Sissela Bok on the analogy of deception and violence

Conclusion Bok defines lying in the same way as Augustine and Kant. But she wants to oppose their position that one cannot lie to save an innocent life. This position was successfully and consistently opposed by Constant and Grotius who did so by redefining lying so that the untruth one tells to save an innocent life does not count as a lie since it does not violate a right. Bok refuses to use this way. She instead uses her analogy of deception and violence. But this analogy is not, as she believes it is, intuitively clear or a good a fortiori argument. Still, if one pays attention to the ordinary sense of the words Bok uses in her confused analogy, deception and lying, force and violence, one realizes that Bok's analogy has some persuasive power, not because violence and lying are right means to save a life, but because force and deception, or force or deception are. And to see why this is so requires that Constant and Grotius's way of opposing Kant, and their definition of lying, must be adopted. Bok's apparent success with her analogy of force and lying is due to the fact that it is a shadow of the more genuine success of the analogy of force and violence and deception and lying which requires Constant and Grotius's definition of deception and lying. Thus her way of opposing Augustine and Kant is weak in trying to do it in a new approach and demonstrates the advantages of Constant and Grotius's approach.     

Science and Morality: Mind the Gap, Use Happiness as a Safe Bridge!

In 2002 Sissela Bok re-published her book “Common Values”, first published in 1995, about her search for a minimal set of values to be respected all over the world. In her view such a set of values is needed to facilitate international communication and cooperation. Values already recognized in every society can be included as a starting point. In her book “Exploring happiness”, published in 2010, she explains why she finds happiness unfit to be included. She observes that there are discordant claims about what happiness is. Any particular vision can lead to practical choices that either adhere or violate the values she prefers. In my view subjective happiness should be included, because there are no discordant claims about the meaning of subjective happiness, and subjective happiness is simultaneously attractive as a moral value and as an object of scientific research. Subjective happiness can function as a bridge between science and morality. The only discordant claims are about ‘objective’ happiness, as a wider interpretation of well-being in the context of some specific morality or ideology.     

Truth and democratic education

The connection of education to democracy is an issue of central importance to communities committed to liberty and justice. In her influential book Democratic Education Amy Gutmann addresses this connection. In doing so she takes up a position regarding democracies and the teaching of truth which is indefensible, and which removes any ban on manipulating citizens. Also indefensible is Gutmann's position concerning publicly-funded community colleges and universities. These she deems nonselective institutions; a mistake that obscures the unequal distribution of opportunities for democratically-required education. The outcome is to reveal Gutmann's analysis of democratic education and democratic participation to be, in important respects, inadequate.     

Bribery: the concept

The aim of this paper is to clarify the concept of bribery, and to do this in a way that reveals its underlying normative features. Bribery, like lying is not a value neutral concept. It has a negative connotation and is regarded by most as generally, although not necessarily universally, wrong. At the very least, those who resort to bribery bear a burden of justification for what they do. This is no small point, as no such burden must be borne for the vast majority of human activities, such as engaging in conversation or taking a walk, which normally do not. As Sissela Bok says of lying, we might say that a negative moral weight attaches to every act of bribery; it may be possible to counter this negative weight in some instances, but not without an argument (the provision of good reasons).¹ Why should a negative moral weight be attached to every act of bribery? It might be thought that, even if most instances of bribery are morally objectionable, the concept of bribery itself is morally neutral.² However, enticing people to violate what they take to be their positional duties does seem to call for some sort of moral justification. This seems to be so even in extreme cases, for example, when bribing a Nazi guard to allow concentration camp prisoners to escape. The ready availability of a moral justification in such circumstances does not eliminate the need for one.     

Book Reviews

Books reviewed in this articles:
Secrets: on the ethics of concealment and revelation . Sissela Bok
Women's Choices: philosophical problems facing feminism . Mary Midgley & Judith Hughes
World Poverty: challenge and response . Nigel Dower
Authenticity and Learning: Nietzsce's educational philosophy . David E. Cooper
The Foundations of Morality . Joel J. Kupperman
Spheres of Justice . Michael Walzer     

