Oxford University Press's Blog, page 657

Watching the true detectives

The media has a key role to play in the construction of our knowledge of crime and policing. In the post-war decades, they argue the representation of policing in the UK reflected the general social consensus. The dominant image here is Jack Warner playing George Dixon in the popular UK TV series Dixon of Dock Green that ran from 1955 to 1976. George Dixon came to represent the archetypal ‘British Bobby’, a pillar of the community who was widely respected. The homely and reassuring values that Dixon represented were summarized in his catchphrase “Evenin’ all”.

The TV cop drama has been a mainstay of the schedules virtually since the birth of the medium.  It is probably impossible to list all the variations of the maverick cop that have made appearances on our screens. Representations of the police officer on a continuum ranging from “married to the job” to “broken by the job” has a history dating back to the emergence of the private investigator in the Hollywood Film Noir era of the 1940s. The detective as an essentialist loner battling authority and bureaucracy within the Police service whilst righting wrongs has become a cliché of the genre. Modern cop drama focuses on the personal problems of the individual officers. The Holmesian genius has been replaced by characters such as the alcoholic Jim McNulty anti-hero of David Simon’s The Wire. McNulty is a womanising drunk but still respected as a great cop.

Inspector Morse with his Oxford degree, love of classic music, classic Jag, and tormented relationship with women is a modern archetype. Inspector Morse is also an excellent example of the cannibalistic nature of TV, as the death of John Thaw led to the creation of two spin off series: Lewis, about his partner and Endeavour, a look at Morse’s early career in the force.

The BBC series The Detectives features none of the stock characters of the modern TV cop drama; there are none of the hi-tech gadgets of CSI or the insight profilers of series like Law and Order: Special Victims Unit. Some elements of the genre’s signature cinematography do appear – gloomy early morning wide shots of urban landscapes, a low key score – but this is a documentary series, a world away from the maverick cop solving crimes by a flash of inspiration. The Detectives follows the work of the Serious Sexual Offices Unit of Greater Manchester Police (GMP), set up specifically to deal with the investigation of crimes of sexual violence. There has been recognition that sexual crimes require specially trained officers. As DC John Chadwick comments in the first episode: “general-purpose detectives can do murder all day long. They’re not best equipped to deal with rape.”

Showing the painstaking detail in which these cases are investigated, The Detectives portrays in graphic and harrowing detail the nature of sexual violence and its impact on victims.

Following the exposure of the crimes of Jimmy Savile, there has been an increase in the reports of sexual offences. This has occurred across the country, but GMP has seen a huge spike. The BBC’s three-part series follows the Unit staff as they deal with its biggest case, strongly linked to the Savile investigation. Ray Teret was a DJ based in Manchester, who was eventually sentenced to 25 years for a string of rapes and indecent assaults on underage girls. Interwoven with the meticulous  investigation of the Teret case, the series shows the officers dealing with a range of other cases, including an attack on a woman on her way home and the statutory rape of a 12 year old by an 18 year old who contacted her via social media.

Teret generated mountains of evidence, but these cases are often very difficult to investigate: offences were committed against girls in their early teens, who came forward as much as forty years later. The access provided to the film makers was incredible – it included 999 calls, interviews with witnesses, filming of police interviews, and face-to-face conversations with the detectives themselves. Showing the painstaking detail in which these cases are investigated, The Detectives portrays in graphic and harrowing detail the nature of sexual violence and its impact on victims.

The Criminal Justice System (CJS) has rightly been criticised for its responses to rape and sexual violence. Following the Teret case, the impact and strain of given evidence and confronting a perpetrator was clear to see. The most striking feature of the officers themselves was their clear dedication. There were no mavericks in this Unit. A genuine maverick would not have the skills or eye for detail required to gather the information required to secure convictions in such cases. The Detectives is a welcome antidote to the stylised cop drama. It is also required viewing for those who wish to understand the CJS response to sexual violence.

Documentary series The Detectives is available to watch on BBC iPlayer until 30 June 2015.

Featured image: Promotional image from The Detectives (2015). (c) BBC, Minnow Films, via BBC.

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Italian women and 16th-century social media

Venetian courtesan Veronica Franco (1546-1591) describes the perils of her profession in her one of her Familiar Letters, which she published in 1580:

“To give oneself as prey to so many men, with the risk of being stripped, robbed or killed, that in one single day everything you have acquired over so much time may be taken from you, with so many other perils of injuries and horrible contagious diseases; to drink with another’s mouth, sleep with another’s eyes, move according to another’s desires, always running the clear risk of shipwreck of one’s faculties and life, what could be a greater misery?”

Writing letters was a quintessential part of everyday life in the Renaissance. The ability to write elegant, expressive, persuasive letters was a highly-prized skill. Beyond a practical necessity, letter writing was considered a high art. The Renaissance art of epistolarity, specifically the humanist penchant for modeling personal letters after those of Cicero, has been well documented. Less examined is what it meant for Renaissance individuals to publish their personal letters for all to read.

