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By Mary Warnock

In "Ethics Since 1900," renowned philosopher Mary Warnock provides a comprehensive analysis of the evolution of ethical theories and debates over the past century. From the rise of utilitarianism and deontology to contemporary discussions on environmental ethics and bioethics, Warnock navigates the complex landscape of moral philosophy with clarity and insight. Drawing on her expertise, Warnock delves into key ethical issues such as personal autonomy, justice, and the ethical implications of technological advancements. "Ethics Since 1900" is a thought-provoking exploration of the ever-evolving ethical considerations that shape our understanding of right and wrong in the modern world.

Oxford University Press, 1960, 212 pages

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BY MAX HORKHEIMER AND THEODOR W. ADORNO

Dialectic of Enlightenment is, quite justifiably, one of the most celebrated and often cited works of modern social philosophy. It has been identified as the keystone of the 'Frankfurt School', of which Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer were the leading members, and does not cease to impress in its wide-ranging ambition and panache. Adorno and Horkheimer addressees themselves to a question which went to the very heart of the modern age, namely 'why mankind, instead of entering into a truly human condition, is sinking into a new kind of barbarism'. Modernity, far from redeeming the promises and hopes of the Enlightenment, had resulted in a stultification of mankind and an administered society, characterised by simulation and candy-floss entertainment. To seek an answer to the question of how such a condition could arise, Adorno and Horkheier subjected the whole history of Western catagories of reason and nature, from Homer to Nietzsche, to a searching philosophical and psychological critique. Drawing on psychoanalytical insights, their own work on the 'culture industry', deep knowledge of the key Enlightenment and anti-Enlightenment thinkers, as well as fascinating considerations on the relationship between reason and myth - the rational and the irrational - the authors exposed the domination and violence towards both nature and humanity that underpin the Enlightenment project

Verso, 1997, 258 pages

By Calvin L. Warren

In Ontological Terror Calvin L. Warren intervenes in Afro-pessimism, Heideggerian metaphysics, and black humanist philosophy by positing that the "Negro question" is intimately imbricated with questions of Being. Warren uses the figure of the antebellum free black as a philosophical paradigm for thinking through the tensions between blackness and Being. He illustrates how blacks embody a metaphysical nothing. This nothingness serves as a destabilizing presence and force as well as that which whiteness defines itself against. Thus, the function of blackness as giving form to nothing presents a terrifying problem for whites: they need blacks to affirm their existence, even as they despise the nothingness they represent. By pointing out how all humanism is based on investing blackness with nonbeing—a logic which reproduces antiblack violence and precludes any realization of equality, justice, and recognition for blacks—Warren urges the removal of the human from its metaphysical pedestal and the exploration of ways of existing that are not predicated on a grounding in being.

Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2018. 233p.

Edited by Ibo van de Poel, Lily Frank, Julia Hermann, Jeroen Hopster, Dominic Lenzi, Sven Nyholm, Behnam Taebi, and Elena Ziliotti

Technologies shape who we are, how we organize our societies and how we relate to nature. For example, social media challenges democracy; artificial intelligence raises the question of what is unique to humans; and the possibility to create artificial wombs may affect notions of motherhood and birth. Some have suggested that we address global warming by engineering the climate, but how does this impact our responsibility to future generations and our relation to nature? This book shows how technologies can be socially and conceptually disruptive and investigates how to come to terms with this disruptive potential. Four technologies are studied: social media, social robots, climate engineering and artificial wombs. The authors highlight the disruptive potential of these technologies, and the new questions this raises. The book also discusses responses to conceptual disruption, like conceptual engineering, the deliberate revision of concepts.

Cambridge, UK: Open Book Publishers, 2023 188p.

By Jan Breman

For a long time, Europe’s colonizing powers justified their urge for expansion with the conviction that they were ‘bringing civilization to territories where civilization was lacking.’ This doctrine of white superiority and indigenous inferiority was accompanied by a boundless exploitation of local labor. Under colonial rule, the ideology that later became known as neoliberalism was free to subject labor to a capitalism tainted by racialized policies. This political economy has now become dominant in the Western world, too, and has reversed the trend towards equality. In Colonialism, Capitalism and Racism, Jan Breman shows how racial favoritism is no longer contained to ‘faraway, indigenous peoples,’ but has become a source of polarization within Western societies as well.

Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2024. 434p.

By JM Berger

Can legal codes and court rulings function as extremist ideological texts? 

Academics usually define extremism as a set of beliefs that fall outside the norms of the society in which they are situated, but entire societies have at times been organized around recognizably extreme beliefs. This paper will examine the U.S. Supreme Court decision in Scott v. Sandford, 60 US 393 (1856), more commonly known as the Dred Scott decision. Widely considered the worst Supreme Court decision of all time, the opinion written by Chief Justice Roger B. Taney decreed that Black people, whether enslaved or free, could never become citizens of the United States and that they had no rights under the Constitution. 

This paper will analyze the Dred Scott decision to consider whether and how it implements and institutionalizes many widely recognized tropes of extremist ideology. The paper will conclude with a discussion of empirical frameworks that can enable and empower the study of lawful extremism. 

United States, Middlebury Institute of International Studies at Montery. 2023, 57pg

By Enzo Nussio

How do moral beliefs influence favorability to collective violence? In this article, I argue that, first, moral beliefs are influential depending on their salience, as harm avoidance is a common moral concern. The more accessible moral beliefs in decision-making, the more they restrain harmful behavior. Second, moral beliefs are influential depending on their content. Group-oriented moral beliefs can overturn the harm avoidance principle and motivate individuals to favor collective violence. Analysis is based on a representative survey in Mexico City and focuses on a proximate form of collective violence, locally called lynching. Findings support both logics of moral influence. Experimentally induced moral salience reduces favorability to lynching, and group-oriented moral beliefs are related to more favorability. Against existing theories that downplay the relevance of morality and present it as cheap talk, these findings demonstrate how moral beliefs can both restrain and motivate collective violence.
Comparative Political StudiesOnlineFirst© The Author(s) 2023

By Antonia Lucia Dawes

Race talk is about language use as an anti-racist practice in multicultural city spaces. The book contends that attention to talk reveals the relations of domination and subordination in heterogeneous, ethnically diverse and multilingual contexts, while also helping us to understand how transcultural solidarity might be expressed. Drawing on original ethnographic research conducted on licensed and unlicensed market stalls in heterogeneous, ethnically diverse and multilingual contexts, this book examines the centrality of multilingual talk to everyday struggles about difference, positionality and entitlement. In these street markets, Neapolitan street vendors work alongside documented and undocumented migrants from Bangladesh, China, Guinea Conakry, Mali, Nigeria and Senegal as part of an ambivalent, cooperative and unequal quest to survive and prosper. As austerity, anti-immigration politics and urban regeneration projects encroached upon the possibilities of street vending, talk across linguistic, cultural, national and religious boundaries underpinned the collective action of street vendors struggling to keep their markets open. The edginess of their multilingual organisation offered useful insights into the kinds of imaginaries that will be needed to overcome the politics of borders, nationalism and radical incommunicability.

Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 2020.

Edited by Willemijn Ruberg, Lara Bergers, Pauline Dirven and Sara Serrano Martínez

This edited volume examines the performance of physicians, psychiatrists and other scientists as expert witnesses in modern European courts of law and police investigations. Its chapters discuss cases from criminal, civil and international law to parse the impact of forensic evidence and expertise in different European countries (Scotland, England, Germany, Spain, Italy, Russia, Portugal, Norway and the Netherlands) in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. They show how modern forensic science and technology was inextricably entangled with political ideology, gender norms, changes in the law and legal systems. New scientific ideas and technology, such as blood tests and DNA, helped develop forensic science, but did not necessarily lead to a straightforward acceptance of expertise in the courtroom. Discussing fascinating case studies, the chapters in this book highlight how the ideology of authoritarian and liberal regimes affected the practical enactment of forensic expertise. They also emphasise the influence of images of masculinity and femininity on the performance of experts and their assessment of evidence, victims and perpetrators, for example in cases of rape, infanticide and crimes of passion. This book is an important contribution to our knowledge of modern European forensic practices, which, as several chapters underline, sometimes surprisingly diverge from institutional regulations.

Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 2023. 304p.

