Browsing by Subject "political philosophy"
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Item Open Access Informatic Opacity: Biometric Facial Recognition and the Aesthetics and Politics of Defacement(2014) Blas, Zachary MarshallConfronting the rapidly increasing, worldwide reliance on biometric technologies to surveil, manage, and police human beings, my dissertation Informatic Opacity: Biometric Facial Recognition and the Aesthetics and Politics of Defacement charts a series of queer, feminist, and anti-racist concepts and artworks that favor opacity as a means of political struggle against surveillance and capture technologies in the 21st century. Utilizing biometric facial recognition as a paradigmatic example, I argue that today's surveillance requires persons to be informatically visible in order to control them, and such visibility relies upon the production of technical standardizations of identification to operate globally, which most vehemently impact non- normative, minoritarian populations. Thus, as biometric technologies turn exposures of the face into sites of governance, activists and artists strive to make the face biometrically illegible and refuse the political recognition biometrics promises through acts of masking, escape, and imperceptibility. Although I specifically describe tactics of making the face unrecognizable as "defacement," I broadly theorize refusals to visually cohere to digital surveillance and capture technologies' gaze as "informatic opacity," an aesthetic-political theory and practice of anti- normativity at a global, technical scale whose goal is maintaining the autonomous determination of alterity and difference by evading the quantification, standardization, and regulation of identity imposed by biometrics and the state. My dissertation also features two artworks: Facial Weaponization Suite, a series of masks and public actions, and Face Cages, a critical, dystopic installation that investigates the abstract violence of biometric facial diagramming and analysis. I develop an interdisciplinary, practice-based method that pulls from contemporary art and aesthetic theory, media theory and surveillance studies, political and continental philosophy, queer and feminist theory, transgender studies, postcolonial theory, and critical race studies.
Item Open Access RECONSTRUCTING RACISM: TRANSFORMING RACIAL HIERARCHY FROM “NECESSARY EVIL” INTO “POSITIVE GOOD”(Social Philosophy and Policy, 2017) Grynaviski, JD; Munger, MCCopyright © 2017 Social Philosophy and Policy Foundation. Our theoretical claim is that racism was consciously (though perhaps not intentionally) devised, and later evolved, to serve two conflicting purposes. First, racism served a legal-economic purpose, legitimating ownership and savage treatment of slaves by southern whites, preserving the value of property rights in labor. Second, racism allowed slave owners to justify, to themselves and to outsiders, how a morally "good" person could own slaves. Racism portrayed African slaves as being less than human (and therefore requiring care, as a positive duty of the slave owner, as a man cares for his children, who cannot care for themselves), or else as being other than human (and therefore being spiritually no different from cattle or horses, and therefore requiring only the same considerations for maintenance and husbandry). The interest of the historical narrative presented here is the emergence of racial chattel slavery as a coherent and fiercely defended ideal, rather than the "necessary evil" that had been the perspective of the Founders. The reason that this is important is that the ideology of racism persisted far beyond the destruction of the institution of slavery, through Reconstruction, Jim Crow, and in some ways persisting even today. This work is an example of the problems of assuming that there is a "feedback" mechanism by which moral intuitions are updated and perfected; to the contrary, as suggested by Douglass North, even socially inferior ideologies can prove extremely persistent.Item Open Access The Problem of Sorting: A Dilemma Between Freedom of Association and Social Justice(2021) Soon, Valerie-JeanWhat does justice require of us in the personal realm of intimate association? Many seemingly innocent choices at the heart of private life, such as our tendency to sort ourselves into groups of friends, partners, and neighbors who share our social identities, play a significant role in perpetuating social segregation and its concomitant inequalities. And oftentimes, we rely on structures such as informal social norms, selective rules of club membership, or local land-use policies to protect these associational choices. I call this the problem of sorting. Because these choices are in the private realm, there is significant tension between personal liberty, especially the freedom of association, and the demands of justice. I begin this dissertation by using empirical social science to outline the problem of sorting. Individuals have reasons to take political action in favor of shaping their search environments according to these criteria, and they also have reasons to offer social opportunities to the excluded. The state should take positive steps to create diverse search environments. However, the state ought not interfere in our actual associations, and individuals have no duties to form substantive associations with the excluded. I conclude that this understanding of freedom of association and its concomitant duties reduces the tension that we began with, though it does not eliminate it.
Item Open Access The Right of Exit: Emigration, Secession and the Structure of International Taxation(2021) Sam, Erick JerardThis Dissertation critiques the prevailing law and dominant scholarly treatment of the right to emigrate, which I understand to mean the conjunction of the rights (i) to physically leave one’s nation of membership and (ii) to renounce one’s citizenship therein. Contrary to this status quo, which holds that this legal right is and ought to be near-unconditional, it defends the revisionary view that legitimate nations, which are in good standing with the international community and respect human rights, should be permitted to recover great losses unjustly sustained as a result of unrestricted emigration by taxing their emigrants on their worldwide income on an ongoing basis where necessary, or iff such attempts at taxation prove infeasible, inadequate, or otherwise inappropriate, by employing as a backup measure the least severe restrictions on emigration required to forestall such injustices. In general, tax and economically motivated emigrants, as well as more well-off emigrants, should be taxed and regulated prior to doing so for emigrants who relocate for other reasons, such as for political or cultural reasons. In practice, however, one would expect that nations would seldom have to rely upon actual physical restrictions. This is because a home nation’s mere threat to restrict the relocation of its desirable emigrants would often provide potential destination nations with an incentive to cooperate with the home nation in the administration of a tax on its emigrants—which, under the regime I defend, the home nation would be required to avail itself of before resorting to physical restrictions.