Previous scholarship has focused on inductive and deductive patterns as the two predominant modes of reasoning. In this paper, we argue that there are many ways that people from diverse cultures organize their justificatory reasoning in conversation with others and that these patterns are connected, in part, to cultural beliefs and values. We report on a study of people who identify themselves as being in one of four cultural groups: African Americans, Asian Americans, Asians, and European Americans. The types (...) of organization they used in their conversations included deductive, inductive, abductive, and narrative patterns. Abduction occurred as often as induction and deduction across groups. Narratives were used equally by all of the groups, but they occurred less frequently than the other types. Asian Americans used inductive patterns more than other types, and Asians were most likely to reason deductively. These choices did not appear to have an effect on partners' judgments, although Asians received the lowest appropriateness ratings, and both Asians and Asian Americans were given the lowest effectiveness ratings. (shrink)

In the last 25 years increased violence against Black Americans by police and white vigilantes has led to a resurgence in lynching discourse. This article examines two strains of twenty-first century lynching discourse in America with attention to questions of historical erasure and racial appropriation. The move from justificatory discourses of lynching to rhetoric stigmatizing its practice led to two distinct discursive forms: a rhetoric of memorialization that reads Black women as part of the lynching archive and a (...) rhetoric of white aggrievement and victimhood that leverages the moral authority of Black trauma to evade justice. By mapping the shift from justificatory discourses of lynching and rhetoric professing its ‘end’ to discourse memorializing victims and rhetoric professing lynching’s persistence, this article illumines how the term lynching circulates in the twenty-first century American discourse. (shrink)

Clayton and Stevens argue that political liberals should engage with the religiously unreasonable by offering religious responses and showing that their religious views are mistaken, instead of refusing to engage with them. Yet they recognize that political liberals will face a dilemma due to such religious responses: either their responses will alienate certain reasonable citizens, or their engagements will appear disingenuous. Thus, there should be a division of justificatory labour. The duty of engagement should be delegated to religious citizens. (...) In this comment, I will argue that the division of justificatory labour is indefensible. This dilemma can be avoided if politicians and political philosophers correctly use conjecture, a form of discourse that involves non-public reason. As a conditional response, conjecture avoids alienating any reasonable citizens. Also, if conjecture is given in a sincere and open-minded manner, then the problem of disingenuousness can be overcome. My comment concludes that while the engagement of politicians and political philosophers does not necessarily jeopardize overlapping consensus, they should be permitted, or perhaps even required, to engage with the religiously unreasonable due to the natural duty of justice. (shrink)

The concept of consensus is often appealed to in discussions of biomedical ethics and applied ethics, and it plays an important role in many influential ethical theories. Consensus is an especially influential notion among theorists who reject ethical realism and who frame ethics as a practice of discourse rather than a body of objective knowledge. It is also a practically important notion when moral decision making is subject to bureaucratic organization and oversight, as is increasingly becoming the case in medicine. (...) Two models of consensus are examined and criticized: pluralistic consensus and overlapping consensus. As an alternative to these models, the paper argues that consensus refers to the dialogic aspects of a broader normative conception of democratic moral agency. When the preconditions for that dialogic democratic practice are met, consensus has a justificatory role in ethics; when they are not, consensus, as distinct from mere agreement, does not emerge and can have no moral authority. Keywords: applied ethics, bioethics, consensus, contract theory, democracy, discourse ethics, liberalism CiteULike Connotea Del.icio.us What's this? (shrink)

The paper is structured into four parts. Firstly I discuss the connection between the concept of injustice and the idea of human or individual rights. The claim is quite trivial: the language of rights has been and is still used as a strategy to demand correctives against injustice. Since this strategy has negative effects, of which concrete examples are given, I suggest a different grammar be adopted, the grammar of needs, which is what societies adopt in their justificatory (...) class='Hi'>discourses anyway. This leads into a consideration of how social criticism could start precisely from such discourses and why, under specific circumstances, the grammar of needs could represent a better strategy for this criticism than the language of rights does. (shrink)

Focusing on the development of justificatory discourse on global governance, Steffek examines how differing conceptions of distributive and social justice have played a role in negotiations in the domains of security, economics, and protecting the environment.

The most promising recent attempt to rethink both Discourse Ethics (especially Rawls and Habermas) and Kantian deontology is found in the work of Rainer Forst. This paper suggests the strength of the latter lies in its shift from a theory of justice to a theory of injustice: from the question of what legitimates claims that seek normative consensus, to claims that argue the normative status quo is problematic. In Forst’s idiom: claims arguing the justifications behind that status quo are unacceptable. (...) Yet the association of injustice with justificatory inequality—disparities in people’s capacity to either demand or present reasons—ends up tracking not injustice but mere disagreement. In so doing this theory effectively exposes the broader problem of discourse ethics: its conception of injustice as a (negative) quality of discursive conduct rather than of social relations. At the same time, Forst’s theory also effectively implies a more wholesale rejection of the deontological interpretation of dignity than his reading of Kant suggests. This dual-impasse points to an alternative albeit latent conception of injustice, offering a more promising starting-point for Critical Theory: Injustice understood not as dignity-violations, but as forms of social interdependence predicated on turning certain people systemically vulnerable. (shrink)

