This study examines the visual [monomodal] and multimodal metaphorical representations of Jordanians’ perceptions and attitudes toward the amended Cyber Crime Law in Jordan as depicted by Jordanian activists and image creators online. It adopts Forceville’s theory of Multimodal Metaphor [ 1, 2 ] as its theoretical framework. Twenty visual and multimodal depictions were collected from online platforms and were analysed to identify metaphorical representations. The results reveal a higher frequency of use of multimodal metaphors over monomodal ones, which can (...) potentially be attributed to the former employing both visual and verbal cues; thus, improving message clarity and comprehensibility. The analysis depicts a predominantly negative image of Jordanian perceptions and attitudes, portraying the law as a silencer, barbed wires, and handcuffs which demonstrates its perceived restriction of Jordanians’ freedom of speech in digital space and their online activities. Jordanians were also visually depicted as potential criminals, suggesting that ordinary citizens are potentially viewed as suspects or criminals under the new Cyber Crime Law. The study highlights the influential role of visual representations in shaping public opinions and perceptions of laws. (shrink)

Criminal violence is one of the most pressing problems in Latin America and the Caribbean, with profound political consequences. Its effects on social policy preferences, however, remain largely unexplored. This article argues that to understand such effects it is crucial to analyze victimization experiences and perceptions of insecurity as separate phenomena with distinct attitudinal consequences. Heightened perceptions of insecurity are associated with a reduced demand for public welfare provision, as such perceptions reflect a sense of the state’s failure to provide (...) public security. At the same time, acknowledging the mounting costs and needs that direct experience with crime entails, victimization is expected to increase support for social policies, particularly for health services. Survey data from twenty-four Latin American and Caribbean countries for the period 2008–12 show that perceptions of insecurity indeed reduce support for the state’s role in welfare provision, whereas crime victimization strongly increases such preferences. (shrink)

An earlier version of this paper was presented at the 2011 IEEE International Symposium on Technology and Society at Saint Xavier University in Chicago, Illinois. This paper describes a proposed mobile platform, Transafe, that captures and analyses public perceptions of safety to deliver 'crowdsourced' collective intelligence about places in the City of Melbourne, Australia, and their affective states at various times of the day. Public perceptions of crime on public transport in Melbourne are often mismatched with actual crime (...) statistics and such perceptions thus can act as social barriers to visitors and locals traversing within and through the city. Using interactive mobile applications and social media, the visualization of this crowdsourced safety perception information will increase the commuter's awareness of various situations in the City of Melbourne. In addition, through social behavioral analysis and ethnographic research, the collective public intelligence will also help inform the stakeholders of the city for future policy-making and policing strategies for safety perception management. At the centre of the proposed platform is the design and development of a mobile phone application that can contribute to people feeling safer by supporting users to report crimes and misdemeanors that they witness, and provide information about transportation and emergency services around where the users are located. The proposed application can also act as a crime deterrent with one feature that enables user tracking by up to three nominated friends if the user opts to activate tracking when feeling unsafe while roaming the city. (shrink)

Crimes of Reason brings together expanded and updated versions of some of Braude’s best previously published essays, along with new essays written specifically for this book.

Is it permissible to be a fan of an artist or a sports team that has behaved immorally? While this issue has recently been the subject of widespread public debate, it has received little attention in the philosophical literature. This paper will investigate this issue by examining the nature and ethics of fandom. I will argue that the crimes and misdemeanors of the object of fandom provide three kinds of moral reasons for fans to abandon their fandom. First, being a (...) fan of the immoral may provide support for their immoral behavior. Second, fandom alters our perception in ways that will often lead us to be fail to perceive our idol’s faults and even to adopting immoral points of view in order to be able to maintain the positive view we have of them. Third, fandom, like friendship, may lead us to engage in acts of loyalty to protect the interests of our idols. This gives fans of the immoral good reason to abandon their fandom. However, these reasons will not always be conclusive and, in some cases, it may be possible to instead adopt a critical form of fandom. (shrink)

The forensic use of Deoxyribonucleic Acid (DNA) is demonstrating significant success as a crime-solving tool. However, numerous concerns have been raised regarding the potential for DNA use to contravene cultural, ethical, and legal codes. In this article the expectations and level of knowledge of the New Zealand public of the DNA data-bank and the surrounding processes are discussed. A questionnaire was developed in consultation with key stakeholders, comprising a combination of open and closed questions. The ensuing survey comprised a (...) sample of 100 participants. Although participants initially appeared in favor of the forensic use of DNA, particularly in regard to the collection of DNA from sex offenders, perceptions and attitudes were based on limited knowledge of processes, policies, and implications. Upon further discussion and reflection a number of concerns were raised, such as ownership of DNA samples and the potential for misuse. (shrink)

Moral judgments about a situation are profoundly shaped by the perception of individuals in that situation as either moral agents or moral patients (Gray & Wegner, 2009; Gray, Young, & Waytz, 2012), Specifically, the more we see someone as a moral agent, the less we see them as a moral patient, and vice versa. As a result, casting the perpetrator of a transgression as a victim tends to have the effect of making them seem less blameworthy (Gray & Wegner, (...) 2011). Based on this theoretical framework, we predicted that criminal offenders with a mental disorder that predisposes them to antisocial behavior would be judged more negatively when the disorder is described as having a genetic origin than when it is described as environmentally caused, as in the case of childhood abuse or accident. Further, we predicted that some environmental explanations would mitigate attributions of blame more than others, namely, that offenders whose disorder was caused by childhood abuse (intentional harm) would be seen as less blameworthy than offenders whose disorder is caused by an unfortunate accident (unintentional harm). Results from two vignette-based studies designed to test these predictions, conducted with participants recruited from Amazon Mechanical Turk (N = 244 and N = 387, respectively), confirmed the first prediction but not the second. Implications of this research for three areas — the psychology of moral judgment, philosophical debates about moral responsibility and determinism, and the practice of the law — are discussed in the sequel. (shrink)

Management information system (MIS) professionals have a central role in technology development, determining how technology is used in organizations, and the effects it has on clients and society. MIS stakeholders have expressed concern regarding MIS professional's role in computer crime, and security of electronically stored information. It is recognized that MIS professionals must make decisions based on their professional ethics. The Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) and the Data Processing Management Association (DPMA) have developed codes of ethics to help (...) guide practitioners with ethical professional decision making. In this study, a model was developed from the combined ACM and DPMA codes of ethics and used in the construction of a survey instrument. The survey was conducted using public sector MIS professionals, and findings relative to the influences that codes of ethics, ethical enforcement systems, and membership in professional organizations has on ethical perception were studied. In addition, the influence that ethical obligation to particular constituencies had on respondents' ethical attitudes was also investigated. The study indicated that ethical obligation of public sector MIS professionals is stronger for management and employers than for peers, society, or clients. (shrink)

