that morality is a product of evolutionary forces acting at an individual level and also at the group level through group selection (although to what degree this actually occurs is a controversial topic in evolutionary theory). Some sociobiologists contend that the set of behaviors that constitute morality evolved largely because they provided possible survival or reproductive benefits (i.e. increased evolutionary success). Humans consequently evolved "pro-social" emotions, such as feelings of empathy or guilt, in response to these moral behaviors.
On this understanding, moralities are sets of self-perpetuating and biologically driven behaviors which encourage human cooperation. Biologists contend that all social animals, from ants to elephants, have modified their behaviors, by restraining immediate selfishness in order to improve their evolutionary fitness. Human morality, although sophisticated and complex relative to the moralities of other animals, is essentially a natural phenomenon that evolved to restrict excessive individualism that could undermine a group's cohesion and thereby reducing the individuals' fitness.
On this view, moral codes are ultimately founded on emotional instincts and intuitions that were selected for in the past because they aided survival and reproduction (inclusive fitness). Examples: the maternal bond is selected for because it improves the survival of offspring; the Westermarck effect, where close proximity during early years reduces mutual sexual attraction, underpins taboos against incest because it decreases the likelihood of genetically risky behaviour such as inbreeding.
The phenomenon of reciprocity in nature is seen by evolutionary biologists as one way to begin to understand human morality. Its function is typically to ensure a reliable supply of essential resources, especially for animals living in a habitat where food quantity or quality fluctuates unpredictably. For example, some vampire bats fail to feed on prey some nights while others manage to consume a surplus. Bats that did eat will then regurgitate part of their blood meal to save a conspecific from starvation. Since these animals live in close-knit groups over many years, an individual can count on other group members to return the favor on nights when it goes hungry (Wilkinson, 1984)
Marc Bekoff and Jessica Pierce (2009) have argued that morality is a suite of behavioral capacities likely shared by all mammals living in complex social groups (e.g., wolves, coyotes, elephants, dolphins, rats, chimpanzees). They define morality as "a suite of interrelated other-regarding behaviors that cultivate and regulate complex interactions within social groups." This suite of behaviors includes empathy, reciprocity, altruism, cooperation, and a sense of fairness. In related work, it has been convincingly demonstrated that chimpanzees show empathy for each other in a wide variety of contexts. They also possess the ability to engage in deception, and a level of social politics prototypical of our own tendencies for gossip and reputation management.
Christopher Boehm (1982) has hypothesized that the incremental development of moral complexity throughout hominid evolution was due to the increasing need to avoid disputes and injuries in moving to open savanna and developing stone weapons. Other theories are that increasing complexity was simply a correlate of increasing group size and brain size, and in particular the development of theory of mind abilities.
In modern moral psychology, morality is considered to change through personal development. A number of psychologists have produced theories on the development of morals, usually going through stages of different morals. Lawrence Kohlberg, Jean Piaget, and Elliot Turiel have cognitive-developmental approaches to moral development; to these theorists morality forms in a series of constructive stages or domains. In the Ethics of care approach established by Carol Gilligan, moral development occurs in the context of caring, mutually responsive relationships which are based on interdependence, particularly in parenting but also in social relationships generally. Social psychologists such as Martin Hoffman and Jonathan Haidt emphasize social and emotional development based on biology, such as empathy. Moral identity theorists, such as William Damon and Mordechai Nisan, see moral commitment as arising from the development of a self-identity that is defined by moral purposes: this moral self-identity leads to a sense of responsibility to pursue such purposes. Of historical interest in psychology are the theories of psychoanalysts such as Sigmund Freud, who believe that moral development is the product of aspects of the super-ego as guilt-shame avoidance.
Because we are naturally prone to be empathic and moral, we have a sense of responsibility to pursue moral purposes, we still, at least occasionally, engage in immoral behavior. Such behaviors jeopardize our moral self-image; however, when we engage in immoral behaviors we still feel as though we are moral individuals. "Moral self-licensing" attempts to explain this phenomenon and proposes that self-image security increases our likelihood to engage in immoral behavior. When our moral self-image is threatened, we can gain confidence from our past moral behavior. The more confident we are, the less we will worry about our future behavior which actually increases the likelihood that we will engage in immoral behaviors. Monin and Miller (2001) examined the "moral self-licensing" effect and found that when participants established credentials as non-prejudiced persons, they were more willing to express politically incorrect opinions despite the fact that the audience was unaware of their credentials.
As an alternative to viewing morality as an individual trait, some sociologists as well as social- and discursive psychologists have taken upon themselves to study the "in-vivo" aspects of morality by examining how persons conduct themselves in social interaction.
Moral cognition refers to cognitive processes that allow a person to act or decide in morally permissible ways. It consists of several domain-general cognitive processes, ranging from perception of a morally salient stimulus to reasoning when faced with a moral dilemma. While it's important to mention that there is not a single cognitive faculty dedicated exclusively to moral cognition, characterizing the contributions of domain-general processes to moral behavior is a critical scientific endeavor to understand how morality works and how it can be improved.
Cognitive psychologists and neuroscientists investigate the inputs to these cognitive processes and their interactions, as well as how these contribute to moral behavior by running controlled experiments. In these experiments putatively moral versus nonmoral stimuli are compared to each other, while controlling for other variables such as content or working memory load. Often, the differential neural response to specifically moral statements or scenes, are examined using functional neuroimaging experiments.
Critically, the specific cognitive processes that are involved depend on the prototypical situation that a person encounters. For instance, while situations that require an active decision on a moral dilemma may require active reasoning, an immediate reaction to a shocking moral violation may involve quick, affect-laden processes. Nonetheless certain cognitive skills such as being able to attribute mental states—beliefs, intents, desires, emotions to oneself, and to others is a common feature of a broad range of prototypical situations. In line with this, a meta-analysis found overlapping activity between moral emotion and moral reasoning tasks, suggesting a shared neural network for both tasks. The results of this meta-analysis, however, also demonstrated that the processing of moral input is affected by task demands.
It has been recently found that moral judgment consists in concurrent evaluations of three different components that align with precepts from three dominant moral theories (virtue ethics, deontology, and consequentialism): the character of a person (Agent-component, A); their actions (Deed-component, D); and the consequences brought about in the situation (Consequences-component, C). This, implies that various inputs of the situation a person encounters affect moral cognition.
The brain areas that are consistently involved when humans reason about moral issues have been investigated by multiple quantitative large-scale meta-analyses of the brain activity changes reported in the moral neuroscience literature. The neural network underlying moral decisions overlaps with the network pertaining to representing others' intentions (i.e., theory of mind) and the network pertaining to representing others' (vicariously experienced) emotional states (i.e., empathy). This supports the notion that moral reasoning is related to both seeing things from other persons' points of view and to grasping others' feelings. These results provide evidence that the neural network underlying moral decisions is probably domain-global (i.e., there might be no such things as a "moral module" in the human brain) and might be dissociable into cognitive and affective sub-systems.
An essential, shared component of moral judgment involves the capacity to detect morally salient content within a given social context. Recent research implicated the salience network in this initial detection of moral content. The salience network responds to behaviorally salient events and may be critical to modulate downstream default and frontal control network interactions in the service of complex moral reasoning and decision-making processes.
The explicit making of moral right and wrong judgments coincides with activation in the ventromedial prefrontal cortex (VMPC) while intuitive reactions to situations containing implicit moral issues activates the temporoparietal junction area.
Stimulation of the VMPC by transcranial magnetic stimulation, has been shown to inhibit the ability of human subjects to take into account intent when forming a moral judgment. According to this investigation, TMS did not disrupt participants' ability to make any moral
judgment. On the contrary, moral judgments of intentional harms and non-harms were unaffected by TMS to either the RTPJ or the control site; presumably, however, people typically make moral judgments of intentional harms by considering not only the action's harmful outcome but the agent's intentions and beliefs. So why
were moral judgments of intentional harms not affected by TMS to the RTPJ? One possibility is that moral judgments typically reflect a weighted function of any morally relevant information that is available at the time. On the basis of this view, when information concerning the agent's belief is unavailable or degraded, the resulting moral judgment simply reflects a higher weighting of other
morally relevant factors (e.g., outcome). Alternatively, following TMS to the RTPJ, moral judgments might be made via an abnormal processing route that does not take belief into account. On either account, when belief information is degraded or unavailable, moral judgments are shifted toward other morally relevant factors (e.g., outcome). For intentional harms and non-harms, however, the outcome suggests the same moral judgment as the intention. Thus, the researchers suggest that TMS to the RTPJ disrupted the processing of negative beliefs for both intentional harms and attempted harms, but the current design allowed the investigators to detect this effect only in the case of attempted harms, in which the neutral outcomes did not afford harsh moral judgments on their own.
Similarly VMPC-impaired persons will judge an action purely on its outcome and are unable to take into account the intent of that action.
Mirror neurons are neurons in the brain that fire when another person is observed doing a certain action. The neurons fire in imitation of the action being observed, causing the same muscles to act minutely in the observer as are acting grossly in the person actually performing the action. Research on mirror neurons, since their discovery in 1996, suggests that they may have a role to play not only in action understanding, but also in emotion sharing empathy. Cognitive neuroscientist Jean Decety thinks that the ability to recognize and vicariously experience what another individual is undergoing was a key step forward in the evolution of social behavior, and ultimately, morality. The inability to feel empathy is one of the defining characteristics of psychopathy, and this would appear to lend support to Decety's view.
If morality is the answer to the question 'how ought we to live' at the individual level, politics can be seen as addressing the same question at the social level, though the political sphere raises additional problems and challenges. It is therefore unsurprising that evidence has been found of a relationship between attitudes in morality and politics. Moral foundations theory, authored by Jonathan Haidt and colleagues, has been used to study the differences between liberals and conservatives, in this regard. Haidt found that Americans who identified as liberals tended to value care and fairness higher than loyalty, respect and purity. Self-identified conservative Americans valued care and fairness less and the remaining three values more. Both groups gave care the highest over-all weighting, but conservatives valued fairness the lowest, whereas liberals valued purity the lowest. Haidt also hypothesizes that the origin of this division in the United States can be traced to geo-historical factors, with conservatism strongest in closely knit, ethnically homogenous communities, in contrast to port-cities, where the cultural mix is greater, thus requiring more liberalism.
Group morality develops from shared concepts and beliefs and is often codified to regulate behavior within a culture or community. Various defined actions come to be called moral or immoral. Individuals who choose moral action are popularly held to possess "moral fiber", whereas those who indulge in immoral behavior may be labeled as socially degenerate. The continued existence of a group may depend on widespread conformity to codes of morality; an inability to adjust moral codes in response to new challenges is sometimes credited with the demise of a community (a positive example would be the function of Cistercian reform in reviving monasticism; a negative example would be the role of the Dowager Empress in the subjugation of China to European interests). Within nationalist movements, there has been some tendency to feel that a nation will not survive or prosper without acknowledging one common morality, regardless of its content.
Political Morality is also relevant to the behavior internationally of national governments, and to the support they receive from their host population. Noam Chomsky states that
... if we adopt the principle of universality : if an action is right (or wrong) for others, it is right (or wrong) for us. Those who do not rise to the minimal moral level of applying to themselves the standards they apply to others—more stringent ones, in fact—plainly cannot be taken seriously when they speak of appropriateness of response; or of right and wrong, good and evil.
In fact, one of the, maybe the most, elementary of moral principles is that of universality, that is, If something's right for me, it's right for you; if it's wrong for you, it's wrong for me. Any moral code that is even worth looking at has that at its core somehow.
Religion and morality are not synonymous. Morality does not depend upon religion although for some this is "an almost automatic assumption". According to "The Westminster Dictionary of Christian Ethics", religion and morality "are to be defined differently and have no definitional connections with each other. Conceptually and in principle, morality and a religious value system are two distinct kinds of value systems or action guides."
Within the wide range of moral traditions, religious value systems co-exist with contemporary secular frameworks such as consequentialism, freethought, humanism, utilitarianism, and others. There are many types of religious value systems. Modern monotheistic religions, such as Islam, Judaism, Christianity, and to a certain degree others such as Sikhism and Zoroastrianism, define right and wrong by the laws and rules set forth by their respective scriptures and as interpreted by religious leaders within the respective faith. Other religions spanning pantheistic to nontheistic tend to be less absolute. For example, within Buddhism, the intention of the individual and the circumstances should be accounted for to determine if an action is right or wrong. A further disparity between the values of religious traditions is pointed out by Barbara Stoler Miller, who states that, in Hinduism, "practically, right and wrong are decided according to the categories of social rank, kinship, and stages of life. For modern Westerners, who have been raised on ideals of universality and egalitarianism, this relativity of values and obligations is the aspect of Hinduism most difficult to understand".
Religions provide different ways of dealing with moral dilemmas. For example, there is no absolute prohibition on killing in Hinduism, which recognizes that it "may be inevitable and indeed necessary" in certain circumstances. In monotheistic traditions, certain acts are viewed in more absolute terms, such as abortion or divorce. Religion is not always positively associated with morality. Philosopher David Hume stated that, "the greatest crimes have been found, in many instances, to be compatible with a superstitious piety and devotion; Hence it is justly regarded as unsafe to draw any inference in favor of a man's morals, from the fervor or strictness of his religious exercises, even though he himself believe them sincere."
Religious value systems can diverge from commonly held contemporary moral positions, such as those on murder, mass atrocities, and slavery. For example, Simon Blackburn states that "apologists for Hinduism defend or explain away its involvement with the caste system, and apologists for Islam defend or explain away its harsh penal code or its attitude to women and infidels". In regard to Christianity, he states that the "Bible can be read as giving us a carte blanche for harsh attitudes to children, the mentally handicapped, animals, the environment, the divorced, unbelievers, people with various sexual habits, and elderly women", and notes morally suspect themes in the Bible's New Testament as well. Christian apologists address Blackburn's viewpoints and construe that Jewish laws in the Hebrew Bible showed the evolution of moral standards towards protecting the vulnerable, imposing a death penalty on those pursuing slavery and treating slaves as persons and not property. Elizabeth Anderson holds that "the Bible contains both good and evil teachings", and it is "morally inconsistent". Humanists like Paul Kurtz believe that we can identify moral values across cultures, even if we do not appeal to a supernatural or universalist understanding of principles - values including integrity, trustworthiness, benevolence, and fairness. These values can be resources for finding common ground between believers and nonbelievers.
A number of studies have been conducted on the empirics of morality in various countries, and the overall relationship between faith and crime is unclear. A 2001 review of studies on this topic found "The existing evidence surrounding the effect of religion on crime is varied, contested, and inconclusive, and currently no persuasive answer exists as to the empirical relationship between religion and crime." Phil Zuckerman's 2008 book, "Society without God", based on studies conducted during a 14-month period in Scandinavia in 2005–2006, notes that Denmark and Sweden, "which are probably the least religious countries in the world, and possibly in the history of the world", enjoy "among the lowest violent crime rates in the world [and] the lowest levels of corruption in the world".
Dozens of studies have been conducted on this topic since the twentieth century. A 2005 study by Gregory S. Paul published in the "Journal of Religion and Society" stated that, "In general, higher rates of belief in and worship of a creator correlate with higher rates of homicide, juvenile and early adult mortality, STD infection rates, teen pregnancy, and abortion in the prosperous democracies," and "In all secular developing democracies a centuries long-term trend has seen homicide rates drop to historical lows" with the exceptions being the United States (with a high religiosity level) and "theistic" Portugal. In a response, Gary Jensen builds on and refines Paul's study. His conclusion is that a "complex relationship" exists between religiosity and homicide "with some dimensions of religiosity encouraging homicide and other dimensions discouraging it". In April 2012, the results of a study which tested their subjects' pro-social sentiments were published in the "Social Psychological and Personality Science" journal in which non-religious people had higher scores showing that they were more inclined to show generosity in random acts of kindness, such as lending their possessions and offering a seat on a crowded bus or train. Religious people also had lower scores when it came to seeing how much compassion motivated participants to be charitable in other ways, such as in giving money or food to a homeless person and to non-believers.
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Religion&Philosophy&Ethics | Communitarianism
Communitarianism is a philosophy that emphasizes the connection between the individual and the community. Its overriding philosophy is based upon the belief that a person's social identity and personality are largely molded by community relationships, with a smaller degree of development being placed on individualism. Although the community might be a family, communitarianism usually is understood, in the wider, philosophical sense, as a collection of interactions, among a community of people in a given place (geographical location), or among a community who share an interest or who share a history. Communitarianism usually opposes extreme individualism and disagrees with extreme "laissez-faire" policies that neglect the stability of the overall community.
The philosophy of communitarianism originated in the 20th century, but the term "communitarian" was coined in 1841, by John Goodwyn Barmby, a leader of the British Chartist movement, who used it in referring to utopian socialists and other idealists who experimented with communal styles of life. However, it was not until the 1980s that the term "communitarianism" gained currency through association with the work of a small group of political philosophers. Their application of the label "communitarian" was controversial, even among communitarians, because, in the West, the term evokes associations with the ideologies of socialism and collectivism; so, public leaders — and some of the academics who champion this school of thought — usually avoid the term "communitarian", while still advocating and advancing the ideas of communitarianism.
The term is primarily used in two senses:
Czech and Slovak philosophers like Marek Hrubec, and Luboš Blaha extend communitarianism to social projects tied to the values and significance of community or collectivism, and to various types of socialism and communism (Christian, Utopian, Scientific), for example:
While the term communitarian was coined only in the mid-nineteenth century, ideas that are communitarian in nature appear much earlier. They are found in some classical socialist doctrine (e.g. writings about the early commune and about workers' solidarity), and further back in the New Testament. Communitarianism has been traced back to early monasticism.
A number of early sociologists had strongly communitarian elements in their work, such as Ferdinand Tönnies in his comparison of Gemeinschaft (oppressive but nurturing communities) and Gesellschaft (liberating but impersonal societies), and Emile Durkheim's concerns about the integrating role of social values and the relations between the individual and society. Both authors warned of the dangers of anomie (normlessness) and alienation in modern societies composed of atomized individuals who had gained their liberty but lost their social moorings. Modern sociologists saw the rise of a mass society and the decline of communal bonds and respect for traditional values and authority in the United States as of the 1960s. Among those who raised these issues were Robert Nisbet (Twilight of Authority), Robert N. Bellah "Habits of the Heart", and Alan Ehrenhalt (The Lost City: The Forgotten Virtues Of Community In America). In his book Bowling Alone (2000), Robert Putnam documented the decline of "social capital" and stressed the importance of "bridging social capital," in which bonds of connectedness are formed across diverse social groups.
In the twentieth century communitarianism also began to be formulated as a philosophy by Dorothy Day and the Catholic Worker movement. In an early article the "Catholic Worker" clarified the dogma of the Mystical Body of Christ as the basis for the movement's communitarianism. Along similar lines, communitarianism is also related to the personalist philosophy of Emmanuel Mounier.
Responding to criticism that the term 'community' is too vague or cannot be defined, Amitai Etzioni, one of the leaders of the American communitarian movement, pointed out that communities can be defined with reasonable precision as having two characteristics: first, a web of affect-laden relationships among a group of individuals, relationships that often crisscross and reinforce one another (as opposed to one-on-one or chain-like individual relationships); and second, a measure of commitment to a set of shared values, norms, and meanings, and a shared history and identity – in short, a particular culture. Further, author David E. Pearson argued that "[t]o earn the appellation 'community,' it seems to me, groups must be able to exert moral suasion and extract a measure of compliance from their members. That is, communities are necessarily, indeed, by definition, coercive as well as moral, threatening their members with the stick of sanctions if they stray, offering them the carrot of certainty and stability if they don't."
What is specifically meant by "community" in the context of communitarianism can vary greatly between authors and time periods. Historically, communities have been small and localized. However, as the reach of economic and technological forces extended, more-expansive communities became necessary in order to provide effective normative and political guidance to these forces, prompting the rise of national communities in Europe in the 17th century. Since the late 20th century there has been some growing recognition that the scope of even these communities is too limited, as many challenges that people now face, such as the threat of nuclear war and that of global environmental degradation and economic crises, cannot be handled on a national basis. This has led to the quest for more-encompassing communities, such as the European Union. Whether truly supra-national communities can be developed is far from clear.
More modern communities can take many different forms, but are often limited in scope and reach. For example, members of one residential community are often also members of other communities – such as work, ethnic, or religious ones. As a result, modern community members have multiple sources of attachments, and if one threatens to become overwhelming, individuals will often pull back and turn to another community for their attachments. Thus, communitarianism is the reaction of some intellectuals to the problems of Western society, an attempt to find flexible forms of balance between the individual and society, the autonomy of the individual and the interests of the community, between the common good and freedom, rights and duties.
In moral and political philosophy, communitarians are best known for their critiques of John Rawls' political liberalism, detailed at length in his book "A Theory of Justice". Communitarians criticize the image Rawls presents of humans as atomistic individuals, and stress that individuals who are well-integrated into communities are better able to reason and act in responsible ways than isolated individuals, but add that if social pressure to conform rises to high levels, it will undermine the individual self. Communitarians uphold the importance of the social realm, and communities in particular, though they differ in the extent to which their conceptions are attentive to liberty and individual rights. Even with these general similarities, communitarians, like members of many other schools of thought, differ considerably from one another. There are several distinct (and at times wildly divergent) schools of communitarian thought.
The following authors have communitarian tendencies in the philosophical sense, but have all taken pains to distance themselves from the political ideology known as communitarianism, which is discussed further below:
Whereas the classical liberalism of the Enlightenment can be viewed as a reaction to centuries of authoritarianism, oppressive government, overbearing communities, and rigid dogma, modern communitarianism can be considered a reaction to excessive individualism, understood as an undue emphasis on individual rights, leading people to become selfish or egocentric.
The close relation between the individual and the community was discussed on a theoretical level by Michael Sandel and Charles Taylor, among other academic communitarians, in their criticisms of philosophical liberalism, especially the work of the American liberal theorist John Rawls and that of the German Enlightenment philosopher Immanuel Kant. They argued that contemporary liberalism failed to account for the complex set of social relations that all individuals in the modern world are a part of. Liberalism is rooted in an untenable ontology that posits the existence of generic individuals and fails to account for social embeddeddness. To the contrary, they argued, there are no generic individuals but rather only Germans or Russians, Berliners or Muscovites, or members of some other particularistic community. Because individual identity is partly constructed by culture and social relations, there is no coherent way of formulating individual rights or interests in abstraction from social contexts. Thus, according to these communitarians, there is no point in attempting to found a theory of justice on principles decided behind Rawls' veil of ignorance, because individuals cannot exist in such an abstracted state, even in principle.
Academic communitarians also contend that the nature of the political community is misunderstood by liberalism. Where liberal philosophers described the polity as a neutral framework of rules within which a multiplicity of commitments to moral values can coexist, academic communitarians argue that such a thin conception of political community was both empirically misleading and normatively dangerous. Good societies, these authors believe, rest on much more than neutral rules and procedures—they rely on a shared moral culture. Some academic communitarians argued even more strongly on behalf of such particularistic values, suggesting that these were the only kind of values which matter and that it is a philosophical error to posit any truly universal moral values.
In addition to Charles Taylor and Michael Sandel, other thinkers sometimes associated with academic communitarianism include Michael Walzer, Alasdair MacIntyre, Seyla Benhabib, and Shlomo Avineri.
Beginning in the late 20th century, many authors began to observe a deterioration in the social networks of the United States. In the book "Bowling Alone", Robert Putnam observed that nearly every form of civic organization has undergone drops in membership exemplified by the fact that, while more people are bowling than in the 1950s, there are fewer bowling leagues.
This results in a decline in "social capital", described by Putnam as "the collective value of all 'social networks' and the inclinations that arise from these networks to do things for each other". According to Putnam and his followers, social capital is a key component to building and maintaining democracy.
Communitarians seek to bolster social capital and the institutions of civil society. The Responsive Communitarian Platform described it thus:
Many social goals require partnership between public and private groups. Though government should not seek to replace local communities, it may need to empower them by strategies of support, including revenue-sharing and technical assistance. There is a great need for study and experimentation with creative use of the structures of civil society, and public-private cooperation, especially where the delivery of health, educational and social services are concerned.
Important to some supporters of communitarian philosophy is the concept of positive rights, which are rights or guarantees to certain things. These may include state-subsidized education, state-subsidized housing, a safe and clean environment, universal health care, and even the right to a job with the concomitant obligation of the government or individuals to provide one. To this end, communitarians generally support social security programs, public works programs, and laws limiting such things as pollution.
A common objection is that by providing such rights, communitarians violate the negative rights of the citizens; rights to "not" have something done for you. For example, taxation to pay for such programs as described above dispossesses individuals of property. Proponents of positive rights, by attributing the protection of negative rights to the society rather than the government, respond that individuals would not have any rights in the absence of societies—a central tenet of communitarianism—and thus have a social responsibility to give something back to it. Some have viewed this as a negation of natural rights. However, what is or is not a "natural right" is a source of contention in modern politics, as well as historically; for example, whether or not universal health care, private property or protection from polluters can be considered a birthright.
Alternatively, some agree that negative rights may be violated by a government action, but argue that it is justifiable if the positive rights protected outweigh the negative rights lost. In the same vein, supporters of positive rights further argue that negative rights are irrelevant in their absence. Moreover, some communitarians "experience this less as a case of being used for others' ends and more as a way of contributing to the purposes of a community I regard as my own".
Still other communitarians question the very idea of natural rights and their place in a properly functioning community. They claim that instead, claims of rights and entitlements creates a society unable to form cultural institutions and grounded social norms based on shared values. Rather, the liberalist claim to individual rights leads to a morality centered on individual emotivism, as ethical issues can no longer be solved by working through common understandings of the good. The worry here is that not only is society individualized, but so are moral claims.
In the early 1990s, in response to the perceived breakdown in the moral fabric of society engendered by excessive individualism, Amitai Etzioni and William A. Galston began to organize working meetings to think through communitarian approaches to key societal issues. This ultimately took the communitarian philosophy from a small academic group, introduced it into public life, and recast its philosophical content.
Deeming themselves "responsive communitarians" in order to distinguish the movement from authoritarian communitarians, Etzioni and Galston, along with a varied group of academics (including Mary Ann Glendon, Thomas A. Spragens, James Fishkin, Benjamin Barber, Hans Joas, Philip Selznick, and Robert N. Bellah, among others) drafted and published The Responsive Communitarian Platform based on their shared political principles, and the ideas in it were eventually elaborated in academic and popular books and periodicals, gaining thereby a measure of political currency in the West. Etzioni later formed the Communitarian Network to study and promote communitarian approaches to social issues and began publishing a quarterly journal, "The Responsive Community".
The main thesis of responsive communitarianism is that people face two major sources of normativity: that of the common good and that of autonomy and rights, neither of which in principle should take precedence over the other. This can be contrasted with other political and social philosophies which derive their core assumptions from one overarching principle (such as liberty/autonomy for libertarianism). It further posits that a good society is based on a carefully crafted balance between liberty and social order, between individual rights and personal responsibility, and between pluralistic and socially established values.
Responsive communitarianism stresses the importance of society and its institutions above and beyond that of the state and the market, which are often the focus of other political philosophies. It also emphasizes the key role played by socialization, moral culture, and informal social controls rather than state coercion or market pressures. It provides an alternative to liberal individualism and a major counterpoint to authoritarian communitarianism by stressing that strong rights presume strong responsibilities and that one should not be neglected in the name of the other.
Following standing sociological positions, communitarians assume that the moral character of individuals tends to degrade over time unless that character is continually and communally reinforced. They contend that a major function of the community, as a building block of moral infrastructure, is to reinforce the character of its members through the community's "moral voice," defined as the informal sanction of others, built into a web of informal affect-laden relationships, which communities provide.
Responsive communitarians have been playing a considerable public role, presenting themselves as the founders of a different kind of environmental movement, one dedicated to shoring up society (as opposed to the state) rather than nature. Like environmentalism, communitarianism appeals to audiences across the political spectrum, although it has found greater acceptance with some groups than others.
Although communitarianism is a small philosophical school, it has had considerable influence on public dialogues and politics. There are strong similarities between communitarian thinking and the Third Way, the political thinking of centrist Democrats in the United States, and the Neue Mitte in Germany. Communitarianism played a key role in Tony Blair's remaking of the British socialist Labour Party into "New Labour" and a smaller role in President Bill Clinton's campaigns. Other politicians have echoed key communitarian themes, such as Hillary Clinton, who has long held that to raise a child takes not just parents, family, friends and neighbors, but a whole village.
It has also been suggested that the compassionate conservatism espoused by President Bush during his 2000 presidential campaign was a form of conservative communitarian thinking, although he did not implement it in his policy program. Cited policies have included economic and rhetorical support for education, volunteerism, and community programs, as well as a social emphasis on promoting families, character education, traditional values, and faith-based projects.
President Barack Obama gave voice to communitarian ideas and ideals in his book "The Audacity of Hope", and during the 2008 presidential election campaign he repeatedly called upon Americans to "ground our politics in the notion of a common good," for an "age of responsibility," and for foregoing identity politics in favor of community-wide unity building. However, for many in the West, the term communitarian conjures up authoritarian and collectivist associations, so many public leaders – and even several academics considered champions of this school – avoid the term while embracing and advancing its ideas.
Reflecting the dominance of liberal and conservative politics in the United States, no major party and few elected officials openly advocate communitarianism. Thus there is no consensus on individual policies, but some that most communitarians endorse have been enacted. Nonetheless, there is a small faction of communitarians within the Democratic Party; prominent communitarians include Bob Casey Jr., Joe Donnelly, and Claire McCaskill. Many communitarian Democrats are part of the Blue Dog Coalition. A small communitarian faction within the Republican Party also exists. Rick Santorum is an example of a communitarian Republican. It is quite possible that the United States' right-libertarian ideological underpinnings have suppressed major communitarian factions from emerging.
Dana Milbank, writing in the "Washington Post", remarked of modern communitarians, "There is still no such thing as a card-carrying communitarian, and therefore no consensus on policies. Some, such as John DiIulio and outside Bush adviser Marvin Olasky, favor religious solutions for communities, while others, like Etzioni and Galston, prefer secular approaches."
In August 2011, the right-libertarian "Reason Magazine" worked with the Rupe organization to survey 1,200 Americans by telephone. The Reason-Rupe poll found that "Americans cannot easily be bundled into either the 'liberal' or 'conservative' groups". Specifically, 28% expressed conservative views, 24% expressed libertarian views, 20% expressed communitarian views, and 28% expressed liberal views. The margin of error was ±3.
A similar Gallup survey in 2011 included possible centrist/moderate responses. That poll reported that 17% expressed conservative views, 22% expressed libertarian views, 20% expressed communitarian views, 17% expressed centrist views, and 24% expressed liberal views. The organization used the terminology "the bigger the better" to describe communitarianism.
The Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf party, founded and led by Imran Khan, is considered the first political party in the world which has declared communitarianism as one of their official ideologies.
Early communitarians were charged with being, in effect, social conservatives. However, many contemporary communitarians, especially those who define themselves as responsive communitarians, fully realize and often stress that they do not seek to return to traditional communities, with their authoritarian power structure, rigid stratification, and discriminatory practices against minorities and women. Responsive communitarians seek to build communities based on open participation, dialogue, and truly shared values. Linda McClain, a critic of communitarians, recognizes this feature of the responsive communitarians, writing that some communitarians do "recognize the need for careful evaluation of what is good and bad about [any specific] tradition and the possibility of severing certain features . . . from others." And R. Bruce Douglass writes, "Unlike conservatives, communitarians are aware that the days when the issues we face as a society could be settled on the basis of the beliefs of a privileged segment of the population have long since passed."
One major way the communitarian position differs from the social conservative one is that although communitarianism's ideal "good society" reaches into the private realm, it seeks to cultivate only a limited set of core virtues through an organically developed set of values rather than having an expansive or holistically normative agenda given by the state. For example, American society favors being religious over being atheist, but is rather neutral with regard to which particular religion a person should follow. There are no state-prescribed dress codes, "correct" number of children to have, or places one is expected to live, etc. In short, a key defining characteristic of the ideal communitarian society is that in contrast to a liberal state, it creates shared formulations of the good, but the scope of this good is much smaller than that advanced by authoritarian societies."
Authoritarian governments often embrace extremist ideologies and rule with brute force, accompanied with severe restrictions on personal freedom, political and civil rights. Authoritarian governments are overt about the role of the government as director and commander. Civil society and democracy are not generally characteristic of authoritarian regimes.
Liberal theorists such as Simon Caney disagree that philosophical communitarianism has any interesting criticisms to make of liberalism. They reject the communitarian charges that liberalism neglects the value of community, and holds an "atomized" or asocial view of the self.
According to Peter Sutch the principal criticisms of communitarianism are:
However, he goes on to show that such arguments cannot be leveled against the particular communitarian theories of Michael Walzer and Mervyn Frost.
Other critics emphasize close relation of communitarianism to neoliberalism and new policies of dismantling the welfare state institutions through development of the third sector.
| 43375 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=43375 |
Religion&Philosophy&Ethics | Alfred North Whitehead
Alfred North Whitehead (15 February 1861 – 30 December 1947) was an English mathematician and philosopher. He is best known as the defining figure of the philosophical school known as process philosophy, which today has found application to a wide variety of disciplines, including ecology, theology, education, physics, biology, economics, and psychology, among other areas.
In his early career Whitehead wrote primarily on mathematics, logic, and physics. His most notable work in these fields is the three-volume "Principia Mathematica" (1910–1913), which he wrote with former student Bertrand Russell. "Principia Mathematica" is considered one of the twentieth century's most important works in mathematical logic, and placed 23rd in a list of the top 100 English-language nonfiction books of the twentieth century by Modern Library.
Beginning in the late 1910s and early 1920s, Whitehead gradually turned his attention from mathematics to philosophy of science, and finally to metaphysics. He developed a comprehensive metaphysical system which radically departed from most of western philosophy. Whitehead argued that reality consists of processes rather than material objects, and that processes are best defined by their relations with other processes, thus rejecting the theory that reality is fundamentally constructed by bits of matter that exist independently of one another. Today Whitehead's philosophical works – particularly "Process and Reality" – are regarded as the foundational texts of process philosophy.
Whitehead's process philosophy argues that "there is urgency in coming to see the world as a web of interrelated processes of which we are integral parts, so that all of our choices and actions have consequences for the world around us." For this reason, one of the most promising applications of Whitehead's thought in recent years has been in the area of ecological civilization and environmental ethics pioneered by John B. Cobb.
Alfred North Whitehead was born in Ramsgate, Kent, England, in 1861. His father, Alfred Whitehead, was a minister and schoolmaster of Chatham House Academy, a school for boys established by Thomas Whitehead, Alfred North's grandfather. Whitehead himself recalled both of them as being very successful schools, but that his grandfather was the more extraordinary man. Whitehead's mother was Maria Sarah Whitehead, formerly Maria Sarah Buckmaster. Whitehead was apparently not particularly close with his mother, as he never mentioned her in any of his writings, and there is evidence that Whitehead's wife, Evelyn, had a low opinion of her.
Whitehead was educated at Sherborne School, Dorset, one of the best public schools in the country. His childhood was described as over-protected, but when at school he excelled in sports and mathematics and was head prefect of his class.
In 1880, Whitehead began attending Trinity College, Cambridge, and studied mathematics. His academic advisor was Edward Routh. He earned his BA from Trinity in 1884, and graduated as fourth wrangler.
Elected a fellow of Trinity in 1884, Whitehead would teach and write on mathematics and physics at the college until 1910, spending the 1890s writing his "Treatise on Universal Algebra" (1898), and the 1900s collaborating with his former pupil, Bertrand Russell, on the first edition of "Principia Mathematica". He was a Cambridge Apostle.
In 1890, Whitehead married Evelyn Wade, an Irish woman raised in France; they had a daughter, Jessie Whitehead, and two sons, Thomas North Whitehead and Eric Whitehead. Eric Whitehead died in action at the age of 19, while serving in the Royal Flying Corps during World War I. Alfred's brother Henry became Bishop of Madras, and wrote the closely observed ethnographic account "Village Gods of South-India" (Calcutta: Association Press, 1921), which is still of value today.
In 1910, Whitehead resigned his senior lectureship in mathematics at Trinity and moved to London without first lining up another job. After being unemployed for a year, Whitehead accepted a position as lecturer in applied mathematics and mechanics at University College London, but was passed over a year later for the Goldsmid Chair of Applied Mathematics and Mechanics, a position for which he had hoped to be seriously considered.
In 1914 Whitehead accepted a position as professor of applied mathematics at the newly chartered Imperial College London, where his old friend Andrew Forsyth had recently been appointed chief professor of mathematics.
In 1918 Whitehead's academic responsibilities began to seriously expand as he accepted a number of high administrative positions within the University of London system, of which Imperial College London was a member at the time. He was elected dean of the Faculty of Science at the University of London in late 1918 (a post he held for four years), a member of the University of London's Senate in 1919, and chairman of the Senate's Academic (leadership) Council in 1920, a post which he held until he departed for America in 1924. Whitehead was able to exert his newfound influence to successfully lobby for a new history of science department, help establish a Bachelor of Science degree (previously only Bachelor of Arts degrees had been offered), and make the school more accessible to less wealthy students.
Toward the end of his time in England, Whitehead turned his attention to philosophy. Though he had no advanced training in philosophy, his philosophical work soon became highly regarded. After publishing "The Concept of Nature" in 1920, he served as president of the Aristotelian Society from 1922 to 1923.
In 1924, Henry Osborn Taylor invited the 63-year-old Whitehead to join the faculty at Harvard University as a professor of philosophy.
During his time at Harvard, Whitehead produced his most important philosophical contributions. In 1925, he wrote "Science and the Modern World", which was immediately hailed as an alternative to the Cartesian dualism that plagued popular science. Lectures from 1927 to 1928, were published in 1929 as a book named "Process and Reality", which has been compared to Immanuel Kant's "Critique of Pure Reason".
The Whiteheads spent the rest of their lives in the United States. Alfred North Whitehead retired from Harvard in 1937 and remained in Cambridge, Massachusetts, until his death on 30 December 1947.
The two-volume biography of Whitehead by Victor Lowe is the most definitive presentation of the life of Whitehead. However, many details of Whitehead's life remain obscure because he left no "Nachlass" (personal archive); his family carried out his instructions that all of his papers be destroyed after his death. Additionally, Whitehead was known for his "almost fanatical belief in the right to privacy", and for writing very few personal letters of the kind that would help to gain insight on his life. Wrote Lowe in his preface, "No professional biographer in his right mind would touch him."
Led by Executive Editor Brian G. Henning and General Editor George R. Lucas Jr., the Whitehead Research Project of the Center for Process Studies is currently working on a critical edition of Whitehead's published and unpublished works. The first volume of the "Edinburgh Critical Edition of the Complete Works of Alfred North Whitehead" was published in 2017 by Paul A. Bogaard and Jason Bell as "The Harvard Lectures of Alfred North Whitehead, 1924–1925: The Philosophical Presuppositions of Science".
In addition to numerous articles on mathematics, Whitehead wrote three major books on the subject: "A Treatise on Universal Algebra" (1898), "Principia Mathematica" (co-written with Bertrand Russell and published in three volumes between 1910 and 1913), and "An Introduction to Mathematics" (1911). The former two books were aimed exclusively at professional mathematicians, while the latter book was intended for a larger audience, covering the history of mathematics and its philosophical foundations. "Principia Mathematica" in particular is regarded as one of the most important works in mathematical logic of the 20th century.
In addition to his legacy as a co-writer of "Principia Mathematica", Whitehead's theory of "extensive abstraction" is considered foundational for the branch of ontology and computer science known as "mereotopology", a theory describing spatial relations among wholes, parts, parts of parts, and the boundaries between parts.
In "A Treatise on Universal Algebra" (1898) the term "universal algebra" had essentially the same meaning that it has today: the study of algebraic structures themselves, rather than examples ("models") of algebraic structures. Whitehead credits William Rowan Hamilton and Augustus De Morgan as originators of the subject matter, and James Joseph Sylvester with coining the term itself.
At the time structures such as Lie algebras and hyperbolic quaternions drew attention to the need to expand algebraic structures beyond the associatively multiplicative class. In a review Alexander Macfarlane wrote: "The main idea of the work is not unification of the several methods, nor generalization of ordinary algebra so as to include them, but rather the comparative study of their several structures." In a separate review, G. B. Mathews wrote, "It possesses a unity of design which is really remarkable, considering the variety of its themes."
"A Treatise on Universal Algebra" sought to examine Hermann Grassmann's theory of extension ("Ausdehnungslehre"), Boole's algebra of logic, and Hamilton's quaternions (this last number system was to be taken up in Volume II, which was never finished due to Whitehead's work on "Principia Mathematica"). Whitehead wrote in the preface:
Such algebras have an intrinsic value for separate detailed study; also they are worthy of comparative study, for the sake of the light thereby thrown on the general theory of symbolic reasoning, and on algebraic symbolism in particular ... The idea of a generalized conception of space has been made prominent, in the belief that the properties and operations involved in it can be made to form a uniform method of interpretation of the various algebras.
Whitehead, however, had no results of a general nature. His hope of "form[ing] a uniform method of interpretation of the various algebras" presumably would have been developed in Volume II, had Whitehead completed it. Further work on the subject was minimal until the early 1930s, when Garrett Birkhoff and Øystein Ore began publishing on universal algebras.
"Principia Mathematica" (1910–1913) is Whitehead's most famous mathematical work. Written with former student Bertrand Russell, "Principia Mathematica" is considered one of the twentieth century's most important works in mathematics, and placed 23rd in a list of the top 100 English-language nonfiction books of the twentieth century by Modern Library.
"Principia Mathematica"s purpose was to describe a set of axioms and inference rules in symbolic logic from which all mathematical truths could in principle be proven. Whitehead and Russell were working on such a foundational level of mathematics and logic that it took them until page 86 of Volume II to prove that 1+1=2, a proof humorously accompanied by the comment, "The above proposition is occasionally useful."
Whitehead and Russell had thought originally that "Principia Mathematica" would take a year to complete; it ended up taking them ten years. When it came time for publication, the three-volume work was so long (more than 2,000 pages) and its audience so narrow (professional mathematicians) that it was initially published at a loss of 600 pounds, 300 of which was paid by Cambridge University Press, 200 by the Royal Society of London, and 50 apiece by Whitehead and Russell themselves. Despite the initial loss, today there is likely no major academic library in the world which does not hold a copy of "Principia Mathematica".
The ultimate substantive legacy of "Principia Mathematica" is mixed. It is generally accepted that Kurt Gödel's incompleteness theorem of 1931 definitively demonstrated that for any set of axioms and inference rules proposed to encapsulate mathematics, there would in fact be some truths of mathematics which could not be deduced from them, and hence that "Principia Mathematica" could never achieve its aims. However, Gödel could not have come to this conclusion without Whitehead and Russell's book. In this way, "Principia Mathematica"'s legacy might be described as its key role in disproving the possibility of achieving its own stated goals. But beyond this somewhat ironic legacy, the book popularized modern mathematical logic and drew important connections between logic, epistemology, and metaphysics.
Unlike Whitehead's previous two books on mathematics, "An Introduction to Mathematics" (1911) was not aimed exclusively at professional mathematicians, but was intended for a larger audience. The book covered the nature of mathematics, its unity and internal structure, and its applicability to nature. Whitehead wrote in the opening chapter:
The object of the following Chapters is not to teach mathematics, but to enable students from the very beginning of their course to know what the science is about, and why it is necessarily the foundation of exact thought as applied to natural phenomena.
The book can be seen as an attempt to understand the growth in unity and interconnection of mathematics as a whole, as well as an examination of the mutual influence of mathematics and philosophy, language, and physics. Although the book is little-read, in some ways it prefigures certain points of Whitehead's later work in philosophy and metaphysics.
Whitehead showed a deep concern for educational reform at all levels. In addition to his numerous individually written works on the subject, Whitehead was appointed by Britain's Prime Minister David Lloyd George as part of a 20-person committee to investigate the educational systems and practices of the UK in 1921 and recommend reform.
Whitehead's most complete work on education is the 1929 book "The Aims of Education and Other Essays", which collected numerous essays and addresses by Whitehead on the subject published between 1912 and 1927. The essay from which "Aims of Education" derived its name was delivered as an address in 1916 when Whitehead was president of the London Branch of the Mathematical Association. In it, he cautioned against the teaching of what he called "inert ideas" – ideas that are disconnected scraps of information, with no application to real life or culture. He opined that "education with inert ideas is not only useless: it is, above all things, harmful."
Rather than teach small parts of a large number of subjects, Whitehead advocated teaching a relatively few important concepts that the student could organically link to many different areas of knowledge, discovering their application in actual life. For Whitehead, education should be the exact opposite of the multidisciplinary, value-free school model – it should be "trans"disciplinary, and laden with values and general principles that provide students with a bedrock of wisdom and help them to make connections between areas of knowledge that are usually regarded as separate.
In order to make this sort of teaching a reality, however, Whitehead pointed to the need to minimize the importance of (or radically alter) standard examinations for school entrance. Whitehead writes:
Every school is bound on pain of extinction to train its boys for a small set of definite examinations. No headmaster has a free hand to develop his general education or his specialist studies in accordance with the opportunities of his school, which are created by its staff, its environment, its class of boys, and its endowments. I suggest that no system of external tests which aims primarily at examining individual scholars can result in anything but educational waste.
Whitehead argued that curriculum should be developed specifically for its own students by its own staff, or else risk total stagnation, interrupted only by occasional movements from one group of inert ideas to another.
Above all else in his educational writings, Whitehead emphasized the importance of imagination and the free play of ideas. In his essay "Universities and Their Function", Whitehead writes provocatively on imagination:
Imagination is not to be divorced from the facts: it is a way of illuminating the facts. It works by eliciting the general principles which apply to the facts, as they exist, and then by an intellectual survey of alternative possibilities which are consistent with those principles. It enables men to construct an intellectual vision of a new world.
Whitehead's philosophy of education might adequately be summarized in his statement that "knowledge does not keep any better than fish." In other words, bits of disconnected knowledge are meaningless; all knowledge must find some imaginative application to the students' own lives, or else it becomes so much useless trivia, and the students themselves become good at parroting facts but not thinking for themselves.
Whitehead did not begin his career as a philosopher. In fact, he never had any formal training in philosophy beyond his undergraduate education. Early in his life he showed great interest in and respect for philosophy and metaphysics, but it is evident that he considered himself a rank amateur. In one letter to his friend and former student Bertrand Russell, after discussing whether science aimed to be explanatory or merely descriptive, he wrote: "This further question lands us in the ocean of metaphysic, onto which my profound ignorance of that science forbids me to enter." Ironically, in later life Whitehead would become one of the 20th century's foremost metaphysicians.
However, interest in metaphysics – the philosophical investigation of the nature of the universe and existence – had become unfashionable by the time Whitehead began writing in earnest about it in the 1920s. The ever-more impressive accomplishments of empirical science had led to a general consensus in academia that the development of comprehensive metaphysical systems was a waste of time because they were not subject to empirical testing.
Whitehead was unimpressed by this objection. In the notes of one of his students for a 1927 class, Whitehead was quoted as saying: "Every scientific man in order to preserve his reputation has to say he dislikes metaphysics. What he means is he dislikes having his metaphysics criticized." In Whitehead's view, scientists and philosophers make metaphysical assumptions about how the universe works all the time, but such assumptions are not easily seen precisely because they remain unexamined and unquestioned. While Whitehead acknowledged that "philosophers can never hope finally to formulate these metaphysical first principles," he argued that people need to continually re-imagine their basic assumptions about how the universe works if philosophy and science are to make any real progress, even if that progress remains permanently asymptotic. For this reason Whitehead regarded metaphysical investigations as essential to both good science and good philosophy.
Perhaps foremost among what Whitehead considered faulty metaphysical assumptions was the Cartesian idea that reality is fundamentally constructed of bits of matter that exist totally independently of one another, which he rejected in favor of an event-based or "process" ontology in which events are primary and are fundamentally interrelated and dependent on one another. He also argued that the most basic elements of reality can all be regarded as experiential, indeed that everything is constituted by its experience. He used the term "experience" very broadly, so that even inanimate processes such as electron collisions are said to manifest some degree of experience. In this, he went against Descartes' separation of two different kinds of real existence, either exclusively material or else exclusively mental. Whitehead referred to his metaphysical system as "philosophy of organism", but it would become known more widely as "process philosophy."
Whitehead's philosophy was highly original, and soon garnered interest in philosophical circles. After publishing "The Concept of Nature" in 1920, he served as president of the Aristotelian Society from 1922 to 1923, and Henri Bergson was quoted as saying that Whitehead was "the best philosopher writing in English." So impressive and different was Whitehead's philosophy that in 1924 he was invited to join the faculty at Harvard University as a professor of philosophy at 63 years of age.
This is not to say that Whitehead's thought was widely accepted or even well understood. His philosophical work is generally considered to be among the most difficult to understand in all of the western canon. Even professional philosophers struggled to follow Whitehead's writings. One famous story illustrating the level of difficulty of Whitehead's philosophy centres around the delivery of Whitehead's Gifford lectures in 1927–28 – following Arthur Eddington's lectures of the year previous – which Whitehead would later publish as "Process and Reality":
Eddington was a marvellous popular lecturer who had enthralled an audience of 600 for his entire course. The same audience turned up to Whitehead's first lecture but it was completely unintelligible, not merely to the world at large but to the elect. My father remarked to me afterwards that if he had not known Whitehead well he would have suspected that it was an imposter making it up as he went along ... The audience at subsequent lectures was only about half a dozen in all.
Indeed, it may not be inappropriate to speculate that some fair portion of the respect generally shown to Whitehead by his philosophical peers at the time arose from their sheer bafflement. The Chicago theologian Shailer Mathews once remarked of Whitehead's 1926 book "Religion in the Making": "It is infuriating, and I must say embarrassing as well, to read page after page of relatively familiar words without understanding a single sentence."
However, Mathews' frustration with Whitehead's books did not negatively affect his interest. In fact, there were numerous philosophers and theologians at Chicago's Divinity School that perceived the importance of what Whitehead was doing without fully grasping all of the details and implications. In 1927 they invited one of America's only Whitehead experts, Henry Nelson Wieman, to Chicago to give a lecture explaining Whitehead's thought. Wieman's lecture was so brilliant that he was promptly hired to the faculty and taught there for twenty years, and for at least thirty years afterward Chicago's Divinity School was closely associated with Whitehead's thought.
Shortly after Whitehead's book "Process and Reality" appeared in 1929, Wieman famously wrote in his 1930 review:
Not many people will read Whitehead's recent book in this generation; not many will read it in any generation. But its influence will radiate through concentric circles of popularization until the common man will think and work in the light of it, not knowing whence the light came. After a few decades of discussion and analysis one will be able to understand it more readily than can now be done.
Wieman's words proved prophetic. Though "Process and Reality" has been called "arguably the most impressive single metaphysical text of the twentieth century," it has been little-read and little-understood, partly because it demands – as Isabelle Stengers puts it – "that its readers accept the adventure of the questions that will separate them from every consensus." Whitehead questioned western philosophy's most dearly held assumptions about how the universe works, but in doing so he managed to anticipate a number of 21st century scientific and philosophical problems and provide novel solutions.
Whitehead was convinced that the scientific notion of matter was misleading as a way of describing the ultimate nature of things. In his 1925 book "Science and the Modern World", he wrote that
There persists ... [a] fixed scientific cosmology which presupposes the ultimate fact of an irreducible brute matter, or material, spread through space in a flux of configurations. In itself such a material is senseless, valueless, purposeless. It just does what it does do, following a fixed routine imposed by external relations which do not spring from the nature of its being. It is this assumption that I call "scientific materialism." Also it is an assumption which I shall challenge as being entirely unsuited to the scientific situation at which we have now arrived.
In Whitehead's view, there are a number of problems with this notion of "irreducible brute matter". First, it obscures and minimizes the importance of change. By thinking of any material thing (like a rock, or a person) as being fundamentally the "same" thing throughout time, with any changes to it being secondary to its "nature", scientific materialism hides the fact that nothing ever stays the same. For Whitehead, change is fundamental and inescapable; he emphasizes that "all things flow."
In Whitehead's view, then, concepts such as "quality", "matter", and "form" are problematic. These "classical" concepts fail to adequately account for change, and overlook the active and experiential nature of the most basic elements of the world. They are useful abstractions, but are not the world's basic building blocks. What is ordinarily conceived of as a single person, for instance, is philosophically described as a continuum of overlapping events. After all, people change all the time, if only because they have aged by another second and had some further experience. These occasions of experience are logically distinct, but are progressively connected in what Whitehead calls a "society" of events. By assuming that enduring objects are the most real and fundamental things in the universe, materialists have mistaken the abstract for the concrete (what Whitehead calls the "fallacy of misplaced concreteness").
To put it another way, a thing or person is often seen as having a "defining essence" or a "core identity" that is unchanging, and describes what the thing or person "really is". In this way of thinking, things and people are seen as fundamentally the same through time, with any changes being qualitative and secondary to their core identity (e.g. "Mark's hair has turned gray as he has gotten older, but he is still the same person"). But in Whitehead's cosmology, the only fundamentally existent things are discrete "occasions of experience" that overlap one another in time and space, and jointly make up the enduring person or thing. On the other hand, what ordinary thinking often regards as "the essence of a thing" or "the identity/core of a person" is an abstract generalization of what is regarded as that person or thing's most important or salient features across time. Identities do not define people, people define identities. Everything changes from moment to moment, and to think of anything as having an "enduring essence" misses the fact that "all things flow", though it is often a useful way of speaking.
Whitehead pointed to the limitations of language as one of the main culprits in maintaining a materialistic way of thinking, and acknowledged that it may be difficult to ever wholly move past such ideas in everyday speech. After all, each moment of each person's life can hardly be given a different proper name, and it is easy and convenient to think of people and objects as remaining fundamentally the same things, rather than constantly keeping in mind that each thing is different from what it was a moment ago. Yet the limitations of everyday living and everyday speech should not prevent people from realizing that "material substances" or "essences" are a convenient generalized description of a continuum of particular, concrete processes. No one questions that a ten-year-old person is quite different by the time he or she turns thirty years old, and in many ways is not the same person at all; Whitehead points out that it is not philosophically or ontologically sound to think that a person is the same from one second to the next.
A second problem with materialism is that it obscures the importance of "relations". It sees every object as distinct and discrete from all other objects. Each object is simply an inert clump of matter that is only "externally" related to other things. The idea of matter as primary makes people think of objects as being fundamentally separate in time and space, and not necessarily related to anything. But in Whitehead's view, relations take a primary role, perhaps even more important than the relata themselves. A student taking notes in one of Whitehead's fall 1924 classes wrote that, "Reality applies to "connections", and only relatively to the things connected. (A) is real for (B), and (B) is real for (A), but [they are] not absolutely real independent of each other." In fact, Whitehead describes any entity as in some sense nothing more and nothing less than the sum of its relations to other entities – its "synthesis of" and "reaction to" the world around it. A real thing is just that which forces the rest of the universe to in some way conform to it; that is to say, if theoretically a thing made strictly no difference to any other entity (i.e. it was not "related" to any other entity), it could not be said to really exist. Relations are not secondary to what a thing is, they "are" what the thing is.
It must be emphasized, however, that an entity is not "merely" a sum of its relations, but also a valuation of them and reaction to them. For Whitehead, creativity is the absolute principle of existence, and every entity (whether it is a human being, a tree, or an electron) has some degree of novelty in how it responds to other entities, and is not fully determined by causal or mechanistic laws. Of course, most entities do not have consciousness. As a human being's actions cannot always be predicted, the same can be said of where a tree's roots will grow, or how an electron will move, or whether it will rain tomorrow. Moreover, inability to predict an electron's movement (for instance) is not due to faulty understanding or inadequate technology; rather, the fundamental creativity/freedom of all entities means that there will always remain phenomena that are unpredictable.
The other side of creativity/freedom as the absolute principle is that every entity is constrained by the social structure of existence (i.e., its relations) – each actual entity must conform to the settled conditions of the world around it. Freedom always exists within limits. But an entity's uniqueness and individuality arise from its own self-determination as to just how it will take account of the world within the limits that have been set for it.
In summary, Whitehead rejects the idea of separate and unchanging bits of matter as the most basic building blocks of reality, in favor of the idea of reality as interrelated events in process. He conceives of reality as composed of processes of dynamic "becoming" rather than static "being", emphasizing that all physical things change and evolve, and that changeless "essences" such as matter are mere abstractions from the interrelated events that are the final real things that make up the world.
Since Whitehead's metaphysics described a universe in which all entities experience, he needed a new way of describing perception that was not limited to living, self-conscious beings. The term he coined was "prehension", which comes from the Latin "prehensio", meaning "to seize". The term is meant to indicate a kind of perception that can be conscious or unconscious, applying to people as well as electrons. It is also intended to make clear Whitehead's rejection of the theory of "representative" perception, in which the mind only has private ideas about other entities. For Whitehead, the term "prehension" indicates that the perceiver actually incorporates aspects of the perceived thing into itself. In this way, entities are constituted by their perceptions and relations, rather than being independent of them. Further, Whitehead regards perception as occurring in two modes, "causal efficacy" (or "physical prehension") and "presentational immediacy" (or "conceptual prehension").
Whitehead describes causal efficacy as "the experience dominating the primitive living organisms, which have a sense for the fate from which they have emerged, and the fate towards which they go." It is, in other words, the sense of causal relations between entities, a feeling of being influenced and affected by the surrounding environment, unmediated by the senses. Presentational immediacy, on the other hand, is what is usually referred to as "pure sense perception", unmediated by any causal or symbolic interpretation, even unconscious interpretation. In other words, it is pure appearance, which may or may not be delusive (e.g. mistaking an image in a mirror for "the real thing").
In higher organisms (like people), these two modes of perception combine into what Whitehead terms "symbolic reference", which links appearance with causation in a process that is so automatic that both people and animals have difficulty refraining from it. By way of illustration, Whitehead uses the example of a person's encounter with a chair. An ordinary person looks up, sees a colored shape, and immediately infers that it is a chair. However, an artist, Whitehead supposes, "might not have jumped to the notion of a chair", but instead "might have stopped at the mere contemplation of a beautiful color and a beautiful shape." This is not the normal human reaction; most people place objects in categories by habit and instinct, without even thinking about it. Moreover, animals do the same thing. Using the same example, Whitehead points out that a dog "would have acted immediately on the hypothesis of a chair and would have jumped onto it by way of using it as such." In this way symbolic reference is a fusion of pure sense perceptions on the one hand and causal relations on the other, and that it is in fact the causal relationships that dominate the more basic mentality (as the dog illustrates), while it is the sense perceptions which indicate a higher grade mentality (as the artist illustrates).
Whitehead believed that when asking questions about the basic facts of existence, questions about value and purpose can never be fully escaped. This is borne out in his thoughts on abiogenesis, or the hypothetical natural process by which life arises from simple organic compounds.
Whitehead makes the startling observation that "life is comparatively deficient in survival value." If humans can only exist for about a hundred years, and rocks for eight hundred million, then one is forced to ask why complex organisms ever evolved in the first place; as Whitehead humorously notes, "they certainly did not appear because they were better at that game than the rocks around them." He then observes that the mark of higher forms of life is that they are actively engaged in modifying their environment, an activity which he theorizes is directed toward the three-fold goal of living, living well, and living better. In other words, Whitehead sees life as directed toward the purpose of increasing its own satisfaction. Without such a goal, he sees the rise of life as totally unintelligible.
For Whitehead, there is no such thing as wholly inert matter. Instead, all things have some measure of freedom or creativity, however small, which allows them to be at least partly self-directed. The process philosopher David Ray Griffin coined the term "panexperientialism" (the idea that all entities experience) to describe Whitehead's view, and to distinguish it from panpsychism (the idea that all matter has consciousness).
Whitehead's idea of God differs from traditional monotheistic notions. Perhaps his most famous and pointed criticism of the Christian conception of God is that "the Church gave unto God the attributes which belonged exclusively to Caesar." Here Whitehead is criticizing Christianity for defining God as primarily a divine king who imposes his will on the world, and whose most important attribute is power. As opposed to the most widely accepted forms of Christianity, Whitehead emphasized an idea of God that he called "the brief Galilean vision of humility":
It does not emphasize the ruling Caesar, or the ruthless moralist, or the unmoved mover. It dwells upon the tender elements in the world, which slowly and in quietness operates by love; and it finds purpose in the present immediacy of a kingdom not of this world. Love neither rules, nor is it unmoved; also it is a little oblivious as to morals. It does not look to the future; for it finds its own reward in the immediate present.
For Whitehead, God is not necessarily tied to religion. Rather than springing primarily from religious faith, Whitehead saw God as necessary for his metaphysical system. His system required that an order exist among possibilities, an order that allowed for novelty in the world and provided an aim to all entities. Whitehead posited that these ordered potentials exist in what he called the "primordial nature" of God. However, Whitehead was also interested in religious experience. This led him to reflect more intensively on what he saw as the second nature of God, the "consequent nature". Whitehead's conception of God as a "dipolar" entity has called for fresh theological thinking.
The primordial nature he described as "the unlimited conceptual realization of the absolute wealth of potentiality," i.e., the unlimited possibility of the universe. This primordial nature is eternal and unchanging, providing entities in the universe with possibilities for realization. Whitehead also calls this primordial aspect "the lure for feeling, the eternal urge of desire," pulling the entities in the universe toward as-yet unrealized possibilities.
God's consequent nature, on the other hand, is anything but unchanging – it is God's reception of the world's activity. As Whitehead puts it, "[God] saves the world as it passes into the immediacy of his own life. It is the judgment of a tenderness which loses nothing that can be saved." In other words, God saves and cherishes all experiences forever, and those experiences go on to change the way God interacts with the world. In this way, God is really changed by what happens in the world and the wider universe, lending the actions of finite creatures an eternal significance.
Whitehead thus sees God and the world as fulfilling one another. He sees entities in the world as fluent and changing things that yearn for a permanence which only God can provide by taking them into God's self, thereafter changing God and affecting the rest of the universe throughout time. On the other hand, he sees God as permanent but as deficient in actuality and change: alone, God is merely eternally unrealized possibilities, and requires the world to actualize them. God gives creatures permanence, while the creatures give God actuality and change. Here it is worthwhile to quote Whitehead at length:
"In this way God is completed by the individual, fluent satisfactions of finite fact, and the temporal occasions are completed by their everlasting union with their transformed selves, purged into conformation with the eternal order which is the final absolute 'wisdom.' The final summary can only be expressed in terms of a group of antitheses, whose apparent self-contradictions depend on neglect of the diverse categories of existence. In each antithesis there is a shift of meaning which converts the opposition into a contrast.
"It is as true to say that God is permanent and the World fluent, as that the World is permanent and God is fluent.
"It is as true to say that God is one and the World many, as that the World is one and God many.
"It is as true to say that, in comparison with the World, God is actual eminently, as that, in comparison with God, the World is actual eminently.
"It is as true to say that the World is immanent in God, as that God is immanent in the World.
"It is as true to say that God transcends the World, as that the World transcends God.
"It is as true to say that God creates the World, as that the World creates God ...
"What is done in the world is transformed into a reality in heaven, and the reality in heaven passes back into the world ... In this sense, God is the great companion – the fellow-sufferer who understands."
The above is some of Whitehead's most evocative writing about God, and was powerful enough to inspire the movement known as process theology, a vibrant theological school of thought that continues to thrive today.
For Whitehead the core of religion was individual. While he acknowledged that individuals cannot ever be fully separated from their society, he argued that life is an internal fact for its own sake before it is an external fact relating to others. His most famous remark on religion is that "religion is what the individual does with his own solitariness ... and if you are never solitary, you are never religious." Whitehead saw religion as a system of general truths that transformed a person's character. He took special care to note that while religion is often a good influence, it is not "necessarily" good – an idea which he called a "dangerous delusion" (e.g., a religion might encourage the violent extermination of a rival religion's adherents).
However, while Whitehead saw religion as "beginning" in solitariness, he also saw religion as necessarily expanding beyond the individual. In keeping with his process metaphysics in which relations are primary, he wrote that religion necessitates the realization of "the value of the objective world which is a community derivative from the interrelations of its component individuals." In other words, the universe is a community which makes itself whole through the relatedness of each individual entity to all the others – meaning and value do not exist for the individual alone, but only in the context of the universal community. Whitehead writes further that each entity "can find no such value till it has merged its individual claim with that of the objective universe. Religion is world-loyalty. The spirit at once surrenders itself to this universal claim and appropriates it for itself." In this way the individual and universal/social aspects of religion are mutually dependent.
Whitehead also described religion more technically as "an ultimate craving to infuse into the insistent particularity of emotion that non-temporal generality which primarily belongs to conceptual thought alone." In other words, religion takes deeply felt emotions and contextualizes them within a system of general truths about the world, helping people to identify their wider meaning and significance. For Whitehead, religion served as a kind of bridge between philosophy and the emotions and purposes of a particular society. It is the task of religion to make philosophy applicable to the everyday lives of ordinary people.
Isabelle Stengers wrote that "Whiteheadians are recruited among both philosophers and theologians, and the palette has been enriched by practitioners from the most diverse horizons, from ecology to feminism, practices that unite political struggle and spirituality with the sciences of education." Indeed, in recent decades attention to Whitehead's work has become more widespread, with interest extending to intellectuals in Europe and China, and coming from such diverse fields as ecology, physics, biology, education, economics, and psychology. One of the first theologians to attempt to interact with Whitehead's thought was the future Archbishop of Canterbury, William Temple. In Temple's Gifford Lectures of 1932-1934 (subsequently published as "Nature, Man and God"), Whitehead is one of a number of philosophers of the emergent evolution approach Temple interacts with. However, it was not until the 1970s and 1980s that Whitehead's thought drew much attention outside of a small group of philosophers and theologians, primarily Americans, and even today he is not considered especially influential outside of relatively specialized circles.
Early followers of Whitehead were found primarily at the University of Chicago Divinity School, where Henry Nelson Wieman initiated an interest in Whitehead's work that would last for about thirty years. Professors such as Wieman, Charles Hartshorne, Bernard Loomer, Bernard Meland, and Daniel Day Williams made Whitehead's philosophy arguably the most important intellectual thread running through the divinity school. They taught generations of Whitehead scholars, the most notable of whom is John B. Cobb.
Although interest in Whitehead has since faded at Chicago's divinity school, Cobb effectively grabbed the torch and planted it firmly in Claremont, California, where he began teaching at Claremont School of Theology in 1958 and founded the Center for Process Studies with David Ray Griffin in 1973. Largely due to Cobb's influence, today Claremont remains strongly identified with Whitehead's process thought.
But while Claremont remains the most concentrated hub of Whiteheadian activity, the place where Whitehead's thought currently seems to be growing the most quickly is in China. In order to address the challenges of modernization and industrialization, China has begun to blend traditions of Taoism, Buddhism, and Confucianism with Whitehead's "constructive post-modern" philosophy in order to create an "ecological civilization". To date, the Chinese government has encouraged the building of twenty-three university-based centres for the study of Whitehead's philosophy, and books by process philosophers John Cobb and David Ray Griffin are becoming required reading for Chinese graduate students. Cobb has attributed China's interest in process philosophy partly to Whitehead's stress on the mutual interdependence of humanity and nature, as well as his emphasis on an educational system that includes the teaching of values rather than simply bare facts.
Overall, however, Whitehead's influence is very difficult to characterize. In English-speaking countries, his primary works are little-studied outside of Claremont and a select number of liberal graduate-level theology and philosophy programs. Outside of these circles his influence is relatively small and diffuse, and has tended to come chiefly through the work of his students and admirers rather than Whitehead himself. For instance, Whitehead was a teacher and long-time friend and collaborator of Bertrand Russell, and he also taught and supervised the dissertation of Willard Van Orman Quine, both of whom are important figures in analytic philosophy – the dominant strain of philosophy in English-speaking countries in the 20th century. Whitehead has also had high-profile admirers in the continental tradition, such as French post-structuralist philosopher Gilles Deleuze, who once dryly remarked of Whitehead that "he stands provisionally as the last great Anglo-American philosopher before Wittgenstein's disciples spread their misty confusion, sufficiency, and terror." French sociologist and anthropologist Bruno Latour even went so far as to call Whitehead "the greatest philosopher of the 20th century."
Deleuze's and Latour's opinions, however, are minority ones, as Whitehead has not been recognized as particularly influential within the most dominant philosophical schools. It is impossible to say exactly why Whitehead's influence has not been more widespread, but it may be partly due to his metaphysical ideas seeming somewhat counter-intuitive (such as his assertion that matter is an abstraction), or his inclusion of theistic elements in his philosophy, or the perception of metaphysics itself as passé, or simply the sheer difficulty and density of his prose.
Historically Whitehead's work has been most influential in the field of American progressive theology. The most important early proponent of Whitehead's thought in a theological context was Charles Hartshorne, who spent a semester at Harvard as Whitehead's teaching assistant in 1925, and is widely credited with developing Whitehead's process philosophy into a full-blown process theology. Other notable process theologians include John B. Cobb, David Ray Griffin, Marjorie Hewitt Suchocki, C. Robert Mesle, Roland Faber, and Catherine Keller.
Process theology typically stresses God's relational nature. Rather than seeing God as impassive or emotionless, process theologians view God as "the fellow sufferer who understands", and as the being who is supremely affected by temporal events. Hartshorne points out that people would not praise a human ruler who was unaffected by either the joys or sorrows of his followers – so why would this be a praise-worthy quality in God? Instead, as the being who is most affected by the world, God is the being who can most appropriately respond to the world. However, process theology has been formulated in a wide variety of ways. C. Robert Mesle, for instance, advocates a "process naturalism", i.e. a process theology without God.
In fact, process theology is difficult to define because process theologians are so diverse and transdisciplinary in their views and interests. John B. Cobb is a process theologian who has also written books on biology and economics. Roland Faber and Catherine Keller integrate Whitehead with poststructuralist, postcolonialist, and feminist theory. Charles Birch was both a theologian and a geneticist. Franklin I. Gamwell writes on theology and political theory. In "Syntheism - Creating God in The Internet Age", futurologists Alexander Bard and Jan Söderqvist repeatedly credit Whitehead for the process theology they see rising out of the participatory culture expected to dominate the digital era.
Process philosophy is even more difficult to pin down than process theology. In practice, the two fields cannot be neatly separated. The 32-volume State University of New York series in constructive postmodern thought edited by process philosopher and theologian David Ray Griffin displays the range of areas in which different process philosophers work, including physics, ecology, medicine, public policy, nonviolence, politics, and psychology.
One philosophical school which has historically had a close relationship with process philosophy is American pragmatism. Whitehead himself thought highly of William James and John Dewey, and acknowledged his indebtedness to them in the preface to "Process and Reality". Charles Hartshorne (along with Paul Weiss) edited the collected papers of Charles Sanders Peirce, one of the founders of pragmatism. Noted neopragmatist Richard Rorty was in turn a student of Hartshorne. Today, Nicholas Rescher is one example of a philosopher who advocates both process philosophy and pragmatism.
In addition, while they might not properly be called process philosophers, Whitehead has been influential in the philosophy of Gilles Deleuze, Milič Čapek, Isabelle Stengers, Bruno Latour, Susanne Langer, and Maurice Merleau-Ponty.
Scientists of the early 20th century for whom Whitehead's work has been influential include physical chemist Ilya Prigogine, biologist Conrad Hal Waddington, and geneticists Charles Birch and Sewall Wright.
Henry Murray dedicated his "Explorations in Personality" to Whitehead, a contemporary at Harvard.
In physics, Whitehead's theory of gravitation articulated a view that might perhaps be regarded as dual to Albert Einstein's general relativity. It has been severely criticized. Yutaka Tanaka suggested that the gravitational constant disagrees with experimental findings, and proposed that Einstein's work does not actually refute Whitehead's formulation. Whitehead's view has now been rendered obsolete, with the discovery of gravitational waves, phenomena observed locally that largely violate the kind of local flatness of space that Whitehead assumes. Consequently, Whitehead's cosmology must be regarded as a local approximation, and his assumption of a uniform spatio-temporal geometry, Minkowskian in particular, as an often-locally-adequate approximation. An exact replacement of Whitehead's cosmology would need to admit a Riemannian geometry. Also, although Whitehead himself gave only secondary consideration to quantum theory, his metaphysics of processes has proved attractive to some physicists in that field. Henry Stapp and David Bohm are among those whose work has been influenced by Whitehead.
In the 21 st century, Whiteheadian thought is still a stimulating influence: Timothy E. Eastman and Hank Keeton's "Physics and Whitehead" (2004) and Michael Epperson's "Quantum Mechanics and the Philosophy of Alfred North Whitehead" (2004) and "Foundations of Relational Realism: A Topological Approach to Quantum Mechanics and the Philosophy of Nature" (2013), aim to offer Whiteheadian approaches to physics. Brian G. Henning, Adam Scarfe, and Dorion Sagan's "Beyond Mechanism" (2013) and Rupert Sheldrake's "Science Set Free" (2012) are examples of Whiteheadian approaches to biology.
One of the most promising applications of Whitehead's thought in recent years has been in the area of ecological civilization, sustainability, and environmental ethics.
"Because Whitehead's holistic metaphysics of value lends itself so readily to an ecological point of view, many see his work as a promising alternative to the traditional mechanistic worldview, providing a detailed metaphysical picture of a world constituted by a web of interdependent relations."
This work has been pioneered by John B. Cobb, whose book "Is It Too Late? A Theology of Ecology" (1971) was the first single-authored book in environmental ethics. Cobb also co-authored a book with leading ecological economist and steady-state theorist Herman Daly entitled "For the Common Good: Redirecting the Economy toward Community, the Environment, and a Sustainable Future" (1989), which applied Whitehead's thought to economics, and received the Grawemeyer Award for Ideas Improving World Order. Cobb followed this with a second book, "Sustaining the Common Good: A Christian Perspective on the Global Economy" (1994), which aimed to challenge "economists' zealous faith in the great god of growth."
Whitehead is widely known for his influence in education theory. His philosophy inspired the formation of the Association for Process Philosophy of Education (APPE), which published eleven volumes of a journal titled "Process Papers" on process philosophy and education from 1996 to 2008. Whitehead's theories on education also led to the formation of new modes of learning and new models of teaching.
One such model is the ANISA model developed by Daniel C. Jordan, which sought to address a lack of understanding of the nature of people in current education systems. As Jordan and Raymond P. Shepard put it: "Because it has not defined the nature of man, education is in the untenable position of having to devote its energies to the development of curricula without any coherent ideas about the nature of the creature for whom they are intended."
Another model is the FEELS model developed by Xie Bangxiu and deployed successfully in China. "FEELS" stands for five things in curriculum and education: Flexible-goals, Engaged-learner, Embodied-knowledge, Learning-through-interactions, and Supportive-teacher. It is used for understanding and evaluating educational curriculum under the assumption that the purpose of education is to "help a person become whole." This work is in part the product of cooperation between Chinese government organizations and the Institute for the Postmodern Development of China.
Whitehead's philosophy of education has also found institutional support in Canada, where the University of Saskatchewan created a Process Philosophy Research Unit and sponsored several conferences on process philosophy and education. Howard Woodhouse at the University of Saskatchewan remains a strong proponent of Whiteheadian education.
Three recent books which further develop Whitehead's philosophy of education include: "Modes of Learning: Whitehead's Metaphysics and the Stages of Education" (2012) by George Allan; and "The Adventure of Education: Process Philosophers on Learning, Teaching, and Research" (2009) by Adam Scarfe, and "Educating for an Ecological Civilization: Interdisciplinary, Experiential, and Relational Learning" (2017) edited by Marcus Ford and Stephen Rowe. "Beyond the Modern University: Toward a Constructive Postmodern University," (2002) is another text that explores the importance of Whitehead's metaphysics for thinking about higher education.
Whitehead has had some influence on philosophy of business administration and organizational theory. This has led in part to a focus on identifying and investigating the effect of temporal events (as opposed to static things) within organizations through an “organization studies” discourse that accommodates a variety of 'weak' and 'strong' process perspectives from a number of philosophers. One of the leading figures having an explicitly Whiteheadian and panexperientialist stance towards management is Mark Dibben, who works in what he calls "applied process thought" to articulate a philosophy of management and business administration as part of a wider examination of the social sciences through the lens of process metaphysics. For Dibben, this allows "a comprehensive exploration of life as perpetually active experiencing, as opposed to occasional – and thoroughly passive – happening." Dibben has published two books on applied process thought, "Applied Process Thought I: Initial Explorations in Theory and Research" (2008), and "Applied Process Thought II: Following a Trail Ablaze" (2009), as well as other papers in this vein in the fields of philosophy of management and business ethics.
Margaret Stout and Carrie M. Staton have also written recently on the mutual influence of Whitehead and Mary Parker Follett, a pioneer in the fields of organizational theory and organizational behavior. Stout and Staton see both Whitehead and Follett as sharing an ontology that "understands becoming as a relational process; difference as being related, yet unique; and the purpose of becoming as harmonizing difference." This connection is further analyzed by Stout and Jeannine M. Love in "Integrative Process: Follettian Thinking from Ontology to Administration"
Whitehead's political views sometimes appear to be libertarian without the label. He wrote:
On the other hand, many Whitehead scholars read his work as providing a philosophical foundation for the social liberalism of the New Liberal movement that was prominent throughout Whitehead's adult life. Morris wrote that "... there is good reason for claiming that Whitehead shared the social and political ideals of the new liberals."
Books written by Whitehead, listed by date of publication.
In addition, the Whitehead Research Project of the Center for Process Studies is currently working on a critical edition of Whitehead's writings, which is set to include notes taken by Whitehead's students during his Harvard classes, correspondence, and corrected editions of his books.
"For the most comprehensive list of resources related to Whitehead, see the thematic bibliography of the Center for Process Studies."
| 43395 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=43395 |
Religion&Philosophy&Ethics | Henry David Thoreau
Henry David Thoreau (see name pronunciation; July 12, 1817 – May 6, 1862) was an American essayist, poet, and philosopher. A leading transcendentalist, he is best known for his book "Walden", a reflection upon simple living in natural surroundings, and his essay "Civil Disobedience" (originally published as "Resistance to Civil Government"), an argument for disobedience to an unjust state.
Thoreau's books, articles, essays, journals, and poetry amount to more than 20 volumes. Among his lasting contributions are his writings on natural history and philosophy, in which he anticipated the methods and findings of ecology and environmental history, two sources of modern-day environmentalism. His literary style interweaves close observation of nature, personal experience, pointed rhetoric, symbolic meanings, and historical lore, while displaying a poetic sensibility, philosophical austerity, and attention to practical detail. He was also deeply interested in the idea of survival in the face of hostile elements, historical change, and natural decay; at the same time he advocated abandoning waste and illusion in order to discover life's true essential needs.
He was a lifelong abolitionist, delivering lectures that attacked the Fugitive Slave Law while praising the writings of Wendell Phillips and defending the abolitionist John Brown. Thoreau's philosophy of civil disobedience later influenced the political thoughts and actions of such notable figures as Leo Tolstoy, Mahatma Gandhi, and Martin Luther King Jr.
Thoreau is sometimes referred to as an anarchist. Though "Civil Disobedience" seems to call for improving rather than abolishing government—"I ask for, not at once no government, but "at once" a better government"—the direction of this improvement contrarily points toward anarchism: "'That government is best which governs not at all;' and when men are prepared for it, that will be the kind of government which they will have."
Amos Bronson Alcott and Thoreau's aunt each wrote that "Thoreau" is pronounced like the word "thorough" ( —in General American, but more precisely —in 19th-century New England). Edward Waldo Emerson wrote that the name should be pronounced "Thó-row", with the "h" sounded and stress on the first syllable. Among modern-day American English speakers, it is perhaps more commonly pronounced —with stress on the second syllable.
Thoreau had a distinctive appearance, with a nose that he called his "most prominent feature". Of his appearance and disposition, Ellery Channing wrote:
His face, once seen, could not be forgotten. The features were quite marked: the nose aquiline or very Roman, like one of the portraits of Caesar (more like a beak, as was said); large overhanging brows above the deepest set blue eyes that could be seen, in certain lights, and in others gray,—eyes expressive of all shades of feeling, but never weak or near-sighted; the forehead not unusually broad or high, full of concentrated energy and purpose; the mouth with prominent lips, pursed up with meaning and thought when silent, and giving out when open with the most varied and unusual instructive sayings.
Henry David Thoreau was born David Henry Thoreau in Concord, Massachusetts, into the "modest New England family" of John Thoreau, a pencil maker, and Cynthia Dunbar. His paternal grandfather had been born on the UK crown dependency island of Jersey. His maternal grandfather, Asa Dunbar, led Harvard's 1766 student "Butter Rebellion", the first recorded student protest in the American colonies. David Henry was named after his recently deceased paternal uncle, David Thoreau. He began to call himself Henry David after he finished college; he never petitioned to make a legal name change. He had two older siblings, Helen and John Jr., and a younger sister, Sophia Thoreau. None of the children married. Helen (1812–1849) died at age 36 years, from tuberculosis. John Jr. (1815–1842) died at age 27, of tetanus. Henry David (1817–1862) died at age 44, of tuberculosis. Sophia (1819–1876) survived him by 14 years, dying at age 57 years, of tuberculosis.
Thoreau's birthplace still exists on Virginia Road in Concord. The house has been restored by the Thoreau Farm Trust, a nonprofit organization, and is now open to the public. He studied at Harvard College between 1833 and 1837. He lived in Hollis Hall and took courses in rhetoric, classics, philosophy, mathematics, and science. He was a member of the Institute of 1770 (now the Hasty Pudding Club). According to legend, Thoreau refused to pay the five-dollar fee (approximately ) for a Harvard diploma. In fact, the master's degree he declined to purchase had no academic merit: Harvard College offered it to graduates "who proved their physical worth by being alive three years after graduating, and their saving, earning, or inheriting quality or condition by having Five Dollars to give the college". He commented, "Let every sheep keep its own skin", a reference to the tradition of using sheepskin vellum for diplomas.
The traditional professions open to college graduates—law, the church, business, medicine—did not interest Thoreau, so in 1835 he took a leave of absence from Harvard, during which he taught school in Canton, Massachusetts. After he graduated in 1837, he joined the faculty of the Concord public school, but he resigned after a few weeks rather than administer corporal punishment. He and his brother John then opened the Concord Academy, a grammar school in Concord, in 1838. They introduced several progressive concepts, including nature walks and visits to local shops and businesses. The school closed when John became fatally ill from tetanus in 1842 after cutting himself while shaving. He died in Henry's arms.
Upon graduation Thoreau returned home to Concord, where he met Ralph Waldo Emerson through a mutual friend. Emerson, who was 14 years his senior, took a paternal and at times patron-like interest in Thoreau, advising the young man and introducing him to a circle of local writers and thinkers, including Ellery Channing, Margaret Fuller, Bronson Alcott, and Nathaniel Hawthorne and his son Julian Hawthorne, who was a boy at the time.
Emerson urged Thoreau to contribute essays and poems to a quarterly periodical, "The Dial", and lobbied the editor, Margaret Fuller, to publish those writings. Thoreau's first essay published in "The Dial" was "Aulus Persius Flaccus", an essay on the Roman playwright, in July 1840. It consisted of revised passages from his journal, which he had begun keeping at Emerson's suggestion. The first journal entry, on October 22, 1837, reads, "'What are you doing now?' he asked. 'Do you keep a journal?' So I make my first entry to-day."
Thoreau was a philosopher of nature and its relation to the human condition. In his early years he followed Transcendentalism, a loose and eclectic idealist philosophy advocated by Emerson, Fuller, and Alcott. They held that an ideal spiritual state transcends, or goes beyond, the physical and empirical, and that one achieves that insight via personal intuition rather than religious doctrine. In their view, Nature is the outward sign of inward spirit, expressing the "radical correspondence of visible things and human thoughts", as Emerson wrote in "Nature" (1836).
On April 18, 1841, Thoreau moved into the Emerson house. There, from 1841 to 1844, he served as the children's tutor; he was also an editorial assistant, repairman and gardener. For a few months in 1843, he moved to the home of William Emerson on Staten Island, and tutored the family's sons while seeking contacts among literary men and journalists in the city who might help publish his writings, including his future literary representative Horace Greeley.
Thoreau returned to Concord and worked in his family's pencil factory, which he would continue to do alongside his writing and other work for most of his adult life. He rediscovered the process of making good pencils with inferior graphite by using clay as the binder. This invention allowed profitable use of a graphite source found in New Hampshire that had been purchased in 1821 by Thoreau's brother-in-law, Charles Dunbar. The process of mixing graphite and clay, known as the Conté process, had been first patented by Nicolas-Jacques Conté in 1795. The company's other source of graphite had been Tantiusques, a mine operated by Native Americans in Sturbridge, Massachusetts. Later, Thoreau converted the pencil factory to produce plumbago, a name for graphite at the time, which was used in the electrotyping process.
Once back in Concord, Thoreau went through a restless period. In April 1844 he and his friend Edward Hoar accidentally set a fire that consumed of Walden Woods.
Thoreau felt a need to concentrate and work more on his writing. In March 1845, Ellery Channing told Thoreau, "Go out upon that, build yourself a hut, & there begin the grand process of devouring yourself alive. I see no other alternative, no other hope for you." Two months later, Thoreau embarked on a two-year experiment in simple living on July 4, 1845, when he moved to a small house he had built on land owned by Emerson in a second-growth forest around the shores of Walden Pond. The house was in "a pretty pasture and woodlot" of that Emerson had bought, from his family home.
On July 24 or July 25, 1846, Thoreau ran into the local tax collector, Sam Staples, who asked him to pay six years of delinquent poll taxes. Thoreau refused because of his opposition to the Mexican–American War and slavery, and he spent a night in jail because of this refusal. The next day Thoreau was freed when someone, likely to have been his aunt, paid the tax, against his wishes. The experience had a strong impact on Thoreau. In January and February 1848, he delivered lectures on "The Rights and Duties of the Individual in relation to Government", explaining his tax resistance at the Concord Lyceum. Bronson Alcott attended the lecture, writing in his journal on January 26:
Thoreau revised the lecture into an essay titled "Resistance to Civil Government" (also known as "Civil Disobedience"). It was published by Elizabeth Peabody in the "Aesthetic Papers" in May 1849. Thoreau had taken up a version of Percy Shelley's principle in the political poem "The Mask of Anarchy" (1819), which begins with the powerful images of the unjust forms of authority of his time and then imagines the stirrings of a radically new form of social action.
