Within Michel Foucault’s own conceptualization of governmentality, there is little room for something like ‘ungovernable life’. The latter seems to hint at a form of social conduct beyond power-relations, which would offend Foucault’s basic philosophical postulates. I argue that this identification between governmentality and power as such demonstrates a one-sided focus on the history of Western power-relations. By opposing Foucault’s genealogy of governmentality to Ivan Illich’s critical history of government, I delineate indigenous struggles against governmentalization as a form of ungovernable (...) counter-conduct. Throughout his books from the 1970s to 1990s, Illich wrote a critical history of government surprisingly similar to Foucault’s, from the pastorate to modern political economy. However, rather than merely describing this history, Illich argued governmentalization alienated human beings from their autonomy. As a former missionary priest, he criticized the Church’s and modern governments’ attempts to subsume populations under a conduct of conducts. He advocated anticolonial resistance to subsumption under Western governmental regimes. In Illich’s appreciation of decolonized life, an ungovernable form of life can be discovered, which I defend with the example of Zapatismo and indigenous self-government through mandar obedeciendo. (shrink)

Dit essay begrijpt het project van Krisis vanuit ‘het epistemologische probleem van de kritische theorie’, namelijk: vanuit welk standpunt is emancipatoire kritiek überhaupt mogelijk? Door de kritische theorie in brede zin op te vatten, worden vormen van politieke contestatie en de theoretisering daarvan die vaak als 'identiteitspolitiek' worden weggezet besproken in relatie tot de vroege denkers van de kritische theorie en het late werk van Foucault over tegengedrag.

How Propaganda Became Public Relations pulls back the curtain on propaganda: how it was born, how it works, and how it has masked the bulk of its operations by rebranding itself as public relations. Cory Wimberly uses archival materials and wide variety of sources — Foucault’s work on governmentality, political economy, liberalism, mass psychology, and history — to mount a genealogical challenge to two commonplaces about propaganda. First, modern propaganda did not originate in the state and was never primarily located (...) in the state; instead, it began and flourished as a for-profit service for businesses. Further, propaganda is not focused on public beliefs and does not operate mainly through lies and deceit; propaganda is an apparatus of government that aims to create the publics that will freely undertake the conduct its clients’ desire. Businesses have used propaganda since the early twentieth century to construct the laboring, consuming, and voting publics that they needed to secure and grow their operations. Over that time, corporations have become the most numerous and well-funded apparatuses of government in the West, operating privately and without democratic accountability. Wimberly explains why liberal strategies of resistance have failed and a new focus on creating mass subjectivity through democratic means is essential to countering propaganda. This book offers a sophisticated analysis that will be of interest to scholars and advanced students working in social and political philosophy, Continental philosophy, political communication, the history of capitalism, and the history of public relations. (shrink)

Interest in just war theory has boomed in recent years, as a revisionist school of thought has challenged the orthodoxy of international law, most famously defended by Michael Walzer [1977]. These revisionist critics have targeted the two central principles governing the conduct of war (jus in bello): combatant equality and noncombatant immunity. The first states that combatants face the same permissions and constraints whether their cause is just or unjust. The second protects noncombatants from intentional attack. In response to these (...) critics, some philosophers have defended aspects of the old orthodoxy on novel grounds. Revisionists counter. As things stand, the prospects for progress are remote. In this paper, we offer a way forward. We argue that exclusive focus on first-order moral principles, such as combatant equality and noncombatant immunity, has led revisionist and orthodox just war theorists to engage in “proxy battles.” Their first-order moral disagreements are at least partly traceable to second-order disagreements about the nature and purpose of political theory. These deeper disputes have been central to the broader discipline of political theory for several years; we hope that bringing them to bear on the ethics of war will help us move beyond the present impasse. (shrink)

ABSTRACT This article addresses shortcomings in the way that philosophers and cultural critics have considered propaganda by offering a new genealogical account. Looking at figures such as Marx, Adorno, Marcuse, Habermas, Bourdieu, and Stanley, this article finds that their consideration of propaganda has not necessarily been wrong but has missed some of the most significant and important functions of propaganda. This text draws on archival and published materials from propagandists, most notably Edward Bernays, to elaborate a new governmentality of propaganda (...) and public relations. Through focusing on the concept of public opinion, I argue that propaganda is best thought of as an apparatus whose function it is to construct, modify, counter, and destroy relations of force within public opinion in order to produce the subjectivities and conduct that propagandists and their clients desire. (shrink)

