Although the managerial practice of cheating spans complex and heterogeneous situations, most business ethics scholars consider that the very idea of cheating is indefensible on moral grounds, and quickly dismiss it as wrongdoing. This paper proposes to fine-tune this conventional moral assessment by arguing that some forms of cheating can be justified—or at least excused. To do so, it starts with a value-free definition of cheating that covers a wide diversity of situations: “breaking the rules while deliberately leading or allowing (...) others to think they have been respected.” While using this definition at the metaethical level, the paper contends that the moral assessment of cheating depends on the obligation to comply with the rules. There are rules which do not entail moral obligations, and there are special circumstances where other more important obligations override the obligation to comply with the rules. Furthermore, the paper argues that respecting the penalty rules also influences the moral assessment of cheating on the rules. The key interest of this endeavor lies in contributing to building a more solid theoretical framework for the study of cheating in management, which may replace our common prejudices and basic intuitions on this matter. (shrink)

Since 2016, there has been an explosion of academic work and journalism that fixes its subject matter using the terms ‘fake news’ and ‘post-truth’. In this paper, I argue that this terminology is not up to scratch, and that academics and journalists ought to completely stop using the terms ‘fake news’ and ‘post-truth’. I set out three arguments for abandonment. First, that ‘fake news’ and ‘post-truth’ do not have stable public meanings, entailing that they are either nonsense, context-sensitive, or contested. (...) Secondly, that these terms are unnecessary, because we already have a rich vocabulary for thinking about epistemic dysfunction. Thirdly, I observe that ‘fake news’ and ‘post-truth’ have propagandistic uses, meaning that using them legitimates anti-democratic propaganda, and runs the risk of smuggling bad ideology into conversations. (shrink)

As law originates in violence, it is always haunted by its constitutive trauma. Recourse to law's origin, which is implicitly or explicitly sought in adjudication, thus requires a way to deal with law's trauma. What is needed is a cover, to be provided through interpretation. Four such interpretive ‘cover up’ operations, all necessarily somewhat duplicitous, are discussed. The first three represent main currents in legal theory. First, the standard legal view, which denies the trauma but relies on traditional authority to (...) cover it. Second, a ‘neurotic’ solution, in which trauma is also denied but nevertheless cover is produced through collective interpretation. In the third, ‘perverse’ solution, trauma is admitted, and even enjoyed; on the other hand, it is denied that cover can be produced by any interpretive authority. The fourth option provides an alternative: recognition of law's trauma, covering it through the collectively shared practice of interpretation. It is shown that an example of such a collective effort can be found in the Dutch practice of gedogen, the deliberate under-enforcement of law, which is capable of creating an ‘informal rule of law’ that deals with intractable social problems more successfully than attempts formally to enforce applicable law. (shrink)

This paper explores how scientists perceive public engagement initiatives. By drawing on interviews with nanoscientists, it analyzes how researchers imagine science–society interactions in an early phase of technological development. More specifically, the paper inquires into the implicit framings of citizens, of scientists, and of the public in scientists’ discourses. It identifies four different models of how nanoscientists understand public engagement which are described as educational, paternalistic, elitist, and economistic. These models are contrasted with the dialog model of public engagement promoted (...) by social scientists and policymakers. The paper asks if and in what ways participatory discourses and practices feed back into scientists’ understandings, thus co-producing public discourses and science. (shrink)

In light of the variety of uses of the term autonomy in recent bioethics literature, in this paper, I suggest that competence, not being as contested, is better placed to play the anti-paternalistic role currently assigned to autonomy. The demonstration of competence, I will argue, can provide individuals with robust spheres of non-interference in which they can pursue their lives in accordance with their own values. This protection from paternalism is achieved by granting individuals rights to non-interference upon demonstration of (...) competence. In this paper, I present a risk-sensitive account of competence as a means of grounding rights to non-interference. On a risk-sensitive account of competence individuals demonstrate their competence by exercising three capacities to the extent necessary to meet a threshold determined by the riskiness of the decision. These three capacities are the capacity to acquire knowledge, use instrumental rationality, and form and revise a life plan. (shrink)

En este artículo se argumenta que el poder de juzgar es una capacidad fundamental para pensar la política. La relevancia de tal capacidad radica en que la estructura y función de los juicios reflexionantes, tal como son leídos por hannah Arendt a partir de la Crítica del Juicio kantiana, nos permiten explicar el difícil equilibrio entre los juicios compartidos en las comunidades y la posibilidad de la crítica.

