Machine intelligence already helps medical staff with a number of tasks. Ethical decision-making, however, has not been handed over to computers. In this proof-of-concept study, we show how an algorithm based on Beauchamp and Childress’ prima-facie principles could be employed to advise on a range of moral dilemma situations that occur in medical institutions. We explain why we chose fuzzy cognitive maps to set up the advisory system and how we utilized machine learning to train it. We report on the (...) difficult task of operationalizing the principles of beneficence, non-maleficence and patient autonomy, and describe how we selected suitable input parameters that we extracted from a training dataset of clinical cases. The first performance results are promising, but an algorithmic approach to ethics also comes with several weaknesses and limitations. Should one really entrust the sensitive domain of clinical ethics to machine intelligence? (shrink)

Good physical experiments conform to the basic methodological standards of experimental design: they are objective, reliable, and valid. But is this also true of thought experiments? Especially problems of personal identity have engendered hypothetical scenarios that are very distant from the actual world. These imagined situations have been conspicuously ineffective at resolving conflicting intuitions and deciding between the different accounts of personal identity. Using prominent examples from the literature, I argue that this is due to many of these thought experiments (...) not adhering to the methodological standards that guide experimental design in nearly all other disciplines. I also show how empirically unwarranted background assumptions about human physiology render some of the hypothetical scenarios that are employed in the debate about personal identity highly misleading. (shrink)

abstractBy appealing to the similarity between pre-vital and post-mortem nonexistence, Lucretius famously tried to show that our anxiety about death was irrational. His so-called Symmetry Argument has been attacked in various ways, but all of these strategies are themselves problematic. In this paper, I propose a new approach to undermining the argument: when Parfit’s distinction between identity and what matters is applied, not diachronically but across possible worlds, the alleged symmetry can be broken. Although the pre-vital and posthumous time spans (...) that we could have experienced are indeed analogous with respect to our identity, they are not analogous with respect to psychological continuity, which forms the basis of prudential concern. Lucretius even anticipated the Parfitian distinction. He did not, however, notice the significance that it has for his Symmetry Argument. (shrink)

Lockean views of personal identity maintain that we are essentially persons who persist diachronically by virtue of being psychologically continuous with our former selves. In this article, I present a novel objection to this variant of psychological accounts, which is based on neurophysiological characteristics of the brain. While the mental states that constitute said psychological continuity reside in the cerebral hemispheres, so that for the former to persist only the upper brain must remain intact, being conscious additionally requires that a (...) structure originating in the brainstem—the ascending reticular activating system—be functional. Hence, there can be situations in which even small brainstem lesions render individuals irreversibly comatose and thus forever preclude access to their mental states, while the neural correlates of the states themselves are retained. In these situations, Lockeans are forced to regard as fulfilled their criterion of diachronic persistence since psychological continuity, as they construe it, is not disrupted. Deeming an entity that is never again going to have any mental experiences to be a person, however, is an untenable position for a psychological account to adopt. In their current form, Lockean views of personal identity are therefore incompatible with human neurophysiology. (shrink)

The COVID-19 pandemic has been overwhelming public health-care systems around the world. With demand exceeding the availability of medical resources in several regions, hospitals have been forced to invoke triage. To ensure that this difficult task proceeds in a fair and organised manner, governments scrambled experts to draft triage guidelines under enormous time pressure. Although there are similarities between the documents, they vary considerably in how much weight their respective authors place on the different criteria that they propose. Since most (...) of the recommendations do not come with ethical justifications, analysing them requires that one traces back these criteria to their underlying theories of distributive justice. In the literature, COVID-19 triage has been portrayed as a value conflict solely between utilitarian and egalitarian elements. While these two accounts are indeed the main antipodes, I shall show that in fact all four classic theories of distributive justice are involved: utilitarianism, egalitarianism, libertarianism, and communitarianism. Detecting these in the documents and classifying the suggested criteria accordingly enables one to understand the balancing between the different approaches to distributive justice—which is crucial for both managing the current pandemic and in preparation for the next global health crisis. (shrink)

