According to a tradition going back to Socrates, one should thoroughly examine the grounds of one’s judgments before settling on what one has reason to do or believe. According to contemporary metaethical constructivism, assumed in this essay, reflective scrutiny is also central to assessing a judgment’s claim to justification. This essay argues against the injunctions to thoroughly examine oneself and seek ultimate reasons for one’s normative judgments. In other words, the essay argues against the ideal of the philosophical (...) way of life. It shows that in most cases one does not have reason to question the practical conclusion of one’s initial deliberation. It is only under very limited conditions, specified in the essay, that one is justified in engaging in further reflection. Furthermore, the essay argues that if one does go for full self‐examination, the consequences are most likely to be bad for oneself, given one’s practical interests. (shrink)

“What do you see when you look at your face in the mirror?” asks J. David Velleman in introducing his philosophical theory of action. He takes this simple act of self-scrutiny as a model for the reflective reasoning of rational agents: our efforts to understand our existence and conduct are aided by our efforts to make it intelligible. Reflective reasoning, Velleman argues, constitutes practical reasoning. By applying this conception, Practical Reflection develops philosophical accounts of intention, free will, (...) and the foundation of morals. This new edition of Practical Reflection contains the original 1989 text along with a new introduction and is the latest entry in The David Hume Series of Philosophy and Cognitive Science Reissues, which keeps in print previously published indispensable works in the area of cognitive science. (shrink)

Pindar’s songs were composed for men at play, but his poetry was political in its impulse and in its function. The men in question were rich and powerful, and their games were a display of exclusive class attributes, vicariously shared by lesser mortals who responded with gratitude and loyalty . Victories were counted as princely benefactions and laid up as city treasure like the wealth deposited in the treasuries at Delphi . Athletic victory was thus both a manifestation and an (...) enhancement of aristocratic domination, which meant that the poet who praised those who boxed and raced in pan-Hellenic games necessarily praised the social structure that depended on them.Pindar understood his political function and was proud of it—“I would consort with victors” .1 He believed in athletic contest as a model for all human life. He believed in the aristocratic system: “Inherited governance of cities lies properly with the nobility” . He believed also that praise poetry could regulate as well as laud that system, and he believed finally that such poetry was itself incorruptible. Games, song, and princely rulers were all parts of a single brilliant order, and this truth had a linguistic reflection, for the bit that tames a horse, the meter of a poetic line, and the moderation of a ruler were all called by the same name—metron. “Measure inheres in everything” . 1. All translations are my own. Anne Burnett is professor of classical languages and literature at the University of Chicago. Her most recent publications are Three Archaic Poets: Archilochus, Alcaeus, Sappho and The Art of Bacchylides . A monograph on choral poetry, with focus on the Sicilian poet Stesichorus, is forthcoming. (shrink)

In this essay, I examine Kant’s interpretation of Rousseau through the lens of Reflection 6593. This Reflection deserves scrutiny because it serves as a bridge between Kant’s well-known engagement with Rousseau in the mid-1760s and his later discussions of the vocation of the human being in the lectures on ethics and anthropology. Through a close reading of R 6593, I argue that the Reflection offers the earliest evidence of Kant’s philosophy of history and its integration into his treatment of (...) the human vocation. This change, I propose, is instigated by Rousseau’s “Abstract” of St. Pierre’s Perpetual Peace. I conclude that R 6593 is a crucial indicator of Kant’s evolving views on Rousseau and shows his enduring importance for understanding the formation of Kant’s mature political thought. (shrink)

“What do you see when you look at your face in the mirror?” asks J. David Velleman in introducing his philosophical theory of action. He takes this simple act of self-scrutiny as a model for the reflective reasoning of rational agents: our efforts to understand our existence and conduct are aided by our efforts to make it intelligible. Reflective reasoning, Velleman argues, constitutes practical reasoning. By applying this conception, _Practical Reflection_ develops philosophical accounts of intention, free will, (...) and the foundation of morals. This new edition of _Practical Reflection_ contains the original 1989 text along with a new introduction and is the latest entry in The David Hume Series of Philosophy and Cognitive Science Reissues, which keeps in print previously published indispensable works in the area of cognitive science. _ _ _ _. (shrink)

1. EXPLICATING THE CONCEPT OF REFLECTION (under review) -/- To understand how ‘reflection’ is used, I consider ordinary, philosophical, and scientific discourse. I find that ‘reflection’ seems to refer to reasoning that is deliberate and conscious, but not necessarily self-conscious. Then I offer an empirical explication of reflection’s conscious and deliberate features. These explications not only help explain how reflection can be detected; they also distinguish reflection from nearby concepts such as ruminative and reformative reasoning. After this, I find that (...) reflection is not obviously limited to only practical or only theoretical reasoning. The chapter ends with reasons to prefer ‘unreflective’ and ‘reflective’ to dual process theorists’ labels about systems or types. -/- 2. BOUNDED REFLECTIVISM & EPISTEMIC IDENTITY (in Metaphilosophy) -/- Reflection features centrally in philosophy (e.g., Korsgaard, 1996; Rawls, 1971; Sosa, 1991) and psychology (e.g., Pennycook, 2018). Bounded reflectivism is an empirically adequate model of reflection that explains reflection’s capacity to either help or hinder reasoning—e.g., reflective equilibrium vs. reflective polarization (e.g., Kahan et al., 2017). One innovation of the model is epistemic identity: an identity that involves particular beliefs—e.g., religious and political identities. When we feel that our epistemic identity is threatened, we can reflectively defend its beliefs rather than update our beliefs according to the best arguments and evidence. The solution, I argue, is not to suppress epistemic identity but embrace it by appealing to shared, superordinate epistemic identities. -/- 3. ALL MEASURES ARE NOT CREATED EQUAL (under review) -/- A bat and a ball cost $1.10 in total. The bat costs $1.00 more than the ball. How much does the ball cost? “10 cents” comes to most people’s minds immediately. However, upon reflection, we can realize that “5 cents” is the correct answer. There are many reflection tests. Each has its limitations. Some reflection tests are mathematical—like the bat-and-ball problem (e.g., Frederick, 2005) and others are logical (e.g., Janis & Frick, 1943). So there are concerns that reflection tests track logical and mathematical competence rather than reflection per se. Also, some psychologists assume a priori that correct answers are reflective and lured answers are unreflective. New evidence raises additional concerns about the plausibility of these assumptions. I argue that think aloud protocols (Ericsson & Simon, 1998) and process dissociation (Jacoby, 1991) can assuage some of these concerns. -/- 4. GREAT MINDS DO NOT THINK ALIKE (in Review of Philosophy and Psychology) -/- Two large studies (N = 1299), one pre-registered, found that many correlations between reflection and philosophical beliefs among non-philosophers replicated among philosophers. For example, less reflective philosophers preferred theism to atheism and utilitarian rather than deontological responses to the trolley problem (Hannikainen & Cova, in prep.; Pennycook et al., 2016; Reynolds, Byrd, & Conway, forthcoming). However, philosophical judgments were sometimes better predicted by factors like education, gender, and personality than by reflection test performance. So although some relationships between reflection and philosophy were robust, there is more to the link between reflection and philosophy. Normative implications are also discussed—e.g., how we can infer the quality of philosophical views from their correlations with reflective or unreflective reasoning. -/- 5. WHAT WE CAN (AND CAN’T) INFER ABOUT IMPLICIT BIAS (in Synthese) -/- Contrary to some philosophers and psychologists, I argue that implicit bias is probably associative. However, I also argue that debiasing is not thereby entirely unconscious and involuntary. Indeed, strong evidence suggests that reflection can change implicitly biased behavior—e.g., conscious and deliberate counterconditioning. This has implications for the science and morality of implicit bias—e.g., evidence suggests that we can reform biases; so. intuitively, we can be responsible for biases. (shrink)

“What do you see when you look at your face in the mirror?” asks J. David Velleman in introducing his philosophical theory of action. He takes this simple act of self-scrutiny as a model for the reflective reasoning of rational agents: our efforts to understand our existence and conduct are aided by our efforts to make it intelligible. Reflective reasoning, Velleman argues, constitutes practical reasoning. By applying this conception, _Practical Reflection_ develops philosophical accounts of intention, free will, (...) and the foundation of morals. This new edition of _Practical Reflection_ contains the original 1989 text along with a new introduction and is the latest entry in The David Hume Series of Philosophy and Cognitive Science Reissues, which keeps in print previously published indispensable works in the area of cognitive science. _ _ _ _. (shrink)

Recent years have seen a rekindling of interest in the method of reflective equilibrium. Most of this attention has been suspicious, however. Critics have alleged that the method is nothing more than a high-minded brand of navel-gazing, that it suffers from all the classic problems of inward-looking coherence theories, and that it overestimates the usefulness of self-scrutiny. In this paper I argue that these criticisms miss their mark because they labor under crucial misconceptions about the method of (...) class='Hi'>reflective equilibrium. In defending reflective equilibrium I put forward a handful of theses about the nature of inquiry (or, more generally, norm-governed enterprises) that form the backdrop to the method. The critics’ objections fall short, I argue, because they do not recognize reflective equilibrium’s embrace of these theses. Confronting these objections and understanding why they fail brings us to a better understanding what, exactly, the method of reflective equilibrium is. The answer I come to in the final section of the paper is that the method of reflective equilibrium is not, exactly, anything. It is a mistake to try to give a positive characterization of the view, to identify it with a concern with a particular species of data, particular procedures and methods, or even a particular conception of normative success. Instead, it should be understood as the denial of essentialism about just these matters—as a form of anti-essentialism about our epistemic inputs, methods, and goals. (shrink)

Dunn, Geoffrey D Lent is a time of preparation for Easter. It developed during the fourth century as a time when sinners, who could no longer participate as full members of the church due to the serious and public nature of their offences, prepared for reconciliation with the church through penance, and adult catechumens, who were seeking to join the church as new members, prepared for initiation into the church. The season is a time of renewal of relationships for the (...) community, of renewal of our relationship with God and of renewal of our relationships with others. The central theme is conversion: a conversion as radical as reorienting one's whole life according to the gospel of Jesus, and as total as requiring the surrender of life. We surrender our old way of life and allow the Spirit to conform us to the new way of life as a disciple of Jesus. The Year A readings have a particular focus on the initiation of catechumens, who, at the start of Lent, celebrate the rite of election and enter the final period of purification and enlightenment before initiation at Easter. On the Third, Fourth, and Fifth Sundays the elect celebrate the scrutinies, when the community examines their readiness for initiation. The symbols of the Easter liturgy feature in the readings of these three Sundays: water, light, and life. (shrink)

According to a tradition going back to Socrates, one should thoroughly examine the grounds of one’s judgments before settling on what one has reason to do or believe. According to contemporary metaethical constructivism, assumed in this essay, reflective scrutiny is also central to assessing a judgment’s claim to justification. This essay argues against the injunctions to thoroughly examine oneself and seek ultimate reasons for one’s normative judgments. In other words, the essay argues against the ideal of the philosophical (...) way of life. It shows that in most cases one does not have reason to question the practical conclusion of one’s initial deliberation. It is only under very limited conditions, specified in the essay, that one is justified in engaging in further reflection. Furthermore, the essay argues that if one does go for full self-examination, the consequences are most likely to be bad for oneself, given one’s practical interests. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reflections on Academic ReflectionJohn D. Copenhaver Jr.Contemplative pedagogy deserves both the careful scrutiny and the sustained exploration that the Society for Buddhist-Christian Studies is uniquely well suited to provide. As higher education comes under increased pressure for accountability, we need to be able to explain clearly both the pedagogical value and academic integrity of these elements in our curriculum. Academics seeking to incorporate contemplative practices into their teaching (...) need to pay careful attention to their institutional setting. While people in all types of higher education may share certain values (e.g., free inquiry, critical thinking, intellectual rigor, clear reasoning), different institutional settings offer different kinds of opportunities and challenges. Shenandoah University, where I teach, is one of five private universities in Virginia related to the United Methodist Church (UMC). All these schools acknowledge the relationship, but some seem rather embarrassed by it. For us it is a warm embrace.In its mission statement, our university characterizes the relationship this way: “As an institution affiliated with the United Methodist Church, Shenandoah University practices the highest ethical standards in its interactions with the community and with students of other faiths.”1 While the university is clear about its church affiliation, the phrase “highest ethical standards in its interaction with students of other faiths” indicates the kind of mutual respect and understanding that characterize pluralism. Among its core values are “respect for diverse cultures, experiences, and perspectives” and “dedication to global outreach.”2 Dedication to “global outreach” sounds like window dressing, but it is genuine. With its Global Citizenship Project, the university funds all expenses for fifty-five students each year to travel to one of five countries over spring break for cultural immersion. This mission statement and our core values make it much easier to root our religious studies curriculum in an atmosphere of religious pluralism than one might expect at a church-related university.Our Department of Religion recognizes two purposes for religious studies. The first is to offer an array courses to meet general education needs for moral reasoning and cross-cultural understanding. One of the department’s goals for general education religion courses is to promote interreligious and multicultural understanding. Another is to serve the church by offering a program to train students for religious leadership roles, called the JustFaith Christian Leadership Program. It is designed to integrate theological education and spiritual formation that promotes social justice. [End Page 41] In the department’s view, this commitment to justice is consistent with our Wesleyan heritage, but is often neglected in churches and rare in higher education. Although our religion major requirements reflect the university’s Christian heritage, we do require a course in world religions and one course in a religious tradition other than Christianity.This institutional setting invites me to teach in very different ways. Of the eight courses I teach over a two-year rotation, two take a philosophical approach, two take a phenomenological approach without any contemplative practices, and two blend the phenomenological approach with contemplative practices.3 The other two I teach “from the inside,” as a Christian ordained in the United Methodist Church. I present my own experience and convictions as part of that tradition, and the course emphasizes religious practices such as fasting, prayer, meditation, contemplative prayer, and/or periods of solitude. This confessional approach would not be possible at a state university, but I think students should have this option at church-related schools. The delicate issue is that most students do not come to our university because of its religious heritage. Our students are much like their counterparts at state universities, and often register for courses on the basis of what fits their academic schedules rather than any particular interest in or affinity for the topic. For this reason, we try to be as clear as possible in course descriptions about the various contents and approaches of our courses. Still, that does not prevent a poorly advised agnostic or atheist from registering occasionally for my course on Christian spirituality. On the first day of class I discuss the confessional nature of the course and the spiritual exercises students will be expected to do. I do not screen anyone... (shrink)