Suppose one has a system, the infinite set of positive integers, P, and one wants to study the characteristics of a subset (or subsystem) of that system, the infinite subset of odd positives, O, relative to the overall system. In mathematics, this is done by pairing off each odd with a positive, using a function such as O=2P+1. This puts the odds in a one-to-one correspondence with the positives, thereby, showing that the subset of odds and the original set of (...) positives are the same size, or have the same cardinality. This counter-intuitive result ignores the “natural” relationship of one odd for every two positives in the sequence of positive integers, which would suggest that O is one-half the size of P. However, in the set of axioms that constitute mathematics, it is considered valid. Fair enough. In the physical universe (i.e., the starting system), though, relationships between entities matter. In biochemistry, if you start with an organism, say a rat, and you want to study its heart, you can do this by removing some heart cells and studying them in isolation in a cell culture system. But, the results often differ compared to what occurs in the intact animal because studying the isolated cultured cells ignores the relationships in the intact body between the cells, the rest of the heart tissue and the rest of the rat. In chemistry, if a copper atom were studied in isolation, it would never be known that copper atoms in bulk can conduct electricity because the atoms share their electrons. In physics, the relationships between inertial reference frames in relativity, and observer and observed in quantum physics can't be ignored. Relationships matter in the physical world, but the mathematics of infinite sets is still used to describe it. Does this matter? It seems to, at least in physics. Infinities cause numerous problems in theoretical physics such as non-renormalizability and problems in unifying quantum mehanics and general relativity . This suggests that the pairing off method and the mathematics of infinite sets based on it are analogous to a cell culture system or studying a copper atom in isolation if they are used in studying the physical universe because they ignore the inherent relationships between entities. In the real, physical world, the natural, inherent, relationships between entities can't be ignored. Said another way, the set of axioms that constitute abstract mathematics may be similar but not identical to the set of physical axioms by which the real, physical universe runs. This suggests that the results from abstract mathematics about infinities may not apply to or should be modified for use in physics. (shrink)

At the center of the hate speech controversy is the question whether it constitutes conduct. If hate speech is not conduct, then restricting it runs counter to free speech. But even if it could be shown that it is a kind of conduct, complicated questions arise. Does it necessarily follow that we restrict speech? Practically speaking, can speech even be restricted, either through new legislation or the enforcement of existing laws regulating conduct? Are measures such as hate crimes legislation (...) both useful and appropriate in protecting individuals and groups from violence? The present paper aims to address these questions by reconstructing and assessing Judith Butler’s important treatment of speech-acts and hate speech in her book Excitable Speech: The Politics of the Performative. (shrink)

Recent analyses have critically evaluated the connection of abstract rights with territorial nation-states. This article extends those findings by analyzing the way discourses of rights (human, political, national) are interconnected. It is argued that the system of relations that rights establish between their norms and concrete sociopolitical practices allows rights to function as overall machinery, one that both produces and governs subjects. From this perspective, this article establishes that: (a) since rights depend for their legal guarantee on the power of (...) nation-states, they are a normative standard which coincides with the political power of a nation-state; (b) since rights require a certain ethic from subjects in order that their exercise of rights be legally protectable, they govern subjects through inclusion, that is, by structuring fields of action in order that a certain “proper” conduct may take place; (c) since the nation-state framework with which rights are connected operates in a postcolonial order, the functioning of rights is also connected with the discursive dynamics of postcoloniality. The empirical focus of the discussion is on Pakistan. The first section focuses on the use of human rights’ discourse in order to counter drone attacks in Pakistan’s tribal belt. The conundrums that human rights in this context generate are then filled in by acknowledging “rights” of a state (i.e. political sovereignty and territorial integrity), which is the focus of second section. The third section comments on the way national and political rights correspond to the notions of “citizenship” and “belongingness,” which in turn shapes the conduct of subjects in a contextually apt manner. (shrink)

Certain puzzling cases have been discussed in the literature recently which appear to support the thought that knowledge can be obtained by way of deduction from a falsehood; moreover, these cases put pressure, prima facie, on the thesis of counter closure for knowledge. We argue that the cases do not involve knowledge from falsehood; despite appearances, the false beliefs in the cases in question are causally, and therefore epistemologically, incidental, and knowledge is achieved despite falsehood. We also show that (...) the principle of counter closure, and the concomitant denial of knowledge from falsehood, is well motivated by considerations in epistemological theory--in particular, by the view that knowledge is first in the epistemological order of things. (shrink)

What are the truth conditions of want ascriptions? According to an influential approach, they are intimately connected to the agent’s beliefs: ⌜S wants p⌝ is true iff, within S’s belief set, S prefers the p worlds to the not-p worlds. This approach faces a well-known problem, however: it makes the wrong predictions for what we call (counter)factual want ascriptions, wherein the agent either believes p or believes not-p—for example, ‘I want it to rain tomorrow and that is exactly what (...) is going to happen’ or ‘I want this weekend to last forever, but of course it will end in a few hours’. We solve this problem. The truth conditions for want ascriptions are, we propose, connected to the agent’s conditional beliefs. We substantiate this connection by pursuing a striking parallel between (counter)factual and non-(counter)factual want ascriptions on the one hand and counterfactual and indicative conditionals on the other. (shrink)

