Elements comprising a set of building blocks for a feminist reconstruction of citizenship might include: a critical synthesis of citizenship as a status and a practice; strengthening the inclusive side of citizenship (within and across nation-states); the principle of differentiated universalism, addressing tensions between an analysis grounded in difference and the universalism standing at the heart of citizenship; and a challenge to the binary thinking that constrains the articulation of women's claims to citizenship.

This Article addresses the general question of "why citizenship?" through the lens of children’s citizenship. It unpacks the different elements of substantive citizenship and considers what they mean for children: membership and participation; rights; responsibilities; and equality of status, respect and recognition. It then discusses the lessons that may be learned from feminist critiques of mainstream constructions of citizenship, paying particular attention to the question of capacity for citizenship. It concludes by suggesting that much of the literature that is making (...) the case for recognition of children as citizens is not so much arguing for the wholesale extension of adult rights and obligations of citizenship to children but recognition that children’s citizenship practices constitute them as de facto, even if not complete de jure, citizens. More broadly, the Article argues that this position points towards an understanding of citizenship which embraces but goes beyond that of a bundle of rights. (shrink)

A synthesis of rights and participatory approaches to citizenship, linked through the notion of human agency, is proposed as the basis for a feminist theory of citizenship. Such a theory has to address citizenship's exclusionary power in relation to both nation-state ‘outsiders’ and ‘insiders’. With regard to the former, the article argues that a feminist theory and politics of citizenship must embrace an internationalist agenda. With regard to the latter, it offers the concept of a ‘differentiated universalism’ as an attempt (...) to reconcile the universalism which lies at the heart of citizenship with the demands of a politics of difference. Embracing also the reconstruction of the public-private dichotomy, citizenship, reconceptualized in this way, can, it is argued, provide us with an important theoretical and political tool. (shrink)

Notions of recognition and difference do not inform the mainstream debate about welfare reform, which is, instead, dominated by a dichotomous discourse of active modernization vs passive ‘welfare dependency’. The article challenges this dichotomy within the context of New Labour’s welfare reform agenda in the UK. It argues, first, that welfare reform should treat improvements in social security benefits not as promoting ‘passive’ welfare but as complementary to labour market activation policies. Second, it redefines active welfare to incorporate notions of (...) active citizenship, which construct welfare subjects as actors in the political process of welfare policy-making and delivery. As a framework for this position, the article discusses three ‘R’s of welfare reform, risk protection, redistribution and recognition, together with the further two ‘R’s of rights and responsibilities. It concludes by emphasizing the importance of a rights agenda both to tackling poverty and exclusion and to recognition politics. (shrink)

?Power, not pity? is a demand articulated by the Poor People's Economic Human Rights Campaign in the United States. The article discusses the ways in which some poverty activists are deploying an ethical discourse of human rights as a way of thinking about, talking about and mobilising against poverty and as a way of articulating concrete demands. They are staking a claim to power and to recognition as well as redistribution. It concludes that as an ethical discourse human rights performs (...) an important symbolic and mobilising function but that its effectiveness as a political tool in combating poverty is yet to be proven. (shrink)

Citizenship can be represented as both a status and a practice, reflecting the liberal/social rights and civic republican traditions but also moving beyond them in a critical synthesis. A key challenge for contemporary feminist and radical citizenship theory is how to move beyond the bogus universalism that underpinned both of these traditions, as well as that implied by the category `woman', so as to accommodate citizenship's universalist promise to the demands of diversity and difference. The article suggests how citizenship as (...) both a status and a practice can be rethought so as to respond to this challenge. Drawing on a range of social and political theorists, it offers the concept of a `differentiated universalism' as a means of encapsulating the creative tension between the universal and the particular that lies at the heart of this approach to citizenship. (shrink)

The Conservative Manifesto has to be scoured for policies which might improve the lives of women as a sex. There is a section on animal welfare but nothing on the welfare of women. Little attention is paid to women's special problems either at work or as carers in the home. Yet much Conservative social policy depends on women as unpaid carers. (St-John Brooks, 1987).

Written by one of today's most creative and innovative philosophers, Ruth Garrett Millikan, this book examines basic empirical concepts; how they are acquired, how they function, and how they have been misrepresented in the traditional philosophical literature. Millikan places cognitive psychology in an evolutionary context where human cognition is assumed to be an outgrowth of primitive forms of mentality, and assumed to have 'functions' in the biological sense. Of particular interest are her discussions of the nature of abilities as (...) different from dispositions, her detailed analysis of the psychological act of reidentifying substances, and her critique of the language of thought for mental representation. In a radical departure from current philosophical and psychological theories of concepts, this book provides the first in-depth discussion on the psychological act of reidentification. (shrink)

The fourth edition of this bestselling title is designed to help you think critically and thoughtfully about ethical decisions you'll face in practice-in any health care discipline. Utilizing a unique 6-step decision making process designed by the author, this multi-disciplinary text provides an expert framework for making effective choices that lead to a professional and caring response to patients and clients.

