Christian Grave zählte zu den prägenden Philosophen, Übersetzern und Publizisten der europäischen Aufklärung zwischen 1770 und 1800, und zwar sowohl innerhalb gewichtiger Teilbereiche der Fach- oder Schulphilosophie, wie der Moralphilosophie und Politik, als auch im Zusammenhang literarischer und populärphilosophischer Diskurse der sich entwickelnden und an Dynamik gewinnenden Öffentlichkeit. Grave nahm entscheidenden Einfluss auf wichtige Debatten, Kontroversen und Forschungsentwicklungen seiner Zeit; so entwickelte er Vorformen soziologischen Forschens und Argumentierens. Seine durch Friedrich II. angeregte Neuübersetzung und Kommentierung von Ciceros 'De officiis' (...) war nicht nur ein großer Verkaufserfolg, sondern hatte auch immensen Einfluss auf die Debatten zur Moralphilosophie und deren pädagogische Umsetzung im späten 18. Jahrhundert - namentlich auf Kant. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The Microscope of Experience: Christian Garve’s Translation of Cicero’s De Officiis (1783)Johan van der ZandeDuring the negotiations leading to the Treaty of Teschen of 1779, ending the phony War of Bavarian Succession, Frederick II and his court stayed in Breslau, the capital of Silesia. There, in conversation with Christian Garve, the city’s most famous son, the king strongly recommended a new German translation of Cicero’s On Moral (...) Duties (De Officiis), one of the classical texts of humanist philosophy and his favorite book. Frederick’s faithful subject dutifully obliged his sovereign. Four years later, in the subservient language of a dedication to a royal patron, Garve offered in due obedience to Frederick a result that, “perhaps flawed,” was “vindicated by the efforts directed toward the execution of the command.” 1Yet Garve’s interest in Cicero differed markedly from that of Frederick. After all, as Garve wrote in the preface to the philosophical commentary on his translation, Cicero’s book was written for “persons of the higher classes who participated in the affairs of state” and for whom “moral prescription often transformed into political instruction.” Clearly that was not the world in which Garve lived. The son of an artisan, Garve, after a brief stint as a professor of philosophy in Leipzig in the early 1770s, was forced by his illness to spend the rest of his life as a reclusive private scholar in his hometown. He admitted that Cicero sometimes “condescended to deal with those classes who occupy themselves as educators and scholars.” The producing classes, however, “this vast, indispensable, and valuable part of humankind,” could only find prescriptions [End Page 75] for the virtuous life in Cicero’s work insofar as they were human beings, not in relation to their station in life. In general terms Garve thought that Cicero had neglected to deal sufficiently with domestic duties, a reproach which he also leveled against another intellectual pedigree, Adam Ferguson. This did not mean, however, that Garve reduced the citizen’s actions to the private sphere, where they could be productive economically and concerned only with their own Bildung. On the contrary, for Garve useful citizens were those who committed themselves to sociability and to political engagement. Moral actions were not only to be judged according to their motivation (as Kant asserted) but also on their effects on society at large.This different emphasis, I suggest, was typical of the German popular philosophers, who in the time span between Christian Wolff and Immanuel Kant formulated a philosophy of life and among whom Garve emerged as the foremost representative. As a group they constituted a philosophical movement in their own right and were not merely, as they are usually described, the popularizers of Wolff’s philosophy. Rather, popular philosophy was a characteristic compound of Wolffian rationalism and British empiricism. Some popular philosophers, mostly the older generation, were more inclined to the rationalist and others, among them Garve, to the empirical end of this spectrum. Little concerned with epistemological problems or with the irrational cult of life as were the life philosophies of the nineteenth century, the popular philosophers were primarily interested in the virtuous life, in a philosophical theory of moral and aesthetic action. Theirs was a “science of man,” that is, a combination of practical philosophy and literary skills with the goal of morally educating a literate but non-specialized public to be useful citizens of the absolute state. They wanted to speak with propriety on all themes of human existence rather than pursue those philosophical questions not directly related to human life. 2 I entirely agree with a recent commentator who describes Garve’s concerns as non-bourgeois, or better, pre-bourgeois and deeply rooted in humanist values. 3This approach shows in Garve’s Cicero translation and commentary. In Leipzig he had attended the lectures of the classical philologist Friedrich Wilhelm Reiz, who trained his students in precise, critical scholarship. When Garve became a professor himself, he and Reiz anonymously published a Latin edition of Aristotle’s Rhetoric. Later, Garve wrote that his own philosophy was indebted to Reiz who had pointed out to him the close relationship between linguistic and... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The Microscope of Experience: Christian Garve’s Translation of Cicero’s De Officiis (1783)Johan van der ZandeDuring the negotiations leading to the Treaty of Teschen of 1779, ending the phony War of Bavarian Succession, Frederick II and his court stayed in Breslau, the capital of Silesia. There, in conversation with Christian Garve, the city’s most famous son, the king strongly recommended a new German translation of Cicero’s On Moral (...) Duties (De Officiis), one of the classical texts of humanist philosophy and his favorite book. Frederick’s faithful subject dutifully obliged his sovereign. Four years later, in the subservient language of a dedication to a royal patron, Garve offered in due obedience to Frederick a result that, “perhaps flawed,” was “vindicated by the efforts directed toward the execution of the command.” 1Yet Garve’s interest in Cicero differed markedly from that of Frederick. After all, as Garve wrote in the preface to the philosophical commentary on his translation, Cicero’s book was written for “persons of the higher classes who participated in the affairs of state” and for whom “moral prescription often transformed into political instruction.” Clearly that was not the world in which Garve lived. The son of an artisan, Garve, after a brief stint as a professor of philosophy in Leipzig in the early 1770s, was forced by his illness to spend the rest of his life as a reclusive private scholar in his hometown. He admitted that Cicero sometimes “condescended to deal with those classes who occupy themselves as educators and scholars.” The producing classes, however, “this vast, indispensable, and valuable part of humankind,” could only find prescriptions [End Page 75] for the virtuous life in Cicero’s work insofar as they were human beings, not in relation to their station in life. In general terms Garve thought that Cicero had neglected to deal sufficiently with domestic duties, a reproach which he also leveled against another intellectual pedigree, Adam Ferguson. This did not mean, however, that Garve reduced the citizen’s actions to the private sphere, where they could be productive economically and concerned only with their own Bildung. On the contrary, for Garve useful citizens were those who committed themselves to sociability and to political engagement. Moral actions were not only to be judged according to their motivation (as Kant asserted) but also on their effects on society at large.This different emphasis, I suggest, was typical of the German popular philosophers, who in the time span between Christian Wolff and Immanuel Kant formulated a philosophy of life and among whom Garve emerged as the foremost representative. As a group they constituted a philosophical movement in their own right and were not merely, as they are usually described, the popularizers of Wolff’s philosophy. Rather, popular philosophy was a characteristic compound of Wolffian rationalism and British empiricism. Some popular philosophers, mostly the older generation, were more inclined to the rationalist and others, among them Garve, to the empirical end of this spectrum. Little concerned with epistemological problems or with the irrational cult of life as were the life philosophies of the nineteenth century, the popular philosophers were primarily interested in the virtuous life, in a philosophical theory of moral and aesthetic action. Theirs was a “science of man,” that is, a combination of practical philosophy and literary skills with the goal of morally educating a literate but non-specialized public to be useful citizens of the absolute state. They wanted to speak with propriety on all themes of human existence rather than pursue those philosophical questions not directly related to human life. 2 I entirely agree with a recent commentator who describes Garve’s concerns as non-bourgeois, or better, pre-bourgeois and deeply rooted in humanist values. 3This approach shows in Garve’s Cicero translation and commentary. In Leipzig he had attended the lectures of the classical philologist Friedrich Wilhelm Reiz, who trained his students in precise, critical scholarship. When Garve became a professor himself, he and Reiz anonymously published a Latin edition of Aristotle’s Rhetoric. Later, Garve wrote that his own philosophy was indebted to Reiz who had pointed out to him the close relationship between linguistic and... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The Microscope of Experience: Christian Garve’s Translation of Cicero’s De Officiis (1783)Johan van der ZandeDuring the negotiations leading to the Treaty of Teschen of 1779, ending the phony War of Bavarian Succession, Frederick II and his court stayed in Breslau, the capital of Silesia. There, in conversation with Christian Garve, the city’s most famous son, the king strongly recommended a new German translation of Cicero’s On Moral (...) Duties (De Officiis), one of the classical texts of humanist philosophy and his favorite book. Frederick’s faithful subject dutifully obliged his sovereign. Four years later, in the subservient language of a dedication to a royal patron, Garve offered in due obedience to Frederick a result that, “perhaps flawed,” was “vindicated by the efforts directed toward the execution of the command.” 1Yet Garve’s interest in Cicero differed markedly from that of Frederick. After all, as Garve wrote in the preface to the philosophical commentary on his translation, Cicero’s book was written for “persons of the higher classes who participated in the affairs of state” and for whom “moral prescription often transformed into political instruction.” Clearly that was not the world in which Garve lived. The son of an artisan, Garve, after a brief stint as a professor of philosophy in Leipzig in the early 1770s, was forced by his illness to spend the rest of his life as a reclusive private scholar in his hometown. He admitted that Cicero sometimes “condescended to deal with those classes who occupy themselves as educators and scholars.” The producing classes, however, “this vast, indispensable, and valuable part of humankind,” could only find prescriptions [End Page 75] for the virtuous life in Cicero’s work insofar as they were human beings, not in relation to their station in life. In general terms Garve thought that Cicero had neglected to deal sufficiently with domestic duties, a reproach which he also leveled against another intellectual pedigree, Adam Ferguson. This did not mean, however, that Garve reduced the citizen’s actions to the private sphere, where they could be productive economically and concerned only with their own Bildung. On the contrary, for Garve useful citizens were those who committed themselves to sociability and to political engagement. Moral actions were not only to be judged according to their motivation (as Kant asserted) but also on their effects on society at large.This different emphasis, I suggest, was typical of the German popular philosophers, who in the time span between Christian Wolff and Immanuel Kant formulated a philosophy of life and among whom Garve emerged as the foremost representative. As a group they constituted a philosophical movement in their own right and were not merely, as they are usually described, the popularizers of Wolff’s philosophy. Rather, popular philosophy was a characteristic compound of Wolffian rationalism and British empiricism. Some popular philosophers, mostly the older generation, were more inclined to the rationalist and others, among them Garve, to the empirical end of this spectrum. Little concerned with epistemological problems or with the irrational cult of life as were the life philosophies of the nineteenth century, the popular philosophers were primarily interested in the virtuous life, in a philosophical theory of moral and aesthetic action. Theirs was a “science of man,” that is, a combination of practical philosophy and literary skills with the goal of morally educating a literate but non-specialized public to be useful citizens of the absolute state. They wanted to speak with propriety on all themes of human existence rather than pursue those philosophical questions not directly related to human life. 2 I entirely agree with a recent commentator who describes Garve’s concerns as non-bourgeois, or better, pre-bourgeois and deeply rooted in humanist values. 3This approach shows in Garve’s Cicero translation and commentary. In Leipzig he had attended the lectures of the classical philologist Friedrich Wilhelm Reiz, who trained his students in precise, critical scholarship. When Garve became a professor himself, he and Reiz anonymously published a Latin edition of Aristotle’s Rhetoric. Later, Garve wrote that his own philosophy was indebted to Reiz who had pointed out to him the close relationship between linguistic and... (shrink)

