1795 erschien die 1. Auflage von Kants Schrift Zum ewigen Frieden. Zu einer der vordringlichsten, von der Philosophie aber häufig vernachlässigten Aufgaben der Politik stellt sie bis heute den wichtigsten klassischen Text dar. Kant entfaltet in ihm die philosophischen Grundlagen für eine internationale Rechts- und Friedensgemeinschaft. Gleichzeitig stellt er sich aber auch die Frage nach einer Vermittlung von normativer Theorie und politischer Praxis. In 12 Beiträgen wird Kants Text in diesem Band 'entschlüsselt', interpretiert, auf seine systematische Überzeugungskraft und auf seine (...) politische Tragweite hin untersucht und in seinen und unseren sozialgeschichtlichen Kontext gestellt. Der kooperative Kommentar wurde anlässlich des 300. Jubiläums Immanuel Kants überarbeitet und auf den neuesten Forschungsstand gebracht. Mit Beiträgen von Reinhard Brandt, Monique Castillo, Michael W. Doyle, Volker Gerhardt, Otfried Höffe, Wolfgang Kersting, Pierre Laberge, Jean-Christophe Merle, Hans Saner. (shrink)

Determining who, or indeed what, is to respond to prescriptions for action in cases of international crisis is a critical endeavor. Without such an allocation of responsibilities, calls to action–whether to protect the environment or to rescue distant strangers–lack specified agents, and, therefore, any meaningful indication of how they might be met. A fundamental step in arriving at this distribution of duties is identifying moral agents in international relations, or, in other words, identifying those bodies that can deliberate and act (...) and thereby respond to ethical guidelines. Often, the most effective and relevant moral agents in international relations are not individuals but institutions. However, it is necessary to qualify any claim that institutions can bear duties in international relations. Not only must they possess capacities for decision-making and purposive action, they must also enjoy the conditions under which specific duties can be discharged. The importance of this latter stipulation can be usefully illustrated by examining the disparate circumstances within which states–those that exercise positive sovereignty and those that are sovereign only in name–are expected to act. (shrink)

Tradicionalmente, se ha argumentado que el concepto de eudaimonía en Aristóteles se encuentra anclado en el contexto de una comprensión teleológica del universo, por cuanto dicha noción parece radicar en una definición funcionalista de la naturaleza humana. Teniendo esto en mente, Bernard Williams ha desarrollado una crítica en contra de la propuesta ética de Aristóteles, acusándola de una cierta ambición científica en el campo del razonamiento práctico que resulta insostenible actualmente. Este ensayo busca discutir si, en efecto, estos señalamientos tienen (...) un sustento plausible o si, por el contrario, se basan en una interpretación debatible de los fundamentos de la ética aristotélica. Con este propósito, se analiza la justificación del razonamiento ético de Aristóteles a la luz de los argumentos de Williams y de algunos de sus contradictores. (shrink)

Machine ethics and robot rights are quickly becoming hot topics in artificial intelligence and robotics communities. We will argue that attempts to attribute moral agency and assign rights to all intelligent machines are misguided, whether applied to infrahuman or superhuman AIs, as are proposals to limit the negative effects of AIs by constraining their behavior. As an alternative, we propose a new science of safety engineering for intelligent artificial agents based on maximizing for what humans value. In particular, we challenge (...) the scientific community to develop intelligent systems that have human-friendly values that they provably retain, even under recursive self-improvement. (shrink)

Doom and Democracy: An Essay in Political Soteriology The essay explores the philosophical (metatheoretical) presuppositions of democratic social strategy in the current "apocalyptic age". Here democracy means a way of life based on the assumption that individual freedom, mutual respect and fundamental good will toward the other can be taken for granted; as a feasible and a desirable way of ordering human affairs. In this broadly cultural sense, democracy is an outgrowth of a deeply rooted consensus on the posture of (...) respect and good will toward all. Yet democracy, with its Enlightenment heritage of sober rationality, seems ill-equipped for dealing with apocalyptic threats. That what makes our age apocalyptic is truth denied. The arrogant posture of omnipotence leads to paralysis. A democratic strategy needs to be one that has the courage to face the truth and the commitment to deal heart and will with the finite tasks we recognise once we give up the arrogance of infinite ones. (shrink)

