J Metz
Biographic Data
| ID | 53031 |
|---|---|
| NAME | J Metz |
| GIVEN NAMES | J |
| FAMILY NAME | Metz |
| SIGNATURE | METZ J |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Arizona |
| ORCID | 0000-0001-7936-6766 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 14 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 10 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 14 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1989 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 2 |
Unlearning Agency: Lessons from Cults
This paper investigates a type of agential impairment that has not been fully appreciated in the philosophical literature: unlearning agency, a process which undermines or destroys its victim’s sense of self and agential competence. This type of manipulation is prominent in cults and is vividly displayed by the puzzling phenomenon of cult members seeming to harm themselves despite doing what they claim they want to do, as when several men in Heav…
Why there are no Frankfurt‐style omission cases
Frankfurt‐style action cases have been immensely influential in the free will and moral responsibility literatures because they arguably show that an agent can be morally responsible for a behavior despite lacking the ability to do otherwise. However, even among the philosophers who accept Frankfurt‐style action cases, there remains significant disagreement about whether also to accept Frankfurt‐style omission cases – cases in which an agent omit…
Preemptive Omissions
Omissions, Moral Luck, and Minding the (Epistemic) Gap
This paper warns of two threats to moral responsibility that arise when accounting for omissions, given some plausible assumptions about how abilities are related to responsibility. The first problem threatens the legitimacy of our being responsible by expanding the preexisting tension that luck famously raises for moral responsibility. The second threat to moral responsibility challenges the legitimacy of our practices of holding responsible. Ho…
An ability-based theory of responsibility for collective omissions
Keeping It Simple: Rethinking Abilities and Moral Responsibility
Moral responsibility requires that we are in control of what we do. Many contemporary accounts of responsibility cash out this control in terms of abilities and hold that the relevant abilities are strong abilities, like general abilities. This paper raises a problem for strong abilities views: an agent can plausibly be morally responsible for an action or omission, despite lacking any strong abilities to do the relevant thing. It then offers a w…
Fomo and Regret for Non-Doings
An important but underexplored aspect of our negative agency is that it is fitting to regret only a limited subset of our non-doings even though there are many things that we fail to do. This paper examines why it is ill-fitting to regret certain non-doings, arguing that abilities form the primary constraint on the fittingness of this regret. There are many types of abilities, so a central aim of this paper is to clarify which abilities are relev…
Protect this Belief: Teaching Sport, Media, and Race During the Baltimore Protests
In April 2015, the Freddie Gray protests/riots/uprisings in Baltimore, Maryland, sparked a conversation on the national scene and in classrooms across the country. In my classroom near Baltimore, these events became a test case on how to teach and be in a moment of crisis. Building on a bricolage of methodologies, I explore teaching Bonilla-Silva's (2014) work on color-blind racism in my “Sport and Media” class during the Freddy Gray riots/protes…
Sacher-Masoch and the Jewish Bildungsroman
This essay reads Sacher-Masoch’s narrative Venusim Pelz as an oppositional parody of the German Bildungsroman in which male, female, Slavic, Black, and “Greek” (i.e., “German”) coordinates collapse into each other under the sign of “Jewish” representational and gender fluidity—that is, a fluidity that was widely coded in Masoch’s day as Jewish. The resulting figure, a Greek-Jewish composite of the Austro-Hungarian Empire’s dominant and subaltern …
Dancing in the Shadows of War: Pedagogical Reflections on the Performance of Gender Normativity and Racialized Masculinity
This article explores the use of performative pedagogy to examine popular culture, the body and gender from a critically engaged, personal, and moral perspective. It examines the effectiveness of using reflexive auto-ethnography in the classroom by having students create Mystories (Denzin, 1997) to explore their conceptions of gender. Moving forward in the reflexive moment, by juxtaposing the image of Pat Tillman and patriotism and the athletes o…