The concept of the highest good is an important but hardly uncontroversial piece of Kant’s moral philosophy. In the considerable literature on the topic, challenges are raised concerning its apparently heteronomous role in moral motivation, whether there is a distinct duty to promote it, and more broadly whether it is ultimately to be construed as a theological or merely secular ideal. Yet comparatively little attention has been paid to the context of a doctrine that had enjoyed a place of prominence (...) in the ethical systems of the ancients, where these systems provided a key critical foil for the development of Kant’s own conception of the highest good in terms of “happiness distributed in exact proportion to morality” (cf. 5:110). Indeed, these ethical systems prove important for Kant not only in his initial presentation of his account in the Canon of Pure Reason in the first Critique, where he sought to redress the errors of the Epicurean and Stoic conception in particular, but also and importantly in the course of his development towards the second Critique. As I argue in this paper, Christian Garve’s defense of a revised but recognizably Stoic conception of the highest good in his translation of and commentary on Cicero’s De officiis (On Duties), helps to account for Kant’s renewed attention to that doctrine, and specifically to the errors attending the Stoic version, in the Dialectic of Pure Practical Reason. (shrink)

against Garve' constitute his reaction to the latter's remarks on Cicero's De Officiis . Two related criticisms of Kant's against Garve are discussed in brief in this paper. A closer look is then taken at Garve's claim that `Kantian morality destroys all incentives that can move human beings to act at all'. I argue that Kant and Garve rely on two different models of human action for their analyses of moral motivation; these models differ in what each takes to be (...) salient for the explanation of human action. I show that Samuel Clarke's analogy of physical explanation in the framework of Newtonianism (in his Discourse concerning the Unchangeable Obligations of Natural Religion ) usefully illuminates the difference between Kant and Garve in these respects. Key Words: Christian Garve • Kantian ethical theory • moral motivation • moral obligation • Samuel Clarke. (shrink)

Name der Zeitschrift: Kierkegaard Studies Yearbook Jahrgang: 23 Heft: 1 Seiten: 247-288.

