In the title of his 1980 Dewey Lectures, John Rawls announced that his theory of justice as fairness could be described as an example of “Kantian Constructivism in Moral Theory” (KC). Rawls flirted around 1980 with a strong commitment to Kantian autonomy, only to abandon it as unnecessary to the justification of his theory of justice. The chapter argues that this supposed opposition is based on a serious misunderstanding of Rawls's intellectual trajectory, and especially of the way he understands the (...) Kantian elements of his theory. It shows that, against the assumptions of the familiar debates, Rawls in and after KC, consistently held that the practical aims of constructivism and the philosophical goal of a fully rational justification are not in any sort of tension. Rawls's claims in Political Liberalism and after, and especially his distinction between his political and Kant's moral constructivism, in no way undermine this argument. (shrink)

For a long time, Kant’s Doctrine of Right languished in relative neglect, even among Kantians. The work was best known for its uncompromising views on punishment and revolution, and for a seemingly limited and not particularly original emphasis on private property. Kant’s more interesting political claims were often said to be located elsewhere: in the third Critique (Hannah Arendt, Patrick Riley), or the structure of the critical project (Onora O’Neill). When John Rawls explained why his theory of justice could be (...) given a ‘Kantian interpretation’, he drew on concepts found just in Kant’s moral philosophy, bypassing the Doctrine of Right entirely. -/- In recent years, however, there has been an expanding body of work on the Doctrine of Right, by writers like B. Sharon Byrd and Joachim Hruschka, Arthur Ripstein, Elisabeth Ellis, and Lea Ypi. Ripstein and Ellis, in particular, have sought to reframe the arguments of Kant’s text in terms more congenial to contemporary legal and political theory. But can Kant’s arguments really be applied to twenty-first-century political debates? -/- The authors in this collection of essays explore this question in different ways, by looking at different aspects of Kant’s text. What is distinctive about Kant’s conception of the social contract, or human rights? Can a Kantian political philosophy concern itself with poverty and welfare rights? Can a Kantian affirm a conception of civil disobedience? What kind of view should a Kantian have of international relations? Can Kant’s views on punishment be reconciled with a conception of forgiveness? What would a Kantian position be in contemporary debates about marriage? -/- The authors of this volume do not always agree with one another, but they always seek to be faithful to the text, and to understand what a political position grounded in the Doctrine of Right would look like in twenty-first-century terms. (shrink)

What is the point of appealing to a social contract? An intuitively plausible answer is that the metaphor functions as a justification for the obligation to obey the law. If I have made a contract to establish a political authority, then I am bound to obey the commands of that authority. In a contract, my agreement creates an obligation to perform. Then only remaining question is what reasons I have to make the agreement in the first place. It would then (...) seem that classical social contract theory is divided between those who understand our reasons to agree as prudential and those who take our reasons to be moral. But this kind of interpretation fails to make sense of Kant’s political theory, which understands our obligation to enter into a civil condition as prior to the appeal to the social contract. The original contract enters into Kant’s theory at a crucially later point, after the creation of specific political institutions. It functions as a way of reconciling these institutions with the idea of rightful coercion, by imposing normative requirements on the political reasoning of legislators and citizens. For Kant, the distinctive feature of normative political reasoning is the notion of a unified will, an idea that was already present at the start of social contract theory in Hobbes, but had yet to be properly clarified. Kant appeals to the original contract not to ground our political obligations, but to explain both the coherence and the necessity of the idea of a common will for political argument. (shrink)

This book introduces Hegel's best-known and most influential work, Phenomenology of Spirit, by interpreting it as a unified argument for a single philosophical claim: that human beings achieve their freedom through retrospective self-understanding. In clear, non-technical prose, Larry Krasnoff sets this claim in the context of the history of modern philosophy and shows how it is developed in the major sections of Hegel's text. The result is an accessible and engaging guide to one of the most complex and (...) important works of nineteenth-century philosophy, which will be of interest to all students and teachers working in this area. (shrink)

