This article attempts, for the first time, to link some central motives in the thought of Jürgen Habermas with the biographical experiences of the philosopher and social theorist. What are the relations which Habermas himself thematizes in his life story by means of discursive analysis? Three elements are central: the change in significance of the nation state against the backdrop of the process of European integration, the concept of a deliberative democracy, and the timely and controversial issue of the taming (...) of world capitalism. Finally, the article discusses the question of how plausible it is that there is no alternative to capitalism and to what extent democracy can tame capitalism. (shrink)

An examination of Hegel and Freud as the twin influences on the work of Frantz Fanon, culminating in a new theory of emancipation.

I argue that Marcuse follows Kant’s critical distinction in mapping three basic forms of judgment: cognitive, moral, and aesthetic, all united by the underlying structure of purposiveness. Marcuse argues in Eros and Civilization that psychoanalysis has falsely identified repression as moral judgment with material need. With the gradual disappearance of material need, however, the authority of repression disappears, creating the possibility for freedom. However, the vacuum left by moral authority is replaced by cognitive and aesthetic judgments seeking to take morality’s (...) place. (shrink)

In this paper, I argue that so called “systematic critiques” of the liberal conception of law in Catherine MacKinnon and Critical Race Theory which have traditionally been seen to reject liberalism should really be understood as subjecting the liberal conception of law as impartial and just to an immanent critique. Critical Race Theory and MacKinnon both seek to unmask the seemingly neutral subject which authorizes law as in reality a hegemonic and oppressive subject. They also employ the tools of liberalism, (...) demanding justice and equal protection under the law. I argue that the apparent contradiction of their demands can be understood by seeing the subject itself as combining these contradictions at the level of the relation between the unconscious and consciousness. The ego strives for rational self‐organization while the unconscious contains sedimented socially transmitted prejudice. There is thus room within both for the struggle for freedom and justice espoused by liberalism at the conscious level as well as for the unconscious perpetuation of prejudice and domination. I conclude that MacKinnon’s work and that of CRT show that liberalism must not be abandoned as post‐structuralism does, but that liberals is in fact aided by its critics. (shrink)

In this paper, I argue for two claims. The first is that all social and political thinking lies along a continuum and that the structure of each thought along the continuum is that of a basic desire for self-determination. Self-determination, I argued, occurs in a variety of ways including, importantly, at a variety of levels of intention. On the one hand, there are the relatively unreflective ways of understanding oneself as autonomous. I attributed this way of thinking of the Neo-Aristotelian (...) conception of practical reason which is characteristic of conservatism. On the other side of the continuum, there is a rigoristic version of Kantian moral philosophy in which, to be autonomous, one must act exclusively from duty or from purely economic motivation. The second claims is that populism can be understood as a clash between different practical conceptions of autonomy which are brought into conflict as a result of the process of modern rationalization. This clash can, I argued, be clarified and also alleviated by appreciating that what the values which stand opposed in the “us vs. them” of populism and liberalism are based on a fundamentally similar conception of the value of autonomy but have come into conflict by sometime contingent historical processes which can be undone or steered in a different direction. (shrink)

I argue that Franz Fanon can usefully be situated in the tradition of German Idealism in the sense that he takes from Kant and especially Hegel the conception of agency as something to be achieved through struggle for the ideal of humanity as self-determining. Fanon sees the suffering cased by colonial rule in Africa and elsewhere as deriving from the systematic deprivation of agency by the colonial power. Using the work of Hegel, Fanon seeks to reconstruct the emancipatory project of (...) the black man in close analogy to Hegel’s master-slave dialectic. The violence which Fanon sees as unavoidable in such a struggle is not violence for the sake of violence but, following Hegel, the violence that constitutes the subject in the first place. (shrink)

Abstract: This article argues that Christine Korsgaard's conception of self-constitution can be historicized by considering the impact of actual humans on our reflective activity. Because Korsgaard bases her argument on a philosophy of action rather than of intention (as Kant does), and our actions must always be concrete, the article argues that the principles for action which we develop in reflection are likewise responses to concrete human demands. It further interprets the types of demands humans make on each other as (...) the expression of historical circumstance rather than as transcendentally anchored. The notion of universal respect that reflection seeks to achieve is thus seen as developing by a self-correcting process of concrete human interaction. Finally, the article concludes that there can be no metaphysical proof of morality, since morality develops through human interaction that seeks to approximate the idea of respect for persons. (shrink)

