This chapter addresses a number of foundational issues in relation to the position of the modern liberal state and the use of techniques and procedures that can prevent the birth of a disabled child. It begins by explaining why the traditional approach to the ethics of selective reproduction is insufficient as it usually sidelines or minimises the role of the state, following on from a common assumption that the state is neutral. It then considers the meaning of a liberal commitment to neutrality, so that we can analyse and question this common assumption. Among other things, the chapter claims that the relevance of the role of the state is not limited to the use of coercive measures, and that we should focus on state intention. Although neutrality can be a matter of degree, and while there are different interpretations of a neutral state intention, the chapter suggests that the position of the state can be assessed by reference to certain central liberal commitments. In particular, the chapter examines the importance of individual choice as an essential commitment of the modern liberal state, and considers what choice should be available to prospective parents.

Aggression is associated with inflicting damage. Anger underlies it. Links to coercion and dominance are described, as well as excitation transfer. Defensive/offensive aggression and predatory aggression are distinct. The dichotomy between reactive aggression and instrumental (proactive) aggression is described. ‘Appetitive aggression’ is conducted for intrinsic pleasure. The notion of levels of control applies to the inhibition on aggression. Explanatory models are discussed (e.g. Lorenz’s hydraulic model). Aggression can exhibit positive reinforcement. A number of brain regions are discussed (e.g. the amygdala, VTA−NAcc, hypothalamus, cortex, and periaqueductal grey). The role of hormones is reviewed. Healthy development consists in part of learning to inhibit aggression. Early exposure to toxic role models increases the chances of later showing aggression. Other things that inhibit aggression are discussed (e.g. empathy). The chapter concludes with a discussion of several situations associated with aggression: ostracism, xenophobia, dehumanization, the weapons effect, media violence, alcohol, and traumatic brain injury.

Chapter 1 links current concerns about the ambiguities of persuasion to ancient Greek preoccupations with peithō (inducement). The chapter outlines the central contribution of the book: a recontextualization of peithō as a necessary yet dangerous force that demanded cautious attention within ancient Greek communities, particularly those committed to democracy. This study is then situated as a series of synchronic analyses of peithō as a goddess or abstract force presented throughout a breadth of textual, visual, and material source material from the archaic through the Hellenistic ages and even into late antiquity, with particular focus on Athenian evidence from the fifth and fourth centuries BCE. An analysis of Aesop’s fable of the North Wind and the Sun re-positions peithō a fraternal twin to bia (physical force) and outlines different manifestations of her coercive action. The chapter concludes with an overview of methodology and the social-psychological principles of ambiguity tolerance and psychological reactance that are used to reframe collective practices from ancient Greece as tools for fostering communal resilience before peithō’s threats.

The environment has been leveraged as a tool of control in conflict settings throughout human history. Capturing or enclosing and controlling the resources needed for everyday needs and livelihoods has been a feature of most conflicts. Understanding how this happens and what the implications are for the environment in conflict is critical to addressing environmental and conflict issues. This chapter lays out how this has unfolded in many contexts and highlights critical nuances for different environmental mediums and across space and time.

Assisted Outpatient Treatment (AOT) is a controversial civil court program wherein a judgeorders a person with severe mental illness to adhere to an outpatient treatment plan designed to improve treatment adherence, prevent relapse and dangerous deterioration. Several states, including California and New York, have recently promoted use of AOT to try to address high rates of homelessness among person with severe mental illness. Under AOT, clinicians treating these patients must balance the ethical principles of patient autonomy and beneficence, andemploy AOT only when previous treatment failed as a result of treatment non-adherence. However, some critics of AOT argue that not only is it coercive and ineffective but that the court mandate to adhere to prescribed medications, usually antipsychotic medications, compels AOT recipients to take ineffective and even harmful medications. This article examines the assertion of these critics and reviews the evidence of antipsychotic effectiveness and potential harms in treating psychotic disorders under a civil court order.

As in many pre-modern societies, in ancient Rome the use of and protection from violence acted as a blunt display of an individual’s power. When a person did violence to another, they manifestly had the power to do so. Violence not only creates social hierarchies, but it also protects them, and power, status and wealth, and the resources they commanded, played an important role in protecting high-status individuals from the threat of everyday violence and physical coercion, treatment more readily associated with those of lower status. But while we know this to be the case for the powerful men of ancient Rome, can the same thing be said to apply to powerful women? Through an analysis of the physicality of Roman power as it applied to wealthy women, both as agents and targets of physical coercion, at home and in public, this chapter argues that it can.

Sephardi women in the Mediterranean, whose vocality was primarily confined to private spaces, used singing in situations of danger as a beacon to deploy networked connections of protection. Before the heritagization of Judeo-Spanish repertoire in the late twentieth century following massive emigrations from the Eastern Mediterranean, North Africa, and the Balkans, female Sephardi voices were deployed as a manner of portable salon. This chapter demonstrates how women used their voices, and the cultural capital embedded within communicative functions of timbre, affect, volume, and silence to resist sexual aggression, assault, and coercion. Using two case studies from urban Mediterranean Judeo-Spanish, one from Bulgaria and the other from Morocco, this chapter unpacks how this intersectional minority deployed voice as a powerful creator of enclosed and safeguarding space. In these cases, women’s voices pushed their traditionally inner salons outwards, enacting a vocal protective shield semiotically prevalent in Sephardi communities.

