The paper begins with a more carefully stated version of ontologically neutral (ON) logic, originally introduced in (Hailperin, 1997). A non-infinitistic semantics which includes a definition of potential infinite validity follows. It is shown, without appeal to the actual infinite, that this notion provides a necessary and sufficient condition for provability in ON logic.

This essay explores a series of sovereign ‘machines’ – slaves, puppets, automata – in political theory from Benjamin to Agamben. It is now well-documented that the philosophical question of ‘the machine’ – of whether a complex system requires a human operator or whether it can function autonomously – is also a crucial political question that haunts every discussion of sovereignty from Hobbes onwards. However, my wager in what follows is that this machine is not just a metaphor for a metaphysical (...) situation – whether it be rationality, bureaucratization, neutralization, historicism or governmentality – but a material phenomenon that carries transformative political promise and threat. To summarize the argument of this essay, I contend that ‘sovereign machines’ like slavery, puppets, automata or clockwork, lens, optics and mirrors (Hobbes, Kantorowicz, Benjamin, Lacan,... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Approaching Infinity:Dignity in Arthur Koestler's Darkness at NoonRoger BerkowitzIn his allegorical novel Darkness at Noon, Arthur Koestler tells of Rubashov, a founding father of an unnamed Party in an unnamed state.1 Jailed by the current Party leader, "Number One," and pressed to recant his deviationist views, Rubashov resists. At first, he resolves to go to his death to preserve his integrity. Later, Rubashov recognizes that to hold to his (...) own truth when it endangers the goals of political reform is politically irresponsible. He decides to recant.The aristocratic soldier in the neighboring cell is appalled by Rubashov's self-betrayal. "Honour," the aristocrat insists, "is to live and die for one's belief." Rubashov disagrees with the aristocratic idea of honor and responds that honour is "to be useful without vanity," which provokes his neighbor to erupt: "honour is decency—not usefulness." Rubashov answers: "We have replaced decency by reason" (Koestler, pp. 177–78).Today, we rationalist readers of Darkness at Noon are left with the question of the competing demands of usefulness and decency, of reason and dignity. Reason makes its arguments in familiar terms: to prevent a genocide, we will bomb the aggressors; in the name of rationalized health care, some will not get the care they need; for reasons of state, some will be tortured. In politics, as Max Weber teaches, rational ends demand a slow, powerful boring through of hard boards (Weber, p. 93).2 Thus reason—and Koestler unfolds reason as calculating rationality in its most Machiavellian garb—requires the willingness to employ sober and rational means to achieve desired ends. In common parlance, the end justifies the means. Against the nostalgia for a politics of decency [End Page 296] and dignity, reason counsels that to make an omelet, you need to break a few eggs.But what lies behind the opposing claim to decency? What is it that pulls us to resist the claim of reason when reason counsels war, torture, or even bureaucratic neutrality? What, to paraphrase Hannah Arendt, is to be said for the eggs? (Arendt, pp. 270–84).3We may invoke conscience, duty, and decency. We might invoke civil and human rights. We condemn realpolitik and affirm a Judeo-Christian world order. In short, we invoke the dignity of man and affirm one's humanity as an inalienable core that cannot be breached. The limitations of such invocations are by now clear. At a time of recurrent genocides, democratically sanctioned torture, and suicide bombings of civilians, the stirring claims of the dignity of mankind ring hollow. Yet the collapse of the Western tradition of dignity does not necessitate the loss of dignity itself. The failure to secure dignity on religious or rationalist grounds need not send us fleeing, our eyes covered in horror and our heads between our legs. What is needed is a confrontation with our situation, one that seeks to comprehend both the impulse to affirm an inviolable core to humanity and our failure to do so.The ambition of Darkness at Noon lies in its bald effort to affirm the truth of human decency even as it recognizes that man's humanity is a bald-faced fiction. When Rubashov teeters on the precipice between reason and decency, his "eye" tooth aches. He rubs his eyeglasses. He steps only on whole squares in the floor, avoiding the cracks. Tooth, glass, and wholeness refer to the problem of the singular "I," an entity so mysterious that Rubashov follows Nietzsche in naming it the "grammatical fiction." What is the "I," the conscience, the self? How is it that the fictional "I" can and must have such an essential role in modern politics? Where, if anywhere, lies the relevance of the "I" for politics?Darkness at Noon is acclaimed as one of the most important books of the twentieth century—it is number eight on the Modern Library's list of the Hundred Best Novels of the twentieth century. Yet, given its enormous impact, its philosophical ruminations, and its political theme, the novel has garnered surprisingly little academic consideration. It is worth asking, therefore, why Darkness at Noon has not been taken seriously by the academic... (shrink)

