Argues that the War on Drugs and policies that deny convicted felons equal access to employment, housing, education and public benefits create a permanent under-caste based largely on race. Reprint. 12,500 first printing.

In recent years, counterfeiting has grown exponentially and has now become a grave economic problem. The acquisition of counterfeits poses an ethical dilemma as it benefits the buyer and illegal seller at the cost of the legitimate producer and with fewer taxes being paid throughout the supply chain. Previous research reveals inconsistent and sometimes inconclusive findings regarding whether materialism is associated, positively or negatively, with intentions to purchase counterfeits. The current research seeks to resolve these inconsistencies by investigating previously ignored (...) interactions between three variables: risk of embarrassment, counterfeit detectability and product conspicuousness. First, risk of embarrassment mediates the relationship between materialism and counterfeit purchase intentions. Specifically, materialism negatively predicts counterfeit purchase intentions as mediated by risk of embarrassment. Second, this relationship only holds when the counterfeit can be easily detected. When it is not easily detected, materialism instead leads to positive purchase intentions. Third, these positive effects can be offset when the product is not highly visible. This research has important implications for marketers, manufacturers and academics and contributes to better understanding the antecedents of counterfeit purchases. (shrink)

The future of work is forcing the world to adjust to a new paradigm of working. New skills will be required to create and adopt new technology and working methods. Additionally, cognitive skills, particularly creative problem-solving, will be highly sought after. The future of work paradigm has threatened many occupations but bolstered others such as engineering. Engineers must keep up to date with the technological and cognitive demands brought on by the future of work. Using an exploratory mixed-methods approach, our (...) study sought to make sense of how engineers understand and use creative problem solving. We found significant associations between engineers’ implicit knowledge of creativity, exemplified creative problem solving, and the perceived value of creativity. We considered that the work environment is a potential facilitator of creative problem-solving. We used an innovative exceptional cases analysis and found that the highest functioning engineers in terms of knowledge, skills, and perceived value of creativity, also reported working in places that facilitate psychosocially safe environments to support creativity. We propose a new theoretical framework for a creative environment by integrating the Four Ps and psychosocial safety climate theory that management could apply to facilitate creative problem solving. Through the acquisition of knowledge to engage in creative problem solving as individuals or a team, a perception of value must be present to enforce the benefit of creativity to the engineering role. The future of work paradigm requires that organisations provide an environment, a psychosocially safe climate, for engineers to grow and hone their sought-after skills that artificial technologies cannot currently replace. (shrink)

Institutional and individual stigmatization represent major barriers that prevent children with disabilities from accessing education. It can be presumed that children with disabilities are labeled as such even in inclusive educational settings and that teachers’ attitudes toward inclusive education and children with disabilities play a crucial role in this context. Against this background, the present study aims to apply and conceptualize the mixed-blessings model in the context of stigma-related reactions to children’s disability labels in inclusive education and shed light on (...) the causal attributions of teachers that underlie stigma-related attitudes toward children with various disabilities. A 3 × 2 × 2 × 2 × 2 online experiment examined the ways in which disability-specific causes and symptoms, the type of disability in question, the children’s sex, and efficacy cues regarding educational efforts affect future teachers’ attitudes toward and expectations of inclusive education as well as their social distance toward children with disabilities. The participants in this experiment were N = 605 German student and trainee teachers representing different types of teaching professions. A multivariate analysis of variance revealed that, in particular, the cause attributed to the disability, the depicted type of disability and the probability of learning success led to changes in attitudes. Respondents’ teaching self-efficacy and their status as students or trainees emerged as moderators of the effect of pupils’ type of disability. As a result, teacher education and training as well as communication regarding pupils with disabilities require a high degree of sensitivity to disability-specific and efficacy-related cues to prevent professional or institutional stigmatization. (shrink)

