In his article “Utility Cascades”, Max Khan Hayward argues that act-utilitarians should sometimes either ignore evidence about the effectiveness of their actions or fail to apportion their support to an action's effectiveness. His conclusions are said to have particular significance for the effective altruism movement, which centers seeking and being guided by evidence. Hayward's argument is that act-utilitarians are vulnerable to succumbing to “utility cascades”, that these cascades function to frustrate the ultimate goals of act-utilitarians, and that one apposite way to avoid them is by “ostriching”: ignoring relevant evidence. If true, this conclusion would have remarkable consequences for act-utilitarianism and the effective altruism movement. However, Hayward is mistaken – albeit in an interesting way and with broader significance for moral philosophy. His argument trades on a subtle mischaracterization of act-utilitarianism. Act-utilitarians are not especially vulnerable to utility cascades (or at least not objectionably so), and they shouldn't ostrich.

Writing on social media often departs from prescriptive norms through the use of non-standard words, spellings and punctuation. Amongst these traits is the repetition of letters (e.g. <ouiiiii> for oui ‘yes’). In this study, we draw upon a corpus of over 65 million tweets from three dialects of French (Laurentian, Metropolitan and Midi) to test phonological motivations for the choice of repeated letter in a word with repetition. Using mixed-effects multinomial regression, we compare dialectal differences in whether repetition targets final consonants (silent or pronounced), word-final orthographic <e> corresponding to phonological schwa, and prosodically accented penults. We demonstrate that repetition covertly signals phonological properties. We conclude that prosody mediates morphological and phonological effects and that grapheme-to-phoneme correspondences vary between regions, thereby producing phonological patterns that writers likely did not intend to convey at the time of writing. We also propose that orthographic repetition on Twitter has two prosodic sources: the default pitch accent in French (shifted or not) and focus.

The Gersum Project has significantly developed our understanding of Norse-derived terms in English by providing a highly systematic typology for their identification. However, this article shows that, in order to fully comprehend the lexical impact that Anglo-Scandinavian contact had on medieval English, we need to go beyond the identification of the Norse-derived terms and explore their process of integration into English. To exemplify the benefits of this approach, the article analyses the make-up of the lexico-semantic field of emotion, particularly fear, in the texts attributed to the Gawain-poet, and examines the interaction between native, Norse- and French-derived terms. This analysis moves away from the traditional study of the texts’ vocabulary in relation to their sociohistorical context, considering the terms instead from semasiological, onomasiological and stylistic perspectives. By taking this novel approach, this article addresses key linguistic and literary topics: the formal and semantic factors that facilitated the integration of Norse-derived terms into this lexico-semantic field and, more broadly, the impact that multilingualism had on the expression of emotions in medieval England; diachronic and diatopic variation in the field; and the Gawain-poet's artistry and interest in fear as a key emotion closely linked to other affective and cognitive processes.

This paper presents a new kind of problem in the ethics of distribution. The problem takes the form of several ‘calibration dilemmas’, in which intuitively reasonable aversion to small-stakes inequalities requires leading theories of distribution to recommend intuitively unreasonable aversion to large-stakes inequalities. We first lay out a series of such dilemmas for prioritarian theories. We then consider a widely endorsed family of egalitarian views and show that they are subject to even more forceful calibration dilemmas than prioritarian theories. Finally, we show that our results challenge common utilitarian accounts of the badness of inequalities in resources.

This article discusses the phenomenon of normative resilience, with a focus on evaluative resilience. An object can become more or less valuable. In addition to this change in an object's value, the object's value can become more or less resilient. If it is less resilient, it cannot withstand as much evaluative change without its degree of value changing, as compared to an object with more resilient value. The article consists of three parts. First, examples of resilience are presented to give the reader an intuitive understanding of the phenomenon, Second, the Fitting Attitudes Analysis of value is invoked to provide a formal account of evaluative resilience. Third, the theoretical and practical advantages of acknowledging the existence of evaluative resilience are brought to light.

