UB Philosophers Awarded NEH Research Grants

BUFFALO, N.Y. -- Pablo DeGreiff, Ph.D., and Miriam Thalos, Ph.D., both assistant professors of philosophy at the University at Buffalo, have received research grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities that will allow them to complete projects that reassess common assumptions about how and why human beings behave the way they do under certain conditions.

DeGreiff and Thalos are two of only four philosophers in the nation to receive NEH research fellowships during this funding cycle.

Thalos' project, "Units of Decision-making: The Role of the Collective," will challenge the standard individualistic model of decision-making and introduce a new style of decision analysis that offers a different understanding of cooperation in general.

Its application to the resolution of "Prisoner's Dilemmas" will be of interest to legal theorists, she says, and is applicable to such issues as the provision of public goods in economics and to the social function of "free-riding."

"The purpose of the project is to challenge the usefulness of standard, two-part decision-making theory and render a deeper understanding of sociality," she says, "and of the ties that bind human beings to one another on grounds of rationality."

"It also will provide an understanding that goes beyond the role of the individual in the decision-making process," she says, "and include the role played by institutions in promoting and enabling social behaviors."

Thalos has set out to identify a new procedure by which decision-making can be broken down into its component parts. Her model will allow analysis of large expanses of decision-making behavior not currently considered by standard decision theory and will be applicable to individual and collective decision-making processes.

"It also will include some account of a "switching" mechanism or procedure that prescribes, or at least licenses, movement between the individual mode and the collective mode of decision-making so we will be able to analyze how these modes operate together," she says.

DeGreiff is a social and moral philosopher who has lectured and published extensively on the subject of international justice and transition to democracy. He will use his grant to complete a book manuscript in which he examines the question of how successor governments should deal with the human-rights abuses of preceding regimes.

His will be one of the few books on the subject of transitional justice written by a philosopher. While it is intended to be of interest to philosophers and political scientists, it also is addressed to human-rights activists, policy makers and to those concerned with international affairs and transitions to democracy.

His study analyzes what he calls the "two inadequate policies" by which governments deal with the human-rights abuses -- including state-sponsored terrorism -- of a preceding regime.

One model is based on the "retributive model" of the Nuremberg tribunals set up after World War II to rectify the human rights abuses of Germany's Third Reich. DeGreiff explains this model as one that employs courts and penal institutions to achieve retribution for human rights crimes. It is an attempt to prevent the repetition of past atrocities, he says, and notes that it has been used to address genocide in Rwanda and Yugoslavia.

"The main virtue of the retributive model is that it seems to respond to the claims for justice that scream to be addressed after periods of brutality," DeGreiff says.

"Unfortunately, incipient liberal governments find it difficult to implement the retributive model," DeGreiff says. "And if it is implemented, it can pose a serious threat to the new democracy because members of the preceding regime often continue to hold substantial military, political and economic power.

"So in the case of nations moving from an oppressive, abusive government to one based in democratic principles...the 'amnesty and oblivion' model of transitional justice often is employed instead."

That model, says DeGreiff, offers amnesty to those who perpetrated human-rights abuses under the previous government, followed by "oblivion" or an official "forgetting" of their crimes, thus cutting off further investigation and granting them freedom from future prosecution.

Is one model more useful or more ethical than the other?

"In a broad range of matters...the success of a policy depends upon whether or not it can satisfy citizens' expectations for justice," DeGreiff says. It is essential, therefore, that in this regard we answer the question of what morality requires of us and select the model accordingly."

"It is possible to make a moral case for the adoption of the amnesty-and-oblivion model that opposes trial and punishment on the grounds that a democratic regime stands under a moral obligation to preserve itself," he says. "This obligation becomes especially clear in the light of the alternatives against which democracy normally contends."