In Unfit for the Future, Ingmar Persson and Julian Savulescu present a sophisticated argument in defense of the imperative of moral enhancement. They claim that without moral enhancement, the future of humanity is seriously compromised. The possibility of ultimate harm, caused by a dreadful terrorist attack or by a final unpreventable escalation of the present environmental crisis aggravated by the availability of cognitive enhancement, makes moral enhancement a top priority. It may be considered optimistic to think that our present moral (...) capabilities can be successfully improved by means of moral education, moral persuasion, and fear of punishment. So, without moral enhancement, drastic restrictions on human freedom would become the only alternative to prevent those dramatic potential outcomes. In this article, I will try to show that we still have reason to be less pessimistic and that Persson & Savulescu’s arguments are fortunately unconvincing. (shrink)

Sometimes people are unfortunate in ways which facilitate their success ‐ and happiness. This creates the perplexity whether someone can be said to have been unfortunate, if an apparent misfortune has been, overall, beneficial to his or her life. I argue that whether something is a misfortune cannot be determined in itself, even in seemingly obvious cases. It depends also upon what one makes of it, what it makes of one. In short, it depends upon what happens later. (...) People cannot claim to have suffered a misfortune for which they are to be pitied or compensated, when this ‘misfortune’ is crucial in having made them what they are, what they are happy to be. Hard determinism aside, the notion of ‘fortunate misfortune’ lacks, however, an easy parallel in ‘unfortunate good‐fortune’. (shrink)

In a previous work I considered the philosophically neglected phenomenon of “Fortunate Misfortune” (or FM). This follows from the way in which sometimes what seems an obvious misfortune turns out, in fact, to be actually good fortune. The paradox, in a certain class of cases, is this: if a seemingly unfortunate aspect of a life has proven to be beneficial overall, then it has not been a real misfortune. However, certain aspects of actual lives seem to be (...) obvious misfortunes, irrespective of what follows. Often, saying both that the life-aspects under consideration are misfortunes and denying that they are, seem unacceptable. In the present paper I aim to survey some of the conceptual, moral and social implications of cases of Fortunate Misfortune. This will be mostly done in the form of questions, exploring the perplexities FM brings up and the challenges it hence poses for further work. (shrink)

The Covid-19 pandemic has brought unexpected changes in important aspects of young people’s lives. The academic literature contains many studies on the risks and adverse effects, while any potential positive aspects have been side-lined. This paper examines quality of life and relationships among young people in emerging and young adulthood in order to identify the negatives and benefits of the pandemic. In this qualitative research a “letter to a friend” free-writing exercise was used as the data collection method on a (...) total sample of 107 young people aged 18-34 years. Using reflective thematic analysis, the statements were then grouped into two themes: “Covid as a misfortune” and “Covid as a benefit”. (shrink)

This chapter contains section titled: Note.

A close look at the rhetoric in America's recent welfare‐reform debate has both surprising and important implications for political philosophy. Political philosophers typically presume that opponents of redistribution are motivated by considerations other than equality. Recent arguments for welfare reform, however, have been formulated in a manner consistent with most contemporary egalitarian theories. This result should make us question either the political relevance of egalitarian ideals or the adequacy of those theories of equality.

Levinas himself raises the question: "why would I feel responsible in the presence of the Face" since "we are separate ontological beings?" This questions the character of our response to the other--both in terms of agency and motivation. While the general reception of Levinas's thought has focused on his description of us as "hostage"--that is, on the moment of assignation (or assignment) by the other--I suggest that Levinas himself also, though not as directly, addresses (as he needs to) the correlative (...) moment, the moment of response. My essay reconstructs Levinas's implicit understanding of the character of our initiative in the light of his concept of Desire. I explore the different dimensions of Desire as appetite and generosity, and I argue that the "transition to moral consciousness" that Levinas wants to "justify" is one from complacent happiness to "non-complacent happiness" and can be illuminated by the notion of "passion seeking its downfall.". (shrink)

In this important study, first published in 1989, Thomas Halper examines the policies and practices of the British National Health Services in treating kidney disease. Technological advances since the 1960s mean that end-stage renal disease, an otherwise fatal condition, can usually be treated successfully. In Britain, however, the availability of resources necessary for treatment has been limited in past years and many people have gone untreated. Professor Halper discusses a number of issues, both ethical and political, that arise from having (...) to choose who does and does not get treated. These issues include: the right to health care; the interaction between political demands, government agencies, and public policy; the promise of technology in a society where resources are scarce; and duties owed the individual by the community. The book draws on numerous personal accounts, often moving or unintentionally revealing, and should prove interesting to professionals and students with an interest in philosophy, health care, public health, public policy and British politics. (shrink)

