Wild horses are becoming dependent on transitional environments between domesticity and wildness. In Dutch new nature areas they are learning to perform roles as ecological surrogates for their extinct ancestors. In the U.S. wild horses are 'feral' and exist in numbers deemed to be in excess of the carrying capacity of semi-arid public range lands. The federal government is removing and relocating thousands to long-term holding pastures. The capabilities approach of Nussbaum (2006) allows us to evaluate this transitional environment against (...) a threshold of opportunities to exercise capabilities judged to be central to their flourishing as wild horses. (shrink)

En este artículo discuto las diferentes actitudes implícitas en "valorar" nuestra humanidad, según lo entiende Kant. El atributo distintivo de la humanidad es la capacidad de la elección moral racional. Según mi argumento, valorar nuestra capacidad moral nos compromete con el bien moral, lo cual no ..

Special sections are planned for forthcoming issues 20:1, 20:2 and 20:3 Issue 20:1 – submissions due 15 January, 2024Issue 20:2 – submissions due 15 MayIssue 20:3 – submissions due 15 SeptemberFor...

The precarious rights of senior citizens, especially those who are highly educated and who are expected to counsel and guide the younger generations, has stimulated the creation internationally of advocacy associations and opinion leader groups. The strength of these groups, however, varies from country to country. In some countries, they are supported and are the focus of intense interest; in others, they are practically ignored. For this is reason we believe that the creation of a network of all these associations (...) is essential. The proposed network would act as a support for the already-existing policies of the United Nations’ High Commission for Human Rights, of independent experts, and of the Global Alliance for the Rights of Older People. All three have long ago recommended the creation of a recognized instrument for uniting presently scattered efforts. The proposed network, therefore, will seek to promote the international exchange of relevant expertise, and it will reinforce the commitments and actions that single countries are currently taking to meet these objectives. For example, informative public events can be organised to promote particular support initiatives and to provide an opportunity for new members of the network to be presented. The network will promote health for senior citizens, disease prevention, senior mobility, safe free time for seniors, alimentary education, protection against new risks and dangers, as well as equity in the services necessary for seniors to adopt new information and communication technologies. In the case of retired academic members, the network will promote equality with respect to continuing use of digital technologies (particularly email), continuing access to research libraries, and the guaranteed ability for seniors to fund their own research programs and to deliver free seminars. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Aviation and the Aerial View:Le Corbusier's Spatial Transformations in the 1930s and 1940sM. Christine Boyer (bio)Part One: The Aerial ViewAviation and Equipment. A London publishing house, The Studio, Ltd, sent Le Corbusier a letter in January 1935, inquiring whether he would be interested in collaborating on a new series of books to be titled The New Vision. The promoters explained that each book in the series would be (...) devoted to a unique event in industrial design, with specific attention paid to the designers, their aims, and the potential these designs held for social and human development. They would begin the series with a volume on the airplane. Le Corbusier was asked to write an introductory essay, supply captions for the images they had already collected, and offer a few suggestions for additional illustrations.1Accepting the invitation, Le Corbusier in his reply, however, transformed the project: instead of the word "airplane" he preferred "aviation," by which he meant all the prodigious phenomena opening vast new horizons in space and influencing the future of "equipment" in the broadest sense of the word.2 Already in Precisions (1930) he had written, "I replace the word 'urbanism' by the term 'equipment.' I have already replaced the term 'furniture' by that of 'equipment.' Such stubbornness shows well that we are purely and simply claiming tools for work, for we do not want to die of hunger facing the embroidered flowerbeds of aesthetic urbanism" [143]. To his bag of equipment, Le Corbusier now adds "aviation," a tool of modern communication forging new modes of exchange and new links between nations.3The material subsequently sent by the publishing house to Le Corbusier also met with lukewarm reception: he favored more lively documentation such as the view from an airplane as it flew over cities—vast open terrain, the sea, and the forests. And he wanted more picturesque treatment of the lives of aviators, their psychological and social attitudes including analysis of the great aerial routes being drawn between Europe and America, Africa, or Asia. The publishing house was unable to fulfill Le Corbusier's [End Page 93] expectations, reminding him that their focus was limited to "the airplane" and that they expected to receive all his material by May.4What did Le Corbusier mean by "aviation" and the "epic of the air," a phrase he used in the preface of the subsequent book Aircraft (1935)? What new horizons did aviation open and how did this affect the perception of space and the process of reading the terrain as a two-dimensional map or a plan? And what did aviation have to do with "equipment"? Just the year before Le Corbusier had seen the Exposition de l'Aéronautique in Milan for which Mussolini offered the maxim: "Aviation is grand, small, or nothing at all, depending on whether public awareness of aviation is grand, small, or nothing at all."5 Le Corbusier, ever the great publicist, accepted the challenge to spread the meaning of "aviation" in the inclusive sense of the word entailing adventure and service, organization, and machinery.The rapid growth of aviation during the interwar period was mercurial, dramatically reshaping perception of the world and of space. There were daring flights of aviators challenging the breath of oceans and deserts, the heights of Everest, the length of Africa, the uncharted terrain of the North and South Poles. The airplane not only internationalized cartography; it was a tool for exploring and controlling the colonies. While aerial photography, which recorded in precise detail the realistic shape of landmasses, coastlines, seas, deserts, and mountains, perfected the process of mapmaking and enriched the documentary archive of the planet.Yet even more stunning, aviation continually shrunk the size of the globe after the initial KLM flight between Amsterdam and Jakarta took off in 1924. Then the time needed to navigate the 9000 miles was 55 days; within five years it had been reduced to a mere 12 days. A world map criss-crossed with national air routes came into view. In the 1930s civil airlines began to offer passenger and mail service between London and the Middle East, then on to India and... (shrink)

