A portrait of scholastic approaches to a qualified disagreement of opinions, focusing on the antagonism of scholastic probabilism and anti-probabilism in the early modern era.

Journal of Philosophy of Education, EarlyView.

What impact should sufficientarianism have on the measurement of inequality? Like other theories of justice, sufficientarianism influences how economic inequality is conceived. For the purpose of measurement, its standards of justice can be approximated by income-based thresholds of sufficiency. At which income level could a threshold of having enough be pegged in OECD countries? What would it imply for standard indicators of inequality, such as decile comparisons of cumulated income, income spreads, or the Gini coefficient? This paper suggests some answers (...) to these questions, showing that sufficientarian ideas could make a difference with respect to the measurement of inequality in a society. (shrink)

In a familiar interpretation, the Non-Identity Problem claims that persons whose existence depends on a seemingly harmful action cannot in fact be harmed through such an action. It is often objected that the persons in question can nevertheless be wronged through a violation of their rights. However, this objection seems to fail because these persons would readily waive any violated right in order to come into existence. The present article will analyze this Waiver Counter Argument in detail and show why (...) it does not succeed. First, it is necessary to distinguish between a prospective and a retrospective waiver scenario. In the prospective scenario an imagined person must consider whether she wants to waive a right in order to come into existence. In the retrospective scenario a person is asked whether she would prefer a wronged existence to never having been born. In both scenarios the conditions of a legitimate waiver of rights are not met, but for different reasons. On this basis, an argument against NIP can be developed. (shrink)

Abstractabstract:Cardinal Sforza Pallavicino, SJ (1607–67), conceived a procedure for determining natural moral laws by voting under a veil of ignorance. Behind this veil, imagined possible people who are ignorant of their social position, personal characteristics, nation, and the historical period in which they live vote as equals. These possible people are asked to establish a moral law in pursuit of their own and collective happiness, which they are obligated by God to follow. This article discusses Pallavicino's innovative approach to natural (...) law and examines its reception in Southern Germany and (what is now) Austria. (shrink)

The comment focusses on O'Neill's advocacy of Classical Institutionalism (CI) and the problems of the ideal-regarding approach to the construction of institutions. It maintains that CI shows no signs of progress which would justify a renewed exclusive interest in this paradigm and that the ideal-regarding approach needs some consequentialist balancing to avoid obvious risks of totalitarian denaturation.

Social epistemology existed in the scholastic tradition in the shape of doctrines on the legitimate use of probable opinions. Medieval scholasticism had developed sophisticated approaches in this respect, but the apogee of scholastic theoretical reflection on social epistemology occurred in the Baroque era and its Catholic moral theology. The huge debate on probable opinions at that time produced the most far-reaching and deepest investigations into the moral and epistemological foundations and limitations of opinion-based, reasonable discourse prior to the late twentieth (...) century. It is time to recover the arguments and claims of Baroque scholastic social epistemology, not only to fill a lacuna in intellectual history but also to see whether some of its challenges are still with us today. (shrink)

How should a crisis sparked by migration of the poor be dealt with? How should tax evasion be addressed? What is the appropriate response to manipulation of elections? Daniel Schwartz's book illustrates that moralists, lawyers, political decision makers, and society at large already contended with these issues some four hundred years ago. The underlying problems and their normative implications were thoroughly analyzed by scholastic authors at the time, many of whom wrote with an eye on influencing the emerging interested public, (...) or doubled as advisors for political decision makers. Political morality, the moral analysis of political decisions, is a particular field of applied ethics (undoubtedly, an important... (shrink)

Deontologists often assume that ethical constraints hold ‘come what may’ but that violations of the constraints can be excused or pardoned. Vinit Haksar has argued for pardon as deontologically appropriate mitigation for the violation of deontological constraints. However, the reasons he adduces against excuse are inconclusive. In this paper, I show how complex the question of excuse versus pardon for deontological transgressions is. Liability for the development of character traits and the assumption of agent-centered responsibility have to be taken into (...) account before the possibility of pardon can be identified as appropriate deontological softener for strict constraints. (shrink)

This paper claims that deontological and consequentialist ethics are best distinguished with reference to different assumptions concerning moral accountability and accounting. Deontological ethics can thereby be defended against the accusation of inordinate concern with the moral purity of agents. Moreover, deontological ethics can and should reject being based on the concept of agent-relative value. Even under the assumption that deontological ethics can be consequentialized, agent-relative value need not play a fundamental role. This is not the same as denying agent-relativity a (...) key role in deontological ethics. Deontological moral accounting of universal value should be regarded as agent-relative, whereas consequentialist accounting assumes a shared moral account of all moral agents. (shrink)

In the history of scholastic philosophy, the fifteenth century is traditionally regarded as a period of decay, a downturn between the heights of fourteenth-century nominalism and the Spanish revival of scholasticism in the sixteenth century. This paper sets out to challenge this received view. First, however, the received view is confirmed on the basis of sixteenth-century lists of ecclesiastical writers containing very few notable scholastic philosopher-theologians for the fifteenth century. On the other hand, the same lists show a significant increase (...) in notable scholastics in the fields of practical ethics and jurisprudence. The overall picture signals a shift of philosophical and theological activity from theoretical towards practical concerns. If practical philosophy is not considered to be of lesser rank than theoretical philosophy, there was thus no downturn of scholastic philosophy in the fifteenth century. (shrink)