Johannes von Kries (1853-1928) left a fascinating work: As a physiologist, he had a lasting influence on research into colour perception. As a philosopher, he formulated a theory of probability which was received not only in philosophy (Hans Reichenbach, Ludwig Wittgenstein), but also in physics (Ludwig Boltzmann, Max Planck), jurisprudence (Gustav Radbruch), sociology (Alfred Schütz, Max Weber), economics (John Maynard Keynes), and belles-lettres (Robert Musil). This anthology reconstructs some central lines of reception. It contexts Kries' work in the history of (...) ideas and examines its topicality. --Page 4 cover. (shrink)

Max Weber ist ein Klassiker der Kultur- und Sozialwissenschaften. Sein Werk gehört weltweit zum Kernbestand von Forschung und Lehre, und dies gilt besonders für seine methodologischen Schriften, denen auch 100 Jahre nach ihrer Publikation nachhaltige Aufmerksamkeit beschieden ist. Allerdings gibt es immer noch kein einvernehmliches Verständnis von Webers Position. Der Grund dafür liegt in der mangelnden Aufarbeitung der Quellen. Viele wichtige Autoren, deren Werke Weber rezipierte, sind in Vergessenheit geraten. Sie in Erinnerung zu rufen, ist dringend notwendig, um seine Wissenschaftslehre (...) in ihrer ganzen Komplexität zu verstehen. 0Das vorliegende Sammelwerk leistet einen Beitrag zur Schließung dieser Forschungslücke. Es rekonstruiert den Denkraum des späten 19. und frühen 20. Jahrhunderts, in dem sich Weber bewegte, und zeigt anhand von Studien zu ausgewählten Autoren, wie umfassend und interdisziplinär sein Denken tatsächlich war. Dabei werden nicht nur Autoren aus den Kultur- und Sozialwissenschaften berücksichtigt, sondern auch solche aus den Naturwissenschaften, denn Weber war mit dem Fortschritt dieser Disziplinen ebenfalls vertraut. (shrink)

In this article I argue that contractarian theory is a fruitful approach for dealing with questions of legitimacy in light of globalisation. I try to point out that impaired conditions for providing collective goods in nation-states do not call the legitimacy of globalisation into question, even if the provision of such goods meets with consent amongst the citizens of the nation-state. The need to raise taxes as a consequence of the transfer of mobile resources to other countries can indicate the (...) existence of state activities which lack legitimacy from the contractarian perspective. However, the impossibility of applying the exclusion principle in providing collective goods indeed entails legitimatory problems of globalisation. In this respect, a need for international agreements exists. Nevertheless, unilateral attempts by nation-states to withraw the domestic economy from global influences can interfere with the welfare of other collectives and they therefore lack legitimacy, a moral consequence which is in danger of being neglected even from a contractarian approach. (shrink)

The constraint against harming people in order to save yourself and others seems stronger than the constraint against harming people as a consequence of saving yourself and others. The reduced constraint against acting in one type of case is often justified with reference to the intentions of the agent or to the fact that she does not use the people she harms as a means. In this article I offer a victim-centered account. I argue that the circumstances in which the (...) people to be harmed find themselves are significant in distinguishing morally between two instances of harming. (shrink)

Do members of democratic societies have a moral right that others not actively prevent them from engaging in wrongdoing? Many political theorists think that they do. “It is a feature of democratic government,” Michael Walzer writes, “that the people have a right to act wrongly—in much the same way that they have a right to act stupidly”. Of course, advocates of a democratic right to do wrong may believe that the scope of this right is limited. A majority in a (...) democratic society, for example, may not have a moral right against being prevented from enslaving or arbitrarily disenfranchising a minority, or if it were to launch a wrongful aggressive war against another society. But many join Walzer in asserting that it would be wrong in principle to intervene to prevent some wrongs that democratic societies would inflict. This thesis, which we call the democratic right to do wrong thesis (DRTDWT), can be formulated as follows: DRTDWT – For democratic societies A and agents B, there is a class of wrongful policies and institutions X, such that if A chooses to implement members of this class pursuant to democratic procedures, B has a duty not to actively intervene to prevent the implementation of X. Our goal in this essay is to show that the DRTDWT should be rejected. (shrink)

: When suggesting that we—the affluent in the developed world—are legitimate targets of defensive force due to our contribution to global poverty one is likely to be countered by one of two strategies. The first denies that we contribute to global poverty. The second seems to affirm that we contribute, and even that we have stringent contribution-based duties to address this poverty, but denies that such contribution makes forcible resistance permissible. Those in this second group employ several argumentative strategies. In (...) this paper I investigate these strategies for denying the force-related implication of contribution to poverty. I do not argue for political violence or for the permissibility of targeting the affluent, I merely investigate a conditional: if contribution to global poverty generates stringent duties to address it, then this contribution implies permission on the part of the victims to defend themselves with force, or for third parties to use force on their behalf. (shrink)

