A Modern Legal Ethics proposes a wholesale renovation of legal ethics, one that contributes to ethical thought generally. Daniel Markovits reinterprets the positive law governing lawyers to identify fidelity as its organizing ideal. Unlike ordinary loyalty, fidelity requires lawyers to repress their personal judgments concerning the truth and justice of their clients' claims. Next, the book asks what it is like--not psychologically but ethically--to practice law subject to the self-effacement that fidelity demands. Fidelity requires lawyers to lie and to (...) cheat on behalf of their clients. However, an ethically profound interest in integrity gives lawyers reason to resist this characterization of their conduct. Any legal ethics adequate to the complexity of lawyers' lived experience must address the moral dilemmas immanent in this tension. The dominant approaches to legal ethics cannot. Finally, A Modern Legal Ethics reintegrates legal ethics into political philosophy in a fashion commensurate to lawyers' central place in political practice. Lawyerly fidelity supports the authority of adjudication and thus the broader project of political legitimacy. Throughout, the book rejects the casuistry that dominates contemporary applied ethics in favor of an interpretive method that may be mimicked in other areas. Moreover, because lawyers practice at the hinge of modern morals and politics, the book's interpretive insights identify--in an unusually pure and intense form--the moral and political conditions of all modernity. (shrink)

In Knights, Aristophanes represents the dangers of parrhēsia run amuck with the near-destruction of an elderly man’s Athenian household by Paphlagon. In this setting, Paphlagon’s invocations of his own parrhēsia and goodwill become a destructive form of flattery, causing chaos in the household and threatening its viability. This article begins with a discussion of the problem of parrhēsia in democratic Athens and the ways in which Cleon exemplified those problems. Moving to an examination of Aristophanes’ Knights, the author tracks the (...) playwright’s exploration and response. Aristophanes uses the figure of the elderly Demos as a metaphor for the decline of the city, allowing him to both critique the demos and to align himself with it. Moreover, even as he must win the audience over in order to achieve the theatrical success he craves, Aristophanes removes himself from the perverse logic of dēmophilia-turned-pandering by claiming to be motivated not by goodwill for the audience, but by his hatred of Cleon, an enemy shared by both the playwright and the city. (shrink)

In Knights, Aristophanes represents the dangers of parrhēsia run amuck with the near-destruction of an elderly man’s Athenian household by Paphlagon. In this setting, Paphlagon’s invocations of his own parrhēsia and goodwill become a destructive form of flattery, causing chaos in the household and threatening its viability. This article begins with a discussion of the problem of parrhēsia in democratic Athens and the ways in which Cleon exemplified those problems. Moving to an examination of Aristophanes’ Knights, the author tracks the (...) playwright’s exploration and response. Aristophanes uses the figure of the elderly Demos as a metaphor for the decline of the city, allowing him to both critique the demos and to align himself with it. Moreover, even as he must win the audience over in order to achieve the theatrical success he craves, Aristophanes removes himself from the perverse logic of dēmophilia-turned-pandering by claiming to be motivated not by goodwill for the audience, but by his hatred of Cleon, an enemy shared by both the playwright and the city. (shrink)

In the wake of the considerable cultural changes and social shifts that the United States and all advanced industrial democracies have experienced since the late 1960s and early 1970s, social discourse around the disempowered has changed in demonstrable ways. In From Property to Family: American Dog Rescue and the Discourse of Compassion, Andrei Markovits and Katherine Crosby describe a “discourse of compassion” that actually alters the way we treat persons and ideas once scorned by the social mainstream. This “culture (...) turn” has also affected our treatment of animals inaugurating an accompanying “animal turn”. In the case of dogs, this shift has increasingly transformed the discursive category of the animal from human companion to human family member. One of the new institutions created by this attitudinal and behavioral change towards dogs has been the breed specific canine rescue organization, examples of which have arisen all over the United States beginning in the early 1980s and massively proliferating in the 1990s and subsequent years. While the growing scholarship on the changed dimension of the human-animal relationship attests to its social, political, moral and intellectual salience to our contemporary world, the work presented in Markovits and Crosby’s book constitutes the first academic research on the particularly important institution of breed specific dog rescue. (shrink)

Mental model theory has been used to explain many differing phenomena in adult reasoning, including the extensively studied case of conditional reasoning. However, the current theory makes predictions about the development of conditional reasoning that are not consistent with data. In this article, young children's performance on conditional reasoning problems and the justifications given are analysed. A mental model account of conditional reasoning is proposed that assumes that (1) young children can reason with two models and (2) the fleshing out (...) of conditionals involves activation of information in semantic memory that uses the minor premise as a retrieval cue. (shrink)