By Katrin Frisch

Ezra Pound, T. S. Eliot, and Wyndham Lewis have all, to varying degrees, been the subject of studies that explore their ideology. All too often, however, these studies have not tackled the issue adequately, limiting their analytical approach to fascism or other phenomena such as anti-Semitism. Frequently, they have also sought to exculpate these writers or to normalise their political tendencies in an effort to circumnavigate the dilemma of how to address the paradox of right-wing artists who are both harbingers and opponents of the imagined trajectory of progressive modernity. This interdisciplinary study analyses the connections between literary Modernism and right-wing ideology. Moreover, it is the first academic study to explore the reception of these Modernist authors by today's far right, seeking to understand in what ways they use strategic readings of Modernist texts to legitimise right-wing ideology. By raising fundamental questions about the relationship between aesthetics and politics, this study ultimately challenges its readers to see their cultural practices as political. It wants to make visible and problematize the interdependencies of right-wing ideology and cultural production as well as reception in order to explain the (far) Right as a phenomenon deeply rooted in European history and cultural development. It thus lays bare the misconceptions, the gaps as well as the complicity in the debate about right-wing ideology in literature.

Berlin: Logos Verlag Berlin GmbH , 2019. 378p.

By Syed Muhammad Ishraque Osman, Antonia Gkergki

Limited scholarly attention has been devoted to examining the impact of immigration on developing economies relative to developed ones. Even the impact of immigration on developed nations continues to be a subject of intense debate. The voluminous empirical literature that has emerged in this field is far from conclusive. In this paper we test the impact of an unprecedented increase in immigrants with dissimilar social, but similar human capital on the host country’s crime. To do this we explore the Syrian refugee influx in Turkey. Our work contributes to the new area of research in the literature by examining how immigrants with varying levels of social capital affect emerging economies rather than developed ones. We found no impact on violent crime, but found a significant impact on non-violent crime. Using a more machine learning approach of ‘Trajectory Balancing’, we found our significant impact result for the non-violent crime to be robust and strikingly close. We also use 'Causal Forest' which is one of the most sophisticated (if not the most) causal machine learning methods. Using Causal Forest, we effectively unmasked the average treatment effect on the non-violent crime rate and investigate the heterogeneous treatment effect depending on region level characteristics, which can greatly assist policymakers in this regard. We also argue that the higher impact on non-violent crime rate is due to the displacement of natives by migrants, from the more competitive informal job (agricultural) sector in the treated regions

Unpublished paper, 2023. 41p.

By Carolina Scaramutti https://orcid.org/0000-0002-4587-5316c.scaramutti@gmail.com, Renae Danielle Schmidt, et al.

Millions of Venezuelans have fled their country in hopes for a better future outside the political and financial turmoil in their home country. This paper examines the self-reported needs of Venezuelans in the United States and Colombia. Specifically, it looks at perceived discrimination in each country and its effect on the service needs of Venezuelan immigrants. The authors used data from a larger project conducted in October to November 2017 to perform a qualitative content analysis on the specific services that participants and others like them would need following immigration. The sample consisted of 647 Venezuelan immigrant adults who had migrated to the United States (n = 342) or Colombia (n = 305).

Its findings indicate statistically significant differences between the two countries. Venezuelan immigrants in the United States were more likely to identify mental health and educational service needs, while those in Colombia were more likely to list access to healthcare, help finding jobs, and food assistance. When looking at perceived discrimination, means scores for discrimination were significantly greater for participants who indicated needing housing services, who indicated needing assistance enrolling children in school and who indicated needing food assistance, compared to participants who did not list those needs. Venezuelans who had experienced greater negative context of reception were less likely to indicate needing mental health services, where 11.9 percent of those who did not perceive a negative context of reception responded that they needed mental health services.

Evaluating existing service networks will be essential in working to bridge the gap between the services provided to and requested by Venezuelans. Collaboration between diverse government actors, community-based organizations (CBOs) and other stakeholders can help identify gaps in existing service networks. CBOs can also facilitate communication between Venezuelan immigrants and their new communities, on the need to invest in necessary services.