The multiple-choice video game Life is Strange was described by its French developers as a metaphor for the inner conflicts experienced by a teenager in trying to become an adult. In psychological work with adolescents, there is a stark similarity between what they experience and some concepts of existentialist philosophy. Sartre’s script for the movie Les Jeux Sont Faits (literally ‘‘games are made’’) uses the same narrative strategy as Life is Strange—the capacity for the main characters to travel back in (...) time to change their own existence—in order to stimulate philosophical, ethical, and political thinking and also to effectively simulate existential ‘‘limit situations.’’ This article is a dialogue between Sartre’s views and Life is Strange in order to examine to what extent questions such as what is freedom? what is choice? what is autonomy and responsibility? can be interpreted anew in hybrid digital–human—‘‘anthrobotic’’—environments. (shrink)

The discursive character of human rights prevents a precise summary of historical origin, rationale, or definition outside of the various codifications in religious texts, secular philosophies, founding national documents, and international treaties, charters, conventions, covenants, declarations, and protocols. Regarding the objects of human rights, we can speak of a “foundational five” 1) Personal security 2) Material subsistence 3) Elemental equality 4) Personal Freedom and 5) Recognition as a member of the human community. Despite, or perhaps because of its multivalence, the (...) concept of human rights has been criticized as “foundationalist,” “essentialist,” or “ethnocentric”—its universalism being used as a weapon against itself by critics of cultural imperialism. Even the tolerance discourses so popular in critical theory, however, gain their normative force from the same basic notion of individual or group rights. Notwithstanding these rhetorical abuses, the concept of human rights has proved robust as a doctrine of equality owing to its openness to a pluralism of justifications grounding the basic “goods” agreed as necessary for human development. (shrink)

A “sender–receiver” framework based on models developed in several fields can provide a general treatment of communicative and symbolic phenomena, replacing traditional semiotic theories that have failed to live up to the hopes of their advocates. Sender–receiver models have mostly been applied to linguistic behavior, gestures, and other ephemeral interactions between individuals. I look at the application of this framework to enduring artifacts, including pictures, using indigenous rock art in Australia as a case study.

In chapter one I firstly critique some contemporary family-resemblance approaches to the category woman, and claim that they do not take sufficient account of dis-semblance, that is, resemblances that people have in common with members of the contrast category man. Second, I analyze how the concept of woman is semantically contestable: resemblance/dissemblance structures give rise to vagueness and to borderline cases. Borderline cases can either be included in the category or excluded from it. The factors which incline parties in a (...) dispute about membership to include or exclude depend on metaphysical, ethical, or political background assumptions. In chapter two, I begin by considering the harms suffered by transgender persons through “misgendering”, the deployment of gender terms which inflict psychological harms upon transgender persons, place them in situations of injustice, or diminish their self-respect. Such deployments are morally contestable: they can be challenged on ethical grounds. Several characterisations of the term ‘woman’ proposed in the feminist literature are critiqued from this perspective. In chapter three, I elaborate a broadly liberal approach to gender pluralism. The approach involves: i) the public toleration of gender practices and beliefs which contest prevalent gender norms; and ii) state-gender neutrality. Public toleration allows gender non-conforming practices and beliefs within public space. State gender-neutrality consists mainly in the removal from law and government policy of provisions which assume compliance with prevalent conceptions of gender. (shrink)

The article represents a contribution to the discussions about the basis, motives, and goals of European integration, which were stimulated by the recent “normative turn” in EU studies. My aim in this the article is threefold: By addressing the issue of internal legitimacy of EU decision-making, I wish to show that the European Union is in need of a public “story” of European integration; however, a closer analysis suggests that there is much normative disagreement on values and principles that are (...) supposed to define such “Europeanness”. This is also relevant for the role of Europe on the scene of international or global politics, where the EU aspires to become a leading actor, or is supposed to do so by cosmopolitan-minded authors. Lastly, the text defends the usefulness of the traditional conceptual apparatus of political theory, which which has – in relation to the European integration – in recent times come under attack. (shrink)

The term ‘human nature’ can refer to different things in the world and fulfil different epistemic roles. Human nature can refer to a classificatory nature (classificatory criteria that determine the boundaries of, and membership in, a biological or social group called ‘human’), a descriptive nature (a bundle of properties describing the respective group’s life form), or an explanatory nature (a set of factors explaining that life form). This chapter will first introduce these three kinds of ‘human nature’, together with seven (...) reasons why we disagree about human nature. In the main, this chapter focuses on the explanatory concept of human nature, which is related to one of the seven reasons for disagreement, namely, the scientific authority inherent in the term ‘nature’. I will examine why, in a number of historical contexts, it was attractive to refer to ‘nature’ as an explanatory category, and why this usage has led to the continual contestation of the term within the sciences. The claim is that even if the contents of talk about ‘nature’ varied historically, the term’s pragmatic function of demarcation stayed the same. The term ‘nature’ conveys scientific authority over a territory; ‘human nature’ is a concept used to divide causes, as well as experts, and thereby conquer others who threaten to invade one’s epistemic territory. Analysing this demarcation, which has social as well as epistemic aspects, will help us to understand why the explanatory role has been important and why it is unlikely that people will ever agree on either the meaning or the importance of ‘human nature’ as an explanatory category. (shrink)

