The tendency of classical politics to embed the individual in universal and transcendental patterns of action followed in part from the recognition of the futility of unpredictable action oriented to the individual's transient personal future. By contrast, F. A. Hayek argues for liberalism and the rule of law because it is instrumental to the achievement of human ends. Michael Oakeshott, however, claims that freedom is a value in itself, and that liberalism should emphasize moral autonomy because the moral life is (...) public and not oriented to external ends. The moral life intimates a form of self‐sufficiency in action, and self‐sufficient action is timeless in the sense of being indifferent to either the past or the future. Oakeshott returns liberalism to the problems of classical politics without recourse to the dictatorial imposition of a single substantive good. (shrink)

In comparison to Aristotle, Plato's general understanding of law receives little attention in legal theory, due in part to ongoing perceptions of him as a mystic or a totalitarian. However, some of the critical or communitarian themes that have guided theorists since Aristotle find strong expression in Plato's work. More than any thinker until the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, Plato rejects the rank individualism and self-interest which, in his view, emerge from democratic legal culture. He rejects schisms between legal norms (...) and community values, institutional separation of law from morals, intricate regimes of legislation and adjudication, and a culture of rampant litigation. He rejects the alienation of individuals, from each other and from their communities, that is so easily bred within highly complex political and legal systems. An understanding of his approach to some of the classic questions of legal theory provides insight not only into some central ideas of his own thought, but also into the roots of critical and communitarian critiques of law. (shrink)

Taylor, Sandel, Walzer, and MacIntyre waver between granting the community authority over the individual and limiting this authority so severely that communitarianism becomes a dead letter. The reason for this vacillation can be found in the aspiration of each theorist to base liberal values‐equality and liberty—on particularism. Communitarians compound liberal formalism by adding to the liberal goal, individual autonomy, the equally abstract aim of grounding autonomy in a communally shared identity. Far from returning political theory to substantive considerations of the (...) good, communitarianism legitimizes really existing liberal politics—the politics of the nation‐state. (shrink)

The accusation that contemporary political philosophy is carried out in too ahistorical a fashion depends upon it being possible for historical facts to ground normative political principles. This they cannot do. Each of the seven ways in which it might be thought possible for them to do so fails for one or more of four reasons: History yields no timeless set of universal moral values; it displays no convergence upon such a set; it reveals no univocal moral or cultural context (...) in the present; the failure of an ethical tradition to successfully respond to criticism over a long period of time is no guarantee of its inability to do so. Because historical critiques of contemporary normative thought rely upon one or more of these things holding true, they are, as a class of arguments, to be rejected. (shrink)

O artigo procura mostrar em que sentido a democracia deliberativa proposta pela teoria discursiva de Jürgen Habermas dá conta do problema dos reducionismos econômicos e juridificantes da mundialização ou globalização, entendida como uma colonização técnico-sistêmica do mundo da vida. Recorrendo a sua concepção de um ethos democrático transnacional embasado na soberania popular, a teoria habermasiana logra resgatar o caráter normativo da mundialização através da irredutibilidade de valores humanos como a liberdade, a dignidade e os direitos humanos, inerentes às mais diferentes (...) e incompatíveis autocompreensões de mundos da vida. (shrink)

Starting from the sensuous perception of what is seen, an attempt is made at re-casting a Husserlian theory of constitution of the object of intuition, as one leaves the natural attitude through a transcendental method, by positing several theses so as to avoid the aporias of philosophical binary oppositions such as rationalism and empiri-cism, realism and idealism, logicism and psychologism, subjectivism and objectivism, transcendentalism and ontologism, metaphysics and positivism. Throughout fifty-five theses on constitution, the Husserlian proposal of continuously reforming philosophizing (...) by transcendental reduction is revisited, leaving the latter incomplete as new conversions are required by noetic-noematic correlations between world and consciousness. (shrink)

