This article explores the transition to integrated reporting by a customer-owned bank and identifies the drivers of this transition, thereby providing insights for other businesses seeking to engage in such reporting. Practice theory provides a theoretical lens for this study. A case study approach encompassing in-depth interviews and documents analysis enabled the data to be collected for this research. This study finds that a customer-owned business context enables innovative approaches to reporting. An understanding of reporting and recognition of the potential (...) value of integrated reporting, basic guidelines for such a practice, and organisational ethical values and goals based on a combination of economic, social and environmental considerations matched by an organisational structure that embeds economic, social and environmental responsibilities rather than treating these as separate silos, enabled Goodbank to transition to integrated reporting and differentiate itself from its competitors and other organisations. (shrink)

Study on religious and social values of people as influenced by the philosophical views of Ramakrishna, 1836-1886 in his time.

On Advaita philosophy; commentary on Taittīriyopaniṣad.

Sumit K. Mandal uncovers the hybridity and transregional connections underlying modern Asian identities. By considering Arabs in the Malay world under European rule, Becoming Arab explores how a long history of inter-Asian interaction was altered by nineteenth-century racial categorisation and control. Mandal traces the transformation of Arabs from familiar and multi-faceted creole personages of Malay courts into alienated figures defined by economic and political function. The racialisation constrained but did not eliminate the fluid character of Arabness. Creole Arabs responded (...) to the constraints by initiating transregional links with the Ottoman Empire and establishing modern social organisations, schools, and a press. Contentions emerged between organisations respectively based on Prophetic descent and egalitarianism, advancing empowering but conflicting representations of a modern Arab and Islamic identity. Mandal unsettles finite understandings of race and identity by demonstrating not only the incremental development of a modern identity, but the contested state of its birth. (shrink)

The essay takes up the issue of postcolonial representation in terms of a critique of European modernism that has been symptomatic of much postcolonial theoretical debates in the recent years. It tries to enumerate the epistemic changes within the paradigm of postcolonial theoretical writing that began tentatively with the publication of Edward Said’s Orientalism in 1978 and has taken a curious postmodern turn in recent years with the writings of Gayatri Spivak and Homi Bhabha. The essay primarily focuses on Bhabha’s (...) concepts of ambivalence and mimicry and his politics of theoretical anarchism that take the representation debate to a newer height vis-à-vis modes of religious nationalism and Freudian psychoanalysis. It is interesting to see how Bhabha locates these within a postmodern paradigm. (shrink)

An important way in which philosophy can contribute to public discourse is by clarifying concepts that are central to it. This paper is a philosophical contribution in that spirit. It offers an account of fake news—a notion that has entered public debate following the 2016 US presidential election. On the view I defend, fake news is Frankfurtian bullshit that is asserted in the form of a news publication. According to Frankfurt’s famous account, bullshit has two characteristics. There is, firstly, an (...) “indifference to how things really are” on the part of the bullshitter. This does not mean that what a bullshitter says is always false. It might well be true. What it does mean, however, is that, unlike a liar, who tries to convince us that a given statement he believes to be false is true, a bullshitter simply does not care whether what he says is true. The same, I believe, is true of the publisher of fake news. Secondly, the bullshitter misrepresents “in a certain way … what he is up to”. Likewise, the publisher of fake news seems to misrepresent what he is up to. It appears that he wants to hide his actual motives. At any rate, so I will argue. (shrink)

This book examines the theoretical foundations of order ethics and discusses business ethics problems from an order ethics perspective. Order ethics focuses on the social order and the institutional environment in which individuals interact. It is a well-established paradigm in European business ethics. The book contains articles written by leading experts in the field and provides both a concise introduction to order ethics and short summary articles homing in on specific aspects of the order-ethical paradigm. It presents contributions describing fundamental (...) concepts, historical roots, and the economic, social, and philosophical background of the theory. The second part of the handbook focuses on the theory's application in business, society, and politics, casting new light on an array of topics that loom large in contemporary ethical discourse.​. (shrink)