Public reasoning is widely thought to be essential to democracy, but there is much disagreement about whether such deliberation should be constrained by a principle of public reason, which may seem to conflict with important democratic values. This paper denies that there is such a conflict, and argues that the distinctive contribution of public reason is to constitute a relationship of civic friendship in a diverse society. Acceptance of public reason would not work against mutual understanding, learning, or compromise, nor (...) does the principle involve any violation of political equality. The real threat to democracy is not public reason, but the framing of public reason by a presumption against state action. (shrink)

On rivers, mountains and secrets : an introduction to the study and its subjects -- Talking to God-- and God talking back -- Mind embodied : spiritual practice and consciousness -- Place and the making of religious practice -- The spirit of the work : challenging oppression, nurturing diversity -- Conscious sex, sacred celibacy : sexuality and the spiritual path.

Public reason in practice and theory -- False starts: unsuccessful justifications of public reason -- Respect for persons as a constraint on coercion -- Higher-order unanimity escape clause -- Civic friendship as a constraint on reasons for decision -- Public reason and (same-sex) marriage.

One objection to the principle of public reason is that since there is room for reasonable disagreement about distributive justice as well as about human flourishing, the requirement of reasonable acceptability rules out redistribution as well as perfectionism. In response, some justificatory liberals have invoked the argument from higher-order unanimity, or nested inclusiveness. If it is not reasonable to reject having some system of property rights, and if redistribution is just the enforcement of a different set of property rights, redistribution (...) is legitimate if chosen democratically. This article explores two problems with this response. First, there are different ways to describe the set of possible policies, and so different ways to specify the noncoercive default that obtains in the absence of conclusive justification. Second, if the coercive exercise of political power must be conclusively justified, policies that are more coercive ought to require conclusive justification as against policies that are less coercive. These problems about the baseline with respect to which we require public justification raise the question of how we measure coercion, and whether or in what sense there is a presumption against coercion. The article distinguishes and argues against three such presumptions. (shrink)

Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz -- Gabriel Álvarez de Toledo -- Pedro de Peralta Barnuevo -- Francisco Botello de Moraes.

Hannah Arendt claims the concept of brotherhood presents false notions of political community that elide historic hatreds of others and threaten modern political life. This paper explores Arendt’s critical assessment of the concept of brotherhood in order to reflect on one specific example: the politics of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt in the wake of the Arab Spring of 2011. While some observers reject Arendt’s assessment of brotherhood as too narrow, her criticisms raise useful questions about democracy and plurality, which (...) confront any community that exhorts its members to act as ‘brethren’ rather than as ‘citizens.’ The Muslim concept of brotherhood suggests many different possibilities for belonging: a classic universalism of the Abrahamic natural law tradition; a progressive counter-public sphere; and as well the authoritarian private community of believers as represented in the early writings of the Muslim Brotherhood leadership. Therefore, the politically controversial Muslim Brotherhood has no monopoly over the understanding of the Muslim concept of brotherhood. However, it is the most powerful, most well-organized brotherhood movement. The paper opens and ends with reflections on the Arab Spring of 2011, its one-year anniversary in January 2012, and considers other possibilities for the concept of brotherhood against the backdrop of Arendt’s analysis. (shrink)

This article considers two arguments that purport to show that inductive reasoning is unjustified: the argument adduced by Sextus Empiricus and the (better known and more formidable) argument given by Hume in the Treatise. While Sextus’ argument can quite easily be rebutted, a close examination of the premises of Hume’s argument shows that they are seemingly cogent. Because the sceptical claim is very unintuitive, the sceptical argument constitutes a paradox. And since attributions of justification are theoretical, and the claim that (...) they are never (or seldom) true isn’t preposterous, the correct response to the paradox may well be to admit that the sceptic has exposed our error in making them. (shrink)

In liberal political theory, meaningful work is conceptualised as a preference in the market. Although this strategy avoids transgressing liberal neutrality, the subsequent constraint upon state intervention aimed at promoting the social and economic conditions for widespread meaningful work is normatively unsatisfactory. Instead, meaningful work can be understood to be a fundamental human need, which all persons require in order to satisfy their inescapable interests in freedom, autonomy, and dignity. To overcome the inadequate treatment of meaningful work by liberal political (...) theory, I situate the good of meaningful work within a liberal perfectionist framework, from which standpoint I develop a normative justification for making meaningful work the object of political action. To understand the content of meaningful work, I make use of Susan Wolf’s distinct value of meaningfulness, in which she brings together the dimensions of objectivity and subjectivity into the ‘bipartite value’ of meaningfulness (BVM) (Wolf, Meaning in life and why it matters, 2010). However, in order to be able to incorporate the BVM into our lives, we must become valuers, that is, co-creators of values and meanings. This demands that we acquire the relevant capabilities and status as co-authorities in the realm of value. I conclude that meaningful work is of first importance because it is a fundamental human need, and that society ought to be arranged to allow as many people as possible to experience their work as meaningful through the development of the relevant capabilities. (shrink)

