Satyāgraha (Sanskrit: सत्याग्रह) is a composite lexeme composed of the word satya (meaning “truth”) and agraha (“holding firmly to”). It also refers to a virtue in Indian philosophy, referring to being truthful and pure in thought, word and action. In Yoga philosophy, satya is one of five yamas (Sanskrit: यम).
“You assist an evil system most effectively by obeying its orders and decrees. An evil system never deserves such allegiance.
Allegiance to it means partaking of the evil. A good person will resist an evil system with his or her whole soul.”
The CIA was very interested in various methods to manipulate and exploit the human mind. Besides illegal experiments which involved psychotropic drugs and torture, they were also interested in parapsychology as the document at hand shows.
The objective of this group of experimental sessions was to verify Geller’s apparent paranormal perception under carefully controlled conditions with the goal of understanding the physical and psychological variables underlying such ability.
A straw man is a common form of argument and is an informal fallacy based on giving the impression of refuting an opponent’s argument, while actually refuting an argument that was not presented by that opponent. One who engages in this fallacy is said to be “attacking a straw man.”
Further References
Eemeren, F. H. Van, Amsterdam, F. V., & Walton, D.. (1996). The straw man fallacy. Logic and Argumentation
“In this paper, an analysis is given of the straw man fallacy as a misrepresentation of someone’s commitments in order to refute that person’s argument. with this analysis a distinction can be made between straw man and other closely related fallacies such as ad hominem, secundum quid and ad verecundiam. when alleged cases of the straw man fallacy are evaluated, the speaker’s commitment should be conceived normatively in relation to the type of conversation the speaker was supposed to be engaged in.”
Talisse, R., & Aikin, S. F.. (2006). Two forms of the Straw Man. Argumentation
“The authors identify and offer an analysis of a new form of the straw man fallacy, and then explore the implications of the prevalence of this fallacy for contemporary political discourse.”
Lewiński, M.. (2011). Towards a Critique-Friendly Approach to the Straw Man Fallacy Evaluation. Argumentation
“In this article i address the following question: when are reformulations in argumentative criticisms reasonable and when do they become fallacious straw men? following ideas developed in the integrated version of pragma-dialectics, i approach argumentation as an element of agonistic exchanges permeated by arguers’ strategic manoeuvring aimed at effectively defeating the opponent with reasonable means. i propose two basic context-sensitive criteria for deciding on the reasonableness of reformulations: precision of the rules for interpretation (precise vs. loose) and general expectation of cooperativeness (critical vs. constructive). on the basis of analysis of examples taken from online political discussions, i argue that in some contexts, especially those that are critical and loose, what might easily be classified as a straw man following conventional treatment should be taken as a harsh, yet reasonable, strategic argumentative criticism.”
Lewiński, M., & Oswald, S.. (2013). When and how do we deal with straw men? A normative and cognitive pragmatic account. Journal of Pragmatics
“In a recent paper in this journal, ‘the fallacy of beneficial ignorance: a test of hirschman’s hiding hand’, professor bent flyvbjerg claims that there is no such thing as beneficial ignorance and that ignorance is detrimental to project success. moreover, he argues that if hirschman’s principle of the hiding hand were correct, then benefit overruns would exceed cost overruns. thus, with a statistical test, he demonstrates that the hiding hand is in fact less common than its ‘evil twin’, the planning fallacy. in this rejoinder, the author shows that flyvbjerg’s test is built on a straw man fallacy and that he fails to refute the hiding hand. contrary to flyvbjerg—who focuses on the narrow costs and benefits—this paper provides evidence that while the hiding hand is found among projects that are project management failures but project successes, the planning fallacy fits with projects that are both project management and project failures. on that basis, the author analyzes a sample of 161 world bank-funded projects of different types and finds that the hiding hand prevails. while future research should ascertain this finding, the author then points out the methodological limitations of flyvbjerg’s test. indeed, it is ironic that the hiding hand, a principle crafted against the very idea of cost–benefit analysis, is refuted on that very basis. even worse, flyvbjerg, in his cost–benefit analysis, ignores the full life-cycle project costs and benefits, the unintended project effects, the difficulties, and problem-solving abilities so dear to hirschman, and, thus, treats the management of projects as a kind of ‘black box’. finally, the author submits that hirschman was a behavioral project theorist, and argues that it is more important to shed light on the circumstances where the hiding hand works than to question whether the principle of the hiding hand is right.”
