Xavier Landes | : Happiness has become a central theme in public debates. Happiness indicators illustrate this importance. This article offers a typology of the main challenges conveyed by the elaboration of happiness indicators, where happiness can be understood as hedonia, subjective well-being, or eudaimonia. The typology is structured around four questions: what to measure?—i.e., the difficulties linked to the choice of a particular understanding of happiness for building an indicator; whom to include?—i.e., the limits of the community monitored (...) by such an indicator; how to collect the data?—i.e., the difficulties stemming from objective and subjective reporting; what to do?—i.e., the concerns about the use of happiness indicators in public policy. The major points of normative contention are discussed for each of these dimensions. The purpose of this article is to contribute in a constructive manner to happiness research by offering an overview of some major philosophical and political challenges of building happiness indicators. The conclusion underlines the importance of the strategy of diversification- hybridization, which consists in setting a variety of indicators or composite indicators that articulate different understandings of happiness. It is stressed that happiness indicators raise democratic and institutional issues with which normative thinkers should deal. | : Le bonheur est devenu un thème central dans les débats publics. Les indicateurs de bonheur illustrent cette importance. Cet article offre une typologie des principaux enjeux contenus dans le travail d’élaboration d’indicateurs de bonheur quand ce dernier est compris comme hedonia, bien-être subjectif ou eudaimonia. La typologie est structurée autour de quatre questions : 1) que mesurer?, où sont en jeu les difficultés liées au choix d’une compréhension particulière du bonheur pour construire un indicateur; 2) qui inclure?, c’est-à-dire comment tracer les limites de la communauté morale qui est l’objet d’un tel indicateur; 3) comment collecter les données?, où on interroge les difficultés propres aux techniques subjectives et objectives de collecte de données; 4) que faire?, où on soulève l’enjeu des craintes quant à l’usage d’indicateurs de bonheur dans les politiques publiques. Les points majeurs de dispute normative sont discutés pour chaque dimension. Nous espérons ainsi contribuer de manière constructive à la recherche sur le bonheur en offrant un aperçu de quelques défis philosophiques et politiques majeurs relatifs à la construction d’indicateurs de bonheur. Nous concluons en soulignant l’importance de la stratégie de diversification-hybridation qui consiste à mettre en place des indicateurs variés ou composites articulant différentes compréhensions du bonheur. Ces indicateurs soulèvent des enjeux démocratiques et institutionnels que les penseurs normatifs doivent considérer. (shrink)

Insurance is pervasive in many social settings. As a cooperative device based on risk pooling, it serves to attenuate the adverse consequences of various risks by offering policyholders coverage against the losses implied by adverse events in exchange for the payment of premiums. In the insurance industry, the concept of actuarial fairness serves to establish what could be adequate, fair premiums. Accordingly, premiums paid by policyholders should match as closely as possible their risk exposure. Such premiums are the product of (...) the probabilities of losses and the expected losses. This article presents a discussion of the fairness of actuarial fairness through three steps: defining the concept based on its formulation within the insurance industry; determining in which sense it may be about fairness; and raising some objections to the actual fairness of actuarial fairness. The necessity of a normative evaluation of actuarial fairness is justified by the influence of the concept on the current reforms of public insurance systems and the fact that it highlights the question of the repartition of the gains and burdens of social cooperation. (shrink)

In Racial Prescriptions, Jonathan Xavier Inda offers a critical and timely analysis of the making of BiDil, the first (and only) drug that was marketed exclusively to African Americans. Sibille Merz speaks to him about the re-articulation of racial politics under neoliberalism, the legacies of scientific racism and the molecularization of biopolitics in the genomic age.

This paper examines the logic of conditional obligation, which originates from the works of Hansson, Lewis, and others. Some weakened forms of transitivity of the betterness relation are studied. These are quasi-transitivity, Suzumura consistency, acyclicity and the interval order condition. The first three do not change the logic. The axiomatic system is the same whether or not they are introduced. This holds true under a rule of interpretation in terms of maximality and strong maximality. The interval order condition gives rise (...) to a new axiom. Depending on the rule of interpretation, this one changes. With the rule of maximality, one obtains the principle known as disjunctive rationality. With the rule of strong maximality, one obtains the Spohn axiom (also known as the principle of rational monotony, or Lewis’ axiom CV). A completeness theorem further substantiates these observations. For interval order, this yields the finite model property and decidability of the calculus. (shrink)

