The article has two aims. First, to show that a version of luck egalitarianism that includes relational goods amongst its distribuenda can, as a matter of internal logic, account for one of the core beliefs of relational egalitarianism. Therefore, there will be important extensional overlap, at the level of domestic justice, between luck egalitarianism and relational egalitarianism. This is an important consideration in assessing the merits of and relationship between the two rival views. Second, to provide some support for including (...) relational goods, including those advocated by relational egalitarianism, on the distribuenda of justice and therefore to put in a good word for the overall plausibility of this conception of justice. I show why relational egalitarians, too, have reason to sympathise with this proposal. (shrink)

The Unconscious as Space explores the experience of being and the practice of psychoanalysis by thinking of the unconscious in mathematical terms. Anca Carrington introduces mathematical models of space, from dimension theory to algebraic topology and knot theory, and considers their immediate psychoanalytic relevance. The hypothesis that the unconscious is structured like a space marked by impossibility is then examined. Carrington considers the clinical implications, with particular focus on the interplay between language and the unconscious as related topological spaces (...) in which movement takes place along knot-like pathways. The Unconscious as Space will be of appeal to psychotherapists, psychoanalysts, and mental health professionals in practice and in training. (shrink)

The liberal democratic regimes rest on a well-developed public sphere accessible to all citizens that favors free discussions based on reason and critical debate and serves as a space where public opinion is formed through reasoned dialogue. The new digital technologies disrupted many parts of contemporary democratic societies and transformed their public sphere. Digital transformation alters industries and markets, changing the perceived subjective value, satisfaction, and usefulness of goods or services and displacing established companies and products. Within the political realm, (...) digital transformation creates a cleavage between the vulnerable populations who are ill-informed and lack digital fluency and politicians who tend to learn about peoples‟ problems not to deal with them but to weaponize new technologies to engineer elections and win power. The rise of misinformation and disinformation undermines public trust in democratic institutions and discourages or incapacitates citizens from engaging in debates within the public sphere. On the other hand, the digital transformation of the public sphere empowers ordinary people to aggregate in various publics and counteract the domination of the mainstream parties. Our paper aims to answer whether new technologies provide citizens with ways to counter the undemocratic tendencies caused by digital transformation and engage actively in the public sphere. (shrink)

There is a broad philosophical consensus that both children’s and prospective parents’ interests are relevant to the justification of a right to parent. Against this view, I argue that it is impermissible to sacrifice children’s interests for the sake of advancing adults’ interest in childrearing. Therefore, the allocation of the moral right to parent should track the child’s, and not the potential parent’s, interest. This revisionary thesis is moderated by two additional qualifications. First, parents lack the moral right to exclude (...) others from associating with the child. Second, children usually come into the world as part of a relationship with their gestational mother; often, this relationship deserves protection. (shrink)

Axel Gosseries considers, and partly defends, several strategies to address the non-identity problem (NIP). We engage critically with two strategies endorsed by Gosseries: the severance strategy and the overlap strategy. The latter comprises two different sub-strategies: the containment sub-strategy and the indirect sub-strategy. We believe that severance is less promising than Gosseries suggests. It comes at a high theoretical cost, which is important to acknowledge even if, ultimately, there is reason to pay it. The sub-strategies that comprise the overlap strategy (...) are more promising, and they can justify more in terms of the scope and content of inter-generational justice than Gosseries suggests in his book. Endorsing the overlap strategies is attractive because doing so limits the need for impersonal considerations in theories of inter-generational justice. (shrink)

