The anti-global movement as the growth of new economies in peripheries contrast the symbolic leadership of American brands. The terrorist attacks on New York and Washington, highly symbolic too, appeared at the very moment when the new economy crisis became obvious. It is not possible to grow up information means too much, because consumers cannot pay them attention enough. But the knowledge produced by multitudes remain in their brain while crisis is around.

In this essay, the author describes the trajectory toward a just peace framework in contemporary Catholic social teaching, as well as similar trends in the broader Christian community. He articulates a refined just peace framework or process that has arisen from and within a pastoral approach that listens to the experiences and voices of people in conflict situations across various cultural spaces. He then turns to the recent and challenging case of the war in Ukraine to explore and argue (...) for a just peace approach rooted in the praxis of accompaniment. The author also reflects on the distinction between and implications of an accompaniment approach and a justification-of-war approach to initiate more inquiry on this topic. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Spiritual AuthorityA Christian PerspectiveKarl BaierOne could define spiritual authority as the power to support the opening of the entire universe —and especially of the life of human beings—toward union with the redeeming ultimate reality. Christian tradition knows several holders of this power: God, Jesus Christ, the angels, the saints and priests, spiritual guides, and last but not least each and every Christian and person of goodwill. (...) They all are spiritual authorities and together create a field of liberating power with many interdependent centers. One can conceive of spiritual authority in Christianity as a complex interplay between these various forces. The manifestation of spiritual power through them does not take place for its own sake, or to celebrate the holder of spiritual authority, but to empower other centers. Thus, spiritual power is not private property. It is only real insofar as it is passed on to others. In the field of human spiritual authority, tensions and struggles arise if the flow of authority is blocked by a particular center attempting to monopolize spiritual power for the establishment of an illusionary self-identity.Rather than going into an analysis of the entire field, I would like to take a closer look at one of its facets: “spiritual guides,” those who are acknowledged specialists in helping others to a life in the presence of God. Of course, other centers of spiritual authority will sooner or later also come into the picture, because in the field of spiritual power one authority cannot be understood without the others. Fields of other forms of power and their centers of authority (scriptural authority, political authority, etc.) also influence and partially permeate the field of spiritual authority, but that is a subject for another enquiry.Spiritual Guidance in the History of ChristianityA central socioreligious form of spiritual authority manifests itself within relationships of spiritual guidance, or (to use the common Christian phrase) within spiritual direction. The remaining part of this paper deals with concepts of spiritual direction and ways of understanding the authority of the director in his or her relationship to [End Page 107] the directee within Christian spiritual life. Before looking into the current situation, I will highlight some milestones in the history of Christian spiritual guidance.From late antiquity onward, spiritual authority was accepted within Christian communities as a specific form of authority, quite different from other forms and especially different from the authority of the clergy to lead the Church.The earliest context in which this difference appeared coincides with the beginning of spiritual direction. Spiritual direction in Christianity originated as a monastic concept.1 “Historically it was from the movement of desert monasticism that we received the idea of spiritual direction within the framework of Christian practice.”2 As abba (“father”) and amma (“mother”) ascetics, holy men or women, like the hermits of the Egyptian desert who lived on the periphery of the socioreligious zone controlled by the ecclesiastical hierarchy, functioned as independent spiritual authorities for their fellow monks and nuns as well as for people from further afield who visited the desert to ask for spiritual advice. As one can imagine, the relationship between the two forms of authority was complex, and one can observe tensions and attempts at reconciliation between the authority of the charismatic ascetics and the authority of the bishops, as well as between ascetical ideals taken from monasticism and the pastoral care for lay Christians from the fourth to the sixth century.3The Decretum Gelasianum, an official document dating back to the beginning of the sixth century, assessed that the vitae patrum—the books containing narratives of the lives and the spiritual teachings of the desert fathers—were to be accepted by the Church as valid teaching with all honor (cum omni honore suscipimus). The use of the term “father” in this text indirectly confirms that no ordination was necessary to receive this honorary title and the ministry connected to it. Most of the fathers acknowledged by the Decretum Gelasianum have never been ordained priests.When the desert tradition was superseded by organized monasticism, the charismatic authority of the abba or amma became institutionalized in the form of monastery rules, which functioned... (shrink)

