In most of the introductions to Rawls and contemporary contractarianism, Rawls is seen as the representative of Kantian contractarianism. He is understood as inheriting a contractarian tradition that can be traced back to Kant and which has inspired followers such as Barry and Scanlon. This paper argues that the label does not fit Rawls. While a Kantian contractarian would presuppose a monistic conception of practical reason, Rawls is a hybrid contractarian who presupposes a dual conception. (...) I shall first argue that the way in which a contractarian model is labeled is determined by its conception of practical reason. Then I show that Rawls and Kantian contractarians assume different conceptions of practical reason, and therefore should be seen as belonging to two strands of thought. I further argue that, although Rawls acknowledges his intellectual affiliation with Kant, he cannot be considered a Kantian contractarian in the commonly understood way. In his Lectures on the History of Moral Philosophy, Rawls interprets Kant as endorsing a hybrid contractarian model that is similar to his. By understanding Rawls as a hybrid contractarian and not confusing his philosophical project with that of Kantian contractarians, Rawls’s contribution to the history of contractarianism can be better evaluated. (shrink)

The topic of Chief Executive Officer (CEO) compensation has been a focus of interest for many years. The purpose of this article is to explore the ethical dimensions of various generally accepted theories of CEO renumeration. We argue that a contractarian approach, based on the Kantian ethical framework, can be used to augment the existing contingent pay models.While the neoclassical economic model of the firm views the maximization of the shareholders'' wealth as the sole responsibility of top management, (...) a contractarian approach regards the balancing of various stakeholders'' interests as the primary task of top management. Ethical problems emerge when there are divergent, yet equally justifiable interests which compete in order to channel organizational resources to meet their own needs. In this situation, given the inherent ambiguities and ever present possibilities of multiple perspectives, it may not always be feasible to provide a categorical answer to the question of whether the CEO''s decisions are ethical. We suggest that a broad interpretation of the neoclassical theory of the firm, one that is grounded in Kantian and contractarian ethics, can serve as a basis for a reconciliation of different theories of executive compensation. (shrink)

Since the ancient Greeks, philosophers have often mounted arguments for political or moral conclusions by invoking the idea of a ‘social contract’, either between the people and the ruler, or among the people themselves, or both. The contractarian form of argument became popular in the seventeenth century, and its popularity continues to this day. Advocates of this approach tell us to resolve answers to moral and political issues by asking what a group of rational persons could all agree to, (...) or, alternatively, what such people would be unreasonable to reject. (shrink)

I critically discuss contemporary work in African, i.e., sub-Saharan, moral philosophy that has been written in English. I begin by providing an overview of the profession, after which I consider some of the major issues in normative ethics, then discuss a few of the more noteworthy research in applied ethics, and finally take up the key issues in meta-ethics. My aim is to highlight discussions that should be of interest to an ethicist working anywhere in the world, focusing on ideas (...) characteristic of the sub-Saharan region that are under-appreciated not merely for the purpose of comparative ethics, but also for substantive ethical argumentation. In particular, I maintain that there are kinds of communitarian and vitalist approaches to morality commonly held by sub-Saharan philosophers that international scholars should take seriously as genuine rivals to utilitarian, Kantian, contractarian, and care-oriented outlooks that dominate contemporary Euro-American discussion of ethically right action. (shrink)

Fifty years ago John Dewey asked: "What is freedom and why is it prized?" Charles Sherover raises that question again and answers it with the help of the theoretical traditions of phenomenology, existentialism, American pragmatism, and British idealism, which he relates to the traditions of civic-spirited republicanism from Greek antiquity to the American Founding. His ambitious presentation of a "systematically developed public philosophy" confronts a world experiencing an "accommodation with the universal appeal of freedom," yet one still lacking theoretical clarity (...) about the grounds of that appeal and the character of the institutions that respond to it. Sherover's is a timely and novel defense of liberalism that exposes weaknesses in contemporary liberal thought and practice, attempts to define a new way between the libertarian, Kantian contractarian, and communitarian alternatives that dominate discussion today, draws learnedly on a wide range of sources in the Western heritage of political and moral reflection in this effort, and grounds its critical and positive discussions in an original theory of freedom that employs a Heideggerian analysis of the finite temporal horizon of human existence, with its dual character of dependence on a determinate past and openness to an indeterminate future. (shrink)

Because contractarians see justice as mutual advantage, they hold that justice can be rationally grounded only when each can expect to gain from it. John Rawls seems to avoid this feature of contractarianism by fashioning the parties to the contract as Kantian agents whose personhood grounds their claims to justice. But Rawls also endorses the Humean idea that justice applies only if people are equal in ability. It would seem to follow from this idea that dependent persons (such as (...) the disabled) lack claims of justice. It appears, then, that the Kantian and Humean themes in Rawls conflict. I present a reading of Rawls that resolves this tension between the Kantian and Humean themes. The first theme, I argue, allows Rawls to maintain that persons as such are owed justice regardless of their ability to engage in social cooperation. The second theme, I argue, allows him to retain Hume's connection between justice and reciprocity, but confines the reciprocity condition to relations among nondependents. I conclude that Rawls's approach permits him to rebut recent criticisms leveled by disability theorists and others who claim that his theory excludes dependents. (shrink)

