The traditional Lockean justification of property rights has been argued to be no longer valid in a world in which much wealth does not derive from acquisitions of natural resources, and in which much property, such as money, is intangible. This means that libertarians need to reconsider whether and why property rights are justified for objects that fall outside of the scope of the Lockean justification. This paper gives a justification of property rights in relation to modern (...) money, which uses the self-ownership principle as its central premise. Since modern money is a form of credit, I start with a justification of credit property rights. I then consider both money under gold convertibility and present-day fiat systems, showing that the justification of credit property rights remains valid under these conditions. (shrink)

In at least some cases of justified perceptual belief, our perceptual experience itself, as opposed to beliefs about it, evidences and thereby justifies our belief. While the phenomenon is common, it is also mysterious. There are good reasons to think that perceptions cannot justify beliefs directly, and there is a significant challenge in explaining how they do. After explaining just how direct perceptual justification is mysterious, I considerMichael Huemers (Skepticism and the Veil of Perception, 2001) and Bill Brewers (Perception (...) and Reason, 1999) recent, but radically different, attempts to eliminate it. I argue that both are unsuccessful, though a consideration of their mistakes deepens our appreciation of the mystery. (shrink)

According to an epistemically optimistic view of empathy – understood as the simulation of another person’s state – agents learn (1) in which state the target is and (2) what it is like for her to be in this state. Assuming the necessity of justification for knowledge, this view faces the challenge of how imagination can justify beliefs. Constraining simulation to match the target’s state seems to be a solution. Because of the abundance of plausible psychological reactions towards a (...) specific situation, however, we need to know how the target reacts in order to simulate the correct mental state. According to narrativists, we gain this knowledge by means of testimony, which makes simulation superfluous. For those who accept that (2) has epistemic value, the paper presents a solution to the problem of justification that assigns a central role to both testimony and imagination. (shrink)

Harming other people is prima facie wrong. Unless we can be very certain that doing so is justified under the circumstances, we ought not to do it. In this paper, I argue that we ought to dismantle harsh retributivist criminal justice systems for this reason; we cannot be sufficiently certain that the harm is justified. Gregg Caruso, Ben Vilhauer and others have previously argued for the same conclusion; however, my own version sidesteps certain controversial premises of theirs. Harsh retributivist criminal (...) justice can only be morally right if the following three propositions are true: Moral responsibility exists, retributivism is right, and we can find out how much punishment offenders deserve for their crimes. Suppose that we initially assign a high credence to each of the three propositions; I assume for the sake of argument that there are good arguments in support of each. Nevertheless, these arguments ultimately depend on intuitions. Since we have philosophical peers whose intuitions differ from ours, we ought to downgrade our credence in each. However, even slightly less credence in each proposition means far less credence in a conjunction of all three. Since the stakes are high and there are morally safer options for a criminal justice system, we ought to dismantle harsh retributivist ones. (shrink)

This paper examines the philosophical justification for World Rugby’s ban of trans women athletes from the ‘Women’s’ category at elite level. It is argued that Pike’s lexical priority argument in support of this ban is flawed; that Burke’s partially concessive response to Pike leads Burke to endorse an incoherent position; and that by rejecting Pike’s lexical priority argument, Burke’s view can both be made consistent and can be defended against the two criticisms levelled to it by Imbrišević. A stronger (...) justification for WR’s ban is identified and discussed, and a diagnosis for the debate’s intractability is proposed. (shrink)

Public justification in political liberalism is often conceptualized in light of Rawls’s view of its role in a hypothetical well-ordered society as an ideal or idealizing form of justification that applies a putatively reasonable conception of political justice to political matters. But Rawls implicates a different idea of public justification in his doctrine of general reflective equilibrium. The paper engages this second, more fundamental idea. Public justification in this second sense is actualist and fundamental. It is (...) actualist in that it fully enfranchises actual reasonable citizens. It is fundamental in that political liberalism qualifies conceptions of political justice as reasonable to begin with only if they can be accepted coherently by actual reasonable citizens. Together, these features invite the long-standing concern that actualist political liberalism is objectionably exclusionary. I argue that the exclusion objection, while plausible, is more problematic in own right than it seems if actualist and fundamental public justification hypotheticalizes and discursive respect is compatible with substantive discursive inequality. This leaves proponents and critics of political liberalism with deeper questions about the nature of permissible discursive inequality in public justification. (shrink)