This paper reports completeness results for dyadic deontic logics in the tradition of Hansson’s systems. There are two ways to understand the core notion of best antecedent-worlds, which underpins such systems. One is in terms of maximality, and the other in terms of optimality. Depending on the choice being made, one gets different evaluation rules for the deontic modalities, but also different versions of the so-called limit assumption. Four of them are disentangled, and compared. The main observation of this paper (...) is that, even in the partial order case, the contrast between maximality and optimality is not as significant as one could expect, because the logic remains the same whatever notion of best is used. This is established by showing that, given analogous properties for the betterness relation, the same system is sound and complete with respect to its intended modelling. The chief result of this paper concerns Åqvist’s system F supplemented with the principle of cautious monotony. It is established that, under the maximality rule, F + is sound and complete with respect to the class of models in which the betterness relation is required be reflexive and smooth . From this, a number of spin-off results are obtained. First and foremost, it is shown that a similar determination result holds for optimality; that is, under the optimality rule, F + is also sound and complete with respect to the class of models in which the betterness relation is reflexive and smooth . Other spin-off results concern classes of models in which further constraints are placed on the betterness relation, like totalness and transitivity. (shrink)

Several ethicists have defended the use of responsibility-based criteria in healthcare rationing. Yet in this article we outline two challenges to the implementation of responsibility-based healthcare rationing policies. These two challenges are, namely, that responsibility for past behavior can diminish as an agent changes, and that blame can come apart from responsibility. These challenges suggest that it is more difficult to hold someone responsible for health related actions than proponents of responsibility-sensitive healthcare policies suggest. We close by discussing public health (...) policies that could function as an alternative to contentious, responsibility-sensitive rationing policies. (shrink)

Xavier Labbée dirige l'Institut du Droit et de l'Ethique.

Quines són les causes del dèficit filosòfic que arrossega la cultura catalana contemporània? Aquest llibre ofereix un panorama bastant complet —i amarg— de les condicions acadèmiques i extraacadèmiques en què s’ha hagut de conrear als Països Catalans la filosofia, tota la filosofia, centrant-se, això sí, en les aventures personals i col·lectives dels qui han tingut la vel·leïtat de dedicar-se a la lògica. Hi són narrades amb amenitat i lucidesa l’estada de Bertrand Russell a Barcelona, la defenestració d’Eugeni d’Ors, les aberracions (...) docents de Josep Daurella i Rull, la breu i fulgurant trajectòria intel·lectual de Joan Crexells, les peripècies eclesiàstiques de David Garcia Bacca i Miquel Soy, l’exili de Josep Ferrater Mora i la gestació del seu voluminós Diccionario de filosofía, la marginació de Manuel Sacristan, els conflictes de la Facultat de Filosofia de València en els anys 70... El resultat és una història de la filosofia apartada en molts aspectes de la imatge «abstracta» i «idealitzada» que sol oferir la historiografia filosòfica a l’ús. (shrink)

Before his death in 1989, Gilbert Simondon wrote two major books consisting of his principal and complementary theses, both defended in 1958. The complementary thesis on the mode of existence of technical objects was published in 1958, while it was only in 1964 that sections of his principal thesis on individuation were made available to the public (and even then only the chapters dedicated to the regimes of physical and vital individuation, excluding those dealing with psychic and collective individuation.) Over (...) the course of his career, Simondon produced other major texts, but only in the form of unpublished courses or conference presentations published in poorly distributed journals. Some of these texts have .. (shrink)

We prove strong completeness of the □-version and the ◊-version of a Gödel modal logic based on Kripke models where propositions at each world and the accessibility relation are both infinitely valued in the standard Gödel algebra [0,1]. Some asymmetries are revealed: validity in the first logic is reducible to the class of frames having two-valued accessibility relation and this logic does not enjoy the finite model property, while validity in the second logic requires truly fuzzy accessibility relations and this (...) logic has the finite model property. Analogues of the classical modal systems D, T, S4 and S5 are considered also, and the completeness results are extended to languages enriched with a discrete well ordered set of truth constants. (shrink)

Several bioethicists have recently discussed the complexity of defining human death, and considered in particular how our definition of death affects our understanding of the ethics of vital organ procurement. In this brief paper, we challenge the mainstream medical definition of human death—namely, that death is equivalent to total brain failure—and argue with Nair-Collins and Miller that integrated biological functions can continue even after total brain failure has occurred. We discuss the implications of Nair-Collins and Miller’s argument and suggest that (...) it may be necessary to look for alternative biological markers that reliably indicate the death of a human being. We reject the suggestion that we should abandon the dead-donor criteria for organ donation. Rather than weaken the ethical standards for vital organ procurement, it may be necessary to make them more demanding. The aim of this paper is not to justify the dead donor rule. Rather, we aim to explore the perspective of those who agree with critiques of the whole brain and cardiopulmonary definitions of death but yet disagree with the proposal that we should abandon the dead-donor rule. We will consider what those who want to retain the dead-donor rule must argue in light of Nair-Collins and Miller’s critique. (shrink)