The history of contractarian moral theory is long and varied. It includes the classic social contract theories of Hobbes (1651), Hume (1739/1740), and Kant (1785) as well as modern versions of these theories, such as those of Gauthier (1986), Scanlon (1998), Darwall (2006), and Southwood (2010). In Minimal Morality: A Multilevel Social Contract Theory (2018), I continue this tradition by developing a ‘multilevel social contract theory’ that combines Humean, Hobbesian, and Kantian moral features. In this article, I reply (...) to comments by Fred D’Agostino, John Thrasher, Christopher W. Morris, and Peter Vanderschraaf. I am deeply grateful for these commentators’ constructive and engaging comments that, in their own way, shed light on core assumptions and features of the theory. Due to space restrictions, I focus on what I consider to be the main criticisms and have organized my responses thematically. I hope that doing so will also help readers who are less familiar with my work to understand the relevance of multilevel social contract theory for morally diverse societies. (shrink)

Do any needs defensibly make claims on anyone? If so, which needs and whose needs can defensibly do this? What are the grounds for our responsibilities to meet others' needs, when we have such responsibilities? The distinguished contributors to this volume consider these questions as they evaluate the moral force of needs. They approach questions of obligation and moral importance from a variety of different theoretical perspectives, including contractarian, Kantian, Aristotelian, rights-based, egalitarian, liberal, and libertarian perspectives.

This book develops a novel multilevel social contract theory that, in contrast to existing theories in the liberal tradition, does not merely assume a restricted form of reasonable moral pluralism, but is tailored to the conditions of deeply morally pluralistic societies which may be populated by liberal moral agents, nonliberal moral agents, and, according to the traditional understanding of morality, nonmoral agents alike. The book draws on the history of the social contract tradition, especially the work of Hobbes, Hume, Kant, (...) Rawls, and Gauthier, as well as on the work of some of the critics of this tradition, such as Sen and Gaus. The two-level contractarian theory holds that morality in its best contractarian version for the conditions of deeply morally pluralistic societies entails Humean, Hobbesian, and Kantian moral properties. The theory defines the minimal behavioral restrictions that are necessary to ensure, compared to violent conflict resolution, mutually beneficial peaceful long-term cooperation in deeply morally pluralistic societies. The theory minimizes the problem of compliance for morally diverse societies by maximally respecting the interests of all members of society. Despite its ideal nature, the theory is, in principle, applicable to the real world and, for the conditions described, most promising for securing mutually beneficial peaceful long-term cooperation in a world in which a fully just society, due to moral diversity, is unattainable. If Rawls’ intention was to carry the traditional social contract argument to a higher level of abstraction, then the two-level contractarian theory brings it back down to earth. (shrink)

At two fronts I defend my 1994 article. I argue that differences between Confucian jen ethics and feminist care ethics do not preclude their shared commonalities in comparison with Kantian, utilitarian, and contractarian ethics, and that Confucians do care. I also argue that Confucianism is capable of changing its rules to reflect its renewed understanding of jen, that care ethics is feminist, and that similarities between Confucian and care ethics have significant implications.

Most contemporary philosophers accept Kant's view1 that the central question of morality is what ought I to do. This gives choice a pivotal role, for choice is what one faces when the question has to be answered. Since what is chosen is an action, this view of morality—I shall call it the current view —is action-orientated. And since actions are directed towards people, the current view stresses altruism and universalizability. Morality is thus supposed to be activist and social. It is (...) a sensible, public-spirited enterprise in which responsible members of society will participate because they realize that reason requires it. Kantians, Utilitarians, Contractarians, and Marxists disagree, of course, about the nature of the relation between reason and morality. But they agree that choice intending to lead to action contributing to the welfare of others is the central concern of morality. (shrink)

Kant's political thinking is predominantly evaluated in contractarian terms, though recent contributions have also emphasized the natural law influence on him. This paper argues that the assimilation of Kant into either tradition is problematic. An analysis of his account of political obligation cannot ignore the distinctiveness of Kant's general philosophical framework. Two recurrent Kantian themes are crucial to a reconstruction of his political argument. The first is the tension between freedom and causality, or nature. The second is the (...) role of reflective judgment in practical reasoning. The paper analyses Kant's property argument, and his related account of political obligation, from the perspective of these Kantian themes. Kant's ‘antinomy of Right’, formulated in the context of his property argument, is interpreted as a conflict between freedom and nature, and in analogy with the third antinomy of the Critique of Pure Reason. Kant's obscure theorem, the lex permissiva, is central to his ‘solution’ to the antinomy. The theorem is best understood as a reflective practical judgment, through which agents are brought to acknowledge that their obligations of justice towards one another are a direct entailment of their respective claims to property. The connection between property rights and political obligations is thus intrinsic, not extrinsic; the acknowledgement of that connection an act of reflective judgment, not contractual. (shrink)

The publicity of a moral conception is a central idea in Kantian and contractarian moral theory. Publicity carries the idea of general acceptability of principles through to social relations. Without publicity of its moral principles, the intuitive attractiveness of the contractarian ideal seems diminished. For it means that moral principles cannot serve as principles of practical reasoning and justification among free and equal persons. This article discusses the role of the publicity assumption in Rawls’s and Scanlon’s contractualism. (...) I contend that a regard for publicity and a moral conception’s potential to provide a public basis for justification and agreement account for much of the evolution of Rawls’s account of justice after A Theory of Justice . I also discuss whether contractualism can provide a basis for justification and general agreement under the social conditions that it endorses. I contend that it cannot, and conclude with a discussion showing why this should not be a problem for contractualism. Despite appearances, contractualism is a distinctive form of contractarianism, substantially different from Rawls’s position and the social contract tradition out of which it evolved. Key Words: contractarianism • contractualism • John Rawls • public justification • T.M. Scanlon • justice. (shrink)

