Surrealism, an Exalting Freedom: The Sexual and Erotic Dimension

This article aims at exploring the sexual factor, which sensitized and even scandalized the contemporaries of Surrealism. The tendency for a different kind of freedom put the Surrealist movement at the forefront of the changes that happened in the twentieth century. The Surrealists became aware that sexuality was becoming a source of huge scandals and debates and they thought of using it as an “attack” weapon. In the Second Surrealist Manifesto, Breton calls upon every Surrealist “to level at the breed of ‘moral duties’ the long-range weapon of sexual cynicism ».

Cicero

This chapter explores Cicero’s republican political philosophy. It argues that Cicero’s political thought has two fundamental principles. First, Cicero argues that there are universally applicable moral duties—the natural law—that are binding on everyone always. These principles have their basis in humans’ nature as rational beings. Second, he argues that a legitimate regime will recognize the people as the ultimate source of authority. No political regime can be just without resting on this basis. But these two principles threaten to come into conflict whenever the people’s will contradicts natural law. The chapter examines Cicero’s attempt to mediate this conflict. It also explores Cicero’s conceptions of liberty, justice, property, and empire, all of which emerge out of the relationship between the claims of natural law and popular sovereignty.

Quintilian as a Literary Critic

This chapter is devoted to the study of the Institutio oratoria as a complex space in which Quintilian, in addition to developing an education manual, a rhetorical treatise, and an essay on the orator’s moral duties and obligations, also includes theoretical reflections on literary criticism as well as analysis and assessments of specific literary works. In this sense, this chapter studies Quintilian as a literary critic. From a general and theoretical point of view, it reviews the relations established within the framework of the Institutio oratoria between literary criticism and poetarum enarratio, or exegesis of poetic texts, which should be practised by grammar students before continuing to the study of rhetoric. This review forces us to reconsider the question of the interdependence that exists between grammar and rhetoric as classical sciences of discourse. From an applicative and practical perspective, the chapter stresses the importance of Book 10 for a better knowledge of the literary critical analyses and evaluations that Quintilian makes of the most important works and authors of Greek and Roman literature, always in relation to its usefulness for the orator’s training through the exercise of reading and on the basis of the principle of imitation of literary models, which not only include poetic texts, but also historical, philosophical, and rhetorical texts. Finally, the chapter reviews the theory of Attic, Asianic, and Rhodian styles in Quintilian’s thinking and his defence of the one which, even defined by hybridization, best adapts itself to the pragmatic-communicative requirements of the rhetorical fact.

A Puzzle of Enforceability: Why do Moral Duties Differ in their Enforceability?

When someone is poised to fail to fulfil a moral duty, we can respond in a variety of ways. We might remind them of their duty, or seek to persuade them through argument. Or we might intervene forcibly to ensure that they act in accordance with their duty. Some duties appear to be such that the duty-bearer can be liable to forcible interference when this is necessary to ensure that they comply with them. We’ll call duties that carry such liabilities enforcement-apt. Not all duties seem to be enforcement-apt. Some, for example, accept that a person in a monogamous marriage has a moral duty to refrain from infidelity, but deny that a spouse can be compelled to comply with their duty to be faithful without transgressing her rights. More controversially, some think that our duties to assist others in severe need are not enforcement-apt. What could explain the contrast between duties that are enforcement-apt while and those that are not? We’ll call this the puzzle of enforceability and our paper considers three broad strategies for responding to it. The first strategy takes the form of identifying some substantive feature or features that are necessary and/or sufficient for a duty to possess some enforcement status. We consider a range of candidate explanations of this sort but find that none are plausible. The second strategy rejects the idea that there are genuinely enforcement-inapt duties and instead seeks to explain why there can nonetheless be marked differences amongst duties concerning how they can be enforced and who can enforce them. We find that this strategy too is largely unsuccessful. The third strategy offered seeks an explanation of differences in enforcement status by appeal to the broader social costs of enforcing certain kinds of duties. We find that this approach holds some promise but note that it requires adopting a controversial set of moral commitments. We conclude by considering our options in the absence of a solution to our puzzle.