La 4e de couverture indique : "Ce livre commence par définir ce qu'est un exercice spirituel. Quelle est cette notion qui est aussi une pratique dans l'antiquité? Il analyse en détail l'expression en s'interrogeant sur les théories et les mises en oeuvre qui peuvent s'y référer dans l'antiquité : de l'ascèse à la méditation, de la conversion à la maîtrise de soi ou encore le travail de l'âme. Enfin, cet ouvrage questionne également la continuité des exercices spirituels des Anciens, leurs (...) reprises à l'aube du christianisme, mais également par les philosophies de la Renaissance (Montaigne), des époques classique, moderne (Descartes) et par celles des Lumières (Shaftesbury, Kant, Rousseau).". (shrink)

resumo: Enquanto as duas teses defendidas por Simondon em 1958 relevam o problema da individuação humana na sua dimensão psicossocial e técnica, a publicação nos últimos anos do conjunto do corpus simondoniano sugere que outro tema constitui o fio condutor do pensamento de Simondon por três décadas, dos anos 50 ao início dos anos 80: aquele da vida. Ora, enquanto o problema da individuação humana poderia ser interpretado na ótica de uma reflexão política, notadamente através do conceito de “transindividualidade” desenvolvido (...) nas teses e efetivamente considerado pelos comentadores como o conceito chave da política simondoniana, a questão de se saber o que se torna essa política simondoniana coloca-se, precisamente, no momento em que o deslocamento do acento em direção a uma filosofia da vida é operado. Na medida em que o conceito de transindividualidade desaparece dos escritos posteriores às teses, a questão coloca-se ainda mais. Como compreender esta centralidade do tema da vida, enquanto que aquele do homem e de seus modos de ser no mundo parecia privilegiado nas teses? Em qual medida este deslocamento de acento conduz Simondon a abandonar a reflexão política proposta nas teses em prol de uma antropologia biológica que, cabe perguntar-se, flertaria com o programa da sociobiologia dos anos 70? Este artigo propõe elementos em resposta a essas duas questões. abstract: Whereas the two theses defended by Simondon in 1958 highlight the problem of human individuation in its psychosocial and technical dimension, the publication in the last years of the set of the Simondonian corpus suggests that another theme constitutes the leading thread of Simondon’s thought for three decades, from the 1950s to the early 1980s: that of life. Now, whereas the problem of human individuation could be interpreted in the view of a political reflection, mostly through the concept of “transindividuality” developed in the theses and effectively considered by the commentators as the key concept of Simondonian politics, the question of knowing what makes this Simondonian politics is put forth precisely at the moment in which is operated the displacement of the accent towards a philosophy of life. As the concept of transindividuality disappears from the manuscripts posterior to the theses, the question is even more pressing. How can one comprehend this centrality of the theme of life, whereas that of man and its modes of being in the world would seem to be privileged in the theses? To which extent does this displacement of accent lead Simondon to abandon the political reflection proposed in the theses towards a biological anthropology that, one may ask, would flirt with the sociobiology program of the 1970s? This paper provides some elements to answer these two questions. (shrink)

Cuerpo físico y cuerpo vivido no deben interpretarse como dos realidades separadas, sino que representan dos aspectos distintos de la misma experiencia corporal descrita en términos fenomenológicos. La experiencia de la corporalidad puede seguir dos direcciones: a) la primera es una dirección ascendente, que implica el desarrollo de las posibilidades de movimiento, acción y expresión del cuerpo en toda su plenitud; b) el otro camino o dirección, en contraste con el anterior, toma una senda descendente, y se halla estrechamente relacionado (...) con la experiencia del dolor, de la limitación, de la resistencia corporal que es experimentada como oposición a la propia voluntad: es el cuerpo vulnerable. Aquí reaparece un nuevo dualismo: el cuerpo poético de la expresión frente al cuerpo vulnerable de la enfermedad y el dolor. Mi contribución trata de cuestionar la idea de que el cuerpo poético de la expresión artística y el cuerpo vulnerable de la vejez, de la discapacidad o de la enfermedad, pertenezcan a esferas completamente separadas. Con este propósito, se intenta poner de relieve los múltiples puntos de intersección entre ambas perspectivas, al tiempo que se sostiene que tales intersecciones pueden llegar a ser interesantes puntos de partida de la investigación interdisciplinar. (shrink)