Objective Adolescents have had very limited access to research on biomedical prevention interventions despite high rates of HIV acquisition. One concern is that adolescents are a vulnerable population, and trials carry a possibility of harm, requiring investigators to take additional precautions. Of particular concern is preventive misconception, or the overestimation of personal protection that is afforded by enrolment in a prevention intervention trial. Methods As part of a larger study of preventive misconception in adolescent HIV vaccine trials, we interviewed 33 (...) male and female 16–19-year-olds who have sex with men. Participants underwent a simulated HIV vaccine trial consent process, and then completed a semistructured interview about their understanding and opinions related to enrolment in a HIV vaccine trial. A grounded theory analysis looked for shared concepts, and focused on the content and process of adolescent participants’ understanding of HIV vaccination and the components of preventive misconception, including experiment, placebo and randomisation. Results Across interviews, adolescents demonstrated active processing of information, in which they questioned the interviewer, verbally worked out their answers based upon information provided, and corrected themselves. We observed a wide variety of understanding of research concepts. While most understood experiment and placebo, fewer understood randomisation. All understood the need for safer sex even if they did not understand the more basic concepts. Conclusions Education about basic concepts related to clinical trials, time to absorb materials and assessment of understanding may be necessary in future biomedical prevention trials. (shrink)

At the beginning of 2020, COVID-19 became a global problem. Despite all the efforts to emphasize the relevance of preventive measures, not everyone adhered to them. Thus, learning more about the characteristics determining attitudinal and behavioral responses to the pandemic is crucial to improving future interventions. In this study, we applied machine learning on the multi-national data collected by the International Collaboration on the Social and Moral Psychology of COVID-19 (N = 51,404) to test the predictive efficacy of constructs from (...) social, moral, cognitive, and personality psychology, as well as socio-demographic factors, in the attitudinal and behavioral responses to the pandemic. The results point to several valuable insights. Internalized moral identity provided the most consistent predictive contribution—individuals perceiving moral traits as central to their self-concept reported higher adherence to preventive measures. Similar was found for morality as cooperation, symbolized moral identity, self-control, open-mindedness, collective narcissism, while the inverse relationship was evident for the endorsement of conspiracy theories. However, we also found a non-negligible variability in the explained variance and predictive contributions with respect to macro-level factors such as the pandemic stage or cultural region. Overall, the results underscore the importance of morality-related and contextual factors in understanding adherence to public health recommendations during the pandemic. (shrink)

Given its non-invasive nature, there is increasing interest in the use of transcutaneous vagus nerve stimulation across basic, translational and clinical research. Contemporaneously, tVNS can be achieved by stimulating either the auricular branch or the cervical bundle of the vagus nerve, referred to as transcutaneous auricular vagus nerve stimulation and transcutaneous cervical VNS, respectively. In order to advance the field in a systematic manner, studies using these technologies need to adequately report sufficient methodological detail to enable comparison of results between (...) studies, replication of studies, as well as enhancing study participant safety. We systematically reviewed the existing tVNS literature to evaluate current reporting practices. Based on this review, and consensus among participating authors, we propose a set of minimal reporting items to guide future tVNS studies. The suggested items address specific technical aspects of the device and stimulation parameters. We also cover general recommendations including inclusion and exclusion criteria for participants, outcome parameters and the detailed reporting of side effects. Furthermore, we review strategies used to identify the optimal stimulation parameters for a given research setting and summarize ongoing developments in animal research with potential implications for the application of tVNS in humans. Finally, we discuss the potential of tVNS in future research as well as the associated challenges across several disciplines in research and clinical practice. (shrink)

The Repugnant Conclusion served an important purpose in catalyzing and inspiring the pioneering stage of population ethics research. We believe, however, that the Repugnant Conclusion now receives too much focus. Avoiding the Repugnant Conclusion should no longer be the central goal driving population ethics research, despite its importance to the fundamental accomplishments of the existing literature.

Advanced biopreservation technologies using subzero approaches such as supercooling, partial freezing, and vitrification with reanimating techniques including nanoparticle infusion and laser rewarming are rapidly emerging as technologies with potential to radically disrupt biomedicine, research, aquaculture, and conservation. These technologies could pause biological time and facilitate large-scale banking of biomedical products including organs, tissues, and cell therapies.

