Agostino d’Ippona è stato un punto di riferimento costante nella produzione filosofica arendtiana, a partire dalla dissertazione di dottorato del 1928, intitolata Il concetto d’amore in Agostino, fino alle ultime pagine scritte prima di morire, e dedicate alla trattazione della volontà. Il segno più evidente di questo rapporto è costituito da una frase del De civitate Dei, « initium ut esset creatus est homo, ante quem nullus fuit» sulla quale Hannah Arendt fonda il proprio concetto di libertà, intesa come la (...) capacità dell’uomo di “essere” un nuovo inizio. Attraverso questo concetto H. Arendt tenta di restituire all’uomo il senso della propria irriducibile unicità, contro i tentativi del potere di rendere ogni individuo “superfluo”. A monte dell’interesse per Agostino vi sono, però, anche ragioni di carattere biografico, se è vero che la donna conobbe Agostino attraverso la mediazione, umana e intellettuale, del suo maestro Martin Heidegger. (shrink)

Drawing from extensive, eye-opening first-person accounts, No Refuge puts a spotlight on the millions of refugees worldwide who have to leave home but find nowhere to resettle. As political philosopher Serena Parekh argues, this is not just a problem for politicians. Citizens also have a moral duty to help resolve the global refugee crisis and to end the suffering and denial of human rights that refugee are forced to endure, often for years. While the media usually focus on the (...) challenges that Western states have with the arrival of large numbers of asylum seekers and refugees, the real problem is that millions are stuck in inhumane conditions in refugee camps and urban centers, with little chance of finding a more permanent solution. Grounded in powerful testimony from refugees and meticulous research on the conditions in which so many suffer worldwide, No Refuge shows why, as states but also as citizens, we cannot afford to wait any longer to end this crisis. (shrink)

Does justice require that individuals get what they deserve? Serena Olsaretti brings together new essays by leading moral and political philosophers examining the relation between desert and justice; they also illuminate the nature of distributive justice, and the relationship between desert and other values, such as equality and responsibility.

Are inequalities of income created by the free market just? In this book Serena Olsaretti examines two main arguments that justify those inequalities: the first claims that they are just because they are deserved, and the second claims that they are just because they are what free individuals are entitled to. Both these arguments purport to show, in different ways, that giving responsible individuals their due requires that free market inequalities in incomes be allowed. Olsaretti argues, however, that neither (...) argument is successful, and shows that when we examine closely the principle of desert and the notions of liberty and choice invoked by defenders of the free market, it appears that a conception of justice that would accommodate these notions, far from supporting free market inequalities, calls for their elimination. Her book will be of interest to a wide range of readers in political philosophy, political theory and normative economics. (shrink)

The method of philosophy. Introduction to part I -- Thought experiments -- Reflective equilibrium -- What is philosophy? Introduction to Part II and Part III -- The nature of the philosophical enterprise -- The nature of intuitive judgements -- Experimental philosophy. Empirical inquiries versus armchair investigations -- Against experimental philosophy.

Distributive justice has come to the fore in political philosophy: how should we arrange our social and economic institutions so as to distribute benefits and burdens fairly? Thirty-two leading figures from philosophy and political theory present specially written critical assessments of the key issues in this flourishing area of research.

Contemporary egalitarian theories of justice constrain the demands of equality by responsibility, and do not view as unjust inequalities that are traceable to individuals' choices. This paper argues that, in order to make non-arbitrary determinate judgements of responsibility, any theory of justice needs a principle of stakes , that is, an account of what consequences choices should have. The paper also argues that the principles of stakes seemingly presupposed by egalitarians are implausible, and that adopting alternative principles of stakes amounts (...) to fleshing out the demands of responsibility rather than imposing limits on them. (shrink)

This book is a philosophical analysis of the ethical treatment of refugees and stateless people, a group of people who, though extremely important politically, have been greatly under theorized philosophically. The limited philosophical discussion of refugees by philosophers focuses narrowly on the question of whether or not we, as members of Western states, have moral obligations to admit refugees into our countries. This book reframes this debate and shows why it is important to think ethically about people who will never (...) be resettled and who live for prolonged periods outside of all political communities. Parekh shows why philosophers ought to be concerned with ethical norms that will help stateless people mitigate the harms of statelessness even while they remain formally excluded from states. (shrink)