 Journal on Migration and Human Security, 0(0).  (online 2023)

By Niloufer Taber, Lina Cook, Chris Mai and Jennifer Hill

Access to education is in high demand among the incarcerated population. There are clear benefits to students who are incarcerated, their families and communities, public safety, and safety inside prisons. Yet the gap in educational aspirations and participation has been largely driven by a lack of capacity due to limited funding.

The Manhattan District Attorney’s Criminal Justice Investment Initiative funded the College-in-Prison Reentry Initiative (CIP) to close this gap by expanding access to college education in prisons throughout New York State. In this report, Vera Institute of Justice (Vera) researchers unpack the impact of participation in degree programs offered by seven colleges participating in CIP and reveal the effects that college in prison can have on in-facility behavior, recidivism, employment, and income after release. Vera additionally presents a cost analysis of program delivery and potential expansion, in order to better understand the potential return on investment of such initiatives.

New York: Vera Institute of Justice, 2023. 52p.

By Christopher M. Campbell, et al.

In an effort to empirically explore and identify potential areas of reform that might exist in the Oregon Board of Parole and Post-Prison Supervision (the Board) release process hearings and decision-making process, the Criminal Justice Reform Clinic at Lewis & Clark Law School (CJRC) launched a project funded by Arnold Ventures in November of 2020. This project aimed to understand how incarcerated potential parolees (petitioners) and parolees in the community are impacted by the Board’s process using a large-scale mixed method (qualitative and quantitative) research study. Moreover, the purpose of the study is also to examine how the Board’s decisions and processes may be related to certain outcomes (e.g., initial release and supervision failure). Where possible, special attention is given to differences in race/ethnicity of the parolee and subsequent outcomes of decisions and supervisions. The key research goals of this study were to (1) determine if there are any patterns in Board decisions to release an eligible person to parole supervision, (2) determine if there are any differences across cases brought before the Board, (3) identify how the hearing and decision-making process impact eligible parties/parolees, and (4) examine the degree to which release decisions are accurate in determining a parolee’s likelihood to reoffend. Below are summaries of each goal and a brief overview of the takeaway messages from each section. Please note that the data and findings associated with each goal capture cases released over the last several years. They encompass laws that have changed as well as many Board member cohorts that have long since turned over during the analyzed time-frame. For this report, the Board is examined and discussed as a living institution, the scope of which can be impacted depending on who serves on it. Thus, none of the conclusions provided here are directed at any one cohort of Board members, including the current Board. In fact, limited data were available on decisions made by the current cohort for this report due to several reasons (e.g., COVID-19 disruptions and lack of staffing resources). All findings and conclusions are drawn from data and reflections that incorporate multiple Board cohorts and governor administrations. As a result, all recommendations made here are focused on reforms to improve the fairness, transparency, and legitimacy of the Board as an institution while maintaining the mission of public safety. Recommendations are provided to emphasize the fact that the Board’s processes and policies transcend any single cohort of Board members and culture, and the codification of data-driven policies is the best way to safeguard fairness across Board cohorts. 

Portland, OR:  Criminal Justice Reform Clinic at Lewis & Clark Law School . 2020. 93p.

By John Bae

Housing is a human right. However, for many people in the United States, the right to safe and affordable housing is not secure. Discriminatory and restrictive policies bar admission to housing for millions of people with a history of arrest or conviction. But housing providers and policymakers are now taking steps to address this. In recent years, the agencies that administer the Low-Income Housing Tax Credit (LIHTC) program have started to adopt more inclusive policies. In this report, Vera consolidates state housing finance agencies’ rules and regulations that determine admission to affordable housing for people with conviction histories. The policies across the country reflect varying admissions standards, highlighting opportunities for jurisdictions to increase housing stability and public safety.

New York: Vera Institute of Justice, 2023. 26p

By Jacqueline Altamirano Marin, John Bae and Niloufer Taber

Housing is foundational for people to succeed post-incarceration. However, restrictive housing policies bar people with conviction histories from securing a home. To estimate the scope of this issue in Oklahoma, Vera analyzed criminal justice data and the admissions policies of public housing authorities and developments funded by the Low-Income Housing Tax Credit (LIHTC) program. The fact sheet sheds light on the number of people affected by these policies and offers recommendations to increase access to safe and affordable housing for all individuals.

New York: Vera Institute of Justice, 2023. 3p.