The aim of the present paper is to offer an interpretation of the Rawlsian original position coherent with its own theory of justice. An evaluation of the aforementioned mechanism is presented. Afterwards, in light of it, a solution of the existing overlapping between its elements is offered. The solution is to consider the formal constraints as «partial conclusions», excluding them from the original position. The original position, as an «intermediate stage» aimed at representing the philosophical foundations of Rawls's theory in (...) a way that could provide the deduction of the principles of justice, cannot include straightforwardly any characteristic of those principles, not even the formal ones. The remainder of the elements of the original position (the idea of a contract, the circumstances of justice, the veil of ignorance and the rationality of the parties), acting conjointly, allow for the deduction of the formal constraints themselves. In addition, they also engender the same effects on the exclusion of egoism as a proposal of principles of justice. (shrink)

The essays in this collection examine the moral import of emotion, motivation, judgment, perception, and group identifications, and explore how all these psychic capacities contribute to a morally good life. They examine moral exemplars and the "moral saints" debate, the morality of rescue during the Holocaust, role morality as lying between "personal" and "impersonal" perspectives, Carol Gilligan's theory of women and morality, Iris Murdoch's moral philosophy, and moral responsiveness in young children.

This paper compares Joseph Heath’s critique of the just deserts rationale for markets with an earlier critique due to Frank Knight, Milton Friedman, and Friedrich Hayek. Heath shares their emphasis upon the role of luck in prices based on supply and demand. Yet he avoids their claim that the inheritance of human capital is on a moral par with the inheritance of ordinary capital, as a basis for unequal shares of the social product. Heath prefers to argue that markets do (...) not tend to reward talent as such. The paper raises some doubts about this factual claim, and argues that sweeping the issue of talent under the rug threatens to make our theory of justice less egalitarian than it would otherwise be. The paper also addresses the objection that claims of unfairness based on the arbitrariness of the distribution of innate abilities will undermine self-respect. (shrink)

Using both Confucian texts and the work of American pragmatist John Dewey, this book offers a distinctly Confucian model of democracy.

Roger T. Ames's A Sourcebook in Classical Confucian Philosophy is a companion volume to his Conceptual Lexicon for Classical Confucian Philosophy. It includes texts in the original classical Chinese along with their translations, allowing experts and novices alike to make whatever comparisons they choose. In applying a method of comparative cultural hermeneutics, Ames has tried to let the tradition speak on its own terms. The goal is to encourage readers to move between the translated text and commentary, the philosophical introduction (...) that attempts to sensitize them to the interpretative context, and the companion Lexicon of key philosophical terms, with the expectation that in the fullness of time they will be able to appropriate the original Chinese terminologies themselves. Armed with their own increasingly robust insight into these philosophical terms, readers will be able to carry this nuanced understanding over into their critical reading of other available translations. Ultimately, for students who would understand Chinese philosophy, tian 天 must be understood as tian 天, and dao 道 must be dao 道. (shrink)

In A Philosophical Defense of Culture, Shuchen Xiang draws on the Confucian philosophy of "culture" and Ernst Cassirer's philosophy of symbolic forms to argue for the importance of "culture" as a philosophic paradigm. A defining ideal of Confucian-Chinese civilization, culture (wen) spans everything from natural patterns and the individual units that make up Chinese writing to literature and other refining vocations of the human being. Wen is thus the soul of Confucian-Chinese philosophy. Similarly, as a philosopher who bridged the classical (...) age of German humanism and postwar modernity, Cassirer implored his and future generations to think of humankind in terms of their culture and to think of the human being as a "symbolic animal." The philosophies of culture of these two traditions, very much compatible, are of urgent relevance to our contemporary epoch. Xiang describes the similarity of their projects by way of their conception of the human being, her relationship to nature, the relationship of human culture to nature, the importance of cultural pluralism, and the role of the arts in human life, as well as the metaphysical frameworks that gave rise to such conceptions. Combining textual exegesis in classical Chinese texts and an exposition of Cassirer's most important insights against the backdrop of post-Kantian philosophy, this book is philosophy written in a cosmopolitan mode, arguing for the contemporary philosophical relevance of "culture" by drawing on and bringing together two different but strikingly similar streams in our world tradition. (shrink)

