The classic programme of conceptual engineering (Cappelen, Herman. 2018. Fixing Language: An Essay on Conceptual Engineering. Oxford: Oxford University Press; Eklund, Matti. 2021. “Conceptual Engineering.” In The Routledge Handbook of Social and Political Philosophy of Language, edited by Justin Khoo, and Rachel Sterken, 15–30. London: Routledge) envisages a two-stage ameliorating process. First, we assess ‘F’ and determine what the term should express. Second, we bring it about that ‘F’ expresses what it should express. The second stage gives rise to (...) a practical challenge: the implementation challenge. Engineering advocates need to explain by what means they can implement specific conceptual changes in the natural language shared by a community – a feat Herman Cappelen (2018. Fixing Language: An Essay on Conceptual Engineering. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020; “Conceptual Engineering: The Master Argument.” In Conceptual Engineering and Conceptual Ethics, edited by Alexis Burgess, Herman Cappelen, and David Plunkett, 132–151. Oxford: Oxford University Press) argues to be beyond our understanding and control both on an externalist and on an internalist meta-semantics. I devise a new answer to the implementation challenge. Enlisting the influential theory of social norms by Cristina Bicchieri, I argue that engineering social norms in Bicchieri’s technical sense amounts to an effective, specific, and feasible means to implement specific conceptual change, at least on internalist premises. I also argue that Bicchieri’s social norms are an essential addition to the more familiar conventions and moral norms when it comes to conceptual engineering. (shrink)

Distributed cognition refers to processes which are (i) cognitive and (ii) distributed across multiple agents or devices rather than performed by a single agent. Distributed cognition has attracted interest in several fields ranging from sociology and law to computer science and the philosophy of science. In this paper, I discuss distributed cognition from a social-choice-theoretic perspective. Drawing on models of judgment aggregation, I address two questions. First, how can we model a group of individuals as a distributed cognitive system? (...) Second, can a group acting as a distributed cognitive system be ‘rational’ and ‘track the truth’ in the outputs it produces? I argue that a group’s performance as a distributed cognitive system depends on its ‘aggregation procedure’ – its mechanism for aggregating the group members’ inputs into collective outputs – and I investigate the properties of an aggregation procedure that matter. (shrink)

Applying the concept of social agent in the field of criminology and of penal law is aimed at advancing criminological research and analyzing the operations of penal justice from a perspective other than those generally in use. This, summarized in a very few words, is our principal objective.

The turn of the century saw a significant increase in the amount of attention being paid by philosophers to empirical issues about moral character. Dating back at least to Plato and Aristotle in the West, and Confucius in the East, philosophers have traditionally drawn on empirical data to some extent in their theorizing about character. One of the main differences in recent years has been the source of this empirical data, namely the work of social and personality psychologists on (...) morally relevant thought and action. -/- This entry briefly examines four recent empirical approaches to moral character. It will draw on the psychology literature where appropriate, but the main focus will be on the significance of that work for philosophers interested in better understanding moral character. The four areas are situationism, the CAPS model, the Big Five model, and the VIA. The remainder of this entry devotes a section to each of them. (shrink)

Are companies, churches, and states genuine agents? Or are they just collections of individuals that give a misleading impression of unity? This question is important, since the answer dictates how we should explain the behaviour of these entities and whether we should treat them as responsible and accountable on the model of individual agents. Group Agency offers a new approach to that question and is relevant, therefore, to a range of fields from philosophy to law, politics, and the social (...) sciences. Christian List and Philip Pettit argue that there really are group or corporate agents, over and above the individual agents who compose them, and that a proper approach to the social sciences, law, morality, and politics must take account of this fact. Unlike some earlier defences of group agency, their account is entirely unmysterious in character and, despite not being technically difficult, is grounded in cutting-edge work in social choice theory, economics, and philosophy. (shrink)

I first summarize the main line of argument used by Harman and Doris against Aristotelian virtue ethics in particular. In section two I present what seems to me to be the most promising response to their argument. Finally in section three I briefly review and assess the other leading responses in the now sizable literature that has developed in this area.