It has become a truism today that with the availabilty of online social media such as Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram, the barriers between private and public have been shattered, intimate details of peoples’ lives routinely shared with the world at large. We are living in an age when it is theoretically possible for anyone to enjoy Kardashian-like celebrity merely through typing a few keystokes on his or her electronic device. This is not an entirely new phenomenon, however; the advent of the technology of the printing press in Europe in the mid-fifteenth century opened up comparable possibilities for Renaissance individuals wishing to share details of their personal lives.

The trend was started by Pietro Aretino (1492-1556), the poet, polemicist, and pornographer who was the first to realize there was a market for familiar letters, printing his first volume of letters in 1538. A runaway success, the volume was reprinted twelve times in the next two years, causing Aretino to follow up this success with another five volumes over the course of the next two decades.

After Aretino, Italian letter books became a publishing phenomenon; numerous volumes of familiar letters were in circulation in the sixteenth century. Between 1538 and 1627 the number of letter books published in Italy rose to 540, on average six books per year appearing. Within less than a century nearly 40,000 letters were printed. French philosopher Michel de Montaigne (1533-1592) wrote in 1588: “These Italians are great printers of letters. I believe I have more than a hundred volumes of them.” Among these was the volume of Franco’s Familiar Letters, a copy of which the author sent to the Frenchman when he visited Venice in 1580.

Renaissance women participated in this publishing phenomenon, demonstrating a willingness to share their innermost thoughts and to expose intimate details of their lives to the broader reading public. In addition to Franco, volumes of letters by female authors as diverse as humanist Laura Cereta (1469-1499), actress Isabella Andreini (1562-1604), and nun Arcangela Tarabotti (1604-1652) were being published. Not all women were enthusiastic about having their works, whether letters, poems, or other writings appear in print; noblewomen Veronica Gambara (1485-1550) and Vittoria Colonna (c.1490-1547), for instance, preferred to maintain their privacy and vigorously resisted having their works published.

Veronica Franco

Veronica Franco by Domenico Tintoretto, circa 1575. Public domain via Wikimedia Commons

Laura Cereta

Portrait of Laura Cereta from 1640. Epistolae; iam primum e m[anu]s[criptis] in lucem productae a Iacobo Philippo Tomasino, qui eius vitam et notas addidit. Universität Mannheim. Public domain via Wikimedia Commons

Isabella Andreini

Portrait of a Woman with a Dog (Isabella Andreini) by Paolo Veronese, 1585 and 1588. Thyssen-Bornemisza Museum. Public domain via Wikimedia Commons

Veronica Gambara

Ritratto di dama (Veronica Gambara) by Antonio da Correggio, 1517-18. Hermitage Museum. Public domain via Wikimedia Commons

Vittoria Colonna

Portrait of Vittoria Colonna by Cristofano dell’Altissimo. Piazzale degli Uffizi. Public domain via Wikimedia Commons

Laura Battiferri

Portrait of Laura Battiferri by Bronzino, 1550-1555. Palazzo Vecchio. Public domain via Wikimedia Commons

Tullia d'Aragona

Portrait of Tullia d’Aragona as Salomè by Moretto da Brescia, circa 1537. Pinacoteca Tosio Martinengo. Public domain via Wikimedia Commons

However, so popular were letters penned by women that several collections of familiar letters appear to have been written by men who published them under fictitious female names in order to cash in on the trend. Examples of this are Girolamo Parabosco’s 1547 Lettere amorose, which included love letters written by the male author in a female voice and Ortensio Lando’s 1548 Lettere di molte valorose donne, as well as the anonymously authored Lettere amorose di Celia Romana (1562)–so successful that it was reprinted ten times by 1628.

The specific content was different. There are no equivalents for “selfies” or extreme oversharing of explicitly sexual material in these letters. The reach of printed editions would have numbered in the hundreds, not the millions enjoyed by today’s bloggers.

Nevertheless, the intentions for publicizing oneself were strikingly similar in the sixteenth-century. Much has been made of historian Greenblatt’s concept of “Renaissance self-fashioning,” which looked at in practical terms can be viewed more simply as self-promotion. Fame, whether literary or otherwise, which had previously been an elusive prize, suddenly seemed within the grasp of authors savvy enough to have their words set in moveable type and marketed to the public.

