In this paper I will juxtapose the concept of the veil of ignorance – a fundamental premise of Rawlsian justice as fairness – and solidarity in the context of the organisation of a healthcare system. My hypothesis is that the veil of ignorance could be considered a rhetorical tool that supports compassion solidarity. In the concept of the veil of ignorance, I will find some crucial features of compassion solidarity within the Rawlsian concept of (...) “reciprocity” – located between “impartiality” and “mutual advantage”. I conclude that, even behind this “thick” veil, some essential, yet “particular” facts on health and wealth redistribution are available to decision makers. Lastly, I discover that by means of the assumption of self-interest in the original position the veil aims to convert egoism into empathy, thus invoking the solidarity of compassion that in turn could be translated into principles of the organisation of a healthcare system. (shrink)

The veil of ignorance argument was used by John C. Harsanyi to defend Utilitarianism and by John Rawls to defend the absolute priority of the worst off. In a recent paper, Lara Buchak revives the veil of ignorance argument, and uses it to defend an intermediate position between Harsanyi's and Rawls' that she calls Relative Prioritarianism. None of these authors explore the implications of allowing that agent's behind the veil are averse to ambiguity. Allowing for (...) aversion to ambiguity---which is both the most commonly observed and a seemingly reasonable attitude to ambiguity---however supports a version of Egalitarianism, whose logical form is quite different from the theories defended by the aforementioned authors. Moreover, it turns out that the veil of ignorance argument neither supports standard Utilitarianism nor Prioritarianism unless we assume that rational people are insensitive to ambiguity. (shrink)

The veil of ignorance has been used often as a tool for recommending what justice requires with respect to the distribution of wealth. We complete Harsanyi's model of the veil of ignorance by appending information permitting objective comparisons among persons. In order to do so, we introduce the concept of objective empathy. We show that the veil-of-ignorance conception of John Harsanyi, so completed, and Ronald Dworkin's, when modelled formally, recommend wealth allocations in conflict with (...) the prominently espoused view that priority should be given to the less able in wealth allocation. We finally argue that the veil of ignorance should be rejected as a tool for discovering what justice requires. (shrink)

In this paper we argue that there is a kind of moral disagreement that survives the Rawlsian veil of ignorance. While a veil of ignorance eliminates sources of disagreement stemming from self-interest, it does not do anything to eliminate deeper sources of disagreement. These disagreements not only persist, but transform their structure once behind the veil of ignorance. We consider formal frameworks for exploring these differences in structure between interested and disinterested disagreement, and argue (...) that consensus models offer us a solution concept for disagreements behind the veil of ignorance. (shrink)

Some authors view the veil of ignorance as a preferred method for allocating resources because it imposes impartiality by stripping deliberators of knowledge of their personal identity. Using some prominent examples of such reasoning in the health care sector, I will argue for the following claims. First, choice behind a veil of ignorance often fails to provide clear guidance regarding resource allocation. Second, regardless of whether definite results could be derived from the veil, these results (...) do not in themselves have important moral standing. This is partly because the veil does not determine which features are morally relevant for a given distributive problem. Third, even when we have settled the question of what features to count, choice behind a veil of ignorance arguably fails to take persons seriously. Ultimately, we do not need the veil to solve distributive problems, and we have good reason to appeal to some other distributive model. (shrink)

A natural view in distributive ethics is that everyone's interests matter, but the interests of the relatively worse off matter more than the interests of the relatively better off. I provide a new argument for this view. The argument takes as its starting point the proposal, due to Harsanyi and Rawls, that facts about distributive ethics are discerned from individual preferences in the "original position." I draw on recent work in decision theory, along with an intuitive principle about risk-taking, to (...) derive the view. (shrink)

For more than two millennia the development of philosophy in what is called the West has been the province of men who trace their intellectual heritage to men in ancient Greece. Within “the development of philosophy” I include the training of philosophers as well as publishing and preserving philosophical work in libraries. Thus I regard philosophy as a very material as well as spiritual enterprise. My focus here is on the spiritual impact, actual and potential, of recent changes in the (...) material base of philosophy and the material impact of recent changes in the spiritual focus of philosophers. Before the Twentieth Century, the most significant transitions in the development of Western philosophy were its coming under the domination of Christian religious institutions and then its becoming relatively freed from such domination. Since the advent of the Twentieth Century, the most significant transitions may come from the increasing access to academic institutions of the middle and working classes, of people of color with histories of oppression by white societies, and of women from all classes and ethnic backgrounds—people who do not always or only trace their intellectual heritages to men of ancient Greece. What differences might these changes make to, and call for in, the development of philosophy?What I have thought about most are differences made by women and differences that have drawn in women to academic philosophy in Western democracies, such as the United States. Twentieth Century women in these contexts have published substantial bodies of philosophical inquiry with feminist agendas . I want to comment on two features of such inquiry that often make it attractive to women less readily engaged by the traditions defined by privileged men. These features are holism and what I call “historical particularism.” I begin with “particularism.”. (shrink)