Background The COVID-19 pandemic continues to disrupt every society as SARs-CoV-2 variants surge among the populations. Health care providers are exhausted, becoming ill themselves, and in some instances have died. Indeed, hospitals are struggling to find staff to care for critically ill patients most in need. Previous work has reported on the unending work-related conditions that hospital staff are laboring under and their subsequent mental and physical health strains. Health care providers need support, but it is not clear where that (...) support is to come from. While much research has reported on the COVID-19-related fears of nurses and physicians, fewer studies have focused on supportive features of the hospital work environment and how it may provide relief to front-line health care providers.Purpose This purpose of this study was to explore an often-overlooked resource within hospital systems across the United States—clinical ethicists—and examine their many roles during COVID-19 and the types of ethical issues they addressed with nurses, physicians, administrators, and others.Methods This was a primary analysis of semi-structured, qualitative interviews with 23 clinical ethicists across the United States. The interviews were conducted from November 2020–April 2021 and were audiotaped, transcribed verbatim, and de-identified; both inductive and deductive analyses were used to identify qualitative themes.Results Five major themes were identified: ethical issues that were increasingly more complex, moral distress that was “endemic,” shifting ethical paradigms from the focus on the individual to the population, fostering a supportive environment, and organizational ethics: variation in the value, roles, and policy input of clinical ethicists.Conclusions Our findings report on the integral and expanded role of clinical ethicists at an unprecedented time in our nation, and how they stepped forward to support front-line clinicians in hospitals across the country. (shrink)

