This white paper resulted from a risk dialogue project with climate scientists and experts on the subject of climate engineering – conducted by the neutral and independent Risk-Dialogue Foundation St. Gallen between April 2016 and March 2017. The aim was to identify the current state of research on the topic as well as related risk and to evaluate a potential need for wider public deliberation. The project was carried out on behalf of the Swiss Federal Office for the Environment, Climate (...) Division. In line with views expressed during the dialogue, the sole objective of this paper is to argue for an open and public deliberation process and not to favour or promote any technologies or deployment thereof. The views expressed in this report are solely those of its authors, and do not reflect any official positions. (shrink)

Schoene-Seifert's and Stier's thought-provoking target article (2013) addresses so many complex issues that it seems impossible to provide a comprehensive commentary in this space. Therefore, we co...

This special issue is motivated by the observation that conservatism plays a marginal role in contemporary philosophy even though it appears to be of considerable importance in moral, social, and political reality. One reason for this neglect is that defenders of conservatism have often refrained from articulating their arguments in a language that is acceptable to and understandable by analytically -trained philosophers. The contributions of this special issue show that conservatism can profitably be approached from the point of view of (...) analytic philosophy. Many of them are indebted to Jerry Cohen’s (2012) seminal paper on conservative value, which develops a sophisticated justification of what Oakeshott (1991) called the disposition to be conservative. (shrink)

There seem to be good reasons that democratic institutions must be reformed in order to minimize the danger of unsustainable policy decisions infringing upon duties of intergenerational justice. This is why there exist a number of different proposals of how to reform democratic states in order to foster their duties towards the future. However, the debate lacks a systematic assessment of these suggested reforms within a coherent theoretical and norma-tive framework. This paper aims at developing such a framework. We suggest (...) two conceptual dimensions defining the spectrum of different justi-fiable institutional reforms: the relation between democracy and justice as one dimension and the conditions considered relevant for viewing democracies as responsible collective agents as the other. Depending on how we understand this relation and these conditions, it is possible to substantiate a set of types of institutional reforms that will promote democracies’ capacities to comply with their responsibilities towards the future. (shrink)

The Paris Climate Agreement is an important step for international climate policy, but the compensation for negative effects of climate change based on clear assignment of responsibilities remains highly debated. From both a policy and a science perspective, it is unclear how responsibilities should be defined and on what evidence base. We explore different normative principles of justice relevant to climate change impacts, and ask how different forms of causal evidence of impacts drawn from detection and attribution research could inform (...) policy approaches in accordance with justice considerations. We reveal a procedural injustice based on the imbalance of observations and knowledge of impacts between developed and developing countries. This type of injustice needs to be considered in policy negotiations and decisions, and efforts strengthened to reduce it. (shrink)

The principle of nemo iudex in causa sua is central to John Locke’s social contract theory: the state is justified largely due to the human need for an impartial system of criminal justice. In contemporary Anglo-American legal practice, the value of impartiality in criminal justice is accepted uncritically. At the same time, advocates of restorative justice frequently make reference to a crime victim’s right to have his or her voice heard in the criminal justice process without regard for impartiality as (...) potentially being morally valuable. In this article, I challenge the central place of impartiality in criminal justice on the grounds that it leads to a setup ill-suited to moral psychology. Though restorative justice advocates are not principled in their implicit rejection of impartiality and the nemo iudex principle, their preferred method of criminal justice conduces to crime victims’ being good judges in their own case. (shrink)

Claims about coercion play a significant role in some of the most important questions in political philosophy: most ordinary citizens as well as philosophers think that the exercise of power by the state and other political institutions is coercive, and as such requires special justification. Political philosophy, it has been assumed, must assess both the truth of that claim and its relevance for whether or not states, in general, can be justified. Whether the state is always or necessarily coercive is (...) a central question in the philosophy of law. Under what conditions a state exercising coercive power can be justified is the question that informs all major works in the social contract tradition since Thomas Hobbes's Leviathan. (shrink)