Kant's relation to Hobbesian voluntarism has recently become a source of controversy for the interpretation of Kant's practical philosophy. Realist interpreters, most prominently Karl Ameriks, have attacked the genealogies of Kantian autonomy suggested by J. B. Schneewind and Christine Korsgaard as misleadingly voluntarist and unacceptably anti-realist. In this debate, however, there has been no real discussion of Kant's own views about Hobbes. By examining the relation of Hobbes' voluntarism to a kind of conventionalism, and through a reading of Kant's most (...) explicit discussion of Hobbes, in “Theory and Practice,“ 1 I argue that Kant's criticism of Hobbes is much more limited than it might first appear. Rather than rejecting Hobbes' voluntarism and conventionalism entirely, Kant ends up criticizing only Hobbes' understanding of the relation between these doctrines. The essay thus defends Schneewind's and Korsgaard's histories of modern moral philosophy, and raises doubts about realist readings of Kant's practical philosophy. (shrink)

According to a familiar criticism, liberal pluralism is undermined by the special value which liberals give to autonomy. This special value is then undermined by the very exercise of autonomy in practical judgement, since rational agents ought to give priority to values they have judged to be worthy, not to autonomy. This criticism presupposes an over-theoretical view of practical judgement which overlooks our need to integrate our diverse practical judgements into our lives. I explain this integration through a conception of (...) autonomy as the ability of a plurality to act in common. Drawing on Rawls' account of overlapping consensus, I argue that this view fits not only cases of collective activity, but also cases of individuals making life-structuring commitments. Understanding the essential connection between autonomy and plurality reveals what is mistaken about the familiar criticism of liberalism. (shrink)

Kantian autonomy is often thought to be independent of time and place, but J. B. Schneewind in his landmark study, The Invention of Autonomy, has shown that there is much to be learned by setting Kant's moral philosophy in the context of the history of modern moral philosophy. The distinguished authors in the collection continue Schneewind's project by relating Kant's work to the historical context of his predecessors and to the empirical context of human agency. This will be a valuable (...) resource for professionals and advanced students in philosophy, the history of ideas, and the history of political thought. (shrink)

In the UK and USA ‘Hate crime’ has become a topic of public controversy and social mobilization around issues of violence and harassment. This has largely but not exclusively addressed racism, homophobia and gender based violence. This article has three objectives. First, to situate hate crime legislation within a broad theory of modernity;secondly to examine the politics of its emergence as a public issue; thirdly to use data from the authors' recent research in Greater Manchester to illuminate the complexity of (...) the concept of ‘hate crime’. The centrality of ‘hate crime’ to current debates derives from the importance of rights-based regulation of complex societies and the juridical management of emotional life. Hatred and violence have become problematic behaviour thrown into relief by a long term civilizing process. Hate crimes have thus acquired powerful rhetorical focus for mobilization of victim and identity politics. With reference to racist violence in Oldham and elsewhere in Greater Manchester, we argue that in its application and construction, however, ‘hate crime’ is a complex phenomenon that might dramatize rather than regulate the problems it seeks to address. (shrink)

The multiple emergencies of global heating require bioethicists to embrace the dormant, comprehensive bioethics legacy of Van Rensselaer Potter, moving beyond the current narrower focus of the field on medicine and health care. We recommend readings that expand the core literature of bioethics to address key environmental issues. These are Jessica Pierce and Andrew Jameton's The Ethics of Environmentally Responsible Health Care; Dale Jamieson's Reason in a Dark Time; and David Wallace‐Well's The Uninhabitable Earth. Because efforts to mitigate climate (...) disasters are likely to be only partially successful, we also recommend the teachings of late Roman Stoicism and core texts of Buddhism, which provide ethical wisdom likely to be needed in the multiple crises of the Anthropocene. (shrink)

