Being silent about the truth : narrative ethics in Mats Wahl’s I ballong över Stilla havet

Lying and deceiving are prominent topics in ethical narration. This has to do with an often absolutist stance against lying that shapes a large part of philosophical, religious, and political discourses. At the same time, lying and deceiving are topics in the field of moral education in which moral values such as honesty, sincerity, and truthfulness are propagated. Bringing these issues together, this article demonstrates how reflection about honesty and autonomy is narrated in Mats Wahl’s young adult novel I ballong över Stilla havet (In a Balloon over the Pacific Ocean). This novel shows that, while lying and deceiving undermine trust and can lead to harmful results, there are ways to fight against the moral destruction. This fight involves not only prosocial (versus mendacious) lying but also acknowledging individual motives for the lying behavior of others. Thus, while hating adults’ lies and deceptive actions as well as learning to lie himself, the male protagonist matures and takes on responsibility for his actions. We contend that this protagonist may constitute a moral exemplar that invites moral learning

How pushing hyper-specific – and fact free – policy proposals helps politicians like Donald Trump

When election candidates and politicians address voters, they often face a choice in how they speak: they can be specific in what they propose, or they can be deliberately ambiguous. Gustav Meibauer looks at the trade-off between these two rhetorical strategies, and argues that many politicians – like Donald Trump – aim to get the best of both worlds by choosing to be hyper-specific but fact free

How the 2011 Libyan intervention may have discredited the no-fly zone as a policy tool.

Given the country’s condition today, the 2011 military intervention by NATO in Libya is now seen as having largely been a failure. Gustav Meibauer argues that NATO’s failure in that country has also now tainted the utility of no-fly zones as an intervention in such conflicts. While previously regarded as a relatively low-cost intervention that goes beyond sanctions, the relatively forceful imposition of the Libyan no-fly zone means that the policy tool is now viewed with suspicion

On commitment to untruthful implicatures

In the current debate on the lying-misleading distinction, many theorists distinguish between lying as insincere assertion and misleading through conveying an untruthful implicature. There is growing empirical evidence that average speakers count untruthful implicatures as cases of lying. What matters for them is the (degree) of commitment to an untruthful implicature. Since untruthful conversational implicatures may arise with non-assertions, and untruthful presuppositions are also judged as lying, a realistic conception of lying should aim at a definition of lying that it is able to cover these possibilities. Such a conception, which supports traditional assumptions about the semantics-pragmatics distinction, leads to a commitment-based definition of lying, as recently proposed by a number of authors

Ambiguous specificity: the production of foreign policy bullshit in electoral contexts

This article conceptualises the production of foreign policy bullshit in electoral contexts as a result of contending incentives towards ambiguity and specificity. Candidates must speak to widely divergent, even contradictory, policy ideas to maximise voter share in primaries and elections. At the same time, overly broad rhetoric or evasion risks signalling incompetence and unsuitability for office. Candidates are thus incentivized to hide the compromise character of their suggestions behind hyper-specific rhetoric. Following literature from philosophy and linguistics, this is a form of deception best captured by ‘bullshit’, that is, when the candidate simply does not care too much whether what they are saying matches with objective reality but does care that this inattention to truth is not known to the audience. This dynamic is illustrated in a case study on the 2015/2016 elections. Specifically, bipartisan support for a US-enforced no-fly zone in Syria cannot be explained by the tool’s likely utility and effectiveness. Instead, the tool’s value for many candidates lay in its effective communication of contradictory policy ideas. The tool allowed presidential hopefuls to appear resolute yet responsible, purposive yet pragmatic, idealist, and realist, while also signalling specificity and thus foreign policy expertise

What Goes On in Strangers’ Minds? How Reading Children’s Books Affects Emotional Development

Based on recent studies in developmental psychology and cognitive narratology, this article shows the impact of Theory of Mind on children’s understanding and apprehension of other people’s thoughts and beliefs presented in fictional texts. With a special focus on the depiction of emotions in two children’s novels, Erich Kästner’s Emil and the Detectives (1929) and Anne Cassidy’s Looking for JJ (2004), it is argued that the representation of the main characters’ states of mind demands specific capacities on behalf of the reader, encompassing mind reading and acquisition of higher levels of empathy, thus fostering children’s comprehension of fictional characters’ life conditions

The futility of buffer zones in international politics

Buffer zones as a concept have a long history. Despite their frequent occurrence in international relations past and present, however, they have been treated in passing by scholars and policymakers alike, and then usually from a purely historical perspective. Their importance in conflict management, third-party intervention and power politics are not adequately mirrored in scholarly research. This article seeks to remedy this lapse by re-introducing the buffer zone as a tool of international conflict management in a new and systematic fashion. In this article, we survey buffer zones, their conceptual roots and characteristics, and illustrate our theoretical findings with an array of different examples—predominantly from the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. In so doing, we make three fundamental arguments about buffer zones

Introduction to the special issue: elections, rhetoric and American foreign policy in the age of Donald Trump

This introduction presents the special issue’s conceptual and empirical starting points and situates the special issue’s intended contributions. It does so by reviewing extant scholarship on electoral rhetoric and foreign policy and by teasing out several possible linkages between elections, rhetoric and foreign policy. It also discusses how each contribution to the special issue seeks to illuminate causal mechanisms at work in these linkages. Finally, it posits that these linkages are crucial to examining the changes brought about by Trump’s election and his foreign policy rhetoric