Talk of gender identity is at the core of heated current philosophical and political debates. Yet, it is unclear what it means to have one. I examine several ways of understanding this concept in light of core aims of trans writers and activists. Most importantly, the concept should make good trans people’s understanding of their own gender identities and help understand why misgendering is a serious harm and why it is permissible to require information about people’s gender identities in public (...) life. I conclude that none of the available accounts meets these essential criteria, on the assumption that the gender norms of femininity and masculinity are unjustified. But we can, and should, pursue the feminist project without “gender identity”. Such feminism can include trans people because it is possible to account for the specific harm of misgendering without assuming a claim to the recognition of our gender identities. I conclude that we should eliminate the concept of “gender identity.” To understand the phenomena that are putatively captured by “gender identity,” we are better off employing other concepts, such as “sexual dysphoria,” (assigned or aspirational) “gender roles,” and (internalised or endorsed) “gender norms”. These concepts can usefully replace “gender identity” in an individual evaluation of each of the trans people’s claims to inclusion into particular spaces. (shrink)

The evaluation of labour markets and of particular jobs ought to be sensitive to a plurality of benefits and burdens of work. We use the term 'the goods of work' to refer to those benefits of work that cannot be obtained in exchange for money and that can be enjoyed mostly or exclusively in the context of work. Drawing on empirical research and various philosophical traditions of thinking about work we identify four goods of work: 1) attaining various types of (...) excellence; 2) making a social contribution; 3) experiencing community; and 4) gaining social recognition. Our account of the goods of work can be read as unpacking the ways in which work can be meaningful. The distribution of the goods of work is a concern of justice for two conjoint reasons: First, they are part of the conception of the good of a large number of individuals. Second, in societies without an unconditional income and in which most people are not independently wealthy, paid work is non-optional and workers have few, if any, occasions to realize these goods outside their job. Taking into account the plurality of the goods of work and their importance for justice challenges the theoretical and political status quo, which focuses mostly on justice with regard to the distribution of income. We defend this account against the libertarian challenge that a free labour market gives individuals sufficient options to realise the goods of work important to them, and discuss the challenge from state neutrality. In the conclusion, we hint towards possible implications for today’s labour markets. (shrink)

I propose, defend and illustrate a principle of gender justice meant to capture the nature of a variety of injustices based on gender:A society is gender just only if the costs of a gender-neutral lifestyle are, all other things being equal, lower than, or at most equal to, the costs of gendered lifestyles.The principle is meant to account for the entire range of gender injustice: violence against women, economic and legal discrimination, domestic exploitation, the gendered division of labor and gendered (...) socialization. The sense of “costs” employed is similarly wide. Costs can be material, psychological and social.I defend the principle by appeal to the values at the core of liberal egalitarian justice: equality of access and the good of individual choice. I illustrate my case through a discussion of the injustice of a gendered division of labor. Some feminists doubt that liberal egalitarianism has the theoretical resources to recognize the unjust nature of the gendered division of labor. I argue that it does.If the principle advanced here is correct, then gender injustice is pervasive. At the same, it does not affect only women but also men. Liberal egalitarianism is capable of acknowledging this fact without denying that, overall, gender norms oppress women more than they oppress men: Arguably, women who wish to lead a gender-neutral lifestyle have to pay higher costs that men who wish to do the same. (shrink)

There is a widespread belief that, conceptually, justice cannot require what we cannot achieve. This belief is sometimes used by defenders of so-called ‘non-ideal theories of justice’ to criticise so-called ‘ideal theories of justice’. I refer to this claim as ‘the feasibility constraint on the concept of justice’ and argue against it. I point to its various implausible implications and contend that a willingness to apply the label ‘unjust’ to some regrettable situations that we cannot fix is going to enhance (...) the action-guiding potential of a conception of justice, by providing an aspirational ideal. This is possible on the condition that, at all times, we cannot specify with certainty the limits of what is feasible for us collectively. The rejection of the feasibility constraint entails that there can be injustice without perpetrators; this is a theoretical price worth paying. (shrink)

One of the main problems one is faced while dealing with Roma issues is to find reliable statistics. The Roma refuse to declare themselves as Roma, if they participate at all in the research. Whether it is a problem related to their Roma identity, if their refusal is a well thought action we will try to find out in this paper. We will discuss the issue of Roma identity, we will present data showing the discrepancy between the official number of (...) Roma living in different countries and approximations made by competent organizations, as well as reasons one can consider for Romaís refusal do declare their identity. Theoretical aspects related to decision making will also be reviewed in the final attempt to establish whether the attitude Roma have towards declaring their identity is a result of a difficult decision making process, or just an instant rejection reaction. (shrink)

