The contributors to The Moral of the Story, all preeminent political theorists, are unified by their concern with the instructive power of great literature. This thought-provoking combination of essays explores the polyvalent moral and political impact of classic world literatures on public ethics through the study of some of its major figures-including Shakespeare, Dante, Cervantes, Jane Austen, Henry James, Joseph Conrad, Robert Penn Warren, and Dostoevsky. Positing the uniqueness of literature's ability to promote dialogue on salient moral and intellectual virtues, (...) editor Henry T. Edmonson III has culled together a wide-ranging exploration of such fundamental concerns as the abuse of authority, the nature of good leadership, the significance of "middle class virtues" and the needs of adolescents. This collection reinvigorates the study of classic literature as an endeavor that is not only personally intellectually satisfying, but also an inimitable and unique way to enrich public discourse. (shrink)

Offers an outline for a new ethical practice - one responsive to the need for critical autonomy and grounded in a new sense of the human subject. The author demonstrates how difficult it is to give an account of oneself, and how this lack of self-transparency and narratibility is crucial to an ethical understanding of the human.

Both experimental and ethnographic studies show that reciprocal exchanges (in which actors unilaterally provide benefits to each other without formal agreements) produce stronger trust than negotiated exchanges secured by binding agreements. We develop the theoretical role of risk and uncertainty as causal mechanisms that potentially explain these results, and then test their effects in two laboratory experiments that vary risk and uncertainty within negotiated and reciprocal forms of exchange. We increase risk in negotiated exchanges by making agreements nonbinding and decrease (...) uncertainty in reciprocal exchanges by having actors communicate their intentions. Our findings support three main theoretical conclusions. (1) Increasing risk in negotiated exchange produces levels of trust comparable to those in reciprocal exchange only if the partner's trustworthiness is near-absolute. (2) Decreasing uncertainty in reciprocal exchange either increases or decreases trust, depending on network structure. (3) Even when reciprocal and negotiated exchanges produce comparable levels of trust, their trust differs in kind, with reciprocal exchange partners developing trust that is more resilient and affect-based. (shrink)

This paper argues that one problem that besets black-box AI is that it lacks algorithmic justifiability. We argue that the norm of shared decision making in medical care presupposes that treatment decisions ought to be justifiable to the patient. Medical decisions are justifiable to the patient only if they are compatible with the patient’s values and preferences and the patient is able to see that this is so. Patient-directed justifiability is threatened by black-box AIs because the lack of rationale provided (...) for the decision makes it difficult for patients to ascertain whether there is adequate fit between the decision and the patient’s values. This paper argues that achieving algorithmic transparency does not help patients bridge the gap between their medical decisions and values. We introduce a hypothetical model we call Justifiable AI to illustrate this argument. Justifiable AI aims at modelling normative and evaluative considerations in an explicit way so as to provide a stepping stone for patient and physician to jointly decide on a course of treatment. If our argument succeeds, we should prefer these justifiable models over alternatives if the former are available and aim to develop said models if not. (shrink)

The author draws on the policy analysis literature to delineate the linkage between conceptualization of risk and the formulation and proposed solution of risk-related policy problems. Two concepts of risk are identified: a concept of risk as a physically given attribute of hazardous technologies and a concept of risk as a socially constructed attribute. The argument is advanced that the social construction of risk provides a firm, theoretical basis for the design of policy. The discussion links the perception, manage ment, (...) and communication of risk to the more fundamental issue of the nature and role of science and technology. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Further Reflections on Conversations of Our TimeJudith Butler (bio)The exchange that Ernesto Laclau and I conducted through e-mail last year at this time begins a conversation that I expect will continue. And I suppose I would like to use this “supplementary” reflection to think about what makes such a conversation possible, and what possibilities might emerge from such a conversation.First of all, I think that I was drawn to (...) the work of Laclau and Mouffe when I began to read Hegemony and Socialist Strategy and realized that I had found a set of Marxist thinkers for whom discourse was not merely a representation of preexisting social and historical realities, but was also constitutive of the field of the social and of history. The second moment came when I realized that central to the notion of articulation, appropriated from Gramsci, was the notion of rearticulation. As a temporally dynamic and relatively unpredictable play of forces, hegemony had been cast by both Laclau and Mouffe as an alternative to forms of static structuralism that tend to construe contemporary social forms as timeless totalities. I read in Laclau and Mouffe the political transcription of Derrida’s “Structure, Sign, and Play”: a structure gains its status as a structure, its structurality, only through its repeated reinstatement. The dependency of that structure on its reinstatement means that the very possibility of structure depends on a reiteration that is in no sense determined fully in advance, that for structure, and social structure as a result, to become possible, there must first be a contingent repetition at its basis. Moreover, for some social formation to appear as structured is for it to have covered over in some way the contingency of its own installation.The theoretical rearticulation of structure as hegemony marked the work of Laclau and Mouffe as consequentially poststructuralist and offered perhaps the most important link between politics and poststructuralism in recent years (along with the work of Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak). The move from a structuralist account in which capital is understood to structure social relations in relatively homologous ways to a view of hegemony in which power relations are subject to repetition, convergence, and rearticulation brought the question of temporality into the thinking of structure, and marked a shift from a form of Althusserian theory that takes structural totalities as theoretical objects to one in which the insights into the contingent possibility of structure inaugurate a renewed conception of hegemony as bound up with the contingent sites and strategies of the rearticulation of power.It is, of course, impossible in this context to reconstruct the particular way in which Derrida’s work and Foucault’s work converge in the reconceptualization of hegemony that Laclau and Mouffe have offered. One of the points, however, that became most salient for me is the reintroduction of temporality and, indeed, of futurity into the thinking of social formations. Among many critical social theorists, the tendency has been to underscore how the systemic character of capital tends to incorporate any instance of opposition in the service of capital’s own self-augmentation. I would clearly agree that the incorporative and domesticating possibilities of capital are immense. But I would also [End Page 13] argue that any theory that fails to think the possibilities of transformation from within that “systemic” formation is itself complicit with the idea of the “eternal” character of capital that capital so readily produces. Hegemony also marks a limit to the totalizing terms within which social formations are to be thought. For what hegemony attends to are the moments of breakage, of rearticulation, convergence, and resistance that are not immediately coopted by social formations in their past and present forms. That no social formation can endure without becoming reinstated, and that every reinstatement puts the “structure” in question at risk, suggests that the possibility of its own undoing is at once the condition of possibility of structure itself.Before I knew the work of Laclau and Mouffe very well, I came close to this kind of insight in my work on gender. 1 There I argued that gender is not an inner core or static essence, but a reiterated enactment of... (shrink)

