One prominent criticism of luck egalitarianism is that it requires either shameful revelations or otherwise problematic declarations by the state toward those who have had bad brute luck. Relational egalitarianism, by contrast, is portrayed as an alternative that requires no such revelations or declarations. I argue that this is false. Relational equality requires the state to draft anti-discrimination laws for both state and private action. The ideal of relational egalitarianism requires these laws to be asymmetric, that is to allow affirmative (...) action for disadvantaged groups while prohibiting affirmative action for advantaged groups. Hence, the state needs to make a public declaration on which groups are privileged and which are underprivileged; and individuals need to reveal whether they belong to groups officially declared underprivileged. These declarations are no more problematic in this case than in the case of luck egalitarianism. (shrink)

Most non-consequentialists “let the numbers count” when one can save either a lesser or greater number from equal or similar harm. But they are wary of doing so when one can save either a small number from grave harm or instead a very large number from minor harm. Limited aggregation is an approach that reconciles these two commitments. It is motivated by a powerful idea: our decision whom to save should respect each person who has a claim to our help, (...) including those whom we fail to save. However, it has recently been argued that it is open to decisive objections. I develop a new limitedly aggregative view:Hybrid Balance Relevant Claims. This view is well grounded in the reasons we have to be skeptical of aggregation and resolves all recent challenges by paying careful attention to the rationale for limited aggregation. (shrink)

Whether there are philosophically relevant connections between the expressive role of first-personal vocabulary and self-knowledge is an on-going debate in analytical philosophy. We will take a look at this debate by considering Ludwig Wittgenstein’s distinction between the two uses of ‘I’ as object and as subject and work out a further distinction within the subject-use of ‘I’. This relates to a problem that is inherent in Robert Brandom’s inferentialist program regarding the role of first-personal vocabulary. It can be shown that (...) subject-related aspects of language are necessary elements of inferentially articulated discourses—and not, like Brandom assumes, merely contingent features. (shrink)

How should contractualists assess the permissibility of risky actions? Both main views on the question, ex ante and ex post, fail to distinguish between different kinds of risk. In this article, I argue that this overlooks a third alternative that I call “objective ex ante contractualism”. Objective ex ante substitutes discounting complaints by epistemic risk in favor of discounting by objective risk. I further argue in favor of this new view. Objective ex ante contractualism provides the best model of justifiability (...) to each. (shrink)

You and I lead different lives. While we share a society and a world, our existence is separate from one another. You and I matter individually, by ourselves. My dissertation is about this simple thought. I argue that this simple insight, the separateness of persons, tells us something fundamental about morality. My dissertation seeks to answer how the separateness of persons matters. I develop a precise view of the demands of the separateness of persons. The separateness of persons imposes both (...) a requirement on the justification of first-order moral principles as well as a requirement on the content of first-order moral principles. In specifying these demands, I argue that respecting the separateness of persons requires taking into consideration each person’s point of view separately. This requires taking into account the moral relations in which individuals stand to one another. I make use of this relational understanding of the separateness of persons to advance various debates in moral and political philosophy. I argue for a framework to assess to which extent the veil of ignorance can be reconciled with the separateness of persons. I also argue for a new view on the ethics of risk which is a form of contractualism that discounts risks only by their objective risk. Furthermore, I argue for a new solution to the problem of aggregation that is skeptical of aggregation and can set plausible limits to aggregation. Lastly, I provide a new relational agent-based justification for deontological constraints. In addition to answering how the separateness of persons matters, I defend the separateness of persons against challenges. Most importantly, I argue that the importance of the separateness of persons is not undermined even if we believe that our personal identity, i.e. whether we persist as the same person, is unimportant. (shrink)

Limited aggregation holds that we are only sometimes, not always, permitted to aggregate. Aggregation is permissible only when the harms and benefits are relevant to one another. But how should limited aggregation be extended to cases in which we are uncertain about what will happen? In this article, I provide a challenge to ex post limited aggregation. I reconstruct a precise version of ex post limited aggregation that relies on the notion of ex post claims. However, building a theory of (...) limited aggregation based on ex post claims leads to a dilemma. This shows that ex post limited aggregation is currently far away from being a well-defined alternative, strengthening the case for ex ante limited aggregation. (shrink)