Suppose two people are about to drown. We are in a position to save only one, so the other will have to die. One of the two has just culpably killed an innocent person, but has no intention of killing anybody else and there is no reason to expect that he will. Everything else being equal, should we give them an equal chance of being saved by flipping a coin? In this paper I argue that we should not. I argue (...) that the implications of a person's moral culpability for (recent or prospective) harm to a particular victim should transfer to other conflict situations in which the wrongdoer might find him or herself. This requires establishing the extent to which a person's contributing to harming another person — and his moral culpability for that harm — impinges on our decision making in situations where it is possible only to assist either the wrongdoer or some other person that is not his victim. (shrink)

Two conditions guiding permissible use of force in self-defence are proportionality and success. According to the proportionality condition the means used to prevent an attack can be permissible only if they are proportional to the interest at stake.1 According to the success condition, otherwise impermissible acts can be justified under the right to self-defence only if they are likely to succeed in preventing the perceived threat.2 These requirements should not always be interpreted narrowly. Sometimes people are permitted to kill culpable (...) aggressors in order to avoid a non-lethal harm. Sometimes people are permitted to take up arms to defend themselves against culpable aggressors they have little or no hope of .. (shrink)

At the heart of the current debate about immigration we find a conflict of convictions. Many people seem to believe that a country has a right to decide who to let in and who to keep out, but quite often they appear equally committed to the view that it is morally wrong to expel someone from within the borders of their country if that would seriously jeopardise the person in question. While the first conviction leads to stricter border controls in (...) an attempt to prevent would‐be immigrants from entering the country illegally, the latter conviction ensures that aliens with a legitimate claim on protection will not be removed forcibly. It is not strange, therefore, that the task of pinning down a morally sound immigration policy is such an elusive enterprise.In this paper I take it for granted that no electorate would be prepared to accept the kind of policy they ought to, and that we in consequence will continue to let in as few immigrants as is currently the case. Given this constraint I argue against two common assumptions concerning a viable immigration policy. First, granted that certain conditions are satisfied, professional smugglers should not face legal sanctions for bringing asylum seekers to a potential host country. Second, countries that limit immigration should not treat people seeking family reunion preferentially or on a par with other immigrants, but rather act so as to maximise the number of refugees allowed to enter. (shrink)

Two conditions guiding permissible use of force in self-defence are proportionality and success. According to the proportionality condition the means used to prevent an attack can be permissible only if they are proportional to the interest at stake. According to the success condition, otherwise impermissible acts can be justified under the right to self-defence only if they are likely to succeed in preventing the perceived threat. These requirements should not always be interpreted narrowly. Sometimes people are permitted to kill culpable (...) aggressors in order to avoid a non-lethal harm. Sometimes people are permitted to take up arms to defend themselves against culpable aggressors they have little or no hope of defeating. (shrink)

Mit dem Entwurf eines merkantilistischen, autarken und sozialen Ständestaates liefert Fichte eine der geschlossensten Konkretisierungen seiner rechtspolitischen Ideen, nämlich das erste Modell einer sozialistischen Planwirtschaft. Zugleich berührt das Werk ein Kernproblem von Fichtes praktischer Philosophie: Wie läßt sich die freie Selbsttätigkeit der Einzelnen mit der alle auf ein Ideal verpflichtenden Hoheit des Vernunftsstaates vereinigen?

In this paper I ponder the moral status of conditional threats, in particular the extent to which a threatened party would be permitted to use (lethal) defensive force. I first investigate a mugger case before turning briefly to the more complicated issue of national defence in the face of an invading army. One should not exaggerate the level of protection people under threat owe their conditioned killers simply because what is extorted is of little value. After all, either the conditional (...) threat is willing to kill for something she has no claim on at all, or, if she has a just claim on it - or good reason to believe that she has - she is willing to kill to (re)acquire something of not much worth. In both cases the moral culpability of the conditional threat could be seen as reducing her claim on protection from harm. (shrink)

Thomas Pogge argues that affluent people in the developing world have contribution-based duties to help protect the poor. And it follows from Pogge's most general thesis that affluent people are contributing to most, if not all, instances of global poverty. In this article I explore two problems with Pogge's general thesis. First, I investigate a typical way in which affluent people would be contributing to global poverty according to Pogge: that affluent countries use their superior bargaining power to get poor (...) countries to accept trading schemes that are unduly favourable to the affluent. I suggest that this type of relation is best understood as exploitation, and that Pogge's general thesis is better understood as a thesis about how affluent people exploit poor people rather than about how they contribute to poverty. Second, I argue that the exploitation does not have the normative content of doing harm. Although exploiting people is often morally wrong, it is not at all clear how demanding exploitation-based duties are. (shrink)