Ellen Ripley stands out from the ordinary, stereotypical women in horror and science fiction movies up until the release of Alien in 1979. It isn't hard to interpret Ripley's fight against the Xenomorphs as a metaphor for the feminist struggle against sexual violence directed at women, or to see her actions as violent opposition to those who would deny her sexual self‐determination. Proponents of care‐focused approaches observe that women have a special way of moral reasoning, whereas status‐oriented thinkers seek to (...) overcome gender‐based inequalities and unjust social relationships through criticizing status differences between men and women, like stereotypes and differences in pay for the same work. Two brief examples from Aliens illustrate the difference between these approaches. This chapter considers whether Ripley exercises a feminist ethics of care. In the last scene of Alien, Ripley's strong identification with her professional role shows itself again when she makes a final entry in the Nostromo's log. (shrink)

Several philosophers have recently claimed to have discovered a new and rather significant problem with virtue ethics. According to them, virtue ethics generates certain expectations about the behavior of human beings which are subject to empirical testing. But when the relevant experimental work is done in social psychology, the results fall remarkably short of meeting those expectations. So, these philosophers think, despite its recent success, virtue ethics has far less to offer to contemporary ethical theory than might have been (...) initially thought. I argue that there are plausible ways in which virtue ethicists can resist arguments based on empirical work in social psychology. In the first three sections of the paper, I reconstruct the line of reasoning being used against virtue ethics by looking at the recent work of Gilbert Harman and John Doris. The remainder of the paper is then devoted both to responding to their challenge as well as to briefly sketching a positive account of character trait possession. (shrink)

What is a person? This fundamental question is a perennial concern of philosophers and theologians. But, Christian Smith here argues, it also lies at the center of the social scientist’s quest to interpret and explain social life. In this ambitious book, Smith presents a new model for social theory that does justice to the best of our humanistic visions of people, life, and society. Finding much current thinking on personhood to be confusing or misleading, Smith finds inspiration (...) in critical realism and personalism. Drawing on these ideas, he constructs a theory of personhood that forges a middle path between the extremes of positivist science and relativism. Smith then builds on the work of Pierre Bourdieu, Anthony Giddens, and William Sewell to demonstrate the importance of personhood to our understanding of social structures. From there he broadens his scope to consider how we can know what is good in personal and social life and what sociology can tell us about human rights and dignity. Innovative, critical, and constructive,_ What Is a Person?_ offers an inspiring vision of a social science committed to pursuing causal explanations, interpretive understanding, and general knowledge in the service of truth and the moral good. (shrink)

In this paper I will introduce a practical explication for the notion of expertise. At first, I motivate this attempt by taking a look on recent debates which display great disagreement about whether and how to define expertise in the first place. After that I will introduce the methodology of practical explications in the spirit of Edward Craig’s Knowledge and the state of nature along with some conditions of adequacy taken from ordinary and scientific language. This eventually culminates in the (...) respective explication of expertise according to which this term essentially refers to a certain kind of service-relation. This is why expertise should be considered as a predominantly social kind. This article will end up with a discussion of advantages and prima facie plausible objections against my account of expertise. (shrink)

The two most influential traditions of contemporary theorizing about democracy, social choice theory and deliberative democracy, are generally thought to be at loggerheads, in that the former demonstrates the impossibility, instability or meaninglessness of the rational collective outcomes sought by the latter. We argue that the two traditions can be reconciled. After expounding the central Arrow and Gibbard-Satterthwaite impossibility results, we reassess their implications, identifying the conditions under which meaningful democratic decision making is possible. We argue that deliberation can (...) promote these conditions, and hence that social choice theory suggests not that democratic decision making is impossible, but rather that democracy must have a deliberative aspect. (shrink)

Why does equality matter, as a social and political value, and what does it require? Relational egalitarians argue that it does not require that people receive equal distributive shares of some good, but that they relate as equals. Christian Schemmel here provides the first comprehensive development of a liberal conception of relational equality, one which understands relations of non-domination and egalitarian norms of social status as stringent demands of social justice. He first argues that expressing respect for (...) the freedom and equality of individuals in social cooperation requires stringent protections against domination. Taking this as a starting point, he then develops a substantive, liberal conception of non-domination and argues that non-domination is a particularly important, but not the only, concern of social justice. From there, Schemmel develops an account of the wrongness of inegalitarian norms of social status which shows how status-induced foreclosure of important social opportunities is a social injustice in its own right, over and above the role of status inequality in enabling domination, and the threats it poses to individuals' self-respect. Finally, Schemmel articulates the core requirements of liberal relational egalitarianism for political, economic, and health justice: these amount to demands for far-reaching forms of equality in all three domains, which can rarely, if ever, be overridden by competing concerns. With expert rigor and creativity, Justice and Egalitarian Relations brings together scholarship in a variety of related topics, from social justice and liberalism to distributive and relational equality, social equality, neo-republicanism, and non-denomination. (shrink)