The late antique and early medieval Mediterranean was characterized by wide-ranging cultural and linguistic diversity. Yet, under the influence of Christianity, communities in the Mediterranean world were bound together by common concepts of good rulership, which were also shaped by Greco-Roman, Persian, Caucasian, and other traditions. This collection of essays examines ideas of good Christian rulership and the debates surrounding them in diverse cultures and linguistic communities. It grants special attention to communities on the periphery, such as the Caucasus (...) and Nubia, and some essays examine non-Christian concepts of good rulership to offer a comparative perspective. As a whole, the studies in this volume reveal not only the entanglement and affinity of communities around the Mediterranean but also areas of conflict among Christians and between Christians and other cultural traditions. By gathering various specialized studies on the overarching question of good rulership, this volume highlights the possibilities of placing research on classical antiquity and early medieval Europe into conversation with the study of eastern Christianity. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Karl Barth and Christian Ethics: Living in Truth by William WerpehowskiJames W. SkillenKarl Barth and Christian Ethics: Living in Truth William Werpehowski BURLINGTON, VT: ASHGATE, 2014. 172 PP. $54.95 (PAPERBACK), $153.00 (CLOTH)In this two-part volume, William Werpehowski aims in part 1 to elucidate Karl Barth's "approach to the nature and source of the good, the divine command in its relation to the personal history of a (...) moral agent, and the place of narrative in Christian ethics" (xii). The author does this both by exposition of Barth's writings and by engaging with the arguments of other students of Barth, including James Gustafson, Stanley Hauerwas, John Webster, Matthew Rose, and Gerald McKenny. The titles of the chapters of part 1 indicate the ground being covered: "Divine Commands and Philosophical Dilemmas," "Command and History," "Narrative and Ethics," and "Realism and Discernment." In part 2 the author presents diverse essays on "virtue, moral practices, and discernment," most of which deal with the rearing and education of children, which shows the author's sympathy with Barth even as he draws on other traditions of Christian ethics.Werpehowski's exposition is generally clear and detailed as he seeks to explain and defend Barth's identification of the norm for human ethics with the subject, Jesus Christ. According to Barth, "humanity's obedience to God … must always be obedience to and conformity with Jesus Christ. He is the criterion by which is measured all demands on our behavior" (6). Furthermore, "God's eternal will is for humanity in Jesus Christ; the normative criterion is identical to God's will and the history it accomplishes" (7). Although the response to God's electing love in Christ should be willing obedience, Barth (with Werpehowski) does not deal substantively with the accountability of those who do not so respond. In the end, for Barth, God's "Yes" in Christ always trumps God's "No" to sin (see 65–69).At times the author's defense of Barth appears to be more a deflection of, than an engagement with, the criticism. One example: the author offers a brief summary of Nigel Biggar's sympathetic criticism of Barth at the point where he believes Barth deals inadequately with human responsibility and accountability. Werpehowski acknowledges the legitimacy of Biggar's point—"that the temporal world of eternal grace may be depicted as our one common world only if creaturely rationality and non-arbitrary moral justification are prominently affirmed" (63); he states that Biggar is trying to save Barth "at his best" from a weakness in his position. Yet Werpehowski's next step is to say that Biggar's correction "is in danger of being an overcorrection" because his [End Page 212] moral justification requirement "belongs more to the periphery of the ethics of [Barth's] divine command" (64). That requirement, says Werpehowski, "must be governed by the central significance of the gracious God who commands in the reality of the ethical event" (64).Werpehowski's book is worthy of careful study, especially by those who want to understand Barth in relation to other ethicists. A criticism I have concerns the limits of Barth's ethics with respect to human institutions and social practices for which humans bear communal responsibility. Werpehowski acknowledges that those limits are due to Barth's focus on the relation of Christ to the individual person in the "ethical event." By contrast, at a few points in part 2, Werpehowski draws in Dietrich Bonhoeffer, who insists that it is in "friendships, families, work, citizenship, and life in the church" where Christ is present preserving and reconciling the world to God (141). Despite all the attention in recent decades to Christian social and political ethics, the author does little with that subject in either his assessment of Barth or in the chapters of part 2.James W. SkillenPresident (retired), Center for Public JusticeCopyright © 2017 Society of Christian Ethics... (shrink)

Kants Musikästhetik wird weithin unterschätzt. Dabei bietet sie die entscheidenden Ansätze zur Befreiung der Musik aus den Fängen der Nachahmungsästhetik, wie sie vor allem E.T.A.Hoffman kongenial umgesetzt hat.

