The United Kingdom’s approach to encouraging environmentally positive behaviour has been three-pronged, through voluntarism, incentives and regulation, and the balance between the approaches has fluctuated over time. Whilst financial incentives and regulatory approaches have been effective in achieving some environmental management behavioural change amongst farmers, ultimately these can be viewed as transient drivers without long-term sustainability. Increasingly, there is interest in ‘nudging’ managers towards voluntary environmentally friendly actions. This approach requires a good understanding of farmers’ willingness and ability to take (...) up environmental activities and the influences on farmer behavioural change. The paper aims to provide insights from 60 qualitative farmer interviews undertaken for a research project into farmers’ willingness and ability to undertake environmental management, particularly focusing on social psychological insights. Furthermore, it explores farmers’ level of engagement with advice and support networks that foster a genuine interest, responsibility and a sense of personal and social norm to sustain high quality environmental outcomes. Two conceptual frameworks are presented for usefully exploring the complex set of inter-relationships that can influence farmers’ willingness to undertake environmental management practices. The research findings show how an in-depth understanding of farmer’s willingness and ability to adopt environmental management practices and their existing level of engagement with advice and support are necessary to develop appropriate engagement approaches to achieve sustained and durable environmental management. (shrink)

Formalised knowledge systems, including universities and research institutes, are important for contemporary societies. They are, however, also arguably failing humanity when their impact is measured against the level of progress being made in stimulating the societal changes needed to address challenges like climate change. In this research we used a novel futures-oriented and participatory approach that asked what future envisioned knowledge systems might need to look like and how we might get there. Findings suggest that envisioned future systems will need (...) to be much more collaborative, open, diverse, egalitarian, and able to work with values and systemic issues. They will also need to go beyond producing knowledge about our world to generating wisdom about how to act within it. To get to envisioned systems we will need to rapidly scale methodological innovations, connect innovators, and creatively accelerate learning about working with intractable challenges. We will also need to create new funding schemes, a global knowledge commons, and challenge deeply held assumptions. To genuinely be a creative force in supporting longevity of human and non-human life on our planet, the shift in knowledge systems will probably need to be at the scale of the enlightenment and speed of the scientific and technological revolution accompanying the second World War. This will require bold and strategic action from governments, scientists, civic society and sustained transformational intent. (shrink)

During the set-up phase of an international study of genetic influences on outcomes from sepsis, we aimed to characterise potential differences in ethics approval processes and outcomes in participating European countries. Between 2005 and 2007 of the FP6-funded international Genetics Of Sepsis and Septic Shock project, we asked national coordinators to complete a structured survey of research ethic committee approval structures and processes in their countries, and linked these data to outcomes. Survey findings were reconfirmed or modified in 2017. Eighteen (...) countries participated in the study, recruiting 2257 patients from 160 ICUs. National practices differed widely in terms of composition of RECs, procedures and duration of the ethics approval process. Eight countries used a single centralised process for approval, seven required approval by an ethics committee in each participating hospital, and three required both. Outcomes of the application process differed widely between countries because of differences in national legislation, and differed within countries because of interpretation of the ethics of conducting research in patients lacking capacity. The RECs in four countries had no lay representation. The median time from submission to final decision was 1.5 months; in nine approval was received within 1 month; six took over 6 months, and in one 24 months; had all countries been able to match the most efficient approvals processes, an additional 74 months of country or institution-level recruitment would have been available. In three countries, rejection of the application by some local RECs resulted in loss of centres; and one country rejected the application outright. The potential benefits of the single application portal offered by the European Clinical Trials Regulation will not be realised without harmonisation of research ethics committee practices as well as national legislation. (shrink)

The essays in this volume illuminate a central topic in ethical theory: moral dilemmas. Some contemporary philosophers dispute the traditional view that a true moral dilemma -- a situation in which a person has two irreconcilable moral duties -- cannot exist. This collection provides the historical background to the ongoing debate with selections from Kant, Mill, Bradley, and Ross. The best recent work on the question is represented in essays by Donagan, Foot, Hare, Marcus, Nagel, van Fraassen, Williams, and others.

