Evil intent and design responsibility

Mass casualty attacks in recent years have demonstrated the need to include “evil intent” as a design consideration. Three recent actual or potential weapons of mass destruction (WMD) attacks did not involve nuclear bombs or other devices designed as weapons, but rather benign objects used with evil intent. Just as unplanned events such as hurricanes, earthquakes, fires, and user misuse have been codified into design requirements based on the likelihood and potential impact of the event, “evil intent” has to become part of the design process for buildings, vehicles, equipment, and other items. The endstate should be reasonable additions to existing codes and standards such that it is clear what is and is not designed for. In the absence of specific design guidance, professionals with appropriate expertise can assess potential for “evil intent” and provide recommendations to design out or warn against this potential harm to public safety, particularly when codified requirements are not present. An earlier version of this paper was presented at the “Ethics and Social Responsibility in Engineering and Technology” meeting, New Orleans, 2003. Author Note: Bart Kemper, PE, is the principal engineer for Kemper Imageering, Inc. A significant portion of his work has been involved in industrial equipment design, product design, and the design and analysis of different security devices as well as performing simulations, computer modelling, reliability studies, blast analyses, and FMEA analyses on commercial equipment, including marine, offshore, and industrial facilities. He is also a US Army Reserve captain in the Corps of Engineers and was mobilized and deployed overseas in February 2003 in support of Operation Iraqi Freedom as a member of the 412^th Engineer Command, headquartered in Vicksburg, Mississippi. A significant portion of his duties involved reviewing intelligence, analyzing potential courses of action, and evaluating risks with regard to Iraqi and Coalition activities in the northern Iraqi oilfields as well as base camp design and infrastructure engineering. This paper is unclassified and has been cleared for publication.     

Religious Parties, Religious Political Identity, and the Cold Shoulder of Liberal Democratic Thought

Elements of the relation between religion and politics are standard themes in political theory: toleration and free exercise rights; the parameters of separation of church and state; arguments for and against constraints imposed on religious discourse by philosophic norms of public reason. But religious parties and partisanship are no part of political theory, despite contemporary interest in value pluralism and in liberal democratic theory's capacity to address multicultural, religious, and ethnic group claims. This essay argues that religious parties are missing elements in discussions of identity politics. They play an important role not just in expressing but also in constructing and mobilizing religious political identity. Political activity linked to parties is a principal way of bringing diffuse, politically unorganized groups, whose leaders are self-appointed and not regularly accountable for the way they represent co-religionists in political life, into the democratic mainstream. With political organization and especially partisanship, the fact of pluralism is made concrete for democratic purposes.     

人为什么要有道德?(上)

本文从道德哲学的角度提出“人为什么要有道德?”的问题,并尝试给出某种解答。通过“善(好)生活”、“利益(关系)”和“人性(潜能)”三个核心概念,作者力图阐明道德之于人类生活的内在性,并从人类的生活目的、行为方式和人性潜能三个基本方面,揭示人类道德生活所内含的美德一目的论与规范一道义论之双重维度。     

Toleration and Cultural Controversies*

Multicultural societies are far more likely than others to include minorities committed to the pursuit of practices that offend the majority, and treating the cultural commitments of all citizens fairly will require some set of guiding principles to distinguish tolerable ‘cultural controversies’ from intolerable ones. This paper does not directly address the moral question at stake here (i.e. demarcating the limits of toleration) but rather seeks to provide a politically justifiable normative argument to explain when tolerant restraint is necessary, permissible or prohibited. This argument emerges from a concern to treat the cultural commitments of all citizens fairly. In turn, the argument indicates a potential reconciliation of the ‘politics of toleration’ with the ‘politics of respect’. *I would like to thank Stephen De Wijze, Hillel Steiner, Thomas Uebel, Peter Jones and Res Publica’s anonymous referees for their very helpful comments. I would also like to thank the ESRC for providing funding.     

Modernization,Rights, and Democratic Society: The Limits of Habermas’s Democratic Theory

Jürgen Habermas’s discourse-theoretic reconstruction of the normative foundations of democracy assumes the formal separation of democratic political practice from the economic system. Democratic autonomy presupposes a vital public sphere protected by a complex schedule of individual rights. These rights are supposed to secure the formal and material conditions for democratic freedom. However, because Habermas argues that the economy must be left to function according to endogenous market dynamics, he accepts as a condition of democracy (the formal separation of spheres) a social structure that is in fact anti-democratic. The value of self-determination that Habermas’s theory of democracy presupposes is contradicted by the actual operations of capitalist markets. Further democratic development demands that the steering mechanisms of the capitalist market be challenged by self-organizing civic movements.     

