In response to the Covid-19 pandemic, many states in the United States issued stay-at-home orders that prohibited people from leaving their homes except to access essential services. Upon reopening, a number of those states passed mask mandates requiring people to wear face coverings while in public, but as I write this, in October of 2020, there remain a substantial number of states that have not outlawed what I'll call ‘mask-less shopping’. This is a mistake. After describing the standard, public health (...) argument for outlawing mask-less shopping and explaining why it fails, I give a better argument for outlawing mask-less shopping that depends on the claim that mask-less shopping is analogous to drunk driving. It follows that every state should outlaw it. (shrink)

Our study explores the relationships between psychological and driving-related personality traits, fluid intelligence and cognitive abilities for drivers whose driving licence has been revoked due to intoxicated driving (alcohol and/or drugs). We were able to show that highly significant impacts on cognitive functions derive from the participants’ age and fluid intelligence. In addition, driving-related personality traits such as emotional instability, a sense of responsibility and self-control contributed significantly to some of the cognitive abilities that are important (...) for fitness to drive. Additionally, the mediating effects of fluid intelligence in the model are discussed. Traffic psychologists can use this knowledge in their assessment of drivers, mainly regarding the possible compensation of cognitive deficits regarding the fitness to drive. (shrink)

In this paper, we argue that if a set of plausible conditions obtain, then driving a standard vehicle rather than riding in an autonomous vehicle (AV) will become analogous to driving drunk rather than driving sober, and therefore impermissible. In addition, we argue that a ban on the production, sale, and purchase of new standard vehicles would also become justified. We make this case in part by highlighting that the central reasons typically offered in support of (...) state-mandated vaccination will also support mandating AV use. Finally, we discuss some of the implications of our argument for the obligations of vehicle-producing firms. (shrink)

In this dialogue, I illustrate why moral arguments from analogy are a valuable part of moral reasoning by considering how texting while driving is, morally speaking, no different than drunk driving.

"Golf day 2005 @ federal golf club, red hill." Ethos: Official Publication of the Law Society of the Australian Capital Territory, (196), pp. 7.

Philosophical reflection on racial profiling tends to take one of two forms. The first sees it as an example of ‘statistical discrimination,’ (SD), raising the question of when, if ever, probabilistic generalisations about group behaviour or characteristics can be used to judge particular individuals.(Applbaum 2014; Harcourt 2004; Hellman, 2014; Risse and Zeckhauser 2004; Risse 2007; Lippert-Rasmussen 2006; Lippert-Rasmussen 2007; Lippert-Rasmussen 2014) . This approach treats racial profiling as one example amongst many others of a general problem in egalitarian political philosophy, (...) occasioned by the fact that treating people as equals does not always require, or permit, us to treat them the same. The second form is concerned with how racial profiling illuminates the nature, justification, and reproduction of hierarchies of power and privilege based on skin colour and morphology. This form of reflection on racial profiling is therefore less about the justification for judging people based on the characteristics of the group to which they (appear to) belong, and more concerned with the specific ways in which the association of racialized minorities – and, in particular, black people – with crime, contributes to, and reflects, racial inequality, and oppression.(Kennedy 1998; Zack, 2015; Lever, 2005; Lever 2007). Both approaches to profiling have much to recommend them and, taken together, they form an essential component of the political philosophy of race. The statistical approach has the merits of linking racial profiling, as practice, to a body of other practices that generate and justify inequalities based on factors other than race, but it typically offers little by way of insight into the role of racial profiling itself in sustaining racial inequality and injustice. The racial construction approach, for obvious reasons, is rather better at the latter task, but its insights tend to come at the price of a broader understanding of the ways in which inequality is reproduced and justified, or of the ethical dilemmas raised by our competing claims to security. As we will see, insights from both approaches can be synthesized to clarify what, if anything, is wrong with racial profiling and what broader conclusions for equality and security follow from the study of profiling. (shrink)

Control-based accounts of moral responsibility face a familiar problem. There are some actions which look like obvious cases of responsibility but which appear equally obviously to lack the requisite control. Drunk-driving cases are canonical instances. The familiar solution to this problem is to appeal to tracing. Though the drunk driver isn't in control at the time of the crash, this is because he previously drank to excess, an action over which he did plausibly exercise the requisite control. (...) Tracing seeks to show that an agent's responsibility for some outcome can be traced back to a prior exercise of control which caused the later lack of control. These and related cases have led many theorists to treat tracing as an indispensable component of any adequate theory of responsibility. This paper argues that tracing is in fact dispensable. I offer two strategies for explaining responsibility in drunk-driving cases : responsibility can either be exhaustively modeled on recklessness, or exhaustively modeled on negligence. Neither explanation, however, relies on tracing. If I'm right, the case for tracing is seriously weakened. (shrink)

Democracy is both an obvious and dubious idea. Here's why democracy is an obvious idea: For most of history, most governments divided people into the few who rule and the many who obey. The few then used the state to advance their own private interests at the expense of the many. Rulers were less like noble protectors appointed by God and more like intestinal parasites. The obvious solution is to eliminate the distinction between those who rule and those who obey. (...) Make every citizen both a ruler and a subject of that rule. This ensures government promotes everyone's interests. Thus, democracy is the best form of government. It's too bad it took most of civilized history to realize this-and too bad that the world isn't more democratic than it is. Here's why democracy is a dubious idea. Government decisions are high stakes. It decides matters of war and peace, prosperity and poverty, freedom or oppression. Yet we let incompetent people steer the ship of state. Most voters are ignorant and process what little information they have in biased and irrational ways. They fall prey to propaganda and demagogues. They are conformists and don't even try to vote their interests. Democracy is the political equivalent of drunk driving. Thus, democracy is a defective form of government. Democracy is a method by which the masses shoot themselves in their feet. Philosophy students often start essays by writing, "Since the dawn of time, humanity has pondered..." In this case, these arguments and concerns are old, if not dawn-of-time old. We find laypeople, pundits, social scientists, and philosophers making these two arguments today. But in ancient Athens, Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle said similar things. (shrink)

This is a case that should go to the European Court of Human Rights. A decent, senior qualified family doctor was accused by his mentally ill daughter of sex abuse. Without real evidence except for what the girl told another mentally ill patient at a psychiatric hospital she stayed at for several years, and wit just two witnesses, one a younger child wo saw none of the accused offences, and the other parent, struck off the General Medical Council Register for (...) drunk driving more than once, the case was fitted up by those who are rampantly seeking to raise statistical numbers for child sex abuse offences by high level persons- a bizarre situation and a travesty against tis family doctor's human rights, because a judge can use his 'discretion' to send a much needed family doctor to 18 years in jail. The International Community should scrutinize the United Kingdom's Criminal Justice System. (shrink)

Both the commonsensical and leading theoretical accounts of entrepreneurship, democracy, and solidarity fail to describe adequately entrepreneurial, democratic, and solidarity?building practices. These accounts are inadequate because they assume a faulty description of human being. In this article we develop an interpretation of entrepreneurship, democratic action, and solidarity?building that relies on understanding human beings as neither primarily thinking nor desiring but as skillful beings. Western human beings are at their best when they are engaged in producing large?scale cultural or historical changes (...) in the way people and things are dealt with. The three domains of human activity where these historical changes are most clearly accomplished are entrepreneurship, democratic action, and solidarity. Section I, guided by a roughly Kuhnian notion of holding on to an anomaly until it re?gestalts the way we see things, offers a general interpretation of how skillful human beings open up new worlds by changing their shared background practices in three ways: reconfiguring, which makes a marginal practice central; cross?appropriation, in which one domain of practices takes over useful practices from another domain; and articulating, whereby dispersed or confused practices are brought into clearer focus. An entrepreneur creates a product which reconfigures the practices. This interpretation of entrepreneurial skills is contrasted with current accounts that overlook ehtrepreneurship to concentrate on instrumental or theoretical models of business activities. Section II claims that the most exemplary kind of political action in a liberal democracy is that of political action groups. Such groups produce a change in a nation's background practices through a kind of speaking that leads to massive cross?appropriation. We describe Mothers Against Drunk Driving (MADD) and suggest that it both satisfies the requirements for genuine democratic action that we have established in our examination of other views and lacks their disadvantages. We conclude that the relatively detached action suggested by current theories of liberal democracy fail to do justice to democratic practice. The final section argues that those who claim that a single highest value or procedure provides a source of solidarity that satisfies all the competing interests in a multi?cultural nation always arrive at a solidarity that is too thin to provide for the serious sort of commitments that one would be willing to die for. We propose that solidarity in multi?cultural states implies commitment to a set of thick values, and that when one realizes that these thick values construct one's identity one is willing to die for them. While political action concerns itself with ordering values, solidarity involves the cultivation of them in such a way that no ordering of them matters. But solidarity is not to be understood as a subjective feeling. It is rather the experience of a group identity, a ?we?, that sees things and deals with things in terms of shared concerns. This ?we? comes to recognize itself when the actions it engages in transform it. The paradigmatic action that transforms such a ?we? occurs when a culture figure articulates some forgotten concern or value. As in the cases of entrepreneurship and democratic action, a culture figure cultivates solidarity by changing the background practices in a historical manner. It is concluded that traditional theoretical accounts, by overlooking the primacy of involved skillful activities and the importance of background change, fail to capture the source, the function, and the point of entrepreneurship, liberal democracy, and solidarity. (shrink)

Morality and mental health are now inseparably linked in our view of character. Alcoholics are sick, yet they are punished for drunk driving. Drug addicts are criminals, but their punishment can be court ordered therapy. The line between character flaws and personality disorders has become fuzzy, with even the seven deadly sins seen as mental disorders. In addition to pathologizing wrong-doing, we also psychologize virtue; self-respect becomes self-esteem, integrity becomes psychological integration, and responsibility becomes maturity. Moral advice is (...) now sought primarily from psychologists and therapists rather than philosophers or theologians. This book asks: are we replacing morality with therapy, in potentially confused and dangerous ways, or are we creatively integrating morality and mental health? According to the book, it's a little bit of both. It surveys the ways in which morality and mental health are related, touching on practical concerns like love and work, self-respect and self-fulfillment, guilt and depression, crime and violence, and addictions. Terming this integrative development “the therapeutic trend in ethics,” the book uses examples from popular culture, various moral controversies, and draws on line of thought that includes Plato, the Stoics, Freud, Nietzsche, and contemporary psychotherapeutic theories. The book develops some interesting conclusions, among them that sound morality is indeed healthy, and that moral values are inevitably embedded in our conceptions of mental health. In the end, the book shows how both morality and mental health are inextricably intertwined in our pursuit of a meaningful life. (shrink)

