Is it allowable for your government, or anyone else, to influence or coerce you 'for your own sake'? This is a question about paternalism, or interference with a person's liberty or autonomy with the intention of promoting their good or averting harm, which has created considerable controversy at least since John Stuart Mill's On Liberty. Mill famously decried paternalism of any kind, whether carried out by private individuals or the state. In this volume of new essays, leading moral, (...) political and legal philosophers address how to define paternalism, its justification, and the implications for public policy, professional ethics and criminal law. So-called 'libertarian' or non-coercive paternalism receives considerable attention. The discussion addresses the nature of freedom and autonomy and the relation of individuals to law, policy and the state. The volume will interest a wide range of readers in political philosophy, public policy and the philosophy of law. (shrink)

In the article, the authors attempt to analyze the various origins of libertarian paternalism - political, social, cultural, and try to explore the essence of this social and social phenomenon. Libertarian paternalism has both positive and negative features, which are actualized, in turn, by modern planetary challenges.The aim and the tasks: analysis of the essence of the social phenomenon of libertarian paternalism, and the study of its origins - political, social, cultural. Research methods are historical, (...) structural and functional, systemic and equitable.For the revision of specific projects, it is also the principle of consistency, objectivity, convergence from the abstract to the concrete. Research results: Democracy and human rights have found themselves in the grip of challenges, to which both the government and the private sector of the economy in particular react in a peculiar way. In the civilized world, the problem of social protection is acute; an ordinary person dramatically perceives the massive pressure of advertising, the media, certain structures that are interested, first of all, in the early sale of their products - material, spiritual and social. Libertarian paternalism is seen by the authors as a possible way to reconcile these issues, especially from the point of view of protecting the human rights and freedoms. Discussion. In this regard, other authors note that in the practical implementation of Nudge technology, people rarely follow the ideal interpretation of private well-being in terms of full satisfaction of needs. Opponents suggest in this regard that people can be guided by temporary benefits in terms of irrational consumer behavior, that is, the socio-psychological bases of consumerism are affected. Conclusion. Libertarian paternalism was created as a reaction to political, economic and sociocultural changes in society under the impact of globalization, informatization and revision of social programs in the governments.The concept of libertarian paternalism and its practical implementation of nudge technology is relevant and promising in the context of a constant increase in the level of welfare of citizens. Libertarian paternalism affects the most subtle sociophilosophical, socio-psychological elements of the consciousness of an individual who has become hostage to government programs and private projects. The price of a rational choice of an individual is his own freedom, in the context of modern realities of social life. (shrink)

Although the principle of respect for personal autonomy has been the subject of debate for almost 40 years, the conversation has often suffered from lack of clarity regarding the philosophical traditions underlying this principle. In this article, I trace a genealogy of autonomy, first contrasting Kant’s autonomy as moral obligation and Mill’s teleological political liberty. I then show development from Mill’s concept to Beauchamp and Childress’ principle and to Julian Savulescu’s non-teleological autonomy sketch. I argue that, although the reach (...) for a new principle to guide choices in physician–patient relationships can rightfully be seen as important, the notion that is now called autonomy within bioethics has corollaries that undermine critical aspects of medical care. As such, there is need for a richer account of the interplay between the free choice of patients and the informed recommendations of doctors. (shrink)

Efforts to develop a coherent role for white people in racial justice initiatives in the USA are often stymied by the defensiveness, paternalism, and guilt of many white liberals. Such efforts are also undermined by critiques of whiteness that conflate white identity and white supremacy. I address this dilemma by developing an account of antiracist white identity politics, conceived of here as taking responsibility for the effects of being socially defined as white. I locate conceptual resources for this project (...) in James Baldwin’s reflections on tragedy, love, and identity. In contrast to those who invoke Baldwin to argue for abolishing white identity, I make a case for politicizing it. I draw on Baldwin’s articulation of a tragic sensibility to argue that white antiracism requires accepting a morally compromised identity one has not chosen. It also requires accepting that serious efforts to end white supremacy inevitably lead to mistakes, misunderstandings, and counterproductive outcomes. By adopting a tragic perspective on these aspects of white antiracism, white people would become more capable of forging antiracist white identities through robust engagement in struggles for racial justice. (shrink)

