We kindly inform you that, as long as the subject affiliation of our 300.000+ articles is in progress, you might get unsufficient or no results on your third level or second level search. In this case, please broaden your search criteria.
This article addresses the issue of how moral philosophy and social sciences can play a role in defining visions of a better future for humanity. The author analyzes Hilary Putnam’s relevant ideas in this respect, including the possible impact of knowledge obtained through literature in this process. The article emphasizes two aspects of Putnam’s discussion. First, the author focuses on what underlies the current inability of social sciences and practical reasoning to perform their proper visionary functions. Second, the author presents certain potentially interesting consequences of Putnam’s ideas on errors in practical reasoning, which are applicable to a classical debate in this field.
More...
The article is based on a lecture given by the author as a PP-presentation on the occasion of her election to the academic rank of professor in 2015. The reference to the popular proverb “Friendship is friendship but cheese costs money”, does not evoke the usual opposition of ethics and business, but, quite to the contrary, illustrates business ethics. It is assumed that the statement gives a good idea of: (1) business ethics – i.e., the possibility to apply ethical standards to business; (2) the specificity of this application; (3) the specificity of ethical standards applied to business. The elucidation of these three questions not only clarifies important issues of business ethics but shows that the proverb is relevant to them. This ultimately helps understand (4) the actual place of friendship in business and why, even for friends, cheese costs money. The structure and content of the article follow this logical order. The conclusion refers to some hazards associated with the extrapolation of the understanding of friendship in business to all human relationships.
More...
The main aim of the article is to argue the existence of a necessary link between the expansion of utilitarianism in the Victorian-Age and the problems we find today in the ethical thinking of modern liberal democratic societies, whose fundamental institutions and structural changes of the public field are still, to a certain degree, under the sway of that influential philosophical doctrine. In pursuing this aim, I make a closer study of the utilitarian philosophy of Henry Sidgwick, insofar as he is the main representative of utilitarianism in the late Victorian Age. Moreover, Sidgwick is the ethical philosopher who succeeded in adapting the system of classical utilitarianism to the dynamically changing world of the late 19th century. He was one of the first modern philosophers whose works established conditions for the emergence of the analytical tradition in ethics. Due to this, we must have a clearer understanding of the specific changes in the body of utilitarian ethics in the late Victorian Аge that brought about the emergence of today’s modern ethical discourse.
More...
Тhe text is focused on the interpretation of Aristotle's conception of the human being as a citizen, as a political creature, and his view on happiness as the goal of humans. The article discusses Machiavelli’s and Weber’s ideas – emblematic for modernity – about the relation between ethics and politics, and the theoretical reflection of this relation in the context of contemporary society as a risk society and in the globalized world. The article aims to distinguish, based on comparative analysis, between Aristotle's understanding of ethics and politics as two sides of the same coin, i.e., as aspects of the life of people in a community. The article discusses the importance of Aristotle’s view of humans as beings that are political because they are ethical and ethical because they are political.
More...
The purpose of the present study is that of examining what I call Robert Nozick’s “evolutionist turn” in ethics. More specifically, my aim is to provide an answer to the following question: what type of ethical theory does Robert Nozick sketch in his last book, Invariances? My first objective will be that of delineating the philosophical framework which will accommodate my future discussion, highlighting the distinction between the metaphysical and scientific approaches to ethics as proposed by Ken Binmore, but also Emanuel Socaciu's taxonomy of ethical theories, which stems from the particular way in which moral philosophers tackle the nature of ethical norms and moral motivation. I then set forth to show that, in the philosophical framework previously described, Robert Nozick's approach from Anarchy, State, and Utopia should be seen as a metaphysical one. The last and most important part of my study aims to show how Nozick's “evolutionist turn” took place and developed, from his perspective on rationality in The Nature of Rationality, to his ethical theory advanced in Invariances.
More...
Processuality as refusal to “freeze,” “eternize,” and fragment reality is an attempt to deconstruct the I’s main mechanism, which is, as it was named in psychoanalysis, the compulsion of repetition. Through this deceit and illusion fabrication mechanism, the knowing I tries to “freeze”, to “fixate” and to fragment reality, through “catching” it in different images, formulae, dogmas, theories, ideologies, symbols and systems which become just as many “icons” or graven images of reality. This attempt of deconstruction is made from the perspective of a philosophy/ vision of process, quite sporadic in the Western space, bringing arguments from the perspective of Henri Bergson and Emil Cioran’s intuitionist philosophy, as well as from that of the new scientific paradigm of quantum mechanics. All these philosophies could be seen as philosophies of process, demanding as it were an understanding of reality in terms of process, and not of result. This understanding of process takes place with the help of intuition, the only one which can grasp, beyond the static, rigid and artificial concepts or categories of the intellect, the movement, “verb” or interior pulsation of things within the framework of an integration process which reveals the unity, non-separability, intercorrelation and mutual interconnectivity of things.
