This chapter contains sections titled: The Idea of an Exceptionless Moral Norm The Role of Exceptionless Precepts in Moral Thinking Exceptionless Rules and Consequentialism The Casuistry of Exceptionless Rule Approaches References.

Encultured individuals see the behavioral rules of cultural systems of moral norms as objective. In addition to prescriptive regulation of behavior, moral norms provide templates, scripts, and scenarios regulating the expression of feelings and triggered emotions arising from perceptions of norm violation. These allow regulated defensive responses that may arise as moral idea systems co-opt emotionally associated biological survival instincts.

What role do human relationships play within the moral domain? There appears to be a lot of agreement that relationships play an important role in and for morality, but certainly not any foundational one. Yet, there has been a recent interest in seeking to explain the foundation of morality in relational terms. According to these relational proposals, the very foundation of impartial morality, and in particular the domain of “what we owe to each other” can be found in the (...) same normative structures that are characteristic of interpersonal relationships and the partial reasons they give rise to. This suggestion has been met with serious criticism, according to which any seeming appeal to a so-called moral relationship does no work in grounding morality and the obligations that we owe to each other. The present paper intends to challenge this conclusion by arguing that the objections rendered are not decisive, as a result of which we can begin to make sense of the idea that we do share a reason-giving relationship with each other in the moral sphere. The moral relationship, the paper argues, is one we simply share with each other in virtue of our shared vulnerability to attitudinal injury as rational agents. (shrink)

The topic of this book is a fundamental philosophical question: why should I be moral? Philosophers have long been concerned with the legitimacy of morality's claim on us, especially with morality's ostensible aim to motivate certain actions of all persons unconditionally. While the problem of moral normativity - that is, the justification of the binding force of moral claims - has received extensive treatment analytic moral theory, little attention has been paid to the potential contribution that (...) phenomenology might make to this central debate in metaethics. -/- In The Phenomenology of Moral Normativity, William H. Smith takes up the question of morality's legitimacy anew, drawing contemporary moral philosophers, particularly Christine Korsgaard and Stephen Darwall, into conversation with present-day phenomenologists like John Drummond and the phenomenological philosophy of Edmund Husserl, Martin Heidegger, and Emmanuel Levinas. -/- The results of this juxtaposition are surprising: utilizing a two-part account of moral normativity, Smith contends that the ground of morality itself is second-personal, rooted in the ethical demand intrinsic to other persons, while the ground for particular moral-obligations is first-personal, rooted in the subject's avowal or endorsement of certain moral norms within a concrete historical situation. Thus, Smith argues that phenomenological analysis allows us to make sense of an idea that has long held intuitive appeal, but that modern moral philosophy has been unable to render satisfactorily, namely, that the normative source of valid moral claims is simply other persons and what we owe to them. (shrink)

The idea with which Rabindranath Tagore established Visva-Bharati is different from that of the grounding of Immanuel Kant's "university with condition" or that of Jacques Derrida's "university without condition." The thinking that finally materialized into Visva-Bharati, or rather the "fore-thinking," is an uncanny complex of aesthetics, politics, topolitics, pedagogy, and Tagorean philosophy of the "home" and the "world." There is neither the "conflict" of Kant's essay _The Conflict of the Faculties_ nor Derrida's absolute radicality and radical absoluteness: there is (...) neither Kant's "freedom of the Enlightenment" nor Derrida's "freedom from the Enlightenment." Ranjan Ghosh captures this so-called dichotomy engrossingly in his book _Aesthetics, Politics, Pedagogy and Tagore_. In Tagore's idea of university, we find a "traffic," an exchange of some sort, between nativism and cosmopolitanism, colonial and postcolonial, singularity and plurality, root and rootlessness. Ghosh not only controls the "traffic" in his work but also gives his close reading of the institution and, most importantly, the underlying principle that led to the establishment of the institution. Visva-Bharati was not built upon the principles of a modern university. It did not have the moral responsibility of following the already established norms and regulations or the society at large but had what Ghosh calls a sense of "no-responsibility." Tagore's idea of university was thus built upon the "no-responsibility" toward the old Eurocentric model of pedagogy and the "responsibility" toward creating a new and more reflective model. He employed one set of responsibilities to "counter" another set of responsibilities. This article in a way is a reimagining, a commentary on Ghosh's work on the pedagogical aspects of Visva-Bharati. (shrink)

Recent work in English speaking moral philosophy has seen the rise to prominence of the idea of a normative reason1. By ‘normative reasons’ I mean the reasons agents appeal to in making rational claims on each other. Normative reasons are good reasons on which agents ought to act, even if they are not actually motivated accordingly2. To this extent, normative reasons are distinguishable from the motivating reasons agents appeal to in reason explanations. Even agents who fail to act (...) on their normative reasons can be said to act on reasons insofar as their actions are rationally intelligible. Thus, when it is said that agents may never use violence in self-defence, this is naturally interpreted to mean that there are powerful normative reasons not to use violence even in selfdefence, even though some agents would use violence in selfdefence. Normative reasons are reasons to pursue ends, where by ends I mean a subset of objects of possible desire, such as taking a stroll or giving all your money to charity. The set of objects of possible desire might include items that are not straightforwardly ends of action. For example, you might want the world to be a better place, or want a secure basis in knowledge of relevant facts to be assigned the highest priority in the assessment of people’s preferences. Objects of possible desire are a subset of objects of possible response, where by ‘response’ I mean the whole range of prepositional attitudes, including desires, preferences, beliefs, commitments and so on. I use the term ‘option’ to refer to objects of possible response in this wider sense. Recent philosophical claims about the grounds of normative reasons can be divided into two strands. Each strand takes as its starting point what is perceived to be a fundamental constraint embodied in normative reason attributions.. (shrink)

The historiography of Greek ethics has, since the days of Winckelmann, Schiller, and Hegel, been shaped by an effort to use it in modern debates. Kantians believed that the Greeks ignored the notion of morality. Hegelians by contrast thought that they understood how to show that one's own happiness is compatible with the happiness of others and conformity to ethical norms—either through inclusivism or fusionism.

