The making of public Islam: piety, agency, and commodification on the landscape of the Indonesian public sphere

Over the last three decades, Islam has demonstrated its vitality as a system of symbolic and collective identity that informs the social and political dynamics of Indonesian society. It has increasingly served as the most important frame of reference for many Indonesians to reflect upon the socio-political and cultural system they imagined capable of bringing about justice and attaining veritable development. Keeping pace with the growing influence of Islam among the emerging Indonesian Muslim middle class, it has even gradually emerged as a symbol of elitism, associated with the road to success. Its strength lies in the fact that it has developed into some sort of network that enables large numbers of people from different social backgrounds to share and make contacts, both real and virtual. Through this network, the Islamic revival messages have resonated loudly, influencing multiple social and political fields. The network, in turn, provides credible paths for upward mobility and also a market for commercial products.     

Respecting the margins of agency: Alzheimer's patients and the capacity to value

1 Quoted in Oliver Sacks, The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat and Other Clinical Tales (New York: Summit Books, 1985), p. 32. Philosophy & Public Affairs 28, no. 2.

     

The profession of ferryman: Considerations on the analyst's internal attitude in consultation and in referral1

Psychoanalytic consultation is an interview with a patient who will not be taken in treatment by the consultant analyst, but who will be sent to another, perhaps specifi cally chosen, colleague after one or more assessment sessions. This practice is becoming increasingly important since, besides traditional private relationships between consultant and patient, it is now common in many specialized centres affi liated to offi cial psychoanalytical institutions. The author explores some fundamental aspects of the analyst's internal attitude in consultation: motivation to know; a ‘concave’ attitude to listening; responsibility in proposing suitable technical choices and referral to a further specialist; empathy and partial identifi cation; the balance between authentic experience in the consultation and risks of seduction; internal links within the community of colleagues; the technique for sending patients on. He presents a clinical example, specifi cally aimed at reproducing the internal attitude of the analyst, together with the necessary work that allows a diffi cult patient to initiate psychoanalytic treatment.     

On the ethical analysis of value issues in public decision-making

Abstract

The nature, methodology, importance and implications of an ethical analysis of value issues pertaining to public decision-making is not evident. In this paper I would like to address these issues by posing the following questions:

• Why is it important to focus on values in any process of public decision-making?

• What is the nature of an ethical analysis of the value issues involved?

• What is the basis, if any, for ethical analysis that moves beyond relativism and subjectivity?

• What difference can such an ethical analysis make to public decision-making?

During the course of discussing these issues, the question “What is ethics?” will be addressed in passing, as well as the usual objections against ethics and the consideration of value issues in public decision-making, namely that

• values cannot be analysed and discussed objectively

• values and ethics are relative to people and cultures

• value and ethical questions cannot be settled in a rational manner

• ethics cannot provide answers

• arguments about value and ethical issues move in circles, taking us nowhere

• values and ethics are so intertwined with emotions and biases that one cannot take them seriously in any process of public decision-making.

     

Discrepancy between explicit judgement of agency and implicit feeling of agency: Implications for sense of agency and its disorders

The sense of agency refers to the feeling of authorship that “I am the one who is controlling external events through my own action”. A distinction between explicit judgement of agency and implicit feeling of agency has been proposed theoretically. However, there has not been sufficient experimental evidence to support this distinction. We have assessed separate explicit and implicit agency measures in the same population and investigated their relationships. Intentional binding task was employed as an implicit measure and self-other attribution task as an explicit measure, which are known to reflect clinical symptoms of disorders in the sense of agency. The results of the implicit measure and explicit measure were not correlated, suggesting dissociation of the explicit judgement of agency and the implicit feeling of agency.     

Struggles over access to the Muslim public sphere: Multiple publics and discourses on agency,belonging and citizenship (Introduction to the Themed Section)

This introductory essay provides the context for the articles in this Themed Section. Despite the diversity in locations, historical backgrounds and contemporary processes of change, all contributors to this Themed Section focus on the struggle of Muslim groups over access to an emergent Muslim public sphere. They highlight the contestations of and shifts in the notions of agency, belonging, and citizenship in nation-states with Muslim communities within its borders. The introduction consists of two parts. The first part reviews the notion of the public sphere as conceptualized by Habermas and critiqued by scholars of a diversity of backgrounds. In relation to the concept of the Muslim public sphere, three aspects of critique are given closer consideration in this first part: the value of thinking in terms of multiple publics, the loss of legitimacy of traditional religious authorities, and the importance of agency and identity that allow individuals to engage in a diversity of publics. The second part introduces the various contributions in the Themed Section.     

