Our curious silence about kindness in planning: Challenges of addressing vulnerability and suffering

2020 ◽  
pp. 147309522093076 ◽  
Author(s):  
John Forester

Discussions of “justice” in planning are commonplace; discussions of “kindness,” strangely enough, are rare. Perhaps not by accident. Taking “compassion” as an empathetic, intentional orientation toward suffering, we analyze “kindness” as the situated action of compassion that requires—following and extending analysis of Martha Nussbaum—four contingent, contextually sensitive practical judgments: (1) empathetic recognition of another’s vulnerability or suffering; (2) causal/moral gauging of the sources of that vulnerability or suffering; (3) crafting of acts to mitigate that vulnerability/suffering, and (4) forming the motivation to respond practically to that Other’s situation. Diverse planning cases from Cleveland, the Canadian Yukon, and Australia illuminate these practical judgments. We show how these contingent judgments can go wrong and thereby produce not kindness but humiliation, shame and victim blaming, pity and condescension, or dependency not autonomy. In doing so, the article makes a fresh contribution toward analyzing the moral requirements of, and the risks faced in, any planning seeking to respond to others’ vulnerabilities and suffering.

2007 ◽  
Author(s):  
Catherine Coppolillo ◽  
Ed De St. Aubin ◽  
Eric Vandevoorde

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Maryam Falahatpishe Baboli ◽  
Farzan Karimi-Malekabadi

Sexual assaults are a social problem in Iran; however, psychological factors that predict perceptions of sexual assault remain largely unexamined. Here, we examine the relationship between moral concerns, culture-specific gender roles and victim blaming in sexual assault scenarios in Iranian culture. Relying on Moral Foundations Theory and recent theoretical developments in moral psychology in Iranian context, we examined the correlations between five moral foundations (Care, Fairness, Loyalty, Authority, Purity), a culture-specific set of values called Qeirat (which includes guarding and (over)protectiveness of female kin, romantic partners, broader family, and country), and victim blaming. In a community sample of Iranians (N = 411), we found Qeirat values to be highly correlated with victim blaming, and that this link was mediated by a number of culture-specific proscriptions about women’s roles and dress code (i.e., Haya). In a regression analysis with all moral foundations, Qeirat values, Haya, and religiosity as predictors of victim blaming, only Haya, religiosity, high Authority values, and low Care values were found to predict how strongly Iranian participants blamed victims of sexual assault scenarios.


Author(s):  
Julian Velasco

This chapter examines fiduciary duty in corporate law. Fiduciary duty is pervasive as well as all encompassing in corporate law. One common misconception about fiduciary duty in corporate law is that it is merely aspirational. Fiduciary duties are not simply moral requirements, they are legal ones. They are not merely suggestions, they represent the demands of the law. Although corporate law has often compromised rather than insisting upon strict enforcement of fiduciary law principles, these compromises are due to practical considerations that are entirely consistent with the goals of fiduciary law. In corporate law, general fiduciary law principles are balanced with practical considerations concerning the profit motive in order to achieve the best overall result for the shareholders. Understanding this tension between ambition and practicality is key to understanding fiduciary duty in corporate law. This chapter first considers the triggers for fiduciary duty in corporate law before discussing the role that the duty of loyalty plays in corporate law. It then explores the duty of care in corporate law, along with other fiduciary duties such as good faith, takeover situations and contests for control, shareholder voting rights, and the duty to monitor and the duty to disclose. The chapter proceeds by analyzing mandatory and default rules regarding the extent to which fiduciary duties can be waived in corporate law and concludes with an overview of remedies for breach of fiduciary duty.


2021 ◽  
pp. 026975802110106
Author(s):  
Raoul Notté ◽  
E.R. Leukfeldt ◽  
Marijke Malsch

This article explores the impact of online crime victimisation. A literature review and 41 interviews – 19 with victims and 22 with experts – were carried out to gain insight into this. The interviews show that most impacts of online offences correspond to the impacts of traditional offline offences. There are also differences with offline crime victimisation. Several forms of impact seem to be specific to victims of online crime: the substantial scale and visibility of victimhood, victimisation that does not stop in time, the interwovenness of online and offline, and victim blaming. Victims suffer from double, triple or even quadruple hits; it is the accumulation of different types of impact, enforced by the limitlessness in time and space, which makes online crime victimisation so extremely invasive. Furthermore, the characteristics of online crime victimisation greatly complicate the fight against and prevention of online crime. Finally, the high prevalence of cybercrime victimisation combined with the severe impact of these crimes seems contradictory with public opinion – and associated moral judgments – on victims. Further research into the dominant public discourse on victimisation and how this affects the functioning of the police and victim support would be valuable.


Hypatia ◽  
2021 ◽  
pp. 1-22
Author(s):  
Lee Wilson

Abstract Social philosophers often invoke the concept of false consciousness in their analyses, referring to a set of evidence-resistant, ignorant attitudes held by otherwise sound epistemic agents, systematically occurring in virtue of, and motivating them to perpetuate, structural oppression. But there is a worry that appealing to the notion in questions of responsibility for the harm suffered by members of oppressed groups is victim-blaming. Individuals under false consciousness allegedly systematically fail the relevant rationality and epistemic conditions due to structural distortions of reasoning or knowledge practices, undermining their status as responsible moral agents. But attending to the constitutive mechanisms and heterogeneity of false consciousness enables us to see how having it does not in itself render someone an inappropriate target of blame. I focus here on the 1889 antisuffragist manifesto “An Appeal against Female Suffrage,” arguing that its signatories, despite false consciousness, satisfy both conditions for ordinary blameworthiness. I consider three prominent signatories, observing that the irrationality characterization is unsustainable beyond group-level diagnoses, and that their capacity to respond appropriately to reasons was not compromised. Following recent work on epistemic injustice, I also argue that culpable mechanisms constituted their false consciousness, rendering them blameworthy for the Appeal.


Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document