Research Objective: This study focuses on ADs in the Netherlands and introduces a cross-cultural perspective by comparing it with other countries. Methods: A questionnaire was sent to a panel comprising 1621 people representative of the Dutch population. The response was 86%. Results: 95% of the respondents didn't have an AD, and 24% of these were not familiar with the idea of drawing up an AD. Most of those familiar with ADs knew about the Advanced Euthanasia Directive (AED, 64%). Both low (...) education and the presence of a religious conviction that plays an important role in one's life increase the chance of not wanting to draw up an AD. Also not having experienced a request for euthanasia from someone else, and the inconceivability of asking for euthanasia yourself, increase the chance of not wanting to draw up an AD. Discussion: This study shows that the subjects of palliative care and end-of-life-decision-making were very much dominated by the issue of euthanasia in the Netherlands. The AED was the best known AD; and factors that can be linked to euthanasia play an important role in whether or not people choose to draw up an AD. This differentiates the Netherlands from other countries and, when it comes to ADs, the global differences between countries and cultures are still so large that the highest possible goals, at this moment in time, are observing and possibly learning from other cultural settings. (shrink)

The American Journal of Bioethics, Volume 12, Issue 7, Page 23-25, July 2012.

We give picture-covariant formulations of the equations of motion for observables and states such that the Hamiltonian operator is transformed asH-0304;=U(t)HU † (t) under a time-dependent unitary transformationU(t). Next, we consider the explicit and implicit covariance of Heisenberg's equations of motion for observables with respect to general transformations of coordinate operators. Most of our representation is spread out over a number of textbooks and articles, where the subject has been considered with greater or lesser clarity from different points of view.

This volume explores how Catholicism began and continues to open its doors to the wider world and to other confessions in embracing ecumenism, thanks to the vision and legacy of the Second Vatican Council. It explores such themes as the twentieth century context preceding the council; parallels between Vatican II and previous councils; its distinctively pastoral character; the legacy of the council in relation to issues such as church-world dynamics, as well as to ethics, social justice, economic activity. Several chapters (...) discuss the role of women in the church before, during, and since the council. Others discern inculturation in relation to Vatican II. The book also contains a wide and original range of ecumenical considerations of the council, including by and in relation to Free Church, Reformed, Orthodox, and Anglican perspectives. Finally, it considers the Council’s ongoing promise and remaining challenges with regard to ecumenical issues, including a groundbreaking essay on the future of ecumenical dialogue by Cardinal Walter Kasper. (shrink)

This book examines influential conceptions of sport and then analyses the interplay of challenging borderline cases with the standard definitions of sport. It is meant to inspire more thought and debate on just what sport is, how it relates to other activities and human endeavors, and what we can learn about ourselves by studying sport.

Kasper Lippert-Rasmussen’s interesting criticisms of the ideal of equality of opportunity for welfare provide a welcome occasion for rethinking the requirements of egalitarian distributive justice.1 In the essay he criticizes I had proposed that insofar as we think distributive justice requires equality of any sort, we should conceive of distributive equality as equal opportunity provision. Roughly put, my suggestion was that equality of opportunity for welfare obtains among a group of people when all would have the same expected welfare over (...) the course of their lives if each behaved as prudently as it would be reasonable to expect her to behave. My specific proposal was more demanding, holding that when an age cohort reaches the onset of responsible adulthood, they enjoy equal opportunity for welfare when for each of them, the best sequence of choices that it would be reasonable to expect the person to follow would yield the same expected welfare for all, the second-best sequence of choices would also yield the same expected welfare for all, and so on through the array of lifetime choice sequences each faces. (In the jargon of my 1989 essay, equal opportunity for welfare obtains when everyone faces effectively equivalent sets of life options.). (shrink)