Necessity is a notoriously dangerous and slippery concept-dangerous because it contemplates virtually unrestrained killing in warfare and slippery when used in conflicting ways in different areas of international law. Jens David Ohlin and Larry May untangle these confusing strands and perform a descriptive mapping of the ways that necessity operates in legal and philosophical arguments in jus ad bellum, jus in bello, human rights, and criminal law. Although the term "necessity" is ever-present in discussions regarding the law and (...) ethics of killing, its meaning changes subtly depending on the context. It is sometimes an exception, at other times a constraint on government action, and most frequently a broad license in war that countenances the wholesale killing of enemy soldiers in battle. Is this legal status quo in war morally acceptable? Ohlin and May offer a normative and philosophical critique of international law's prevailing notion of jus in bello necessity and suggest ways that killing in warfare could be made more humane-not just against civilians but soldiers as well. Along the way, the authors apply their analysis to modern asymmetric conflicts with non-state actors and the military techniques most likely to be used against them. Presenting a rich tapestry of arguments from both contemporary and historical Just War theory, Necessity in International Law is the first full-length study of necessity as a legal and philosophical concept in international affairs. (shrink)

We will argue here that after more than 30 years of talk, theory, and clinical practice, we bioethicists still know far too little about what patients, subjects, and healthcare professionals are up to, morally. Bioethics is still near the beginning in grasping what it means to understand, much less to honor fully, the moral power and perspicacity of those bioethics is designed to serve. This is, of course, a serious charge, but one we will endeavor to show has merit. However, (...) we want to be clear from the start that we do not gainsay the important work that has been done in and through the influence of bioethics, both as a field of practical engagement and as a cultural movement, in improving how healthcare is delivered and how human subjects are treated. Thirty or 40 years—depending on how one marks the beginning point—is a very short time, and it is hard to imagine that wholesale changes, all of them in the right direction, could be the outcome for a field this young. Hence, we do not intend the title, “One Cheer for Bioethics,” as a wholesale indictment, but as an indication that there is a great deal of work yet to be done, and that following the currently dominant direction of the field is not likely to get us there. Our aim is to indicate just where future work should be focused, and to do so we will need to be critical of some of the preoccupations of the last three decades. a. (shrink)

Weighing Lives in War examines the core principles of the modern law of war: necessity, proportionality, and distinction, and provides new and innovative insights into the process of weighing lives implicit in all theories of jus in bello.

This paper explores the role of friendship in the lives of people with psychiatric disabilities through the use of narrative. We suggest that the use of phenomenologically based investigation in experimental or other traditional research designs provides a more in-depth and complex view of the lives of people with serious mental illness. We offer the example of the Partnership Project, which provides people with psychiatric disabilities a consumer or non-consumer "partner" with whom to enjoy community activities and spend a weekly (...) stipend. Through the lens of narrative, we examine the ways that friendship differs between people matched with either a consumer or non-consumer partner and delve into the importance of connection and friendship in the lives of people with psychiatric disabilities. (shrink)

Universal Human Rights brings new clarity to the important and highly contested concept of universal human rights. This collection of essays explores the foundations of universal human rights in four sections devoted to their nature, application, enforcement, and limits, concluding that shared rights help to constitute a universal human community, which supports local customs and separate state sovereignty. The eleven contributors to this volume demonstrate from their very different perspectives how human rights can help to bring moral order to an (...) otherwise divided world. (shrink)

This paper explores the status of language and suffering in recovery from psychosis from a transcendentally-informed phenomenological perspective. We suggest that each of these concepts can apply both to the illness itself and to the person with the illness. The relationship between the two will be one focus of this discussion. The other focus will be on the various ways in which phenomenological approaches to psychopathology have understood the nature of this relationship; a relationship characterized by different meanings of the (...) term "immanence." Drawing inspiration from a Borges poem and from Husserl's debate with Heidegger over the content of his "Phenomenology" article for the Encyclopedia Britannica, we argue that it is misleading, as well as unhelpful, to continue to focus on deficits and dysfunction while ignoring the person's hopes, strengths, assets, and agency. As long as there remains no cure for psychosis, we conclude that it is more effective to promote recovery among people with psychosis than to remain focused on reducing, minimizing, or eliminating their disorder. (shrink)

