Christine Swanton presents a new target centred virtue ethics, which is opposed to orthodox virtue ethics in two major ways. She rejects the 'natural goodness' metaphysics of neo-Aristotelian virtue ethics in favour of a 'hermeneutic ontology' of ethics, and she offers a new target centred framework for assessing rightness of acts.

After discussing de Sousa's view of emotion in akrasia, I suggest that emotions be viewed as nonconceptual perceptions of value (see Tappolet 2000). It follows that they can render intelligible actions which are contrary to one's better judgment. An emotion can make one's action intelligible even when that action is opposed by one's all-things-considered judgment. Moreover, an akratic action prompted by an emotion may be more rational than following one's better judgement, for it may be the judgement and not the (...) perception which is in error. By contrast, "cool" akrasia is genuinely puzzling; it is not clear whether it exists. (shrink)

ExtractThe idea that all the entities in the world may be, for legal and moral purposes, divided into the two categories of ‘persons’ and ‘things’ comes down to us from the tradition of Roman law. In the law, a ‘person’ is essentially the subject of rights and obligations, while a thing may be owned as property. In ethics, a person is an object of respect, to be valued for her own sake, and never to be used as a mere means (...) to an end, while a thing has only a derivative value, and may be used as a means to some person's ends. This bifurcation is unfortunate because it seems to leave us with no alternative but to categorize everything as either a person or a thing. Yet some of the entities that give rise to the most vexing ethical problems are exactly the ones that do not seem to fit comfortably into either category. For various, different, kinds of reasons, it seems inappropriate to categorize a fetus, a non-human animal, the environment, or an object of great beauty, as a person, but neither does it seem right to say of such things that they are to be valued only as means.Send article to KindleTo send this article to your Kindle, first ensure [email protected] is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about sending to your Kindle. Find out more about sending to your Kindle. Note you can select to send to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be sent to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply. Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.PERSONHOOD, ANIMALS, AND THE LAWVolume 12, Issue 34Christine M. KorsgaardDOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/S1477175613000018Your Kindle email address Please provide your Kindle [email protected]@kindle.com Available formats PDF Please select a format to send. By using this service, you agree that you will only keep articles for personal use, and will not openly distribute them via Dropbox, Google Drive or other file sharing services. Please confirm that you accept the terms of use. Cancel Send ×Send article to Dropbox To send this article to your Dropbox account, please select one or more formats and confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about sending content to Dropbox. PERSONHOOD, ANIMALS, AND THE LAWVolume 12, Issue 34Christine M. KorsgaardDOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/S1477175613000018Available formats PDF Please select a format to send. By using this service, you agree that you will only keep articles for personal use, and will not openly distribute them via Dropbox, Google Drive or other file sharing services. Please confirm that you accept the terms of use. Cancel Send ×Send article to Google Drive To send this article to your Google Drive account, please select one or more formats and confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about sending content to Google Drive. PERSONHOOD, ANIMALS, AND THE LAWVolume 12, Issue 34Christine M. KorsgaardDOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/S1477175613000018Available formats PDF Please select a format to send. By using this service, you agree that you will only keep articles for personal use, and will not openly distribute them via Dropbox, Google Drive or other file sharing services. Please confirm that you accept the terms of use. Cancel Send ×Export citation. (shrink)

Cognitive Theories of emotions have enjoyed great popularity in recent times. Allegedly, the so-called Perceptual Theory constitutes the most attractive version of this approach. However, the Perceptual Theory has come under increasing pressure. There are at least two ways to deal with the barrage of objections, which have been mounted against the Perceptual Theory. One is to argue that the objections work only if one assumes an overly narrow conception of what perception consists in. On a better and more liberal (...) understanding of perception, the objections lose their force. The other is to stress that the differences between emotions and sensory perceptions can be explained by focusing on a new analogy. As I will argue, emotions have interesting similarities with magnitude representations, such as the representation of distance. Such representations are plausibly thought to be analog and non-conceptual, but by contrast to sensory perceptions, such as colour perceptions, they do not lie at the sensory periphery. This new analogy makes room for a novel and attractive theory of emotions, the Receptive Theory, which allows for a positive and epistemologically fruitful characterization of emotions. (shrink)

It is not unusual now for Hume to be read as part of a virtue ethical tradition. However there are a number of obstacles in the way of such a reading: subjectivist, irrationalist, hedonistic, and consequentialist interpretations of Hume. In this paper I support a virtue ethical reading by arguing against all these interpretations. In the course of these arguments I show how Hume should be understood as part of a virtue ethical tradition which is sentimentalist in a response-dependent sense, (...) as opposed to Aristotelian. (shrink)