One of Mill's primary targets, throughout his work, is intuitionism. In this paper, I distinguish two strands of intuitionism, against which Mill offers separate arguments. The first strand, a priorism, makes an epistemic claim about how we come to know norms. The second strand, ‘first principle pluralism’, makes a structural claim about how many fundamental norms there are. In this paper, I suggest that one natural reading of Mill's argument against first principle pluralism is incompatible with the naturalism that drives (...) his argument against a priorism. It must, therefore, be discarded. Such a reading, however, covertly attributes Mill realist commitments about the normative. These commitments are unnecessary. To the extent that Mill's argument against first principle pluralism is taken seriously, I suggest, it is an argument that points towards Mill as having an antirealist approach to the normative. (shrink)

In this paper, I examine the presumption that Mill endorses a form of metaethical non-cognitivism. I argue that the evidence traditionally cited for this interpretation is not convincing, and suggest that we should instead remain open to a cognitivist reading. I begin, in Section I, by laying out the ‘received view’ of Mill on the status of practical norms, as given by Alan Ryan in the 1970s. There is, I claim in Sections II and III, no firm textual evidence for (...) this reading of Mill: his remarks on ‘art’ and ‘science’ do not show the metaethical commitments they have been taken to. Neither is there firm textual evidence for a cognitivist reading. However, I suggest in Section IV, a non-cognitivist interpretation suffers from the fault of anachronism, and is difficult to reconcile with a clear commitment in Utilitarianism IV.3 to the possibility of evidence being given for the desirability of pleasure. A cognitivist reading would not suffer from these faults, and on that basis, I conclude that we should think further about what a cognitivist reading of Mill might amount to. (shrink)

Journal of Social Philosophy, EarlyView.

This paper explores the level of obligation called for by Milton Friedman’s classic essay “The Social Responsibility of Business is to Increase Profits.” Several scholars have argued that Friedman asserts that businesses have no or minimal social duties beyond compliance with the law. This paper argues that this reading of Friedman does not give adequate weight to some claims that he makes and to their logical extensions. Throughout his article, Friedman emphasizes the values of freedom, respect for law, and duty. (...) The principle that a business professional should not infringe upon the liberty of other members of society can be used by business ethicists to ground a vigorous line of ethical analysis. Any practice, which has a negative externality that requires another party to take a significant loss without consent or compensation, can be seen as unethical. With Friedman’s framework, we can see how ethics can be seen as arising from the nature of business practice itself. Business involves an ethics in which we consider, work with, and respect strangers who are outside of traditional in-groups. (shrink)

A regularity theory of causation analyses type-level causation in terms of Boolean difference-making. The essential ingredient that helps this theoretical framework overcome the problems of Hume’s and Mill’s classical accounts is a principle of non-redundancy: only Boolean dependency structures from which no elements can be eliminated track causation. The first part of this article argues that the recent regularity-theoretic literature has not consistently implemented this principle, for it disregarded an important type of redundancies: structural redundancies. Moreover, it is shown that (...) a regularity theory needs to be underwritten by a hitherto neglected metaphysical background assumption stipulating that the world’s causal makeup is not ambiguous. Against that background, the second part then develops a new regularity theory that does justice to all types of redundancies and, thereby, provides the first all-inclusive notion of Boolean difference-making. (shrink)

Journal of Social Philosophy, EarlyView.

Journal of Social Philosophy, EarlyView.

Helen McCabe’s excellent book builds a patient, detailed, nuanced case for thinking of Mill as a socialist. The depth of her scholarship, and the care with which she constructs the argument, make t...