In recent years, an interdisciplinary debate on the social and political role of business corporations has evolved. With this special issue, we would like to facilitate a comprehensive discussion of three questions that are especially pertinent in that debate: (1) How is the social and political agency of corporations to be understood? (2) How should the power of corporations be analyzed? (3) Under which conditions would the social and political roles of corporations be legitimate? In this introduction (...) to the special issue, we start with a short outline of the debate. In the next step, we provide an overview of the five contributions. We conclude by summarizing what can be learned from those contributions with respect to the three research questions. (shrink)

Social choice theory is the study of collective decision processes and procedures. It is not a single theory, but a cluster of models and results concerning the aggregation of individual inputs (e.g., votes, preferences, judgments, welfare) into collective outputs (e.g., collective decisions, preferences, judgments, welfare). Central questions are: How can a group of individuals choose a winning outcome (e.g., policy, electoral candidate) from a given set of options? What are the properties of different voting systems? When is a voting (...) system democratic? How can a collective (e.g., electorate, legislature, collegial court, expert panel, or committee) arrive at coherent collective preferences or judgments on some issues, on the basis of its members' individual preferences or judgments? How can we rank different social alternatives in an order of social welfare? Social choice theorists study these questions not just by looking at examples, but by developing general models and proving theorems. (shrink)

A fresh interpretation of Jeremy Bentham, finding that his “radical foolery” embodied a social ethics that was revolutionary for its time. Jeremy Bentham (1748–1832) is best remembered today as the founder of utilitarianism (a philosophy infamously abused by the Victorians) and the conceiver of the Panopticon, the circular prison house in which all prisoners could be seen by an unseen observer—later seized upon by Michel Foucault as the apotheosis of the neoliberal control society. In this volume in the Untimely (...) Meditation series, Christian Welzbacher offers a new interpretation of Bentham, arguing that his “radical foolery” (paraphrasing Goethe's characterization of Bentham) actually embodied a social ethics that was new for its time and demands proper historical contextualization rather than retroactive analysis from the vantage point of late capitalism. Welzbacher provides just such an analysis, offering an account of the two great utilitarian projects that occupied Bentham all his life: the Panopticon and the Auto-Icon. Welzbacher rescues the Panopticon from the misapprehensions of Foucault, Orwell, and Lacan, arguing that Bentham saw the Panopticon as a pedagogical instrument incorporating the tenets of reason; construction and function, plan and influence, architecture and politics are brought into alignment. Bentham extolled the discovery in words that could easily be ascribed to Le Corbusier, Bruno Taut, or any other modernist architect. The Auto-Icon expressed Bentham's theories that the dead should benefit later generations; these theories were effectively sealed when Bentham decided to have his body preserved and put on display. (It can be seen today in a cabinet at University College London.) He also donated his inner organs to science—a practice outlawed at the time—and posthumously stage-managed his own ceremonial autopsy. Welzbacher reveals a Bentham who raised questions that feel familiar and current, invoking topoi that would come to define the modern era and that reverberate to this day. (shrink)

The goal of this book is to develop a new framework for thinking about what moral character looks like today. My central claim will be that most people have moral character traits, but at the same time they do not have either the traditional  ...