Matthew Clayton claims that ‘comprehensive enrolment’ – raising one’s children in accordance with one’s own conception of the good – is illegitimate. In his argument against comprehensive enrolment, Clayton refers to Rawls’s idea of public reason. In a recent response to Clayton, Christina Cameron not only rejects Clayton’s conclusions, but also denies that the idea of public reason can be applied to the parent–child relationship. This article responds to both Clayton and Cameron: It is stated, first, that political arrangements concerning (...) children’s upbringing must be acceptable in the light of public reason. Second, it is claimed that comprehensive enrolment can nevertheless be considered as legitimate. (shrink)

The concept of human dignity has remained surprisingly absent from philosophical discussions about the ethics of childhood so far. Likewise, children as a group are mostly neglected in the ongoing discourse on human dignity. In this paper, we attempt to close this double gap by showing that there is, first, a meaningful way to speak of children’s dignity, and that, second, considering children as a group can be illuminating for dignity theorists in general. After an analysis of the reasons why (...) the debates on human dignity and the ethics of childhood have been conducted almost entirely separately, we develop a concept of respecting children as respecting their dignity. Drawing upon personhood accounts of human dignity, we suggest that respecting a child’s dignity means respecting her activity, which means essentially developing and maintaining a perspective of one’s own. Construed in that way, respecting children’s dignity is in some important respects different from concerns about their well-being and their autonomy. In the last section, we will take a step back from the debate about the ethics of childhood and point to some possible conclusions for the debate about human dignity in general. (shrink)

Is it necessary to have an ideal of perfection in mind to identify and evaluate true biotechnological human “enhancements”, or can one do without? To answer this question we suggest employing the distinction between ideal and non-ideal theory, found in the debate in political philosophy about theories of justice: the distinctive views about whether one needs an idea of a perfectly just society or not when it comes to assessing the current situation and recommending steps to increase justice. In this (...) paper we argue that evaluating human enhancements from a non-ideal perspective has some serious shortcomings, which can be avoided when endorsing an ideal approach. Our argument starts from a definition of human enhancement as improvement, which can be understood in two ways. The first approach is backward-looking and assesses improvements with regard to a status quo ante. The second, a forward-looking approach, evaluates improvements with regard to their proximity to a goal or according to an ideal. After outlining the limitations of an exclusively backward-looking view, we answer possible objections against a forward-looking view. Ultimately, we argue that the human enhancement debate would lack some important moral insights if a forward-looking view of improvement is not taken into consideration. (shrink)

Attitudes toward repository projects cannot be explained merely on the basis of perceived risks, trust, or technical information. Issues of justice and fairness frequently arise when burdens and benefits are to be allocated. A fair distribution across the various parts of a given territory of the waste to be stored is unlikely to be accomplished as it is contingent on appropriate geological formations and other factors. The process by which the specific distribution is determined and accomplished needs to be taken (...) into account as well. Thus, justice evaluations of both the distributive outcome and the process itself, by which the outcome is accomplished, are likely to affect people’s attitudes toward and acceptance of siting decisions. Data from a number of methodically different studies conducted over the last eight years on site selection in Switzerland suggest that a fair procedure is more essential than a fair distribution to a consensus about the decisions made. As a consequence, even normative assessments of the fairness of a distribution of nuclear waste must consider procedural justice as a valuable indicator, independently of the particular shape of the distribution. However, contextual factors, such as the wider nuclear energy strategy of a country, may compete with procedural fairness in terms of importance. Even though fairness is a requirement it does not guarantee acceptance. It may, however, enhance acceptability from a moral standpoint. (shrink)

As our experience with this special issue shows, climate change is such a multi-faceted problem that interdisciplinary research is a necessity. This is much more easily said than done. In the course of the publication of this special issue there were many lessons to be learned. First of all we saw how the exchange between our authors allowed them to expand the focus of their respective disciplines. Philosophers considered literature from various fields they would not have touched upon in their (...) usual course of inquiry. Scientists and legal scholars became more sensitive to the normative dimensions and justice-related intricacies involved in their research. This enabled all contributors to open up to different vocabularies and standards of research. At the same time, however, several obstacles to the success of this issue emerged as well. For such an endeavor it is necessary to find researchers who are ready to engage with other disciplines and to take up ideas and comments which at first sight might not seem relevant and out of place from their disciplinary perspective. Due to the special format another challenge was to communicate the interdisciplinary character of this special issue to the reviewers and to put the reviews in context accordingly without risking to diminish the disciplinary quality of contributions. For the guest editors this came with a further challenge. We not only had to become familiar with different disciplinary vocabularies and standards of research but also had to judge the quality and relevance of contributions in the light of our overall aim as well as disciplinary standards of quality. (shrink)

