The Reading Augustine series presents short, engaging books offering personal readings of St. Augustine of Hippo's contributions to western philosophical, literary, and religious life. This two-volume work provides a new understanding of Western subjectivity as theorized in the Augustinian Rule. A theopolitical synthesis of Antiquity, the Rule is a humble, yet extremely influential example of subjectivity production. In these volumes, Jodra argues that the Classical and Late-Ancient communitarian practices along the Mediterranean provide historical proof of a worldview in which the (...) self and the other are not disjunctive components, but mutually inclusive forces. The Augustinian Rule is a culmination of this process and also the beginning of something new: The paradigm of the monastic self as protagonist of the new, medieval worldview. Three main theoretical challenges leading to, and present in the Rule are tackled: What are the sources of our modern understanding of subjectivity? Can Ancient sources provide an alternative genealogy that resists the individualistic turn of Modernity? And can the commons be saved without suppressing individuality? Jodra seeks to prove that the synthesis-which is also an appropriation-of Greek and Judaic sources carried out by the first Christians allowed for two contrasting models of subjectivity, the self-less and the other-less, to 'take turns' to dominate our understanding of human nature. The Greek world provided the political dimension and the Jewish world established the key theological principles of a Mediterranean synthesis which took place in Rome. Coherently and progressively, Jodra emphasizes the theopolitical nature of our worldview even today, and claim that the subject of the primitive Church is its most visible incarnation. These volumes therefore restore the unity of the Hellenistic and Judaic world as found by the first Christians, proving that the self and the other are two essential pieces in the construction of our world. (shrink)

This two-volume work provides a new understanding of Western subjectivity as theorized in the Augustinian Rule. A theopolitical synthesis of Antiquity, the Rule is a humble, yet extremely influential example of subjectivity production. In these volumes, Jodra argues that the Classical and Late-Ancient communitarian practices along the Mediterranean provide historical proof of a worldview in which the self and the other are not disjunctive components, but mutually inclusive forces. The Augustinian Rule is a culmination of this process and also the (...) beginning of something new: The paradigm of the monastic self as protagonist of the new, medieval worldview. Three main theoretical challenges leading to, and present in the Rule are tackled: What are the sources of our modern understanding of subjectivity? Can Ancient sources provide an alternative genealogy that resists the individualistic turn of Modernity? And can the commons be saved without suppressing individuality? Jodra seeks to prove that the synthesis-which is also an appropriation-of Greek and Judaic sources carried out by the first Christians allowed for two contrasting models of subjectivity, the self-less and the other-less, to 'take turns' to dominate our understanding of human nature. The Greek world provided the political dimension and the Jewish world established the key theological principles of a Mediterranean synthesis which took place in Rome. Coherently and progressively, Jodra emphasizes the theopolitical nature of our worldview even today, and claim that the subject of the primitive Church is its most visible incarnation. These volumes therefore restore the unity of the Hellenistic and Judaic world as found by the first Christians, proving that the self and the other are two essential pieces in the construction of our world. (shrink)

In the late 1990s, Mexican feminists mobilized transnationally to demand state accountability for the feminicidios of women in Ciudad Juarez. Feminicidio refers to the misogynous killing of women and the state’s complicity in this violence by tolerating it with impunity. Drawing on debates of the Mexican Federal Congress and interviews with feminist state and non-state actors, I examine feminist legislators’ response to transnational activism, which was to pass the “General Law on Women’s Access to a Life Free of Violence” and (...) to create the penal-type code of feminicidio, which includes provisions to punish negligent state actors. These laws make the state a target of its own punitive power. To pass these acts, feminist legislators faced resistance from male legislators and the Federal Executive. I build on feminist institutionalism to theorize this resistance as gendered. Gendered state resistance was pervasive because feminist legislators practiced accountability by identifying the complicity of state institutions, including Congress, in perpetuating feminicidio. As part of the process, they built alliances with other female legislators and framed their arguments with notions of modern statehood. Although this framing strategy resulted in innovative legal change, I interrogate the assumption that modernity is the solution to feminicidio, because it can lead gendered state resistance to manifest as a simulation of accountability. (shrink)