Philosophy strives to give us a firmer hold on our concepts. But what about their hold on us? Why place ourselves under the sway of a concept and grant it the authority to shape our thought and conduct? Another conceptualization would carry different implications. What makes one way of thinking better than another? This book develops a framework for concept appraisal. Its guiding idea is that to question the authority of concepts is to ask for reasons of a special kind: (...) reasons for concept use, which tell us which concepts to adopt, adhere to, or abandon, thereby shoring up—or undercutting—the reasons for action and belief that guide our deliberations. Traditionally, reasons for concept use have been sought either in timeless rational foundations or in concepts’ inherent virtues, such as precision and consistency. Against this, the book advances two main claims: that we find reasons for concept use in the conceptual needs we discover when we critically distance ourselves from a concept by viewing it from the autoethnographic stance; and that sometimes, concepts that conflict, or exhibit other vices such as vagueness or superficiality, are just what we need. By considering not what concepts are absolutely best, but what concepts we now need, we can reconcile ourselves to the contingency of our concepts, determine the proper place of efforts to tidy up thought, and adjudicate between competing conceptions of things,—even things as contested as liberty or free will. A needs-based approach separates helpful clarification from hobbling tidy-mindedness, and authoritative definition from conceptual gerrymandering. (shrink)

This essay argues that philosophy can be combined with qualitative research without sacrificing the aims of either approach. Philosophers and qualitative researchers have articulated and supported the idea that human meaning-constructions are appropriately grasped through close attention to “consequences incurred in action,” in Dewey’s words. Furthermore, scholarship in both domains explores alternative possibilities to familiar constructions of meaning. The essay explains by means of a concrete example the approach I took to hybridizing these approaches. It describes an ethnographic and philosophical (...) study of how children made meaning of justice and solidarity through their practice of democratic citizenship in an extracurricular program called Village. At Village, children built and ran a miniature town. Their actions and conversations around the political challenges that inevitably arose exemplify meaning-making of ideals in response to actual problems. The meaning of solidarity and justice for these children emerged through the consequences of previous and present actions they took in communication with others. This essay details the methods I used for designing the study, collecting data, and analyzing my findings. (shrink)

Argues that love plays an essential—if often implicit—role in Hegel's mature theory of moral subjectivity and political community.

In this paper, I seek to challenge two prevailing views about religious accommodation. The first maintains that religious practices deserve accommodation only if they are regarded as something unchosen on a par with the involuntary circumstances of life people must face. The other view maintains that religious practices are nothing more than preferences but questions the necessity of their accommodation. Against these views, I argue that religious conducts, even on the assumption that they represent voluntary behaviours, deserve in certain circumstances (...) certain kinds of accommodation. They must be understood as one possible expression, along with nonreligious or secular beliefs, of a person's convictions of conscience, which are strong ethical commitments upon which depends the moral integrity of those having such convictions. I demonstrate that the main ground for religious accommodation is the need to protect fairly, through such rights as religious freedom and freedom of conscience, the ethical commitments and conscientious beliefs of all citizens. Finally, against the objection that such a view risks leading to the proliferation of demands for accommodation, I maintain that a deliberative approach to religious accommodation is in a good position to put serious hurdles in the path of unreasonable demands. (shrink)

Abstract Susan Moller Okin has criticized Michael Sandel's view that the family is an example of an institution that is sometimes ?above? or ?beyond? justice, and for which justice is not, under the best conditions, a virtue. She argues that he both misses the point of justice as a virtue of social institutions and that he idealizes the family, and after undertaking this ?ground-clearing?, goes on to argue that families should be just. This paper offers a qualified defense of Sandel. (...) I argue, first, that Sandel has not missed the point of justice as a virtue of social institutions. But I go on to argue, more centrally, that if we distinguish between what I call ?internal? and ?social? justice of the family, and look carefully at the conclusions of Okin's own arguments, we see that she has really argued for the social justice of the family, and that this can be maintained alongside Sandel's vision of the family as an institution within which considerations of justice are neither central, nor necessarily appropriate. I try to carve out space both for Sandel's vision of the family, and for Okin's substantive feminist conclusions about family-based gender injustice. (shrink)

I defend a neo-Kantian view wherein we are capable of being completely autonomous and impartial and argue that this ability can ground normativity. As this view includes an existentialist conception of the self, I defend radical choice, a primary component of that conception, against arguments many take to be definitive. I call the ability to use radical choice “existentialist voluntarism” and bring it into a current debate in normative philosophy, arguing that it allows that we can be distanced from all (...) ends at once so as to be completely impartial. Finally, I indicate how this can be the source of normativity as it provides a purely impartial reason for being rational. (shrink)

Originally published as L'Islam et l'occident, 2006. Translated by Teresa Lavender Fagan. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008. xxii + 114 pp. Hardback, $19.99.