At the heart of the current debate about immigration we find a conflict of convictions. Many people seem to believe that a country has a right to decide who to let in and who to keep out, but quite often they appear equally committed to the view that it is morally wrong to expel someone from within the borders of their country if that would seriously jeopardise the person in question. While the first conviction leads to stricter border controls in (...) an attempt to prevent would‐be immigrants from entering the country illegally, the latter conviction ensures that aliens with a legitimate claim on protection will not be removed forcibly. It is not strange, therefore, that the task of pinning down a morally sound immigration policy is such an elusive enterprise.In this paper I take it for granted that no electorate would be prepared to accept the kind of policy they ought to, and that we in consequence will continue to let in as few immigrants as is currently the case. Given this constraint I argue against two common assumptions concerning a viable immigration policy. First, granted that certain conditions are satisfied, professional smugglers should not face legal sanctions for bringing asylum seekers to a potential host country. Second, countries that limit immigration should not treat people seeking family reunion preferentially or on a par with other immigrants, but rather act so as to maximise the number of refugees allowed to enter. (shrink)

Critical Rationalism has become an influential philosophy in many areas including a great number of scientific disciplines. Yet only few studies have been devoted to the role of the philosophy of Sir Karl Popper in the vast field of education. This volume undertakes to fill this gap. Leading scholars in the educational science and in the philosophy of education have critically written for this volume in an attempt to elaborate Popper's methodological and socio-political views and confront them with a globally (...) relevant spectrum of scientific objectives and cultural values. Among the topics discussed are moral values, education for freedom and its consequences for the student, and the critical attitude in political education. Attention is also paid to the historiography of this significant philosophical movement. Regarding pedagogical research, the empirical paradigm, the falsificatory approach to educational research, the complex relationship between educational theory and practice as well as the problem of value-neutrality in educational science are objects of critical analysis. (shrink)

The DDE yields counterintuitive verdicts about certain cases: it may deem it permissible to kill a certain number of people when they are not used as means and their death is not intended, but deny that killing fewer of these people is permissible if that requires intending their death, or using them as means. To accommodate the judgement that we may kill the lesser number in such cases, supporters of the DDE may appeal to Frances Kamm's Principle of Secondary Permissibility. (...) The principle says, roughly, that if it is permissible to kill n people when not intending their death, or using them as means, then it is permissible to kill n − m people in a way that does involve intending their deaths, or using them as means, as ‘secondarily permissible’. In this article I argue that appealing to the PSP to solve the puzzling cases of the DDE is generally misleading and that it fails in particular cases. The crux of my argument is that the PSP allows killings that go against the grain of the DDE. (shrink)

In this book the author gives a broad overview of different areas of research in nonmonotonic reasoning, and presents some new results and ideas based on his research. The guiding principles are: clarification of the different research activities in the area, which have sometimes been undertaken independently of each other; and appreciation of the fact that these research activities often represent different means to the same ends, namely sound theoretical foundations and efficient computation. The book begins with a discussion of (...) the various types of nonmonotonic reasoning, their applications and their logics. Theorem proving techniques for these logics are also described. The following chapters deal with formulations of nonmonotonic inheritance, and nonmonotonic reasoning based on nonmonotonic rules. The final chapter discusses the achievements in the field in the light of the Yale shooting example. The book will be welcomed by researchers in theoretical computer science and artificial intelligence. (shrink)

A riddle in the ethics of war concerns whether lethal defensive force may be justifiably used against aggressing soldiers who are morally innocent.

I explain the asymmetry between innocent aggressors and their (innocent) victims, and attempt to separate justified and unjustified defensive force when both parties are innocent. I propose the principle of initiating behaviour, which states that: ‘In order for one person to be justified in using defensive force the other party must initiate the apparently threatening behaviour, but the defendant’s interpretation of that behaviour, as being threatening, would have to be reasonable.’ We can thereby maintain the view that there is a (...) significant relation between an act being justified and which party ought eventually to be given priority in a conflict situation. If we know that an act is justified, we know that we have to give preference to its agent when there is a choice between imposing equal harm on him or her and his or her victim. (shrink)

Philosophers have had trouble defending the common sense view that it is permissible to impose significant cost on an innocent person who is about to harm you to prevent the harm from occurring. In this paper, I argue that such harm can be justified if one pays attention to the moral significance of imposing a cost on others. The constraint against harming people who give rise to cost by their presence or movements is weaker than the constraint against harming bystanders. (...) Moreover, I argue that people who give rise to cost have a duty to take on some of that cost to help protect the person under threat. (shrink)

ABSTRACT In 1975 John Harris envisaged a survival lottery to redistribute organs from one to a greater number in order to reduce number of deaths as a consequence of organ failure. In this paper I reach a conclusion about when running a survival lottery is permissible by looking at the reason prospective participants have for allowing the procedure from a contractual perspective. I identify three versions of the survival lottery. In a National Lottery, everyone within a jurisdiction is a candidate (...) for being a donor for everyone else, disregarding all differences between individuals' eventual possibility of needing an organ. In a Group Specific Lottery, it is a question of running a lottery among members of a specific group who share the same probability of getting organ failure. In a Local Lottery one randomises among individuals who are already in need of a new organ but who happen to be compatible and in need of different organs. While the first is vulnerable to considerations of fairness, it is difficult to perceive a feasible way to implement the second option that does not come with a host of unwelcome consequences. I argue, however, that it is permissible to run Local Lotteries. (shrink)