It is known that people have been getting distressed for a long‐time and healthcare workers, like the military, seem to fit criteria for being at particular risk. Fairly recently a term of art, moral distress, has been added to types of distress at work, though not restricted to work, they can suffer. There are recognized scales that measure psychological distress such as the General Health Questionnaire and the Kessler scales but moral distress it is claimed is different warranting (...) its own scale. This seems to be because of both the intensity and nature of moral problems encountered at work that is so powerful and so destructive of moral agency and integrity. This paper will focus on how, if at all, moral distress is different by examining the idea of moral normativity. Moral normativity is understood as roughly the sort of thing that all rational persons would endorse regardless of his interests, having an “automatic reason giving force” and is likely to also require an overriding force. Specifically, it will examine how this force of moral claims seems to be needed for moral distress to be so destructive of healthcare professional's moral agency and integrity. This is related to the idea of warrantedness of the reaction of distress. Even if morality had such a strong normativity, one can still ask is distress the correct or warranted reaction? It seems plausible that if distress is a correct response for it to be both moral and warranted it needs a strong account of moral normativity. The idea of a distinct form of distress as moral distress may be true in theory but is too contested both ontologically and epistemologically for a useful practice of measurement at present. (shrink)

The aim of the paper is to investigate the relations between the basic moral categories, namely those of norms, ideals and supererogation. The subject of discussion is, firstly, the ways that these categories are understood; secondly, the possible approaches towards moral acting that appear due to their use; and thirdly, their relationship within the moral system. However, what is of a special importance here is the relationship between the categories of norms and ideals (or in a wider (...) aspect — laudable acts) and a thesis about their complementary character. For it seems that the omission of one of the elements that are analysed within a moral system must result in an essential limitation of both the possibilities of finding an adequate approach to a given moral problem (on a descriptive level), as well as defining the full set of normative guidelines. Therefore, as I shall argue, resigning from a two-level method of moral analysis may lead to the atrophy of the very idea of ethics itself. (shrink)

In reference to two central concepts of Albert Camus' philosophy, that is, the absurd and the rebellion, this article examines to what extent hisThe Plague is of interest to medical ethics. The interpretation of this novel put forward in this article focuses on the main character of the novel, the physician Dr. Rieux. For Rieux, the plague epidemic, as it is described in the novel, implies an unquestioning commitment to his patients and fellow men. According to Camus this epidemic has (...) to be understood as a symbol of the absurd. Unable to base his actions on a Christian, metaphysical value system, Rieux sees his commitment as a continuous rebellion against the fact of the absurd, which opposes him in the form of evil, suffering and death. As a physician, Rieux is therefore forced to adjust his actions to life in its immediacy, that is, the suffering of his patients. In this article, it will be shown that Rieux's attention to the immediate is of particular interest to medical ethics: Theother person in need, rather thanmy moral convictions, sets the norm. (shrink)

In the article, I analyze Georg Simmel’s essay on individual law and summarize his criticism of the concept of a universal moral law, which was developed by Immanuel Kant. Simmel identifies two ways of conceptualizing the concept of a moral law: as universal, referring to the regulation of the actions of all rational beings, and as individual, including a specific acting person in his integrity and connection with the world, which is, at the same time, absolute only for (...) him. Kant became the personification of the first method for Simmel; Simmel put forward the second method as an alternative to the first. The central characteristic of law for Simmel is its integrity and individuality, not rationality and universality. If Kant understands the moral law through a distraction from personal characteristics and inclinations in favor of impersonal norms that operate for all rational beings, then, for Simmel, the moral law manifests itself as an integral and individual human act, in which the flow of life manifests itself in the whole. Simmel insists that the idea of Kant’s universal law overlooks the very es-sence of moral obligation, which can only be individual, since only in an individual form life manifests itself – a single source of both the real and the proper. The article ends with a criticism of Simmel’s example of an individual law, which, as I show, not only contradicts a number of Simmel’s statements made earlier, but also demonstrates the undeveloped nature of his concept as a whole, namely: Simmel’s insensitivity to the distinction between integrity and totality as well as disregard for the figure of the Other. (shrink)

Nolan reviews three works describing the influence of ethics on modern international relations, namely Code of Peace: Ethics and Security in the World of the Warlord States ; The Age of Rights ; and Morality and American Foreign Policy: The Role of Ethics in International Affairs.

Sustainability has become a major goal of domestic and international development. This essay analyzes the transitions of normative ideas embedded in the notion of sustainability by reviewing the discourses in the representative reports and literature from different periods. Three sets of ideas are proposed: inter- and intra-generational equity, stability of public systems, and a sense of solidarity, which confirms the scope of community and functions as a precondition for the previous two ideas. This essay uses the case of a health (...) system in a hypothetical country to illustrate that, besides securing financial sustainability, a genuinely sustainable public system must also meet the three normative ideas of sustainability. This essay also finds that these three ideas may create intrinsic tensions within the prevalent policy-making model—democracy. The pursuit of sustainability is not only the responsibility of a democratic government, but also a shared moral obligation of the body politic. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Hegel’s Idea of a “Phenomenology of Spirit” by Michael N. ForsterGünter ZöllerMichael N. Forster. Hegel’s Idea of a “Phenomenology of Spirit.” Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998. Pp. xi + 661. Paper, $30.00.Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit (1807) has remained an enigmatic and controversial work. Typically it has been studied and appropriated selectively, by focusing on a few topics or sections of this immense opus. There are (...) also several commentaries on all or part of the work that immerse the reader in plenty of detail, but often with insufficient attention paid to the work’s overall design. Forster’s book is thematically focused but has sufficient scope to provide the reader with an overall orientation about the Phenomenology. Moreover, it is written in a clear, accessible language, with plenty of genuinely philosophical material to balance the more narrowly exegetical aspects of the study. Forster’s work stands in the tradition of a number of German and French studies that seek to unravel the “genesis and structure” (Hyppolite) of the Phenomenology as a key to understanding and assessing the import of Hegel’s singular work. Forster discusses those earlier readings, subjects them to a thorough critique, and develops original positions on a number of key issues in scholarship on the Phenomenology.The entire first half of the book (Parts One and Two) is concerned with the “official project of the Phenomenology,” which Forster reconstructs as three sets of philosophical tasks. First are the pedagogical tasks designed to introduce the reader to the superior viewpoint of Hegel’s system and its ability to overcome the ills specific to modern culture. In particular, Hegel is shown to further advance Herder’s and Schiller’s philosophical project of replacing the multiple, unreconciled dualisms of the modern intellectual and moral outlook with a unified, monistic account of natural and social reality. In a strong interpretive move, Forster attributes a naturalism of sorts to Hegel’s integrationist account of mind and body or self and world.Second are the epistemological tasks designed to justify the cognitive claims of Hegel’s [End Page 541] system (“science”) against those of all other philosophical and popular viewpoints. In particular, Forster shows Hegel’s indebtedness to the ancient (Pyrronic) skeptical strategy of equipollence, i.e., the method of setting into opposition equally strong arguments on both sides of any issue and thereby producing an equal balance of justification on all sides of the issue. Of all possible viewpoints only Hegel’s own, which is not subject to any external opposition, eludes the scope of the method of equipollence.The third, specifically metaphysical set of tasks of the Phenomenology centers around the work’s social and (on Forster’s reading) naturalist conceptions of God, meaning and truth, in which transcendent warrants are replaced by communal consensus. Forster concludes the first half of his study with a detailed consideration of the relation between the Phenomenology and Hegel’s system proper. He stresses that the work is only the “appearance” (Erscheinung) of the philosophical science itself and that it remains systematically independent of the latter.Part Three examines the role of history and historicism in the Phenomenology. Forster distinguishes between teleological or normative historicism and intellectual or descriptive historicism, and limits his investigation to the latter as the philosophically defensible of the two enterprises. He argues extensively for a one-to-one correlation between the various “shapes of consciousness” to be found in the core of the Phenomenology (from the chapter on Consciousness through the chapter on Reason) and specific periods in human history. This chronological history of consciousness is shown to be supplemented by two further accounts of the history of consciousness (in the chapter on Spirit and in the chapters on Religion and Absolute Knowledge, respectively), in which the first history’s focus on individual consciousness is enlarged to include supra-individual mind (“spirit”).In Part Four Forster explains the tripling of the history of consciousness with a shift in the plan of the Phenomenology, away from the more limited project of the original or “Ur-Phenomenology”—to lead individual consciousness to the viewpoint of (Hegelian) science—to the more ambitious goal... (shrink)