Moral Realism as a Moral Doctrine

This paper argues for the legalization of vote markets. I contend that the state should not prohibit the sale of votes under certain institutional conditions. Jason Brennan has recently argued for the moral permissibility of vote selling; yet, thus far, no philosopher has argued for the legal permissibility of vote selling. I begin by giving four prima facie reasons in favour of legalizing vote markets. First, vote markets benefit both buyers and sellers. Second, citizens already enjoy significant discretion in their use of their vote, including the ability to use their vote in ways antithetical to justice and the public interest. Third, vote markets are relevantly similar to other democratic practices that are legally permissible. Fourth, vote markets enable elections to better reflect the intensity of citizens’ preferences. Next, I reply to two counter-arguments. The first contends that vote markets will increase the political power of the wealthy; the second contends that votes must be used in the service of the public interest rather than private interests or influenced by participation in collective political deliberation. I argue that vote markets will not increase political inequalities relative to democracies without vote markets. There is little reason to expect electoral regulations to be less effective in satisfying egalitarian criteria in democracies with vote markets than in democracies without vote markets. Moreover, the claim that votes must be influenced by participation in collective deliberation or serve the common good implies counter-intuitive restrictions on political liberties beyond a ban on vote buying and selling, including an abridgement of equal suffrage.     

Remembering democracy

A proper sense of history and the past is often held to be essential to democracy. Current attitudes to history and the past in the United Kingdom, particularly but not only in the context of formal education, show signs of strain, just as many other aspects of democracy do. Conceptions of history as heritage or as a site for the exercise of skills deserve critical examination. We need to look for a fresh basis for the relationship of democracies with their past. Perhaps this can be found in the essentially oppositional or ironical structure that both democracy and remembering require for their full flourishing.     

Trust and Involvement as Higher-Order Factors of General Attitudes Towards Politics. Testing a Structural Model Across 26 Democracies

Interindividual differences in how people think and feel about politics have been investigated for decades. However, the great number of attitudinal concepts that has been developed to describe these differences is likely to distract from their conceptual overlap and dimensional structure. In addition, not much is known about the cross-cultural invariance of their interrelation. We propose that attitudes towards politics can be structured by two broad higher-order factors, a factor of general political involvement and a factor of general political trust. In two studies (N₁ = 767; N₂ = 29,018), including representative samples from 26 democracies, we first conduct several confirmatory factor analyses (CFA) to show that the higher-order model is a well-fitting and parsimonious alternative to a baseline model without higher-order factors in most samples. Second, we present evidence from multigroup CFA that the overall patterns of factor loadings are the same across all 26 countries. We interpret this structural equivalence across different democracies as support for the assumption that general political involvement and general political trust reflect basic orientations towards politics that are based on (1) demands of democratic political systems and (2) universal principles in human trait structure.     

The Right to be Publicly Naked: A Defence of Nudism

Res Publica - Many liberal democracies have legal restrictions on nudism. This article argues that when public nudity does not pose a health threat (which it seldom does), such restrictions are...     

Preserved and Impaired Detection of Structure From Motion by a 'Motion-blind" Patient

Following bilateral extrastriate damage to areas that include the suspected human homologue of V5/MT, the patient LM has a specific deficit in processing moving stimuli. She has difficulty detecting the movement or coding the velocity of single moving dots. Nevertheless, we find that she can report human actions in Johansson “biological motion ”; displays. This requires the accurate coding of the direction and velocity of many moving dots. The implication is that structure can be extracted from motion in regions of visual cortex other than those traditionally associated with motion processing. However, she cannot report the spatial disposition of the actors whose actions she has recognized, not their movement in depth relative to her. A possible interpretation is that coding in these additional regions is primarily object-centred. Adding a small number of random stationary “noise” dots to the display prevents her from identifying the actions, suggesting that segregation by motion is implemented within the traditional movement areas.     

Public Art and Dewey's Democratic Experience: The Case of John Adams's On the Transmigration of Souls

The aesthetic and political sides of public art have recently been examined from different theoretical vantage points. Pragmatist accounts, however, have been largely absent from the discussion. This article develops a theory of public art on some central ideas of John Dewey's aesthetics and social philosophy. From a pragmatist perspective, the best cases of public art turn out to have high social significance, for they are means of promoting the sense of community, which Dewey saw as foundational for well‐functioning democracies. The Deweyan account of public art developed in this article is set against theories that explain its social value by public artworks’ ability to disrupt people's everyday routines and beliefs, as well as by the political alertness they often raise. Diana Boros's recent treatment of what she calls “visionary public art” serves as the main specimen of this approach. The Deweyan understanding of public art is illuminated and defended with the help of a reading of John Adams's On the Transmigration of Souls—a piece composed in memory of the victims of 9/11—that highlights its capacity to generate such communal experiences that have a fundamental role in Dewey's theory of democracy.     