Macagno, F., & Damele, G.. (2013). The dialogical force of implicit premises: Presumptions in enthymemes. Informal Logic
“The implicit dimension of enthymemes is investigated from a pragmatic perspective to show why a premise can be left unexpressed, and how it can be used strategically. the relationship between the implicit act of taking for granted and the pattern of presumptive reasoning is shown to be the cornerstone of kairos and the fallacy of straw man. by taking a proposition for granted, the speaker shifts the burden of proving its unacceptability onto the hearer. the resemblance (likeliness) of the tacit premise with what is commonly acceptable or has been actually stated can be used as a rhetorical strategy”
A coup d’état also known simply as a coup, a putsch, golpe, or an overthrow, is an illegal and overt seizure of a state by the military or other elites within the state apparatus.[1]
A 2003 review of the academic literature found that the following factors were associated with coups:
officers’ personal grievances
military organizational grievances
military popularity
military attitudinal cohesiveness
economic decline
domestic political crisis
contagion from other regional coups
external threat
participation in war
foreign veto power and military’s national security doctrine
“‘Noam chomsky’s prolific writings have made him one of the most-quoted educators in history-the only living writer on a most-cited list that includes plato, shakespeare, and freud. yet until now, no book has systematically offered chomsky’s influential writings on education. in chomsky on miseducation, noam chomsky builds a larger understanding of our educational needs, starting with the changing role of schools today, and then broadening our view toward new models of public education for citizenship. chomsky weaves global technological change and the primacy of responsible media with the democratic role of schools and higher education. a truly democratic society, he argues, cannot thrive in a rapidly changing world unless our approach to education- formal and otherwise- is dramatically reformed. chomsky’s critique of how our current educational system miseducates’ students- and his prescriptions for change- are essential reading for teachers, parents, school administrators, activists, and anyone concerned about the future.””
Hauser, M. D., Chomsky, N., & Fitch, W. T.. (2010). The faculty of language: What is it, who has it, and how did it evolve?. In The Evolution of Human Language: Biolinguistic Perspectives
“We argue that an understanding of the faculty of language requires substantial interdisciplinary cooperation. we suggest how current developments in linguistics can be profitably wedded to work in evolutionary biology, anthropology, psychology, and neuroscience. we submit that a distinction should be made between the faculty of language in the broad sense (flb) and in the narrow sense (fln). flb includes a sensory-motor system, a conceptual-intentional system, and the computational mechanisms for recursion, providing the capacity to generate an infinite range of expressions from a finite set of elements. we hypothesize that fln only includes recursion and is the only uniquely human component of the faculty of language. we further argue that fln may have evolved for reasons other than language, hence comparative studies might look for evidence of such computations outside of the domain of communication (for example, number, navigation, and social relations).”
Chomsky, N.. (2011). Language and other cognitive systems. What is special about language?. Language Learning and Development
“The traditional conception of language is that it is, in aristotle’s phrase, sound with meaning. the sound-meaning correlation is, furthermore, unbounded, an elementary fact that came to be understood as of great significance in the 17th century scientific revolution. in contemporary terms, the internal language (i-language) of an individual consists, at the very least, of a generative process that yields an infinite array of structured expressions, each interpreted at two interfaces, the sensory-motor interface (sound, sign, or some other sensory modality) for externalization and the conceptual-intentional interface for thought and planning of action. the earliest efforts to address this problem, in the 1950s, postulated rich descriptive apparatus—in different terms, rich assumptions about the genetic component of the language faculty, what has been called ‘universal grammar’ (ug). that seemed necessary to provide for a modicum of descriptive adequacy. also, many puzzles were discovered that had passed u…”
Chomsky, N.. (1992). Manufacturing Consent: Noam Chomsky and the Media. East
“Explores the political life and times of the controversial author, linguist and radical philosopher, noam chomsky. highlighting his analysis of media, chomsky focuses on democratic societies where populations not disciplined by force are subject to more subtle forms of ideological control.”