It is a commonplace that liberalism and religious belief conflict. Liberalism, its proponents and critics maintain, requires the privatization of religious belief, since liberals often argue that citizens of faith must repress their fundamental commitments when participating in public life. Critics of liberalism complain that privatization is objectionable because it requires citizens of faith to violate their integrity. The liberal political tradition has always sought to carve out social space for individuals to live by their own lights. If liberalism requires (...) citizens to violate their integrity, liberals have cause for concern. I seek to rebut this integrity objection to liberalism. I focus on the dominant form of philosophical liberalism: public reason liberalism. I argue that the integrity objection undermines the mainstream conception of public reason liberalism, but not public reason liberalism itself. The paper opens by outlining the structure of public reason liberalism and the integrity objection (§§2 and 3). It then analyses two versions of the objection and argues that the second version is successful against the mainstream conception of public reason (§4). I argue in response that public reason liberalism need not endorse principles of restraint—the civic restrictions on religious expression typically associated with it. I then sketch a conception of public reason liberalism that eschews principles of restraint (§5). This alternative promises to reconcile public reason liberals and their faith-friendly critics by putting the integrity objection to rest. (shrink)

Both modernist and post-modern social criticism of power presuppose that agents frequently consent to power relations, which a political theorist may wish to critique. This raises the question: from what normative position can one critique power which is, as a sociological fact, legitimate in the eyes of those who reproduce it? This paper argues that "symbolic violence" is a useful metaphor for providing such a normative grounding. In order to provide an epistemological basis of critique, it is further argued that (...) social actors have multiple interpretative horizons available to them as part of their everyday social practices. Thus, they are not caught in a preconstituted web of meaning from which there is no escape, as is sometimes implicit in the over-socialized perceptions of agency associated with post-modernism. (shrink)

Pride in our own actions tells a story: we faced a challenge, overcame it, and achieved something praiseworthy. In this paper, I draw on recent psychological literature to distinguish to between two varieties of pride, 'authentic' pride that focuses on particular efforts (like guilt) and 'hubristic' pride that focuses on the whole self (like shame). Achievement pride is fitting when either efforts or traits explain our success in meeting contextually relevant, authoritative, and challenging standards without excessive opportunity cost. When it (...) is fitting, our lives are at least somewhat meaningful. (shrink)

A comprehensive account of human kindness.

In the early 1990s Israel underwent a so-called constitutional revolution. According to the champions of this revolution, Israel has essentially become, as a result of this momentous event, a constitutional democracy, upholding individual freedom and liberties and allowing for judicial review of parliamentary legislation. Despite the congratulatory rhetoric, it is generally agreed upon that the constitution is still in need of some essential supplements before Israel can qualify as a fully constitutional democracy. The main question addressed in this paper is (...) the following: is it ‘reasonable’ that Israel take the further necessary steps that qualify it as a fully constitutional democracy? The doubts raised in this regard stem from the very concerns that lead political philosophers (mainly Rawls) to stress the unique value of liberal democracy. As they argue, liberal democracy provides deeply divided societies with the best means to secure their legitimacy and political stability. Israel's political realities, I argue, defy this claim. Moreover, Israel's political realities may also carry a valuable lesson to other states, even to seemingly robust liberal democracies. It is not the purpose of the paper, of course, to argue that Israel's existing rule of government should be embraced by other states – far from that. Israel should undergo some radical changes so that it can protect the rights and interests of all its citizens. Yet, to achieve this purpose, it should transcend, I will argue, liberal democracy. As matters stand, simply strengthening its liberal character, Israel's political system may be exposed to a growing challenge to its legitimacy and stability. It should, therefore, reject liberal democracy and especially the principle of neutrality that is intimately connected with a liberal rule of government and embrace, instead, the ideal of multicultural democracy. This ideal, I argue, is better equipped to answer the need of deeply divided societies to secure their legitimacy and stability. (shrink)