Recent work by Matthew Bedke and Max Hayward develops a new attack on metaethical non-naturalists: that they are committed to an immoral state of mind, because they must be willing to change their mind about the moral importance of certain actions given possible evidence about the layout of the non-natural realm. For example, they must be willing to decrease their credence that torturing babies is bad, if they ever get evidence that torturing babies is not in the extension of (...) a non-natural property. The present paper aims to both develop the strongest version of this argument and propose a response to it. The first section argues that the strongest version of this attack does not depend on whether accepting non-naturalism commits one to believing a certain kind of conditional proposition. Rather, it depends on whether accepting non-naturalism commits one to having a certain kind of conditional credences. Moreover, the moral criticism at hand does not hinge on the causal inertness of non-natural properties. And in so far as the argument does not depend on causal inertness, the people threatened by immorality are not just non-naturalists, but metaethicists in general (Sect. 2). This is because the worry hinges instead on particular relationships of epistemic dependence between our metaethical and some of our ethical views. But it is not clear that those relationships obtain; we could adopt metaethical methodologies that preclude morally problematic dependence of relevant first order views on evidence about our metaethical theories (Sect. 3). (shrink)

Intuitions are funny things. Intuitions would seem to be these fluid, temporary mental states that we form minute by minute. On the face of it, they would seem to have no real value. But, when we ask whether a particular theory is true, we usually turn to our intuitions. This is nowhere more prevalent than in moral theorizing. When we attempt to show that a particular moral theory is mistaken, we usually present cases that yield counterintuitive results (...) for the theory. For example, take the famous Trolley Car example. Suppose a trolley car is traveling down a steep street and is heading straight for a child. Suppose further that you have the means to push a button that will divert the trolley car to a different track thereby missing the child. But, if you push the button to save the one child, you will kill five other children standing on the other track to which the trolley car will be diverted. So the choice is do not push the button and let one child die, or push the button, saving, the one child, but killing five other children. What do you do? Such cases are common in moral theorizing and our intuitions concerning what we would do in such cases are usually taken as evidence for or against a moral theory. In the trolley car case, a utilitarian would say, ceteris paribus, you should not push the button diverting the trolley car. Since an action is morally right if and only if it produces more net good (say, pleasure), diverting the trolley car would result in more pain in the world and hence be the wrong action. But how do our intuitions evidentially fit into the case? Since our goal is to have a moral theory that coincides with our intuitions about cases, if our intuitions fit with the theory, then we have prima facie evidence for the theory. If our intuitions do not fit, then we have prima facie evidence against the theory. Concerning the trolley car case, if our intuitions are that we should not push the button, thus letting the single child die, then our intuitions count as evidence for the correctness of utilitarian moral theory. If we do not share the intuitions of the utilitarians, then it is said to count as evidence against the correctness of utilitarian moral theory. Thus, it is our intuitions that carry the evidential burden. Since most agents take their intuitions to have significant evidential weight, cases (such as the Trolley Car case) usually indicate something problematic with the theory in question. Yet, there has been considerable interest lately in the status of such a practice. This interest has in part surrounded the issue of whether the cases themselves pose a problem for moral theorizing. Such cases are sometimes called intuition pumps. These thought experiment-style cases are usually taken to elicit intuitions that count for or against a moral theory. But many have claimed that the reliance upon such intuition pumps in moral theorizing is unjustified. In this paper I will investigate this claim. First, I lay out what I take to be the problem of intuition pumps. In particular, the problem will surround (1) there always being the possibility of constructing new cases that “pump” people’s intuitions to the other side of a moral debate and (2) there being systematic and patterned disagreement as to what the “correct” intuitive response for a given case is. Next, I give an account of the structure and evidence-conferring status of intuitions. Then, given this account, I illustrate how we can and why we should appeal to the intuitions of experts to solve the problem of intuition pumps. Thus, I hope to show that the problem of intuition pumps is not a problem for moral theorizing. That is, the use of intuition pump-style cases in moral theorizing is prima facie justified. (shrink)

When engaging with classical Chinese ethics, we might end up wondering what kind of moral theorizing we ultimately are confronted with. The accounts and answers to specific practical problems are dispersed throughout the texts and expressed via various codes of composition, ranging from sayings to theoretical reflections to poems. However, what exactly the aim of these theories consists in is not explicitly addressed by systematic second-order reflections. In this article I try to shed some light on the understanding (...) of moral theorizing that underlies the transmitted texts. For this, I adopt an issue-centered approach that attempts to indirectly address the understanding of moral theorizing via the question about the source of normativity. That approach will be tested by drawing on the accounts of Mengzi 孟子 and Cheng Yi 程頤. First conclusions will show that moral theorizing can be understood as the simultaneous business of a moral anatomist and a moral painter. (shrink)

Journal of Political Philosophy, EarlyView.