Besides the general agreement about the human capability of reflection, there is a large area of disagreement and debate about the nature and value of “reflective scrutiny” and the role of “second-order states” in everyday life. This problem has been discussed in a vast and heterogeneous literature about topics such as epistemic injustice, epistemic norms, agency, understanding, meta-cognition etc. However, there is not yet any extensive and interdisciplinary work, specifically focused on the topic of the epistemic value of (...) reflection. This volume is one of the first attempts aimed at providing an innovative contribution, an exchange between philosophy, epistemology and psychology about the place and value of reflection in everyday life. -/- Our goal in the next sections is not to offer an exhaustive overview of recent work on epistemic reflection, nor to mimic all of the contributions made by the chapters in this volume. We will try to highlight some topics that have motivated a new resumption of this field and, with that, drawing on chapters from this volume where relevant. -/- Two elements defined the scope and content of this volume, on the one hand, the crucial contribution of Ernest Sosa, whose works provide original and thought-provoking contributions to contemporary epistemology in setting a new direction for old dilemmas about the nature and value of knowledge, giving a central place to reflection. On the other hand, the recent developments of cultural psychology, in the version of the “Aalborg approach”, reconsider the object and scope of psychological sciences, stressing that “[h]uman conduct is purposeful”. (shrink)

Many normative theorists want to contribute to making the world a better place. In recent years, it has been suggested that to realise this ambition one must start with an adequate description of real-life practices. To determine what should be done, however, one must also fundamentally criticise existing moral beliefs. The method of reflective equilibrium offers a way of doing both. Yet, its practical usefulness has been doubted and it has been largely ignored in the recent practical turn of (...) normative theorising. This paper offers a complementary methodology to the method of reflective equilibrium, referred to as Rawlsian constructivism, which brings forth its practical merits. With the support of Rawlsian constructivism, the method of reflective equilibrium becomes a tool for public reasoning about practical problems which aims to facilitate shared solutions. The process of reflective scrutiny is used, not in the search of moral truth, but rather to highlight what stands in the way of solutions to problems agents face in different domains of social life. The practical value lies in scrutinising reasons for action that are taken for granted, explicating new rationales for action and highlighting neglected points of agreement. The paper exemplifies this approach with a process of justifying individual obligations to combat climate change. Normative theorists who share the practical agenda have correctly noted the importance of bottom-up investigations of subject domains. This paper argues that the next step should be to utilise this version of the method of reflective equilibrium to explore the potential for morally progressive solutions to these problems. (shrink)

Rawls’ notion of reflective equilibrium has a hybrid character. It is embedded in the pragmatist tradition, but also includes various Kantian and other non-pragmatist elements. I argue that we should discard all non-pragmatist elements and develop reflective equilibrium in a consistently pragmatist manner. I argue that this pragmatist approach is the best way to defend reflective equilibrium against various criticisms, partly by embracing the critiques as advantages. I begin with discussing how each of the three versions of (...) reflective equilibrium in Rawls’ work combines pragmatist and non-pragmatist elements. For Rawls, the primary purpose of reflective equilibrium is epistemic: namely, to construct moral theories or judgments. In a pragmatist approach, there are three connected purposes for moral inquiry: right action, reliable understanding and self-improvement. Depending on the specific context of a reflective equilibrium process, these general purposes can give rise to a variety of specific purposes. In the next sections, I develop a pragmatist approach to reflective equilibrium and discuss the implications of this approach for core elements of reflective equilibrium. These elements are: the initial convictions, facts, personal commitments and comprehensive views of life, coherence and additional methods for critical scrutiny. (shrink)

The academic study of religious belief and practice is frequently taken to debunk the content of religion. This attitude impedes the science‐theology dialogue and causes believers to react defensively toward studies of religion. I argue that a large, although not unrestricted, domain exists in which phenomenology of religion is neutral with respect to content, that is, compatible with either belief or unbelief. Theology can constructively interact with secular studies of religion, in some cases even explicitly hostile ones. Three themes emerge (...) that elaborate on this interaction: (1) the claim that a scientific study of religion is capable of refuting belief is a logical mistake; (2) religious practice, and to some extent belief, can benefit from secular scrutiny; (3) the entirety of religious expressions is richer than the content that can be captured by analytical study of the phenomenon. (shrink)

This essay presents some preliminary thoughts about the linkages between current human rights universalism and the practice of violence in the form of wars and interventions. I draw three parallels that may help us think about the current wars on terror and in Iraq. The first parallel concerns the progress of liberal universalist thought from the Enlightenment period in which a concern for rights coexisted with the justifications for imperialism. In the current era the succeeding line of universalist thought is (...) that of human rights which similarly coexists with the overt and tacit support for violence that deprives some humans of their lives.The second parallel concerns the use of national identity. In the imperial era, the justification for rights either given or withheld was closely linked to constructions of national identity. Similarly, today there is a resurgence of nationalist discourse in which the construction of U.S. national identity is used to justify the violence that is done against Iraqi citizens. This discourse which constructs the U.S. as ontologically civilized and the Iraqis as barbarians is used to justify the violence that is done to them.Finally, the last parallel concerns violence in general. During imperialism, the scrutiny for acts of violence was borne largely by the native. Because he was constructed as a barbarian, his violence was made far more obvious as further evidence of his lesser development. In the present circumstances, a similar scrutiny is borne by the Iraqi insurgent while the violence of the coalition forces remains veiled beneath euphemisms like collateral damage. The torture scandal at Abu-Ghraib presented an opportunity to reverse the gaze but because of its interpretation as an aberration that falls squarely outside the ``normal" and the failure to widen the debate to other violence, this opportunity was largely lost.These three parallels taken together suggest that the old liberal hegemonic order of imperialism with its conflicting narratives of rights and oppression has been carried forward and sublimated into a human rights regime. And human rights is now deployed to justify violence against ``human rights abusers." Because of this continuity, there is a need to create a new universalism born organically from the struggles of subordinated peoples that eliminates old-order imperialist justifications for the oppression of Others while claiming to support human rights. (shrink)

In what ways does a society perceive itself as beautiful? Do images of physical perfection indicate aspirations of the social or national body, the perfect body/face emblematic of the collective self-image? In recent years, under conditions of economic and cultural globalization, practices and discourses to render the body beautiful have come under increasing scrutiny. Concerned with the marketing and commodification of body ideals, these studies trace the deleterious effects of advertising, fashion, and celebrity culture in various national and cross-cultural (...) contexts. Yet beauty itself is strangely absent in historical and aesthetic accounts of traditional and new media. In this essay, I try to account for this absence and to provide an alternative view of Indian society's relationship to media images of the body. Using examples from popular cinema, I explore the historical and cultural meanings underlying the fascination with the beautiful. (shrink)

Every business and organization today needs to impress stakeholders with its ethics policy. Universities, Ethics and Professions examines how this emphasis on ethics by the professional world is impacting universities, institutions that have long been key contributors to ethical reflection and debate, and shapers of ethical discourse. Changing objectives, globalization, and public concerns continue to bring professionalism, and commercialization, into the dialogue about what ethics mean on campus. Universities, Ethics and Professions offers an in-depth examination of the changing landscape of (...) academic ethics, with case-study analysis from sociologists, educationalists, management specialists and philosophers. As professionalism becomes an integral part of university teaching, training, and research, this book considers the impact on the ethical practices of academics, and explores the importance of universities remaining sites of open discourse on ethics in the future. (shrink)

In her influential article published in 2016, Alexandra Walsham, Professor of Modern History at the University of Cambridge, coined the metaphor that ‘Archives are the factories and laboratories of the historian’. Traditionally viewed as neutral storehouses of official records passively awaiting historians’ scrutiny, conceptions of archives have expanded in recent decades. Archives are now understood as complex social and cultural entities that actively participate in shaping understandings of the past. This paper examines shifting perspectives on the nature and functions (...) of archives through a critical analysis of key debates. Specifically, this paper adopts a hermeneutic lens to critically engage Walsham’s metaphor and move beyond its potential limitations through situated analysis and interpretation. This paper explores how archives are actively implicated in knowledge construction through their contents, organisational frameworks, and interactions with historians. Recognising archives as fragmented, culturally contingent remnants that mediate engagement with the past, the paper calls for collaborative, reflective approaches between archivists and historians. The paper also acknowledges historians’ subjective interpretive roles while advocating consultation of archivists’ contextual expertise. Ultimately, it advances methodological discussions on writing history through a nuanced appreciation of archives as dynamic mediators within historical research, not transparent conduits neutrally supplying facts. (shrink)

The main aim of this paper is to propose that reflection is a performance that has epistemic value. This idea contains two parts: the first asserts that reflection has instrumental value. The second that reflective performance promotes an epistemic virtue that has final value. The first part is not controversial and most epistemologists would accept it. The second, however, asserts that there is a kind of epistemic good which can only be achieved through reflection. There is much controversy in (...) this. Reflection is understood here as a performance, an activity in which the person examines the evidence, content and reliability of their own beliefs. This performance may lead to different results, but if someone is capable of critically reflecting on their own beliefs in skeptical-dialectic contexts, whatever the results, this performance will produce positive epistemic states – contrary to people who, in the face of skeptical challenges, simply decide to remain intellectually immobile, maintaining a cowardly, arrogant or dogmatic position. The critical spirit with which someone discusses opinions in the context of dialectical disagreement, submitting them to the scrutiny of reason (that is, to the arguments for or against), is virtuous and has epistemic value. The consequence of this performance, the epistemic preference, has a final value, since deliberations based on free judgment have final value. (shrink)

Starting from support for James's critique of Clifford's dictum, the article argues for holding beliefs, whether secular or religious, firmly but provisionally, remaining open to fresh experience. This consideration prompts reflection on the debate following the attack on Charlie Hebdo. Alternative beliefs were opposing each other with seemingly equal certainty. The justification for insistence on the right to free speech itself requires scrutiny. The article finishes by noting the baleful effects of the intellectual apartheid which has tended to be (...) practised in the West which presumes that religion and reason have nothing to do with each other. (shrink)

J.L. Schellenberg’s Argument from Divine Hiddenness maintains that if a perfectly loving God exists, then there is no non-resistant non-belief. Given that such nonbelief exists, however, it follows that there is no perfectly loving God. To support the conditional claim, Schellenberg presents conceptual and analogical considerations, which we subject to critical scrutiny. We also evaluate Schellenberg’s claim that the belief that God exists is logically necessary for entering into a relationship with the Divine. Finally, we turn to possible variants (...) of Schellenberg’s case, and argue that the modifications necessary to accommodate our criticismas leave those variants with much less of a sting than originally suggested by his provocative formulation. (shrink)

This review article situates the work Black Flame within a capita selecta of earlier publications on anarchism-syndicalism and radical thought. Schmidt and Van der Walt's contribution (2009) is a recent addition to political thought, theory and socio-economic practice within the broad stream of anarcho-syndicalism. Its treatment of anarchism and anarchist syndicalist groups in the workplace within an international context since the middle 1800s and the attempt to situate the debate in contemporary society are some notable features. The authors engage with (...) the past relevance of anarcho-syndicalism and implications for the future given current discontent with (global) politics. As an ongoing discourse on social philosophy, references are made to areas of agreement and differences between Anarchist and Marxist discourse. The latter versus one ‘grand narrative’ conjectures that liberal-capitalism on a global scale is bringing about an ‘End of History’ and that we have entered a post-industrial or even post-modern condition on the globe. However, theories-put-into-practice around the implosion of history and a ‘clash of civilisations’ result in deep inequality and the rise of absolute poverty. The work invites reflection and critical engagement. (shrink)

One emerging issue in contemporary epistemology concerns the relation between animal knowledge, which can be had by agents unable to take a view on the epistemic status of their attitudes, and reflective knowledge, which is only available to agents capable of taking such a view. Philosophers who are open to animal knowledge often presume that while many of the beliefs of human adults are formed unreflectively and thus constitute mere animal knowledge, some of them—those which become subject of explicit (...) scrutiny or are the result of a deliberative effort—may attain the status of reflective knowledge. According to Sanford Goldberg and Jonathan Matheson (2020), however, it is impossible for reflective subjects to have mere animal knowledge. If correct, their view would have a number of repercussions, perhaps most notably the vindication of a dualism about knowledge, which would frustrate attempts to provide a unified account of knowledge-attributions to human adults, very young children, and non-human animals. I discuss Goldberg and Matheson’s proposal, outline some of the ways in which it is insightful, and argue that it is ultimately unsuccessful because it neglects the inherent temporal dimension of knowledge acquisition. While the article is pitched as a reply to Goldberg and Matheson, its primary aim is to highlight significant connections between the debates on the relation between animal and reflective knowledge, propositional and doxastic justification, and the theory of epistemic defeat. (shrink)

