According to comparativism, degrees of belief are reducible to a system of purely ordinal comparisons of relative confidence. (For example, being more confident that P than that Q, or being equally confident that P and that Q.) In this paper, I raise several general challenges for comparativism, relating to (i) its capacity to illuminate apparently meaningful claims regarding intervals and ratios of strengths of belief, (ii) its capacity to draw enough intuitively meaningful and theoretically relevant distinctions between doxastic (...) states, and (iii) its capacity to handle common instances of irrationality. (shrink)

What, normatively speaking, are the grounds of rational choice? This paper defends ‘comparativism’, the view that a comparative fact grounds rational choice. It examines three of the most serious challenges to comparativism: 1) that sometimes what grounds rational choice is an exclusionary-type relation among alternatives; 2) that an absolute fact such as that it’s your duty or conforms to the Categorial Imperative grounds rational choice; and 3) that rational choice between incomparables is possible, and in particular, all that (...) is needed for the possibility of rational choice is that one alternative is not worse than the others. Each challenge is questioned. If comparativism is correct, then no matter what normative theory you favor, your answer to the question, ‘What makes my choice rational?’ must be comparative in form. In this way, comparativism provides a framework for normative theorizing. (shrink)

Although physical theories routinely posit absolute quantities, such as absolute position or intrinsic mass, it seems that only comparative quantities such as distance and mass ratio are observable. But even if there are in fact only distances and mass ratios, the success of absolutist theories means that the world looks just as if there are absolute positions and intrinsic masses. If comparativism is nevertheless true, there is a sense in which it is a cosmic conspiracy that the world looks (...) just as if there are absolute quantities: the comparative quantities satisfy certain relations that only absolutism can explain. I show that such cosmic conspiracies are a pervasive feature of comparativist theories. The argument is structurally similar to the well-known No Miracles Argument for scientific realism. Just as anti-realism cannot explain the empirical adequacy of our theories in general, so comparativism cannot explain the empirical adequacy of absolutist theories in particular. (shrink)

Comparativism is the view that comparative confidences (e.g., being more confident that P than that Q) are more fundamental than degrees of belief (e.g., believing that P with some strength x). In this paper, I outline the basis for a new, non-probabilistic version of comparativism inspired by a suggestion made by Frank Ramsey in `Probability and Partial Belief'. I show how, and to what extent, `Ramseyan comparativism' might be used to weaken the (unrealistically strong) probabilistic coherence conditions (...) that comparativism traditionally relies on. (shrink)

ABSTRACT According to comparativism, comparative confidence is more fundamental than absolute confidence. In two recent AJP papers, Stefánsson has argued that comparativism is capable of explaining interpersonal confidence comparisons. In this paper, I will argue that Stefansson’s proposed explanation is inadequate; that we have good reasons to think that comparativism cannot handle interpersonal comparisons; and that the best explanation of interpersonal comparisons requires thinking about confidence in a fundamentally different way than that which comparativists propose: specifically, we (...) should think of confidence as a dimensionless quantity. (shrink)

According to asymmetric comparativism, it is worse for a person to exist with a miserable life than not to exist, but it is not better for a person to exist with a happy life than not to exist. My aim in this paper is to explain how asymmetric comparativism could possibly be true. My account of asymmetric comparativism begins with a different asymmetry, regarding the (dis)value of early death. I offer an account of this early death asymmetry, (...) appealing to the idea of conditional goods, and generalize it to explain how asymmetric comparativism could possibly be true. I also address the objection that asymmetric comparativism has unacceptably antinatalist implications. (shrink)

According to standard comparativist views, death is bad insofar as it deprives someone of goods she would otherwise have had. In The Ethics of Killing, Jeff McMahan argues against such views and in favor of a gradualist account according to which how bad it is to die is a function of both the future goods of which the decedent is deprived and her cognitive development when she dies. Comparativists and gradualists therefore disagree about how bad it is to die at (...) different ages. In this paper I examine two prominent criticisms of gradualism and show that both misconstrue McMahan. I develop a related criticism that seems to show that a gradualist cannot coherently relate morbidity and mortality. This criticism also fails, but has an instructive implication for how policy-makers setting priorities for health care investments should regard choices between life-saving interventions and interventions against non-fatal diseases in the very young. (shrink)

Ted Sider has shown that my indeterminism argument for comparativist theories of quantity also applies to Mundy's absolutist theory. This is because Mundy's theory posits only "pure" relations, i.e. relations between values of the same quantity (between masses and other masses, or distances and other distances). It is straightforward to solve the problem by positing additional mixed relations.

