This third 2021 issue of "SYMPHILOSOPHIE: International Journal of Philosophical Romanticism" contains a main dossier of new research articles guest edited by Leif Weatherby (New York University) and devoted to the topic of early German romanticism and science. In addition to the papers of this main section issue number 3 of SYMPHILOSOPHIE includes translations of primary sources and book reviews. All contents are freely available online.

The ML community recognizes the importance of anticipating and mitigating the potential negative impacts of benchmark research. In this position paper, we argue that more attention needs to be paid to areas of ethical risk that lie at the technical and scientific core of ML benchmarks. We identify overlooked structural similarities between human IQ and ML benchmarks. Human intelligence and ML benchmarks share similarities in setting standards for describing, evaluating and comparing performance on tasks relevant to intelligence. This enables us (...) to unlock lessons from feminist philosophy of science scholarship that need to be considered by the ML benchmark community. Finally, we outline practical recommendations for benchmark research ethics and ethics review. (shrink)

The most prominent theories of rights, the Will Theory and the Interest Theory, notoriously fail to accommodate all and only rights-attributions that make sense to ordinary speakers. The Kind-Desire Theory, Leif Wenar’s recent contribution to the field, appears to fare better in this respect than any of its predecessors. The theory states that we attribute a right to an individual if she has a kind-based desire that a certain enforceable duty be fulfilled. A kind-based desire is a reason (...) to want something which one has simply in virtue of being a member of a certain kind. Rowan Cruft objects that this theory creates a puzzle about the relation between rights and respect. In particular, if rights are not grounded in aspects of the particular individuals whose rights they are, how can we sustain the intuitive notion that to violate a right is to disrespect the right-holder? I present a contractualist account of respect which reconciles the Kind-Desire Theory with the intuition that rights-violations are disrespectful. On this account, respect for a person is a matter of acknowledging her legitimate authority to make demands on the will and conduct of others. And I argue that kind-based desires authorize a person to make demands even if they do not correspond to that person’s well-being or other non-relational features. (shrink)

This volume brings together a range of influential essays by distinguished philosophers and political theorists on the issue of global justice. Global justice concerns the search for ethical norms that should govern interactions between people, states, corporations and other agents acting in the global arena, as well as the design of social institutions that link them together. The volume includes articles that engage with major theoretical questions such as the applicability of the ideals of social and economic equality to the (...) global sphere, the degree of justified partiality to compatriots, and the nature and extent of the responsibilities of the affluent to address global poverty and other hardships abroad. It also features articles that bring the theoretical insights of global justice thinkers to bear on matters of practical concern to contemporary societies, such policies associated with immigration, international trade, and climate change. -/- Contents: Introduction; Part I Standards of Global Justice: (i) Assistance-Based Responsibilities to the Global Poor: Famine, affluence and mortality, Peter Singer; We don't owe them a thing! A tough-minded but soft-hearted view of aid to the faraway needy, Jan Narveson; Does distance matter morally to the duty to rescue? Frances Myrna Kamm. (ii) Contribution-Based Responsibilities to the Global Poor: 'Assisting' the global poor, Thomas Pogge; Should we stop thinking about poverty in terms of helping the poor?, Alan Patten; Poverty and the moral significance of contribution, Gerhard Øverland. (iii)Cosmopolitans, Global Egalitarians, and its Critics: The one and the many faces of cosmopolitanism, Catherine Lu; Cosmopolitan justice and equalizing opportunities, Simon Caney; The problem of global justice, Thomas Nagel; Against global egalitarianism, David Miller; Egalitarian challenges to global egalitarianism: a critique, Christian Barry and Laura Valentini. Part II Pressing Global Socioeconomic Issues: (i) Governing the Flow of People: Immigration and freedom of association, Christopher Wellman; Democratic theory and border coercion: no right to unilaterally control your own borders, Arash Abizadeh; Justice in migration: a closed borders utopia?, Lea Ypi. (ii) Climate Change: Global environment and international inequality, Henry Shue; Valuing policies in response to climate change: some ethical issues, John Broome; Saved by disaster? Abrupt climate change, political inertia, and the possibility of an intergenerational arms race, Stephen M. Gardiner; Polycentric systems for coping with collective action and global environmental change, Elinor Ostrom. (iii) International Trade: Responsibility and global labor justice, Iris Marion Young; Property rights and the resource curse, Leif Wenar; Fairness in trade I: obligations arising from trading and the pauper-labor argument, Mathias Risse; Name index. -/- See: www.ashgate.com/default.aspx?page=637&calctitle=1&pageSubject=483&sort=pubdate&forthcoming=1&title_i d=9958&edition_id=13385. (shrink)

The dissertation investigates whether virtue ethics can provide the normative ground for the justification of rights. Most justificatory accounts of rights consist in different explanations of the function of rights. On the view I will defend, rights have a plurality of functions and one of the main functions of rights is to make the right-holder more virtuous. The idea that the possession of rights leads to the development of virtues, called the function of virtue acquisition, is the core of a (...) virtue-based justification of rights elaborated in this dissertation. Based on Leif Wenar’s Kind-Desire Theory of rights and Nancy E. Snow’s Minimal Virtue of the Folk, I argue that there are two general types of rights, enabling rights and protective rights, and that both types are essential to the development of virtues. Enabling rights have the function of virtue acquisition because they allow the right-holder to strive for approximation of ideal role models while performing duties and other tasks. Such models are called heuristic models of virtues for they define what virtues are and how these virtues should be expressed in action. Some protective rights, namely promissory rights and the power-right to promise, behave like enabling rights when it comes to their ability to develop virtues. Other protective rights, especially children’s rights, make right-holders more virtuous via protecting their essential needs. The dissertation succeeds in elaborating the virtue-based justification of many rights, hence it suggests that people hold and should have rights because rights make them better people. (shrink)

