Many liberal political philosophers hold that the state should not impose or even promote any particular conception of the good life or human flourishing. It should not, for instance, enact laws and policies designed to elevate citizens' tastes, to refine their sensibilities or to perfect their characters. Instead, the state should restrict itself to maintaining a fair framework of rights and opportunities within which all citizens can pursue their own beliefs about what constitutes a good life. Against this backdrop, (...) class='Hi'>Collis Tahzib develops a version of perfectionist political philosophy. Whereas previous perfectionists have argued that the promotion of flourishing ways of life is permissible or legitimate, Tahzib casts perfectionism as a doctrine of justice. On this view, the implementation of laws and policies designed to promote sound ideals of the good life--ideals such as moral, intellectual and artistic excellence--is not merely a legitimate complement to justice but an essential constituent of justice. Over the years, perfectionism has faced various objections: that it is premised on values and judgements that are controversial within modern pluralistic societies; that it is unduly restrictive of freedom or autonomy; that it treats citizens as if they are children, unable to run their own lives; that it expresses the meddlesome mentality of a village busybody; that it mistakenly assumes that there are objective truths about human flourishing; and that it risks the abuse of power by incompetent, overzealous or corrupt state officials. These ideas represent some of the deepest, most vibrant and most powerful strains in liberal thought. In defending perfectionism against these charges, the arguments in A Perfectionist Theory of Justice make a novel and important contribution to longstanding debates about the philosophical foundations of liberalism. (shrink)

Public reason liberals hold that laws and institutions must be in some sense justifiable to all reasonable citizens. Different public reason liberals have developed different accounts of the constituency of reasonable citizens to whom justification is owed. Recently, a number of theorists have suggested that public reason views with less “sectarian” accounts of reasonableness are in one way better than public reason views with more “sectarian” accounts of reasonableness. Yet, despite being used to tremendous effect to motivate particular theories of (...) public reason, this anti-sectarianism desideratum has not received focused treatment, and hardly any detailed arguments have been offered for it. In this paper, I fill this gap by considering the case for the anti-sectarian desideratum. I find that there is no good reason to regard less sectarian public reason views as in one way better than more sectarian views. (shrink)

Philosophy &Public Affairs, Volume 47, Issue 2, Page 144-178, Spring 2019.

According to public reason liberalism, the laws and institutions of society must be in some sense justifiable to all reasonable citizens. But why care about justifiability to reasonable citizens? Recently, Gerald Gaus has developed a novel and sophisticated defence of public justification. Gaus argues that our everyday reactive attitudes of resentment and indignation presuppose public justification and that these reactive attitudes are essential to social life. In this article, I challenge the first premise by considering cases in which agents are (...) liable to the reactive attitudes for violating moral rules that they had no sufficient reason to endorse, and I challenge the second premise by drawing on recent work on moral responsibility that suggests that social life would still be possible, and perhaps even improved, in the absence of the reactive attitudes. Finally, I question whether the reactive attitudes are even the kind of thing that could justify public reason. (shrink)

Public reason liberalism holds that laws and policies must be justifiable to all reasonable citizens. Recently, David Enoch has offered an impressive and influential argument against the epistemological commitments of public reason liberalism on the grounds that they are ‘highly controversial’. After setting out this argument (Sections I and II), I show how its central claim is ambiguous between two senses of ‘controversial’. This gives rise to a dilemma: either Enoch's claim is that the relevant epistemological commitments are controversial in (...) the sense of being subject to controversy amongst actual people, in which case this is true but not troubling for public reason theorists; or the claim is that the relevant commitments are controversial in the sense of being subject to controversy amongst reasonable people, in which case this simply begs the question against public reason theorists (Section III). I then defend each horn of the dilemma against objections (Sections IV and V). I conclude by generalizing this dilemma, showing how it defuses not just Enoch's argument but also a number of other arguments frequently made in the literature on public reason liberalism (Section VI). (shrink)

According to public reason liberalism, the laws and institutions of society must be in some sense justifiable to all reasonable citizens. But why care about justifiability to reasonable citizens? R...