Muraskas et al. and Hefferman and Heilig present the painfully elusive ethical questions regarding decisionmaking in the care of the extremely low birth weight infants in the intensive care nursery. At what gestation or size do we resuscitate? Can we stop resuscitation after we have started? How much money is too much to spend? Is the distress of the parents of the ELBW infant, the anguish of their caregivers, and the moral and ethical uncertainty of the approach to these infants (...) too much to pay? Who speaks for the neonate: the parent, nurse, attorney, or physician? Ideally these questions should have been answered 30 years ago when modern neonatology embarked on a journey from where it could not return. A new breed of physician, called “neonatologist,” seduced by the high-tech lure and the promise of saving lives previously unsavable pioneered a lucrative and life-saving technological revolution in the care of premature newborns. This rapid advancement in neonatology occurred a few years after the death of a premature infant named Patrick Kennedy in 1963. While the country mourned, medical scientists vowed that this would not happen again. First continuous positive airway pressure, then mechanical ventilation, changed medical care of premature newborns forever. It began an era of euphoria and excitement. Neonatologists raced to push to the edge of newborn viability. What was the youngest salvageable gestational age? What was the smallest that could be saved? Yes, we dreamed, and still do dream of artificial placentas. Ethical questions took a back seat in the search for the edge because the waters were uncharted and the tough questions could not be answered without experience. What was to be the cost in dollars and in anguish to save the Patrick Kennedys of the world? Triumphs led to grave concerns as we approached the edge. However, no advancement in neonatology has ever changed the ultimate questions. (shrink)

The Spring 1999 issue of CambridgeQuarterly adds to the growing body of academic inquiry into the goals of neonatal intensive care practices. Muraskas and colleagues thoughtfully presented the possibility of nontreatment for neonates born at or under 24 weeks gestation. Jain, Thomasma, and Ragas explained that quality of future life must not be ignored in clinical deliberation. And Hefferman and Heilig described once again the dilemmas nurses face when caring for potentially devastated neonates kept alive by technology. These authors take (...) brave steps by publicly questioning the trend of intensive medical support for most every American-born product of conception. But many questions addressing the goals of neonatal intensive care remain, and few authors have actually tried to distill these goals. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Notes and Fragments THE GENEALOGY OF PRAGMATISM by Anthony J. Cascardi At SEVERAL POINTS in Philosophy and the Minor ofNature (1979) and in.the essays collected as Consequences of Pragmatism (1982), Richard Rorty mentions John Dewey as one of a group of "edifying" philosophers whose tutelary presence and audiority are invoked in the project which he elsewhere describes as die "circumvention" of Western metaphysics.1 Dewey joins the ranks of his (...) fellow American pragmatiste James and Peirce as well as those of two odier rather disparate groups: on die one hand, those philosophers like Davidson, Sellars, and Quine, who demonstrate from within diat analytical philosophy eventually transcends and cancels itself; and on the other, those "continental" philosophers like Foucault, Gadamer, and Derrida, who comfortably accept the image of philosophy as a subgenre of "literature" or "writing," a discourse with no privileged insights into the nature of rationality or claims to truth. Rorty's own project is a blend of all diree. Widi James he claims that truth is simply "what is good in die way of belief," not the proper or even fruitful object of theoretical speculation ("truth is not the sort of thing one should expect to have a philosophically interesting dieory about.... Pragmatiste think that the history of attempts to isolate the True or the Good, or to define die word 'true' or 'good,' supports their suspicion that there is no interesting work to be done in this area.... The history of attempts to do so, and of criticisms of such attempts, is roughly coextensive wim the history of that literary genre we call 'philosophy' — a genre founded by Plato," Consequences ofPragmatism, pp. xiii-xiv). Yet he shares widi Davidson, Sellars, and Quine the will to demonstrate the limits of analytical phdosophy while framing his own propositions in the language ofanalysis. 295 296Philosophy and Literature Foucault and Derrida in their turn complete the image of life in a "postphilosophical " culture, where the designation of "post" indicates a final refusal to regard pragmatism as yet another metanarrative ofthe history of philosophy. In this case, die historicist part of the Hegelian teaching, which is dieir common inheritance, the assimilation of logic to history, is accepted, while the assimilation of history to logic, which completes the Hegelian syndiesis, is rejected on account of its totalizing designs and its reliance on die notion of Absolute Spirit. So seen, the genealogy of pragmatism is of considerably broader scope than die initial intentions of Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature would suggest. In diat book, Rorty claimed to be marshalling the various forces named above not so much in response to Platonism as in reply to a single episode in the history of philosophy — viz., that which begins in Descartes and receives its fullest expression in Kant, and considers truth as a matter of the accurate correspondence of ideas held inforo intemo to objects in the external world, and accordingly regards die world as a representation of the mind. Heidegger articulated a similar complaint when he spoke of the Cartesian age as that in which die world was first determined as a "picture" ("Die Zeit des Weltbildes") and noted diat from this time forward epistemology was determined as "first philosophy": "a dieory ofknowledge had to be erected before a theory of the world."2 Pragmatism is on mis more limited view primarily a response to the conditions of a technological age and to the conception ofreason as mathematical representation which sustains modern science. Thus Rorty should well be surprised at Dewey's claim to have applied a scientific and empirical method in die study of metaphysics, whose proper objects consist, in Dewey's description, of"die large and constant features of human sufferings, enjoyments, trials, failures, and successes together with the institutions of art, science, technology, politics, and religion,"3 for to have done so would have been to have countered the Cartesian division between science on the one hand and qualities and values ("experience") on die other. Instead, Rorty imputes a different claim to Experience and Nature and sees it as a way-station on the pam toward that hypothetical book called Nature and Culture, in which die idea of an empirical method... (shrink)

