This unique volume explores what ethics has to offer the practicing physician, nurse, and allied health care worker. The authors introduce the basic vocabulary of ethics and present and discuss the most commonly used ethical theories, using case studies to illustrate how ethics work within the context of health care. Newcomers to the field will learn what ethics is all about and how it relates to the pragmatic concerns of the health care professional. Those who already have a working knowledge (...) of the field will find a new approach to ethical theory--personalism--which the authors believe can make the practical use of ethics more effective and reliable. (shrink)

It is a popular view thatpractical deliberation excludes foreknowledge of one's choice. Wolfgang Spohn and Isaac Levi have argued that not even a purely probabilistic self-predictionis available to thedeliberator, if one takes subjective probabilities to be conceptually linked to betting rates. It makes no sense to have a betting rate for an option, for one's willingness to bet on the option depends on the net gain from the bet, in combination with the option's antecedent utility, rather than on the offered (...) odds. And even apart from this consideration, assigning probabilities to the options among which one is choosing is futile since such probabilities could be of no possible use in choice. The paper subjects these arguments to critical examination and suggests that, appearances notwithstanding, practical deliberation need not crowd outself-prediction. (shrink)

In this paper, I make three points. The first is that there is indeed a distinctive approach to moral methodology, different from standard moral reasoning, that can be described as “practice-dependence”. I argue that its distinctness lies in recommending an aptness claim , namely that moral principles for regulating social practices must be principles for better fulfilling the point of those practices, a point discoverable in shared understandings of the practice. Participants treat domestic political societies as having (...) a different point to the practice of international relations. On this approach, then, different moral principles apply in each case: principles of distributive justice between citizens in the former and principles of cooperative fairness between states in the latter. My second point is that this approach fails, however, an important test which I call the justifiability constraint . Any formulation of a moral principle assigning rights and duties, benefits and burdens, to people should be justifiable to those persons by reference to a moral value. Yet, as I show, the practice-dependence view cannot offer any justification based on moral value for the aptness claim. My last point is that both endorsers and critics of practice-dependence have mistakenly attributed this approach to theorists who restrict the scope of justice on the basis of moral justification. Such views are, in fact, incompatible with the aptness claim given that they offer plausible independently derived moral grounds for restricting the scope of justice. They are also compatible with the justifiability constraint. For these reasons, I conclude that practice-dependence is a red herring for debates on global justice. (shrink)

An increasingly popular approach to global justice claims we should be ‘integrationist,’ where integrationism represents an attempt to unify our theorising between different domains of global politics. These political theorists have argued that we cannot identify plausible principles in one domain, such as climate justice, which are not sensitive to general moral concerns. This paper argues we ought to reject the concept of integrationism. It shows that integrationism is either trivial, or it obscures relevant disagreement by ignoring the distinctive methodological (...) and substantive commitments held by its opponents. The paper then argues that the relevant disagreement is actually about the role of practices for political philosophy and, as such, should be framed in terms of the distinction between practice-dependent and practice-independent theory. Finally, I provide my own account of that distinction, identifying a practice-dependent claim that those concerned about the narrowness of prominent accounts of global justice should target. (shrink)

A shared presumption among practice-dependent theorists is that a principle of justice is dependent on the function or aim of the practice to which it is supposed to be applied. In recent contributions to this debate, the condition of epistemic uncertainty plays a significant role for motivating and justifying a practice-dependent view. This paper analyses the role of epistemic uncertainty in justifying a practice-dependent approach. We see two kinds of epistemic uncertainty allegedly playing this justificatory role. (...) What we call ‘normative epistemic uncertainty’ emerges from dealing with the problem of value uncertainty in justifying applied principles when our higher-level principles are open-textured, that is, when their content is too vague or unclear to generate determinate prescriptions. What we call ‘descriptive epistemic uncertainty’ emerges from dealing with uncertainty about empirical facts, such as the problem of moral assurance, that is, the problem that the requirements of justice cannot go beyond arrangements that we can know with reasonable confidence that we can jointly establish and maintain. In both cases, practice-dependent theorists conclude that the condition of epistemic uncertainty justifies a practice-dependent approach, which puts certain restrictions on theorizing regulative principles and has wide-ranging practical implications for the scope of justice. Our claim in this paper is that neither kind of epistemic uncertainty justifies a practice-dependent approach. (shrink)

