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Item Discrimination in Plain Sight(Dhaka - Tribune. Bangladesh, 2018) Rainer, ElbertDiscrimination in plain sightItem Philosophy means business(The Citizen New Paper Tanzania, 2018) Rainer, ElbertPhilosophy means BusinessItem The Tenacity of Truthfulness(Pretoria: EARS Publishing Company, 2019) Lauer, Helen and Yitah HelenThis book is a festschrift to honour the unique inspiration of Professor Mogobe Bernard Ramose. The essays reflect, echo, reinforce and amplify Ramose’s influence and concerns in contemporary African ethics, ontology and epistemology, political struggle and the public responsibility of philosophers to facilitate transformation and liberation. The contributors to this festschrift hail from Azanian South Africa, Cameroon, Kenya, Nigeria, Austria, Canada, Germany, Holland, and America: Jonathan Chimakonam, Michael Cloete, Ndumiso Dladla, Edwin Etieyibo, Rainer Forst, Anke Graness, Henk Haenen, Barry Hallen, Bruce Janz, M. John Lamola, Teboho Lebakeng, D.A. Masolo, Ifeayni A. Menkiti, Ezekiel Mkhwanazi, Pascah Mungwini, Victor C. A. Nweke, J. Obi Oguejiofor, Renate Schepen, Mandla Seleoane, and Godfrey Tangwa. The collection is intended to function as a comprehensive resource tool for navigating Ramose’s opus and the trajectories of his thought pursued by other well established scholars and devoted political activists.Item Mipaka ya kijiografia isiwe chanzo cha ubaguzi ana udhalilishaji(Mwananchi News Paper, 2018-11-30) Rainer, Elbertmipaka ya kijiografia isiwe chanzo au sababu ya udhalilishajiItem Implicitly racist epistemology: recent philosophical appeals to the neurophysiology of tacit prejudice(Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group., 2019) Lauer, HelenThis essay explores why examples of mainstream philosophy of cognition and applied phenomenology demonstrate the implicit bias that they treat as their subject matter, whether the authors of these works intend or approve of their doing so. It is shown why egalitarian intuitions, which form the basis for ideal models of justice appealing to elites in racially stratified societies, provide an inadequate framework for illuminating and dismantling the mechanics of racial discrimination. Recently developed results in social choice theory are applied here to cases where racial bias is perpetuated through institutionally orchestrated collective decision making. The “discursive dilemma” theorem suggests why the analysis of subliminal attitudes is irrelevant to correcting the racial injustices presumed to follow from implicit bias in societies where negative racial stereotypes, ostensibly and explicitly deplored, are covertly and illicitly reinforced. Keywords colour-blind racist ideology; implicit bias; laissez-faire racism; racial oppression; whiteness; black self-identityItem Academic Integrity: the imperative of probity in African development research." Plenary paper delieverd 16th November, 2018. First Annual UDSM Two Day International Conference Enhancing Strategic Research For Inclusive Industrial Development In Tanzania SIDA-UDSM(2018-11-16) Lauer, HelenThe international community refers to this as the era of post-truth. But for African scientific researchers investigating and theorizing African realities, there is nothing new about this era of relying upon stereotypes rather than evidence-based hypotheses to spin familiar falsehoods promulgated in the guise of scientific consensus. The global arena is rife with misrepresentations that sustain the bizarre yet incorrigible conviction that Africans require foreign expertise to direct research agendas and to move development policy in a sustainable direction. This is why academic integrity is so important to uphold particularly as individual researchers and knowledge producers representing academic excellence and proximity with facts on the ground, through your expertise and proximity to indigenous knowledge custodians in this part of the world. By academic integrity here I refer narrowly to truthfulness and rigour in the production of knowledge outputs and in the critical assessment, dissemination or rejection of products already in circulation. Key to this notion of integrity is the avoidance of plagiarism. But in the research sciences integrity entails sustaining the confidence to speak facts to fiction, to resist the overwhelming power of knowledge monopolies, where one’s access to research funding and potential career opportunities rest on one’s capitulating to profit-driven research agendas. This begins by correcting the widespread ignorance that passes as received knowledge and theoretical advice sustained by consensus in the global arena about Africans and the interpretation of long term implications of global capital expansion and resource extraction on the Two Thirds World. But the opportunity to forward such corrections will not be offered; it has to be seized, demanded, fought for. That is a struggle that requires courage and tenacity, it requires defiance and commitment and professional risk-taking.Item Weierstrass meets Enriques,(2010) Rainer, Ebert, Andreas P. Braun,Arthur Hebecker & Roberto ValandroWe study in detail the degeneration of K3 to T^4/Z_2. We obtain an explicit embedding of the lattice of collapsed cycles of T^4/Z_2 into the lattice of integral cycles of K3 in two different ways. Our first method exploits the duality to the heterotic string on T^3. This allows us to describe the degeneration in terms of Wilson lines. Our second method is based on the blow-up of T^4/Z_2. From this blow-up, we directly construct the full lattice of integral cycles of K3. Finally, we use our results to describe the action of the Enriques involution on elliptic K3 surfaces, finding that a Weierstrass model description is consistent with the Enriques involution only in the F-theory limit.Item “Innocent Threats and the Moral Problem of Carnivorous Animals(2012) Rainer, Ebert and Tibor R. Machan.The existence of predatory animals is a problem in animal ethics that is often not taken as seriously as it should be. We show that it reveals a weakness in Tom Regan's theory of animal rights that also becomes apparent in his treatment