Even though the last decade has seen more original and significant work on Fichte, the flow of studies on his rival and "successor," Schelling, seems to continue uninterrupted. Beyond so many short and often quite modest writings, Kasper's huge book is towering, and not only because of its size. Kasper, like Horst Fuhrmans to whom he seems to be the most indebted and who is not in Schelling studies, is a Roman Catholic theologian who commands an immense and impressive knowledge (...) of the history of theological speculation from the Greek Fathers to the nineteenth century school of Tübingen. Like most major studies on Schelling, the present one must struggle its way through the evolution of the many phases of his thought before getting down to the more systematic investigation. Such an endeavor must express a "preference" for one of those phases, and, as is usually the case today, the greatest appreciation is directed towards the Spätphilosophie. The core and kernel of the book is the beautiful and highly concentrated exposition on "God as the ground and the Lord of history" where historicity itself receives its ontological deduction from the premisses of theism. The book concludes with the concrete modalities of the divine mediation of history through the great issues of the fall, mythology, and revelation. For more than a decade Walter Schulz's interpretation of Schelling's late philosophy has seemed to overshadow, and to dismiss, all more Weltanschauung-orientated research. It has long been time for a study focusing on Schelling, the philosopher of Christianity, which is what Schelling considered himself to be for the last forty-five years of his life.--M. J. V. (shrink)

In a series of recently published lectures and essays two Roman Catholic Cardinals—Cardinals Ratzinger and Kasper—have offered significantly different positions of the issue of the relationship of the Universal to the Particular Churches. Cardinal Kasper locates the root of the disagreement in the philosophical foundations of the two views in privileging the Universal over the Particular (or vice versa) as the starting point for ecclesiology. I will explain why I find Josiah Royce’s late work (as informed by C. S. Peirce’s (...) thought) to be a valuable resource for the complexities of such a rich ecclesiological enquiry. I examine the interrelationship between Spirit, Community and the Interpretation of Signs in the mature thought of Royce, I assess his contribution to the preceding discussion, and I offer some insights into his potential value to any ongoing dialogue on the nature and purpose of the Church. (shrink)

Muraskas et al. and Hefferman and Heilig present the painfully elusive ethical questions regarding decisionmaking in the care of the extremely low birth weight infants in the intensive care nursery. At what gestation or size do we resuscitate? Can we stop resuscitation after we have started? How much money is too much to spend? Is the distress of the parents of the ELBW infant, the anguish of their caregivers, and the moral and ethical uncertainty of the approach to these infants (...) too much to pay? Who speaks for the neonate: the parent, nurse, attorney, or physician? Ideally these questions should have been answered 30 years ago when modern neonatology embarked on a journey from where it could not return. A new breed of physician, called seduced by the high-tech lure and the promise of saving lives previously unsavable pioneered a lucrative and life-saving technological revolution in the care of premature newborns. This rapid advancement in neonatology occurred a few years after the death of a premature infant named Patrick Kennedy in 1963. While the country mourned, medical scientists vowed that this would not happen again. First continuous positive airway pressure, then mechanical ventilation, changed medical care of premature newborns forever. It began an era of euphoria and excitement. Neonatologists raced to push to the edge of newborn viability. What was the youngest salvageable gestational age? What was the smallest that could be saved? Yes, we dreamed, and still do dream of artificial placentas. Ethical questions took a back seat in the search for the edge because the waters were uncharted and the tough questions could not be answered without experience. WhatwastobethecostindollarsandinanguishtosavethePatrickKennedysoftheworld?Triumphsledtograveconcerns asweapproachedtheedge.However,noadvancementinneonatologyhaseverchangedtheultimatequestions. (shrink)