Key legislations in many countries emphasize the importance of involving children in decisions regarding their own health at a level commensurate with their age and capacities. Research is engaged in developing tools to assess capacity in children in order to facilitate their responsible involvement. These instruments, however, are usually based on the cognitive criteria for capacity assessment as defined by Appelbaum and Grisso and thus ill adapted to address the life-situation of children. The aim of this paper is to revisit (...) and critically reflect upon the current definitions of decision-making capacity. For this purpose, we propose to see capacity through the lens of essential contestability as it warns us against any reification of what it means to have capacity. Currently, capacity is often perceived of as a mental or cognitive ability which somehow resides within the person, obscuring the fact that capacity is not just an objective property which can be assessed, but always operates within a dominant cultural framework that “creates” that same capacity and defines the threshold between capable and incapable in a specific situation. Defining capacity as an essentially contested concept means using it in a questioning mode and giving space to alternative interpretations that might inform and advance the debate surrounding decision-making. (shrink)

This article argues for the elimination of the concept of life worth living from philosophical vocabulary on three complementary grounds. First, the basic components of this concept suffer from multiple ambiguities, which hamper attempts to ground informative evaluative and classificatory judgments about the worth of life. Second, the criteria proposed to track the extension of the concept of life worth living rest on unsupported axiological assumptions and fail to identify precise and plausible referents for this concept. And third, the concept (...) of life worth living is not shown to serve any major evaluative or classificatory purpose besides those served by already available axiological concepts. By eliminating the concept of life worth living, philosophers will free themselves of the task of addressing ill-posed axiological questions and ground reflection about the worth of life on more rigorous conceptual foundations. (shrink)

This dissertation argues that there is an agreed upon commonsense view of violence, but beyond this view, definitions for kinds of violence are essentially contested and non-neutrally, politically ideological, given that the political itself is an essentially contested concept defined in relation to ideologies that oppose one another. The first chapter outlines definitions for a commonsense view of violence produced by Greene and Brennan. This chapter argues that there are incontestable instances of violence that are almost universally agreed upon, such (...) as when an adult intentionally smashes a child’s head against a table, purposefully causing harm. It is also claimed that, because political, ideological distinctions between kinds of violence arise from the creation of moral equivalences to the commonsense view of violence, political ideology is the source of disagreement. The second chapter argues that the concept of violence and of the political are essentially contested concepts. Gallie’s criteria for what counts as an essentially contested concept are utilized in order to argue that violence is an essentially contested concept at the level of the political, though not at the level of the commonsense view of violence. In fact, the paradigmatic cases that the commonsense view of violence pertains to serve as the core cases that are then interpreted as kinds of violence at the ideological level. To define violence as altogether wrong, or to define kinds of violence as acceptable and others as wrong is itself a politically ideological move to make, such as when liberalism defines its own uses of violence as justified and legitimate, and its enemy’s violence as unjustifiable and illegitimate. The World Health Organization and Bufacchi’s definitions for violence are presented, as are the definition for terroristic violence defined by Nagel. Erlenbusch’s critique of a liberal view, such as that of Nagel and the World Health Organization, is addressed as a reflection on the fact that, beyond the commonsense view of violence, violence is an essentially contested concept for which an ideologically, politically non-neutral definition is unlikely. The third chapter outlines numerous definitions produced by various philosophers, historians, and theorists, such as Machiavelli, Arendt, Hobbes, Kant, Treitschke, Weber, Bakunin, Sorel, Žižek, and Benjamin. The definitions produced by each demonstrates that person’s political ideological assumptions. Their definitions demonstrate an ongoing disagreement, in the sense of Rancière’s formulation for what counts as a disagreement in that each theorist defines kinds of violence under the yoke of their own political ideology. They all might agree that a single act is violent, under the commonsense view of violence, but they disagree concerning what kind of violence it is. So, though they may point to the same events and actions as examples of violence, what they mean fundamentally differs, and this means that they disagree. Their disagreement arises due to their respective political ideologies. This disagreement shows that there is no neutral justification for the neutrality of a state, particularly if a neutral state must defend itself. The state is instead defined in historically contextual terms of how the state relates to kinds of violence, and the distinctions between kinds of violence are not themselves politically, ideologically neutral. So, the concept of violence, beyond the commonsense view, is an essentially contested concept for which a non-neutral definition is unlikely. Beyond the commonsense view, political ideology is inextricably bound up within distinctions between kinds of violence. The fourth chapter then examines arguments on the question of whether nonviolence counts as a kind of violence. If distinctions between kinds of violence are essentially contested and non-neutrally defined, and nonviolence is defined as distinct from violence, then it follows that nonviolence is an essentially contested concept for which no non-neutral definition is possible, at least beyond a commonsense view of nonviolence. A commonsense view of nonviolence is defined as the assumption that nonviolence is not violent in the way that the commonsense view defines violence. That is, nonviolence occurs when there is no action or event that most people would define as a violent one. Definitions for nonviolence, civil disobedience, nonviolent political actions, and nonviolent direct actions are then outlined. These definitions aim at showing that the doctrine of nonviolence does not merely refer to nonviolent acts, but to a strategy that is a means to defeating violence. Given that what counts as the nonviolence that defeats violence is ideologically a matter of disagreement, nonviolence, in this sense, can count as a kind of violence. The fifth chapter concludes, raising questions concerning how violence can be valued, the degree to which a state cannot neutrally justify its neutrality, and the degree to which, beyond the commonsense view of violence, there ever could be agreement concerning what counts as kinds of violence. 1 In this dissertation, I draw on a number of ideas/passages that appeared earlier in my paper “The Efficacy of Scapegoating and Revolutionary Violence," in Philosophy, Culture, and Traditions: A Journal of the World Union of Catholic Philosophical Societies, ed. William Sweet, 10(2014), 203-219. I am grateful to the editors of the journal for permission to draw on this material here. (shrink)