In this paper I argue for the following conclusions. First, quotas are not normative goals in themselves but only a means to reach non-discriminatory selection procedures. Second, in a democracy quotas are most plausibly used as a means to fill offices in those bodies which have a major impact on how well interests or discourses are translated into policy. Third, quotas for the young can be justified since, due to demographic development, their discourses tend to be marginalized. Fourth, youth quotas (...) cannot be a means to ensure long-term policy-making, but they can enhance legitimacy of long-term impacts from policy decisions taken today. (shrink)

In the Cancun Adaptation Framework, the parties to the United Framework Convention on Climate Change agreed “that adaptation is a challenge faced by all Parties, and that enhanced action and international cooperation is urgently required to enable and support the implementation of adaptation actions aimed at reducing vulnerability and building resilience in developing country Parties […].” Furthermore, the conference of the parties requests the developed countries to provide developing countries with additional finance, technology, and capacity-building. This paper argues that this (...) decision tends to oversimplify matters because it seems to differentiate responsibilities for climate change adaptation according to differences in the contribution to anthropogenic climate change only. However, the differentiation of responsibilities for climate change adaptation is more complex than it first appears to be. To show why the differentiation of responsibilities for climate change adaptation is more complex, this paper analyzes the aspects of responsibility as a fourfold concept. Someone is always responsible for something, answerable to some institution, and held accountable to a norm. The paper argues, first, that the appropriate object of responsibility in climate change adaptation is the burdens to be shared for effective and efficient adaptation. Second, for such adaptation to occur, however, subjects of responsibility should not only be developed countries. If appropriate competence and decision-structures are given in developing countries, these countries should also be deemed responsible for their own adaptation. Third, the paper shows that those vulnerable to the adverse effects of climate change should decide on their own what adaptation measures they wish to take. Fourth, the argument of this paper suggests that ability-to-pay principles are the most appropriate norms by which to blame countries for failing their responsibilities in climate change adaptation. (shrink)

This paper suggests a way to elaborate the ethical implications of the Warsaw International Mechanism (WIM) as decided at COP 19 from the perspective of justice. It advocates three pro-posals. First, in order to fully understand the responsibilities and liabilities implied in the WIM, adaptation needs to be distinguished from loss and damage (L&D) on the basis of the different goals which should be attributed to adaptation and to L&D approaches. Second, the primary concern of the WIM should be compensatory (...) justice. In case of climate L&D, three aspects of compensatory justice should be kept separate: corrective liability, remedial responsibility, and with regard to the resources available, fair remedy. Third, it is crucial to distinguish between recov-erable damage and irrecoverable or at least not fully recoverable loss. This distinction is crucial because it informs the principles of fair remedy and because damage and loss may differ in their relevance for the stability and functioning of a human system. (shrink)

This volume includes essays presented at the conference on Emotions and Rationality in Moral Philosophy held at the Universities of Neuchâtel and Bern in October 2005. The authors of this volume share the Humean insight that the ‘sentiments’ have a crucial role to play in elucidating the practice of morality. In a Humean fashion, they warn us against taking an intellectualist view of emotions and reject the rationalist account of morality.

‘Emotions are Janus-faced,’ writes de Sousa. ‘This suggests that we might speak of a truth, or perhaps two kinds of truth of emotions, one of which is about the self, and the other about conditions in the world’. Emotions, it is claimed, disclose facts about how the world is and about who we are. The articles in this volume all focus on one, the other, or both of these aspects of emotions – How do they contribute to provide reasons for (...) judgements and actions? How do these judgements and actions, individual or collective, serve as occasions for interrogation and evaluation of the self or of morality? (shrink)

This chapter serves as an introduction to the collected volume. In the first section, we aim to provide background on important themes in social egalitarianism and to set the context for understanding which significant questions the chapters in this book pose and attempt to answer. In this section we focus especially on what could be said to characterize socially egalitarian relationships, on which relationships are of concern, and on what might make social egalitarianism distinct. In the second section, we provide (...) a brief explanation of the structure of the book and each of its chapters. (shrink)

