Thursday 30 May 2013

Video: The Philosophy of Hate Crime: Concepts, Values and Tensions in the European Context

As some may have noticed, from time to time I have posted materisls and ideas coming out of a European research project on hate crime policy of which I have been a part. The project When Law and Hate Collide is now officially over, but material will keep coming out throughout this as well as the next few years. For instance, at the moment, me and my philsopher colleague in the project, David Brax, are in the process of preparing a special issue on the philosophy of hate crime of the cross-disciplinary research periodical Journal of Interpersonal Violence, to appear in 2014, and earlier this year, we made public our report on the philosophy of hate crime, available open access for online reading and download by clicking the link above.

Now you can also view online videos from the final conference of the project, held in Brussels, January 29, available via youtube here, and the presentation of our philosophical perspective, The Philosophy of Hate Crime: Concepts, Values and Tensions in the European Context, is embedded for direct viewing here below (the slides are not very visible on the video, so these can be downloaded separately via the link above)!



All earlier posts connecting to this project, including videos from earlier symposia on the philosophy as well as psychology of hate crime, are here.

Wednesday 22 May 2013

Utilitarianism and Empathy, or: Are Kantians Abnormally Empathic?

I just made some comments on a new psychology research article on the topic of how moral judgement link to emotional features in the journal PLOS ONE, entitled Low Levels of Empathic Concern Predict Utilitarian Moral Judgment. As with other articles of this type, I am a bit concerned by the sloppy use of ethical theoretical terminology among psychology and cognitive science researchers, as well as biased reportings of results. The secondary title of this little post is meant as a well-meant and humorous wink to the authors of the article and other researchers in the field of moral psychology as to what they may be unwittingly assuming when reporting their findings....