180,975 research outputs found
The politics of post-truth
Every book is imbued with the name of God, and we have anagrammed all books in history, without praying [âŠ]. What our lips said, our cells have learnt. What have my cells done? They have invented a different Plan, and now they are going their way. My cells have invented a history which is not everybodyâs history. My cells have learnt that one can be blasphemous by anagramming the Book and all books. So they have learnt to do with my body. They invert, transpose, alter, permute, create cells never seen before and with no sense, or with a sense which is contrary to the right sense. There must be a right sense, and wrong senses, otherwise one dies.
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Higher than what?
With its world heritage site Greenwich can potentially create a university that combines the best of the old with something new. That this does not happen automatically shows that the French sociologist of education, Pierre Bourdieu, was wrong in his contention that higher education is all form and no substance. But what is the substance of âhigherâ learning? Higher than what? Further than where? as Sir Toby Weaver, author of our 1965 Woolwich Polytechnic speech, asked.
Some would answer that higher educationâs (HE) âhighernessâ comes from specialisation but this is also the case in further education (FE). Others would assert academic freedom allows HE teachers to set their own courses linked to their research interests. However, although there is not (yet) a National Curriculum for HE, many programmes of study have long been agreed with professional bodies. And in an institution where the main activity of most staff is teaching or supporting teaching, research and scholarship exist, we admit, only in âpocketsâ. So this is not distinctive either.
Therefore, when we are pushed to characterise âhighernessâ, we fall back on what we often look for in student assignments: A critical analysis of the information required. This is seen as âdeepâ rather than âsurfaceâ knowledge. Yet these tacit notions are often confused so that we know them when we see them but find them hard to justify explicitly. This contribution to Greenwichâs new pedagogic journal seeks to do this as simply as possible in the interests of stimulating debate and innovation
The Future of Work: Apps, Artificial Intelligence, Automation and Androids
The analysis offered here is not a Neo-Luddite rage against âthe machine.â As with the oft-stated reproach about paranoia, there sometimes really are situations in which people are âout to get you.â In our current situation the threat is not from people but from the convergence of a set of technological innovations that are and will increasingly have an enormous impact on the nature of work, economic and social inequality and the existence of the middle classes that are so vital to the durability of Western democracy. The fact is that developed nationsâ economies such as found in Western Europe and the US are facing a convergence of technologies that fit into Joseph Schumpeterâs idea of âcreative destructionâ but without the âcreativeâ phase of economic rebirth. The forces and technologies pushing us in this direction are relentless. In a globalized market economy where power and authority are dispersed across borders with nations holding incompatible interests and agendas and policy dictated by unaccountable multilateral institutions we lack the ability to impose limits on what is occurring even if we wanted to. This discussion is only peripherally about law schools and lawyers. Those two institutions are nothing more than derivative manifestations of what is occurring in our larger systems rather than the drivers or creators of economic and political forces. As US law schools experience a dramatic downward shift in applications and enrollments, concerned and increasingly panicked law faculties at many institutions are looking in the wrong direction and at the wrong factors in trying to determine their future. This is because anyone attempting to tease out strategies by which we can adapt to economic change by designing positive plans of action based on past cycles and workplace conditions is chained to a bench in Platoâs Cave â mistaking flickering shadows for concrete reality
The Future of Work: Apps, Artificial Intelligence, Automation and Androids
The analysis offered here is not a Neo-Luddite rage against âthe machine.â As with the oft-stated reproach about paranoia, there sometimes really are situations in which people are âout to get you.â In our current situation the threat is not from people but from the convergence of a set of technological innovations that are and will increasingly have an enormous impact on the nature of work, economic and social inequality and the existence of the middle classes that are so vital to the durability of Western democracy. The fact is that developed nationsâ economies such as found in Western Europe and the US are facing a convergence of technologies that fit into Joseph Schumpeterâs idea of âcreative destructionâ but without the âcreativeâ phase of economic rebirth. The forces and technologies pushing us in this direction are relentless. In a globalized market economy where power and authority are dispersed across borders with nations holding incompatible interests and agendas and policy dictated by unaccountable multilateral institutions we lack the ability to impose limits on what is occurring even if we wanted to. This discussion is only peripherally about law schools and lawyers. Those two institutions are nothing more than derivative manifestations of what is occurring in our larger systems rather than the drivers or creators of economic and political forces. As US law schools experience a dramatic downward shift in applications and enrollments, concerned and increasingly panicked law faculties at many institutions are looking in the wrong direction and at the wrong factors in trying to determine their future. This is because anyone attempting to tease out strategies by which we can adapt to economic change by designing positive plans of action based on past cycles and workplace conditions is chained to a bench in Platoâs Cave â mistaking flickering shadows for concrete reality
Political Stare Decisis
The doctrine of stare decisis famously instructs judges to respect past decisions even if they believe these decisions are wrong. Many believe stare decisis serves venerable values and bemoan its apparent demise in various apex courts around the world. But can something like stare decisis appear in politics too? In other words, can we expect public officials, much like we expect judges, to also adhere to past decisions even if they think these decisions are wrong? Or when they face temptations to ignore the past?
