The question of military intervention for humanitarian purposes is a major focus for international law, the United Nations, regional organizations such as NATO, and the foreign policies of nations. Against this background, the 2011 bombing in Libya by Western nations has occasioned renewed interest and concern about armed humanitarian intervention and the doctrine of Responsibility to Protect. This volume brings together new essays by leading international, philosophical, and political thinkers on the moral and legal issues involved in AHI, and contains (...) both critical and positive views of AHI. Topics include the problem of abuse and needed limitations, the future viability of RtoP and some of its problematic implications, the possibility of AHI providing space for peaceful political protest, and how AHI might be integrated with post-war justice. It is an important collection for those studying political philosophy, international relations, and humanitarian law. (shrink)

“April is the cruelest month, breeding Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing memory and desire… ” So, begins T.S. Eliot’s iconic poem, “The Wasteland,” challenging the memory of Chaucer’s April from Canterbury Tales, as being a delightful month to go on pilgrimage. Platonic teachings emphasize that you don’t create, you just remember. Might the inverse might also be true, “You don’t remember, you just create.” As the oneirocritic, Robert Bosnak, contends, you do not actually remember your dreams. You remember (...) your memory you recreate the dream in this time. Since the challenges of post-modernism, this is no longer a far-fetched idea. The eminent historian of immigration, Deborah Dash Moore, defines history in this regard, as “a search for a plausible narrative.” “History” is not a record of what happened, but rather, is a record of what we believe happened, or what we want to believe happened. This brings to the fore Foucault’s documenting the relationship of knowledge to power, as well as Freud’s assertion that material which is unacceptable to the ego, is disguised, in order to make them palatable. This places the notion of memory in a different light. There are incidents that occurred fifty years ago that seem as if they occurred five minutes ago. The depth psychologist and champion of the imagination, James Hillman, referred to this process as “soul-making.” Back to T.S. Eliot: when he studied Sanskrit at Harvard, he was certainly aware that the Sanskrit word for memory, smara (from which smrti “that which is remembered,” is derived) is also an epithet for Kama Deva, the Indian Cupid. Hence, the mixing of memory and desire. Perhaps, in this light, the study of history, which is a form of collective memory, is also a form of mass therapy, an effort to process the collective past. Hegel and Marx both believed classical India to be an inferior civilization because it had “no history,” but collections of mythologies. Maybe classical India, however, held an awareness that all memory is myth, a word which in its early Greek form literally translates as “plot.” Jesus declares (in the Gospel story) “Let the dead bury the dead.” As the Jesus narrative exemplifies, however, burying the dead is no easy task. Perhaps our ongoing, ever-morphing narratives, allow us an oblique opportunity to connect with and process our pain. And in this theatre of memory, the goal may not be to accumulate or catalogue what has been spoken (itihasa), but look a good miller, to process the grain into its essence: from what has passed, and is passing, and is to come, into what always is. Perhaps, the pilgrimage of the mind, on its endless perigination of story, is meant to ultimately take us to love, but that may be unspeakable. Keywords: memory, desire, narrative, history, myth, power. (shrink)

I thank the commentators for their thoughtful remarks about and criticisms of my exploratory essay on the indefinite detention of mega-terrorists.1 Because of space restrictions, I have not been ab...

Christian prayer and worship are not so much derived from as generative of the doctrine of God.

A unique study, Beyond Certainty is a phenomenological approach to the connection between factual knowledge and moral judgment. Marietta holds logical certainty to be unnecessary for moral decision-making. In point of fact, logical certainty about our moral judgments, according to the author, is impossible. Key dilemmas in recent moral theory are caught within this impasse represented through an "is/ought" dichotomy. Marietta trumps this impasse through a return to concrete reflection on our most primal consciousness of the world.

Dictionaries distinguish the following senses of ‘punishment’:the act of punishing, or the fact of being punished - where ‘punish’ is defined as: an act of public authority causing an offender to suffer for an offense. As In: ‘the respectable not only obey the law, but punish those who refuse to do so’.that which is inflicted as a penalty for an offense. As in: ‘all punishments are to be carried out in the Barrack Yard’, ‘fit the punishment to the crime’.severe handling (...) or treatment causing heavy damage, injury or loss. As in: ‘the fighter had been subjected to heavy punishment in his losing bout’, ‘the ships received considerable punishment from the batteries’. (shrink)