It is the purpose of this article to offer an account of Mill's metaethics. Expanding upon clues given recently by Dale Miller, and previously by John Skorupski, I suggest that when it comes to the foundations of his philosophy, Mill might share more with the intuitionists than we are accustomed to think. Common wisdom holds that Mill had no time for the normativity of intuitions. I wish to dispute, or at least temper, this dogma, by claiming that Mill's attitude towards (...) intuitions is far more complex and ambivalent than is generally thought. I argue that, according to Mill, our belief in the reliability of inductive moves and apparent memories, as well as the desirability of pleasure, is vindicated by something akin to intuition. Although his endorsement of the normativity of these intuitions might seem to be in tension with the arguments he offers against the ‘intuitionist school’, this tension is only apparent.Send article to KindleTo send this article to your Kindle, first ensure [email protected] is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about sending to your Kindle. Find out more about sending to your Kindle. Note you can select to send to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be sent to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply. Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.Mill, Intuitions and NormativityVolume 25, Issue 1CHRISTOPHER MACLEOD DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/S095382081200026XYour Kindle email address Please provide your Kindle [email protected]@kindle.com Available formats PDF Please select a format to send. By using this service, you agree that you will only keep articles for personal use, and will not openly distribute them via Dropbox, Google Drive or other file sharing services. Please confirm that you accept the terms of use. Cancel Send ×Send article to Dropbox To send this article to your Dropbox account, please select one or more formats and confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about sending content to Dropbox. Mill, Intuitions and NormativityVolume 25, Issue 1CHRISTOPHER MACLEOD DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/S095382081200026XAvailable formats PDF Please select a format to send. By using this service, you agree that you will only keep articles for personal use, and will not openly distribute them via Dropbox, Google Drive or other file sharing services. Please confirm that you accept the terms of use. Cancel Send ×Send article to Google Drive To send this article to your Google Drive account, please select one or more formats and confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about sending content to Google Drive. Mill, Intuitions and NormativityVolume 25, Issue 1CHRISTOPHER MACLEOD DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/S095382081200026XAvailable formats PDF Please select a format to send. By using this service, you agree that you will only keep articles for personal use, and will not openly distribute them via Dropbox, Google Drive or other file sharing services. Please confirm that you accept the terms of use. Cancel Send ×Export citation Request permission. (shrink)

In this article, I explore the relation between theoretical and practical reason in the work of J.S. Mill. I argue that Mill holds that theoretical reason is subordinate to practical reason. Ultimately, this amounts to the claim that the norms of theoretical reason – those rules governing how we ought to believe – are grounded in considerations of utility.

In this chapter, I offer a reading of Mill's theory of history. Mill maintains some views about history which we typically associate with the eighteenth century – most obviously, a concern for charting the natural stages of development through which societies must pass in the process of civilization. But he also moves towards doctrines associated with the historicists of the nineteenth century. He believes in the historical variability of human nature, the need to understand historical periods in their own terms, (...) and of progress driven not according to timeless laws but by an inner principle of development. As with so many other things, Mill's view of history is guided by an attempt to reconcile and combine the best of eighteenth‐century British philosophy with nineteenth‐century Continental developments. (shrink)

Medical and non-medical experts increasingly argue that individuals, whether they are diagnosed with a specific chronic disease or condition or not (and whether they are judged at minimal risk of these consequences or not), have an obligation to make ‘healthy’ food choices. We argue that this obligation is neither scientifically nor ethically justified at the level of the individual. Our intent in the article is not simply to argue against moralization of the value of prudential uses of food for nutritional (...) health, but to situate nutritional advocacy in the context of Western liberal democracy that values free choice. We have two objectives: (i) to untangle and examine the substance of discourses on ‘healthy’ food choice that simplify nutrition science and place a moral obligation on individuals and (ii) to establish a more comprehensive view of the relationship among food, ethics and health. Although critical of certain features of the liberal political and moral tradition, we argue that John Stuart Mill’s notion of experiments in living provides fertile ground for an improved ethical understanding of individual obligation and of the interconnections among food, health and well-being. (shrink)

This review essay critically examines Catherine Mills’s Biopolitics and Camisha Russell’s The Assisted Reproduction of Race. Although distinct works, the centrality of race and reproduction provides a point of connection and an opening into reframing contemporary debates within bioethics and biopolitics. In reviewing these books together I hope to show how biopolitical theory and critical philosophy of race can be useful in looking at bioethical problems from a new perspective that open up different kinds of analyses, especially around historically (...) embedded problems like institutional racism and the legacies of colonialism in healthcare. (shrink)