The compensatory desert argument is an argument that purports to justify inequalities in (some) incomes generated by a free labour market. It holds, first, that the principle of compensation is a principle of desert; second, that a distribution justified by a principle of desert is just; and third, that (some) rewards people reap on a free labour market are compensation for costs they incur. It concludes that therefore, a distribution of (some) rewards generated by a free labour market is just. (...) In this chapter I criticise the first two premises of this argument. I argue that the principle of compensation is not a principle of desert (sections 3 and 4), and that a distribution of deserved compensatory payments may be unjust (sections 5 and 6). Before developing my critique of the compensatory desert argument, I start by illustrating further that argument in the version of it which has been defended by Julian Lamont (section 1), and to dispel two objections that have been moved against the view that compensation is a principle of desert. (shrink)

The first issue of Artificial Intelligence and Law journal was published in 1992. This paper offers some commentaries on papers drawn from the Journal’s third decade. They indicate a major shift within Artificial Intelligence, both generally and in AI and Law: away from symbolic techniques to those based on Machine Learning approaches, especially those based on Natural Language texts rather than feature sets. Eight papers are discussed: two concern the management and use of documents available on the World Wide Web, (...) and six apply machine learning techniques to a variety of legal applications. (shrink)

The pharmaceutical industry plays an increasingly dominant role in healthcare, raising concerns about “conflicts of interest” on the part of the medical professionals who interact with the industry. However, there is considerable disagreement over the extent to which COI is a problem and how it should be managed. Participants in debates about COI have become entrenched in their views, which is both unproductive and deeply confusing for the majority of medical professionals trying to work in an increasingly commercialized environment. We (...) used a modified meta-narrative review method to analyse debates about COI in the academic and grey literature. We found two Discourse Models: The Critical Discourse Model sees COI in health and biomedicine as a major problem that both can and should be addressed, while the Defensive Discourse Model argues that current efforts to control COIs are at best unnecessary and at worst harmful. Each model is underpinned by profoundly differing views about how society should be organized—in particular whether market forces should be encouraged or curtailed—and how the dangers associated with market forces should be managed. In order to make any headway, academics and policymakers must recognize that these debates are underpinned by profoundly differing worldviews. (shrink)

This article examines our moral obligations to refugees and stateless people. I argue that in order to understand our moral obligations to stateless people, both de jure refugees and de facto stateless people, we ought to reconceptualize the harm of statelessness as entailing both a legal/political harm (the loss of citizenship) and an ontological harm, a deprivation of certain fundamental human qualities. To do this, I draw on the work of Hannah Arendt and show that the ontological deprivation has three (...) distinct though interconnected elements: a reduction to the merely human or bare life, a separation from the common realm of humanity and abandonment, and the diminishment of agency or ability to act in the Arendtian sense. If we pull apart the legal/political harm of statelessness from the ontological harm, we are better able to see that we can address some of the features of the ontological deprivation even though we may not be able to rectify the political harm. I conclude this article by discussing some suggestions that follow from a recognition of the reality and harm of the ontological deprivation. (shrink)

Preference orderings assigned by coherent lower and upper conditional previsions are defined and they are considered to define maximal random variables and Bayes random variables. Sufficient conditions are given such that a random variable is maximal if and only if it is a Bayes random variable. In a metric space preference orderings represented by coherent lower and upper conditional previsions defined by Hausdorff inner and outer measures are given.

