New Proposals for New Questions Nuevas propuestas para nuevas cuestiones In six sections, the volume deals with different questions of political philosophy. The first section focuses on democratic theories, the second on conceptual debates, discussing topics such as collective rights, the terrorist phenomenon, Libertarianism and conceptions of freedom. In a third section on contemporary debates, perspectives on sovereignity and legitimacy as well as discourse theory versus political liberalism are discussed. The volume also features essays on democracy and law, and in (...) a section entitled oJudicial construction of democracyo papers on constitutional reviews by judges in the Netherlands as well as the construction of democracy in the context of Latin-American democracies. Finally, in the last section the volume deals with the European Constitutional Treatise, analysing the arguments and examining the legitimacy crisis and the main objections displayed against this treatise. Contents I. On Democratic theory / Teoria de la democracia: Eerik Lagerspetz: The Problem of the Common Good in Democratic Theory Sergiy Maksymov: The Kantian Project of the Law Governed Society and New Democracies II. Conceptual debates / Debates conceptuales: Martin Blanchard: Recognition and the Case of Indigenous Reparations: A Habermasian Critique of Habermas Bronik Matwijkiw: The failed Model of Terrorism Susumu Morimura: The Libertarian View of Human Nature Jonathan E. Soeharno: Freedom as Second Nature. Exploring the value of Hegel's concept of Autonomous Personality for Global institutional theory Hashimoto Tsutomu: On the Concept of Positive and Negative Liberty III. Contemporary debates / Debates contemporaneos: Terhi Kiiskinen: Sovereignty Revisited: On Inalienable Constitutional Power Luiz B. Leite Araujo: A Decade of Debate: Discourse Theory versus Political Liberalism IV. Democracy and law / Democracia y derecho: Kenneth E. Himma: Does it really mather whether a Judicial Decision is morally Legitimate? The practical implications of Judicial Illegitimacy in a otherwise Legitimate State Carl Lebeck: Commitments, Rules and the limits of Constitutionalism Oliver W. Lembcke: Exception Rules? Freedom and the Order in a State of Exception Bart van Klink: Does Necessity knows no Laws? Application of Law in a State of Exception Costanza Margiotta: Ideas and Values of the oLegalo State Jiri Priban: Constitution-Making. Morality and Legal Symbolism: on Identity, Temporality and Differentiation of the legal, political and moral Systems V. Judicial construction of democracy / Construccion judicial de la democracia: Maurice Adams: Judging the Constitution: the Third Way. Some reflections on the introduction of Constitutional Review by Judges in The Netherlands Larry Alexander: What is the Problem of Judicial Review? Roberto Corona Copado: Las reglas del juego democratico. La Suprema Corte de Justicia de Mexico en la solucion de controversias entre organos del poder politico desde 1995 Jose de J. Ibarra Cardenas: La construccion judicial de la Democracia en Iberoamerica VI. Deliberation on European constitutional norm / Deliberacion sobre la nueva constitucion europea: Olaf Tans: Deliberating European Constitucional Norms. An Analysis of arguments Carla M. Zoethout: The Court and the Charter or Who Guards the Court of Justice of the EU under the new Constitution?. (shrink)

Nesse trabalho será analisado o tratamento teórico apresentado por Hannah Arendt sobre o tema da desobediência civil em sua obra Crises da República, traçando um paralelo com as práticas do Movimento dos Trabalhadores Rurais Sem-Terra no que tange à legitimidade dos seus atos de desobediência civil. Sob esse enfoque a luta pelo acesso a terra se apresenta como uma possibilidade de que seus integrantes integrem-se em comunidade fundando um espaço público e desenvolvendo sua capacidade de ação política, característica essencial da (...) vida humana. (shrink)