Cultural Geographies of Afro-Brazilian Symbolic Practice: Tradition and Change in Maracatu de Nação (Recife, Pernambuco, Brazil)
Cultural Geographies of Afro-Brazilian Symbolic Practice: Tradition and Change in Maracatu de Nação (Recife, Pernambuco, Brazil) Jerry D. Metz (bio) Maracatu de Nação, A Tradition Reinvigorated The main carnival of Pernambuco, Brazil, which takes place in the large coastal city of Recife and the nearby town of Olinda, has received little attention from non-Brazilian scholars — either as an annual event or as a locus of cultural activity year-roun…
An Inter-View on Motherhood: Racial Politics and Motherhood in Late Capitalist Sport
This article explores Women's National Basketball Association (WNBA) player, Jackie Moore's experience as a celebrity sport mother and my experience interviewing her. I use reflexive auto-ethnographic (Denzin, 1997, 2003; Tierney, 2002) and performance ethnographic (Denzin, 2003; Denzin & Lincoln, 2000) practices to provide an active dramaturgical interrogation of both the contextual moment for women's professional basketball and motherhood and t…
Stories about Stories: Rilke's Geschichten vom lieben Gott as Criti-Fiction
Like many of Rilke's early prose works, the story-cycle Geschichten vom lieben Gott, published in 1900 and in a second edition in 1904, has elicited relatively little critical attention. Yet despite scholarly reservations regarding that immature period of Rilke' s artistic development that also produced the Cornet, the Geschichten deserve an in-depth reconsideration from a perspective concerned not with stylistic literary merit but with the analy…
Cases and Comments
Dancing in the Shadows of War: Pedagogical Reflections on the Performance of Gender Normativity and Racialized Masculinity
This article explores the use of performative pedagogy to examine popular culture, the body and gender from a critically engaged, personal, and moral perspective. It examines the effectiveness of using reflexive auto-ethnography in the classroom by having students create Mystories (Denzin, 1997) to explore their conceptions of gender. Moving forward in the reflexive moment, by juxtaposing the image of Pat Tillman and patriotism and the athletes o…
An Inter-View on Motherhood: Racial Politics and Motherhood in Late Capitalist Sport
This article explores Women's National Basketball Association (WNBA) player, Jackie Moore's experience as a celebrity sport mother and my experience interviewing her. I use reflexive auto-ethnographic (Denzin, 1997, 2003; Tierney, 2002) and performance ethnographic (Denzin, 2003; Denzin & Lincoln, 2000) practices to provide an active dramaturgical interrogation of both the contextual moment for women's professional basketball and motherhood and t…
Cases and Comments
Stories about Stories: Rilke's Geschichten vom lieben Gott as Criti-Fiction
Like many of Rilke's early prose works, the story-cycle Geschichten vom lieben Gott, published in 1900 and in a second edition in 1904, has elicited relatively little critical attention. Yet despite scholarly reservations regarding that immature period of Rilke' s artistic development that also produced the Cornet, the Geschichten deserve an in-depth reconsideration from a perspective concerned not with stylistic literary merit but with the analy…
Cultural Geographies of Afro-Brazilian Symbolic Practice: Tradition and Change in Maracatu de Nação (Recife, Pernambuco, Brazil)
Cultural Geographies of Afro-Brazilian Symbolic Practice: Tradition and Change in Maracatu de Nação (Recife, Pernambuco, Brazil) Jerry D. Metz (bio) Maracatu de Nação, A Tradition Reinvigorated The main carnival of Pernambuco, Brazil, which takes place in the large coastal city of Recife and the nearby town of Olinda, has received little attention from non-Brazilian scholars — either as an annual event or as a locus of cultural activity year-roun…
An Inter-View on Motherhood: Racial Politics and Motherhood in Late Capitalist Sport
This article explores Women's National Basketball Association (WNBA) player, Jackie Moore's experience as a celebrity sport mother and my experience interviewing her. I use reflexive auto-ethnographic (Denzin, 1997, 2003; Tierney, 2002) and performance ethnographic (Denzin, 2003; Denzin & Lincoln, 2000) practices to provide an active dramaturgical interrogation of both the contextual moment for women's professional basketball and motherhood and t…
