This philosophical narrative delves into deepening crises afflicting modern democracies, when extreme inequality and its resultant alienation grips not just adults but, even more anguishingly, children. These children and often their parents come in far under the social radar, so out-of-touch that even census takers overlook them. In this milieu, weapons and narcotics are as much an unquestioned part of life as breathing. The world beyond this invisible cage entirely escapes them, nor does the larger society miss (...) them or know about them. This documentary narrative follows a thirteen-year-old who forces himself to escape his oblivious father, not out of hope, but for sheer escape from the execrable situation, without even the will to be himself, whatever that is. He also must navigate through his nightmare existemce, relying on an illicit business, the only thing he knows as well as breathing. If the individuals in this milieu--which cut across racial boundaries--ever even hear of voting, they are drawn to strong-arm politicians, who appeal to these scattered inhabitants, as examples of strength, no-nonsense, even hatred. The ethics of such circumstances' mere existence--further extreme than even those in Les Miserable--in our societies poses a formidable challenge to the ethics of social and political philosophy and are hardly touched upon in the academic literature. The central philosophical question is whether it is possible for a political system to preempt such conditions, particularly when these individuals, especially the children, are veritably invisible. The metaphilosophical issue is why philosophy does not focus more concern about this ignored human morass. To say an indictment of soiciopolitical philosophy is not justified here, that the persons encountered here are merely messed-up self-indulgent people, only adds cause to the charge. (shrink)

In this paper, I offer an account of social alienation, a genre of alienation engendered by contemporary work that has gone largely overlooked in the ethics of labor. Social alienation consists in a corruption of workers’ relations to their social life and the people that make it up. When one is socially alienated, one’s sociality and close relations exist as a mere afterthought or break from work, while labor is the central activity of one’s (...) life. While one might think that existing solutions to alienated labor would resolve this social alienation, I suggest that such solutions at best leave the problem intact and may in fact contribute to it by giving labor the place of priority in workers’ lives. Resolving social alienation, I suggest, requires rethinking the amount of time we commit to work, the rigidity of the work schedule, and most crucially, the value that we attribute to work as the primary source of purpose in our lives. (shrink)

Feelings of marginalisation impact the lives of LGBT+ people in a fundamental way, but for those who have an intellectual disability, and are gay, there is a heightened sense of alienation. This article examines the unique oppression faced by these individuals in a heteronormative and ableist world, where a long history of extreme control of sexual intimacy has resulted in harsh forms of social exclusion. Although moves have been made to empower service users who are intellectually disabled (...) and identify as LGBT+ to participate fully in life, there is also a need to assess the relationship between rights, responsibility, and risk. This article further explores whether by drawing upon government social policy, barriers are being dismantled through the development of innovative local strategies that aim to deliver non-discriminatory person-centred services. (shrink)

The aesthetic domain is a social one. We coordinate our individual acts of creation, appreciation, and performance with those of others in the context of social aesthetic practices. More strongly, many of the richest goods of our aesthetic lives are constitutively social; their value lies in the fact that individuals are engaged in joint aesthetic agency, participating in cooperative and collaborative project that outstrips what can be realized alone. I provide an account of nature and value of (...) two such social aesthetic goods—aesthetic communities and aesthetic traditions—and further argue that such goods are a core constituent of an aesthetically good life. At the same time, I argue that the ideals of the dominant theory of aesthetic value, aesthetic value hedonism, are incompatible with a full commitment to these social aesthetic goods; the hedonist is thereby alienated from the other participants within aesthetic communities and traditions. This sets up a dilemma for the hedonist: either the hedonist must bite the bullet, accepting that the theory leads to a problematic form of aesthetic alienation; or, we must reject aesthetic value hedonism and adopt a different theory of aesthetic value which accommodates the value of social aesthetic goods. I argue that we should take the second horn of the dilemma. (shrink)

This paper is about the modern-day problem of human alienation and fulfillment in work from the perspective of the Catholic social thought. It analyses the symptoms and causes of work alienation, the meaning of work and its significance in the individual’s quest for fulfillment, and how the Catholic social teachings can shed light on the problems involved in transforming the world of work. Alienation in work affects one’s subjective and psychological fulfillment, but it is not (...) ultimately dependent on material culture or economic models. The problem of alienation in work cannot be dealt with by simply modifying the production process or the wage system, although these are factors that alienate people even more. Social problems cannot be solved without light of faith and the recognition of the moral order that is rooted in God. In the final analysis, alienation is not simply the loss of meaning in human activities. It is the loss of life’s meaning and man’s estrangement from his own authentic nature, including his reason for being and final end, that results from the rejection of God and His teachings. What Catholicism provides is a combination of economic, psychological, moral, social, and spiritual motives for work that will make it personally fulfilling. (shrink)

Are extreme beliefs constitutive of echo chambers, or only typically caused by them? Or are many echo chambers unproblematic, amplifying relatively benign beliefs? This paper details the conceptual relations between echo chambers and extreme beliefs, showing how different conceptual choice-points in how we understand both echo chambers and extreme beliefs affects how we should evaluate, study, and engage with echo chambering groups. We also explore how our theories of extreme beliefs and echo chambers shape social (...) scientific research and contribute in a practical way when treating these phenomena, focusing on examples of climate change scepticism. (shrink)

Modern individuals grapple with a paradoxical reality: their lives are characterized by a strong feeling of independence as well as by an intense social interconnection. This article argues that despite an increased discussion of dependence in contemporary social and political philosophy, current ways of theorizing it have disregarded the concrete form that our social dependence takes under capitalist relations. I maintain that without integrating the critique of political economy, we risk offering a defense of dependence that remains (...) unaware of important axes of domination. In particular, I suggest recuperating Marx’s notion of objective dependence, which has been insufficiently discussed in the existing literature. Finally, drawing on recent developments in critical theory, I put forward a normative critique of dependence. I contend that the issue with modern societies is that they promote alienated and reified relations of dependence, transforming the basis of our social freedom into an objective form of domination. -/- . (shrink)

