Jill Stauffer, Ethical Loneliness: The Injustice of Not Being Heard, New York : Columbia University Press, 2015, ISBN 978-0-231-17150-2
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Jill Stauffer defines ethical loneliness early in her book as "the experience of having been abandoned by humanity compounded by the experience of not being heard" (1).Seemingly simple, but it will take the rest of the book for Stauffer to unpack the complexity of what this means.The result is one of the most interesting philosophical works that I have read in a long time.Ethical Loneliness positions itself in the literature on justice and demands that attention be paid to those who are abandoned in and through experiences of violence, oppression, and power.The book is at times unrelenting in describing examples of cruelty wrought by human beings on other human beings and of the effects of this on those who are subjected to the vilest forms of violence.Reprieve from the difficulties of "hearing" these stories comes in the form of a sort of "trigger" warning: "this book full of stories of violence and injustice is also describing the human condition: our intersubjective reliance on one another" (3).Unexpectedly, what softens the blow is Stauffer's account of "our intersubjective reliance on one another" and her promise to intermingle stories of ordinary examples of ethical loneliness with those of violence.If ethical loneliness describes the human condition, then it is mundane and widespread as well as extraordinary and implacable in its grip on those in contexts fraught with violence, conflict, genocide, and war.It can be found in the day-to-day lives of ordinary people, in the experiences of many in colonial and post-colonial societies, in rights-violating societies transitioning to rights-respecting ones, in perpetrators as well as victims of violence, and in those participating in the very institutions designed to address injustices but who are then abandoned because what they say about harm and suffering is not heard.Stauffer's extensive use of testimony "delivered in diverse settings--South Africa, Argentina, Holocaust archives, Native American dealings with US legal proceedings, American prisons, the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia" (6)--makes her case for understanding ethical loneliness as an injustice very convincing.Failures to hear or understand are rampant and have resulted in unsuccessful, inadequate, or botched attempts to address this kind of injustice.Sometimes the very processes of reparation, restoration, amnesty, or reconciliation meant to achieve justice fail to really hear what those who have suffered great harms say.When this happens, those who are abandoned may be unable to move on in a world that has not changed and will not change. Ethical Loneliness has implications that go well beyond what has been described thus far.Capturing what is important about the book is no easy task.I will be selective and highlight some
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.003 | 0.005 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.003 | 0.005 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.006 | 0.009 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.006 | 0.007 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.022 | 0.009 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".