In normative political theory, it is widely accepted that democracy cannot be reduced to voting alone, but that it requires deliberation. In formal social choice theory, by contrast, the study of democracy has focused primarily on the aggregation of individual opinions into collective decisions, typically through voting. While the literature on deliberation has an optimistic flavour, the literature on social choice is more mixed. It is centred around several paradoxes and impossibility results identifying conflicts between different intuitively plausible (...) desiderata. In recent years, there has been a growing dialogue between the two literatures. This paper discusses the connections between them. Important insights are that (i) deliberation can complement aggregation and open up an escape route from some of its negative results; and (ii) the formal models of social choice theory can shed light on some aspects of deliberation, such as the nature of deliberation-induced opinion change. (shrink)

Nach den Anschlagen in Paris, Brussel und Nizza und den verzweifelten Erklarungsversuchen sind die Baden-Badener Reden von Alfred Grosser, Hans Gert-Pottering und Robert Zollitsch eine grosse Hilfe. Eine Hilfe, die schmerzenden Erfahrungen des Augenblicks in einen grosseren Zusammenhang zu bringen. Wenn etwa Alfred Grosser in seiner Rede den Bogen zu seiner eigenen Biografie hin zu den Banlieues unserer Tage in Paris spannt. "Ich bin seit 1937 Franzose, unsere Erziehungsministerin ist Franzosin seit 1995, unser Premierminister seit 1982, die Burgermeisterin von Paris (...) seit 1973, Nicolas Sarkozy ist Fluchtlingssohn. Niemand wird sagen, sie sind nicht Franzosen. Aber die jungen Leute in den sogenannten "Vororten" sind fast alle franzosische Staatsburger und werden total diskriminiert. Also, sie haben die franzosische Identitat, gewiss, aber sie suchen eine andere Identitat und das ist der Islam. Nicht der Islam war zuerst da, sondern die Diskriminierung.". (shrink)

This study aims to characterize the different types of certification in the Brazilian citriculture as well as analyze the major changes in the market. The paper also has the objective to discuss how social and environmental factors influence the demand for food certifications and the sustainability and ethics aspects in the field. Therefore, a literature review on the subject was carried out as well as a qualitative research using interviews with certifiers, governmental institutions, farmers, cooperatives and producer associations. The (...) certification is becoming mandatory for those working in foreign markets and for those working nationally; it can be a competitive differential. The organic certification in citriculture shows the highest number of growers. Companies with large areas of citrus and the orange juice processing industry are adhering to this certification in order to maintain themselves competitive in the market. There is an enormous potential of Brazilian citriculture certification, because the certified area is still less than 6 % of the total area. Certification reduces the asymmetry of information and consists of an important step towards sustainability although incapable of solely guaranteeing it. (shrink)

This book first reviews Miller's theory of Mixed Traits, as developed in his 2013 book Moral Character: An Empirical Theory. It then engages extensively with situations, the CAPS model in social psychology, and the Big Five Model in personality psychology. It ends by taking up implications for his view in meta-ethics (a modified error theory) and normative ethics (a challenge for virtue ethics).

Pour chaque volume de la collection Lectures de..., l'éditeur a fait appel aux universitaires les plus éminents dans le souci d'offrir au public francophone un ensemble d'études, hors de tout parti pris, sur les principaux philosophes de l'Antiquité à nos jours. Longtemps tenu pour un auteur ésotérique, Wittgenstein est aujourd'hui une référence centrale dans la vie intellectuelle, et il ne s'agit plus d'un simple effet de mode. Son oeuvre est présente dans le paysage international, non seulement en philosophie, mais aussi (...) en sciences humaines et sociales : la sociologie, l'anthropologie, la philosophie du droit et de l'économie s'en inspirent. Elle a largement débordé le monde anglophone, où elle façonne une partie de la réflexion depuis plus d'un demi-siècle. Pourtant, l'appréhension philosophique de cette oeuvre est loin d'être univoque, puisque l'on a assisté, depuis la mort de Wittgenstein en 1951, à une série de lectures divergentes de ses textes, dont les plus prégnantes méritent d'être ici expliquées. Les points de vue sur Wittgenstein se sont par ailleurs multipliés : d'abord lu dans les années 1950-1960 comme philosophe avant tout logicien, en fonction du Tractatus et dans le sillage de ses maîtres Frege et Russell, comme mystique ou comme philosophe du langage, au vu de sa "seconde" philosophie, il apparaît ensuite comme l'auteur d'une oeuvre complexe et multidimensionnelle touchant à des questions de philosophie générale (expérience, signification, réalité, etc.). Le présent ouvrage se donne pour tâche de cartographier ce réseau complexe qu'est la philosophie de Wittgenstein, d'abord en présentant les grands textes et les thèmes majeurs qui ont jalonné son parcours philosophique, puis en introduisant aux différentes lectures qui en ont été proposées dans la tradition interprétative. (shrink)

This volume examines whether the “public sphere” remains a central explanatory model in the social sciences, political theory, and the humanities.