Then, as now, there was a monetary value attached to celebrity, though money was only one of the rewards that Renaissance authors expected their letters to bring them, and often an indirect one. By prefacing one of her books of verse with a dedicatory letter to the duchess of Florence, poet Laura Battiferra (1523-1589) was able to promote not only her own career, but that of her husband, the sculptor Bartolomeo Ammannati (1511-1592), earning him lucrative commissions with the ruling Medici family. Then there was Tullia d’Aragona (c.1501-1556), who, besides being a courtesan, was an accomplished poet, and hoped to elevate her social status through literary self-promotion. From being forced by contemporary sumptuary legislation to wear a humiliating veil identifying her by her profession as a prostitute when she appeared in public, she wished to be identified with a poet’s laurel. Her 1547 Rime della Signora Tullia di Aragona e di diversi a lei, a collection of messages in verse, exchanged with the most celebrated literary figures of her day, ensured that d’Aragona’s reputation as poet would supersede that as a prostitute.

And finally, it is probably this circulation and exchange of written messages, even when they were not intended for print per se, which we find most familiar today. Women participated fully in the sharing of news and ideas in their letters, many of which traveled throughout Italy and Europe. The social circles in which such letters traveled could be viewed as a kind of sixteenth-century Facebook. Letters on scientific and philosophical topics might also be compared with participation in a Republic of Letters, similar to that associated with Enlightenment figures such as Voltaire (1694-1778) or John Locke (1632-1704). Examples of women’s writing of this kind include Camilla Erculiani’s (c.1540-c.1590) Letters on Natural Philosophy (1581) and Chiara Matraini’s (1515-1604) Lettere, with their reflections on philosophical and theological issues.

Chiara Matraini is turning 500 this year. If she were alive today would Matraini use Twitter or Facebook to communicate her ideas? Possibly, although Academia.edu seems more likely in her case. The point is that social networks were already being exploited during the sixteenth century, and women, whose contributions to Italian Renaissance culture have tended to be overlooked, were some of the most active on the literary scene. Perhaps women like Matraini, Gambara, or Colonna would not have embraced the more blatantly self-aggrandizing forms of today’s social media, although it is hard to imagine them not enjoying seeing their writings discussed on the OUPblog.

Featured image: Cropped from the portrait of Laura Battiferri by Bronzino. Palazzo Vecchio. Public domain via Wikimedia Commons.

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What made Russell feel ready for suicide?

In early May 1913 Bertrand Russell sat down to write a book on the theory of knowledge, his first major philosophical work after Principia Mathematica. He set a brisk pace for himself – ten pages a day at first, up to twelve by mid-May. He was “bursting with work” and “felt happy as king”. By early June he had 350 pages. 350 pages in one month!

He never finished the manuscript. Some parts of it were published as journal articles, but the book itself was never completed. (It was later published posthumously under the title Theory of Knowledge.) What went wrong?

In a word: Wittgenstein. Russell details his troubles in a series of extraordinary letters to Ottoline Morrell.

“Wittgenstein came to see me – we were both cross from the heat – I showed him a crucial part of what I have been writing. He said it was all wrong, not realizing the difficulties – that he had tried my view and knew it wouldn’t work. I couldn’t understand his objection – in fact he was very inarticulate – but I feel in my bones that he must be right, and that he has seen something that I have missed. If I could see it too I shouldn’t mind, but as it is, it is worrying, and has rather destroyed the pleasure in my writing.” (Russell’s letter to Ottoline Morrell, 27 May 1913)

His depression persisted through June:

“All that has gone wrong with me lately comes from Wittgenstein’s attack on my work – I have only just realized this. It was very difficult to be honest about it, as it makes a large part of the book I meant to write impossible for years to come probably … I must be much sunk – it is the first time that I have failed in honesty over work. I have been creeping back towards a better frame of mind all these weeks, but have only really achieved it today. Only yesterday I felt ready for suicide…” (Russell’s letter to Ottoline Morrell, 19 June 1913)

Looking back on this incident he wrote:

“Do you remember that at the time when you were seeing Vittoz I wrote a lot of stuff about Theory of Knowledge, which Wittgenstein criticized with the greatest severity? His criticism, tho’ I don’t think you realised it at the time, was an event of first-rate importance in my life, and affected everything I have done since. I saw he was right, and I saw that I could not hope ever again to do fundamental work in philosophy. My impulse was shattered, like a wave dashed to pieces against a breakwater.” (Russell’s letter to Ottoline Morrell, 4 March 1916)

Note the date on this last letter – three years after Wittgenstein’s initial criticism. Russell had a penchant for overstatement, but this was no heat-of-the-moment reaction. Whatever they talked about in late May 1913 had a powerful and lasting effect on Russell.

Othello by Christian Köhler (1809-1861) (Koller Auktionen). Public domain via Wikimedia Commons

Wittgenstein’s criticism was directed at the philosophical core of Russell’s Theory of Knowledge manuscript, the so-called Multiple Relation Theory of Judgment. According to the Multiple Relation Theory, judgment is not a two-place relation between a person and a proposition, but rather a many-place relation between a person and what would have been the constituents of a proposition. For example, when Othello judges that Desdemona loves Cassio he doesn’t bear a two-place relation to the proposition that Desdemona loves Cassio, but rather a four-place relation to Desdemona, love, and Cassio. This theory allowed Russell to do away with propositions and thus avoid a set of problems about propositions, collectively known as the problem of the unity of the proposition, which had been plaguing him for the better part of a decade.