A crucial philosophical problem of social robots is how much they perform a kind of sociality in interacting with humans. Scholarship diverges between those who sustain that humans and social robots cannot by default have social interactions and those who argue for the possibility of an asymmetric sociality. Against this dichotomy, we argue in this paper for a holistic approach called “Δ phenomenology” of HSRI. In the first part of the paper, we will analyse the semantics of (...) an HSRI. This is what leads a human being to assign or receive a meaning of sociality by interacting with a social robot. Hence, we will question the ontological structure underlying HSRIs, suggesting that HSRIs may lead to a peculiar kind of user alienation. By combining all these variables, we will formulate some final recommendations for an ethics of social robots. (shrink)

Stephen Houlgate has written an introduction to Hegel that is more than historical. For him, “Hegel’s is still a viable philosophical endeavour with extremely important things to contribute to modern debates, particularly the debates about historical relativism, poverty and social alienation, the nature of freedom and political legitimacy, the future of art, and the character of the Christian faith”. This ambitious book is clearly written and very thoughtful. By concentrating on a number of central themes, Houlgate avoids giving (...) us another numbing summary of the whole Hegelian system, yet he conveys a general idea and feel for the overall project. He also provides fresh looks at areas of Hegel’s thought not usually treated by those in his wing of Hegel interpretation. (shrink)

I argue that the social dimension of alienation, as discussed by Williams and Railton, has been underappreciated. The lesson typically drawn from their exchange is that moral theory poses a threat to the internal integrity of the agent, but there is a parallel risk that moral theory will implicitly construe agents as constitutively alienated from one another. I argue that a satisfying account of agency will need to make room for what I call ‘genuine ethical contact’ with others, (...) both as concrete objects in the world external to ourselves and as subjects who can recognize us reciprocally. (shrink)

The topic of alienation has fallen out of fashion in social and political philosophy. It used to be salient, especially in socialist thought and in debates about labor practices in capitalism. Although the lack of identification of people with their working lives—their alienation as workers—remains practically important, normative engagement with it has been set back by at least four objections. They concern the problems of essentialist views, a mishandling of the distinction between the good and the right, (...) the danger of paternalistic impositions, and the significance of democratic authorization. This paper recasts the critique of alienation in a way that vindicates its importance for social and political philosophy and rebuts these objections. First, it provides an analytic framework to understand alienation—distinguishing its various conceptual, explanatory, and normative dimensions. Second, it accounts for the normative aspect of the critique of alienation by articulating it in terms of prudential and moral ideas of positive freedom regarding human flourishing and solidaristic empowerment. Finally, the normative account is developed further, and sharpened to respond to the four objections, through the introduction of the Dignitarian Approach—the view that we have reason to organize social life in such a way that we respond appropriately to the valuable features of individual human beings that give rise to their dignity. (shrink)

In this paper, I explore the approaches to methodological abstraction and self-alienation developed respectively in Karl Mannheim’s early sociology of intellectuals and in Edmund Husserl’s late transcendental phenomenology. In Mannheim’s early and experimental works, the resistance to abstraction and alienation is located in a stratum of intellectuals able to meaningfully combine diverse cultural currents in a social process of cultivation (Bildung). In Husserl, to contrast, this resistance is grasped as a constant crisis in the methods of pursuing (...) philosophical truth. While these approaches seem difficult to reconcile, I suggest in closing that this difficulty can be related to their shared emphasis on a theoretical response to the practical and historical reality of self-alienation. (shrink)

I argue that metaethicists should be concerned with two kinds of alienation that can result from theories of normativity: alienation between an agent and her reasons, and alienation between an agent and the concrete others with whom morality is principally concerned. A theory that cannot avoid alienation risks failing to make sense of central features of our experience of being agents, in whose lives normativity plays an important role. The twin threats of alienation establish two (...) desiderata for theories of normativity; however, I argue that they are difficult to jointly satisfy. (shrink)

After years of neglect, alienation has again reached the agenda of critical thought. In my case, I recognize alienation as a challenge for education in contemporary societies. To obtain conceptual resources to overcome this challenge, I have revisited the comprehensive 20 th century discussion of alienation. Today, alienation is naturally discussed as an existential condition of human being, but still in the 1980s, there was a strong Marxist current that claimed alienation to be implied by (...) capitalism, in particular by the institution of private property and the social division of labor, and that alienation therefore should be criticized as part of the critique of capitalism and political economy and possibly overcome. Today, under the hegemony of neo-liberal capitalism, this critical and processual concept of alienation is more relevant than ever. Hence, in the present work I argue that the basic logic of Marx's idea of alienation still has critical potential. The argument forms a long engagement with mainly 20 th century literature, departing from the very idea of capitalism, considering the ideas of history, education and democracy, discussing how to distinguish and translate key terms, considering why alienation became an object of controversy among Marxists, offering an interpretation of Marx's critique relevant for contemporary society, thus considering alienation a consequence of working under conditions of private property, i.e. being a human being in a capitalist society, and finally presenting Marx's idea of communism as relevant to the contemporary educational agenda. (shrink)

Critics across the political spectrum have worried that ordinary uses of words like 'racist', 'sexist', and 'homophobic' are becoming conceptually inflated, meaning that these expressions are getting used so widely that they lose their nuance and, thereby, their moral force. However, the charge of conceptual inflation, as well as responses to it, are standardly made without any systematic investigation of how 'racist' and other expressions condemning oppression are actually used in ordinary language. Once we examine large linguistic corpora to see (...) how these expressions are actually used, we find that English speakers have a rich linguistic repertoire for qualifying the degree to which and dimensions along which something is racist, sexist, homophobic, and so on. These facts about ordinary usage undermine the charge of conceptual inflation. Without awareness of facts about ordinary usage, theorists risk making linguistic prescriptions that are unnecessary or counterproductive. (shrink)