Based on her earlier ground-breaking axiomatization of quantified modal logic, the papers collected here by the distinguished philosopher Ruth Barcan Marcus cover much ground in the development of her thought, spanning from 1961 to 1990. The first essay here introduces themes initially viewed as iconoclastic, such as the necessity of identity, the directly referential role of proper names as "tags", the Barcan Formula about the interplay of possibility and existence, and alternative interpretations of quantification. Marcus also addresses the putative (...) puzzles about substitutivity and about essentialism. The collection also includes influential essays on moral conflict, on belief and rationality, and on some historical figures. Many of her views have been incorporated into current theories, while others remain part of a continuing debate. (shrink)

Research on visual attention has uncovered significant anomalies, and some traditional methods may have inadvertently probed peripheral vision rather than attention. Vision science needs to rethink visual attention from the ground up. To facilitate this, for a year I banned the word “attention” in my lab. This constraint promoted a more precise discussion of attention-related phenomena, capacity limits, and mechanisms. The insights gained lead me to challenge attributing to “attention” those phenomena that can be better explained by perceptual processes, are (...) predictable by an ideal observer model, or that otherwise may not require an additional mechanism. I enumerate a set of critical phenomena in need of explanation. Finally, I propose a unifying theory in which all perception results from performing a task, and tasks face a limit on complexity. (shrink)

For many years now Allen Buchanan has been one of the most important theorists working on the philosophy of human rights, producing a large number of papers and two books significantly devoted to the topic. In the work under consideration in this symposium, Buchanan breaks new ground by examining what he claims to be the “heart” of international human rights practice – the international legal human rights (“ILHR”) system, subjecting it to moral and philosophical analysis and criticism. Buchanan's book was (...) the subject of an author meets critics session sponsored by the APA Committee on Law and Philosophy at the 2015 Pacific APA Meeting. The following paper introduces the resulting special issue of the journal, _Law and Philosophy_, summarizing Buchanan's important contribution and criticisms by William Talbot, Brooke Ackerley, Erin Kelly, and Mathias Risse, as well as Buchanan's replies. (shrink)

In the face of the Brexit vote and the election of Trump, there is serious worry about whether the liberal, democratic, and cosmopolitan values thought to underlie progressive immigration policies are in fact widely shared. In this article, I examine these worries and provide suggestions about how those who do favor just progressive immigration policies might best respond to the problems we currently face.

On June 10, 1480, William Caxton issued his edition of the Chronicles of England, based on the Middle English prose Brut. On August 18 of the same year he issued the Description of Britain, a short work adapted from John Trevisa's translation of Ranulph Higden's Polychronicon. Two years later, at some point between July 2 and November 20, 1482, Caxton published his full edition of Trevisa's Polychronicon, and on October 8 of the same year he issued a second edition of (...) the Chronicles of England. (shrink)

They examine the currents of thought behind some of the most significant works in Western philosophy, including those by John Locke and David Hume.

Christians, health care, and basic moral reasoning -- When life ends -- Chronic illness, suffering, and Christian responses -- Organ donation and heroic medicine -- Scarce resources and Christian compassion -- Abortion -- Assisted reproduction and embryo selection -- Embryo research and cloning -- What happened to the neighbors? global health care -- The global challenge of HIV/AIDS -- Concluding thoughts.

Based on Robert Baker's metaphorical view of damaging language, I argue that morally responsible individuals are obligated to refrain from using the word as a negative adjective directed towards that which the speaker dislikes. According to the metaphorical view, while a speaker may understand her use of the word as devoid of homosexual connotations, the hearer is likely to conclude that his puts him in the same hated category as all of those other objects, events, and persons who are negatively (...) called. (shrink)

To the Editor: I was glad to see the Times taking an interest in the growing field of philosophical counseling, as evidenced by its March 21 article “The Socratic Shrink”. However, while providing...

" Biosemantics " was the title of a paper on mental representation originally printed in The Journal of Philosophy in 1989. It contained a much abbreviated version of the work on mental representation in Language Thought and Other Biological Categories. There I had presented a naturalist theory of intentional signs generally, including linguistic representations, graphs, charts and diagrams, road sign symbols, animal communications, the "chemical signals" that regulate the function of glands, and so forth. But the term " biosemantics " (...) has usually been applied only to the theory of mental representation. Let me first characterize a more general class of theories called "teleological theories of mental content" of which biosemantics is an example. Then I will discuss the details that distinguish biosemantics from other naturalistic teleological theories. (shrink)

Sexual abuse by clergymen, poisoned water, police brutality—these cases each involve two wrongs: the abuse itself and the attempt to avoid responsibility for it. Our focus is this second wrong—the cover up. Cover ups are accountability failures, and they share common strategies for thwarting accountability whatever the abuse and whatever the institution. We find that cover ups often succeed even when accountability mechanisms are in place. Hence, improved institutions will not be sufficient to prevent accountability failures. Accountability mechanisms are tools (...) that people must be willing to use in good faith. They fail when people are complicit. What explains complicity? We identify certain human proclivities and features of modern organizations that lead people to become complicit in the wrongdoing of others. If we focus exclusively on the design of institutions, we will fail to constrain the perpetrators of wrongdoing. Understanding complicity is key to understanding accountability failures. (shrink)