Gerben Meynen (2019) invites us to consider the potential ethical implications of what he refers to as “thought apprehension” technology for psychiatric practice, that is, technologies that involve recording brain activity, and using this to infer what people are thinking (or intending, desiring, feeling, etc.). His article is wide-ranging, covering several different ethical principles, various situations psychiatrists might encounter in therapeutic, legal and correctional contexts, and a range of potential incarnations of this technology, some more speculative than others. Although Meynen’s (...) article raises some highly relevant potential implications of some “thought apprehension”-based neurotechnologies, which are certainly worthy of further exploration, I suggest that Meynen’s analysis is beset by two problems. First, some of the technologies that form the focus of his discussion are too speculative, and second, due to the many issues under consideration, some problems are not adequately characterized, relevant ethical principles are misidentified, and valuable literature is not sufficiently engaged with. Consideration of these weaknesses might allow us to better see how to conduct a fruitful analysis of speculative neurotechnologies. (shrink)

Tainted political symbols ought to be confronted, removed, or at least recontextualized. Despite the best efforts to achieve this, however, official actions on tainted symbols often fail to take place. In such cases, I argue that political vandalism—the unauthorized defacement, destruction, or removal of political symbols—may be morally permissible or even obligatory. This is when, and insofar as, political vandalism serves as fitting counter-speech that undermines the authority of tainted symbols in ways that match their publicity, refuses to let (...) them speak in our name, and challenges the derogatory messages expressed through a mechanism I call derogatory pedestalling: the glorification or honoring of certain individuals or ideologies that can only make sense when members of a targeted group are taken to be inferior. (shrink)

In this paper, I present a counter-example to the two most prominent theories of pragmatic encroachment (regarding knowledge ascriptions): Contextualism (specifically, DeRose's version), and Stanley's Subject-Sensitive Invariantism (SSI). The example is a variation on DeRose's bank case. -/- Key words: Knowledge, knowledge ascriptions, pragmatic encroachment, Stanley, DeRose, bank case, standards, stakes.

A counter analysis of David Chalmers' claims about the possibility of mind uploading within the context of the Singularity event.

Recently, there have been several attempts to generalize the counterfactual theory of causal explanations to mathematical explanations. The central idea of these attempts is to use conditionals whose antecedents express a mathematical impossibility. Such countermathematical conditionals are plugged into the explanatory scheme of the counterfactual theory and—so is the hope—capture mathematical explanations. Here, I dash the hope that countermathematical explanations simply parallel counterfactual explanations. In particular, I show that explanations based on countermathematicals are susceptible to three problems counterfactual explanations do (...) not face. These problems seriously challenge the prospects for a counterfactual theory of explanation that is meant to cover mathematical explanations. (shrink)

This chapter presents Gustave Flaubert’s Madame Bovary and Samuel Beckett’s Trilogy as modern fictions with ancient-skeptical ambitions. Whether in the affective domain (Flaubert) or in the cognitive (Beckett), the aim is to help the reader achieve a position of studied neutrality—ataraxia, époché—thanks not to an a priori decision but to the mutual cancellation of opposing tendencies. Understanding Flaubert and Beckett in this way allows us, first, to enrich our sense of what “catharsis” may involve; second, to see why the apparently (...) odious Charles, in Madame Bovary, suddenly becomes a deeply touching figure; and third, to recognize the severe limitations of empathy-based moralist theories of fiction. (shrink)

A key question in the philosophy of logic is how we have epistemic justification for claims about logical entailment (assuming we have such justification at all). Justification holism asserts that claims of logical entailment can only be justified in the context of an entire logical theory, e.g., classical, intuitionistic, paraconsistent, paracomplete etc. According to holism, claims of logical entailment cannot be atomistically justified as isolated statements, independently of theory choice. At present there is a developing interest in—and endorsement of—justification holism (...) due to the revival of an abductivist approach to the epistemology of logic. This paper presents an argument against holism by establishing a foundational entailment-sentence of deduction which is justified independently of theory choice and outside the context of a whole logical theory. (shrink)

