Journal Name: Philologus Issue: Ahead of print.

Horace’s Carmen 3.27 has been subject to various interpretations. Being at first glance a sympathetically written propempticon to Galatea, the ode on closer inspection shows many negative undertones: The omens in the first stanzas are ambiguous, the sea will be stormy (literally and metaphorically), and even in the illustrating myth of Europa negative aspects predominate, above all her desperation, which two delusive deities, Jupiter the adulterer and a perfidum ridens Venus, do not really help to end. Europa’s beguilement by Jupiter (...) serves as a warning to the beloved Galatea: The rival whom she is about to follow over the sea might be as philandering as the adulterous god. (shrink)

Iris Marion Young (1949-2006) was one of the most influential and innovative political theorists of her generation who had a significant impact on a wide range of topics such as democratic theory, feminist theory, and justice. She bridged many longstanding divides among political theorists, engaging in Continental and critical theory, but also insisting on the importance of normative argument: her corpus stands as a testament to the fruitfulness of engaging in both abstract theory and the 'real world' of everyday (...) politics. This volume spans the several decades of her work, illustrating her intellectual development over time through three major areas of innovation: Gender: Maintaining that gender is both conceptually and politically meaningful, Young theorized gender in terms of structures that, in combination, position different people we call "women" in different ways, such that some women have some structures in common, without all women sharing all gendered structures in common. Justice: Young's early writings on a critical theory of justice evolved in her later and posthumously published works where she developed an account of justice that brought together her theorization of structure with her concern to respond to contemporary claims of injustice. The Politics of Difference: Young rejected universal and abstract theories of justice and maintained that justice instead required attending to the experiences of people marked by difference. (shrink)

In this classic work of feminist political thought, Iris Marion Young challenges the prevailing reduction of social justice to distributive justice.

This paper contributes to the discussion of the moral demandingness of Kantian ethics by critically discussing an argument that is currently popular among Kantians. The argument from the system of duties holds that (a) in the Kantian system of duties the demandingness of our duty of beneficence is internally moderated by other moral prescriptions, such as the indirect duty to secure happiness, duties to oneself and special obligations. Furthermore, proponents of this argument claim (b) that via these prescriptions Kant’s system (...) of duties incorporates into morality what current debates on (over-)demandingness call happiness and personal projects. These two claims are in conjunction supposed to establish that Kant’s ethics, at least when it comes to beneficence, is not plagued by the problem of excessive moral demands. We show that claims (a) and (b) are mistaken given what Kant says about beneficence, the application of imperfect duties and about emergencies. We finally argue that special obligations towards loved ones, a class of obligations largely overlooked by advocates of the system of duties, are the most promising candidates for internal moderation. These duties are, however, of a narrow scope. (shrink)

We discuss Kant’s conception of beneficence against the background of the overdemandingness debate. We argue that Kant’s conception of beneficence constitutes a sweet spot between overdemandingess and undemandingess. To this end we defend four key claims that together constitute a novel interpretation of Kant’s account of beneficence: 1) for the same reason that we are obligated to be beneficent to others we are permitted to be beneficent to ourselves; 2) we can prioritise our own ends; 3) it is more virtuous (...) to do more rather than less when it comes to helping others; and 4) indifference to others is vicious. Finally, we explain how this represents a system of duties that gives our personal ends a moral standing without unacceptably moralising them. (shrink)

This paper contributes to the debate about how the overdemandingness objection applies to Kant's ethics. I first look at the versions of the overdemandingness objections Kant himself levels against other ethicists and ethical principles and I discuss in what sense he acknowledges overdemandingness as a problem. Then I argue that, according to Kant's own standards, introspection about the moral worthiness of one's actions can constitute forms of moral overdemandingness. Self-scrutiny and Kant's well-known claim that we can never be certain that (...) we acted for the right reason jeopardize agents’ deserved happiness. Furthermore, self-scrutiny can constitute an activity Kant himself criticizes under the labels of “micrology” and “fantastic virtue”. The demandingness of critical self-scrutiny has not yet received due attention in the overdemandingness debate since this debate is focused on duties we have towards others. (shrink)

Muḥammad Mahdī ibn Abī Z̲arr Narāqī, -1794 or 1795. Jāmiʻ al-saʻādāt - Criticism and interpretation; Islamic ethics.