New Threats to Freedom In the twentieth century, free people faced a number of mortal threats,ranging from despotism, fascism, and communism to the looming menace of global terrorism. While the struggle against some of these overt dangers continues, some insidious new threats seem to have slipped past our intellectual defenses. These often unchallenged threats are quietly eroding our hard-won freedoms and, in some cases, are widely accepted as beneficial. In New Threats to Freedom, editor and author Adam Bellow has assembled (...) an all-star lineup of innovative thinkers to challenge these insidious new threats. Some leap into already raging debates on issues such as Sharia law in the West, the rise of transnationalism, and the regulatory state. Others turn their attention to less obvious threats, such as the dogma of fairness, the failed promises of the blogosphere, and the triumph of behavioral psychology. These threats are very real and very urgent, yet this collection avoids projecting an air of doom and gloom. Rather, it provides a blueprint for intellectual resistance so that modern defenders of liberty may better understand their enemies, more effectively fight to preserve the meaning of freedom, and more surely carry its light to a new generation. What are the new threats to freedom? when has authority not claimed, when imposing trammels and curbs on liberty, that it does so for a wider good and a greater happiness?” —Christopher Hitchens “The regulatory state amounts to a regressive tax that penalizes small independent producers and protects the status quo.” —Max Borders “Europe tends to favor stability over democracy, America democracy over stability.” —Daniel Hannan “The value of free expression is perceived to be at odds with goals that were considered ‘more important,’ like inclusiveness, diversity, nondiscrimination, and tolerance.” —Greg Lukianoff “The masses cannot ultimately be free: only the individual can be.” —Robert D. Kaplan “That old bugbear of postwar sociology—the mob-self—is now a reality. In a participatory/popularity culture, the freedom to think and act for ourselves becomes harder and harder to achieve.” —Lee Siegel “As traditional marriage declines, the ranks of single women are growing, and increasingly these women are substituting the security of a husband with the security of the state.” —Jessica Gavora “Ending the freedom to fail is a mean-spirited attack on the freedom to succeed.” —Michael Goodwin “The only solution to the new threats to American press freedom lies in organized resistance.” —Katherine Mangu-Ward “The new behaviorism isn’t interested in protecting people’s freedom to choose; on the contrary, its core principle is the idea that only by allowing an expert elite to limit choice can individuals learn to break their bad habits.” —Christine Rosen “There’s a world of Travis Bickles out there, and they’re not driving cabs. They’re reading blogs.” —Ron Rosenbaum “The first amendment ensures not that speech will be fair, but that it will be free. It cannot be both.” —David Mamet Join the conversation about these issues at www.newthreatstofreedom.com. (shrink)

Making public policy choices based on available scientific evidence is an ideal condition for any policy making. However, the mechanisms governing these scenarios are complex, non-linear, and, alongside the medical-health and epidemiological issues, involve socio-economic, political, communicative, informational, ethical and epistemological aspects. In this article we analyze the role of scientific evidence when implementing political decisions that strictly depend on it, as in the case of the COVID-19 pandemic. In carrying out this analysis, we will focus above (...) all on the Italian case. This, on the one hand, precisely because Italy led the way regarding the containment policies of the pandemic. Secondly, the government's action was immediately criticized in various respects. Some were calling into question not only the cumbersome political mechanisms, but also suggesting a scarce ability to take scientific evidence into account. On other fronts, there are those who have criticized Italy for its blind and uncritical faith in science and for the paternalism of its decisions. This debate therefore offers the possibility of dealing with some aspects concerning scientific results and their implementation at the political level from the point of view of a political philosophy of science, roughly in the spirit suggested by John Dupré. (shrink)

Mathews, Race This essay - appearing in two parts - examines aspects of the early and middle phases of the episcopate of Archbishop Daniel Mannix, in the context of a wider study of responses to Catholic social teachings in Victoria between 1891 and 1966. Part I dealt mainly with Mannix's significance and early life, and the focus in Part II is on the episcopate up to and including the onset of the Great Depression.

Adopting a view of utilitarian ethics in which motivation in the public interest takes on greater weight than is generally appreciated, this book explores the extent to which the philosophy of Immanuel Kant is consistent with this nuanced version of utilitarianism. Kant's requirement that full ethical merit needs an agent to act purely 'from duty' to forward 'the universal end of happiness' rather than from a personal inclination to achieve that end clearly distinguishes his position from the version of utilitarian (...) ethics adopted here. But this book also argues that Kant's approval of a secondary category of conduct - conduct 'in conformity with' duty - entailing other-regarding or 'sympathetic' motivation to advance general happiness, differs from the utilitarian position only in its meriting a qualified degree of ethical credit. After comparing Kant's position with those of eighteenth-century utilitarian writers from Locke to Bentham, the book evaluates reactions to Kant by J.S. Mill and Karl Marx and proposes Michel de Montaigne (1533-1592) as a 'precursor' for maintaining a 'Kantian' doctrine of conduct 'from duty' and for other shared features. In terms of public policy, the work demonstrates Kant's justification of poor relief and reduced inequality, his proposal for a state education plan, and his opposition to paternalism. This book provides essential reading for academic specialists and students concerned with the interface of political economy and ethics, as well as the history of economic thought, political economy, history of ethics, history of political thought and intellectual history. Samuel Hollander is University Professor Emeritus at the University of Toronto, Canada, and an Officer in the Order of Canada. (shrink)