Throughout one’s career, a professional sports practitioner is confronted with various choices to make, ranging from coaching a fair match or offering opportunities for selected individuals to win; showing true sportsmanship or venturing for a better compensation; to even sticking to one’s home team or accepting a better offer. This is faced by all sports practitioners within the same industry: athletes, coaches, managers, and even team owners. In making these choices, individuals recognize essential ethical considerations. However, a primary factor that (...) influences them—albeit without them knowing—is their alienated state. The preferences of the sports practitioner mirror society’s response to the demands of the Culture Industry. He or she would opt to choose what the Industry is offering and uphold these standards. After all, sports is a social phenomenon that has undergone changes throughout the years, along with other aspects of society. It bears the impact of the Aufklärung, the true question of being enlightened and of being cultured. Thus, sports could be seen as constituting another level in the individual’s (and even society’s) alienated sphere. This paper seeks to shed light on the ethical considerations of the sports practitioner, in particular the heavy influence of the Culture Industry, the individual’s alienated state, and his or her response. I am interested in the play of power-relations among the sports practitioners and society, both dominated by the Industry. The paper does not present an exhaustive claim enlisting all considerations, but merely critiques the present setup. By presenting individuals’ (ultimately social) alienated state, I show that their choices are in fact social, even though they would seem to be solely individualistic in terms of their situated-ness in sporting events. Thus, this paper shows the heavy influence of the Industry in the continuous power relations between sports practitioners and society, as well as the alienated state of both. (shrink)

As we enter the 21st century, we do well to consider the values implicit in science fiction, the principal arena of future speculation in popular culture. This study explored whether consumption of science fiction (SF) is correlated with distinctive socio-ethical views. SF tends to advocate the extension of value and rights to all forms of intelligence, regardless of physical form; enthusiasm for technology; and social and economic libertarianism. This suggests that consumers with these socio-ethical views would be attracted to (...) the SF genre, and that amount of SF consumption would be correlated with adoption of these views. -/- Groups of respondents involved in medical ethical and environmental issues were surveyed in 1992 (N=278). SF consumption was found, at first-order correlation and controlling for covariates, to be associated with: greater support for extending rights to animal and machine intelligence; greater enthusiasm for technology, and rejection of limits to human endeavors; and greater social libertarianism. SF consumption was not associated with specific views on the cognitively and physically disabled; support for abortion rights; or economic libertarianism. (shrink)

Alienation has been recently revived as a central theme in critical theory. Current debates, however, tend to focus on normative rather than on explanatory issues. In this paper, I confront the latter and advance an account of alienation that bears on the mechanisms that bring it about in order to locate alienation as a distinctive social and psychological fact. In particular, I argue that alienation can be explained as a disruption induced by social factors (...) in the sense of mental ownership that comes with the first personal awareness of being a subject of attitudes, emotions, and actions, and outline how social factors can play a structuring causal role in the process that brings it about. In the first section, I introduce the theme and explain why it is important to focus on the mechanisms that underlie alienation. In the second section, I maintain that understanding how alienation works is crucial to make sense of false consciousness. In the third section, I consider the relevance of mental ownership to explaining alienation and discuss existing evidence about whether and how it can fail. In the final section, I argue that disturbances in the simulation routines that support social cognition might underpin alienation, and outline how social factors might play a structuring causal role in this connection. (shrink)

There are two different ways of understanding alienation: as a condition and as a struggle. On this distinction turns the whole theory and practice of Marxism.

I extend my account of social invisibility and interpersonal recognition by applying it to one form of racism: racial alienation—the failure to emotionally identify with members of another racial group on the basis of their race. I argue that leading views of racism in the analytic tradition threaten to contravene the conviction that racial alienation involves a misrecognition of the other group’s humanity. The pitfall is best avoided by developing a conception of interpersonal awareness that is informed (...) by Wittgenstein’s remarks on other minds, particularly his point that our awareness of others as humanly minded consists in ‘an attitude towards a soul’ rather than in an 'opinion' that she has a soul. (shrink)

ABSTRACT: Simon Baron-Cohen has argued that autism and related developmental disorders (sometimes called “autism spectrum conditions” or “autism spectrum disorders”) can be usefully thought of as the condition of possessing an “extreme male brain.” The impetus for regarding autism spectrum disorders (ASD) this way has been the accepted science regarding the etiology of autism, as developed over that past several decades. Three important features of this etiology ground the Extreme Male Brain theory. First, ASD is disproportionately male (approximately (...) 10:1 in the case of Asperger’s Syndrome or high-functioning autism (HFA) and approximately 4:1 in the case of autistic disorder). Second, ASD is not psychogenic but biological in origin, and hence is not the product of sexist conditioning or childrearing practices, although these may affect the development of the disorder. Third, ASD is regarded as a spectrum developmental disorder, unlike other disorders such as Down Syndrome that are diagnosed by a (nearly) binary criterion. Down Syndrome, for example, is diagnosed by the presence in all or most cells within a given individual of an extra copy of Chromosome 21. Autism, on the other hand, is diagnosed by the presence of a set of symptoms that vary in their intensity and in their milder forms seem to conform to purported sex differences in cognitive, emotional, and social functioning. -/- In this paper, I do not challenge accepted science regarding the etiology of autism, and I do not challenge the idea of ASD as a disorder. Nor do I wish to offer an alternative account of what autism is. Instead, I focus on the usefulness of thinking of a disorder as an extreme version of ordinary sex differences. Does it follow from the fact that a disorder is more often found in men that we should think of it as an extreme form of maleness? If not, what other conditions must be met in order to warrant this way of thinking about ASD? What does it mean to say that ASD is a form of “extreme male brain”? Feminists are rightly skeptical of theories that make claims about male and female brains, so how should we respond to the clear evidence that the differences between typical and ASD individuals are not caused by childrearing practices? I explain what I take to be Baron-Cohen’s central argument that autism should be seen as the extreme male brain, and critique that argument. I conclude that there is no good argument that autistic symptoms should be regarded as an extreme form of male mental traits, and that Baron-Cohen’s claim does not help us to understand autism, women, or men. His claim is a speculative thesis that is readily mobilized for sexist practices. As such it requires a higher threshold for evidentiary support and rigorous argumentation—support and argumentation that does not exist. -/- KEYWORDS: autism, brain, gender, neuroscience, feminism, male . (shrink)

