There are two principal philosophical conceptions of socialism, corresponding to two interpretations of the notion of a rational society. The first conception corresponds to an instrumental view of social rationality. Captured by the image of socialism as “one big workshop,” the instrumental view holds that social ownership of the means of production is rational because it promotes the optimal development of the productive forces. Social ownership is optimal because it eliminates the costs of coordination imposed by the conduct of economic (...) activities in formally independent enterprises, and, more generally, overcomes fetters on development that result from the control of resources by individuals whose particular interests imperfectly correspond to a general interest in productive advance. (shrink)

My purpose is to consider if, in political society, there can be any legitimate and sure principle of government, taking men as they are and laws as they might be. —Jean‐Jacques Rousseau, The Social Contract Following Rousseau's opening thought in The Social Contract…, I shall assume that his phrase “men as they are” refers to persons' moral and psychological natures and how that nature works within the framework of political and social institutions. —John Rawls, The Law of peoples.

Deliberation and democratic legitimacy -- Moral pluralism and political consensus -- Associations and democracy (with Joel Rogers) -- Freedom of expression -- Procedure and substance in deliberative democracy -- Directly-deliberative polyarchy (with Charles Sabel) -- Democracy and liberty -- Money, politics, political equality -- Privacy, pluralism, and democracy -- Reflections on deliberative democracy -- Truth and public reason.

Jiirgen Habermas is a radical democrat. The source of that self-designation is that his conception of democracy-what he calls "discursive democracy"-is founded on the ideal of "a self-organizing community of free and equal citizens," co- ordinating their collective affairs through their common reason. The author discusses three large challenges to this radical-democratic ideal of collective self-regulation: 1) What is the role of private autonomy in a radical-democratic view? 2) What role does reason play in collective self-regulation? 3) What relevance might (...) a radical- democratic outlook have for contemporary democracies? The author addresses these questions by considering Habermas' answers, and then presenting alternative responses to them. The alternatives are also radical-democratic in inspiration, but they draw on a richer set of normative-political ideas than Habermas wants to rely on, and are more ambitious in their hopes for democratic practice. (shrink)

This chapter contains sections titled: Introduction Deliberation Reasons for Deliberative Democracy Skepticism About Deliberation Some Tensions Between Participation and Deliberation And So? Final Reflections Notes.

Ellen Fox and collaborators have produced the most detailed description of healthcare ethics practices in the United States available. Some findings are shocking for anyone committed to promoting q...

The arc of the moral universe -- Structure, choice, and legitimacy: Locke's theory of the state -- Democratic equality -- A more democratic liberalism -- For a democratic society -- Knowledge, morality and hope: the social thought of Noam Chomsky: with Joel Rogers -- Reflections on Habermas on democracy -- A matter of demolition?: Susan Okin on justice and gender -- Minimalism about human rights: the most we can hope for? -- Is there a human right to democracy? -- Extra (...) republicam nulla justitia?: with Charles Sabel. (shrink)

Heinrich Hertz dedicated the last four years of his life to a systematic reformulation of mechanics. One of the main issues that troubled Hertz in the customary formulation of mechanics was a "logical obscurity" in the notion of force. However, it is unclear what this logical obscurity was, hence it is unclear how Hertz took himself to have avoided it. -/- In this paper, I argue that a subtle ambiguity in Newton's original laws of motion lay at the basis of (...) Hertz's concerns; an ambiguity which led to the development of two slightly different notions of force. I then show how Hertz avoided this ambiguity by deriving a unitary notion of force, thus dispelling the obscurity that lurked in the customary representation of mechanics. (shrink)

Scholars and professional organizations in bioethics describe various approaches to “quality assessment” in clinical ethics. Although much of this work represents significant contributions to the literature, it is not clear that there is a robust and shared understanding of what constitutes “quality” in clinical ethics, what activities should be measured when tracking clinical ethics work, and what metrics should be used when measuring those activities. Further, even the most robust quality assessment efforts to date are idiosyncratic, in that they represent (...) evaluation of single activities or domains of clinical ethics activities, or a range of activities at a single hospital or healthcare system. Countering this trend, in this article we propose a framework for moving beyond our current ways of understanding clinical ethics quality, toward comprehensive quality assessment. We first describe a way to conceptualize quality assessment as a process of measuring disparate, isolated work activities; then, we describe quality assessment in terms of tracking interconnected work activities holistically, across different levels of assessment. We conclude by inviting future efforts in quality improvement to adopt a comprehensive approach to quality assessment into their improvement practices, and offer recommendations for how the field might move in this direction. (shrink)

