“Racism” is the name given to a type of behavior which consists in the display of contempt or aggressiveness toward other people on account of physical differences between them and oneself. It should be noted that this definition does not contain the word “race,” and this observation leads us to the first surprise in this area which contains many: whereas racism is a well-attested social phenomenon, “race” itself does not exist! Or, to put it more clearly: there are a great (...) number of physical differences among human groups, but these differences cannot be superimposed; we obtain completely divergent subdivisions of the human species according to whether we base our description of the “races” on an analysis of their epidermis or their blood types, their genetic heritages or their bone structures. For contemporary biology, the concept of “race” is therefore useless. This fact has no influence, however, on racist behavior: to justify their contempt or aggressiveness, racists invoke not scientific analyses but the most superficial and striking of physical characteristics —namely, differences in skin color, pilosity, and body structure.Thus, it is with good cause that the word “race” was placed in quotes in the title of this issue: “races” do not exist. I am less sure, however, that all the contributors managed to avoid postulating the existence, behind this word as behind most words, of a thing. In his introduction Gates remarks that “race, in these usages, pretends to be an objective term of classification, when in fact it is a dangerous trope,” and he goes on to describe as follows the goal of the special issue: “to deconstruct, if you will, the ideas of difference inscribed in the trope of race, to explicate discourse itself in order to reveal the hidden relations of power and knowledge inherent in popular and academic usages of ‘race’ ” . Up to a point, I agree with him, even if I cannot help pointing out the insistent allusions to certain contemporary critical theories —allusions which furnish proof that the author of these lines possesses a particular knowledge and thereby sets up a particular power relationship between himself and the reader. This, however, is not the problem. The problem arises on page 15, when the same author declares, “We must, I believe, analyze the ways in which writing relates to race, how attitudes toward racial differences generate and structure literary texts by us and about us.” What bothers me about this sentence is not so much that “generate” and “structure” allude to yet another critical theory as that its author seems to be reinstating what he himself referred to as the “dangerous trope” of “race”: if “racial differences” do not exist, how can they possibly influence literary texts? Tzvetan Todorov works at the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique in Paris. His most recent book in translation is The Conquest of America . Criticism of Criticism is forthcoming. Loulou Mack is a free-lance writer and translator living in Paris. (shrink)

Arien Mack and Irvin Rock make the radical claim that there is no conscious perception of the visual world without attention to it.

Part I of this essay supports the anti-egalitarian conclusion that individuals may readily become entitled to substantially unequal extra-personal holdings by criticizing end-state and pattern theories of distributive justice and defending the historical entitlement doctrine of justice in holdings. Part II of this essay focuses on a second route to the anti-egalitarian conclusion. This route combines the self-ownership thesis with a contention that is especially advanced by G.A. Cohen. This is the contention that the anti-egalitarian conclusion can be inferred from (...) the self-ownership thesis without the aid of additional controversial premises. Cohen advances this contention, not because he wants to support the anti-egalitarian conclusion, but rather because he wants to emphasize the need for one to reject the self-ownership thesis if one is to reject the anti-egalitarian conclusion. In Part II of this essay, I support this second route to the anti-egalitarian conclusion by reinforcing Cohen's special contention while rejecting his challenges to the self-ownership thesis. Cohen's special contention is reinforced by way of an explanation of why the redistributive state must trench upon some people's self-ownership rights. One important challenge to the self-ownership thesis is answered through the articulation of a new and improved Lockean proviso. Another challenge offered by Cohen is answered by arguing that the philosophical costs of denying the self-ownership thesis are as great as the self-ownership libertarian maintains. Thus, I defend both of the key elements of self-ownership libertarianism, the self-ownership thesis and the anti-egalitarian conclusion. (shrink)

Michal Krumer-Nevo (2020) provides an in-depth overview and practical social work application of the Poverty-Aware Paradigm (PAP). Originating in Israel with Krumer-Nevo at Ben-Gurion University, t...

