While having a breast reconstruction, women have certain expectations about their future breasted bodies. The aim of this paper is to describe and analyze these expectations in the process of reconstruction. By applying a qualitative, phenomenological study within a longitudinal research design, this paper acknowledges the temporarily complex, contextualized, embodied, and subjective nature of the phenomenon of expectations. The analysis identified expectations regarding three different aspects of women’s embodiment: their gazed body, their capable/practical body, and their felt body. After reconstruction, (...) these women try to reconfigure—adjust, level or retrospectively rewrite—their expectations. Further, some women face what apparently arrives totally unexpected, namely a strange feeling breast or a failed reconstruction. The development of these women’s expectations can be understood as an active, continuously evolving, difficult and sometimes impossible dynamic of expecting the surprise that is a breast reconstruction. Within this dynamic, women formulate and reconfigure—by definition—unrealistic expectations and validate and try to achieve unexpected futures. We suggest that medical professionals can facilitate this dynamic in various ways. (shrink)

The concepts of love and business do not seem to match very well, despite attempts to operationalize love as agape or neighborly love. In line with the emerging literature, this contribution uses a profane and analytical approach to agape as an ‘Agenda for Growth and Affirmation of People and the Environment’. Within this agenda we define agape as ‘the commitment to the well-being and flourishing of others’ and operationalized it to measure the concept in a substantial sample of 420 medium-sized (...) and large companies in The Netherlands. At the core of the research lies the question whether and to what extent companies, represented by senior managers and members of the works council, are committed to the well-being of their employees. This article analyses the concept of agape and its application in a business context and presents the results of a survey. The results show that, on average, respondents report that their organization is committed to employees’ well-being in line with the organization’s values. Though not the aim of agape, since organizations that apply the concept reap tangible business benefits from it, the concept becomes suitable to a wider range of businesses. (shrink)

Harry van der Linden's review of: Helmut Holzhey, Cohen und Natorp : Volume I, Ursprung und Einheit; Volume II, Der Marburger Neukantianismus in Quellen, Basel/Stuttgart: Schwabe & Co., 1986.

Harry van der Linden's contribution to The Cambridge Dictionary of Philosophy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Harry van der Linden's review of: Welfare in the Kantian State. By Alexander Kaufman. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999. Pp.xii, 179. ISBN 0-19-829467-0. £42.50, $45.00.

This study argues for three main theses: (1) Immanuel Kant’s ethics is a social ethics; (2) the basic premises of his social ethics point to a socialist ethics; and (3) this socialist ethics constitutes a suitable platform for criticizing and improving Karl Marx’s view of morality. -/- Some crucial aspects of Kant’s social ethics are that we must promote the “realm of ends” as a moral society of co-legislators who assist each other in the pursuit of their individual ends, which (...) requires in turn that we seek the realization of the republican state and peace between the nations. Thus, hope for progress, as supported by the enthusiasm engendered among the spectators of the French Revolution, becomes pivotal to Kant’s ethics as well as other moral feelings such as moral indignation and solidarity with the victims of oppression. -/- Kant views the moral society in the final instance as an “inner” unification of good wills. In a decisive elaboration of Kant, the neo-Kantian Hermann Cohen argues that all our social institutions, and notably economic enterprises, must instantiate the “realm of ends,” leading him to support cooperative socialism in Wilhelmine Germany. In his own words, Kant “is the true and real originator of German socialism” (1896). -/- There are important evaluative similarities between Kantian socialist ethics and Marx, such as a condemnation of capitalism as a system of servitude and an understanding of the ideal society as a cooperative society, but only Marx contends that the ideal society does not set a moral task and that there is a dialectic operative in human history that inevitably leads to communist society. This dogmatic Hegelian understanding of history must be replaced by Kantian regulative understanding of progress in support of revolutionary praxis as moral praxis. -/- We need a “Kantianization” of Marx, as Cohen and other neo-Kantian socialists also proclaimed in the three decades leading up to World War I. This study concludes with “A Historical Note on Kantian Ethical Socialism,” addressing, among others, Cohen, Karl Vorländer, Eduard Bernstein, and Kurt Eisner and the Munich Revolution of 1918. Their voices were largely silenced by the rise of fascism, and this study hopes to show that their voices still need to be heard. -/- Awarded the 1985 Johnsonian Prize in Philosophy. (shrink)

"Kantian Ethics," published in Ready Reference: Ethics, Revised Edition, pages 806-08, reprinted by permission of the publisher Salem Press. Copyright, ©, 2004 by Salem Press.