Fifty years have passed since brain death was first proposed as a criterion of death. Its advocates believe that with the destruction of the brain, integrated functioning ceases irreversibly, somatic unity dissolves, and the organism turns into a corpse. In this article, I put forward two objections against this assertion. First, I draw parallels between brain death and other pathological conditions and argue that whenever one regards the absence or the artificial replacement of a certain function in these pathological conditions (...) as compatible with organismic unity, then one equally ought to tolerate that function’s loss or replacement in brain death. Second, I show that the neurological criterion faces an additional problem that is only coming to light as life-supporting technology improves: the growing sophistication of the latter gives rise to a dangerous decoupling of the actual performance of a vital function from the retention of neurological control over it. Half a century after its introduction, the neurological criterion is facing the same fate as its cardiopulmonary predecessor. (shrink)

When an individual is comatose while parts of her brain remain functional, the question arises as to whether any mental characteristics are still associated with this brain, that is, whether the person still exists. Settling this uncertainty requires that one becomes clear about two issues: the type of functional loss that is associated with the respective profile of brain damage and the persistence conditions of persons. Medical case studies can answer the former question, but they are not concerned with the (...) latter. Conversely, in the philosophical literature, various accounts of personal identity are discussed, but usually detached from any empirical basis. Only uniting the two debates and interpreting the real-life configurations of brain damage through the lens of the philosophical concepts enables one to make an informed judgment regarding the persistence of comatose persons. Especially challenging are cases in which three mental characteristics that normally occur together—wakefulness, awareness and memory storage—come apart. These shall be the focus of this paper. (shrink)

Can machine intelligence do clinical ethics? And if so, would applying it to actual medical cases be desirable? In a recent target article (Meier et al. 2022), we described the piloting of our advisory algorithm METHAD. Here, we reply to commentaries published in response to our project. The commentaries fall into two broad categories: concrete criticism that concerns the development of METHAD; and the more general question as to whether one should employ decision-support systems of this kind—the debate we set (...) out to ignite with our target article. (shrink)

This article presents and discusses for the first time an excerpt from Censorinus’ “De die natali” (12,3-13,1) which forms part of a Carolingian collection of Latin texts on music. The relevant collection, which is extant in at least five manuscripts ranging from the 9th to the 13th century, has not been recognized as such in the past. It was assembled between ca. 750 and 830 in Northeastern France, and its compiler might also be responsible for an ‘edition’ of the so-called (...) “Notitia Galliarum” found in MS Città del Vaticano, Reg. lat. 982. The Censorinus excerpt offered by the collection is negligible for the constitution of the text, but it enlarges our knowledge of the Carolingian reception of the “De die natali”. (shrink)

In 2016 Justin Stover published an important editio princeps of a fragmentarily preserved text that was originally discovered by Raymond Klibansky in the first half of the twentieth century: a kind of Summarium librorum Platonis which Klibansky took as a Latin translation of a lost Greek original, whereas Stover argues it was written by Apuleius, namely as the third book of his De Platone. The following notes deal primarily with details pertaining to the constitution of the text, but I will (...) start with one remark on a detail of Stover's translation and close with a discussion concerning the alleged medieval reception of the so-called ‘New Apuleius’. Chapters, pages, Latin text, apparatus criticus entries, and translations are quoted according to Stover's edition; all bold highlights are mine, as are all translations from works other than the ‘New Apuleius’ if not indicated otherwise. (shrink)

The present article provides a full description of the little known 9 th century Nuremberg fragment of the “Historia Augusta” (Stadtbibliothek Fragm. lat. 7) as well as an extensive discussion of the work’s Carolingian manuscript tradition. It is demonstrated 1.) that the Nuremberg fragment most probably is a remnant of a volume from the former library of Murbach (= M) which was used by Erasmus and Froben for their edition of 1518, 2.) that M, the excerpts preserved in Vatican Pal. (...) lat. 886 (= Π), and also Vatican Pal. lat. 899 (= P), our most important witness to the text, go back independently to a common exemplar, 3.) that Sedulius Scottus († ca. 875) culled the extracts preserved in his „Collectaneum miscellaneum“ from P, in which his typical excerption signs are still visible. Due to its close kinship to P, the Murbach copy did by no means contain a version of the “Historia Augusta” different from P or even more original than P, as has been variously claimed in recent years. (shrink)

In their Target Article, Rahimzadeh et al. (2023) discuss the virtues and vices of employing ChatGPT in ethics education for healthcare professionals. To this end, they confront the chatbot with a moral dilemma and analyse its response. In interpreting the case, ChatGPT relies on Beauchamp and Childress’ four prima-facie principles: beneficence, non-maleficence, respect for patient autonomy, and justice. While the chatbot’s output appears admirable at first sight, it is worth taking a closer look: ChatGPT not only misses the point when (...) applying the principle of non-maleficence; its response also fails, in several places, to honour patient autonomy – a flaw that should be taken seriously if large language models are to be employed in ethics education. I therefore subject ChatGPT’s reply to detailed scrutiny and point out where it went astray. (shrink)

