Pornography

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mari Mikkola
Keyword(s):  
Civil Rights ◽  
Hate Speech ◽  
Social Ontology ◽  
Feminist Philosophy ◽  
Philosophical Work ◽  
Starting Point ◽  
Feminist Pornography ◽  
Private Matter ◽  
Political Commitments ◽  
Philosophical Debates

Everyday and philosophical debates concerning pornography are fraught with many difficult questions. These include: What is pornography? What does pornography do (if anything at all)? Is the consumption of pornography a harmless private matter, or does pornography violate women’s civil rights? What, if anything, should legally be done about pornography? Can there be feminist pornography? Answering these questions is complicated by confusion over the conceptual and political commitments of different anti- and pro-pornography positions, and whether these positions are even in tension with one another: different people understand the concept of pornography differently and easily end up talking past one another. This book provides an opinionated and accessible introduction to contemporary philosophical debates on pornography, which will be conducted from a feminist perspective. The book’s starting point is morally neutral, and it provides a comprehensive discussion of various philosophical positions on pornography that are found in ethics, aesthetics, feminist philosophy, political philosophy, epistemology, and social ontology. Topics include: whether pornography subordinates and silences women; free speech versus hate speech; whether pornography produces a distinct kind of knowledge; whether it objectifies and if so, in what sense; how should we think about the aesthetics of pornography; what difference do nonheteronormative, female-friendly and/or queer pornography make to philosophical debates. The book clarifies different stances in the debate, thus helping readers to understand what is at stake in philosophical examinations of pornography. In so doing, it also offers readers important methodological insights about doing philosophical work on something so this-worldly as pornography.

The Decision of the General Meeting of Members in a Non-Public Business Company: Concept and Types

2020 ◽  
Vol 2 (2) ◽  
pp. 148-169
Author(s):  
V. K. Andreev ◽  
◽  
V. A. Kondratiev ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Civil Rights ◽  
General Meeting ◽  
Business Community ◽  
Positive Law ◽  
State Register ◽  
Business Results ◽  
Starting Point ◽  
Business Entities ◽  
State Registration ◽  
A Company

Introduction. The article examines the features of holding general meetings of members in non-public business companies, in particular questions about the place of decisions of general meeting in the system of legal facts, their relationship with the deal and the contract. The ability to use digital technology in decision making. Theoretical Basis. Methods. The article is based on an analysis of the norms of positive law, primarily the Civil Code and the Laws on Company Business. Results. The authors conclude that the starting point in the activities of a non-public business company is the acquisition and exercise of their civil rights and the fulfilment of duties, and not a legal relationship that includes civil rights and civil duties as a necessary element. In addition, the decision of a general meeting, despite having many features in common, is not a deal. The decision of a general meeting, acting as an act of individual regulation, is in fact an act of a legal entity, and not a decision of the business community. The authors proposed a classification of decisions of meetings of business entities, depending on the method of their adoption, the possibilities being: the unanimously adoption by all participants of the company; decisions of the meeting of members of a company being adopted by a majority, or a qualified majority, of votes; decisions of the meeting of members of a company to change its charter, reorganization and liquidation of the company, requiring state registration in the unified state register of legal entities. The decision of a general meeting can be made either in person or in absentia, or a combination of the two. The decision of the meeting adopted in absentia will be valid, despite the absence of any special document establishing the procedure for its adoption. Discussion and Conclusion. Decisions of general meetings are actions of participants in a business company concerning legal consequences, including civil rights and obligations, in cases specified by law, and binding on all persons entitled to participate in the meeting, as well as other persons, whether required by law or having some other involvement.