While the value of early detection of dementia is largely agreed upon, population-based screening as a means of early detection is controversial. This controversial status means that such screening is not recommended in most national dementia plans. Some current practices, however, resemble screening but are labelled “case-finding” or “detection of cognitive impairment”. Labelled as such, they may avoid the ethical scrutiny that population-based screening may be subject to. This article examines conceptualizations of screening and case-finding. It shows how the definitions (...) and delimitations of the concepts (the _what_ of screening) are drawn into the ethical, political, and practical dimensions that screening assessment criteria or principles are intended to clarify and control (the _how_ of screening, how it is and how it should be performed). As a result, different conceptualizations of screening provide the opportunity to rethink what ethical assessments should take place: the conceptualizations have different ethico-political implications. The article argues that population-based systematic screening, population-based opportunistic screening, and case-finding should be clearly distinguished. (shrink)

This article examines a population-based opportunistic screening practice for cognitive impairment that takes place at a hospital in Sweden. At the hospital, there is a routine in place that stipulates that all patients over the age of 65 who are admitted to the ward will be offered testing for cognitive impairment, unless they have been tested within the last six months or have been diagnosed with any form of cognitive impairment. However, our analysis shows that this routine is not universally (...) and mechanically applied. Rather, the health care professionals have developed and use an ethico-political judgment, concerning, for example,whomto test,whento offer the tests, andhowto explain and perform them. This article explores the role and practice of this form of judgment, emphasising its political and ethical nature. The analysis is based on qualitative interviews with professionals and patients, and draws on the theories of Aristotle and Hannah Arendt. (shrink)

This volume consists of nine essays on the political teaching of such Muslim philosophers as al-Kindi and al-Razi, as well as the more familiar al-Fârâbî, ...

This paper revisits the perennial crisis of African development. The authors, unoblivious of theories that have been put forward for ending this crisis, delimit their intervention to the political and economic aspects. They review the dominant approaches to African development, that is, capitalism and Marxism. Following this review and a critical reading of the reigning orthodoxies of economic mobilization and statecraft inherent in pre-colonial Africa, the authors propose a liberal-paternalistic theory of development rooted in the idea of African (...) socialism/communalism. They argue that this idea provides a veritable basis for Africa’s development. (shrink)

The author describes Heller’s concept of ethics as a “quasi-sphere” intersecting with various fields relating to human relationships. Special attention is paid to the axiological aspects of her concept of ethics and the relationship between virtues and responsibility. The author also seeks to show how Heller integrated a traditional philosophical question—the relationship between “is” and “ought to be”—into her concept of “radical philosophy” at an earlier stage in the development of her philosophy. She initially considered the relationship between “is” (...) and “ought to be” to be contrasting. Later, when she had come to accept the political model of liberal capitalist society, the ideal of all-compassing equality became the ideal of “equality of opportunities”. The author interprets this shift as one in which the relationship becomes continual. He is also critical of Heller’s underestimation of the effect the “social a priori” has on the possibilities of human life. (shrink)

The political passages in Polanyi’s Personal Knowledge are an integral part of his arguments against ‘objectivism’ and/or a post-critical, personalist, fiduciary and fallibilist philosophy. This paper elaboratesthe social and political implications of Polanyi’s emphasis upon acceptance of one’s situation and the exercise in it of a sense of responsibility to transcendent ideals, as against attempts to start with a clean slate, to overcome all imperfections and to find some simple rule for political policy. Prescriptive duties and rights, (...) and mutual trust and solidarity, are the bases of politics, anti responsible action must start with them. But much of modern politics expresses a Gnostic impatience of our created and finite existence which results in arbitrary commitment to some radical and destructive ideology. (shrink)

Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) 2 relates to ending hunger, achieving food security and improving nutrition, and promoting sustainable agriculture. The SDGs mention only a few political indicators and SDG2 in particular is largely devoid of political considerations to end hunger and achieve food security. Nobel Laureate Amartya Sen famously observed the absence of famine in democracies, suggesting that a democratic system provides checks and balances that prevent famine. His observation has elicited further debate and triggered empirical studies in (...) recent years. Going beyond Sen’s hypothesis, this essay examines other political factors that would explain vulnerability to famine and that need to be addressed more explicitly in SDG 2 and similar initiatives. By taking the case of pastoralists in the Afar region of Ethiopia, this research explores selected political determinants of vulnerability to famine. The Eritrea-Ethiopia war and the ensuing border closure have had a detrimental effect on the livelihood of pastoralists in Afar – many pastoralists were deprived of a market and a reliable source of income. In addition, Afar pastoralists were sidelined from the informal salt sector on which they used to rely. The state facilitated this expropriation, leaving pastoralists even more vulnerable to famine. I argue that political considerations are crucial in successfully ending hunger and achieving food security. The essay uses a qualitative case study design and is based on a PhD dissertation. (shrink)

