This paper presents medieval Guelphism as an `ideological constellation', in which libertas played a prominent role, and argues that, because it was lumped together with references to the French dynasty and the Church, the ordinary concept of liberty in late medieval Italy needs to be understood within the context of partisan struggles. New studies on medieval factions in the fifteenth century support the idea that a concept of libertas derived from the Guelph tradition could fulfill surprisingly different ideological functions, particularly (...) when mobilized in debates and struggles concerning the nature of sovereignty. Pragmatic political documents, in fact, show that a libertas-empire, such as that of the Florentine republic, was by no means the dominant concept of liberty in Quattrocento Italy. (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)

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.

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)

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)

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)

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 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)

Tout au long de l’époque moderne, l’utopie a connu une floraison vaste et diversifiée dans ses expressions, non seulement littéraire, philosophique, politique, architecturale et urbanistique, mais aussi dans le cadre des mouvements populaires. L’utopie moderne rassemble des contenus issus des mythes, de la pensée grecque classique, des innovations, découvertes et explorations modernes, du nouveau rôle de la rationalité. Avec les auteurs les plus considérables de l’utopie moderne – More, Campanella, Bacon, Mercier – se forment les archétypes utopiques de la narration (...) et du projet, de l’ ou-topos/eu-topos. En même temps se produit la rencontre entre l’imaginaire et la rationalité, l’analyse critique du présent et la comparaison avec l’ailleurs, spatial ou temporel. Les déclinaisons modernes de la société juste et heureuse, du progrès et du développement humain, des droits et de la paix, émergent à la fois de la contribution utopique de nombreux auteurs et des grands événements révolutionnaires modernes. (shrink)

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...

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)

The first issue of Artificial Intelligence and Law journal was published in 1992. This paper offers some commentaries on papers drawn from the Journal’s third decade. They indicate a major shift within Artificial Intelligence, both generally and in AI and Law: away from symbolic techniques to those based on Machine Learning approaches, especially those based on Natural Language texts rather than feature sets. Eight papers are discussed: two concern the management and use of documents available on the World Wide Web, (...) and six apply machine learning techniques to a variety of legal applications. (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)

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)

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.

_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)

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)

Following Erika Fischer-Lichte’s notion of emergence as an unexpected phenome-non that questions the notion of agency, our aim is to investigate how dance emerges through movements that are spontaneous and yet learnt while not being reducible to a motor expertise. Through Hermann Schmitz’ theory of the felt body, and notions such as “kinaesthetic attention”, grace and “pure” presence, we will show how dance movements emerge from the mutual “affective” influence be-tween dancers and the surroundings thanks to dancers’ “pathic” state between (...) awareness and unconsciousness, laîcher prise and restraint. (shrink)

This paper is an exploration of the role of conscience in the justification of human rights. I argue that in both the western tradition of natural rights and the non-western traditions, human rights are justified, in part, because of their appeal to conscience, and not simply because they issue from a divine source or are based on reason. In contrast, contemporary justifications of human rights primarily look for an objective foundation or simply assert the pragmatic importance of human rights as (...) their justification. While there are distinct advantages to this way of arguing, there are also problems, which I will discuss. As an alternative, I outline Arendt's understanding of conscience as the ability to be with and think with one's self as a secular alternative to both a non-secular version of conscience, and the denial of conscience implicit in contemporary theories. Her view of political judgment helps us to understand how conscience can be understood as subjective but not arbitrary. This paper brings Arendt's insights on conscience and judgment to bear on contemporary discourses of human rights. (shrink)

A growing interest for the emotion of disgust has recently arisen in international contexts across several fields of research. A general definition of disgust will be primarily assumed: by disgust I understand a total rejection that generates a motion of repulsion and removal of an object that is in the proximity of the subject, without constituting a real danger. In reference to the notion of taboo, I will first of all assume its ambivalence. The emotion of disgust, essentially natural and (...) cultural at the same time, as a typical trait of the process of human civilization that distinguishes humans from animals. At variance with other theories of disgust, I will argue that it is not possible to theoretically articulate the overcoming of disgust, but that it is possible to educate about this emotion through artistic experience. On this ground, an ethics of disgust will be outlined, which starts from the acknowledgement of one of our most bodily emotions. (shrink)

Xavier Le Roy’s performance Self-Unfinished is emblematic of how contemporary dance’s resistance to the submission of the body to a codified ideal body model manifests itself through the staging of bodies “beyond codes”, i.e., bodies that take surprising, sometimes even apparently “monstrous” shapes. The purpose of this article is to investigate the “monstrosity” of Self-Unfinished and to sketch out an analysis of it following Hermann Schmitz's theory of the Leib and Tonino Griffero’s account on atmospheres.