In four new and nine previously published essays, Joseph Heath provides a compelling new framework for thinking about the moral obligations of economic actors. The "market failures" approach to business ethics that he develops provides the basis for a unified theory of business ethics, corporate law, economic regulation, and the welfare state.

In most liberal democracies for example, the central bank is as independent as the supreme court, yet deals with a wide range of economic, social, and political issues. How do these public servants make these policy decisions? What normative principles inform their judgments? In The Machinery of Government, Joseph Heath attempts to answer these questions. He looks to the actual practice of public administration to see how normative questions are addressed. More broadly, he attempts to provide the outlines of (...) a "philosophy of the executive" by taking seriously the claim to political authority of the most neglected of the three branches of the state. (shrink)

Using formal systems to represent and reason about uncertainty.

"Although the task of formulating an appropriate policy response to the problem of anthropogenic climate change is one that raises a number of very difficult normative issues, environmental ethicists have not played an influential role in government deliberations. This is primarily due to their rejection of many of the assumptions that structure the debates over policy. This book offers a philosophical defense of these assumptions, in order to overcome the major conceptual barriers to the participation of philosophers in these debates. (...) There are five important barriers: First, the policy debate presupposes a stance of liberal neutrality, as a result of which it does not privilege any particular set of environmental values over other concerns. Second, it assumes ongoing economic growth, along with a commitment to what is sometimes called a weak sustainability framework when analyzing the value of the bequest being made to future generations. Third, it treats climate change as fundamentally a collective action problem, not an issue of distributive justice. Fourth, there is the acceptance of cost-benefit analysis, or more precisely, the view that a carbon pricing regime should be guided by our best estimate of the social cost of carbon. And finally, there is the view that when this calculation is undertaken, it is permissible to discount costs and benefits, depending on how far removed they are from the present. This book attempts to make explicit and defend these presuppositions, and in so doing offer philosophical foundations for the debate over climate change policy"--. (shrink)

One of the most influential ideas in the field of business ethics has been the suggestion that ethical conduct in a business context should be analyzed in terms of a set of fiduciary obligations toward various “stakeholder” groups. Moral problems, according to this view, involve reconciling such obligations in cases where stakeholder groups have conflicting interests. The question posed in this paper is whether the stakeholder paradigm represents the most fruitful way of articulating the moral problems that arise in business. (...) By way of contrast, I outline two other possible approaches to business ethics: one, a more minimal conception, anchored in the notion of a fiduciary obligation toward shareholders; and the other, a broader conception, focused on the concept of market failure. I then argue that the latter offers a more satisfactory framework for the articulation of the social responsibilities of business. (shrink)

One of the most influential ideas in the field of business ethics has been the suggestion that ethical conduct in a business contextshould be analyzed in terms of a set of fiduciary obligations toward various “stakeholder” groups. Moral problems, according to this view, involve reconciling such obligations in cases where stakeholder groups have conflicting interests. The question posed in this paper is whether the stakeholder paradigm represents the most fruitful way of articulating the moral problems that arise in business. By (...) way of contrast, I outline two other possible approaches to business ethics: one, a more minimal conception, anchored in the notion of a fiduciary obligation toward shareholders; and the other, a broader conception, focused on the concept of market failure. I then argue that the latter offers a more satisfactory framework for the articulation of the social responsibilities of business. (shrink)

Introduction -- Instrumental rationality -- Social order -- Deontic constraint -- Intentional states -- Preference noncognitivism -- A naturalistic perspective -- Transcendental necessity -- Weakness of will -- Normative ethics.