The aim of my paper is to explore in some detail some epistemological issues concerning moral theorizing on global warming. First, I consider the issue of the structure of the theoretical approach in a field of inquiry requiring normative assessments. How do theoretical principles work here? What is to be regarded as a normative evidence for such a theory? Second, the criteria to determine which part, if any, of the theory gets normatively constrained, and which does not, are (...) discussed. Third, I focus on the procedures to reach an equilibrium between such a theory and its evidence and to reach it, changes might be required on the normative side of the theory, rather than on its non-normative one. (shrink)

David Enoch recently defended the idea that there are valid inferences of the form ‘it would be good if p, therefore, p’. I argue that Enoch's proposal allows us to infer the absurd conclusion that ours is the best of all possible worlds.

The range of the present work can be indicated by an abstract of the three parts into which it is somewhat loosely divided. The first is concerned with an analysis of the human situation, and of the central problem that this poses for man. The second describes in detail various tempting but fallacious solutions to this problem, and, more vaguely, the one correct solution. The third presents an account of man's obligation to his fellows, and seeks to develop a (...) class='Hi'>moral criterion. (shrink)

Nietzsche on the Banishment of Supererogation by Luther and its Influence on Modern Ethical Life and Moral Theorizing. Much attention has been paid to Nietzsche’s refusal of obligation-centred moral theories (such as Kantian deontology and Utilitarian consequentialism), but little or no attention to the historical roots of such conceptions. The aim of this paper is to explore the ways Nietzsche connects the Kantian version of legal moral theory to the Lutheran Reformation, taking as its leitmotif the (...) exclusion by Luther of the so-called supererogation (the ideal of a Christian perfect life of sainthood being the most evident case) from the horizon of our ethical life (see D 88; GS 355; NL 1884, 25[271]). After establishing this historical connection, we are better positioned to understand the motivation behind his rejection of legal moral theories, particularly the Kantian version. This also allows us to shed new light on the contemporary attempts to characterize Nietzsche’s much-discussed perfectionist normative commitments. (shrink)

Moral theory is no substitute for virtue, but virtue is no substitute for moral theory. Many critics of moral theory, with Richard Posner being one prominent recent example, complain that moral theory is too abstract, that it cannot generally be used to derive particular rights and wrongs, and that it does not improve people's characters. Posner complains that it is thus of no use to legal theorists. This article defends moral theory, and to some degree, (...) philosophical inquiry in general, against such pragmatic complaints. I argue that the primary goal of moral theorizing is not pragmatic, but theoretical. Moral theory aims at explanation, at answering certain kinds of questions about morality. Moral theory is meant to deepen our insight into morality but, to count as deepening our insight, it need not provide a formula for calculating what to do in a particular circumstance, nor must it make us more virtuous. I provide an account of the scope and nature of explanation provided by moral theory as well as an account of why such explanations can be worth having, even if they were to have few pragmatic consequences. (shrink)

Call "radical moral theorizing" the project of developing a moral theory that not only tries to conform to our existing moral intuitions, but also manifests various theoretical virtues: consistency, simplicity, explanatory depth, and so on. Many moral philosophers assume that radical moral theorizing does not require any particular metaethical commitments. In this paper, I argue against this assumption. The most natural justification for radical moral theorizing presupposes moral realism, broadly construed; (...) in contrast, there may be no justification for radical moral theorizing if moral anti-realism is true. (shrink)

This paper takes up the question of the role of philosophical moral theory in our attempts to resolve the ethical problems that arise in health care, with particular reference to the contention that we need theory to be determinative of our choice of actions. Moral theorizing is distinguished from moral theories and the prospects for determinacy from the latter are examined through a consideration of the most promising candidates: utilitarianism, deontology and the procedures involved in reflective (...) equilibrium. It is argued that the current lack of any generally accepted method of solving moral problems, together with the extreme improbability of philosophy achieving a plausibly determinate theory, should encourage us to approach the problems in a spirit of agnosticism regarding the way in which theoretical material might be of relevance. The practical test for both moral theorizing and moral theories is thus not determinacy but the degree to which they increase our understanding of moral problems by serving, as they do in philosophy, as a means of inquiry into their nature. (shrink)

