The Power to be Ethical: Controlling Moral Assemblages in Border Militias

Every year, hundreds of U.S. citizens patrol the Mexican border dressed in camouflage and armed with pistols and assault rifles. Unsanctioned by the government, these militias aim to stop the movement of narcotics into the United States. Recent interest in the anthropology of ethics has focused on how individuals cultivate themselves toward a notion of the ethical. In contrast, within the militias, ethical self-cultivation was absent. I argue the volunteers derived the power to be ethical from the control of the dominant moral assemblage and the construction of an immoral “Other” which provided them the power to define a moral landscape that limited the potential for ethical conflicts. In the article, I discuss two instances Border Watch and its volunteers dismissed disruptions to their moral certainty and confirmed to themselves that their actions were not only the “right” thing to do, but the only ethical response available.

Aristóteles e a Lógica da Contingência: uma interpretação tradicional do argumento da batalha naval

Since Antiquity, the meaning and purpose of Aristotle’s sea-battle argument have been highly controversial. On the so-called traditional interpretation of De Interpretatione 9, the argument is intended to prove that not every statement is always true or false on the assumption deemed evident that facts may occur contingently in our sublunar world. In this paper I argue that this interpretation is for many reasons much more plausible than any of its competitors, so that its correctness is worthy at least of moral certainty. In particular, I contend that it can coexist in perfect logical harmony with a moderately charitable reading of Aristotle’s texts that at first glance it seems to confute. As a matter of fact, I contend that it is faithful to Aristotle’s view of logical laws as consequent upon the metaphysical structure of reality.

Whose hearing matters? Context and regimes of perception in sociolinguistics

This piece argues for the importance of centering regimes of perception and the dynamics of power in sociolinguistics, drawing upon cases where Chinese and Korean terms have been heard and enregistered as English slurs. It notes how different interlocutors mobilize phenomena at various scales in invocations of context. It calls for greater attention to the range of subject positions that are produced by speakers, perceivers, and institutions and a reconsideration of the moral certainty of our analyses. It challenges us to rethink the ontological status of the linguistic sign as a self-presenting entity and to develop frameworks of analysis that can look across scales.

Moral Discernment and Doubt in the Human Journey

An ongoing challenge within all approaches to ethical decision making is reducing the degree of doubt about what action is right, good, or at least better in a given situation. The process of moral discernment within Christian thought is no exception; however, different Christian communities tend to understand moral doubt and moral certainty differently, to pursue different ways of allaying doubt, and to expect—and accept—different degrees of moral certainty. Drawing especially from Aristotelian virtue theory, selected teachings from the Eastern Orthodox tradition on humility, and recent discussions of the ‘grace of self-doubt,’ I sketch an account of virtuous moral doubt as a mean between the extremes of excessive and deficient moral doubt. My hope is doing so will help to make space and provide the framework for an ecumenical understanding of doubt’s proper role in moral discernment.

Strong Public Claims May Not Reflect Researchers’ Private Convictions

How confident are researchers in their own claims? Augustus De Morgan suggested that researchers may initially present their conclusions modestly, but afterwards use them as if they were a “moral certainty”. To prevent this from happening, De Morgan proposed that whenever researchers make a claim, they accompany it with a number that reflects their degree of confidence. Current reporting procedures in academia, however, usually present claims without the authors’ assessment of confidence. Here, we report the partial results from an anonymous questionnaire on the concept of evidence.

On Algorithmic Opacity and Moral Certainty

In modern society, algorithms play an important role in social and cultural realms, in political and economic spheres. In spite of algorithmic pervasiveness in many areas and wide diffusion in digital life, algorithmic opacity is still poorly understood compared to other ethical issues (e.g., fairness, accountability, and transparency). In this essay, we try to elucidate the relation between algorithmic opacity and moral certainty from the individualistic standpoint and through the virtue ethic perspective. For doing so, we follow hermeneutic tradition and rely on interpretation of recent authors and impactful papers. We summarize our argument as follows: if the algorithm is understood as the combination of rules and numbers we create for simplifying our lives and sharing with others, then our present activities and future actions as imagined, realized or missed, ascertain if algorithmic opacity become a moral issue or problem for us and others. Among the implications, we emphasize that sometime dormant and hard to anticipate, algorithmic opacity becomes an apparent during executions, deployments and prolonged uses of algorithmic systems. Moreover, our lived experience and disharmony between our unrealized expectations and unanticipated algorithmic behavior may lead to moral issues and problems for us and others. Overall, algorithmic opacity may constantly evade the formalization efforts (e.g., outlining as guidelines, principles) or quantification exercises (e.g., assigning numerical values to symbols or signs), both of which are essentially social practices.