John Stuart Mill is one of the hallowed figures of the liberal tradition, revered for his defense of liberal principles and expansive personal liberty. By examining Mill's arguments in On Liberty in light of his other writings, however, Joseph Hamburger reveals a Mill very different from the "saint of rationalism" so central to liberal thought. He shows that Mill, far from being an advocate of a maximum degree of liberty, was an advocate of liberty and control--indeed a degree of (...) control ultimately incompatible with liberal ideals.Hamburger offers this powerful challenge to conventional scholarship by presenting Mill's views on liberty in the context of his ideas about, in particular, religion and historical development. The book draws on the whole range of Mill's philosophical writings and on his correspondence with, among others, Harriet Taylor Mill, Auguste Comte, and Alexander Bain to show that Mill's underlying goal was to replace the traditional religious basis of society with a form of secular religion that would rest on moral authority, individual restraint, and social control. Hamburger argues that Mill was not self-contradictory in thus championing both control and liberty. Rather, liberty and control worked together in Mill's thought as part of a balanced, coherent program of social and moral reform that was neither liberal nor authoritarian.Based on a lifetime's study of nineteenth-century political thought, this clearly written and forcefully argued book is a major reinterpretation of Mill's ideas and intellectual legacy. (shrink)

There is an idea, extremely common among social contract theorists, that the primary function of social institutions is to secure some form of cooperative benefit. If individuals simply seek to satisfy their own preferences in a narrowly instrumental fashion, they will find themselves embroiled in collective action problems – interactions with an outcome that is worse for everyone involved than some other possible outcome. Thus they have reason to accept some form of constraint over their conduct, in order to achieve (...) this superior, but out-of-equilibrium outcome. A social institution can be defined as a set of norms that codify these constraints.1 Simplifying somewhat, one can then say that social institutions exist in order to secure gains in Pareto-efficiency. (shrink)

In the economic literature on the firm, especially in the transaction-cost tradition, a sharp distinction is drawn between so-called “market transactions” and “administered transactions.” This distinction is of enormous importance for business ethics, since market transactions are governed by the competitive logic of the market, whereas administered transactions are subject to the cooperative norms that govern collective action in a bureaucracy. The widespread failure to distinguish between these two types of transactions, and thus to distinguish between adversarial and non-adversarial relations, (...) has led many business ethicists to develop a “uniform” moral code. Yet in market transactions, the checks and balances built into the system of commercial exchange are such as to permit more instrumental forms of behavior. In administered transactions, by contrast, these checks and balances are absent, and thus the institutional context calls for much greater exercise of moral restraint. In this paper, I begin the task of developing an adversarial ethic for business. According to this view, the competitive environment licenses a greater range of “self-interested” behavior, but also imposes its own constraints on the strategies that firms may adopt in the pursuit of their interests. (shrink)

(1968 [1922]). It amounts to the claim that social phenomena must be explained by showing how they result from individual actions, which in turn must be explained through reference to the intentional states that motivate the individual actors. It involves, in other words, a commitment to the primacy of what Talcott Parsons would later call “the action frame of reference” (Parsons 1937: 43-51) in social-scientific explanation. It is also sometimes described as the claim that explanations of “macro” social phenomena must (...) be supplied with “micro” foundations, ones that specify an action-theoretic mechanism (Alexander, 1987). (shrink)

False belief tasks have enjoyed a monopoly in the research on children’s development of a theory of mind. They have been granted this status because they promise to deliver an unambiguous assessment of children’s understanding of the representational nature of mental states. Their poor cousins, true belief tasks, have been relegated to occasional service as control tasks. That this is their only role has been due to the universal assumption that correct answers on true belief tasks are inherently ambiguous regarding (...) the level of the child’s understanding of mental states. It has also been due to the universal assumption that nothing in the child’s developing theory of mind would lead to systematically incorrect answers on true belief tasks. We review new findings that 4- and 5-year-olds do err, systematically and profoundly, on the true belief versions of all the extant belief tasks. This reveals an intermediate level of understanding in the development of children’s theory of mind. Researchers have been unaware of this intermediate level because it produces correct answers in false belief tasks. A simple two-task battery—one true belief task and one false belief task—is sufficient to remove the ambiguity from each task. The new findings show that children do not acquire an understanding of beliefs, and hence a representational theory of mind, until after 6 years of age, or 2 years later than most developmental psychologists have concluded. This raises the question of how to interpret other new findings that infants are able to pass false belief tasks. We review these new infant studies, as well as recent studies on chimpanzees, in light of older children’s failure on true belief tasks, and end with some speculation about how all of these new findings might be reconciled. (shrink)