Social Ontology and Model-Building: A Response to Epstein

2021 ◽  
Vol 51 (2) ◽  
pp. 176-192
Author(s):  
Nadia Ruiz
Keyword(s):  
Social Sciences ◽  
Social Science ◽  
Model Building ◽  
Social Ontology ◽  
Model Construction ◽  
Ontological Commitments ◽  
Starting Point ◽  
The Social

Brian Epstein has recently argued that a thoroughly microfoundationalist approach towards economics is unconvincing for metaphysical reasons. Generally, Epstein argues that for an improvement in the methodology of social science we must adopt social ontology as the foundation of social sciences; that is, the standing microfoundationalist debate could be solved by fixing economics’ ontology. However, as I show in this paper, fixing the social ontology prior to the process of model construction is optional instead of necessary and that metaphysical-ontological commitments are often the outcome of model construction, not its starting point. By focusing on the practice of modeling in economics the paper provides a useful inroad into the debate about the role of metaphysics in the natural and social sciences more generally.

Confessions of a Free Speech Lawyer

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rodney A. Smolla
Keyword(s):  
Civil Rights ◽  
Free Speech ◽  
Hate Speech ◽  
Task Force ◽  
Supreme Court Decision ◽  
Law Schools ◽  
History Of ◽  
Gang Rape ◽  
The Right ◽  
The City

This personal and frank book offers an insider's view on the violent confrontations in Charlottesville during the “summer of hate.” Blending memoir, courtroom drama, and a consideration of the unhealed wound of racism in our society, the book shines a light on the conflict between the value of free speech and the protection of civil rights. The author has spent his career in the thick of these tempestuous and fraught issues, from acting as lead counsel in a famous Supreme Court decision challenging Virginia's law against burning crosses, to serving as co-counsel in a libel suit brought by a fraternity against Rolling Stone magazine for publishing an article alleging that one of the fraternity's initiation rituals included gang rape. The author has also been active as a university leader, serving as dean of three law schools and president of one and railing against hate speech and sexual assault on US campuses. Well before the tiki torches cast their ominous shadows across the nation, the city of Charlottesville sought to relocate the Unite the Right rally; the author was approached to represent the alt-right groups. Though the author declined, he came to wonder what his history of advocacy had wrought. Feeling unsettlingly complicit, the author joined the Charlottesville Task Force, and realized that the events that transpired there had meaning and resonance far beyond a singular time and place. Why, he wonders, has one of our foundational rights created a land in which such tragic clashes happen all too frequently?

Rights, Dignity, and Public Accommodations

2020 ◽  
Vol 38 (3) ◽  
pp. 599-619
Author(s):  
Christopher W. Schmidt
Keyword(s):  
Civil Rights ◽  
Racial Discrimination ◽  
The United States ◽  
Legal Rights ◽  
Moral Issue ◽  
Civil Rights Era ◽  
National Debate ◽  
Starting Point ◽  
Public Rights ◽  
History Of

In this essay I consider why debates over applying anti-discrimination norms to public accommodations have long been, and remain today, such a resilient presence in the history of the United States. I use as my starting point the most famous iteration of this phenomenon, the national debate sparked by the 1960 sit-in movement and culminating in the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which banned racial discrimination in public accommodations across the nation. The battle over racial discrimination and public accommodations in the early 1960s illuminates the moral issue at the heart of the issue, the lines of argument that characterize the debate over how to define legal rights in this area, and the ways in which different legal institutions have resolved, or failed to resolve, the issue. I then move backward time, highlighting the continuities between this episode and the struggle over race and public accommodations during Reconstruction. The history of the civil rights era provides a useful framework to analyze the terms of debate from a century earlier, and it provides particular insights into the significance of the concept of public rights that Rebecca Scott has so effectively brought to our attention.

“How dare you call her a pig, I know several pigs who would be upset if they knew”

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Eleonora Esposito ◽  
Sole Alba Zollo
Keyword(s):  
Large Scale ◽  
Hate Speech ◽  
Gender Based Violence ◽  
Amnesty International ◽  
Representation Of Women ◽  
Starting Point ◽  
Depth Analysis ◽  
Discourse Studies ◽  
Gender Based ◽  
Online Misogyny