This chapter discusses how order ethics relates to the theory of justice. We focus on John Rawls's influential conception "Justice as Fairness" (JF) and compare its components with relevant aspects of the order-ethical approach. The two theories, we argue, are surprisingly compatible in various respects. We also analyse how far order ethicists disagree with Rawls and why. The main source of disagreement that we identify lies in a thesis that is central to the order ethical system, viz. the requirement of (...) incentive-compatible implementability. It purports that an ethical norm can be normatively valid only if individuals have a self-interested motive to support it. This idea conflicts with the Rawlsian view because there are cases where it is not clear, from the standpoint of self-interest, why everybody should support its moral demands. If the thesis of incentive-compatible implementability is, in fact, correct, a proponent of JF would have to reform her views. We suggest how she could do that while salvaging the heart of her normative system as a “regulative idea”. The conception that would result from this reformation may be seen as a new variant of order ethics, which we propose to call “Rawlsian Order Ethics”. (shrink)

Sentiment analysis is the field of natural language processing to analyze opinionated data, for the purpose of decision making. An opinion is a statement about a subject which expresses the sentiments as well as the emotions of the opinion makers on the topic. In this paper, we develop a sentiment analysis tool namely SENTI-METER. This tool estimates the success rate of social campaigns based on the algorithms we developed that analyze the sentiment of word as well as blog. Social campaigns (...) have a huge impact on the mindset of people. One such campaign was launched in India on October 2, 2014, named Swachh Bharat Abhiyan. Our tool computes an elaborated analysis of Swachh Bharat Abhiyan, which examines the success rate of this social campaign. Here, we performed the location-wise analysis of the campaign and predict the degree of polarity of tweets along with the monthly and weekly analysis of the tweets. The experiments were conducted in five phases namely extraction and preprocessing of tweets, tokenization, sentiment evaluation of a line, sentiment evaluation of a blog and analysis. Our tool is also capable of handling transliterated words. Unbiased tweets were extracted from Twitter related to this specific campaign, and on comparing with manual tagging we were able to achieve 84.47 % accuracy using unigram machine learning approach. This approach helps the government to implement the social campaigns effectively for the betterment of the society. (shrink)

Suitable for student readers and more advanced scholars who would like an introduction to experimental philosophy, this book guides the reader through current debates on the topic, and provides links to current and emerging work in the field.

This book argues that critics of consequentialism have not been able to make a successful and comprehensive case against all versions of consequentialism because they have been using the wrong methodology. This methodology relies on the crucial assumption that consequentialist theories share a defining characteristic. This text interprets consequentialism, instead, as a family resemblance term. On that basis, it argues quite an ambitions claim, viz. that all versions of consequentialism should be rejected, including those that have been created in response (...) to conventional criticisms. The book covers a number of classic themes in normative ethics, metaethics and, particularly, ethical methodology and also touches upon certain aspects of experimental moral philosophy. It is written in clear language and is analytic in its argumentative style. As such, the book should appeal to students, graduate students as well as professional academics with an interest in analytic moral philosophy. (shrink)

Homoeopathy is commonly recognised as pseudoscience. However, there is, to date, no systematic discussion that seeks to establish this view. In this paper, we try to fill this gap. We explain the nature of homoeopathy, discuss the notion of pseudoscience, and provide illustrative examples from the literature indicating why homoeopathy fits the bill. Our argument contains a conceptual and an empirical part. In the conceptual part, we introduce the premise that a doctrine qualifies as a pseudoscience if, firstly, its proponents (...) claim scientific standing for it and, secondly, if they produce bullshit to defend it, such that, unlike science, it cannot be viewed as the most reliable knowledge on its topic. In the empirical part, we provide evidence that homoeopathy fulfils both criteria. The first is quickly established since homoeopaths often explicitly claim scientificity. To establish the second, we dive into the pseudo-academic literature on homoeopathy to provide evidence of bullshit in the arguments of homoeopaths. Specifically, we show that they make bizarre ontological claims incompatible with natural science, illegitimately shift the burden of proof to sceptics, and mischaracterise, cherry-pick, and misreport the evidence. Furthermore, we demonstrate that they reject essential parts of established scientific methodology and use epistemically unfair strategies to immunise their doctrine against recalcitrant evidence. (shrink)