At Walden Pond, Thoreau completed a first draft of "A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers", an elegy to his brother John, describing their trip to the White Mountains in 1839. Thoreau did not find a publisher for the book and instead printed 1,000 copies at his own expense; fewer than 300 were sold. He self-published the book on the advice of Emerson, using Emerson's publisher, Munroe, who did little to publicize the book.
In August 1846, Thoreau briefly left Walden to make a trip to Mount Katahdin in Maine, a journey later recorded in "Ktaadn", the first part of "The Maine Woods".
Thoreau left Walden Pond on September 6, 1847. At Emerson's request, he immediately moved back to the Emerson house to help Emerson's wife, Lidian, manage the household while her husband was on an extended trip to Europe. Over several years, as he worked to pay off his debts, he continuously revised the manuscript of what he eventually published as "Walden, or Life in the Woods" in 1854, recounting the two years, two months, and two days he had spent at Walden Pond. The book compresses that time into a single calendar year, using the passage of the four seasons to symbolize human development. Part memoir and part spiritual quest, "Walden" at first won few admirers, but later critics have regarded it as a classic American work that explores natural simplicity, harmony, and beauty as models for just social and cultural conditions.
The American poet Robert Frost wrote of Thoreau, "In one book ... he surpasses everything we have had in America."
The American author John Updike said of the book, "A century and a half after its publication, Walden has become such a totem of the back-to-nature, preservationist, anti-business, civil-disobedience mindset, and Thoreau so vivid a protester, so perfect a crank and hermit saint, that the book risks being as revered and unread as the Bible."
Thoreau moved out of Emerson's house in July 1848 and stayed at a house on nearby Belknap Street. In 1850, he and his family moved into a house at 255 Main Street, where he lived until his death.
In the summer of 1850, Thoreau and Channing journeyed from Boston to Montreal and Quebec City. These would be Thoreau's only travels outside the United States. It is as a result of this trip that he developed lectures that eventually became "A Yankee in Canada". He jested that all he got from this adventure "was a cold". In fact, this proved an opportunity to contrast American civic spirit and democratic values with a colony apparently ruled by illegitimate religious and military power. Whereas his own country had had its revolution, in Canada history had failed to turn.
In 1851, Thoreau became increasingly fascinated with natural history and narratives of travel and expedition. He read avidly on botany and often wrote observations on this topic into his journal. He admired William Bartram and Charles Darwin's "Voyage of the Beagle". He kept detailed observations on Concord's nature lore, recording everything from how the fruit ripened over time to the fluctuating depths of Walden Pond and the days certain birds migrated. The point of this task was to "anticipate" the seasons of nature, in his word.
He became a land surveyor and continued to write increasingly detailed observations on the natural history of the town, covering an area of , in his journal, a two-million-word document he kept for 24 years. He also kept a series of notebooks, and these observations became the source of his late writings on natural history, such as "Autumnal Tints", "The Succession of Trees", and "Wild Apples", an essay lamenting the destruction of indigenous wild apple species.
With the rise of environmental history and ecocriticism as academic disciplines, several new readings of Thoreau began to emerge, showing him to have been both a philosopher and an analyst of ecological patterns in fields and woodlots. For instance, "The Succession of Forest Trees", shows that he used experimentation and analysis to explain how forests regenerate after fire or human destruction, through the dispersal of seeds by winds or animals. In this lecture, first presented to a cattle show in Concord, and considered his greatest contribution to ecology, Thoreau explained why one species of tree can grow in a place where a different tree did previously. He observed that squirrels often carry nuts far from the tree from which they fell to create stashes. These seeds are likely to germinate and grow should the squirrel die or abandon the stash. He credited the squirrel for performing a "great service ... in the economy of the universe."
He traveled to Canada East once, Cape Cod four times, and Maine three times; these landscapes inspired his "excursion" books, "A Yankee in Canada", "Cape Cod", and "The Maine Woods", in which travel itineraries frame his thoughts about geography, history and philosophy. Other travels took him southwest to Philadelphia and New York City in 1854 and west across the Great Lakes region in 1861, when he visited Niagara Falls, Detroit, Chicago, Milwaukee, St. Paul and Mackinac Island. He was provincial in his own travels, but he read widely about travel in other lands. He devoured all the first-hand travel accounts available in his day, at a time when the last unmapped regions of the earth were being explored. He read Magellan and James Cook; the arctic explorers John Franklin, Alexander Mackenzie and William Parry; David Livingstone and Richard Francis Burton on Africa; Lewis and Clark; and hundreds of lesser-known works by explorers and literate travelers. Astonishing amounts of reading fed his endless curiosity about the peoples, cultures, religions and natural history of the world and left its traces as commentaries in his voluminous journals. He processed everything he read, in the local laboratory of his Concord experience. Among his famous aphorisms is his advice to "live at home like a traveler".
After John Brown's raid on Harpers Ferry, many prominent voices in the abolitionist movement distanced themselves from Brown or damned him with faint praise. Thoreau was disgusted by this, and he composed a key speech, "A Plea for Captain John Brown", which was uncompromising in its defense of Brown and his actions. Thoreau's speech proved persuasive: the abolitionist movement began to accept Brown as a martyr, and by the time of the American Civil War entire armies of the North were literally singing Brown's praises. As a biographer of Brown put it, "If, as Alfred Kazin suggests, without John Brown there would have been no Civil War, we would add that without the Concord Transcendentalists, John Brown would have had little cultural impact."
Thoreau contracted tuberculosis in 1835 and suffered from it sporadically afterwards. In 1860, following a late-night excursion to count the rings of tree stumps during a rainstorm, he became ill with bronchitis. His health declined, with brief periods of remission, and he eventually became bedridden. Recognizing the terminal nature of his disease, Thoreau spent his last years revising and editing his unpublished works, particularly "The Maine Woods" and "Excursions", and petitioning publishers to print revised editions of "A Week" and "Walden". He wrote letters and journal entries until he became too weak to continue. His friends were alarmed at his diminished appearance and were fascinated by his tranquil acceptance of death. When his aunt Louisa asked him in his last weeks if he had made his peace with God, Thoreau responded, "I did not know we had ever quarreled."
Aware he was dying, Thoreau's last words were "Now comes good sailing", followed by two lone words, "moose" and "Indian". He died on May 6, 1862, at age 44. Amos Bronson Alcott planned the service and read selections from Thoreau's works, and Channing presented a hymn. Emerson wrote the eulogy spoken at the funeral. Thoreau was buried in the Dunbar family plot; his remains and those of members of his immediate family were eventually moved to Sleepy Hollow Cemetery () in Concord, Massachusetts.
Thoreau's friend William Ellery Channing published his first biography, "Thoreau the Poet-Naturalist", in 1873. Channing and another friend, Harrison Blake, edited some poems, essays, and journal entries for posthumous publication in the 1890s. Thoreau's journals, which he often mined for his published works but which remained largely unpublished at his death, were first published in 1906 and helped to build his modern reputation. A new, expanded edition of the journals is under way, published by Princeton University Press. Today, Thoreau is regarded as one of the foremost American writers, both for the modern clarity of his prose style and the prescience of his views on nature and politics. His memory is honored by the international Thoreau Society and his legacy honored by the Thoreau Institute at Walden Woods, established in 1998 in Lincoln, Massachusetts.
Thoreau was an early advocate of recreational hiking and canoeing, of conserving natural resources on private land, and of preserving wilderness as public land. He was himself a highly skilled canoeist; Nathaniel Hawthorne, after a ride with him, noted that "Mr. Thoreau managed the boat so perfectly, either with two paddles or with one, that it seemed instinct with his own will, and to require no physical effort to guide it."
He was not a strict vegetarian, though he said he preferred that diet and advocated it as a means of self-improvement. He wrote in "Walden", "The practical objection to animal food in my case was its uncleanness; and besides, when I had caught and cleaned and cooked and eaten my fish, they seemed not to have fed me essentially. It was insignificant and unnecessary, and cost more than it came to. A little bread or a few potatoes would have done as well, with less trouble and filth."
Thoreau neither rejected civilization nor fully embraced wilderness. Instead he sought a middle ground, the pastoral realm that integrates nature and culture. His philosophy required that he be a didactic arbitrator between the wilderness he based so much on and the spreading mass of humanity in North America. He decried the latter endlessly but felt that a teacher needs to be close to those who needed to hear what he wanted to tell them. The wildness he enjoyed was the nearby swamp or forest, and he preferred "partially cultivated country". His idea of being "far in the recesses of the wilderness" of Maine was to "travel the logger's path and the Indian trail", but he also hiked on pristine land. In the essay "Henry David Thoreau, Philosopher" Roderick Nash wrote, "Thoreau left Concord in 1846 for the first of three trips to northern Maine. His expectations were high because he hoped to find genuine, primeval America. But contact with real wilderness in Maine affected him far differently than had the idea of wilderness in Concord. Instead of coming out of the woods with a deepened appreciation of the wilds, Thoreau felt a greater respect for civilization and realized the necessity of balance."
Of alcohol, Thoreau wrote, "I would fain keep sober always. ... I believe that water is the only drink for a wise man; wine is not so noble a liquor. ... Of all ebriosity, who does not prefer to be intoxicated by the air he breathes?"
Thoreau never married and was childless. He strove to portray himself as an ascetic puritan. However, his sexuality has long been the subject of speculation, including by his contemporaries. Critics have called him heterosexual, homosexual, or asexual. There is no evidence to suggest he had physical relations with anyone, man or woman. Some scholars have suggested that homoerotic sentiments run through his writings and concluded that he was homosexual. The elegy "Sympathy" was inspired by the eleven-year-old Edmund Sewell, with whom he hiked for five days in 1839. One scholar has suggested that he wrote the poem to Edmund because he could not bring himself to write it to Edmund's sister, and another that Thoreau's "emotional experiences with women are memorialized under a camouflage of masculine pronouns", but other scholars dismiss this. It has been argued that the long paean in "Walden" to the French-Canadian woodchopper Alek Therien, which includes allusions to Achilles and Patroclus, is an expression of conflicted desire. In some of Thoreau's writing there is the sense of a secret self. In 1840 he writes in his journal: "My friend is the apology for my life. In him are the spaces which my orbit traverses". Thoreau was strongly influenced by the moral reformers of his time, and this may have instilled anxiety and guilt over sexual desire.
Thoreau was fervently against slavery and actively supported the abolitionist movement. He participated as a conductor in the Underground Railroad, delivered lectures that attacked the Fugitive Slave Law, and in opposition to the popular opinion of the time, supported radical abolitionist militia leader John Brown and his party. Two weeks after the ill-fated raid on Harpers Ferry and in the weeks leading up to Brown's execution, Thoreau delivered a speech to the citizens of Concord, Massachusetts, in which he compared the American government to Pontius Pilate and likened Brown's execution to the crucifixion of Jesus Christ:
In "The Last Days of John Brown", Thoreau described the words and deeds of John Brown as noble and an example of heroism. In addition, he lamented the newspaper editors who dismissed Brown and his scheme as "crazy".
Thoreau was a proponent of limited government and individualism. Although he was hopeful that mankind could potentially have, through self-betterment, the kind of government which "governs not at all", he distanced himself from contemporary "no-government men" (anarchists), writing: "I ask for, not at once no government, but at once a better government."
Thoreau deemed the evolution from absolute monarchy to limited monarchy to democracy as "a progress toward true respect for the individual" and theorized about further improvements "towards recognizing and organizing the rights of man". Echoing this belief, he went on to write: "There will never be a really free and enlightened State until the State comes to recognize the individual as a higher and independent power, from which all its power and authority are derived, and treats him accordingly."
It is on this basis that Thoreau could so strongly inveigh against British and Catholic power in "A Yankee in Canada". Despotic authority had crushed the people's sense of ingenuity and enterprise; the Canadian "habitants" had been reduced, in his view, to a perpetual childlike state. Ignoring the recent Rebellions, he argued that there would be no revolution in the St. Lawrence River valley.
Although Thoreau believed resistance to unjustly exercised authority could be both violent (exemplified in his support for John Brown) and nonviolent (his own example of tax resistance displayed in "Resistance to Civil Government"), he regarded pacifist nonresistance as temptation to passivity, writing: "Let not our Peace be proclaimed by the rust on our swords, or our inability to draw them from their scabbards; but let her at least have so much work on her hands as to keep those swords bright and sharp." Furthermore, in a formal lyceum debate in 1841, he debated the subject "Is it ever proper to offer forcible resistance?", arguing the affirmative.
Likewise, his condemnation of the Mexican–American War did not stem from pacifism, but rather because he considered Mexico "unjustly overrun and conquered by a foreign army" as a means to expand the slave territory.
Thoreau was ambivalent towards industrialization and capitalism. On one hand he regarded commerce as "unexpectedly confident and serene, adventurous, and unwearied" and expressed admiration for its associated cosmopolitanism, writing:
On the other hand, he wrote disparagingly of the factory system:
Thoreau also favored bioregionalism, the protection of animals and wild areas, free trade, and taxation for schools and highways. He disapproved of the subjugation of Native Americans, slavery, technological utopianism, consumerism, philistinism, mass entertainment, and frivolous applications of technology.
Thoreau was influenced by Indian spiritual thought. In "Walden", there are many overt references to the sacred texts of India. For example, in the first chapter ("Economy"), he writes: "How much more admirable the Bhagvat-Geeta than all the ruins of the East!" "American Philosophy: An Encyclopedia" classes him as one of several figures who "took a more pantheist or pandeist approach by rejecting views of God as separate from the world", also a characteristic of Hinduism.
Furthermore, in "The Pond in Winter", he equates Walden Pond with the sacred Ganges river, writing:
Thoreau was aware his Ganges imagery could have been factual. He wrote about ice harvesting at Walden Pond. And he knew that New England's ice merchants were shipping ice to foreign ports, including Calcutta.
Additionally, Thoreau followed various Hindu customs, including a diet largely consisting of rice ("It was fit that I should live on rice, mainly, who loved so well the philosophy of India."), flute playing (reminiscent of the favorite musical pastime of Krishna), and yoga.
In an 1849 letter to his friend H.G.O. Blake, he wrote about yoga and its meaning to him:
Thoreau read contemporary works in the new science of biology, including the works of Alexander von Humboldt, Charles Darwin, and Asa Gray (Charles Darwin's staunchest American ally). Thoreau was deeply influenced by Humboldt, especially his work Kosmos.
In 1859, Thoreau purchased and read Darwin's "On the Origin of Species". Unlike many natural historians at the time, including Louis Agassiz who publicly opposed Darwinism in favor of a static view of nature, Thoreau was immediately enthusiastic about the theory of evolution by natural selection and endorsed it, stating:
Thoreau's political writings had little impact during his lifetime, as "his contemporaries did not see him as a theorist or as a radical", viewing him instead as a naturalist. They either dismissed or ignored his political essays, including "Civil Disobedience". The only two complete books (as opposed to essays) published in his lifetime, "Walden" and "A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers" (1849), both dealt with nature, in which he "loved to wander". His obituary was lumped in with others rather than as a separate article in an 1862 yearbook. Nevertheless, Thoreau's writings went on to influence many public figures. Political leaders and reformers like Mohandas Gandhi, U.S. President John F. Kennedy, American civil rights activist Martin Luther King Jr., U.S. Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas, and Russian author Leo Tolstoy all spoke of being strongly affected by Thoreau's work, particularly "Civil Disobedience", as did "right-wing theorist Frank Chodorov [who] devoted an entire issue of his monthly, "Analysis", to an appreciation of Thoreau".
Thoreau also influenced many artists and authors including Edward Abbey, Willa Cather, Marcel Proust, William Butler Yeats, Sinclair Lewis, Ernest Hemingway, Upton Sinclair, E. B. White, Lewis Mumford, Frank Lloyd Wright, Alexander Posey, and Gustav Stickley. Thoreau also influenced naturalists like John Burroughs, John Muir, E. O. Wilson, Edwin Way Teale, Joseph Wood Krutch, B. F. Skinner, David Brower, and Loren Eiseley, whom "Publishers Weekly" called "the modern Thoreau". English writer Henry Stephens Salt wrote a biography of Thoreau in 1890, which popularized Thoreau's ideas in Britain: George Bernard Shaw, Edward Carpenter, and Robert Blatchford were among those who became Thoreau enthusiasts as a result of Salt's advocacy. Mohandas Gandhi first read "Walden" in 1906 while working as a civil rights activist in Johannesburg, South Africa. He first read "Civil Disobedience" "while he sat in a South African prison for the crime of nonviolently protesting discrimination against the Indian population in the Transvaal. The essay galvanized Gandhi, who wrote and published a synopsis of Thoreau's argument, calling its 'incisive logic ... unanswerable' and referring to Thoreau as 'one of the greatest and most moral men America has produced'." He told American reporter Webb Miller, "[Thoreau's] ideas influenced me greatly. I adopted some of them and recommended the study of Thoreau to all of my friends who were helping me in the cause of Indian Independence. Why I actually took the name of my movement from Thoreau's essay 'On the Duty of Civil Disobedience', written about 80 years ago."
Martin Luther King, Jr. noted in his autobiography that his first encounter with the idea of nonviolent resistance was reading "On Civil Disobedience" in 1944 while attending Morehouse College. He wrote in his autobiography that it was,
Here, in this courageous New Englander's refusal to pay his taxes and his choice of jail rather than support a war that would spread slavery's territory into Mexico, I made my first contact with the theory of nonviolent resistance. Fascinated by the idea of refusing to cooperate with an evil system, I was so deeply moved that I reread the work several times. I became convinced that noncooperation with evil is as much a moral obligation as is cooperation with good. No other person has been more eloquent and passionate in getting this idea across than Henry David Thoreau. As a result of his writings and personal witness, we are the heirs of a legacy of creative protest. The teachings of Thoreau came alive in our civil rights movement; indeed, they are more alive than ever before. Whether expressed in a sit-in at lunch counters, a freedom ride into Mississippi, a peaceful protest in Albany, Georgia, a bus boycott in Montgomery, Alabama, these are outgrowths of Thoreau's insistence that evil must be resisted and that no moral man can patiently adjust to injustice.
American psychologist B. F. Skinner wrote that he carried a copy of Thoreau's "Walden" with him in his youth. In 1945 he wrote "Walden Two", a fictional utopia about 1,000 members of a community living together inspired by the life of Thoreau. Thoreau and his fellow Transcendentalists from Concord were a major inspiration of the composer Charles Ives. The 4th movement of the Concord Sonata for piano (with a part for flute, Thoreau's instrument) is a character picture, and he also set Thoreau's words.
Actor Ron Thompson did a dramatic portrayal of Henry David Thoreau on the 1976 NBC television series "The Rebels".
Thoreau's ideas have impacted and resonated with various strains in the anarchist movement, with Emma Goldman referring to him as "the greatest American anarchist". Green anarchism and anarcho-primitivism in particular have both derived inspiration and ecological points-of-view from the writings of Thoreau. John Zerzan included Thoreau's text "Excursions" (1863) in his edited compilation of works in the anarcho-primitivist tradition titled "Against civilization: Readings and reflections". Additionally, Murray Rothbard, the founder of anarcho-capitalism, has opined that Thoreau was one of the "great intellectual heroes" of his movement. Thoreau was also an important influence on late-19th-century anarchist naturism. Globally, Thoreau's concepts also held importance within individualist anarchist circles in Spain, France, and Portugal.
For the 200th anniversary of his birth, publishers released several new editions of his work: a recreation of "Walden" 1902 edition with illustrations, a picture book with excerpts from "Walden", and an annotated collection of Thoreau's essays on slavery. The United States Postal Service issued a commemorative stamp honoring Thoreau on May 23, 2017 in Concord, MA.
In 2017, "Walden, a Game" was released on itch.io. Created by Tracy Fullerton, it is an open world, first person videogame adaptation of Thoreau's "Walden". Players can build the protagonist's cabin, explore the environment, record flora and fauna, farm the land, visit Emerson's house and the town of Concord. At the end of each day players are invited to reflect on their journal which gradually fills up with reflections based on the player's journey and day-to-day experiences. The game also includes letters between Thoreau and his contemporaries, including Amos Bronson Alcott and Ralph Waldo Emerson. It also includes letters between his contemporaries to build a picture of Thoreau's reception as a writer and his connections in the literary and Transcendentalist scene in America at the time. The game was released for Playstation 4 in 2018.
Although his writings would receive widespread acclaim, Thoreau's ideas were not universally applauded. Scottish author Robert Louis Stevenson judged Thoreau's endorsement of living alone and apart from modern society in natural simplicity to be a mark of "unmanly" effeminacy and "womanish solitude", while deeming him a self-indulgent "skulker".
Nathaniel Hawthorne had mixed feelings about Thoreau. He noted that "He is a keen and delicate observer of nature—a genuine observer—which, I suspect, is almost as rare a character as even an original poet; and Nature, in return for his love, seems to adopt him as her especial child, and shows him secrets which few others are allowed to witness." On the other hand, he also wrote that Thoreau "repudiated all regular modes of getting a living, and seems inclined to lead a sort of Indian life among civilized men".
In a similar vein, poet John Greenleaf Whittier detested what he deemed to be the "wicked" and "heathenish" message of "Walden", claiming that Thoreau wanted man to "lower himself to the level of a woodchuck and walk on four legs".
In response to such criticisms, English novelist George Eliot, writing for the "Westminster Review", characterized such critics as uninspired and narrow-minded:
Thoreau himself also responded to the criticism in a paragraph of his work "Walden" by illustrating the irrelevance of their inquiries:
Recent criticism has accused Thoreau of hypocrisy, misanthropy, and being sanctimonious, based on his writings in "Walden", although this criticism has been perceived as highly selective.
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Religion&Philosophy&Ethics | Prisoner's dilemma
The prisoner's dilemma is a standard example of a game analyzed in game theory that shows why two completely rational individuals might not cooperate, even if it appears that it is in their best interests to do so. It was originally framed by Merrill Flood and Melvin Dresher while working at RAND in 1950. Albert W. Tucker formalized the game with prison sentence rewards and named it "prisoner's dilemma", presenting it as follows:
It is implied that the prisoners will have no opportunity to reward or punish their partner other than the prison sentences they get and that their decision will not affect their reputation in the future. Because betraying a partner offers a greater reward than cooperating with them, all purely rational self-interested prisoners will betray the other, meaning the only possible outcome for two purely rational prisoners is for them to betray each other. In reality, humans display a systemic bias towards cooperative behavior in this and similar games despite what is predicted by simple models of "rational" self-interested action. This bias towards cooperation has been known since the test was first conducted at RAND; the secretaries involved trusted each other and worked together for the best common outcome.
An extended "iterated" version of the game also exists. In this version, the classic game is played repeatedly between the same prisoners, who continuously have the opportunity to penalize the other for previous decisions. If the number of times the game will be played is known to the players, then (by backward induction) two classically rational players will betray each other repeatedly, for the same reasons as the single-shot variant. In an infinite or unknown length game there is no fixed optimum strategy, and prisoner's dilemma tournaments have been held to compete and test algorithms for such cases.
The prisoner's dilemma game can be used as a model for many real world situations involving cooperative behavior. In casual usage, the label "prisoner's dilemma" may be applied to situations not strictly matching the formal criteria of the classic or iterative games: for instance, those in which two entities could gain important benefits from cooperating or suffer from the failure to do so, but find it difficult or expensive—not necessarily impossible—to coordinate their activities.
Two prisoners are separated into individual rooms and cannot communicate with each other.
The normal game is shown below:
It is assumed that both prisoners understand the nature of the game, have no loyalty to each other, and will have no opportunity for retribution or reward outside the game. Regardless of what the other decides, each prisoner gets a higher reward by betraying the other ("defecting"). The reasoning involves an argument by dilemma: B will either cooperate or defect. If B cooperates, A should defect, because going free is better than serving 1 year. If B defects, A should also defect, because serving 2 years is better than serving 3. So either way, A should defect. Parallel reasoning will show that B should defect.
Because defection always results in a better payoff than cooperation regardless of the other player's choice, it is a dominant strategy. Mutual defection is the only strong Nash equilibrium in the game (i.e. the only outcome from which each player could only do worse by unilaterally changing strategy). The dilemma, then, is that mutual cooperation yields a better outcome than mutual defection but is not the rational outcome because the choice to cooperate, from a self-interested perspective, is irrational.
The structure of the traditional prisoner's dilemma can be generalized from its original prisoner setting. Suppose that the two players are represented by the colors red and blue, and that each player chooses to either "cooperate" or "defect".
If both players cooperate, they both receive the reward "R" for cooperating. If both players defect, they both receive the punishment payoff "P". If Blue defects while Red cooperates, then Blue receives the temptation payoff "T", while Red receives the "sucker's" payoff, "S". Similarly, if Blue cooperates while Red defects, then Blue receives the sucker's payoff "S", while Red receives the temptation payoff "T".
This can be expressed in normal form:
and to be a prisoner's dilemma game in the strong sense, the following condition must hold for the payoffs:
The payoff relationship implies that mutual cooperation is superior to mutual defection, while the payoff relationships and imply that defection is the dominant strategy for both agents.
The "donation game" is a form of prisoner's dilemma in which cooperation corresponds to offering the other player a benefit "b" at a personal cost "c" with "b" > "c". Defection means offering nothing. The payoff matrix is thus
Note that (i.e. ) which qualifies the donation game to be an iterated game (see next section).
The donation game may be applied to markets. Suppose X grows oranges, Y grows apples. The marginal utility of an apple to the orange-grower X is "b", which is higher than the marginal utility ("c") of an orange, since X has a surplus of oranges and no apples. Similarly, for apple-grower Y, the marginal utility of an orange is "b" while the marginal utility of an apple is "c". If X and Y contract to exchange an apple and an orange, and each fulfills their end of the deal, then each receive a payoff of "b"-"c". If one "defects" and does not deliver as promised, the defector will receive a payoff of "b", while the cooperator will lose "c". If both defect, then neither one gains or loses anything.
If two players play prisoner's dilemma more than once in succession and they remember previous actions of their opponent and change their strategy accordingly, the game is called iterated prisoner's dilemma.
In addition to the general form above, the iterative version also requires that , to prevent alternating cooperation and defection giving a greater reward than mutual cooperation.
The iterated prisoner's dilemma game is fundamental to some theories of human cooperation and trust. On the assumption that the game can model transactions between two people requiring trust, cooperative behaviour in populations may be modeled by a multi-player, iterated, version of the game. It has, consequently, fascinated many scholars over the years. In 1975, Grofman and Pool estimated the count of scholarly articles devoted to it at over 2,000. The iterated prisoner's dilemma has also been referred to as the "peace-war game".
If the game is played exactly "N" times and both players know this, then it is optimal to defect in all rounds. The only possible Nash equilibrium is to always defect. The proof is inductive: one might as well defect on the last turn, since the opponent will not have a chance to later retaliate. Therefore, both will defect on the last turn. Thus, the player might as well defect on the second-to-last turn, since the opponent will defect on the last no matter what is done, and so on. The same applies if the game length is unknown but has a known upper limit.
Unlike the standard prisoner's dilemma, in the iterated prisoner's dilemma the defection strategy is counter-intuitive and fails badly to predict the behavior of human players. Within standard economic theory, though, this is the only correct answer. The superrational strategy in the iterated prisoner's dilemma with fixed "N" is to cooperate against a superrational opponent, and in the limit of large "N", experimental results on strategies agree with the superrational version, not the game-theoretic rational one.
For cooperation to emerge between game theoretic rational players, the total number of rounds "N" must be unknown to the players. In this case "always defect" may no longer be a strictly dominant strategy, only a Nash equilibrium. Amongst results shown by Robert Aumann in a 1959 paper, rational players repeatedly interacting for indefinitely long games can sustain the cooperative outcome.
According to a 2019 experimental study in the "American Economic Review" which tested what strategies real-life subjects used in iterated prisoners' dilemma situations with perfect monitoring, the majority of chosen strategies were always defect, tit-for-tat, and Grim trigger. Which strategy the subjects chose depended on the parameters of the game.
Interest in the iterated prisoner's dilemma (IPD) was kindled by Robert Axelrod in his book "The Evolution of Cooperation" (1984). In it he reports on a tournament he organized of the "N" step prisoner's dilemma (with "N" fixed) in which participants have to choose their mutual strategy again and again, and have memory of their previous encounters. Axelrod invited academic colleagues all over the world to devise computer strategies to compete in an IPD tournament. The programs that were entered varied widely in algorithmic complexity, initial hostility, capacity for forgiveness, and so forth.
Axelrod discovered that when these encounters were repeated over a long period of time with many players, each with different strategies, greedy strategies tended to do very poorly in the long run while more altruistic strategies did better, as judged purely by self-interest. He used this to show a possible mechanism for the evolution of altruistic behaviour from mechanisms that are initially purely selfish, by natural selection.
The winning deterministic strategy was tit for tat, which Anatol Rapoport developed and entered into the tournament. It was the simplest of any program entered, containing only four lines of BASIC, and won the contest. The strategy is simply to cooperate on the first iteration of the game; after that, the player does what his or her opponent did on the previous move. Depending on the situation, a slightly better strategy can be "tit for tat with forgiveness". When the opponent defects, on the next move, the player sometimes cooperates anyway, with a small probability (around 1–5%). This allows for occasional recovery from getting trapped in a cycle of defections. The exact probability depends on the line-up of opponents.
By analysing the top-scoring strategies, Axelrod stated several conditions necessary for a strategy to be successful.
The optimal (points-maximizing) strategy for the one-time PD game is simply defection; as explained above, this is true whatever the composition of opponents may be. However, in the iterated-PD game the optimal strategy depends upon the strategies of likely opponents, and how they will react to defections and cooperations. For example, consider a population where everyone defects every time, except for a single individual following the tit for tat strategy. That individual is at a slight disadvantage because of the loss on the first turn. In such a population, the optimal strategy for that individual is to defect every time. In a population with a certain percentage of always-defectors and the rest being tit for tat players, the optimal strategy for an individual depends on the percentage, and on the length of the game.
In the strategy called Pavlov, win-stay, lose-switch, faced with a failure to cooperate, the player switches strategy the next turn. In certain circumstances, Pavlov beats all other strategies by giving preferential treatment to co-players using a similar strategy.
Deriving the optimal strategy is generally done in two ways:
Although tit for tat is considered to be the most robust basic strategy, a team from Southampton University in England introduced a new strategy at the 20th-anniversary iterated prisoner's dilemma competition, which proved to be more successful than tit for tat. This strategy relied on collusion between programs to achieve the highest number of points for a single program. The university submitted 60 programs to the competition, which were designed to recognize each other through a series of five to ten moves at the start. Once this recognition was made, one program would always cooperate and the other would always defect, assuring the maximum number of points for the defector. If the program realized that it was playing a non-Southampton player, it would continuously defect in an attempt to minimize the score of the competing program. As a result, the 2004 Prisoners' Dilemma Tournament results show University of Southampton's strategies in the first three places, despite having fewer wins and many more losses than the GRIM strategy. (In a PD tournament, the aim of the game is not to "win" matches – that can easily be achieved by frequent defection). Also, even without implicit collusion between software strategies (exploited by the Southampton team) tit for tat is not always the absolute winner of any given tournament; it would be more precise to say that its long run results over a series of tournaments outperform its rivals. (In any one event a given strategy can be slightly better adjusted to the competition than tit for tat, but tit for tat is more robust). The same applies for the tit for tat with forgiveness variant, and other optimal strategies: on any given day they might not "win" against a specific mix of counter-strategies. An alternative way of putting it is using the Darwinian ESS simulation. In such a simulation, tit for tat will almost always come to dominate, though nasty strategies will drift in and out of the population because a tit for tat population is penetrable by non-retaliating nice strategies, which in turn are easy prey for the nasty strategies. Richard Dawkins showed that here, no static mix of strategies form a stable equilibrium and the system will always oscillate between bounds.}} this strategy ended up taking the top three positions in the competition, as well as a number of positions towards the bottom.
This strategy takes advantage of the fact that multiple entries were allowed in this particular competition and that the performance of a team was measured by that of the highest-scoring player (meaning that the use of self-sacrificing players was a form of minmaxing). In a competition where one has control of only a single player, tit for tat is certainly a better strategy. Because of this new rule, this competition also has little theoretical significance when analyzing single agent strategies as compared to Axelrod's seminal tournament. However, it provided a basis for analysing how to achieve cooperative strategies in multi-agent frameworks, especially in the presence of noise. In fact, long before this new-rules tournament was played, Dawkins, in his book "The Selfish Gene", pointed out the possibility of such strategies winning if multiple entries were allowed, but he remarked that most probably Axelrod would not have allowed them if they had been submitted. It also relies on circumventing rules about the prisoner's dilemma in that there is no communication allowed between the two players, which the Southampton programs arguably did with their opening "ten move dance" to recognize one another; this only reinforces just how valuable communication can be in shifting the balance of the game.
In a stochastic iterated prisoner's dilemma game, strategies are specified by in terms of "cooperation probabilities". In an encounter between player "X" and player "Y", "X" 's strategy is specified by a set of probabilities "P" of cooperating with "Y". "P" is a function of the outcomes of their previous encounters or some subset thereof. If "P" is a function of only their most recent "n" encounters, it is called a "memory-n" strategy. A memory-1 strategy is then specified by four cooperation probabilities: formula_1, where formula_2 is the probability that "X" will cooperate in the present encounter given that the previous encounter was characterized by (ab). For example, if the previous encounter was one in which "X" cooperated and "Y" defected, then formula_3 is the probability that "X" will cooperate in the present encounter. If each of the probabilities are either 1 or 0, the strategy is called deterministic. An example of a deterministic strategy is the tit for tat strategy written as "P"={1,0,1,0}, in which "X" responds as "Y" did in the previous encounter. Another is the win–stay, lose–switch strategy written as "P"={1,0,0,1}, in which "X" responds as in the previous encounter, if it was a "win" (i.e. cc or dc) but changes strategy if it was a loss (i.e. cd or dd). It has been shown that for any memory-n strategy there is a corresponding memory-1 strategy which gives the same statistical results, so that only memory-1 strategies need be considered.
If we define "P" as the above 4-element strategy vector of "X" and formula_4 as the 4-element strategy vector of "Y", a transition matrix "M" may be defined for "X" whose "ij" th entry is the probability that the outcome of a particular encounter between "X" and "Y" will be "j" given that the previous encounter was "i", where "i" and "j" are one of the four outcome indices: "cc", "cd", "dc", or "dd". For example, from "X" 's point of view, the probability that the outcome of the present encounter is "cd" given that the previous encounter was "cd" is equal to formula_5. (The indices for "Q" are from "Y" 's point of view: a "cd" outcome for "X" is a "dc" outcome for "Y".) Under these definitions, the iterated prisoner's dilemma qualifies as a stochastic process and "M" is a stochastic matrix, allowing all of the theory of stochastic processes to be applied.
One result of stochastic theory is that there exists a stationary vector "v" for the matrix "M" such that formula_6. Without loss of generality, it may be specified that "v" is normalized so that the sum of its four components is unity. The "ij" th entry in formula_7 will give the probability that the outcome of an encounter between "X" and "Y" will be "j" given that the encounter "n" steps previous is "i". In the limit as "n" approaches infinity, "M" will converge to a matrix with fixed values, giving the long-term probabilities of an encounter producing "j" which will be independent of "i". In other words, the rows of formula_8 will be identical, giving the long-term equilibrium result probabilities of the iterated prisoners dilemma without the need to explicitly evaluate a large number of interactions. It can be seen that "v" is a stationary vector for formula_7 and particularly formula_8, so that each row of formula_8 will be equal to "v". Thus the stationary vector specifies the equilibrium outcome probabilities for "X". Defining formula_12 and formula_13 as the short-term payoff vectors for the {cc,cd,dc,dd} outcomes (From "X" 's point of view), the equilibrium payoffs for "X" and "Y" can now be specified as formula_14 and formula_15, allowing the two strategies "P" and "Q" to be compared for their long term payoffs.
In 2012, William H. Press and Freeman Dyson published a new class of strategies for the stochastic iterated prisoner's dilemma called "zero-determinant" (ZD) strategies. The long term payoffs for encounters between "X" and "Y" can be expressed as the determinant of a matrix which is a function of the two strategies and the short term payoff vectors: formula_16 and formula_17, which do not involve the stationary vector "v". Since the determinant function formula_18 is linear in "f", it follows that formula_19 (where "U"={1,1,1,1}). Any strategies for which formula_20 is by definition a ZD strategy, and the long term payoffs obey the relation formula_21.
Tit-for-tat is a ZD strategy which is "fair" in the sense of not gaining advantage over the other player. However, the ZD space also contains strategies that, in the case of two players, can allow one player to unilaterally set the other player's score or alternatively, force an evolutionary player to achieve a payoff some percentage lower than his own. The extorted player could defect but would thereby hurt himself by getting a lower payoff. Thus, extortion solutions turn the iterated prisoner's dilemma into a sort of ultimatum game. Specifically, "X" is able to choose a strategy for which formula_22, unilaterally setting formula_23 to a specific value within a particular range of values, independent of "Y" 's strategy, offering an opportunity for "X" to "extort" player "Y" (and vice versa). (It turns out that if "X" tries to set formula_24 to a particular value, the range of possibilities is much smaller, only consisting of complete cooperation or complete defection.)
An extension of the IPD is an evolutionary stochastic IPD, in which the relative abundance of particular strategies is allowed to change, with more successful strategies relatively increasing. This process may be accomplished by having less successful players imitate the more successful strategies, or by eliminating less successful players from the game, while multiplying the more successful ones. It has been shown that unfair ZD strategies are not evolutionarily stable. The key intuition is that an evolutionarily stable strategy must not only be able to invade another population (which extortionary ZD strategies can do) but must also perform well against other players of the same type (which extortionary ZD players do poorly, because they reduce each other's surplus).
Theory and simulations confirm that beyond a critical population size, ZD extortion loses out in evolutionary competition against more cooperative strategies, and as a result, the average payoff in the population increases when the population is larger. In addition, there are some cases in which extortioners may even catalyze cooperation by helping to break out of a face-off between uniform defectors and win–stay, lose–switch agents.
While extortionary ZD strategies are not stable in large populations, another ZD class called "generous" strategies "is" both stable and robust. In fact, when the population is not too small, these strategies can supplant any other ZD strategy and even perform well against a broad array of generic strategies for iterated prisoner's dilemma, including win–stay, lose–switch. This was proven specifically for the by Alexander Stewart and Joshua Plotkin in 2013. Generous strategies will cooperate with other cooperative players, and in the face of defection, the generous player loses more utility than its rival. Generous strategies are the intersection of ZD strategies and so-called "good" strategies, which were defined by Akin (2013) to be those for which the player responds to past mutual cooperation with future cooperation and splits expected payoffs equally if he receives at least the cooperative expected payoff. Among good strategies, the generous (ZD) subset performs well when the population is not too small. If the population is very small, defection strategies tend to dominate.
Most work on the iterated prisoner's dilemma has focused on the discrete case, in which players either cooperate or defect, because this model is relatively simple to analyze. However, some researchers have looked at models of the continuous iterated prisoner's dilemma, in which players are able to make a variable contribution to the other player. Le and Boyd found that in such situations, cooperation is much harder to evolve than in the discrete iterated prisoner's dilemma. The basic intuition for this result is straightforward: in a continuous prisoner's dilemma, if a population starts off in a non-cooperative equilibrium, players who are only marginally more cooperative than non-cooperators get little benefit from assorting with one another. By contrast, in a discrete prisoner's dilemma, tit for tat cooperators get a big payoff boost from assorting with one another in a non-cooperative equilibrium, relative to non-cooperators. Since nature arguably offers more opportunities for variable cooperation rather than a strict dichotomy of cooperation or defection, the continuous prisoner's dilemma may help explain why real-life examples of tit for tat-like cooperation are extremely rare in nature (ex. Hammerstein) even though tit for tat seems robust in theoretical models.
Players cannot seem to coordinate mutual cooperation, thus often get locked into the inferior yet stable strategy of defection. In this way, iterated rounds facilitate the evolution of stable strategies. Iterated rounds often produce novel strategies, which have implications to complex social interaction. One such strategy is win-stay lose-shift. This strategy outperforms a simple Tit-For-Tat strategy – that is, if you can get away with cheating, repeat that behavior, however if you get caught, switch.
The only problem of this tit-for-tat strategy is that they are vulnerable to signal error. The problem arises when one individual cheats in retaliation but the other interprets it as cheating. As a result of this, the second individual now cheats and then it starts a see-saw pattern of cheating in a chain reaction.
The prisoner setting may seem contrived, but there are in fact many examples in human interaction as well as interactions in nature that have the same payoff matrix. The prisoner's dilemma is therefore of interest to the social sciences such as economics, politics, and sociology, as well as to the biological sciences such as ethology and evolutionary biology. Many natural processes have been abstracted into models in which living beings are engaged in endless games of prisoner's dilemma. This wide applicability of the PD gives the game its substantial importance.
In environmental studies, the PD is evident in crises such as global climate-change. It is argued all countries will benefit from a stable climate, but any single country is often hesitant to curb emissions. The immediate benefit to any one country from maintaining current behavior is wrongly perceived to be greater than the purported eventual benefit to that country if all countries' behavior was changed, therefore explaining the impasse concerning climate-change in 2007.
An important difference between climate-change politics and the prisoner's dilemma is uncertainty; the extent and pace at which pollution can change climate is not known. The dilemma faced by government is therefore different from the prisoner's dilemma in that the payoffs of cooperation are unknown. This difference suggests that states will cooperate much less than in a real iterated prisoner's dilemma, so that the probability of avoiding a possible climate catastrophe is much smaller than that suggested by a game-theoretical analysis of the situation using a real iterated prisoner's dilemma.
Osang and Nandy (2003) provide a theoretical explanation with proofs for a regulation-driven win-win situation along the lines of Michael Porter's hypothesis, in which government regulation of competing firms is substantial.
Cooperative behavior of many animals can be understood as an example of the prisoner's dilemma. Often animals engage in long term partnerships, which can be more specifically modeled as iterated prisoner's dilemma. For example, guppies inspect predators cooperatively in groups, and they are thought to punish non-cooperative inspectors.
Vampire bats are social animals that engage in reciprocal food exchange. Applying the payoffs from the prisoner's dilemma can help explain this behavior:
In addiction research / behavioral economics, George Ainslie points out that addiction can be cast as an intertemporal PD problem between the present and future selves of the addict. In this case, "defecting" means "relapsing", and it is easy to see that not defecting both today and in the future is by far the best outcome. The case where one abstains today but relapses in the future is the worst outcome – in some sense the discipline and self-sacrifice involved in abstaining today have been "wasted" because the future relapse means that the addict is right back where he started and will have to start over (which is quite demoralizing, and makes starting over more difficult). Relapsing today and tomorrow is a slightly "better" outcome, because while the addict is still addicted, they haven't put the effort in to trying to stop. The final case, where one engages in the addictive behavior today while abstaining "tomorrow" will be familiar to anyone who has struggled with an addiction. The problem here is that (as in other PDs) there is an obvious benefit to defecting "today", but tomorrow one will face the same PD, and the same obvious benefit will be present then, ultimately leading to an endless string of defections.
John Gottman in his research described in "the science of trust" defines good relationships as those where partners know not to enter the (D,D) cell or at least not to get dynamically stuck there in a loop.
The prisoner's dilemma has been called the "E. coli" of social psychology, and it has been used widely to research various topics such as oligopolistic competition and collective action to produce a collective good.
Advertising is sometimes cited as a real-example of the prisoner's dilemma. When cigarette advertising was legal in the United States, competing cigarette manufacturers had to decide how much money to spend on advertising. The effectiveness of Firm A's advertising was partially determined by the advertising conducted by Firm B. Likewise, the profit derived from advertising for Firm B is affected by the advertising conducted by Firm A. If both Firm A and Firm B chose to advertise during a given period, then the advertisement from each firm negates the other's, receipts remain constant, and expenses increase due to the cost of advertising. Both firms would benefit from a reduction in advertising. However, should Firm B choose not to advertise, Firm A could benefit greatly by advertising. Nevertheless, the optimal amount of advertising by one firm depends on how much advertising the other undertakes. As the best strategy is dependent on what the other firm chooses there is no dominant strategy, which makes it slightly different from a prisoner's dilemma. The outcome is similar, though, in that both firms would be better off were they to advertise less than in the equilibrium. Sometimes cooperative behaviors do emerge in business situations. For instance, cigarette manufacturers endorsed the making of laws banning cigarette advertising, understanding that this would reduce costs and increase profits across the industry. This analysis is likely to be pertinent in many other business situations involving advertising.
Without enforceable agreements, members of a cartel are also involved in a (multi-player) prisoner's dilemma. 'Cooperating' typically means keeping prices at a pre-agreed minimum level. 'Defecting' means selling under this minimum level, instantly taking business (and profits) from other cartel members. Anti-trust authorities want potential cartel members to mutually defect, ensuring the lowest possible prices for consumers.
Doping in sport has been cited as an example of a prisoner's dilemma.
Two competing athletes have the option to use an illegal and/or dangerous drug to boost their performance. If neither athlete takes the drug, then neither gains an advantage. If only one does, then that athlete gains a significant advantage over their competitor, reduced by the legal and/or medical dangers of having taken the drug. If both athletes take the drug, however, the benefits cancel out and only the dangers remain, putting them both in a worse position than if neither had used doping.
In international political theory, the Prisoner's Dilemma is often used to demonstrate the coherence of strategic realism, which holds that in international relations, all states (regardless of their internal policies or professed ideology), will act in their rational self-interest given international anarchy. A classic example is an arms race like the Cold War and similar conflicts. During the Cold War the opposing alliances of NATO and the Warsaw Pact both had the choice to arm or disarm. From each side's point of view, disarming whilst their opponent continued to arm would have led to military inferiority and possible annihilation. Conversely, arming whilst their opponent disarmed would have led to superiority. If both sides chose to arm, neither could afford to attack the other, but both incurred the high cost of developing and maintaining a nuclear arsenal. If both sides chose to disarm, war would be avoided and there would be no costs.
Although the 'best' overall outcome is for both sides to disarm, the rational course for both sides is to arm, and this is indeed what happened. Both sides poured enormous resources into military research and armament in a war of attrition for the next thirty years until the Soviet Union could not withstand the economic cost. The same logic could be applied in any similar scenario, be it economic or technological competition between sovereign states.
Many real-life dilemmas involve multiple players. Although metaphorical, Hardin's tragedy of the commons may be viewed as an example of a multi-player generalization of the PD: Each villager makes a choice for personal gain or restraint. The collective reward for unanimous (or even frequent) defection is very low payoffs (representing the destruction of the "commons"). A commons dilemma most people can relate to is washing the dishes in a shared house. By not washing dishes an individual can gain by saving his time, but if that behavior is adopted by every resident the collective cost is no clean plates for anyone.
The commons are not always exploited: William Poundstone, in a book about the prisoner's dilemma (see References below), describes a situation in New Zealand where newspaper boxes are left unlocked. It is possible for people to take a paper without paying ("defecting") but very few do, feeling that if they do not pay then neither will others, destroying the system. Subsequent research by Elinor Ostrom, winner of the 2009 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences, hypothesized that the tragedy of the commons is oversimplified, with the negative outcome influenced by outside influences. Without complicating pressures, groups communicate and manage the commons among themselves for their mutual benefit, enforcing social norms to preserve the resource and achieve the maximum good for the group, an example of effecting the best case outcome for PD.
Douglas Hofstadter once suggested that people often find problems such as the PD problem easier to understand when it is illustrated in the form of a simple game, or trade-off. One of several examples he used was "closed bag exchange":
Defection always gives a game-theoretically preferable outcome.
"Friend or Foe?" is a game show that aired from 2002 to 2005 on the Game Show Network in the US. It is an example of the prisoner's dilemma game tested on real people, but in an artificial setting. On the game show, three pairs of people compete. When a pair is eliminated, they play a game similar to the prisoner's dilemma to determine how the winnings are split. If they both cooperate (Friend), they share the winnings 50–50. If one cooperates and the other defects (Foe), the defector gets all the winnings and the cooperator gets nothing. If both defect, both leave with nothing. Notice that the reward matrix is slightly different from the standard one given above, as the rewards for the "both defect" and the "cooperate while the opponent defects" cases are identical. This makes the "both defect" case a weak equilibrium, compared with being a strict equilibrium in the standard prisoner's dilemma. If a contestant knows that their opponent is going to vote "Foe", then their own choice does not affect their own winnings. In a specific sense, "Friend or Foe" has a rewards model between prisoner's dilemma and the game of Chicken.
The rewards matrix is
This payoff matrix has also been used on the British television programmes "Trust Me", "Shafted", "The Bank Job" and "Golden Balls", and on the American shows "Bachelor Pad" and "Take It All". Game data from the "Golden Balls" series has been analyzed by a team of economists, who found that cooperation was "surprisingly high" for amounts of money that would seem consequential in the real world, but were comparatively low in the context of the game.
Researchers from the University of Lausanne and the University of Edinburgh have suggested that the "Iterated Snowdrift Game" may more closely reflect real-world social situations. Although this model is actually a chicken game, it will be described here. In this model, the risk of being exploited through defection is lower, and individuals always gain from taking the cooperative choice. The snowdrift game imagines two drivers who are stuck on opposite sides of a snowdrift, each of whom is given the option of shoveling snow to clear a path, or remaining in their car. A player's highest payoff comes from leaving the opponent to clear all the snow by themselves, but the opponent is still nominally rewarded for their work.
This may better reflect real world scenarios, the researchers giving the example of two scientists collaborating on a report, both of whom would benefit if the other worked harder. "But when your collaborator doesn’t do any work, it’s probably better for you to do all the work yourself. You’ll still end up with a completed project."
In coordination games, players must coordinate their strategies for a good outcome. An example is two cars that abruptly meet in a blizzard; each must choose whether to swerve left or right. If both swerve left, or both right, the cars do not collide. The local left- and right-hand traffic convention helps to co-ordinate their actions.
Symmetrical co-ordination games include Stag hunt and Bach or Stravinsky.
A more general set of games are asymmetric. As in the prisoner's dilemma, the best outcome is co-operation, and there are motives for defection. Unlike the symmetric prisoner's dilemma, though, one player has more to lose and/or more to gain than the other. Some such games have been described as a prisoner's dilemma in which one prisoner has an alibi, whence the term "alibi game".
In experiments, players getting unequal payoffs in repeated games may seek to maximize profits, but only under the condition that both players receive equal payoffs; this may lead to a stable equilibrium strategy in which the disadvantaged player defects every X games, while the other always co-operates. Such behaviour may depend on the experiment's social norms around fairness.
Several software packages have been created to run prisoner's dilemma simulations and tournaments, some of which have available source code.
Hannu Rajaniemi set the opening scene of his "The Quantum Thief" trilogy in a "dilemma prison". The main theme of the series has been described as the "inadequacy of a binary universe" and the ultimate antagonist is a character called the All-Defector. Rajaniemi is particularly interesting as an artist treating this subject in that he is a Cambridge-trained mathematician and holds a PhD in mathematical physics – the interchangeability of matter and information is a major feature of the books, which take place in a "post-singularity" future. The first book in the series was published in 2010, with the two sequels, "The Fractal Prince" and "The Causal Angel", published in 2012 and 2014, respectively.
A game modeled after the (iterated) prisoner's dilemma is a central focus of the 2012 video game "" and a minor part in its 2016 sequel "".
In "The Mysterious Benedict Society and the Prisoner's Dilemma" by Trenton Lee Stewart, the main characters start by playing a version of the game and escaping from the "prison" altogether. Later they become actual prisoners and escape once again.
In "The Adventure Zone: Balance" during "The Suffering Game" subarc, the player characters are twice presented with the prisoner's dilemma during their time in two liches' domain, once cooperating and once defecting.
In the 8th novel from the author James S. A. Corey Tiamat's Wrath . Winston Duarte explains the prisoners dilemma in his 14-year-old daughter, Teresa, to train her in strategic thinking.
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Religion&Philosophy&Ethics | Reality
Reality is the sum or aggregate of all that is real or existent within a system, as opposed to that which is only imaginary. The term is also used to refer to the ontological status of things, indicating their existence. In physical terms, reality is the totality of a system, known and unknown. Philosophical questions about the nature of reality or existence or being are considered under the rubric of ontology, which is a major branch of metaphysics in the Western philosophical tradition. Ontological questions also feature in diverse branches of philosophy, including the philosophy of science, philosophy of religion, philosophy of mathematics, and philosophical logic. These include questions about whether only physical objects are real (i.e., Physicalism), whether reality is fundamentally immaterial (e.g., Idealism), whether hypothetical unobservable entities posited by scientific theories exist, whether God exists, whether numbers and other abstract objects exist, and whether possible worlds exist.
A common colloquial usage would have "reality" mean "perceptions, beliefs, and attitudes toward reality", as in "My reality is not your reality." This is often used just as a colloquialism indicating that the parties to a conversation agree, or should agree, not to quibble over deeply different conceptions of what is real. For example, in a religious discussion between friends, one might say (attempting humor), "You might disagree, but in my reality, everyone goes to heaven."
Reality can be defined in a way that links it to worldviews or parts of them (conceptual frameworks): Reality is the totality of all things, structures (actual and conceptual), events (past and present) and phenomena, whether observable or not. It is what a world view (whether it be based on individual or shared human experience) ultimately attempts to describe or map.
Certain ideas from physics, philosophy, sociology, literary criticism, and other fields shape various theories of reality. One such belief is that there simply and literally "is" no reality beyond the perceptions or beliefs we each have about reality. Such attitudes are summarized in the popular statement, "Perception is reality" or "Life is how you perceive reality" or "reality is what you can get away with" (Robert Anton Wilson), and they indicate anti-realism – that is, the view that there is no objective reality, whether acknowledged explicitly or not.
Many of the concepts of science and philosophy are often defined culturally and socially. This idea was elaborated by Thomas Kuhn in his book "The Structure of Scientific Revolutions" (1962). "The Social Construction of Reality", a book about the sociology of knowledge written by Peter L. Berger and Thomas Luckmann, was published in 1966. It explained how knowledge is acquired and used for the comprehension of reality. Out of all the realities, the reality of everyday life is the most important one since our consciousness requires us to be completely aware and attentive to the experience of everyday life.
Philosophy addresses two different aspects of the topic of reality: the nature of reality itself, and the relationship between the mind (as well as language and culture) and reality.
On the one hand, ontology is the study of being, and the central topic of the field is couched, variously, in terms of being, existence, "what is", and reality. The task in ontology is to describe the most general categories of reality and how they are interrelated. If a philosopher wanted to proffer a positive definition of the concept "reality", it would be done under this heading. As explained above, some philosophers draw a distinction between reality and existence. In fact, many analytic philosophers today tend to avoid the term "real" and "reality" in discussing ontological issues. But for those who would treat "is real" the same way they treat "exists", one of the leading questions of analytic philosophy has been whether existence (or reality) is a property of objects. It has been widely held by analytic philosophers that it is "not" a property at all, though this view has lost some ground in recent decades.
On the other hand, particularly in discussions of objectivity that have feet in both metaphysics and epistemology, philosophical discussions of "reality" often concern the ways in which reality is, or is not, in some way "dependent upon" (or, to use fashionable jargon, "constructed" out of) mental and cultural factors such as perceptions, beliefs, and other mental states, as well as cultural artifacts, such as religions and political movements, on up to the vague notion of a common cultural world view, or .
The view that there is a reality independent of any beliefs, perceptions, etc., is called realism. More specifically, philosophers are given to speaking about "realism "about"" this and that, such as realism about universals or realism about the external world. Generally, where one can identify any class of object, the existence or essential characteristics of which is said not to depend on perceptions, beliefs, language, or any other human artifact, one can speak of "realism "about"" that object.
One can also speak of "anti"-realism about the same objects. "Anti-realism" is the latest in a long series of terms for views opposed to realism. Perhaps the first was idealism, so called because reality was said to be in the mind, or a product of our "ideas". Berkeleyan idealism is the view, propounded by the Irish empiricist George Berkeley, that the objects of perception are actually ideas in the mind. In this view, one might be tempted to say that reality is a "mental construct"; this is not quite accurate, however, since, in Berkeley's view, perceptual ideas are created and coordinated by God. By the 20th century, views similar to Berkeley's were called phenomenalism. Phenomenalism differs from Berkeleyan idealism primarily in that Berkeley believed that minds, or souls, are not merely ideas nor made up of ideas, whereas varieties of phenomenalism, such as that advocated by Russell, tended to go farther to say that the mind itself is merely a collection of perceptions, memories, etc., and that there is no mind or soul over and above such mental events. Finally, anti-realism became a fashionable term for "any" view which held that the existence of some object depends upon the mind or cultural artifacts. The view that the so-called external world is really merely a social, or cultural, artifact, called social constructionism, is one variety of anti-realism. Cultural relativism is the view that social issues such as morality are not absolute, but at least partially cultural artifact.
A correspondence theory of knowledge about what exists claims that "true" knowledge of reality represents accurate correspondence of statements about and images of reality with the actual reality that the statements or images are attempting to represent. For example, the scientific method can verify that a statement is true based on the observable evidence that a thing exists. Many humans can point to the Rocky Mountains and say that this mountain range exists, and continues to exist even if no one is observing it or making statements about it.
The nature of being is a perennial topic in metaphysics. For, instance Parmenides taught that reality was a single unchanging Being, whereas Heraclitus wrote that all things flow. The 20th century philosopher Heidegger thought previous philosophers have lost sight the question of Being (qua Being) in favour of the questions of beings (existing things), so that a return to the Parmenidean approach was needed. An ontological catalogue is an attempt to list the fundamental constituents of reality. The question of whether or not existence is a predicate has been discussed since the Early Modern period, not least in relation to the ontological argument for the existence of God. Existence, "that" something is, has been contrasted with "essence", the question of "what" something is.
Since existence without essence seems blank, it associated with nothingness by philosophers such as Hegel. Nihilism represents an extremely negative view of being, the absolute a positive one.
The question of direct or "naïve" realism, as opposed to indirect or "representational" realism, arises in the philosophy of perception and of mind out of the debate over the nature of conscious experience; the epistemological question of whether the world we see around us is the real world itself or merely an internal perceptual copy of that world generated by neural processes in our brain. Naïve realism is known as "direct" realism when developed to counter "indirect" or representative realism, also known as epistemological dualism, the philosophical position that our conscious experience is not of the real world itself but of an internal representation, a miniature virtual-reality replica of the world.
Timothy Leary coined the influential term Reality Tunnel, by which he means a kind of representative realism. The theory states that, with a subconscious set of mental filters formed from their beliefs and experiences, every individual interprets the same world differently, hence "Truth is in the eye of the beholder". His ideas influenced the work of his friend Robert Anton Wilson.
The status of abstract entities, particularly numbers, is a topic of discussion in mathematics.
In the philosophy of mathematics, the best known form of realism about numbers is Platonic realism, which grants them abstract, immaterial existence. Other forms of realism identify mathematics with the concrete physical universe.
Anti-realist stances include formalism and fictionalism.
Some approaches are selectively realistic about some mathematical objects but not others. Finitism rejects infinite quantities. Ultra-finitism accepts finite quantities up to a certain amount. Constructivism and intuitionism are realistic about objects that can be explicitly constructed, but reject the use of the principle of the excluded middle to prove existence by reductio ad absurdum.
The traditional debate has focused on whether an abstract (immaterial, intelligible) realm of numbers has existed "in addition to" the physical (sensible, concrete) world. A recent development is the mathematical universe hypothesis, the theory that "only" a mathematical world exists, with the finite, physical world being an illusion within it.
An extreme form of realism about mathematics is the mathematical multiverse hypothesis advanced by Max Tegmark. Tegmark's sole postulate is: "All structures that exist mathematically also exist physically". That is, in the sense that "in those [worlds] complex enough to contain self-aware substructures [they] will subjectively perceive themselves as existing in a physically 'real' world". The hypothesis suggests that worlds corresponding to different sets of initial conditions, physical constants, or altogether different equations should be considered real. The theory can be considered a form of Platonism in that it posits the existence of mathematical entities, but can also be considered a mathematical monism in that it denies that anything exists except mathematical objects.
The problem of universals is an ancient problem in metaphysics about whether universals exist. Universals are general or abstract qualities, characteristics, properties, kinds or relations, such as being male/female, solid/liquid/gas or a certain colour, that can be predicated of individuals or particulars or that individuals or particulars can be regarded as sharing or participating in. For example, Scott, Pat, and Chris have in common the universal quality of "being human" or "humanity".
The realist school claims that universals are real – they exist and are distinct from the particulars that instantiate them. There are various forms of realism. Two major forms are Platonic realism and Aristotelian realism. "Platonic realism" is the view that universals are real entities and they exist independent of particulars. "Aristotelian realism", on the other hand, is the view that universals are real entities, but their existence is dependent on the particulars that exemplify them.
Nominalism and conceptualism are the main forms of anti-realism about universals.
A traditional realist position in ontology is that time and space have existence apart from the human mind. Idealists deny or doubt the existence of objects independent of the mind. Some anti-realists whose ontological position is that objects outside the mind do exist, nevertheless doubt the independent existence of time and space.
Kant, in the "Critique of Pure Reason", described time as an "a priori" notion that, together with other "a priori" notions such as space, allows us to comprehend sense experience. Kant denies that either space or time are substance, entities in themselves, or learned by experience; he holds rather that both are elements of a systematic framework we use to structure our experience. Spatial measurements are used to quantify how far apart objects are, and temporal measurements are used to quantitatively compare the interval between (or duration of) events. Although space and time are held to be "transcendentally ideal" in this sense, they are also "empirically real", i.e. not mere illusions.
Idealist writers such as J. M. E. McTaggart in "The Unreality of Time" have argued that time is an illusion.
As well as differing about the reality of time as a whole, metaphysical theories of time can differ in their ascriptions of reality to the past, present and future separately.
Time, and the related concepts of process and evolution are central to the system-building metaphysics of A. N. Whitehead and Charles Hartshorne.
The term "possible world" goes back to Leibniz's theory of possible worlds, used to analyse necessity, possibility, and similar modal notions. Modal realism is the view, notably propounded by David Kellogg Lewis, that all possible worlds are as real as the actual world. In short: the actual world is regarded as merely one among an infinite set of logically possible worlds, some "nearer" to the actual world and some more remote. Other theorists may use the Possible World framework to express and explore problems without committing to it ontologically.
Possible world theory is related to alethic logic: a proposition is "necessary" if it is true in all possible worlds, and "possible" if it is true in at least one. The many worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics is a similar idea in science.
The philosophical implications of a physical TOE are frequently debated. For example, if philosophical physicalism is true, a physical TOE will coincide with a philosophical theory of everything.
The "system building" style of metaphysics attempts to answer "all" the important questions in a coherent way, providing a complete picture of the world. Plato and Aristotle could be said to be early examples of comprehensive systems. In the early modern period (17th and 18th centuries), the system-building "scope" of philosophy is often linked to the rationalist "method" of philosophy, that is the technique of deducing the nature of the world by pure "a priori" reason. Examples from the early modern period include the Leibniz's Monadology, Descartes's Dualism, Spinoza's Monism. Hegel's Absolute idealism and Whitehead's Process philosophy were later systems.
Other philosophers do not believe its techniques can aim so high. Some scientists think a more mathematical approach than philosophy is needed for a TOE, for instance Stephen Hawking wrote in "A Brief History of Time" that even if we had a TOE, it would necessarily be a set of equations. He wrote, "What is it that breathes fire into the equations and makes a universe for them to describe?"
On a much broader and more subjective level, private experiences, curiosity, inquiry, and the selectivity involved in personal interpretation of events shapes reality as seen by one and only one individual and hence is called phenomenological. While this
form of reality might be common to others as well, it could at times also be so unique to oneself as to never be experienced or agreed upon by anyone else. Much of the kind of experience deemed spiritual occurs on this level of reality.
Phenomenology is a philosophical method developed in the early years of the twentieth century by Edmund Husserl and a circle of followers at the universities of Göttingen and Munich in Germany. Subsequently, phenomenological themes were taken up by philosophers in France, the United States, and elsewhere, often in contexts far removed from Husserl's work.
The word "phenomenology" comes from the Greek "phainómenon", meaning "that which appears", and "lógos", meaning "study". In Husserl's conception, phenomenology is primarily concerned with making the structures of consciousness, and the phenomena which appear in acts of consciousness, objects of systematic reflection and analysis. Such reflection was to take place from a highly modified "first person" viewpoint, studying phenomena not as they appear to "my" consciousness, but to any consciousness whatsoever. Husserl believed that phenomenology could thus provide a firm basis for all human knowledge, including scientific knowledge, and could establish philosophy as a "rigorous science".
Husserl's conception of phenomenology has been criticised and developed not only by himself, but also by his student and assistant Martin Heidegger, by existentialists, such as Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Jean-Paul Sartre, and by other philosophers, such as Paul Ricoeur, Emmanuel Levinas, and Dietrich von Hildebrand.
Skeptical hypotheses in philosophy suggest that reality is very different from what we think it is; or at least that we cannot prove it is not. Examples include:
Jain philosophy postulates that seven tattva (truths or fundamental principles) constitute reality. These seven "tattva" are:
Scientific realism is, at the most general level, the view that the world described by science (perhaps ideal science) is the real world, as it is, independent of what we might take it to be. Within philosophy of science, it is often framed as an answer to the question "how is the success of science to be explained?" The debate over what the success of science involves centers primarily on the status of entities that are not directly observable discussed by scientific theories. Generally, those who are scientific realists state that one can make reliable claims about these entities (viz., that they have the same ontological status) as directly observable entities, as opposed to instrumentalism. The most used and studied scientific theories today state more or less the truth.
"Realism" in the sense used by physicists does not equate to realism in metaphysics.
The latter is the claim that the world is mind-independent: that even if the results of a measurement do not pre-exist the act of measurement, that does not require that they are the creation of the observer. Furthermore, a mind-independent property does not have to be the value of some physical variable such as position or momentum. A property can be "dispositional" (or potential), i.e. it can be a tendency: in the way that glass objects tend to break, or are disposed to break, even if they do not "actually" break. Likewise, the mind-independent properties of quantum systems could consist of a tendency to respond to particular measurements with particular values with ascertainable probability. Such an ontology would be metaphysically realistic, without being realistic in the physicist's sense of "local realism" (which would require that a single value be produced with certainty).
A closely related term is counterfactual definiteness (CFD), used to refer to the claim that one can meaningfully speak of the definiteness of results of measurements that have not been performed (i.e. the ability to assume the existence of objects, and properties of objects, even when they have not been measured).
Local realism is a significant feature of classical mechanics, of general relativity, and of electrodynamics; but quantum mechanics has shown that quantum entanglement is possible. This was rejected by Einstein, who proposed the EPR paradox, but it was subsequently quantified by Bell's inequalities. If Bell's inequalities are violated, either local realism "or" counterfactual definiteness must be incorrect; but some physicists dispute that experiments have demonstrated Bell's violations, on the grounds that the sub-class of inhomogeneous Bell inequalities has not been tested or due to experimental limitations in the tests. Different interpretations of quantum mechanics violate different parts of local realism and/or counterfactual definiteness.
The quantum mind–body problem refers to the philosophical discussions of the mind–body problem in the context of quantum mechanics. Since quantum mechanics involves quantum superpositions, which are not perceived by observers, some interpretations of quantum mechanics place conscious observers in a special position.
The founders of quantum mechanics debated the role of the observer, and of them, Wolfgang Pauli and Werner Heisenberg believed that it was the observer that produced collapse. This point of view, which was never fully endorsed by Niels Bohr, was denounced as mystical and anti-scientific by Albert Einstein. Pauli accepted the term, and described quantum mechanics as "lucid mysticism".
Heisenberg and Bohr always described quantum mechanics in logical positivist terms. Bohr also took an active interest in the philosophical implications of quantum theories such as his complementarity, for example. He believed quantum theory offers a complete description of nature, albeit one that is simply ill-suited for everyday experiences – which are better described by classical mechanics and probability. Bohr never specified a demarcation line above which objects cease to be quantum and become classical. He believed that it was not a question of physics, but one of philosophy.
Eugene Wigner reformulated the "Schrödinger's cat" thought experiment as "Wigner's friend" and proposed that the consciousness of an observer is the demarcation line which precipitates collapse of the wave function, independent of any realist interpretation. Commonly known as "consciousness causes collapse", this interpretation of quantum mechanics states that observation by a conscious observer is what makes the wave function collapse.
The multiverse is the hypothetical set of multiple possible universes (including the historical universe we consistently experience) that together comprise everything that exists: the entirety of space, time, matter, and energy as well as the physical laws and constants that describe them. The term was coined in 1895 by the American philosopher and psychologist William James. In the many-worlds interpretation (MWI), one of the mainstream interpretations of quantum mechanics, there are an infinite number of universes and every possible quantum outcome occurs in at least one universe.
The structure of the multiverse, the nature of each universe within it and the relationship between the various constituent universes, depend on the specific multiverse hypothesis considered. Multiverses have been hypothesized in cosmology, physics, astronomy, religion, philosophy, transpersonal psychology and fiction, particularly in science fiction and fantasy. In these contexts, parallel universes are also called "alternative universes", "quantum universes", "interpenetrating dimensions", "parallel dimensions", "parallel worlds", "alternative realities", "alternative timelines", and "dimensional planes", among others.
A theory of everything (TOE) is a putative theory of theoretical physics that fully explains and links together all known physical phenomena, and predicts the outcome of "any" experiment that could be carried out "in principle". The theory of everything is also called the final theory. Many candidate theories of everything have been proposed by theoretical physicists during the twentieth century, but none have been confirmed experimentally. The primary problem in producing a TOE is that general relativity and quantum mechanics are hard to unify. This is one of the unsolved problems in physics.
Initially, the term "theory of everything" was used with an ironic connotation to refer to various overgeneralized theories. For example, a great-grandfather of Ijon Tichy, a character from a cycle of Stanisław Lem's science fiction stories of the 1960s, was known to work on the "General Theory of Everything". Physicist John Ellis claims to have introduced the term into the technical literature in an article in "Nature" in 1986. Over time, the term stuck in popularizations of quantum physics to describe a theory that would unify or explain through a single model the theories of all fundamental interactions and of all particles of nature: general relativity for gravitation, and the standard model of elementary particle physics – which includes quantum mechanics – for electromagnetism, the two nuclear interactions, and the known elementary particles.
Current candidates for a theory of everything include string theory, M theory, and loop quantum gravity.
Virtual reality (VR) is a computer-simulated environment that can simulate physical presence in places in the real world, as well as in imaginary worlds.
The Virtuality Continuum is a continuous scale ranging between the completely virtual, a Virtuality, and the completely real: Reality. The reality-virtuality continuum therefore encompasses all possible variations and compositions of real and virtual objects. It has been described as a concept in new media and computer science, but in fact it could be considered a matter of anthropology. The concept was first introduced by Paul Milgram.
The area between the two extremes, where both the real and the virtual are mixed, is the so-called Mixed reality. This in turn is said to consist of both Augmented Reality, where the virtual augments the real, and Augmented virtuality, where the real augments the virtual.
Cyberspace, the world's computer systems considered as an interconnected whole, can be thought of as a virtual reality; for instance, it is portrayed as such in the cyberpunk fiction of William Gibson and others. Second life and MMORPGs such as "World of Warcraft" are examples of artificial environments or virtual worlds (falling some way short of full virtual reality) in cyberspace.
On the Internet, "real life" refers to life in the real world. It generally references life or consensus reality, in contrast to an environment seen as fiction or fantasy, such as virtual reality, lifelike experience, dreams, novels, or movies. Online, the acronym "IRL" stands for "in real life", with the meaning "not on the Internet". Sociologists engaged in the study of the Internet have determined that someday, a distinction between online and real-life worlds may seem "quaint", noting that certain types of online activity, such as sexual intrigues, have already made a full transition to complete legitimacy and "reality". The abbreviation "RL" stands for "real life". For example, one can speak of "meeting in RL" someone whom one has met in a chat or on an Internet forum. It may also be used to express an inability to use the Internet for a time due to "RL problems".
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Religion&Philosophy&Ethics | Hanlon's razor
Hanlon's razor is an aphorism "Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity", known in several other forms. It is a philosophical razor which suggests a way of eliminating unlikely explanations for human behavior. Similar statements have been recorded since at least the 18th century. Probably it is named after Robert J. Hanlon, a person who submitted the idea to a joke book.
Inspired by Occam's razor, the aphorism became known in this form and under this name by the "Jargon File", a glossary of computer programmer slang.
Later that same year, the "Jargon File" editors noted lack of knowledge about the term's derivation and the existence of a similar epigram by William James. In 1996, the "Jargon File" entry on Hanlon's Razor noted the existence of a similar quotation in Robert A. Heinlein's novella "Logic of Empire" (1941), with speculation that Hanlon's Razor might be a corruption of "Heinlein's Razor". (The character "Doc" in Heinlein's story described the "devil theory" fallacy, explaining, "You have attributed conditions to villainy that simply result from stupidity.")
In 2001, Quentin Stafford-Fraser published two blog entries citing e-mails from Joseph E. Bigler explaining that the quotation originally came from Robert J. Hanlon of Scranton, Pennsylvania, as a submission (credited in print) for a compilation of various jokes related to Murphy's Law that were published in Arthur Bloch's "Murphy's Law Book Two: More Reasons Why Things Go Wrong!" (1980). Subsequently, in 2002, the "Jargon File" entry noted the same.
Earlier attributions to the idea go back to at least the 18th century. First published in German (1774) Johann Wolfgang von Goethe wrote in "The Sorrows of Young Werther" (as translated):
An alternate expression of the idea comes from Jane West, in her novel "The Loyalists: An Historical Novel" (1812):
A similar quote is also misattributed to Napoleon.
Andrew Roberts, in his biography of Winston Churchill (Penguin Books, 2019, p. 771), quotes from Churchill‘s correspondence with King George VI in February 1943 regarding disagreements with Charles De Gaulle: " 'De Gaulle is hostile to this country, and I put far more confidence in Giraud than in him,‘ he insisted, albeit allowing that his 'insolence...may be founded on stupidity rather than malice.' "
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Religion&Philosophy&Ethics | Turning the other cheek
Turning the other cheek is a phrase in Christian doctrine from the Sermon on the Mount that refers to responding to injury without revenge and allowing more injury. This passage is variously interpreted as commanding nonresistance, Christian pacifism, or nonviolence on the part of the victim. It has also been interpreted as a way to embarrass a bully.
The phrase originates from the Sermon on the Mount in the New Testament. In the Gospel of Matthew chapter 5, an alternative for "an eye for an eye" is given by Jesus:
In the Sermon on the Plain in the Gospel of Luke chapter 6, as part of his command to "love your enemies", Jesus says:
This phrase, as with much of the Sermon on the Mount, has been subject to both literal and figurative interpretations.
According to this interpretation the passages call for total nonresistance to the point of "facilitating" aggression against oneself, and since human governments defend themselves by military force, some have advocated Christian anarchism, including Leo Tolstoy who elucidated his reasoning in "The Kingdom of God Is Within You".
The scholar Walter Wink, in his book "Engaging the Powers: Discernment and Resistance in a World of Domination", interprets the passage as ways to subvert the power structures of the time.
At the time of Jesus, says Wink, striking backhand a person deemed to be of lower socioeconomic class was a means of asserting authority and dominance. If the persecuted person "turned the other cheek," the discipliner was faced with a dilemma: The left hand was used for unclean purposes, so a back-hand strike on the opposite cheek would not be performed. An alternative would be a slap with the open hand as a challenge or to punch the person, but this was seen as a statement of equality. Thus, by turning the other cheek, the persecuted was demanding equality.
Wink continues with an interpretation of handing over one's cloak in addition to one's tunic. The debtor has given the shirt off his back, a situation forbidden by Hebrew law as stated in Deuteronomy (24:10–13). By giving the lender the cloak as well, the debtor was reduced to nakedness. Wink notes that public nudity was viewed as bringing shame on the viewer, and not just the naked, as seen in Noah's case (Genesis 9:20–23).
Wink interprets the succeeding verse from the Sermon on the Mount as a method for making the oppressor break the law. The commonly invoked Roman law of Angaria allowed the Roman authorities to demand that inhabitants of occupied territories carry messages and equipment the distance of one mile post, but prohibited forcing an individual to go further than a single mile, at the risk of suffering disciplinary actions. In this example, the nonviolent interpretation sees Jesus as placing criticism on an unjust and hated Roman law, as well as clarifying the teaching to extend beyond Jewish law.
Another interpretation is that Jesus was not changing the meaning of "an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth", but restoring it to the original context. Jesus starts his statement with "you have heard it said," which could mean that he was clarifying a misconception, as opposed to "it is written", which could be a reference to scripture. The common misconception seems to be that people were using Exodus 21:24–25 (the guidelines for a magistrate to punish convicted offenders) as a justification for personal vengeance. However, the command to "turn the other cheek" would be not a command to allow someone to beat or rob a person but a command not to take vengeance.
In the New Thought community popular in the late 19th and early 20th century, many spiritual teachers such as Emmet Fox viewed Jesus Christ as the greatest teacher of metaphysics that ever lived; that in his teachings he was attempting to explain to the individuals of the day how to improve their lot in life through practical teachings. The Sermon on the Mount records the details of one such seminar. Despite losing much in translation, as well as using ancient metaphors which are easily misinterpreted in the modern age, the tenets of Jesus's teachings, phrases such as 'resist evil' and 'turn the other cheek' are pure Godly instructions.
Rather than taking 'an eye for an eye', Jesus encourages us to resist evil, because giving our attention to evil just invites more evil into our lives. Likewise, if someone should strike us, rather than retaliating and therefore becoming embroiled in a battle, Jesus encourages us to 'turn the other cheek'. This is not (as some may have interpreted) so that the assailant may strike the other, but indicates that turning and walking away from the potential altercation is the only way to get a positive and Christ-like outcome. Violence begets more violence.
If we focus on any selfish, sinful thought, word or deed, it only increases its power and presence in our lives. By asking us to turn the other cheek, Jesus is suggesting we focus on forgiveness and loving others, rather than just the things we want.
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Religion&Philosophy&Ethics | Zoroaster
Zoroaster (, ; , "Zōroastrēs"), also known as Zarathustra (, ; , "Zaraθuštra"), Zarathushtra Spitama or Asho Zarathushtra (), was an ancient Iranian prophet, religious reformer and spiritual leader who founded what is now known as Zoroastrianism.
The Oxford Dictionary of Philosophy considers Zoroaster to have been the first philosopher. Zoroaster has also been described as the father of ethics, the first rationalist and the first monotheist (having belief in just one God) as well as the first to articulate the notions of heaven and hell, judgment after death and free will.
The religion founded by Zoroaster was the first major world religion and has had significant influence on other religious and philosophical systems, including Christianity, Judaism, Islam, Buddhism, the Bahá'í Faith, Gnosticism and Greek philosophy. His teachings challenged the existing traditions of the Indo-Iranian religion and inaugurated a movement that eventually became the dominant religion in Ancient Persia. He was a native speaker of Old Avestan and lived in the eastern part of the Iranian Plateau, but his exact birthplace is uncertain.
There is no scholarly consensus on when he lived. However, approximating using linguistic and socio-cultural evidence allows for dating to somewhere in the second millennium BC. This is done by estimating the period in which the Old Avestan language (as well as the earlier Proto-Indo-Iranian and Proto-Iranian languages and the related Vedic Sanskrit) were spoken, the period in which the Proto-Indo-Iranian religion was practised, and correlation between the burial practice described in the Gathas with the archeological Yaz culture. However, other scholars still date him in the 7th and 6th century BC as a near-contemporary of Cyrus the Great and Darius I to as far back as the sixth millennium BC.
Zoroastrianism eventually became the official religion of Ancient Persia and its distant subdivisions from the 6th century BCE to the 7th century CE. Zoroaster is credited with authorship of the Gathas as well as the Yasna Haptanghaiti, hymns composed in his native dialect, Old Avestan, and which comprise the core of Zoroastrian thinking. Most of his life is known from these texts. By any modern standard of historiography, no evidence can place him into a fixed period, and the historicization surrounding him may be a part of a trend from before the 10th century that historicizes legends and myths.
Zoroaster's name in his native language, Avestan, was probably "Zaraϑuštra". His English name, "Zoroaster", derives from a later (5th century BC) Greek transcription, "Zōroastrēs" (), as used in Xanthus's "Lydiaca" (Fragment 32) and in Plato's "First Alcibiades" (122a1). This form appears subsequently in the Latin "" and, in later Greek orthographies, as Ζωροάστρις "Zōroastris". The Greek form of the name appears to be based on a phonetic transliteration or semantic substitution of Avestan "zaraϑ-" with the Greek ζωρός "zōros" (literally "undiluted") and the Avestan "-uštra" with ἄστρον "astron" ("star").
In Avestan, "Zaraϑuštra" is generally accepted to derive from an Old Iranian "*Zaratuštra-"; The element half of the name ("-uštra-") is thought to be the Indo-Iranian root for "camel", with the entire name meaning "he who can manage camels".
Reconstructions from later Iranian languages—particularly from the Middle Persian (300 BCE) "Zardusht", which is the form that the name took in the 9th- to 12th-century Zoroastrian texts—suggest that "*Zaratuštra-" might be a zero-grade form of "*Zarantuštra-".
Subject then to whether "Zaraϑuštra" derives from "*Zarantuštra-" or from "*Zaratuštra-", several interpretations have been proposed.
If "Zarantuštra" is the original form, it may mean
"with old/aging camels", related to Avestic "zarant-" ("cf." Pashto "zōṛ" and Ossetian "zœrond", "old"; Middle Persian "zāl", "old"):
The interpretation of the "-ϑ-" () in Avestan "zaraϑuštra" was for a time itself subjected to heated debate because the "-ϑ-" is an irregular development: As a rule, "*zarat-" (a first element that ends in a dental consonant) should have Avestan "zarat-" or "zarat̰-" as a development from it. Why this is not so for "zaraϑuštra" has not yet been determined. Notwithstanding the phonetic irregularity, that Avestan "zaraϑuštra" with its "-ϑ-" was linguistically an actual form is shown by later attestations reflecting the same basis. All present-day, Iranian-language variants of his name derive from the Middle Iranian variants of "Zarϑošt", which, in turn, all reflect Avestan's fricative "-ϑ-".
In Middle Persian, the name is 𐭦𐭫𐭲𐭥𐭱𐭲 "Zardu(x)št", in Parthian "Zarhušt", in Manichaean Middle Persian "Zrdrwšt", in Early New Persian "Zardušt", and in modern (New Persian), the name is زرتشت "Zartosht".
There is no consensus on the dating of Zoroaster, the Avesta gives no direct information about it, while historical sources are conflicting. Some scholars base their date reconstruction on the Proto-Indo-Iranian language and Proto-Indo-Iranian religion, and thus it is considered to have been some place in northeastern Iran and some time between 1500 and 500 BCE.
Some scholars such as Mary Boyce (who dated Zoroaster to somewhere between 1700–1000 BC) used linguistic and socio-cultural evidence to place Zoroaster between 1500 and 1000 BC (or 1200 and 900 BC). The basis of this theory is primarily proposed on linguistic similarities between the Old Avestan language of the Zoroastrian Gathas and the Sanskrit of the Rigveda (c. 1700–1100 BC), a collection of early Vedic hymns. Both texts are considered to have a common archaic Indo-Iranian origin. The Gathas portray an ancient Stone-Bronze Age bipartite society of warrior-herdsmen and priests (compared to Bronze tripartite society; some conjecture that it depicts the Yaz culture), and thus it is implausible that the Gathas and Rigveda could have been composed more than a few centuries apart. These scholars suggest that Zoroaster lived in an isolated tribe or composed the Gathas before the 1200–1000 BC migration by the Iranians from the steppe to the Iranian Plateau. The shortfall of the argument is the vague comparison, and the archaic language of Gathas does not necessarily indicate time difference.
Other scholars propose a period between 7th and 6th century, for example, c. 650–600 BC or 559–522 BC. The latest possible date is the mid 6th century, at the time of Achaemenid Empire's Darius I, or his predecessor Cyrus the Great. This date gains credence mainly on the thesis that certain figures must be based on historical facts, thus some have related the mythical Vishtaspa with Darius I's father Vishtaspa (or Hystaspes in Greek) with the account on Zoroaster's life. However, in the Avesta it should not be ignored that Vishtaspa's son became the ruler of the Persian Empire, Darius I would not neglect to include his patron-father in the Behistun Inscription. A different proposed conclusion is that Darius I's father was named in honor of the Zoroastrian patron, indicating possible Zoroastrian faith by Arsames.
Classical scholarship in the 6th to 4th century BC believed he existed six thousand years before Xerxes I invasion of Greece in 480 BCE (Xanthus, Eudoxus, Aristotle, Hermippus), which is a possible misunderstanding of the Zoroastrian four cycles of 3000 years i.e. 12,000 years. This belief is recorded by Diogenes Laërtius, and variant readings could place it six hundred years before Xerxes I, somewhere before 1000 BCE. However, Diogenes also mentions Hermodorus's belief that Zoroaster lived five thousand years before the Trojan War, which would mean he lived around 6200 BC. The 10th-century Suda, provides a date of "500 years before Plato" in the late 10th century BC. Pliny the Elder cited Eudoxus who also placed his death six thousand years before Plato, c. 6300 BC. Other pseudo-historical constructions are those of Aristoxenus who recorded Zaratas the Chaldeaean to have taught Pythagoras in Babylon, or lived at the time of mythological Ninus and Semiramis. According to Pliny the Elder, there were two Zoroasters. The first lived thousands of years ago, while the second accompanied Xerxes I in the invasion of Greece in 480 BCE. Some scholars propose that the chronological calculation for Zoroaster was developed by Persian magi in the 4th century BC, and as the early Greeks learned about him from the Achaemenids, this indicates they did not regard him as a contemporary of Cyrus the Great, but as a remote figure.
Some later pseudo-historical and Zoroastrian sources (the "Bundahishn", which references a date "258 years before Alexander") place Zoroaster in the 6th century BC, which coincided with the accounts by Ammianus Marcellinus from 4th century CE. The traditional Zoroastrian date originates in the period immediately following Alexander the Great's conquest of the Achaemenid Empire in 330 BCE. The Seleucid rulers who gained power following Alexander's death instituted an "Age of Alexander" as the new calendrical epoch. This did not appeal to the Zoroastrian priesthood who then attempted to establish an "Age of Zoroaster". To do so, they needed to establish when Zoroaster had lived, which they accomplished by (erroneous, some even identified Cyrus with Vishtaspa) counting back the length of successive generations, until they concluded that Zoroaster must have lived "258 years before Alexander". This estimate then re-appeared in the 9th- to 12th-century Arabic and Pahlavi texts of Zoroastrian tradition, like the 10th century Al-Masudi who cited a prophecy from a lost Avestan book in which Zoroaster foretold the Empire's destruction in three hundred years, but the religion would last for a thousand years.