If we rely on our normal intuitions about politics, or observe its current state around the world, the answer seems to be âno.â And while previous scholarship presents a more qualified view, this literature is greatly incomplete. It focuses on a limited set of domestic and international institutions that primarily resemble judicial ones. Alternatively, this scholarship is preoccupied with the normative or interpretive question of how domestic and international courts should incorporate what looks like a political analogy to stare decisis into legal doctrine. As a result, we are left uncertain about how broad the phenomenon of constraint by the past in politics really is. We are also left unsure about where the phenomenon is likely to appear, how exactly it operates, and what we might be able to do to achieve more (or less) of this type of constraint. In a world where so much of what seems wrong in domestic and global politics appears connected to the rushed erosion of the past, or its increased stickiness, this omission is significant.
This Article fills this gap by offering a comprehensive explanatory and functional theory of the role of the past as a constraint in domestic and global politics, or, in short, a theory of political stare decisis. Given the stakes of the past in politics today, the Article suggests what public officials and institutional designers in domestic and international politics might be able to do to deliberately âtinkerâ with political stare decisis. For example, how officials can establish entirely new political precedents that will constrain in the future, how they might strengthen existing political precedents that they like (or weaken political precedents they dislike), and what solutions are generally available to make political stare decisis more robust.
The Article concludes with a more jurisprudential point. While much in the discussion demonstrates that political stare decisis and the more familiar institution of judicial stare decisis substantially diverge, the Article claims that these differences may be much less meaningful than meets the eye. Instead of completely divergent practices, judicial stare decisis may ultimately be nothing more than one species of political stare decisis. The Article argues that acknowledging this fact significantly improves our understanding of judicial stare decisis. Among other things, it shows us when judicial stare decisis is âfor suckersâ and when it is not; it flags new ways to strengthen judicial stare decisis in jurisdictions where it seems to have dramatically weakened; and it illuminates how those who work to achieve their goals through domestic and international courts and their precedents should appropriately (and effectively) approach this task
When Explanations "Cause" Error: A Look at Representations and Compressions
We depend upon explanation in order to âmake senseâ out of our world. And, making sense is all the more important when dealing with change. But, what happens if our explanations are wrong? This question is examined with respect to two types of explanatory model. Models based on labels and categories we shall refer to as ârepresentations.â More complex models involving stories, multiple algorithms, rules of thumb, questions, ambiguity we shall refer to as âcompressions.â Both compressions and representations are reductions. But representations are far more reductive than compressions. Representations can be treated as a set of defined meanings â coherence with regard to a representation is the degree of fidelity between the item in question and the definition of the representation, of the label. By contrast, compressions contain enough degrees of freedom and ambiguity to allow us to make internal predictions so that we may determine our potential actions in the possibility space. Compressions are explanatory via mechanism. Representations are explanatory via category. Managers are often confusing their evocation of a representation as the creation of a context of compression . When this type of explanatory error occurs, more errors follow. In the drive for efficiency such substitutions are all too often proclaimed â at the managerâs peri
Perceptual Skill And Social Structure
Visual perception relies on stored information and environmental associations to arrive at a determinate representation of the world. This opens up the disturbing possibility that our visual experiences could themselves be subject to a kind of racial bias, simply in virtue of accurately encoding previously encountered environmental regularities. This possibility raises the following question: what, if anything, is wrong with beliefs grounded upon these prejudicial experiences? They are consistent with a range of epistemic norms, including evidentialist and reliabilist standards for justification. I argue that we will struggle to locate a flaw with these sorts of perceptual beliefs so long as we focus our analysis at the level of the individual and her response to information. We should instead broaden our analysis to include the social structure within which the individual is located. Doing so lets us identify a problem with the way in which unjust social structures in particular âgerrymanderâ the regularities an individual is exposed to, and by extension the priors their visual system draws on. I argue that in this way, social structures can cap perceptual skill