In this book, I will discuss three main topics: the roots and aims of scientific knowledge, scientific knowledge in society, and science and values I understand scientific knowledge as being a planned and continuous production of the general and common knowledge of scientific communities. I begin my discussion with a brief analysis of the main differences between sciences, on the one hand, and everyday experience, philosophies, religions, and ideologies, on the other. I define the concept of science as a set (...) of family resemblances (in Wittgenstein's sense). The sciences can be distinguished along three lines, in terms of the difference between empirical and non-empirical sciences, differences in degrees of theoretical and methodological structure among individual sciences and scientific disciplines. Scientific knowledge is based upon some grounds, paradigmatic knowledge bases. Scientific knowledge is founded on a unified paradigmatic knowledge base. The latter includes fundamental theories, basic facts, generally accepted empirical regularities (laws), scientific research methods, scientific explanations, and established relations to other sciences. Scientific knowledge in general is defined well in classical terms by the definition that knowledge is a true and rationally-justified belief. In this connection, scientific truth is relative, depending on the given paradigmatic knowledge base and on the precision and accessibility of the measurements and observations involved. In the book's first part, I consider the production and testing of scientific hypotheses, scientific explanations, the structure of scientific theories, and the problem of scientific realism. I consider explanation an integral part of a wider nexus of heuristic and theoretical activities in science like giving reasons, understanding, clarification, and founding. Continuous production of scientific explanations is a necessary condition for the systematic reproduction of scientific knowledge. Accordingly, it does not suffice to describe them in terms of the logical structure of the arguments on which they are based, but rather, scientific explanations ought to be given complete with an epistemic and pragmatic context of the explanation. I consider especially deductive-nomological, inductive-statistical, dispositional, teleological-functional, and genetic explanations. I emphasize the ever-increasing importance of explanations by analogy and by model. Orthogonal to these distinctions lies the distinction between causal and epistemic explanation. Epistemic explanations relate scientific discoveries to epistemic progress, and causal explanations are these epistemic explanations that relate scientific discoveries to reality too. Causal explanations inform us that certain changes occur in the world as agents of other changes, or rather, that certain changes are real consequences of other changes. Thus, by having explanations of causes, we can intervene in the world to induce by design certain changes in some course of phenomena. I consider scientific theories as logically and epistemically ordered wholeness of scientific knowledge in a realm of research that enables us to construct useful models of reality. After the discussion of different 'statement' views on theories and different interpretations of the theory-experience relation, I introduce the 'model' theoretical (non-statement) views on theories, especially the structural theory of science. The model views on theories transcend the realism-antirealism dualism by introducing models between theory and reality. Therefore, the question of scientific realism is not merely whether and, if so, which element(s), of scientific theories represent reality, but rather which conditions suffice to infer from a theory that one of its models truly expresses reality. In other words, under which conditions do models of a theory represent models of reality? Generally, models are just as much images of reality in a theory as they are images of a theory in reality. The actual problem of scientific realism doesn't originate in the observable-unobservable distinction (even if this distinction is otherwise theoretically loaded), but rather in ontological quandaries, of the sort especially encountered in modern physical theories such as quantum mechanics, relativity theory, and cosmological theories, although they are known to arise in other sciences as well. Scientific theories may be real, even if they describe nothing about the world. However, such theories can be given this status only if their formal, mathematical postulates exhibit some formal homology between reality and mathematical forms. The very fact that it is possible to describe reality with the help of mathematics even in cases, where every (representational, conceptual) language and thought fall short, would indicate that even mathematics itself is, in some sense, a part of reality, although 'outside' of the empirical world. It follows we have to distinguish the non-empirical reality and the empirical world. Formal objectivity and non-arbitrariness of theories do not emerge from either our language or thoughts, or from the world of facts, causes, and effects, but rather from non-empirical reality, which frames the world as some kind of objective transcendental condition for the possibility of the existence of the world, thoughts, and language. In the second part of the book, I consider the incorporation of scientific work and scientific knowledge into modern society and its relations to values and ethics. Production of scientific knowledge goes on as a parallel distributed process of a special kind of social (shared) cognition. The central part of this cognition is the presentation of parts of the world by scientific (theoretical) models which are warranted by the shared and public practice of justification, and in reflective acting in the world as it would. I consider various formal concepts of collective propositional knowledge (distributed, mutual, common knowledge). Scientific knowledge is an achievement to be ascribed to a scientific community or, indirectly, to all those who apply or expand it, rather than to individuals per se. It presents the continuous and partially planned production of non-trivial common knowledge of the research communities in modern societies. However, besides common knowledge, shared dispositional knowledge (knowledge how of scientific teams) and shared knowledge by acquiring (knowledge of fundamental similarities and differences in scientific teams) are parts of the real body of scientific knowledge. Scientific common knowledge implies the projection into idealized universal knowledge of all real or potentially rational and well-informed individuals. The respect of scientific knowledge thus presents the norm of rationality. Science as the intensively shared and socially distributed kind of cognition enters into modern society as a special kind of work (general work), as a productive force (social invention drive), and as a form of capital (human, social, cultural, informational, etc.). However any of these categories can adequately represent the socio-economical role of science in modern societies, and we are still waiting for a more adequate general concept that would theoretically cover the 'scientification' of modern societies. My thesis is that the most important general effect of scientification is (and will be) the growth of social processes that structurally resemble parallel distributed shared social cognition of science, and not so much the rise of the use of scientific knowledge and scientifically based information in all kinds of production. Scientification of modern societies inevitably includes a much stronger need for moral and social responsibility of scientists for their work and its effects in their local society and the global world. This need comes in contradiction with the quite large accepted idea (and even the 'norm') on value-free research. I discuss to some degree different arguments for the absence of non-epistemic values and ethical reasoning from science and find them non-convincing. The sound idea of value-free research lies in the need for the absence of categorical value statements from scientific explanations and theoretical deductions. Values and ethical judgment have, and sometimes they even have to play an important role in another part of research and its application in science or outside it. Not the value-loudness of research is a danger for science but its blind, non-reflective use. It leads to the ideologization and politicization of science. A similar danger lies in the purely value-neutrality of research. It leads to the instrumentalization of science to the technical or bureaucratic means for 'any' aims. (shrink)

