While the concept of adaptive preferences is an important tool for criticizing injustice, it is often claimed that using the concept involves showing disrespect for persons judged to have adaptive preferences. In this paper, I propose an account of adaptive preferences that does the relevant political work while still showing persons two centrally important kinds of respect. My account is based in what I call an indirect substantive account of autonomy, which places substantive requirements on the options available to a (...) person, rather than on the option that she ultimately prefers. This allows us to pinpoint cases in which a person's circumstances have rendered her insufficiently autonomous, without saying that any conception of the good must be non-autonomous tout court. (shrink)

In this paper, I argue for the counter-intuitive conclusion that the same adaptive preference can be both prudentially good and prudentially bad for its holder: that is, it can be prudentially objectionable from one temporal perspective, but prudentially unobjectionable from another. Given the possibility of transformative experiences, there is an important sense in which even worrisome adaptive preferences can be prudentially good for us. That is, if transformative experiences lead us to develop adaptive preferences, then their objects can become prudentially (...) better for our actual selves than the objects of their non-adaptive alternatives would now be. I also argue, however, that the same worrisome adaptive preferences might still be prospectively prudentially objectionable: that is, our pre-transformation selves might be prudentially better off undergoing a non-adaptive alternative transformative experience instead. I argue that both claims hold across the range of the most broadly-defended accounts of well-being in the literature. (shrink)

In this article, I first propose four guidelines that follow from understanding the project of assigning victims duties to resist oppression as an ameliorative project. That is, if we understand the project to be motivated by the urgent aim of ending or mitigating the harm that oppression imposes on the oppressed, I argue that we should focus on developing and assigning duties that satisfy what I call the ability, weighting, fairness, and overdemandingness guidelines. Second, I develop the duty to be (...) a non-normative individual, which satisfies all four guidelines. (shrink)

Although the problem of adaptiveness plays an important motivating role in her work on human capabilities, Martha Nussbaum never gives a clear account of the controversial concept of adaptive preferences on which she relies. In this paper, I aim both to reconstruct the most plausible account of the concept that may be attributed to Nussbaum and to provide a critical appraisal of that account. Although her broader work on the capabilities approach moves progressively towards political liberalism as time passes, I (...) aim to show that her account of adaptive preferences continues to maintain her earlier commitment to perfectionism about the good. I then distinguish between two obligatory kinds of respect for persons, which I call, respectively, primary and secondary recognition respect. This distinction allows us to see that her perfectionist account of adaptive preferences allows her to show persons primary but not secondary recognition respect. Ultimately, I claim that an acceptable account of adaptive prefer.. (shrink)

Accounts of adaptive preferences are of two kinds: well-being accounts fully theorized for their own sake and political accounts theorized to facilitate the political project of reducing oppression and marginalization. Given their practical role, the latter are often less fully theorized, and are therefore less robust to theoretical criticism. In this paper, I first draw on well-being accounts to identify the well-theorized elements that political accounts should want to adopt in order to strengthen their project and avoid common criticisms. Second, (...) I appeal to the political project to show the shortcomings of the well-being accounts on which I draw. (shrink)

In this article, I develop a tension in the capabilities approach between committing to political liberalism and ensuring full capability for all persons. In particular, I argue that the capabiliti...

A purely theoretical analysis of Martha Nussbaum’s basis of the capabilities approach in feminist (rather than more broadly liberal humanist) justice yields a philosophical project that may appear inconsistent, if not incoherent. However, I suggest in this paper that when the reader considers the project’s very concrete aims, there surfaces an intelligible reason for the apparent incongruities between her feminist and liberal commitments. Since even a capabilities approach rooted in feminist justice is itself radical and must win political support in (...) order to be implemented, I suggest that Nussbaum’s basis of the approach in feminist justice can perhaps be understood as a canny attempt to win support for her project on politically popular grounds, using the rhetoric of sex and social justice that has already been embraced by current economic powers. Once arguments based on morally irrelevant differences between sexes are politically endorsed, it will perhaps be easier to argue for the directly parallel moral irrelevance of differences based on accident of birth into the underdeveloped world. (shrink)