Do men and women perceive cybercrime types differently? This article draws on the distinction between socio-economic and psychosocial cybercrime proposed by Lazarus (2019) to investigate whether men and women hold different perceptions of digital crimes across these two dimensions. Informed by the synergy between feminist theory and the Tripartite Cybercrime Framework (TCF), our survey examined respondents’ differential perceptions of socio-economic cybercrime (online fraud) and psychosocial cybercrime (cyberbullying, revenge porn, cyberstalking, online harassment) among men and women in the United Kingdom. The (...) results revealed that women considered psychosocial cybercrime worse than men. Conversely, we found no differences between men and women with regard to socio-economic cybercrime. The article concludes that psychosocial cybercrimes are more gendered than socio-economic cybercrime, suggesting problems with the meaning of ‘cyber-enabled crimes’, and substantiating the synergy between the TCF and feminist perspectives. (shrink)

This article intends to define a Global Spirituality Index with a holistic perspective and attempts to look at some socio-economic indicators of Spirituality. It also attempts to find a relationship between crimes, such as perceived levels of corruption (as measured by Transparency International) and violence such as homicides, and various aspects of Spirituality.

This article deals critically with the process of coming to terms with ‘genocide’. It starts from the observation that conventional philosophical and legal approaches to capturing the essence of ‘genocide’ through an improved definition necessarily fail to adapt to the ever-changing nature of political violence. Faced with this challenge, the article suggests that the contemporary debate on genocide (and its denial) should be complemented with a focus on transforming the perceptive and interpretive frameworks through which acts of violence are discussed (...) in the public sphere. The main purpose of this article is to contribute, from the vantage point of political theory, to this debate by offering a novel normative perspective on negative reactions to genocide. Hence I argue that it is productive to speak of ‘genocide blindness’ in cases when the members of the public sphere are simply incapable of seeing an instance of violence as genocidal. To establish this claim, the article introduces Ludwig Wittgenstein’s reflections on ‘aspect-seeing’ so as to underline the importance of changing the way that political violence is perceived and interpreted. In a second step, the article turns to María Pía Lara’s theory of storytelling as a concrete mechanism for triggering and instituting this kind of change. (shrink)

Traditional notions of crime control often position the police against an individual, known or not yet known, who is responsible for the commission of a crime. However, with increasingly sophisticated technology, policing increasingly prioritizes the prevention of crime, making it necessary to ascertain who, or what class of persons, may be the next likely criminal before a crime can be committed, termed predictive policing. This causes a shift from individualized suspicion toward predictive profiling that may sway (...) the expectations of a police patrol. Classically, where a patrol officer forms reasonable suspicion prior to a stop, it is based upon his/her analysis of the situation taken as a whole in context. However, where a predictive profile is employed, information available to the officer accordingly adjusts his/her perception of context and affects the application of the reasonable suspicion standard. This article addresses the way in which new approaches to forming reasonable suspicion affect the due process protection of individuals’ fundamental rights. It argues that while an officer still operates with good faith discretion, using predictive profiling causes reasonable suspicion to be based on an augmented understanding of reality and as a result, due process guarantees are weakened. The rights to non-discrimination and the presumption of innocence are assessed and argued as illustrative of this weakening and shift in policing standards. The article ultimately argues that while predictive policing cannot be categorically labeled as inconsistent with criminal justice, changes as seemingly moderate as the manner in which discretion operates have larger effects on individuals’ rights. (shrink)

In this study we test how the composition of crime news articles contributes to reader perceptions of the moral blameworthiness of vehicular homicide offenders. After employing a rigorous process to develop realistic experimental vignettes about vehicular homicide in Minnesota, we deploy a survey to test differential assignments of suggested punishment. We find that readers respond to having very little information by choosing neutral or mid-point levels of punishment, but increase recommended punishment based on information about morally charged conduct. By (...) contrast, information about the perpetrator’s immigration status caused respondents to split into two groups on whether the offense deserves neutral or increased punishment. We find that political ideology strongly influences recommendations for more severe punishment when the immigration status of the perpetrator is revealed. We argue that this difference represents a moral dimension to punishment and blameworthiness that incorporates factors outside the active offense and therefore reveals the social influence of differential reporting in shaping public perception. (shrink)

The current study explores the role of individual and environmental determinants on students’ fear of crime. Based on a large-scale survey among students of a Belgian university (n = 1,463), the relationship between perceived social and physical disorder and the three dimensions of fear of crime (perceived risk of victimization, feelings of anxiety, avoidance behaviour) is examined. Support was found for a relationship between perceived social and physical disorder and perceived risk of victimization. Moreover, a relationship was found (...) between students’ perception of social disorder and anxiety and students’ perception of physical disorder and avoidance behaviour. Based on the results, this study suggests that preventing or reducing visible signs of disorder on campus should inevitably be included in the university’s security policy. This research offers universities more insight in the determinants of students’ fear of crime and potential measures to increase their (perception of) safety. (shrink)

The police’s use of facial recognition technologies allows them to verify identification in real-time by mapping facial features into indicators that can be compared with other data stored in its database or in online social networks. Advances in facial recognition technologies have changed law enforcement agencies’ operations, improving their ability to identify suspects, investigate crimes, and deter criminal behavior. Most applications are used in tracking and identifying potential terrorists, searching for abducted and missing persons, and security surveillance at airports, national (...) borders, and large public gatherings. However, for facial recognition technologies to fulfill their potential, they must not only be adopted by the police, but the public must also support their routine use. Using a secondary data analysis of a public opinion survey conducted by the Pew Research Center among a representative sample of US residents (N = 5307), we investigated the factors associated with the public`s expectations about the positive and negative outcomes of the police’s adoption of facial recognition technologies. Our results show that public attitudes to FRT are balanced, indicating awareness of the public for potential advantages, but also disadvantages of police adoption of FRT. Privacy considerations and familiarity with the technology were found to be critical for the explanation of public attitudes expressing both positive and negative expectations from the police adoption of facial recognition technology. Our study contributes to the understanding of the factors associated with public attitudes police’s use of facial recognition technologies. (shrink)