It is often claimed that in normative political theory political imagination should remain unaffected by real-world contingencies: our idea of how the world “ought to be” should be independent from how the world “actually is”. According to the practice-dependent thesis, instead, “[t]he content, scope, and justification of a conception of justice depends on the structure and form of the practices that the conception is intended to govern”. This methodological approach conceives the relationship between theory and practice as an (...) interplay: normative theory applies to practice, but practices are also able to affect the content of normative theory. In this paper, I argue that the interplay between theory and practices that the practice-dependent method generates has not been fully understood. Though it may – at a superficial look – appear as a method compliant with the status quo, I will show that this method implies an idea of political theory as an activity of continuous critical engagement. Given an extended account of the method, political imagination has boundaries but these are not fixed nor easilydefinable: the real-world fact that constrains practice-dependent principles is the point and purpose of the practice they are meant to apply to, but this fact in itself is partly shaped and critically assessed by the theorist. (shrink)

The practice-dependent approach to justice has received a lot of attention in post-millennium political philosophy. It has been developed in different directions and its normative implications have been criticized, but little attention has been directed to the very distinction between practice-dependence and practice-independence and the question of what theoretically differentiates a practice-dependent account from mainstream practice-independent accounts. The core premises of the practice-dependent approach, proponents argue, are meta-normative and methodological. A key feature is (...) the presumption that a concept of justice is dependent on the function or aim of the social practices to which it is supposed to be applied. Closely related to this meta-normative thesis is an interpretive methodology for deriving principles of justice from facts about existing practices, in particular regarding their point and purpose. These two premises, practice-dependent theorists claim, differentiate their account since they are not accepted by practice-independent accounts and they justify different principles of justice than practice-independent accounts. Our aim in this article is to refute both and, demonstrating that practice-independent accounts may indeed accept the meta-normative and methodological premises of the practice-dependent accounts, and that we are given no theoretical reason to think that practice-dependent accounts justify other principles of justice for a practice than do practice-independent accounts. In other words, practice-dependent theorists have not substantiated their claim that practice-dependence is theoretically differentiated from mainstream accounts. When practice-dependent proponents argue for other principles of justice than mainstream theorists, it will be for the usual reason in normative theory: their first-order normative arguments differ. (shrink)

The practice-dependence approach offers a new way of theorizing about human rights and distributive justice that promises to settle some of the ongoing disputes about their justification, content, and scope. In sharp contrast with naturalistic theories, which conceive of human rights as an abstract moral ideal, practice-dependence theories regard human rights as a public political doctrine constructed to play a specific regulatory role in contemporary world politics. They maintain accordingly that the content of those rights should (...) be determined in light of the role played by human rights in the contemporary practice of international politics. Similarly, those theories do not conceive of distributive justice simply as a moral virtue proper to all human beings, but rather as a political value arising as necessary to the regulation of certain social and political practices. In this view, the content and scope of justice should depend on an interpretation of the structure and point of the practices in question. The articles gathered in this volume propose a comprehensive introduction to the practice-dependence approach by some of its major supporters, as well as a critical discussion of its theoretical promises. (shrink)

This review essay discusses two recent attempts to reform the framework in which issues of international and global justice are discussed: Iris Marion Young's ?social connection' model and the practice-dependent approach, here exemplified by Ayelet Banai, Miriam Ronzoni and Christian Schemmel's edited collection. I argue that while Young's model may fit some issues of international or global justice, it misconceives the problems that many of them pose. Indeed, its difficulties point precisely in the direction of practice dependence (...) as it is presented by Banai et al. I go on to discuss what seem to be the strengths of that method, and particularly Banai et al.'s defence of it against the common claim that it is biased towards the status quo. I also discuss Andrea Sangiovanni and Kate MacDonald's contributions to the collection. (shrink)

In this paper I argue that the attempt to develop practice dependence as a middle path between cosmopolitanism and social liberalism ultimately fails. In particular, I contend that the only type of practice dependence that can coherently be defended collapses into cosmopolitanism. I trace the origin of practice dependence theory from Cohen and Sabel’s work through Sangiovanni and Valentini. After discussing the various different types of practice dependence, I argue that the only (...) type of practice dependence that stands up to scrutiny is functionalism, but that if functionalism is true, it commits us to cosmopolitanism. (shrink)