In 1964, the young Walter Kasper (born in 1933) was granted by the Faculty of Catholic Theology at Tübingen the licence to teach dogmatic theology on the basis of a thesis on Philosophie und Theologie der Geschichte in der Spätphilosophie Schellings (Philosophy and Theology of History in Schelling’s Late Philosophy). Kasper’s interest in Schelling, himself a student at the Evangelisches Stift at Tübingen, thus originated in the context of his university studies in the school of J.R. Geiselmann and developed in (...) parallel with his theological education. For this reason, it is impossible to form a correct idea of Kasper and his whole theology unless one is willing to take into account this background, not least because he himself has always consciously and forcefully recognised this fact and seen in it his own centre of gravity. Kasper’s work and thought were shaped in a lasting manner during his university years. In fact, his entire academic oeuvre has been nurtured from this fecund origin so much so that he became one of the most well known names associated with the Catholic school at Tübingen to which he gave a new, creative impulse having himself been profoundly inspired by it. ‘He always emphasised his own roots not only as a teacher of theology and a member of the teaching faculty of this institution, but also as bishop’ and cardinal. The principal intention of the present article is precisely this: to return to this beginning and elucidate these decisive years for Kasper in broad outline by way of a relecture and interpretation of his book on The Absolute in History and the particular manner in which he interpreted the so-called second Schelling, an author whom he approached in the wake of Walter Schulz and at practically the same time as Xavier Tilliette. The analysis will subsequently move on into the more properly theological field. (shrink)

The relatively new practice of continuous sedation at the end of life (CS) is increasingly being debated in the clinical and ethical literature. This practice received much attention when a U.S. Supreme Court ruling noted that the availability of CS made legalization of physician-assisted suicide (PAS) unnecessary, as CS could alleviate even the most severe suffering. This view has been widely adopted. In this article, we perform an in-depth analysis of four versions of this ?argument of preferable alternative.? Our goal (...) is to determine the extent to which CS can be considered to be an alternative to PAS and to identify the grounds, if any, on which CS may be ethically preferable to PAS. (shrink)

Because health care professions exist to provide a good for society, ethical questions are inherently part of them. Such professions and their members can be assessed based on how effective they are in developing knowledge and enacting practices that further the health and well‐being of individuals and society. The complexity of contemporary health care environments makes it important to prepare clinicians who can anticipate, recognize, and address problems that arise in practice or that prevent a profession from fulfilling its service (...) goals and obligations. Different health care professions have evolved distinct perspectives about appropriate goals for, and the purposes of, their clinicians, even when the goal of improving health and well‐being for society is shared across professions. While medicine and nursing goals are shared in principle, they differ in the particulars. Given the centrality to nursing of ethical questions, the profession has a collective responsibility to help clinicians at all levels of practice become ethically savvy and to reinforce their moral agency as needed. Both knowledge of nursing ethics and knowledge of the interdisciplinary field of bioethics are critical to nursing work. (shrink)

This paper examines the extent to which parents have absorbed New Right ideas about education and acted accordingly. What emerges is that their commitment to the rhetoric of school choice is strong. However, concepts such as the market and competition are viewed less favourably. An important theme here is the avoidance by parents of any collective agenda in discussing education policy, a factor that may thwart those who attempt to predict their responses to government policy for schools.

From 1827 to 1831 the German historian Leopold von Ranke travelled through Germany, Austria, and Italy, hunting for documents and archives. During this journey Ranke developed a new model for historical research that transformed the archive into the most important site for the production of historical knowledge. Within the archive, Ranke claimed, the trained historian could forget his personal predispositions and political loyalties, and write objective history. This essay critically examines Ranke's model for historical research through a study of the (...) obstacles, frustrations, and joys that he encountered on his journey. It shows how Ranke's archival experiences inspired him to re-evaluate his own identity as a historian and as a human being, and investigates some of the affiliations between his model for historical research and the political realities of Prince Metternich's European order. Finally, the essay compares Ranke's historical discipline to other nineteenth-century disciplines, such as anthropology and archaeology. (shrink)