Research on advanced biopreservation — technologies that include, for example, partial freezing, supercooling, and vitrification with nanoparticle infusion and laser rewarming — is proceeding at a rapid pace, potentially affecting many areas of medicine and the life sciences, food, agriculture, and environmental conservation. Given the breadth and depth of its medical, scientific, and corresponding social impacts, advanced biopreservation is poised to emerge as a disruptive technology with real benefits, but also ethical challenges and risks. Early engagement with potentially affected groups (...) can help navigate possible societal barriers to adoption of this new technology and help ensure that emerging capabilities align with the needs, desires, and expectations of a broad range of interested parties. (shrink)

Individuals with Down syndrome (DS) are widely believed to possess considerable socialization strengths. However, the findings on social cognition capabilities are controversial. In the present study, we investigated whether individuals with DS exhibit shortage in face tuning, one of the indispensable components of social cognition. For this purpose, we implemented a recently developed Face-n-Food paradigm with food-plate images composed of food ingredients such as fruits and vegetables. The key benefit of such ‘face like non-face’ images is that single elements do (...) not facilitate face processing. In a spontaneous recognition task, 25 children with DS aged 9 to 18 years were presented with a set of Face-n-Food images bordering on the Giuseppe Arcimboldo style. The set of images was administered in a predetermined order from the least to most resembling a face. In DS individuals, thresholds for recognition of the Face-n-Food images as a face were drastically higher as compared not only with typically developing controls, but also with individuals with autistic spectrum disorders and Williams-Beuren syndrome. This outcome represents a significant step towards better conceptualization of visual social world in DS and neurodevelopmental disorders in general. (shrink)

Digital Earth applications provide a common ground for visualizing, simulating, and modeling real-world situations. The potential of Digital Earth applications has increased significantly with the evolution of artificial intelligence systems and the capacity to collect and process complex amounts of geospatial data. Yet, the widespread techno-optimism at the root of Digital Earth must now confront concerns over high-risk artificial intelligence systems and power asymmetries of a datafied society. In this commentary, we claim that not only can current debates about data (...) governance and ethical artificial intelligence inform development in the field of Digital Earth, but that the specificities of geospatial data, together with the expectations surrounding Digital Earth applications, offer a fruitful lens through which to examine current debates on data governance and artificial intelligence ethics. In particular, we argue that for the implementation of ethical artificial intelligence and inclusive approaches to data governance, Digital Earth initiatives need to involve stakeholders and communities at the local level and be sensitive to social, legal, cultural, and institutional contexts, including conflicts that might arise within those contexts. (shrink)

An increasing number of financial services (FS) companies are adopting solutions driven by artificial intelligence (AI) to gain operational efficiencies, derive strategic insights, and improve customer engagement. However, the rate of adoption has been low, in part due to the apprehension around its complexity and self-learning capability, which makes auditability a challenge in a highly regulated industry. There is limited literature on how FS companies can implement the governance and controls specific to AI-driven solutions. AI auditing cannot be performed in (...) a vacuum; the risks are not confined to the algorithm itself, but rather permeates the entire organization. Using the risk of unfairness as an example, this paper will introduce the overarching governance strategy and control framework to address the practical challenges in mitigating risks AI introduces. With regulatory implications and industry use cases, this framework will enable leaders to innovate with confidence. (shrink)

Silence and madness can be likened to irritating cousins. Both introduce questionable or negative elements to the ideals of dialogue and rational communication. Silence can disturb and disrupt the rational pursuit of truth, while madness can noisily provoke a mockery of any meaningful or reciprocal exchange of ideas and thoughts. In the work and life of philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, silence and madness highlight more positive features.To study and articulate these features, this paper relies on the central themes of two prominent (...) thinkers, the archaeological and genealogical studies from the late Michel Foucault and the revived forces of phenomenology from American philosopher Alphonso Lingis, to present the case that Nietzsche embraced a late 19th century disorder called the fugue. This disorder, what Ian Hacking calls a transient mental illness, involves nomadic life. Nietzsche exemplified such a life. His writings and experiences comprise a mixture of travels, arts of the self, willful forgetfulness, and a philosophical play with madness. From conventional perspectives, this play is viewed as irrelevant or detrimental to Nietzsche's philosophical importance. From Nietzsche's own perspective, however, this play might be appreciated as a gift from the insights of madness and the enriching contacts with silence. (shrink)