In this article, we model FPTP systems as social preference rules and give two characterizations. We show that a social preference rule is an FPTP system if, and only if, it satisfies the axioms of subset consistency, district consistency, subset cancellation, and district cancellation. The second characterization consists of the axioms of subset consistency, subset anonymity, neutrality, topsonlyness, Pareto optimality, district consistency and district cancellation. The characterizations give us an opportunity to compare the characteristic properties of FPTP systems to the (...) characteristic properties that we found for list systems of proportional representation (list PR systems) in Hout et al. (Social Choice and Welfare, 27:459–475, 2006), where we modelled those systems also as social preference rules. We find that consistency and anonymity distinguish list PR systems from FPTP systems. On the other hand, it is district cancellation that distinguishes FPTP systems from list PR systems. (shrink)

The theme of the 6th biennial Radical Philosophy Association Conference, held at Howard University in Washington, D.C. in November 2004, was "Philosophy Against Empire." The U.S. imperial project, pursued by both Republican and Democratic administrations, has many dimensions, including military force and the mechanisms for its legitimation; the global economy and flows of money and people across borders; and biopolitics, or the disciplining of bodies through the micro-mechanisms of power apart from traditional forms of sovereignty. These issues are explored in (...) depth in these collected and revised essays from the Conference, along with the forms of subjectivity that can resist and respond to the alienation produced within and by the imperial project, toward the creation of an alternative global order. Authors include Karsten Struhl, Ann Ferguson, Edmund Byrne, David Cormier, Harry Targ, Jo-Ann Pilardi, Lucinda Joy Peach, Devin Zane Shaw, Tzuchien Tho, Eduardo Mendieta, Richard Schmitt, Richard Jones, Richard Peterson, Peter Amato, William McBride, Omar Dahbour, Kory Schaff, David Schweickart, and Carol Gould. (shrink)

In this paper I argue that a merit of Iris Young’s social connection model of responsibility for structural injustices is that it directs the American people’s responsibility for unjust wars, such as the recent war against Iraq, toward their responsibility to abolish the “war machine,” including the “empire of bases,” that is a contributing factor of unjust U.S. wars. I also raise two objections to her model. First, her model leads us to downplay the culpability of the American people as (...) a political collective in voting to continue the Iraq war with the re-election of George W. Bush. Second, Young misinterprets her model of responsibility as a new type of responsibility that is conceptually completely distinct from liability responsibility rather than as offering a new ground for holding people responsible. (shrink)

A short introduction to the main jus ad bellum and jus in bello principles. A short annotated bibliography is included.

This book chapter addresses two questions. First, can targeted killing by drones in non-battlefield zones be justified on basis of just war theory? Second, will the proliferation and expansion of combat drones in warfare, including the introduction of autonomous drones, be an obstacle to initiating or executing wars in a just manner in the future? The first question is answered by applying traditional jus ad bellum and jus in bello principles to the American targeted killing campaign in Pakistan; the second (...) question is answered on basis of principles of “just military preparedness” or jus ante bellum, a new category of just war thinking. It is concluded that an international ban on weaponized drones is morally imperative and, certainly, that an international treaty against autonomous lethal weapons should be adopted. (shrink)

This essay is part of a symposium on Cheyney Ryan’s The Chickenhawk Syndrome: War, Sacrifice, and Personal Responsibility . Ryan’s reply to his critics can be found on pp. 181-89 in Radical Philosophy Review, Volume 13, Issue 2, 2010.

My main aim here is to examine what the significance is of the communitarian critique of liberalism for Hermann Cohen's political philosophy. I will conclude that Cohen's socialist Kantianism can successfully meet this critique. Also, I will argue that his political philosophy can better deal with some of the problems that communitarians detect in our Western democracies than can communitarianism itself. One crucial reason for this is that Cohen completes the original Kantian liberal project by making all agents fully autonomous (...) in the economic sphere. (shrink)

This paper rejects most aspects of John W. Lango and Eric Patterson’s proposal that the United States should plan for a possible intervention in Sudan on secessionist and humanitarian grounds and announce this planning as a deterrent to the central government of Sudan attacking the people of South Sudan if they would opt in a January 2011 referendum for independence. I argue that secession is not a just cause for armed intervention and that, rightfully, neither the American people nor many (...) of its men and women in uniform would be prepared to engage in an intervention that might easily escalate. I also caution that American intervention against an Islamic regime might have high global security costs. For the sake of avoiding these negative consequences and harm to the people of Sudan, available nonviolent policy alternatives should be pursued. Still, I grant that the global community should intervene in Sudan if mass slaughter of civilians were to occur as a result of renewed hostilities between North and South Sudan. My objections to Lango and Patterson’s intervention proposal appeal to jus ad bellum principles as well as just military preparedness (jus ante bellum) principles. (shrink)

