Talk of powers is muddled. Building upon Powers and capacities in philosophy: The new aristotelianism, Routledge, London, 2012a, pp 207–227), I disambiguate four senses of the term: powers construed as activity, as capacity/potentiality, as essence and as necessity, respectively, in an attempt to clarify what it is that realists about causal powers take themselves to be realists about.

ABSTRACT Aristotle says in the Rhetoric that leading judges into passions is like warping a rule or kanon before using it. Rather than seeing this as an exclusion of emotion from rhetoric, I argue that the ability for the pathe to bend judgment has its appropriate use in achieving equity. The pathe are themselves a kanon, resembling the soft, leaden rule used by Lesbian masons, referred to in his discussion of equity in the Nicomachean Ethics. In problematic cases, the rigidity (...) of law requires the correction of a judge's pathetic capacity. I then read Lysias's Against Simon, a speech given under strict relevancy requirements, to show how the pathe are used in the narration of the accused party in seeking an equitable judgment. I conclude with how such a view may inform contemporary rhetorical inquiry on the emotions. (shrink)

Current discussions of hermeneutical injustice, I argue, poorly characterise the cognitive state of victims by failing to account for the communicative success that victims have when they describe their experience to other similarly situated persons. I argue that victims, especially when they suffer moral wrongs that are yet unnamed, are able (1) to grasp certain salient aspects of the wrong they experience and (2) to cultivate the ability to identify instances of the wrong in virtue of moral emotions. By moral (...) emotions I mean emotions like indignation that reflect an agent’s ethical commitments and bear on her ethical assessments. Further, I argue that victims can impart their partial understanding of the wrong they suffer to others who are not similarly situated by eliciting moral emotions such as pity that are tied to broad notions of justice and fairness. (shrink)

This paper focuses on the importance of wonder in human flourishing and is orientated towards the dynamics between the two, but with an emphasis on how the former is important for illuminating the latter. It begins with a preliminary sketch of both wonder and human flourishing and subsequently moves on to highlight three aspects of human flourishing: 1) ‘Individuality’, 2) ‘Relations’ and 3) ‘The political’, and why these play to wonderment.

The aim of the article is to examine the role that memory and oblivion, forgiveness and unforgiveness play in Hannah Arendt’s thought in relation to acts of violence in the political sphere. Political communities do not always decide to remember the crimes they have committed or the wrongs they have suffered, but neither can they always forget their mutual harms, even when there is already peace between them. Without striving to exhaust the entire subject matter of Arendt’s work, I would (...) like to illustrate the difficulty of understanding the role forgiveness plays in her thought as well as to indicate possible solutions when forgiveness becomes unachievable within the framework of her considerations. Her reflection can be divided into two stages. The first is a focus on the idea of radical evil and the need to forgive perpetrators for their crimes. Second, under the influence of the Adolf Eichmann trial, she developed the idea of the banality of evil. This idea points to situations so terrible that they transcend all human moral judgment, making forgiveness impossible. However, even when the moral possibility of individual forgiveness has been rejected, when the legal possibility of seeking justice has been exhausted and when victims and perpetrators in the community are still unable to live together peacefully, Arendt’s thought leads us to the possibility of political reconciliation. (shrink)

By offering an analysis of different conceptions of corruption connected to the political regime and contingency in which they developed, the article retrieves a systemic meaning of political corruption. Through the works of Plato, Aristotle, Polybius and Machiavelli, it reconstructs a dimension of political corruption particular to popular governments and also engages with recent neo-republican and institutionalist attempts at redefining political corruption. The article concludes that we still lack a proper conception of systemic corruption comparable to the one of the (...) Ancients because we are yet unable to account for the role procedures and institutions play in fostering corruption through their normal functioning and what this means for liberal democratic regimes. (shrink)

This paper explores the notion that business calls for an adversarial ethic, akin to that of sport. On this view, because of their competitive structure, both sport and business call for behaviours that are contrary to ‘ordinary morality’, and yet are ultimately justified because of the goods they facilitate. I develop three objections to this analogy. Firstly, there is an important qualitative difference between harms risked voluntarily and harms risked involuntarily. Secondly, the goods achieved by adversarial relationships in sport go (...) beyond the function of sport, i.e. to entertain audiences. Thirdly, the most plausible account of the athlete’s motivational development starts with their love of the sport, which can explain a commitment to the sporting ethics in a way that is not paralleled in business. I close by drawing attention to the ways in which an Aristotelian conception of business ethics may be able to accommodate these objections. (shrink)

The essay examines solitude not as fate, sacrifice or passion, but as an experience that is actively initiated, that is perceived ambivalently, sometimes painfully, but also sensually, and that functions as context as well as occasion for the practice of cultural techniques – talking (to oneself), reading, writing, drawing or painting. Solitude techniques are analysed as “technologies of the self” (Michel Foucault) and “techniques of the body” (Marcel Mauss), as strategies for self-perception and “internal policy” (Paul Valéry). The history of (...) these self-techniques as solitude techniques is unfolded using examples from Stoic philosophy and early Christian theology. An emphasis is placed on self-doubling or splitting techniques: those who are alone with themselves also see themselves as more or less resilient objects that can be strengthened against the influences of other voices and people. Among the techniques of solitude is, above all, the quest for suitable places that are often – desert, sea, mountain peak, etc. – characterised not only by being devoid of humans, but also by a kind of uniformity. In this way, they resemble writing or drawing surfaces on which meanings can be brought to light through sketches or graphic characters. (shrink)