Chomsky, N.. (1970). Remarks on Nominalization. In Readings in English Tranformational Grammar
“This article reviews, and rethinks, a few leading themes of the biolinguistic program since its inception in the early 1950s, at each stage influenced by developments in the biological sciences. the following also discusses how the questions now entering the research agenda develop in a natural way from some of the earliest concerns of these inquiries.”
Chomsky, N.. (2001). Hegemony or Survival. Business Week
“During early telencephalic development, the major portion of the ventral telencephalic (subpallial) region becomes subdivided into three regions, the lateral (lge), medial (mge), and caudal (cge) ganglionic eminences. in this study, we systematically recapitulated subpallial patterning in mouse embryonic stem cell (esc) cultures and investigated temporal and combinatory actions of patterning signals. in serum-free floating culture, the dorsal-ventral specification of esc-derived telencephalic neuroectoderm is dose-dependently directed by sonic hedgehog (shh) signaling. early shh treatment, even before the expression onset of foxg1 (also bf1; earliest marker of the telencephalic lineage), is critical for efficiently generating lge progenitors, and continuous shh signaling until day 9 is necessary to commit these cells to the lge lineage. when induced under these conditions and purified by fluorescence-activated cell sorter, telencephalic cells efficiently differentiated into nolz1(+)/ctip2(+) lge neuronal precursors and subsequently, both in culture and after in vivo grafting, into darpp32(+) medium-sized spiny neurons. purified telencephalic progenitors treated with high doses of the hedgehog (hh) agonist sag (smoothened agonist) differentiated into mge- and cge-like tissues. interestingly, in addition to strong hh signaling, the efficient specification of mge cells requires fgf8 signaling but is inhibited by treatment with fgf15/19. in contrast, cge differentiation is promoted by fgf15/19 but suppressed by fgf8, suggesting that specific fgf signals play different, critical roles in the positional specification of esc-derived ventral subpallial tissues. we discuss a model of the antagonistic fgf8 and fgf15/19 signaling in rostral-caudal subpallial patterning and compare it with the roles of these molecules in cortical patterning.”
Chomsky, N.. (2001). The New War Against Terror. Human Nature
“Everyone knows its the tv people who run the world crowd laugher. i just got orders that im supposed to be here, not there. well the last talk i gave at this forum was on a light pleasant topic. it was about how humans are an en- dangered species and given the nature of their institutions they are likely to destroy themselves in a fairly short time. so this time there is a little relief and we have a pleasant topic instead, the new war on terror. unfortunately, the world keeps coming up with things that make it more and more horrible as we proceed.”