Moral Theory and Theorizing in Healthcare Ethics Content Type Journal Article Category Editorial Pages 365-368 DOI 10.1007/s10677-011-9291-x Authors Mike McNamee, College of Human and Health Sciences, Swansea, SA28PP UK Thomas Schramme, Universität Hamburg, Philosophisches Seminar, Von-Melle-Park 6, 20146 Hamburg, Germany Journal Ethical Theory and Moral Practice Online ISSN 1572-8447 Print ISSN 1386-2820 Journal Volume Volume 14 Journal Issue Volume 14, Number 4.

In this article I provide a conceptual analysis of an underexplored issue in the debate about effective altruism: its theory of effectiveness. First, I distinguish effectiveness from efficiency and claim that effective altruism understands effectiveness through the lens of efficiency. Then, I discuss the limitations of this approach in particular with respect to the charge that it is incapable of supporting structural change. Finally, I propose an expansion of the notion of effectiveness of effective altruism by referring to the debate (...) in political philosophy about realism and the practical challenge of normative theories. I argue that effective altruism, both as a social movement and as a conceptual paradigm, would benefit from clarifying its ideal, taking into account the role of institutions, and expanding its idea of feasibility. (shrink)

Stokes’ earlier chapter in this volume argued that, given the role ethical considerations play in our judgments of what to believe, ethical factors will put limits on the extent to which we can embrace particularism about conspiracy theories. However, that will only be the case if there are ethical problems with conspiracy theory as a practice (rather than simply as a formal class of explanation). Utilising the Lakatosian framework for analysing conspiracy theories developed by Steve Clarke, this paper identifies a (...) morally costly feature of conspiracy theorizing: its tendency to generate and expand new accusations purely to defend the core theory from countervailing evidence. Such 'auxiliary accusations' violate important norms around justified accusation, which supplies a defeasible, but important, reason to be reluctant to take part in the practice of conspiracy theorizing. (shrink)

Despite the growing attention to oppression and resistance in social and political philosophy as well as ethics, philosophers continue to struggle to describe and appropriately attribute agency under non-ideal circumstances of oppression and structural injustice. This chapter identifies some features of new accounts of non-ideal agency and then examines a particular problem for such theories, what Serene Khader has called the agency dilemma. Under the agency dilemma, attempts to articulate the agency of subjects living under oppression must on the one (...) hand avoid overemphasizing constraints on agency, and thereby producing paternalistic theories that “deny agency” for oppressed subjects, and on the other hand avoid failing to fully appreciate the effects of oppression on agency, thereby missing crucial features of how oppression unjustly shapes a person’s lived possibilities. This chapter traces this dilemma to a preoccupation with ascribing agency, which produces problematic descriptive and political effects for theorizing agency under oppression: what the author calls an asymmetry problem and a disenfranchisement problem. Finally, the chapter proposes that the agency dilemma might be ameliorated if theorists scrutinize more closely how moral, epistemic, and political agency interact and overlap in life under oppression. (shrink)

This collection of essays examines the relationship between moral injury and just war theory. The included essays attempt to broaden the ethical subject of moral injury, while also seeking greater conceptual clarity about the nature of moral harm that occurs in the contexts of both warfare and the afterwar.

The contemporary philosophical debate on free will and moral responsibility is rife with appeal to a variety of allegedly intuitive cases and principles. As a result, some have argued that many strands of this debate end in “dialectical stalemates,” boiling down to bedrock, seemingly intractable disagreements about intuition . Here I attempt to carve out a middle ground between conventional reliance on appeal to intuition and intuitional skepticism in regards to the philosophical discussion of moral responsibility in particular. (...) The main goal of this paper is to propose and defend a new methodological assumption that I argue responsibility theorists can and should accept, one that serves to preserve a general skepticism about the proper role of intuition in our responsibility theorizing while marking a particular class of our responsibility judgments as having a privileged epistemic status such that they can play a role in constraining our responsibility theorizing. (shrink)

