Paulo Freire insists that the oppressed are the more likely agents of liberation because the oppressors self-handicap their abilities to dismantle the systems of oppression they create and sustain. I develop this basic picture relying on the thought of Mexican philosopher Jorge Portilla and the character-type he calls 'apretado.' Apretados are people who understand themselves in relation to their material possessions, relatively high social positions, and who construe their social positions as self-validating proof of their deserving more or being more valuable than others. Apretados create oppressive social structures that enable them to live in accordance with their self-conceptions, but these structures enslave apretados to the validating gaze of others and condemn apretados to a state of Sartrean bad faith and alienation from the selves they construct in time with their actions. Unafflicted by these self-imposed harms, the oppressed are the more likely agents of liberation, as Freire insists.
This paper addresses the issue of violent images that have been subjected to a specific photographic reinformation. This process is typically used in the case of mass-distributed violent images to protect the dignity of persons depicted in a state of extreme vulnerability. Taking juridical and sociological explanations as a starting point, I explore the reasons behind the visual strategies increasingly adopted by the media for photographic materials documenting violent events in recent history. Then, I highlight the philosophical stakes underlying the media's choice to blur imagistic violence, focusing on three issues: the effect of the attenuation of visual aggressiveness on the viewer; the tension arising between the desire to see everything and the hiatus produced by blurring in the visual field; and the viewer's forms of appropriating the content of the violent blurred images.
A recent discussion in virtue ethics revives the question of how virtue relates to skill. Is skill merely a useful analog to explaining the nature of virtue, or is virtue actually a skill? The motivation objection is one of a number of arguments that virtue is not a skill. The idea is that virtues are motivationally constrained by requiring their possessors to have certain concerns, goals, and motivations, but skills are not. In this paper, we argue that the motivation objection fails because, contra the objection, skills include at least four motivational constraints: aspiration for excellence, commitment to the game, beauty and truth, and the goods of persons. These four constraints ground our evaluation of skills and the skillful. Together, they form a motivational spectrum of skill. We conclude by arguing that the motivational spectrum of skill defeats the motivation objection and provides some evidence for virtue being a skill.
I argue that, given the choice, we have a right not to undergo transformative experiences. We are entitled to affirm our previous autonomous agency by deciding in this way, and this right is grounded in the significance of our self-authorship. I further show that many of the suggested demands of morality involve transformative change, and so meeting these demands would involve not just paying a high cost, but forfeiting this right. Though this may be morally required, we may wrong ourselves in complying.
I offer a new way of thinking about immortality: like atmospheric convection, it might be sensitive to initial conditions (the butterfly effect). Bernard Williams famously argued that eternal life would become boring or alienating. But suppose our world is a non-linear dynamical system: the laws of nature and the past determine the future but there is no lower limit on a future-altering difference in the initial state. So, eternal life might have unending possibilities for fascination while remaining sta-ble enough to help us preserve our identity and character. This is not to say that eternity would be enjoyable. It might be awful. Nor does it entail that we should accept it. A mortal life might be better or equal. But non-linearity shows new ways to enjoy and understand eternity.