Skull and Bones’s membership developed a reputation in association with the “power elite“.[10] Regarding the qualifications for membership, Lanny Davis wrote in the 1968 Yale yearbook:
If the society had a good year, this is what the “ideal” group will consist of: a football captain; a Chairman of the Yale Daily News; a conspicuous radical; a Whiffenpoof; a swimming captain; a notorious drunk with a 94 average; a film-maker; a political columnist; a religious group leader; a Chairman of the Lit; a foreigner; a ladies’ man with two motorcycles; an ex-service man; a negro, if there are enough to go around; a guy nobody else in the group had heard of, ever…
Like other Yale senior societies, Skull and Bones membership was almost exclusively limited to white Protestant males for much of its history. While Yale itself had exclusionary policies directed at particular ethnic and religious groups, the senior societies were even more exclusionary.[11][12] While some Catholics were able to join such groups, Jews were more often not.[12] Some of these excluded groups eventually entered Skull and Bones by means of sports, through the society’s practice of tapping standout athletes. Star football players tapped for Skull and Bones included the first Jewish player (Al Hessberg, class of 1938) and African-American player (Levi Jackson, class of 1950, who turned down the invitation for the Berzelius Society).[11]
Yale became coeducational in 1969, prompting some other secret societies such as St. Anthony Hall to transition to co-ed membership, yet Skull and Bones remained fully male until 1992. The Bones class of 1971’s attempt to tap women for membership was opposed by Bones alumni, who dubbed them the “bad club” and quashed their attempt. “The issue”, as it came to be called by Bonesmen, was debated for decades.[13] The class of 1991 tapped seven female members for membership in the next year’s class, causing conflict with the alumni association.[14] The Trust changed the locks on the Tomb and the Bonesmen instead met in the Manuscript Society building.[14] A mail-in vote by members decided 368–320 to permit women in the society, but a group of alumni led by William F. Buckley obtained a temporary restraining order to block the move, arguing that a formal change in bylaws was needed.[14][15] Other alumni, such as John Kerry and R. Inslee Clark, Jr., spoke out in favor of admitting women. The dispute was highlighted on an editorial page of The New York Times.[14][16] A second alumni vote, in October 1991, agreed to accept the Class of 1992, and the lawsuit was dropped.[14][17]
Judith Ann Schiff, Chief Research Archivist at the Yale University Library, has written: “The names of its members weren’t kept secret—that was an innovation of the 1970s—but its meetings and practices were.”[18] While resourceful researchers could assemble member data from these original sources, in 1985, an anonymous source leaked rosters to Antony C. Sutton. This membership information was kept privately for over 15years, as Sutton feared that the photocopied pages could somehow identify the member who leaked it. He wrote a book on the group, America’s Secret Establishment: An Introduction to the Order of Skull and Bones. The information was finally reformatted as an appendix in the book Fleshing out Skull and Bones, a compilation edited by Kris Millegan and published in 2003.
In the 2004 U.S. Presidential election, both the Democratic and Republican nominees were alumni. George W. Bush wrote in his autobiography, “[In my] senior year I joined Skull and Bones, a secret society; so secret, I can’t say anything more.”[21] When asked what it meant that he and Bush were both Bonesmen, former Presidential candidate John Kerry said, “Not much, because it’s a secret.”[22][23]
“The structure of the control network of transnational corporations affects global market competition and financial stability. so far, only small national samples were studied and there was no appropriate methodology to assess control globally. we present the first investigation of the architecture of the international ownership network, along with the computation of the control held by each global player. we find that transnational corporations form a giant bow-tie structure and that a large portion of control flows to a small tightly-knit core of financial institutions. this core can be seen as an economic ‘super-entity’ that raises new important issues both for researchers and policy makers.”
Heemskerk, E. M., & Takes, F. W.. (2016). The Corporate Elite Community Structure of Global Capitalism. New Political Economy
“A key debate on the merits and consequences of globalisation asks to what extent we have moved to a multipolar global political economy. here we investigate this issue through the properties and topologies of corporate elite networks and ask: what is the community structure of the global corporate elite? in order to answer this question, we analyse how the largest one million firms in the world are interconnected at the level of corporate governance through interlocking directorates. community detection through modularity maximisation reveals that regional clusters play a fundamental role in the network architecture of the global political economy. transatlantic connections remain particularly strong: europe and north america remain interconnected in a dense network of shared directors. a distinct asian cluster stands apart as separate and oriented more towards itself. while it develops and gains economic and political power, asia remains by and large outside the scope of the networks of the incumbent global (that is, north atlantic) corporate elite. we see this as a sign of the rise of competing corporate elites. but the corporate elites from the traditional core countries still form a powerful opponent for any competing faction in the global corporate elite.”
When the preferences of economic elites and the stands of organized interest groups are controlled for, the preferences of the average American appear to have only a minuscule, near-zero, statistically non-significant impact upon public policy.