The notion of biopolitical sovereignty and the theory of the state of exception are perspectives derived from Carl Schmitt’s thought and Michel Foucault’s writings that have been popularized by critical political theorists like Giorgio Agamben and Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri of late. This article argues that these perspectives are not sufficient analytical points of departure for a critique of the contemporary politics of terror, violence and war marked by a growing global exploitation of bodies, tightened management of life, and (...) endless and unpredictable abusive force. To better capture the singularity of our present condition of violence, war and terror, a supplementation of Schmitt’s and Foucault’s approaches by way of Hannah Arendt’s language of political action and agonistic engagement is useful. By bringing Arendt’s language of political agony to bear on contemporary biopolitical debates and discourses, we wish to revisit common practices of war and terror as matters of ‘agonal sovereignty’. ‘Agonal sovereignty’ allows us to peer into the ‘abyss of total violence’ that manifests itself after sovereign decisionism and biopolitical modalities of power have taken over the everyday conduct of political affairs. (shrink)

Michel Foucault was one of the 20th century’s great practitioners of study. Time in the archives and library, teaching, reading, thinking, and writing were all integrated aspects of his tireless la...

Michel de Montaigne inherited a copy of Lucretius’ De rerum natura from his bosom friend, Etienne de La Boétie. He read it carefully and annotated it with pleasure. A comparative study of the successive editions of the Essais reveals the continuous presence of this didactic poem composed by the most famous of all epicureans. The humanist-philosopher shares with Lucretius and Augustine a critical perspective on the capacities men attribute to themselves. Montaigne uses not only this epicurean poem against Augustine – (...) the gods do not care about the fortune of men –, he pushes the argument even further alleging that men, and thus Lucretius, are far too insignificant to understand the gods and the universe. The young Montaigne was mostly above all fascinated by the moral strength of the stoics. As he became older he questionned the legitimacy of their philosophical conceptions. But their spiritual exercices helped him, even in it his older years, to cope with human dereliction. (shrink)

The concept of biopolitics was first outlined by Michel Foucault (2003, 2007, 2009) in his lectures at the Collège de France in the late 1970s in order to name and analyze emergent logics of power...

Modern sovereignty is anthropocentric, constituted and organized by reference to human beings alone. Although a metaphysical assumption, anthropocentrism is of immense practical import, enabling modern states to command loyalty and resources from their subjects in pursuit of political projects. It has limits, however, which are brought clearly into view by the authoritative taboo on taking UFOs seriously. UFOs have never been systematically investigated by science or the state, because it is assumed to be known that none are extraterrestrial. Yet in (...) fact this is not known, which makes the UFO taboo puzzling given the ET possibility. Drawing on the work of Giorgio Agamben, Michel Foucault, and Jacques Derrida, the puzzle is explained by the functional imperatives of anthropocentric sovereignty, which cannot decide a UFO exception to anthropocentrism while preserving the ability to make such a decision. The UFO can be "known" only by not asking what it is. (shrink)

AbstractCorruption is one of the most intractable problems that the world is faced with and its reported impact is widespread and pervasive. Since the mid-1990s, international efforts to combat this problem expanded significantly, driven by the involvement governments, international financial institutions and non-governmental organisations. The objective of this article is to use Michel Foucault’s work in a critical analysis of the international fight against corruption. This analysis is centred on Foucault’s concept of governmentality, as well as his notions of knowledge, (...) power and ethics. The primary focus is on the role played by the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund and Transparency International in the proliferation of international anti-corruption discourse and practices. Furthermore, South Africa will be used as a case study to unpack the historical and contextual factors that play a role in the legitimisation of corruption. As will be shown in this assessment, without adequately understanding the local factors that stimulate corruption and the other societal characteristics that serve to compound its pervasiveness, internationally driven anti-corruption initiatives have limited scope for success. Corruption will persist where there is a lack of resonance between international anti-corruption ideals and local norms, values and ideologies. (shrink)

