Are the Average Effects of Foster Care Placement Really Close to Zero?

In their provocative article, Barth and colleagues interrogate existing research on a series of claims about the child welfare system. In this reply, we focus on just one of their conclusions: that foster care placement does little, on average, to cause the poor outcomes of children who are ever placed in care. Our argument proceeds in three stages. In the first, we dispute the claim that the average effects of foster care placement on children are “settled” in any scientific sense. In the second, we note that the lack of agreement about what constitutes the appropriate counterfactual makes the idea of average effects of foster care placement in this area problematic. In the third, we problematize the idea that near-zero average effects equate to unimportant effects by showing how different types of effect heterogeneity may lead us to think differently about how the system is working.

Generalized Greenberger–Horne–Zeilinger Arguments from Quantum Logical Analysis

The Greenberger–Horne–Zeilinger (GHZ) argument against noncontextual local hidden variables is recast in quantum logical terms of fundamental propositions, states and probabilities. Unlike Kochen–Specker- and Hardy-like configurations, this operator based argument proceeds within four nonintertwining contexts. The nonclassical performance of the GHZ argument is due to the choice or filtering of observables with respect to a particular state. We study the varieties of GHZ games one could play in these four contexts, depending on the chosen state of the GHZ basis.

Tipping the Scale

In this chapter, the author argues that the weighty reason to use an open donor identified by the Significant Interest view is, normally, a decisive reason. The argument proceeds by first distinguishing between intrinsic and extrinsic reasons for using an anonymous donor and then showing that, generally speaking, there are no intrinsic reasons that outweigh the reason to use an open donor identified by the Significant Interest view. While there might be extrinsic reasons that give some people decisive reason to use an anonymous donor, the author argues that the lack of intrinsic reasons means that we should work to remove extrinsic reasons for using an anonymous donor.

The Liberating Cacophony of Feelings: Kierkegaard on Emotions

This article argues that Kierkegaard’s account of emotions has something important to contribute to contemporary philosophy of emotions. The argument proceeds in five steps. The first section starts by outlining two influential paradigms in contemporary philosophy of emotions: the feeling theories and the cognitive theories. The second section then turns to a critique of two prominent approaches that read Kierkegaard’s conception of emotions as belonging to the cognitive theories. The third section presents Kierkegaard as a phenomenologist of emotional ambiguity, while the fourth section attempts to outline a taxonomy of Kierkegaard’s phenomenology of emotional experience. The fifth and final section argues that Kierkegaard’s primary contribution to contemporary philosophy of emotions is to be found in his concept of anxiety as the experience of human freedom particularly with respect to the ambiguity of feeling and understanding characteristic of this fundamental affective phenomenon.

The allure of prizes: how contests trap us in competitive relationships

Contests and prizes along with the compulsion to make winners and losers are ubiquitous features of contemporary capitalism in the USA. Combining the anthropological literature on traps and trapping, Simmel’s work on competitive relationships, film criticism, and a rereading of management consulting logic, we develop a theory of prizes as organizers and enforcers of competitive relationships. We argue that contests are traps, funnelling both the wary and unsuspecting into competitive relationships through the lure of material and symbolic rewards. Empirically, our argument proceeds through paired case studies. The first case examines how a straightforward (if technically daunting) educational project designed to teach newcomers the basics of laboratory techniques is transformed into a competitive project when a potential prize is introduced. The second case examines how people spontaneously organize and compete with each other around the promise of an amorphous and fictitious prize during the development of high-speed trading.

The Misogyny of Authoritarians in Contemporary Democracies

Contemporary democracy in multiple countries has been under assault from what has been variously called right-wing populism, authoritarian populism, cultural majoritarianism, new nativism, new nationalism, quasi-fascism, and neo-fascism. While the authoritarian behaviors of several electorally legitimated leaders in these countries have been in focus, their misogyny is seen as merely an incidental part of their personality. This article highlights the centrality of misogyny in legitimating the political goals and regimes of a set of leaders in contemporary democracies—Trump, Modi, Bolsonaro, Duterte, and Erdogan (all but Trump are still in power)—in countries from across Global North/South, non-West/West, with mixed populations and different majority religions. The argument proceeds as follows. First, I clarify the conceptualization of misogyny and explain why it matters. Second, I demonstrate the substantive misogyny of political leaders who are/have been heads of hegemonic right-wing political projects in five contemporary democracies (Trumpism, Modification, Bolsonarismo, Dutertismo, and Erdoganism). Third, I put forward three systematic ways in which misogyny works as an effective political strategy for these projects, by enabling a certain politics of identity to demonize opponents as feminine/inferior/anti-national, scavenging upon progressive ideas (rather than rejecting them) and distorting them, and sustaining and defending a militarized masculinist approach to policy and delegitimizing challenges to it. This article, thus, contributes to the literature on how masculinity, misogyny, and gender norms more broadly intersect with political legitimacy, by arguing for understanding the analytic centrality of misogyny to the exercise of political power in multiple global projects.