The idea of self-fashioning that Stephen Greenblatt presents in his book Renaissance Self-Fashioning can be very useful in an effort to understand Christine de Pizan's work. Specifically, a reading of The Treasure of the City of Ladies or The Book of the Three Virtues in the light of self-fashioning may help explain the book's intent. In writing The Treasure, Christine is often criticized for what appears to be a departure from her vigorous defense of women presented in The (...) City of Ladies. The article argues, however, that quite the contrary is the case in the later book. Christine uses self-fashioning in The Treasure as a strategy of survival for herself and other women. For example, she frames an argument in which she casts the male literary establishment as well as the misogynistic texts produced by that establishment as Other. Consequently, what appears to be submission in The Treasure is really a textual strategy, a subversion which is aimed at giving women an identity and protecting them against the many dangers of a male-dominated world. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:594 Feminist Studies 41, no. 3. © 2015 by Feminist Studies, Inc. Liberty Walther Barnes and Christin L. Munsch The Paradoxical Privilege of Men and Masculinity in Institutional Review Boards In the 1939 Hollywood classic The Wizard of Oz, the great wizard admonishes Dorothy and her friends to “pay no attention to that man behind the curtain.” Dorothy and company turn to see a man standing before a large (...) control panel operating the smoke, holographic image, and voice of the great wizard. Realizing he has been discovered, the man gives up manipulating the switches and the nebulous wizard vanishes.1 Hegemonic masculinity is analogous to the “all-powerful” wizard.2 In order to maintain its grandeur, power, and mystique, the mechanics of masculine ideology—as well as the social actors who participate in its reproduction —must be kept hidden.3 A crucial aim of feminist research is to 1. The Wizard of Oz, directed by Victor Fleming (Culver City, CA: Metro-Goldwyn -Mayer, 1939). 2. See R. W. Connell, Masculinities: Knowledge, Power and Social Change (Berkeley : University of California Press, 1995); R. W. Connell and James W. Messerschmidt, “Hegemonic Masculinity: Rethinking the Concept,” Gender & Society 19 (2005): 829–61; Michael Kaufman, “Me, Feminism, and Men’s Contradictory Experiences of Power,” in Theorizing Masculinities, ed. Harry Brod and Michael Kaufman (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications, 1994), 142– 63; and Michael S. Kimmel, “Masculinity as Homophobia: Fear, Shame, and Silence in the Construction of Gender Identity” in Brod and Kaufman, Theorizing Masculinities, 119–42. 3. Michael Flood and Bob Pease, “Undoing Men’s Privilege and Advancing Gender Equality in Public Sector Institutions,” Policy and Society 24, no. 4 (2005): 119–38; Allan G. Johnson, The Gender Knot: Unraveling Liberty Walther Barnes and Christin L. Munsch 595 pull back the curtain on men’s lives and masculine institutions in order to demystify socially constructed masculinities, particularly in their most powerful forms. As early feminist scholars note, male privilege renders women’s lives invisible.4 But male privilege renders aspects of men’s lives invisible, too. In this article we highlight how institutional review boards (IRBs) in universities and hospitals erect barriers to research that render particular aspects of men’s lives invisible. We draw on our experiences of submitting ten applications for a series of methodologically diverse studies of masculinity to eight IRBs. First, we argue that, despite their original function of protecting subordinated groups, IRBs are gendered institutions in which members base their decisions on culturally dominant, normative images of women and men. We show how this results in the stringent protection of male research participants, the safeguarding of participants’ personal masculinity, and the shielding of men’s lives from social inquiry. Second, we argue that IRBs are gendering institutions. Our experiences reveal how the privileging and protection of masculinity results in mandatory protocol modifications that idealize hegemonic masculinity. These modifications require researcher-participant interactions that socialize men to engage in gender “appropriate” behavior and reify gendered expectations. Third, our experiences reveal the ways in which IRBs protect the institution itself and privilege the universities, hospitals, and (predominantly male) medical doctors they represent. Consequently, the ways they reproduce social inequality remain impervious to academic inquiry. IRBS AS GENDERED AND GENDERING INSTITUTIONS Every university and hospital in the United States where human research is conducted houses a human research protections program, or IRB, to oversee academic research. Universities with hospitals typically our Patriarchal Legacy (Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, 1997); Michael Kimmel, Guyland: The Perilous World Where Boys Become Men (New York: Harper Collins, 2008). 4. Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, trans. Howard M. Parshley (New York: Knopf, 1951); Sandra Harding, The Science Question in Feminism (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1986); Dorothy E. Smith, “Women’s Perspective as a Radical Critique of Sociology,” in Feminist Perspectives on Social Research, ed. Sharlene N. Hesse-Biber and Michelle L. Yaiser (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004), 84–96. 596 Liberty Walther Barnes and Christin L. Munsch maintain two types of IRB committees: a social-behavioral committee that oversees studies in the social sciences, and a biomedical committee to supervise clinical drug trials, experimental medical treatments, and tissue and blood research. The duty of the... (shrink)