How often our actions go awry because our perceptions are at odds with reality! This book examines the legal issues that arise when we seek to avoid the untoward consequences of an action by claiming that our perception was flawed. We all make mistakes. Some have unfortunate consequences: we might overpay a debt or make an unfavourable contract, or we might be sued or accused of a crime as a result of our mistake. Claims to alleviation on the (...) grounds of mistake are likely to arise wherever the law prescribes a state of mind as a prerequisite for the application of a legal rule. This book asks when the fact that a person made a mistake should entitle them to alleviation. This may involve the intention to enter into a contract or a payment, in which case a person could seek its reversal, or it might involve the intent to commit a tort or crime, in which case they could seek forgiveness for the offence. Farnsworth defines 'alleviating' mistakes as those which entitle a person to relief from untoward consequences of their mistake.There is no general 'law of mistake', and despite their similarities, few discussions of mistake in one setting pause to consider mistakes in other contexts. The goals of fields as disparate as contracts and criminal law are very different: how do these differences affect the treatment of mistakes? Farnsworth sets out a new taxonomy of mistakes. His analysis reveals that over the past century, there has been a remarkable increase in the receptivity of courts and scholars to claims for both reversal and forgiveness- a waxing of alleviating mistakes. (shrink)

Trying to separate out nature and nurture as explanations for behaviour, as in classic genetic studies of twins and families, is now said to be both impossible and unproductive. In practice the nature-nurture model persists as a way of framing discussion on the causes of behaviour in genetic research papers, as well as in the media and lay debate. Social and environmental theories of crime have been dominant in criminology and in public policy while biological theories have been seen (...) as outdated and discredited. Recently, research into genetic variations associated with aggressive and antisocial behaviour has received more attention in the media. This paper explores ideas on the role of nature and nurture in violent and antisocial behaviour through interviews and open-ended questionnaires among lay publics. There was general agreement that everybody’s behaviour is influenced to varying degrees by both genetic and environmental factors but deterministic accounts of causation, except in exceptional circumstances, were rejected. Only an emphasis on nature was seen as dangerous in its consequences, for society and for individuals themselves. Whereas academic researchers approach the debate from their disciplinary perspectives which may or may not engage with practical and policy issues, the key issue for the public was what sort of explanations of behaviour will lead to the best outcomes for all concerned. (shrink)

This essay examines the ways in which dead bodies were transformed by traditional Chinese forensic methodology into objects of postmortem examination during the Qing dynasty. The Qing authorities implemented various devices to standardize not only the forensic examination as an administrative procedure but also the cognitive activities involved, such as corpse observation, wound interpretation, and transcription. The essay argues that these devices, such as the official forensic manual, formalized documents, and strict norms of documenting, were constituents of a specific pattern (...) of perception that normalized the ways in which a corpse should be regarded and understood so as to bear forensic significance. Although this pattern of perception led to a rigid vision of crimes and the consequent corporeal damage, it enabled forensic reasoning to function like an operational procedure, which presented certain advantages with regard to the particular legal culture of the Qing era. (shrink)

It is rather uncontroversial that gender should have no influence on treating others as equal epistemic agents. However, is this view reflected in practice? This paper aims to test whether the gender of the testifier and the accused of assault is related to the perception of a testimony’s reliability and the guilt of the potential perpetrator. Two experiments were conducted: the subjects (n = 361, 47% females, 53% males) assessed the reliability of the testifier in four scenarios of assault (...) accusation, in which the only difference was the gender of the people presented. During the study, we have observed dependencies of gender and ascription of reliability, but only marginal differences in guilt attribution. The results of our research may constitute an argument for the existence of different epistemic status endowed on people depending on their gender and existing gender stereotypes. Our results suggest that gender bias may be situated at a deeper level than the linguistically triggered representation. (shrink)

Gender differences have been observed regarding many political and social issues, yet we lack comprehensive evidence on differences in perceptions on a wide range of security issues increasingly important to voters: military threats, criminality, and terrorism. Previous research suggests that when women are highly politically mobilized, as they are in Sweden, gender differences in political opinion are large. On the other hand, Swedish politicians have worked hard to reduce gender stereotypical thinking. This prompts the question: Are there gender differences in (...) attitudes on security issues in Sweden, and if so, in what ways do the attitudes differ? This study is based on comprehensive data from focus groups and a large-scale survey. The results show that women were more prone to respond with an “ethic of care,” across security issues. Women were more inclined to understand security problems as structural, explained by macho culture, segregation, and injustice. Women tend to support preventive measures that provide individuals with opportunities to choose “the right path,” such as education and economic investment in deprived areas. When asked about national security, women believe more in diplomacy and dialogue. In general, women are less inclined to support various repressive solutions. (shrink)

What is the relationship between taxation and public safety? Contrary to studies suggesting that personal victimization and heightened perceptions of insecurity increase pro-social attitudes and support for state intervention in the form of greater taxation, this article argues that such concerns decrease willingness to pay taxes to address public safety. It estimates what citizens are willing to pay to reduce crime, using an original representative survey conducted in Mexico and relying on the contingent valuation method to assess the value (...) of nonmarket goods. Attitudes toward taxation are found to respond to subjective, sociotropic assessments of public safety rather than to actual risk or occurrences of individual victimization. These findings counter the conventional wisdom that demand for personal security enables greater extraction, a central proposition in classic accounts of state building. Showing that willingness to accept heavier taxation may be weakest among those who perceive the gravest need for security, the study adds precision to theories of fiscal exchange. (shrink)

Since commencing its illegal invasion in 2022, the Russian military and authorities have committed numerous war crimes against the people of Ukraine. These include the mutilation and execution of combatants; the torture, kidnapping, forced expulsion, rape, and massacre of civilians; and indiscriminate attacks on densely populated areas. In this essay, I evaluate the strategic implications of this misconduct, focusing exclusively on Western responses. I argue that war crimes can and often do negatively impact the strategic goals of the perpetrator, but (...) whether and how this occurs is rarely governed exclusively by the offending action. Western perceptions of battlefield atrocity, shaped as they are by identity, race, and politics, may radically shift from one context to another. In the case of the Russia-Ukraine war, the status of both the participants and the conflict itself has helped inculcate a particular sensitivity among Western actors to the battlefield criminality of Russia. Drawing on evidence from the 2022 Bucha massacre and the ongoing bombing of Ukrainian civilians, I argue that Russian misconduct has consolidated Western support for the Ukrainian military effort, politically, diplomatically, and materially. (shrink)

We asked whether and how generations vary in their perceptions on moral matters ranging from their justifications of crime and questions concerning bodily autonomy. In our exploratory study using data from the World Values Survey, we found that Generations Y and Z are more likely than their older counterparts to justify crimes, such as cheating on taxes or stealing property, and to favor greater bodily autonomy in issues such as suicide and abortion. They also rank lower the importance of (...) God and national pride. Implications are offered for employers who wish to motivate and incentivize a multi-generational workforce. (shrink)