This commentary contributes to philosophical reflection on the growing challenge of digital distraction and the value of attention in the digital age. It clarifies the nature of the problem in conceptual and historical terms; analyzes “freedom of attention” as an organizing ideal for moral and political theorizing; considers some constraints of political morality on coercive state action to bolster users’ attentional resources; comments on corporate moral responsibility; and touches on some reform ideas. In particular, the commentary develops (...) a response to an anti-paternalistic line of argument rooted in Mill’s Harm Principle that would oppose state regulation on the grounds that securing attentional capacities is a matter of personal responsibility alone. The commentary engages throughout with James Williams’s recent work on the attention economy by identifying areas of agreement and difference. (shrink)

This essay responds to the thoughtful essays on the Order of Public Reason (OPR) by Elvio Baccarini, Giulia Bistagnino and Nenad Miscevic. All three essays interrogate OPR’s understanding of moral theory - “meta” matters about the nature of morality, reasons and modeling within moral theories. I first turn to the general understanding of the moral enterprise underlying OPR, explaining why it takes a view at odds with the contemporary mainstream in moral philosophy. I then explain the (...) idea of moral truth in OPR: when it comes to social morality, moral truth is necessarily a function of what can be endorsed by some collectivity. Th is leads to a fundamental worry about theories of public reason: why is the endorsement of the public so important? And if some sort of public endorsement is really so terribly important, how can a theory of public reason withstand the fact that it advances its own controversial claims that cannot be publicly endorsed? After considering when public endorsement is necessary, and when public reason theories can make controversial claims, I close by considering in what way OPR does, and in what way it does not, employ a thought experiment, and the complexities of that. (shrink)

Surprisingly little is known about what ancient Confucian thinkers struggled with in their own social and political contexts and how these struggles contributed to the establishment and further development of classical Confucian political theory. Leading scholar of comparative political theory, Sungmoon Kim offers a systematic philosophical account of the political theories of Mencius and Xunzi, investigating both their agreements and disagreements as the champions of the Confucian Way against the backdrop of the prevailing realpolitik of the late Warring States period. (...) Together, they contributed to the formation of Confucian virtue politics, in which concerns about political order and stability and concerns about moral character and moral enhancement are deeply intertwined. By presenting their political philosophies in terms of constitutionalism, Kim shows how they each developed the ability to authorize the ruler's legitimate use of power in domestic and interstate politics in ways consistent with their distinctive accounts of human nature. (shrink)

Human reasoning is often conceived as an interplay between a more intuitive and deliberate thought process. In the last 50 years, influential fast-and-slow dual-process models that capitalize on this distinction have been used to account for numerous phenomena – from logical reasoning biases, over prosocial behavior, to moral decision making. The present paper clarifies that despite the popularity, critical assumptions are poorly conceived. My critique focuses on two interconnected foundational issues: the exclusivity and switch feature. The exclusivity feature refers (...) to the tendency to conceive intuition and deliberation as generating unique responses such that one type of response is assumed to be beyond the capability of the fast-intuitive processing mode. I review the empirical evidence in key fields and show that there is no solid ground for such exclusivity. The switch feature concerns the mechanism by which a reasoner can decide to shift between more intuitive and deliberate processing. I present an overview of leading switch accounts and show that they are conceptually problematic – precisely because they presuppose exclusivity. I build on these insights to sketch the groundwork for a more viable dual-process architecture and illustrate how it can set a new research agenda to advance the field in the coming years. (shrink)

This paper examines the support for diversity from a moral perspective. Combining business ethics theory with a lens of critical discourse analysis, it reconstructs the debates on the ethicality of three disability inclusion practices—positive discrimination, job adaptations, and voluntary disclosure—drawn from multi-stakeholder interviews in disability-friendly organizations. Discursive resistance to disability inclusion practices, otherwise known to work, arises out of moral beliefs characteristic of an ethic of justice, whereas support is more often informed by an ethic of care. This (...) study contributes to the literature by laying bare how ethics fuel ‘resistance to’ rather than ‘support for’ diversity and inclusion. Like prior studies, it links such resistance to the myth of individual merit, noting that some re-appropriation of an ethic of justice becomes possible when legal awareness around issues of disability is raised in the context of work. In addition, it identifies an ethic of care as holding the greatest potential for fostering workplace inclusion yet cautions for two adverse side effects that may arise when promoting corporate care: the potential of paternalism and the inclination to individualise inherent to wellbeing initiatives. (shrink)