"It's the animal in us," we often hear when we've been bad. But why not when we're good? Primates and Philosophers tackles this question by exploring the biological foundations of one of humanity's most valued traits: morality. In this provocative book, primatologist Frans de Waal argues that modern-day evolutionary biology takes far too dim a view of the natural world, emphasizing our "selfish" genes. Science has thus exacerbated our reciprocal habits of blaming nature when we act badly and labeling the (...) good things we do as "humane." Seeking the origin of human morality not in evolution but in human culture, science insists that we are moral by choice, not by nature. Citing remarkable evidence based on his extensive research of primate behavior, de Waal attacks "Veneer Theory," which posits morality as a thin overlay on an otherwise nasty nature. He explains how we evolved from a long line of animals that care for the weak and build cooperation with reciprocal transactions. Drawing on both Darwin and recent scientific advances, de Waal demonstrates a strong continuity between human and animal behavior. In the process, he also probes issues such as anthropomorphism and human responsibilities toward animals. Based on the Tanner Lectures de Waal delivered at Princeton University's Center for Human Values in 2004, Primates and Philosophers includes responses by the philosophers Peter Singer, Christine M. Korsgaard, and Philip Kitcher and the science writer Robert Wright. They press de Waal to clarify the differences between humans and other animals, yielding a lively debate that will fascinate all those who wonder about the origins and reach of human goodness. (shrink)

Content skepticism about practical reason is doubt about the bearing of rational considerations on the activities of deliberation and choice. Motivational skepticism is doubt about the scope of reason as a motive. Some people think that motivational considerations alone provide grounds for skepticism about the project of founding ethics on practical reason. I will argue, against this view, that motivational skepticism must always be based on content skepticism. I will not address the question of whether or not content skepticism is (...) justified. I want only to establish the fact that motivational skepticism has no independent force. (shrink)

It is widely held that reflexivity is the defining feature of selfhood: the ability of the self to stand in a certain relation to itself. The question of how exactly to theorize this self-relation, however, has been the source of ongoing debate. In recent years, Kantian and post-Kantian approaches such as Christine Korsgaard’s constitutivism and Richard Moran’s commitment view, have attempted to establish the priority of the agential over the epistemic self-relation, thereby re-orientating the debate away from metaphysics and (...) epistemology towards ethics and moral psychology. Despite the important progress they make towards a de-alienated and reified understanding of the self-relation, however, I argue that the Kantian paradigm is ultimately inadequate because its methodological individualism makes it incapable of accounting for the irreducibly social dimension of the self-relation and, therefore, of successfully making the transition from ethics to social and political philosophy. In other words, an adequate ontology of the self-relation is possible only as a social ontology. In order to motivate this thesis, I appeal to two examples that expose the “social deficit” of the Kantian approach: Frantz Fanon’s phenomenology of race/racism in “The Lived Experience of the Black” and the phenomenon of cultural collapse in Jonathan Lear’s Radical Hope. I then go on to provide a sketch of an alternative approach based on the notion of “self-appropriation”, distinguishing it from Rahel Jaeggi’s use of the term in her recent critique of alienation, in the process. (shrink)

Ethical concepts are, or purport to be, normative. They make claims on us: they command, oblige, recommend, or guide. Or at least when we invoke them, we make claims on one another; but where does their authority over us - or ours over one another - come from? Christine Korsgaard identifies four accounts of the source of normativity that have been advocated by modern moral philosophers: voluntarism, realism, reflective endorsement, and the appeal to autonomy. She traces their history, showing (...) how each developed in response to the prior one and comparing their early versions with those on the contemporary philosophical scene. Kant's theory that normativity springs from our own autonomy emerges as a synthesis of the other three, and Korsgaard concludes with her own version of the Kantian account. Her discussion is followed by commentary from G. A. Cohen, Raymond Geuss, Thomas Nagel, and Bernard Williams, and a reply by Korsgaard. (shrink)

Christine M. Korsgaard is one of today's leading moral philosophers: this volume collects ten influential papers by her on practical reason and moral psychology ...