Forensics is proposed as a means to understand, trace, and recompile data and computational activities. It has a securitocratic dimension and one that is being developed as a means of opening processes, events and systems into a more public state. This article proposes an analysis of forces at play in the circulation of a ‘screener’ of Quentin Tarantino’s The Hateful Eight and associated files, to suggest that forensic approaches used to control flows of data may be repurposed for dis­semination. The (...) article maps a brief history of digital forensics and sets out some of its political entailments, indicating further lines of enquiry regarding the inter-relation of technosocial powers constituted in the interactions between forensics and coun­ter-measures. The article proposes that the posthumanities are partially constituted by a renewed relationship between questions of culture, subjectivity, knowledge and the technical. Some propositions for the technical as grounds for cultural politics are made. (shrink)

This thesis focuses on a philosophical analysis of literature. The central question is: when making moral choices in a forced labor camp, what options remain? Hannah Arendt has written about the forced labor, concentration and extermination camps as the central institutions of totalitarianism, where the project of complete destruction of unwanted human beings is carried out; the end result is the removal of spontaneity and uniqueness in people. We join Arendt’s insights with those of Richard Rorty who employed the concept (...) of unmaking a person’s world in his discussion of Orwell’s 1984. A synthesis of their ideas highlights the importance of language and the freedom of narrativity for countering the elimination of spontaneity (Rorty emphasized the importance of redescription). Chapter 3 uses this synthesis for analyzing the Gulag stories of an Estonian writer, Jaan Kross. Our reading of the stories “Vürst” and “Halleluuja” outlines the concept of playfulness which employs independent redescription of the characters themselves and the situation, and upholds the inmates’ freedom of narrativity and spontaneity. This playfulness emerges in theatricality, bravura, distance from the situation and its script (the distance-keeping has a notable parallel to Rorty’s concept of irony), enacting the unexpected, and playing with risks and possibilities. (shrink)

Weighing competing obligations and achieving the “greatest balance” of right over wrong guides an individual, an agency or a country in determining what ought to be done in an ethically challenging situation. Conducting controlled human infection model (CHIM) studies in India is one such situation. The ethical challenge in conducting a CHIM study lies in completing the difficult task of introducing standardised, attenuated strains of micro-organisms into normal healthy volunteers, at the same time ensuring the safety of these healthy individuals (...) from potential and completely informed risks in a fashion that is transparent and accountable. The bar is further raised against the background of already fragile public confidence in biomedical research in India; especially when “deliberate” introduction of microbial agents into healthy individuals is involved, with the larger altruistic objective of gain to society as a whole. -/- This paper discusses the uses of CHIM studies with respect to the larger scientific Indian research enterprise of the 21st century. It further explores etic and emic perspectives in conducting such trials in India and seeks to generate an ethical coherence to the justification for conducting CHIM studies in India. The paper deliberates on ethical issues arising out of conducting CHIM studies and reflects on how developing the capacity for CHIM studies in India is likely to strengthen the health research and development sector in the country. -/- . (shrink)

Infusing contemporary critical terrorism studies (CTS) with concepts and methodologies from philosophy and critical theory via a Baradian posthumanist agential realist perspective and (counter)terrorist cases and vignettes, this chapter argues for a retheorisation of (counter)terrorism. It does so, firstly, by reconceptualising terrorism and counterterrorism as complex assemblages consisting not only of discursive-material components – an entanglement now largely accepted within CTS and critical security studies (CSS) – but also of affective layers and more-than-human phenomena. Secondly, by analysing European (...) urban (counter)terrorist cases from the UK, Germany, France, and Spain, together with these cases’ surprising spacetime-jumping interlinkages underwriting what we here conceptualise as queer(ing) spacetimematterings, this chapter zooms in on the intra-actions taking place between human and more-than-human agential phenomena and their risk-managed urban environments. Lastly, extra analytical attention is paid to how, in this neoliberal day and age – here rephrased as control society-driven ‘situationscaping times’ – very specific macro- and micropolitical violence-preventing measures and efforts are employed in the fight against various manifestations of urban terror and terrorism. (shrink)

In the past few decades, peer review has come to dominate virtually all professionally respectable academic and scientific publications. However, despite its near-universal acceptance, no code of conduct has been developed to which peer reviewers and their editors are encouraged to adhere. This paper proposes such a code of conduct.

In the past decade, policy-makers in science have been concerned with harmonizing research integrity standards across Europe. These standards are encapsulated in the European Code of Conduct for Research Integrity. Yet, almost every European country today has its own national-level code of conduct for research integrity. In this study we document in detail how national-level codes diverge on almost all aspects concerning research integrity – except for what constitutes egregious misconduct. Besides allowing for potentially unfair responses to joint misconduct by (...) international collaborations, we argue that the divergences raise questions about the envisaged self-regulatory function of the codes of conduct. (shrink)