Wittgenstein states his criticism in a number of places, all characteristically telegraphic and obscure. First, there is a letter to Russell from June 1913:

“I can now express my objection to your theory of judgment exactly: I believe it is obvious that, from the proposition ‘A judges that (say) a is in a relation R to b’, if correctly analysed, the proposition ‘aRb.Ú.~aRb’ must follow directly without the use of any other premiss. This condition is not fulfilled by your theory.” (Wittgenstein’s letter to Russell, June 1913)

Then “Notes on Logic” from September 1913:

“Every right theory of judgment must make it impossible for me to judge that ‘this table penholders the book’.”

Russell’s theory does not satisfy this requirement.

And finally the Tractatus:

“5.5422 The correct explanation of the form of the proposition, ‘A makes the judgement p’, must show that it is impossible for a judgement to be a piece of nonsense. (Russell’s theory does not satisfy this requirement.)”

What problem is Wittgenstein raising here? And why did it have such an overwhelming effect on Russell?

These have become some of the most intensely debated questions in the history of early analytic philosophy. For a time, the consensus was that Wittgenstein had uncovered an unresolvable tension between the Multiple Relation Theory and the theory of types in Principia Mathematica. But that consensus has recently been shattered and now different interpretations of Wittgenstein’s criticism are proliferating. Here’s what’s certain: the criticism has something to do with ruling out judgments of “nonsense”, and it was absolutely devastating for Russell. Beyond that, there’s very little agreement about what Wittgenstein was getting at. I have my own ideas about the answers to these questions, but my aim here is to pose a problem, not to solve it.

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The cases for and against hydrofracking

The EPA recently released a report stating that while hydrofracking has not led to significant impacts on drinking water, contamination may occur with “potential vulnerabilities in the water lifecycle that could impact drinking water.” In this extract from Hydrofracking: What Everyone Needs to Know, Alex Prud’homme breaks down the cases for and against hydrofracking.

In the case for hydrofracking: What is the impact of shale oil and gas on the US economy?

In a word: revolutionary. As proponents point out, hydrofracking has helped to create new jobs, higher incomes, and tax windfalls for cash-strapped states.

For decades, the dialogue about oil and gas has been built on a paradigm of limited supply, declining production, and volatile pricing. These assumptions were based on the pioneering work of M. King Hubbert, a Shell geologist who in the 1950s forecast that American oil production would peak in 1971. Shale gas reserves have turned those assumptions on their head.

The United States produced less oil in 2012 than in 1971—Hubbert was correct—and prices remained high. Yet America produced more oil in 2012 than in any year since 1994, and natural gas production is nearing record levels. In 2000, shale gas represented merely 2 percent of the nation’s energy supply;


by 2012, it was 37 percent.

The abundance of gas has set off ripples throughout the US economy, with numerous additional impacts. As power companies substitute gas for coal in their generators, for instance, consumers benefit from lower prices. This switch has led to another important boon: a significant reduction in CO2 emissions.

“One thing is clear,” writes Steven Mufson, an energy and financial news reporter at the Washington Post. “Tumbling natural gas prices have changed every calculation and assumption about the energy business .”

In the case against hydrofracking: What are the biggest concerns in terms of water supplies?

Opponents have expressed three main concerns about water. First, they worry that hydraulic fracturing uses so much H2O—about 5 million gallons per well, on average—that it can deplete groundwater supplies faster than nature can recharge them, especially in dry regions like Texas or California. (“Recharge” signifies the amount of water an aquifer—an underground water supply—regains each year from precipitation and runoff.) Second, the injection of chemicals—some of them toxic—underground at extreme pressures raises fears of chemical spills on the surface and consequent contamination of water supplies below ground as those chemicals seep into the fractured rock. Third, the safe disposal of fluid and “produced water” (groundwater that is brought to the surface in the course of drilling) remains a challenge, and has occasionally caused minor earthquakes when injected into geologic fault zones.

Headline Image Credit: Operating oil and gas well. © cta88 via iStock.

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Preconception stress and infertility: a Q&A with Dr. Courtney D. Lynch

Does preconception stress increase the risk of infertility? Dr. Courtney D. Lynch will be presenting the results from a couple-based prospective cohort study, the LIFE study, at this year’s Human Reproduction Keynote Lecture in Lisbon. We meet Dr Lynch to learn more about how she came to specialise in reproductive medicine and the findings of her research.

What encouraged you to pursue a career in the field of reproductive medicine?

Shortly after I graduated from college, I saw the movie Outbreak and was introduced to the field of epidemiology. As I researched the discipline, I learned that maternal and child health epidemiology was a subspecialty that would allow me to marry my interest in pregnancy with my desire to be a disease detective.