Should Germany be prosecuting crimes committed in Syria pursuant to universal jurisdiction (UJ)? This article revisits the normative questions raised by UJ—the principle that a state can prosecute serious international crimes such as genocide, crimes against humanity, and war crimes committed by foreigners outside of its territories—against the backdrop of increasing European UJ proceedings regarding Syrian conflict–related crimes, focusing on Germany as an illustrative example. While existing literature justifies UJ on the basis of universal prohibition of certain atrocities, this creates residual normative issues. Alternatively, this article applies the “two-tiered test” derived from the “dual foundation” thesis of the Eichmann judgment, in which the normative appropriateness of UJ is evaluated against both accounts of universal prohibition and the specific politics surrounding the prosecution. It contends that the large number of Syrian refugees in Germany means that Germany, in particular, should initiate Syrian conflict–related UJ proceedings to prevent continued harm and recognize the political agency of refugees. Ultimately, the article suggests UJ should normatively be thought of as a domestic, rather than international, political event.

By the turn of the nineteenth century composers such as Daniel Steibelt and Muzio Clementi were writing keyboard pieces with tambourine (and, occasionally, triangle) parts that were clearly intended for private salon performances by girls and young women. These works were introduced to public and private European salons during the early nineteenth century. Steibelt performed such pieces, typically waltzes, bacchanals, rondos and divertissements whilst on tour with his English wife Catherine, daughter of the London-based music publisher and patent tambourine manufacturer Joseph Dale. She became a renowned tambourine virtuoso, even attracting the attention of the Bohemian musician and writer Václav Jan Tomášek, who described the great sensation caused by Catherine's performances.

I analyse different types of works that were written for the tambourine around the year 1800. Examples of short waltzes (which were usually published in sets of 6 or 12) are plentiful – they were by far the most common pieces written for piano and tambourine – and in them the historical link between the tambourine and dance is most obvious. I argue that these waltzes may have served as a bridging point between dance-like, energetic, social activities and passive, recreational drawing-room music. Further support for this idea can be found in a Grand Sonata for pianoforte, tambourine, flute, violin and basso by Joseph Dale. The tambourine part contains numerous choreographic instructions as well as a wide variety of playing techniques such as thumb rolls, bass notes and harmonics, the likes of which did not become common practice in the orchestral or chamber repertory until the twentieth century. Dale's intention was clearly to provide an opportunity for women musicians to express themselves in ways that were contrary to contemporary expectations of female social etiquette.

Military hospitals in Britain during the First World War cultivated a variety of activities that promoted healing for soldiers, of which music was central. This music was documented by soldiers in hospital-sponsored magazines such as The Hydra at Craiglockhart, an officers’ hospital in Edinburgh that specialized in treatment of shell shock. There, this article argues, music and sound were associated with a curative physicality and sensoriality, revealing the aural and tactile to be aligned within the ideology of the magazine and trauma therapies prescribed.

Music's role in trauma narratives in The Hydra reflects the two approaches to shell shock treatment at the hospital. First, reviews identified weekly musical entertainments, which included singing, playing instruments and listening, as part Captain Arthur Brock's ‘cure by functioning’ regime. Second, narratives in literary contents that reference music in depicting memory and dreams reflect the Freudian psychotherapy used by Dr W. H. R. Rivers, a narrativizing process that I connect to the concept of ‘testimony’ in trauma studies. While the two approaches and their use of music are tied to social class, in both – as I show in drawing upon theories of Jean-Martin Charcot, Pierre Janet and Bessel van der Kolk – music is therapeutic because it is visceral – its curative properties lie in its ability to ultimately move the body and mind. Finally, drawing upon theories of cultural trauma by Jeffrey Alexander, this article posits that these narratives evince a self-fashioning of this shell-shocked community that has over time (amplified by the legacies of the hospital's most famous patients, Wilfred Owen and Siegfried Sassoon) become central to the dominant British cultural memory of the war. This article establishes music's role in narratives about trauma in First World War Britain, illuminating music's place in testimonies about not only hospital life and community formation, but also alienation, trauma and recovery; memory and mourning; and sacrifice and resilience.