Deflationists believe that the question “What is truth?” should be answered not by means of a metaphysical inquiry into the nature of truth, but by figuring out what use we make of the concept of truth, and the word ‘true’, in practice. This article accepts this methodology, and it thereby rejects pluralism about truth that is driven by ontological considerations. However, it shows that there are practical considerations for a pluralism about truth, formulated at the level of use. The theory (...) expounded by this article states that truth is a dual-purpose tool; it can be used as a device for transferring justificatory burdens and, for select areas of discourse, it can also be used as a standard, a norm. This contrast in how truth is used introduces a bifurcation in our discourse that is reminiscent of metaphysical divides traced by more traditional versions of alethic pluralism. However, my pluralism “at the level of use” states that truth is plural solely at the level of use. It is unified at both the conceptual as well as the metaphysical level. At those levels, the theory takes its cue from deflationism. As such, this theory is offered as a midway point and as a potential way forward in the debate between deflationism and pluralism. (shrink)

Constitutional reform has been an important means to push populist authoritarian agendas in Hungary, Poland, Turkey and Venezuela. The embrace of constitutional means and rhetoric in pursuit of these agendas has led to the growing recognition of ‘populist constitutionalism’ as a contemporary political phenomenon. In all four examples mentioned above, democracy, popular sovereignty and direct plebiscitary appeal to the people is the rhetorical and justificatory framework for constitutional reform. This, I worry, gives democracy a bad name and reinforces the (...) widespread suspicion that citizens should not be directly involved in constitutional reform as popular participation can lead to dangerous majoritarianism and is easily manipulated by elite actors seeking to weaken constitutional checks and balances. But the problem, I argue, is not inherent in citizen’s participation in constitutional reform. In contrast to populist constitutionalism, I develop an idea of deliberative constitutionalism in which citizens can participate in constitution-making and reform without hijacking constitutionalism for majoritarian, nationalist or anti-pluralist ends. Deliberative constitutionalism as I understand it has four features: a Habermasian co-originality thesis that articulates the interdependence of democracy and liberalism mediated by a conception of discourse; a proceduralized idea of popular sovereignty that reduces the tension between appeal to the people and respect for pluralism; the centrality of the public sphere over the voting booth as the cradle of democracy; institutional innovations intended to include citizens in constitutional reform but avoid majoritarian and populist pathologies. (shrink)

This symposium begins with a critique by Paul Hirst of Wilfred Carr's ‘Philosophy and Education’(Journal of Philosophy of Education, 2004, 38.1), where Carr argues that philosophy of education should be concerned with ‘practical philosophy’ rather than ‘theoretical philosophy’. Hirst argues that the philosophy of education is best understood as a distinctive area of academic philosophy, in which the exercise of theoretical reason contributes critically to the development of rational educational practices and their discourse. While he acknowledges that these practices and (...) their discourse must of their nature be directly developed in the exercise of practical reason, or phronesis, the notion of ‘practical philosophy’ is rejected as ultimately incoherent and illusory. In his reply to Hirst's critique, Carr identifies three central claims in Hirst's argument and takes issue with each of these. He reaffirms the need to draw upon the resources afforded by the Aristotelian tradition of practical philosophy in order to identify inadequacies in our present understanding of how philosophy is related to education. He suggests that it is only through bringing their own ‘prejudices’ into critical confrontation with this tradition that philosophers of education will be able to assess whether practical philosophy is incoherent and illusory, as Hirst claims, or whether it is indispensable to the future development of their discipline. In a rejoinder to Carr, Hirst, defends the claim that philosophy of education is a social practice concerned with developing justifiable propositional accounts of the conceptual relations, justificatory procedures and presuppositions of educational practices. He rejects the argument that this ‘theoretical philosophy’ approach must be replaced by that of a new ‘practical philosophy’. (shrink)

Radical forms of geoengineering, such as stratospheric sulfate injection (SSI), raise serious concerns about justice and the plight of the most vulnerable. However, these are sometimes dismissed on the basis of a challenge: “What if, in the face of catastrophic impacts, the most vulnerable countries initiate geoengineering themselves, or beg the richer, more technically sophisticated countries to do it? Wouldn’t geoengineering then be ethically permissible? Who could refuse them?” As a US tech billionaire put it, “Frankly, the Maldives could say, (...) ‘F--- you all—we want to stay alive’. Would you blame them? Wouldn’t any reasonable country do the same?” Such questions are intended to be rhetorical: it is assumed simply to be obvious that the appeals of the desperate would justify radical geoengineering. Moreover, the framing suggests that other nations would have strong moral reasons either to respect intervention by the desperate, or even to aid them by deploying themselves. Sometimes such arguments are also used to justify accelerating research on geoengineering now. If the desperate might attempt geoengineering, it is said, we should work out how best to do it, so as to assist them through advice. In general, the overriding thought is that the threat of catastrophe coupled with the plight of vulnerable populations provides most of the justification needed for the wider pursuit of a geoengineering agenda. Desperation becomes a trump card in the policy discourse. In this article, I argue that the desperation argument misses much of what is at stake, ethically speaking, in geoengineering policy. I focus on two further questions. The more obvious—the justificatory question—asks “under what conditions would geoengineering become justified?”, where the conditions to be considered would include, for example, the threat to be confronted, the governance mechanisms, the individual protections to be provided, the compensation provisions to be made, and so on. The less obvious question is the contextual question: “What is the ethical context within which geoengineering is likely to occur, and what difference does this make to our analysis of it?” (Gardiner 2013). In light of this distinction, I argue for two claims. First, on neither of the two most obvious interpretations of it does the desperation argument clearly justify the pursuit of geoengineering. Indeed, it may even count against such pursuit. Second, in any case, the context in which SSI is actually being pursued reveals more about the live threats and ethical import of geoengineering. For example, to push the most vulnerable to the point where they feel forced to accept pronounced subjugation to those who have made them desperate is a morally horrifying prospect which we have strong ethical reason to avoid. Such possibilities should not be concealed behind the superficial bravado of “f--- you all” and “what any reasonable country would do.” None of this implies that ethical geoengineering is impossible. However, it does suggest that geoengineering is morally complex in ways unappreciated by simple appeals to desperation. (shrink)