In recent years, there has been significant interest in injustices that do not consist in inflicting physical or material harm on others, but operate in more subtle ways, e.g. by targeting our status as epistemic agents. In a similar fashion, this paper aims to bring to the forefront a currently overlooked kind of injustice that occurs in relation to our concepts: conceptual injustice, which is characterised by wrongful in- or exclusion from the application of a concept. The first part of (...) the paper is concerned with spelling out the notion, discussing its characteristic wrongs, and with tracing it in a number of examples. In the second part, I discuss conceptual injustice in relation to connected but different forms of injustice, such as epistemic injustice. This highlights the advantages of having the notion on hand: it enhances our understanding of other forms of injustice like hermeneutical injustice, and allows us to capture a ‘remainder of injustice’ for which we could not account otherwise. (shrink)

Moral Relativism can be considered an attractive alternative to realism because relativists can make good sense of cultural and societal disagreements by seeing them as faultless. However, we can show that this advantage is made possible by systematically disagreeing with moral phenomenology. Relativists make a substantial distinction between intercultural and intracultural discourses which turns out to be incoherent. This can be shown by making use of Crispin Wright’s notion of Cognitive Command.

Wittgenstein's discussion of rule-following can be considered as a part of his criticism of metaphysics: Naturalistic as well as non-naturalistic ontologies fail to present us an adequate explanation of the normative dimension of linguistic behavior. In this paper, we will reconstruct this criticism of metaphysics and show that thereby we gain an important philosophical insight: Wittgenstein's criticism implies that the normativity of language is not a phenomenon that stands in need for an explanation but rather – to the contrary – (...) has to be considered as a primitive, non-reducible condition that we have to presuppose in order to show how linguistic meaning is possible at all. In this sense, the notion of rule-following gives rise to a transcendental semantics. (shrink)

Do moral questions have objective answers? In this great debate, Gilbert Harman explains and argues for relativism, emotivism, and moral scepticism. In his view, moral disagreements are like disagreements about what to pay for a house; there are no correct answers ahead of time, except in relation to one or another moral framework. Independently, Judith Jarvis Thomson examines what she takes to be the case against moral objectivity, and rejects it; she argues that it is possible to find out (...) the correct answers to some moral questions. In her view, some moral disagreements are like disagreements about whether the house has a ghost. Harman and Thomson then reply to each other. This important, lively accessible exchange will be invaluable to all students of moral theory and meta-ethics. (shrink)

Afin de préciser l’héritage théologique dans lequel le Séminaire de culture théologique s’est inscrit par ses fondateurs, il convient d’explorer la manière dont les libristes ont développé leur enseignement théologique au fil du temps au sein de leur Faculté fondée à Lausanne en 1847. Il nourrit la formation octroyée aux laïcs mettant en œuvre une pédagogie de la conviction ancrée dans la théologie du Réveil propagée durant plus d’un siècle (1847-1966) par l’Église évangélique libre du canton de Vaud et par (...) sa Faculté. Au lendemain de la Seconde Guerre mondiale, il s’agissait plus largement de repenser l’implication du christianisme dans la société. Le Séminaire contribua ainsi à renforcer la place des laïcs et à démocratiser l’accès à la théologie. (shrink)

In many countries, the COVID‐19 pandemic varied starkly between different racial and ethnic groups. Before vaccines were approved, some considered assigning priority access to worse‐hit racial groups. That debate can inform rationing in future pandemics and in some of the many areas outside COVID‐19 that admit of racial health disparities. However, concerns were raised that “race‐responsive” prioritizations would be ruled unlawful for allegedly constituting wrongful discrimination. This legal argument relies on an understanding of discrimination law as demanding color‐blindness. We argue (...) that a, color‐blind understanding of discrimination would be hostile only to one of two rationales for prioritizing the relevant racial minorities in settings of racial health disparities. We also propose a method for incorporating appropriate race‐responsive concerns that is in many ways ethically and legally superior to ones suggested thus far. That method turns artificial intelligence, thanks precisely to its artificial and “black box” nature (features that underlie recent concerns about artificial intelligence's discriminatory potential), into an instrument of social justice. (shrink)