Since the publication of John Rawls'sA Theory of Justice, normative democratic theory has focused principally on three tasks: refining principles of justice, clarifying the nature of political justification, and exploring the public policies required to ensure a just distribution of education, health care, and other basic resources. Much less attention has been devoted to examining the political institutions and social arrangements that might plausibly implement reasonable political principles. Moreover, the amount of attention paid to issues of organizational and institutional implementation (...) has varied sharply across the different species of normative theory. Neoliberal theorists, concerned chiefly with protecting liberty by taming power, and essentially hostile to the affirmative state, have been far more sensitive to such issues than egalitarian-democratic theorists, who simultaneously embrace classically liberal concerns with choice, egalitarian concerns with the distribution of resources, and a republican emphasis on the values of citizen participation and public debate. Neglect of how such values might be implemented has deepened the vulnerability of egalitarian-democratic views to the charge of being unrealistic: “good in theory but not so good in practice.”. (shrink)

In “Epistemic Modals,” Seth Yalcin argues that what explains the deficiency of sentences containing epistemic modals of the form ‘p and it might be that not-p’ is that sentences of this sort are strictly contradictory, and thus are not instances of a Moore-paradox as has been previous suggested. Benjamin Schnieder, however, argues in his Yalcin’s explanation of these sentences’ deficiency turns out to be insufficiently general, as it cannot account for less complex but still defective sentences, such as ‘Suppose it (...) might be raining.’ Consequently, Schnieder proposes his own, expressivist treatment of epistemic modals which he thinks can explain the deficiency of both the original sentence type as well as more complex cases of embedded sentences containing epistemic modals. In this study, I argue that although Schnieder is right to draw our attention to the explanatory failure of Yalcin’s account, we aren’t forced to adopt Schnieder’s expressivist account of epistemic modals. I defend instead a contextualist-friendly alternative which explains the deficiencies of all the relevant sentence types, while avoiding both the defects of Yalcin’s account and the intuitive costs of expressivism. (shrink)

Susan Okin has written an important book on justice and the family. Animated by the experiences that contemporary feminism has sought to articulate, and guided by a principled hostility to the subordination of women that continues to disgrace American life, she argues that the current ordering of domestic life in the United States is unjust and that its alteration ought to be made a matter of public policy.Families, according to Okin, are not havens in an otherwise heartless world. Instead the (...) current division of domestic labor marks them as the centerpiece of a broader system of inequalities between men and women. Justice condemns those inequalities and commands their remedy through the transformation of our domestic practices. Because the division of domestic labor is so fundamental to injustice, we need in particular to ‘encourage and facilitate’ equal sharing by parents in the responsibilities of child-rearing, and in the more quotidian chores that provide the material foundation of modern domesticity. (shrink)

At the time of Heinrich Hertz's premature death in 1894, he was regarded as one of the leading scientists of his generation. However, the posthumous publication of his treatise in the foundations of physics, "Principles of Mechanics", presents a curious historical situation. Although Hertz's book was widely praised and admired, it was also met with a general sense of dissatisfaction. Almost all of Hertz's contemporaries criticized "Principles" for the lack of any plausible way to construct a mechanism from the hidden (...) masses that are particularly characteristic of Hertz's framework. This issue seemed especially glaring given the expectation that Hertz's work might lead to a model of the underlying workings of the ether. In this paper I seek an explanation for why Hertz seemed so unperturbed by the difficulties of constructing such a mechanism. In arriving at this explanation, I explore how the development of Hertz's image-theory of representation framed the project of "Principles". The image-theory brings with it an austere view of the essential content of mechanics, only requiring a kind of structural isomorphism between symbolic representations and target phenomena. I argue that bringing this into view makes clear why Hertz felt no need to work out the kinds of mechanisms that many of his readers looked for. Furthermore, I argue that a crucial role of Hertz's hypothesis of hidden masses has been widely overlooked. Far from acting as a proposal for the underlying structure of the ether, I show that Hertz's hypothesis ruled out knowledge of such underlying structure. (shrink)

I claim that Wittgenstein’s reference to Hertz’s “dynamical models” at 4.04 in the Tractatus provides evidence for the view that the Tractatus does not explain the sense of propositions by offering an account of the fundamental structure of reality. Just as Hertz’s dynamical models capture what all mechanical descriptions of the same system have in common, so Tractarian analysis captures what all propositions that express the same sense have in common, and in neither case is there a need to appeal (...) to an underlying ontology. (shrink)