MacIntyre argues that management embodies emotivism, and thus is inherently amoral and manipulative. His claim that management is necessarily Weberian is, at best, outdated, and the notion that management aims to be neutral and value free is incorrect. However, new forms of management, and in particular the increased emphasis on leadership which emerged after MacIntyre’s critique was published, tend to support his central charge. Indeed, charismatic and transformational forms of leadership seem to embody emotivism to a greater degree than do (...) more Weberian, bureaucratic forms of management; hence, MacIntyre’s central contention about our emotivistic culture seems to be well founded. Having criticised the details but defended the essence of MacIntyre’s critique of management, this paper sketches a MacIntyrean approach to management and leadership by highlighting the affinities between MacIntyre’s political philosophy and Greenleaf’s concept of servant leadership. (shrink)

Should the Western democracies, contrary to their prevailing self-image as "planned" and "managed," be seen as highly disorganized systems of social power and political authority? If so, what are the symptoms, consequences of, and possible remedies for these disorganizing tendencies?In these ten essays, Claus Offe seeks to answer such questions. Moving beyond the boundaries of both Marxism and established forms of political sociology, he focuses on the growth of serious divisions within the work force, the importance of the "informal" sector, (...) the severe difficulties faced by trade unions in coping with the present economic crisis, the vulnerability of neocorporatist mechanisms, and the failures of state policymaking based on either majority rule or bureaucratic administration.In examining these and other fundamental problems of advanced capitalist democracies, Offe also contests some widely held assumptions of contemporary social science. He calls into question the neutrality of liberal democratic mechanisms of participation and representation, the centrality of the category of work and the division between labor and capital, and the feasibility and desirability of full employment.Claus Offe is the author of numerous books and essays, including Contradictions of the Welfare State. He is currently Professor of Political Science and Sociology in the Faculty of Sociology, University of Bielefeld, West Germany. John Keane is Senior Lecturer in Political Theory and Sociology at the Polytechnic of Central London. Disorganized Capitalism is included in the series, Studies in Contemporary German Social Thought, edited by Thomas McCarthy. (shrink)

Political philosophy has difficulties to cope with the complexity and variety of state-religions relations. ‘Strict separationism’ is still the preferred option amongst liberals, deliberative and republican democrats, socialist and feminists. In this article, I develop a complex typology based on comparative history and sociology of religions. I summarize my reasons why institutional pluralist models like plural establishment or non-constitutional pluralism are attractive not only for religious minorities but for religiously deeply diverse societies in general. Most attention is paid defending associative (...) democracy, the most flexible and open variety of institutional pluralism, against realist objections that group representation is incompatible with liberal democracy, that it leads to stigmatization and bureaucratization, that it strengthens undemocratic leaders, that it leads to an ossification of the status quo, and, most importantly, that it is inherently divisive undermining social cohesion and political unity. In my refutation of these objections I try to show that it helps to integrate minority religions into liberal democratic policies compatible with reasonable pluralism and to prevent religious and political fundamentalism. (shrink)