RZYMIANIE I ICH PRAWO. INSTYTUCJE SPOŁECZEŃSTWA NIEEGALITARNEGO

Roman authors demonstrated this hierarchy-oriented approach already when talking about the very establishment of Rome by Romulus, who divided then the foundational community into social orders of patricians and plebeians. Rome begins not with the individuals entering into a kind of social contract but with the pre-existing community. This community is granted with new identity with establishment of a specific order, that allowed addressing all the needs of the community and provided it with significant potential for expansion. Both social orders were burdened with the duties of mutual care and the specific duties towards Roman community itself. Therefore, the social relationships were understood in terms of duties and not rights. In order to provide for proper functioning of this social system, special institutions were established. Among others, that were described, particular attention was paid to Censors being in charge of supervising appropriate moral conduct of the citizens. The Censors exercised control over the way in which the citizens performed their moral duties, i.e. whether they have been observing mores (socially accepted patterns of conduct) in social life. Requirements stemming from the mores depended on the social position, and the higher the social position was, the greater were the requirements towards a given citizen. Censors could punish a citizen who had violated mores, with a censor’s note (nota censoria). The effect of the censor’s note were diverse and could entail severe consequences ending with exclusion from the community which resulted in deprivation of citizenship (capitis deminutio media).

Beneficence, Non-Identity, and Responsibility: How Identity-Affecting Interventions in Nature can Generate Secondary Moral Duties

In chapter 3 of Wild Animal Ethics Johannsen argues for a collective obligation based on beneficence to intervene in nature in order to reduce the suffering of wild animals. In the same chapter he claims that the non-identity problem is merely a “theoretical puzzle” (p.32) which doesn’t affect our reasons for intervention. In this paper I argue that the non-identity problem affects both the strength and the nature of our reasons to intervene. By intervening in nature on a large scale we change which animals come into existence. In doing so, we enable harmful animals to inflict harms on other animals, and we put other animals in harm’s way. The harms that these animals will inflict and endure are foreseeable. Furthermore, since non-human animals aren’t moral agents, harmful animals cannot be morally responsible for their harmful actions. I argue therefore that by causing animals to exist, knowing that they will inflict and suffer harms, we become morally responsible for those harms. By engaging in identity-affecting actions then we take on secondary moral duties towards the animals we have thereby caused to exist, and these secondary moral duties may be extremely demanding, even more so than the initial costs of intervention. Finally, these duties are duties of justice rather than duties of beneficence, and as such are more stringent than purely beneficence-based moral reasons. Furthermore, this conclusion flows naturally from several plausible principles which Johannsen explicitly endorses.

Management of Medical Data in Emerging Threats

"Emerging viral or bacterial threats pose significant medical and ethical issues, caused not only by the management of the disease, but also by the uncontrolled dissemination of information, both true and fake. Even the most correct and impartially presented piece of information can be understood by the patients or by the public at large in ways that are opposite to those intended by the communicators. This, associated with the increased prevalence of fake news, may cause havoc and decrease the efficacy of the needed preventive measures that have to be taken to tackle the actual medical problem. Within the context of the coronavirus outbreak, this has been coined as “infodemic”, increasing the difficulty of finding an optimal solution to the actual problem. Medical data about an emerging medical threat is disseminated through mass – and social media, especially by public authorities and physicians. The latter have specific duties, appertaining to their professional codes of morals, toward minimizing the harms generated by diseases, both at a personal and at a populational level. In infodemics, the management of the information they present to the public is extremely important, as each wording can be improperly interpreted and cause opposite effects. In this paper, we will discuss whether and which healthcare professionals should be involved in disseminating information about emerging healthcare threats, and which moral duties should prevail in these instances. "

FREEDOM OF EXPRESSION AND SOCIAL COERCION

ABSTRACT Much legal and philosophical work has been devoted to discussing the importance of protecting freedom of expression from legislative curtailment by the state. That state-centric focus has meant that the ways that wider social phenomena can stifle freedom of expression have, with a notable exception, escaped sustained philosophical attention. The paper reflects on the nature of socially coercive restrictions on free expression and offers an account of how it is appropriate to respond to such forms of social coercion. First, it considers a range of social costs pertaining to expression and argues that such costs can constitute meaningful restrictions on the freedom to express. Second, it reflects on the normative implications concerning that threat to free expression and defends two related moral duties citizens have to refrain from being complicit in unjustified social coercion—a duty of expressive toleration and a duty of respect for expressive agency.