The birthplace of Zoroaster is also unknown, and the language of the Gathas is not similar to the proposed north-western and north-eastern regional dialects of Persia. It is also suggested that he was born in one of the two areas and later lived in the other area.
"Yasna" 9 and 17 cite the Ditya River in Airyanem Vaējah (Middle Persian "Ērān Wēj") as Zoroaster's home and the scene of his first appearance. The Avesta (both Old and Younger portions) does not mention the Achaemenids or of any West Iranian tribes such as the Medes, Persians, or even Parthians. The "Farvardin Yasht" refers to some Iranian peoples that are unknown in the Greek and Achaemenid sources about the 6th and 5th century BC Eastern Iran. The "Vendidad" contain seventeen regional names, most of which are located in north-eastern and eastern Iran.
However, in "Yasna" 59.18, the "zaraϑuštrotema", or supreme head of the Zoroastrian priesthood, is said to reside in 'Ragha' (Badakhshan). In the 9th- to 12th-century Middle Persian texts of Zoroastrian tradition, this 'Ragha' and with many other places appear as locations in Western Iran. While the land of Media does not figure at all in the Avesta (the westernmost location noted in scripture is Arachosia), the "Būndahišn", or "Primordial Creation," (20.32 and 24.15) puts Ragha in Media (medieval Rai). However, in Avestan, Ragha is simply a toponym meaning "plain, hillside."
Apart from these indications in Middle Persian sources that are open to interpretations, there are a number of other sources. The Greek and Latin sources are divided on the birthplace of Zarathustra. There are many Greek accounts of Zarathustra, referred usually as Persian or Perso-Median Zoroaster; Ctesias located him in Bactria, Diodorus Siculus placed him among Ariaspai (in Sistan), Cephalion and Justin suggest east of greater Iran whereas Pliny and Origen suggest west of Iran as his birthplace. Moreover, they have the suggestion that there has been more than one Zoroaster.
On the other hand, in post-Islamic sources Shahrastani (1086–1153) an Iranian writer originally from Shahristān, present-day Turkmenistan, proposed that Zoroaster's father was from Atropatene (also in Medea) and his mother was from Rey. Coming from a reputed scholar of religions, this was a serious blow for the various regions who all claimed that Zoroaster originated from "their" homelands, some of which then decided that Zoroaster must then have then been buried in their regions or composed his Gathas there or preached there. Also Arabic sources of the same period and the same region of historical Persia consider Azerbaijan as the birthplace of Zarathustra.
By the late 20th century, most scholars had settled on an origin in eastern Greater Iran. Gnoli proposed Sistan, Baluchistan (though in a much wider scope than the present-day province) as the homeland of Zoroastrianism; Frye voted for Bactria and Chorasmia; Khlopin suggests the Tedzen Delta in present-day Turkmenistan.
Sarianidi considered the Bactria–Margiana Archaeological Complex region as "the native land of the Zoroastrians and, probably, of Zoroaster himself." Boyce includes the steppes to the west from the Volga. The medieval "from Media" hypothesis is no longer taken seriously, and Zaehner has even suggested that this was a Magi-mediated issue to garner legitimacy, but this has been likewise rejected by Gershevitch and others.
The 2005 "Encyclopedia Iranica" article on the history of Zoroastrianism summarizes the issue with "while there is general agreement that he did not live in western Iran, attempts to locate him in specific regions of eastern Iran, including Central Asia, remain tentative".
Zoroaster is recorded as the son of Pourušaspa of the Spitamans or Spitamids (Avestan "spit" mean "brilliant" or "white"; some argue that Spitama was a remote progenitor) family, and Dugdōw, while his great-grandfather was Haēčataspa. All the names appear appropriate to the nomadic tradition. His father's name means "possessing gray horses" (with the word "aspa" meaning horse), while his mother's means "milkmaid". According to the tradition, he had four brothers, two older and two younger, whose names are given in much later Pahlavi work.
The training for priesthood probably started very early around seven years of age. He became a priest probably around the age of fifteen, and according to Gathas, he gained knowledge from other teachers and personal experience from traveling when he left his parents at age twenty. By the age of thirty, he experienced a revelation during a spring festival; on the river bank he saw a shining Being, who revealed himself as Vohu Manah (Good Purpose) and taught him about Ahura Mazda (Wise Lord) and five other radiant figures. Zoroaster soon became aware of the existence of two primal Spirits, the second being Angra Mainyu (Destructive Spirit), with opposing concepts of Asha (truth/order) and Druj (lie/deception). Thus he decided to spend his life teaching people to seek Asha. He received further revelations and saw a vision of the seven Amesha Spenta, and his teachings were collected in the Gathas and the Avesta.
He taught about free will, and opposed the use of the hallucinogenic Haoma plant in rituals, polytheism, over-ritualising religious ceremonies and animal sacrifices, as well an oppressive class system in Persia which earned him strong opposition among local authorities. Eventually, at the age of about forty-two, he received the patronage of queen Hutaosa and a ruler named Vishtaspa, an early adherent of Zoroastrianism (possibly from Bactria according to the Shahnameh). Zoroaster's teaching about individual judgment, Heaven and Hell, the resurrection of the body, the Last Judgment, and everlasting life for the reunited soul and body, among other things, became borrowings in the Abrahamic religions, but they lost the context of the original teaching.
According to the tradition, he lived for many years after Vishtaspa's conversion, managed to establish a faithful community, and married three times. His first two wives bore him three sons, Isat Vâstra, Urvatat Nara, and Hvare Chithra, and three daughters, Freni, Thriti, and Pouruchista. His third wife, Hvōvi, was childless. Zoroaster died when he was 77 years and 40 days old. The later Pahlavi sources like Shahnameh, instead claim that an obscure conflict with Tuiryas people led to his death, murdered by a "karapan" (a priest of the old religion) named Brādrēs (Turbaratur or Turbaraturhash).
This legend of his death is not mentioned in the Denkard, and some esoteric interpretations have Turbaratur not as a person but rather the embodiment of evil, which was destroyed during Zarathushtra's last moments on earth.
The Cypress of Kashmar is a mythical cypress tree of legendary beauty and gargantuan dimensions. It is said to have sprung from a branch brought by Zoroaster from Paradise and to have stood in today's Kashmar in northeastern Iran and to have been planted by Zoroaster in honor of the conversion of King Vishtaspa to Zoroastrianism. According to the Iranian physicist and historian Zakariya al-Qazwini King Vishtaspa had been a patron of Zoroaster who planted the tree himself. In his "ʿAjā'ib al-makhlūqāt wa gharā'ib al-mawjūdāt", he further describes how the Al-Mutawakkil in 247 AH (861 AD) caused the mighty cypress to be felled, and then transported it across Iran, to be used for beams in his new palace at Samarra. Before, he wanted the tree to be reconstructed before his eyes. This was done in spite of protests by the Iranians, who offered a very great sum of money to save the tree. Al-Mutawakkil never saw the cypress, because he was murdered by a Turkish soldier (possibly in the employ of his son) on the night when it arrived on the banks of the Tigris.
A number of parallels have been drawn between Zoroastrian teachings and Islam. Such parallels include the evident similarities between Amesha Spenta and the archangel Gabriel, the Chinvat bridge, praying five times a day, last judgement, heaven and hell, resurrection, absence of idolatry, covering one's head during prayer, and the mention of Thamud and Iram of the Pillars in the Quran. These may also indicate the vast influence of the Achaemenid Empire on the development of either religion.
Salman al-Farsi, a former Zoroastrian mobad was regarded by Mohammed as ahal-al-bayt (member of his household). Whilst Salman had adopted Islam it is considered highly probable that his intervention and personal relationship with Mohammed resulted in the introduction of many Zoroastrian elements into Islam.
Jacques Duchesne-Guillemin argues that Zoroastrian theology survived in Islam in three ways
The Sabaeans, who believed in free will coincident with Zoroastrians, are also mentioned in the Quran.
Like the Greeks of classical antiquity, Islamic tradition understands Zoroaster to be the founding prophet of the Magians (via Aramaic, Arabic "Majus", collective "Majusya"). The 11th-century Cordoban Ibn Hazm (Zahiri school) contends that "Kitabi" "of the Book" cannot apply in light of the Zoroastrian assertion that their books were destroyed by Alexander. Citing the authority of the 8th-century al-Kalbi, the 9th- and 10th-century Sunni historian al-Tabari (i.648) reports that Zaradusht bin Isfiman (an Arabic adaptation of "Zarathustra Spitama") was an inhabitant of Israel and a servant of one of the disciples of the prophet Jeremiah. According to this tale, Zaradusht defrauded his master, who cursed him, causing him to become leprous (cf. Elisha's servant Gehazi in Jewish Scripture).
The apostate Zaradusht then eventually made his way to Balkh (present day Afghanistan) where he converted Bishtasb (i.e. Vishtaspa), who in turn compelled his subjects to adopt the religion of the Magians. Recalling other tradition, al-Tabari (i.681–683) recounts that Zaradusht accompanied a Jewish prophet to Bishtasb/Vishtaspa. Upon their arrival, Zaradusht translated the sage's Hebrew teachings for the king and so convinced him to convert (Tabari also notes that they had previously been "Sabi"s) to the Magian religion.
The 12th-century heresiographer al-Shahrastani describes the Majusiya into three sects, the "Kayumarthiya", the "Zurwaniya" and the "Zaradushtiya", among which Al-Shahrastani asserts that only the last of the three were properly followers of Zoroaster. As regards the recognition of a prophet, Zoroaster has said: "They ask you as to how should they recognize a prophet and believe him to be true in what he says; tell them what he knows the others do not, and he shall tell you even what lies hidden in your nature; he shall be able to tell you whatever you ask him and he shall perform such things which others cannot perform." (Namah Shat Vakhshur Zartust, .5–7. 50–54) When the companions of Muhammad, on invading Persia, came in contact with the Zoroastrian people and learned these teachings, they at once came to the conclusion that Zoroaster was really a Divinely inspired prophet. Thus they accorded the same treatment to the Zoroastrian people which they did to other "People of the Book".
Though the name of Zoroaster is not mentioned in the Qur'an, still he was regarded as one of those prophets whose names have not been mentioned in the Qur'an, for there is a verse in the Qur'an: "And We did send apostles before thee: there are some of them that We have mentioned to thee and there are others whom We have not mentioned to Thee." (40 : 78). Accordingly, the Muslims treated the founder of Zoroastrianism as a true prophet and believed in his religion as they did in other inspired creeds, and thus according to the prophecy, protected the Zoroastrian religion. James Darmesteter remarked in the translation of Zend Avesta: "When Islam assimilated the Zoroastrians to the People of the Book, it evinced a rare historical sense and solved the problem of the origin of the Avesta." (Introduction to Vendidad. p. 69.)
Ahmadi Muslims view Zoroaster as a Prophet of God and describe the expressions of Ahura Mazda, the god of goodness, and Ahraman, the god of evil, as merely referring to the coexistence of forces of good and evil enabling humans to exercise free will.Mirza Tahir Ahmad, the fourth Caliph of the Ahmadiyya Muslim Community, in his book "Revelation, Rationality, Knowledge & Truth" views Zoroaster as Prophet of God and describes such the expressions to be a concept which is similar to the concepts in Judaism, Christianity and Islam.
Manichaeism considered Zoroaster to be a figure (along with the Buddha and Jesus) in a line of prophets of which Mani (216–276) was the culmination. Zoroaster's ethical dualism is—to an extent—incorporated in Mani's doctrine, which viewed the world as being locked in an epic battle between opposing forces of good and evil. Manicheanism also incorporated other elements of Zoroastrian tradition, particularly the names of supernatural beings; however, many of these other Zoroastrian elements are either not part of Zoroaster's own teachings or are used quite differently from how they are used in Zoroastrianism.
Zoroaster appears in the Bahá'í Faith as a "Manifestation of God", one of a line of prophets who have progressively revealed the Word of God to a gradually maturing humanity. Zoroaster thus shares an exalted station with Abraham, Moses, Krishna, Jesus, Muhammad, the Báb, and the founder of the Bahá'í Faith, Bahá'u'lláh. Shoghi Effendi, the head of the Bahá'í Faith in the first half of the 20th century, saw Bahá'u'lláh as the fulfillment of a post-Sassanid Zoroastrian prophecy that saw a return of Sassanid emperor Bahram: Shoghi Effendi also stated that Zoroaster lived roughly 1000 years before Jesus.
In the Gathas, Zoroaster sees the human condition as the mental struggle between "aša" and "druj". The cardinal concept of "aša"—which is highly nuanced and only vaguely translatable—is at the foundation of all Zoroastrian doctrine, including that of Ahura Mazda (who is "aša"), creation (that is "aša"), existence (that is "aša"), and as the condition for free will.
The purpose of humankind, like that of all other creation, is to sustain and align itself to "aša". For humankind, this occurs through active ethical participation in life, ritual, and the exercise of constructive/good thoughts, words and deeds.
Elements of Zoroastrian philosophy entered the West through their influence on Judaism and Platonism and have been identified as one of the key early events in the development of philosophy. Among the classic Greek philosophers, Heraclitus is often referred to as inspired by Zoroaster's thinking.
In 2005, the Oxford Dictionary of Philosophy ranked Zarathustra as first in the chronology of philosophers. Zarathustra's impact lingers today due in part to the system of religious ethics he founded called Mazdayasna. The word "Mazdayasna" is Avestan and is translated as "Worship of Wisdom/Mazda" in English. The encyclopedia Natural History (Pliny) claims that Zoroastrians later educated the Greeks who, starting with Pythagoras, used a similar term, philosophy, or "love of wisdom" to describe the search for ultimate truth.
Zoroaster emphasized the freedom of the individual to choose right or wrong and individual responsibility for one's deeds. This personal choice to accept "asha" (divine order) and shun "druj (lies and ignorance)" is one's own decision and not a dictate of Ahura Mazda. For Zoroaster, by thinking good thoughts, saying good words, and doing good deeds (e.g. assisting the needy, doing good works, or conducting good rituals) we increase the force of "asha" in the world and in ourselves, celebrate the divine order, and we come a step closer on the everlasting road to Frashokereti. Thus, we are not the slaves or servants of Ahura Mazda, but we can make a personal choice to be co-workers, thereby hereby refreshing the world and ourselves.
Although a few recent depictions of Zoroaster show him performing some deed of legend, in general the portrayals merely present him in white vestments (which are also worn by present-day Zoroastrian priests). He often is seen holding a "baresman" (Avestan; Middle Persian "barsom"), which is generally considered to be another symbol of priesthood, or with a book in hand, which may be interpreted to be the Avesta. Alternatively, he appears with a mace, the "varza"—usually stylized as a steel rod crowned by a bull's head—that priests carry in their installation ceremony. In other depictions he appears with a raised hand and thoughtfully lifted finger, as if to make a point.
Zoroaster is rarely depicted as looking directly at the viewer; instead, he appears to be looking slightly upwards, as if beseeching. Zoroaster is almost always depicted with a beard, this along with other factors bearing similarities to 19th-century portraits of Jesus.
A common variant of the Zoroaster images derives from a Sassanid-era rock-face carving. In this depiction at Taq-e Bostan, a figure is seen to preside over the coronation of Ardashir I or II. The figure is standing on a lotus, with a "baresman" in hand and with a gloriole around his head. Until the 1920s, this figure was commonly thought to be a depiction of Zoroaster, but in recent years is more commonly interpreted to be a depiction of Mithra. Among the most famous of the European depictions of Zoroaster is that of the figure in Raphael's 1509 The School of Athens. In it, Zoroaster and Ptolemy are having a discussion in the lower right corner. The prophet is holding a star-studded globe.
The Greeks—in the Hellenistic sense of the term—had an understanding of Zoroaster as expressed by Plutarch, Diogenes Laertius, and Agathias that saw him, at the core, to be the "prophet and founder of the religion of the Iranian peoples," Beck notes that "the rest was mostly fantasy". Zoroaster was set in the ancient past, six to seven millennia before the Common Era, and was described as a king of Bactria or a Babylonian (or teacher of Babylonians), and with a biography typical of a Neopythagorean sage, i.e. having a mission preceded by ascetic withdrawal and enlightenment. However, at first mentioned in the context of dualism, in Moralia, Plutarch presents Zoroaster as "Zaratras," not realizing the two to be the same, and he is described as a "teacher of Pythagoras".
Zoroaster has also been described as a sorcerer-astrologerthe creator of both magic and astrology. Deriving from that image, and reinforcing it, was a "mass of literature" attributed to him and that circulated the Mediterranean world from the 3rd century BCE to the end of antiquity and beyond.
The language of that literature was predominantly Greek, though at one stage or another various parts of it passed through Aramaic, Syriac, Coptic or Latin. Its ethos and cultural matrix was likewise Hellenistic, and "the ascription of literature to sources beyond that political, cultural and temporal framework represents a bid for authority and a fount of legitimizing "alien wisdom". Zoroaster and the magi did not compose it, but their names sanctioned it." The attributions to "exotic" names (not restricted to magians) conferred an "authority of a remote and revelatory wisdom."
Among the named works attributed to "Zoroaster" is a treatise "On Nature" ("Peri physeos"), which appears to have originally constituted four volumes (i.e. papyrus rolls). The framework is a retelling of Plato's Myth of Er, with Zoroaster taking the place of the original hero. While Porphyry imagined Pythagoras listening to Zoroaster's discourse, "On Nature" has the sun in middle position, which was how it was understood in the 3rd century. In contrast, Plato's 4th-century BCE version had the sun in second place above the moon. Ironically, Colotes accused Plato of plagiarizing Zoroaster, and Heraclides Ponticus wrote a text titled "Zoroaster" based on his perception of "Zoroastrian" philosophy, in order to express his disagreement with Plato on natural philosophy. With respect to substance and content in "On Nature" only two facts are known: that it was crammed with astrological speculations, and that Necessity ("Ananké") was mentioned by name and that she was in the air.
Pliny the Elder names Zoroaster as the inventor of magic ("Natural History" 30.2.3). "However, a principle of the division of labor appears to have spared Zoroaster most of the responsibility for introducing the dark arts to the Greek and Roman worlds." That "dubious honor" went to the "fabulous magus, Ostanes, to whom most of the pseudepigraphic magical literature was attributed." Although Pliny calls him the inventor of magic, the Roman does not provide a "magician's persona" for him. Moreover, the little "magical" teaching that is ascribed to Zoroaster is actually very late, with the very earliest example being from the 14th century.
Association with astrology according to Roger Beck, were based on his Babylonian origin, and Zoroaster's Greek name was identified at first with star-worshiping ("astrothytes" "star sacrificer") and, with the "Zo-", even as the "living" star. Later, an even more elaborate mythoetymology evolved: Zoroaster died by the living ("zo-") flux ("ro-") of fire from the star ("astr-") which he himself had invoked, and even, that the stars killed him in revenge for having been restrained by him.
The alternate Greek name for Zoroaster was Zaratras or Zaratas/Zaradas/Zaratos. Pythagoreans considered the mathematicians to have studied with Zoroaster in Babylonia.Lydus, in "On the Months", attributes the creation of the seven-day week to "the Babylonians in the circle of Zoroaster and Hystaspes," and who did so because there were seven planets. The Suda's chapter on "astronomia" notes that the Babylonians learned their astrology from Zoroaster. Lucian of Samosata, in "Mennipus" 6, reports deciding to journey to Babylon "to ask one of the magi, Zoroaster's disciples and successors," for their opinion.
While the division along the lines of Zoroaster/astrology and Ostanes/magic is an "oversimplification, the descriptions do at least indicate what the works are "not""; they were not expressions of Zoroastrian doctrine, they were not even expressions of what the Greeks and Romans ""imagined" the doctrines of Zoroastrianism to have been" [emphases in the original]. The assembled fragments do not even show noticeable commonality of outlook and teaching among the several authors who wrote under each name.
Almost all Zoroastrian pseudepigrapha is now lost, and of the attested texts—with only one exception—only fragments have survived. Pliny's 2nd- or 3rd-century attribution of "two million lines" to Zoroaster suggest that (even if exaggeration and duplicates are taken into consideration) a formidable pseudepigraphic corpus once existed at the Library of Alexandria. This corpus can safely be assumed to be pseudepigrapha because no one before Pliny refers to literature by "Zoroaster", and on the authority of the 2nd-century Galen of Pergamon and from a 6th-century commentator on Aristotle it is known that the acquisition policies of well-endowed royal libraries created a market for fabricating manuscripts of famous and ancient authors.
The exception to the fragmentary evidence (i.e. reiteration of passages in works of other authors) is a complete Coptic tractate titled "Zostrianos" (after the first-person narrator) discovered in the Nag Hammadi library in 1945. A three-line cryptogram in the colophones following the 131-page treatise identify the work as "words of truth of Zostrianos. God of Truth ["logos"]. Words of Zoroaster." Invoking a "God of Truth" might seem Zoroastrian, but there is otherwise "nothing noticeably Zoroastrian" about the text and "in content, style, ethos and intention, its affinities are entirely with the congeners among the Gnostic tractates."
Another work circulating under the name of "Zoroaster" was the "Asteroskopita" (or "Apotelesmatika"), and which ran to five volumes (i.e. papyrus rolls). The title and fragments suggest that it was an astrological handbook, "albeit a very varied one, for the making of predictions." A third text attributed to Zoroaster is "On Virtue of Stones" ("Peri lithon timion"), of which nothing is known other than its extent (one volume) and that pseudo-Zoroaster "sang" it (from which Cumont and Bidez conclude that it was in verse). Numerous other fragments preserved in the works of other authors are attributed to "Zoroaster," but the titles of those books are not mentioned.
These pseudepigraphic texts aside, some authors did draw on a few genuinely Zoroastrian ideas. The "Oracles of Hystaspes", by "Hystaspes", another prominent magian pseudo-author, is a set of prophecies distinguished from other Zoroastrian pseudepigrapha in that it draws on real Zoroastrian sources. Some allusions are more difficult to assess: in the same text that attributes the invention of magic to Zoroaster, Pliny states that Zoroaster laughed on the day of his birth, although in an earlier place, Pliny had sworn in the name of Hercules that no child had ever done so before the 40th day from his birth. This notion of Zoroaster's laughter (like that of "two million verses") also appears in the 9th– to 11th-century texts of genuine Zoroastrian tradition, and for a time it was assumed that the origin of those myths lay with indigenous sources. Pliny also records that Zoroaster's head had pulsated so strongly that it repelled the hand when laid upon it, a presage of his future wisdom. The Iranians were however just as familiar with the Greek writers, and the provenance of other descriptions are clear. For instance, Plutarch's description of its dualistic theologies reads thus: "Others call the better of these a god and his rival a daemon, as, for example, Zoroaster the Magus, who lived, so they record, five thousand years before the siege of Troy. He used to call the one Horomazes and the other Areimanius".
Zoroaster was known as a sage, magician, and miracle-worker in post-Classical Western culture. Although almost nothing was known of his ideas until the late 18th century, his name was already associated with lost ancient wisdom.
The earliest recorded references to Zoroaster in English literature occur in the writings of the physician-philosopher Sir Thomas Browne who asserted in his Religio Medici (1643)
In his The Garden of Cyrus (1658) Browne's study of comparative religion led him to speculate-
The Oxford English Dictionary attributes the English poet Lord Byron as the first to allude to the religion itself in 1811 when stating-
During the Enlightenment writers such as Voltaire promoted research into Zoroastrianism in the belief that it was a form of rational Deism, preferable to Christianity. Zoroaster was the subject of the 1749 opera, "Zoroastre", by Jean-Philippe Rameau. With the translation of the Avesta by Abraham Anquetil-Duperron, Western scholarship of Zoroastrianism began.
An early 19th-century representation of Zoroaster derived from the portrait of a figure that appears in a 4th-century sculpture at Taq-e Bostan in south-western Iran.
In E. T. A. Hoffmann's novel "" (1819), the mage Prosper Alpanus states that Professor Zoroaster was his teacher.
In his seminal work "Also sprach Zarathustra (Thus Spoke Zarathustra)" (1885) the philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche uses the native Iranian name Zarathustra which has a significant meaning as he had used the familiar Greek-Latin name in his earlier works. It is believed that Nietzsche invents a characterization of Zarathustra as the mouthpiece for Nietzsche's own ideas against morality.
The Austrian composer Richard Strauss's large-scale tone-poem "Also sprach Zarathustra" (1896) was inspired by Nietzsche's book.
Irish poet William Butler Yeats (1865–1939) and his wife reportedly claimed to have contacted Zoroaster through "automatic writing".
A sculpture of Zoroaster by Edward Clarke Potter, representing ancient Persian judicial wisdom and dating to 1896, towers over the Appellate Division Courthouse of New York State at East 25th Street and Madison Avenue in Manhattan. A sculpture of Zoroaster appears with other prominent religious figures on the south side of the exterior of Rockefeller Memorial Chapel on the campus of the University of Chicago.
The protagonist and narrator of Gore Vidal's 1981 novel "Creation" is described to be the grandson of Zoroaster. Zarathustra, the mythic hero in Giannina Braschi's 2011 dramatic novel "United States of Banana", joins forces with Shakespeare's Hamlet.
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Religion&Philosophy&Ethics | Erotic spanking
<onlyinclude>Erotic spanking is the act of spanking another person for the sexual arousal or gratification of either or both parties. It is considered part of BDSM. It may involve very light and brief spanking or much more extensive spanking, including the use of implements such as whips or paddles. Activities range from a spontaneous smack on bare buttocks during a sexual activity, to occasional sexual roleplay, such as ageplay, or domestic discipline and may involve the use of a hand or a variety of spanking implements, such as a spanking paddle or cane.</onlyinclude> Erotic spankings are commonly combined with other forms of sexual foreplay. The most common type of erotic spanking is administered on the bare buttocks. For safety, erotic spanking should take care to avoid the tailbone and hipbones.
Spanking can also be combined with bondage, in order to heighten the sexual stimulation of the experience.
"See also: Spanking literature"
One of the earliest depictions of erotic spanking is found in the Etruscan Tomb of the Whipping from the fifth century BC.
Spanking was a constant focus of erotica produced during the Victorian era.
Interest in sexual gratification received from giving, receiving and witnessing spanking began to increase during the 19th century (particularly within France and the United Kingdom). Interest was not only confined to spanking literature, but the development of photography during 19th century resulted in the beginning of the creation of spanking photography. In the context of literature, this growing demand caused the publication of numerous limited edition spanking novels (although, while the term novel is/was used many of these works from this time and subsequently can be instead classified as novellas).
This interest for spanking (both in regards to literature and photography) followed into the next century, with the early 20th century being considered the "Golden Age" of spanking literature. This period of spanking literature is marked by three notable characteristics. First, greater audiences were reached with the availability of less expensive editions and greater print runs. Second, many of the spanking novels contained numerous illustrations (many of which have fallen under public domain and are easily available online). Third, this period saw a gradual increase in the output and publication of spanking literature, growing particularly within the 1920s and peaking within the 1930s. Much of the output of spanking literature during this period was by French publishers, writers and illustrators. Similarly, within the context of spanking photography, France was also the home to the creation of much content, with the most notable studios being the Biederer Studio and the Ostra Studio. This "Golden Age" of spanking literature (and French spanking photography) came to an end as a result of the Second World War, more specifically due to the German occupation of France between 1940 and 1944 and later the enforcement of censorship laws. A somewhat notable exception to the decline of spanking literature during this period was John Willie's bondage "Bizarre" magazine (published between 1946 and 1959).
Of the many French works from the "Golden Age" few at the time were translated into other languages within which spanking literature was popular, namely English and German, but beginning during the mid-1960s a number of these French works were translated into English and published, along with these works being republished in French and older British works also being republished. The occurrence of this was facilitated by the availability of mass-produced paperbacks and changes in censorship laws.
According to Dan Savage, journalist Jillian Keenan is "America's most prominent spanking fetishist" today. She has written about erotic spanking for the "New York Times", "Slate", and "Pacific Standard". In her "Slate" article, Keenan criticized the use of spanking as a punishment for children, while acknowledging that children and adolescents who experience sexual pleasure while being beaten may go on to enjoy the fetish of sadomasochism as adults. Keenan has argued that spanking fetishism is a form of sexual orientation, which should not be considered a mental illness.
Routine corporal punishment of women by their husbands, including spanking, does still exist in some parts of the world. However, today, spanking of an adult tends to be confined to erotic spanking. A controversial subculture known as Christian domestic discipline (CDD) promotes spanking of wives by their husbands as a form of punishment; some describe CDD as a form of abuse and controlling behavior, but others consider it a type of erotic spanking. Christian conservative radio host Bryan Fischer said to the "Huffington Post" that it was a "horrifying trendbizarre, twisted, unbiblical and un-Christian".
A spanking may be carried out with the use of a bare or gloved hand, or with any of a variety of implements, including a paddle, tawse, strap, hairbrush, feather duster or belt. Other popular implements are canes, riding crops, whips, switches, birches, sneakers, phonebooks, rolled-up catalogs or newspapers, rulers or martinets.
A spank skirt or spanking skirt has an additional opening in back designed to expose the buttocks. While the name "spank skirt" suggests that the wearer could be spanked "bare bottom" without removing or repositioning the skirt, this item may be worn for reasons other than spanking, for instance, exposure. Considered fetish wear, spank skirts are typically tight-fitting and made of fetishistic materials (such as leather, PVC or latex). Regardless of the gender of the wearer, spank skirts are usually considered female attire. The male gender role equivalent might be motorcycle chaps.
A spanking bench or spanking horse is a piece of furniture used to position a spankee on, with or without restraints. They come in many sizes and styles, the most popular of which is similar to a sawhorse with a padded top and rings for restraints. The 19th-century British dominatrix Mrs. Theresa Berkley became famous for her invention of the Berkley Horse, a similar form of BDSM apparatus. A spanking bench is on permanent display at the Leather Archives and Museum.
Notes
Further reading
| 44439 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=44439 |
Religion&Philosophy&Ethics | Morality play
The morality play is a genre of medieval and early Tudor theatrical entertainment. In their own time, these plays were known as interludes, a broader term for dramas with or without a moral. Morality plays are a type of allegory in which the protagonist is met by personifications of various moral attributes who try to prompt them to choose a good life over one of evil. The plays were most popular in Europe during the 15th and 16th centuries. Having grown out of the religiously based mystery plays of the Middle Ages, they represented a shift towards a more secular base for European theatre. Hildegard von Bingen's "Ordo Virtutum" (English: "Order of the Virtues") composed c. 1151, is the earliest known morality play by more than a century, and the only Medieval musical drama to survive with an attribution for both the text and the music.
Morality plays typically contain a protagonist who represents either humanity as a whole or a smaller social structure. Supporting characters are personifications of good and evil. This alignment of characters provides the play’s audience with moral guidance. Morality plays are the result of the dominant belief of the time period, that humans had a certain amount of control over their post-death fate while they were on earth.
In "Everyman", perhaps the archetypal morality play, the characters take on the common pattern, representing broader ideas. Some of the characters in "Everyman" are God, Death, Everyman, Good-Deeds, Angel, Knowledge, Beauty, Discretion, and Strength. The personified meanings of these characters are hardly hidden. The premise of "Everyman" is that God, believing that the people on earth are too focused on wealth and worldly possessions, sends Death to Everyman to remind him of God's power and the importance of upholding values. The emphasis put on morality, the seemingly vast difference between good and evil, and the strong presence of God makes "Everyman" one of the most concrete examples of a morality play. At the same time, most morality plays focus more on evil, while "Everyman" focuses more on good, highlighting sin in contrast.
Other plays that take on the typical traits of morality plays, but are rarely given the title of "morality play" are "Hickscorner" and "The Second Shepherds' Play." The characters in "Hickscorner" are Pity, Perseverance, Imagination, Contemplation, Freewill, and Hickscorner. They blatantly represent moral ideals. In "The Second Shepherds' Play", the characters are less obviously representative of good and evil, being primarily a trio of shepherds. But other characters such as Mary, The Child Christ, and An Angel show a strong moral presence and the importance of God in the play.
In early English dramas Justice was personified as an entity which exercised “theological virtue or grace, and was concerned with the divine pronouncement of judgment on man”. However, as time progressed, more moralities began to emerge; it is during this transitional period where one begins to see Justice begin to assume more and more the qualities of a judge. The Justice in "Respublica" begins to concern himself with administering justice on “the criminal element”, rather than with the divine pronouncement on a generic representative of mankind. This is the first instance where one may observe a direct divergence from the theological virtues and concerns that were previously exerted by Justice in the morality plays of the fifteenth century. The Justice in "Respublica" is personified as a “civil force rather than a theological one”. An evolution of sorts takes place within the morals and agendas of Justice, he begins to don the Judicial Robe of prosecutor and executioner.
Another change envelops in the character of Justice during the sixteenth century in morality plays; Equity replaces Justice and assumes the judiciary duties previously performed by Justice. This changing of rulers, or preceding justices, is done when Equity declares that his brother Justice has been banished from the country and that he (Equity) will from now on take on the duties of the former monarch, Justice. This change of ruling heads is portrayed in the morality play, "Liberality and Prodigality", where Equity serves Virtue in the detection, arrest, and punishment of Prodigality for the robbery and murder of Tenacity, a yeoman in the country of Middlesex. Virtue states,
So horrible a fact can hardly pleaded for favour:
Therefore go you, Equity, examine more diligently
The manner of this outrageous robbery:
And as the same by examination shall appear,
Due justice may be done in presence here. ("Liberality and Prodigality" 377)
The meta phases that Justice undergoes during the sixteenth century in morality plays, from “Justice” to “Equity” further illustrates the evolution of Justice; not only did Justice change from a “theological abstraction to a civil servant”, but he experienced a corporeal change as well.
One may readily observe the evolutionary progression of Justice as portrayed in the plays of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. One encounters Justice in the early-fifteenth-century moralities as a performer playing the role of a theological virtue or grace, and then one sees him develop to a more serious figure, occupying the position of an arbiter of justice during the sixteenth century. It is a journey of discovery and great change on which Justice welcomes one to embark as one leafs through the pages of morality plays.
Although the purpose of all morality plays is to instruct listeners on the means of receiving redemption, morality plays after the Protestant Reformation are of a distinctly different didacticism than the morality plays before the Reformation.
Morality plays before the Reformation teach a Catholic approach to redemption, with an emphasis on works and the sacraments, a view originating with Tertullian (c. 155 – c. 240 AD) and Cyprian (d. 258). The emphasis on works can be seen in the final speech in one of the most well-known of medieval morality plays, Everyman, in which there is a clear statement about the necessity of good works for the one who desires heaven:
<poem>
Doctor: This moral men may have in mind;
Ye hearers, take it of worth, old and young,
And forsake pride, for he deceiveth you in the end,
And remember Beauty, Five-wits, Strength, and Discretion,
They all at last do Everyman forsake,
Save his Good-Deeds, there doth he take.
But beware, and they be small
Before God, he hath no help at all.
None excuse may be there for Everyman.
</poem>
The importance of the sacraments is seen in the morality tale entitled Mankind. In this play, the sacrament of penance is emphasized when the allegorical character Mercy speaks to Mankind: “Come let us go to this cloister and incline your mind towards God. Don’t sin thinking that you are assured mercy, that itself is a sin. It’s not a good idea to take advantage of the Lord.”
Pre-Reformation plays emphasized the importance of the sacraments of the Catholic Church (such as partaking in mass and baptism), the church clergy, the church hierarchy, the church establishment in general, and the abstinence from the Seven Deadly Sins. Many of the morality tales were allegories and involved characters with names of Vices (e.g., Gluttony) and Virtues (e.g., Goodness). Their purpose was to direct the playgoers to pursue virtue and renounce vice.
Frequently a character representing a Vice would state, upon his first appearance, that he was evil. For example, in The Castle of Perseverance, a character called Lust-Liking states:
<poem>
Lo, me! here ready Lord, to fare and to flee
To seek thee a servant valued and dear!
Whoso will by Folly ruled be,
He is worthy to be a servant here,
Who slips into the Sins Seven.
</poem>
Even after this initial introduction, however, the Vice will continually reiterate to the audience that his nature is diabolic. Very often, the Vice presented will bring his character into criticism by the manner in which he presents himself to his audience, thus further demonstrating his wickedness. For example, the Vices in the earlier morality plays often spoke using vulgar language and by blasphemous swearing. Often, these curses were spoken in Latin, which being considered the holy language, made these curses even more offensive to the audience. Moreover, the Vices often made a mockery of religious practices sacred to the audience, thereby castigating themselves in the eyes of their audience. Deceit is another means by which the Vice exposes his wickedness to the audience and serves as an example to them of what to avoid in a righteous life. Furthermore, in the pre-Reformation play, the Vices denounce their own characters by acting violently toward each other, and toward the Virtues.
Whereas the pre-Reformation morality plays sought to reinforce the establishment of the Catholic Church and Catholic doctrine, the post-Reformation morality plays worked to destroy Catholic credibility and demonise the Catholic Church. Although post-Reformation morality plays were like its predecessor in that it also was concerned with the salvation of its audience, it differed in that it believed that the theology promoted by pre-Reformation plays was antithetical to salvation. Thus, a major shift in focus, from concern for the individual’s moral behaviour to concern for the individual's theological practices, occurred with the post-Reformation morality plays. The wave of Protestantism which fuelled the content of these plays dictated that more attention should be given to warning people against the Catholic Church than of their sinful nature. The means of redemption, according to the philosophy embedded in post-Reformation morality plays, is dependent upon the audience understanding the truthfulness of Protestant theology and verses and also the deceptiveness and wickedness of Catholic theology, whose best example is the secular play of Calderón.
The Vices in post-Reformation morality plays are almost always depicted as being Catholic. At times this depiction is achieved through their physical appearance. For example, Vices in post-Reformation morality plays would be dressed as cardinals, friars, monks, or the pope. Other times, the Vice comes out and states he is a Catholic, or elucidates that he is Catholic by swearing a Catholic pledge. Oftentimes, the Vice in post-Reformation plays admits that Catholic theology is flawed, and that by being Catholic the Vice is committing treason. Moreover, Vices often appear ignorant and naive, especially when it comes to their biblical understanding and knowledge of the New Testament. Often, morality plays coming out the post-Reformation period ridicule ritualistic Catholic practices. Furthermore, these plays postulated that Catholics were opposed to moral behaviour and truthfulness, and that the Catholic Church warped the text of the Bible to justify sinning. To deceive the victim of post-Reformation morality plays, the Vice typically assumes a new name to disguise what actual Vice he is.
Because the Vice is aggressively tied to Catholicism from the outset of the play, when the Vice is reprimanded and damned, so are his Catholic beliefs. Therefore, the Vice served as a central component to discrediting the Catholic Church in post-Reformation morality plays.
The role of the Virtues in post-Reformation morality plays was to preach a message of salvation based upon an individual’s faith and the grace of God. They promoted Protestant beliefs of original sin, the importance of bible reading and meditation, the marriage of clergymen, and the cleansing of sin only through Christ’s sacrifice; at the same time, they discredited the Catholic belief in transubstantiation.
Notes
Bibliography
| 44715 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=44715 |
Religion&Philosophy&Ethics | Dogma
Dogma is an official system of principles or doctrines of a religion, such as Roman Catholicism, or the positions of a philosopher or of a philosophical school such as Stoicism.
In the pejorative sense, dogma refers to enforced decisions, such as those of aggressive political interests or authorities. More generally, it is applied to some strong belief whose adherents are not willing to discuss rationally. This attitude is named as a dogmatic one, or as dogmatism; and is often used to refer to matters related to religion, but is not limited to theistic attitudes alone and is often used with respect to political or philosophical dogmas.
The word "dogma" was translated in the 17th century from Latin "dogma" meaning "philosophical tenet" or principle, derived from the Greek "dogma" (δόγμα) meaning literally "that which one thinks is true" and the verb "dokein", "to seem good". The plural, based on the Greek, is "dogmata" (), though "dogmas" may be more commonly used in English and other languages.
Formally, the term dogma has been used by some theistic religious groups to describe the body of positions forming the group's most central, foundational, or essential beliefs, though the term may also be used to refer to the entire set of formal beliefs identified by a theistic or non-theistic religious group. In some cases dogma is distinguished from religious opinion and those things in doctrine considered less significant or uncertain. Formal church dogma is often clarified and elaborated upon in its communication.
View or position (Pali ', Sanskrit ') is a central idea in Buddhism. In Buddhist thought, a view is not a simple, abstract collection of propositions, but a charged interpretation of experience which intensely shapes and affects thought, sensation, and action. Having the proper mental attitude toward views is therefore considered an integral part of the Buddhist path, as sometimes correct views need to be put into practice and incorrect views abandoned, while othertimes all views are seen as obstacles to enlightenment.
Christianity is defined by a set of core beliefs shared by virtually all Christians, though how those core beliefs are implemented and secondary questions vary within Christianity. When formally communicated by the organization, these beliefs are sometimes referred to as 'dogmata'. The organization's formal religious positions may be taught to new members or simply communicated to those who choose to become members. It is rare for agreement with an organization's formal positions to be a requirement for attendance, though membership may be required for some church activities. Protestants to differing degrees are less formal about doctrine, and often rely on denomination-specific beliefs, but seldom refer to these beliefs as dogmata. The first unofficial institution of dogma in the Christian church was by Saint Irenaeus in his "Demonstration of Apostolic Teaching", which provides a 'manual of essentials' constituting the 'body of truth'.
For Catholicism and Eastern Christianity, the dogmata are contained in the Nicene Creed and the canon laws of two, three, seven, or twenty ecumenical councils (depending on whether one is Church of the East, Oriental Orthodox, Eastern Orthodox, or Roman Catholic). These tenets are summarized by John of Damascus in his "Exact Exposition of the Orthodox Faith", which is the third book of his main work, titled "The Fount of Knowledge". In this book he takes a dual approach in explaining each article of the faith: one, directed at Christians, where he uses quotes from the Bible and, occasionally, from works of other Church Fathers, and the second, directed both at members of non-Christian religions and at atheists, for whom he employs Aristotelian logic and dialectics.
The decisions of fourteen later councils that Catholics hold as dogmatic and a small number of decrees promulgated by popes exercising papal infallibility (for examples, see Immaculate Conception and Assumption of Mary) are considered as being a part of the Church's sacred body of doctrine.
In Islam the Quran", Hadith", and "aqidah" correspond, albeit differently across cultural and theological lines, to the Latin terms "dogma/dogmata".
In Stoicism "dogma" (δόγμα) is a principle established by reason and experience. Stoicism has many dogmas, such as the well-known Stoic dogma "the only good is moral good, and the only evil is moral evil".
In Pyrrhonist philosophy "dogma" refers to assent to a proposition about a non-evident matter. The main principle of Pyrrhonism is expressed by the word "acatalepsia", which connotes the ability to withhold assent from doctrines regarding the truth of things in their own nature; against every statement its contradiction may be advanced with equal justification. Consequently, Pyrrhonists withhold assent with regard to non-evident propositions, i.e., dogmas. Pyrrhonists argue that dogmatists, such as the Stoics, Epicureans, and Peripatetics, have failed to demonstrate that their doctrines regarding non-evident matters are true.
| 44941 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=44941 |
Religion&Philosophy&Ethics | Transnational Radical Party
The Transnational Radical Party (TRP), whose official name is Nonviolent Radical Party, Transnational and Transparty (NRPTT), is a political association of citizens, members of parliament and members of government of various national and political backgrounds who intend to adopt nonviolent means to create an effective body of international law with respect for individuals, human, civil and political rights, as well as the affirmation of democracy and political freedom in the world.
The TRP does not participate in elections, and despite being named "party", is a non-governmental organization (NGO), adept in building synergies among political forces aimed at achieving the goals of its congressional motions.
The TRP is the direct evolution of the Italian Radical Party (1955–1989) and is separate from the once-connected Italian Radicals party (founded in 2001), has been an NGO at the Economic and Social Council (ECOSOC) of the United Nations (UN) since 1995, listed in the general consultative status' category.
The TRP often advocates the international use of Esperanto in its literature.
The TRP's forerunner, the Radical Party (PR), was established in 1955 by a left-wing splinter group from the centre-right Italian Liberal Party (PLI). In 1989 the PR was transformed into the TRP. In 1992 a majority of the Radicals formed, at the national-level in Italian politics, the Pannella List, as its most senior figure was Marco Pannella. Since 1999 the List ran in elections under the banner of Bonino List, named after Emma Bonino. In 2001 the Radicals in Italy formed the Italian Radicals (RI).
In the first European Parliament election in 1979 the PR obtained its best result ever countrywide (3.7% of the vote, resulting in the election of three MEPs, including Pannella). Following the election, the PR was involved with the Coordination of European Green and Radical Parties (CEGRP) and its unsuccessful efforts to create a single pan-European platform for green and radical politics. More importantly, since then, the party projected itself into international politics.
In 1988, after a decade during which transnational issues and values were emphasised, the PR's congress decided that the party would be transformed during 1989 into the TRP and that the latter would not present itself in elections (in order to avoid competition with the other parties and stimulate cooperation instead), while permitting "dual membership" with other parties. The new symbol featuring the stylised face of Mahatma Gandhi was the point of no return in the transformation of the PR into an instrument of political fight completely at disposal of issue-oriented campaigns.
All this provoked great controversy among Radicals. Some long-time members left in order to continue their own activity in other parties or retire from public life. However, also most TRP Radicals continued to be actively engaged in politics, sometimes supported by the TRP itself, sometimes seeking hospitality in traditional parties or creating entirely new electoral lists. In the 1989 European Parliament election Pannella stood as a successful candidate of the joint list between the PLI (his former party) and the Italian Republican Party, some Radicals formed the "Anti-prohibition List on Drugs" (1 MEP), while others joined the Rainbow Greens (2 MEPs). In the run-up of the 1992 general election the Pannella List was formed.
Sergio Stanzani and Emma Bonino were the first secretary and president of the party, respectively. In 1993 Bonino, who would be appointed to the European Commission in 1995, replaced Stanzani, and Pannella became president.
The TRP was soon involved in comparing the conditions of the rule of law among different democracies throughout the world. While its members and economic resources continued to come primarily from Italy, the party strengthened its activities worldwide, especially in the countries of post-communist Eastern Europe. In this respect, the TRP launched the Multilingual Telematics System, one of the first bulletin board systems in Italy to allow multiple connections at the same time with the many countries where the party had influence and membership.
In 1995, after an intense institutional work, the TRP became a non-governmental organization for the promotion of human rights' legislation and the affirmation of democracy and freedom worldwide. As such, it was granted the general consultative status at the Economic and Social Council (ECOSOC) of the United Nations (UN).
Also in 1995 Olivier Dupuis, a long-time Radical from Belgium and founding member of the TRP who had moved to Budapest, Hungary in 1988 and from there had coordinated TRP's activities in Eastern Europe, was elected secretary of the party, while Jean-François Hory, a French MEP of the Radical Party of the Left within the TRP-sponsored European Radical Alliance group, was president. In 1996 Dupuis took Pannella's seat in the European Parliament.
Within the UN, the party has carried out high-profile battles on several issues: the moratorium on the death penalty and the proposal of his complete abolition, anti-prohibition against global mafias, fair justice, freedom of scientific research and the ban on female genital mutilation. Additionally, the TRP has allowed access to UN meetings to some stateless people, including Tibetans, Uyghurs and Montagnards., and led active monitoring of the conflicts against despotic regimes, such as the case of Ukraine versus Russia, or gave voice to dissidents opposed to authoritarian regimes like Cuba and Turkey. For its proposal of a peace plan in the Chechen–Russian conflict, the party has collided with Russia and its members risked expulsion from the country.
Despite its successes worldwide, the TRP and its initiaves mostly failed to find space on the local press in Italy, which has often focused merely on the internal conflicts within the Radical world. The inadequate information on Radical initiatives by the Italian media has been meticulously verified by the TRP-sponsored "Centro d'Ascolto dell'Informazione Radiotelevisiva" and produced several sentences featuring compensations to be paid by RAI, the Italian public broadcaster, and commercial TV as well. Some confusion came from the fact that since the 2000s, rather than highlighting its expansion abroad, the TRP has preferred to focus on the "Case Italy", emblematic of the decadence of a constitutional political system into a "real democracy", that is to say a formal democracy in which its very institutions substantially act in contrast with the constitution. According to the TRP, Italy has become a "partycratic regime" and, as such, has started to spread the "plague" of "real democracy" around the democratic world. That was denounced by Radicals within international organisations and though the publication of a "yellow book" on the "Italian plague".
However, the TRP effectively suffered internal problems too. In 2003 Dupuis resigned from secretary because of serious political differences with Pannella. In 2011–14 Demba Traoré, a politician from Mali, served briefly as secretary: he left the party without officially resigning, after being returned to the government of his own country. The TRP was later provisionally run by a committee, known as the "Senate" ("Senato"), led by Pannella and composed of the party's leading members.
After the death of Pannella in May 2016, an extraordinary congress was convened in September to overcome the long inactivity due to the absence of the secretary, as well as the economic problems undermining the party's viability. The congress adopted with 178 votes in favour, 79 against and 13 abstentions on the final resolution:
The minority faction, led by Bonino and Marco Cappato, in turn, controlled the RI, as confirmed in their November 2016 congress. In February 2017 the TRP severed its ties with the RI (accused of boycotting the TRP, using its assets without paying for them and pursuing an Italian-only electoral agenda), and the latter could no longer use the Radical headquarters. However, the RI's congress invited its members to adhere to the TRP. The 3,000-member target for 2017 was achieved by the TRP in December, while the RI had launched a pro-Europeanist electoral list named More Europe for the 2018 Italian general election.
The 2016 congress elected a collective Presidency, composed of the following members: Matteo Angioli, Angiolo Bandinelli, Marco Beltrandi, Rita Bernardini (coordinator), Maurizio Bolognetti, Antonella Casu (coordinator), Antonio Cerrone, Deborah Cianfanelli, Maria Antonietta Coscioni, Sergio D'Elia (coordinator), Mariano Giustino, Giuseppe Rippa, Giuseppe Rossodivita, Irene Testa, Maurizio Turco (coordinator and legal representative), Valter Vecellio, and Elisabetta Zamparutti.
Current prominent members (as of December 2017):
Former prominent members:
| 45067 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=45067 |
Religion&Philosophy&Ethics | Discourse
Discourse (from ) generally denotes written and spoken communications, though its usage differs between various disciplines and approaches. For instance, in semantics and discourse analysis, it is a conceptual generalization of conversation within each modality and context of communication. Moreover, in regard to semantics, discourse is understood as the totality of codified language (i.e., vocabulary) used in a given field of intellectual enquiry and of social practice, such as legal discourse, medical discourse, religious discourse, etc.
In the work of philosopher Michel Foucault, and that of the social theoreticians Foucault inspired, "discourse" describes "an entity of sequences, of signs, in that they are" statements () in conversation. As discourse, a statement is not a unit of semiotic signs, but an abstract construct that allows such signs to assign meaning, thus conveying specific, repeatable communications to, between, and among objects, subjects, and statements. As such, a discourse is composed of semiotic sequences (relations among signs that communicate meaning) between and among objects, subjects, and statements. In simple terms, Foucault's analysis of a "discourse" examines and determines the connections among language, as well as structure and agency. Foucault applied what he called "discursive formation" (), a term that conceptually describes the regular communications (written and spoken) that produce such discourses (e.g. informal conversations), in his analyses of large bodies of knowledge, such as political economy and natural history.
Various understandings of discourse can be seen as being in perpetual conflict with each other in time. Hence, in the course of intellectual enquiry, discourse among researchers features questions of, and answers to, ""What is ...?"" and ""What is not...?,"" conducted according to the meanings (i.e., denotation and connotation) of the concepts (statements) used in the given field of enquiry, such as anthropology, ethnography, sociology, cultural studies, and literary theory, as well as the philosophies of science and feminism.
In semantics, and the more-general discourse analysis, "discourse" is a conceptual generalization of conversation within each modality and context of communication. In this sense, the term is studied in corpus linguistics, the study of language expressed in "corpora" (samples) of "real world" text.
The study of semantics particularizes "discourse" as meaning the totality of codified language (i.e., vocabulary) used in a given field of intellectual enquiry and of social practice, such as legal discourse, medical discourse, religious discourse, etc. In this sense, along with that of Foucault's in the previous section, the analysis of a "discourse" examines and determines the connections among language and structure and agency.
Moreover, because a discourse is a body of text meant to communicate specific data, information, and knowledge, there exist internal relations in the content of a given discourse, as well as external relations among discourses. As such, a discourse does not exist "per se" (in itself), but is related to other discourses, by way of inter-discursive practices.
In formal semantics, discourse representation theory describes the formal semantics of a sentence using predicate logic.
In the general humanities and social sciences, discourse describes a formal way of thinking that can be expressed through language. Discourse is a social boundary that defines what statements can be said about a topic. Many definitions of discourse are largely derived from the work of French philosopher Michel Foucault. In sociology, "discourse" is defined as "any practice (found in a wide range of forms) by which individuals imbue reality with meaning."
Political science sees discourse as closely linked to politics and policy making. Likewise, different theories among various disciplines understand discourse as linked to power and state, insofar as the control of "discourses" is understood as a hold on reality itself (e.g. if a state controls the media, they control the "truth"). In essence, "discourse" is inescapable, since any use of language will have an affect on individual perspectives. In other words, the chosen discourse provides the vocabulary, expressions, and, perhaps, even the style needed to communicate. For example, two notably distinct discourses can be used about various guerrilla movements, describing them either as "freedom fighters" or "terrorists."
In psychology, discourses are embedded in different rhetorical genres and meta-genres that constrain and enable them—language talking about language. This is exemplified in the APA's "Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders", which tells of the terms that have to be used in speaking about mental health, thereby mediating meanings and dictating practices of professionals in psychology and psychiatry.
Modern theorists were focused on achieving progress and believed in the existence of natural and social laws which could be used universally to develop knowledge and thus a better understanding of society. Such theorists would be preoccupied with obtaining the "truth" and "reality," seeking to develop theories which contained certainty and predictability. Modernist theorists therefore viewed discourse as being relative to talking or way of talking and understood discourse to be functional. Discourse and language transformations are ascribed to progress or the need to develop new or more "accurate" words to describe new discoveries, understandings, or areas of interest. In modern times, language and discourse are dissociated from power and ideology and instead conceptualized as "natural" products of common sense usage or progress. Modernism further gave rise to the liberal discourses of rights, equality, freedom, and justice; however, this rhetoric masked substantive inequality and failed to account for differences, according to Regnier.
Structuralist theorists, such as Ferdinand de Saussure and Jacques Lacan, argue that all human actions and social formations are related to language and can be understood as systems of related elements. This means that the "…individual elements of a system only have significance when considered in relation to the structure as a whole, and that structures are to be understood as self-contained, self-regulated, and self-transforming entities." In other words, it is the structure itself that determines the significance, meaning and function of the individual elements of a system. Structuralism has made an important contribution to our understanding of language and social systems. Saussure's theory of language highlights the decisive role of meaning and signification in structuring human life more generally.
Following the perceived limitations of the modern era, emerged postmodern theory. Postmodern theorists rejected modernist claims that there was one theoretical approach that explained all aspects of society. Rather, postmodernist theorists were interested in examining the variety of experience of individuals and groups and emphasized differences over similarities and common experiences.
In contrast to modern theory, postmodern theory is more fluid, allowing for individual differences as it rejects the notion of social laws. Such theorists shifted away from truth-seeking, and instead sought answers for how truths are produced and sustained. Postmodernists contended that truth and knowledge is plural, contextual, and historically-produced through discourses. Postmodern researchers therefore embarked on analyzing discourses such as texts, language, policies, and practices.
French social theorist Michel Foucault developed a notion of discourse in his early work, namely in the "Archaeology of Knowledge" (1969; ). Iara Lessa (2006) summarizes Foucault's definition of discourse as "systems of thoughts composed of ideas, attitudes, courses of action, beliefs and practices that systematically construct the subjects and the worlds of which they speak." Foucault traces the role of discourses in wider social processes of legitimating and power, emphasizing the construction of current truths, how they are maintained, and what power relations they carry with them. He would later theorize discourse as a medium through which power relations produce speaking subjects.
Foucault (1977, 1980) argued that power and knowledge are inter-related and, thus, every human relationship is a struggle and negotiation of power. Even further, he would state that power is always present and can both produce and constrain the truth. Discourse according to Foucault (1977, 1980, 2003) is related to power as it operates by rules of exclusion. Discourse, therefore, is controlled by: objects, what can be spoken of; ritual, where and how one may speak; and the privileged, who may speak. Coining the phrase power-knowledge, Foucault (1980) would argue that knowledge is both the "creator" of power and the "creation" of power. An object becomes a "node within a network." In "the Archaeology of Knowledge," Foucault uses the example of a book to illustrate a node within a network: a book is not made up of individual words on a page, each of which has meaning, but rather "is caught up in a system of references to other books, other texts, other sentences." The meaning of that book is connected to a larger, overarching web of knowledge and ideas to which it relates.
One of the key discourses that Foucault identified as part of his critique of power-knowledge was that of neoliberalism, which he related very closely to his conceptualization of governmentality in his lectures on biopolitics. This trajectory of Foucault's thinking has been taken up widely within Human Geography.
| 45134 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=45134 |
Religion&Philosophy&Ethics | Biosafety
Biosafety is the prevention of large-scale loss of biological integrity, focusing both on ecology and human health.
These prevention mechanisms include conduction of regular reviews of the biosafety in laboratory settings, as well as strict guidelines to follow. Biosafety is used to protect from harmful incidents. Many laboratories handling biohazards employ an ongoing risk management assessment and enforcement process for biosafety. Failures to follow such protocols can lead to increased risk of exposure to biohazards or pathogens. Human error and poor technique contribute to unnecessary exposure and compromise the best safeguards set into place for protection.
The international Cartagena Protocol on Biosafety deals primarily with the agricultural definition but many advocacy groups seek to expand it to include post-genetic threats: new molecules, artificial life forms, and even robots which may compete directly in the natural food chain.
Biosafety in agriculture, chemistry, medicine, exobiology and beyond will likely require the application of the precautionary principle, and a new definition focused on the biological nature of the threatened organism rather than the nature of the threat.
When biological warfare or new, currently hypothetical, threats (i.e., robots, new artificial bacteria) are considered, biosafety precautions are generally not sufficient. (link to incident report, i.e. such as problems with CDC research labs in 2014)The new field of biosecurity addresses these complex threats.
Biosafety level refers to the stringency of biocontainment precautions deemed necessary by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) for laboratory work with infectious materials.
Typically, institutions that experiment with or create potentially harmful biological material will have a committee or board of supervisors that is in charge of the institution's biosafety. They create and monitor the biosafety standards that must be met by labs in order to prevent the accidental release of potentially destructive biological material. (note that in the US, several groups are involved, and efforts are being made to improve processes for government run labs, but there is no unifying regulatory authority for all labs.
Biosafety is related to several fields:
Chemical hazards typically found in laboratory settings include carcinogens, toxins, irritants, corrosives, and sensitizers. Biological hazards include viruses, bacteria, fungi, prions, and biologically-derived toxins, which may be present in body fluids and tissue, cell culture specimens, and laboratory animals. Routes of exposure for chemical and biological hazards include inhalation, ingestion, skin contact, and eye contact.
Physical hazards include ergonomic hazards, ionizing and non-ionizing radiation, and noise hazards. Additional safety hazards include burns and cuts from autoclaves, injuries from centrifuges, compressed gas leaks, cold burns from cryogens, electrical hazards, fires, injuries from machinery, and falls.
A complete understanding of experimental risks associated with synthetic biology is helping to enforce the knowledge and effectiveness of biosafety.
With the potential future creation of man-made unicellular organisms, some are beginning to consider the effect that these organisms will have on biomass already present. Scientists estimate that within the next few decades, organism design will be sophisticated enough to accomplish tasks such as creating biofuels and lowering the levels of harmful substances in the atmosphere. Scientist that favor the development of synthetic biology claim that the use of biosafety mechanisms such as suicide genes and nutrient dependencies will ensure the organisms cannot survive outside of the lab setting in which they were originally created. Organizations like the ETC Group argue that regulations should control the creation of organisms that could potentially harm existing life. They also argue that the development of these organisms will simply shift the consumption of petroleum to the utilization of biomass in order to create energy. These organisms can harm existing life by affecting the prey/predator food chain, reproduction between species, as well as competition against other species (species at risk, or act as an invasive species).
Synthetic vaccines are now being produced in the lab. These have caused a lot of excitement in the pharmaceutical industry as they will be cheaper to produce, allow quicker production, as well as enhance the knowledge of virology and immunology.
Biosafety, in medicine and health care settings, specifically refers to proper handling of organs or tissues from biological origin, or genetic therapy products, viruses with respect to the environment, to ensure the safety of health care workers, researchers, lab staff, patients, and the general public. Laboratories are assigned a biosafety level numbered 1 through 4 based on their potential biohazard risk level. The employing authority, through the laboratory director, is responsible for ensuring that there is adequate surveillance of the health of laboratory personnel. The objective of such surveillance is to monitor for occupationally acquired diseases. The World Health Organization attributes human error and poor technique as the primary cause of mishandling of biohazardous materials.
Biosafety is also becoming a global concern and requires multilevel resources and international collaboration to monitor, prevent and correct accidents from unintended and malicious release and also to prevent that bioterrorists get their hands-on biologics sample to create biologic weapons of mass destruction. Even people outside of the health sector needs to be involved as in the case of the Ebola outbreak the impact that it had on businesses and travel required that private sectors, international banks together pledged more than $2 billion to combat the epidemic. The bureau of international Security and nonproliferation (ISN) is responsible for managing a broad range of U.S. nonproliferation policies, programs, agreements, and initiatives, and biological weapon is one their concerns
Biosafety has its risks and benefits. All stakeholders must try to find a balance between cost-effectiveness of safety measures and use evidence-based safety practices and recommendations, measure the outcomes and consistently reevaluate the potential benefits that biosafety represents for human health.
Biosafety level designations are based on a composite of the design features, construction, containment facilities, equipment, practices and operational procedures required for working with agents from the various risk groups.
Classification of biohazardous materials is subjective and the risk assessment is determined by the individuals most familiar with the specific characteristics of the organism. There are several factors taken into account when assessing an organism and the classification process.
See World Health Organization Biosafety Laboratory Guidelines: World Health Organization Biosafety Laboratory Guildlines
Investigations have shown that there are hundreds of unreported biosafety accidents, with laboratories self-policing the handling of biohazardous materials and lack of reporting. Poor record keeping, improper disposal, and mishandling biohazardous materials result in increased risks of biochemical contamination for both the public and environment.
Along with the precautions taken during the handling process of biohazardous materials, the World Health Organization recommends:
Staff training should always include information on safe methods for highly hazardous procedures that are commonly encountered by all laboratory personnel and which involve:
In June 2009, the Trans-Federal Task Force On Optimizing Biosafety and Biocontainment Oversight recommended the formation of an agency to coordinate high safety risk level labs (3 and 4), and voluntary, non-punitive measures for incident reporting. However, it is unclear as to what changes may or may not have been implemented following their recommendations.
The United States Code of Federal Regulations is the codification (law), or collection of laws specific to a specific to a jurisdiction that represent broad areas subject to federal regulation. Title 42 of the Code of Federal Regulations addresses laws concerning Public Health issues including biosafety which can be found under the citation 42 CFR 73 to 42 CFR 73.21 by accessing the US Code of Federal Regulations (CFR) website.
Title 42 Section 73 of the CFR addresses specific aspects of biosafety including Occupational safety and health, transportation of biohazardous materials and safety plans for laboratories using potential biohazards. While biocontainment, as defined in the Biosafety in Microbiological and Biomedical Laboratories and Primary Containment for Biohazards: Selection, Installation and Use of Biosafety Cabinets manuals available at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention website much of the design, implementation and monitoring of protocols are left up to state and local authorities.
The United States CFR states "An individual or entity required to register [as a user of biological agents] must develop and implement a written biosafety plan that is commensurate with the risk of the select agent or toxin" which is followed by 3 recommended sources for laboratory reference.
While clearly the needs of biocontainment and biosafety measures vary across government, academic and private industry laboratories, biological agents pose similar risks independent of their locale. Laws relating to biosafety are not easily accessible and there are few federal regulations that are readily available for a potential trainee to reference outside of the publications recommended in 42 CFR 73.12. Therefore, training is the responsibility of lab employers and is not consistent across various laboratory types thereby increasing the risk of accidental release of biological hazards that pose serious health threats to the humans, animals and the ecosystem as a whole.
Many government agencies have made guidelines and recommendations in an effort to increase biosafety measures across laboratories in the United States. Agencies involved in producing policies surrounding biosafety within a hospital, pharmacy or clinical research laboratory include: the CDC, FDA, USDA, DHHS, DoT, EPA and potentially other local organizations including public health departments. The federal government does set some standards and recommendations for States to meet their standards, most of which fall under the Occupational Safety and Health Act of 1970. but currently, there is no single federal regulating agency directly responsible for ensuring the safety of biohazardous handling, storage, identification, clean-up and disposal. In addition to the CDC, the Environmental Protection Agency has some of the most accessible information on ecological impacts of biohazards, how to handle spills, reporting guidelines and proper disposal of agents dangerous to the environment. Many of these agencies have their own manuals and guidance documents relating to training and certain aspects of biosafety directly tied to their agency's scope, including transportation, storage and handling of blood borne pathogens. (OSHA, IATA). The American Biological Safety Association (ABSA) has a list of such agencies and links to their websites, along with links to publications and guidance documents to assist in risk assessment, lab design and adherence to laboratory exposure control plans. Many of these agencies were members of the 2009 Task Force on BioSafety. There was also a formation of a Blue Ribbon Study Panel on Biodefense, but this is more concernend with national defense programs and biosecurity.
Ultimately states and local governments, as well as private industry labs, are left to make the final determinants for their own biosafety programs, which vary widely in scope and enforcement across the United States. Not all state programs address biosafety from all necessary perspectives, which should not just include personal safety, but also emphasize an full understanding among laboratory personnel of quality control and assurance, exposure potential impacts on the environment, and general public safety.
Toby Ord puts into question whether the current international conventions regarding biotechnology research and development regulation, and self-regulation by biotechnology companies and the scientific community are adequate.
State occupational safety plans are often focused on transportation, disposal, and risk assessment, allowing caveats for safety audits, but ultimately leaves the training in the hands of the employer. 22 states have approved Occupational Safety plans by OSHA that are audited annually for effectiveness. These plans apply to private and public sector workers, and not necessarily state/ government workers, and not all specifically have a comprehensive program for all aspects of biohazard management from start to finish. Sometimes biohazard management plans are limited only to workers in transportation specific job titles. The enforcement and training on such regulations can vary from lab to lab based on the State's plans for occupational health and safety. With the exception of DoD lab personnel, CDC lab personnel, First responders, and DoT employees, enforcement of training is inconsistent, and while training is required to be done, specifics on the breadth and frequency of refresher training does not seem consistent from state to state; penalties may never be assessed without larger regulating bodies being aware of non-compliance, and enforcement is limited.
Medical waste management was identified as an issue in the 1980s; with the Medical Waste Tracking Act of 1988 becoming the new standard in biohazard waste disposal.
Although the Federal Government, EPA & DOT provide some oversight of regulated medical waste storage, transportation, and disposal the majority of biohazard medical waste is regulated at the state level. Each state is responsible for regulation and management of their own bioharzardous waste with each state varying in their regulatory process. Record keeping of biohazardous waste also varies between states.
Medical healthcare centers, hospitals veterinary clinics, clinical laboratories and other facilities generate over one million tons of waste each year. Although the majority of this waste is as harmless as common household waste, as much as 15 percent of this waste poses a potential infection hazard, according to the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). Medical waste is required to be rendered non-infectious before it can be disposed of. There are several different methods to treat and dispose of biohazardous waste. In the United States, the
primary methods for treatment and disposal of biohazard, medical and sharps waste may include:
Different forms of biohazardous wasted required different treatments for their proper waste management. This is determined largely be each states regulations. Currently, there are several contracted companies that focus on medical, sharps and biological hazard disposal. Stericycle and Daniels Health are two national leaders in medical waste and pharmaceutical disposal in the United States.
The United States Government has made it clear that biosafety is to be taken very seriously. In 2014, incidents with Anthrax and Ebola pathogens in CDC laboratories (), prompted the CDC director Tom Frieden to issue a moratorium for research with these types of select agents. An investigation concluded that there was a lack of adherence to safety protocols and "inadequate safeguards" in place. This indicated a lack of proper training or reinforcement of training and supervision on regular basis for lab personnel.
Following these incidents, the CDC established an "External Laboratory Safety Workgroup" (ELSW), and suggestions have been made to reform effectiveness of the Federal Select Agent Program. The White House issued a report on national biosafety priorities in 2015, outlining next steps for a national biosafety and security program, and addressed biological safety needs for health research, national defense, and public safety.
In 2016, the Association of Public Health Laboratories (APHL) had a presentation at their annual meeting focused on improving biosafety culture. This same year, The UPMC Center for Health Security issued a case study report including reviews of ten different nations' current biosafety regulations, including the United States. Their goal was to "provide a foundation for identifying national‐level biosafety norms and enable initial assessment of biosafety priorities necessary for developing effective national biosafety regulation and oversight."
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Religion&Philosophy&Ethics | Erich Fromm
Erich Seligmann Fromm (; ; March 23, 1900 – March 18, 1980) was a German Jew who fled the Nazi regime and settled in the US. He was a social psychologist, psychoanalyst, sociologist, humanistic philosopher, and democratic socialist. He was one of the Founders of The William Alanson White Institute of Psychiatry, Psychoanalysis and Psychology in New York City and was associated with the Frankfurt School of critical theory.
Erich Fromm was born on March 23, 1900, at Frankfurt am Main, the only child of Orthodox Jewish parents, Rosa (Krause) and Naphtali Fromm. He started his academic studies in 1918 at the University of Frankfurt am Main with two semesters of jurisprudence. During the summer semester of 1919, Fromm studied at the University of Heidelberg, where he began studying sociology under Alfred Weber (brother of the better known sociologist Max Weber), psychiatrist-philosopher Karl Jaspers, and Heinrich Rickert. Fromm received his PhD in sociology from Heidelberg in 1922. During the mid-1920s, he trained to become a psychoanalyst through Frieda Reichmann's psychoanalytic sanatorium in Heidelberg. They married in 1926, but separated shortly after and divorced in 1942. He began his own clinical practice in 1927. In 1930 he joined the Frankfurt Institute for Social Research and completed his psychoanalytical training.
After the Nazi takeover of power in Germany, Fromm moved first to Geneva and then, in 1934, to Columbia University in New York. Together with Karen Horney and Harry Stack Sullivan, Fromm belongs to a Neo-Freudian school of psychoanalytical thought. Horney and Fromm each had a marked influence on the other's thought, with Horney illuminating some aspects of psychoanalysis for Fromm and the latter elucidating sociology for Horney. Their relationship ended in the late 1930s. After leaving Columbia, Fromm helped form the New York branch of the Washington School of Psychiatry in 1943, and in 1946 co-founded the William Alanson White Institute of Psychiatry, Psychoanalysis, and Psychology. He was on the faculty of Bennington College from 1941 to 1949, and taught courses at the New School for Social Research in New York from 1941 to 1959.
When Fromm moved to Mexico City in 1949, he became a professor at the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM) and established a psychoanalytic section at the medical school there. Meanwhile, he taught as a professor of psychology at Michigan State University from 1957 to 1961 and as an adjunct professor of psychology at the graduate division of Arts and Sciences at New York University after 1962. He taught at UNAM until his retirement, in 1965, and at the Mexican Society of Psychoanalysis (SMP) until 1974. In 1974 he moved from Mexico City to Muralto, Switzerland, and died at his home in 1980, five days before his eightieth birthday. All the while, Fromm maintained his own clinical practice and published a series of books.
Fromm was reportedly an atheist but described his position as "nontheistic mysticism".
Beginning with his first seminal work of 1941, "Escape from Freedom" (known in Britain as "Fear of Freedom"), Fromm's writings were notable as much for their social and political commentary as for their philosophical and psychological underpinnings. Indeed, "Escape from Freedom" is viewed as one of the founding works of political psychology. His second important work, "Man for Himself: An Inquiry into the Psychology of Ethics", first published in 1947, continued and enriched the ideas of "Escape from Freedom". Taken together, these books outlined Fromm's theory of human character, which was a natural outgrowth of Fromm's theory of human nature. Fromm's most popular book was "The Art of Loving", an international bestseller first published in 1956, which recapitulated and complemented the theoretical principles of human nature found in "Escape from Freedom" and "Man for Himself"—principles which were revisited in many of Fromm's other major works.
Central to Fromm's world view was his interpretation of the Talmud and Hasidism. He began studying Talmud as a young man under Rabbi J. Horowitz and later under Rabbi Salman Baruch Rabinkow, a Chabad Hasid. While working towards his doctorate in sociology at the University of Heidelberg, Fromm studied the Tanya by the founder of Chabad, Rabbi Shneur Zalman of Liadi. Fromm also studied under Nehemia Nobel and Ludwig Krause while studying in Frankfurt. Fromm's grandfather and two great grandfathers on his father's side were rabbis, and a great uncle on his mother's side was a noted Talmudic scholar. However, Fromm turned away from orthodox Judaism in 1926, towards secular interpretations of scriptural ideals.
The cornerstone of Fromm's humanistic philosophy is his interpretation of the biblical story of Adam and Eve's exile from the Garden of Eden. Drawing on his knowledge of the Talmud, Fromm pointed out that being able to distinguish between good and evil is generally considered to be a virtue, but that biblical scholars generally consider Adam and Eve to have "sinned" by disobeying God and eating from the Tree of Knowledge. However, departing from traditional religious orthodoxy on this, Fromm "extolled" the virtues of humans taking independent action and using reason to establish moral values rather than adhering to authoritarian moral values.
Beyond a simple condemnation of authoritarian value systems, Fromm used the story of Adam and Eve as an allegorical explanation for human biological evolution and existential angst, asserting that when Adam and Eve ate from the Tree of Knowledge, they became aware of themselves as being separate from nature while still being part of it. This is why they felt "naked" and "ashamed": they had evolved into human beings, conscious of themselves, their own mortality, and their powerlessness before the forces of nature and society, and no longer united with the universe as they were in their instinctive, pre-human existence as animals. According to Fromm, the awareness of a disunited human existence is a source of guilt and shame, and the solution to this existential dichotomy is found in the development of one's uniquely human powers of love and reason. However, Fromm distinguished "his" concept of love from unreflective "popular" notions as well as "Freudian paradoxical" love (see the criticism by Marcuse below).
Fromm considered love to be an interpersonal creative capacity rather than an emotion, and he distinguished this creative capacity from what he considered to be various forms of narcissistic neuroses and sado-masochistic tendencies that are commonly held out as proof of "true love". Indeed, Fromm viewed the experience of "falling in love" as evidence of one's failure to understand the true nature of love, which he believed always had the common elements of "care", "responsibility", "respect", and "knowledge". Drawing from his knowledge of the Torah, Fromm pointed to the story of Jonah, who did not wish to save the residents of Nineveh from the consequences of their sin, as demonstrative of his belief that the qualities of "care" and "responsibility" are generally absent from most human relationships. Fromm also asserted that few people in modern society had "respect" for the autonomy of their fellow human beings, much less the objective "knowledge" of what other people truly wanted and needed.
Fromm believed that freedom was an aspect of human nature that we either embrace or escape. He observed that embracing our freedom of will was healthy, whereas escaping freedom through the use of escape mechanisms was the root of psychological conflicts. Fromm outlined three of the most common escape mechanisms:
The word biophilia was frequently used by Fromm as a description of a productive psychological orientation and "state of being". For example, in an addendum to his book "The Heart of Man: Its Genius For Good and Evil", Fromm wrote as part of his humanist credo:
"I believe that the man choosing progress can find a new unity through the development of all his human forces, which are produced in three orientations. These can be presented separately or together: biophilia, love for humanity and nature, and independence and freedom."
Erich Fromm postulated eight basic needs:
Fromm's thesis of the "escape from freedom" is epitomized in the following passage. The "individualized man" referenced by Fromm is man bereft of the "primary ties" of belonging (i.e. nature, family, etc.), also expressed as "freedom from":
In his book "Man for Himself" Fromm spoke of "orientation of character". He differentiates his theory of character from that of Freud by focusing on two ways an individual relates to the world. Freud analyzed character in terms of libido organization, whereas Fromm says that in the process of living, we relate to the world by: 1) acquiring and assimilating things—"Assimilation", and 2) reacting to people—"Socialization". Fromm asserted that these two ways of relating to the world were not instinctive, but an individual's response to the peculiar circumstances of his or her life; he also believed that people are never exclusively one type of orientation. These two ways of relating to life's circumstances lead to basic character-orientations.
Fromm lists four types of nonproductive character orientation, which he called receptive, exploitative, hoarding, and marketing, and one positive character orientation, which he called productive. Receptive and exploitative orientations are basically how an individual may relate to other people and are socialization attributes of character. A hoarding orientation is an acquiring and assimilating materials/valuables character trait. The marketing orientation arises in response to the human situation in the modern era. The current needs of the market determine value. It is a relativistic ethic. In contrast, the productive orientation is an objective ethic. Despite the existential struggles of humanity, each human has the potential for love, reason and productive work in life. Fromm writes, "It is the paradox of human existence that man must simultaneously seek for closeness and for independence; for oneness with others and at the same time for the preservation of his uniqueness and particularity. ...the answer to this paradox – and to the moral problems of man – is productiveness."
Fromm's four non-productive orientations were subject to validation through a psychometric test, "The Person Relatedness Test" by Elias H. Porter, PhD in collaboration with Carl Rogers, PhD at the University of Chicago's Counseling Center between 1953 and 1955. Fromm's four non-productive orientations also served as basis for the "LIFO" test, first published in 1967 by Stuart Atkins, Alan Katcher, PhD, and Elias Porter, PhD and the "Strength Deployment Inventory", first published in 1971 by Elias H. Porter, PhD. Fromm also influenced his student Sally L. Smith who went on to become the founder of the Lab School of Washington and the Baltimore Lab School.
Fromm examined the life and work of Sigmund Freud at length. Fromm identified a discrepancy between early and later Freudian theory: namely that, prior to World War I, Freud had described human drives as a tension between desire and repression, but after the end of the war, began framing human drives as a struggle between biologically universal Life and Death (Eros and Thanatos) instincts. Fromm charged Freud and his followers with never acknowledging the contradictions between the two theories.
Fromm also criticized Freud's dualistic thinking. According to Fromm, Freudian descriptions of human consciousness as struggles between two poles were narrow and limiting. Fromm also condemned Freud as a misogynist unable to think outside the patriarchal milieu of early 20th century Vienna. However, in spite of these criticisms, Fromm nonetheless expressed a great respect for Freud and his accomplishments. Fromm contended that Freud was one of the "architects of the modern age", alongside Albert Einstein and Karl Marx, but emphasized that he considered Marx both far more historically important than Freud and a finer thinker.
Fromm's best known work, "Escape from Freedom", focuses on the human urge to seek a source of authority and control upon reaching a freedom that was thought to be an individual's true desire. Fromm's critique of the modern political order and capitalist system led him to seek insights from medieval feudalism. In "Escape from Freedom", he found value in the lack of individual freedom, rigid structure, and obligations required on the members of medieval society:
The culmination of Fromm's social and political philosophy was his book "The Sane Society", published in 1955, which argued in favor of a humanistic and democratic socialism. Building primarily upon the early works of Karl Marx, Fromm sought to re-emphasise the ideal of freedom, missing from most Soviet Marxism and more frequently found in the writings of libertarian socialists and liberal theoreticians. Fromm's brand of socialism rejected both Western capitalism and Soviet communism, which he saw as dehumanizing, and which resulted in the virtually universal modern phenomenon of alienation. He became one of the founders of socialist humanism, promoting the early writings of Marx and his humanist messages to the US and Western European public.
In the early 1960s, Fromm published two books dealing with Marxist thought ("Marx's Concept of Man" and "Beyond the Chains of Illusion: My Encounter with Marx and Freud"). In 1965, working to stimulate the Western and Eastern cooperation between Marxist humanists, Fromm published a series of articles entitled "Socialist Humanism: An International Symposium". In 1966, the American Humanist Association named him Humanist of the Year.
For a period, Fromm was also active in U.S. politics. He joined the Socialist Party of America in the mid-1950s, and did his best to help them provide an alternative viewpoint to McCarthyist trends in some US political thought. This alternative viewpoint was best expressed in his 1961 paper "May Man Prevail? An Inquiry into the Facts and Fictions of Foreign Policy". However, as a co-founder of SANE, Fromm's strongest political activism was in the international peace movement, fighting against the nuclear arms race and U.S. involvement in the Vietnam War. After supporting Senator Eugene McCarthy's losing bid for the Democratic presidential nomination, Fromm more or less retreated from the American political scene, although he did write a paper in 1974 entitled "Remarks on the Policy of Détente" for a hearing held by the U.S. Senate Committee on Foreign Relations. Fromm was awarded Nelly Sachs Prize in 1979.
In "Eros and Civilization", Herbert Marcuse is critical of Fromm: In the beginning, he was a radical theorist, but later he turned to conformity. Marcuse also noted that Fromm, as well as his close colleagues Sullivan and Karen Horney, removed Freud's libido theory and other radical concepts, which thus reduced psychoanalysis to a set of idealist ethics, which only embrace the status quo. Fromm's response, in both "The Sane Society" and in "The Anatomy of Human Destructiveness", argues that Freud indeed deserves substantial credit for recognizing the central importance of the unconscious, but also that he tended to rectify his own concepts that depicted the self as the passive outcome of instinct and social control, with minimal volition or variability. Fromm argues that later scholars such as Marcuse accepted these concepts as dogma, whereas social psychology requires a more dynamic theoretical and empirical approach. In reference to Fromm's leftist political activism as a public intellectual, Noam Chomsky said "I liked Fromm's attitudes but thought his work was pretty superficial".
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Religion&Philosophy&Ethics | Conservation movement
The conservation movement, also known as nature conservation, is a political, environmental, and social movement that seeks to protect natural resources, including animal and plant species as well as their habitat for the future. Evidence-based conservation seeks to use high quality scientific evidence to make conservation efforts more effective.
The early conservation movement included fisheries and wildlife management, water, soil conservation, and sustainable forestry. The contemporary conservation movement has broadened from the early movement's emphasis on use of sustainable yield of natural resources and preservation of wilderness areas to include preservation of biodiversity. Some say the conservation movement is part of the broader and more far-reaching environmental movement, while others argue that they differ both in ideology and practice. Chiefly in the United States, conservation is seen as differing from environmentalism in that it aims to preserve natural resources expressly for their continued sustainable use by humans. Outside the U.S. the term conservation more broadly includes environmentalism.
The conservation movement can be traced back to John Evelyn's work "Sylva", presented as a paper to the Royal Society in 1662. Published as a book two years later, it was one of the most highly influential texts on forestry ever published. Timbre resources in England were becoming dangerously depleted at the time, and Evelyn advocated the importance of conserving the forests by managing the rate of depletion and ensuring that the cut down trees get replenished.
The field developed during the 18th century, especially in Prussia and France where scientific forestry methods were developed. These methods were first applied rigorously in British India from the early-19th century. The government was interested in the use of forest produce and began managing the forests with measures to reduce the risk of wildfire in order to protect the "household" of nature, as it was then termed. This early ecological idea was in order to preserve the growth of delicate teak trees, which was an important resource for the Royal Navy. Concerns over teak depletion were raised as early as 1799 and 1805 when the Navy was undergoing a massive expansion during the Napoleonic Wars; this pressure led to the first formal conservation Act, which prohibited the felling of small teak trees. The first forestry officer was appointed in 1806 to regulate and preserve the trees necessary for shipbuilding. This promising start received a setback in the 1820s and 30s, when laissez-faire economics and complaints from private landowners brought these early conservation attempts to an end.
Conservation was revived in the mid-19th century, with the first practical application of scientific conservation principles to the forests of India. The conservation ethic that began to evolve included three core principles: that human activity damaged the environment, that there was a civic duty to maintain the environment for future generations, and that scientific, empirically based methods should be applied to ensure this duty was carried out. Sir James Ranald Martin was prominent in promoting this ideology, publishing many medico-topographical reports that demonstrated the scale of damage wrought through large-scale deforestation and desiccation, and lobbying extensively for the institutionalization of forest conservation activities in British India through the establishment of Forest Departments. Edward Percy Stebbing warned of desertification of India. The Madras Board of Revenue started local conservation efforts in 1842, headed by Alexander Gibson, a professional botanist who systematically adopted a forest conservation program based on scientific principles. This was the first case of state management of forests in the world.
These local attempts gradually received more attention by the British government as the unregulated felling of trees continued unabated. In 1850, the British Association in Edinburgh formed a committee to study forest destruction at the behest of Dr. Hugh Cleghorn a pioneer in the nascent conservation movement.
He had become interested in forest conservation in Mysore in 1847 and gave several lectures at the Association on the failure of agriculture in India. These lectures influenced the government under Governor-General Lord Dalhousie to introduce the first permanent and large-scale forest conservation program in the world in 1855, a model that soon spread to other colonies, as well the United States. In the same year, Cleghorn organised the Madras Forest Department and in 1860 the Department banned the use shifting cultivation. Cleghorn's 1861 manual, "The forests and gardens of South India", became the definitive work on the subject and was widely used by forest assistants in the subcontinent. In 1861, the Forest Department extended its remit into the Punjab.
Sir Dietrich Brandis, a German forester, joined the British service in 1856 as superintendent of the teak forests of Pegu division in eastern Burma. During that time Burma's teak forests were controlled by militant Karen tribals. He introduced the "taungya" system, in which Karen villagers provided labor for clearing, planting and weeding teak plantations. After seven years in Burma, Brandis was appointed Inspector General of Forests in India, a position he served in for 20 years. He formulated new forest legislation and helped establish research and training institutions. The Imperial Forest School at Dehradun was founded by him.
Germans were prominent in the forestry administration of British India. As well as Brandis, Berthold Ribbentrop and Sir William P.D. Schlich brought new methods to Indian conservation, the latter becoming the Inspector-General in 1883 after Brandis stepped down. Schlich helped to establish the journal "Indian Forester" in 1874, and became the founding director of the first forestry school in England at Cooper's Hill in 1885. He authored the five-volume "Manual of Forestry" (1889–96) on silviculture, forest management, forest protection, and forest utilization, which became the standard and enduring textbook for forestry students.
