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110
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"Blame Fiction."
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Betty Bunny didn't do it
When a young rabbit breaks a table lamp and blames the Tooth Fairy, her family explains the importance of honesty.
Book
Moral difference between humans and robots: paternalism and human-relative reason
According to some philosophers, if moral agency is understood in behaviourist terms, robots could become moral agents that are as good as or even better than humans. Given the behaviourist conception, it is natural to think that there is no interesting moral difference between robots and humans in terms of moral agency (call it the equivalence thesis). However, such moral differences exist: based on Strawson’s account of participant reactive attitude and Scanlon’s relational account of blame, I argue that a distinct kind of reason available to humans—call it human-relative reason—is not available to robots. The difference in moral reason entails that sometimes an action is morally permissible for humans, but not for robots. Therefore, when developing moral robots, we cannot consider only what humans can or cannot do. I use examples of paternalism to illustrate my argument.
Journal Article
Who wet my pants?
When Reuben the bear brings doughnuts to his forest friends, they discover that his pants are wet and he angrily accuses them of the dirty deed.
Book
Trading in innocence: slave-shaming in Ghanaian children's market fiction
Ghana's market fiction of the early 2000s takes up the issue of modern slavery, particularly in the form of forced child labour. This paper argues, first of all, that market fiction pits innocent children against negligent parents, to insist that parents shoulder the blame for their children's descent into slavery. However, the texts frequently directly associate this notion of contemporary culpability with historical complicity in the Atlantic slave trade in a turn that points to the larger systemic inequalities of modernity that encourage parents to 'sell' their own children. With reference to Perry Nodelman's notion of the 'shadow text' that accompanies all narrative constructions of childhood, we examine how depictions of innocence in these stories of child capture are informed by adult desires and anxieties. Accordingly, the sensational strategy of eliciting culturally painful - and shameful - memories serves as a typically extreme mechanism for delivering cautionary warnings both to adult and young readers not only about the horrific nature of contemporary slavery but also about excessive investment in the structures and ideologies of global capitalism.
Journal Article
Hidden
When fourteen-year-olds Wren and Darra meet at a Michigan summer camp, both are overwhelmed by memories from six years earlier when Darra's father stole a car, unaware that Wren was hiding in the back.
Book
Fiction as Counter Memory: Writing Armenia and Palestine in Aline Ohanesian’s Orhan’s Inheritance and Susan Abulhawa’s Mornings in Jenin
This article examines the role fiction plays in retrieving pasts that have been suppressed or occluded within dominant narratives by grafting these counter memories onto memorable forms. It investigates the way two novels, Susan Abulhawa’s Mornings in Jenin (2010) and Aline Ohanesian’s Orhan’s Inheritance (2015), guide us to rethink well-known narratives that shape our understanding of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and the negotiations around the recognition of the Armenian genocide, respectively. These novels aim not only to portray the past but to rework, rewrite, and interrogate it. In addition to revising a contested past for an international readership, we argue these novels are “meta-mnemonic”; they stage the process of historical recollection, both individual and collective, and thereby interrogate the ways past events accrue meaning for future generations. The novels’ use of literary techniques like multiple temporal perspectives, characters of different nationalities, and interwoven narratives present a nuanced, multi-perspectival understanding of the past, one which resists a simple repositioning of blame. Instead, these authors challenge their readers to revise their understanding of the past and create bridges between different versions of history. In so doing, they carve for literature a potent role in the formation of collective memory. Taken together, Mornings in Jenin and Orhan’s Inheritance demonstrate the political power novels can have if conceived as a part of a national, ethnic, or religious memory-making process, not only to continually explore the past and attest to its ongoing effects but to imagine transformed futures.
Journal Article
Postdecisional Counterfactual Thinking by Actors and Readers
How do individuals think counterfactually about the outcomes of their decisions? Most previous studies have investigated how readers think about fictional stories, rather than how actors think about events they have actually experienced. We assumed that differences in individuals' roles (actor vs. reader) can make different information available, which in turn can effect counterfactual thinking. Hence, we predicted an effect of role on postdecisional counterfactual thinking. Reporting the results of eight studies, we show that readers undo the negative outcome of a story by undoing the protagonist's choice to tackle a given problem, rather than the protagonist's unsuccessful attempt to solve it. But actors who make the same choice and experience the same negative outcome as the protagonist undo this outcome by altering features of the problem. We also show that this effect does not depend on motivational factors. These results contradict current accounts of counterfactual thinking and demonstrate the necessity of investigating the counterfactual thoughts of individuals in varied roles.
Journal Article
Women's Erotic Rape Fantasies: An Evaluation of Theory and Research
This article is the first systematic review of the research literature on women's rape fantasies. Current research indicates that between 31% and 57% of women have fantasies in which they are forced into sex against their will, and for 9% to 17% of women these are a frequent or favorite fantasy experience. Erotic rape fantasies are paradoxical: they do not appear to make sense. Why would a person have an erotic and pleasurable fantasy about an event that, in real life, would be abhorrent and traumatic? In this article, the major theories of women's rape fantasies are evaluated both rationally and empirically. These theories explain rape fantasies in terms of masochism, sexual blame avoidance, openness to sexuality, sexual desirability, male rape culture, biological predisposition to surrender, sympathetic physiological activation, and adversary transformation. This article evaluates theory and research, makes provisional judgments as to which theories appear to be most viable, and begins the task of theoretical integration to arrive at a more complete and internally consistent explanation for why many women engage in erotic rape fantasies. Methodological critiques and programs for future research are presented throughout.
Journal Article
SAUDI NOVELISTS' RESPONSE TO TERRORISM THROUGH FICTION: A STUDY IN COMPARISON TO WORLD LITERATURE
The post-9/11 period has posited new questions for the Saudi society that required answers from different perspectives. The Saudi novelists tackled the issue of terrorism in their works and tried to define it and dig for its roots. Some blame the dominant religious-based culture for this phenomenon asking for more openness in the Saudi culture. Others take a defensive approach of the religious discourse blaming outside factors for this phenomenon. This positively connoted research uses the principles of deductive research and puts the Saudi novels that treat the theme of terrorism on par with some world literature that have the same concern excavating the common patterns such as (a) drive for terrorism and the lifestyle of a terrorist; (b) extreme religious groups and religious discourse; and (c) way of life: liberal West versus the Islamist. The selected novels are in three languages: Arabic, Urdu and English. Al-Irhabi 20 and Terrorist explore the background and transformation of the terrorists. Jangi, and Qila Jungi share almost identical events and ideological background, they explain the reasons for apparently irresistible attraction for Jihad. Along such a dichotomy, one can find varied degrees of analysis through a psycho-analytical and textual perspective.
Journal Article