A background assumption in much contemporary political philosophy is that justice is the first virtue of social institutions, taking priority over other values such as beneficence. This assumption is typically treated as a methodological starting point, rather than as following from any particular moral or political theory. In this paper, I challenge this assumption. To frame my discussion, I argue, first, that justice doesn’t in principle override beneficence, and second, that justice doesn’t typically outweigh beneficence, since, in institutional contexts, (...) the stakes of beneficence are often extremely high. While there are various ways one might resist this argument, none challenge the core methodological point that political philosophy should abandon its preoccupation with justice and begin to pay considerably more attention to social beneficence—that is, to beneficence understood as a virtue of social institutions. Along the way, I also highlight areas where focusing on social beneficence would lead political philosophers in new and fruitful directions, and where normative ethicists focused on personal beneficence might scale up their thinking to the institutional case. GPI Working Paper No. 11-2022. (shrink)

Questions are currently being posed concerning the implications of the clinical uptake of psychedelics. While enthusiasm surrounds the potential therapeutic benefits of psychedelics and critique surrounds their appropriation to commercial ends, limited attention has been given to the role of psychedelics in generating social transformation. Herbert Marcuse contended radical change requires ‘new imaginaries of liberation’. We consider whether clinical uptake of psychedelics may produce the perceptual shifts necessary to generate social transformation surrounding contemporary alienating conditions. Economic structures contributing (...) to these alienating conditions are highly resistant to change and may neuter psychedelics’ revolutionary potential. We illustrate how psychedelics may be instrumentalised: regulating individuals into unjust systems; redirecting psychedelic usage away from therapeutic ends towards productivity; distracting or diverting attention from systemic forms of control; usurping non- ordinary states into the domain of self-care; and fetishistically commodifying psychedelic experience as a consumable. There are, however, reasons to believe that psychedelics, in raising consciousnesses, may prove resistant to co-option. In particular, psychedelics induce perceptual experiences that: challenge the paradigmatic assumptions of industrial society by provoking alternative epistemologies and meta- physics; generate expanded or ecological constructions of selfhood, thereby offering resignifications of meanings, desires, and life potentials; and offer the enriched phenomenological insight into self, other, and world called for in combating ubiquitous social alienation. In this way, psychedelics may induce the revolution in perception necessary to imagine liberatory potentials and spark the desire for collective emancipation. (shrink)

Current conceptions of meaning and culture tend toward extreme forms of disembodied abstraction, indicating an alienation from the original, earthy meaning of the word culture. I turn to the earlier meanings of the word and why the “cultic,” the living impulse to meaning, was and remains essential to a conception of culture as semeiosis or sign-action. Culture and biology are often treated by social scientists as though they were oil and water, not to be mixed. I am (...) fully aware of the assumed nature-culture dichotomy, but I reject it, not because I am a sociobiologist, quite the contrary, but rather because I am a semiotician, and my studies of signs have led me toward a critical reconstruction of the concepts of nature and culture. In my perspective, culture is a living, social metaboly of signs, not limited to a convention but in transaction with the inmost recesses of the person, and with the qualitative, physical, and significant environment. The question is not whether culture is a “system” or not, but whether we shall continue to conceive of culture as an inert, mechanical system or code, incapable of self-critical cultivation, or as a “living system”--a way of living--fully open to contingency, spontaneity, purposive growth and decay. Putting the “cult” back into culture requires a reconception of the relations between human biology and meaning, and between non-discursive, non-rational reason and modern rationality. Such a reconception involves considering how the technics of the biosocial human body itself form the primary source of culture. (shrink)

Ideologies, worldviews, or simply personal theories, often acquire a distorted and pathological character, and become a factor of alienation rather than an epistemic resource and an aid for personal existence. This paper attempts to better define the limits and characteristics of this experience, which we call distorted intellectual beliefs, or general conceptual beliefs (GB), while trying to highlight both its sometimes dramatic background and its personal and social consequences, which are no less potentially deleterious. We believe that such (...) experiences should not be confused tout court with a broader and more complex phenomenon, such as extremism and politico-religious radicalism, but are a specific typology of that broader and multifaceted fact that is self-deception. We hypothesize that the self-deception implicit in experiences of intellectual distortion produces a cognitive dissonance of which the subject is normally, though with varying intensity, aware (or may become aware through honest introspection). The phenomenon occurs in two extreme forms: one is normal (sporadic), the other is exceptional (systematic). The passage from one to the other is a complex process of escalation and de-escalation, on which multiple external and internal variables act. In its ascending path, it essentially coincides with a process of psychological polarization and cognitive "de-pluralization", while its descending phase marks a return to reality and a "re-pluralization", where the subject returns to being what he basically is, namely, an active and tireless meaning seeker. In the central part of the chapter, similarities and differences between processes of deradicalization and phenomena of religious deconversion are analyzed, with reference, among others, to the case of the Austro-Hungarian writer Arthur Koestler. -/- An abridged version of this text has been delivered for the Workshop "Explaining Extreme Belief and Extreme Behavior", September 15-16, 2022, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam. I am grateful to David Konstan (NYU) for reading and commenting on a first version of this chapter and to Rik Peels (VUA) for his comments and questions during the Workshop. I would also like to thank my bachelor's and master's students at UDG, who discussed these topics at length with during semester 2022-B. (shrink)

