Rafe McGregor

Evidence-based policing: translating research into practice

Cynthia Lum and Christopher Koper are both associate professors in the Department of Criminology, Law, and Society at George Mason University. Lum served in the Baltimore Police Department for five...

Better No Longer to Be

Abstract David Benatar argues that coming into existence is always a harm, and that – for all of us unfortunate enough to have come into existence – it would be better had we never come to be. We contend that if one accepts Benatar’s arguments for the asymmetry between the presence and absence of pleasure and pain, and the poor quality of life,2 one must also accept that suicide is preferable to continued existence, and that his view therefore implies both anti-natalism and pro-mortalism3. This conclusion has been argued for before by Elizabeth Harman – she takes it that because Benatar claims that our lives are ‘awful’, it follows that ‘we would be better off to kill ourselves’ (Harman 2009: 784). Though we agree with Harman’s conclusion, we think that her argument is too quick, and that Benatar’s arguments for non-pro-mortalism4 deserve more serious consideration than she gives them. We make our case using a tripartite structure. We start by examining the prima facie case for the claim that pro-mortalism follows from Benatar’s position, presenting his response to the contrary, and furthering the dialectic by showing that Benatar’s position is not just that coming into existence is a harm, but that existence itself is a harm. We then look to Benatar’s treatment of the Epicurean line, which is important for him as it undermines his anti-death argument for non-pro-mortalism. We demonstrate that he fails to address the concern that the Epicurean line raises, and that he cannot therefore use the harm of death as an argument for non-pro-mortalism. Finally, we turn to Benatar’s pro-life argument for non-pro-mortalism, built upon his notion of interests, and argue that while the interest in continued existence may indeed have moral relevance, it is almost always irrational. Given that neither Benatar’s anti-death nor pro-life arguments for non-pro-mortalism work, we conclude that pro-mortalism follows from his anti-natalism, As such, if it is better never to have been, then it is better no longer to be.

NARRATIVE REPRESENTATION AND PHENOMENOLOGICAL KNOWLEDGE

The purpose of this paper is to demonstrate that narrative representations can provide knowledge in virtue of their narrativity, regardless of their truth value. I set out the question in section 1, distinguishing narrative cognitivism from aesthetic cognitivism and narrative representations from non-narrative representations. Sections 2 and 3 argue that exemplary narratives can provide lucid phenomenological knowledge, which appears to meet both the epistemic and narrativity criteria for the narrative cognitivist thesis. In section 4, I turn to non-narrative representation, focusing on lyric poetry as presenting a disjunctive objection: either lucid phenomenological knowledge can be reduced to identification and fails to meet the epistemic criterion, or lucid phenomenological knowledge is provided in virtue of aesthetic properties and fails to meet the narrativity criterion. I address both of these problems in sections 5 and 6, and I close with a tentative suggestion as to how my argument for narrative cognitivism could be employed as an argument for aesthetic cognitivism.

Race, Riots, and the Police

Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1–14. McClelland, J.S., 1989. The crowd and the mob: from Plato to Canetti. London: Unwin Hyman. Metropolitan Police Service. 2012. 4 Days in August: strategic review into the disorder of August 2011. London: MPS. Reicher, S., and Stott, C., 2011. Mad Mobs and Englishmen: Myths and Realities of the 2011 riots. London: Constable Robinson. Waddington, D., Jones, K., and Critcher, C., Falshpoint: Studies in Public Disorder. London: Routledge. Waddington, D., Jones, K., and Critcher, C., 1989. Flashpoints: Studies in Public Disorder. London: Routledge. Wilson, J.Q., and Kelling, G., 1982. The police and neighbourhood safety: broken windows. Atlantic Monthly, 249, 29–38.

The Ethical Value of Narrative Representation

Abstract The purpose of this paper is to defend a deflationary account of the ethical value of narrative representation. In sections 1 and 2 I demonstrate that there is a necessary relation between narrative representation and ethical value, but not between narrative representation and moral value. Ethical is conceived in terms of moral as opposed to amoral and moral in terms of moral as opposed to immoral and the essential value of narrative representation is restricted to the former. Recently, both theorists involved in the ethical turn in criticism and analytic philosophers have erred in conflating these two distinct kinds of value. In sections 3 to 5 I defend my deflationary view against three attempts to elevate the ethical value of narrative representation to moral value: Martha Nussbaum’s theory of realist novels, Noël Carroll’s virtue wheels, and Geoffrey Galt Harpham’s closural moral order.

Introduction: The Analytic Engagement with Continental Philosophy

This Special Issue of the International Journal of Philosophical Studies originates from ‘A Dangerous Liaison? The Analytic Engagement with Continental Philosophy’, a conference held at the University of York on 9 December 2011 courtesy of the support of The Mind Association, the Aristotelian Society, and the Humanities Research Centre. There were four invited speakers, each with a respondent, and two graduate speakers, with papers presented by four of the six article authors in this volume. The aim of the conference was to promote cross-pollination between the two traditions of philosophy, with the emphasis on what analytic philosophers could gain from engaging with phenomenology and hermeneutics. The conference was bookended by two excellent broadcasts on the relationship under scrutiny: Stephen Mulhall, Béatrice Han-Pile, and Hans-Johann Glock were interviewed on BBC Radio 4 in a programme of In Our Time entitled ‘The Continental-Analytic Split’ on 10 November; and the Philosophy Bites podcast for 18 December was ‘Brian Leiter on The Analytic/ Continental Distinction’. As all four of the interviewees point out, the terms ‘Anglo-American’ and ‘Continental’ are misnomers and the ‘divide’ itself an over-simplification, ‘the culture of two cultures’ in Simon Glendenning’s terms. There are nonetheless different styles of doing philosophy, and the distinction between approaches derived from Hegel, Nietzsche, and Husserl on the one hand and Frege, Russell, and Wittgenstein on the other provides – at the very least – a starting point for inquiries into the recent history of philosophy. Furthermore, regardless of the grounds of the distinction, it remains the cause of not only resistance but open hostility. The inspiration behind the conference is illustrated by the dialogue between Socrates and Thrasymachus in Book I of the Republic, particularly the following: