The goal of this paper is to explain the evolution of life through the evolution of cellular and supra-cellular closures, two distinct ways of strict delimitation against the surroundings. Such closures are a necessary precondition of organisation, semiosis, and agency. We argue that in addition to the basic, first-order, cellular closures, which have been in existence without interruption since the dawn of life, there also exist second-order closures (cell communities), which are dynamic and often formed ad hoc. Moreover, a (...) living entity may belong simultaneously to different kinds of such second-order closures. It is these second-order closures which organise cellular (and higher-order) communities and form the core of the bonds that hold the biosphere together. In second-order closures, there exist countless crisscrossing pathways leading to manifold interpretations of particular situations. We provide examples of such relationships and point to an elaborate network connecting all denizens of the biosphere. (shrink)

Markets allow for the processing of decentralized information through the price mechanism. But in addition, many markets rely on other mechanisms in markets, or non-market institutions, that provide and manage other forms of knowledge. Within national economies, these institutions form an ‘epistemic infrastructure’ for markets. In global markets, in contrast, this epistemic infrastructure is very patchy, undermining the preconditions for morally responsible agency. New technologies might help to improve the epistemic infrastructure of global markets, but they require conceptualizing (...) knowledge not only as a tradable good, but also as a precondition of morally responsible agency. (shrink)

The aim of this paper is to establish the logically necessary preconditions for the existence of self-awareness in an artificial or a natural agent. We examine the terms, agent, situated, embodied, embedded, and representation, as employed ubiquitously in cognitive science, attempting to clarify their meaning and the limits of their use. We discuss the minimal conditions for an agent’s environment constituting a ‘world’ and reject most, though not all, types of virtual world. We argue that to qualify as genuinely (...) situated an agent should function in real time within the dynamic world we inhabit, or some close simulacrum of it. We show that embodied agents will possess or evolve local co-ordinate systems, or points of view, locating, identifying and interacting with objects relative to their current position in space-time, and we discuss various types of embodiment, arguing that most current situated and embodied systems are too limited to be candidates for even the most minimal claim to self-identity. We argue that a truly autonomous agent has to be active in its participation with the world, able to synthesise and order its internal representations from its own point of view, and to do this effectively the agent will have to be embedded. To this end we propose a six point definition of embeddedness. Ultimately we argue for a philosophical-cum-cognitive science model of the self that satisfies essential elements of both sets of definitions of the term. (shrink)

One of the major contributions which Christopher Hookway has made to pragmatist epistemology is a critical exploration of the role that affective dispositions play in inquiry. According to Hookway, a well-functioning rational inquirer must rely upon a set of pre-reflective and affective dispositions which are not themselves fully available to rational evaluation. Despite their pre-reflective nature, on the pragmatist account these affective dispositions provide us with judgments and evaluations which are in many cases more reliable than those provided by explicit (...) rational reflection. -/- This chapter presents and defends Hookway’s account of the epistemic importance of our affective dispositions. The first section presents three roles which affective dispositions play within inquiry. The second section considers the concern that affective dispositions should be considered impositions upon our epistemic agency. In response, Hookway suggests that we must identify with our affective dispositions, and two interpretations of this claim are offered. The third section considers the possibility that the confidence we have in our affective dispositions might be appropriately shaken if we recognize that they are not shared by other inquirers. The chapter concludes by suggesting that Hookway’s position can overcome this worry by developing his notion of critical self-trust in three distinct ways. (shrink)

We present a Hilbert style axiomatization and an equational theory for reasoning about actions and capabilities. We introduce two novel features in the language of propositional dynamic logic, converse as backwards modality and abstract processes specified by preconditions and effects, written as \({\varphi \Rightarrow \psi}\) and first explored in our recent paper (Hartonas, Log J IGPL Oxf Univ Press, 2012), where a Gentzen-style sequent calculus was introduced. The system has two very natural interpretations, one based on the familiar relational (...) semantics and the other based on type semantics, where action terms are interpreted as types of actions (sets of binary relations). We show that the proof systems do not distinguish between the two kinds of semantics, by completeness arguments. Converse as backwards modality together with action types allow us to produce a new purely equational axiomatization of Dynamic Algebras, where iteration is axiomatized independently of box and where the fixpoint and Segerberg induction axioms are derivable. The system also includes capabilities operators and our results provide then a finitary Hilbert-style axiomatization and a decidable system for reasoning about agent capabilities, missing in the KARO framework. (shrink)

“Like much recent work on personal identity,” Carol Rovane writes in the opening sentence of The Bounds of Agency: An Essay in Revisionary Metaphysics, “this effort takes its main cue from Locke”. The work also—as its title suggests—takes inspiration from Strawsonian neo-Kantianism. And although direct allusion to his writings is limited to a few passing references, Rovane’s essay is largely Davidsonian in spirit. Indeed, it would not be an exaggeration to say that The Bounds of Agency answers a (...) question about personal identity by providing a transcendental analysis of the conditions for personhood whose analysans turns out to be a commitment to agency. In situating the work within such an intellectual context, I do not mean to cast aspersions on its originality; there is no question that Rovane offers a tremendously innovative and sophisticated account of personal identity. But it may be helpful for readers approaching the book on the basis of its title to realize at the outset that it is neither a work of analytic metaphysics, nor a work concerned with the internal structure of agency. Rather, The Bounds of Agency offers a sustained exploration of the preconditions and implications of taking seriously a particular conception of personhood that uniquely satisfies a cluster of methodological constraints that should be accepted by all parties in the debate concerning the nature of persons and the conditions that govern their identity over time. According to such a conception, what distinguishes persons from other sorts of beings is their capacity to engage in agency-regarding relations. What underpins that capacity is a commitment to rational agency, that is, a commitment to achieving overall rational unity. So, argues Rovane, what it is to be a person is to be committed to acting upon all-things-considered judgments in rationally optimal ways. And what it is for a person to persist over time is for certain sorts of rational relations to hold among certain sorts of intentional episodes, in ways that allow the commitments of the person at one time to govern the intentional actions of a person at another. (shrink)

The purpose of this article is to explore structural preconditions for occupational well-being among blue-collar temporary agency workers within the Swedish manufacturing industry based on managers’ views and expectations of the worker. Through 25 interviews, we investigate how blue-collar temporary agency workers are seen by management using critical realism and the concept of ‘norm circles’ to analyse spatial, relational, sociotechnical and normative structures. We show how structures and norm circles possess alienating or dealienating mechanisms that precondition blue-collar (...) temporary agency workers’ occupational well-being. The findings indicate management’s role as an important gatekeeper in determining structural preconditions for blue-collar temporary agency workers’ occupational well-being. By introducing aspects of skill and acquired skill, along with social aspects changing over time, this article contributes to the existing literature on blue-collar temporary agency workers’ occupational well-being. (shrink)

This article provides a conceptual clarification of the complementary relationship between teachers’ research literacy and their role-based agency. In many countries, teachers are increasingly expected to actively use and develop research. However, without taking account of teachers’ distinct conditions of agency, this expectation may weaken rather than strengthen the profession. Top-down mechanisms that push teachers to follow rigid evidence-based procedures diminish their professional autonomy. At the same time, conceptual research on teachers’ agency has developed new tools for (...) promoting research literacy in a way that is conducive to professional autonomy. By conceptualizing research literacy as shaped by polyphonic agency, the article clarifies this field to support future teachers in terms of teacher education and working life. The article also articulates strategies for enhancing agency, such as raising awareness of the relevant standards, responding to accountability mechanisms, and developing teacher education programs. (shrink)

I argue for constraining the nomological possibility space of temporal experiences and endorsing the Succession Requirement for agents. The Succession Requirement holds that the basic structure of temporal experience must be successive for agentive subjects, at least in worlds that are law-like in the same way as ours. I aim to establish the Succession Requirement by showing non-successively experiencing agents are not possible for three main reasons, namely that they (1) fail to stand in the right sort of causal relationship (...) to the outcomes of their actions, (2) exhibit the wrong sort of epistemic status for agency, and (3) lack the requisite agentive mental attitude of intentionality. I conclude that agency is incompatible with non-successive experience and therefore we should view the successive temporal structure of experience as a necessary condition for agency. I also suggest that the Succession Requirement may actually extend beyond my main focus on agency, offering preliminary considerations in favor of seeing successive experience as a precondition for selfhood as well. The consequences of the Succession Requirement are wide-ranging, and I discuss various implications for our understanding of agency, the self, time consciousness, and theology, among other things. (shrink)

Drawing on posthumanist theories from geography, anthropology, and science and technology studies , this article argues that agency is shared unevenly between humans and nonhumans. It proposes that conceptualizing animals as agents allows them to enter history as active beings rather than static objects. Agency has become a key concept within history, especially since the rise of the “new” social history. But many historians treat agency as a uniquely human attribute, arguing that animals lack the cognitive abilities, (...) self-awareness, and intentionality to be agents. This article argues that human levels of intentionality are not a precondition of agency. Furthermore, it draws on research into canine psychology to propose that dogs display some degree of intentionality and self-directed action. The aim is not to turn dogs, or any other animals, into human-style agents nor to suggest that they display the same levels of skill, intentionality, and intelligence as humans. Instead, the objective is to show how dogs are purposeful and capable agents in their own way and to explore how they interact with human agents. The article particularly considers the agency of militarized dogs, especially those on the Western Front , to suggest how historians can use primary sources to uncover how individuals in the past have treated dogs as capable creatures and to capture some sense of dogs’embodied and purposeful agency. (shrink)

In trying to decide between two choices, I might try to compare them in order to determine which alternative is better with respect to some appropriate choice value. But could it happen that the two choices fail to compare? Much of the debate about this question has centred on the issue of whether the items could be incomparable. If they are incomparable, then they fail to compare with respect to the relevant choice value. However, what has largely been neglected is (...) the possibility that the choices fail to compare by instead being noncomparable. If they are noncomparable, then they are not covered by any appropriate choice value, such that the formal preconditions for a comparison does not obtain. This paper argues that the concept of noncomparability may be at least as important as that of incomparability for explaining why choices fail to compare, if they do. (shrink)

The central claim of this article is that narrative agency, which I will define as a subject’s capacity to make sense of herself as an ‘I’ over time and in relation to other ‘I’s, is a precondition for identity formation. I engage with two critiques of this claim: first, that narrative agency is limited by, rather than primary to, subordinating gender norms and, second, that a view of narrative agency as primary is committed to too ambitious a (...) conception of the communicability of narratives. I argue that the narrative model survives these two criticisms by emphasising its irreducibility, its inherent relationality and its generative potential. I then suggest some of the ways in which a concept of narrative agency might help feminist critical theory to posit mutual recognition and respect as productive criteria for progressive self and social transformation. (shrink)

This chapter explores how Guo Xiang’s views emerge from his approach to the metaphysics of dao 道 (way) and the place of human activity and agency in dao. Once we understand his views on these points, we can see that he holds a distinctive conception of the self and agency—and, accordingly, normatively appropriate action—on which self-fulfillment and easy, aimless freedom are consistent with his doctrine of non-mindedness, which in fact presents a precondition for attaining them. As I will (...) show, GUO Xiang uses key terms such as zi 自 (self), xin (heart-mind), zhi 知 (know), and xing (inherent character) in distinctive, specialized ways that diverge both from common uses of these words in Chinese and from familiar categories in contemporary philosophical psychology yet are coherent, intelligible, and defensible. The normative conception of agency and the well-lived life that emerges from his Zhuangzi commentary can at first sight seem puzzling and counterintuitive. But I will contend that it is plausible and presents a fascinating, profound, and potentially correct view of the nature of human agency and the sources of normativity. (shrink)

Agency and representation are viewed as preconditions for democratic action. The dominant understanding of agency and representation is defined in terms of certain capacities and abilities that are considered to constitute the basis of personhood. The article will put into question this understanding and the assumptions that underpin it and argue that it rests on a mistaken conception of human animality – one that reduces the self to an autonomous and disembodied rational mind. The article will also (...) suggest that it is problematic because it marginalizes more than human forms of life – as well as those of us who are differently human – and excludes their points of view from the political processes of world making. In contrast, I will put forward an understanding of agency and representation that is attuned to the relational dimensions of all life on earth. By paying attention to the semiotic propensities that all forms of life share – which entails considering nonlinguistic forms of communication – this article responds to the need for more radically democratic ways of listening, giving voice, and caring for the earth’s beings and the relations that form the conditions for life to flourish. (shrink)

Abstract: In this article I consider Bernard Williams's argument against the possibility of external reasons for action and his claim that the only reasons for action are therefore internal. Williams's argument appeals to David Hume's claim that reason is the slave of the passions, and to the idea that reasons are capable of motivating the agent who has them. I consider two responses to Williams's argument, by John McDowell and by Stephen Finlay. McDowell claims that even if Hume is right, (...) there might nevertheless be external reasons. Finlay also claims that external reasons exist but, rejecting the connection between reasons and motivation, claims that they don't matter—that is, aren't motivationally significant for the agent whose reasons they are. Although I reject aspects of McDowell's and Finlay's arguments, I argue that external reasons do exist and in particular that any agent has an external reason to satisfy the preconditions of his or her agency. (shrink)

Taking the perspective of knowledge representation, we introduce a simple logic of agency where the agents’ actions are described by their precondition and effects and whose semantics is based on the concept of attempt. We give its syntax, semantics, and axiomatics and discuss the relation with other proposals, in particular Belnap and Horty’s ‘branching time and agent choice’ semantics (BT+AC) and Czelakowski’s relational semantics.