En el presente escrito intentaré explorar la relación entre dos temas controvertidos: el daño y el problema de la no-identidad. Sostendré la idea de que ninguna tesis plausible del daño puede resolver completamente el problema de la no-identidad. Sin embargo, defenderé que una reformulación de la tesis comparativa contra-fáctica es superior a todas las otras tesis del daño y por tanto debería ser adoptada. | In this paper I tried to explore the relation between two controversial issues: harm and the (...) non-identity problem. I will defend the idea that any harm account cannot fully solve the nonidentity problem. However, I will defend that a reformulation of the counterfactual comparative account is better than all others harm accounts, and therefore should be adopted. (shrink)

This thesis consists of several independent papers in population ethics. I begin in Chapter 1 by critiquing some well-known 'impossibility theorems', which purport to show there can be no intuitively satisfactory population axiology. I identify axiological vagueness as a promising way to escape or at least mitigate the effects of these theorems. In particular, in Chapter 2, I argue that certain of the impossibility theorems have little more dialectical force than sorites arguments do. From these negative arguments I move to (...) positive ones. In Chapter 3, I justify the use of a 'veil of ignorance', starting from three more basic normative principles. This leads to positive arguments for various kinds of utilitarianism - the best such arguments I know. But in general the implications of the veil depend on how one answers what I call 'the risky existential question': what is the value to an individual of a chance of non-existence? I chart out the main options, and raise some puzzles for non-comparativism, the view that life is incomparable to non-existence. Finally, in Chapter 4, I consider the consequences for population ethics of the idea that what is normatively relevant is not personal identity, but a degreed relation of psychological connectedness. In particular, I pursue a strategy based in population ethics for understanding the controversial 'time-relative interests' account of the badness of death. (shrink)

Imprecise probabilities are often modelled with representors, or sets of probability functions. In the recent literature, two ways of interpreting representors have emerged as especially prominent: vagueness interpretations, according to which each probability function in the set represents how the agent's beliefs would be if any vagueness were precisified away; and comparativist interpretations, according to which the set represents those comparative confidence relations that are common to all probability functions therein. I argue that these interpretations have some important limitations. I (...) also propose an alternative—the functional interpretation—according to which representors are best interpreted by reference to the roles they play in the theories that make use of them. (shrink)

Theorists of health have, to this point, focused exclusively on trying to define a state—health—that an organism might be in. I argue that they have overlooked the possibility of a comparativist theory of health, which would begin by defining a relation—healthier than—that holds between two organisms or two possible states of the same organism. I show that a comparativist approach to health has a number of attractive features, and has important implications for philosophers of medicine, bioethicists, health economists, and policy (...) makers. (shrink)

This paper presents an argument against the widespread view that ‘hard choices’ are hard because of the incomparability of the alternatives. The argument has two parts. First, I argue that any plausible theory of practical reason must be ‘comparativist’ in form, that is, it must hold that a comparative relation between the alternatives with respect to what matters in the choice determines a justified choice in that situation. If comparativist views of practical reason are correct, however, the incomparabilist view of (...) hard choices should be rejected. Incomparabilism about hard choices leads us to an implausible error theory about the phenomenology of hard choices, threatens an unattractive view of human agency, and leaves us in perplexity about what we are doing when we choose in hard choices. The second part of the argument explores the main competitor to comparativist views of practical reason, noncomparativist view, according tow which a choice is justified so long as it is not worse than any of the alternatives. This view is often assumed by rational choice theorists but has its best philosophical defense in work by Joseph Raz. On Raz’s view, incomparabilism about hard choices avoids the problems faced if comparativism is correct, but it faces different difficulties. I argue that Raz’s noncomparativist view mistakenly assimilates practical reason to more restricted normative domains such as the law. (shrink)