When does a human being cease to exist? For millennia, the answer to this question had remained largely unchanged: death had been diagnosed when heartbeat and breathing were permanently absent. Only comparatively recently, in the 1950s, rapid developments in intensive-care medicine called into question this widely accepted criterion. What had previously been deemed a permanent cessation of vital functions suddenly became reversible. -/- A new criterion of death was needed. It was suggested that the destruction of the brain could indicate (...) the death of the organism in the presence of external life support. Soon the so-called brain death became the new worldwide standard. In recent years, however, doubts about this neurological criterion have been growing. Is brain death really our death? -/- This is the question that this thesis seeks to answer. To this end, we shall connect the medical debate about the definition of death to the philosophical debate about personal identity. While we will find that the destruction of its brain does in fact not correspond to an organism’s death, we shall also ask whether the assumption that we are essentially organisms is correct. May brain death be the ceasing to exist of a different entity? -/- Substituting clinical case reports and considerations about human physiology for the use of thought experiments, the thesis takes a novel and philosophically unconventional approach to the problem of what we essentially are. We shall analyse various pathological conditions and their respective effects on the bodily and mental characteristics of our existence. We will conclude that brain death is indeed our death – but for reasons entirely different from those cited in the original justification of this criterion. (shrink)

-/- Zuk et al. (2023) examined researchers’ views on how deep brain stimulation may impact patients’ personality, mood, and behaviour (PMB). The team found that experts vary substantially in the notion of personality they employ. However, despite noting the lack of conceptual precision, no attempt was made at scientifically defining any of the involved concepts, so that the results of the different interviews remain largely incommensurable. In this comment, I am doing the interpretative work that the authors should have undertaken (...) following the descriptive part of the paper: first, disentangling the PMB cluster by defining what exactly constitutes personality, mood, and behaviour; and secondly, conceptualising the notion of personality change. I am arguing that what sets personality changes apart from other modifications is diachronic persistence. (shrink)

For hundreds of years, death had been defined by cardiopulmonary criteria. When heart and respiratory functions were permanently absent, doctors declared their patients dead. Three developments in intensive care medicine called into question these widely-accepted criteria, however: the advent of positive pressure ventilation and the promotion of cardiopulmonary resuscitation, both in the early 1950s, and the first successful heart transplantation in 1967. What had previously been diagnosed as the permanent absence of vital functions, suddenly became reversible. Not only could doctors (...) replace a defective heart with a functioning transplant; patients could also be kept oxygenated in the total absence of spontaneous respiratory function. The traditional boundaries between life and death became blurred. Patients for whom there was not the remotest possibility of regaining consciousness following massive brain damage continued to consume valuable medical resources. Moreover, their organs could not be procured for transplantation. Were those patients still alive or could the ventilators be switched off? A criterion suited to indicate a patient’s death despite the provision of external life support was needed. In 1968 an ad hoc committee of the Harvard Medical School published the first comprehensive definition of what would soon become the new clinical standard: brain death. The brain bears a special relation to other organs; it directs bodily functions without carrying them out. When the brain is destroyed, it was argued, this control mechanism is irreversibly dysfunctional, so that the organism becomes unable to maintain its vital functions, loses its somatic unity and, consequently, ceases to exist. This neurological criterion has been controversial ever since its introduction. Whether brain death is indeed death is what I shall be investigating in this thesis. I will be asking three main questions: What are we? Is brain death the death of an organism? Is brain death the death of a psychological being? The question of personal identity and the question of the appropriate definition of death are intimately related. Only when we have determined what kind of entity we essentially are can we specify what conditions must apply for this entity to persist or to cease to exist. I shall argue that we are essentially psychological beings, which entails that our death is distinct from the death of our organisms. Hence, we need two different criteria – one for the death of each entity. I shall try to establish whether brainstem death and whole-brain death correspond to the irreversible cessation of organismic functioning. I will then determine by which criterion the death of a psychological being can be diagnosed. (shrink)