I treat despotism as a virtual concept. Thus it is necessary to expose its actualizations even when it appears as its opposite, refusing to recognize itself as despotism. I define despotism initially as arbitrary rule, in terms of a monstrous transgression of the law. But since the monster is grounded in its very formlessness, it cannot be demonstrated. However, one can always try to de-monstrate it through disagreements. In doing this, I deal with despotism not as a solipsistic undertaking but (...) as part of a constellation that always already contains two other elements: economy and voluntary servitude. I give three different – ancient, early modern and late modern – accounts of this nexus, demonstrating how despotism continuously takes on new appearances. I conclude, in a counter-classical prism, how the classical nexus has evolved in modernity while the focus gradually shifted towards another triangulation: neo-despotism, use and dissent. (shrink)

To operate in an unpredictable environment, a vehicle with advanced driving assistance systems, such as a robot or a drone, not only needs to register its surroundings but also to combine data from different sensors into a world model, for which it employs filter algorithms. Such world models, as this article argues with reference to the SLAM problem in robotics, consist of nothing other than probabilities about states and events arising in the environment. The model, thus, contains a virtuality of (...) possible worlds that are the basis for adaptive behavior. The article shows that the current development of these technologies requires new concepts because their complex adaptive behaviors cannot be explained by referring them to mere algorithmic processes. Instead, it proposes the heuristic instrument of microdecisions to designate the temporality of decisions between alternatives that are created by probabilistic procedures of world modeling. Microdecisions are more than the implementation of deterministic processes—they decide between possibilities and, thus, always open up the potential of their otherness. By describing autonomous adaptive technologies with this heuristic, the question of sovereignty inevitably arises. It forces us to re-think what autonomy means when decisions can be automated. (shrink)

Scholars in the field of environmental and animal ethics have propounded theories that outline what, in their view, ought to constitute an ethical relationship between humans and the environment and humans and nonhuman animals respectively. In the field of animal ethics, the contributions by Western scholars to theorize a body of animal ethics, either as an ethic in its own right or as a branch of the broader field of environmental ethics is clearly seen. Consequently, there are, notably, two main (...) schools of thought in the field of animal ethics. These are the ‘welfarist’ and the ‘rightist’ approaches (Regan, 2006; Owoseni & Olatoye, 2014). Unfortunately, a clearly concerted effort to theorize on animal ethics from an African perspective is at the minimal, although there is a lot written in African environmental ethics, broadly construed. It is within this context that this study locates an African animal ethic within the two main theories in the global animal ethics debate, using traditional Akan ontology and ethics particularly, those that speak to their relationship with the environment and, especially animals. Thus, using Akan ontological worldview and ethics as foundational sources, alongside learned principles from the emerging theories in African environmental ethics, the study seeks to find the place of Akan animal ethics within the rightist and welfarist debates. (shrink)

In Science as a Profession and Vocation, Max Weber presents a clear task to scientists: he claims that they have the responsibility to present uncomfortable knowledge to politicians, students and o...

This article attempts to assess the claim that the unum necessarium in our time is the general dissemination of scientific knowledge because liberal civilization or the “good society” cannot be had in the presence of traditional religion and “metaphysics.” The paper attempts to place this claim in the context of continuing globalization and related questions such as 9/11, Fundamentalist Islam, Sino-Western relations, “pop” atheism and the prospect of a “post-human” future. The paper describes the continuance of pre-Enlightenment traditions and beliefs (...) even as constant globalizing influences with their attendant secularism, atheism and technologism make their presence felt. The paper canvasses the views of Chet Raymo, C.S. Lewis, Bryan Appleyard, Werner Heisenberg, Stanley Rosen, Henry Adams, Friedrich Nietzsche Martin Heidegger and Francis Fukuyama as a means of assessing the claim that an education rooted in a simple commitment to scientific progressivism will be inadequate to the demands of the 21 st Century. (shrink)

Max Weber is seen by mainstream social scientists as a sociologist, social theorist, and theorist of bureaucracy. In this reassessment of Weber’s social science and its methodology, it is suggested that Weber can also be seen as a compelling early 20th-century critic of science and technology. The theme of technology, and Weber’s ambivalence about it, is approached through a discussion of his notion of disenchantment. In the modern, disenchanted world, social scientists are compelled to choose the values that guide research, (...) but research is constrained by the technocratic requirements of large, bureaucratic institutions that sponsor and fund it. The article asks whether Weber’s notion of individual values is still applicable in the context of social science in the early 21st century. In a line of thought that can be traced to Postman and Ellul, it is asked whether the choices social scientists make can puncture the dense web of bureaucratic-technological rationality of which Weber was critical. (shrink)