The present study aims to explore the status of filled pauses as pragmatic markers by taking into account their accompanying visual and gestural behavior. This aspect has not yet been widely explored, and the current study breaks new ground by demonstrating that the analysis of gaze and gesture can shed substantial light on the pragmatic functions of filled pauses and other pausing phenomena. Filled pauses (FPs) serve several pragmatic functions in speech, mainly planning but also turn-holding and emphasis, and their (...) use is also highly determined by register and setting. This research explores the different pragmatic functions of FPs by analyzing their distribution in two different communication settings (conversation vs presentation setting), combining a quantitative and a qualitative methodology, following Kosmala & Crible’s (2021) study on the same data. Particular attention was paid to the co-occurring gestural activity of uh/ums and gaze behavior. Analyses show that the pragmatic functions of FPs are also embodied in kinetic activities which differ according to the setting: more pragmatic and referential ones were found during FPs in conversation than in the presentation setting, as well as more eye-contact, which reflects their potential communicative role during interactional sequences. (shrink)

The study of so-called ‘disfluency’ phenomena (uh and um, filled and unfilled pauses, self-repairs and the like) has gained a lot of attention in various fields in linguistics in the past few decades, but a majority of studies tend to be production-oriented and often disregard fundamental aspects of face-to-face communication such as interactional dynamics and gesture. This paper presents a multimodal and multilevel model of “inter-fluency”, considering different levels of analysis, mainly, talk, gesture, and interaction, by combining different theoretical frameworks (...) and methodologies in gesture studies and interactional linguistics in order to bridge this gap and go beyond previous cognitive-oriented models. (shrink)

ObjectivesThe end of life is an ethically challenging time requiring complex decision-making. This study describes ethical frameworks among physician trainees, explores how these frameworks manifest and relates these frameworks to experiences delivering end-of-life care.DesignWe conducted semistructured in-depth exploratory qualitative interviews with physician trainees about experiences of end-of-life care and moral distress. We analysed the interviews using thematic analysis.SettingAcademic teaching hospitals in the United States and United Kingdom.ParticipantsWe interviewed 30 physician trainees. We purposefully sampled across three domains we expected to be (...) associated with individual ethics in order to elicit a diversity of ethical and experiential perspectives.ResultsSome trainees subscribed to a best interest ethical framework, characterised by offering recommendations consistent with the patient’s goals and values, presenting only medically appropriate choices and supporting shared decision-making between the patient/family and medical team. Others endorsed an autonomy framework, characterised by presenting all technologically feasible choices, refraining from offering recommendations and prioritising the voice of patient/family as the decision-maker.ConclusionsThis study describes how physician trainees conceptualise their roles as being rooted in an autonomy or best interest framework. Physician trainees have limited clinical experience and decision-making autonomy and may have ethical frameworks that are dynamic and potentially highly influenced by experiences providing end-of-life care. A better understanding of how individual physicians’ ethical frameworks influences the care they give provides opportunities to improve patient communication and advance the role of shared decision-making to ensure goal-aligned end-of-life care. (shrink)

Fodor and Lepore, in their recent book "Holism," maintain that if an inference from semantic anatomism to semantic holism is allowed, certain fairly deleterious consequences follow. In Section 1 Fodor and Lepore's terminology is construed and amended where necessary with the result that the aforementioned deleterious consequences are neither so apparent nor straightforward as they had suggested. In Section 2 their "Argument A" is considered in some detail. In Section 3 their "argument attributed to Quine" is examined at length and (...) a shorter and more perspicacious argument suggested which avoids their charge that the Quinean argument is guilty of an equivocation on the word 'statement'. (shrink)