In a recent paper, José Ángel Gascón extends the Frankfurtian notion of bullshit to the sphere of argumentation. On Frankfurt’s view, the hallmark of bullshit is a lack of concern for the truth of an utterance on the part of the bullshitter. Similarly, Gascón argues, the hallmark of argumentative bullshit should be viewed as a lack of concern for whether the reasons that are adduced for a claim genuinely support that claim. Gascón deserves credit for drawing attention to the idea (...) of argumentative bullshit. Nevertheless, we argue, his treatment leaves room for further refinement as he fails to clarify important points and misidentifies several features of argumentative bullshit. In particular, Gascón’s account fails to accommodate non-Frankfurtian forms of argumentative bullshit. This paper aims to amend and extend his proposal and proposes a general account that can encompass both Frankfurtian and non-Frankfurtian forms of argumentative bullshit. (shrink)

The ability to dominate or exercise will in social encounters is often assumed in social theory to define power, but there is another form of power that is often confused with it and rarely analyzed as distinct: logistics or the ability to mobilize the natural world for political effect. I develop this claim through a case study of seventeenthcentury France, where the power of impersonal rule, exercised through logistics, was fundamental to state formation. Logistical activity circumvented patrimonial networks, disempowering the (...) nobility and supporting a new regime of impersonal rule: the modern, territorial state. (shrink)

This chapter offers a concise discussion of classic utilitarianism which is the prototypical moral doctrine of the utilitarian family. It starts with an analysis of the classic utilitarian criterion of rightness, gives an overview over its virtues and vices, and suggests an overall assessment of its adequacy as a theory of morality. Furthermore, it briefly discusses whether classic utilitarianism holds promise as a philosophy for doing business.

The idea of responsibility is deeply embedded into the “lifeworld” of human beings and not subject to change. However, the empirical circumstances in which we act and ascribe responsibility to one another are subject to change. Science and technology play a great part in this transformation process. Therefore, it is important for us to rethink the idea, the role and the normative standards behind responsibility in a world that is constantly being transformed under the influence of scientific and technological progress. (...) This volume is a contribution to that joint societal effort. (shrink)

Wie kann ein Experiment zur Beantwortung philosophischer Fragestellungen beitragen? Etwa: Was ist Wissen? Was bedeuten sprachliche Ausdrücke? Haben wir einen freien Willen? Kann man etwas absichtlich tun, ohne es zu beabsichtigen? Vertreter einer jungen philosophischen Bewegung wollen den Fragen ihres Fachs mithilfe empirisch-psychologischer Methoden auf den Grund gehen. Anstatt den Lehnstuhl (»armchair«) aufzusuchen, um sich philosophischen Problemen zu widmen, begeben sich experimentelle Philosophen ins Labor, um mithilfe empirischer Informationen aus Psychologie, Neurowissenschaft und Kognitionswissenschaft philosophische Schlussfolgerungen zu stützen. Die Einführung gibt (...) einen anschaulichen Einblick in das neue Forschungsfeld der XPhi und stellt wichtige experimentelle Beiträge zur Erkenntnistheorie, Sprachphilosophie, Philosophie des Geistes und Handlungstheorie vor. In den Blick genommen wird außerdem die florierende metaphilosophische Debatte, die zwischen experimentellen Philosophen und ihren Kritikern geführt wird. (shrink)

In this paper, I offer a conceptual analysis of fake news. In essence, I suggest analysing this notion as a species of Frankfurtian bullshit. This construal, I argue, allows us to distinguish it from similar phenomena like bad or biased journalism and satire. First, I introduce four test cases. The first three are, intuitively, not cases of fake news, while the fourth one is. A correct conceptual analysis should, hence, exclude the first three while including the fourth. Next, I go (...) through some factors that could explain the difference between the first three cases and the fourth one before I offer my explanation. After that, I propose an analysis of fake news and show that it matches our intuitions about the four test cases. Finally, I consider a possible objection to my proposal. (shrink)

Die Medizin ist nur eines von vielen Beispielen, die zeigen, wie wichtig die Unterscheidung zwischen Wissenschaft und Pseudowissenschaft ist. Wer wissenschaftlich erforschte Arzneimittel verwendet, der maximiert seine Chance auf Heilung. Wer sich dagegen auf pseudowissenschaftliche Präparate verlässt, der verschenkt diese Chance oder schadet sich sogar. Aus diesem Grund ist die Frage, wie man Pseudowissenschaften erkennt, nicht nur von wissenschaftsphilosophischem Interesse. Es handelt sich dabei um eine enorm wichtige, lebenspraktische Frage. Der folgende Beitrag stellt zehn Kriterien vor, die bei der Unterscheidung (...) von Wissenschaft und Pseudowissenschaft helfen. (shrink)