Context is a pivotal concept for social scientists in their attempt to weave singularities or universals to moral codes and political orders. However, in this, social scientists might be neglecting the ways in which individuals or groups who are excluded from the collective production of knowledge want to politicize their concerns also by claiming their uniqueness and singularity. In this article, drawing on the public controversy about access to dementia drugs on the U.K. National Health Service and on the work (...) of pioneering sociologist Helen McGill Hughes on “human interest stories,” the author argues that the “politics of singularities” can be articulated in two related ways within technical controversies. First, it expresses the unraveling of sociotechnical ties caused by institutional failure to take concerns into account. Second, it expresses the concrete uniqueness of persons caught by standardized, “universal” and impersonal implements and/or policies. Both these effects are underpinned by resourcing to allegorical expression, a literary form that while fostering political imagination in technological democracies might weaken Science and Technology Studies' ambitions to influence decision making. (shrink)

Giorgio Agamben’s work on biopower thematizes the biopolitical distinction between what the 1789 Declaration distinguishes as citoyen and homme. In this contribution, Foucault’s and Agamben’s views on biopolitics are critically discussed. It argues that a crucial distinction exists between what can be called zoēpolitics and biopolitics. Whereas the former takes the biological body as its object and is only indirectly geared towards the social body, the latter more directly has the social body as its object. Citizenship can be regarded a (...) crucial form of population control that is both zoēpolitical and biopolitical in scope. It is zoēpolitical in that it distinguishes citizens from non-citizens. It is biopolitical in that it separates the life of ‘society’ from what is today, for instance, in discourse on immigrant integration, discursively articulated as the ‘outside society’. It is thus crucial to take seriously a discourse on what ‘society’ is, who belongs to it, and who resides ‘outside of society’, instead of taking the sovereign position of defining ‘society’ as a social body existing prior to its biopolitical articulation. (shrink)

Large exchange markets, big money, interest-bearing credit, big landholdings, proletarian masses, imperial expansion and even ‘capital’ or ‘salaried workers’, are not in themselves specific, unique institutional features of Modern Capitalism. This article argues that the features that characterize Modern Capitalism are a massive emergence of ‘free’, monetized wage labour, a self-propelled rush to unbounded world expansion and the progressive conversion of expropriated and privatized land into a monetized commodity, as well as a radically new use of the ancestral social institutions (...) of money and credit as an instrument for financing the production of commodities to obtain a surplus in the form of monetary profit, but also to generate expropriatory social debt relations. This article explains these dynamic historical forces and their importance for political philosophy and for legal and economic history and economics and sheds some light on the relationship between ‘capitalism’ and ‘modernity’. (shrink)

This article explores the ideological origins of the American free-speech tradition. It analyzes the two principal categorizations of free speech in classical antiquity: isegoria, the right to voice one’s opinion, and parrhesia, the license to say what one pleases often through provocative discourse, thus grounding modern free-speech epistemology and jurisprudential philosophy in a sociohistorical context. Part 1 reviews the First Amendment corpus juris. A progression of incrementally absolute judicial holdings promotes parrhesia, highlighting democratic utility over individual self-actualization; thus, Americans no (...) longer view freedom of speech as an end ipso facto. While Athenian democracy recognized the need for provocative speech, certain institutional and social constraints, such as dokimasia, established standards of truth and accountability. Part 2 frames the historical developments of isegoria and parrhesia for modern analysis. The author begins by discussing isegoria’s principal aims, namely, promoting individual self-actualization and effective democratic governance. The European free-speech tradition, which views the individual as the locus of power, favors the former. The American tradition, which ‘depersonizes’ civil liberties such that the collective becomes the locus of control, favors the latter. Part 3 identifies the colonial developments in Anglo-American history that account for present-day U.S. free-speech permissiveness. It shows that the American preference for parrhesia-based absolutism was born from British imperialism and censorship. Part 4 suggests a need to reexamine free speech-understandings in the context of new-media proliferation and digital content regulation. The dominance of U.S.-based social media companies injects the American speech tradition into cultures with disparate free-speech philosophies and practices. (shrink)

In The Principle of Hope, Ernst Bloch claims that the Russian Orthodox Christian Church was theologically more open towards the ideas of October than its Western counterpart. The remark is intriguing, but Bloch does not offer any detailed explanation except to say that Orthodoxy considers the revelation “unconcluded.” This article is an attempt to provide a slightly more detailed background to Bloch’s remark and present some elements of Orthodox Christianity and its utopianism by way of comparative critical hermeneutics, a method (...) that looks at the interpretative differences between Orthodox and Western Christianity with respect to some basic shared dogmas and their de-alienating and alienating effects. (shrink)

The term “speciesism” has played a key role in debates about the moral consideration of nonhuman animals, yet little work has been dedicated to clarifying its meaning. Consequently, the concept remains poorly understood and is often employed in ways that might display a speciesist bias themselves. To address this problem, this article develops a definition of speciesism in terms of discrimination and argues in favor of its advantages over alternative accounts. After discussing the key desiderata for a definition of discrimination (...) in general and speciesism in particular, a wide and evaluative account of speciesism is presented. According to it, speciesism is unjustified consideration or treatment of those who are not classified as belonging to a certain species. The article then discusses rival accounts, namely narrow and descriptive definitions of speciesism. The article argues that such accounts are problematic as they overly restrict the scope of phenomena that can be identified as speciesist and disrupt the continuity with other forms of discrimination such as racism and sexism. (shrink)