Neo-sentimentalism is the view that to judge that something has an evaluative property is to judge that some affective or emotional response is appropriate with respect to it. The difficulty in assessing neo-sentimentalism is that it allows for radically different versions. My aim is to spell out what I take to be its most plausible version. I distinguish between a normative version, which takes the concept of appropriateness to be normative, and a descriptive version, which claims that appropriateness in emotions (...) is a matter of correspondence to evaluative facts. I argue that the latter version can satisfy the normativity requirement that follows from Moore’s Open Question Argument, that it is superior to the former with respect to the explanatory role of values, and with respect to the Wrong Kind of Reason Objection. Finally, I argue that the circularity that is involved is not vicious: understood epistemically, neo-sentimentalism remains instructive. (shrink)

This article aims to offer a general view of the work and the progress the Partnership and promotions team, placed at the core of the Globethics.net Foundation activities, has reached so far. Starting with a general view on its tasks and duties, Christine Housel opens the floor for the regional officers of the department to offer a personalized view and opinion on the relevant and pressing matters Globethics.net has to focus, or has focused on, locally. During this exposition, we (...) will hear about the Partnership and promotion team’s commitment with students at all levels, its work to foster and nurture ethics in higher education on institutions worldwide, and the diversity and plurality held in itself, a clear embodiment of the pluralistic vocation of Globethics.net. (shrink)

A well-trod debate at the nexus of cognitive science and linguistics, the so-called past tense debate, has examined how rules and exceptions are individually acquired. However, this debate focuses primarily on individual mechanisms in learning, saying little about how rules and exceptions function from a sociolinguistic perspective. To remedy this, we use agent-based models to examine how rules and exceptions function across populations. We expand on earlier work by considering how repeated interaction and cultural transmission across speakers affects the dynamics (...) of rules and exceptions in language, measuring linguistic outcomes within a social system rather than focusing individual learning outcomes. We consider how population turnover and growth effect linguistic rule dynamics in large and small populations, showing that this method has considerable potential particularly in probing the mechanisms underlying the linguistic niche hypothesis. (shrink)

This article uses elements of autoethnography to theorize an in/formal support relationship between a friend with a physical disability, who uses attendant services, and me. Through thinking about our particular “frien-tendant” relationship, I find the common scholarly orientations toward “care” are inadequate. Starting from the conversations between feminist and disability perspectives on care, I build on previous work to further develop the theoretical framework of accessible care. Accessible care takes a critical, engaged approach that moves beyond understanding “accessibility” as merely (...) concrete solutions to create more inclusive forms of care. Care, in this context, is positioned as an unstable tension among competing definitions, including that it is a complex form of oppression. Accessible care draws on feminist disability perspectives and the feminist political ethic of care to build bridges in four areas: from daily experiences of disability and support to theoretical discussions; across feminist care research and disability perspectives; across divisions and anxieties within disability communities; and from the local to transnational applications. These bridges do not aim to resolve debates but allow us to travel back and forth between differing perspectives and demonstrate the tenuous possibility of accessible practices and concepts of care. (shrink)

This article explores the emergence of leadership during implementation of a water saving initiative in the rural community surrounding Barren Box Swamp in the Murray Darling Basin, Australia. Qualitative data analysis indicated that the system elements affecting the type of leadership to emerge included the extent to which the groups were engaged in the process, the level of access to resources, and the level of investment in the outcomes of the project. Although these results reinforced key aspects of complex problem-solving (...) through collaboration, they demonstrated varying degrees and types of both engagement and leadership within the case community. Given the current finding that these varying elements can coincide within one system, this case suggests that each community’s characteristics, resources and context will determine the optimal combination of leadership style and level of collaboration needed to facilitate sustainable community development. (shrink)

Cet article, adossé à un cas clinique, propose une réflexion sur la dimension traumatique à l’adolescence en analysant la problématique de l’intrus persécuteur et la problématique transgénérationnelle. L’adolescent manifeste une dynamique de survie psychique par des symptômes somatiques, des conduites phobosociales et une hypersensibilité narcissique. La différenciation et la séparation-individuation d’avec l’objet interne intruseur sont également apparues dans le travail psychique engagé dans les entretiens familiaux.

