American History X, Cinematic Manipulation, and Moral Conversion

American History X (hereafter AHX) has been accused by numerous critics of a morally dangerous cinematic seduction: using stylish cinematography, editing, and sound, the film manipulates the viewer through glamorizing an immoral and hate-filled neo-nazi protagonist. In addition, there’s the disturbing fact that the film seems to accomplish this manipulation through methods commonly grouped under the category of “fascist aesthetics.” More specifically, AHX promotes its neo-nazi hero through the use of several filmic techniques made famous by Nazi propagandist Leni Riefenstahl. Now most critics admit that, in the end, the film claims to denounce racism and attempts to show us the conversion of the protagonist to the path of righteousness, but they complain that nonetheless the film (perhaps unintentionally) ends up implicitly promoting the immoral worldview it rather superficially professes to reject in its final act. This charge of hypocrisy is connected to another worry: the moral conversion in the film is said to fall flat because the intellectual resources on display to support the character’s racism are not counterbalanced by equally explicit (but superior) arguments for the anti-racist position ultimately embraced by the character. In other words, just as the devil is said to get all the good lines in Milton’s Paradise Lost, in AHX the racists get all the arguments. This has been taken to be a morally problematic flaw of the film. Critics lament that Derek’s conversion seems to result not from relevant logical inferences and valid rational argumentation but from overly simplistic and arguably egoistic insights (e.g., “has anything you've done made your life better?”) combined, perhaps, with a hackneyed cliché (in prison, one of his best friends is a black person!) In this paper I’ll attempt to rebut these charges and defend the film as a powerful, and powerfully moral, work of art. I’ll be suggesting that the seductive techniques employed allow for many viewers a degree of sympathy towards the protagonist that is crucial, both for making that character’s more horrific actions especially unsettling, and also for making his eventual conversion plausible and ultimately compelling. I’ll also argue that the manner in which his conversion is presented is in fact subtler than many critics have allowed: Derek’s transformation is not artificial or implausible but is depicted as resulting from a cumulative series of emotionally powerful life events and personal engagements. It is certainly true that it is not represented in the way some would seemingly have preferred, i.e. as straightforwardly resulting from a process of gradual intellectual improvement in Derek’s reasoning on questions of race and politics. However, I’ll argue that the decidedly emotional basis of his moral evolution is both refreshingly realistic and no hindrance to accepting his conversion as rational. Finally, properly understanding the legitimacy of the emotional foundations of much moral thought will also allow us to appreciate the ways in which our initial worries about this film’s (not insignificant) ability to persuade viewers through the engagement of emotions need not, in itself, be seen as a barrier to endorsing the film as a morally praiseworthy work

Love and history

In this essay, I argue that a proper understanding of the historicity of love requires an appreciation of the irreplaceability of the beloved. I do this through a consideration of ideas that were first put forward by Robert Kraut in “Love De Re” (1986). I also evaluate Amelie Rorty's criticisms of Kraut's thesis in “The Historicity of Psychological Attitudes: Love is Not Love Which Alters Not When It Alteration Finds” (1986). I argue that Rorty fundamentally misunderstands Kraut's Kripkean analogy, and I go on to criticize her claim that concern over the proper object of love should be best understood as a concern over constancy. This leads me to an elaboration of the distinct senses in which love can be seen as historical. I end with a further defense of the irreplaceability of the beloved and a discussion of the relevance of recent debates over the importance of personal identity for an adequate account of the historical dimension of lov

Moral Status, Speciesism, and Liao’s Genetic Account

This paper offers several criticisms of the account of rightholding laid out in S. Matthew Liao’s recent paper “The Basis of Human Moral Status.” I argue that Liao’s account both does too much and too little: it grants rightholder status to those who may not deserve it, and it does not provide grounds for offering such status to those who arguably do deserve it. Given these troubling aspects of his approach, I encourage Liao to abandon his “physical basis of moral agency” account of moral status and instead adopt a position closer to a traditional “speciesist” view