This paper uses social network analysis to examine the interaction between corporate blogs devoted to sustainability issues and the blogosphere, a clustered online network of collaborative actors. By analyzing the structural embeddedness of a prototypical blog in a virtual community, we show the potential of online platforms to document corporate social responsibility (CSR) activities and to engage with an increasingly socially and ecologically aware stakeholder base. The results of this study show that stakeholder involvement via sustainability blogs is (...) a valuable new practice for CSR communications and stakeholder engagement. It also opens new horizons for communicating CSR issues to key constituencies online. (shrink)

Many theories of social justice maintain that concern for the social bases of self-respect grounds demanding requirements of political and economic equality, as self-respect is supposed to be dependent on continuous just recognition by others. This paper argues that such views miss an important feature of self-respect, which accounts for much of its value: self-respect is a capacity for self-orientation that is robust under adversity. This does not mean that there are no social bases of self-respect that (...) such theories ought to incorporate. It means that they are different: they consist of the motivational and epistemic resources needed to develop and maintain such robustness. (shrink)

Suppose that the members of a group each hold a rational set of judgments on some interconnected questions, and imagine that the group itself has to form a collective, rational set of judgments on those questions. How should it go about dealing with this task? We argue that the question raised is subject to a difficulty that has recently been noticed in discussion of the doctrinal paradox in jurisprudence. And we show that there is a general impossibility theorem that that (...) difficulty illustrates. Our paper describes this impossibility result and provides an exploration of its significance. The result naturally invites comparison with Kenneth Arrow's famous theorem (Arrow, 1963 and 1984; Sen, 1970) and we elaborate that comparison in a companion paper (List and Pettit, 2002). The paper is in four sections. The first section documents the need for various groups to aggregate its members' judgments; the second presents the discursive paradox; the third gives an informal statement of the more general impossibility result; the formal proof is presented in an appendix. The fourth section, finally, discusses some escape routes from that impossibility. (shrink)

The aim of this exploratory paper is to review an under-appreciated parallel between group agency and artificial intelligence. As both phenomena involve non-human goal-directed agents that can make a difference to the social world, they raise some similar moral and regulatory challenges, which require us to rethink some of our anthropocentric moral assumptions. Are humans always responsible for those entities’ actions, or could the entities bear responsibility themselves? Could the entities engage in normative reasoning? Could they even have rights (...) and a moral status? I will tentatively defend the (increasingly widely held) view that, under certain conditions, artificial intelligent systems, like corporate entities, might qualify as responsible moral agents and as holders of limited rights and legal personhood. I will further suggest that regulators should permit the use of autonomous artificial systems in high-stakes settings only if they are engineered to function as moral (not just intentional) agents and/or there is some liability-transfer arrangement in place. I will finally raise the possibility that if artificial systems ever became phenomenally conscious, there might be a case for extending a stronger moral status to them, but argue that, as of now, this remains very hypothetical. (shrink)

The interdisciplinary debate about the nature of expertise often conflates having expertise with either the individual possession of competences or a certain role ascription. In contrast to this, the paper attempts to demonstrate how different dimensions of expertise ascription are inextricably interwoven. As a result, a balanced account of expertise will be proposed that more accurately determines the closer relationship between the expert’s dispositions, their manifestations and the expert’s function. This finally results in an advanced understanding of expertise that views (...) someone as an expert only if she is undefeatedly disposed to fulfill a contextually salient service function adequately at the moment of assessment. (shrink)

Mass media ethics and the classical liberal ideal of the autonomous individual are historically linked and professionally dominant--yet the authors of this work feel this is intrinsically flawed. They show how recent research in philosophy and social science--together with a longer tradition in theological inquiry--insist that community, mutuality, and relationship are fundamental to a full concept of personhood. The authors argue that "persons-in-community" provides a more defensible grounding for journalists' professional moral decision-making in crucial areas such as truthtelling, privacy, (...) organizational culture, and balanced coverage. With numerous examples drawn from life as well as from theory, this book will interest journalists, editors, and professionals in media management as well as students and scholars of media ethics, reporting, and media law. (shrink)