Peter Vanderschraaf’s Strategic Justice is a powerful elaboration and defense of what he calls ‘justice as mutual advantage’. Vanderschraaf opens Strategic Justice by observing that ‘Plato set a template for all future philosophers by raising two interrelated questions: (1) What precisely is justice? (2) Why should one be just?’. He answers that (1) justice consists of conventions which (2) are followed because each sees that doing so is in her interest. These answers depend upon two conditions which Vanderschraaf calls Baseline (...) Consistency and Negative Mutual Expectations. I contend that the plausibility of the first condition depends upon principles which are prior to Vanderchraaf’s conventions of justice and that the second condition does not account for the interest Vanderschraaf must think we take in those principles. I therefore worry that Vanderschraaf does what he accuses other theorists of justice as mutual advantage of doing: going outside the bounds of justice as mutual advantage. To lay the groundwork for his conditions, Vanderschraaf analyzes the circumstances of justice. I argue that, his claims to the contrary notwithstanding, he does not take the circumstances to be the kind of conditions Hume takes them to be, but that he has good reason to do so. (shrink)

A model is “any representation or concept that helps us to understand the world whenever common sense or direct observations are inadequate.” Common sense and direct observation often prove inadequate to the complexities of the twenty-first-century cities. Thus, models abound in urban life and governance. However, a model is not only a tool for control but a way of defining a situation. Framing the city so as to render it susceptible to interpretation and intervention is an exercise not merely with (...) scientific or technological value but with rhetorical power. The tradition of comprehensive urban models, beginning with the advent of computers and culminating in the self-analyzing “smart city,” I argue, sidelines this rhetorical power in favor of a tone of scientific authority that, while justifiable in technical domains, does not legitimately scale to the level of a political community. Making good on the civic potential of Big Data thus requires recontextualizing properly scientific enterprises within an adequate political philosophy of the city, allowing for the construction of cultural urban models that set human freedom at the core of its inner workings. (shrink)

This paper draws a distinction between ‘right MacIntyreans’ who are relatively optimistic that MacIntyre’s vision of ethics can be realised in capitalist society, and ‘left MacIntyreans’ who are sceptical about this possibility, and aims to show that the ‘left MacIntyrean’ position is a promising perspective available to business ethicists. It does so by arguing for a distinction between ‘community-focused’ practices and ‘excellence-focused’ practices. The latter concept fulfils the promise of practices to provide us with an understanding of the best work (...) for humankind and highlights the affinities between MacIntyre’s concept of a practice and Marx’s conception of good work as free, creative activity. The paper concludes with a suggestion that we reflect on the best forms of work so that we can strive to ensure the very best activities, those most consonant with our flourishing, one day become available to all. (shrink)

This paper addresses the question of why democracy is desirable in terms of a relational theory of democracy. The theory draws on concepts from Aristotelian, critical realist, and psychoanalytic th...

One of the orienting claims in Yuk Hui’s The Question Concerning Technology in China is that an adequate accounting for the pluralism of technicity remains forthcoming. Hui brings this to our atten...

This paper assesses the complex debt of Machiavelli’s moral and political thought to Aristotle and the Aristotelian tradition, especially in its Scholastic variant. My claim is that Machiavelli’s attitude vis-à-vis Aristotle is twofold because it reflects two different aspects of Aristotle’s moral and political theory that are closely intertwined and that were selectively developed by subsequent Aristotelian Scholastic commentators: a teleological and a realist aspect. On one hand, Machiavelli provides a model that dramatically breaks with Aristotle on, for example, the (...) question of the origin of human society and the moral prudence of rulers. On the other hand, Machiavelli’s engagement with Aristotle amounts to something more complex than a simple rejection. The Florentine appears to read Aristotle rather selectively, and emphasizes the realist dimension of certain Aristotelian ideas that suit his own original overturning of classical moral and political ideas. I use two paradigmatic themes in which the Aristotelian teleological-realist divide is most evident, i.e. the account of the origin of human society and the case of prudence, in order to prove the dual relationship of Machiavelli’s thought with Aristotelianism. (shrink)

In recent years, debates about euthanasia and assisted suicide have increased to the point that now, many people defend the recognition of the right to die, the right for people to decide upon the end of their life. Consistently, advocates fight to legalise practices such as euthanasia to guarantee patients’ possibility to die when they request it. In this paper, I review two of the strongest arguments invoked by proponents of physician-assisted suicide: the argument for compassion and the argument for (...) dignity. The focus of this paper is to propose a review of these arguments through the lens of virtue ethics to inform the debate on physician-assisted suicide and question the relevance of such arguments for the legalisation of that right that would greatly ease the possibilities to end the life of a patient asking for it. (shrink)

Are humans a domesticated species? How is this issue related to debates on the roles of human agency in human evolution? This article discusses four views on human domestication: Darwin’s view; the view of those who link human domestication to anthropogenic niche construction and, more specifically, to sedentism; the view of those who link human domestication to selection against aggression and the domestication syndrome; and a novel view according to which human domestication can be conceived of in terms of a (...) process of political selection. The article examines and compares these views to illustrate how discussions of human domestication can contribute to debates about how, and to what extent, human agency has affected human evolution. (shrink)