According to a traditional account, moral cognition is an achievement gained over time by sharing a practice under the guidance and the example of the wise, in analogy with craft and apprenticeship. This model captures an important feature of practical reason, that is, its incompleteness, and highlights our dependence on others in obtaining moral knowledge, coherently with the socially extended mind agenda and recent findings in empirical psychology. However, insofar as it accords to exemplars’ decisive authority to determine the standard (...) of correctness for moral cognition, the model does not offer protection against arbitrariness and discrimination. The article argues that to understand the socially distributed nature of practical knowledge, we have to discard the notion of exemplars and reconceive of others as having equal normative standing. This claim allows us to revisit the conception of autonomy as key to distributed practical knowledge. While autonomy does not amount to selfsufficiency and self-reliance, it does demand independence of judgement and stands in contrast to servility, submission, and other sorts of defective ways of relying on others. The requirement of equal standing provides the basis for distinguishing between proper and improper reliance on others. Keywords: autonomy, Aristotle, exemplarism, extended mind, constructivism, practical knowledge, equal standing. (shrink)

This publication features the stories and experiences of pharmacy professionals who identify as members of historically underrepresented groups. This collection of personal essays presents significant events in the lives of those in the pharmacy community whose experiences have been shaped by their race, ethnicity, gender or gender presentation, sexual orientation, ability, language, mental health, or other factors. The perspectives from the narratives highlight the importance of diversity, equity, and inclusion in the healthcare sector. The authors of the narratives also reflect (...) on their experience to consider what they wish would have happened in the experience, to offer advice for others that may be faced with similar situations. Access to these stories will deepen the collective understanding among pharmacy colleagues, patients, and society of the experiences that individuals from historically underrepresented groups within pharmacy have experienced. (shrink)

Metaethical constructivism is the view that insofar as there are normative truths, they are not fixed by normative facts that are independent of what rational agents would agree to under some specified conditions of choice. The appeal of this view lies in the promise to explain how normative truths are objective and independent of our actual judgments, while also binding and authoritative for us. -/- Constructivism comes in several varieties, some of which claim a place within metaethics while others claim (...) no place within it at all. In fact, constructivism is sometimes defended as a normative theory about the justification of moral principles. Normative constructivism is the view that the moral principles we ought to accept are the ones that agents would agree to or endorse were they to engage in a hypothetical or idealized process of rational deliberation. -/- Metaethical constructivist theories aim to account for the nature of normative truths and practical reasons. They bear a problematic relation to traditional classifications of metaethical theories. In particular, there are disagreements about how to situate constructivism in the realism/antirealism debate. These disagreements are rooted in further differences about the definition of metaethics, the relation between normative and metaethical claims, and the purported methods pertinent and specific to metaethical inquiry. The question of how to classify metaethical constructivism will be addressed in what follows by focusing on the distinctive questions that constructivist theories have been designed to answer. Section 1 explains the origin and motivation of constructivism. Sections 2–4 examine the main varieties of metaethical constructivism. Section 5 illustrates related constructivist views, some of which are not proposed as metaethical accounts of all normative truths, but only of moral truths. Sections 6 and 7 review several debates about the problems, promise and prospects of metaethical constructivism. (shrink)

I investigate the reciprocal relationship between social accounts of knowledge production and efforts to increase the representation of women and some minorities in the academy. In particular, I consider the extent to which feminist social epistemologies such as Helen Longino’s critical contextual empiricism can be employed to argue that it is in researchers’ epistemic interests to take active steps to increase gender diversity. As it stands, critical contextual empiricism does not provide enough resources to succeed at this task. However, considering (...) this view through an employment equity lens highlights areas where such theories need to be further developed. I argue that views such as Longino’s ought to attend to nuances of community structure and cultural features that inhibit critical social interactions, if we are to maximize the epistemic as well as the ethical improvements associated with a social approach to knowing. These developments advance these epistemic theories for their own sake. They also help develop these theories into a tool that can be used by those calling for increased diversity in the academy. (shrink)