The starting point of my study is Kant’s remark to the effect that Garve in his treatise on the connection between morality and politics presents arguments in defence of unjust principles. Recognition of these principles is, according to Kant, an inadvisable concession to those who are inclined to abuse it. I interpret this judgement by making a detailed comparison of the texts of the two treatises. I demonstrate that Garve’s work is an eclectic attempt to combine in one concept the (...) lessons of historical experience with the ideas drawn from British empiricism and German rationalism. These ideas were criticised by Kant in his “critical” period. There is a consensus among researchers that Garve condoned the expansionist policy of Frederick II of Prussia, totally denied that legality in international relations was possible and in general deserved the reputation of an conservative. From that point of view the key values for Garve were the security and well-being of the state. I offer an alternative interpretation of Garve’s position because I believe that the value of political stability plays an important role in it. Such an interpretation makes it possible to treat Garve’s narrative as it was assessed by Kant, i.e. as a concession to the common principles of political practice as a result of a failure to find the guiding theory. My study has established that the role of Garve’s work in the writing of Kant’s treatise Toward Perpetual Peace was more significant than Kant’s own words suggest. Besides, I show that it was under Garve’s influence that Kant turned to the problem of excessive complexity of the principles involved in the search for concrete political decisions. Garve obviously laments this complexity and yet makes these principles still more complex. Kant offers a simpler solution of the problem on the basis of his theory of morals and right. (shrink)

In this chapter I evaluate whether Garve was a ‘eudaimonist’, as Kant famously alleged he was. In the first sections of the paper I clarify that eudaimonism can mean either that happiness is the final end of creation, or that human beings are always motived by the desire for happiness, and I discuss Garve’s engagement with Aristotle’s understanding of eudaimonia. I then provide an account of Garve’s understanding of happiness and discuss his theory of motivation before arguing that Garve believes (...) that happiness is both the final end of creation and ultimate end of all human action. I suggest, however, that although Garve is an egoist of sorts, he should not be classified as a hedonist. (shrink)

What is the proper task of Kantian ethical theory? This paper seeks to answer this question with reference to Kant's reply to Christian Garve in Section I of his 1793 essay on Theory and Practice . Kant reasserts the distinctness and natural authority of our consciousness of the moral law. Every mature human being is a moral professional—even philosophers like Garve, if only they forget about their ill-conceived ethical systems and listen to the voice of pure practical reason. Normative (...) theory, Kant argues, cannot be refuted with reference to alleged experience. It is the proper task of the moral philosopher to emphasize this fact. The paper also discusses Kant's attempts to clarify his moral psychology, philosophy of value and conception of the highest good in the course of replying to Garve's challenge. Key Words: Christian Garve • ethical theory and practice • Immanuel Kant • moral psychology • theory of value. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Kant's Critique of Berkeley HENRY E. ALLISON THE CLAIMTHAT KANT'S IDEALISM,or at least certain strands of it, is essentially identical to that of Berkeley has a long and distinguished history. It was first voiced by several of Kant's contemporaries such as Mendelssohn, Herder, Hamann, Pistorius and Eberhard who attacked the alleged subjectivism of the Critique of Pure Reason. 1 This viewpoint found its sharpest contemporary expression in the notorious (...) Garve-Feder review to which Kant responded at length in the Prolegomena. In subsequent times it has been championed by Schopenhauer, and most nineteenth century German commentators on the relation between the two philosophers. 2 In addition, it has been, and continues to be, the prevailing view of the vast majority of British writers on Kant, including, with significant qualifications, Norman Kemp Smith. 3 This tradition continues despite the fact that Kant specifically, and in no uncertain terms, repudiated this identification in the Prolegomena and the second edition of the Critique. In both works he responds to the charges of subjectivism, and in so doing distinguishes his position from that of Berkeley, who in the eighteenth century was commonly regarded as a solipsist and denier of the "external world." 4 In contra-distinction to Kant's own critical or transcendental idealism, which explains the possibility of synthetic a priori knowledge within the realm of possible experience, Berkeley is characterized as a "dogmatic" or "visionary idealist." He is judged guilty of "degrading bodies to mere illusion" (B69), of regarding things in space as "merely imaginary entities" (B274), and of holding with all "genuine idealists" that: "all knowledge through the senses and experience is i Cf. Hans Vaihinger, Commentar zu Kant's Kritik der Reinen Vernunft (Stuttgart, Berlin, Leipzig, 1892), II, 494-505. Cf. Friederich Fredericks, Der Phainomenale Idealisraus Berkeley's und Kant's (Berlin, 1871); Robert Zimmerman, "Ober Kant's Widerlegung des Idealismus yon Berkeley" (Sitzungsberichte der Akademie der Wissenschaften, Vienna, Philox.-hist. Kl.), LXVIII (1871); Gustav Dieckert, tiber dos Verhiiltnis des Berkeleyschen ldealismus zu Kantischen Vernun]tkritik (Konitz, 1888). Tiffs is a consequence of the general British tendency to view Kant in phenomenalist terms. A typical recent example is found in P. F. Strawson, The Bounds of Sense (London, 1966). Kemp Smith in his Commentary to Kant's Critique o[ Pure Reason (2nd ed., rev., 1923) takes greaZ pains to distinguish between the subjectivist strand in Kant's thought, which is essentially identical to Berkeley's position, and the genuine critical doctrine which stands side by side with it in the text. 9 Cf. I-I.M. Bracken, The Early Reception of Berkeley's Materialism 1710-1733, rev. ed. (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1965). [43] 44 HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY nothing but sheer illusion, and only in the ideas of pure understanding is there truth" (374). 5 One of the chief reasons for the continuation of the Kant-Berkeley tradition is that these, and similar statements about Berkeley, which we find in these works and in Kant's correspondenc e with Beck, have not been taken very seriously by Kant's critics. They are usually dismissed as obvious misinterpretations, due to Kant's ignorance of Berkeley's actual writings, and of his reliance upon distorted second and third hand accounts of Berkeley's thought such as is to be found in Beattie. Furthermore, this view is often supported by the philological reflection that Kant did not read English, and that Berkeley's writings were not yet available in German translation. 6 The philological argument, however, loses much of its force when we consider that there was indeed a German translation of Berkeley's Dialogues, which although apparently unknown to nineteenth century scholars, was readily accessible to Kant. This is to be found, together with a translation of Collier's Clavis Universalis and critical analyses, in a work by the professor of philosophy at Rostock, Johann Christian Eschenbach, entitled: Samlung der vornehmsten Schri[tsteller die die tFirklichkeit ihres eignen K~rpers und der ganzen Ki~rperwelt leugnen (Rostock, 1756). Furthermore, in addition to this work, which was probably known to Kant, there is Berkeley's important Latin work, De Motu (1721), as well as French translations of many of... (shrink)