This paper develops and explores a new framework for theorizing about the measurement and aggregation of well-being. It is a qualitative variation on the framework of social welfare functionals developed by Amartya Sen. In Sen’s framework, a social or overall betterness ordering is assigned to each profile of real-valued utility functions. In the qualitative framework developed here, numerical utilities are replaced by the properties they are supposed to represent. This makes it possible to characterize the measurability and interpersonal comparability of (...) well-being directly, without the use of invariance conditions, and to distinguish between real changes in well-being and merely representational changes in the unit of measurement. The qualitative framework is shown to have important implications for a range of issues in axiology and social choice theory, including the characterization of welfarism, axiomatic derivations of utilitarianism, the meaningfulness of prioritarianism, the informational requirements of variable-population ethics, the impossibility theorems of Arrow and others, and the metaphysics of value. (shrink)

The idea of a philosophical Other as comparativists have often historically used it to signify radical alterity, although sometimes a remedy and correction for the erroneous generalizations which originate from a presupposition of human sameness, merely shifts the center of philosophy's unchallenged assumptions in at least two ways. First, the notion of a philosophical Other avoids an explicit characterization of how one recognizes that one is philosophizing in the sphere of this Other and of what "otherness" is philosophically interesting. Second, (...) the notion of a philosophical Other is unable to capture and describe the dynamic, ever-changing relations that serve to demarcate philosophical traditions or spatio-temporal webs of thinkers in the first place. For the sake of the comparative project of exposing the comparativist's own culturally-embedded assumptions, comparative methodology should allow for the possibility of analyzing more than one place where similarities and differences can present themselves at the same time. In short, comparativists would serve their own interests better if they began to approach their projects in recognition of a complex, limitless, and dynamic array of sameness and difference, instead of with premature assumptions of radical alterity. (shrink)