At first glance, Moritz Geiger’s reaction to Husserl’s Ideas I appears to be neither systematically articulated nor particularly original. Geiger talks about Husserl’s idealism in Ideas I in just a few passages from his book Die Wirklickheit der Wissenschaften und die Metaphysik, and in a short essay in praise of Alexander Pfänder, Alexander Pfänders Methodische Stellung. There, Geiger seems to follow a general line of criticism shared by several so-called early phenomenologists, and most fully articulated by Jean Hering, (...) Roman Ingarden, Theodor Celms and Max Scheler. In this paper I argue that Geiger’s reaction to Ideas I contains some well-developed and original contributions to phenomenological thought. In particular, I defend three theses. First, Geiger’s criticism of Husserl’s idealism is much more original and sophisticated than it at first appears, because it rests on a complex phenomenology of “attitudes” [Einstellungen]. Second, Geiger offers a unique account of phenomenology as a variation of “stance” [Haltung], rather than a variation of attitude. Third, Geiger points to an alternative kind of phenomenology, which I call certainty-based phenomenology as opposed to an evidence-based phenomenology. Elements of this certainty-based phenomenology can be found in thinkers such as Merleau-Ponty and Ricoeur, but many of their views are significantly anticipated by Geiger. (shrink)

This volume celebrates the life achievements of Jason W. Brown, who, along with Jean Piaget, Heinz Werner, Alexander Luria and the Wurzburg school, has significantly contributed to the development of a process-based theory of brain/mind capable of challenging the currently fashionable modularist or cybernetic approaches to understanding human thought and feeling. As a paradigm, Brown's microgenetic theory is thus applicable in both brain science (where Brown was inspired by the pioneering work of Schilder and Pick) and the philosophy of (...) mind (where the influence of Bergson, Whitehead, Cassirer, and Merleau-Ponty can be seen). Essays with a range of focus as wide as Brown's expertise have been collected in such diverse areas as neuropsychology (microstructure of action, symptomatology, neuro-rehabilitation, neurolinguistics, locationism), theoretical psychology (consciousness, hypnosis, morphogenesis, personality development, psychoanalysis, Buddhist psychology, mysticism), and philosophy of mind (evolutionary epistemology, emergence/novelty/creativity, subjectivity, will and action, Whiteheadian process philosophy).". (shrink)

Categoricalism is a doctrine about properties according to which the dispositional aspects of properties are not essential to them. In opposition to categoricalism, dispositionalism holds that the dispositional aspects of properties are essential to them. In this article, I shall construct a new version of categoricalism that should be favoured over the other existing versions: Semi-Necessitarian Categoricalism. In Section 2 I shall elaborate on the distinction between categoricalism and dispositionalism and single out different ‘shades’ of both doctrines. I shall also (...) illustrate the main advantages and problems that characterize categoricalism. In Section 3 I shall introduce Necessitarian Categoricalism—as it has been recently developed by Alexander Kelly and Deborah Smith, among others. Even if Necessitarian Categoricalism solves the aforementioned problems of categoricalism, it also loses its main advantages. In Section 4 I shall refine this version of Necessitarian Categoricalism, thus developing Semi-Necessitarian Categoricalism. In Section 5 I shall face some objections. Finally, in Section 6, I shall briefly draw some conclusions and compare my account with other accounts. (shrink)

This essay considers the abiding preoccupation with glory in Michel Serres’s work and wonders how useful it is for understanding the economies of glory in the contemporary world. Glory is often linked for Serres with violence and the assertion of power, as these are bound up both with communication and publicity. Though he uses the story of the meeting of Diogenes and Alexander to focus the contrast between temporal power and the humbler claims of knowledge, Serres is also gloomily (...) aware of the ways in which knowledge too can be taken up in the pursuit of glory. His posthumous book, Relire le relié (Religion: Rereading What is Bound Together), proposes that the transcendence of divine glory can contain the human striving for power and fame. This essay uses the arguments of Giorgio Agamben regarding the political theology of glory to unfold an alternative, and much less idealistic account of the esteem economies of collective narcissism maintained by the global mediations of the contemporary world. Ultimately, Serres’s work hovers uncertainly, as perhaps the contemporary world does, between the condition of a glory-war of all against all and the function of glory as a kind of social glue. (shrink)