The use of agency theory remains highly controversial among business ethicists. While some regard it as an essential tool for analyzing and understanding the recent spate of corporate ethics scandals, others argue that these scandals might not even have occurred had it not been for the widespread teaching of agency theory in business schools. This paper presents a qualified defense of agency theory against these charges, first by identifying the theoretical commitments that are essential to the theory (in order to (...) distinguish between agency theory itself and certain incorrect interpretations that have been widely promulgated), and second, by specifying more clearly the different ways that agency theory can be used to analyze relations within the firm. The recommendation that follows from this analysis is that agency theory be used as a critical-diagnostic tool, to identify the points at which both firms and markets will be vulnerable to breakdown in the absence of moral constraint. (shrink)

What experimental game theorists may have demonstrated is not that people are systematically irrational but that human rationality is heavily scaffolded. Remove the scaffolding, and we do not do very well. People are able to get on because they “offload” an enormous amount of practical reasoning onto their environment. As a result, when they are put in novel or unfamiliar environments, they perform very poorly, even on apparently simple tasks. -/- This observation is supported by recent empirically informed shifts in (...) philosophy of mind toward a view of cognition as (to cite the current slogan) “embodied, embedded, enactive, extended.” Andy Clark and others have made a very plausible case for the idea that a proper assessment of human cognitive competence must include environmental components. To limit our attention to what lies within the skin-skull boundary is, in effect, to miss the big story on human rationality. Insofar as we are rational, it is often because of our ingenuity at developing “work-arounds” to the glitches in the fast-and-frugal heuristic problem-solving capabilities that natural selection has equipped us with. And these work-arounds often involve a detour through the environment (so-called offloading of cognitive burdens). -/- When it comes to practical rationality, things are no different. Yet in many discussions of “the will,” there is still a tendency to put too much emphasis on what goes on inside the agent’s head. Our objective in this chapter is to articulate this conception of “the extended will” more clearly, using the strategies that people employ to overcome procrastination for the central set of examples. Procrastination, in our view, constitutes a particular type of self-control problem, one that is particularly amenable to philosophical reflection, not only because of the high volume of psychological research on the subject but also because of the large quantity of “self-help” literature in circulationa literature that provides an invaluable perspective on the everyday strategies that people use in order to defeat (or, better yet, circumvent) this type of self-defeating behavior pattern. In general, what we find is that the internalist bias that permeates discussions of the will gives rise to a set of practical recommendations that overemphasize changing the way one thinks about a task, while ignoring the much richer set of strategies that are available in the realm of environmental scaffolding. In the concluding section, we highlight some of the policy implications of this, particularly regarding social trends involving the dismantling of support structures. (shrink)

This paper raises a challenge for those who assume that corporate social responsibility and good corporate governance naturally go hand-in-hand. The recent spate of corporate scandals in the United States and elsewhere has dramatized, once again, the severity of the agency problems that may arise between managers and shareholders. These scandals remind us that even if we adopt an extremely narrow concept of managerial responsibility – such that we recognize no social responsibility beyond the obligation to maximize shareholder value – (...) there may still be very serious difficulties associated with the effective institutionalization of this obligation. It also suggests that if we broaden managerial responsibility, in order to include extensive responsibilities to various other stakeholder groups, we may seriously exacerbate these agency problems, making it even more difficult to impose effective discipline upon managers. Hence, our central question: is a strong commitment to corporate social responsibility institutionally feasible? In searching for an answer, we revisit the history of public management, and in particular, the experience of social-democratic governments during the 1960s and 1970s, and their attempts to impose social responsibility upon the managers of nationalized industries. The results of this inquiry are less than encouraging for proponents of corporate social responsibility. In fact, the history of public-sector management presents a number of stark warnings, which we would do well to heed if we wish to reconcile robust social responsibility with effective corporate governance. (shrink)

