Salience, Imagination, and Moral Luck

One key desideratum of a theory of blame is that it be able to explain why we typically have differing blaming responses in cases involving significant degrees of luck. T.M. Scanlon has proposed a relational account of blame, and he has argued that his account succeeds in this regard and that this success makes his view preferable to reactive attitude accounts of blame. In this paper, I aim to show that Scanlon's view is open to a different kind of luck-based objection. I then offer a way of understanding moral luck cases which allows for a plausible explanation of our differential blaming responses by appealing to the salience of certain relevant features of the action in question

My First Days in Australia

Postcard from Natalie Stout, during the Linfield College Semester Abroad Program at James Cook University in Cairns, Australi

Reindustrialization From Below: The Steel Valley Authority

[Excerpt] Trade unionists and community residents determined to save the Monongahela Valley have succeeded in forging an effective instrument for waging their struggle. In January 1986 the Steel Valley Authority was officially incorporated by the State of Pennsylvania. Its board includes representatives of nine municipalities, including the city of Pittsburgh. In the months since the Authority was launched, its power, including the power of eminent domain, has been used to pressure corporations not to abandon manufacturing plants in the Mon Valley region. The fight to reindustrialize the Pittsburgh area is fairly joined, and victory is a real possibility. It took nearly five years of education and patient organizing to establish the Steel Valley Authority (SVA). Other communities around the country, suffering similar problems of capital flight, have much to learn from the story of the campaign to establish the SVA. But the most important lessons are easy to tell: You can win community support for the idea that deindustrialization is not inevitable. You can mount a viable struggle to preserve your community\u27s industrial base. In this article, I will describe our five-year campaign to win public support for our approach to reindustrialization

The auto-Igusa zeta function of a plane curve singularity is rational

It is shown that the auto-Igusa zeta function of a plane curve singularity is rational. This gives a new criterion for a plane curve over an algebraically closed field of characteristic zero to be smooth at a point.Comment: 9 page

Egocentric physics : just about Mie

We show that the physics of anapole excitations can be accurately described in terms of a resonant state expansion formulation of standard Mie theory without recourse to Cartesian coordinate based `toroidal' currents that have previously been used to describe this phenomenon. In this purely Mie theory framework, the anapole behavior arises as a result of a Fano-type interference effect between different quasi-normal modes of the scatterer that effectively eliminate the scattered field in the associated multipole order.Comment: 10 pages, 5 figure