This book analyses the dynamic relationship between art and subjective consciousness, following a phenomenological, pragmatist and enactive approach. It brings out a new approach to the role of the body in art, not as a speculative object or symbolic material but as the living source of the imaginary. It contains theoretical contributions and case studies taken from various artistic practices (visual art, theatre, literature and music), Western and Eastern, the latter concerning China, India and Japan. These contributions allow us to (...) nourish the debate on embodied cognition and aesthetics, using theory-philosophy, art history, neuroscience-and the authors' personal experience as artists or spectators. According to the Husserlian method of "reduction" and pragmatist introspection, they postulate that listening to bodily sensations-cramps, heartbeats, impulsive movements, eye orientation-can unravel the thread of subconscious experience, both active and affective, that emerge in the encounter between a subject and an artwork, an encounter which, following John Dewey, we deem to be a case study for life in general. Ce livre analyse la relation dynamique entre l'art et la conscience subjective, selon une approche phénoménologique, pragmatiste et enactive. Il vise à faire émerger une nouvelle approche du rôle du corps dans l'art, non pas comme objet spéculatif ou matériau symbolique, mais comme source vivante de l'imaginaire. Les contributions théoriques et les études de cas sont prises à diverses pratiques artistiques (arts visuels, théâtre, littérature et musique), occidentales et orientales, ces dernières concernant la Chine, l'Inde et le Japon. Selon la méthode husserlienne de réduction, en écho à l'introspection pragmatiste, les textes témoignent que l'écoute des sensations corporelles - crampes, battements de coeur, mouvements pulsionnels, orientation des yeux - mises en jeu par l'oeuvre, permet de dénouer le fil de l'expérience inconsciente, à la fois kinesthésique et affective, qui émerge dans la rencontre entre un sujet et une oeuvre d'art, une rencontre comprise, à la manière de Dewey, comme un cas d'école de la vie en général. (shrink)

Recent culture wars, as fueled by right-wing extremists and warmongers over an identitarian and biologistic understanding of culture, require philosophy of culture to contradict and articulate its self-understanding. The article is structured along four theses that contest widespread assumptions, unfold their problematics and outline perspectives of cultural philosophy: 1. culture is not a being 2. critique is not enmity 3. technology is not a doom 4. history is not destiny.

Conscience is the psychological faculty by which we aware of and respond to the moral character of our own actions. It is most commonly thought of as the source of pains we suffer as a result of doing what we believe is wrong --- the pains of guilt, or “pangs of conscience.” It may also be seen, more controversially, as the source of our knowledge of what is right and wrong, or as a motive for moral conduct. Thus a person (...) who is motivated to act on principle is said to act “conscientiously.” These terms come from the Latin “conscientia,” a direct translation of the Greek “syneidesis.” This ranges in meaning from being aware of something to “knowing something in common with” someone. Knowing something in common with someone can mean sharing his secret, and this puts you in a position to serve as a witness against him. Thus the term came to have a judicial use, to describe one who could bear witness. In certain contexts, “syneidesis” came to mean a state of knowing in common with oneself, and so of bearing witness against oneself. Although these terms appear in Stoic and Epicurean works, conscience did not receive extensive philosophical treatment until the Medieval period, when treatises on conscience became standard. Medieval philosophers distinguished two aspects of conscience, “conscientia” and “synderesis.” Roughly, “synderesis” refers to the ineradicable and infallible basis of conscience in human nature, while “conscientia” refers to the more particular judgments we make about our actions. There are various ways of specifying the two ideas further. In Thomas Aquinas’s account, which became standard, synderesis grasps the basic moral principles which are the first premises of practical reasoning, while conscientia is the conclusion, the act of judging that one ought to perform a particular action. (shrink)

