It is commonplace by now that moral philosophy has a long history of gender biases, not only regarding the pertinent moral issues but also regarding the development of concepts and theories. This insight from feminist philosophy, however, has not yet received sufficient attention in the debate on supererogation. That is not least surprising, since we all are familiar with the phenomenon that what is morally expected of an agent is not gender-neutral but at least to some extent relates to gender (...) roles and social expectations. Therefore, the main aim of this chapter is to build on theoretical and methodological insights from feminist philosophy to carve out this research gap and to map the field for future research. It will be argued that feminist approaches can only be ignored within the debate on supererogation at the cost of philosophical rigor since they do not only give rise to novel perspectives and insights on questions already discussed, but also make matters visible that would have been overlooked otherwise. Thereby this chapter seeks essentially to contribute to a more extensive understanding of the social, political, and epistemic dimensions of supererogation that have hitherto been neglected. (shrink)

Wir diskutieren ethische Probleme der medizinischen Behandlung intersexueller Kinder. Gefragt wird nach dem Stellenwert von Elternwünschen nach eindeutiger Geschlechtszuweisung sowie nach den Konfliktfeldern, die zum einen zwischen konkurrierenden Wunschvorstellungen der Eltern und der behandelnden Ärzte, zum andern zwischen Kindeswohl und Kinderrechten entstehen können. Gegenwärtig wird Neugeborenen mit anatomisch uneindeutigem Genital trotz unsicherer Prognose über die Behandlungsergebnisse oft noch ein Geschlecht zugewiesen und operativ erstellt. Dieses Vorgehen ist von verschiedenen Seiten ethisch heftig kritisiert worden. Kipnis u. Diamond forderten 1998 im „Journal (...) of Clinical Ethics“ ein Moratorium für alle nicht vital indizierten geschlechtskorrigierenden Eingriffe. Diese Forderung orientiert sich am Interesse des zukünftigen Erwachsenen, betont dessen prospektive Autonomie und klammert den Elternwunsch aus. Dieses „Modell des antizipierten Konsenses“ kann jedoch mit Bezug auf Neugeborene und Kleinkinder bedeutsame Aspekte des Eltern-Kind-Verhältnisses nicht angemessen erfassen. Im Aufsatz werden Argumente angeführt, die es aus Sicht einer Ethik der Elternschaft rechtfertigen, ethische Entscheidungen auf der Basis eines beziehungsorientierten Modells zu treffen. In unserem Modell fallen Elternwünsche ethisch ins Gewicht. (shrink)

Wir diskutieren ethische Probleme der medizinischen Behandlung intersexueller Kinder. Gefragt wird nach dem Stellenwert von Elternwünschen nach eindeutiger Geschlechtszuweisung sowie nach den Konfliktfeldern, die zum einen zwischen konkurrierenden Wunschvorstellungen der Eltern und der behandelnden Ärzte, zum andern zwischen Kindeswohl und Kinderrechten entstehen können. Gegenwärtig wird Neugeborenen mit anatomisch uneindeutigem Genital trotz unsicherer Prognose über die Behandlungsergebnisse oft noch ein Geschlecht zugewiesen und operativ erstellt. Dieses Vorgehen ist von verschiedenen Seiten ethisch heftig kritisiert worden. Kipnis u. Diamond forderten 1998 im „Journal (...) of Clinical Ethics“ ein Moratorium für alle nicht vital indizierten geschlechtskorrigierenden Eingriffe. Diese Forderung orientiert sich am Interesse des zukünftigen Erwachsenen, betont dessen prospektive Autonomie und klammert den Elternwunsch aus. Dieses „Modell des antizipierten Konsenses“ kann jedoch mit Bezug auf Neugeborene und Kleinkinder bedeutsame Aspekte des Eltern-Kind-Verhältnisses nicht angemessen erfassen. Im Aufsatz werden Argumente angeführt, die es aus Sicht einer Ethik der Elternschaft rechtfertigen, ethische Entscheidungen auf der Basis eines beziehungsorientierten Modells zu treffen. In unserem Modell fallen Elternwünsche ethisch ins Gewicht. (shrink)