Iris Murdoch once observed: 'philosophy is often a matter of finding occasions on which to say the obvious'. What was obvious to Murdoch, and to all those who read her work, is that Good transcends everything - even God. Throughout her distinguished and prolific writing career, she explored questions of Good and Bad, myth and morality. The framework for Murdoch's questions - and her own conclusions - can be found here.

I discuss the problem that Kant’s ethics seems to be incapable of capturing our strong intuition that emergencies create a context for actions that is very different from other cases of helping and from other opportunities to further obligatory ends. I argue that if we pay attention to how Kant grounds beneficence we see that distress and emergency function as constitutive concerns. They are vital to establishing the duty of beneficence in the first place, and they also guide the application (...) of duties to specific cases. Kant’s conception of imperfect duties to others, when understood correctly, offers a way to understand why emergencies are morally important, but also why other factors have a place in our moral reasoning. (shrink)

Dooley provides background information for each of the interviews, along with a thorough index.

Kant was a keen psychological observer and theorist of the forms, mechanisms and sources of self-deception. In this Element, the author discusses the role of rationalizing/Vernünfteln for Kant's moral psychology, normative ethics and philosophical methodology. By drawing on the full breadth of examples of rationalizing Kant discusses, the author shows how rationalizing can extend to general features of morality and corrupt rational agents thoroughly. Furthermore, the author explains the often-overlooked roles common human reason, empirical practical reason and even pure practical (...) reason play for rationalizing. Kant is aware that rationality is a double-edged sword; reason is the source of morality and of our dignity, but it also enables us to seemingly justify moral transgressions to ourselves, and it creates an interest in this justification in the first place. Finally, this Element discusses whether Kant's ethical theory itself can be criticised as a product of rationalizing. (shrink)

The acclaimed author of The Good Apprentice draws on the entire history of philosophy--and particularly on Plato and Kant--to formulate her own model of morality and demonstrate how thoroughly it is bound up with our daily lives. "An utterly absorbing book".--The Wall Street Journal.

I argue that, alongside the already well-established prohibition against treating persons as mere means, Kant’s Formula of Humanity requires a prohibition against treating persons as mere things. The former captures ethical violations due to someone’s (perceived) instrumental value, e.g. exploitation, the latter captures cases in which I mistreat others because they have no instrumental value to me. These are cases in which I am indifferent and complacent towards persons in need; forms of mistreatment frequently suffered by the world’s poorest. I (...) explain why we need the category of treating others as mere things and what the prohibition against such treatment entails. Prohibitions against treating as mere means and as mere things are both essential for understanding the specific nature and extent of our duties to the world’s poorest. (shrink)

Cognitive Science, Volume 46, Issue 3, March 2022.

Critics of a politics of difference have misidentified these social movements as asserting an identity politics of recognition. Most of these movements are better understood as resisting unjust structural inequalities. Inclusive democratic process involves paying specific attention to group differences in order to transform preferences and maximize social knowledge.

Kant considers eudaimonism as his main opponent and he assumes that his ethics is the only viable alternative to eudaimonism. He does not explicitly address theories differing from both eudaimonism and from his own. I argue that whilst Kant and Act-Consequentialists advocate different normative principles, their positions share the important abstract feature that they establish what is to be done from a rational principle and not based on what is in the self-interest of the respective agent, as Kant thinks eudaimonism (...) does. Act-Consequentialism is thus closer to Kant’s ethics than is often assumed. I will demonstrate and vindicate this point with a new interpretation of the Fact of Reason. This reading also establishes that the notion of a Fact of Reason is less contentious than many of Kant’s critics believe. We should not expect that the Fact establishes Kantianism. Instead, the Fact is only supposed to count against a specific competing view of morality, namely, eudaimonism. Act-Consequentialists can accept the Fact as well. (shrink)

Journal of Political Philosophy, EarlyView.

This latest work from one of the world's leading political philosophers will appeal to audiences from a variety of fields, including philosophy, political science, women's studies, ethnic studies, sociology, and communications studies.

Journal of Philosophy of Education, EarlyView.

Name der Zeitschrift: Archiv für Geschichte der Philosophie Jahrgang: 97 Heft: 3 Seiten: 358-387.