The revisionist critique of conventional just war theory has undoubtedly scored some important victories. Walzer’s elegantly unified defense of combatant legal equality and noncombatant immunity has been seriously undermined. This critical success has not, however, been matched by positive arguments, which when applied to the messy reality of war would deprive states and soldiers of the permission to fight wars that are plausibly thought to be justified. The appeal to law that is sought to resolve this objection by casting it (...) as a practical concern, a pragmatic worry about implementation, which while germane to debates over the laws of war, need not undermine our convictions in the fundamental principles the revisionists advocate. This response is inadequate. Revisionists have not shown that soldiers should obey the laws of war, in practice, when they conflict with their other moral reasons – our worries about application remain intact. Moreover, a theory of war that offers only an account of the laws of war, and a set of fundamental principles developed in abstraction from feasibility constraints, is radically incomplete. We need to know how to apply those fundamental principles, and whether, when applied, they lead to defensible conclusions. Only two options seem to remain. Perhaps the revisionists’ arguments for their chosen fundamental principles are sufficiently compelling that we should stick with them, and accept their troubling conclusions – in other words, accept pacifism. Alternatively, we need to revise our fundamental principles, so that when applied they yield conclusions that we can more confidently endorse. -/- Though it does not save the revisionist view from the responsibility dilemma and cognate objections, the appeal to law does raise an important, and previously inadequately theorized, question – or, rather, resurrects a neglected topic, discussed in depth by historical just war theorists such as Grotius and Vattel. There are good grounds for distinguishing the laws of war from the morality of war, and for adjusting the former to accommodate predictable noncompliance, that should not impact on our account of the latter. Nonetheless, I have argued that there are some profound moral insights underlying both combatant legal equality and noncombatant immunity: specifically, we cannot infer from a combatant’s side having not satisfied jus ad bellum that he may not justifiably use lethal force; and other things equal, it is more wrongful to harm a nonliable noncombatant than to harm a nonliable combatant. (shrink)

The turn of the century saw a significant increase in the amount of attention being paid by philosophers to empirical issues about moral character. Dating back at least to Plato and Aristotle in the West, and Confucius in the East, philosophers have traditionally drawn on empirical data to some extent in their theorizing about character. One of the main differences in recent years has been the source of this empirical data, namely the work of social and personality psychologists (...) on morally relevant thought and action. -/- This entry briefly examines four recent empirical approaches to moral character. It will draw on the psychology literature where appropriate, but the main focus will be on the significance of that work for philosophers interested in better understanding moral character. The four areas are situationism, the CAPS model, the Big Five model, and the VIA. The remainder of this entry devotes a section to each of them. (shrink)

This chapter offers a new interpretation of Nietzsche’s argument for moral skepticism, an argument that should be of independent philosophical interest as well. On this account, Nietzsche offers a version of the argument from moral disagreement, but, unlike familiar varieties, it does not purport to exploit anthropological reports about the moral views of exotic cultures, or even garden-variety conflicting moral intuitions about concrete cases. Nietzsche, instead, calls attention to the single most important and embarrassing fact about (...) the history of moral theorizing by philosophers over two millennia: namely, that no rational consensus has been secured on any substantive, foundational proposition about morality. Persistent and apparently intractable disagreement on foundational questions, of course, distinguishes moral theory from inquiry in the sciences and mathematics. According to Nietzsche, the best explanation for this disagreement is that, even though moral skepticism is true, philosophers can still construct valid dialectical justifications for moral claims because the premises of different justifications will answer to the psychological needs of at least some philosophers and thus be deemed true by some of them. The chapter concludes by considering various attempts to defuse this abductive argument for scepticism. (shrink)

Refugees can be formed as “subjects” as they navigate forced displacement in countries that are not their own. In particular, everyday life as the politicized Other, and as humanitarianism’s depoliticized beneficiary, can constitute them as political subjects. Understanding these produced subjects and subjectivities leads us to conceive of forced displacement – or “refugeedom” – as a human condition or experience of political (sub)alterity, within which inhere distinctive subjectivations and subjectivities. Drawing on fieldwork in Beirut, Lebanon, we use young Syrian and (...) Iraqi refugees’ experiences with everyday racism, violent bullying and racialized discrimination as heuristic lenses with which to see displacement’s political subjects and subjectivities. We argue that the young refugees emerge as both political and moral subjects through core and defining struggles within – and against – these politicizing constraints. We interpret their struggles as ambivalently and dynamically situated within humanitarianism’s and racism’s subjections and subjectivities. Yet we also found that occasionally the young refugees could eclipse these produced subjectivities to claim repoliticized subjecthoods distinct from those of humanitarianism and outside displacement’s normal politics. We interpret these in Rancièrian terms as “political subjectivation.” Abstracting our findings, we offer a simple theoretical architecture of refugeedom’s subjectivations, subjects, and subjectivities as comprising humanitarianism’s rights-bearing or juridical subject; the vulnerable and resilient, innocent and suffering subject; and the Othered or racialized subject, formed through the exclusions of displacement’s politicized spaces. But we also conceive refugeedom as a space of values, and so the ground on which moral meaning and significance attach to agency and subjectivity. (shrink)