This essay contrasts two approaches to permissible self-defensive killing. The first is the forfeiture approach; the second is the elbow room for self-defense approach. The forfeiture approach comes in many versions — not all of which make prominent use of the word “forfeiture.” However, all versions presume that the permissibility of X killing Y (when X must kill Y in order to prevent herself from being unjustly killed) depends entirely on there being some feature of Y in virtue of which (...) Y has become liable to be killed, that is, in virtue of which Y has forfeited or lost or been stripped of his right not to be killed. Different versions of the forfeiture approach advance different claims about what feature of Y will render Y liable to being killed by X. I criticize versions of this approach offered by Thomson, Otsuka, and McMahan and argue that the shared deep error is the presumption that the permissibility of X’s action turns entirely on some feature of Y. In focusing entirely on Y, the forfeiture approach fails to take seriously X’s right of self-defense. In contrast, the elbow room for self-defense approach starts with an explication of a plausible right of self-defense and maintains that a proper explication of Y’s right not to be killed must make moral elbow room from X’s exercise of this right. Within the elbow room approach, Y’s liability to being killed is based upon X’s right of self-defense rather than the permissibility of X’s killing Y being based upon Y’s forfeiture. (shrink)

It is held that absolute poverty causes approximately one third of all human deaths, some 18 million annually, and blights billions of lives with hunger and disease. This book develops universalizable norms aimed at tackling absolute poverty and the complex and multilayered problems associated with it.

The two main theses of are: (i) that persons possess an original, non-acquired right not to be precluded from making extra-personal material their own (or from exercising discretionary control over what they have made their own); and (ii) that this right can and does take the form of a right that others abide by the rules of a (justifiable) practice of property which facilitates persons making extra-personal material their own (and exercising discretionary control over what they have made their own). (...) I articulate some of the good reasons we have to affirm persons' possession of an original, non-acquired right of self-ownership and argue that the same good reasons support the ascription to persons of a natural right of property. I contrast an conception of the actions through which (initial) rights over extra-personal objects arise with a conception of (initial) entitlement-generating actions. I argue that the fact that the natural right to property can and does take the form of persons' rights that others abide by the rules of a (justifiable) practice of property explains how there are many instances of (initial) entitlement generation which are not plausibly explained by those wed to the inherent feature conception of entitlement-generating actions and why there is a strong conventional dimension in the procedures through which persons acquire (initial) property rights. (shrink)

In this book, leading expert Eric Mack provides a rigorous and clear account of the philosophical principles of libertarianism. This book will be essential reading for anyone interested in political philosophy, political ideologies and the nature of liberty and state authority, from students and scholars to general readers.

In this essay I propose to explicate and defend a new and improved version of a Lockean proviso—the self-ownership proviso . I shall presume here that individuals possess robust rights of self-ownership. I shall take it that each individual has strong moral claims over the elements which constitute her person, e.g., her body parts, her talents, and her energies. However, in the course of the essay, I shall be challenging what I take to be the standard conception of self-ownership and (...) proposing an enrichment of that conception. The SOP is presented and in part justified as an implication of the right of self-ownership as it is more richly conceived—hence its designation as the self-ownership proviso. As an implication of the right of self-ownership which is also compatible, in theory and practice, with extensive and robust private property rights, the SOP is offered as an integral element of classical-liberal political theory. (shrink)

Mack critically surveys a range of arguments characteristic of Randian writings in ethics (including Craig Biddle's Loving Life). He focuses on "the Shuffle," a set of argumentative moves in which there is illicit shifting back and forth between causal and conceptual understandings and defenses of claims of the form: Man's survival requires man's behaving in manner X (e.g., being rational, being productive). Mack concludes that much Randian argumentation is deeply flawed and urges admirers to discriminate between Rand's genuine (...) individualist ethical crusade and her line-by-line argumentation, which includes a much too strict identification of man's good with man's survival. (shrink)