In a topic as controversial as the Turin Shroud, it is always surprising to note that there remains a large area of consensus among scholars who hold opposite opinions on the origin of this piece of fabric. According to the consensus view, neither science nor history can prove that the Turin Shroud shows signs of the Resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth. However, the reasons provided for this important claim are not convincing, especially in light of recent developments in historiography and (...) analytic philosophy. (shrink)

In recent years an increasing quantity of UK legislation has introduced blended or ‘hybridised’ procedures that blur the previously clear demarcation between civil and criminal legal processes, typically on the grounds of normatively-motivated political expediency. This paper provides a critical perspective on instances of procedural hybridisation in order to illustrate that, first, the reliance upon civil law measures to remedy criminal law infractions can raise human rights issues and, second, that such instrumental criminal justice strategies deliberately circumvent the enhanced procedural (...) protections of the criminal law. By conceptualising the rule of law as a structural coupling between the political and legal systems, and due process rights as necessary and self-imposed limitations upon systemic operations, this paper employs a systems-theoretical approach to critique this balancing act between expediency and principle, and queries the circumstances under which legislation contravening the rule of law can be said to lack legitimacy. (shrink)

Since Gallie introduced the notion of essentially contested concepts, it has given rise to considerable debate and confusion. The aim of this paper is to bring clarity to these debates by offering a critical reconstruction of the notion of essential contestedness. I argue that we should understand essentially contestable concepts as concepts that refer to ideals or to concepts and phenomena that can only be fully understood in light of ideals and that are, as a consequence, open to pervasive contestation. (...) Moreover, some concepts are second-order essentially contested: it may be a matter of ongoing dispute as to whether they should be regarded as essentially contested. The concept of law is an example. Some authors argue that it is ideal-oriented, whereas others claim it is not. This insight that ‘law’ is a second-order essentially contested concept may explain some of the disagreements between legal positivism and its various opponents. (shrink)

Justice is a contested concept. There are many different and competing conceptions, i.e. interpretations of the concept. Different domains of justice deal with different fields of application of justice claims, such as structural justice, distributive justice, participatory justice or recognition. We present a formal conceptual structure of justice applicable to all these domains. We show that conceptions of justice can be described by specifying the following conceptual elements: the judicandum, the community of justice including claim holders and claim addressees, their (...) claims, the informational base for the assessment, the principles of justice, and on a more practical level, the instruments of justice. By specifying these conceptual elements of justice, it is possible to analyse and compare different conceptions of justice, to assess their internal consistency, to explore new definitions of justice in an analytical way, and to explicate an idea of justice in a manner that provides concrete links to the relevant context. (shrink)