Dancing in the Shadows of War: Pedagogical Reflections on the Performance of Gender Normativity and Racialized Masculinity
This article explores the use of performative pedagogy to examine popular culture, the body and gender from a critically engaged, personal, and moral perspective. It examines the effectiveness of using reflexive auto-ethnography in the classroom by having students create Mystories (Denzin, 1997) to explore their conceptions of gender. Moving forward in the reflexive moment, by juxtaposing the image of Pat Tillman and patriotism and the athletes o…
Sacher-Masoch and the Jewish Bildungsroman
This essay reads Sacher-Masoch’s narrative Venusim Pelz as an oppositional parody of the German Bildungsroman in which male, female, Slavic, Black, and “Greek” (i.e., “German”) coordinates collapse into each other under the sign of “Jewish” representational and gender fluidity—that is, a fluidity that was widely coded in Masoch’s day as Jewish. The resulting figure, a Greek-Jewish composite of the Austro-Hungarian Empire’s dominant and subaltern …
Protect this Belief: Teaching Sport, Media, and Race During the Baltimore Protests
In April 2015, the Freddie Gray protests/riots/uprisings in Baltimore, Maryland, sparked a conversation on the national scene and in classrooms across the country. In my classroom near Baltimore, these events became a test case on how to teach and be in a moment of crisis. Building on a bricolage of methodologies, I explore teaching Bonilla-Silva's (2014) work on color-blind racism in my “Sport and Media” class during the Freddy Gray riots/protes…
Fomo and Regret for Non-Doings
An important but underexplored aspect of our negative agency is that it is fitting to regret only a limited subset of our non-doings even though there are many things that we fail to do. This paper examines why it is ill-fitting to regret certain non-doings, arguing that abilities form the primary constraint on the fittingness of this regret. There are many types of abilities, so a central aim of this paper is to clarify which abilities are relev…
Keeping It Simple: Rethinking Abilities and Moral Responsibility
Moral responsibility requires that we are in control of what we do. Many contemporary accounts of responsibility cash out this control in terms of abilities and hold that the relevant abilities are strong abilities, like general abilities. This paper raises a problem for strong abilities views: an agent can plausibly be morally responsible for an action or omission, despite lacking any strong abilities to do the relevant thing. It then offers a w…
Omissions, Moral Luck, and Minding the (Epistemic) Gap
This paper warns of two threats to moral responsibility that arise when accounting for omissions, given some plausible assumptions about how abilities are related to responsibility. The first problem threatens the legitimacy of our being responsible by expanding the preexisting tension that luck famously raises for moral responsibility. The second threat to moral responsibility challenges the legitimacy of our practices of holding responsible. Ho…
An ability-based theory of responsibility for collective omissions
Preemptive Omissions
Unlearning Agency: Lessons from Cults
This paper investigates a type of agential impairment that has not been fully appreciated in the philosophical literature: unlearning agency, a process which undermines or destroys its victim’s sense of self and agential competence. This type of manipulation is prominent in cults and is vividly displayed by the puzzling phenomenon of cult members seeming to harm themselves despite doing what they claim they want to do, as when several men in Heav…
Why there are no Frankfurt‐style omission cases
Frankfurt‐style action cases have been immensely influential in the free will and moral responsibility literatures because they arguably show that an agent can be morally responsible for a behavior despite lacking the ability to do otherwise. However, even among the philosophers who accept Frankfurt‐style action cases, there remains significant disagreement about whether also to accept Frankfurt‐style omission cases – cases in which an agent omit…
Sociology (8 works) · Philosophy (7 works) · Political science (7 works) · Art (6 works) · Epistemology (6 works) · Free Will and Agency (6 works) · Law (5 works) · Law (4 works) · Literature (4 works) · Media studies (4 works)