You have been chosen to present the key note lecture at this year’s annual ESHRE Congress. Can you tell us a bit about the paper you are presenting on?

The paper about which I will be speaking addresses the issue of whether or not there is a prospective association between stress and fecundity as defined by time to pregnancy and infertility. It has long been known that the experience of infertility is extremely stressful for affected couples. What has remained unclear, however, is whether stressed individuals take longer to get pregnant, thereby leading to higher rates of infertility in this group.

We enrolled 501 couples in the United States who were discontinuing contraception with the intent of getting pregnant. Each partner of the couple completed a baseline questionnaire and collected biospecimens and was then asked to complete separate structured daily diaries for up to a year and through pregnancy if it occurred. Women collected saliva specimens, once the morning following enrolment, and once the morning following their first study-observed menses for the measurement of salivary cortisol and alpha-amylase.

While we found no association between salivary cortisol and fecundity, we found that women in the highest tertile of salivary alpha-amylase exhibited a 29% reduction in fecundity (i.e., a longer time to pregnancy) compared to women in the lowest tertile after adjustment for confounders, which translated into a more than two-fold increased risk of infertility among these women.

Pregnancy by Greyerbaby. CC0 via Pixabay.

What inspired you to start researching this particular topic?

When I began my career as a post-doctoral fellow at the National Institutes of Health, I originally thought I wanted to focus on the comparative effectiveness of obstetric interventions. However, during my time there, many of my friends and colleagues were getting married and it seemed like more than a handful of them were experiencing difficulty getting pregnant. I was approached by several friends who asked if I thought stress was impacting their ability to get pregnant and when I looked to the literature to find an answer, I quickly learned that the topic (i.e., does stress impact time to pregnancy) had not received adequate attention. I became very concerned, as it was distressing to see otherwise healthy young women be moved to tears when they experienced difficulty getting pregnant. I decided that something needed to be done and that I wanted to be part of the solution.

Were there any findings in the study which particularly surprised you?

There weren’t really any surprising results in this study, as what we found mirrored what we had found several years prior in a smaller and shorter study of women in the UK who were trying to get pregnant.

What do you see as the next steps for this kind of research?

There are really two main directions that we are going with this work now that our initial papers have been published. First, in the coming year, we hope to obtain funding to further examine the methodological issues that impact the validity of this work. First, we wish to affirm that salivary alpha-amylase levels do not vary substantively throughout the menstrual cycle. Also, while we have yet to find a measure of self-reported stress that correlates well with salivary alpha-amylase levels, the search continues.

At the same time, we are currently attempting to obtain funding to conduct a randomized controlled trial of a proven stress reduction technique to see if its use decreases time to pregnancy. While we now know there is a consistent prospective association between stress and time to pregnancy, what remains unknown is whether the use of stress reduction techniques can help couples get pregnant faster.

How does it feel to be selected as the key note speaker at this year’s ESHRE Congress?

It is extremely humbling to be selected as the keynote speaker for ESHRE this year. More than anything, we are simply happy to continue the conversation with our reproductive medicine colleagues regarding this issue. The impact of stress on reproduction is complex and will only be able to be adequately addressed through the expertise of multidisciplinary teams.

What do you think are the challenges being faced in the field today?

The biggest challenges impacting the study of natural fertility today are the cost and logistics of conducting prospective pregnancy studies with preconception enrolment. First, it is time-consuming and expensive to find couples who are currently trying to get pregnant. Then, once couples are identified and enrolled, it can be costly to retain them long-term in a study that requires daily journal completion. However, through the use of novel online recruitment and follow-up methods, we hope to make these issues less of a concern in the future.

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It’s time to play the (Broadway) music

Whether you think the Tony Awards represent the epitome of Broadway talent or serve as just another marketing device, it’s a night where everyone has a front row seat to the creative, the lively, the emotional moments that have become a part of the Great White Way this season. Today, on behalf of the OUP Music team, I’m sharing a playlist featuring some of those moments – with bonus songs from Tommy Tune (this year’s Lifetime Achievement Award recipient), The Last Five Years (now a feature film), and A Chorus Line (which recently celebrated 50 years since it opened on Broadway).

Note: I did cheat twice. Ella Fitzgerald may not be in An American in Paris but her version of “I Got Rhythm” is fantastic and can’t be left out. Josh Groban will be performing at the show this year because of the release of Stages, his (impressive) album of show tune covers. I couldn’t resist including one of my personal favorites.

Happy listening!

For anyone curious about the schedule of upcoming cast recordings, mark your calendars: The King & I (9 June); The Visit (23 June); Something Rotten (17 July); Doctor Zhivago (31 July).

Don’t forget to print out your Tony ballot and tune in on 7 June 2015, 8/7c!

Featured image: The Cathedrals of Broadway, 1929. Painting by Florine Stettheimer. Public domain via WikiArt.