T. M. Scanlon’s contractualism attempts to give an account of right and wrong in terms of the moral code that could not be reasonably rejected. Reasonable rejectability is then a function of what kind of consequences the general adoption of different moral codes has for different individuals. It has been shown that moral codes should be compared at a lower than 100% level of social acceptance. This leads to the counter-culture challenge. The problem is that the cultural background of (...) the individuals who have not internalized the majority code affects the consequences of the codes and furthermore there does not seem to be a non-arbitrary way of choosing the minority cultures. This chapter first surveys and critically evaluates different responses to this challenge. It then outlines a version of ‘Real World Contractualism’, which offers the best response to the counter-culture challenge. (shrink)

Plays, symphonies and other works in the performing arts are generally regarded, ontologically speaking, as being types, with individual performances of those works being regarded as tokens of those types. But I show that there is a logical feature of type theory which makes it impossible for such a theory to satisfactorily explain a 'double performance' case that I present: one in which a single play performance is actually a performance of two different plays. Hence type theories fail, both for (...) plays and for the related performing art of music as well. (shrink)

In a short paper, Smilansky (2022) provides an argument in favor of the belief in social progress. He considers the "probability of losing a child" to be a pivotal element among various criteria to be assessed in order to evaluate human progress and as this probability has decreased considerably in the modern era, he evaluates humanity today in a better situation than the previous generations. In this paper, I criticize Smilansky's argument and try to show that his account of the (...) difference between historical periods is superficial. (shrink)

The social media platform Twitter platform has played a crucial role in the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement. The immediate, flexible nature of tweets plays a crucial role both in spreading information about the movement’s aims and in organizing individual protests. Twitter has also played an important role in the right-wing reaction to BLM, providing a means to reframe and recontextualize activists’ claims in a more sinister light. The ability to bring about social change depends on the balance of these (...) two forces, and in particular which side can capture and maintain sustained attention. The present study examines 2 years worth of tweets about BLM (about 118 million in total). Timeseries analysis reveals that activists are better at mobilizing rapid attention, whereas right-wing accounts show a pattern of moderate but more sustained activity driven by reaction to political opponents. Topic modeling reveals differences in how different political groups talk about BLM. Most notably, the murder of George Floyd appears to have solidified a right-wing counter-framing of protests as arising from dangerous “terrorist” actors. The study thus sheds light on the complex network and rhetorical effects that drive the struggle for online attention to the BLM movement. (shrink)

Infallibilism is commonly rejected because it is apparently subject to easy counter-examples. I describe a strategy that infallibilists can use to resist this objection. Because the sentences used in the counter-examples to express evidence and belief are context-sensitive, the infallibilist can insist that such counter-examples trade on a vacillation between different readings of these sentences. I describe what difficulties await those who try to produce counter-examples against which the proposed strategy is ineffective.

By exercising their (imperfect) capacity to discriminate, people try to recognize and to understand some important differences between things that make them prefer some things to other. In this article I will use my ability to discriminate between people and societies according to a principle which plays the role of attractor, both at individual and societal levels, namely the principle of peaceable conduct. This principle allows us to discriminate at the civic level between the people who have a civilized conduct (...) and those who manifest an aggressive conduct. The category of civilized people includes individuals who (a) respect the life and bodily integrity of their fellows, (b) practice self-control, not control over others and (c) do not claim, through coercive means, the goods that their fellows have obtained by making free and peaceful use of their own faculties and capabilities. The category of aggressive people reunites (a) murderers (those who endanger the lives of their fellow), (b) tyrants (those who beslave their fellows by taking control of some of their faculties) and (c) thieves (those who claim the goods of their fellows without their consent). The civilized conduct requires high standards of action of the people who embrace it and, implicitly, considerable physical and psychical costs. The primary impulses originating in our lower Self blatantly contradict the respect for life, liberty and property of our fellows, so that it seems impossible for them to be controlled only by personal effort. Therefore, it is vital that the energy allotted to peaceable conduct by our higher Self be superior to the energy which it spontaneously mobilizes in support of the primary impulses of our lower Self. This can be achieved by feeding the people with the social energy of certain social emotions in the process of internalizing the norms of peaceable conduct. Among these emotions, contempt and shame, respectively anger and guilt stand out through the predominance of the moral dimension and force of shaping human conduct. They underlie two different moral systems – “shame morality”, and “guilt morality” respectively – that support our peaceable conduct and, ipso facto, our civilized life. (shrink)

A rejoinder to Harri Mäcklin, "A Heideggerian Critique of Immersive Art".