In this article I seek to explain Hegel’s significance to contemporary meta-ethics, in particular to Kantian constructivism. I argue that in the master–slave dialectic in the Phenomenology of Spirit, Hegel shows that self-consciousness and intersubjectivity arise at the same time. This point, I argue, shows that there is no problem with taking other people’s reasons to motivate us since reflection on our aims is necessarily also reflection on the needs of those around us. I further explore Hegel’s contribution to the (...) debate about internal and external reasons. I end by arguing that we should understand reasons as historically constructed in the sense that who counts as an intrinsic bearer of value changes over time. I thus argue that the struggle for recognition is in fact the beginning of the long march toward the idea of recognition and the Kantian kingdom of ends. This march, however, is driven by the need to overcome injustice as it is instantiated at the beginning of history by the master’s absolute domination of the slave. (shrink)

In this article I seek to explain Hegel’s significance to contemporary meta-ethics, in particular to Kantian constructivism. I argue that in the master–slave dialectic in the Phenomenology of Spirit , Hegel shows that self-consciousness and intersubjectivity arise at the same time. This point, I argue, shows that there is no problem with taking other people’s reasons to motivate us since reflection on our aims is necessarily also reflection on the needs of those around us. I further explore Hegel’s contribution to (...) the debate about internal and external reasons. I end by arguing that we should understand reasons as historically constructed in the sense that who counts as an intrinsic bearer of value changes over time. I thus argue that the struggle for recognition is in fact the beginning of the long march toward the idea of recognition and the Kantian kingdom of ends. This march, however, is driven by the need to overcome injustice as it is instantiated at the beginning of history by the master’s absolute domination of the slave. (shrink)

Abstract: In response to Arroyo, I explain my position on the concept of “natural goodness” and how my use of that concept compares to that of Geach and Foot. An Aristotelian or functional notion of goodness provides the material for Kantian endorsement in a theory of value that avoids a metaphysical commitment to intrinsic values. In response to Cummiskey, I review reasons for thinking Kantianism and consequentialism incompatible, especially those objections to aggregation that arise from the notion of the natural (...) good previously described. In response to Moland, I explain why I think Hegelian worries about the supposed emptiness of the Kantian self do not apply to my account. And in response to both Moland and Bird-Pollan, I argue that, contrary to the view of some Hegelians, the intersubjective normativity of reason is not something developed through actual social relations; rather, it is something essential to an individual's relations with himself or herself. (shrink)

What is the contribution of pragmatism to the sociology of morality? I answer to the points raised by the essays in this symposium on Moral Entanglements: Conserving Birds in Britain and Germany by outlining what the work of John Dewey adds to recent discussions on the question how values change over time and how individuals develop moral commitments.

In their Minds and Machines essay How would you know if you synthesized a Thinking Thing? (Kary & Mahner, Minds and Machines, 12(1), 61–86, 2002), Kary and Mahner have chosen to occupy a high ground of materialism and empiricism from which to attack the philosophical and methodological positions of believers in artificial intelligence (AI) and artificial life (AL). In this review I discuss some of their main arguments as well as their philosophical foundations. Their central argument: ‘AI is Platonism’, which (...) is based on a particular interpretation of the notion of ‘definition’ and used as a critique against AI, can be counter criticized from two directions: first, Anti-Platonism is not a necessary precondition for criticizing AI, because outspoken Platonist criticism against AI is already known (Penrose, The emperor’s new mind (with a foreword by M. Gardner), 1989). Second, even in case that AI would essentially be ‘Platonism’ this would not be a sufficient argument for proving AI wrong. In my counter criticism I assume a more or less Popperian position by emphasizing the openness of the future: Not by quasi-Scholastic arguments (like Kary and Mahner’s), but only after being confronted with a novel ‘thinking thing’ by future AI engineers we can start to analyze its particular properties (Let me use a history analogon to illustrate my position: In the 19th century, mechanized aviation was widely regarded impossible—only natural organisms (such as birds or bees) could fly, and any science of aerodynamics or aviation did not exist. Only after some non-scientific technicians had confronted their astonished fellows with the first (obviously) flying machine the science of ‘Artificial Aviation’ came into existence, motivated by the need for understanding and mastering that challenging and puzzling new phenomenon). (shrink)