According to public reason liberalism, the state must abide by a principle of public justification. This principle holds that the laws and institutions of society must be in some sense justifiable to, or acceptable to, all reasonable citizens. But why accept the public justification principle? Recently, Kevin Vallier has developed an interesting and empirically informed argument from social trust to public justification. Sustaining a system of social trust within diverse and large‐scale societies, argues Vallier, requires adherence to the public justification (...) principle. After summarizing Vallier’s argument (Section 1), I argue that Vallier’s defence of public justification does not succeed because there are alternative conceptions of democratic discourse and decision‐making that lack a public justification principle yet that could still sustain social trust (Section 2). I then defend this argument against two objections: that alternatives to public justification would produce less social trust (Section 3) and that such alternatives would not produce social trust in the right way (Section 4). (shrink)

Up against capacity‐based approaches to animal ethics, Cora Diamond has put the idea of animals as our fellow creatures. The aim of this article is to explore the implications of this concept for our treatment of fish. Fish have traditionally been placed at the borders or even outside of the moral community, although there is growing evidence that they have perceptual and social capacities comparable to animals that are considered morally significant. Given that a fellow creature's approach is not primarily (...) concerned with capacities, fish may pose a challenge: Can fish be seen as our fellow creatures, and if so, on what grounds? In exploring these questions, we defend Diamond against Jeff McMahan's critique of her account and its implications that the fellow creature‐concept is reducible to either capacities or special relationships and leaves no room for argument‐based moral reform. We suggest that moral attention is key to grasping the moral significance of fish and discuss how scientific research can support such attention. In so doing, we demonstrate how Diamond's approach to animal ethics provides a viable alternative to the dominant animal ethics approaches. Finally, we indicate how this approach can be useful for discussions on industrial fish farming. (shrink)

ABSTRACT It used to be said that shame culture waned in early modernity, but there is a growing body of historiography on the vital role that recognition and the opinion of others continued to play. Honour mattered; for some it was the mark and the maker of your true self. While philosophers like Hobbes, Locke, Mandeville, Hume, Smith, and Rousseau disagreed in their evaluations of the phenomenon, they were united in thinking that the great engine of recognition whirred like furious (...) clockwork through human society. When one listens to voices from the margins of power, however, to formerly enslaved black women and men, and white women, one hears a different story – that the machine is broken. I argue that, albeit from incomparable positions, they articulate a theory of misrecognition in the face of systematic power. Sensitive to the entanglements of epistemology and naturalised inequality, they offer a politics of vision that deconstructs the punitive lenses of gender and race which render people invisible and misunderstood, and in so doing they try to write themselves into view. They offer an account of the mysterious intractability of hegemonic ways of seeing that poses a challenge to both the putatively laissez-faire economy of recognition of their enlightened contemporaries, and to the emancipatory teleology of modern recognition theorists. (shrink)

There are better and worse ways to blame others. Likewise, there are better and worse ways to blame yourself. And though there is an ever-expanding literature on the norms that govern our blaming practices, relatively little attention has been paid to the norms that govern expressions of self-blame. In this essay, I argue that when we blame ourselves, we ought not do so privately. Rather, we should, ceteris paribus, express our self-blame to those we have wronged. I then explore how (...) this norm can contribute to our understanding of the ethics of self-blame as well as the nature of blameworthiness itself. (shrink)

Auf den ersten Blick haben Hannah Arendt und Michel Foucault kaum etwas gemein. Tatsächlich beziehen sie sich jedoch auf die identischen Topoi der Philosophiegeschichte - wenn ihre Auslegungen der Quellen auch denkbar verschieden sind. Als Grund hierfür bestimmt Hannah Holme die komplementären Perspektiven der beiden, die sie als Aneignungen des heideggerschen Sorgebegriffs deutet: die ethische Sorge um sich Foucaults und die politische Sorge um die Welt Arendts. Am Ende steht ein Plädoyer für eine Verbindung des machtkritischen Ethos der (...) Sorge um sich mit der Macht des politischen Handelns, das der Sorge um die Welt unterstellt ist. (shrink)

We explore multi-scale relations in artificial intelligence (AI) use in order to identify difficulties with coordinating relations between users, machine learning (ML) processes, and “sociobuilt contexts”—specifically in terms of their applications to medical technologies and decisions. We begin by analyzing a recent COVID-19 machine learning case study in order to present the difficulty of traversing the detailed causal topography of “sociobuilt contexts.” We propose that the adequate representation of the interactions between social and built processes that occur on many scales (...) ought to drive interdisciplinary approaches for ML modification. Next, we describe ML algorithm development as a process that is partly dependent on methodological stabilization for reliability and partly on coordinating relations. In the coordination between user, ML process, and sociobuilt contexts, we propose that new methods can be explored that promote the inclusion of patients and communities for the purpose of cross-checking portions of the ML process. Finally, we suggest that the advantages of responsible innovation emerge through the iterative entanglement of ethical, methodological, and ontological considerations within the broader conceptual infrastructure of epistemic responsibility. (shrink)

I defend the normativity of meaning against recent objections by arguing for a new interpretation of the ‘ought’ relevant to meaning. Both critics and defenders of the normativity thesis have understood statements about how an expression ought to be used as either prescriptive or semantic. I propose an alternative view of the ‘ought’ as conveying the primitively normative attitudes speakers must adopt towards their uses if they are to use the expression with understanding.