For their deployment in human societies to be safe, AI agents need to be aligned with value-laden cooperative human life. One way of solving this “problem of value alignment” is to build moral machines. I argue that the goal of building moral machines aims at the wrong kind of ideal, and that instead, we need an approach to value alignment that takes seriously the categorically different cognitive and moral capabilities between human and AI agents, a condition I call deep agential (...) diversity. Domestication is the answer to a similarly structured problem: namely, how to integrate nonhuman animals that lack moral agency safely into human society and align their behavior with human values. Just like nonhuman animals, AI agents lack a genuinely moral agency; and just like nonhuman animals, we might find ways to train them to nevertheless assist us, and live and work among us – to “domesticate” them, in other words. I claim that the domestication approach does well in explaining many of our intuitions and worries about deploying AI agents in our social practices. (shrink)

Das Fundament der Rawls’schen Gerechtigkeitstheorie ist die moralische Gleichheit aller Gerechtigkeitssubjekte. Die symmetrische Positionierung der Parteien bei den Urzustands-Deliberationen stellt sicher, dass Subjekte mit gleichem moralischen Status das gleiche Recht auf faire Interessenberücksichtigung haben. Dabei fällt allerdings auf, dass Rawls nicht per se gegen unverdiente Ungleichheit argumentiert, sondern gegen unverdiente Ungleichheit zwischen moralisch Gleichen. Hier stellt sich die Frage: kann es Gerechtigkeit zwischen moralisch Ungleichen geben? Und wenn ja: ändert ein ungleicher moralischer Status der Gerechtigkeitssubjekte auch den Inhalt der, und (...) die Ansprüche auf, Gerechtigkeit? Wenn man annimmt, Gerechtigkeitsbeziehungen bestünden ausschließlich zwischen Menschen, dann erscheinen diese Fragen offensichtlich unsinnig. Ich argumentiere allerdings, dass die exklusive Anwendung von Gerechtigkeitstheorien auf Personen begrifflich kontingent ist – und dass die Einbeziehung von nichtmenschlichen Akteuren Rawls’ Gerechtigkeitstheorie zwar vor schwierige, aber möglicherweise produktive Herausforderungen stellt, die ich in diesem Beitrag untersuchen möchte. (shrink)

What can international courts say when criminals ask, by what right do you try me? Some authors attempt to draw a connection between humanity's responsibility to call offenders to account and the harm humanity has suffered as a consequence of the offender's crimes. Others have argued that there need not be a special connection between those calling to account and the offenders, as the right to punish offenders is a general right each and every person has. Both lines of argument (...) are ultimately unconvincing. Instead, I argue for a modified version of the second position which proposes a democratically based theory of responsibility for punishment held by international criminal law institutions. (shrink)

Contribution for book symposium on Andrea Sangiovanni's Humanity without Dignity.

The philosophical foundations of human rights are as complex as they are controversial. For some years, the debate has been dominated by the rather gridlocked opposition between moral and political conceptions of human rights. Moreover, a profound examination of the social and relational dimension of human rights has been lacking. Against this background, this volume brings together contributions which scrutinise the multi-faceted foundations of human rights. It is a valuable collection for philosophers, political scientists and legal scholars interested in fresh (...) insights into the idea and practice of human rights. With contributions by Markus Abraham | Andreas Busen | Johannes Haaf | Christoph Herrler | Justine Lacroix | Franziska Martinsen | Luise Müller | Esther Neuhann | Niklas Plätzer | Ned Richardson-Little | Regina Schidel | Tatjana Noemi Tömmel | Alexander Weiß | Markus Wolf. (shrink)