How are we to understand criminal law reform? The idea seems simple—the criminal law on the books is wrong: it should be changed. But 'wrong’ how? By what norms 'wrong’? As soon as one tries to answer those questions, the issue becomes more complex. One kind of answer is that the criminal law is substantively wrong: that is, we assume valid norms of background political morality, and we argue that doctrinally the criminal law on the books does not embody those (...) norms. Another kind of answer is that the criminal law as it stands presupposes certain empirical facts, and yet those facts do not hold. Traditionally, criminal law reform has been informed by both these answers. Analytical theorists examine doctrine for its conceptual structure, and social scientists examine the actual workings of the criminal justice system. This tidy picture is, however, challenged by social constructivist accounts of the criminal law. They challenge the stability and conceptual purity of doctrine, and they challenge the objectivity of social science. On the basis of these challenges, they undermine the ambitions of traditional criminal law reform, and argue that the only reforms to the criminal law that matter are politicized ones—that criminal law reform is pointless unless it serves the interests of the marginalized and the dispossessed. It seems undeniable that in some sense our perceptions of crime in our society are indeed moulded by social forces, and that crime does not exist independently of the social structures and processes that help to define and control it. But why should those insights have the implications for our understanding of criminal law reform that they are alleged to have? How could it follow from those insights that criminal law reform either becomes radicalized or valueless? The aim of this paper is to show that what can legitimately be taken from the emphasis on the social constructedness of crime does not require wholesale abandonment of the traditional picture of criminal law reform, even though it may require some modifications of that picture. (shrink)

Providing a wide-ranging account of the narrative properties of photographs, Greg Battye focuses on the storytelling power of a single image, rather than the sequence. Drawing on ideas from painting, drawing, film, video, and multimedia, he applies contemporary research and theories drawn from cognitive science and psychology to the analysis of photographs. Using genuine forensic photographs of crime scenes and accidents, the book mines human drama and historical and sociological authenticity to argue for the centrality of the perception (...) and representation of time in photographic narrativity. (shrink)

Various authors have argued that in the future not only will it be technically feasible for human minds to be transferred to other substrates, but this will become, for most humans, the preferred option over the current biological limitations. It has even been claimed that such a scenario is inevitable in order to solve the challenging, but imperative, multi-agent value alignment problem. In all these considerations, it has been overlooked that, in order to create a suitable environment for a particular (...) mind – for example, a personal universe in a computational substrate – numerous other potentially sentient beings will have to be created. These range from non-player characters to subroutines. This article analyzes the additional suffering and mind crimes that these scenarios might entail. We offer a partial solution to reduce the suffering by imposing on the transferred mind the perception of indicators to measure potential suffering in non-player characters. This approach can be seen as implementing literal empathy through enhanced cognition. (shrink)

The mystery does not always end when the crime has been solved. Indeed, the most insolvable problems of crime and punishment are not so much who committed the crime, but how to see that justice is done. Now, in this illuminating volume, one of America's great legal thinkers, Norval Morris, addresses some of the most perplexing and controversial questions of justice in a highly singular fashion--by examining them in fictional form, in what he calls "parables of the (...) law." The protagonist of these stories, the figure who must see that justice is done, is Eric Blair, a name familiar to most readers: it's the real name of George Orwell. In fact, Morris has set his tales in the time and place of Orwell's famous essay, "Shooting an Elephant," in Moulmein, Burma, in the 1920s. What might seem a curious strategy at first glance--borrowing Orwell's persona to narrate these tales--is actually a brilliant stroke. For in Eric Blair we have an ideal narrator to highlight the complexities of justice: an untrained police lieutenant and junior magistrate, uncertain of judgement--and all the more likely to anguish over judgement, and to examine every facet of a case before deciding. And in 1920s Moulmein we have a neutral time and space in which to consider--free of our own political, religious, or social prejudices--a set of contemporary legal and moral questions that rarely find so calm an arena. And these stories certainly address some highly charged issues--capital punishment, insanity as a murder defense, the "battered wife syndrome" as a murder defense, child custody, "parental neglect" due to religious conviction--to name a few. In each tale, Norval Morris excels at placing Blair at the center of a controversy that has no easy answer, and that he and he alone must decide. In the title story, for instance, a retarded boy, whose only understanding of sex comes from the brothel in which he works, accidentally murders a young girl while raping her, his only defense being "Please sir, I paid her." Blair can see that the boy doesn't realize that he has committed a crime, but both the Burmese and the European community of Moulmein demand the boy's execution. Does capital punishment make sense in such an instance? Does it ever make sense? To broaden our understanding of these intricate cases, Morris concludes each story with a perceptive and often provocative commentary on each issue. After "Brothel Boy," for instance, Morris points out that no reputable study has ever shown capital punishment to be an effective deterrent to future murders, and more surprisingly, that paroled murderers commit proportionately fewer homicides than paroled felons who used a firearm in the commission of their crime. Norval Morris is one of America's foremost experts on crime and punishment, and the stories collected here represent the culmination of a lifetime of thought on the major criminal law debates of our time. A reader of these tales will come away with a deeper understanding of these debates and with a profound respect for the intricacies of justice and the complexity of the law. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:464 Feminist Studies 44, no. 2. © 2018 by Feminist Studies, Inc. Claire Raymond and Sarah Corse A Distorting Mirror: Educational Trajectory After College Sexual Assault This article focuses on the broad and specific impacts of college sexual assault on student-survivors’ academic performance, academic trajectory, and their sense of self in relation to the university community. We frame this study with, and relate our findings to, the historic and (...) theoretical literatures that provide the context for this essay, including the large and burgeoning literature on the sexual assault of women college students and recent studies analyzing the role of fraternities in sexual assault, students’ fears and perceptions about college assault, bystander intervention training, and survivors’ grade-point averages after assault.1 Our study also builds on the history of feminist resistance to rape, feminist writings about rape, and campus activism against rape, with the 1. Cortney Franklin, Leana Allen Bouffard, and Travis C. Pratt, “Sexual Assault on the College Campus: Fraternity Affiliation, Male Peer Support, and Low Self-Control,” Criminal Justice and Behavior 39, no. 11 (2012): 1457– 80; Christine A. Gidycz, John R. McNamara, and Katie M. Edwards, “Women ’s Risk Perception and Sexual Victimization: A Review of the Literature,” Aggression and Violent Behavior 11, no. 5 (2006): 441–56; Jennifer Katz and Jessica Moore, “Bystander Education Training for Campus Sexual Assault Prevention: An Initial Meta-Analysis,” Violence and Victims 28, no. 6 (2013): 1054–67; Douglas W. Pryor and Marion R. Hughes, “Fear of Rape among College Women: A Social Psychological Analysis,” Violence and Victims 28, no. 3 (2013): 443–65; Carol E. Jordan, Jessica L. Combs, and Gregory T. Smith, “An Exploration of Sexual Victimization and Academic Performance among College Women,” Trauma, Violence, & Abuse 15, no. 3 (2014): 191–200. Claire Raymond and Sarah Corse 465 goal of shedding light on one aspect of the problem. Groundbreaking (and in some cases controversial) works analyzing the cultures of rape, such as Susan Brownmiller’s Against Our Will and Peggy Sanday’s “The Socio-Cultural Context of Rape” (in which Sanday creates the concept of the rape-producing culture—a concept that is central to our argument in this essay), found immediate reception with feminist activists of the 1970s and early 1980s.2 Mary Koss’s work regarding the scope of rape in college settings is also foundational to our study of campus rape.3 Susan Estrich, Catharine MacKinnon, and other feminist theorists in the mid-1980s developed critical apparatuses to shift the understanding of rape, providing a feminist framework wherein rape is interpreted as violence committed against a woman—in opposition to the patriarchal argument that rape is caused by a woman’s actions or is the product of her distortion of events after the fact.4 Angela Davis and bell hooks were deeply influential in framing understandings of the racial and racist aspects of feminist discussions of rape, while legal scholar Sarah Deer has more recently broadened understandings of the racialized discourse of rape, and Lisa Wade has written on twenty-first century hookup culture and the ways that this social landscape promulgates rates of maleon -female rape that are significantly higher on college campuses than in the general population.5 2. Peggy Reeves Sanday, “The Socio-Cultural Context of Rape: A Cross-Cultural Study,” Journal of Social Issues 37, no. 4 (1981): 5–27; Susan Brownmiller, Against Our Will: Men, Women and Rape (New York: Penguin Books, 1976). 3. Mary P. Koss, Christine A. Gidycz, and Nadine Wisniewski, “The Scope of Rape: Incidence and Prevalence of Sexual Aggression and Victimization in a National Sample of Higher Education Students,” Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology 55, no. 2 (1987): 162–70. 4. Susan Estrich, Real Rape: How the Legal System Victimizes Women Who Say No (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988); Duncan Chappell, Robley Geis, and Gilbert Geis, eds., Forcible Rape: The Crime, the Victim and the Offender (New York: Columbia University Press, 1977). 5. Angela Davis, “Rape, Racism, and the Myth of the Black Rapist,” in her Women, Race, and Class (New York: Vintage Books, 1983), 172–201; bell hooks, Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center (Boston: South End Press, 1984); Sarah Deer, The Beginning and End... (shrink)

