Marx’s Inferno reconstructs the major arguments of Karl Marx’s Capital and inaugurates a completely new reading of a seminal classic. Rather than simply a critique of classical political economy, William Roberts argues that Capital was primarily a careful engagement with the motives and aims of the workers’ movement. Understood in this light, Capital emerges as a profound work of political theory. Placing Marx against the background of nineteenth-century socialism, Roberts shows how Capital was ingeniously modeled on Dante’s Inferno, and how (...) Marx, playing the role of Virgil for the proletariat, introduced partisans of workers’ emancipation to the secret depths of the modern “social Hell.” In this manner, Marx revised republican ideas of freedom in response to the rise of capitalism. Combining research on Marx’s interlocutors, textual scholarship, and forays into recent debates, Roberts traces the continuities linking Marx’s theory of capitalism to the tradition of republican political thought. He immerses the reader in socialist debates about the nature of commerce, the experience of labor, the power of bosses and managers, and the possibilities of political organization. Roberts rescues those debates from the past, and shows how they speak to ever-renewed concerns about political life in today’s world. (shrink)

There is something amiss about post-Rawlsian efforts to bring political theory down to earth by insisting upon the political primacy of the question of legitimacy, peace, or order. The intuition driving much realism seems to be that we must first agree to get along, and only then can we get down to the business of pursuing justice. I argue that the ideological narratives of the powerful pose a political problem for this primacy of legitimacy thesis. To prioritize the achievement of (...) democratic legitimacy seems to make sense only to the extent that we already live in a world in which systematic domination—and its ideological baggage—has been stamped out. I draw on the social study of domination for the sake of combatting in political theory the temptation to focus on the static design of the constitutional state at the expense of ignoring or even condemning the social processes that motivate legal and constitutional changes. (shrink)

Social scientists have drawn attention to the role of hype and optimistic visions of the future in providing momentum to biomedical innovation projects by encouraging innovation alliances. In this article, we show how less optimistic, uncertain, and modest visions of the future can also provide innovation projects with momentum. Scholars have highlighted the need for clinicians to carefully manage the expectations of their prospective patients. Using the example of a pioneering clinical team providing deep brain stimulation to children and young (...) people with movement disorders, we show how clinicians confront this requirement by drawing on their professional knowledge and clinical expertise to construct visions of the future with their prospective patients; visions which are personalized, modest, and tainted with uncertainty. We refer to this vision-constructing work as recalibration, and we argue that recalibration enables clinicians to manage the tension between the highly optimistic and hyped visions of the future that surround novel biomedical interventions, and the exigencies of delivering those interventions in a clinical setting. Drawing on work from science and technology studies, we suggest that recalibration enrolls patients in an innovation alliance by creating a shared understanding of how the “effectiveness” of an innovation shall be judged. (shrink)

This essay seeks to bring into focus the latent political theory of CLR James’s World Revolution, 1917-1936, and to show, on this basis, how World Revolution explains certain difficult aspects of The Black Jacobins. The core of James’s theory is the thesis that social classes are organically and internally identified, and that each has a preformed and unitary interest, which can be articulated as a set of political principles. A class is called to act by the voice that expresses the (...) class’s interest in the terms of its political principles. Once these points are made clear, several problems regarding the interpretation of The Black Jacobins disappear. First, James’s claim that the slaves of San Domingo were “closer to a modern proletariat than any group of workers in existence at the time” follows from his organic concept of the proletariat. Second, James’s revision of his account of the Haitian Revolution over the decades does not signify a move in the direction of “history from below” but a changed estimation of the conditions under which the mirroring operation he assigned to political leadership might take place. What seems to be James’s inordinate interest in the individual leader, finally, is more properly understood to be his antipathy to institutions and organizations. (shrink)

The ongoing critical redeployment of primitive accumulation proceeds under two premises. First, it is argued that Marx, erroneously, confined primitive accumulation to the earliest history of capit...