I would like to research Dewey’s philosophy of education and its moral issues in context of contemporary debates. Dewey pointed out many moral educational problems which are topical also nowadays (in Slovakia too). Education tends to socialize its members. Dewey focuses especially on the quality and value of the socialization which depends upon the habits and goals of the group including its morality. According to him, to have a large number of common as well as moral values, (...) it is necessary to offer to all the members of the group an equal opportunity to receive them. The commitment of society to education is a familiar fact. For the reason it is necessary to build connections among teachers, schools, parents, families and society. Dewey emphasizes necessity to look upon such moral values like honesty, loyalty, perseverance, amiability, as moral goods and also some rules for other values – balance, harmony, etc. They are very important as norms or criteria of judging the benefit of new experiences that parents and teachers are usually want to teach them to the youth. Moral values provide the norms and models that guide us to satisfaction and meaning. Dewey’s philosophy of moral education is expressive about the duty of the teacher in moral education of students. He emphasized the influence of intellectual environment the minds of young generation. (shrink)

In his later years, Peirce proposed the idea of ethics as a normative science. Is such a thing possible? John Dewey asks “whether scientific propositions about the direction of human conduct, about any situation into which the idea of should enters, are possible; and, if so, of what sort they are and the grounds upon which they rest”. If the meaning of ‘science’ here is taken in its contemporary sense—the way in which physics or biology might be understood—then (...) normative science implies ethical naturalism, the position that normativity is explainable as a natural property, and capable of empirical study. Russ Shafer-Landau defines it precisely in these terms, where moral properties.. (shrink)

It is often claimed that humans are rational, linguistic, cultural, or moral creatures. What these characterizations may all have in common is the more fundamental claim that humans are normative animals, in the sense that they are creatures whose lives are structured at a fundamental level by their relationships to norms. The various capacities singled out by discussion of rational, linguistic, cultural, or moral animals might then all essentially involve an orientation to obligations, permissions and prohibitions. And, if (...) this is so, then perhaps it is a basic susceptibility, or proclivity to normative or deontic regulation of thought and behavior that enables humans to develop the various specific features of their life form. This volume of new essays investigates the claim that humans are essentially normative animals in this sense. The contributors do so by looking at the nature and relations of three types of norms, or putative norms-social, moral, and linguistic-and asking whether they might all be different expressions of one basic structure unique to humankind. These questions are posed by philosophers, primatologists, behavioral biologists, psychologists, linguists, and cultural anthropologists, who have collaborated on this topic for many years. The contributors are committed to the idea that understanding normativity is a two-way process, involving a close interaction between conceptual clarification and empirical research. (shrink)

This article explores a set of questions about the ‘idea of freedom’ that Kant introduces in the fourth paragraph of Groundwork III. I develop a reading that supports treating it as a normative notion and brings out its normative content in some detail. I argue that we should understand the idea as follows: that it is a general feature of reasoning and judgement that it understands itself to be a correct or sound application of the normative standards of (...) the relevant domain of cognition, not influenced by irrelevant or external factors. Reasoning and judgement are thus normatively committed to these standards of correctness. A second and related concern is to explore connections between the idea of freedom and Kant’s conception of autonomy and to identify different points at which autonomy plays a role in the argument of Groundwork III. In the final section, I mine the idea of freedom for a set of normative commitments specific to rational agency that play a foundational role in Kant’s moral conception. (shrink)

In terms of income and wealth (and a variety of other measures), citizens of the United States are significantly less equal than their peers in Canada and Europe. In addition, American society is becoming increasingly less equal. Some theorists argue that this inequality is inefficient. Others claim that is unjust. Many Americans, however, are less concerned with the potential inefficiency and injustice of growing inequality. Distinguishing as Milton Friedman does between equality of result and equality of opportunity, many claim that (...) American inequality is greater because our social and political institutions hold individuals responsible for their decisions. There is nothing unjust about holding individuals responsible for their choices or preferences. This political philosophy builds from the popular idea that, in the words of Dennis Prager of the Heritage Foundation, “American individualism and the Judeo-Christian notion of personal accountability gave us the extraordinary nation that we built here.” At least since the publication of the Republican Party’s Contract with America, every prominent Republican (and many Democrats) has affirmed the importance of personal responsibility. The idea of personal responsibility plays a central role in debates over how to structure U.S. society. For these reasons, this paper considers a group of theories that Elizabeth Anderson labels “luck egalitarian.” These theories remain the most influential philosophical attempts to incorporate personal responsibility into a theory of justice. This essay takes as its staring point Anderson’s widely discussed criticisms for these theorists, and considers several of the best and most sustained responses to these criticisms (and related claims by Samuel Scheffler, Jonathan Wolff, and others). The goal is not to provide a summary of different luck egalitarian accounts of justice, a task others have performed admirably (Knight 2009, Knight and Stemplowska 2011). Furthermore, this paper will not attempt to decide which luck egalitarian theory best withstands these criticisms. Instead, this paper makes a philosophically and empirically informed case regarding how policy makers ought to utilize a principle that plays a prominent role in current American public policy debates: the role of personal responsibility. In order to make this case, I must weave normative and empirical analysis, and consider the ways in which social position in the status quo United States does not trace personal responsibility. From this analysis, I suggest three policy priorities for those interested in redeeming the oft-celebrated claim about American society: that an individual is responsible for her social position. This work promises to be of interest to any theorist or policy maker concerned with the practical implications of recent work in the moral and political philosophy of personal responsibility, or, really, anyone interested in making American society comparatively just. (shrink)