Talk of harm reduction has expanded horizontally, to apply to an ever-widening range of policy domains, and vertically, becoming part of official legal and political discourse. This expansion calls for philosophical theorization. What is the best way in which to characterize harm reduction? Does it represent a distinctive ethical position? How is it best morally justified, and what are its moral limits? I distinguish two varieties of harm reduction. One of them, technocratic harm reduction, is premised on the fact of (...) non-enforceability of prohibitionist policies. The second, deliberative harm reduction, is premised on the fact of reasonable disagreement, grounded in the fact that reasonable persons disagree about a range of controversial behaviours. I argue that deliberative harm reduction better accounts for some of harm reduction’s most attractive features, and provides a plausible way of accounting for harm reductions’s justificatory grounds and limits. (shrink)

This article defends the democratic ideal of inclusive public discourse, as articulated in Democratic Speech in Divided Times, against the critiques offered by Billingham, Fraser, and Hannon. Specifically, it considers and responds to three core challenges. The first challenge argues, notably, that the “shared reasons” constraint should either apply everywhere or not at all, and that, if this constraint is to apply in divided circumstances, its justificatory constituency must be idealized. The second challenge contends that the resistance of hate (...) speech and misinformation to counterspeech cannot adequately be explained by considerations of salience, and therefore cannot adequately by countered (as I suggest) by “positive” forms of counterspeech. Finally, the last challenge objects that the ideal of inclusive public discourse I defend remains, as pessimists allege, excessively idealistic. (shrink)

The principle of fair equality of opportunity is regularly used to justify social policies, both in the philosophical literature and in public discourse. However, too often commentators fail to make explicit just what they take the principle to say. A principle of fair equality of opportunity does not say anything at all until certain variables are filled in. I want to draw attention to two variables, timing and currency. I argue that once we identify the few plausible ways we have (...) at our disposal for filling in those variables, it will become apparent that a reasonable version of the principle will be quite narrow. Its usefulness as a justificatory basis for social policies will be limited to those policies that target the distribution of competitive opportunities among people entering majority. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Philosophy and Literature 26.1 (2002) 57-74 [Access article in PDF] An American Novelist in the Philosopher King's Court Thomas P. Crocker I MORAL PHILOSOPHY has languished long within the confines of something like the following purported dilemma: either moral discourse is the discourse of principles and rules rationally grounded, or moral discourse is the discourse of passions and personal preferences, clothed in the garments of rational justification. Alasdair MacIntyre's (...) disquieting suggestion—that our language of moral debate is nothing more than the "simulacra of morality"—provides a grim outlook for moral philosophy. 1 Indeed, when moral inquiry is conducted in terms of ethical theory, without independent grounds upon which competing arguments can meet, philosophical discourse, embedded in competing theories, seems to be only so much cacophonous clamor, rationally convincing no one except those who already accept the terms employed by their own theory. One way to avoid this philosophical effluvium produced by moral philosophy is to follow Ludwig Wittgenstein in rejecting the very terms upon which it is made (the distinction between the particular perspective and the universal standpoint), recognizing that moral inquiry begins from where we already are—the everyday world in which we find ourselves.Towards the end of avoidance here, I wish to add to this simmering background of ethical discord Mark Twain's story of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. 2 Twain's controversial voice provides a place for moral thinking unavailable through strictly theoretical discourse. 3 And reading Huck and Jim's story through the philosophical avoidance of Wittgenstein's latent ethical thought provides the transformative possibility of seeing the domain of the ethical in a new light. 4 [End Page 57]Although Twain boldly states at the beginning of his novel that "persons attempting to find a moral in it will be banished," 5 he does show us without the need of theory or dogma how a change in one's way of seeing is intertwined with a change in one's way of living; this connection between ways of seeing and ways of living makes possible a kind of moral transformation that characterizes the change in Huck's perception of Jim, from that of a slave to that of a friend. This moral conversion is much like the perceptual transformations that Ludwig Wittgenstein considers in his discussions of "noticing an aspect," 6 in which a shift in what one sees is connected to the background against which the perceptual object is seen and to the ways in which one is prepared to respond to it. When confronting perceptual ambiguity, as in the case of Jastrow's ambiguous duck/rabbit figure, one looks to the context and background to clarify what one sees, just as one does with semantic ambiguity. In coming to see in one way or the other, nothing is explicitly stated, nothing is put into argumentative form. And in Twain's narrative, we are not given arguments for why we should see Jim as human, nor does the narrative recount Huck's confrontations with moral arguments; rather, through his interactions with Jim, Huck is shown Jim's humanity, his friendship, and we, the readers, are shown the possibility of a moral transformation that is not determined by or grounded in rules or philosophical arguments.The moral realist might agree that such a transformation could be motivated in ways other than rational arguments, but to be legitimate, it must be possible to reconstruct the transformation according to rational considerations. The ability to "get behind" the transformation in some justificatory way is what I am denying here (as is Wittgenstein); for what one finds when one "gets behind" is another situated language game that is itself not open to question (though it could be if we direct our attention towards it). There is no final "getting behind" the things we do and the situations in which we do them, and hence there is no final justificatory argument one can give—as Wittgenstein famously says, "If I have exhausted the justifications I have reached bedrock, and my spade is turned. Then I am... (shrink)