Decision-making under normative uncertainty requires an agent to aggregate the assessments of options given by rival normative theories into a single assessment that tells her what to do in light of her uncertainty. But what if the assessments of rival theories differ not just in their content but in their structure -- e.g., some are merely ordinal while others are cardinal? This paper describes and evaluates three general approaches to this "problem of structural diversity": structural enrichment, structural depletion, and multi-stage (...) aggregation. All three approaches have notable drawbacks, but I tentatively defend multi-stage aggregation as least bad of the three. (shrink)

Les disciplines historiques, littéraires et philosophiques font un emploi abondant des catégories historiographiques. Parmi celles-ci, les termes en ismes sont très fréquents pour référer à une doctrine, un courant artistique, une idéologie ou des événements spécifiques. On fait cependant remarquer que ces désignations posent de nombreux problèmes d’interprétation. En particulier, que l’origine exacte d’une catégorie est souvent méconnue et que sa signification est plus équivoque qu’on ne le croit habituellement. La formation d’un terme en isme s’explique souvent dans un contexte (...) polémique et sert à condamner ou critiquer plutôt qu’à comprendre une pensée, un mouvement ou des faits historiques. Les catégories d’athéisme, de classicisme ou de féminisme en sont de bons exemples. Le présent volume vise à contribuer à l’étude critique des catégories historiographiques et des notions en isme en s’attardant à l’époque moderne (XVI e XVIII e siècles). Il s’agit d’un moment clef de l’histoire européenne pendant laquelle nombre de ces notions apparaissent ou pour laquelle l’historiographie en a fait un emploi abondant. Les chapitres en examinent la valeur théorique par rapport à une origine ou des usages, et déterminent de quelles manières elles contribuent à l’interprétation de l’histoire, de la littérature ou de la philosophie, de la Renaissance jusqu’à la Révolution française. (shrink)

The principle that rational agents should maximize expected utility or choiceworthiness is intuitively plausible in many ordinary cases of decision-making under uncertainty. But it is less plausible in cases of extreme, low-probability risk (like Pascal's Mugging), and intolerably paradoxical in cases like the St. Petersburg and Pasadena games. In this paper I show that, under certain conditions, stochastic dominance reasoning can capture most of the plausible implications of expectational reasoning while avoiding most of its pitfalls. Specifically, given sufficient background uncertainty (...) about the choiceworthiness of one's options, many expectation-maximizing gambles that do not stochastically dominate their alternatives "in a vacuum" become stochastically dominant in virtue of that background uncertainty. But, even under these conditions, stochastic dominance will not require agents to accept options whose expectational superiority depends on sufficiently small probabilities of extreme payoffs. The sort of background uncertainty on which these results depend looks unavoidable for any agent who measures the choiceworthiness of her options in part by the total amount of value in the resulting world. At least for such agents, then, stochastic dominance offers a plausible general principle of choice under uncertainty that can explain more of the apparent rational constraints on such choices than has previously been recognized. (shrink)

This article demonstrates how white Christianity in urban South Africa is fated by demographic change. The repeal of apartheid in 1994 enacted some sociocultural changes in urban South Africa. The white population exited the city and town centres, followed by the black South Africans. The historical relationship of the government under the National Party (NP) and the Dutch Reformed Church (DRC) led to latters’ redundancy in the cities. The cultural development towards multiculturalism led to polycentric focus where the suburban (...) class='Hi'>peripheries and the city centres experience some form of socio- and cultural-economic developments. Two proposals are made to redress the situation. Firstly, a rethinking was suggested of the theology of the city, which should always demonstrate solidarity with the poor and the marginalised trapped within the decadent city culture. Secondly, a missiological refocus was suggested, which should pursue, embrace and include activities that are not paternalistic. (shrink)