Part I: WHAT IS ETHICS? Plato: Socratic Morality: Crito. Suggestions for Further Reading. Part II: ETHICAL RELATIVISM VERSUS ETHICAL OBJECTIVISM. Herodotus: Custom is King. Thomas Aquinas: Objectivism: Natural Law. Ruth Benedict: A Defense of Ethical Relativism. Louis Pojman: A Critique of Ethical Relativism. Gilbert Harman: Moral Relativism Defended. Alan Gewirth: The Objective Status of Human Rights. Suggestions for Further Reading. Part III: MORALITY, SELF-INTEREST AND FUTURE SELVES. Plato: Why Be Moral? Richard Taylor: On the Socratic Dilemma. David Gauthier: Morality and (...) Advantage. Gregory Kavka: A Reconciliation Project. Derek Parfit: Later Selves and Moral Principles. Bernard Williams: Persons, Character, and Morality. Suggestions for Further Reading. Part IV: VALUE. Jeremy Bentham: Classical Hedonism. Robert Nozick: The Experience Machine. Richard Taylor: Value and the Origin of Right and Wrong. Friedrich Nietzsche: The Transvaluation of Values. Derek Parfit: What Makes Someone’s Life Go Best? Thomas Nagel: Value: The View from Nowhere. Suggestions for Further Reading. Part V: UTILITARIANISM AND CONSEQUENTIALISM. John Stuart Mill: Utilitarianism. J.J.C. Smart: Extreme and Restricted Utilitarianism. Kai Nielsen: Against Moral Conservatism. Bernard Williams: Against Utilitarianism. John Hospers: Rule-Utilitarianism. Robert Nozick: Side Constraints. Peter Singer: Famine, Affluence and Morality. Suggestions for Further Reading. Part VI: KANTIAN AND DEONTOLOGICAL SYSTEMS. Immanuel Kant: Foundation for the Metaphysic of Morals. W. D. Ross: What Makes Right Acts Right? Onora O’Neill: Kantian Formula of the End in Itself and World Hunger. Thomas Nagel: Moral Luck. Philippa Foot: Morality as a System of Hypothetical Imperatives. Judith Jarvis Thomson: Killing, Letting Die, and the Trolley Problem. Suggestions for Further Reading. Part VII: CONTRACTARIAN ETHICAL SYSTEMS. Thomas Hobbes: The Leviathan. David Gauthier: Why Contractarianism? John Rawls: Contractualism: Justice as Fairness. T.M. Scanlon: Contractualism and Utilitarianism. Suggestions for Further Reading. Part VIII: VIRTUE-BASED ETHICAL SYSTEMS. Aristotle: The Ethics of Virtue. Bernard Mayo: Virtue and the Moral Life. William Frankena: A Critique of Virtue-Based Ethics. Walter Schaller: Are Virtues No More than Dispositions to Obey Moral Rules? Alasdair MacIntyre: The Nature of the Virtues. Susan Wolf: Moral Saints. Louis P. Pojman: In Defense of Moral Saints. Suggestions for Further Reading. Part IX: THE FACT/VALUE PROBLEM: METAETHICS IN THE TWENTIETH CENTURY. David Hume: On Reason and the Emotions: The Fact/Value Distinction. G. E. Moore: Non-Naturalism. A. J. Ayer: Emotivism. R. M. Hare: Prescriptivism: The Structure of Ethics and Morals. Geoffrey Warnock: The Object of Morality. Suggestions for Further Reading. Part X: MORAL REALISM AND THE CHALLENGE OF SKEPTICISM. J.L. Mackie: The Subjectivity of Values. Jonathan Harrison: A Critique of Mackie’s Error Theory. Gilbert Harman: Moral Nihilism. Nicholas Sturgeon: Moral Explanations. Bernard Williams: Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy. Bruce Russell: Two Forms of Ethical Skepticism. Michael Smith: A Defense of Moral Realism. Suggestions for Further Reading. Part XI: RELIGION AND ETHICS. Plato: Morality and Religion. Immanuel Kant: God and Immortality as Necessary Postulates of Morality. George Mavrodes: Religious and the Queerness of Morality. Kai Nielson: Ethics Without God. Suggestions for Further Reading. Part XII: CONTEMPORARY CHALLENGES TO CLASSICAL ETHICAL THEORY. Part A. Sociobiology and the Question of Moral Responsibility. Charles Darwin: Ethics and the Descent of Man. E.O.Wilson: Sociobiology and Ethics. Michael Ruse: Evolution and Ethics: The Sociobiological Approach. Elliot Sober: Prospects for an Evolutionary Ethics. J.L. Mackie: The Law of the Jungle, Evolution and Morality. Suggestions for Further Readingon Sociobiology. Part B. The Challenge of Determinism to Moral Responsibility and Desert. Galen Strawson: The Impossibility of Moral Responsibility. Louis Pojman: Free Will, Determinism, and Moral Responsibility:A Response to Galen Strawson. Richard Taylor: A Libertarian Defense of Free Will and Responsibility. Suggestions for Further Reading on Moral Responsibility. Glossary of Ethical Terms. (shrink)

Is evil a distinct moral concept? Or are evil actions just very wrong actions? Some philosophers have argued that evil is a distinct moral concept. These philosophers argue that evil is qualitatively distinct from ordinary wrongdoing. Other philosophers have suggested that evil is only quantitatively distinct from ordinary wrongdoing. On this view, evil is just very wrong. In this paper I argue that evil is qualitatively distinct from ordinary wrongdoing. The first part of the paper is critical. I argue that (...) Luke Russell’s attempt to show that evil is only quantitatively distinct from ordinary wrongdoing fails. Russell’s argument fails because it is based on an implausible criterion for determining whether two concepts are qualitatively distinct. I offer a more plausible criterion and argue that based on this criterion evil and wrongdoing are qualitatively distinct. To help make my case, I sketch a theory of evil which makes a genuinely qualitative distinction between evil and wrongdoing. I argue that we cannot characterize evil as just very wrong on plausible conceptions of evil and wrongdoing. I focus on act-consequentialist, Kantian, and contractarian conceptions of wrongdoing. (shrink)