There has been a growing charge that perdurantism—with its bloated ontology of very person-like objects that coincide persons—implies the repugnant conclusion that we are morally obliged to be feckless. I argue that this charge critically overlooks the epistemic situation—what I call the ‘veil of ignorance’—that perdurantists find themselves in. Though the veil of ignorance still requires an alteration of our commonsense understanding of the demands on action, I argue for two conclusions. The first is that the (...) alteration that is required isn’t a moral one, but rather an alteration of prudential reasoning. Second, and more importantly, this alteration isn’t necessarily a repugnant one. In fact, given that it prudentially pushes one towards greater impartiality, it may be seen as a point in favor of perdurantism. (shrink)

This paper discusses the attempt in this issue of the journal by Peter Singer, John McKie, Helga Kuhse and Jeff Richardson, to defend QALYs against the argument from double jeopardy which I first outlined in 1987. In showing how the QALY and other similar measures which combine life expectancy and quality of life and use these to justify particular allocations of health care resource, remain vulnerable to the charge of double jeopardy I am able to clarify some of the central (...) issues concerning the value of life. In particular, the idea that the value of a life varies with its life expectancy and with its quality, understood in terms of its richness, variety, success etc, is subjected to special examination. It is shown how defenders of QALYs are committed to the view that so far from all lives being of equal value, all lives are necessarily of subtly different value. The paper then analyses the use to which the notorious 'veil of ignorance' has been put both by Singer et al and by others and shows how this device of John Rawls's cannot do the work so often assigned to it. The paper then considers the issue of hypothetical consent and the role that it can play in justifying disposing of the lives of people who have not in fact consented to their lives being disposed of in particular ways. Finally, the paper makes some points about the comprehensive nature of the data collection and storage which would be required by QALY advocates and points out the independent problems attaching to licensing such comprehensive collection and use of personal data. (shrink)

This article argues that the decision problem in the original position should be characterized as a decision problem under uncertainty even when it is assumed that the denizens of the original position know that they have an equal chance of ending up in any given individual’s place. It supports this claim by arguing that (a) the continuity axiom of decision theory does not hold between all of the outcomes the denizens of the original position face and that (b) neither us (...) nor the denizens of the original position can know the exact point at which discontinuity sets in, because the language we employ in comparing different outcomes is ineradicably vague. It is also argued that the account underlying (b) can help proponents of superiority in value theory defend their view against arguments offered by Norcross and Griffin. (shrink)

Lara Buchak argues for a version of rank-weighted utilitarianism that assigns greater weight to the interests of the worse off. She argues that our distributive principles should be derived from the preferences of rational individuals behind a veil of ignorance, who ought to be risk averse. I argue that Buchak’s appeal to the veil of ignorance leads to a particular way of extending rank-weighted utilitarianism to the evaluation of uncertain prospects. This method recommends choices that violate (...) the unanimous preferences of rational individuals and choices that guarantee worse distributions. These results, I suggest, undermine Buchak’s argument for rank-weighted utilitarianism. (shrink)

In a recent JME paper, Matthew John Minehan applies John Rawls’ veil of ignorance against Judith Thomson’s famous violinist argument for the permissibility of abortion. Minehan asks readers to ‘imagine that one morning you are back to back in bed with another person. One of you is conscious and the other unconscious. You do not know which one you are’. Since from this position of ignorance, you have an equal chance of being the unconscious violinist and the (...) conscious person attached to him, it would be rational to oppose a right for detachment. Likewise, behind the veil of ignorance, it is rational to oppose abortions since you could be the fetus, Minehan claims. This paper provides a plausible reply to this argument. (shrink)

