Damian Cox
Bond University, Faculty of Society & Design, Faculty Member
- I teach at philosophy Bond University, Gold Coast, Australia. I have had appointments at Edith Cowan University in P... moreI teach at philosophy Bond University, Gold Coast, Australia. I have had appointments at Edith Cowan University in Perth, Australia and the University of Queensland, Brisbane, Australia. My areas of specialisation are virtue ethics, emotions and film philosophy.edit
So far we have considered a number of dimensions to what we have seen as a new political paradigm that is emerging with the ‘war on terror’. The first of these has been the politics of security — that is, the overwhelming obsession with... more
So far we have considered a number of dimensions to what we have seen as a new political paradigm that is emerging with the ‘war on terror’. The first of these has been the politics of security — that is, the overwhelming obsession with security that has come to dominate our societies. As we have shown, however, not only does the deliberate vagueness and permeability of idea of ‘security’ lead to greater insecurity — in both real and psychological terms — it also seriously undermines democratic politics by restricting spaces for autonomy, freedom and political agency. The second of these dimensions has been the resurgence — or at least a re-articulation — of religious fundamentalism and racial intolerance, not only in the Islamic world, but also here in our supposedly secular West. Thus, it also poses a threat to liberal democratic politics, which relies upon a clear separation between the political and the religious. The third element of this paradigm has been the cynical manipulation of the truth — or downright lying — that has come to be a feature of contemporary political life. This lack of accountability — and, more worryingly, people’s apparent complacency in the face of the lies and distortions of their political leaders — also suggests a profound debilitation of democratic politics.
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Research Interests: Psychology and Routledge
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When it comes to everyday discourse about political agency, there is a disturbing asymmetry between the kinds of explanation that tend to be offered of one’s own group and those offered of foreign or enemy groups. The actions and... more
When it comes to everyday discourse about political agency, there is a disturbing asymmetry between the kinds of explanation that tend to be offered of one’s own group and those offered of foreign or enemy groups. The actions and motivations of political actors in one’s own camp, say Western politicians, tend to be rationalized and understood in terms of straightforward, even if not always wholly lucid or laudable, cognitive goals. Beliefs and principles are generally assumed to be the chief motivating features here, and so explanations of actions, including acts of horrendous violence, have to refer to these. The underlying supposition of Western popular discourse on US policy in Iraq, for example, seems to be that no matter how ill-planned it has been, there could be no reason for the invasion of Iraq other than destroying weapons allegedly already present, or forestalling the development of weapons of mass destruction by an unwholesome and dangerous dictator or helping the Iraqis to free themselves of a tyrannical regime. These are often taken as laudable — or at least perfectly understandable — goals and as central to explaining, if not justifying, US action. Even if the strategy for achieving them is seen as misguided, the intention of the strategy at least makes sense.
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The previous chapter explored some of the ethical and political tensions central to liberal democracy — tensions highlighted in Ignatieff’s ultimately unsuccessful attempt to reconcile liberal democratic principles and institutions with... more
The previous chapter explored some of the ethical and political tensions central to liberal democracy — tensions highlighted in Ignatieff’s ultimately unsuccessful attempt to reconcile liberal democratic principles and institutions with various forms of state violence and coercion in response to the threat of terrorism. Unlike Ignatieff, we have argued that enhanced security measures and military responses to terrorism, right up to extra-judicial detention, targeted assassination and preventive wars — all of which Ignatieff allows under his ethics of the ‘lesser evil’ — cannot be enacted without doing major damage to the very liberal democratic principles in defence of which these measures are supposedly taken. Neither the slippery logic of the ‘lesser evil’, nor blind faith in judicial scrutiny and adversarial review, gets around this problem. We are left in a quandary: what would be an ethically and politically legitimate response to terrorism?
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This chapter deals with an issue not much dealt with in the literature on terror — that of lying. It may at first seem a background or preliminary problem. It proves, however, to be very much at the centre of what has happened to politics... more
This chapter deals with an issue not much dealt with in the literature on terror — that of lying. It may at first seem a background or preliminary problem. It proves, however, to be very much at the centre of what has happened to politics as it responds to terrorism. It underpins a subversion of discourses on terror, tolerance and democracy, as well as means/ends thinking and a distortion of moral judgment. Lying and other forms of mendacity undermine freedom and democratic politics.1 More than violence and terrorism itself (though deception and lying are directly related to these) it threatens the future viability of liberal democracy — not just as a polity but also as a way of thinking. It raises the question of whether so-called Western democracies, formally or substantively considered, can properly be regarded as democracies at all.2 The overly insistent idea — used like some school motto — that it is terrorism and violence that threaten Western democracies rather than lies and deceit, is best seen as a subterfuge and projective form of defence. This kind of lying, like excessive self-deception and hypocrisy, is self-propagating and proliferate. Here on a local level at least, Kant’s notion that the practice of lying as a matter of course is self-defeating in that it undermines the possibility of any meaningful discourse whatsoever seems to hold.