Disciplinary issues -- Field studies -- Appendix: Theory of law : legal ethnography, or, the theoretical fruits of the inquiries into folkways. /// Reedition of papers in English spanning from 1995 to 2008 /// DISCIPLINARY ISSUES -- LAW AS CULTURE? [2002] 9–14 // TRENDS IN COMPARATIVE LEGAL STUDIES [2002] 15–17 // COMPARATIVE LEGAL CULTURES: ATTEMPTS AT CONCEPTUALISATION [1997] 19–28: 1. Legal Culture in a Cultural-anthropological Approach 19 / 2. Legal Culture in a Sociological Approach 21 / 3. Timely Issues of (...) Central and Eastern Europe 24 // COMPARATIVE LEGAL CULTURES? [2001] 29–48: 1. Legal Comparativism Challenged 29 / 2. Comparative Legal Cultures versus Comparative Law 34 / 3. Contrasting Fields 40 [a) The Historical Understanding of Socialist Law 42 / b) Convergence of Civil Law and Common Law 44] 4. Concluding Remarks 46 // THEATRUM LEGALE MUNDI: ON LEGAL SYSTEMS CLASSIFIED [2005] 49–75: 1. Preliminaries 49 / 2. Proposals 50 / 3. Impossible Taxonomy, or the Moment of Practicality in Legal Mapping 69 / 4. Diversity as a Fundamental Quality of Human Existence 74 // LEGAL TRADITIONS? IN SEARCH FOR FAMILIES AND CULTURES IN LAW [2004] 77–97: 1. Comparative Law and the Comparative Study of Legal Traditions 78 / 2. ‘System’, ‘Family’, ‘Culture’, and ‘Tradition’ in the Classification of Law 80 / 3. Different Traditions, Differing Ways of Thinking 85 / 4. Different Expectations, Differings Institutionalisations in Law 88 / 5. Different “Rationalities”, Differing “Logics” 92 / 6. Mentality in Foundation of the Law 94 / 7. Defining a Subject for Theoretical Research in Law 96 // SOMETHING NEW, SOMETHING OLD IN THE EUROPEAN IDENTITY OF LAW? [1995] 99–102 --- FIELD STUDIES -- MEETING POINTS BETWEEN THE TRADITIONS OF ENGLISH–AMERICAN COMMON LAW AND CONTINENTAL-FRENCH CIVIL LAW: DEVELOPMENTS AND EXPERIENCE OF POSTMODERNITY IN CANADA [2002] 105–130: I. Canadian Law in General 105 / II. Canadian Legal Developments in Particular [1. The Transformation of the Role of Precedents 112 / 2. The Transformation of Law-application into a Collective, Multicultural and Multifactorial Search for a Solution 116 / 3. Practical Trends of Dissolving the Law’s Positivity 120 / 4. New Prerogatives Acquired by Courts 125 {a) Unfolding the Statutory Provisons in Principles 126 / b) Constitutionalisation of Issues 127 / c) The Supreme Court as the Nation’s Supreme Moral Authority 129}] // MAN ELEVATING HIMSELF? DILEMMAS OF RATIONALITY IN OUR AGE [2000] 131–163: I. Reason and its Adventures 1. Progress and Advance Questioned 131 / 2. The Human Search for Safety Objectified 133 / 3. Knowledge Separated from Wisdom 135 / 4. Pure Intellectuality thereby Born 137 / II. The Will-Element Formalised in Law 5. Mere Voluntas in the Foundation of Legal Positivism 141 / 6. Formalism with Operations Fragmented 145 / III. The State of America Exemplified 7. “Slouching into Gomorrah” 147 / IV. Consequences 8. Utopianism-cum-Voluntarism 154 / 9. With Logic in Posterior Control of Human Formulations Only 159 / V. Perspectives 10. And a Final Resolution Dreamed about 161 // RULE OF LAW? MANIA OF LAW? ON THE BOUNDARY BETWEEN RATIONALITY AND ANARCHY IN AMERICA [2002] 165–180: {Transformation of American Law and Legal Mentality 165 / With Repercussions on the Underlying Ethos 168 / Legislation through Processualisation 170 / With Hyperrationalism Added 172 / Example: Finding Lost Property 172 / Practicalness Veiled by Verbal Magic 173 / Ending in Jurispathy 175 / Transubstantiating the Self-interest of the Legal Profession 178 / Post-modernity, Substituting for Primitiveness 178} // TRANSFERS OF LAW: A CONCEPTUAL ANALYSIS [2003] 181–207: 1. Terms 182 / 2. Technicality 190 / 3. Contrasts in Transfers of Law 200 {Contrasts 200 / Criticisms 202 / Alternatives205} 4. Conclusions 206 // THE DANGERS FOR THE SELF OF BEING SELF-CENTRED: ON STANDARDS AND VALUES [2002] 209–212 --- APPENDIX -- THEORY OF LAW – LEGAL ETHNOGRAPHY, OR THE THEORETICAL FRUITS OF THE INQUIRIES INTO FOLKWAYS [2008] 213–234 1. Encounters 213 / 2. Disciplines 218 / 3. The Lawyerly Interest 223 / 4. Law and/or Laws 226 / 5. Conclusion 233 --- Index of Subjects 235 / Index of Normative Materials 242 / Index 244 . (shrink)

Ethicists increasingly reject the scale as a useful metaphor for weighing reasons. Yet they generally retain the metaphor of a reason’s weight. This combination is incoherent. The metaphor of weight entails a very specific scale-based model of weighing reasons, Dual Scale. Justin Snedegar worries that scale-based models of weighing reasons can’t properly weigh reasons against an option. I show that there are, in fact, two different reasons for/against distinctions, and I provide an account of the relationship between the various kinds (...) of reason for and against. With this account in hand, we’ll see that Dual Scale has no problem weighing any kind of reason against. (shrink)