We will argue here that after more than 30 years of talk, theory, and clinical practice, we bioethicists still know far too little about what patients, subjects, and healthcare professionals are up to, morally. Bioethics is still near the beginning in grasping what it means to understand, much less to honor fully, the moral power and perspicacity of those bioethics is designed to serve. This is, of course, a serious charge, but one we will endeavor to show has merit. However, (...) we want to be clear from the start that we do not gainsay the important work that has been done in and through the influence of bioethics, both as a field of practical engagement and as a cultural movement, in improving how healthcare is delivered and how human subjects are treated. Thirty or 40 years—depending on how one marks the beginning point—is a very short time, and it is hard to imagine that wholesale changes, all of them in the right direction, could be the outcome for a field this young. Hence, we do not intend the title, “One Cheer for Bioethics,” as a wholesale indictment, but as an indication that there is a great deal of work yet to be done, and that following the currently dominant direction of the field is not likely to get us there. Our aim is to indicate just where future work should be focused, and to do so we will need to be critical of some of the preoccupations of the last three decades. a. (shrink)

In the context of technology development and systems engineering, knowledge is typically treated as a complex information structure. In this view, knowledge can be stored in highly sophisticated data systems and processed by explicitly intelligent, software-based technologies. This paper argues that the current emphasis upon knowledge as information (or even data) is based upon a form of rationalism which is inappropriate for any comprehensive treatment of knowledge in the context of human-centred systems thinking. A human-centred perspective requires us to treat (...) knowledge in human terms. The paper sets out the particular importance of tacit knowledge in this regard. It sets out two case studies which reveal the critical importance of a careful treatment of tacit knowledge for success in two complex, technology-driven projects. (shrink)

This article shares reflections from members of the community of philosophers of education in the United States and Canada who were invited to express their insights in response to the theme ‘Snaps...

From Locke to Kierkegaard to those annoying car ads that promise “No Boundaries”— Is our use of the word 'freedom' still coherent? Was it ever coherent? Is it significant that this fuzzy term is so often used to carry so much rhetorical force? With Larry Hatab , David Walsh , and Mark Murphy.

Personal observations and survey data are used to examine the future of the village in a restructured food and agricultural sector in the former Soviet Union. Specific comparisons are made between the subjective quality of life of residents in two villages in the former Soviet Union (one in southern Russia and one in eastern Ukraine) and two villages in northwest Missouri. Residents of the Russian and Ukrainian villages have substantially lower assessments of specific domains of their lives than do American (...) villagers. Respondents in the Russian and Ukrainian sample express an interest in some aspects of privatization of services and consumer goods but, by and large, exhibit little interest in replacing the collective farms with household-level private farming. Historical factors, different incentive structures, and the possibilities for different institutional arrangements are discussed. (shrink)

DNA microarrays are perfectly suited for comparing gene expression in different populations of cells. An important application of microarray techniques is identifying genes which are activated by a particular drug of interest. This process will allow biologists to identify therapies targeted to particular diseases, and, eventually, to gain more knowledge about the biological processes in organisms. Such an application is described in this paper. It is focused on diabetes and obesity, which is a genetically heterogeneous disease, meaning that multiple defective (...) genes are responsible for the diseases. The paper is divided in three parts, each dealing with a different problem addressed to our study. First we validate the data from our microarray experiment. We identified significant systematic sources of variability which are potentially issues for other microarray datasets. Second, we applied multiple hypothesis testing to identify differentially expressed genes. We found a set of genes which appear to change in expression level over time in response to a drug treatment. Third, we tried to address the problem of identification of co-expressed genes using cluster analysis. This last problem is still under discussion. (shrink)

In this chapter, we treat Larry David’s television series, Curb Your Enthusiasm as, in large measure, a philosophical exercise. We argue that it presents a critique of our norms, practices, and conventions of social behavior, notably those that pertain primarily to civility rather than to morality. This critique identifies certain essential features of such behavior including: the typical unspoken-ness of its governing norms, and their non-necessity, despite appearances to the contrary, due to our intense emotional investment in them. (...) In Curb Your Enthusiasm, the ostensible justification that “This is just how we do things” comes in for merciless, satirical interrogation, most often by Larry David but sometimes by others, at Larry David’s expense. This chapter relies heavily on Mary Douglas’s discussion of jokes, but parts company with it in crucial respects. The chapter will also situate Larry David’s brand of humor in the context of the philosophy of comic amusement in terms of the notion of incongruity. Special emphasis will be played on the importance Larry David assigns to emotions in the maintenance of the relevant social norms. (shrink)

Do axiomatic derivations advance positive economics? If economists are interested in predicting how people behave, without a pretense to change individual decision making, how can they benefit from representation theorems, which are no more than equivalence results? We address these questions. We propose several ways in which representation results can be useful and discuss their implications for axiomatic decision theory.