In Rawls’ influential social contract approach to distributive justice, the fair income distribution is the one that an individual would choose behind a veil of ignorance. Harsanyi treated this situation as a decision under risk and arrived at utilitarianism using expected utility theory. This paper investigates the implications of applying cumulative prospect theory instead, which better describes behavior under risk. I find that the specific type of inequality in bottom-heavy right-skewed income distributions, which includes the log-normal income distribution, (...) could be perceived as desirable. This optimal inequality result contrasts the implications of other social welfare criteria. (shrink)

Rawls' original position is a thought experiment by which we are asked to imagine ourselves as rational agents choosing the principles of justice under specific informational and motivational constraints. In this paper, I am concerned only with the informational constraints and I shall argue that the way Rawls designed them reveals an implausible conception of mind and knowledge. This conception, of a mind separable from knowledge, as well as one of its correlates which I will call epistemic egalitarianism, is not (...) an objection one may address uniquely to the original position. However, the failure to construct the original position as a one-solution problem renders its epistemology not only implausible but of no use for moral reasoning. (shrink)

This chapter purports to give empirical feedback on impartial reasoning to justice by using online survey experiments. More precisely, the study focuses on whether and how the different conceptions of the veil of ignorance and John Rawls’s method of reflective equilibrium affect real people’s impartial reasoning to justice. The findings show that, while ordinary people support impartial reasoning to the difference principle (maximin), their endorsement of it echoes neither John Harsanyi’s nor Rawls’s reasoning. The results illuminate that findings (...) in human psychology, such as the principles of loss aversion and “perceived luckiness,” cannot be dismissed for denoting the relevant impartial reasoning to justice. (shrink)

Abstractabstract:Cardinal Sforza Pallavicino, SJ (1607–67), conceived a procedure for determining natural moral laws by voting under a veil of ignorance. Behind this veil, imagined possible people who are ignorant of their social position, personal characteristics, nation, and the historical period in which they live vote as equals. These possible people are asked to establish a moral law in pursuit of their own and collective happiness, which they are obligated by God to follow. This article discusses Pallavicino's innovative (...) approach to natural law and examines its reception in Southern Germany and (what is now) Austria. (shrink)

Mark Rowlands gives a compelling argument that, if John Rawls's contractarianism is consistently applied, and Rawls's premises fully explained, then we have powerful reasons to believe that representatives behind the Veil of Ignorance should be blind to species membership in the same way that they are blind to economic status and natural talent.1I argue that even if we suppose this to be correct, these agents would not choose the two principles of justice, but instead ones that more closely (...) resemble utilitarian principles. (shrink)

The paper examines consensual contractarianism John Rawls proposed in his A Theory of Justice, and develops the following criticism. The veil of ignorance device requires but cannot secure the neutrality of the primary goods. In the Rawlsian ‘original position’ of contract, the only relevant information the hypothetical choosers are allowed to have is that they all prefer to have some ‘primary goods’ rather than not to have any, and that they prefer to have more rather than less of (...) the primary goods. This stipulation entails that the ‘primary goods’ are neutral with regard to the diverging preferences of the choosers. In other words, for the Rawlsian contract to yield acceptable results, neutrality of the primary goods must hold. It cannot, however. Hence Rawls’ account of a consensual contract is untenable. The paper suggests that the difficulty is not rooted in the particular features of the Rawlsian theory but in the very idea of a consensual contract. (shrink)

John Rawls argues that the Difference Principle would be chosen by parties trying to advance their individual interests behind the Veil of Ignorance. Behind this veil, the parties do not know who they are and they are unable to assign or estimate probabilities to their turning out to be any particular person in society. Much discussion of Rawls’s argument concerns whether he can plausibly rule out the parties’ having access to probabilities about who they are. Nevertheless, I (...) argue that, even if the parties lacked access to probabilities about who they are in society, they would still reject the Difference Principle. I argue that there are cases where it is still clear to the parties that it is not in any of their individual interests that the Difference Principle is adopted. (shrink)

This paper discusses “impartiality thought experiments”, i.e., thought experiments that attempt to generate intuitions which are unaffected by personal characteristics such as age, gender or race. We focus on the most prominent impartiality thought experiment, the Veil of Ignorance (VOI), and show that both in its original Rawlsian version and in a more generic version, empirical investigations can be normatively relevant in two ways: First, on the assumption that the VOI is effective and robust, if subjects dominantly favor (...) a certain normative judgment behind the VOI this provides evidence in favor of that judgment; if, on the other hand, they do not dominantly favor a judgment this reduces our justification for it. Second, empirical investigations can also contribute to assessing the effectiveness and robustness of the VOI in the first place, thereby supporting or undermining its applications across the board. (shrink)