The American movement received its inspiration from 19th century works that exalted the inherent value of nature, quite apart from human usage. Author Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862) made key philosophical contributions that exalted nature. Thoreau was interested in peoples' relationship with nature and studied this by living close to nature in a simple life. He published his experiences in the book "Walden," which argued that people should become intimately close with nature. The ideas of Sir Brandis, Sir William P.D. Schlich and Carl A. Schenck were also very influential - Gifford Pinchot, the first chief of the USDA Forest Service, relied heavily upon Brandis' advice for introducing professional forest management in the U.S. and on how to structure the Forest Service.
Both conservationists and preservationists appeared in political debates during the Progressive Era (the 1890s—early 1920s). There were three main positions. The laissez-faire position held that owners of private property—including lumber and mining companies, should be allowed to do anything they wished on their properties.
The conservationists, led by future President Theodore Roosevelt and his close ally George Bird Grinnell, were motivated by the wanton waste that was taking place at the hand of market forces, including logging and hunting. This practice resulted in placing a large number of North American game species on the edge of extinction. Roosevelt recognized that the laissez-faire approach of the U.S. Government was too wasteful and inefficient. In any case, they noted, most of the natural resources in the western states were already owned by the federal government. The best course of action, they argued, was a long-term plan devised by national experts to maximize the long-term economic benefits of natural resources. To accomplish the mission, Roosevelt and Grinnell formed the Boone and Crockett Club, whose members were some of the best minds and influential men of the day. Its contingency of conservationists, scientists, politicians, and intellectuals became Roosevelt's closest advisers during his march to preserve wildlife and habitat across North America. Preservationists, led by John Muir (1838–1914), argued that the conservation policies were not strong enough to protect the interest of the natural world because they continued to focus on the natural world as a source of economic production.
The debate between conservation and preservation reached its peak in the public debates over the construction of California's Hetch Hetchy dam in Yosemite National Park which supplies the water supply of San Francisco. Muir, leading the Sierra Club, declared that the valley must be preserved for the sake of its beauty: "No holier temple has ever been consecrated by the heart of man."
President Roosevelt put conservationist issue high on the national agenda. He worked with all the major figures of the movement, especially his chief advisor on the matter, Gifford Pinchot and was deeply committed to conserving natural resources. He encouraged the Newlands Reclamation Act of 1902 to promote federal construction of dams to irrigate small farms and placed 230 million acres (360,000 mi or 930,000 km) under federal protection. Roosevelt set aside more federal land for national parks and nature preserves than all of his predecessors combined.
Roosevelt established the United States Forest Service, signed into law the creation of five national parks, and signed the year 1906 Antiquities Act, under which he proclaimed 18 new national monuments. He also established the first 51 bird reserves, four game preserves, and 150 national forests, including Shoshone National Forest, the nation's first. The area of the United States that he placed under public protection totals approximately .
Gifford Pinchot had been appointed by McKinley as chief of Division of Forestry in the Department of Agriculture. In 1905, his department gained control of the national forest reserves. Pinchot promoted private use (for a fee) under federal supervision. In 1907, Roosevelt designated 16 million acres (65,000 km) of new national forests just minutes before a deadline.
In May 1908, Roosevelt sponsored the Conference of Governors held in the White House, with a focus on natural resources and their most efficient use. Roosevelt delivered the opening address: "Conservation as a National Duty".
In 1903 Roosevelt toured the Yosemite Valley with John Muir, who had a very different view of conservation, and tried to minimize commercial use of water resources and forests. Working through the Sierra Club he founded, Muir succeeded in 1905 in having Congress transfer the Mariposa Grove and Yosemite Valley to the federal government. While Muir wanted nature preserved for its own sake, Roosevelt subscribed to Pinchot's formulation, "to make the forest produce the largest amount of whatever crop or service will be most useful, and keep on producing it for generation after generation of men and trees."
Theodore Roosevelt's view on conservationism remained dominant for decades; - Franklin D. Roosevelt authorised the building of many large-scale dams and water projects, as well as the expansion of the National Forest System to buy out sub-marginal farms. In 1937, the Pittman–Robertson Federal Aid in Wildlife Restoration Act was signed into law, providing funding for state agencies to carry out their conservation efforts.
Environmental reemerged on the national agenda in 1970, with Republican Richard Nixon playing a major role, especially with his creation of the Environmental Protection Agency. The debates over the public lands and environmental politics played a supporting role in the decline of liberalism and the rise of modern environmentalism. Although Americans consistently rank environmental issues as "important", polling data indicates that in the voting booth voters rank the environmental issues low relative to other political concerns.
The growth of the Republican party's political power in the inland West (apart from the Pacific coast) was facilitated by the rise of popular opposition to public lands reform. Successful Democrats in the inland West and Alaska typically take more conservative positions on environmental issues than Democrats from the Coastal states. Conservatives drew on new organizational networks of think tanks, industry groups, and citizen-oriented organizations, and they began to deploy new strategies that affirmed the rights of individuals to their property, protection of extraction rights, to hunt and recreate, and to pursue happiness unencumbered by the federal government at the expense of resource conservation.
Although the conservation movement developed in Europe in the 18th century, Costa Rica as a country has been heralded its champion in the current times. Costa Rica hosts an astonishing number of species, given its size, having more animal and plant species than the US and Canada combined while being only 250 miles long and 150 miles wide. A widely accepted theory for the origin of this unusual density of species is the free mixing of species from both North and South America occurring on this "inter-oceanic" and "inter-continental" landscape. Preserving the natural environment of this fragile landscape, therefore, has drawn the attention of many international scholars.
Costa Rica has made conservation a national priority, and has been at the forefront of preserving its natural environment with over a quarter of its land designated as protected in some form, which is under the administrative control of SINAC (National System of Conservation Areas) a division of MINAE (Ministry of Environment, Energy and Telecommunications). SINAC has subdivided the country into various zones depending on the ecological diversity of that region - these zones are depicted in figure 1.
The country has used this ecological diversity to its economic advantage in the form of a thriving ecotourism industry, putting its commitment to nature, on display to visitors from across the globe. It is estimated that a record 2.6 million foreigners visited the country in 2015, almost half the population of Costa Rica itself. This tourism is facilitated by the fact that Costa Rica has a stable democracy and has a human development index of 0.776, the highest for any country in Latin America.
It is also the only country in the world that generates more than 99% of its electricity from renewable sources, relying on hydropower (78%), wind (10%), geothermal energy (10%), biomass and solar (1%). Critics have pointed out however, that in achieving this milestone, the country has built several dams (providing the bulk of its electricity) some of which have negatively impacted indigenous communities as well as the local flora and fauna.
"The Green Republic: A Conservation History of Costa Rica" by Sterling Evans is a renowned book that traces the development of the conservation movement in Costa Rica from the mid 1700s to present day. Evans mentions that when the Spaniards first arrived in the Americas, the landscape of Costa Rica did not appear particularly hospitable to them, compared to Guatemala or Mexico which seemed more reminiscent of the Spanish climate. Therefore, up until the 18th century, there was very little agricultural development in the region. It also lacked gold and other minerals that Christopher Columbus had hoped to find in these areas (hence the name, Rich Coast). As a result, the forest cover of Costa Rica was left more or less intact by the European settlement in the Americas.
By the mid-19th century, it was observed that the Costa Rican soil was particularly conducive to the growth of coffee. The global demand for coffee was growing rapidly, fueled by the demand from the working class in the industrializing west. The agricultural model adopted by coffee growers in Costa Rica was of small family owned farms known as "cafeteras," and they strove to be responsible stewards of the land. This approach was in stark contrast to the coffee monoculture that would've developed by adopting a purely capitalistic ideology. As a result, even though the coffee production increased substantially from 1850 to 1950, there wasn't large scale deforestation in Costa Rica until the 1950s, contrary to popular belief.
Some of the key points often overlooked in Costa Rica's conservation history between 1850 and 2000 according to Evans, are as follows:
1. President Bernardo Soto's government in 1888 began the process of attracting scholars from all over the world, particularly Switzerland and Germany in an effort to educate the locals about agricultural practices harmonious with the environment such that by 1914, Costa Rica became a leading scientific research center in tropical America
2. The establishment of the University of Costa Rica (UCR) in the 1940s was a landmark event, since the university acted as a springboard for research into tropical studies in Central America. At the helm of UCR were many influential academics such as Rafael Lucas Rodríguez and Alexander Skutch whose forward thinking publications served as a foundation for the future policy decisions. Skutch noted,
3. By 1950, Costa Rica became heavily reliant on coffee exports to Europe and the US. Around the same time, it was battling the dilemma between increasing agricultural output on one hand and protecting natural resources for future use on the other. In 1958, however, the world coffee prices plummeted, and Costa Rica's main source of income was shown to be very vulnerable to unpredictable forces. The government responded by promoting internal manufacturing and encouraging other industries. One such industry that emerged as a result, was the meat industry.
The Central American valley has been described as "perfect for cattle" by Carl Hoffman. Until 1970, the cattle raised in Costa Rica were primarily used for domestic consumption. Around 1970, the demand for beef from the US started showing an exponential growth due to the rise of the fast-food industry. This robust demand, coupled with the falling coffee prices gave the cattle industry a boost and forests started getting replaced with pastures. At its worst, Costa Rica was losing 4% of its forested area per year.
An alternative analysis by Julia Flagg within the framework of "process-tracing" reveals that after gaining independence in 1821 the isolation of Costa Rica from El Salvador, Honduras, Guatemala, and Nicaragua was critical in shaping its future and served as a divergence point in the evolution of the Central American nations. According to Mahoney “ . . . while all of the other provinces quickly became engulfed in warfare and political chaos, Costa Rica escaped such devastation and made tentative economic strides forward”. She also argues that the lack of a land-owning elite class in Costa Rica was instrumental in the development of good governance and maintaining a stable democracy in the country. The abolishing of the military in 1948 helped free up valuable resources that the government chose to invest into education and resource protection. The country entered into a positive reinforcement cycle thereafter, where new laws enacted drew international praise which helped solidify Costa Rica's position as global leader in resource protection .
To counter reducing forest area coverage in the 1980s, the Costa Rican government pioneered a scheme in 1997 known as "PES", which rewarded private land owners for keeping forests intact on their lands in lieu of the services provided by these forests to the environment and the economy as a whole. The World Bank, which provided the loan initially from 2000 to 2006 to support the payments incentivizing afforestation, viewed the program as a success overall despite some of its shortcomings.
It is estimated that the percentage of Costa Rican land covered by forests has gone up from around 20% in the 1980s to over 50% of the total area in 2013 - a growth of 250%. The program has also reduced the national carbon emissions by 11 million tons over a period of 6 years from 1999 to 2005. Indigenous communities and women in particular, have benefited due to this program. Buoyed by this success, the World Bank extended its support to the Costa Rican government's initiative by funding a new program titled "Mainstreaming Market-Based Instruments for Environmental Management". Over the years, many international agencies have pushed the national government to make the process of obtaining the payments easier so as to include more underdeveloped communities and cast a wider net for the program.
The green sea turtle is a globally endangered species and one of the most important nesting grounds for it is in Tortuguero, Costa Rica - the word Totuguero is derived from old Spanish maps meaning "place of turtles". After a steady global decline in its population due to overhunting for its meat and eggs, the Tortuguero National Park was established in 1975 in an effort to protect and save the turtle's breeding zone. A highly cited study by Tröeng and Rankin, investigated in 2004, the effects that this protective measure has had on the nesting trend. Although the population of turtles shows a large inter-annual variation thus making the task of determining the exact number very difficult, on an average, the trend has been positive over a long time scale of almost 35 years. The study illustrated that the enactment of three laws by the Costa Rican government was vital in stabilizing and increasing the population of these green sea turtles.
1. A ban on turtle and egg collection in 1963
2. A ban on the export of calipee (a part of the turtle's head that is considered a delicacy) in 1970 and finally,
3. The creation of the Tortuguero National Park in 1975 by the legislative assembly.
The lasting impact created by such forward thinking political decisions exhibits the necessity of meaningful governmental intervention.
Although they contribute only 0.15% to the world's greenhouse gas emissions, the governments of New Zealand and Costa Rica have independently expressed their intents to become carbon neutral in the next decade, with Costa Rica aiming to achieve an ambitious target of becoming carbon neutral by 2021. In doing so, it would become the world's first carbon neutral country, with the expectation of influencing policy decisions in other major countries. The proposal hopes to ignite the interest of private companies to engage in practices that reduce their emissions, for example, using more fuel efficient routes in transportation, relying more on digital documents than printed ones, adopting LED lighting in offices and using more efficient air conditioning systems.
The government's approach to attain zero net emissions has yielded positive results overall, but has been described as insufficient and lacking by experts because it neglects vehicular emissions which account for nearly 20% of the country's total emissions. The 2021 target has also been called "arbitrary" and "overambitious", since the efforts to reduce the country's reliance on imported oil will take much longer to take effect.
In 2006, a study by Sierra and Russman analyzed the additional conservation obtained through PES, over and above the baseline conservation rate. The study concluded that the PES program definitely affected land use decisions because land owners used the payments for other productive activities thus keeping the forest cover intact. However, they also concluded that this was not the most effective use of funds because the majority of these forests would have remained intact even without the payments. The study suggested that it would a better strategy to engage in the protection of more critical habitats instead.
The jaguar is an endangered species and its habitat came under threat due to construction of the Reventazón Dam in the Reventazón valley. The Reventazón dam is the largest dam in Central America with an installed capacity of 305.5 MW. The two financiers of the project, the World Bank and the Inter-American Development Bank, financed it on the condition that the construction of the dam by the state-run Costa Rican Electricity Institute (ICE) would "restore and maintain connectivity within the Barbilla-Destierro Corridor" which is critical to the survival of the jaguar.
Protestors of this project claim that the construction has failed to meet the expectations on the following issues:
1) The constructors did not completely clear vegetation from the areas that would be flooded due to this project. As a result, the uncleared vegetation in the flooded areas began to stagnate, creating the perfect conditions for the growth of the Water Hyacinth (an invasive species). The Water Hyacinth acted as a source for a large amount of carbon dioxide and methane emitted into the atmosphere.
2) Reforestation around the reservoir lake to assist in the migration of the jaguars has not been completed making their movement more difficult.
3) Due to the removal of a lot of material to facilitate construction, the neighboring Lancaster wetlands (home to more than 250 species of birds and 80 species of mammals, reptiles and amphibians) have been left in a state more susceptible to landslides.
What appears to be common in these criticisms is that the initiatives have moved things in the right direction overall, but the implementation hasn't been as good as promised.
The World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF) is an international non-governmental organization founded in 1961, working in the field of the wilderness preservation, and the reduction of human impact on the environment. It was formerly named the "World Wildlife Fund", which remains its official name in Canada and the United States.
WWF is the world's largest conservation organization with over five million supporters worldwide, working in more than 100 countries, supporting around 1,300 conservation and environmental projects. They have invested over $1 billion in more than 12,000 conservation initiatives since 1995. WWF is a foundation with 55% of funding from individuals and bequests, 19% from government sources (such as the World Bank, DFID, USAID) and 8% from corporations in 2014.
WWF aims to "stop the degradation of the planet's natural environment and to build a future in which humans live in harmony with nature." The Living Planet Report is published every two years by WWF since 1998; it is based on a Living Planet Index and ecological footprint calculation. In addition, WWF has launched several notable worldwide campaigns including Earth Hour and Debt-for-Nature Swap, and its current work is organized around these six areas: food, climate, freshwater, wildlife, forests, and oceans.
Evidence-based conservation is the application of evidence in conservation management actions and policy making. It is defined as systematically assessing scientific information from published, peer-reviewed publications and texts, practitioners' experiences, independent expert assessment, and local and indigenous knowledge on a specific conservation topic. This includes assessing the current effectiveness of different management interventions, threats and emerging problems and economic factors.
Evidence-based conservation was organized based on the observations that decision making in conservation was based on intuition and/ or practitioner experience often disregarding other forms of evidence of successes and failures (e.g. scientific information). This has led to costly and poor outcomes. Evidence-based conservation provides access to information that will support decision making through an evidence-based framework of “what works” in conservation
The evidence-based approach to conservation is based on evidence-based practice which started in medicine and later spread to nursing, education, psychology and other fields. It is part of the larger movement towards evidence-based practices.
Deforestation and overpopulation are issues affecting all regions of the world. The consequent destruction of wildlife habitat has prompted the creation of conservation groups in other countries, some founded by local hunters who have witnessed declining wildlife populations first hand. Also, it was highly important for the conservation movement to solve problems of living conditions in the cities and the overpopulation of such places.
The idea of incentive conservation is a modern one but its practice has clearly defended some of the sub Arctic wildernesses and the wildlife in those regions for thousands of years, especially by indigenous peoples such as the Evenk, Yakut, Sami, Inuit and Cree. The fur trade and hunting by these peoples have preserved these regions for thousands of years. Ironically, the pressure now upon them comes from non-renewable resources such as oil, sometimes to make synthetic clothing which is advocated as a humane substitute for fur. (See Raccoon dog for case study of the conservation of an animal through fur trade.) Similarly, in the case of the beaver, hunting and fur trade were thought to bring about the animal's demise, when in fact they were an integral part of its conservation. For many years children's books stated and still do, that the decline in the beaver population was due to the fur trade. In reality however, the decline in beaver numbers was because of habitat destruction and deforestation, as well as its continued persecution as a pest (it causes flooding). In Cree lands however, where the population valued the animal for meat and fur, it continued to thrive. The Inuit defend their relationship with the seal in response to outside critics.
The Izoceño-Guaraní of Santa Cruz Department, Bolivia is a tribe of hunters who were influential in establishing the Capitania del Alto y Bajo Isoso (CABI). CABI promotes economic growth and survival of the Izoceno people while discouraging the rapid destruction of habitat within Bolivia's Gran Chaco. They are responsible for the creation of the 34,000 square kilometre Kaa-Iya del Gran Chaco National Park and Integrated Management Area (KINP). The KINP protects the most biodiverse portion of the Gran Chaco, an ecoregion shared with Argentina, Paraguay and Brazil. In 1996, the Wildlife Conservation Society joined forces with CABI to institute wildlife and hunting monitoring programs in 23 Izoceño communities. The partnership combines traditional beliefs and local knowledge with the political and administrative tools needed to effectively manage habitats. The programs rely solely on voluntary participation by local hunters who perform self-monitoring techniques and keep records of their hunts. The information obtained by the hunters participating in the program has provided CABI with important data required to make educated decisions about the use of the land. Hunters have been willing participants in this program because of pride in their traditional activities, encouragement by their communities and expectations of benefits to the area.
In order to discourage illegal South African hunting parties and ensure future local use and sustainability, indigenous hunters in Botswana began lobbying for and implementing conservation practices in the 1960s. The Fauna Preservation Society of Ngamiland (FPS) was formed in 1962 by the husband and wife team: Robert Kay and June Kay, environmentalists working in conjunction with the Batawana tribes to preserve wildlife habitat.
The FPS promotes habitat conservation and provides local education for preservation of wildlife. Conservation initiatives were met with strong opposition from the Botswana government because of the monies tied to big-game hunting. In 1963, BaTawanga Chiefs and tribal hunter/adventurers in conjunction with the FPS founded Moremi National Park and Wildlife Refuge, the first area to be set aside by tribal people rather than governmental forces. Moremi National Park is home to a variety of wildlife, including lions, giraffes, elephants, buffalo, zebra, cheetahs and antelope, and covers an area of 3,000 square kilometers. Most of the groups involved with establishing this protected land were involved with hunting and were motivated by their personal observations of declining wildlife and habitat.
Usa be lit sometimes
| 45441 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=45441 |
Religion&Philosophy&Ethics | Utility
Within economics, the concept of utility is used to model worth or value. Its usage has evolved significantly over time. The term was introduced initially as a measure of pleasure or satisfaction within the theory of utilitarianism by moral philosophers such as Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mill. The term has been adapted and reapplied within neoclassical economics, which dominates modern economic theory, as a utility function that represents a consumer's preference ordering over a choice set. Utility has thus become a more abstract concept, that is not necessarily solely based on the satisfaction/pleasure received.
Consider a set of alternatives facing an individual, and over which the individual has a preference ordering. A utility function is able to represent those preferences if it is possible to assign a real number to each alternative, in such a way that "alternative a" is assigned a number greater than "alternative b" if, and only if, the individual prefers "alternative a" to "alternative b". In this situation an individual that selects the most preferred alternative available is necessarily also selecting the alternative that maximises the associated utility function. In general economic terms, a utility function measures preferences concerning a set of goods and services. Often, utility is correlated with words such as happiness, satisfaction, and welfare, and these are hard to measure mathematically. Thus, economists utilize consumption baskets of preferences in order to measure these abstract, non quantifiable ideas.
Gérard Debreu precisely defined the conditions required for a preference ordering to be representable by a utility function. For a finite set of alternatives these require only that the preference ordering is complete (so the individual is able to determine which of any two alternatives is preferred, or that they are equally preferred), and that the preference order is transitive.
Utility is usually applied by economists in such constructs as the indifference curve, which plot the combination of commodities that an individual or a society would accept to maintain a given level of satisfaction. Utility and indifference curves are used by economists to understand the underpinnings of demand curves, which are half of the supply and demand analysis that is used to analyze the workings of goods markets.
Individual utility and social utility can be construed as the value of a utility function and a social welfare function respectively. When coupled with production or commodity constraints, under some assumptions these functions can be used to analyze Pareto efficiency, such as illustrated by Edgeworth boxes in contract curves. Such efficiency is a central concept in welfare economics.
In finance, utility is applied to generate an individual's price for an asset called the indifference price. Utility functions are also related to risk measures, with the most common example being the entropic risk measure.
In the field of artificial intelligence, utility functions are used to convey the value of various outcomes to intelligent agents. This allows the agents to plan actions with the goal of maximizing the utility (or "value") of available choices.
It was recognized that utility could not be measured or observed directly, so instead economists devised a way to infer underlying relative utilities from observed choice. These 'revealed preferences', as they were named by Paul Samuelson, were revealed e.g. in people's willingness to pay: Utility is taken to be correlative to Desire or Want. It has been already argued that desires cannot be measured directly, but only indirectly, by the outward phenomena to which they give rise: and that in those cases with which economics is chiefly concerned the measure is found in the price which a person is willing to pay for the fulfillment or satisfaction of his desire.
There has been some controversy over the question whether the utility of a commodity can be measured or not. At one time, it was assumed that the consumer was able to say exactly how much utility he got from the commodity. The economists who made this assumption belonged to the 'cardinalist school' of economics. Today utility functions, expressing utility as a function of the amounts of the various goods consumed, are treated as either "cardinal" or "ordinal", depending on whether they are or are not interpreted as providing more information than simply the rank ordering of preferences over bundles of goods, such as information on the strength of preferences.
When cardinal utility is used, the magnitude of utility differences is treated as an ethically or behaviorally significant quantity. For example, suppose a cup of orange juice has utility of 120 utils, a cup of tea has a utility of 80 utils, and a cup of water has a utility of 40 utils. With cardinal utility, it can be concluded that the cup of orange juice is better than the cup of tea by exactly the same amount by which the cup of tea is better than the cup of water. Formally speaking, this means that if one has a cup of tea, she would be willing to take any bet with a probability, p, greater than .5 of getting a cup of juice, with a risk of getting a cup of water equal to 1-p. One cannot conclude, however, that the cup of tea is two thirds of the goodness of the cup of juice, because this conclusion would depend not only on magnitudes of utility differences, but also on the "zero" of utility. For example, if the "zero" of utility was located at -40, then a cup of orange juice would be 160 utils more than zero, a cup of tea 120 utils more than zero. Cardinal utility, to economics, can be seen as the assumption that utility can be measured through quantifiable characteristics, such as height, weight, temperature, etc.
Neoclassical economics has largely retreated from using cardinal utility functions as the basis of economic behavior. A notable exception is in the context of analyzing choice under conditions of risk (see below).
Sometimes cardinal utility is used to aggregate utilities across persons, to create a social welfare function.
When ordinal utilities are used, differences in utils (values taken on by the utility function) are treated as ethically or behaviorally meaningless: the utility index encodes a full behavioral ordering between members of a choice set, but tells nothing about the related "strength of preferences". In the above example, it would only be possible to say that juice is preferred to tea to water, but no more. Thus, ordinal utility utilizes comparisons, such as "preferred to", "no more", "less than", etc.
Ordinal utility functions are unique up to increasing monotone (or monotonic) transformations. For example, if a function formula_1 is taken as ordinal, it is equivalent to the function formula_2, because taking the 3rd power is an increasing monotone transformation (or monotonic transformation). This means that the ordinal preference induced by these functions is the same (although they are two different functions). In contrast, cardinal utilities are unique only up to increasing linear transformations, so if formula_1 is taken as cardinal, it is not equivalent to formula_2.
Although preferences are the conventional foundation of microeconomics, it is often convenient to represent preferences with a utility function and analyze human behavior indirectly with utility functions. Let "X" be the consumption set, the set of all mutually-exclusive baskets the consumer could conceivably consume. The consumer's utility function formula_5 ranks each package in the consumption set. If the consumer strictly prefers "x" to "y" or is indifferent between them, then formula_6.
For example, suppose a consumer's consumption set is "X" = {nothing, 1 apple,1 orange, 1 apple and 1 orange, 2 apples, 2 oranges}, and its utility function is "u"(nothing) = 0, "u"(1 apple) = 1, "u"(1 orange) = 2, "u"(1 apple and 1 orange) = 4, "u"(2 apples) = 2 and "u"(2 oranges) = 3. Then this consumer prefers 1 orange to 1 apple, but prefers one of each to 2 oranges.
In micro-economic models, there are usually a finite set of L commodities, and a consumer may consume an arbitrary amount of each commodity. This gives a consumption set of formula_7, and each package formula_8 is a vector containing the amounts of each commodity. In the previous example, we might say there are two commodities: apples and oranges. If we say apples is the first commodity, and oranges the second, then the consumption set formula_9 and "u"(0, 0) = 0, "u"(1, 0) = 1, "u"(0, 1) = 2, "u"(1, 1) = 4, "u"(2, 0) = 2, "u"(0, 2) = 3 as before. Note that for "u" to be a utility function on "X", it must be defined for every package in "X".
A utility function formula_5 represents a preference relation formula_11 on X iff for every formula_12, formula_13 implies formula_14. If u represents formula_11, then this implies formula_11 is complete and transitive, and hence rational.
In financial applications, e.g. portfolio optimization, an investor chooses financial portfolio which maximizes his/her own utility function, or, equivalently, minimizes his/her risk measure. For example, modern portfolio theory selects variance as a measure of risk; other popular theories are expected utility theory, and prospect theory. To determine specific utility function for any given investor, one could design a questionnaire procedure with questions in the form: How much would you pay for "x%" chance of getting "y"? Revealed preference theory suggests a more direct approach: observe a portfolio "X*" which an investor currently holds, and then find a utility function/risk measure such that "X*" becomes an optimal portfolio.
In order to simplify calculations, various alternative assumptions have been made concerning details of human preferences, and these imply various alternative utility functions such as:
Most utility functions used in modeling or theory are well-behaved. They are usually monotonic and quasi-concave. However, it is possible for preferences not to be representable by a utility function. An example is lexicographic preferences which are not continuous and cannot be represented by a continuous utility function.
The expected utility theory deals with the analysis of choices among risky projects with multiple (possibly multidimensional) outcomes.
The St. Petersburg paradox was first proposed by Nicholas Bernoulli in 1713 and solved by Daniel Bernoulli in 1738. D. Bernoulli argued that the paradox could be resolved if decision-makers displayed risk aversion and argued for a logarithmic cardinal utility function. (Analyses of international survey data in the 21st century have shown that insofar as utility represents happiness, as in utilitarianism, it is indeed proportional to log income.)
The first important use of the expected utility theory was that of John von Neumann and Oskar Morgenstern, who used the assumption of expected utility maximization in their formulation of game theory.
Von Neumann and Morgenstern addressed situations in which the outcomes of choices are not known with certainty, but have probabilities attached to them.
A notation for a "lottery" is as follows: if options A and B have probability "p" and 1 − "p" in the lottery, we write it as a linear combination:
More generally, for a lottery with many possible options:
where formula_19.
By making some reasonable assumptions about the way choices behave, von Neumann and Morgenstern showed that if an agent can choose between the lotteries, then this agent has a utility function such that the desirability of an arbitrary lottery can be calculated as a linear combination of the utilities of its parts, with the weights being their probabilities of occurring.
This is called the "expected utility theorem". The required assumptions are four axioms about the properties of the agent's preference relation over 'simple lotteries', which are lotteries with just two options. Writing formula_20 to mean 'A is weakly preferred to B' ('A is preferred at least as much as B'), the axioms are:
Axioms 3 and 4 enable us to decide about the relative utilities of two assets or lotteries.
In more formal language: A von Neumann–Morgenstern utility function is a function from choices to the real numbers:
which assigns a real number to every outcome in a way that captures the agent's preferences over simple lotteries. Under the four assumptions mentioned above, the agent will prefer a lottery formula_42 to a lottery formula_43 if and only if, for the utility function characterizing that agent, the expected utility of formula_42 is greater than the expected utility of formula_43:
Of all the axioms, independence is the most often discarded. A variety of generalized expected utility theories have arisen, most of which drop or relax the independence axiom.
Castagnoli and LiCalzi (1996) and Bordley and LiCalzi (2000) provided another interpretation for Von Neumann and Morgenstern's theory. Specifically for any utility function, there exists a hypothetical reference lottery with the expected utility of an arbitrary lottery being its probability of performing no worse than the reference lottery. Suppose success is defined as getting an outcome no worse than the outcome of the reference lottery. Then this mathematical equivalence means that maximizing expected utility is equivalent to maximizing the probability of success. In many contexts, this makes the concept of utility easier to justify and to apply. For example, a firm's utility might be the probability of meeting uncertain future customer expectations.
An indirect utility function gives the optimal attainable value of a given utility function, which depends on the prices of the goods and the income or wealth level that the individual possesses.
One use of the indirect utility concept is the notion of the utility of money. The (indirect) utility function for money is a nonlinear function that is bounded and asymmetric about the origin. The utility function is concave in the positive region, reflecting the phenomenon of diminishing marginal utility. The boundedness reflects the fact that beyond a certain point money ceases being useful at all, as the size of any economy at any point in time is itself bounded. The asymmetry about the origin reflects the fact that gaining and losing money can have radically different implications both for individuals and businesses. The non-linearity of the utility function for money has profound implications in decision making processes: in situations where outcomes of choices influence utility through gains or losses of money, which are the norm in most business settings, the optimal choice for a given decision depends on the possible outcomes of all other decisions in the same time-period.
Cambridge economist Joan Robinson famously criticized utility for being a circular concept: "Utility is the quality in commodities that makes individuals want to buy them, and the fact that individuals want to buy commodities shows that they have utility." Robinson also pointed out that because the theory assumes that preferences are fixed this means that utility is not a testable assumption. This is so because if we take changes in peoples' behavior in relation to a change in prices or a change in the underlying budget constraint we can never be sure to what extent the change in behavior was due to the change in price or budget constraint and how much was due to a change in preferences. This criticism is similar to that of the philosopher Hans Albert who argued that the ceteris paribus conditions on which the marginalist theory of demand rested rendered the theory itself an empty tautology and completely closed to experimental testing. In essence, demand and supply curve (theoretical line of quantity of a product which would have been offered or requested for given price) is purely ontological and could never been demonstrated empirically.
Another criticism comes from the assertion that neither cardinal nor ordinal utility is empirically observable in the real world. In the case of cardinal utility it is impossible to measure the level of satisfaction "quantitatively" when someone consumes or purchases an apple. In case of ordinal utility, it is impossible to determine what choices were made when someone purchases, for example, an orange. Any act would involve preference over a vast set of choices (such as apple, orange juice, other vegetable, vitamin C tablets, exercise, not purchasing, etc.).
Other questions of what arguments ought to enter into a utility function are difficult to answer, yet seem necessary to understanding utility. Whether people gain utility from coherence of wants, beliefs or a sense of duty is key to understanding their behavior in the utility organon. Likewise, choosing between alternatives is itself a process of determining what to consider as alternatives, a question of choice within uncertainty.
An evolutionary psychology perspective is that utility may be better viewed as due to preferences that maximized evolutionary fitness in the ancestral environment but not necessarily in the current one.
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Religion&Philosophy&Ethics | World peace
World peace, or peace on Earth, is the concept of an ideal state of happiness, freedom and peace within and among all people and nations on Planet Earth. This idea of world nonviolence is one motivation for people and nations to willingly cooperate, either voluntarily or by virtue of a system of governance that has this objective. Different cultures, religions, philosophies, and organizations have varying concepts on how such a state would come about.
Various religious and secular organizations have the stated aim of achieving world peace through addressing human rights, technology, education, engineering, medicine or diplomacy used as an end to all forms of fighting. Since 1945, the United Nations and the five permanent members of its Security Council (China, France, Russia, the United Kingdom and the United States) have operated under the aim to resolve conflicts without war or declarations of war. Nonetheless, nations have entered numerous military conflicts since then.
Many theories as to how world peace could be achieved have been proposed. Several of these are listed below.
The term is traced back to the Roman Emperor Hadrian (reigned AD 117 – 138) but the concept is as old as recorded history. In 1943, at the peak of World War II, the founder of the Paneuropean Union, Richard von Coudenhove-Kalergi, argued that after the war the United States is bound to take "command of the skies" to ensure the lasting world peace:
In fact, near the entrance to the headquarters of the SAC at Offutt Air Force Base stands a large sign with a SAC emblem and its motto: "Peace is our profession." The motto "was a staggering paradox that was also completely accurate". One SAC Bomber—Convair B-36—is called "Peacemaker" and one inter-continental missile-LGM-118-"Peacekeeper".
In 2016, former US Secretary of Defense Ash Carter envisaged that the rebalance to the Asia-Pacific will make the region "peaceful" through "strength":
Introduction to US National Security and Defense Strategies of 2018 states: The US force posture combined with the allies will "preserve peace through strength". The document proceeds to detail what "achieving peace through strength requires".
Associated with "peace through strength" are concepts of "preponderance of power" (as opposed to balance of power), hegemonic stability theory, "unipolar stability", and imperial peace (such as Pax Romana, Pax Britannica, or Pax Americana).
According to the dialectic materialist theory of Karl Marx, humanity under capitalism is divided in just two classes: the proletariat - who do not possess the means of production, and the bourgeoisie - who do possesses the means of production. Once the communist revolution occurs and consequently abolishes the private propriety of the means of production, humanity will not be divided and the tension created between these two classes will cease. Through a period called socialism, the rule of the proletariat will dissolve the last vestiges of capitalism, and will help to make the revolution worldwide. Once private propriety has been abolished worldwide, the state will no longer be needed to act as a monopoly of violence and will therefore disappear. Organizations of workers will take its place and manage the production of things, but no organization will have any military power, a police force, nor prisons.
The main principle of Marx's theory is that material conditions limit spiritual conditions. Should their material conditions allow it, people around the world will not be violent but respectful, peaceful and altruistic. In a state of communism, they will no longer need to live for survival, but for their own spiritual fulfillment.
Leon Trotsky argued that a proletariat world revolution would lead to world peace.
Proponents of the democratic peace theory claim that strong empirical evidence exists that democracies never or rarely wage war against each other.
There are, however, several wars between democracies that have taken place, historically.
In her essay "The Roots of War", Ayn Rand held that the major wars of history were started by the more controlled economies of the time against the freer ones and that capitalism gave mankind the longest period of peace in history—a period during which there were no wars involving the entire civilized world—from the end of the Napoleonic wars in 1815 to the outbreak of World War I in 1914, with the exceptions of the Franco-Prussian War (1870), the Spanish–American War (1898), and the American Civil War (1861–1865), which notably occurred in perhaps the most liberal economy in the world at the beginning of the industrial revolution.
Proponents of Cobdenism claim that by removing tariffs and creating international free trade wars would become impossible, because free trade prevents a nation from becoming self-sufficient, which is a requirement for long wars.
However, free trade does not prevent a nation from establishing some sort of emergency plan to become temporarily self-sufficient in case of war or that a nation could simply acquire what it needs from a different nation. A good example of this is World War I, during which both Britain and Germany became partially self-sufficient. This is particularly important because Germany had no plan for creating a war economy.
More generally, free trade—while not making wars impossible—can make wars, and restrictions on trade caused by wars, very costly for international companies with production, research, and sales in many different nations. Thus, a powerful lobby—unless there are only national companies—will argue against wars.
Mutual assured destruction is a doctrine of military strategy in which a full-scale use of nuclear weapons by two opposing sides would effectively result in the destruction of both belligerents. Proponents of the policy of mutual assured destruction during the Cold War attributed this to the increase in the lethality of war to the point where it no longer offers the possibility of a net gain for either side, thereby making wars pointless.
After World War II, the United Nations was established by the United Nations Charter to "save successive generations from the scourge of war which twice in our lifetime has brought untold sorrow to mankind" (Preamble). The Preamble to the United Nations Charter also aims to further the adoption of fundamental human rights, to respect obligations to sources of international law as well as to unite the strength of independent countries in order to maintain international peace and security. All treaties on international human rights law make reference to or consider "the principles proclaimed in the Charter of the United Nations, recognition of the inherent dignity and of the equal and inalienable rights of all members of the human family is the foundation of freedom, justice and "peace in the world".
Gordon B. Hinckley saw a trend in national politics by which city-states and nation-states have unified and suggests that the international arena will eventually follow suit. Many countries such as China, Italy, the United States, Australia, Germany, India and Britain have unified into single nation-states with others like the European Union following suit, suggesting that further globalization will bring about a world state.
World peace has been depicted as a consequence of local, self-determined behaviors that inhibit the institutionalization of power and ensuing violence. The solution is not so much based on an agreed agenda, or an investment in higher authority whether divine or political, but rather a self-organized network of mutually supportive mechanisms, resulting in a viable politico-economic social fabric. The principal technique for inducing convergence is thought experiment, namely backcasting, enabling anyone to participate no matter what cultural background, religious doctrine, political affiliation or age demographic. Similar collaborative mechanisms are emerging from the Internet around open-source projects, including Wikipedia, and the evolution of other social media.
Economic norms theory links economic conditions with institutions of governance and conflict, distinguishing personal clientelist economies from impersonal market-oriented ones, identifying the latter with permanent peace within and between nations.
Through most of human history, societies have been based on personal relations: individuals in groups know each other and exchange favors. Today in most lower-income societies hierarchies of groups distribute wealth based on personal relationships among group leaders, a process often linked with clientelism and corruption. Michael Mousseau argues that in this kind of socio-economy conflict is always present, latent or overt, because individuals depend on their groups for physical and economic security and are thus loyal to their groups rather than their states, and because groups are in a constant state of conflict over access to state coffers. Through processes of bounded rationality, people are conditioned towards strong in-group identities and are easily swayed to fear outsiders, psychological predispositions that make possible sectarian violence, genocide, and terrorism.
Market-oriented socio-economies are integrated not with personal ties but the impersonal force of the market where most individuals are economically dependent on trusting strangers in contracts enforced by the state. This creates loyalty to a state that enforces the rule of law and contracts impartially and reliably and provides equal protection in the freedom to contract – that is, liberal democracy. Wars cannot happen within or between nations with market-integrated economies because war requires the harming of others, and in these kinds of economies everyone is always economically better off when others in the market are also better off, not worse off. Rather than fight, citizens in market-oriented socio-economies care deeply about everyone's rights and welfare, so they demand economic growth at home and economic cooperation and human rights abroad. In fact, nations with market-oriented socio-economies tend to agree on global issues and not a single fatality has occurred in any dispute between them.
Economic norms theory should not be confused with classical liberal theory. The latter assumes that markets are natural and that freer markets promote wealth. In contrast, Economic norms theory shows how market-contracting is a learned norm, and state spending, regulation, and redistribution are necessary to ensure that almost everyone can participate in the "social market" economy, which is in everyone's interests. One proposed mechanism for world peace involves consumer purchasing of renewable and equitable local food and power sources involving artificial photosynthesis ushering in a period of social and ecological harmony known as the Sustainocene.
Nonkilling, popularized in the 2002 book "Nonkilling Global Political Science" by Glenn D. Paige, builds on nonviolence theory and encompasses the concepts of peace (absence of war and conditions conducive to war), nonviolence (psychological, physical, and structural), and ahimsa (noninjury in thought, word and deed). Nonkilling provides a distinct approach characterized by the measurability of its goals and the open-ended nature of its realization. it can be quantified and related to specific causes, for example by following a public health perspective (prevention, intervention and post-traumatic transformation toward the progressive eradication of killing).
The International Day of Peace, sometimes called World Peace Day, is observed annually on 21 September. It is dedicated to peace, and specifically the absence of war and violence, and can be celebrated by a temporary ceasefire in a combat zone. The International Day of Peace was established in 1981 by the United Nations General Assembly. Two decades later, in 2001, the General Assembly unanimously voted to designate the day as a day of preventing violence and a cease-fire. The celebration of this day is recognized by many nations and people. In 2013, for the first time, the day has been dedicated to peace education, i.e. by the key preventive means to reduce war sustainably.
Many religions and religious leaders have expressed a desire for an end to violence.
The central aim of the Bahá'í Faith is the establishment of the unity of the peoples of the world. Bahá'u'lláh, the founder of the Bahá'í Faith, stated in no uncertain terms, "the fundamental purpose animating the Faith of God and His Religion is to safeguard the interests and promote the unity of the human race ..." In his writings, Bahá'u'lláh described two distinct stages of world peace – a lesser peace and a most great peace.
The lesser peace is essentially a collective security agreement between the nations of the world. In this arrangement, nations agree to protect one another by rising up against an aggressor nation, should it seek the usurpation of territory or the destruction of its neighbors. The lesser peace is limited in scope and is concerned with the establishment of basic order and the universal recognition of national borders and the sovereignty of nations. Bahá'ís believe that the lesser peace is taking place largely through the operation of the Divine Will, and that Bahá'í influence on the process is relatively minor.
The most great peace is the eventual end goal of the lesser peace and is envisioned as a time of spiritual and social unity – a time when the peoples of the world genuinely identify with and care for one another, rather than simply tolerating one other's existence. The Bahá'ís view this process as taking place largely as a result of the spread of Bahá'í teachings, principles and practices throughout the world. The larger world peace process and its foundational elements are addressed in the document "The Promise of World Peace", written by the Universal House of Justice.
Many Buddhists believe that world peace can only be achieved if we first establish peace within our minds. The idea is that anger and other negative states of mind are the cause of wars and fighting. Buddhists believe people can live in peace and harmony only if we abandon negative emotions such as anger in our minds and cultivate positive emotions such as love and compassion. As with all Dharmic religions (Hinduism, Jainism, Buddhism and Sikhism), ahimsa (avoidance of violence) is a central concept.
Peace pagodas are monuments that are built to symbolize and inspire world peace and have been central to the peace movement throughout the years. These are typically of Buddhist origin, being built by the Japanese Buddhist organisation Nipponzan Myohoji. They exist around the world in cities such as London, Vienna, New Delhi, Tokyo and Lumbini.
The basic Christian ideal specifies that peace can only come by the Word and love of God, which is perfectly demonstrated in the life of Christ:
As christologically interpreted from , whereupon the "Word of the Lord" is established on the earth, the material human-political result will be 'nation not taking up sword against nation; nor will they train for war anymore'. Christian world peace necessitates the living of a proactive life replete with all good works in direct light of the Word of God. The details of such a life can be observed in the Gospels, especially the historically renowned Sermon on the Mount, where forgiving those who do wrong things against oneself is advocated among other pious precepts.
However, not all Christians expect a lasting world peace on this earth:
Many Christians believe that world peace is expected to be manifest upon the "new earth" that is promised in Christian scripture such as .
The Roman Catholic religious conception of "Consecration of Russia", related to the Church's high-priority Fátima Marian apparitions, promises a temporary "world peace" as a result of this process being fulfilled, though before the coming of the Antichrist. This period of temporary peace is called "the triumph of the Immaculate Heart".
Traditionally, Hinduism has adopted an ancient Sanskrit phrase "Vasudhaiva kutumbakam", which translates as "The world is one family". The essence of this concept is the observation that only base minds see dichotomies and divisions. The more we seek wisdom, the more we become inclusive and free our internal spirit from worldly illusions or "Maya". World peace is hence only achieved through internal means—by liberating ourselves from artificial boundaries that separate us all. As with all Dharmic religions (Hinduism, Jainism, Buddhism and Sikhism), ahimsa (avoidance of violence) is a central concept.
According to Islamic eschatology, the whole world will be united under the leadership of prophet Isa in his second coming. At that time love, justice and peace will be so abundant that the world will be in likeness of paradise.
The concept of "Tikkun olam" (Repairing the World) is central to modern Rabbinic Judaism. "Tikkun olam" is accomplished through various means, such as ritualistically performing God's commandments, charity and social justice, as well as through example persuading the rest of the world to behave morally. According to some views, "Tikkun olam" would result in the beginning of the Messianic Age. It has been said that in every generation, a person is born with the potential to be the spiritual Messiah. If the time is right for the Messianic Age within that person's lifetime, then that person will be the mashiach. But if that person dies before he completes the mission of the Messiah, then that person is not the Messiah (Mashiach).
Specifically, in Jewish messianism it is considered that at some future time a "Messiah" (literally "a King appointed by God") will rise up to bring all Jews back to the Land of Israel, followed by everlasting global peace and prosperity. This idea originates from passages in the Old Testament and the Talmud.
Compassion for all life, human and non-human, is central to Jainism. They have adopted the wordings of Lord Mahvira Jiyo aur Jeeno Do. Human life is valued as a unique, rare opportunity to reach enlightenment; to kill any person, no matter what crime he may have committed, is considered unimaginably abhorrent. It is a religion that requires monks and laity, from all its sects and traditions, to be vegetarian. Some Indian regions, such as Gujarat, have been strongly influenced by Jains and often the majority of the local Hindus of every denomination have also become vegetarian. Famous quote on world peace as per Jainism by a 19th-century Indian legend, Virchand Gandhi: "May peace rule the universe; may peace rule in kingdoms and empires; may peace rule in states and in the lands of the potentates; may peace rule in the house of friends and may peace also rule in the house of enemies." As with all Dharmic religions (Hinduism, Jainism, Buddhism and Sikhism), ahimsa (avoidance of violence) is a central concept.
Peace comes from God. Meditation, the means of communicating with God, is unfruitful without the noble character of a devotee, there can be no worship without performing good deeds. Guru Nanak stressed now "kirat karō": that a Sikh should balance work, worship, and charity, and should defend the rights of all creatures, and in particular, fellow human beings. They are encouraged to have a "chaṛdī kalā", or "optimistic" – "resilience", view of life. Sikh teachings also stress the concept of sharing—"vaṇḍ chakkō"—through the distribution of free food at Sikh gurdwaras ("laṅgar"), giving charitable donations, and working for the good of the community and others ("sēvā"). Sikhs believe that no matter what race, sex, or religion one is, all are equal in God's eyes. Men and women are equal and share the same rights, and women can lead in prayers. As with all Dharmic religions (Hinduism, Jainism, Buddhism and Sikhism), ahimsa (avoidance of violence) is a central concept.
A report in June 2015 on the Global Peace Index highlighted that the impact of violence on the global economy reached US$14.3 trillion. The report also found that the economic cost of violence is 13.4% of world GDP, equal to the total economic output of Brazil, Canada, France, Germany, Spain and the UK combined.
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Religion&Philosophy&Ethics | Social Darwinism
Social Darwinism is any of various theories of society which emerged in the United Kingdom, North America, and Western Europe in the 1870s, claiming to apply biological concepts of natural selection and survival of the fittest to sociology and politics. Social Darwinists argue that the strong should see their wealth and power increase while the weak should see their wealth and power decrease. Different social-Darwinist groups have differing views about which groups of people are considered to be "the strong" and which groups of people are considered to be "the weak", and they also hold different opinions about the precise mechanisms that should be used to reward strength and punish weakness. Many such views stress competition between individuals in "laissez-faire" capitalism, while others were used in support of authoritarianism, eugenics, racism, imperialism, fascism, Nazism, and struggle between national or racial groups.
As a scientific concept, Social Darwinism broadly declined in popularity following World War I and was largely discredited by the end of World War II, partially due to its association with Nazism and partially due to a growing scientific consensus that it was scientifically groundless. Later theories that were categorised as social Darwinism were generally described as such as a critique by their opponents; their proponents did not identify themselves by such a label. Creationists have often maintained that social Darwinism—leading to policies designed to reward the most competitive—is a logical consequence of "Darwinism" (the theory of natural selection in biology). Biologists and historians have stated that this is a fallacy of appeal to nature, since the theory of natural selection is merely intended as a description of a biological phenomenon and should not be taken to imply that this phenomenon is "good" or that it ought to be used as a moral guide in human society. While most scholars recognize some historical links between the popularisation of Darwin's theory and forms of social Darwinism, they also maintain that social Darwinism is not a necessary consequence of the principles of biological evolution.
Scholars debate the extent to which the various social Darwinist ideologies reflect Charles Darwin's own views on human social and economic issues. His writings have passages that can be interpreted as opposing aggressive individualism, while other passages appear to promote it. Darwin's early evolutionary views and his opposition to slavery ran counter to many of the claims that social Darwinists would eventually make about the mental capabilities of the poor and colonial indigenes. After the publication of "On the Origin of Species" in 1859, one strand of Darwins' followers, led by Sir John Lubbock, argued that natural selection ceased to have any noticeable effect on humans once organised societies had been formed. However, some scholars argue that Darwin's view gradually changed and came to incorporate views from other theorists such as Herbert Spencer. Spencer published his Lamarckian evolutionary ideas about society before Darwin first published his hypothesis in 1859, and both Spencer and Darwin promoted their own conceptions of moral values. Spencer supported "laissez-faire" capitalism on the basis of his Lamarckian belief that struggle for survival spurred self-improvement which could be inherited. An important proponent in Germany was Ernst Haeckel, who popularized Darwin's thought and his personal interpretation of it, and used it as well to contribute to a new creed, the monist movement.
The term Darwinism was coined by Thomas Henry Huxley in his March 1861 review of "On the Origin of Species", and by the 1870s it was used to describe a range of concepts of evolution or development, without any specific commitment to Charles Darwin's theory of natural selection.
The first use of the phrase "social Darwinism" was in Joseph Fisher's 1877 article on "The History of Landholding in Ireland" which was published in the "Transactions of the Royal Historical Society". Fisher was commenting on how a system for borrowing livestock which had been called "tenure" had led to the false impression that the early Irish had already evolved or developed land tenure;
Despite the fact that Social Darwinism bears Charles Darwin's name, it is also linked today with others, notably Herbert Spencer, Thomas Malthus, and Francis Galton, the founder of eugenics. In fact, Spencer was not described as a social Darwinist until the 1930s, long after his death. The social Darwinism term first appeared in Europe in 1880, and journalist Emilie Gautier had coined the term with reference to a health conference in Berlin 1877. Around 1900 it was used by sociologists, some being opposed to the concept. The term was popularized in the United States in 1944 by the American historian Richard Hofstadter who used it in the ideological war effort against fascism to denote a reactionary creed which promoted competitive strife, racism and chauvinism. Hofstadter later also recognized (what he saw as) the influence of Darwinist and other evolutionary ideas upon those with collectivist views, enough to devise a term for the phenomenon, "Darwinist collectivism". Before Hofstadter's work the use of the term "social Darwinism" in English academic journals was quite rare. In fact,
Social Darwinism has many definitions, and some of them are incompatible with each other. As such, social Darwinism has been criticized for being an inconsistent philosophy, which does not lead to any clear political conclusions. For example, "The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Politics" states:Part of the difficulty in establishing sensible and consistent usage is that commitment to the biology of natural selection and to 'survival of the fittest' entailed nothing uniform either for sociological method or for political doctrine. A 'social Darwinist' could just as well be a defender of laissez-faire as a defender of state socialism, just as much an imperialist as a domestic eugenist.
The term "Social Darwinism" has rarely been used by advocates of the supposed ideologies or ideas; instead it has almost always been used pejoratively by its opponents. The term draws upon the common meaning of "Darwinism", which includes a range of evolutionary views, but in the late 19th century was applied more specifically to natural selection as first advanced by Charles Darwin to explain speciation in populations of organisms. The process includes competition between individuals for limited resources, popularly but inaccurately described by the phrase "survival of the fittest", a term coined by sociologist Herbert Spencer.
Creationists have often maintained that Social Darwinism—leading to policies designed to reward the most competitive—is a logical consequence of "Darwinism" (the theory of natural selection in biology).
Biologists and historians have stated that this is a fallacy of appeal to nature and should not be taken to imply that this phenomenon ought to be used as a moral guide in human society. While there are historical links between the popularization of Darwin's theory and forms of social Darwinism, social Darwinism is not a necessary consequence of the principles of biological evolution.
While the term has been applied to the claim that Darwin's theory of evolution by natural selection can be used to understand the social endurance of a nation or country, Social Darwinism commonly refers to ideas that predate Darwin's publication of "On the Origin of Species". Others whose ideas are given the label include the 18th century clergyman Thomas Malthus, and Darwin's cousin Francis Galton who founded eugenics towards the end of the 19th century.
The expansion of the British Empire fitted in with the broader notion of social Darwinism used from the 1870s onwards to account for the remarkable and universal phenomenon of "the Anglo-Saxon overflowing his boundaries", as phrased by the late-Victorian sociologist Benjamin Kidd in "Social Evolution", published in 1894. The concept also proved useful to justify what was seen by some as the inevitable extermination of "the weaker races who disappear before the stronger" not so much "through the effects of … our vices upon them" as "what may be called the virtues of our civilisation." Winston Churchill, a political proponent of eugenics, maintained that if fewer ‘feebleminded’ individuals were born, less crime would take place.
Herbert Spencer's ideas, like those of evolutionary progressivism, stemmed from his reading of Thomas Malthus, and his later theories were influenced by those of Darwin. However, Spencer's major work, "Progress: Its Law and Cause" (1857), was released two years before the publication of Darwin's "On the Origin of Species", and "First Principles" was printed in 1860.
In "The Social Organism" (1860), Spencer compares society to a living organism and argues that, just as biological organisms evolve through natural selection, society evolves and increases in complexity through analogous processes.
In many ways, Spencer's theory of cosmic evolution has much more in common with the works of Lamarck and Auguste Comte's positivism than with Darwin's.
Jeff Riggenbach argues that Spencer's view was that culture and education made a sort of Lamarckism possible and notes that Herbert Spencer was a proponent of private charity. However, the legacy of his social Darwinism was less than charitable.
Spencer's work also served to renew interest in the work of Malthus. While Malthus's work does not itself qualify as social Darwinism, his 1798 work "An Essay on the Principle of Population", was incredibly popular and widely read by social Darwinists. In that book, for example, the author argued that as an increasing population would normally outgrow its food supply, this would result in the starvation of the weakest and a Malthusian catastrophe.
According to Michael Ruse, Darwin read Malthus' famous "Essay on a Principle of Population" in 1838, four years after Malthus' death. Malthus himself anticipated the social Darwinists in suggesting that charity could exacerbate social problems.
Another of these social interpretations of Darwin's biological views, later known as eugenics, was put forth by Darwin's cousin, Francis Galton, in 1865 and 1869. Galton argued that just as physical traits were clearly inherited among generations of people, the same could be said for mental qualities (genius and talent). Galton argued that social morals needed to change so that heredity was a conscious decision in order to avoid both the over-breeding by less fit members of society and the under-breeding of the more fit ones.
In Galton's view, social institutions such as welfare and insane asylums were allowing inferior humans to survive and reproduce at levels faster than the more "superior" humans in respectable society, and if corrections were not soon taken, society would be awash with "inferiors". Darwin read his cousin's work with interest, and devoted sections of "Descent of Man" to discussion of Galton's theories. Neither Galton nor Darwin, though, advocated any eugenic policies restricting reproduction, due to their Whiggish distrust of government.
Friedrich Nietzsche's philosophy addressed the question of artificial selection, yet Nietzsche's principles did not concur with Darwinian theories of natural selection. Nietzsche's point of view on sickness and health, in particular, opposed him to the concept of biological adaptation as forged by Spencer's "fitness". Nietzsche criticized Haeckel, Spencer, and Darwin, sometimes under the same banner by maintaining that in specific cases, sickness was necessary and even helpful. Thus, he wrote:
Wherever progress is to ensue, deviating natures are of greatest importance. Every progress of the whole must be preceded by a partial weakening. The strongest natures retain the type, the weaker ones help to advance it.
Something similar also happens in the individual. There is rarely a degeneration, a truncation, or even a vice or any physical or moral loss without an advantage somewhere else. In a warlike and restless clan, for example, the sicklier man may have occasion to be alone, and may therefore become quieter and wiser; the one-eyed man will have one eye the stronger; the blind man will see deeper inwardly, and certainly hear better. To this extent, the famous theory of the survival of the fittest does not seem to me to be the only viewpoint from which to explain the progress of strengthening of a man or of a race.
Ernst Haeckel's recapitulation theory was not Darwinism, but rather attempted to combine the ideas of Goethe, Lamarck and Darwin. It was adopted by emerging social sciences to support the concept that non-European societies were "primitive", in an early stage of development towards the European ideal, but since then it has been heavily refuted on many fronts. Haeckel's works led to the formation of the Monist League in 1904 with many prominent citizens among its members, including the Nobel Prize winner Wilhelm Ostwald.
The simpler aspects of social Darwinism followed the earlier Malthusian ideas that humans, especially males, require competition in their lives in order to survive in the future. Further, the poor should have to provide for themselves and not be given any aid. However, amidst this climate, most social Darwinists of the early twentieth century actually supported better working conditions and salaries. Such measures would grant the poor a better chance to provide for themselves yet still distinguish those who are capable of succeeding from those who are poor out of laziness, weakness, or inferiority.
"Social Darwinism" was first described by Eduard Oscar Schmidt of the University of Strasbourg, reporting at a scientific and medical conference held in Munich in 1877. He "noted" how socialists, although opponents of Darwin's theory, used it to add force to their political arguments. Schmidt's essay first appeared in English in "Popular Science" in March 1879. There followed an anarchist tract published in Paris in 1880 entitled "Le darwinisme social" by Émile Gautier. However, the use of the term was very rare—at least in the English-speaking world (Hodgson, 2004)—until the American historian Richard Hofstadter published his influential "Social Darwinism in American Thought" (1944) during World War II.
Hypotheses of social evolution and cultural evolution were common in Europe. The Enlightenment thinkers who preceded Darwin, such as Hegel, often argued that societies progressed through stages of increasing development. Earlier thinkers also emphasized conflict as an inherent feature of social life. Thomas Hobbes's 17th century portrayal of the state of nature seems analogous to the competition for natural resources described by Darwin. Social Darwinism is distinct from other theories of social change because of the way it draws Darwin's distinctive ideas from the field of biology into social studies.
Darwin, unlike Hobbes, believed that this struggle for natural resources allowed individuals with certain physical and mental traits to succeed more frequently than others, and that these traits accumulated in the population over time, which under certain conditions could lead to the descendants being so different that they would be defined as a new species.
However, Darwin felt that "social instincts" such as "sympathy" and "moral sentiments" also evolved through natural selection, and that these resulted in the strengthening of societies in which they occurred, so much so that he wrote about it in "Descent of Man":
The following proposition seems to me in a high degree probable—namely, that any animal whatever, endowed with well-marked social instincts, the parental and filial affections being here included, would inevitably acquire a moral sense or conscience, as soon as its intellectual powers had become as well, or nearly as well developed, as in man. For, firstly, the social instincts lead an animal to take pleasure in the society of its fellows, to feel a certain amount of sympathy with them, and to perform various services for them.
Nazi Germany's justification for its aggression was regularly promoted in Nazi propaganda films depicting scenes such as beetles fighting in a lab setting to demonstrate the principles of "survival of the fittest" as depicted in "Alles Leben ist Kampf" (English translation: "All Life is Struggle"). Hitler often refused to intervene in the promotion of officers and staff members, preferring instead to have them fight amongst themselves to force the "stronger" person to prevail—"strength" referring to those social forces void of virtue or principle. Key proponents were Alfred Rosenberg, who was hanged later at Nuremberg. Such ideas also helped to advance euthanasia in Germany, especially Action T4, which led to the murder of mentally ill and disabled people in Germany.
The argument that Nazi ideology was strongly influenced by social Darwinist ideas is often found in historical and social science literature. For example, the philosopher and historian Hannah Arendt analysed the historical development from a politically indifferent scientific Darwinism via social Darwinist ethics to racist ideology.
By 1985, creationists were taking up the argument that Nazi ideology was directly influenced by Darwinian evolutionary theory.
Such claims have been presented by creationists such as Jonathan Sarfati. Intelligent design creationism supporters have promoted this position as well. For example, it is a theme in the work of Richard Weikart, who is a historian at California State University, Stanislaus, and a senior fellow for the Center for Science and Culture of the Discovery Institute.
It is also a main argument in the 2008 intelligent-design/creationist movie "". These claims are widely criticized. The Anti-Defamation League has rejected such attempts to link Darwin's ideas with Nazi atrocities, and has stated that "Using the Holocaust in order to tarnish those who promote the theory of evolution is outrageous and trivializes the complex factors that led to the mass extermination of European Jewry." Robert J. Richards describes the link as a myth that ignores far more obvious causes of Nazism - including the "pervasive anti-Semitic miasma created by Christian apologists" - and dismisses efforts to tie Darwin to Nazism as "crude lever" used by religious fundamentalists to try and reduce public support for Darwin's theories.
Similar criticisms are sometimes applied (or misapplied) to other political or scientific theories that resemble social Darwinism, for example criticisms leveled at evolutionary psychology. For example, a critical reviewer of Weikart's book writes that "(h)is historicization of the moral framework of evolutionary theory poses key issues for those in sociobiology and evolutionary psychology, not to mention bioethicists, who have recycled many of the suppositions that Weikart has traced."
Another example is recent scholarship that portrays Ernst Haeckel's Monist League as a mystical progenitor of the Völkisch movement and, ultimately, of the Nazi Party of Adolf Hitler. Scholars opposed to this interpretation, however, have pointed out that the Monists were freethinkers who opposed all forms of mysticism, and that their organizations were immediately banned following the Nazi takeover in 1933 because of their association with a wide variety of causes including feminism, pacifism, human rights, and early gay rights movements.
Spencer proved to be a popular figure in the 1880s primarily because his application of evolution to areas of human endeavor promoted an optimistic view of the future as inevitably becoming better. In the United States, writers and thinkers of the gilded age such as Edward L. Youmans, William Graham Sumner, John Fiske, John W. Burgess, and others developed theories of social evolution as a result of their exposure to the works of Darwin and Spencer.
In 1883, Sumner published a highly influential pamphlet entitled "What Social Classes Owe to Each Other", in which he insisted that the social classes owe each other nothing, synthesizing Darwin's findings with free enterprise Capitalism for his justification. According to Sumner, those who feel an obligation to provide assistance to those unequipped or under-equipped to compete for resources, will lead to a country in which the weak and inferior are encouraged to breed more like them, eventually dragging the country down. Sumner also believed that the best equipped to win the struggle for existence was the American businessman, and concluded that taxes and regulations serve as dangers to his survival. This pamphlet makes no mention of Darwinism, and only refers to Darwin in a statement on the meaning of liberty, that "There never has been any man, from the primitive barbarian up to a Humboldt or a Darwin, who could do as he had a mind to."
Sumner never fully embraced Darwinian ideas, and some contemporary historians do not believe that Sumner ever actually believed in social Darwinism. The great majority of American businessmen rejected the anti-philanthropic implications of the theory. Instead they gave millions to build schools, colleges, hospitals, art institutes, parks and many other institutions. Andrew Carnegie, who admired Spencer, was the leading philanthropist in the world (1890–1920), and a major leader against imperialism and warfare.
H. G. Wells was heavily influenced by Darwinist thoughts, and novelist Jack London wrote stories of survival that incorporated his views on social Darwinism. Film director Stanley Kubrick has been described as having held social Darwinist opinions.
Social Darwinism has influenced political, public health and social movements in Japan since the late 19th and early 20th century. Social Darwinism was originally brought to Japan through the works of Francis Galton and Ernst Haeckel as well as United States, British and French Lamarckian eugenic written studies of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Eugenism as a science was hotly debated at the beginning of the 20th century, in "Jinsei-Der Mensch", the first eugenics journal in the empire. As Japan sought to close ranks with the west, this practice was adopted wholesale along with colonialism and its justifications.
Social Darwinism was formally introduced to China through the translation by Yan Fu of Huxley's "Evolution and Ethics", in the course of an extensive series of translations of influential Western thought. Yan's translation strongly impacted Chinese scholars because he added national elements not found in the original. Yan Fu criticized Huxley from the perspective of Spencerian social Darwinism in his own annotations to the translation. He understood Spencer's sociology as "not merely analytical and descriptive, but prescriptive as well", and saw Spencer building on Darwin, whom Yan summarized thus:
By the 1920s, social Darwinism found expression in the promotion of eugenics by the Chinese sociologist Pan Guangdan.
When Chiang Kai-shek started the New Life movement in 1934, he
Social evolution theories in Germany gained large popularity in the 1860s and had a strong antiestablishment connotation first. Social Darwinism allowed people to counter the connection of "Thron und Altar", the intertwined establishment of clergy and nobility, and provided as well the idea of progressive change and evolution of society as a whole. Ernst Haeckel propagated both Darwinism as a part of natural history and as a suitable base for a modern Weltanschauung, a world view based on scientific reasoning in his Monist League. Friedrich von Hellwald had a strong role in popularizing it in Austria. Darwin's work served as a catalyst to popularize evolutionary thinking.
A sort of aristocratic turn, the use of the struggle for life as a base of Social Darwinism "sensu stricto" came up after 1900 with Alexander Tille's 1895 work Entwicklungsethik (Ethics of Evolution) which asked to move "from Darwin till Nietzsche". Further interpretations moved to ideologies propagating a racist and hierarchical society and provided ground for the later radical versions of Social Darwinism.
Social Darwinism came to play a major role in the ideology of Nazism, where it was combined with a similarly pseudo-scientific theory of racial hierarchy in order to identify the Germans as a part of what the Nazis regarded as an Aryan or Nordic master race. Nazi social Darwinist beliefs led them to retain business competition and private property as economic engines. Nazism likewise opposed social welfare based on a social Darwinist belief that the weak and feeble should perish. This association with Nazism, coupled with increasing recognition that it was scientifically unfounded, contributed to the broader rejection Social Darwinism after the end of World War II.
Social Darwinism has many definitions, and some of them are incompatible with each other. As such, social Darwinism has been criticized for being an inconsistent philosophy, which does not lead to any clear political conclusions. For example, "The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Politics" states:
Part of the difficulty in establishing sensible and consistent usage is that commitment to the biology of natural selection and to 'survival of the fittest' entailed nothing uniform either for sociological method or for political doctrine. A 'social Darwinist' could just as well be a defender of laissez-faire as a defender of state socialism, just as much an imperialist as a domestic eugenist.
Social Darwinism was predominantly found in laissez-faire societies where the prevailing view was that of an individualist order to society. As such, social Darwinism supposed that human progress would generally favor the most individualistic races, which were those perceived as stronger. A different form of social Darwinism was part of the ideological foundations of Nazism and other fascist movements. This form did not envision survival of the fittest within an individualist order of society, but rather advocated a type of racial and national struggle where the state directed human breeding through eugenics. Names such as "Darwinian collectivism" or "Reform Darwinism" have been suggested to describe these views, in order to differentiate them from the individualist type of social Darwinism.
As mentioned above, social Darwinism has often been linked to nationalism and imperialism. During the age of New Imperialism, the concepts of evolution justified the exploitation of "lesser breeds without the law" by "superior races". To elitists, strong nations were composed of white people who were successful at expanding their empires, and as such, these strong nations would survive in the struggle for dominance. With this attitude, Europeans, except for Christian missionaries, seldom adopted the customs and languages of local people under their empires.
Peter Kropotkin argued in his 1902 book "" that Darwin did not define the fittest as the strongest, or most clever, but recognized that the fittest could be those who cooperated with each other. In many animal societies, "struggle is replaced by co-operation".
It may be that at the outset Darwin himself was not fully aware of the generality of the factor which he first invoked for explaining one series only of facts relative to the accumulation of individual variations in incipient species. But he foresaw that the term [evolution] which he was introducing into science would lose its philosophical and its only true meaning if it were to be used in its narrow sense only—that of a struggle between separate individuals for the sheer means of existence. And at the very beginning of his memorable work he insisted upon the term being taken in its "large and metaphorical sense including dependence of one being on another, and including (which is more important) not only the life of the individual, but success in leaving progeny." [Quoting "Origin of Species," chap. iii, p. 62 of first edition.]
While he himself was chiefly using the term in its narrow sense for his own special purpose, he warned his followers against committing the error (which he seems once to have committed himself) of overrating its narrow meaning. In "The Descent of Man" he gave some powerful pages to illustrate its proper, wide sense. He pointed out how, in numberless animal societies, the struggle between separate individuals for the means of existence disappears, how struggle is replaced by co-operation, and how that substitution results in the development of intellectual and moral faculties which secure to the species the best conditions for survival. He intimated that in such cases the fittest are not the physically strongest, nor the cunningest, but those who learn to combine so as mutually to support each other, strong and weak alike, for the welfare of the community. "Those communities", he wrote, "which included the greatest number of the most sympathetic members would flourish best, and rear the greatest number of offspring" (2nd edit., p. 163). The term, which originated from the narrow Malthusian conception of competition between each and all, thus lost its narrowness in the mind of one who knew Nature.
Noam Chomsky discussed briefly Kropotkin's views in an 8 July 2011 YouTube video from Renegade Economist, in which he said Kropotkin argued
... the exact opposite [of Social Darwinism]. He argued that on Darwinian grounds, you would expect cooperation and mutual aid to develop leading towards community, workers' control and so on. Well, you know, he didn't prove his point. It's at least as well argued as Herbert Spencer is ...
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Religion&Philosophy&Ethics | Indifference curve
In economics, an indifference curve connects points on a graph representing different quantities of two goods, points between which a consumer is "indifferent". That is, any combinations of two products indicated by the curve will provide the consumer with equal levels of utility, and the consumer has no preference for one combination or bundle of goods over a different combination on the same curve. One can also refer to each point on the indifference curve as rendering the same level of utility (satisfaction) for the consumer. In other words, an indifference curve is the locus of various points showing different combinations of two goods providing equal utility to the consumer. Utility is then a device to represent preferences rather than something from which preferences come. The main use of indifference curves is in the representation of potentially observable demand patterns for individual consumers over commodity bundles.
There are infinitely many indifference curves: one passes through each combination. A collection of (selected) indifference curves, illustrated graphically, is referred to as an indifference map.
The theory of indifference curves was developed by Francis Ysidro Edgeworth, who explained in his 1881 book the mathematics needed for their drawing; later on, Vilfredo Pareto was the first author to actually draw these curves, in his 1906 book. The theory can be derived from William Stanley Jevons' ordinal utility theory, which posits that individuals can always rank any consumption bundles by order of preference.
A graph of indifference curves for several utility levels of an individual consumer is called an indifference map. Points yielding different utility levels are each associated with distinct indifference curves and these indifference curves on the indifference map are like contour lines on a topographical graph. Each point on the curve represents the same elevation. If you move "off" an indifference curve traveling in a northeast direction (assuming positive marginal utility for the goods) you are essentially climbing a mound of utility. The higher you go the greater the level of utility. The non-satiation requirement means that you will never reach the "top," or a "bliss point," a consumption bundle that is preferred to all others.
Indifference curves are typically represented to be:
It also implies that the commodities are good rather than bad. Examples of bad commodities can be disease, pollution etc. because we always desire less of such things.
Consumer theory uses indifference curves and budget constraints to generate consumer demand curves. For a single consumer, this is a relatively simple process. First, let one good be an example market e.g., carrots, and let the other be a composite of all other goods. Budget constraints give a straight line on the indifference map showing all the possible distributions between the two goods; the point of maximum utility is then the point at which an indifference curve is tangent to the budget line (illustrated). This follows from common sense: if the market values a good more than the household, the household will sell it; if the market values a good less than the household, the household will buy it. The process then continues until the market's and household's marginal rates of substitution are equal. Now, if the price of carrots were to change, and the price of all other goods were to remain constant, the gradient of the budget line would also change, leading to a different point of tangency and a different quantity demanded. These price / quantity combinations can then be used to deduce a full demand curve. A line connecting all points of tangency between the indifference curve and the budget constraint is called the expansion path.
In Figure 1, the consumer would rather be on "I" than "I", and would rather be on "I" than "I", but does not care where he/she is on a given indifference curve. The slope of an indifference curve (in absolute value), known by economists as the marginal rate of substitution, shows the rate at which consumers are willing to give up one good in exchange for more of the other good. For "most" goods the marginal rate of substitution is not constant so their indifference curves are curved. The curves are convex to the origin, describing the negative substitution effect. As price rises for a fixed money income, the consumer seeks the less expensive substitute at a lower indifference curve. The substitution effect is reinforced through the income effect of lower real income (Beattie-LaFrance). An example of a utility function that generates indifference curves of this kind is the Cobb–Douglas function formula_1. The negative slope of the indifference curve incorporates the willingness of the consumer to make trade offs.
If two goods are perfect substitutes then the indifference curves will have a constant slope since the consumer would be willing to switch between at a fixed ratio. The marginal rate of substitution between perfect substitutes is likewise constant. An example of a utility function that is associated with indifference curves like these would be formula_2.
If two goods are perfect complements then the indifference curves will be L-shaped. Examples of perfect complements include left shoes compared to right shoes: the consumer is no better off having several right shoes if she has only one left shoe - additional right shoes have zero marginal utility without more left shoes, so bundles of goods differing only in the number of right shoes they include - however many - are equally preferred. The marginal rate of substitution is either zero or infinite. An example of the type of utility function that has an indifference map like that above is the Leontief function: formula_3.
The different shapes of the curves imply different responses to a change in price as shown from demand analysis in consumer theory. The results will only be stated here. A price-budget-line change that kept a consumer in equilibrium on the same indifference curve:
Choice theory formally represents consumers by a preference relation, and use this representation to derive indifference curves showing combinations of equal preference to the consumer.
Let
In the language of the example above, the set formula_4 is made of combinations of apples and bananas. The symbol formula_5 is one such combination, such as 1 apple and 4 bananas and formula_6 is another combination such as 2 apples and 2 bananas.
A preference relation, denoted formula_11, is a binary relation define on the set formula_4.
The statement
is described as 'formula_5 is weakly preferred to formula_6.' That is, formula_5 is at least as good as formula_6 (in preference satisfaction).
The statement
is described as 'formula_5 is weakly preferred to formula_6, and formula_6 is weakly preferred to formula_5.' That is, one is "indifferent" to the choice of formula_5 or formula_6, meaning not that they are unwanted but that they are equally good in satisfying preferences.
The statement
is described as 'formula_5 is weakly preferred to formula_6, but formula_6 is not weakly preferred to formula_5.' One says that 'formula_5 is strictly preferred to formula_6.'
The preference relation formula_11 is complete if all pairs formula_33 can be ranked. The relation is a transitive relation if whenever formula_13 and formula_35 then formula_36.
For any element formula_37, the corresponding indifference curve, formula_38 is made up of all elements of formula_4 which are indifferent to formula_40. Formally,
formula_41.
In the example above, an element formula_5 of the set formula_4 is made of two numbers: The number of apples, call it formula_44 and the number of bananas, call it formula_45
In utility theory, the utility function of an agent is a function that ranks "all" pairs of consumption bundles by order of preference ("completeness") such that any set of three or more bundles forms a transitive relation. This means that for each bundle formula_46 there is a unique relation, formula_47, representing the utility (satisfaction) relation associated with formula_46. The relation formula_49 is called the utility function. The range of the function is a set of real numbers. The actual values of the function have no importance. Only the ranking of those values has content for the theory. More precisely, if formula_50, then the bundle formula_46 is described as at least as good as the bundle formula_52. If formula_53, the bundle formula_46 is described as strictly preferred to the bundle formula_52.
Consider a particular bundle formula_56 and take the total derivative of formula_47 about this point:
or, without loss of generality,
where formula_60 is the partial derivative of formula_47 with respect to its first argument, evaluated at formula_46. (Likewise for formula_63)
The indifference curve through formula_56 must deliver at each bundle on the curve the same utility level as bundle formula_56. That is, when preferences are represented by a utility function, the indifference curves are the level curves of the utility function. Therefore, if one is to change the quantity of formula_66 by formula_67, without moving off the indifference curve, one must also change the quantity of formula_68 by an amount formula_69 such that, in the end, there is no change in "U":
Thus, the ratio of marginal utilities gives the absolute value of the slope of the indifference curve at point formula_56. This ratio is called the marginal rate of substitution between formula_66 and formula_68.
If the utility function is of the form formula_75 then the marginal utility of formula_66 is formula_77 and the marginal utility of formula_68 is formula_79. The slope of the indifference curve is, therefore,
Observe that the slope does not depend on formula_66 or formula_68: the indifference curves are straight lines.
If the utility function is of the form formula_83 the marginal utility of formula_66 is formula_85 and the marginal utility of formula_68 is formula_87.Where formula_88. The slope of the indifference curve, and therefore the negative of the marginal rate of substitution, is then
A general CES (Constant Elasticity of Substitution) form is
where formula_91 and formula_92. (The Cobb–Douglas is a special case of the CES utility, with formula_93.) The marginal utilities are given by
and
Therefore, along an indifference curve,
These examples might be useful for modelling individual or aggregate demand.
As used in biology, the indifference curve is a model for how animals 'decide' whether to perform a particular behavior, based on changes in two variables which can increase in intensity, one along the x-axis and the other along the y-axis. For example, the x-axis may measure the quantity of food available while the y-axis measures the risk involved in obtaining it. The indifference curve is drawn to predict the animal's behavior at various levels of risk and food availability.
Indifference curves inherit the criticisms directed at utility more generally.
Herbert Hovenkamp (1991) has argued that the presence of an endowment effect has significant implications for law and economics, particularly in regard to welfare economics. He argues that the presence of an endowment effect indicates that a person has no indifference curve (see however Hanemann, 1991) rendering the neoclassical tools of welfare analysis useless, concluding that courts should instead use WTA as a measure of value. Fischel (1995) however, raises the counterpoint that using WTA as a measure of value would deter the development of a nation's infrastructure and economic growth.
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Religion&Philosophy&Ethics | Wisdom
Wisdom, sapience, or sagacity is the ability to think and act using knowledge, experience, understanding, common sense and insight. Wisdom is associated with attributes such as unbiased judgment, compassion, experiential self-knowledge, self-transcendence and non-attachment, and virtues such as ethics and benevolence.
Wisdom has been defined in many different ways, including several distinct approaches to assess the characteristics attributed to wisdom.
The "Oxford English Dictionary" defines wisdom as "Capacity of judging rightly in matters relating to life and conduct; soundness of judgement in the choice of means and ends; sometimes, less strictly, sound sense, esp. in practical affairs: opp. to folly;" also "Knowledge (esp. of a high or abstruse kind); enlightenment, learning, erudition." Charles Haddon Spurgeon defined wisdom as "the right use of knowledge". Robert I. Sutton and Andrew Hargadon defined the "attitude of wisdom" as "acting with knowledge while doubting what one knows". In social and psychological sciences, several distinct approaches to wisdom exist, with major advances made in the last two decades with respect to operationalization and measurement of wisdom as a psychological construct.
The ancient Greeks considered wisdom to be an important virtue, personified as the goddesses Metis and Athena. Metis was the first wife of Zeus, who, according to Hesiod's Theogony, had devoured her pregnant; Zeus earned the title of Mêtieta ("The Wise Counselor") after that, as Metis was the embodiment of wisdom, and he gave birth to Athena, who is said to have sprung from his head. Athena was portrayed as strong, fair, merciful, and chaste. Apollo was also considered a god of wisdom, designated as the conductor of the Muses ("Musagetes"), who were personifications of the sciences and of the inspired and poetic arts; According to Plato in his Cratylus, the name of Apollo could also mean ""Ballon"" (archer) and ""Omopoulon"" (unifier of poles [divine and earthly]), since this god was responsible for divine and true inspirations, thus considered an archer who was always right in healing and oracles: “he is an ever-darting archer”. Apollo was considered the god who prophesied through the priestesses (Pythia) in the Temple of Apollo (Delphi), where the aphorism “know thyself" ("gnōthi seauton") was inscribed (part of the wisdom of the Delphic maxims). He was contrasted with Hermes, who was related to the sciences and technical wisdom, and, in the first centuries after Christ, was associated with Thoth in an Egyptian syncretism, under the name Hermes Trimegistus. Greek tradition recorded the earliest introducers of wisdom in the Seven Sages of Greece.
To Socrates and Plato, philosophy was literally the love of wisdom (philo-sophia). This permeates Plato's dialogues; in "The Republic" the leaders of his proposed utopia are philosopher kings who understand the Form of the Good and possess the courage to act accordingly. Aristotle, in "Metaphysics", defined wisdom as understanding why things are a certain way (causality), which is deeper than merely knowing things are a certain way. He was the first to make the distinction between "phronesis" and "sophia".
According to Plato and Xenophon, the Pythia of the Delphic Oracle answered the question "who is the wisest man in Greece?" by stating Socrates was the wisest. According to Plato's "Apology", Socrates decided to investigate the people who might be considered wiser than him, concluding they lacked true knowledge:
Thus it became popularly immortalized in the phrase "I know that I know nothing" that it is wise to recognize one's own ignorance and to value epistemic humility.
The ancient Romans also valued wisdom which was personified in Minerva, or Pallas. She also represents skillful knowledge and the virtues, especially chastity. Her symbol was the owl which is still a popular representation of wisdom, because it can see in darkness. She was said to be born from Jupiter's forehead.
Wisdom is also important within Christianity. Jesus emphasized it. Paul the Apostle, in his first epistle to the Corinthians, argued that there is both secular and divine wisdom, urging Christians to pursue the latter. Prudence, which is intimately related to wisdom, became one of the four cardinal virtues of Catholicism. The Christian philosopher Thomas Aquinas considered wisdom to be the "father" (i.e. the cause, measure, and form) of all virtues.
In Buddhist traditions, developing wisdom plays a central role where comprehensive guidance on how to develop wisdom is provided. In the Inuit tradition, developing wisdom was one of the aims of teaching. An Inuit Elder said that a person became wise when they could see what needed to be done and did it successfully without being told what to do.
In many cultures, the name for third molars, which are the last teeth to grow, is etymologically linked with wisdom, e.g., as in the English "wisdom tooth." It has its nickname originated from the classical tradition, which in the Hippocratic writings has already been called "sóphronistér" (in Greek, related to the meaning of moderation or teaching a lesson), and in Latin "dens sapientiae" (wisdom tooth), since they appear at the age of maturity in late adolescence and early adulthood.
Public schools in the US have an approach to character education. Eighteenth century thinkers such as Benjamin Franklin, referred to this as training wisdom and virtue. Traditionally, schools share the responsibility to build character and wisdom along with parents and the community.
Nicholas Maxwell, a contemporary philosopher in the United Kingdom, advocates that academia ought to alter its focus from the acquisition of knowledge to seeking and promoting wisdom. This he defines as the capacity to realize what is of value in life, for oneself and others. He teaches that new knowledge and technological know-how increase our power to act. Without wisdom though, Maxwell claims this new knowledge may cause human harm as well as human good.
Psychologists have begun to gather data on commonly held beliefs or folk theories about wisdom. Initial analyses indicate that although "there is an overlap of the implicit theory of wisdom with intelligence, perceptiveness, spirituality and shrewdness, it is evident that wisdom is an expertise in dealing with difficult questions of life and adaptation to the complex requirements."
Such implicit theories stand in contrast to the explicit theories and empirical research on resulting psychological processes underlying wisdom.
Baltes and colleagues in "Wisdom: its structure and function in regulating lifespan successful development" defined wisdom as "the ability to deal with the contradictions of a specific situation and to assess the consequences of an action for themselves and for others. It is achieved when in a concrete situation, a balance between intrapersonal, inter- personal and institutional interests can be prepared". Balance itself appears to be a critical criterion of wisdom. Empirical research started to provide support to this idea, showing that wisdom-related reasoning is associated with achieving balance between intrapersonal and interpersonal interests when facing personal life challenges, and when setting goals for managing interpersonal conflicts.
Researchers in the field of positive psychology have defined wisdom as the coordination of "knowledge and experience" and "its deliberate use to improve well being." Under this definition, wisdom is further defined as a multidimensional construct with the following facets:
This theoretical model has not been tested empirically, with an exception of a broad link between wisdom-related reasoning and well-being.
Grossmann and colleagues have synthesized prior psychological literature, indicating that in the face of ill-defined life situations wisdom involves certain cognitive processes affording unbiased, sound judgment: (i) intellectual humility or recognition of limits of own knowledge; (ii) appreciation of perspectives broader than the issue at hand; (iii) sensitivity to the possibility of change in social relations; and (iv) compromise or integration of different perspectives. Importantly, Grossmann highlights the fundamental role of contextual factors, including the role of culture, experiences, and social situations for understanding, development, and propensity of showing wisdom, with implications for training and educational practice. This situated account of wisdom ushered a novel phase of wisdom scholarship, using rigorous evidence-based methods to understand contextual factors affording sound judgment. For instance, Grossmann and Kross have identified a phenomenon they called "the Solomon's paradox" - wiser reflections on other people's problems as compared to one's own. It is named after King Solomon, the third leader of the Jewish Kingdom, who has shown a great deal of wisdom when making judgments about other people's dilemmas but lacked insight when it came to important decisions in his own life.
Empirical scientists have also begun to focus on the role of emotions in wisdom. Most researchers would agree that emotions and emotion regulation would be key to effectively managing the kinds of complex and arousing situations that would most call for wisdom. However, much empirical research has focused on the cognitive or meta-cognitive aspects of wisdom, assuming that an ability to reason through difficult situations would be paramount. Thus, although emotions would likely play a role in determining how wisdom plays out in real events and on reflecting on past events, only recently has empirical evidence started to provide robust evidence on how and when different emotions improve or harm a person’s ability to deal wisely with complex events. One notable finding concerns the positive relationship between diversity of emotional experience and wise reasoning, irrespective of emotional intensity.