The characteristic focus, intensity and hopefulness of Noam Chomsky's political writings reflect a set of more fundamental views about human nature, justice and social order that are not simple matters of fact. This chapter explores these more fundamental ideas, the central elements in Chomsky's social thought. Chomsky's own conception of human nature draws together a romantic emphasis on the distinctive human capacity for creative expression and a rationalist contention that there is an intrinsic and determinate structure to the human mind. (...) According to Chomsky, the “fundamental fact about the normal use of language” is its “creative aspect’. The linguistic knowledge expressed in such creativity is acquired by virtually all human beings in a short period of time, and in the face of unstructured and impoverished inputs from the environment. The chapter examines his libertarian social ideals and views on social stability and social evolution, both of which are animated by this conception of our nature. (shrink)

We show that there is a computable procedure which, given an ∀∃-sentence ${\varphi}$ in the language of the partially ordered sets with a top element 1 and a bottom element 0, computes whether ${\varphi}$ is true in the Medvedev degrees of ${\Pi^0_1}$ classes in Cantor space, sometimes denoted by ${\mathcal{P}_s}$.

In the past few decades, political theorists have attempted to articulate a nontheological basis for a special human place in the moral universe. These attempts, I argue, generally fall into two groups, one centered around the concept of “dignity” and the other around ideas of “difference.” Both of these attempts ultimately fail, I maintain, but their failures are instructive and help us along a path toward a better kind of relationship with nature and the earth as well as one another. (...) In the face of increased scientific knowledge about the environment, animals, and our own species, we have every reason to recalibrate our stance toward nature as a whole. But in doing so we must acknowledge that the human relationship with nature is ultimately a representative one that can therefore never achieve the kind of reciprocity available in human society. Whatever form our respect for nature takes, it will always be distinct from the relationships we have with those we consider co-citizens. (shrink)

One of the most pressing ethical challenges facing phase I cancer research centres is the process of informed consent. Historically, most scholarship has been devoted to redressing therapeutic misconception, that is, the conflation of the nature and goals of research with those of therapy. While therapeutic misconception continues to be a major ethical concern, recent scholarship has begun to recognise that the informed consent process is more complex than merely a transfer of information and therefore cannot be evaluated only according (...) to how well an individual understands such information. Other components of decision-making operate independently of understanding and yet still may compromise the quality of informed consent. Notable among these components is unrealistic optimism, an event-specific belief that one has a better chance of receiving benefit than others similarly situated. In this article, we consider responses to interviews with parents who had recently completed an informed consent conference for enrolling their child in a phase I cancer clinical trial to examine how this influence manifests and how investigators might address it during informed consent. (shrink)

In a short section of his 2015 book Beyond the Abortion Wars, Charles Camosy claims that direct abortion to save the life of the mother is consistent with Catholic principles. Joshua Evans published an essay critical of this view in the Summer 2017 issue of the National Catholic Bioethics Quarterly, to which Camosy responded in the Summer 2018 issue. In the current essay, Evans replies to Camosy’s recent response by offering a further examination of three central issues in dispute: (...) how the history of moral theology bears on public debates, how past authoritative Church teaching applies when the method of moral theology apparently has shifted, and how the analysis of vital conflicts is affected when examined in relation to more fundamental theological considerations. (shrink)

Der Aufbau eines Heimatgefühls in der frühen Kindheit ist eine komplexe Errungenschaft. Dieser Prozess wird beschrieben als eine Interaktion zwischen einem sicheren Zuhausesein im Körper-als-Mutter (Konstitution); der Internalisierung der Mutter-als-Ich (und die Schaffung eines inneren und eines zwischenmenschlichen Raums); dem Aufbau eines triangulären ödipalen Raums. Die Konstruktion eines Zuhauses als Wechselspiel zwischen diesen Elementen wird von ausgeprägten Ängsten und unbewussten Phantasien begleitet. Störungen in diesem frühen Prozess können zu schweren Pathologien führen. Die vielfältigen Erscheinungsformen von Heimat, Heimatlosigkeit und Nirgendwosein werden (...) unter Rückgriff auf klinisches Material aus der Analyse eines Kindes von Geflüchteten, das an einer autistischen Erkrankung litt, sowie seines Vaters diskutiert und dabei die Rolle der Psychoanalyse und des Psychoanalytikers bei der Förderung der Schaffung einer inneren Heimat mit Bezug auf die Technik beschrieben. (shrink)

Editors Sarah Tyson and Joshua M. Hall convene an international group of philosophical thinkers—from both inside and outside prison walls—who draw on a variety of historical figures and critical perspectives to think about prisons in our new historical era.

