1,720,954 research outputs found
Justice: The ordinary understanding examined
No full text“What is justice?” seems an interminable question. That is, we persistently disagree as to the nature and meaning of justice. Ought we, then, to despair of the concept? My project is in some sense a reason to think we should not, without attempting to uncover the one uniquely rational understanding of justice, for it seems unlikely that such an understanding is possible. Instead, my project is to begin with the ways we generally talk about justice in the context of ordinary life and to attempt to extract from this moral talk a plausible theory of justice.
To that end, I turn first to the most prominent concerns we discuss in terms of justice in ordinary life. I do not attempt a direct definition of justice but a theory of what justice does, firstly, because the ordinary understanding of justice does not lead to a definition and, secondly, because the function of a thing is often the best way we have of making sense of what that thing is. What I find is that our ordinary talk of justice focuses negatively on the badness of injustice and the necessity of (as far as possible) undoing it. Given the economic language in which we typically discuss moral wrongdoing, I call my theory the Moral Debt Model of Justice. With a theory based on the ordinary understanding of justice in hand, beginning in Chapter 2, I attempt to determine whether this theory is plausible by considering how it fits within morality as a whole. My conclusion is that the social function of morality is to promote the ability of people to live together in relative peace and that, in the aggregate, justice is a device for the achievement of that end.
The value of this project is not only to turn philosophical discussion of justice back toward ordinary life, but also to make sense of the vital importance of justice, even in the face of deep disagreement as to its nature. Thus, my theory offers an explanation of the social significance of justice while also demonstrating why we are not always wrong to compromise on justice for the sake of peace
Noble Lies: A Reexamination of Human Rights
Get PDFLiterature Review
Plato���s Republic (c. 380 BC) is the most critical text under examination, offering the idea of the ���noble lie��� around which this project is built. Seminal political documents which proclaim some form of human rights, including The Declaration of Independence, the Declaration of Rights of Man and Citizen, and the United Nations Declaration of Human Rights are referenced and explored. Samuel Moyn���s book The Last Utopia: Human Rights in History (2012) and Cary J. Nederman���s essay on ���Rights��� from The Oxford Handbook of Medieval Philosophy (2012) provide important background to the notion of human rights and their history. Excerpts from Hannah Arendt���s books, Origins of Totalitarianism (1958) and Between Past and Future (1961), as well as Jenna Reinbold���s Seeing the Myth in Human Rights (2017) are the basis for the critical evaluation of human rights as a noble made in the final chapter. Finally, various historical sources are discussed throughout in order to explicate key concepts such as human rights and noble lies.
���
Thesis Statement
Human rights are a Platonic noble lie, and their value and role in society must be reexamined.
Theoretical Framework
The theoretical framework of this essay is political theory and the methods used are those usually employed in the discipline. The purpose of the project is to investigate the possibility that human rights do not exist in the way that they are currently conceived; in other words, that they are a noble lie (as defined by Plato in his Republic).
Project Description
Modern civil society is ordered around the, often unconscious, assumption that human rights exist. That is to say, there are certain rights to which all people are entitled simply by virtue of their membership in the human species. In 1789, for instance, the French National Assembly in The Declaration of the Rights of Man proclaimed that it had ���determined to set forth in a solemn declaration the natural, unalienable, and sacred rights of man.��� Other renowned political charters, including the U.S. Declaration of Independence and the U.N. Universal Declaration of Human Rights, similarly state that there are rights natural and undeniable to all people. Since the revolutions of the Enlightenment era, human rights have been codified in more and more foundational political documents. The bloody history of the last century, however, has been a constant foil to the idea that human beings have any inviolable dignity or rights that can be guaranteed on a global scale.
The apparent tension between human rights in theory and in practice prompts the question: do human rights, in fact exist in any tangible way? Philosopher Hannah Arendt argued that there are no human rights. Describing the plight of minorities in 20th Century Europe, she writes that ���The Rights of Man, supposedly inalienable, proved to be unenforceable���even in countries whose constitutions were based upon them��� (Origins of Totalitarianism 293). Arendt goes on to argue that rights are not impossible, but that they can be guaranteed only in a political community, not by any universal doctrine. If Arendt���s judgment is correct, and humans are entitled to no certain protections by nature, then it is incumbent upon scholars to reexamine how human rights are understood. All the same, such an investigation will not necessarily lead to the same conclusions as Arendt draws.