Mortgaging the future: Dumping ethics with nuclear waste

On August 22, 2005 the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency issued proposed new regulations for radiation releases from the planned permanent U.S. nuclear-waste repository in Yucca Mountain, Nevada. The goal of the new standards is to provide public-health protection for the next million years — even though everyone admits that the radioactive wastes will leak. Regulations now guarantee individual and equal protection against all radiation exposures above the legal limit. Instead E.P.A. recommended different radiation exposure-limits for different time periods. It also recommended using only the arithmetic mean of the dose distribution, to assess regulatory compliance during one time period, but using only the median dose to assess compliance during another period. This piece argues that these two changes — in exposure-limits and in methods of assessing regulatory compliance — have at least four disturbing consequences. The changes would threaten equal protection, ignore the needs of the most vulnerable, allow many fatal exposures, and sanction scientifically flawed dose calculations.     

Effects of posting self-set goals on collegiate football players' skill execution during practice and games

The effects of self-set goals and public posting on athletic performance of 5 collegiate football players was studied. All players were linebackers on a National Association of Intercollegiate Athletics Division II football team. The dependent variables were the percentage of correct occasions when the linebacker (a) positioned himself to cover a specified area on the field during a pass or from the line of scrimmage during a run; (b) moved to the correct position in response to the positioning of the offense; and (c) tackled and stopped the progress of the ball carrier. A multiple baseline design across behaviors showed an immediate increase in the practice performance of the players and a corresponding increase in game performance following introduction of the independent variable. This study extends research using public posting in sport by demonstrating the effects of player-determined goals and public posting of goal attainment.     

The impact of conflict of interest on trust in science

Conflicts of interest have an erosive effect on trust in science, damaging first the attitude of the public toward scientists and their research, but also weakening the trusting interdependence of scientists. Disclosure is recognized as the key tool for management of conflicts, but rules with sanctions must be improved, new techniques for avoidance of financial conflicts by alternative funding of evaluative research must be sought, and there must be new thinking about institutional conflicts of interest. Our profession is education, and both the public and research professionals of all ages would benefit from greater understanding of how science should and does work. An earlier version of this paper was presented at an International Conference on “Conflict of Interest and its Significance in Science and Medicine” held in Warsaw, Poland on 5–6 April, 2002.     

Who lives,who dies,who decides: Differences between mass public shooters who survive,are killed,and commit suicide

This study provides an in-depth analysis of American mass public shooting conclusions between 1966 and 2017. Specifically, this work examines differences in factors contributing to the perpetrator's likelihood of surviving, being killed, and committing suicide. Ten hypotheses, rooted in previous homicide, suicide, homicide-suicide, and mass public shooting literature consider different psychological, situational, and background factors shaping the outcome of mass public shootings. Significant findings indicate factors influencing perpetrators' suicide include suicidal ideation, higher victim counts, and suicide copycat effects. Factors influencing perpetrators being killed similarly include higher victim counts, the arrival of law enforcement, lethal/non-lethal resistance, and government targets. This investigation provides practical implications for practitioners and policymakers, especially law enforcement and mental health practitioners, seeking to develop intervention and prevention strategies for addressing suicidal ideation and its most lethal outcome: mass public shootings.     

The precarious power of a strongly worded letter: Political correspondence,Lutheran theology,and civic participation

Facing political decisions involving local issues or systemic injustice, we sometimes decide to write a letter. Opinion pieces in the town newspaper, online posts about current events, and letters sent to elected officials all share the presumption that putting words on a page can make the political community a better place. This article examines these practices and the reasoning that supports them by connecting Martin Luther's theology of good works with insights from political theory and current debates about civic participation. Luther claims that good works are needed to discipline the body and serve the neighbor in love. This theological framework is offered as a guide for assessing the value and functions of political correspondence. It contends that writing letters serves to discipline individual and collective political bodies, developing needed skills for sharing and receiving the claims we make while resisting temptations that pull us towards indifference, cynicism, or self-righteous assurance. Letters should be seen as invitations of service and neighbor love that display our competence and commitment to others. Letter writing, as a good work, is risky in that the goodness of our labors remains an open question. The analysis here offers guidance for assessing our better and worse reasons for political postings, whether on the church door or elsewhere.