Medicine increasingly envisions health promotion in terms of reducing risk as determined by quantitative risk factors, such as blood pressure, blood lipids, or genetic variants. This essay argues that this vision of health care as risk reduction is dangerous for Christian bioethics, since risk can be infinitely reduced leading to a self-defeating spiral of iatrogenic effects. Moreover, it endangers character because this vision of health is connected to a reductionist vision of the body and an understanding of individual risk that (...) undermines the more communal virtue of solidarity. The essay concludes by discussing how recent Thomistic analyses in favor of physical enhancements illustrate some of the problems that envisioning health care in terms of risk reduction holds for Christian bioethics. (shrink)

Whereas bioethicists generally consider medicine a practice aimed at the individual good of each patient, in this paper I present an alternative conception of the goods of medicine. I first explain how modern liberal political theory gives rise to the predominant view of the medical good and then contrast this understanding of politics with that of Thomas Aquinas, informed by Aristotle. I then show how this Christian politics is implicit in certain aspects of contemporary medical practice and argue that Christians (...) ought to draw more attention to this point in order to direct medicine toward the common good. (shrink)

This article argues for a new interpretation of the realist claim that politics is autonomous from morality and involves specific political values. First, this article defends an original normative...

The relations of power between healthcare-related institutions and the professionals that interact with them are changing. Generally, the institutions are gaining the upper hand. Consequently, the intellectual abilities necessary for professionals to pursue the internal goods of healthcare are changing as well. A concrete case is the struggle over sickness benefits in Sweden, in which theSwedish Social Insurance Agency(SSIA) and physicians are important stakeholders. The SSIA has recently consolidated its power over the sickness certificates that doctors issue for their patients. (...) The result has been a stricter gatekeeping of sickness benefits. In order to combat the inroads made by state institutions into sickness certification, and into the sphere of medical practice, some doctors have developed cunning “techniques” to maximize the chance to have their sickness certificates accepted by the SSIA. This article attempts to demonstrate that cunning intelligence—the ability of the weak to “outsmart” a stronger adversary—plays an important role in the practice of medicine. Cunning intelligence is not merely a defective form of prudence (phronesis), nor is it simply an instance of instrumental reason (techne), but rather an ability that occupies a distinct place among the intellectual abilities generally ascribed to professionals. (shrink)

The position of this paper is that the political developments in Nigeria has bearing with Protagoras’ “man is the measure”. This dictum simply implies humanism. It is based on this that this work posits that humanism is what underlies and informs the political developments in Nigeria. Hence, it is argued that all the political eras in Nigeria have the well-being of human beings as their impetus. Thus, this work is premised on the need to meet up with the welfare of (...) Nigerians, in which its failure has resulted in the political developments experienced within the Nigerian-nation states. This conclusion is reached through critical analysis and evaluation. (shrink)

In this essay, I undertake a critical phenomenological exposition of the conditions of ethical community as they present themselves in the light of the Anthropocene. I begin by approaching the present human condition by following Arendt in her considerations of what more recently has been termed the Anthropocene. I will take her notion of the process character of action as a lodestar in a so-called anarcheological reading of Aristotle that opens for a thinking of unbounded possibility and unbounded affinity and (...) that shows how Aristotle’s ethics, like so many other ethical and moral theories, is really a project of metaphysical closure in the face of the poignantly sensed, but theoretically marginalized, anarchic apertures of communitary life. To prepare for an ethics capable of perpetually affirming, rather than closing off, these anarchic apertures of the human condition, I bring the insights won in the anarcheological reading of Aristotle into conversation with accounts of the ethical responses presented by the Native American nation of the Crow towards the end of the 19th century, when they – in a sense not-dissimilar to what we now experience in the Anthropocene – faced the end of the world. I conclude by extracting from this some elements for a thinking of ethics at the end of worlds that affirms the unbounded apertures of human community. (shrink)

In her book Democracy and Truth: The Conflict between Political and Epistemic Virtues, Snjezana Prijic Samarzija advocates a stance that not only political, but also epistemic values are necessary for justification of democracy. Specifically, she mounts defense for one particular type of public deliberation on epistemic grounds. In this paper, I will discuss the following issue: What connects this type of public deliberation to the wider context of justification of democracy? I will attempt to explain why Prijic Samarzija's stance can (...) be understood as a version of deliberative epistemic instrumentalism and to discuss the role played by the public deliberation within this framework. (shrink)

This paper examines the relationship between morality and reasoning in a general sense. Following a broadly Aristotelian framework, it is shown that reasoning well about morality requires good character and a grounding in virtue and experience. Topic neutral ‘critical thinking’ on its own is not enough and may even be detrimental to morality. This has important consequences both for philosophy and for education. While morality is objective and universal, it should not be seen purely in terms of the intellectual grasp (...) of true propositions. As Simone Weil shows, it emerges from very basic aspects of our nature. As well as reasoning in an abstract sense we need what Pascal calls esprit de finesse based in our humanity as a whole, in sens, raison et coeur. The paper concludes with some reflections on our propensity to fail morally and on the relationship between virtue and happiness. (shrink)

European Journal of Philosophy, EarlyView.