In light of the recent focus in bioethics on questions of deliberate moral enhancement through the use of psychoactive drugs, Levy et al. (2014) argue that the more pressing issue may be the incidental effect that prescription drugs could already be having on moral agency. Although concerns have focused on the possibility of altering moral psychology through direct effects on brain function, the authors point out that this may already be a reality, albeit an unintentional one. They conclude from their (...) survey of prescription drugs already in use, that we should urgently investigate the ways they may be “influencing the shape of our societies” (2014, 123). The question of how we ought to respond to this possibility, I believe, must be considered in the broader context of existing attitudes and policy in response to substances with similar effects; and the relative significance of these drug effects compared with other factors, in particular social factors that shape society through their developmental influence on moral psychology. -/- First, it is important to consider the drugs described by the authors alongside widely used drugs with known, comparable effects. For example, alcohol has profound effects on features of cognition that seem relevant to moral agency, in altering risk assessment and increasing aggression (Bushman and Cooper 1990; George et al. 2005). Its impairing of inhibitory control arguably undermines the reflective processes that are often considered central to moral agency (Craigie 2011; Field et al. 2010). However, by and large the current policy adopted in liberal democratic societies is to educate people about these dangers but leave it up to adults to choose whether they use alcohol. Exceptions to this position are grounded in reasons of public protection, for example, in the case of blood alcohol limits for drivers in order to protect people against injury or death as a result of drunk driving. Restrictions are also sometimes placed on inebriation in the context of particular public roles, for example, serving on a jury, although the issue remains controversial (Law Reform Commission 2010, s. 8.21, 8.26, 8.27). This approach to alcohol regulation offers an established model for responding to the kinds of drugs in question. Broadly, it suggests that concerns about the effect of a drug on moral agency are only considered serious enough to warrant restricting its use when this puts others at risk of serious harms, or when a person is fulfilling a public role where sound decision making is of great importance (e.g., in maintaining trust in institutions such as the criminal justice system). Although at first it may be an alarming thought that pharmaceuticals [End Page 127] could be influencing individual moral psychology, the example of alcohol suggests that this this is a familiar experience, and something for which states already have a policy framework. -/- Caffeine is another commonly used drug with psychoactive properties that seem likely to affect moral agency. Along with potentially morally relevant effects on attention and aggression (Einöther and Giesbrecht 2013; Kuhns et al. 2010), research suggests a connection between cortisol—a hormone that is elevated by caffeine—and the processing of social cues relating to threat (Montoya et al. 2012; Putman et al. 2007). There are little in the way of restrictions on the use of caffeine. Nonetheless, one might be concerned about the possible effects of caffeine on moral agency and society, particularly if the effects are less obvious than in the case of alcohol (Kuhns et al. 2010). The same concern might apply to the pharmaceuticals in question. Perhaps there is a need to investigate these effects on thought and behavior because they are not easy to detect. The greater danger might be in the fact that people do not recognize how these drugs change their appraisals and decisions, rather than in the effects themselves. It seems a reasonable suggestion that if a drug has significant enough effects on interpersonal relationships, then this information should be made available as a part of an informed consent procedure. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Fortuyn, Van Gogh, Hirsi AliWhy the Unholy Trinity Was Driven Out of the NetherlandsHenri Beunders (bio)“Vulnerability” and “tolerance” are pretty vague notions. A lot of suggestions, images, and good intentions cling to them, while scientific clarity is virtually absent.The same goes for the Netherlands. Abroad, my country had the image of a tolerant, liberal, and free society, a place where things could be said and done that were forbidden (...) elsewhere. So the question is: how on earth did this country turn into a battlefield due to a clash of civilizations almost overnight?I will try to explain to you how and why in the past decades the Netherlands became so vulnerable that in 2002 a political revolt broke out quite unexpectedly, a revolt that lasted for years and still is not over yet. The crisis resulted in two people becoming victims of political killings, while a third had to flee the country. Because all three of these people were liberal individualists who criticized two types of religion—the political-cultural left, or “Red Church,” and fundamentalist Islam—I will refer to them as the unholy trinity, an unholy trinity that had to be exorcized to restore the peace.Freedom of speech and freedom of religion are key factors in the Dutch crisis. Cultural wars and mimetic rivalry are other factors. Americanization and the advent of the multicultural society are the forces profondes. [End Page 201]I: Tolerance and the Dutch ConstitutionLet us talk briefly about tolerance first. Everybody seems to be in favor of it, except when we collectively decide we must not tolerate things, like drunk driving, smoking in public buildings, and so on.In the present Dutch constitution, created in 1983, article 1 begins with these sentences: “All persons in the Netherlands shall be treated equally in equal circumstances. Discrimination on the grounds of religion, belief, political opinion, race, or sex or on any other grounds whatsoever shall not be permitted.”1In essence, the constitution states that a colored Dutchman has the right to be treated in the same way as a white one. This has, however, nothing to do with tolerance. Tolerance means that a dominant group permits a nondominant group to have opinions or lifestyles that seem to deviate from the usual order. If we ask natives to be tolerant toward exotic immigrants, this implies hierarchy. There is a group that tolerates, and there is a group that is tolerated. In the strict sense of the word, tolerance implies discrimination and is therefore hostile to the constitution.As a Dutch historian once remarked, every philosopher who thought about these things, like John Locke, Mirabeau, or Thomas Paine, knew that the notion of religious tolerance is useless if you assume all men by nature to have inviolable rights anyway, like those of freedom of thought, expression, and religion.2Of course, a nation-state has to be intolerant sometimes, for instance, when freedom of religion is used to undermine the state, when, for example, the state is promoting violence, which in democratic societies is the monopoly of the state. This is a matter of principle. The rest is a matter of political debate.At this point we have to conclude that trying to give meaning to a word such as tolerance can be very complicated and confusing, and that such a word has to be used very carefully. The same goes for all those other container words, like racism, fascism, populism, and so forth, that have been used so frequently in recent decades to label and scapegoat people and things that are feared or simply disliked. But words are important.The idle and gratuitous manner in which container words of this kind are used to denounce “the enemy” represents the other side of the so-called liberal, “tolerant” society of the Netherlands. All this name calling definitely keeps you from researching and facing the things that are really going on. During the 1990s, this name calling resulted in the dominance of political correctness, a phenomenon that leaves no room for doubt as to who the angels and devils are in society, and it implies that there is no need to look... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Feminist Studies 41, no. 2. © 2015 by Feminist Studies, Inc. 463 Kawika Guillermo Libido Ergo Sum Sitting atop a red beanbag stained with dark splotches, Kelsey watched the tells from the five boys sitting on the carpet in front of her. One by one they gave away their hands, their eyes dodging hers, perhaps afraid of her female intuition. She loved these surreptitious moments, when her boys tried (...) to fool her, believing that they had her in their clutches, as if she couldn’t help but be pulled by their charms. Kelsey went all in, moving her chips into the middle of the carpet. Kaleb’s mouth grinned to the right while Gabriel impatiently tapped on his knee, keeping beat with the remixed 80’s tune coming from the large boom box behind him. Billy’s face was in a gleeful Leave-It-to-Beaver of daffiness, and Michael’s dumbfounded expression—worn to distract her— was put out by a nervous scratch of his neck. After each had pussied out, Kelsey leaned over to distract them further with her cleavage as she picked up the red playing cards, her hair settling onto the boys’ laps as if to imitate fellatio. “Alright, pussy bitches,” she said, collecting the chips and stirring the toothpick in her mouth like a mortar. “Pass’em down,” pointing to the gold dealer’s piece. “Big blind, little blind.” She watched the world as if from a recliner and saw herself dealing the next hand with the finesse of a professional dealer. Her gaze circled the carpet of poker players. Their eyes never met hers. In every house party Kelsey hosted, she always saw a faint bleakness in her guests. She always cleaned them out, her eyes scanning them like food at a supermarket, unveiling their moves with every glance. She watched them all at once: Jackson wiping his mouth, Michael adjusting his glasses, Gabriel 464 Kawika Guillermo chewing on bubblegum in loud smacks, Billy grinning as he mouthed curse words. Finally, Kelsey took only a glimpse at her own cards before doubling the ante. Tommy shrugged and tossed his cards; Michael met her raise and she went all in. She noticed these patterns all between them. She saw their reactions before they even happened: Michael shaking his head and calling her a bitch as he splashed his cards onto her living room carpet. At two in the morning she drank two tequila shots in the kitchen with Paul, one of the many toxic men that she had invited to her party from work. He was a sturdy baseball player/lightweight alcoholic, toxic in his thoughtless remarks on meeting schedules, upcoming due-dates, and portfolios. “Then you put the salt on your thumb, or whatever,” Paul said, shaking up a bottle of Patrón Silver, as if it needed to be shaken. Kelsey stuck out her shot glass for another. A year ago she would have been doing homework, playfully kicking off the dust of the world with a big biology textbook in her hands. Since then, she had discovered that there was a pattern to debauchery that led to some existential fulfillment—a realizing of herself as a living substance—an uber-debauchery. Refusing to dilute her angst into anything but total surrender, she was still a Vegas girl, willing to throw herself into in the Las Vegas rites of passage of drunk driving, diving nude into neighbor’s pools, and waking up in hotel rooms with a hundred dollar bill on the cupboard, weighted in place by Gideon’s Bible. “Another sausage fest,” said a man in a cowboy hat and vintage overalls. Kelsey didn’t know him. He sat on the countertop like the Cheshire Cat and flipped through a book of bumper stickers. He wore one with the words “Libido Ergo Sum” on his forehead. “All right!” another drunken voice shouldered through waves of sound: “Seize the day!” “James’s baby sure looks cute tonight,” said another drunken voice. “’Course no one would try, except this guy.” The man in the cowboy hat smiled up at her. “How come you don’t invite your girlfriends to your parties?” “I don’t have... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Feminist Studies 44, no. 3. © 2018 by Feminist Studies, Inc. 699 Jennifer C. Nash The Political Life of Black Motherhood In 1976, Adrienne Rich wrote, “We know more about the air we breathe, the seas we travel, than about the nature and meaning of motherhood.”1 In the four decades since the publication of Rich’s now-canonical Of Woman Born, Andrea O’Reilly has argued for the advent of “maternal theory” (...) as an academic discipline, the maternal memoir has become a highly popular (and profitable) literary genre, and there has been sustained attention to maternal activism with scholarly analyses of such organizations as Mothers Against Drunk Driving and Mothers of the Movement.2 If Mamie Till Bradley boldly “let the world see” her son’s mutilated body in a 1955 public plea to make visible black suffering and antiblack violence, Valerie Castile’s statement after a jury found a police officer not guilty in the death of her son continued in the tradition of 1. Adrienne Rich, Of Woman Born: Motherhood as Experience and Institution (New York: W. W. Norton, 1995), 11. 2. See Andrea O’Reilly, ed., Maternal Theory: A Reader (New York: Demeter Press, 2007); Ann Hulbert, “The Real Myth of Motherhood,” Slate, March 8, 2005; Jennifer C. Nash and Samantha Pinto, “Strange Intimacies: Reading Black Mothering Memoirs,” Public Culture (forthcoming); Danielle Poe, Maternal Activism: Mothers Confronting Injustice (Albany: SUNY Press, 2016); and Ruth Feldstein, Motherhood in Black and White: Race and Sex in American Liberalism, 1930–1965 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2000). 700 Jennifer C. Nash Books Discussed in This Essay Revolutionary Mothering: Love on the Front Lines. Edited by Alexis Pauline Gumbs, China Martens, and Mai’a Williams. Oakland, CA: PM Press, 2016. Laboring Positions: Black Women, Mothering and the Academy. Edited by Sekile Nzinga-Johnson. Bradford, ON: Demeter Press, 2013. How All Politics Became Reproductive Politics: From Welfare Reform to Foreclosure to Trump. By Laura Briggs. Oakland: University of California Press, 2017. Birthing Justice: Black Women, Pregnancy, and Childbirth. Edited by Julia Oparah and Alicia Bonaparte. New York: Routledge, 2016. making black (male) pain visible through grief-stricken black motherhood. Castile said, My son loved this state. He had one tattoo on his body and it was of the twin cities, the state of Minnesota with “TC” on it. My son loved this city, and this city killed my son and the murderer gets away.... We’re not evolving as a civilization, we’re devolving, we have taken steps forward, people have died for us to have these rights and now we’re devolving, we’re going back to 1969.3 Her emotional plea reveals the political currency of black maternal suffering, one of the few spaces in which black pain is readily culturally visible. Indeed, there has been intensified scholarly and popular interest in representing black motherhood as both a site constituted by grief and expected loss and as a political position made visible (only) because of its proximity to death. It is certainly the case that a cultural inattention to motherhood has been replaced by an intense investment in representing at least some aspects of “the nature and meaning of motherhood” and 3. “Philando Castile’s Mother Reacts to Verdict,” Washington Post video on YouTube, posted on June 16, 2017, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RJsD4cCpUA. Jennifer C. Nash 701 in representing certain mothers—particularly black mothers—as symbols of trauma and injury, of pain that can be mobilized for “legitimate” political ends and social change. If, as O’Reilly suggests, maternal theory is now a distinct field, it has been fundamentally shaped by the intellectual and political labor of black feminists—Dorothy Roberts, bell hooks, Alice Walker, Patricia Hill Collins, Hortense Spillers, and Audre Lorde—who have captured the myriad ways that black maternity is cast as pathological, excessive, and marked by aberrant performances of gender and heterosexuality that threaten both the nuclear family and the heterosexual state. Drawing on a varied archive from the Moynihan Report to cultural panics about “kids having kids,” from ongoing representations of black women’s “failure” to breastfeed as a public health crisis to the racialized underpinnings of birth control, black feminist theory... (shrink)

