Practicing Teaching to Transgress

One of four short essays published in this issue of the journal to celebrate the 25th anniversary of bell hooks's classic book, Teaching to Transgress (1994). The authors reflect on the importance of this text for their teaching, when they discovered it, and how it has shaped their approach to the classroom, as illustrated in a particular teaching strategy or assignment that they have used that is inspired by the book.     

Taboo Trade-offs: Reactions to Transactions That Transgress the Spheres of Justice

Taboo trade-offs violate deeply held normative intuitions about the integrity, even sanctity, of certain relationships and the moral-political values underlying those relationships. For instance, if asked to estimate the monetary worth of one's children, of one's loyalty to one's country, or of acts of friendship, people find the questions more than merely confusing or cognitively intractable: they find such questions themselves morally offensive. This article draws on Fiske's relational theory and Tetlock's value pluralism model: (a) to identify the conditions under which people are likely to treat trade-offs as taboo; (b) to describe how people collectively deal with trade-offs that become problematic; (c) to specify the conceptual components of moral outrage and the factors that affect the intensity of reactions to various explicit trade-offs; (d) to explore the various strategies that decision-makers—required by resource scarcity and institutional roles to confront taboo trade-offs—use to deflect the wrath of censorious observers; (e) to offer a method of dispute resolution based on pluralism.     

Hell,justice, and freedom

International Journal for Philosophy of Religion -     

Psychiatry,language and freedom

For political reasons, the social control functions of psychiatry are not openly recognized as such but are disguised as benevolent medical treatment. The roots of this disguise may be traced to the political revolutions in which the rule of man was replaced by the rule of law. This transformation generated a conflict between the desire for freedom under law and the desire for a greater degree of social control than is provided by law. Involuntary mental hospitalization is the neurotic resolution of this conflict by society. The social control functions of psychiatry are disguised and justified by the medical model which describes the moral action of both psychiatrist and patient in the ostensibly value neutral language of science and medicine. The cost of this disguise is great. It negates individuals as moral agents and obscures the moral nature of the problems that psychiatrists seek to understand which, in turn, handicaps them in helping the persons they seek to assist. The task of the philosopher in this situation is honestly and critically to analyze and evaluate psychiatric language, psychiatric practices and the moral issues involved.     

The effects of fear arousal,fear position,fear exposure,and sidedness on compliance with dietary instructions

Investigated the effects of fear arousal and sidedness variables on compliance with a dietary regimen. Experiments involved 202 women volunteers who were 10 per cent or more overweight, and aged 20-60 years. Experiment 1 involved a 3 (low, medium, high fear) × 2 (single, multiple exposure to fear message) × 2 (one-, two-sided communication) design. The fear levels involved discussing the health hazards of obesity. Experiment 2 manipulated the fear-message position relative to the recommendations (fear-recommendations, recommendations-fear, fear-delay-recommendations). Persuasive impact was measured via follow-up weight checks at 2, 4, 8, and 16 weeks. Results indicate nonsignificant effects from sidedness and pre-standardised fear levels. Using subjects' fear arousal ratings medium fear is significantly better (p < .025), supporting Janis's curvilinear hypothesis. A single exposure to the fear message is superior (p < .025) to multiple exposures, the interaction with time being highly significant (p < .001). Experiment 2 results indicate the optimum position for the fear message as immediately prior to recommendations (p < .025). Results support both cognitive and fear-reduction hypotheses, but the latter is favoured.     

Ought implies can,asymmetrical freedom,and the practical irrelevance of transcendental freedom

In this paper, I demonstrate that Kant's commitment to an asymmetry between the control conditions for praise and blame is explained by his endorsement of the principle Ought Implies Can (OIC). I argue that Kant accepts only a relatively weak version of OIC and that he is hence committed only to a relatively weak requirement of alternate possibilities for moral blame. This suggests that whether we are transcendentally free is irrelevant to questions about moral permissibility and moral blameworthiness.     