Contemporary international migration is directly related to the construction of the nation-state. The variations in this migration are multiple, depending on the type of mobility, the territories and the characteristics of the people who practice it. One kind of migration that has been particularly important at the end of the twentieth century and so far in the twenty-first century is that of minors who migrate without being accompanied by their parents. The legal definitions, bureaucratic practices and rights of these (...) minors-turned-migrants vary across European states and in the international literature. This paper aims to analyse the terminology used colloquially in the media and academically to refer to this group of people. In the early days of the phenomenon, the acronym MENA (unaccompanied migrant minors) has been the most common in Spain. It was intended to be a “neutral” term used in the legal sphere and migration studies. Still, in recent times, MENA has become more than a descriptive category. It has become a way of criminalising a group of young people who are in national territory and come from another country (usually an African country and, especially, a Maghreb country). However, not everything is determined by the circumstances surrounding us or our lives as social beings. Social pressure, with its narrative, cannot mean leaving aside history, legal culture, and learning. We need a new language to talk about this group of people. Currently, the negative connotation hides the most human aspect of this condition; the term “MENA” is a banner to mystify a fundamental fact: we are talking about children and adolescents who, not being able to count on the protection of an adult or family member, are condemned to social exclusion. This article approaches the migrant child as a critical figure who embodies the paradox of humanitarian reasoning, which is also a legal and political paradox, encapsulating the tension between structural rejection and the individual capacity of the human subject. By focusing on the theoretically productive role of minors without parental guardianship as subjects of ethnographic examination, this paper aims to understand better how current anthropological knowledge redefines the concepts of childhood, adulthood, and migration. The first part of this paper focuses on examining the terminologies used at the European and international levels, with their respective social implications. The second part focuses on the Spanish case, with the different impacts the term produces at the local level. The third and final part focuses on the terminology of refugee children and opens the discussion on scapegoating in Spain. (shrink)

Criticisms have been made against international laws and conventions on asylum and refugees, arguing that these have been based on a male model of definition, which have ignored women’s persecutions. This article will argue that recent developments in European asylum policy have the potential to deepen this discrimination and to further reduce the rights of female asylum seekers. Although there have been some positive developments in jurisprudence that have recognised that gender-specific persecution may be the basis for granting asylum, these (...) advances remain relatively sporadic and are undermined by the operation of random and discretionary exercises of power by bureaucrats and decision makers in many cases. Further, although new developments in asylum policy are in theory “gender neutral,” differences in the material circumstances of men and women who arrive to seek asylum may mean in effect that the implications of these policies are deeply gendered. (shrink)

The state is often regarded as an abstract and neutral bureaucratic entity. Against this common sense idea, At the Heart of the State argues that it is also a concrete and situated reality, embodied in the work of its agents and inscribed in the issues of its time. The result of a five-year investigation conducted by ten scholars, this book describes and analyses the police, the court system, the prison apparatus, the social services, and mental health facilities in France. (...) Combining genealogy and ethnography, its authors show that these state institutions do not simply implement laws, rules and procedures: they mobilise values and affects, judgements and emotions. In other words, they reflect the morality of the state. Of immense interest to both social scientists and political theorists, this work will make an important contribution to the ever expanding literature on the contemporary state. (shrink)

First, something about the word. 'Bureau' (French, borrowed into German) is a desk, or by extension an office (as in 'I will be at the office tomorrow'; 'I work at the Bureau of Statistics'). 'Bureaucracy' is rule conducted from a desk or office, i.e. by the preparation and dispatch of written documents - or, these days, their electronic equivalent. In the office are kept records of communications sent and received, the files or archives, consulted in preparing new ones. This kind (...) of rule is of course not found in the ancient classifications of kinds of government: monarchy, aristocracy, democracy - and bureaucracy? In fact it does not belong in such a classification. It is a servant of government, a means by which a monarchy, aristocracy, democracy, or other form of government, rules. Those who invented the word wanted to suggest that the servant was trying to become the master. Weber is of course aware of this tendency; in fact he attacked the pretensions of the Prussian bureaucracy to be an objective and neutral servant of society, above politics, and emphasized that every bureaucracy has interests of its own, and connections with other social strata (especially among the upper classes); see Beetham, chapter 3. But formally and in theory the bureaucracy is merely a means, and this is largely true also in practice: someone must provide policy direction and back the bureaucrat up (if necessary) with force. 'At the top of a bureaucratic organization, there is necessarily an element which is at least not purely bureaucratic', SEO, p. 335, to give policy direction. (shrink)

The ombudsman tradition originated in Sweden in 1809 and has spread throughout the world in less than two hundred years. An ombudsman is a public official that offers people an opportunity to have their complaints heard, evaluated, and investigated by a neutral and independent body, and offers recommendations to the involved parties. The ombudsman plays an important role in strengthening democratic governance, rule of law, and civil society. Article 73 of the Constitution of the Republic of Lithuania establishes that: ‘The (...) Seimas controllers shall examine complaints of citizens concerning the abuse of powers by, or bureaucratic intransigence of, State and municipal officials (with the exception of judges). They shall have the right to submit a motion before a court that the guilty officials be dismissed from office. The powers of the Seimas controllers shall be established by law. If necessary, the Seimas shall also establish other institutions of control. Their system and powers shall be established by law.’. (shrink)

This article uses the idea of resilience as a point of departure for analysing some contemporary challenges to the climate justice movement posed by social-ecological sciences. Climate justice activists are increasingly rallying for a system-change, demanding fundamental changes to political bureaucracy and the economy, which would put ecology, biodiversity and climate change first for all future political decisions. Since the concept of resilience has taken up a central role in recent developments in ecological sciences, it has also become part of (...) the activist debate. The article’s main argument is that the scientific framework behind resilience is not politically neutral and that this framework tends to weaken the activist’s demands for a just transition and place more emphasis on technical and bureaucratic processes. (shrink)

