Gernot Böhme’s original proposal regarding an aesthetic as a philosophic theory of perceptual knowledge could, in our opinion, be usefully compared with certain aspects, historical-theoretical and methodological, of Gestalt psychology. From an historical point of view there is the attention commonly paid to the work of the 18th-century philosopher, Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten, considered as an important precursor of the study of sensitive knowledge, while the subsequent basic themes of the perceptual-cognitive approach, of the expressive qualities, of the distinction “physical reality (...) /actual reality,” of the physiognomic problem, to cite but a few, recall nuclear questions, although perhaps not traditionally included in the “major canon”—to use a terminological proposal of Rocco Ronchi’s—of philosophy and specifically of experimental phenomenology. (shrink)

Contemporary egalitarian theories of justice constrain the demands of equality by responsibility, and do not view as unjust inequalities that are traceable to individuals' choices. This paper argues that, in order to make non-arbitrary determinate judgements of responsibility, any theory of justice needs a principle of stakes , that is, an account of what consequences choices should have. The paper also argues that the principles of stakes seemingly presupposed by egalitarians are implausible, and that adopting alternative principles of stakes amounts (...) to fleshing out the demands of responsibility rather than imposing limits on them. (shrink)

Does justice require that individuals get what they deserve? Serena Olsaretti brings together new essays by leading moral and political philosophers examining the relation between desert and justice; they also illuminate the nature of distributive justice, and the relationship between desert and other values, such as equality and responsibility.

Argumentation is a mechanism to support different forms of reasoning such as decision making and persuasion and always cast under the light of critical thinking. In the latest years, several comput...

This book is a philosophical analysis of the ethical treatment of refugees and stateless people, a group of people who, though extremely important politically, have been greatly under theorized philosophically. The limited philosophical discussion of refugees by philosophers focuses narrowly on the question of whether or not we, as members of Western states, have moral obligations to admit refugees into our countries. This book reframes this debate and shows why it is important to think ethically about people who will never (...) be resettled and who live for prolonged periods outside of all political communities. Parekh shows why philosophers ought to be concerned with ethical norms that will help stateless people mitigate the harms of statelessness even while they remain formally excluded from states. (shrink)

The compensatory desert argument is an argument that purports to justify inequalities in (some) incomes generated by a free labour market. It holds, first, that the principle of compensation is a principle of desert; second, that a distribution justified by a principle of desert is just; and third, that (some) rewards people reap on a free labour market are compensation for costs they incur. It concludes that therefore, a distribution of (some) rewards generated by a free labour market is just. (...) In this chapter I criticise the first two premises of this argument. I argue that the principle of compensation is not a principle of desert (sections 3 and 4), and that a distribution of deserved compensatory payments may be unjust (sections 5 and 6). Before developing my critique of the compensatory desert argument, I start by illustrating further that argument in the version of it which has been defended by Julian Lamont (section 1), and to dispel two objections that have been moved against the view that compensation is a principle of desert. (shrink)

In this paper, I argue that there is a philosophical basis for the claim that states can be held responsible for structural injustices such as gender discrimination and violence—a claim that has been made in international human rights documents, but one that has not gained much normative force. To show this, I draw on and develop Iris Young's notion of “political responsibility.” The purpose of political responsibility is not to find fault or blame the state for a past wrong, but (...) to encourage the state to make things more just in the future. I argue that the state is able to take responsibility in this sense and can discharge the duty of political responsibility in a more systematic way than individuals can. Further, I show that taking political responsibility would entail changing how states think about their human rights obligations. Rather than focusing on cataloguing abuses, states would be required to work toward changing conditions so that human rights violations are less likely to occur in the future. Consequently, I show that it does make sense to say that the state can be held accountable for structural injustices that lead to women's human rights violations. (shrink)

This article explores strategies of cultural representation in the production of Gurinder Chadha, a British director of Sikh origin. Chadha’s work is located in what Marie Louise Pratt defines as ‘contact zones’, negotiating between US, European and Indian audiences. The result is a directing style that puts together ‘East’ and ‘West’, Bollywood and Hollywood, in an in-between space that has been radically reconfigured through hybridization. This happens in particular through her use of music and soundtrack, from the documentary I’m British (...) but..., up to the recent Bend It Like Beckham and Bride and Prejudice. Here, many and diverse musical languages are put together through the representational strategies of parody and kitsch, deconstructing the idea of cultural identity in the very gesture that creates it. (shrink)