This article aims to provide a minimal interpretation of the theme of aesthetic justification of life in Birth of Tragedy without relying on any substantial metaphysical claim about reality, presenting it rather as a practical and naturalistic response that is valuable and feasible regardless of one’s acceptance of Nietzsche’s metaphysical position, if he has any. According to this interpretation, the aesthetic justification of the Apolline and the Dionysiac metaphysical solace are originally instinctual remedies nature provides to address our (...) naturally aroused metaphysical need. The Apolline seeks to cultivate acceptance of suffering, liberating individuals from the burden of attempting to alter their human condition fundamentally. The Dionysiac treatment turns to metaphysical solace in the face of death, seeking to make the human encounter with death bearable by fostering a sense of unity with a higher whole or community and reconnecting individuals with nature and their animality. (shrink)

Can experience justify modal beliefs? A long tradition dating back to Descartes, Hume, and Kant, which denies that experience plays a justificatory role in modal justification, says ‘no’. Here, I answer ‘yes’. Specifically, I argue that perception justifies some of our modal beliefs, namely the perceptual ones. Using a naturalized reliabilist framework for perceptual justification, I argue that one of the assumptions perception makes about the world, which enables it to organize itself, is modal—namely, ‘objects presented within peripersonal (...) space are reachable and graspable’—such that relying on this modal assumption, perception outputs modal beliefs reliably, and so we can render perceptual modal justification as a function of the reliability of perception as a modal-belief-forming process. (shrink)

The Right to Justification : Elements of a Constructivist Theory of Justice.

Is knowledge definable as justified true belief? We argue that one can legitimately answer positively or negatively, depending on whether or not one’s true belief is justified by what we call adequate reasons. To facilitate our argument we introduce a simple propositional logic of reason-based belief, and give an axiomatic characterization of the notion of adequacy for reasons. We show that this logic is sufficiently flexible to accommodate various useful features, including quantification over reasons. We use our framework to contrast (...) two notions of JTB: one internalist, the other externalist. We argue that Gettier cases essentially challenge the internalist notion but not the externalist one. Our approach commits us to a form of infallibilism about knowledge, but it also leaves us with a puzzle, namely whether knowledge involves the possession of only adequate reasons, or leaves room for some inadequate reasons. We favor the latter position, which reflects a milder and more realistic version of infallibilism. (shrink)

The discovery-justification distinction stands as a pivotal issue within 20th-century philosophy of science. It subtly underpins many foundational topics and concepts pertinent to our comprehension of knowledge. Thomas Kuhn's contributions are indispensable in this regard, with his critiques playing a pivotal role in shaping both his initial model of scientific progress and its subsequent revisions. Kuhn addressed this dichotomy head-on in the first of his Thalheimer Lectures, presented in 1984. In this paper, we revisit Pablo Melogno's (2019) examination of (...) Kuhn's engagement with this theme. Concurring with Melogno, our analysis extends his interpretation by exploring Larry Laudan's objections to certain research programs focused on a logic of discovery. We further scrutinize specific assumptions about discovery heuristics that have been misinterpreted within Laudan's methodological framework, particularly the one stemming from Herbert Simon's pioneering work. By synthesizing these perspectives, we aim to set up a preliminary framework for a more refined understanding of how history and philosophy of science inform the epistemic practices of agents operating with bounded rationality. (shrink)