: In his Theological Political Treatise Spinoza lays the groundwork for the secular project of separation between religion and public life which will be characteristic of Western politics throughout Modern and Contemporary Ages. This project, however, is marked by a number of tensions which can already be seen in Spinoza’s work. This article tries to delineate the philosopher’s argument, identify and make explicit its main concepts and point to some of the tensions still working within the secular project, tensions which (...) arise from the philosophical reasoning employed by this project since its inception, as can be seen in Spinoza’s work. Keywords: Spinoza; Theological Political Treatise; secularism; freedom; religion; politics. (shrink)

Democracy is prone to what may be called presentism – a bias in the laws in favor of present over future generations. I identify the characteristics of democracies that lead to presentism, and examine the reasons that make it a serious problem. Then I consider why conventional theories are not adequate to deal with it, and develop a more satisfactory alternative approach, which I call democratic trusteeship. Present generations can represent future generations by acting as trustees of the democratic process. (...) The general principle is that present generations should act to protect the democratic process itself over time. They should try to make sure that future citizens continue to have competent control over their collective decision‐making. (shrink)

A number of theorists have proposed mechanisms suggesting that corporate social responsibility produces better financial results. Others subscribe to the theory that, realistically, less ethical means are necessary. This article contains an analysis of these perspectives drawing on observations from evolutionary game theory and nature. Based on these analyzes, it is concluded that the financial returns of corporate social responsibility and irresponsibility (CSR and CSI) are equal on average. The explanation is that CSR and CSI are driven to a state (...) of equilibrium, because if one or the other were to offer higher profits, it would attract more players who would compete for the best opportunities until there was no difference in average profit. Existing empirical research generally shows a positive correlation between CSR as measured and financial outcomes. It is argued that what is actually causing that finding is probably not CSR but management skill. More skillful managers, whether actually responsible or irresponsible, are able to obtain both higher profits and greater credit in imperfect measures of CSR. Next it is shown that this theory of equal returns implies greater moral freedom and therefore responsibility for business leaders. It is concluded that this insight can intensify the interest of decent business leaders in vigorously championing CSR. (shrink)

This paper considers three accounts of the relationship between personal immortality and materialism. In particular, the pagan mortalism of the Epicureans is compared with the Christian mortalism of Thomas Hobbes and John Locke. It is argued 1) that there are significant similarities between these views, 2) that Locke and Hobbes were, to some extent, influenced by the Epicureans, and 3) that the relation between mortality and materialism is not as straightforward as is commonly supposed.

Abstract In this paper I set the debate between Kant and Schiller in terms of the role that an ideal of life can play within an autonomist ethic. I begin by examining the critical role Schiller gives to emotions in tackling specific motivational concerns in Kant's ethics. In the Kantian response I offer to these criticisms, I emphasise the role of metaphysics for a proper understanding of Kant's position whilst allowing that with respect to moral psychology, Kant and Schiller are (...) in agreement about the importance of emotions in our moral lives. I conclude by returning to the themes broached in the introduction to consider the extent to which the teleological concerns that motivate Schiller can be addressed within Kant's autonomist ethics. (shrink)

La filosofía moral de Adam Smith se fundamenta en el papel de la imaginación para explicar el orden social en un nivel macro, y como mecanismo de identificación afectiva en un nivel micro. En ambos casos, el rol de la imaginación en nuestra psicología moral refuta la tesis de un homo economicus, o de que el ser humano está motivado a entrar en sociedad por su interés personal. Esto sirve de premisa para refutar la posición hobbesiana de un estado de (...) naturaleza histórico que está en la base de nuestros juicios morales que fundan la sociedad civil y la necesidad del magistrado. Adam Smith's moral philosophy is grounded in the role of the imagination in explaining the social order at a macro level and as a mechanism for affective identification at the micro level. In both cases, the role of the imagination in our moral psychology refutes the homo economicus thesis according to which human beings are motivated to enter into society due to personal interests. This premise serves to refute the Hobbesian position of a historical state of nature that underlies the moral judgments grounding civil society and the need for a magistrate. (shrink)