Drawing from extensive, eye-opening first-person accounts, No Refuge puts a spotlight on the millions of refugees worldwide who have to leave home but find nowhere to resettle. As political philosopher Serena Parekh argues, this is not just a problem for politicians. Citizens also have a moral duty to help resolve the global refugee crisis and to end the suffering and denial of human rights that refugee are forced to endure, often for years. While the media usually focus on the (...) challenges that Western states have with the arrival of large numbers of asylum seekers and refugees, the real problem is that millions are stuck in inhumane conditions in refugee camps and urban centers, with little chance of finding a more permanent solution. Grounded in powerful testimony from refugees and meticulous research on the conditions in which so many suffer worldwide, No Refuge shows why, as states but also as citizens, we cannot afford to wait any longer to end this crisis. (shrink)

Are inequalities of income created by the free market just? In this book Serena Olsaretti examines two main arguments that justify those inequalities: the first claims that they are just because they are deserved, and the second claims that they are just because they are what free individuals are entitled to. Both these arguments purport to show, in different ways, that giving responsible individuals their due requires that free market inequalities in incomes be allowed. Olsaretti argues, however, that neither (...) argument is successful, and shows that when we examine closely the principle of desert and the notions of liberty and choice invoked by defenders of the free market, it appears that a conception of justice that would accommodate these notions, far from supporting free market inequalities, calls for their elimination. Her book will be of interest to a wide range of readers in political philosophy, political theory and normative economics. (shrink)

This article examines our moral obligations to refugees and stateless people. I argue that in order to understand our moral obligations to stateless people, both de jure refugees and de facto stateless people, we ought to reconceptualize the harm of statelessness as entailing both a legal/political harm (the loss of citizenship) and an ontological harm, a deprivation of certain fundamental human qualities. To do this, I draw on the work of Hannah Arendt and show that the ontological deprivation has three (...) distinct though interconnected elements: a reduction to the merely human or bare life, a separation from the common realm of humanity and abandonment, and the diminishment of agency or ability to act in the Arendtian sense. If we pull apart the legal/political harm of statelessness from the ontological harm, we are better able to see that we can address some of the features of the ontological deprivation even though we may not be able to rectify the political harm. I conclude this article by discussing some suggestions that follow from a recognition of the reality and harm of the ontological deprivation. (shrink)

Distributive justice has come to the fore in political philosophy: how should we arrange our social and economic institutions so as to distribute benefits and burdens fairly? Thirty-two leading figures from philosophy and political theory present specially written critical assessments of the key issues in this flourishing area of research.

Our understanding of the impact of gender on refugee determination has evolved greatly over the last 60 years. Though many people initially believed that women could not be persecuted qua women, it is now frequently recognized that certain forms of gender-related persecution are sufficient to warrant asylum. Yet despite this conceptual progress, many states are still reluctant to consider certain forms of gender-related persecution to be sufficient to warrant asylum or refugee status. One reason for this continued bias is the (...) lack of a framework with which to understand gender-related persecution. I argue that we ought to understand gender-related persecution as resulting from the intersection of individual or state persecution and structural injustice. Structural injustice can be understood as the kind of everyday injustice, harm, and violence that women experience that makes possible the more extraordinary kinds of violence that women are likely to claim as the basis of asylum. Understanding gender-related persecution within the context of structural injustice will, I argue, help us to see it as a legitimate form of persecution and thus allow more just outcomes for women refugees. (shrink)

_Hannah Arendt and the Challenge of Modernity_ explores the theme of human rights in the work of Hannah Arendt. Parekh argues that Arendt's contribution to this debate has been largely ignored because she does not speak in the same terms as contemporary theoreticians of human rights. Beginning by examining Arendt’s critique of human rights, and the concept of "a right to have rights" with which she contrasts the traditional understanding of human rights, Parekh goes on to analyze some of the (...) tensions and paradoxes within the modern conception of human rights that Arendt brings to light, arguing that Arendt’s perspective must be understood as phenomenological and grounded in a notion of intersubjectivity that she develops in her readings of Kant and Socrates. (shrink)

In this paper I argue that we should not frame the debate over whether or not we have duties to help refugees in terms of duties of rescue. This way of framing the issue, where Western states are depicted as rescuing refugees from harms unconnected to them, does not adequately represent the reality experienced by refugees in the 21 st century. I suggest that we need a framework that includes the secondary harms experienced by refugees as they try to seek (...) refuge in camps, urban spaces and via asylum. These secondary harms constitute serious violations of human rights and prevent refugees from accessing the minimum conditions of human dignity. As a result, the rescue metaphor is inappropriate and, perhaps more importantly, prevents us from having a proper debate about the obligations of states in general, and Western states in particular, to refugees. (shrink)