Child moral agency is dismissed in many historical and contemporary accounts based on children's supposed lack or marginal possession of agency-bearing capacities, including reason, deliberation, and judgment, amongst others. Given its prominence in the philosophical canon, I call this the traditional view of child agency. Recent advancements in moral developmental psychology challenge the traditional view, pointing toward the possession of relevant capacities and competencies for moral and responsible agency in early and middle childhood. I argue that both views—traditional and developmental—underdetermine (...) our practices of holding children responsible in our common interactions. For one, we face significant epistemic barriers in accurately assessing children’s agential status qua possession of responsibility-bearing capacities and competencies. Second, overreliance on assessments of individualistic capacities emphasizes an atomistic view of agency at the expense of relational views that are of particular relevance for children as uniquely developing persons. Our practices of holding children responsible and the values that guide these practices in the context of supportive relationships are central to both supporting current and drawing out future responsible agency in childhood and, importantly, provide us with a path to regard children as participants in our moral communities, as opposed to mere agents-in-waiting. (shrink)

Over the last few decades, there have been intense debates concerning the effects of markets on the morality of individuals’ behaviour. On the one hand, several authors argue that markets’ ongoing expansion tends to undermine individuals’ intentions for mutual benefit and virtuous character traits and actions. On the other hand, leading economists and philosophers characterize markets as a domain of intentional cooperation for mutual benefit that promotes many of the character traits and actions that traditional virtue ethics accounts classify as (...) virtuous. In this paper, I join this debate and argue for three claims of general interest to philosophers, economists and policy makers. First, market transactions do not reliably promote individuals’ intentions for mutual benefit, and often select against such intentions. Second, the set of so-called market virtues lacks a substantial overlap with the set of character traits that traditional virtue ethics accounts classify as virtuous. And third, many seemingly virtuous actions observed in market contexts are merely actions in accordance with virtue rather than genuine actions from virtue. These three claims do not license opposition to markets, but challenge the main empirical and theoretical presuppositions of leading virtue ethics defences of markets. (shrink)

Full virtue and practical wisdom comprise the end of neo-Aristotelian moral development, but wisdom cannot be cultivated straight away through arguments and teaching. Wisdom is integrated with, and builds upon, habituation: the acquisition of virtuous character traits through the repeated practice of corresponding virtuous actions. Habit formation equips people with a taste for, and commitment to, the good life; furthermore it provides one with discriminatory and reflective capacities to know how to act in particular circumstances. Unfortunately, habituation is often understood (...) primarily as a method suitable only for children. This article examines whether Aristotle limited habituation to children and, if not, what the relationship between habituation and wisdom beyond childhood might look like. This article concludes that wisdom-guided habituation is also possible for adults who continue and confirm their already established virtuous habits. The implications of this for professional moral education are subsequently discussed. (shrink)

Sheldon S. Wolin’s ‘fugitive democracy’ is arguably his most provocative contribution to political theory. Breaking with the understanding of democracy as a constitutional form whose origins he locates in the work of Aristotle, Wolin claims democracy is better understood not as a constitution, but as a ‘rebellious moment,’ making democracy dependent on cultural rather than institutional characteristics. This formulation poses a problem for democracy as a political phenomenon, as political power today tends to be concentrated within institutions. Without institutional expression, (...) democracy is alienated from political power and hence a contradiction in terms. I reconstruct an understanding of Wolin’s fugitive democracy that can avoid such problems, while also being adequate to the current political juncture. I argue that Aristotle’s conception of the practice of justice, read through the lens of Wolin’s ‘fugitive democracy,’ becomes ‘fugitive justice,’ the cultivation of a democratic ethos that might support and sustain fortuitous democratic moments, connecting democratic culture to political institutions. In this way, Aristotle’s work is split: not simply the founder of constitutionalism, through ‘fugitive justice’ Aristotle becomes a resource for radical democrats, and a complement to Wolin’s concept of democracy. (shrink)

An important issue within the field of global ethics is the extent or scope of moral obligation or duties. Cosmopolitanism argues that we have duties to all human beings by virtue of some common property. Communitarian ethics argue that one’s scope of obligation is circumscribed by one’s community or some other defining property. Public virtues, understood to be either a property that communities possess to function well or a moral excellence constitutive of that community, offer an interesting challenge to this (...) binary by positing moral goods or excellences that are constitutive of a community yet global in application. Virtues such as tolerance, charity, moderation, or benevolence might be examples of such goods or excellences endorsed by a community but applied to individuals who are not members of the community, or, as in the case of environmental ethics, even to entities that are not moral agents. Unlike cosmopolitan ethics, the scope of the obligation does not depend on identifying universal properties, such as rationality, human dignity, or utility, but could be defined entirely by and within a community. (shrink)

Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679) toplum sözleşmesi teorisinin kurucusu olarak kabul edilen önemli bir siyaset kuramcısıdır. Hobbes’un doğal durumu tanımlaması, toplumun oluşmasındaki nedenleri belirtmesi, yetkiye ve siyasi yükümlülüklere dair fikirleri siyasi düşünce tarihinde dikkat çeker. Düşünür, özellikle yaşadığı yüzyılda monarşiyi güçlendirmek adına siyasal itaati meşrulaştırmanın gerekliliği üzerinde durmuş, dönemin koşullarından dolayı Tanrı fikrini tamamıyle dışlayamamıştır. Bu yüzden toplum sözleşmesi fikrini temellendirdikten sonra ahlaki yasalar ve yükümlülükler aracılığı ile Tanrı kavramını teorisine dahil etmeyi seçmiştir. Bununla birlikte, kendisinden önceki düşünürlerin aksine Tanrı’ya siyasal ve (...) toplumsal düzeni sağlama hususunda ancak ikincil bir görev vermiştir. Tanrı kavramını ve yazılı olmayan kuralların yükümlülüğünü dışlaması, söz konusu dönemde Hobbes’un ateist olduğuna dair tartışmalara yol açsa da, kendisi bunu kabul etmemiştir. Bizim kanaatimiz, Hobbes’un aslında bir ateist olduğu ve Tanrı fikrini sadece toplumun düzenini sağlamak için siyasi bir araç olarak kullandığı yönündedir. Bir başka deyişle, argümanımız; Hobbes’un dini ve Tanrı korkusunu, bireyleri yazılı yasalara uymaları yönünde zorlamak için kullandığı şeklindedir. Bu argümanın haklılığını gösterebilmek için makalemizde Hobbes’un De Cive ve Leviathan kitaplarındaki argümanları analiz edilmiş ve geliştirmiş olduğu kuramda dinin ve Tanrı’nın yeri incelenmiştir.Özet: Thomas Hobbes, İngiltere’de sosyal ve siyasi düzenin tehlike altında olduğu ve egemen gücün meşrulaştırılması gerektiği bir dönem olan onyedinci yüzyılda yaşamıştır. Doğal bilimlerdeki ilerlemeler ve felsefik düşünce yapısındaki değişimler, rasyonaliteyi önemli kılarak, söz konusu dönemde egemenin gücünün ve bireylerin özgür istencinin sorgulanmasına olanak vermiştir. Bu yüzden, Tanrı, din ve siyasi yükümlülükler ile ilgili sorunlar da yeni bir boyut kazanmıştır. Hobbes’un esas felsefesi Aristoteles teleolojisini çürütmek ve sonrasında da onu mekanik yaklaşım ile değiştirmekti. Hobbes’un modern doğal bilimlere olan yaklaşımı, siyaset felsefesini de mekanik bir yaklaşımla temellendirmeye itmiştir. Bu sebeple, Tanrı’nın birincil rolünü siyaset felsefesinden çıkarmış, ama bunu yaparken de Tanrı’nın varlığını inkar etmemiştir. Hobbes’un bu makalede tartışılan kitapları; De Cive ve Leviathan’da, bireylerin toplumun önemli parçaları olduğundan ama doğal olarak siyasi birer varlık olmadıklarından bahsedilir. Hobbes’a göre bireyler hayatta kalmak için siyasi bir kurumun altına girmek durumundadırlar. Bir başka deyişle, insanın zayıflığı, siyasi toplumun kurulmasını gerekli kılmıştır. İnsan doğal olarak siyasi bir varlık olmasa dahi, siyasi bir kurum altında yaşamak insan doğasına aykırı bir durum değildir. Hobbes’un üzerinde durduğu temel nokta, sivil toplumun yapay bir ürün olsa dahi bireylerin refahı için gerekli olduğudur. Yazılı yasaların ve bir otoritenin, kısacası zorlayıcı bir gücün olmaması halinde, insanlar tehlike altında olacaktır. Bu koşullar altında, bir kişinin kendisini koruması için ne gerekiyorsa yapacağı şaşırtıcı bir durum değildir. Böylesi bir savaş durumunu engellemek için, kişiler doğal durumdaki sınırsız özgürlüklerini bırakarak, egemen bir gücün altında yaşamayı tercih edeceklerdir. Aslında Hobbes’a göre, insanın güvenliğini sağlayan siyasi toplumun varlığı değil, zorlayıcı bir gücün varlığıdır. Bu güç, insanların barış içerisinde yaşaması için gereken koşuldur. Bir başka deyişle, bireyler önce toplumu oluşturmak için sonra da o toplumun devamlılığını sağlamak için bir güçten korkmalıdırlar. Korku kavramı olmadan Hobbes’un bahsettiği siyasi güce bir temel bulmak zor olacaktır çünkü korku faktörü bireylerin kişisel çıkarları ile toplumsal iyinin karşı karşıya geldiği durumlarda, bireyi korkutarak siyasi güce uymayı zorlayacak ve böylece toplumsal refahı sağlayacaktır. Bu noktada, Hobbes’un kuramına Tanrı kavramı dahil olur. Bu makalede, Hobbes’un kuramında dinin rolü olmadan siyasi yükümlülük kavramının eksik kalacağı tartışılmıştır. Bireyler birbirlerinden korktukları için ve güvenliğe ihtiyaçları oldukları için bir toplumun altında yaşamayı tercih ederler. Hobbes’a göre bu ihtiyaç Tanrı korkusuyla desteklenmelidir. Fakat, Hobbes