Ideologies, worldviews, or simply personal theories, often acquire a distorted and pathological character, and become a factor of alienation rather than an epistemic resource and an aid for personal existence. This paper attempts to better define the limits and characteristics of this experience, which we call distorted intellectual beliefs, or general conceptual beliefs (GB), while trying to highlight both its sometimes dramatic background and its personal and social consequences, which are no less potentially deleterious. We believe that such (...) experiences should not be confused tout court with a broader and more complex phenomenon, such as extremism and politico-religious radicalism, but are a specific typology of that broader and multifaceted fact that is self-deception. We hypothesize that the self-deception implicit in experiences of intellectual distortion produces a cognitive dissonance of which the subject is normally, though with varying intensity, aware (or may become aware through honest introspection). The phenomenon occurs in two forms: one is normal (sporadic), the other is exceptional (systematic). The passage from one to the other is a complex process of escalation and de-escalation, on which multiple external and internal variables act. In its ascending path, it essentially coincides with a process of psychological polarization and cognitive "de-pluralization", while its descending phase marks a return to reality and a "re-pluralization", where the subject returns to being what he basically is, namely, an active and tireless meaning seeker. In the central part of the chapter, similarities and differences between processes of deradicalization and phenomena of religious deconversion are analyzed, with reference, among others, to the case of the Austro-Hungarian writer Arthur Koestler. -/- An abridged version of this text has been delivered for the Workshop "Explaining Extreme Belief and Extreme Behavior", September 15-16, 2022, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam. I am grateful to David Konstan (NYU) for reading and commenting on a first version of this chapter and to Rik Peels (VUA) for his comments and questions during the Workshop. I would also like to thank my bachelor's and master's students at UDG, who discussed these topics at length with during semester 2022-B. (shrink)

One of the core insights from Eleanor Rosch’s work on categorization is that human categorization isn’t arbitrary. Instead, two psychological principles constrain possible systems of classification for all human cultures. According to these principles, the task of a category system is to provide maximum information with the least cognitive effort, and the perceived world provides us with structured rather than arbitrary features. In this paper, I show that Rosch's insights give us important resources for making progress on the 'feasibility question' (...) in conceptual engineering: the question of how we can implement conceptual engineering projects in ways that are practically feasible. Specifically, I show that one overlooked upshot of Rosch's work is that naming practices play an extremely important role in the construction of perceived similarities within and dissimilarities between categories, and, correspondingly, the dissemination of social stereotypes that serve as markers between different categories that are otherwise similar. Thus, naming practices will be a crucial constraint for the feasibility of certain ameliorative projects. (shrink)

Given the technological constraints of long-duration space travel and planetary settlement, off-Earth humans will likely need to employ food systems very different from their terrestrial counterparts, and newly emerging food technologies are being developed that will shape novel food systems in these off-Earth contexts. Projected off-Earth food systems may therefore potentially “alienate” their users in new ways compared to Earth-based food systems. They will be susceptible to alienation in ways that are similar to such potential on Earth, where there (...) are points of overlap between off-Earth food systems and any of the multitudes of ways in which food systems on Earth are structured. They will also be susceptible to new forms of alienation, as we encounter scenarios that are genuinely structurally novel to humanity. These are especially important to consider since there are comparatively fewer analyses of these food systems where they differ from existing ones. We propose five non-exhaustive sources of value beyond nutrition our individual relationships with a food may possess: gustatory, social, cultural, epistemic, and authorial value. Using these, we offer examples of ways in which an off-Earth food system may exacerbate or alleviate alienation for humans in long-term off-Earth food systems. (shrink)

This article challenges the use of social deprivation as a punishment, and offers a preliminary examination of the human rights implications of exile and solitary confinement. The article considers whether a human right against coercive social deprivation is conceptually redundant, as there are recognised rights against torture, extremely cruel, inhumane, or degrading treatment as well as rights to basic health care, education, and security, which might encompass what this right protects. The article argues that the right is not (...) conceptually redundant, but that, even if it were, there would be significant reasons to articulate it. (shrink)

In the first part of the work we propose to explore the arguments that Hartmut Rosa offers in his classic work Alienation and Acceleration in order to demonstrate the author's diagnosis of the epoch. Then, we will analyze the proposal he makes in Indisposability to counteract the forms of life of a new type of totalitarianism that is typical of capitalist acceleration and that he considers as negative with respect to the relationship to which individuals are forced to live (...) in the world. Finally, we will arrive at our own hypothesis about the diagnosis presented by Rosa and to his theoretical proposal of individual-world resonance to affirm that it is novel within the Critical Theory as a tradition. (shrink)