People's treatment of others (humans, nonhuman animals, or other entities) often depends on whether they think the entity is worthy of moral concern. Recent work has begun to investigate which entities are included in a person's moral circle, examining how certain target characteristics (e.g., species category, perceived intelligence) and judge characteristics (e.g., empathy, political orientation) shape moral inclusion. However, the relative importance of target and judge characteristics in predicting moral inclusion remains unclear. When predicting whether a person will deem an (...) entity worthy of moral consideration, how important is it to know who is making the judgment (i.e., characteristics of the judge), who is being judged (i.e., characteristics of the target), and potential interactions between the two factors? Here, we address this foundational question by conducting a variance component analysis of the moral circle. In two studies with participants from the Netherlands, the United States, the United Kingdom, and Australia (N = 836), we test how much variance in judgments of moral concern is explained by between‐target differences, between‐judge differences, and by the interaction between the two factors. We consistently find that all three components explain substantial amounts of variance in judgments of moral concern. Our findings provide two important insights. First, an increased focus on interactions between target and judge characteristics is needed, as these interactions explain as much variance as target and judge characteristics separately. Second, any theoretical account that aims to provide an accurate description of moral inclusion needs to consider target characteristics, judge characteristics, and their interaction. (shrink)

Derek Parfit famously argued that personal identity is not what matters for prudential concern about the future. Instead, he argues what matters is Relation R, a combination of psychological connectedness and continuity with any cause. This revisionary conclusion, Parfit argued, has profound implications for moral theory. It should lead us, among other things, to deny the importance of the separateness of persons as an important fact of morality. Instead, we should adopt impersonal consequentialism. In this paper, I argue that Parfit (...) is mistaken about this last step. His revisionary arguments about personal identity and rationality have no implications for moral theory. We need not decide whether Relation R or personal identity contain what matters if we want to retain the importance of the separateness of persons. (shrink)

In this exciting Handbook, Ian Jarvie and Jesús Zamora-Bonilla have put together a wide-ranging and authoritative overview of the main philosophical currents and traditions at work in the social sciences today. Starting with the history of social scientific thought, this Handbook sets out to explore that core fundamentals of social science practice, from issues of ontology and epistemology to issues of practical method. Along the way it investigates such notions as paradigm, empiricism, postmodernism, naturalism, language, agency, power, culture, and causality.

I. C. Jarvie was trained as a social anthropologist in the center of British social anthropology - the London School of Economics, where Bronislaw Malinowski was the object of ancestor worship. Jarvie's doctorate was in philosophy, however, under the guidance of Karl Popper and John Watkins. He changed his department not as a defector but as a rebel, attempting to exorcize the ancestral spirit. He criticized the method of participant obser vation not as useless but as not comprehensive: it is (...) neither necessary nor sufficient for the making of certain contributions to anthropology; rather, it all depends on the problem-situation. And so Jarvie remained an anthro pologist at heart, who, in addition to some studies in rather conventional anthropological or sociological molds, also studied the tribe of social scien tists, but also critically examining their problems - especially their overall, rather philosophical problems, but not always so: a few of the studies in cluded in this volume exemplify his work on specific issues, whether of technology, or architecture, or nationalism in the academy, or moviemaking, or even movies exhibiting excessive sex and violence. These studies attract his attention both on account of their own merit and on account of their need for new and powerful research tools, such as those which he has forged in his own intellectual workshop over the last two decades. (shrink)

Deontologists believe that it is wrong to violate a right even if this will prevent a greater number of violations of the same right. This leads to the paradox of deontology: If respecting everyone’s rights is equally important, why should we not minimize the number of rights violations? One possible answer is agent-based. This answer points out that you should not violate rights even if this will prevent someone else’s violations. In this paper, I defend a relational agent-based justification that (...) focuses on the relation in which the agent stands to her would-be victims. I argue that this justification can avoid two key objections levelled against agent-based justifications: It can explain why we are not permitted to minimize our own rights violations, and the justification avoids the charge of being excessively self-concerned. (shrink)

During the last century of meta-ethical debates, moral realism was much criticized for its ontological assumptions. These assumptions arise from the semantic intuition that lies at the heart of realist theories – namely, the intuition that language represents states of affairs. This makes moral realism hardly compatible with a naturalist world view and gives rise to consider ontologically more economic approaches. Moral constructivists can explain objectivity in ethics without inheriting the realist’s ontological burden. Nevertheless, constructivists tend to ignore the semantic (...) task of giving an account of what moral sentences mean. The semantics of moral discourse, however, cannot be considered representational because, then, constructivism would lapse back into realism. I argue that semantic pragmatism is an appropriate partner for moral constructivism. Thereby, we can see the personal standpoint as an engagement in asserting moral sentences. (shrink)

Blumenthal-Barby et al. (2022) are right. Philosophers should pay greater attention to bioethics and bioethicists should pay greater attention to insights from philosophy. This commentary extends t...