Political philosophers working on ideal and non-ideal theory sometimes seem to be stuck in a bind: while ideal theory risks being too ideal to be useful in the real world, non-ideal theory risks being so non-ideal that it stops far short of justice. In this paper, I highlight a third – and equally unappealing – possibility: that non-ideal theory, precisely because of its obvious engagement with real-world problems, might fail to recognize the unacceptable ways in which it is itself problematically (...) idealized. I highlight this problem through the case-study of adaptive preferences. Although work in adaptive preferences obviously fits into non-ideal theory, the actual work being done in the literature is idealized in that it takes only the circumstances and needs of adults into account. In the best case, this means that the needs of one of our most vulnerable populations – that is, children – are ignored. In the worst case, where the needs of children and adults conflict, the needs of children will be actively frustrated. In this way, non-ideal theory can fail to approximate justice precisely because it fails to recognize the idealizations that it itself employs. (shrink)

In this thesis I argue that the tradition of political philosophy which follows in John Rawls's footsteps is obligated to concern itself not only with the realizability, but also with the realization, of justice. Although Rawls himself expresses a commitment only to the former of these, I argue that the roles which he assigns to political philosophy require him to take on the further commitment to realization. This is because these roles are meant to influence not only political philosophers, but (...) the citizens of the wider community as well. The realistically utopian role, which I take to be the central one, requires political philosophy to inspire in that population a hope which I argue that realizability alone cannot provide. Given the deep revisions regarding the political nature of justice as fairness which Rawls made on the basis of realizability concerns, I argue that his theory must in this case be committed to a similar revision. The hope which political philosophy is meant to provide is simply not realizable until the discipline concerns itself centrally with the task of realization. (shrink)

In this article, I argue that opposite-sex couples planning weddings have a duty to make their choices in ways that undermine the harmful norms that lead to most women taking their husband’s last names when they marry, and most weddings being extremely expensive. This duty, however, is not a duty to significantly reduce the prevalence of those norms, since doing so is generally not in the power of individual couples. Rather, it is a duty to provide observing couples around them (...) with new live options for their own weddings. (shrink)

In this paper I show the short-comings of autonomy-based justifications for exemptions from paternalism and appeal to the value of settling to defend an alternative well-being-based justification. My well-being-based justification, unlike autonomy-based justifications, can 1) explain why adults but not children are exempt from paternalism; 2) show which kinds of paternalism are justified for children; 3) explain the value of the capacity of autonomy; 4) offer a plausible relationship between autonomy and exemption from paternalism; and 5) give political philosophers a (...) justification for exempting persons from paternalism even if broad scepticism about the capacity for autonomy is justified. (shrink)

In this paper, I use the framework developed by Julie Rose in Free Time to offer an initial analysis of another under-theorized resource that liberal egalitarian states might owe their citizens: that is, the sense of moral of entitlement to make use of their basic liberties. First, I suggest that this sense of moral entitlement, like free time, might be necessary for the effective use of those basic liberties. Next, I suggest that this sense of moral entitlement (again, like free (...) time) might be the kind of all-purpose good that satisfies publicity and feasibility criteria. Together, this suggests that a sense of moral entitlement to make use of basic liberties is the kind of resource that is appropriate for distribution by a liberal egalitarian state, and that such states indeed owe their citizens. (shrink)

Philosophical Papers, Volume 41, Issue 2, Page 323-329, July 2012.

Martha Nussbaum grounds her version of the capabilities approach in political liberalism. In this paper, we argue that the capabilities approach, insofar as it genuinely values the things that persons can actually do and be, must be grounded in a hybrid account of liberalism: in order to show respect for adults, its justification must be political; in order to show respect for children, however, its implementation must include a commitment to comprehensive autonomy, one that ensures that children develop the skills (...) necessary to make meaningful choices about whether or not to exercise their basic capabilities. Importantly, in order to show respect for parents who do not necessarily recognize autonomy as a value, we argue that the liberal state, via its system of public education, should take on the role of ensuring that all children within the state develop a sufficient degree of comprehensive autonomy. (shrink)