Using the results of a survey of animal rights activists, advocates, and supporters, the paper reveals much more convergence than divergence of attitudes and actions by male and female animal protectionists. Analysis of the divergence suggests that the differences between men and women in the movement are contingent upon such things as early socialization, gendered work and leisure patterns, affinity with companion animals, ambivalence about science, and a history of opposition to nonhuman animal abuse by generations of female activists and (...) animal advocates. Aside from the feminist and women's movements and groups like Mothers Against Drunk Driving, it is rare to find a social movement in which the standing of women eclipses those of their male colleagues. The paper suggests that animal protection remains a bastion of female activism and advocacy because women care about blood, flesh, and pain and, unlike earlier generations of animal activists, no longer are seen as a liability to the success of the movement. (shrink)

In their article, “Racial Profiling,” Risse and Zeckhauser offer a qualified defense of racial profiling in a racist society, such as the contemporary United States of America. It is a qualified defense, because they wish to distinguish racial profiling as it is, and as it might be, and to argue that while the former is not justified, the latter might be. Racial profiling as it is, they recognize, is marked by police abuse and the harassment of racial minorities, and by (...) the disproportionate use of race in profiling.These, on their view, are unjustified. But, they contend, this does not mean that all forms of racial profiling are unjustified, even in a racist society, or that one has to be indifferent to the harms of racism to believe that this is so. Indeed, one of the aims of their article is to show that racial profiling, suitably qualified, “is consistent with support for far-reaching measures to decrease racial inequities and inequality” (p. 134), and so to challenge the assumption that “arguments in support of profiling can speak only to those who callously disregard the disadvantaged status of racial minorities.” In a long and provocative article there is, inevitably, a great deal to discuss. However, I will concentrate on two claims about the harms of racial profiling advanced on page 146, both because these merit careful discussion and because they are critical to Risse and Zeckhauser’s argumentative strategy. Those two claims are (1) that “the harm caused byprofiling per se is largely due to underlying racism” and is, therefore, purely expressive; and (2) that “the incremental harm done by profiling often factors into utilitarian considerations in such a way as to support profiling.” We can call the first the expressive harm thesis and the second the incremental harm thesis. I am no expert on racial profiling, or on racism, however, I will suggest that these two theses are far more controversial than Risse and Zeckhauser assume, and point to serious difficulties with their justification of profiling. (shrink)

A recurring question within contemporary democratic countries relates to whether parliamentary immunity only serves to protect the interests of representatives, rather than the interests of those they were elected to represent. With every act that is suspected of being corrupt (for example, accepting a bribe in return for asking a question or delivering a speech in parliament, failure to declare campaign contributions, insider trading, nepotism etc.), or otherwise illegal (for example, defamation, drunk driving etc.), that is left unexamined (...) by the courts, the justifiability of parliamentary immunity is brought into question. The problem posed by parliamentary immunity is that it affords each representative greater scope to pursue their own personal and political interests, over and above that which is made possible simply by their position of influence. As citizens it is this undemocratic possibility that might incline us to wish for the immunity to be curtailed. The political pressure to circumscribe the immunity is given added impetus by the prevailing public perception that political corruption is widespread.1 Indeed it is increasingly evident that a growing number of countries have either already reduced the scope of parliamentary immunity or are considering doing so.2 The principal rationale behind this trend is that the only telling way to prevent the decision-making.. (shrink)

While there are many significant ethical questions which can deliver the lessons of an introductory ethics course (e.g. global warming, world hunger, genetic engineering), students do not face these moral difficulties directly in their lives. The author argues that commonly-faced ethical questions are more effective for rendering the content of introductory ethics immediately relevant to students. This paper presents a general outline of an introductory ethics course structured around the theme of drunk driving. Not only is drunk (...) driving something that college students are confronted with consistently, but the topic lends itself to discussions of moral subjectivism and moral skepticism, various moral theories’ framings of the problem, the assignment of culpability and conditions which mitigate it, secondary responsibility, intoxication and agency, punishment, deterrents, contrition, and forgiveness. The author details each of these discussions and concludes by considering further benefits of teaching a course built around this theme. (shrink)

While there are many significant ethical questions which can deliver the lessons of an introductory ethics course (e.g. global warming, world hunger, genetic engineering), students do not face these moral difficulties directly in their lives. The author argues that commonly-faced ethical questions are more effective for rendering the content of introductory ethics immediately relevant to students. This paper presents a general outline of an introductory ethics course structured around the theme of drunk driving. Not only is drunk (...) driving something that college students are confronted with consistently, but the topic lends itself to discussions of moral subjectivism and moral skepticism, various moral theories’ framings of the problem, the assignment of culpability and conditions which mitigate it, secondary responsibility, intoxication and agency, punishment, deterrents, contrition, and forgiveness. The author details each of these discussions and concludes by considering further benefits of teaching a course built around this theme. (shrink)