Although machine intelligence is increasingly employed in healthcare, the realm of decision-making in medical ethics remains largely unexplored from a technical perspective. We propose an approach based on fuzzy cognitive maps (FCMs), which builds on Beauchamp and Childress’ prima-facie principles. The FCM’s weights are optimized using a genetic algorithm to provide recommendations regarding the initiation, continuation, or withdrawal of medical treatment. The resulting model approximates the answers provided by our team of medical ethicists fairly well and offers a high degree (...) of interpretability. Possible applications of such a system include informal guidance on medical ethics dilemmas as well as educational purposes. (shrink)

Objective: While behavioral recommendations regarding physical activity commonly focus on reaching demanding goals by proposing ‘thresholds’, little attention has been paid to the question of how much of a behavioral change is needed to make people feel that they have changed. The present research investigated this relation between actual and felt behavior change. Design: Using data from two longitudinal community samples, Study 1 and 2 comprised 614 (63 % women) and 398 participants (61 % women) with a mean age of (...) 40.9 years (SD = 13.6) and 42.5 years (SD = 13.4), respectively. Using a stage-approach, participants were classified into four groups by asking them at the respective second measurement to indicate whether they had become more physically active since their last participation six months ago (“Changers”), had tried but did not succeed in becoming more physically active (“Attempters”), were already physically active on a regular basis (“Regular Actives”), or had not tried to become more physically active (“Non-Attempters”). Physical activity was measured using the International Physical Activity Questionnaire (IPAQ), and fitness level was assessed as physical working capacity (PWC) via bicycle ergometry. Mixed ANOVAs including Time and Perceived Change as within and between factors were conducted, followed up by simple effect analyses. Results: Participants stating to have become more active in the past six months (Changers) showed a significant increase in vigorous physical activity but not in moderate physical activity, with an average of 6.8 (Study 1) and 10.6 (Study 2) MET-h per week in vigorous activity. Corroborating these findings, objective fitness also significantly increased in the group of Changers. No systematic change in moderate or vigorous physical activity was observed for the three other ‘non-changer’ groups (regular actives, attempters, non-attempters). Conclusion: The intensity of physical activity is the crucial variable for people’s perception of change in physical activity. Moderate physical activity seems not to be perceived as an effective means for behavior change. It thus might fail to unfold sufficient motivational impact, despite its known positive effects on health. (shrink)

Groups need contributions that are personally costly to their members. Such cooperation is only adaptive when others cooperate as well, as unconditional cooperation may incur high costs to the individual. We argue that individuals can useWe-if-then plans (collective implementation intentions, cIIs) to regulate their group-directed behavior strategically, helping them to cooperate selectively with group members in the situation planned for. In line with this prediction, a cII to consider group earnings increased cooperative decisions in a prisoners’ dilemma game when playing (...) against another group member but not when playing against a stranger (i.e., non-group member). Moreover, cIIs to cooperate in the prisoners’ dilemma game did not increase cooperation in a structurally similar investment game that participants had not planned for. We discuss the role of collective planning in solving social dilemmas. (shrink)

Fowers et al. recently made a general argument for virtues as the characteristics necessary for individuals to flourish, given inherent human limitations. For example, people can flourish by developing the virtue of friendship as they navigate the inherent human dependency on others. This general argument also illuminates a pathway to flourishing during the COVID-19 pandemic, the risks of which have induced powerful fears, exacerbated injustices, and rendered life and death decisions far more common. Contexts of risk and fear call for (...) the virtue of courage. Courage has emerged more powerfully as a central virtue among medical personnel, first responders, and essential workers. Longstanding inequalities have been highlighted during the pandemic, calling for the virtue of justice. When important personal and public health decisions must be made, the central virtue of practical wisdom comes to the fore. Wise decisions and actions incorporate the recognition of relevant moral concerns and aims, as well as responding in fitting and practical ways to the specifics of the situation. Practicing courage, justice, and practical wisdom illuminates a path to flourishing, even in a pandemic. (shrink)

A distorted representation of one's own body is a diagnostic criterion and core psychopathology of both anorexia nervosa (AN) and bulimia nervosa (BN). Despite recent technical advances in research, it is still unknown whether this body image disturbance is characterized by body dissatisfaction and a low ideal weight and/or includes a distorted perception or processing of body size. In this article, we provide an update and meta-analysis of 42 articles summarizing measures and results for body size estimation (BSE) from 926 (...) individuals with AN, 536 individuals with BN and 1920 controls. We replicate findings that individuals with AN and BN overestimate their body size as compared to controls (ES= 0.63). Our meta-regression shows that metric methods (BSE by direct or indirect spatial measures) yield larger effect sizes than depictive methods (BSE by evaluating distorted pictures), and that effect sizes are larger for patients with BN than for patients with AN. To interpret these results, we suggest a revised theoretical framework for BSE that accounts for differences between depictive and metric BSE methods regarding the underlying body representations (conceptual vs. perceptual, implicit vs. explicit). We also discuss clinical implications and argue for the importance of multimethod approaches to investigate body image disturbance. (shrink)