(Gilens & Page, 2014, p.575)
“Each of four theoretical traditions in the study of american politics – which can be characterized as theories of majoritarian electoral democracy, economic elite domination, and two types of interest group pluralism, majoritarian pluralism and biased pluralism – offers different predictions about which sets of actors have how much influence over public policy: average citizens; economic elites; and organized interest groups, mass-based or business-oriented. a great deal of empirical research speaks to the policy influence of one or another set of actors, but until recently it has not been possible to test these contrasting theoretical predictions against each other within a single statistical model. this paper reports on an effort to do so, using a unique data set that includes measures of the key variables for 1,779 policy issues. multivariate analysis indicates that economic elites and organized groups representing business interests have substantial independent impacts on u.s. government policy, while average citizens and mass-based interest groups have little or no independent influence. the results provide substantial support for theories of economic elite domination and for theories of biased pluralism, but not for theories of majoritarian electoral democracy or majoritarian pluralism.”
“Human freedom is best understood as self-determination. free action consists of deliberation, decision, and action. the free human person deserves dignity, that is, we each deserve to be treated as a moral end and not merely as a means to someone else’s end. neurocentrist philosophy-a form of eliminative materialism-based on neuroscience, however, threatens the extinction of the human self and, thereby, threatens to turn our experience of freedom and dignity into a mere delusion. this evacuates the moral agenda of every activist liberation theology. one task of today’s public theologian is to protect cognitive liberty, because it conceptually undergirds political, economic, and social liberation.”
Sommaggio, P., Mazzocca, M., Gerola, A., & Ferro, F.. (2017). Cognitive Liberty. A first step towards a human neuro-rights declaration. BioLaw Journal
“This paper discusses the emerging debate concerning the concept of cognitive liberty and its connection with human rights. therefore, considering how recent developments of neurosciences are granting us an increasing ability to monitor and influence mental processes, this article aims to provide a clear definition of cognitive liberty understood as a necessary condition to all other freedoms that cannot be reduced to existing rights. in this regard, after presenting the most important positions on the issue, we introduce our point of view, according to which cognitive liberty allows us to lay the groundwork for building new neurorelated human rights.”
Weissenbacher, A.. (2018). Defending cognitive liberty in an age of moral engineering. Theology and Science
“In 2009, mark walker first proposed the genetic virtue project, advancing that science should explore using genetic engineering to eliminate moral evils just as it attempts to eliminate natural ones like disease. this seemed like an issue for the far future given the unique challenges. walker focused on the wrong aspect of personhood, however, as moral engineering of the brain appears to be a more likely possibility. as early aspects of moral engineering the brain are in development, especially through the manipulation of the neural correlates of religious and political beliefs, emotions, and behaviors, i consider several issues surrounding this project so as to protect individual rights and prevent future harms. i advance an internal criterion for the field called acceptability across ideologies to serve as a guide to protect against coercive and harmful technologies and analyze how current laws protecting cognitive liberty are lacking and in need of revision.”
Sommaggio, P., & Mazzocca, M.. (2020). Cognitive liberty and human rights. In Neuroscience and Law: Complicated Crossings and New Perspectives
“This chapter discusses the emerging debate regarding the relationship between the concept of cognitive liberty and human rights. for this reason, after briefly presenting some issues related to the development of recent neurotechnology, the different types of definitions of the concept of cognitive liberty, that have been recently proposed, are illustrated. starting from these last, this chapter aims to analyze how, the whole relationship between human rights and cognitive liberty can change depending on the legislative strategy that one prefers to undertake.”
Ienca, M.. (2017). The Right to Cognitive Liberty. Scientific American
“Rapid advancements in human neuroscience and neurotechnology open unprecedented possibilities for accessing, collecting, sharing and manipulating information from the human brain. such applications raise important challenges to human rights principles that need to be addressed to prevent unintended consequences. this paper assesses the implications of emerging neurotechnology applications in the context of the human rights framework and suggests that existing human rights may not be sufficient to respond to these emerging issues. after analysing the relationship between neuroscience and human rights, we identify four new rights that may become of great relevance in the coming decades: the right to cognitive liberty, the right to mental privacy, the right to mental integrity, and the right to psychological continuity.”