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American religion in the Age of Reagan [quiz]

You may have heard about the recent Pew Research Center study that shows millennials (born roughly between 1980 and 1995) fleeing Christian churches to occupy the ranks of the “nones,” those professing no religious affiliation. But how much do you know about the decade that gave birth to the millennial generation? The Eighties witnessed the rise of the Christian Right and the end of the Cold War, the dusk of disco and the dawn of MTV, the emergence of the AIDS crisis and the decline of the welfare state. How did the culture wars of the Eighties shape the religious landscape and popular culture that have gotten us to where we are today? Revisit the “Age of Reagan” by taking a tour through some of the decade’s religious highlights—or learn what you missed, if you were born too late to experience the turbulent Eighties yourself.

Featured image credit: Church By Jeff Sheldon. CC0 via Unsplash.

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Is pleasure all that matters?

This week I convened a philosophy seminar in Oxford with Kasia de Lazari-Radek and Peter Singer. Singer is probably the world’s most famous living philosopher, well known for his pioneering work on the ethics of our treatment of non-human animals, on global poverty, and on many other issues. Less well known, perhaps, is the fact that Singer has recently changed his mind on the question of what really matters.

I’m talking here about what matters for individual beings – what makes their lives good or bad for them. For many years Singer took the view that what makes the lives of persons, like you and me, good for us is the satisfaction of certain preferences or desires. This enabled him to argue, for example, that there is something especially bad about killing a person, because – unlike non-persons – they would have had a preference to go on living, and by killing them one is making sure that that preference remains unfulfilled. What about non-persons, and in particular most non-human animals? Here Singer was readier to accept the view long known as hedonism: all that matters to such beings is pleasure or pain. On this view, then, there’d be nothing wrong with painlessly killing a mouse, say, as long as one replaced that mouse with one exactly like it.

In recent years, however, Singer has been influenced by the work of Henry Sidgwick, a Cambridge philosopher who died in 1900, and wrote what a later Cambridge professor – C.D. Broad – described as the best book ever on moral philosophy, The Methods of Ethics. In fact, Singer was so impressed by Sidgwick on re-reading him that he himself wrote an excellent book about Sidgwick with Kasia. It was called The Point of View of the Universe and published last year by OUP.

Hedonism is not new: as a philosophical view it dates back to the origins of philosophy itself, two-and-a-half millennia ago. And it still seems plausible to many of us – how could anything matter to us except in so far as we enjoy it, or it causes us pain? But hedonism has faced many objections over the centuries.

Portrait of Henry Sidgwick, by Elliott & Fry. Public domain via Wikimedia Commons.

One important one revolves around the idea of ‘evil pleasures’. A hedonist has to say that the pleasures of sadistic killing are good for the killer, and this might seem unacceptable. Hedonists, however, might say that we need to keep a sharp distinction between our theory of what’s good or bad for people, and our moral theory. One can condemn sadists morally, even if we have to accept that they do get something good for themselves out of what they do.

Another old objection, found in the work of Plato, is that things matter to us independently of pleasure and pain. In recent years, this objection has been stated using the example of the ‘experience machine’ (see especially Robert Nozick’s description in his Anarchy, State, and Utopia). Here is one version of that objection. Consider first the life of an accomplished composer, who becomes very famous for her innovative work. She has a family and friends who love her, and lives a long and healthy life. Let’s say we put the value of her life at level V. Now imagine that some brilliant but crazy neuroscientist has somehow downloaded what is going on in this woman’s brain to a computer program. He then kidnaps a baby, and ‘plays back’ these experiences to the baby, in such a way that ‘from the inside’ everything appears just the same as it did to the composer. A hedonist has to accept that the life of this individual is also of value V. But, we might think, really accomplishing something, or having real friendships, make an individual’s life better for her in themselves, independently of the pleasure or enjoyment that accompany them.

Sidgwick himself discussed these kinds of case, and tried to explain how hedonists can weaken their persuasive force in various ways, by pointing out, for example, that valuing things other than pleasure is often rational in real life. So a tennis player who just gets into her game and tries to win, for example, will enjoy her game more than a player who is constantly trying to maximize her own pleasure.

Sidgwick’s view on pleasure was one of the topics of our seminar, as was the insight into hedonism provided by recent neuroscience. It appears, for example, that the same ‘brain circuits’ are used for both pleasure and pain, which validates to some extent the hedonist’s decision to understand the value of life in terms of a balance between these two states. (The leading neuroscientist Morten Kringelbach also took part in our discussion. His book Pleasures of the Brain (OUP), co-edited with Kent Berridge, another leader in the field, makes for fascinating and intriguing reading.)