Ideology is an important part of the political mechanism that helps to ensure the loyalty of citizens to the state and give it a moral basis and justification. Roman patriotism was deeply religious. The community was the subject of faith, but also faith was a state duty, a testimony of trustworthiness. Personal religiosity was res privata, but loyalty to the state cult was res publica. Roman ideology was based on respect for ancestors, respect for the institution of the family and (...) the promotion of fertility, the Christian community initially opposed all this paganism, offering a completely different paradigm. From the concept of the race as the sacred connection of generations follows the cult of ancestors, especially the cult of the leaders of the family, its “patriarchs”. The latter have always been to some extent political leaders, and political leaders, in turn, turned out to be the leaders of the race. The deification of the emperor after death was based on the cult of ancestors, which had a great significance for the Romans. A person feels comfortable in the ancestral world, where he clearly represents his place in the connection of generations, honoring his ancestors and the land of his ancestors. The clan religion quite organically fits into this paradigm, being its ideological justification. Paganism unites “us”, opposing them “alien” on the basis of belonging to the race, contact with the land. Christianity was formed as a non–ethnic religion, rejecting the cult of ancestors as such. Everything that is important to the state turns out to be devoid of meaning for a person who takes the teaching of Christ seriously and considers it as a guide to action. But such extreme forms of religiosity, being the choice of individuals, can not act as a social standard; there can not be a state if all its members abandon their worldly affairs and will search for the Kingdom of Heaven. Early Christians had a plan to fight the world, but there was no plan for its reorganization. When this new power won, it became obvious that without cardinal rebirth, it is doomed, because Christianity in its original sense could not become the basis of any state. It had to adapt to the tasks of state building, but at the cost of this was a complete transformation, distorting the original message beyond recognition. With the establishment of Christianity as a state religion, the conditions for the transformation of Christianity into a civilizational factor began to take shape. The foundations of Christian civilization were laid by the first Christians, but Christian civilization was created by the “second” who were able to reconcile two sworn enemies – the state and the church. (shrink)

Positing implicit social cognitive processes is common in the social cognition literature. We see it in discussions of theories of mentalizing, empathy, and infants' social-cognitive capacities. However, there is little effort to articulate what counts as implicit social cognition in general, so theorizing about implicit social cognition is extremely disparate across each of these sub-domains. In this paper, I argue that Michael Brownstein’s account of implicit cognition promises to be a fruitful, unifying account of implicit (...) cognition in general, and it is well suited to explain implicit cognition in various sub-domains of social cognition. (shrink)

​In the wake of the extremely divisive 2016 presidential election, many US Americans are feeling deeply unsettled by the sense that the basic norms that govern life in our society are in a state of flux. How might we best describe and analyze the experience of living in a society that is so divided, a society whose very normative structure seems to be disintegrating? What problematic behaviors might arise in this situation? And how might we continue to work for positive (...) social change without further disrupting the normative order of our society? In this paper, I explore some insights into these issues that can be found in the work of Mexican phenomenologist Jorge Portilla, whose fascinating essays on cultural politics are just beginning to be translated into English. Portilla lived at a time in which his society’s normative structure was also in a state of flux. He argues that this state of normative disintegration generates a widely shared sense of zozobra—a profound anxiety that is not a psychological state but a state of existence, and that tends to provoke a number of defensive reactions that may be familiar to us today. I argue that Portilla's analysis of zozobra is a valuable resource for navigating the contemporary world.​. (shrink)

Those who believe in the simplistic trust model between politics and science unintentionally (or intentionally) omit the fact that there exists something called cultural value systems and norms, which govern the formation, growth and demise of a group. These elements are so critical that by setting them aside, we risk entering total disagreements whenever difficult problems arise. One such serious problem is the climate crisis and the need for building the eleventh cultural value as proposed by Vuong [7]. And this (...) value will complement the progressive value system suggested by Harrison [8]. It is safe to say that besides hard-core sciences, resolving global problems posing existential threats to humankind will certainly require us to deploy our best weapons, and many must come from the social sciences and humanities [9]. Therefore, the future solution to global change problems will have to show us its social heart. (shrink)

The viruses coexist for approx. 300 million years with the humans. Sometimes viruses can infect people on a large scale. But how was the current pandemic possible? Global warming is causing extreme weather events that have led to an increase in infectious diseases. The new climate can support epidemiological vectors for longer periods of time, creating more favorable conditions for replication and the emergence of new vectors. In the case of emerging infectious diseases, it is considered that there is (...) a border that has already been crossed. Viruses normally have a native area (their "reservoir") from which they should not be pushed out. This creates a dangerous intimacy, with "hotspots" that include locations such as markets, which become real hotbeds of epidemics. DOI: 10.13140/RG.2.2.26974.87364 . (shrink)

Marx's concept of alienation has proven to be a subject of controversy for many social theorists. One of the more provocative treatments of this concept has been outlined by Jean-Paul Sartre. Drawing heavily on Marxism's Hegelian tradition, Sartre portrays alienation as being a crucial element in the formation of the individual's perception of social reality. An appreciation of Sartre's project and its relevance to Marxist theory necessitates the examination of the origins and development of the concept (...) of alienation. For this purpose, a brief account of Hegel's usage of the term is followed by a discussion of Feuerbach's efforts to counter Hegelian idealism with an explicitly materialist perspective. Alienation makes its first appearance in Marx's work with the publication of the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844 and the concept was to be a topic of concern throughout Marx's life. In particular, his analysis of commodity fetishism in his later work shows an obvious connection with alienation. Georg Lukacs' presentation of the reification of consciousness is a valuable addition to the examination of the fetishism of commodities. Lukacs provides numerous insights concerning the relationship between alienation and commodity fetishism as well as offering a useful articulation of the role of consciousness in Marxist theory. Lukacs' contribution is especially helpful in clarifying the nature of Sartre's project. Both theorists seek to outline an exposition of consciousness which counters idealistic excesses with a materialistic perspective faithful to the basic tenents of Marxism. In addition, Sartre employs the notion of reification as well as that of alienation in his psychoanalytic approach. His technique is intended to illuminate the class biases inherent in the consciousness of each individual, a proposal which finds an immediate application in explaining the distorted awareness which petit bourgeois intellectuals such as Lukacs and Sartre himself bring to the study of Marx's method. (shrink)