The conceptualization of human agency is one of the oldest and most debated challenges in political theory. This essay defends the continuous relevance of this endeavour against a proliferating theoretical pessimism. Instead of engaging the much rehearsed structure-agency debate, the author conceptualizes agency in relation to discourses. However, such an approach inevitably elicits suspicion. Is discourse not merely a faddish term, destined to wax and wane with fleeting intellectual trends of the postmodern and poststructural kind? Does the (...) concept of discourse, as many fear, suck us into a nihilistic vortex and deprive us of the stable foundations that are necessary to ground our thoughts and actions? Not so, argues this essay, and defends an anti-essentialist stance as the most viable chance for retaining an adequate understanding of how people situate themselves as agents and influence their socio-political environment. The ensuing analysis, which focuses on everyday forms of resistance, demonstrates how the very acceptance of ambiguity, often misrepresented as relativism, is a crucial precondition not only for the conceptualization of human agency, but also for its actual application in practice. (shrink)

Becoming autonomous is a process of coming to realise oneself in shared, socio-historical practices. There can be no self before these practices, but their existence is no guarantee for selfhood either: one can be heteronomous through one's successful participation in various practices if that participation is not a genuine expression of one's own personhood. This means that the sheer capability to participate in the practices in which one finds oneself is not sufficient for personal autonomy. Something else is required before (...) the self is realised in shared, socio-historical practices. How can this be, if as we said, there can be no self before these practices? By what principle do we decide whether a particular expression of selfhood in a socio-historical practice is genuine? If there can only be a self within socio-historical practices, it stands to reason that we can find it only there. If, however, one's participation cannot be considered in advance as a genuine expression of oneself, what we may expect to find is perhaps only a fragment, a hint of autonomy always already entangled in heteronomous elements, or things that would be different if one could have so chosen. To come to an understanding of oneself, then, will require more than just a handle on one's existence in various practices. It will require the capacity to see one's participation in this socio-historically determined practice as a fragment of a whole, a particular instance of something more general which points beyond our present participation in these particular, socio-historically determined practices towards a horizon of possibility that recedes beyond our grasp whenever we try to make definitive sense out of a possibility for agency. (shrink)

In this article, I propose one way of understanding the expression “feminist epistemology.” I begin from the premise that improper philosophical attention has been paid to the implications of what I call The Fact of Preconditions for Agency: that moral and rational agents become such only through a long, deliberate, and intensive process of intervention and teaching, a process that requires commitments of time, effort and emotion on the part of other agents. I contend that this is a (...) sufficiently important aspect of what it is to be a person that accounting for its philosophical implications may have repercussions not only for moral and political theory, but for epistemology as well. I contend further that, given the current configuration of social possibilities, a theory that acknowledges this Fact might appropriately be deemed “feminist.” My argument is presented in four segments. In Section II, I show how such a theory could be feminist by providing a discussion of categories of social identity; in Section III, I show how such a theory could be epistemology by describing a strategy of argument from parity. In Section IV, I apply this strategy to a case from political philosophy to show why its counter‐intuitive implications do not provide good grounds for rejecting the suggested redistricting. And in Section V, I apply the same strategy to a case from epistemology to bring out how it might lead to a theory that might legitimately claim to be feminist epistemology. (shrink)

SOCREAL 2013 : 3rd International Workshop on Philosophy and Ethics of Social Reality 2013. Hokkaido University, Sapporo, Japan, 25-27 October 2013. Session 4 : Agency, Responsibility, and Intentionality.

In ethical systems that focus on apportioning praise and blame, a key consider- ation is often whether or not the individual is a free agent since individuals are only held to be responsible for what they freely choose. As various critiques indicate, if it were to be the case that freedom is in some way illusory or radically restricted, these systems would have a significant problem since reactive attitudes would involve holding individuals responsible for actions that they did not freely (...) choose. I will argue that the problem may run even deeper: even if there is such a thing as free agency, it is a mistake to think that autonomous individ- uals uniquely instantiate this agency. I will draw on arguments from Pratyabhijñā Śaivism, which state that although there is ultimately no such thing as a praise or blameworthy indi- vidual agent, free agency is the precondition for manifestation itself. Worlds, not individuals, are the proper unit of analysis for ethical theories. This position picks up on many of the critiques of the kind of substantial self that stands apart from the world that were offered by various Buddhist traditions in the Classical Sanskritic context. At the same time, it does not fall prey to these objections precisely because the self that Pratyabhijñā theorists argue for is neither an unchanging substance nor a minimally thin kind of self-awareness that could be accommodated by no-self theorists. Pratyabhijñā theorists’ particular way of understand- ing agency, then, presents a productive exchange between some of the most ethically salient ramifications of Buddhist no-self theories and insights into why, nevertheless, freedom and agency are inextricably bound up in our worlds. (shrink)

This is a review essay of Quassim Cassam, Self-Knowledge for Humans (Oxford, 2014) and John Doris, Talking to Our Selves (Oxford, 2015). In it I question whether Cassam succeeds in his challenge to Richard Moran's account of first-personal authority, and whether Doris is right that experimental evidence for unconscious influences on behavior generates skeptical worries on accounts that regard accurate self-knowledge as a precondition of agency.