There is a need to rapidly assess the impact of new technology initiatives on the Counter Improvised Explosive Device battle in Iraq and Afghanistan. The immediate challenge is the need for rapid decisions, and a lack of engineering test data to support the assessment. The rapid assessment methodology exploits available information to build a probabilistic model that provides an explicit executable representation of the initiative’s likely impact. The model is used to provide a consistent, explicit, explanation to decision makers (...) on the likely impact of the initiative. Sensitivity analysis on the model provides analytic information to support development of informative test plans. (shrink)

The art of the theatre is a collaborative enterprise. It involves the creative efforts of different artists: director, stage manager, set, lighting, properties, costume, make-up and sound designers. These artists work together for the realization of a theatrical production. They work within a production concept which is the guiding principle upon which a production is based. However, as the theatre is audio-visual and immediate, it is the duty of these artists to ensure that every aspect of the production is perfectly (...) deployed for the audience’s understanding of the play. Of all the artists of the theatre, the scenic designer’s work is the most eloquent visual expressive element in the theatre because he is the artist responsible for interpreting the play/drama in concrete visual terms through the creation of an aesthetically pleasing and functional background. This essay interrogates the use of scenic design in countering terrorism in the Unizik performance of Emma Dandaura’s Venom for Venom. The study finds that through adequate use of the elements and principles of design that the scenic artist was able to counter the spate of terrorism as depicted in the play through his set design. It submits that terror in a theatrical performance can be ameliorated through subtle use of design for the audience’s better understanding of the message of the play. (shrink)

A philosophical genealogy of the development of liberal 'arts of government' through the work of John Locke and Michel Foucault.

This is a largely expository review of Thomas Polger’s and Laurence Shapiro’s The Multiple Realization Book (Oxford Press 2016).

Comme tous les autres projets humains, les politiques de santé publique sont souvent affectées par des imperfections et des erreurs. Cependant, elles sont mieux ancrées dans les résultats de la recherche scientifique que d’autres actions humaines en général, et politiques gouvernementales en particulier. D’une manière générale, les données sur lesquelles reposent les politiques de santé publique remplissent les conditions suivantes : méthodes de recherche rigoureuses, tests indépendants et précis, reproductibilité des résultats, mesure du taux d’erreur, capacité à écarter des hypothèses (...) rivales et un degré d’acceptation satisfaisant au sein de la communauté scientifique. Les politiques de santé publique comprennent des campagnes de vaccination de la population, en particulier des enfants. Ces actions de vaccination sont considérées comme sûres et efficaces par les institutions publiques, les organisations de santé, les médecins et les chercheurs en santé. Malgré cela, un nombre croissant de parents choisit de ne pas vacciner leurs enfants. Les fausse nouvelles sur les vaccins publiées dans les médias, en particulier dans les nouveaux médias, par les influenceurs, ont contribué certainement à cette tendance. Ces influenceurs sont insuffisamment qualifiés ou totalement non qualifiés pour commenter l’innocuité et l’efficacité des vaccins dans les médias. Par conséquent, ils ne peuvent pas produire des données fiables et des opinions qualifiées, c’est-à-dire des informations indépendantes, précises, pertinentes, fiables et complètes. Cependant, ces influenceurs parviennent à influencer, dans une large mesure, le comportement des parents en matière de vaccination. La stratégie de lutte contre les fausses nouvelles en publiant des preuves contraires est évidemment nécessaire, mais pas suffisante parce que beaucoup de fausses infos sur les vaccins fonctionnent comme des mythes. Etant fixées d’une manière partiellement irrationnelle, les mythes anti-vaccination ne peuvent être démystifiés seulement avec les dernières preuves scientifiques. C’est pourquoi il est nécessaire d’envisager des stratégies de relations publiques capables d’influencer des opinions collectives irrationnelles. (shrink)

Corporative global media cannot be an instrument of the culture of peace, because they have made widespread individualistic values of the consummative society. Through their symbolic power, they successfully dominate over every sphere of existence of a society: politics, economic life, social ties, national culture, human communication and private life. Traditional media could not be a factor in the promotion and development of culture of peace, simply because they are proponents of corporative economic and political interests. It is in the (...) interest of citizens to counter the activities of “rapacious capitalism” (SCHMIDT 1998), of local comprador political and economic elites, and the practice of robbery of their work; to bridle the proliferation of weapons and acts of aggression. (shrink)

This paper examines the role of self-documentation in the care of the self. As is well known, Michel Foucault exposes how disciplinary power functions in hospitals, schools, prisons, and other institutions to train the living for productive use. An important tool of disciplinary power is documentation, or the recording and cataloguing of the living that constitutes them as objects of knowledge. I show how documentation creates and extends knowledge to individuals. At the same time, documents become physical appendages of the (...) lives they record, which, while separable from those lives, nevertheless affect those lives. Despite these apparently negative functions, Foucault finds that documentation can also be the means by which the living take over their own disciplining. In writings about both fiction and ancient ethics, Foucault points to self-documentation as a way of objectifying the self before the self, so that the self may train itself according to self-imposed standards. Although disciplinary power may be inescapable, self-documentation offers a technique of counter-discipline that functions alongside and against institutional discipline. (shrink)