Critical Notice on Organizations as Wrongdoers By Stephanie Collins Oxford University Press, 2023. -/- Extract: What, if any, role does metaphysics have to play in addressing moral questions? When answering questions about moral responsibility, many theories rely on answers to questions about the nature of agency and agents, the persistence of persons and the existence and nature of free will. In recent work in social ontology, philosophers have argued for views of social categories or identities that take ethical (...) and social–political desiderata into consideration in several ways. Some argue for views of gender identities that depend on epistemic and ethical considerations (Bettcher, 2009). Others develop views of gender categories in ways they take to be metaphysically realist, tracking robust explanatory patterns in the world. For instance, Barnes (2017) argues for this interpretation of Haslanger’s views of racial and gender categories. Others argue that injustice and oppression are reflected in the nature of social categories. For instance, while it ought not to be this way, some gender categories are, for instance, trans-exclusionary (Ásta 2018). Indeed, one might even argue that social categories can involve a distinctively metaphysical form of oppression (Jenkins 2020, 2023). It is clear that many philosophers argue in ways that draw close connections between metaphysical and moral theorizing. ... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Theorizing the Language of LawJesús Rodríguez-Velasco (bio)Law transforms reality, de iure and de facto, inasmuch as it attempts to bridge the gap between that which is done de facto and that which is regulated de iure. It is standard practice, for Alfonso X of Castile,1 to reinvent the means of writing the law. He does not limit himself to compiling or revising existing legal statutes; rather, he elevates (...) the corpus of the law to the level of juridical science. Dominating the meaning of the word—its hermeneutics and its relation to truth, lies, rhetoric, history, and poetry—is also the key to dominating juridical discourse itself and its capacity for creating certainty. Or, at least, for controlling uncertainty. Uncertainty, that is to say, the ambiguity in the interpretation of the relationship between words and things, appears to be one of the targets of Alfonsine juridical science.It is in the institutions that one can best study this desire for control. In particular, the need for control becomes visible in the court and the places related to it (the palace, chamber, or bedroom), codified by the law in order to put justice into action, in the representation of power, in cultural exchange, in education, and in recreation. Here legislation acquires a special significance with respect to the word, to narration, and to rhetoric. This is a philological problem: How does one compose and administer a text capable of controlling its own interpretation? How does one transpose this same dynamic to the institutions? How does one transmit this notion from the institution to those who inhabit it and who are, after all, the subjects of the legal science?It is therefore fitting to examine legislation about legal discourse, which is, in itself, the theory of law—not, however, in its abstract aspects but rather in the concrete elements of the formation of a legal vocabulary, in the way in which words, whose semantic and hermeneutic problems are clear, give life to this legal vocabulary. How is legal discourse constructed? In what way is it transmitted? What are the consequences of its dissemination? In what way is the law in charge of words, in particular, those expressed in the institutions?Perhaps the problem is philological, in the sense supposed by Giambattista Vico. Vico, in his Principi per una scienza nuova [1: 10] proposed that the study of philosophy, as a science of truth could not exist independently without a philology, the origin of the conscience of certainty (coscienza del certo). Attaching myself, then, to this idea of certainty (although not, of course, from Vico’s perspective) throughout this study I shall call “the space of certainty” the theoretical and conceptual construction (which is of both a philological and textual character) stipulated by the legislator in an attempt to control the distinct concepts related to the legal word, its institutional statute and its legal, moral, and cultural hermeneutics. I shall thus attempt to understand the meaning of this space of certainty, in what way it has been constructed, and how it affects legal, political, social, and cultural mechanisms. [End Page 64]1Law and KingIn the first title of the first Partida, Alfonso outlines the virtues of the laws.2 In addition, this first law discusses the overall structure of the Siete partidas, as if, in fact, they were nothing more than a lengthy and virtuous discourse about the law. It makes sense as the Partidas are not only a legal code capable of being enforced but also an enormous manual on legal theory. The law(s) and legal doctrine, then, come together to form the first expression of legal science. Going further than compilations of Roman law such as the Liber augustalis,3 further than the scientific expressions of jurisprudence of specialists from Bologna, the Île-de-France, and Orleans utroque iure,4 the Partidas—and I should like to insist on this—can be considered a constitutional legal text. In this sense the Partidas attempts to regulate the actual material from which the laws are made: language. Put another way, the text of the Partidas is at once legality, establishment, and discussion of legal language... (shrink)

