Work in Western modernity is production of more than is needed, and regardless of whether the surplus is regulated by the state or reinvested by individual entrepreneurs, the social space that modern work brings to being is inseparable from alienated labor. Paradoxically, work has been also the preferred means for curing alienation. A crucial component of political ideologies, work has played a central role in various totalitarianisms, their social ideas, and political organizations. Fascism, for example, posited (...) work as the essence of man, and with the vision of community in fusion, implemented work as a tool of self-appropriation, collective strength, and expulsion of otherness. Work retained its .. (shrink)

Against the background of intellectual and political debates in France during the 1950s and 1960s, Daniel Just examines literary narratives and works of literary criticism arguing that these texts are more politically engaged than they may initially appear. As writings by Roland Barthes, Maurice Blanchot, Albert Camus, and Marguerite Duras show, seemingly disengaged literary principles - such as blankness, minimalism, silence, and indeterminateness - can be deployed to a number of potent political and ethical ends. At the time the (...) main focus of this activism was the escalation of violence in colonial Algeria. The poetics formulated by these writers suggests that blankness, weakness, and withdrawal from action are not symptoms of impotence and political escapism in the face of historical events, but deliberate literary strategies aimed to neutralize the drive to dominate others that characterized the colonial project. (shrink)

The purpose of this paper is to present some of the findings (which were reported on more extensively in earlier work) regarding the visibility of gender issues in the literature on selected information and communication technologies (ICTs) with a view to make predictions about potential ethical issues that the application of these ICTs may bring about in the future. On the basis of the analysis of around 100 published sources, which dealt with various aspects of selected ICTs, conclusions have (...) been drawn regarding gender issues and concerns that the applications of these ICTs may cause. The authors' analysis is theoretically informed by critical discourse analysis (CDA) which assumes that texts, both written and spoken, as well as other forms of symbolic representations, are indicative of social practices. Of particular methodological relevance was the survey of methods of text and discourse analysis presented in Titscher et al and especially the application of keyword search as a way to measure the prominence of each investigated method. This approach to literature surveying proved very useful in selecting analytic material: only those published sources on the selected four ICTs have been included in the survey, for which the analysis of keywords, abstracts and indexes of terms indicated authors' interest in gender issues. Findings - First, ICTs such as affective computing, ambient intelligence, and artificial intelligence, have been found to have the potential of positively affecting gender power relations and thus positively affecting gender balance in the areas of labour market related to ICT across EU countries and worldwide. Second, more research on the relationship between gender and ICT design, application and representation is needed, so as to enhance a better understanding of ethical issues resulting from unequal participation of women and men in all aspects of ICT production and implementation, which in itself is an ethical dilemma with which both the ICT business and legislators have to grapple. The paper offers insight into the relationship between the level of attention devoted to particular ICTs by ICT researchers, as evidenced in the reviewed literature, and the likelihood of the application of a particular ICT in the future, which is looked at and assessed from a gender perspective. (shrink)