Measurement of wisdom often depends on researcher’s theoretical position about the nature of wisdom. A major distinction here concerning either viewing wisdom as a stable personality trait or rather as a context-bound process The former approach often capitalizes on single-shot questionnaires. However, recent studies indicated that such single-shot questionnaires produce biased responses., which is antithetical to the wisdom construct, and neglects the notion that wisdom is best understood in the contexts when it is most relevant, namely in complex life challenges. In contrast, the latter approach advocates for measuring wisdom-related features of cognition, motivation, and emotion on the level of a specific situation. Use of such state-level measures provides less biased responses as well as greater power in explaining meaningful psychological processes. Furthermore, a focus on the level of the situation has allowed wisdom researchers to develop a fuller understanding of the role of context itself for producing wisdom. Specifically, studies showed evidence of cross-cultural and within-cultural variability and systematic variability in reasoning wisely across contexts and in daily life.
Many, but not all, studies find that adults' self-ratings of perspective/wisdom do not depend on age. This belief stands in contrast to the popular notion that wisdom increases with age. The answer to the question of age-wisdom association depends on how one defines wisdom, and the methodological framework used to evaluate theoretical claims. Most recent work suggests that the answer to this question also depends on the degree of experience in a specific domain, with some contexts favoring older adults, others favoring younger adults, and some not differentiating age groups. Notably, rigorous longitudinal work is necessary to fully unpack the question of age-wisdom relationship and such work is still outstanding, with most studies relying on cross-sectional observations.
Sapience is closely related to the term ""sophia"" often defined as "transcendent wisdom", "ultimate reality", or the ultimate truth of things. Sapiential perspective of wisdom is said to lie in the heart of every religion, where it is often acquired through intuitive knowing. This type of wisdom is described as going beyond mere practical wisdom and includes self-knowledge, interconnectedness, conditioned origination of mind-states and other deeper understandings of subjective experience. This type of wisdom can also lead to the ability of an individual to act with appropriate judgement, a broad understanding of situations and greater appreciation/compassion towards other living beings.
The word "sapience" is derived from the Latin "sapientia", meaning "wisdom".
The corresponding verb "sapere" has the original meaning of "to taste", hence "to perceive, to discern" and "to know"; its present participle "sapiens" was chosen by Carl Linnaeus for the Latin binomial for the human species, "Homo sapiens".
In Mesopotamian religion and mythology, Enki, also known as Ea, was the God of wisdom and intelligence. Divine Wisdom allowed the provident designation of functions and the ordering of the cosmos, and it was achieved by humans in following me-s (in Sumerian, order, rite, righteousness), restoring the balance. In addition to hymns to Enki or Ea dating from the third millennium BC., there is amongst the clay tablets of Abu Salabikh from 2600 BC, considered as being the oldest dated texts, an "Hymn to Shamash", in which it is recorded written:
The concept of Logos or manifest word of the divine thought, a concept also present in the philosophy and hymns of Egypt and Ancient Greece (being central to the thinker Heraclitus), and substantial in the Abrahamic traditions, seems to have been derived from Mesopotamian culture.
Sia represents the personification of perception and thoughtfulness in the traditional mythology adhered to in Ancient Egypt. Thoth, married to Maat (in ancient Egyptian, meaning order, righteousness, truth), was also important and regarded as a national introducer of wisdom.
In the Avesta hymns traditionally attributed to Zoroaster, the Gathas, Ahura Mazda means "Lord" (Ahura) and "Wisdom" (Mazda), and it is the central deity who embodies goodness, being also called "Good Thought" (Vohu Manah). In Zoroastrianism in general, the order of the universe and morals is called Asha (in Avestan, truth, righteousness), which is determined by the designations of this omniscient Thought and also considered a deity emanating from Ahura (Amesha Spenta); it is related to another ahura deity, Spenta Mainyu (active Mentality). It says in Yazna 31:
The word wisdom (חכם) is mentioned 222 times in the Hebrew Bible. It was regarded as one of the highest virtues among the Israelites along with kindness (חסד) and justice (צדק). Both the books of Proverbs and Psalms urge readers to obtain and to increase in wisdom.
In the Hebrew Bible, wisdom is represented by Solomon, who asks God for wisdom in . Much of the Book of Proverbs, which is filled with wise sayings, is attributed to Solomon. In , the fear of the Lord is called the beginning of wisdom. In , there is also reference to wisdom personified in female form, "Wisdom calls aloud in the streets, she raises her voice in the marketplaces." In , this personified wisdom is described as being present with God before creation began and even taking part in creation itself.
The Talmud teaches that a wise person is a person who can foresee the future. "Nolad" is a Hebrew word for "future," but also the Hebrew word for "birth", so one rabbinic interpretation of the teaching is that a wise person is one who can foresee the consequences of his/her choices (i.e. can "see the future" that he/she "gives birth" to).
In Christian theology, "wisdom" (From Hebrew: "חכמה" transliteration: chokmâh pronounced: khok-maw', Greek: "Sophia", Latin: "Sapientia") describes an aspect of God, or the theological concept regarding the wisdom of God.
There is an oppositional element in Christian thought between secular wisdom and Godly wisdom. Paul the Apostle states that worldly wisdom thinks the claims of Christ to be foolishness. However, to those who are "on the path to salvation" Christ represents the wisdom of God. () Wisdom is considered one of the seven gifts of the Holy Spirit according to Anglican, Catholic, and Lutheran belief. gives an alternate list of nine virtues, among which wisdom is one.
The book of Proverbs in the Old Testament of the Bible primarily focuses on wisdom, and was primarily written by one of the wisest kings according to Jewish history, King Solomon. Proverbs is found in the Old Testament section of the Bible and gives direction on how to handle various aspects of life; one's relationship with God, marriage, dealing with finances, work, friendships and persevering in difficult situations faced in life.
Apart from Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, and James, other main books of wisdom in the Bible are Job, Psalms, and 1 and 2 Corinthians, which give lessons on gaining and using wisdom through difficult situations.
In the Indian traditions, wisdom can be called prajña or vijñana.
Developing wisdom is of central importance in Buddhist traditions, where the ultimate aim is often presented as “seeing things as they are” or as gaining a “penetrative understanding of all phenomena,” which in turn is described as ultimately leading to the “complete freedom from suffering.” In Buddhism, developing wisdom is accomplished through an understanding of what are known as the Four Noble Truths and by following the Noble Eightfold Path. This path lists mindfulness as one of eight required components for cultivating wisdom.
Buddhist scriptures teach that a wise person is usually endowed with good and maybe bodily conduct, and sometimes good verbal conduct, and good mental conduct.("AN 3:2") A wise person does actions that are unpleasant to do but give good results, and doesn’t do actions that are pleasant to do but give bad results ("AN 4:115"). Wisdom is the antidote to the self-chosen poison of ignorance. The Buddha has much to say on the subject of wisdom including:
To recover the original supreme wisdom of self-nature (Buddha-nature or Tathagata) covered by the self-imposed three dusty poisons (the kleshas: greed, anger, ignorance) Buddha taught to his students the threefold training by turning greed into generosity and discipline, anger into kindness and meditation, ignorance into wisdom. As the Sixth Patriarch of Chán Buddhism, Huineng, said in his Platform Sutra,"Mind without dispute is self-nature discipline, mind without disturbance is self-nature meditation, mind without ignorance is self-nature wisdom." In Mahayana and esoteric buddhist lineages, Mañjuśrī is considered as an embodiment of Buddha wisdom.
In Hinduism, wisdom is considered a state of mind and soul where a person achieves liberation.
The god of wisdom is Ganesha and the goddess of knowledge is Saraswati.
The Sanskrit verse to attain knowledge is:
Wisdom in Hinduism is knowing oneself as the truth, basis for the entire Creation, i.e., of "Shristi". In other words, wisdom simply means a person with Self-awareness as the one who witnesses the entire creation in all its facets and forms. Further it means realization that an individual through right conduct and right living over an unspecified period comes to realize their true relationship with the creation and the "Paramatma" who rules it.
The Arabic term corresponding to Hebrew "Chokmah" is "ḥikma".
The term occurs a number of times in the Quran, notably in Sura 2:269:
"He gives wisdom to whom He wills, and whoever has been given wisdom has certainly been given much good. And none will remember except those of understanding." ().
and Sura 22:46: "Have they not travelled in the land, and have they hearts wherewith to feel and ears wherewith to hear? For indeed it is not the eyes that grow blind, but it is the hearts, which are within the bosoms, that grow blind."
Sura 6: 151: "Say: "Come, I will rehearse what Allah (God) hath (really) prohibited you from": Join not anything as equal with Him; be good to your parents; kill not your children on a plea of want;― We provide sustenance for you and for them;― come not nigh to shameful deeds, whether open or secret; take not life, which Allah hath made sacred, except by way of justice and law: thus doth He command you, that ye may learn wisdom" ().
The sufi philosopher Ibn Arabi considers "al-Hakim" ("The Wise") as one of the names of the Creator. Wisdom and truth, considered divine attributes, were concepts related and valued in the Islamic sciences and philosophy since their beginnings, and the first Arab philosopher, Al-Kindi says at the beginning of his book:
The Buddhist term "Prajñā" was translated into Chinese as
According to the "Doctrine of the Mean", Confucius said:
"Love of learning is akin to wisdom. To practice with vigor is akin to humanity. To know to be shameful is akin to courage (zhi, ren, yong.. three of Mengzi's sprouts of virtue)."
Compare this with the Confucian classic "Great Learning", which begins with: "The Way of learning to be great consists in manifesting the clear character, loving the people, and abiding in the highest good." One can clearly see the correlation with the Roman virtue prudence, especially if one interprets "clear character" as "clear conscience". (From Chan's Sources of Chinese Philosophy).
In Taoism, wisdom is construed as adherence to the Three Treasures (Taoism): charity, simplicity, and humility.
"He who knows other men is discerning [智]; he who knows himself is intelligent [明]." (Tao Te Ching 33)
In Norse mythology, the god Odin is especially known for his wisdom, often acquired through various hardships and ordeals involving pain and self-sacrifice. In one instance he plucked out an eye and offered it to Mímir, guardian of the well of knowledge and wisdom, in return for a drink from the well.
In another famous account, Odin hanged himself for nine nights from Yggdrasil, the World Tree that unites all the realms of existence, suffering from hunger and thirst and finally wounding himself with a spear until he gained the knowledge of runes for use in casting powerful magic. He was also able to acquire the mead of poetry from the giants, a drink of which could grant the power of a scholar or poet, for the benefit of gods and mortals alike.
In Bahá'í scripture,
"The essence of wisdom is the fear of God, the dread of His scourge and punishment, and the apprehension of His justice and decree." Wisdom is seen as a light, that casts away darkness, and "its dictates must be observed under all circumstances". One may obtain knowledge and wisdom through God, his Word, and his Divine Manifestation and the source of all learning is the knowledge of God.
In the Star Wars universe, wisdom is valued in the narrative of the films, in which George Lucas figured issues of spirituality and morals, recurrent in mythological and philosophical themes; one of his inspirations was Joseph Campbell's The Hero of a Thousand Faces. Master Yoda is generally considered a popular figure of wisdom, evoking the image of an "Oriental Monk", and he is frequently quoted, analogously to Chinese thinkers or Eastern sages in general. Psychologist D. W. Kreger's book ""The Tao of Yoda"" adapts the wisdom of the Tao Te Ching in relation to Yoda's thinking. Knowledge is canonically considered one of the pillars of the Jedi, which is also cited in the non-canon book "The Jedi Path", and wisdom can serve as a tenet for Jediism. The Jedi Code also states: "Ignorance, yet knowledge." In a psychology populational study published by Grossmann and team in 2019, master Yoda is considered wiser than Spock, another fictional character (from the Star Trek series), due to his emodiversity trait, which was positively associated to wise reasoning in people: "Yoda embraces his emotions and aims to achieve a balance between them. Yoda is known to be emotionally expressive, to share a good joke with others, but also to recognize sorrow and his past mistakes".
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Religion&Philosophy&Ethics | Jeremy Bentham
Jeremy Bentham (; 15 February 1748 [O.S. 4 February 1747] – 6 June 1832) was an English philosopher, jurist, and social reformer regarded as the founder of modern utilitarianism.
Bentham defined as the "fundamental axiom" of his philosophy the principle that "it is the greatest happiness of the greatest number that is the measure of right and wrong." He became a leading theorist in Anglo-American philosophy of law, and a political radical whose ideas influenced the development of welfarism. He advocated individual and economic freedoms, the separation of church and state, freedom of expression, equal rights for women, the right to divorce, and (in an unpublished essay) the decriminalising of homosexual acts. He called for the abolition of slavery, capital punishment and physical punishment, including that of children. He has also become known as an early advocate of animal rights. Though strongly in favour of the extension of individual legal rights, he opposed the idea of natural law and natural rights (both of which are considered "divine" or "God-given" in origin), calling them "nonsense upon stilts". Bentham was also a sharp critic of legal fictions.
Bentham's students included his secretary and collaborator James Mill, the latter's son, John Stuart Mill, the legal philosopher John Austin, as well as Robert Owen, one of the founders of utopian socialism. He "had considerable influence on the reform of prisons, schools, poor laws, law courts, and Parliament itself."
On his death in 1832, Bentham left instructions for his body to be first dissected, and then to be permanently preserved as an "auto-icon" (or self-image), which would be his memorial. This was done, and the auto-icon is now on public display in the entrance of the Student Centre at University College London (UCL). Because of his arguments in favour of the general availability of education, he has been described as the "spiritual founder" of UCL. However, he played only a limited direct part in its foundation.
Bentham was born on 15 February 1748 in Houndsditch, London, to a wealthy family that supported the Tory party. He was reportedly a child prodigy: he was found as a toddler sitting at his father's desk reading a multi-volume history of England, and he began to study Latin at the age of three. He learnt to play the violin, and at the age of seven Bentham would perform sonatas by Handel during dinner parties. He had one surviving sibling, Samuel Bentham (1757–1831), with whom he was close.
He attended Westminster School; in 1760, at age 12, his father sent him to The Queen's College, Oxford, where he completed his bachelor's degree in 1763 and his master's degree in 1766. He trained as a lawyer and, though he never practised, was called to the bar in 1769. He became deeply frustrated with the complexity of English law, which he termed the "Demon of Chicane". When the American colonies published their Declaration of Independence in July 1776, the British government did not issue any official response but instead secretly commissioned London lawyer and pamphleteer John Lind to publish a rebuttal. His 130-page tract was distributed in the colonies and contained an essay titled "Short Review of the Declaration" written by Bentham, a friend of Lind, which attacked and mocked the Americans' political philosophy.
In 1786 and 1787, Bentham travelled to Krichev in White Russia (modern Belarus) to visit his brother, Samuel, who was engaged in managing various industrial and other projects for Prince Potemkin. It was Samuel (as Jeremy later repeatedly acknowledged) who conceived the basic idea of a circular building at the hub of a larger compound as a means of allowing a small number of managers to oversee the activities of a large and unskilled workforce.
Bentham began to develop this model, particularly as applicable to prisons, and outlined his ideas in a series of letters sent home to his father in England. He supplemented the supervisory principle with the idea of "contract management"; that is, an administration by contract as opposed to trust, where the director would have a pecuniary interest in lowering the average rate of mortality. The Panopticon was intended to be cheaper than the prisons of his time, as it required fewer staff; "Allow me to construct a prison on this model," Bentham requested to a Committee for the Reform of Criminal Law, "I will be the gaoler. You will see ... that the gaoler will have no salary—will cost nothing to the nation." As the watchmen cannot be seen, they need not be on duty at all times, effectively leaving the watching to the watched. According to Bentham's design, the prisoners would also be used as menial labour, walking on wheels to spin looms or run a water wheel. This would decrease the cost of the prison and give a possible source of income.
The ultimately abortive proposal for a panopticon prison to be built in England was one among his many proposals for legal and social reform. But Bentham spent some sixteen years of his life developing and refining his ideas for the building and hoped that the government would adopt the plan for a National Penitentiary appointing him as contractor-governor. Although the prison was never built, the concept had an important influence on later generations of thinkers. Twentieth-century French philosopher Michel Foucault argued that the panopticon was paradigmatic of several 19th-century "disciplinary" institutions. Bentham remained bitter throughout his later life about the rejection of the panopticon scheme, convinced that it had been thwarted by the King and an aristocratic elite. It was largely because of his sense of injustice and frustration that he developed his ideas of "sinister interest"—that is, of the vested interests of the powerful conspiring against a wider public interest—which underpinned many of his broader arguments for reform.
On his return to England from Russia, Bentham had commissioned drawings from an architect, Willey Reveley. In 1791, he published the material he had written as a book, although he continued to refine his proposals for many years to come. He had by now decided that he wanted to see the prison built: when finished, it would be managed by himself as contractor-governor, with the assistance of Samuel. After unsuccessful attempts to interest the authorities in Ireland and revolutionary France, he started trying to persuade the prime minister, William Pitt, to revive an earlier abandoned scheme for a National Penitentiary in England, this time to be built as a panopticon. He was eventually successful in winning over Pitt and his advisors, and in 1794 was paid £2,000 for preliminary work on the project.
The intended site was one that had been authorised (under an act of 1779) for the earlier Penitentiary, at Battersea Rise; but the new proposals ran into technical legal problems and objections from the local landowner, Earl Spencer. Other sites were considered, including one at Hanging Wood, near Woolwich, but all proved unsatisfactory. Eventually Bentham turned to a site at Tothill Fields, near Westminster. Although this was common land, with no landowner, there were a number of parties with interests in it, including Earl Grosvenor, who owned a house on an adjacent site and objected to the idea of a prison overlooking it. Again, therefore, the scheme ground to a halt. At this point, however, it became clear that a nearby site at Millbank, adjoining the Thames, was available for sale, and this time things ran more smoothly. Using government money, Bentham bought the land on behalf of the Crown for £12,000 in November 1799.
From his point of view, the site was far from ideal, being marshy, unhealthy, and too small. When he asked the government for more land and more money, however, the response was that he should build only a small-scale experimental prison—which he interpreted as meaning that there was little real commitment to the concept of the panopticon as a cornerstone of penal reform. Negotiations continued, but in 1801 Pitt resigned from office, and in 1803 the new Addington administration decided not to proceed with the project. Bentham was devastated: "They have murdered my best days."
Nevertheless, a few years later the government revived the idea of a National Penitentiary, and in 1811 and 1812 returned specifically to the idea of a panopticon. Bentham, now aged 63, was still willing to be governor. However, as it became clear that there was still no real commitment to the proposal, he abandoned hope, and instead turned his attentions to extracting financial compensation for his years of fruitless effort. His initial claim was for the enormous sum of nearly £700,000, but he eventually settled for the more modest (but still considerable) sum of £23,000. An Act of Parliament in 1812 transferred his title in the site to the Crown.
More successful was his cooperation with Patrick Colquhoun in tackling the corruption in the Pool of London. This resulted in the Thames Police Bill of 1798, which was passed in 1800. The bill created the Thames River Police, which was the first preventive police force in the country and was a precedent for Robert Peel's reforms 30 years later.
Bentham was in correspondence with many influential people. In the 1780s, for example, Bentham maintained a correspondence with the aging Adam Smith, in an unsuccessful attempt to convince Smith that interest rates should be allowed to freely float. As a result of his correspondence with Mirabeau and other leaders of the French Revolution, Bentham was declared an honorary citizen of France. He was an outspoken critic of the revolutionary discourse of natural rights and of the violence that arose after the Jacobins took power (1792). Between 1808 and 1810, he held a personal friendship with Latin American revolutionary Francisco de Miranda and paid visits to Miranda's Grafton Way house in London. He also developed links with José Cecilio del Valle.
Bentham contributed to a plan to found a new colony in South Australia: in 1831 a "Proposal to His Majesty's Government for founding a colony on the Southern Coast of Australia" was prepared under the auspices of Robert Gouger, Charles Grey, 2nd Earl Grey, Anthony Bacon and Bentham, but its ideas were considered too radical, and it was unable to attract the required investment.
In 1823, he co-founded "The Westminster Review" with James Mill as a journal for the "Philosophical Radicals"—a group of younger disciples through whom Bentham exerted considerable influence in British public life. One was John Bowring, to whom Bentham became devoted, describing their relationship as "son and father": he appointed Bowring political editor of "The Westminster Review" and eventually his literary executor. Another was Edwin Chadwick, who wrote on hygiene, sanitation and policing and was a major contributor to the Poor Law Amendment Act: Bentham employed Chadwick as a secretary and bequeathed him a large legacy.
An insight into his character is given in Michael St. John Packe's "The Life of John Stuart Mill":
A psychobiographical study by Philip Lucas and Anne Sheeran argues that he may have had Asperger's syndrome. Bentham was an atheist.
Bentham's ambition in life was to create a "Pannomion", a complete utilitarian code of law. He not only proposed many legal and social reforms, but also expounded an underlying moral principle on which they should be based. This philosophy of utilitarianism took for its "fundamental axiom", "it is the greatest happiness of the greatest number that is the measure of right and wrong"". Bentham claimed to have borrowed this concept from the writings of Joseph Priestley, although the closest that Priestley in fact came to expressing it was in the form "the good and happiness of the members, that is the majority of the members of any state, is the great standard by which every thing relating to that state must finally be determined".
The "greatest happiness principle", or the principle of utility, forms the cornerstone of all Bentham's thought. By "happiness", he understood a predominance of "pleasure" over "pain". He wrote in "The Principles of Morals and Legislation":
Bentham was a rare major figure in the history of philosophy to endorse psychological egoism.
Bentham was a determined opponent of religion. Crimmins observes: "Between 1809 and 1823 Jeremy Bentham carried out an exhaustive examination of religion with the declared aim of extirpating religious beliefs, even the idea of religion itself, from the minds of men."
Bentham suggested a procedure for estimating the moral status of any action, which he called the hedonistic or felicific calculus. Utilitarianism was revised and expanded by Bentham's student John Stuart Mill. Mill sharply criticized Bentham's view of human nature, which failed to recognize conscience as a human motive. Mill considered Bentham's view "to have done and to be doing very serious evil." In Mill's hands, "Benthamism" became a major element in the liberal conception of state policy objectives.
Bentham's critics have claimed that he undermined the foundation of a free society by rejecting natural rights. Historian Gertrude Himmelfarb wrote "The principle of the greatest happiness of the greatest number was as inimical to the idea of liberty as to the idea of rights."
In his exposition of the felicific calculus, Bentham proposed a classification of 12 pains and 14 pleasures, by which we might test the "happiness factor" of any action. Nonetheless, it should not be overlooked that Bentham's "hedonistic" theory (a term from J. J. C. Smart), unlike Mill's, is often criticised for lacking a principle of fairness embodied in a conception of justice. In "Bentham and the Common Law Tradition", Gerald J. Postema states: "No moral concept suffers more at Bentham's hand than the concept of justice. There is no sustained, mature analysis of the notion..." Thus, some critics object, it would be acceptable to torture one person if this would produce an amount of happiness in other people outweighing the unhappiness of the tortured individual. However, as P. J. Kelly argued in "Utilitarianism and Distributive Justice: Jeremy Bentham and the Civil Law", Bentham had a theory of justice that prevented such consequences. According to Kelly, for Bentham the law "provides the basic framework of social interaction by delimiting spheres of personal inviolability within which individuals can form and pursue their own conceptions of well-being". It provides security, a precondition for the formation of expectations. As the hedonic calculus shows "expectation utilities" to be much higher than natural ones, it follows that Bentham does not favour the sacrifice of a few to the benefit of the many. Law professor Alan Dershowitz has quoted Bentham to argue that torture should sometimes be permitted.
Bentham's "An Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation" focuses on the principle of utility and how this view of morality ties into legislative practices. His principle of utility regards "good" as that which produces the greatest amount of pleasure and the minimum amount of pain and "evil" as that which produces the most pain without the pleasure. This concept of pleasure and pain is defined by Bentham as physical as well as spiritual. Bentham writes about this principle as it manifests itself within the legislation of a society. He lays down a set of criteria for measuring the extent of pain or pleasure that a certain decision will create.
The criteria are divided into the categories of intensity, duration, certainty, proximity, productiveness, purity, and extent. Using these measurements, he reviews the concept of punishment and when it should be used as far as whether a punishment will create more pleasure or more pain for a society. He calls for legislators to determine whether punishment creates an even more evil offence. Instead of suppressing the evil acts, Bentham argues that certain unnecessary laws and punishments could ultimately lead to new and more dangerous vices than those being punished to begin with, and calls upon legislators to measure the pleasures and pains associated with any legislation and to form laws in order to create the greatest good for the greatest number. He argues that the concept of the individual pursuing his or her own happiness cannot be necessarily declared "right", because often these individual pursuits can lead to greater pain and less pleasure for a society as a whole. Therefore, the legislation of a society is vital to maintain the maximum pleasure and the minimum degree of pain for the greatest number of people.
Bentham's opinions about monetary economics were completely different from those of David Ricardo; however, they had some similarities to those of Henry Thornton. He focused on monetary expansion as a means of helping to create full employment. He was also aware of the relevance of forced saving, propensity to consume, the saving-investment relationship, and other matters that form the content of modern income and employment analysis. His monetary view was close to the fundamental concepts employed in his model of utilitarian decision making. His work is considered to be an early precursor of modern welfare economics.
Bentham stated that pleasures and pains can be ranked according to their value or "dimension" such as intensity, duration, certainty of a pleasure or a pain. He was concerned with maxima and minima of pleasures and pains; and they set a precedent for the future employment of the maximisation principle in the economics of the consumer, the firm and the search for an optimum in welfare economics.
Bentham advocated "Pauper Management" which involved the creation of a chain of large workhouses.
Bentham was the first person to be an aggressive advocate for the codification of "all" of the common law into a coherent set of statutes; he was actually the person who coined the verb "to codify" to refer to the process of drafting a legal code. He lobbied hard for the formation of codification commissions in both England and the United States, and went so far as to write to President James Madison in 1811 to volunteer to write a complete legal code for the young country. After he learned more about American law and realised that most of it was state-based, he promptly wrote to the governors of every single state with the same offer.
During his lifetime, Bentham's codification efforts were completely unsuccessful. Even today, they have been completely rejected by almost every common law jurisdiction, including England. However, his writings on the subject laid the foundation for the moderately successful codification work of David Dudley Field II in the United States a generation later.
Bentham is widely regarded as one of the earliest proponents of animal rights. He argued and believed that the ability to suffer, not the ability to reason, should be the benchmark, or what he called the "insuperable line". If reason alone were the criterion by which we judge who ought to have rights, human infants and adults with certain forms of disability might fall short, too. In 1789, alluding to the limited degree of legal protection afforded to slaves in the French West Indies by the Code Noir, he wrote:
Earlier in that paragraph, Bentham makes clear that he accepted that animals could be killed for food, or in defence of human life, provided that the animal was not made to suffer unnecessarily. Bentham did not object to medical experiments on animals, providing that the experiments had in mind a particular goal of benefit to humanity, and had a reasonable chance of achieving that goal. He wrote that otherwise he had a "decided and insuperable objection" to causing pain to animals, in part because of the harmful effects such practices might have on human beings. In a letter to the editor of the "Morning Chronicle" in March 1825, he wrote:
Bentham said that it was the placing of women in a legally inferior position that made him choose in 1759, at the age of eleven, the career of a reformist. Bentham spoke for a complete equality between the sexes, arguing in favour of women's suffrage, a woman's right to obtain a divorce, and a woman's right to hold political office.
Bentham nevertheless thought women inferior to men regarding such qualities as "strength of intellectual powers" and "firmness of mind".
The essay "Paederasty" ("Offences Against One's Self") (c. 1785) argued for the liberalisation of laws prohibiting homosexual sex. The essay remained unpublished during his lifetime for fear of offending public morality. Some of Bentham's writings on 'sexual non-conformity' were published for the first time in 1931, but "Paederasty" was not published until 1978. Bentham does not believe homosexual acts to be unnatural, describing them merely as "irregularities of the venereal appetite". The essay chastises the society of the time for making a disproportionate response to what Bentham appears to consider a largely private offence—public displays or forced acts being dealt with rightly by other laws. When the essay was published in the "Journal of Homosexuality" in 1978, the "Abstract" stated that Bentham's essay was the "first known argument for homosexual law reform in England".
For Bentham, transparency had moral value. For example, journalism puts power-holders under moral scrutiny. However, Bentham wanted such transparency to apply to everyone. This he describes by picturing the world as a gymnasium in which each "gesture, every turn of limb or feature, in those whose motions have a visible impact on the general happiness, will be noticed and marked down". He considered both surveillance and transparency to be useful ways of generating understanding and improvements for people's lives.
Bentham distinguished among fictional entities what he called "fabulous entities" like Prince Hamlet or a centaur, from what he termed "fictitious entities", or necessary objects of discourse, similar to Kant's categories, such as nature, custom, or the social contract.
Bentham is widely associated with the foundation in 1826 of London University (the institution that, in 1836, became University College London), though he was 78 years old when the University opened and played only an indirect role in its establishment. His direct involvement was limited to his buying a single £100 share in the new University, making him just one of over a thousand shareholders.
Bentham and his ideas can nonetheless be seen as having inspired several of the actual founders of the University. He strongly believed that education should be more widely available, particularly to those who were not wealthy or who did not belong to the established church; in Bentham's time, membership of the Church of England and the capacity to bear considerable expenses were required of students entering the Universities of Oxford and Cambridge. As the University of London was the first in England to admit all, regardless of race, creed or political belief, it was largely consistent with Bentham's vision. There is some evidence that, from the sidelines, he played a "more than passive part" in the planning discussions for the new institution, although it is also apparent that "his interest was greater than his influence". He failed in his efforts to see his disciple John Bowring appointed professor of English or History, but he did oversee the appointment of another pupil, John Austin, as the first professor of Jurisprudence in 1829.
The more direct associations between Bentham and UCL—the College's custody of his Auto-icon (see above) and of the majority of his surviving papers—postdate his death by some years: the papers were donated in 1849, and the Auto-icon in 1850. A large painting by Henry Tonks hanging in UCL's Flaxman Gallery depicts Bentham approving the plans of the new university, but it was executed in 1922 and the scene is entirely imaginary. Since 1959 (when the Bentham Committee was first established) UCL has hosted the Bentham Project, which is progressively publishing a definitive edition of Bentham's writings.
UCL now endeavours to acknowledge Bentham's influence on its foundation, while avoiding any suggestion of direct involvement, by describing him as its "spiritual founder".
Bentham was an obsessive writer and reviser, but was constitutionally incapable, except on rare occasions, of bringing his work to completion and publication. Most of what appeared in print in his lifetime (see list of published works online) was prepared for publication by others. Several of his works first appeared in French translation, prepared for the press by Étienne Dumont, for example, Theory of Legislation, Volume 2 (Principles of the Penal Code) 1840, Weeks, Jordan, & Company. Boston. Some made their first appearance in English in the 1820s as a result of back-translation from Dumont's 1802 collection (and redaction) of Bentham's writing on civil and penal legislation.
On his death, Bentham left manuscripts amounting to an estimated 30 million words, which are now largely held by UCL's Special Collections (c. 60,000 manuscript folios) and the British Library (c.15,000 folios).
John Bowring, the young radical writer who had been Bentham's intimate friend and disciple, was appointed his literary executor and charged with the task of preparing a collected edition of his works. This appeared in 11 volumes in 1838–1843. Bowring based much of his edition on previously published texts (including those of Dumont) rather than Bentham's own manuscripts, and elected not to publish Bentham's works on religion at all. The edition was described by the "Edinburgh Review" on first publication as "incomplete, incorrect and ill-arranged", and has since been repeatedly criticised both for its omissions and for errors of detail; while Bowring's memoir of Bentham's life included in volumes 10 and 11 was described by Sir Leslie Stephen as "one of the worst biographies in the language". Nevertheless, Bowring's remained the standard edition of most of Bentham's writings for over a century, and is still only partially superseded: it includes such interesting writings on international relations as Bentham's A Plan for an Universal and Perpetual Peace written 1786–89, which forms part IV of the Principles of International Law.
In 1952–1954, Werner Stark published a three-volume set, "Jeremy Bentham's Economic Writings", in which he attempted to bring together all of Bentham's writings on economic matters, including both published and unpublished material. Although a significant achievement, the work is considered by scholars to be flawed in many points of detail, and a new edition of the economic writings is currently in preparation by the Bentham Project.
In 1959, the Bentham Committee was established under the auspices of University College London with the aim of producing a definitive edition of Bentham's writings. It set up the Bentham Project to undertake the task, and the first volume in "The Collected Works of Jeremy Bentham" was published in 1968. The "Collected Works" are providing many unpublished works, as well as much-improved texts of works already published. To date, 31 volumes have appeared; the complete edition is projected to run to around seventy. The volume "Of Laws in General" (1970) was found to contain many errors and has been replaced by "Of the Limits of the Penal Branch of Jurisprudence" (2010) In June 2017, Volumes 1–5 were re-published in open access by UCL Press.
To assist in this task, the Bentham papers at UCL are being digitised by crowdsourcing their transcription. Transcribe Bentham is an award-winning crowdsourced manuscript transcription project, run by University College London's Bentham Project, in partnership with UCL's UCL Centre for Digital Humanities, UCL Library Services, UCL Learning and Media Services, the University of London Computer Centre, and the online community. The project was launched in September 2010 and is making freely available, via a specially designed transcription interface, digital images of UCL's vast Bentham Papers collection—which runs to some 60,000 manuscript folios—to engage the public and recruit volunteers to help transcribe the material. Volunteer-produced transcripts will contribute to the Bentham Project's production of the new edition of "The Collected Works of Jeremy Bentham", and will be uploaded to UCL's digital Bentham Papers repository, widening access to the collection for all and ensuring its long-term preservation. Manuscripts can be viewed and transcribed by signing-up for a transcriber account at the Transcription Desk, via the Transcribe Bentham website.
Free, flexible textual search of the full collection of Bentham Papers is now
possible through an experimental handwritten text image indexing and search system, developed by the PRHLT research center in the framework of the READ project.
Bentham died on 6 June 1832 aged 84 at his residence in Queen Square Place in Westminster, London, England. He had continued to write up to a month before his death, and had made careful preparations for the dissection of his body after death and its preservation as an auto-icon. As early as 1769, when Bentham was 21 years old, he made a will leaving his body for dissection to a family friend, the physician and chemist George Fordyce, whose daughter, Maria Sophia (1765–1858), married Jeremy's brother Samuel Bentham. A paper written in 1830, instructing Thomas Southwood Smith to create the auto-icon, was attached to his last will, dated 30 May 1832.
On 8 June 1832, two days after his death, invitations were distributed to a select group of friends, and on the following day at 3 p.m., Southwood Smith delivered a lengthy oration over Bentham's remains in the Webb Street School of Anatomy & Medicine in Southwark, London. The printed oration contains a frontispiece with an engraving of Bentham's body partly covered by a sheet.
Afterward, the skeleton and head were preserved and stored in a wooden cabinet called the "Auto-icon", with the skeleton padded out with hay and dressed in Bentham's clothes. Originally kept by Bentham's disciple, Thomas Southwood Smith, it was acquired by University College London in 1850. It is kept on public display at the main entrance of the UCL Student Centre. It was previously displayed at the end of the South Cloisters in the main building of the college until it was moved in 2020. Upon the retirement of Sir Malcolm Grant as provost of the College in 2013, however, the body was present at Grant's final council meeting.
As of 2013, this was the only time that the body of Bentham has been taken to a UCL council meeting. (There is a persistent myth that the body of Bentham is present at all council meetings.)
Bentham had intended the auto-icon to incorporate his actual head, mummified to resemble its appearance in life. Southwood Smith's experimental efforts at mummification, based on practices of the indigenous people of New Zealand and involving placing the head under an air pump over sulfuric acid and drawing off the fluids, although technically successful, left the head looking distastefully macabre, with dried and darkened skin stretched tautly over the skull. The auto-icon was therefore given a wax head, fitted with some of Bentham's own hair. The real head was displayed in the same case as the auto-icon for many years, but became the target of repeated student pranks. It was later locked away. In 2017, plans were announced to re-exhibit the head and at the same time obtain a DNA sample for sequencing with the goal of identifying genetic evidence of autism.
In 2020 the auto-icon was put into a new glass display case and moved to the entrance of UCL's new Student Centre on Gordon Square.
The Faculty of Laws at University College London occupies Bentham House, next to the main UCL campus.
Bentham's name was adopted by the Australian litigation funder IMF Limited to become Bentham IMF Limited on 28 November 2013, in recognition of Bentham being "among the first to support the utility of litigation funding".
| 46038 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=46038 |
Religion&Philosophy&Ethics | Violence
Violence is "the use of physical force so as to injure, abuse, damage, or destroy." Less conventional definitions are also used, such as the World Health Organization's definition of violence as "the intentional use of physical force or power, threatened or actual, against oneself, another person, or against a group or community, which either results in or has a high likelihood of resulting in injury, death, psychological harm, maldevelopment, or deprivation."
Internationally, violence resulted in the deaths of an estimated 1.28 million people in 2013 up from 1.13 million in 1990. Of the deaths in 2013, roughly 842,000 were attributed to self-harm (suicide), 405,000 to interpersonal violence, and 31,000 to collective violence (war) and legal intervention. In Africa, out of every 100,000 people, each year an estimated 60.9 die a violent death. For each single death due to violence, there are dozens of hospitalizations, hundreds of emergency department visits, and thousands of doctors' appointments. Furthermore, violence often has lifelong consequences for physical and mental health and social functioning and can slow economic and social development.
In 2013, assault by firearm was the leading cause of death due to interpersonal violence, with 180,000 such deaths estimated to have occurred. The same year, assault by sharp object resulted in roughly 114,000 deaths, with a remaining 110,000 deaths from personal violence being attributed to other causes.
Violence in many forms can be preventable. There is a strong relationship between levels of violence and modifiable factors in a country such as an concentrated (regional) poverty, income and gender inequality, the harmful use of alcohol, and the absence of safe, stable, and nurturing relationships between children and parents. Strategies addressing the underlying causes of violence can be relatively effective in preventing violence, although mental and physical health and individual responses, personalities, etc. have always been decisive factors in the formation of these behaviors.
The World Health Organization divides violence into three broad categories:
This initial categorization differentiates between violence a person inflicts upon himself or herself, violence inflicted by another individual or by a small group of individuals, and violence inflicted by larger groups such as states, organized political groups, militia groups and terrorist organizations. These three broad categories are each divided further to reflect more specific types of violence:
Alternatively, violence can primarily be classified as either instrumental or reactive / hostile.
Self-directed violence is subdivided into suicidal behaviour and self-abuse. The former includes suicidal thoughts, attempted suicides – also called "para suicide" or "deliberate self-injury" in some countries – and completed suicides. Self-abuse, in contrast, includes acts such as self-mutilation.
Collective violence is subdivided into structural violence and economic violence. Unlike the other two broad categories, the subcategories of collective violence suggest possible motives for violence committed by larger groups of individuals or by states. Collective violence that is committed to advance a particular social agenda includes, for example, crimes of hate committed by organized groups, terrorist acts and mob violence. Political violence includes war and related violent conflicts, state violence and similar acts carried out by larger groups. Economic violence includes attacks by larger groups motivated by economic gain – such as attacks carried out with the purpose of disrupting economic activity, denying access to essential services, or creating economic division and fragmentation. Clearly, acts committed by larger groups can have multiple motives.
This typology, while imperfect and far from being universally accepted, does provide a useful framework for understanding the complex patterns of violence taking place around the world, as well as violence in the everyday lives of individuals, families and communities. It also overcomes many of the limitations of other typologies by capturing the nature of violent acts, the relevance of the setting, the relationship between the perpetrator and the victim, and – in the case of collective violence – possible motivations for the violence. However, in both research and practice, the dividing lines between the different types of violence are not always so clear. State violence also involves upholding, forms of violence of a structural nature, such as poverty, through dismantling welfare, creating strict policies such as 'welfare to work', in order to cause further stimulation and disadvantage Poverty as a form of violence may involve oppressive policies that specifically target minority or low socio-economic groups. The 'war on drugs', for example, rather than increasing the health and well-being of at risk demographics, most often results in violence committed against these vulnerable demographics through incarceration, stigmatization and police brutality
War is a state of prolonged violent large-scale conflict involving two or more groups of people, usually under the auspices of government. It is the most extreme form of collective violence.
War is fought as a means of resolving territorial and other conflicts, as war of aggression to conquer territory or loot resources, in national self-defence or liberation, or to suppress attempts of part of the nation to secede from it. There are also ideological, religious and revolutionary wars.
Since the Industrial Revolution the lethality of modern warfare has grown. World War I casualties were over 40 million and World War II casualties were over 70 million.
Interpersonal violence is divided into two subcategories: Family and intimate partner violence – that is, violence largely between family members and intimate partners, usually, though not exclusively, taking place in the home. Community violence – violence between individuals who are unrelated, and who may or may not know each other, generally taking place outside the home. The former group includes forms of violence such as child abuse, intimate partner violence and abuse of the elderly. The latter includes youth violence, random acts of violence, rape or sexual assault by strangers, and violence in institutional settings such as schools, workplaces, prisons and nursing homes. When interpersonal violence occurs in families, its psychological consequences can affect parents, children, and their relationship in the short- and long-terms.
Child maltreatment is the abuse and neglect that occurs to children under 18 years of age. It includes all types of physical and/or emotional ill-treatment, sexual abuse, neglect, negligence and commercial or other child exploitation, which results in actual or potential harm to the child's health, survival, development or dignity in the context of a relationship of responsibility, trust, or power. Exposure to intimate partner violence is also sometimes included as a form of child maltreatment.
Child maltreatment is a global problem with serious lifelong consequences, which is, however, complex and difficult to study.
There are no reliable global estimates for the prevalence of child maltreatment. Data for many countries, especially low- and middle-income countries, are lacking. Current estimates vary widely depending on the country and the method of research used. Approximately 20% of women and 5–10% of men report being sexually abused as children, while 25–50% of all children report being physically abused.
Consequences of child maltreatment include impaired lifelong physical and mental health, and social and occupational functioning (e.g. school, job, and relationship difficulties). These can ultimately slow a country's economic and social development. Preventing child maltreatment before it starts is possible and requires a multisectoral approach. Effective prevention programmes support parents and teach positive parenting skills. Ongoing care of children and families can reduce the risk of maltreatment reoccurring and can minimize its consequences.
Following the World Health Organization, youth are defined as people between the ages of 10 and 29 years. Youth violence refers to violence occurring between youths, and includes acts that range from bullying and physical fighting, through more severe sexual and physical assault to homicide.
Worldwide some 250,000 homicides occur among youth 10–29 years of age each year, which is 41% of the total number of homicides globally each year ("Global Burden of Disease", World Health Organization, 2008). For each young person killed, 20-40 more sustain injuries requiring hospital treatment. Youth violence has a serious, often lifelong, impact on a person's psychological and social functioning. Youth violence greatly increases the costs of health, welfare and criminal justice services; reduces productivity; decreases the value of property; and generally undermines the fabric of society.
Prevention programmes shown to be effective or to have promise in reducing youth violence include life skills and social development programmes designed to help children and adolescents manage anger, resolve conflict, and develop the necessary social skills to solve problems; schools-based anti-bullying prevention programmes; and programmes to reduce access to alcohol, illegal drugs and guns. Also, given significant neighbourhood effects on youth violence, interventions involving relocating families to less poor environments have shown promising results. Similarly, urban renewal projects such as business improvement districts have shown a reduction in youth violence.
Different types of youth on youth violence include witnessing or being involved in physical, emotional and sexual abuse (e.g. physical attacks, bullying, rape), and violent acts like gang shootings and robberies. According to researchers in 2018, "More than half of children and adolescents living in cities have experienced some form of community violence." The violence "can also all take place under one roof, or in a given community or neighborhood and can happen at the same time or at different stages of life." Youth violence has immediate and long term adverse impact whether the individual was the recipient of the violence or a witness to it.
Youth violence impacts individuals, their families, and society. Victims can have lifelong injuries which means ongoing doctor and hospital visits, the cost of which quickly add up. Since the victims of youth-on-youth violence may not be able to attend school or work because of their physical and/or mental injuries, it is often up to their family members to take care of them, including paying their daily living expenses and medical bills. Their caretakers may have to give up their jobs or work reduced hours to provide help to the victim of violence. This causes a further burden on society because the victim and maybe even their caretakers have to obtain government assistance to help pay their bills. Recent research has found that psychological trauma during childhood can change a child's brain. "Trauma is known to physically affect the brain and the body which causes anxiety, rage, and the ability to concentrate. They can also have problems remembering, trusting, and forming relationships." Since the brain becomes used to violence it may stay continually in an alert state (similar to being stuck in the fight or flight mode). "Researchers claim that the youth who are exposed to violence may have emotional, social, and cognitive problems. They may have trouble controlling emotions, paying attention in school, withdraw from friends, or show signs of post-traumatic stress disorder".
It is important for youth exposed to violence to understand how their bodies may react so they can take positive steps to counteract any possible short- and long-term negative effects (e.g., poor concentration, feelings of depression, heightened levels of anxiety). By taking immediate steps to mitigate the effects of the trauma they've experienced, negative repercussions can be reduced or eliminated. As an initial step, the youths need to understand why they may be feeling a certain way and to understand how the violence they have experienced may be causing negative feelings and making them behave differently. Pursuing a greater awareness of their feelings, perceptions, and negative emotions is the first step that should be taken as part of recovering from the trauma they have experienced. “Neuroscience research shows that the only way we can change the way we feel is by becoming aware of our inner experience and learning to befriend what is going on inside ourselves”.
Some of the ways to combat the adverse effects of exposure to youth violence would be to try various mindfulness and movement activities, deep breathing exercises and other actions that enable youths to release their pent up emotions. Using these techniques will teach body awareness, reduce anxiety and nervousness, and reduce feelings of anger and annoyance. Over time these types of activities will help these younger victims of violence to have greater control over their feelings and behaviors and avoid unhealthy ways of coping. Another way to help trauma victims of youth violence is through the arts. This can be accomplished by giving them the opportunity to engage in drawing, painting, music, and singing which will give them an outlet to express themselves and their emotions in a positive way.
Youth who have experienced violence benefit from having a close relationship with one or more people. This is important because the trauma victims need to have people who are safe and trustworthy that they can relate and talk to about their horrible experiences. Some youth do not have adult figures at home or someone they can count on for guidance and comfort. Schools in bad neighborhoods where youth violence is prevalent should assign counselors to each student so that they receive regular guidance. In addition to counseling/therapy sessions and programs, it has been recommended that schools offer mentoring programs where students can interact with adults who can be a positive influence on them. Another way is to create more neighborhood programs to ensure that each child has a positive and stable place to go when school in not in session. Many children have benefited from formal organizations now which aim to help mentor and provide a safe environment for the youth especially those living in neighborhoods with higher rates of violence. This includes organizations such as Becoming a Man, CeaseFire Illinois, Chicago Area Project, Little Black Pearl, and Rainbow House". These programs are designed to help give the youth a safe place to go, stop the violence from occurring, offering counseling and mentoring to help stop the cycle of violence. If the youth do not have a safe place to go after school hours they will likely get into trouble, receive poor grades, drop out of school and use drugs and alcohol. The gangs look for youth who do not have positive influences in their life and need protection. This is why these programs are so important for the youth to have a safe environment rather than resorting to the streets. For example, Derek grew up amongst the violence in Chicago in the 1980s and was even a former gang leader. It took him thirty years in a gang and time in jail to realize he was on the wrong path. He created a boxing program called "Boxing Out Negativity" which provides youth in high crime areas a safe place to get out their anger and energy. It helps them in a positive way and keeps them off the street. With the help of programs to help victims of youth violence there is a greater opportunity for these youth to turn their lives around.
Intimate partner violence refers to behaviour in an intimate relationship that causes physical, sexual or psychological harm, including physical aggression, sexual coercion, psychological abuse and controlling behaviours.
Population-level surveys based on reports from victims provide the most accurate estimates of the prevalence of intimate partner violence and sexual violence in non-conflict settings. A study conducted by WHO in 10 mainly developing countries found that, among women aged 15 to 49 years, between 15% (Japan) and 70% (Ethiopia and Peru) of women reported physical and/or sexual violence by an intimate partner.
Intimate partner and sexual violence have serious short- and long-term physical, mental, sexual and reproductive health problems for victims and for their children, and lead to high social and economic costs. These include both fatal and non-fatal injuries, depression and post-traumatic stress disorder, unintended pregnancies, sexually transmitted infections, including HIV.
Factors associated with the perpetration and experiencing of intimate partner violence are low levels of education, history of violence as a perpetrator, a victim or a witness of parental violence, harmful use of alcohol, attitudes that are accepting of violence as well as marital discord and dissatisfaction. Factors associated only with perpetration of intimate partner violence are having multiple partners, and antisocial personality disorder.
A recent theory named "The Criminal Spin" suggests a mutual flywheel effect between partners that is manifested by an escalation in the violence. A violent spin may occur in any other forms of violence, but in Intimate partner violence the added value is the mutual spin, based on the unique situation and characteristics of intimate relationship.
The primary prevention strategy with the best evidence for effectiveness for intimate partner violence is school-based programming for adolescents to prevent violence within dating relationships. Evidence is emerging for the effectiveness of several other primary prevention strategies – those that: combine microfinance with gender equality training; promote communication and relationship skills within communities; reduce access to, and the harmful use of alcohol; and change cultural gender norms.
Sexual violence is any sexual act, attempt to obtain a sexual act, unwanted sexual comments or advances, or acts to traffic, or otherwise directed against a person's sexuality using coercion, by any person regardless of their relationship to the victim, in any setting. It includes rape, defined as the physically forced or otherwise coerced penetration of the vulva or anus with a penis, other body part or object.
Population-level surveys based on reports from victims estimate that between 0.3–11.5% of women reported experiencing sexual violence. Sexual violence has serious short- and long-term consequences on physical, mental, sexual and reproductive health for victims and for their children as described in the section on intimate partner violence. If perpetrated during childhood, sexual violence can lead to increased smoking, drug and alcohol misuse, and risky sexual behaviors in later life. It is also associated with perpetration of violence and being a victim of violence.
Many of the risk factors for sexual violence are the same as for domestic violence. Risk factors specific to sexual violence perpetration include beliefs in family honor and sexual purity, ideologies of male sexual entitlement and weak legal sanctions for sexual violence.
Few interventions to prevent sexual violence have been demonstrated to be effective. School-based programmes to prevent child sexual abuse by teaching children to recognize and avoid potentially sexually abusive situations are run in many parts of the world and appear promising, but require further research. To achieve lasting change, it is important to enact legislation and develop policies that protect women; address discrimination against women and promote gender equality; and help to move the culture away from violence.
Elder maltreatment is a single or repeated act, or lack of appropriate action, occurring within any relationship where there is an expectation of trust which causes harm or distress to an older person. This type of violence constitutes a violation of human rights and includes physical, sexual, psychological, emotional; financial and material abuse; abandonment; neglect; and serious loss of dignity and respect.
While there is little information regarding the extent of maltreatment in elderly populations, especially in developing countries, it is estimated that 4–6% of elderly people in high-income countries have experienced some form of maltreatment at home However, older people are often afraid to report cases of maltreatment to family, friends, or to the authorities. Data on the extent of the problem in institutions such as hospitals, nursing homes and other long-term care facilities are scarce. Elder maltreatment can lead to serious physical injuries and long-term psychological consequences. Elder maltreatment is predicted to increase as many countries are experiencing rapidly ageing populations.
Many strategies have been implemented to prevent elder maltreatment and to take action against it and mitigate its consequences including public and professional awareness campaigns, screening (of potential victims and abusers), caregiver support interventions (e.g. stress management, respite care), adult protective services and self-help groups. Their effectiveness has, however, not so far been well-established.
Several rare but painful episodes of assassination, attempted assassination and school shootings at elementary, middle, high schools, as well as colleges and universities in the United States, led to a considerable body of research on ascertainable behaviors of persons who have planned or carried out such attacks. These studies (1995–2002) investigated what the authors called "targeted violence," described the "path to violence" of those who planned or carried out attacks and laid out suggestions for law enforcement and educators. A major point from these research studies is that targeted violence does not just "come out of the blue".
As an anthropological concept, "everyday violence" may refer to the incorporation of different forms of violence (mainly political violence) into daily practices. Latin America and the Caribbean, the region with the highest murder rate in the world, experienced more than 2.5 million murders between 2000 and 2017.
Violence cannot be attributed to a single factor. Its causes are complex and occur at different levels. To represent this complexity, the ecological, or social ecological model is often used. The following four-level version of the ecological model is often used in the study of violence:
The first level identifies biological and personal factors that influence how individuals behave and increase their likelihood of becoming a victim or perpetrator of violence: demographic characteristics (age, education, income), genetics, brain lesions, personality disorders, substance abuse, and a history of experiencing, witnessing, or engaging in violent behaviour.
The second level focuses on close relationships, such as those with family and friends. In youth violence, for example, having friends who engage in or encourage violence can increase a young person's risk of being a victim or perpetrator of violence. For intimate partner violence, a consistent marker at this level of the model is marital conflict or discord in the relationship. In elder abuse, important factors are stress due to the nature of the past relationship between the abused person and the care giver.
The third level explores the community context—i.e., schools, workplaces, and neighbourhoods. Risk at this level may be affected by factors such as the existence of a local drug trade, the absence of social networks, and concentrated poverty. All these factors have been shown to be important in several types of violence.
Finally, the fourth level looks at the broad societal factors that help to create a climate in which violence is encouraged or inhibited: the responsiveness of the criminal justice system, social and cultural norms regarding gender roles or parent-child relationships, income inequality, the strength of the social welfare system, the social acceptability of violence, the availability of weapons, the exposure to violence in mass media, and political instability.
While studies showing associations between physical punishment of children and later aggression cannot prove that physical punishment causes an increase in aggression, a number of longitudinal studies suggest that the experience of physical punishment has a direct causal effect on later aggressive behaviors. Cross-cultural studies have shown that greater prevalence of corporal punishment of children tends to predict higher levels of violence in societies. For instance, a 2005 analysis of 186 pre-industrial societies found that corporal punishment was more prevalent in societies which also had higher rates of homicide, assault, and war. In the United States, domestic corporal punishment has been linked to later violent acts against family members and spouses. The American family violence researcher Murray A. Straus believes that disciplinary spanking forms "the most prevalent and important form of violence in American families", whose effects contribute to several major societal problems, including later domestic violence and crime.
The causes of violent behavior in people are often a topic of research in psychology. Neurobiologist Jan Vodka emphasizes that, for those purposes, "violent behavior is defined as overt and intentional physically aggressive behavior against another person."
Based on the idea of human nature, scientists do agree violence is inherent in humans. Among prehistoric humans, there is archaeological evidence for both contentions of violence and peacefulness as primary characteristics.
Since violence is a matter of perception as well as a measurable phenomenon, psychologists have found variability in whether people perceive certain physical acts as "violent". For example, in a state where execution is a legalized punishment we do not typically perceive the executioner as "violent", though we may talk, in a more metaphorical way, of the state acting violently. Likewise, understandings of violence are linked to a perceived aggressor-victim relationship: hence psychologists have shown that people may not recognise defensive use of force as violent, even in cases where the amount of force used is significantly greater than in the original aggression.
The "violent male ape" image is often brought up in discussions of human violence. Dale Peterson and Richard Wranghamin "Demonic Males: Apes and the Origins of Human Violence" write that violence is inherent in humans, though not inevitable.
However, William L. Ury, editor of a book called "We Must Fight! From the Battlefield to the Schoolyard—A New Perspective on Violent Conflict and Its Prevention" criticizes the "killer ape" myth in his book which brings together discussions from two Harvard Law School symposiums. The conclusion is that "we also have lots of natural mechanisms for cooperation, to keep conflict in check, to channel aggression, and to overcome conflict. These are just as natural to us as the aggressive tendencies."
The psychiatrist James Gilligan argues that most violent behavior represents an effort to eliminate feelings of shame and humiliation, which he calls "the death of self". The use of violence often is a source of pride and a defence of honor, especially among males who believe violence defines manhood.
In an article entitled "The History of Violence" in "The New Republic", Steven Pinker posits that, on average, the amount and cruelty of violence to humans and animals has decreased over the last few centuries.
Pinker's observation of the decline in interpersonal violence echoes the work of Norbert Elias, who attributes the decline to a "civilizing process", in which the state's monopolization of violence, the maintenance of socioeconomic interdependencies or "figurations", and the maintenance of behavioural codes in culture all contribute to the development of individual sensibilities, which increase the repugnance of individuals towards violent acts.
Some scholars disagree with the argument that all violence is decreasing arguing that not all types of violent behaviour are lower now than in the past. They suggest that research typically focuses on lethal violence, often looks at homicide rates of death due to warfare, but ignore the less obvious forms of violence. However, non-lethal violence, such as assaults or bullying appear to be declining as well.
In his article "The Coming Anarchy", Robert D. Kaplan introduces the notion of liberating violence. According to Kaplan, we will observe more violent civil wars in the future, which will be fought due to economic inequalities around the world.
The concept of violence normalization, is known as socially sanctioned or structural violence, and is a topic of increasing interest to researchers trying to understand violent behavior. It has been discussed at length by researchers in sociology, medical anthropology, psychology, philosophy, and bioarchaeology.
Evolutionary psychology offers several explanations for human violence in various contexts, such as sexual jealousy in humans, child abuse, and homicide. Goetz (2010) argues that humans are similar to most mammal species and use violence in specific situations. He writes that "Buss and Shackelford (1997a) proposed seven adaptive problems our ancestors recurrently faced that might have been solved by aggression: co-opting the resources of others, defending against attack, inflicting costs on same-sex rivals, negotiating status and hierarchies, deterring rivals from future aggression, deterring mate from infidelity, and reducing resources expended on genetically unrelated children."
Goetz writes that most homicides seem to start from relatively trivial disputes between unrelated men who then escalate to violence and death. He argues that such conflicts occur when there is a status dispute between men of relatively similar status. If there is a great initial status difference, then the lower status individual usually offers no challenge and if challenged the higher status individual usually ignores the lower status individual. At the same an environment of great inequalities between people may cause those at the bottom to use more violence in attempts to gain status.
Research into the media and violence examines whether links between consuming media violence and subsequent aggressive and violent behaviour exists. Although some scholars had claimed media violence may increase aggression, this view is coming increasingly in doubt both in the scholarly community and was rejected by the US Supreme Court in the Brown v EMA case, as well as in a review of video game violence by the Australian Government (2010) which concluded evidence for harmful effects were inconclusive at best and the rhetoric of some scholars was not matched by good data.
The threat and enforcement of physical punishment has been a tried and tested method of preventing some violence since civilisation began. It is used in various degrees in most countries.
A review of scientific literature by the World Health Organization on the effectiveness of strategies to prevent interpersonal violence identified the seven strategies below as being supported by either strong or emerging evidence for effectiveness. These strategies target risk factors at all four levels of the ecological model.
Among the most effective such programmes to prevent child maltreatment and reduce childhood aggression are the Nurse Family Partnership home-visiting programme and the Triple P (Parenting Program). There is also emerging evidence that these programmes reduce convictions and violent acts in adolescence and early adulthood, and probably help decrease intimate partner violence and self-directed violence in later life.
Evidence shows that the life skills acquired in social development programmes can reduce involvement in violence, improve social skills, boost educational achievement and improve job prospects. Life skills refer to social, emotional, and behavioural competencies which help children and adolescents effectively deal with the challenges of everyday life.
Evaluation studies are beginning to support community interventions that aim to prevent violence against women by promoting gender equality. For instance, evidence suggests that programmes that combine microfinance with gender equity training can reduce intimate partner violence. School-based programmes such as Safe Dates programme in the United States of America and the Youth Relationship Project in Canada have been found to be effective for reducing dating violence.
Rules or expectations of behaviour – norms – within a cultural or social group can encourage violence. Interventions that challenge cultural and social norms supportive of violence can prevent acts of violence and have been widely used, but the evidence base for their effectiveness is currently weak. The effectiveness of interventions addressing dating violence and sexual abuse among teenagers and young adults by challenging social and cultural norms related to gender is supported by some evidence.
Interventions to identify victims of interpersonal violence and provide effective care and support are critical for protecting health and breaking cycles of violence from one generation to the next. Examples for which evidence of effectiveness is emerging includes: screening tools to identify victims of intimate partner violence and refer them to appropriate services; psychosocial interventions – such as trauma-focused cognitive behavioural therapy – to reduce mental health problems associated with violence, including post-traumatic stress disorder; and protection orders, which prohibit a perpetrator from contacting the victim, to reduce repeat victimization among victims of intimate partner violence.
Not surprisingly, scientific evidence about the effectiveness of interventions to prevent collective violence is lacking. However, policies that facilitate reductions in poverty, that make decision-making more accountable, that reduce inequalities between groups, as well as policies that reduce access to biological, chemical, nuclear and other weapons have been recommended. When planning responses to violent conflicts, recommended approaches include assessing at an early stage who is most vulnerable and what their needs are, co-ordination of activities between various players and working towards global, national and local capabilities so as to deliver effective health services during the various stages of an emergency.
One of the main functions of law is to regulate violence. Sociologist Max Weber stated that the state claims the monopoly of the legitimate use of force practised within the confines of a specific territory. Law enforcement is the main means of regulating nonmilitary violence in society. Governments regulate the use of violence through legal systems governing individuals and political authorities, including the police and military. Civil societies authorize some amount of violence, exercised through the police power, to maintain the status quo and enforce laws.
However, German political theorist Hannah Arendt noted: "Violence can be justifiable, but it never will be legitimate ... Its justification loses in plausibility the farther its intended end recedes into the future. No one questions the use of violence in self-defence, because the danger is not only clear but also present, and the end justifying the means is immediate". Arendt made a clear distinction between violence and power. Most political theorists regarded violence as an extreme manifestation of power whereas Arendt regarded the two concepts as opposites.
In the 20th century in acts of democide governments may have killed more than 260 million of their own people through police brutality, execution, massacre, slave labour camps, and sometimes through intentional famine.
Violent acts that are not carried out by the military or police and that are not in self-defense are usually classified as crimes, although not all crimes are violent crimes. Damage to property is classified as violent crime in some jurisdictions but not in all. The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) classifies violence resulting in homicide into criminal homicide and justifiable homicide (e.g. self-defense).
The criminal justice approach sees its main task as enforcing laws that proscribe violence and ensuring that "justice is done". The notions of individual blame, responsibility, guilt, and culpability are central to criminal justice's approach to violence and one of the criminal justice system's main tasks is to "do justice", i.e. to ensure that offenders are properly identified, that the degree of their guilt is as accurately ascertained as possible, and that they are punished appropriately. To prevent and respond to violence, the criminal justice approach relies primarily on deterrence, incarceration and the punishment and rehabilitation of perpetrators.
The criminal justice approach, beyond justice and punishment, has traditionally emphasized indicated interventions, aimed at those who have already been involved in violence, either as victims or as perpetrators. One of the main reasons offenders are arrested, prosecuted, and convicted is to prevent further crimes – through deterrence (threatening potential offenders with criminal sanctions if they commit crimes), incapacitation (physically preventing offenders from committing further crimes by locking them up) and through rehabilitation (using time spent under state supervision to develop skills or change one's psychological make-up to reduce the likelihood of future offences).
In recent decades in many countries in the world, the criminal justice system has taken an increasing interest in preventing violence before it occurs. For instance, much of community and problem-oriented policing aims to reduce crime and violence by altering the conditions that foster it – and not to increase the number of arrests. Indeed, some police leaders have gone so far as to say the police should primarily be a crime prevention agency. Juvenile justice systems – an important component of criminal justice systems – are largely based on the belief in rehabilitation and prevention. In the US, the criminal justice system has, for instance, funded school- and community-based initiatives to reduce children's access to guns and teach conflict resolution. In 1974, the US Department of Justice assumed primary responsibility for delinquency prevention programmes and created the Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention, which has supported the "Blueprints for violence prevention" programme at the University of Colorado Boulder.
The public health approach is a science-driven, population-based, interdisciplinary, intersectoral approach based on the ecological model which emphasizes primary prevention. Rather than focusing on individuals, the public health approach aims to provide the maximum benefit for the largest number of people, and to extend better care and safety to entire populations. The public health approach is interdisciplinary, drawing upon knowledge from many disciplines including medicine, epidemiology, sociology, psychology, criminology, education and economics. Because all forms of violence are multi-faceted problems, the public health approach emphasizes a multi-sectoral response. It has been proved time and again that cooperative efforts from such diverse sectors as health, education, social welfare, and criminal justice are often necessary to solve what are usually assumed to be purely "criminal" or "medical" problems. The public health approach considers that violence, rather than being the result of any single factor, is the outcome of multiple risk factors and causes, interacting at four levels of a nested hierarchy (individual, close relationship/family, community and wider society) of the Social ecological model.
From a public health perspective, prevention strategies can be classified into three types:
A public health approach emphasizes the primary prevention of violence, i.e. stopping them from occurring in the first place. Until recently, this approach has been relatively neglected in the field, with the majority of resources directed towards secondary or tertiary prevention. Perhaps the most critical element of a public health approach to prevention is the ability to identify underlying causes rather than focusing upon more visible "symptoms". This allows for the development and testing of effective approaches to address the underlying causes and so improve health.
The public health approach is an evidence-based and systematic process involving the following four steps:
In many countries, violence prevention is still a new or emerging field in public health. The public health community has started only recently to realize the contributions it can make to reducing violence and mitigating its consequences. In 1949, Gordon called for injury prevention efforts to be based on the understanding of causes, in a similar way to prevention efforts for communicable and other diseases. In 1962, Gomez, referring to the WHO definition of health, stated that it is obvious that violence does not contribute to "extending life" or to a "complete state of well-being". He defined violence as an issue that public health experts needed to address and stated that it should not be the primary domain of lawyers, military personnel, or politicians.
However, it is only in the last 30 years that public health has begun to address violence, and only in the last fifteen has it done so at the global level. This is a much shorter period of time than public health has been tackling other health problems of comparable magnitude and with similarly severe lifelong consequences.
The global public health response to interpersonal violence began in earnest in the mid-1990s. In 1996, the World Health Assembly adopted Resolution WHA49.25 which declared violence "a leading worldwide public health problem" and requested that the World Health Organization (WHO) initiate public health activities to (1) document and characterize the burden of violence, (2) assess the effectiveness of programmes, with particular attention to women and children and community-based initiatives, and (3) promote activities to tackle the problem at the international and national levels. The World Health Organization's initial response to this resolution was to create the Department of Violence and Injury Prevention and Disability and to publish the World report on violence and health (2002).
The case for the public health sector addressing interpersonal violence rests on four main arguments. First, the significant amount of time health care professionals dedicate to caring for victims and perpetrators of violence has made them familiar with the problem and has led many, particularly in emergency departments, to mobilize to address it. The information, resources, and infrastructures the health care sector has at its disposal are an important asset for research and prevention work. Second, the magnitude of the problem and its potentially severe lifelong consequences and high costs to individuals and wider society call for population-level interventions typical of the public health approach. Third, the criminal justice approach, the other main approach to addressing violence (link to entry above), has traditionally been more geared towards violence that occurs between male youths and adults in the street and other public places – which makes up the bulk of homicides in most countries – than towards violence occurring in private settings such as child maltreatment, intimate partner violence and elder abuse – which makes up the largest share of non-fatal violence. Fourth, evidence is beginning to accumulate that a science-based public health approach is effective at preventing interpersonal violence.
The human rights approach is based on the obligations of states to respect, protect and fulfill human rights and therefore to prevent, eradicate and punish violence. It recognizes violence as a violation of many human rights: the rights to life, liberty, autonomy and security of the person; the rights to equality and non-discrimination; the rights to be free from torture and cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment or punishment; the right to privacy; and the right to the highest attainable standard of health. These human rights are enshrined in international and regional treaties and national constitutions and laws, which stipulate the obligations of states, and include mechanisms to hold states accountable. The Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women, for example, requires that countries party to the Convention take all appropriate steps to end violence against women. The Convention on the Rights of the Child in its Article 19 states that States Parties shall take all appropriate legislative, administrative, social and educational measures to protect the child from all forms of physical or mental violence, injury or abuse, neglect or negligent treatment, maltreatment or exploitation, including sexual abuse, while in the care of parent(s), legal guardian(s) or any other person who has the care of the child.
Violence, as defined in the dictionary of human geography, "appears whenever power is in jeopardy" and "in and of itself stands emptied of strength and purpose: it is part of a larger matrix of socio-political power struggles". Violence can be broadly divided into three broad categories – direct violence, structural violence and cultural violence. Thus defined and delineated, it is of note, as Hyndman says, that "geography came late to theorizing violence" in comparison to other social sciences. Social and human geography, rooted in the humanist, Marxist, and feminist subfields that emerged following the early positivist approaches and subsequent behavioral turn, have long been concerned with social and spatial justice.
Along with critical geographers and political geographers, it is these groupings of geographers that most often interact with violence. Keeping this idea of social/spatial justice via geography in mind, it is worthwhile to look at geographical approaches to violence in the context of politics.
Derek Gregory and Alan Pred assembled the influential edited collection "Violent Geographies: Fear, Terror, and Political Violence", which demonstrates how place, space, and landscape are foremost factors in the real and imagined practices of organized violence both historically and in the present. Evidently, political violence often gives a part for the state to play. When "modern states not only claim a monopoly of the legitimate means of violence; they also routinely use the threat of violence to enforce the rule of law", the law not only becomes a form of violence but is violence. Philosopher Giorgio Agamben's concepts of state of exception and "homo sacer" are useful to consider within a geography of violence. The state, in the grip of a perceived, potential crisis (whether legitimate or not) takes preventative legal measures, such as a suspension of rights (it is in this climate, as Agamben demonstrates, that the formation of the Social Democratic and Nazi government's lager or concentration camp can occur). However, when this "in limbo" reality is designed to be in place "until further notice…the state of exception thus ceases to be referred to as an external and provisional state of factual danger and comes to be confused with juridical rule itself". For Agamben, the physical space of the camp "is a piece of land placed outside the normal juridical order, but it is nevertheless not simply an external space". At the scale of the body, in the state of exception, a person is so removed from their rights by "juridical procedures and deployments of power" that "no act committed against them could appear any longer as a crime"; in other words, people become only "homo sacer". Guantanamo Bay could also be said to represent the physicality of the state of exception in space, and can just as easily draw man as homo sacer.
In the 1970s, genocides in Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge and Pol Pot resulted in the deaths of over two million Cambodians (which was 25% of the Cambodian population), forming one of the many contemporary examples of state-sponsored violence. About fourteen thousand of these murders occurred at Choeung Ek, which is the best-known of the extermination camps referred to as the Killing Fields. The killings were arbitrary; for example, a person could be killed for wearing glasses, since that was seen as associating them with intellectuals and therefore as making them part of the enemy. People were murdered with impunity because it was no crime; Cambodians were made "homo sacer" in a condition of bare life. The Killing Fields—manifestations of Agamben's concept of camps beyond the normal rule of law—featured the state of exception. As part of Pol Pot's "ideological intent…to create a purely agrarian society or cooperative", he "dismantled the country's existing economic infrastructure and depopulated every urban area". Forced movement, such as this forced movement applied by Pol Pot, is a clear display of structural violence. When "symbols of Cambodian society were equally disrupted, social institutions of every kind…were purged or torn down", cultural violence (defined as when "any aspect of culture such as language, religion, ideology, art, or cosmology is used to legitimize direct or structural violence") is added to the structural violence of forced movement and to the direct violence, such as murder, at the Killing Fields. Vietnam eventually intervened and the genocide officially ended. However, ten million landmines left by opposing guerillas in the 1970s continue to create a violent landscape in Cambodia.
Human geography, though coming late to the theorizing table, has tackled violence through many lenses, including anarchist geography, feminist geography, Marxist geography, political geography, and critical geography. However, Adriana Cavarero notes that, "as violence spreads and assumes unheard-of forms, it becomes difficult to name in contemporary language". Cavarero proposes that, in facing such a truth, it is prudent to reconsider violence as "horrorism"; that is, "as though ideally all the…victims, instead of their killers, ought to determine the name". With geography often adding the forgotten spatial aspect to theories of social science, rather than creating them solely within the discipline, it seems that the self-reflexive contemporary geography of today may have an extremely important place in this current (re)imaging of violence, exemplified by Cavarero.
As of 2010, all forms of violence resulted in about 1.34 million deaths up from about 1 million in 1990. Suicide accounts for about 883,000, interpersonal violence for 456,000 and collective violence for 18,000. Deaths due to collective violence have decreased from 64,000 in 1990.
By way of comparison, the 1.5 millions deaths a year due to violence is greater than the number of deaths due to tuberculosis (1.34 million), road traffic injuries (1.21 million), and malaria (830'000), but slightly less than the number of people who die from HIV/AIDS (1.77 million).
For every death due to violence, there are numerous nonfatal injuries. In 2008, over 16 million cases of non-fatal violence-related injuries were severe enough to require medical attention. Beyond deaths and injuries, forms of violence such as child maltreatment, intimate partner violence, and elder maltreatment have been found to be highly prevalent.
In the last 45 years, suicide rates have increased by 60% worldwide. Suicide is among the three leading causes of death among those aged 15–44 years in some countries, and the second leading cause of death in the 10–24 years age group. These figures do not include suicide attempts which are up to 20 times more frequent than completed suicide. Suicide was the 16th leading cause of death worldwide in 2004 and is projected to increase to the 12th in 2030. Although suicide rates have traditionally been highest among the male elderly, rates among young people have been increasing to such an extent that they are now the group at highest risk in a third of countries, in both developed and developing countries.
Rates and patterns of violent death vary by country and region. In recent years, homicide rates have been highest in developing countries in Sub-Saharan Africa and Latin America and the Caribbean and lowest in East Asia, the western Pacific, and some countries in northern Africa. Studies show a strong, inverse relationship between homicide rates and both economic development and economic equality. Poorer countries, especially those with large gaps between the rich and the poor, tend to have higher rates of homicide than wealthier countries. Homicide rates differ markedly by age and sex. Gender differences are least marked for children. For the 15 to 29 age group, male rates were nearly six times those for female rates; for the remaining age groups, male rates were from two to four times those for females.
Studies in a number of countries show that, for every homicide among young people age 10 to 24, 20 to 40 other young people receive hospital treatment for a violent injury.
Forms of violence such as child maltreatment and intimate partner violence are highly prevalent. Approximately 20% of women and 5–10% of men report being sexually abused as children, while 25–50% of all children report being physically abused. A WHO multi-country study found that between 15–71% of women reported experiencing physical and/or sexual violence by an intimate partner at some point in their lives.
Wars grab headlines, but the individual risk of dying violently in an armed conflict is today relatively low—much lower than the risk of violent death in many countries that are not suffering from an armed conflict. For example, between 1976 and 2008, African Americans were victims of 329,825 homicides. Although there is a widespread perception that war is the most dangerous form of armed violence in the world, the average person living in a conflict-affected country had a risk of dying violently in the conflict of about 2.0 per 100,000 population between 2004 and 2007. This can be compared to the average world homicide rate of 7.6 per 100,000 people. This illustration highlights the value of accounting for all forms of armed violence rather than an exclusive focus on conflict related violence. Certainly, there are huge variations in the risk of dying from armed conflict at the national and subnational level, and the risk of dying violently in a conflict in specific countries remains extremely high. In Iraq, for example, the direct conflict death rate for 2004–07 was 65 per 100,000 people per year and, in Somalia, 24 per 100,000 people. This rate even reached peaks of 91 per 100,000 in Iraq in 2006 and 74 per 100,000 in Somalia in 2007.
Scientific evidence for warfare has come from settled, sedentary communities. Some scholars argue humans may have a predisposition for violence (chimpanzees, also great apes, have been known to kill members of competing groups for resources like food), placing the origins of organized violence prior to modern settled societies. However, actual evidence suggests that organized, large-scale, militaristic, or regular human-on-human violence was absent for the vast majority of the human timeline, and is first documented to have started only relatively recently in the Holocene, an epoch that began about 11,700 years ago, probably with the advent of higher population densities due to sedentism. Social anthropologist Douglas P. Fry writes that scholars are divided on the origins of this greater degree of violence—in other words, war-like behavior:
Jared Diamond in his books "Guns, Germs and Steel" and "The Third Chimpanzee" posits that the rise of large-scale warfare is the result of advances in technology and city-states. For instance, the rise of agriculture provided a significant increase in the number of individuals that a region could sustain over hunter-gatherer societies, allowing for development of specialized classes such as soldiers, or weapons manufacturers.
In academia, the idea of the peaceful pre-history and non-violent tribal societies gained popularity with the post-colonial perspective. The trend, starting in archaeology and spreading to anthropology reached its height in the late half of the 20th century. However, some newer research in archaeology and bioarchaeology may provide evidence that violence within and among groups is not a recent phenomenon. According to the book "The Bioarchaeology of Violence" violence is a behavior that is found throughout human history.
Lawrence H. Keeley at the University of Illinois writes in "War Before Civilization" that 87% of tribal societies were at war more than once per year, and that 65% of them were fighting continuously. He writes that the attrition rate of numerous close-quarter clashes, which characterize endemic warfare, produces casualty rates of up to 60%, compared to 1% of the combatants as is typical in modern warfare. "Primitive Warfare" of these small groups or tribes was driven by the basic need for sustenance and violent competition.
Fry explores Keeley's argument in depth and counters that such sources erroneously focus on the ethnography of hunters and gatherers in the present, whose culture and values have been infiltrated externally by modern civilization, rather than the actual archaeological record spanning some two million years of human existence. Fry determines that all present ethnographically studied tribal societies, "by the very fact of having been described and published by anthropologists, have been irrevocably impacted by history and modern colonial nation states" and that "many have been affected by state societies for at least 5000 years."
The relatively peaceful period since World War II is known as the Long Peace.
Steven Pinker's 2011 book, "The Better Angels of Our Nature", roused both acclaim and controversy by asserting that modern society is less violent than in periods of the past, whether on the short scale of decades or long scale of centuries or millennia.
Steven Pinker argues that by every possible measure, every type of violence has drastically decreased since ancient and medieval times. A few centuries ago, for example, genocide was a standard practice in all kinds of warfare and was so common that historians did not even bother to mention it. Cannibalism and slavery have been greatly reduced in the last thousand years, and capital punishment is now banned in many countries. According to Pinker, rape, murder, warfare and animal cruelty have all seen drastic declines in the 20th century. However, Pinker's analyses have met with much criticism, mainly concerning the statistical question of how to measure violence and whether it is in fact declining.
Beyond deaths and injuries, highly prevalent forms of violence (such as child maltreatment and intimate partner violence) have serious lifelong non-injury health consequences. Victims may engage in high-risk behaviours such as alcohol and substance misuse and smoking, which in turn can contribute to cardiovascular disorders, cancers, depression, diabetes and HIV/AIDS, resulting in premature death. The balances of prevention, mitigation, mediation and exacerbation are complex, and vary with the underpinnings of violence.
In countries with high levels of violence, economic growth can be slowed down, personal and collective security eroded, and social development impeded. Families edging out of poverty and investing in schooling their sons and daughters can be ruined through the violent death or severe disability of the main breadwinner. Communities can be caught in poverty traps where pervasive violence and deprivation form a vicious circle that stifles economic growth. For societies, meeting the direct costs of health, criminal justice, and social welfare responses to violence diverts many billions of dollars from more constructive societal spending. The much larger indirect costs of violence due to lost productivity and lost investment in education work together to slow economic development, increase socioeconomic inequality, and erode human and social capital.
Additionally, communities with high level of violence do not provide the level of stability and predictability vital for a prospering business economy. Individuals will be less likely to invest money and effort towards growth in such unstable and violent conditions. One of the possible proves might be the study of Baten and Gust that used “regicide” as measurement unit to approximate the influence of interpersonal violence and depict the influence of high interpersonal violence on economic development and level of investments. The results of the research prove the correlation of the human capital and the interpersonal violence.
In 2016, the Institute for Economics and Peace, released the Economic Value of Peace report, which estimates the economic impact of violence and conflict on the global economy, the total economic impact of violence on the world economy in 2015 was estimated to be $13.6 trillion in purchasing power parity terms.
Religious and political ideologies have been the cause of interpersonal violence throughout history. Ideologues often falsely accuse others of violence, such as the ancient blood libel against Jews, the medieval accusations of casting witchcraft spells against women, and modern accusations of satanic ritual abuse against day care center owners and others.
Both supporters and opponents of the 21st-century War on Terrorism regard it largely as an ideological and religious war.
Vittorio Bufacchi describes two different modern concepts of violence, one the "minimalist conception" of violence as an intentional act of excessive or destructive force, the other the "comprehensive conception" which includes violations of rights, including a long list of human needs.
Anti-capitalists assert that capitalism is violent. They believe private property and profit survive only because police violence defends them and that capitalist economies need war to expand. They may use the term "structural violence" to describe the systematic ways in which a given social structure or institution kills people slowly by preventing them from meeting their basic needs, for example the deaths caused by diseases because of lack of medicine.
Frantz Fanon critiqued the violence of colonialism and wrote about the counter violence of the "colonized victims."
Throughout history, most religions and individuals like Mahatma Gandhi have preached that humans are capable of eliminating individual violence and organizing societies through purely nonviolent means. Gandhi himself once wrote: "A society organized and run on the basis of complete non-violence would be the purest anarchy." Modern political ideologies which espouse similar views include pacifist varieties of voluntarism, mutualism, anarchism and libertarianism.
Terence Fretheim writing about the Old Testament:
For many people, ... only physical violence truly qualifies as violence. But, certainly, violence is more than killing people, unless one includes all those words and actions that kill people slowly. The effect of limitation to a “killing fields” perspective is the widespread neglect of many other forms of violence. We must insist that violence also refers to that which is psychologically destructive, that which demeans, damages, or depersonalizes others. In view of these considerations, violence may be defined as follows: any action, verbal or nonverbal, oral or written, physical or psychical, active or passive, public or private, individual or institutional/societal, human or divine, in whatever degree of intensity, that abuses, violates, injures, or kills. Some of the most pervasive and most dangerous forms of violence are those that are often hidden from view (against women and children, especially); just beneath the surface in many of our homes, churches, and communities is abuse enough to freeze the
blood. Moreover, many forms of systemic violence often slip past our attention because they are so much a part of the infrastructure of life (e.g., racism, sexism, ageism).
| 46112 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=46112 |
Religion&Philosophy&Ethics | Globalization
Globalization or globalisation is the process of interaction and integration among people, companies, and governments worldwide. As a complex and multifaceted phenomenon, globalization is considered by some as a form of capitalist expansion which entails the integration of local and national economies into a global, unregulated market economy. Globalization has grown due to advances in transportation and communication technology. With the increased global interactions comes the growth of international trade, ideas, and culture. Globalization is primarily an economic process of interaction and integration that's associated with social and cultural aspects. However, conflicts and diplomacy are also large parts of the history of globalization, and modern globalization.
Economically, globalization involves goods, services, the economic resources of capital, technology, and data. Also, the expansions of global markets liberalize the economic activities of the exchange of goods and funds. Removal of cross-border trade barriers has made formation of global markets more feasible. The steam locomotive, steamship, jet engine, and container ships are some of the advances in the means of transport while the rise of the telegraph and its modern offspring, the Internet and mobile phones show development in telecommunications infrastructure. All of these improvements have been major factors in globalization and have generated further interdependence of economic and cultural activities around the globe.
Though many scholars place the origins of globalization in modern times, others trace its history long before the European Age of Discovery and voyages to the New World, some even to the third millennium BC. Large-scale globalization began in the 1820s. In the late 19th century and early 20th century, the connectivity of the world's economies and cultures grew very quickly. The term "globalization" is recent, only establishing its current meaning in the 1970s.
In 2000, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) identified four basic aspects of globalization: trade and transactions, capital and investment movements, migration and movement of people, and the dissemination of knowledge. Further, environmental challenges such as global warming, cross-boundary water, air pollution, and over-fishing of the ocean are linked with globalization. Globalizing processes affect and are affected by business and work organization, economics, socio-cultural resources, and the natural environment. Academic literature commonly subdivides globalization into three major areas: economic globalization, cultural globalization, and political globalization.
The term "globalization" became popular in social science in the 1990s. It derives from the word "globalize", which refers to the emergence of an international network of economic systems. The term 'globalization' had been used in its economic sense at least as early as 1981, and in other senses since at least as early as 1944. Theodore Levitt is credited with popularizing the term and bringing it into the mainstream business audience in the later half of the 1980s. Since its inception, the concept of globalization has inspired competing definitions and interpretations. Its antecedents date back to the great movements of trade and empire across Asia and the Indian Ocean from the 15th century onward.
Due to the complexity of the concept, various research projects, articles, and discussions often stay focused on a single aspect of globalization.
Sociologists Martin Albrow and Elizabeth King define globalization as "all those processes by which the people of the world are incorporated into a single world society." In "The Consequences of Modernity", Anthony Giddens writes: "Globalization can thus be defined as the intensification of worldwide social relations which link distant localities in such a way that local happenings are shaped by events occurring many miles away and vice versa." In 1992, Roland Robertson, professor of sociology at the University of Aberdeen and an early writer in the field, described globalization as "the compression of the world and the intensification of the consciousness of the world as a whole."
In "Global Transformations", David Held and his co-writers state:
Held and his co-writers' definition of globalization in that same book as "transformation in the spatial organization of social relations and transactions—assessed in terms of their extensity, intensity, velocity and impact—generating transcontinental or inter-regional flows" was called "probably the most widely-cited definition" in the 2014 DHL Global Connectiveness Index.
Swedish journalist Thomas Larsson, in his book "The Race to the Top: The Real Story of Globalization", states that globalization:
Paul James defines globalization with a more direct and historically contextualized emphasis:
Globalization is the extension of social relations across world-space, defining that world-space in terms of the historically variable ways that it has been practiced and socially understood through changing world-time.
Manfred Steger, professor of global studies and research leader in the Global Cities Institute at RMIT University, identifies four main empirical dimensions of globalization: economic, political, cultural, and ecological. A fifth dimension—the ideological—cutting across the other four. The ideological dimension, according to Steger, is filled with a range of norms, claims, beliefs, and narratives about the phenomenon itself.