Abstract On the occasion of the 2017 UK election campaign, Amnesty International conducted a large-scale, sentiment-based analysis of online hate speech against women MPs on Twitter (Dhrodia 2018), identifying the “Top 5” most attacked women MPs as Diane Abbott, Joanna Cherry, Emily Thornberry, Jess Phillips and Anna Soubry. Taking Amnesty International’s results as a starting point, this paper investigates online misogyny against the “Top 5” women MPs, with a specific focus on the video-sharing platform YouΤube, whose loosely censored cyberspace is known as a breeding ground for antagonism, impunity and disinhibition (Pihlaja 2014), and, therefore, merits investigation. By collecting and analysing a corpus of YouTube multimodal data we explore, critique and contextualize online misogyny as a techno-social phenomenon applying a Social Media Critical Discourse Studies (SM-CDS) approach (KhosraviNik and Esposito 2018). Mapping a vast array of discursive strategies, this study offers an in-depth analysis on how technology-facilitated gender-based violence contributes to discursively constructing the political arena as a fundamentally male-oriented space, and reinforces stereotypical and sexist representation of women in politics and beyond.

The Frustrated Activist

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Emily Abrams Ansari
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Cold War ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
Musical Theater ◽  
New Left ◽  
Art Music ◽  
Leonard Bernstein ◽  
New York Philharmonic ◽  
Civil Rights Movements ◽  
Political Commitments

This chapter presents an account of the composer and conductor Leonard Bernstein, who, although constrained significantly by the ideological climate of the 1950s, refused to silence himself politically. Beginning in the last years of the decade, he became increasingly vocal in his support for New Left causes, including the antiwar, antinuclear, and civil rights movements. On State Department–funded conducting tours with the New York Philharmonic, he tried to use music, particularly the Americanist tradition, to challenge US foreign policy. In his compositions, he remained true to musical Americanism, striving earnestly in his art music to continue Copland’s prewar approach. He found a fruitful outlet for his political commitments in his works for musical theater, but his art music compositions present a much more complex and fraught picture. Bernstein was attempting to resist and undermine political nationalism, while simultaneously advancing cultural nationalism. But in the binarized climate of Cold War America, this would not prove easy.

The Concept of Rights as Limits on Government

1990 ◽  
Vol 3 (2) ◽  
pp. 8-9
Author(s):  
Jennifer Nedelsky
Keyword(s):  
Civil Rights ◽  
Private Property ◽  
The Political ◽  
Individual Rights ◽  
Political Rights ◽  
Bill Of Rights ◽  
The People ◽  
Starting Point ◽  
Central Argument ◽  
Republican Government

Most Americans take for granted the notion that the powers of government are circumscribed by individual rights. But this commonplace notion is, in fact, very complicated conceptually and poses difficult problems institutionally. This course explored both the conceptual and the institutional problems, from their origins to their contemporary manifestations. We began with the formation of the Constitution: the writing of the document in the Constitutional Convention of 1787, its ratification, the addition of the Bill of Rights in 1789, and the establishment of judicial review. As a starting point, I offered my own perspective through excerpts from my forthcoming book, Private Property and the Limits of American Constitutionalism: The Madisonian Framework and Its Legacy. My central argument is that the Framers' concern with protecting the rights of property distorted both their understanding of constitutionalism and the institutions they designed to implement that understanding. The Framers wanted to design a republican form of government based on the notion of consent by the governed, and thus some form of democratic (as we would call it today) representation. But the Federalists, whose views dominated the convention, also wanted to ensure that civil rights would be secure in the new republic. Property became the focus of their efforts to make the political rights implicit in republican government compatible with the security of civil rights. Unfortunately, their focus on the protection of unequal property, the property of the minority as threatened by the (future) propertyless majority, distorted their vision of the basic problem of protecting individual rights in a democracy. Their fears of the propertyless bred a focus on containing the political power of the people.

scholarly journals This Is What a Historicist and Relativist Feminist Philosophy of Disability Looks Like

2015 ◽  
pp. 7-42 ◽  
Author(s):  
Shelley Tremain
Keyword(s):  
Friedrich Nietzsche ◽  
Disability Studies ◽  
Explanatory Power ◽  
Western Philosophy ◽  
Feminist Philosophy ◽  
Philosophical Work ◽  
Philosophy Of Disability