Criticisms have been made against international laws and conventions on asylum and refugees, arguing that these have been based on a male model of definition, which have ignored women’s persecutions. This article will argue that recent developments in European asylum policy have the potential to deepen this discrimination and to further reduce the rights of female asylum seekers. Although there have been some positive developments in jurisprudence that have recognised that gender-specific persecution may be the basis for granting asylum, these (...) advances remain relatively sporadic and are undermined by the operation of random and discretionary exercises of power by bureaucrats and decision makers in many cases. Further, although new developments in asylum policy are in theory “gender neutral,” differences in the material circumstances of men and women who arrive to seek asylum may mean in effect that the implications of these policies are deeply gendered. (shrink)

The purpose of this paper is to analyse the nature of bureaucratization within public research bodies and its relationship to scientific performance, focusing on an Italian case-study. The main finding is that the bureaucratization of the research sector has two dimensions: public research labs have academic bureaucratization since researchers spend an increasing part of their time in administrative matters (i.e., preparing grant applications, managing grants/projects, and so on); whereas universities mainly have administrative bureaucratization generated by the increase over time of (...) administrative staff in comparison with researchers and faculty. In addition, I show that research units with higher bureaucratization have lower scientific performance. (shrink)

Arendt’s reflections on the reverberations of the bureaucratic way of governing give rise to two distinct and, above all, complementary argumentative trajectories: 1) its investigation as a form of domination originating from imperialism and later used as a model of totalitarian; 2) the role of bureaucrats. Both help to understand why the bureaucracy not only survived the fall of totalitarian regimes, but also remained the organizational model of nations. At the intersection of these readings, the essay “Auschwitz on Trial” (...) presents two types of participants in the Nazi bureaucratic apparatus: bureaucratic assassins (desk murderes) and subordinate men. In common among them was a lack of responsibility for the crimes perpetrated by the regime and thoughtlessness; however, their degree of participation in the hierarchy and their punishability in post-war trials differed greatly. In these terms, this article aims to analyze the similarities and differences between subordinate men and bureaucratic murderers. To do so, it is assumed that understanding them helps to understand bureaucracy as a form of government that makes public freedom and the free exercise of spiritual activities unfeasible. (shrink)

Neutral monism is a position in metaphysics defended by Mach, James, and Russell in the early twentieth century. It holds that minds and physical objects are essentially two different orderings of the same underlying neutral elements of nature. This paper sets out some of the central concepts, theses and the historical background of ideas that inform this doctrine of elements. The discussion begins with the classic neutral monism of Mach, James, and Russell in the first part of the paper, then (...) considers recent neo-Russellian versions in the second half. The chances for a revival of neutral monism are probably slight; its key ideas and starting points lie far from those in contemporary philosophy of mind. A better route might be through the philosophy of science and a deeper understanding of causation. (shrink)

The ability to (re)classify populations is a key component of state power, but not all new state classifications actually succeed in changing how people are categorized and governed. This article examines the French state’s partly unsuccessful project in 2005 to use a new classification—“psychic handicap”—to ensure that people with severe mental disorders received services and benefits from separate agencies based on a designation of being both “mentally ill” and “disabled.” Previous research has identified how new classifications can be impeded by (...) cultural and cognitive barriers to their adoption and struggles between professionals or administrators over their implementation. Drawing on 186 interviews, archival sources, and 13 months of observations across different French bureaucracies, I expand on this literature in two ways. First, I use the case of psychic handicap to argue that a new classification can also fail to achieve its intended effect when it constitutes a bureaucratically split personality—a combination of classifications that imply that individuals belong to two, mutually exclusive kinds of people. I show how psychic handicap embodied contradictory expectations about the behavior, characteristics, and institutional trajectory of people with mental disorders. Second, I identify how bureaucrats resolved these contradictions through mechanisms of refractory looping, outsourcing expertise, and classification by default, which in this case led to the reclassification of this population as simply “mentally ill.” This framework calls attention to how practical inconsistencies can limit the impact of new classifications, even absent overt resistance to their elaboration or implementation. (shrink)

This article contributes to a growing conversation about the role of numbers in promoting gendered agendas in potentially contradictory ways. Drawing from interviews with gender advisors—the professionals tasked with mainstreaming gender in development projects—in an East African country, I begin from the paradox that gender advisors articulate a strong preference for qualitative data to best capture the lives of the women they aim to assist while voicing a need for quantitative metrics. I demonstrate that gender advisors come to imagine metrics (...) as expeditious bureaucratic tools able to inspire cooperation from otherwise reluctant coworkers. I argue that development organizations are gendered in ways—acutely seen in how advisors struggle, are sidelined, and attempt to advance their goals with numbers—that lead to the utility of valuing quantitative metrics over qualitative ones. I establish two theoretical contributions: Gendered organizations theory is essential to understanding the adoption and globalization of performance metrics, and in an age of evidence-based decision making, the utility of quantified data to garner resources is heightened, rewarding those who adopt quantified knowledge production. I coin the term “the paradox of quantified utility” to describe how these material advantages encourage even skeptics to value quantitative metrics. (shrink)

