Is it tautological to call an action "wrongful discrimination?" Some philosophers and political theorists answer this question in the affirmative and claim that the term "discrimination" is intrinsically evaluative. Others agree that "discrimination" usually conveys the action’s moral wrongness but claim that the term can be used in a purely descriptive way. In this paper, we present two corpus studies and two experiments designed to test whether the folk concept of discrimination is evaluative. We demonstrate that the term has undergone (...) a historical development and is nowadays no longer used purely descriptively. Further, we show that this evaluation cannot be cancelled without yielding a contradiction. We conclude that the descriptive use of "discriminatory" is a thing of the past. (shrink)

In Reasonable Democracy, Simone Chambers describes, explains, and defends a discursive politics inspired by the work of Jürgen Habermas. In addition to comparing Habermas's ideas with other non-Kantian liberal theories in clear and accessible prose, Chambers develops her own views regarding the role of discourse and its importance within liberal democracies. Beginning with a deceptively simple question—"Why is talking better than fighting?"—Chambers explains how the idea of talking provides a rich and compelling view of morality, rationality, and political stability. (...) She considers talking as a way for people to respect each other as moral agents, as a way to reach reasonable and legitimate solutions to disputes, and as a way to reproduce and strengthen shared understandings. In the course of this argument, she defends modern universalist ethics, communicative rationality, and what she calls a "discursive political culture," a concept that locates the political power of discourse and deliberation not so much in institutions of democratic decision-making as in the type of conversations that go on around these institutions. While discourse and deliberation cannot replace voting, bargaining, or compromise, Chambers argues, it is important to maintain a background moral conversation in which to anchor other activities. As an extended case study, Chambers examines the conversation about language rights that has been taking place for more than twenty years in Quebec. A culture of dialogue, she shows, has proved a positive and powerful force in resolving some of the disagreements between the two linguistic communities there. (shrink)

In this paper, I interview Francesca De Vecchi (Full Professor of Theoretical Philosophy in Vita-Salute San Raffaele University) about her qualitative ontology and its social and normative implications. If at the foundation of our lifeworld there are significantly qualitative experiences, phenomenology can investigate the most important contemporary issues, such as gender disparity, socio-virtuality depersonalizations and political urgencies.

The book shows how the question of time was crucial for the specific articulation of Latin America’s postcolonialism.

Education as identity formation in Western-style liberal-democracies relies, in part, on neutrality as a justification for the reproduction of collective individual identity, including societal, cultural, institutional and political identities, many aspects of which are problematic in terms of the reproduction of environmentally harmful attitudes, beliefs and actions. Taking a position on an issue necessitates letting go of certain forms of neutrality, as does effectively teaching environmental education. We contend that to claim a stance of neutrality is to claim a position (...) beyond criticism. In the classroom this can also be an epistemically damaging position to hold. To further explore the problem of neutrality in the classroom, and to offer a potential solution, we will look to the philosophical community of inquiry pedagogy, and advocate for the addition of place-based education; a form of experiential education that promotes learning in local communities in which the school is situated, each with its own history, culture, economy and environment. However, how we understand ‘place’ is fundamental to understanding the potential of place-based education in giving students a ‘sense of place’—how they perceive a place, which includes place attachment and place meaning. To this end, we look to Indigenous understandings of Place and social reconstruction learning to inform place-based pedagogies. Doing so, we hold, opens a pathway to ethical education. (shrink)

The pathologies of the democratic public sphere, first articulated by Plato in his attack on rhetoric, have pushed much of deliberative theory out of the mass public and into the study and design of small scale deliberative venues. The move away from the mass public can be seen in a growing split in deliberative theory between theories of democratic deliberation (on the ascendancy) which focus on discrete deliberative initiatives within democracies and theories of deliberative democracy (on the decline) that attempt (...) to tackle the large questions of how the public, or civil society in general, relates to the state. Using rhetoric as the lens through which to view mass democracy, this essay argues that the key to understanding the deliberative potential of the mass public is in the distinction between deliberative and plebiscitary rhetoric. (shrink)