This article looks at the relationship between logistical power and the assemblages of sites that constitute modern states. Rather than treating states as centralizing institutions and singular sites of power, we treat them as multi-sited. They gain power by using logistical methods of problem solving, using infrastructures to enforce and depersonalize relations of domination and limit the autonomy of elites. But states necessarily solve diverse problems by different means in multiple locations. So, educating children is not continuous with governing colonies (...) even though both are necessary to nineteenth-century states. For this reason, states use logistical means of coordination to link sites, and they make the power of the state seem unitary even though the exercise of state power is not. (shrink)

The empirical circumstances in which human beings ascribe responsibility to one another are subject to change. Science and technology play a great part in this transformation process. Therefore, it is important for us to rethink the idea, the role and the normative standards behind responsibility in a world that is constantly changing under the influence of scientific and technological progress. This volume is a contribution to that joint societal effort.

This study explores the impact of both individual ethics (IE) and organizational ethics (OE) on ethical intention (EI). Ethical intention, or the individual's intention to engage in ethical behavior, is useful as a dependent variable because it relates to behavior which can be an expression of values, but also is influenced by organizational and societal variables. The focus is on EI in international business decision-making, since the international context provides great latitude in making ethical decisions. Results demonstrate that both IE (...) and OE influence EL Ethical congruence is also discussed as a positive influence. Younger managers are more influenced by OE than older managers. The findings call for creating governance mechanisms to enhance ethical congruence, thereby increasing the likelihood of managers making ethical choices in organizational decision-making. (shrink)

In normative ethics there has been a long-standing debate between consequentialists and deontologists. To settle this dispute moral theorists have often used a selective approach. They have focused on particular aspects of our moral practice and have teased out what consequentialists and deontologists have to say about it. One of the focal points of this debate has been the morality of promising. In this paper I review arguments on both sides and examine whether consequentialists or deontologists offer us a more (...) plausible account of promissory obligation. My conclusion is negative. Given the arguments on the table, I argue, we should conclude that the debate is in a stalemate. It is, therefore, hard to see how the issue of promissory obligation could help us choose between consequentialism and deontology. (shrink)

Those who invoke the notion of moral responsibility in ethical discourse seem to be faced with a dilemma. Apparently, they either have to violate the “control principle” which says that nobody can be held responsible for what is beyond one's control. Or they have to concede that in many cases there is a “responsibility void” which means that nobody is responsible. The first option seems unjustifiable. The second renders the concept of moral responsibility useless. This dilemma may be taken to (...) suggest that thinking about moral issues in terms of responsibility is an unproductive way of doing ethics. In our paper we offer a solution which, we hope, can rehabilitate responsibility as a moral concept. It combines order ethics (which is a kind of ethics that primarily focuses on the institutional structure of society) with a recently developed account of group agency. (shrink)

Over the years, consequentialism has been subjected to numerous serious objections. Its adherents, however, have been remarkably successful in fending them off. As I argue in this paper, the reason why the case against consequentialism has not been more successful lies, at least partly, in the methodological approach that critics have commonly used. Their arguments have usually proceeded in two steps. First, a definition of consequentialism is given. Then, objections are put forward based on that definition. This procedure runs into (...) one of two problems. Substantive criticisms of consequentialism can only be formulated, if the posited definition is sufficiently concrete and narrow. In that case, however, consequentialists can defend themselves using a strategy that I call “interpretive divergence”. They can simply point out that the critic's definition does not accord with their understanding of consequentialism to which criticisms do not apply. If, on the other hand, an all-encompassing definition is used, it is so abstract that it is doubtful whether any substantive criticisms can be formulated. To escape this dilemma, I sketch a methodological approach which drops the assumption that consequentialism should be defined. It assumes, rather, that the term “consequentialism” should be interpreted as a Wittgensteinian family resemblance term. (shrink)