This paper aims at providing an epistemic defense of democracy based on John Dewey’s idea that democracies do not only find problems and provide solutions to them but they also articulate problems. According to this view, when citizens inquire about collective issues, they also partially shape them. This view contrasts with the standard account of democracy’s epistemic defense, according to which democracy’s is good at tracking and finding solutions that are independent of political will-formation and decision-making. It is also less (...) vulnerable to the criticisms that have been raised against the standard account. To show this, the paper develops a theory of expressive domination and argues that problem-articulation works best when it is inclusive and domination-free. It also shows that democratic conflict represents a fundamental element for problem-articulation. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Rhetoricians Identified:A Call to Interdisciplinary Action and How it Resonated in the Field of RhetoricChristine Isager and Sine Nørholm Just"I actually like this book a lot, but I am not sure how comfortable I am with liking it," wrote William Keith (1995, 488) in a review of the original 1993 edition of Steve Fuller's Philosophy, Rhetoric, and the End of Knowledge (PREK), in which rhetoric is invited to (...) participate in the interdisciplinary reconfiguration of Science and Technology Studies (STS). This hesitant enthusiasm aptly exemplifies how an interdisciplinary invitation is likely to make its addressees squirm as they watch their professional aims being defined and then redefined by a disciplinary outsider who points out a place for them in a novel disciplinary constellation. Moreover, and more specifically, Keith's comment exemplifies how PREK was received by rhetoricians. On the surface, the reviews were glowing. In Philosophy and Rhetoric as well as in Philosophy of the Social Sciences, Keith expressed certain doubts about Fuller's work, but still he described it as "important," "exceptional," "superb" (1996; 1995). In the Quarterly Journal of Speech, Kenneth S. Zagacki called PREK both "excellent" and "exciting" (1995), and he was backed by John Angus Campbell and Keith R. Benson a year later when the same journal included PREK in an omnibus review entitled "The Rhetorical Turn in Science Studies" (Campbell and Benson 1996). Like Alan Gross, who reviewed the book in College English together with a number of works on workplace writing (1994), Campbell and Benson placed PREK at the cutting edge of rhetorical theory.The initial excitement over PREK forms a sharp contrast to the quite negligible impact that the book has had on the field of rhetoric in the decade that has passed since it was first published. In this essay we will undertake a close reading of the book along with the five above-mentioned reviews, looking for an explanation of the peculiar fate that met Steve [End Page 248] Fuller's proposal in the rhetorical disciplinary context. Our conclusion is that on reading the book, rhetoricians felt so flattered by Fuller's confident handling of rhetoric that the task of introducing and applying rhetorical theory in STS seemed, on the whole, to have been done for them. Furthermore, Fuller's attempts to construct a rhetorical agency are subverted by his idiosyncratic, i.e., inimitable, professional approach, which is also reflected in his style of writing. At once presumptuous and colloquial, his rhetoric serves to impress and entertain, but it fails to engage his audience substantially and to enact the interpenetrative stance that was intended to be the hallmark of PREK and that continues to be the commendable chief concern of Steve Fuller and his fellow social epistemologists.Text-Intertext and IdentificationInterdisciplinary invitations or, rather, interdisciplinary inspirational works of science were originally described as a noteworthy rhetorical genre by Leah Ceccarelli (2001). Ceccarelli explores how claims to scientific unity have handled a primary constraint: their multiple audiences. Fuller explicitly positions PREK within the genre of interdisciplinary inspiration by asserting that "the success of this book... should be measured in terms of its ability to persuade philosophers, theoretical humanists and social scientists, STS practitioners, and rhetoricians of science to see each other as engaged in a common enterprise" (1993, xii-xiii). We will not, however, be examining PREK's ability to be strategically opaque (as Fuller puts it), polysemous(Ceccarelli's term), or otherwise adapted to address its multiple audiences. Instead, we focus solely on Fuller's address to rhetoricians and study how he identifies with this particular audience. Ceccarelli recognizes the importance of ethical appeal in interdisciplinary invitations by positing the establishment of both an authoritative and personal authorial persona as a generic criterion. We follow this lead and add a Burkean emphasis on identification.According to Kenneth Burke, identification is a prior condition for persuasion "precisely because there is division" (Burke 1969, 22). The speaker's success depends on his ability to imitate the ways of his audience and to create a common ground or perspective that makes collective action possible. Burke's work allows us to distinguish three rhetorical strategies of identification. The first strategy... (shrink)

By studying several cases of expert systems' use, a variety of difficulties were identified as directly depending on specific characteristics of experts and their tasks. This concerns more than the questions: “May experts be replaced by machines?” or “Is experts' knowledge explicable?”. The organisational structure of their work as well as the cyclic, non-plannable way of their task performing have further relevance. The paper introduces the concept of experts' systems to deal with diversities of their expertise and complexities of (...) their work. It draws a distinction between non-monotonic problem solving, exploration, medium and modification, and argues that these modes are not reducible to yet another improved input/output strategy or dialogue style but introduce additional functions supporting the human-computer interaction according to experts' needs. In the first few sections, the paper covers the theoretical and empirical results of our research, whereas Section 4 introduces our design suggestions for experts' systems. (shrink)