When Marx dissected the capitalist economy and intervened in the international workers’ movement, he did so in the service of freeing people from alien, uncontrolled power. His political project was the realisation of what he called the social republic, and his theoretical project was to identify the forces that promote or retard this political project. In order to bring out the specificity and cogency of the social-republican Marx, this essay uproots the positive-freedom reading that has overgrown the edifice of his (...) thought. Marx certainly hoped for ‘real freedom’, which is a sort of self-realisation. He also hoped for a sort of collective self-determination. And he thought that collective self-determination was a prerequisite for general self-realisation. But Marx also thought that generalised freedom from domination was a prerequisite for collective self-determination. (shrink)

This article reviews practitioners’ evaluations of in-hospital ethics seminars. A qualitative study included 11 innovative in-hospital ethics seminars, preceded and followed by interviews with most participants. The settings were obstetric, neonatal and haematology units in a teaching hospital and a district general hospital in England. Fifty-six health service staff in obstetric, neonatal, haematology, and related community and management services participated; 12 attended two seminars, giving a total of 68 attendances and 59 follow-up evaluation interviews. The 11 seminars facilitated by an (...) ethicist addressed the key local concerns of staff about the social and ethical consequences of advances in genetics and their impact on professional policies and practice. Seminar agendas were drawn from prior interviews with 70 staff members. During evaluation interviews, participants commented on general aspects that they had enjoyed, how the sessions could be improved, timing, the mix of participants, the quality of the facilitation, whether sessions should be more challenging, after-effects of sessions, and interest in attending seminars and contacting the ethicist in future. Participants valued the increased interprofessional understanding and coherent discussion of many pressing issues that addressed important though seldom discussed ethical questions. The seminars worked well in the different hospitals and specialties. (shrink)

This paper reports from an ongoing multidisciplinary, ethnographic study that is exploring the views, values and practices (the ethical frameworks) drawn on by professional staff in assisted conception units and stem cell laboratories in relation to embryo donation for research purposes, particularly human embryonic stem cell (hESC) research, in the UK. We focus here on the connection between possible incidental findings and the circumstances in which embryos are donated for hESC research, and report some of the uncertainties and dilemmas of (...) our staff participants. We explore the views of our study participants in relation to two themes: (1) rights to information and anticipating how donors might be informed about future research findings and (2) occupational work goals and trust. (shrink)

In this article we focus upon the embodiment of vulnerability as an area in which medicine, society and the humanities can be profitably conjoined. We illustrate our argument with two interrelated case studies of narratives of the embodiment of ageing and longevity. First, we draw upon Leoš Janáček’s opera The Makropulos Case (1926) as a locus for debates about human longevity. Second, we discuss 70-year-old Janáček’s decade of unrequited love for a woman 37 years younger than himself, through an examination (...) of their intimate letters. We suggest that both the opera and elements of Janáček’s biography illuminate the passionate emotions that are often hidden behind ‘the mask of ageing’. Finally, we propose that a focus on the embodiment of vulnerability is a productive catalyst for research on narratives of ageing. (shrink)

In 2013 the Nuffield Council on Bioethics launched their report Novel Neurotechnologies: Intervening in the Brain. The report, which adopts the European Commission’s notion of Responsible Research and Innovation, puts forward a set of priorities to guide ethical research into, and the development of, new therapeutic neurotechnologies. In this paper, we critically engage with these priorities. We argue that the Nuffield Council’s priorities, and the Responsible Research and Innovation initiative as a whole, are laudable and should guide research and innovation (...) in all areas of healthcare. However, we argue that operationalising Responsible Research and Innovation requires an in-depth understanding of the research and clinical contexts. Providing such an understanding is an important task for empirical ethics. Drawing on examples from sociology, science and technology studies, and related disciplines, we propose four avenues of social science research which can provide such an understanding. We suggest that these avenues can provide a manifesto for empirical ethics. (shrink)

In this paper we set out to explore the enactments of risk by clinicians involved in the development of stem cell therapy for liver disease. In the process, we contribute to a performative re-thinking of how ‘risk’ can be analytically treated in relation to health. The bulk of the paper, drawing on interview data, is concerned with how clinicians’ accounts about the risks entailed in their research-oriented work performatively ‘make’ clinicians themselves, but also various other ‘constituencies’ – notably, publics and (...) regulatory actors, and also such diverse ‘entities’ as scientific rigour and ethics. We trace the ways in which they enact the complexities of taking risks in the context of public demands, regulatory constraints, and resource limitation and explore how clinicians tend to represent themselves as caught between the ‘rock of courage’ and the ‘hard place of caution’. (shrink)