Kant's correspondence with his colleague and zealous disciple, Marcus Herz, was prophetic: only a few will understand the Critique of Pure Reason. Unfortunately, the problems are intractable and the necessary conceptual scheme to deal with the problems requires a "complete change of thinking in this part of human knowledge". But eventually people will "get over the initial numbness" Kant reassures another correspondent, Christian Garve. Fortunately, he suggests, there is a central question at the foundation of his difficult thought - (...) a question that is the key to his ideas. So what is this important question that Kant insists has been "stated clearly enough"? And how clear is it? I explore these issues in my paper. (shrink)

Einleitung, Begriff und Vorgeschichte der ästhetischen Humanitätsidee -- Gotthold Ephraim Lessing -- Moses Mendelssohn -- Christian Garve -- Johann Gottfried Herder -- Die Scheidung der Humanitätsidee von der ästhetischen Theorie in der Kantschen Tranzendentalphilosophie.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Journal of the History of Philosophy 39.3 (2001) 447-448 [Access article in PDF] Brigitte Sassen, translator and editor. Kant's Early Critics: The Empiricist Critique of the Theoretical Philosophy. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000. Pp. ix + 331. Cloth, $54.95. Brigitte Sassen has translated and edited an extremely useful collection of texts dating from the years 1782 to 1789. Most of the texts were written by Kant's empirically minded (...) critics, but a few are the work of defenders of the Critical philosophy. Although some have been translated before—e.g., the notorious Feder/Garve review of the first Critique that prompted Kant's vitriolic response in the Prolegomena, the original Garve review that served as the basis of the Feder/Garve review, and Jacobi's critique of Kant's transcendental idealism—the entire anthology is the first ever to be devoted exclusively to English translations of some of the first reactions to and defenses of Kant's theoretical philosophy. All of this makes for an exciting event in Kant studies.Sassen identifies three major trends in Kant criticism that began in 1782. The first is the empiricist reaction to Kant's theoretical writings. Sassen considers the year 1789 the endpoint of this trend, since critical attention, she argues, shifted around that time to the rationalist reaction to Kant's writings. The initial wave of rationalist criticism, which constitutes the second trend, lasted until 1793. The third and final trend, she says, is the more forward-looking one that eventually blossomed into the systems of post-Kantian thought.Given such a wealth of material, Sassen has focused on Kant's empiricist critics, choosing the writers and topics most representative of the overall empiricist critique of the 1780s. The selections are divided into five sections. The first consists of the Feder/Garve and Garve reviews (from 1782 and 1783, respectively). Since these were the very first reviews of the Critique of Pure Reason, they helped to formulate many of the classic objections to it. For example, not only does the standard charge of Berkeleyan idealism originate in these reviews, but Feder and Garve also express concerns about Kant's ability to distinguish between reality and illusion if nothing in sensation itself determines the understanding to combine sensations in one way as opposed to another. The second section contains discussions of the Transcendental Aesthetic, including an early version of the "neglected alternative" charge more famously made by Trendelenburg in the nineteenth century. Hermann Andreas Pistorius, one of the most sophisticated of Kant's empiricist critics, argues that Kant has not ruled out the possibility that space and time are both forms of sensibility and properties of things in themselves. The third section (especially Jacobi's famous critique) explores the relationship between appearances and things in themselves, the problem of affection, and other topics touching on the very nature of Kant's idealism. The fourth section deals with various issues involving the table of categories. For example, Kant's critics had doubts about its completeness, and they were also puzzled as to how a priori concepts could be applied to ordinary experience. The fifth and final section looks at the contrast between empiricism and purism, that is, the overall adequacy of empiricist and Kantian approaches to issues in metaphysics and epistemology. Here we find Pistorius once again writing thoughtfully about the Critical philosophy, this time in response to Carl Christian [End Page 447] Erhard Schmid, the author of a dictionary for the "easier use" of Kant's writings that went through several editions in the late 1780s and 1790s.This brief sketch of Sassen's book gives only an inadequate idea of its richness and usefulness. Her introduction, which is thorough and informative, patiently sorts out the various players in the debates of the 1780s, outlines their arguments with Kant and one another, and even describes the nature of periodical publication in late eighteenth-century Germany. The editorial apparatus includes short biographies of the participants in the debates as well as the other authors mentioned throughout the book... (shrink)

The idea that some things are fine in theory, but do not work in practice, was already an “old saying” when Kant wrote about it in 1793. Kant, who was annoyed that a man named Garve had criticized his ethical theory on this ground, responded by pointing out that there is always a gap between theory and practice. Theory provides general rules but it cannot tell us how to apply them--for that, practical judgment is needed. “[T]he general rule,” said Kant, (...) “must be supplemented by an act of judgement whereby the practitioner distinguishes instances where the rule applies from those where it does not.” This means that those who lack judgment might be helpless, even though they know a lot of theory. “There are doctors and lawyers,” Kant explains, “who did well during their schooling but who do not know how to act when asked to give advice.” The point is especially important for the kind of absolutist ethic that Kant defends. Kant held that moral rules have no exceptions; on his way of thinking, we may never lie, we may never break a promise, and so on. This is a clear example of an ethic that seems not to work in practice, for sensible people recognize that in extreme circumstances even very serious rules may have to be broken. But the “gap” that Kant identifies has often been exploited to soften the impact of such harsh precepts. Traditional Christian ethics, for example, says (like Kant) that suicide is always wrong; but because judgment is required to determine which acts count as suicide, casuists have been able to excuse various sorts of self-destruction (and, not coincidentally, avoid consigning the deceased to hellfire) by classifying them as something else. Thus the hero who sacrifices herself to save others is not a suicide, nor is the man who kills himself while blind with grief, as he lacks the required rational intention. It might be thought that such gaps could be closed by adding further principles to the theory--for example, principles that specify more closely what counts as suicide.... (shrink)