Abstract The principal aim of this paper is to give a positive analysis of self-deception. I argue that self-deception is a species ?self-emplotment?. Through narrative self-emplotment one groups the events of one's life thematically in order to understand and monitor oneself. I argue that self-emplotment is an unextraordinary feature of mental life that is a precondition of agency. Self-emplotment, however, proceeds according to certain norms, some of which provide apparent justification for self-deceptive activity. A secondary aim of the paper (...) is to sketch the common characteristics between self-deception and self-knowledge. The framework of self-emplotment from which self-deception can emerge is also the framework that delivers self-knowledge; to the extent that the activity of self-emplotment is partially constitutive of what it means to possess self-knowledge, the self-deceiver may be closer to a state of self-knowledge than the person who fails to engage in significant introspective narrative. (shrink)

The crux of the dispute on the mutual relations between attention and consciousness, and to which I have referred in this paper, lies in the question of what can be attended in spatial attention that obviously resonates with the phenomenological issue of intentionality. The discussion has been initiated by Christopher Mole. He began by calling for a commonsense psychology, according to which one is conscious of everything that one pays attention to, but one does not pay attention to all the (...) things that one is conscious of. In other words, attention is supposed to be a condition which is sufficient but not necessary for consciousness, i.e., consciousness is a necessary concomitant of attention, but attention is not a necessary concomitant of consciousness. Mole seeks to validate his stance with data from psychology labs. His view is, however, partly confronted, for instance, by Robert Kentridge, Lee de-Wit and Charles Heywood, who used their experimental research on a neurological condition called blindsight as evidence of a dissociation between attention and consciousness, i.e., that visual attention is not a sufficient precondition for visual awareness. In this meta-theoretical state of affairs, I would like to focus on the cognitive phenomenon most often referred to as Inhibition of Return and suggest that, following its micro dynamics from the perspective of micro-phenomenology, it can be used to actually showcase all of the options on both sides of the argument. One of my leading goals would be also to follow Mole’s attempt to link attention with agency but where we differ is that I wish to heuristically articulate the matter in terms of Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenological notion of embodied pre-reflective intentionality. (shrink)

In this chapter, we focus on the simple sounding question: What is it to have sex? On the assumption that having sex is what you do with all and only your sexual part-ners, this offers a way of focusing the question: What would it take for a sex robot to be a sex partner? In order to understand the significance of the development of robots with whom (or which) we can have sex, we need to know what it is to (...) have sex with a robot. And in order to know this, we have to know what it is to have sex, period. In the bulk of the chapter, we develop an account of shared sexual agency we think is a plausible precondition of genuinely having sex. In the final section, we remark briefly on the issue of what it would take to form a sexual we (as we call it) with a robot. For if we can do this, we can probably have sex with robots; but if we can’t, we can’t. (shrink)

This paper is written from a perspective that is sympathetic to the basic idea of the capability approach. Our aim is to compare Martha Nussbaum’s capability theory of justice with Alan Gewirth’s moral theory, on two points: the selection and the justification of a list of central capabilities. On both counts, we contend that Nussbaum’s theory suffers from flaws that Gewirth’s theory may help to remedy. First, we argue that her notion of a (dignified) human life cannot fulfill the role (...) of a normative criterion that Nussbaum wants it to play in selecting capabilities for her list. Second, we question whether Nussbaum’s method of justification is adequate, discussing both her earlier self-validating argumentative strategy and her more recent adherence to the device of an overlapping consensus. We conclude that both strategies fail to provide the capabilities theory with the firm foundation it requires. Next, we turn to Gewirth’s normative theory and discuss how it can repair these flaws. We show how his theory starts from a fundamental moral principle according to which all agents have rights to the protection of the necessary preconditions of their agency. Gewirth’s justification of this principle is then presented, using a version of a transcendental argument. Finally, we explicitly compare Nussbaum and Gewirth and briefly demonstrate what it would mean for Nussbaum to incorporate Gewirthian elements into her capabilities theory of justice. (shrink)

Nietzsche’s late writings present a value opposition of health and decadence based in his conception of organic life. While this appears to be a moral ideal that risks the naturalistic fallacy of directly deriving norms from facts, it instead describes a meta-ethical ideal: the necessary conditions for any kind of moral agency. Nietzsche’s ideal of health not only evades but also dissolves the naturalistic fallacy by suggesting that the specific content of morality is irrelevant. If health is measured by (...) power over one’s drives rather than the environment, then the source of moral conflict—organic life’s essential tendency toward domination—is surmounted by successful integration of any moral norms, regardless of content. Nietzsche’s concept of health draws on his characterization of organic life as essentially ‘exploitation’: growth through domination of the environment (BGE 259, GM II: 12). In animals, power coincides with happiness, while health and decadence track the correspondence between instinct and happiness (TI II: 11). This simple picture is complicated by the Genealogy, where Nietzsche depicts human nature as an animal illness caused by civilization’s disruption of the natural correspondence of instinct and happiness. Civilization shapes this ‘sick animal’ into the distinctly human ‘sovereign individual’ (GM III: 13, II: 2), restoring the harmony of instinct and happiness in an internal hierarchy of drives. So, sovereign individuality is a distinctly human model of health. Although life is exploitation, human health does not coincide with greater environmental power, but rather an internal qualitative expansion of power: greater variety and tension among drives, greater ‘wholeness in diversity’ in the ‘social structure’ of the self (BGE 212, 12). Nonetheless, health is not a moral criterion, but instead the precondition of moral agency. The subordination of drives to a commanding hierarchy grounds the ability to uphold any moral principles at all, to make and keep promises to oneself and others. Moral agency coincides, in turn, with overcoming the source of moral conflict in organic life’s drive for growth. The unification of opposing drives provides pleasure in power over oneself rather than one’s environment, the ‘happiness of high tension’ among drives (BGE 260), and in environmental resistance, a need for ‘equal opponents’ (TI IX: 38, EH 1: 7). Consequently, Nietzsche’s meta-ethical ideal supports a moral pluralism that supports any moral content. Moral conflicts arise precisely to the degree individuals are incapable of achieving moral agency, but they dissolve as moral agency of any kind is more widely achieved. (shrink)