Feminist social theory and female body experience are the twin themes of Iris Marion Young's twelve outstanding essays written over the past decade and brought together here. Her contributions to social theory raise critical questions about women and citizenship, the relations of capitalism and women's oppression, and the differences between a feminist theory that emphasizes women's difference and one that assumes a gender-neutral humanity. Loosely following a phenomenological method of description, Young's essays on female embodiment discuss female movement, pregnancy, (...) clothing, and the breasted body. In an introduction that situates her work in the context of shifts in feminist theory and politics over the past decade, Young emphasizes the rootedness of her theorizing in a dedicated and seasoned political activism. (shrink)

In her long-awaited Responsibility for Justice, Young discusses our responsibilities to address "structural" injustices in which we among many are implicated, often by virtue of participating in a market, such as buying goods produced in sweatshops, or participating in booming housing markets that leave many homeless.

I discuss two puzzling and neglected passages in the Critique of Practical Reason, namely, V:92 and V:163. In these passages Kant claims that practical philosophers should follow the paradigm of the chemist and conduct experiments on common human reason. I explain Kant’s conception of the chemical experiment, provide a detailed interpretation of the two passages in question, and conclude by applying the structure of the chemical experiment to the Analytic of the Critique of Practical Reason. Chemical experiments as a model (...) of ethics should be understood as a method of confirming that a philosophical theory systematizes and defends ideas that ordinary rational agents are already committed to. (shrink)

There is a consensus that Kant's aim in the Groundwork is to clarify, systematize and vindicate the common conception of morality. Philosophical theory hence serves a restorative function. It can strengthen agents' motivation, protect against self-deception and correct misunderstandings produced by uncritical moral theory. In this paper, I argue that Kant also corrects the common perspective and that Kant's Groundwork shows in which senses the common perspective, even considered apart from its propensity to self-deception and without being influenced by misleading (...) theory, is deficient. Critical practical philosophy needs to set right agents about the stringency of some of their duties, and agents need to be made aware that they have certain other duties. I discuss how Kant corrects the common agent's notion of the stringency of the duty to not make false promises and how Kant corrects the common agent's notion of duties to self. I finally discuss how his critical practical philosophy can become popular and achieve the correction of the common perspective. I stress the role of education informed by philosophical theory for this and contrast it with so called ‘popular philosophy’. (shrink)

Journal of Philosophy of Education, EarlyView.

We discuss the demandingness of Kant’s ethics. Whilst previous discussions of this issue focused on imperfect duties, our first aim is to show that Kantian demandingness is especially salient in the class of perfect duties. Our second aim is to introduce a fine-grained picture of demandingness by distinguishing between different possible components of a moral theory which can lead to demandingness: a required process of decision making, overridingness and the stringent content of demands, due to a standpoint of moral purity. (...) This distinction allows a specification of the sources of demandingness in Kant. The most characteristically Kantian form of demandingness springs from overridingness and purity and comes as a constant threat that an agent might find herself in a situation in which, due to no fault of her own, she is required to sacrifice everything for little to no non-moral goods. Our third aim is to discuss whether Kant has the resources to reply to those who criticize his ethics based on its demandingness. For this purpose we discuss Kant’s notion of “rationalizing” in the context of various types of current conceptions of demandingness and calls for moderate ethical theories. (shrink)

The essays in this special issue shed new light on the transnational movement and exchange of researchers, data, theories, and scientific objects in the anthropological and genetic study of human populations in the twentieth century. Historians have long stressed how the study of race and human populations in this period served to create a national identity for emerging nation states. More recently, historical narratives of anthropology and human genetics have emphasized the global scale of research networks in these sciences. This (...) issue explores the specific routes, crossings, and interactions between national and international contexts prompted by the study of races and populations. The essays reveal not only how... (shrink)

Ido Geiger's paper ‘What it is the Use of the Universal Law Formula of the Categorical Imperative?’ is part of a growing trend in Kant scholarship, which stresses the significance of the rational competence of ordinary human beings. I argue that this approach needs to take into account that the common agent is an active reasoner who has the means to find out what she ought to do. The purpose of my paper is to show how universality already figures in (...) the active reasoning of pre-theoretical agents in the form of a common universalization test. I present textual evidence for this test, and argue that this conception does not present pre-theoretical moral cognition in an overly intellectualistic or mechanistic way. Finally, I discuss how, on the pre-theoretical level, universalization relates to humanity or a rational agent's special status. Universalization is present to common agents in the form of procedures or questions that we ask ourselves, humanity as an awareness of certain particularly blatant violat.. (shrink)

I respond to a challenge raised by Jordan Pascoe: Kant’s conception of obtaining full citizenship through working oneself up necessarily condemns some people to passive citizenship. I argue that we should not focus on work to establish universal full citizenship. Rather, a Universal Basic Income, an income paid regularly to everyone and without conditions, can secure everyone’s full citizenship. Moreover, I argue that such a scheme is more Kantian in nature than hitherto assumed.