At nightfall on 20 May [1947], I had just left the site where we maintained our radio communications equipment and was on my way home when two comrades suddenly appeared and seized me as I passed the entrance to this building. They said: ‘You walk past here every day. Today we would like you to come in for a chat.’ Since we were close to a sentry point and they had already seized me, resistance seemed pointless, so I entered the building with them. By coincidence, our equipment had malfunctioned that day and I had not been able to send or receive any messages, so when they frisked me, they did not find any incriminating papers on me. I was then taken to another room and told to wait. The sudden and unforeseen turn of events had made me panic and tremble, and my heart beat like mad, but I now got a moment’s respite and did my best to calm down. Worrying whether the terror I felt would be obvious, I sought to compose myself. I also thought about how best to deal with the impending interrogation.

When he was arrested by the Harbin Public Security Bureau in December 1949, Yang X was thirty-one years old and working as a teacher in one of the most prestigious middle schools in the city. A former member of the Guomindang intelligence and security services, the Juntong, he no longer maintained any active links to the organisation that in 1946 had become the Republic of China’s Ministry of National Defence Protection of Secrets Bureau, but he remained in touch privately with some of his old colleagues. While he was in police custody, officers from the Political Protection Division developed a profile of him and, after just over half a year, they concluded that he would be amenable to an attempt to be recruited as an agent. Below is the handwritten memorandum deposited in Yang’s Agent Personal File that documents the hands-on advice his rookie recruiter took from a final pre-recruitment pep talk by a senior officer on how to conduct the all-important elicitation talk with Yang.

This chapter discusses the relation between ‘Morals’ (Sitten, Moral) and ‘Right’ (Recht) in Kant’s Metaphysics of Morals. Two questions should be distinguished: (1) Are Kantian Morals necessary for Kantian Right in the sense that the latter presupposes Kant’s specific account of morality? (2) Is Kant’s account of Morals sufficient to justify his conception of Right, in the sense that the fundamental principles of Right can be derived from, or normatively justified by, the Categorical Imperative (or some other element of Kantian Morals) without additional normative principles? With respect to the first question, it is argued that Kantian Right presupposes a central aspect of Kantian Morals: the idea of moral universality, where moral rights and duties are the same for all. This idea must be distinguished from the Categorical Imperative introduced in the Groundwork for a Metaphysics of Morals. Concerning the second question, it is argued that only when applied to individual juridical (coercible) rights does the idea of moral universality result in a Kantian conception of Right. Thus, Kant’s conception of Morals alone is not sufficient to derive juridical rights and duties.

Kant is often read as being committed to the idea that morality is within our control, leading him to develop an ethical theory in which there is no room for moral luck. Kant’s political and legal philosophy, by contrast, is taken to be concerned with external actions, in particular with their effects on the freedom of others, and thus seems to be far from immune to luck. From this perspective a significant chasm opens up between ethics and right, making it hard to see how right could be derived from ethics and how both of them could be integrated into a unified theory based on a single supreme principle. This chapter argues that the role of luck in Kant’s practical philosophy needs to be reconceived and that considerations of luck do not stand in the way of a unification of ethics and right.

At the heart of this chapter lies the following question: how can the fact that lawful behaviour can be enforced be explained against the background of Kant’s moral philosophy? I argue that without grounding Right in morality we cannot even understand coercion as a normative problem. The reason is that for Kant coercion becomes problematic only vis-à-vis persons, because they – being ends in themselves – can legitimately claim not to be coerced (1). This does not mean, however, that coercion is completely inadmissible according to Kant. For by defining equal, relational freedom as a sphere of non-domination, the law also defines a sphere in which coercion is permissible because it is morally unproblematic and requires no justification (2). Tracing back coercion to the limits of autonomy, however, does not only explain why coercive force is ‘deducible’ from moral autonomy (and the Categorical Imperative as its principle). Even more, this requires us to reconsider whether Kant can consistently argue against the external enforceability of internal perfect duties (e.g. the prohibition of suicide) (3).

A framing case study examines a debt dispute between a Wall Street investor and Argentina that resulted in the seizure of an Argentine warship in Ghana. Then the chapter tackles the topic of upholding international law. The chapter discusses: (1) international legal enforcement, including major bodies, when these bodies refuse to rule, and access to non-state actors; (2) domestic legal enforcement, including jurisdiction and various forms of immunity; and (3) political enforcement via coercion and persuasion.

A key source of CPC power is its control of the armed forces, which it can mobilize not just for national defence but also to preserve the regime. This chapter examines the CPC’s evolving relationship with its military wing – the People’s Liberation Army (PLA). In previous decades the PLA has enjoyed a high degree of autonomy from the CPC’s civilian leaders. The Central Military Commission (CMC), which oversees the armed forces, has maintained a status commensurate with the Politburo, partly as a result of the fragmentation of control mechanisms. Since coming to power Xi Jinping has worked to bring the armed forces under his direct authority, but it remains unclear the extent to which direct control mechanisms can be institutionalized. This chapter examines the new features of CPC–PLA relations in the Xi era.

Chapter 7 studies how Kasımpaşa, nearby the Arsenal, transformed into working-class neighborhoods, focusing on the complicated connections between migration networks, labor coercion, industrial production, and urban modernization.Utilizing wage and population records, it demonstrates how shipbuilding was central to the district’s demography and culture, and how regional and occupational networks were significant in settlement patterns. It investigates the connections between forced labor draft (particularly from the Black Sea coasts and Alexandria/Egypt), the increasing visibility of bachelors, the settlement of working-class families, and the urban policies and elite perceptions towards the district. It investigates the social, cultural, and economic divergence between Kasımpaşa and the adjacent Galata-Pera axis in Istanbul, the epicenter of urban reforms in the Tanzimat Era. It highlights the emergence of a working-class culture, and analyzes the proletarian experiences of working-class families and the increasing contention between working-class men and women and the Ottoman state, by focusing particularly on strikes and petitioning.