The article scutinizes the solicitation we experience when affected by human suffering at a distance. Referring to the approaches of Emmanuel Lévinas and Hannah Arendt, the author outlines her Ethic of Cohabitation and points to both writers’ particular and rather diverging affiliation to Jewish heritage. The author’s own idea of alternative Jewishness emphasizes the importance of solidarity with those who are threatened by persecution or subjugation, with the dispossessed and the “ungrievable”, even and especially with those who exceed our immediate (...) sphere of belonging. (shrink)

The cultural group selection approach provides a compelling explanation for recent changes in human societies, but has trouble explaining why our ancestors, rather than any other great ape, evolved into a hyper-cooperative niche. The cooperative breeding hypothesis can plug this gap and thus complement CGS, because recent comparative evidence suggests that it promoted proactive prosociality, social transmission, and communication in Pleistocene hominins.

This paper addresses the views of R.G. Collingwood and Theodor Adorno on the role of amusement and art in what each of them saw as the crisis of contemporary Western civilization. We will begin by showing how the aesthetic theories of Collingwood and Adorno develop out of their shared concerns about the harmful effects of amusement and bad art on the consciousness of human beings. We will argue that a productive dialogue between these two figures clarifies that the value of (...) art consists in its ability to remedy the corruption of the mental and emotional lives of human beings and in helping to fashion a different social and political order. As part of this, we will show how, despite appearances, Adorno’s aesthetic cognitivism and Collingwood’s expression theory of art agree with and complement one another in significant ways. In establishing this point, this work will leave us with an understanding of art that is more comprehensive and better equipped to address the crisis of contemporary Western society. (shrink)

In “Assessing the Remedy: The Case for Contracts in Clinical Trials,” Sarah Edwards (2011) proposes that research participants acquire contractual obligations to investigators, thus opening the doo...

Résumé Si l’espoir est une revendication impossible, alors nous exigeons l’impossible. Mais la vérité, c’est qu’il n’y a effectivement pas ici de revendications qui puissent être soumises à un arbitrage quelconque, parce que nous ne sommes pas réunis simplement pour exiger la justice économique et l’égalité sociale. Nous composons une communauté de corps ralliés dans les rues et dans les parcs.

First published in 1993. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

Un projet artistique propose à des résidents d’EHPAD de manier l’argile et d’interagir avec des IA. Il en émerge quelques déplacements de nos binarités coutumières : la machine n’est pas plus performante que les personnes qui écrivent en EHPAD ; les humains ne sont pas forcément plus créatifs que les machines ; les pertes, les oublis, les répétitions, les incohérences ou les hallucinations ne sont pas (seulement) des défauts, mais des éléments constitutifs de leurs langages respectifs. Et c’est justement parce (...) que l’humain et la machine sont incomplets que du lien peut se faire, entre eux comme avec d’autres dimensions de leurs environnements communs. (shrink)

This book is for people who are interested in nondual spiritual awakening. It can help people make sense of the various, conflicting theories about nonduality that are currently available to the spiritual seeker and it provides effective practices for recognizing, embodying and stabilizing in nondual realization in one's daily life.

First published in 1998. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.