In the half-century that elapsed between 1830 and 1880, the city of Barcelona, while industrializing and tripling its population, saw how rich scientific collections (mainly naturalistic, archeological, and anatomical) could be created or lost, opened to the public or forgotten. The complexity and variety of the movements of these collections go beyond the narrow historiographical framework defined by a supposedly linear evolution towards greater accumulation and openness to the public. On the contrary, the examples examined in this article reveal a (...) variety of paths and vicissitudes. (shrink)

Trata-se da tradução do artigo "The Sense of Justice", de John Rawls, publicado originalmente emThe Philosophical Review, Jul., 1963, Vol. 72, No. 3, pp. 281-305.

An extensions by new axioms and rules of an algebraizable logic in the sense of Blok and Pigozzi is not necessarily algebraizable if it involves new connective symbols, or it may be algebraizable in an essentially different way than the original logic. However, extension whose axioms and rules define implicitly the new connectives are algebraizable, via the same equivalence formulas and defining equations of the original logic, by enriched algebras of its equivalente quasivariety semantics. For certain strongly algebraizable logics, all (...) connectives defined implicitly by axiomatic extensions of the logic are explicitly definable. (shrink)

Est-ce un hasard si Jean-Marc Ferry, d'un côté du Rhin, Jürgen Habermas, de l'autre, entrouvrent aujourd'hui la porte de la République au discours religieux? Si la raison publique faite de liberté et d'égalité semblait suffire pour régir le champ économique et social de notre Modernité première, elle s'avère trop courte lorsqu'il s'agit de formuler la norme commune applicable aux fondamentaux de l'existence tels que la vie, le corps, l'amour, la mort... D'où l'appel de nos deux auteurs aux ressources de sens (...) qu'ont accumulées les religions et, singulièrement, le christianisme. Pour prendre cette requête au sérieux, il fallait revisiter les grands axes de la tradition chrétienne (création, faute, incarnation, salut, trinité, eucharistie) pour en dégager les enseignements qui enrichiraient la raison publique d'aujourd'hui. Mais la foi se laissera-t-elle ainsi arraisonner? Et la raison s'ouvrira-t-elle à ce discours qui vient de plus loin qu'elle? La partie est loin d'être gagnée. Xavier Dijon la mène avec grand talent. (shrink)

Personalized medicine has recently become the new horizon of healthcare policies worldwide, but it hasalso given rise to misunderstandings and conflicting debates due to the lack of clear definitions and appropriate framing. Personalized medicine is mainly defined as the tailoring of diagnosis and therapies to the genetic profile of each patient, both enhanced by considerable improvements of technologies for acquiring and processing large amounts of data. Is personalized medicine the right term however, considering that it focuses on signaling pathways at (...) the molecular level, where undoubtely persons as such cannot be found?The rival expression «person-centered medicine» has been coined to avoid any ambiguity: on the one hand, molecular biomedicine improved by high-throughtput molecular technologies is more legitimately labelled «individualized» or «precision» medicine, while on the other hand «person-centered medicine» is considered the only authentic personalized medicine insofar as it focuses on the patient as a whole.Far from overcoming the misunderstandings and conflicting views at stake in current debates on futuremedicine however, this divide between personalized and person-centered medicine gives rise to new difficulties and proves to be misleading. Conceptual confusions remain underinvestigated and undermine current attempts to clarify core issues of biomedical research and biomedicine today. This paper intends tohighlight these confusions. (shrink)

Pourquoi parle-t-on si facilement de l'âme d'un violon, d'une poutre, d'un canon et avec plus d'embarras, de l'âme humaine? Le mot "âme" a des résonances qui pour beaucoup paraissent suspectes. Nombre de nos contemporains pensent ou préfèrent se passer de la notion d'âme qu'ils jugent désuète, mythique ou trop chargée de religieux. Et s'il y avait une relation étroite entre le refoulement du religieux et celui de l'âme? se demande Xavier Lacroix. De même que le religieux est porteur d'une (...) signification qui lui est propre, de même la notion d'âme est-elle porteuse d'une signification qui va plus loin que les notions modernes par lesquelles on croit la remplacer. En vérité, le terme d'âme est irremplaçable. Nous n'en avons pas fini avec lui, qui implique la raison et la foi, le bon sens et la Révélation. (shrink)