This paper critically explores the path of some of the controversies over public reason and religion through four distinct steps. The first part of this article considers the engagement of John Finnis and Robert P. George with John Rawls over the nature of public reason. The second part moves to the question of religion by looking at the engagement of Nicholas Wolterstorff with Rawls, Robert Audi, and others. Here the question turns specifically to religious reasons, and their permissible use by (...) citizens in public debate and discourse. The third part engages Jürgen Habermas's argument that while citizens must be free to make religious arguments, still, there is an obligation of translation, and a motivational constraint on lawmakers. The final section argues that even though Habermas's proposal fails, nevertheless he recognizes a key difficulty for religious citizens in contemporary liberal polities. Restoration of a full role for religiously grounded justificatory reasons in public debate is one part of an adequate solution to this problem, but a second plank must be added to the solution: recognition that religious reasons can enter into public deliberation not just as first-order justifications of particular policies, but as second-order reasons, to be considered by any polity that respects its religious citizens and, more broadly, the good of religion. (shrink)

Classical logic yields counterintuitive results for numerous propositional argument forms. The usual alternatives (modal logic, relevance logic, etc.) generate counterintuitive results of their own. The counterintuitive results create problems—especially pedagogical problems—for informal logicians who wish to use formal logic to analyze ordinary argumentation. This paper presents a system, PL– (propositional logic minus the funny business), based on the idea that paradigmatic valid argument forms arise from justificatory or explanatory discourse. PL– avoids the pedagogical difficulties without sacrificing insight into argument.

The author singles out various conceptions of rationality used in practical legal discourse: formal and substantive rationality, instrumental goal‐ and means‐rationality, communicative rationality. Practical rationality is expressed in decisions justified by epistemic and axiological premises according to the rules of justificatory reasoning. Five levels of analysis of this justification are identified. Rules, principles and evaluations are used as justifying arguments and their characteristics determine the dimensions of rationality of decision depending on the features of rules, various conceptions of principles, (...) and kinds of relativisation of evaluations. The dimensions of legal rationality depend mainly on three singled out conceptions of rationality, i.e., formal rationality dealing with the deep structure of justification, instrumentally oriented rationality as content of justifiability, and communicative rationality linked with the pragmatics of human interaction. Legitimacy, according to the presented analysis, appears as a subclass of external justification dealing with axiological premisses in terms of instrumental rationality and/or communicative rationality. (shrink)

I propose a characterization of the dialectical dimension of argumentation by considering the activity of arguing as involving a “second order intersubjectivity”. I argue that argumentative communication enables this kind of intersubjectivity as a matter of the recursive nature of acts of arguing—both as justificatory and as persuasive devices. Calling attention to this feature is a way to underline that argumentative discourses represent the explicit part of a dynamic activity, “a mechanism of rational validation”, as Rescher showed, which (...) is a practice that presupposes the possibility of attaining objectivity. (shrink)

This article pursues two questions: Can one use Foucault’s later writings on parrhesia and Kant to create a Foucaldian approach to public reason? If so, what lessons might those attracted to John Rawls’ well-known model of public reason draw from a Foucaldian orientation? By putting Foucault into a competitive yet productive relationship with Rawls, this article addresses some of the latter’s shortcomings. In doing so it also makes a larger argument about the need to develop approaches to democratic deliberation that (...) involve engagement with – rather than simple toleration and/or accommodation of – the various ‘reasonable’ ethical commitments deliberators, on some fundamental level, reason in light of. The justificatory aims of public reason are best achieved when participants’ most-cherished beliefs are opened to critical dialogue rather than banished to the realm of the ‘non-political’. The article begins by briefly illuminating the salient features of Rawls’ model of public reasoning as well as three problems that ensue with the limitations it places on discourses regulated by public reason. It then attempts to distill a Foucaldian approach to public reason by briefly discussing 4 elements of Foucault’s later work on Rawls’ philosophical godfather Kant together with several features of the antiquarian studies of parrhesia that Foucault was conducting at the time these Kantian works were written. Third, Jeffrey Stout’s recent account of theistic democratic actors in some of the most economically disadvantaged US localities demonstrates how many of the ideals integral to this Foucaldian approach to public reasoning built on engaging (rather than simply tolerating and/or accommodating) contrasting ethical perspectives are central to some concrete practices of public reasoning. It concludes with some thoughts on the necessity of publicly reasoning through rather than independently of our deepest commitments. (shrink)

