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Dan Demetriou [18]Daniel Demetriou [2]
  1. (1 other version)The Ethics of Racist Monuments.Dan Demetriou & Ajume Wingo - 2018 - In David Boonin (ed.), Palgrave Handbook of Philosophy and Public Policy. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan.
    In this chapter we focus on the debate over publicly-maintained racist monuments as it manifests in the mid-2010s Anglosphere, primarily in the US (chiefly regarding the over 700 monuments devoted to the Confederacy), but to some degree also in Britain and Commonwealth countries, especially South Africa (chiefly regarding monuments devoted to figures and events associated with colonialism and apartheid). After pointing to some representative examples of racist monuments, we discuss ways a monument can be thought racist, and neutrally categorize removalist (...)
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  2. Ashes of Our Fathers: Racist Monuments and the Tribal Right.Dan Demetriou - 2019 - In Bob Fischer (ed.), Ethics, Left and Right: The Moral Issues that Divide Us. New York: Oxford University Press.
    [Updated 2/23/21: complete chapter scan] In this chapter I sketch a rightist approach to monumentary policy in a diverse polity beleaguered by old ethnic grievances. I begin by noting the importance of tribalism, memorialization, and social trust. I then suggest a policy which 1) gradually narrows the gap between peoples in the heritage landscape, 2) conserves all but the most offensive of the least beloved racist monuments, 3) avoids recrimination (i.e., “keeps it positive”) and eschews ideological commentary in new monuments (...)
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  3.  97
    “Do Women War Refugees Owe Connubial Loyalty to the Men They Leave Behind?”.Dan Demetriou - forthcoming - Public Affairs Quarterly.
    The present war in Ukraine has seen millions of women flee as refugees, while martial law forbids adult men under 60 from leaving the country. According to various reports, many and perhaps most women Ukrainian refugees are breaking romantic ties with the men they leave behind, building new lives with men in their countries of refuge, and/or planning never to return. I avoid any comment about the morality of these events, and instead take up the general question of whether women (...)
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  4. There’s Some Fetish in Your Ethics: A limited defense of purity reasoning in moral discourse.Dan Demetriou - 2013 - Journal of Philosophical Research 38:377-404.
    Call the ethos understanding rightness in terms of spiritual purity and piety, and wrongness in terms of corruption and sacrilege, the “fetish ethic.” Jonathan Haidt and his colleagues suggest that this ethos is particularly salient to political conservatives and non-liberal cultures around the globe. In this essay, I point to numerous examples of moral fetishism in mainstream academic ethics. Once we see how deeply “infected” our ethical reasoning is by fetishistic intuitions, we can respond by 1) repudiating the fetishistic impulse, (...)
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  5. "Honor" (entry for Encyclopedia of Heroism Studies).Dan Demetriou - 2023 - Encyclopedia of Heroism Studies.
    Such a bewildering and contradictory welter of behaviors and traits are connoted by “honor” and its best equivalents in other languages that analyses of the concept have daunted philosophers, anthropologists, sociologists, political scientists, historians, and literary scholars for millennia. Is it an external good given — and revoked just as easily — by others? Or does “honor” name an inner good that’s absolutely in our control: our integrity, our very commitment to right conduct? Is honor a central moral virtue — (...)
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  6. Honor War Theory: Romance or Reality?Daniel Demetriou - 2013 - Philosophical Papers 42 (3):285 - 313.
    Just War Theory (JWT) replaced an older "warrior code," an approach to war that remains poorly understood and dismissively treated in the philosophical literature. This paper builds on recent work on honor to address these deficiencies. By providing a clear, systematic exposition of "Honor War Theory" (HWT), we can make sense of paradigm instances of warrior psychology and behavior, and understand the warrior code as the martial expression of a broader honor-based ethos that conceives of obligation in terms of fair (...)
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  7. The Fictionalist’s Attitude Problem.Graham Oddie & Daniel Demetriou - 2007 - Ethical Theory and Moral Practice 10 (5):485-498.