What kind of animals are human beings? And how do our visions of the human shape our theories of social action and institutions? In Moral, Believing Animals>, Christian Smith advances a creative theory of human persons and culture that offers innovative, challenging answers to these and other fundamental questions in sociological, cultural, and religious theory. Smith suggests that human beings have a peculiar set of capacities and proclivities that distinguishes them significantly from other animals on this planet. Despite the (...) vast differences in humanity between cultures and across history, no matter how differently people narrate their lives and histories, there remains an underlying structure of human personhood that helps to order human culture, history, and narration. Drawing on important recent insights in moral philosophy, epistemology, and narrative studies, Smith argues that humans are animals who have an inescapable moral and spiritual dimension. They cannot avoid a fundamental moral orientation in life and this, says Smith, has profound consequences for how sociology must study human beings. (shrink)

Suppose you perform two actions. The first imposes a risk of harm that, on its own, would be excessive; but the second reduces the risk of harm by a corresponding amount. By pairing the two actions together to form a set of actions that is risk-neutral, can you thereby make your overall course of conduct permissible? This question is theoretically interesting, because the answer is apparently: sometimes Yes, sometimes No. It is also practically important, because it bears on the moral (...) status of practices such as offsetting personal greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. In this article we propose a criterion for distinguishing between cases where pairing risk-increasing and risk-reducing actions makes each action permissible, and those where it does not: the Principle of Aggregate Risk-Imposition. We work towards this by considering a range of examples that illustrate various illegitimate ways of pairing risk-increasing actions with risk-reducing ones, and asking what goes wrong in each case. We then use this criterion to evaluate GHG offsetting. Is offsetting a legitimate way of removing the risk-imposition associated with GHG emissions, or not? Controversially, we argue that this turns out to depend on the form that the offsetting takes. (shrink)

Contrary to a widespread belief, this book establishes that ontological and epistemological reductionism stand or fall together.

Spacetime as we know and love it is lost in most approaches to quantum gravity. For many of these approaches, as inchoate and incomplete as they may be, one of the main challenges is to relate what they take to be the fundamental non-spatiotemporal structure of the world back to the classical spacetime of GR. The present essay investigates how spacetime is lost and how it may be regained in one major approach to quantum gravity, loop quantum gravity.

Some moral theorists argue that innocent beneficiaries of wrongdoing may have special remedial duties to address the hardships suffered by the victims of the wrongdoing. These arguments generally aim to simply motivate the idea that being a beneficiary can provide an independent ground for charging agents with remedial duties to the victims of wrongdoing. Consequently, they have neglected contexts in which it is implausible to charge beneficiaries with remedial duties to the victims of wrongdoing, thereby failing to explore the limits (...) of the benefiting relation in detail. Our aim in this article is to identify a criterion to distinguish contexts in which innocent beneficiaries plausibly bear remedial duties to the victims of wrongdoing from those in which they do not. We argue that innocent beneficiaries incur special duties to the victims of wrongdoing if and only if receiving and retaining the benefits sustains wrongful harm. We develop this criterion by identifying and explicating two general modes of sustaining wrongful harm. We also show that our criterion offers a general explanation for why some innocent beneficiaries incur a special duty to the victims of wrongdoing while others do not. By sustaining wrongful harm, beneficiaries-with-duties contribute to wrongful harm, and we ordinarily have relatively stringent moral requirements against contributing to wrongful harm. On our account, innocently benefiting from wrongdoing _per se_ does not generate duties to the victims of wrongdoing. Rather, beneficiaries acquire such duties because their receipt and retention of the benefits of wrongdoing contribute to the persistence of the wrongful harm suffered by the victim. We conclude by showing that our proposed criterion also illuminates why there can be reasonable disagreement about whether beneficiaries have a duty to victims in some social contexts. (shrink)

Christian Georg Martin offers an argumentative reconstruction of the whole work, reading it as a critical ontology, namely as the attempt to abstract from all presuppositions and to immanently unfold conceptual determinations characterizing ...

Some moral theorists argue that being an innocent beneficiary of significant harms inflicted by others may be sufficient to ground special duties to address the hardships suffered by the victims, at least when it is impossible to extract compensation from those who perpetrated the harm. This idea has been applied to climate change in the form of the beneficiary-pays principle. Other philosophers, however, are quite sceptical about beneficiary pays. Our aim in this article is to examine their critiques. We conclude (...) that, while they have made important points, the principle remains worthy of further development and exploration. Our purpose in engaging with these critiques is constructive — we aim to formulate beneficiary pays in ways that would give it a plausible role in allocating the cost of addressing human-induced climate change, while acknowledging that some understandings of the principle would make it unsuitable for this purpose. (shrink)

This book examines the epistemic function of perception and the relation between language and conceptual thought, and provides new ways of conceptualizing the Buddhist defense of the reflexivity thesis of consciousness: namely, that each cognitive event is to be understood as involving a pre-reflective implicit awareness of its own occurrence.

