This collection of essays, offered in honor of the distinguished career of prominent political philosophy professor Clifford Orwin, brings together internationally renowned scholars to provide a wide context and discuss various aspects of the virtue of “humanity” through the history of political philosophy.

This paper extends scholarship on multi-stakeholder initiatives (MSIs) in the context of corporate social responsibility in three ways. First, I outline a framework to analyze the strength of couplings between actors participating in MSIs. Characterizing an MSI as consisting of numerous local networks that are embedded in a wider global network, I argue that tighter couplings (within local networks) and looser couplings (between local networks) coexist. Second, I suggest that this coexistence of couplings enables MSIs to generate policy outcomes which (...) address the conditions of a transnational regulatory context. I argue that MSIs’ way of organizing enables them to cope with three challenges: the stability, flexibility, and legitimacy of governance. Reflecting on these challenges, the article identifies a number of problems related to MSIs’ role in transnational governance. Third, I discuss the UN Global Compact as an illustrative case and examine problems and opportunities related to its stability, flexibility, and legitimacy. (shrink)

I explore the limits of corporate responsibility standards – for example Social Accountability 8000 (SA 8000), the Global Reporting Initiative, the Fair Labor Association workplace code – by looking at these initiatives through Derrida's aporias of justice as set out in 'Force of Law: The "Mystical Foundation of Authority"'. Based on a discussion of SA 8000, I uncover the unavoidable aporias that are associated with the use of this standard. I contribute to the literature on corporate responsibility standards in general (...) and SA 8000 in particular by showing (a) that attempts to standardise corporate responsibility can only be successful insofar as we recognise that compliance with SA 8000's rules requires a 'fresh judgement' every time they are applied, (b) that SA 8000 should not be pushed down the supply chain as such coercion does not require a truly responsible decision by suppliers and eventually leads to moral mediocrity and (c) that the necessarily time-consuming reflections about the singular contexts within which SA 8000 is applied challenge the urgent need for implementing this standard. I discuss the implications of my analysis of SA 8000 for corporate responsibility standards in general. (shrink)

Introspection presents our phenomenal states in a manner otherwise than physical. This observation is often thought to amount to an argument against physicalism: if introspection presents phenomenal states as they essentially are, then phenomenal states cannot be physical states, for we are not introspectively aware of phenomenal states as physical states. In this article, I examine whether this argument threatens a posteriori physicalism. I argue that as along as proponents of a posteriori physicalism maintain that phenomenal concepts present the nature (...) of their referents in a partial and incomplete manner, a posteriori physicalism is safe. (shrink)

In den letzten Jahren hat sich eine Vielfalt unterschiedlicher Gremien zur Ethikberatung entwickelt: vom Konsil mit einem einzelnen Berater bis zum Ethikkomitee. In dem Band werden die Ethikberatung, ihre Entwicklung und Anwendung, sowie die Gründung von Gremien in Krankenhäusern, Pflegeeinrichtungen, Hospizen und von niedergelassenen Ärzten anhand von Fallbeispielen erläutert. Dabei schlagen die Autoren eine Brücke zwischen traditioneller philosophischer Ethik und anwendungsbezogener klinischer Ethik. Auch rechtliche Fragen werden erörtert.

Luck egalitarianism is a responsibility-sensitive theory of distributive justice. Its application to health and healthcare is controversial. This article addresses a novel critique of luck egalitarianism, namely, that it wrongfully discriminates against those responsible for their health disadvantage when allocating scarce healthcare resources. The philosophical literature about discrimination offers two primary reasons for what makes discrimination wrong (when it is): harm and disrespect. These two approaches are employed to analyze whether luck egalitarian healthcare prioritization should be considered wrongful discrimination. Regarding (...) harm, it is very plausible to consider the policies harmful but much less reasonable to consider those responsible for their health disadvantages a socially salient group. Drawing on the disrespect literature, where social salience is typically not required for something to be discrimination, the policies are a form of discrimination. They are, however, not disrespectful. The upshot of this first assessment of the discrimination objection to luck egalitarianism in health is, thus, that it fails. (shrink)

The tenets of critical and social realism are well supported in the literature. However, researchers following a realist paradigm have concerns about the lack of methodical guidance for qualitative...