Notions of human rights as enshrined in international law have become the “idea of our time”; a “dominant moral narrative by which world politics” is organized; and a powerful “discourse of public persuasion.”1 With the rise of human rights discourse, we need to ask, how do protagonists make human rights claims? What sort of resources, techniques, and strategies do they use in order to publicize information about human rights abuses and stipulations set out in international law? With the democratization of (...) mapping practices, various individuals, organizations, and governments are increasingly using maps in order to put forth certain social and political claims. This article draws on the sociology of knowledge, science studies, critical cartography, cultural studies, and anthropological studies of law in order to analyze how various international, Palestinian, and Israeli organizations design maps of the West Bank Barrier in accord with assumptions embedded within international law as part of their political and new media activism. Qualitative sociological methods, such as in-depth interviewing, ethnography, and the collection of cartographic material pertaining to the West Bank Barrier, provide the empirical tools to do so. The maps examined here exemplify how universalistic notions of international law and human rights become a powerful rhetorical tool to make various and often incommensurable social and political claims across different maps. At the same time, international human rights law, rather than dictating local mapping practices, becomes inevitably “vernacularized” and combined with local understandings, cultural preferences, and political concerns. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The Novelistic Incarnation and the Question of TruthChristine Orsini (bio)Translated by William A. JohnsenINTRODUCTIONLike many of you, I was overwhelmed by reading René Girard's first book Mensonge romantique et vérité romanesque, published in 1961.1 But I belong to a special class: Compared to all the young and less young readers and researchers who make up this assembly, I am what in high places, at the ARM [Association Recherches mimétiques], (...) we do not hesitate to qualify as a "historical Girardian": I read this book in 1961, thanks to Michel Deguy. And, of course, all his other books in the order of their publication. So I'm probably the oldest surviving groupie of René Girard. It's not a claim to fame, but it's in this way that I find a fellowship with you and that I'm happy to be before you. Indeed, I think that between Girardians, the differences matter less than the similarities.It is about another event, very recent, but directly linked to the previous one and also moving for me, that I am going to talk to you: the discovery of René Girard, biographie, the forthcoming book by Benoît Chantre, that I had the chance, once again, to read before everyone else. I read it passionately because [End Page 1] of all the things it teaches us about the genesis of Girard's work and above all because it gives this work an extraordinary and indisputable unity.I had assumed the unity of Girard's work but Benoît Chantre's book confirms it: What is called the mimetic theory is not a whole made up of separate and detachable parts, like a three-stage rocket, to which we like to compare it. Even if the writing of mimetic theory has undergone the turbulence of world history and the biography of its author, the whole determines its parts; the whole comprehends the boundaries of the work, the first writings and the last, in both senses of the word: to be taken altogether, understood as a whole, or discarded altogether. Moreover, its radical nature prohibits any form of readjustment or compromise. Girard has said it expressly in his interviews: There is no "Girardian system" but at the outset, a very compact intuition that fertilized all his research. This same intuition allowed Girard to profit from the work of his contemporaries and to maintain real relationships with the thought leaders of his time, such as Goldmann, Deguy, Foucault, Lacan, Barthes, and Derrida, without ever turning away from his own path. This intuition takes shape even before the conception of a "triangular" desire on an individual scale, a desire that will subsequently become "mimetic" on the scale of human societies.By reading the biography of Girard by Benoît Chantre, I better understood the importance of literature in the genesis of what we call mimetic theory. Marx wrote that ideas are not born like mushrooms; they always reflect a state of social reality. Girard showed, on the contrary, that social reality is not merely reflected but revealed by great literature. And with Girard, brilliant ideas are of the order of an event, intuitions inspired by readings in tune with events in his life. Reading Girard's intellectual biography therefore holds some surprises, things we did not know and things that can shed new light on those we already know.A genuine surprise is to learn that the excellent title "mensonge romantique et vérité romanesque" of his first work was imposed on him by his publisher. Girard had titled his history of the novel, which is at the same time a history of desire, "L'incarnation romanesque." At first, we will see what this mysterious title can mean; then, we will see that there are not only circumstantial reasons, linked to his teaching, to explain the confidence that Girard placed in literature, and not in philosophy and the human sciences, in his search for truth. [End Page 2]NOVELISTIC INCARNATIONIt was in Girard's personal papers, described by him as "very important papers" and carefully preserved and carried around from one move to another, that Benoît Chantre found... (shrink)

In this volume, renowned scholars come together to reflect on Michael Krausz’s examinations of the relation between interpretation and ontology, the varieties of relativism, and the interpretive dimension of identity.

Climate change challenges the means of subsistence for many, particularly in the Global South. To respond to the challenges of climate change, countries increasingly resort to resettling those most affected by land erosion, heat, drought, floods, and the like. In this article, I investigate to what extent resettlement can compensate for the harm that climate-induced migration brings. The first harm I identify is that to individual autonomy. I argue that climate change changes the options of those affected by it to (...) the point that the decision to migrate can no longer count as a voluntary one. In some cases, I argue, the conditions of climate change coerce individuals. Second, I suggest that climate-induced migration severs the ties to territory, explaining the constitutive nature of such ties for accounts of individual autonomy. Third, I argue that severing ties with a traditional and historical territory challenges the capacity to imagine a future for individuals. I conclude that resettlement, even if actively planned and chosen, possibly providing gains in individual well-being and human flourishing, nevertheless harms individual autonomy interests. (shrink)

Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex presents phenomenolog¬ical analyses that are intertwined and political proposals that posit that the individual ought to acknowledge the ambiguity of her own experience as human as well as the ambiguity of her relations with the Other and enact this ambiguous encounter. This is possible only with the rejection of the patriarchal system of values and meaning which negates ambiguity through its determinations of the feminine and the mascu¬line. A radical transformation of the social imaginaries (...) permeating our lives is needed. The Second Sex functions as a call to its readers to undertake this transformation. My claim is that in addition to putting forward a concept of political subjectivity as fundamentally ambiguous, Beauvoir also addresses us, the readers, as such subjects. I explain that this work is an instance of what Beauvoir defines as metaphysical literature that performs an appeal to ambiguous agents. (shrink)

L’article propose de mettre en évidence les déterminants des trajectoires scolaires exceptionnelles de huit filles, d’une même famille protestante de la petite bourgeoisie rurale, nées à l’aube du XXe siècle.