Dieses Buch erklärt anschaulich und lebensnah die zentralen Regeln vernünftigen Denkens – die 10 Gebote des gesunden Menschenverstands. Diese Regeln sind essentiell für jeden, der im Leben Erfolg haben möchte. Denn wer Erfolg haben will, muss klug entscheiden. Und wer klug entscheiden will, muss klar und vernünftig denken. Aber wie können Sie diese Fähigkeit entwickeln? Nikil Mukerji, Philosoph und Unternehmensberater, weiß Rat: Sie müssen zehn Regeln befolgen, die verblüffend einfach sind, aber sogar von intelligenten Menschen häufig verletzt werden: die (...) 10 Gebote des gesunden Menschenverstands. Jedes dieser Gebote wird wissenschaftlich fundiert erläutert und anhand zahlreicher Beispiele aus verschiedenen Lebensbereichen praktisch veranschaulicht. Konkrete Tipps erleichtern Ihnen die Umsetzung der 10 Gebote in Ihrer eigenen Lebenspraxis. (shrink)

In this short piece, I explore why we, as moral philosophers, should watch sci-fi movies. Though I do not believe that sci-fi material is ne- cessary for doing good moral philosophy, I give three broad reasons why good sci-fi movies should nevertheless be worth our time. These reasons lie in the fact that they can illustrate moral-philosophical pro- blems, probe into possible solutions and, perhaps most importantly, an- ticipate new issues that may go along with the use of new technologies. (...) For the sake of illustration, I focus, for the most part, on aspects of robo-ethics in the movie I, Robot. (shrink)

Minimum wages are usually assumed to be inefficient as they prevent the full exploitation of mutual gains from trade. Yet advocates of wage regulation policies have repeatedly claimed that this loss in market efficiency can be justified by the pursuit of ethical goals. Policy makers, it is argued, should not focus on efficiency alone. Rather, they should try to find an adequate balance between efficiency and equity targets. This idea is based on a two-worlds-paradigm that sees ethics and economics as (...) two inherently conflicting ways of thinking. We, however, believe that this view of the relationship between ethics and economics is fundamentally flawed and blurs our understanding of how an ethically responsible regulation of the labour market should be conducted. In drawing on an economic-ethical approach that resolves the antinomy between efficiency and equity, we show that ethics and economics are, in fact, two sides of the same coin and that minimum wage legislation can only be ethically responsible, if it is at the same time economically efficient. In other words, we can have our cake and eat it too. On the basis of our approach, we develop two simple game theoretical models for different types of labour markets and derive policy implications from an economic-ethical viewpoint. We suggest that under the assumption of perfectly competitive labour markets a tax-funded wage subsidy is preferable over minimum wages, as it makes everyone better off. If, however, employers have monopsony power in the wage setting process, the minimum wage is justifiable under certain conditions. (shrink)

We offer a concise introduction to the methodology of order-ethics and highlight how it connects aspects of economic theory and, in particular, game theory with traditional ethical considerations. The discussion is conducted along the lines of five basic propositions, which are used to characterize the methodological approach of order ethics.

In this essay, I will examine how technological progress affects the responsibilities of human agents. To this end, I will distinguish between two interpretations of the concept of responsibility, viz. responsibility as attributability and substantive responsibility. On the former interpretation, responsibility has to do with the idea of authorship. When we say that a person is responsible for her actions we mean that she is to be seen as the author of these actions. They can be attributed to her, such (...) that she can be normatively appraised – i.e. blamed, praised, etc. – on that basis. In discussing this kind of responsibility I will show that the responsibility of human agents tends to increase as their technologies progress. This claim is often taken for granted, but seldom clarified and argued for. I will give it a clear interpretation and provide a semi-formal reasoning that supports it. The second interpretation of responsibility that I will discuss is substantive responsibility. It has to do with the normative demands that confront us with what we are required to do. I will argue that technological change can affect, firstly, what our substantive responsibilities are on a case-by-case basis. Secondly, I will try to show that it can affect the way we think about our substantive responsibilities at the level of theoretical normative ethics. (shrink)