Research Interests: Terrorism, Political Science, Politics, Subversion, Democracy, and 3 moreDeception, Hypocrisy, and Lying
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Political responses to terror have to be understood in context of the kinds of prejudice and irrationality that underlie and mar relations between Western and non-Western cultures. But do orthodox liberal democratic conceptions of... more
Political responses to terror have to be understood in context of the kinds of prejudice and irrationality that underlie and mar relations between Western and non-Western cultures. But do orthodox liberal democratic conceptions of political justice and good political practice have the resources to combat these prejudices and their role in the formation of political judgement? Reflection on political responses to terror must also acknowledge the remarkable failures and moral obscenities that have issued from the response to terror. Do orthodox liberal democratic conceptions of political justice and good political practice have the resources to understand and respond to these failures? Is the moral failure of the ‘war on terror’ the result of the unlucky fact that administrations in the US and Britain just happened to have been mendacious in their accounts of the reasons for war and overconfident in their prosecution of it? Or does the moral failure of the ‘war on terror’ uncover deep inadequacies in the way politics is normally done in liberal democracies? More central to our concerns: is the moral failure of the ‘war on terror’ a sign of some deep failure in liberal democratic conceptions of politics?
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ABSTRACT Extract:The article discusses objections regarding the inclusion of Peace Studies in the university curriculum. The earliest objection contested that there was no need for Peace Studies to be introduced because the supposed... more
ABSTRACT Extract:The article discusses objections regarding the inclusion of Peace Studies in the university curriculum. The earliest objection contested that there was no need for Peace Studies to be introduced because the supposed coverage of the subject could be better accomplished within the well-established humanities disciplines. The second objection was aimed at the nature of the field itself. The concept of objectivity and like-mindedness is also discussed.
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This Journal Article is brought to you by the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences at ePublications@bond. It has been accepted for inclusion in Humanities & Social Sciences papers by an authorized administrator of... more
This Journal Article is brought to you by the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences at ePublications@bond. It has been accepted for inclusion in Humanities & Social Sciences papers by an authorized administrator of ePublications@bond. For more information, please contact Bond University's Repository Coordinator. Recommended Citation Damian Cox. (2013) "October and the question of cinematic thinking" ,, : ISSN 1328-9756.
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ABSTRACT The War on Terror has exposed deep problems within contemporary political practice. It has demonstrated the moral fragility of liberal democracy. Much critical literature on the topic is devoted to uncovering the sources of this... more
ABSTRACT The War on Terror has exposed deep problems within contemporary political practice. It has demonstrated the moral fragility of liberal democracy. Much critical literature on the topic is devoted to uncovering the sources of this fragility. In this paper, we accept the general thrust of much of this literature, but turn our attention to the practical upshot of the criticism. A common feature of the literature is that, when it comes to offering remedies of the problems it identifies, what is offered is ‘diagnosis without treatment’. The negation of a problem is regarded as a solution. For example, if the problem is that the USA is not acting as a good international citizen, the solution is that it begins to act as such. This is like a doctor diagnosing gout and recommending to the patient that they reduce the level of uric acid in their big toe. We argue that diagnosis without treatment is endemic in literature on the War on Terror and the ills of liberal democracy. We divide this literature into five categories and examine representative works in each. At the end of the paper, we describe what is required to avoid offering yet more diagnosis without treatment.
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Posthumanist film and television is both a vehicle for reflection on discrimination and prejudice and a means of gratifying in fantasy deeply imbedded human impulses towards prejudice. Discrimination lies at the heart of posthuman... more
Posthumanist film and television is both a vehicle for reflection on discrimination and prejudice and a means of gratifying in fantasy deeply imbedded human impulses towards prejudice. Discrimination lies at the heart of posthuman narratives whenever the posthuman coalesces around an identifiable group in conflict with humans. We first introduce the idea of prejudice as a form of psychological defense, contrasting it with other accounts of prejudice in the philosophical literature. We then apply this notion to number of posthumanist film and television narratives. An adequate account of prejudice tells us about posthumanism in film—the significance of posthumanist thinking, speculation and fantasy. It helps account for the proliferation of television series and films about people who—being at one time dead, still dead or partially dead, or only sometimes dead, or have powers and appetites we do not have—are borderline creatures: not fully us, but still near to us.