This article considers the changing perceptions, expressions and representations of violence in South Africa post-1994, with particular reference to photography. Following the evolution of the documentary tradition in its relationship to the political history of South Africa, I will suggest that since the release of Nelson Mandela and the first democratic elections in South Africa, photography has taken a new turn, particularly with regard to its representation of violence, which had been its primary iconography up to that watershed moment. I (...) will follow three arguments (from Sartre, Benjamin and Mbembe) in my explication of the ways in which violence has both altered South African society and assumed a different place in the collective mind of South Africans living in a country that is politically free but grappling with an ever-rising wave of violent crime. (shrink)

How does law effect well-being? Can school rules influence the feel-good factor among children? If a self-perception of being ‘good’ improves well-being, people would prefer to be good—even children. But traditional school rules are often contrary to the principles of well-being, and create ‘good criminals’. Starting from the seemingly absurd truth—‘crime is caused by the law’— the paper proposes that children should learn to view law critically and creatively. Then, through a novel application of Occupational Therapy , and (...) using ‘law’ to focus social agency, a case study develops ‘The law of school dress’ as a public good. The result reflects Jeremy Bentham’s Principle of Utility. Philosophy of OT reminds us that the ultimate purpose of education is not just to learn: it is to improve well-being through learning as meaningful ‘occupation’. And ‘law’ has a part to play. (shrink)

Despite the Swan River Colony of Western Australia being founded as the first, experimental, and free colony on the Australian continent, crime and punishment were intertwined with colonisation. It can be demonstrated that Jeremy Bentham’s writings on punishment and reform, specifically through the panopticon, had a significant influence on the punishment of prisoners in the Swan River Colony. Most notably, this occurred through the construction of Fremantle Gaol. Indeed, in the emerging port town of Fremantle, the jail was designed (...) by Henry Willey Reveley, a known associate of Bentham, and it incorporates crucial elements of the panopticon into its architecture and operations. Whilst it should be noted that the prison does not conform to the entirety of the panopticon design, it can be viewed as a practical response to the model in a colonial setting with limited resources. Deviations from the methods of discipline and punishment outlined by Bentham through the panopticon and other writings are attributable to the increased need for the perception of control over a disgruntled settler population who felt that they had been misled regarding the potential of the colony, and an Indigenous population who sought to defend their homeland against invasion. Thus, the jail provides an interesting insight into the state of crime, society and penal trends that emerged in the formative years of the Swan River Colony between 1831-1841. Through analysis of the surviving records, this paper will examine Fremantle Gaol as an example of Bentham’s panopticon, in particular how its architecture and operations mirrored the model. (shrink)

This article foregrounds an unofficial, “dark” strand of shamanic revival, which lies at the interstices of local inspirational religion and the state’s law in a Siberian periphery. Focusing on consultations concerned with ritual healing and counter-cursing in the Russian Republic of Tuva/tyva, southern Siberia, the article documents a field of metaphysical disorder which is governed by shamans as purveyors of “forensic” evidence of cursing and as arbiters of justice. The data on counter-cursing consultations evince a social perception of shamanism (...) as a redress for kinds of violence which transcend the limits of state law. Drawing on two shamanic narratives of affliction and its professionalization as a charisma for healing and revenge respectively, the article argues that a new kind of “forensic” evidence of crime and violence emerges from the materials on counter-cursing in Kyzyl. (shrink)

A survey was conducted of the perceived correlates of illegal abuses in the electronics industry. Human resource directors of thirty-one firms responded to a questionnaire which assessed their perceptions of the degree to which illegal behavior was caused by (1) deficiencies in the moral character of employees (2) the clarity of expectations and standards describing illegal behavior and (3) the presence of reinforcements and punishments contingent on these behaviors. All three variables were related to the frequency of abuses in three (...) areas of organizational crime (e.g. administrative, labor, environment) and three areas of personal crime (theft, falsifying records kickbacks) as reported by the directors and/or indicated by archival records. The implications of these findings are discussed in terms of how organizations may reduce illegal activity. (shrink)