Human subjects seem to have a type of introspective access to their mental states that allows them to immediately judge the types and intensities of their occurrent emotions, as well as what those emotions are about or “directed at”. Such judgments manifest what I call “emotion-direction beliefs”, which, if reliably produced, may constitute emotion-direction knowledge. Many psychologists have argued that the “directed emotions” such beliefs represent have a componential structure, one that includes feelings of emotional responses and related but independent (...) representations of what those feelings are about. I argue that such componentiality may help to explain how emotion-direction knowledge is achievable. I begin by developing a hybrid view of introspection that combines David Chalmers’ phenomenal realism with Alvin Goldman’s “partial redeployment” account of meta-belief content. I then provide a process-reliabilist account of introspectively gained emotion-direction knowledge that outlines the minimum conditions of reliably forming emotion-direction beliefs, and specifies several ways in which the warrant of such beliefs could be defeated by relevant counterfactual alternatives. The overall account suggests how distinct introspective processes might be epistemically synergistic. (shrink)

The interpretation of economic theories varies along several dimensions. First, models can describe reality, illustrate a recommended state of affairs, or analyze the structure and implications of a theory. Second, theories can be used for prediction or for explanation. Third, theories can relate to reality in a rule-based or case-based manner. Fourth, theories can be statements about economic reality or about the act of economic reasoning itself. Fifth, theories can offer predictions or merely critique reasoning. We argue that theories are (...) often open to multiple interpretations which can shift depending on the context in which the theory is applied, the surrounding economic literature, and the argument made by the interpreter. (shrink)

Michela Bella & Matteo Santarelli – What was the state of Pragmatism studies when you first encountered pragmatism? Larry A. Hickman – After completing my undergraduate degree in psychology I decided that I wanted to study philosophy. In order to prepare for graduate school, I spent a year taking philosophy courses at the University of Texas in Austin. The faculty included Charles Hartshorne, who was co-editor of the Peirce Collected Papers. There was also David L. Miller and George (...) Gentry, b... (shrink)

Five faculty members in the College of Business at Northern Illinois University received a grant from the James S. Kemper Foundation to integrate ethics into the graduate business curriculum. This was the second phase of a comprehensive program to integrate ethics into the business curriculum. Each faculty member taught a required course in the MBA program. The faculty members represented each of the five functional departments in the College of Business.This paper describes the ethics content, materials, and approaches that were (...) used to cover ethics by each of the five faculty members. Hopefully, this description will help other faculty and universities integrate ethics more effectively into the business curriculum. (shrink)

As early as 1784, sharp-eyed engineers and scientists noted striking similarities between the dynamics of seagoing vessels and aerial vehicles. By the early twentieth century, naval engineers and scientists were developing and designing airplanes and dirigibles using empirical principles derived from naval architecture. Several key researchers in aerodynamics began their career as naval architects (David A. Taylor, William F. Durand and Jerome C. Hunsaker) and carried out their experiments in ship testing facilities. By the 1930s, however, the transfer of (...) knowledge was irrevocably reversed as empiricism gave way to more fundamental, physics-based research. The rapid evolution of complex aircraft systems and flight envelopes led to new theoretical developments in aerodynamics and maneuvering, which quickly found their way into naval ship design. The theoretical and experimental results for airfoils, rigid airships and fixed-wing aircraft developed by Ludwig Prandtl, Theodore von Kármán, Max M. Munk and Hilda M. Lyon were employed in the hydrodynamic development of surface ships and submarines. This paper examines how the ideas, concepts and data from one discipline influenced the other and explores the processes by which that knowledge was transferred between disciplines. (shrink)

Each contributor to this book has used personal experience as the basis from which to frame his individual sociological perspectives. Because they have personalized their work, their accounts are real, and recognizable as having come from 'real' persons, about 'real' experiences. There are no objectively-distanced disembodied third person entities in these accounts. These writers are actual people whose stories will make you laugh, cry, think, and want to know more.