The theme of this issue of the St. Gallen Business Review is "Harmony". For this reason, we would like to discuss whether two aspects of our life- world are in harmony, namely economic optimization and morality. What is the relation between them? According to a widely shared view, which is one aspect of the doctrine of "mainstream economics", the functioning of an economic system does not require moral behaviour on the part of the individual economic agent. In what follows, we (...) will try to convince you that this is false. If all economic agents – managers, employees, bankers, consumers and so on – were purely self-interested, as mainstream economics assumes, our economic practice would fail. There are various reasons for this. Here we will focus on one of them, namely the pivotal role of interpersonal communication. (shrink)

Was tun Philosophen eigentlich, wenn sie Philosophie treiben? Oder besser: Was sollten Philosophen tun, wenn sie Philosophie treiben? Diese Frage ist selbst eine philosophische. Und sie wird seit einigen Jahren wieder mit zunehmender Intensität diskutiert. Dafür ist vor allem eine neue philosophische Bewegung verantwortlich, die man als „experimentelle Philosophie“ oder kurz „ x-phi “ bezeichnet. Anhänger dieser Bewegung glauben, die Philosophie solle sich in Vorgehensweise und Methodik den empirischen Wissenschaften annähern und philosophischen Fragestellungen mithilfe empirischer Tests zu Leibe rücken. Diese (...) Ansicht steht im krassen Widerspruch zur konventionellen Sichtweise, nach der die Philosophie eine empirieferne Disziplin ist, die von Philosophen im sprichwörtlichen Lehnstuhl betrieben werden kann. Entsprechend stießen die Thesen experimenteller Philosophen bei Vertretern der klassischen Sichtweise zunächst auf Stirnrunzeln und Unverständnis. Mittlerweile hat sich die experimentelle Philosophie jedoch zu einer reputierlichen Position entwickelt, der ganze Aufsatzbände gewidmet werden. Im Folgenden werden wir einen ihrer Teilbereiche betrachten, nämlich die „experimentelle Ethik“. Dazu werden wir zunächst die klassische Sichtweise von Ethik einführen, die das Bild einer autonomen, von empirischer Wissenschaft weitestgehend unabhängigen Ethik zeichnet. Danach werden wir die experimentell-ethische Sichtweise einführen, die mit dem traditionellen Bild bricht. Es soll uns lediglich darum gehen, die zentrale These der experimentellen Ethik, nach der empirisch-wissenschaftliche Fragen für ethische Grundsatzfragen relevant sind, zu verstehen und zu plausibilisieren. Wir werden zu diesem Zweck zwei Argumentationslinien betrachten, die deutlich machen, dass grundsätzliche ethische Fragen von empirisch-wissenschaftlichen Fragen abhängen können. Schließlich werden wir klären, welche Rolle der klassischen Lehnstuhl-Philosophie im Rahmen des experimentell-ethischen Paradigmas zukommt bzw. zukommen sollte. (shrink)

In this paper, I address the question whether drones, which may soon possess the ability to make autonomous choices, should be allowed to make life-and-death decisions and act on them. To this end, I examine an argument proposed by Rob Sparrow, who dismisses the ethicality of what he calls “killer robots”. If successful, his conclusion would extend to the use of what I call autonomous killer drones, which are special kinds of killer robots. In Sparrow’s reasoning, considerations of responsibility occupy (...) centre stage. Though I reject his argument, I agree both with Sparrow’s conclusion and with his basic contention that the idea of responsibility should play an important role in the investigation of the problem at hand. Therefore, I propose a different argument to show that we should not allow autonomous robots and more specifically autonomous drones to make life-and-death decisions. This argument also invokes the concept of responsibility. But it does so in a way that is different from Sparrow’s use and is congenial to an account of responsibility that I favour. It assumes the simple principle that morally significant choices should only be made by subjects who are capable of responsibility, which can be reconciled both with a deontological and a consequentialist view of morality. Since killer robots, and in particular autonomous killer drones, seem to lack that capability, it follows that they should not be entrusted to make life-and-death decisions and act on them. (shrink)