Particular persons have claims against being made worse off than they could have been. The literature, however, has focused primarily on only two-option cases; yet, these cases fail to capture all of the morally relevant factors, especially when a person’s existence is in question. This paper explores how to assess claims in multiple-option choice sets. We scrutinize the only extant proposal, offered by Michael Otsuka, which we call the Weakening View. In light of its problems, we develop an alternative: the (...) Combining View. The Weakening View holds that a person’s claim against a loss of well-being relative to one distribution is weakened by the availability of further alternatives relative to which the person gains well-being. By contrast, our view holds that a person has an overall claim for or against a certain distribution relative to the whole option set, where overall claims are second-order functions of the different pairwise claims. Finally, we defend the Combining View by exploring its implications for the impact of a person’s possible non-existence on their overall claims, and we develop a proposal for how the number of distributions relative to which a person gains or loses welfare influences the strength of their overall claims. (shrink)

Half of the drug offenders incarcerated in the United States are black, even though whites and blacks use and sell drugs at the same rate, and blacks make up only 13 percent of the population. Noncomparativists about retributive justice see nothing wrong with this picture; for them, an offender’s desert is insensitive to facts about other offenders. By contrast, comparativists about retributive justice assert that facts about others can partially determine an offender’s desert. Not surprisingly, comparativists, especially comparative egalitarians, contend (...) that differential punishment is retributively unjust. I agree with this assessment, but take issue with the reasons egalitarians cite in its favor. In this paper, I argue that differential punishment violates retributive justice because it contributes to structural racial oppression. Over the course of developing and defending this claim, I identify the shortcomings of both comparative egalitarianism and respectarianism, which is the most popular and plausible brand of noncomparativism. (shrink)

Bai Tongdong’s Against Political Equality argues for Confucian meritocracy over a pure democracy of equals. His arguments draw on a multiple modernities comparison between the Spring and Autumn Warring States period in China and early modernity in the West, and rest on a Mencian conception of human nature according to which humans are equal in moral potential but not in moral actuality. I argue that there is a crucial disanalogy between this Chinese early modernity and Western early modernity: the role (...) of capitalism. In a similarly comparativist and modernist spirit, drawing on B. R. Ambedkar and M. K. Gandhi, I argue that this disanalogy challenges both Bai’s critique of democracy and his positive account. Bai’s failure to take into account the role of capitalism in Western modernity raises a challenge to the explanatory power of his Mencian conception of human nature with regard to the failings of contemporary democracies, namely that capitalism fosters the relevant features of our moral psychology that cause those failings. Further, without that grounding assumption, Bai’s arguments against democracy cut equally against his Confucian meritocracy. The disanalogy also creates challenges for his positive proposal. Bai, I argue, provides an ideal theory of Confucian meritocracy at the same time as he provides a non-ideal theory of democracy. But, taking into account the non-ideal cultural and moral psychological features of capitalism, Bai’s Confucian meritocracy is likely to fall into an unjust and oligarchic hierarchy. (shrink)

Purpose (metatask) of the present work is to attempt to give a glance at the problem of existential and anthropo- logical risk caused by the contemporary man-made civilization from the perspective of comparison and confronta- tion of aesthetics, the substrate of which is emotional and metaphorical interpretation of individual subjective values and politics feeding by objectively rational interests of social groups. In both cases there is some semantic gap pre- sent between the represented social reality and its representation in perception (...) of works of art and in the political doctrines as well. Methodology of the research is evolutionary anthropological comparativistics. Originality of the conducted analysis comes to the following: As the antithesis to biological and social reductionism in interpretation of the phenomenon of bio-power it is proposed a co-evolutionary semantic model in accordance with which the de- scribed semantic gap is of the substantial nature related to the complex module organization of a consistent and adaptive human strategy consisting of three associated but independently functional modules (genetic, cultural and techno-rational). Evolutionary trajectory of all anthropogenesis components including civilization cultural and so- cial-political evolution is identified by the proportion between two macro variables – evolutionary effectiveness and evolutionary stability (sameness), i.e. preservation in the context of consequential transformations of some invari- ants of Homo sapiens species specificity organization. It should be noted that inasmuch as in respect to human, some modules of the evolutionary (adaptive) strategy assume self-reflection attributes, it would be more correctly to state about evolutionary correctness, i.e. correspondence to some perfection. As a result, the future of human nature de- pends not only on the rationalist principles of ethics of Homo species (the archaism of Jurgen Habermas), but also on the holistic and emotionally aesthetic image of «Self». In conclusion it should be noted that there is a causal link between the development of High Hume (NBIC) technologies and the totality of the trend in the anthropological phenomenon of bio-power that permeates all the available human existence in modern civilization. As a result, there is a transformation of a contemporary social (man-made) risk in the evolutionary civilization risk. (shrink)