This paper aims to make an empirically informed analytical contribution to the development of a more socially embedded bioethics. Drawing upon 10 interviews with cutting edge stem cell researchers (5 scientists and 5 clinicians) it explores and illustrates the ways in which the role positions of translational researchers are shaped by the ‘normative structures’ of science and medicine respectively and in combination. The empirical data is used to illuminate three overlapping themes of ethical relevance: what matters in stem cell research, (...) experimental treatment, and responsible claim making (as contrasted with ‘hype’. Finally, we suggest that this kind of ‘descriptive’ ethical analysis has potential relevance for understanding other substantive areas of stem cell ethics in practice, and we briefly consider the questions our analysis raises about role positions and ethical agency, and the implications for bioethics as a field of scholarship. (shrink)

In this paper, we present the first stage of an empirical bioethics project exploring the moral sources of paternal responsibilities and rights. In doing so, we present both (1) data on men's normative constructions of fatherhood and (2) the first of a two-stage methodological approach to empirical bioethics. Using data gathered from 12 focus groups run with UK men who have had a variety of different fathering experiences (n = 50), we examine men's perspectives on how paternal responsibilities and rights (...) are generated and the significance of the genetic connection within the father–child relationship. We do not attempt to explore men's experiences of fatherhood or their fathering practices; and neither is the analysis driven from a particular sociological perspective. Rather, we explore men's normative constructions of fatherhood in order to present accessible data that might be of significance to the philosophical/moral debate on the sources of paternal rights and responsibilities. (shrink)

William Barnes' reputation as one of the pre-eminent British "dialect" poets, the equal of Robert Burns and John Clare, is being increasingly recognized. The range of his writings is extraordinary as evidenced by the contents of this collection, which includes works on etymology, philology, topography, mathematics, ancient history and economics. This collection displays the full diversity of Barnes' considerable intellect. Included are major and lesser-known works, biographical pieces by Thomas Hardy, and the biography by his daughter, Lucy Baxter.

In this paper we contribute to “sociology in bioethics” and help clarify the range of ways sociological work can contribute to ethics scholarship. We do this using a case study of an innovative neurotechnology, functional magnetic resonance imaging, and its use to attempt to diagnose and communicate with severely brain-injured patients. We compare empirical data from interviews with relatives of patients who have a severe brain injury with perspectives from mainstream bioethics scholars. We use the notion of an “ethical landscape” (...) as an analogy for the different ethical positions subjects can take—whereby a person’s position relative to the landscape makes a difference to the way they experience and interact with it. We show that, in comparison to studying abstract ethics “from above” the ethical landscape, which involves universal generalizations and global judgements, studying ethics empirically “from the ground,” within the ethical landscape foregrounds a more plural and differentiated picture. We argue it is important not to treat empirical ethics as secondary to abstract ethics, to treat on-the-ground perspectives as useful only insofar as they can inform ethics from above. Rather, empirical perspectives can illuminate the plural vantage points in ethical judgments, highlight the “lived” nature of ethical reasoning, and point to all ethical vantage points as being significant. This is of epistemic importance to normative ethics, since researchers who pay attention to the various positions in and trajectories through the ethical landscape are unlikely to think about ethics in terms of abstract agency—as can happen with top-down ethics—or to elide agency with the agency of policymakers. Moreover, empirical perspectives may have transformative implications for people on the ground, especially where focus on the potential harms and benefits they face brings their experiences and interests to the forefront of ethical and policy discussion. (shrink)

