Few people seem to be disturbed by the view that the idea of human rights is ‘a product of the culture of the West.’ Truisms, however, often hide problems and this one is no exception. One of the main problemsone that is seldom recognized is this: How can we even begin to understand a supposed relation between a culture and a doctrine?

The recent debate over the nature of rights has been dominated by two rival theories of rights. Proponents of the Will Theory of rights hold that individual freedom, autonomy, control, or sovereignty are somehow to be fundamental to the concept of a right, while proponents of the Interest Theory argue that rights rather protect people's welfare. Participants in this debate commonly assume the existence of a single ‘concept’ of which both theories provide competing descriptions. The aim of this article is (...) to show that both accounts are better understood as providing characterizations of different ‘kinds’ of rights. (shrink)

Non-consequentialist libertarianism usually revolves around the claim that there are only “negative,” not “positive,” rights. Libertarian nega- tive-rights theories are so patently problematic, though, that it seems that there is a more fundamental notion at work. Some libertarians think this basic idea is freedom or liberty; others, that it is self-ownership. Neither approach is satis- factory.

Until recently, few people would have doubted that the idea of distributive justice is old, indeed ancient. Several authors have now challenged this assumption. Most prominently, Samuel Fleischacker argued that distributive justice originates in the eighteenth century. If accurate, this would upset much of what we have taken for granted about an important part of the history of Western political thought. However, the thesis is manifestly flawed; and since it has already proven influential, it is important to set the record (...) straight. We will focus on the principle of extreme necessity, developed in twelfth- and thirteenth-century canon law, and subsequently adopted in civil law. Despite its immense importance for the history of political thought, the principle is barely known, and much less discussed. We briefly characterize the main tenets of the principle and show that it meets all the criteria to count as a principle of distributive justice. (shrink)

G. E. Morton’s attempt to defend libertarianism against my claim that it relies on an implausible secularization of ideas of divine sovereignty fails. It is not true that morality itself entails human sovereignty, as witnessed by the moral theories of theological voluntarists and of consequentialists. Nor is it true that sovereignty can be conceptually transferred from God to equal human individuals, since they would have no legitimate way to legislate over each other short of a unanimous “general will.” Nor, finally, (...) does the idea of first possession rescue libertarian philosophy, since it is as applicable to animals and children as to adult human beings. (shrink)

The debate between the 'Will Theory' and the 'Interest Theory' of rights is actually a debate over stipulative definitions. I argue how this could have happened, and suggest how we might proceed building a theory of rights.

ABSTRACT G. E. Morton tries to defend libertarianism against my claim that it relies on an implausible secularization of ideas of divine sovereignty. But it is not true, as he claims, that morality itself entails human sovereignty: witness the moral theories of divine‐command theorists and philosophical consequentialists. Nor is it true that sovereignty can be conceptually transferred from God to equal human individuals, since they would have no legitimate way to legislate over each other, short of a unanimous “general will.” (...) Nor, finally, does the idea of first possession rescue private property rights, since it is as applicable to animals and children as to adult human beings. (shrink)

Nicholas Vrousalis has aimed to recast an old objection to the will theory of rights by focusing on Hillel Steiner’s version of that theory. He has argued that Will Theory must either be insensitive to the (values of the) lives of the unempowerable, or be incomplete, because it has no argumentative resources within its conceptual apparatus to ascribe or justify restrictions on the amount of discretion exercised by legal officials. I show that both charges are problematic. They rely on some (...) of Steiner’s inferences which are simply unjustified because they are based on misinterpretations of the logic of Hohfeld’s terminology. The problem for Vrousalis is that his critique takes for granted some of these flawed arguments. The critique is also misdirected to the extent that it assumes that the problems with Steiner’s theory affect Will Theory in general. (shrink)

Contemporary scholars writing on sovereignty can be roughly divided between those who believe that we should get rid of the concept (because it is inherently confusing, or essentially contested) and those who grant many of the criticisms of the first group, but add that we nevertheless cannot do without the concept, since much of our thinking about politics in general, and the state in particular, seems to be structured by this notion. I hope to demonstrate that much of the confusion (...) surrounding the notion is due precisely to fact that sovereignty is an inherently religious concept. (shrink)

Arguing for the existence of a non-trivial link between culture and human rights does not commit the author to relativism or a simplistic notion of culture.