C'est en 1941, dans le contexte chaotique de la Deuxième Guerre mondiale, que Simone Weil, très tôt préoccupée par les questions du malheur et de la vérité, découvre le principe de la kénose divine en lisant l'hymne aux Philippiens de saint Paul (Ph 2, 5-11). La lecture de ce texte est un moment philosophique et spirituel décisif dans le parcours de la philosophe car, prenant pleinement en charge les questions universelles et paradoxales de l'amour de Dieu et du malheur, l'hymne (...) paulinien lui permet de tisser un lien de cohérence métaphysique entre sa recherche personnelle de la vérité, l'existence du malheur et ses expériences spirituelles. A contrario d'un texte-miracle qui nierait le réel et minimiserait l'impact du malheur sur nos vies, Simone Weil accueille effectivement cet hymne comme l'expression universelle de l'abaissement du divin qui s'incarne dans la condition humaine et appelle tout homme à le suivre, et à se libérer de son sentiment de toute-impuissance face au mal écrasant. Après cette rencontre scripturaire. Simone Weil n'aura alors de cesse d'actualiser, dans ses écrits et ses engagements dans le monde, cette invitation explicite de saint Paul à l'imitatio Christi. Sa pensée s'élaborera en une théologie pratique nourrie par l'Amour du Père et du Christ qui rejoint chacun de nous. II s'agira alors, pour elle, de comprendre concrètement "comment nous pouvons l'imiter?" et d'étudier de quelles manières le caractère universel de la vérité de la kénose divine est, comme l'exprime l'antique doctrine des "semences du Verbe", préfiguré dans les différentes cultures et traditions du bassin indo-européen. (shrink)

In matters such as affirmative action or home schooling, rights of ethnic and other minority groups often come into conflict with those of society in a culturally diverse population such as ours. But before considering the dilemmas posed by these issues, we must first ask such basic but important questions as what group rights are and how they intersect with the principles of democracy. This new collection brings together some of today's leading thinkers from the cutting edge of these debates, (...) taking in a broad range of issues confronting philosophers, sociologists, and political scientists. Contributors such as Carl Wellman, Carol Gould, and Rex Martin examine the nature of groups and the conflict between group rights and democracy and also consider case studies depicting current issues in cultural, ethnic, and religious rights. The first section, on the nature of groups, examines some of the perplexing alternatives in the formulation of a theory of group rights. These articles investigate the kinds of rights minorities might claim and ask when groups can be held responsible for the acts of some of their members. The second section addresses the treatment of groups in a democracy and the precarious balance between indifference toward minorities and capitulation to their demands. Here the contributors examine five principles for the sensitive treatment of minority and disadvantaged groups in a democratic society. A final section explores specific conflicts between subgroup and societal claims through case studies dealing with affirmative action, religious practice and the education of children, and the land rights of indigenous peoples. By drawing on the legal and political dilemmas related to these cases, the authors confront issues of core versus peripheral interests, of individual member versus subgroup rights, and of the possibilities for social openness raised in the preceding sections Written from varied perspectives, Groups and Group Rights offers stimulating reading for both students and professionals as it takes on some of the most pressing dilemmas confronting our society. (shrink)

One factor that impedes medical students from speaking up about ethical situations is the lack of sufficient knowledge and skills in conflict resolution. This may also affect students’ decision and timing to intervene. This article will provide practical ways to effectively and efficiently address the medical student’s ethical case presented in August A. Culbert et al.’s “Navigating Informed Consent and Patient Safety in Surgery: Lessons for Medical Students and Junior Trainees.”.

There are various programmes currently advocated for ways in which children might encounter philosophy as an explicit part of their education. An analysis of these reveals the ways in which they are predicated on views of what constitutes philosophy. In the sense in which they are inquiry based, purport to encourage the pursuit of puzzlement and contribute towards creating democratic citizens, these programmes either implicitly rest on the work of John Dewey or explicitly use his work as the main warrant (...) for their approach. This article explores what might count as educational in the practice of children ‘doing’ philosophy, by reconsidering Dewey’s notion of ‘experience’. The educational desire to generate inquiry, thought and democracy is not lost, but a view that philosophy takes its impetus from wonder is introduced to help re-evaluate what might count as educational experience in a Deweyan sense. (shrink)