John Charvet presents an original philosophical theory that transcends the liberal-communitarian debate and justifies universally valid principles of prudential and moral reason. The Idea of an Ethical Community rejects contemporary positions - the liberal theorist's politically neutral stance toward alternative conceptions of good, on the one hand, and the communitarian's moral relativism, on the other. Charvet espouses what he calls an "antirealist" view of shared norms and maintains that although reason cannot be unconditionally authoritative, there can be (...) conditionally definitive rational principles. His book advances a view of the ethical community consistent both with the contractarian idea of John Rawls's early work. A Theory of Justice and with a due emphasis on communitarian values. But he grounds this view of the ethical community in a theory of the autonomous person and a theory of value. (shrink)

ABSTRACT This article critically examines Axel Honneth’s account of social freedom by paying particular attention to the conceptual apparatus of normative reconstruction that is supposed to lend social freedom its explanatory force. More specifically, the article demonstrates, through an immanent critique, that Honneth is unable to follow through with his ambitious view of the capitalist market as an institutional expression of social freedom. Furthermore, Honneth’s inability to derive robust relations of cooperative solidarity from the actuality of contemporary liberal democratic ethical (...) life leads him to posit socialism as a regulative idea. Honneth’s idea of socialism risks succumbing to the very pitfalls that he continues to associate with neo-Kantian proceduralism. Such an aporia poses a particular challenge for Honneth’s attempt at advancing a persuasive neo-Hegelian alternative to neo-Kantian proceduralism. As a means of addressing this aporia, I suggest a possible strategy that Honneth could adopt to retrieve his historically informed and radically reformist conception of justice without unwittingly rendering socialism a purely regulative idea. Such a strategy involves re-Hegelianizing Honneth’s socialism and the idea of social freedom that it seeks to actualize. (shrink)

Within cognitive science, mental processing is often construed as computation over mental representations—i.e., as the manipulation and transformation of mental representations in accordance with rules of the kind expressible in the form of a computer program. This foundational approach has encountered a long-standing, persistently recalcitrant, problem often called the frame problem; it is sometimes called the relevance problem. In this paper we describe the frame problem and certain of its apparent morals concerning human cognition, and we argue that these morals (...) have significant import regarding both the nature of moral normativity and the human capacity for mastering moral normativity. The morals of the frame problem bode well, we argue, for the claim that moral normativity is not fully systematizable by exceptionless general principles, and for the correlative claim that such systematizability is not required in order for humans to master moral normativity. (shrink)

A new set of “Sustainable Development Goals” are currently being negotiated at the United Nations, and there is a widespread consensus that these goals must be “universal.” This article analyses what universality might mean in this context, and its normative significance as a guiding principle for the goals. After briefly introducing the Sustainable Development Goals as found in the current stage of the negotiations, thearticle proceeds in three sections that consider three different senses of universality. In the first, I outline (...) the most intuitive or straightforward sense of universality as a claim about the scope of the goals, with limited import for the content. In the second section, I expand on this idea by noting a widespread understanding of the content of the goals which might also be thought universal and which reflects a moral cosmopolitan constraint on the ambition of each goal. Universality is paired with, and contrasted against, the need fordifferentiation. In the final section, I examine this idea of differentiation, asking how and how far, the goals should allow for country context. From this discussion arises a third account of universality which incorporates a demand for fair burden-sharing. I consider, and ultimately caution against, this account of universality, even though the demand forfairness is crucial in its own right. (shrink)

This book explores the salient ethical idea of personhood in African philosophy. It is a philosophical exposition that pursues the ethical and political consequences of the normative idea of personhood as a robust or even foundational ethical category. Personhood refers to the moral achievements of the moral agent usually captured in terms of a virtuous character, which have consequences for both morality and politics. The aim is not to argue for the plausibility of the ethical and (...) political consequences of the idea of personhood. Rather, the book showcases some of the moral-political content and consequences of the account it presents. (shrink)

This dissertation is a critical study of rationalism in ethics: the view that acting morally is a requirement of rationality, and that all agents consequently have reason to be moral. The study attempts first to reconstruct the essential elements of the rationalist approach in ethics, and then to identify the most critical obstacles in the way of that approach. By way of reconstruction, it is argued that the rationalist in ethics needs to construe rationality as a set of ideal (...) principles or norms, and to affirm a connection between one's having a practical reason and the capacity of rationality to lead one to be motivated to act on the reason. This latter claim amounts to a version of internalism, and some time is devoted to the task--hitherto neglected by philosophers--of clarifying and defending the connection which it postulates between practical reasons and the motivation to act on them. Given internalism, the burden on the rationalist is to show that rational reflection can by itself lead to the motivation to act on moral reasons. Opponents of rationalism have characteristically challenged the very possibility of such purely rational motivations, and the dissertation considers next the arguments that have been offered for this broadly Humean position. The conclusion is reached that there are no plausible a priori arguments against the very possibility of a rationalist explanation of motivation. This does not however represent a vindication of the rationalist approach: there is room for a pragmatic argument against purely rational explanations of motivation, and the dissertation concludes by offering such an argument, focussing in particular on the case of prudence and prudential reasons. (shrink)

Kant describes the concept of freedom as "the keystone of the whole structure of a system of pure reason, even of speculative reason." Kant's theory of freedom thus plays a foundational and unifying role in all aspects of his philosophy and is thus of significant interest to historians of Kant's philosophy. Kant's theory of freedom has also played a significant role in contemporary debates in metaphysics, normative ethics, and metaethics. This volume brings historians of Kant's philosophy into conversation with contemporary (...) metaphysicians and ethicists with the aim of representing the current state of scholarship on Kant's and Kantian accounts of freedom while at the same time opening new avenues of exploration. The Idea of Freedom includes papers by leading scholars on a range of historical and contemporary topics centrally related to the Kantian theory of freedom, including transcendental idealism, determinism, Kant's normative ethical theory, Kant's conception of cognition, Kant's theory of beauty, Kant's conception of logic, and many others. (shrink)