Whether the justification at stake is ethical or juridical, all attempts to argue for the welfare principle in Kant’s metaphysics of morals are unsuccessful. This principle cannot be justified a priori in Kant’s context. However, it is not only possible but also necessary to argue for a certain degree of social welfare in politics as the practice of right; otherwise, Kant’s project of political practice, with enlightenment as its core concept, will inevitably fail. Enlightenment requires that the state be (...) committed to reducing the impact of an unequal social structure on individuals so as to preserve the possibility of their enlightenment. However, it also imposes limits on state-sponsored social welfare because excessive social welfare could lead to a general minority. (shrink)

Los descubrimientos de las neurociencias permiten intervenir en el cerebro humano para mejorar su estado o sus capacidades sin indicación médica. Este fenómeno es conocido como “Neuroenhancement” y está sujeto a un amplio debate ético. Como “Neuroenhancement” es un fenómeno evolutivo, el debate de aspectos éticos está necesariamente orientado al futuro y depende de la información sobre el posible desarrollo de la tecnología y sus consecuencias para la sociedad. Sin embargo, hay que establecer límites para la formulación de previsiones especulativas (...) en argumentos éticos y justificaciones políticas. Propongo distinguir argumentos con tres propósitos distintos: la formación de intuiciones éticas, el reflejo sobre el futuro de la sociedad y justificación de normativas y políticas. Para cada uno de ellos necesitamos estándares adecuados. Es tarea de la filosofía política desarrollar un estándar para los argumentos justificadores.: Neuroscientific findings allow interventions in the human brain to improve its function or modify mental states even without medical indication. This procedure, termed as neuroenhancement, is subject to a broad ethical debate. As neuroenhancement is an evolving phenomenon, the debate is necessarily future-oriented and highly dependent on information about future developments. It remains an open question to what degree uncertain forecasting or even speculation should be considered in the ethical debate and policy-making. I propose to distinguish between arguments with three different purposes: intuition-forming, self-reflecting and justifying arguments. Adequate standards are required for all kinds of future-oriented arguments. The development of these standards for justifying arguments is a task for political philosophy. (shrink)

SummaryI offer reflections on the doctrine of justification by faith alone in the light of the many challenges of globalization. I briefly characterize globalization as the new context of contemporary theology in the first part, and go on in the second part to defend its relevance as a radical and total critique of life today in its nihilistic pursuit of creaturely arrogance, greed, and pleasure, and argue for the particular urgency of promoting the love and solidarity of Others beyond (...) the conventional boundaries of identity in a world increasingly suffering from unreconciled pluralism of all sorts, ethnic, religious, cultural, and economic. In the third, longest part I offer a new perspective on the soterioriological significance of „good works“ on the basis of a new relationship between creator and creature, a concrete anthropology of action as mediation between subjectivity and objectivity, and the irreducible involvement of the free and responsible subject in the very believing relationship to God. I try to reinstate „good works“ as the human way, as a free and responsible being, of „participating“ in God’s own redemptive work, not as „cooperating with“ divine grace or as „contributing to“ God’s redeeming work, or as „causing“ one’s own redemption. (shrink)

The apportionment of responsibility for health policy within multi‐level states should be sensitive to a number of conflicting normative pressures, some of which militate for placing decision‐making authority at the higher reaches of policy‐making structures, while others would seem to require placing them lower down this structure. The principle of subsidiarity is a structural principle that addresses in a manner that is neutral with respect to these values a way of addressing the conflicting claims of these values. Standard accounts of (...) federalism fare poorly with respect to the criterion of subsidiarity. While central governments are at first glance better equipped to apply such a principle to the issue of the distribution of authority, there are strong empirical grounds for thinking that centralized governments will non‐neutrally privilege central authorities in applying the principle. Federal structures that admit of overlapping jurisdictions, and that therefore require that deliberation among federal parties occur as a condition of the problem of the distribution of powers over health care being solved, are most amenable to solving problems of distribution of authority. (shrink)