Place-based education is founded on the idea that the student’s local community is one of their primary learning resources. Place-based education’s underlying educational principle is that students need to first have an experiential understanding of the history, culture, and ecology of the environment in which they are situated before tackling broader national and global issues. Such attempts are a step in the right direction in dealing with controversial issues in a democracy by providing resources for synthesising curriculum though theory (curriculum (...) content, including traditional subjects) and practice (practical learning as experiential education). Nevertheless, many place-based accounts discount Indigenous conceptions of place, which are integral to Indigenous ways of knowing, being and doing, especially in relation to the ontological relationship to Land and Country. Indigenous philosophy has the potential to inform what place-based education means by students developing a ‘sense of place’ when engaging with local communities as their ‘own’ place. In this article we re-imagine the community of inquiry as a place-responsive pedagogy by learning from Indigenous philosophy, and recentring Indigenous notions of place in experiential learning. In addition to exploring the pedagogical potential of a place-responsive account of the community of inquiry, we look to the implications for teacher preparation. (shrink)

This essay reviews contemporary theories of public justification. In particular, it argues that conceptions of public justification and public reason have moved significantly beyond Rawls.

In the reported, experiment participants hit a ball to aim at the vertex of a Müller–Lyer configuration. This configuration either remained stable, changed its shaft length or the orientation of the tails during movement execution. A significant illusion bias was observed in all perturbation conditions, but not in the stationary condition. The illusion bias emerged for perturbations shortly after movement onset and for perturbations during execution, the latter of which allowed only a minimum of time for making adjustments . These (...) findings indicate that allocentric information is exploited for online control when people make rapid adjustments in response to a sudden change in the environment and not when people guide their limb movements to interact with a stable environment. (shrink)

In this article we discuss what are the implications for improving the design of corporate ethics programs, if we focus on the moral motivation accounts offered by main ethical theories. Virtue ethics, deontological ethics and utilitarianism offer different criteria of judgment to face moral dilemmas: Aristotle's virtues of character, Kant's categorical imperative, and Mill's greatest happiness principle are, respectively, their criteria to answer the question "What is the right thing to do?" We look at ethical theories from a different perspective: (...) the question we ask is "Why should I do the right thing?" In other words, we deal with the problem of moral motivation, and we examine the different rationale the main ethical theories provide. We then point out the relation between moral motivation and the concept of rationality in the different approaches - is acting morally seen as an expression of rational behavior? Our analysis of moral motivation provides a useful framework to improve the understanding of the relationships between formal and informal elements of corporate ethics programs, emphasizing the importance of the latter, often overlooked in compliance-focused programs. We conclude by suggesting that the concept of moral imagination can provide a unifying approach to enhance the effectiveness of corporate ethics programs, by providing an intangible asset that supports the implementation of their formal components into management decision making. (shrink)

The techno-moral scenarios approach has been developed to explore the interplay between technology, society and morality. Focused on new and emerging sciences and technologies, techno-moral scenarios can be used to inform and enhance public deliberation on the desirability of socio-technical trajectories. The article presents an attempt to hybridise this scenario tool, complementing the focus on ethics with an explicit acknowledgement of the multiple meanings of responsibility and of the plurality of its regimes, i.e. the institutional arrangements presiding over the assumption (...) and assignment of responsibilities. We call this integrated technique ‘rTMS’ to stress the continuity with the original technique and, at the same time, to highlight the additional element we aim to develop: responsibility. The article describes this approach and illustrates a loosely standardised procedure that can be used to organise and conduct public engagement workshops based on rTMS. (shrink)

ABSTRACT Diana Mutz's individual-level data show that participation and deliberation are often inversely related. This, according to Mutz, undermines many claims made by deliberative-democratic theory. However, a systemic approach to deliberative democracy challenges the significance of this finding. Although it is true that some citizens are political activists not open to hearing the other side and other citizens are less active but more open minded, both types of citizens make equally important and positive contributions to deliberative politics when it is (...) viewed as a system that deploys a division of labor. (shrink)

En 1933-1934, Simone Weil était professeur à Roanne. Dans un petit pavillon isolé au fond d'un parc, sur l'herbe ou sous la neige, elle enseigna alors la philosophie à quelques élèves. On découvrira ici, à travers les notes recueillies par une de ces jeunes filles, ce que furent ces leçons, véritables entretiens socratiques. Le lecteur y reconnaîtra l'unité profonde de Simone Weil dont la vie brève fut intensément consacrée à la recherche de la vérité.