Christine Korsgaard has become one of the leading interpreters of Kant's moral philosophy. She is identified with a small group of philosophers who are intent on producing a version of Kant's moral philosophy that is at once sensitive to its historical roots while revealing its particular relevance to contemporary problems. She rejects the traditional picture of Kant's ethics as a cold vision of the moral life which emphasises duty at the expense of love and value. Rather, Kant's work is (...) seen as providing a resource for addressing not only the metaphysics of morals, but also for tackling practical questions about personal relations, politics, and everyday human interaction. This collection contains some of the finest current work on Kant's ethics and will command the attention of all those involved in teaching and studying moral theory. (shrink)

Agency and identity -- Necessitation -- Acts and actions -- Aristotle and Kant -- Agency and practical identity -- The metaphysics of normativity -- Constitutive standards -- The constitution of life -- In defense of teleology -- The paradox of self-constitution -- Formal and substantive principles of reason -- Formal versus substantive -- Testing versus weighing -- Maximizing and prudence -- Practical reason and the unity of the will -- The empiricist account of normativity -- The rationalist account of normativity (...) -- Kant on the hypothetical imperative -- Against particularistic willing -- Deciding and predicting -- Autonomy and efficacy -- The function of action -- The possibility of agency -- Non-rational action -- Action -- Attribution -- The psychology of action -- Expulsion from the garden : the transition to humanity -- Instinct, emotion, intelligence, and reason -- The parts of the soul -- Inside or outside -- Pull yourself together -- The constitutional model -- Models of the soul -- The city and the soul -- Platonic virtues -- Justice : substantive, procedural, and platonic -- Kant and the constitutional model -- Defective action -- The problem of bad action -- Being governed by the wrong law -- Or five bad constitutions -- Conceptions of evil -- Degrees of action -- Integrity and interaction -- Deciding to be bad -- The ordinary cases -- Dealing with the disunified -- Kant's theory of interaction -- My reasons -- Deciding to treat someone as an end in himself -- Interacting with yourself -- How to be a person -- What's left of me? (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Hypatia’s Daughters: Fifteen Hundred Years of Women Philosophers ed. by Linda Lopez McAllisterSue M. WeinbergLinda Lopez McAllister, editor. Hypatia’s Daughters: Fifteen Hundred Years of Women Philosophers. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1996. Pp. xiv + 345. Cloth, $49.95. Paper, $22.50.Hypatia: born in the fourth century A.D.: philosopher, mathematician, astronomer, teacher; brutally murdered in Alexandria in 415 A.D—whether for holding religious views regarded as heretical or because she (...) was a woman who dared to be a scholar and teacher remains a matter of speculation. Today, she gives her name to the journal for feminist philosophy. She is a symbol for those women who, over the centuries, have struggled to be part of the philosophical life of their time.Until very recently, the centuries that separated Hypatia from the present were assumed to have been a philosophical desert for women. But times have changed. Hypatia’s Daughters is a sign of this change. It contains eighteen articles on seventeen philosophers: Hypatia; Hildegard of Bingen, Heloise, and Christine de Pisan from the Middle Ages; Elizabeth of Bohemia, Sor Juana de la Cruz, Anne Conway, Damaris Masham, Catharine Trotter, Belle van Zuylen and Mary Wollstonecraft from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries; Anne Doyle Wheeler and Harriet Taylor Mill from the nineteenth; Charlotte Perkins Oilman, Edith Stein, Hannah Arendt, and Angela Davis from the late nineteenth century into contemporary times. Few are known as well as they deserve, but many names are familiar even to non-specialists. Their ideas, however, are another matter.The collection in no way constitutes a definitive selection of women philosophers; those discussed are not presented as the most significant women philosophers in the history of philosophy. (A different kind of study would be necessary for evaluations of that kind.) The women here studied have little in common as a group; they wrote on many topics of philosophical concern; their views and their supporting reasoning differ. Further, as the subjects of the articles differ in their ideas, so do the contributors’ approaches and their methods of studying those ideas differ. These differences are the strengths of a collection that is stimulating, enlightening, provocative. The following examples indicate their range.Andrea Nye examines the correspondence of Heloise and Abelard and, in a second article, of Elizabeth of Bohemia and Descartes. Heloise and Elizabeth are usually regarded as passive followers or, at best, no more than serious questioners seeking answers of their correspondents. Nye’s fresh look at the Heloise-Abelard correspondence finds not only important differences between two ways of thinking, but also sees already underlying their disagreement what she calls the “macroquestion” of philosophy’s future: philosophy as “a professional discipline independent of political or social concerns or... an ongoing critical and cultural discourse.” (25) Elizabeth’s persistent questions to Descartes reveal ideas that challenge his views, especially on moral issues and physiological-psychological [End Page 164] phenomena; these are views that have a greater complexity than the basic issue of mind-body interaction that is usually identified as central to their exchange.Writing on Harriet Taylor Mill, Jo Ellen Jacobs examines changing attitudes towards her subject, beginning with views of Taylor Mill’s contemporaries and moving through the decades into our time. She finds parallels between criticisms of Taylor Mill and attitudes towards the so-called intellectual woman. In times encouraging of women, Taylor Mill is regarded as having made important contributions to the development of J. S. Mill’s thinking, in addition to writing and speaking about her own ideas and positions that did not always follow those of J. S. Mill. In less encouraging times, her significance tends to be minimized.Hannah Arendt is not usually thought of as a feminist. Joanne Cutting-Gray, through her discussion of Arendt’s early book on Rahel Varnhagen, develops implications of that study for Arendt as a “feminist thinker,” in particular through her focus on “the politics of alterity.” Cutting-Gray finds in the Varnhagen biography “an analogy between Jewish and female alterity [that] can stretch our understanding of women and politics.” (281)And there is more, much more: Martha Brandt Bolton’s scholarly examination of the philosophical works... (shrink)