A number of philosophers, including Kant, Kripke, Boghossian, Gibbard and Brandom, can be read as endorsing the view that concepts are normative. I distinguish two versions of that view: a strong, non-naturalistic version which identifies concepts with norms or rules (Kant, Kripke), and a weaker version, compatible with naturalism, on which the normativity of concepts amounts only to their application’s being governed by norms or rules (Boghossian, Gibbard, Brandom). I consider a problem for the strong version: grasp of a rule (...) seems to require grasp of the concepts which constitute the content of that rule, so how can we explain concept acquisition without falling into regress? I offer a Kantian response, on which grasp of a rule does not require antecedent grasp of concepts, but still involves the recognition of normativity in one’s rule-governed behavior. I distinguish the normativity of concepts, so understood, from the normativity associated with truth or warrant. Keywords: concepts, normativity, rules, Kant, Kripke, Boghossian, Gibbard, Brandom. (shrink)

This new translation is an extremely welcome addition to the continuing Cambridge Edition of Kant’s works. English-speaking readers of the third Critique have long been hampered by the lack of an adequate translation of this important and difficult work. James Creed Meredith’s much-reprinted translation has charm and elegance, but it is often too loose to be useful for scholarly purposes. Moreover it does not include the first version of Kant’s introduction, the so-called “First Introduction,” which is now recognized as indispensable (...) for an understanding of the work. Werner Pluhar’s more recent translation, which does include the First Introduction, is highly accurate when it confines itself to rendering Kant’s German. However, it is often more of a reconstruction than a translation, containing so many interpretative interpolations that it is often difficult to separate out Kant’s original text from the translator’s contributions. Paul Guyer and Eric Matthews have provided a translation that compares to or exceeds Pluhar’s in its literal approach to the German, but that confines all interpretative material to footnotes and endnotes, so that the text itself, with all its unclarities and ambiguities, lies open to view. In addition, Guyer, as editor of the volume, has provided a great deal of valuable supplementary material. This includes an introduction with an outline of the work and details of the history of its composition and publication, and a wealth of endnotes offering clarifications of the text, background information, and, most strikingly, many references to related passages in Kant’s voluminous writings, particularly in connection with Kant’s earlier writings related to aesthetics. The edition also records differences among the first three editions of the work, and—of particular interest—erasures from and additions to Kant’s manuscript of the First Introduction. Although the introduction and endnotes reflect interpretative views that are sometimes disputable, this supplementary material makes the present edition into a valuable resource even for those able to read the text in German. (shrink)

Imagination comes with varying degrees of sensory accompaniment. Sometimes imagining is phenomenologically lean (cognitive imagining); at other times, imagining involves or requires sensory presentation such as mental imagery (sensory imagining). Philosophers debate whether contradictions can obtain in fiction and whether cognitive imagining is robust enough to explain our engagement with fiction. In this paper, I defend the Principle of Poetic License by arguing for the Permissive View of fictional truth: we can have fictions in which a contradiction is true, everything (...) is true, or nothing is true. I show that imagination-based worries about impossible, unlimited, and empty fictions can be shown to be about sensory imagination and that sensory imagination isn’t necessary for fictional truth. (shrink)

This article examines the inherently ethical nature of resource allocation in policing. Decision-makers must make trade-offs between values such as efficiency vs. equity, individual vs. collective benefit, and adopt principles of distribution which allocate limited resources fairly. While resource allocation in healthcare has been the subject of extensive discussion in both practitioner and academic literature, ethical resource allocation in policing has received almost no attention. We first consider whether approaches used in healthcare settings would be suitable for policing. Whilst there (...) are some high-level similarities in the relevant ethical considerations and processes—such as aiming for efficient and equitable resource deployment—there are also fundamental differences between the two settings, which we argue necessitate a different approach. These differences include: (1) greater diversity and incommensurability of the benefits of policing, (2) more frequent non-linearity in returns on policing investment, (3) greater “ethical divisibility” (permissible scaling down) of programs in policing, (4) a requirement to assess “need” for policing resources at the collective (rather than individual) level, and (5) clearer primacy of equity considerations in policing. Having drawn out the implications of these differences, we sketch some tentative proposals for ethical resource allocation in policing. (shrink)

So many of us believe that we are free to shape our own destiny. But what if free will doesn't exist? What if our lives are largely predetermined, hardwired in our brains - and our choices over what we eat, who we fall in love with, even what we believe are not real choices at all? Neuroscience is challenging everything we think we know about ourselves, revealing how we make decisions and form our own reality, unaware of the role of (...) our unconscious minds. Leading neuroscientist Hannah Critchlow draws vividly from everyday life and other experts in their field to show the extraordinary potential, as well as dangers, which come with being able to predict our likely futures - and looking at how we can alter what's in store for us. (shrink)

Tracing the many aesthetic, philosophical, and technological parallels between cinema and astronomy, Hannah Goodwin demonstrates how filmmakers have used cosmic imagery and themes to respond to the twentieth century's moments of existential dread. As our outlook on the future continues to change, Stardust illuminates the promise of cinema to bear witness to humanity's fragile existence within the vast expanse of the universe.