ABSTRACTSerene Khader and Rosa Terlazzo have each recently proposed theories of adaptive preferences which purport to both respect persons’ agency and provide an effective political tool. While Khader and Terlazzo thus share a similar goal, they take fundamentally different paths in its pursuit: Khader offers a perfectionist account of APs and Terlazzo an autonomy-based theory. In this paper, I argue first that if it is to adequately respect persons’ agency, a theory of APs should in some (...) way include autonomy considerations. If it is to provide an effective political tool, however, our theory should not be entirely autonomy-based, but include a condition addressing a preference’s compatibility with basic flourishing. The suggestion is thus that it is worth considering the possibility of a ‘mixed,’ rather than exclusively perfectionist or exclusively autonomy-based, theory of APs. I outline two such theories. The first, I argue, does quite well with respect to the political efficacy aim of AP theoriz... (shrink)

Heidegger, Lukacs and Heller confronted the “crisis” of modernity already at the beginning of their own paths of thinking and asked how to address it. Lukacs did never completely lose faith in politics, whereas Heidegger and Heller only briefly leant on a party to direct the course of history. Heidegger and Lukacs described modem life as an “unowned” existence occasioned by the metaphysics’ “forgetfulness of Being” and the “reification of consciousness” in the late capitalism respectively. Whilst Heidegger entrusted the task (...) of preparing a “turning” to the thinking of the truth of Being and Lukacs assigned materialistic dialectic to undertake a revolution, Heller worked out an ethics of responsibility that can both keep under control the modernity’s “dark side” and make again fruitful in today’s multicultural society the main achievement of the modem age, that is, freedom. (shrink)

This paper proposes a formal top-level model of explaining the outputs of machine-learning-based decision-making applications and evaluates it experimentally with three data sets. The model draws on AI & law research on argumentation with cases, which models how lawyers draw analogies to past cases and discuss their relevant similarities and differences in terms of relevant factors and dimensions in the problem domain. A case-based approach is natural since the input data of machine-learning applications can be seen as cases. While the (...) approach is motivated by legal decision making, it also applies to other kinds of decision making, such as commercial decisions about loan applications or employee hiring, as long as the outcome is binary and the input conforms to this paper’s factor- or dimension format. The model is top-level in that it can be extended with more refined accounts of similarities and differences between cases. It is shown to overcome several limitations of similar argumentation-based explanation models, which only have binary features and do not represent the tendency of features towards particular outcomes. The results of the experimental evaluation studies indicate that the model may be feasible in practice, but that further development and experimentation is needed to confirm its usefulness as an explanation model. Main challenges here are selecting from a large number of possible explanations, reducing the number of features in the explanations and adding more meaningful information to them. It also remains to be investigated how suitable our approach is for explaining non-linear models. (shrink)

Throughout his long intellectual life, Leibniz penned his reflections on Christian theology, yet this wealth of material has never been systematically gathered or studied. This book addresses an important and central aspect of these neglected materials—Leibniz’s writings on two mysteries central to Christian thought, the Trinity and the Incarnation. -/- From Antognazza’s study emerges a portrait of a thinker surprisingly receptive to traditional Christian theology and profoundly committed to defending the legitimacy of truths beyond the full grasp of human reason. (...) This view of Leibniz differs strikingly from traditional perceptions of the philosopher as a “hard” rationalist and quasi-deist. Antognazza also sets Leibniz’s writings in the context of the important theological controversies of his day. (shrink)

A number of experiences have demonstrated how digital solutions are effective in improving quality of life (QoL) and health outcomes for older adults. Smart Health Age-Friendly Environments (SHAFE) is a new concept introduced in Europe since 2017 that combines the concept of Age-Friendly Environments with Information Technologies, supported by health and community care to improve the health and disease management of older adults and during the life-course. This chapter aims to provide an initial overview of the experiences available not only (...) in Europe, based on the research work of the participants of the International Interdisciplinary Network on Health and Well-being in an Age-Friendly Digital World (NET4Age-Friendly), which could be of interest to preventive, health and social authorities. The chapter reports good practices, pain points, and bottlenecks that may require a collaborative, interdisciplinary research approach to facilitate the transformations towards smart, sustainable, health and age-friendly cities and communities. (shrink)

