Believing in Others

Suppose some person 'A' sets out to accomplish a difficult, long-term goal such as writing a passable Ph.D. thesis. What should you believe about whether A will succeed? The default answer is that you should believe whatever the total accessible evidence concerning A's abilities, circumstances, capacity for self-discipline, and so forth supports. But could it be that what you should believe depends in part on the relationship you have with A? We argue that it does, in the case where A is yourself. The capacity for "grit" involves a kind of epistemic resilience in the face of evidence suggesting that one might fail, and this makes it rational to respond to the relevant evidence differently when you are the agent in question. We then explore whether similar arguments extend to the case of "believing in" our significant others -- our friends, lovers, family members, colleagues, patients, and students

Creating, Posting, and Using Open Scholarship: Open Textbooks, Journals, and Scholarly Works in Teaching and Research

The new GSU scholarly repository platform, OPUS, has the potential to transform faculty research, teaching, and scholarship. The platform supports the publication of student research journals, the posting of faculty work (presentations, papers, abstracts, working papers, published peer reviewed articles). OPUS stands for Open Portal to University Scholarship, and is hosted on the Digital Commons Network published by Bepress, Berkeley, California. This presentation reports on the successes of the College of Arts and Sciences pilot project of posting graduation capstones and Theses in OPUS, with data from OPUS’s first year, and will also discuss the platforms support on scholarly monograph publishing and open textbooks. This presentation was given at the 2015 Faculty Summer Institute, Governors State University, on June 2, 2015

Justice: 1850s San Francisco and the California Gold Rush

Using stories from the 1848-1851 California gold miners, the 1851 San Francisco vigilante committees, Nazi concentration camps of the 1940s, and wagon trains of American westward migration in the 1840s, the chapter illustrates that it is part of human nature to see doing justice as a value in itself—in people’s minds it is not dependent for justification on the practical benefits it brings. Having justice done is sufficiently important to people that they willingly suffer enormous costs to obtain it, even when they were neither hurt by the wrong nor in a position to benefit from punishing the wrongdoer.This is Chapter 4 from the general audience book Pirates, Prisoners, and Lepers: Lessons from Life Outside the Law (Potomac Books 2015). Included is a table of contents for the book and a summary of the line of argument of all of its chapters. (Chapter 3 of the book is also available on SSRN at http://ssrn.com/abstract=2413875)

TRAGEDY, OUTRAGE & REFORM Crimes That Changed Our World: 1911 – Triangle Factory Fire – Building Safety Codes

Can a crime make our world better? Crimes are the worst of humanity’s wrongs but, oddly, they sometimes do more than anything else to improve our lives. As it turns out, it is often the outrageousness itself that does the work. Ordinary crimes are accepted as the background noise of our everyday existence but some crimes make people stop and take notice – because they are so outrageous, or so curious, or so heart-wrenching. These “trigger crimes” are the cases that this book is about. They offer some incredible stories about how people, good and bad, change the world around them by energizing, or disgusting, the rest of us. The images are striking: a burning river, a hundred poisoned children, falling flaming bodies, four dead little girls in their Sunday best, collapsing skyscrapers, and indifferent police watching a wife get beaten. The stories show us how a single individual can make an enormous difference. The mother whose daughter is killed by a drunk driver ends up changing the way we think about drunk driving. The government attorney who figures out how to protect witnesses against the Mafia creates a flood of organized crime defections. A black minister who creates his own vigilante squad starts the war on drugs. The stories also show how far we have come even within the memory of people still living. We take for granted much of the world around us, but things were very different not long ago. Imagine a world where stores regularly sell contaminated food and adulterated drugs, where many buildings are veritable death traps, and where flagrant financial wrongdoing is accepted as a natural corollary to capitalism. This is our not-too-distant past. Perhaps most striking in these tales is what they reveal about the nature of progress. We would like to think it is orderly and rational, but in truth it is often chaotic and unpredictable. Who would have guessed that a single kidnapping would create the federalization of criminal law, that a particular sniper would lead to the creation of SWAT teams, or that an attack on a New York Street would inspire the national 9-1-1 system? At the same time, the stories are comforting in the apparent inevitability of American progress. Our progress may be messy but it is relentless. As a bonus, the stories, presented in chronological order, walk the reader through some of the most interesting parts of American social and political history: the Progressive era of the 1900s, Prohibition in the 1920s, the Depression in the 1930s, the inward focus of the post-World War II 1950s, the social revolution of the 1960s, the rise of global terrorism in the 1970s and militant Islam in the 1980s, and the expansion of the global economy in the 2000s. The book’s ultimate success is in presenting riveting accounts of human stories that taken together provide important insights into foundational issues like the nature of social progress. Presented here is the first chapter of the book: the story of the 1911 Triangle Factory fire, which was horrific in its effect and came at just the right time of political and social development so as to trigger a widespread outrage that ultimately led to a tectonic shift in how our society, and eventually the world, dealt with building safety