Wir diskutieren ethische Probleme der medizinischen Behandlung intersexueller Kinder. Gefragt wird nach dem Stellenwert von Elternwünschen nach eindeutiger Geschlechtszuweisung sowie nach den Konfliktfeldern, die zum einen zwischen konkurrierenden Wunschvorstellungen der Eltern und der behandelnden Ärzte, zum andern zwischen Kindeswohl und Kinderrechten entstehen können. Gegenwärtig wird Neugeborenen mit anatomisch uneindeutigem Genital trotz unsicherer Prognose über die Behandlungsergebnisse oft noch ein Geschlecht zugewiesen und operativ erstellt. Dieses Vorgehen ist von verschiedenen Seiten ethisch heftig kritisiert worden. Kipnis u. Diamond forderten 1998 im „Journal (...) of Clinical Ethics“ ein Moratorium für alle nicht vital indizierten geschlechtskorrigierenden Eingriffe. Diese Forderung orientiert sich am Interesse des zukünftigen Erwachsenen, betont dessen prospektive Autonomie und klammert den Elternwunsch aus. Dieses „Modell des antizipierten Konsenses“ kann jedoch mit Bezug auf Neugeborene und Kleinkinder bedeutsame Aspekte des Eltern-Kind-Verhältnisses nicht angemessen erfassen. Im Aufsatz werden Argumente angeführt, die es aus Sicht einer Ethik der Elternschaft rechtfertigen, ethische Entscheidungen auf der Basis eines beziehungsorientierten Modells zu treffen. In unserem Modell fallen Elternwünsche ethisch ins Gewicht. (shrink)

European Journal of Political Theory, Ahead of Print.

European Journal of Political Theory, Ahead of Print.

Psychiatric disorders share an excess of seasonal birth in winter and spring, suggesting an increase of neurodevelopmental risks. Evidence suggests season of birth can serve as a proxy of harmful environmental factors. Given that prenatal exposure of these factors may trigger pathologic processes in the neurodevelopment, they may consequently lead to brain volume alterations. Here we tested the effects of season of birth on gray matter volume in a transdiagnostic sample of patients with schizophrenia and depression compared to healthy controls. (...) We found a significant effect of season of birth on gray matter volume with reduced right hippocampal volume in summer-born compared to winter-born patients with depression. In addition, the volume of the right hippocampus was reduced independent from season of birth in schizophrenia. Our results support the potential impact of season of birth on hippocampal volume in depression. (shrink)

There is a common demand that moral theory be 'practical', voiced both in- and outside of philosophy. Neo-Humeans, Kantian constitutivists and Aristotelian naturalists have all advocated the idea that my knowledge that I ought to do something must lead me to actually do it—an idea sometimes called the “practicality requirement” for moral theory. Some university administrators apply this idea in practice, when they force students who violate the code of conduct to complete classes in moral theory, hoping that the knowledge (...) obtained there would lead the student not to reoffend. I argue that the practicality requirement rests on a false understanding of the relation both between knowledge and motivation, focusing my critique on recent Aristotelian proposals. (shrink)

Die Wittgenstein-Schülerin Elizabeth Anscombe zählt zu den einflussreichsten Philosophinnen des 20. Jahrhunderts. Mit der Monographie Absicht begründete sie die analytische Handlungstheorie, viele ihrer Abhandlungen gelten als Klassiker, aber nur wenige liegen bislang in deutscher Übersetzung vor. Der vorliegende Band füllt diese Lücke: Er versammelt zwölf von Anscombes wichtigsten Aufsätzen, die thematisch von der praktischen Philosophie über die Metaphysik und die Philosophie des Geistes bis hin zu Aristoteles- und Wittgenstein-Interpretationen reichen, also das ganze Spektrum ihres Denkens repräsentieren. Die Anmerkungen und Erläuterungen (...) der Herausgeber sowie das Nachwort von Anselm W. Müller erschließen die Texte und bieten zusätzliche Einblicke in das facettenreiche Werk dieser solitären Denkerin. (shrink)