Joseph Agassi is a critic, a gadfly, a debunker and deflater; he is also a constructor, a speculator and an imaginative scholaro In the history and philosophy of science, he has been Peck's bad boy, delighting in sharp and pungent criticism, relishing directness and simplicity, and enjoying it all enormously. As one of that small group of Popper's students (ineluding Bartley, Feyerabend and Lakatos) who took Popper seriously enough to criticize him, Agassi remained his own man, holding Popper's work (...) itself to the criteria of critical refutation. Agassi's range is wide and his publications proliik. He has published serious studies in the historiography of science, applied sociology (on Hong Kong with LC. Jarvie), foundations of anthropology, interpretive scientific biography (Faraday), Judaic studies, philosophy of technology (which Agassi pioneered, particulady in distinguishing it from the philosophy of science), as weIl as the many works on the Iogic, methodoI­ ogy, and history of science. Even as we go to press, Agassi's works are appearing; we append an imperfect and selected bibliography. For Agassi, the test of relevance is whether something is interesting. (shrink)

It is generally agreed that the method of explication consists in replacing a vague, presystematic notion (the explicandum) with a precise notion (the explicatum) formulated in a systematic context. However, Carnap and others who have used this and related terms appear to hold inconsistent views as to what constitutes an adequate explication. The central feature of the present explication of 'explication' is the correspondence condition: permitting the explicandum to deviate from some established "ordinary-language" conventions but, at the same time, requiring (...) that the explicatum correspond (via an effective translation) to the chosen "definitive intension" of the explicandum. (In effect, the first stages of an explication provide an informal characterization of a vague and possibly inconsistent language convention.) The present account of explication contrasts sharply with that sketched by Quine in Word and Object (although Quine accepts a correspondence condition of a sort). The terms `explication 1 ' and `explication 2 ' are used to indicate these quite different senses of the term. In Kaplan's terminology, explication 1 is intended to remedy "external vagueness" while explication 2 is intended to remedy "internal vagueness.". (shrink)

The appropriateness of S5 as a logic of knowledge has been attacked at some length in the philosophical literature. Here one particular attack based on the interplay between knowledge and belief is considered: Suppose that knowledge satisfies S5, belief satisfies KD45, and both the entailment property (knowledge implies belief) and positive certainty (if the agent believes something, she believes she knows it) hold. Then it can be shown that belief reduces to knowledge: it is impossible to have false beliefs. While (...) the entailment property has typically been viewed as perhaps the least controversial of these assumptions, an argument is presented that it can plausibly be viewed as the culprit. More precisely, it is shown that this attack fails if we weaken the entailment property so that it applies only to objective (nonmodal) formulas, rather than to arbitrary formulas. Since the standard arguments in favor of the entailment property are typically given only for objective formulas, this observation suggests that care must be taken in applying intuitions that seem reasonable in the case of objective formulas to arbitrary formulas. (shrink)

Within any adversarial rule-governed system, it often takes time for strategically motivated agents to discover effective exploits. Once discovered, these strategies will soon be copied by all other participants. Unless it is possible to adjust the rules to preclude them, the result will be a degradation of the performance of the system. This is essentially what has happened to public political discourse in democratic states. Political actors have discovered, not just that the norm of truth can be violated in specific (...) ways, but that many of the norms governing rational deliberation can also be violated, not just without penalty, but often for significant political gain. As a result, the level of noise has come to drown out the signal. The post-truth political condition is the cumulative result of innovations developed by actors who adopt an essentially strategic orientation toward political communications. (shrink)

Journal of Political Philosophy, EarlyView.

This book analyses tensions that arise between the principles of social justice and the need for cooperation to advance collective goals.

Critical response to John Rawls's The Law of Peopleshas been surprisingly harsh) Most of the complaints centre on Rawls's claim that there are no obligations of distributive justice among nations. Many of Rawls's critics evidently had been hoping for a global application of the difference principle, so that wealthier nations would be bound to assign lexical priority to the development of the poorest nations, or perhaps the primary goods endowment of the poorest citizens of any nation. Their subsequent disappointment reveals (...) that, while the reception of Rawls's political philosophy has been very broad, it has not been especially deep. Rawls has very good reason for denying that there are obligations of distributive justice in an international context. (shrink)