According to relational egalitarianism, a society is just insofar as the relations in that society are equal. Exclusively, relational egalitarians have been concerned with why humans, in particular adults, must relate as equals. This is unfortunate since relational egalitarians claim to be in line with the concerns of real-life egalitarians; but real-life egalitarians, such as vegans and vegetarians, clearly care about injustices committed against non-human animals. In this paper, I thus explore the role of non-human animals in relational egalitarianism. I (...) distinguish four accounts of relational egalitarianism and argue that they differ in what they imply for relationships between humans and animals. Interestingly, it will also become clear that in relational egalitarianism, a relation may not only be unequal or equal; it may also be non-unequal. (shrink)

Whether meaning is compositional has been a major issue in linguistics and formal philosophy of language for the last 2 decades. Semantic holism is widely and plausibly considered as an objection to the principle of semantic compositionality therein. It comes as a surprise that the holistic peculiarities of scientific language have been rarely addressed in formal accounts so far, given that semantic holism has its roots in the philosophy of science. For this reason, a model-theoretic approach to semantic holism in (...) the language of science is presented here. This approach preserves compositionality to a large extent. *Received September 2009; revised February 2010. †To contact the author, please write to: Seminar for Philosophy, Logic, and Theory of Science, Hauspostfach 49, Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität, Munich 80539, Germany; e-mail: holger.andreas@lrz.uni-muenchen.de. (shrink)

Martin Heidegger distinguishes the human—as a world-forming, historical being that is capable of language—from the animal, which, according to him, is poor in world, ahistorical and incapable of language. This clear-cut distinction, which is connected to Heidegger’s anti-biologism, has frequently been criticised. By discussing the criticism of Matthew Calcaro, Giorgio Agamben and Jacques Derrida, the present paper aims to show that in Heidegger the human-animal difference is not a biologically determined distinction, human language is not understood as an instrument of (...) expression and communication, and humans are not distinguished from animals on the basis of their supposed access to an “objective” reality. While all three points imply corrections to the reception of Heidegger in animal philosophy, is particularly crucial since it refutes Derrida’s interpretation of the as-structure, which has had a large influence on readings of Heidegger, also far beyond the topic of animality. Taking into account these clarifications, a specific historical response-ability of the human becomes intelligible that is relevant in particular in regard to ethical aspirations in animal philosophy. (shrink)

The aim of this study was to conduct a Scenic Narrative Microanalysis of a modern dance performance, “Kontakthof” by Pina Bausch, performed by lay dancers over 65 years of age. SNMA analysis consisted of both individual and group sessions with students of the International Psychoanalytic University. The method was successfully applied to artistic material insofar as relevant moments in terms of “Now Moments” and “Moments of Meeting” were identified by the raters throughout the dance piece. The selection of moments showed (...) a notable overlap with the results of different and independent methods of analysis presented in this section. (shrink)

Journal of Political Philosophy, EarlyView.

Faced with the ongoing tragedy of poverty in our world today, many have long called for a common standard of global justice. Such a standard should not be tied to any one particular strand of justice conceptualizations and it should yet be in harmony with the central motivating beliefs of the various concerned moral worldviews. The article reframes global justice thinking by approaching a core problem, namely motivating people to care for distant needy strangers, in a concrete intercultural manner: it (...) sets out to study and compare the motivational underpinnings for an expansion of social justice, in an exemplary fashion, within two long-standing worldview traditions, namely Christian social ethics and contemporary Confucian ethics, in order to gain a more realistic impression of what a commonly shared and motivationally backed notion of global justice may look like. While the former expresses a universal concern for the poor, the latter has recently attracted interest, since Southeast Asian countries managed to lift millions of people out of abject poverty. As both traditions consider loving communal relationships to constitute the foundation of all justice considerations, the article inquires how this quest shapes each tradition’s way to motivate their adherents’ compliance with a vision of global justice. (shrink)