ne Tanrı korkusunu ne de ahlaki yasaların varlığını doğal durumda kullanmıştır. Bunun yerine, sonrasında siyasi düzen için gerekli olan yükümlülüklere bir temel bulmak için, Tanrı kavramını kullanmayı seçmiştir. Hobbes, burada analiz edilen kitaplarında doğal yasalar, ahlaki yasalar ve ilahi yasalar kavramlarını açıklar. Ona göre, doğal yasalar ahlaki yasalardır ve aynı zamanda ilahi yasalar olarak da adlandırılabilirler. Bu yüzden üçü de aynı görünür ve hepsi de Tanrı tarafından verilir. Tanrı her bireye akıl verdiğinden, herkes bu yasalara akılları aracılığı ile ulaşabilir. Hobbes’un kuramında bu noktaya kadar, sadece sivil toplumda değil, doğal durumda da ahlaki yükümlülüklerin olmasına imkan veriliyordu. Fakat, Hobbes insanların doğal durumda ahlaki bilinçlerinin olmadığını ve ahlaki yasalara uymak zorunda olmadıklarını söyler. Ona göre doğal yasalar, ahlaki yasalar ya da Tanrı’nın yasaları, adına her ne dersek diyelim, yükümlülük yaratan yasalar olmaları için bir sivil otoritenin yaptırımında olması gerekir. Her ne kadar da doğal durumda ahlaki yasaların varlığından söz etse de, söz konusu yasaların insanların toplum altında yaşamaya geçmeden önce yükümlülüğe yol açmadığını da ekler.Doğal yasalar sadece insanları toplum altında birleştirmeye zorlayacak bir güç olması halinde, Tanrı’nın buyrukları olarak zorunluluğa dönüşürler. Bu demektir ki; ahlaki ilkeler siyasi bir güç olmadığı sürece anlamsızdırlar. Hobbes’un felsefesinde aklın buyrukları ve Tanrı’nın yasaları iki farklı kavram olarak ortaya çıkar; bu durum da bizi Hobbes’un aslında Tanrı’ya inanmadığını savunmaya kadar götürebilir. Halbuki, Hobbes’un yükümlülükleri meşrulaştırmak için dinin gücüne ihtiyacı vardır. Bu sebeple, Tanrı’yı bir araç olarak kullanmayı seçmiştir. Böylece, egemenin mutlak gücünü de sınırlamış ve yükümlülükler için de bir temel bulabilmiştir. Bir başka deyişle, Tanrı’nın varlığının dini açıdan meşrulaştırmasını yapmak yerine, egemen gücün eline dini ve Tanrı’yı siyasi ve sosyal düzene ulaşmak için bir araç olarak vermiştir. Hobbes’un göstermeye çalıştığı, Leviathan diye adlandırdığı toplumun bireylerden oluştuğu ve bu bireylerin egemen güce biat etme sebeplerinin, kendilerinin vermiş olduğu rıza ve yetki olduğudur. Kısacası, Hobbes siyaset felsefesinin temeline Tanrı’yı değil, öznelerin özgür iradelerini koyar. Bireyler doğal durumdaki sınırsız özgürlüklerinden feragat ederek bir egemen altında yaşamaya rıza göstermişlerdir, çünkü karşılığında güvenliklerini sağlayacaklardır. Bu anlaşma gereği egemene itaat etmeyi kabul ederler. Böylece siyasal olarak bireyin bağlı bulunduğu yükümlülükler Tanrı kavramı ile sınırlandırılmış olan egemenin gücü ile meşrulaştırılmış olur. Bu makalede, Hobbes’un egemenin mutlak gücünü ilahi irade olan Tanrı ile sınırlandırmış olduğu gösterilir. Aslında Hobbes’un yapmaya çalıştığı, egemenin gücüne mutlakiyet sağlayarak, onu ne dünyevi ne de ilahi bir güce karşı sorumluluk altına sokmaktır. Bunu nasıl başardığı ise bu makalede, Hobbes’un De Cive ve Leviathan kitaplarının analiz edilmesi ile detaylı olarak gösterilmiştir. (shrink)

According to a recent interpretive orthodoxy, Spinoza is a profoundly democratic theorist of state authority. I reject this orthodoxy. To be sure, for Spinoza, a political order succeeds in proportion as it harnesses the power of the people within it. However, Spinoza shows that political inclusion is only one possible strategy to this end; equally if not more useful is political exclusion, so long as it maintains what I call the depoliticised acquiescence of those excluded.

The aim of this paper is to contribute to the development of a political theology that take both God and law as central. Rather than operate abstractly, the paper works closely on passages from Exodus and Genesis that are themselves linked directly to what is at stake in “listening to God”. The transformation of the immediacy of listening to the necessarily mediated response to the law is the move that the passages from the Torah entail. Within that setting, listening breaks (...) the hold of immediacy and thus the possibility of any immediacy of reception. What is opened as a result, the argument continues, is an importantly different hermeneutic register and philosophical anthropology. (shrink)