Zusammenfassung In dem Beitrag wird argumentiert, dass sich aufgrund verschiedener Entwicklungen in den letzten zwanzig Jahren die Position des Fußballs in den Vereinigten Staaten im Vergleich zu seiner früheren vollständigen Marginalisierung im Sportraum Amerikas auffällig verändert hat. Zwar vermag der Fußball nirgendwo in den Vereinigten Staaten die kulturelle Vorherrschaft der nordamerikanischen „Großen Vier“ - die eine hegemoniale Sportkultur ausgebildet haben, die vergleichbar ist mit dem, was Fußball praktisch überall sonst in der Welt darstellt - nur ansatzweise streitig zu machen. Gleichwohl (...) hat er sich in den letzten beiden Dekaden in zwei Richtungen verändert: Auf der Seite der Produktion hat er sich zu einer weit verbreiteten sportlichen Aktivität entwickelt, die Millionen von Spielern auf dem ganzen Kontinent in Ligen, Vereinen und im Rahmen der gesamten, zu jeder Sportart gehörenden Infrastruktur betreiben. Auf der Seite der Konsumtion hat sich ebenfalls eine interessante Verschiebung ergeben, insofern als das Topereignis des Fußballs - die Weltmeisterschaft - Bestandteil der amerikanischen Sportkultur geworden ist, ohne dass der Fußballsport selbst aber eine solche Position einnimmt. Vor diesem Hintergrund sprechen die Autoren von einer „Olympianisierung“ des Fußballs in Amerika, wo dieser seit nunmehr zwei Dekaden alle vier Jahre Interesse hervorruft, was vorher nicht der Fall war. Ähnlich wie die Olympischen Spiele wird er in Amerikas Sportöffentlichkeit aber nur in diesem vierjährigen Rhythmus verfolgt. (shrink)

Based mostly on extensive interviews with diplomats and human rights activists, this article questions the claim advanced by the German philosopher Jürgen Habermas that current transatlantic relations can be described in terms of a “Divided West.” We examine the scope and depth of shared understandings between key actors in the United States, Germany, and Canada with regard to the definition, monitoring, and implementation of international human rights and to the reform of human rights-related mechanisms within the broader context of current (...) UN reforms. While we do find differences between US, German, and Canadian perspectives, we argue that the meaning attributed to these differences by diplomats and nongovernmental organizations does not justify the polarizing discourse of the Divided West. In addition, we argue that this discourse tends to obfuscate other important trends in the human rights world such as the growing assertiveness of non-Western powers. (shrink)

Julia Markovits develops a desire-based, internalist account of what normative reasons are--an account which is compatible with the idea that moral reasons can apply to all of us, regardless of our desires. She builds on Kant's formula of humanity to defend universal moral reasons, and addresses the age-old question of why we should be moral.

Byrne's book makes a strong case for the important role of imagination as a creator of possibilities that are used to understand complex relations, while remaining rational. I suggest that imagination also serves a critical developmental role by creating possibilities that are not rational, and that act to modify the nature of the cognitive processes that are used to define rationality.

A total of 152 students were asked to respond to a series of causal conditional (“If P then Q”) inferences with major premises for which there was variable access to information contradicting the premises. Half the students were given 12.5 s for each inference, the other half were given 8.5 s. The percentage of accepted inferences was significantly lower when the time was shorter for the MP and MT inferences, but no effect was observed for the AC and DA inferences. (...) Results are interpreted as supporting the idea that inhibition of retrieved information contradicting the premise is necessary to explain reasoning with the MP and MT inferences under logical instructions (Markovits & Barrouillet, 2002). (shrink)

ABSTRACT The target of John Broome’s critique is a certain kind of reductive project: that of reducing the property of rationality to that of normativity, or the property of being rational to that of being as we ought or have conclusive reason to be. Broome argues that this reductive project fails, because the identity claim on which it rests is false. Rationality, he argues, supervenes on the mind: two people who are mental duplicates are necessarily also rational duplicates. But normativity, (...) or reasons-responsiveness, or being as we ought to be does not supervene on our minds: two people who are mental duplicates may not be normative duplicates. I am interested in the appeal of and prospects for the opposite reduction: of reasons, or normativity, understood as the property of being how one ought to be, to rationality. But because this reduction also entails the identity claim that Broome rejects, its success also depends on addressing Broome’s worries. This commentary has two aims: first, to motivate the project of reducing normativity or obligation or reasons to rationality, by bringing out what is attractive about it; and second, to argue that the project is not simply a non-starter, by taking up Broome’s challenge to the identity claim: like rationality, I argue, normativity, too—or at least the species of normativity that the reductive project targets—does supervene on the mind. (shrink)