This paper challenges the thesis that Søren Kierkegaard’s theory of stages is a project undertaken in the first authorship, and is abandoned in the second one, where the task of becoming a Christian becomes central. For this, I have reopened the hermeneutical discussion with regards to the whole Kierkegaardian oeuvre, and proposed a new thesis that pin-points the shift from the first to the second authorship in 1847’s Upbuilding Discourses. In this sense, the discourse on the “Lilies and the Birds”, (...) which is suggestively repeated in 1849, becomes paradigmatic. The proposed restructuring of Kierkegaard’s authorship eventually puts forward the ground for a new way of understanding the drastic differences between categories of “the Christian” and “the religious”, and the aesthetic writings/stage. (shrink)

Combinatorial behavior involves combining different elements into larger aggregates with meaning. It is generally contrasted with compositionality, which involves the combining of meaningful elements into larger constituents whose meaning is derived from its component parts. Combinatoriality is commonly considered a capacity found in primates and other animals, whereas compositionality often is considered uniquely human. Questioning the validity of this claim, this multidisciplinary special issue of the International Journal of Primatology unites papers that each study aspects of combinatoriality and compositionality found (...) in primate and bird communication systems, tool use, skills, and human language. The majority of authors conclude that compositionality is evolutionarily preceded by combinatoriality and that neither are uniquely human. This introduction briefly introduces readers to the major findings and issues raised by the contributors. -/- . (shrink)

Perhaps the commonest reasons for the keeping of pets are companionship and as a conduit for affection. Pets are, therefore, being “used” for human ends in much the same way as laboratory or farm animals. So shouldn’t the same arguments apply to the use of pets as to those used in other ways? In accepting the “rights” of farm animals to fully express their natural behavior, one must also accept the “right” of pets to express their intrinsic natural behavior. Dogs (...) kept in houses for most of the day are being kept in an unnatural environment. So are rabbits kept in hutches, and guinea-pigs or birds in cages. These conditions infringe the animals’ telos. Dogs are naturally pack animals, so is a dog in isolation being denied its telos? Other actions more deliberately infringe telos and autonomy. Enforced shampooing – or even exercise; hair-cutting of poodles; putting animals in clothes; and tail-docking. If de-beaking of chickens is considered wrong, then the same must be true for tail-docking of dogs. One should also question the ethics of specialist breeding – especially when that results in physiological disadvantages. There would appear to be no advantage to the animals in having such health problems and when these are the direct result of the breeders’ desire for specific cosmetic traits, we should question the ethics of the practice at least as much as when animals are bred for specific agricultural traits. (shrink)

Perhaps the commonest reasons for the keeping of pets are companionship and as a conduit for affection. Pets are, therefore, being “used” for human ends in much the same way as laboratory or farm animals. So shouldn’t the same arguments apply to the use of pets as to those used in other ways? In accepting the “rights” of farm animals to fully express their natural behavior, one must also accept the “right” of pets to express their intrinsic natural behavior. Dogs (...) kept in houses for most of the day are being kept in an unnatural environment. So are rabbits kept in hutches, and guinea-pigs or birds in cages. These conditions infringe the animals’ telos. Dogs are naturally pack animals, so is a dog in isolation being denied its telos? Other actions more deliberately infringe telos and autonomy. Enforced shampooing – or even exercise; hair-cutting of poodles; putting animals in clothes; and tail-docking. If de-beaking of chickens is considered wrong, then the same must be true for tail-docking of dogs. One should also question the ethics of specialist breeding – especially when that results in physiological disadvantages (boxers with breathing troubles). There would appear to be no advantage to the animals in having such health problems and when these are the direct result of the breeders’ desire for specific cosmetic traits, we should question the ethics of the practice at least as much as when animals are bred for specific agricultural traits. (shrink)

In 2011, for the first time ever, two scientific journals were asked not to publish research papers in full detail. The research in question was on the H5N1 influenza virus (bird flu), and the concern was that the expected public health benefits of disseminating the findings did not outweigh the potential harm should the knowledge be misused for malicious purposes. This constraint raises important ethical concerns as it collides with scientific freedom and openness. In this article, we argue that (...) constraining the dissemination of dual-use knowledge can in certain cases be justified because, for example: scientists have a responsibility for potentially harmful consequences of their research; the public need not always know of all scientific discoveries; uncertainty about the risks of harm may warrant precaution; and expected benefits do not always outweigh potential harm. However, the constraints in question are not absolute but can be both temporary and partial. We propose three core aspects for an ethics of dual-use dissemination: dual-use awareness, precaution, and acknowledgment of conflicting values. Additionally, to help scientists understand when constraints on dissemination may be justified we suggest three corresponding conditions that prompt scientists to recognize dual-use material or research, consider the potential impact of dual-use knowledge dissemination, and acknowledge and respond to external dissemination concerns. (shrink)