This article pursues two questions: Can one use Foucault’s later writings on parrhesia and Kant to create a Foucaldian approach to public reason? If so, what lessons might those attracted to John Rawls’ well-known model of public reason draw from a Foucaldian orientation? By putting Foucault into a competitive yet productive relationship with Rawls, this article addresses some of the latter’s shortcomings. In doing so it also makes a larger argument about the need to develop approaches to democratic deliberation that (...) involve engagement with – rather than simple toleration and/or accommodation of – the various ‘reasonable’ ethical commitments deliberators, on some fundamental level, reason in light of. The justificatory aims of public reason are best achieved when participants’ most-cherished beliefs are opened to critical dialogue rather than banished to the realm of the ‘non-political’. The article begins by briefly illuminating the salient features of Rawls’ model of public reasoning as well as three problems that ensue with the limitations it places on discourses regulated by public reason. It then attempts to distill a Foucaldian approach to public reason by briefly discussing 4 elements of Foucault’s later work on Rawls’ philosophical godfather Kant together with several features of the antiquarian studies of parrhesia that Foucault was conducting at the time these Kantian works were written. Third, Jeffrey Stout’s recent account of theistic democratic actors in some of the most economically disadvantaged US localities demonstrates how many of the ideals integral to this Foucaldian approach to public reasoning built on engaging contrasting ethical perspectives are central to some concrete practices of public reasoning. It concludes with some thoughts on the necessity of publicly reasoning through rather than independently of our deepest commitments. (shrink)

Reflective equilibrium is overdue a twenty-first century update. Despite its apparent popularity, there is scant evidence that theorists ever thoroughly implement the method, and fewer still openly and transparently publish their attempts to do so in print—stymying its supposed justificatory value. This paper proposes digitising reflective equilibrium as a solution. Inspired by the global open science movement, it advocates for coupling a novel, digital implementation of the equilibrating process with new publication norms that can capitalise on the inherent reproducibility (...) of digital data. The argument is structured around three main claims: that digitising will make it easier to (a) methodically construct, (b) widely disseminate, and (c) thoroughly critique reflective equilibria. Practical guidance is also provided throughout. Altogether, it is argued that digitisation will not only help theorists to better realise reflective equilibrium’s latent theoretical potential, but also greatly extend its value as a justificatory device in contemporary academic discourses. (shrink)

Recent years have seen increased debate about the contributions that human rights make to the creation of conditions of peace. However, less attention has been paid to the claim that peace itself is a genuine human right. Whereas some critics argue that a focus on rights results in an overly formal juridical account of peace at the expense of a more robust notion of positive peace, others contend that a legal framework of rights is all that is needed to eliminate (...) violent conflict. In this paper I strike a position between these two arguments and articulate a normative defense of the human right to peace embedded within a broader discourse of social justice. I do so by demonstrating that a right to peace is a genuine human right because it satisfies appropriate justificatory tests, including those concerning its scope, the duties it generates, and its economic feasibility. S. Afr. J. Philos. Vol.21(3) 2002: 147-162. (shrink)