Abstract:Organizational justice is a behavioral science concept that refers to the perception of fairness of the past treatment of the employees within an organization held by the employees of that organization. These subjective perceptions of fairness have been empirically shown to be related to 1) attitudinal changes in job satisfaction, organizational commitment and managerial trust beliefs; 2) behavioral changes in task performance activities and ancillary extra-task efforts to assist group members and improve group methods; 3) numerical changes in the quantity, (...) quality and efficiency of divisional outputs; and—though this is far more tentative—4) eventual changes in the competitive advantage and financial performance of the full organization. The authors propose that these constructs can be applied to all stakeholders, rather than just to the current employees of the firm, and that objective determinations of fairness by the managers can be related to subjective perceptions of fairness by the stakeholders that will result in the sequential series of attitudinal, behavioral and numerical changes that will lead to performance improvements. In short, the authors propose a normative stakeholder theory of the firm, based upon ethical principles, that will have testable descriptive hypotheses derived from the behavioral constructs. (shrink)

The first impacts of climate change have become evident and are expected to increase dramatically over the next decades. Thus, it becomes more and more pressing to decide who has to compensate those people who suffer from negative impacts of climate change but have neither contributed to the problem nor possess the resources to cope with the consequences. Since the frequently invoked Polluter Pays Principle cannot account for all climate-related harm, I will take a closer look at the much more (...) controversial Beneficiary Pays Principle. It is argued that, appropriately qualified, the Beneficiary Pays Principle can help to identify additional duty-bearers. Based on these results, I briefly comment on three different policy options to generate funds for compensation. (shrink)

This book explores Nietzsche's philosophical naturalism in its historical context, showing that his position is best understood against the background of encounters between neo-Kantianism and the life sciences in the nineteenth century. Analyzing most of Nietzsche's writings from the late 1860s onwards, Christian J. Emden reconstructs Nietzsche's naturalism and argues for a new understanding of his account of nature and normativity. Emden proposes historical reasons why Nietzsche came to adopt the position he did; his genealogy of values and his (...) account of a will to power are as much influenced by Kantian thought as they are by nineteenth-century debates on teleology, biological functions, and theories of evolution. This rich and wide-ranging study will be of interest to scholars and students of Nietzsche, the history of modern philosophy, intellectual history, and history of science. (shrink)

Orthodox Bayesianism is a highly idealized theory of how we ought to live our epistemic lives. One of the most widely discussed idealizations is that of logical omniscience: the assumption that an agent’s degrees of belief must be probabilistically coherent to be rational. It is widely agreed that this assumption is problematic if we want to reason about bounded rationality, logical learning, or other aspects of non-ideal epistemic agency. Yet, we still lack a satisfying way to avoid logical omniscience within (...) a Bayesian framework. Some proposals merely replace logical omniscience with a different logical idealization; others sacrifice all traits of logical competence on the altar of logical non-omniscience. We think a better strategy is available: by enriching the Bayesian framework with tools that allow us to capture what agents can and cannot infer given their limited cognitive resources, we can avoid logical omniscience while retaining the idea that rational degrees of belief are in an important way constrained by the laws of probability. In this paper, we offer a formal implementation of this strategy, show how the resulting framework solves the problem of logical omniscience, and compare it to orthodox Bayesianism as we know it. (shrink)

Some moral theorists argue that being an innocent beneficiary of significant harms inflicted by others may be sufficient to ground special duties to address the hardships suffered by the victims, at least when it is impossible to extract compensation from those who perpetrated the harm. This idea has been applied to climate change in the form of the beneficiary-pays principle. Other philosophers, however, are quite sceptical about beneficiary pays. Our aim in this article is to examine their critiques. We conclude (...) that, while they have made important points, the principle remains worthy of further development and exploration. Our purpose in engaging with these critiques is constructive — we aim to formulate beneficiary pays in ways that would give it a plausible role in allocating the cost of addressing human-induced climate change, while acknowledging that some understandings of the principle would make it unsuitable for this purpose. (shrink)