Although research to date has helped in important ways to shed light on the penetration of Burke’s Enquiry into the German-language area, a comprehensive treatment of this reception as a process distinguished not only by changes over time, but also characterized by regional variations, remains lacking. Based on the lectures on aesthetics by August Gottlieb Meißner at Prague University in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, the paper seeks to illuminate this underexposed regional aspect. The first phase of the (...) reception of the Enquiry took place especially in Berlin immediately after its publication in London in 1757. The second phase can be located mainly in the northern maritime centres of German culture, particularly Königsberg, Riga, Hamburg as well as Copenhagen. Christian Garve’s translation, published anonymously by Hartknoch in Riga in 1773, and Kant’s Critique of Judgement constitute two peaks of north-German interest in Burke’s Enquiry. The intense reception of the Critique of Judgement within German aesthetics around and after 1800 subsequently led to the polemic with the British author becoming a part of Idealist interpretations for the next few decades. Outlining the three centres of the German reception of Burke’s Enquiry begs the question which of them should be connected with Meißner’s remarks concerning Burke’s ideas. Leipzig is presented as another important German-language centre disseminating knowledge of Burke’s Enquiry, especially in the first half of the Seventies, moreover the decisive intermediary for the penetration of the Enquiry into the south-German Roman Catholic areas, Prague in particular. (shrink)

The article opens with the analysis of a 2013 legal memorandum of the U.S. Department of Justice that sanctions state ordered killings of citizens on foreign soil, as well as the violation of foreign sovereignty that may have to accompany such killings. This document, together with arguments of contemporary juridical pragmatist like M. Ignatieff, functions in the article as a prototype of the kind of juridical thinking that has been explicitly countered in classical philosophies of right. Section I outlines Kant’s (...) theory of the common ethical ground of morals and politics, his criticism of Christian Garve, and his distinction of politics from pseudopolitics. Section II presents Hegel’s scrutiny of the central role of public hypocrisy and its casuistry, especially with regards to the concealment of crimes against humanity under the philanthropic veil. (shrink)

My aim in this paper is to clarify Kant’s conception of self-contentment, which is a particular kind of satisfaction associated with being a virtuous person. I do so by placing the term in the context of Kant’s answer to an objection made by Kant’s contemporary Christian Garve, namely the objection that if virtuous action is accompanied by a feeling of satisfaction, then virtuous action might only performed in order to experience this feeling of satisfaction . I begin by illustrating (...) the main features of Kant’s concept of self-contentment before turning to Garve’s objection and Kant’s response to it. I conclude by clarifying the differences between self-contentment, respect for the moral law, and Kant’s concept of moral pleasure. (shrink)

The article opens with the analysis of a 2013 legal memorandum of the U.S. Department of Justice that sanctions state ordered killings of citizens on foreign soil, as well as the violation of foreign sovereignty that may have to accompany such killings. This document, together with arguments of contemporary juridical pragmatist like M. Ignatieff, functions in the article as a prototype of the kind of juridical thinking that has been explicitly countered in classical philosophies of right. Section I outlines Kant’s (...) theory of the common ethical ground of morals and politics, his criticism of Christian Garve, and his distinction of politics from pseudopolitics. Section II presents Hegel’s scrutiny of the central role of public hypocrisy and its casuistry, especially with regards to the concealment of crimes against humanity under the philanthropic veil. (shrink)

In a 1798 letter to Christian Garve, Kant claims that without a transition [Übergang] from the metaphysical foundations of natural science to physics there will be a ‘gap’ in the Critical philosophy. He does not make clear, however, exactly what this gap is or how the transition is supposed to fill the gap. The Übergang section of Kant's Opus postumum has received considerable attention of late due to the many drafts it contains of Kant's Ether Deduction. Commentators have also (...) hoped to find a solution there to the gap problem. Little attention has been paid, however, to Kant's project in Convolut 10 of the OP which he began in August 1799 immediately after completing the Übergang section. Assuming that the Ether Deduction is sound and proves a priori the existence of a transcendental material condition for experience, Convolut 10 discusses what changes would have to be made to the transcendental formal conditions of experience in their empirical function given the addition of this transcendental material condition. Kant claims in Convolut 10 that these changes are necessary to finally effect a transition from the metaphysical foundations of natural science to physics and, as I will argue, such a transition will be tantamount to bridging the gap in the Critical philosophy mentioned in the letter to Garve. (shrink)

Sažetak Da postoji neka malena recenzija čuvene „Kritike čistoga uma“, na koju se Kant osjećao primoran tako odgovoriti da se od početka do kraja svojih „Prolegomena za svaku buduću metafiziku“ stalno s njome razračunava, moglo bi biti poznato boljiim poznavaocima Kantovih spisa, no bit će manje poznato da je ta recenzija – Göttingenska recenzija – ujedno dala povoda da se Kant javno postavi nasuprot onodobnoj filozofiji s kojom je njegova u više važnih pogleda bila srodna, naime škotskoj filozofiji zdravoga razuma. (...) U ovome se članku istražuje u kojem se kontekstu to suočenje odvijalo. -/- Zusammenfassung Dass es eine kleine Recension der berühmten „Kritik der reinen Vernunft“ gibt, auf die Kant sich genötigt fühlte, so zu antworten, dass er seine „Prolegomena zu einer jeden künftigen Metaphysik“ hindurch stetig mit ihr auseinandersetzt, könnte den besseren Kennern der kantischen Schriften bekannt sein, aber dass diese Recension – die Göttinger Recension – zugleich veranlasst hatte, dass Kant sich der damaligen Philosophie, mit der die seinige in mehreren wichtigen Hinsichten verwandt ist, nämlich der schottischen Philosophie des Common-Sense, öffentlich gegenüberstellte, ist vielleicht weniger bekannt. In dieser Aufsatz wird untersucht, in welchem Kontext es geschah. (shrink)