ABSTRACT Pragmatism as a theoretical enterprise has been criticized since its inception for not having a coherent account of the role of power and violence in human affairs as well as a moral justification and criteria for marshaling arguments in favor of democracy. In this essay I approach recent developments in pragmatic democratic theory with those persistent criticisms in mind. Rather than lacking justificatory resources and underthematizing the role of violence and asymmetrical power relations, Robert Talisse's and James Bohman's (...) works, respectively, demonstrate the epistemological depth and power of updating pragmatism as a theory of situated and critical political inquiry. However, each could be extended by utilizing a more robust description of the problematic situation polities currently face. Specifically, I turn to Dewey for guidance in how our pragmatic epistemological and evaluative practices might incorporate the facts of our problematic situation. I do this in terms of the power structures of economic processes both in terms of contract and in terms of the intellectual discourses that attempt to scientifically describe these processes. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Citizenship and Culture in Early Modern EuropePeter N. MillerCharlotte Wells, Law and Citizenship in Early Modern France (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995), xviii, 198p.Paula Findlen, Possessing Nature: Museums, Collecting, and Scientific Culture in Early Modern Italy (Berkeley, Los Angeles, and London: University of California Press, 1994), xviii, 449p.Steven Shapin, The Social History of Truth: Civility and Science in Seventeenth-Century England (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, (...) 1994), xxiv, 483p.Anne Goldgar, Impolite Learning: Conduct and Community in the Republic of Letters 1680–1775 (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1995), xv, 395p.Lawrence Klein, Shaftesbury and the Culture of Politeness: Moral Discourse and Cultural Politics in Early Eighteenth-Century England (Cambridge, U.K., 1994), xiii, 217p.Daniel Gordon, Citizens Without Sovereignty: Equality and Sociability in French Thought, 1670–1789 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994), viii, 270p.Dena Goodman, The Republic of Letters: A Cultural History of the French Enlightenment (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1994), xiii, 338p.E. J. Hundert, The Enlightenment’s “Fable”: Bernard Mandeville and the Discovery of Society (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), xii, 284p.The pre-modern political world was broken and remade in the two centuries that separate Montaigne from Jefferson. The long agony of the mixed constitution that began in the civil wars which raged in Iberia, France, the Low Countries, and England and seemed settled by the widespread adoption of the maxims of reason of state, revived at the end of the period, with revolution in Poland, Denmark, Sweden, Geneva, and, more famously, [End Page 725] British North America and France. The problem, classically, turned on the location of sovereignty, or supreme authority, in political systems designed to balance and diffuse rather than concentrate power. When budget deficits and fratricidal culture wars raised the cry of “necessity”—with the knowledge, of course, that necessity knew no law—estates and kings across Europe found themselves at daggers drawn. The claim that the ruler, who naturally was wholly committed to the common good, had therefore the ability to take emergency action was used both by those accustomed to rule and those newly attained to it by force. The pursuit of an “interest” that was identified with the nation’s effectively marginalized discussions of right and law while still serving an essentially constitutional, justificatory role in political debate. But if unchecked authority was necessary in order to meet the challenge of a world characterized by change and chance and thus had to reside somewhere, was there anything that made its exercise by one body more appropriate than another? This was the question that lay behind the late eighteenth-century repudiation of the reason of state “solution” to the problem of the mixed constitution. The answer, which clearly underpinned the establishment in fact of what had first been theorized already a century earlier, was that only consent could legitimate the exercise of sovereignty in time of necessity.1Representation, in one form or another, was the acknowledged solution to the problem formulated by Hobbes: “the name of Tyranny, signifieth nothing more, nor less, than the name of Sovereignty, be it in one, or many men, saving that they that use the former word are understood to be angry with them they call Tyrants.” But representation also acknowledged the reality behind the charged category of “citizenship”: most people in most places could not be said to live the life of the active citizen celebrated in Roman republican literature. Hence Hobbes’s attack on recourse to classical exempla in general, and the Libertas of Lucca in particular. The idea of civis as law-abiding subject was as radical a redrawing of the terms of debate as the identification of human nature with unsociability. Insofar as politics, classically, justified itself as the means for individual self-perfection, the practice of the ancient citizen could be conceived of as the practice of that best life speculated upon by philosophers. For the represented citizen, however, politics necessarily occupied a more subsidiary position. What, then, defined the best life to which he could aspire?There is no simple answer to this question, and the early modern ambivalence has persisted into our own time... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Overcoming Violence in Practice1Sarah K. PinnockIn Christian thought, the classic theological response to evil and suffering, known as "theodicy," operates on a metaphysical level. It aims to elucidate questions about God: God's power to prevent evil, God's goodness and justice, and God's purposes in allowing evil. It also examines questions about humanity: Are humans chronically prone to sin and violence? Does suffering serve good purposes? Does God redeem suffering? (...) In recent Christian attempts at theodicy, attention has focused on divine omnipotence and human freedom in attempts to exculpate God for cruelty in allowing the magnitude of suffering visible in such events as the Holocaust, where six million Jews and five million Poles, gypsies, homosexuals, and other noncombatants were killed under Nazi orders. Symmetrical with exploration of the "front end" explanatory questions of why bad things happen in a supposedly good world, theodicies also explore the "back end" justificatory questions of how God can heal the damage, unevenly and unfairly distributed, in this life or the afterlife. Key exemplars of modern theodicy are Leibniz and Hegel, thinkers who have greatly influenced twentieth-century analytic and continental philosophy of religion, respectively. Despite the urgency of responding to evil, theodicy has been criticized for its abstract, global approach to suffering and its programmatic focus on justifying God in the face of violence. My own critique of theodicy has epistemic and moral components. Theodicy rests on epistemological hubris, building precarious intellectual systems in pursuing knowledge of God. Additionally, theodicy is guilty of moral turpitude on account of its single-minded focus on explanation, which smooths over the scandal of suffering and overlooks the prevention and alleviation of violence.2Fortunately, there are more promising alternatives than theodicy in Christian thought. Particularly in the twentieth century, existentialist and Marxian philosophical movements have contributed to practical rather than theoretical emphases in response to theodicy questions. Reflection on the situatedness of the subject has prompted this shift as theology becomes more self-conscious of its cultural assumptions. Especially since the 1960s, contextual varieties of theology have emerged that recognize its socially embedded character. Theology is never purely dislocated conceptual reflection, innocent of ethical consequences, but a discourse with practical origins and effects. To use Marxian vocabulary, all theology is an "ideology" expressing the conscious and unconscious interests of a social group or class. This insight [End Page 73] does not dismiss the truth and power of theology, but forces closer examination of its production and implications. As Marx wrote in his "Theses on Feuerbach," "philosophers [and theologians] have only interpreted the world in various ways; the point, however, is to change it."3 Theology as a discourse must attend to how it functions within society to motivate opposition or acceptance of violence. Also, it must attend to how reliably it exposes and articulates violence within its vocabulary, and what social cases of violence it addresses.I propose that the shift toward practical or contextual Christian anti-theodicy responses to violence resonates with Buddhist attention to practice, rather than speculation, in answer to suffering. To use a well-known image from the Buddha's teaching, all human beings are like persons pierced with poisoned arrows. All suffer grievously because of craving and desire, and desperately long for relief. In such a condition of life, sliding toward death while suffering, what is the most urgent need: to find out how to remove the poisoned arrow and heal the wound, or to find out where the arrow came from and why it was shot?4 Of course, the moral of the story is that the alleviation of suffering is primary and urgent. It would be foolish to searchfor an explanation instead of a cure for the poison. Understanding the cosmic origins of suffering is a distraction, irrelevant to alleviating suffering and detrimental to practice. Preoccupation with metaphysical speculation does not produce wisdom. Such wisdom is the fruit of awareness resulting from meditation training.In presenting my ideas to a forum for Buddhist-Christian dialogue, I am very much aware of the perils of comparative thinking. My understanding of Buddhism reflects the Westernized transmission of Mahayana Zen Buddhist traditions, based on writings intended for an... (shrink)