In this paper, I explore a noted empirical link between regret and insomnia. Drawing on Brian O’Shaughnessy analysis of wakeful consciousness, I sketch three candidate ways of excavating a conceptual connection. Regret involves a certain kind of temporal orientation that, for O’Shaughnessy, only the state of wakefulness makes possible. Regret involves mental activity – it is productive of and precipitates patterns of counterfactual thought and imagining. Further, picking up a cue from Bernard Williams’ celebrated conception of agent-regret in ‘Moral (...) Luck’, sometimes the mental activity that occurs in regret is affective and expressive – as I argue, it is expressive of the wish that things were otherwise were satisfied now. Finally, I take up the puzzle as to why occurrent regret is not merely incompatible with sleep – insofar as it necessitates wakefulness - but may preclude falling asleep and I offer a tentative solution, focusing on the self-conscious character of occurrent regret. (shrink)

Commentator: Mark Purvis Commentator: Sheena McMain Commentator: Clare Connolly Commentator: Maggie Eisner Commentator: Shirley Brierley Commentator: Becky Ship.

Former Google advertising strategist, now Oxford-trained philosopher James Williams launches a plea to society and to the tech industry to help ensure that the technology we all carry with us every day does not distract us from pursuing our true goals in life. As information becomes ever more plentiful, the resource that is becoming more scarce is our attention. In this 'attention economy', we need to recognise the fundamental impacts of our new information environment on our lives in order (...) to take back control. Drawing on insights ranging from Diogenes to contemporary tech leaders, Williams's thoughtful and impassioned analysis is sure to provoke discussion and debate. Williams is the inaugural winner of the Nine Dots Prize, a new Prize for creative thinking that tackles contemporary social issues. This title is also available as Open Access. (shrink)

Inspired by the work of Wilfrid Sellars, Michael Williams launches an all-out attack on what he calls "phenomenalism," the idea that our knowledge of the world rests on a perceptual or experiential foundation.

Marilyn Adams rightly pointed out that there are many kinds of evil, some of which are horrendous. I claim that one species of horrendous evil is what I call horrendous-difference disabilities. I distinguish two subspecies of horrendous-difference disabilities based in part on the temporal relation between one’s rational moral wishing for a certain human function F and its being thwarted by intrinsic and extrinsic conditions. Next, I offer a theodicy for each subspecies of horrendous-difference disability. Although I appeal to some (...) claims made by Marilyn Adams for this theodicy, I reject one particular claim. I deny that one must be aware that one participates in a horrendous evil when the horrific event occurs. To develop this point and its relevance for a theodicy for horrendous-difference disabilities, I engage with Andrew Chignell’s work on infant suffering. In doing so, I show that what partly motivates the claim is a time-bias, i.e., near-bias. By rejecting this time-bias, I show how it is possible, given post-mortem life, for persons with profound cognitive disabilities to participate in horrendous evils and how these might be defeated by God. (shrink)

This volume brings together Paul Williams's previously published papers on the Indian and Tibetan interpretations of selected verses from the eighth and ninth chapters of the Bodhicaryavatara. In addition, there is a much longer version of the paper 'Identifying the Object of Negation', and nearly half the book consists of a wholly new essay, 'The Absence of Self and the Removal of Pain', subtitled 'How Santideva Destroyed the Bodhisattva Path'. This book will be of interest to those concerned with (...) the history and interpretation of Indian and Tibetan philosophy. (shrink)

Why do well‐functioning psychological systems sometimes give rise to absurd beliefs that are radically misaligned with reality? Drawing on signalling theory, I develop and explore the hypothesis that groups often embrace beliefs that are viewed as absurd by outsiders as a means of signalling ingroup commitment. I clarify the game‐theoretic and psychological underpinnings of this hypothesis, I contrast it with similar proposals about the signalling functions of beliefs, and I motivate several psychological and sociological predictions that could be used to (...) distinguish it from alternative explanations of irrational group beliefs. (shrink)

The term “medium independence” has different meanings. One sense maps onto “abstract-as-abstracta” descriptions while the other maps onto “abstract-as-omission” descriptions. Both senses have been deployed when it comes to understanding the nature of physical computation. However, because medium independence is a polysemic term, the sense being used should be clearly stated. If the sense is not clearly stated, then those who wish to engage in debates regarding medium independence and physical computation run the risk of conflating different but related issues (...) which can have consequences when it comes to thinking about physical computation across contexts. (shrink)