Luck egalitarianism — the theory that makes individual responsibility central to distributive justice, so that bad luck underwrites a more compelling case for redistribution than do the bad choices of the disadvantaged — has recently come under a sustained attack from critics who are deeply committed to the broader struggle for equality. These egalitarian critics object, first, that luck egalitarianism’s policy recommendations are often unappealing. Second, they add that luck egalitarianism neglects the deep political connection between equality and non-subordination, in (...) favor of a shallowly distributive regime. This Article argues that both objections to luck egalitarianism have been exaggerated. Insofar as the criticisms are accurate, they apply only to a particular, maximalist strand of luck egalitarianism, whose distributive principle does not merely adjust allocations in light of responsibility but instead proposes that allocations should precisely track responsibility. However, this responsibility-tracking view does not represent the best or truest development of the basic luck egalitarian ideal. Moreover, the pathologies of the responsibility-tracking view help to cast the appeal of more judicious luck egalitarianism into sharp relief. The redistributive policies that more moderate developments of luck egalitarianism recommend are less objectionable than critics have supposed. And, more importantly, such modest luck egalitarianism is not a purely distributive ideal but instead contains, at its core, a vision of political solidarity among free and equal citizens. (shrink)

Faut-il penser l'unite de - la - philosophie des Lumieres comme s'il s'agissait d'un phenomene europeen homogene? Lumieres, Aufklarung, Enlightment, Illuminismo: ces termes ne sont pas la traduction l'un de l'autre. Unifier ces pensees en leur attribuant un commun recours a l'universel a un caractere profondement problematique et peut avoir un sens ideologique et politique. Le present ouvrage, en marquant la persistance de l'argumentaire sceptique, propose, selon la formule de La Mothe Le Vayer, un Decalogue sceptique qui ne se reduit (...) pas au doute generalise: il prescrit et programme une systematicite dans l'etude de la variation des normes. Au temps des Lumieres, en effet, l'universel de toutes les normes, theoriques ou pratiques, fait reellement debat et met en question une philosophie de la lumiere naturelle et une metaphysique du moi suppose etre un point fixe. Cette critique de l'universel s'exprime dans une philosophie du sensible: Diderot etudie la figure paradoxale de l'Aveugle, Condillac erige sa statue, l'abbe de l'Epee restitue les sourds muets a la dimension de la discursivite, La Mettrie invente - Monsieur Machine - tout en invoquant une metaphysique de la tendresse, Rousseau justifie un epicurisme de la raison et un art de jouir, Hume naturalise la religion en l'articulant a des passions fondamentales, Montesquieu, attentif a la logique des histoires singulieres, demonte et compare les machines juridiques. Le pluriel des Lumieres a ete meconnu: il permet pourtant de comprendre le caractere equivoque de leur heritage aujourd'hui, entre la reprise morale d'un universalisme des normes et sa contestation dans un travail juridique et anthropologique.". (shrink)

Private law theory must confront the plurality of values that inform the problems that private law addresses in practice. We consider Hanoch Dagan’s and Michael Heller’s The Choice Theory of Contracts as a case-study in the promise and perils that embracing plural values poses for private law theory. We begin by arguing that private law theory cannot ignore value pluralism and identify three approaches that theory might take to pluralism. We call these approaches capitulating to, leveraging, and embracing value pluralism. (...) We illustrate each approach and assess its strengths and weaknesses. Theories that capitulate to pluralism simultaneously limit their scope and hamper their persuasiveness even within their restricted domains. Theories that leverage pluralism limit their domains more dramatically still. And theories that embrace pluralism are difficult to operationalize in practice without abandoning their pluralist roots. We briefly illustrate the drawbacks of capitulating to and leveraging pluralism with examples from recent contract theory. We then take up theories that embrace pluralism in greater detail, by studying Dagan and Heller’s approach. We argue that Dagan and Heller do not solve the deep problems that operationalizing their embrace of pluralism inevitably engenders. (shrink)

This commentary on Elinor Mason’s _Ways to be Blameworthy_ considers Mason’s proposed reflexivity constraint on ordinary blame- and praiseworthy action. I argue that the reflexivity constraint leaves too many intuitively apt targets of praise and blame out of the reach of those attitudes, and the availability of their detached counterparts does not make up for this. I also suggest that Mason’s case for the constraint is open to question. This gives us reasons to prefer a moral concern account of ordinary (...) or communicative praise- and blameworthiness, an account that does not include a reflexivity constraint. Finally, I argue that the moral concern view has more resources to explain some of the nuances and complexities of our practice of moral judgment than Mason allows—nuances Mason turned to pluralism to capture. (shrink)