In this article, the dominant legitimating discursive strategies around the ever-increasing labour demands and ever-declining standards of safety and well-being at work in Spain are analysed through the lens of Boltanski and Thévenot’s (2006) view of the transformation of capitalism. A qualitative methodology based on semi-structured interviews is used. Results show that the justificatory arguments most commonly put forward by managers and experts are the logic of supply and demand, and values related to flexibility, resilience and adaptability to change. (...) In contrast, the stability and protection established in the twentieth century are widely cherished values, particularly among union representatives and some human resources specialists. We found that discourse practices map two specific legitimating categories (market values and a projects orientation), and one critical category (Civic World), but the critical category has no practical impact, as the predominant feeling is resignation. Our research describes the common attitudes to legitimacy in the job market and points to a deep discontent in some of its key agents. (shrink)

Cheryl Misak argues that since disquotationalism cannot distinguish between different kinds of declarative sentences it cannot make sense of the disciplined nature of moral discourse. This apparent weakness is overcome by her pragmatist theory of truth, which reinflates truth by linking it to our everyday practices of justification and verification. In this paper I argue that the criticism that a deflated notion of truth cannot capture our justificatory practices has no purchase with someone who has no such aspirations for (...) the truth predicate, and I go on to argue that this points to a more serious problem with Misak’s pragmatist theory of truth, namely her desire to explicate justification in terms of truth. The burden of making sense of debates in the moral realm lies not with the truth theorist, but elsewhere. Misak is right that moral claims demand greater justification than certain other sorts of declarative sentences, but the best explanation for this is the nature of the subject matter introduced by a claim to which the predicate ‘true’ is then applied. (shrink)

In recent times, ‘just war’ discourse has become unfortunately associated, in the minds of some, with the idea of the forcible promotion or imposition of democracy as a legitimate just cause. It would thus be understandable if supporters of just war theory were to disavow any particular linkage of its tenets with the democratic ideal. However, while certainly not endorsing the stated cause, this article contends that the theory in its most plausible and attractive form does exhibit certain biases towards (...) the ideal, in both jus ad bellum and jus post bellum. If these biases fall short of shackling the theory to claims such as ‘only democracies can fight just wars’, they may nevertheless place taxing justificatory burdens on a non-democracy's claim to have a war-waging right and on non-democratic conceptions of the just peace that should ideally follow a just war. (shrink)

The topic of the presence, legitimacy and epistemic worth of narrative explanations in different kinds of scientific discourse has already enjoyed several revivals within related discussions in contemporary philosophy of science. In fact, we have recently witnessed a more extensive, more unprejudiced and ambitious attention to narrative modes of making science. I think we need a systematic theoretical framework in order to categorize these different functions of narratives and understand their role in scientific explanatory and justificatory practice. My claim (...) is that some distinctions and analytic tools developed within the field of contemporary Argumentation Theory might be of help. (shrink)

This study examines the complex dynamics of communication in the changing field of journalism influenced by the use of media. It specifically focuses on how thoughts and perceptions are expressed in this evolving landscape. Information and communication technologies significantly influence journalism by rapidly disseminating news, updates, and societal impacts. Utilizing critical discourse analysis, the study aims to reveal systematic language usages and uncover latent meanings beyond news texts. Focused on the 2023 Turkish Presidential Election, news texts from four prominent international (...) newslets Al Jazeera, BBC, CNN, and Euronews are analyzed. The comprehensive analysis of international media coverage investigates the interplay of linguistic and thematic choices in shaping narratives. With a dual focus on macro and micro levels of discourse, the study uncovers diverse approaches among foreign media outlets. Each outlet adopts a distinctive thematic approach at the macro level, emphasizing key figures and sociopolitical contexts. Al Jazeera spotlights competition, BBC underscores post-election polarization, CNN focuses on Erdogan's victory, and Euronews provides insights into national challenges. Visual elements, like photographs, contribute significantly to framing events, offering nuanced political messaging. Micro-level analysis explores linguistic choices, syntax, and rhetoric, emphasizing the active voice to underscore leaders' agency. Deliberate use of the passive voice in presenting election results maintains a neutral tone. The way sentences are structured and the cause-and-effect connections help readers understand political developments by providing context. The study underscores the importance of media literacy in decoding political event representations, emphasizing the multifaceted complexities of media discourse. (shrink)