In this article I examine the question of how a liberal state should go about defining death. Plausible standards for a definition of death include a somatic one based on circulatory criteria, death by neurologic criteria (DNC), and higher brain death. I will argue that Rawlsian “burdens of judgment” apply in this process: that is, reasonable disagreement should be expected on important topics, and such disagreement ought not be resolved via the coercive powers of the state. Nevertheless, the state must (...) legislate a definition of death, and in doing so faces a “neutralist dilemma,” that is, when there are multiple reasonable ways to move forward, only one can be chosen. I will examine a possible way to exit this neutralist dilemma. Finally, I will argue for DNC as the normatively preferred default definition of death. To do this, I will employ the Rawlsian heuristic of the “original position” and offer public reasons in favor of using DNC as the preferred default definition of death. (shrink)

Journal of Political Philosophy, EarlyView.

Rawls' original position is a thought experiment by which we are asked to imagine ourselves as rational agents choosing the principles of justice under specific informational and motivational constraints. In this paper, I am concerned only with the informational constraints and I shall argue that the way Rawls designed them reveals an implausible conception of mind and knowledge. This conception, of a mind separable from knowledge, as well as one of its correlates which I will call epistemic egalitarianism, is not (...) an objection one may address uniquely to the original position. However, the failure to construct the original position as a one-solution problem renders its epistemology not only implausible but of no use for moral reasoning. (shrink)

In this article, I defend the veil of ignorance against the objection that the device is inadequate for deriving demands of justice, because the veil of ignorance purportedly enforces a stronger form of impartiality than Kant’s categorical imperative and, primarily as a consequence, it generally leads to non-prioritarian conclusions. I show that the moral ideal of impartiality that is expressed by the veil of ignorance is not essentially different from Kant’s notion of impartiality and (...) that it does not generally lead to non-prioritarian conclusions. Although the moral ideal of impartiality that is modeled by the veil of ignorance demands solid justification for favoring particular positions of society, it generally does not rule out prioritarianism. Rather, the non-prioritarian conclusions reached by many theories of justice that rely on veil of ignorance reasoning are a result of the complex structures of these theories and the way that they combine and weigh different moral ideals, as well as their informational bases. (shrink)

The pair-bond model of human origin proposed by Lovejoy in his “Reexamining Human Origins in Light of Ardipithecus ramidus” combines fossil records with the unique sexual behavior of modern humans. This construct, however, seems to lack an emotionally important element. By connecting ovulatory crypsis with frontal copulation and face-to-face contact, the transition to the complexity and subtlety of human emotional life becomes more evident. Reproductive success and emotional representation are considered as two interacting levels in the phylogenetic scale. Thus, the (...) behavioral frame of sociobiology is extended to psychobiological phenomena and a bridge is built between natural sciences and philosophy. Light from both sides will be thrown on the origin of man, including his unique cultural history. (shrink)

Harris levels two main criticisms against our original defence of QALYs (Quality Adjusted Life Years). First, he rejects the assumption implicit in the QALY approach that not all lives are of equal value. Second, he rejects our appeal to Rawls's veil of ignorance test in support of the QALY method. In the present article we defend QALYs against Harris's criticisms. We argue that some of the conclusions Harris draws from our view that resources should be allocated on the (...) basis of potential improvements in quality of life and quantity of life are erroneous, and that others lack the moral implications Harris claims for them. On the other hand, we defend our claim that a rational egoist, behind a veil of ignorance, could consistently choose to allocate life-saving resources in accordance with the QALY method, despite Harris's claim that a rational egoist would allocate randomly if there is no better than a 50% chance of being the recipient. (shrink)