I consider whether a positive rate of pure intergenerational time preference is justifiable in terms of agent-relative moral reasons relating to partiality between generations, an idea I call ​discounting for kinship​. I respond to Parfit's objections to discounting for kinship, but then highlight a number of apparent limitations of this approach. I show that these limitations largely fall away when we reflect on social discounting in the context of decisions that concern the global community as a whole.

The essay argues that »truth« as basic element of judicial decision represents the result of constructions of reality, guided by law. In creating such scripts their authors are limited in their power: There is actually room for different arrangements of these descriptions. Its size depends from the objectives of the particular legal system, which is to be applied in the respective case.

Relational egalitarianism is a theory of justice according to which people must relate as equals. However, not just any inegalitarian relation is unjust, i.e., the fact that parents do not relate as equals to their children is not unjust. Whereas an adult treating another adult paternalistically is objectionable from the point of view of relational egalitarianism, parent-child paternalism is not. What may explain this difference in judgment? I refer to this as the Puzzle. I discuss four justifications of the Puzzle (...) and argue that none of them is satisfactory. In the final part of the paper, I discuss where this leaves relational egalitarianism as a theory of justice. (shrink)

I don't have any serious quarrels with John Searle's approach to speech act theory.' There's a lot of little things that I do not really understand. (Example: what is a direction of fit?) There are a few mmor points which I think are wrong. (Example: the doctrine about "underlying rules" which are "manifested or realized" by conventions, and, to be frank, the whole thing about so called constitutive rules. Why should a statement like "Greeting in a normal context cotmts as (...) a corteous recognition of the addressee by the speaker" be regarded as conveying a rule? How could one violate, or follow, the alleged role? Maybe greeting is something which presupposes the existence of certain rules, or maybe statements of the type "x counts as y in context c" are true only in virtue of the fact that certain policies are accepted in the contexts in question, but the statement above, concerning the essence of.. (shrink)

“One person, one vote” is wedded to the idea of democracy to such an extent that many would hesitate to refer to a system, which deviated from this, as a democracy. In this paper, I show why this assumption is hard to defend. I do so by pointing to the importance of baseline in justifying a system of “one person, one vote.” The investigation will show that the reasons underlying the most prominent views on democratic inclusion cannot justify “one person, (...) one vote” robustly. This ultimately means that democrats should be less confident in their judgment that 1P1V is a necessary part of democracy. (shrink)

Geoengineering is typically defined as a techno-scientific response to climate change that differs from mitigation and adaptation, and that includes diverse individual technologies, which can be classified as either solar radiation management or carbon dioxide removal. We analyse the representation of geoengineering on Wikipedia as a way of opening up this dominating, if contested, model for further debate. We achieve this by contrasting the dominating model as presented in the encyclopaedic article texts with the patterns of hyper-link associations between the (...) articles. Two datasets were created tracing the geoengineering construct on Wikipedia, shedding light on its boundary with its context, as well as on its internal structure. The analysis shows that the geoengineering category tends to be associated on Wikipedia primarily with atmospheric solar radiation management rather than land-based carbon dioxide removal type technologies. The results support the notion that the dominant model of defining and classifying geoengineering technology has been beneficial for solar radiation management type technologies more than for land-based carbon dioxide removal ones. The article also demonstrates that controversy mapping with Wikipedia data affords analysis that can open up dominating definitions and classifications of technologies, and offer resistance to their frequent naturalising and decontextualising tendencies. This work is in line with recent work on digital sociology, but the article contributes a new methodology and reports on the first empirical application of controversy mapping using Wikipedia data to a technology. (shrink)

