Diversity Reading List

Abstract: On October 25, 1946, three weeks after the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg entered its verdicts, the United States established Military Tribunal I for the trial of twenty-three Nazi physicians. The charges, delivered by Brigadier General Telford Taylor on December 9, 1946, form a seminal chapter in the history of medical ethics and, specifically, medical ethics in war. The list of noxious experiments conducted on civilians and prisons of war, and condemned by the Tribunal as war crimes and as crimes against humanity, is by now more or less familiar. That list included: high-altitude experiments; freezing experiments; malaria experiments; sulfanilamide experiments; bone, muscle, and nerve regeneration and bone transplantation experiments; sea water experiments; jaundice and spotted fever experiments; sterilization experiments; experiments with poison and with incendiary bombs. What remains less familiar is the moral mindset of doctors and health care workers who plied their medical skill for morally questionable uses in war. In his 1981 work, The Nazi Doctors, Robert Jay Lifton took up that question, interviewing doctors, many of whom for forty years continued to distance themselves psychologically from their deeds. The questions about moral distancing Lifton raised (though not the questions about criminal experiments) have immediate urgency for us now. Military medical doctors, psychiatrists and psychologists serve in U.S. military prisons in Guantánamo, Abu Ghraib, Kandahar, and, until very recently, in undisclosed CIA operated facilities around the world where medical ethics are again at issue. Moreover, they serve in top positions in the Pentagon, as civilian and military heads of command, who pass orders and regulations to military doctors in the field, and who are in charge of the health of enemy combatants, as well as U.S. soldiers. Because we recently marked the sixtieth anniversary of the judgment at Nuremberg, I want to awaken our collective memory to the ways in which doctors in war, even in a war very different from the one the Nazis fought, can insulate themselves from their moral and professional consciences.

Abstract: Lawyers often work pro bono to liberate death-row inmates from flawed legal verdicts that otherwise would kill them. This is the first book on practical philosophy of science, how to practically evaluate scientific findings with life-and-death consequences. Showing how to uncover scores of scientific flaws - typically used by special interests who try to justify their pollution - this book aims to liberate many potential victims of environmentally induced disease and death.It shows how citizens can help uncover flawed science and thus liberate people from science-related societal harms such as pesticides, waste dumps, and nuclear power. It shows how flawed biology, economics, hydrogeology, physics, statistics, and toxicology are misused in ways that make life-and-death differences for humans. It thus analyzes science at the heart of contemporary controversies - from cell phones, climate change, and contraceptives, to plastic food containers and radioactive waste facilities. It illustrates how to evaluate these scientific findings, instead of merely describing what they are. Practical evaluation of science is important because, at least in the United States, 75 percent of all science is funded by special interests, to achieve specific practical goals, such as developing pharmaceuticals or showing some pollutant causes no harm. Of the remaining 25 percent of US science funding, more than half addresses military goals. This means that less than one-eighth of US science funding is for basic science; roughly seven-eighths is done by special interests, for practical projects from which they hope to profit. The problem, however, is that often this flawed, special-interest science harms the public.

Abstract:

By looking at a canonical article representing academic philosophy’s orthodox view against cultural relativism, James Rachels’ “The Challenge of Cultural Relativism,” this paper argues that current mainstream western academic philosophy’s fear of cultural relativism is premised on a fear of the racial Other. The examples that Rachels marshals against cultural relativism default to the persistent, ubiquitous, and age-old stereotypes about the savage/barbarian Other that have dominated the history of western engagement with the non-western world. What academic philosophy fears about cultural relativism, it is argued, is the barbarians of the western imagination and not fellow human beings. The same structure that informs fears of cultural relativism, whereby people with different customs are reduced to the barbarian/savage of the western imagination, can be seen in the genesis of international law which arose as a justification for the domination of the Amerindian (parsed as “barbarians”). It is argued that implicit in arguments against cultural relativism is the preservation of the same right to dominate the Other. Finally, it is argued that the appeal of the fear of cultural relativism is that, in directing moral outrage at others, one can avoid reflecting on the failures of one’s own cultural tradition.

Summary: Sigman studies outrage and offense in the art context. The first important observation she makes is that, often enough, the public's recoiling from a piece of art comes with the assumption that the object of offense is interpretatively transparent. This is because in the absence of art-historical or theoretical wherewithal, we default to pre-conceptual reactions - fear of otherness, loss of our ethical bearings, low self-esteem etc. Since most historical offense-based arguments against art have made a claim that the particular work is demeaning to the public, Sigman carefully lays out the features of demeaning treatment - a mostly intentional act that treats persons as less than persons, usually in an abusive manner. On this description, very few artworks could be considered demeaning. Furthermore, as Sigman shows in her art-historical contextualization of artist Stelarc's performance work Street Suspension, public outrage could be tempered and/or extinguished through attentive engagement with problematic artworks.

Summary: Starting from our appreciation of cubist portraits, asks why it to commonplace for us to contemplate distorted depictions of faces with eagerness and enjoyment but to be repelled by real people whose physiognomies resemble the depicted ones. Argues that the aesthetic process that permits our attraction to portrayed human anomalies can be expanded so as to offset the devalued social positioning of real people whose physiognomic features are anomalous. Presenting an anomaly as originality rather than deviance is crucial.

Summary: Follow-up essay on her 'From the Crooked Timber of Humanity, Beautiful Things Can Be Made' (note the one-word difference in the title). Adds the idea that medical professionals have at least a mild duty to cultivate aesthetic judgment of individuals with biological differences. Also makes the case that beauty is not the same thing as attractiveness or normalcy.