More...
In the present inquiry I explore the concept of conceptual analysis, looking for ways for it to be improved, and I come to the following conclusions. Conceptual analysis as ordinarily understood in analytic philosophy is a method which consists in drawing a conclusion about what the definition of a predicate is on the basis of an armchair investigation into whether the predicate is semantically applicable in different possible cases; but, the concept of conceptual analysis can be improved by making two changes to it: 1) the investigation into whether the predicate is semantically applicable in different possible cases is not to serve as a basis for a conclusion about what the definition of the predicate is, but as a basis for a conclusion about whether this-and-this is an only necessary, only sufficient, both necessary and sufficient, or neither necessary nor sufficient condition for the predicate’s semantic application; 2) the investigation into whether the predicate is semantically applicable in different possible cases is done not only from the armchair, but also empirically.
More...
In the first part of this text, the author exposes the main features of the liberal or civic state, because both communitarians and multiculturalists tend to criticize that type of state. Their critique of the liberal state and the liberal self as an unencumbered self is “culturalist” by its character. However, it is an expression of conceptual confusion, i.e. of their incomprehension of an essential difference between two conceptual levels: one that belongs to the purely normative rights-justifying perspective and the other that refers to the ontological perspective. Consequently, both of them reject the central liberal thesis according to which the right is prior to the good. The author agrees with an assessment of Richard Robson that multiculturalism is only a form of communitarianism. Contrary to communitarians and multiculturalists, he additionally argues that collective rights are incompatible with the civic state in its pure form because there are structural differences between civic and specific minority rights. Further, the author attempts to show that communitarianism and multiculturalism are forms of postmodernism. Namely, brought to their ultimate logical consequences, the mentioned orientations can be connected to the postmodern notion of radical, irreducible difference. In the conclusive part of the text, he summarizes the common points of communitarianism and multiculturalism and emphasizes the importance of these contemporary theoretical tendencies.
More...
This paper examines toleration at two levels. At the first level, liberal individualism is concerned that the individual must be as free as possible to pursue their own goals and lifestyles. At the second level, liberal political theory is concerned with the value of liberal political culture and institutions and how to maintain and protect them. I argue that we can learn a great deal about the exercise of toleration and respect at the level of the liberal polity by examining them at the level of the liberal individual. Both tolerance and intolerance at the level of the polity must be principled. Principled tolerance and intolerance have the following features. First, the judgment whether to tolerate a particular belief or practice must be based on the value of toleration itself, not pragmatic political requirements. Second, it should be an issue of setting aside moral principles and convictions rather than dislikes, prejudices or fears. Third, it should respect the distinction between the public and the private, and should only recognise an issue as one of toleration if there is a public impact at stake.
More...
The limits of tolerance are discussed in this article with regard to the status of religious, ethnic, and national minorities in liberal-democratic societies. The question that the author is trying to answer is this: how can minority policies be designed in such a way that they provide the due conditions for the reproduction of minority identities over time which, at the same time, do not compromise national integrity. The line of demarcation between these two kinds of policy would also be the limit of tolerance, concerning the role of these identities in society. In the first part of the article a critical analysis is made of the policy of cultural neutrality of the state, based on the differentiation between the approaches to minority issues in the public and in the private life of the citizens. In the second part an alternative possible solution is presented―to draw the limits of tolerance by means of the legitimization of minority policies via public communication which is protected from manipulations by means of the methodology of public deliberation.
More...
The deepening and development of epistemological issues on the one hand, and the unpleasant historical experience on the other hand, made modern humanity after the Renaissance gradually became tolerant and recognized "the Other." The epistemological basis for tolerance is the obscurity and complexity of truth and difference in the understanding of human beings. Its moral basis is not to see oneself as above others and to endure the intricacies of practicing morality. Tolerance is rational for two reasons: one is the epistemological basis that hinders the dogma of possessing absolute truth, self-knowledge, and repudiating others; the other is the advantages of tolerance for collective living. This article seeks to show that Rumi, while paying attention to the moral and epistemological principles of tolerance, goes beyond the rational tolerance of calculating profits, losses, and trading. According to his mystical view, his tolerance is a “loving tolerance,” a tolerance which is based solely on love and compassion towards human beings, rather than being based on calculations of profit and loss, with no expectation for reward.
More...