Contemporary political theory is characterised by a realistic critique of liberalism. Realist theorising is seen as avoiding foundational disagreements about justice mutating into second-order disputes concerning the justifiability of legitimate political institutions. In this sense, the realist critique challenges a key aspect of Rawls’ liberal project – that is, its justificatory constituency. McCabe’s Modus Vivendi Liberalism presents an interesting case of such a critique. Given the condition of deep pluralism that characterizes contemporary democracies, the liberal Justificatory Requirement (JR) should be (...) recast so to include those, illiberal or sceptical, who are excluded by Rawls’ justificatory constituency. This paper confronts McCabe’s modus vivendi justificatory project with Rawls view. It suggests that both views seem to endorse a practice-dependent account of political justice in which “politics is prior to morality”; yet the ways in which reasons are endorsed to justify the shared conception of political authority are significantly different in these two schemes. The paper shows that the most problematic aspect of McCabe contingent model is that it disconnects the idea of legitimacy from a conception of liberal political morality. On this account, political legitimacy that reflects the uncoercive character of extant institutions seems to be sufficient to meet the MVL JR. Yet, from a normative point of view, this might be not enough to ensure morally acceptable outcomes. In conclusion, the paper considers McCabe’s model as a version of ‘practice-independent’ moral theorizing committed to a transcendent view of ‘threshold morality’. This move, however, comes at the cost of sacrificing the theory’s premises of anti-perfectionism and realism. (shrink)

In recent years, several political theorists have argued that reasonable principles of justice are practice-dependent. In this paper it is suggested that we can distinguish between at least two main models for doing practice-dependent theorizing about justice, interpretivism and constructivism, and that they can be understood as based in two different conceptions of practices. It is then argued that the reliance on the notion of participants that characterizes interpretivism disables this approach from adequately addressing certain matters of justice (...) and that a better way of developing the idea of practice-dependence can be found in a constructivism that starts from the Rawlsian idea of overlapping consensus, but which shifts the focus of that approach from societies to a more open-ended category of domains, and which understands the parties to a possible overlapping consensus as stakeholders in a certain set of interconnected practices. (shrink)

The right to religious liberty as for instance set out in the European Convention of Human Rights protects acts of religious observance. Such protection can clash with other considerations, including laws aimed at protecting other state interests. Religious freedom therefore requires an account of when the right should lead to exemptions from other laws and when the right can legitimately be limited. Alan Patten has proposed a Fair Opportunity view of the normative logic of religious liberty. But Patten’s view faces (...) several problems. The normative work in his view is mainly done by added accounts of reasonable claims and of justifiability. So, the Fair Opportunity view in itself does not provide a normative criterion. Defenses of the Fair Opportunity view must therefore turn on the theoretical preferability of its structural features. But the Fair Opportunity view has the wrong form to capture the right to freedom of religion. The form of the right to freedom of religion is due to how its point is to address how states limit the liberty of citizens. Given a practice dependent approach, which assigns importance to the point and purpose of the right to freedom of religion, Patten’s theory is thus problematic. (shrink)

Wagenknecht a récemment introduit une distinction conceptuelle entre dépendance épistémique translucide et dépendance épistémique opaque, dans le but de mieux rendre compte de la diversité des relations de dépendance épistémique au sein des pratiques collaboratives de recherche. Dans la continuité de son travail, mon but est d’expliciter les différents types d’expertise requis lorsque sont employés instruments et ordinateurs dans la production de connaissance, et d’identifier des sources potentielles d’opacité. Mon analyse s’appuie sur un cas contemporain de création de connaissance scientifique, (...) à savoir le traitement de données astrophysiques. (shrink)

Disability has remained on the fringes of research in Africa in general and Southern Africa in particular, especially in the field of theology. Its glaring absence constitutes an indictment against both church and society, revealing in the process both the church's and society's penchant for a dependence paradigm which has been the paradigm with respect to issues of disabilities and people with disabilities. Using the participatory method with its proclivity for bringing to the fore the voice of the 'other' (...) and the marginalised, both the dependence and independence paradigms within the context of disability are put under scrutiny. In the process and through the voice of people with disabilities, the practical theological paradigm of interdependence emerges as the most appropriate and friendliest one, as it resonates with both the New Testament notion of koinonia through love and the African notion of botho through interconnection. The practical theology of holding each other in arms resonates with the theology of embrace that has been popularised by Volf within the context of much hatred and alienation. All these different dimensions of the theology of interdependence become the bedrock for inclusive and respectful treatment of each other irrespective of race, gender, religion, ability and social class. (shrink)

