Bianco Luno’s notes on June Stephenson’s Men are Not Cost-Effective
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Editor’s Introduction
“Women and men do not participate equally in crime. The disparity is so extreme, ancient, and immanent that it long ago should have garnered serious attention from philosophers for what it signals about the only two kinds of moral consciousness.” So […]
Bianco Luno’s notes on June Stephenson’s Men are Not Cost-Effective
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Law Enforcement
Them, too. The people who protect us: watch out for them. They are cut of the same cloth. Often enough it is firefighters who start fires and policemen who commit violent crimes.
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“Arson is the only crime where the suspect sticks around,” […]
Bianco Luno’s notes on June Stephenson’s Men are Not Cost-Effective
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Conclusions
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Not all men are criminals, but nearly almost all criminals are men. By a ratio of 94 to 6, men outnumber women in prison, a fact that raises the questions of whether and why crime is a masculine statement. [I wonder why […]
Bianco Luno’s notes on Roy F. Baumeister’s “Is There Anything Good About Men?” (American Psychological Association, Invited Address, 2007)
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Editor’s Introduction
Baumeister intends a corrective to a popular view that favors the qualities of women over men. That view, which usually takes feminist form, arises as a reaction to a history of social and political […]
Notes on Roy F. Baumeister’s “Is There Anything Good About Men?” (American Psychological Association, Invited Address, 2007) Part II
Text in black below is from Baumeister’s address. Text in blue is Luno’s commentary, unless otherwise noted.
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Men and Culture
This provides a new basis for understanding gender politics and inequality.
The generally accepted view is that back […]
Notes on Jeffrie G. Murphy, “Marxism and Retribution”
Editor’s note: The contract theory of punishment gets a well-deserved lashing from Murphy with a borrowed Marxist whip. But Luno lashes out indiscriminately with the utmost discrimination: Let’s go after the theorists…
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The only moral way to punish is the Kantian way but the Kantian way forbids the use […]
In this classic paper in the literature on the idea of supererogation (acts above and beyond moral duty), Urmson argues for recognition of a special class of moral acts that, while clearly moral, cannot be required—at least not generally. In the course of his argument, he makes explicit a masculine assumption about the feminine relation to morality. Susan Wolf reacts to this paper. Together, Urmson’s seemingly off-handed remark and Wolf’s response, are symptomatic of the deep rift in moral perspective between women and men. The underlying clash of principles were first clearly examined by Otto Weininger a century ago. Luno picks up where Weininger left off, using Urmson and Wolf as philosophical occasions.
Wolf does not consider moral perfection “a model of personal well-being.” She disagrees with the assumption “that one ought to be as morally good as possible.” Either we must make our ideals more “palatable” or, as she will argue, tinker with what we mean when we affirm a moral theory. She explores what is wrong with being a moral saint.
O’Neill addresses the Kantian moral concepts of not treating others as means (i.e., using them) and treating them positively as persons, how these are related, and finally how “an adequate understanding of what it is to treat others as persons must view them not abstractly as possibly consenting adults, but as particular men and women with limited and determinate capacities to understand or consent to proposals of action.” The Kantian moral ideal so far as it has practical application must take account of human limitations.
Notes on Harriet Taylor Mill, The Enfranchisement of Women
[The essay first appeared in the Westminster Review (1851), then in 1868 in a pamphlet under her name, and in John Stuart Mill’s Dissertations and Discussions in 1875. After some confusion as to its authorship, J. S. Mill attributed the essay to Harriet Taylor (1807–1858). Mill elaborated […]
