Empathic emotions and justice in society

Empathy is defined as an affect more appropriate to another's situation than to one's own. The paper (i) summarizes different modes of empathic affect arousal; (ii) shows how empathic affect may interact with social-cognitive development, to produce four levels of empathy development; (iii) suggests that causal attributions may transform empathic affect into sympathy, guilt, and empathic anger, which are major moral affects; (iv) discusses how these affects may influence moral judgment and behavior; (v) points up empathic morality's limitations and the need to embed empathy in relevant moral principles; (vi) discusses possible links between empathy and justice principles, with special focus on Rawls; (vii) illustrates the interplay of empathy, moral judgment, and justice; and (viii) suggests that moral principles may become hot cognitions.     

A Poverty of Imagination: Blaming the Poor for Inequality

Inequality in Britain today is now so deep that the top 10 per cent own 100 times more than the bottom 10 per cent, yet there is remarkably little public concern or anger about poverty. Indeed, compassion and concern for the poorest in society has actually declined in recent years due to the continued, and even increased, prevalence of the view that poverty is largely caused by laziness and lack of willpower, or is simply an unavoidable fact of modern life. Either way, many people tacitly accept that ‘the poor will always be with us’. Moreover, much of the British public believes that there are sufficient opportunities to succeed for those who try hard enough, and also that it is the middle class which actually struggles the most, economically or financially. These assumptions are highly conservative in their ideological and political implications because they limit public support for egalitarianism and extensive wealth redistribution from rich to poor.     

Ethics of Emotions as Ethics of Human Rights: A Jurisprudence of Sympathy in Adorno, Horkheimer and Rorty

This article considers in a different light the relationship between legal theory and ethics by means of an interpretation of the thought of Adorno and Horkheimer, and of the writings of Richard Rorty, as two moments of a marginal stream of ethics of passions that runs beneath the history of rationalist Western philosophy. It departs from the critique of Modernity as a dialectic of barbarism and civilisation, and from a genealogy of Auschwitz that finds its antecedents in Kantian morality. It also characterises modern culture as one of apathy and bourgeois stoicism, and establishes a link between the cold modern ethos and the dynamics of Nazi hardness. The article turns then to a consideration of some of the responses to the comprehensive crisis of Modernity: the imperative ‘Auschwitz never again’, Adorno’s ‘general enlightenment’ and Horkheimer’s ethics of sympathy. Finally it reflects upon Rorty’s proposal of sentimental education as an effective strategy to foster a human rights culture in Postmodernity, with the aim of bridging the tradition of moral sentiments and contemporary struggles for human rights. I am very grateful to Costas Douzinas, Sonia Romero, Shaun Haselhurst, David-Alexander Smith, José Bellido and the two anonymous referees for their comments, and to Alexander García-Düttman for his suggestions. This text is dedicated to Paul Gready.     

《唐律疏议》有关女性犯罪规定的梳理

在古代的法典中,有许多关于女性犯罪的法律规定,从中我们可以看出古代法律的性别观念以及女性的法律地位。本文主要就《唐律疏议》中涉及女性犯罪的罪名、刑罚及优恤的制度作了梳理与介绍,以从制度角度了解唐代妇女的法律地位。     

Situational variables or beliefs? A multifaceted approach to understanding blame attributions

Are victim and perpetrator blame attributions affected more by situational-specific variables or observers’ basic motives and personal beliefs? In three experiments, varying the scenario setting, the effects of victim and participant age, participant gender, sympathy for the victim, trust in the justice system, belief in a just world and acceptance of rape myths were investigated. In total, 877 Swedish adolescents and adults read scenarios reflecting common acquaintance rape situations. Victim age (18 or 31) was manipulated, but did not affect attributed blame. Effects of participant age and gender varied markedly across the three experiments. Sympathy for the victim and acceptance of rape myths were stronger predictors than belief in a just world. Consistently, blame attributions were found to be more affected by personal beliefs than situational-specific variables.     

禁止儿童乞讨的法经济学分析

分析和解决社会问题有多种进路。法经济学仰仗其强大的解释力和不断自我升级的活力,为分析社会问题提供了一种新颖实用的视角。我们可以运用法经济学的分析范式研究禁止儿童乞讨的问题。儿童乞讨问题受到社会各界广泛关注。有人建议立法干预,甚至全面禁止儿童乞讨。通过法经济学的视角可以剖析儿童乞讨问题的社会根源,并就制度设计过程中需要界清的有关概念以及各种社会成本与收益进行分析,进而按照法经济学的评价体系对各种主张进行考察,从技术层面与国际比较的层面上对禁止儿童乞讨作出制度设计或改进方面的具体分析与建议。     

道德：在理性与情感之间

在西方伦理学发展史上，道德究竟是以理性还是以情感为基础，就此而言存在着理性伦理派和情感伦理派之间针锋相对的两种立场。文章在阐释和分析了以霍布斯和休谟为代表的契约论理性伦理和以叔本华为代表的同情伦理的基础上，论证了从根本上说情感与理性在伦理道德中并不是截然对立的，而是我们道德决断中交织在一起共同作用的因素。人之所以需要守德，与人既是由理性驱动、也是由情感引导的特性相关，因而应从理性合作和情感驱动两个方面．才能厘清人娄服从道德要求的动力机制。     

Bodies in abolition: broken hearts and open wounds

This paper explores some of connections between bodies and slavery in the antislavery discourses of the late eighteenth and the early twenty-first centuries. It focuses on representations of violence and cruelty, and on the discourses of blood, sweat and tears in the eighteenth century to interrogate the bases of the humanitarianism discourses and what it meant to ‘compassionate’ the suffering of others. It argues that the connections between slavery, the body and citizenship lie in the socialization of sentience, the ‘complicated stings’ of social death and the idea of having a secure property in the person. Some of these connections were broken by the de-historicizing move towards focusing on the vulnerability of the slave and the power of the consumer. Using the slave sugar boycotts of 1791–1792 as a particular example, the paper argues that these more complicated stories are ‘leached out’ by discourses that treat slaves only as bodies, moralize consumption and rely on a neat split between public and private at the expense of a layered understanding of citizenship and empire, and of inequality, subordination, marginalization and social conflict. The article then traces some of the ways in which this emphasis on moralized consumption and disposable bodies resurfaces in current antislavery campaigns in the twenty-first century in the rhetoric of ethical consumption, risking the same ‘leaching out’ of political analysis, hollowing out our understanding of the link between slavery and citizenship.     

A Portrait of the (Tortured) Artist as a Young (Coloured) Man: Reading Arthur Nortje

This article examines Robert Semple’s Walks and Sketches at the Cape of Good Hope (1803), a largely forgotten early colonial text which intriguingly blends the genres of travel writing and the sentimental novel. My analysis seeks to place the text within the longer genealogies of South African literature in English by arguing that it anticipates a number of the central concerns this literature, among them sympathy for the suffering of others, the representation of racial and social difference, and the fracturing of metropolitan literary protocols in the colonial context.     

"移情说"的主客体关系论

移情说的核心、同时也构成其突出贡献的是从心理学角度揭示了审美过程中主客体之间的关系。移情说理论深化了把审美作为人的一种存在方式的认识,注意到"同情"中深层的心理活动,避免了把审美移情看成单纯的表层直觉活动而流于肤浅,推进了心理学美学的纵深发展,探索并强调了人在审美移情中所获得的彻底解脱和完全自由。虽然存在不足之处,但移情说试图从心理学的角度研究审美经验及其中的主客体关系,在一定程度上超越了主观主义与客观主义、表现论和形式论这种二元对立的局限,把美学研究向着精确化、科学化方向推进了一大步。