Résumé On attribue souvent à John Stuart Mill une théorie de la liberté fondée sur un principe de non-nuisance qui conduirait à une critique radicale du paternalisme politique et juridique. Cependant, en analysant de plus près la portée de ce principe ainsi que son mode de justification, il est possible d’en donner une interprétation qui soit compatible avec certaines formes de paternalisme. On peut ainsi considérer De la liberté comme une des sources du paternalisme libéral et plus précisément d’un paternalisme (...) perfectionniste visant à préserver et à promouvoir l’autonomie des individus. (shrink)

This Companion offers a state-of-the-art survey of the work of John Stuart Mill – one which covers the historical influences on Mill, his theoretical, moral and social philosophy, as well as his relation to contemporary movements. Its contributors include both senior scholars with established expertise in Mill’s thought and new emerging interpreters. Each essay acts as a ‘go-to’ resource for those seeking to understand an aspect of Mill’s thought or to familiarise themselves with the contours of a debate within the (...) scholarship. The Companion is a key reference on Mill’s theory of liberty and utilitarianism, but also provides a valuable resource on lesser-known aspects of his work, including his epistemology, metaphysics, and philosophy of language. The volume is divided into six sections. Part I covers Mill’s life, his immediate posthumous reputation, and his own telling of his life-story. Part II brings together an accessible and comprehensive summary of the various influences on Mill’s thought. Part III offers an account of the foundations of Mill’s philosophy and his thought on key philosophic topics. Parts IV and V tackle issues from Mill’s moral and social philosophy. Part VI concludes with a treatment of the broader aspects of Mill’s thought, tracing his relation to major movements in philosophy. (shrink)

This thesis is an examination of the philosophy of John Stuart Mill and its relation to the romantic movement. The Introduction outlines reasons to believe that such an inquiry is sensible: Mill’s readings of the British and German romantics are outlined. I proceed to offer an argument for the application of an historical term such as ‘romanticism’ in philosophy and suggest that the space opened up by the revisionist view of romanticism as an extension, rather than a denial, of the (...) Enlightenment project creates room to take seriously Mill’s relation to the romantic movement. Chapters 1-4 are concerned with Mill’s metanormative theory. For Mill, the norms of acting and believing are founded on the assent given to our primitive dispositions under critical scrutiny. I investigate this foundation in the context of Mill’s denial of normative validity to intuitions. The relation of Mill’s metanormative theory to romanticism is taken up during the process of interpretation. The movement shows broad endorsement of what I term ‘romantic-cognitivism’ – the post-Kantian view that we can arrive at truth through the process of ‘creative-discovery’. I hold that Mill’s metanormative theory is not so far away from romantic-cognitivism in orientation as might be thought. I turn to Mill’s macro-epistemology and conception of mind in Chapter 5. Mill’s view of how we come to know, I suggest, moves towards a Coleridgean position – Mill sees the mind as active, and holds that we come to possess a deeper state of knowledge by engaging with propositions actively. In Chapter 6, I consider Mill’s philosophy of history. Many have noted that Mill endorses a directional theory of historical progress. I argue that he also adopts ‘hermeneutical historicism’ in his discussions of history. In Chapter 7, I consider Mill’s theory of human nature. Mill believes that human nature is malleable: it is subject to change and emendation. (shrink)

In this article, I argue that the practice of civil disagreement has robust epistemic benefits and that these benefits enable meaningful forms of reconciliation—across worldview lines and amid the challenging information environment of our age. I then engage two broad groups of objections: either that civil disagreement opposes, rather than promotes, clarity, or else that it does little to help it. If successful, my account gives us reason to include civil disagreement among what Mill calls “the real morality of public (...) discussion,” a fact that should stir us to take more seriously the decline of civility in contemporary life. (shrink)