Rowlands offers a de-intellectualised account of personhood that is meant to secure the unity of a mental life. I argue that his characterisation also singles out a morally relevant feature of individuals. Along the same lines that the orthodox understanding of personhood reflects a fundamental precondition for moral agency, Rowlands’s notion provides a fundamental precondition for moral patienthood.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Hegel’s Practical Philosophy: Rational Agency as Ethical LifeLiz DisleyRobert B. Pippin. Hegel’s Practical Philosophy: Rational Agency as Ethical Life. Cambridge-New York: Cambridge University Press, 2008. Pp. xi + 308. Paper, $29.99In this work, Pippin offers an interpretation of freedom, rationality, and agency in Hegel’s work and adds substantive content to the key concept of recognition. In doing so, he offers not only a compelling elucidation (...) of a particularly opaque part of Hegel’s analysis of human action and interaction, but also demonstrates the relevance of his practical philosophy to contemporary discussions about free will, intersubjectivity, autonomy, recognition, and liberalism. Pippin provides a substantial defense of Hegel’s position in the context of contemporary political philosophy, arguing against a commonly-held view that Hegelian political philosophy must be much closer to modern communitarian theories than those of classical or modern liberalism. Pippin’s work is central to the recent resurgence of interest in Hegel’s theoretical philosophy by analytical philosophers such as Robert Brandom and John McDowell, as well as the renewed study of recognition in a practical context.Controversially, Pippin claims that Hegel has only one theory of intersubjectivity and recognition from the time of the Jena writings to the Philosophy of Right. The theory develops from an initial stage, where “the desideratum of mutual recognition is posed and explored,” to a realization that ethical life as described in the Philosophy of Right provides the necessary conditions for rational, mutual recognition (184n4). Thus, he rejects the common view in recent Continental Hegel scholarship, asserted by critics including Jürgen Habermas, Michael Theunissen, and Axel Honneth, that Hegel fails to develop adequately the theory of intersubjectivity initially present in his earlier writings and subsumes intersubjectivity into a “grand metaphysical process” of the Absolute Subject’s self-manifestation (184).Pippin defends Hegel from this common charge on the basis of his “very unusual” concept of freedom (185). The key claim here is that Hegel does not set recognition or indeed other-relation as a precondition for any kind of self-relation, but rather, “A true individual [End Page 112] is a free subject and recognition relations function in a complex way as conditions for that possibility” (186). This seems like a promising method of demonstrating that Hegel’s intersubjectivity does not, after all, dissolve in the face of a monological divine conception of reality. The difficulty with the approach, as Pippin concedes, is that it involves making a series of radical, strange, and controversial claims. These claims, in general, focus on the temporal priority of freedom, recognition, and rationality: deeds can count as “mine” in Pippin’s special sense only if they are undertaken rationally, but this state of rationality depends on being in a social state of recognizing and being recognized (190). However, it is neither radical nor strange to make a clear distinction between human interdependence in terms of our particular social psychology and in terms of “an ideal of normative mutuality inherent in any attempt to act” (211).Pippin appreciates that defenders of Hegel’s concept of recognition do not want to say that I cannot be a free subject by myself, but at the same time want to leave the door open for there to be some kind of possibility of ascertaining moral harm in cases of failure to recognize. For Pippin, free actions, and actions committed out of free will, are those committed by agents in a particular social context, namely being situated within norm-governed relations of reciprocal recognition to others. Such an approach fulfills neither of these criteria, since it means I cannot be free by myself but also that, in the case of my being placed in a situation where I am not within these relations of reciprocal recognition to others, there is no obvious originator of moral harm caused by this recognition (218). Pippin accepts that there is no clear answer to this difficulty, but his account of the genesis of norms and social rationality does save Hegel’s account from the objection by Theunissen, Habermas, Honneth et al. mentioned above. Like Rolf-Peter Horstmann, Pippin sees the answer to charges of introducing a... (shrink)

In complex settings, organizations overlap with other collective entities in time and space even as they struggle for visibility or invisibility as relevant entities. Moreover, they do not act as legal persons or complete organizational actors all the time. Such settings give rise to a question that bears on the fundamental question of adequately identifying and assessing causal forces in social processes, namely: Who or what is responsible here? Where personal experiences, organizational and network dynamics, and large-scale societal forces seem (...) to work together efficiently and without friction, the task of analyzing an organization as a singular collective instance with causal power driving a series of events is met with formidable challenges. I propose a practice-based framework on organizational agency to address such analytical issues and distinguish between three forms, namely organizational interventions, stable organizations, and competent organizational actors. Each of these three types differs in how to assess organizational agency and its constitution. To conclude, I call for a distinct sociological stance for answering questions of collective causation and responsibility in debates over legal liability in digitalized spheres and corporate or political responsibilities for large-scale social challenges, like sustainable transitions. This stance differs from Weberian roots, in that it neither preconditions formal procedures nor a collective actor. A case study of a scientific project network discovering catalytic mechanisms in producing hydrogen to drive a sustainable energy transition illustrates the analytical value of this framework. (shrink)

This essay explores the implications of what we call attachments to innocence for critical scholarship and progressive politics. After tracing the appearance of innocence in various strands of contemporary thought, we turn to how it shields individuals and groups from examining the depth of our own participation in oppression and harm. This evasion of responsibility works in our perspective as a hindrance to understanding power and engaging with others ethically. The essay more concretely examines how the reductionist and authoritarian dimensions (...) of innocence dovetail with the neoliberal uptake of ‘progressive’ politics in university and activist settings. We are interested in how academics and activists of different kinds are rewarded for cultivating their innocent-selves through discursive and material interventions that leave power relations untouched. It is not merely monetary or status rewards that perpetuate this, but the crisis produced by our implication in the very violence we reject. Working with and through the mobility of agency, power, abuse, and justice, we explore what is at stake in shedding our attachments to innocence in the hope of a different sort of encounter – one that proceeds from the recognition that innocence is not a precondition for our engagement in political life. (shrink)

Principle of equality of arms is part of fair trial concept, which encompasses several guarantees linked to the defence opportunities during the criminal procedure. The accused person is entitled to a fair trial. Balance of rights between the parties is bedrock for procedural fairness and the judge has to perform his competence in providing all necessary preconditions as for the trial to be fair. There are differences between interpretation and implementation of equality of arms in the jurisprudence of European (...) court on human rights and international criminal courts. Decisions of ECtHR are much more similar with domestic understanding of equality of arms as reasonable opportunity of the defence to present the case without disadvantages vis-à-vis the prosecutor, due to inherent inequity between the parties. When analyzing proceeding before the ad hoc Tribunals, there is “more liberal interpretation” of this principle, which allowed the Prosecutor to invoke equality of arms, as well. ICTY Trial Chamber in Aleksovski case concluded that application of the concept of a fair trial in favor of both parties is understandable because the Prosecution acts on behalf of and in the interests of the international community, including the interests of the victims of the offence charged and also has held that it is difficult to see how a trial could ever be considered to be fair where the accused is favored at the expense of the Prosecution. This interpretation has been justified with dependence of the international Tribunals on state cooperation and due to the fact that international criminal courts have no autonomous enforcement agencies at their disposal. Fortunately, ICC Statute considered equality of arms as solely afforded to the defence, or to the Prosecutor on the behalf of accused. (shrink)