_Gravity and Grace_ shows Weil's religious thoughts and ideas, drawn from many sources - Christian, Jewish, Indian, Greek and Hindu - and focusing on suffering and redemption. It brings the reader face to face with the profoundest levels of existence as Weil explores the relationship of the human condition to the realm of the transcendent.

Contemporary socio-political issues often seen as socially controversial and highly politicised topics, such as anthropogenic climate change, public scepticism over preventive public health measures during pandemics such as COVID-19, and Indigenous sovereignty, lands rights, and ways of knowing, being and doing, highlight the need for education to address such issues more effectively. Controversial issues do not exist in isolation. They are connected to questions of order, interpretation, meaning-making, ethics, and why and how we live, i.e., to philosophical questions. We argue (...) that philosophical inquiry is essential for dealing with controversial topics in the classroom. However, we point to the need for teachers to understand the role of the community of inquiry in addressing such topics. This has implications for teacher preparation. We, therefore, examine John Dewey’s use of experiential education to argue for rethinking teacher preparation, especially when dealing with controversial topics which point to the need for greater emphasis on how best to engage with them philosophically. To this end, we will argue in favour of a reconstruction of educational philosophy, specifically the community of inquiry, by integrating a Deweyan inspired place-based education that emphasises environment, experience, and social reconstruction learning. (shrink)

In this paper, I argue in favor of necessitarianism, the view that dispositions, when stimulated, necessitate their manifestations. After introducing and clarifying what necessitarianism does and does not amount to, I provide reasons to support the view that dispositions once stimulated necessitate their manifestations according to the stimulating conditions and the relevant properties at stake. In this framework, I will propose a principle of causal relevance and some conditions for the possibility of interference that allow us to avoid the use (...) of ceteris paribus clauses. I then defend necessitarianism from recent attacks raised by, among others, Mumford and Anjum, noting that the antecedent strengthening test is a test for causal relevance that raises no difficulties for necessitarianism. (shrink)

Epigenetic and transcriptional variability contribute to the vast diversity of cellular and organismal phenotypes and are key in human health and disease. In this review, we describe different types, sources, and determinants of epigenetic and transcriptional variability, enabling cells and organisms to adapt and evolve to a changing environment. We highlight the latest research and hypotheses on how chromatin structure and the epigenome influence gene expression variability. Further, we provide an overview of challenges in the analysis of biological variability. An (...) improved understanding of the molecular mechanisms underlying epigenetic and transcriptional variability, at both the intra- and inter-individual level, provides great opportunity for disease prevention, better therapeutic approaches, and personalized medicine. Epigenetic and transcriptional variability mediate phenotypic plasticity, enabling adaptation to changing environments. In this review, we describe the sources of inter- and intra-individual variability and discuss epigenetic regulators of gene expression variability, including DNA methylation and chromatin structure. Understanding these molecular mechanisms will improve therapeutic approaches and personalized medicine. (shrink)