: Many people have lamented the proliferation of human rights claims. The cure for this problem, it may be thought, would be to develop a theory that can distinguish ‘real’ from ‘supposed’ human rights. I argue, however, that the proliferation of human rights mirrors a deep problem in human rights theory itself. Contemporary theories of natural rights to welfare are historical descendants from a theory of rights to subsistence which was developed in twelfth-century Europe. According to this theory, each human (...) being has a special role to fulfil in God's plan and therefore has inalienable rights to subsist. Later theories have secularized this idea by claiming that human beings are purposive agents. Secularization, however, comes at a price. In the case of these theories, the price is a failure to provide satisfactory answers to the most basic questions we would expect of a theory of natural rights to answer. They have failed to provide a basis for ascribing these rights to all and only to human beings. They have not been able to generate a clear and viable criterion for ascribing duties correlative to these rights. And they cannot limit rights-claims in a non-arbitrary way. Hence we should abandon these theories. (shrink)

In the first part of the paper, van Duffel argues, persuasively, why rights cannot be based (as some libertarians have tried to base them) on the notion of freedom. These arguments are not original; Friedman2 and Cohen3, among others, have articulated them at length. The obvious problem is that rights, while they enhance the freedom of their holders, restrict the freedom of others. Thus, if I own an automobile, then my freedom is arguably increased by the unrestricted use my (...) property right in that automobile confers, and anyone who deprived me of it would eliminate that freedom. But it is just as obvious that if I have exclusive use of that automobile, and the exclusive power to grant or withhold permission for others to use it, then others are not free to use it. Their freedom is is thus restricted at the same time, and by the same concept, that enhances mine. (shrink)

TO assert that one should come to terms with the past if one wants to understand the present would be to underline the obvious. And yet, even though we know much more of the history of natural rights theories now, especially of the origin of these theories before the seventeenth century, than we did, say, twenty years ago, this increase in knowledge seems to have had little impact on contemporary philosophical discussions about the nature of rights. Sometimes it seems that (...) philosophers, especially the more analytically minded ones, regard the history of ideas as a separate subject with little or no relevance to their research. One of the reasons might be a tendency to regard conceptual analysis of rights as being relatively impartial between different theories in which these concepts might function. Even those who would allow for a close connection between a certain conception of the nature of rights and a theory of rights would find it prudent to distinguish more or less sharply between the question of what it means to have a right on the one hand, and the question which rights we have on the other hand. I would like to suggest that concepts of rights are the concepts of a theory and that we need to understand the theories from which they have emerged in order to fully understand contemporary rights language. One way of making this claim plausible would be to focus on an issue that has become central to contemporary debates about rights, that is, the conception of the rights-holder as a sovereign individual. I believe that our notion of individual sovereignty wavers between two quite different conceptions of sovereignty. The difference between the two will become obvious if we consider the relation between moral rights and more general moral obligations that people might have. I will then draw attention to a recent account of the history of natural rights theories. The point of doing so is this: if the account is true, then we have to acknowledge that ‘our’ ideas of natural rights (and especially of the sovereignty that people are supposed to possess according to these theories) have.... (shrink)

In “Libertarian Natural Rights,” Siegfried Van Duffel endeavors to illuminate shortcomings in libertarian defenses of natural‐rights theory. Noting that defenses based on freedom beg the question, Van Duffel explores whether libertarians can find salvation in the concept of the sovereignty of the will, and concludes that this approach leads to incoherence. But because his arguments ignore the actual moral basis of natural rights, they at best fell a straw man, not libertarianism. They do, however, call into question (...) the viability of the entire moral enterprise. (shrink)