Carl Schmitt (1888–1985), one of the leading conservative legal thinkers of the Weimar Republic and Nazi Germany, is best known today for his critique of liberalism. Between the late 1930s and mid-1950s, Schmitt wrote numerous articles and two books addressing the mythical and geopolitical significance of land and sea. In recent years, these texts have begun to attract attention from historians as well as theorists. This article reconstructs the origins of Schmitt's theories about land and sea, and shows how they (...) developed in the context of his efforts to delegitimize the British Empire and justify the persecution of Jews. It also explains how Schmitt selectively misread the history of maritime law in order to critique the ‘freedom of the seas.’ Finally, it reveals that the meaning Schmitt ascribed to ‘the opposition of the elements of land and sea’ changed dramatically to suit his political needs. For all their evocative qualities and insights, Schmitt's texts on land and sea do not constitute a coherent theory, but rather a shifting field of polemical positions in search of theoretical support. (shrink)

German philosopher Immanuel Kant employs the story of Eve in the Garden of Eden as a way to think about what the development of autonomy in human beings must have involved. In the beginning, our ancestors invariably listened to their instincts, which would have seemed to them, as Kant describes it, like the “voice of God which all animals must obey”. Regardless of whether it has any basis in historical reality, that moment represents for Kant the birth of human autonomy: (...) at some point in our history, our ancestors attained self‐awareness and realized that they could disobey their instincts. There is a limited sense in which the actions that stem from internal sources, whether natural or artificial, are autonomous in the sense of involving internal control. The responsibility is one that every autonomous individual has, for better or worse, whether guest or host, in Westworld or outside of it. (shrink)

Bruno Latour, the increasingly popular French philosopher and foundational thinker for science studies, once wrote: “I know neither who I am nor what I want, but others say they know on my behalf, others who will define me, link me up, make me speak, interpret what I say, and enroll me”. This invocation of an “other” as a self-definition is no longer surprising nor radical but has long been a common answer to Plato’s famous and persistent insistence that we must, (...) before all else, know ourselves. I cannot know myself except insofar as I know and encounter others, who through a collective process, determine what I am. Within rhetoric, Diane Davis, in her recent account of the “prior... (shrink)

I like punk rock. I like girls with weird eyes. I like drugs but my body and mind won’t allow me to take them. I like passion. I like things that are built well. I like innocence. I like and am grateful for the blue collar worker whos existence allows Artists to not have to work at menial jobs. I like killing gluttony. I like playing my cards wrong. I like various styles of music. I like making fun of musicians (...) who I feel pladgerise or offend music as art by exploiting their embarrassingly, pathetic versions of their work. I like to write poetry. I like to ignore others poetry. I like vinyl. I like nature and animals. I like to swim. I like to be with my friends. I like to be by myself. I like to feel guilty for.. (shrink)

Disruptive societal changes following from emerging science and technology have recently led to a growing interest in developing ethical frameworks. Responsible Research and Innovation (RRI) is such a framework that aims to improve the relationship between science and society. Now a decade after its conceptualization, it still seems to suffer from conceptual unclarity and lack of implementation. Since responsibility in research and innovation practice remains as important as ever, we propose to revive the normative potential of RRI by approaching it (...) as a matter of collective democratic experimentation. To further develop this approach, we propose a pragmatist conceptualization inspired by John Dewey, his work on democracy as an ethical way of life and his attention to the contextual nature of responsibility. Furthermore, we show how his interest in social inquiring publics provides a particularly apt foothold from which to operationalize collective democratic experimentation with RRI. We will illustrate the utility of this approach, with specific attention to the social, experimental and public character of social inquiry, by connecting it to the recent call to use social labs methodology to experiment with RRI. From this we draw lessons for future collective democratic experimentation with responsibility in research and innovation practice. (shrink)

As the national debate intensifies over what marriage is and who may marry, Mary Lyndon Shanley argues that although the state should continue to play a role in regulating personal relations, the law must be fundamentally reformed if marriage is to become a more just institution. Thirteen prominent writers and thinkers respond, including Nancy F. Cott, William N. Eskridge, Jr., Amitai Etzioni, Martha Albertson Fineman, and Cass R. Sunstein.