One of the basic notions of ethics is certainly the concept of the will. Although in his Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, Wittgenstein excludes that ethical sentences can be meaningfully formulated, the conception of the will occupies a prominent position in his book. This supposed tension in the Tractatus is not accidental, but an integral part of Wittgenstein's concern to reach a new, non-philosophical approach towards ethics.

Der vorliegende Aufsatz entwickelt die These, dass Arbeitsteilung ein wesentliches Medium ist, um gesellschaftliche Verachtung zu organisieren und zu mobilisieren. Er tut dies im Ausgang und im Rückgriff auf Simone Weil. Ihre Überlegungen zu Arbeit und Arbeitsteilung erlauben es, einen Brückenschlag zwischen zwei aktuellen Forschungssträngen zu schlagen, die in der Regel nebeneinanderher laufen: die sozialphilosophische Diskussion um das Verhältnis von Anerkennung und Arbeit auf der einen Seite und die Debatte zur Frage bedeutungsvoller Arbeit (meaningful work) in der Politischen Philosophie auf (...) der anderen Seite. Simone Weil erlaubt es, beide Debatten zu bereichern und zu verknüpfen. Ihre Reflexion auf das Phänomen Arbeitsteilung bereichert die sozialphilosophische Diskussion, indem sie zeigt, dass Arbeit nicht nur ein Medium gesellschaftlicher Anerkennungsprozesse ist bzw. sein kann, sondern auch ein Mittel gesellschaftlicher Verachtungsprozesse (Teil 1). Zugleich fordert sie, dass Arbeit so gestaltet wird, dass die Tätigen darin Autonomie erfahren können. Ihre diesbezüglichen Überlegungen ergänzen die Debatte in der Politischen Philosophie, in der ebenfalls auf das Kriterium der Autonomie zurückgegriffen wird, um bestimmen zu können, was „meaningful work“ ist (Teil 2). Am Ende des Aufsatzes werden die wesentlichen Ergebnisse kurz zusammengefasst und die weiterführende Frage aufgeworfen, inwiefern sich mit diesen Überlegungen an das normative Projekt einer verachtungsfreien Gesellschaft angeknüpft werden kann, das Avishai Margalit mit seinem Buch „The Decent Society“ einst skizziert hat. (shrink)

This paper attempts to specify the force of Michel Henry’s concept of life. It suggests that the phenomenological clarity of Henry’s concept of life is nevertheless accompanied by a certain ambiguity about the relationship between phenomenological description of life, on the one hand, and the value or pathos which is attached to ‘life’ in Henry’s work, on the other. The article pursues this relationship by showing how Henry’s account of life’s value is developed through two subsidiary but important ideas in (...) Henry’s authorship: the notions of ‘culture’ and of ‘barbarism’. It concludes that not even a material phenomenology can demonstrate that the attempt to find ‘life’ in ‘the world’ must always be (in Henry’s phrase) a ‘ruinous confusion’. (shrink)

Abstract:Making works in isolation often in very remote or isolated environments, Jarvis's intimate series of landscape embodiment rituals raise the dichotomy of site-specific practice as potential platform for increased environmental awareness. Reviewing her recent environmental works in a framework of deconstructive ecopsychology, Beatrice will address through theoretical and practice based models how far the artist and landscape form a dynamic synthesis within the collaborative experience of landscape. Jarvis will debate how far site specific performance and the practice of (...) long distance walking offers an embodied landscape narrative. This paper raises the seminal question how can the body can become mirror to its surroundings, asking through embodied practice, photography, film and writing; how does the body become a living archive? (shrink)