1. Dioniso, Apollo, Eleusi, Orfeo, Museo, Iperborei, Enigma -- 2. Epimenide, Ferecide, Talete, Anassimandro, Annassimene, Onomacrito (2. ed., 1994) -- 3. Eraclito (2a ed., 1982).

This book brings together science fiction, history, visual art, and exploration to reframe the relationship among climate, crisis, and creation. A Year Without a Winter presents stories by four renowned science fiction authors alongside critical essays, extracts from Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, and dispatches from extreme geographies.

The study examines the employment experience of workers with intellectual disability in the hotel sector in Australia. Through a qualitative case study, we interviewed managers and WWID, and held focus groups with supervisors and colleagues at three hotels. We have used the theoretical framework of corporate social responsibility to investigate HR practices that create an ethical climate which promote authentic work experiences for WWID. The study found that participative work practices provide evidence of how WWID fit in at the workplace. (...) When workers are confronted with work-related anxieties, the pragmatic nature of existential authenticity becomes a reality. Our findings reveal that managing workers ethically can lead to more authentic work experiences. In turn, this may promote social inclusion of WWID and improve their reported well-being. (shrink)

Debates about empathy's role in morality are notoriously complex. On the one hand, proponents of empathy argue that it plays a crucial role in the process of making moral judgments, moral motivation, moral development, and the cultivation of meaningful personal relationships. On the other hand, critics of empathy warn that it is especially susceptible to a number of morally troubling biases and motivational shortcomings. Yet there is little consensus about what empathy is or what it might be good for from (...) a moral point of view. As a result, critics and proponents of empathy alike often wind up talking past each other and debates about empathy's role in morality reach an impasse. This paper proposes a typology of empathy's affective, cognitive, and motivational dimensions and the different forms that empathy can take depending on the nature and degree of prominence of these. It argues that different forms of empathy are well equipped to handle some moral tasks as well as ill‐equipped to handle others. Its aim in doing so is to clarify an otherwise conceptually thorny set of debates and to amplify future research on empathy and its role in the moral life. (shrink)

In this article, I aim to do two things: first, introduce Juche, the official philosophy of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (“North Korea”), and second, defend Juche against Alzo David-West’s allegation that it is a nonsensical philosophy. I organize David-West’s complaints into two major strands—that Juche’s axiom is too vague to be of philosophical use and that Juche makes too stark a distinction between human vs. everything else—and offer responses to both strands. My goal isn’t to defend the regime, (...) but to present its ideology in the most charitable way so its merits and demerits can be seen more clearly in future engagements. (shrink)

Thomas Hobbes was an English philosopher who was roiled by the bloodshed and turmoil of the English Civil War. During this period of ceaseless in-fighting, he wrote his masterpiece, Leviathan, which established the foundation for Western political thought. His work has inspired both hate and awe, as he reveals the darker side of human nature and the value of authority. Though he claims man's nature is inherently competitive and selfish, he also shows us how to utilize these traits to our (...) advantage to flourish, be fearless, and free. (shrink)

Describing rabbinic reasoning as a rational response to experience. Hashkes combines insights from the analytic philosophy of Wittgenstein, Quine, and Davidson with the semiotics of Peirce to construe knowledge as systematic reasoning occurring within a community of inquiry. Her reading of the works of Emmanuel Levinas and Jean-Luc Marion allows her to create a philosophical bridge between a discourse of God and a discourse of reason. This synthesis of analytic philosophy and pragmatism, hermeneutics and theology provides Hashkes with a sophisticated (...) tool to understand Rabbinic Judaism. It also makes this study both unique and path breaking in contemporary Jewish philosophy and Rabbinic thought. (shrink)

In a 2020 article in Analysis, Lippert-Rasmussen argues that the moral equality account of the hypocrite’s lack of standing to blame fails. To object to this account, Lippert-Rasmussen considers the contrary of hypocrisy: hypercrisy. In this article, I show that if hypercrisy is a problem for the moral equality account, it is also a problem for Lippert-Rasmussen’s own account of why hypocrites lack standing to blame. I then reflect on the hypocrite’s and hypercrite’s standing to self-blame, which reveals that the (...) challenge hypercrisy poses for accounts of standing is different from the challenge Lippert-Rasmussen articulates. (shrink)