Courses on ethics and technology have become compulsory for many students at the three Dutch technical universities during the past few years. During this time, teachers have faced a number of didactic problems, which are partly due to a growing number of students. In order to deal with these challenges, teachers in ethics at the three technical universities in the Netherlands — in Delft, Eindhoven and Twente — have developed a web-based computer program called Agora (see www.ethicsandtechnology.com). This program enables (...) students to exercise their ethical understanding and skills extensively. The program makes it possible for students to participate actively in moral reflection and reasoning, and to develop the moral competencies that are needed in their later professional practice. The developers of the program have tried to avoid two traps. Firstly, they rejected, from the outset, a cookbook style of dealing with ethical problems that applied ethics is often taken to be and, secondly, they wanted to design a flexible program that respects the student’s as well as the teacher’s creativity, and that tries to engage students in moral reflection. Agora meets these requirements. The program offers possibilities that extend beyond the requirements that are usually accepted for case-exercises in applied ethics, and that have been realised in several other computer models for teaching ethics. In this article, we describe the main considerations in the development of Agora and the features of the resulting program. (shrink)

When people inhabit a city, they situate themselves and are situated through the intersections of infrastructure and technical systems, and the particular domains and modalities of occupation – settlement and work – that are configured by them. At the same time, people are also inhabited by the city, as a kind of possession, endowment, and series of conundrums. People figure themselves out through figuring arrangements of materials, of designing what is available to them in formats and positions that enable them (...) particular vantage points and ways of doing things. What it is possible for people to do with each other is largely a question of what it is that exists between them, and how this ‘between’ can be shaped as active points of reference, connection and anchorage. Infrastructure exerts a force – not simply in the materials and energies it avails, but also the way it attracts people, draws them in, coalesces and expends their capacities. If territory is a bundle of political technologies for measuring, administering and regulating the scope of what it is possible to do in the city, then other inventive political technologies are also at work in the making of urban life. (shrink)

In this paper, I argue that the asymmetrical mediated communication of the broad democratic public sphere can profitably be understood through the lens of deliberative democracy only if we adopt a system approach to deliberation. A system approach, however, often introduces a division of labor between ordinary citizens and experts. Although this division of labor is unavoidable and I believe compatible with a deliberative principle of legitimacy, it flirts with elitist theories of democracy: epistemic elites come up with the agendas, (...) ideas, and policy positions and democratic publics ratify or repudiate the agendas but do not generate or really engage with them. This I argue would violate an essential defining feature of deliberative democracy, namely that epistemic quality and equal participation are tightly linked. I turn to Habermas and his idea of a feedback loop as a possible solution to this dilemma. (shrink)

Two views on the nature and location of pain are usually contrasted. According to the first, experientialism, pain is essentially an experience, and its bodily location is illusory. According to the second, perceptualism or representationalism, pain is a perceptual or representational state, and its location is to be traced to the part of the body in which pain is felt. Against this second view, the cases of phantom, referred and chronic pain have been marshalled: all these cases apparently show that (...) one can be in pain while not having anything wrong in her body. Pain bodily location, then, would be illusory. I this paper I shall defend the representational thesis by presenting an argument against experientialism while conceding that the appearance / reality distinction collapses. A crucial role in such identification is played by deictics. In reporting that we feel pain here, the deictic directly refers to the bodily part as coinciding with the part as represented. So, pain location is not illusory. The upshot is that the body location is part and parcel of the representational content of pain states, a representation built up from the body map. (shrink)

Constitutional reform has been an important means to push populist authoritarian agendas in Hungary, Poland, Turkey and Venezuela. The embrace of constitutional means and rhetoric in pursuit of these agendas has led to the growing recognition of ‘populist constitutionalism’ as a contemporary political phenomenon. In all four examples mentioned above, democracy, popular sovereignty and direct plebiscitary appeal to the people is the rhetorical and justificatory framework for constitutional reform. This, I worry, gives democracy a bad name and reinforces the widespread (...) suspicion that citizens should not be directly involved in constitutional reform as popular participation can lead to dangerous majoritarianism and is easily manipulated by elite actors seeking to weaken constitutional checks and balances. But the problem, I argue, is not inherent in citizen’s participation in constitutional reform. In contrast to populist constitutionalism, I develop an idea of deliberative constitutionalism in which citizens can participate in constitution-making and reform without hijacking constitutionalism for majoritarian, nationalist or anti-pluralist ends. Deliberative constitutionalism as I understand it has four features: a Habermasian co-originality thesis that articulates the interdependence of democracy and liberalism mediated by a conception of discourse; a proceduralized idea of popular sovereignty that reduces the tension between appeal to the people and respect for pluralism; the centrality of the public sphere over the voting booth as the cradle of democracy; institutional innovations intended to include citizens in constitutional reform but avoid majoritarian and populist pathologies. (shrink)