Following the spirit of Walter Benjamin’s Arcades Project, this volume acts as a kaleidoscope of change in the 21st century, tracing its different reflections in the international contemporary while seeking to understand both individual and collective reactions and adjustments to change through a series of questions: Is there something significantly different about the way in which ‘change’ occurs in the 21st century?; Is change mainly reflected in the material and visual environment surrounding us or someplace else?; What are the sensibilities (...) through which we perceive change, and more importantly, have those sensibilities been increased or dulled by modern technology? (shrink)

Wittgenstein’s Private Language Argument was received within the Pittsburgh School of Philosophy as raising new and interesting difficulties for the traditional empiricist model of knowledge justification. While McDowell’s attempt to solve the difficulties in question is still debated, I claim that a different solution to the same difficulties might have been suggested by Wittgenstein himself in On Certainty.

The paper contains a conceptual proposal, its key idea being that the successful functioning of a rule embedding artifact designed to regulate a practice (not pertaining to its use) produces the same result as the successful performance of the rule-invoking non-communicative actions belonging to the practice in case.

This chapter argues that there is a collective responsibility to have enough children in order to ensure that people will not, in the future, suffer great harm due to depopulation. Moreover, if people stopped having children voluntarily, it could be legitimate for states to incentivize and maybe even coerce individuals to bear and rear children. Various arguments against the enforceability of an individual duty to bear and rear children are examined. Coercing people to have children would come at significant moral (...) cost; however, none of the arguments against enforceability seem decisive. The existence of a collective responsibility to have children bears on the question of whether parents and non-parents ought to shoulder the costs of childbearing and child rearing together. (shrink)

Some philosophers argue that we should limit procreation – for instance, to one child per person or one child per couple – in order to reduce our aggregate carbon footprint. I provide additional support to the claim that population size is a matter of justice, by explaining that we have a duty of justice towards the current generation of children to pass on to them a sustainable population. But instead of, or, more likely, alongside with, having fewer children in in (...) each family, we could also create families with more than two parents. I explore this possibility by pointing out the ways in which multi-parenting can advance children’s interests: in higher levels of well-being, in non-monopolistic child-rearing, and in a future opportunity to become themselves parents. (shrink)

This paper provides an answer to the question why birth parents have a moral right to keep and raise their biological babies. I start with a critical discussion of the parent-centred model of justifying parents’ rights, recently proposed by Harry Brighouse and Adam Swift. Their account successfully defends a fundamental moral right to parent in general but, because it does not provide an account of how individuals acquire the right to parent a particular baby, it is insufficient for addressing the (...) question whether and why there is a right to parent one’s biological child. Such a right is important because, in its absence, fairness towards adequate prospective parents who are involuntarily childless would demand a ‘babies redistribution’; moreover, in societies with entrenched histories of injustice there may be reasons of fairness for shuffling babies amongst all recent parents. I supplement the Brighouse-Swift account of fundamental parental rights by an account of how adequate parents acquire the right to parent their biological babies. I advance two arguments to this conclusion: by the time of birth, the birth parents will have already shouldered various burdens in order to bring children into existence, and are likely to have formed an intimate relationship with the future baby. Denying birth parents who would make at least adequate parents the right to keep their baby would be unfair to them and would destroy already formed parent-baby relationships which, I assume, are intrinsically valuable. (shrink)