Irreplaceability and Unique Value

This essay begins with a consideration of one way in which animals and persons may be valued as “irreplaceable.” Drawing on both Plato and Pascal, I consider reasons for skepticism regarding the legitimacy of this sort of attachment. While I do not offer a complete defense against such skepticism, I do show that worries here may be overblown due to the conflation of distinct metaphysical and normative concerns. I then go on to clarify what sort of value is at issue in cases of irreplaceable attachment. I characterize “unique value” as the kind of value attributed to a thing when we take that thing to be (theoretically, not just practically) irreplaceable. I then consider the relationship between this sort of value and intrinsic value. After considering the positions of Gowans, Moore, Korsgaard, Frankfurt, and others, I conclude that unique value is best understood not as a variety of intrinsic value but rather as one kind of final value that is grounded in the extrinsic properties of the object

Love and Power: Grau and Pury (2014) as a Case Study in the Challenges of X-Phi Replication

Grau and Pury (Review of Philosophy and Psychology, 5, 155–168, 2014) reported that people’s views about love are related to their views about reference. This surprising effect was however not replicated in Cova et al.’s (in press) replication study. In this article, we show that the replication failure is probably due to the replication’s low power and that a metaanalytic reanalysis of the result in Cova et al. suggests that the effect reported in Grau and Pury is real. We then report a large, highly powered replication that successfully replicates Grau and Pury 2014. This successful replication is a case study in the challenges involved in replicating scientific work, and our article contributes to the discussion of these challenges

Vascular endothelial cells cultured from patients with cerebral or uncomplicated malaria exhibit differential reactivity to TNF.

Plasmodium falciparum malaria is a major cause of morbidity and mortality in African children, and factors that determine the development of uncomplicated (UM) versus cerebral malaria (CM) are not fully understood. We studied the ex vivo responsiveness of microvascular endothelial cells to pro-inflammatory stimulation and compared the findings between CM and UM patients. In patients with fatal disease we compared the properties of vascular endothelial cells cultured from brain tissue to those cultured from subcutaneous tissue, and found them to be very similar. We then isolated, purified and cultured primary endothelial cells from aspirated subcutaneous tissue of patients with CM (EC(CM) ) or UM (EC(UM) ) and confirmed the identity of the cells before analysis. Upon TNF stimulation in vitro, EC(CM) displayed a significantly higher capacity to upregulate ICAM-1, VCAM-1 and CD61 and to produce IL-6 and MCP-1 but not RANTES compared with EC(UM) . The shedding of endothelial microparticles, a recently described parameter of severity in CM, and the cellular level of activated caspase-3 were both significantly greater in EC(CM) than in EC(UM) . These data suggest that inter-individual differences in the endothelial inflammatory response to TNF may be an additional factor influencing the clinical course of malaria

Evidence that thaxtomin C is a pathogenicity determinant of Streptomyces ipomoeae, the causative agent of streptomyces soil rot disease of sweet potato

Streptomyces ipomoeae is the causal agent of Streptomyces soil rot of sweet potato, a disease marked by highly necrotic destruction of adventitious roots, including the development of necrotic lesions on the fleshy storage roots. Streptomyces potato scab pathogens produce a phytotoxin (thaxtomin A) that appears to facilitate their entrance into host plants. S. ipomoeae produces a less-modified thaxtomin derivative (thaxtomin C) whose role in pathogenicity has not been examined. Here, we cloned and sequenced the thaxtomin gene cluster (txt) of S. ipomoeae, and we then constructed targeted txt mutants that no longer produced thaxtomin C. The mutants were unable to penetrate intact adventitious roots but still caused necrosis on storage-root tissue. These results, taken in context with previous histopathological study of S. ipomoeae infection, suggest that thaxtomin C plays an essential role in inter- and intracellular penetration of adventitious sweet potato roots by S. ipomoeae. Once inside the plant host, the pathogen uses one or more yet-tobe- determined factors to necrotize root tissue, including that of any storage roots it encounters. © 2012 The American Phytopathological Society