Bovine tuberculosis is the most important animal health and welfare policy issue in Britain. Badgers are a wildlife reservoir of disease, although the eight-year Independent Scientific Group Randomised Badger Culling Trial concluded with a recommendation against culling. The report advised government that bovine TB could be controlled, and ultimately eradicated, by cattle-based measures alone. Despite the ISG recommendation against culling, the farming and veterinary industries continued to lobby government for a badger cull. The 2005–2010 Labour government followed the ISG advice (...) and decided against a cull. The 2010–2015 Coalition and the 2015-present Conservative governments have followed a badger culling policy. This paper investigates whether a virtuous government would cull badgers. It provides an overview of virtue theory in the context of government animal health and welfare policy. Bovine TB and badger control policy options are then analysed in the context of the virtues of justice, wisdom, integrity, loyalty, curiosity, trust, empathy, compassion and aesthetics. Justice is the first virtue of government, and badger culling is seriously problematic from a virtue perspective given that five badgers are culled per cow that avoids slaughter as a result. Analysis based on other virtues strongly suggests that government should not cull badgers. The paper concludes that a virtuous government would not cull badgers as part of policy to control bovine TB in cattle. (shrink)

De moderne filosofie lijdt aan muziekvergetelheid. Opvallend is echter dat filosofen, wanneer ze toch aandacht schenken aan muziek, hun aandacht bij voorkeur op één bepaald genre richten, namelijk de opera. Filosofen zoals Søren Kierkegaard en Friedrich Nietzsche lieten hun gedachten over Don Giovanni, Parsifal en Carmen gaan, terwijl omgekeerd de filosofie van Arthur Schopenhauer de opera heeft beïnvloed via Wagner. Diens werk lijkt zich op het snijpunt van het grensverkeer tussen moderne filosofie en moderne muziek te bevinden. Het was zijn (...) ambitie de menselijke existentie en de menselijke geschiedenis in één panoramisch oeuvre te vatten, vanaf het primordiale begin tot en met de dramatische finale die ophanden leek: een catastrofale apotheose die een geheel nieuwe toekomst mogelijk zou maken. Dat is althans de verhaallijn van zijn meesterwerk Der Ring des Nibelungen. Aan het slot van Götterdämmerung lijkt zich een algehele verwoesting te hebben voltrokken: ‘Everything is destroyed and there is an enigmatic kind of hovering over the scene of destruction’ (Badiou 2010, p. 106), een ambivalente stemming van hoop en destructie zette Wagner op muziek. Voor Wagner is dan ook een hoofdrol in deze studie weggelegd: voor zijn muziektheoretische geschriften (waarin hij over een ‘muziek van de toekomst’ filosofeerde), maar meer nog voor de muzikale totaalkunstwerken die hij daadwerkelijk componeerde. (shrink)

Para quienes tengan interés en la filosofía moral y política contemporánea la obra de John Rawls es sin discusión una parada necesaria. De hecho, la tesis de Robert Nozick según la cual resulta imposible hacer filosofía moral y política sin considerar el marco ofrecido por Rawls, aunque parezca extrema, resulta bastante acertada. En gran medida el impacto de la obra de Rawls radica en su interés por ofrecer una teoría sustantiva de la justicia, teoría que hundiendo sus raíces en la (...) tradición de la filosofía sea capaz de orientarnos al momento de abordar las discusiones contemporáneas sobre justicia social. -/- En los trabajos que componen este libro el lector podrá encontrar una discusión actualizada sobre aquellos elementos que definen la base moral y política que Rawls presentó como fundamento de su teoría de la justicia. Al mismo tiempo, estos ensayos intentan construir un puente entre la justicia como equidad y otras tradiciones de la filosofía moral y política contemporánea. Para lograr este último fin, varios de los trabajos que aquí se presentan consideran las ideas de reconocimiento y autorrespeto como claves de interpretación de la obra de Rawls. (shrink)