Bioethics introduces students to the most relevant historical, epistemological, methodological, and practical aspects of bioethics. The book presents readers with some of the most thought-provoking writing in the field, along with an original introduction to each reading. Selections range from the work of great philosophers like Aristotle, Immanuel Kant, and John Stuart Mill, to contemporary writings and reports. Readers explore various ideologies and philosophies including the seminal work of Tom Beauchamp and James Childress on principles of biomedical ethics and (...) the dialogical approach to bioethics. They also consider controversial topics straight from the headlines of the day, such as the collision between paternalism and autonomy, futility, human research, genetic manipulation, and active and passive euthanasia. Bioethics encourages students to think objectively and impartially in order to resolve the ethical dilemmas that stem from biotechnological empowerment and biomedical techniques. The book is suitable for courses in biomedical, research, and practical ethics, as well as those that discuss moral philosophy. It can be used as a stand-alone text, or as a supplement to standard textbooks. Erick Valdes earned a Ph.D. in philosophy from the University of Chile as well as a Ph.D. in political philosophy from Paris-Sorbonne University in France. He is an adjunct research scholar at the Kennedy Institute of Ethics, Georgetown University, where he conducts advanced research on bioethics and biolaw. In addition, Dr. Valdes teaches bioethics, research ethics, theories of democracy and international human rights at George Mason University and American University. He is the author of nine books on bioethics and political philosophy and has published in both English and Spanish. He has written extensively on bioethics and biolaw for international journals, and served as a visiting professor at universities in England, France, Spain, Russia, Mexico, Colombia, Argentina, and Chile. (shrink)

The sixth IPCC report states that a proper conception of climate justice that can address the complexity of the phenomenon of anthropogenic climate change as a whole requires considering not only one but rather three dimensions of justice today: redistributive, procedural, and recognition dimensions. In this article, my focus is on exploring the latter dimension, drawing special attention to climate policies addressing cultural-identity issues. In the first section, I illustrate how climate policies can be connected to discriminatory practices against minority (...) cultures and their identities. To do so, I take the struggles of Black movements against environmental racism and the struggles of Indigenous peoples against a colonialist cultural heritage as case studies. In the second section, I look into the most advanced normative model to address the dimension of recognition, its advantages, and how it addresses the so-called ‘institutionalization of cultural patterns’ in climate policies: the Nancy Fraser model. Finally, in the third section, I investigate an aspect that remains open. It concerns the matter of how to use institutional authority to ‘deinstitutionalize’ non-ecological cultural patterns, while respecting pluralism and avoiding falling into the risks of institutional paternalism. (shrink)

Many feminist philosophers have been highly critical of Kant’s ethics, either because of his rationalism or because of particular claims he makes about women in his writings on anthropology and political philosophy. In this paper, I call attention to the aspects of Kant’s ethical theory that make it attractive from a feminist standpoint. Kant’s duties to oneself are rich resource for feminism. These duties require women to act in ways that show respect for themselves as rational human agents (...) by, e.g., avoiding servility, self-deception, self-mutilation, and sexual self-degradation, and cultivating their natural talents (as well as their virtue). Duties to others demand that other people treat women respectfully by requiring that they avoid mocking, degrading, or acting arrogantly toward others. Indeed, even when one sets out to promote others’ happiness, Kant’s ethics requires that one not act paternalistically. Kant’s ethics insists that every rational agent recognize the equality and dignity of all rational agents. Thus, it pushes women to respect themselves and to demand respect from others; and it pushes men to respect women as a basic moral requirement. (shrink)

As the use of nudges by governmental agencies becomes more common, the need for normative guidelines regarding the processes by which decisions about the implementation of specific nudges are taken becomes more acute. In order to find a justified set of such guidelines one must meet several theoretical challenges to Libertarian Paternalism that arise at the foundational level. In this paper, I identify three central challenges to Libertarian Paternalism, and suggest that Susan Hurley's political philosophy as presented (...) in her Natural Reasons (1989) can be viewed as offering powerful responses to them. (shrink)

This essay argues that neutral paternalism (NP) is problematic for antiperfectionist liberal theories. Section 2 raises textual evidence that Rawlsian liberalism does not oppose and may even support NP. In section 3, I cast doubt on whether NP should have a place in political liberalism by defending a partially comprehensive conception of the good I call “moral capacity at each moment,” or MCEM, that is inconsistent with NP. I then explain why MCEM is a reasonable conception on Rawls's (...) account of reasonableness. In section 4, I handle concerns that showing NP fails the test of Rawlsian public justification is a nonstarter since NP does not threaten any of our basic liberties. I sketch an argument that, if this is so, the burden is on political liberalism to defend its particular account of basic liberties, since MCEM is reasonable on Rawlsian grounds. More precisely, MCEM is a conception that challenges the way Rawls characterizes basic liberties; that is, his list of basic liberties should be more inclusive by political liberalism's own structural commitments, including Rawls's “liberal principle of legitimacy.” On this revised account, political liberalism can mount a strong opposition to hard legal paternalism. (shrink)

Critiques of development aid from its recipient’s sometimes draw our attention to the perception of paternalism on the part of ‘development industry’ actors. Even within participatory project designs, critical voices recount experiences of clear power divides and informal hierarchies determining the content and form of ‘cooperation’. While neoliberal as well as neo-Marxist scholars base their critiques on a distributive scheme of global justice, post-development theory emphasizes respect and recognition as the central aspect of justice Indeed, post-development theorists continue to (...) complain of neo-colonial power structures between nations as well as on a micro-level between the ‘experts’ and local people. The latter feel misrecognized in being judged according to the parameters of Western actors within the international community. This article explores how charges of misrecognition within development cooperation challenge the assumption by many liberal political theorists that more global justice could be achieved through more aid. (shrink)