President Barack Obama has clearly placed himself in the just war tradition, and so we may ask how successful has President Obama in fact been as just war theorist? His justification of the recent NATO intervention in Libya shows that the record is at best mixed. More broadly, Obama’s failure as just war theorist is at least partly a failure of the theory itself: as long as this theory does not address issues of “just military preparedness,” it will fail to (...) place real constraints on American resort to military force. (shrink)

Many contemporary liberals adhere to the "liberal peace project" -- that is, the idea that world peace can be realized through the spread of political liberalism, or capitalist democracy. The LPP is based on projecting toward the future the well-documented fact that secure modern democracies have never fought wars with one another. A spirit of optimism prevails among LPP proponents, bolstered by the recent uprise in democracies, and they argue that their cause can be advanced by a liberal foreign policy (...) that promotes free trade and human rights. I argue that the LPP is flawed by not recognizing that the stability of new democracies and the emergence of additional democratic states require a fundamental regulation of the growing global economic market. It should include global labor rights, a "Tobin tax" or a "global resources dividend" that generates capital for investment in developing countries, and global environmental measures. I conclude that lasting world peace necessitates global justice and a democratization of international institutions. (shrink)

This paper seeks to defend the thesis that this American project of military hegemony has a variety of global security costs of such combined magnitude that there is a strong prima facie case against the resort to armed force by the United States, so that its wars might be wrong even when there is a just cause. My thesis is based on the jus ad bellum principle of proportionality.

The neo-Kantian Hermann Cohen famously wrote that Kant “is the true and real originator of German socialism.” This paper seeks to explicate Cohen’s socialist reconstruction of Kant’s ethics and show that this reconstruction overcomes some weaknesses of Kant’s ethics. In conclusion, the paper discusses the contemporary relevance of Cohen’s cooperative socialism.

Article reviews the book "Essays on Kant's Political Philosophy," edited by Howard Lloyd Williams.

This review essay discusses three recent books on the Green New Deal, written, respectively, by Naomi Klein, Jeremy Rifkin, and Kate Aronoff and a few other democratic socialists. It argues that the New Deal offers a better model of how to envision the change required for deep carbonization than the vision of war mobilization after Pearl Harbor since it emphasizes not only the need for massive introduction of green technology but also the importance of broad social change constituting a just (...) transition. The essay argues that the GND should be placed in a global context so that the adoption of the GND in the Global North would lead to much greater funding of green developments in the less industrialized countries of the Global South. (shrink)

Harry van der Linden's contribution to: American Justice, ed. Joseph M. Bessette.

Harry van der Linden's contribution to The Cambridge Dictionary of Philosophy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Under Review: Matthew T. Huber. Climate Change as Class War. Building Socialism on a Warming Planet. Brooklyn, NY: Verso, 2022. Paperback, pp. 312. $24.95. ISBN 978-1-78873-388-5.

Editors’ Introduction: Radical Philosophy and Politics Amid the Climate Crisis and the Coronavirus Pandemic for Radical Philosophy Review.

"Immanuel Kant," published in Ethics, Revised Edition, pages 804-06, reprinted by permission of the publisher Salem Press. Copyright, ©, 2004 by Salem Press. Reprinted in International Encyclopedia of Ethics.

Although the author concedes that much criticism from the left alleging ulterior imperialist motives of missions for “humanitarian intervention” is valid; nevertheless, the author argues that it would be wrong to rule out the concept of humanitarian intervention, even when conducted by imperialist powers for imperialist motives. The concept of “rescue” remains a valid humanitarian concept, and a logical foundation for solidarity with populations who find themselves under assault and defenseless. The author considers various regulative principles that may guide more (...) careful thinking about humanitarian intervention. (shrink)

