Keyao Yang

Addiction in practice possesses a distinct social dimension. Consistent empirical evidence shows that a range of social challenges can significantly increase the likelihood of developing and sustaining addiction. These challenges include economic recession; violence and public safety concerns; deficits in housing, education, and healthcare; marginalization of social minorities; social injustice and inequality; and political instability. Philosophers have reason to investigate whether and to what extent these social factors might mitigate or exempt a person’s responsibility and blameworthiness for addiction-related wrongdoing. However, current discussions on addiction and responsibility predominantly emphasize the physiological and psychological aspects of addiction, focusing on how it affects a person’s responsibility through its influence on cognitive and volitional capacities. Attention to addiction’s social dimension is notably lacking. In this article, I articulate and defend a duress-like approach to excusing addiction-related infractions that is particularly suited to addressing the intricate social factors involved in addiction and helps to fill existing theoretical gaps in the current literature.

The Darwinian protolanguage hypothesis is one of the most popular theories of the evolution of human language. According to this hypothesis, language evolved through a three stage process involving general increases in intelligence, the emergence of grammatical structure as a result of sexual selection on protomusical songs, and finally the attachment of meaning to the components of those songs. The strongest evidence for the second stage of this process has been considered to be birdsong, and as a result researchers have investigated the existence of various forms of grammar in the production and comprehension of songs by birds. Here, we argue that mating dances are another relevant source of sexually-selected complexity that has until now been largely overlooked by proponents of Darwinian protolanguage, focusing especially on the dances of long-tailed manakins. We end by sketching several lines of research that should be pursued to determine the relevance of mating dances to the evolution of language.