In this paper I argue that, in Leibniz’s mature metaphysics, primary matter is not a positive constituent which must be added to the form in order to have a substance. Primary matter is merely a way to express the negation of some further perfection. It does not have a positive ontological status and merely indicates the limitation or imperfection of a substance. To be sure, Leibniz is less than explicit on this point, and in many texts he writes as if (...) primary matter were a positive constituent of a substance. It seems to me, however, that the view most in keeping with the thrust of his mature philosophical system is that captured by a striking remark of 1695: “Materia rerum est nihilum: id est limitatio [The matter of things is nothing: that is, limitation].” This becomes especially apparent in texts showing that Leibniz’s conception of primary matter corresponds to his conception of creaturely limitation. I start by discussing the notion of primary matter in the scholastic tradition. I then show that although Leibniz places the scholastic terminology of primary matter at a crucial juncture of his metaphysics, he thinks of primary matter in a way which significantly deviates from earlier scholastic views. I conclude that despite his adoption of distinctive terminology of Aristotelian scholasticism, instead of holding a broadly Aristotelian concept of primary matter as the ultimate subject of inherence, Leibniz thinks of primary matter according to a Neoplatonic blue-print in which matter is non-being, privation, mere absence of perfection. (shrink)

In this article, we focus on a particular kind of emotional impact of the pandemic, namely the phenomenology of the experience of moral injury in healthcare professionals. Drawing on Weber's reflections in his lecture Politics as a Vocation and data from the Experiences of Social Distancing during the COVID-19 Pandemic Survey, we analyse responses from healthcare professionals which show the experiences of burnout, sense of frustration and impotence, and how these affect clinicians’ emotional state. We argue that this may relate (...) to the ethical conflicts they experience when they are forced to make clinical decisions where there are no optimal outcomes, and how in turn that impacts on their own emotional state. We then further examine the notion of ‘burnout’ and the phenomenology of ‘moral injury’. Our argument is that these experiences of moral injury across a range of clinicians during the pandemic may be more prevalent and long-standing in psychiatry and mental health than in other areas of healthcare, where ethically difficult decisions and resource constraints are common outside times of crisis. Hence, in these clinical arenas, moral injury and the phenomenology of emotional changes may be independent of the pandemic. The insights gained during the pandemic may provide wider insights into the challenges of developing services and training the workforce to provide appropriate mental health care. (shrink)

The concept of Smart Healthy Age-Friendly Environments (SHAFE) emphasises the comprehensive person-centred experience as essential to promoting living environments. SHAFE takes an interdisciplinary approach, conceptualising complete and multidisciplinary solutions for an inclusive society. From this approach, we promote participation, health, and well-being experiences by finding the best possible combinations of social, physical, and digital solutions in the community. This initiative emerged bottom-up in Europe from the dream and conviction that innovation can improve health equity, foster caring communities, and sustainable development. (...) Smart, adaptable, and inclusive solutions can promote and support independence and autonomy throughout the lifespan, regardless of age, gender, disabilities, cultural differences, and personal choices, as well as promote happier and fairer living places. The New European Bauhaus initiative gathers “beautiful, sustainable, and inclusive projects and ideas” to inspire a positive transformation around us. The New European Bauhaus 2024 Festival took place between 9-13 April. “Designing the perfect New European Bauhaus neighbourhood: New European Bauhaus meets SHAFE” was a Satellite Event of the Festival, held as an online workshop, organised by the SHAFE Foundation on April 9th, 2024. At the event, a group of 50 participants with a multidisciplinary background discussed how to meet the challenges of the European Garcia family to enable them to live in a perfect neighbourhood. The White Paper presents the findings of the participants with the New European Bauhaus inspiring projects and ideas to house the European Garcia family in their neighbourhood. The White Paper recommends developers, designers, planners, and policymakers to include person-centred design of social and physical environments and technologies. Although awareness of person-centred design is growing, many initiatives still hamper the inclusion of citizens or end-users throughout the development of products and services. (shrink)