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This essay examines the relationship between music and ethics. Can music have a positive or negative role in our disposition toward, or performance of, right and wrong acts, duties, and virtues? Can it make a difference to us morally? Can... more
This essay examines the relationship between music and ethics. Can music have a positive or negative role in our disposition toward, or performance of, right and wrong acts, duties, and virtues? Can it make a difference to us morally? Can musical experience make us better or worse off from a moral point of view? It is argued that although there is no necessary connection between listening to or appreciating music and one’s moral character, the contingent connections are many and various. Kivy’s critique of the character-building force of absolute music is examined and rejected. If music possesses epistemic and behavioral moral force, then it possesses—for some people, some of the time—the power to build moral character. If music enlarges our capacities of emotional empathy (not for everyone, or all music, and not on all occasions), then it has a role to play in building moral character.
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Introduction: Philosophical Approaches to Race in Film Dan Flory and Mary K. Bloodsworth-Lugo Epistemology 1. Imaginative Resistance and the White Gaze in Machete and The Help Dan Flory 2. Born into Bondage: Teaching The Matrix and... more
Introduction: Philosophical Approaches to Race in Film Dan Flory and Mary K. Bloodsworth-Lugo Epistemology 1. Imaginative Resistance and the White Gaze in Machete and The Help Dan Flory 2. Born into Bondage: Teaching The Matrix and Unlearning the Racial Organization of Knowledge Michael Eng 3. What's So Bad About Blackface? Christy Mag Uidhir Aesthetics 4. So Now You're Swedish American?': Jewish-American Women, Philosophies of Beauty in Requiem for a Dream Renee R. Curry and William Brigham 5.Cruising Through Race Monique Roelofs Moral Philosophy 6. True Blood and Race: From Progress to Complacency to Paganism, to Humanity Naomi Zack 7. Avatar: Racism and Prejudice on Pandora Michael P. Levine and Damian Cox 8. "Now, Imagine She's White": The Gift of the Black Gaze and the Re-Inscription of Whiteness as Normative in A Time to Kill George Yancy Social and Political Philosophy 9. Race As/And (Ex)change: Trading Places and the Rise of Neo-Liberalism Charles W. Mills 10. Hardly Black and White: Racial and Sexual Stereotypes in Manderlay and Black Snake Moan Melanie Walton 11. Elisions of Race and Stories of Progress: Planet 51 and The Princess and the Frog Mary K. Bloodsworth-Lugo and Carmen R. Lugo-Lugo Technology and the (Lived) Body 12.Vampires, Technology, and Racism: The Vampiric Image in Twilight and Let Me In Brian H. Onishi 13. Desperate Black Female: Sex and Race in Monster's Ball Lucy Bolton
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Research Interests: Sociology and Wrongdoing
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ABSTRACT Extract: Concerning ethics, we have two intuitions that might seem to conflict. On the one hand, we want to have respect for different moral views. On the other hand, the essence of morality is that we should be able to criticize... more
ABSTRACT Extract: Concerning ethics, we have two intuitions that might seem to conflict. On the one hand, we want to have respect for different moral views. On the other hand, the essence of morality is that we should be able to criticize each other. Today, many Westerners are anxious not to be ethnocentric and no longer want to claim that our norms and values should be universally accepted, as this might indicate disrespect for other cultures. At the same time, this might lead to a form of moral skepticism that does more harm than good. If there are no universal norms and values, the idea of universal human rights becomes void, and constructive criticism of other cultures impossible. Our respect for a certain culture might imply that we have to tolerate that the rights, or at least our conceptions of what rights are, of individuals in the culture are violated. This indicates that a reasonable position about human rights should avoid relativism and dogmatism. The apparent tension between tolerance and criticism can be resolved by taking certain moral rules that hold for everybody as objective truths, whereas we can be more liberal about others. Ethical intuitionism provides for a theoretical framework for this view.
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© Damian Cox, Marguerite La Caze and Michael P. Levine, 2003 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic. mechanical,... more
© Damian Cox, Marguerite La Caze and Michael P. Levine, 2003 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic. mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise without ...
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Abstract This paper defends an argument from interpretation against the possibility of massive error. The argument shares many important features with Donald Davidson's famous argument, but also key differences. I defend the argument... more
Abstract This paper defends an argument from interpretation against the possibility of massive error. The argument shares many important features with Donald Davidson's famous argument, but also key differences. I defend the argument against claims that it begs the question against scepticism and that it leaves the sceptic with an obvious means of escape.
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Research Interests: Philosophy, Metaphysics, Epistemology, Political Science, Moral Realism, and 3 moreRealism, Appeal, and Ratio
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... References Alston, William. 1996. A realist conception oftruth. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Devitt, Michael. 1997. Realism and truth. Princeton: Princeton University Press. 485 Page 14. Damian Cox Horwich, Paul. 1996. Realism... more
... References Alston, William. 1996. A realist conception oftruth. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Devitt, Michael. 1997. Realism and truth. Princeton: Princeton University Press. 485 Page 14. Damian Cox Horwich, Paul. 1996. Realism and truth. ...