Those of us who are not pacifists face an obvious challenge. Common-sense morality contains a stringent constraint on intentional killing, yet war involves homicide on a grand scale. If wars are to be morally justified, it needs be shown how this conflict can be reconciled. A major fault line running throughout the contemporary just war literature divides two approaches to attempting this reconciliation. On a ‘reductivist’ view, defended most prominently by Jeff McMahan, the conflict is largely illusory, since such killing (...) can be justified by aggregating individuals’ ordinary permissions to use force in self- and other-defence. In opposition, a rival ‘nonreductivist’ approach holds that these considerations are insufficient for the task. One prominent version of non-reductivism grounds the permission to kill in combatants’ membership in certain kinds of group or association. The key claim is that participation in certain morally important relationships can provide an independent source of permission for killing in war. This paper argues that non-reductivism should be rejected. It does so by pushing a dilemma onto non-reductivists: if they are successful in showing that the relevant relationships can generate permissions to kill in war, they must also jettison the most intuitive restrictions on conduct in war—the constraint on intentionally killing morally innocent non-combatants most saliently. Since this conclusion is unacceptable, non-reductivism should be rejected. (shrink)

Originally proposed by John Rawls, the idea of reasoning from conjecture is popular among the proponents of political liberalism in normative political theory. Reasoning from conjecture consists in discussing with fellow citizens who are attracted to illiberal and antidemocratic ideas by focusing on their religious or otherwise comprehensive doctrines, attempting to convince them that such doctrines actually call for loyalty to liberal democracy. Our goal is to criticise reasoning from conjecture as a tool aimed at persuasion and, in turn, at (...) improving the stability of liberal democratic institutions. To pursue this goal, we use as case study real-world efforts to counter-radicalise at-risk Muslim citizens, which, at first glance, reasoning from conjecture seems well-placed to contribute to. This case study helps us to argue that the supporters of reasoning from conjecture over-intellectualise opposition to liberal democracy and what societies can do to counter it. Specifically, they (i) underestimate how few members of society can effectively perform reasoning from conjecture; (ii) overlook that the burdens of judgement, a key notion for political liberals, highlight how dim the prospects of reasoning from conjecture are and (iii) do not pay attention to the causes of religious persons’ opposition to liberal democracy. However, not everything is lost for political liberals, provided that they redirect attention to different and under-researched resources contained in Rawls’s theory. In closing, we briefly explain how such resources are much better placed than reasoning from conjecture to provide guidance relative to counter-radicalisation in societies (i) populated by persons who do not generally hold anything close to a fully worked out and internally consistent comprehensive doctrine and (ii) where political institutions should take responsibility for at least part of the existing alienation from liberal democratic values. (shrink)

For the last ten years, within molecular life sciences, the reproducibility crisis discourse has been embodied as a crisis of trust in scientific images. Beyond the contentious perception of “questionable research practices” associated with a digital turn in the production of images, this paper highlights the transformations of gel electrophoresis as a family of experimental techniques. Our aim is to analyze the evolving epistemic status of generated images and its connection with a crisis of trust in images within that field.From (...) the 1980s to the 2000s, we identify two key innovations (precast gels and gel docs) leading to a “two‐tiered” gel electrophoresis with different standardization procedures, different epistemic statuses of the produced images and different ways of generating (dis)trust in images. The first tier, exemplified by differential gel electrophoresis (DIGE), is characterized by specialized devices processing images as quantitative data. The second tier, exemplified by polyacrylamide gel electrophoresis (PAGE), is described as a routine technique making use of image as qualitative “virtual witnessing.” The difference between these two tiers is particularly apparent in the ways images are processed, even though both tiers involve image digitization. Our account thus highlights different views on reproducibility within the two tiers. Comparability of images is insisted upon in the first tier while traceability is expected in the second tier. It is striking that these differences occur not only within the same scientific field, but even within the same family of experimental techniques. In the second tier, digitization entails distrust, whereas it implies a collective sentiment of trust in the first tier. (shrink)

Hortense Spillers asserts the imperative for black writers to reconfigure the languages they inherit. One way of doing so is to craft counter-myths against dominative mythologies. Spillers casts myth as an integration of form and concept which overdetermines the significance of what it is used to talk about. One crucial effect of America’s racialising mythos has been to deny black women the ability to determine that significance. She then describes how this mythos is crafted through a double wounding that (...) creates at least two ‘interstices’—first between home and market, then between blackness and humanity—which are covered up by mythological terms. Finally, Spillers shows how counter-mythologies can be crafted by speaking from within these interstices to reconfigure the conditions of possibility governing meaningful speech, taking the 19th- century African-American preaching tradition as her example. The article concludes by reflecting on what it might mean to practice Christian theology as counter-mythology in light of Spillers’ work through a reading of Edwidge Danticat’s The Dew Breaker. (shrink)