Christine M. Korsgaard is Arthur Kingsley Porter Professor of Philosophy at Harvard University. She was educated at the University of Illinois and received a Ph.D. from Harvard. She has held positions at Yale, the University of California at Santa Barbara, and the University of Chicago, and visiting positions at Berkeley and UCLA. She is a member of the American Philosophical Association and a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. She has published extensively on Kant, and about (...) moral philosophy and its history, the theory of practical reason, the philosophy of action, and personal identity. Her two published books are The Sources of Normativity (1992) and Creating the King- dom of Ends (1996). (shrink)

Aristotle believes that an agent lacks virtue unless she enjoys the performance of virtuous actions, while Kant claims that the person who does her duty despite contrary inclinations exhibits a moral worth that the person who acts from inclination lacks. Despite these differences, this chapter argues that Aristotle and Kant share a distinctive view of the object of human choice and locus of moral value: that what we choose, and what has moral value, are not mere acts, but actions: acts (...) done for the sake of ends. Morally good actions embody a kind of intrinsic value that inspires us to do them from duty (in Kant) or for the sake of the noble (in Aristotle). The chapter traces the difference in their attitudes about doing one's duty with pleasure to a difference in their attitudes towards pleasure itself: Aristotle sees it as a perception of the good, while Kant thinks of it as mere feeling. (shrink)

This paper criticizes two accounts of the normativity of practical principles: the empiricist account and the rationalist or realist account. It argues against the empiricist view, focusing on the Humean texts that are usually taken to be its locus classicus. It then argues both against the dogmatic rationalist view, and for the Kantian view, through a discussion of Kant's own remarks about instrumental rationality in the second section of the Groundwork. It further argues that the instrumental principle cannot stand alone. (...) Unless there are normative principles directing us to the adoption of certain ends, there can be no requirement to take the means to our ends. The familiar view that the instrumental principle is the only requirement of practical reason is incoherent. (shrink)

Christine Bard, avec Les Garçonnes, propose un fougueux antidote à la remarquable capacité du patriarcat à convertir la rébellion féminine en un reflet de son propre désir ou anxiété. Dans une analyse extrêmement précise de la garçonne, l'auteur montre combien cette figure est essentiellement une métaphore de la dissolution des mœurs. La garçonne rejette la féminité traditionnelle, s'attirant la colère de ceux qu'inquiète la dépopulation. Son corps échappe aux bornes érigées par les co..