Classified advertising occupies a prominent place in the history and current economics of the print media in America, including magazines. There are dozens of classifications, most of which are as innocuous as the language that constitutes the individual advertisements. The personals classification, however, is not always so innocuous. Gun-for-hire classified advertisements in one magazine were so blatant that several serious crimes, including murder, were committed as a result of the advertisements. Generally, courts find no liability for disseminators of advertising that (...) causes harm. But the application of the ethical theory of basic mixed rule deontology would mandate that publications should not publish such classified advertising notwithstanding that it is likely legal to do so. (shrink)

By strict definition, television journalism, like every form of journalism, has always been ?unreal?; some form of constructed mediated reality.1 But now, television journalism is coming to a crossroads?one where ethics and technology will meet squarely at right angles if not head?on. And it is reality, even the constructed mediated kind, that will be at risk. In a few years, television journalism at the network and local levels will have the capability, through television's emerging conversion from analog to digital technology, (...) to easily manipulate video and audio in utterly fundamental ways. It will be simple to completely re?shape, even to create, reality. The question won't be: ?Is it live or is it Memorex?"2 rather, it will be something like: ?Is it real or is it digitex?"3This article explores this new technology and the concomitant merger of form and substance in television journalism; it presents several hypothetical examples of this kind of unethical behavior and the motivations behind them; and, finally, it wonders what impact unethical digitexing might have on the First Amendment. (shrink)

A number of recent books and articles have claimed that environmental ethics should be pluralistic; in response to these J. Baird Callicott has written a strong attack upon moral pluralism. This paper will survey briefly some of the recent work advocating moral pluralism and examine Callicott's defense of moral monism. Then it will examine the justification for building an ethical system upon more than one fundamental source of moral insight. The moral system which succeeds in taking into account all that (...) is morally relevant will be contextualist, and it might need to be pluralistic as well. (shrink)

1 Philosophers on Sexuality Ancient Philosophy A positive and constructive philosophy of sexuality is largely a product of the twentieth century. ...

This book is a collection of original essays by some of the leading moral and political thinkers of our time on the ethical and legal implications of humanitarian military intervention. As the rules for the 'new world order' are worked out in the aftermath of the Cold War, this issue is likely to arise more and more frequently, and the moral implications of such interventions will become a major focus for international law, the United Nations, regional organizations such as NATO, (...) and the foreign policies of nations. The essays collected here present a variety of normative perspectives on topics such as the just-war theory and its limits, secession and international law, and new approaches toward the moral legitimacy of intervention. They form a challenging and timely volume that will interest political philosophers, political theorists, readers in law and international relations, and anyone interested in moral dimensions of international affairs. (shrink)

The author focuses attention on some of the historical antecedents of the United Nations Global Compact. Developments such as the Global Compact do not arrive “whole cloth” but require people and institutions to be in a “state of readiness” for the idea. The article discusses Secretary-General Annan’s challenge to action, the historical background of three stages of corporate social responsibility, and the future of global corporate responsibility.

Don Ihde tries to conceptualize cross-cultural technology transfer within the post-phenomenological perspective. Using his concept of the multistability of technological artifacts, Ihde discusses how technologies could have a variety of uses in different contexts. When taken at the level of international technology transfer, i.e. the level where technologies move from one cultural geography to another, there will be two contexts: (i) the context where the artifact is being produced and (ii) the context into which it is moving to. Ihde’s (...) problem lies in emphasizing the first and almost concluding with certainty that technologization is Westernization. Consequently, his theory of technology transfer, in addition to being culturalist, gives priority to the cultural context from which it was physically separated to the culture in which it has started functioning. The author of this paper critically engages this tendentiously culturalist point of view. (shrink)