If human rights cannot be protected internationally, are they perhaps a noble lie? The concept of a noble lie originates in Plato���s Republic. In it the philosopher proposes a complex civil hierarchy based on the fiction that the best citizens, guardians, are fashioned by the gods out of gold, warriors or auxiliaries of silver, and farmers and craftsmen from bronze. It is a myth, but one that, if believed, ���would help to make [people] care more for the city and each other��� (Plato Republic 415d-e). A noble lie, then, is simply a falsehood meant to be accepted for the sake of a stable, harmonious society. Similarly, if human rights do not exist inherently, perhaps it is still better for people to believe and act as if they do. It is possible that the current understanding of human rights must be reconsidered, if it is truly a noble lie.
Human rights, and even noble lies, are widely known and much debated topics. Nevertheless, in weaving together the disparate threads already discussed, an original project emerges: On the assumption that Arendt and thinkers like her are correct, and human rights are not truly enforceable, then the idea of human rights is some kind of falsehood. That being the case, is the concept of human rights a noble lie���something that it is better for society to believe in regardless of its truth���or is it a false idea that is detrimental to society? The answer to this question will be sought through a survey of the philosophy and history surrounding both noble lies and human rights. Such a project could reveal that current thought on human rights needs adjustment and might suggest what those adjustments should be
Going Beyond Counting First Authors in Author Co-citation Analysis
Get PDFThe present study examines one of the fundamental aspects of author co-citation analysis (ACA) - the way co-citation
counts are defined. Co-citation counting provides the data on which all subsequent statistical analyses and mappings
are based, and we compare ACA results based on two different types of co-citation counting - the traditional type that
only counts the first one among a cited work's authors on the one hand and a non-traditional type that takes into
account the first 5 authors of a cited work on the other hand. Results indicate that the picture produced through this non-traditional author co-citation counting contains more coherent author groups and is therefore considerably clearer. However, this picture represents fewer specialties in the research field being studied than that produced through the traditional first-author co-citation counting when the same number of top-ranked authors is selected and analyzed. Reasons for these effects are discussed
Variations on the Author
Get PDF“Variations on the Author” discusses two of Eduardo Coutinho’s recent films (Um Dia na Vida, from 2010, and Últimas Conversas, posthumously released in 2015) and their contribution to the general question of documentary authorship. The director’s filmography is characterized by a consistent yet self-effacing form of authorial self-inscription: Coutinho often features as an interviewer that rather than express opinions propels discourses; an interviewer that is good at listening. This mode of self-inscription characterizes him as an author who is not expressive but who is nonetheless markedly present on the screen. In Um Dia na Vida, however, Coutinho is completely absent form the image, while Últimas Conversas, on the contrary, includes a confessional prologue that moves the director from the margins to the center of his films. This article examines the ways in which these works stand out in the filmography of a director who offers new insights into the notion of cinematic authorship
Appropriate Similarity Measures for Author Cocitation Analysis
Get PDFWe provide a number of new insights into the methodological discussion about author cocitation analysis. We first argue that the use of the Pearson correlation for measuring the similarity between authors’ cocitation profiles is not very satisfactory. We then discuss what kind of similarity measures may be used as an alternative to the Pearson correlation. We consider three similarity measures in particular. One is the well-known cosine. The other two similarity measures have not been used before in the bibliometric literature. Finally, we show by means of an example that our findings have a high practical relevance.information science;Pearson correlation;cosine;similarity measure;author cocitation analysis
Dispelling the Myths Behind First-author Citation Counts
Get PDFWe conducted a full-scale evaluative citation analysis study of scholars in the XML research field to explore just how different from each other author rankings resulting from different citation counting methods actually are, and to demonstrate the capability of emerging data and tools on the Web in supporting more realistic citation counting methods. Our results contest some common arguments for the continued
use of first-author citation counts in the evaluation of scholars, such as high correlations between author rankings by first-author citation counts and other citation
counting methods, and high costs of using more realistic citation counting methods that are not well-supported by the ISI databases. It is argued that increasingly available digital full text research papers make it possible for citation analysis studies to go beyond what the ISI databases have directly supported and to employ more
sophisticated methods
koamabayili/VECTRON-author-checklist: VECTRON author checklist
No full textWe have done our best to complete the author checklist relating to the use of animals in the hut study. Note that the objective for the hut study was to evaluate the IRS treatment applications for residual efficacy against Anopheles mosquitoes, including the local An. coluzzii mosquito population. Cows were only used to attract mosquitoes into the huts and no tests were carried out directly on the cows. The author checklist is intended for use with studies where experiments are carried out on animals, which is why we have had such difficulty in completing this for the hut study, as many of the questions do not relate to how the cows were used
Author-wise bibliometric analysis based on entropy.
No full textAuthor-wise bibliometric analysis based on entropy.</p
- …