This article researches how a corporate code of ethics (CCE) implemented in local government X has influenced the behavior of its employees, middle managers, and managers. Metaphors from the existing and desired CCE elicited by these three groups provided information on how to improve the effectiveness of the CCE. This method proved to be very fruitful. It appeared that continuous systematic attention needed to be paid to the CCE after the CCE had been implemented, particularly by management. Initiatives from management (...) to start discussions about relevant questions of integrity appeared to be also necessary to make the topic a “normal” topic which employees were no longer afraid to discuss. In this way, the possibility could be created to develop collectively a “practical” frame of reference concerning relevant questions of integrity that would help employees to make decisions in difficult situations during their work in the future. (shrink)

_Oppression and Liberty_ is one of Simone Weil's most important books on political theory.Here she discusses political and social oppression, its permanent causes, the way it works and its contemporary forms. Simone Weil's writings on oppression and liberty continue to be as valid and thought-provoking today as they were in her lifetime.

This text considers how a host of ethical traditions define civil society.

A distorted representation of one's own body is a diagnostic criterion and core psychopathology of both anorexia nervosa (AN) and bulimia nervosa (BN). Despite recent technical advances in research, it is still unknown whether this body image disturbance is characterized by body dissatisfaction and a low ideal weight and/or includes a distorted perception or processing of body size. In this article, we provide an update and meta-analysis of 42 articles summarizing measures and results for body size estimation (BSE) from 926 (...) individuals with AN, 536 individuals with BN and 1920 controls. We replicate findings that individuals with AN and BN overestimate their body size as compared to controls (ES= 0.63). Our meta-regression shows that metric methods (BSE by direct or indirect spatial measures) yield larger effect sizes than depictive methods (BSE by evaluating distorted pictures), and that effect sizes are larger for patients with BN than for patients with AN. To interpret these results, we suggest a revised theoretical framework for BSE that accounts for differences between depictive and metric BSE methods regarding the underlying body representations (conceptual vs. perceptual, implicit vs. explicit). We also discuss clinical implications and argue for the importance of multimethod approaches to investigate body image disturbance. (shrink)

Making better choices about future technologies that are being researched or developed is an important motivator behind lay ethics interventions. However, in practice, they do not always succeed to serve that goal. Especially authors who have noted that lay ethicists sometimes take recourse to well-known themes which stem from old, even ‘archetypical’ stories, have been criticized for making too little room for agency and decision-making in their approach. This paper aims to contribute to a reflection on how lay ethics can (...) acquire more practical relevance. It will use resources in narrative ethics to suggest that in order to be relevant for action, facilitators of lay ethics interventions need to invite participants to engage in a narrative quest. As part of a quest, lay ethicists should be asked to reflect on a specific question or choice, use diverse input which is informative about the heterogeneity of viewpoints that are defended in society and argue for their standpoints. (shrink)

Today’s exponential advancement of information and communication technologies is reconfiguring participatory urban development practices. The use of digital technology implies new forms of decentralised governance, collaborative knowledge production, and social activism. The digital transformation has the potential to overcome shortcomings in citizen participation, make participatory processes more deliberative, and enable collaborative approaches for making cities. While digital tools such as digital mapping, e‐participation platforms, location‐based games, and social media offer new opportunities for the various actors and may act as a (...) catalyst for renegotiating urban space and collective goods, digitalisation can also perpetuate or even attenuate existing inequalities and exclusion. This editorial introduces the thematic issue “Citizen Participation, Digital Agency, and Urban Development” which focuses on the trajectories and (dis)continuities of citizen participation through digitalisation and elaborates this with examples from Europe and Asia on how the digital transformation impacts, challenges, or reproduces hegemonic power relations in urban development. (shrink)