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Research Interests: Sociology, Philosophy, Metaphysics, Ontology, Epistemology, and 8 moreTheory, Complexity, Virtue, Hierarchy, Logics, True, Logical Truth, and Obstacle
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Page 1. DOING PHILOSOPHY, WATCHING MOVIES ®W1LEY-BLACKWELL Page 2. ®W!LEY-BLACKWELL Page 3. Page 4. THINKING THROUGH FILM Page 5. Page 6. Thinking Through Film Doing Philosophy, Watching Movies ...
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The first season of the Netflix series Mindhunter (2017) poses a question: what does it take to understand the mind of a serial killer? The season explores contrasting forms of understanding: practical understanding, as represented by the... more
The first season of the Netflix series Mindhunter (2017) poses a question: what does it take to understand the mind of a serial killer? The season explores contrasting forms of understanding: practical understanding, as represented by the character of Bill Tench; categorical and causal knowledge, as represented by the character of Wendy Carr. A third character, Holden Ford, seeks to understand serial killers from the inside, empathetically and phenomenologically. The chapter examines the epistemological struggles and conflicts of its three protagonists and argues that the task of fully understanding the evil of a serial killer is impossible and ethically dubious. The impossibility and moral hazard of the task are illustrated in the final episode of the season.
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In "A Refutation of Environmental Ethics" Janna Thompson argues that by assigning intrinsic value to nonhuman elements of nature either our evaluations become (1) arbitrary, and therefore unjustified, or (2) impractical, or (3)... more
In "A Refutation of Environmental Ethics" Janna Thompson argues that by assigning intrinsic value to nonhuman elements of nature either our evaluations become (1) arbitrary, and therefore unjustified, or (2) impractical, or (3) justified and practical, but only by reflecting human interest, thus failing to be truly intrinsic to nonhuman nature. There are a number of possible responses to her argument, some of which have been made explicitly in reply to Thompson and others which are implicit in the literature. In this discussion I describe still another response, one which takes Thompson's concerns about value seriously, but does not assign nature intrinsic or nonanthropocentric value. I suggest a relational environmental ethic as the basis for a genuinely ethical stance toward nature in which our relations to nature are a principal object of ethical concern. © Copyright Environmental Ethics, 1997.
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According to the earliest line of objection, there was no need for Peace Studies to be introduced as a separate area of the curriculum because what Peace Studies courses would cover could be better accomplished within the well-established... more
According to the earliest line of objection, there was no need for Peace Studies to be introduced as a separate area of the curriculum because what Peace Studies courses would cover could be better accomplished within the well-established humanities disciplines, such as history, philosophy, and English literature. This objection was rooted in a rather narrow view of the disciplines—sometimes pumped up with claims of the specialized methodological grounding of traditional disciplines—and perhaps also in a territorial and self-protective mentality. Funds to universities were being cut and the introduction of new disciplines or fields of study was often financially threatening to established disciplines. This battle over the exclusivity of traditional disciplines has now been lost with the widespread introduction of fields such as cultural studies, and with the establishment of multidisciplinary and interdisciplinary studies. The change has come primarily from within, with humanities disciplines re-conceiving and reinventing themselves. Studying English literature, philosophy, or anthropology is now very different from what it was in the 1980s. A second objection, or series of objections, to the introduction of Peace Studies was directed at the nature of the field itself. According to Caroline Cox, Roger Scruton, and John Marks, teaching in such a field could not
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The gamer’s dilemma, initially proposed by Luck (Ethics and Information Technology 11(1):31–36, 2009) posits a moral comparison between in-game acts of murder and in-game acts of paedophilia within single-player videogames. Despite each... more
The gamer’s dilemma, initially proposed by Luck (Ethics and Information Technology 11(1):31–36, 2009) posits a moral comparison between in-game acts of murder and in-game acts of paedophilia within single-player videogames. Despite each activity lacking the obvious harms of their real-world equivalents, common intuitions suggest an important difference between them. Some responses to the dilemma suggest that intuitive responses to the two cases are based on important differences between the acts themselves or their social meaning. Others challenge the fundamental assumptions of the dilemma. In this paper, we identify and explore key imaginative and emotional differences in how certain types of in-game violence are experienced by players, consider how these differences factor into the moral lives of players, and use these insights to resolve the dilemma. The view we develop is that the key moral emotion in offensive video gameplay is self-repugnance. This is not repugnance of the act...