This paper concerns the relationship between epistemology and radically extended cognition. Radically extended cognition (REC) – as advanced by Andy Clark and David Chalmers – is cognition that is partly located outside the biological boundaries of the cognizing subject. Epistemologists have begun to wonder whether REC has any consequences for theories of knowledge. For instance, while Duncan Pritchard suggests that REC might have implications for which virtue epistemology is acceptable, J. Adam Carter wonders whether REC threatens anti-luck epistemology. In this (...) paper, I argue that the possibility of REC has no systematic consequences for theorizing in epistemology. I suggest an alternative relationship between the two: epistemology can play a role in diagnosing cases of REC. Thus, by establishing that entities partially located outside biological boundaries don't play certain epistemic roles, one can establish that they don't play the related cognitive roles either. I conclude the paper by illustrating this last point. (shrink)

Peter Mandler’s Return from the Natives examines Margaret Mead mid-career when she devoted much energy to promoting anthropology and anthropologists to government and industry and positioned herself as a prominent social commentator. By the time she returned to the field after an interlude of 14 years, something had happened to her professionally: she was treated as a bit of an embarrassment, no longer a scientific heavyweight, and much of this stems from the rather hare-brained “culture cracking” she engaged in during (...) the war. So while honors and kudos enhanced her official image, behind the scenes, she complained of being neglected and shunted aside. Her discipline became radicalized, and her balanced and accommodating approach was rejected. (shrink)

Can knowledge be defined? We expound an argument of John Cook Wilson's that it cannot. Cook Wilson's argument connects knowing with having the power to inquire. We suggest that if he is right about that connection, then knowledge is, indeed, indefinable.

Name der Zeitschrift: Zeitschrift für kritische Sozialtheorie und Philosophie Jahrgang: 4 Heft: 1-2 Seiten: 364-396.

Are persons rational because they are self-conscious or are they self-conscious because they are rational? Wittgenstein's remarks on the grammatical peculiarities of first-person expressions are not only a criticism of the conception of a Cartesian Ego but also give rise to systematical extensions which help to answer our question. The distinction between subject- and object-usage of ,,I” – which is made in the ,,Blue Book” – enables Wittgenstein to conceive of sentences like ,,I am in pain” as non-referential expressions. With (...) this distinction, Wittgenstein criticizes the ontological commitment to an Ego which results from the referential usage of ,,I”. Nevertheless, Wittgenstein's distinction stands in need of an addition: We will distinguish an epistemic form of expression from a phenomenal form. On this basis, we can show that self-consciousness systematically builds on rationality – and not the other way around. Competent usage of epistemic-expressive I-sentences is antecedent to talking meaningfully of a self-conscious person. In turn, the competent usage of such sentences is embedded in a social structure. Self-consciousness has a social place. (shrink)

According to proponents of radically extended cognition, some cognition is located outside the boundaries of biological organisms. In this paper, I offer a new argument for a modest version of this view according to which some cognitive processes are radically extended. I do so by showing that features of a subject's environment—in particular, the pen and paper that a subject uses to solve complex mathematical problems—can have epistemic roles that are indicative of cognitive roles. I end the paper by discussing (...) how epistemology might play a significant role in diagnosing alleged cases of radically extended cognition. (shrink)

While social geographers have convincingly made the case that space is not an external constant, but rather is produced through inter-relations, anthropologists and sociologists have done much to further an understanding of time, as itself constituted through social interaction and inter-relation. Their work suggests that time is not an apolitical background to social life, but shapes how we perceive and relate to others. For those interested in exploring issues such as identity, community and difference, this suggests that attending to how (...) temporal discourses are utilised in relation to these issues is a key task. This article seeks to contribute to an expansion of the debate about time and sociality by contributing an analysis of a variety of ways in which Gloria Anzaldúa utilises temporal concepts as part of her work of rethinking social identity and community. In particular, I suggest that in contesting homogeneous identity, Anzaldúa also implicitly contests linear temporal frameworks. Further, in creating new frameworks for identity, I suggest the possibility of discerning an alternative approach to time in her work that places difference at the heart of simultaneity. I suggest that the interconnection between concepts of time and community within Anzaldúa’s work indicates, more broadly, that attempts to rework understandings of relationality must be accompanied by reworked accounts of temporality. (shrink)