James and Steger stated that the concept of globalization "emerged from the intersection of four interrelated sets of 'communities of practice' (Wenger, 1998): academics, journalists, publishers/editors, and librarians." They note the term was used "in education to describe the global life of the mind"; in international relations to describe the extension of the European Common Market; and in journalism to describe how the "American Negro and his problem are taking on a global significance". They have also argued that four forms of globalization can be distinguished that complement and cut across the solely empirical dimensions. According to James, the oldest dominant form of globalization is embodied globalization, the movement of people. A second form is agency-extended globalization, the circulation of agents of different institutions, organizations, and polities, including imperial agents. Object-extended globalization, a third form, is the movement of commodities and other objects of exchange. He calls the transmission of ideas, images, knowledge, and information across world-space disembodied globalization, maintaining that it is currently the dominant form of globalization. James holds that this series of distinctions allows for an understanding of how, today, the most embodied forms of globalization such as the movement of refugees and migrants are increasingly restricted, while the most disembodied forms such as the circulation of financial instruments and codes are the most deregulated.
The journalist Thomas L. Friedman popularized the term "flat world", arguing that globalized trade, outsourcing, supply-chaining, and political forces had permanently changed the world, for better and worse. He asserted that the pace of globalization was quickening and that its impact on business organization and practice would continue to grow.
Economist Takis Fotopoulos defined "economic globalization" as the opening and deregulation of commodity, capital, and labor markets that led toward present neoliberal globalization. He used "political globalization" to refer to the emergence of a transnational élite and a phasing out of the nation-state. Meanwhile, he used "cultural globalization" to reference the worldwide homogenization of culture. Other of his usages included "ideological globalization", "technological globalization", and "social globalization".
Lechner and Boli (2012) define globalization as more people across large distances becoming connected in more and different ways.
"Globophobia" is used to refer to the fear of globalization, though it can also mean the fear of balloons.
There are both distal and proximate causes which can be traced in the historical factors affecting globalization. Large-scale globalization began in the 19th century.
Archaic globalization conventionally refers to a phase in the history of globalization including globalizing events and developments from the time of the earliest civilizations until roughly the 1600s. This term is used to describe the relationships between communities and states and how they were created by the geographical spread of ideas and social norms at both local and regional levels.
In this schema, three main prerequisites are posited for globalization to occur. The first is the idea of Eastern Origins, which shows how Western states have adapted and implemented learned principles from the East. Without the spread of traditional ideas from the East, Western globalization would not have emerged the way it did. The second is distance. The interactions of states were not on a global scale and most often were confined to Asia, North Africa, the Middle East, and certain parts of Europe. With early globalization, it was difficult for states to interact with others that were not within a close proximity. Eventually, technological advances allowed states to learn of others' existence and thus another phase of globalization can occur. The third has to do with inter-dependency, stability, and regularity. If a state is not dependent on another, then there is no way for either state to be mutually affected by the other. This is one of the driving forces behind global connections and trade; without either, globalization would not have emerged the way it did and states would still be dependent on their own production and resources to work. This is one of the arguments surrounding the idea of early globalization. It is argued that archaic globalization did not function in a similar manner to modern globalization because states were not as interdependent on others as they are today.
Also posited is a "multi-polar" nature to archaic globalization, which involved the active participation of non-Europeans. Because it predated the Great Divergence in the nineteenth century, where Western Europe pulled ahead of the rest of the world in terms of industrial production and economic output, archaic globalization was a phenomenon that was driven not only by Europe but also by other economically developed Old World centers such as Gujarat, Bengal, coastal China, and Japan.
The German historical economist and sociologist Andre Gunder Frank argues that a form of globalization began with the rise of trade links between Sumer and the Indus Valley Civilization in the third millennium BCE. This archaic globalization existed during the Hellenistic Age, when commercialized urban centers enveloped the axis of Greek culture that reached from India to Spain, including Alexandria and the other Alexandrine cities. Early on, the geographic position of Greece and the necessity of importing wheat forced the Greeks to engage in maritime trade. Trade in ancient Greece was largely unrestricted: the state controlled only the supply of grain.
Trade on the Silk Road was a significant factor in the development of civilizations from China, Indian subcontinent, Persia, Europe, and Arabia, opening long-distance political and economic interactions between them. Though silk was certainly the major trade item from China, common goods such as salt and sugar were traded as well; and religions, syncretic philosophies, and various technologies, as well as diseases, also traveled along the Silk Routes. In addition to economic trade, the Silk Road served as a means of carrying out cultural trade among the civilizations along its network. The movement of people, such as refugees, artists, craftsmen, missionaries, robbers, and envoys, resulted in the exchange of religions, art, languages, and new technologies.
"Early modern-" or "proto-globalization" covers a period of the history of globalization roughly spanning the years between 1600 and 1800. The concept of "proto-globalization" was first introduced by historians A. G. Hopkins and Christopher Bayly. The term describes the phase of increasing trade links and cultural exchange that characterized the period immediately preceding the advent of high "modern globalization" in the late 19th century. This phase of globalization was characterized by the rise of maritime European empires, in the 15th and 17th centuries, first the Portuguese Empire (1415) followed by the Spanish Empire (1492), and later the Dutch and British Empires. In the 17th century, world trade developed further when chartered companies like the British East India Company (founded in 1600) and the Dutch East India Company (founded in 1602, often described as the first multinational corporation in which stock was offered) were established.
Early modern globalization is distinguished from modern globalization on the basis of expansionism, the method of managing global trade, and the level of information exchange. The period is marked by such trade arrangements as the East India Company, the shift of hegemony to Western Europe, the rise of larger-scale conflicts between powerful nations such as the Thirty Years' War, and the rise of newfound commodities—most particularly slave trade. The Triangular Trade made it possible for Europe to take advantage of resources within the Western Hemisphere. The transfer of animal stocks, plant crops, and epidemic diseases associated with Alfred W. Crosby's concept of the Columbian Exchange also played a central role in this process. European, Muslim, Indian, Southeast Asian, and Chinese merchants were all involved in early modern trade and communications, particularly in the Indian Ocean region.
According to economic historians Kevin H. O'Rourke, Leandro Prados de la Escosura, and Guillaume Daudin, several factors promoted globalization in the period 1815–1870:
During the 19th century, globalization approached its form as a direct result of the Industrial Revolution. Industrialization allowed standardized production of household items using economies of scale while rapid population growth created sustained demand for commodities. In the 19th century, steamships reduced the cost of international transport significantly and railroads made inland transportation cheaper. The transport revolution occurred some time between 1820 and 1850. More nations embraced international trade. Globalization in this period was decisively shaped by nineteenth-century imperialism such as in Africa and Asia. The invention of shipping containers in 1956 helped advance the globalization of commerce.
After World War II, work by politicians led to the agreements of the Bretton Woods Conference, in which major governments laid down the framework for international monetary policy, commerce, and finance, and the founding of several international institutions intended to facilitate economic growth by lowering trade barriers. Initially, the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) led to a series of agreements to remove trade restrictions. GATT's successor was the World Trade Organization (WTO), which provided a framework for negotiating and formalizing trade agreements and a dispute resolution process. Exports nearly doubled from 8.5% of total gross world product in 1970 to 16.2% in 2001. The approach of using global agreements to advance trade stumbled with the failure of the Doha Development Round of trade negotiation. Many countries then shifted to bilateral or smaller multilateral agreements, such as the 2011 South Korea–United States Free Trade Agreement.
Since the 1970s, aviation has become increasingly affordable to middle classes in developed countries. Open skies policies and low-cost carriers have helped to bring competition to the market. In the 1990s, the growth of low-cost communication networks cut the cost of communicating between countries. More work can be performed using a computer without regard to location. This included accounting, software development, and engineering design.
Student exchange programs became popular after World War II, and are intended to increase the participants' understanding and tolerance of other cultures, as well as improving their language skills and broadening their social horizons. Between 1963 and 2006 the number of students studying in a foreign country increased 9 times.
Since the 1980s, modern globalization has spread rapidly through the expansion of capitalism and neoliberal ideologies. The implementation of neoliberal policies has allowed for the privatization of public industry, deregulation of laws or policies that interfered with the free flow of the market, as well as cut-backs to governmental social services. These neoliberal policies were introduced to many developing countries in the form of structural adjustment programs (SAPs) that were implemented by the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF). These programs required that the country receiving monetary aid would open its markets to capitalism, privatize public industry, allow free trade, cut social services like healthcare and education and allow the free movement of giant multinational corporations. These programs allowed the World Bank and the IMF to become global financial market regulators that would promote neoliberalism and the creation of free markets for multinational corporations on a global scale.
In the late 19th and early 20th century, the connectedness of the world's economies and cultures grew very quickly. This slowed down from the 1910s onward due to the World Wars and the Cold War, but picked up again in the 1980s and 1990s. The revolutions of 1989 and subsequent liberalization in many parts of the world resulted in a significant expansion of global interconnectedness. The migration and movement of people can also be highlighted as a prominent feature of the globalization process. In the period between 1965 and 1990, the proportion of the labor force migrating approximately doubled. Most migration occurred between the developing countries and least developed countries (LDCs). As economic integration intensified workers moved to areas with higher wages and most of the developing world oriented toward the international market economy. The collapse of the Soviet Union not only ended the Cold War's division of the world – it also left the United States its sole policeman and an unfettered advocate of free market. It also resulted in the growing prominence of attention focused on the movement of diseases, the proliferation of popular culture and consumer values, the growing prominence of international institutions like the UN, and concerted international action on such issues as the environment and human rights. Other developments as dramatic were the Internet's becoming influential in connecting people across the world; , more than 2.4 billion people—over a third of the world's human population—have used the services of the Internet. Growth of globalization has never been smooth. One influential event was the late 2000s recession, which was associated with lower growth (in areas such as cross-border phone calls and Skype usage) or even temporarily negative growth (in areas such as trade) of global interconnectedness.
Globalized society offers a complex web of forces and factors that bring people, cultures, markets, beliefs, and practices into increasingly greater proximity to one another.
Economic globalization is the increasing economic interdependence of national economies across the world through a rapid increase in cross-border movement of goods, services, technology, and capital. Whereas the globalization of business is centered around the diminution of international trade regulations as well as tariffs, taxes, and other impediments that suppresses global trade, economic globalization is the process of increasing economic integration between countries, leading to the emergence of a global marketplace or a single world market. Depending on the paradigm, economic globalization can be viewed as either a positive or a negative phenomenon. Economic globalization comprises: globalization of production; which refers to the obtainment of goods and services from a particular source from locations around the globe to benefit from difference in cost and quality. Likewise, it also comprises globalization of markets; which is defined as the union of different and separate markets into a massive global marketplace. Economic globalization also includes competition, technology, and corporations and industries.
Current globalization trends can be largely accounted for by developed economies integrating with less developed economies by means of foreign direct investment, the reduction of trade barriers as well as other economic reforms, and, in many cases, immigration.
International standards have made trade in goods and services more efficient. An example of such standard is the intermodal container. Containerization dramatically reduced transport of its costs, supported the post-war boom in international trade, and was a major element in globalization. International Organization for Standardization is an international standard-setting body composed of representatives from various national standards organizations.
A multinational corporation or worldwide enterprise is an organization that owns or controls production of goods or services in one or more countries other than their home country. It can also be referred as an international corporation, a transnational corporation, or a stateless corporation.
A free-trade area is the region encompassing a trade bloc whose member countries have signed a free-trade agreement (FTA). Such agreements involve cooperation between at least two countries to reduce trade barriers import quotas and tariffs and to increase trade of goods and services with each other.
If people are also free to move between the countries, in addition to a free-trade agreement, it would also be considered an open border.
Arguably the most significant free-trade area in the world is the European Union, a politico-economic union of member states that are primarily located in Europe. The EU has developed European Single Market through a standardized system of laws that apply in all member states. EU policies aim to ensure the free movement of people, goods, services, and capital within the internal market,
Trade facilitation looks at how procedures and controls governing the movement of goods across national borders can be improved to reduce associated cost burdens and maximize efficiency while safeguarding legitimate regulatory objectives.
Global trade in services is also significant. For example, in India, business process outsourcing has been described as the "primary engine of the country's development over the next few decades, contributing broadly to GDP growth, employment growth, and poverty alleviation".
William I. Robinson's theoretical approach to globalization is a critique of Wallerstein's World Systems Theory. He believes that the global capital experienced today is due to a new and distinct form of globalization which began in the 1980s. Robinson argues not only are economic activities expanded across national boundaries but also there is a transnational fragmentation of these activities. One important aspect of Robinson's globalization theory is that production of goods are increasingly global. This means that one pair of shoes can be produced by six countries, each contributing to a part of the production process.
Cultural globalization refers to the transmission of ideas, meanings, and values around the world in such a way as to extend and intensify social relations. This process is marked by the common consumption of cultures that have been diffused by the Internet, popular culture media, and international travel. This has added to processes of commodity exchange and colonization which have a longer history of carrying cultural meaning around the globe. The circulation of cultures enables individuals to partake in extended social relations that cross national and regional borders. The creation and expansion of such social relations is not merely observed on a material level. Cultural globalization involves the formation of shared norms and knowledge with which people associate their individual and collective cultural identities. It brings increasing interconnectedness among different populations and cultures.
Cross-cultural communication is a field of study that looks at how people from differing cultural backgrounds communicate, in similar and different ways among themselves, and how they endeavour to communicate across cultures. Intercultural communication is a related field of study.
Cultural diffusion is the spread of cultural items—such as ideas, styles, religions, technologies, languages etc.
Cultural globalization has increased cross-cultural contacts, but may be accompanied by a decrease in the uniqueness of once-isolated communities. For example, sushi is available in Germany as well as Japan, but Euro-Disney outdraws the city of Paris, potentially reducing demand for "authentic" French pastry. Globalization's contribution to the alienation of individuals from their traditions may be modest compared to the impact of modernity itself, as alleged by existentialists such as Jean-Paul Sartre and Albert Camus. Globalization has expanded recreational opportunities by spreading pop culture, particularly via the Internet and satellite television.
Religions were among the earliest cultural elements to globalize, being spread by force, migration, evangelists, imperialists, and traders. Christianity, Islam, Buddhism, and more recently sects such as Mormonism are among those religions which have taken root and influenced endemic cultures in places far from their origins.
Globalization has strongly influenced sports. For example, the modern Olympic Games has athletes from more than 200 nations participating in a variety of competitions. The FIFA World Cup is the most widely viewed and followed sporting event in the world, exceeding even the Olympic Games; a ninth of the entire population of the planet watched the 2006 FIFA World Cup Final.
The term globalization implies transformation. Cultural practices including traditional music can be lost or turned into a fusion of traditions. Globalization can trigger a state of emergency for the preservation of musical heritage. Archivists may attempt to collect, record, or transcribe repertoires before melodies are assimilated or modified, while local musicians may struggle for authenticity and to preserve local musical traditions. Globalization can lead performers to discard traditional instruments. Fusion genres can become interesting fields of analysis.
Music has an important role in economic and cultural development during globalization. Music genres such as jazz and reggae began locally and later became international phenomena. Globalization gave support to the world music phenomenon by allowing music from developing countries to reach broader audiences. Though the term "World Music" was originally intended for ethnic-specific music, globalization is now expanding its scope such that the term often includes hybrid subgenres such as "world fusion", "global fusion", "ethnic fusion", and worldbeat.
Bourdieu claimed that the perception of consumption can be seen as self-identification and the formation of identity. Musically, this translates into each individual having their own musical identity based on likes and tastes. These likes and tastes are greatly influenced by culture, as this is the most basic cause for a person's wants and behavior. The concept of one's own culture is now in a period of change due to globalization. Also, globalization has increased the interdependency of political, personal, cultural, and economic factors.
A 2005 UNESCO report showed that cultural exchange is becoming more frequent from Eastern Asia, but that Western countries are still the main exporters of cultural goods. In 2002, China was the third largest exporter of cultural goods, after the UK and US. Between 1994 and 2002, both North America's and the European Union's shares of cultural exports declined while Asia's cultural exports grew to surpass North America. Related factors are the fact that Asia's population and area are several times that of North America. Americanization is related to a period of high political American clout and of significant growth of America's shops, markets and objects being brought into other countries.
Some critics of globalization argue that it harms the diversity of cultures. As a dominating country's culture is introduced into a receiving country through globalization, it can become a threat to the diversity of local culture. Some argue that globalization may ultimately lead to Westernization or Americanization of culture, where the dominating cultural concepts of economically and politically powerful Western countries spread and cause harm to local cultures.
Globalization is a diverse phenomenon which relates to a multilateral political world and to the increase of cultural objects and markets between countries. The Indian experience particularly reveals the plurality of the impact of cultural globalization.
Transculturalism is defined as "seeing oneself in the other". Transcultural is in turn described as "extending through all human cultures" or "involving, encompassing, or combining elements of more than one culture".
Political globalization refers to the growth of the worldwide political system, both in size and complexity. That system includes national governments, their governmental and intergovernmental organizations as well as government-independent elements of global civil society such as international non-governmental organizations and social movement organizations. One of the key aspects of the political globalization is the declining importance of the nation-state and the rise of other actors on the political scene.
William R. Thompson has defined it as "the expansion of a global political system, and its institutions, in which inter-regional transactions (including, but certainly not limited to trade) are managed".
Political globalization is one of the three main dimensions of globalization commonly found in academic literature, with the two other being economic globalization and cultural globalization.
Intergovernmentalism is a term in political science with two meanings. The first refers to a theory of regional integration originally proposed by Stanley Hoffmann; the second treats states and the national government as the primary factors for integration.
Multi-level governance is an approach in political science and public administration theory that originated from studies on European integration. Multi-level governance gives expression to the idea that there are many interacting authority structures at work in the emergent global political economy. It illuminates the intimate entanglement between the domestic and international levels of authority.
Some people are citizens of multiple nation-states. Multiple citizenship, also called dual citizenship or multiple nationality or dual nationality, is a person's citizenship status, in which a person is concurrently regarded as a citizen of more than one state under the laws of those states.
Increasingly, non-governmental organizations influence public policy across national boundaries, including humanitarian aid and developmental efforts. Philanthropic organizations with global missions are also coming to the forefront of humanitarian efforts; charities such as the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, Accion International, the Acumen Fund (now Acumen) and the Echoing Green have combined the business model with philanthropy, giving rise to business organizations such as the Global Philanthropy Group and new associations of philanthropists such as the Global Philanthropy Forum. The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation projects include a current multibillion-dollar commitment to funding immunizations in some of the world's more impoverished but rapidly growing countries. The Hudson Institute estimates total private philanthropic flows to developing countries at US$59 billion in 2010.
As a response to globalization, some countries have embraced isolationist policies. For example, the North Korean government makes it very difficult for foreigners to enter the country and strictly monitors their activities when they do. Aid workers are subject to considerable scrutiny and excluded from places and regions the government does not wish them to enter. Citizens cannot freely leave the country.
Globalization has been a gendered process where giant multinational corporations have outsourced jobs to low-wage, low skilled, quota free economies like the ready made garment industry in Bangladesh where poor women make up the majority of labor force. Despite a large proportion of women workers in the garment industry, women are still heavily underemployed compared to men. Most women that are employed in the garment industry come from the countryside of Bangladesh triggering migration of women in search of garment work. It is still unclear as to whether or not access to paid work for women where it didn't exist before has empowered them. The answers varied depending on whether it is the employers perspective or the workers and how they view their choices. Women workers did not see the garment industry as economically sustainable for them in the long run due to long hours standing and poor working conditions. Although women workers did show significant autonomy over their personal lives including their ability to negotiate with family, more choice in marriage, and being valued as a wage earner in the family. This did not translate into workers being able to collectively organize themselves in order to negotiate a better deal for themselves at work.
Another example of outsourcing in manufacturing includes the maquiladora industry in Ciudad Juarez, Mexico where poor women make up the majority of the labor force. Women in the maquiladora industry have produced high levels of turnover not staying long enough to be trained compared to men. A gendered two tiered system within the maquiladora industry has been created that focuses on training and worker loyalty. Women are seen as being untrainable, placed in un-skilled, low wage jobs, while men are seen as more trainable with less turnover rates, and placed in more high skilled technical jobs. The idea of training has become a tool used against women to blame them for their high turnover rates which also benefit the industry keeping women as temporary workers.
Scholars also occasionally discuss other, less common dimensions of globalization, such as environmental globalization (the internationally coordinated practices and regulations, often in the form of international treaties, regarding environmental protection) or military globalization (growth in global extent and scope of security relationships). Those dimensions, however, receive much less attention the three described above, as academic literature commonly subdivides globalization into three major areas: economic globalization, cultural globalization and political globalization.
An essential aspect of globalization is movement of people, and state-boundary limits on that movement have changed across history. The movement of tourists and business people opened up over the last century. As transportation technology improved, travel time and costs decreased dramatically between the 18th and early 20th century. For example, travel across the Atlantic ocean used to take up to 5 weeks in the 18th century, but around the time of the 20th century it took a mere 8 days. Today, modern aviation has made long-distance transportation quick and affordable.
Tourism is travel for pleasure. The developments in technology and transport infrastructure, such as jumbo jets, low-cost airlines, and more accessible airports have made many types of tourism more affordable. International tourist arrivals surpassed the milestone of 1 billion tourists globally for the first time in 2012.
A visa is a conditional authorization granted by a country to a foreigner, allowing them to enter and temporarily remain within, or to leave that country. Some countries – such as those in the Schengen Area – have agreements with other countries allowing each other's citizens to travel between them without visas. The World Tourism Organization announced that the number of tourists who require a visa before traveling was at its lowest level ever in 2015.
Immigration is the international movement of people into a destination country of which they are not natives or where they do not possess citizenship in order to settle or reside there, especially as permanent residents or naturalized citizens, or to take-up employment as a migrant worker or temporarily as a foreign worker.
According to the International Labour Organization, there were an estimated 232 million international migrants in the world (defined as persons outside their country of origin for 12 months or more) and approximately half of them were estimated to be economically active (i.e. being employed or seeking employment). International movement of labor is often seen as important to economic development. For example, freedom of movement for workers in the European Union means that people can move freely between member states to live, work, study or retire in another country.
Globalization is associated with a dramatic rise in international education. More and more students are seeking higher education in foreign countries and many international students now consider overseas study a stepping-stone to permanent residency within a country. The contributions that foreign students make to host nation economies, both culturally and financially has encouraged major players to implement further initiatives to facilitate the arrival and integration of overseas students, including substantial amendments to immigration and visa policies and procedures.
A transnational marriage is a marriage between two people from different countries. A variety of special issues arise in marriages between people from different countries, including those related to citizenship and culture, which add complexity and challenges to these kinds of relationships.
In an age of increasing globalization, where a growing number of people have ties to networks of people and places across the globe, rather than to a current geographic location, people are increasingly marrying across national boundaries. Transnational marriage is a by-product of the movement and migration of people.
Before electronic communications, long-distance communications relied on mail. Speed of global communications was limited by the maximum speed of courier services (especially horses and ships) until the mid-19th century. The electric telegraph was the first method of instant long-distance communication. For example, before the first transatlantic cable, communications between Europe and the Americas took weeks because ships had to carry mail across the ocean. The first transatlantic cable reduced communication time considerably, allowing a message and a response in the same day. Lasting transatlantic telegraph connections were achieved in the 1865–1866. The first wireless telegraphy transmitters were developed in 1895.
The Internet has been instrumental in connecting people across geographical boundaries. For example, Facebook is a social networking service which has more than 1.65 billion monthly active users .
Globalization can be spread by Global journalism which provides massive information and relies on the internet to interact, "makes it into an everyday routine to investigate how people and their actions, practices, problems, life conditions etc. in different parts of the world are interrelated. possible to assume that global threats such as climate change precipitate the further establishment of global journalism."
In the current era of globalization, the world is more interdependent than at any other time. Efficient and inexpensive transportation has left few places inaccessible, and increased global trade has brought more and more people into contact with animal diseases that have subsequently jumped species barriers (see zoonosis).
Coronavirus disease 2019, abbreviated COVID-19, first appeared in Wuhan, China in November 2019. More than 180 countries have reported cases since then. , the U.S. has the most confirmed active cases in the world. More than 3.4 million people from the worst-affected countries entered U.S. in the first three months since the inception of the 2019–20 coronavirus pandemic.
One index of globalization is the "KOF Index of Globalization", which measures three important dimensions of globalization: economic, social, and political. Another is the A.T. Kearney / Foreign Policy Magazine Globalization Index.
Measurements of economic globalization typically focus on variables such as trade, Foreign Direct Investment (FDI), Gross Domestic Product (GDP), portfolio investment, and income. However, newer indices attempt to measure globalization in more general terms, including variables related to political, social, cultural, and even environmental aspects of globalization.
The DHL Global Connectedness Index studies four main types of cross-border flow: trade (in both goods and services), information, people (including tourists, students, and migrants), and capital. It shows that the depth of global integration fell by about one-tenth after 2008, but by 2013 had recovered well above its pre-crash peak. The report also found a shift of economic activity to emerging economies.
Reactions to processes contributing to globalization have varied widely with a history as long as extraterritorial contact and trade. Philosophical differences regarding the costs and benefits of such processes give rise to a broad-range of ideologies and social movements. Proponents of economic growth, expansion and development, in general, view globalizing processes as desirable or necessary to the well-being of human society.
Antagonists view one or more globalizing processes as detrimental to social well-being on a global or local scale; this includes those who focus on social or natural sustainability of long-term and continuous economic expansion, the social structural inequality caused by these processes, and the colonial, imperialistic, or hegemonic ethnocentrism, cultural assimilation and cultural appropriation that underlie such processes.
Globalization tends to bring people into contact with foreign people and cultures. Xenophobia is the fear of that which is perceived to be foreign or strange. Xenophobia can manifest itself in many ways involving the relations and perceptions of an ingroup towards an outgroup, including a fear of losing identity, suspicion of its activities, aggression, and desire to eliminate its presence to secure a presumed purity.
Critiques of globalization generally stem from discussions surrounding the impact of such processes on the planet as well as the human costs. They challenge directly traditional metrics, such as GDP, and look to other measures, such as the Gini coefficient or the Happy Planet Index, and point to a "multitude of interconnected fatal consequences–social disintegration, a breakdown of democracy, more rapid and extensive deterioration of the environment, the spread of new diseases, increasing poverty and alienation" which they claim are the unintended consequences of globalization. Others point out that, while the forces of globalization have led to the spread of western-style democracy, this has been accompanied by an increase in inter-ethnic tension and violence as free market economic policies combine with democratic processes of universal suffrage as well as an escalation in militarization to impose democratic principles and as a means to conflict resolution.
On August 9, 2019, Pope Francis denounced isolationism and hinted that the Catholic Church will embrace globalization at the October 2019 Amazonia Synod, stating “the whole is greater than the parts. Globalization and unity should not be conceived as a sphere, but as a polyhedron: each people retains its identity in unity with others"
A 2005 study by Peer Fis and Paul Hirsch found a large increase in articles negative towards globalization in the years prior. In 1998, negative articles outpaced positive articles by two to one. The number of newspaper articles showing negative framing rose from about 10% of the total in 1991 to 55% of the total in 1999. This increase occurred during a period when the total number of articles concerning globalization nearly doubled.
A number of international polls have shown that residents of Africa and Asia tend to view globalization more favorably than residents of Europe or North America. In Africa, a Gallup poll found that 70% of the population views globalization favorably. The BBC found that 50% of people believed that economic globalization was proceeding too rapidly, while 35% believed it was proceeding too slowly.
In 2004, Philip Gordon stated that "a clear majority of Europeans believe that globalization can enrich their lives, while believing the European Union can help them take advantage of globalization's benefits while shielding them from its negative effects." The main opposition consisted of socialists, environmental groups, and nationalists. Residents of the EU did not appear to feel threatened by globalization in 2004. The EU job market was more stable and workers were less likely to accept wage/benefit cuts. Social spending was much higher than in the US. In a Danish poll in 2007, 76% responded that globalization is a good thing.
Fiss, "et al.", surveyed US opinion in 1993. Their survey showed that, in 1993, more than 40% of respondents were unfamiliar with the concept of globalization. When the survey was repeated in 1998, 89% of the respondents had a polarized view of globalization as being either good or bad. At the same time, discourse on globalization, which began in the financial community before shifting to a heated debate between proponents and disenchanted students and workers. Polarization increased dramatically after the establishment of the WTO in 1995; this event and subsequent protests led to a large-scale anti-globalization movement.
Initially, college educated workers were likely to support globalization. Less educated workers, who were more likely to compete with immigrants and workers in developing countries, tended to be opponents. The situation changed after the financial crisis of 2007. According to a 1997 poll 58% of college graduates said globalization had been good for the US. By 2008 only 33% thought it was good. Respondents with high school education also became more opposed.
According to Takenaka Heizo and Chida Ryokichi, there was a perception in Japan that the economy was "Small and Frail". However, Japan was resource-poor and used exports to pay for its raw materials. Anxiety over their position caused terms such as "internationalization" and "globalization" to enter everyday language. However, Japanese tradition was to be as self-sufficient as possible, particularly in agriculture.
Many in developing countries see globalization as a positive force that lifts them out of poverty. Those opposing globalization typically combine environmental concerns with nationalism. Opponents consider governments as agents of neo-colonialism that are subservient to multinational corporations. Much of this criticism comes from the middle class; the Brookings Institution suggested this was because the middle class perceived upwardly mobile low-income groups as threatening to their economic security.
The literature analyzing the economics of free trade is extremely rich with extensive work having been done on the theoretical and empirical effects. Though it creates winners and losers, the broad consensus among economists is that free trade is a large and unambiguous net gain for society. In a 2006 survey of 83 American economists, "87.5% agree that the U.S. should eliminate remaining tariffs and other barriers to trade" and "90.1% disagree with the suggestion that the U.S. should restrict employers from outsourcing work to foreign countries."
Quoting Harvard economics professor N. Gregory Mankiw, "Few propositions command as much consensus among professional economists as that open world trade increases economic growth and raises living standards." In a survey of leading economists, none disagreed with the notion that "freer trade improves productive efficiency and offers consumers better choices, and in the long run these gains are much larger than any effects on employment." Most economists would agree that although increasing returns to scale might mean that certain industry could settle in a geographical area without any strong economic reason derived from comparative advantage, this is not a reason to argue against free trade because the absolute level of output enjoyed by both "winner" and "loser" will increase with the "winner" gaining more than the "loser" but both gaining more than before in an absolute level.
In the book "The End of Poverty", Jeffrey Sachs discusses how many factors can affect a country's ability to enter the world market, including government corruption; legal and social disparities based on gender, ethnicity, or caste; diseases such as AIDS and malaria; lack of infrastructure (including transportation, communications, health, and trade); unstable political landscapes; protectionism; and geographic barriers. Jagdish Bhagwati, a former adviser to the U.N. on globalization, holds that, although there are obvious problems with overly rapid development, globalization is a very positive force that lifts countries out of poverty by causing a virtuous economic cycle associated with faster economic growth. However, economic growth does not necessarily mean a reduction in poverty; in fact, the two can coexist. Economic growth is conventionally measured using indicators such as GDP and GNI that do not accurately reflect the growing disparities in wealth. Additionally, Oxfam International argues that poor people are often excluded from globalization-induced opportunities "by a lack of productive assets, weak infrastructure, poor education and ill-health;" effectively leaving these marginalized groups in a poverty trap. Economist Paul Krugman is another staunch supporter of globalization and free trade with a record of disagreeing with many critics of globalization. He argues that many of them lack a basic understanding of comparative advantage and its importance in today's world.
The flow of migrants to advanced economies has been claimed to provide a means through which global wages converge. An IMF study noted a potential for skills to be transferred back to developing countries as wages in those a countries rise. Lastly, the dissemination of knowledge has been an integral aspect of globalization. Technological innovations (or technological transfer) are conjectured to benefit most developing and least developing countries (LDCs), as for example in the adoption of mobile phones.
There has been a rapid economic growth in Asia after embracing market orientation-based economic policies that encourage private property rights, free enterprise and competition. In particular, in East Asian developing countries, GDP per head rose at 5.9% a year from 1975 to 2001 (according to 2003 Human Development Report of UNDP). Like this, the British economic journalist Martin Wolf says that incomes of poor developing countries, with more than half the world's population, grew substantially faster than those of the world's richest countries that remained relatively stable in its growth, leading to reduced international inequality and the incidence of poverty.
Certain demographic changes in the developing world after active economic liberalization and international integration resulted in rising general welfare and, hence, reduced inequality. According to Wolf, in the developing world as a whole, life expectancy rose by four months each year after 1970 and infant mortality rate declined from 107 per thousand in 1970 to 58 in 2000 due to improvements in standards of living and health conditions. Also, adult literacy in developing countries rose from 53% in 1970 to 74% in 1998 and much lower illiteracy rate among the young guarantees that rates will continue to fall as time passes. Furthermore, the reduction in fertility rate in the developing world as a whole from 4.1 births per woman in 1980 to 2.8 in 2000 indicates improved education level of women on fertility, and control of fewer children with more parental attention and investment. Consequently, more prosperous and educated parents with fewer children have chosen to withdraw their children from the labor force to give them opportunities to be educated at school improving the issue of child labor. Thus, despite seemingly unequal distribution of income within these developing countries, their economic growth and development have brought about improved standards of living and welfare for the population as a whole.
Per capita gross domestic product (GDP) growth among post-1980 globalizing countries accelerated from 1.4 percent a year in the 1960s and 2.9 percent a year in the 1970s to 3.5 percent in the 1980s and 5.0 percent in the 1990s. This acceleration in growth seems even more remarkable given that the rich countries saw steady declines in growth from a high of 4.7 percent in the 1960s to 2.2 percent in the 1990s. Also, the non-globalizing developing countries seem to fare worse than the globalizers, with the former's annual growth rates falling from highs of 3.3 percent during the 1970s to only 1.4 percent during the 1990s. This rapid growth among the globalizers is not simply due to the strong performances of China and India in the 1980s and 1990s—18 out of the 24 globalizers experienced increases in growth, many of them quite substantial.
The globalization of the late 20th and early 21st centuries has led to the resurfacing of the idea that the growth of economic interdependence promotes peace. This idea had been very powerful during the globalization of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, and was a central doctrine of classical liberals of that era, such as the young John Maynard Keynes (1883–1946).
Some opponents of globalization see the phenomenon as a promotion of corporate interests. They also claim that the increasing autonomy and strength of corporate entities shapes the political policy of countries. They advocate global institutions and policies that they believe better address the moral claims of poor and working classes as well as environmental concerns. Economic arguments by fair trade theorists claim that unrestricted free trade benefits those with more financial leverage (i.e. the rich) at the expense of the poor.
Globalization allows corporations to outsource manufacturing and service jobs from high cost locations, creating economic opportunities with the most competitive wages and worker benefits. Critics of globalization say that it disadvantages poorer countries. While it is true that free trade encourages globalization among countries, some countries try to protect their domestic suppliers. The main export of poorer countries is usually agricultural productions. Larger countries often subsidize their farmers (e.g., the EU's Common Agricultural Policy), which lowers the market price for foreign crops.
Democratic globalization is a movement towards an institutional system of global democracy that would give world citizens a say in political organizations. This would, in their view, bypass nation-states, corporate oligopolies, ideological non-governmental organizations (NGO), political cults and mafias. One of its most prolific proponents is the British political thinker David Held. Advocates of democratic globalization argue that economic expansion and development should be the first phase of democratic globalization, which is to be followed by a phase of building global political institutions. Dr. Francesco Stipo, Director of the United States Association of the Club of Rome, advocates unifying nations under a world government, suggesting that it "should reflect the political and economic balances of world nations. A world confederation would not supersede the authority of the State governments but rather complement it, as both the States and the world authority would have power within their sphere of competence". Former Canadian Senator Douglas Roche, O.C., viewed globalization as inevitable and advocated creating institutions such as a directly elected United Nations Parliamentary Assembly to exercise oversight over unelected international bodies.
Global civics suggests that civics can be understood, in a global sense, as a social contract between global citizens in the age of interdependence and interaction. The disseminators of the concept define it as the notion that we have certain rights and responsibilities towards each other by the mere fact of being human on Earth. World citizen has a variety of similar meanings, often referring to a person who disapproves of traditional geopolitical divisions derived from national citizenship. An early incarnation of this sentiment can be found in Socrates, whom Plutarch quoted as saying: "I am not an Athenian, or a Greek, but a citizen of the world." In an increasingly interdependent world, world citizens need a compass to frame their mindsets and create a shared consciousness and sense of global responsibility in world issues such as environmental problems and nuclear proliferation.
Baha'i-inspired author Meyjes, while favoring the single world community and emergent global consciousness, warns of globalization as a cloak for an expeditious economic, social, and cultural Anglo-dominance that is insufficiently inclusive to inform the emergence of an optimal world civilization. He proposes a process of "universalization" as an alternative.
Cosmopolitanism is the proposal that all human ethnic groups belong to a single community based on a shared morality. A person who adheres to the idea of cosmopolitanism in any of its forms is called a cosmopolitan or cosmopolite. A cosmopolitan community might be based on an inclusive morality, a shared economic relationship, or a political structure that encompasses different nations. The cosmopolitan community is one in which individuals from different places (e.g. nation-states) form relationships based on mutual respect. For instance, Kwame Anthony Appiah suggests the possibility of a cosmopolitan community in which individuals from varying locations (physical, economic, etc.) enter relationships of mutual respect despite their differing beliefs (religious, political, etc.).
Canadian philosopher Marshall McLuhan popularized the term "Global Village" beginning in 1962. His view suggested that globalization would lead to a world where people from all countries will become more integrated and aware of common interests and shared humanity.
Military cooperation – Past examples of international cooperation exist. One example is the security cooperation between the United States and the former Soviet Union after the end of the Cold War, which astonished international society. Arms control and disarmament agreements, including the Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (see START I, START II, START III, and New START) and the establishment of NATO's Partnership for Peace, the Russia NATO Council, and the G8 Global Partnership against the Spread of Weapons and Materials of Mass Destruction, constitute concrete initiatives of arms control and de-nuclearization. The US–Russian cooperation was further strengthened by anti-terrorism agreements enacted in the wake of 9/11.
Environmental cooperation – One of the biggest successes of environmental cooperation has been the agreement to reduce chlorofluorocarbon (CFC) emissions, as specified in the Montreal Protocol, in order to stop ozone depletion. The most recent debate around nuclear energy and the non-alternative coal-burning power plants constitutes one more consensus on what not to do. Thirdly, significant achievements in IC can be observed through development studies.
Economic cooperation - One of the biggest challenges in 2019 with globalization is that many believe the progress made in the past decades are now back tracking. The back tracking of globalization has coined the term "Slobalization." Slobalization is a new, slower pattern of globalization.
Anti-globalization, or counter-globalization, consists of a number of criticisms of globalization but, in general, is critical of the globalization of corporate capitalism. The movement is also commonly referred to as the alter-globalization movement, anti-globalist movement, anti-corporate globalization movement, or movement against neoliberal globalization. Opponents of globalization argue that there is unequal power and respect in terms of international trade between the developed and underdeveloped countries of the world. The diverse subgroups that make up this movement include some of the following: trade unionists, environmentalists, anarchists, land rights and indigenous rights activists, organizations promoting human rights and sustainable development, opponents of privatization, and anti-sweatshop campaigners.
In "The Revolt of the Elites and the Betrayal of Democracy", Christopher Lasch analyzes the widening gap between the top and bottom of the social composition in the United States. For him, our epoch is determined by a social phenomenon: the revolt of the elites, in reference to "The revolt of the masses" (1929) of the Spanish philosopher José Ortega y Gasset. According to Lasch, the new elites, i.e. those who are in the top 20% in terms of income, through globalization which allows total mobility of capital, no longer live in the same world as their fellow-citizens. In this, they oppose the old bourgeoisie of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, which was constrained by its spatial stability to a minimum of rooting and civic obligations. Globalization, according to the sociologist, has turned elites into tourists in their own countries. The denationalization of business enterprise tends to produce a class who see themselves as "world citizens, but without accepting ... any of the obligations that citizenship in a polity normally implies". Their ties to an international culture of work, leisure, information – make many of them deeply indifferent to the prospect of national decline. Instead of financing public services and the public treasury, new elites are investing their money in improving their voluntary ghettos: private schools in their residential neighborhoods, private police, garbage collection systems. They have "withdrawn from common life".
Composed of those who control the international flows of capital and information, who preside over philanthropic foundations and institutions of higher education, manage the instruments of cultural production and thus fix the terms of public debate. So, the political debate is limited mainly to the dominant classes and political ideologies lose all contact with the concerns of the ordinary citizen. The result of this is that no one has a likely solution to these problems and that there are furious ideological battles on related issues.
However, they remain protected from the problems affecting the working classes: the decline of industrial activity, the resulting loss of employment, the decline of the middle class, increasing the number of the poor, the rising crime rate, growing drug trafficking, the urban crisis.
D.A. Snow et al. contend that the anti-globalization movement is an example of a new social movement, which uses tactics that are unique and use different resources than previously used before in other social movements.
One of the most infamous tactics of the movement is the Battle of Seattle in 1999, where there were protests against the World Trade Organization's Third Ministerial Meeting. All over the world, the movement has held protests outside meetings of institutions such as the WTO, the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the World Bank, the World Economic Forum, and the Group of Eight (G8). Within the Seattle demonstrations the protesters that participated used both creative and violent tactics to gain the attention towards the issue of globalization.
Capital markets have to do with raising and investing money in various human enterprises. Increasing integration of these financial markets between countries leads to the emergence of a global capital marketplace or a single world market. In the long run, increased movement of capital between countries tends to favor owners of capital more than any other group; in the short run, owners and workers in specific sectors in capital-exporting countries bear much of the burden of adjusting to increased movement of capital.
Those opposed to capital market integration on the basis of human rights issues are especially disturbed by the various abuses which they think are perpetuated by global and international institutions that, they say, promote neoliberalism without regard to ethical standards. Common targets include the World Bank (WB), International Monetary Fund (IMF), the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) and the World Trade Organization (WTO) and free trade treaties like the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA), the Multilateral Agreement on Investment (MAI) and the General Agreement on Trade in Services (GATS). In light of the economic gap between rich and poor countries, movement adherents claim free trade without measures in place to protect the under-capitalized will contribute only to the strengthening the power of industrialized nations (often termed the "North" in opposition to the developing world's "South").
Corporatist ideology, which privileges the rights of corporations (artificial or juridical persons) over those of natural persons, is an underlying factor in the recent rapid expansion of global commerce. In recent years, there have been an increasing number of books (Naomi Klein's 2000 "No Logo", for example) and films ("e.g. The Corporation" & "Surplus") popularizing an anti-corporate ideology to the public.
A related contemporary ideology, consumerism, which encourages the personal acquisition of goods and services, also drives globalization. Anti-consumerism is a social movement against equating personal happiness with consumption and the purchase of material possessions. Concern over the treatment of consumers by large corporations has spawned substantial activism, and the incorporation of consumer education into school curricula. Social activists hold materialism is connected to global retail merchandizing and supplier convergence, war, greed, anomie, crime, environmental degradation, and general social malaise and discontent. One variation on this topic is activism by "postconsumers", with the strategic emphasis on moving "beyond" addictive consumerism.
The global justice movement is the loose collection of individuals and groups—often referred to as a "movement of movements"—who advocate fair trade rules and perceive current institutions of global economic integration as problems. The movement is often labeled an anti-globalization movement by the mainstream media. Those involved, however, frequently deny that they are anti-globalization, insisting that they support the globalization of communication and people and oppose only the global expansion of corporate power. The movement is based in the idea of social justice, desiring the creation of a society or institution based on the principles of equality and solidarity, the values of human rights, and the dignity of every human being. Social inequality within and between nations, including a growing global digital divide, is a focal point of the movement. Many nongovernmental organizations have now arisen to fight these inequalities that many in Latin America, Africa and Asia face. A few very popular and well known non-governmental organizations (NGOs) include: War Child, Red Cross, Free The Children and CARE International. They often create partnerships where they work towards improving the lives of those who live in developing countries by building schools, fixing infrastructure, cleaning water supplies, purchasing equipment and supplies for hospitals, and other aid efforts.
The economies of the world have developed unevenly, historically, such that entire geographical regions were left mired in poverty and disease while others began to reduce poverty and disease on a wholesale basis. From around 1980 through at least 2011, the GDP gap, while still wide, appeared to be closing and, in some more rapidly developing countries, life expectancies began to rise. If we look at the Gini coefficient for world income, since the late 1980s, the gap between some regions has markedly narrowed—between Asia and the advanced economies of the West, for example—but huge gaps remain globally. Overall equality across humanity, considered as individuals, has improved very little. Within the decade between 2003 and 2013, income inequality grew even in traditionally egalitarian countries like Germany, Sweden and Denmark. With a few exceptions—France, Japan, Spain—the top 10 percent of earners in most advanced economies raced ahead, while the bottom 10 percent fell further behind. By 2013, 85 multibillionaires had amassed wealth equivalent to all the wealth owned by the poorest half (3.5 billion) of the world's total population of 7 billion.
Critics of globalization argue that globalization results in weak labor unions: the surplus in cheap labor coupled with an ever-growing number of companies in transition weakened labor unions in high-cost areas. Unions become less effective and workers their enthusiasm for unions when membership begins to decline. They also cite an increase in the exploitation of child labor: countries with weak protections for children are vulnerable to infestation by rogue companies and criminal gangs who exploit them. Examples include quarrying, salvage, and farm work as well as trafficking, bondage, forced labor, prostitution and pornography.
Women often participate in the workforce in precarious work, including export-oriented employment. Evidence suggests that while globalization has expanded women's access to employment, the long-term goal of transforming gender inequalities remains unmet and appears unattainable without regulation of capital and a reorientation and expansion of the state's role in funding public goods and providing a social safety net. Furthermore, the intersectionality of gender, race, class, and more remain overlooked when assessing the impact of globalization.
In 2016, a study published by the IMF posited that neoliberalism, the ideological backbone of contemporary globalized capitalism, has been "oversold", with the benefits of neoliberal policies being "fairly difficult to establish when looking at a broad group of countries" and the costs, most significantly higher income inequality within nations, "hurt the level and sustainability of growth."
Beginning in the 1930s, opposition arose to the idea of a world government, as advocated by organizations such as the World Federalist Movement (WFM). Those who oppose global governance typically do so on objections that the idea is unfeasible, inevitably oppressive, or simply unnecessary. In general, these opponents are wary of the concentration of power or wealth that such governance might represent. Such reasoning dates back to the founding of the League of Nations and, later, the United Nations.
Environmentalism is a broad philosophy, ideology and social movement regarding concerns for environmental conservation and improvement of the health of the environment. Environmentalist concerns with globalization include issues such as global warming, global water supply and water crises, inequity in energy consumption and energy conservation, transnational air pollution and pollution of the world ocean, overpopulation, world habitat sustainability, deforestation, biodiversity loss and species extinction.
One critique of globalization is that natural resources of the poor have been systematically taken over by the rich and the pollution promulgated by the rich is systematically dumped on the poor. Some argue that Northern corporations are increasingly exploiting resources of less wealthy countries for their global activities while it is the South that is disproportionately bearing the environmental burden of the globalized economy. Globalization is thus leading to a type of" environmental apartheid".
Helena Norberg-Hodge, the director and founder of Local Futures/International Society for Ecology and Culture, criticizes globalization in many ways. In her book "", Norberg-Hodge claims that "centuries of ecological balance and social harmony are under threat from the pressures of development and globalization." She also criticizes the standardization and rationalization of globalization, as it does not always yield the expected growth outcomes. Although globalization takes similar steps in most countries, scholars such as Hodge claim that it might not be effective to certain countries and that globalization has actually moved some countries backward instead of developing them.
A related area of concern is the pollution haven hypothesis, which posits that, when large industrialized nations seek to set up factories or offices abroad, they will often look for the cheapest option in terms of resources and labor that offers the land and material access they require (see Race to the bottom). This often comes at the cost of environmentally sound practices. Developing countries with cheap resources and labor tend to have less stringent environmental regulations, and conversely, nations with stricter environmental regulations become more expensive for companies as a result of the costs associated with meeting these standards. Thus, companies that choose to physically invest in foreign countries tend to (re)locate to the countries with the lowest environmental standards or weakest enforcement.
The European Union–Mercosur Free Trade Agreement, which would form one of the world's largest free trade areas, has been denounced by environmental activists and indigenous rights campaigners. The fear is that the deal could lead to more deforestation of the Amazon rainforest as it expands market access to Brazilian beef.
Globalization is associated with a more efficient system of food production. This is because crops are grown in countries with optimum growing conditions. This improvement causes an increase in the world's food supply which encourages improved food security.
Norway's limited crop range advocates globalization of food production and availability. The northern-most country in Europe requires trade with other countries to ensure population food demands are met. The degree of self-sufficiency in food production is around 50% in Norway.
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Religion&Philosophy&Ethics | Fun
Fun is defined by the Oxford English Dictionary as "Light-hearted pleasure, enjoyment, or amusement; boisterous joviality or merrymaking; entertainment". Although particularly associated with recreation and play, fun may be encountered during work, social functions, and in daily life. There are psychological and physiological implications to the experience of fun. Modern Westernized civilizations prioritize fun as an external and sexual aspect.
The word "fun" is associated with sports, sexual activity, entertaining media, high merriment, and amusement. Although its etymology is uncertain, it has been speculated that it may be derived from "fonne" (fool) and "fonnen" (the one fooling the other). An 18th century meaning (still used in Orkney and Shetland) was "cheat, trick, hoax", a meaning still retained in the phrase "to make fun of".
The way the word "fun" is used demonstrates its distinctive elusiveness and happiness. Expressions such as "Have fun!" and "That was fun!" indicate that fun is pleasant, personal, and to some extent unpredictable. Expressions such as "I was making fun of myself" convey the sense that fun is something that can be amusing and not to be taken seriously. The adjective "funny" has two meanings which often need to be clarified between a speaker and listener. One meaning is "amusing, jocular, droll" and the other meaning is "odd, quirky, peculiar". These differences indicate the evanescent and experiential nature of fun and the difficulty of distinguishing "fun" from "enjoyment".
Fun's evanescence can be seen when an activity regarded as fun becomes goal-oriented. Many physical activities and individual sports are regarded as fun until the participant seeks to win a competition, at which point, much of the fun may disappear as the individual's focus tightens. Surfing is an example. If you are a "mellow soul" (not in a competition or engaging in extreme sport) "once you're riding waves, you're guaranteed to be having ... fun".
The pleasure of fun can be seen by the numerous efforts to harness its positive associations. For example, there are many books on serious subjects, about skills such as music, mathematics and languages, normally quite difficult to master, which have "fun" added to the title.
Many physical activities provide opportunities to play and have fun. Not only can these activities be fun but can also improve physical and mental states.
According to Johan Huizinga, fun is "an absolutely primary category of life, familiar to everybody at a glance right down to the animal level." Psychological studies reveal both the importance of fun and its effect on the perception of time, which is sometimes said to be shortened when one is having fun. As the adage states: "Time flies when you're having fun".
It has been suggested that games, toys, and activities perceived as fun are often challenging in some way. When a person is challenged to think consciously, overcome challenge and learn something new, they are more likely to enjoy a new experience and view it as fun. A change from routine activities appears to be at the core of this perception, since people spend much of a typical day engaged in activities that are routine and require limited conscious thinking. Routine information is processed by the brain as a "chunked pattern": "We rarely look at the real world", according to game designer Raph Koster, "we instead recognize something we have chunked, and leave it at that. [...] One might argue that the essence of much of art is in forcing us to see things as they really are rather than as we assume them to be". Since it helps people to relax, fun is sometimes regarded as a "social lubricant", important in adding "to one's pleasure in life" and helping to "act as a buffer against stress".
For children, fun is strongly related to play and they have great capacity to extract the fun from it in a spontaneous and inventive way. Play "involves the capacity to have fun – to be able to return, at least for a little while, to never-never land and enjoy it."
Some scientists have identified areas of the brain associated with the perception of novelty, which are stimulated when faced with "unusual or surprising circumstances". Information is initially received in the hippocampus, the site of long-term memory consolidation, where the brain attempts to match the new information with recognizable patterns stored in long-term memory. When it is unable to do this, the brain releases dopamine, a chemical which stimulates the amygdala, the site of emotion, and creates a pleasurable feeling that is associated with the new memory. In other words, fun is created by stimulating the brain with novelty.
In the modern world, fun is sold as a consumer product in the form of games, novelties, television, toys and other amusements. Marxist sociologists such as the Frankfurt School criticise mass-manufactured fun as too calculated and empty to be fully satisfying. Bill Griffith satirises this dysphoria when his cartoon character Zippy the Pinhead asks mechanically, "Are we having fun yet?" In the Beatles song "She's Leaving Home" fun is called "the one thing that money can't buy."
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Religion&Philosophy&Ethics | Nel Noddings
Nel Noddings (; born January 19, 1929) is an American feminist, educationalist, and philosopher best known for her work in philosophy of education, educational theory, and ethics of care.
Noddings received a bachelor's degree in mathematics and physical science from Montclair State College in New Jersey, a master's degree in mathematics from Rutgers University, and a Ph.D. in education from the Stanford Graduate School of Education.
Nel Noddings worked in many areas of the education system. She spent seventeen years as an elementary and high school mathematics teacher and school administrator, before earning her PhD and beginning work as an academic in the fields of philosophy of education, theory of education and ethics, specifically moral education and ethics of care. She became a member of the Stanford faculty in 1977, and was the Jacks Professor of Child Education from 1992 until 1998. While at Stanford University she received awards for teaching excellence in 1981, 1982 and 1997, and was the associate dean or acting dean of the School of Education for four years. After leaving Stanford University, she held positions at Columbia University and Colgate University. She is past president of the Philosophy of Education Society and the John Dewey Society. In 2002-2003 she held the John W. Porter Chair in Urban Education at Eastern Michigan University. She has been Lee L. Jacks Professor of Education, Emerita, at Stanford University since she retired in 1998.
Nel Noddings has 10 children, 39 grandchildren, and over 20 great- grandchildren, many of whom are highly educated and educators themselves. In 2012 she lost her husband of over 60 years to cancer.
She has described her early educational experiences and her close relationships as key in her development of her philosophical position.
Noddings' first sole-authored book "Caring: A Feminine Approach to Ethics and Moral Education" (1984) followed close on the 1982 publication of Carol Gilligan’s ground-breaking work in the ethics of care "In a Different Voice". While her work on ethics continued, with the publication of "Women and Evil" (1989), and later works on moral education, most of her later publications have been on the philosophy of education and educational theory. Her most significant works in these areas have been "Educating for Intelligent Belief or Unbelief" (1993) and "Philosophy of Education" (1995).
Besides contributing to philosophy, Noddings also works in the field of social psychology. Noddings is currently on the Editorial Board of "Greater Good Magazine", published by the Greater Good Science Center of the University of California, Berkeley. Noddings' contributions include the interpretation of scientific research into the roots of compassion, altruism, and peaceful human relationships.
Nel Noddings' approach to ethics of care has been described as "relational ethics" because it prioritizes concern for relationships. Like Carol Gilligan, Noddings accepts that justice based approaches, which are supposed to be more masculine, are genuine alternatives to ethics of care. However, unlike Gilligan, Noddings' believes that caring, 'rooted in receptivity, relatedness, and responsiveness' is a more basic and preferable approach to ethics ("Caring" 1984, 2).
The key to understanding Noddings' ethics of care is to understand her notion of caring and ethical caring in particular.
Noddings believes that it would be a mistake to try to provide a systematic examination of the requirements for caring; nevertheless, she does suggest three requirements for caring ("Caring" 1984, 11-12). She argues that the carer ("one-caring") must exhibit engrossment and motivational displacement, and the person who is cared for ("cared-for") must respond in some way to the caring (1984, 69). Noddings' term "engrossment" refers to thinking about someone in order to gain a greater understanding of him or her. Engrossment is necessary for caring because an individual's personal and physical situation must be understood before the one-caring can determine the appropriateness of any action. 'Engrossment' need not entail, as the term seems to suggest, a deep fixation on the other. It requires only the attention needed to come to understand the position of the other. Engrossment could not on its own constitute caring; someone could have a deep understanding of another person, yet act against that person's interests. Motivational displacement prevents this from occurring. Motivational displacement occurs when the one-caring's behaviour is largely determined by the needs of the person for whom she is caring. On its own, motivational displacement would also be insufficient for ethical caring. For example, someone who acted primarily from a desire to accomplish something for another person, but failed to think carefully enough about that other person's needs (failed to be correctly engrossed in the other), would fail to care. Finally, Noddings believes that caring requires some form of recognition from the cared-for that the one-caring is, in fact, caring. When there is a recognition of and response to the caring by the person cared for, Noddings describes the caring as "completed in the other" (1984, 4).
Nel Noddings draws an important distinction between natural caring and ethical caring (1984, 81-83). Noddings distinguishes between acting because "I want" and acting because "I must". When I care for someone because "I want" to care, say I hug a friend who needs hugging in an act of love, Noddings claims that I am engaged in natural caring. When I care for someone because "I must" care, say I hug an acquaintance who needs hugging in spite of my desire to escape that person's pain, according to Noddings, I am engaged in ethical caring. Ethical caring occurs when a person acts caringly out of a belief that caring is the appropriate way of relating to people. When someone acts in a caring way because that person naturally cares for another, the caring is not ethical caring (1984, 79-80). Noddings' claims that ethical caring is based on, and so dependent on, natural caring (1984, 83, 206 fn 4). It is through experiencing others caring for them and naturally caring for others that people build what is called an "ethical ideal", an image of the kind of person they want to be.
Noddings describes wrong actions in terms of "a diminishment of the ethical ideal" and "evil". A person's ethical ideal is diminished when she either chooses or is forced to act in a way that rejects her internal call to care. In effect, her image of the best person it is possible for her to be is altered in a way that lowers her ideal. According to Noddings, people and organizations can deliberately or carelessly contribute to the diminishment of other's ethical ideals. They may do this by teaching people not to care, or by placing them in conditions that prevent them from being able to care (1984, 116-119). A person is evil if, in spite of her ability to do otherwise, she either fails to personally care for someone, or prevents others from caring. Noddings writes, "[when] one intentionally rejects the impulse to care and deliberately turns her back on the ethical, she is evil, and this evil cannot be redeemed" (1984, 115).
This is referred to as "obligation". "There are moments for all of us when we care quite naturally. We just do care; no ethical effort is required. 'Want' and 'ought' are indistinguishable in such cases." I have the ability to "abstain from action if I [so] believe that anything I might do would tend to work against the best interests of the cared-for." According to Noddings we are obligated to pursue the "musts".
Nel Noddings' ethics of care has been criticised by both feminists and those who favour more traditional, and allegedly masculine, approaches to ethics. In brief, feminists object that the one caring is, in effect, carrying out the traditional female role in life of giving while receiving little in return. Those who accept more traditional approaches to ethics argue that the partiality shown to those closest to us in Noddings' theory is inappropriate.
Noddings tends to use unequal relationships as a model for understanding caring. Philosopher and feminist Sarah Lucia Hoagland argues that the relationships in question, such as parenting and teaching, are ideally relationships where caring is a transitory thing designed to foster the independence of the cared-for, and so end the unequal caring relationship. Unequal relationships, she writes, are ethically problematic, and so a poor model for an ethical theory. Hoagland argues that on Noddings' account of ethical caring, the one-caring is placed in the role of the "giver" and the cared-for in the role of the "taker". The one-caring is dominant, choosing what is good for the cared-for, but gives without receiving caring in return. The cared-for is put in the position of being a dependent, with insufficient control over the nature of the caring. Hoagland believes that such unequal relationships cannot be morally good.
In education, the ethic of care speaks of obligation to do something right and a sense that we must do something right when others address us. The "I must" response is induced in direct encounter in preparation for response. We respond because we want to; either we love and respect those that address us or we have significant regard for them. As a result, the recipients of care must respond in a way that demonstrates their caring has been received.
In regards, to education, caring refers to the relationship between student and teacher, not just the person who cares. As educators respond to the needs of students, teachers may see the need to design a differentiated curriculum because as teachers work closely with students, we will be moved by their different needs and interests. The claim to care must not be based on a one time virtuous decision but an ongoing interest in the student’s welfare.
In “Identifying Needs in Education" Noddings (2003) provides criteria for deciding whether a want should be recognized or treated as a need. This criteria is as follows:
The overt or explicit curriculum in education is designed to meet the inferred needs of students, as they are those identified by teachers or individuals to improve the classroom learning environment. In the ethics of care philosophy, inferred needs are referred to as those that come from those not directly expressing the need. Most needs identified by educators for learners are inferred needs because they are not being identified by the learners themselves. Students’ inferred needs can often be identified interactively, through working with them one on one or observing their behaviour in a classroom environment.
Expressed needs are difficult to assess and address in the classroom environment, as they are needs directly expressed by learners through behaviour or words. Although expressed needs are difficult to address, educators need to treat them positively in order to maintain a caring relationship with learners. If expressed needs are not treated carefully, the individual might not feel cared for. Educators should make a consistent effort to respond to a student’s expressed needs through prior planning and discussions of moral and social issues surrounding the needs
Basic needs are defined as the most basic needs required to survive such as food, water and shelter. Basic needs and needs associated with self-actualization (overwhelming needs) co-exist when basic needs are being compromised over extended periods of time.
Overwhelming needs cannot be met by the usual processes of schooling and include extreme instances such as abuse, neglect and illness. As well, a student’s socioeconomic status (SES) or dysfunctional family environment can cause them to come to school with needs that cannot be expressed nor met by educators. To help meet those overwhelming needs of students, particularly those in poor neighborhood, the ethic of care philosophy dictates that schools should be full-service institutions. Medical and dental care, social services, childcare and parenting advice should be available on campus. In turn, students in these situations are often forced into academic courses and fight an uphill battle, where they have to engage in activities that are difficult to focus on, based on their circumstances.
People who are poor, perhaps homeless, without dependable transportation cannot afford to run all over town seeking such services, and often they don’t know where to begin. Despite being aware of the overwhelming needs many students face, we force all children—regardless of interest or aptitude—into academic courses and then fight an uphill battle to motivate them to do things they do not want to do.
Emotion has been aggravated by the rise of professions with their insistence on detachment, distance, cool appraisal and systematic procedures. Concern for rational and professional functioning keeps emotion out of education, as it is supposed that real professionals do not allow themselves to feel controlled by their emotions and are forced to face problems with dispassionate rationality Noddings (1996) states that in the teaching profession, the concern takes several forms:
The use of stories in teacher education could be powerful in dispelling these beliefs, as they illustrate how deeply experienced teachers feel about the inevitable difficulties that occur in the classroom
In the ethic of care model, the aim of education is centered around happiness. Incorporating this component into education involves not only helping our students understand the components of happiness by allowing teachers and students to interact as a whole community In regard to the education of the whole child, Noddings (2005) stated that, “We will not find the solution to problems of violence, alienation, ignorance, and unhappiness in increasing our security, imposing more tests, punishing schools for their failure to produce 100 percent proficiency, or demanding that teachers be knowledgeable in the subjects they teach. Instead, we must allow teachers and students to interact as whole persons, and we must develop policies that treat the school as a whole community.”
One criticism of Noddings' ethic of care, in regards to education, is that it advocates little importance to caring for oneself, except as a means to provide further care for others. In regards to education, the teacher-student relationship could be jeopardized because the educator might not engage in self care and instead, devote all their energy into meeting their students' needs. Hoaglard (1991, p. 255) states that the caregiver would be defined as a “martyr, servant or slave” by the philosophy in the ethic of care.
Another criticism of Noddings' argument is that ethic of care may result not only in the exploitation of the caregiver, but also in a smothering paternalism. Goodin (1996, p. 507) writes that, “the trouble with subsuming individuals into relationships of ‘we’ness is precisely that we then risk losing track of the separateness of people”. As well, Goodin (1996, p. 116-120) states that Noddings' criteria for implicit and explicit needs assumes that needs are transparent to the caregiver and that the caregiver’s perceptions are privileged in the process of interpreting needs. Lastly, Grimshaw (1986) explains that it is important to consider that good care always entails an element of distance between individuals. She states, (1986, p. 183) “Care and understanding require the sort of distance that is needed in order not to see the other as a projection of the self, or self as a continuation of other”. Thus, a clear distance between the self and the individual that is being cared for needs to exist in order to keep the personal care of both individuals in mind.
| 7159985 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=7159985 |
Religion&Philosophy&Ethics | Impact of nanotechnology
The impact of nanotechnology extends from its medical, ethical, mental, legal and environmental applications, to fields such as engineering, biology, chemistry, computing, materials science, and communications.
Major benefits of nanotechnology include improved manufacturing methods, water purification systems, energy systems, physical enhancement, nanomedicine, better food production methods, nutrition and large-scale infrastructure auto-fabrication. Nanotechnology's reduced size may allow for automation of tasks which were previously inaccessible due to physical restrictions, which in turn may reduce labor, land, or maintenance requirements placed on humans.
Potential risks include environmental, health, and safety issues; transitional effects such as displacement of traditional industries as the products of nanotechnology become dominant, which are of concern to privacy rights advocates. These may be particularly important if potential negative effects of nanoparticles are overlooked.
Whether nanotechnology merits special government regulation is a controversial issue. Regulatory bodies such as the United States Environmental Protection Agency and the Health and Consumer Protection Directorate of the European Commission have started dealing with the potential risks of nanoparticles. The organic food sector has been the first to act with the regulated exclusion of engineered nanoparticles from certified organic produce, firstly in Australia and the UK, and more recently in Canada, as well as for all food certified to Demeter International standards
The presence of nanomaterials (materials that contain nanoparticles) is not in itself a threat. It is only certain aspects that can make them risky, in particular their mobility and their increased reactivity. Only if certain properties of certain nanoparticles were harmful to living beings or the environment would we be faced with a genuine hazard. In this case it can be called nanopollution.
In addressing the health and environmental impact of nanomaterials we need to differentiate between two types of nanostructures: (1) Nanocomposites, nanostructured surfaces and nanocomponents (electronic, optical, sensors etc.), where nanoscale particles are incorporated into a substance, material or device (“fixed” nano-particles); and (2) “free” nanoparticles, where at some stage in production or use individual nanoparticles of a substance are present. These free nanoparticles could be nanoscale species of elements, or simple compounds, but also complex compounds where for instance a nanoparticle of a particular element is coated with another substance (“coated” nanoparticle or “core-shell” nanoparticle).
There seems to be consensus that, although one should be aware of materials containing fixed nanoparticles, the immediate concern is with free nanoparticles.
Nanoparticles are very different from their everyday counterparts, so their adverse effects cannot be derived from the known toxicity of the macro-sized material. This poses significant issues for addressing the health and environmental impact of free nanoparticles.
To complicate things further, in talking about nanoparticles it is important that a powder or liquid containing nanoparticles almost never be monodisperse, but contain instead a range of particle sizes. This complicates the experimental analysis as larger nanoparticles might have different properties from smaller ones. Also, nanoparticles show a tendency to aggregate, and such aggregates often behave differently from individual nanoparticles.
The health impacts of nanotechnology are the possible effects that the use of nanotechnological materials and devices will have on human health. As nanotechnology is an emerging field, there is great debate regarding to what extent nanotechnology will benefit or pose risks for human health. Nanotechnology's health impacts can be split into two aspects: the potential for nanotechnological innovations to have medical applications to cure disease, and the potential health hazards posed by exposure to nanomaterials.
Nanomedicine is the medical application of nanotechnology. The approaches to nanomedicine range from the medical use of nanomaterials, to nanoelectronic biosensors, and even possible future applications of molecular nanotechnology. Nanomedicine seeks to deliver a valuable set of research tools and clinically helpful devices in the near future. The National Nanotechnology Initiative expects new commercial applications in the pharmaceutical industry that may include advanced drug delivery systems, new therapies, and in vivo imaging. Neuro-electronic interfaces and other nanoelectronics-based sensors are another active goal of research. Further down the line, the speculative field of molecular nanotechnology believes that cell repair machines could revolutionize medicine and the medical field.
Nanomedicine research is directly funded, with the US National Institutes of Health in 2005 funding a five-year plan to set up four nanomedicine centers. In April 2006, the journal Nature Materials estimated that 130 nanotech-based drugs and delivery systems were being developed worldwide. Nanomedicine is a large industry, with nanomedicine sales reaching $6.8 billion in 2004. With over 200 companies and 38 products worldwide, a minimum of $3.8 billion in nanotechnology R&D is being invested every year. As the nanomedicine industry continues to grow, it is expected to have a significant impact on the economy.
Nanotoxicology is the field which studies potential health risks of nanomaterials. The extremely small size of nanomaterials means that they are much more readily taken up by the human body than larger sized particles. How these nanoparticles behave inside the organism is one of the significant issues that needs to be resolved. The behavior of nanoparticles is a function of their size, shape and surface reactivity with the surrounding tissue. For example, they could cause overload on phagocytes, cells that ingest and destroy foreign matter, thereby triggering stress reactions that lead to inflammation and weaken the body's defense against other pathogens.
Apart from what happens if non-degradable or slowly degradable nanoparticles accumulate in organs, another concern is their potential interaction with biological processes inside the body: because of their large surface, nanoparticles on exposure to tissue and fluids will immediately adsorb onto their surface some of the macromolecules they encounter. This may, for instance, affect the regulatory mechanisms of enzymes and other proteins. The large number of variables influencing toxicity means that it is difficult to generalise about health risks associated with exposure to nanomaterials – each new nanomaterial must be assessed individually and all material properties must be taken into account. Health and environmental issues combine in the workplace of companies engaged in producing or using nanomaterials and in the laboratories engaged in nanoscience and nanotechnology research. It is safe to say that current workplace exposure standards for dusts cannot be applied directly to nanoparticle dusts.
The National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health has conducted initial research on how nanoparticles interact with the body's systems and how workers might be exposed to nano-sized particles in the manufacturing or industrial use of nanomaterials. NIOSH currently offers interim guidelines for working with nanomaterials consistent with the best scientific knowledge. At The National Personal Protective Technology Laboratory of NIOSH, studies investigating the filter penetration of nanoparticles on NIOSH-certified and EU marked respirators, as well as non-certified dust masks have been conducted. These studies found that the most penetrating particle size range was between 30 and 100 nanometers, and leak size was the largest factor in the number of nanoparticles found inside the respirators of the test dummies.
Other properties of nanomaterials that influence toxicity include: chemical composition, shape, surface structure, surface charge, aggregation and solubility,
and the presence or absence of functional groups of other chemicals.
The large number of variables influencing toxicity means that it is difficult to generalise about health risks associated with exposure to nanomaterials – each new nanomaterial must be assessed individually and all material properties must be taken into account.
Literature reviews have been showing that release of engineered nanoparticles and incurred personal exposure can happen during different work activities. The situation alerts regulatory bodies to necessitate prevention strategies and regulations at nanotechnology workplaces.
The environmental impact of nanotechnology is the possible effects that the use of nanotechnological materials and devices will have on the environment. As nanotechnology is an emerging field, there is debate regarding to what extent industrial and commercial use of nanomaterials will affect organisms and ecosystems.
Nanotechnology's environmental impact can be split into two aspects: the potential for nanotechnological innovations to help improve the environment, and the possibly novel type of pollution that nanotechnological materials might cause if released into the environment.
Green nanotechnology refers to the use of nanotechnology to enhance the environmental sustainability of processes producing negative externalities. It also refers to the use of the products of nanotechnology to enhance sustainability. It includes making green nano-products and using nano-products in support of sustainability. Green nanotechnology has been described as the development of clean technologies, "to minimize potential environmental and human health risks associated with the manufacture and use of nanotechnology products, and to encourage replacement of existing products with new nano-products that are more environmentally friendly throughout their lifecycle."
Green nanotechnology has two goals: producing nanomaterials and products without harming the environment or human health, and producing nano-products that provide solutions to environmental problems. It uses existing principles of green chemistry and green engineering to make nanomaterials and nano-products without toxic ingredients, at low temperatures using less energy and renewable inputs wherever possible, and using lifecycle thinking in all design and engineering stages.
Nanopollution is a generic name for all waste generated by nanodevices or during the nanomaterials manufacturing process. Nanowaste is mainly the group of particles that are released into the environment, or the particles that are thrown away when still on their products.
Beyond the toxicity risks to human health and the environment which are associated with first-generation nanomaterials, nanotechnology has broader societal impact and poses broader social challenges. Social scientists have suggested that nanotechnology's social issues should be understood and assessed not simply as "downstream" risks or impacts. Rather, the challenges should be factored into "upstream" research and decision-making in order to ensure technology development that meets social objectives
Many social scientists and organizations in civil society suggest that technology assessment and governance should also involve public participation.
Over 800 nano-related patents were granted in 2003, with numbers increasing to nearly 19,000 internationally by 2012. Corporations are already taking out broad-ranging patents on nanoscale discoveries and inventions. For example, two corporations, NEC and IBM, hold the basic patents on carbon nanotubes, one of the current cornerstones of nanotechnology. Carbon nanotubes have a wide range of uses, and look set to become crucial to several industries from electronics and computers, to strengthened materials to drug delivery and diagnostics. Carbon nanotubes are poised to become a major traded commodity with the potential to replace major conventional raw materials.
Nanotechnologies may provide new solutions for the millions of people in developing countries who lack access to basic services, such as safe water, reliable energy, health care, and education. The 2004 UN Task Force on Science, Technology and Innovation noted that some of the advantages of nanotechnology include production using little labor, land, or maintenance, high productivity, low cost, and modest requirements for materials and energy. However, concerns are frequently raised that the claimed benefits of nanotechnology will not be evenly distributed, and that any benefits (including technical and/or economic) associated with nanotechnology will only reach affluent nations.
Longer-term concerns center on the impact that new technologies will have for society at large, and whether these could possibly lead to either a post-scarcity economy, or alternatively exacerbate the wealth gap between developed and developing nations. The effects of nanotechnology on the society as a whole, on human health and the environment, on trade, on security, on food systems and even on the definition of "human", have not been characterized or politicized.
Significant debate exists relating to the question of whether nanotechnology or nanotechnology-based products merit special government regulation. This debate is related to the circumstances in which it is necessary and appropriate to assess new substances prior to their release into the market, community and environment.
Regulatory bodies such as the United States Environmental Protection Agency and the Food and Drug Administration in the U.S. or the Health & Consumer Protection Directorate of the European Commission have started dealing with the potential risks posed by nanoparticles. So far, neither engineered nanoparticles nor the products and materials that contain them are subject to any special regulation regarding production, handling or labelling. The Material Safety Data Sheet that must be issued for some materials often does not differentiate between bulk and nanoscale size of the material in question and even when it does these MSDS are advisory only.
Limited nanotechnology labeling and regulation may exacerbate potential human and environmental health and safety issues associated with nanotechnology. It has been argued that the development of comprehensive regulation of nanotechnology will be vital to ensure that the potential risks associated with the research and commercial application of nanotechnology do not overshadow its potential benefits. Regulation may also be required to meet community expectations about responsible development of nanotechnology, as well as ensuring that public interests are included in shaping the development of nanotechnology.
In "The Consumer Product Safety Commission and Nanotechnology," E. Marla Felcher suggests that the Consumer Product Safety Commission, which is charged with protecting the public against unreasonable risks of injury or death associated with consumer products, is ill-equipped to oversee the safety of complex, high-tech products made using nanotechnology.
| 7200558 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=7200558 |
Religion&Philosophy&Ethics | Covert incest
Covert incest, also known as emotional incest, is a type of abuse in which a parent looks to their child for the emotional support that would be normally provided by another adult. The effects of covert incest on children when they become adults are thought to mimic actual incest, although to a lesser degree. This term describes interactions between a parent and child that are exclusive of sexual abuse. The term has been criticized for broadening the definition of "incest" to an excessive degree, inflating the prevalence of child abuse, and being over-used and unsubstantiated.
"Covert incest" was defined in the 1980s as an emotionally abusive relationship between a parental figure and child that does not involve incest or sexual intercourse, though it involves similar interpersonal dynamics as a relationship between sexual partners. Defining such relationships as "incest" has led to criticism of the concept for dramatically loosening the definition of incest, making child abuse seem more prevalent than it actually is.
Covert incest is described as occurring when a parent is unable or unwilling to maintain a relationship with another adult and forces the emotional role of a spouse onto their child instead. The child's needs are ignored and instead the relationship exists solely to meet the needs of the parent and the adult may not be aware of the problems created by their actions.
The effects of covert incest are thought to mimic actual incest though to a lesser degree, and Kenneth Adams, who originated the concept, describes the victims as having anger or guilt towards parents and problems with self-esteem, addiction and sexual and emotional intimacy. Psychotherapist Roni Weisberg-Ross has noted that the term may not be particularly useful, since it can lead to attributing nearly any possible dysfunctional relationship or problem, becoming "a catchall, watered down diagnosis". Ross also criticizes the term for its emphasis on children meeting parents' "unmet needs", noting that children often meet the emotional or other needs of parents, with relationship boundaries frequently blurring and no definition of when this leads to permanent damage or harm.
Jungian analyst and author Marion Woodman describes covert incest as "unboundaried bonding" in which the parent or parents use the child as a mirror to support their needs, rather than mirroring the child in support of the child's emotional development.
Alcoholism and other substance addictions are also associated with the occurrence of covert incest.
| 7239141 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=7239141 |
Religion&Philosophy&Ethics | Psychical nomadism
Psychical nomadism is a philosophical term that refers to the practice of taking as one needs from any moral, religious, political, ethical, or whatever system, and leaving behind the parts of that system found to be unappealing.
It is one of the main characteristics of the Temporary Autonomous Zone by Hakim Bey, but the notion was previously discussed by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari in "Nomadology and the War Machine", by Jean-François Lyotard in "Driftworks" and by various authors in the "Oasis" issue of "Semiotext(e)".
Psychic nomadism facilitates the construction of ad hoc reference frames in which to situate the temporary actions required by TAZ.
Bey in his essay explains why he chose the name:
""We use the term "psychic nomadism" here rather than "urban nomadism," "nomadology," "driftwork," etc., simply in order to garner all these concepts into a single loose complex, to be studied in light of the coming- into-being of the TAZ.""
He states that there is a paradox where our modern society’s false unity blurs all cultural diversity and any place is as good as another.
Bey describes psychic nomadism's tactical qualities along with Deleuze and Guattari's sensibilities about the war machine:
"“These nomads practice the razzia, they are corsairs, they are viruses; they have both need and desire for TAZs, camps of black tents under the desert stars, interzones, hidden fortified oases along secret caravan routes, 'liberated' bits of jungle and bad-land, no-go areas, black markets, and underground bazaars.”"
Bey also discusses these nomads in terms of the Internet and cyberspace. His poetry foreshadows ideas that appear in CAE’s "The Electronic Disturbance" and later in electronic civil disobedience. With the words “cyberspace” and “hallucination” used interchangeably, we can see William Gibson's cyberpunk novel "Neuromancer" (1984) being combined with Deleuze and Guattari.
"“These nomads chart their course by strange stars, which might be luminous clusters of data in cyberspace, or perhaps hallucinations. Lay down a map of the land; over that, set a map of political change; over that, a map of the Net, especially the counter-Net with its emphasis on clandestine information-flow and logisitics - and finally, over all, the 1:1 map of the creative imagination, aesthetics, values. The resultant grid comes to life, animated by unexpected eddies and surges of energy, coagulations of light, secret tunnels, and surprises.”"
| 7247062 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=7247062 |
Religion&Philosophy&Ethics | Happiness economics
The economics of happiness or happiness economics is the quantitative and theoretical study of happiness, positive and negative affect, well-being, quality of life, life satisfaction and related concepts, typically combining economics with other fields such as psychology, health and sociology. It typically treats such happiness-related measures, rather than wealth, income or profit, as something to be maximized. The field has grown substantially since the late 20th century, for example by the development of methods, surveys and indices to measure happiness and related concepts. Its findings have been described as a challenge to the economics profession.
The subject may be categorized in various ways, depending on specificity, intersection, and cross-classification. For example, within the "Journal of Economic Literature" classification codes, it has been categorized under:
Given its very nature, reported happiness is subjective. It is difficult to compare one person's happiness with another's. It can be especially difficult to compare happiness across cultures. However, many happiness economists believe they have solved this comparison problem. Cross-sections of large data samples across nations and time demonstrate consistent patterns in the determinants of happiness.
Happiness is typically measured using subjective measures – e.g. self-reported surveys – and/or objective measures. One concern has always been the accuracy and reliability of people's responses to happiness surveys. Objective measures such as lifespan, income, and education are often used as well as or instead of subjectively reported happiness, though this assumes that they generally produce happiness, which while plausible may not necessarily be the case. The terms quality of life or well-being are often used to encompass these more objective measures.
Some scientists claim that happiness can be measured both subjectively and objectively by observing the joy center of the brain lit up with advanced imaging, although this raises philosophical issues, for example about whether this can be treated as more reliable than reported subjective happiness.
Micro-econometric happiness equations have the standard form: formula_1. In this equation formula_2 is the reported well-being of individual formula_3 at time formula_4, and formula_5 is a vector of known variables, which include socio-demographic and socioeconomic characteristics.
Happiness, well-being, or satisfaction with life, was seen as unmeasurable in classical and neo-classical economics. Van Praag was the first person who organized large surveys in order to explicitly measure welfare derived from income. He did this with the Income Evaluation Question (IEQ). This approach is called the Leyden School. It is named after the Dutch university where this approach was developed. Other Researchers included Arie Kapteyn and Aldi Hagenaars.
Typically national financial measures, such as gross domestic product (GDP) and gross national product (GNP), have been used as a measure of successful policy. There is a significant association between GDP and happiness, with citizens in wealthier nations being happier than those in poorer nations. It has been argued that this relationship extends only to an average GDP per capita of about $15,000. In the 2000s, several studies have obtained the opposite result, so this Easterlin paradox is controversial.
Historically, economists have said that well-being is a simple function of income. However, it has been found that once wealth reaches a subsistence level, its effectiveness as a generator of well-being is greatly diminished. Happiness economists hope to change the way governments view well-being and how to most effectively govern and allocate resources given this paradox.
In 2010, Daniel Kahneman and Angus Deaton found that higher earners generally reported better life satisfaction, but people's day-to-day emotional well-being only rose with earnings until a threshold annual income of $75,000.
Other factors have been suggested as making people happier than money. A short term course of psychological therapy is 32 times more cost effective at increasing happiness than simply increasing income.
Scholars at the University of Virginia, University of British Columbia and Harvard University released a study in 2011 after examining numerous academic paper in response to an apparent contradiction: "When asked to take stock of their lives, people with more money report being a good deal more satisfied. But when asked how happy they are at the moment, people with more money are barely different than those with less." Published in the "Journal of Consumer Psychology", the study is entitled "If Money Doesn't Make You Happy, Then You Probably Aren't Spending It Right" and included the following eight general recommendations:
In their "Unhappy Cities" paper, Edward Glaeser, Joshua Gottlieb and Oren Ziv examined the self-reported subjective well-being of people living in American metropolitan areas, particularly in relation to the notion that "individuals make trade-offs among competing objectives, including but not limited to happiness." The researchers findings revealed that people living in metropolitan areas where lower levels of happiness are reported are receiving higher real wages, and they suggest in their conclusion that "humans are quite understandably willing to sacrifice both happiness and life satisfaction if the price is right."
Ruut Veenhoven claimed that social security payments do not seem to add to happiness. This may be due to the fact that non-self-earned income (e.g., from a lottery) does not add to happiness in general either. Happiness may be the mind's reward to a useful action. However, Johan Norberg of CIS, a free enterprise economy think tank, presents a hypothesis that as people who think that they themselves control their lives are more happy, paternalist institutions may decrease happiness.
An alternative perspective focuses on the role of the welfare state as an institution that improves quality of life not only by increasing the extent to which basic human needs are met, but also by promoting greater control of one's life by limiting the degree to which individuals find themselves at the mercy of impersonal market forces that are indifferent to the fate of individuals. This is the argument suggested by the U.S. political scientist Benjamin Radcliff, who has presented a series of papers in peer reviewed scholarly journals demonstrating that a more generous welfare state contributes to higher levels of life satisfaction, and does so to rich and poor alike.
Generally, the well-being of those who are employed is higher than those who are unemployed. Employment itself may not increase subjective well-being, but facilitates activities that do (such as supporting a family, philanthropy, and education). While work does increase well-being through providing income, income level is not as indicative of subjective well-being as other benefits related to employment. Feelings of autonomy and mastery, found in higher levels in the employed than unemployed, are stronger predictors of subjective well-being than wealth.
When personal preference and the amount of time spent working do not align, both men and women experience a decrease in subjective well-being. The negative effect of working more or working less than preferred has been found across multiple studies, most finding that working more than preferred (over-employed) is more detrimental, but some found that working less (under-employed) is more detrimental. Most individuals' levels of subjective well-being returned to "normal" (level previous to time mismatch) within one year. Levels remained lower only when individuals worked more hours than preferred for a period of two years or more, which may indicate that it is more detrimental to be over-employed than under-employed in the long-term.
Employment status effects are not confined to the individual. Being unemployed can have detrimental effects on a spouse's subjective well-being, compared to being employed or not working (and not looking for work). Partner life satisfaction is inversely related to the number of hours their partner is underemployed. When both partners are underemployed, the life-satisfaction of men is more greatly diminished than women. However, just being in a relationship reduces the impact unemployment has on the subjective well-being of an individual. On a broad scale, high rates of unemployment negatively affect the subjective well-being of the employed.
Becoming self-employed can increase subjective well-being, given the right conditions. Those who leave work to become self-employed report greater life satisfaction than those who work for others or become self-employed after unemployment; this effect increases over time. Those who are self-employed and have employees of their own report higher life-satisfaction than those who are self-employed without employees, and women who are self-employed without employees report a higher life satisfaction than men in the same condition.
The effects of retirement on subjective well-being vary depending on personal and cultural factors. Subjective well-being can remain stable for those who retire from work voluntarily, but declines for those who are involuntarily retired. In countries with an average social norm to work, the well-being of men increases after retirement, and the well-being of retired women is at the same level as women who are homemakers or work outside the home. In countries with a strong social norm to work, retirement negatively impacts the well-being of men and women.
Relative declines in female happiness have eroded a gender gap in happiness in which women in the 1970s typically reported higher subjective well-being than did men.
In rich societies, where a rise in income doesn't equate to an increase in levels of subjective well-being, personal relationships are the determining factors of happiness.
Glaeser, Gottlieb and Ziv suggest in their conclusion that the happiness trade-offs that individuals seem willing to make aligns with the tendency of parents to report less happiness, as they sacrifice their personal well-being for the "price" of having children.
There is a significant correlation between feeling in control of one's own life and happiness levels.
A study conducted at the University of Zurich suggested that democracy and federalism bring well-being to individuals. It concluded that the more direct political participation possibilities available to citizens raises their subjective well-being. Two reasons were given for this finding. First, a more active role for citizens enables better monitoring of professional politicians by citizens, which leads to greater satisfaction with government output. Second, the ability for citizens to get involved in and have control over the political process, independently increases well-being.