of innocent human threats. We show that there are cases in which Regan's justice‐prevails‐approach to morality implies a duty not to assist the jeopardized, contrary to his own moral beliefs. While a modified account of animal rights that recognizes the moral patient as a kind of entity that can violate moral rights avoids this counterintuitive conclusion, it makes non‐human predation a rights issue that morally ought to be subjected to human regulation. Jennifer Everett, Lori Gruen and other animal advocates base their treatment of predation in part on Regan's theory and run into similar problems, demonstrating the need to radically rethink the foundations of the animal rights movement. We suggest to those who, like us, find it less plausible to introduce morality to the wild than to reject the concept of rights that makes this move necessary to read our criticism either as a modus tollens argument and reject non‐human animal rights altogether or as motivating a libertarian‐ish theory of animal rights.Item Good to die(2013) Rainer, ebertAmong those who reject the Epicurean claim that death is not bad for the one who dies, it is popularly held that death is bad for the one who dies, when it is bad for the one who dies, because it deprives the one who dies of the good things that otherwise would have fallen into her life. This view is known as the deprivation account of the value of death, and Fred Feldman is one of its most prominent defenders. In this paper, I explain why I believe that Feldman’s argument for the occasional badness of death fails. While staying within an Epicurean framework, I offer an alternative that adequately accounts for a significant range of widely held intuitions about prudential value. My account implies that death is almost always good for the one who dies, yet often less good than not dying. Finally, I discuss some puzzles that remain for my account and hint at possible ways to address them.Item Item Global Justice as Process: Applying Normative Ideals of Indigenous African Governance, Philosophical Papers(2017) Lauer, HelenThis contribution explores correctives to several errors that Thomas Nagel (2005) and others presuppose in defending scepticism about global justice. Depending upon conventions of reconciliation and arbitration that survive in West Africa, to define global justice as a work in progress—not a fixed univocal formula, but an on-going collaborative effort, a project in perpetual renovation and inter-cultural reconsideration, by successive generations which presupposes a diversity of values and ways of sanctifying human life.Item The Importance of an African Social Epistemology to Improve Public Health and Increase Life Expectancy in Africa, in Method, Substance and the Future of African Philosophy(2018) Lauer, HelenIn most nations of Africa today, epidemic control strategies are dominated by the way health care needs are understood and addressed in the global health arena. A causal connection is exposed here which links (i) the disinformation about African morbidity and mortality promulgated worldwide, (ii) the prejudicial dismissal of locally affiliated African-based expertise, and (iii) the perpetuation of the very conditions that worsen both the mortality and morbidity rates in Africa. The global emergency response to the West Africa Ebola crisis of 2014-2015 is the case detailed as an example.Item Philosophy without borders: Relocating African critical authority in the global knowledge society. forthcoming in Philosophical Foundations of the Humanities through African Perspectives(2018) Lauer, HelenGlobal advisory councils have urged the architects of higher education policy in African economies to help tackle their bloated rural and urban informal sectors by narrowing the application of scarce government revenues for the greatest possible short term success of making graduates employable, with the expectation of long term gains for sustainable development. I argue that the neo-liberal economists’ prescriptions for increasing the relevance of African public universities in their respective national agendas are unrealistic.Item Reclaiming the Human Sciences and Humanities through African Perspectives.(Fundacao Alexandre de Gusmao Biblioteca Digital e Loja Virtual, 2016) Lauer, Helen. et al.This book is designed to crystallize the experience of confronting explosive new insights and transformation of theories about African peoples, issues and topics germane to all the arts and social sciences. Cross referencing and copious bibliographies for all the 85 chapters in the two volumes provides a starting point for graduate studies in African concerns. Brazil’s new law requiring African cultures and history has inspired this translation, paid for by its Ministry of Foreign Affairs.Item Talking Global Justice: The importance of critical social theory in the African business paradigm, in Corporate Social Responsibility and Governance, CSR, Sustainability, Ethics & Governance,(Springer International, 2015) Lauer, HelenCultural diversity is best regarded as a vehicle for discovering fundamental convictions about the possibilities for a trans-national meaning of economic justice rather than the main obstacle to its realisation. Guidance is taken from principles of indigenous models of good governance and diplomacy that characterise contemporary West Africa’s rich cultural diversity and which alleviate the severe economic pressures of its many histories.Item “Mental-Threshold Egalitarianism: How Not to Ground Full Moral Status,”(Social Theory and Practice, 2018) Rainer, EbertMental-threshold egalitarianism, well-known examples of which include Jeff McMahan’s two-tiered account of the wrongness of killing and Tom Regan’s theory of animal rights, divides morally considerable beings into equals and unequals on the basis of their individual mental capacities. In this paper, I argue that the line that separates equals from unequals is unavoidably arbitrary and implausibly associates an insignificant difference in empirical reality with a momentous difference in moral status. In response to these objections, McMahan has proposed the introduction of an intermediate moral status. I argue that