This elegant essay on the justice of work focuses on the fit between who we are and the kind of work we do. Russell Muirhead shows how the common hope for work that fulfills us involves more than personal interest; it also points to larger understandings of a just society. We are defined in part by the jobs we hold, and Muirhead has something important to say about the partial satisfactions of the working life, and the (...) increasingly urgent need to balance the claims of work against those of family and community. Against the tendency to think of work exclusively in contractual terms, Muirhead focuses on the importance of work to our sense of a life well lived. Our notions of freedom and fairness are incomplete, he argues, without due consideration of how we fit the work we do. Muirhead weaves his argument out of sociological, economic, and philosophical analysis. He shows, among other things, how modern feminism's effort to reform domestic work and extend the promise of careers has contributed to more democratic understandings of what it means to have work that fits. His account of individual and social fit as twin standards of assessment is original and convincing--it points both to the unavoidable problem of distributing bad work in society and to the personal importance of finding fulfilling work. These themes are pursued through a wide-ranging discussion that engages thinkers from Plato to John Stuart Mill to Betty Friedan. Just Work shows what it would mean for work to make good on the high promise so often invested in it and suggests what we--both as a society and as individuals--might do when it falls short. (shrink)

This is a book about the American Dream: how to understand this central principle of American public philosophy, the ways in which it is threatened by a number of winner-take-all economic trends, and how to make it a reality for workers and their families in the 21st century. Integrating political philosophy and the history of political thought with recent work in economics, political science, and sociology, this book calls for renewed political and policy commitment to “just work.” (...) -/- Such a commitment is essential to combat the negative moral externalities of an economy where the fruits of growth are increasingly claimed by a relatively small portion of the population: slower growth, rising inequality, declining absolute mobility, dying communities, the erosion of social solidarity, lack of faith in political leaders and institutions, exploding debt, ethnic and nationalist backlash, widespread hopelessness, and the rapid rise in what economists Angus Deaton and Anne Case call deaths of despair. -/- Covid-19 threatens to pour gasoline on these winner-take-all fires, further concentrating economic and political power in the hands of those best suited to withstand (and even profit from) the pandemic-driven economic crisis. In this book, the author provides a model for understanding the American Dream and making it a reality in a post-Covid-19 economy. -/- A tour de force, this book is essential reading for scholars and researchers of political philosophy, political economy, political theory, and economics, as well as for the layperson trying to make sense of the post-pandemic world. (shrink)

My dissertation comprises three inter-related chapters, all of which explore the nature of work law and critically analyze the prevailing emphasis on matters of contract. The Escape Plans of Mill and Jefferson: I discuss these thinkers’ unsuccessful “escape plans” to minimize wage work. Mill advocated cooperative, worker-owned firms, while Jefferson favored farming the vast American frontier. I explore whether, if realized, either proposal would have satisfied the demands of justice. I argue that such proposals are normatively deficient because (...) they lead us mistakenly to assume that so long as the law provides alternatives to wage labor, it can justly leave work relationships in an unregulated, Dickensian state. In reply, I contend that we have no just alternative to engaging in the messy and difficult task of regulating the workplace. Revising the Roles of Master and Servant: I critically examine the claim that work law is best understood as part of contract law, arguing that this view is neither descriptively nor normatively instructive. Rather than understanding work law as a set of restraints on freedom of contract, we should see it as creating and defining special relationships, much like the codified definitions of marriages and corporations. I trace the development of work relationships through the common law of “master and servant” and more recent statutory modifications. I argue that the history and present form of work law are not consistent with the contract-centered view of work law as “interfering” with an otherwise free labor market. Competing Ideologies and the End of the Lochner Era: I examine Howard Gillman’s critique of the view that early-20th Century Supreme Court Justices sought to advance policy preferences rather than interpret the law. Gillman reconstructs the legal basis for their decisions, thus undermining the claim that they merely pursued laissez faire policies. However, Gillman then claims that the Justices who overruled liberty-of-contract in West Coast Hotel had no principled basis for their decisions. In response, I argue that West Coast Hotel was not only based on a plausible interpretation of constitutional law, but also the best outcome with respect to justice. (shrink)

Work is an integral part of modern society. However, the question of the normative conditions that distinguish just from unjust work has been under-investigated in political theory. This article, b...