ResumoNeste artigo, são analisados filme e roteiro de Bacurau (2019), dirigido por Kléber Mendonça Filho e Juliano Dornelles. Compreende-se a obra sob a perspectiva da ficção weird pela conjunção entre os elementos de futuridade da narrativa e os conflitos sociais do interior do Brasil, circunscritos a uma realidade histórica. Misturando gêneros cinematográficos em um filme que vai do cangaço ao gore, Bacurau nos coloca frente a uma distopia sobre a proliferação de tecnologias de vigilância e controle e, sobretudo, sobre a (...) proliferação de sistemas políticos de morte.Palavras-chave: Bacurau. Ficção weird. Aceleracionismo. Desterritorialidade. Necropolítica. Estudos decoloniais. AbstractIn this article I analyze the film and the script of Bacurau (2019), directed by Kléber Mendonça Filho and Juliano Dornelles. The work is understood from the perspective of weird fiction for the conjunction between the elements of futurity of the narrative and the social conflicts of Brazil’s countryside, anchored in a historical reality. Mixing cinematographic genres in a film that goes from Cangaço Cinema to Gore, Bacurau confronts us with a dystopia about the proliferation of surveillance and control technologies and, specially, about the proliferation of political systems of death.Keywords: Bacurau. Weird Fiction. Accelerationism. Deterritorialization. Necropolitics. Decolonial Studies. (shrink)

Considered by many to be Abraham Robinson's magnum opus, this book offers an explanation of the development and applications of non-standard analysis by the mathematician who founded the subject. Non-standard analysis grew out of Robinson's attempt to resolve the contradictions posed by infinitesimals within calculus. He introduced this new subject in a seminar at Princeton in 1960, and it remains as controversial today as it was then. This paperback reprint of the 1974 revised edition is indispensable reading for anyone interested (...) in non-standard analysis. It treats in rich detail many areas of application, including topology, functions of a real variable, functions of a complex variable, and normed linear spaces, together with problems of boundary layer flow of viscous fluids and rederivations of Saint-Venant's hypothesis concerning the distribution of stresses in an elastic body. (shrink)

We would be wrong to state that Plato’s approach to the Golden Age in the Statesman occurs through nostalgia, even if he stresses the immense distance between our world and that blessed time. After evoking the shepherd-god as a ruler, Plato shows that the completely abandoned disposition of the ruled is only justifiable in presence of an unbridgeable chasm between the two, such as that between gods and men, or men and beasts. The real question in the Statesman is how (...) to single out the peculiar form of knowledge possessed by the few men that are truly capable to rule. (shrink)

This paper investigates the prospects of Rodney Brooks’ proposal for AI without representation. It turns out that the supposedly characteristic features of “new AI” (embodiment, situatedness, absence of reasoning, and absence of representation) are all present in conventional systems: “New AI” is just like old AI. Brooks proposal boils down to the architectural rejection of central control in intelligent agents—Which, however, turns out to be crucial. Some of more recent cognitive science suggests that we might do well to dispose of (...) the image of intelligent agents as central representation processors. If this paradigm shift is achieved, Brooks’ proposal for cognition without representation appears promising for full-blown intelligent agents—Though not for conscious agents. (shrink)

Katharina D. Giesel befasst sich mit den Fragen, was in den verschiedensten Sozialwissenschaften unter Leitbildern verstanden wird, wie diese Kategorie konzeptionell in Forschungs- und Handlungskonzepte eingebunden wird und inwiefern ...

Although moral relativists often appeal to cases of apparent moral disagreement between members of different communities to motivate their view, accounting for these exchanges as evincing genuine disagreements constitutes a challenge to the coherence of moral relativism. While many moral relativists acknowledge this problem, attempts to solve it so far have been wanting. In response, moral relativists either give up the claim that there can be moral disagreement between members of different communities or end up with a view on which (...) these disagreements have no “epistemic significance” because they are always faultless. This paper introduces an alternative strategy: accounting for disagreement in terms of “metalinguistic negotiation”. It argues that this strategy constitutes a better solution to the challenge disagreement poses for moral relativists because it leads to a nuanced understanding of the epistemic significance of moral disagreement between members of different communities. The upshot is a novel account of disagreement for moral relativists that has consequences for how moral relativism should be understood. (shrink)

