How is Nigeria’s failure to fulfil its obligations as a signatory of the United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities to be appreciated or even resolved? Answers to this are sought through a seminal criticism of human rights, namely, Simone Weil’s 1942 essay Human Personality. Weil questioned the ability of human rights concepts to cause the powerful to develop the emotional dispositions of empathy for those who suffer. Weil’s insights provide a convincing explanation that the indifference of (...) Nigerian authorities towards the Convention may be accounted for by the weakness of human rights discourse to foster human capacity for empathy and care for those who suffer. Weil’s criticisms will serve as a point of departure for a particular way to circumvent this inadequacy of human rights discourse to achieve disability justice in Nigeria through other means. I argue that Weil, through her concept of attention, grappled with and offers a consciousness of suffering and vulnerability that is not only uncommon to existing juridical human rights approaches, but is achievable through the active participation in the very forms of suffering and vulnerability in which amelioration is sought. To provide empirical content to this argument, I turn to a short-lived initiative of the Nigerian disability movement, which if ethico-politically refined and widely applied, can supply an action-theoretical grounding for and be combined with Weil’s work to elevate agitations for disability justice above human rights to the realm of human obligations. (shrink)

The social intuitionist approach to moral judgments advanced by social psychologist Jonathan Haidt presupposes that it is possible to provide an explanation of the human moral sense without normative implications. By contrast, Iris Murdoch’s philosophical work on moral psychology suggests that every description of morality necessarily involves evaluative features that reveal the thinker’s own moral attitudes and implicit philosophical pictures. In the light of this, we contend that Haidt’s treatment of the story about Julie and Mark, two siblings who decide (...) to have casual, protected, and in his view harmless sex, provides a too simplistic picture of what is involved in understanding human morality. Despite his aim to explain the roots of moral judgments, he fails to provide a deeper understanding of morality in two different respects. First, he does so by suggesting that his story contains all the relevant information needed to take a moral stand on it, and by rejecting as irrelevant the wider human context in which questions about sexual and family relations arise. Second, he simplifies the responses of the people who are subject to his experiment by disregarding their various reasons for disapproving and by equating understanding human morality with explaining an impersonal psychological process. (shrink)

In his much-discussed Hitler’s Willing Executioners, Daniel Goldhagen claims to bring ‘the critical eye of the anthropologist’ to the task of understanding the motivational state of Holocaust perpetrators. This aspect of his methodology has not received much critical attention. In this article I seek to fill that gap. I do so through consideration of Peter Winch’s reflections on the concept of learning from anthropological study of an alien social and cultural world. Goldhagen tells us that perpetrators acted as they did (...) because they believed it was ‘necessary and just’ to do so. But he only tells us thatthey believed this. We need to know howthey could have believed such a thing. Drawing upon Winch’s reflections, and with recourse to a controversial analogy, I address the ‘phenomenological’ question that Goldhagen poses, but fails, to explore. (shrink)

This paper introduces Simone Weil’s notion of reading and some of its implications to education. Weil’s philosophy, in particular her notion of attention has caught interest of some education scholars; however, the existing studies are still underdeveloped. Introducing Weil’s notion of reading, which has not been studied almost at all by educationists but its significance is well-recognized by Weil scholars, I intend to set forth a more nuanced understanding of Weil’s attention that is necessary to further discuss Weil’s potential contribution (...) to education research. Attention to other people, hence love of others, is reframed as “reading better.” We read better not simply by purifying our reading through detachment and self-negation, which is how the notion of attention is often understood and thus found problematic, but by incorporating multiple perspectives and finding balance among them. Learning to read better, then, is not merely inward effort of detachment done through introspection, but it also necessarily involves outward effort of working with other people and the world. It is through interacting with others, we may learn our own readings, recognize others’ readings, and seeking for just balance among them. This latter element which has been greatly dismissed is indispensable for any serious discussions of Weil’s philosophy in education. (shrink)

The experience of feeling safe even in the midst of trials and temptations seems to be a central feature of the Christian faith. In this article I will try to solve some possible difficulties in understanding this kind of absolute safety by discussing some problems noted by philosophers in connection with the related statements by Socrates that a good man cannot be harmed, and by Wittgenstein that he sometimes feels absolutely safe, that nothing can injure him whatever happens. First, I (...) will investigate whether there is an invalid prediction implied in this feeling of absolute safety: how can someone know that nothing will hurt him or her? Second, I will examine whether this experience of complete safety is dependent upon impossible requirements, such as to be a good man or an impeccable Christian. Third, I will consider the character of the people who claim absolute safety as portrayed by different philosophers: do these people really need to be so cold and inhumanly detached from the world for them to be able to say that nothing can hurt them? I will argue that if, instead of asking how someone can claim absolute safety, we ask to what someone commits him- or her-self in making this claim, these difficulties disappear. (shrink)

In his posthumously published Living Up to Death Paul Ricoeur left an impressive testimony on what it means to live at a high old age with death approaching. In this article I present him as a teacher who reminds us of valuable lessons taught by patients in palliative care and their caretakers who accompany them on their way to death, and also as a guide in our search for a modern ars moriendi, after—what many at least experience as—the breakdown of (...) traditional religious belief in a personal afterlife. These lessons can be summarized in the following theses. ‘Living up to death, one cannot experience one’s own death. Therefore, never consider someone dying as moribund’. ‘Though everybody is alone in dying, nobody should die alone.’ ‘The preparation for death is an affirmation of life’. ‘Life experienced as a gift can be given up’. The plausibility of the last thesis, however, may go beyond the confines of austere philosophical thinking. (shrink)

In 1986, a debate - der Historikerstreit (the historians’ dispute) - erupted in the German public sphere. It involved a number of historians who attempted to ‘revise’ approaches to the study of the Holocaust. Their endeavours met with fierce opposition, most notably from Jürgen Habermas, who accused them of trying to endow Germany with a presentable political image by relativizing the Holocaust. This article examines the conduct of the debate, in particular the manner in which each side alleged of the (...) other that it was driven by political motives rather than wissenschaftliche interests. I consider the way in which Ernst Nolte tries to ‘understand’ the Holocaust, and discuss the difficulties of investigating the Holocaust in a wissenschaftlichen manner.1. (shrink)