American psychologist Barry Schwartz argues in his book "The Paradox of Choice" that too many consumer and lifestyle choices can produce anxiety and unhappiness due to analysis paralysis and raised expectations of satisfaction.
National cross-sectional data suggest an inverse relationship between religious diversity and happiness, possibly by facilitating more bonding (and less bridging) social capital.
Much of the research regarding happiness and leisure relies on subjective well-being (SWB) as an appropriate measure of happiness. Research has demonstrated a wide variety of contributing and resulting factors in the relationship between leisure and happiness. These include psychological mechanisms, and the types and characteristics of leisure activities that result in the greatest levels of subjective happiness. Specifically, leisure may trigger five core psychological mechanisms including detachment-recovery from work, autonomy in leisure, mastery of leisure activities, meaning-making in leisure activities, and social affiliation in leisure (DRAMMA). Leisure activities that are physical, relational, and performed outdoors are correlated with greater feelings of satisfaction with free time. Research across 33 different countries shows that individuals who feel they strengthen social relationships and work on personal development during leisure time are happier than others. Furthermore, shopping, reading books, attending cultural events, getting together with relatives, listening to music and attending sporting events is associated with higher levels of happiness. Spending time on the internet or watching TV is not associated with higher levels of happiness as compared to these other activities.
Research has shown that culture influences how we measure happiness and leisure. While SWB is a commonly used measure of happiness in North America and Europe, this may not be the case internationally. Quality of life (QOL) may be a better measure of happiness and leisure in Asian countries, especially Korea. Countries such as China and Japan may require a different measurement of happiness, as societal differences may influence the concept of happiness (i.e. economic variables, cultural practices, and social networks) beyond what QOL is able to measure. There seem to be some differences in leisure preference cross-culturally. Within the Croatian culture, family related leisure activities may enhance SWB across a large spectrum of ages ranging from adolescent to older adults, in both women and men. Active socializing and visiting cultural events are also associated with high levels of SWB across varying age and gender. Italians seem to prefer social conceptions of leisure as opposed to individualistic conceptions. Although different groups of individuals may prefer varying types and amount of leisure activity, this variability is likely due to the differing motivations and goals that an individual intends to fulfill with their leisure time.
Research suggests that specific leisure interventions enhance feelings of SWB. This is both a top-down and bottom-up effect, in that leisure satisfaction causally affects SWB, and SWB causally affects leisure satisfaction. This bi-directional effect is stronger in retired individuals than in working individuals. Furthermore, it appears that satisfaction with our leisure at least partially explains the relationship between our engagement in leisure and our SWB. Broadly speaking, researchers classify leisure into active (e.g. volunteering, socializing, sports and fitness) and passive leisure (e.g. watching television and listening to the radio). Among older adults, passive leisure activities and personal leisure activities (e.g. sleeping, eating, and bathing) correlate with higher levels of SWB and feelings of relaxation than active leisure activities. Thus, although significant evidence has demonstrated that active leisure is associated with higher levels of SWB, or happiness, this may not be the case with older populations.
Both regular and irregular involvement in sports leisure can result in heightened SWB. Serious, or systematic involvement in certain leisure activities, such as taekwondo, correlates with personal growth and a sense of happiness. Additionally, more irregular (e.g. seasonal) sports activities, such as skiing, are also correlated with high SWB. Furthermore, the relationship between pleasure and skiing is thought to be caused in part by a sense of flow and involvement with the activity. Leisure activities, such as meeting with friends, participating in sports, and going on vacation trips, positively correlate with life satisfaction. It may also be true that going on a vacation makes our lives seem better, but does not necessarily make us happier in the long term. Research regarding vacationing or taking a holiday trip is mixed. Although the reported effects are mostly small, some evidence points to higher levels of SWB, or happiness, after taking a holiday.
Poverty alleviation are associated with happier populations. According to the latest systematic review of the economic literature on life satisfaction: Volatile or high inflation is bad for a population's well-being, particularly those with a right-wing political orientation. That suggests the impact of disruptions to economic security are in part mediated or modified by beliefs about economic security.
The Voxeu analysis of the economic determinants of happiness found that life satisfaction explains the largest share of an existing government's vote share, followed by economic growth, which itself explains six times as much as employment and twice as much as inflation.
Individualistic societies have happier populations. Institutes of economic freedom are associated with increases wealth inequality but does not necessarily contribute to decreases in aggregate well-being or subjective well-being at the population level. In fact, income inequality enhances global well-being.
There is some debate over whether living in poor neighbours make one happier. And, living among rich neighbours can dull the happiness that comes from wealth. This is purported to work by way of an upward or downward comparison effect (Keeping up with the Joneses). The balance of evidence is trending in favour of the hypothesis that living in poor neighbourhoods makes one less happy, and living in rich neighbourhoods actually makes one happier, in the United States. While social status matters, a balance of factors like amenities, safe areas, well maintained housing, turn the tide in favour of the argument that richer neighbours are happier neighbours.
"The right to participate in the political process, measured by the extent of direct democratic rights across regions, is strongly correlated with subjective well-being (Frey and Stutzer, 2002) ... a potential mechanism that explains this relationship is the perception of procedural fairness and social mobility." Institutions and well-being, democracy and federalism are associated with a happier population. Correspondingly, political engagement and activism have associated health benefits.
On the other hand, some non democratic countries such as China and Saudi Arabia top the Ipsos list of countries where the citizenry is most happy with their government's direction. That suggests that voting preferences may not translate well into overall satisfaction with the government's direction. In any case, both of these factors revealed preference and domain specific satisfaction rather than overall subjective well being.
Historically, economists thought economic growth was unrelated to population level well-being, a phenomenon labelled the Easterlin paradox. More robust research has identified that there is a link between economic development and the wellbeing of the population.
A <2017 meta-analysis shows that the impact of infrastructure expenditure on economic growth varies considerably. So, one cannot assume an infrastructure project will yield welfare benefits. The paper doesn't investigate or elaborate on any modifiable variables that might predict the value of a project. However, government spending on roads and primary industries is the best value target for transport spending, according to a 2013 meta-analysis.
7%+/−3% per annum discount rates are typically applied as the discount rate on public infrastructure projects in Australia. Smaller real discount rates are used internationally to calculate the social return on investment by governments.
While the mainstream happiness economics has focused on identifying the determinants of happiness, an alternative approach in the discipline examines instead what are the economic consequences of happiness. Happiness may act as a determinant of economic outcomes: it increases productivity, predicts one's future income and affects labour market performance. There is a growing number of studies justifying the so-called "happy-productive worker" thesis. The positive and causal impact of happiness on an individual's productivity has been established in experimental studies.
The idea that happiness is important to a society is not new. Many other prominent intellectuals, philosophers and political leaders throughout history, including Aristotle, Confucius, and Plato, incorporated happiness into their work.
350 B.C.- "Happiness is the meaning and the purpose of life, the whole aim and end of human existence." -Aristotle
Thomas Jefferson put the "pursuit of happiness" on the same level as life and liberty in the United States' Declaration of Independence. Jeremy Bentham believed that public policy should attempt to maximize happiness, and he even attempted to estimate a "hedonic calculus". In the United States, there is no explicit policy that requires the rulers to develop the physical and mental well-being of the citizens or hold the government agencies accountable for their performance against specific measures or metrics of well-being. Until the 1972 there was no formal government policy, anywhere in the world, that placed happiness and well-being as a main criterion for public policy decision making.
1789- France adopts the Declaration: It emphasizes happiness as fundamental right and universal goal.
The following is a chronological list of happiness economics and well-being indices:
1972 – Bhutan's former king, Jigme Singye Wangchuck, introduced the Gross National Happiness (GNH) philosophy and its four development pillars at an international conference.
2005 – Med Jones of the International Institute of Management introduced the first GNH Index and Global GNH Index Survey. The GNH Index, also known as Gross National Well-being (GNW) Index framework served as the first integrated objective (economic) and subjective (happiness) socioeconomic development framework. Prior the GNH Index, there were few development indices that improved upon the gross domestic product (GDP), but did not measure happiness. For example, the Genuine Progress Indicator was focused on the environmental cost of economic development, then later (in 2006) it was updated to include similar measures to the GNH Index. Another development index is the Human Development Index (HDI) that originally focused on literacy and education but also did not measure happiness. The HDI now measures three basic dimensions of human development, health (as measured by life expectancy at birth), overall knowledge level (as measured by the literacy rate), and standard of living (as measured by GDP per capita for a given year). Among the criticisms of the HDI is the complaint that it is a mixture of stock measures (life expectancy at birth and literacy rate) and a flow measure (GDP per capita for a given year). To overcome this criticism, Hou, Walsh, and Zhang (2015) proposed a new index called HDIF (Human Development Index Flow), in which they replaced life expectancy at birth by the under-five mortality rate (for a given year), and they also replaced the literacy rate by the gross primary school enrollment ratio for a given year). They calculated both the HDI and the HDIF for many countries and found that "the HDIF and the HDI tend to converge for wealthy countries and diverge for poor countries, especially those with low HDI rankings". The development performance of poor countries improved using the HDIF while the performance of the wealthy countries declined.
2006 – The Genuine Progress Indicator was updated from a green measurement system to a broader concept that included quantitative measurement of well-being and happiness. The new measure is motivated by the philosophy of the GNH and the same notion of that subjective measures like well-being are more relevant and important than more objective measures like consumption. It is not measured directly, but only by means of the factors which are believed to lead to it.
2007 – Thailand releases Green and Happiness Index (GHI).
2008 – French President Nicolas Sarkozy launched a Happiness Initiative similar to GNH, calling for the inclusion of happiness and well-being among the criteria for national governance policies. He commissioned three prominent economists, Joseph Stiglitz (USA), Amartya Sen (India), Jean-Paul Fitoussi (France), to publish a report calling for a global "statistical system which goes beyond commercial activity to measure personal well-being." Later it was described as gross domestic happiness (GDH). The GDH Index is similar to the GNH Index of 2005.
2009 – In the United States, the Gallup poll system launched the happiness survey collecting data on national scale. The Gallup Well-Being Index was modeled after the GNH Index framework of 2005. The Well-Being Index score is an average of six sub-indexes which measure life evaluation, emotional health, work environment, physical health, healthy behaviors, and access to basic necessities. In October 2009, the US scored 66.1/100.
2010 – The concept was taken seriously, as the Centre for Bhutan Studies, under the leadership of Karma Ura, developed a sophisticated survey instrument to measure the population's general level of well-being. Two Canadians, Michael and Martha Pennock played a major role in developing the Bhutanese survey, which took a six- to seven-hour interview to complete. They developed a shorter international version of the survey which has been used in their home region of Victoria BC as well as in Brazil. The Pennocks also collaborated with Ura in the production of a policy lens which is used by the Bhutanese GNH Commission for anticipating the impact of policy initiatives upon the levels of GNH in Bhutan
2010 – The Center for Bhutan Studies further defined the original four pillars with greater specificity into eight general contributors to happiness—physical, mental and spiritual health; time-balance; social and community vitality; cultural vitality; education; living standards; good governance; and ecological vitality. The Bhutan GNH Index.
2010 – The Oxford Poverty and Human Development Initiative OPHI at the University of Oxford in UK, launched the Multidimensional Poverty Index (MPI) for the United Nations Development Programme, (UNDP). Similar to the GNH Index of 2005, OPHI promotes collection and analysis of data on five dimensions including Quality of work, Empowerment, Physical safety, Ability to go about without shame, Psychological wellbeing.
2011 – UN General Assembly Resolution 65/309, titled "Happiness: towards a holistic approach to development"
2011 – The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) launched "Better Life Index" (BLI).
2011 – The United Nations released the World Happiness Report
2011 – Canadian Index of Wellbeing Network (CIW Network) released The Canadian Index of Wellbeing (CIW).
2011 – The Israeli newspaper "Haaretz" published an article suggesting that western GDP economics is an incomplete development model and called for the adoption of Bhutan's GNH philosophy and Jones' GNH Index in Israel.
2011 – Chuluun Togtokh criticized the HDI in an article published in "Nature", calling for a revised HDI, writing that "The revised index should include each nation's per capita carbon emissions, and so become a Human Sustainable Development Index (HSDI)." Bravo (2014) provided details of how the HSDI was computed and proposed an amended HSDI by including the proportion of forested area in each country. He argued that this proposed indicator "represents an important measure of the capacity of natural system to provide fundamental ecological services."
2012 – In a report prepared for the US Congressman Hansen Clarke, R, researchers Ben Beachy and Juston Zorn, at John F. Kennedy School of Government in Harvard University, recommended that "the Congress should prescribe the broad parameters of new, carefully designed supplemental national indicators; it should launch a bipartisan commission of experts to address unresolved methodological issues, and include alternative indicators." They proposed that the government can use the survey results to see which well-being dimensions are least satisfied and which districts and demographic groups are most deficient, so as to allocate resources accordingly. The report list the Gross National Happiness Index and its seven measurement area as one of the main frameworks to consider.
2012 – Professor Peter T. Coleman, a director of the International Center for Cooperation and Conflict Resolution at Columbia University, suggested that Jones' GNH Index initiative could inform the Global Peace Index Initiative GPI.
2012 – South Korea launched Happiness Index citing the GNH Index framework.
2012 – The government of Goa, India, published a strategy for socioeconomic development citing the GNH Index as a model for measuring happiness.
2012 – The city of Seattle in Washington, launched its own happiness index initiative, emphasizing measures similar to the GNH Index.
2013 – The Social Progress Index SPI was launched by Michael Porter
2013 – The president of Singapore, Tony Tan, proposed that in addition to building up substantial financial reserves, Singapore needed to focus on building up its "social reserves", a concept that appears to have parallels to GNH.
2013 – Economist Karol Jan Borowiecki motivates that well-being indices can be obtained from the way people communicate, as is established in psychology, and compiles the first well-being indices covering the life-time of a person.
2013 – A joint commission led by the Conseil économique et social, the Conseil supérieur pour un développement durable and the Observatoire de la Compétitivité introduces a set of indicators measuring the quality of life in Luxembourg. The conclusions of the commission are summarised in a document titled "Projet PIBien-être", which identifies 64 indicators belonging to 11 different domains to assess quality of life in Luxembourg.
2014 – The government of Dubai launched its localized Happiness Index to measure the public's contentment and satisfaction with different government services.
2014 – The United Kingdom launched its own well-being and happiness statistics.
2015 – Within the "Projet PIBien-être" launched in 2013, STATEC (National Institute of Statistics and Economic Studies of the Grand Duchy of Luxembourg) presents a preliminary analysis of the "Luxembourgish Index of Well-being" (LIW), a first proposal of synthetic indicator measuring the quality of life in Luxembourg. The presentation entitled "Preliminary Assessment of Quality of Life in Luxembourg" was delivered by Marcin Piekałkiewicz on 16 December 2015.
2017 – The Minderoo Foundation launched the Global Slavery Index, providing a map of the estimated prevalence of modern slavery. The information allows an objective comparison and assessment of both the problem and adequacy of the response in 167 countries.
The Satisfaction with Life Index is an attempt to show the average self-reported happiness in different nations. This is an example of a recent trend to use direct measures of happiness, such as surveys asking people how happy they are, as an alternative to traditional measures of policy success such as GDP or GNP. Some studies suggest that happiness can be measured effectively. The Inter-American Development Bank (IDB), published in November 2008 a major study on happiness economics in Latin America and the Caribbean.
There are also several examples of measures that includes self-reported happiness as one variable. Happy Life Years, a concept brought by Dutch sociologist Ruut Veenhoven, combines self-reported happiness with life expectancy. The Happy Planet Index combines it with life expectancy and ecological footprint.
Gross National Happiness (GNH) is a concept introduced by the King of Bhutan in 1972 as an alternative to GDP. Several countries have already developed or are in the process of developing such an index. Bhutan's index has led that country to limit the amount of deforestation it will allow and to require that all tourists to its nation must spend US$200 Allegedly, low-budget tourism and deforestation lead to unhappiness.
After the military coup of 2006, Thailand also instituted an index. The stated promise of the new Prime Minister Surayud Chulanont is to make the Thai people not only richer but happier as well. Much like GDP results, Thailand releases monthly GNH data. The Thai GNH index is based on a 1–10 scale with 10 being the most happy. As of May 13, 2007, the Thai GNH measured 5.1 points. The index uses poll data from the population surveying various satisfaction factors such as, security, public utilities, good governance, trade, social justice, allocation of resources, education and community problems.
Australia, China, France and the United Kingdom are also coming up with indexes to measure national happiness. The UK began to measure national wellbeing in 2012. North Korea also announced an international Happiness Index in 2011 through Korean Central Television. North Korea itself came in second, behind #1 China. Canada released the Canadian Index of Wellbeing (CIW) in 2011 to track changes in wellbeing. The CIW has adopted the following working definition of wellbeing: The presence of the highest possible quality of life in its full breadth of expression focused on but not necessarily exclusive to: good living standards, robust health, a sustainable environment, vital communities, an educated populace, balanced time use, high levels of democratic participation, and access to and participation in leisure and culture
Ecuador's and Bolivia's new constitutions state the indigenous concept of "good life" ("buen vivir" in Spanish, "sumak kawsay" in Quichua, and "suma qamaña" in Aymara) as the goal of sustainable development.
Neoclassical, as well as classical economics, are not subsumed under the term "happiness economics" although the original goal was to increase the happiness of the people. Classical and neoclassical economics are stages in the development of welfare economics and are characterized by mathematical modeling. Happiness economics represents a radical break with this tradition. The measurement of "subjective" happiness respectively life satisfaction by means of survey research across nations and time (in addition to objective measures like lifespan, wealth, security etc.) marks the beginning of happiness economics.
Some have suggested that establishing happiness as a metric is only meant to serve political goals. Recently there has been concern that happiness research could be used to advance authoritarian aims. As a result, some participants at a happiness conference in Rome have suggested that happiness research should not be used as a matter of public policy but rather used to inform individuals.
Even on the individual level there is discussion on how much effect external forces can have on happiness. Less than 3% of an individual's level of happiness comes from external sources such as employment, education level, marital status, and socioeconomic status. To go along with this, four of the Big Five Personality Traits are substantially associated with life satisfaction, openness to experience is not associated. Having high levels of internal locus of control lead to higher reported levels of happiness.
Even when happiness can be affected by external sources, it has high hedonic adaptation, some specific events such as an increase in income, disability, unemployment, and loss (bereavement) only have short-term (about a year) effects on a person's overall happiness and after a while happiness may return to levels similar to unaffected peers.
What has the most influence over happiness are internal factors such as genetics, personality traits, and internal locus of control. It is theorized that 50% of the variation in happiness levels is from genetic sources and is known as the genetic set point. The genetic set point is assumed to be stable over time, fixed, and immune to influence or control. This goes along with findings that well-being surveys have a naturally positive baseline.
With such strong internal forces on happiness it is hard to have an effect on a person's happiness externally. This in turn lends itself back to the idea that establishing a happiness metric is only for political gain and has little other use. To support this even further it is believed that a country aggregate level of SWB can account for more variance in government vote share than standard macroeconomic variables, such as income and employment.
According to Bond and Lang (2018) the results are skewed due to the fact that the respondents have to "round" their true happiness to the scale of, e.g., 3 or 7 alternatives (e.g., very happy, pretty happy, not too happy). This "rounding error" may cause a less happy group seem more happy, in the average. This would not be the case if the happiness of both groups would be normally distributed with the same variance, but that is usually not the case, based on their results. For some not-implausible log-normal assumptions on the scale, typical results can be reversed to the opposite results.
They also show that the "reporting function" seems to be different for different groups and even for the same individual at different times. For example, when a person becomes disabled, they soon start to lower their threshold for a given answer (e.g., "pretty happy"). That is, they give a higher answer than they would have given at the same happiness state before becoming disabled.
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Religion&Philosophy&Ethics | Amor fati
Amor fati ( "love of fate") is a Latin phrase that may be translated as "love of fate" or "love of one's fate". It is used to describe an attitude in which one sees everything that happens in one's life, including suffering and loss, as good or, at the very least, necessary.
Amor fati is often associated with what Friedrich Nietzsche called "eternal recurrence", the idea that, over an infinite period of time, everything recurs infinitely. From this he developed a desire to be willing to live exactly the same life over and over for all eternity ("..."long for nothing more fervently" than this ultimate eternal confirmation and seal”).
The concept of "amor fati" has been linked to Epictetus. It has also been linked to the writings of Marcus Aurelius, who did not use the words (he wrote in Greek, not Latin). However, it found its most explicit expression in Nietzsche, who made love of fate central to his philosophy. In "Why I Am So Clever" "Ecce Homo", section 10, he writes:"My formula for greatness in a human being is "amor fati": that one wants nothing to be different, not forward, not backward, not in all eternity. Not merely bear what is necessary, still less conceal it—all idealism is mendacity in the face of what is necessary—but "love" it."The phrase is used elsewhere in Nietzsche's writings and is representative of the general outlook on life that he articulates in section 276 of "The Gay Science":
"I want to learn more and more to see as beautiful what is necessary in things; then I shall be one of those who makes things beautiful. "Amor fati": let that be my love henceforth! I do not want to wage war against what is ugly. I do not want to accuse; I do not even want to accuse those who accuse. "Looking away" shall be my only negation. And all in all and on the whole: some day I wish to be only a Yes-sayer."
Nietzsche in this context refers to the "Yes-sayer", not in a political or social sense, but as a person who is capable of uncompromising acceptance of reality "per se".
Nietzsche's love of fate naturally leads him to confront the reality of suffering in a radical way. For to love that which is necessary, demands not only that we love the bad along with the good, but that we view the two as inextricably linked. In section 3 of the preface of "The Gay Science", he writes:"Only great pain is the ultimate liberator of the spirit….I doubt that such pain makes us ‘better’; but I know that it makes us more profound."Nietzsche does not promote suffering as a good in itself, but rather as a precondition for good. A 'single moment' of good justifies an eternity of bad, but one extreme cannot have meaning without the other. In "Will to Power," he writes:"For nothing is self-sufficient, neither in us ourselves nor in things; and if our soul has trembled with happiness and sounded like a harp string just once, all eternity was needed to produce this one event—and in this single moment of affirmation all eternity was called good, redeemed, justified, and affirmed.”
The French philosopher Albert Camus spoke of a desire to accept and even come to love difficulty along with ease, or at least to not ignore it. In "The Myth of Sisyphus" ("Return to Tipasa"), he writes: "What else can I desire than to exclude nothing and to learn how to braid with white thread and black thread a single cord stretched to the breaking-point?".
Camus, like Nietzsche, held his embrace of fate to be central to his philosophy and to life itself. Summarizing his general view of life in the above work, Camus further spoke of: "a will to live without rejecting anything of life, which is the virtue I honor most in this world."
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Religion&Philosophy&Ethics | Mark Cherry
Mark J. Cherry is the Dr. Patricia A. Hayes Professor in Applied Ethics at St. Edward's University, Austin, Texas. He is the author of "Kidney for Sale by Owner: Human Organs, Transplantation, and the Market" (2005), in which he argues that human body parts are commodities, and that the market is the most efficient and morally justified way to procure and allocate organs for transplant. His argument is based in part on what he calls the moral authority of persons over themselves.
Cherry is the editor of the "Journal of Medicine and Philosophy", "Christian Bioethics", editor-in-chief of the Health- Care Ethics Committee Forum, and series co-editor of the "Annals of Bioethics".
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Religion&Philosophy&Ethics | Diotima of Mantinea
Diotima of Mantinea (; ; ) was an ancient Greek prophetess and philosopher thought to have lived circa 440 B.C.E., who plays an important role in Plato's "Symposium". In the dialogue, her ideas are the origin of the concept of Platonic love.
The name Diotima means one who honors or is honored by Zeus, and her Mantinean origin is reminiscent of the root "mantis", which would suggest an association with prophecy. The Greek form also includes the sound nike: Diotima Mantinike as a pun in Greek would thus sound like "Diotima from Prophet-victory".
In the "Symposium", she is implied to be a priestess or prophetess and is said to be from the Peloponnesian city of Mantinea, which was allied against Athens at the time of the dialogue - though one version of the manuscript preferred in old readings called her a mantic woman, or seeress, rather than a woman from Mantinea.
Since the only contemporaneous source concerning her is Plato, doubts have been raised about whether she was a real historical personage or merely a fictional creation; however, nearly all of the characters named in Plato's dialogues have been found to correspond to real people living in ancient Athens.
Plato was thought by most 19th and early 20th century scholars to have based Diotima on Aspasia, the mistress of Pericles, so impressed was he by her intelligence and wit. However, Aspasia appears under her own name in Plato's dialogue "Menexenus", and some scholars have convincingly argued that Plato did not use false names; therefore, Diotima could be a historical figure. In the "Symposium", Diotima puts forth ideas that are different from both Socrates's and Plato's, thereby representing a different philosophical position. Socrates also claims to have learned from her. Both of these instances in Plato's dialogue have been used to argue for her existence.
A first century bronze relief found in Pompeii depicts Socrates and an unnamed female figure, along with a winged Eros; although some have supposed the seated woman in the image to be Diotima, others have argued her appearance (notably a necklace) would suggest she is in fact more likely to be Aphrodite or Aspasia. Writings from the second through the fifth centuries A.D. refer to Diotima as a real person, although Plato is probably their only basis for this. The suggestion that she was a fictional creation was not introduced until the 15th century (notably by Marsilio Ficino), probably based on the fact that she was a woman; however, this plausible hypothesis (with numerous parallels in the study of Platonic dialogues, for instance Callicles in the "Gorgias") was in fact put forward because Diotima is not mentioned by contemporary or near-contemporary sources and because her very name and origin could be understood as symbolic.
In Plato's "Symposium" the members of a party discuss the meaning of love. Socrates says that in his youth he was taught "the philosophy of love" by Diotima, who was a seer or priestess. Socrates also claims that Diotima successfully postponed the Plague of Athens. In a dialogue that Socrates recounts at the symposium, Diotima says that Socrates has confused the idea of love with the idea of the beloved. Love, she says, is neither fully beautiful nor good, as the earlier speakers in the dialogue had argued. Diotima gives Socrates a genealogy of Love (Eros), stating that he is the son of "resource ("poros)" and poverty ("penia)"". In her view, love drives the individual to seek beauty, first earthly beauty, or beautiful bodies. Then as a lover grows in wisdom, the beauty that is sought is spiritual, or beautiful souls. For Diotima, the most correct use of love of other human beings is to direct one's mind to love of wisdom, or philosophy. The beautiful beloved inspires the mind and the soul and directs one's attention to spiritual things. One proceeds from recognition of another's beauty, to appreciation of Beauty apart from any individual, to consideration of Divinity, the source of Beauty, to love of Divinity.. . . and directing his gaze from now, on towards beauty as a whole, he should turn to the great ocean of beauty, and in contemplation of it give birth to many beautiful and magnificent speeches and thoughts in the abundance of philosophy. (Diotima to Socrates in Plato's Symposium.)
Beginning in the 1980s, the dehistoricization of Diotima became a subject of interest for several scholars, including Mary Ellen Waithe. In 2005, Margaret Urban Walker summarized Waithe's research, stating that "the evidence for Diotima's reality is substantial, even if not conclusive, and that her imaginary status appears to be a fifteenth-century fiction that stuck."
In 2019 the Oxford classical scholar Armand D'Angour published "Socrates in Love: The Making of a Philosopher", presenting for the first time a wholly new case for identifying Diotima with Aspasia. His historical arguments are based on 1) the likelihood of Aspasia's involvement in the warding off of plague that Athenians will have expected to be brought on by Pericles' irreligious actions (e.g. failure to bury the dead) after his campaign against Samos in 440-39 2) the fact that 'Diotima' means 'honored by/honoring Zeus'; Pericles was called 'Zeus' in comedy and popular parlance, and he was notorious for the unusual honor that he bestowed on Aspasia.
"Diotima" has often been used as a title for philosophical or artistic projects, journals, essays, etc.:
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Religion&Philosophy&Ethics | Alexander Rosenberg
Alexander Rosenberg (born August 31 1946) is an American philosopher, and the R. Taylor Cole Professor of Philosophy at Duke University who now publishes as Alex Rosenberg.
Rosenberg attended the City College of New York where he graduated with a B.A. in 1967. He received his Ph.D. from the Johns Hopkins University in 1971. He won the Lakatos Award in 1993 and was the National Phi Beta Kappa Romanell Lecturer in 2006.
Rosenberg is an atheist, and a metaphysical naturalist.
Rosenberg's early work focused on the philosophy of social science and especially the philosophy of economics. His doctoral dissertation, published as "Microeconomic Laws" in 1976, was the first treatment of the nature of economics by a contemporary philosopher of science. Over the period of the next decade he became increasingly skeptical about neoclassical economics as an empirical theory.
He later shifted to work on issues in the philosophy of science that are raised by biology. He became especially interested in the relationship between molecular biology and other parts of biology. Rosenberg introduced the concept of supervenience to the treatment of intertheoretical relations in biology, soon after Donald Davidson began to exploit Richard Hare's notion in the philosophy of psychology. Rosenberg is among the few biologists and fewer philosophers of science who reject the consensus view that combines physicalism with antireductionism (see his 2010 on-line debate with John Dupré at Philosophy TV).
Rosenberg also coauthored an influential book on David Hume with Tom Beauchamp, "Hume and the Problem of Causation", arguing that Hume was not a skeptic about induction but an opponent of rationalist theories of inductive inference.
Rosenberg's treatment of fitness as a supervenient property, which is an undefined concept in the theory of natural selection, is criticized by Brandon and Beatty. His original development of how the supervenience of Mendelian concepts blocks traditional derivational reduction was examined critically by C. Kenneth Waters. His later account of reduction in developmental biology was criticized by Günter Wagner. Elliott Sober's "Multiple realization arguments against reductionism" reflects a shift towards Rosenberg's critique of anti-reductionist arguments of Putnam's and Fodor's.
Sober has also challenged Rosenberg's view that the principle of natural selection is the only biological law.
The explanatory role of the principle of natural selection and the nature of evolutionary probabilities defended by Rosenberg were subject to counter arguments by Brandon and later by Denis Walsh. Rosenberg's account of the nature of genetic drift and the role of probability in the theory of natural selection draws on significant parallels between the principle of natural selection and the second law of thermodynamics.
In the philosophy of social science, Rosenberg's more skeptical views about microeconomics were challenged first by Wade Hands, and later by Daniel Hausman in several books and articles. The financial crisis of 2007–08 resulted in renewed attention to Rosenberg's skeptical views about microeconomics. Biologist Richard Lewontin and historian Joseph Fracchia express skepticism about Rosenberg's claim that functional explanations in social science require Darwinian underlying mechanisms.
In 2011 Rosenberg published a defense of what he called "Scientism"—the claim that "the persistent questions" people ask about the nature of reality, the purpose of things, the foundations of value and morality, the way the mind works, the basis of personal identity, and the course of human history, could all be answered by the resources of science. This book was attacked on the front cover of The New Republic by Leon Wieseltier as "The worst book of the year". Leon Wiseltier's claim, in turn, was critiqued as exaggeration by Philip Kitcher in The New York Times Book Review. On February 1, 2013, Rosenberg debated Christian apologist William Lane Craig on the question 'Is Faith in God Reasonable?' during which some of the arguments of the book were discussed.
Rosenberg has contributed articles to "The New York Times" Op/Ed series The Stone, on naturalism, science and the humanities, and meta-ethics, and the mind's powers to understand itself by introspection that arise from the views he advanced in "The Atheist's Guide to Reality."
Rosenberg's 2015 novel, "The Girl From Krakow", Lake Union Publishing, is a narrative about a young woman named Rita Feuerstahl from 1935 to 1947, mainly focusing on her struggles to survive in Nazi-occupied Poland and later in Germany, under a false identity. A secondary plot involves her lover's experiences in France and Spain during its Civil War in the 1930s and then in Moscow during the war. Rosenberg has acknowledged that the novel is based on the wartime experiences of people he knew. He has also admitted the incongruity of writing a narrative, given his attack on the form in "The Atheist’s Guide to Reality". He has said that "The Girl from Krakow" began as an attempt to put some of the difficult arguments of "The Atheist’s Guide to Reality" into a form easier to grasp". "The Girl From Krakow" has been translated into Italian, Hungarian, Polish and Hebrew.
In 2016 Rosenberg's second novel, "Autumn in Oxford", appeared, also published by Lake Union Publishing. An afterword identifies the large number of real persons—academics, civil rights advocates, military officers, politicians and intelligence agents from the 1940s and '50s who figure in the narrative.
In 2018 Rosenberg published "How History Gets Things Wrong: The Neuroscience of our Addiction to Stories" This work develops the eliminative materialism of "The Atheist’s Guide to Reality", applying it to the role ‘the theory of mind’ plays in history and other forms of story telling. Rosenberg argues that the work of Nobel Prize winners, Eric Kandel, John O'Keefe and May-Britt Moser along with Edvard Moser reveals that the ‘‘theory of mind‘‘ employed in every day life and narrative history has no basis in the organization of the brain. Evidence from evolutionary anthropology, child psychology, medical diagnosis and neural imaging reveals it is an innate or almost innate tool that arose in Hominini evolution to foster collaboration among small numbers of individuals in immediate contact over the near future, but whose predictive weakness beyond this domain reveals its explanatory emptiness.
| 7304484 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=7304484 |
Religion&Philosophy&Ethics | Epstein–Zin preferences
In economics, Epstein–Zin preferences refers to a specification of recursive utility.
A recursive utility function can be constructed from two components: a time aggregator that characterizes preferences in the absence of uncertainty and a risk aggregator that defines the certainty equivalent function that characterizes preferences over static gambles and is used to aggregate the risk associated with future utility. With Epstein–Zin preferences, the time aggregator is a linearly homogenous CES aggregate of current consumption and the certainty equivalent of future utility. Specifically, the date-t utility index, formula_1, for a sequence of positive scalar consumptions formula_2, that are potentially stochastic for time periods beyond date t, is defined recursively as the solution to the nonlinear stochastic difference equation
where formula_4 is a real-valued certainty equivalent operator. The parameter formula_5 determines the marginal rate of time preference, formula_6, and the parameter formula_7 determines the elasticity of intertemporal substitution, formula_8. Epstein and Zin considered a variety of certainty equivalent operators, but a popular choice for both theoretical and empirical research has been formula_9, where formula_10 denotes the expected value of probability distribution of formula_11, conditional on information available to the planner in date t. The parameter formula_12 encodes risk aversion, with smaller values of formula_13, other things equal, implying a stronger aversion to risk. The parameter restriction formula_14 results in a time-additive von Neumann–Morgenstern expected utility index.
Importantly, unlike VNM utility functions (e.g. isoelastic utility), Epstein-Zin preferences allow the elasticity of intertemporal substitution (determined above by formula_15) to be unrelated to risk aversion (determined above by formula_13).
| 7306242 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=7306242 |
Religion&Philosophy&Ethics | Evolutionary argument against naturalism
The evolutionary argument against naturalism (EAAN) is a philosophical argument asserting a problem with believing both evolution and philosophical naturalism simultaneously. The argument was first proposed by Alvin Plantinga in 1993 and "raises issues of interest to epistemologists, philosophers of mind, evolutionary biologists, and philosophers of religion". The EAAN argues that the combined belief in both evolutionary theory and naturalism is epistemically self-defeating. The argument for this is that if both evolution and naturalism are true, then the probability of having reliable cognitive faculties is low.
The idea that "naturalism" undercuts its own justification was put forward by Arthur Balfour. C. S. Lewis popularised it in the first edition of his book "Miracles" in 1947. Similar arguments were advanced by Richard Taylor in "Metaphysics", as well as by Stephen Clark, Richard Purtill and J. P. Moreland. In 2003 Victor Reppert developed a similar argument in detail in his book "C.S. Lewis's Dangerous Idea, In Defense of the Argument from Reason". Contemporary philosophers who have employed a similar argument against physical determinism are James Jordan and William Hasker.
Plantinga proposed his "evolutionary argument against naturalism" in 1993. In the twelfth chapter of his book "Warrant and Proper Function", Plantinga developed Lewis' idea, and constructed two formal arguments against evolutionary naturalism. He further developed the idea in an unpublished manuscript entitled "Naturalism Defeated" and in his 2000 book "Warranted Christian Belief", and expanded the idea in "Naturalism Defeated?", a 2002 anthology edited by James Beilby. He also responded to several objections to the argument in his essay "Reply to Beilby's Cohorts" in Beilby's anthology.
In the 2008 publication "Knowledge of God" Plantinga presented a formulation of the argument that solely focused on semantic epiphenomenalism instead of the former four jointly exhaustive categories.
Plantinga repeats the argument in his 2011 book "Where the Conflict Really Lies: Science, Religion, and Naturalism".
Plantinga's argument attempted to show that to combine naturalism and evolution is self-defeating, because, under these assumptions, the probability that humans have reliable cognitive faculties is low or inscrutable. He claimed that several thinkers, including C. S. Lewis, had seen that evolutionary naturalism seemed to lead to a deep and pervasive skepticism and to the conclusion that our unreliable cognitive or belief-producing faculties cannot be trusted to produce more true beliefs than false beliefs. He claimed that "Darwin himself had worries along these lines" and quoted from an 1881 letter:
In the letter, Darwin had expressed agreement with William Graham's claim that natural laws implied purpose and the belief that the universe was "not the result of chance", but again showed his doubts about such beliefs and left the matter as insoluble. Darwin only had this doubt about questions beyond the scope of science, and thought science was well within the scope of an evolved mind. Michael Ruse said that by presenting it as "Darwin's doubt" that evolutionary naturalism is self-defeating, Plantinga failed to note that Darwin at once excused himself from philosophical matters he did not feel competent to consider. Others, such as Evan Fales, agreed that this citation allowed Plantinga to call the source of the problem EAAN addresses "Darwin's Doubt". Also, contrary to Ruse's claim, Plantinga gave the name "Darwin's Doubt" not to the idea that the conjunction of naturalism and evolution is self-defeating, but rather to the view that given naturalism and evolution our cognitive faculties are unlikely to be reliable. Plantinga asserts that "this doubt arises for naturalists or atheists, but not for those who believe in God. That is because if God has created us in his image, then even if he fashioned us by some evolutionary means, he would presumably want us to resemble him in being able to know; but then most of what we believe might be true even if our minds have developed from those of the lower animals."
Plantinga defined:
and suggested that the conditional probability of R given N and E, or P(R|N&E), is low or inscrutable.
Plantinga's argument began with the observation that our beliefs can only have evolutionary consequences if they affect behaviour. To put this another way, natural selection does not directly select for true beliefs, but rather for advantageous behaviours. Plantinga distinguished the various theories of mind-body interaction into four jointly exhaustive categories:
Perhaps Paul very much "likes" the idea of being eaten, but when he sees a tiger, always runs off looking for a better prospect, because he thinks it unlikely the tiger he sees will eat him. This will get his body parts in the right place so far as survival is concerned, without involving much by way of true belief. ... Or perhaps he thinks the tiger is a large, friendly, cuddly pussycat and wants to pet it; but he also believes that the best way to pet it is to run away from it. ... Clearly there are any number of belief-cum-desire systems that equally fit a given bit of behaviour.
Thus, Plantinga argued, the probability that our minds are reliable under a conjunction of philosophical naturalism and naturalistic evolution is low or inscrutable. Therefore, to assert that naturalistic evolution is true also asserts that one has a low or unknown probability of being right. This, Plantinga argued, epistemically defeats the belief that naturalistic evolution is true and that ascribing truth to naturalism and evolution is internally dubious or inconsistent.
In a 1998 paper Branden Fitelson of the University of California, Berkeley and Elliott Sober of the University of Wisconsin–Madison set out to show that the arguments presented by Plantinga contain serious errors. Plantinga construed evolutionary naturalism as the conjunction of the idea that human cognitive faculties arose through evolutionary mechanisms, and naturalism which he equated to atheism. Plantinga tried to throw doubt on this conjunction with a preliminary argument that the conjunction is probably false, and a main argument that it is self-defeating; if you believe it you should stop believing it.
First, they criticised Plantinga's use of a Bayesian framework in which he arbitrarily assigned initial probabilities without empirical evidence, predetermining the outcome in favor of traditional theism, and described this as a recipe for replacing any non-deterministic theory in the natural sciences, so that for example a probable outcome predicted by quantum mechanics would be seen as the outcome of God's will. Plantinga's use of R to mean that "the great bulk" of our beliefs are true fails to deal with the cumulative effect of adding beliefs which have variable reliability about different subjects. Plantinga asserted that the traditional theist believes being made in God's image includes a reflection of divine powers as a knower, but cognitive science finds human reasoning subject to biases and systematic error. Traditional theology is not shown to predict this varying reliability as well as science, and there is the theological problem of the omnipotent Creator producing such imperfection. They described how Plantinga set out various scenarios of belief affecting evolutionary success, but undercut the low probability he previously required when he suggested an "inscrutable" probability, and by ignoring availability of variants he fails to show that false beliefs will be equally adaptive as his claim of low probability assumes. Even if his claims of improbability were correct, that need not affect belief in evolution, and they considered it would be more sensible to accept that evolutionary processes sometimes have improbable outcomes.
They assessed Plantinga's main argument—which asserts that since the reliability of evolutionary naturalism is low or of inscrutable value, those believing it should withhold assent from its reliability, and thus withhold assent from anything else they believe including evolutionary naturalism, which is therefore self-defeating—and found it unconvincing, having already disputed his argument that the reliability is low. Even if "E&N" defeated the claim that 'at least 90% of our beliefs are true,' they considered that Plantinga must show that it also defeats the more modest claim that 'at least a non-negligible minority of our beliefs are true'. They considered his sentiment that high probability is required for rational belief to be repudiated by philosophical lessons such as the lottery paradox, and that each step in his argument requires principles different from those he had described. They concluded that Plantinga has drawn attention to unreliability of cognitive processes that is already taken into account by evolutionary scientists who accept that science is a fallible exercise, and appreciate the need to be as scrupulous as possible with the fallible cognitive processes available. His hyperbolic doubt as a defeater for evolutionary naturalism is equally a defeater for theists who rely on their belief that their mind was designed by a non-deceiving God, and neither "can construct a non-question-begging argument that refutes global skepticism."
Indiana University South Bend Professor of Philosophy J. Wesley Robbins contended that Plantinga's argument applied only to Cartesian philosophies of mind but not to pragmatist philosophies of mind. Robbins' argument, stated roughly, was that while in a Cartesian mind beliefs can be identified with no reference to the environmental factors that caused them, in a pragmatic mind they are identifiable "only" with reference to those factors. That is to say, in a pragmatic mind beliefs would not even exist if their holder had not come in contact with external belief-producing phenomena in the first place.
A collection of essays entitled "Naturalism Defeated?" (2002) contains responses by 11 philosophers to EAAN. According to James K. Beilby, editor of the volume, Plantinga's proposition "raises issues of interest to epistemologists, philosophers of mind, evolutionary biologists, and philosophers of religion". The responsive essays include the following:
"Naturalism Defeated?" also included Plantinga's replies to both the critical responses contained in the book and to some objections raised by others, including Fitelson & Sober:
In a chapter titled 'The New Creationism: Its Philosophical Dimension', in "The Cultures of Creationism", philosopher of science Michael Ruse discussed EAAN. He argued:
Ruse concluded his discussion of the EAAN by stating:
To be honest, even if Plantinga's argument [the EAAN] worked, I would still want to know where theism ends (and what form this theism must take) and where science can take over. Is it the case that evolution necessarily cannot function, or it is merely false and in another God-created world it might have held in some way — and if so, in what way? Plantinga has certainly not shown that the theist must be a creationist, even though his own form of theism is creationism.
Supposing there was no intelligence behind the universe, no creative mind. In that case, nobody designed my brain for the purpose of thinking. It is merely that when the atoms inside my skull happen, for physical or chemical reasons, to arrange themselves in a certain way, this gives me, as a by-product, the sensation I call thought. But, if so, how can I trust my own thinking to be true? It's like upsetting a milk jug and hoping that the way it splashes itself will give you a map of London. But if I can't trust my own thinking, of course I can't trust the arguments leading to Atheism, and therefore have no reason to be an Atheist, or anything else. Unless I believe in God, I cannot believe in thought: so I can never use thought to disbelieve in God.
In the 2008 publication "Knowledge of God" Plantinga presented a formulation of the argument that solely focused on semantic epiphenomenalism instead of the former four jointly exhaustive categories.
Plantinga stated that from a materialist's point of view a belief will be a neuronal event. In this conception a belief will have two different sorts of properties:
Plantinga thought that we have something of an idea as to the history of NP properties: structures with these properties have come to exist by small increments, each increment such that it has proved to be useful in the struggle for survival. But he then asked how the "content" property of a belief came about: "How does it [the content] get to be associated in that way with a given proposition?"
He said that materialists offer two theories for this question: According to the first, content "supervenes upon" NP properties; according to the second, content "is reducible to" NP properties. (He noted that if content properties are reducible to NP properties, then they also supervene upon them.) He explained the two theories as follows:
Plantinga argued that neural structures that constitute beliefs have "content", in the following way: "At a certain level of complexity, these neural structures start to display content. Perhaps this starts gradually and early on (possibly C. elegans [a small worm with a nervous system composed of only a few neurons] displays just the merest glimmer of consciousness and the merest glimmer of content), or perhaps later and more abruptly; that doesn't matter. What does matter is that at a certain level of complexity of neural structures, content appears. This is true whether content properties are reducible to NP properties or supervene on them."<ref name="Plantinga/Tooley 2008p 37">Plantinga/Tooley (2008)p 37</ref>
So given materialism some neural structures at a given level of complexity acquire content and become beliefs. The question then is according to Plantinga: "what is the likelihood, "given materialism", that the content that thus arises is in fact "true"?"
This way of proceeding replaced the first step of Plantinga's earlier versions of the argument.
The EAAN claims that according to naturalism, evolution must operate on beliefs, desires, and other contentful mental states for a biological organism to have a reliable cognitive faculty such as the brain. Eliminative materialism maintains that propositional attitudes such as beliefs and desires, among other intentional mental states that have content, cannot be explained on naturalism and therefore concludes that such entities do not exist. It is not clear whether the EAAN would be successful against a conception of naturalism which accepts eliminative materialism to be the correct scientific account of human cognition.
In his discussion of EAAN, Michael Ruse described Plantinga as believing in the truth of the attack on evolution presented by intelligent design advocate Phillip E. Johnson, and as having endorsed Johnson's book "Darwin on Trial". Ruse said that Plantinga took the conflict between science and religion further than Johnson, seeing it as not just a clash between the philosophies of naturalism and theism, but as an attack on the true philosophy of theism by what he considers the incoherent and inconsistent philosophy of naturalism.
Plantinga has stated that EAAN is not directed against "the theory of evolution, or the claim that human beings have evolved from simian ancestors, or anything in that neighborhood". He also claimed that the problems raised by EAAN do not apply to the conjunction of theism and contemporary evolutionary science. In his essay "Evolution and Design" Plantinga outlines different ways in which theism and evolutionary theory can be combined.
In the foreword to the anthology "Naturalism Defeated?" James Beilby wrote: "Plantinga's argument should "not" be mistaken for an argument against evolutionary theory in general or, more specifically, against the claim that humans might have evolved from more primitive life forms. Rather, the purpose of his argument is to show that the denial of the existence of a creative deity is problematic."
| 7322651 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=7322651 |
Religion&Philosophy&Ethics | Dignity of labour
Social reformers such as Basava and his contemporary Sharanas, as well as Mahatma Gandhi, were prominent advocates of the dignity of labor.
The dignity of labor is one of the major themes in Christian ethics, and as such, it is upheld by the Anglican Communion, in Catholic social teaching, in Methodist principles, and in Reformed theology.
In Roman Catholicism, usually titled "The dignity of work and the rights of workers" the affirmation of the dignity of human labor is found in several papal encyclicals, most notably Pope John Paul II's "Laborem Exercens", published September 15, 1981. Simply put, any form of work, manual or intellectual, is called labor and respecting any kind of job (manual or intellectual) is called "dignity of labor".
| 7328421 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=7328421 |
Religion&Philosophy&Ethics | Friendship bench
The Friendship Bench is a tool for positive mental and emotional health used in various settings. It is used as a psychological intervention to address depression usually by trained lay health workers.
In Zimbabwe, the Friendship Bench approach to therapy uses listening and "problem-solving therapy" (PST) by trained lay-counselor grandmothers. When seeking mental health care is stigmatized or resources are not available—Zimbabwe has just 12 psychiatrists for 14 million people—the Friendship Bench offers what so far seems to be an effective and simple option. Depression is referred to as "kufungisisa," “thinking too much," in the Shona language. A strategy in this peer-to-peer support model include co-production practices and skill building such as the way participants make bags out of recycled plastics during therapeutic sessions.
The Project Bench is also often used as psychological intervention in places with high prevalence of people with HIV. The psychotherapy sessions, which focus on problem-solving therapy, is delivered the Friendship Bench framework.
In a school setting a friendship bench may also be known as a buddy bench, and is a special place in a school playground where a child can go when they want someone to talk to. Friendship benches may be distinctively different from other seating in the school and may be specially designed by an artist or with the help of the children themselves. They are rainbow-colored and were originally created by C.R Plastics, a Canadian company that creates recycled plastic outdoor furniture. Such benches are situated in open and well-traveled areas of the school so that any child using the bench will be noticed quickly.
When a child feels the need for a friend to talk to, he or she can show this by using the friendship bench. Other children and staff will recognize this as a sign that some help, support or comfort is needed and will come to talk with the child.
The friendship bench is a means by which a child can seek support without the need to rationalize their feelings or to seek out a particular member of staff or special friend. Because the bench is in the day-to-day environment of the school it can be used at any time and for any reason—from seemingly trivial matters to more serious concerns—and encourages children to ask for help when they are troubled.
| 7332678 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=7332678 |
Religion&Philosophy&Ethics | Fair Trade Certified Mark
The Fair Trade Certified Mark is a fair trade certification mark used primarily in the United States and Canada. It appears on products as an independent guarantee that disadvantaged producers in the developing world are getting a better deal. The Fair Trade Certified Mark is the North American equivalent of the International Fairtrade Certification Mark used in Europe, Africa, Asia, Australia and New Zealand.
For a product to carry either Certification Marks, it must come from Fair Trade USA inspected and certified producer organizations. The crops must be grown and harvested in accordance with the fair trade standards set by Fair Trade USA. Some of the supply chains are also monitored by FLO-CERT to ensure the integrity of labelled products. Only Fair Trade USA (formerly "TransFair USA") licensees can use the Fair Trade Certified Mark on their products.
The Fair Trade Certified Mark in the United States was introduced by TransFair USA on the American market in 1998.
In 2012 a variation of the US Fair Trade certification mark was adopted with the benefit of being registered globally as a trade mark. The mark is designed to pop better on the shelf through a far simpler design and the use of color. The one basket with outstretched hands indicates sharing and a "give and take" between producers and purchases. The green signals the environmental strength of Fair Trade.
| 7333443 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=7333443 |
Religion&Philosophy&Ethics | Erotic lactation
Erotic lactation is sexual arousal by breastfeeding on a woman's breast. Depending on the context, the practice can also be referred to as adult suckling, adult nursing, and adult breastfeeding. Practitioners sometimes refer to themselves as being in an adult nursing relationship (ANR). Two persons in an exclusive relationship can be called a nursing couple.
"Milk fetishism" and "lactophilia" are medical, diagnostic terms for paraphilias and are used for disorders according to the precise criteria of ICD-10 and DSM-IV.
Breasts, and especially nipples, are highly erogenous zones, for both men and women. Nipple and breast stimulation of women are a near-universal aspect of human sexuality, though nipples in males are not as sexualized. Humans are the only primates whose female members have permanently enlarged breasts after the onset of puberty; the breasts of other primate species are enlarged only during pregnancy and nursing. One hypothesis postulates that the breasts grew as a frontal counterpart to the buttocks as primates became upright to attracting mates, a model first developed in 1967. Other hypotheses include that by chance breasts act as a cushion for infant heads, are a signal of fertility, or elevate the infant's head in breastfeeding to prevent suffocation. Paradoxically, there is even a school that believes that they are an evolutionary flaw, and can actually suffocate a nursing infant.
The association of pleasure and nutrition holds true as well for the lips, also erogenous zones, where pleasure may have led to "kiss feeding", in which mothers chew food before passing it on to the child.
Unintended milk flow (galactorrhea) is often caused by nipple stimulation and it is possible to reach normal milk production exclusively by suckling on the breast. Nipple stimulation of any sort is noted in reducing the incidence of breast cancer.
Some women lose the ability to be aroused while breastfeeding, and thus would not find lactation with a sexual partner to be erotic. This can be a result of physical reasons (soreness) or psychological reasons (conflicted about her breasts being used other than for an infant).
Because female breasts and nipples are generally regarded as an important part of sexual activity in most cultures, it is not uncommon that couples may proceed from oral stimulation of the nipples to actual breastfeeding. In lesbian partnerships, mutual breastfeeding has been regarded as a familiar expression of affection and tenderness.
In its issue of March 13, 2005, the London weekly "The Sunday Times" gave a report of a scientific survey (composed of 1690 British men) revealing that in 25 to 33% of all couples, the male partner had suckled his wife's breasts. Regularly, the men gave a genuine emotional need as their motive.
The breasts have two main roles in human society: nutritive and sexual. Breastfeeding in general is considered by some to be a mild form of exhibitionism, especially in Western societies (see breastfeeding in public). Breastfeeding mothers have faced legal ramifications for nursing their children into toddler-hood or in public, or for photographing themselves while nursing.
Researcher Nikki Sullivan, in her book "A Critical Introduction to Queer Theory", calls erotic lactation a manifestation of "Queer." She defines Queer as an ideology; that is, as a "sort of vague and indefinable set of practices and (political) positions that has the potential to challenge normative knowledges and identities." Drawing on a statement of David Halperin, she continues "since queer is a positionality rather than an identity in the humanist sense, it is not restricted to gays and lesbians but can be taken up by anyone who feels marginalized as a result of their sexual practices." The hetero-normative profile of breastfeeding assumes certain norms:
Additionally, any relevant third party is assumed to be the mother's significant other and this person is relegated to a supportive role to maximize the breastfeeding mother's success.
The following are various methods people employ to practice erotic lactation. They are listed according to prevalence, in decreasing order:
https://www.mirror.co.uk/news/weird-news/breastfeeding-prostitution-ring-raided-police-4897565
</ref>
Erotic lactation between partners or an adult nursing relationship may develop from natural breastfeeding of a baby. During the lactation period the partner starts to suckle on the female breast, and continues after the baby is weaned off. Milk production is continually stimulated and the milk flow continues. According to the book "Body parts: critical explorations in corporeality", adult nursing may occur when an "individual, usually a mother, may choose to continue lactating after weaning a child, so that she avoids the significant physical challenge that inducing lactation can entail."
However, milk production can be "artificially" and intentionally induced in the absence of any pregnancy in the woman. This is called induced lactation, while a woman who has lactated before and restarts is said to relactate. This can be done by regularly sucking on the nipples (several times a day), massaging and squeezing the female breasts, or with additional help from temporary use of milk-inducing drugs, such as the dopamine antagonist Domperidone. In principle—with considerable patience and perseverance—it is possible to induce lactation by sucking on the nipples alone.
It is not necessary that the woman has ever been pregnant, and she can be well in her post-menopausal period. Once established, lactation adjusts to demand. As long as there is regular breast stimulation, lactation is possible.
Though birth is the beginning of the separation between mother and child, breastfeeding slows this process, making the mother and infant connect physically continually, sometimes for years. As a source of nourishment, the immediacy of this connection is intensified. Breastfeeding has a sexual element as a result of physiological factors. In a study conducted in 1999, approximately 33 to 50 percent of mothers found breast feeding erotic, and among them 25 percent felt guilty because of this. This study corroborated a study in 1949 that found that in a few cases where the arousal was strong enough to induce orgasm, some nursing mothers abandoned breastfeeding altogether. In a 1988 questionnaire on orgasm and pregnancy published in a Dutch magazine for women, when asked "Did you experience, while breastfeeding, a sensation of sexual excitement?", 34 percent (or 153 total) answered in the affirmative. An additional 71 percent answered in the affirmative when asked "Did you experience, while breastfeeding, pleasurable contractions in the uterine region"
Since the European Middle Ages, a multitude of subliminally erotic, visionary experiences of saints have been passed on in which breastfeeding plays a major role. One prominent example is the Lactatio of Saint Bernard of Clairvaux.
Roman Charity (or "Caritas Romana"). is a story of a woman, Pero, who secretly breastfeeds her father, Cimon, after he is incarcerated and sentenced to death by starvation. She is found out by a jailer, but her act of selflessness impresses officials and wins her father's release. The story comes from the Roman writer Valerius Maximus in the years AD 14–AD 37. In about AD 1362 the story was retold by the famous writer Giovanni Boccaccio. After Boccaccio, hundreds or possibly thousands of paintings were created, which tell the story. A variant of this story can be found at the conclusion of John Steinbeck's 1939 novel "The Grapes of Wrath". Primarily, the story tells of a conflict. An existing taboo (implied incest and adult breastfeeding of a woman's milk) "or" saving a life by breaking the taboo. In this aspect there is no erotic focus to the story.
Valerius Maximus tells another story about a woman breastfeeding her mother, which is followed by the very short story of a woman breastfeeding her father. The second, father-daughter story in fact consists of one sentence only. Thirteen hundred years later, Boccaccio retells the (first) mother-daughter story, and does not mention the father-daughter story, and the first is apparently forgotten, leading to nearly all "caritas romana" oil paintings and drawings showing only the father-daughter story.
Adult suckling was used to treat ailing adults and treat illnesses including eye disease and pulmonary tuberculosis. The writer Thomas Moffat recorded one physician's use of a wet nurse in a tome first published in 1655.
In traditional Islamic law, a child under the age of two (besides many strict rules like that the suckling should be of such quantity that it could be said that the bones of the child were strengthened and the flesh allowed to grow. And if that cannot be ascertained, then if a child suckles for one full day and night, or if it suckles fifteen times to its fill, it will be sufficient), is that woman's child through a foster relationship (the woman is then called "milk mother"). However, according to the Jurist Abu's-Su`ud (c.1490–1574), this only applies to sucklings under the age of two and a half years. Also, according to Ayatollah Ali Sistani, a highly praised scholar for the Shia Muslims: "The child should not have completed two years of his age". The same latter source states at least eight conditions that should apply before that child is considered a son/daughter of the feeding woman. (This is not considered to be an adoption, which is strictly proscribed by the Qu'ran.) A modern Saudi Jurist, in 1983, upheld that if a man suckles from his wife, their marriage is nullified. The query remains a popular one into the 21st century, and has come up in Saudi advice columns. A Sunni cleric Sheik Ezzat Atiya (عزت عطية), President of the Hadith Department of Egypt's al-Azhar University issued a fatwa in 2007 encouraging women to breastfeed their male business colleagues so that the man could become symbolically related to the woman, thereby precluding any sexual relations and the need for both sexes to observe modesty. "Breast feeding an adult puts an end to the problem of the private meeting" It was later denounced and declared defamatory to Islam.
In 2013 a domestic staff agency in China named Xinxinyu was reported to be providing wet nurses for the sick and other adults as well as for newborns. The agency's clients could choose to drink the breast milk directly from the breast or to drink it via a breast pump. The reports caused controversy in China, with one writer describing it as "adding to China's problem of treating women as consumer goods and the moral degradation of China's rich." The agency was forced to suspend its operations by Chinese authorities for a number of reasons, one of which was for missing three years of annual checks.
In 1903, German philosopher Carl Buttenstedt published his marriage guidebook ""Die Glücksehe – Die Offenbarung im Weibe, eine Naturstudie"" ("The Marriage of Happiness – The Revelation in the Woman, a study from nature"), in which he described and recommended the lactational amenorrhea method (LAM) as a form of contraception and natural family planning that also deepens the relationship between wife and husband. He explicitly described erotic lactation as a source of great sexual pleasure for both partners, claiming that this is intended by nature especially on the part of the woman. This particular aspect of his broader general marriage philosophy gained a lot of attention and sparked wide debate. While some welcomed Buttenstedt's advice as inspirational for new ways to improve sexual satisfaction between marriage partners, others warned that this technique could "pathologically increase sexual sensation of both partners." Consequently, the book was banned by the Nazis in 1938.
The "Bonyu Bar" (Mother’s Milk Bar), located in Tokyo’s entertainment and red-light district of Kabukicho, employs nursing women who provide customers with breast milk in a glass for 2,000 yen (about 15 euros) or directly from the nipple for 5000 yen (about 37.50 euros). In the latter case the women can run their fingers through the customers' hair, coo and say their name as they suckle.
| 7364325 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=7364325 |
Religion&Philosophy&Ethics | Heinz dilemma
The Heinz dilemma is a frequently used example in many ethics and morality classes. One well-known version of the dilemma, used in Lawrence Kohlberg's stages of moral development, is stated as follows:
From a theoretical point of view, it is not important what the participant thinks that Heinz should "do". Kohlberg's theory holds that the justification the participant offers is what is significant, the "form" of their response. Below are some of many examples of possible arguments that belong to the six stages:
| 7376392 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=7376392 |
Religion&Philosophy&Ethics | Sexual abuse
Sexual abuse, also referred to as molestation, is abusive sexual behavior by one person upon another. It is often perpetrated using force or by taking advantage of another. When force is immediate, of short duration, or infrequent, it is called sexual assault. The offender is referred to as a sexual abuser or (often pejoratively) molester. The term also covers any behavior by an adult or older adolescent towards a child to stimulate any of the involved sexually. The use of a child, or other individuals younger than the age of consent, for sexual stimulation is referred to as child sexual abuse or statutory rape.
Spousal sexual abuse is a form of domestic violence. When the abuse involves threats of unwanted sexual contact or forced sex by a woman's husband or ex-husband, it may constitute rape, depending on the jurisdiction, and may also constitute an assault.
Child sexual abuse is a form of child abuse in which a child is abused for the sexual gratification of an adult or older adolescent. It includes direct sexual contact, the adult or otherwise older person engaging indecent exposure (of the genitals, female nipples, etc.) to a child with intent to gratify their own sexual desires or to intimidate or groom the child, asking or pressuring a child to engage in sexual activities, displaying pornography to a child, or using a child to produce child pornography.
Effects of child sexual abuse include shame, self-blame, depression, anxiety, post-traumatic stress disorder, self-esteem issues, sexual dysfunction, chronic pelvic pain, addiction, self-injury, suicidal ideation, borderline personality disorder, and propensity to re-victimization in adulthood. Child sexual abuse is a risk factor for attempting suicide. Additionally, some studies have shown childhood sexual abuse to be a risk factor of the perpetration of intimate partner violence in men. Much of the harm caused to victims becomes apparent years after the abuse happens. With specific regard to addiction, a study by Reiger et al. supports previous findings that adverse life events increase sensitivity to drug rewards and bolster drug reward signaling by exposing an association between heightened limbic response to cocaine cues.
Sexual abuse by a family member is a form of incest, which can result in severe long-term psychological trauma, especially in the case of parental incest.
Globally, approximately 18–19% of women and 8% of men disclose being sexually abused during their childhood. The gender gap may be caused by higher victimization of girls, lower willingness of men to disclose abuse, or both. Most sexual abuse offenders are acquainted with their victims; approximately 30% are relatives of the child, most often fathers, uncles or cousins; around 60% are other acquaintances such as friends of the family, babysitters, or neighbors; strangers are the offenders in approximately 10% of child sexual abuse cases. Most child sexual abuse is committed by men; women commit approximately 14% of offenses reported against boys and 6% of offenses reported against girls. Child sexual abuse offenders are not pedophiles unless they have a primary or exclusive sexual interest in prepubescent children.
People with developmental disabilities are often victims of sexual abuse. According to research, people with disabilities are at a greater risk for victimization of sexual assault or sexual abuse because of lack of understanding (Sobsey & Varnhagen, 1989).
Elderly people, especially those with dementia, can be at risk of abuse. There were over 6,000 "safeguarding concerns and alerts" at UK care homes from 2013 to 2015. These included alleged inappropriate touching and worse allegations. Offenders were most often other residents but staff also offended. It is suspected some care homes may deliberately overlook these offenses.
Sometimes abuse victims are not believed because they are not seen as credible witnesses due to their dementia. Perpetrators frequently target victims who they know are unlikely to be believed. Spouses and partners sometimes continue to pursue sexual relations, without realising they no longer have this right, because the person with dementia can no longer consent.
Sex abuse is one of the most common forms of abuse in nursing homes. If a nursing home fails to do proper background checks on an employee who subsequently abuses residents, the home can be liable for negligence. If nursing homes fail to supervise staff or train staff to recognise signs of abuse, the home can also be liable for negligence. Sexual activity by care givers may be a crime. Victims may not report abuse or cooperate with investigations due to associated stigma and/or reluctance to mention body parts.
In the emergency department, contraceptive medications are offered to women raped by men because about 5% of such rapes result in pregnancy. Preventative medication against sexually transmitted infections are given to victims of all types of sexual abuse (especially for the most common diseases like chlamydia, gonorhea, trichomoniasis and bacterial vaginosis) and a blood serum is collected to test for STIs (such as HIV, hepatitis B and syphilis). Any survivor with abrasions are immunized for tetanus if 5 years have elapsed since the last immunization. Short-term treatment with a benzodiazepine may help with acute anxiety and antidepressants may be helpful for symptoms of PTSD, depression and panic attacks.
Sexual abuse has been linked to the development of psychotic symptoms in abused children. Treatment for psychotic symptoms may also be involved in sexual abuse treatment.
In regards to long term psychological treatment, prolonged exposure therapy has been tested as a method of long-term PTSD treatment for victims of sexual abuse.
Child sexual abuse prevention programmes were developed in the United States of America during the 1970s and originally delivered to children. Programmes delivered to parents were developed in the 1980s and took the form of one-off meetings, two to three hours long. In the last 15 years, web-based programmes have been developed.
The term "survivor" is sometimes used for a living victim, including victims of usually non-fatal harm, to honor and empower the strength of an individual to heal, in particular a living victim of sexual abuse or assault. For example, there are the Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests and The Survivors Trust.
Sexual misconduct can occur where one person uses a position of authority to compel another person to engage in an otherwise unwanted sexual activity. For example, sexual harassment in the workplace might involve an employee being coerced into a sexual situation out of fear of being dismissed. Sexual harassment in education might involve a student submitting to the sexual advances of a person in authority in fear of being punished, for example by being given a failing grade.
Several sexual abuse scandals have involved abuse of religious authority and often cover-up among non-abusers, including cases in the Southern Baptist Convention, Catholic Church, Episcopalian religion, Islam, Jehovah's Witnesses, Lutheran church, Methodist Church, The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, Orthodox Judaism, other branches of Judaism, and various cults.
Sexual abuse is a problem in some minority communities. In 2007, a number of Hispanic victims were included in the settlement of a massive sexual abuse case involving the Los Angeles archdiocese of the Catholic Church. A qualitative study by Kim et al. discusses the experiences of sexual abuse in the US population of Mexican immigrant women, citing immigration, acculturation, and several other social elements as risk factors for abuse. To address the issue of sexual abuse in the African-American community, the prestigious Leeway Foundation sponsored a grant to develop www.blacksurvivors.org, a national online support group and resource center for African-American sexual abuse survivors. The non-profit group was founded in 2008 by Sylvia Coleman, an African-American sexual abuse survivor and national sexual abuse prevention expert.
Sexual abuse has been identified among animals as well; for example, among the Adélie penguins.
| 7397019 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=7397019 |
Religion&Philosophy&Ethics | History of the cooperative movement
The history of the cooperative movement concerns the origins and history of cooperatives across the world. Although cooperative arrangements, such as mutual insurance, and principles of cooperation existed long before, the cooperative movement began with the application of cooperative principles to business organization.
The cooperative movement began in Europe in the 19th century, primarily in Britain and France. The Shore Porters Society claims to be one of the world's first cooperatives, being established in Aberdeen in 1498 (although it has since demutualized to become a private partnership). The industrial revolution and the increasing mechanism of the economy transformed society and threatened the livelihoods of many workers. The concurrent labour and social movements and the issues they attempted to address describe the climate at the time.
The first documented consumer cooperative was founded in 1769, in a barely furnished cottage in Fenwick, East Ayrshire, when local weavers manhandled a sack of oatmeal into John Walker's whitewashed front room and began selling the contents at a discount, forming the Fenwick Weavers' Society.
In the decades that followed, several cooperatives or cooperative societies formed including Lennoxtown Friendly Victualling Society, founded in 1812.
By 1830, there were several hundred co-operatives.
Some were initially successful, but most cooperatives founded in the early 19th century had failed by 1840.
However, Lockhurst Lane Industrial Co-operative Society (founded in 1832 and now Heart of England Co-operative Society), and Galashiels and Hawick Co-operative Societies (1839 or earlier, merged with The Co-operative Group) still trade today.
It was not until 1844 when the Rochdale Society of Equitable Pioneers established the "Rochdale Principles" on which they ran their cooperative, that the basis for development and growth of the modern cooperative movement was established.
Financially, cooperative banks, called credit unions in the US, were invented in Germany in the mid-19th century, first by Franz Hermann Schulze-Delitzsch (1852, urban), then by Friedrich Wilhelm Raiffeisen (1864, rural). While Schulze-Delitzsch is chronologically earlier, Raiffeisen has proven more influential over time – see history of credit unions. In Britain, the friendly society, building society, and mutual savings bank were earlier forms of similar institutions.
Robert Owen (1771–1858) is considered as the father of the cooperative movement. A Welshman who made his fortune in the cotton trade, Owen believed in putting his workers in a good environment with access to education for themselves and their children. These ideas were put into effect successfully in the cotton mills of New Lanark, Scotland. It was here that the first co-operative store was opened. Spurred on by the success of this, he had the idea of forming "villages of co-operation" where workers would drag themselves out of poverty by growing their own food, making their own clothes and ultimately becoming self-governing. He tried to form such communities in Orbiston in Scotland and in New Harmony, Indiana in the United States of America, but both communities failed.
Although Owen inspired the co-operative movement, others – such as Dr. William King (1786–1865) – took his ideas and made them more workable and practical. King believed in starting small, and realized that the working classes would need to set up co-operatives for themselves, so he saw his role as one of instruction. He founded a monthly periodical called "The Co-operator", the first edition of which appeared on 1 May 1828. This gave a mixture of co-operative philosophy and practical advice about running a shop using cooperative principles. King advised people not to cut themselves off from society, but rather to form a society within a society, and to start with a shop because, "We must go to a shop every day to buy food and necessaries – why then should we not go to our own shop?" He proposed sensible rules, such as having a weekly account audit, having 3 trustees, and not having meetings in pubs (to avoid the temptation of drinking profits).
The Rochdale Society of Equitable Pioneers was a group of 10 weavers and 20 others in Rochdale, England, that was formed in 1844. As the mechanization of the Industrial Revolution was forcing more and more skilled workers into poverty, these tradesmen decided to band together to open their own store selling food items they could not otherwise afford. With lessons from prior failed attempts at co-operation in mind, they designed the now famous Rochdale Principles, and over a period of four months they struggled to pool one pound sterling per person for a total of 28 pounds of capital. On December 21, 1844, they opened their store with a very meagre selection of butter, sugar, flour, oatmeal and a few candles. Within three months, they expanded their selection to include tea and tobacco, and they were soon known for providing high quality, unadulterated goods.
The Co-operative Group formed gradually over 140 years from the merger of many independent retail societies, and their wholesale societies and federations. In 1863, twenty years after the Rochdale Pioneers opened their co-operative, the North of England Co-operative Society was launched by 300 individual co-ops across Yorkshire and Lancashire. By 1872, it had become known as the Co-operative Wholesale Society (CWS). Through the 20th century, smaller societies merged with CWS, such as the Scottish Co-operative Wholesale Society (1973) and the South Suburban Co-operative Society (1984).
By the 1990s, CWS's share of the market had declined considerably and many came to doubt the viability of co-operative model. CWS sold its factories to Andrew Regan in 1994. Regan returned in 1997 with a £1.2 billion bid for CWS. There were allegations of "carpet-bagging" – new members who joined simply to make money from the sale – and more seriously fraud and commercial leaks. After a lengthy battle, Regan's bid was seen off and two senior CWS executives were dismissed and imprisoned for fraud. Regan was cleared of charges. The episode recharged CWS and its membership base. Tony Blair's Co-operative Commission, chaired by John Monks, made major recommendations for the co-operative movement, including the organisation and marketing of the retail societies. It was in this climate that, in 2000, CWS merged with the UK's second largest society, Co-operative Retail Services.
Its headquarters complex is situated on the north side of Manchester city centre adjacent to the Manchester Victoria railway station. The complex is made up of many different buildings with two notable tower blocks of New Century House and the solar panel-clad CIS tower.
Other independent societies are part owners of the Group. Representatives of the societies that part own the Group are elected to the Group's national board. The Group manages The Co-operative brand and the Co-operative Retail Trading Group (CRTG), which sources and promotes goods for food stores. There is a similar purchasing group (CTTG) for co-operative travel agents.
The United States first known Co-op was the mutual fire insurance company founded in 1752 by Benjamin Franklin. The first dairy co-op was founded in 1810 with small locals found nationwide by 1866. The first known consumer co-op in 1845 was Boston's Workingman's Protective Union. The country's first organization to promote cooperative values and the Rochedale Principles was the Order of the Patrons of Husbandry, known as the Grange that started after the Civil War. The co-operative movement grew during the 1890s in response to the expansion of large corporate monopolies. The country's first credit unions were in Massachusetts while The Cooperative League of the United States of America, known today as the National Cooperative Business Association was organized in 1916 to promote cooperatives . In the late 1960s the Co-op movement entered a new phase with Food cooperatives and Food Conspiracies as an alternative to corporate agriculture that linked organic farmers to urban consumers.
The co-operative model has a long history in the U.S., including a factory in the 1790s, the Knights of Labor, and the Grange. In Colorado, USA the Meadowlark cooperative administers the only private free land program in the United States, providing many services to its members who buy and sell together. In New York City, several food co-operatives were founded around 2010, adding to others, some existing since the 1970s. The U.S. has some diverse worker co-operatives, such as a home care agency, an organic bread factory co-op and an engineering firm. Some have already incorporated environmental and/or Fair Trade criteria into their products, such as the aforementioned bread-maker, Organic Valley, and Equal Exchange.
Credit unions were established in the U.S. by 1908. Their member-owned, co-operative structure created stable governance structure, so that they were only slightly affected by the 2008 mortgage securities crisis.
Electrical co-operatives became an important economic strategy for U.S. rural areas beginning in the 1930s, and continue to operate successfully through events such as Hurricane Sandy in 2012. However, the majority in the U.S. demonstrate that co-operative values do not necessarily lead to a progressive social and environmental consciousness, as many remain focuses on fossil fuel and nuclear fuels. Nevertheless, new generation renewable power co-operatives have begun to be organized.
Agricultural co-operatives in the U.S. have had some mainstream success, including Welch's, Ocean Spray, and Land O'Lakes.
In the United States, a co-operative association was founded by 1920. Currently there are over 29,000 co-operatives employing 2 million people with over $652 billion in annual revenue. To address the need for an organization oriented to newer and smaller co-ops, the United States Federation of Worker Cooperatives was founded after 2000.
An alternative method of employee-ownership, the Employee Stock Ownership Plan (ESOP), was developed in the U.S. by Louis Kelso and advocated by Senator Russell Long to be incentivized in the ERISA law of 1974. For example, a large Southeastern US supermarket chain a California manufacturer, and a furniture-maker with earnings of more than $2 billion, are employee-owned. Employee-owned trusts have also been developed more or less independently, for example at an established iron pipe company
Alice Acland, the editor of the "Women's Corner" in the "Co-operative News" publication, and Mary Lawrenson, a teacher, recognized the need for a separate women's organization within the Cooperative Movement and began organizing a "Woman's League for the Spread of Co-operation" in 1883. This League formally met for the first time during the 1883 Co-operative Congress in Edinburgh in a group of 50 women and established Acland as its organizing secretary. By 1884 it had six different branches with 195 members, and the League was renamed the Women's Cooperative Guild.
The Guild organized around working women's issues and expanding the Cooperative Movement. It continued to publish articles advocating for women's involvement in the Cooperative Movement in the "Women's Corner," and later through its own publications such as "The importance of women for the cooperative movement." The Guild also opened the Sunderland cooperative store in 1902, which catered to poor working-class women. It engaged in many political campaigns concerning women's health, women's suffrage and pacifism. Until recently the organisation participated in social justice activism, but has now closed.
In Russia the village co-operative ("obshchina" or "mir"), operated from pre-serfdom times until the 20th century.
Raiffeisen and Schultz-Delitsch developed an independently formulated co-operative model in Germany, the credit union. The model also moved abroad, reaching the United States by the 1880s and the Knights of Labour's projects. Leland Stanford, the railroad magnate and Robber Baron, became a Senator and advocated for co-operatives. By 1920 a national association had formed in the U.S. This organization began to develop international programs, and by the 1970s, a World Council formed.
Co-operatives in the U.S. have a long history, including an early factory in the 1790s. By the 1860s Brigham Young had started applying co-operative ideas in Utah, and by the 1880s, the Knights of Labor and the Grange both promoted member-owned organizations. Energy co-operatives were founded in the U.S. during the Depression and the New Deal.
Diverse kinds of co-operatives were founded and have continued to perform successfully in different areas: in agriculture, wholesale purchasing, telephones, and in consumer-food buying.
James Warbasse, an American doctor, became the first president of the U.S. National Co-operative Business Association. He wrote extensively on co-operative history and philosophy. Benjamin Ward began an important effort in co-operative economic theory in the 1950s, with Jaroslav Vanek developing a general theory. David Ellerman began a line of theoretical thinking beginning with legal principles, developing especially the labor theory of property, and later reaching a treatment which evaluates the role of capital in labor managed firms using the conventional economic production formula Q = f(K, L). At one point in the 1990s he worked at the World Bank with Nobel laureate Joseph Stiglitz.
Co-operative enterprises were formed successfully following Rochdale, and an international association was formed in 1895. Co-operative enterprises are now widespread, with one of the largest and most successful examples being the industrial Mondragón Cooperative Corporation in the Basque country of Spain. Mondragon Co-op was founded under the oppressive conditions of Fascist Franco Spain after community-based democracy-building activities of a priest, Jose Maria Arizmendiarrieta. They have become an extremely diverse network of co-operative enterprises, a huge enterprise in Spain, and a multinational concern. Co-operatives were also successful in Yugoslavia under Tito where Workers' Councils gained a significant role in management.
In many European countries, cooperative institutions have a predominant market share in the retail banking and insurance businesses. There are also concrete proposals for the cooperative management of the common goods, such as the one by Initiative 136 in Greece.
In the UK, co-operatives formed the Co-operative Party in the early 20th century to represent members of co-ops in Parliament. The Co-operative Party now has a permanent electoral pact with the Labour Party, and some Labour MPs are Co-operative Party members. UK co-operatives retain a significant market share in food retail, insurance, banking, funeral services, and the travel industry in many parts of the country.
Denmark has had a strong cooperative movement.
In Germany, the rebuilding of the country after World War II created a legislative opportunity in which politician Hans Boeckler significantly lobbied for the Co-Determination ("Mitbestimmung") policies which were established, requiring large companies to include a Workers' Council in the Board of Directors. These policies have had some influence on European Union policies.
Emilia Romagna, Italy had two separate and strong co-operative traditions that resisted Cold War interference by US agencies and have worked effectively in conjunction with each other.
Co-operative banks have become very successful throughout Europe, and were able to respond more effectively than most corporate banks during the 2008 mortgage-securities crisis.
Renewable Energy co-operatives in Europe became important in the early development of windpower in Denmark beginning in the 1970s. Germany followed in the early 1990s, first on a larger scale with wind co-ops, then with a citizen's movement which challenged the reliance on nuclear power, organized, challenged the energy monopolists there, and successfully created a successful co-op social enterprise by 1999. A citizen's group began operating wind turbines and involving broad community ownership in the U.K. by 1995. Deregulation of the electricity markets allowed energy co-operative social entrepreneurs to begin to create alternatives to the monopolies in various countries. In France, where an enormous percentage of the power is generated by nuclear sources, this occurred after 2000. In Spain, wind power was developed by corporate-led efforts, and it took longer for a renewable energy-focused social enterprise to get established. Similar renewable energy co-ops around Europe have organized in a network.
Asian societies have adapted the co-operative model, including some of the most successful in the world. Nevertheless, the crises generated by traditional inequalities and the shareholder model continues to require civil society and entrepreneurial responses, such as the Citizens Coalition for Economic Justice in South Korea, the Seikatsu Club Consumer Co-operative in Japan, and the Self-Employed Women's Association in India. Other noteworthy efforts include Sophon Suphapong's efforts as governor in Thailand with agricultural co-ops and Antonio Yapsutco Fortich's contributions in the Philippines helping formulate a co-operative strategy with sugar workers.
The International Labor Organization, originally established in 1919, has a Co-operative Division.
Co-operatives were brought to Latin America and developed there by 1902. Substantially independent efforts to develop employee-owned enterprises or co-operatives have occurred as responses to crises, such as the systemic IMF-based default in Argentina in 2001 In Brazil, the World Social Forum process lead to the articulation of Solidarity Economics, a modern, activist formulation of co-operativism, with the MST landless worker's movement demonstrating enormous courage and social entrepreneurship. In Venezuela, the late Hugo Chávez's administration began to incentivize co-operatives, resulting in their rapid and extensive development there.
The Fair Trade certification movement established first in the Netherlands in 1988 with an international headquarters in Bonn nine years later requires member farmers to have established a co-operative.
In 2016, UNESCO inscribed "Idea and practice of organizing shared interests in cooperatives" on the Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity.
| 7405764 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=7405764 |
Religion&Philosophy&Ethics | Richard Brandt
Richard Booker Brandt (17 October 1910 – 10 September 1997) was an American philosopher working in the utilitarian tradition in moral philosophy.
Brandt was originally educated at Denison University, a Baptist institution he was shepherded to by his minister father, and graduated in 1930 with majors in philosophy and classical studies. In 1933 he earned another B.A., this time in the philosophy of religion, from Cambridge University. He received his Ph.D. in Philosophy from Yale University in 1936. He taught at Swarthmore College before becoming Chair of the Department of Philosophy the University of Michigan in 1964, where he taught with Charles Stevenson and William K. Frankena (1908–1994) and spent the remainder of his career. The expressivist moral philosopher Allan Gibbard has mentioned his great intellectual debt to Brandt.
Brandt gave the John Locke Lectures at Oxford University in 1974-75, material that later appeared in "A Theory of the Good and the Right" (1979).
Brandt wrote "Ethical Theory" (1959), an influential textbook in the field. He defended a version of rule utilitarianism in "Toward a credible form of utilitarianism" (1963) and performed cultural-anthropological studies in "Hopi Ethics" (1954). In "A Theory of the Good and the Right", Brandt proposed a "reforming definition" of rationality, that one is rational if one's preferences are such that they survive cognitive psychotherapy in terms of all relevant information and logical criticism. He argued also that the morality such rational persons would accept would be a form of utilitarianism.
Brandt believed that moral rules should be considered in sets which he called moral codes. A moral code is justified when it is the optimal code that, if adopted and followed, would maximise the public good more than any alternative code would. The codes may be society-wide standards or special codes for a profession like engineering.
| 7414016 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=7414016 |
Religion&Philosophy&Ethics | The Centipede's Dilemma
"The Centipede's Dilemma" is a short poem that has lent its name to a psychological effect called the centipede effect or centipede syndrome. The centipede effect occurs when a normally automatic or unconscious activity is disrupted by consciousness of it or reflection on it. For example, a golfer thinking too closely about her swing or someone thinking too much about how he knots his tie may find his performance of the task impaired. The effect is also known as hyper-reflection or Humphrey's law after the English psychologist George Humphrey (1889–1966), who propounded it in 1923. As he wrote of the poem, "This is a most psychological rhyme. It contains a profound truth which is illustrated daily in the lives of all of us". The effect is the reverse of a solvitur ambulando.
The poem, a short rhyme, is usually attributed to Katherine Craster (1841–1874) in "Pinafore Poems", 1871. By 1881 it had begun appearing in journals such as "The Spectator" and "The Living Age". The poem later appeared in an article by British zoologist E. Ray Lankester, published in the scientific journal "Nature" on May 23, 1889, which discussed the work of the photographer Eadweard Muybridge in capturing the motion of animals: "For my own part," wrote Lankester, "I should greatly like to apply Mr. Muybridge's cameras, or a similar set of batteries, to the investigation of a phenomenon more puzzling even than that of 'the galloping horse'. I allude to the problem of 'the running centipede. Lankester finished the article on a fanciful note by imagining the "disastrous results in the way of perplexity" that could result from such an investigation, quoting the poem and mentioning that the author was unknown to him or to the friend who sent it to him. It has since been variously attributed to specific authors but without convincing evidence, and often appears under the title "The Centipede's Dilemma".
The version in the article is as follows:
Another version of the Centipede's Dilemma:
Modern versions of the poem often recast it in verse as a fable of a spider (or other protagonist) who found a clever way to avoid being eaten.
Another rhyme goes:
The psychologist George Humphrey referred to the tale in his 1923 book "The Story of Man's Mind": "No man skilled at a trade needs to put his constant attention on the routine work", he wrote. "If he does, the job is apt to be spoiled". He went on to recount the centipede's story, commenting, "This is a most psychological rhyme. It contains a profound truth which is illustrated daily in the lives of all of us, for exactly the same thing happens if we pay conscious attention to any well-formed habit, such as walking". Thus, the eponymous "Humphrey's law" states that once performance of a task has become automatized, conscious thought about the task, while performing it, impairs performance. Whereas habit diminishes and then eliminates the attention required for routine tasks, this automaticity is disrupted by attention to a normally unconscious competence.
The philosopher Karl Popper referred to the centipede effect in his book "Knowledge and the Body-Mind Problem: In Defence of Interaction": "if we have learnt certain movements so that they have sunk below the level of conscious control, then if we try to follow them consciously we very often interfere with them so badly that we stop them". He gives the example of the violinist Adolf Busch who was asked by fellow-violinist Bronisław Huberman how he played a certain passage of Beethoven's violin concerto. Busch told Huberman that it was quite simple—and then found that he could no longer play the passage.