Walsh, C.. (2010). Drugs and human rights: Private palliatives, sacramental freedoms and cognitive liberty. International Journal of Human Rights
Kraft, C. J., & Giordano, J.. (2017). Integrating brain science and law: Neuroscientific evidence and legal perspectives on protecting individual liberties. Frontiers in Neuroscience
“Advances in neuroscientific techniques have found increasingly broader applications, including in legal neuroscience (or ‘neurolaw’), where experts in the brain sciences are called to testify in the courtroom. but does the incursion of neuroscience into the legal sphere constitute a threat to individual liberties? and what legal protections are there against such threats? in this paper, we outline individual rights as they interact with neuroscientific methods. we then proceed to examine the current uses of neuroscientific evidence, and ultimately determine whether the rights of the individual are endangered by such approaches. based on our analysis, we conclude that while federal evidence rules constitute a substantial hurdle for the use of neuroscientific evidence, more ethical safeguards are needed to protect against future violations of fundamental rights. finally, we assert that it will be increasingly imperative for the legal and neuroscientific communities to work together to better define the limits, capabilities, and intended direction of neuroscientific methods applicable for use in law.”
Rainey, S., Martin, S., Christen, A., Mégevand, P., & Fourneret, E.. (2020). Brain Recording, Mind-Reading, and Neurotechnology: Ethical Issues from Consumer Devices to Brain-Based Speech Decoding. Science and Engineering Ethics
“Brain reading technologies are rapidly being developed in a number of neuroscience fields. these technologies can record, process, and decode neural signals. this has been described as ‘mind reading technology’ in some instances, especially in popular media. should the public at large, be concerned about this kind of technology? can it really read minds? concerns about mind-reading might include the thought that, in having one’s mind open to view, the possibility for free deliberation, and for self-conception, are eroded where one isn’t at liberty to privately mull things over. themes including privacy, cognitive liberty, and self-conception and expression appear to be areas of vital ethical concern. overall, this article explores whether brain reading technologies are really mind reading technologies. if they are, ethical ways to deal with them must be developed. if they are not, researchers and technology developers need to find ways to describe them more accurately, in order to dispel unwarranted concerns and address appropriately those that are warranted.”
Ienca, M., & Andorno, R.. (2021). Towards new human rights in the age of neuroscience and Neurotechnology. Analisis Filosofico
“Rapid advancements in human neuroscience and neurotechnology open unprecedented possibilities for accessing, collecting, sharing and manipulating information from the human brain. such applications raise important challenges to human rights principles that need to be addressed to prevent unintended consequences. this paper assesses the implications of emerging neurotechnology applications in the context of the human rights framework and suggests that existing human rights may not be sufficient to respond to these emerging issues. after analysing the relationship between neuroscience and human rights, we identify four new rights that may become of great relevance in the coming decades: the right to cognitive liberty, the right to mental privacy, the right to mental integrity, and the right to psychological continuity.”
Wolpe, P. R.. (2017). Neuroprivacy and cognitive liberty. In The Routledge Handbook of Neuroethics
“The term ‘‘cognitive liberty’’ has been used in a variety of ways. in general, it refers to the degree to which an individual has the right to control his or her own mental and emotional brain processes against the desires of external agents, especially the state, to control or access them. it is largely reflective of the value of neuroprivacy, the idea that privacy rights extend to a citizen’s brain, and that if privacy has any meaning at all, it must mean one’s right to protect the contents of one’s brain (i.e., one’s thoughts, emotions, and other subjective states). these terms are relatively recent concepts, reactions to the development of neurotechnologies that are beginning to allow unprecedented access to the inner workings of the brain. the values they reflect, however, have a long pedigree.”
Walsh, C.. (2014). Beyond religious freedom: Psychedelics and cognitive liberty. In Prohibition, Religious Freedom, and Human Rights: Regulating Traditional Drug Use
“This chapter will examine the blurred boundaries between the sacred and the secular when it comes to psychedelic experiences, and the inevitable ensuing arbitrariness involved in protecting some such rituals and not others. it will put forth the argument that there is a need to move beyond simply seeking exemptions from drug prohibition in the name of religious freedom; rather, there should be a broader right to ingest psychedelics as an aspect of cognitive liberty. cognitive liberty is the right to control one’s own consciousness. it is a concept that equates to freedom of thought, a right protected internationally by the universal declaration of human rights and enforceable in europe through article 9 of the european convention of human rights.”