John Harsanyi and John Rawls both used the veil of ignorance thought experiment to study the problem of choosing between alternative social arrangements. With his ‘impartial observer theorem’, Harsanyi tried to show that the veil of ignorance argument leads inevitably to utilitarianism, an argument criticized by Sen, Weymark and others. A quite different use of the veil-of-ignorance concept is found in evolutionary biology. In the cell-division process called meiosis, in which sexually reproducing organisms produce (...) gametes, the chromosome number is halved; when meiosis is fair, each gene has only a fifty percent chance of making it into any gamete. This creates a Mendelian veil of ignorance, which has the effect of aligning the interests of all the genes in an organism. This paper shows how Harsanyi's version of the veil-of-ignorance argument can shed light on Mendelian genetics. There turns out to be an intriguing biological analogue of the impartial observer theorem that is immune from the Sen/Weymark objections to Harsanyi's original. View HTML Send article to KindleTo send this article to your Kindle, first ensure [email protected] is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about sending to your Kindle. Find out more about sending to your Kindle. Note you can select to send to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be sent to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply. Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.SOCIAL JUSTICE, GENOMIC JUSTICE AND THE VEIL OF IGNORANCE: HARSANYI MEETS MENDELVolume 28, Issue 1Samir Okasha DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/S0266267112000119Your Kindle email address Please provide your Kindle [email protected]@kindle.com Available formats PDF Please select a format to send. By using this service, you agree that you will only keep articles for personal use, and will not openly distribute them via Dropbox, Google Drive or other file sharing services. Please confirm that you accept the terms of use. Cancel Send ×Send article to Dropbox To send this article to your Dropbox account, please select one or more formats and confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about sending content to Dropbox. SOCIAL JUSTICE, GENOMIC JUSTICE AND THE VEIL OF IGNORANCE: HARSANYI MEETS MENDELVolume 28, Issue 1Samir Okasha DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/S0266267112000119Available formats PDF Please select a format to send. By using this service, you agree that you will only keep articles for personal use, and will not openly distribute them via Dropbox, Google Drive or other file sharing services. Please confirm that you accept the terms of use. Cancel Send ×Send article to Google Drive To send this article to your Google Drive account, please select one or more formats and confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about sending content to Google Drive. SOCIAL JUSTICE, GENOMIC JUSTICE AND THE VEIL OF IGNORANCE: HARSANYI MEETS MENDELVolume 28, Issue 1Samir Okasha DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/S0266267112000119Available formats PDF Please select a format to send. By using this service, you agree that you will only keep articles for personal use, and will not openly distribute them via Dropbox, Google Drive or other file sharing services. Please confirm that you accept the terms of use. Cancel Send ×Export citation Request permission. (shrink)

In a recently published paper entitled, “The Difference Principle Would Not Be Chosen behind the Veil of Ignorance”, Johan E. Gustafsson attempts to demonstrate that the parties in Rawls’s original position would not choose the difference principle. Gustafsson’s main strategy was to show that Rawls’s difference principle in both of its ex post and ex ante versions imply counterintuitive distributional prescriptions in a few contrived examples. The purpose of this paper is to precisely demonstrate exactly how Gustafsson’s arguments (...) have failed to show that the difference principle would not be chosen behind the veil of ignorance. (shrink)

A conceptual and mathematical model of a social community behavior in a choice situation under a veil of ignorance, where two alternative policies—Rawlsian maximin and Harsanyian utilitarianism—can be implemented through the aggregation of individual preferences over these two policies, is constructed and investigated. We first incorporate in our conceptual model psychological features such as risk-aversion and prosocial preferences that likely underlie choices of welfare policies. We secondly develop and select the mathematical model presented it by means of an (...) autonomous system of ordinary differential equations. A qualitative analysis of this system global phase-plane behavior shows possible tendencies of community development under social choices over Rawlsian or utilitarian societies depending on psychological parameters such as risk aversion and prosocial preferences. (shrink)

John Rawls posited that we could determine the nature of justice if we imagined ourselves observing conditions in society from behind a hypothetical “veil of ignorance.” Not knowing how or where we would end up—rich, poor, empowered, disabled—we would choose governing principles that did not leave one disadvantaged because of his or her circumstances. Rawls's concepts are implicitly embedded in the Affordable Care Act, which guarantees that vastly more Americans can obtain health insurance. The law effectively closed down (...) the de facto lottery that awarded coverage to most but left out millions of others. (shrink)

In “The Difference Principle Would Not Be Chosen behind the Veil of Ignorance,” Johan E. Gustafsson argues that the parties in the Original Position would not choose the Difference Principle to regulate their society’s basic structure. In reply to this internal critique, we provide two arguments. First, his choice models do not serve as a counterexample to the choice of the difference principle, as the models must assume that individual rationality scales to collective contexts in a way that (...) begs the question in favor of utilitarianism. Second, the choice models he develops are incompatible with the constraints of fairness that apply in the OP, which by design subordinates claims of rationality to claims of impartiality. When the OP is modeled correctly the difference principle is indeed entailed by the conditions of the OP. (shrink)

