Scripts in Rural Élites’ Attitude as Narrative Barriers in the Hungarian–Roma Interethnic Relations in Szeklerland (Romania)

Relying on an interview-based research conducted in Romania’s Szeklerland area, in settlements with a significant Roma population where the majority of the inhabitants are of Hungarian ethnicity, the present study investigates the non-Roma rural élites’ attitude towards the local Roma population. The regional relevance of the topic is indicated by the fact that the importance of the Roma population’s social integration is present in social publicity, while at the same time the three decades following the 1989 socio-political turn in Romania witnessed only a few attempts at the planning and launching of programmes aimed at the Roma population’s social integration. In the course of the past three decades, the regional institutions and élites have repeatedly shuffled off the professional thematization and practical addressing of this issue, whereas in principle they emphasized the importance of social integration. This study aims to explore some of the components making up the background of the above-outlined ambivalent attitude. With the script analysis method, we intend to look into what scripts rural elite actors adopt in building the narratives on the Hungarian–Roma attitude and what role this narrative creation has in the case of the élite belonging to the Hungarian ethnic majority.

The Primacy of Intention and the Duty to Truth: A Gandhi-Inspired Argument for Retranslating Hiṃsā and Ahiṃsā, with Connections to History, Ethics, and Civil Resistance

The words "violence" and "nonviolence" are increasingly misleading translations for the Sanskrit words hiṃsā and ahiṃsā -- which were used by Gandhi as the basis for his philosophy of satyāgraha. I argue for re-reading hiṃsā as “maleficence” and ahiṃsā as “beneficence.” These two more mind-referring English words – associated with religiously contextualized discourse of the past -- capture the primacy of intention implied by Gandhi’s core principles, better than “violence” and “nonviolence” do. Reflecting a political turn in moral accountability detectable through linguistic data, both the scope and the usage of the word “violence” have expanded dramatically. The expanded scope of “violence” reflects greater consciousness of the various forms that serious harm can take, but also makes it harder to convincingly characterize people and actions as “nonviolent.” New translations could clarify the distinction between hiṃsā and ahiṃsā, and thereby prevent some misunderstandings of Gandhi. Training in beneficence would reflect Gandhi’s psychological path to reducing avoidable harm: detachment from the ego, learning to love universally, and seeking truth by experiment.

“AI will fix this” – The Technical, Discursive, and Political Turn to AI in Governing Communication

Technologies of “artificial intelligence” (AI) and machine learning (ML) are increasingly presented as solutions to key problems of our societies. Companies are developing, investing in, and deploying machine learning applications at scale in order to filter and organize content, mediate transactions, and make sense of massive sets of data. At the same time, social and legal expectations are ambiguous, and the technical challenges are substantial. This is the introductory article to a special theme that addresses this turn to AI as a technical, discursive and political phenomena. The opening article contextualizes this theme by unfolding this multi-layered nature of the turn to AI. It argues that, whereas public and economic discourses position the widespread deployment of AI and automation in the governance of digital communication as a technical turn with a narrative of revolutionary breakthrough-moments and of technological progress, this development is at least similarly dependent on a parallel discursive and political turn to AI. The article positions the current turn to AI in the longstanding motif of the “technological fix” in the relationship between technology and society, and identifies a discursive turn to responsibility in platform governance as a key driver for AI and automation. In addition, a political turn to more demanding liability rules for platforms further incentivizes platforms to automatically screen their content for possibly infringing or violating content, and position AI as a solution to complex social problems.

The Freegan Challenge to Veganism

There is a surprising consensus among vegan philosophers that freeganism—eating animal-based foods going to waste—is permissible. Some ethicists even argue that vegans should be freegans. In this paper, we offer a novel challenge to freeganism drawing upon Donaldson and Kymlicka’s ‘zoopolitical’ approach, which supports ‘restricted freeganism’. On this position, it’s prima facie wrong to eat the corpses of domesticated animals, as they are members of a mixed human-animal community, ruling out many freegan practices. This exploration reveals how the ‘political turn’ in animal ethics can offer fertile lenses through which to consider ethical puzzles about eating animals.