According to Iris Murdoch, the chief experience in morality is loving attention. Her view calls into question the Kantian account of the standard of moral authority, and ultimately denies that reason might provide moral discernment, validate moral experience, or drive us toward moral progress. Like Kant, Murdoch defines the moral experience as the subjective experience of freedom, which resists any reductivist approach. Unlike Kant, she thinks that this free agency is unprincipled. Some of her arguments are based on an oversimplified (...) account of Kant’s theory of reflective agency and discount the discipline of reason, thereby nullifying its practical import. However, Murdoch’s work offers a distinctive view of the standard of proof as a “moral proof”, which rehabilitates the transformative power of love and represents a genuine alternative to theories of practical reason as well as to reductivist empiricist views of the mind. (shrink)

Against the standard reading of Isaiah Berlin's thought that drives a wedge between his early and subsequent work, this article suggests that his late normative anti-reductionism has roots in the early writings on meaning, semantics and truth. Berlin's anti-reductionist objection to logical positivists in the realm of semantics evince a sensitivity to reductionism, a recognition of the irreducibility of propositional meaning, a plea for the embededness of language in a temporal continuum, an anti-dualist call, and a celebration of the plural (...) and open-ended character of propositions, all of which keep broad affinity with his mature value pluralism in ethics and politics. The unity of concerns in Berlin's work brings about two implications. First, it sheds light on the fact that Berlin's ethical and political pluralism rests on views about semantics and ontology as well. Second, it offers a basis on which to deflect some current moral realist readings of his value pluralism, offering instead a history-laden understanding of his pluralism that provides more compelling grounds to understand the relationship between the latter and liberalism in Berlin's work. (shrink)

Este artículo asocia la actividad tallerística de varios grupos contemporáneos de cine comunitario cordobés a una dinámica de legitimación de la “pedagogía decolonial”. Entiendo esta última como praxis de un “dispositivo” que identifico como el dispositivo decolonial pues sus relaciones de saber/poder son una práctica contra-hegemónica dentro de las dinámicas onto-epistemológicas de reproducción de aquello que Aníbal Quijano llamó “Colonialidad del poder”. El artículo observa como el cine comunitario sigue los dos estadios propuestos por la pedagogía decolonial como pasos ineludibles (...) hacia la emancipación de los sujetos subalternos. 1- la puesta en crisis de los saberes y las identidades hegemónicas, lo que se logra desde la identificación critica de su situación histórica y el aprendizaje de los artificios del lenguaje audiovisual en tanto aparato de reproducción ideológica colonial-capitalista. 2- Una propuesta teleológica por una vida decolonializada que emerge tanto de la apropiación tecnológica del lenguaje audiovisual desde el cual realizan su narración, su film, como también de las relaciones sociales “Otras” de producción de su mensaje. (shrink)

If the aura has been interpreted as a result of the artwork or its enactment, it is possible to think the aura as the work that the artwork produces: the artwork acts, interacts with the Other or identifies it. Can the aura be identified in this relationship between moods and emotions, between the artwork and the viewer? Where to place the path that opens a gap to establish a connection between Self and Other? The aura of the artwork is this (...) Otherness, this Other that remains to be seen, to be listened and traced: the Other that still cannot be heard, which remains silent or speaks through tensions, plots and tracks. The relationship between trauma (shock) and experience, memory and consciousness, between what is remembered and what is hard to remember, is the question addressed in these pages. (shrink)

This paper discusses the legal implications of setting up two new biobanks in Belgium. The first is hospital-based and will archive tissue from patients with haematologic cancer, whereas the second is linked to a general practice based morbidity registry and will involve storage of blood samples. To date, Belgium has no specific legislation that regulates storage of human tissue and related databases. Several issues concerning the protection of individuals with regard to the processing of personal medical data are discussed from (...) the existing privacy legislation. We will address the principle of consent (broad versus specific) and the type of data recorded (anonymous, encoded and identifiable) for both biobanks. (shrink)