Are Nativists a Different Kind of Democrat? Democratic Values and “Outsiders” in Japan

This paper combines three elements: a discussion of democratic values and the status of outsiders in Japanese political culture, the development of new measures to examine sensitive issues of nativism and foreigner perception in Japan, and an empirical exploration of the relationship between democratic values and antipathy toward outsiders. Two forms of democratic orientation were investigated in a sample of about 1,000 university students in Japan: a defensive version, which adheres to the formalistic requirements of democracy but is exclusionary and illiberal, and a universalist version that is liberal and tolerant. A defensive orientation is associated with greater chauvinism, a greater sense of threat emanating from foreigners, and a heightened anxiety about economic competition. A universalist orientation is associated with low perceived threat and low chauvinism, a lack of fear of economic competition, and a positive view of the cultural contributions of outsiders. Nativism may indeed be compatible with democratic values, but only with the defensive, exclusionary form. In short, the defensive form is democracy for xenophobes. Such an orientation is not unique to Japan, but is likely to be found in developing democracies as well as in advanced democracies that feel threatened.     

Articles of Faith: Freedom of Expression and Religious Freedom in Contemporary Multiculture

ABSTRACT

This article examines the relationship between freedom of religion and freedom of speech and expression within contemporary multicultural liberal democracies. These two fundamental human rights have increasingly been seen, in public and political discourse, in terms of tension if not outright opposition, a view reinforced by the Charlie Hebdo killings in January 2015. And yet in every human rights charter they are proximate to one another. This essay argues that this adjacency is not coincidental, that it has a history and that, in illuminating this history, it is possible to explore how the contemporary framing of these two rights as being in opposition has come about. Looking back to the framing of the First Amendment of the US Constitution, the essay offers an historical perspective that, in turn, facilitates a reappraisal and re-evaluation of these two liberties that is the necessary, albeit insufficient, predicate to the task of addressing the problematic of multicultural ‘crisis' in the contemporary liberal democracies of Western Europe, North America and Australasia, in which the presence of certain religious communities (Muslims, in particular) and the role of religion in public and political life more generally (and, conversely, of secularism) has assumed a central importance.     

APOLOGIZING WITHOUT REGRET

A common belief about the nature of agent regret is that regretting some event E is closely linked to being sorry for the occurrence of E. Or more specifically, that if one is sorry for E then she must regret E. I will call this ‘the sorry‐regret hypothesis’. My contention is that one may be sorry for some action but not regret it. I take the rejection of this ‘truism’ to be a positive development. I offer two lines of argument for rejecting the sorry‐regret hypothesis. One line of argument is based on counterexamples. The second attacks the validity of a reconstructed argument for the sorry‐regret hypothesis. It is desirable to reject the sorry‐regret hypothesis since there is a component of regret that many will not wish to be saddled with as a condition of apologizing. To regret an act, one must wish that she had not performed that act. Since a person is the person she is (speaking loosely) because of the actions she has performed, for many actions, if one regrets an action, then she wishes that she were a different person. This is a worrisome consequence.     

Keeping Out Extremists: Refugees,Would-Be Immigrants,and Ideological Exclusion

Many people want to live in liberal democracies because they are liberal and democratic. Yet it would be mistaken, indeed naïve, to assume that this applies to all would-be residents. Just as some inhabitants of liberal democracies oppose one or more fundamental liberal-democratic values and principles (e.g. the rule of law, freedoms of conscience and speech, rights to private property and to political participation), so there are foreign would-be residents who do so, who might include individuals with e.g. Jihadist, Neo-Nazi, and radical anarchist views. Proceeding on the assumption that there exists no unconditional moral right to immigrate, this article asks whether it is ever morally permissible for liberal democracies to deny residence to nonnationals based on evidence that they personally hold extremist views. I argue that this is sometimes the case. Specifically, my contention is that even if we adopt a cosmopolitan perspective on which states are not allowed to prioritise the interests of their own citizens and residents over those of foreign nonresidents, there are two conditions under which such exclusions are justified even when refugees are being refused admission (although, as I suggest, states might be morally required in such cases to admit other refugees instead).     

Witnessing and Passing. Discussion of Prince's “The Self in Pain: The Paradox of Memory. The Paradox of Testimony”

The author indicates that she has two voices. One voice speaks to the patient's loneliness and detachment and her expectation to not be seen, believed, or acknowledged. This voice, housing the knowledge that events that remain unprocessed continue to have an impact, wants Dr. Prince to risk intrusion and preemption. This voice believes that it is worth it. The author's other voice considers bottomless wounds and speaks to the patient's need to build up healthy aspects of personality that is necessary to do the holocaust work. This voice holds that this is not the time for Dr. Prince to witness what happened to the patient, what the perpetrators of massive crimes did to her or what the onlookers saw and chose not to do. This voice says that the patients lead should be followed. The author elaborates on her two voices and indicates what she would have done had she been working with the patient.     