The ArgumentThis paper applies the approach developed by the congnitive sciences to a classical field of social anthropology—i.e., the analysis of represetations and behaviors relative to misfortune in “traditional” societies.The initial argument is that the conceptual division and the modes of description and explanation of anthropology suffer from serious weaknesses: these concepts cannot serve to understand empirical phenomena ; they rely on a confused and erroneous conception of the different domains involved and the causalities between them; and they use (...) simplistic hypotheses about the existence and causal status of the entities that usually form the ultima ratio of anthropological reasoning. These entities would directly “cause” other individual representations or behaviors. This simplification also affects the analysis of states of belief in these entities, to which individuals would supposedly “adhere”.I argue here that the cognitivist approach, within a “methodological individualism” framework, provides a more adequate description of phenomena observed in the field. This enables the various levels and domains to be more finely defined. The analysis of “typical” utterances and inferences in a “tranditional” society, the Senufo of the Ivory Coast, is here used to clarify these anthropological problems. Two levels can be distinguished: a priori representations, which are underdetermined, enabling them to occur within valid inferences; perception and/or action, which obeys different cognitive constraints. The existential status of unobservable entities appearing in causal inferences is not equivalent depending on whether they are determined as antecedent or consequent.This paper suggests a theory of interpretive processes and beliefs having flexible references, because they are incomplete and domain-specific. It allows a comparison with facts observed in Western societies. It is also in contrast to the ordinary conception of religious states of belief — i.e., these states would be purely psychological, states of “adherence,” collective, autonomous, obligatory, part of a systemized set of knowledge; collective notions would here logically precede individual representations. (shrink)

Chaucer tells this story: A knight commits a serious crime and the king hands him over to the queen for disposal, whereupon the queen orders him to answer one question: What is a woman's greatest wish? The knight is unable to answer the question then and there, so the queen gives him a time limit. If he cannot answer the question in that time, his head will be chopped off. So the knight journeys far and wide to find the answer. (...) Eventually he finds it and saves his own head. There would be no story if he did not find it. It is said the noblewomen discussed the answer and all found it to be correct. It was: "A woman's greatest wish is to be loved." If that were today, women's rights activists would probably disagree, but in the Middle Ages, this answer would get full approval marks. (shrink)

Dominant theories of moral blame require an individual to have caused or intended harm. However, across four studies we demonstrate cases where no harm is caused or intended, yet individuals are nonetheless deemed worthy of blame. Specifically, individuals are judged to be blameworthy when they engage in actions that enable them to benefit from another’s misfortune (for example, betting that a company’s stock will decline or that a natural disaster will occur). We present evidence suggesting that perceptions of the (...) actor’s wicked desires are responsible for this phenomenon. We argue that these results are consistent with a growing literature demonstrating that moral judgments are often the product of evaluations of character in addition to evaluations of acts. (shrink)

In many traditional, small-scale societies, death and other misfortunes are commonly explained as a result of others’ malign occult agency. Here, we call this family of epistemic tendencies “the agential view of misfortune.” After reviewing several ethnographic case studies that illustrate this view, we argue that its origins and stability are puzzling from an evolutionary perspective. Not only is the agential view of misfortune false; it imposes costs on individuals and social groups that seem to far outweigh whatever (...) benefits the view might provide. We thus doubt that the agential view of misfortune is explainable in terms of adaptive effects. However, neither does it seem readily explainable as a consequence of belief formation strategies that are on the whole adaptive (as is plausibly the case for certain other of our false beliefs, including some that are costly). Accordingly, we contend that the commonness of the agential view of misfortune demands a special evolutionary explanation of some kind. We provide a partial explanation of this phenomenon by highlighting the adaptive benefits that often flow to occult specialists in environments where the agential view of misfortune is entrenched. What this does not explain, however, is the general lack of resistance we observe in response to occultists’ exploitative behaviours over (cultural) evolutionary timescales. We conclude by canvassing a few possible explanations for this puzzling lack of resistance, and while we commit ourselves to none, we do find one option more promising than the others. (shrink)

This paper asks questions about 'trauma' and its cultural representation specifically, trauma's representation in the cinema. In this respect, it compares and contrasts the work of Robert Bresson, in particular his 1967 masterpiece, Mouchette , with contemporary Hollywood film. James Mangold's 1999 'Oscar-winning' Girl, Interrupted offers an interesting example for cultural comparison. In both Mouchette and Girl, Interrupted the subject matter includes, amongst other traumatic experiences, rape, childhood abuse and suicide. The paper ponders the question of whether such aspects of (...) trauma can ever be authentically represented on film; or, whether, on the contrary, through the deployment of cultural stereotypes, cinematic representation tends rather to reproduce the very forms of structural power which are, in the first place, trauma's primary cause. Bresson emerges from this analysis in a favourable light for, whereas Mangold stereotypes victims of trauma and represents traumatic experience itself as inevitable and over-determined, Bresson always retains for the victim a sense of critical agency. By contrasting key scenes from both films, the paper suggests that contemporary popular cinema (the 'Hollywood-ized' form), working in tandem with institutions of social control, such as psychiatry, does not subvert but, in fact, reproduces patterns of structural power. This argument has particular significance for the cultural representation of women. The paper is theoretically framed by Simone Weil's reflections on both 'representation' and 'structural power'. (shrink)