Don't tell terrible stories—everyone here has enough of their own. Everyone here has a whole bloody sack of terrible stories, and at the bottom of the sack is a hammer the narrator uses to pound you on the skull the instant you dare not believe your ears. Or to pound you when you do believe. Not long ago I saw a tomboyish girl on Khreshchatyk Street demand money of an elderly woman, threatening to bite her and infect her with syphilis. (...) Don't stroll through Volodymyr Hill Park, don't stroll around the botanical garden, and especially don't stroll on Kontraktova Square. Don't stroll anywhere. Don't go to the pavilion with the Golgotha panorama near St. Alexander's Church. Not even the twelve-meter-tall crucified Christ will save you. Don't go outside when it's dark and people turn into shadows a shade darker than dark. Also don't go where you can be seen from far away. Not to imply that people used to be like a bunch of lilies, but now they stink like a cellar of cabbage.The city, which earlier might have had some fun, is now going crazy. It's like a fish in warm water: it doesn't react to anything, swims slowly like it doesn't care if it swallows a hook or not. The excitement and exaltation pass into oppression, just as our necks have sunk into our shoulders, our shoulders into our lumbars, our lumbars into our nether regions. The holiday turns into a funeral, the parades into explosions, depression into mania. Winter passes into summer, people turn into beasts, the hours into ages, and the ages into hours. It's worth simply walking around the city to see a soldier from an unknown army taking a piss near the opera. Farther on is a row of identical old widows selling ball gowns and candelabra. Then there are the aristocrats and manufacturers who throw so much at the prostitutes that they'll soon be richer than their wives.I returned late through the Kyryliv Wood, not heeding all the warnings that I myself have given here. It really is dangerous—the place is famous for it. There's a madhouse nearby, caves where criminals and the sick can hide out. Also, once upon a time, as they say in fairy tales, the great dragon Zmei Gorynich lived here beside the Puchai River. The stench in these places drives away the most committed misanthropes and even one type of philanthrope—that is, perverts. It sounds dumb, but the stench is cleansing. I don't know where it comes from. After the operating theaters and the rooms with amputees, the stench no longer repelled or attracted me; it just was. And this was a great place to think. As I walked, I considered an incident with our patient.The patient, a respectable individual whose name carries too much weight for me to state it directly, one day began to assault people. He nearly strangled a merchant who he believed asked too much for a beaver coat. He likewise wanted to kill his business partner when he didn't say hello loudly enough. But the worst was, he lost all shame of his own nakedness. At first it was the police who took care of it. When our future patient slipped off his pants and undergarments, he was taken to Kyrylivska, which has had means for dealing with such cases dating back to the day when unhinged Cossacks and composers from Kyiv Mohyla Academy were taken there.During the examination we determined that the patient was experiencing a severe breakdown. His wife added that lately, more than once, he had allowed himself strong words in front of the children and often suffered from ennui. Furthermore, she said, the patient had been undergoing treatment for “the French disease” for some years—which was, obviously, where we needed to start.“Syphilis!” Skorsky spat out the matchstick he was chewing on. He was a specialist on the psychological aspects of diseases related to the venereal. “Tertiary syphilis! When poorly treated, over time ‘the French disease’ can destroy the central nervous system. Hence the patient's chicanery. Such theater!”Skorsky and I had not spoken since the incident at Bilinsky's. Meanwhile, something significant had happened to him. The most boring person on earth, Skorsky had simply caught fire. He said hello and kibitzed. I even heard the doctor got drunk alone in his office, then wandered through the forest. Could he be using narcotic substances?“Cocaine!” was the doctor's second proclamation. It was his favorite treatment for the psychological complications of syphilis. Skorsky himself never took what he called “the universal drug”—good for alcoholism and toothaches, neuroses and morphine dependency—though he had read in an article by a respectable Viennese physician, who used cocaine as a panacea, that it was not addictive. That doctor subsequently recanted, but Skorsky paid no attention. He believed the retraction was made under pressure from pharmacologists who had no incentive to cease production of the medications that cocaine might supplant. Their representatives either paid or threatened the Viennese to repent.As the patient was escorted to his room, he assaulted the orderly, Alevtyna. They tried pulling him off her, but, though he released his fingers from her neck, he buried his teeth in her leg. The poor orderly, who had not until then been attacked by a psychotic, nearly died of fear. Later, panic set in over Skorsky's diagnosis. He told her about the consequences of syphilis: grotesque patterns on one's face due to infection of the skin, mucous membranes, cartilage, and bones. He went on about the devastation to the central nervous system, which they had just observed in real life: “The face starts to look like lace some mangy dogs fought over before rolling in the mud.”Alevtyna, who had not yet regained her faculty of speech, straightened up. Ignoring the slavering male orderlies, she bared her leg to get a better look at the wound. She then ran down the hall and out into the garden, where she fell on the ground to rip up grass and small bunches of daisies. Alevtyna ate them along with the soil in their roots.“Minor hysteria. She needs fifteen milligrams of cocaine.”Skorsky took a snuff box out of his pocket and scooped up some white powder with a toothpick made from a goose feather. He gave the order to close Alevtyna's mouth and one of her nostrils, forcing her to snort the medication.We fretted over her so long that evening fell. I decided to walk down, along the ravine, behind the church.It was unlikely there were any large beasts there, but something was rustling. The pits and mounds, ravines, paths, graves of witches whose living sisters flew in the treetops from time to time, the whispers of the forest spirits, the spirits of the nutcases who died in the hospital, the spirits of the monks from the St. Cyril Monastery, Zmei Gorynich and the bogatyrs who wanted to defeat him. The city would be calmer without this forest. I saw the gaps between the trees and went off in the direction of the tram tracks.As I was coming out of the forest, there was a patch of Amanita muscaria that had been trampled into porridge. A bit farther on, the body of Professor Bilinsky lay killed in the blackberry bushes. The way he was lying it looked as though he had not struggled before death. I quickly examined his body but saw nothing out of the ordinary. There were no wounds, no dirt under the fingernails. Animals had not yet smelled the carrion, but swarms of various insects covered him. Oh, why did I have to find the putrid body?The best thing would be to take the tram to his house to inform his relatives. The doors closed, and I noticed my own calm. This death had not evoked any emotions in me other than a feeling of responsibility, the need to tell the family. But also—some alarm at the thought of who the murderer could be. I knew that it was murder.“Your nose is bleeding.” A woman as round as an onion, carrying two baskets full of strawberries, offered me an ironed and starched handkerchief.“Have I dirtied my shirt?”“No, it's as neat as a pin. It's just your nose that's dirty. Wipe it now before you spray blood on my strawberries.”“No one will see the red on red.”“Ah, but it's salty!”“You know why it's not sweet? We'd drink it like syrup.”“Those with Christ in their heart do not talk that way.”“Are your strawberries expensive?”“Why? What?”“I'm checking to see if you have God in your heart.”“Child, if you knew how I have to work for this berry! I have to weed it a hundred times. In a week, the quitch grass grows as high as a horse. And I water it with water I carry from the stream, it kills my arms... ”“How much are the berries?”“They're not for sale. Anyway, soon money won't mean a thing. Soon all money, all these papers made from the skins of sinners on their satanic presses will be annulled. What matters is how we treat each other.”“So if I try your strawberries for free, my ‘thank you’ will be enough?”“Hands off!” she said and thwacked my fingers.I heard loud laughter behind me—same laughter as from the café near the Continental. There was no one sitting near Alina. (This is what fate looks like, remember.) Without asking, I sat next to her, away from the old lady.“Excuse me, but the night before last didn't you, yes, didn't you intrude on my privacy?” She started right away.“I saw it a little differently. Who was that young man with the mustache who paid me for you?”“Are you checking to see if you can flirt?”The tram stopped. People got on and off.“Are you coming back from the hospital?” she asked. “Don't be shocked. My uncle works there. He's told me all about you.”“An uncle by the name of Skorsky?”(Remember: this is what fate looks like.)“Yes. Skorsky's been strange recently—says things that make me wonder if he hasn't lost his mind. Have you noticed anything?”“I don't know.”“You know perfectly well.”“Where are you going?” I tried to change the subject.“I have to send something to my theater friends in Odesa. By the way, they'll be putting on Oedipus Rex soon in Kyiv—in Ukrainian.”“Greek tragedy in Ukrainian! That's a first.”“Exactly. The troupe is rehearsing now in Odesa. The theater where they will perform this fall is being remodeled.”“Wait. Now I remember where I've seen you before—it was at a performance! Vynnychenko's Black Panther and White Bear, at the Bergonier on Fundukleivska.“The same director is doing the Oedipus. He's my friend.”“He's your friend in what sense?”“Again with that tired subject. By the way, I've been thinking about you.”“And I about you.”“That's good. I was thinking not about you, to be precise, but about that elevator you invited me on.”“Who was that man with you?”“Like a broken record! Even if he had been my fiancé, I'm not bought or inherited. I'm not a brooch or a hundred acres of land, and I'm not a house in Kaniv!... Who was with you when you saw Black Panther?“Ah, so.”“Answer!”“That was my mother. She looks very young. She is coming to Kyiv the day after tomorrow. I can introduce you.”“Oh, this is my stop.”I looked out the window and realized that I had long since passed the stop for Bilinsky's.“Can we see each other again?”“We can. But you have only one chance.”Alina the anarchist wrote something on a scrap of paper and handed it to me.Morning, not morning but a thick porridge (I hate porridge). Dew, thick spit, crushed fruits, urine, all on the sparkling cobblestones. The sun, just barely having made its appearance, is already scorching. The human masses scurry and grumble like poorly digested food inside a stomach.I walked diagonally across St. Sofia's Square, then along the perimeter, then one edge, then again diagonally across. I went underground. The basement café of the Continental Hotel was practically empty. I again asked the server to bring the cloth with the embroidered portrait, but I couldn't remember the musician's last name, only that it ended with -sky. The server said that -sky was currently in the southern cities of Yalta and Odesa. I added that Kurbas, the director, Alina's friend, was also in Odesa, rehearsing Oedipus Rex, and that he'd previously put on Black Panther.I was bored, so I walked along Khreshchatyk and then headed down, calling to mind all the Kyiv churches of Podil: there's Birth of Christ, St. Nicholas on the Shore, Intercession, Pyrohoshcha, Holy Presentation, St. Dymytrii Rostovsky, St. Illia's. And also the Epiphany Brotherhood Monastery, Ascension Convent, and St. Katherine's, all these whipped-cream churches on the waffles of our streets. A few of them reminded me of themselves by appearing suddenly out of nowhere.The smells on Kontraktova Plaza where commerce buzzed were like multicolored light bulbs turning on one after another. Here you could catch the aroma of Balabukha jam, which blended with the next smell, English shoe polish at the Raiskys’ shop. Then the crunchy-smelling cabbage from old women standing in a row like herons and spitting out the shells of sunflower seeds. Farther on, the stench of a good-sized rat that crawled under Mrs. Shevchuk's shop where she sells broadcloth. Oh, she can't scream: no, she'll quietly dig that rat out herself so as to not scare off her clients.I bought a paper and two pairs of underwear. I asked two laughing young chambermaids who were secretly puffing in a grape-filled yard for a smoke. I wandered around Podil until evening when I came across a sawmill near the Dnipro that surprisingly smelled pleasantly of mazut fuel oil. The weather was dry, yet in the middle of the road was an enormous puddle, a deep dark black. A forty-year-old woman in a pale pink dress stood near it. The theatricality of it all provoked me to pose her a question,“Ma'am, what should I do?”But she paid me no attention. I shouted,“What should I do?”“What to do, what to do?” she said in Polish. “Jump in the water and swim so far away that you cannot return.”I quickly crossed a section of the forest. The wind brought a mixture of unpleasant air, like a stinky handkerchief held under one's nose. Passing the trees, I saw light in the spaces between them and exited at the hospital.Outside the windows, two orderlies lay in chairs with their heads thrown back. Two others—fools—ran around the yard in different directions, peering out at... something. The lights on the first floor of the hospital were on, and the staff milled about.“You're just in time!” said Ivan, a tall, young orderly.“For what?”“Your patient ran away! We went into his room and he wasn't there.”“What patient?”“The one who bit Alevtyna,” said Danylo, the other orderly, short and middle-aged.“That's Skorsky's patient, not mine.”I had no intention of helping them. This was all history—like my family, Kyiv, and my previous life. I had no intention of thinking about it. I wanted to go to my office, pack up my field surgery kit, and get out. So what? Their psychotic syphilitic ran away—it happened.Of course, that patient could have something to do with Bilinsky's murder. But that was no longer my problem.“What a strange coincidence!” the doctor on duty said. “Comrade doctor, the other one responsible for this patient was just here.”“And where is he now?”“He took off toward the church to look for the patient.”“Didn't the patient escape earlier?”“Don't know.”“How do you not know? You had better call the police, moron, before he kills someone. And get those sleeping orderlies to look for him.”“They can't... ”“Why not? Should I go wake them?”“They're on morphine.”“And you, I can see, have lost your mind. Go, catch your psycho! If it turns out that he killed Bilinsky—and on your watch—you can't imagine what's in store for you.”I adjusted my homburg and set off in the direction of St. Cyril's, that unwelcoming monolithic cube. I glanced around—what if our escaped syphilitic were to jump out of the bushes and bite or strangle me. I looked around because I wasn't sure of my actions, wasn't sure of my choices. Tripping over a clump of clover, I reached the open doors of the church. I couldn't stop myself from going in.The walls and ceiling were covered with frescoes. There was what used to be an angel rolling up the sky on the southern column of the narthex. But also graffiti: people scratched their names on it so as not to be forgotten—their idea of eternity. Prince Volodymyr the Great compared this activity to the desecration of graves. The vandals paid a fine and were beaten with canes. During the raids of Batu Khan, the church was deserted and cracks appeared all over it. Wild martens and feral dogs sought shelter here; insects swarmed under the ceiling with its red mosaics. Birches grew in its midst. Water seeped in the cracks, the water became ice, the ice widened the cracks, more water seeped in the cracks, becoming more ice that further widened the cracks, the wall split and nearly fell over, and then the wall fell over. Yet the angel is still rolling up the sky... When I reached the exit, I heard a rustling behind me. I turned after I stepped outside: in the depths of the church, like a stick in a pot of tar, stood a man with a large bag thrown over his shoulder and a revolver pointed right at me.“Is that you, Doctor?“Don't move!”“What's... Skorsky, what's with you?”“Don't move, I say!”“What are you doing here?”And finally I understood... Skorsky was himself the psycho! (Really, I had known for a while.)“You are the murderer! I knew it! But—why?”“Shut up.”“It was you. You! The stolen cigarettes, the strange behavior, Bilinsky. If I shout, everybody will come running. They've already called the police!”There was heavy breathing behind me. And then a gun rang out.The city is overgrown with new buildings. They encircle everything that was once on the periphery. Kyiv has become an old lady that can no longer restrain herself in the face of pastries. The city climbs farther. It steps over the swamps, turns the old rivers into a series of lakes; the other bodies of water it drives into canals. The grain that falls from the wild wheat is black. When the sun heats it, the grain melts and trickles into the earth. St. Cyril's stands indestructible. No one spackles the small cracks in its walls with either expensive putty or glues, nor with cheap cement and whitewash. One day a small fox appears in the doorway. It runs inside and along the floor of simple gray tiles. The gods watch from the walls, watch and fall into ruin. The fox runs to the iconostasis. Before it is a time-darkened Virgin Mother and Child in oil on sheets of zinc. The fox runs the metal steps that wind up to the second floor. The fox runs past all the vaults, naves, all the frescoes. A buckthorn seed flies in through a broken window. It will be the first. Soon the buckthorn will grow everywhere. A dumb hare will make its nest in the buckthorn bushes and nightingales will settle in the upper branches to sing until the end of the world. The fox runs between the thick rays that penetrate the windows. It catches one of the rays, squints its eyes, and warms itself in the sun.The shot rang out, but I did not fall. I looked around—and on the church threshold was our syphilis patient bearing a rod. His head lay on the rocks by the doorway.“If only he'd been at the stage of nose deformity! Just imagine: a hole instead of a nose plus a hole from the bullet—like an extra pair of eyes!” Skorsky laughed at the corpse.“We need to call the orderlies.”“They heard the shot. They'll run here on their own. You see, Professor Bilinsky believed it would take two or three years to wrap up this patient's case,” Skorsky told me. “But I took care of it much faster!”“Excuse me, but I'm going crazy in this city. I thought that you were Bilinsky's murderer.”“Just so. Why not? I am Bilinsky's murderer.”“Don't tease. You've changed a lot recently, so... ”“Yes, I've started killing people. You might term such a change significant.”“You have the right to irony.”“I am not being ironic.”“Let's call it sarcasm.”“It's the honest-to-God truth.”“And yes, you have the right to mock me.”“Well then, let's be done. To the horses!”“What horses?”“Alina's waiting!”Alina, her uncle Skorsky, a few others I didn't know, and I rode like the wind that ripped off my homburg and carried it back to Kyiv.“There's a fresco in the choir loft at St. Cyril's where Vrubel painted himself and patients from the hospital as the apostles. When I came across it by accident, I really believed they were saints,” Alina said.“I've never been up there. I've only seen the church from below.”“Remember the way back so you can see it sometime.”“The Puchai River used to flow here. You shouldn't trust the landscape,” Skorsky said, reaching for something, perhaps his bag, just when we left the darkness of the trees and saw the endless steppe ahead of us.We rode all night without stopping. Though no one was chasing us. Though we had nowhere to be. We rode like beasts released from a cage. The promises of the horizon turned what we'd left behind into a cage fit for those from whom freedom had been severed, like an anomaly, at birth.The pre-morning sky looked at first like a sack of turnips—filled with something heavy. But with each verst, the sky became lighter. When it was finally light enough to see clearly, we arrived at a knoll at the foot of a stone wall that from a distance had appeared to be a gigantic piece of halva. The exterior ruins of the castle gave no hint of how it was when all was fine here, when people defended themselves successfully from the nomads’ raids. From far off, the wreckage looked like a natural agglomeration of stones—a rocky elevation, no more: a cluster of cliffs. It would rain a few hundred more times, a few hundred more winds from a few hundred directions would blow on this heap, and it would collapse as though nothing had ever been here.A few stalks of wheat grew from one of the rocks. Someone had probably cast a handful of grain here for some birds that forgot to eat it.“Who could this castle belong to?” I asked Skorsky.“I reckon the Swan Princess,” the doctor rejoined, hoping to sound knowledgeable.From behind one of the piles of gray sandstone emerged a young man in a black reptilian coat and a white papakha as lush, bright, and out of place as a dahlia. His name was Artem. The heat was melting our brains, but he was dressed like that, in rooster fashion, which was popular among the otamans. Artem helped Alina dismount her horse and tried to kiss her on the lips, but she offered him a cheek instead.Had she been racing to see this clown?We entered the yard—the ruins had fashioned an internal space that was more or less protected, at least from strangers’ eyes. It turned out that there were even places where it was possible to hide from the rain, and from there the ruins didn't look half bad.In the center of the court was a table, and on it a wooden bucket with pink gladiolas. How romantic! It all looked like it came from outer space. Where on earth, in the middle of the steppe, far from any village or town, did this table, this simple table, come from? And the gladiolas? The steppe hadn't been plowed in so long that any cultivars would have gone wild, degenerated, dried up completely.A campfire crackled nearby—a little preview of what we would soon do to the houses, villages, and cities. Artem the otaman brought over a cezve from the fire and poured the first portion into a small, copper cup for Alina. He also got out a porcelain cup with images of rosy cherubim—but how...?“Who else would like coffee?”Only Skorsky and I responded. The question excited me, even distracted me from the thought of the kiss I had recently witnessed and the Kyiv I had recently left.“It's obvious who the professors here are; cultured people drink coffee. Are you both doctors?”“Uh-huh.”“For wolves of the steppe, like us, doctors are gold, even more precious than gold. Actually, a Hippocrates like you should eat more, because those in your profession will soon be worth your weight in gold. Work on your figures, both of you.”“Who will take pity on the horses that have to carry us?”“We'll find the horses. And very large doctors can be transported on machine-gun carts. We'll need to seat the otamans near you. Only a fool would shoot at a doctor.”“I think we'll find quite enough fools here.”“With your beard, Doctor, you look like Tsar Nicholas II. But even so you won't be shot. You might even be canonized!”“We've only just arrived and you're going on about executions,” Skorsky grumbled and checked to make sure that he still had his bag.“Apologies, apologies, pardonnez-moi. But you are not merely a doctor. A venereologist! Skorsky, you're a specialist! A venereologist is the most important person in wartime. The most valuable! You are the botanists of war. You can't imagine what varieties of flowers grow here, and these beds have long awaited a proper gardener. Or even just a man with a scythe!”