In this article I argue that the conception of discourse ethics that Jürgen Habermas advances in his seminar paper, ‘Discourse Ethics: Notes on a Program of Philosophical Justification’, is subject to significant revision in later work. The central difference has to do with the status of the universalization principle and its relationship to the ‘rightness’ validity claim. The earlier view is structured by a desire to provide a weak-transcendental defense of the universalization principle. The later revision, however, essentially undercuts the (...) basis of this argument, because it severs the conception of practical discourse from the analysis of speech acts. As a way of responding to the difficulties this creates, I propose a ‘reboot’ of the discourse ethics program. This involves reverting to the earlier, more Durkheimian and less Kantian, formulation of the theory. The result is a program that is no longer encumbered by sterile debates about the correct formulation of the universalization principle, but can plausibly claim to provide insight into the role that language-dependence plays in the development and entrenchment of increasingly pro-social behavior patterns within our institutions. (shrink)

The deeply entrenched, sometimes heated conflict between the disability movement and the profession of bioethics is well known and well documented. Critiques of prenatal diagnosis and selective abortion are probably the most salient and most sophisticated of disability studies scholars’ engagements with bioethics, but there are many other topics over which disability activists and scholars have encountered the field of bioethics in an adversarial way, including health care rationing, growth-attenuation interventions, assisted reproduction technology, and physician-assisted suicide. -/- The tension between (...) the analyses of the disabilities studies scholars and mainstream bioethics is not merely a conflict between two insular political groups, however; it is, rather, also an encounter between those who have experienced disability and those who have not. This paper explores that idea. I maintain that it is a mistake to think of this conflict as arising just from a difference in ideology or political commitments because it represents a much deeper difference—one rooted in variations in how human beings perceive and reason about moral problems. These are what I will refer to as variations of moral psychology. The lived experiences of disability produce variations in moral psychology that are at the heart of the moral conflict between the disability movement and mainstream bioethics. I will illustrate this point by exploring how the disability movement and mainstream bioethics come into conflict when perceiving and analyzing the moral problem of physician-assisted suicide via the lens of the principle of respect for autonomy. To reconcile its contemporary and historical conflict with the disability movement, the field of bioethics must engage with and fully consider the two groups’ differences in moral perception and reasoning, not just the explicit moral and political arguments of the disability movement. (shrink)

While engaging in rich discussion, Conspiracy Theories analyzes current arguments and evidence while providing real-world examples so students can contextualize and visualize the debates. Each chapter addresses important current questions, provides conceptual tools, defines important terms, and introduces the appropriate methods of analysis.

It may seem obvious that causing disability in another person is morally problematic in a way that removing or preventing a disability is not. This suggests that there is a moral asymmetry between causing disability and causing non-disability. This chapter investigates whether there are any differences between these two types of actions that might explain the existence of a general moral asymmetry. After setting aside the possibility that having a disability is almost always bad or harmful for a person (a (...) view that we have critiqued at length elsewhere), seven putative differences are considered. Ultimately, it is concluded that none of these seven factors can ground a general moral asymmetry between causing disability and causing non-disability, though each factor can provide some moral reason to avoid causing disability in certain particular cases. (shrink)

There are many examples in the literature that suggest that indistinguishability is intransitive, despite the fact that the indistinguishability relation is typically taken to be an equivalence relation (and thus transitive). It is shown that if the uncertainty perception and the question of when an agent reports that two things are indistinguishable are both carefully modeled, the problems disappear, and indistinguishability can indeed be taken to be an equivalence relation. Moreover, this model also suggests a logic of vagueness that seems (...) to solve many of the problems related to vagueness discussed in the philosophical literature. In particular, it is shown here how the logic can handle the sorites paradox. (shrink)