Focusing on the U.S. military as a gendered and raced institution and using 33 in-depth interviews with U.S. servicewomen, this study identifies tactics and consequences of workplace harassment that occur through administrative channels, a phenomenon I label bureaucratic harassment. I identify bureaucratic harassment as a force by which some servicemen harass, intimidate, and control individual, as well as groups of, servicewomen through bureaucratic channels. Examples include issuing minor infractions with the intention of delaying or stopping promotions, threatening (...) to withhold military benefits for reporting sexual abuse/harassment, and revoking servicewomen’s qualifications in order to remove them from positions or units. The manipulation of administrative rules and regulations is made possible by the interplay between a gendered and raced organizational climate and bureaucratic features such as discretion, hierarchy, and the blending of work and personal life. I show that bureaucratic harassment has both raced and gendered implications. Ultimately, harassment that is enacted through bureaucratic means is often overlooked but carries distinct consequences for the professional careers and workplace experiences of the victims. (shrink)

Liberal neutrality requires that, given the diversity of conceptions of the good life held by people, the state should be in some sense neutral between these conceptions. Just what that sense is has been a matter of debate but it seems generally accepted that neutrality is a property of the justifications for government action and not of the consequences of such action. In other words, the state must be neutral by avoiding invoking any conception of the good in (...) its justification for laws and policies and by avoiding having any laws and policies that can be justified only by reference to some conception of the good. It need not, so it seems generally accepted, ensure that the consequences of its laws and policies do not favor some conceptions of the good over others. Against this commonly held view, in this chapter I argue that justificatory neutrality is inadequate as a full picture of what liberal neutrality means and that some conception of consequential neutrality is more plausible. (shrink)

Should government be neutral "on the question of the good life, or of what gives value to life"?1 Some political theorists propose that governmental neutrality is a core commitment of any liberalism worth the name and a requirement of justice. For them, neutrality is the appropriate generalization of the ideal of religious tolerance. The state should be neutral in matters of religion, and neutral also in all controversies concerning the nature of the good or the ways in which (...) it is valuable and worthwhile to live. (shrink)

In this work we answer a long standing request for temporal embeddings of deontic STIT logics by introducing the multi-agent STIT logic TDS . The logic is based upon atemporal utilitarian STIT logic. Yet, the logic presented here will be neutral: instead of committing ourselves to utilitarian theories, we prove the logic TDS sound and complete with respect to relational frames not employing any utilitarian function. We demonstrate how these neutral frames can be transformed into utilitarian temporal frames, while preserving (...) validity. Last, we discuss problems that arise from employing binary utility functions in a temporal setting. (shrink)

The bureaucrat's intellectual configuration is identical with the psychopath's.

This article interrogates the bureaucratization of war, incarnate in the covert lethal drone. Bureaucracies are criticized typically for their complexity, inefficiency, and inflexibility. This article is concerned with their moral indifference. It explores killing, which is so highly administered, so morally remote, and of such scale, that we acknowledge a covert lethal program. This is a bureaucratized program of assassination in contravention of critical human rights. In this article, this program is seen to compromise the advance of global justice. Moreover, (...) the bureaucratization of lethal force is seen to dissolve democratic ideals from within. The bureaucracy isolates the citizens from lethal force applied in their name. People are killed, in the name of the State, but without conspicuous justification, or judicial review, and without informed public debate. This article gives an account of the risk associated with the bureaucratization of the State’s lethal power. Exemplified by the covert drone, this is power with formidable reach. It is power as well, which requires great moral sensitivity. Considering the drone program, this article identifies challenges, which will become more prominent and pressing, as technology advances. (shrink)

Some philosophers think that life is worth living not merely because of the goods and the bads within it, but also because life itself is good. I explain how this idea can be formalized by associating each version of such of a view with a function from length of life to the value generated by life itself. Then I argue that every version of the view that life itself is good faces some version of the following dilemma: either (1) good (...) human lives are worse than very long lives wholly devoid of pleasure, desire-satisfaction, knowledge, or any other goods, or (2) very short lives containing nothing but suffering are worth living. Since neither result is plausible, we ought to reject the view that life itself is good. On the view I favor, any given life may be worth living because of the goods that it contains, but life itself is neutral. (shrink)