[First paragraphs: This essay takes its practical orientation from my experiences as a member of a philosophy reading group on death row at Riverbend Maximum Security Penitentiary in Nashville, Tennessee. Its theoretical orientation comes from W. E. B. Du Bois’ lecture-turned-essay, “Criteria of Negro Art,” which argues that the realm of aesthetics is vitally important in the war against racial discrimination in the United States. And since, according to Michele Alexander’s critically-acclaimed The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the (...) Age of Colorblindness, the prison system should be the primary front today in this war, my essay’s ultimate aim is t/o articulate a new criterion of the present-day “Negro” art being created by a prison population that is still overwhelmingly constituted by persons of color. In my first section, I will show how Du Bois’ insights in “Criteria of Negro Art” remain relevant today, especially in the prison context, and argue that it is thus appropriate for my new criterion to be shaped by his distinctive conception of “propaganda.” In my second section, through a close reading of two texts by Michel Foucault (the pivotal thinker of modern imprisonment), I will flesh out this new criterion, “self-torsion,” defined as the effect of prisoners’ attempts at self-care within a prison system that distorts those attempts into further exploitation of both prisoners and the outside world that imprisons them. And my final section, in an attempt to illustrate this new criterion’s efficacy as a form of propagandistic resistance to contemporary racism, will deploy self-torsion as a critique of two artworks created by imprisoned members of my reading group at Riverbend penitentiary. (shrink)

This essay offers a new way to conceptualize the “police violence against Blacks” phenomenon. I argue that we should see the situation as an instance of what Thomas Hobbes called the state of nature, that is, a state without effective law. This understanding of the phenomenon stands in sharp contrast to that offered by Professor Michelle Alexander in her book The New Jim Crow. Alexander sees the phenomenon as a continuation of centuries-old patterns of state-backed anti-Black racism. (...) My account is that police are not under control of the state in their interactions with Blacks. (shrink)

Since the mid-1960s, the carceral population in the US has increased around 900%. This article analyses that increase from a Marxist framework. After interrogating the theories of Michelle Alexander and Loïc Wacquant, I lay out a theoretical framework for a Marxist theory of mass incarceration. I then offer a historical analysis of mass incarceration in keeping with this theoretical framework, emphasising the carceral system’s relationship to the class struggle and the large-scale economic dislocations of post-Fordism. Finally, I emphasise (...) how private prison companies, increasingly central to the story of mass incarceration, are influencing current efforts to reform the prison system and shift to ‘alternatives to incarceration’. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Redeeming a Prison Society: A Liturgical and Sacramental Response to Mass Incarceration by Amy LevadLloyd SteffenRedeeming a Prison Society: A Liturgical and Sacramental Response to Mass Incarceration Amy Levad minneapolis: fortress press, 2014. 233 pp. $39.00.Amy Levad (University of St. Thomas) has added a theological voice to the national conversation that Michelle Alexander opened with her devastating critique of the American criminal justice system in The (...) New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness. Alexander showed how policies grounded in the war on drugs have disproportionately distressed racial and ethnic minorities—African Americans and Latinos—and the poor, destroying lives and communities. Incarceration in the United States is today a system that perpetuates what Alexander called a “caste” system from which escape is, especially among black males, virtually impossible. In this informed and well-presented study, Levad takes up Alexander’s social justice analysis, extending it in new directions, offering a creative theological contribution to the mass incarceration crisis in the world’s first “genuine prison society.”Levad observes that a limitation in the Christian response to mass incarceration is the “lack of Catholic voices” (47), which her book makes an effort to correct. She draws on core insights of Catholic tradition to address conditions that foster crime while also responding “to the ways in which the criminal justice crisis both reflects and sustains social injustices” (48). Her book offers a wonderfully clear analysis of mass incarceration and related issues such as recidivism strategies and policing policies. She advocates “pulling levers,” policing policies that aim at avoiding prison, versus harsh “window-breaking” policies that for deterrence reasons criminalize even minor offences. Levad addresses theories of punishment, proposes ideas for prison reform, and, while acknowledging a limited need for prisons, sets forth constructive suggestions for how best to decarcerate society through restorative justice and rehabilitation practices that reintegrate offenders into society.The study is a provocative interdisciplinary conversation between criminology and theology. Levad’s focus is on liturgy and sacrament, the central resources of Roman Catholic theology, finding in the Eucharist the theological [End Page 204] model for inviting the marginalized and dispossessed into the common fellowship of human dignity. She then argues that penance and reconciliation yield attitudes and behaviors that parallel secular restorative justice efforts. Advocating alternatives to prison while denying the effectiveness of punitive retribution, Levad critiques the approaches of the US Conference of Catholic Bishops and other Catholics. She highlights Kathryn Soltis as a Catholic scholar who uses theological resources to affirm the dignity of prisoners, attend to the common good, and seek ways to repair relationships between victims and offenders.Some of Levad’s ideas could be developed further. Pluralism, for instance, is mentioned as a contextual issue for her theological work but never thoroughly developed. Utilitarianism is denied a constructive ethics role, but Levad’s discussion of recidivism appeals to it as a marker of the common good (122). And Levad’s attention to the internal failures of the Church in confronting social justice issues leads one to wonder whether the decarcerated vision of society she desires is practicable.Levad speaks to the heart of the incarceration crisis in America, challenging the willingness of Americans to “throw people away” (198) through imprisonment—especially the young, the poor, and minorities. With her underlying question of “what kind of people we want to be and what we want our communities to be like” (43), Levad presents readers with a distinctive “vision of justice in God’s reign conveyed by liturgy and sacraments” (197). With that, she has accomplished what she set out to do: confront the social injustice of mass incarceration with the best insights of modern criminology but also with a theological perspective that embodies the struggle to realize an engaged Catholic praxis of justice.Lloyd SteffenLehigh UniversityCopyright © 2016 Society of Christian Ethics... (shrink)