    According to John Mackie, moral talk is representational but its metaphysical presuppositions are wildly implausible. This is the basis of Mackie's now famous error theory: that moral judgments are cognitively meaningful but systematically false. Of course, Mackie went on to recommend various substantive moral judgments, and, in the light of his error theory, that has seemed odd to a lot of folk. Richard Joyce has argued that Mackie's approach can be vindicated by a fictionalist account of moral discourse. And Mark (...)
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  8. The Racial Offense Objection to Confederate Monuments: A Reply to Timmerman.Dan Demetriou - 2019 - In Bob Fischer (ed.), Ethics, Left and Right: The Moral Issues that Divide Us. New York: Oxford University Press.
    This is my reply essay (1000 words) to Travis Timmerman's "A Case for Removing Confederate Monuments" in Bob Fisher's _Ethics, Left and Right: The Moral Issues That Divide Us_ volume (2020). In it, I explain why I think the mere harm from the racial offense a monument may cause does not justify removing it.
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  9. Virgin vs. Chad: On Enforced Monogamy as a Solution to the Incel Problem.Dan Demetriou - 2022 - In David Boonin (ed.), The Palgrave Handbook of Sexual Ethics. London: Palgrave Macmillan. pp. 155-175.
    Controversially, psychologist and public intellectual Jordan Peterson advises “enforced monogamy” for societies with high percentages of “incels.” As Peterson’s proposal resonates in manosphere circles, this chapter reconstructs and briefly evaluates the argument for it. Premised on the moral importance of civilizational sustainability, advocates argue that both polygamous and socially monogamous but sexually liberal mating patterns result in unsustainable proportions of unattached young men. Given the premises, monogamous societies are probably justified in maintaining their anti-polygamist social and legal norms. The case (...)
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  10. Fighting Together: Civil Discourse and Agonistic Honor.Dan Demetriou - 2016 - In Laurie Johnson & Dan Demetriou (eds.), Honor in the Modern World: Interdisciplinary Perspectives. Lanham: Lexington. pp. 21-42.
    Whereas civil discourse is usually thought to be about defusing conflict, this essay argues it may be fruitfully thought of as fighting honorably for what we believe. Thus agonistic honor, which conceives of rightness in terms of fair and respectful contest for status, will be an especially important virtue in contexts—from classrooms to courtrooms to pluralistic democracies in general—where conflict is inevitable and desirable. To motivate this claim, I take a Hobbesian approach. I begin with a rational reconstruction of honor (...)
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  11. Defense with dignity: how the dignity of violent resistance informs the Gun Rights Debate.Dan Demetriou - 2022 - Philosophical Studies 179 (12):3653-3670.
    Perhaps the biggest disconnect between philosophers and non-philosophers on the question of gun rights is over the relevance of arms to our dignitary interests. This essay attempts to address this gap by arguing that we have a strong prima facie moral right to resist with dignity and that violence is sometimes our most or only dignified method of resistance. Thus, we have a strong prima facie right to guns when they are necessary often enough for effective dignified resistance. This approach (...)
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  12. Fighting Fair: The Ecology of Honor in Humans and Animals.Dan Demetriou - 2015 - In Jonathan Kadane Crane (ed.), Beastly Morality: Animals as Ethical Agents. New York: Cambridge University Press. pp. 123-154.
    This essay distinguishes between honor-typical and authoritarian behavior in humans and animals. Whereas authoritarianism concerns hierarchies coordinated by control and obedience, honor concerns rankings of prestige determined by fair contests. Honor-typical behavior is identifiable in non-human species, and is to be expected in polygynous species with non-resource-based mating systems. This picture lends further support to an increasingly popular psychological theory that sees morality as constituted by a variety of moral systems. If moral cognition is pluralistic in this way, then the (...)
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  13. Questioning the Assumptions of Moralism, Universalism, and Interpretive Dominance in Racist Monument Debates.Dan Demetriou - 2022 - Public Affairs Quarterly 36 (3):233-255.