Adolescents’ Civic Commitments in Stable and Fledgling Democracies: The Role of Family,School, and Community

The authors examined the associations between adolescents’ perceptions of proximal processes in families, schools, and communities and their civic commitments (to the local community, nation, and conventional politics) in stable (Australia, United States) and fledgling (Bulgaria, Hungary) democracies in the mid-1990s. Results of multivariate analysis of covariance (MANCOVA) revealed that adolescents in the stable democracies reported higher levels of extracurricular participation, family emphasis on social responsibility, and community social capital compared to peers in the fledgling democracies. Using a multiple group regression approach, the authors found that in both types of polities, community social capital was positively associated with all three civic outcomes and a family ethic of social responsibility was positively associated with commitments to the local community and nation. However, whereas in the stable democracies, a democratic school climate was positively associated with commitments to the community and nation, in the fledgling democracies such school climates were positively associated with commitments to conventional politics.     

Hannah Gadsby’s Nanette: Connection Through Comedy

Hannah Gadsby: Nanette (2018) is a brilliant and masterful work of comedy in which Gadsby announces she is quitting comedy. In this article, I draw on classical and contemporary humor theory to explore the comedic content of Nanette and critique Gadsby’s reasons for quitting. Although I largely agree with Gadsby’s concerns about comedy, I argue that the very show in which she presents them, Nanette, stands as evidence against their universal truth. Gadsby argues that comedy is no longer conducive to her health for at least three related reasons. First, the self-deprecatory comedy out of which she has built her career is a symptom of her humiliation which she is no longer willing or able to showcase for the pleasure of others. I argue that while self-deprecatory humor can, of course, be a sign of humiliation, it needn’t be. Comedians, including those on the margins, can and do effectively employ self-deprecation without humiliation or denigration of self, and one way comedians do this is as a ruse to expose the ignorance of the audience or of comic targets not present. Second, Gadsby analyzes jokes and argues their two-part structure, set-up and punch line, is inadequate for telling the whole story of the trauma she has endured as a lesbian who, as she puts it, presents as “gender not-normal.” However, I maintain that, although jokes may not be, stand-up sets are often complete wholes with beginnings, middles, and ends. In fact, Nannette is a prime example of such complex comedy. Finally, she argues that the comedian’s job is to create and dispel tension, but she is no longer willing to take responsibility for or do anything to dispel the tension created when she speaks of her past trauma. But I discuss how Gadsby, as a true master of her craft, is able to create a highly successful and very funny comedy show in which she completely controls the tension while explicitly choosing to leave significant portions of it with the audience. In fact, super stand-up comedy can introduce tension it neglects to remove without sacrificing the humor. Indeed, Hannah Gadsby’s Nanette is a prime example of comedy that powerfully does precisely this.     

Participatory Policy-Making,Participatory Civil Society: A Key for Dissolving Elite Rule in New Democracies in the Era of Globalization

The author argues that in democracies a strong state and strong civil society are not mutually exclusive. Only a democratic, legitimate, and strong state can provide the environment for civil society activities to flourish; in return, only a strong and a participatory civil society can outline the reach of state strength vis-à-vis the society. The author discusses the need for civil society organizations to collaborate with policy-making institutions, in which they can negotiate policy concerns with ministers and officials while retaining an independent distance from the state and the political parties. Further, the author argues that an environment as such would provide for the transformative capacity of human agency to manifest itself in full in a globalizing world. The author discusses how participatory state and civil society structures will enhance the role of the human agency in order to dissolve elite rule, especially in new democracies.     

Dissociative Identity Disorder,Ambivalence, and Responsibility

If someone with dissociative identity disorder (DID) commits a wrongful act, is she responsible? If one adopts the Multiple Persons Thesis, it may seem that one alter cannot be responsible for the actions of another alter. Conversely, if one regards the subject as a single person, it may seem that she is responsible for any actions she performs. I will argue that this subject is a single person, but one who suffers from delusions of disownership and therefore does not fulfill ordinary requirements for responsible agency. This is because she suffers from extreme ambivalence: her deep‐seated needs and desires conflict, and she forms alter‐personalities as a way to cope with inner discord without abandoning any of these contradictory impulses. However, although the ability to exercise autonomous agency is eroded in such cases, the capacity for autonomous agency is preserved. The subject with DID is weakly responsible for her wrongful acts.