This article concerns the problems of proportionality in the theory of punishment. The problem is how to determine whether the severity of a punishment for a criminal offense is proportional to the seriousness of that offense. The resolution to this problem proposed in the article is that, first, one understand punishment as pain or loss intentionally and openly inflicted on someone S in retaliation for something S did, by a person or agent who is at least as powerful as S, (...) and, second, one take such retaliatory pain or loss as, within stable social groups, a means for preserving social order. Accordingly, it is argued that, on this proposal, the measure by which the severity of punishment is determined to be proportional to the seriousness of the crime for which it is inflicted is the minimal amount of pain or loss necessary to preserve social order. Sentencing policies that follow this measure, it is then observed, tend to yield less severe punishments than the policies that classical deterrence theory yields. Finally, the article offers an argument for regarding as morally more defensible sentencing policies whose goal is preserving social order than sentencing policies whose goal is that of classical deterrence theory, which is to achieve the smallest incidence of crimes consistent with not diminishing the overall welfare of society. (shrink)

Early modern theorists linked the idea of sovereign power to a conception of absolute power developed during the medieval period. Ockham had reframed the already extant distinction between God's absolute and ordained powers in order to argue that God was free of moral constraint in ordaining natural law for human beings. Thus, the natural law could command the opposite of what God had ordained if He wished to make it so. Bodin extended Ockham's argument to earthly sovereigns, who do not (...) (he argued) have to obey civil law. However, Bodin undermined his absolutism by maintaining that civil law has to be consistent with natural and divine law. Hobbes more consistently argued that while mortal sovereigns are accountable to God, the power of sovereigns to command is not subject to moral constraints. Underlying Ockham's view of God's sovereignty, and Bodin's and Hobbes's view of earthly sovereigns, is a notion of the will's unconstrained power. But this notion is self-referentially incoherent. This incoherence, in turn, infects the very notion of sovereignty. (shrink)

Due to the domain characteristics of business ethics, a contractarian theory for business ethics will need to be essentially different from the contract model as it is applied to other domains. Much of the current criticism of contractarian business ethics (CBE) can be traced back to autonomy, one of its three boundary conditions. After explaining why autonomy is so important, this article considers the notion carefully vis à vis the contracting partners in the contractarian approaches in business ethics. Autonomy is (...) too demanding a condition for the realm of CBE. But a less stringent version of the contract may be possible, a version which uses the contract as a heuristic device, which merely requires moral responsibility. Furthermore, it is argued that views of (human) agency and the moral subject should be made explicit in such a theory. (shrink)

Neste trabalho, explicamos de que maneira a teoria do filósofo inglês do século XVII, Thomas Hobbes, pode ser aproveitada e aplicada, com as devidas proporções e limitações, ao atual contexto de pandemia no que circunscreve o Brasil. Mais especificamente, analisaremos a situação atual a partir de casos concretos do fenômeno definido como bolsonarismo, termo utilizado para se referir às políticas e à ideologia do atual Presidente da República Federativa do Brasil e seus filhos. Os seguidores do bolsonarismo são conhecidos por (...) tratarem o presidente como uma espécie de herói que irá salvar a nação. Levando em consideração a teoria hobbesiana de origem contratual do Estado Moderno – visto que este último é a base política do Ocidente – em nossa investigação, iremos recorrer aos princípios propostos pelo filósofo seiscentista para avaliar as possíveis causas que levariam ao esfacelamento do Estado brasileiro frente à atual crise governamental agravada e gerada pela pandemia do novo coronavírus. Além disso, abordaremos a necessidade de dois elementos hobbesianos basilares para assegurar a soberania estatal plenamente: a autoridade política e a liberdade republicana. A posição defendida pelo autor será estudada a partir do _Leviatã_, obra que concentra a maior parte das discussões hobbesianas acerca da desobediência civil, em conjunto, certamente, com outros comentadores de peso e demais referenciais teóricos pertinentes. Por fim, trata-se de um convite à desobediência civil, associado a um autor que constrói a sua teoria a partir da submissão de súditos a um poder soberano. (shrink)

(2014). Cross-world luck at the time of decision is a problem for compatibilists as well. Philosophical Explorations: Vol. 17, No. 2, pp. 112-125. doi: 10.1080/13869795.2014.912673.