The concept of consensus is often appealed to in discussions of biomedical ethics and applied ethics, and it plays an important role in many influential ethical theories. Consensus is an especially influential notion among theorists who reject ethical realism and who frame ethics as a practice of discourse rather than a body of objective knowledge. It is also a practically important notion when moral decision making is subject to bureaucratic organization and oversight, as is increasingly becoming the case in medicine. (...) Two models of consensus are examined and criticized: pluralistic consensus and overlapping consensus. As an alternative to these models, the paper argues that consensus refers to the dialogic aspects of a broader normative conception of democratic moral agency. When the preconditions for that dialogic democratic practice are met, consensus has a justificatory role in ethics; when they are not, consensus, as distinct from mere agreement, does not emerge and can have no moral authority. Keywords: applied ethics, bioethics, consensus, contract theory, democracy, discourse ethics, liberalism CiteULike Connotea Del.icio.us What's this? (shrink)

We examine the perceived importance of three organizational preconditions theorized to be critical for ethics program effectiveness. In addition, we examine the importance of ethical leadership and congruence between formal ethics codes and informal ethical norms in influencing employee perceptions. Participants from a large southern California government agency completed a survey on the perceived effectiveness of the organization’s ethics program. Results suggest that employee perceptions of organizational preconditions, ethical leadership and informal ethical norms were related to perceptions (...) of ethics program effectiveness. Based on these findings, organizations should evaluate the presence of essential preconditions and take steps to ensure that leaders model espoused organizational values to foster perceptions of effective ethics programs. (shrink)

Ethical beliefs may vary across cultures but there are things that must be valued as preconditions to any cultural practice. Physical and mental abilities vital to believing, valuing and practising a culture are such preconditions and it is always important to protect them. If one is to practise a distinct culture, she must at least have these basic abilities. Access to basic healthcare is one way to ensure that vital abilities are protected. John Rawls argued that access to (...) all-purpose primary goods must be ensured. Amartya Sen and Martha Nussbaum claim that universal capabilities are what resources are meant to enable. Len Doyal and Ian Gough identify physical health and autonomy as basic needs of every person in every culture. When we disagree on what to prioritize, when resources to satisfy competing demands are scarce, our common needs can provide a point of normative convergence. Need-based rationing, however, has been criticized for being too indeterminate to give guidance for deciding which healthcare services to prioritize and for tending to create a bottomless-pit problem. But there is a difference between needing something (first-order need) and needing to have the ability to need (second-order need). Even if we disagree about which first-order need to prioritize, we must accept the importance of satisfying our second-order need to have the ability to value things. We all have a second-order need for basic healthcare as a means to protect our vital abilities even if we differ in what our cultures consider to be particular first-order needs. (shrink)

Funding is an important mechanism for exercising influence over ever more parts of academic systems. In order to do so, funding agencies attempt to export their functional and normative prerequisites for financing to new fields. One essential requirement for fundees is then to construct research processes in the form of a project beforehand, one that is limited in time, scope and content. This article demonstrates how the public funding of doctoral programs expands this model of project research from experienced academics (...) to the socialization process for the new academic generation. This process of “projectification” underlies funding-driven institutional changes in doctoral training. A multi-level comparative study of German policies, funding mechanisms and organizational frameworks for doctoral training demonstrates the emergence of a specific model of predefined PhD projects. The investigation of doctoral training practices reveals that socio-epistemic preconditions regulate whether research fields adopted or rejected this demanding model. This result contradicts widespread claims about a radical change in doctoral training and suggests focusing on the actual practices of field-specific doctoral research. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Richard Price, the Debate on Free Will, and Natural RightsGregory I. MolivasWhen Richard Price projected metaphysical assumptions onto his ethical theory, he elaborated a conception of man as a normatively self-regulating being. Endowed with rationality, man is a “law unto himself.” Price’s political writings postulated accordingly that man should be his own legislator. The first proposition appeared in his ethics in the context of man’s identification with his higher (...) faculties, and the second in the context of man considered as a member of civil society. Crucial to the transition from the first context to the second was Price’s notion of man’s inward constitution as permeating his conception of practical virtue, a view he expanded in his discussion on free will. This conception was built on a sharp contrast between reason and passion, which he described in terms of a relationship like that of sovereign to subject. The contrast is between those faculties which are destined to command, and those who ought to obey. This analogy facilitated comparison with normative relationships obtaining in civil society, where Price identified subservience to passion with obedience to an external-to-the-“self “ power, which in a political context manifested as the wishes of other people.These successive steps from ethical supposition to political claims, formed a body of assumptions underlying beliefs that were shared by many of his contemporaries. They did not constitute a unified system of principles, and it is vain to seek theoretical consistency in all those who seemed to have espoused ideas similar to those of Price. His assumptions do, however, help to explain why some of his contemporaries found his ideas familiar or self-evident, while to others they were incomprehensible. Nor is it a coincidence that Price’s most able critics happened to be psychological determinists (Richard Hey, John Lind, Edmund Burke), who attacked his conception of political liberty after undermining, or disputing, Price’s conception of man. [End Page 105]I. In the writings of all those who inveighed against the rights of man, the words “natural rights” and “metaphysics” are often found together. Thomas Paine was accused of having “crudely stolen” his “crazy metaphysics” from others, 1 and studies of Edmund Burke have continuously pointed to his dislike of the “professor of metaphysics.” Burke’s aversion to abstract speculation and metaphysics has often been interpreted as the natural reaction of an English politician confronting the generalities of continental writers. Frederick Dreyer, however, argues that when Burke wrote his Reflections, he had in mind Price’s philosophical arguments rather than the events of the French Revolution. 2 According to him, the anonymous “metaphysician” whom Burke so often and so vehemently denounced was, in fact, Richard Price.In substantiating his position Dreyer quotes, among other things, a revealing passage from Burke: “There are people who have split and anatomized the doctrine of free government, as if it were an abstract question concerning metaphysical liberty and necessity, and not a matter of moral prudence and natural feeling.” 3 Although Dreyer does not pursue the full implications of the evidence he presents, this is a remarkable statement, because it indicates what Price had undertaken in his political writings. In his philosophical works Price had defended the idea of metaphysical or philosophical liberty as a precondition of moral agency. In the first and most important theoretical section of his influential Observations on the Nature of Civil Liberty, 4 which set out to analyze the nature of liberty, Price summarized his earlier philosophical views. As William King noted in this section of his political pamphlet Price was “totally out in his philosophy.” 5Price defined liberty as the power of self-government and approached it through its four general divisions: physical liberty, moral, religious, and civil liberty. Commentators on Price have often acknowledged that his conception of liberty, as expounded in his political pamphlet, is indebted to his earlier philosophical work and notably his Review of the Principal Questions in Morals; 6 but they have not followed up with a clear exposition of how the divisions of liberty Price put forward in his Observations are related. [End Page 106]Although J. C. D. Clark claims that... (shrink)