In this paper, I argue that Humean theories of moral motivation appear preferable to Kantian approaches only if one assumes a broadly foundationalist conception of rational justification. Like foundationalist approaches to justification generally, Humean psychology aims to counter the regress-of-justification argument by positing a set of ultimate regress-stoppers-in this case, unmotivated desires. If the need for regress-stoppers of this type in the realm of practical deliberation is accepted, desires do indeed appear to be the most likely candidate. But if this (...) foundationalist strategy is rejected, there is no longer any reason to suppose that all motivation must be traceable to some extra-rational incentive. This clears the way for a rehabilitation of the Kantian claim that reasons for action can take the form of categorical imperatives. To illustrate this thesis, I show how a conception of practical rationality that incorporates a contextualist model of justification can be developed that treats social norms as reasons for action, without assigning any mediating role to agent desires. a theory of action of this type eliminates the gap between moral obligation and action, and so articulates the fundamental Kantian intuition that acting on the basis of moral principle-and with disregard for self-interest-is just one way of acting rationally. (shrink)

Henry Hansmann has claimed we have reached the “end of history” in corporate law, organized around the “widespread normative consensus that corporate managers should act exclusively in the economic interests of shareholders.” In this paper, I examine Hansmann’s own argument in support of this view, in order to draw out its implications for some of the traditional concerns of business ethicists about corporate social responsibility. The centerpiece of Hansmann’s argument is the claim that ownership of the firm is most naturally (...) exercised by the group able to achieve the lowest agency costs, and that homogeneity of interest within the ownership group is the most important factor in achieving lower costs. He defends this claim through a study of cooperatives, attempting to show that homogeneity is the source of the competitive advantage most often enjoyed by shareholders over other constituency groups, such as workers, suppliers and customers, when it comes to exercising control over the firm. Some business ethicists, impressed by this argument, have taken it to be a vindication of Milton Friedman’s claim that profit-maximization is the only “social responsibility” of management. I would like to suggest that this conclusion does not follow, and that the “Hansmann argument” lends itself to a less minimalist view, what I refer to as a “market failures” approach to business ethics. (shrink)

Authority is one of the key issues in political studies, for the question of by what right one person or several persons govern others is at the very root of political activity. In selecting key readings for this volume Joseph Raz concerns himself primarily with the moral aspect of political authority, choosing pieces that examine its justification, determine who is subject to it and who is entitled to hold it, and whether there are any general moral limits to it. (...) The readings-by such modern political thinkeres as Robert Paul Wolff, H. L. A. Hart, G. E. M. Anscombe, and Ronald Dworkin-examine the basic moral issues and provide an essential introduction to the debate about the nature of authority for all students of political theory. (shrink)

Ronald Dworkin’s argument for resource egalitarianism has as its centerpiece a thought experiment involving a group of shipwreck survivors washed ashore on an uninhabited island, who decide to divide up all of the resources on the island equally using a competitive auction. Unfortunately, Dworkin misunderstands how the auction mechanism works, and so misinterprets its significance for egalitarian political philosophy. First, he makes it seem as though there is a conceptual connection between the ‘envy-freeness’ standard and the auction, when in fact (...) there is none. Second, he fails to appreciate how idealized the conditions are that must be satisfied in order for his results to obtain. This leads him to draw practical conclusions from the thought experiment that do not follow, such as his claim that the principle of equality generates a presumption in favor of the market as a mechanism for the distribution of resources. The result is that Dworkin saddles resource egalitarianism with a set of commitments that are, in fact, inessential to that view. (shrink)

Joseph Grange's beautifully written book provides a unique synthesis of two major figures of world philosophy, John Dewey and Confucius, and points the way to a global philosophy based on American and Confucian values. Grange concentrates on the major themes of experience, felt intelligence, and culture to make the connections between these two giants of Western and Eastern thought. He explains why the Chinese called Dewey "A Second Confucius," and deepens our understanding of Confucius's concepts of the way (dao) (...) of human excellence (ren). The important dimensions of American and Chinese cultural philosophy are welded into an argument that calls for the liberation of what is finest in both traditions. The work gives a new appreciation of fundamental issues facing Chinese and American relations and brings the opportunities and dangers of globalization into focus. (shrink)