The Göttingen philosopher Michael Hissmann (1752-1784) has been the subject of considerable attention from historians of philosophy due to his materialistic positions. He conducted an extensive correspondence with friends and colleagues, including Christian Garve, Wilhelm Dohm, Franz von Irwing, and Jakob Mauvillon. Hissmann's recently discovered legacy now makes possible an extensive documentation of this correspondence.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Journal of the History of Philosophy 39.3 (2001) 447-448 [Access article in PDF] Brigitte Sassen, translator and editor. Kant's Early Critics: The Empiricist Critique of the Theoretical Philosophy. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000. Pp. ix + 331. Cloth, $54.95. Brigitte Sassen has translated and edited an extremely useful collection of texts dating from the years 1782 to 1789. Most of the texts were written by Kant's empirically minded (...) critics, but a few are the work of defenders of the Critical philosophy. Although some have been translated before—e.g., the notorious Feder/Garve review of the first Critique that prompted Kant's vitriolic response in the Prolegomena, the original Garve review that served as the basis of the Feder/Garve review, and Jacobi's critique of Kant's transcendental idealism—the entire anthology is the first ever to be devoted exclusively to English translations of some of the first reactions to and defenses of Kant's theoretical philosophy. All of this makes for an exciting event in Kant studies.Sassen identifies three major trends in Kant criticism that began in 1782. The first is the empiricist reaction to Kant's theoretical writings. Sassen considers the year 1789 the endpoint of this trend, since critical attention, she argues, shifted around that time to the rationalist reaction to Kant's writings. The initial wave of rationalist criticism, which constitutes the second trend, lasted until 1793. The third and final trend, she says, is the more forward-looking one that eventually blossomed into the systems of post-Kantian thought.Given such a wealth of material, Sassen has focused on Kant's empiricist critics, choosing the writers and topics most representative of the overall empiricist critique of the 1780s. The selections are divided into five sections. The first consists of the Feder/Garve and Garve reviews (from 1782 and 1783, respectively). Since these were the very first reviews of the Critique of Pure Reason, they helped to formulate many of the classic objections to it. For example, not only does the standard charge of Berkeleyan idealism originate in these reviews, but Feder and Garve also express concerns about Kant's ability to distinguish between reality and illusion if nothing in sensation itself determines the understanding to combine sensations in one way as opposed to another. The second section contains discussions of the Transcendental Aesthetic, including an early version of the "neglected alternative" charge more famously made by Trendelenburg in the nineteenth century. Hermann Andreas Pistorius, one of the most sophisticated of Kant's empiricist critics, argues that Kant has not ruled out the possibility that space and time are both forms of sensibility and properties of things in themselves. The third section (especially Jacobi's famous critique) explores the relationship between appearances and things in themselves, the problem of affection, and other topics touching on the very nature of Kant's idealism. The fourth section deals with various issues involving the table of categories. For example, Kant's critics had doubts about its completeness, and they were also puzzled as to how a priori concepts could be applied to ordinary experience. The fifth and final section looks at the contrast between empiricism and purism, that is, the overall adequacy of empiricist and Kantian approaches to issues in metaphysics and epistemology. Here we find Pistorius once again writing thoughtfully about the Critical philosophy, this time in response to Carl Christian [End Page 447] Erhard Schmid, the author of a dictionary for the "easier use" of Kant's writings that went through several editions in the late 1780s and 1790s.This brief sketch of Sassen's book gives only an inadequate idea of its richness and usefulness. Her introduction, which is thorough and informative, patiently sorts out the various players in the debates of the 1780s, outlines their arguments with Kant and one another, and even describes the nature of periodical publication in late eighteenth-century Germany. The editorial apparatus includes short biographies of the participants in the debates as well as the other authors mentioned throughout the book... (shrink)

In _An Introduction to Kant’s Aesthetics_, Christian Wenzel discusses and demystifies Kant’s Critique of the Power of Judgment, guiding the reader each step of the way and placing key points of discussion in the context of Kant’s other work. Explains difficult concepts in plain language, using numerous examples and a helpful glossary. Proceeds in the same order as Kant’s text for ease of reference and comprehension. Includes an illuminating foreword by Henry E. Allison. Offers twenty-six further-reading sections, commenting briefly (...) on books and articles from the English, German, and French, that are relevant for each topic Provides an extensive bibliography and a chapter summarizing Kant's main points. (shrink)

Several philosophers have recently claimed to have discovered a new and rather significant problem with virtue ethics. According to them, virtue ethics generates certain expectations about the behavior of human beings which are subject to empirical testing. But when the relevant experimental work is done in social psychology, the results fall remarkably short of meeting those expectations. So, these philosophers think, despite its recent success, virtue ethics has far less to offer to contemporary ethical theory than might have been initially (...) thought. I argue that there are plausible ways in which virtue ethicists can resist arguments based on empirical work in social psychology. In the first three sections of the paper, I reconstruct the line of reasoning being used against virtue ethics by looking at the recent work of Gilbert Harman and John Doris. The remainder of the paper is then devoted both to responding to their challenge as well as to briefly sketching a positive account of character trait possession. (shrink)

Suppose you perform two actions. The first imposes a risk of harm that, on its own, would be excessive; but the second reduces the risk of harm by a corresponding amount. By pairing the two actions together to form a set of actions that is risk-neutral, can you thereby make your overall course of conduct permissible? This question is theoretically interesting, because the answer is apparently: sometimes Yes, sometimes No. It is also practically important, because it bears on the moral (...) status of practices such as offsetting personal greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. In this article we propose a criterion for distinguishing between cases where pairing risk-increasing and risk-reducing actions makes each action permissible, and those where it does not: the Principle of Aggregate Risk-Imposition. We work towards this by considering a range of examples that illustrate various illegitimate ways of pairing risk-increasing actions with risk-reducing ones, and asking what goes wrong in each case. We then use this criterion to evaluate GHG offsetting. Is offsetting a legitimate way of removing the risk-imposition associated with GHG emissions, or not? Controversially, we argue that this turns out to depend on the form that the offsetting takes. (shrink)

Many political theorists defend the view that egalitarian justice should extend from the domestic to the global arena. Despite its intuitive appeal, this ‘global egalitarianism’ has come under attack from different quarters. In this article, we focus on one particular set of challenges to this view: those advanced by domestic egalitarians. We consider seven types of challenges, each pointing to a specific disanalogy between domestic and global arenas which is said to justify the restriction of egalitarian justice to the former, (...) and argue that none of them – both individually and jointly – offers a conclusive refutation of global egalitarianism. (shrink)