8 March, now known as International Women’s Day, is a day for feminist claims where demonstrations are organized in over 150 countries, with the participation of millions of women all around the world. These demonstrations can be viewed as collective rituals and thus focus attention on the processes that facilitate different psychosocial effects. This work aims to explore the mechanisms involved in participation in the demonstrations of 8 March 2020, collective and ritualized feminist actions, and their correlates associated with personal (...) well-being and collective well-being, collective efficacy and collective growth, and behavioral intention to support the fight for women’s rights. To this end, a cross-cultural study was conducted with the participation of 2,854 people from countries in Latin America and Europe, with a retrospective correlational cross-sectional design and a convenience sample. Participants were divided between demonstration participants and non-demonstrators or followers who monitored participants through the media and social networks. Compared with non-demonstrators and with males, female and non-binary gender respondents had greater scores in mechanisms and criterion variables. Further random-effects model meta-analyses revealed that the perceived emotional synchrony was consistently associated with more proximal mechanisms, as well as with criterion variables. Finally, sequential moderation analyses showed that proposed mechanisms successfully mediated the effects of participation on every criterion variable. These results indicate that participation in 8M marches and demonstrations can be analyzed through the literature on collective rituals. As such, collective participation implies positive outcomes both individually and collectively, which are further reinforced through key psychological mechanisms, in line with a Durkheimian approach to collective rituals. (shrink)

The category of metaphysical evil introduced by Leibniz appears to cast a sinister shadow over the goodness of creation. It seems to imply that creatures, simply in virtue of not being gods, are to some degree intrinsically and inescapably evil. After briefly unpacking this difficulty and outlining a recent attempt to deal with it, this paper returns to the texts to propose a novel and multilayered understanding of Leibniz’s category of metaphysical evil by reading it against the backdrop of the (...) traditional typologies of evil with which he was unquestionably familiar. It comes to the conclusion that metaphysical evil plays two key roles for Leibniz. First, it captures what Aquinas and especially Suarez meant by ‘natural evil’. Contrary to the common assumption that it is Leibniz’s category of physical evil that holds the place of natural evil, the paper shows that Leibniz’s physical evil corresponds to Augustine’s category of evil of punishment for sin whereas natural evil – intended as a kind of evil which is not related to moral responsibility -- is subsumed under metaphysical evil. Secondly, the category of metaphysical evil covers also the notion of original creaturely imperfection. In classifying creaturely limitation as a kind of evil Leibniz breaks from the Augustinian-Thomist-Scholastic tradition and its distinction between negatio and privatio. On the other hand, notwithstanding this important break, Leibniz’s notion of metaphysical evil is intended to account for something which is firmly within the broadly Augustinian-Scholastic tradition, namely the ascription to all creatures of a limitation that stems from their being created ex nihilo. Finally, the paper returns a verdict of non-guilty to the charge that Leibniz’s metaphysical evil implies that creatures qua creatures are to some extent necessarily intrinsically evil. More generally, in typical Leibnizian fashion, the notion of metaphysical evil will appear to be a complex mix of indebtedness to tradition and bending of received doctrines into something significantly different. (shrink)

While the notion of chance has been central in discussions over the probabilistic nature of natural selection and genetic drift, its role in the production of variants on which populational sampling takes place has received much less philosophical attention. This article discusses the concept of chance in evolution in the light of contemporary work in evo-devo. We distinguish different levels at which randomness and chance can be defined in this context, and argue that recent research on variability and evolvability demands (...) a causal understanding of variational probabilities under which development acquires a creative, rather than a constraining role in evolution. We then provide a propensity interpretation of variational probabilities that solves a conceptual confusion between causal properties, variational probabilities and extant variation present in the literature, and explore some metaphysical consequences that follow from our interpretation, specifically with regards to the nature of developmental types. 2.1Mutational randomness 2.2Morphological randomness 2.3Adaptive randomness3Variability and Phenotypic Probabilities 3.1The RNA model as a model for evo-devo4Evolvability and the Probability of Evolving5Variational Propensities in Evo-Devo 5.1Individuating variational propensities 5.2Developmental types6Conclusion. (shrink)