Sensory information,fear level,and reactions to pain1

An experiment was conducted to investigate the conditions under which sensory information has beneficial versus detrimental value as preparatory information to assist individuals in coping with stress. Fourteen high fear and twelve low fear college women underwent exposure to the cold pressor test. Half of each fear group was provided with sensory information about the sensations produced by the cold pressor and half received a control message. Distress judgments made during the cold pressor showed (a) that sensory information effectively reduced distress for low fear women, but (b) sensory information exacerbated the distress of high fear women—at least during early portions of the cold pressor test. The data generally support Leventhal's (1979) perceptual-motor theory of emotion and have pragmatic implications for those persons who provide preparatory information to individuals anticipating a stressful encounter.     

The right to freedom

The Journal of Value Inquiry -     

Reactions to an offense in relation to authoritarianism,knowledge about risk,and freedom of action

This research investigated a situation where a fictitious company distributed contaminated meat that led to serious food poisoning. Participants (N = 241) responded to scenarios that varied information about knowledge of risk (aware, unaware) and freedom of action (free to act, constrained by higher authority). They provided judgments concerning compliance, foreseeability, negligence, recklessness, seriousness of offense, responsibility, deservingness, anger, sympathy, harshness/leniency of penalty, compensation, jail sentence, and community service. They also completed Altemeyer's Right‐Wing Authoritarianism Scale. Results implied that high authoritarians were less sensitive and less responsive to information about the risk of contamination and more sensitive and more responsive to information about constraints from the higher authority when compared with low authoritarians. These interaction effects involving authoritarianism and the two contextual variables occurred for judgments that related to the organizations and to the executive officers within them. These differences in the reactions of high and low authoritarians to the contextual cues were interpreted as reflecting the effects of value differences and possible differences in the way information was subsequently processed. Copyright © 2001 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Cruelty to Compassion: the Poetry of Teaching Transformation

Two complementary bodies of literature either claim explicitly or imply that human cruelty is rooted in asymmetrical relationships. The first describes and analyzes various forms of domination and acquiescence, including colonialism, racism, imperialism, sexism, and interpersonal power dynamics, among others. The second attempts to describe what would constitute the antidote, namely symmetrical relationships of mutuality and equality. Both of these literatures counsel abandoning asymmetrical relationships in favor of the symmetrical. To the contrary, this paper argues that it is only in the context of asymmetrical relationships that humans can learn the basics of equality and mutual regard that undergird democracy. More particularly, the moral use of asymmetrical relations would be to help the young acquire, inter alias, the kinds of self-awareness and self-understanding that would enable them to function as responsible parties in symmetrical relations.     

Sex roles, gender, and fear

Male and female college students classified as masculine, feminine, androgynous, or undifferentiated on the Bem (1974) Sex Role Inventory (N = 199) were given the Wolpe (1969) Fear Inventory. Significant differences in average fear scores were seen between men and women and between the four sex-role categories, with sex role and gender contributing equally to the variability. The argument is raised here that excessive fearfulness or fearlessness might be as much a product of sex-role conditioning as a product of gender.     

Knowledge,learning, and freedom from thought

This paper discusses the acquisition of knowledge by one generation from another, and the problems inherent in the process. The difficulties are seen as falling into three areas: (i) the difficulty of understanding the knowledge itself; (ii) the difficulty that a fact or a theory becomes an internal object subject to all the vicissitudes of object relations; and (iii) the difficulty of finding a training method that will enable the learner to assimilate knowledge and use it judiciously rather than to swallow it in an uncomprehending way. Examples are drawn from the history of ideas in general, and from the author's experience of therapeutic communities, particularly the Cassel Hospital. The danger of allowing a body of knowledge to become, in its passage from one person to another, a mere set of never-to-be-questioned beliefs is illustrated. The common frailties of both trainers and trainees are discussed and methods suggested for understanding and overcoming them.