Abstract Inspired by Rawls?s admission that his twentieth?century contract theory builds in the parochial horizon of modern constitutional democracy, this essay critically examines two truisms about seventeenth?century contract theory. The first is the stock view that the English case is irrelevant to the logic of Leviathan and the Second Treatise. To the contrary, I argue that their political conclusions depend on introducing constitutional and legal ?facts?, in particular, facts about the constitution of the English monarchy. Second, I challenge the Whiggish (...) characterization of contract theory as an important step in the development of democratic sovereignty. I draw on Hume?s famous critique of the genre to make the case that seventeenth?century contract theory addressed a peculiarly ancien?regime issue ? namely, resistance to legitimate rulers. In both respects, Hobbes?s and Locke?s social contracts are properly regarded as ancien?regime theories of politics. They are, as Rawls would put it, ?political not metaphysical? theories. (shrink)

ArgumentTalk of “reason” and “rationality” has been perennial in the philosophy and sciences of the European, Latin tradition since antiquity. But the use of these terms in the early-modern period has left especial marks on the specialties and disciplines that emerged as components of “science” in the modern world. By examining discussions by seventeenth-century philosophers, including natural philosophers such as Descartes, Pascal, and Hobbes, the practical meanings of, specifically, inferential reasoning can be seen as reducing, for most, to intellectual processes (...) deriving from foundations that required intuitional insight that was owing to God. Mechanical reasoning, or artificial intelligence, was a contradiction in terms for such as Pascal, whose views of his own arithmetical machine illustrate the issue well. Hobbes’ analysis of reason, however, replaced the ineffable authority of God with the authority of the civil power, to reveal the social reality of “reason” as nothing other than authorized judgment. (shrink)

‘Free action’ is subject to the causal theory of reference and thus that The essential nature of free actions can be discovered only by empirical investigation, not by conceptual analysis. Heller ’s proposal, if true, would have significant philosophical implications. Consider the enduring issue we will call the Compatibility Issue : whether the thesis of determinism is logically compatible with the claim that.

During spring of 2020, environmental ethics students at a medium sized metropolitan university in the Southeastern United States were asked to read and comment on classic essays from Robert Heilbroner and Garrett Hardin, essays regarding our responsibilities towards future generations. In general, students seemed to hold more with Heilbroner’s stance, which left room for compassion, while condemning Hardin’s harshness. Students were then asked to provide written responses stating whether they would personally sacrifice their eventual retirement in order to stop COVID-19 (...) and the reasons for their views. Responses were analyzed and categorized to detect inconsistencies between students’ described views and their willingness to personally sacrifice for the sake of others. Almost 72% of respondents asserted that they would be willing to intervene to stop the novel coronavirus by sacrificing their retirement. A fair number of respondents that stated they would sacrifice said that they would do so because they would benefit personally from the avoidance of guilt and/or from the opportunity to feel good about themselves, suggesting that even seemingly selfless behaviors are sometimes driven by egoistic motivations. Forty percent of all respondents held inconsistent views. Most notably, a number of students condemned Hardin for his lack of compassion, yet were not willing to act compassionately themselves. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Ecological Ethics: An IntroductionDavid Keller (bio)Patrick Curry, Ecological Ethics: An Introduction. Malden, Massachusetts: Polity Press, 2007, 173pages.Were I in Bath having drinks with Patrick Curry, we would have much to agree about. Explaining his choice of title of his book, Ecological Ethics, he rightly points out that the more common descriptor "environmental ethics" presupposes a dualism between human beings and the nonhuman environment—an assumption which is itself anthropocentric (...) (p. 4). For philosophers interested in studying the human/ nonhuman dynamic, the legitimacy of anthropocentrism is itself an open question. Because the word 'ecology' treats humans, as biota, as integral parts of ecological systems, the phrase "ecological ethics" is less presumptuous and hence more accurate. The word 'ecological' also has the benefit of conveying the message that the subject is notgoing to involve extending moral considerability from humans out into the "environment." Instead, ecological systems as the locus of value provide the starting point for the elaboration of ethics (p. 2). For Curry, as for Leopold (1960) and Callicott (1989), "ecological community" is coextensive with the ethical community.To correlate the ethical community with the biotic community within the rubric of "ecological ethics" is nothing novel. Curry's claim that "there is something ancient about an ecological ethic" (p. 7) got me thinking: [End Page 153]prior to Abrahamic monotheism and Greek rationalism, ancient peoples, particularly nomadic hunter-gatherers, probably considered themselves as integral parts of what encompassed them, moving with herds, in concert with meteorological and seasonal changes, seeing themselves as one amongst other living beings. They probably did not see themselves apart from the "environment" as we have learned to do. Then with the advent of agriculture, linear furrows and controlled inundations must have fostered an addictive sense of security from flood and famine. Later, the innovations of industrial civilization further distanced us from the caprice of nature's wild vicissitudes. Yet that comfort comes at the expense of lost awareness of our responsibilities as bioticcitizens. Therefore, Curry says, following Sylvan (1973), we need a new ecological ethic since traditional Western morality "is no longer up to the job" (ibid.).Curry remarks that ethics, cast in this light, is not something "optional," something to be addressed after one's belly is full, debts settled, and lodging secured. Rather, ethics cuts directly to the core of human action, of all human activity (p. 5)—a claim reminiscent of Socrates' exhortation to Thrasymachus that it is no small matter that they are discussing, nothing of less importance than the right way to live one's life (Plato 2005, p. 603).Over the first sips of ale, I would praise him for giving his book a simple and straightforward structure that makes a challenging subject accessible, especially to students. After laying down the groundwork of basic concepts in moral philosophy (chapter 3)—objectivism versus relativism, the problem of the is/ought gap, religious morality and environmental philosophy (domination, stewardship, and managerialism), and virtue and rule-based ethics (chapter 4)—Curry addresses axiology (chapter 5). Are humans the sole locus of value (anthropocentrism), or are there other entities worthy of some sort of moral consideration who themselves do not carry the burden of moral responsibility (zoocentrism, biocentrism, ecocentrism)? Curry answers the latter in the affirmative, arguing that ontological interconnectedness of humans with other living beings within ecological systems discloses that something greater than humanity is the locus of value (p. 46).The most useful part of the book for my students out in Utah would be the middle chapters (6–8) in which Curry casts degrees of nonanthropocentrism [End Page 154]in shades of green. These shades range from light green or "shallow" anthropocentric ethics such Bookchin's Social Ecology (p. 50), Hardin's Lifeboat Ethics (pp. 52–54), and mainstream environmentalism (p. 51), through medium green ethics based on the extension of traditional human-oriented moral philosophy to nonhumans such as Singer's Animal Liberation (pp. 56–59), Regan's Animal Rights (pp. 59–60), and Taylor's Biocentrism (pp. 60–62). Curry proceeds to the dark green ethics of ecocentrism, such as Land Ethics (pp. 65–68), the Gaia Hypothesis (pp. 68–71... (shrink)