Unternehmen sind nicht nur wirtschaftliche, sondern auch politische Akteure. Vor allem aber sind sie entgegen verbreiteter Ansichten auch moralische Akteure, das heißt, sie sind grundsätzlich fähig, den moralischen Standpunkt einzunehmen, auch wenn sie dies in der Praxis selten tun. Daraus erwächst eine politische und moralische Verpflichtung: Auch für Unternehmen gelten die Menschenrechte als moralischer und rechtlicher Maßstab, daran müssen sich ihr Handeln und erst recht ihr Unterlassen messen lassen. Christian Neuhäuser zeigt mit beeindruckenden philosophischen Mitteln und anhand exponierter Beispiele (...) unternehmerischen Handelns, inwiefern und inwieweit Unternehmen moralisch zur Rechenschaft gezogen werden können. Dies hat weitreichende philosophische, ethische und nicht zuletzt politische Konsequenzen. (shrink)

More often than not, recently popular structuralist interpretations of physical theories leave the central concept of a structure insufficiently precisified. The incipient causal sets approach to quantum gravity offers a paradigmatic case of a physical theory predestined to be interpreted in structuralist terms. It is shown how employing structuralism lends itself to a natural interpretation of the physical meaning of causal set theory. Conversely, the conceptually exceptionally clear case of causal sets is used as a foil to illustrate how a (...) mathematically informed rigorous conceptualization of structure serves to identify structures in physical theories. Furthermore, a number of technical issues infesting structuralist interpretations of physical theories such as difficulties with grounding the identity of the places of highly symmetrical physical structures in their relational profile and what may resolve these difficulties can be vividly illustrated with causal sets. (shrink)

Globalization arguably generated a governance gap that is being filled by transnational rule-making involving private actors among others. The democratic legitimacy of such new forms of governance beyond nation states is sometimes questioned. Apart from nation-centered democracies, such governance cannot build, for example, on representation and voting procedures to convey legitimacy to the generated rules. Instead, alternative elements of democracy such as deliberation and inclusion require discussion to assess new instruments of governance. The recently published standard ISO 26000 is an (...) interesting example of transnational governance. ISO 26000 was developed in a lengthy multiorganizational process for the purpose of giving guidance on the social responsibility of organizations. By assessing the specific case of ISO 26000, this study sheds light on the question of how legitimacy beyond nation-state democracy is ensured or constricted. Centering on the idea of deliberate democracy and democratic legitimacy, the study offers in-depth insights on the normative legitimacy of the development process of ISO 26000. Positioned on the interface of business studies and public policy, this article contributes to the academic literature on transnational governance and on the role of multistakeholder processes in shaping the role of business in society. (shrink)

Some moral theorists argue that being an innocent beneficiary of significant harms inflicted by others may be sufficient to ground special duties to address the hardships suffered by the victims, at least when it is impossible to extract compensation from those who perpetrated the harm. This idea has been applied to climate change in the form of the beneficiary-pays principle. Other philosophers, however, are quite sceptical about beneficiary pays. Our aim in this article is to examine their critiques. We conclude (...) that, while they have made important points, the principle remains worthy of further development and exploration. Our purpose in engaging with these critiques is constructive — we aim to formulate beneficiary pays in ways that would give it a plausible role in allocating the cost of addressing human-induced climate change, while acknowledging that some understandings of the principle would make it unsuitable for this purpose. (shrink)

Structural realist interpretations of generally relativistic spacetimes have recently come to enjoy a remarkable degree of popularity among philosophers. I present a challenge to these structuralist interpretations that arises from considering cosmological models in general relativity. As a consequence of their high degree of spacetime symmetry, these models resist a structuralist interpretation. I then evaluate the various strategies available to the structuralist to react to this challenge. †To contact the author, please write to: Department of Philosophy, 9500 Gilman Drive, 0119, (...) University of California, San Diego, La Jolla, CA 92093‐0119; e‐mail: [email protected]. (shrink)

The present volume collects essays on the philosophical foundations of quantum theories of gravity, such as loop quantum gravity and string theory. Central for philosophical concerns is quantum gravity's suggestion that space and time, or spacetime, may not exist fundamentally, but instead be a derivative entity emerging from non-spatiotemporal degrees of freedom. In the spirit of naturalised metaphysics, contributions to this volume consider the philosophical implications of this suggestion. In turn, philosophical methods and insights are brought to bear on the (...) foundations of quantum gravity itself. For instance, the idea of functionalism, borrowed from the philosophy of mind and discussed by several essays, exemplifies this mutual interaction the collection seeks to foster. (shrink)

This small volume successfully captures the essential in Kant’s philosophy, his insight and understanding of the a priori as the universal and necessary condition in epistemology and ethics. Knowledge and morality, if they are to qualify as knowledge and morality, must be subjected to principles of universalizability, and it is Kant’s contribution to philosophy that he argues for the non-empirical conditions that make these possible. The author approaches Kant’s theory of knowledge from an untraditional perspective. Rather than start his inquiry (...) with a study of the Transcendental Aesthetic and Transcendental Analytic, Hartnack focuses in on the Transcendental Dialectic giving Kant’s arguments for the first two antinomies and presenting a cursory account of the paralogisms and Transcendental Idea. Hartnack defends his procedure by calling our attention to the fact that it was not primarily Hume’s attack on the necessary connexion of cause and effect that influenced Kant to undertake his transcendental criticism as many scholars believe. By Kant’s own admission which he makes clear in a letter to Christian Garve in 1798 it was the antinomy of pure reason that "first aroused me from my dogmatic slumber and drew me to the Critique of Pure Reason itself in order to resolve the scandal of ostensible contradiction of reason with itself." It was the illegitimate use of reason that prompted Kant to search out the bounds and limits to which reason could legitimately make claim to. Bearing this in mind the present study centers on the dialectical illusion of reason which necessarily implies that it has another side to it, the legitimate and regulative use of reason. Hartnack strongly emphasizes the relationship between the Transcendental Analytic and Transcendental Dialectic and the relationship of the Critique as a whole to the Critique of Practical Reason where the a priori finds its expression in the categorical imperative. The Transcendental Dialectic are as two sides of the same coin. Reason on the one side legitimately applies its categories to the empirical, conditioned, phenomenal object of sense experience. But by nature reason seeks the unempirical, unconditioned, noumenal object which by definition cannot be given, and reason by applying the categories falls prey to the antinomies, paralogisms, and transcendental Idea. Hartnack’s critical account reveals the intimate and dynamic unity within the first Critique and its unity with the Critique of Practical Reason, a synthesis of Kant’s theory of knowledge and theory of morality. Much of what is obscure and obfuscatory in the primary sources is clarified and simplified for us in this work and yet the author has sacrificed none of the depth and dimension that characterize Kant’s writings. Rather in a few pages he has managed to target in on a significant aspect that sheds light and puts into proper perspective Kant’s project as a whole. Here is a case where less is better than more.—K.R.M. (shrink)