In recent decades, revisionist philosophers have radically challenged the orthodox just war theory championed by Michael Walzer in the 1970s. This review considers two new contributions to the debate, Benbaji and Statman’s War by Agreement and Ripstein’s Kant and the Law of War, which aim to defend the traditional war convention against the revisionist attack. The review investigates the two books’ respective contractarian and Kantian foundations for the war convention, their contrast with the revisionist challenge, and their points (...) of disagreement. Building on the responses to Ripstein in the edited collection, The Public Uses of Coercion and Force, and providing an overview of the broader debate, the review offers an analysis of the two books’ positions on the relationship between the morality and laws of war, on just cause and the crime of aggression, and on the equality between just and unjust combatants. (shrink)

The primary goal of this monograph is to justify the possibility of building a hybrid theory of normative ethics which can combine ethical consequentialism, deontology and virtue ethics. The aim of the book is to demonstrate the possibility of constructing a synthetic theory from ethical traditions that are generally considered to be contradictory. In addition, I propose an outline of an original theory which tries to carry out such a synthesis. I call it Institutional Function Consequentialism. The justification for a (...) hybrid theory of normative ethics requires the resolution of certain meta-ethical issues. I discuss them in part 1.1. After a brief overview of my research aims I consider the answer to the following questions: “What kind of meta-ethical beliefs must we assume for normative ethics?” and "Why should we build ethical theories?". I also discuss the various forms of ethical scepticism, which should be rejected if we develop a hybrid theory of normative ethics. I also describe possible methods of justifying any ethical theory. At the end of part 1.1 I explain that the best method for justifying any ethical theory is the method of wide reflective equilibrium. In parts 1.2, 1.3 and 1.4 I analyse three main types of normative ethics which are considered to be competitive: consequentialism, deontology, and virtue ethics. Part 1.2 is about consequentialism and its difference between utilitarianism and teleological theories. I also present the main reasons for the popularity of consequentialism. In part 1.3 I define deontology, present its variations and show important benefits that motivate its continuous growth. In part 1.4 I discuss virtue ethics, which is often referred as the viable alternative to consequentialism and deontology. If we want to build any new ethical theory, first we should describe the problems of the old ones. For this reason, in chapter 2 I describe the most important arguments against ethical consequentialism, and in chapter 3 I explain the difficulties of deontology. Critical remarks on virtue ethics are considered in part 1.4. The last two chapters directly concern the main aim of the monograph. Because in chapter 3 I show that deontology suffers from a number of problems such as the paradox of deontology, in chapters 4 and 5 I present only consequentialist versions of hybrid theories. These versions try to avoid the common pleas of utilitarianism and combine the advantages of opponents to utilitarianism. I answer the question (4.1) "What is hybrid consequentialism?" and briefly describe (4.2) the most important examples of hybrid theories by others. I discuss the prerogatives without restrictions idea by Samuel Scheffler, rule consequentialism by Brad Hooker, Kantian consequentialism by Richard M. Hare, David Cummiskey and Derek Parfit and consequentializing procedure proposed by Douglas W. Portmore. In the last chapter I present a new hybrid version of consequentialism that I call Institutional Function Consequentialism. I start from the thesis (5.1) that traditional meta-ethics of analytic philosophy incorrectly defines the main field of its research. Rather than focusing on the philosophy of language and metaphysics it should try to answer one question: “What should morality and ethics be for?”. Therefore I introduce an original methodology for meta-ethics that I call the Functional Model of Analysis (FMA). It is a meta-ethical framework in which the fundamental questions concern the practical functions of normative domains such as morality and ethics and the most rational way of achieving them. FMA is meta-ethical project that (a) explains the persistence of fundamental ethical disagreement among experts, (b) sets the background for explaining or justifying the correct structure of the ethical theory, (c) gives the possibility to create a hybrid theory of normative ethics. In part 5.2 I formulate a generalized argument against various popular theories of normative ethics which states that most of the popular theories are too narrow and one-sided, causing permanent dispute between them. There are many distinct practical functions of morality that are usually based on different types of normative theories such as Aristotelian ethics, utilitarianism, contractarianism and contractualism. In order to remove these conflicts, the correct ethical theory should try to take into account all of these relevant features of moral life. Unfortunately, most ethical theories are mono-functional. This means that their supporters consciously or unconsciously (1) recognize or accept only one genuine practical function, (2) think that this one practical function overrides all other practical functions or (3) try to reduce all practical functions to the one that is chosen. In part 5.2 I present a description and justification of a new normative account that I call Hybrid Function Consequentialism. The formal scheme of this consequentialism can be summarized in the following way: we should act according to some important focal points P1…Pn with contents C1…Cn that are selected on the basis of considerations about which kind of P with C will bring the best realization of the best mix of normative functions F1...Fn. In the next part (5.2.2) I present the new way of “consequentializing” particular theories of normative ethics by applying the scheme of Hybrid Function Consequentialism. As an example of the use of this procedure, I formulate perfectionist virtue consequentialism, contractarian institution consequentialism, contractualist rule consequentialism and consequentialism of salvation. In part 5.3 I formulate an original theoretical concept that I call Institutional Function Consequentialism (IFC). It is a hybrid theory that is based on the previously described Functional Model of Analysis and a reflection on the role of institutions in modern developed societies. IFC claims that we should always act according to some rules, virtues, motives and intentions that constitute the homeostasis of normative institutions whose internalization by the overwhelming majority of each new generation has maximum expected value in terms of the best realization of the equilibrium of the most important practical functions of normative domains. Responsibility and sanctions related to wrongful actions should be dependent on the particular institution whose standards have been violated. IFC has several unique features which are described and justified in part 5.3. It is a form of hybrid consequentialism – it mixes features of consequentialism, deontology and virtue ethics. It does this on three different levels: justification, structure and content. The main focal point of the theory is not rules or virtues, but normative institutions. Values to be optimized in the framework of consequentialism are not "happiness", "well-being" or "preferences", but the fulfilment of normative functions. IFC is not limited to the field of ethics only, but it is a meta-normative account of justification for an entire social order which is comprised of a number of different institutions. It also assumes a specific, circular relationship between practical ethics (e.g. research on such important issues as civil disobedience, fair distribution of wealth, philosophy of punishment or autonomy of conscience), and the content of the general rules that may constitute the optimal homeostasis of institutions. It rejects the simplistic belief that moral thinking is based solely on deductive implications from general ethical principles or meta-ethical beliefs. (shrink)