In this comment a challenge Kerr’s claim that a coherent expression of a ‘liberalism of freedom’ needs an extended first Rawlsian principle of justice incorporating the principle of fair equality of opportunity for two reasons. First, such an extended first principle leads to illiberal consequences by narrowing down the scope of individual responsibility for choice and effort way too much. Second, such an extended first principle misses a main Rawlsian insight, namely that in a theory of justice the principle securing (...) basic liberties and the principle of fair equality of opportunity serve different purposes. (shrink)

In this paper, I argue that the normative framework of liberal democracy is one of the sources of the failure of international climate politics. The liberal framework makes it very likely that at least some democracies will not consent to an international agreement to mitigate greenhouse gas emissions. In this situation, the institution of judicial review might be viewed as crucial to overcome the risk of a tragedy of the commons. However, judicial review cannot serve this purpose in the case (...) of climate change and an institutional change of the kind required cannot be derived from within the normative framework of liberal democracy itself. (shrink)

Immigration is omnipresent in current political, legal and, more broadly, societal debates. In industrialised Europe, the multiple challenges linked to immigration are objects of passionate struggles. The stakes are high in adequately addressing the demands by would-be migrants to access the territory, the labour market, the welfare provisions or the political membership of a given political community. The result of a doctoral thesis, the present book tackles the legal and philosophical challenges linked to family reunification and economic immigration to the (...) European Union. It provides a detailed analysis of the legal regime created by the Lisbon treaty on the common European immigration policy and thoroughly challenges its foundations by highlighting the moral tensions it entails, not least with respect to the values and principles upon which the EU is built. The original contribution of this book is three-fold : a new methodological approach linking legal analysis and political philosophy, a focus on the European immigration regime and the resources the EU has to offer in facing immigration challenges and an outline of republican ethics related to immigration. Overall, the present work aims to provide insights on how the EU immigration regime could be reformed to be more consistent with the EU's founding values and principles. It is of primary relevance to legal and philosophical scholars working on issues of immigration, the political theory of the EU and republicanism. Most importantly, it also provides political decision-makers with clearly argued reform proposals. (shrink)

In recent years, economic life has become increasingly politicized: now, every company has a ‘philosophy’, promising its customers some ethical surplus in return for buying their products; consumers shop for change; workers engage in individualized forms of employee activism such as whistleblowing; and governments contribute to the re-configuration of the economic sphere as a site of political contestation by reminding corporate and private economic actors of their duty to ‘do their bit’. The Politics of Economic Life addresses this trend by (...) exploring the ways in which practices of consumption, work, production, and entrepreneurship are imbued with political strategy and ideology, and assesses the potentials and perils of the politicization of economic activity for democracy in the 21st century. (shrink)

Over the last decade European democracies have conducted numerous trials with a wide range of ICT enabled forms of novel political experimentation. These initiatives have been conducted across various levels of political authority, from the local right through to the supranational. At the same time, there has been considerable variance in terms of the distinct e-techniques that have been the subject of political experimentation. In this sense, Europe's diverse political landscape offers us a rare political laboratory for examining the potential (...) impact of varying institutional structures and political cultures on distinct forms of so-called e-democratic experimentation. This is especially the case with regard to a number of recent evoting trials. This paper argues that a focus on small-scale forms of political experimentation, such as e-voting, can overcome certain methodological difficulties related to undertaking cross-national comparative analyses of larger-scale edemocratic experimentation. Given the sheer variability in the types of recent edemocratic experimentation, their focus, target groups, the technologies used and the role of distinct public actors, it is argued that by adopting the former approach, that is by focusing on smaller scale trials, we are more likely to ensure that comparable phenomena are actually being compared. To the extent that this is achieved, and our analyses our more structured and focused across cases, we are also more likely to derive valid inferences as to the particular mechanisms or factors at play in a given form of ICT enabled political experimentation. (shrink)