Foreign knowledge being tested: European physicians fighting the Moscow plague of 1771. – The transfer of Western medicine to Russia increased significantly in the Eighteenth century. Foreign doctors were employed, their writings translated, their education standards copied. But who regarded that knowledge as superior and why? Taking the Moscow Plague of 1771 as a case study, this article examines the crucial role foreign and Russian medical practitioners played during the epidemic. It argues that especially those ideas and practices that were (...) useful for social control filtered into politics and public discourse, but failed to convince the majority of the population. (shrink)

In this paper, a new account of empirical claims in structuralism is developed. Its novelty derives from the use that is made of the linguistic approach to scientific theories despite the presumed incompatibility of structuralism with that approach. It is shown how the linguistic approach can be applied to the framework of structuralism if the semantic foundations of that approach are refined to do justice to the doctrine of indirect interpretation of theoretical terms. This doctrine goes back to Carnap but (...) has been advanced until the present day without a proper semantic explanation. (shrink)

This article describes and refines an experiential distinction which has been highlighted by neuro-linguistic programming (NLP), perceptual positions. When you are imagining a past or future scene, you may perceive it (usually pre-reflectively) from three different viewpoints or perceptual positions. If you are looking at the world from your own point of view, through your own eyes, you are in the first perceptual position. If you are looking at the scene through another person's eyes, appreciating the other person's point of (...) view, you are in the second position. If you are seeing the world from an outside point of view, as an independent observer, you are in the third position. NLP highlighted the fact that our feelings change dramatically according to the perceptual position we adopt. Through a concrete example, Connirae Andreas shows that this distinction does not only concern visual perceptions, but also auditory and kinaesthetic perceptions. She also shows that our visual, auditory and kinaesthetic perceptions may be split in different perceptual positions at the same time, and that this misalignment may cause difficulties. Learning to 'align' our perceptual positions brings us greater wholeness, enables us to become more integrated. (shrink)

Hilary Kornblith argues that many traditional philosophical accounts involve problematic views of reflection. According to Kornblith, reflection does not add reliability, which makes it unfit to underlie a separate form of knowledge. We show that a broader understanding of reflection, encompassing Type 2 processes, working memory, and episodic long-term memory, can provide philosophy with elucidating input that a restricted view misses. We further argue that reflection in fact often does add reliability, through generalizability, flexibility, and creativity that is helpful in (...) newly encountered situations, even if the restricted sense of both reflection and knowledge is accepted. And so, a division of knowledge into one reflexive form and one reflective form remains a plausible, and possibly fruitful, option. (shrink)

Faszination ist eine zentrale Form ästhetischen Erlebens in der Gegenwart, deren Merkmale und historisches Profil bislang nur ansatzweise beschrieben sind. Ausgehend vom modernen Verständnis von Faszination entwickelt die begriffsgeschichtlich breit fundierte Untersuchung einen formalen Begriff dieser ästhetischen Emotion, der für zwei bedeutende Epochen der ästhetischen, poetologischen und semiotischen Theoriebildung -- die griechische Antike und das 18. Jahrhundert -- diskutiert wird. In der Auseinandersetzung mit antiken Konzepten der Metapher und des Erhabenen sowie mit ästhetischen Positionen bei Addison, Mendelssohn, Klopstock, Hamann, Kant, (...) Stewart und Goethe werden grundlegende Erklärungskomponenten für die Entstehung und Wirkung sprachlich induzierter Faszination aufgezeigt. Ästhetische Faszination ist kein Pathos-, sondern ein Tiefenkonzept. Sie resultiert aus einer Divergenzerfahrung in der Prozessierbarkeit von Sinnlichkeit und Bedeutung. Faszination bewirkt keine Verabschiedung, sondern eine Stimulierung des Intelligiblen. (shrink)

Constellations, Volume 26, Issue 3, Page 384-390, September 2019.