In _German Idealism and the Jew_, Michael Mack uncovers the deep roots of anti-Semitism in the German philosophical tradition. While many have read German anti-Semitism as a reaction against Enlightenment philosophy, Mack instead contends that the redefinition of the Jews as irrational, oriental Others forms the very cornerstone of German idealism, including Kant's conception of universal reason. Offering the first analytical account of the connection between anti-Semitism and philosophy, Mack begins his exploration by showing how the fundamental (...) thinkers in the German idealist tradition—Kant, Hegel, and, through them, Feuerbach and Wagner—argued that the human world should perform and enact the promises held out by a conception of an otherworldly heaven. But their respective philosophies all ran aground on the belief that the worldly proved incapable of transforming itself into this otherworldly ideal. To reconcile this incommensurability, Mack argues, philosophers created a construction of Jews as symbolic of the "worldliness" that hindered the development of a body politic and that served as a foil to Kantian autonomy and rationality. In the second part, Mack examines how Moses Mendelssohn, Heinrich Heine, Franz Rosenzweig, and Freud, among others, grappled with being both German and Jewish. Each thinker accepted the philosophies of Kant and Hegel, in varying degrees, while simultaneously critiquing anti-Semitism in order to develop the modern Jewish notion of what it meant to be enlightened—a concept that differed substantially from that of Kant, Hegel, Feuerbach, and Wagner. By speaking the unspoken in German philosophy, this book profoundly reshapes our understanding of it. (shrink)

This essay critically examines three theories of moral rights, theBenefit, the Interest, and the Choice theories. The Interest andChoice theories attempt to explain how rights can be more robustthan seems possible on the Benefit theory. In particular, moralrights are supposed to be resistant to trade-offs to supportprincipled anti-paternalism, to constitute a distinct dimensionof morality, and to provide right holders with a range ofdiscretionary choice. I argue that these and other featuresare better yet provided by a fourth theory of moral rights, (...) theJurisdiction theory. (shrink)

If individuals possess robust rights over their own persons and legitimately acquired possessions does any action on the part of another person that has any physical effect on the right-holder or her property to which the right-holder has not consented violate those rights? If so, it seems that almost every ordinary exercise of one’s rights—e.g., starting one’s car up in one’s own driveway, emitting some smoke while grilling in one’s own backyard—violate the rights of one’s neighbors. To avoid this conclusion (...) must the libertarian theorist shift to a less robust understanding of rights? This chapter argues against the need for such a general attenuation of rights. Any sensible delineation of rights must leave moral elbow room for the exercise of those rights. So, a sensible delineation of rights will not construe the minor physical intrusions under consideration as moral boundary-crossings. (shrink)

I offer a defense of the moral side-constraints to which Robert Nozick appeals in Anarchy, State and Utopia but for which he fails to provide a sustained justification. I identify a line of anti-consequentialist argumentation which is present in Nozick and which, in the terminology of Samuel Scheffler, moves first to affirm a personal prerogative which allows the individual not to sacrifice herself for the sake of the best overall outcome and second moves on to affirm restrictions (i.e., moral side-constraints) (...) which prohibit the individual from suppressing others' exercise of their personal prerogatives even if that suppression would serve the overall good. I argue that one ought to follow this line of anti-consequentialist argumentation all the way to the affirmation of restrictions by showing that the rationale for the adoption of the personal prerogative is not satisfied unless the accompanying restrictions are adopted as well. Footnotesa A distant ancestor of this essay was written during the spring of 1997 when I was a Visiting Scholar at the Social Philosophy and Policy Center, Bowling Green State University. The draft of the present essay was composed during the tenure of a summer research grant from the Murphy Institute of Political Economy at Tulane University. I am very grateful to both institutions and to Ellen Frankel Paul and Mary Sirridge for their exceedingly helpful editorial advice. (shrink)