Background The scrutiny surrounding gender-affirming medical treatment (GAMT) for youth has increased, particularly concerning the limited evidence on long-term treatment outcomes. The Standards of Care 8 by the World Professional Association for Transgender Health addresses this by outlining research evidence suggesting “effective” outcomes of GAMT for adolescents. However, claims concerning what are considered “effective” outcomes of GAMT for adolescents remain implicit, requiring further reflection. Methods Using trans negativity as a theoretical lens, we conducted a theory-informed reflexive thematic analysis of (...) the literature cited in the “Research Evidence” section of the SOC8 Adolescents chapter. We selected 16 articles that used quantitative measures to assess GAMT outcomes for youth, examining how “effective” outcomes were framed and interpreted to uncover implicit and explicit normative assumptions within the evidence base. Results A total of 44 different measures were used to assess GAMT outcomes for youth, covering physical, psychological, and psychosocial constructs. We identified four main themes regarding the normative assumptions of “effective” treatment outcomes: (1) doing bad: experiencing distress before GAMT, (2) moving toward a static gender identity and binary presentation, (3) doing better: overall improvement after GAMT, and (4) the absence of regret. These themes reveal implicit norms about what GAMT for youth should achieve, with improvement being the benchmark for “effectiveness.” Discussion We critically reflect on these themes through the lens of trans negativity to challenge what constitutes “effective” GAMT outcomes for youth. We explore how improvement justifies GAMT for youth and address the limitations of this notion. Conclusions We emphasize the need for an explicit discussion on the objectives of GAMT for adolescents. The linear narrative of improvement in GAMT for adolescents is limited and fails to capture the complexity of GAMT experiences. With currently no consensus on how the “effectiveness” of GAMT for adolescents is assessed, this article calls for participatory action research that centers the voices of young TGD individuals. (shrink)

After one hundred years of new research, new ideas, new methodologies, is it really possible that The Varieties of Religious Experience still has something worthwhile to offer? Is it really possible to penetrate the early twentieth century prose and discover insights that can speak to a modern, even postmodern, audience? Yes. Without a doubt, yes. This text is an undeniable classic. The primary difficulty is not how to uncover the gems that are strewn throughout the text, but rather, how to (...) choose which gems are the most brilliant, which most deserve close scrutiny in the context of this essay. What follows are a few carefully delimited attempts to cull from this classic work several compelling Jamesian insights that clearly demonstrate the enduring value of the Varieties, that show how, if taken seriously, it continues to offer viable, and valuable, solutions to many of the dilemmas that are today troubling a wide variety of disciplines, particularly in the fields of religion, psychology, mysticism and consciousness studies. (shrink)

Neo-Aristotelian forms of character education often draw on literary sources as materials, although rarely poetry. This article offers retrospective reflections on a poetry-based character-education intervention, conducted in an Icelandic secondary-school setting. Having run into practical difficulties during the implementation phase, the challenges of implementation were reflected upon through consultation with ten subject experts who shared their views about the enablers and barriers encountered when running such an intervention. The interviews yielded a rich data set, which often took interviewees beyond the (...) boundaries of a poetry-based curricular context to focus on more general conditions for effective, character-inspiring school-work. Through thematic analysis, four themes were identified: freedom, time, creativity, and wonderment. Of these four, creativity had been identified in advance as an interview theme, meaning that the researchers expected to find it. The remaining three provide an insight into how, according to the interviewees, the ideal Icelandic school system should be designed. The theme of freedom addresses both negative and positive aspects of the current state of affairs, while the theme of time mostly reflects negative aspects of the Icelandic curriculum. The theme of wonderment has solely positive connotations in the minds of interviewees, and is the core of this analysis because it seems to hold the key to the question: what factors would enable an effective intervention of the sort under scrutiny here? This theme is analysed in detail, and some specific and general educational implications are elicited. (shrink)

ABSTRACTResearch that dissociates different types of processes within a given task using a processing tree approach suggests that attitudes may be acquired through evaluative conditioning in the absence of explicit encoding of CS-US pairings in memory. This research distinguishes explicit memory for the CS-US pairings from CS-liking acquired without encoding of CS-US pairs in explicit memory. It has been suggested that the latter effect may be due to an implicit misattribution process that is assumed to operate when US evocativeness is (...) low. In the present research, the latter assumption was supported neither by two high-powered experiments nor by complementary meta-analytic evidence, whereas evocativeness exerted an influence on explicit memory. This pattern of findings is inconsistent with the view that CS-liking acquired without encoding of CS-US pairs in explicit memory reflects an implicit misattribution process at learning. Hence, the underlying learning process is awaiting further empirical scrutiny. (shrink)

The relationship of embryonal carcinoma (EC) cells, the stem cells of germ cell‐ or embryo‐derived teratocarcinoma tumors, to early embryonic cells came under intense scrutiny in the early 1970s when mouse chimeras were produced between EC cells and embryos. These chimeras raised tantalizing possibilities and high hopes for different areas of research. The normalization of EC cells by the embryo lent validity to their use as in vitro models for embryogenesis and indicated that they might reveal information about the (...) relationship between malignancy and differentiation. Chimeras also showed the way for the potential introduction of genes, selected in EC cells in vitro, into the germ line of mice. Although EC cells provided material for the elucidation of early embryonic events and stimulated many studies of early molecular differentiation, after years of intense scrutiny, they fell short as the means of genetic manipulation of the germ line, although arguably they pointed the way to the development of embryonic stem (ES) cells that eventually fulfilled this goal. (shrink)

The recent struggle over the confirmation of Clarence Thomas and the credibility of Anita Hill raises in a dramatic and pointed way many of the issues at stake in theorizing the public sphere in contemporary society. At one level, the Senate Judiciary Committee hearings on Hill’s claim that Thomas sexually harassed her constituted an exercise in democratic publicity as it has been understood in the classical liberal theory of the public sphere. The hearings opened to public scrutiny a function (...) of government, namely, the nomination and confirmation of a Supreme Court justice. They thus subjected a decision of state officials to the force of public opinion. Through the hearings, in fact, public opinion was constituted and brought to bear directly on the decision itself, affecting the process by which the decision was made as well as its substantive outcome. As a result, state officials were held accountable to the public by means of a discursive process of opinion and will formation.Yet that classical liberal view of the public sphere does not tell the whole story of these events.1 If were examine the Thomas confirmation struggle more closely, we see that the very meaning and boundaries of the concept of publicity was at stake. The way the struggle unfolded, moreover, depended at every point on who had the power to successfully and authoritatively define where the line between the public and the private would be drawn. It depended as well on who had the power to police and defend that boundary. 1. See Jürgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society, trans. Thomas Burger. Nancy Fraser is associate professor of philosophy and faculty fellow of the Center for Urban Affairs and Policy Research at Northwestern University, where she also teaches in the women’s studies program. She is the author of Unruly Practices: Power, Discourse, and Gender in Contemporary Social Theory. She is currently working on Keywords of the Welfare State, a jointly authored book with Linda Gordon. (shrink)

Let it be granted that Buddhism has, e.g., in its logical literature, detailed canons and explicit rules of right reason that, amongst other things, ban inconsistency as irrational. This is the normative dimension of how people should think according to many major Buddhist authors. But do important Buddhist writers ever recognize any interesting or substantive role for inconsistency and forms of irrationality in their account of how people actually do think and act? The article takes as its point of departure (...) a recurring theme in the writings of the 8th Century Indian Buddhist thinker, Śāntideva, who subjects his own behaviour and thought to minute scrutiny in argumentation with himself, only to be puzzled at his own seemingly irrational persistence in ways of thinking that he knows to be wrong and actions that he knows to be worse courses. The Buddhist’s situation is profitably comparable to issues of akrasia, weakness of the will, that are taken up by Plato, Aristotle and many modern philosophers, including notably Donald Davidson and David Wiggins. (shrink)

Europe's largest Muslim population of 4-5 million Muslim resides in France. On February 10, 2004 the French government approved an internationally controversial ban on headscarves, known as the hijab, worn by Muslim women attending public schools. Although the law banned all religious symbols, in this paper I focus on the ramification it has on the Muslim girls adhering to the hijab. The purpose of this paper is to discuss the legislation ban of the hijab in France. Several questions are explored (...) at various stages of the discussion including the following: Is wearing the hijab an expression of culture, religious obligation, or both? Does wearing the hijab jeopardize secularism, as French educational policy suggests? What are the alleged reasons, explicit and underlying, for the French legislation under scrutiny? What do French educators think of the law banning the hijab? Did the legislation take into account the decision's effect on young Muslim women in France, their self-esteem, their educational pursuits, and their identity formation? (shrink)

_ Source: _Volume 56, Issue 3-4, pp 320 - 339 Thirteenth-century views on consequences have not yet received much attention. Authors of this period deserve closer scrutiny, because of their profound interest in the nature of consequence. The fundamental feature of a consequence was captured in the claim that its antecedent is the cause of its consequent. At the same time authors systematically discussed consequences in terms of truth-preservation. This paper considers the requirements of syllogistic argument and consequences in (...) general, including the role of ‘cause’ in the identification of syllogisms proper, looks at different descriptions of consequence, moves on to discussions of the syncategorema ‘_si_’ – in _syncategoremata_ treatises by Peter of Spain, Henry of Ghent, Nicholas of Paris and William of Sherwood, as well as some _sophismata_ tracts – and explores what thirteenth-century authors make of the truth-functional characterisation of consequence, showing how it clashes with the authors’ insistence on a causal connection between antecedent and consequent. (shrink)

Though there is much interest nowadays in "aporias" there is relatively little research on the relation between these aporias and deconstruction, and further, between these two and the philosophy of education. First, it will be argued here that a sufficient understanding of the aporias must preserve the complexity of Aristotle’s own understanding and explications, or in other words, must avoid the reductive approaches one sometimes finds in some recent commentaries on studies of Aristotle’s aporias. Second, it will be argued that (...) some critiques of Aristotelian aporias, such as a deconstructive critique, require careful scrutiny. Third it will be argued that the complex Aristotelian understanding of aporias is by no means a tired or exhausted paradigm - far from it; it has rather some significant implications for educators and in relation to educational thinking in the twenty first century, especially when understood in relation to Wittgenstein’s work on some questions, some language games, as knots in our understanding (significantly, Aristotle used just the same kind of metaphor in relation to aporias). (shrink)

Slippery slope argumentation features prominently in debates over assisted suicide. The jurisdiction of Oregon features prominently too, especially as regards parliamentary scrutiny of assisted suicide proposals. This paper examines Oregon’s public data (including certain official pronouncements) on assisted suicide in light of the two basic versions of the slippery slope argument, the empirical and moral-logical versions. Oregon’s data evidences some normatively interesting shifts in its assisted suicide practice which in turn prompts consideration of two elements of moral-logical slippage that (...) are not widely discussed. One is slippage from an initial autonomy-based public justification for assisted suicide which does not include burden-based concerns within its operative account of voluntariness to an evolved public justification that does. The other is an expansion of a terminal illness ground to include chronic illnesses effectively rendered terminal via a refusal of treatment. (shrink)

This article offers two arguments for the conclusion that we should refuse on moral grounds to establish a human presence on the surface of Mars. The first argument appeals to a principle constraining the use of invasive or destructive techniques of scientific investigation. The second appeals to a principle governing appropriate human behavior in wilderness. These arguments are prefaced by two preliminary sections. The first preliminary section argues that authors working in space ethics have good reason to shift their focus (...) away from theory-based arguments in favor of arguments that develop in terms of pretheoretic beliefs. The second argues that of the popular justifications for sending humans to Mars only appeals to scientific curiosity can survive reflective scrutiny. (shrink)

Ugliness is a neglected topic in contemporary analytic aesthetics. This is regrettable given that this topic is not just genuinely fascinating, but could also illuminate other areas in the field, seeing as ugliness, albeit unexplored, does feature rather prominently in several debates in aesthetics. This paper articulates a ‘deformity-related’ conception of ugliness. Ultimately, I argue that deformity, understood in a certain way, and displeasure, jointly suffice for ugliness. First, I motivate my proposal, by locating a ‘deformity-related’ conception of ugliness in (...) aesthetic tradition, offering examples in support, and rejecting related alternative suggestions. Second, I argue that the proposal boasts considerable merits. Not only does it capture much of what we ordinarily think of as ugly, but it also comprises an objective criterion for ugliness, offers unity and comprehensiveness, and is informative and explanatorily potent. Third, I discuss a number of objections, thereby demonstrating that the proposal withstands reflective scrutiny. (shrink)

It has been claimed that Adam Smith, like David Hume, has a ‘reflective endorsement’ account of the authority of morality. On such a view, our moral faculties and notions are justified insofar as they pass reflective scrutiny. But Smith's moral philosophy, unlike Hume's, is also peppered with references to God, to divine law, and to our being ‘set up’ in a specific way so as to best attain what is good and useful for us. This language suggests (...) that there is another strategy available for accounting for the authority of morality, one that would align Smith with teleological accounts of human nature and theological accounts of morality. The authority of Smith's impartial spectator would, on such an account, be derivative – it would be derived from the supreme authority of God. Such a view poses a serious challenge for contemporary interpreters of Smith who seek to read him as an empiricist, naturalist, and sentimentalist moral philosopher. This paper examines the textual evidence for this view, focusing on the role of the explicitly religious language found in a key section of Smith's Theory of Moral Sentiments. I argue that this language should neither be interpreted as merely ornamental, nor as providing a theological justification of morality. Rather, it is part of Smith's illustration of the psychological influence of religious beliefs, especially the beliefs in an all-seeing judge and in a just afterlife where all human actions will be accounted for and appropriately rewarded or punished. (shrink)

This work advances a theory of deliberation about the goals, projects and values that constitute a good or worthwhile life for a person. The central argument begins with the assumption that the concerns most people have in this kind of deliberation are to discover which goals are worth pursuing, or which ends worth valuing, given those features of ourselves that we find important on reflection, and choose our goals and values in such a way that our choices can bear our (...) reflective scrutiny. (shrink)

The article brings under scrutiny an understudied dialogical account about the deposition of the patriarch of Constantinople Nicholas IV Mouzalon (1147-51). A close reading shows that this is not an official record of the proceedings but a piece of fiction that deliberately inverts the generic conventions of the two types of texts indicative of the 12th-century literary landscape, namely 1) minutes of church councils and 2) syllogistic theological dialogues. The anonymous author invites the reader to recognize the all-familiar scheme (...) of the Socratic interrogation but eventually departs from it investing the protagonists (Manuel I Komnenos and Mouzalon) with features that distance them from their Platonic models. The text seems to be inextricably linked to Mouzalon’s canonical dilemma: can an archbishop who previously voluntarily fled from his office be appointed archbishop once again? In fact, the author’s primary concern is not the patriarch but the emperor, a judge-logician who is at one and the same time Socrates and more than Socrates, and the new language able to reflect the changing balance between the imperial and ecclesiastical powers in mid- 12th-century Byzantium. (shrink)

In this chapter I defend a methodological view about how we should conduct substantive ethical inquiries in the fields of normative and practical ethics. I maintain that the direct plausibility and implausibility of general ethical principles – once fully clarified and understood – should be foundational in our substantive ethical reasoning. I argue that, in order to expose our ethical intuitions about particular cases to maximal critical scrutiny, we must determine whether they can be justified by directly plausible principles. (...) To expose apparently plausible principles to maximal critical scrutiny, we must determine whether their direct plausibility can survive careful clarification of what they are really saying. This means that intuitions about cases are useful only in (a) suggesting principles that must stand on their own two feet, and (b) illustrating or otherwise helping us clarify what a principle is really saying. We should not reject principles that seem most directly plausible after we have fully clarified their content simply because they conflict with our intuitions about cases, because to do so is to side with uncritical prejudices over the teachings of critical scrutiny. (shrink)

Veksler and Gunzelmann argue that the vigilance decrement and the deleterious effects of sleep loss reflect functionally equivalent degradations in cognitive processing and performance. Our account is implemented in a cognitive architecture, where these factors produce breakdowns in goal-directed cognitive processing that we refer to as microlapses. Altmann raises a number of challenges to microlapses as a unified account of these deficits. Under scrutiny, however, the challenges do little to discredit the theory or conclusions in the original paper. In (...) our response, we address the most serious challenges. In so doing, we provide additional support for the theory and mechanisms, and we highlight opportunities for extending their explanatory breadth. (shrink)

_How does a man who once adored music beyond measure come to revile it as a form of tyranny?_ Throughout Pascal Quignard’s distinguished literary career, music has been a recurring obsession. As a musician he organized the International Festival of Baroque Opera and Theatre at Versailles in the early 1990s, and thus was instrumental in the rediscovery of much forgotten classical music. Yet in 1994 he abruptly renounced all musical activities. _The Hatred of Music_ is Quignard’s masterful exploration of the (...) power of music and what history reveals about the dangers it poses. From prehistoric chants to challenging contemporary compositions, Quignard reflects on music of all kinds and eras. He draws on vast cultural knowledge—the Bible, Greek mythology, early modern history, modern philosophy, the Holocaust, and more—to develop ten accessible treatises on music. In each of these small masterpieces the author exposes music’s potential to manipulate, to mesmerize, to domesticate. Especially disturbing is his scrutiny of the role music played in the concentration camps of Nazi Germany. Quignard’s provocative book takes on particular relevance today, as we find ourselves surrounded by music as never before in history. (shrink)

This essay explores the portrayal of Catholicism in eight Spanish anarchist-themed films. The first part discusses negative representations of the Catholic religion rehearsed in these films, set as they are mainly in the context of the Spanish Civil War. Among those representations are: the political and economic purpose of the Catholic Church’s control of education in Spain; the breaking of the religious vows of poverty and chastity, and the recourse to praising the vow of obedience when under scrutiny; and (...) the breaking of the seal of the confessional. In the second part, the essay shows that those films also portray a Christianity which can be more solidary, revolutionary and attached to a different idealization of Christ, unlike the Church consisting of high-ranking members of the clergy. This second part also considers the notion of “secularization” and the extent to which anarchism has become an alternative religion in these films. The essay also reflects on the reliability of films as historical sources. (shrink)

The use of Kant’s universalizability principle as a method of determining the warrantability of an ethical claim has two fundamental flaws. On the one hand, it renders the universalizing moralizer mute in the face of fanaticism, and, on the other, it too easily dissolves into irrational rule worship. In the face of such flaws,many have argued that this “rational” approach to ethics ought to be abandoned in favor of fanning the flames of sentiment. Such a proposal suggests that we have (...) trapped ourselves into a false dilemma. While there is no doubt that the employment of the universalizability principle is more “reflective” than simply following what springs from the heart, nonetheless, it is no where near the pinnacle of rationality to which we can aspire. Ethicists, like their natural and social scientific colleagues, can adopt a form of scientific ethicism that demands that the legitimacy of any ethical claim depends upon the degree to which the reasons that back it are subjected to the formal demands of both local and global sufficiency, and as well, that the legitimacy of the entire procedure survive scrutiny in a public forum of objective inquirers. Paradoxically, since this process is inter- rather than intra-subjective, and since the surviving claims will be maximally unbiased, the widespread adoption of scientific ethicism has the potential to proportionally expand “the circle of we”—which is precisely what critics of rationality, who advocate non-rational sentiment expansion, would have us do. (shrink)

Judicial Deliberations compares how and why the European Court of Justice, the French Cour de cassation and the US Supreme Court offer different approaches for generating judicial accountability and control, judicial debate and deliberation, and ultimately judicial legitimacy. Examining the judicial argumentation of the United States Supreme Court and of the French Cour de cassation, the book first reorders the traditional comparative understanding of the difference between French civil law and American common law judicial decision-making. It then uses this analysis (...) to offer the first detailed comparative examination of the interpretive practice of the European Court of Justice. Lasser demonstrates that the French judicial system rests on a particularly unified institutional and ideological framework founded on explicitly republican notions of meritocracy and managerial expertise. Law-making per se may be limited to the legislature; but significant judicial normative administration is entrusted to State selected, trained, and sanctioned elites who are policed internally through hierarchical institutional structures. The American judicial system, by contrast, deploys a more participatory and democratic approach that reflects a more populist vision. Shunning the unifying, controlling, and hierarchical French structures, the American judicial system instead generates its legitimacy primarily by argumentative means. American judges engage in extensive debates that subject them to public scrutiny and control. The ECJ hovers delicately between the institutional/argumentative and republican/democratic extremes. On the one hand, the ECJ reproduces the hierarchical French discursive structure on which it was originally patterned. On the other, it transposes this structure into a transnational context of fractured political and legal assumptions. This drives the ECJ towards generating legitimacy by adopting a somewhat more transparent argumentative approach. (shrink)