Moral reasoning typically informs environmental decision-making by measuring the possible outcomes of policies or actions in light of a preferred ethical theory. This method is subject to many problems. Environmental pragmatism tries to overcome them, but it suffers also from some pitfalls. This paper proposes a new method of environmental pragmatism that avoids the problems of both the traditional method of environmental moral reasoning and of the general versions of environmental pragmatism. We call it 'justificatory moral pluralism' - it (...) develops the intuition that normative ethical theories need not be mutually exclusive. This leaves room for important forms of pluralist environmental ethics that do not require a once-and-for-all prior commitment to an ethical theory when deciding about policies or courses of action related to the protection of the environment. Justificatory moral pluralism offers a viable solution to the recurrent conflicts between efficient environmental decisions and the need for moral reasoning. (shrink)

This book advances a theory of personal, public and political justification. Drawing on current work in epistemology and cognitive psychology, the work develops a theory of personally justified belief. Building on this account, it advances an account of public justification that is more normative and less "populist" than that of "political liberals." Following the social contract theories of Hobbes, Locke and Kant, the work then argues that citizens have conclusive reason to appoint an umpire to resolve disputes arising from inconclusive (...) public justifications. The rule of law, liberal democracy and limited judicial review are defended as elements of a publicly justified umpiring procedure. (shrink)

In a number of publications, Gerald Gaus has presented an ambitious account of political morality that gives the ideal of public justification pride of place. This article critically discusses Gaus’s characterization and defense of the ideal of public justification in politics. It also presents an account and an argument in support of first-person political justification.

Given the pervasiveness of AI systems and their potential negative effects on people’s lives (especially among already marginalised groups), it becomes imperative to comprehend what goes on when an AI system generates a result, and based on what reasons, it is achieved. There are consistent technical efforts for making systems more “explainable” by reducing their opaqueness and increasing their interpretability and explainability. In this paper, we explore an alternative non-technical approach towards explainability that complement existing ones. Leaving aside technical, statistical, (...) or data-related issues, we focus on the very conceptual underpinnings of the design decisions made by developers and other stakeholders during the lifecycle of a machine learning project. For instance, the design and development of an app to track snoring to detect possible health risks presuppose some picture or another of “health”, which is a key notion that conceptually underpins the project. We take it as a premise that these key concepts are necessarily present during design and development, albeit perhaps tacitly. We argue that by providing “justificatory explanations” about how the team understands the relevant key concepts behind its design decisions, interested parties could gain valuable insights and make better sense of the workings and outcomes of systems. Using the concept of “health”, we illustrate how a particular understanding of it might influence decisions during the design and development stages of a machine learning project, and how making this explicit by incorporating it into ex-post explanations might increase the explanatory and justificatory power of these explanations. We posit that a greater conceptual awareness of the key concepts that underpin design and development decisions may be beneficial to any attempt to develop explainability methods. We recommend that “justificatory explanations” are provided as technical documentation. These are declarative statements that contain at its simplest: (1) a high-level account of the understanding of the relevant key concepts a team possess related to a project’s main domain, (2) how these understandings drive decision-making during the life-cycle stages, and (3) it gives reasons (which could be implicit in the account) that the person or persons doing the explanation consider to have plausible justificatory power for the decisions that were made during the project. (shrink)

A recurrent issue in the vast amount of literature on reasoning models in ethics is the role and nature of moral intuitions. In this paper, we start from the view that people who work and live in a certain moral practice usually possess specific moral wisdom. If we manage to incorporate their moral intuitions in ethical reasoning, we can arrive at judgements and (modest) theories that grasp a moral experience that generally cannot be found outside the practice. Reflective equilibrium (RE) (...) provides a framework for balancing moral intuitions, ethical principles and general theories. Nevertheless, persisting problems associated with the use of intuitions need to be addressed. One is the objection that moral intuitions lack the credibility necessary to guide moral reasoning. Ethicists have tried to solve this problem by formulating criteria to separate the “bad” intuitions from the “good” ones at the beginning of the reasoning process. We call this the credible input-justified outcome strategy. An example is the appeal to the common morality by Beauchamp and Childress. We think this approach is unsuccessful. As an alternative, we outline the good reasoning-justified outcome strategy. It connects to a variant of RE in which intuitions from different sources are incorporated. We argue that the elements of RE have different levels of justificatory power at the start of reasoning. In our strategy, each element can gain or lose justificatory power when it is tested in a reasoning process that meets several criteria. (shrink)

This paper discusses the commitment account of assertion, according to which two necessary conditions for asserting that p are the speaker's undertaking a commitment to justify her assertion in the face of challenges and the speaker's licensing the audience to defer justificatory challenges back to her. Relying on what I call the "cancellation test," and focusing on Robert Brandom's version of the CAA, I show that the latter is wrong: it is perfectly possible to assert that p even while (...) explicitly disavowing the justificatory commitment and while refusing to issue a deferring license. Then I sketch an alternative to the CAA, the trust account of assertion, according to which speakers necessarily present themselves as trustworthy concerning p's truth whenever they assert p. I explain why this is different from undertaking a justificatory commitment, and offer some reasons for thinking that this is a more promising account. (shrink)