The central virtue at issue in recent philosophical discussions of the empirical adequacy of virtue ethics has been the virtue of compassion. Opponents of virtue ethics such as Gilbert Harman and John Doris argue that experimental results from social psychology concerning helping behavior are best explained not by appealing to so-called ‘global’ character traits like compassion, but rather by appealing to external situational forces or, at best, to highly individualized ‘local’ character traits. In response, a number of philosophers have (...) argued that virtue ethics can accommodate the empirical results in question. My own view is that neither side of this debate is looking in the right direction. For there is an impressive array of evidence from the social psychology literature which suggests that many people do possess one or more robust global character traits pertaining to helping others in need. But at the same time, such traits are noticeably different from a traditional virtue like compassion. (shrink)

I first summarize the central issues in the debate about the empirical adequacy of virtue ethics, and then examine the role that social psychologists claim positive and negative mood have in influencing compassionate helping behavior. I argue that this psychological research is compatible with the claim that many people might instantiate certain character traits after all which allow them to help others in a wide variety of circumstances. Unfortunately for the virtue ethicist, however, it turns out that these helping (...) traits fall well short of exhibiting certain central features of compassion. (shrink)

"Nous pensons dans la langue et communiquons grâce à elle. Or les langues diffèrent, selon le temps et le lieu, et rendent nécessaire l'acte de traduire, l'effort de dire la même chose autrement.

This paper generalises the classical Condorcet jury theorem from majority voting over two options to plurality voting over multiple options. The paper further discusses the debate between epistemic and procedural democracy and situates its formal results in that debate. The paper finally compares a number of different social choice procedures for many-option choices in terms of their epistemic merits. An appendix explores the implications of some of the present mathematical results for the question of how probable majority cycles (as (...) in Condorcet's paradox) are in large electorates. (shrink)

Chez Saint-Simon, la substitution d'une réorganisation sociale et d'un autre rapport à la nature à l'exploitation de l'homme par l'homme, de l'administration des choses au gouvernement des hommes, entre autres, ont pris corps théoriquement en partant de l'expérience plutôt que de 'raisonnements a priori' (Le Producteur, oct. 1825 - oct. 1826). De la lecture de ses Œuvres éditées pour la première fois en 2012 en Œuvres complètes émergent des liens entre action et pensée, corps et esprit. Le saint-simonisme (1825-1835) apparaît, (...) au lendemain de la Révolution de Juillet, comme un 'espace-temps' élargi aux prolétaires et aux femmes attirés par cette 'nouvelle et puissante doctrine', prêts à s'impliquer dans la pratique de ces liens et les discussions dramatiques entre les deux 'Pères', Bazard et Enfantin (sur la 'question de la femme', les rapports internes et externes - silence sur les émeutes des canuts lyonnais). Saint-Simon et le saint-simonisme ont été /sont des 'passe-frontières' entre les sexes, les cultures, les états (réciprocité des échanges avec la Toscane pré-unitaire et l'Allemagne des intellectuels post-hégeliens). À la promesse 'd'être sincères en tout', véritable leitmotiv du saint-simonisme, les 'prolétaires saint-simoniennes' ont répondu en créant un mouvement autonome où vivre leur désir de ne pas séparer cœur, corps et esprit, 'dans la foi religieuse qui nous donne la force de vaincre' (La femme libre, 1832) ; par la création de cette forme sociale-politique et l'audace de leur pensée, elles ont précédé les hommes ; leurs écrits et ceux de leurs proches (Cl. Démar, S. Voilquin) nous bouleversent encore. Des formes de créativité étonnamment populaires sont nées en Provence sur les décombres de la société d'ordre, telles les chansons provençales de V. Gelu à Marseille (1837-1855) et ses 'Notes biographiques' écrites en français (rééditées en partie à la fin XXe siècle), tel Le marquis des Saffras, roman du saint-simonien J. de la Madelène (1849) réédité plusieurs fois. Femmes et hommes se réfèrant au 'vrai', chez lesquels la totalité de l'être est engagée dans le sillage de Saint-Simon, n'inventent-ils pas le politique moderne à l'encontre des codes et des chartes fustigés par Cl. Démar (1833)? Le saint-simonisme n'a-t-il pas été la matrice de la sociologie avec la découverte du rapport à l'autre, dégagée du moralisme étouffant du 'Me siècle (S. Zweig), peut-être articulée à la naissance du féminisme? N'a-t-il pas généré une nouvelle manière de penser que la Ille République aurait tenté d'annihiler (imposition du positivisme comme philosophie centrale) et les prémices de la découverte freudienne?"--Page 4 of cover. (shrink)