I do disagree a little with some of Peter and Kasia’s interpretations of Sidgwick. But to be honest I think Sidgwick’s text is somewhat indeterminate. He says different things in different places about pleasure and hedonism, and all interpreters have to force certain bits of the jigaw into place. But for me the main point of doing history of philosophy is that it enables us to grasp certain new philosophical options. So what’s important is not so much whether I’ve got Sidgwick right or not, but whether the views I’m ascribing to him are right in themselves. In my opinion, Sidgwick was indeed correct about many of the major issues in ethics, and if you haven’t already done so then I encourage you to follow in the footsteps of Peter Singer and read Sidgwick for yourself.

Featured image credit: “The path”. CCO Public Domain via Pixabay.

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Catholics and the torture chamber

Argentina, 1976. On the afternoon of 3 August, Fr. James Weeks went to his room to take a nap while the five seminarians of the La Salette congregation living with him went to attend classes. Joan McCarthy, an American nun who was visiting them, stayed by the fireplace, knitting a scarf. They would have dinner together and discuss the next mission in Jujuy, a Northwestern province of Argentina, where McCarthy worked. Suddenly, a loud noise came from the door. Before McCarthy could reach it, a mob burst into the house. Around ten men spread all over the house, claiming to be the police, looking for weapons, guerrilla hideouts, and ‘subversive fighters.’ When the seminarians arrived, they and Weeks were blindfolded and taken to an unknown location. The seminarians ‘disappeared’ for a few days, then were jailed and tortured for two months, before finally being exiled to the United States.

The perpetrators were part of the Argentine military government that took power under president General Jorge Videla in 1976, ostensibly to fight Communism in the name of Christian civilization. The military dictatorship claimed to be a Catholic government, yet no other military or civilian government killed and persecuted as many Catholics as did General Jorge Videla’s dictatorship. By the end of the dictatorship, more than 100 Catholic social actors had been killed. The most astonishing fact was—and to some extent, still is—the silence of the Catholic hierarchy while the government witch-hunted ‘subversives’ among the Catholic flock.

Since the 2013 election of Francis I, the first Latin American pope, the role that the Catholic Church played in the 1970s has been revisited. Most of the newspapers articles, scholar statements, and Church press releases are based on a simplification of the situation. For instance, according to critics, the Catholic Church did nothing and was even an accomplice of the dictators; the Church, on the other hand, claims it didn’t know what was going on and had tried to help when possible. Moreover it is assumed that Argentina’s historical context is similar to other Latin American countries; however, unlike large countries such as Chile and Brazil, political violence seems to have been an acceptable means of political participation in Argentina, as both the guerrillas and military government received popular support for their fight.

As a public scholar, I want to contribute to the understanding of the Argentine context and the role of ‘Catholics religious workers’ under state terror. Most of the current literature uses theological positions to explain the behavior of Catholics. Contrary to this, I explore how religious transformations (secularization) under particular conditions explain the roles of different ‘Catholic religious workers’—laypersons, seminarians, nuns, priests, and bishops working as identified members of the Catholic Church—during Argentina’s Dirty War. By placing these ‘religious workers’ in their proper social context, I aim to fill a void in the current academic literature.

“Argentine military general Jorge Rafael Videla at a military parade in Buenos Aires, 1978.” CC 2.0 via Wikimedia Commons.

Additionally, I explore the complexity of the social and political situation, bringing in a new perspective: the point of view of the victims. At that time, the official church considered these Catholics to be at the margins of the institution. Yet this same disservice has manifested itself in current academic literature. The few scholarly works published about Catholicism in Argentina’s Dirty War focus on the hierarchy of the Catholic Church. In contrast, I place ordinary Catholic religious workers within the institution at the center of my research. If we fail to pay attention to these religious workers, we might conclude that Argentine Catholics automatically enacted the official statements of the Church and supported the Dirty War, or we may think the ones who opposed it were outsiders. This is not accurate. To understand Catholicism in the Argentinean context, we also need to understand ordinary Catholics, not just official statements. Therefore, I provide a more nuanced view of the relationship between Catholicism and state terror during the Dirty War through an examination of a particular case study—that of the La Salette missionaries, a group of Catholic religious workers who were arrested and tortured by the regime.  

This case study, in many senses, can be used to illustrate the complex relationship between Catholic faith and political violence during Argentina’s infamous Dirty War. For instance, how did the Argentine government deploy Catholic discourse to justify the violence it imposed on the seminarians and many other Catholics? Similarly, how did the official Catholic hierarchy in Argentina rationalize its silence in the face of violence? By drawing on the diverse points of view of the La Salette case, I am able to analyze how Catholic victims of state violence and their supporters understood their own faith in this complicated context—in other words, what it meant to be Catholic under Argentina’s dictatorship.

Ultimately, I argue that political violence provoked division among Argentine Catholics into three distinct postures: ‘embedded Catholicism,’ ‘Anti-secular Catholicism,’ and ‘Institutional Catholicism.’ Anti-secular Catholics viewed political violence as a necessary tool in a holy war against godless communism. Institutional Catholics disliked it, but assumed it was the lesser of two evils and didn’t understand the magnitude of the massacre. Embedded Catholics, suffering under the regime, unsurprisingly launched human rights campaigns. Each of these postures was not only linked to a distinct position on political violence, but represented distinct responses to the challenges of modernity itself.