Widowhood is common in old age, can be accompanied by serious health consequences and is often linked to substantial changes in social network. Little is known about the impact of social isolation on the development of depressive symptoms over time taking widowhood into account. We provide results from the follow-up 5 to follow-up 9 from the longitudinal study AgeCoDe and its follow-up study AgeQualiDe. Depression was measured with GDS-15 and social isolation was assessed using the Lubben Social Network Scale (LSNS-6). (...) The group was aligned of married and widowed people in old age and education through entropy balancing. Linear mixed models were used to examine the frequency of occurrence of depressive symptoms for widowed and married elderly people depending on the risk of social isolation. Our study shows that widowhood alone does not lead to an increased occurrence of depressive symptoms. However, "widowed oldest old", who are also at risk of social isolation, have significantly more depressive symptoms than those without risk. In the group of "married oldest old", women have significantly more depressive symptoms than men, but isolated and non-isolated do not differ. Especially for people who have lost a spouse, the social network changes significantly and increases the risk for social isolation. This represents a risk factor for the occurrence of depressive symptoms. (shrink)

Particularly in the latter half of the nineteenth century sensorial experiences changed at breakneck speed. Social and technological developments of modernity like the industrial revolution, rapid urban expansion, the advance of capitalism and the invention of new technologies transformed the field of the senses. Instead of attentiveness, distraction became prevalent. It is not only Baudelaire who addressed these transformations in his poems, but they can also be recognized in the works of novelist Gustave Flaubert and painter Edward Munch. By means (...) of the work of William James, Walter Benjamin, Siegfried Kracauer and Georg Simmel, the repercussions of this crisis of the senses for subjectivity will be discussed. (shrink)

The framework of elementary probabilistic operations (EPO) explains the structure of elementary probabilistic reasoning tasks as well as people’s performance on these tasks. The framework comprises three components: (a) Three types of probabilities: joint, marginal, and conditional probabilities; (b) three elementary probabilistic operations: combination, marginalization, and conditioning, and (c) quantitative inference schemas implementing the EPO. The formal part of the EPO framework is a computational level theory that provides a problem space representation and a classification of elementary probabilistic problems based (...) on computational requirements for solving a problem. According to the EPO framework, current methods for improving probabilistic reasoning are of two kinds: First, reduction of Bayesian problems to a type of probabilistic problems requiring less conceptual and procedural competencies. Second, enhancing people’s utilization competence by fostering the application of quantitative inference schemas. The approach suggests new applications, including the teaching of probabilistic reasoning, using analogical problem solving in probabilistic reasoning, and new methods for analyzing errors in probabilistic problem solving. (shrink)

Humean Supervenience is a metaphysical model of the world according to which all truths hold in virtue of nothing but the total spatiotemporal distribution of perfectly natural, intrinsic properties. David Lewis and others have worked out many aspects of HS in great detail. A larger motivational question, however, remains unanswered: As Lewis admits, there is strong evidence from fundamental physics that HS is false. What then is the purpose of defending HS? In this paper, we argue that the philosophical merit (...) of HS is largely independent of whether it correctly represents the world’s fundamental structure. In particular, we show that insofar as HS is an apt model of the world’s higher-level structure, it thereby provides a powerful argument for reductive physicalism and explains otherwise opaque inferential relations. Recent criticism of HS on the grounds that it misrepresents fundamental physical reality is, therefore, beside the point. (shrink)

Metaphysicians speak of laws of nature in terms of necessity and universality; scientists, in terms of symmetry and invariance. In this book van Fraassen argues that no metaphysical account of laws can succeed. He analyzes and rejects the arguments that there are laws of nature, or that we must believe there are, and argues that we should disregard the idea of law as an adequate clue to science. After exploring what this means for general epistemology, the author develops the empiricist (...) view of science as a construction of models to represent the phenomena. (shrink)

Dispositional essentialism is a non-Humean view about the essences of certain fundamental or natural properties that looms large in recent metaphysics , not least because it promises to explain neatly the natural modalities such as laws of nature, counterfactuals, causation and chance. In the current paper, however, several considerations are presented that indicate a serious tension between its essentialist core thesis and natural “metaphysical” interpretations of its central explanatory claims.