ʿAbd al-Razzāq al-Sanhūrī (d. 1971), the father of the Egyptian legal code, theorized a relationship between dīn (religion) and dawla (state) that was key to his project. In this relationship, al-Sanhūrī posited a delineation between the spheres of dīn and dawla that allowed him to map these categories onto the existing distinction between matters of ʿibādāt (acts of worship) and muʾāmalāt (transactions) in Islamic law (fiqh). I propose that Islamic jurisprudential distinctions between ʿibādāt and muʿāmalāt—for al-Sanhūrī—was the ideal medium to maintain and police the borderlines between religion and state in the postcolonial Egyptian state. Al-Sanhūrī's objective was to keep the domain of dīn outside of state sanction and to facilitate a transition whereby the state's legal institutions assumed exclusive lawmaking powers based on its own independent legal reasoning in Islamic law (ijtihād). I argue that al-Sanhūrī was a committed comparatist, not a reformer of Islamic law. Al-Sanhūrī's legal project should be viewed as a faithful commitment to French comparative law as a method of legal inquiry and a reflection of his nationalist agenda of creating a unified legal order that cannot exist without relying upon indigenous forms of law and culture. Al-Sanhūrī saw Khedival legal pluralism as an obstacle for national sovereignty. As a result of the institutional and legal readjustments from the 1920s through 1950s in Egypt, al-Sanhūrī did not see a future for Islamic law in the emerging legal state apparatus outside of civil law strictures and insisted that Islamic courts and religious tribunals for Jews and Christians must be subsumed under nationalized secular state courts.

In the “terrible year” of 1870–71 – spanning the Franco-Prussian War through the Commune – Parisians looked on with horror at the nightmarish transformation of their Ville Lumière. They not only watched, they listened – garnering crucial information but also failing to shut out belliphonic sounds that rendered them sleepless, sick or even unable to function. In a flood of lectures and treatises, a generation of neurologists and psychiatrists assessed the impact of this year on French minds and bodies. Moreover, Charcot and Janet formulated early understandings of trauma amidst the cultural memories and traumatized populations impacted by 1870–71.

Weaving together contemporary medical discourse, journals, reportage and iconography, this article reveals a topography of Parisian sonic violence. Drawing on Mark M. Smith and Jennifer Stoever's work on how race, gender, and class structure listening, this case study analyses the positionality of sound's traumatic impacts on nineteenth-century Parisians. Connecting sound, the events of 1870–71, and early conceptions of trauma also critically integrates these decades with subsequent experiences of la grande guerre. As I ultimately situate a specifically urban theorization of the aural experiences of war, I conclude with how sonic trauma of l'année terrible might stretch far beyond 1870–71. Borrowing from Andreas Huyssen's concept of city as palimpsest – where visual reminders of violence leave ‘absent presences’ in the heart of an urban space – I query how sonic memories of conflict might similarly leave traces – sonic scars? – in both physical places and in individual and collective memories.

This article traces how Ottoman interpretations and uses of Islamic law adapted to deal with non-Muslim rebellions between roughly 1769 and 1830. Drawing on Ottoman fatwas (legal opinions), bureaucratic registers, sultanic decrees, and chronicles, as well as British diplomatic records, it argues that the Ottoman state actively reinterpreted its commitment to the Islamic legal tradition in order to forge the law of rebellion into a weapon against both foreign and domestic enemies. The Ottomans first used declarations of rebellion to mobilize military forces against its imperial rivals, then to discourage and suppress domestic dissent, and finally to deny rebels’ sovereignty under international law. In doing so, the Sublime Porte effectively redefined sovereignty by interleaving Islamic and international concepts. The article places this development in global context, arguing that it resembled legal moves made by Atlantic states as they dealt with the Age of Revolutions. At the same time, this story shows how the Ottoman state’s commitment to Islamic law, and its employment of officially authorized scholars to interpret that law, could both license and constrain state policy. The Islamic legal tradition was flexible, but also meaningful. Interpretation occurred at different levels, and was done by different actors. While the state had significant latitude, it faced limits arising from the substance of the law and the process of interpretation itself.