Background: The 21-item Nurses’ Moral Courage Scale was developed and validated in 2018 in Finland with the purpose of measuring moral courage among nurses. Objectives: The objective of this study was to make a Dutch translation of the Nurses’ Moral Courage Scale to describe the level of nurses’ self-assessed moral courage and associated socio-demographic factors in Flanders, Belgium. Research design: A forward–backward translation method was applied to translate the English Nurses’ Moral Courage Scale to Dutch, and a pilot study was (...) conducted to improve readability and understandability. A non-experimental, descriptive cross-sectional exploratory design was used to conduct a survey. Descriptive analysis was used. Participants: The data were collected from a convenience sample of 559 nurses from two hospitals in Flanders. Ethical considerations: Ethical approval was obtained from the university ethics committee, permission to conduct the study was obtained from the participating hospitals. Participants received a guide letter and gave their informed consent. Findings: The readability and understandability of the Dutch Nurses’ Moral Courage Scale were positively evaluated, and the scale revealed a good level of internal consistency for the total scale and all subscales. Nurses’ mean score of the 21-item Nurses’ Moral Courage Scale was 3.77. The total Nurses’ Moral Courage Scale score was associated with age, experience, professional function, level of education and personal interest. Discussion and Conclusion: The Nurses’ Moral Courage Scale was successfully translated to Dutch. The Flemish nurses perceived themselves as morally courageous, especially when they were in a direct interpersonal relationship with their patients. Acting courageously in ethical dilemmas that involved other actors or organizations appeared to be more challenging. The results strongly suggest the important role of education and ethical leadership in developing and supporting this essential virtue in nursing practice. (shrink)

Recently there has been some discussion concerning a particular type of enhancement, namely ‘moral enhancement’. However, there is no consensus on what precisely constitutes moral enhancement, and as a result the concept is used and defined in a wide variety of ways. In this article, we develop a clarificatory taxonomy of these definitions and we identify the criteria that are used to delineate the concept. We think that the current definitions can be distinguished from each other by the criteria used (...) for determining whether an intervention is indeed moral enhancement. For example, some definitions are broad and include moral enhancement by any means, while other definitions focus only on moral enhancement by means of specific types of intervention. Moreover, for some definitions it suffices for an intervention to be aimed or intended to morally enhance a person, while other definitions only refer to ‘moral enhancement’ in relation to interventions that are actually effective. For all these differences in definitions we discuss some of their implications. This shows that definitions are significantly less descriptive and more normative than they are regularly portrayed to be. We therefore hope that the taxonomy developed in this paper and the comments on the implications for the normative debate of the variety of definitions will provide conceptual clarity in a complex and highly interesting debate. (shrink)

"The idea for this book arose in connection with the Workshop on Semantic functions of complementizers in European languages, which we organized in October 28-29, 2011, at the University of Copenhagen, Denmark. Around two thirds of the book chapters are elaborations on contributions to this workshop, the remaining one third arose independently of the workshop.".

The conceptual pair of own-world and common world constitutes an archaic pair, originally introduced by Heraclitus. More than two millennia after its introduction, Binswanger picked up this conceptual pair in the attempt to understand existence and mental disorder. Ever since, this conceptual pair has been part of the conceptualization of schizophrenia in phenomenological psychopathology. However, the concepts of ídios kósmos and koinós kósmos have seldomly been elaborated and expanded upon, and certain unclarities rest within the literature. This paper resolves some (...) of these unclarities and contributes to a theory of anthropological proportions, which furthers our understanding of ídios kósmos and koinós kósmos. The paper begins with an exploration of the theoretical underpinnings of this conceptual pair, i.e., it discusses the concept of world, what is understood by common world, and what it means to live in an own-world. This theoretical exploration segues into an in-depth analysis of the alterations of experiential life in schizophrenia, which can be illuminated via this conceptual pair. It is further argued that this conceptual pair contributes to an understanding of the puzzling phenomenon of double bookkeeping. Finally, the paper concludes in a discussion of clinical implications of this conceptual pair, stressing the importance of a mindfulness of the alterations to the ídios kósmos and koinós kósmos in schizophrenia. (shrink)

In The Myth of Morality Richard Joyce presents a simple and very influential argument for the truth of moral error theory. In this paper I point out that the argument does not have the form Joyce attributes to it, the argument is not valid in an extensional propositional logic and on the most natural way of explicating the meanings of the involved terms, it remains invalid. I conclude that more explanation is needed if we are to accept this particular argument (...) for moral error theory. (shrink)

Name der Zeitschrift: Cognitive Linguistics Jahrgang: 27 Heft: 1 Seiten: 67-100.

Owen Griffiths has recently argued that Etchemendy’s account of logical consequence faces a dilemma. Etchemendy claims that we can be sure that his account does not overgenerate, but that we should expect it to undergenerate. Griffiths argues that if we define the relationship between formal and natural language as being dependent on logical consequence, then Etchemendy’s claims are not true; and if we define the relationship as being independent of logical consequence, then we cannot assess the truth of the claims (...) without further information. I argue that Griffiths misconstrues Etchemendy’s theory and overstates the first horn of the dilemma: Etchemendy does see the relationship as being dependent on logical consequence, but that does not mean that his claims are not true. (shrink)

Name der Zeitschrift: Jahrgang: 13 Heft: 2 Seiten: 170-189.

