It is now a commonplace that emotions are not mere sensations but, rather, conceptually contentful states. In trying to expand on this insight, however, most theoretical approaches to emotions neglect central intuitions about what emotions are like. We therefore need a methodological shift in our thinking about emotions away from the standard accounts' attempts to reduce them to other mental states and toward an exploration of the distinctive work emotions do. I show that emotions' distinctive function is to engage us (...) with both objective and personal values. Attention to emotions' work reveals that it is precisely their “unruliness” that allows them to play meaningful roles in our lives. (shrink)

Polish-German relations in the first half of 2014 were dominated by the Ukraine crisis. This study is an attempt to answer the question of how Polish and German press assessed the cooperation of both countries in resolving the conflict in Ukraine; to what extent the most widely read magazines associated themselves with the decisions of their politicians and the feelings of their own societies and how much understanding they showed for the arguments of their EU partner. The analysis focuses on (...) the unprecedented mission of the Weimar Triangle foreign ministers to Ukraine in February 2014, which led to an agreement between the Ukrainian opposition and President Viktor Yanukovych. A turning point was the visit paid by Radoslaw Sikorski and Frank-Walter Steinmeier to St. Petersburg in June 2014. The next meetings agreed on by EU partners were held without inviting the Polish partner. In view of the speed of events in the selected time interval, the articles subjected to analysis were taken from the most widely read online editions of national daily newspapers in Poland and Germany. (shrink)

Empathy has become a common point of debate in moral psychology. Recent developments in psychiatry, neurosciences and social psychology have led to the revival of sentimentalism, and the ‘empathy thesis’ has suggested that affective empathy, in particular, is a necessary criterion of moral agency. The case of psychopaths – individuals incapable of affective empathy and moral agency, yet capable of rationality – has been utilised in support of this case. Critics, however, have been vocal. They have asserted that the case (...) of autism proves the empathy thesis wrong; that psychopathy centres on rational rather than empathic limitations; that empathy is not relevant to many common normative behaviours; and that rationality is required when empathy fails. The present paper analyses these four criticisms. It will be claimed that they each face severe difficulties, and that moral agency ought to be approached via a multi-tier model, with affective empathy as a baseline. (shrink)

The climate crisis is an enormous challenge for contemporary societies. Yet, public discussions on it often lead to anger, mocking, denial and other defensive behaviours, one prominent example of which is the reception met by the climate advocate Greta Thunberg. The paper approaches this curious phenomenon via shame. It argues that the very idea of anthropogenic climate change invites feelings of human failure and thereby may also entice shame. The notion of “climate shame” is introduced and distinguished from “climate guilt”. (...) Whereas climate guilt prioritises the flourishing of the environment and is focused on actions and morality, climate shame is concerned with human identity and selfhood. The paper then explores whether shame is a morally destructive or constructive emotion. Making use of both psychological and philosophical literature on shame, it argues that although shame faces many challenges that question its usefulness in moral pedagogy, these challenges can be met with “moral maturity”—moreover, following a utilitarian approach, the overall benefits of climate shame can justify its costs to individuals. My argument is that climate shame holds the potential of being a highly effective moral psychological method of persuasion, capable of inviting wholesale critical reflection on current, environmentally damaging practices and cultivation of more virtuous ways of co-existing with the rest of the natural world and other species. (shrink)

Contemporary literature includes a wide variety of definitions of empathy. At the same time, the revival of sentimentalism has proposed that empathy serves as a necessary criterion of moral agency. The paper explores four common definitions in order to map out which of them best serves such agency. Historical figures are used as the backdrop against which contemporary literature is analysed. David Hume’s philosophy is linked to contemporary notions of affective and cognitive empathy, Adam Smith’s philosophy to projective empathy, and (...) Max Scheler’s account to embodied empathy. Whereas cognitive and projective empathy suffer from detachment and atomism, thereby providing poor support for the type of other-directedness and openness entailed by moral agency, embodied and affective empathy intrinsically facilitate these factors, and hence are viewed as fruitful candidates. However, the theory of affective empathy struggles to explain why the experience of empathy includes more than pure affective mimicry, whilst embodied empathy fails to take into account forms of empathy that do not include contextual, narrative information. In order to navigate through these difficulties, Edith Stein’s take on non-primordial experience is used as a base upon which a definition of affective empathy, inclusive of an embodied dimension, and founded on a movement between resonation and response, is sketched. It is argued that, of the four candidates, this new definition best facilitates moral agency. (shrink)