The topic of alienation has fallen out of fashion in social and political philosophy. It used to be salient, especially in socialist thought and in debates about labor practices in capitalism. Although the lack of identification of people with their working lives—their alienation as workers—remains practically important, normative engagement with it has been set back by at least four objections. They concern the problems of essentialist views, a mishandling of the distinction between the good and the right, the danger (...) of paternalistic impositions, and the significance of democratic authorization. This paper recasts the critique of alienation in a way that vindicates its importance for social and political philosophy and rebuts these objections. First, it provides an analytic framework to understand alienation—distinguishing its various conceptual, explanatory, and normative dimensions. Second, it accounts for the normative aspect of the critique of alienation by articulating it in terms of prudential and moral ideas of positive freedom regarding human flourishing and solidaristic empowerment. Finally, the normative account is developed further, and sharpened to respond to the four objections, through the introduction of the Dignitarian Approach—the view that we have reason to organize social life in such a way that we respond appropriately to the valuable features of individual human beings that give rise to their dignity. (shrink)

The essay is a quantitative analysis of a questionnaire distributed to a sample of 775 worshipers immediately after the Sunday Liturgy in a random number of churches in Athens, Thessaloniki and Mytilini. The questions addressed to them try to grasp feelings and thoughts felt during liturgical experience and effervescence as such, as well as reflections concerning the religious and the political self. The findings suggest that the liturgy has profound effects on those who attend service often, but it is (...) not irrelevant even to those who attend service less often. Those who attend service often and feel strongly the liturgical rite tend to identify religion, both doctrinal and vernacular, with politics, consider themselves to be rightist and hold political beliefs revolving around antinomian egotism and authoritative paternalism. Those who attend service rarely and do not experience any effervescence, as the mirror-image of the former, tend to identify themselves as leftist and hold political beliefs revolving around revolution, defiance and the like, and reject democratic institutions. The study underlines the very close connection of church attendance to ‘magical’ aspects of the Orthodox religion, as well as the very strong presence of icons in the life of the believers irrespective of their frequency of liturgical attendance. (shrink)

While researchers have offered remonstration-oriented, reciprocal, voluntary, and gratitude-based accounts of political obligation in classical Confucianism, I argue that these interpretations are either in conflict with the textual evidence or merely scratch the surface of Confucius’ theory of political obligation without fully elaborating its essence. Instead, I demonstrate that the theory of political obligation in Confucianism is a specific argument from paternalistic gratitude in which the people’s political obligation is analogically compared to children’s grateful duty to (...) their parents. Moreover, I use the Confucian theory of paternalistic gratitude to critically examine China’s recent politics of political obligation in the wake of the 2008 Sichuan 四川 earthquake. Although the Confucian-sounding references, such as kindness and the parent-state analogy, figure into the CPC’s Gratitude Education campaign, the Party’s politics of political obligation does not meet the Confucian normative standard. Specifically, in the Confucian theory of paternalistic gratitude, the people will be grateful to a benevolent ruler without this feeling being demanded by the state. However, in the Gratitude Education campaign, the Party self-righteously exacted the earthquake survivors’ gratitude. Local dissidents were subject to the stigmatization of “ungratefulness” and faced political violence as a consequence. The case of the Gratitude Education campaign serves as another example of the CPC’s political use of Confucianism for its non-Confucian goals. (shrink)

Introduction -- The ethics of care and global politics -- Rethinking human security -- 'Women's work' : the global care and sex economies -- Humanitarian intervention and global security governance -- Peacebuilding and paternalism : reading care through postcolonialism -- Health and human security : gender, care and HIV/AIDS -- Gender, care, and the ethics of environmental security -- Conclusion. Security through care.