Epistemologists often claim that in addition to belief and disbelief there is a third, neutral, doxastic attitude. Various terms are used: ‘suspending judgment’, ‘withholding’, ‘agnosticism’. It is also common to claim that the factors relevant to the justification of these attitudes are epistemic in the narrow sense of being factors that bear on the strength or weakness of one’s epistemic position with respect to the target proposition. This paper addresses two challenges to such traditionalism about doxastic attitudes. The first concerns (...) the relevance of non-epistemic factors we might call "future-comparative" – e.g., that you’ll have more decisive evidence on whether p tomorrow – to the justification of suspending judgment. The second, from Jane Friedman, is to explain the point of the neutral attitude without appealing to inquiry and thus taking goal-related factors, which are not epistemic, such as the value of the goal or the prospects for finding means to achieve it, to bear on the justification of the neutral attitude. My defense of traditionalism relies on distinguishing three ways of being neutral on a question: agnosticism, inquiry and suspension of judgment. Traditionalism is saved because, of these, agnosticism alone is a genuine doxastic attitude. (shrink)

According to the “Textbook View,” there is an extensional dispute between consequentialists and deontologists, in virtue of the fact that only the latter defend “agent-relative” principles—principles that require an agent to have a special concern with making sure that she does not perform certain types of action. I argue that, contra the Textbook View, there are agent-neutral versions of deontology. I also argue that there need be no extensional disagreement between the deontologist and consequentialist, as characterized by the Textbook View.

This Handbook focuses on value theory as it pertains to ethics, broadly construed, and provides a comprehensive overview of contemporary debates pertaining not only to philosophy but also to other disciplines-most notably, political theory...

If more than a tiny minority of people were non-bureaucrats, civilization would not be possible.

Two strategies for using a model as “null” are distinguished. Null modeling evaluates whether a process is causally responsible for a pattern by testing it against a null model. Baseline modeling measures the relative significance of various processes responsible for a pattern by detecting deviations from a baseline model. When these strategies are conflated, models are illegitimately privileged as accepted until rejected. I illustrate this using the neutral theory of ecology and draw general lessons from this case. First, scientists cannot (...) draw certain conclusions using null modeling. Second, these conclusions follow using baseline modeling, but doing so requires more evidence. (shrink)

Recent pragmatic accounts of slurs argue that the offensiveness of slurs is generated by a speaker's free choice to use a slur opposed to a more appropriate and semantically equivalent neutral counterpart. I argue that the theoretical role of neutral counterparts on such views is overstated. I consider two recent pragmatic analyses, Bolinger (Noûs, 51, 2017, 439) and Nunberg (New work on speech acts, Oxford University Press, 2018), which rely heavily upon the optionality of slurs, namely, that a speaker exercises (...) a deliberate lexical choice to use a slur when they could have easily used a neutral counterpart instead. Against such views, I argue that across a range of different offensive uses of slurs, a speaker's choice to use a slur opposed to a neutral counterpart plays little to no role in accounting for why the slur generates offence. Such cases cast serious doubt upon the explanatory depth of these pragmatic analyses, and raise more general concerns for views which draw upon the relationship between a slur and its neutral counterpart. The main upshot is this: theorists should exercise caution in assuming that neutral counterparts play any fundamental or systemic role in explaining why slurs are offensive. (shrink)

Neutrality functions as an ideal in deliberation—we are supposed to have a neutral standpoint in debate, speak without bias or taking sides. We argue against the ideal of neutrality. We sketch how a theory of meaning could avoid commitment even to the coherence of a neutral space of discourse for exchanging reasons. In a model that accepts the ideal of neutrality, what makes propaganda exceptional is its non-neutrality. However, a critique of propaganda cannot take the form (...) of “clearing out” the obstacles for a “neutral space of discourse for exchanging reasons”, since that is to misunderstand how speech works. Such a critique would suggest that any emotive appeal is fundamentally undemocratic, and would delegitimize almost all historical protest movements. In this paper, we contrast a neo-Fregean picture of the neutral core of language with our own practice-based view, a view that takes political propaganda and the language of protest as central cases, and in which all language practice is understood as fundamentally perspectival. (shrink)

Robust technological enhancement of core cognitive capacities is now a realistic possibility. From the perspective of neutralism, the view that justifications for public policy should be neutral between reasonable conceptions of the good, only members of a subset of the ethical concerns serve as legitimate justifications for public policy regarding robust technological enhancement. This paper provides a framework for the legitimate use of ethical concerns in justifying public policy decisions regarding these enhancement technologies by evaluating the ethical concerns that arise (...) in the context of testing such technologies on nonhuman animals. Traditional issues in bioethics, as well as novel concerns such as the possibility of moral status enhancement, are evaluated from the perspective of neutralism. (shrink)

Focusing on the problem of bureaucracy as a striking example of the ‘necessary stupidity’ that real-life forces us to tolerate, the philosophical meaning of Musil’s «intelligent stupidity» will be discussed. To a closer confrontation with the text, and with passages from Man Without Qualities that are particularly relevant to the theme of the relationship between stupidity and bureaucracy, a number of reflections will be anteposed in order to highlight how, by making the concepts of liberalism and bureaucracy react to each (...) other, it is possible to sketch a first outline of that aporetic of stupidity that seems to characterise so substantially the behaviour of modern man. (shrink)

Burke moves from case study to theory to explore the question: How are we to make bureaucracies both accountable and responsive?