The book introduced in this text is based on the premise that the trade-off between privacy and security is both unsound and conceals important aspects of surveillance and control. Accordingly, the authors analyse the symbiotic relationship between liberty and security, and the emptiness of both concepts when considered in isolation. They explore and contextualise different notions of risk, surveillance practices and the value of the rights to private life and data protection. Thereby, they show that surveillance and control neither necessarily (...) attain security, nor always pose a threat to privacy and, conversely, that protecting privacy does not necessarily hamper security provision. Moreover, they appreciate how surveillance and control, mediated through technology, express and sustain specific power relationships. The book thus offers a kaleidoscope of perspectives, ranging from critical studies to international relations, law, philosophy and sociology, to rethink surveillance and control. (shrink)

Le politiche di sicurezza hanno assunto nel corso degli ultimi decenni un ruolo centrale all’interno dell’Unione Europea (UE) e ne costituiscono attualmente uno dei settori più controversi. Nel porsi come attore in grado di garantire sicurezza, l’Unione assume da un lato sempre più compiti e funzioni che sin dall’inizio dell’età moderna sono stati prerogativa del potere statale, senza poter direttamente avvalersi, dall’altro lato, dei principi di legittimazione propri dello Stato. Gli sviluppi recenti delle politiche di sicurezza UE, inoltre, sono fortemente (...) condizionati dai processi di digitalizzazione. Questi favoriscono l’emergere di nuovi modi di intenderle, caratterizzati da un approccio “preemptivo”. Questo denota un modo di affrontare la criminalità che si concentra sugli effetti piuttosto che sulle cause e, attraverso la formulazione di prognosi, mira a intervenire prima che determinati avvenimenti si manifestino al fine di evitarli. Il libro esplora questi sviluppi e discute se, alla luce di essi, i principi fondamentali di legittimità dell’UE siano in grado di esercitare effettivamente la propria funzione di limitazione del potere e tutela dei diritti fondamentali. Attraverso analisi di pratiche concrete quali l’utilizzo e il potenziamento di grosse banche dati, tra cui il sistema di informazione Schengen (SIS), l’analisi dei codici di prenotazione recentemente introdotti dalla Direttiva PNR e l’incremento dell’interoperabilità tra le banche dati europee, il volume mette in atto un approccio filosofico “critico-realistico”, che si ancora nella realtà ma non rinuncia alla normatività e all’elaborazione di proposte alternative. Nel far ciò, le ricerche qui esposte intendono offrire un contributo agli ambiti disciplinari della filosofia politica e della filosofia del diritto, e, più specificamente, dei Security Studies e degli European Studies. (shrink)

Most philosophers who had the opportunity to meet Paolo Casalegno (1952-2009) have been impressed by his sharp acumen, his passion for discussing philosophy and his human and intellectual generosity. I had the chance more than others to appreciate his qualities and benefit from them: we worked in the same university in Milan for many years and we had many occasions to discuss philosophy and other non-philosophical topics. I owe a debt of gratitude to him and, together with Paolo’s friends and (...) colleagues, I look for opportunities to remember his work and to continue to discuss it. One of them is the conference 'Good Points. Paolo Casalegno’s criticisms of some analytic philosophers' held in Milan in April 2011; the present special issue of dialectica collects the contributions on Paolo’s work presented on this occasion together with the reviews of two books published posthumously. (shrink)

A recent preoccupation in scholarly research is the capacity of firms in developing country industrial clusters to comply with international corporate social responsibility policies and codes of conducts. This research is at an early stage and draws on several—often quite distinct—scholarly traditions. In this paper, we argue that future work in this area would benefit from a more explicit examination of the connection between cluster firms and human rights defined according to the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights and subsequent (...) covenants and treaties. We argue that cluster firms’ adoption of CSR policies, often indiscriminately imposed by global buyers, should be differentiated from firms’ actual human rights practices. Based on this distinction, we elaborate a typology of industrial clusters and identify a set of factors likely to influence their practice. Against this background, we discuss an agenda for future research and elaborate on the potential methodological intricacies related to research on the interface between industrial clusters and human rights. (shrink)