In this essay, we explore an issue of moral uncertainty: what we are permitted to do when we are unsure about which moral principles are correct. We develop a novel approach to this issue that incorporates important insights from previous work on moral uncertainty, while avoiding some of the difficulties that beset existing alternative approaches. Our approach is based on evaluating and choosing between option sets rather than particular conduct options. We show how our approach is particularly well-suited to address (...) this issue of moral uncertainty with respect to agents that have credence in moral theories that are not fully consequentialist. (shrink)

Unlike the relativity theory it seeks to replace, causal set theory has been interpreted to leave space for a substantive, though perhaps ‘localized’, form of ‘becoming’. The possibility of fundamental becoming is nourished by the fact that the analogue of Stein’s theorem from special relativity does not hold in causal set theory. Despite this, we find that in many ways, the debate concerning becoming parallels the well-rehearsed lines it follows in the domain of relativity. We present, however, some new twists (...) and challenges. In particular, we show that a novel and exotic notion of becoming is compatible with causal sets. In contrast to the ‘localized’ becoming considered compatible with the dynamics of causal set theory by its advocates, our novel kind of becoming, while not answering to the typical A-theoretic demands, is ‘global’ and objective. (shrink)

Our aim in this brief essay is not to defend a particular policy or attitude toward lockdown measures in the United States or elsewhere, but to consider the scope and limits of different types of arguments that can be offered for them. Understanding the complexity of these issues will, we hope, go some way to helping us understand each other and our attitudes toward state responses to the pandemic.

Climate change and other harmful large-scale processes challenge our understandings of individual responsibility. People throughout the world suffer harms—severe shortfalls in health, civic status, or standard of living relative to the vital needs of human beings—as a result of physical processes to which many people appear to contribute. Climate change, polluted air and water, and the erosion of grasslands, for example, occur because a great many people emit carbon and pollutants, build excessively, enable their flocks to overgraze, or otherwise stress (...) the environment. If a much smaller number of people engaged in these types of conduct, the harms in question would not occur, or would be substantially lessened. However, the conduct of any particular person (and, in the case of climate change, of even quite large numbers of people) could make no apparent difference to their occurrence. My carbon emissions (and quite possibly the carbon emissions of much larger groups of people dispersed throughout the world) may not make a difference to what happens to anyone. When the conduct of some agent does not make any apparent difference to the occurrence of harm, but this conduct is of a type that brings about harm because many people engage in it, we can call this agent an overdeterminer of that harm, and their conduct overdetermining conduct. In this essay we explore the moral status of overdetermining harm. (shrink)

When can or should citizenship be granted to prospective members of states? When can or should states withdraw citizenship from their existing members? In recent decades, political philosophers have paid considerable attention to the first question, but have generally neglected the second. There are of course good practical reasons for prioritizing the question of when citizenship should be granted—many individuals have a strong interest in acquiring citizenship in particular political communities, while many fewer are at risk of denationalization. Still, loss (...) of membership in a political community is a practice with a long history that continues to take place today. -/- Concerns about national security have recently led several liberal democratic states to pass, strengthen or consider legislation that would empower their governments to denationalize certain persons.] At the international level, formal norms governing denationalization are vague and generally toothless, and there are no international legal norms that restrict denationalization to citizens who hold another citizenship or wish to take up citizenship elsewhere (Worster, 2009). So it is important to determine whether there are conditions under which denationalization can be morally justified and, if so, what those conditions are. We shall argue that while denationalization is ordinarily impermissible, there is a class of crime committed by citizens that may render it not only permissible, but a fitting response on the part of the state. (shrink)

This essay considers and evaluates recent results and arguments from classical chaotic systems theory and non-relativistic quantum mechanics that pertain to the question of whether our world is deterministic or indeterministic. While the classical results are inconclusive, quantum mechanics is often assumed to establish indeterminism insofar as the measurement process involves an ineliminable stochastic element, even though the dynamics between two measurements is considered fully deterministic. While this latter claim concerning the Schrödinger evolution must be qualified, the former fully depends (...) on a resolution of the measurement problem. Two alleged proofs that nature is indeterministic, relying, in turn, on Gleason's theorem and Conway and Kochen's recent 'free will theorem', are shown to be wanting qua proofs of indeterminism. We are thus left with the conclusion that the determinism question remains open. (shrink)

Traditionally, moral philosophers have distinguished between doing and allowing harm, and have normally proceeded as if this bipartite distinction can exhaustively characterize all cases of human conduct involving harm. By contrast, cognitive scientists and psychologists studying causal judgment have investigated the concept ‘enable’ as distinct from the concept ‘cause’ and other causal terms. Empirical work on ‘enable’ and its employment has generally not focused on cases where human agents enable harm. In this paper, we present new empirical evidence to support (...) the claim that some important cases in the moral philosophical literature are best viewed as instances of enabling harm rather than doing or allowing harm. We also present evidence that enabling harm is regarded as normatively distinct from doing and allowing harm when it comes to assigning compensatory responsibility. Moral philosophers should be exploring the tripartite distinction between doing harm, allowing harm, and enabling harm, rather than simply the traditional bipartite distinction. Cognitive scientists and psychologists studying moral judgment, who have so far largely adopted the bipartite distinction in this area of research, should likewise investigate the tripartite distinction. (shrink)

Some moral theorists argue that being an innocent beneficiary of significant harms inflicted by others may be sufficient to ground special duties to address the hardships suffered by the victims, at least when it is impossible to extract compensation from those who perpetrated the harm. This idea has been applied to climate change in the form of the beneficiary-pays principle. Other philosophers, however, are quite sceptical about beneficiary pays. Our aim in this article is to examine their critiques. We conclude (...) that, while they have made important points, the principle remains worthy of further development and exploration. Our purpose in engaging with these critiques is constructive — we aim to formulate beneficiary pays in ways that would give it a plausible role in allocating the cost of addressing human-induced climate change, while acknowledging that some understandings of the principle would make it unsuitable for this purpose. (shrink)