Beginning with the view that human consciousness is essentially embodied and that the way we consciously experience the world is structured by our bodily dynamics and surroundings, the book argues that emotions are a fundamental manifestation of our embodiment, and play a crucial role in self-consciousness, moral evaluation, and social cognition.

Michel Foucault, one of the most cited scholars in the social sciences, devoted his last three lectures to a study of leader development. Going back to pagan sources, Foucault found a persistent theme in Hellenistic antiquity that, in order to qualify for leadership, a person must undergo processes of subjectivation, which is simply the way that a person becomes a Subject. From this perspective, an aspiring leader first becomes a Subject who happens to lead. These processes depend on a condition (...) of _parresia_, which is truth-telling at great risk that is for the edification of the other person. A leader requires a mentor and advisors in order to lead successfully, while also developing the capacity in one’s own mind to heed the truth. In other words, a leader must learn how to guide oneself. A valuable contribution to the field of leadership studies, this book summarizes these last lectures as they pertain to the study and practice of leadership, emphasizing the role of ethics and truth-telling as a check on power. It then presents several other contexts where these same lessons can be seen in practice, including in the life of Alexander Solzhenitsyn, whose career as a writer epitomized speaking truth to power, and somewhat surprisingly in the United States military, in response to its twenty-first century mission of counterinsurgency. (shrink)

Michel Foucault articulated the hypothesis of biopower and biopolitics in the 1970s, and Giorgio Agamben developed this hypothesis in his Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, published in English in 1998. Since these interventions, biopower and biopolitics have become indispensable as a theoretical point of reference in the humanities and social sciences. Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri argue that in the last thirty years the process of biopower and biopolitical regulation has increased, so much so that today every aspect (...) of social relation is subjected to the operations of this power. This chapter considers the position of biopower in the thought of Foucault and Agamben, and how the two conceive of power and resistance to power. It examines how biopower relates to sovereign power in both philosophers’ work, and specifically how Agamben’s development of Foucault’s thought is radical and offers a markedly different direction to scholarship on biopower and its relationship to sovereign power. Despite the relative age of Foucault’s writings, they continue to offer conceptual and theoretical tools for scholars in ways that Agamben’s theories and work do not. I use the example of the coronavirus pandemic to illustrate the shortcomings in Agamben’s thought. Finally, this chapter draws on recent work by Alexander Weheliye and Achille Mbembé to explore the close relationship between sexuality and race, and to show how both gender and race open up new avenues for exploring biopower and its relationship to sovereignty in the twenty-first century. (shrink)

Harcourt argues that in clinical contexts, children and young people with mental health illness can experience epistemic, specifically testimonial, injustice when their perspectives are unjustifiably discounted by health service providers.1 Our goal in this commentary was to illustrate how caregivers, a critical component of CYP treatment triad, can also engage in testimonial injustice towards CYP patients. Testimonial injustice occurs when one suffers a credibility deficit and that credibility deficit is based on prejudice.2 Harcourt expands Fricker’s account of testimonial injustice by (...) arguing that for CYPs, the credibility deficits attributed to them by clinicians, for example, may result from epistemic arrogance in that CYPs are viewed as having unreliable knowledge about their condition. Harcourt writes: ‘Being a CYP is treated as a heuristic for epistemic unreliability across a wide range of domains’, including clinical settings. Harcourt’s expansion of Fricker’s account thus includes epistemic arrogance as an alternative necessary condition, in addition to prejudice, to apply the concept of testimonial injustice. We think Harcourt’s argument can also be extended to caregivers, who are central to the CYP treatment triad. We illustrate how this may be the case by drawing from research we conducted to understand the perspectives of clinicians and prospective families, both caregivers and paediatric patients with obsessive–compulsive disorder about the possibility of …. (shrink)