First-generation students are more likely to feel misplaced and struggle at university than students with university-educated parents. We assumed that the shutdowns during the Coronavirus-pandemic would particularly threaten FGS due to obstructed coping mechanisms. Specifically, FGS may show lower identification with the academic setting and lower perceived fairness of the university system. We investigated whether FGS and CGS used different defenses to cope with the shutdown threat in a large sample of German-speaking students. Using Structural Equation Modeling, we found that (...) for all students, independent of academic parental background, high levels of system justification were associated with perceiving the learning situation as less threatening, better coping with failure, and less helplessness. However, in comparison to CGS, FGS showed small but significant reductions in system justification and relied more on concrete personal relationships with other students as well as their academic identity to cope with the threatening situation. We discuss implications for helping FGS succeed at university. (shrink)

Given a countable model of set theory, we study the structure of its generic multiverse, the collection of its forcing extensions and ground models, ordered by inclusion. Mostowski showed that any finite poset embeds into the generic multiverse while preserving the nonexistence of upper bounds. We obtain several improvements of his result, using what we call the blockchain construction to build generic objects with varying degrees of mutual genericity. The method accommodates certain infinite posets, and we can realize these embeddings (...) via a wide variety of forcing notions, while providing control over lower bounds as well. We also give a generalization to class forcing in the context of second-order set theory, and exhibit some further structure in the generic multiverse, such as the existence of exact pairs. (shrink)

Establishing the basic knowledge, methodology, and technology for a framework for the continuous decoding of hand/arm movement intention was the aim of the ERC-funded project “Feel Your Reach”. In this work, we review the studies and methods we performed and implemented in the last 6 years, which build the basis for enabling severely paralyzed people to non-invasively control a robotic arm in real-time from electroencephalogram. In detail, we investigated goal-directed movement detection, decoding of executed and attempted movement trajectories, grasping correlates, (...) error processing, and kinesthetic feedback. Although we have tested some of our approaches already with the target populations, we still need to transfer the “Feel Your Reach” framework to people with cervical spinal cord injury and evaluate the decoders’ performance while participants attempt to perform upper-limb movements. While on the one hand, we made major progress towards this ambitious goal, we also critically discuss current limitations. (shrink)

The notion of a critical successor [5] in relational semantics has been central to most classic modal completeness proofs in interpretability logics. In this paper we shall work with a more general notion, that of an assuring successor. This will enable more concisely formulated completeness proofs, both with respect to ordinary and generalised Veltman semantics. Due to their interesting theoretical properties, we will devote some space to the study of a particular kind of assuring labels, the so‐called full labels and (...) maximal labels. After a general treatment of assuringness, we shall apply it to obtain a completeness result for the modal logic w.r.t. generalised semantics for a restricted class of frames. (shrink)

L’objet de la présente contribution est d’examiner les relations qu’établissent plusieurs auteurs entre l’amélioration de l’homme, la nature humaine et l’humanisme. Après avoir défini un sens faible et un sens fort du transhumanisme, nous y avons opposé deux critiques, celle de J. Habermas et de M. Sandel, en prenant l’exemple le plus discuté dans la littérature : la possibilité d’améliorer génétiquement son enfant et avons montré qu’elles ne sont pas convaincantes : le recours au concept de la nature humaine à (...) lui seul n’aide pas à répondre à la question de savoir si l’amélioration génétique d’un enfant est morale ou non. Il en est de même de la caractérisation de l’amélioration de l’homme en terme d’humanisme. Loin d’être une justification, il peut aussi s’appliquer à toute position dite bioconservatrice : le transhumanisme peut être humaniste dans le sens heideggérien critique de la technique comme métaphysique. (shrink)