Motherland under attack! Nationalism, terrorist threat, and support for the restriction of civil liberties The paper addresses the role which national attitudes play in terrorist threat perception and in the choice of specific counterterrorism strategies. Study 1 shows that participants higher on nationalism tend to perceive the threat of terrorism as more serious than participants lower on nationalism. Moreover, we found that nationalism mediated the relationship between the perceived terrorist threat and the support for tough domestic policies, even at (...) the expense of considerable limitation of civil liberties. Study 2 confirms the link between the perceived terrorism threat and the support for suspension of civil liberties. Nevertheless, when terrorism was seen in terms of crime rather than in terms of war, the mediating role of nationalism disappeared. The results contribute to a better understanding of the process whereby the perception of one's own national group and the perception of one's own nation-state translate into specific reactions triggered by external threats. (shrink)

The relation between virtue and knowledge is at the heart of the Socratic view of human excellence, but it also points to a central puzzle of the Platonic dialogues: Can Socrates be serious in his claims that human excellence is constituted by one virtue, that vice is merely the result of ignorance, and that the correct response to crime is therefore not punishment but education? Or are these assertions mere rhetorical ploys by a notoriously complex thinker? Lorraine Smith Pangle (...) traces the argument for the primacy of virtue and the power of knowledge throughout the five dialogues that feature them most prominently—the _Apology, Gorgias, Protagoras, Meno,_ and _Laws_—and reveals the truth at the core of these seemingly strange claims. She argues that Socrates was more aware of the complex causes of human action and of the power of irrational passions than a cursory reading might suggest. Pangle’s perceptive analyses reveal that many of Socrates’s teachings in fact explore the factors that make it difficult for humans to be the rational creatures that he at first seems to claim. Also critical to Pangle’s reading is her emphasis on the political dimensions of the dialogues. Underlying many of the paradoxes, she shows, is a distinction between philosophic and civic virtue that is critical to understanding them. Ultimately, Pangle offers a radically unconventional way of reading Socrates’s views of human excellence: Virtue is not knowledge in any ordinary sense, but true virtue is nothing other than wisdom. (shrink)

_Dark Tongues _constitutes a sustained exploration of a perplexing fact that has never received the attention it deserves. Wherever human beings share a language, they also strive to make from it something new: a cryptic idiom, built from the grammar that they know, which will allow them to communicate in secrecy. Such hidden languages come in many shapes. They may be playful or serious, children's games or adults' work. They may be as impenetrable as foreign tongues, or slightly different from (...) the idioms from which they spring, or barely perceptible, their existence being the subject of uncertain, even unlikely, suppositions. The first recorded jargons date to the time of the Renaissance, when writers across Europe noted that obscure languages had suddenly come into use. A varied cast of characters -- lawyers, grammarians, and theologians -- denounced these new forms of speech, arguing that they were tools of crime, plotted in tongues that honest people could not understand. Before the emergence of these modern jargons, however, the artificial twisting of languages served a different purpose. In epochs and regions as diverse as archaic Greece and Rome and medieval Provence and Scandinavia, singers and scribes also invented opaque varieties of speech. They did so not to defraud, but to reveal and record a divine thing: the language of the gods, which poets and priests alone were said to master. _Dark Tongues _moves among these various artificial and hermetic tongues. From criminal jargons to sacred idioms, from Saussure's work on anagrams to Jakobson's theory of subliminal patterns in poetry, from the arcane arts of the Druids and Biblical copyists to the secret procedure that Tristan Tzara, founder of Dada, believed he had uncovered in Villon's songs and ballads, Dark Tongues explores the common crafts of rogues and riddlers, which play sound and sense against each other. (shrink)

ABSTRACT Empathy is relevant to sociomoral development, especially in relation to prosociality and the penalization of acts as faults and crimes. The objective of this research was to test whether empathy is a predictor of prosociality and of perceptions of seriousness of delinquent acts among research participants in Argentina and Spain. The Argentinian sample comprised 215 high school and university students. The Spanish sample comprised 199 university students. The proposed theoretical model showed good fit in both countries. Although empathy was (...) found to predict prosocial conduct more than the perception of the seriousness acts as offenses and crimes, empathy was a significant of both prosocial conduct and perception of the seriousness acts as faults and crimes. Thus, the importance of empathy in morality was supported for both countries, supporting the influence of in different cultural context. (shrink)

This remarkable book--the fruit of almost two decades of study--traces in compelling fashion the changes in Western attitudes toward death and dying from the earliest Christian times to the present day. A truly landmark study, The Hour of Our Death reveals a pattern of gradually developing evolutionary stages in our perceptions of life in relation to death, each stage representing a virtual redefinition of human nature. Starting at the very foundations of Western culture, the eminent historian Phillipe Aries shows how, (...) from Graeco-Roman times through the first ten centuries of the Common Era, death was too common to be frightening; each life was quietly subordinated to the community, which paid its respects and then moved on. Aries identifies the first major shift in attitude with the turn of the eleventh century when a sense of individuality began to rise and with it, profound consequences: death no longer meant merely the weakening of community, but rather the destruction of self. Hence the growing fear of the afterlife, new conceptions of the Last Judgment, and the first attempts (by Masses and other rituals) to guarantee a better life in the next world. In the 1500s attention shifted from the demise of the self to that of the loved one (as family supplants community), and by the nineteenth century death comes to be viewed as simply a staging post toward reunion in the hereafter. Finally, Aries shows why death has become such an unendurable truth in our own century--how it has been nearly banished from our daily lives--and points out what may be done to "re-tame" this secret terror. The richness of Aries's source material and investigative work is breathtaking. While exploring everything from churches, religious rituals, and graveyards (with their often macabre headstones and monuments), to wills and testaments, love letters, literature, paintings, diaries, town plans, crime and sanitation reports, and grave robbing complaints, Aries ranges across Europe to Russia on the one hand and to England and America on the other. As he sorts out the tangled mysteries of our accumulated terrors and beliefs, we come to understand the history--indeed the pathology--of our intellectual and psychological tensions in the face of death. (shrink)

In 1441, Eleanor Cobham, duchess of Gloucester, was arrested, together with three associates: Margery Jourdemayne, the ‘Witch of Eye’, Roger Bolingbroke, Oxford cleric and astrologer, and Thomas Southwell, MB, canon of St. Stephen’s, Westminster. They were accused of plotting to kill King Henry VI by necromancy, but contemporary chronicles differed on the precise nature of their crime: had they summoned demons or cast an astrological chart? This paper explores the relationship between astrology and demonic magic, focusing on feelings, rites (...) and apparatus, and perceptions that the more the practitioner’s body was implicated in the divinatory procedure, the more likely it was to be illicit. (shrink)

We offer a functional perspective on hate, showing that hate has a unique pattern of appraisals and action tendencies. Hate is based on perceptions of a stable, negative disposition of persons or groups. We hate persons and groups more because of who they are, than because of what they do. Hate has the goal to eliminate its target. Hate is especially significant at the intergroup level, where it turns already devalued groups into victims of hate. When shared among group members, (...) hate can spread fast in conflict zones where people are exposed to hate-based violence, which further feeds their hate. Hate can be reassuring and self-protective, because its message is simple and helps confirming people’s belief in a just world. (shrink)