Art had always a prominent place in libertarian universe because the productions were advertising’s instruments that carried a marked ideological purpose. This article reconstructs the characteristics of anarchist art in Buenos Aires between 1900 and 1930. It studies the doctrinal texts of the main theorists and the way in which they influenced the local artists, as well as the articulation between local productions, newspaper articles and specialized art magazines, in order to address the aesthetic values that delineate these productions. It (...) concludes that, although anarchism preferred to exclude national realities due to its strong internationalism, argentine libertarian art had a strong local component that does not deny the libertarian anchorage of those artists and militants. (shrink)

El artículo relaciona el nuevo orden narrativo con la técnica del “storytelling” y cómo se manifiestan en el periodismo actual. Se estudian los casos de tres periodistas: David Simon, Stieg Larsson y Ryzard Kapuscinski y cómo su obra muestra la difusa línea de los hechos, la recreación, la invención, la fábula, la historia, la apariencia y la verdad. Se contrastan estos casos con las aportaciones del paradigma narrativo de Fisher. Nos preguntamos también cómo se crean narraciones en Internet a partir (...) de los periodistas estudiados. El ámbito de la verdad periodística se entremezcla con una apariencia de verdad mientras la ficción que aparenta realidad se convierte en acercamiento a ésta. La aproxi-mación a este fenómeno, que se inicia a finales del siglo XX y se consolida en la primera década del siglo XXI, se lleva a cabo desde las aportaciones de la Teoría de la Comunicación. (shrink)

O tema deste estudo é o ritmo samba-reggae como uma expressão afrobrasileira. Apresentamos, inicialmente, alguns aspectos sócio históricos relevantes no tocante à construção da multietnismo e multilinguismo na Bahia, para que se possa compreender tal ritmo como expressão afro. Como corpus de análise apresentamos algumas composições musicais do ritmo citado, que foram examinadas a partir de uma perspectiva léxico semântica, com o objetivo de assinalar sua conexão com aspectos afro religioso e afro político.

O presente trabalho pretende dar forma à ideia de cisheteronormatividade, a partir de conceitos de teóricos de gênero e sexualidade que apresentam a normatividade como heteronormatividade e cisnormatividade ou cissexismo, convertendo tais conceitos, até então distintos, em conjunto delimitado e único, que oprime e marginaliza sujeitos inadequados à cisheteronorma. Corroborando tal pressuposto - da cisheteronorma como força única e não separadamente como heteronormatividade e cissexismo - será feita uma leitura cruzada com o conceito de “instituições totais”, instituições disciplinares que têm (...) como principal objetivo a modelagem da subjetividade dos indivíduos que nela vivem, comparando ações de violência (que se supõem corretivas) contra a comunidade LGBT com ações de reforço e punições presentes nas instituições totais caracterizadas por Goffman na obra Manicômios, prisões e conventos (1961). Dessa forma, a sociedade pode ser globalmente compreendida como uma instituição total que tem como objetivo a modelagem da subjetividade dos corpos para que estes naturalizem identidades cisgêneras e heterossexuais, através de esquemas de reforços e punições bem delimitados, tais quais as instituições estudadas por Goffman. (shrink)

Este comentario se centra en el primer capítulo de Abductive Reasoning (2006), donde Aliseda ofrece nuevas herramien-tas conceptuales para examinar los modelos metodológicos que trazan una distinción de contextos en la investigación científica. Elucidamos la posición de Popper frente al problema del descubrimiento y distinguimos dos sentidos en que deliberadamente utiliza ‘discovery’ en su LSD (1959), distinción que permite reforzar la heterodoxa interpretación que hace Aliseda de la metodología popperiana. Por último, nos detenemos en la comparación entre Popper y Simon (...) frente a la “lógica del descubrimiento”, ya que condensa las razones por las que Aliseda considera que la dicotomía descubrimiento-justificación está destinada al fracaso.This brief commentary focuses on the first chapter of Abductive Reasoning (2006), where Aliseda offers new conceptual tools for examining the methodological models in which a distinction between contexts of scientific research is traced. In particular, we analyze Popper’s position with respect to the problem of discovery and distinguish two different senses in which he deliberately uses the term ‘discovery’ in LSD (1959); this, in turn, lends support to Aliseda’s heterodox interpretation of the Popperian methodology. Last, we examine the comparison the author makes between Popper and Simon as it contains the primary reasons for asserting that the discovery-justification dichotomy is doomed to failure. (shrink)