In his latest work, Sortir de la grande nuit, the Cameroonian social theorist Achille Mbembe nuances his description of the ontological status of the postcolonial African subject, which he had theorized extensively in his best-known text, On the Postcolony, and at the same time exploits the conceptual resources of a number of Jean-Luc Nancy's lexical innovations. This recent text is also a reprise of an earlier autobiographical essay, and the gesture of this ‘reinscription’ is critical to our understanding of Mbembe's (...) status as a contemporary ‘postcolonial thinker’, and the way in which he positions himself in relation to a certain intellectual genealogy of postcolonial theory. Within this trajectory, I argue that we can read fruitfully his relationship to three influential figures: Jacques Derrida, Jean-Luc Nancy and Ruben Um Nyobè. (shrink)

We can enjoy and suffer many kinds of human goods and evils. The goods include not only experiences and enjoyments but also the having and exercise of various talents and abilities, the receipt of recognitions and rewards, successes, employments, opportunities. The evils include not only pains and frustrations but also defects such as ugliness, disabilities such as paralysis or retardation, lack of standard opportunities such as unemployment, financial loss, failure, disgrace. It is tempting to say that wherever a person has (...) a good he has an advantage and when he suffers an evil he is, in that respect, disadvantaged. However this usage can make it look as if all human goods and evils are subject matter for distributive justice. In fact that is not the conventional view. (shrink)

This scarce antiquarian book is a facsimile reprint of the original. Due to its age, it may contain imperfections such as marks, notations, marginalia and flawed pages. Because we believe this work is culturally important, we have made it available as part of our commitment for protecting, preserving, and promoting the world's literature in affordable, high quality, modern editions that are true to the original work.

This essay’s starting point is Judith Shklar’ diagnosis of a pathology marring democratic societies: complex injustices passing as “misfortunes” that nobody feels responsible for. I propose that denunciations can reveal the political nature of the suffering that everyone conveniently ignores, thus advancing democratic accountability. While denunciations can target various invisible injustices and take many forms, this essay deals with the case of societies with an unmastered past of violence. In order to avoid taking responsibility for the plight of victims, the (...) past is often redescribed in the language of “catastrophe” or “necessity.” Building on Hannah Arendt’s views on spectatorship and storytelling, this essay analyses theatrical denunciations addressing the wider community. Theatre—professional or amateur—can repoliticise neutralised areas of social interaction and transform passive onlookers into reflective spectators. The Argentinean performance of escraches and Thomas Bernhard’s play Heldenplatz are discussed as examples of successful political denunciations communicated in dramaturgical form. (shrink)

Despite growing interest in emotions, organizational scholars have largely ignored the moral emotion of schadenfreude, which refers to pleasure felt in response to another’s misfortune. As a socially undesirable emotion, it might be assumed that individuals would be hesitant to share their schadenfreude. In two experimental studies involving emotional responses to unethical behaviors, we find evidence to the contrary. Study 1 revealed that subjects experiencing schadenfreude were willing to share their feelings, especially if the misfortune was perceived to (...) be deserved. Study 2 extends this work by incorporating schadenfreude targets of different status. Consistent with the “tall poppy syndrome,” subjects were more willing to share schadenfreude concerning high status targets than low status targets when the perceived severity of the target’s misconduct was low. This status effect disappeared at higher levels of perceived deservingness, however. Reported willingness to share schadenfreude was strongest at these levels but did not differ significantly between high and low status targets. These findings build on the social functional account of emotions, suggesting that sharing schadenfreude may signal normative cues to others regarding workplace behaviors that are deemed to be unethical. (shrink)

Any fundamental examination of managerial practices must consider a philosophical conundrum at the heart of market exchange. Economically, the opportunity for profit seems to demand somebody else’s loss, and ethically, we must not take advantage of others’ misfortune. In a market system involving a multiplicity of stakeholders, profit opportunities may arise in which relationships between winners and losers are distant, indirect, or even nonexistent; their motives are multivalent; and their market participation may be intentional or accidental. Reflecting two decades (...) later upon several cases arising from the 9/11/2001 terrorist attacks, this paper describes several examples of profiting from loss that demonstrate the ubiquity and variety of the problem. It also invokes numerous bodies of literature that demonstrate the inherent complexity and interdisciplinarity of the problem and the absence of determinative principles to answer the question of when it is justifiable to profit from loss. The paper positions casuistry, the ancient philosophical art of case analysis that resembles modern business pedagogy, as a complement to ethical theory. The Loss Agency-Division of Benefits framework developed in the paper demonstrates the value of philosophy to managerial practices when economic theory is insufficient for ethically classifying and evaluating forms of profiting from loss. (shrink)