Perhaps the commonest reasons for the keeping of pets are companionship and as a conduit for affection. Pets are, therefore, being “used” for human ends in much the same way as laboratory or farm animals. So shouldn’t the same arguments apply to the use of pets as to those used in other ways? In accepting the “rights” of farm animals to fully express their natural behavior, one must also accept the “right” of pets to express their intrinsic natural behavior. Dogs (...) kept in houses for most of the day are being kept in an unnatural environment. So are rabbits kept in hutches, and guinea-pigs or birds in cages. These conditions infringe the animals’ telos. Dogs are naturally pack animals, so is a dog in isolation being denied its telos? Other actions more deliberately infringe telos and autonomy. Enforced shampooing – or even exercise; hair-cutting of poodles; putting animals in clothes; and tail-docking. If de-beaking of chickens is considered wrong, then the same must be true for tail-docking of dogs. One should also question the ethics of specialist breeding – especially when that results in physiological disadvantages (boxers with breathing troubles). There would appear to be no advantage to the animals in having such health problems and when these are the direct result of the breeders’ desire for specific cosmetic traits, we should question the ethics of the practice at least as much as when animals are bred for specific agricultural traits. (shrink)

Jennifer Bird-Pollan has recently argued that Nozickians are wrong to oppose the estate tax. Promising to argue from within the Nozickian framework, she presses the fundamental point that the estate tax does not violate anyone’s rights: neither the deceased nor their would-be heirs can claim a right to any holdings subject to the estate tax. This paper shows that Bird-Pollan’s discussion fails on three fronts. First, she frequently misinterprets Nozick, and thus does not defend the estate (...) tax from a Nozickian perspective. Second, even if Bird-Pollan is correct in denying that the deceased and their potential heirs have a right to the holdings in question, it does not follow that the estate tax is licit, because Nozickians can oppose it on other grounds. For example, Nozickians may hold that the enforcement of the estate tax will violate other rights people have. The government’s preemptive claims to holdings subject to estate taxes, along with the force required to enforce those claims, are unjustified. The crucial premise motivating these conclusions is the Nozickian denial that our current state possesses the authority to enforce the estate tax. This is the third front on which Bird-Pollan’s argument fails: she must show that Nozickians ought to believe government has the moral authority to enforce the estate tax, yet she makes no effort to do so. (shrink)

Introduction and brief summary of revised symposium papers of Christopher Arroyo, David Cummiskey, Lydia Moland, and Stephan Bird-Pollan on the work of Professor Korsgaard and her replies. The symposia took place at the annual Northern New England Philosophical Association (NNEPA) conference, October 16–17, 2009, where Professor Korsgaard gave the keynote address, as well as participating in the symposia on her work, both held at the University of New Hampshire-Durham.

Moral Entanglements: Conserving Birds in Britain and Germany, by Stefan Bargheer, claims that work and play orientations have respectively organized German and British wild bird conservation efforts. The book argues that work and play are nonmoral categories, and—more broadly—that moral justifications for action should be understood as mere post-hoc surface phenomena that contribute little to social action. The new French pragmatic sociology provides conceptual tools to examine how categories like work and play intertwine with logics of moral evaluation (...) that define what activities rightly qualify as each category, what public goods might each yield, and what value ought to be attached to them. With this approach in mind, this review examines Moral Entanglements’ claims, and identifies ways in which moral logics did indeed play a role in establishing different bird conservation styles in each country. The review highlights the broader importance for comparative-historical sociologists to take moral repertoires into account as they reconstruct historical institutional emergence. (shrink)

This article shows how activists in the open data movement re-articulate notions of democracy, participation, and journalism by applying practices and values from open source culture to the creation and use of data. Focusing on the Open Knowledge Foundation Germany and drawing from a combination of interviews and content analysis, it argues that this process leads activists to develop new rationalities around datafication that can support the agency of datafied publics. Three modulations of open source are identified: First, by regarding (...) data as a prerequisite for generating knowledge, activists transform the sharing of source code to include the sharing of raw data. Sharing raw data should break the interpretative monopoly of governments and would allow people to make their own interpretation of data about public issues. Second, activists connect this idea to an open and flexible form of representative democracy by applying the open source model of participation to political participation. Third, activists acknowledge that intermediaries are necessary to make raw data accessible to the public. This leads them to an interest in transforming journalism to become an intermediary in this sense. At the same time, they try to act as intermediaries themselves and develop civic technologies to put their ideas into practice. The article concludes with suggesting that the practices and ideas of open data activists are relevant because they illustrate the connection between datafication and open source culture and help to understand how datafication might support the agency of publics and actors outside big government and big business. (shrink)

Business Ethics, the Environment &Responsibility, Volume 32, Issue 2, Page 415-418, April 2023.