Before 1800 nothing was irrelevant. So argues Elisa Tamarkin's sweeping cultural history of a key shift in consciousness: the arrival, around 1800, of "relevance" as the means to grasp how something previously disregarded becomes important and interesting. At a time when so much makes claims to attention every day, how does one decide what is most valuable right now? This is not only a contemporary problem. For Ralph Waldo Emerson, the question for the nineteenth century was how, in the (...) immensity and "succession" of objects, anything becomes a proper object of experience. How that question was finally defined as one of relevance is the story of Apropos of Nothing. Relevance, Tamarkin shows, was primarily an Anglo-American concept. It engaged major intellectual figures, centrally the pragmatists-William James, Alain Locke, and John Dewey-and before them thinkers including Emerson and Alfred North Whitehead. Most of all, relevance was a problem for the worlds of art, literature, education, and criticism. These were fascinated by how old, boring, distant, or unfamiliar things get taken in; how they are admitted as meaningful; how they come home to us like the ludicrous raven comes to Edgar Allan Poe's student in the middle of the night in some obscure connection with himself. Many nineteenth-century American artists saw their paintings as pragmatic works that make relevance-that suggest versions of events that feel apropos of our world the moment we see them. (Tamarkin's book is richly illustrated, in color, with works by Winslow Homer, Abbott Handerson Thayer, Edgar Degas, and others.) Relevance remains a conundrum, especially for the humanities. It obliges us to say why we admit Poe's poem-or, say, a line of Emerson's-is interesting enough to study it, to dedicate ourselves to understanding it, to affirming that this effort is, in Emerson's words, "relevant to me and mine, to nature, and the hour that now passes.". (shrink)

The re-use of publicly available (personal) data for originally unanticipated purposes has become common practice. Without such secondary uses, the development of many AI systems like large language models (LLMs) and ChatGPT would not even have been possible. This chapter addresses the ethical implications of such secondary processing, with a particular focus on data protection and privacy issues. Legal and ethical evaluations of secondary processing of publicly available personal data diverge considerably both among scholars and the general public. While some (...) of these uses are met with opposition and criticism, others are quite unanimously viewed as unproblematic. Often, proponents and opponents of such practices invoke the same ethical and legal standards for their opposite conclusions. This state of affairs shows that other considerations besides the public availability of data must play a role. It calls for a theoretical clarification of the additional criteria that should guide decisions about the (legally informed) ethical acceptability of re-processing practices. In order to make a contribution towards this goal, the present chapter maps the ongoing debate and systematises the existing contributions around three lines of argument: a consent-centred position, an approach that focuses on the distinction between data and information, and finally a line of argument that focuses on the contextual norms that govern the flows of information. The chapter further relates these arguments to three underlying conceptions of privacy and data protection: rights-based, structural and contextual, and discusses the advantages and disadvantages of each position in the light of concrete examples. It concludes by arguing for a mixed approach that combines core elements of the structural and contextual approaches. The chapter aims to contribute to existing research in the fields of data, AI and research ethics, and to reconnect the debate with ethical and legal scholarship on privacy and data protection. In doing so, it aims to make a theoretical contribution towards refining existing conceptions of privacy and data protection in order to make them more fit to ‘drive our digital world’ as far as the use of publicly available data is concerned. (shrink)

From the feminist ‘sex wars’ of the 1980s to the queer theory and politics of the 1990s, debates about the politics of sexuality have been at the forefront of contemporary theoretical, social, and political demands. This article seeks to intervene in these debates by challenging the terms through which they have been defined. Investigating the importance of ‘sex positivity’ and transgression as conceptual features of feminist and queer discourses, this essay calls for a new focus on the political and material (...) effects of pro-sexuality. (shrink)

Artificial intelligence (AI) and molecular biotechnologies (MB) are among the most promising, but also ethically hotly debated emerging technologies. In both fields, several ethics reports, which invoke lists of ethics principles, have been put forward. These reports and the principles lists are technology specific. This article aims to contribute to the ongoing debate on ethics of emerging technologies by comparatively analysing four European ethics reports from the two technology fields. Adopting a qualitative and in-depth approach, the article highlights how ethics (...) principles from MB can inform AI ethics and vice versa. By synthesizing the respective ethical cores of the principles included in the analysed reports, the article derives, moreover, a unified list of principles for assessing emerging technologies. The suggested list consists of nine principles: autonomy; individual and social well-being and prevention of harm; reliability, safety and security; informational privacy; transparency; accountability; communication, participation and democracy; justice, fairness, and non-discrimination; sustainability. (shrink)

Despite a growing awareness within American biomedicine and bioethics that the social category “race” is of limited use in describing patients, some fields of medicine continue to use it interchangeably with, or instead of, the term “ethnicity.” Doing so reflects the assumption that social categories have a basis in physiology.