This article is motivated by a reading of J.J. Abrams’ proceedings Shusterman’s Somaesthetics: From Hip Hop Philosophy to Politics and Performance Art. Of the diverse range of essays in the proceedings, I concentrate my attention primarily on those aspects of the texts that highlight Richard Shusterman’s practical somaesthetics, and in which their authors focus on the more personal aspects of Shusterman’s philosophical-artistic experimentation, as captured in The Adventures of the Man in Gold: Paths Between Art and Life, A Philosophical Tale. (...) Through references to Foucault’s notion of care of the self and the aesthetics of existence, the article demonstrates that the individual level of Shusterman’s practical somaesthetics is not separable from the social-ethical level. This is matched by the conclusion of the text, which points out that Shusterman’s practical somaesthetics overcomes the dichotomy of private and public in Richard Rorty’s pragmatism. (shrink)

Haec tractatio est responsio critica ad tractationem Ludovici Groarke, titulo “Orbitae ellipticae, possintne Aristotelice explicari?”, necnon ad commentationem Jacobi Franklin, cui titulus “De orbitis ellipticis ac Aristotelica revolutione scientifica”. Auctor imprimis ostendit (ultra censuram a J. Franklin factam procedens) explanationem “Aristotelicam” orbitarum ellipticarum a L. Groarke propositam non solum analysi Newtonianae repugnare, sed etiam in se esse incohaerentem. Porro auctor alia L. Groarke proposita impugnat: scil. nostri temporis physicam mathematicam esse essentialiter Platonicam, item Newtonianam orbitarum ellipticarum explicationem assymetriam prae se (...) ferre inexplicabilem (cui sententiae J. Franklin quoque assentit). Auctor e contra arguit, textibus nonnulis S. Thomae Aquinatis innixus, physicam modernam, mathematica sui methodo non exclusa, realisticae epistemologiae Aristotelicae esse congruam, immo pure Aristotelice intelligi posse (ac debere). Auctor tamen reicit quod J. Franklin insinuat, scil. physicam modernam nunc Aristotelicae philosophiae naturalis explere munia. Physica mathematica enim, methodo sua constricta, quaestiones genuine philosophicas (nempe ad essentias rerum spectantes) movere non potest, ac proinde philosophiae naturalis vice fungi nequit.This discussion article is a critical reaction to L. Groarke’s paper “Can Aristotelianism Make Sense of Perihelion–Aphelion Orbits?” and J. Franklin’s comment “Elliptical Orbits and the Aristotelian Scientific Revolution”. In the first place, the author shows (going beyond Franklin’s criticism) that Groarke’s proposed “Aristotelian” explanation of elliptical planetary orbits is inconsistent both in itself and with the Newtonian analysis. Furthermore, he challenges Groarke’s claims that modern mathematical physics is inherently Platonic and that the Newtonian explication of elliptical orbits involves unexplained assymmetries (a claim endorsed by Franklin as well). With the help of several Aquinas’s texts the author argues that modern physics, including its maths-driven methodology, is not incompatible with Aristotelian realist epistemology but can (and should) be interpreted in a purely Aristotelian vein. On the other hand, the author rejects the view implied by Franklin that modern physics is an up-to-date replacement of Aristotelian philosophy of nature. Due to its methodological limits, mathematical physics is incapable of asking genuinely philosophical questions concerning the essence of bodies, and so it cannot be expected to do the job of natural philosophy. (shrink)

The volume brings together a collection of original papers on some of the main tenets of Joseph Raz's legal and political philosophy: Legal positivism and the nature of law, practical reason, authority, the value of equality, incommensurability, harm, group rights, and multiculturalism. James Griffin and Yael Tamir raise questions concerning Raz's notion of group rights and its application to claims of cultural and political autonomy, while Will Kymlicka and Bernhard Peters examine Raz's theory of multicultural society. Lukas Meyer investigates (...) the applicability of the notion of harm in the intergenerational context. Other papers are devoted to fundamental theoretical tenets of Raz's work. Hillel Steiner and Andrei Marmor examine Raz's account of value pluralism and incommensurability in light of what these authors consider to be goods whose equal distribution must be valued for its own sake. Robert Alexy and Timothy Endicott discuss traditional issues of jurisprudence and legal philosphy with special attention to Raz's contribution. Rüdiger Bittner, Bruno Celano, and J. E. Penner discuss and criticize aspects of Raz's theory of practical reason. Jeremy Waldron presents a critique of Raz's interpretation of authority.This volume concludes with a chapter by Joseph Raz in which he responds to arguments in the foregoing essays. (shrink)

Leitura que qualifica a discussão intelectual sobre o destino das utopias revolucionárias no fim do século XX. Obra de teoria política, afirma que no marxismo há uma ética que, apoiada na democracia socialista, articula-se cognitivamente com a consciência de classe do proletariado.