Trust is a fundamental aspect of the moral treatment of stakeholders within the organization–stakeholder relationship. Stakeholders trust the organization to return benefit or protections from harm commensurate with their contributions or stakes. However, in many situations, the firm holds greater power than the stakeholder and therefore cannot necessarily be trusted to return the aforementioned duty to the stakeholder. Stakeholders must therefore rely on the trustworthiness of the organization to fulfill obligations in accordance to Phillips’ principle of fairness (Business Ethics Quarterly7(1), (...) 1997, 51–66), particularly where low-power stakeholders may not be fully consenting (Van Buren III, Business Ethics Quarterly11(3), 2001, 481–499). The construct of organizational trustworthiness developed herewith is presented as a possible solution to the problem of unfairness in organization–stakeholder relations. While organizational trustworthiness does not create an ethical obligation where none existed before, stakeholders who lack power will likely be treated fairly when organizational trustworthiness is present. (shrink)

Prenatal genetic testing is becoming available for an increasingly broad set of diseases, and it is only a matter of time before parents can choose to test for hundreds, if not thousands, of genetic conditions in their fetuses. Should access to certain kinds of fetal genetic information be limited, and if so, on what basis? We evaluate a range of considerations including reproductive autonomy, parental rights, disability rights, and the rights and interests of the fetus as a potential future child. (...) We conclude that parents should be able to access information that could be useful during pregnancy, but that testing for non-medical information should be limited. Next, we argue that the government lacks a compelling state interest in regulating prenatal genetic testing and propose that regulation should occur through medical professional organizations. Finally, we present a framework for determining what testing physicians should recommend, offer neutrally, or not offer at all. (shrink)

We examine whether mindfulness can neutralize the negative impact of COVID-19 stressors on employees’ sleep duration and work engagement. In Study 1, we conducted a field experiment in Wuhan, China during the lockdown between February 20, 2020, and March 2, 2020, in which we induced state mindfulness by randomly assigning participants to either a daily mindfulness practice or a daily mind-wandering practice. Results showed that the sleep duration of participants in the mindfulness condition, compared with the control condition, was less (...) impacted by COVID-19 stressors (i.e., the increase of infections in the community). In Study 2, in a 10-day daily diary study in the United Kingdom between June 8, 2020, and June 19, 2020, we replicate our results from Study 1 using a subjective measure of COVID-19 stressors and a daily measure of state mindfulness. In addition, we find that mindfulness buffers the negative effect of COVID-19 stressors on work engagement mediated by sleep duration. As the COVID-19 pandemic is ongoing and the number of reported cases continues to rise globally, our findings suggest that mindfulness is an evidence-based practice that can effectively neutralize the negative effect of COVID-19 stressors on sleep and work outcomes. The findings of the present study contribute to the employee stress and well-being literature as well as the emerging organizational research on mindfulness. (shrink)

Building on contemporary research in embodied cognition, enactivism, and the extended mind, this book explores how social institutions in contemporary neoliberal nation-states systematically affect our thoughts, feelings, and agency. Human beings are, necessarily, social animals who create and belong to social institutions. But social institutions take on a life of their own, and literally shape the minds of all those who belong to them, for better or worse, usually without their being self-consciously aware of it. Indeed, in contemporary neoliberal societies, (...) it is generally for the worse. In The Mind-Body Politic, Michelle Maiese and Robert Hanna work out a new critique of contemporary social institutions by deploying the special standpoint of the philosophy of mind—in particular, the special standpoint of the philosophy of what they call essentially embodied minds—and make a set of concrete, positive proposals for radically changing both these social institutions and also our essentially embodied lives for the better. (shrink)