In 1791, two years after the proclamation of the ‘Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen’, the playwright, essayist, philosopher and revolutionary Olympe de Gouges wrote a short work entitled The Rights of Woman, the core of which is the Declaration of the Rights of Woman and of the Citizen. As is already clear from the title, with her writing de Gouges intends to highlight the gendered character of the 1789 Declaration. To this end, the author first (...) of all points out the contradictory nature of this Declaration: the rights it proclaims as universal apply, in law and in fact, only to human beings of the male gender. De Gouges also reformulates the claims of the Declaration so that they apply equally to men and women. This essay focuses on two themes of particular importance within de Gouges' reformulation: the claim of freedom of expression and the extension of the social contract to relationships. In dealing with these themes, de Gouges elaborates far-reaching theoretical insights that are significant not only for gender studies, but also for political philosophy and the philosophy of law. In fact, de Gouges' reflections, while placing themselves within the natural law tradition, reject and overturn some of its fundamental assumptions. Prominent among these are the subtraction of the family sphere from the equal regulation of relations between individuals, which instead characterises relations between citizens in the public sphere, and the abstraction from differences on which the particularism of rights, though proclaimed as universal, is based. (shrink)

Surveillance, understood as the collection of information about populations for supervision purposes, is a critical technique of social control. As such, it can reveal important features of the power that exercises it. The article analyses two contemporary surveillance measures in Europe: the Schengen Information System and the Directive 2006/24/EC on data retention. The analysis aims to identify the structural characteristics of the changing power of the EU and the role security plays in it. The main thesis is that security is (...) a key element of the legitimacy claim of the expanding power of the EU. (shrink)

With the exception of James Ostrow’s 1990 study, social sensitivity has received scarce attention in philosophy, whilst it has become an important area of research in social and clinical psychology, where it is commonly known as interpersonal sensitivity. The latter is usually understood as a form of social skill to appropriately recognise and decode the appearance and behaviour of others. However, this view suffers from conceptual limitations in that it tends to reduce social sensitivity to standardised skilful behaviour. Drawing on (...) Husserl’s phenomenology of perception, I disambiguate social sensitivity from social skills, arguing that the former builds on the receptivity of habit to beliefs and cognitive dissonance. In this revised sense, social sensitivity informs processes of attitude change that challenge ingrained dispositions and potentially defy social codes and expectations. (shrink)

The critical examination of current hypotheses is one of the key ways in which scientific fields develop and grow. Therefore, any critique, including Haidle and Schlaudt’s article, “Where Does Cumulative Culture Begin? A Plea for a Sociologically Informed Perspective,” represents a welcome addition to the literature. However, critiques must also be evaluated. In their article, Haidle and Schlaudt review some approaches to culture and cumulative culture in both human and nonhuman primates. H&S discuss the “zone of latent solutions” hypothesis as (...) applied to nonhuman primates and stone-toolmaking premodern hominins. Here, we will evaluate whether H&S’s critique addresses its target. (shrink)

Gaze direction is an important social cue for understanding the intentions of other people. Indeed, interacting with others requires the ability to encode their current focus of attention in order to predict their future actions. Previous studies have showed that when asked to detect or identify a target, people are faster if shown a gaze oriented toward rather than away from that target. Most importantly, there is evidence that the emotion conveyed by the face with the averted gaze matters. We (...) further tested the interplay between gaze and face emotion in the context of manipulable objects to understand whether and to what extent other people's gaze influences our own actions toward objects. Participants judged whether a target graspable object was upright or inverted after viewing a face cue with a central or averted gaze. Importantly, the target's handle could be oriented toward the gazed-at location or the opposite side such that gaze and handle were corresponding or non-corresponding in space. Furthermore, we manipulated the expression of the cue by using neutral and fearful faces. Results showed a handle-response compatibility effect only with fearful cues with a central gaze. (shrink)

The subjective feeling of free choice is an important feature of human experience. Experimental tasks have typically studied free choice by contrasting free and instructed selection of response alternatives. These tasks have been criticised, and it remains unclear how they relate to the subjective feeling of freely choosing. We replicated previous findings of the fMRI correlates of free choice, defined objectively. We introduced a novel task in which participants could experience and report a graded sense of free choice. BOLD responses (...) for conditions subjectively experienced as free identified a postcentral area distinct from the areas typically considered to be involved in free action. Thus, the brain correlates of subjective feeling of free action were not directly related to any established brain correlates of objectively-defined free action. Our results call into question traditional assumptions about the relation between subjective experience of choosing and activity in the brain’s so-called voluntary motor areas. (shrink)

This study focuses on the devices implemented in classical Indian texts on ritual and language in order to develop a structure of rules in an economic and systematic way. These devices presuppose a spatial approach to ritual and language, one which deals for instance with absences as substitutions within a pre-existing grid, and not as temporal disappearances. In this way, the study reveals a key feature of some among the most influential schools of Indian thought. The sources are Kalpasūtra, Vyākaraṇa (...) and Mīmāṃsā, three textual traditions which developed alongside each other, sharing - as the volume shows - common presuppositions and methodologies. The book will be of interest for Sanskritists, scholars of ritual exegesis and of the history of linguistics. - Cover. (shrink)