This article outlines the structure of a Rawlsian theory of justice in the employment relationship. A focus on this theory is motivated by the role it plays in debates in business ethics. The Rawlsian theory answers three central questions about justice and the workplace. What is the relationship between social justice and justice at work? How should we conceive of the problem of justice in the economic sphere? And, what is justice in the workplace? To see fully what demands (...) justice makes on the workplace, we should first spell out the implications that domestic justice has for working conditions. When this is done, we can develop a conception of workplace justice and investigate what content such local justice should have. John Rawls’s political liberalism was constructed for the specific problem of a just basic structure; in order to apply it to another problem the key theoretical concepts must be revised. Reasons for a specific construction of a local original position are given and arguments are presented in support of a principle of local justice, which takes the form of a choice egalitarian local difference principle. (shrink)

This article examines the reproduction of gendered workplace inequalities through in-depth interviews with female-to-male transsexuals. Many FTMs enter the workforce as women and then transition to become men, an experience that can provide them with an “outsider-within” perspective on the “patriarchal dividend”—the advantages men in general gain from the subordination of women. Many of the respondents in this article find themselves, as men, receiving more authority, reward, and respect in the workplace than they received as women, even when they remain (...) in the same jobs. The author argues that their experiences can make the underpinnings of gendered workplace disparities visible and help illuminate how structural disadvantages for women are reproduced in workplace interactions. As tall, white FTMs see more advantages than short FTMs and FTMs of color, these experiences also illustrate how men's gender advantages at work vary with characteristics such as race/ethnicity and body structure. (shrink)

Perceiving a pay system as just has been suggested to be a precondition for individualized pay to have a motivating effect for employees. Supervisors’ enacted justice is central for understanding the effects that pay setting can have on employee attitudes and behavior. Yet, enacted justice has received little research attention, in regard to both organizational justice and pay-related topics. This study examines the effects of employees’ perceived pay justice and supervisors’ enacted justice, as well as the degree of congruence, (...) on employees’ work-related attitudes and behaviors. Questionnaire data from employees (N = 566) matched with data from their pay-setting supervisors (N = 208), employed in a Swedish manufacturing company, were analyzed. Results of polynomial regression with response surface analysis show that employees’ perceptions of pay justice were important for their work-related attitudes and behaviors and that supervisor–employee congruence regarding pay justice was positively related to employees’ attitudes and behavior, particularly when the ratings concerned high levels of justice. The results not only highlight the importance of developing a pay system that is perceived as just by employees but also emphasize the importance of reaching a congruence between supervisors’ and employees’ perceptions of high fairness, as this has positive implications for employees’ attitudes and behaviors. (shrink)

This article examines an omission in the study of discretionary time that bears on proposals currently being evaluated in this part of political philosophy. Specifically, this is the tendency in many jobs for work time to bleed into what is meant to be protected or discretionary time. I refer to this phenomenon as the relative proximity of labour and capital, which has become more prevalent in the labour market due to increased use of mobile communications technology. Ignored by the (...) literature is the fact that whether a job exhibits a high degree of proximity of labour and capital will influence workers' access to their discretionary time entitlements, including policies such as workplace flexibility and the four-day week. To account for this, I provide a descriptive and normative account of the proximity of labour and capital, in response to which I propose a remedial policy that provides workers with greater autonomy over how and when they take up their discretionary time entitlements. (shrink)

The executive hypothesis of self-regulation places cognitive information processing at the center of self-regulatory success/failure. While the hypothesis is well supported by cross-sectional studies, no study has tested its primary prediction, that temporary lapses in executive control underlie moments of self-regulatory failure. Here, we conducted a naturalistic experiment investigating whether short-term variation in executive control is associated with momentary self-regulatory outcomes, indicated by negative affect reactivity to everyday stressors. We assessed working memory capacity (WMC) through ultra-brief, ambulatory assessments on smart (...) phones five times per day in a 7-day ecological momentary assessment (EMA) study involving college-aged adults. We found that participants exhibited more negative affect reactivity to stressor exposures during moments when they exhibited lower than usual WMC. Contrary to previous findings, we found no between-person association between WMC and average stress reactivity. We interpret these findings as reflecting the role of executive control in determining one’s effective capacity to self-regulate. (shrink)