This paper posits that differences in corporate governance structure partly result from differences in institutional arrangements linked to business systems. We developed a new international triad of business systems: the Anglo-American, the Communitarian and the Emerging system, building on the frameworks of Choi et al. (British Academy of Management (Kynoch Birmingham) 1996, Management International Review 39, 257–279, 1999). A common factor determining the success of a corporate governance structure is the extent to which it is transparent to market forces. Such (...) transparency is more than pure financial transparency; as it can also be based on factors such as governmental, banking and other types of institutional transparency mechanism. There may also be a choice for firms to adopt voluntary corporate disclosure in situations where mandatory disclosure is not established. The Asian financial crisis of 1997–1999 and the more recent corporate governance scandals such as Enron, Andersen and Worldcom in the United States and Ahold and Parmalat in Europe show that corporate governance and business ethics issues exist throughout the world. As an illustration we focus on Asia’s emerging1 markets, as, both in view of the pressure of globalization and taking into account the institutional arrangements peculiar to the emerging business system, these issues are important there. Particularly for those who have to find an accommodation between the corporate governance structures and disclosure standards of the Emerging system and those of the Anglo-American and Communitarian systems. (shrink)

Are the emotions relevant for the theory of value and normativity? Is there a set of morally correct arrangements of emotions? Current debates are often structured as though there were only two theoretical options to approach these questions, a sentimentalist theory of some sort, which emphasizes the role of emotions in forming ethical behaviour and practical thought, and intellectualist rationalism, which denies that emotions can help at all in generating normativity and contributing to moral value, hence also denying that they (...) may have any role to play in moral agency and moral thinking. In what follows, I will offer a Kantian account of ‘practical reason’ as the seat of moral agency, which recognizes a diversified and complex relation between reason and sensibility. (shrink)

Theory of Mind (ToM, also referred to as mentalising; Fonagy, 1991; Frith & Frith, 2006) was coined by primatologists, Premack and Woodruff (1978) and adapted in developmental psychology to refer t...

ABSTRACT As we strive for a more polyvocal history of science, historians have placed increasing emphasis on local case studies as a way to globalize the field. This tension between the local and the global extends to the practice as well as the content of the history of science, as the field has begun to pay more attention not just to local case studies, but also to local cultures of historiography. Many historians of science want multiple historiographical voices that take (...) seriously the concerns and literatures in different linguistic and national contexts. As more journals urge translation into what are perceived as the dominant languages in “global” humanities discourses and scholars are encouraged to facilitate the Englishing of their historical research, many questions remain: In what ways does it make sense to nationalize or culturally locate individual cultures of the history of science? Is translation a democratic and positive force in the discipline, and/or does it kill local difference? Will it continue to be meaningful to talk about the history of science? A collective dialogue within the field depends on finding a way to take local diversity in historiography and epistemology seriously while translating that local difference into a meaningful common conversation. This essay considers the challenges of embracing multiple ways of knowing that might fall under the purview of the history of science, while wondering what that means for the coherence of the field as we move forward into the next century of work in Isis. (shrink)

While foregrounding the historiography of HIV and AIDS in the South African context, this article analyses AIDS as simultaneously existing in three spheres: first, virtually – as the subject matter of electronically measurable research; second, academically – as a topic of research in the discipline of History; and third, actually – as a complex health concern and signifier that, via the field of Medical and Health Humanities, could allow for new collaborations between historians and others interested in understanding AIDS. Throughout, (...) the central focus is the discipline of History and the global trends that become evident when examining metrics about AIDS research, particularly those that show the hierarchies of knowledge ‘production’, the reinforcement of disciplinary boundaries, and the discrepancy between the amount of research ‘produced’ by scientific and humanities disciplines. Overall, the article suggests that ‘post-AIDS’ is not currently helpful to health historians working on South African and other majority world contexts. More specifically, the article reflects on what AIDS histories still need to be written, and I argue that Medical and Health Humanities could provide a space for historians to work within and across disciplinary boundaries given the ever evolving remit of AIDS histories, temporalities, and narratives. (shrink)