This paper calls attention to a philosophical presupposition, coined here the continuity thesis which underlies and unites the different, often conflicting, hypotheses in the origin of life field. This presupposition, a necessary condition for any scientific investigation of the origin of life problem, has two components. First, it contends that there is no unbridgeable gap between inorganic matter and life. Second, it regards the emergence of life as a highly probable process. Examining several current origin-of-life theories. I indicate the implicit (...) or explicit role played by the continuity thesis in each of them. In addition, I identify the rivals of the thesis within the scientific community — the almost miracle camp. Though adopting the anti-vitalistic aspect of the continuity thesis, this camp regards the emergence of life as involving highly improbable events. Since it seems that the chemistry of the prebiotic stages and of molecular self-organization processes rules out the possibility that life is the result of a happy accident, I claim that the almost miracle view implies in fact, a creationist position. (shrink)

This article presents a weak system of intuitionistic second-order arithmetic, WKV, a subsystem of the one in S.C. Kleene, R.E. Vesley [The Foundations of Intuitionistic Mathematics: Especially in Relation to Recursive Functions, North-Holland Publishing Company, Amsterdam, 1965]. It is then shown that some statements of real analysis, like a version of the Heine–Borel Theorem, and some statements of logic, e.g. compactness of classical proposition calculus, are equivalent to the Fan Theorem in this system.

Several climate ethicists have recently argued that having children is morally equivalent to over-consumption, and contributes greatly to parents’ personal carbon footprints. We show that these claims are mistaken, for two reasons. First, including procreation in parents’ carbon footprints double-counts children’s consumption emissions, once towards their own, and once towards their parents’ footprints. We show that such double-counting defeats the chief purpose of the concept of carbon footprint, namely to measure the sustainability and equitability of one’s activities and choices. Furthermore, (...) we show that proposals to avoid double-counting have other unacceptable implications. Second, we show that the key arguments for a supposed moral equivalence of procreation and consumption overgenerate and lead to unacceptable consequences in many cases, such as for the work of doctors who save lives or enable procreation. Finally, we propose that rather than counting children’s emissions towards their parents’ carbon footprints, we should consider these emissions as part of the parents’ carbon impact, i.e. the difference that their choices make to the overall global carbon emissions. It is from the perspective of impact that we should think about the ethics of procreation in an age of climate change. (shrink)

When Black Feminist Thought by Patricia Hill Collins was published in 1990, reviewers called it "remarkable", "rich and valuable", and proclaimed, "with the publication of this book, Black feminism has moved to a new level". Now, in Fighting Words, Collins expands and extends the discussion of the "outsider within" presented in her earlier work, investigating how effectively Black feminist thought confronts the injustices African American women currently face. Collins takes on a broad range of issues -- poverty, mothering, white supremacy (...) and Afrocentrism, the resegregation of American society by race and class, the ideas of Sojourner Truth and how they can serve as a springboard for more liberating social theory. Contrasting social theories that support unjust power relations of race, class, gender, and nation with those that challenge inequalities, Collins investigates why some ideas are granted the status of "theory" while others remain "thought". "It is not that elites produce theory while everyone else produces mere thought", she writes. "Rather, elites possess the power to legitimate the knowledge that they define as theory as being universal, normative, and ideal". Collins argues that because African American women and other historically oppressed groups seek economic and social justice, their social theories may emphasize themes and work from assumptions that are different from those of mainstream American society, generating new angles of vision on injustice. Collins also puts such oppositional social theory to the test: while the words of these theories may challenge injustice, do the ideas make a difference in the lives of the people they claim to represent? Throughout,Collins provides an essential understanding of how "outsiders" resist mainstream perspectives, and what the mainstream can learn from such "outsiders". Historically situated yet transcending the specific, Fighting Words provides a new interpretive framework for both thinking through and overcoming social injustice. (shrink)