Aesthetics and communications theories are often applied to art, media and popular culture but not within legal empirical (audiovisual) material—despite the fact that a judicial and legal process comprises a palpable utilisation of the visual as evidence of an historical reality. Based on four distinct Swedish cases, this study analyses the court’s reasoning, interpretation and use of (audio)visual evidence. Inspired by an embodied film theory, Benjamin’s thoughts on the technical-dramaturgical components of the camera and the later Barthes’ notion of the (...) ‘punctum’, the article discusses how (audio)visual evidence cannot be disconnected from affective and aesthetic significances that ultimately can be taken to affect the perception of truth and (the crime’s) reality. The gap between theory and practice is debated and argued as beginning to co-exist; instead of seeing (visual) theory and (judicial) practice as a dichotomy, an attempt should be made for a conversation between seemingly different but in practice related areas of knowledge. The author’s aim is to suggest that photographic and filmic evidence has a particular significance in itself, which means that the relation between (judicial) interpretation and outcome should be considered within an affective and aesthetic dimension, rather than being placed and/or theorized outside of it. (shrink)

The significance of this article is in its deconstruction of the criminal insanity defence in a meta-legal critical context. The article’s objective is to critically review beliefs that the insanity defence was designed solely for public protection from insane violent people, or, for criminal deterrence. Arising from the long and continued use of the Roman Law concept of non compos mentis, the question arises as to what has become of the practical meaning of the term “insanity”, when used as a (...) defence. The article tries to show that the defence of insanity is a public act of judicial denunciation against the accused, while the accused may have no effective responsibility for the crime. Argument begins with a critical discussion on the character of common-place denunciation as an appeal to public agreement. Then, it follows how the idea of “manifest criminality”, of the 1800s, might be cognate to modern ideas of “manifest madness”, linking into the origins of the English special verdict of insanity. This will allow a short critical analysis of the M’Naghten Case. Argument is completed with analysis of a psychologists’ expert construct of insanity and its relationship to jury perception. The article will suggest strongly that arguments based on the common law rules of insanity tend to expose juries more to denunciation of the accused, than to a reasoned account of the nature of his insanity and to the defects in his responsibility. Duly persuaded jurors would tend to acquiesce and participate in the denunciation of an accused person, whose unusual and unhealthy behaviours emanated from his sufferings by dint of his unbearable circumstances. (shrink)

Memory conformity may occur when a person’s belief in another’s memory report outweighs their belief in their own. Witnesses might be less likely to believe and therefore take on false information from intoxicated co-witnesses, due to the common belief that alcohol impairs memory performance. This paper presents an online study in which participants watched a video of a mock crime taking place outside a pub that included a witness either visibly consuming wine or a soft drink. Participants then read (...) a statement from the witness that varied in the number of false details it contained before being asked to recall the crime. We found that the intoxicated witness was regarded as significantly less credible, but participants were not less likely to report misinformation from them. This suggests that intoxication status impacts one’s perception of how credible a source is, but not one’s ability to reject false suggestions from this source. Our findings reinforce the importance of minimizing co-witness discussion prior to interview, and not to assume that people automatically discount information provided by intoxicated co-witnesses. (shrink)

Concerns about a “crisis of expertise” have been raised recently in both scholarship and public debate. This article asks why there is such a widespread perception that expertise is in crisis, and why this “crisis” has posed such a difficult puzzle for sociology to explain. It argues that what has been interpreted as a crisis is better understood as a transformation: the dissolution of a regime of expertise organized around practices of social integration, and its displacement by a new (...) regime organized around practices of expulsion. This article introduces a new framework that envisages expertise as an historically constituted phenomenon, which is the outcome of relational networks (which I call alliances). It argues that this approach, in which expertise(s) are understood as the historically contingent outcome of alliances between knowledge producers, problems, and modes of intervention, can better account for recent shifts. It does this by enabling us to reinterpret what has been described as a general crisis of expertise as, instead, the observed effects of the dissolution of specific alliances of knowledge and practice. This article demonstrates the power of this relational approach through two case studies: the dissolution of the expert alliances organized around the rehabilitative approach to crime and the counterinsurgency approach to irregular political violence. In each these cases, it finds that, as alliances of social expertise, characterized by policies and interventions that attempted to discipline problem actors and integrate them into society, unraveled, they were displaced by new alliances that sought to manage problems through practices of exclusion. The paper concludes with a theory of why the field of sociology has had such difficulty explaining the crisis of expertise. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Vice, Disorder, Conduct, and CulpabilityStephen J. Morse (bio)Keywordsvice, conduct, culpability, mental disorderDr. John sadler’s interesting paper raises an important issue. It defines vice as criminal, wrongful or immoral behavior. He claims that the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) “confounds the concepts of vice and mental illness” and that this confounding has “important implications... for the relationship between crime, criminality, wrongful conduct, and mental illness.” The (...) paper correctly notes that disorders for which vice is the primary criterion tend to be impoverished diagnostically and are probably less valid than non–vice-related disorders. Dr. Sadler wonders if the subjects of his case studies are “involved in sick behavior, immoral behavior, both, neither, or some other metaphysical kind altogether.” This is an excellent question that this comment will seek to clarify. It will also consider the moral and legal implications of the answer.The domain of immoral, wrongful, and criminal behavior is essentially action. Some moral and religious traditions evaluate the content of an agent’s thoughts, desires, and character, but the dominant view is that vice primarily describes action that is wrongful because it violates the rights of others or it is wrong in itself. The rules of morality and law create value, but their essential task is to guide the action of agents who must live together. Dr. Sadler does not explicitly recognize that the diagnostic criteria that are vice are all actions, and not simply abnormal perceptions, desires, thoughts, or moods. His three case studies of conduct disorder, factitious disorder, and paraphilia confirm this point. Even pedophilia, which can be diagnosed simply on the basis of urges or fantasies that cause marked distress or interpersonal difficulty, would not be considered a vice unless the agent acted on these sexual urges. Those individual actions that meet Dr. Sadler’s criteria for vice I will term “vice actions.”Actions, including vice actions, may be evaluated medically and morally. There is no logical or conceptual reason why the same action cannot be both a sign of mental disorder and wrongful and potentially blameworthy. Actions can be just mad, just bad, or mad and bad. Also, the same action may sometimes be a sign of disorder and sometimes not. No general argument suggesting the contrary is provided. Consequently, there is no confound between the concepts of vice and mental disorder unless vice actions fail to satisfy the generic criteria for being a sign of mental disorder. Dr. Sadler seems to implicitly recognize [End Page 47] this when he asks whether vice–mental disorder relationship criteria are impoverished because there is a lack of consensus about “the minimum requirements for an acceptable set of descriptive criteria for a mental disorder category,” or when he asks “where criminal syndromes... fit into a classification of mental disorders.”No consensual, generic definition of mental disorder exists, and deciding whether actions should be signs of mental disorder is particularly fraught because cultural context and values always play a role in the definition of mental disorder. The other potential signs and symptoms of mental disorder are virtually all phenomena that simply happen to people and are not products of agency. Actions are by definition the product of agency, however, and vice actions affect by definition the rights and interests of others. The latter is true whether or not the agent is “vicious.” Even if an agent who has done wrong is excused, the rights of the victim have been violated.Moral, political, and legal evaluation is largely beside the point for non-action signs and symptoms, but it is always on point for vice actions. This is the primary potential source of the confound between vice and disorder. To claim that a vice action is a sign of disorder because it is vice begs the question and is indeed a confound. Even the presence of a biological marker will not save this claim. All human action presumably has biological markers and one cannot say that a marker is of a disorder without first having an independent definition of disorder that the vice action satisfies.Until a robust theory of mental disorder is provided, we cannot determine whether a vice action is... (shrink)