There is wide agreement that children have human rights, and that their human rights differ from those of adults. What explains this difference which is, at least at first glance, puzzling, given that human rights are meant to be universal? The puzzle can be dispelled by identifying what unites children’s and adults’ rights as human rights. Here I seek to answer the question of children’s human rights – that is, rights they have merely in virtue of being human and of (...) being children – by exploring how children’s interests are different from adults’, and how respect for children’s and adults’ moral status yields different practical requirements. If human rights protect interests, then children have many, but not all, of the human rights of adults, and, in addition, have some human rights that adults lack. I discuss the way in which children’s human rights, as I conceive of them here are, or fail to be, reflected in the law; as an illustration, I use the most important legal document listing children’s rights, namely the 1990 United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child. (shrink)

Because families disrupt fair patterns of distribution and, in particular, equality of opportunity, egalitarians believe that the institution of the family needs to be defended at the bar of justice. In their recent book, Harry Brighouse and Adam Swift have argued that the moral gains of preserving the family outweigh its moral costs. Yet, I claim that the egalitarian case for abolishing the family has been over-stated due to a failure to consider how alternatives to the family would also disturb (...) fair distributions and, in particular, equality of opportunity. Absent the family, children would continue to be exposed to care-givers of different levels of ability, investment in childrearing and beneficial partiality. In addition, social mechanisms other than the family would lead to the accumulation of economic inequalities. Any kind of upbringing will fail to realise equality for reasons that go deeper than the family: our partiality and unequal abilities to nurture. (shrink)

Traditionally, most philosophers saw childhood as a state of deficiency and thought that its value was entirely dependent on how successfully it prepares individuals for adulthood. Yet, there are good reasons to think that childhood also has intrinsic value. Children possess certain intrinsically valuable abilities to a higher degree than adults. Moreover, going through a phase when one does not yet have a “self of one’s own,” and experimenting one’s way to a stable self, seems intrinsically valuable. I argue that (...) children can have good lives, on several understandings of well-being – as a pleasurable state, as the satisfaction of simple desires or as the realization of certain objective goods. In reply to the likely objection that only individuals capable of morality can have intrinsic value, I explain why it is plausible that children have sufficient moral agency to be as deserving of respect as adults. (shrink)

Common sense morality and legislations around the world ascribe normative relevance to biological connections between parents and children. Procreators who meet a modest standard of parental competence are believed to have a right to rear the children they brought into the world. I explore various attempts to justify this belief and find most of these attempts lacking. I distinguish between two kinds of biological connections between parents and children: the genetic link and the gestational link. I argue that the second (...) can better justify a right to rear. (shrink)

Parenting involves an extraordinary degree of power over children. Republicans are concerned about domination, which, on one view, is the holding of power that fails to track the interests of those over whom it is exercised. On this account, parenting as we know it is dominating due to the low standards necessary for acquiring and retaining parental rights and the extent of parental power. Domination cannot be fully eliminated from child-rearing without unacceptable loss of value. Most likely, republicanism requires that (...) we minimise children’s domination. I examine alternative models of child-rearing that are immune to republican criticism. (shrink)

I distinguish between three different ideas that have been recently discussed under the heading of 'the intrinsic goods of childhood': that childhood is itself intrinsically valuable, that certain goods are valuable only for children, and that children are being owed other goods than adults. I then briefly defend the claim the childhood is intrinsically good. Most of the chapter is dedicated to the analysis, and rejection, of the claim that certain goods are valuable only for children. This has implications about (...) how a good society should trade off economic productivity on the one hand and goods such as play and unstructured time on the other hand. (shrink)