From 1965, the Swedish penal law does not require accountability as a condition for criminal responsibility. Instead, severely mentally disordered offenders are sentenced to forensic psychiatric care. The process that led to the present legislation had its origins in a critique of the concept of accountability that was first launched 50 years earlier by the founding father of Swedish forensic psychiatry, Olof Kinberg. The concept severe mental disorder is part of the Criminal Code as well as the Compulsory Mental Act. (...) The medical conditions for being sentenced to forensic psychiatric care are supposed to be the same as those for being admitted to involuntary psychiatric care. What these conditions are is not regulated in any law. For the guidance of the courts and others, there is a collection of examples in the government bill drafting the legislation in question. On the basis of these examples the content of the concept of severe mental disorder is chiselled out. However, the purposes of imposing penal law sanction and admitting someone to psychiatric care are not the same, and therefore the content of the concept severe mental disorder is bound to differ accordingly. Severe mental disorder is a legal concept that masks as a psychiatric one. In its applications in penal law, the court determines its content. But for the forensic psychiatrist it is more natural to interpret the term as a medical one. This creates a tension that has led to several controversies in recent criminal cases in Sweden. The best way to alleviate the situation is to discard the concept of severe mental disorder from criminal law. This will allow for a better separation of the roles of the psychiatrist and the court. (shrink)

If science fiction is a genre, then attempts to think about the nature of science fiction will be affected by one’s understanding of what genres are. I shall examine two approaches to genre, one dominant but inadequate, the other better, but only occasionally making itself seen. I shall then discuss several important, interrelated issues, focusing particularly on science fiction : what it is for a work to belong to a genre, the semantics of genre names, the validity of attempts to (...) define genres, and the connections between genre and normativity. One important but neglected clue to the nature of genres lies in the kinds of disagreements they generate over the assignment of works to genres. I conclude by explaining why these disagreements tell us something about the nature of genres, and discussing in some detail two famous cases of disagreement about whether some work or works are science fiction. (shrink)

This is the most comprehensive book ever published on philosophical methodology. A team of thirty-eight of the world's leading philosophers present original essays on various aspects of how philosophy should be and is done. The first part is devoted to broad traditions and approaches to philosophical methodology. The entries in the second part address topics in philosophical methodology, such as intuitions, conceptual analysis, and transcendental arguments. The third part of the book is devoted to essays about the interconnections between philosophy (...) and neighbouring fields, including those of mathematics, psychology, literature and film, and neuroscience. (shrink)

Stakeholder theory is widely accepted but elementary aspects remain indeterminate as the term ‘stakeholder’ is an essentially contested concept, being variously describable, internally complex and open in character. Such contestability is highly problematic for theory development and empirical testing. The extent of essential contestability, previously unknown, is demonstrated in this paper through a bounded systematic review of 593 different stakeholder theory definitions. As an essentially contested concept, the solution does not lie in a universal stakeholder definition, but in debating the (...) boundaries of stakeholder identification. To this end, this paper presents the first major attempt at sorting, filtering and ordering stakeholder theory and stakeholder definitions to produce a comprehensive, multi-dimensional classification of stakeholder theory. The constructs of the classification model juxtapose existing stakeholder theories and contributions from across the multi-contextual applications of stakeholder theory, thereby providing an invaluable overview of what we know about stakeholder theory in one model. The classification model is then tested with positive results. The paper concludes with a comprehensive discussion of the implications of classification stakeholder theory definitions, which has for future research. (shrink)

In this thesis I investigate causal inquiry in the social sciences, drawing on examples from various disciplines and in particular from conflict studies. In a backlash against the pervasiveness of statistical methods, in the last decade certain social scientists have focused on finding the causal mechanisms behind observed correlations. To provide evidence for such mechanisms, researchers increasingly rely on ‘process tracing’, a method which attempts to give evidence for causal relations by specifying the chain of events connecting a putative cause (...) and effect of interest. I will ask whether the causal claims process tracers make are defensible, and where they are not defensible I will ask how we can improve the method. Throughout these investigations, I show that the conclusions of process tracing are constrained both by the causal structure ofthe social world and by social scientists’ aims and values. My central argument is this: all instances of social phenomena have causally relevant differences, which implies that any research design that requires some comparison between cases is limited by how we systematize these phenomena. Moreover, such research cannot rely on stable regularities. Nevertheless, to forego causal conclusions altogether is not the right response to these limitations; by carefully outlining our epistemic assumptions we can make progress in causal inquiry. While I use philosophical theories of causation to comment on the feasibility of a social scientific method, I also do the reverse: by investigating a popular contemporary method in the social sciences, I show to what extent our philosophical theories of causation are workable in practice. Thus, this thesis is both a methodological and a philosophical work. Every chapter discusses both a fundamental philosophical position on the social sciences and a relevant case study from the social sciences. (shrink)

Human flourishing is the topic of an increasing number of books and articles in educational philosophy. Flourishing should be regarded as an ideal aim of education. If this is defended, the first step should be to elucidate what is meant by flourishing, and what exactly the concept entails. Listing formal criteria can facilitate reflection on the ideal of flourishing as an aim of education. We took Aristotelian eudaimonia as a prototype to construct two criteria for the concept of human flourishing: (...) human flourishing is regarded as intrinsically worthwhile and flourishing means ‘actualisation of human potential’. The second criterion has three sub-criteria: flourishing is about a whole life, it is a ‘dynamic state’ and flourishing presupposes there being objective goods. (shrink)