When it comes to specifying the moral duties we bear towards future generations, most political philosophers position themselves on what could be regarded as a safe ground. A variant of the Lockean proviso is commonplace in the literature on intergenerational justice, taking the form of an obligation to bestow upon future people a minimum of goods necessary for reaching a certain threshold of well-being (Meyer, 2017). Furthermore, even this minimum is often frowned upon, given the non-identity problem and the challenges this presents to the topic of justice between generations. Additional issues are raised at the level of non-ideal theory, the most significant being the problem of non-compliance (Gosseries and Meyer, 2009). In this paper I intend to probe the limits of “practical political possibility” (Rawls 1999), by inquiring whether embracing the sufficiency view (Frankfurt, 1987; Crisp, 2003; Benbaji, 2005) as a distributive pattern and capabilities as a metric can lead to more burdensome obligations for present generations. More specifically, I try to show that we have a duty to invest in research that aims at prolonging the lifespan of humans (the idea can already be found in the sufficientarian literature, for instance in Farrelly, 2007). Moreover, given the Earth’s limited resources, we ought to encourage the terraforming of other planets in order to make them inhabitable for (future) people. I argue that these two seemingly far-fetched projects are in fact worthwhile goals to pursue on the one hand, and moral obligations on the other hand. Nonetheless, they are not the only ones we ought to take on; for instance, we must simultaneously pursue them and try to improve the prospects of those who fall under a sufficiency threshold here and now. That is, specifying these (prima facie) duties towards future generations is connected with stronger obligations towards the current generation. Towards the end of the paper I engage in a discussion regarding the role of the feasibility constraint in a theory of justice, as rationales pertaining to feasibility are perhaps going to be the most recurrent criticisms raised against my proposal. To that end, I defend limitarian policies, which aim at setting an upper limit to how much money individuals are allowed to possess (Robeyns, 2017; Volacu and Dumitru, 2019).
More...
In this paper, one of my primary objectives is to analyze why adopting particular machine-learning techniques and using a moral AI as an adviser is an insufficient condition for eradicating racist human attitudes. By outlining some difficulties in justifying what artificial “explicit ethical agents” in Moor’s sense should look like, I explore why, even if the development of machine-learning techniques can be accepted in epistemic terms, it does not follow that the techniques in question will have a positive impact in changing immoral human behavior.
More...
The main aim of this paper is to examine the tangible forms of cultural heritage represented by European hospital buildings from states across the Black Sea that are still functional or have been closed, and that are subjected, due to the lack of sustainable financial means for conservation and restoration, to degradation, abandonment, and destruction. For the purpose of this analysis, I will tackle both elements of the operational plan of hospital buildings that have been evaluated and registered as national monuments, from the perspective of their clinical functionality, and the elements of architecture and aesthetic forms behind such structures that embrace medical canons and particularities. Therefore, hospitals will be treated as entities of tangible cultural heritage that develop, through their complementary medical and cultural history, forms of intangible cultural heritage. This wide range of buildings can be reduced to two operational categories: hospital buildings designed from the beginning to fulfil a clinical functionality, and cultural buildings – from ecumenical establishments, castles, or villas, such as hermitages and churches, to military structures, such as garrisons – which have been adapted for historical, social, or political reasons to clinical conversion. I will analyse not only the national constraints, prejudgments, and values that contributed to a certain medical and cultural imaginary of state hospitals as monuments, but also the similar strategies and cultural policies that different states across the Black Sea have adopted in preserving the memory and structure of these buildings. The main question I address is: To what extent is it possible to create a network Black Sea region state hospitals as European cultural monuments, and what advantages might this bring to the attempt to perform a more reflective and inclusive notion of European identity? The current research is designed to be a starting point for the development of transectorial public policies, which could lead to an improvement in standards for quality of life, the infrastructures of medical units, and the preservation of tangible forms of cultural heritage, such as the public state hospitals classified as monuments.
More...
A world in constant motion, in a state of migration turbulence, presents humanity with new challenges and risks. Globalization is a blessing or a tragedy for humanity, occasioning the problem of how to preserve one’s identity, remaining “one’s own among strangers” while, at the same time, not becoming “a stranger among one’s own.” Integration processes in the world today are met with resistance by multidirectional processes that encourage a critical engagement with all spheres of life in modern society in order to counteract forces of depersonalization and the disappearance of one's identity – one's self – as expressed in the preservation of one's ethnic group, culture, religion, and so on. This is especially evident in attempts at preserving identity within Muslim communities in European countries. Given the growing Muslim population in Europe, it has become obvious that “European” and “Islamic” values are opposed in the context of preserving one's own identity, which is increasingly manifested in a religious context. Europe today has become a hostage of its values, which are despised by many of the immigrants who have poured into its borders. These are tolerance, political correctness, multiculturalism, democracy, and freedom of speech, among others, which are perceived as weakness and indecision. Eastern mentality, habits, and traditions are sometimes very different from European ones. The author examines the transformation of Muslim identity and the compatibility of “European” and “Islamic” values. The article also presents the opinions of various researchers on this issue, and provides possible scenarios for the trajectory of events, given continued intercultural contact through immigration and given the stakes and state of this collision of values.
More...