The responsibilities of the manager have been examined through several lenses in the business ethics literature: Kantian (Bowie, 1999 ), contractarian (Donaldson and Dunfee, 1999 ), consequentialist (Friedman, 1970 ), and virtue ethics (Solomon, 1992 ), to name just four. This paper explores what the ethical responsibilities of the manager would look like if viewed through an evolutionary lens. Discussion is focused on the impact of evolutionary thinking on the process of moral reasoning, rather than on the sources (...) or the substance of morality. The conclusion is reached that the evolutionary lens supports the view that moral luck plays an important role in how we assign ethical responsibilities. (shrink)

Over twenty years after the publication of A Theory of Justice (1971), Rawls avowed that it was an error in Theory to describe a theory of justice as part of the theory of rational choice. This paper elucidates the reasons why Rawls had to make such an avowal of the error in connection with his contractarian rational deduction project of morality, i.e., rational contractarianism. Two major issues are involved here. They are about the construction of the original position and (...) the maximin derivation of the two principles of justice. Because of the moral irrelevancy of rationality in Hobbes’ model, Rawls tries to construct a fair original position. Hence Rawls’ rational contractarianism turns out rationality cum fairness model. However, this model of Rawls’ commits the circularity of moral assumptionsprior to rationality, which might be rationally arbitrary. Furthermore, because of its highly conservative psychological attitude of risk-aversion, Rawls cannot show the superior rationality in the maximin strategic derivation of the two principles of justice over the other strategies. These are the reasons why Rawls had to admit the error. After the avowal of the error, Rawls shifted to Kantian conception of free and equal moral persons for the justificatory device of his theory of justice. Several polemical issues around the Kantian conception are discussed and adjudicated. (shrink)

This dissertation relates the philosophy of David Hume to the current debate over the nature and foundations of liberalism. The debate is often described as pitting neo-Kantians such as John Rawls against their contextualist critics, such as Michael Sandel, Charles Taylor, Michael Walzer and Richard Rorty. The thesis of the dissertation is that Hume addresses the issues raised by the debate, and offers resolutions of them more plausible than any of the current alternatives. Four issues are identified and treated in (...) succeeding chapters: the nature of the self, the role of contractarian arguments in justification, the nature of justice, and the place of democracy in liberal theory. Hume begins with certain minimal and plausible universalist assumptions about human nature and the material conditions of human existence. Within these, however, he sees convention and culture as the decisive factors in understanding justice in any particular society. Hume's "thin universalism," I argue, offers a middle way between the universalism of the neo-Kantians and the contextualism of their critics. (shrink)

In this new study of Rousseau, Levine presents a Kantian reading of the Social Contract. By attempting to reveal Rousseau’s anticipation of such Kantian themes as moral right and obligation the author’s purpose has been "to produce a Kantian reading of The Social Contract, a reading that emphasizes the many respects in which Rousseau anticipates Kant and motivates his investigations in moral philosophy". This purported similarity has been noted previously by thinkers such as Hegel and Cassirer. The (...) book also develops the theme that the solution to the conflict between moral autonomy and political authority is the main issue in The Social Contract. Because Rousseau apparently "grasped his conflict better than either Hobbes or Locke" he was able to anticipate Marx’s critique of the contractarian tradition. Consequently, Rousseau’s political philosophy underlies the "deep structure" of contemporary mentality, and continues to dominate our own sense of self, society, and being-in-the-world. While the main issues in Kant’s moral philosophy—autonomy/heteronomy, person/thing, rule of reason/heteronomous irrationalism—are present in ovo in Rousseau, the author warns us of crucial differences between the two thinkers, for example, in Kant the notion of our being forced to our own freedom is absent. But both thinkers share the belief that any conception of the state’s function as merely external coercion or coordination is sub-rational. Also, Kant’s conception of moral autonomy located in the de jure kingdom of political ends is anticipated in Rousseau’s attempt to direct society to the norm of the general will as its legitimate political end. In sum, Levine’s book, while drawing from the previous work of Althusser, avoids the usual Marxist concept manipulation, and gives us an interesting addition to Rousseau scholarship.—H.N.T. (shrink)