In 1956, W.B. Gallie introduced his idea of essentially contested concepts. In my paper, I offer a novel interpretation of his theory and argue that his theory, thus interpreted, is correct. The key to my interpretation lies in a condition Gallie places on essentially contested concepts that other interpreters downplay or dismiss: that the use of an essentially contested concept must be derived “from an original exemplar whose authority is acknowledged by all the contestant users of the concept.” This reveals (...) a similarity between Gallie’s views and the semantic externalist views of Hilary Putnam, and others, about natural kind terms like “water” and “tiger.” I argue that natural kind terms and terms for essentially contested concepts are two species of a single semantic genus. In the case of natural kind terms, a term refers to a natural kind, the exemplars are instances of that kind, and the relation between the exemplars and anything to which the term applies is co-membership of the kind. In the case of terms for essentially contested concepts, a term refers to an historical tradition, the exemplar is a stage or temporal part of that tradition, and the relation between the exemplar and anything to which the term refers is being the heir of. This allows me to understand the contests that alerted Gallie to the phenomenon of essentially contested concepts as contests over the ownership of historical traditions. (shrink)

In a topic as controversial as the shroud of Turin, it is always surprising to notice that there still exists a large area of consensus among scholars holding opposite opinions on the topic. According to the consensus view, neither science nor history can ever prove that the Turin Shroud shows signs of the Resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth. However, the reasons given for such an important claim are not convincing, especially in regard of recent developments in historiography and analytic philosophy.

It has become increasingly popular to argue that legal positivism is actually a normative theory, and that it cannot be purely descriptive and morally neutral as H.L.A. Hart has suggested. This article purports to disprove this line of thought. It argues that legal positivism is best understood as a descriptive, morally neutral, theory about the nature of law. The article distinguishes between five possible views about the relations between normative claims and legal positivism, arguing that some of them are not (...) at odds with Hart’s thesis about the nature of jurisprudence, while the others are wrong, both as expositions of legal positivism or as critiques of it. Legal positivism does not necessarily purport to justify any aspect of its subject matter, nor is it committed to any particular moral or political evaluations. (shrink)

Cet article explore les conséquences pour le libéralisme politique de considérer l’existence d’un pluralisme raisonnable au sujet des différentes conceptions du juste. Comment une conception publique de la justice peut se développer malgré un désaccord raisonnable et profond sur les termes mêmes de cette justice ? En comparant le libertarisme, la justice comme équité et l’égalitarisme strict, il sera montré que les concepts fondamentaux de ces conceptions du juste sont essentiellement contestés. En guise de solution, deux conditions seront suggérées afin (...) de faire en sorte que la conception publique de la justice en soit une de tolérance politique : premièrement, elle devra se baser sur une liste de droits minimaux reconnus par les différentes conceptions raisonnables du juste; et deuxièmement, si la conception publique de la justice a pour ambition de se développer au-delà du dénominateur commun, elle devra offrir des mesures compensatoires à ceux supportant des conceptions du juste plus restrictives. À certains égards, cette problématique et ces accommodements s’apparentent à ce qui est déjà proposé au sujet de multiculturalisme. (shrink)

This article examines the methodology of a core branch of contemporary political theory or philosophy: “analytic” political theory. After distinguishing political theory from related fields, such as political science, moral philosophy, and legal theory, the article discusses the analysis of political concepts. It then turns to the notions of principles and theories, as distinct from concepts, and reviews the methods of assessing such principles and theories, for the purpose of justifying or criticizing them. Finally, it looks at a recent debate (...) on how abstract and idealized political theory should be, and assesses the significance of disagreement in political theory. The discussion is carried out from an angle inspired by the philosophy of science. (shrink)

Systematic research in the wide field of practical knowledge is a recent phenomenon. In this paper, the approaches which have been developed in the main centres of research into practical knowledge in Norway and Sweden are compared with an emphasis on their potential for revitalizing the study of ethics. The focus on narratives and reflection based on the researcher’s own professional experience which is the distinguishing feature of the centre for practical knowledge at the University of Nordland is seen as (...) a very promising addition to the traditional repertory of ethical studies. (shrink)

The purpose of this paper is to inquire into the relationship between persuasive definition and common knowledge (propositions generally accepted and not subject to dispute in a discussion). We interpret the gap between common knowledge and persuasive definition (PD) in terms of potential disagreements: PDs are conceived as implicit arguments to win a potential conflict. Persuasive definitions are analyzed as arguments instantiating two argumentation schemes, argument from classification and argument from values, and presupposing a potential disagreement. The argumentative structure of (...) PDs reveals different levels of disagreement, and different pos-sibilities of resolving the conflict or causing dialogical deadlock. (shrink)