Abstract:

Despite emerging attention to Indigenous philosophies both within and outside of feminism, Indigenous logics remain relatively underexplored and underappreciated. By amplifying the voices of recent Indigenous philosophies and literatures, I seek to demonstrate that Indigenous logic is a crucial aspect of Indigenous resurgence as well as political and ethical resistance. Indigenous philosophies provide alternatives to the colonial, masculinist tendencies of classical logic in the form of paraconsistent—many-valued—logics. Specifically, when Indigenous logics embrace the possibility of true contradictions, they highlight aspects of the world rejected and ignored by classical logic and inspire a relational, decolonial imaginary. To demonstrate this, I look to biology, from which Indigenous logics are often explicitly excluded, and consider one problem that would benefit from an Indigenous, paraconsistent analysis: that of the biological individual. This article is an effort to expand the arenas in which allied feminists can responsibly take up and deploy these decolonial logics.

Summary: As 'always already' racialized object of the white patriarchal look African-Americans have enduringly suffered from having to negotiate notions of the self from a crisis position. The act of self-portraiture for the African-American artist has the value of bestowing upon the self-portraitist a sense of empowerment.

Abstract: Consent is a bedrock principle in democratic society and a primary means through which our law expresses its commitment to individual liberty. While there seems to be broad consensus that consent is important, little is known about what people think consent is. This article undertakes an empirical investigation of people’s ordinary intuitions about when consent has been granted. Using techniques from moral psychology and experimental philosophy, it advances the core claim that most laypeople think consent is compatible with fraud, contradicting prevailing normative theories of consent. This empirical phenomenon is observed across over two dozen scenarios spanning numerous contexts in which consent is legally salient, including sex, surgery, participation in medical research, warrantless searches by police, and contracts. Armed with this empirical finding, this Article revisits a longstanding legal puzzle about why the law refuses to treat fraudulently procured consent to sexual intercourse as rape. It exposes how prevailing explanations for this puzzle have focused too narrowly on sex. It suggests instead that the law may be influenced by the commonsense understanding of consent in all sorts of domains, including and beyond sexual consent. Meanwhile, the discovery of “commonsense consent” allows us to see that the problem is much deeper and more pervasive than previous commentators have realized. The findings expose a large—and largely unrecognized—disconnect between commonsense intuition and the dominant philosophical conception of consent. The Article thus grapples with the relationship between folk morality, normative theory, and the law.

Publisher's Note: Justice, Gender and the Politics of Multiculturalism explores the tensions that arise when culturally diverse democratic states pursue both justice for religious and cultural minorities and justice for women. Sarah Song provides a distinctive argument about the circumstances under which egalitarian justice requires special accommodations for cultural minorities while emphasizing the value of gender equality as an important limit on cultural accommodation. Drawing on detailed case studies of gendered cultural conflicts, including conflicts over the 'cultural defense' in criminal law, aboriginal membership rules and polygamy, Song offers a fresh perspective on multicultural politics by examining the role of intercultural interactions in shaping such conflicts. In particular, she demonstrates the different ways that majority institutions have reinforced gender inequality in minority communities and, in light of this, argues in favour of resolving gendered cultural dilemmas through intercultural democratic dialogue.

Abstract: Article: The article examines the idea of multiculturalism in contemporary political philosophy. It considers the variety of justifications for multiculturalism, including communitarian, liberal egalitarian, anti-domination, and historical injustice arguments. It then surveys a number of critiques of multiculturalism. It concludes by discussing concerns about political backlash and retreat from multiculturalism in the Western liberal democratic countries.

Summary: Sontag mines the history of philosophical aesthetics and art criticism for the reasons why interpretation has held us under its spell for the last two millennia. One such reason is our insistence on the form/content dichotomy and the vestigial prioritizing of content in the way we talk about art. Another reason is the discursive, and thus political, control that interpretation enables. A third reason is our willingness to sacrifice our unmediated experience of an artwork, and our sensitivity to an artist's intentions, for the sake of interpretative success. To counter these "reactionary, impertinent, cowardly, stifling" tendencies, Sontag proposes an "erotics of art" - a new emphasis on transparence, which favors description and appreciation over interpretation. This critical ethos does not only change the terms of conceptual engagement; it also opens the gates for creative approaches to art which explicitly challenge vestigial modes of meaning-making and meaning extraction. Even though Sontag does not specifically single any of these approaches out, performance art is arguably the most extreme of the potential candidates.

Abstract: This paper examines the relationship of bonding with nonhuman animals during an interactive, animal-in-the-wild science program and the science attitudes of 358 young children between the ages of 8 and 14 Talking Talons utilizes typically wild animals such as raptors, reptiles, and bats in a school-based educational science curriculum. Qualitative data from interviews with students in the program indicated that 'bonding with animals' and the educators within the program were related to increased positive attitudes toward science. The program used quantitative methods to examine these dual relationships - with animals and with educators- on student attitude toward science. The program performed a step-wise multiple regression with 'Attitude toward Science' as the dependent variable and 'Gender,' 'Age,' and 'Bonding with Animals' as independent variables. Both 'Bonding with Animals' and 'Bonding with the Educator' contributed significantly to prediction of the participants' science attitudes. Altogether 28% of the variance in 'Science Attitude' was predicted by both 'Gender' and 'Age' , 'Bonding with Animals' and 'Bonding with Educator'. Bonding with the animals had a large quantifiable relationship with student attitudes toward science.

Abstract: Srinivasan attempts to address the question of how we are able to dwell in the ambivalent place where we acknowledge that no one is obligated to desire anyone else, that no one has a right to be desired, but also that who is desired and who isn’t is a political question, a question usually answered by more general patterns of domination and exclusion.

Content: Modifies and then defends a Rawlsian theory of justice from the charge that it cannot adequately account for the claims of severely disabled individuals who cannot participate fully in schemes of cooperation.