Evidence affirms that aesthetic engagement patterns our movements, often with us barely aware. This invites an examination of pre-reflective engagement within cities and also aesthetic experience as a form of the pre-reflective. The invitation is amplified because design has political implications. For instance, it can draw people in or exclude them by establishing implicitly recognized public-private boundaries. The Value Sensitive Design school, which holds that artifacts embody ethical and political values, stresses some of this. But while emphasizing that (...) design embodies implicit values, research in this field lacks sustained attention to largely unconscious background biases or values, rooted in cultural attitudes and personal interests, that lead theorists and planners—often too narrowly—to promote design organized around specific values such as defensibility. In examining these points, I draw on J. J. Gibson, a central figure for some writing on aesthetics and cities, and whom pragmatists and phenomenologists in turn influenced. Taking a cue from pragmatists in particular, I argue Gibson’s perceptual theory of affordances entails a theory of values, meaning our perception and therewith movements are inherently value-based. I advocate design that accounts for relatively constantly held values such as safety, while also handling the vast pluralism that exists and not crushing the aesthetic vibrancy of city life. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Kantian Ethics and Economics: Autonomy, Dignity, and CharacterIvan A. BoldyrevMark D. White. Kantian Ethics and Economics: Autonomy, Dignity, and Character. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2011. Pp. xi + 270. Cloth, $55.00.This remarkable book provides a new ethical perspective for economics based on Kantian ethics of autonomy and dignity. There are two main messages in it that I find particularly important. First, Mark White derives from Kant the (...) idea of irreducible moral principles that govern the behavior of economic agents independently of welfarist and, more generally, consequentialist concerns. These principles of duty and the “incomparable worth” (21) of human dignity, as well as justice or rights, may not be economically traded off against some other motivations; hence, they simply evade economic reasoning altogether.Second, White endorses a version of libertarian Kantianism that treats people as individuals in essence (“autonomous”) and social in orientation (respecting the rights and the choices of the others). In discussing individualism, White attacks the conventional wisdom of economics and claims that preferences alone do not account for the identity of individuals [End Page 298] in space and time, although their unique characters do. Persons should be given free choice (absent in deterministic rational-choice models) and hence responsibility for their choices that incorporates the social factors in decision-making. However, White never mentions the almost insurmountable difficulties associated with fleshing out the truly individual features of a given person. Although he allows for a person’s identity and character changing over time, he does not recognize that character itself is in many respects a social construction.White criticizes paternalistic economic policies that suggest manipulating choice environments in order to follow the “true” preferences of the individuals. Instead, real consent, as satisfying both relevant preferences and principles (e.g. rights and human dignity), is, in his view, the sole criterion for justifying particular policy measures—not Pareto-efficiency or Kaldor-Hicks compensation. Economists’ obsession with efficiency leading to the misconceived notions such as “efficient level of crime” or “manageable level of terrorism” is also severely criticized.For White, the most popular formalistic version of the categorical imperative is less important than the other two—prohibiting treating other people simply as means and instituting the “Kingdom of Ends.” Formalism is reserved merely for the negative evaluation of actions and providing strict perfect duties that give clear guidance concerning what should not be done. White’s “Kantian-economic” model of decision-making incorporates perfect duties as constraints, and imperfect (positive) duties as preferences. He also stresses that for Kant, duties derived from the imperative depend on empirical knowledge, the context of decision-making, and judgment as a unique personal interpretation of the moral law. He further emphasizes the intersubjective role of Kantian morality: moral law should be universalizable to all rational persons (the “Kingdom of Ends” formula of the imperative), whereas rationality means not just following the patterns of behavior developed in the preference-oriented choice model, but rather acting on one’s beliefs and desires or choosing not to follow them, thus exhibiting genuine autonomy.The new and important contribution to the discussion is an explicit treatment of will as an inner faculty that, together with judgment, constitutes a person’s character or “self,” and helps to overcome the mere inclination to follow duty. Will is the missing link between decision and action and should be “well-trained” for bringing about true morality.The book is clearly written, and the author has upheld the interdisciplinary appeal of the topic, demonstrating an outstanding knowledge of the vast literature on ethics (both Kantian and not) and economics. White’s emphasis on the irreducibility of moral principles is absolutely relevant for current economic and political debates. However, some reservations are in order.There is an ambiguity concerning the status of his analysis. If in its positive aspect White’s recommendations for economists is to accept the Kantian vision of morality, then almost no arguments are given for this, and his modifications of the standard choice model are introduced in an ad hoc manner, just to reconcile it with the Kantian framework. Are an individual’s decisions to act on principles and to overcome mere inclinations really... (shrink)

In _Elementary Aspects of the Political_ Prathama Banerjee moves beyond postcolonial and decolonial critiques of European political philosophy to rethink modern conceptions of "the political" from the perspective of the global South. Drawing on Indian and Bengali practices and philosophies from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Banerjee identifies four elements of the political: the self, action, the idea, and the people. She examines selfhood in light of precolonial Indic traditions of renunciation and realpolitik; action (...) in the constitutive tension between traditional conceptions of karma and modern ideas of labor; the idea of equality as it emerges in the dialectic between spirituality and economics; and people in the friction between the structure of the political party and the atmospherics of fiction and theater. Throughout, Banerjee reasserts the historical specificity of political thought and challenges modern assumptions about the universality, primacy, and self-evidence of the political. In formulating a new theory of the political, Banerjee gestures toward a globally salient political philosophy that displaces prevailing Western notions of the political masquerading as universal. (shrink)