Image Credit: “Plaza de Mayo y la muerte de Néstor Kirchner” by Guillermo Tomoyose. CC BY-NC2.0 via Flickr.

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Residency training and lifestyle

For many generations, doctors seemingly had little choice. Work came first. Doctors were expected to live and breathe medicine, spend long hours at the office or hospital, and, when necessary, neglect their families for the sake of their patients. Such behavior was in accordance with cultural norms of the broader society. Leisure time and material goals were traditionally seen by society as unbecoming of a person dedicated to service.

Physicians’ workaholic ways were buoyed by the traditional family structure in America. Anecdotal evidence had long suggested this, but in 1980 Marcia Fowlkes empirically documented the phenomenon. Most doctors delayed marriage and deferred personal gratifications. When doctors did marry, they tended to select wives less accomplished than spouse of other academic or professional men. During marriage, medical wives customarily subordinated themselves to their husbands’ careers. The doctors in this study almost universally indicated that career success was more important to them than satisfaction in other aspects of life, and they typically played only secondary roles in child-rearing and family life.

Physicians’ professional success did not come without cost—particularly for their wives.  Spouses had to endure considerable loneliness and solitude. Effects on the children of physicians are not well understood, although there is considerable anecdotal evidence that some children also felt ignored, particularly by unusually high-achieving fathers.

In the 1970s, traditional attitudes toward work and family life among young physicians began to change.  A major reason for this was the entry of much larger numbers of women into the profession. Women physicians had traditionally sought a more harmonious balance between work and family life than their male counterparts. In this sense the entry of large numbers of women into the profession likely represented a leavening influence. The effects of the women’s movement ran deeper, however. The feminist movement enabled more women to enter virtually every area of the workforce, not just medicine. As a result, there was a rise in two-career families and a corresponding decline in traditional families, where the stay-at-home wives had long enabled the workaholic ways of their husbands.  As the traditional family became less common, an important prop for many generations of doctors became weaker.

NEC-Medical-137 by NEC Corporation of America. CC BY 2.0 via Flickr

A decade later, generational changes also began contributing to new attitudes toward work and personal life among house officers. Members of “Generation X” (born 1963-81) and “Millennials” (born 1982-2000) began entering medicine, and they tended not to share their elders’ preoccupation with work.  Younger physicians were not so eager to delay gratification or neglect their families for the sake of a career. They were less career-driven than their parents and grandparents, and they tended to seek jobs that would enable them to attend their children’s soccer games—or even to coach—rather than to provide a high income or big house. Compared with doctors of the silent generation and Baby Boomers, they focused on achieving meaning in life, not just meaning in work.

Beginning in the 1990s, the result was a decided shift in interest among many young physicians toward specialties that allowed greater time for personal and family activities. Fields that became especially popular included dermatology, ophthalmology, anesthesiology, plastic and reconstructive surgery, radiology, radiological oncology, and emergency medicine—all prestigious, high-paying fields with comfortable lifestyles. These so-called “lifestyle” fields all had in common fewer work hours, less night call, more predictable schedules, greater flexibility, and more free time for family, leisure, and avocational pursuits.

At the turn of the twenty-first century, the emergence of “lifestyle” considerations among house officers created considerable consternation among older doctors. Some felt that contemporary house officers exhibited less intensity, determination, and devotion. To the older generation, the lack of complete immersion in medicine was indicative of a less-than-full commitment to being a doctor. They tended to view the desire of many younger doctors to work fewer hours and avoid around-the-clock demands on their time as smacking of unprofessionalism.

However, the rise of lifestyle considerations among residents and young doctors did not represent the “decline and fall” of professionalism in medicine, as some older doctors were wont to maintain. Rather, it represented a natural evolution of the profession, another chapter in the ongoing story of generational change. Indeed, studies demonstrated a strong work ethic and firm commitment to their medical careers among Generation X and Millennial doctors. The main difference seemed to be that younger doctors defined success by their total life, not just by their work, and thus they strove much harder to keep the two in balance.

The early twenty-first century interest in “lifestyle” among residents and young doctors cast into sharp relief the ongoing dilemmas of professionalism in medicine.  At the core of professionalism is the ethic that the needs of patients come first.  Illness does not follow a clock; service to patients frequently causes inconvenience for doctors.  Yet, no one wishes to be attended by exhausted or burned-out physicians either.  What is the appropriate balance? These tensions are intrinsic to the practice of medicine, and accordingly they will never go away. Ultimately, each generation must decide this matter for itself, as much each individual physician.

Featured Image: “Doctors with patient, 1999″ by Seattle Municipal Archives. CC BY 2.0 via Flickr. 

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