Proponents of enactivism should be interested in exploring what notion of action best captures the type of action-perception link that the view proposes, such that it covers all the aspects in which our doings constitute and are constituted by our perceiving. This article proposes and defends the thesis that the notion of sensorimotor dependencies is insufficient to account for the reality of human perception, and that the central enactive notion should be that of perceptual practices. Sensorimotor enactivism is insufficient because (...) it has no traction on socially dependent perceptions, which are essential to the role and significance of perception in our lives. Since the social dimension is a central desideratum in a theory of human perception, enactivism needs a notion that accounts for such an aspect. This article sketches the main features of the Wittgenstein-inspired notion of perceptual practices as the central notion to understand perception. Perception, I claim, is properly understood as woven into a type of social practices that includes food, dance, dress, music, etc. More specifically, perceptual practices are the enactment of culturally structured, normatively rich techniques of commerce of meaningful multi- and inter-modal perceptible material. I argue that perceptual practices explain three central features of socially dependent perception: attentional focus, aspects’ saliency, and modal-specific harmony-like relations. (shrink)

Eoin Carney | : Continuing on from recent discussions on the overlap between Paul Ricoeur’s philosophy and care ethics, this article will aim to clarify the status of practice in Ricoeur’s work. I will argue that even though Ricoeur’s philosophy is indeed marked by its “desire for a foundation,” as care ethicist Joan Tronto has pointed out, this aim is more of a fragile wager than a principle, and is always at risk of being overturned by practices and other (...) worldviews. I will demonstrate this point by arguing that Ricoeur’s hermeneutic approach to practice leads to the view that objective methods of knowledge and explanation are always grounded by the broader hermeneutic task of practical understanding and care for the self; in moral reasoning, Ricoeur’s analysis of the conflict between respect for the rule and respect for persons results in his prioritizing of respect for the singular other rather than the universal rule, meaning that the other can always disrupt and reorient universal or foundational modes of reasoning; and finally within healthcare relations Ricoeur aims to develop an alternative understanding of respect that places it in a dialectical relation with care. These practice-oriented readings of hermeneutics, morality, and respect aim to open up a dialogue between care ethics and philosophical approaches that have often been placed outside of care ethics. | : Poursuivant les récentes discussions concernant les recoupements entre la philosophie de Paul Ricoeur et les éthiques du care, cet article a pour objectif de clarifier le statut de la pratique dans l’oeuvre de Ricoeur. Je soutiendrai que même si la philosophie ricoeurienne est bien marquée par un « désir d’un fondement », ainsi que l’éthicienne du care Joan C. Tronto le souligne, cet objectif repose plus sur un pari que sur un véritable principe, et risque toujours d’être renversé par les pratiques ou d’autres visions du monde. Je démontrerai cela en soutenant trois arguments. 1) L’approche herméneutique de Ricoeur concernant la pratique mène à penser que les méthodes objectives de connaissance et d’explication sont toujours soutenues par une tâche herméneutique plus large de la compréhension pratique et du souci de soi. 2) En ce qui a trait au raisonnement moral, l’analyse de Ricoeur sur le conflit entre le respect de la règle et le respect de la personne accorde la priorité au respect de l’autre singulier plutôt que de la règle universelle. Ainsi, l’autre peut toujours perturber et réorienter l’universel ou les modes fondateurs du raisonnement. 3) Réfléchissant aux relations thérapeutiques, Ricoeur tend à suggérer une nouvelle compréhension du respect qui se place dans une relation dialectique avec le souci. Ces lectures – de l’herméneutique, de la moralité et du respect – orientées vers la pratique ouvrent la voie à un dialogue entre les éthiques du care et des approches philosophiques que l’on considère souvent éloignées de celles-ci. (shrink)

My dissertation covers a number of different topics in Kant scholarship, but is driven by one central question: how do our sense-based capacities to perceive, desire, and feel relate to our capacity to reason? I take the answer to this question to be key to understanding much about Kant’s philosophical system. For topics as diverse as the role that sensation plays in practical knowledge, the character of moral motivation, the nature of evil, or Kant’s theory that we are morally required (...) to believe in our immortality and God’s existence, I claim that the correct reading turns on a novel approach to the relation between our rational and sensitive capacities. To properly understand this relation, we must overcome the deeply entrenched thought that Kant inherits his conception of reason from the rationalists, and his conception of sense experience from the empiricists. This would be to adopt a fundamentally dualistic philosophy, on which reason and the senses are independently intelligible and sometimes even diametrically opposed. On Kant’s actual view, our capacities to perceive, feel, and desire are metaphysically interdependent with and thus not intelligible in isolation from our capacity to reason. Developing the details of this more unified position leads to satisfying philosophical accounts of a number of controversial issues in Kant scholarship that have suffered under a dualistic framework. (shrink)

