The main goal of critical social justice is to ensure the agency of citizens, which enables them to take part, not only in public discussions about how resources are distributed, but also about matters such as what should be produced, how to do it and through what kind of production, among others. Critical social justice can be best formulated within the foundation programme of discursive ethics, in particular within Apel's version specified in his principle of co-responsibility. This principle establishes a (...) telos that operates as a normative guide to formulate the constructive question about which the necessary conditions are for someone to be able to become a subject of dialogue. Answering this question leads, on the one hand, to the development of some constitutive elements of critical social justice and, on the other hand, to the identification of the social relations and structures that undermine the possibilities of a person to effectively participate in the discussion of the topics they consider relevant. As its constitutive elements, I propose reciprocal recognition autonomy, the metric of capabilities and a sufficientarian principle of justice, which work together with the well-known difference principle. These elements constitute a normative net that allows contemporary societies to be criticized from the perspective of justice. (shrink)

This paper provides a justificatory rationale for recommending the inclusion of imagined future use cases in neurotechnology development processes, specifically for legal and policy ends. Including detailed imaginative engagement with future applications of neurotechnology can serve to connect ethical, legal, and policy issues potentially arising from the translation of brain stimulation research to the public consumer domain. Futurist scholars have for some time recommended approaches that merge creative arts with scientific development in order to theorise possible futures toward which current (...) trends in technology development might be steered. Taking a creative, imaginative approach like this in the neurotechnology context can help move development processes beyond considerations of device functioning, safety, and compliance with existing regulation, and into an active engagement with potential future dynamics brought about by the emergence of the neurotechnology itself. Imagined scenarios can engage with potential consumer uses of devices that might come to challenge legal or policy contexts. An anticipatory, creative approach can imagine what such uses might consist in, and what they might imply. Justifying this approach also prompts a co-responsibility perspective for policymaking in technology contexts. Overall, this furnishes a mode of neurotechnology’s emergence that can avoid crises of confidence in terms of ethico-legal issues, and promote policy responses balanced between knowledge, values, protected innovation potential, and regulatory safeguards. (shrink)

The purpose of this article is to bring contributions to the elaboration of a social-semiotic model of social constructionism, which will make a synthesis between the theory of communicative action and the theories of social-constructionist semiotic model?, based on the postulation of a social universe in a network of communicative interdependencies developed on levels of reality. The interpretative model we propose comes to conceptualize the particularities of the sociological analysis of the transmodern society, seen as a knowledge-based society, placed at (...) the interference with the postmodern society; that of generalized permissiveness. The model proposed aims at a constructionist-fractalic analysis of the interpretative drift of social constructs, under the empire of different constructive instances. (shrink)

In the order of beingness, duty is a state much closer to Dasein than any form of rationality could be. The true duty and the true respect for the golden rule can only come from the authenticity of one’s beingness. The same goes for what we call humility. This duty, as an existential state, is a movement of the spirit which seems to be overwhelmed by the care for the Other, towards the Other. Any duty which does not “move the (...) being”, and which results, for example, from reason, is unauthentic and, viewed from a phenomenological perspective, it means the alienation of the appreciative capacity of the beingness - understood as Dasein. As such, appreciative ethics can only be placed at the crossroads between constructionism - as a theory on the agreed existence, and the phenomenology which enables the understanding of the subjective experience of the process of social construction of reality itself. (shrink)

This article aims to highlight the theoretical and philosophical debate on hospitality underlining the normative elements of framing migrants and refugees as individual agents in the light of hospitality theory and migration governance. It argued the critiques of the neo-Kantian hospitality approach and the EU welcome culture with regard to refugees in the EU from a philosophical perspective. The “No human being is illegal” motto is proposed to be conceived as a principle of the EU Charter of Fundamental Rights. The (...) cosmopolitan right to visit and the universal right to reside were discussed in the context of human rights and co-responsibility. Linking the hospitality approach with migration governance enables the reconstruction of reception policies and practices, diversification of non-state actors that engage in migration governance mechanism, and polarization of political initiatives (e.g., politics of allocation and dispersal, readmission negotiations, convergence/divergence of priorities and strategic interests). The research findings highlight that the EU adopted a neo-Kantian hospitality approach that combines both “co-responsibility” and “vertical/heterarchical relations.” The EU’s “New Pact on Migration and Asylum” was considered proof of how the EU follows neo-Kantian hospitality that is manifested in dualism and contradictory approach. The study presents a typology that splits co-responsibility into individual/institutional actions and human rights/migration governance. (shrink)