This paper deals with Daniel Dennett’s well-known charges against phenomenological philosophy as an endevour to restore the rights of introspection: that is, the attempt, albeit doomed to failure, to contribute to the science of the mind from a purported incorrigible, ineffable and ‘subjective’ (interpreted as ‘private’) first-person perspective. According to Dennett’s heterophenomenology, only a strict third-person method is possible when it comes to the scientific study of the mind. I will dispute Dennett’s method in order to do both: correct Dennett’s (...) caricaturization of phenomenological philosophy as naïve introspection and offer not only a clarification of phenomenology’s true aims and scope, but also a case in which phenomenology will stand as a crucial option in the new studies of the mind, under the sigh of fresh air that can be found in the new approaches to cognitive science (the so-called 4EA approaches: embodied, embedded, extended, enacted, affective). By way of introducing the concept of ‘phenomenological skillful-coping,’ an affirmative respond to Dennett’s own question shall be given: “Is there anything about experience that is not explorable by heterophenomenology? I’d like to know what.” The answer to Dennett should be firm: Yes there is! No less than the most basic non-theoretical, non-representational, embodied and embedded, human experience or coping. (shrink)

In this article, I explore how efficacious film can be in countering propaganda in film. To set up the discussion, I first sketch out a simple theory of propaganda, under which propaganda can be ranked from completely rational to very irrational, on six different dimensions. These are the degrees to which the propaganda is: evidence-based; truthful; broadly logical; transparent; properly targeted; and transparent. I then review in detail the main propaganda film, Gasland. This film was a highly successful documentary that (...) attacked the production of natural gas by hydrofracturing, called in America “fracking.” Gasland succeeded in organizing domestic opposition to fracking, actually blocking it in the Delaware River Basin system. The film was also influential abroad, leading to fracking bans in France, Bulgaria, and elsewhere in Europe. Next, I review in detail two counter-propaganda films—that is, in this case, two pro-fracking documentaries: Truthland and FrackNation. Truthland is a short documentary that aims at rebutting many of Gasland’s major claims. It was funded by the fracking industry and had limited distribution but it succeeded in refuting much of the longer and better-funded anti-fracking film. A much more successful film in terms of both general distribution and efficacy of rebuttal was the much longer pro-fracking documentary FrackNation. It critiques all of Gasland’s major points, in vivid detail. Since it was crowdfunded, it couldn’t be dismissed on the grounds that it was biased because of being industry-backed. I conclude by explaining why the pro-fracking documentaries did not result in a major change in public opinion. (shrink)

The moral issues that occur for profit corporations are a unique function of many internal and external factors, including corporate policies and purpose, business regulations, and business governance's economic and political system. Several possible theoretical frameworks prescribe behavioral norms and standards of conduct to companies, such as utilitarianism, deontological ethics, or virtue ethics. In this paper, we argue although there are signs cant similarities between Kantian Ethics and ideal corporate cultures, Kantian ethics cannot fully be integrated into contemporary corporate practices. (...) Kant's theory of morality fundamentally fails to consistently accommodate the infamous given purpose of corporations, namely the profit-maximizer. We also provide empirical insights from a case study in developing a semi-Kantian corporate code of conduct in a large technology-based company. (shrink)

The goal of this article is to present a first list of ethical concerns that may arise from research and personal use of virtual reality (VR) and related technology, and to offer concrete recommendations for minimizing those risks. Many of the recommendations call for focused research initiatives. In the first part of the article, we discuss the relevant evidence from psychology that motivates our concerns. In Section “Plasticity in the Human Mind,” we cover some of the main results suggesting that (...) one’s environment can influence one’s psychological states, as well as recent work on inducing illusions of embodiment. Then, in Section “Illusions of Embodiment and Their Lasting Effect,” we go on to discuss recent evidence indicating that immersion in VR can have psychological effects that last after leaving the virtual environment. In the second part of the article, we turn to the risks and recommendations. We begin, in Section “The Research Ethics of VR,” with the research ethics of VR, covering six main topics: the limits of experimental environments, informed consent, clinical risks, dual-use, online research, and a general point about the limitations of a code of conduct for research. Then, in Section “Risks for Individuals and Society,” we turn to the risks of VR for the general public, covering four main topics: long-term immersion, neglect of the social and physical environment, risky content, and privacy. We offer concrete recommendations for each of these 10 topics, summarized in Table 1. (shrink)