Longtermists claim that what we ought to do is mainly determined by how our actions might affect the very long-run future. A natural objection to longtermism is that these effects may be nearly impossible to predict — perhaps so close to impossible that, despite the astronomical importance of the far future, the expected value of our present actions is mainly determined by near-term considerations. This paper aims to precisify and evaluate one version of this epistemic objection to longtermism. To that (...) end, I develop two simple models for comparing ‘longtermist’ and ‘neartermist’ interventions, incorporating the idea that it is harder to make a predictable difference to the further future. These models yield mixed conclusions: if we simply aim to maximize expected value, and don’t mind premising our choices on minuscule probabilities of astronomical payoffs, the case for longtermism looks robust. But on some prima facie plausible empirical worldviews, the expectational superiority of longtermist interventions depends heavily on these ‘Pascalian’ probabilities. So the case for longtermism may depend either on plausible but non-obvious empirical claims or on a tolerance for Pascalian fanaticism. (shrink)

Rev. version of the author's Habilitationsschrift, Martin-Luther-Universitèat.

In this book, Christian Barry and Sanjay G. Reddy propose ways in which the international trading system can support poor countries in promoting the well-being of their peoples.

When are we responsible for addressing the acute deprivations of others beyond state borders? One widely held view is that we are responsible for addressing or preventing acute deprivations insofar as we have contributed to them or are contributing to bringing them about. But how should agents who endorse this “contribution principle” of allocating responsibility yet are uncertain whether or how much they have contributed to some problem conceive of their responsibilities with respect to it? Legal systems adopt formal norms (...) that set the burden of proof, the standard of proof, and the constraints on admissible evidence, which help courts to apply liability rules in cases where there are significant evidential uncertainties. Applying principles for determining ethical responsibilities, too, require such norms. Their content, however, should be much different from that found in criminal and even civil legal settings, where the moral costs of falsely holding those responsible for bringing about some harm are more worrisome. Instead of demanding that an agent be shown to have contributed to some deprivation “beyond a reasonable doubt,” we should express a willingness to err in favor of the acutely deprived subjects, demanding that even those agents who merely suspect that they may have substantially contributed to these deprivations undertake efforts to address them. (shrink)

If I am aware that p, say, that it is raining, is it the case that I must be aware that I am aware that p? Does introspective or object-awareness entail the apprehension of mental states as being of some kind or another: self-monitoring or intentional? That is, are cognitive events implicitly self-aware or is “self-awareness” just another term for metacognition? Not surprisingly, intuitions on the matter vary widely. This paper proposes a novel solution to this classical debate by reframing (...) the problem of self-knowledge in terms of the relation between phenomenal concepts and phenomenal knowledge. Concepts of consciousness such as “introspective awareness” and “reflexive self-awareness” are grounded in phenomenal experiences rather than physical events and processes. As such they yield a different kind of self-knowledge than what can be gained by applying externalist conceptual schemas to understanding the mind. I argue that Dharmakīrti’s theory of content can be seen as endorsing the efficacy of phenomenal experience as a vehicle for self-knowledge. (shrink)

Although actions of individuals do contribute to climate change, the question whether or not they, too, are morally obligated to reduce the GHG emissions in their responsibility has not yet been addressed sufficiently. First, I discuss prominent objections to such a duty. I argue that whether individuals ought to reduce their emissions depends on whether or not they exceed their fair share of emission rights. In a next step I discuss several proposals for establishing fair shares and also take practical (...) considerations into account. I conclude that individuals should not always be obliged to reduce their emissions to what is their fair share for they may depend on carbon-intensive structures. Instead, they have a Kantian imperfect duty to reduce their emissions ‘as far as can reasonably be demanded of them’. In addition, they should press governments to introduce proper regulation. At the end, I further specify both duties. (shrink)

In the climate ethics debate, scholars largely agree that individuals should promote institutions that ensure the reduction of greenhouse gas emissions. This paper aims to establish that there are individual duties beyond compliance with and promotion of institutions. Duties of individuals to reduce their emissions are often objected to by arguing that an individual’s emissions do not make a morally relevant difference. We challenge this argument from inconsequentialism in two ways. We first show why the argument also seems to undermine (...) the case for duties to promote institutions that the arguments’ proponents endorse. Second, we argue that individuals ought to cut emissions if they exceed their fair share of emissions entitlements and, by emitting, contribute to climate-related harm. In response to inconsequentialism, we specify the notion of ‘contribution’ via the so-called NESS theory, according to which an act is causally relevant for and contributes to an outcome if it is a Necessary Element of a Set of conditions that is Sufficient for the outcome. After refuting two objections to our approach, we conclude by discussing how to deal with possible conflicts between duties to promote institutions and to reduce one’s emissions. (shrink)