Egalitarian theories assume, without defending it, the view that the costs of children should be shared between non-parents and parents. This standard position is called into question by the Parental Provision view. Drawing on the familiar idea that people should be held responsible for the consequences of their choices, the Parental Provision view holds that under certain conditions egalitarian justice requires parents to pay for the full costs of their children, as it would be unfair for non-parents to bear the (...) negative externalities of others’ choices to have children. This article examines closely the Parental Provision view and argues that various possible justifications for it are unsuccessful. In so doing, it brings to light respects in which the choice to have and rear children is special and may not be treated as being on a par with other choices for which we think people should be held responsible. (shrink)

The pharmaceutical industry plays an increasingly dominant role in healthcare, raising concerns about “conflicts of interest” on the part of the medical professionals who interact with the industry. However, there is considerable disagreement over the extent to which COI is a problem and how it should be managed. Participants in debates about COI have become entrenched in their views, which is both unproductive and deeply confusing for the majority of medical professionals trying to work in an increasingly commercialized environment. We (...) used a modified meta-narrative review method to analyse debates about COI in the academic and grey literature. We found two Discourse Models: The Critical Discourse Model sees COI in health and biomedicine as a major problem that both can and should be addressed, while the Defensive Discourse Model argues that current efforts to control COIs are at best unnecessary and at worst harmful. Each model is underpinned by profoundly differing views about how society should be organized—in particular whether market forces should be encouraged or curtailed—and how the dangers associated with market forces should be managed. In order to make any headway, academics and policymakers must recognize that these debates are underpinned by profoundly differing worldviews. (shrink)

A central question for assessing the merits of Amartya Sen's capability approach as a potential answer to the “distribution of what”? question concerns the exact role and nature of freedom in that approach. Sen holds that a person's capability identifies that person's effective freedom to achieve valuable states of beings and doings, or functionings, and that freedom so understood, rather than achieved functionings themselves, is the primary evaluative space. Sen's emphasis on freedom has been criticised by G. A. Cohen, according (...) to whom the capability approach either uses too expansive a definition of freedom or rests on an implausibly active, indeed “athletic,” view of well-being. This paper defends the capability approach from this criticism. It argues that we can view the capability approach to be underpinned by an account of well-being which takes the endorsement of valuable functionings as constitutive of well-being, and by a particular view of the way in which endorsement relates to force and choice. Footnotes1 I would like to thank Paul Bou-Habib, Ian Carter, Matthew Kramer, Ingrid Robeyns, Peter Vallentyne, and two Economics and Philosophy referees for very helpful comments on earlier drafts of this paper. I am also grateful to the participants of the Edinburgh ECPR Workshop, the Hoover Chair Seminar in Louvain-La-Neuve, the King's College Moral Philosophy Group in Cambridge, the Nuffield Political Theory Workshop in Oxford, and the session on the Capability Approach at the Philadelphia APSA Annual Conference. (shrink)

This essay explores recent scholarship on Hannah Arendt's contribution to the field of global justice. I show that many of Arendt's ideas have been brought to bear fruitfully on some of the most pressing global issues of our day. I turn first to the area in which Arendt has, arguably, been most influential, namely human right. I then look at recent scholarship on Arendt and various issues in global justice, including immigration, statelessness, human security, global poverty, political reconciliation, and global (...) democracy. This essay offers a critical analysis of the ways that Arendt's work has been employed in discussions of global justice and highlights the contributions that she has made to this field of thought.© 2013 John Wiley & Sons Ltd. (shrink)

The aim of this paper is to present the activities and research methodologies of CTL, a laboratory of the Scuola Normale Superiore of Pisa, founded and directed by Lina Bolzoni. CTL’s objective is to investigate the complex structure of relationships between the linguistic and the figurative code in literary tradition, paying particular attention to the XVth, XVIth and XVIIth centuries and using information technologies both as an auxiliary research tool and as a medium for scientific dissemination. Here I shall be (...) discussing the Centre’s digitalization projects, and in particular the project concerned with the Orlando Furioso and its remediation into images. This project, active since 2007, is, I believe, particularly representative of the progressive implementation within CTL of both traditional and computer-related methodologies in the planning of digital collections dedicated to words and images. (shrink)