Today research on prosocial behaviour is very much shaped by the success of social neuroscience. However, some philosopher's criticise neuroscience as reductionist. The purpose of this paper is to analyse this critique. With a philosophical background in Charles Taylor's hermeneutic thesis "man as a self-interpreting animal", the paper shows that neuroscientists' attempt to describe prosocial behaviour in science through brain imaging technologies (MRI) constitute a neurochemical self that resonates a modern ‘paradigm of clarity and objectivity’ as presented by Taylor. (...) It is argued that this scientific explanation model challenges Taylor's hermeneutic self. Where human behaviour previous was mapped on a psychological level, prosocial behaviour is described in the body - the human brain - on a neurophysiological level. The author applies an autism analogy metaphor, which paradoxical shows that the neurochemical self’s emphasis on structures and observations epistemological facilitate an autistic understanding of prosocial behaviour alien to the situated and interpreted feelings of Taylor's self-understanding(s), and the logic of our everyday language. (shrink)

Hegel’s claim that the social world is included in consciousness is exposed through five-fold humanities lenses.

The growth of knowledge has always included opposing worldviews and clashes of distinct interests. This includes different rationalities which either have served or disserved the State. A Copernican world defied the Catholic Church. Cartesian philosophy and Newtonian physics incited a major split between an allegedly knowing subject and external realities. As an outcome, many dualisms emerged: subjectivity/objectivity, particular/universal, etc. Hegelian dialectics elaborated such approach to its most extreme. The pretension of social science to be value-free assumed a neutral (...) observer collating external facts. Yet both Hume and Adam Smith challenged Descartes cogito as banal, stressing that it is not because we think that we are but rather than how we think is who we have become through the values, dispositions and beliefs that we have consciously or less than consciously acquired from life experience, and that no perception is neutral. Hume anticipated Bourclieu both on habItus and also on reflexivity in his concept of the reflexive mind" yet this then was lost by the presumption, such as by Bertrand Russell, that Hume was a "mere empiricist". Logical positivism then claimed that an appeal to 'facts' could dismiss metaphysics, invoking the logical atomism of Russell and the early Wittgenstein. But which Wittgenstein transcended not in the sense of transcendental metaphysics, though he was deeply influenced by Schopenhauer, but - after a road to Damascus encounter with Sraffa - coming to realise that meanings depend on context and that their context needs to be understood. Which we suggest in this paper is that these issues are highly relevant to the troubled relationship between rationality - or rationalities - and the State. (shrink)

This study examines from an ethical framework the circumstances of workers who are engaged in non-professional services that are offered through corporations that are organized to serve high volume of costumers. Drawing on the relevant ethical teachings of the Catholic social tradition (CST), it explores some practices, strategies, and policies that could address the problems experienced by many service providers in the United States today. CST refers to a wide variety of documents of the magisterium of the Catholic Church (...) which respond to the changing social and economic challenges of the modern world. The study argues that the primacy of the person, love and subsidiarity, sense of community, and respect for worker’s rights and unionism in CST are not only moral principles that uphold intrinsic human goods, they are likewise instrumental to operational effectivity because they promote job satisfaction, smooth interpersonal relationship, and long-term commitment with the company. They enable service providers to work efficiently, deliver exceptional service, and act as conduit between the customers and the business establishment, rather than simply being caught between their conflicting demands. (shrink)

Virușii coabitează de cca. 300 milioane de ani cu oamenii. Uneori, virușii pot infecta oamenii pe scară largă. Dar, cum a fost posibilă actuala pandemie? Încălzirea globală determină fenomene meteorologice extreme care au dus la o creștere a bolilor infecțioase. Noul climat poate susține vectori epidemiologici pentru perioade mai lungi de timp, creând condiții mai favorabile replicării și apariția de noi vectori. În cazul bolilor infecțioase emergente, se consideră că există o graniță peste care s-a sărit deja. Virușii au, (...) în mod normal, o zonă nativă („rezervorul” lor), din care nu ar trebui să fie împinși afară. Se creează astfel o intimitate periculoasă, cu „puncte fierbinți” care includ locații precum piețele, care devin adevărate focare de epidemii. DOI: 10.13140/RG.2.2.16634.11202. (shrink)

Social Media is part of contemporary technology that is the contentious subject matter within the society. It is paradoxical when social media should provide techniques and objects that serve human being in a positive way, but at the same time, it can dehumanize human being such as alienation. The main problem is because the lack of impact of public policy, which does not involve society in the democratic sphere. The article is about the possibility of democratization (...) class='Hi'>social media in the discourse of philosophy of technology. I refer to Andrew Feenberg’s Critical Theory of Technology (CTT) for opening discourse and criticizing social media. Social Media should be changed by the critical view to analyze the internal contradictions in technocracy, which view social media merely as an instrument and value-free. In the other hand, CTT will lead into the discourse of instrumentalization theory, technological rationality, technical code and democratization of social media. I conclude this article by applying CTT to delineate extant approach and consideration of democratization of social media in Indonesian through critical thinking participation and emotional education in the public sphere. (shrink)

Why are some people capable of sympathizing with and/or committing acts of political violence, such as attacks aimed at innocent targets? Attempts to construct terrorist profiles based on individual and situational factors, such as clinical, psychological, ethnic, and socio-demographic variables, have largely failed. Although individual and situational factors must be at work, it is clear that they alone cannot explain how certain individuals are radicalized. In this paper, we propose that a comprehensive understanding of radicalization and of how it may (...) lead to political violence requires the integration of information across multiple levels of analysis and interdisciplinary perspectives from evolutionary theory, social, personality and cognitive psychology, political science and neuroscience. Characterization of the structural-functional relationships between neural mechanisms and the cognitive and affective psychological processes that underpin group dynamics, interpersonal processes, values and narratives, as well as micro-sociological processes may reveal latent drivers of radicalization and explain why some people turn to extreme political violence. These drivers may not be observable within a single individual level of scientific enquiry. The integrative, multilevel approach that characterizes social neuroscience has the potential to provide theoretical and empirical clarity regarding the antecedents of radicalization and support for extreme violence. (shrink)