This paper offers an analytic perspective on epistemic dependence that is grounded in theoretical discussion and field observation at the same time. When in the course of knowledge creation epistemic labor is divided, collaborating scientists come to depend upon one another epistemically. Since instances of epistemic dependence are multifarious in scientific practice, I propose to distinguish between two different forms of epistemic dependence, opaque and translucent epistemic dependence. A scientist is opaquely dependent upon a colleague (...) if she does not possess the expertise necessary to independently carry out, and to profoundly assess, the piece of scientific labor which her colleague is contributing. If the scientist does possess the necessary expertise, I argue, her dependence is translucent. However, the distinction between opaque and translucent epistemic dependence does not exhaust dependence relations in scientific practice, because many dependence relations are neither entirely opaque nor translucent. I will discuss why this is the case, and show how we can make sense of the gray zone between opaque and translucent epistemic dependence. (shrink)

Morwenna Griffiths, Richard Smith; Standing Alone: dependence, independence and interdependence in the practice of education, Journal of Philosophy of Education.

Morwenna Griffiths, Richard Smith; Standing Alone: dependence, independence and interdependence in the practice of education, Journal of Philosophy of Education.

Most acts of the will have a complex structure, i.e. wanting A in relation to B . Duns Scotus makes the innovative claim that the will itself is responsible for the order of this complex structure. It does this by causing its own will-dependent relations, which he construes as a kind of mind-dependent relations . By means of these relations, the will can arrange the terms of its will-acts independently of any arrangement proposed by the intellect. This not only allows (...) the structure of one's will-act to diverge from the structure proposed by the intellect's final practical judgement; the structure of the will-act need not even have been considered by the intellect at all. One could, therefore, even will an inconceivable state of affairs. I argue that this theory, which scholars have virtually ignored, is fundamental to Scotus's account of divine, angelic, and human freedom, and that it follows necessarily from his voluntarist understanding of freedom. For Scotus, if the will could not structure its acts independently of the intellect, it would not be free. (shrink)

Children dependent on life-prolonging medical technology are often subject to a constant background risk of sudden death or catastrophic complications. Such children can be cared for in hospital, in an intensive care environment with highly trained nurses and doctors able to deliver specialised, life-saving care immediately. However, remaining in hospital, when life expectancy is limited, can considered to be a harm in of itself. Discharge home offers the possibility for an improved quality of life for the child and their family (...) but comes with significant medical risks.When making decisions for children, two ethical models predominate, the promotion of the child’s best interests or the avoidance of harm. However, in some circumstances, particularly for children with life-limiting and/or life-threatening illness, all options may be associated with risk. There are no good options, only potentially harmful choices.In this paper, we explore decisions made by one family in such circumstances. We describe a model adopted from risk management programmes beyond medicine, which offers a potential framework for identifying risks to the child that are morally permissible. Some risks and harms to a child, not ordinarily permitted, may be acceptable when undertaken in the pursuit of a specified desired good, so long as they are as low as reasonably practicable. (shrink)

Based on an empirical study of a research team in natural science, the author argues that collaborating scientists do not trust each other completely. Due to the inherent incompleteness of trust, epistemic trust among scientists is not sufficient to manage epistemic dependency in research teams. To mitigate the limitations of epistemic trust, scientists resort to specific strategies of indirect assessment such as dialoguing practices and the probing of explanatory responsiveness. Furthermore, they rely upon impersonal trust and deploy practices of hierarchical (...) authorship. (shrink)