Pogge and Wenar have recently argued that we are responsible for the persistence of the so-called ‘resource curse’. But their analyses are limited in important ways. I trace these limitations to their undue focus on the ways in which the international rules governing resource transactions undermine government accountability. To overcome the shortcomings of Pogge’s and Wenar’s analyses, I propose a normative framework organized around the social value of government responsiveness and discuss the implications of adopting this framework for (...) future normative assessment of the resource curse and our relationships to it. (shrink)

In this paper, I examine whether Wenar's Bloody Oil ( 2016) succeeds in providing a theory able to accommodate the statist commitment to peoples’ sovereignty without dismissing the cosmopolitan concern regarding a just global market. Contextualising Blood Oil within the broader debate on global justice and resource ownership, I focus on some specific aspects of Wenar’s Clean Trade scheme and explain why it comes to quite radical conclusions. Yet, if these conclusions are taken seriously, Clean Trade seems too (...) demanding from the point of view of a statist account of justice. For cosmopolitans, too, the lack of normative justification for any alleged national resource sovereignty might weaken this position, especially for those who might oppose arguments to justify different forms of resource ownership. I will therefore discuss two problems with Wenar’s theory. First, I will show that, in spite of its statist premises, Wenar’s radical conclusions hardly pass the test of anti-paternalism. Is the Clean Trade scheme able to accommodate the demand of pluralism emerging in the Society of Peoples? Second, I focus on an issue that is neglected in Wenar’s book and which refers directly to the normative basis of resources ownership. I argue that this is a crucial issue, especially in contexts where the traditional idea of national sovereignty is contested, which often occurs in resource-cursed societies. (shrink)

In this article, I use the expanded hohfeldian model presented by Wenar to argue that, according to Aristotle's theory of friendship, every bond of friendship that is based on utility or virtue creates duties and hohfeldian incidents between those who are friends. In section 1, I provide a quick presentation of Hohfeld's work and of Wenar's hohfeldian model. In section 2, I present my thesis about the creation of certain hohfeldian incidents and certain duties in virtue and utility (...) friendships as conceived by Aristotle. In section 3, I give a broad characterization of Aristotle's theory of friendship and of the three great kinds of friendship that he recognizes. In section 4, I defend the thesis that it is only in virtue and utility friendships that duties are created. In section 5, I specify what are the hohfeldian incidents created by these two kinds of friendship. In section 6, I specify the two ways in which, according to Aristotle, these incidents and duties might be created. In section 7, I conclude with a brief recapitulation of the argument. En este artículo utilizo el modelo hohfeldiano extendido, presentado por Wenar, para argumentar que, según la teoría de la amistad de Aristóteles, todo lazo de amistad basado en la utilidad o la virtud crea deberes e incidentes hohfeldianos entre aquellos que son amigos. En la sección 1 proporciono una presentación rápida de la obra de Hohfeld y del modelo hohfeldiano de Wenar. En la sección 2 presento mi tesis sobre la creación de ciertos incidentes hohfeldianos y ciertos deberes en las amistades basadas en la virtud y la utilidad tal como fueron concebidos por Aristóteles. En la sección 3 ofrezco una caracterización general de la teoría de la amistad de Aristóteles y de los tres grandes tipos de amistad que reconoce. En la sección 4 defiendo la tesis de que los deberes se crean solamente en las amistades basadas en la virtud y la utilidad. En la sección 5 especifico cuáles son los incidentes hohfeldianos creados por estos dos tipos de amistad. En la sección 6 especifico las dos maneras en que, según Aristóteles, podrían crearse estos incidentes y deberes. En la sección 7 concluyo con una breve recapitulación de la argumentación. (shrink)

Wesley Newcomb Hohfeld was an American jurist who published a series of articles between 1909 and 1917 that were very important for 20th century analytical philosophy of right. In these articles, Hohfeld analyzed how jurists and judges alike use the word ‘right’ to speak of the rights of groups and individuals. Since he presented his articles, it has been commonplace among ‘hohfeldian specialists’ to distinguish rights into four groups: privileges, or claims, powers and immunities. This paper has four sections. In (...) section I, I present Hohfeld’s notion of privilege and point to a difficulty that has long been known by specialists, namely, that there are actually two significantly different legal relations that this notion is supposed to cover. In section II, I analyze and criticize the way (Wenar 2005) proposes we should define these two legal relations. In section III, I do the same with suggestion proposed by (Moritz 1960, 1073). In section IV, I present my own suggestion about how we should understand them. (shrink)

All’interno dell’essere umano si situa, forse, una delle facoltà più peculiari, sulla quale sono stati costruiti interi sistemi morali e giuridici: la libertà. La relazione si propone di cogliere il libero arbitrio come spazio liminale dal quale emerge in modo singolare l’inscindibile rapporto tra le cosiddette scienze dure e la filosofia, che sin dai suoi albori si è occupata di questo argomento. Si analizzeranno in particolare le ricadute che hanno avuto sulla riflessione del libero agire umano le scoperte della fisica (...) classica prima e il notevole cambio di prospettiva fornito dalla meccanica quantistica dopo. Fine ultimo del contributo è quello di individuare un approccio sintetico alla questione del libero arbitrio. (shrink)

Recensione a: Adriano Pessina (a cura di), Vulnus. Persone nella pandemia, Mimesis (I nodi del tempo n. 1), Milano 2022, pp. 171.