The Holocaust was a rupture in civilisation – a Zivilisationsbruch –, a shattering of ontological certainty. The perception of the event enshrined in the notion of “rupture in civilisation” is the result of both the historical and the conceptual engagement with the event. Its manifest content seeks to combine two ways of discerning which are in fact opposed to one another: a particular one and a universal one. The particular perspective reflects the experience undergone by Jews as Jews of (...) having been destroyed everywhere and solely because of their belonging, i.e. because of their alleged origin. It was hence the experience of being exposed to total extermination without any reason. Never before had anything of this kind taken place: a rupture in civilisation, carried out upon the Jews. The significance of the concept is further-reaching, however. The concept of rupture in civilisation seeks to denote the indeed singular circumstance of the extermination of human persons by human persons as the transgression of all the ethical and instrumental limits of comportment which had hitherto been considered as certain and secure. Transgression of this kind marks a rupture in civilisation that is carried out upon all humankind. The phenomenon of the crime against humanity experienced by the Jews can, however, be split and regarded from those two opposing perspectives: one that argues historically and that is above all adopted by the victims, while the other is an anthropologically inclined perception of the events which rather reaches further into a universal domain. The latter focuses on the significance of the events for the species as such. These perspectives are necessarily unequal. They may even work against other. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Anger in a Perilous Environment:María LugonesMariana Alessandriin a hundred years, maybe our commonsense beliefs about anger will come from a distinguished line of Women of Color like Audre Lorde, bell hooks, and María Lugones, who make a case for listening to our anger instead of stifling it. But our ideas about anger still come from ancient Greek and Roman philosophers. Their stories about how anger works and why it (...) is bad have been dominant throughout history, and they are not kind to angry women in the twenty-first century. They have created a perilous environment for us, existentially speaking, by painting anger as irrational, crazy, and ugly. They have left us no way to handle our anger that does not amount to trying to control, suppress, or eradicate it. In this short paper, I contrast a philosophy of anger left to us by ancient Western philosophy with a contemporary one offered by Latina feminist María Lugones. Lugones offers a philosophy of anger that assumes it has something to teach us about our perilous environment.1Part I: Anger Seen in the LightPlato compared passions like anger to a hard-to-control, hot-blooded, black-skinned horse that must be reined in by the "charioteer" of reason (Phaedrus, ln. 253E). He thought we should use self-control to contain our anger, and he was not alone. The Roman Stoic Seneca, who described anger similarly, once told a story about Plato getting livid (Potegal and Novaco 9–24). Instead of beating one of his slaves, Plato froze, his hand drawn back in striking position. A friend asked Plato what he was doing. "I am making an angry man expiate his crime," Plato replied (Seneca, De Ira, Book III, section 12). Plato's freezing was his way of acknowledging that rage is weakness. Seneca formulated this scene into a principle: the only appropriate time to express anger is when you are not angry. Otherwise, you are a slave to your emotion. [End Page 23]I became angry during quarantine. I had been promised a year without teaching or administrative responsibility, but everything changed when the schools went remote. Since my kids were home anyway, I decided to home-school them. But I found myself becoming angry almost daily, and it was upsetting. To make sense of it, I went back to my philosophical sources.I consulted Epictetus, the Stoic philosopher whose Handbook I used to read every year. For the fifteenth time, he told me that "an uneducated man blames others; a partially educated man blames himself. A fully educated man blames no one" (13). While I could not control my circumstances in 2020—Epictetus granted that I did not have the power to end a pandemic or reopen schools—I could control my bursts of anger. Instead of blaming my spouse and kids for my troubles, I should blame myself for expecting life to be easier. Better yet, I should blame no one and accept the new normal gracefully. I also reread the Meditations of Marcus Aurelius, the second-century Roman emperor and Stoic who believed that yielding to anger is a sign of weakness (Potegal and Novaco 16). Marcus reformulated one of the central tenets of Stoicism: "Disturbance comes only from within—from our own perceptions" (38). His advice? Lower your expectations. Remember that the only person you can change is yourself. To that end, expect people to irritate you daily and you will be ready for it (17). For me, that meant remembering that having kids meant having messes. But expecting a mess did not clean the table every night, load or unload the dishwasher, or vacuum the crumb-riddled floor. Marcus did not send his servants to clean my house. So, I left him for Aristotle.Aristotle's soul was not a charioteer with horses, but it was tripartite: feelings, predispositions, active conditions. Feelings are hard to change, Aristotle thought, so let's not waste too much energy trying. Predispositions just name the likelihood of feeling a particular feeling. Both categories matter, but chiefly because self-knowledge is a philosophical virtue. Mostly, Aristotle urged us to cultivate our "active conditions." Forever a... (shrink)

This chapter focuses on two main points: early Africana public philosophy critiques of anti‐Black propaganda and how contemporary anti‐Black propaganda has legitimized violence against Africana public thinkers. Between the fifteenth and nineteenth centuries, the propaganda that informed Western perceptions and expeditions to Africa was that Africa was a land full of cannibals and lawless kingdoms. Beginning with slavery, Africana public thinkers were the first to formulate slavery and its associated violence as crimes against humanity and construct more egalitarian notions of (...) human rights, citizenship, economic restitution, and respect for Black people to have self‐governance. The propaganda about the inability of Africans to self‐rule, be ethical, and be law‐abiding influenced the moral sentiments and policies that justified the enslavement of Africans. Lessons from Africana public philosophy warrant serious consideration of how anti‐Black propaganda impacts the future of Black people. (shrink)