The aim of this paper is to strengthen the point made by Horty about the relationship between reason holism and moral particularism. In the literature prima facie obligations have been considered as the only source of reason holism. I strengthen Horty’s point in two ways. First, I show that contrary-to-duties provide another independent support for reason holism. Next I outline a formal theory that is able to capture these two sources of holism. While in simple settings the proposed account coincides (...) with Horty’s one, this is not true in more complicated or “realistic” settings in which more than two norms collide. My chosen formalism is so-called input/output logic. A bottom-line example is introduced. It raises the issue of whether the conventional wisdom is right in assuming that normative reasons run parallel to epistemic ones. (shrink)

It is shown that Friedman's problem, whether there exists a proper extension of first order logic satisfying the compactness and interpolation theorems, has extremely simple positive solutions if one considers extensions by generalized (finitary) propositional connectives. This does not solve, however, the problem of whether such extensions exist which are also closed under relativization of formulas.

In this article we defend the inferential view of scientific models and idealisation. Models are seen as “inferential prostheses” (instruments for surrogative reasoning) construed by means of an idealisation-concretisation process, which we essentially understand as a kind of counterfactual deformation procedure (also analysed in inferential terms). The value of scientific representation is understood in terms not only of the success of the inferential outcomes arrived at with its help, but also of the heuristic power of representation and their capacity to (...) correct and improve our models. This provides us with an argument against Sugden’s account of credible models: the likelihood or realisticness (their “credibility”) is not always a good measure of their acceptability. As opposed to “credibility” we propose the notion of “enlightening”, which is the capacity of giving us understanding in the sense of an inferential ability. (shrink)

Le but de cet article est double. Il s'agit d'une part de donner une représentation des verbes trilitères (i.e. comportant trois consonnes, autrement dit les verbes de forme CvCvC) du somali qui rend compte de l'ensemble de leurs propriétés. D'autre part, au travers de cet exemple d'analyse, je m'attache à discuter du rapport qu'entretient le phonologue avec les corpus, en particulier, leur constitution, leur exploitation, l'appréhension et la résolution des contre-exemples ; on verra aussi que l'analyse proposée (comportement des verbes (...) [CvCvC] du somali) ainsi que ses dividendes, capitaux pour la compréhension de la phonologie de cette langue, auraient été impossibles à obtenir ou du moins non crédibles sans l'utilisation de l'outil informatique. Dans le dernier paragraphe seront discutés les problèmes que posent la constitution de corpus électroniques ainsi que leur exploitation automatique. (shrink)

"Contains a balanced account of recent advances in set theory, model theory, algebraic logic, and proof theory, originally presented at the Tenth Latin American Symposium on Mathematical Logic held in Bogata, Columbia. Traces new interactions among logic, mathematics, and computer science. Features original research from over 30 well-known experts worldwide.".

Traditionally, political philosophers and theorists (from Plato and Aristotle to Montesquieu) not only systematically distinguished a greater number of political regimes than we are accustomed to distinguish today (identifying several varieties of democracy and non-democracy, according to several normative criteria) but also used these distinctions for specifically evaluative purposes: distinctions among political regimes corresponded to the degree to which a political regime facilitated important values (e.g., the common good, the good life, freedom, etc.). Questions of evaluation often took priority over (...) questions of justification. Contemporary political theory, by contrast, with some exceptions, has mostly operated within the restricted distinction between (liberal) democratic and non-democratic regimes, and has failed to attend to the morally significant differences among "imperfect" or "less justified" political regimes. Questions of justification have mostly taken priority over questions of evaluation. In this paper, I explore the possibilities for constructing an evaluative theory of imperfect (or not fully justified) political regimes. I argue that a political regime is a system for the division of the labor of political decisionmaking that can (and has historically been) evaluated from three different perspectives: the perspective of the decisions made through it, the perspective of the interests promoted and protected through it, and the perspective of its stability in regards to the kinds of characters it fosters and through which it is sustained. Each of these perspectives provides their own criteria for evaluation: the idea of a well-organized regime for the "decisions" perspective, the idea of a public-goods producing regime for the "interests" perspective, and the idea of a "resilient" regime for the stability perspective. Nevertheless, I also show that these criteria are not necessarily congruent with one another, and that a fully justified regime need not be ideal along any of these dimensions. I suggest that this problem is unavoidable insofar as political regimes facilitate the pursuit of more than one central value. (shrink)