Proponents of probabilism argued that 'when an opinion is probable it may be followed even when the contrary opinion is more probable'. Gabriel Vazquez (1549-1604) was the first Jesuit theologian to defend and expand this doctrine. The prevalent theory of sovereignty at the time held that: (1) when sovereigns are victims of wrongs, they take on the role of international judges (thus just wars are just punishments); and (2) the sovereign need not stand before the judgment of any (...) other human being. The conjunction of probabilism and the idea of the sovereign as a superior judge made it conceptually possible for a war to be just on both sides. The reason is that probabilism allows two sovereigns to inculpably carry out two conflicting but probable judicial sentences about the same case. Confronted with this problem, Vazquez decided to eliminate the overlap between sovereign jurisdictions by revising the then dominant conception of sovereign supremacy and proposing criteria for determining > the competent forum to settle sovereign disputes. His views developed during his involvement in the controversy about Castilian claims to the Portuguese throne. (shrink)

Invisible work is neither defined nor recognized as labor and is not compensated as such. Studies show that manifestations of invisible work at home flow into the marketplace. What is lacking is systematic conceptualization and measurement of invisible work in the labor market built upon women’s and men’s knowledge and experiences. In this study, I address this lacuna using mixed-method sequential analysis. Twelve group interviews of employed women and men of varied socioeconomic locations in Israel yielded diverse (...) expressions of invisible practices in the workplace and their gendered meanings. Based on that knowledge, a typology of invisible work types was deduced, and an instrument was developed and distributed through a survey to a representative sample of the Israeli labor force. Regression analyses revealed that women and other disadvantaged groups do more invisible work at work than men and more advantaged groups do, regardless of occupation and managerial position. Beyond that, there are varied relations between labor market position and performing invisible work, across different types of practices. The study develops a typology of invisible work as a heuristic device contributing to office housework theory. I argue that invisible work should be conceived as an integral part of the labor market that needs to be considered when studying gender inequality. (shrink)

While deliberation has traditionally played a central role in philosophical and behavioral accounts of ethical decision-making, several recent studies challenge the value of deliberation. These studies find that deliberative thinking, such as considering divergent views or different perspectives, leads to less ethical decisions. We observe, however, that these studies do not address normative deliberation, in which decision-makers consider or apply a normative standard. We predict that normative deliberation improves ethical decision-making. Across six experiments, we examine the effects of non-normative deliberation (...) and normative deliberation on ethical decision-making. We find that normative deliberation improves ethical decision-making and, in contrast to recent studies, no form of deliberation harms ethical decision-making. (shrink)

The decades immediately following the Second World War saw extensive interest in the literary novels of Sade. Compared with the Sade studies of Maurice Blanchot, Jacques Lacan, and Gilles Deleuze, Simone de Beauvoir offers a unique perspective in her essay Must We Burn De Sade?. Indeed, unlike her contemporaries, Beauvoir focuses not only on Sade's prose but also on Sade's life and the relationship between Sade's life and literature. The latter is interpreted in two different ways. Thus, Beauvoir uses at (...) least three different perspectives to understand the Marquis de Sade. In our essay, each of these three approaches, not clearly distinguished by Beauvoir's interpreters, will be discussed separately. This discussion will be linked to the important point that Beauvoir mentions three different notions of sadistic enjoyment. It will be argued that the distinction between these different notions coincides with the distinction between the three perspectives Beauvoir uses in her reading of Sade. We will evaluate both how Beauvoir's study on Sade is related to her existentialist philosophy, and the relationship between Must We Burn De Sade? and the studies of Beauvoir's contemporaries, a relationship which is neglected by most scholars in continental philosophy. (shrink)