In this paper a symmetry argument against quantity absolutism is amended. Rather than arguing against the fundamentality of intrinsic quantities on the basis of transformations of basic quantities, a class of symmetries defined by the Π-theorem is used. This theorem is a fundamental result of dimensional analysis and shows that all unit-invariant equations which adequately represent physical systems can be put into the form of a function of dimensionless quantities. Quantity transformations that leave those dimensionless quantities invariant are empirical and (...) dynamical symmetries. The proposed symmetries of the original argument fail to be both dynamical and empirical symmetries and are open to counterexamples. The amendment of the original argument requires consideration of the relationships between quantity dimensions. The discussion raises a pertinent issue: what is the modal status of the constants of nature which figure in the laws? Two positions, constant necessitism and constant contingentism, are introduced and their relationships to absolutism and comparativism undergo preliminary investigation. It is argued that the absolutist can only reject the amended symmetry argument by accepting constant necessitism. I argue that the truth of an epistemically open empirical hypothesis would make the acceptance of constant necessitism costly: together they entail that the facts are nomically necessary. (shrink)

In this article, the author carries on his research into critical bibliographic reviews of foreign biblical studies made by professors of Kyiv Theological Academy in the second half of the nineteenth and early twentieth century. In his analysis of the structure and topics of those reviews, the author spotlights how the European experience of biblical studies played a role in shaping of the Orthodox Biblical discourse in Kyiv Theological Academy. The European biblical studies of that period increasingly promoted the biblical (...) knowledge. Several leading intellectual centers were emerging as conceptual and methodological ‘camps’, including rationalistic, apologetic, and ‘moderate’ ones. Structurally, the foreign studies of Bible have been focusing on the origin, authorship, historicity, and authenticity of biblical books. Critical and apologetic interpretation strategies have been compared. The catalyzing effect was brought about by the text studies based on new critical editions of the Hebraic, Old Greek (LXX), and Greek New Testaments as well as new dictionaries and grammar books. Biblical studies were in pursuit of their proper place at the crossroads of theology and a wide range of historical, humanitarian and social sciences. Biblical studies were increasingly linked to current social and cognitive issues debated in the West. Remarkably, various biblical and non-biblical sources have been compared more and more frequently. Against this background, the sprouts of religious comparativism and early efforts of historical religious reconstructions have emerged. Finally, the comparison of historical and mythological elements in the Bible was the focal point of debates in the West for researchers of both the Old and the New Testaments. Critical bibliographic publications, in particular the large annual reviews of foreign literature, strongly illustrate that the Kyiv spiritual and academic biblical studies had been increasingly integrating in the global academic and theological dimension. (shrink)