Political science is divided between methodological individualists, who seek to explain political phenomena by reference to individuals and their interactions, and holists (or nonreductionists), who consider some higher-level social entities or properties such as states, institutions, or cultures ontologically or causally significant. We propose a reconciliation between these two perspectives, building on related work in philosophy. After laying out a taxonomy of different variants of each view, we observe that (i) although political phenomena result from underlying individual attitudes and (...) behavior, individual-level descriptions do not always capture all explanatorily salient properties, and (ii) nonreductionistic explanations are mandated when social regularities are robust to changes in their individual-level realization. We characterize the dividing line between phenomena requiring nonreductionistic explanation and phenomena permitting individualistic explanation and give examples from the study of ethnic conflicts, social-network theory, and international-relations theory. (shrink)

The importance of communicating corporate social responsibility (CSR) not only to socially responsible investors but also to the mainstream of the financial community is gaining importance in a more competitive capital market environment. This article looks at how equity analysts at the German stock exchange in Frankfurt – individuals who are not particularly involved in socially responsible investment (SRI) research – perceive economic, legal, ethical and philanthropic responsibility strategies. The evidence obtained in our interviews suggests that responsibility issues are (...) increasingly becoming part of mainstream investment analysis. However, for them to play a larger part in the future, investor relations personnel must frame responsibility strategies in a way that is more consistent with the financial community's perspective. In particular, the impact of CSR measures on strategic development, competitive anticipation and creating trust with stakeholders are key in leveraging CSR in financial communications. (shrink)

Contemporary Christian ethics encounters the challenge to communicate genuinely Christian normative orientations within the scientific debate in such a way as to render these orientations comprehensible, and to maintain or enhance their plausibility even for non-Christians. This essay, therefore, proceeds from a biblical motif, takes up certain themes from the Christian tradition (in particular the idea of social justice), and connects both with a compelling contemporary approach to ethics by secular moral philosophy, i.e. with Axel Honneth's reception of Hegel, (...) as based on Hegel's theory of recognition. As a first step, elements of an ethics of recognition are developed on the basis of an anthropological recourse to the conditions of intersubjective encounters. These conditions are then brought to bear on the idea of social justice, as developed in the social-Catholic tradition, and as systematically explored in the Pastoral Letter of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, Economic Justice For All (1986). Proceeding from this basis, aspects of a Christian ethics of community service with regard to long-term care can be defined. (shrink)

In ‘Normative Uncertainty as a Voting Problem’, William MacAskill argues that positive credence in ordinal-structured or intertheoretically incomparable normative theories does not prevent an agent from rationally accounting for her normative uncertainties in practical deliberation. Rather, such an agent can aggregate the theories in which she has positive credence by methods borrowed from voting theory—specifically, MacAskill suggests, by a kind of weighted Borda count. The appeal to voting methods opens up a promising new avenue for theories of rational choice under (...) normative uncertainty. The Borda rule, however, is open to at least two serious objections. First, it seems implicitly to ‘cardinalize’ ordinal theories, and so does not fully face up to the problem of merely ordinal theories. Second, the Borda rule faces a problem of option individuation. MacAskill attempts to solve this problem by invoking a measure on the set of practical options. But it is unclear that there is any natural way of defining such a measure that will not make the output of the Borda rule implausibly sensitive to irrelevant empirical features of decision-situations. After developing these objections, I suggest an alternative: the McKelvey uncovered set, a Condorcet method that selects all and only the maximal options under a strong pairwise defeat relation. This decision rule has several advantages over Borda and mostly avoids the force of MacAskill’s objection to Condorcet methods in general. (shrink)