In this thesis I consider two common, though directly opposed, interpretations of Kantian morality. According to what I call "the other-regarding interpretation," Kantian morality is primarily about the regulation of human interaction. According to what I call "the private and internal interpretation," Kantian morality is primarily self-regarding since what chiefly matters, on this view, is adopting moral motives. I argue that both interpretations rest on a failure to understand Kant's distinction between ethics and justice , a distinction (...) which he introduces in The Metaphysics of Morals, on which I primarily focus. As I interpret this distinction, ethics addresses the question about the supreme individual good , whereas justice addresses the question how to make possible the coexistence of the freedom of action of a plurality of agents who pursue their personal ends. I argue that the other-regarding interpretation tends to reduce morality to justice , whereas the internal and private interpretation reduces morality to ethics and cannot accommodate Kantian justice as part of morality. I focus most of my attention on the former view because it has been significantly more influential in recent debates. Against this view, I argue that ethics, on Kant's account, is about the pursuit of the supreme individual good , and not about the regulation of human interaction. The tendency to reduce morality to justice is manifest in the thesis that the justification of principles of personal morality rest upon an agreement as well as in a certain version of the thesis of the priority of the right over the good. Both theses are present in the work of Jurgen Habermas. The use of agreement is common among followers of John Rawls's who attempt to extend his Contractarian justification of principles of justice to the domain of personal morality. Such an extension, I argue, presupposes an understanding of personal morality by analogy with justice. Paradoxically, these two theses are regarded as "Kantian," though they have contributed to the distortion in recent debates of what I argue is central to Kant's ethics. (shrink)

This is intended to be a foundational study in what the author claims is a new branch of ethics, "genethics," which has as its distinctive subject matter three sorts of questions: Should some human being or group of human beings come into existence? If so, how many? Of these, what should they be like? Heyd maintains that these questions are posed for the first time, or in a distinctive way, because of developments in biotechnology, and that they cannot be resolved (...) within any of the major types of ethical theory. Contractarian theory is useless, for either we include future generations as parties to the contract or not: if we do, we suppose their existence and beg the question; if we do not, then we are bound to appeal to noncontractarian considerations. Kantian theory obliges us to treat persons as ends, but genethics is concerned with the prior question of whether there should be persons to treat thus. Moreover, principles of respect and autonomy, as well as the categorical imperative, seem to have no natural application to genethic cases. Utilitarianism both in its total- and average-welfare maximizing forms is beset with familiar difficulties. Heyd mentions Aristotelian virtue ethics only to dismiss it as a viewpoint "which cannot be of much help in the direct analysis of procreation". This is odd, however, since Aristotle gives ample attention to issues of justice and friendship across generations. (shrink)

Since Peter Singer’s Animal Liberation, many philosophers have addressed the ethics of our relations with other animals with skill and insight. By and large, they have argued that something is badly wrong and therefore in need of radical reform, though there have been dissenters, like Peter Carruthers, in The Animals Issue. One feature many such works have had in common is the reliance of their authors upon contentious theoretical stances. There have been utilitarian, Kantian, and contractarian arguments, with (...) theses and arguments in philosophy of language, philosophy of mind, and cognitive science called upon for supporting evidence. -/- Such an approach is hazardous to the extent that it makes it appear that persons interested in the issue must first be convinced of one or more complicated and controversial philosophical theories, and must also follow and agree with a further abstruse line of argument supposed to lead from the theories to practical conclusions. Especially in applied ethics, where the aim is, in part, to improve our practice, the heavily theoretical strategy runs the risk of making the discussion academic in the worst sense of the term, something of interest only to specialists. It would be an important gain if the theory-intensive approach to animal ethics could be avoided, without compromising rigor or substantive argument. (shrink)

Habermas's collection of essays "The Future of Human Nature" is of particular interest for two sorts of reasons. For those interested in bioethics, it contains a genuinely new set of arguments for placing serious restrictions on using prenatal genetic technologies to “enhance” offspring. And for those interested in Habermas’s moral philosophy, it contains a number of new developments in his “discourse ethics”—not the least of which is a willingness to engage in applied ethics at all. -/- The real key to (...) Habermas’s argument is that human personhood and moral agency presuppose certain modes of relating to oneself that are threatened by the asymmetrical way in which genetic enhancements would presumably work. Thus, instead of taking up and then extending familiar normative concerns about unequal opportunities or the criteria for moral personhood, Habermas believes that the emerging technologies of genetic enhancement demand genuinely new arguments, and he proposes to focus on the effects of genetic programming on whether the agent can consider herself free and equal—effects, that is, regarding what one might call the reflexive attitudinal preconditions for moral agency. -/- Like contractarians and Kantians more generally, Habermas faces difficulties accommodating the intuition that we might have obligations toward potential persons. The difficulty is particularly pronounced in the case of Habermas’s “discourse theory of morality,” since it construes the moral point of view in terms of processes of deliberation among all those affected by the norm at issue which the participants consider in the deliberative process to be open, fair, and inclusive. Future generations do not fit neatly into this deliberative process, nor do prepersonal humans. Moral norms adjudicated in such discourse clearly affect their interests, but they cannot themselves participate in the discourse. In the past, Habermas and other “discourse ethicists” have tried to address this worry by introducing “advocatory discourses.” But this move threatens to undo a distinctive, appealing feature of Habermas’s moral theory: the pragmatist insistence on the innovative, critical, unpredictable discourse generated by actual participants in discourse and the refusal (contra Rawls, in particular) to rely on hypothetical representatives. -/- In The Future of Human Nature, Habermas ventures a different strategy,focused on expanding what he calls the “ethical” domain, which differs from the “moral” domain in being a matter of a community’s articulation of its core values and conception of the good. Previously, Habermas distinguished “ethical-existential” and “ethical-political” domains, as a matter of who an individual or a community, respectively, is and wants to be. In the present book, Habermas makes the remarkable move of introducing the category of the “species-ethical,” which is supposed to be the domain of questions raised by the human species as a whole about the question of what it is to be human. This theoretical move extends further steps Habermas had already taken in speaking of ethical solidarity within the global community. -/- . (shrink)