Justice requires that high consumption in affluent societies be slowed down for the sake of eradicating extreme poverty in the developing world and improving the condition of its very moderate consumers. A slowdown of high consumption for the sake of ending worldwide poverty can be realized through a social regulation of the global economy. This social regulation should include labor standards, environmental measures, rules for global capital investments, and a distributive schema that shifts some of the wealth obtained from globalization (...) from the rich countries to the developing world. To avoid that the social regulation of the global economy would have a regressive impact on lower-income groups in the affluent societies, a progressive consumption tax should be adopted with a standard deduction large enough so that these groups would not have to pay any tax at all. Attempts to slow down high consumption through a social regulation of the global economy will meet two institutional limits, the sovereign state and capitalism. In the final instance, justice and joyful simplicity for all humans may require cosmopolitan democracy and socialism. (shrink)

Drone warfare, particularly in the form of targeted killing, has serious legal, moral, and political costs so that a case can be made for an international treaty prohibiting this type of warfare. However, the case would be stronger if it could be shown that killing by drones is inherently immoral. From this angle I explore the moral significance of two features of this technology of killing: the killing is done by remote control with the operators geographically far away from the (...) target zone and the killing is typically the outcome of a long process of surveillance. I argue that remote control killing as such might not be inherently wrong but poses the risks of globalizing conflict and prioritizing troop protection above civilian safety, while the “deadly surveillance” aspect of drone killing makes it most clearly intrinsically wrong. (shrink)

The gap between the affluent and the global poor has increased during the past few decades, whether it is measured in terms of private consumption, income, or wealth. One would expect that severe poverty in a world of abundance would constitute a moral challenge to the affluent, but in fact it hardly seems a serious ethical concern. Affluent citizens seem so little morally concerned with global poverty. However, the most promising approach seems to be to explore and divulge factually and (...) conceptually the numerous ways in which the affluent are implicated in a wholly unjust world of growing inequality. Changing people's moral perception is an arduous task and it is to be expected that affluent people will only gradually come to morally question their comfortable lives, at least in the absence of environmental or political disasters that might occur in the future. The immense human suffering at stake makes it a duty for moral philosophers to continue to work at and even increase their efforts towards this task. (shrink)

My main objective in this paper is to show that Hermann Cohen's ethics offers an important but hitherto neglected contribution to the- current debate within Anglo-American ethics on the moral status of the modern business corporation.

The neo-Kantian Hermann Cohen famously wrote that Kant “is the true and real originator of German socialism.” This paper seeks to explicate Cohen’s socialist reconstruction of Kant’s ethics and show that this reconstruction overcomes some weaknesses of Kant’s ethics. In conclusion, the paper discusses the contemporary relevance of Cohen’s cooperative socialism.

This fifth volume of the Radical Philosophy Today series contains papers presented at the 7th Biennial Conference of the Radical Philosophy Association, 2006. Contributors include Karsten Struhl, Lisa Heldke, Amy Wendling, Tom Jeannot, John Exdell, C.W. Dawson, Tommy Curry, Dwayne Tunstall, Jason Mallory, Eduardo Mendieta, Brady Thomas Heiner, Mechthild Nagel, and Jeffrey Paris.

In studying the history of the ethics of war, the just war tradition may be interpreted as a historically evolving body of tenets about just war principles. Instead of a single just war theory, there have been many just war theories—for example, those of Augustine, Aquinas, Vitoria, and Grotius—theories that have various commonalities and differences. A comprehensive history of the evolving just war tradition should feature a thorough study of how these just war theories were rethought. For example, in his (...) landmark work Just and Unjust Wars, written during the Cold War, Michael Walzer exclaimed: “Nuclear weapons explode the theory of just war.” 1 In his rethinking of the just war tradition in light of the superpower practice of nuclear deterrence, he contributed his influential conception of supreme emergency exceptions. Now that the Cold War is over, the authors of the articles in this book are primarily concerned with the question of how the just war tradition—which is understood somewhat differently by the different authors—should be rethought today. Echoing Walzer’s exclamation, among the particular post–Cold War questions that can be raised are these: Is just war theory exploded by terrorism? Is it annihilated by genocide? In their various rethinkings of the just war tradition, our authors state their own particular post–Cold War questions, and answer them from their diverse viewpoints... (shrink)

Should the U.N. Security Council use its coercive powers to bring about effective climate change mitigation? This question remains relevant considering the inadequate mitigation goals set by the signatories of the Paris Climate Accord and the ramifications of U.S. withdrawal from the Accord. This paper argues that the option of the unsc coercing climate change mitigation through military action, or the threat thereof, is morally flawed and ultimately antithetical to effectively addressing climate change. This assessment is based significantly on the (...) application of jus ad bellum principles of just war theory, incorporating some feminist critiques of this theory. (shrink)