A free society requires a citizenry that is capable of taking personal responsibility for bettering their lot, and voluntarily promoting and protecting public goods such as education, health, public order, peace, and justice. Although the law backed by force can have some success at compelling people to make contributions to the public exchequer, refrain from criminal activity, honor legal contracts, and so on, an economically and politically free society cannot rely exclusively on the threat of coercion to induce in citizens (...) a sense of social responsibility. On the contrary, a free society depends on a well‐entrenched sense of responsibility that is internalized and actualized by citizens in their everyday lives. But any realistic attempt to frame an ideal of social responsibility must confront two serious challenges presented by the complexity and scale of modern societies, namely the challenge of knowing the content of our responsibilities and the challenge of finding the motivation to discharge them. With these challenges in view, this essay assesses the power of prevailing accounts of citizenship to generate an effective sense of social responsibility, and proposes some guiding principles to inform a broader theory of responsibility that might synthesize the strengths of political accounts while transcending some of their limitations. (shrink)

The essay begins by the author's recollections of his younger days when people were seldom worried about moral decline in society. Today, however, it has become a real concern. Literature, philosophy, spiritual works are all essentially a celebration of human values. The paper examines the issue of scale of graded values as against that of absolutist universal values. A scrutiny of English literature reveals that some key literary figures in eighteenth-nineteenth century England drew attention to the decline of human values (...) accompanying increasing industrialization. The author discusses his own views on the management and role of human values in it, as also on human values and man's divine nature. He discusses the leader's role and an action programme for human values. The universality of Vedantic monism, and its triple idealism, is suggested as a basis for the regeneration of human values. (shrink)

Beginning from an analysis of moral obligation's form that I defend in The Second-Person Standpoint as what we are answerable for as beings with the necessary capacities to enter into relations of mutual accountability, I argue that this analysis has implications for moral obligation's substance. Given what it is to take responsibility for oneself and hold oneself answerable, I argue, it follows that if there are any moral obligations at all, then there must exist a basic pro tanto obligation not (...) to undermine one another's moral autonomy. (shrink)

The proportionality standard demands a meaningful link between the severity of crimes and the punishments received for them. This article investigates the compatibility between this philosophical d...