Few issues in business ethics are as polarizing as the practice of risk classification and underwrit­ ing in the insurance industry. Theorists who approach the issue from a background in economics often start from the assumption that policy-holders should be charged a rate that reflects the ex­ pected loss that they bring to the insurance scheme. Yet theorists who approach the question from a background in philosophy or civil rights law often begin with a presumption against socalled “actuarially fair” premiums (...) and in favor of “community rating,” in which everyone is charged the same price. This paper begins by examining and rejecting the three primary argu­ ments that have been given to show that actuarially fair premiums are unjust. It then considers the two primary arguments that have been offered by those who wish to defend the practice of risk classification. These arguments overshoot their target, by requiring a “freedom to under­ write” that is much greater than the level of freedom enjoyed in most other commercial transac­ tions. The paper concludes by presenting a defense of a more limited right to underwrite, one that grants the legitimacy of the central principle of risk classification, but permits specific deviations from that ideal when other important social goods are at stake. (shrink)

The term “political” egalitarianism is used here, not to refer to equality within the political sphere, but rather in John Rawls’s sense, to refer to a conception of egalitarian distributive justice that is capable of serving as the object of an overlapping consensus in a pluralistic society.1 Thus “political” egalitarianism is political in the same way that Rawls’s “political” liberalism is political. The central task when it comes to developing such a conception of equality is to determine what constraints a (...) principle of equality must satisfy in order to qualify as “freestanding,” or to be justifiable in a way that does not presuppose the correctness of any one member of the set of reasonable yet incompatible “religious, philosophical and moral” doctrines that attract large numbers of adherents in our world.2 (Rawls uses the analogy of a “module” in order to describe the way that a properly political conception of justice “fits into and can be supported by various reasonable comprehensive doctrines that endure in the society regulated by it.”3 Political egalitarianism would be “modular” in this sense.) Rather than getting embroiled in the controversies that have arisen over Rawls’s formulation of this idea, I would like simply to accept the intuition, widespread among political philosophers, that equality is the sort of principle that – if given a proper formulation – could satisfy the requirements of a political conception of justice. After all, regardless of what peoples’ projects, values, or conceptions of the good life may be, it should be possible to design a set of arrangements that would provide equal opportunity to pursue these goals, or that would treat each conception of the good with equal respect, etc. From this perspective, the principle of equality resembles the principle of Pareto-efficiency, or certain formulations of the principle of liberty – it is one that everyone should be able to endorse, insofar as it does not privilege, or presuppose the correctness of, any particular set of projects, values.. (shrink)

In 1960, E. P. Wigner, a joint winner of the 1963 Nobel Prize for Physics, published a paper titled On the Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics in the Natural Sciences [61]. This paper can be construed as an examination and affirmation of Galileo's tenet that “The book of nature is written in the language of mathematics”. To this effect, Wigner presented a large number of examples that demonstrate the effectiveness of mathematics in accurately describing physical phenomena. Wigner viewed these examples as (...) illustrations of what he called the empirical law of epistemology, which asserts that the mathematical formulation of the laws of nature is both appropriate and accurate, and that mathematics is actually the correct language for formulating the laws of nature. At the same time, Wigner pointed out that the reasons for the success of mathematics in the natural sciences are not completely understood; in fact, he went as far as asserting that “… the enormous usefulness of mathematics in the natural sciences is something bordering on the mysterious and there is no rational explanation for it.”. (shrink)

Disability activists have sometimes claimed their disability has actually increased their well-being. Some even say they would reject a cure to keep these gains. Yet, these same activists often simultaneously propose improvements to the quality and accessibility of assistive technology. However, for any argument favoring assistive over curative technology to work, there must be a coherent distinction between the two. This line is already vague and will become even less clear with the emergence of novel technologies. This paper asks and (...) tries to answer the question: what is it about the paradigmatic examples of curative and assistive technologies that make them paradigmatic and how can these defining features help us clarify the hard cases? This analysis will begin with an argument that, while the common views of this distinction adequately explain the paradigmatic cases, they fail to accurately pick out the relevant features of those technologies that make them paradigmatic and to provide adequate guidance for parsing the hard cases. Instead, it will be claimed that these categories of curative or assistive technologies are defined by the role the technologies play in establishing a person’s relational narrative identity as a member of one of two social groups: disabled people or non-disabled people. (shrink)