White, A. E.. (2010). The lie of fMRI: An examination of the ethics of a market in lie detection using functional magnetic resonance imaging. HEC Forum
“The financial crisis, and associated scandals, created a sense of a juridical deficit with regard to the financial sector. forms of independent judgement within the sector appeared compromised, while judgement over the sector seemed unattainable. elites, in the classical millsian sense of those taking tacitly coordinated ‘big decisions’ over the rest of the public, seemed absent. this article argues that the eradication of jurisdictional elites is an effect of neoliberalism, as articulated most coherently by hayek. it characterizes the neoliberal project as an effort to elevate ‘unconscious’ processes over ‘conscious’ ones, which in practice means elevating cybernetic, non- human systems and processes over discursive spheres of politics and judgement. yet such a system still produces its own types of elite power, which come to consist in acts of translation, rather than judgement. firstly, there are ‘cyborg intermediaries’: elites which operate largely within the system of codes, data, screens and prices. secondly, there are ‘diplomatic intermediaries’: elites who come to narrate and justify what markets (and associated technologies and bodies) are ‘saying’. the paper draws on lazzarato’s work on signifying vs asignifying semiotics in order to articulate this, and concludes by considering the types of elite crisis which these forms of power tend to produce.”
Foster, J. B., & Holleman, H.. (2010). The Financial Power Elite. Monthly Review
“The article presents an historical overview of the emergence of the financial sector within the u.s. banking system, focusing on the developments of the end of the 20th century which led to the formation of a financial elite. introductory comments are given noting the rise and fall of different regulatory regimes within the u.s. banking sector in the first half of the century up to 1980. in-depth discussion is then provided highlighting the concentration of the financial sector as a dominant force in the nation’s economy up to the events of the 2008 global financial crisis and the return of political demands for regulation.”
Iyer, R., Koleva, S., Graham, J., Ditto, P., & Haidt, J.. (2012). Understanding libertarian morality: The psychological dispositions of self-identified libertarians. PLoS ONE
“Libertarians are an increasingly prominent ideological group in u.s. politics, yet they have been largely unstudied. across 16 measures in a large web-based sample that included 11,994 self-identified libertarians, we sought to understand the moral and psychological characteristics of self-described libertarians. based on an intuitionist view of moral judgment, we focused on the underlying affective and cognitive dispositions that accompany this unique worldview. compared to self-identified liberals and conservatives, libertarians showed 1) stronger endorsement of individual liberty as their foremost guiding principle, and weaker endorsement of all other moral principles; 2) a relatively cerebral as opposed to emotional cognitive style; and 3) lower interdependence and social relatedness. as predicted by intuitionist theories concerning the origins of moral reasoning, libertarian values showed convergent relationships with libertarian emotional dispositions and social preferences. our findings add to a growing recognition of the role of personality differences in the organization of political attitudes.”
Boire, R.. (2000). On Cognitive Liberty. In Journal of Cognitive Liberties
“Mirando la pagina de este hombre resulta que es un abogado que dirige un centro por el derecho a la libertad cognitiva y dirigia una revista del mismo nombre que defiende el derecho a mi propio cerebro, especialmente en (a) nadie me puede obligar a tomar psicofarmacos (b) tengo todo el derecho a consumar las drogas que me de la gana (incluyendo marihuana, cannabis etc”
Ienca, M., & Andorno, R.. (2017). Towards new human rights in the age of neuroscience and neurotechnology. Life Sciences, Society and Policy
“Rapid advancements in human neuroscience and neurotechnology open unprecedented possibilities for accessing, collecting, sharing and manipulating information from the human brain. such applications raise important challenges to human rights principles that need to be addressed to prevent unintended consequences. this paper assesses the implications of emerging neurotechnology applications in the context of the human rights framework and suggests that existing human rights may not be sufficient to respond to these emerging issues. after analysing the relationship between neuroscience and human rights, we identify four new rights that may become of great relevance in the coming decades: the right to cognitive liberty, the right to mental privacy, the right to mental integrity, and the right to psychological continuity.”