    This essay questions three widespread assumptions in monument debates it terms “moralism,” “universalism,” and “interpretive dominance.” Roughly: moralism assumes that memorials should be only to good people or good causes; universalism holds that memorials should represent or be “for” the whole polity or its (real or supposed) corporate values; interpretive dominance maintains that, when faced with monuments with reasonable qualifying and disqualifying interpretations, policy should respond to the disqualifying one(s). These assumptions do not settle the debates between removalists and preservationists, (...)
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  14. Gender Exaggeration as Trans.Dan Demetriou & Michael Prideaux - manuscript
    [NOTE: I now disavow this essay, which was too accommodating of trans ideology.] Surprisingly, it follows from commonplaces about sex and gender that there is a widely-practiced variety of transgenderism achievable through sex/gender “exaggerating.” Recognizing exaggeration as trans---or at least its moral equivalent---has several important consequences. One is that, since most traditional cultures endorse exaggeration, trans lifestyles have often been mainstream. But more importantly, recognizing that gender exaggeration is trans (or its moral equivalent) reveals a number of sex- and gender-discriminatory (...)
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  15. Learning All the Wrong Lessons.Dan Demetriou - 2021 - In T. Allan Hillman & Tully Borland (eds.), Dissident Philosophers: Voices Against the Political Current of the Academy. Lanham, Maryland: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers. pp. 123-140.
    [my chapter in "Dissident Philosophers: Voices Against the Political Current of the Academy" (2022), T. Allan Hillman and Tully Borland, eds.].
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  16. Civic Immortality: The Problem of Civic Honor in Africa and the West.Dan Demetriou - 2015 - The Journal of Ethics 19 (3-4):257-276.
    From Thomas Hobbes to Steven Pinker, it is often remarked that cultures of honor are destabilizing and especially dangerous to liberal institutions. This essay sharpens that criticism into two objections: one saying honor cultures encourage tyranny, and another accusing them of undermining rule of law. Since these concerns manifest differently in established as opposed to fledgling liberal democracies, I appeal to Western and African examples both to motivate and allay these worries. I contend that a culture of civic honor is (...)
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  17. Honour (draft of entry for Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy).Dan Demetriou - 2020 - Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
    Given its psychological and sociological importance, especially in non-liberal societies, honor may be the most undertheorized normative phenomenon. Philosophical neglect of honor is due partly to the doubtful moral bona fides of honor: honor-typical motives have been usually viewed by philosophers in both the Christian and liberal West as either non-moral or immoral but replaced by morally sounder ones. More practically, honor (and what is usually translated into the English “honor”) connotes a number of apparently contradictory meanings, further bedeviling analyses. (...)
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  18. The Virtues of Honorable Business Executives.Dan Demetriou - 2013 - In Michael W. Austin (ed.), Virtues in Action: New Essays in Applied Virtue Ethics. New York: Palgrave-Macmillan. pp. 29-38.
    Although most cultures have held honorableness to be a virtue of the first importance, contemporary analytic ethicists have just begun to consider honor’s nature and ethical worth. In this essay, I provide an analysis of the honor ethos and apply it to business ethics. Applying honor to business may appear to be a particularly challenging task, since (for reasons I discuss) honor has traditionally been seen as incompatible with commerce. Nonetheless, I argue here that two of the central virtues of (...)
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  19. Justifying Punishment: The Educative Approach as Presumptive Favorite.Dan Demetriou - 2012 - Criminal Justice Ethics 31 (1):2-18.
    In The Problem of Punishment, David Boonin offers an analysis of punishment and an account of what he sees as ethically problematic about it. In this essay I make three points. First, pace Boonin's analysis, everyday examples of punishment show that it sometimes isn't harmful, but merely "discomforting." Second, intentionally discomforting offenders isn't uniquely problematic, given that we have cases of non-punitive intentional discomforture---and perhaps even harmful discomforture---that seem unobjectionable. Third, a notable fact about both non-harmful punishment and non-punitive intentional (...)
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