Many, including Marx, Rawls, and the contemporary 'Black Lives Matter' movement, embrace the ambition to secure terms of co-existence in which the worth of people's lives becomes a lived reality rather than an empty boast. This book asks whether, as some believe, the philosophical idea of human dignity can help achieve that ambition. Offering a new fourfold typology of dignity concepts, Colin Bird argues that human dignity can perform this role only if certain traditional ways of conceiving it are (...) abandoned. Accordingly, Bird rejects the idea that human dignity refers to the inherent worth or status of individuals, and instead reinterprets it as a social relation, constituted by affects of respect and the modes of mutual attention which they generate. What emerges is a new vision of human dignity as a vital political value, and an arresting vindication of its role as an agent of critical reflection on politics. (shrink)

I articulate a functional characterisation of the concept of evidence, according to which evidence is that which allows us to make inferences that extend our knowledge. This entails Williamson's equation of knowledge with evidence.

We are at a time when international law and the law of war are particularly important. The testing of nuclear weapons that is being used in the rhetoric surrounding threats of war is creating new fears and heightening current tensions. Richard Falk has for decades been an outspoken authority calling for nuclear disarmament and the enforcement of non-proliferation treaties. In this collection of essays, Falk examines the global threats to all humanity posed by nuclear weapons. He is not satisfied with (...) accepting arms control measures as a managerial stopgap to these threats and seeks no less than to move the world back from the nuclear precipice and towards denuclearization. Falk's essays reflect the wisdom and innovative thinking he has brought to his long career as a scholar and activist, as he reminds nuclear weapons states of their obligation under international law and moral imperative to seek nuclear disarmament. (shrink)

The central task of my reflections is to deal with the question what harming a person could mean. In the first part of the reflections, I will be critically concerned with current ways of dealing with the concept of human dignity, and why it is no longer plausible to uphold these regulations, whereby I will particularly focus on the legal dimension. It will come out that the person-object-dichotomy cannot simply be upheld in its traditional manner. Given the plausibility of these (...) reflections, the legal implication that it ought to be legally prohibited to treat another person merely as a means becomes implausible, too, as it rests on the aforementioned distinction between persons and objects. As an alternative, it will be suggested that legally we ought to separate ontological insights clearly from normative ones. In the following part, I will focus on the moral status of personhood, and develop some philosophical reflections which could be upheld on the basis of a posthuman paradigm-shift. Thereby, I will develop a gradual concept of personhood which implies several levels of personhood depending on the corresponding capacity of suffering, which needs to be established empirically. Once, the direction of an alternative concept of personhood becomes clearer, which implies that some animals become person and which provides some reasons for holding that some sufficiently developed embodied AIs could also deserve personhood, the question can be reflected upon further what it could mean to harm a person. The issue of harming, however, is so complex that I merely plan to raise some questions which need to be confronted when clarifying the concept of harming. I do not attempt to propose a definite concept of harming, but stress that the concept is closely related to cultural circumstances, so that there is a permanent need to engage with the concept, redefine it, and adapt it to the current cultural situation. Not proposing a clear concept of harm is not a shortcoming, but rather a necessity. (shrink)

Inference to the Best Explanation is usually employed in the Scientific Realism debates. As far as particular scientific theories are concerned, its most ready usage seems to be that of a theory of confirmation. There are however more uses of IBE, namely as an epistemological theory of testimony and as a means of categorising and justifying the sources of evidence. In this paper, I will present, develop and exemplify IBE as a theory of the quality of evidence - taking examples (...) from medicine and showing that IBE can thereby provide the epistemological underpinning and justify the criteria of grading quality of mechanistic evidence that have been recently provided in the Clarke et al. paper on how evidence of medical mechanisms is to be construed alongside population studies. (shrink)

I argue that the naturalism of Thomas Kuhn's "The Structure of Scientific Revolutions," which he himself later ignored, is worthy of rehabilitation. A naturalistic conception of paradigms is ripe for development with the tools of cognitive science. As a consequence a naturalistic understanding of world-change and incommensurability is also viable.