From mimesis to agency: Clinical steps in the work of psychic two‐ness1

In this paper, through the study of the clinical process of a girl starting treatment at the age of 3 years 10 months, who was thought of as a dummy by her family and who came for consultation when the assumed genetic aetiology was questioned, the authors build upon Tustin's contributions on the context of togetherness and the crisis of two‐ness, and upon Eugenio and Renata Gaddini's on the precursor object. The mimetic phenomena enacted with an older brother and at the kindergarten are found to result from cumulative trauma at her contacting a loving but mind–blind mother. After an initial stage of transference autism, enactment in the session of the traumatic situation was the first step in surmounting her autistic pseudo–stupidity. Mimetic transference dynamics took place principally at the level of the gaze, leading to the unfolding of the work of two–ness to a differentiation from the analyst as psychic breast, on the road to symbol formation and personal agency.     

Negotiating the moral order: paradoxes of ethics consultation

Ethics consultation at the bedside has been hailed as a better way than courts and ethics committees to empower patients and make explicit the value components of treatment decisions. But close examination of the practice of ethics consultation reveals that it in fact risks subverting those ends by interpolating a third (expert) party into the doctor-patient encounter. In addition, the practice of bioethics through consultation does the broader cultural work of fashioning a shared moral order in the face of manifestly plural individual commitments. In doing so, however, bioethics furthers medicine's position as a privileged domain of public moral discourse in contemporary American society.     

Strangers at the benchside: research ethics consultation

Institutional ethics consultation services for biomedical scientists have begun to proliferate, especially for clinical researchers. We discuss several models of ethics consultation and describe a team-based approach used at Stanford University in the context of these models. As research ethics consultation services expand, there are many unresolved questions that need to be addressed, including what the scope, composition, and purpose of such services should be, whether core competencies for consultants can and should be defined, and how conflicts of interest should be mitigated. We make preliminary recommendations for the structure and process of research ethics consultation, based on our initial experiences in a pilot program.     

Vicarious agency: experiencing control over the movements of others

Participants watched themselves in a mirror while another person behind them, hidden from view, extended hands forward on each side where participants' hands would normally appear. The hands performed a series of movements. When participants could hear instructions previewing each movement, they reported an enhanced feeling of controlling the hands. Hearing instructions for the movements also enhanced skin conductance responses when a rubber band was snapped on the other's wrist after the movements. Such vicarious agency was not felt when the instructions followed the movements, and participants' own covet movement mimicry was not essential to the influence of previews on reported control.     

Scaffolding agency: A proleptic account of the reactive attitudes

This paper examines the methodological claim made famous by P. F. Strawson: that we understand what features are required for responsible agency by exploring our attitudes and practices of holding responsible. What is the presumed metaphysical connection between holding responsible and being fit to be held responsible that makes this claim credible? I propose a non‐standard answer to this question, arguing for a view of responsible agency that is neither antirealist nor straightforwardly realist. It is instead “constructivist.” On the “Scaffolding View” I defend, reactive attitudes play an essential role in developing, supporting, and thereby maintaining the capacities that make for responsible agency. Although this view has relatively novel implications for a metaphysical understanding of capacities, its chief virtue, in contrast with more standard views, is in providing a plausible defense of why so‐called “responsible agents” genuinely deserve to be treated as such.     

Realizing the Good: Hegel's Critique of Kantian Morality

Although the best‐known Hegelian objection against Kant's moral philosophy is the charge that the categorical imperative is an ‘empty formalism’, Hegel's criticisms also include what we might call the realizability objection. Tentatively stated, the realizability objection says that within the sphere of Kantian morality, the good remains an unrealizable ‘ought’ – in other words, the Kantian moral ‘ought’ can never become an ‘is’. In this paper, I attempt to come to grips with this objection in two steps. In the first section of the paper, I provide an initial reading of the objection, according to which Hegel agrees with Kant's formulation of the realizability problem but disagrees with the specific Kantian solution, namely, with the Kantian idea of the highest good and the doctrine of the postulates. In the second section, I go on to argue that this reading is potentially too superficial and offer a more far‐reaching interpretation whereby Hegel is ultimately targeting fundamental distinctions (between, for instance, reason and sensibility) of Kant's moral theory. I end by employing these more far‐reaching results of Hegel's objection to sketch some features of Hegel's alternative ethical view.