In this essay, we argue against radical ethical views about human enhancement that either dismiss or endorse it tout court. Instead, we advocate the moderate stance that issues of enhancement should be examined with an open mind and on a case-by-case basis. To make this view plausible, we offer three reasons. The first lies in the fact that it is difficult to delineate enhancement conceptually, which makes it hard to argue for general ethical conclusions about it. The second is that (...) an appropriate view of the edifice of moral theory suggests that tenable moral judgements about human enhancement are the result of a careful consideration of the pros and cons that attach to the use of a specific enhancement technology. Lastly, we show that important normative factors in the enhancement debate can be used both in arguments for and in arguments against enhancement. The bottom line of our discussion is that we should treat issues of human enhancement like we do any other ethical issue, viz. by weighing up the reasons pro and con. (shrink)

In a recent paper, José Ángel Gascón extends the Frankfurtian notion of bullshit to the sphere of argumentation. On Frankfurt’s view, the hallmark of bullshit is a lack of concern for the truth of an utterance on the part of the bullshitter. Similarly, Gascón argues, the hallmark of argumentative bullshit should be viewed as a lack of concern for whether the reasons that are adduced for a claim genuinely support that claim. Gascón deserves credit for drawing attention to the idea (...) of argumentative bullshit. Nevertheless, we argue, his treatment leaves room for further refinement as he fails to clarify important points and misidentifies several features of argumentative bullshit. In particular, Gascón’s account fails to accommodate non-Frankfurtian forms of argumentative bullshit. This paper aims to amend and extend his proposal and proposes a general account that can encompass both Frankfurtian and non-Frankfurtian forms of argumentative bullshit. (shrink)

Order ethicists favour incentives as a means for making moral progress but largely ignore an alternative method, namely, nudging, which has come to prominence through the work of behavioural scientists in recent years. In this paper, we suggest that this is a mistake. Order ethicists have no reason to ignore nudging as an alternative method. Arguments they might press against it include worries about paternalism, manipulation, autonomy, and unintended bad consequences. These are, we argue, largely unfounded insofar as they involve (...) misconceptions or affect incentives as well. In particular, we contend that only some, but not all, nudges are paternalistic, manipulative, and autonomy-reducing. The same is true of incentives. Also, both nudges and incentives can have unintended bad consequences. Therefore, order ethicists cannot endorse arguments against nudges without undermining their favourable view of incentives. In addition, there might be positive reasons to prefer nudges to incentives, for instance, when they are more freedom-preserving, more effective, cheaper, easier to implement, or less inequality-inducing than the latter. (shrink)

John Rawls' Differenzprinzip verlangt, die gesellschaftlichen Spielregeln zum größten Vorteil der sozial Schwächsten einzurichten. Der vorliegende Band analysiert, was diese sozialethische Maxime realiter erfordert und erklärt, wie sie moralphilosophisch begründet werden kann. Dabei wird betont, dass die faktische Realisierbarkeit ethischer Prinzipien eine Bedingung ihrer normativen Geltung darstellt. Und es wird eine Interpretation des Differenzprinzips vorgestellt, die eine Umsetzung der Rawlsschen Idee auch unter realen gesellschaftlichen Bedingungen ermöglicht.

Are foundations of models of ambiguity-sensitive preferences too flawed to be usefully applied to economic models? Al-Najjar and Weinstein (2009) say such is indeed the case. In this paper, first, we point out that many of the key arguments by Al-Najjar and Weinstein do not apply to quite a few of the ambiguity preference models of more recent vintage, and therefore to that extent do not undermine the foundational aspects or applicability of ambiguity models in general. Second, we argue the (...) focus in that paper on Ellsberg examples is an overly narrow concern; the Ellsberg examples have their uses but they are not the best context to understand why reasonable real-world agents may find acting in an ambiguity-sensitive manner normatively or prescriptively appealing. Finally, normative considerations aside, we submit that Al-Najjar and Weinstein are unduly dismissive of the power of such preferences to provide illuminating positive analyses of economic phenomena. (shrink)

Some ethicists believe that we should give no weight to low-level intuitions about cases. In this paper, three common arguments for this position are examined and rejected. All have an empirical basis. The first is the argument from disagreement. The second draws on framing effects. And the third employs debunking explanations. The discussion aims to make a substantive methodological point about ethical inquiry, viz. that low-level intuitions are not to be shunned. Above that, however, its aim is to illuminate, by (...) way of illustration, the relation between empirical findings and normative conclusions – a link that is rather intricate and can only be explored through armchair reflection. (shrink)