By Daniel LaChance

It was a compromise that admitted Missouri into the Union as a state in 1821, temporarily settling a question that would soon divide the country into civil war: was it moral for white people to own Black people as property? In Missouri, the answer was yes, and it joined the Union only with assurance that white people could lawfully continue to own enslaved Black people in the territory. A few decades later, the United States Supreme Court told one of those enslaved men, a man named Dred Scott, that not only would he remain in slavery in Missouri, but also that he was not, and never would be, a citizen of the United States. From the beginning, therefore, race was a critical part of Missouri’s origin story, and racial bias in all its forms — segregation, discrimination, con#ict, and violence – informed its future. "is report focuses on the death penalty — its past and present use. By studying who are targeted, prosecuted, and executed  in Missouri, both legally and illegally, clear patterns emerge. "e data show that the race of defendants and the race of their victims has always played an outsize role in determining who will be sentenced to death in Missouri. "ere are also strong correlations suggesting that charging decisions, crime solving, and policing are also in#uenced by Missouri’s historical treatment of Black people. "e areas of concern identi!ed in this report are deserving of careful study, and may be of particular interest to researchers, legislators, and advocates. Early death penalty statutes identified specific crimes that were only punishable by death if committed by an enslaved person. Historically, a person’s race was the most important factor in determining whether they would be punished by death in Missouri. In 1804, the territory encompassing present-day Missouri adopted “"e Law Respecting Slaves,” which outlined a series of crimes punishable by death only if they were committed by an enslaved person. "ese crimes included slave conspiracy to rebel, make insurrection, or murder; slave preparation, exhibition, or administration of any medicine; and stealing a slave. Black people and white people alike were eligible to receive death sentences for any of the following crimes: treason, murder, arson, and burglary or robbery where an innocent person died.1 "en in 1820, white delegates in the territory attended the Missouri Constitutional Convention and drafted the !rst state constitution. Among the provisions they adopted was a death penalty statute that purported to eliminate these racial distinctions. Article III, Section 27 of the constitution read in part, “...a slave convicted of a capital o%ence shall su%er the same degree of punishment, and no other, that would be in#icted upon a free white person for a like o%ence...” "e subsequent section dictated that “Any person who shall maliciously deprive of life or dismember a slave, shall su%er such punishment as would be in#icted for the like o%ence if it were committed on a free white person.”2 While this provision super!cially eliminated racially speci!c death sentences, the reality was that race continued to play a critical role in determining who would live or die in Missouri, either at the hands of the state or by a murderous mob. 

Washington, DC: Death Penalty Information Center, 2023.   43p.

By Daniel LaChance

In the immediate aftermath of Reconstruction, coverage of executions in the Atlanta Constitution and the New Orleans (Times-)Picayune occasionally portrayed African Americans executed by the state as legally, politically, and spiritually similar to their white counterparts. But as radical white supremacy took hold across the South, the coverage changed. Through an analysis of 667 newspaper articles covering the executions of Black and white men in Georgia and Louisiana from 1877 to 1936, I found that as lynching became the principal form of lethal punishment in the South, accounts of Black men’s legal executions shrank in length and journalists increasingly portrayed them as ciphers, nonentities that the state was dispatching with little fanfare. In contrast, accounts of white men’s executions continued to showcase their individuality and their membership in social, political, and religious communities. A significant gap between the material reality and the cultural representation of capital punishment emerged. Legal executions in Georgia and Louisiana overwhelmingly targeted Black men. But on the pages of each state’s most prominent newspaper, the executions of white men received the most attention. As a result, capital punishment was increasingly represented as a high-status punishment that respected the “whiteness” of those who suffered it.