There is a growing trend in Australia to require lawyers to certify reasonable prospects of success for the cases they bring and defend. New South Wales has led the way with the Legal Profession Act 2004 (NSW) Pt 3.2 Division 10 requiring legal practitioners to certify reasonable prospects of success in all claims for damages. The requirement places a significant onus on lawyers to make a judgment about the merits of a case before it is begun, yet the common law (...) has long provided mechanisms to ensure that cases without prospects of success do not go to trial. This article considers Australian legislative provisions requiring lawyers to certify reasonable prospects of success of cases. It examines the application of the NSW legislation by the courts highlighting the difficulties of interpretation of what constitute 'reasonable prospects of success' and the application of the legislation in the context of the dynamic litigation process. It is argued that these legislated obligations on lawyers will have a detrimental effect on access to justice by denying parties, in particular plaintiffs, the opportunity to have their cases properly and fully determined in the courts. This article examines common law mechanisms for dissuading cases without prospects and argues that the general law is an effective system for ensuring that cases without prospects of success are not maintained. The Australian experience is instructive for consideration of optimal reform packages for the administration of justice and to evaluate the role of any litigation lawyer within the judicial and court process. (shrink)

In 2002 with the passing of the Euthanasia Law, Belgium became one of the few countries worldwide to legalize euthanasia. In the 18 years since the passing of the law, much has changed. We argue that in Belgium a widening of the use of euthanasia is occurring and that this can be ethically and legally problematic. This is in part related to the fact that several legal requirements intended to operate as safeguards and procedural guarantees in reality often fail to (...) operate as such. We focus on three kinds of safeguards or procedural guarantees: the legally defined due care criteria for eligibility for euthanasia; the consultation of a second physician; and the reporting of euthanasia cases to the Federal Control and Evaluation Commission for Euthanasia. We will show how each of these three safeguards can exhibit shortcomings in theory and practice. (shrink)

Advances in life-sustaining medical technology as applied to neonatal cases frequently present ethical concerns with a strong emotional component. Neonates delivered in the gestation period of approximately 23held hostagemoral distress” regarding aggressive courses of treatment for some patients. Some of this distress results from a feeling of powerlessness regarding treatment decisions, coupled with a high intensity of hands-on contact with the patients and family. Lack of authority coupled with high responsibility may itself be a recipe for a different kind of (...) futility. (shrink)

Recombination maps of ancestral species can be constructed from comparative analyses of genomes from closely related species, exemplified by a recently published map of the human‐chimpanzee ancestor. Such maps resolve differences in recombination rate between species into changes along individual branches in the speciation tree, and allow identification of associated changes in the genomic sequences. We describe how coalescent hidden Markov models are able to call individual recombination events in ancestral species through inference of incomplete lineage sorting along a genomic (...) alignment. In the great apes, speciation events are sufficiently close in time that a map can be inferred for the ancestral species at each internal branch ‐ allowing evolution of recombination rate to be tracked over evolutionary time scales from speciation event to speciation event. We see this approach as a way of characterizing the evolution of recombination rate and the genomic properties that influence it. (shrink)

Relational egalitarianism says that moral equals should relate as equals. We explore how moral unequals should relate.

Construed as a theory of justice, relational egalitarianism says that justice requires that people relate as equals. Construed as a theory of what makes democracy valuable, it says that democracy is a necessary, or constituent, part of the value of relating as equals. Typically, relational egalitarians want their theory to provide both an account of what justice requires and an account of what makes democracy valuable. We argue that relational egalitarians with this dual ambition face the justice-democracy dilemma: Understanding social (...) relations in such a way that renders relational egalitarianism plausible as an answer to what makes democracy valuable comes at the price of understanding social relations in a way that makes it less plausible as a theory of justice, and vice versa. We also argue that there is no easy way out of the dilemma and that relational egalitarians, who want relational equality to provide both accounts mentioned, may simply have to set their ambitions lower on behalf of relational equality. (shrink)

Issues surrounding the inclusion of transgender and intersex athletes in the women’s category in sport have spurred vigorous, and sometimes vicious, debate. The loudest voices on one edge of the de...