What is empiricism and what could it be? Bas . van Fraassen, one of the world’s foremost contributors to philosophical logic and the philosophy of science, here undertakes a fresh consideration of these questions and offers a program for renewal of the empiricist tradition. The empiricist tradition is not and could not be defined by common doctrines, but embodies a certain stance in philosophy, van Fraassen says. This stance is displayed first of all in a searing, recurrent critique of metaphysics, (...) and secondly in a focus on experience that requires a voluntarist view of belief and opinion. Van Fraassen focuses on the philosophical problems of scientific and conceptual revolutions and on the not unrelated ruptures between religious and secular ways of seeing or conceiving of ourselves. He explores what it is to be or not be secular and points the way toward a new relationship between secularism and science within philosophy. (shrink)

What is empiricism and what could it be? Bas C. van Fraassen, one of the world’s foremost contributors to philosophical logic and the philosophy of science, here undertakes a fresh consideration of these questions and offers a program for renewal of the empiricist tradition. The empiricist tradition is not and could not be defined by common doctrines, but embodies a certain stance in philosophy, van Fraassen says. This stance is displayed first of all in a searing, recurrent critique of metaphysics, (...) and second in a focus on experience that requires a voluntarist view of belief and opinion._ _Van Fraassen focuses on the philosophical problems of scientific and conceptual revolutions and on the not unrelated ruptures between religious and secular ways of seeing or conceiving of ourselves. He explores what it is to be or not be secular and points the way toward a new relationship between secularism and science within philosophy. (shrink)

Philosophie als -sterben wollen- (Platon) bestimmt die Tradition bis hin zur -Geworfenheit zum Tode- (Heidegger). Die Welt fuhrt sich mit diesem Menschenbild entsprechend auf. Sich absolut setzende Wahrheiten blenden die Wahrnehmung aus, dass wir in einer falschen Welt mit falschem Bewusstsein leben. Der Poet Schiller mokiert sich in seinem Gedicht "Die Taten der Philosophen" (1795) hierzu. In der Schlusszeile spricht er die Krafte an, die aus dem Leben alle Wesen und in besonderer Weise den Menschen bestimmen: HUNGER und LIEBE. Vorliegende (...) Arbeit ist der Versuch einer Theorie des poetischen Menschen aus diesen Urkraften des Lebens. Es ist der Versuch der Wiedervereinigung von KUNST und Mensch und Absage an alle Wahrheits-Ideologien. Der poetische Mensch kennt nur Wahrheiten -auf Zeit-. Einzig im Willen zum Leben kann eine neue Welt gedichtet werden...". (shrink)

This essay argues that there are theoretical benefits to keeping distinct—more pervasively than the literature has done so far—the psychological states of imagining that p versus believing that in-the-story p, when it comes to cognition of fiction and other forms of narrative. Positing both in the minds of a story’s audience helps explain the full range of reactions characteristic of story consumption. This distinction also has interesting conceptual and explanatory dimensions that haven’t been carefully observed, and the two mental state (...) types make distinct contributions to generating emotional responses to stories. Finally, the differences between the mental states illuminate how a given story can be both shared with others and at the same time experienced as personal. (shrink)

In an overview of developments spanning the past seventy years, Siegfried Zielinski discusses how the means of technology-based communication assumed a systemic character and how theory, art, and criticism were operative in this process. [... After the Media] advocates for a distinction to be made between online existence and offline being.

In this paper, we argue that the popular claim that laws of nature explain their instances creates a philosophical puzzle when it is combined with the widely held requirement that explanations need to be underpinned by ‘wordly’ relations. We argue that a “direct solution” to the puzzle that accounts for both explanatory laws and explanatory realism requires endorsing at least a radical metaphysics. Then, we examine the ramifications of a “skeptical solution”, i.e., dissolving it by giving up at least one (...) of these two claims, and argue that adopting it is more favorable to Humean reductionists than to anti-reductionists about laws of nature. (shrink)