Christine Bard, avec Les Garçonnes, propose un fougueux antidote à la remarquable capacité du patriarcat à convertir la rébellion féminine en un reflet de son propre désir ou anxiété. Dans une analyse extrêmement précise de la garçonne, l'auteur montre combien cette figure est essentiellement une métaphore de la dissolution des mœurs. La garçonne rejette la féminité traditionnelle, s'attirant la colère de ceux qu'inquiète la dépopulation. Son corps échappe aux bornes érigées par les co...

One of the great difficulties with Kant’s moral philosophy is that it seems to imply that our moral obligations leave us powerless in the face of evil. Kant’s theory sets a high ideal of conduct and tells us to live up to that ideal regardless of what other persons are doing. The results may be very bad. But Kant says that the law "remains in full force, because it commands categorically" (G, 438-39/57).* The most weI1—known example of...

In this paper I trace the development of one of the central debates of late twentieth-century moral philosophy—the debate between realism and what Rawls called “constructivism.” Realism, I argue, is a reactive position that arises in response to almost every attempt to give a substantive explanation of morality. It results from the realist’s belief that such explanations inevitably reduce moral phenomena to natural phenomena. I trace this belief, and the essence of realism, to a view about the nature of concepts—that (...) it is the function of all concepts to describe reality. Constructivism may be understood as the alternative view that a normative concept refers schematically to the solution to a practical problem. A constructivist account of a concept, unlike a traditional analysis, is an attemptto work out the solution to that problem. I explain how the philosophies of Kant and Rawls can be understood on this model. (shrink)

Then you have a look around, and see that none of the uninitiated are listening to us—I mean the people who think that nothing exists but what they can grasp with both hands; people who refuse to admit that actions and processes and the invisible world in general have any place in reality.

