Racism: Flew's Three Concepts of Racism

ABSTRACT In an article in Encounter, Antony Flew usefully opens up the issue of what racism is by giving three 'concepts': (1) 'unjustified discrimination'; (2) 'heretical belief; and (3) 'institutionalised racism'. He rejects senses (2) and (3) in favour of (1) and finds much 'anti-racism'in fact guilty of it. This article, while benefiting from Flew's account, argues that it basically misconceives and underestimates racism by ignoring its complex ideological (sense 2) and institutional (sense 3) character. In regard to (2) it is argued that we need to distinguish scalar and statistical claims from the binary 'us/them'essentialism characteristic of racism. In regard to (3) it is argued both that affirmative action is required by justice and that it entails 'collateral injustice'as well as consequential uncertainties.     

Relational Development as Negotiated Order in Hostage Negotiation

This article applies negotiated order theory to explore how disputants negotiate relational limits in 10 actual hostage negotiations. Four relational limits are defined through the intersection of affiliation (the degree of liking, trust, and acceptance) and interdependence (the strength of parties’rights and obligations to one another): moving toward the other (high affiliation, high interdependence), moving with the other (high affiliation, low interdependence), moving away from the other (low affiliation and low interdependence), and moving against the other person (low affiliation, high interdependence). Spatial and implicit verbal immediacy language cues were used to operationalize affiliation and interdependence in each utterance across the 10 hostage negotiations. The results indicated that when parties created a “moving against” and “moving away” relational pattern, they experienced more difficulty building a relational consensus during the negotiations. When parties rotated between “moving toward” and “moving with” relational phases, they were more successful in building relational consensus. The results also revealed that disputants in hostage negotiations develop relational rhythms by moving within fairly stable cooperative or competitive relational patterns.     

PROMETHEUS AND KANT: NEUTRALIZING THEOLOGICAL DISCOURSE AND DOXOLOGY

This essay argues that Kant's writings on religion recapitulate or anticipate many of the theoretical moves we find in Promethean discourses of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The first portion of the article lays out fundamental elements of Promethean discourse from a theological point of view, and distinguishes between "aggressive" and "urbane" Prometheanism. I contend that both types attack divine transcendence and Christian doxology, focus almost entirely on soteriology to the detriment of creation, and advocate a movement from theo-centric discourse to anthropocentric discourse. Yet urbane Prometheanism differs from its aggressive cousin by moving from hatred of God to a non-dialogical mode of indifference to God as an impotent and inconsequential deity. I argue that an urbane Prometheanism is what properly characterizes Kant's philosophy of religion—from his epistemic work in the first Critique , through his way of parsing theological and philosophical discursive responsibilities, to his actual hermeneutics of Christian doctrine.