This article draws on federal theory to analyze the dynamics of crafting a privacy regime in the European Union and the United States. Three dimensions of the policy domain are analyzed: how policy was framed, the policy dynamics activated, and the policy instruments used. The main finding is that despite obvious differences in the choice of specific policy instruments, a strikingly similar regulatory dynamic and framing of policy can be detected. Two conclusions are drawn: first, federal theory can reveal novel (...) insights on the politics of regulating privacy, especially in relation to new technologies and counter terrorism measures. Second, applying a comparative research design to EU policy-making can help explain many of its apparent empirical puzzles. (shrink)

This paper addresses the issue of potential bias in VAA generated data. Specifically, we report the findings from a study whereby a VAA questionnaire was administered through two different modes. One group consisted of participants who filled an online version of the VAA while the other consisted of participants elicited through a traditional survey. We find that there is differential respondent behaviour among the two groups suggesting that VAA-generated data is not fully comparable to traditional survey data - though this (...) does not mean VAA data is better or worse but rather that both modes of administration are subject to different forms of methodological bias. (shrink)

Voting advice applications (VAA) are very recently developed in order to aid users in deciding what to vote in elections. Every user is presented with a set of important issues and she is asked to submit her opinion by selecting one of a predefined set of answers (e.g. agree/disagree). The VAA gathers the same information for all candidates that are about to compete in the elections. Hence, it can provide recommendation to users: the candidates that agree with the user on (...) these selected issues. In this paper, we propose a collaborating filtering approach for providing such suggestions. Like-minded users are clustered together based on their profiles (views on the selected issues) and voting recommendation is provided to a user by the members of the nearest (to her profile) cluster. We observe that this method produces more effective recommendations by utilizing two different measures: accuracy and weighted mean rank. Furthermore, the proposed method provides with important insight and summarization information about the electorate's opinion. This research is based on new data gathered by the voting advice application Choose4Greece which was widely used for the most recent elections in Greece. (shrink)

In recent decades Europe?s political landscape has been marked by a notable rise in the use of mechanisms of direct democracy such as the referendum and the citizens? initiative. Our focus in this article is on the national referendums that are directly connected to the European Union integration process. These types of referendums are increasingly recognised by the scholarly community as the source of institutional instability across the wider EU polity. To explain the nature of this empirical puzzle is this (...) article?s main objective. However, instead of pursuing intra-EU comparisons, as does much of the literature, we adopt a comparative perspective on the EU that involves the explicit comparison with other polities. In doing so, we bring to the fore a neglected dimension in the study of EU referendum politics: the operation of federal political institutions. We contend that cross-polity comparison of EU forms of direct democracy with other polities reveal insights that suggest a number of institutional models to overcome the sources of the present instability. (shrink)

This article introduces Voting Advice Applications (VAAs) as a data-generating tool that can be used to measure the positions of party supporters in multidimensional policy space. It begins with an overview of the state of the art as regards methods for locating parties on a common policy space, in terms of how data are gathered and also in terms of how policy dimensions are identified and measured. We then use a dimension reduction technique to identify latent policy dimensions from a (...) dataset obtained from a VAA carried out in Scotland in 2011. These dimensions are used to map the policy positions of supporters of five Scottish political parties. We argue that this tool allows more leverage on understanding the relative locations of parties ‘in the electorate’ in multidimensional policy space. (shrink)

For many observers neither EU-democracy nor e-democracy exist in any meaningful sense. With regard to the latter this is certainly the case, though this does not mean that we are not witnessing innovative experimentation with information and communication technologies (ICT) in the democratic realm. This chapter focuses on the prospects for e-democratic experimentation in the EU political setting. Drawing on normative democratic theory we look at four dimensions of e-democratic innovation: ICT techniques aimed at improving mechanisms of (1) representation, (2) (...) participation and (3) deliberation and (4) opening new channels of contestation. The aim of the chapter is to survey some recent e-democratic innovations within the framework of these four broader normative visions and, in doing so, investigate the potential impact of ICT driven innovation on EU democratisation. (shrink)

This chapter focuses on the pilot-project of introducing e-voting in the Canton of Geneva, Switzerland. The case study provides for some illuminating insights that may be applicable to other political contexts. It addresses the wider policy context, the legal framework and the most salient technical issues, as well as some of the major socio-political issues that have been raised during this key implementation phase.

Taking the example of France between the Enlightenment and the Second World War and focusing especially on the connection between social theories and political projects, this book provides an original analysis of French scholarly debates on the nature of society.