The very existence of society depends on the ability of its members to influence formatively the beliefs, desires, and actions of their fellows. In every sphere of social life, powerful human agents (whether individuals or institutions) tend to use coercion as a favorite shortcut to achieving their aims without taking into consideration the non-violent alternatives or the negative (unintended) consequences of their actions. This propensity for coercion is manifested in the doxastic sphere by attempts to shape people’s beliefs (and doubts) (...) while ignoring the essential characteristics of these doxastic states. I argue that evidential persuasion is a better route to influence people’s beliefs than doxastic coercion. Doxastic coercion perverts the belief-forming mechanism and undermines the epistemic and moral faculties both of coercers and coercees. It succeeds sporadically and on short-term. Moreover, its pseudo doxastic effects tend to disappear once the use of force ceases. In contrast to doxastic coercion, evidential persuasion produces lasting correct beliefs in accordance with proper standards of evidence. It helps people to reach the highest possible standards of rationality and morality. Evidential persuasion is based on the principles of symmetry and reciprocity in that it asks all persuaders to use for changing the beliefs of others only those means they used in forming their own beliefs respecting the freedom of will and assuming the standard of rationality. The arguments in favor of evidential persuasion have a firm theoretical basis that includes a conceptual clarification of the essential traits of beliefs. Belief is treated as a hypercomplex system governed by Leibniz’s law of continuity and the principle of self-organization. It appears to be a mixture consisting of a personal propositional attitude and physical objects and processes. The conceptual framework also includes a typology of believers according to the standards of evidence they assume. In this context, I present a weak version of Clifford’ ethical imperative. In the section dedicated to the prerequisites for changing beliefs, I show how doxastic agents can infuse premeditated or planned changes in the flow of endogenous changes in order to shape certain beliefs in certain desired forms. The possibility of changing some beliefs in a planned manner is correlated with a feedback doxastic (macro-mechanism) that produces a reaction when it is triggered by a stimulus. In relation with the two routes to influence beliefs, a response mechanism is worth taking into consideration – a mechanism governed to a significant extent by human conscience and human will, that appears to be complex, acquired, relatively detached from visceral or autonomic information processing, and highly variable in reactions. Knowing increasingly better this doxastic mechanism, we increase our chances to use evidential persuasion as an effective (although not time-efficient) method to mold people’s beliefs. (shrink)

In philosophy, there are two competitor views about the nature and value of childhood: The first is the traditional, deficiency, view, according to which children are mere unfinished adults. The second is a view that has recently become increasingly popular amongst philosophers, and according to which children, perhaps in virtue of their biological features, have special and valuable capacities, and, more generally, privileged access to some sources of value. This article provides a conceptual map of these views and their possible (...) interpretations, and notes their bearing on issues of population ethics and on the duties that we are owed during childhood. (shrink)

Care-supporting policies incentivise women’s withdrawal from the labour market, thereby reinforcing statistical discrimination and further undermining equality of opportunities between women and men for positions of advantage. This, I argue, is not sufficient reason against such policies. Supporting care also improves the overall condition of disadvantaged women who are care-givers; justice gives priority to the latter. Moreover, some of the most advantageous existing jobs entail excessive benefits; we should discount the value of allocating such jobs meritocratically. Further, women who have (...) a real chance to occupy positions of advantage have most likely already enjoyed more than their fair share of opportunities; they lack a claim to more. Women can have a complaint grounded in the expressive disvalue of sexist discrimination. This gives them special claims against men occupying the vast majority of top positions and against their higher share of opportunities for positions of advantage. But their claim does not speak against care-supporting policies. (shrink)

In this paper we propose to present from a new perspective some loci comunes of traditional logic. More exactly, we intend to show that some hypothetico-disjunctive inferences (i.e. the complex constructive dilemma, the complex destructive dilemma, the simple constructive dilemma, the simple destructive dilemma) and two hypothetico-categorical inferences (namely modus ponendo-ponens and modus tollendo-tollens) particularize two more abstract inferential structures: the constructive n-lemma and the destructive nlemma.