Kant is often regarded as one of the founding fathers of modern liberal democracy. His political theory reaches its climax in the ground-breaking work, Perpetual Peace (1795), which sets out the basic framework for a world federation of states united by a system of international law. What is less well known is that two years earlier, in his Religion within the Bounds of Bare Reason (1793/1794), Kant had postulated a very different, explicitly religious path to the politics of peace: he (...) presents the idea of an “ethical community” as a necessary requirement for humanity to become “satisfactory to God”. While many recent scholars have noted the importance of Kant’s concept of the ethical community, few recognize the force of his argument that such a community is possible only if it takes the form of a church; as a result, the precise status of his proposal remains unclear and under-appreciated. He argues in Division One, Section IV, of Religion’s Third Piece that the idea of this community can become a reality only through a “church” that is characterized by four rational requirements: unity, integrity, freedom, and the changeability of all church rules except these four unchangeable marks. Prior to Section IV, Division One portrays this ethical community as having a political form, yet an essentially nonpolitical matter. He compares it with Jewish theocracy, but observes that the latter failed to be an ethical commonwealth because it was explicitly political. Whereas traditional theocracy replaces the political state of nature (which conforms to the law, “might makes right”) with an ethical state of nature (which conforms to the law that I call, “should makes good”), or attempts to synthesize them, non-coercive theocracy transcends this distinction through a new perspective: it unites humanity in a common vision of a divine legislator whose only law is inward, binding church members together like families, through the law of love. Whereas the legal rights supported by democracy and a system of international law can go a long way to prepare for world peace, Kant’s conviction is that it will be ultimately impossible without support from healthy religion. (shrink)

Immanuel Kant’s work on the sublimity of aesthetic experience lends itself to puzzlement, if not misclassification. Complicating matters, Kant distinguishes between two kinds of sublimity: respectively, the “mathematical” and “dynamical” sublime. More mystifying is that the sublime is ineffable, beyond the ken of human comprehension. These perplexities notwithstanding, Kant argues that sublime sentiment produces a feeling of supersensible comfort. Commentators identify this comfort emanating most strongly from the dynamical sublime. However, in this paper I draw from the unity of reason (...) thesis to offer a plausible account of how the mathematical sublime is equally capable of providing the same feeling of supersensible comfort. (shrink)

This paper is reprinted in the book Machine Ethics, eds. M. Anderson and S. Anderson, Cambridge University Press, 2011.

Commentators who lament that Kant offers no concrete guidelines for how to set up an ethical community typically neglect Kant’s claim in Religion that the ethical state of nature can transform into an ethical community only by becoming a people of God—i.e., a religious community, or “church.” Kant’s argument culminates by positing four categorial precepts for church organization. The book’s next four sections can be read as elaborating further on each precept, respectively. Kant repeatedly warns against using religious norms to (...) control people. Accordingly, he explicitly forbids the true church from adopting any standard form of political governance; it must aim to be radically non-political. Nevertheless, churches organized according to Kant’s non-coercive theocratic model contribute something essential to the ultimate political goal of achieving perpetual peace and an end to war: by approaching the ultimate ethical goal, the true church offers an antidote to normative fragmentation. (shrink)

This study argues that the notion of transparency requires reconsideration as an essence of ethical agency. It provides a brief explication of the concept of transparency, rooted in the principle of human dignity of Immanuel Kant, and suggests that it has been inadequately appreciated by media ethics scholars and instructors more focused on relatively simplistic applications of his categorical imperative. This study suggests that the concept's Kantian roots raise a radical challenge to conventional understandings of human interaction and, by (...) extension, what it means to exercise freedom. (shrink)

Trust relations in the health services have changed from asymmetrical paternalism to symmetrical autonomy-based participation, according to a common account. The promises of personalized medicine emphasizing empowerment of the individual through active participation in managing her health, disease and well-being, is characteristic of symmetrical trust. In the influential Kantian account of autonomy, active participation in management of own health is not only an opportunity, but an obligation. Personalized medicine is made possible by the digitalization of medicine with an ensuing (...) increased tailoring of diagnostics, treatment and prevention to the individual. The ideal is to increase wellness by minimizing the layer of interpretation and translation between relevant health information and the patient or user. Arguably, this opens for a new level of autonomy through increased participation in treatment and prevention, and by that, increased empowerment of the individual. However, the empirical realities reveal a more complicated landscape disturbed by information ‘noise’ and involving a number of complementary areas of expertise and technologies, hiding the source and logic of data interpretation. This has lead to calls for a return to a mild form of paternalism, allowing expertise coaching of patients and even withholding information, with patients escaping responsibility through blind or lazy trust. This is morally unacceptable, according to Kant’s ideal of enlightenment, as we have a duty to take responsibility by trusting others reflexively, even as patients. Realizing the promises of personalized medicine requires a system of institutional controls of information and diagnostics, accessible for non-specialists, supported by medical expertise that can function as the accountable gate-keeper taking moral responsibility required for an active, reflexive trust. (shrink)

Farsi translation of ‘Kantian Causality and Quantum Quarks: The Compatibility between Quantum Mechanics and Kant’s Phenomenal World’ (uploaded September 2014).

Two questions should be considered when assessing the Kantian dimensions of Kuhn’s thought. First, was Kuhn himself a Kantian? Second, did Kuhn have an influence on later Kantians and neo-Kantians? Kuhn mentioned Kant as an inspiration, and his focus on explanatory frameworks and on the conditions of knowledge appear Kantian. But Kuhn’s emphasis on learning; on activities of symbolization; on paradigms as practical, not just theoretical; and on the social and community aspects of scientific research as constitutive (...) of scientific reasoning, are all outside the Kantian perspective. Kuhn’s admiration for Kant is tempered by his desire to understand the processes of learning, of initiation into a scientific community, of experimentation using instruments, and of persuasion, drawing on the work of familiar influences, including Piaget, Koyré, and Wittgenstein, and less familiar ones, including Langer, Demos, and Frank. Both Kuhn and Kant were interested in the question: what is the status of science, and what is the role of the scientist in its development and justification? But Kuhn presents science in a much more messy, historically contingent, and socially charged way than Kant does. The paper’s conclusion evaluates Kuhn’s reception among researchers including Richardson and Friedman, assessing the prospects for future work. (shrink)

Various arguments have been provided for drawing non-humans such as animals and artificial agents into the sphere of moral consideration. In this paper, I argue for a shift from an ontological to a social-philosophical approach: instead of asking what an entity is, we should try to conceptually grasp the quasi-social dimension of relations between non-humans and humans. This allows me to reconsider the problem of justice, in particular distributive justice . Engaging with the work of Rawls, I show that an (...) expansion of the contractarian framework to non-humans causes an important problem for liberalism, but can be justified by a contractarian argument. Responding to Bell’s and Nussbaum’s comments on Rawls, I argue that we can justify drawing non-humans into the sphere of distributive justice by relying on the notion of a co-operative scheme. I discuss what co-operation between humans and non-humans can mean and the extent to which it depends on properties. I conclude that we need to imagine principles of ecological and technological distributive justice. (shrink)

True,Kant takes the conclusions of his ethical work for granted in his political theorizing; he treats corollaries of the categorical imperative as conclusive principles of political right.However,in his political theory his concern is not simply to lay ...

This is a semifinal draft of a forthcoming paper. Kant’s account of the pain of remorse involves a hybrid justification based on self-retribution, but constrained by forward-looking principles which say that we must channel remorse into improvement, and moderate its pain to avoid damaging our rational agency. Kant’s corpus also offers material for a revisionist but textually-grounded alternative account based on wrongdoers’ sympathy for the pain they cause. This account is based on the value of care, and has forward-looking constraints (...) much like Kant’s own account. Drawing on both Kant’s texts and recent work in empirical psychology, I argue that experiences of remorse which conform to the sympathetic account may fulfill Kant’s forward-looking goals better than those conforming to his own account. (shrink)

Despite the praise his writing garnered during his lifetime, e.g., from readers such as Einstein and de Broglie, Émile Meyerson has been largely forgotten. The rich tradition of French épistémologie has recently been taken up in some Anglo-American scholarship, but Meyerson—who popularized the term épistémologie through his historical method of analyzing science, and criticized positivism long before Quine and Kuhn—remains overlooked. If Meyerson is remembered at all, it is as a historian of classical science. This paper attempts to rectify both (...) states of affairs by explicating one of Meyerson׳s last and untranslated works, Réel et déterminisme dans la théorie quantique, an opuscule on quantum physics.I provide an overview of Meyerson׳s philosophy, his critique of Max Planck׳s interpretation of quantum physics, and then outline and evaluate Meyerson׳s neo-Kantian alternative. I then compare and contrast this interpretation with Cassirer׳s neo-Kantian program. Finally I show that, while Meyerson believes the revolutionary new physics requires "profoundly" modifying our conception of reality, ultimately, he thinks, it secures the legitimacy of his thesis: that science seeks explanations in the form of what he calls "identification." I hope my research will enable a more general and systematic engagement with Meyerson׳s work, especially with a view to assessing its viability as a philosophical method today. (shrink)

The ‘unity of reason’ is mentioned at several points in Kant's writings, but it is never systematically discussed or explained in any detail. Occasionally, this ‘unity’ seems something that we can take for granted. At other times, it appears to be a thesis that has just been implicitly established. However, for the most part it is presented as an extremely ambitious, all-encompassing research project that Kant feels he has to postpone until some indefinite time in the future. This chapter tries (...) to disentangle these different ‘unities’ of reason, arguing that Kant was primarily concerned with the unity of the final philosophical system that reason as a unitary faculty seeks to produce, whereas the unity of reason in the sense of a unitary faculty of reason is taken for granted. The chapter focuses on some philosophically important features of Kant's critical theory of reason, reasoning and reasons in the two spheres. (shrink)

This book investigates several dimensions of the concept of cosmopolitanism since Kant. The first of these dimensions is a world vision that considers the construction of a 'cosmopolitan self' as a question of justice. The second is the idea that a local political-legal order is fully democratic only if it respects the environment and the human rights of all people of the world, regardless of their citizenship. The third dimension concerns the practice of crossborder associations between individuals, institutionalized or not (...) (cosmopolitics, as Balibar called it). The fourth considers individuals as subjects of international law, as in the case of individual petitions concerning human rights through the European Court of Human Rights and individual responsibility in international criminal law. Finally, the fifth dimension is a form of ecological consciousness based on the relationship between the self and the cosmos, which would imply a profound revision of modern anthropocentric concepts."--Publisher. (shrink)

In this paper I provide an interpretation of Kant’s conception of free speech. Free speech is understood as the kind of speech that is constitutive of interaction respectful of everybody’s right to freedom, and it requires what we with John Rawls may call ‘public reason’. Public reason so understood refers to how the public authority must reason in order to properly specify the political relation between citizens. My main aim is to give us some reasons for taking a renewed interest (...) in Kant’s conception of free speech, including his account public reason. Kant’s position provides resources for dealing with many of the legal and political problems we currently struggle to analyze under this heading, such as the proper distinction between the sphere of justice and the sphere of ethics, hate speech, freedom of speech, defamation, and the public guarantee of reliable media and universal education. (shrink)