Many legal, social, and medical theorists and practitioners, as well as lay people, seem to be concerned with the harmfulness of discriminative practices. However, the philosophical literature on the moral wrongness of discrimination, with a few exceptions, does not focus on harm. In this paper, I examine, and improve, a recent account of wrongful discrimination, which divides into a definition of group discrimination, and a characterisation of its moral wrong-making feature in terms of harm. The resulting account analyses the wrongness (...) of discrimination in terms of intrapersonal comparisons of the discriminatee’s actual, and relevantly counterfactual, well-being levels. I show that the account faces problems from counterfactuals, which can be traced back specifically to the orthodox - comparative, counterfactual, welfarist - concept of harm. I argue that non-counterfactual and non-comparative harm concepts face problems of their own, and don’t fit easily with our best understanding of discrimination; hence they are unsuitable to replace the orthodox concept here. I then propose a non-orthodox - comparative, counterfactual, hybrid - concept of harm, which relies on counterfactual comparisons of ways of being treated. I suggest how such a concept can help us handle the problems from counterfactuals, at least for my account of discrimination. I also show that there are similar proposals in other harm-related debates. An upshot of the paper is thus to corroborate the case for a non-orthodox, hybrid concept of harm, which seems better able to fulfil its functional roles in a variety of contexts. (shrink)

A realist view of numbers often rests on the following thesis: statements like ‘The number of moons of Jupiter is four’ are identity statements in which the copula is flanked by singular terms whose semantic function consists in referring to a number (henceforth: Identity). On the basis of Identity the realists argue that the assertive use of such statements commits us to numbers. Recently, some anti-realists have disputed this argument. According to them, Identity is false, and, thus, we may deny (...) that the relevant statements commit us to numbers. The present paper argues that the correct linguistic analysis of the relevant number statements supports the anti-realist view that Identity is false. However, as will further be shown, pace the anti-realist, this analysis does not establish that such statements do not commit us to numbers after all. (shrink)

This essay is broadly conceived as a study of how the emotional experience of shame can play an important role in the construction of personal identity. It considers, on the one hand, the way in which Greek culture conceives the social meaning of this emotion and, on the other, the double representation that Plato provides in the Symposium of two very different forms of pedagogy of shame. Using the Platonic text as a phenomenological source, the author discusses the general validity (...) and relevance to the Greek world of the anthropological scheme that opposes «shame cultures» to «guilt cultures», attributing evolutionary primacy to the latter in terms of the acquisition of individual moral autonomy. (shrink)

In this paper, we argue that ‘good care’ in residential nursing homes is enacted through different care practices that are either inspired by a ‘professional logic of care’ that aims for justice and non-maleficence in the professional treatment of residents, or by a ‘relational logic of care’, which attends to the relational quality and the meaning of interpersonal connectedness in people’s lives. Rather than favoring one care logic over the other, this paper indicates how important aspects of care are constantly (...) negotiated between different care practices. Based on the intricate everyday negotiations observed during an ethnographic field study at an elderly nursing home in Germany, the paper puts forth the argument that care is always a matter of tinkering with different, sometimes competing ‘goods’. This tinkering process, which unfolds through ‘intuitive deliberation’, ‘situated assessment’ and ‘affective juggling’ is then theorized along the conceptualization of a ‘practical ethics of care’: an ethics which makes no a priori judgments of what may be considered as good or bad care, but instead calls for momentary judgments that are pliable across changing situations. (shrink)

In today’s highly dynamic societies, moral norms and values are subject to change. Moral change is partly driven by technological developments. For instance, the introduction of robots in elderly care practices requires caregivers to share moral responsibility with a robot (see van Wynsberghe 2013 ). Since we do not know what elements of morality will change and how they will change (see van der Burg 2003 ), moral education should aim at fostering what has been called “moral resilience” (Swierstra 2013 (...) ). We seek to fill two gaps in the existing literature: (i) research on moral education has not paid enough attention to the development of moral resilience; (ii) the very limited literature on moral resilience does not conceptualise moral resilience in relation to new technological developments. We argue that philosophical accounts of moral education need to do justice to the importance of moral resilience, and that a specific form of moral resilience should be conceptualised as “technomoral resilience” to underline the added value of cultivating moral resilience in relation to technomoral change. We illustrate the role of technomoral resilience in practice by looking at the context of elderly care. To make the first step towards an account of how technomoral resilience can be fostered in moral education, we propose that moral education shall focus on a triangle of capacities: (1) moral imagination, (2) a capacity for critical reflection, and (3) a capacity for maintaining one’s moral agency in the face of disturbances. (shrink)