The essay theorizes the responsibilities moral agents may be said to have in relation to global structural social processes that have unjust consequences. How ought moral agents, whether individual or institutional, conceptualize their responsibilities in relation to global injustice? I propose a model of responsibility from social connection as an interpretation of obligations of justice arising from structural social processes. I use the example of justice in transnational processes of production, distribution and marketing of clothing to illustrate operations of structural (...) social processes that extend widely across regions of the world. The social connection model of responsibility says that all agents who contribute by their actions to the structural processes that produce injustice have responsibilities to work to remedy these injustices. I distinguish this model from a more standard model of responsibility, which I call a liability model. I specify five features of the social connection model of responsibility that distinguish it from the liability model: it does not isolate perpetrators; it judges background conditions of action; it is more forward looking than backward looking; its responsibility is essentially shared; and it can be discharged only through collective action. The final section of the essay begins to articulate parameters of reasoning that agents can use for thinking about their own action in relation to structural injustice. a Footnotesa Thanks to David Alexander, Daniel Drezner, David Owen, and Ellen Frankel Paul for comments on an earlier version of this essay. Thanks to David Newstone for research assistance. (shrink)

A number of influential Kantian philosophers assume that true need represents shared and fundamental human concerns that can both ground duties of aid and limit how much an agent can be morally required to do for others. In this paper, I take on this misreading and argue that true need is representative of personal priorities. This subjectivist reading fits better with Kant’s own characterization of true need and with his conceptions of need and happiness. Moreover, I argue that Kant’s own (...) conception of true need is philosophically appealing, as it is anti-paternalistic. Agents are free to determine their own true need. This frees Kant from the challenge of coming up with a list of true human needs that are supposedly stable across cultures, epochs and individuals. Furthermore, my reading also implies that the mere fact that someone else considers something their true need does not necessitate our help. (shrink)

In this paper, we draw attention to several important tensions between Kant’s account of moral education and his commitment to transcendental idealism. Our main claim is that, in locating freedom outside of space and time, transcendental idealism makes it difficult for Kant to both provide an explanation of how moral education occurs, but also to confirm that his own account actually works. Having laid out these problems, we then offer a response on Kant’s behalf. We argue that, while it might (...) look like Kant has to abandon his commitment to either moral education or transcendental idealism, there is a way in which he can maintain both. (shrink)

This article discusses the importance of social interaction for the development of the representations for symbolic communication. We suggest that there is no need to distinguish between different representational systems emerging at different stages of development. Instead, we propose that representations are rich right from the beginning of a child’s life, and that they are driven mainly by acting and interacting in the physical and social world. The more variety in a child’s interactional experience (i.e., synchrony, sequentiality, and prediction), the (...) more enriched and abstracted the representations become. We review literature providing evidence for the ways in which infants’ development toward symbolic communication benefits from repeated social (inter)action and consider some implications for computational approaches. (shrink)

A large campaign has sought to destigmatize psychiatric disorders by disseminating the view that they are in fact brain disorders. But when psychiatric disorders are associated with neurobiological correlates, laypeople's attitudes toward patients are harsher, and the prognoses seem poorer. Here, we ask whether these misconceptions could result from the essentialist presumption that brain disorders are innate. To this end, we invited laypeople to reason about psychiatric disorders that are diagnosed by either a brain or a behavioral test that were (...) strictly matched for their informative value. Participants viewed disorders as more likely to be innate and immutable when the diagnosis was supported by a brain test as compared to a behavioral test. These results show for the first time that people spontaneously essentialize psychiatric conditions that are linked to the brain, even when the brain probe offers no additional diagnostic or genetic information. This bias suggests that people consider the biological essence of living things as materially embodied. (shrink)

In this paper, we hypothesize that X chromosome-associated mechanisms, which affect X-linked genes and are behind the immunological advantage of females, may also affect X-linked microRNAs. The human X chromosome contains 10% of all microRNAs detected so far in the human genome. Although the role of most of them has not yet been described, several X chromosome-located microRNAs have important functions in immunity and cancer. We therefore provide a detailed map of all described microRNAs located on human and mouse X (...) chromosomes, and highlight the ones involved in immune functions and oncogenesis. The unique mode of inheritance of the X chromosome is ultimately the cause of the immune disadvantage of males and the enhanced survival of females following immunological challenges. How these aspects influence X-linked microRNAs will be a challenge for researchers in the coming years, not only from an evolutionary point of view, but also from the perspective of disease etiology. (shrink)