The process of globalisation and the so-called war on terror are two prominent features marking our present age. While the process of globalisation promises the prospect of moving beyond or across borders, the war on terror marks a return to fences, check-points, and dividing walls. Terror war is a global politics of fear, a politics conducted under the rigid border control between ‘us' and ‘them’. This paper examines the ominous development of fear in world politics from a number of angles. (...) First, it explores the growing linkage of politics with terror war by tracing its roots ultimately to the friend-enemy distinction. Next, it discusses the shortcomings of the terror war syndrome, by turning to some prominent critics of this ideology. Finally, it examines possible ways pointing beyond this ideology, enlisting for this purpose a number of theologians and intellectuals, to arrive at the promising notions of ‘border-crossing’ and political-existential Grenzgänger or people who criss-cross multiple borders. (shrink)

In a society dominated by Confucian ethics, a spirit of Confucian public morality can be seen in the Confucian debate over publicness and privateness, but it is usually activated in circumstances of large ethical crisis. Confucian theory mainly uses ethical relationships to create self and social identities, causing problems of identification in the public life and hindering the expression of moral feelings and actions, thus revealing a weakness in public morality. This is a space that Confucianism has not yet been (...) able to cover, and also where it has room for growth. (shrink)

This paper analyses how security affects well-being. Security is understood as someone’s sureness of enjoying some good in the future; well-being is treated as a matter of human flourishing. Security can contribute to our well-being in various ways: if we are in fact bound to enjoy a good, in principle this is positive for our flourishing in the future; if we also believe that we will enjoy this good, we can be more efficient in pursuing our well-being; if we also (...) feel secure, this supports our enjoyment of our physical and mental capacities. For some of these benefits to obtain fully, however, it is important that our beliefs and feelings align with the facts. Furthermore, mirroring security’s upsides, there are also ways in which security can hamper our flourishing: it can obstruct the change, surprise, and pleasurable fear that are sometimes required for a good life too. (shrink)

One of the greatest woman intellectuals of eighteenth-century Germany is Elise Reimarus, whose contribution to Enlightenment political theory is rarely acknowledged today. Unlike other social contract theorists, Reimarus rejects a people's right to violent resistance or revolution in her philosophical dialogue Freedom (1791). Exploring the arguments in Freedom, this paper observes a number of similarities in the political thought of Elise Reimarus and Immanuel Kant. Both, I suggest, reject violence as an illegitimate response to perceived political injustice in a way (...) that opposes Locke's strong voluntarism and the absolutism of Hobbes. First, they emphasize the need to maintain the legal state as a precondition for the possibility of external right. Second, they share an optimistic view of the inherently "just" nature of the tripartite republican state. And finally, Reimarus and Kant both outline an alternative, non-violent response to political injustice that consists in the freedom of public expression and a discourse on the moral enlightenment of man. (shrink)

Descartes held the following view of declarative memory: to remember is to reconstruct an idea that you intellectually recognize as a reconstruction. Descartes countenanced two overarching varieties of declarative memory. To have an intellectual memory is to intellectually reconstruct a universal idea that you recognize as a reconstruction, and to have a sensory memory is to neurophysiologically reconstruct a particular idea that you recognize as a reconstruction. Sensory remembering is thus a capacity of neither ghosts nor machines, but only of (...) human beings qua mind-body unions. This interpretation unifies Descartes’s various remarks (and conspicuous silences) about remembering, from the 1628 Rules for the Direction of the Mind through the suppressed-in-1633 Treatise of Man to the 1649 Passions of the Soul. It also rebuts a prevailing thesis in the current secondary literature—that Cartesian critters can remember—while incorporating the textual evidence for that thesis—Descartes’s detailed descriptions of the corporeal mechanisms that construct sensory memories. (shrink)

Black Panther, directed by Ryan Coogler, became one of the highest grossing films of all time. It also received a lot of critical attention for its direct engagement with black experience and black politics. It speaks to the legacy of slavery and the exploitation of African-Americans and the ongoing post-colonial struggle represented most starkly by the Black Lives Matter Movement. However, the film was also criticised for supposedly leaving that radical black politics behind, even demonising it in its lead antagonist, (...) Killmonger, and instead proposing a liberal, reformist agenda very much in keeping with current forms of sovereign power, bolstered under the current neoliberal regime by the charity of billionaires. To some extent this is understandable, but it is also a very limited reading of what happens in the film and does a disservice to the radical dissent that the character of Killmonger represents. To address this, the paper uses the concept of sovereignty and asks how superheroes can help us unpack this concept. It argues that rather than seeing superheroes as vigilantes, thinking of them as sovereigns helps us unpack the complex knot of law, authority and violence that is key to understanding it. In particular it draws on Agamben’s discussion of sovereignty and the politics of the exception, and how this might be relevant to Fanon’s work on counter-colonial violence to show how the film remains true to radical protest throughout. On the way it also addresses the important cultural politics of the original comic. (shrink)

