"No Artist has Ethical Sympathies": Oscar Wilde, Aesthetics, and Moral Evolution

“There is no mode of action, no form of emotion, that we do not share with the lower animals” (137). This evolutionary claim is not attributable to Darwin, but to Oscar Wilde, who allows Gilbert to voice this bold assertion in “The True Function of Criticism.” While critics have long wrestled with the ethical stance and coherence of Wilde's writings, they have overlooked a significant influence on his work: debates concerning the evolution of morality that animated the periodicals in which he was writing. Wilde was fascinated by the proposition that complex human behaviours, including moral and aesthetic responses, might be traced back to evolutionary impulses. Significantly, he also wrote for a readership already engaged with these controversies.

Harmful transgressions qua moral transgressions: A deflationary view

One important issue in moral psychology concerns the proper characterization of the folk understanding of the relationship between harmful transgressions and moral transgressions. Psychologist Elliot Turiel and associates have claimed with a broad range of supporting evidence that harmful transgressions are understood as transgressions that are authority independent and general in scope, which, according to them, characterizes these transgressions as moral transgressions. Recently, many researchers questioned the position advocated by the Turiel tradition with some new evidence. We entered this debate proposing an original, deflationary view in which perceptions of basic-rights violation and injustice are fundamental for the folk understanding of harmful transgressions as moral transgressions in Turiel’s sense. In this article, we elaborate and refine our deflationary view, while reviewing the debate, addressing various criticisms raised against our perspective, showing how our perspective explains the existent evidence, and suggesting new lines of inquiry.

Ethnic Segregation, Moral Panics and Social Class: A Comparative Study of the Experiences and Perspectives of Working Class and Middle Class Children in Belfast

This paper begins by describing the moral panics that have tended to emerge sporadically in Northern Ireland over the last few years with regard to young people’s involvement in sectarian violence in Belfast. Within this, while these young people have been cast in the traditional role of folk devils, the paper will show how younger children also tend to be explicitly identified and named in an ambiguous way through such moral panics; playing a deviant role as participators, and sometimes instigators, of sectarian violence but also carrying the symbolic responsibility of representing Belfast’s future. It will be shown that it is because of this ambiguous position that it is adults rather than the children themselves that tend to be held responsible for their actions; either as rioters using the children as political pawns or as parents guilty of neglect. With this as a starting point the paper then explores the perspectives and experiences of two groups of 10-11 year old children living in Belfast and the impact of these moral panics on them. One group of children, living in affluent middle class areas were found to be appropriating and re-working these broader moral panics into more general discourses of derision that tended to pathologize working class children and communities more generally. For the other group of children, living in economically deprived areas with high levels of sectarian tensions and violence, their experiences of such violence and their participation in it are discussed. It will be shown that for these children, the broader moral panics that exist tend to have the effect of reinforcing the processes that tend to segregate and exclude them.

The 'Ordinariness of the EU's Foreign Policy Power: The Use of WTO Litigation as a Means to Export EU Norms, Values and Interests

The EU has historically been portrayed as a distinctive international actor both in terms of the norms and values it exports in context of its international relations and the manner in which it seeks to influence others. However, such claims to the EU’s distinctiveness are increasingly being questioned. This article joins this chorus of voices arguing the non-distinctiveness of the EU’s foreign policy power by focusing on a specific feature of the EU’s external trade policy, the role of World Trade Organization (WTO) dispute settlement in the EU’s attempts to promote its interests, values and norms.

How much risk ought we to take? Exploring the possibilities of risk-sensitive consequentialism in the context of climate engineering

When it comes to assessing the deontic status of acts and policies in the context of risk and uncertainty, moral theories are often at a loss. In this paper we hope to show that employing a multi-dimensional consequentialist framework provides ethical guidance for decision-making in complex situations. The paper starts by briefly rehearsing consequentialist responses to the issue of risk, as well as their shortcomings. We then go on to present our own proposal based on three dimensions: wellbeing, fairness and probability. In the last section we apply our approach to a comparison of different climate policy options, including stratospheric solar-radiation management.

Human rights and traditional values

A series of ‘traditional values’ resolutions, passed by the UN Human Rights Council in 2009, 2011, and 2012, were the result of a highly controversial initiative spearheaded by Russia. Do these ‘traditional values’ underpin human rights? If not, why are religious traditions or, indeed, any traditional values worth preserving at all? Why are they valuable from the point of view of adherents to that tradition? Should the larger society take into account the fact that a practice is based on tradition in deciding whether or not to override it in the name of human rights? Put more technically, in what does the normativity of tradition lie, for adherents and non-adherents of that tradition? These are the questions that this essay explores, in the context of the recent debates over the scope and meaning of human rights stimulated by the Human Rights Council Resolutions. Much of the support for the Resolutions comes from what can broadly be called the global South. In several books, particularly Human Rights, Southern Voices, and General Jurisprudence: Understanding Law from a Global Perspective William Twining has explored the question of how to reconcile human rights norms and belief systems embedded in the global South (including ‘traditional values’), and in doing so has drawn particular attention to intellectuals from that part of the world, in particular Francis Deng, Yash Ghai, Abdullahi An-Na’im, and Upendra Baxi. I suggest that those concerned to recognize the legitimate concerns that significant sections of the global South have about the human rights project, concerns reflected in the ‘traditional values’ Resolutions would do well to pay more attention to the ‘Southern voices’ on whom Twining rightly focuses attention.

The effect of AMS δ13C values on 14C ages measured on a 0.5MV NEC compact accelerator

Many AMS systems can measure 14C, 13C and 12C simultaneously thus providing δ13C values which can be used for fractionation normalization without the need for offline 13C /12C measurements on isotope ratio mass spectrometers (IRMS). However AMS δ13C values on our 0.5MV NEC Compact Accelerator often differ from IRMS values on the same material by 4-5‰ or more. It has been postulated that the AMS δ13C values account for the potential graphitization and machine induced fractionation, in addition to natural fractionation, but how much does this affect the 14C ages or F14C? We present an analysis of F14C as a linear least squares fit with AMS δ13C results for several of our secondary standards. While there are samples for which there is an obvious correlation between AMS δ13C and F14C, as quantified with the calculated probability of no correlation, we find that the trend lies within one standard deviation of the variance on our F14C measurements. Our laboratory produces both zinc and hydrogen reduced graphite, and we present our results for each type. Additionally, we show the variance on our AMS δ13C measurements of our secondary standards.