The law of contracts, at least in its orthodox expression, concerns voluntary, or chosen, legal obligations. When Brody accepts Susan’s offer to sell him a canoe for a set price, the parties’ choices alter their legal rights and duties. Their success at changing the legal landscape depends on a background system of rules that specify when and how contractual acts have legal effects, rules that give the offer and acceptance of a bargain-exchange a central role in generating obligations. Contract law (...) conceived as a body of rules empowering individuals to shape their own rights and responsibilities presents an object of philosophical study. The philosophy of contract includes two broad sets of projects. One set, the focus of the first part of this entry, targets the basic structure and normative justification of the law of contracts. The aim is to subsume a salient body of contract law rules under general principles in order to clarify contract law’s conceptual categories, distinguish it from other areas of law, and specify criteria relevant to its normative appraisal. This kind of philosophical work presupposes detailed knowledge of the law in existing legal regimes, and the entry begins by outlining the common law of contracts. A second set of projects draws on resources from the philosophy of language, philosophy of action, and moral and political philosophy to address debates within contract law. Questions about the nature of meaning and interpretation, intentionality, freedom in contract, and distributive justice drive contemporary legal debates concerning contract formation, interpretation, and enforcement. Philosophical work on these topics has attracted significant commentary which serves as the focus of the second part of this entry. (shrink)

"En 1754, dans le Traité des sensations, Condillac s'efforce de démontrer que "toutes nos connaissances et toutes nos facultés viennent des sens, ou plutôt des sensations" Pour cela, Condillac développe une fiction, celle d'une statue dont il éveillerait progressivement les sens. Il demande au lecteur de se penser à la place de la statue, de s'imaginer n'avoir qu'un sens lorsque celle-ci n'en a qu'un seul d'éveillé, d'examiner successivement les cinq sens, isolément puis en les associant l'un à l'autre. L'attention, l'imagination, (...) la mémoire, l'entendement ne seraient pas les facultés d'un ego mais seraient distribués sur chaque sens. Au lieu de déterminer des facultés comme les pouvoirs d'un moi substantiel dans une métaphysique créationniste, Condillac construit le paradigme d'un moi pluriel, effet des opérations qu'il effectue. Le présent livre réévalue ainsi ce qu'une tradition philosophique, des idéologues aux positivistes, a décrit comme le sensualisme. Pour interroger cette interprétation, la fiction condillacienne de la statue peut être confrontée aux hypothèses qui lui sont contemporaines La Mettrie et son homme-machine. Diderot et l'idée d'anatomie métaphysique, Boureau-Deslandes et son Pygmalion, l'histoire naturelle de Charles Bonnet et l'homo duplex de Buffon, à des titres différents, retravaillent l'anthropologie. Cette pensée du sensible qui déplace l'homme dans la nature et dans l'histoire inquiète théologiens et moralistes et convoque les lecteurs d'aujourd'hui dans leur critique du subjectivisme."--Page 4 of cover. (shrink)

Tuberculosis (TB) is a potentially fatal infectious disease that, in Aotearoa New Zealand (NZ), inequitably affects Asian, Pacific, Middle Eastern, Latin American, and African (MELAA), and Māori people. Medical research involving genome sequencing of TB samples enables more nuanced understanding of disease strains and their transmission. This could inform highly specific health interventions. However, the collection and management of TB isolate samples for research are currently informed by monocultural biomedical models often lacking key ethical considerations. Drawing on a qualitative kaupapa (...) Māori–consistent study, this paper reports on preliminary discussions with groups of Māori, Pacific, and Afghan people in NZ, whose communities have been harmed by TB and TB stigma. Participants’ discussions highlight key concerns and meanings that ought to inform the development of guidelines and a more robust consultative process for the governance of how TB isolate samples are collected and used both retrospectively and in future research. We argue for ethical processes to be culturally nuanced and community-generated, flexible and meaningful, and situated in relation to the physical and symbolic effects of TB. We discuss the significance of Indigenous data sovereignty, rights, and kāwanatanga (governorship) in shaping a multicultural data sovereignty model. (shrink)

Ṣadr, Muḥammad Bāqir; Islamic philosophy; 20th century.

A lógica não contém teoremas puramente existenciais: as únicas sentenças existenciaisválidas são aquelas com análogas universais válidas. Aqui, mostramos que istorealmente é assim quando corretamente interpretado: toda validade ex- istencial possuiuma análoga universal simples, que também é válida. Também caracterizamos validadesuniversais e existenciais em termos de tautologias.

‘Putting the cart before the horse is folly, even when disguised under one ofthose Greek phrases which are so often employed-in grammar, in medicine,and in theology-to cloak ignorance. No writer of sense puts that last whichshould come first, and to accuse a great writer of doing so is mere impertinence.’1.