Mill was receptive to all sorts of ideas, both plausible and implausible, which did not fit well with utilitarianism. He was, for example, inclined to think of equality, not just pleasure, as. He was able to think of himself as a utilitarian only by grossly expanding that notion to cover any doctrine which did not entirely rely, without the possibility of further explanation, on or God's commands. It is even doubtful whether he was a consequentialist in any sense. Mill's account (...) of moral obligation is not a maximizing, nor even a satisficing, one. And the account emphasizes the place of supererogation. There is no suggestion in Mill that one is obliged to do something merely because a teaching to that effect would be felicific. Far from there being an obligation to maximize, it would sometimes be wrong merely to make Pareto-improvements. Sympathetically understood, the account of obligation in Mill is more or less the same as one finds in Hobbes, with his theorems. (shrink)

Mill wrote in the 1849 edition of Principles of Political Economy that Fourierism presented “in every respect the least open to objection, of the forms of Socialism”. Why did he think this? If we look at Mill's earlier engagements with the Saint-Simonians and Comte side by side a striking pattern of agreements and disagreements emerges: Comte and Mill were anti-utopians, but the Saint-Simonians were not; Mill and the Saint-Simonians were feminists, but Comte was not; and the Saint-Simonians and Comte sought (...) government by industrialists, but Mill did not. To understand this pattern is to highlight just how much common ground Mill did indeed share with the Fourierists and makes his verdict that they were less “open to objection” than any of the other socialists not so much surprising but practically over-determined. (shrink)

Leibniz standardly associates “mechanism” with extended material bodies and their aggregates. In this paper, I identify and analyze a further distinct sense of “mechanism” in Leibniz that extends, by analogy, beyond the domain of material bodies and applies to the operations of immaterial substances such as the monads that serve, for Leibniz, as the metaphysical foundations of physical reality. I argue that in this sense, Leibniz understands “mechanism” as an intelligible process that is capable of providing a sufficient reason for (...) a series of changes. I then apply these findings to enrich our understanding of Leibniz’s well-known mill argument in Monadology ¶17: although material machines and mechanisms cannot produce perceptions, the perceptual activity of immaterial monads is to be understood as “mechanical” according to this analogical sense. (shrink)

I argue that the Carroll-Chen cosmogonic model does not provide a plausible scientific explanation of the past hypothesis (the thesis that our universe began in an extremely low-entropy state). I suggest that this counts as a welcomed result for those who adopt a Mill-Ramsey-Lewis best systems account of laws and maintain that the past hypothesis is a brute fact that is a non-dynamical law.

This paper examines the relation between Cartwright's concept of 'capacities' and Mill's concept of 'tendencies' and argues that they are not equivalent. Cartwright's concept of 'capacities' and her motivation to adopt it as a central notion in her philosophy of science are described. It is argued that the Millian concept of 'tendencies' is distinct because Mill restricts its use to a set of special cases. These are the cases in which causes combine 'mechanically'. Hence for Mill 'tendencies' do not merely (...) describe the operation of causes, but also and perhaps even primarily how they combine. This does not hold of Cartwrightian capacities which are meant to have unlimited applicability. Mill also explicitly denies the realism of 'capacities' in a sense which overlaps with Cartwright's. Her attempt to derive empirist credentials for her notion of capacity from Mill is therefore unsuccessful. (shrink)

Originally published in 1996 and newly revised, _Conspicuous Criticism_ is a ringing defense of the need for religion and tradition in contemporary society. Writing with moral passion and critical verve, Christopher Shannon offers a convincing indictment of the forces that isolate the individual in modern capitalist society and counters more than a century of efforts by modern intellectuals­ to displace tradition in favor of a humanism that actually diminishes humanity in the name of freeing its potential. Featuring in-depth analyses (...) of the works of John Dewey, Thorstein Veblen, C. Wright Mills, and others, _Conspicuous Criticism_ is a call to reinstate traditional relations to God, nature, and the common good. Scholars in fields from American studies to intellectual history will be forced to grapple with Shannon’s trenchant critique, which is well on its way to becoming a classic of Christian thought. “_Conspicuous Criticism_ inspired a concern about the modern world that in the years since I’ve not been able to brush aside.”—Eric Miller, _First Things _. (shrink)

