As an increasing number of scholars have argued, the fiction of popular culture and the reality of politics are inseparable. Fact and fiction, rather than remaining distinct, are mutually constitutive and interact to produce new meaning.... more
As an increasing number of scholars have argued, the fiction of popular culture and the reality of politics are inseparable. Fact and fiction, rather than remaining distinct, are mutually constitutive and interact to produce new meaning. A critical reading of Fox Television's intensely popular series 24 suggests that the series (re)produces key elements of the global war on terrorism discourse and is therefore a particularly useful case for under standing the importance of intertextuality for the production of meaning. Though the packaging of 24 may be new and exciting, the underlying messages remain the same, in the process rendering commonsensical the US global war on terrorism and the way that it has been waged.
This article develops a framework for assessing thought experiments in normative political theory. It argues that we should distinguish between relevant and irrelevant hypotheticals according to a criterion of modality. Relevant... more
This article develops a framework for assessing thought experiments in normative political theory. It argues that we should distinguish between relevant and irrelevant hypotheticals according to a criterion of modality. Relevant hypotheticals, while far-fetched, construct imaginary cases that are possible for us, here and now. Irrelevant hypotheticals conjure up imaginary cases that are barely conceivable at all. To establish this claim, the article interrogates, via a discussion of Susan Sontag and Judith Butler’s accounts of representations of violence, the frames through which hypotheticals construct possible worlds, and concludes that some frames are better than others at sustaining a link with the world as we know it. Frames that disrupt this link can be charged with failing to offer action-guidance.
The Principle of Morally Problematic Correlation (PMPC) states that we should not accept any intuitions as evidence for some normative position if those intuitions are correlated with moral bias in a statistically significant way, at... more
The Principle of Morally Problematic Correlation (PMPC) states that we should not accept any intuitions as evidence for some normative position if those intuitions are correlated with moral bias in a statistically significant way, at least until the correlation can be plausibly regarded as coincidental. After presenting and defending PMPC, the results of a recent empirical study are presented. The study reveals a statistically significant correlation between levels of outgroup prejudice and likelihood that one would condone an act of extreme violence (torture). We argue that there is strong reason to think this correlation is not accidental, and hence that standard thought-experiments involving extreme violence should not be regarded as evidence in favor of particular normative positions. We further suggest that the results of our study call into question the generalizability of abstract thought-experiments involving extreme violence, and thus also much of the standard argumentation in applied ethics.