Concerns about the under-representation of female academic philosophers and about the stereotype that philosophy is best done by men have recently led to efforts to make academic philosophy a more inclusive discipline. An example is the Gendered Conference Campaign, encouraging event organisers and volume editors to include women amongst invited speakers and authors. Initiatives such as the GCC raise worries about tokenism. Potential invitees may be concerned about unfairness towards whose who would have been invited in their place in the (...) absence of affirmative action and about the way in which affirmative action can affect the quality of the conference or volume in question. And women philosophers often worry that, if formal rules or significant social pressures towards gender inclusiveness play a role in selection processes, their achievements will be discounted. I argue there is no good reason for these fears: there is no pure meritocracy in academia, nor is the ideal of pure meritocracy either feasible or desirable. There are several legitimate grounds — independent of professional competence — for including people in positions of visibility and prestige; gender is such a legitimate reason. (shrink)

The main thesis of my article is that the viability of the European Union does not depend so much on its political structure as on its being anchored in a culture-based public sphere and on the establishment of a cultural European citizenship. The public sphere could be defined as an unique world, characterized by consensus and cooperation, in which only public goods can be sought and acquired, or as an unique world, characterized by rivalry and competition, in which everyone could (...) pursue their private interests, but only if there is a consensus regarding an objective and fair procedure. In any way, we cannot speak of a pluralism of public spheres - like the black public sphere, the LGBT public sphere, etc. - but (at the most) a plurality of interests represented in the public sphere, under the reserve of respecting a fair procedure, which allows the expression of axiological judgments. The EU needs a progressive citizenship, from civil citizenship to cultural citizenship, depending on the acquired skills, behavior and virtues. One deserves cultural citizenship and have the right (or, perhaps the privilege) to manifest - in the public sphere - a way of life and a cultural identity only if promote authentic values: virtues, rationality, free will etc. The problematic aspects of the European media sphere are obstacles on the way to establishing an authentic European cultural citizenship. They can be kept under control by assuming a healthy reactionary attitude and associating every element of change and contingent progress (speed, reductive simplicity, user's solitude, pictoriality, lateralness, data overload, immediacy, segmentation, social amnesia, etc.) with an element of moderation and equilibrium. Only thus can the media contribute in the making of a viable union of the European peoples, grounded on a well articulated European cultural citizenship. (shrink)

Anca Dohotariu ABSTRACT: This article seeks to identify and analyse the most significant changes regarding parental leave provision in post-communist Romania, as well as the extent to which its legal adjustments that took place after 1990 reveal both old trends inherited from the former political regime as well as new tendencies influenced by EU norms...

I review three existing arguments in favor of having some childcare done by nonparents and then I advance five arguments, most of them original, to the same conclusion. My arguments rely on the assumption that, no matter who provides it, childcare will inevitably go wrong at times. I discuss the importance of mitigating bad care, of teaching children how to enter caring relationships with people who are initially strangers to them, of addressing children's structural vulnerability to their caregivers, of helping (...) children and parents contain the ambivalent feelings of the child-parent relationship, and of distributing the responsibility of care and the ensuing blame for bad care more widely. I conclude that nonparental childcare should be universal. (shrink)

Emprunte au domaine de la lumiere et assimile au domaine de la pensee, le diaphane designe pour Aristote, son inventeur, une nature commune a tout milieu dans lequel la vue et la visibilite des choses s'achevent en regard recepteur et en image recue du monde diurne. Car, il ne suffit pas qu'il y ait de la lumiere et du solide pour que le monde puisse etre vu dans ses couleurs et connu sous ses formes et ses especes; il faut aussi (...) qu'il y ait du diaphane, c'est-a-dire un tertium quid qui relie les choses entre elles et ouvre a travers lui la porte de la reception sensible et de l'entendement. Des lors, la notion de diaphane en vient a impregner tacitement toute la representation du monde sous son double aspect sensible et intelligible; il s'opere la une veritable mutation du physique au metaphysique. (shrink)

Three claims about love and justice cannot be simultaneously true and therefore entail a paradox: (1) Love is a matter of justice. (2) There cannot be a duty to love. (3) All matters of justice are matters of duty. The first claim is more controversial. To defend it, I show why the extent to which we enjoy the good of love is relevant to distributive justice. To defend (2) I explain the empirical, conceptual and axiological arguments in its favour. Although (...) (3) is the most generally endorsed claim of the three, I conclude we should reject it in order to avoid the paradox. (shrink)