Se reflexiona sobre las fuentes de la normatividad según el neokantismo contemporáneo que ha dividido a los neokantianos en realistas y constructivistas. Se analiza el kantismo constructivista de Christine Korsgaard, para mostrar sus alcances y limitaciones, y se propone como alternativa fundar la normatividad en la sola idea de libertad, en cuanto valor interno o absoluto no normativo, como la entiende Kant. Esta propuesta que permite esbozar las líneas de un neokantismo que articule los modelos constructivistas y realistas a (...) partir de la sola idea de libertad. The article carries out a reflection on the sources of normativity in contemporary Neo-Kantianism, which has divided Neo-Kantians into realists and constructivists. After analyzing the constructivist Kantianism of Christine Korsgaard, we propose an alternative: that of grounding normativity solely on the idea of freedom, as an internal value or non-normative absolute, as Kant understands it. This proposal makes it possible to outline a Neo-Kantianism that articulates constructivist and realist models on the sole basis of the idea of freedom. (shrink)

Most contemporary legal philosophers tend to take force to be an accessory to the law. According to this prevalent view the law primarily consists of a series of demands made on us; force, conversely, comes into play only when these demands fail to be satisfied. This book claims that this model should be jettisoned in favour of a radically different one: according to the proposed view, force is not an accessory to the law but rather its attribute. The law is (...) not simply a set of rules incidentally guaranteed by force, but it should be understood as essentially rules about force. The book explores in detail the nature of this claim and develops its corollaries. It then provides an overview of the contemporary jurisprudential debates relating to force and violence, and defends its claims against well-known counter-arguments by Hart, Raz and others. This book offers an innovative insight into the concept of Pure Theory. In contrast to what was claimed by Hans Kelsen, the most eminent contributor to this theory, the author argues that the core insight of the Pure Theory is not to be found in the concept of a basic norm, or in the supposed absence of a conceptual relation between law and morality, but rather in the fundamental and comprehensive reformulation of how to model the functioning of the law intended as an ordering of force and violence. (shrink)

We are subject to many different norms telling us how to act, from moral norms to etiquette rules and the law. While some norms may simply be ignored, we live under the impression that others matter for what we ought to do. How can we make sense of this normative authority some norms have? Does it fit into our naturalist worldview? Many philosophers claim it does not. Normativity is conceived to be distinct from ordinary natural properties, making it mysterious. (...) The mystery fuels a radical yet prominent scepticism about the existence of normative properties: if they are too strange to actually exist, there is nothing we ought to do. Some take this to mean, moreover, that nothing is morally right or wrong. We must critically examine the ideas behind these theories, which put both morality and normativity in general on the line. -/- The aim of this thesis is to unravel the mystery of normativity. It uncovers and objects to the influential non-natural conception of it, arguing that we can capture normativity with natural properties. In particular, it explores how the authority of norms can be explained by the commitments of the people subject to them. In connection to this, it challenges the conceptual claim behind the view that all moral judgements are mistaken. Finally, it reveals that treating morality as a mere fiction has revolutionary practical implications. This emphasises the importance of the overall conclusion: we need not conceive of either moral or normative properties as too mysterious to exist. (shrink)

This chapter discusses the ways in which the ideological imposition of the Utopian Socialist vision of the city was fundamental to the Communist project of ‘moulding’ the new man for the new political system. It is suggested that the idea of this kind of city flourished in situations of economic, environmental and ecological crises. Starting from an analysis of Campanella's ‘Sun City’, it shows how in the twentieth century a romanticised conception of the Utopian city translated, in reality, into (...) a system of cruelty, violence and infringement of moral norms. Firmly convinced of their pedagogic mission, the authorities ultimately denied people's participation in the political process through the implementation of such a devious project. The human resources involved were either recruited by means of ideological mobilization or came from the forced labour of the imprisoned dissidents who did not believe in such a mission. (shrink)

In Amartya Sen’s The Idea of Justice, democracy is necessary for the reconciliation of plural justice claims. Sen’s treatment of democracy is however incomplete and inadequate: democracy is under-specified, there are unrecognized difficulties in any context featuring deep moral disagreement or deep division and a conceptualization of public reason in the singular erodes his pluralism. These faults undermine Sen’s account of justice. Developments in the theory of deliberative democracy can be deployed to remedy these deficiencies. This deployment points (...) to a deliberative system encompassing those affected by collective decisions, with places for non-partisan forums and discursive representatives, conditionally open to multiple forms of communication, and geared to the production of workable agreements under normative and discursive meta-consensus. Democracy does not guarantee justice, but in a plural world it is essential to the pursuit of justice. (shrink)

This dissertation examines the psychology of moral judgment and its implications for normative ethics and metaethics. Recent empirical findings in moral psychology, such as the impact of emotions, intuitions, and situational factors on moral judgments, have sparked a debate about whether ordinary moral judgments are systematically error-prone. Some philosophers, such as Peter Singer and Joshua Greene, argue that these findings challenge the reliability of moral intuitions and support more "reasoned", consequentialist approaches over deontological ones. The (...) first part of the dissertation reviews these provocative findings and the philosophical reactions to them, which often invoke the notion of 'moral relevance' - the idea that some factors shaping moral judgments are morally irrelevant. The second part develops a psychological account of moral relevance, drawing on theories of the moral domain, the role of emotions, and models of moral cognition. This account reveals the complex interplay of intuitive and reasoned processes in generating impressions of moral relevance. The final part reevaluates the philosophical discussions in light of this psychological understanding. It contends that the evolutionary background of moral intuitions does not necessarily render them inadequate, and that both deontological and consequentialist judgments likely depend on evolved intuitions to a significant degree. Furthermore, the tendency to dismiss certain influences on moral judgment as irrelevant can itself be explained psychologically. Considering the psychological account presented, mind-independent accounts of morality become less plausible. The dissertation concludes that while empirical moral psychology reveals important constraints on normative theorizing, it does not decisively favor consequentialism over deontology. To assess the significance of empirical-scientific findings for ethics, a nuanced understanding of the origins of moral judgments is nevertheless indispensable. (shrink)

What is the status and nature of the “it” and the ontological progression from an “it” to an “it” in Ifeanyi Menkiti’s normative conception of a person? In this article, I attempt to preliminarily give some nuance content to the “it” of childhood and the “it” of the nameless dead. My motivation is straightforwardly simple: to defend Menkiti’s claim that both “its” have some depersonalised moral standing or existence. However, in doing so, I argue that a better account of (...) the ontological progression of personhood is from an “it” to an “it-it” 1 rather than from an “it” to an “it.” On this modified version of the double hyphenated “its”, which is underpinned by the idea of moral force, the prior moral worth of the nameless dead is taken into account as valuable members of our collective immortality, notwithstanding the fact that their names have been forgotten. Keywords: African Philosophy, Collective Immortality, Menkiti, It, It-it, Moral Force, Nameless Dead, Personhood. (shrink)