_Hannah Arendt and the Challenge of Modernity_ explores the theme of human rights in the work of Hannah Arendt. Parekh argues that Arendt's contribution to this debate has been largely ignored because she does not speak in the same terms as contemporary theoreticians of human rights. Beginning by examining Arendt’s critique of human rights, and the concept of "a right to have rights" with which she contrasts the traditional understanding of human rights, Parekh goes on to analyze some of the (...) tensions and paradoxes within the modern conception of human rights that Arendt brings to light, arguing that Arendt’s perspective must be understood as phenomenological and grounded in a notion of intersubjectivity that she develops in her readings of Kant and Socrates. (shrink)

Following Erika Fischer-Lichte’s notion of emergence as an unexpected phenome-non that questions the notion of agency, our aim is to investigate how dance emerges through movements that are spontaneous and yet learnt while not being reducible to a motor expertise. Through Hermann Schmitz’ theory of the felt body, and notions such as “kinaesthetic attention”, grace and “pure” presence, we will show how dance movements emerge from the mutual “affective” influence be-tween dancers and the surroundings thanks to dancers’ “pathic” state between (...) awareness and unconsciousness, laîcher prise and restraint. (shrink)

This paper is part of a book symposium on Fred Feldman's, *Pleasure and the Good Life*. I argue that Feldman’s defence of hedonism, although successful on its own terms, is of less significance than it may seem at first, for two main reasons. First, Feldman’s defence of the claim that attitudinal pleasures are the chief good is either implausible or crucially incomplete. Second, Feldman’s claim that hedonists can overcome the objections levelled against them while remaining pure hedonists is only partially (...) true. (shrink)

This paper proposes communities of practice (CoP) as a process to build moral resilience in healthcare settings. We introduce the starting point of moral distress that arises from ethical challenges when actions of the healthcare professional are constrained. We examine how situations such as the current COVID-19 pandemic can exponentially increase moral distress in healthcare professionals. Then, we explore how moral resilience can help cope with moral distress. We propose the term collective moral resilience to capture the shared capacity arising (...) from mutual engagement and dialogue in group settings, towards responding to individual moral distress and towards building an ethical practice environment. Finally, we look at CoPs in healthcare and explore how these group experiences can be used to build collective moral resilience. (shrink)

In this paper, I argue that there is a philosophical basis for the claim that states can be held responsible for structural injustices such as gender discrimination and violence—a claim that has been made in international human rights documents, but one that has not gained much normative force. To show this, I draw on and develop Iris Young's notion of “political responsibility.” The purpose of political responsibility is not to find fault or blame the state for a past wrong, but (...) to encourage the state to make things more just in the future. I argue that the state is able to take responsibility in this sense and can discharge the duty of political responsibility in a more systematic way than individuals can. Further, I show that taking political responsibility would entail changing how states think about their human rights obligations. Rather than focusing on cataloguing abuses, states would be required to work toward changing conditions so that human rights violations are less likely to occur in the future. Consequently, I show that it does make sense to say that the state can be held accountable for structural injustices that lead to women's human rights violations. (shrink)

This article explores the issue of jus contra bellum as a particular development within just war thought. At its heart, the jus contra bellum amounts to an attempt to apply the principles of jus in bello (discrimination and proportionality) in order to negate the jus ad bellum. This approach was rather prevalent throughout the Cold War era, as concerns over the prospective use of nuclear weapons facilitated an increasingly sceptical attitude towards the use of force. Whereas the vast majority of (...) just war thinkers have tended to overlook this phenomenon, James Turner Johnson has adeptly recognised the perils of jus contra bellum, and its rather disastrous implications for just war thought. In this respect, Johnson's analysis of this issue constitutes one of his most significant contributions to the tradition. However, as this article will suggest, his assessment of this approach, and consequent efforts to counter it, do not go far enough. As will be noted, the roots of the jus contra bellum can be traced to the prevailing structure of just war thought – a structure which has been consistently championed by virtually every just war thinker. (shrink)

Preferences are often thought to be relevant for well-being: respecting preferences, or satisfying them, contributes in some way to making people's lives go well for them. A crucial assumption that accompanies this conviction is that there is a normative standard that allows us to discriminate between preferences that do, and those that do not, contribute to well-being. The papers collected in this volume, written by moral philosophers and philosophers of economics, explore a number of central issues concerning the formulation of (...) such a normative standard. They examine what a defensible account of how preferences should be formed for them to contribute to well-being should look like; whether preferences are subject to requirements of rationality and what reasons we have to prefer certain things over others; and what the significance is, if any, of preferences that are arational or not conducive to well-being. (shrink)