Shanker, S. G.. (2009). Three concepts of liberty. In After Cognitivism: A Reassessment of Cognitive Science and Philosophy
Rindermann, H.. (2012). Intellectual classes, technological progress and economic development: The rise of cognitive capitalism. Personality and Individual Differences
SENTENTIA, W.. (2006). Neuroethical Considerations: Cognitive Liberty and Converging Technologies for Improving Human Cognition. Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences
“Developers of nbic (nano-bio-info-cogno) technologies face a multitude of obstacles, not the least of which is navigating the public ethics of their applied research. biotechnologies have received widespread media attention and spawned heated interest in their perceived social implications. now, in view of the rapidly expanding purview of neuroscience and the growing array of technologic developments capable of affecting or monitoring cognition, the emerging field of neuroethics calls for a consideration of the social and ethical implications of neuroscientific discoveries and trends. to negotiate the complex ethical issues at stake in new and emerging kinds of technologies for improving human cognition, we need to overcome political, disciplinary, and religious sectarianism. we need analytical models that protect values of personhood at the heart of a functional democracy-values that allow, as much as possible, for individual decision-making, despite transformations in our understanding and ability to manipulate cognitive processes. addressing cognitive enhancement from the legal and ethical notion of ‘cognitive liberty’ provides a powerful tool for assessing and encouraging nbic developments.”
Desai, A. C.. (2011). Libertarian Paternalism, Externalities, and the “Spirit of Liberty”: How Thaler and Sunstein Are Nudging Us toward an “Overlapping Consensus”. Law and Social Inquiry, 36(1), 263–295.
“In their 2008 book nudge: improving decisions about health, wealth, andnhappiness, richard thaler and cass sunstein use research from psychologynand behavioral economics to argue that people suffer from systematicncognitive biases. they propose that policy makers mitigate these biasesnby framing people’s choices in ways that help people act in their ownnself-interest. thaler and sunstein call this approach “libertariannpaternalism,{’’} and they market it as “the real third way.{’’} in thisnessay, i argue that the book is a brilliant contribution to thinkingnabout policy making but that “choice architecture{’’} is not just ansolution to the problem of cognitive biases. rather, it is a means ofnapproaching any kind of policy making. i further argue that policynmakers must take externalities into account, even when using choicenarchitecture. finally, i argue that libertarian paternalism can best benseen as motivated by what sunstein has celebrated in his work onnconstitutional theory: a humility about the possibility of policy-makernerror embodied in learned hand’s famous aphorism about the “spirit ofnliberty{’’} and an attempt to reduce social conflicts by searching fornwhat john rawls called an “overlapping consensus.{’’}.”
Pustilnik, A. C.. (2012). Neurotechnologies at the intersection of criminal procedure and constitutional law. In The Constitution and the Future of Criminal Justice in America
“The rapid development of neurotechnologies poses novel constitutional issues for criminal law and criminal procedure. these technologies can identify directly from brain waves whether a person is familiar with a stimulus like a face or a weapon, can model blood flow in the brain to indicate whether a person is lying, and can even interfere with brain processes themselves via high-powered magnets to cause a person to be less likely to lie to an investigator. these technologies implicate the constitutional privilege against compelled, self-incriminating speech under the fifth amendment and the right to be free of unreasonable search and seizure under the fourth amendment of the united states constitution. law enforcement use of these technologies will not just require extending existing constitutional doctrine to cover new facts but will challenge these doctrines’ foundations. this short chapter discusses cognitive privacy and liberty under the fourth and fifth amendments, showing how current jurisprudence under both amendments stumbles on limited and limiting distinctions between the body and the mind, the physical and the informational. brain processes and emanations sit at the juncture of these categories. this chapter proposes a way to transcend these limitations while remaining faithful to precedent, extending these important constitutional protections into a new era of direct access to the brain/mind.”