This clear and engaging introduction is the first book to assess the ideas of Kwame Anthony Appiah, the Ghanaian-British philosopher who is a leading public intellectual today. The book focuses on the theme of 'identity' and is structured around five main topics, corresponding to the subjects of his major works: race, culture, liberalism, cosmopolitanism, and moral revolutions. This handy guide: teaches students about the sources, opportunities, and dilemmas of personal and social identity - whether on the basis of race, gender, (...) sexuality, or class, among others - in the purview of Appiah. locates Appiah within a broader tradition of intellectual engagement with these issues - involving such thinkers as W. E. B. Du Bois, John Stuart Mill, and Martha Nussbaum - and thus how Appiah is both an inheritor and innovator of preceding ideas. seeks to inspire students on how to approach and negotiate identity politics in the present. This book ultimately imparts a more diverse and wider-reaching geographic sense of philosophy through the lens of Appiah and his intellectual contributions, as well as emphasize the continuing social relevance of philosophy and critical theory more generally to everyday life today. (shrink)

This unique collection presents texts in international relations from Ancient Greece to the First World War. Major writers such as Thucydides, Augustine, Aquinas, Machiavelli, Grotius, Kant and John Stuart Mill are represented by extracts of their key works; less well-known international theorists including John of Paris, Cornelius van Bynkershoek and Friedrich List are also included. Fifty writers are anthologised in what is the largest such collection currently available. The texts, most of which are substantial extracts, are organised into broadly chronological (...) sections, each of which is headed by an introduction that places the work in its historical and philosophical context. Ideal for both students and scholars, the volume also includes biographies and guides to further reading. (shrink)

This paper is a reply to Jonathan Riley’s criticism of my reading of Mill (both published in the Philosophical Quarterly 2003). I show that Riley’s interpretation has no textual support in Mill’s writing by putting the supposedly supporting quotations in their proper context. Secondly it is demonstrated how my reading is not incompatible with hedonism. Mill’s use of the concepts of ‘quality’, ‘quantity’, and ‘pleasure’ are explained and illustrated. I conclude by considering whether the possible redundancy of Mill’s quality/quantity discussion (...) would be problematic. (shrink)

It is well known that John Stuart Mill repeatedly acknowledges Harriet Taylor Mill's substantial contribution to On Liberty. After her death, however, he decides to publish the book under his name only. Are we justified in continuing this practice, initiated by JSM, of refusing unequivocal co-authorship status to HTM? Drawing on stylometric analyses, we make a preliminary case that JSM did not write On Liberty all by himself and that HTM had a hand in formulating it. Drawing on plausible standards (...) for authorship ascription, we further point out that authorship status requires, in addition to a substantial contribution, the approval by all contributors. We discuss potential reasons to assume that HTM did not approve the published version of On Liberty and would have objected to including her name on the title page. (This paper is available on an open-access basis at UTILITAS). (shrink)

This chapter offers an account of the aspect of nineteenth‐century naturalism, by focusing on the work of J. S. Mill and Auguste Comte. Both philosophers have high ambitions for naturalism, aiming to offer a sweeping account of all of human knowledge in naturalistic terms. Mill argued that the metaphysical thinking must already have started to exert an influence in order for monotheistic approaches to take hold, and that Comte's account of the theological stage overstated the extent to which fetishistic or (...) polytheistic understanding of phenomena could exist independently of one another. But these are minor disagreements, framed in terms of a narrative that Mill basically accepts. Mill thought Comte's three stage theory important for understanding the rise our way of conceptualizing the world, and consistent with his own account of the rise of scientific induction. (shrink)