The aim of this article is to give an account of a methodological link between drama and political theory. This account is drawn primarily from the early philosophical work of Deleuze. Following Deleuze, we will refer to it as ‘the method of dramatization’. We will argue that dramatization is a method aimed at determining the quality of political concepts by ‘bringing them to life’, in the way that dramatic performances bring to life the characters and themes of a play-script. We (...) demonstrate that this can be specified in relation to the development of this method in Deleuze's early philosophical work as a practical, critical and artistic method and, in relation to the ontological assumptions he articulated and defended in Difference and Repetition, as a process of intensification of the Idea of the political. By way of example, we discuss how the dramatization of the concept of ideology functions in Deleuze and Guattari's Anti-Oedipus and A Thousand Plateaus. We conclude with some lines of inquiry that could be pursued by political theorists looking to investigate further the dramatic nature of method in political theory. (shrink)

In this article I describe the analytic approach adopted by Peters, his colleagues and followers of the ?London line? in the 1960s and 1970s and argue that, even in those times, other approaches to philosophy of education were being valued and practised. I show that Peters and his colleagues later became aware of the need for philosophy of education to become aware of and take in hand a new set of agendas and address the list of substantive issues inherent in (...) the contexts and political considerations beginning to impinge on education in the 1980s and beyond. I argue that there is much to be said for adopting a postempiricist problem-solving approach and point to the ways in which an evolutionary epistemology may be usefully applied to many of the problems of modern educational discourse. But I also seek to show how the abiding axiological concerns of Peters may still serve as the substantive background and definition of the value emphasis of the aims and directions in which philosophers of education are currently still working. (shrink)

Summary Historians of all kinds are beginning to return to temporally expansive studies after decades of aversion and neglect. There are even signs that intellectual historians are returning to the longue durée. What are the reasons for this revival of long-range intellectual history? And how might it be rendered methodologically robust as well as historically compelling? This article proposes a model of transtemporal history, proceeding via serial contextualism to create a history in ideas spanning centuries, even millennia: key examples come (...) from work in progress on ideas of civil war from ancient Rome to the present. The article concludes with brief reflections on the potential impact of the digital humanities on the practice of long-range intellectual history. Summary Historians of all kinds are beginning to return to temporally expansive studies after decades of aversion and neglect. There are even signs that intellectual historians are returning to the longue durée. What are the reasons for this revival of long-range intellectual history? And how might it be rendered methodologically robust as well as historically compelling? This article proposes a model of transtemporal history, proceeding via serial contextualism to create a history in ideas spanning centuries, even millennia: key examples come from work in progress on ideas of civil war from ancient Rome to the present. The article concludes with brief reflections on the potential impact of the digital humanities on the practice of long-range intellectual history. (shrink)

I compare a ‘realist’ with a ‘social–relational’ perspective on our judgments of the moral status of artificial agents (AAs). I develop a realist position according to which the moral status of a being—particularly in relation to moral patiency attribution—is closely bound up with that being’s ability to experience states of conscious satisfaction or suffering (CSS). For a realist, both moral status and experiential capacity are objective properties of agents. A social relationist denies the existence of any such objective properties in (...) the case of either moral status or consciousness, suggesting that the determination of such properties rests solely upon social attribution or consensus. A wide variety of social interactions between us and various kinds of artificial agent will no doubt proliferate in future generations, and the social–relational view may well be right that the appearance of CSS features in such artificial beings will make moral role attribution socially prevalent in human–AA relations. But there is still the question of what actual CSS states a given AA is capable of undergoing, independently of the appearances. This is not just a matter of changes in the structure of social existence that seem inevitable as human–AA interaction becomes more prevalent. The social world is itself enabled and constrained by the physical world, and by the biological features of living social participants. Properties analogous to certain key features in biological CSS are what need to be present for nonbiological CSS. Working out the details of such features will be an objective scientific inquiry. (shrink)

This article presents a framework intended to provide pension funds with practical guidance for the successful implementation of a sustainable investing strategy. The framework is developed with respect to the UK and US pension funds (as these share certain common legal characteristics) and focuses on the changes that pension funds adopting such a strategy should make to their investment strategies and governance (particularly through the formulation and articulation of clear investment mission and strong investment beliefs). The article proceeds with a (...) review of socially responsible investment (SRI) and more recent responsible investment (RI) literature, in the context of growing public awareness (but not necessarily understanding) of the concept of sustainability ("Literature review of SRI field: SRI, RI and sustainable investing" section). It then examines the literature on pension fund governance, arguing the need for more detailed practical guidance for funds moving towards sustainable investing, especially for those implementing a sustainable investing strategy ("Anglo-American pension fund governance" section). It presents the framework for the practical implementation of sustainable investing in the "Sustainable investing framework" section. Finally, we review the relevant Anglo-American legal backdrop, outlining how pension funds adopting our framework should approach their fiduciary obligations, and then discussing potential regulatory enablers of sustainable investment ("Legal context: barriers to and enablers of sustainable investing" section). (shrink)