In her 2021 Lebowitz Prize Lecture, ‘A Simple Theory of Acting Together’, Margaret Gilbert seeks to articulate the ‘idea’ of acting together that ‘animates’ our commonsense talk about this important phenomenon. I seek a model that provides illuminating sufficient conditions for this phenomenon. As I see it, these are not quite the same project. After all, our commonsense idea and talk may well have two interrelated faces: an inchoate understanding of what the phenomenon is; and an inchoate understanding (...) of norms about, very roughly, what those who participate in this phenomenon normally thereby owe to each other. Gilbert develops a rich and complex articulation of this second element, one according to which the interpersonal obligations in question are not in general moral obligations. Broadly speaking, her strategy is then to take this web of interpersonal obligations and the like and directly build it into her account of what the phenomenon of acting together is. This leads her to say that that phenomenon involves a non-reducible phenomenon in which A and B are ‘jointly committed to endorse G as a body’––where such joint commitments are constituted at least in part by the interpersonal obligations and the like to which our commonsense idea of acting together alludes. (shrink)

What is the status and nature of the “it” and the ontological progression from an “it” to an “it” in Ifeanyi Menkiti’s normative conception of a person? In this article, I attempt to preliminarily give some nuance content to the “it” of childhood and the “it” of the nameless dead. My motivation is straightforwardly simple: to defend Menkiti’s claim that both “its” have some depersonalised moral standing or existence. However, in doing so, I argue that a better account of (...) the ontological progression of personhood is from an “it” to an “it-it”5 rather than from an “it” to an “it.” On this modified version of the double hyphenated “its”, which isunderpinned by the idea of moral force, the prior moral worth of the nameless dead is taken into account as valuable members of our collective immortality, notwithstanding the fact that their names have been forgotten. (shrink)

William Booth's 'On the Idea of the Moral Economy' (1994) is a scathing critique of the economic historians labelled as 'moral economists', chief among them Karl Polanyi, whose The Great Transformation is the groundwork for much of the later theorizing on the subject. The most devastating of Booth's criticisms is the allegation that Polanyi's normative prescriptions have anti-democratic, Aristotelian and aristocratic undertones for being guided by a preconceived notion of 'the good'. This article presents an attempt to (...) rescue Polanyi from this charge by reinterpreting his view of the relationship between the economic and the political, while elucidating the practical meaning of a moral economy. (shrink)

It is worth beginning any discussion of the trends of universalization and particularization of value-normative systems with some refl ections on theory. Theories about values, norms, and morality are themselves closely related to the moralities they explain and to the moral outlook of those doing the explaining. A choice of a value is an act of faith, which echoes the Lutheran salvation doctrine of “justifi cation by faith alone.” The distance between these concepts and the “moral” ideas of (...) Oceania, such as the idea of tabu, whose violation produces a mechanical consequence of harm to the violator, is obviously large. (shrink)

The idea of moral progress played a central role in liberal political thought from the Enlightenment through the nineteenth century but is rarely encountered in moral and political philosophical discourse today. One reason for this is that traditional liberal theorists of moral progress, like their conservative detractors, tended to rely on under-evidenced assumptions about human psychology and society. For the first time, we are developing robust scientific knowledge about human nature, especially through empirical psychological theories of (...) morality and culture that are informed by evolutionary theory. On the surface, evolutionary accounts of morality paint a rather pessimistic picture of human moral nature, suggesting that certain types of moral progress are unrealistic or inappropriate for beings like us. Humans are said to be ‘hard-wired’ for tribalism. However, such a view overlooks the great plasticity of human morality as evidenced by our history of social and political moral achievements. To account for these changes while giving evolved moral psychology its due, we develop a dynamic, biocultural theory of moral progress that highlights the interaction between adaptive components of moral psychology and the cultural construction of moral norms and beliefs, and we explore how this interaction can advance, impede, and reverse moral progress. (shrink)

Catholic sexual ethics proposes a number of exceptionless moral norms. This distinguishes it from theories which deny the possibility of any exceptionless moral norms (e.g. the proportionalist approach proposed in the aftermath of "Humanae Vitae" and condemned in "Veritatis Splendor"). I argue that Catholic teaching on sexual ethics refers to chosen physical structures in such a way as to make ‘new natural law’ theory inherently unstable. I outline a theory of “the moral act” (Veritatis Splendor (...) 78) which emphasises the place which chosen physical features – in particular, chosen sexual structures – play in specifying human actions. I conclude that this account, involving what I term UMDAs, is needed to make sense of the Church’s teaching in these areas. (shrink)

My purpose in this paper is to argue that we are not vulnerableto inescapable wrongdoing occasioned by tragic dilemmas. I directmy argument to those who are most inclined to accept tragicdilemmas: those of broadly Nietzschean inclination who reject``modern moral philosophy'''' in favor of the ethical ideas of theclassical Greeks. Two important features of their project are todeny the usefulness of the ``moral/nonmoral distinction,'''' and todeny that what are usually classified as moral reasons always oreven characteristically ``trump'''' nonmoral (...) reasons in anadmirable agent''s deliberations.I show critics of modern moral philosophy such as BernardWilliams that their acceptance of tragic dilemmas underminestheir project of denying the moral/nonmoral distinction and thepriority of moral reasons. The possibility of tragic dilemmasrequires an account of practical deliberation in which moralreasons appear as already in-force obligations, with blame andguilt ready to be invoked, while nonmoral reasons appear as merereasons. This makes moral reasons importantly different fromnonmoral reasons in how they achieve their deliberative weight,and also makes them characteristically weightier. Thus,accommodating tragic dilemmas reinforces the moral/nonmoraldistinction and the priority of moral reasons, the very thingsthese critics want to deny. By accepting the possibility oftragic dilemmas, these critics are undermining their own project.The standard normative theories are dead set against tragicdilemmas, and the critics of modern moral philosophy shouldreject tragic dilemmas for the good of their project. Thus we allshould reject tragic dilemmas. (shrink)