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Meritocracy as plutocracy: the marketising of âequalityâ within neoliberalism
Meritocracy, in contemporary parlance, refers to the idea that whatever our social position at birth, society ought to facilitate the means for âtalentâ to ârise to the topâ. This article argues that the ideology of âmeritocracyâ has become a key means through which plutocracy is endorsed by stealth within contemporary neoliberal culture. The article attempts to analyse the term âmeritocracyâ, to open up understandings of its genealogy, and to comprehend its current use. It does so through three sections. The first section considers what might be wrong with the notion of meritocracy. The second traces some key points in the travels of the concept within and around academic social theory, moving from Alan Fox and Michael Youngâs initial, disparaging use of the term in the 1950s, to Daniel Bellâs approving adoption of the concept in the 1970s, and on to its take-up by neoconservative think tanks in the 1980s. The third section analyses the use of meritocracy as a plank of neoliberal political rhetoric and public discourse. It focuses on the resonance of the term in relatively recent British culture, discussing how what it terms âmeritocratic feelingâ has come to operate in David Cameronâs âAspiration Nationâ. This final section argues that meritocracy has become a potent blend of an essentialised and exclusionary notion of âtalentâ, competitive individualism and the need for social mobility. Today it is a discourse which predominantly works to marketise the very idea of equality
Being of good character
Calls have been made recently for the renewal of public and private virtues, not least because of the serious scandals that have beset our banks, political system, as well as our health and social welfare provisions. The public appear to want people to be of good character, and so improve the quality of public life. And yet Britain today is a pluralistic society in which our values and virtues appear to be constantly changing and where children are exposed to a variety of perspectives on moral right and wrong. We seem to regard identifying with any set of virtues to be problematic and we often appear to lack any clear conception of what virtues are, which virtues are to be promoted, as well as knowledge of how to promote them
Introduction to Ethics: An Open Educational Resource, collected and edited by Noah Levin
Collected and edited by Noah Levin
Table of Contents:
UNIT ONE: INTRODUCTION TO CONTEMPORARY ETHICS: TECHNOLOGY, AFFIRMATIVE ACTION, AND IMMIGRATION
1 The âTrolley Problemâ and Self-Driving Cars: Your Carâs Moral Settings (Noah Levin)
2 What is Ethics and What Makes Something a Problem for Morality? (David Svolba)
3 Letter from the Birmingham City Jail (Martin Luther King, Jr)
4 A Defense of Affirmative Action (Noah Levin)
5 The Moral Issues of Immigration (B.M. Wooldridge)
6 The Ethics of our Digital Selves (Noah Levin)
UNIT TWO: TORTURE, DEATH, AND THE âGREATER GOODâ
7 The Ethics of Torture (Martine Berenpas)
8 What Moral Obligations do we have (or not have) to Impoverished Peoples? (B.M. Wooldridge)
9 Euthanasia, or Mercy Killing (Nathan Nobis)
10 An Argument Against Capital Punishment (Noah Levin)
11 Common Arguments about Abortion (Nathan Nobis & Kristina Grob)
12 Better (Philosophical) Arguments about Abortion (Nathan Nobis & Kristina Grob)
UNIT THREE: PERSONS, AUTONOMY, THE ENVIRONMENT, AND RIGHTS
13 Animal Rights (Eduardo Salazar)
14 John Rawls and the âVeil of Ignoranceâ (Ben Davies)
15 Environmental Ethics: Climate Change (Jonathan Spelman)
16 Rape, Date Rape, and the âAffirmative Consentâ Law in California (Noah Levin)
17 The Ethics of Pornography: Deliberating on a Modern Harm (Eduardo Salazar)
18 The Social Contract (Thomas Hobbes)
UNIT FOUR: HAPPINESS
19 Is Pleasure all that Matters? Thoughts on the âExperience Machineâ (Prabhpal Singh)
20 Utilitarianism (J.S. Mill)
21 Utilitarianism: Pros and Cons (B.M. Wooldridge)
22 Existentialism, Genetic Engineering, and the Meaning of Life: The Fifths (Noah Levin)
23 The Solitude of the Self (Elizabeth Cady Stanton)
24 Game Theory, the Nash Equilibrium, and the Prisonerâs Dilemma (Douglas E. Hill)
UNIT FIVE: RELIGION, LAW, AND ABSOLUTE MORALITY
25 The Myth of Gyges and The Crito (Plato)
26 God, Morality, and Religion (Kristin Seemuth Whaley)
27 The Categorical Imperative (Immanuel Kant)
28 The Virtues (Aristotle)
29 Beyond Good and Evil (Friedrich Nietzsche)
30 Other Moral Theories: Subjectivism, Relativism, Emotivism, Intuitionism, etc. (Jan F. Jacko
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