In the best literature on unilateral secession, for instance, Buchanan, it is usual to distinguish between remedial theories, which require a just cause for conceding a right to secession for the inhabitants of a territory, part of a State; and primary theories, plebiscitary theories and adscriptivist or nationalist theories. In accordance to this view, only the first are capable of justifying a unilateral right to secession. Well then, in this paper, an argument is elaborated in order to show that the (...) remedial strategy is not applicable to Catalonia and, also to show that even if primary theories are applicable to the case of Catalonia —the plebiscitary strategy has given rise to the so-called right to decide—, they are not able to justify a unilateral right to secession. (shrink)

In the history of liberal theories of property, the predominant model deduces a right to highly unequal amounts of property from a premise that the person is primarily independent and self‐determined. But modem social theory, communitarianism and critical legal theory have generated strong support for an alternative premise of social self‐determination of the person. These theories have not, however, adequately explored the logical implications of social personality for the justifiable degree of equality of income under property right. This study reasons (...) a right to some significant equalization of income from a premise that the individual is socially self‐determined. The supporting argument develops a different concept of social personality than found in prevailing social and communitarian theories. With regard to property, it is particularly important to conceptualize the formation of the individual by and within the system of economic relations. The personological premises are also developed differently from Marx's analysis, which overemphasizes the production side of the economy. The present analysis examines the individual in the consumption side as well. But in contrast to the subjective‐individualist conception of the consumer in neoclassical economic theory, we will utilize a conception of socially self‐determined consumer wants and self‐seeking. This social‐personological premise proves to have strong egalitarian implications for the distribution of income under property rights. (shrink)

Emotionally-related live organ donation is different from almost all other medical treatments in that a family member or, in some countries, a friend contributes with an organ or parts of an organ to the recipient. Furthermore, there is a long-acknowledged but not well-understood gender-imbalance in emotionally-related live kidney donation. This article argues for the benefit of the concept of just love as an analytic tool in the analysis of emotionally-related live organ donation where the potential donor(s) and the recipient are (...) engaged in a love relation. The concept of just love is helpful in the analysis of these live organ donations even if no statistical gender-imbalance prevails. It is particularly helpful, however, in the analysis of the gender-imbalance in live kidney donations if these donations are seen as a specific kind of care-work, if care-work is experienced as a labour one should perform out of love and if women still experience stronger pressures to engage in care-work than do men. The aim of the article is to present arguments for the need of just love as an analytic tool in the analysis of emotionally-related live organ donation where the potential donor(s) and the recipient are engaged in a love relation. The aim is also to elaborate two criteria that need to be met in order for love to qualify as just and to highlight certain clinical implications. (shrink)

This paper comprises a critical examination of foundationalist conceptions of comprehensive doctrines in the religion in politics-debate. I argue that John Rawls, the towering figure of this debate, operates with a foundationalist conception of comprehensive doctrines that has shaped the debate’s view of relevant alternatives (often referred to as exclusivism and inclusivism). However, there are several problems with foundationalist conceptions, and the most serious is that they are empirically inadequate in relation to modern Western societies. I conclude that participants of (...) the exclusivist/inclusivist debate ought to look closer at alternative, non-foundationalist conceptions, and I supply a brief sketch of one such approach, inspired by American pragmatism. (shrink)

The article discusses some of the major issues which need to be examined in a gendered reading of citizenship. However, its basic claim is that a comparative study of citizenship should consider the issue of women's citizenship not only by contrast to that of men, but also in relation to women's affiliation to dominant or subordinate groups, their ethnicity, origin and urban or rural residence. It should also take into consideration global and transnational positionings of these citizenships. The article challenges (...) the gender-blind and Westocentric character of many of the most hegemonic theorizations of citizenship, focusing in particular on the questions of membership in ‘the community’, group rights and social difference and the ways binaries of public/private and active/passive have been constructed to differentiate between different kinds of citizenships. The article argues that in order to be able to analyse adequately people's citizenship, especially in this era of ethnicization on the one hand and globalization on the other hand, and with the rapid pace at which relationships between states and their civil societies are changing, citizenship should best be analysed as a multi-tiered construct which applies, at the same time to people's membership in sub-, cross- and supra-national collectivities as well as in states. (shrink)