SummaryThe essay intends to find out why although many studies have focused on the three-year revolutionary period in Italy from 1796–1799, the Cisalpine Republic has never been studied in the same detail as the Neapolitan Republic. In reconstructing these events, the two republics are regularly presented in opposing terms. The Cisalpine Republic is portrayed as exemplifying subordination to the military protectorate and politics of France, while the Neapolitan Republic is put forward as the shining example of revolutionary resistance within Italy (...) at the time. The essay intends to underline why the nineteenth and the twentieth century historiography has negatively and prejudicially judged the political experience of the Cisalpine Republic. (shrink)

This paper defends a regularly paid basic income as being better equipped to tackle unfair inequalities of outcome. It is argued that the timing of "option-luck" failures – in particular, whether they occur early in a lifetime of calculated gambles, and whether they are clustered together – may lead to a form of "brute bad luck," referred to as "cumulative misfortune." A basic income that is paid on a regular basis provides a way to prevent the emergence of cumulative (...) misfortune, because the basic income at least partially replenishes the individual's ability to take the next calculated gamble. The upshot of this is a nonpaternalistic justification for an unconditional basic income that is paid regularly and is nonmortgageable. This has an important bearing on the debate between those who advocate a one-off endowment at the start of adult life and those who advocate a basic income paid regularly throughout one's life. The paper contends that a regular basic income represents a superior social policy because it prevents the emergence of cumulative misfortune, rather than belatedly attempting to compensate for its effects during our senior years. (shrink)

Is there a morally relevant difference between a brain‐damaged human being and a nonhuman animal at the same cognitive and emotional level to justify, say, performing medical experiments on the animal but not the human being? Some hold that the misfortune of the human being allows us to distinguish between them. I consider the nature of misfortunate and argue that an appeal to misfortune fails to distinguish between the human being and the nonhuman animal when the treatment at (...) issue is equally morally serious, since the source of the limitation taken advantage of by performing the medical experiment, whether misfortunate or natural vulnerability, is irrelevant. (shrink)

Is there a morally relevant difference between a brain‐damaged human being and a nonhuman animal at the same cognitive and emotional level to justify, say, performing medical experiments on the animal but not the human being? Some hold that the misfortune of the human being allows us to distinguish between them. I consider the nature of misfortunate and argue that an appeal to misfortune fails to distinguish between the human being and the nonhuman animal when the treatment at (...) issue is equally morally serious, since the source of the limitation taken advantage of by performing the medical experiment, whether misfortunate or natural vulnerability, is irrelevant. (shrink)

El ensayo ofrece una lectura de la tragedia Woyzeck, del dramaturgo alemán del siglo XIX Georg Büchner. Se intenta mostrar que la obra de ficción constituye una suerte de antípoda respecto de su fuente de inspiración: el informe psiquiátrico que precipitó la condena del sujeto histórico que da título al drama. En esta perspectiva, se propone como clave de lectura el complejo de variaciones que aporta la obra en torno al tópico o la figura de la animalidad como fuerza neutra, (...) impensable e incontrolable que no solo arrastra al protagonista hacia la desgracia, sino que además opera como principio dinámico de toda la galería de personajes. The essay offers a reading of the Woyzeck tragedy, by the XIX century German playwright Georg Büchner. It intends to portray that the fictional work constitutes a sort of antipodes in relation to its source of inspiration: the psychiatric report that precipitated the sentence of the historical subject, which gives the title to the drama. On this point of view, a reading codeis proposed from the set of variations that the play contributes to the subject or the figure of animality. As a neutral, inconceivable, and uncontrollable force, which not only pulls the protagonist towards tragedy, but also functions as a dynamic principle of the complete rangeof characters. (shrink)

Der Aufsatz behandelt eingangs die lateinische Exempeltradition pseudoantiker Bildbeschreibungen im 14. Jh., exemplifiziert diese anhand von “römischen” Bildern des Todes, und interpretiert das “römische Bild des Todes” im Ackermann aus Böhmen im Kontext der lateinischen Exempelbilder sowie der zeitgenössischen Ikonographie. Die Todeskonzeption des ganzen Werks spiegelt sich deutlich in dieser Stelle. Das “römische Bild des Unglücks” im alttschechischen Tkadleček wird als Imitation des Todesbildes im Ackermann bei gleichzeitiger Rückbindung an die lateinische Tradition interpretiert.