The electrification of East Africa followed an exceptionally uneven path. After about 50 years of relative neglect under colonial rule, the construction of hydroelectric dams moved electricity generation into the focus of late colonial development policy and became the major field of intervention for foreign donors after independence. The metrics of electricity attained a role as indicator and driver for economic growth, and therefore as a target figure in economic policy, one that was arguably not justified by their actual significance (...) in the energy landscape of East Africa. This paper analyses both the global preconditions of this shift and its local repercussions. Rather than the physical visibility of electricity in the form of large dams and high-tension lines, the paper focuses on the processes that rendered electricity ontologically visible. It traces attempts by engineers, expert advisors, or development consultants to translate the complex information associated with the generation and consumption of electricity into calculable and comparable metrics. The paper scrutinises these commensuration processes in terms of the resources and knowledge they required, the frameworks of agency they opened, and the way they fed into wider discourses of development. It asks how the metrics of electricity themselves became part of the colonial and postcolonial politics of calculation, as they increasingly came to be seen as a medium for conceiving national economies. This trend was reinforced by the ascent of development economics in the 1950s and its influence on the ontological foundations of international development cooperation and post-independence nation-building. Because of the calculability and capital-intensity of its production, electricity lent itself perfectly to an economic policy based on macroeconomic aggregates and abstract growth models. Conversely, the electricity bias of international development agencies and the national government rendered rural, non-commercial, and non-productive energy use largely invisible. (shrink)

Kierkegaard's writings contain seemingly divergent pictures of the relation of God's grace and human works. The differences are evident in the ways that he portrays the connection of human beings’ natural loving capacities to God's gracious enabling of love. What is the relation of human affiliative dispositions, such as attachment to family and friends, to the more extraordinary forms of Christian love, such as loving strangers, enemies, and God? Kierkegaard sometimes stressed the continuity of natural loves and God's grace and (...) sometimes their discontinuity because in different contexts he was pursuing different edifying purposes. On the one hand, he emphasized the continuity of the two when he was attempting to stimulate the appropriate yearning that is a precondition for welcoming God's grace. On the other hand, elsewhere he stressed the difference of the natural loves and Christian love in order to foster an appreciation for the uniqueness and gratuity of God's self-giving. (shrink)

Character and culture describe man both as an active and a passive agent in life. It is by being fashioned by culture that man cultivates character and by the use of this character so acquired that he develops and upgrades his culture; for culture is dynamic, that is elastic; as such there is need for eternal vigilance on the part of man to see his culture evolve and become better at every point in time. This can come about either spontaneously (...) or through an agency; it is the duty of an agency to act upon what is given, required to produce a good result, in our instance to act on Igbo-African family values. This entails a dialogue of man and his milieu, for character grows form a healthy and salutary agent, so knowledge of, belief in and application of values is indeed a precondition. (shrink)

Anthropocentrism, in its original connotation in environmental ethics, is the belief that value is human-centred and that all other beings are means to human ends. Environmentally -concerned authors have argued that anthropocentrism is ethically wrong and at the root of ecological crises. Some environmental ethicists argue, however, that critics of anthropocentrism are misguided or even misanthropic. They contend: first that criticism of anthropocentrism can be counterproductive and misleading by failing to distinguish between legitimate and illegitimate human interests. Second, that humans (...) differ greatly in their environmental impacts, and consequently, addressing human inequalities should be a precondition for environmental protection. Third, since ecosystems constitute the “life-support system” for humans, anthropocentrism can and should be a powerful motivation for environmental protection. Fourth, human self-love is not only natural but helpful as a starting point for loving others, including nonhumans. Herein we analyze such arguments, agreeing with parts of them while advancing four counter-arguments. First, redefining the term anthropocentrism seems to be an attempt to ignore behavior in which humans focus on themselves at the risk of the planet. Second, if addressing human inequalities is a precondition for environmental protection, biodiversity protection will remain out of the scope of ethical consideration for an indefinite period of time. Third, anthropocentric motivations can only make a positive contribution to the environment in situations where humans are conscious of a direct benefit to themselves. Fourth, ‘self-love’ alone is an inadequate basis for environmental concern and action. We also explore the question of agency, shared responsibility, and a fair attribution of blame for our environmental predicaments. (shrink)

The use of the nomer ‘corporate’ is hardly an issue in contemporary scholarship on corporate governance. I will argue that this nomer is important for two main reasons. First, the corporate form distinguishes itself from any other form of business representation. In this sense, it is important to know exactly how this form is different to understand how conceptions of ‘corporate governance’ relate to different forms of representation. Second, it is my contention that the use of a particular understanding of (...) incorporation directly informs the concept of internal governance in terms of constituency, structure, ownership and the locus of corporate agency. It is in this sense that I argue that the identification of corporate constituencies and the allocation of agency and ownership is a precondition of business ethics. With this aim in mind, I explore the governance in corporations as the result of the legal understanding of incorporation and the separate legal entity. I explore two historical positions from which five legal positions on the separate legal entity can be derived. These five positions provide reference points for the attribution of ownership and agency between the separate legal entity and the aggregation of individuals that together make up the corporation. Incorporation, as the legal act that constitutes the corporation, can then be shown to adopt multiple and mutually exclusive positions. These positions are central to the debate on the respective claims to agency and ownership between the separate legal entity and the aggregation of individuals. I then end the article by arguing that all concepts of incorporation create legal and economic issues regarding the allocation of ownership and agency, which makes their understanding and the choice behind them important for theories of governance. (shrink)

Smartphone apps might offer a low-threshold approach to the detection of mental health conditions, such as depression. Based on the gathering of ‘passive data,’ some apps generate a user’s ‘digital phenotype,’ compare it to those of users with clinically confirmed depression and issue a warning if a depressive episode is likely. These apps can, thus, serve as epistemic tools for affected users. From an ethical perspective, it is crucial to consider epistemic injustice to promote socially responsible innovations within digital mental (...) healthcare. In cases of epistemic injustice, people are wronged specifically as epistemic agents, i.e., agents of the production and distribution of knowledge. We suggest that epistemic agency relies on different resource- and uptake-related preconditions which can be impacted by the functionality of passive self-tracking apps. We consider how this can lead to different forms of epistemic injustice (testimonial, hermeneutical, and contributory injustice) and analyze the influence of the apps’ use on epistemic practices on an individual level, in mental healthcare settings, and on the structural level. (shrink)