this move ultimately fails to address the problem. I conclude that, if we are not prepared to give up moral equality, our full and equal moral status must be grounded in a binary property that is not a threshold property. I tentatively suggest that the capacity for phenomenal consciousness is such a property, and a plausible candidate.Item "The Concept of Human Dignity in German and Kenyan Constitutional Law,” Thought and Practice:(A Journal of the Philosophical Association of Kenya, 2012) Rainer, Ebert; Reginald, Oduor MJThis paper is a historical, legal and philosophical analysis of the concept of human dignity in German and Kenyan constitutional law. We base our analysis on decisions of the Federal Constitutional Court of Germany, in particular its take on life imprisonment and its 2006 decision concerning the shooting of hijacked airplanes, and on a close reading of the Constitution of Kenya. We also present a dialogue between us in which we offer some critical remarks on the concept of human dignity in the two constitutions, each one of us from his own philosophical perspective.Item The Wrongness of Killing(Rice University, 2016) Rainer, EbertThere are few moral convictions that enjoy the same intuitive plausibility and level of acceptance both within and across nations, cultures, and traditions as the conviction that, normally, it is morally wrong to kill people. Attempts to provide a philosophical explanation of why that is so broadly fall into three groups: Consequentialists argue that killing is morally wrong, when it is wrong, because of the harm it inflicts on society in general, or the victim in particular, whereas personhood and human dignity accounts see the wrongness of killing people in its typically involving a failure to show due respect for the victim and his or her intrinsic moral worth. I argue that none of these attempts to explain the wrongness of killing is successful. Consequentialism generates too many moral reasons to kill, cannot account for deeply felt and widely shared intuitions about the comparative wrongness of killing, and gives the wrong kind of explanation of the wrongness of killing. Personhood and human dignity accounts each draw a line that is arbitrary and entirely unremarkable in terms of empirical reality, and hence ill-suited to carry the moral weight of the difference in moral status between the individuals below and above it. Paying close attention to the different ways in which existing accounts fail to convince, I identify a number of conditions that any plausible account of the wrongness of killing must meet. I then go on to propose an account that does. iv I suggest that the reason that typically makes killing normal human adults wrong equally applies to atypical human beings and a wide range of non-human animals, and hence challenge the idea that killing a non-human animal is normally easier to justify than killing a human being. This idea has persisted in Western philosophy from Aristotle to the present, and even progressive moral thinkers and animal advocates such as Peter Singer and Tom Regan are committed to it. I conclude by discussing some important practical implications of my account.Item On What a Good Argument Is, in Science and Elsewhere(Dhaka University Journal on Journalism, Media and Communication Studies 1, 2011-05) Rainer, EbertThis article investigates what constitutes good reason, in particular in scientific communication. I will start out with a general description of what scientists do and will identify the good argument as an integral part of all science. Employing some simple examples, I will then move on to derive some necessary conditions for the goodness of an argument. Along the way, I will introduce various basic concepts in logic and briefly talk about the nature of human knowledge. I will conclude by relating my discussion of good reasoning in science to critical thinking in general and explain why I believe that critical thinking is at the heart of a well-functioning liberal democracy.Item THE EFFECTIVENESS OF COMPLAINTS MECHANISM IN EMPOWERING PATIENTS IN TANZANIA: A Case Study of Three Selected District Hospitals in the Coast Religion.(university of Dar es Salaam, 2017) Mgalula, Eric ClementThis dissertation is about the effectiveness of complaints mechanism in empowering patients in Tanzania. The study was carried out in Coast region, involving Rufiji district hospital, Bagamoyo district hospital and Mkuranga district hospital. Specific objectives for this work intended: to compare the number of patients who experienced unethical conducts from healthcare workers against the number of reported complaints, from January to June this year (2017); to find out whether the existing complaints mechanisms are visible, confidential, impartial, integrated and responsive; to determine patients’ perception about the existing complaints mechanisms and to assess the methods for raising patients’ awareness and confidence about the existing complaints mechanism. The study involved a total of 135 respondents, which included patients, healthcare workers and administrative staffs who deal with handling patients’ complaints. Questionnaires, semi structured interviews, observation and documentary evidences were employed to facilitate data collection, discussion and interpretation. Findings of this study showed that, there is a large number of patients who lack enough confidence to channel their complaints through the available complaints mechanisms. This situation occurs due to lack of impartiality, confidentiality and poor response shown by the existing complaints mechanisms. Internal moral composure of always trying to maintain harmony with authorities while those in authorities look at themselves free from criticism, is an African mindset built in the concept of vital force, this has also contributed to the ineffectiveness of the complaints mechanism in empowering patients in Tanzania. It is suggested in the study that complaint mechanisms should be improved in terms of their visibility, integration, impartiality, confidentiality, and responsiveness. Profound effort should be taken by the government to improve critical thinking mindset among Tanzanians.