The aim of this paper is to show the main thesis concerning the theory of cognition of the eminent neo-Kantian Heinrich Rickert, as presented in his work “Der Gegenstand der Erkenntnis”. On the one hand, Rickert finds out that thinking is fated to “clash with nothingness”, thus creating a temptation to reject all rigours and to yield to complete discretion. On the other hand, he attributes axiological status to nothingness which subjects thinking to a particular kind of “ought”. In his (...) view, the cognizing subject is faced with an axiological choice: either discretion or truth and argues that it is worth opting for truth. His argumentation could be an interesting point of reference for contemporary culture gradually moving away from the type of thinking rooted in objectively existing principles. (shrink)

Recently, convergence liberals, such as Kevin Vallier, argue that the principle of social insurance could be publicly justified. Our paper challenges this marriage of convergence liberalism and welfare state. We begin by examining Vallier’s three reasons for the principle of social insurance: risk aversion, injustice and the promotion of political trust. We then argue that all these reasons are intelligibly objectionable. After examining five possible responses that convergence liberals may offer, this paper concludes that the principle of social insurance is (...) not conclusively justified in the convergence conception of public justification. (shrink)

This paper is to critically examines Pollock’s critical-link semantics with variable degrees of justification. Some possibly counterintuitive consequences of Pollock’s definition of degrees of justification are identified and a modified definition is proposed which avoids these consequences. Then the new solution is applied to the case of so-called presumptive defeat. A second contribution of the paper is to show how the modified semantics can be applied to the ASPIC+ framework: first the ASPIC+ framework is modified to allow for (...) variable degrees of justification and then the modified way to compute these degrees is applied in a new notion of an argument graph. (shrink)

In A Priori Justification, Albert Casullo argues that extant attempts to explicate experiential justification—by stipulation, introspection, conceptual analysis, thought experimentation, and/or appeal to intuitions about hypothetical cases—are unsuccessful. He draws the following conclusion: “armchair methods” such as these are inadequate to the task. Instead, empirical methods should be used to investigate the distinction between experiential and non-experiential justification and to address questions concerning the nature, extent, and existence of the a priori. In this essay, I show that (...) Casullo has not refuted armchair explications of experiential justification, in particular those that appeal to introspectively accessible phenomenology. I do this by presenting a phenomenal theory of experiential justification that (a) has a significant degree of initial plausibility and (b) survives Casullo’s general attack on such theories. As a result, a premise in the central argument for Casullo’s signature proposal concerning the a priori is undermined. (shrink)

How should we proceed when searching for justified answers to normative questions? A prominent proposal is to use the method of reflective equilibrium (RE). Its basic Idea—that we should start from our existing judgments about relevant cases and bring them into equilibrium with systematic principles—is readily recited, but beyond that, conceptions of RE often stay sketchy. RE is seldom explicitly implemented, which makes it difficult to critically evaluate the method and to assess its potential. In my dissertation, I present the (...) first explicit and detailed case study for an application of RE, using it to develop and defend a precautionary principle. -/- The dissertation is divided in two parts, a theoretical and an applied part. In part I, I introduce and operationalize a specific conception of RE. I first describe the central elements of RE by drawing on the most elaborate and fleshed-out conceptions of RE that can be found in the literature. Then, I survey and analyze previous applications of RE in order to both learn from them and identify desiderata for my own case study. Based on a small-scale, exploratory case study, the method is further concretized and operationalized for the implementation in my main case study on the justification of a precautionary principle. -/- In part II, this operationalization is tested in a complex case study that aims at justifying a precautionary principle which is applicable to problems arising from global climate change. In order to be able to select relevant commitments about central problems concerning precautionary principles (PPs), I start with a literature survey. The survey gives an overview on existing proposals for PPs, on which grounds they are defended, and the main objections against them. On this basis, I develop and describe the initial setup for the case study, which is conducted in three main steps and allows to examine different aspects of a RE-application. Thereby, I show that RE can be applied successfully to real problems. I go on to discuss a number of points that are not given sufficient attention in the RE literature so far. With respect to precautionary principles, I show how the commonly discussed principles fail to do justice to ethical considerations, and argue that the application of such principles should instead be triggered by threats of rights violations. (shrink)