In Beyond Neutrality, George Sher criticises the idea that state neutrality between competing conceptions of the good helps protect society from oppression. While he is correct that some governments are non-neutral without being oppressive, I argue that those governments may be neutral at the core of their foundations. The possibility of non-neutrality leading to oppression is further explored; some conceptions of the good would favour oppression while others would not. While it is possible that a non-neutral state (...) may avoid oppression, it is argued that the risks are so great that it is better to bet on government being neutral, thereby minimizing the possibility of oppression. (shrink)

In the context of the ever-increasing political problematization of migration in Europe, agencies charged with migrant administration create diverse categories of difference to distinguish between the 'deserving migrant' and the illegal one: They assess the detainability or the credibility of asylum seekers, the danger posed by Islamic organizations, and make situational decisions that determine whether migration or labour law applies to individual agricultural workers. In this book, each chapter analyses how organizational interpretations 'in service of' the common good shape (...) class='Hi'>bureaucratic practices. Together, these ethnographic analyses reveal how migration policies in different European countries take shape in administrative practice."--Back cover. (shrink)

(Winner of The Res Publica Essay Prize) This article defends a moderate version of state perfectionism by using Gerald Gaus’s argument for liberal neutrality as a starting point of discussion. Many liberal neutralists reject perfectionism on the grounds of respect for persons, but Gaus has explained more clearly than most neutralists how respect for persons justifies neutrality. Against neutralists, I first argue that the state may promote the good life by appealing to what can be called “the qualified (...) judgments about the good life,” which have not been considered by liberal perfectionists including Joseph Chan and Steven Wall. Then I clear up several possible misunderstandings of these judgments, and argue that: (a) moderate perfectionism does not rely on controversial rankings of values and is committed to promoting different valuable ways of life by pluralistic promotion; and (b) moderate perfectionism requires only an indirect form of coercion in using tax money to support certain moderate perfectionist measures, which is justifiable on the grounds of citizens’ welfare. Thus, I maintain that moderate perfectionism does not disrespect citizens, and is not necessarily unfair to any particular group of people. It is, in fact, plausible and morally important. The defence of moderate perfectionism has practical implications for the state’s policies regarding art development, drug abuse, public education, and so on. (shrink)

In International Relations (IR) scholarship, the epistemic communities’ framework has gained relevance for explaining the roles of experts in the context of transnational global governance. However, IR scholars have criticized the framework for descriptive reasoning. This paper aims to strengthen its explanatory power by following rules of a systematic literature review and by using Desmond’s conception of professionalism to further develop Cross’s model of epistemic community. Desmond introduced his concept of professionalism as a response to bureaucratic and market trends (...) in scientific research and Cross developed her concept of professionalism as a comprehensive reconceptualization of Haas’s original model of an epistemic community. The results confirm compatibility between the two concepts. Following the structure of Cross’s model of professionalism, individual autonomy operationalizes selection and training, collective autonomy covers the face-to-face meetings, and the service provision operationalizes the common culture. (shrink)

This article responds to Janet Kourany’s proposal, in Philosophy of Science after Feminism, that scientific practices be held to the ideal of ‘socially responsible science’, to produce results that are not only cognitively sound, but also significant in the light of values ‘that can be morally justified’. Kourany also urges the development of ‘contextualized philosophy of science’—of which feminist philosophy of science is exemplary—that is ‘politically engaged’ and ‘activist’, ‘informed by analyses of the actual ways in which science interacts with (...) the wider society in which it occurs, the ways in which science is shaped by and in turn shapes society’, and that can contribute to understanding both the cognitive and social dimensions of science. Although I share Kourany’s commitment to contextualized philosophy of science, I question her proposed ideal of ‘socially responsible science’ and the grounds she provides for adopting it. My argument leads me to defend rehabilitating the traditional ideal of the ‘neutrality’ of science, which I reinterpret as the ideal of ‘inclusiveness and evenhandedness’. (shrink)

Chiara Cordelli’s book The Privatized State makes an important contribution to debates over the morality of public administration and widespread privatization. Cordelli argues that widespread privatization is a problem of legitimacy, as private actors impose their will unilaterally on others. Bureaucratic decision-making, by contrast, can be legitimate, within the correct institutional context and in accordance with a bureaucratic ethos. In this review, I argue that bureaucratic policymaking faces similar changes from the value of legitimacy that Cordelli raises (...) against widespread privatization. First, I argue that for a polity subject to bureaucratic policymaking to be self-ruling, bureaucracies must incorporate more democracy; but, so doing goes against the rationale of their institutional form. Second, I argue that bureaucrats and private actors acting on behalf of the state do not have starkly different levels of free purposiveness, and that it is morally desirable for bureaucrats to have more free purposiveness than Cordelli allows, and private actors less. (shrink)