Our paper explores how the affective energies and cultural expectations set in motion by best-selling American sentimental novels like Hannah Foster's The Coquette and Susanna Rowson's Charlotte Temple informed the notorious mid-nineteenth-century American trial of Amelia Norman, who attempted to kill the man who seduced her. Once newspapers, defense lawyers, and reformers such as Lydia Maria Child recast the defendant as a sentimental heroine, the trial became about seduction, and Norman was acquitted against the weight of the evidence. Sentimental novels (...) turn on the contrast between the passive victim status of the heroine and the active libidinal quest of the rake-villain. As Cathy Davidson points out, this fiction is "about silence, subservience, stasis (the accepted attributes of women as traditionally defined) in contradistinction to conflicting impulses toward independence, action, and self expression (the ideals of the new American nation)." The seduction plot diverts attention from this disparity by establishing an affective solidarity between heroine and reader and elevating the ruined woman to a tragic status. The sentimental emplotment of Norman's life marshaled a powerful set of emotional responses and moral judgements on her behalf. Norman claimed insanity. And since sentimental heroines are supposed to go mad when they are seduced and abandoned, the jury was prepared to interpret her symptoms according to her lawyers' very strategy for establishing her innocence. Ultimately, however, Norman embodied the plight of the sentimental heroine at the same time that she contested her fictional counterpart's fate. In this way, her trial spectacularized the disparity which the sentimental novel conjures up and displaces but never resolves. The common law theory of coverture, which severely limited the legal personhood of married women, has received a great deal of scholarly attention. Cases like Norman's remind us that unmarried women were also subject to draconian constraints on their legal personhood. The tort of seduction is a key example. Legal historians trace the development of the seduction tort from its common-law origins, when men's property interest in women's bodies formed the basis of the cause of action, to 1851, when Field Code authors (including Norman's lawyer David Graham) persuaded several states to grant seduced women standing to bring their own cause of action. Consequently, courts were forced to reckon with the seduced woman as a moral agent capable of consenting to sex. As trials like Norman's demonstrate, sentimental novels helped lay the groundwork for this shift in the law by elucidating a subjectivity for the seduced woman. Yet the doctrinal implications of Norman's precedent-setting trial had a second, more ambiguous strain. Norman's sentimental strategy proved so powerful that men on trial for killing their wive's seducers appropriated it to bring their own stories before juries and to reinforce male sexual norms. In the end, then, Norman's trial fostered legal reform, but it also suggested - as Child's fictionalization of the case in "Rosenglory" recognized - that only sustained and multifaceted efforts to change cultural as well as legal norms could improve the sexual status of women. Scholars such as Wai Chee Dimock have argued for a focus "on the historical and historically shifting relations between law and literature" - a view we endorse. Where we differ from Dimock is in our diversion of attention away from abstract ideas of law laid out by treatise writers and philosophers in favor of law experienced and manipulated by individuals. So, too, we are interested less in representations of concepts such as justice in legal and literary texts than we are in the ways in which literature (broadly conceived) can create provisional and fragile opportunities for concrete instantiations of justice and even generate legal change (for good or ill). Going further, we would argue that to the extent legal change motivates rather than simply mirrors cultural change, it needs literature to be effective. Thus, we see no need to characterize - and indeed reject the depiction of - law as "a limited arena" in which ideas of morality have little place. This project, then, responds to Gregg Crane's call for attention to "the complex and slippery historical interactions of law and literature that shape and are shaped by an ever changing cultural idiom of justice." The extended story of Amelia Norman not only constitutes a case study in the inescapable interaction between the overlapping and interdependent discourses of law and literature, but also reveals the literary and legal consequences of that interaction. (shrink)

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to explore artificial moral agency by reflecting upon the possibility of a Moral Turing Test and whether its lack of focus on interiority, i.e. its behaviouristic foundation, counts as an obstacle to establishing such a test to judge the performance of an Artificial Moral Agent. Subsequently, to investigate whether an MTT could serve as a useful framework for the understanding, designing and engineering of AMAs, we set out to address (...) fundamental challenges within the field of robot ethics regarding the formal representation of moral theories and standards. Here, typically three design approaches to AMAs are available: top-down theory-driven models and bottom-up approaches which set out to model moral behaviour by means of models for adaptive learning, such as neural networks, and finally, hybrid models, which involve components from both top-down and bottom-up approaches to the modelling of moral agency. With inspiration from Allen and Wallace as well as Prior, we elaborate on theoretically driven approaches to machine ethics by introducing deontic tense logic. Finally, within this framework, we explore the character of human interaction with a robot which has successfully passed an MTT. Design/methodology/approach – The ideas in this paper reflect preliminary theoretical considerations regarding the possibility of establishing a MTT based on the evaluation of moral behaviour, which focusses on moral reasoning regarding possible actions. The thoughts reflected fall within the field of normative ethics and apply deontic tense logic to discuss the possibilities and limitations of artificial moral agency. Findings – The authors stipulate a formalisation of logic of obligation, time and modality, which may serve as a candidate for implementing a system corresponding to an MTT in a restricted sense. Hence, the authors argue that to establish a present moral obligation, we need to be able to make a description of the actual situation and the relevant general moral rules. Such a description can never be complete, as the combination of exhaustive knowledge about both situations and rules would involve a God eye’s view, enabling one to know all there is to know and take everything relevant into consideration before making a perfect moral decision to act upon. Consequently, due to this frame problem, from an engineering point of view, we can only strive for designing a robot supposed to operate within a restricted domain and within a limited space-time region. Given such a setup, the robot has to be able to perform moral reasoning based on a formal description of the situation and any possible future developments. Although a system of this kind may be useful, it is clearly also limited to a particular context. It seems that it will always be possible to find special cases in which a given system does not pass the MTT. This calls for a new design of moral systems with trust-related components which will make it possible for the system to learn from experience. Originality/value – It is without doubt that in the near future we are going to be faced with advanced social robots with increasing autonomy, and our growing engagement with these robots calls for the exploration of ethical issues and stresses the importance of informing the process of engineering ethical robots. Our contribution can be seen as an early step in this direction. (shrink)

Tom Beauchamp and James Childress‘s revolutionary textbook, Principles of Biomedical Ethics, shaped the field of bioethics in America and around the world. Midway through the Principle’s eight editions, however, the authors jettisoned their attempt to justify the four principles of bioethics —autonomy, beneficence, nonmaleficence, justice—in terms of ethical theory, replacing it with the idea that these principles are part of a common morality shared by all rational persons committed to morality, at all times, and in all places. Other commentators (...) contend that their theory has never been empirically confirmed and is unfalsifiable, since counterexamples can be deemed irrational, or as held by those living lives not committed to morality. The thesis of this paper is that common morality theory is the artifact of a category mistake—conflating common areas regulated by moral norms with common norms regulating moral conduct—that accords mid-twentieth century American liberal morality the status of transcultural, transtemporal, eternal moral truths. Such a conception offers bioethicists no tools for analyzing moral change—moral progress, regress, reform, evolution, devolution, or revolution—no theoretical basis for deconstructing structural classicism, racism, and sexism, or for facilitating international cooperation on ethical issues in the context of culturally based moral differences. (shrink)