Law & Social Inquiry , Volume 48 , Issue 3 , August 2023 , pp. 999 - 1022

By The World Rainforest Movement

Almost 30 years of UN climate negotiations have resulted in the establishment of policies and practices that facilitate the constant expansion of the fossil fuel-based economy (and its profits) while hiding its implacable negative impacts for the territories where it expands. Almost 30 years of UN climate negotiations have resulted in the establishment of policies and practices that facilitate the constant expansion of the fossil fuel-based economy (and its profits) while hiding its implacable negative impacts for the territories where it expands. Particularly, the fantasy of carbon offsetting as a solution to the climate crisis is ever more present among the methods of corporate greenwashing for expanding their businesses, despite the mounting evidence of its complete failure to reduce emissions or deforestation - as recently denounced by several organizations. However, the strategies adopted by corporations are unable to hide the oppressive and colonial essence of their advances in the Global South. Precisely for this reason, they keep encountering much resistance when they arrive in the territories of the Peoples and communities. This issue of the WRM Bulletin shares articles that can be divided in two parts. The first part exposes four initiatives that dress themselves up as ‘green’ or ‘socially beneficial’ so as to ensure that extractive and production activities carry on unhindered. After all, these are the engine of the capitalist economy, which in turn is the main cause of the problems that such ‘green’ ventures claim they help solving. The second part highlights three experiences of resistance from the territories to such corporate assault. The first article highlights the embedded contradictions of the so-called “energy transition” by exposing how “the largest green industrial area in the world”, in Kalimantan, Indonesia, will in fact lead to an increase in coal extraction in the region. At the same time, this multi-billion dollar project threatens to appropriate and destroy the livelihoods and interconnected spaces of life on land and sea from which grassroots communities depend upon. These communities are at the frontlines resisting this industrial park in order to defend life. The next two articles show the different consequences of two kinds of projects that claim to be offsetting carbon and which largely depend on community territories. One exposes the trend to expand problematic tree plantations, above all in the Global South, with the argument that the trees will “offset” the pollution emitted somewhere else. This includes the whole gamut from large-scale monoculture plantations sponsored by the pulp industry to those nicely sounding plantations promoted by investment funds by means of abusive contracts with indigenous communities. The other article reflects on the abusive contracts for establishing REDD (Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation) projects in the brazilian Amazon region, specifically on how they compromise millennia-old indigenous practices and communities’ future generations.  The fourth article presents an overview of the perverse logic of certification schemes that over the last 30 years have given ‘sustainability’ and ‘responsibility’ seals to companies from different industries that cause destruction, such as the pulp and paper, palm oil and carbon offsets industries, among others. Such seals often completely ignore violations caused by corporations and legitimize their presence in community territories. The following two articles also expose the greenwashing of industrial monoculture plantations through certification, yet, the focus is turned to highlight the experiences of people’s resistance and organization. In Cameroon, women organized in the Afrise association have shouted a fearless and determined “Enough!” against oil palm plantation company Socapalm/Socfin, which is responsible for decades of “suffering, abuses, violations, theft, hunger, frustration and violations” of their bodies, rights and dignity. We express our full solidarity with these women who, with each others’ support, have declared that they will not tolerate the replanting of oil palm monoculture plantations in their territories. The next article reflects in an interview with Pablo Reyes Huenchumán, member of a Mapuche community in Chile, on the impacts of the violent forestry model imposed on the country which is based on large-scale monoculture plantations. But also, on the achievements and challenges of the Indigenous Mapuche to defend their communities and lives. Pablo explained how the Mapuche have been reclaiming their territories for over 20 years, showing that self-organization and resistance are key.

WRM Bulletin 268 December 2023

Edited by Jeffrey R. Di Leo and Uppinder Mehan

The events of September 11, 2001, have had a strong impact on theory and the humanities. They call for a new philosophy, as the old philosophy is inadequate to account for them. They also call for reflection on theory, philosophy, and the humanities in general. While the recent location and killing of Osama bin Laden, the leader of al-Qaeda, in Pakistan on May 2, 2011—almost ten years after he and his confederates carried out the 9/11 attacks—may have ended the “war on terror,” it has not ended the journey to understand what it means to be a theorist in the age of phobos nor the effort to create a new philosophy that measures up with life in the new millennium. It is in the spirit of hope—the hope that theory will help us to understand the age of terror—that the essays in this collection are presented.

With essays by Christian Moraru, Terry Caesar, David B. Downing, Horace L. Fairlamb, Emory Elliott, Elaine Martin, Robin Truth Goodman, Sophia A. McClennen, William V. Spanos, Zahi Zalloua.

Ann Arbor, MI: Open Humanities Press - An imprint of MPublishing – University of Michigan Library, Ann Arbor , 2012. 250p.