This paper offers a programmatic philosophical articulation of moral and political individualism. This individualism consists of two main components: value individualism and rights individualism. The former is the view that, for each individual, the end which is of ultimate value is his own well-being. Each individual's well-being has ultimate agent-relative value and the only ultimate values are these agent-relative values. The latter view is that individuals possess moral jurisdiction over themselves, i.e., rights of self-ownership. These rights (along with other rights (...) individuals may come to possess) constrain the manner in which agents may pursue value. For this reason, the articulated individualism is an constrained individualism. Sketches of arguments are offered for both value and rights individualism. And it is argued that the sole legitimate function of legal/political institutions is to further delineate and protect the rights of individuals. However, the paper is also concerned to indicate why this radical moral and political individualism does not have many of the features or implications that are commonly ascribed to it. In this connection, I seek to show how this social doctrine accords with individuals' having concern for the well-being of others, with the emergence of relationships among individuals that have both instrumental and non-instrumental value, with a degree of responsibility for self and others that is often thought to be antithetical to individualism and, in general, with a flourishing of civil order. (shrink)

Rights-oriented libertarian theory asserts the existence of robust individual rights - including robust rights of property. If these property rights are absolute, then it seems that all taxation is theft. However, it also seems that, if an individual is (faultlessly) in dire straits, it is permissible for him to seize or trespass in order to escape from those straits. It does seem that in this sense property rights are non-absolute. This essay examines what contribution this non-absoluteness of rights makes to (...) the justification of taxation for the sake of rescuing individuals from their dire straits. The essay investigates how dire an individual's circumstances have to be for him to have a dispensation from the normal obligation to respect property. It distinguishes among different dispensations that individuals in dire enough circumstances may have. And it emphasizes how precarious is the path from the premise that sometimes individuals possess one or another of these dispensations to the conclusion that taxation to rescue people from dire straits is justified. Footnotesa I thank Ellen Paul, the other contributors to this volume, and Mary Sirridge for their helpful comments. (shrink)

Eine Christliche Theorie der Gerechtigkeit ist eine pluralismusfahige christliche Gerechtigkeitsethik mit globaler Reichweite. Angesichts zahlloser globaler Probleme wie die extreme Armut von fast einer Milliarde Menschen ist fur die christliche Ethik ein Paradigmenwechsel zu einer konsensorientierten Ethik der Gerechtigkeit notwendig.

My goal in this essay is to say something helpful about the philosophical foundations of deontic restraints, i.e., moral restraints on actions that are, roughly speaking, grounded in the wrongful character of the actions themselves and not merely in the disvalue of their results. An account of deontic restraints will be formulated and offered against the backdrop of three related, but broader, contrasts or puzzles within moral theory. The plausibility of this account of deontic restraints rests in part on how (...) well this account resolves the puzzles or illuminates the contrasts which make up this theoretical backdrop. (shrink)

In a series of three experiments, we explored the nature of implicit representations in change blindness . Using 3 × 3 letter arrays, we asked subjects to locate changes in paired arrays separated by 80 ms ISIs, in which one, two or three letters of a row in the second array changed. In one testing version, a tone followed the second array, signaling a row for partial report . In the other version, no PR was required. After Ss reported whether (...) a change had been detected and the PR had been completed , they were asked to identify a degraded letter trigram that was either novel, or from a previously shown row . Our findings indicate that when CB occurs, both the pre-change and post-change stimulus information primes despite its unavailability to consciousness. Surprisingly, findings also indicate that when change detection occurs only the post-change information primes. (shrink)

Unter Bezug auf den Exkurs "Die Analogie der individualpsychologischen und der soziologischen Verhältnisse in Georg Simmels großer "Soziologie" gehen der Philosoph Kurt Röttgers und der Psychologe Wolfgang Mack der "Analogie" zwischen ...

Frank Bubb and Tibor Machan raise objections to Mack's "Problematic Arguments in Randian Kthics." Bubb argues that a universalization test allows Rand to condemn every parasitic action—even ones that serve the agent's survival. But this universalization test is faulty; it calls upon individuals to act as would be rational if the world were not as it is. Machan argues that Rand can hold that the fundamental choice between life and death is ungrounded without being a subjectivist. But Machan does (...) not successfully differentiate the putatively ungrounded choice between life and death from other choices that he admits are arbitrary. (shrink)