The medical profession contains five “spheres of morality”: clinical care, clinical research, scientific knowledge, population health, and the market. These distinct sets of normative commitments require physicians to act in different ways depending on the ends of the activity in question. For example, a physician-scientist emphasizes patients’ well-being in clinic, prioritizes the scientific method in lab, and seeks to maximize shareholder returns as a board member of a pharmaceutical firm. Physicians increasingly occupy multiple roles in healthcare and move between them (...) frequently, creating the possibility of conflict between the ethical obligations of their various roles. This paper examines the entire moral landscape of medicine through the lens of role morality. It develops a novel framework that helps physicians recognize how their moral commitments depend on the nature and context of the situation, clarifies ethical conflicts that physicians face, and concludes with ideas for resolving these conflicts. (shrink)

This paper argues that the principles of spiritual traditions provide normative ‘standards of goodness’ within which practitioners evaluate meaningful work. Our comparative study of practitioners in the Buddhist and Quaker traditions provide a fine-grained analysis to illuminate, that meaningfulness is deeply connected to particular tradition-specific philosophical and theological ideas. In the Buddhist tradition, meaningfulness is temporal and rooted in Buddhist principles of non-attachment, impermanence and depending-arising, whereas in the Quaker tradition, the Quaker testimonies and theological ideas frame meaningfulness as eternal. (...) Surprisingly, we find that when faced with unethical choices and clashes between organizational normativity and spiritual normativity, Buddhist practitioners acknowledge the temporal character of meaningfulness and compromise their moral values, whereas in contrast, Quaker practitioners morally disengage from meaningless work. Our study highlights how normative commitments in different spiritual traditions can influence different levels of adaptability in finding work meaningful and stresses the central importance of normative commitments in meaningful work. Our study concludes with practical implications and future pathways for inter-disciplinary research. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:The Invention of Autonomy: A History of Modern Moral Philosophy by J. B. SchneewindFrederick RauscherJ. B. Schneewind. The Invention of Autonomy: A History of Modern Moral Philosophy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998. Pp. xxii + 624. Cloth $69.95.For most of the twentieth century ethics has been relegated to the status of a hanger-on to other pursuits in philosophy. Only in the past three decades has ethics (...) re-emerged as a significant independent subject in the discipline. J.B. Schneewind has taken this development a step further by examining the history of ethics as a distinct branch of philosophy. He argues that modern ethics responded to a separate set of concerns from the surrounding scientific revolution’s epistemological and metaphysical subjects, and while his analysis does not prove this in every case, his treatment certainly shows that ethics does have a vital role in the history of philosophy. The Invention of Autonomy offers the most comprehensive and informative review of moral philosophy in the modern era yet published. But Schneewind supplies more than just the best historical review; he also assesses theories and arguments within the context of the great political, social, religious, and moral debates of their time and shows how those debates brought us to our present conception of moral philosophy. The Invention of Autonomy is a superb example of how to do philosophical history of philosophy.Three interrelated themes thread their way through the narrative. The first concerns the gradual replacement of an ethic of obedience with the concept of self-governance, culminating in Kant’s idea of the dignity of all autonomous rational agents. The second involves the debate between voluntarists, who hold that God imposed morality on us by an arbitrary act of will, and intellectualists, who hold that morality stems from eternal standards in God’s intellect. The third conveys the debates about human moral psychology, in particular our awareness of morality and our motivations to act, and their relation to metaphysical and epistemological claims.These themes cut across the four main, roughly chronological groupings into which Schneewind divides his theorists. Here I can only generalize their characteristic tenets and must omit one of the best features of this book: the detailed analysis of the debates and differences even among theorists who are commonly taken to share the same views. The natural law theorists’ most influential voice is Hugo Grotius. Schneewind identifies a “Grotian problematic”—the existence of conflict stemming from self-interest amid our desire to form a society together—which is taken up by other natural lawyers and eventually by Kant [Hobbes’ theory is “Grotianism at the limit” (82)]. Most but not all natural lawyers gave no substantial role to God in ethics because disagreement about religion is one of the causes of conflict in society. Only by finding rules for behavior, backed by self-interested concerns and threats of punishment, could harmony [End Page 627] reign. The chief shortcoming of natural law theory was its inability to explain the ground of moral duty which concerned only the self.The perfectionists—primarily rationalists—put more emphasis on conforming our-selves to what we know of our place in God’s plans for the universe. The complete human being will not only treat others in decent ways but also adopt a virtuous character which seeks the good. Our motivation to take our proper place in the universe stems not from fear of punishment but from a desire to realize our own happiness and from obligation to the God who created us. Perfectionism’s faults lie with its strong ties to religious belief.The third set of philosophers includes mostly the eighteenth-century empiricists. They went further than the natural lawyers in seeking to divorce morality from dependence upon God by grounding it in human nature. A moral sense or sentiment generates moral normativity and indirectly motivates behavior. This dependence on human nature opens these theorists to the charge of voluntarism or worse, since there appears to be no truly objective foundation for morality.Finally come the theorists who develop autonomy, culminating in Kant. Some writers of the German and French Enlightenment, particularly Rousseau, sought to show that morality... (shrink)

Recent International Relations scholarship has identified ‘societal multiplicity’ as the ontological concept that gives IR its identity as an academic discipline. My article, by contrast, addresses the question: What are the consequences, that is, the positive potential and the necessary costs, of understanding multiplicity as a moral-political value in world politics? The question is important because, in contrast to the focus on multiplicity as the ontology of IR, it allows us to develop a more radically democratic idea of (...) multiplicity as a value in world politics. To address this question, I will bring Rosenberg’s conception of societal multiplicity into conversation with the radically democratic idea of Tully’s ‘strange multiplicity’ and draw out the consequences of such a normative turn. My argument is that while Rosenberg does not frame multiplicity as a value, Tully’s normative understanding of the concept harbours enormous potential to transform oppressive and dominating practices in world politics. However, I will also show that Tully’s general rejection of all forms of domination comes at a price that must not be underestimated. It is of crucial importance to get a clear picture of these consequences as we must decide whether or not this price is, ultimately, worth paying. (shrink)