(2002). A VERY PECULIAR ROYALIST. HOBBES IN THE CONTEXT OF HIS POLITICAL CONTEMPORARIES. British Journal for the History of Philosophy: Vol. 10, No. 2, pp. 167-208. doi: 10.1080/096087800210122455.

This article discusses explanatory theories of normative concepts and argues for a set of criteria of adequacy by which such theories may be evaluated. The criteria offered fall into four categories: ontological, theoretical, pragmatic, and moral. After defending the criteria and discussing their relative weighting, this article uses them to prune the set of available explanatory theories of oppression. Functionalist theories, including Hegelian recognition theory and Foucauldian social theory, are rejected, as are psychoanalytic theory and social dominance theory. Finally, the (...) article defends structural rational choice theory as the most promising methodology for explaining oppression. Key Words: oppression • explanation • rational choice theory. (shrink)

Hobbes’s state of nature is often analyzed in two-person two-action non-cooperative games. By definition, this literature only focuses on duels. Yet, if we consider general games, i.e., with more than two agents, analyzing Hobbes’s state of nature in terms of duel is not completely satisfactory, since it is a very specific interpretation of the war of all against all. Therefore, we propose a definition of the state of nature for games with an arbitrary number of players. We show that this (...) definition coincides with the strategy profile considered as the state of nature in two-person games. Furthermore, we study what we call rational states of nature. We show that in rational states of nature, the utility level of any agent is equal to his maximin payoff. We also show that rational states of nature always exist in inessential games. Finally, we prove the existence of states of nature in a class of symmetric games. (shrink)

This paper explores the role that empathy can play in the interpretation of constitutional rights. It starts by analyzing the complex concept of empathy, comparing it with similar yet distinct concepts such as projection, sympathy and emotional contagion, then it discusses the widespread distrust of empathy among lawyers and legal thinkers. It will be argued that empathy can play a significant role in the interpretation of constitutional rights, mostly in identifying the interests and needs put forward in the claims and (...) counterclaims of the parties. In the final section, the impact of empathetic judging on judicial minimalism will be briefly discussed. (shrink)

The idea that there is a distinctively practical use of reason, and correspondingly a distinctively practical form of knowledge, unites many otherwise diverse voices in the history of practical philosophy: from Aristotle to Kant, from Rousseau to Marx, from Hegel to G.E.M. Anscombe, and many others. This volume gathers works by scholars who take inspiration from these and many other historical figures in order to deepen our systematic understanding of questions raised by their work that still are, or ought to (...) be, at the center of contemporary philosophical debate: the form and nature of practical reasoning, agential self-consciousness or practical knowledge, how knowledge of the good relates to our motivational capacity, and the shape of philosophical thinking about sound forms of living together. Accordingly, the volume is divided into three parts: action theory, meta-ethics, and political philosophy. This fusion of perspectives delivers novel possibilities not only for answering the systematic questions outlined above, but also for understanding both what unifies and distinguishes those historical voices that have sought to articulate the concept of practical reason. “This fascinating volume brings out the richness and profundity of an oft-neglected approach to understanding human agency, one that foregrounds action as itself an exercise of reason. Essays on ethics, mind, action, and political philosophy explore the history, substance, and implications of this idea, cutting across while also revealing the unity underlying various parts of philosophy that are typically treated separately.” – Eric Marcus, Auburn University. (shrink)

When a liberal-democratic state signs a treaty or wages a war, does its whole polity do those things? In this article, we approach this question via the recent social ontological literature on collective agency. We provide arguments that it does and that it does not. The arguments are presented via three considerations: the polity's control over what the state does; the polity's unity; and the influence of individual polity members. We suggest that the answer to our question differs for different (...) liberal-democratic states and depends on two underlying considerations: the amount of discretion held by the state's officeholders; the extent to which the democratic procedure is deliberative rather than aggregative. (shrink)