“Bite your tongue,” Alina said. “I don't need to listen to this.”“Yes, yes, of course. Excuse me, my r—. ” He almost said “rose.”We rested all day. We went down to a surprisingly close river overgrown with lilies. We rowed the boats left by fishermen. I talked to Skorsky. He took his bag everywhere, refusing even to swim so he wouldn't have to part with it. I asked him what he had in it, but he said it wasn't my damned business.Alina rowed with the otaman to the middle of the river. They were having a loud discussion. She was waving her hands. The current carried their boat downstream slowly and smoothly. What a nuisance, that current!I tried to meet with Alina one-on-one, but she was avoiding me. In the morning I was confused, by lunch I was sad, and after lunch I got angry.In the evening, I lay on the hot grass and drank another cup (I have no idea where they got such good coffee), which had no effect at all on my sleep. I watched the Perseids. Every year, the Earth passes through the tail of Comet Swift-Tuttle. People can see the meteor shower and make a wish. I wished. I counted forty-seven falling stars. All forty-seven of my wishes were for the same thing.Around the campfire, they were sitting, talking. I saw how he tickled her face with a piece of grass and she brushed him off in annoyance. Then they were screaming at each other. Later they again spoke kindly, after which they again quarreled. My joy grew after each tiny mistake that Artem made. I wanted him to show the worst he was capable of.They were screaming at each other, but all I could hear was beautiful opera singing. The stars fell to the sound of their screaming. The stars blessed my joy.Then this happened: Alina kicked the fire, scattered burnt kindling, and burned some of the grass. Artem grabbed her by the arm, but she broke away from him and ran off to the horses.“Go then! I guarantee you'll get to Katerynoslav and return with your tail between your legs.”“I'm going to Huliai-Pole! To Father Makhno!”I jumped up and ran after her.“Where do you think you're going?” Artem shouted.Really—where was I going? I was going after her: to Huliai-Pole, to Katerynoslav, to Rome, to Washington, to Istanbul, to Montevideo... “Go to sleep,” he said. “Come morning, this coquette will be here, right as rain. We've already been through this show. Tomorrow she'll be right here next to my boot!”... No, she won't.In some sort of shape we entered some town. There were some buildings that were some colors, some trees, some streets, some roads, and some signs. Posts, flustered birds’ nests, echoes, colors, shapes—each of some kind. A wedding procession was coming toward us. If you want to make orange, you need to add yellow to red, and then bam—it's black. If you want to salt the soup, shake in a little, and then bam—two handfuls. You want to say a kind word, and then bam—a punch in the face. I was rocked around like a watermelon on a boat and threw up my breakfast straight into the horse's fluffy mane. Sanko found this hilarious, but I said I'd pulverize him. So Sanko sped ahead.No one knew anything about Alina. The daytime sky was like a poorly washed bowl. The sun was a squashed, rotten apricot. The night sky looked like the sole of a boot to me. The moon was a dirty cheap copper coin that had gotten stuck to the sole. Everything seemed spoiled to me, irrelevant, unnecessary. Without her, this journey was a waste of time.“You'd better stay away from everyone,” Artem said. “You'll infect us with your pining, and pining is worse than the clap.”The wedding procession was before us. The young couple, still utter children, walked so calmly it was as if they didn't see us. As if we were made of a light breeze—our bodies, clothes, our horses and their iron shoes—of the lightest gasses. As if we were visible only to ourselves and the coal-black dog that barked, panting and gasping.The wedding was headed straight for us. We were in the middle of the road, and so were they. We approached each other slowly, a wave going toward a wave. Some ten meters before their indifferent faces, I noticed the color of the bride's eyes. And the coral-colored tulips that fell on the road before her. Round goose eggs on meaty stems, the flowers were falling and falling before her. The bride's eyes were almond shaped.“Hey there,” Artem shouted at me. “Wake up!”I came to and saw the whole village, everyone there, not realizing my group had turned left onto a side street away from the procession. The tulips disappeared—where'd they get tulips in the fall? I was sitting alone on my horse in the middle of the road, and the entire wedding procession came to a stop. I moved to the side, and the throng marched on, cutting off our escape route. We rode a few more meters and came across the synagogue.“You know what, you're right,” said the otaman.“Who is?”“Oleksii is the only one here who's right.”“About what?”Artem turned his horse and raced back. Everyone stood still while he ran his horse into the crowd and began firing his revolver. People scattered in all directions. Artem trotted, cackling like an imbecile. The horse kicked an old guy in the mouth. The man fell, spitting out his gold teeth. We rode up to the commotion and formed ranks, but none of us wanted to join the otaman.The bride stopped in the middle of the street. On both sides were buildings and trees, as well as dust, sky, and sun. She stood still, beautiful, as if nothing had happened. Then she adjusted her garland and walked calmly on.“Well, should we get some sugar now?” Artem laughed, looking at the bride, and off he went toward the sugar factory.It was then I noticed that all of the houses had shutters—fuchsia, blue, ocher—and that all the shutters were closed.We flew toward the dirty building, whistling and shouting. If there had been aesthetes among the otamans, they would certainly have razed the abomination in this field after seizing it. They would have spread soil on top and sown buckwheat. Long live buckwheat!, that wonderful crop. Like hunting dogs hot on the trail, we raced to our defenseless victim, with the baying of hundreds of hounds behind us. The field shook beneath us. We became an artist's canvas, evolving from Realism to Romanticism, Romanticism to Expressionism, Expressionism to Suprematism. If we had been painted in black and white, we would have been splotches (until the ink ran, annihilating all remaining patches of white).Two men stood near the gate—unarmed and undressed, in nothing but their undershirts and boots. Our fervor, our kinship with the elements, our entirety, were all for naught.“Jesus Christ! What bores!” Artem exclaimed. “How boring you are!”“Maybe boring for us, but fireworks for them,” Sanko said, dismounting his horse.“The fear of death engenders creativity,” our otaman—a distinguished philosopher of the early twentieth century, that demonic breed—prophesied.He went on, “Excuse me, but with all due respect, we are not going to search you. Just show us right away where the money is. Why are there so few of you? Don't say there's not much money. I want piles and piles of money! If you don't show it to us, we'll print our own on your skin. Believe me, we will.”We entered the factory grounds. There were no workers, only an enormous mountain of sugar beets that looked like a pile of coal from a distance and a pile of dead rats from up close.“So, did you have a good year?” Artem asked a man in an undershirt.“Not really—too dry.”“Nah, that's fine. You wouldn't have been able to gather most of the harvest this year anyway. There's a fire burning across all of Ukraine, all of Russia. The whole world!”While Artem tossed thoughts like well-chewed sunflower seeds into the crowd, the two men quietly stepped aside and then ran fast ahead to the factory's main hall. The gigantic door slammed shut. The gate was locked behind us! The windows were smashed! The factory roared from inside like a cumbersome machine starting up. Bullets whirred through every window.“Bastards! It's a trap! Quick, after me!”Still on horseback, Artem bounded over to a vast window, low to the ground, and smashed it mercilessly. He broke the frame and jumped inside on his horse. I and a few others followed. We broke into their lair, threw open the doors, and let the other warriors inside.Iron vats of hot sugar were steaming, pipes were clattering; machinery groaned.“Parasites!” Artem gritted his teeth. “I'll get you. I'll get you red sons of bitches. Painted whores!”At the word “painted,” his horse fell to the ground. Lying prone, Artem continued fighting, but the red soldiers wouldn't let him stand. Fighting nearby, I rode over to assist but did not know where to aim. Artem got up, ran forward, and brought his sword down on the head of the closest soldier, all the way to the middle of his skull, to the bridge of his nose. It was like butchering a pig. Artem thrust the sword into the buttock of another who was fleeing and cut off his leg at the bend in the knee.“I'll cut off every last one of your asses! Cut off your asses!” Artem bellowed.A half hour later, the dead were lying, the captured sitting, and the victors doing anything they pleased.“Skorsky, are there a lot of casualties?” I asked the doctor, whose hour it was. I hoped not, because I was too tired to help him.“Just a few. The dead are already dead, and the wounded are not ours.”Though Skorsky rarely asked my help, and though I'd become an ordinary soldier, the doctor in me was still present in the most unpleasant attribute—knowledge. Others saw an eviscerated man, pieces of dusty flesh smeared with clay, soil, sand, and straw. I saw a perfectly formed kidney hanging perfectly from the rest of its body like a child's mitten from its coat. You could try this death on for size. Wear it like a sanbenito of the Inquisition.Artem counted the money and then lay on the floor alongside the gigantic sugar mountain in the middle of the room. From time to time, the crystals rustled as they fell.“I didn't think you'd be such a fighter!” the otaman said without turning toward me. “I thought you'd be healing us. You'd keep to the rear and we'd hide you like a girl. But here you are, in the vanguard, like a lion!”“I got excited,” I told him, choosing not to react to the “girl” part.“’Cause Alina said there was no sense counting on you to fight.”“Really?”“Does that sting?”“Why would it? I'm a doctor—not everyone is. It requires a brain. Unlike waving a sword.”“Yeah, yeah. I gave her gladiolas. We were lying in the boat near that castle, doing all manner of things, and she told me all about you. How you met.”“You were lying in that boat talking about me?”“It was the day before you left Kyiv. You agreed to go with the anarchists so quickly!”“Were you surprised? Doctors make fast decisions.”“But you probably had great prospects. Your parents are rich, right?”“And who are your parents?”“Probably all your relatives fled abroad—bourgeois. Why did you stay?”“What the hell's your point?”“Alina, by the way, died a while ago. Probably.”“Don't jinx her.”“Listen here,” he said, staring at the ceiling. “And listen good. If you have designs on her—dead or alive—it's best you castrate yourself now.”“After you.”“If I want to kill somebody, you know, I just do it.”At last he looked at me. I was lying on the floor nearby and looking in his direction, sweaty and relaxed, my appearance complemented by my disdain for his opinion, his authority, his stupid hat. His everything.Artem raised his arm above his head, stuck a finger in the sugar mountain, and licked it. We both got up. Had I anticipated this turn of events, I would have readied a gift for him. Artem held his revolver. Under my hand I found a knife the workers used for gathering beets: it was a deliberately sharpened arc they sank into the swollen brassicas. I jumped up and quickly stepped around the sugar mountain.Artem's bullet hit a pane and broke the glass.“Not man enough for hand-to-hand?”The otaman shot again.“You should've challenged me to a duel, you romantic!”Encrusted with white crystals, I charged Artem from the sugar mountain. We fell in, and the sugar stuck in our hair, mustaches, nostrils, armpits.The gang ran in to get us apart, then backed off because it had nothing to do with them. By now the sugar mountain had burst its banks. Of the once perfect pyramid, a deformed mound remained.Wounded, Artem fell on the sugar mound, turning the white red.I stood before the gang sugar-coated and holding a bloody hook. The old otaman was drawing his last breath. Blood trickled from the corner of Artem's mouth and streamed from the left side of his breast.“What's the commotion?” Old Roman had just come in.“Be quiet,” the boys told him. And a good thing they did.“You killed him? You killed the otaman!”“Shut your mouth,” the boys told him.“You... ”I slugged Roman's stinky herring mouth. How did that son of a bitch find pickled herring in a sugar factory? My fist was now bigger and stronger than ever before, a steel anvil that could split nails and shatter memorial plaques. The unfortunate man's jaw twisted like an upper millstone that had gone off track from the lower.“Let's get out of here and go to Makhno's camp,” I gave my first order.We galloped so fast the grass burned beneath us. The birds and bugs had no time to fly out of the way; hooves trampled the burrows of rodents who didn't dare crawl out of their holes for a long time after. We raced like no one had ever raced before.The steppe, that sly fox, pretended to be an innocent fool. The steppe said, “I'm like Adam: I don't even know my own name.” But its grass harbored the tracks of thousands of armies and the heels of Herodotus, the crunch of Trypillia vessels, and the smell of Scythian hemp, Roman coins, clay figures of wolf people, the chevrons of Denikin's army, glass from the Chekists’ ruby stars, traces of uranium from flying saucers. I threatened it: “Steppe, show me your layers, or I will burn you, plow you under, flood you.” But it just replied: “I'm like Adam: I don't yet know my name.”I lost geography as if it were a silver coin. It fell out of my pocket and rolled through the feather grass that blanketed the steppe in white foam. The open space ahead was so endless that the whole world might as well have been steppe. If people ended up here from somewhere else, they would conclude they were on another planet. The coin fell and became an argentum, became one with the ring on the hand of the princess who had one green eye and one blue, with the twisted candlestick at the monastery on the other side of the steppe, with melted ingots. It broke down into simpler elements, simpler and simpler yet. The horse carried me spreading the seeds of northern plants to the south, just as southern riders had once brought flowers and weeds to the north. And then I turned back. Just as I had no geography, I had no time. Every night I fell asleep with the thought that the next day I would again race. Through all spacelessness, all timelessness. I exchanged one horse for another, got on a train, on a boat, traversed forty versts on foot—in rain that brought the river up to the road, in heat that overturned cattle. The earth I walked on became mine. Mine was the water in the lakes and springs, clean water, dirty water, enlightened water, contaminated with oil, stinking of algae, of fish that died in wells, stinking of the memory of atrocities, water as clean as broken bread. The water did not become Alina.I was doing this for her: I got the basturma out from under my saddle, sodden with the horse's sweat, sliced the throat of a rich man whose daughter I had danced with at a ball, climbed into a vat of beet juice and took a sugar bath, carried out the expropriation of the savings banks, wiped the sweat from my face with my shirt—and the cloth turned red; I didn't know from what. If it was someone else's blood, I didn't care; if it was my own, even less.We mostly came across Reds. We scraped them up like old red paint on a door in order to repaint the boards black. Black looked better. Red is tasteless, but black has style. Healthy men died before us of myocardial rupture like bunnies found in the nest. The ones whose hearts were sewn of steel wire envied the deceased. Seizing estates, banks, distilleries, and prisons reminded us of gathering in the harvest. If you're too lazy to pick an apple, you can shake the tree; some of the fruit gets bruised when it falls. We seized buildings like we were shaking apple trees. No one picked the fruits, we just shook: shook under the beds, under the tables, behind the curtains. No, there was no picking. We just shook until the red juice spurted from the apples.Near the Khorol River with Father Makhno and me in charge, we captured sixteen machine guns and four cannons, as well as five hundred prisoners who immediately came over to our side. The villagers voluntarily gave us bread and cheese, chickens and kvas. People joined us. The front of the machine-gun cart said “You can't run,” and “You won't catch us” at the back. We took factory after factory. Millions of karbovantsi, thousands of poods of sugar, weapons. We smashed the telephone exchanges and captured the telegraphs. We made alliances with some and then with others. Lenin, Wrangel, Frunze, the Germans, Chinese, Australians, Kaiser Wilhelm II, Cleopatra, Maria Theresa Walburga Amalia Christina. We ran the steppe. There were a hundred thousand of us. There were three hundred thousand of them. There were three hundred thousand of us. There were a million of them. There were two million of them. We were all of humanity. We were so many that we were none.The nobles’ estates were long ago forsaken. In the people's deepest trunks lay silks and guipure laces that were once perhaps used only to cover a table. Five steps from the barn in the direction of the pear tree, some silver candlesticks are buried; there's a plaster figure of an angel in the chicken coop, covered with shit and feathers.I was reluctant to be going to my home, but I didn't see any way out. Fate intended me to be a different being from the one I was before.Here my grandfathers and great-grandfathers were born. Here the ones who caused my grandfathers and great-grandfathers to flee had stopped. When we were still far off I noticed that someone was in the house. It was our men—Skorsky had brought them here, about twenty in all. I asked Sanko, whom I had walked with side by side more than once, where the doctor was now. All the men answered that he was around somewhere, but I didn't see him that evening.In 1918, the spirit of my great-grandfather Stepan, along with my mother and uncle, had gotten into a britzka and scrambled off to Paris, to Napoleon, against whom my great-grandfather had fought with the Cossacks, to whom the Russians promised to return self-rule. Following him in the cart went the soul of Grandpa Oleh, who lost a finger when he cut down the old linden near the house; his second finger was blown off by a cannonball near Balaklava, and later his entire hand was cut off by some Turk. Next went the spirit of my father, also Stepan, who did not take part in any war but died of measles at the age of forty. They all got the hell out of here. First, they went to Kyiv, led by my mother, Tamara Makarivna, in order to collect Uncle's family and me, their son. And their son, it turns out, has now come back to rob his own home (I didn't drive my war buddies away, did I?). It's a shame that I didn't know where the bathtub was, or whatever they bathed me in when I was small. It would have been good to walk through the ranks of anarchists with that basin and tell them all to spit into it.Remembering every room, I carried Alina upstairs to my mother's bedchamber. There was no longer furniture or pictures, only bare walls. The bed and mattress remained, but that was enough. Mother hated noise, so she set up her room far away from the running in the halls and the creaks on the stairs. I adjusted the mattress; in a gap, looking like a stalk of wheat, there lay a gold bracelet that she lost in the haste and that the thieves could not find in the mayhem. I tucked it into my pocket.The place could still be saved. It was strong, built under the leadership of my grandfather, who knew how to do it right. He built a sawmill, a gristmill, a dress factory (today it's probably been ransacked, maybe even by our own men).Alina had a complete, displaced break in her right fibula. We needed water first. I went downstairs—the guys were dragging out the piano like an old cow to the slaughter.“What are you doing with that?”“Taking it out.”“Why?”“What's it to you? We want to have fun.”“Can you play?”“We're not your bourgeois lily-handed bitches.”They couldn't play, but they were famous at destruction. “Noise is the music of the new time,” one of the smarter among them might have said. “But noise is the opposite of music. Just as a rose is the opposite of your ugly mugs,” I'd have responded if there was anyone to say it to. I could also have said that this was a Bosendorfer grand piano, that it was very valuable—but do the guys not deserve such a luxury?“Why are you so boring? We're relaxing.”“Then let me play a little first.”“Go ahead, but fast. One-two.”So I played. As before. My fingers ran up and down the black and white keys, which weren't simply keys of these, the simplest, colors. These were the keys that remembered my fingers specifically—achieved by that slovenly German Katerina, our governess. She knew a bundle of languages, could play the piano, and was interested in the latest scientific discoveries. But she had not an ounce of sympathy for anyone who couldn't master anything on the first try. More than once she hit my pinkie against the black key that remembered every one of its four thousand touches. She would pound it on the key and shout, “Si bémol! Si bémol,” and later bang my fingers and translate, “B flach! B flach!”I played. I could not expose myself, so the only thing I could do was believe in miracles. What if these coarse men saw value in this bit of furniture so unintelligible to them? And what if they didn't destroy it, this emblem of my childhood, my land, my air, which I could protect in no other way? My air. My water.“Shchedryk, shchedryk, shchedrivochka,” one of them who recognized the tune began to sing along.“Look at you.” They did not expect music from me, who had until recently been drinking blood like water.They said, “Again, again!”A group of curious men gathered around me. They were ordinary farmers, thieves, and recidivists, peasants and workers, everyone except for Skorsky. They needed this music as they needed baths. The music cleansed them from the inside, perhaps. They had not heard anything besides the whistle of a bullet, the neighing of a horse, or the knocking of a chisel and the whirring of a saw, amputating limbs, for a long time.But it could not go on long. I did not close the piano lid, just stood and went to fetch water for Alina, leaving the unfinished song for later. The well was to the north—that is, at the “Head.” My father once promised to give me a compass if I could learn to identify the ends of the earth by means of the sun. And to make it easier to remember, I gave each one of them a name: the east where the day begins was “Right” (my right hand), the west “Left,” the north “Head,” and the south “Feet.” Back when I could still do whatever I wanted all day long, I would wake in the morning and say: I'm going to the Feet. The mound was at the Feet, Left had the river, Right had the forest. It was only to the Head that I rarely went, because a village was located there. When the villagers saw me, they would speak in whispers and avoid the master's son.... I wiped her brow and her burning, sunken cheeks. I lay down next to her to feel the heat of her skin.When the fire in Alina calmed slightly, I went out into our orchard. My father had once been given a gift from Japan—a tulip tree that blossomed with yellow-green flowers. It had to have grown in the time that I was away. It would have been fatal had it been cut down. I again took the stairs down into the drawing room and came across nobody—they had all disappeared in search of food or were hidden away in their burrows. In the middle of the hall, like an opened rib cage, was the piano, irreparably shattered.B Flach! B Flach!Translation © Ali Kinsella 2022. (shrink)