By now, the laboratory tradition, crafting transportable knowledge that allows for comparison, has been amply studied. However, other knowledge traditions, notably that of the clinic, deserve further articulation. The authors contribute to this by unraveling some specificities of rehabilitation practice. How do laboratory and clinical traditions in rehabilitation relate to independence? The first seeks to quantify people's independence; the latter attends to qualitatively different ways of being independent. While measuring independence is a matter of aggregating scores on a priori (...) established dimensions, clinical rehabilitation concerns coordinating different ways of being independent. While independence scales map a linear development in time, rehabilitation participants juggle with time, including uncertain futures in their present. In clinical practice, then, independence is neither a single, coherent, fact nor a clear-cut, stable goal. Instead, professionals as well as patients work by creatively doctoring with the large variety of elements that are relevant to daily life with long-term disabilities. (shrink)

The process of education, and in particular that involving very young children, often involves students' taking their teachers' word on a good many things. At the same time, good education at every level ought to inculcate, develop, and support students' ability to think for themselves. While these two features of education need not be regarded as contradictory, it is not clear how they relate to one another, nor is it clear how (when taken together) these features ought to bear on (...) educational practice itself. This article, which is largely programmatic, aims to provide tentative answers to these questions. (shrink)

According to Hanne Andersen, "an analysis of goes beyond research ethics and includes important epistemological aspects" (p.1). Her purpose is to point at a new area for philosophy of science in practice, which she does by highlighting different epistemological issues about malpractices and showing how documenting them in a precise way is beneficial to their solution. She articulates in particular two questions, namely the issue of the identification of bad practices and malpractices, and the ways of preventing the latter (...) from happening. I shall discuss how Andersen contributes to these issues, and make additional suggestions. Before going further, I first want to clarify a few points. (shrink)

The power of skepticism depends on the apparent possibility of rationally asking, for virtually any kind of proposition commonly thought to be known,howit is known or what justifies believing it. Moral claims are among those commonly subjected to skeptical challenges and doubts, even on the part of some people who are not skeptical about ordinary claims regarding the external world. There may be even more skepticism about the possibility of justifying moralactions,particularly if they are against the agent's self-interest. Both problems-how (...) to justify moral claims and how to justify moral action - come within the scope of the troubling question “Why be moral?” Even a brief response to moral skepticism should consider both kinds of targets of justification, cognitive and behavioural, and should indicate some important relations between the two types of skeptical challenge. I will begin with the cognitive case- with skepticism about the scope of theoretical reason in ethics - proceed to practical skepticism, which concerns the scope of practical reason, and then show how an adequate account of rationality may enable us to respond to moral skepticism. (shrink)

Epistemic dependence refers to our social mechanisms of reliance in practices of knowledge production. Epistemic oppression concerns persistent and unwarranted exclusions from those practices. This article examines the relationship between these two frameworks and demonstrates that attending to their relationship is a fruitful practice for applied epistemology. Paying attention to relations of epistemic dependence and how exclusive they are can help us track epistemically oppressive practices. In order to show this, I introduce a taxonomy of epistemic (...) class='Hi'>dependence. I argue that this particular taxonomy is useful for tracking epistemically oppressive practices in institutional contexts. This is because, first, the forms of epistemic dependence in this taxonomy yield, what I call, diagnostic questions. These are questions that help us track how relations of epistemic dependence could become exclusive and that thus help reveal epistemic oppression in institutional contexts. Second, the forms of epistemic dependence in the taxonomy are interrelated. Paying attention not just to each of three forms of epistemic dependence but also to the way in which they are interrelated is useful for illuminating epistemically oppressive practices. I conclude by demonstrating how the diagnostic questions can be used in analyses of concrete institutional practices in asylum law and higher education. (shrink)

In this paper, I defend two claims about domination. The first is that dispositional theories, which hold that domination obtains just in case one has the ability to interfere with another, are not compelling in accounting for the domination of persons with severe cognitive disabilities. This is because these accounts fall victim to, what I call, the dependency challenge. The second claim is that exercise theories of domination, which hold that domination obtains only when one has actually interfered with another, (...) more plausibly account for the domination of persons with severe cognitive disabilities. (shrink)

I argue that scientific knowledge is collective knowledge, in a sense to be specified and defended. I first consider some existing proposals for construing collective knowledge and argue that they are unsatisfactory, at least for scientific knowledge as we encounter it in actual scientific practice. Then I introduce an alternative conception of collective knowledge, on which knowledge is collective if there is a strong form of mutual epistemic dependence among scientists, which makes it so that satisfaction of the (...) justification condition on knowledge ineliminably requires a collective. Next, I show how features of contemporary science support the conclusion that scientific knowledge is collective knowledge in this sense. Finally, I consider implications of my proposal and defend it against objections. (shrink)