ABSTRACT“How should a person lead her life?” The purpose of this paper is to suggest some principles (not a complete list) which will serve us ‘intellectual instruments’ for assessing forms of life. These principles are utilitarian in nature, and, as I will argue, essential to a reasonably rich account of personal well-being. The principles suggested are not instrumental, that is, they determine the worthiness of a form of life led by an agent irrespective of whether it satisfies her existing desires (...) and meet her actual preferences. Hence, I will argue that a person can be deprived, that is, categorically deprived, even when most of her desires are satisfied. In the last section of the paper I will argue for the role of education in ‘initiating’ the agent into worthy forms of life, and hence evading the charge of categorical deprivation and that of irrationality. (shrink)

The relationship between community and individual is the key issue in contemporary political philosophy and ethics. The concept of self seems very important for individualism, communitarianism and feminism when they respond to relationships, particularly when we have to situate selfhood in the conditions of modernity. Consequently, this paper can be divided into seven parts. First it introduces the debate about the concept of the self between individualism and communitarianism. Second, it discusses the feminist critique of this issue and analyses the (...) feminist concept of self, and then addresses modernity as the condition of women. Next it attempts to analyze how women situate themselves in the conditions of modernity. Then it discusses how Chinese women are reshaping their selfhood under the conditions of modernity, and finally draws some brief conclusions claiming that neither communitarian nor individualist self is adequate in contemporary society. Chinese women, it is argued, are expected to reshape their own selfhood resting on the positive side of Confucian ethics and a feminist concept of self. (shrink)

The earlier much discussed issue of a society's right to educate the young is the starting point for various observations regarding education itself. A distinction is drawn between additive and transformative conceptions of education, the latter seeking to bring about changes to the learner's subjective self as reflected in a tripartite division of entities intended by the phenomenological self. Despite liberal or progressive educators' intuitive preference for the transformative conception, it may be asked whether this may not infringe the learner's (...) rights, however worthy the educator's motives or benign the intended outcomes. This possibility is rejected, however, on grounds of the learner's residual freedom to criticise the educator's values, the necessity of value assumptions as the essential basis of moral freedom and the unpredictability of human perceptions and responses, given the potential gap between the intentions and perceptions of the emitter of language and the understandings of the receiver. (shrink)

This article draws out two implications for cosmopolitan or global friendship from an examination of a recent work on civic friendship in the domestic sphere: (1) Insofar as it is the case that civic friendship, as defined by Schwarzenbach (On civic friendship: Including women in the state. Columbia University Press, New York, 2009) is necessary for justice in the state, it is also the case that the absence of global justice can be partially explained by the absence of what might (...) be called cosmopolitan friendship. (2) If we consider the practicalities of civic friendship, we find that cosmopolitan friendship is an even more difficult and demanding project than we might have imagined. (shrink)

The development of a conception of critical pedagogy is itself an aspect of the development of critical rationality within late modern societies, closely connected with the role of education in developing critical rationality. The role of critique pervades all aspects of life: for people as citizens, workers and self-determining private individuals. Late modern societies depend on a critically minded population for their viability, for the democratic management of a competing balance of interests and for a capacity for rapid renewal. These (...) requirements put a demand on the education system for the development of critical rationality. However, its development contains within itself the seeds, not just of renewal, but of transformation or even anarchy. This is discussed in relation to three major aspects of education—liberal, civic and vocational—and it is argued that there is a tension within each that arises from the requirement of critique for their successful functioning as educational practices in liberal societies and from the implausibility of developing forms of critique that are inherently self-limiting. Societies that espouse the development of critical rationality as a key educational aim exist in a state of tension and of uncertainty as to the extent to which it can be developed. Attempts to limit critique to consideration only of what is worthwhile are bound to be futile. On the other hand, education must be concerned with preparation for the worthwhile. Critique thus performs the important function of ensuring that our conception of the worthwhile does not remain fixed, but is itself an agent of social change. This paper explores this issue and argues that the problem of reconciling preparation for social participation with preparation for critical engagement exists in all three spheres. The problems may not be resolvable ones but should encourage continual awareness of the scope and limits of educational critique in liberal societies. (shrink)