Abortion restrictions are particularly good for black women—at least in the United States. This claim will likely strike many as outlandish. And numerous commentaries on abortion restrictions have suggested otherwise: many authors have lamented the effects of abortion restrictions on women, and black women in particular—these restrictions are bad for them, these authors say. However, abortion restrictions are clearly good for black women. This is because if someone is prevented from performing a morally wrong action, it’s good for her. For (...) example, it’s good for Sarah if she’s prevented from driving home drunk. However, since abortion is morally wrong, it follows that it’s good for women when they are prevented from getting an abortion. And since black women get abortions at disproportionately high rates, abortion restrictions are good in particular for black women. Indeed, this is an example of a positive effect of intersectionality. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:My StoryDawn Ruggeroli–CollinsMy story starts on October 17, 1981. I was 17–years–old and was riding home from a night with friends at the Roundup Rodeo in Simonton, Texas. The girl who was driving was a friend of a friend, so unfortunately I did [End Page E5] not know her well enough to realize that she was drunk. I have very little recollection of the accident, nor of (...) the few days that followed. However, I do recall being very aware that I was paralyzed.For some reason, I had for the previous few years been reading books by women who had spinal cord injuries as a result of some type of accident. I read Joni Eareckson’s book “Joni” and “The Other Side of the Mountain” about Jill Kinmont, and saw the movies about both women. Additionally, my mother bought me “Karen,” and “With Love, from Karen” the story of Karen Killalea, who has cerebral palsy. It seemed to me that reading these books prepared me for dealing with my disability in a positive way rather than “woe is me.”I’m actually one of the luckiest people you’ll ever know! While I have a C–4/C–5 SCI, it is pretty incomplete and as a result I’m pretty mobile. I wear an ankle–foot orthotic (AFO) on my right foot and use a cane. I do have Brown–Séquard syndrome, with better sensation on my right side and better function on the left. So, I was right–handed the first 17 years of my life and I’m now a leftie.A couple of days after my accident, while I was still in the intensive care unit (ICU), one of the nurses felt that it was important for me to realize that I would probably be paralyzed for the rest of my life; never to walk again. So she took it upon herself to deliver this message personally. Well, I wasn’t having any of that! I yelled and screamed and threw the biggest tantrum that one can throw while one’s head is clamped down by Gardner–Wells tongs. Given how well I have recovered, I have often thought how it would be to find Judy, walk up to her, and ask if she remembers me.My dad has often told me that he thinks I went through the grieving process pretty quickly after my accident. It wasn’t always easy, and I did have my down moments, but for the most part I think he’s right. I’ve always been a positive person and that helped get me through this and many other trying times in my life. I think at the time I also had a fear that no one would want to be around me if I was stuck in a wheelchair and was a Debbie Downer. I was only 17 after all.When I went away to college I was still mainly using a wheelchair. When I told a friend that I didn’t want to be in a dorm with all of the disabled students, she laughed and asked me why I didn’t want to be with “my people.” Aside from playing some wheelchair basketball, I had never really hung out with other people with disabilities. I was briefly involved with a disabled support type of group but many of them had really negative attitudes. I didn’t stick around for very long after I learned that one of the guys said to one of the women that she would be really attractive if it weren’t for “that wheelchair.” This coming someone in a wheelchair himself!During my second year at Michigan State I had my first realization that people don’t just see me as someone with a disability. A friend was talking with an acquaintance from the other side of our dorm and she mentioned me. The acquaintance said “oh, Dawn in the wheelchair?” and her response was “yeah, I guess she is in a wheelchair.” When she relayed this conversation to me later I was really moved that she didn’t see me as someone in a wheelchair first... (shrink)