Background Ethical decision making in intensive care is a demanding task. The need to proceed to ethical decision is considered to be a stress factor that may lead to burnout. The aim of this study is to explore the ethical problems that may increase burnout levels among physicians and nurses working in Portuguese intensive care units . A quantitative, multicentre, correlational study was conducted among 300 professionals.Results The most crucial ethical decisions made by professionals working in ICU were related to (...) communication, withholding or withdrawing treatments and terminal sedation. A positive relation was found between ethical decision making and burnout in nurses, namely, between burnout and the need to withdraw treatments , to withhold treatments and to proceed to terminal sedation . This did not apply to physicians. Emotional exhaustion was the burnout subdimension most affected by the ethical decision. The nurses' lack of involvement in ethical decision making was identified as a risk factor. Nevertheless, in comparison with nurses , it was the physicians who more keenly felt the need to proceed to ethical decisions in ICU.Conclusions Ethical problems were reported at different levels by physicians and nurses. The type of ethical decisions made by nurses working in Portuguese ICUs had an impact on burnout levels. This did not apply to physicians. This study highlights the need for education in the field of ethics in ICUs and the need to foster inter-disciplinary discussion so as to encourage ethical team deliberation in order to prevent burnout. (shrink)

This article explores twelve short narrative films created by women and trans people living with disabilities and embodied differences. Produced through Project Re•Vision, these micro documentaries uncover the cultures and temporalities of bodies of difference by foregrounding themes of multiple histories: body, disability, maternal, medical, and/or scientific histories; and divergent futurities: contradictory, surprising, unpredictable, opaque, and/or generative futures. We engage with Alison Kafer's call to theorize disability futurity by wrestling with the ways in which “the future” is normatively deployed in (...) the service of able-bodiedness and able-mindedness, a deployment used to render bodies of difference as sites of “no future”. By re-storying embodied difference, the storytellers illuminate ongoing processes of remaking their bodily selves in ways that respond to the past and provide possibilities for different futures; these orientations may be configured as “dis-topias” based not on progress, but on new pathways for living, uncovered not through evoking the familiar imaginaries of curing, eliminating, or overcoming disability, but through incorporating experiences of embodied difference into time. These temporalities gesture toward new kinds of futures, giving us glimpses of ways of cripping time, of cripping ways of being/becoming in time, and of radically re-presencing disability in futurity. (shrink)

This essay examines phrenological tools as instruments of matchmaking and focuses on the personal ad as a site for producing and exchanging knowledge about individuals. It shows how cranial measurement produced character profiles for the purpose of judging suitable marriage partners and how users integrated those profiles into personal advertisements published in the Water-Cure Journal. A popular but contested science of the mind, phrenology maintained that one could truly know others and oneself through measuring “organs” of the mind via protrusions (...) on the skull. While much has been written about phrenology, less attention has been paid to its focus on marriage and mating and to how users enrolled phrenology to find and judge the viability of a mate. Focused on the American context in the 1850s, this essay will show that notions of race and gender, heredity, and marital “relations” were embedded in the shorthand of phrenological measurements and personal ads. (shrink)

Neoliberal ideology and exclusionary policies based on racialized identities characterize the current contexts in North America and Western Europe. Nursing knowledge cannot be abstracted from social, political and historical contexts; the task of examining the influence of race and racial ideologies on disciplinary knowledge and inquiry therefore remains an important task. Contemporary analyses of the role and responsibility of the discipline in addressing race‐based health and social inequities as a focus of nursing inquiry remain underdeveloped. In this article, we examine (...) nursing's engagement with ideas about race and racism and explore the ways in which nursing knowledge and inquiry have been influenced by race‐based ideological discourses. Drawing on Henry and Tator's framework ofdemocratic racism, we consider how strategic discursive responses—the discourses of individualism, multiculturalism, colour‐blindness, political correctness and denial—have been deployed within nursing knowledge and inquiry to reinforce the belief in an essentially fair and just society while avoiding the need to acknowledge the persistence of racist discourses and ideologies. Greater theoretical, conceptual and methodological clarity regarding race, racialization and related concepts in nursing inquiry is needed to address health and social inequities. (shrink)