To later generations, much of the moral philosophy of the twentieth century will look like a struggle to escape from utilitarianism. We seem to succeed in disproving one utilitarian doctrine, only to find ourselves caught in the grip of another. I believe that this is because a basic feature of the consequentialist outlook still pervades and distorts our thinking: the view that the business of morality is to bring something about . Too often, the rest of us have pitched our (...) protests as if we were merely objecting to the utilitarian account of what the moral agent ought to bring about or how he ought to do it. Deontological considerations have been characterized as “side constraints,” as if they were essentially restrictions on ways to realize ends. More importantly, moral philosophers have persistently assumed that the primal scene of morality is a scene in which someone does something to or for someone else. This is the same mistake that children make about another primal scene. The primal scene of morality, I will argue, is not one in which I do something to you or you do something to me, but one in which we do something together. The subject matter of morality is not what we should bring about, but how we should relate to one another. If only Rawls has succeeded in escaping utilitarianism, it is because only Rawls has fully grasped this point. His primal scene, the original position, is one in which a group of people must make a decision together. Their task is to find the reasons they can share. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Journal of the History of Philosophy 41.4 (2003) 561-562 [Access article in PDF] Gianni Paganini, Miguel Benítez, and James Dybikowski, editors. Scepticisme, Clandestinité et Libre Pensée. Paris: Honoré Champion, 2002. Pp. 382. Cloth, €60.00. This book consists of papers from two Tables rondes held in Dublin in 1999 on the occasion of the Tenth International Congress on the Enlightenment. The contributors are: Paganini, Benítez, Dybikowski, Alan Charles Kors, Winfried (...) Schröder, José R. Maia Neto, Adam Sutcliffe, Justin Champion, Antony McKenna, Lorenzo Bianchi, Christine Berkvens-Stevelinck, Pierre Lurbe, Stephen David Snobelen, Nigel Aston, and Stuart Brown. There is remarkably little overlap among the papers and Paganini has clearly insisted on very [End Page 561] high standards. Because of space limitations, I shall focus on several of the general themes which run through the book rather than on individual contributions.Despite the phenomenal success Richard Popkin and collaborators like the late Charles B. Schmitt, Giorgio Tonelli, and Ezequiel de Olaso have had in documenting the amazing impact of skepticism in the Renaissance and in the years up to the Enlightenment, this volume demonstrates that skepticism, that many-faceted force, continued throughout the eighteenth-century Enlightenment. After Bayle, and the application of his special forms of skepticism to theological topics—forms which were often employed, contrary to Bayle's probable intentions, in defense of atheism—skepticism went "underground." A large variety of literature was circulated in manuscript form, the clandestine literature of the period. The lesson which this conference celebrates is that skepticism did not cease being a major cultural force. Thus there is, thanks to the philosophical dimension of the clandestine literature in the eighteenth century, a transition from Christian rationalism to an anti-Christian rationalism.Major figures of the Enlightenment were, of course, well-acquainted with skepticism, e.g., Berkeley, Voltaire, Hume, Crousaz, Condillac, Reid, and Kant. Not surprisingly, the major topics discussed in these papers center around skepticism, fideism and atheism, proofs for the existence of God, and the status of the "preambles" to the faith. These all receive careful attention. The tension between the arguments for Christian Pyrrhonism versus anti-Christian rationalism runs through many of these papers. And of course Bayle's points of view on both sides of the Christian debate appear in much of the clandestine literature. The matter of the immortality of the soul is carefully discussed. What is the status of this doctrine? Is it a question of Church dogma or is it another belief to be discarded in the light of reason?The connection perceived to hold between atheism and political legitimacy are explored in several papers. In the seventeenth century, Locke would exclude atheists from the body politic, in part because they were unable to truthfully swear an oath. Atheists were perceived as a danger for many eighteenth-century figures and the political need to suppress atheism was widely understood and accepted by those in the various religious establishments. Bayle's two-century-old attempt to break the putative logical tie between morality and religion failed in his own day, and despite the efforts of the authors of clandestine philosophical literature, the intimate link Bayle tried to break seems to be stronger than ever in much of the world today. It is interesting that the United States is virtually the only industrial and democratic society in which atheists are virtually precluded from being political candidates in federal, and probably most local, elections. Among other things, the papers in this volume help one to understand just how difficult breaking free from theological constraints in the interest of political freedom has proved to be. Harry McFarland Bracken Arizona State University, Tempe... (shrink)

Plato and Kant advance a constitutional model of the soul, in which reason and appetite or passion have different structural and functional roles in the generation of motivation, as opposed to the familiar Combat Model in which they are portrayed as independent sources of motivation struggling for control. In terms of the constitutional model we may explain what makes an action different from an event. What makes an action attributable to a person, and therefore what makes it an action, is (...) that it issues from the person''s constitution, and therefore from the person as a whole, rather than from some force working on or in the person. This in turn implies an account of what makes an action good: what makes an action good is that it is deliberated upon and chosen in a way that unifies the person into a constitutional system. Through deliberative action we constitute ourselves as unified agents. Platonic justice and Kant''s categorical imperative are shown to be normative standards for action because they are principles of self-constitution. (shrink)

In Self-Constitution, I argue that the principles governing action are “constitutive standards” of agency, standards that arise from the nature of agency itself. To be an agent is to be autonomousl...

This paper argues for a conception of the natural rights of non-human animals grounded in Kant’s explanation of the foundation of human rights. The rights in question are rights that are in the first instance held against humanity collectively speaking—against our species conceived as an organized body capable of collective action. The argument proceeds by first developing a similar case for the right of every human individual who is in need of aid to get it, and then showing why the (...) situation of animals is similar. I first review some of the reasons why people are resistant to the idea that animals might have rights. I then explain Kant’s conception of natural rights. I challenge the idea that duties of aid and duties of kindness to animals fit the traditional category of “imperfect duties” and argue that they are instead cases of “imperfect right.” I explain how you can hold a right against a group, and why it is legitimate to conceive of humanity as such a group. I then argue that Kant’s account of the foundation of property rights is grounded in a conception of the common possession of the Earth that grounds a right to aid and the rights of animals to be treated in ways that are consistent with their good. Finally, I return to the objections to the idea that animals have rights and offer some responses to them. (shrink)