Massive, rapid capital accumulation is usually associated with capitalist development, but historically, socialist states were among the most aggressive accumulators. Accumulation in Maoist China was faster than even in Stalin's Soviet Union, despite the fact that China was a much poorer country with fewer natural resources. China's accumulation rate, defined as the ratio of gross capital formation to gross national income, reached twenty-five to thirty per cent in 1957–1962, peaking at forty-four per cent in 1958. This level proved to be unsustainable, but after a slowdown in the early 1960s, the rate rose back to thirty-six percent.1 As is well known, the cost of China's rapid industrialization was borne mostly by its rural population.2 My aim in this chapter is to show that it was disproportionally borne by rural women, who contributed to socialist accumulation in direct and indirect ways: directly, as collective farmers, growers of the grain, cotton, soy, tea, sugarcane, etc. that fueled industrialization; and indirectly, by biologically, socially, and materially reproducing the country's labor force and by submitting to a regime of extreme austerity that allowed the government to extract scarce resources and direct them to the cities and the export trade. My argument proceeds in three steps. I will begin with an overview of socialist primitive accumulation under Mao, its preconditions and mechanisms, and the ways it replicated earlier Soviet policies or diverged from them. Next, I will discuss the various ways in which rural women's work underpinned capital accumulation and laid the foundation for China's rapid industrialization in the years since Mao's death. Finally, I will look in some detail at rural women's work at home, to show how their self-exploitation, overwork, and underconsumption in the domestic realm created the conditions for accumulation. My focus is on cotton work – both cotton cultivation and domestic cloth production – but I will also look at other ways in which domestic work supported accumulation.

Markus (2021) argues that the causal modelling frameworks of Pearl and Rubin are not ‘strongly equivalent’, in the sense of saying ‘the same thing in different ways’. Here I rebut Markus’ arguments against strong equivalence. The differences between the frameworks are best illuminated not by appeal to their causal semantics, but rather reflect pragmatic modelling choices.

The Late Iron Age has traditionally been portrayed as an age of swords, Celtic-patterned shields, and bronze cauldrons, a time of warfare, banquets, and raids, mostly starring male warriors. But what do we know about the rest of the population, especially women? Is it possible, based on the same data, to uncover an alternative narrative that includes women? This article focuses on the northern Meseta of Iberia, an area with a long research tradition, in which women are almost invisible in accounts of the Iron Age. Drawing on a range of archaeological and textual evidence, this study brings the roles of women to the forefront, offering a critique of traditional research discourses and a discussion on how Iron Age societies worked from a gender-inclusive perspective.

The upheavals of World War II prepared a new labour regime in twentieth-century India, in employers’ chambers, government offices, and in the newly established Labour Department, but as crucially, at the workplace and on the shop floor. This article studies the case of Calcutta port, an important military port in Southeast Asia after the fall of Singapore and Rangoon, where the complex historical processes resulting from the war generated an unprecedented impetus for the transformation of the labour regime. It examines the powerful impact and dynamics of the war at two levels: at the level of long-run changes in the work organization, and, through a microhistory approach, at the level of workers’ everyday wartime experiences. Under wartime exigencies, the employers introduced ad hoc, piecemeal, but significant reforms – food rations, bonuses, higher wages, housing provisions, and regularization of employment – that were more extensive than originally conceived of and proved to be irreversible, and, ultimately, cracked open a labour regime based on casual labour. The focus on workers’ experiences shows us how the measures designed for stabilization and efficiency proved to be profoundly unsettling in the context of dramatic events that pervaded the workplace. In the shadows of the war, workers and employers experienced a balance of forces in flux. Labour relations were marked by anticipations, hostility, tensions, and, increasingly, sharpness of conflict. The article argues that, by the end of the 1940s, the employers and the state had overcome an industrial relations crisis through nothing less than a restructuring of port labour relations, creating a highly regulated “formal sector” with significant welfare provisions.