This paper considers the social justice initiative of the Canadian Nurses Association (CNA). It focuses mainly on the two editions of the CNA's discussion document on social justice, and particularly on its emphasis on the principle of equity. The paper considers whether a coherent justification can be made for the CNA's espousal of equity, and the discussion focuses in turn on the principle of equity itself and on the CNA's position in relation to equity. A body of arguments supporting an (...) active moral role for professions, generally known as civic professionalism, provides a framework for exploring the CNA's role in this respect. Justifications for equity are explored in relation to the liberal‐contextualist spectrum, and civic professional arguments are subjected to the same structure of analysis. This is in turn related to evidence from the literature concerning nursing perceptions of equity. The paper concludes that contextualist justifications of equity and civic professionalism support one another more robustly than liberal justifications in relation to the CNA's initiative; and that they also sit more comfortably with the realities of the CNA's role in relation to nursing, and to the Canadian health care system. (shrink)

This article will focus on the ethical issues of vaccine mandates and stake claim to the relatively extreme position that outright requirements for people to receive the vaccine are ethically correct at both the governmental and institutional levels. One novel strategy employed here will be to argue that deontological considerations pertaining to consent rights cut as much in favor of mandating vaccines as against them. The presumption seems to be that arguments from consent speak semi-definitively against forcing people to inject (...) something into their bodies, and so any argument in favor of mandates must produce different and overriding logical and ethical considerations. Our central claim will be that the same logic that might seem to prohibit vaccine mandates as violations of consent actually supports such mandates when viewed from the perspective of the potential bystander who might otherwise be exposed to COVID-19. (shrink)

Catholic Social Teaching has taken a remarkable turn with the May 1991 document on economic ethics,Centesimus Annus. During their one hundred year history, church documents were notable for their courageous championing of the rights of the least advantaged; they were much less distinguished for their understanding of how markets and incentives function in capitalism. Most business leaders admired church teaching for its compassion but had little respect for its competence. With this most recent document, however, there is a growing conviction (...) that the church may have come of age in economic ethics. Even theWall Street Journal has celebratedCentesimus Annus. The article outlines the highlights of the document and its points of continuity with the tradition. Responses from business and the academy are also briefly considered. (shrink)

Some philosophers – notably Bernard Williams, Martha Nussbaum and Ruth Barcan Marcus – argue that agents in moral dilemmas are blameworthy whatever they do. I begin by uncovering the connection these philosophers are presupposing between the agent’s judgement of wrongdoing and her tendency to self-blame. Next, I argue that while dilemmatic choosers cannot help but see themselves as wrongdoers, they both can and should divorce this judgement from an ascription of self-blame. As I argue, dilemmatic choosers are morally sui generis (...) in that their actions result in a diminishment of their personal integrity with no corresponding failure of character. It is this that makes them non-blameworthy wrongdoers. This way of seeing the problem should provide dilemmatic choosers with a novel conception of their own moral psychology, one that allows them to view their actions in a manner that is given neither to moral insensitivity nor to pathological self-accusation. (shrink)

John White; The Compulsory Curriculum and Beyond: a reply to Peter Gardner, Journal of Philosophy of Education, Volume 19, Issue 1, 30 May 2006, Pages 129–136.

ABSTRACT This essay challenges the view that John Rawls's recently published undergraduate thesis A Brief Inquiry into the Meaning of Sin and Faith provides little help in understanding his mature work. Two crucial strands of Rawls's Theory of Justice are its critique of teleology and its claims about our moral nature and its expression. These strands are brought together in a set of arguments late in Theory which are important but have attracted little sustained attention. I argue that the target (...) of Rawls's undergraduate thesis is a form of Christianity which rests on assumptions Rawls later came to think were fundamental to teleological views, and that the thesis defends an alternative form of religiosity that anticipates what Rawls says in Theory about the expression of our nature. Those sections of Theory also provide resources Rawls could have used to respond to a number of prominent and recurrent criticisms of his account of moral motivation. Seeing the continuities between Brief Inquiry and Theory of Justice shows how long Rawls wrestled with problems he took up in the neglected sections of Theory and thereby shows their importance to Rawls's thought. (shrink)