Huw Price has argued that on an interventionist account of cause the distinction is perspectival, and the claim prompted some interesting responses from interventionists and in particular an exchange with Woodward that raises questions about what it means to say that one or another structure is perspectival. I’ll introduce his reasons for claiming that the distinction between cause and effect on an interventionist account is perspectival. Then I’ll introduce a distinction between different ways in which a class of concepts can (...) be said to depend on facts about their users. Three importantly different forms of dependence will emerge from the discussion: Pragmatic dependence on us: truth conditions for x-beliefs can be given by a function f \ of more fundamental physical structures making no explicit reference to human agents. But there are any other number of functions ) ontologically on a par with x and what explains the distinguished role f plays in our practical and epistemic lives are facts about us. Implicit relativization: truth conditions for x-beliefs are relative to agent or context; the context supplies the value of a hidden parameter that determines the truth of x-beliefs. Indexicals: like implicit relativization except that the surface syntax contains a term whose semantic value is context-dependent. I suggest that Price’s insights are best understood in the first way. This will draw a crucial disanalogy with his central examples of perspectival concepts, but it will refine the thesis in a way that is more faithful to what his arguments show. The refined thesis will also support generalization to other concepts, and clarify the foundations of the quite distinctive research program that Price has been developing for a number of years. (shrink)

The purpose of this introduction is two-fold. First, it is to provide readers unfamiliar with the debates on practice-dependence with the insight necessary to fully comprehend the different contributions to this volume. Second, it is to make readers already well versed in practice-dependence more sensible to the substantive nature of this view and to provide them with a workable typology. After establishing a first distinction between metaphysical, relational and practice-dependent conceptions of justice, I draw a (...) line, among practice-dependent views, between institutionalism and cultural conventionalism. I complete the typology by differentiating between three forms of institutionalism according to how they regard the institutional fact, namely the fact that individuals are always already placed in a state of submission to existing institutions. Whereas de facto institutionalism describes this fact as a mere factual reality which imposes itself upon human beings, de jure institutionalism regards it as a practical necessity that stands in need of justification to each and every individual. Finally, moral institutionalism accounts for the institutional fact in terms of moral duty , namely the duty to contribute to the emergence of a state of affairs in which everyone’s freedom of choice is respected. (shrink)

The practice-based method of justification requires sensitivity to social practices. This raises difficult questions: Must the practices in question be established or at least realistic? How “constructive” can we be in our interpretation of their form or aims? This paper suggests that our answers to these questions can vary with our explanatory purposes. Requirements of realism and sociological accuracy are relatively thin given purely intellectual aims of moral understanding, thicker given the aim of addressing humanity, and thicker still given (...) the aim of justifying principles as normative for us , in our current world historical situation. I suggest that we have no reason to insist on one set of animating justice concerns to the exclusion of all the others, even as normative requirements rightly take center stage. (shrink)

Over the last few decades, skepticism about political and moral experts has grown into a serious social problem, undermining the functioning of liberal democratic regimes. Indeed, meritocracy-that is, government by hard working, public-spirited people with high levels of relevant expertise-has never looked so promising as an alternative to the dangers of know-nothing populism. One cultural tradition has devoted sustained attention to the idea of meritocracy, as well as to the cultivation of true expertise or mastery: Confucianism. Mastery, Dependence, and (...) the Ethics of Authority presents a compelling analysis of expertise and authority, and examines classical Confucian conceptions of mastery, dependence, and human relationships in order to suggest new approaches to these issues in ethics and political theory. Contemporary Westerners are heirs to multiple traditions that are suspicious of authority, especially coercive political authority. We are also increasingly wary of dependence, which now often seems to signify weakness, neediness, and pathology. Analysts commonly presume that both authority and dependence threaten human autonomy, and are thus intrinsically problematic. But these judgments are mistaken. Our capacity for autonomy needs to be cultivated over time through deliberate practices of training, in which we depend on the guidance of virtuous and skilled teachers. Confucian thought provides a subtle and powerful analysis of one version of this training process, and of the social supports such an education in autonomy requires-as well as the social value of having virtuous and skilled leaders. Early Confucians also argue that human life is marked by numerous interacting forms of dependence, which are not only ineradicable, but in many ways good. On a Confucian view, it is natural, healthy, and good for people to be deeply dependent on others in a variety of ways across the full human lifespan. They teach us that individual autonomy only develops within a social matrix, structured by relationships of mutual dependence that can either help or hinder it, including a variety of authority relations. (shrink)