Who gets to decide what it means to live a healthy lifestyle, and how important a healthy lifestyle is to a good life? As more governments make preventing obesity and diet-related illness a priority, it has become more important to consider the ethics and acceptability of their efforts. When it comes to laws and policies that promote healthy eating—such as special taxes on sugary drinks or programs to encourage consumption of fruits and vegetables—critics argue that these policies are paternalistic, and (...) that they limit individual autonomy over food choices. In our book Healthy Eating Policy and Political Philosophy: A Public Reason Approach (Barnhill and Bonotti 2022), we argue that both paternalistic justifications for healthy eating efforts and anti-paternalistic arguments against them can be grounded in perfectionist views that overly prioritize some values over others. We therefore propose a more inclusive, public reason approach to healthy eating policy that will be appealing to those who take pluralism and cultural diversity seriously, by providing a framework through which different kinds of values, including but not limited to autonomy and health, can be factored into the public justification for healthy eating efforts. Additionally, the book adopts a ‘farm to fork’ approach to the ethics of healthy eating efforts: it engages with theories and debates in political philosophy, considers the implications of different theoretical positions for healthy eating efforts, and then develops a framework for assessing policies that can be used by researchers and policymakers. As well as offering a novel normative analysis of healthy eating policy, we also provide a theoretical framework that will be applicable beyond healthy eating policy to a wide range of public policy scenarios. We are extremely grateful to the contributors to this symposium for their thoughtful commentaries on our book. In this article, we provide a critical reflection on the issues they raise with regard to some key aspects of our analysis. (shrink)

This paper provides a real-world test case for how to approach contemporary preference aggregation procedures. We examine the method of using stated preferences to structure social well-being indices. The method has seen increasing popularity and interest, both in economists’ laboratory research and by governments and international institutions. SP offers a sophisticated aggregation of peoples’ preferences regarding social well-being aspects and, in this way, provides elegant and non-paternalistic techniques for deciding how to weigh and prioritize various potential aspects of (...) social well-being. However, this method also poses difficulties and limitations from broader political and philosophical perspectives. This paper comprehensively charts these difficulties and suggests that SP methods should be complemented with appropriate deliberation procedures. The paper bridges the distinct perspectives of economists and political theorists in order to make SP an attractive instrument in determining policy. (shrink)

InUnto this Last, John Ruskin argued that Britain''s industrial society was morally degenerate and pernicious in that it drove the labouring class into cultural and material poverty. The thinking of the Political Economists, which supported the new liberal industrial order, was correspondingly flawed, because it lacked any credible moral element. Ruskin''s writings are in essence an appeal to the business leader to behave in a socially responsible, paternalistic fashion according to his own moral prescriptions. In this way, he believed (...) that British society might be regenerated. This article examines the ways in William Morris sought to give practical expression to these ideas. There is no perfect correspondence between the business notions of John Ruskin and the practice of William Morris. Yet it is evident that Morris stuck to many of his mentor''s ideas with remarkable tenacity; and the operation of the Morris business, especially those aspects relating to design, craftsmanship, work organisation, working conditions, scale and the market, owed much to Ruskin. (shrink)

The problem of the values of Ukrainian society is one of the most important and debatable problems in modern scientific discourse. This is due to the transition of our state from the traditional model of the state, in which there is authoritarianism, secrecy, to a socially oriented society and a democratic, open state.Accordingly, there is a change in values, which is an integral part of the existence of any society and state. To replace the Soviet system of declaration of surrogatecollective, (...) paternalistic values, which existed for several decades, a new system is formed, which provides a clear orientation of Ukrainians to European values, the significant achievements of the Ukrainian people, the moral recovery of society, increasing values and culture of civil society. Honor and dignity of Ukrainians, which is an indispensable basis for the development of moral culture of society.The purpose and objectives of the article. Based on the achievements of modern science and philosophy, to analyze the essence of the moral culture of the people, the place of human dignity and its importance in moral culture; to characterize and classify the main factors of dignity formation in the moral culture of the people. The research methodology is complex and is based on philosophical-anthropological and philosophical-cultural analysis of the problems of formation of moral culture of the Ukrainian people and its structural element - human dignity. Research results.The most important, synthetic, integral consequence of human development is moral culture. Moral culture is the level of assimilation by an individual or a group of people of existing moral values in society, the degree of their involvement in the moral aspects of activity, a measure of personal moral development. Practical and spiritual factors include, first of all, ethnic stereotypes specific to a certain people (traditions, customs, rituals, typical traits of character and behavior, dominant emotions, folk crafts, entertainment, games), as well as historical memory, established symbols, folk shrines. Historical memory, preserving every page of life, the people’s struggle for social, political and national rights at all stages of its development, serves as a solid foundation on which national self-consciousness is successfully formed.Institutional factors are important for the formation of dignity in the moral culture of the people. These include nation- and state-building activities of public authorities, national elite, political parties, religious and public organizations. If the state creates conditions in society for the assimilation of the historical and cultural experience accumulated by the nation, it contributes to the education of national self-esteem, ie awareness of community members of their belonging to the nation, their duty to the community of like-minded people. Conclusions. Summarizing the results of the study, we can formulate the following conclusions. Human dignity in the moral culture of the Ukrainian people is the result of the interaction of a combination of many factors that determine its structure and content. The process of its formation is quite long, complex and contradictory. This is due to the fact that it is human dignity that provides the spiritual, ideological foundation for the functioning of national communities, contributing to the development of promising guidelines for the development of the nation and the state. (shrink)