This paper aims to integrate insights from psychoanalytic theory into business ethics research on the sources of ethical failures within organizations. We particularly draw from the analysis of sources and outcomes of neurotic processes that are part of human development, as described by the psychoanalyst Karen Horney and more recently by Manfred Kets de Vries; we interpret their insights from a stakeholder theory perspective. Business ethics research seems to have overlooked how “neurotic management styles” could be the antecedents of unethical (...) behavior within organizations. After showing the connection between five managerial neuroses and the corresponding potential ethical failures within organizations that have been already identified within business ethics research, we suggest three organizational strategies to counteract these failures. First, we argue that managers should pay greater attention at the complexity of human motivation, avoiding the simplistic view of compliance‐based approaches. Second, we discuss the importance of developing a conversation around values within organizations, enabling healthy individual growth and limiting the emergence of neurotic processes. Finally, we discuss the role of the business ethicist in facilitating such a process, suggesting a parallel between the role of the business ethicist and that of the psychoanalytic therapist. (shrink)

This is the first collection of essays bringing together Deleuzian Philosophy and postcolonial theory. Bignall and Patton assemble some of the world's leading figures in these fields to explore rich linkages between two previously unrelated areas of study.

ABSTRACTSkepticism about citizen competence is a core component of Christopher H. Achen and Larry M. Bartels’s call, in Democracy for Realists, for rethinking our model of democracy. In this paper I suggest that the evidence for citizen incompetence is not as clear as we might think; important research shows that we are good group problem solvers even if we are poor solitary truth seekers. I argue that deliberative democracy theory has a better handle on this fundamental fact of human cognition (...) and therefore has a more realistic view of the conditions that might improve citizen competence. (shrink)

Soft regulation has increased its importance in science and technology governance. Despite such indisputable significance, the literature on technology policy and regulation so far seems to have dedicated only a limited attention to a systematic understanding of the factors affecting compliance with these soft rules. This article addresses this limitation. By way of a literature scoping exercise, we propose a taxonomy of the mechanisms affecting compliance with soft regulation. We subsequently apply the taxonomy as a guide to examine the opinions (...) of a small group of scientists and company managers in the Italian nanotechnology sector. The case study does not assess compliance in a direct way, i.e., observing how organizations comply with regulation, but it explores the opinions on what the factors affecting compliance are. (shrink)

Philosophy and theology have long harboured contradictory views on spiritual practice. While philosophy advocates the therapeutic benefits of daily meditation, the theology of grace promotes an ideal of happiness bestowed with little effort. As such, the historical juxtaposition of effort and grace grounding modern spiritual exercise can be seen as the essential tension between the secular and sacred. In Effort and Grace, Simone Kotva explores an exciting new theory of spiritual endeavour from the tradition of French spiritualist philosophy. Spiritual (...) exercise has largely been studied in relation to ancient philosophy and the Ignatian tradition, yet Kotva's new engagement with its more recent forms has alerted her to an understanding of contemplative practice as rife with critical potential. Here, she offers an interdisciplinary text tracing the narrative of spiritual exertion through the work of seminal French thinkers such as Maine de Biran, Félix Ravaisson, Henri Bergson, Alain (Émile Chartier), Simone Weil and Gilles Deleuze. Her findings allow both secular philosophers and theologians to understand how the spiritual life can participate in the contemporary philosophical conversation. (shrink)

As the purpose of this book is to open dialogue, we draw no conclusions. Instead, reflecting on the theoretical and practical implications that arise from each chapter, we offer some reflection through an exploration of the ways in which Australia has broadened discussions on P4C. In addition, we situate our discussion in contemporary global issues relevant to education and schooling: gender stereotyping, bias and language; Aboriginal philosophy; environmental education; and sexuality, adolescence and discrimination. As a community of children, adolescents and (...) adults, philosophers and educators, as well as citizens, we have an opportunity to contribute educationally to an inquiring society. (shrink)