Many assert that affluent countries have contributed in the past to poverty in developing countries through wars of aggression and conquest, colonialism and its legacies, the imposition of puppet leaders, and support for brutal dictators and venal elites. Thomas Pogge has recently argued that there is an additional and, arguably, even more consequential way in which the affluent continue to contribute to poverty in the developing world. He argues that when people cooperate in instituting and upholding institutional arrangements that foreseeably (...) result in more severe or more widespread poverty or human rights deficits than would foreseeably result under feasible alternative arrangements, they are contributors to these harms. Because of this, he argues, they have stringent, contribution-based (or negative) duties to address this poverty. We will call this the ‘Feasible Alternatives Thesis' (FAT), and our aim in this article is to examine it critically. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Jesus the World-Protector:Eighteenth-Century Gelukpa Historians View Christianity1Michael J. SweetThe assumption that religion was so seamlessly woven into non-Western and preindustrial cultures that it was not even distinguished as a separate entity, let alone regarded as an object for study, has been a commonplace among Western scholars of religion for some decades.2 From this point of view, which can be broadly characterized as postmodernist and postcolonialist, the concept of religion (...) "is not a native category... it is a category imposed from outside... it is the other... colonialists who are solely responsible for the content of the term."3 This is a somewhat reductionistic and Eurocentric perspective that ignores the universal human capacity to empathically understand other belief systems.One counterexample to this school of thought is found in the works of three eighteenth-century religious historians, all of whom were learned monks in the Gelukpa tradition of Tibetan Buddhism: Gombojab (Mgon po Skyabs, late seventeenth century–after 1766),4 Sumba Khembo (Sum pa Mkhan po Yes shes dpal 'byor, 1704–1776), and Tuken (Thu'u Bkwan Blo bzang Chos kyi Nyi ma, 1737– 1802), authors of The History of Buddhism in China, The Auspicious Wish-Fulfilling Tree,5 and The Crystal Mirror,6 respectively. These scholars had clear conceptions of their own and other religious systems (Tib.: chos lugs), and compared to earlier Tibetan accounts they present relatively tolerant evaluations of other religious philosophies—for example, Chinese Buddhism, Daoism, and the Literati Tradition (Ru jiao, "Confucianism")—while asserting the superiority of the Gelukpa form of Tibetan Buddhism.7As a case in point, we will see how they describe and evaluate Christianity, a religion that was quite foreign to them and that they appear to have understood only imperfectly. Earlier Tibetan Buddhist religious histories, of which the best-known are the Blue Annals of 'Gos Lotsawa and Bu ston's "History of the Dharma," are immensely valuable sources, but they are more parochial in their range of interest than those of the eighteenth-century Tibeto-Mongol scholars.8 For the earlier historians Indo-Tibetan Buddhism was the only religious system worth serious consideration, and Chinese Buddhism, Indian non-Buddhist religious philosophies, Bon, [End Page 173] and Islam were dealt with in a polemical or (especially in the case of Islam) a frankly hostile fashion. Something changed in the eighteenth century that produced works closer to modern comparative religion than to medieval heresiography.A major motive for this shift was surely the triumph of the Manchu Qing dynasty, which by the mid-eighteenth century had incorporated Tibet and Mongolia definitively into its sphere. Thus, the horizon of the Tibeto-Mongol intelligentsia widened to include the vast Manchu empire, whose leadership in its turn was becoming increasingly aware of other Asian societies and of the European colonial powers. I believe it is significant that Sumba Khembo, Tuken, and Gombojab were all of Mongol ethnicity, the first two from Amdo and the last from Mongolia; they were able to combine an encyclopedic mastery of Tibetan Buddhist texts and ritual with the greater objectivity available to people stemming from the geographical and cultural periphery of that tradition. All three of them were exposed to the cosmopolitan world of imperial Beijing, where they had ample opportunity to meet followers of non-Buddhist religions of a wide range of ethnicities.9By the mid-eighteenth century there were four Catholic churches in Beijing, serving thousands of Chinese Christian converts. Dozens of European priests were employed by the imperial court as well.10 The prevailing syncretic view of the three major Chinese religious philosophies (sanjiao)—Buddhism, Daoism, and the Literati Tradition—as being mutually complementary,11 prevailed in the capital. This is the view that is approvingly cited by Tuken: "there are three great traditions (lugs srol) which clarify the ultimate nature of things, the Literati Tradition, Daoism, and Buddhism."12In turning to these scholars' treatment of Christianity, we find the earliest notice of this religion in Gombojab's History of Buddhism in China,13 written around the mid-1730s.14 Gombojab renders the name of Jesus in its traditional Chinese form of Yesu; he is called the World... (shrink)