Restraining Situational Luck

This chapter examines circumstantial luck, or the luck of being in circumstances where a moral response or course of action is called for. The anti-anti-luckist programme is maintained for circumstantial luck as well as resultant luck. The argument proceeds, first, through an examination of Good Cases, calling for praiseworthiness. The fact that a well-intentioned agent is not in a position to collect praise for performing a meritorious act does not generate any serious moral concern. We can still praise this inactive agent for her dispositions if we wish to, and morality does not insist, in any case, upon equal opportunities for collecting praise. These lessons are then transferred to Bad Cases, calling for blameworthiness. The chapter also engages in detail with Michael Zimmerman’s argument involving situational luck, which combines circumstantial luck with constitutive luck. Zimmerman’s radical argument suggests that one agent should be no more blameworthy than another agent if they are separated only by luck, whether of the resultant, circumstantial, or constitutive variety. It is suggested here that Zimmerman’s argument misfires, due to an inconsistency between two principles he relies upon: the ‘Control Principle’ and the ‘No-Difference Claim’.

LITERATURE AS CULTURAL ECOLOGY: A CULTURAL ECOLOGICAL STUDY ON EMERSON AND WHITMAN

This article is intended to find out how a cultural ecological reading is possible for the selected poems of Emerson and Whitman who are considered as the leading figures of the nineteenth century American Renaissance, the artistic spirit which has flourished between the 1830s-1860s in the wake of the Romantic movement. Transcendentalism in America, as a projection of English Romanticism and Christian Unitarianism interprets the organic interaction in-between man, nature and god. Giving the earliest examples of Transcendentalist nature-writing, Emerson and Whitman are open for a cultural-ecological reading because cultural ecology as a new direction in ecocriticism, brings together ecology and aesthetics, nature and man, environment and literature, language and culture in other words human and non-human universes. As an inter-disciplinary theory developing in a dynamic way, cultural ecology, according to Zapf, “can be described as the interrelation of three major discursive functions such as the ‘culture-critical metadiscourse,’ ‘an imaginative counter-discourse,’ and a ‘reintegrative interdiscourse’” (Zapf 2016: 96). In the first model, the artistic work is analyzed to reveal the workings of an oppressive ideological structure and dogmatic values of the society whereas the second one points out the representations of otherness and marginalization within a text and finally last one tries to exemplify the co-evolution of both models in searching for the “transformative role of literature” within “eco-semiotic” discourse. In that sense, this article intends to find out how the poetic examples of Emerson and Whitman fit into the triadic model of cultural ecology. The argument proceeds through the illustration of Zapf’s triadic model in Emerson’s “Hamatreya,” and Whitman’s “The Splendid, Silent Sun.”

The Necessity of Contingency

Of all the standard criticisms of Marxism, the claim that it is wedded to a mechanical and deterministic account of history is among the most pervasive. It is also among the least defensible. This chapter argues that Marxism affords an especially strong set of analytical tools for explaining the contingencies of international law. Romanticising the concept of contingency as illuminative of aporia or ruptures—moments of radical uncertainty utterly at odds with the broader social contexts in which they register—risks relegating the events under scrutiny to the status of mutually unrelated accidents, to be lauded or lambasted in isolation or loose association. By contrast, a Marxist analysis of international law, one that is alive to the co-constitutive relations between class power and juridical authority, provides an explanatory framework within which contingencies may be comprehended. My argument proceeds in two stages. I first revisit some of the ways in which Marx engaged directly with questions of law and rights. I then draw upon Nicos Poulantzas’ theory of the state to propose a new Marxist approach to international law. My contention is that the question of law under capitalism is closely related to the question of contingency under capitalism, that the Marxist tradition’s responses to both questions are considerably more nuanced than they have generally been made out to be, and that being a ‘Marxist’ requires commitment not to the view that all contingency is illusory but simply to the view that contingency (like agency) is socially conditioned.

Reengaging Sound Praxis in the Real World

This chapter questions the politico-epistemological potentials of and challenges notions of dialogue and collaboration in current scholarship on sound praxis. It addresses variable meanings of both dialogue and collaboration as general signifiers central both to social processes and the ethnographic experience. What motivates dialogue and collaboration, and how do variable motivations play (or not) in contexts of struggle for political recognition and valuing of forms of knowledge and practices under pressure from exploitation, inequality, and criminalization of the oppressed? The argument proceeds through three basic steps: (a) a synthetic examination of recent reviews of collaborative/dialogic/advocacy/applied/engaged work in both soundscape and music scholarship vis-à-vis the increasing and generalized self-awareness of local-global political struggles and tensions; (b) highlighting the role often ascribed to the so-called arts in mediating the negotiation of human coexistence in conflictive and post-conflict contexts; and (c) opening a debate on political-epistemological alternatives to research on sound praxis drawing on the theorists Paulo Freire, Orlando Fals Borda, and Luis Guillermo Vasco Uribe.