This introduction to the review symposium on Ryan Patrick Hanley’s works on the relatively neglected early modern philosopher François Fénelon (1651–1715) provides a brief overview of the symposium itself before turning to Hanley’s treatment of Fénelon’s work on the intersection of politics and religion, culminating in a comparison of Fénelon with his most celebrated admirer, Jean-Jacques Rousseau. The article sketches how both francophone thinkers employ conceptions of divine justice as a measure to counter the dangers of amour-propre, contrasting Fénelon’s thick (...) theology with Rousseau’s thin theology. (shrink)

There is something obscure about the nature of toleration, at least when it is regarded as an attitude or a personal principle. Indeed, the problem about the nature of toleration is severe enough for us to raise the question whether, in a strict sense, it is possible at all. Perhaps, rather, it contains some contradiction or paradox which means that practices of toleration, when they exist, must rest on something other than the attitude of toleration as that has been classically (...) described by liberal theory. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Hannah Arendt and Theology by John KiessGregory WilliamsHannah Arendt and Theology John Kiess NEW YORK: BLOOMSBURY T&T CLARK, 2016. XI 1 249 PP. $21.99Of the great secular Jewish thinkers of the mid-twentieth century, none has occasioned quite so much recent attention among Christian theologians as Hannah Arendt. Arendt's popularity is due to a number of factors, not least of which is the ongoing revival of Augustine's thought in (...) political theology, and it is unlikely to subside any time soon. This is why John Kiess's most recent volume, Hannah Arendt and Theology, is of importance to the field of Christian ethics.After providing an intellectual biography of Arendt, the bulk of Kiess's text is devoted to the key loci that theological authors have highlighted in her work, [End Page 210] specifically her concepts of evil, citizenship, action, and thinking. In writing about each of these, Kiess articulates the ways in which theologians have underestimated Arendt. For example, in defending Arendt vis-à-vis Eric Gregory, Kiess argues that "Arendt points to a kind of love that Augustine appears to have overlooked, one which, if falling short of the love of God and neighbor, reaches higher than the love of self to the good of what is common to all" (121).At the same time, Kiess also points out the places where Arendt underestimates Christian theology. Possibly his biggest critique is that, in arguing that the evils of totalitarianism not only transcend but completely "break" traditional definitions of evil, Arendt assumes tradition to be a static article passed on intact from one generation to the next. Against this view, Kiess holds up Alasdair MacIntyre's definition of a tradition as an ongoing argument and shows how Arendt's efforts actually demonstrate the way traditions operate dynamically in contexts of ongoing crisis.Both of these examples also point to broader metaethical questions. In particular, Kiess's statement that Augustine "overlooked" the existence of a nonsalvific love that still rises above the level of the lust for domination that constitutes the telos of the earthly city, or even the love of human glory that gives rise to its greatest virtues, seems to elide the fact that neither Augustine nor his contemporary interpreters have simply forgotten about such a possibility; rather, a chief insight of Augustinian political thought is to deny it. This is precisely why Augustine, as Kiess notes, "longed for a more transformative founding" than Arendt does in her stress on human natality (178). Kiess, it seems, wants to have it both ways on this point. Either the loves of the earthly city can amount to something more than an ethics domination or glory, in which case Augustine's doubts about the founding of political entities based on those loves is overly pessimistic, or the loves and the goods of the earthly and heavenly cities are incommensurable, in which case Arendt's amor mundi, however noble its outcomes, is not immune to the degradations of the earthly city as a whole and must be regarded as one more penultimate earthly virtue.This brings us back to the question of tradition. For all his emphasis on how Arendt exemplifies the dynamism and responsiveness of traditions, Kiess never actually specifies to which tradition Arendt belonged. To put it bluntly, he does not treat it as relevant that Arendt was not a Christian. While she is an extensive and extremely helpful commentator on the Christian theological tradition, she wrote as a critic and an outsider. We can expect certain basic differences between Arendt and her Christian interlocutors to remain irresolvable because that is the nature of interreligious difference. That does not mean, however, that dialogue is not fruitful, and it is because of this that Kiess's text is, and is likely to remain, extremely generative. [End Page 211]Gregory WilliamsDuke UniversityCopyright © 2017 Society of Christian Ethics... (shrink)