Traditionally, philosophers have focused on whether and how emotions threaten autonomy, insofar as they lie outside the sphere of rational agency. That is, they have conceptualized emotional vulnerability as passivity. Second, they have considered how emotions are insensitive to rational judgment, focusing on cases in which emotions are dissonant or recalcitrant. Third, in recognizing the motivational force of emotions, philosophers have tracked their negative impact on rational deliberation. Indeed, emotions are often contrastive elements in rational deliberation. They appear to defeat (...) deliberative judgments about what to do, survive rational deliberation or preempt the very possibility of rational deliberation. But there are more interesting cases in which it is apparent that emotions bear a rather complicated relation to autonomy. Love and shame provide powerful examples of the ambivalences and complexities of such a relation. In analyzing such complexities, my aim is to present a case for appreciating various dimensions of vulnerability and, correspondingly, for exposing the importance of emotional vulnerability for agential autonomy. This view is rooted in a general account of agential autonomy marked by mutual respect and recognition of others, as a normative response to constitutive vulnerability, understood as the capacity to affect and be affected by others as well as by external agentive and non-agentive causes. (shrink)

According to Iris Murdoch, the chief experience in morality is the recognition of others, and this is the experience of loving attention. Love is an independent source of moral authority, distinct from the authority of reason. It is independent because it can be attained through moral experiences that are not certified by reason and cannot be achieved by rational deliberation. This view of love calls into question a cluster of concepts, such as rational agency and principled action, which figure prominently (...) in the Kantian characterization of the moral experience and resound through Kant’s account of virtue as an endured but never-ending struggle. But it would be a mistake to conclude that Murdoch’s philosophical project opposes Kant’s without further qualifications. In this chapter, I illustrate some convergence between Kant and Murdoch at the methodological level, in their polemic against reductivism. They both oppose reductivist empiricism on epistemological and moral grounds, because they define the standard of proof in relation to the experience of morality. In Murdoch’s words, the philosophical proof, if there is one, is the same as the moral proof (Murdoch 1997: 361). This is where Kant and Murdoch part ways. While Kant argues that the moral experience is the experience of the impact of reason, which provides self-discipline by constraint, Murdoch holds that the moral standard of proof is love. The transformative power of love allows us to engage with reality and recognize others for what they are, that in which consists the primal moral experience. Murdoch’s argument against Kant’s appeal to principles brings to the fore a crucial issue, which concerns the source of moral authority and the possibility of practical reason. Some of her most popular arguments against Kant are based on an oversimplified view of the impact of reason in moral life, and perhaps they owe part of their fortune to this oversimplification. I shall argue that such arguments miss their intended target, but I also hope to show that Murdoch sketches a distinctive model of the moral proof, which establishes a genuine alternative both to theories of practical reason and to reductivist accounts of the mind and its activities. (shrink)

Thought experiments play an important epistemic, rhetorical and didactic function in Galileo’s dialogues. In some cases, Salviati, Sagredo and Simplicio agree about what would happen in an imaginary scenario and try to understand whether the predicted outcome is compatible with their respective theoretical assumptions. There are, however, also situations in which the predictions of the three interlocutors turn out to be theory-laden. Salviati, Sagredo and Simplicio not only disagree about what would happen, but they reject each other’s solutions as question-begging (...) and somtimes even dismiss each other’s thought experiments as misleading or nonsensical. (shrink)