This leaves commemorate the death of Mr. Lai drunk for one week of the year, the first highlight of Mr. Yip Lai drunk morality to moral life as a call for the worlds and inviting, rather than imposing a thing, and thus analysis this point in its philosophical basis. Lai drunk leaves care and moral life, and care management of prospects, and that "preaching Management" and the "reasonableness" distinction, and in this perspective, the exploration provision of rational (...) structure, driving force and hope, respectively, in The so-called form of science, experience in the form of scientific, interpretive discipline, analytical philosophy, contemplative philosophy諸level, there are in-depth research and published works, has always wanted to run through from the rational to believe, from the philosophical to the neural science of the road, play its intellectual generosity, to grand philosophical thinking索, to clarify the integrity of the Catholic University of psychiatric treatment, and from science, culture and faith development, pointing In order rational hope. This paper in memory of Prof. Jean Ladrière in the first anniversary of his passing away attempts to feature first his notion of moral life as "an invitation to perfection rather than imposing obligation on others," by referring to his philosophical analysis of moral life. Jean Ladrière concerned himself not only with moral life, but also with human reason and its hope. He made the distinction between reasonableness and rationality, based on which he explored the structure, dynamism and hope of human reason. He worked on the philosophical structure and dynamism of formal sciences, natural-formal sciences, hermeneutic disciplines, analytical philosophy and speculative philosophy as expressions of human reason. He penetrated the energetic development of spirit from science to faith, from philosophy to theology, showing thereby an admirable intellectual generosity and comprehensive power of philosophizing to exemplify the integral function of reason claimed by him as the "eschaton" of Catholic university and to explore the hope of reason through the development of science, culture and faith. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:204 Feminist Studies 46, no. 1. © 2020 by Feminist Studies, Inc. Blood on a Blackberry Darlene Taylor The road bends. In a place where a girl was snatched, no one says her name. They talk about the bloody slip, not the lost girl. The blacktop road curves there and drops. Can’t see what’s ahead so, I listen. Insects scratch their legs and wind their wings above their backs. (...) The road sounds safe. Every day I walk alone on the schoolhouse road, keeping my eyes on where I’m going, not where I’ve been. Bruises on my shoulder from carrying books and notebooks, pencils and crayons. Pebbles crunch. An engine grinds, brakes screech. I step into a cloud of pink dust and weeds. The sandy taste of road dust dries my tongue. Older boys, mean boys, cursing beer-drunk boys laugh and bluster—“Rusty Girl.” They drive fast. Their laughter fades. Feathers of a bent blue bird impale the road. Sun beats the crushed bird. Cutting through the tall, tall grass, I pick up a stick to warn. Songs and sticks have power over snakes. Bramble snaps. Wild berries squish under my feet. The ripe scent makes my belly grumble. Briar thorns prick my skin, making my fingertips bleed. Plucking handfuls, I eat. Blood on a blackberry ruins its taste. Pencils, crayons, books spill. Backwards I fall. Pages tear. Lessons brown like sugar, cinnamon, nutmeg. Blackberry stain. Thistles and nettles grate my legs and thighs. Coarse laughter, not from inside me. A boy, a laughing boy, a mean boy presses. Berry black stains my dress. A snake hisses. I run. Home. I kneel. Well water pumps, washing away sin. The sun burns through kitchen windows, warming, baking. I roll my purple-tipped fingers into my palms. Darlene Taylor 205 “Sweetchild,”grandmotherwillsay.“Smartgirl.Whatdid you learn today?” On the schoolhouse road.... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Tackling AdversityJohn HermanekAs a very active and athletic 21–year–old I was involved in an accident that would change my life forever, but not necessarily for the worse. I was hit by a drunk driver in a pick–up truck while riding my motorcycle. Ironically, I was on my way to sell the motorcycle but never made it that far. I suffered a broken hand, femur, multiple lacerations and the (...) most severe injury of them all, the loss of my right leg just below the knee. I kept the fact that I owned a motorcycle from my parents by storing it at a friend’s house so I knew the news of my injury would be twice as surreal to them. I remember telling the ER nurse that I needed to be the one that called them to tell them what happened. She said she could not do that, but I told her that she did not know my mother and I was able to talk her into accommodating me.It was the summer between my junior and senior year of college and I had had just made Indiana University’s football team as a walk–on linebacker (without having played HS football) so life was good and there was pretty much nothing holding me back or anything I felt I could not do.In an instant the life I once knew would never be the same and I truly wanted to die but little did I know that life would get better, not worse. After keeping my lower leg attached with surgical tape for a week, the inevitable could not be avoided. It was devastating news. At first I refused to sign any papers authorizing the amputation surgery but I was told if I did not, I would surely die as gangrene had set in. I remember scribbling my signature and then throwing the pen—a doctor’s dream I’m sure but I have to believe they’ve seen it all before. I was in traction for the first six weeks and had lost 60 pounds. Two weeks after being removed from traction I was able to get upright but was extremely weak. The emaciated and ghostly white image of me was tough to look at in the mirror, especially with half my right leg missing. That really took some getting used to. At that point, it was like a bad dream and I wasn’t sure what to make of all of it but one thing for certain was that reality had sunk in. Surprisingly, it was at that point that I quit feeling sorry for myself and instantly knew what had to be done.I knew I needed help and I could not do it alone so with the help of my family and friends, I started to put goals in place for myself. First on the list was to gain some weight back so I resumed working out (mostly weightlifting) and turned to my mother’s [End Page 192] great cooking. There were some highs and lows during that process particularly with my first prosthetist (also an amputee) who told me my days of any type of sports activities “were over.” That was pretty devastating news to me but it didn’t take me long to realize he was only telling me things that he himself was never able to accomplish as an amputee and that just created more of an incentive for me because I knew deep down it was possible because I already had the drive and determination. Just under a year later I was back to a regular exercise program, my “pre–accident” weight and feeling healthy and in shape again.I have since become more appreciative of what I have. I used to box in college and in 1991, entered the Chicago Golden Gloves Super heavyweight (senior novice) division. Senior novice means you’ve had five or less fights at that time and that you were at least 21. I lost my first fight in 1991 on a controversial decision and came back in 1992 and had three fights. Just shy of 35 years old, my first opponent... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Commentary on “Multiple Personality and Moral Responsibility”Stephen R. L. Clark (bio)Theaitetos sleeping is not quite “the same” as Theaitetos waking, any more than Alcibiades drunk is Alcibiades sober. Nor am I, at fifty, quite “the same” as Stephen was when he was five. In one way, my sober fifty-year-old waking self can reasonably disclaim responsibility for what Stephen did or seemed to do when he was dreaming, (...) class='Hi'>drunk, or five years old. Those other Stephens were not “fully responsible,” were not doing what they freely chose because they chose it—though it would be odd to deny that they were acting willingly. Nor am I now very likely to do the things that—drunk, asleep, or five years old—“I” did: in that sense I can disown those actions and never fully “owned” them anyway. Maybe now I can even disown such actions as I once really owned: once I thought them the right thing, and now I do not.On the other hand, as Stephen Braude says, even children (even, he might have added, dogs) are treated “as if” they are “responsible”: as if, that is, they know what they were doing and may be deterred from doing it again. Should Alcibiades sober be made accountable for what “he” did when drunk? Why not, if this deters him from getting drunk again? Perhaps, as Aristotle suggested, those who do wrong when they are drunk should be fined double the amount. Perhaps those who find it difficult not to drink habitually should be fined ten times the amount. What matters is the amount of money that will put them off, that will force them to “take responsibility” for their own future lives. People who know that they can’t trust themselves when they are drunk, sexually excited, or driving a fast car must put it out of their own power to be in those positions—and if they can’t do that, then others must do it for them. Free men and women “take responsibility,” take charge of their own lives, and wish to be held responsible for what they do and have done. Those who cannot “take control” must, technically, be slaves.There is no point expecting “natural slaves” to take control of their own lives; to measure what they want against what is allowed by society. Such “slaves,” at best, can be controlled by an immediate threat or prize. In a way, it is pointless to punish them, though it may be necessary to imprison, maim, or kill them. Much the same thing may be said of some who are not, strictly, slavish. Should eighty-year-olds be “held responsible” for what they did in their forgotten youth, a world away? They will not be doing it again, and may not, even now, have any greater understanding than the rest of us as to why they did it in the past. “Punishment” in such a case can only [End Page 55] be used to deter others who might follow the same path, to help them to control their lives in ways that do not injure others. Otherwise, we are not strictly speaking of “punishment” at all: perhaps more often than we like to admit, public condemnation, incarceration, or execution is a symbolic elimination of a perceived evil, whether or not we think, or have good grounds for thinking, that the victim is really guilty. The sacrificial victim carries away our anger or unhappiness.Pragmatically, in other words, we punish people for things that—even at the time of the action—they did not control, or which they have long forgotten. For punishment to deter them, they must understand what they are being punished for. For it to reform them, they must accept that the punishment inflicted is just. Those who neither understand nor accept punishment may still be treated harshly, for the sake of others—maimed, or killed, or simply (if we choose to be humane) imprisoned. There are some acts, so Aristotle said, below the level of humanity: such bestiality cannot be punished. It does not follow that the perpetrators should be “free.” Pragmatism permits us to retain the rites of sacrifice, even... (shrink)