Kantian moral concepts concerning respect for human dignity have played a central role in articulating ethical guidelines for medical practice and research, and for articulating some central positions within bioethical debates more generally. The most common of these Kantian moral concepts is the obligation to respect the dignity of patients and of human research subjects as autonomous, self-determining individuals. This article describes Kant’s conceptual distinction between dignity and autonomy as values, and draws on the work of several contemporary Kantian (...) philosophers who employ the distinction to make sense of some common moral intuitions, feelings, and norms. Drawing on this work, the article argues that the conceptual distinction between dignity and autonomy as values is indispensable in the context of considering our obligations to those who are dependent and vulnerable. (shrink)

The Practical Turn in Political Theory sounds like the monograph political theorists have been waiting for – a monograph that identifies ‘practices’ as a uniting theme that runs through several recently influential debates on non-ideal theory, practice dependence, realism and pragmatist theories of legitimacy and democracy, and then discusses the promise and limits of this uniting theme for the future of political theory. However, The Practical Turn is driven by selective portrayals, omissions and misrepresentation, and hence is not (...) a good source to turn to for understanding the debates it surveys or whether they manifest a ‘practical turn in political theory’ or not; rather, it serves as a warning of how struggles over power can influence and even structure seemingly the most purely intentioned of practices. (shrink)

The question whether distributive justice is at bottom practice-dependent or practice-independent has received much attention in recent years. I argue that the problem of intergenerational justice resolves this dispute in favor of practice-independence. Many believe that we owe more to our descendants than leaving them a world in which they can merely lead minimally decent lives. This thought is particularly convincing given the fact that it is us who determine to a significant extent what this future world (...) will look like. However, no practices that would trigger distributive obligations exist between distant generations. Thus, if we have to leave more than a minimum for future generations, we cannot conceive of distributive justice in terms of the justification of ongoing social interactions. Rather we have to think of the entire concept as an idea based on persons’ legitimate interests and capacity for well-being, and which abstracts from participation in particular practices. (shrink)

The practice-dependent approach to global justice makes a welcome attempt to steer a course between egalitarian liberal cosmopolitanism, on the one hand, and statism and nationalism, on the other. In so doing, it seeks to reconcile the universality of justice with the particular role principles of justice play within the context of different social practices. In this paper, I argue, however, that the “practice turn” in theorising about justice has not gone far enough, either methodologically or substantively. Methodologically, (...) it is necessary to move beyond the residual positivism of the practice-dependent approach to an interpretive approach that takes account of the reflexive, developmental nature of social practices. Substantively, focusing on the reflexivity of social practices, and particularly practices of reflexive constitution-making, provides a framework for a republican approach to international justice concerned with reconciling Kant’s idea of the universality of justice with the emphasis on popular sovereignty of Rousseau and Hegel. (shrink)

Intellectual Dependability is the first research monograph devoted to addressing the question of what it is to be an intellectually dependable person--the sort of person on whom one's fellow inquirers can depend in their pursuit of epistemic goods. While neglected in recent scholarship, this question is an important one for both epistemology--how we should conceptualize the ideal inquirer--and education--how we can enable developing learners to grow toward this ideal. The book defends a virtue theory according to which being an intellectually (...) dependable person is distinctively a matter of possessing a suite of neglected virtues called "the virtues of intellectual dependability" that are themselves distinctively concerned with promoting epistemic goods in others' inquiries. After defending the existence and educational significance of these virtues as a group, the book turns toward the project of identifying and conceptualizing several specific instances of these virtues in detail. Virtues discussed include intellectual benevolence, intellectual transparency, communicative clarity, audience sensitivity, and epistemic guidance. In each case, an interdisciplinary treatment of the nature of the virtue and its relationship to other virtues, vices, and personality features is offered, drawing especially on relevant research in Philosophy and Psychology. The book concludes with a chapter devoted to identifying distinctive ways these virtues of intellectual dependability are manifested when it is inquiring communities, rather than individuals, that occupy the position of intellectual dependence. By directing attention to the ideal of intellectual dependability, the book marks a novel turn of scholarly interest explicitly toward a neglected dimension of the ideal inquirer that will inform both epistemological theorizing and educational practice. (shrink)