This article argues that cruelty, as a willingness to see or orchestrate the suffering of others, is not an unfortunate side-effect of neoliberal theories put into practice but is constitutive of the neoliberal project from its theoretical inception. Drawing on Lisa Duggan’s concept of ‘optimistic cruelty’ and treating the canonical texts of neoliberal economic theory as literary artefacts, the article develops this argument through a close reading of one of the central architects of the neoliberal project, the philosopher and economist (...) Friedrich Hayek. The first part of the article examines how Hayek attempts to justify the brutality of the market order he imagines – the catallaxy – by arguing that this brutality is the natural consequence of the spontaneous evolutionary processes that move civilisation forward. The second part brings to the fore the eugenicist undertones that suffuse this vision, despite Hayek’s apparent rejection of Social Darwinism. I analyse how Hayek’s market order operates through a series of disciplinary and biopolitical technologies that use pain, frustration, punishment and stigmatisation to eliminate bad habits, practices and subjectivities. These cruel mechanisms enable the catallaxy to sort between productive and unproductive lives to ensure that available resources are directed towards the former – even if it means that the others might be left to die. As such, cruelty is an affective atmosphere that permeates the catallaxy. (shrink)

In ‘Parental Virtues: A New Way of Thinking about the Morality of Reproductive Actions’ Rosalind McDougall proposes a virtue-based framework to assess the morality of child selection. Applying the virtue-based account to the selection of children with impairments does not lead, according to McDougall, to an unequivocal answer to the morality of selecting impaired children. In ‘Impairment, Flourishing, and the Moral Nature of Parenthood,’ she also applies the virtue-based account to the discussion of child selection, and claims that couples with (...) an impairment are morally justified in selecting a child with the same impairment. This claim, she maintains, reveals that the flourishing of a child should be understood as requiring environment-specific characteristics. I argue that McDougall's argument begs the question. More importantly, it does not do justice to virtue ethics. I also question to what extent a virtue ethics framework can be successfully applied to discussions about the moral permissibility of reproductive actions. (shrink)

According to a traditional account, moral cognition is an achievement gained over time by sharing a practice under the guidance and the example of the wise, in analogy with craft and apprenticeship. This model captures an important feature of practical reason, that is, its incompleteness, and highlights our dependence on others in obtaining moral knowledge, coherently with the socially extended mind agenda and recent findings in empirical psychology. Insofar as it accords to exemplars decisive authority to determine the standard of (...) correctness for moral cognition, however, the model does not offer protection against arbitrariness and discrimination. The article argues that to understand the socially distributed nature of practical knowledge, we have to discard the notion of exemplars and reconceive of others as peers, i.e. having equal normative standing. This claim allows us to revisit the conception of autonomy as key to distributed practical knowledge. While autonomy does not amount to self-sufficiency and self-reliance, it does demand independence of judgment and stands in contrast to servility, submission, and other sorts of defective ways of relying on others. The requirement of equal standing provides the basis or distinguishing between proper and improper reliance on others. (shrink)

Constructivism in ethics is the view that insofar as there are normative truths, for example, truths about what we ought to do, they are in some sense determined by an idealized process of rational deliberation, choice, or agreement. As a “first-order moral account”--an account of which moral principles are correct-- constructivism is the view that the moral principles we ought to accept or follow are the ones that agents would agree to or endorse were they to engage in a hypothetical (...) or idealized process of rational deliberation. As a “metaethical account” – an account of whether there are any normative truths and, if so, what they are like – constructivism holds that there are normative truths. These truths are not fixed by facts that are independent of the practical standpoint, however characterized; rather, they are constituted by what agents would agree to under some specified conditions of choice. In working to provide a more precise definition of constructivism in metaethics, the focus of this entry, one faces two main difficulties. The first difficulty is that constructivism comes in several varieties, each of which claims a different niche within metaethics, and some claim no space at all. The second difficulty concerns where to place constructivism on the metaethical map in relation to realism and anti-realism. These are terms of art, and it is highly contested which views count as realist and which as antirealist. These two difficulties will be addressed in what follows by focusing on the distinctive questions that constructivist theories are designed to answer. Section §1 defines the scope of constructivism in ethics, in contrast to constructivism in political theory. Sections §§2-5 illustrate the main varieties of metaethical constructivism, which are designed to account for the nature of normative truths and practical reasons. Section §6 presents the main varieties of constructivist accounts of the justification of moral judgments of right and wrong. Section §7 discusses the metaethical status of constructivism, and its distinctive import. (shrink)