Community care for frail elderly people rests heavily on the work of low-status, paraprofessional home care workers. Home care workers describe their work as highly personalized caring labor that often seeps out of its formal boundaries into informal, unpaid activities. Although these activities are valued by workers, their supervisors, elderly clients, and family members, they represent uncompensated and exploited labor. Cost-cutting trends in home care management that seek to depersonalize home care labor are likely to increase its exploitative (...) potential for paid care workers and, simultaneously, to disadvantage and jeopardize elderly home care clients and their unpaid family caregivers. (shrink)

Externalists about epistemic justification have long emphasized the connection between truth and justification, with this coupling finding explicit expression in process reliabilism. Process reliabilism, however, faces a number of severe difficulties, leading disenchanted process reliabilists to find a new theoretical home. The conceptual flag under which such epistemologists have preferred to gather is that of dispositions. Just as reliabilism is determined by the frequency of a particular outcome, making it possible to characterize justification in terms of a particular relationship (...) to truth, dispositions are accompanied by concrete, worldly manifestations. By taking true beliefs as the result, not of certain processes but of particular dispositions, these epistemologists have attempted to respond to the numerous obstacles to reliabilism. Yet all this work has proceeded without regard to the wealth of contemporary work on the metaphysics of dispositions, making the new hope premature at best, ill-founded at worst. Combining contemporary dispositional accounts of justification with extant analyses of dispositions reveals that the latter is the case. The structural differences between epistemic justification and dispositions make it clear that not only should process reliabilism be abandoned, but the subsequent appeal to dispositions along with it. (shrink)

This paper responds to discussion and criticism contained in a mini-symposium on Just health: meeting health needs fairly. The replies clarify existing positions and modify or develop others, specifically in response to the following: Thomas Schramme criticises the claim that health is of special importance because of its impact on opportunity, and James Wilson argues that healthcare is not of special importance if social determinants of health have a major causal impact on population health. Annette Rid is concerned that (...) the relevance condition in accountability for reasonableness is unclear and does little work. Harald Schmidt aims to flesh out where an account of responsibility for health should go since one is under-developed in Just health. Michael Schefczyk and Susanne Brauer challenge aspects of the prudential lifespan account. Samia Hurst asks what impact a population view should have on clinician obligations. (shrink)

Just Shelter: Gentrification, Integration, Race, and Reconstruction is a work of political philosophy that examines the core injustices of the contemporary U.S. housing crisis and its relation to enduring racial injustices. It posits that what is required to achieve justice in social-spatial arrangements—what is otherwise called “spatial justice”—is to prioritize, in the crafting and enforcement of housing policy, individual moral equality and liberty; distributive justice; equal citizenship; and, due to history and continuing practice and effects of racial discrimination (...) in housing policy and the housing market in the United States, corrective justice in the form of rectification programs to address the history of racism in housing policy that should be implemented by local, state, and federal governments. To arrive at and illustrate this conclusion, it investigates aspects of the housing crisis closely related to the history of American racial injustice, such as gentrification, segregation, desegregation, integration, and, to a lesser extent, homelessness, and offers liberal reform gestures toward a broad view of reconstructive justice. (shrink)

Some people claim that evolution is "just a theory". Do you know what a scientific theory really is? Just a theory is an overview of the modern concepts of science. A clear understanding of the nature of science will enable you to distinguish science from pseudoscience (which illegitimately wraps itself in the mantle of science), and real social issues in science from the caricatures portrayed in postmodernist critiques. Prof. Ben-Ari's style is light (even humorous) and easy to read, (...) bringing the latest concepts of science to the general reader. Of particular interest is his analysis of the terminology of science (fact, law, proof, theory) in relation to the colloquial meaning of these terms. Between chapters are biographical vignettes of scientists — both familiar and unfamiliar — showing their common commitment to the enterprise of science, together with a diversity of backgrounds and personalities. This accessible, informative, and comprehensive work will give lay readers a good grasp of real science. (shrink)