Abstract: The present paper seeks to explore the emotional structures that make human beings afraid of death in solitude, the feelings that necessitate the imagining of a peopled death, a death accompanied by fellow humans, gods, or God. In order to do this I take up the works of two great thinkers of the East and the West, and place them on a comparativist spectrum. The discussion covers many areas, including the polytheistic imaginations of ancient Greece and eighth century India, (...) in the context of the complex interface of beauty and death in the thought of Shankaracharya, the great proponent of Advaita Vedanta in India, and Socrates, who, in the Platonic dialogues, presents a monism Shankara could have recognized well. I try to investigate the tension between decay and beauty which leads these philosophers towards a strict ascetic impulse. At the same time, I also argue that neither of them could exclude the beauty of this world altogether from their thought. Finally, I explore the ways in which we can imagine a beauty greater than death that does not let us logocentrically negate death but rather encompasses it. Rather than taking death as the closure of all possible beauty, as ultimate nothingness, can we envisage a beauty that drowns death in the sea of kalon envisioned by Diotima in the Symposium, or in the saundaryalahari, the flood of majestic beauty radiated by Shankaracharya’s Goddess? To explore these areas and to understand the interconnected issues of plurality, impermanence, beauty and truth, I draw on the twentieth century philosophers like Iris Murdoch and Sri Aurobindo as well as Socrates and Shankara. This paper finally embarks on an imaginative journey towards a peopled or crowded death, where gods or divinized humans accompany the dying person in the process of death as his/her “necessary others”(a la Adriana Cavarero). Author’s bio-note: Anway Mukhopadhyay is a doctoral research scholar at the Department of English, Banaras Hindu University, Varanasi, India. He is the author of Do You Love Me, Master?, The Place of Eros in the Master Slave Dialectic(Saarbrucken, Germany: Lambert Academic Publishing, 2010),and Bloom Again in Autumn, The Move towards an Empathetic Temporality in Yuri Medvedev’s “The Bride’s Room” (Munich: Grin Verlag, 2012) and has been published in reputed international journals in India, the USA and Australia. His areas of interest include Indian and Western philosophy, gender and literary and cultural theory. His current research centres round the polyvalent nuances of ‘planetary’ feminisms in our time. Email id: [email protected], [email protected] . (shrink)

The first part of this chapter defends the claim that the over-incarceration of disadvantaged social groups is unjust. Many arguments for penal reform are based on the unequal distribution of punishment, most notably disproportionate punishment of the poor and people of color. However, some philosophers use a noncomparative conception of desert to argue that the justice of punishment is independent of its distribution. On this view, which has significant influence in 14th Amendment jurisprudence, unequal punishment is not unjust. After detailing (...) the “noncomparativist challenge,” this chapter argues that Levinasian conceptions of desert enable a theory of penal justice according to which comparative considerations are essential. In so doing, it shows that the noncomparativist challenge can be met. The chapter concludes by considering whether Levinasian conceptions of desert and responsibility show members of socially advantaged groups to be more blameworthy for their wrongdoing than members of disadvantaged groups. (shrink)

In its etymology and in popular discourse, the term ‘avant-garde’ is commonly associated with a future temporality, while in art-historical discourse, it represents a tradition of modernist innovation, periodised as ‘historical avant-garde’ and ‘neo-avant-garde’. Since this historical periodisation was first established in the 1950s, the avant-garde’s futurity has been repeatedly disputed, bringing the very notion of an avant-garde into question. This thesis takes as its starting point the predicament of ‘an avant-garde after the avant-garde’ as a means to investigate the (...) philosophico-political implications of a historical temporality marked by ‘afterness’. Writing in critical dialogue with scholarship that has articulated the avant-garde as a notion of historical time, the thesis modifies the parameters of this scholarship by foregrounding the category of historicism, and by reformulating the avant-garde as a notion that both resists and inhabits historical periodisation. As a study at the disciplinary intersection of comparative literature and critical theory, 'Ahead of its Time' proceeds via close readings of selected theories of the avant-garde (German literary scholar Peter Bürger’s foundational Theory of the Avant-Garde in the 1970s; British art theorist John Roberts’ formulation of a ‘suspensive avant-garde’ in the twenty-first century; and the intellectual debates of the Italian circle Neoavanguardia in the 1960s), while also mobilising the critical resources available in the thought of Walter Benjamin. Through a non-linear, comparativist critical analysis that discusses these theories in, and as, a Benjaminian constellation, the thesis proposes the avant-garde as a relational, indexical category that is constitutively split between historical continuity and historical rupture. In this manner, 'Ahead of its Time' revisits the broader question of mediation between universality and particularity, and by recasting it in temporal terms, it advocates a chronopolitics of singularity, whereby the avant-garde’s split between continuity and rupture also reveals the ethically-necessary relationship between self-determination and contingency. (shrink)