The Subversions and Perversions of Shadow Vigilantism

This excerpt from the recently published Shadow Vigilantes book argues that, while vigilantism, even moral vigilantism, can be dangerous to a society, the real danger is not of hordes of citizens, frustrated by the system’s doctrines of disillusionment, rising up to take the law into their own hands. Frustration can spark a vigilante impulse, but such classic aggressive vigilantism is not the typical response. More common is the expression of disillusionment in less brazen ways by a more surreptitious undermining and distortion of the operation of the criminal justice system. Shadow vigilantes, as they might be called, can affect the operation of the system in a host of important ways. For example, when people act as classic vigilantes or when people exceed the legal rules in their use of defensive force against apparent criminals, or when law enforcement officials exceed their authority in dealing with offenders, shadow vigilante citizens can refuse to report the crime or to help investigators, or they can refuse to indict as grand jurors or refuse to convict as trial jurors. Further, frustration with doctrines of disillusionment can lead politicians to urge legal reforms that seem to avoid failures of justice, but that also overreach and produce regular injustices. Shadow vigilantism can also be seen in the conduct of officials within the system who feel morally justified in subverting the system because they see it as regularly and indifferently producing failures of justice. Such subversion is apparent, for example, in officials refusing to prosecute vigilantes, police, or crime victims who stray beyond legal limitations when using force against aggressors. It’s also apparent in police “testilying” to subvert search and seizure technicalities (and judicial toleration of it) and in prosecutorial overcharging to compensate for past perceived justice failures

CRIMES THAT CHANGED OUR WORLD: TRAGEDY, OUTRAGE, AND REFORM: Chapter One: 1911 Triangle Factory Fire: Building Safety Codes

This first chapter of the recently published book Crimes That Changed Our World: Tragedy, Outrage, and Reform, examines the process by which the tragic 1911 Triangle Factory Fire provoked enormous outrage that in turn created a local then national movement for workplace and building safety that ultimately became the foundation for today’s building safety codes. What is particularly interesting, however, is that the Triangle Fire was not the worst such tragedy in its day. Why should it be the one that ultimately triggers social progress?The book has 21 chapters, each of which traces the tragedy-outrage-reform dynamic in a different context: from the war on drugs to the militarization of police, from domestic violence reform to three-strikes sentencing, from the creation of professional medical examiners to the establishment of the 9-1-1 emergency system. As the concluding chapter of the project makes clear, the dynamic of progress has many moving parts not all of which are rational and predictable

Punishment: Drop City and the Utopian Communes

Using stories from the utopian non-punishment hippie communes of the late 1960\u27s, the essay challenges today’s anti-punishment movement by demonstrating that the benefits of cooperative action are available only with the adoption of a system for punishing violations of core rules. Rather than being an evil system anathema to right-thinking people, punishment is the lynchpin of the cooperative action that has created human success. This is Chapter 3 from the general audience book Pirates, Prisoners, and Lepers: Lessons from Life Outside the Law. Chapter 4 of the book is also available on SSRN at http://papers.ssrn.com/abstract=2416484)

Punishment: Drop City and the Utopian Communes

Using stories from the utopian non-punishment hippie communes of the late 1960\u27s, the essay challenges today’s anti-punishment movement by demonstrating that the benefits of cooperative action are available only with the adoption of a system for punishing violations of core rules. Rather than being an evil system anathema to right-thinking people, punishment is the lynchpin of the cooperative action that has created human success. This is Chapter 3 from the general audience book Pirates, Prisoners, and Lepers: Lessons from Life Outside the Law. Chapter 4 of the book is also available on SSRN at http://papers.ssrn.com/abstract=2416484)

Justice: 1850s San Francisco and the California Gold Rush

Using stories from the 1848-1851 California gold miners, the 1851 San Francisco vigilante committees, Nazi concentration camps of the 1940s, and wagon trains of American westward migration in the 1840s, the chapter illustrates that it is part of human nature to see doing justice as a value in itself—in people’s minds it is not dependent for justification on the practical benefits it brings. Having justice done is sufficiently important to people that they willingly suffer enormous costs to obtain it, even when they were neither hurt by the wrong nor in a position to benefit from punishing the wrongdoer.This is Chapter 4 from the general audience book Pirates, Prisoners, and Lepers: Lessons from Life Outside the Law (Potomac Books 2015). Included is a table of contents for the book and a summary of the line of argument of all of its chapters. (Chapter 3 of the book is also available on SSRN at http://ssrn.com/abstract=2413875)

Trigger Crimes & Social Progress: The Tragedy-Outrage-Reform Dynamic in America

Can a crime make our world better? Crimes are the worst of humanity’s wrongs but, oddly, they sometimes do more than anything else to improve our lives. It is often the outrageousness itself that does the work. Ordinary crimes are accepted as the background noise of everyday existence but some crimes make people stop and take notice – because they are so outrageous or so heart-wrenching. This brief essay explores the dynamic of tragedy, outrage, and reform, illustrating how certain kinds of crimes can trigger real social progress. Several dozen such “trigger crimes” are identified but four in particular are used as case studies to investigate the most interesting questions: Why do some tragedies produce broad outrage while others, often of a very similar nature, do not? Why do some outrages produce reform while others, often with greater claims to outrageousness, do not? The tragedy-outrage-reform dynamic is sometimes society responding to a new problem, sometimes society finding in new solution to an old problem, and sometimes the product of changing societal norms. As it happens, these three different contexts have some explanatory power in understanding why and when the dynamic operates as it does. Also examined is the period following the tragedy-outrage-reform dynamic, which often reveals a serious gap between legislative reform and real-world change. On the other hand, it is also common that reforms, especially those generated by the tragedy-outrage-reform dynamic, go too far and require further revision to undo the excesses