Les descriptions de la fin des temps et de l'Apocalypse dans le Coran n'ont pas seulement nourri un messianisme temporel, annonçant les événements qui départagent les amis et les ennemis de Dieu. Le philosophe Christian Jambet présente ici une oeuvre du penseur shiite Mullâ Sadrâ qui, au XVIIe siècle," neutralise les conflits de la fin des temps en leur donnant un sens permanent et spirituel, qui en apaise l'urgence, en défait les prestiges temporels au profit du combat spirituel." L'essai (...) qui précède la traduction de L'Epître du rassemblement dévoile ainsi une éthique de la résurrection. Il éclaire également les influences néoplatonicienne et soufie qui parcourent cette oeuvre, dont Christian Jambet restitue ici toute la puissance. (shrink)

In this paper we explore what sacrifices you are morally required to make to save a child who is about to die in front of you. It has been argued that you would have very demanding duties to save such a child (or any adult who is in similar circumstance through no fault of their own, for that matter), and some examples have been presented to make this claim seem intuitively correct. Against this, we argue that you do not in (...) general have a moral requirement to bear more than moderate cost to save even a child who is just in front of you. Moreover, we explain why you have a much more demanding moral requirement in certain cases by appealing to the notions of undue risk and cost sharing. (shrink)

In this paper I will introduce a practical explication for the notion of expertise. At first, I motivate this attempt by taking a look on recent debates which display great disagreement about whether and how to define expertise in the first place. After that I will introduce the methodology of practical explications in the spirit of Edward Craig’s Knowledge and the state of nature along with some conditions of adequacy taken from ordinary and scientific language. This eventually culminates in the (...) respective explication of expertise according to which this term essentially refers to a certain kind of service-relation. This is why expertise should be considered as a predominantly social kind. This article will end up with a discussion of advantages and prima facie plausible objections against my account of expertise. (shrink)

This is a chapter of the planned monograph "Out of Nowhere: The Emergence of Spacetime in Quantum Theories of Gravity", co-authored by Nick Huggett and Christian Wüthrich and under contract with Oxford University Press. (More information at www<dot>beyondspacetime<dot>net.) This chapter introduces causal set theory and identifies and articulates a 'problem of space' in this theory.

ABSTRACT We have previously argued that there are forms of greenhouse gas offsetting for which, when one emits and offsets, one imposes no risk. Orri Stefansson objects that our argument fails to distinguish properly between the people who stand to be harmed by one’s emissions and the people who stand to be benefited by one’s offsetting. We reply by emphasizing the difference between acting with a probability of making a difference to the distribution of harm and acting in a way (...) that worsen’s someone’s prospect. (shrink)

Individuality and collectivity are central concepts in sociological inquiry. Incorporating cultural history, social theory, urban and economic sociology, Borch proposes an innovative rethinking of these key terms and their interconnections via the concept of the social avalanche. Drawing on classical sociology, he argues that while individuality embodies a tension between the collective and individual autonomy, certain situations, such as crowds and other moments of group behaviour, can subsume the individual entirely within the collective. These events, or social avalanches, produce an (...) experience of being swept away suddenly and losing one's sense of self. Cities are often on the verge of social avalanches, their urban inhabitants torn between de-individualising external pressure and autonomous self-presentation. Similarly, Borch argues that present-day financial markets, dominated by computerised trading, abound with social avalanches and the tensional interplay of mimesis and autonomous decision-making. Borch argues that it is no longer humans but fully automated algorithms that avalanche in these markets. (shrink)