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In this chapter, Arendt’s reflections on the question of personal responsibility are taken as a discussion of ‘interrupting the legal person’. Examining trials that took place…
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In this chapter, Arendt’s reflections on the question of personal responsibility are taken as a discussion of ‘interrupting the legal person’. Examining trials that took place after World War II, Arendt observes in ‘Some Questions of Moral Philosophy’, ‘What the courts demand … is that the defendants should not have participated’ (pp. 33–34). Following Arendt, the author argues that thinking could have enabled possible perpetrators of great evil to meet this demand, for when a person stops to think, whatever they are doing is interrupted. What is more, the person who stops to think is themselves interrupted by thinking. In brief, becoming aware of the possibility that they exist as a person in a mode other than what Ngaire Naffine calls ‘the responsible subject’, thinking disrupts the legal person. A discussion of thinking as interrupting the legal person thus illuminates not only what may turn a person away from participation in the life of a criminal state, but also what that turn means for responsibility.
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Purpose – This chapter examines the relationship between prenatal testing, Down syndrome identification, and selective termination practices, and it does so by considering whether…
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Purpose – This chapter examines the relationship between prenatal testing, Down syndrome identification, and selective termination practices, and it does so by considering whether the selective termination of fetuses with Down syndrome might constitute genocidal practices.
Methodology/approach – Exploratory and speculative in nature, this chapter brings the phenomenon of prenatal testing and selective termination practices together, and explores whether the increasingly widespread termination of fetuses with Down syndrome fits within definitions of genocide.
Findings – Addressing perceptions of Down syndrome and disability, and integrating aspects of crip politics and definitions of genocide, this chapter concludes that the phenomenon of selective termination involving fetuses with Down syndrome can constitute genocide when particular definitions and interpretations are adopted.
Originality/value – This chapter is perhaps the first academic text to critically evaluate the relationship between prenatal testing, selective termination of fetuses with Down syndrome, and criminological genocide scholarship. Importantly, it does not evaluate individual decision-making practices regarding termination, but instead focuses on collective practices and conditions that work to minimize the number of people with Down syndrome in society.
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This article seeks to recover and uncover the non-utilitarian excess (jouissance) in crime and punishment since Kant. Jouissance is sharply contrasted with Nietzsche’s account of…
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This article seeks to recover and uncover the non-utilitarian excess (jouissance) in crime and punishment since Kant. Jouissance is sharply contrasted with Nietzsche’s account of ressentiment. The latter is analyzed as the predominant sensation of our penal system which until today structures the subjects and institutions of punishment from within. Jouissance, on the other hand, is obscured in philosophies of punishment that attempt to account for the will to punish but ultimately fail to cover over the excess that constitutes penal theories and practices. Whether it is visible in Kant’s punitive fervor, in the exploration of perversion in de Sade and E. A. Poe, in theories of deterrence and prevention or punitive convictions in our contemporary legal culture, Freud’s discovery of a realm beyond the pleasures principle remains crucial for the understanding of the motives for crime and punishment. The essay concludes with a discussion of Nietzsche and his exploration of the ramifications of recognizing the role of new affects in crime and punishment.
Many depictions of women in the west, through images and old stories, focus on women as either mothers or as young girls in an idealized state. Whenever behaviour deemed correct…
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Many depictions of women in the west, through images and old stories, focus on women as either mothers or as young girls in an idealized state. Whenever behaviour deemed correct to their sex has been disrupted, images and tales about women shift the focus onto blame, using women as scapegoats for their persecuted lives, or showing women's essentialist biological ‘weaknesses’ as the cause of wrongdoing. Surrounded by a blame culture with its negative effects, have women demonstrated a female agency as they project blame back onto a force beyond themselves? Struggling with disappointment and fears, a common belief in ‘bad-luck’ would allow women to voice a varied imaginary of superstitions, omens and presences in the past. While such imagery derives from less legitimate forms of knowledge (i.e. vernacular), remaining chiefly in folklore and fairy, such projections which move between the interior and exterior world as liminal presences expand the domestic sphere, long considered the norm for women. The function of such blaming by women, rather than be read as complaints without a resulting action, instead can be viewed as a positive action which allowed women relief and release, a chance to express and reveal the frustrations of a group with limited power over their own lives. This chapter examines how images and tales reveal and maintain blame culture towards women and suggests a view of blame and blaming transformed into survival tools for women in the past.
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Michael Schwartz and Debra R. Comer
We argue that Oskar Schindler is a moral exemplar. Oskar Schindler and other moral exemplars should, according to Mayo, be emulated. Emulating Schindler when he acted as a moral…
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We argue that Oskar Schindler is a moral exemplar. Oskar Schindler and other moral exemplars should, according to Mayo, be emulated. Emulating Schindler when he acted as a moral exemplar could have led to others’ being helped during truly terrible times. Yet, had officialdom at that time known what Schindler was doing, he would have lost his life, and the lives of the many others he was able to save – as well as their progeny – would also have been lost. Thus, we underscore that it can be extraordinarily difficult for someone to be recognised as a moral exemplar when a moral exemplar is so desperately needed.
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This article combines Mead's notion of sociality with his implicit theory of morality. Specifically, it uses Mead's emphasis on temporality to analyze decisions made by key…
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This article combines Mead's notion of sociality with his implicit theory of morality. Specifically, it uses Mead's emphasis on temporality to analyze decisions made by key characters in the cinematic adaptation (Amazon TV) of Philip Dick's novel, The Man in the High Castle. Using a selective and subversive method to read into this adaptation, I regard Mead's view of morality as complex and as distinguishing between a morality in the specious present and a morality grounded in sociality. The paper links Mead and Mead's pragmatic emphasis to varieties of characters representing immoral foils (e.g., Nazis) and everyday lives to show how morality can emerge from a variety of standpoints, locating Mead's position as distinct from moral absolutism and moral relativity.