The “Universal Declaration of Human Rights” and the “Geneva Declaration” by the World Medical Association, both in 1948, were preceded by the foundation of the United Nations in New York (1945), the World Medical Association in London (1946) and the World Health Organization in Geneva (1948). After the end of World War II the community of nations strove to achieve and sustain their primary goals of peace and security, as well as their basic premise, namely the health of human beings. (...) All these associations were well aware of the crimes by medicine, in particular by the accused Nazi physicians at the Nuremberg Doctors Trial (1946/47, sentence: August 1947). During the first conference of the World Medical Association (September 1947) issues of medical ethics played a major role: and a new document was drafted concerning the values of the medical profession. After the catastrophe of the War and the criminal activities of scientists, the late 1940s saw increased scrutiny paid to fundamental questions of human rights and medical ethics, which are still highly relevant for today’s medicine and morality. The article focuses on the development of medical ethics and human rights reflected in the statement of important persons, codes and institutions in the field. (shrink)

Informed consent is the practical expression of the doctrine of autonomy. But the very idea of autonomy and conscious free choice is undercut by the view that human beings react as their unconscious brain centres dictate, depending on factors that may or may not be under rational control and reflection. This worry is, however, based on a faulty model of human autonomy and consciousness and needs close neurophilosophical scrutiny. A critique of the ethics implied by the model takes us (...) towards a 'care of the self' view of autonomy and the subject's attunement to the truth as the crux of reasoning rather than the inner mental/neural state views of autonomy and human choice on offer at present. (shrink)

This collection of essays represents a sample of the work carried out on the various urgent issues arising from the contemporary "war in terror" by researchers in the Department of Politics and International Relations, Swansea University UK and/or who attended the 2005 conference on politics and ethics at the University of Southern Mississippi (Gulf Coast). Certain specific topics are obviously prompted by this general theme; others dealt with in this book are perhaps not as obviously connected to it - though (...) they are no less important for that. This book is therefore intended to cover some ground in both types of topic and it is to be hoped that its contents will stimulate further reflection and writing on the deep controversies that recent events in world politics have stoked. However misguided much of the debate has been, many have contended that the present era is witnessing a "clash of civilisations", in which fundamentally different value-systems confront each other with their mutually opposed and antagonistic views of the world. This position often undergirds a moral relativism, which denies that there are any universal values: all we have, according to this outlook, are the different values of different cultures seeking (insofar as they "clash") to impose themselves on others. In the first essay, James Beard counters this argument with a case for what he calls a "thin universalism", a relatively sparse but powerful set of fundamental values which can credibly be demonstrated to have universal application.Many who supported the 2003 invasion of Iraq now oppose it, not on the grounds that they were wrong at the outset but that hindsight and subsequent events have given them new reasons to revise their judgements. This has led some to think that arguments about whether a war is just, and justified, can very often only be satisfactorily made "down the line", thus excusing initial support for a conflict which thereafter goes badly wrong. In her article, Christine Stender reminds us of many of the considerations that were available in 2003 itself which readily led to just-war arguments against launching the invasion at the time. It may be easy for the passage of time to cause us to forget those factors. But, given that we can only become more adept at making just-war judgements by reflecting on past experience, it is crucial not to let them disappear in the morass of subsequent experience. Arguably, the Abu Ghraib scandal did more than any other single event to undermine what moral credibility the American occupation of Iraq ever had. It certainly raised acute questions about the conception of "virtue" that the role of combatant in war ought to necessitate and, in his essay, J. Joseph Miller subjects this issue to close philosophical scrutiny, with particular focus on the ethics of torture. Traditional just war theory has been composed of two elements: jus ad bellum, which sets out moral criteria which may sanction the resort to war, and jus in bello, which provides moral rules for its actual conduct. Recent events, and in particular the tragically chaotic situation of post-invasion Iraq, have helped to make the case for a third element: jus post bellum, which deals with the rights and responsibilities of just combatants with respect to the pursuit of a just peace once conflict has ended. This remains an under-researched area and, in their article, Mark Evans and Christine Stender introduce a wide-ranging set of considerations towards the construction of an adequate account of jus post bellum. A concept that has surged to the fore in recent times has been that of a "failed state", which has been invoked as part of arguments for "humanitarian intervention." (Afghanistan is perhaps the most obvious and pertinent example.) It is, however, a highly contentious concept and many think it has nothing other than ideological, polemical value. Whilst admitting that it is prone to such (mis)use, Mark Evans argues, in his essay, that it can be given a determinate and useful normative content, even if it does not necessarily sanction the kind of foreign policies which certain Western leaders have thought it does. Most liberal democracies have responded to the "terror threat" by introducing emergency legislation, or by otherwise suspending in some way what they would "ordinarily" have regarded as inviolable basic liberties and legal safeguards. Nazeer Patel argues that this dangerously undercuts the moral authority that these states claim for themselves and urges that we rethink how liberal democracy should appropriately respond to terrorism; it may take courage not to "overreact" against it, but he plausibly suggests a more measured and morally preferable attitude for it to take. Finally, in her essay, Claire Delisle focuses on one of the more bitter conflicts within a liberal democracy of recent times which has, it seems, been resolved in favour of peaceful accommodation: that between the Nationalist and Unionist communities in the north of Ireland/Ulster. The full story of how this peace became possible has yet to be fully told, and she adds a vital element to the tale, of how incarcerated combatants developed attitudes, strategies and a culture which built the foundations for a process that eventually brought "The Troubles" to what, it is to be hoped, is a permanent end. With the exception of the editor's contributions, the research which is published here is the product of the intellectual labours of scholars who are in the early stages of their careers. This volume is, therefore, a compendium of work in progress and the authors hope that this publication will help to further their reflections; certainly, the issues with which they engage are a long way indeed from being exhausted in terms of the scholarly attention they demand. Obviously, their appearance together in the same volume should not be taken to imply that any of the contributors endorse anything of what any of the others argue. (shrink)

The concept of ‘humane healthcare’ cannot and may not be limited to a personal virtue. For elucidating its meaning and making it functional as a critical ethical criterion for healthcare as a social institution, it is necessary to reflect on the social, cultural, and historical conditions in which modern healthcare finds its offspring and its further development. Doing this is the object and aim of social ethics. Social ethics in itself covers a broad area of different approaches. A main division (...) can be made between a liberal and a communitarian approach. This article focuses on the latter and concentrates on one of its representatives, Charles Taylor. The paper starts with two clarifying paragraphs: one about the terms humane and human, a second about the scope of social ethics. Next, because the term humane presupposes a certain view of man, attention will be paid to the lack of consensus in this respect within modernity, using some reflections of Taylor. In his view, resigning in this lack is a threat for one of the main motives behind modernity: the pursuit of a good and meaningful life. In the following section Taylor's analysis is applied to contemporary healthcare, by means of two examples. At the end the question is raised how to promote humane healthcare? In a short and conclusive sketch, three suggestions are offered for further research: scrutiny of goals and meanings within healthcare and culture, the broadening of the concept of autonomy and the upholding of human dignity as an intrinsic and imperative value. (shrink)