The psychiatric psychoanalyst Theo L. Dorpat compares questions and interventions irrelevant to the patient's current thought process during psychotherapy in his book "Gaslighting" to "the story of the centipede who became disorganized and unable to walk after he was asked, 'What's wrong with your 34th left foot?'."
In 1903, "Simplicissimus" magazine printed an adaptation of the story by the Austrian author Gustav Meyrink, "The Curse of The Toad" ("Der Fluch der Kröte"). The fable was also published in Meyrink's 1903 collection of tales, "The Hot Soldier and Other Stories".
Spider Robinson's short story "The Centipede's Dilemma" concerns a psychic who uses instinctive telekinetic powers to cheat at darts, and is foiled when another character triggers hyper-reflection in him.
| 7420608 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=7420608 |
Religion&Philosophy&Ethics | Sadayoshi Fukuda
Fukuda was the pseudonym of , born on 6 April 1917. He studied philosophy at Hosei University (Tokyo), graduating in 1940. In 1944 he was sent to Halmahera; he returned to Japan in 1946. Two years later he started teaching philosophy at his old university, where he would stay until 1970. Thereafter he supported himself by his writing.
Fukuda — the name he used as a teacher as well as a writer — was a prolific author: a "hyōronka" (critic or pundit) and popularizer of philosophy. He died on 11 December 2002.
| 7439311 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=7439311 |
Religion&Philosophy&Ethics | Islam and masturbation
There are varying scholarly opinions regarding the permissibility of masturbation () in Islam. Islamic scripture does not specifically mention masturbation. There are a few "hadiths" mentioning it, but they are classified as unreliable. Unless one refers to the Hadith in question
The opinions of some of the companions of Muhammad reproduced below from Ibn Hazm's Al-Muhalla (vol.11 pg. 393-394) indicate that they did not forbid it:
Abd Allah ibn Abbas said:
Abdullah ibn Umar said:
Jābir ibn Zayd said:
Hasan of Basra (Hasan al-Basri) said:
The Sunni schools of jurisprudence (known as "madhaahib" - the "Hanafi", "Shafi'i", "Maliki", "Hanbali, and Zahiri" schools of "Fiqh") have differing stances on the issue. Some see it forbidden in certain cases (i.e. if it leads a man/woman to ignore their spouse sexually) but recommended it when they see it as a lesser evil to illicit sex. It is generally prohibited according to the "Hanafi" and "Hanbali" "madhaahib", unless one fears adultery or fornication, or is under the desire pressure, in which case, it is permissible to seek a relief through masturbation. It is prohibited all the time according to the "Maliki" and "Shafi"`i "madhaahib". Zahiri Imam Ibn Hazm regards masturbation as permissible. Scholars have also stated that masturbation would not be necessary if one realizes the flexible approach Islam takes to marriage. For example, according to Sheikh Shomeh Yerkity, 'against the clear teachings of Islam, marriage has been rendered another difficult process today due to warped customs and conventions and undue expectations. When we approach marriage from the point of view of pristine Islam, we shall find less and fewer people being forced to exercise the above type of exceptional rulings'. Yet if one's desire is so overwhelming one might perform masturbation but in that case it will be like eating the flesh of a pig to survive from major hunger or starvation when no other food is available.
Masturbation, like any form of sex in which seminal or vaginal fluids have been released, breaks one's fast if performed during the daylight hours and requires a major ablution if any seminal or vaginal fluids were released. According to Sheikh Hamed Al-Ali: "Masturbation during the daytime of Ramadan breaks the fast, based on the Hadith that a fasting Muslim gives up eating, drinking, and sexual desire for the sake of Allah. Since masturbation is a kind of sexual desire, a fasting Muslim must avoid it. Therefore, masturbation invalidates the fast as does food and as it is one of the sins that if someone does it he or she would be violating the sanctity of this month."
It is considered permissible for spouses to masturbate each other, with the only sexual acts forbidden in Islam being anal intercourse and vaginal sex during menstruation.'Hasan bin 'Ali (May Allah be pleased with them) said:
I remember (these words) from Messenger of Allah (ﷺ): "Give up what is doubtful to you for that which is not doubtful; for truth is peace of mind and falsehood is doubt".'
It is generally prohibited according to the Hanafi "madhhab", unless one fears fornication, or is under the desire pressure, in which case, it is permissible to seek a relief through
masturbation.
It is considered as haram according to the Sunni Imam Malik ibn Anas.
It is prohibited all the time according to the Maliki madhhab.
At the same, there is a minority opinion within the Maliki school that allows masturbation if done in private and without the use of illicit materials such as pornography and drugs.
It is prohibited all the time according to the Shafi`i madhhab. Imam Al-Shafi’i stated that masturbation is forbidden based on the following verses from the Qur'an (interpretation of the meaning):
"And those who guard their chastity (i.e. private parts, from illegal sexual acts). Except from their wives or that their right hands possess, - for them, they are free from blame. But whoever seeks beyond that, then those are the transgressors."
According to his interpretation, the verses are clear in forbidding all illegal sexual acts (including masturbation) except for the wives or that their right hand possess, and whoever seeks beyond that is the transgressor..
It is generally prohibited according to the Hanbali madhhab, unless one fears adultery or fornication, or is under the desire pressure, in which case, it is permissible to seek a relief through masturbation. According to Ahmad ibn Hanbal, it is permissible for prisoners, travellers and for men and women who have difficulty in finding a lawful spouse.
Zahiri Imam Ibn Hazm regards masturbation as permissible.
Any sexual engagement outside of marriage including masturbation is a major sin altogether in the Shi'a Islam. Extra-marital sexual engagement causes the doer to be punished in this life and in the afterlife ("qiyama"). The Qur'an says, "The believers are those who protect their sexual organs except from their spouses... Therefore, whosoever seeks more beyond that (in sexual gratification), then they are the transgressors." (23:5-6) and it is not allowed in any situation.
The majority of scholars among Muslims forbid masturbation stating that it is an immoral act and argue using the verse in the Quran, “And those who guard their private parts save from their wives which their right-hands own – so there is no blame upon them. Then whoever seeks beyond that (which is lawful), they are the transgressors.” (23: 5-6) but a new group of young Muslims have started to question and argue this fatwa. In the conservative kingdom of Saudi Arabia, a group of Saudi Arabians launched a twitter campaign titled "masturbation is halal" and it went viral . Some Saudi psychologists even went further by stating that masturbation was a human need just like defecating or to eat or drink.t
| 7451085 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=7451085 |
Religion&Philosophy&Ethics | Patient advocacy
Patient advocacy is an area of specialization in health care concerned with advocacy for patients, survivors, and caregivers. The patient advocate may be an individual or an organization, often, though not always, concerned with one specific group of disorders. The terms patient advocate and patient advocacy can refer both to individual advocates providing services that organizations also provide, and to organizations whose functions extend to individual patients. Some patient advocates work for the institutions that are directly responsible for the patient's care.
Typical advocacy activities are the following: patient rights, matters of privacy, confidentiality or informed consent, patient representation, awareness building, support and education of patients, survivors and their carers. Patient advocates give a voice to patients, survivors and their carers on healthcare-related (public) fora, informing the public, the political and regulatory world, health-care providers (hospitals, insurers, pharmaceutical companies etc.), organizations of health-care professionals, the educational world, and the medical and pharmaceutical research communities.
The origin of patient advocacy, in its current form, can be traced to the early days of cancer research and treatment, in the 1950s. It is part of the notion of "Total Care", a term coined by Sidney Farber, a Harvard physician and cancer researcher, referring to the treatment of children suffering from leukemia. "Total care signified that the cancer clinician treated the family as a whole," and "[t]he concept of Total Care subordinated clinical investigation to patient welfare..." This is "...because clinical investigation in the field of cancer may be carried out only as part of the "total care" of the patient." In the 1950s, clinicians recruited cancer patients for studies, and suspicion reigned at the National Institutes of Health (NIH) as researchers had to convince doctors and patients they were not harming people to conduct experiments. To properly represent patients in this medico-legal and ethical discussion, patient advocacy came into being.
As global healthcare systems started to become more complex, and as the role of the cost of care continues to place more of a burden on patients, a new profession of private professional advocacy began to take root in the mid-2000s. At that time, two organizations were founded to support the work of these new private practitioners, professional patient advocates. The National Association of Healthcare Advocacy Consultants was started to provide broad support for advocacy. The Alliance of Professional Health Advocates was started to support the business of being a private advocate.
Proponents of private advocacy, such as Australian advocate Dorothy Kamaker, have noted that the patient advocates employed by healthcare facilities have an inherent conflict-of-interest in situations where the needs of an individual patient are at odds with the business interests of an advocate's employer. Kamaker argues that hiring a private advocate eliminates this conflict because the private advocate “…has only one master and very clear priorities.”
Patient opinion leaders, also sometimes called patient advocates, are individuals who are well versed in a disease, either as patients themselves or as caretakers, and share their knowledge on the particular disease with others. Such POLs can have an influence on health care providers and may help persuade them to use evidence-based therapies or medications in the management of other patients. Identifying such people and persuading them is one goal of market access groups at pharmaceutical and medical device companies.
Founded in 2000, the interprofessional Center for Patient Partnerships (CPP) at University of Wisconsin–Madison offers a health advocacy certificate with a focus on either patient advocacy or system-level health policy advocacy. The book chapter "Educating for Health Advocacy in Settings of Higher Education" describes CPP's pedagogy and curriculum.
In the United States, state governmental units have established ombudsmen to investigate and respond to patient complaints and to provide other consumer services.
Such state government offices may also be responsible for intervening in disputes within the legal and insurance systems and in disciplinary actions against health care professionals. Some hospitals, health insurance companies, and other health care organizations also employ people specifically to assume the role of patient advocate. Within hospitals, the person may have the title of Ombudsman or Patient Representative.
The American Nurses Association (ANA) includes advocacy in its definition of nursing:
Nursing is the protection, promotion, and optimization of health and abilities, prevention of illness and injury, facilitation of healing, alleviation of suffering through the diagnosis and treatment of human response, and advocacy in the care of individuals, families, groups, communities, and populations.
Advocacy in nursing finds its theoretical basis in nursing ethics. For instance, the ANA's "Code of Ethics for Nurses" includes language relating to patient advocacy:
Some patient advocacy groups receive donations from pharmaceutical companies. In 2015, 14 companies donated $116 million to patient advocacy groups. A database identifying more than 1,200 patient groups showed that six pharmaceutical companies contributed $1 million or more in 2015 to individual groups representing patients who use their drugs, and 594 groups in the database received donations from pharmaceutical companies. Fifteen patient groups relied on pharmaceutical companies for at least 20 percent of their revenue in the same year, and some received more than half of their revenue from pharmaceutical companies. Recipients of donations from pharmaceutical companies include the American Diabetes Association, Susan G. Komen, and the Caring Ambassadors Program.
| 7458640 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=7458640 |
Religion&Philosophy&Ethics | Amani Trust
The Amani Trust was a Zimbabwean non-profit non-governmental organization dedicated to preventing organized violence and torture, to advocacy for the rights of victims and to rehabilitation of victims through community-based care. It was established in 1993 and had its headquarters in Harare. The organisation has now closed.
In 2002, Justice Minister Patrick Chinamasa declared various NGO's illegal, including the Amani Trust; the Trust was also accused of working with the British government to unseat President Robert Mugabe and destabilize the nation.
| 7464459 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=7464459 |
Religion&Philosophy&Ethics | Institute on Biotechnology and the Human Future
The Institute on Biotechnology and the Human Future (IBHF) is an affiliate of the Illinois Institute of Technology (IIT) and is housed at IIT’s Chicago-Kent College of Law. The IBHF was founded in 2004 by Lori Andrews, J.D., and Nigel M. de S. Cameron, Ph.D., to discuss and analyze the ethical, legal, and social implications of biotechnologies.
The Institute on Biotechnology and the Human Future offers assessments of the scientific benefits and risks of new developments in biotechnology in light of their cultural and ethical significance. IBHF couples continuing academic and policy research with the ability to provide analysis to industry and policymakers.
The Institute on Biotechnology and the Human Future was established early in 2004 at Chicago-Kent College of Law, Illinois Institute of Technology. Working at the intersection of a variety of disciplines, the IBHF has become as a leader in the study of biotechnology and its implications for the human future. The IBHF has regularly been called to Washington D.C. to present information to the United States Congress on matters related to biotechnology and public policy. In addition, the IBHF host numerous forums, symposia, and other conferences around the world aimed at furthering public discourse and understanding of important issues in biotechnology. Lori B. Andrews, J.D., distinguished professor of law at Chicago-Kent and a leading commentator on the legal and social issues raised by biotechnology, co-founded the Institute, and continues to serve as an advisor. Nigel M. de S. Cameron, Ph.D., a bioethics scholar whose special focus is the relations of human values and public policy, joined the law school as university research professor of bioethics with responsibility for the development of the Institute.
The IBHF conducts research on existing and emerging biotechnologies and their effect on law, intellectual property regimes, public health, medicine, genetics, public policy and the environment. IBHF focuses its efforts on six core areas:
Genetic Discrimination
While the rapid advances in genetic technologies offer great promise for the diagnosis and treatment of inheritable diseases, they also raise serious concerns about the potential for the use of this genetic information to discriminate against certain individuals. The IBHF analyzes state and federal law, public opinion, and industry information to make policy recommendations.
Germline Intervention
Germline Genetic Intervention makes possible changes that will spread to every subsequent generation; this form of genetic engineering can also be called inheritable genetic modification and has the potential to change the human species along eugenic lines. The IBHF analyzes scientific research related to germline intervention and its implications to law and bioethics.
Gene Patents
Patents for human genetic material grant exclusivity over naturally occurring sequences of human genes and their effect on research and diagnosis. The IBHF reviews and analyzes the effects of gene patents on research, healthcare, business, and individual rights.
Nanotechnology
The IBHF reviews the development of nanotechnology policy in the United States and Europe, with special focus on the emerging nanotechnology ethical, legal, and social issues (NELSI).
Human Cloning
“Somatic cell nuclear transfer” technology can be used to bring about the birth of replica offspring, and to create embryos for experimentation. The IBHF reviews and analyzes scientific information and policy debates to make recommendations and presentations around the world, including the United Nations and in U.S. federal and state bodies.
Reproductive Technology
The IBHF analyzes developments in reproductive technology, and focuses research on its related ethical, legal, social, and political considerations.
IBHF themes represent diverse perspectives from which to analyze issues in biotechnology. These themes are designed to encourage academics, scientists, policy makers, and the general public to discuss complicated biotech issues in relation to their everyday lives. IBHF themes include: Arts; Bio 101; Business; Eugenics; Human Enhancement; International
The IBHF facilitates numerous conferences, symposia, and other events aimed at building a broad public discussion for issues in biotechnology, law, and society. Past events include:
| 7476080 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=7476080 |
Religion&Philosophy&Ethics | Marketing ethics
Marketing ethics is an area of applied ethics which deals with the moral principles behind the operation and regulation of marketing. Some areas of marketing ethics (ethics of advertising and promotion) overlap with media and public relations ethics.
None of these frameworks allows, by itself, a convenient and complete categorization of the great variety of issues in marketing ethics
Contrary to popular impressions, not all marketing is adversarial, and not all marketing is stacked in favour of the marketer. In marketing, the relationship between producer/consumer or buyer/seller can be adversarial or cooperative. For an example of cooperative marketing, see relationship marketing. If the marketing situation is adversarial, another dimension of difference emerges, describing the power balance
between producer/consumer or buyer/seller. Power may be concentrated with the producer ("caveat emptor"),
but factors such as over-supply or legislation can shift the power towards the consumer ("caveat vendor"). Identifying where the power in the relationship lies and whether the power balance is relevant at all are important to understanding the background to an ethical dilemma in marketing ethics.
A popularist anti-marketing stance commonly discussed on the blogosphere and popular literature is that any kind of marketing is inherently evil. The position is based on the argument that marketing necessarily commits at least one of three wrongs:
Market research is the collection and analysis of information about consumers, competitors and the effectiveness of marketing programs. With market research, businesses can make decisions based on how the responses of the market, leading to a better understanding of how the business has to adapt to the changing market. It is used to establish which portion of the population will or does purchase a product, based on age, gender, location, income level, and many other variables. This research allows companies to learn more about past, current, and potential customers, including their specific likes and dislikes.
Ethical danger points in market research include:
Invasion of privacy
As companies conduct research they also come into contact with confidential and personal information, which comes with a level of risk for both the business as well as the individual. Now day's consumers are bombarded with mail after using their email address to enter in a competition thus becoming part of a businesses mailing list. Therefore, companies are provided with critical information, which they must not take advantage of but use in an ethical manner.
Stereotyping:
Portraying an ideal body, weight or physical appearance can have potential harmful effects on the individual such as low self-esteem issues or anorexia. Good marketing is ethical marketing, it is about pleasing and developing a strong relationship with customers in a caring manner by not primarily only focusing on achieving results in order to generate profit.
People affected by unethical market research:
Approaches to privacy can, broadly, be divided into two categories: free market, and consumer protection.[31] In a free market approach, commercial entities are largely allowed to do what they wish, with the expectation that consumers will choose to do business with corporations that respect their privacy to a desired degree. If some companies are not sufficiently respectful of privacy, they will lose market share. In a consumer protection approach, in contrast, it is claimed that individuals may not have the time or knowledge to make informed choices, or may not have reasonable alternatives available.
Stereotyping occurs because any analysis of real populations needs to make approximations and place individuals into groups. However, if conducted irresponsibly, stereotyping can lead to a variety of ethically undesirable results. In the American Marketing Association Statement of Ethics, stereotyping is countered by the obligation to show respect ("acknowledge the basic human dignity of all stakeholders").
Ethical danger points include:
Examples of unethical market exclusion or selective marketing are past industry attitudes to the gay, ethnic minority and
plus size markets. Contrary to the popular myth that ethics and profits do not mix,
the tapping of these markets has proved highly profitable. For example, 20% of US clothing sales are now plus-size. Another example is the selective marketing of health care, so that unprofitable sectors (i.e. the elderly) will not
attempt to take benefits to which they are entitled.
A further example of market exclusion is the pharmaceutical industry's exclusion of developing countries
from AIDS drugs.
Examples of marketing which unethically targets the elderly include: living trusts, time share fraud, mass marketing fraud and others.
The elderly hold a disproportionate amount of the world's wealth and are therefore the target of financial exploitation.
In the case of children, the main products are unhealthy food, fashionware and entertainment goods. Children are a lucrative market: "...children 12 and under spend more than $11 billion of their own money and influence family spending decisions worth another $165 billion", but are not capable of resisting or understanding marketing tactics at younger ages ("children don't understand persuasive intent until they are eight or nine years old"). At older ages competitive feelings towards other children are stronger than financial sense. The practice of extending children's marketing from television to the school grounds is also controversial (see marketing in schools). The following is a select list of online articles:
Other vulnerable audiences include emerging markets in developing countries, where the public may not be sufficiently aware of skilled marketing ploys transferred from developed countries, and where, conversely, marketers may not be aware how excessively powerful their tactics may be. See Nestle infant milk formula scandal. Another vulnerable group are mentally unstable consumers. The definition of vulnerability is also problematic: for example, when should endebtedness be seen as a vulnerability and when should "cheap" loan providers be seen as loan sharks, unethically exploiting the economically disadvantaged?
Targeting the Vulnerable
Marketing targeting strategies for products that may cause economic, physical and psychological harm has become an aspect of marketing which is criticized a considerable amount, especially in marketing literature with a particular focus on vulnerable consumers
Children, elderly consumers, and economically disadvantaged consumers are often categorized as being a part of the vulnerable group in marketing, in terms of ethics. “Ethics and social responsibility communities seem to agree that targeting a vulnerable group with marketing campaigns that take advantage of their vulnerability is unjust”. George G Brenkert was amongst the first to raise the issue about taking advantage of the vulnerability of a person, which therefore makes marketing practices immoral or unjust. Adolescents and children in the US are major market force in the food and beverage industry and as a result, food marketers are “attracted to the youth as consumers because of their spending power, purchasing influences and as future adult consumers”. It is ethically wrong to target children especially when it comes to unhealthy food and beverages, as children may not want anything else, which could lead to child obesity. Children have difficulty deciding between the purpose of advertising and other modes of communication; therefore it is morally unacceptable to target vulnerable children with such products. In Belgium, it is banned to show commercials during children's programs, similarly in Australia, such ads are not allowed during television programs for preschoolers. It is considered unethical to generate profits through marketing to vulnerable groups, such as children, the poor or the elderly.
The ethics of marketing practice, especially directed towards the vulnerable can be divided into two areas, product and process.
Process related ethical issues are often demonstrated through the use of deceptive or misleading advertising, where as product related issues is predominately focuses on marketing of certain “harmful” products such as tobacco, unhealthy food etc.
Excluding potential customers from the market:
There are certain high caution aspects of ethical marketing in terms of market audience. Using selective marketing to discourage demand from an unwanted market group or exclude them altogether. Examples of market exclusion or selective marketing are certain company's attitudes towards the gay, ethnic groups and overweight (plus size) market groups. Customers are treated like this because companies think that they are unprofitable so they try to deprive them or avoid them altogether. It is often debated amongst the business community that in order to be profitable, often businesses have to be unethical. However, this idea is seemingly outdated as most businesses nowadays follow an ethical business plan. In the United States, plus size apparel is thought to have generated $17.5 billion between May 2013 and April 2014, which is a 5% increase from the previous year, this is to be expected as 65% of American women are plus sized . Another example of exclusion from the market is some pharmaceutical industry's exclude developing countries from AIDS drugs
Pricing ethics:
Pricing along with product, place and promotion are the four functions of marketing. Retailers and producers must ensure that ethical pricing strategies are performed in order to earn profits without deceiving competitors or consumers .
However buyers and sellers have different goals and perceived outcomes in the exchange process. Usually buyers are seeking to gain products and services at the best possible price whereas sellers are generally concentrated on generating maximum profit.
Price fixing:
Price fixing is maintaining a price at a certain level, which has been agreed upon between competing sellers and is illegal in most countries . When price fixing occurs and a price is set by an industry, customers are forced to pay the exorbitant price due to a lack of options.
Price fixing is thought to be unethical and socially irresponsible as it breaks laws that are specifically put into place to promote regular competition between companies . With competition between companies, business will be likely to keep costs low at affordable prices, in order to compete.
Price wars:
Price wars, is when businesses constantly lower its prices in an attempt to demoralize its competition . Price wars can create emotionally devastating and psychologically devastating situations, which has an extraordinary impact on an individual, a company and industry profits . The intention of a price war is to drive competitors out of the market or to create an entry barrier into the market. Although it is beneficial for consumers, as they will get the product or service at a low price, however they are often deprived for quality. Also in the long term, it will force other competitors out of business and lower profits threaten business survival. If a company is involved in price war tactics, then it can be seen as unethical within the industry because they are starting a dangerous position and driving other companies to use similar tactics. A companies overall goal is to maximize its profits and revenue, however through engaging in a price war they are unable to do this and are more likely making less money as they would have had they taken part in normal business competition. If price wars can be avoided, it will prove to be vital success for any business.
Price Collusion:
Price Collusion is when several companies get together in order to hold the price of a good or service at a raised level in the hopes of achieving large profits or restricting the market. Price fixing is sometimes called price collusion in order to emphasize the agreement using secretive, to avoid fair competition.
Pricing practices that are considered unethical in most geographic markets include:
List of pricing practices which may be unethical in certain circumstances and should be used with caution:
Advertising is mass and paid communication, with a fundamental purpose to deliver information, acquire attitudes and induce action beneficial to the advertiser – generally the sale of the product or service. Advertising and promotion have a significant influence on people, society in large, while shaping their attitudes, behaviors and priorities . Some scholars believe that advertising supports ethical issues. It is also considered unethical to shame a substitute or rivals product or services (Srivastava & Nandan, 2010). Other ethical issues include, mistreatment of women, advertising to children, misleading advertising and other issues, which lead to ethical decline of society. Mistreatment of women is evident immensely in advertisements. Often women are matched up with household products such as cleaning supplies and are shown as doing domestic work, which represents stereotyping of women. Women are also often used as sex symbols, to convey particular messages about products. Also men are often apparent in DIY (do it yourself) ads, which deliver the idea of them being a “handy man. An ad, which demonstrates ethical features, is truthful, it doesn’t make false claims, and it provides sufficient information for the buyer to make informed choices. Exhibiting a level of respect and dignity for its buyers is important while demonstrating decency. An example of an advert produced by Coca Cola, through using false advertising, it showed unethical issues behind its production. Coca Cola used of Karl Langerfeld (Chanel designer) who had claimed to lose 80 pounds on a diet that was mainly attributed to diet coke, “I drink diet coke from the minute I get up to the minute I go to bed and I drink nothing else”. This advert was specially targeted towards women as it aimed to be conveyed as a fashion trend, through the use of a famous fashion designer. Coke used thin models and world-renowned fashion designers both of whom are cautious of body image, which shows the wrong message for women, especially young women. The advert shows that going overboard with dieting is conventional and that diet coke is the way of going about achieving a thin and attractive body. It is ethically wrong to be using Karl Lagerfeld's extreme dieting ways in order to promote diet coke. It is not only advocating an extreme statement, but it is also sending the wrong message about the drink by directly associating it to a “healthy ideal body”. Often the line between ethical and unethical advertising is blurred, what may seem unethical to some consumers or businesses, may not to for others. Therefore, in cases like this, businesses should proceed with caution, because unethical advertising and promotion can fail, causing consumers to shy away from the company consequently defeating the purpose of any campaign.
Ethical pitfalls in advertising and promotional content include:
Another breach of marketing ethics has to do with the use of deceptive advertising. This form of advertising is not specific to one target market, and can sometimes go unnoticed by the public. There are a number of different ways in which deceptive marketing can be presented to consumers; one of these methods is accomplished through the use of humor. In a study conducted by Hassib Shabbir and Des Thwaites, 238 advertisements were assessed and 73.5% of them were found to have used deceptive marketing practices. Of those advertisements that were conducted deceptively, 74.5% of them used humor as a masking device in order to mislead potential customers. Part of what drives this study is the idea that humor provides an escape or relief from some kind of human constraint, and that some advertisers intend to take advantage of this by deceptively advertising a product that can potentially alleviate that constraint through humor. Through the study it was also found that all types of humor are used to deceive consumers, and that there are certain types of humor that are used when making certain deceptive claims.
It is important to understand that humor is not the only method that is used to deter consumer's minds from what a product actually offers. Before making important purchases, one should always conduct their own research in order to gain a better understanding of what it is they are investing in.
Business ethics has been an increasing concern among larger companies, at least since the 1990s. Major corporations increasingly fear the damage to their image associated with press revelations of unethical practices. Marketers have been among the fastest to perceive the market's preference for ethical companies, often moving faster to take advantage of this shift in consumer taste. This results in the expropriation of ethics itself as a selling point or a component of a corporate image.
""Liberation marketing takes the old mass culture critique — consumerism as conformity — fully into account, acknowledges it, addresses it, and solves it. Liberation marketing imagines consumers breaking free from the old enforcers of order, tearing loose from the shackles with which capitalism has bound us, escaping the routine of bureaucracy and hierarchy, getting in touch with our true selves, and finally, finding authenticity, that holiest of consumer grails."" (Thomas Frank)
Neuromarketing and its precursor, neuroeconomics, uses clinical information about brain functions and mechanisms to
help explain what is happening inside of the “black box” so prevalent in many explanations of consumer behavior. In order to do so, specialists use neuroimaging techniques and record brain responses to different stimuli.
The Neuromarketing Science & Business Association has launched on November 2012 a Neuromarketing Code of Ethics. This is a first step towards adopting international standards applied to using neuroscientific methods to study the effectiveness of advertising campaigns, packaging and product design, as well as communication campaigns from non-profit organizations and government institutions. However, some ethicists condemn the code as protecting only a very narrow class, and in the extreme position that neuromarketing itself should only be used for the advancement of what is reasonably believed to be public good, employing Thomas Aquinas' doctrine of double effect (DDE). Although one could make the argument that engineering profit serves the public good, it would not be saved under the DDE because the intention behind it is not to generate a greater good than to which the collective harm of manipulation is greater. However, neuromarketing programs to encourage healthy lifestyle choices may be saved under the DDE, provided it is based on good scientific information in the first place, such as regular exercise.
The main theoretical issue here is the debate between free markets and regulated markets.
In a truly free market, any participant can make or change the rules. However, when new rules
are invented which shift power too suddenly or too far, other participants may respond with
accusations of unethical behaviour, rather than modifying their own behaviour to suit (which they
might not be able to anyway). Most markets are not fully free: the real debate is as to the
appropriate extent of regulation.
Case: California electricity crisis, which demonstrates how constant innovation of
new marketing strategies by companies such as Enron outwitted the regulatory bodies
and caused substantial harm to consumers and competitors.
A list of known unethical or controversial marketing strategies:
Controversial marketing strategies associated with the internet:
Marketing ethics overlaps with environmental ethics in respect of waste problems associated with the packaging of products.
Some, such as members of the advocacy group No Free Lunch, have argued that marketing by pharmaceutical companies is negatively impacting physicians' prescribing practices, influencing them to prescribe the marketed drugs rather than others which may be cheaper or better for the patient.
Ethical thinking is responding to situations that deal with principles concerning human behavior in respect to the appropriateness and inappropriateness of certain communication and to the decency and indecency of the intention and results of such actions. In other words, ethics are distinctions between right and wrong. Businesses are confronted with ethical decision making every day, and whether employees decide to use ethics as a guiding force when conducting business is something that business leaders, such as managers, need to instill. Marketers are ethically responsible for what is marketed and the image that a product portrays. With that said, marketers need to understand what good ethics are and how to incorporate good ethics in various marketing campaigns to better reach a targeted audience and to gain trust from customers.
Marketing ethics, regardless of the product offered or the market targeted, sets the guidelines for which good marketing is practiced. When companies create high ethical standards upon which to approach marketing they are participating in ethical marketing. To market ethically and effectively one should be reminded that all marketing decisions and efforts are necessary to meet and suit the needs of customers, suppliers, and business partners. Ethical behavior should be enforced throughout company culture and through company practices.
However, marketers have been known to market questionable products to the public. These tend to be controversial products in that they appeal to some while offending others. An example of such a product that is sold regularly today is a cheap handgun. America is a country in which its citizens have the right to bear arms, yet these weapons are criticized by the public because they are sold at a low price making it rather easy to purchase by members of less affluent communities. Critics have referred to these weapons as " Saturday Night Specials" referring to the negative connotation that they are purchased to commit crimes. In defense of the critics opinions, if in fact these guns are purchased with the intent to commit such crimes, than one must question the ethics behind marketing these products to criminals. Is the marketer facilitating the crime by appealing to this target market with a weapon that is easily accessible? While the argument in this case may seem unethical due to the questionable nature of these cheap handguns, this argument does not apply to the sale of all guns. That is because weapons that are legally sold to customers at an affordable rate for safety purposes, self-defense, hunting, and law enforcement are perfectly ethical due to the fact that they are safe product that is marketed to a responsible consumer. This comparison supports the fact that ethical marketing can be perceived differently consumers depending on the nature of the nature of the product that is being sold.
Marketing ethics and marketing law are related subjects. Relevant areas of law include consumer law which protects consumers and antitrust law which protects competitors - in both cases, against unethical marketing practices. Regulation extends beyond the law to lobbies, watchdog bodies and self-regulatory industry bodies.
| 7483320 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=7483320 |
Religion&Philosophy&Ethics | Ethics committee (European Union)
The ethics committee, according to Directive 2001/20/EC, is an independent body in a member state of the European Union, consisting of healthcare professionals and non-medical members, whose responsibility is to protect the rights, safety and well being of human subjects involved in a clinical trial and to provide public assurance of that protection, by, among other things, expressing an opinion on the clinical trial protocol, the suitability of the investigators involved in the trial and the adequacy of facilities, and on the methods and documents to be used to inform trial subjects and obtain their informed consent.
With the Clinical Trials Directive, the European Union (EU) envisioned a harmonisation of research ethics committees (RECs) across Europe, including the time taken to assess a trial proposal and the kinds of issues a committee should take into account.
Local terms for a European ethics committee include:
| 7483871 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=7483871 |
Religion&Philosophy&Ethics | Conventionalism
Conventionalism is the philosophical attitude that fundamental principles of a certain kind are grounded on (explicit or implicit) agreements in society, rather than on external reality. Unspoken rules play a key role in the philosophy's structure. Although this attitude is commonly held with respect to the rules of grammar, its application to the propositions of ethics, law, science, mathematics, and logic is more controversial.
The debate on linguistic conventionalism goes back to Plato's "Cratylus" and the philosophy of Kumārila Bhaṭṭa.
It has been the standard position of modern linguistics since Ferdinand de Saussure's "l'arbitraire du signe", but there have always been dissenting positions of phonosemantics, recently defended by Margaret Magnus and Vilayanur S. Ramachandran.
The French mathematician Henri Poincaré was among the first to articulate a conventionalist view. Poincaré's use of non-Euclidean geometries in his work on differential equations convinced him that Euclidean geometry should not be regarded as an "a priori" truth. He held that axioms in geometry should be chosen for the results they produce, not for their apparent coherence with – possibly flawed – human intuitions about the physical world.
Conventionalism was adopted by logical positivists, chiefly A. J. Ayer and Carl Hempel, and extended to both mathematics and logic. To deny rationalism, Ayer sees two options for empiricism regarding the necessity of the truth of formal logic (and mathematics): 1) deny that they actually are necessary, and then account for why they only appear so, or 2) claim that the truths of logic and mathematics lack factual content – they are not "truths about the world" – and then explain how they are nevertheless true and informative. John Stuart Mill adopted the former, which Ayer criticized, opting himself for the latter. Ayer's argument relies primarily on the analytic/synthetic distinction.
The French philosopher Pierre Duhem espoused a broader conventionalist view encompassing all of science. Duhem was skeptical that human perceptions are sufficient to understand the "true," metaphysical nature of reality and argued that scientific laws should be valued mainly for their predictive power and correspondence with observations.
Karl Popper broadened the meaning of conventionalism still more. In "The Logic of Scientific Discovery", he defined a "conventionalist stratagem" as any technique that is used by a theorist to evade the consequences of a falsifying observation or experiment. Popper identified four such stratagems:
Popper argued that it was crucial to avoid conventionalist stratagems if falsifiability of a theory was to be preserved. It has been argued that the standard model of cosmology is built upon a set of conventionalist stratagems.
Conventionalism, as applied to legal philosophy is one of the three rival conceptions of law constructed by American legal philosopher Ronald Dworkin in his work "Law's Empire". The other two conceptions of law are legal pragmatism and law as integrity.
According to conventionalism as defined by Dworkin, a community's legal institutions should contain clear social conventions relied upon which rules are promulgated. Such rules will serve as the sole source of information for all the community members because they demarcate clearly all the circumstances in which state coercion will and will not be exercised.
Dworkin nonetheless has argued that this justification fails to fit with facts as there are many occasions wherein clear applicable legal rules are absent. It follows that, as he maintained, conventionalism can provide no valid ground for state coercion. Dworkin himself favored law as integrity as the best justification of state coercion.
One famous criticism of Dworkin's idea comes from Stanley Fish who argues that Dworkin, like the Critical Legal Studies movement, Marxists and adherents of feminist jurisprudence, was guilty of a false 'Theory Hope'. Fish claims that such mistake stems from their mistaken belief that there exists a general or higher 'theory' that explains or constrains all fields of activity like state coercion.
Another criticism is based on Dworkin's assertion that positivists' claims amount to conventionalism. H. L. A. Hart, as a soft positivist, denies such claim as he had pointed out that citizens cannot always discover the law as plain matter of fact. It is however unclear as to whether Joseph Raz, an avowed hard positivist, can be classified as conventionalist as Raz has claimed that law is composed "exclusively" of social facts which could be complex, and thus difficult to be discovered.
In particular, Dworkin has characterized law as having the main function of restraining state's coercion. Nigel Simmonds has rejected Dworkin's disapproval of conventionalism, claiming that his characterization of law is too narrow.
| 7490670 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=7490670 |
Religion&Philosophy&Ethics | Argument from marginal cases
The argument from marginal cases (also known as the argument from species overlap) is a philosophical argument within animal rights theory regarding the moral status of non-human animals. Its proponents hold that if human infants, the senile, the comatose, and the cognitively disabled have direct moral status, non-human animals must have a similar status, since there is no known morally relevant characteristic that those marginal-case humans have that animals lack. "Moral status" may refer to a right not to be killed or made to suffer, or to a general moral requirement to be treated in a certain way.
A version of this argument has been put forward by Peter Singer.
The argument from marginal cases takes the form of a proof by contradiction. It attempts to show that you cannot coherently believe both that all humans have moral status, "and" that all non-humans lack moral status.
Consider a cow. We ask why it is acceptable to kill this cow for food – we might claim, for example, that the cow has no concept of self and therefore it cannot be wrong to kill it. However, many young children may also lack this same concept of "self". So if we accept the self-concept criterion, then we must also accept that killing children is acceptable in addition to killing cows, which is considered a "reductio ad absurdum". So the concept of self cannot be our criterion.
The proponent will usually continue by saying that for any criterion or set of criteria (either capacities, e.g. language, consciousness, the ability to have moral responsibilities towards others; or relations, e.g. sympathy or power relations) there exists some "marginal" human who is mentally handicapped in some way that would also meet the criteria for having no moral status. Peter Singer phrases it this way:
Daniel Dombrowski writes that the argument can be traced to Porphyry in the third century AD. James Rachels has argued that the theory of evolution implies that there is only a gradient between humans and other animals, and therefore marginal-case humans should be considered similar to non-human animals.
A counter-argument is the argument from species normality (a term coined by David Graham), proposed by Tibor Machan. In considering the rights of children or the disabled, Machan uses the analogy of a broken chair:
... classifications and ascriptions of capacities rely on the good sense of making certain generalizations. One way to show this is to recall that broken chairs, while they aren't any good to sit on, are still chairs, not monkeys or palm trees. Classifications are not something rigid but something reasonable. While there are some people who either for a little or longer while – say when they're asleep or in a coma – lack moral agency, in general people possess that capacity, whereas non-people don't. So it makes sense to understand them having rights so their capacity is respected and may be protected. This just doesn't work for other animals.
David Graham interprets this to mean that if most of a species' members are moral agents then any member has the same rights and protections as the species. In brief, "The moral status of an individual depends on what is normal for that individual's species."
James Rachels has responded to Machan that if one adopts the idea that individuals of a species must be treated according to what is normal for that species, then it would imply a chimp that somehow acquired the ability to read and write should not enter a university since it is not "normal" behavior for a chimpanzee.
A related counterargument from Roderick Long is that a being can obtain moral agency by developing a rational capacity, and from there on has full moral agency even if this capacity is lost or diminished:
That is why a cow has no rights, though a human being reduced to the mental level of a cow does have them. There's something wrong with the human; there's nothing wrong with the cow. One might say that in the case of the cow-minded human, there's a blank spot where her moral agency is supposed to be, and someone else can step into that blank spot and act as an agent on her behalf. But in the cow there's no blank spot.
Dr. Arthur L. Caplan, in an article on the ethics of organ donation by infants with anencephaly - born essentially without a brain - before physical death, raises some points about the Argument from Marginal Cases. He writes that some people cannot emotionally handle treating the anencephalic child as not worthy of moral status. Caplan also mentions concerns about possible misdiagnosis risk - the risk that an infant would be incorrectly diagnosed with anencephaly, and also the slippery-slope concern - the concern that other individuals are then at risk for organ donation, such as those in vegetative states or with severe disabilities.
Some philosophers, such as Christopher Grau, argue that there is nothing wrong with granting rights to disabled humans while denying them to animals because it is perfectly valid to use humanity as a moral status. Grau argues that if moral status is to depend on a particular trait, then it must be shown why a particular trait is somehow worthy of basing moral status upon it. It cannot be because humans value it, since humans also value human beings, so it would need to be shown why a certain trait is somehow "better" than any other. In the absence of an impartial observer to tell us what those traits should be (Grau notes that there is also no guarantee that said impartial observer would say humans shouldn't value other humans), there is no reason why it is unclear why simply being human should not be sufficient for moral status. Grau observes that alternative traits proposed for moral status, such as rationality or consciousness, are also often traits that most humans possess and that they are probably valued specifically because most humans possess them and value them, making them just as questionable a criterion for moral status as species membership, as they depend upon human attachment to them as a source of moral status.
| 7500979 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=7500979 |
Religion&Philosophy&Ethics | Code of Conduct for the International Red Cross and Red Crescent Movement and NGOs in Disaster Relief
The Code of Conduct for International Red Cross and Red Crescent Movement and NGOs in Disaster Relief was drawn up in 1992 by the Steering Committee for Humanitarian Response (SCHR) to set ethical standards for organizations involved in humanitarian work. In 1994, the SCHR adopted the code and made the signing of it a condition for membership in the alliance.
Although the initiative began with a call by the French Red Cross to the IFRC to draw up a code of conduct relating to humanitarian aid in response to natural disasters, many of the sponsoring agencies had been involved in complex emergencies such as Biafra and Rwanda and were also looking for guidance for operating in the midst of violent conflicts. more than 600 organizations have signed the code.
In 1995, at the 26th International Conference of the Red Cross and Red Crescent, which included delegates from governments, the Red Cross and Red Crescent National Societies, the IFRC, and the ICRC, a resolution was passed which “took note of” and “welcomed” the code giving it wide international recognition.
Principle Commitments of the Code
The 10 articles of the code fall into two types: Articles 1 through 4 are core humanitarian principles required for humanitarian response. The remaining articles are more aspirational and are important to improving the quality of both humanitarian and developmental work.
The humanitarian imperative, based on the principle of humanity, together with other core principles, impartiality, and independence, stress that humanitarian response must be based on need alone. They are derived, from the Fundamental Principles of the International Red Cross and Red Crescent Movement Red Cross movement. However the principle of neutrality, which is directly related to the special international role of the Red Cross is not included in the code of conduct. Organizations such as military forces and for-profit companies may deliver assistance to communities affected by disaster, but they are not considered by the humanitarian sector as humanitarian agencies as they do not meet all of the core principles.
Articles, 5 through 10, are derived particularly from experience in development work. Most of the original sponsors have had decades of experience working in the development sector and the articles reflect their experience and commitment. Some development agencies are deeply committed to such an approach while being unable to subscribe to the core principles.
The code of conduct is a voluntary code which is self-enforced by each of the signatory organizations.
The code includes two annexes, Annex I, Recommendations to governments of disaster affected countries, and Annex II, Recommendations to donor governments.
The code of conduct is widely used to guide conduct within humanitarian agencies. When the code was drawn up a new term was coined: Non governmental humanitarian agencies (NGHAs), to include the NGOs and the components of the International Red Cross and Red Crescent Movement which are not NGOs.
The Disaster Emergency Committee (DEC) which is based in the UK has used the code for evaluating humanitarian action, beginning with an evaluation of the Gujarat earthquake of 2001 and covering many subsequent evaluations. The evaluators have used the code as a framework, presenting their findings of agencies' performances in relation to each principle in the Code.
Evaluators differ about the usefulness of the code. In the DEC evaluation of the Gujarat earthquake of 2001, the evaluators concluded
However, because of the lack of indicators of compliance with code they were forced to rate overall performance based on the aggregation of their impressions and judgement rather than on an objective measurement. The evaluators of the DEC Tsunami Crisis Response were unable to do this because of different perceptions of different team members. However, the opening paragraph of the executive summary of the Tsunami evaluation states
This is at odds with the conclusions of Hillhorst's review of the code which states:
Hillhorst's paper draws on a survey of code signatories and a conference to review the code, as well as detailed analysis of the code itself.
| 7502686 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=7502686 |
Religion&Philosophy&Ethics | Peace war game
Peace war game is an iterated game originally played in academic groups and by computer simulation for years to study possible strategies of cooperation and aggression. As peace makers became richer over time it became clear that making war had greater costs than initially anticipated. The only strategy that acquired wealth more rapidly was a "Genghis Khan", a constant aggressor making war continually to gain resources. This led to the development of the "provokable nice guy" strategy, a peace-maker until attacked. Multiple players continue to gain wealth cooperating with each other while bleeding the constant aggressor.
The peace war game is a variation of the iterated prisoner's dilemma in which the decisions (Cooperate, Defect) are replaced by (Peace, War). Strategies remain the same with reciprocal altruism, "Tit for Tat", or "provokable nice guy" as the best deterministic one. This strategy is simply to make peace on the first iteration of the game; after that, the player does what his opponent did on the previous move. A slightly better strategy is "Tit for Tat with forgiveness". When the opponent makes war, on the next move, the player sometimes makes peace anyway, with a small probability. This allows an escape from wasting cycles of retribution, a motivation similar to the Rule of Ko in the game of Go. "Tit for Tat with forgiveness" is best when miscommunication is introduced, when one's move is incorrectly reported to the opponent. A typical payoff matrix for two players (A, B) of one iteration of this game is:
Here a player's resources have a value of 2, half of which must be spent to wage war. In this case, there exists a Nash equilibrium, a mutually best response for a single iteration, here (War, War), by definition heedless of consequences in later iterations. "Provokable nice guy's" optimality depends on iterations. How many are necessary is likely tied to the payoff matrix and probabilities of choosing. A subgame perfect version of this strategy is "Contrite Tit-for-Tat" which is to make peace unless one is in "good standing" and one's opponent is not. Good ("standing" assumed) means to make peace with good opponents, make peace when bad, or make war when good and opponent is not.
| 7502798 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=7502798 |
Religion&Philosophy&Ethics | The Price of Privilege
The Price of Privilege is a non-fiction book by Madeline Levine. The book’s primary thesis is that teenagers from affluent families have more intense psychological problems than expected.
Levine maintains that children from rich families with psychological dysfunctions have been ignored because many people assume the wealthy have the resources to take care of themselves. Her findings are based on her experience as a psychologist working with children in Marin County and related clinical studies. She defines affluence as a yearly household income in the US$120,000 to $160,000 range.
Over the course of her practice, the author observed many teenage patients, from affluent households, with excellent grades in school, extracurricular involvement and an appearance of thriving in their environment. According to Levine, many of these teens suffered debilitating neuroses, such as anxiety, depression, drug addiction, anorexia, and self-harm. She noted two key indicators of this dysfunction: achievement pressure and emotional isolation from parents. In affluent communities, according to Levine, external accomplishments such as prestige, power, and money for adults, or grades, clothes, and electronics for kids, become more important than happiness or human agency.
Levine states that there is an inverse relationship between parental income and closeness between children and parents. She suggests that the ritual of eating dinner as a family indicates a healthy closeness; children in such a family are much less likely to suffer from psychological problems.
Dr. Levine refers to the research of Dr. Baumrind in distinguishing three styles of parenting: authoritarian, permissive, and authoritative. She makes a number of recommendations on parenting style, based on this model. She reports that a mother's own happiness is the key to raising psychologically healthy kids, and found that there is an unexpectedly high rate of depression, anxiety, substance abuse, loneliness, and overall unhappiness among mothers of affluent households. This is damaging to the children as well as the mother.
The parents' emphasis on perfection is criticised; those parents who attempt to convey an image of flawless and effortless perfection at work and at home or in society, may in fact damage the self-confidence and development of the children. Real achievements are the results of hard work, often associated with occasional failures that one has to overcome.
The book is divided into four parts:
Publisher's Weekly writes:
[Levine] is particularly useful when explaining common parenting dilemmas, like the difference between being intrusive and being involved, between laying down rules and encouraging autonomy. Alas, while Levine pitches to the educated moms, since they do much of the actual child-rearing, she may be preaching to the choir. Those who need her most may be too busy shopping to pick up such a dire-looking volume. Still, school guidance counselors should be happy to have this clear, sensitive volume on their bookshelves.
The book has also been noted at support site StrugglingTeens.com.
The book is not based on statistically significant data about proportions of patients from each type of background, and reporting each type of problem. Rather, Dr Levine may be describing a trend that she believes she has seen amongst those people who choose (and can afford) to come to her for help.
| 7521152 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=7521152 |
Religion&Philosophy&Ethics | Art and morality
Art and morality have been discussed, compared and linked for as long as they have been identified as concepts.
In the PL7, Zio Nirchio "Republic", Plato saw the function of the actor as bogus, presenting a dangerous illusion of reality, and masking the truth of existence by the pretence of acting. Aristotle, in "The Poetics", saw the role of the actor somewhat differently, suggesting that by witnessing "pity and fear" (in his view the essence of tragedy) on stage, an audience could experience a catharsis of the emotions associated with real tragic events, without having to experience them as first-hand participants.
Since then, the 'stand-off' between those who have seen art as having a direct impact on morality, and those who have asserted its independence, has persisted. Tolstoy was ambivalent about the role of the artist (despite being one himself). In "What is Art?" he castigated now-canonical artists such as Shakespeare, Goethe and Wagner for failing to express the 'simple truths' about morality (as he saw them), opting instead to show off their poetic cleverness. He saw their work as morally reprehensible, effectively a wasting of their talents through their failure to communicate moral truth to the masses.
Since the late nineteenth century and beyond, with the development of 'the Arts' as a cultural concept, the debate about art and morality has intensified, with the ever more challenging activities of artists becoming targets for those who see art as an influence for bad or good, and it has been a mainstay of many art critics' negative reviews. John Ruskin accused Whistler of "flinging a pot of paint in the face of the audience", and several of the ballets of Diaghilev scandalised audiences with their explicit (at the time) sexual themes.
Whistler and Ruskin eventually went face-to-face in the courtroom. But in 1961, one of the most famous legal clashes between art and morality occurred when Penguin Books were taken to court over their publication of D. H. Lawrence's novel "Lady Chatterley's Lover". Similarly, in 1977 the Christian morality campaigner Mary Whitehouse successfully sued a magazine, "Gay News", under blasphemous libel laws.
In popular culture, pornography (if seen in aesthetic terms) is used as an example of the objectification of women, and violent films have been cited as the influence for so-called "copycat" acts in reality. An example of this was the Hungerford Massacre, where a gunman was alleged by the tabloid press to have been influenced by the "Rambo" series of films starring Sylvester Stallone.
In September 2001, shortly after the World Trade Center Attack, the German composer Karlheinz Stockhausen said of the atrocity that it was "Lucifer's greatest work of art." (However, Stockhausen's comments were taken out of context and misunderstood.) The responses were immediate and extreme, fuelled once again by the tabloid press. Some have found, here and elsewhere, art in the service of morality to be politically dangerous.
In purely philosophical terms, the precise nature of art's links with morality have been long been questioned. Some have found no link between the aesthetic and the moral (i.e. being morally reprehensible does not deny an artwork its art status; it does not cease having aesthetic value no matter how depraved some might see it being), whereas others, who have not gone down the explicitly Platonist route, have argued that the relationship is one akin to supervenience. Here, it is argued that an essential component of the production of art, the human factor, can only be made sensible if taken along with the perceived moral codes which govern humanity.
| 7531564 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=7531564 |
Religion&Philosophy&Ethics | Mylan Engel
Mylan Engel Jr. (born 1960) is a full professor of philosophy at Northern Illinois University in DeKalb.
Born in Alabama and educated at Vanderbilt University and the University of Arizona, he was hired by Northern Illinois University in 1988. Engel has also served as Guest Professor at the University of Innsbruck, Austria (1999) and University of Maribor, Slovenia (1999–2002).
Engel's specialties are epistemology, philosophy of religion, Scottish philosopher Thomas Reid, animal ethics, and environmental ethics.
Engel is a "moral vegetarian" (vegan)—the belief that we are morally obligated to refrain from eating meat—and has argued that virtually all humans hold beliefs that, if consistently applied, would make them moral vegetarians as well. Engel has contributed to the study of animal rights and edited the volume "The Moral Rights of Animals" with Gary Lynn Comstock in 2016.
In his spare time, Engel practices karate. He also offered a beginners course for students at Northern Illinois University.
Professor Engel has been Executive Secretary of The Society for the Study of Ethics and Animals since September, 2002.
| 7543506 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=7543506 |
Religion&Philosophy&Ethics | Catholic probabilism
In Catholic moral theology, probabilism provides a way of answering the question about what to do when one does not know what to do. Probabilism proposes that one can follow an authoritative opinion regarding whether an act may be performed morally, even though the opposite opinion is more probable. (An opinion is probable when, by reason of intrinsic or extrinsic arguments, it is able to gain the assent of many prudent men.) It was first formulated in 1577 by Bartholomew Medina, OP, who taught at Salamanca.
Probabilism is one way of approaching difficult matters of conscience. In such cases, according to probabilism, one may safely follow a doctrine approved by a recognized Doctor of the Church, even if the opposite opinion is more probable as judged by other considerations, such as scientific considerations or many other recognized authoritative opinions.
A more radical view, "minus probabilissimus", holds that an action is permissible if a single opinion allowing that action is available, even if the overwhelming weight of opinion proscribes it. This view was advanced by the Spanish theologian Bartolomé de Medina (1527–1581) and defended by many Jesuits such as Luis Molina (1528–1581). It was heavily criticised by Blaise Pascal in his "Provincial Letters" as leading to moral laxity.
Opposed to probabilism are:
After its formulation by the Dominican Medina in Salamanca late in the 16th century, probabilism was widely held by respected Catholic theologians, including many Jesuits and Dominicans, for the next century. Jesuits such as Gabriel Vásquez further developed probabilism, distinguishing intrinsic, argument-based probabilism and extrinsic, authority-based probabilism. Abuses of probabilism led to moral laxism such as that of Juan Caramuel y Lobkowitz.
Fathers, doctors and theologians of the Church at times solved cases on principles which apparently were probabilist in tendency. Augustine of Hippo declared that marriage with infidels was not to be regarded as unlawful since it was not clearly condemned in the New Testament: "Quoniam revera in Novo Testamento nihil inde praeceptum est, et ideo aut licere creditum est, aut velut dubium derelictum". Gregory of Nazianzus laid down, against a Novatian writer, that a second marriage was not unlawful, since the prohibition was doubtful. Thomas Aquinas maintained that a precept does not bind except through the medium of knowledge; and probabilists are accustomed to point out that knowledge implies certainty.
However, many theologians were Probabiliorist in their principles before the sixteenth century, including Sylvester Prierias, Conradus, and Thomas Cajetan. Consequently, Probabiliorism had already gained a strong hold on theologians when Medina arrived on the scene.
Bartholomew Medina, a Dominican, was the first to expound the moral system which is known as probabilism. In his "Expositio in 1am 2ae S. Thomae" he wrote:
His system soon became the common teaching of the theologians, so that in the introduction to his "Regula Morum" Father Terill maintained that until 1638 Catholic theologians of all schools were probabilists. There were exceptions such as Rebellus, Comitolus and Philalethis, but the great body of the theologians around 1600 were on the side of Medina.
With the rise of Jansenism a new phase in the history of the probabilist controversies began. In 1653 Innocent X condemned the five propositions taken from Jansen's book "Augustinus", and in 1655 the Louvain theologians condemned probabilism. Tutiorism was adopted by the Jansenists, and the Irish Jansenist theologian John Sinnichius (1603–1666), was the foremost defender of the Rigorist doctrines. He held that it is not lawful to follow even a most probable opinion in favour of liberty. (Here, "liberty" refers to freedom, in the sense of not being bound by the strictures of (a specific) law.) Jansenist Rigorism spread into France, and Pascal attacked probabilism in his "Lettres Provinciales", which were in turn condemned by Alexander VII in 1657.
After the condemnation of Jansenism, several 18th century theologians unfolded a moderate form of Tutiorism.
Others favoured Laxism, which maintained that a slightly probable opinion in favour of liberty could safely be followed.
Probabiliorism, which held that it is not lawful to act on the less safe opinion unless it is more probable than the safe opinion and which was in vogue before the time of Medina, was renewed in the middle of the seventeenth century as an antidote against Laxism. Its revival was principally due to the efforts of popes Alexander VII and Innocent XI. In 1656, a general chapter of the Dominicans urged all members of the order to adopt Probabiliorism. Though previously Dominican theologians like Medina, Ledesma, Domingo Banez, Alvarez and Ildephonsus were probabilists, subsequently the Dominicans in the main were Probabiliorists. In 1700, the Gallican clergy, under Bossuet, accepted Probabiliorism. The Franciscans as a rule were Probabiliorists, and in 1762 a general chapter of the order at Mantua ordered its members to follow Probabiliorism. In 1598, a general chapter of the Theatines adopted Probabiliorism. The Augustinians, Carmelites, Trinitarians and many Benedictines were also Probabiliorists.
Probabiliorism was also held by many Jesuits. Thyrsus Gonzalez, a Jesuit professor at the University of Salamanca, favoured Probabiliorism in his "Fundamentum Theologiae Moralis" (1670–72). When the book was sent to the Jesuit General Oliva in 1673, permission for publication was refused. Pope Innocent XI favoured Gonzalez and, in 1680, sent a decree through the Holy Office to Oliva ordering that liberty be given to the members of the order to write in favour of Probabiliorism and against probabilism. Gonzalez was elected general of the order in 1687, but his book was not published until 1694.
During the controversies between the probabilists and the probabiliorists, the system known as Æquiprobabilism was not clearly brought into prominence. Æquiprobabilism holds that it is not lawful to follow the less safe opinion when the safe opinion is certainly more probable; that it is not lawful to act on the less safe opinion even when it is equally probable with the safe opinion, if the uncertainty regards the cessation of a law; but that if the existence of the law is in question, it is lawful to follow the less safe opinion if it has equal or nearly equal probability with the safe opinion. Many of the moderate probabilists of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries foreshadowed in their writings the theory to which, in his later-days, St. Alphonsus adhered.
This view gained vigour and persistence from the teaching of Alphonsus Liguori, who began his theological career as a Probabiliorist, subsequently defended probabilism, especially in a treatise entitled "Dissertatio scholastico-moralis pro usu moderato opinionis probabilis in concursu probabilioris" (1749, 1755), and finally embraced Æquiprobabilism about 1762. In a new dissertation he laid down the two propositions that it is lawful to act on the less safe opinion, when it is equally probable with the safe opinion, and that it is not lawful to follow the less safe opinion when the safe opinion is notably and certainly more probable. In the sixth edition (1767) of his "Moral Theology" he again expressed these views and indeed towards the end of his life frequently declared that he was not a probabilist.
Probabilists sometimes hold that St. Alphonsus never changed his opinion once he had discarded Probabiliorism for probabilism, though he changed his manner of expressing his view so as to exclude Laxist teaching and to give an indication of what must be regarded as a solidly probable opinion. As a matter of fact, a comparison between the "Moral Theologies" of moderate probabilists and of Æquiprobabilists shows little practical difference between the two systems, so far at least as the uncertainty regards the existence as distinguished from the cessation of a law.
Since the time of Alphonsus Liguori, the prevailing moral systems have been probabilism and Æquiprobabilism. Probabiliorism has to a great extent disappeared, and even many Dominican theologians have espoused the cause of Æquiprobabilism. Francis Ter Haar and L. Wouters engaged in controversy with August Lehmkuhl who, especially in his "Probabilismus Vindicatus" (1906) and in the eleventh edition of his "Theologia Moralis" (1910), strongly supported the probabilist thesis which had been accepted during the nineteenth century by most theologians.
The system of compensationism has arisen, which holds that a compensating reason proportionate to the gravity of the law and to the degree of probability in favour of the existence of the law, is required in order that a person might lawfully act on the less safe opinion. This theory was proposed by Mannier, Laloux and Potton; but it gained little support and has not yet become a rival of the old theories of probabilism, Æquiprobabilism or even Probabiliorism.
Rigorism, or as it is frequently called, tutiorism, held that the less safe opinion should be most probable, if not absolutely certain, before it could be lawfully put into practice; while laxism maintained that if the less safe opinion were slightly probable it could be followed with a safe conscience. These two views never received serious support from Catholic theologians, and were formally condemned by the Holy See. At one time or another in the history of the Church three other opinions gained many adherents: Probabiliorism, Æquiprobabilism, and traditional Catholic probabilism.
According to Catholic probabilism, whenever a prohibiting law is certain, the subjects of the law are bound to abstain from performing the action which the law forbids, unless they are excused by one of the ordinary exempting causes. On the other hand, when it is certain that no law forbids an action, there is no obligation to abstain from performing it, under this doctrine. Between these two extremes there can be varying degrees of uncertainty about the existence or cessation of a prohibiting law. There is doubt in the strict sense when the intellect neither assents nor dissents, because either there are no positive arguments for and against the law, or the arguments for and against the law are equal in strength. The opinion which favours the law, and which is technically called the safe opinion, can be more probable (in the specialized sense being discussed) than the opinion which favours liberty and which still retains solid (objective) probability.
In estimating the degree which is required and which suffices for solid probability, moralists lay down the general principle that an opinion is solidly probable which by reason of intrinsic or extrinsic arguments is able to gain the assent of many prudent men. Adherents to Catholic probabilism hold that extrinsic authority can have sufficient weight to make an opinion solidly probable; but there is divergence of view in estimating what number of experts is able to give an opinion this solid probability. The prevailing theory holds that if five or six theologians, notable for prudence and learning, independently adhere to an opinion their view is highly probable, if it has not been set aside by authoritative decisions or by intrinsic arguments which they have failed to solve. Even one theologian that is regarded as highly authoritative, such as St. Alphonsus Liguori, is able to make an opinion probable in this sense. Under this view, no justification in terms of reason is sufficient to give an opinion solid probability, nor does the support of theologians who merely repeat the opinions of others.
If one opinion is not only less safe (in that it goes against the law) but also speculatively uncertain, then it is prohibited by Catholic Probabilism, until all reasonable effort has been made to remove the uncertainty, by considering the arguments on both sides and by consulting available authorities. One question at issue between different moral systems concerns the way in which the speculative uncertainty is changed into practical certainty; each system has what is called a reflex principle of its own, by which practical certainty can be obtained.
Some theologians, who put forward the system known as Probabiliorism, hold that the less safe opinion can be lawfully followed only when it is more probable than the safe opinion.
Others, upholding Æquiprobabilism, maintain that, when the uncertainty concerns the existence of a law, following the less safe opinion is allowed when it has equal or almost equal probability with the safe opinion, but that, when there is question of the cessation of a law, the less safe opinion must not be followed unless it is more probable than the safe view.
Catholic probabilists believe that, whether there is question of the existence or of the cessation of a law, it is lawful to act on the less safe opinion if it is solidly probable, even though the safe view is certainly more probable.
Around 1900 a system known as Compensationism tried to reconcile these three opinions by holding that not only the degree of probability attaching to various opinions must be taken into account, but also the importance of the law and the degree of utility attaching to the performance of the action whose morality is in question. According to this system, the more important the law, and the smaller the degree of probability attaching to the less safe opinion, the greater must be the compensating utility which will permit the performance of the action of which the lawfulness is uncertain.
These various moral systems come into play only when the question concerns the lawfulness of an action. If the uncertainty concerns the validity of an action which must certainly be valid, it is not enough to act on mere probability unless, indeed, this is of such a nature as to make the Church certainly supply what is needed for the validity of the act. Thus, apart from necessity, these systems do not allow one to act on mere probability when the validity of the sacraments is in question. Additionally, they do not allow one to act on mere probability when there is question of gaining an end which is obligatory, since certain means must be employed to gain a certainly required end. Hence, when eternal salvation is at stake, these systems demand more than uncertain means as justification. Moreover, their conception of justice demands equality, and as such excludes the use of probability when the established rights of another are concerned. Consequently, if a certain debt has not been certainly paid, at least a payment pro rata dubii is required according to the prevailing view.
The central doctrine of probabilism is that in every doubt that concerns merely the lawfulness or unlawfulness of an action it is permissible to follow a solidly probable opinion in favour of liberty, even though the opposing view is more probable. Probabilists apply their theory only when there is question merely of the lawfulness or unlawfulness of an action, because in other cases certainty might be demanded on various grounds, as happens when the validity of the sacraments, the attainment of an obligatory end, and the established rights of another are concerned. They apply their doctrine whether the doubt about the lawfulness or unlawfulness of an action be a doubt of law, or a doubt of fact which can be reduced to a doubt of law. Thus if it is solidly probable that Friday morning has not yet set in, there is a doubt of fact which can be reduced to a doubt of law as to whether it is lawful in the circumstances to take meat. They also apply their doctrine not merely to human but also to Divine and natural laws, on the ground that the Divine legislator is not more exacting than a human legislator. They apply their principles whether the existence or the cessation of a law is concerned, since, in their estimation, liberty is always in possession. They also apply their doctrine even though the person whose action is in question believes that the safe opinion is the more probable opinion. If, however, he looks on the safe opinion as morally certain, he cannot lawfully use the opinion of others who differ from him. Nor can a person on the same occasion use opposing probabilities in his favour in reference to several obligations of which one or another would be certainly violated; thus a priest cannot lawfully take meat on the probability that Friday has already elapsed, and at the same time postpone the reading of Compline on the probability that Friday will not elapse for some time. Finally, probabilists insist that the opinion in favour of liberty must be based on solid arguments and not on mere flimsy reasons which are insufficient to gain the assent of prudent men.
Probabilism, if untrue, is seriously detrimental to the spiritual life of the faithful, since it permits actions which ought to be forbidden, and the Church cannot tolerate or give approval to such a moral system. But the Church during many centuries has tolerated probabilism, and has given it approval in the person of St. Alphonsus. Hence probabilism is not a false system of morals. That the Church has tolerated probabilism is shown from the numerous approved authors, who, since the time of Medina, have defended it without interference on the part of ecclesiastical authority. That the Church has given positive approval to probabilism in the person of St. Alphonsus is proved from the fact that his works including his treatises in favour of probabilism, received official sanction from the Decree of 18 May 1803, the reply of the Sacred Penitentiary of 5 July 1831, the Bull of Canonization of 26 May 1839, and the Apostolic Letters of 7 July 1871 (cf. Lehmkuhl, "Theologia Moralis", I, nn. 165–75). – Æquiprobabilists reply that this argument proves too much for probabilists, since the Church has also tolerated Æquiprobabilism, and has given it positive approval in the person of St. Alphonsus, whose works in favour of Æquiprobabilism received the sanction of the Holy See in the official documents of 1803, 1831, 1839, and 1871. If Æquiprobabilism is false, it is seriously detrimental to the spiritual life of the faithful, since it imposes burdens which ought not to be imposed. Hence, if any argument can be derived for probabilism from the toleration or approval of the Church, a similar argument can be derived therefrom for Æquiprobabilism.
In interpreting her own laws the Church applies the principles of probabilism, what is true of the Church is equally true of other legislators, because God is not a more exacting Legislator than His Church, nor is the State to be presumed more strict than God and the Church. Æquiprobabilists reply to this argument that when the less safe opinion is certainly less probable than the safe opinion, the former has lost solid probability and consequently cannot, so far as conscience is concerned, obtain the privileges which the Divine Legislator, the Church, and the State concede in the case of really doubtful laws. Moreover, many of these rules of law directly apply to the external forum and ought not, without due limitation, be transferred to the forum of conscience.
A law which has not been promulgated is not a law in the full and strict sense, and does not impose an obligation. But when there is a solidly probable opinion in favour of liberty, the law has not been sufficiently promulgated, since there has not been the requisite manifestation of the mind of the legislator. Hence when there is a solidly probable opinion in favour of liberty, the law is not a law in the full and strict sense, and does not impose any obligation (cf. Lehmkuhl, "Theologia Moralis", I, nn. 176–8). Æquiprobabilists reply that when there is a solidly probable opinion in favour of liberty, the law is probably not sufficiently promulgated, and the question remains whether a law that is probably not sufficiently promulgated imposes any obligation in conscience. It would be begging the question to assume that no obligation is imposed simply because there is a probability that the law has not been sufficiently promulgated. Moreover, if the safe opinion happens to be the true opinion, a material sin is committed by the person who, acting on probability, performs the prohibited action. But, unless the law is promulgated, a material sin cannot be committed by its violation, since promulgation is a necessary condition of a binding law (McDonald, "The Principles of Moral Science", p. 245).
An obligation, concerning whose existence there is invincible ignorance, is no obligation. But, so long as there is a solidly probable opinion in favour of liberty, there is invincible ignorance about the obligation imposed by the law. Hence a law does not impose an obligation so long as the less safe opinion is solidly probable (cf. Lehmkuhl, "Theologia Moralis", I, n. 179). – Æquiprobabilists reply that there is not invincible ignorance in regard to a law when the safe opinion is also the more probable opinion, because in these circumstances a person is bound by ordinary prudence to give assent to the safe opinion. Although it is true that an obligation concerning whose existence there is invincible ignorance is no obligation, this is not true when one is compelled to give assent to an opinion as the more probable opinion (cf. Wouters, "De Minusprobabilismo", p. 121).
According to the axiom: lex dubia non obligat, a doubtful law does not bind. But a law is doubtful when there is a solidly probable opinion against it. Hence it is lawful to follow a solidly probable opinion in favour of liberty (cf. Tanquerey, "Theologia Fundamentalis", n. 409). – Æquiprobabilists in reply say that the axiom lex dubia non obligat holds when the law is strictly doubtful, i.e. when the reasons for and against the law are equal or nearly equal. A fortiori the law does not bind when the safe opinion is more probable than the less safe opinion. It would, however, be begging the question to assume that the axiom holds when the less safe opinion is clearly less probable than the safe opinion.
According to Æquiprobabilists, it is lawful to follow the less safe opinion, when it is more probable than the safe opinion. But they must admit that probabilism is more probable than Æquiprobabilism, since the vast majority of theologians favour the milder view, and Æquiprobabilists do not reject external authority. Hence on their own principles they ought to admit the practical truth of probabilism. – Æquiprobabilists reply that extrinsic authority is of no avail when the arguments on which the authority rests have been proved to be invalid; and they claim that they have proved the invalidity of the probabilist arguments. Moreover, a reflex principle is useless unless its truth is proved with certainty, since its sole utility is to change speculative uncertainty into practical certainty. But greater probability does not give certainty. Accordingly, even if Æquiprobabilists were to admit the greater probability of probabilism, that admission would be useless for probabilists. The case is different with Æquiprobabilism which has practical certainty, since nearly all theologians nowadays admit the lawfulness of following the less safe opinion regarding the existence of a law, when it is equally or almost equally probable with the safe opinion.
Many probabilists lay stress on a practical argument in favour of their opinion, which is derived from the difficulty of distinguishing between various grades of Probability. It is impossible in practice, especially for ordinary people, to tell when one solidly probable opinion is more probable than another solidly probable opinion. But a moral system, to be of any serious utility, must be universal, so that not merely experts in moral science but also ordinary people can utilize it. Hence the systems which demand a knowledge of the various degrees of probability must be discarded as practically useless, and probabilism alone must be accepted as a working system. – Æquiprobabilists reply that their system merely asks, that if after due investigation it is found that the less safe opinion is notably and certainly less probable than the safe opinion, the law must be observed. The necessary investigation has frequently been already made by experts, and others, who are not experts, are safe in accepting the conclusions to which the experts adhere.
When the less safe opinion is notably and certainly less probable than the safe opinion, there is no true probability in favour of liberty, since the stronger destroy the force of the weaker reasons. Hence probabilists cannot consistently maintain that it is safe in practice to act on the less safe opinion which is also the less probable. – probabilists reply that the greater probability does not of necessity destroy the solid probability of the less probable opinion. When the foundations of the opposing probabilities are not derived from the same source, then at least the opposing arguments do not detract from one another; and even when the two probabilities are based on a consideration of the same argument, one opinion will retain probability insofar as the opposing opinion recedes from certainty.
A moral system, to be of any use, must be certain, since an uncertain reflex principle cannot give practical certainty. But probabilism is not certain, because it is rejected by all those theologians who upheld one or another of the opposing views. Hence probabilism cannot be accepted as a satisfactory solution of the question at issue. – Probabilists reply that their system can be of no use to those who do not look on it as certainly true; but the fact that many theologians do not accept it does not prevent its adherents from regarding it as certain, since these can and do believe that the arguments urged in its favour are insuperable.
Probabilism is seen by some Catholic authorities as an easy road to Laxism, because people are often inclined to regard opinions as really probable which are based on flimsy arguments, and because it is not difficult to find five or six serious authors who approve of opinions which right-minded men consider lax. They stress that the only sure way to safeguard Catholic morals is to reject the opinion which opens the way to Laxism. Probabilists reply that their system must be prudently employed, and that no serious danger of Laxism arises if it is recognized that an opinion is not solidly probable unless there are arguments in its favour which are sufficient to gain the assent of many prudent men. As for the authority of approved authors, it must be remembered that five or six grave authors do not give solid probability to an opinion unless they are notable for learning and prudence, and independently adhere to an opinion which has not been set aside by authoritative decisions or by unanswered arguments.
| 7555233 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=7555233 |
Religion&Philosophy&Ethics | Season for Nonviolence
Season for Nonviolence was established in 1998 by Arun Gandhi, Mohandas Gandhi's grandson, as a yearly event celebrating the philosophies and lives of Mohandas Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr. Today, he co-chairs the Season along with Rev. Michael Bernard Beckwith of the Agape International Spiritual Center. It is convened by the Association for Global New Thought.
The "season" begins with the anniversary of Mohandas Gandhi's assassination on January 30 and ends with the anniversary of Martin Luther King, Jr.'s assassination on April 4. It is anchored by a mission, statement of principles, and commitments by participants towards living in a nonviolent way.
| 7559364 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=7559364 |
Religion&Philosophy&Ethics | De spectaculis
De Spectaculis, also known as On the Spectacles or The Shows, is a surviving moral and ascetic treatise by Tertullian. Written somewhere between 197-202, the work looks at the moral legitimacy and consequences of Christians attending the circus, theatre, or amphitheatre.
Tertullian argues that human enjoyment can be an offence to God. His view of these public entertainments is that they are a misuse of God's creation and a perversion of the gifts God has given to man. He supports his claim by reminding the reader that these shows and spectacles derived from pagan ritual rites (the Liberalia, the Consualia, the Equiria, the Bacchanalia, etc.). This means that the events derive from idolatry. Of key concern was that the "show always leads to spiritual agitation". By attending and partaking in the event, man is subject to strong excitements, which are aroused due to natural lapses, which create passionate desire. Additionally, Tertullian writes that that which is not permissible to say or do should not be permissible to see or hear.
Friedrich Nietzsche, in "On the Genealogy of Morality" (Essay 1, Section 15), uses Tertullian's words to highlight the resemblance of Christian worship to circus-going: "In place of athletes, we have our martyrs; if we crave blood, we have the blood of Christ..." To those addicted to the pleasure of pagan spectacles Tertullian tried to show that Christianity offers far superior spectacles. For this reason he spoke of the Second Coming, the resurrection of the saints, New Jerusalem, and of “what no eye has seen, nor ear heard, nor the human heart conceived” (), but the spectacle on which he enlarged most was the Last Judgement and the ensuing punishment of the enemies of Christ:
Such an expression of joy over the ruin of the damned finds no match in the other works of early Christians. However, it must be taken into account that in an earlier chapter of the treatise Tertullian wrote that “the innocent can find no pleasure in another’s sufferings: he rather mourns that a brother has sinned so heinously as to need a punishment so dreadful.” This passage is hard--if not impossible--to reconcile with the one quoted before and it is therefore debatable what Tertullian's real sentiments regarding the damned were.
| 7571029 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=7571029 |
Religion&Philosophy&Ethics | Peter Glassen
Peter Glassen (1920–1986) was a professor of philosophy at the University of Manitoba from 1949 until his death in 1986. He was an analytic moral philosopher, publishing several articles in the late 1950s and early 1960s. He was also known for his arguments against metaphysical materialism, and spent a year (1948–49) in the psychology department at the University of Saskatchewan.
Born in Szeged, Hungary (then the Austro-Hungarian Empire) on October 19, 1920, Glassen emigrated with his parents to Toronto, Canada in 1929, residing on Gladstone Avenue in the city's west end. He graduated from Bloor Collegiate Institute in 1940. Among other academic awards, Glassen received the R.W. Leonard Entrance Scholarship for General Proficiency from the University of Toronto, valued at what was then the very substantial sum of $900. He graduated from the university with a B.A. in 1944 and an M.A. in 1945.
In 1945, Glassen entered Harvard University, having been awarded the Philip H. Sears scholarship. There he studied with Ralph Barton Perry, C. I. Lewis, Henry D. Aiken, W. T. Stace, Henry Austryn Wolfson and others. In October 1947 he qualified for the A.M. degree and, under Aiken's supervision, continued to work on his doctoral dissertation ("The Ethics of Shaftesbury and Hutcheson", later changed to "The Criterion of Rightness in Action") for several years, but never completed his Ph.D. due to his commitments as an assistant professor.
Glassen's first set of publications consisted in eight papers published in major philosophical journals in 1957, 1958 and 1959. These reflected his core interests: analytic moral theory (where he was a cognitivist and champion of ordinary language analysis), value theory (particularly the classification of, and distinctions among, moral and non-moral varieties of normative judgment), and epistemology (notably the question of the possibility of synthetic a priori knowledge). There followed a period of reduced activity, with two papers on cognitivism in 1962 and 1963, several reviews for "Dialogue" from 1963 to 1970, and finally a series of papers on another subject of enduring interest—the refutation of arguments against dualism—between 1976 and 1984. Glassen also authored a number of conference papers, including two that were published in the proceedings of the 12th and 13th meetings of the International Congress of Philosophy, in 1958 and 1963 respectively. Several other papers were unpublished and—with one or two exceptions—are likely lost.
In 1961, Glassen travelled to England on a Canada Council grant, meeting with many leading moral philosophers of the time, including Sir David Ross, H. B. Acton and others.
Glassen's early promise was not entirely realized. This was at least partly due to the lasting effects of a personal tragedy. While returning from Toronto to Winnipeg for the beginning of the 1965-66 school year, Glassen was involved in a car accident that took the life of the other driver. Though not ultimately found at fault, Glassen never fully recovered from the shock. His scholarly output declined and he turned down an opportunity to move to the more prominent department at the University of Toronto in 1967. His career might have faded into complete obscurity had it not been for the development of eliminative materialism by fellow University of Manitoba philosophers Paul Churchland and Patricia Churchland in the 1970s. This aroused his vehement opposition and revived his interest in writing and publishing. After several years of good health, a series of illnesses in 1985-86 brought on a recurrence of depression and alcoholism, leading to his death by suicide on or about March 24, 1986 in Winnipeg.
"Some Questions about Relations" (1957) is an analysis of the ontology of relations. Glassen argues that a relation has both properties (e.g. reflexivity (R), symmetry (S), transitivity (T)) and content. There must be content because many relations share the same set of properties while not being the same relation (e.g. "to the left of" and "before" are both [-R, -S, T]). Thus a relation "r" may be defined in terms of content and properties, e.g. as {r =df con, p1, p2, p3}. Glassen proceeds to point out several troubling questions that arise when we try to understand whether the relationship between content and properties is necessary or accidental. He admits in his conclusion that, "given the Bradleyan flavour of the problems to which it gives rise", there may be something wrong—and perhaps quite importantly wrong—with the initial distinction between content and properties. This paper was reviewed by Alonzo Church in "The Journal of Symbolic Logic" 32:3 (Sept. 1968), p. 408.
"A Fallacy in Aristotle's Argument about the Good" (1957) is a close analysis of a crucial paragraph in Book I, chapter 7 of Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics. Glassen argues that Aristotle fails to show (or even to attempt to argue) that it follows from the fact that the function of a good man is activity of the soul in accordance with virtue that the good of man—his final goal—is precisely that function. This reflects Glassen's attention to the distinction between morality and the broader theory of value. Glassen's argument has been referred to in a number of subsequent papers. Aurel Kolnai, referring to the same problem although not specifically to Glassen's paper, called this the "Aristotelian Equivocation".
"Are There Unresolvable Moral Disputes?" (1962) was influential in the field of ethical objectivism in its introduction of subjective bases of approval on top of the objective bases for approval outlined in emotivist theory - an introduction which made possible the resolution of moral disputes theoretically unresolvable under the emotivist theory. In a way, his work can be seen as straddling the line between emotivism and ethical objectivism.
| 7580142 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=7580142 |
Religion&Philosophy&Ethics | Journalist's Creed
The Journalist's Creed is a personal affirmation of journalism ethics written by Walter Williams in 1914. The creed has been published in more than 100 languages, and a bronze plaque of The Journalist's Creed hangs at the National Press Club in Washington, D.C. Williams was the founding dean of the Missouri School of Journalism.
| 7583340 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=7583340 |
Religion&Philosophy&Ethics | Center for Ethics at Yeshiva University
The Center for Ethics at Yeshiva University, located on Yeshiva University’s Wilf Campus in New York's Washington Heights neighborhood, fosters research on ethical issues and the integration of discourse on ethics into the curriculum among Yeshiva University's schools. The Center seeks to provide opportunities for interdisciplinary collaboration among Yeshiva University's schools.
Adrienne Asch, PhD, the center's director, is the Edward and Robin Milstein Professor of Bioethics at Wurzweiler School of Social Work and Professor of Epidemiology and Population Health at Albert Einstein College of Medicine, both Yeshiva University graduate professional schools.
The Center's activities include:
The Center also hosts the Leonard and Tobee Kaplan Scholar-in-Residence program, designed to provide opportunities for interdisciplinary collaboration among Yeshiva University's schools. In 2007, Michael Walzer served as the Center's inaugural scholar-in-residence. In 2008, Onora O'Neill will serve as scholar-in-residence.
| 7587065 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=7587065 |
Religion&Philosophy&Ethics | Master suppression techniques
The master suppression techniques is a framework articulated in 1945 by the Norwegian psychologist and philosopher Ingjald Nissen. These techniques identified by Nissen are ways to indirectly suppress and humiliate opponents. In the late 1970s the framework was popularized by Norwegian social psychologist Berit Ås, who reduced Nissen's original nine means to five, and claimed this was a technique mostly used in the workplace by men against women. Master suppression techniques are defined as strategies of social manipulation by which a dominant group maintains such a position in a (established or unexposed) hierarchy. They are very prominent in Scandinavian scholarly and public debate, where the expression is also used to refer to types of social manipulation not part of Ås's framework. Master suppression techniques are sometimes called domination techniques.
To silence or otherwise marginalize people in opposition by ignoring them.
Examples:
In a manipulative way to portray the arguments of, or their opponents themselves, in a ridiculing fashion.
Example:
To exclude a person from the decision making process, or knowingly not forwarding information so as to make the person less able to make an informed choice.
Examples:
To punish or otherwise belittle the actions of a person, regardless of how they act.
Examples:
To embarrass someone, or to insinuate that they are themselves to blame for their position.
Example:
Berit Ås has since added two supplementary master suppression techniques.
To discuss the appearance of one or several persons in a situation where it is irrelevant.
To threaten with or use one's physical strength towards one or several persons.
Example:
A group of PhD students at Stockholm University has formulated five "counter strategies":
They have also formulated five "confirmation techniques":
The Centre for Gender Equality in Norway has also published an article about how to combat this phenomenon.
| 7592962 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=7592962 |
Religion&Philosophy&Ethics | Stephanus of Alexandria
Stephanus of Alexandria (Stephanus Alexandrinus, Stephanos of Alexandria; ) was a 7th-century Byzantine philosopher, astronomer and teacher. He was a public lecturer in the court of Heraclius (610-641 AD). In the manuscripts he is called the Universal Philosopher.
He taught on Plato and Aristotle, and on Geometry, Arithmetic, Alchemy, Astronomy and Music.
1. A commentary on Aristotle. Editions:
2. A commentary on the Isagogue of Porphyry. Editions:
3. Astronomical and chronological works. Editions:
4. Alchemical works. Scholars are divided as to whether or not these are authentic works of the same Stephen of Alexandria due to the style of writing. The translator, F. Sherwood Taylor accepts them as his. A compendium of alchemical texts including the poem "De Chrysopoeia" (On how to make gold) is extant in two manuscripts, Venice Cod. Marcianus 299 and Paris BNF 2327.
Editions:
5. Astrological works. These also are apocryphal.
6. Other apocrypha include a 'Weissagungsbuch', a prophecy of Mohammed and the rise of Islam, and probably date from around 775 AD.
Texts:
Dictionaries:
Articles and studies:
| 7614405 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=7614405 |
Religion&Philosophy&Ethics | Acting out
In the psychology of defense mechanisms and self-control,
acting out is the performance of an action considered bad or anti-social. In general usage, the action performed is destructive to self or to others. The term is used in this way in sexual addiction treatment, psychotherapy, criminology and parenting. In contrast, the opposite attitude or behaviour of bearing and managing the impulse to perform one's impulse is called acting in.
The performed action may follow impulses of an addiction (e.g. drinking, drug taking or shoplifting). It may also be a means designed (often unconsciously or semi-consciously) to garner attention (e.g. throwing a tantrum or behaving promiscuously). Acting out may inhibit the development of more constructive responses to the feelings in question.
Freud considered that patients in analysis tended to act out their conflicts in preference to remembering them – repetition compulsion. The analytic task was then to help "the patient who does not remember anything of what he has forgotten and repressed, but acts it out" to replace present activity by past memory.
Otto Fenichel added that acting out in an analytic setting potentially offered valuable insights to the therapist; but was nonetheless a psychological resistance in as much as it deals only with the present at the expense of concealing the underlying influence of the past. Lacan also spoke of "the corrective value of "acting out"", though others qualified this with the proviso that such acting out must be limited in the extent of its destructive/self-destructiveness.
Annie Reich pointed out that the analyst may use the patient by acting out in an indirect countertransference, for example to win the approval of a supervisor.
The interpretation of a person's acting out and an observer's response varies considerably, with context and subject usually setting audience expectations.
Early years, temper tantrums can be understood as episodes of acting out. As young children will not have developed the means to communicate their feelings of distress, tantrums prove an effective and achievable method of alerting parents to their needs and requesting attention.
As children develop they often learn to replace these attention-gathering strategies with more socially acceptable and constructive communications. In adolescent years, acting out in the form of rebellious behaviors such as smoking, shoplifting and drug use can be understood as "a cry for help." Such pre-delinquent behavior may be a search for containment from parents or other parental figures. The young person may seem to be disruptive – and may well be disruptive – but this behaviour is often underpinned by an inability to regulate emotions in some other way.
In behavioral or substance addiction, acting out can give the addict the illusion of being in control.
Criminologists debate whether juvenile delinquency is a form of acting out, or rather reflects wider conflicts involved in the process of socialisation.
Acting out painful feelings may be contrasted with expressing them in ways more helpful to the sufferer, e.g. by talking out, expressive therapy, psychodrama or mindful awareness of the feelings. Developing the ability to express one's conflicts safely and constructively is an important part of impulse control, personal development and self-care.
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