Institutionalized practices of collective justification are central for theorizing international fairness. Institutions matter because they play a significant part in the construal of fairness claims through the provision of internal standards for moral assessment. Conceptions of international fairness must spell out how collective justification works by addressing the jurisprudential and institutional issues at stake in the specification of the moral grounds for compliance with international institutions on the one hand and international civil disobedience on the other. Theoretical (...) models of institutions that do not pay attention to collective justification are inadequate on fairness grounds. More specifically, mainstream neoliberal institutionalist accounts of international regimes are deeply problematic when used in the normative evaluation of international institutions, as they offer the wrong benchmark for moral assessment, given their roots in a brand of exchange theory that is blind to the distribution of burdens and benefits from cooperation. (shrink)

Our aim in this paper is to raise a question about the relationship between theories of responsibility, on the one hand, and a commitment to conscious attitudes, on the other. Our question has rarely been raised previously. Among those who believe in the reality of human freedom, compatibilists have traditionally devoted their energies to providing an account that can avoid any commitment to the falsity of determinism while successfully accommodating a range of intuitive examples. Libertarians, in contrast, have aimed to (...) show that either physical indeterminacy or a certain kind of agent causation can find a place in the world for what they take to be genuine freedom. Few have considered whether moral responsibility requires a commitment to conscious attitudes.2 Our question derives from a confluence of two sources. First, there is reason to think that conscious attitudes matter to theories of responsibility, either directly, as a result of the latter’s commitments, or indirectly, by virtue of the assumptions that they make about certain intuitive examples. Second, there is accumulating evidence suggesting that there aren’t any conscious mental states possessing the sorts of causal roles required of propositional attitudes. Since theorists of responsibility should in general be concerned to make their views compatible with plausible claims about the natural world, the implications of this data should be carefully considered. Our aim is therefore to motivate and begin exploring answers to the following conditional question: If it should turn out that there are no conscious attitudes, then what would be the implications of this fact (if any) for theories of responsibility? We propose that theorists who aren’t skeptics about moral responsibility should examine their accounts, asking whether their theories (or the examples that motivate them) could survive the discovery that there are no conscious judgments, decisions, or evaluations. Since we take it that moral theorizing in general should operate with the weakest possible empirical assumptions about the natural world, such theorists should consider whether their accounts could be motivated in such a way as to be free of any commitment to the existence of conscious attitudes.. (shrink)

Moral psychologists have recently turned their attention to the study of folk metaethical beliefs. We report the results of a cross-cultural study using Chinese, Polish and Ecuadorian participants that seeks to advance this line of investigation. Individuals in all three demographic groups were observed to attribute objectivity to ethical statements in very similar patterns. Differences in participants’ strength of opinion about an issue, the level of societal agreement or disagreement about an issue, and participants’ age were found to significantly (...) affect their inclination to view the truth of an ethical statement as a matter of objective fact. Implications for theorizing about folk morality are discussed. (shrink)

In this article, we advance the perspective that distinct emotions amplify different moral judgments, based on the emotion’s core appraisals. This theorizing yields four insights into the way emotions shape moral judgment. We submit that there are two kinds of specificity in the impact of emotion upon moral judgment: domain specificity and emotion specificity. We further contend that the unique embodied aspects of an emotion, such as nonverbal expressions and physiological responses, contribute to an emotion’s impact (...) on moral judgment. Finally, emotions play a key role in determining which issues acquire moral significance in a society over time, in a process known as moralization (Rozin, 1999). The implications of these four observations for future research on emotion and morality are discussed. (shrink)