Testimony, Responsibility and Recognition: A Ricoeurian Response to Crises of Sexual Abuse

How can we, as individuals and as members of religious, educational, and/ or social institutions, more adequately respond to the crises of sexual abuse that have come to light in recent years? This paper will address this question through the philosophical lens of Paul Ricoeur. The argument proposed here is that through Ricoeur’s hermeneutics of testimony, responsibility, and recognition, we can begin to approach, address, and evaluate the crises of sexual abuse we face by grounding our ethical reflections, and actions, within a more robust philosophical framework. Therefore, this paper will proceed as follows. The first three sections will investigate Ricoeur’s writings in order to glean from them three distinct hermeneutical approaches to three different sets of criteria at play in contemporary crises of sexual abuse: first, a hermeneutics of testimony, related to memory and history; second, a hermeneutics of responsibility, related to authority and justice; and, finally, a hermeneutics of recognition, related to forgiveness and forgetting. Insofar as each of these hermeneutical approaches offers us some insight into the problematics underlying crises of sexual abuse, the fourth section will offer an evaluation of these approaches by focusing on the specific case of the sexual abuse crisis in the Catholic Church. The final section will consider possible avenues for resolution of these crises through Ricoeur’s notion of exceptional “states of peace,” at the heart of which lies mutual recognition. My hope is that this contribution provides new avenues for conversation and deliberation, as well as new resources and frameworks for articulating and implementing responsible action in the face of sexual abuse

Job Satisfaction in Newspaper Ad Departments

The results of a study indicate that newspaper advertising employees are not as dissatisfied as their editorial counterparts but that they are the least satisfied of any group in the advertising industry

Anti-Racist Policies in France. From Ideological and Historical Schemes to Socio-Political Realities

In France, since the 1980s, imaginaries derived from decolonization have played a major role in the elaboration of anti-racist policies. Simultaneously, because of the universalistic conception of the French Republic, the use of ethnic categories has been taboo and systematically replaced, in political schemes, by socio-economic criteria. Multiculturalism, in the Anglo-Saxon meaning, has therefore not been a traditional political analysis framework. Nevertheless, since the 1990s, the French model of integration, which was based on the individual, has been more and more accused of giving way to inequalities and racism. For ten years, the rise of the concept of the «ethnicization» of cultural groups in public debate has thus inspired political demands that require concrete answers, notably against urban violence and education.Anti-racist policies, French model of integration, Multiculturalism, Ethnicization, Urban violence, Education

La transparence du politique et ses limites. Négociations d’intérêts et pluralisme « moral »

Il est courant aujourd’hui que des revendications politiques tirent argument de la pluralité et de l’irréductibilité des horizons moraux pour rejeter des modalités établies de gestion des conflits politiques. Postulant la possibilité du marchandage, celles-ci n’auraient aucune prise sur les logiques identitaires, ni aucune légitimité face à elles. La volonté de rendre compte de ces phénomènes a provoqué une réorientation majeure de la pensée théorique, où la notion de « pluralisme moral » occupe désormais une place centrale. Or, si des débats intenses tournent autour de la nature de la personnalité morale et les conséquences institutionnelles qu’il conviendrait d’en tirer, le pluralisme moral lui-même semble être passé dans le sens commun. Il est pourtant fragile, comme le montre son rapport avec le pluralisme classique des groupes d’intérêt. En dépit de son habillage « moral », la version contemporaine du pluralisme serait en fait impossible à distinguer, dans son fonctionnement politique effectif, du bon vieux pluralisme « polyarchique ». L’articulation théorique essentielle à cet égard est le jeu de la transparence et de l’opacité du conflit politique, ou encore la présence ou l’absence d’une norme d’interaction politique où les raisons d’une revendication sont un critère décisif de la légitimité de celle-ci. Or, de ce point de vue, le pluralisme « moral » est ambivalent, et finalement profondément contradictoire. À supposer que le défi du pluralisme des valeurs soit aussi important qu’on le prétend, la théorie politique du pluralisme moral n’y a pas vraiment répondu.Political claims commonly argue that the plurality of incommensurable moral horizons now renders traditional modes of conflict management obsolete. In particular, the bargaining model has no relevance or legitimacy with respect to identity politics. The desire to give an account of such phenomena has led to a major shift within political theory, where the notion of "moral pluralism" has a key role. While intense debate surrounds the nature of moral personhood and its institutional implications, moral pluralism itself appears taken for granted. Yet its fragility is revealed by a comparison with traditional interest group pluralism. Indeed, in spite of its "moral" language, the contemporary version of pluralism would be indistinguishable, in practical political terms, from good old polyarchy. The crucial theoretical issue in this respect is the play of transparency and opacity with respect to political conflict, in other words the presence or absence of a norm of political interaction in terms of which the reasons for making a claim are decisive in assessing the claim's legitimacy. In these terms, "moral" pluralism is ambivalent, and ultimately deeply contradictory. If the challenge of value pluralism is as important as is, the political theory of moral pluralism has not yet provided an adequate answer

Declarative Immutability in Java

A pervasive mechanism is proposed to declare that variables and object instances are mutable or immutable, and whether methods mutate instances. These declarations are integral to the type structure of the language and allow the developer to declare, and the reader (and compiler) to determine, if a variable or instance is immutable (even if other instances of the Class are mutable) or that an instance is immutable throughout the application (a Pure instance). The concept of the owner or outsiders of variables and instances is combined with a series of tags to declare mutability, and can be enforced during compilation. This provides a more informative definition of the interface for a Class, requires fewer lines of code for implementation, and reduces the runtime overhead of defensive coding (creating clones). In a multi-threaded application, flagging a Pure instance to the JVM can provide significant performance improvements by eliminating unnecessary synchronizations. Many of the benefits recognized for Functional Programming are introduced to Java as an optional enhancement

Family Relations and Inheritance in Early South Carolina

This study analyzes the inheritance strategies of testators in coastal lowcountry South Carolina from the period of settlement to the 1790s. It measures the modification there of customary English attitudes to property relations among family members. Most other studies of inheritance in early modern Anglo-American society have considered it as a process involving patriarchal property relations, with intergenerational definitions of family interests, with primary attention to land, and with preference for males as landholders. By contrast, inheritance decisions in South Carolina played down the distinctiveness of land as a special type of property and tended to give family members, females as well as males, equal and independent shares in the succession. Cette étude analyse les stratégies successorales adoptées par les testateurs de la région côtière de la Caroline du Sud depuis les débuts de la colonisations jusqu’aux années 1790. Elle mesure le changement du comportement traditionnel anglais devant la transmission de la propriété entre les membres de la famille. La plupart des autres travaux sur la succession dans les treize colonies anglo-américaines sont arrivés à un schéma marqué par une transmission de propriété de type patriarcal, définissant en termes de générations les intérêts de la famille, mettant l’accent sur la terre et privilégiant la filiation masculine des biens fonciers. Par contre, dans les décisions prises en matière successorale en Caroline du Sud, la terre perdait son caractère distinct en privilégié par rapport à d’autres types de propriété, et il y avait tendance à une transmission égalitaire — et sans primauté sexuelle — du patrimoine entre les membres de la famille