We expand and transform our habitual agency with countless technologies most moments of the day. Our environments, bodies, thoughts and social interactions are thoroughly shaped and mediated by tapestries of interweaving layers of old and new technologies. Perhaps this intimate relation with technology is at the core of our humanity. But our relation to technology has also repeatedly been feared as a Faustian deal that will be the dystopian end of us, or—in more utopian viewpoints— will bring us beyond our (...) earthbound finitudes toward virtual existences. What many agree on is that dramatic changes to our basic ecological and existential conditions are nearing. I suggest we should look for such critical tipping points and phase shifts not just in our biological bodies and environments but also in the informational and behavioral environments we rely on in our intentional and habitual agency. When thinking particularly about technologically mediated habitual agency an obvious place to start is with Don Ihde’s 4 classic human–technology relations. Interestingly, fellow post-phenomenologist Peter- Paul Verbeek has proposed new additional kinds of relations to e.g. “smart”and virtually “augmenting” technologies. While I find each of these analyses insightful, I worry that a focus on individual relations to particular spatio-temporally circumscribed artifacts falls short—or even obscures—some of the particular new challenges to our agency that networked, and data-driven smart technologies give rise to. I will therefore attempt to broaden the focus to how our agency is scaffolded by not just particular technological artifacts, but by our understanding of the broader informational and behavioral environment. To do this, I start by introducing some core theoretical background ideas that will support a more contextual approach and then proceed to consider both the classic and newer post-phenomenological relations from this more contextual perspective. The goal is not only to affirm the value of analyzing concrete technology relations but also to expand and contextualize the analyses. The latter is key if we want a post-phenomenological analysis that can help us understand how our habitual agency might be transformed as we come to live in increasingly “smart worlds”. These new data and algorithmically driven technologies not only transform our relation to a given context, but due to networked dataflows and “smart” decision-making (1) recursively act on us and (2) collapse and transcend the present context. This chapter will also highlight the uncertainties that informationally leaky and “smart” technologies introduce to our understanding of the kind of affordance space we are in and even what the expected outcomes of our actions will be. I suggest that technology relations with such effects might challenge some of the core contextual stabilities and informational segregations that our habitual agency have hitherto relied on. A further issue is if these new technological configurations challenge our habitual processes in ways we cannot easily adapt to. We certainly seem able to create new habits and adapt to these new technologies locally, but the new information flows, hidden audiences, and context collapses appear to challenge some conditions of agency that are typically out of sight, and the effects of which untraceably shows up well outside the present context. Overall, I shall argue that “smart” technologies can both expand and shrink our habitual agency—but that in terms of our ability to guide our action through various contexts in a perceived world something more fundamental appears to be breaking. (shrink)

We present the first comprehensive taxonomic revision and review the biology of the olingos, the endemic Neotropical procyonid genus Bassaricyon, based on most specimens available in museums, and with data derived from anatomy, morphometrics, mitochondrial and nuclear DNA, field observations, and geographic range modeling. Species of Bassaricyon are primarily forest-living, arboreal, nocturnal, frugivorous, and solitary, and have one young at a time. We demonstrate that four olingo species can be recognized, including a Central American species (Bassaricyon gabbii), lowland species with (...) eastern, cis-Andean (Bassaricyon alleni) and western, trans-Andean (Bassaricyon medius) distributions, and a species endemic to cloud forests in the Andes. The oldest evolutionary divergence in the genus is between this last species, endemic to the Andes of Colombia and Ecuador, and all other species, which occur in lower elevation habitats. Surprisingly, this Andean endemic species, which we call the Olinguito, has never been previously described; it represents a new species in the order Carnivora and is the smallest living member of the family Procyonidae. We report on the biology of this new species based on information from museum specimens, niche modeling, and fieldwork in western Ecuador, and describe four Olinguito subspecies based on morphological distinctions across different regions of the Northern Andes. (shrink)

Adversity provides a chance to reckon with, and properly attend to, our limitations. Appreciating one’s limitations is crucial for humility; and developing humility enhances wisdom.

Octavia E. Butler was notoriously skeptical of utopian science fiction, and though she desired very much to write it, she found herself unable to do so "because I don't believe imperfect humans can form a perfect society."1 In interviews and in practice through her fiction Butler rejected the possibility of an ideal society and instead found her way to what Jim Miller has called "a post-apocalyptic hoping informed by the lessons of the past."2 This is to say that, as (...) a black woman science-fiction writer who had witnessed the pains of systemic racism, patriarchy, and oppressive violence against the communities to which she belonged, and who was particularly affected by the Religious Right–backed racist and classist... (shrink)

This paper discusses global corporate citizenship in the twenty-first century. The primary focus is on the responsibility of managementeducators to foster among students an understanding of the causes and consequences of business activitiy that creates organizationalwealth, including the role of stakeholders. The modern corporation is a stakeholder enterprise: stakeholders enable the business to create wealth and require that it distribute wealth appropriately. The stakeholder enterprise model, which has been so economically successful, also implies corporate citizenship responsibilities. The Clarkson Principles are (...) discussed as a means through which educators and managers can better understand and address the challenges of corporate citizenship in the modern world. (shrink)

This collection of new essays by eleven distinguished environmental philosophers addresses two main questions: first, whether environmental philosophy and ethics should be seen as a form of applied philosophy or as something else, perhaps best called practical philosophy; and second, how environmental philosophy is practiced in human life, especially in the lives of academics.