In this article, I offer a reading of On Liberty II which focuses on the structural features of the argument that Mill presents. Mill's argument, I suggest, is grounded on an appeal to the value of truth, and is divided into three sub-arguments, treating true, false and partially true opinion respectively. In section 1, I consider what constraints the teleological orientation of Mill's argument places on the case he makes, before examining in section 2 what the division of Mill's argument (...) into three exhaustive sub-arguments tells us about the nature of ‘discussion’ as Mill uses the term. I go on, in section 3, to suggest that although On Liberty II does not offer a defence of free speech in the broad sense in which the term is often now used, we should be optimistic about the chances of finding such a defence in On Liberty III. (shrink)

This article attempts to challenge those contemporary philosophical approaches to justice (and this is the majority of them) which ascribe to the notion of justice a dominant role within ethics and political philosophy. In the first section, this overestimation of justice is traced back to J.S. Mill (and to John Rawls). After having pointed out some of the essential features of the Millian (and Rawlsian) concept, I show how far these attributes are away from what we (in our everyday language) (...) mean by the word ‚justice’. Finally, I try to spell out what might be more plausibly seen as the focus of our shared moral intuition, and to highlight to which extent there is an overlap with our common idea of justice. (shrink)

This article attempts to challenge those contemporary philosophical approaches to justice (and this is the majority of them) which ascribe to the notion of justice a dominant role within ethics and political philosophy. In the first section, this overestimation of justice is traced back to J.S. Mill (and to John Rawls). After having pointed out some of the essential features of the Millian (and Rawlsian) concept, I show how far these attributes are away from what we (in our everyday language) (...) mean by the word ‚justice’. Finally, I try to spell out what might be more plausibly seen as the focus of our shared moral intuition, and to highlight to which extent there is an overlap with our common idea of justice. (shrink)

This book is an important effort to fill a notable void in moral and political philosophy, for there has been, according to Sharon K. Vaughan, “no formal study of the treatment of poverty in Western political thought” . Vaughan attempts to rectify this with a survey of the views of Plato, Aristotle, Locke, Rousseau, Adam Smith, Mill, de Tocqueville, Hegel, Marx, Rawls, and Nozick on the subject of poverty, the poor, the redistribution of wealth, and justice. Her effort is valuable, (...) even if more work remains to be done.The time is well chosen for Vaughan’s undertaking, both because of the resurgence of political philosophy in the past forty years and also because of a more recent interest in the relationship between the empirical sciences and philosophy. An account of poverty, and a philosophical theory of how to respond to poverty, are clearly of importance to the justice project, central to contemporary political philosophy; but it is unlikely to be carried out well without attention to empirical details concerning the sources of poverty, the demographics of the poor, analyses of programs that have, and have not, been effectively used in the past, and the like. As Daniel Shapiro has recently shown in Is the. (shrink)

I start from Mill's words about Mansel and the problem of evil. In this dispute Mansel has generally been thought to have come off worst. However, Mansel was clearly right to this extent: that what would make a man a good man would not be the same as what made God good. This is because, quite generally, what makes something good of its kind, where we can talk about goodness at all, varies with the kind. With Aristotle we must say: (...) the criteria are fixed by the thing's ergon, or at least by something analogous. On this account, it would seem that God must be perfect, since as an intelligent agent He does supremely well what is in the nature of an intelligent agent to do. This seems to lead to the right solution to the problem of evil. But Mill also had something useful to contribute. He saw that there would be a consequent difficulty in regard to revelation. This difficulty seems to be severe and insufficiently discussed. (shrink)

Abstract:Austin’s (in)famous characterization of poetry as parasitical has been subject to many interpretations, from Derrida’s considering it a limit of and a central problem in Austin’s theory to Cavell’s attempt to reintegrate poetic uses of language within the framework of Ordinary Language Philosophy. In this essay, I argue that poetry, rather than being excluded from the realm of the performative, can be considered as a performative dispositif that acts upon ordinary language and, through it, upon our forms of life. To (...) reevaluate poetry, I suggest moving from the ‘parasite’ metaphor (poetry is passively feeding on ordinary uses of language) to a ‘virus’ metaphor (poetry is actively disrupting ordinary uses of language). By building on works of French theorists and poets Christophe Hanna, Franck Leibovici, and Manuel Joseph among others, I explore how poetry reveals the virality of language. (shrink)