Habermas's collection of essays "The Future of Human Nature" is of particular interest for two sorts of reasons. For those interested in bioethics, it contains a genuinely new set of arguments for placing serious restrictions on using prenatal genetic technologies to “enhance” offspring. And for those interested in Habermas’s moral philosophy, it contains a number of new developments in his “discourse ethics”—not the least of which is a willingness to engage in applied ethics at all. -/- The real key to (...) Habermas’s argument is that human personhood and moral agency presuppose certain modes of relating to oneself that are threatened by the asymmetrical way in which genetic enhancements would presumably work. Thus, instead of taking up and then extending familiar normative concerns about unequal opportunities or the criteria for moral personhood, Habermas believes that the emerging technologies of genetic enhancement demand genuinely new arguments, and he proposes to focus on the effects of genetic programming on whether the agent can consider herself free and equal—effects, that is, regarding what one might call the reflexive attitudinal preconditions for moral agency. -/- Like contractarians and Kantians more generally, Habermas faces difficulties accommodating the intuition that we might have obligations toward potential persons. The difficulty is particularly pronounced in the case of Habermas’s “discourse theory of morality,” since it construes the moral point of view in terms of processes of deliberation among all those affected by the norm at issue which the participants consider in the deliberative process to be open, fair, and inclusive. Future generations do not fit neatly into this deliberative process, nor do prepersonal humans. Moral norms adjudicated in such discourse clearly affect their interests, but they cannot themselves participate in the discourse. In the past, Habermas and other “discourse ethicists” have tried to address this worry by introducing “advocatory discourses.” But this move threatens to undo a distinctive, appealing feature of Habermas’s moral theory: the pragmatist insistence on the innovative, critical, unpredictable discourse generated by actual participants in discourse and the refusal (contra Rawls, in particular) to rely on hypothetical representatives. -/- In The Future of Human Nature, Habermas ventures a different strategy,focused on expanding what he calls the “ethical” domain, which differs from the “moral” domain in being a matter of a community’s articulation of its core values and conception of the good. Previously, Habermas distinguished “ethical-existential” and “ethical-political” domains, as a matter of who an individual or a community, respectively, is and wants to be. In the present book, Habermas makes the remarkable move of introducing the category of the “species-ethical,” which is supposed to be the domain of questions raised by the human species as a whole about the question of what it is to be human. This theoretical move extends further steps Habermas had already taken in speaking of ethical solidarity within the global community. -/- . (shrink)

Political philosophy was once dominated by discussion of the virtues of character and their importance to the good life and the good society. Contemporary political philosophers, however, following the towering influence of John Rawls, have primarily focused on a single virtue of institutions: justice, while largely avoiding controversial claims about the good life. As a result, political philosophy lacks a unified account of the virtues of institutions and the virtues of character. More importantly, we lack an understanding of the connection (...) between the just society and the good life. This book begins to mend this broken seam, which, on reflection, lies at the heart of our deepest political problems. The book’s central argument is that the virtues of character require institutions, while good institutions enable persons to live together virtuously. Political institutions are a necessary precondition for the moral agency exhibited by the virtues. But good institutions enable virtue to grow, while helping to constrain the excesses of vice. On this view, justice emerges primarily as a virtue of character, not institutions. The just person balances conformity to existing institutional norms with practically wise reforms. Ultimately, this book concludes that the just society and the good life are linked through the common good of virtuous activity within the shared institutions of a political community. (shrink)

Mary Douglas's Purity and Danger and Herbert Fingarette's Confucius: The Secular as Sacred have had a continuous impact on cultural anthropology and the study of ancient Chinese thought, respectively, but neither has typically been read as a contribution to comparative religious ethics. This paper argues that both books developed from profound dissatisfaction with the empiricist presuppositions that dominated their fields into the 1970s and that both should be associated with the revival of American pragmatism that is currently driving a reinterpretation (...) of ethics as a social practice embedded in historically contingent discourse about agency, virtue, and social organization. This pragmatic turn results in a shift of comparative ethics away from issues of methods and metaethics in the direction of history and fieldwork as the preconditions for useful comparison. (shrink)

This paper challenges a pervasive, if not always explicit assumption of the present state of theorising in business ethics. This is the idea that a workable theory of organizational ethics must provide a unified perspective on its subject matter. In this paper we will sketch the broad outlines of an alternative understanding of business ethics, which focuses on constraints on corporate conduct that cannot reasonably be rejected. These constraints stem from at least three different levels or spheres of social reality, (...) i.e. the preconditions of a well-ordered society, the internal morality of economic activity and the preconditions of autonomous agency. (shrink)

What is the connection between dispositions and ethics? Some might think very little and those who are interested in dispositions tend to be metaphysicians whose interests are far from value. However, we argue in this paper that dispositions and dispositionality are central to ethics, indeed a precondition. Ethics rests on a number of notions that are either dispositional in nature or involve real dispositions or powers at work. We argue for a dispositional account of value that offers an alternative to (...) the traditional fact-value dichotomy. We explain the place of value within a structure that explains the possibility of ethics. Elsewhere in this structure, we argue that moral responsibility is a precondition for ethics and that it is a dispositional notion depending critically on what Mumford and Anjum have called the dispositional modality. Moral responsibility in turn depends on there being both agency and normativity. We argue that intentionality and agency are preconditions for agency and that value is a precondition of normativity. All these notions are dispositional and make best sense if there are real dispositions or causal powers of agents. (shrink)

This essay compares the thoughts of Kant and Marx on revolution. It focuses in particular on two issues: the contribution of revolutionary enthusiasm to the cause of emancipatory political agents and its educative role in illustrating the possibility of progress for future generations. In both cases, it is argued, the defence of revolution is offered in the context of illustrating the possibility of moral progress for the species, even if not for individual human beings, and brings out the centrality of (...) collective agency in moving toward universal moral goals. Discussing the implications of these points is of significant historical interest: it allows us to defend an interpretation of Kant’s political thought which is sensitive to the material conditions of historical development and to rescue Marx from an amoral reading of his philosophy of history. Reflecting on the role and preconditions of transformative collective agency is also of normative interest: it allows us to better evaluate the significance of political events that, firstly, re-shape the boundaries of political feasibility and, secondly, play a crucial educative role in motivating future progressive initiatives. (shrink)