With this article, I advance a historicist and relativist feminist philosophy of disability. I argue that Foucault’s insights offer the most astute tools with which to engage in this intellectual enterprise. Genealogy, the technique of investigation that Friedrich Nietzsche famously introduced and that Foucault took up and adapted in his own work, demonstrates that Foucault’s historicist approach has greater explanatory power and transgressive potential for analyses of disability than his critics in disability studies have thus far recognized. I show how a feminist philosophy of disability that employs Foucault’s technique of genealogy avoids ahistorical, teleological, and transcultural assumptions that beleaguer much work in disability studies. The article also situates feminist philosophical work on disability squarely in age-old debates in (Eurocentric) Western philosophy about universalism vs. relativism, materialism vs. idealism, realism vs. nominalism, and freewill vs. determinism, as well as contributes to ongoing discussions in (Western) feminist philosophy and theory about (among other things) essentialism vs. constructivism, identity, race, sexuality, agency, and experience. 

scholarly journals Złożoność zjawiska mowy nienawiści w pozaprawnym aspekcie definicyjnym

2017 ◽  
Vol 39 (2) ◽  
pp. 117-135
Author(s):  
Michał Urbańczyk ◽  
Ewelina Rogalska
Keyword(s):  
Public Sphere ◽  
Hate Speech ◽  
Public Debate ◽  
Political Debate ◽  
Starting Point

THE COMPLEXITY OF THE HATE SPEECH PHENOMENON IN TERMS OF ITS NON-LEGAL DEFINITIONAL ASPECTThe starting point is thinking that the modern political debate manifests in the degradation of the culture of discussion. One of the issues that can be observed next to this phenomenon is the brutalization of the language of public debate — hate speech is becoming more and more common. The aim of the paper is the description and the characteristic of vital aspects which appear in accordance to the designation of hate speech and its manifestations in public sphere.

Gay Straight Communication

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Fabio Fasoli
Keyword(s):  
Sexual Orientation ◽  
Gay Men ◽  
Hate Speech ◽  
Well Being ◽  
Physical Distance ◽  
Positive Attitudes ◽  
Self Acceptance ◽  
And Bisexual ◽  
Private Matter ◽  
The One

Sexual orientation is a private matter that individuals can decide to disclose or conceal. Nevertheless, when interacting with others, people look for cues of sexual orientation. Hence, the person’s face, voice, or non-verbal behavior is taken as a cue revealing sexual orientation. As research on “gaydar” has shown, this detecting ability can sometimes be accurate or stereotype-based. Sometimes gay, lesbian, and bisexual people themselves intentionally communicate their sexual identity explicitly or through more subtle cues. Intentional or not, several cues are taken as communicating sexual orientation with the consequences of shaping interpersonal interactions. Identifying someone as gay or lesbian has several implications. On the one hand, it leads straight men and women to non-verbally behave differently than when interacting with other straight individuals (e.g., more physical distance, more self-touching). On the other hand, it also affects verbal communication (e.g., topics of conversation, questions, and statements). The harshest consequence is hate speech and homophobic language. Research has shown that being labeled as “faggot” or “dyke” not only negatively affects those who are the target of such verbal derogation but also negatively impacts on straight bystanders. Indeed, gay and lesbian targets of homophobic language report a lower level of well-being and self-acceptance, while being exposed to such language increases prejudice toward gay men and lesbians among straight people. In the case of straight men, the use of homophobic language is often associated with identity self-affirmation and self-presentation. Interestingly, a recent trend among gay people has been noticed: they use homophobic labels among them as a form of “reclaimed language,” meaning that these derogatory terms are used with a different intent and reframed in a more positive way. Moreover, communicating sexual orientation can increase self-acceptance, social support, and positive social comparison among gay men and lesbians and can also increase positive attitudes toward gay people, especially when it happens with friends and family members.

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