Digital platform economy has radically changed the modes in which work is organized, stretching the functionality of legal environment of work and its governance. This article builds on a strand of labor law scholarship that advances the need to rethink the legal construction of work and work relationship in order to adapt it to the dynamically evolving socio-economic context. By applying a business and human rights lens to this process, this article confutes the mainstream argument that (...) labor rights guarantees remain contingent on an individual’s enjoying the status of an employee under national jurisdiction. We survey a largely underexamined conception of affording protection to platform workers under International Human Rights Law (IHRL). In doing so, we argue that the instruments of IHRL may in some respects be even better placed than that of national law, both strengthening and complementing areas where state protection is weak or non-existent. Through the right to just and favorable conditions of work perspective, we outline the non-contested, albeit partly poorly implemented obligations of states, as well as largely contentious and contested responsibilities of private actors such as digital platforms towards the rights-holders. We conclude by arguing that the leverage offered by IHRL in the struggle to curb a quasi-sovereign power of the platform largely outweighs the democratically motivated objections this avenue may raise. (shrink)

Counterpossibles are counterfactuals with an impossible antecedent. According to the orthodox view of counterfactuals, all counterpossibles are vacuously true. This is puzzling because some counterpossible statements seem to be false. The paper analyzes two approaches to explaining why certain counterpossibles, though perhaps true, may appear to be false. The first, which appeals to the Gricean mechanism of conversational implicatures, asserts that some counterpossibles appear to be false because their assertion carries with it a false conversational implicature. However, I argue that, (...) under a closer scrutiny, this approach collapses. I therefore turn to a second approach, proposed by Timothy Williamson. It appeals to a heuristic according to which speakers may regard a counterpossible to be false if they have previously accepted its opposite. Since the applicability of Williamson’s solution is limited, I suggest a more general account. Its underlining idea is that a counterpossible is rejected if the speaker cannot find what they regard as a universally true conditional function derivable from the counterpossible by substitutions and syntactic transformations. (shrink)

Contemporary just war theory is divided into two broad camps: revisionists and traditionalists. Traditionalists seek to provide moral foundations for something close to current international law, and in particular the laws of armed conflict. Although they propose improvements, they do so cautiously. Revisionists argue that international law is at best a pragmatic fiction—it lacks deeper moral foundations. In this article, I present the contemporary history of analytical just war theory, from the origins of contemporary traditionalist just war (...) theory in Michael Walzer's work to the revisionist critique of Walzer and the subsequent revival of traditionalism. I discuss central questions of methodology, as well as consider the morality of resorting to war and the morality of conduct in war. I show that although the revisionists exposed philosophical shortcomings in Walzer's arguments, their radical conclusions should prompt us not to reject the broad contemporary consensus, but instead to seek better arguments to underpin it. (shrink)

I argue that, according to Just War Theory, those who work as administrative personnel in the private military industry can be permissibly harmed while at work by enemy combatants. That is, for better or worse, a Just War theorist should consider all those who work as administrative personnel in the private military industry either: (i) individuals who may be permissibly restrained with lethal force while at work, or (ii) individuals who may be harmed by (...) permissible attacks against their workplace. In doing so, I also provide some critical analysis of the relevant Just War concepts. (shrink)

Emotionally-related live organ donation is different from almost all other medical treatments in that a family member or, in some countries, a friend contributes with an organ or parts of an organ to the recipient. Furthermore, there is a long-acknowledged but not well-understood gender-imbalance in emotionally-related live kidney donation. This article argues for the benefit of the concept of just love as an analytic tool in the analysis of emotionally-related live organ donation where the potential donor(s) and the recipient (...) are engaged in a love relation. The concept of just love is helpful in the analysis of these live organ donations even if no statistical gender-imbalance prevails. It is particularly helpful, however, in the analysis of the gender-imbalance in live kidney donations if these donations are seen as a specific kind of care-work, if care-work is experienced as a labour one should perform out of love and if women still experience stronger pressures to engage in care-work than do men. The aim of the article is to present arguments for the need of just love as an analytic tool in the analysis of emotionally-related live organ donation where the potential donor(s) and the recipient are engaged in a love relation. The aim is also to elaborate two criteria that need to be met in order for love to qualify as just and to highlight certain clinical implications. (shrink)