In principle, all patients deserve to receive optimal medical treatment equally. However, in situations in which there is scarcity of time or resources, medical treatment must be prioritized based on a triage. The conventional guidelines of medical triage mandate that treatment should be provided based solely on medical necessity regardless of any non-medical value-oriented considerations (“worst-first”). This study empirically examined the influence of value-oriented considerations on medical triage decision–making. Participants were asked to prioritize medical treatment relating to four case scenarios (...) of an emergency situation resulting from a car collision. The cases differ by situational characteristics pertaining to the at-fault driver, which were related to culpability attribution. In three case scenarios most participants gave priority to the most severely injured individual, unless the less severely injured individual was their brother. Nevertheless, in the aftermath of a vehicle-ramming terror attack most participants prioritized the less severely injured individual (“victim-first”). Our findings indicate that when caregivers are presented with concrete highly conflictual triage situations their choices may be based on value-oriented considerations related to contextual characteristics of the emergency situation. Philosophical and practical ramifications of our findings are discussed. (shrink)

RESUMENEste trabajo busca establecer cuál es el remanente idealista de la razón pública que pervive en el intento infructuoso de superar el idealismo absoluto limitando la razón que debe encargarse de construir el consenso no-excluyente por superposición. Como alternativa se propone pensar un nuevo tipo de consenso, eventual e inestable, que exija- y aquí estaría latente el otro idealismo no absoluto del de Leonberg- una comunicación constante basada en el diálogo inagotable del que nazcan normas concretas de conducta consensuadas pero (...) eventuales.PALABRAS CLAVESCONSENSUS EVENTUEL, KOMMUNIKATIVE VERNUNFT, RECEVABILITE, PUBLIC REASON.ABSTRACTThis paper want to establish the idealist remains of public reason, showing that absolute idealism can not be overcome by limiting the reason, that must build the nonexclusionary consensus by overlapping, but instead proposing like aim a new type of consensus, eventual and unstable, which would require, and here would be latent the other non-absolute idealism of Leonberg, a constant communication based on infinite dialogue that giving cause for specific rules of conduct, agreed but reviewable.KEY WORDSCONSENSUS EVENTUEL, KOMMUNIKATIVE VERNUNFT, RECEVABILITE, PUBLIC REASON. (shrink)

As the title of my article has probably made clear already, this will be an essay on the work of Emmanuel Levinas and John Rawls—and while I might not be the first person ever to compose a paper about Levinas and Rawls together, I'll probably be the second or third if not. There's no question, in any event, that a gulf of sorts separates the thought or work of these two thinkers, yet however much I believe that it would be (...) worthwhile to bridge this chasm for its own sake, that won't be my motivation in these pages; rather, my present purpose will be more "practical," for I'm going to try to bring together the thought of Rawls and Levinas in order to resolve an unsettled difficulty plaguing each of their accounts... (shrink)

There are public projects which many people welcome because they are expected to be beneficial for society at large. On the other hand, however, these projects may generate larger negative externalities for certain parts of society. One example is the erection of a nuclear power-plant, a measure that is widely considered to render a country’s energy provision less dependent on supply from outside. On the other hand, it possibly causes a feeling of insecurity among people who live in the vicinity (...) of such a power station, and can furthermore have negative economic consequences in so far as the price of land and of houses may decline in this area. How should decisions on public projects with larger negative externalities be taken? Assuming that the benefits for all those who are directly or indirectly affected by such a project are roughly the same, a cost-sharing or burden-sharing method is proposed that focuses on a weighted difference between the economic performance of a particular region and the average performance of all regions concerned. The weight is to be determined by an impartial observer. (shrink)

Margaret Cavendish’s views about the nature of bodies and perception leave her with a potentially problematic implication: that light has no role in visual perception. For her, perception occurs through the self-motion of animate matter, not through a mechanical system that appeals to local motions and collisions of contiguous bodies. This means that motion is not transferred from external objects with light playing a mediating role; the matter of our eyes simply moves itself to copy the sensible qualities of external (...) bodies. However, Cavendish cannot ignore the simple empirical fact that we appear to have visual perceptions in the presence of light but not in the presence of darkness. Light must play some role. I argue that light for Cavendish plays an intermediary role but does not transfer motions as the mechanical model suggests. Rather, light behaves like our eyes by moving itself to form copies of external objects. Our eyes then see these copies. For Cavendish, we are directly acquainted with a “veil of light” rather than the objects themselves. (shrink)

Northern researchers and service providers espousing modernist theories of development in order to understand and aid countries and peoples of the South ignore their own non-universal starting points of knowledge and their own vested interests. Universal ethics are rejected in favor of situated ethics, while a modified empowerment development model for aiding women in the South based on poststructuralism requires building a bridge identity politics to promote participatory democracy and challenge Northern power knowledges.