“We are experiencing an ecological and social crisis, driven by exponential capital accumulation, whose end result will be the extinction of human civilisation” (p. 18). While it is easy to shrug off such a dramatic claim, in Alienation, Spectacle, & Revolution: A Critical Marxist Essay, Neil Faulkner takes this relatively strong claim and endeavors to demonstrate its truth. Thus begins his project of updating our understanding of alienation—not an easy task, but one that Faulkner does well. In (...) a time of a simultaneous dearth and deluge of information, Faulkner attempts to pull apart the dialectical and economic structures of the third industrial revolution and follows the breadcrumbs until he comes to a different “end of history.” Faulkner, who died in February 2022, was an archeologist and a political activist. He was a member of the Socialist Workers Party in the U.K. for many years and later a founding member of Anti-Capitalist Resistance. He wrote on topics ranging from the Arab-Anglo conflict to the history of the Olympics. While his corpus spanned several subjects, his books and articles all have a bitingly Marxist take that brought Faulkner much acclaim. (shrink)

This chapter aims to direct attention to the political dimension of the social media age. Although current events like the Cambridge Analytica data breach managed to raise awareness for the issue, the systematically organized and orchestrated mechanisms at play still remain oblivious to most. Next to dangerous monopoly-tendencies among the powerful players on the market, reliance on automated algorithms in dealing with content seems to enable large-scale manipulation that is applied for economical and political purposes alike. The successful replacement (...) of traditional parties by movements based on personality cults around marketable young faces like Emmanuel Macron or Austria’s Sebastian Kurz is strongly linked to products and services offered by an industry that simply provides likes and followers for cash. Inspired by Trump’s monopolization of the Twitter-channel, these new political acteurs use the potential of social media for effective message control, allowing them to avoid confrontations with professional journalists. In addition, an extremely active minority of organized agitators relies on the viral potential of the web to strongly influence and dictate public discourse – suggesting a shift from the Spiral of Silence to the dangerous illusion of a Nexus of Noise. (shrink)

From antiquity to date, communal clashes, inter tribal even to global crisis of war is antecedented by penetration of ill-will, unfair sharing formula of human and natural resources by a privileged few resulting in high social, economic and political acrimony hence, the growing calls to reframe the politics of poverty reduction and social protection in particular, in terms of extending the ‘social contract’ to the poorest groups as people are getting increasingly aware of injustice. This premise is (...) on the widening gap between the rich and poor on daily bases. With the increase of awareness, knowledge, technology and the advent of post-modernist era, the quest for social justice has heightened. Even communism and democracy attempt to offer social justice to its natives. Communism states that humans are free to engage in any kind of occupation and express ourselves freely without government interference, unlike the alienated labour society of the capitalist industry: this for communism is social Justice, while democracy thinks equality before law and power to its natives is social justice. All through the era of Philosophy, Philosophers differ on the definition, and what constitute social justice. Until now, there is no unifying explanation on what social justice is and consists of. This paper tends to look into the history of social Justice and different philosophers from different epochs. It also tried to expose the problems inherent in the definition and what constitute social justice, and cautioned that complimentary imperative should be employ to curtail human egoistic tendency that aids social injustice. (shrink)

Hume maintained that, philosophically speaking, there is no difference between exiting a room out of the first-floor window and using the door. Nevertheless, Hume’s reason and common sense prevailed over his scepticism and he advocated that we should always use the door. However, we are currently living in a world that is more seriously committed to the Humean philosophy of empiricism than he was himself and thus the potential to act inappropriately is an ever-present potential. In this paper, I explore (...) how Hume’s two versions of causality have detrimentally affected our ability both to arrive at and to use research to improve human well-being. I illustrate my argument with an example of what I think is an incorrect yet supposedly scientifically sound assumption: that absenteeism causes poor school attainment. Instead I make the interdisciplinary argument that absenteeism is better understood as an aggravating symptom of a number of other causes of poor attainment, such as poverty and individual psychological factors. I suggest that an instrumental, punitive policy against parents whose children tend to be absent from school may be ineffectual or even counterproductive if the objective is to improve the well-being of those children. To support my argument, I introduce the critical realist idea of transfactuality. Using the example of research into moon rocks, I show how mainstream science uses transfactuality despite its empiricist aversion to it. I also suggest that it is our honesty, integrity, and stoicism that lead us to the extreme overthrow of reason and common sense that we see today in many of the UK’s social policies; an overthrow that Hume himself did not achieve. Metaphorically speaking, British professionals, stoically and honestly believing in the ability of their trusted research correlations to guide their action, are exiting out of the first-floor window rather than using the door. This is a significant barrier to our ability to devise and implement social policy. (shrink)

Lack of consent is valorized within popular culture to the point that sexual assault has become a spectator sport and creepshot entertainment on social media. Indeed, the valorization of nonconsensual sex has reached the extreme where sex with unconscious girls, especially accompanied by photographs as trophies, has become a goal of some boys and men.

Amongst the entities making up social reality, are there necessary relations whose necessity is not a mere reflection of the logical connections between corresponding concepts? We distinguish three main groups of answers to this question, associated with Hume and Adolf Reinach at opposite extremes, and with Searle who occupies a position somewhere in the middle. We first set forth Reinach’s views on what he calls ‘material necessities’ in the realm of social entities. We then attempt to show that (...) Searle has not identified a sustainable position somewhere between the Humean and the Reinachian extremes. This is because Searle’s position is threatened by circularity, and to steer clear of that danger it must incorporate at least some elements of Reinach’s essentialism. (shrink)