Historically, treatment for pain relief has varied according to the social status of the sufferer. A similar tendency to make arbitrary distinctions affecting pain relief was found in an ethnographic study of animal research laboratories. The administration of pain-relieving drugs for animals in laboratories differed from standard practice for humans and, perhaps, for companion animals. Although anesthesia was used routinely for surgical procedures, its administration was sometimes haphazard. Analgesics, however, were rarely used. Most researchers had never thought about using analgesics (...) and did not consider the subject worthy of serious attention. Scientists interviewed for this study agreed readily that animals are capable offeeling pain, but such assertions were muted by an overriding view of lab animals as creatures existing solely for the purposes of research. As a result, it was the exceptional scientist who was able to focus on anything about the animal's subjective experience that might lie outside the boundaries of the research protocol. (shrink)

The observation that neurological illnesses follow recurrent hits to the head was tempered by the terms that first called the diseases into scientific existence: “punch-drunk,” “slugnutty,” “slaphappy,” “goofy,” “punchy,” and a host of other colloquialisms accompanying class identities. Thus the discovery of disease and its medicalization ran straight into a countervailing belief about losers—losers in boxing, losers in life, losers in general. To medicalize such individuals was to fly in the face of a culture that made them jokes. Yet (...) a subculture began to emerge around pathological understandings: first in medicine, then in journalism, then in the courts, and finally with patient accounts about illness. (shrink)

(Runner-up, Royal Institute of Philosophy 2020 Philosophy Essay Prize) Technological developments have led to the digitization of certain sectors of the economy, and this has many authors looking ahead to the prospects of a post-work society. While it is valuable to theorize about this possibility, it is also important to take note of the present state of work. For better or worse, it is what we are currently stuck with, and as the COVID-19 pandemic has ensured, much of that work (...) is now taking place online. Though a ‘return to normalcy’ is on the horizon, part of that normalcy involves online work, which is itself a significant change in the lives of many workers. Here I develop an account of work on which work is teleologically structured. This gives the result that working is something we can fail at doing, even when we try, and we can also be unsure of whether we’ve succeeded or failed. The shift of certain work from in-person to online modes generates a persistent uncertainty for workers in affected professions. Because our ability to work is something we typically value, this uncertainty has significant negative consequences for a worker’s self-conception. Indeed, it is analogous to disorders of agency and generates a kind of alienation. (shrink)

Le Grand describes a situation where a drunk driver, who has medical insurance, is the cause of an accident in which he and a sober pedestrian, who has no medical insurance, are both equally and seriously injured. At the private hospital to which they are both taken, there is available emergency treatment for one of them only. Who should receive it? The issues raised by Le Grand's example are shown to be more interesting, more complex and less clearcut than (...) Le Grand suggests and implies. In particular, it is not the case that, unequivocally, the drunkenness of the driver establishes that the pedestrian rather than he should be treated nor that, unequivocally, the driver's possession of health insurance is morally irrelevant. (shrink)

BackgroundThough sobriety in young people is on the rise, students who drink little or no alcohol may experience social exclusion at University, impacting well-being. We aim to understand the social experiences of United Kingdom undergraduate students who drink little or no alcohol.MethodsA mixed-methods study using semi-structured, one-to-one interviews and the 24-Item Social Provisions Scale and Flourishing Scale with 15 undergraduate students who drink little or no alcohol. Descriptive statistics are presented for quantitative data and thematic analysis for qualitative.ResultsEight main themes (...) and four subthemes were generated from thematic analysis summarised in two sections ‘views of drinkers from non-drinkers’ and ‘how peer pressure feels and how people deal with it.’ The initial transition to University represented a challenge, where participants struggled to find their ‘true’ friends. However, students generally had high levels of social provision, well-being and enjoyed close friendships with fewer casual acquaintances. All students experienced some kind of peer pressure and developed coping strategies when in social situations involving alcohol. Fear of missing out on the ‘typical’ University experience heightened self-imposed expectations to drink. Despite participants acknowledging their counter-normative behaviour, some felt they were subject to stigmatisation by drinkers, doubting their non-drinker status, causing feelings of exclusion or being ‘boring.’ Their desire to ‘be like everyone else’ exposed some insight into the negative stereotypes of sobriety, including frustration behind alcohol’s status elevation.ConclusionStudents adopt strategies to minimise peer pressure and to fit in. Future research should interrogate drinkers’ perceptions of their sober peers to deepen understanding, better break down ‘us and them,’ and mitigate future expectations within the University drinking culture. (shrink)

_ Source: _Page Count 21 This paper spells out the following line of thought: How much we care about various things is in constant flux, even as the world remains as it was. Internal affective shifts due to changes in mood, arousal-states or even hunger cause us to be more or less concerned about something. Further, there often isn't any fact of the matter about how much we ought to care about something. As I argue, it isn't the case that (...) there are prudential or moral norms that fix how worried we should be about every state of affairs in the world. And this suggests that what we should do, both prudentially and morally, is often subject to our affective shifts, at least if how much we care about something is an important element of practical reasoning. (shrink)

Smith shares a delightful, intellectual romp through life's milestones--being born, learning to drive, and getting married--all enlivened with apropos philosophy.

Written and directed by Paul-Thomas Anderson, Punch-Drunk Love exposes the complexity and kitsch superficialities of masculine gender constructions. The following essay provides a summary of gender theory in order to uncover and better understand the film's post-patriarchal vision of masculinity.

Alcohol use has long been assumed to alter cognition via attentional processes. To better understand the cognitive consequences of intoxication, the present study tested the effects of moderate intoxication on attentional processing using complex working memory capacity span tasks and a change blindness task. Intoxicated and sober participants were matched on baseline WMC performance, and intoxication significantly decreased performance on the complex span tasks. Surprisingly, intoxication improved performance on the change blindness task. The results are interpreted as evidence that intoxication (...) decreases attentional control, causing either a shift towards more passive processing and/or a more diffuse attentional state. This may result in decreased performance on tasks where attentional control or focus are required, but may actually facilitate performance in some contexts. (shrink)

Does biology have general laws that apply to all levels of biological organisation, across all evolutionary time? In their book “Biology’s first law: the tendency for diversity and complexity to increase in evolutionary systems” (2010), Daniel McShea and Robert Brandon propose that the most fundamental law of biology is that all levels of biological organisation have an underlying tendency to become more complex and diverse over time. A range of processes, most notably selection, can prevent the expression of this tendency, (...) but they predict that, on average, we should see that lineages tend toward greater diversity and complexity, driven by fundamentally neutral processes. Their hypothesis can be summarised as “diversity is easy, stasis is hard”. Here, I consider evidence for this “zero force evolutionary law”. It provides a fair description of evolutionary change at the genomic level, but the predictions of the proposed law are not met for broad scale patterns in the evolution of the animal kingdom. (shrink)

In this paper, we argue that solutions to normative challenges associated with autonomous driving, such as real-world trolley cases or distributions of risk in mundane driving situations, face the problem of reasonable pluralism: Reasonable pluralism refers to the fact that there exists a plurality of reasonable yet incompatible comprehensive moral doctrines within liberal democracies. The corresponding problem is that a politically acceptable solution cannot refer to only one of these comprehensive doctrines. Yet a politically adequate solution to the (...) normative challenges of autonomous driving need not come at the expense of an ethical solution, if it is based on moral beliefs that are (1) shared in an overlapping consensus and (2) systematized through public reason. Therefore, we argue that a Rawlsian justificatory framework is able to adequately address the normative challenges of autonomous driving and elaborate on how such a framework might be employed for this purpose. (shrink)

Driving behaviours and fitness to drive have been assessed using different tools over time: standardized neuropsychological, on-road and driving simulation testing. Nowadays, the great variability of topics related to driving simulation has elicited a high number of reviews. The present work aims to perform a scientometric analysis on driving simulation reviews and to propose a selective review of reviews focusing on critical issues related to validity and fidelity. A scientometric analysis of driving simulation reviews published (...) from 1988 to 2019 was conducted. Bibliographic data from 298 reviews were extracted from Scopus and WoS. Performance analysis was conducted to investigate most prolific Countries, Journals, Institutes and Authors. A cluster analysis on authors’ keywords was performed to identify relevant associations between different research topics. Based on reviews extracted from cluster analysis, a selective review of reviews was conducted to answer questions regarding validity, fidelity and critical issues. USA and Germany are the first two Countries for number of driving simulation reviews. USA is the leading Country with 5 Institutes in the top-ten. Top Authors wrote from 3 to 7 reviews each and belong to Institutes located in North America and Europe. Cluster analysis identified three clusters and eight keywords. The selective review of reviews showed a substantial agreement for supporting validity of driving simulation with respect to neuropsychological and on-road testing, while for fidelity with respect to real-world driving experience a blurred representation emerged. The most relevant critical issues were the a) lack of a common set of standards, b) phenomenon of simulation sickness, c) need for psychometric properties, lack of studies investigating d) predictive validity with respect to collision rates and e) ecological validity. Driving simulation represent a cross-cutting topic in scientific literature on driving, and there are several evidences for considering it as a valid alternative to neuropsychological and on-road testing. Further research efforts could be aimed at establishing a consensus statement for protocols assessing fitness to drive, in order to a) use standardized systems, b) compare systematically driving simulators with regard to their validity and fidelity, and c) employ shared criteria for conducting studies in a given sub-topic. (shrink)

This essay examines the multifaceted roles of drinking parties in early Greece and in medieval China. It takes as paradigm examples descriptions of ritual intoxication in Plato’s Laws and in the poetry of Ouyang Xiu and Mei Yaochen, arguing that these divergent cultural and philosophical traditions can be both related and made distinct through concepts of pleasure, creativity, and social harmony.