It is the persistence of social suffering in a world in which it could be eliminated that for Adorno is the source of the need for critical reflection, for philosophy. Philosophy continues and gains its cultural place because an as yet unbridgeable abyss separates the social potential for the relief of unnecessary human suffering and its emphatic continuance. Philosophy now is the culturally bound repository for the systematic acknowledgement and articulation of the meaning of the expanse of human suffering within (...) technologically advanced societies that are already committed to liberal ideals of freedom and equality. (shrink)

Following the lead of Annette Baier, this essay argues that trust relations provide the ethical substance of everyday living. When A trusts B, A unreflectively allows B to approach sufficiently close so as to be able to harm A. In order for this to be possible, A practically presupposes that B perceives A as a person and will hence act accordingly. Trust relations are relations of mutual recognition in which we acknowledge our mutual standing and vulnerability with respect to one (...) another. A robust account of trust assumes: first, trust relations are primary and practical, and while monitored by reason, they are not rationally constituted; second, trust can sustain its practical primacy over moral reason because it is developmentally prior to reason; and third, trust relations can be the bearers of our worth and vulnerability because they are the developmental products of first love. (shrink)

Book reviewed in this article: Just War Tradition and the Restraint of War: A Moral and Historical Inquiry. By James Turner Johnson.

Despite optimistic reports about the results of amputation for advanced vascular disease, the patient’s assessment of advantages and disadvantages is seldom acknowledged. A detailed social study of 67 amputees has revealed considerable disparity between the patient’s views and those of the medical staff. About a third of the patients are forced to retire from active work by the amputation; about three-quarters report a serious decline in their social activities; only about half are really independent with prostheses in the long term; (...) a quarter report severe and intractable symptoms related to their amputation stumps; only about a quarter feel that the amputation was definitely beneficial; and only about one in five feel that the medical staff have provided adequate support during their hospital stay. Amputees face physical and financial disability, isolation, and discomfort. Every effort must be made to explain the implications of amputation honestly and realistically and to ensure continuing patient assessment and support. (shrink)

This essay originated as a reply to Richard Rorty's ”Habermas, Derrida, and the Functions of Philosophy“. In it, I contest Rorty's deployment of the categories of private selfcreation and the collective political enterprise of increasing freedom, first developed in Contingency, Irony and Solidarity, to demonstrate that the philosophical projects of Habermas and Derrida are complementary rather than antagonistic. The focus of my critique is two-fold: firstly, I contend that so-called critiques of metaphysics are always simutaneously engaging with some form of (...) social domination or disintegration (e.g. nihilism or societal rationalization); secondly, I argue that the fault-line in Rorty's thought that structures his categories is his, Davidson inspired, naturalized philosophy of language. This philosophy of language falls afoul of Heidegger's analysis of the present-to-hand. (shrink)

ABSTRACTIn this paper, I examine the arguments against physician assisted suicide . Many of these arguments are consequentialist. Consequentialist arguments rely on empirical claims about the future and thus their strength depends on how likely it is that the predictions will be realized. I discuss these predictions against the backdrop of Oregon's Death with Dignity Act and the practice of PAS in the Netherlands. I then turn to a specific consequentialist argument against PAS – Susan M. Wolf's feminist critique of (...) the practice. Finally, I examine the two most prominent deontological arguments against PAS. Ultimately, I conclude that no anti‐PAS argument has merit. Although I do not provide positive arguments for PAS, if none of the arguments against it are strong, we have no reason not to legalize it. (shrink)

Ethical consumerism is the thesis that we should let our values determine our consumer purchases. We should purchase items that accord with our values and refrain from buying those that do not. The end goal, for ethical consumerism, is to transform the market through consumer demand. The arm of this movement associated with food choice embraces the slogan “Vote with Your Fork!” As in the more general movement, the idea is that we should let our values dictate our choices. In (...) this paper, I offer a critique of the Vote with Your Fork campaign (hereafter VWYF) that focuses on the agency of individuals. For VWYF to be effective, minimally, individuals must act _intentionally_ when making food choices. In the ideal case, individuals adopt and endorse the values implicit in VWYF and exhibit _autonomous agency_ when they purchase and consume food. The problem, though, is that a number of things can go wrong along the way. I argue that very few of us are in the position to exhibit autonomous agency with respect to our food choices. Because of this, VWYF could very well undermine its own goals. (shrink)