Preferences are often thought to be relevant for well-being: respecting preferences, or satisfying them, contributes in some way to making people's lives go well for them. A crucial assumption that accompanies this conviction is that there is a normative standard that allows us to discriminate between preferences that do, and those that do not, contribute to well-being. The papers collected in this volume, written by moral philosophers and philosophers of economics, explore a number of central issues concerning the formulation of (...) such a normative standard. They examine what a defensible account of how preferences should be formed for them to contribute to well-being should look like; whether preferences are subject to requirements of rationality and what reasons we have to prefer certain things over others; and what the significance is, if any, of preferences that are arational or not conducive to well-being. (shrink)

One of the central motifs of G. A. Cohen's work was his opposition to capitalism in the name of justice. This motif was fully in view in Cohen's work on Robert Nozick's libertarianism: Cohen carefully reconstructed and relentlessly criticized Nozick's apologetics of the free market, which, he thought, was internally coherent but unconvincing. This article suggests that Cohen's opposition to libertarianism did not, however, go far enough, and identifies two respects in which Cohen's position could and should have been more (...) critical of that philosophy. (shrink)

Parental consent poses challenges to needed research with adolescents who identify as lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer and/or questioning (LGBTQ+) and are at heightened risk for negative health outcomes. Obtaining parental consent in studies focused on LGBTQ+ issues can prove arduous if adolescents have not yet disclosed their identity or have unsupportive guardians. Institutional Review Boards (IRBs) may be hesitant to grant waivers of parental consent, yet research suggests that studies requiring parental consent deter the participation of adolescents who identify (...) as LGBTQ+. In this article, ethical considerations regarding waivers of parental consent in the context of the American Psychological Association’s (APA) general ethical principles are reviewed and recommendations for psychological researchers seeking waivers of parental consent are offered. A vignette is used to demonstrate a question-and-answer guide to help determine if a waiver of parental consent is ethically justified. (shrink)

In a number of debates in contemporary moral and political philosophy and philosophy of economics, philosophers hold the conviction that preferences have normative significance. A central assumption that underlies this conviction is that a cogent account of preference-formation can be developed. This is particularly evident in debates about well-being. Those who defend subjective accounts of well-being, on which a person’s life goes better for her to the extent that her preferences are satisfied, often qualify that account so that it does (...) not include malformed or adaptive preferences (that is, preferences formed in non-autonomous ways, or humble preferences tailored to stifling circumstances), the satisfaction of which does not seem to contribute to well-being. This assumes that there is a normative standard of preference-formation with which to identify those preference that are malformed or adaptive in the relevant sense. An account of preference-formation is also important for philosophers who uphold an objective theory of well-being, on which well-being consists of the pursuit of objectively valuable goals, but who also believe in the value of freedom and thus emphasise the importance of respecting individuals’ choices among various goals. For they, too, in extolling the importance of respect for choices, assume that these choices are not distorted by inauthentically formed preferences, and thus also need an account of preference-formation to help distinguish those cases in which we ought to respect people’s choices from those in which we do not. In the vast literature on preferences, however, relatively little attention has been devoted to the. (shrink)

The Moral Equivalence Thesis claims that procreation in affluent countries and eco‐gluttony are morally on a par, and that both are impermissible. We argue that this ambiguates between two different theses, the Strict and the Lax. On the Strict Reading of the thesis, procreation and eco‐gluttony are both wrong for the same reasons, that is, because both involve individuals overstepping their carbon budget. We argue that this is false at least with regard to a certain number of children and a (...) range of the costs of children. By contrast, a Lax Reading of the thesis is, we think, defensible. On this reading, procreation and eco‐gluttony may both be wrong, but for different reasons and under different conditions. While eco‐gluttony is wrong across a range of ideal and non‐ideal conditions because it is a failure to live within one's fair carbon budget, having a child is only wrong, if it is wrong, under non‐ideal conditions where prospective parents have weighty reasons, or an obligation, to pick up the moral slack of others. (shrink)

This article examines the relation among luck, justice, and desert in the context of contemporary political theory. The distinctive feature of the conventional view of desert-based justice consists in its claim that we deserve on the basis of our achievements, the outcome of our actions, or the quality of our performances. One challenge to the conventional view's treatment of the relation between justice, luck, and desert comes from those who hold that desert-based justice is compatible with more luck than is (...) allowed by the conventional view. (shrink)

Describing his creative process, David Bowie stated: “I’ll take articles out of newspapers, poems that I’ve written, pieces of other people’s books, and put them all into this little warehouse, thi...