Every archive holds many stories; this paper analyses the treatment and socio-political role of the Indian goddess icon, Kali, in the early nineteenth century, considering the story of legal subjectivity through her changing depiction and worship. Kali was reimagined as a monster-like figure of hate and fear, of depravity and unchecked female sexuality, and the anti-thesis of morality, by the East India Company officers who compiled the archive on thuggee. As the icon of reverence to thuggee, an early codified (...) crime of habitual stranglers, this paper follows Kali through her restructuring under the British imperial vision, and as a mirror-metaphor of repressed feminine energy in the legal archive. I analyse the change in Kali’s iconography under the gaze of the law and the advent of a new colonial branding made up from parts of her legend. It is through this new role that the introduction of a standardised legal framework forced Kali to become secondary to Western paternalism, a role that split her Eastern feminine aspect into separate facets. I discuss how the repression of the female voice in the thuggee archive reflects historic attitudes of engendering that echoed as a form of nomos in the twentieth century socio-political climate of Britain. Finally, I present where the feminine energy highlights the need for a subtle reorientation of the criminal law to overcome areas of recurring dissonance in service to its female subjects. (shrink)

In chapter one I firstly critique some contemporary family-resemblance approaches to the category woman, and claim that they do not take sufficient account of dis-semblance, that is, resemblances that people have in common with members of the contrast category man. Second, I analyze how the concept of woman is semantically contestable: resemblance/dissemblance structures give rise to vagueness and to borderline cases. Borderline cases can either be included in the category or excluded from it. The factors which incline parties in a (...) dispute about membership to include or exclude depend on metaphysical, ethical, or political background assumptions. In chapter two, I begin by considering the harms suffered by transgender persons through “misgendering”, the deployment of gender terms which inflict psychological harms upon transgender persons, place them in situations of injustice, or diminish their self-respect. Such deployments are morally contestable: they can be challenged on ethical grounds. Several characterisations of the term ‘woman’ proposed in the feminist literature are critiqued from this perspective. In chapter three, I elaborate a broadly liberal approach to gender pluralism. The approach involves: i) the public toleration of gender practices and beliefs which contest prevalent gender norms; and ii) state-gender neutrality. Public toleration allows gender non-conforming practices and beliefs within public space. State gender-neutrality consists mainly in the removal from law and government policy of provisions which assume compliance with prevalent conceptions of gender. (shrink)

A stereoscopic view on a particular historical event, in which contemporary assessments are combined with mental stereotypes of a medieval man, allows a slightly different assessment of the chronicle plot about the posthumous “baptism of bones” of Oleg and Yaropolk, Princes of Kyivan Rus, in 1044. While from theological positions it is perceived as an absurdity and a direct violation of the rules of the church, in the Middle Ages this act did not contradict the mass religious beliefs. From an (...) ethical point of view, the action of Yaroslav the Wise was regarded as concern for the souls of the ancestors who died pagans and therefore did not claim for the salvation. The soteriological optimism that prevailed in the eleventh century in countries of the late Christianization, including Kyivan Rus, gave hope that living people were able to influence the fate of the souls of the dead. From a political point of view, the baptism of the ashes of the ancestors and their reburial in the family tomb of the Princes of Kyiv in the Church of the Tithes was aimed at expanding the circle of heavenly patrons and protectors of the princely dynasty, expanding the period of the Christian history of Kyivan Rus, and, as a result, legitimizing the power of Yaroslav the Wise. (shrink)

The human history has evidenced a great number of systems of hierarchy and power, various manifestations of power and hierarchy relations in different spheres of social life from politics to information networks, from culture to sexual life. A careful study of each particular case of such relations is very im-portant, especially within the context of contemporary multipolar and multicultural world. In the meantime it is very important to see both the general features, typical for all or most of the hierarchy (...) and power forms, and their variation. This set of issues has been treated by a series of international conferences titled ‘Hierarchy and Power in the History of Civilizations’ held in 2000–2006. Most articles of this volume were originally presented at the 4th conference of this series (Moscow, 2006). Needless to mention that all those presentations have been substantially re-worked for the publication in this volume. Notwithstanding the fact that the relations of hierarchy and power are rele-vant for all the spheres as they penetrate the whole of social life, establishing a sort of framework for the human agency, they are naturally most visible in the political sphere. They existed long before the formation of the earliest states – ethologists maintain that complex systems of hierarchy and power can be found among many highly organized animals. Yet, this was with the formation of the state and civilization when the power and hierarchy relations acquired their mature forms. Although ancient and medieval systems of government and domination always attract special attention, contemporary systems are much closer for every scholar. At the same time relations of power and hierarchy in the modern political world system demonstrate a great number of variants, levels and dimensions. In the present edited volume we only focus on three aspects of this important subject. These are revolutionary transformations (in the broad sense of this notion), violence, and globalization. Each volume section is devoted to one of those themes. (shrink)