In most areas of our lives, legal protections are in place to ensure that we have autonomous control over what happens in and to our bodies. However, there are fewer protections in place for autonomous choice when it comes to the food we purchase and consume. In fact, the current trend in US legislation is pushing us away from autonomous food choice. In this paper, I discuss two examples of this trend: corporate resistance to GM labeling laws and farm protection (...) laws. These examples are quite different from a legislative point of view. In one case, laws that would promote autonomous choice are actively resisted, whereas in the other case, laws that undermine autonomy are enacted. The common core of the two examples is the effect: in both cases, we are unable to determine whether the food we purchase and consume is consistent with our values. In both cases, then, autonomous choice about the food we purchase and put into our bodies is undermined. (shrink)

Adorno contends that something of what we think of knowing and rational agency operate in ways that obscure and deform unique, singular presentations by relegating them to survival-driven interests and needs; hence, in accordance with the presumptions of transcendental idealism, we have come to mistake what are, in effect, historically contingent, species-subjective ways of viewing the world for an objective understanding of the world. And further, this interested understanding of the world is deforming in a more radical way than just (...) obscuring what is there for the sake of interested needs and purposes; these instrumental ways of knowing and acting, are broadly self-interested, in the interest of survival, without effective concern for the well-being and worth of others; by becoming generalized and exclusive, hegemonic, by driving out modes of encountering things and persons that support their differences and independence, their needs and interests, these instrumental practices are the deepest cause of t. (shrink)

Arguably, there is no gesture more typical to philosophy than its repudiation, the sense that philosophical endeavor is a symptom of the pathologies or dislocations of everyday life it seeks to remedy. Throughout the nineteenth century—in the writings of the German Romantics, Young Hegelians, Marx, Kierkegaard, and Nietzsche—the repudiation of philosophy is a constant. Sometimes this repudiation takes a reflective form in which traditional philosophical claims are translated into another vocabulary, or are deflated ; sometimes alternative methods are adopted that (...) attempt to undermine, explain away, what is thought of as uniquely philosophical; sometimes rhetorical strategies are adopted that aim to bring about a “conversion” in the reader away from philosophy and toward a more fully immanent or existential self-understanding; and sometimes that more everyday self-understanding that is to be the antidote to philosophical reflection is construed as not yet available but would come to be in an ideal or utopian future if particular radical transformations of current practices were accomplished. Apart from Kierkegaard, these attempts typically construe themselves as continuous with the critique of religion, as if philosophy were nothing but religious excess in rational dress, and thus continuous with modernity’s drive toward secularity. Because the stakes of repudiation are inevitably normative—the protest against philosophy for the sake of a more “realistic,” more truly natural or historical, conception of what is rational or good—the critique of philosophy becomes, despite itself, philosophical, burdened with presuppositions it can neither sustain nor forgo. In brief, this is the lesson of Daniel Brudney’s meticulous and patient excavation of the writings of the young Marx. (shrink)

Deleuze's philosophy of cinema departs from the standard conception of modernist aesthetics that sees art withdrawing from representation in order to reflect upon the specificity of its medium. While ambitious and influential, Deleuze's attempt fails. Overdetermined by its own metaphysics, it forsakes the real importance of the movies. It is unable to explain how they function and why they matter. This essay pursues three lines of criticism: Deleuze cannot account for the aesthetic specificity of cinema because he deposes the primacy (...) of action in the movement-image in favour of the primacy of belief. This failure is connected to the fact that a cinema of the virtual depends on the very Bazinian realism it is meant to displace. Realism must be acknowledged as the cinematic condition and truth of virtuality. Further, Bazinian realism is the cinematic form of philosophical modernism, preferable for many reasons to Deleuze's philosophy, which returns to pre-modern cosmology in its desire to escape the agent-based, anti-metaphysical commitments of modernism. I apply these criticisms to my analysis of Resnais's Hiroshima mon amour, a movie that prima facie looks made to fulfil the terms of Deleuze's theory but which I argue is an object lesson in realism. (shrink)

After recently meeting with his biological parents, the author--a 29-year-old-married male--learned he had been an hour away from being aborted, being 'saved' only by extraordinary circumstances. In the paper the author reflects upon previous strong pro-choice beliefs and reasserts his commitment to a pro-choice philosophy, integrating his new personal experience. The paper pays particular attention to the biological mother's experience and how her fresh insights have reinforced the author's views on abortion.