(First paragraph.) Different views on the relation between phenomenal reality, the world as we consciously experience it, and noumenal reality, the world as it is independent from an experiencing subject, have different implications for a collection of interrelated issues of meaning and reality including aspects of metaphysics, the philosophy of language, and philosophical methodology. Exploring some of these implications, this paper compares and brings together analytic, continental, and Buddhist approaches, focusing on relevant aspects of the philosophy of Donald Davidson, Jacques (...) Derrida, Dharmakīrti, and Dōgen. Prima facie, these philosophers have little in common, and indeed the differences are vast. Even in case of the two Western thinkers there is a fundamental difference between Davidson’s anti-dualist identification of phenomenal, experienced reality with the noumenal, real, external world on the one hand, and the bracketing or elimination of noumenal reality at the base of Derrida’s thought on the other, which lead to radically different ideas with regards to (the possibility and nature of) objectivity and our linguistic access to the real/external/noumenal world. Nevertheless, there are important similarities between Dharmakīrti’s theory of apoha and Davidson’s and Derrida’s theories of triangulation and différance respectively, and these similarities can be exploited to bridge some of the differences and attempt a constructive engagement. (shrink)

What does the term academic ethics mean? How does this term relate to others in the academic integrity literature, such as research misconduct? Does conceptual confusion in the study of academic ethics complicate development of valid analyses of ethical behavior in an academic setting? The intended goal of many empirical projects on academic ethics is to draw causal conclusions about the factors that lead to faculty or students possessing or disregarding academic integrity. Yet, it is not clear that scholars using (...) the concept academic ethics are measuring the same phenomenon when they use associated concepts, such as responsible conduct of research. The purpose of this paper is to develop a taxonomy of concepts for the empirical study of academic ethics. Based in research on comparative analysis of democracy, another normatively preferable but multifaceted concept, I argue for a taxonomy of concepts for the study of academic integrity that reduces problems of “conceptual stretching” and challenges to the validity of empirical research in this field. (shrink)

The paper makes a twofold contribution. Firstly, it advances a preliminary account of the conditions that need to obtain for constitutional rights to be democratic. Secondly, in so doing, it defends precommitment-based theories from a criticism raised by Jeremy Waldron—namely, that constitutional rights do not become any more democratic when they are democratically adopted, for the people could adopt undemocratic policies without such policies becoming democratic as a result. The paper shows that the reductio applies to political rights, yet not (...) to non-political rights, such as reproductive, environmental, or privacy rights. The democratic status of the former is process-independent. The latter, by contrast, are democratic precisely when they are adopted by democratic means. (shrink)

When we use a word, we face a crucial epistemic gap: we ground our move on the fact that our interlocutor knows the meaning of the word we used, and therefore he can interpret our dialogical intention. However, how is it possible to know the other’s mind? Hamblin explained this dialogical problem advancing the idea of dialectical meaning: on his view, the use of a word is based on a set of presumptions. Building on this approach, the use of a (...) word in a dialogue can be analyzed in terms of presumptive reasoning, while the manipulative strategies based on slanted or loaded terms or redefinitions can be conceived as forms of conflicts of presumptions. A presumptive approach to meaning can also ground different dialectical strategies to solve misunderstanding or definitional disagreements, or tactics to undermine the interlocutor’s arguments by advancing charges of equivocation. (shrink)

What constitutes numerically one and the same tradition diachronically, at different times? This question is the focus of often violent dispute in societies. Is it capable of a rational resolution? Many accounts attempt that resolution with a diagnosis of ambiguity of the disputed concept-Islam, Marxism, or democracy for example. The diagnosis offered is in terms of vagueness, namely the vague criteria for sameness or similarity of central beliefs and practices.

The paper argues that the debate between objectivist criticism and postmodern critique represents a fracturing of the modes of mundane social and linguistic practice. The two together miss the open-textured character of language-in-use and the reflexive properties of situated human practice. Both difference and agreement are grounded in the multiplicity of criteria that are a feature of the logical grammar of language, and therefore of everyday praxis, including that of critique. To escape the duality of foundationalism on the one hand, (...) and radical relativism on the other, attention to the praxiological details of human action and reasoning is needed. The paper draws on Wittgensteinian philosophy and ethnomethodological studies of reasoning to make its case. (shrink)