The importance of communicating corporate social responsibility (CSR) not only to socially responsible investors but also to the mainstream of the financial community is gaining importance in a more competitive capital market environment. This article looks at how equity analysts at the German stock exchange in Frankfurt – individuals who are not particularly involved in socially responsible investment (SRI) research – perceive economic, legal, ethical and philanthropic responsibility strategies. The evidence obtained in our interviews suggests that responsibility issues are (...) increasingly becoming part of mainstream investment analysis. However, for them to play a larger part in the future, investor relations personnel must frame responsibility strategies in a way that is more consistent with the financial community's perspective. In particular, the impact of CSR measures on strategic development, competitive anticipation and creating trust with stakeholders are key in leveraging CSR in financial communications. (shrink)

Much recent philosophical work on social freedom focuses on whether freedom should be understood as non-interference, in the liberal tradition associated with Isaiah Berlin, or as non-domination, in the republican tradition revived by Philip Pettit and Quentin Skinner. We defend a conception of freedom that lies between these two alternatives: freedom as independence. Like republican freedom, it demands the robust absence of relevant constraints on action. Unlike republican, and like liberal freedom, it is not moralized. We show that freedom (...) as independence retains the virtues of its liberal and republican counterparts while shedding their vices. Our aim is to put this conception of freedom more firmly on the map and to offer a novel perspective on the logical space in which different conceptions of freedom are located. (shrink)

The phrase after Auschwitz plays a central role in Adorno's oeuvre. To him, the industrialized genocide of Jews, Sinti and Roma, and Slavic people at death camps like Auschwitz, the systematic mass killing of human beings labeled “life unworthy of life” by their murderers and the ideologues behind them, the ruthlessness and utter contempt for humanity of the Nazi German perpetrators of these unimaginable crimes, give those who live after Auschwitz certainties about the extent of human cruelty as well as (...) human torment that undermine any trust in civilization and social progress, in traditional appeals to meaning, beauty, truth, or goodness. The clearest theoretical expression of these certainties can be found in Adorno's impossibility claims about poetry and art, about the good life, about metaphysical fundamentals. This contribution will examine these impossibility claims in order to clarify the philosophical role of Adorno's phrase after Auschwitz in his own works, but also in order to place Adorno's reflections on life and thought after Auschwitz with respect to our contemporary situation. (shrink)

Is equality a distributive value or does it rather point to the quality of social relationships? This article criticizes the distributive character of luck egalitarian theories of justice and fleshes out the central characteristics of an alternative, relational approach to equality. It examines a central objection to distributive theories: that such theories cannot account for the significance of how institutions treat people (as opposed to the outcomes they bring about). I discuss two variants of this objection: first, that distributive (...) theories fail to account for the importance of how institutions cause good shortfalls and, second, that they fail to account for the normative attitude of social and political institutions expressed in different ways of treating people. The article argues that the causal variant of the objection has only very limited reach, and endorses the expressive variant: the attitudes expressed by institutions in their treatment of persons, such as contempt or neglect, generate potentially unjust social relationships and hierarchies. This should be the focus of a relational egalitarian approach to social justice. The article proceeds to explain how it is possible that artificial agents such as institutions have attitudes and how these attitudes are not reducible to those of the individuals that sustain them, and argues that distributive theories cannot be so modified as to account for such attitudes. It concludes by indicating several directions for the development of more worked-out conceptions of relational equality on this basis. (shrink)

A social responsibility (SR) theory of the press has emerged in various democratic societies worldwide since World War II. The Hutchins Commission in the United States is the source of this paradigm in some cases, but a similar emphasis on serving society rather than commerce or government has also arisen in parallel fashion without any connection to Hutchins. Professionalism and codes of professional ethics are too narrow to serve as the framework for a global SR paradigm of the 21st (...) century. Instead, universal ethical principles are the most appropriate framework, and the cross-cultural axis around which these principles revolve is the sacredness of human life. Embedded in the protonorm of human sacredness are such ethical principles as human dignity, truthtelling, and nonmaleficence. These principles are citizen ethics rather than professional ethics; they are set in the social domain where SR gets its rationale. They provide a frame of reference internationally for assessing local news media practices and formulating codes of ethics. (shrink)