It is argued that, contrary to popular pragmatist opinion, the source of epistemic normativity does not lie in the realm of practical rationality. Epistemic norms are indeed hypothetical, as the pragmatist anticipates, but he has misjudged how much their antecedent can do for him. I first consider the most general argument available to the pragmatist. I then focus on the way John Heil and Hilary Kornblith have refmed it. Kornblith’s position poses the most plausible challenge to the defender of the (...) autonomy of epistemic norms. Even at its best, however, the pragmatist argument flounders. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Veils: The Poetics of John Rawls*George Armstrong KellyPlutarch recounts in Sais, a holy place of Egypt, the image of Isis, understood by the Greeks to be a version of Pallas Athena, bore the inscription: “I am everything that has been, that is, and that shall ever be: no human mortal has discovered me behind my veil.” 1 This recalls a very different god, Yahweh, whose claim is also (...) to compress all knowledge into an eternal present and whose dwelling, in Solomon’s temple, is in a special sanctuary, the Holy of Holies, also guarded by a veil.There, one might say, the similarity ends. Yahweh is a masculine diety (“the father of his people”), though imagistically he remains a space or an absence filled by a name (“I Am That I Am”) indicative of the transcendent distance of the eternal. Isis is a female shape imaging carnal knowledge behind her veil (with its Machiavellian, Baconian temptations). Her truth, as Plutarch makes clear, is driven by desire, truth being a “desire for divinity,” “a study... and work more holy than the vow and obligation of chastity or the guarding and sealing of any....” 2 The almost certain wages, however, for the would-be ravisher is unfulfillment and death, whereas Yahweh, having become the God of the Christians, promises eternal life through the sacrifice of his only-begotten son and a truth above knowledge “that shall make you free” (John 8:32). [End Page 343]To the Semitic mind the name expressed and represented the power of the person: God was present in a special way wherever the “Name of Yahweh” was. 3 The content of the Holy of Holies, originally portable in the ancient Ark of the Covenant, was the two stone tablets of the Law received by Moses at Horeb (1 Kings 8:9). God’s presence, once installed in the Temple of Jerusalem, was represented as “a cloud [that] filled the house of the Lord” (ibid, 8:10; cf. 2 Chronicles 5:10, 13). God was cloud; knowledge was duty. Of the physical place of this indwelling principle of knowledge, Jesus said (John 2:19): “Destroy this sanctuary: within three days I shall raise it up again.” The evangelist explains that his metaphor is transferred to the new Christian idea of the word made flesh. 4 John’s gospel does not cite the rendering of the veil of the temple, but the synoptic gospels all recount that it was “rent in twain from top to bottom” (Matthew 27:51, Mark 16:38, Luke 23:45) at Christ’s Crucifixion. The idea is essentially that knowledge as command and duty has been surpassed by a knowledge that is love in the crucified revelation of the Son of God. This returns us, ambiguously, to the image of the goddess Isis; for even in Hebrew scripture it is foretold: “The watchmen that went about the city found me, they smote me, they wounded me; the keepers of the walls took away my veil from me” (Song of Solomon 5:7). If there is here a clear prefiguration of the fate of both Christ and the temple, there is also an echo of the likely fate of the harlot Rahab, who let Joshua’s spies into Jericho, had God not saved her from the ruin of that city (Joshua 6:17).The purpose of this essay is not to dwell on obvious imagistic and psychological attachments between wisdom and sexual knowledge, but early notice of this liaison is needed to connect the philosophical discourse on veils with motifs disclosed in figurative literature. For the veil that hides the object of desire may also hide the reality of the name or of naming; preserving the veil may be a mode of love, just as challenging it is also. For example, when John Rawls writes: “The principles of justice are chosen behind a veil of ignorance. This ensures that no one is advantaged or disadvantaged in the choice of principles by the outcome of natural chance or the contingency of social circumstances,” 5 what does his image of the veil intend to convey? What exactly is on each side of this veil? From... (shrink)