What makes trust such a powerful concept? Is it merely that in trust the whole range of social forces that we know play together? Or is it that trust involves a peculiar element beyond those we can account for? While trust is an attractive and evocative concept that has gained increasing popularity across the social sciences, it remains elusive, its many facets and applications obscuring a clear overall vision of its essence. In this book, Guido Möllering reviews a broad range (...) of trust research and extracts three main perspectives adopted in the literature for understanding trust. Accordingly, trust is presented as a matter of reason, routine or reflexivity. While all these perspectives contribute something to our understanding of trust, Möllering shows that they imply, but cannot explain, ‘suspension’ – the leap of faith that is typical of trust. He therefore proposes a new direction in trust research that builds on existing perspectives but places the suspension of uncertainty and vulnerability at the heart of the concept of trust. Beyond a purely theoretical line of argument, the author discusses implications for empirical studies of trust and presents original case material that captures the experience of trust in terms of reason, routine, reflexivity and suspension. Möllering concludes by suggesting how the new approach can enhance the relevance of trust research and its contributions to broader research agendas concerning the constitution of positive expectations in the face of prevalent uncertainty and change at various levels in our economies and societies. The book is essential reading for anyone who wants to gain a thorough understanding of trust. It can serve as a general introduction for advanced students and scholars in the social sciences, especially in economics, sociology, psychology and management. For more experienced researchers, it is a challenging and provocative critique of the field and a new approach to understanding trust. (shrink)

The authors of this volume — all of them recognized representatives of a wide range of academic disciplines — agree that Locke’s work must have had a considerable influence both on English and German literature and the visual arts of Great Britain, especially in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. From the perspective of interdisciplinarity and intertextuality, the essays presented here deal with Locke as a source of ideas for Archibald Alison, John Constable, Daniel Defoe, Henry Fielding, Oliver Goldsmith, Johann Timotheus (...) Hermes, William Hogarth, Immanuel Kant, Martin Knutzen, Gottfried Wilhelm von Leibniz, Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, George Lillo, Edward Moore, Johann Gottwerth Müller, Joshua Reynolds, Samuel Richardson, John Ruskin, Joseph Spence, Laurence Sterne, J. M. W. Turner and Thomas Whately, among others. (shrink)

It is natural for those with permissive attitudes toward abortion to suppose that, if they have examined all of the arguments they know against abortion and have concluded that they fail, their moral deliberations are at an end. Surprisingly, this is not the case, as I argue. This is because the mere risk that one of those arguments succeeds can generate a moral reason that counts against the act. If this is so, then liberals may be mistaken about the morality (...) of abortion. However, conservatives who claim that considerations of risk rule out abortion in general are mistaken as well. Instead, risk-based considerations generate an important but not necessarily decisive reason to avoid abortion. The more general issue that emerges is how to accommodate fallibilism about practical judgment in our decision-making. (shrink)

Empirical evidence indicates that bereaved spouses are surprisingly muted in their responses to their loss, and that after a few months many of the bereaved return to their emotional baseline. Psychologists think this is good news: resilience is adaptive, and we should welcome evidence that there is less suffering in the world. I explore various reasons we might have for regretting our resilience, both because of what resilience tells us about our own significance vis-à-vis loved ones, and because resilience may (...) render us incapable of comprehending how things really stand, valuewise. I also compare our actual dispositions to extreme alternatives (“sub-resilience” and “super-resilience”), and consider whether we might endorse (plain) resilience as a kind of mean. (shrink)

This paper discusses two epistemic principles that are important to buyers and sellers: the appeal to popularity and the appeal to incentive structures. I point out the various ways these principles are defeasible, and then offer some examples of them at work in the contexts of hiring, politics and the arts. Finally, I consider why these principles are generally neglected, and conclude that our neglect is unwarranted on both epistemic and moral grounds.

Most people don’t want their teachers, scientists, or journalists to be too ideological. Calling someone an “ideologue” isn’t a compliment. But what is ideology and why exactly is it a threat? I propose that ideology is fruitfully understood in terms of three ingredients: a basic moral claim, a worldview built on top of that claim, and the attempt to politicize this worldview by injecting it into social institutions. I further argue that the central danger of ideology is that activating these (...) three ingredients tends to undermine liberal social institutions. And yet a certain amount of ideology is both unavoidable and desirable, as I show, since it supplies us with important goods like social cohesion and mobilization. This means the best we can do is to try and set boundaries on ideology. (shrink)

The rapid spread of judicially-enforced constitutional rights has been one of the most dramatic developments in modern law. This book argues that there is now a global model for how such rights should function, and develops an original, philosophically grounded, account of their nature and scope.

Consider our attitude toward painful and pleasant experiences depending on when they occur. A striking but rarely discussed feature of our attitude which Derek Parfit has emphasized is that we strongly wish painful experiences to lie in our past and pleasant experiences to lie in our future. Our asymmetrical attitudes toward future and past pains and pleasures can be forcefully illustrated by means of a thought-experiment described by Parfit (1984, 165) which I will paraphrase as follows: You are in the (...) hospital to have an extremely painful but completely safe operation for which you can be given no anaesthetic. In order to ease recovery, you know that the hospital will give you drugs that cause you to forget your operation as soon as it is completed. You wake up, not remembering having gone to sleep, and ask the nurse if your operation has been completed. She tells you that there were two patients for this operation and she cannot remember which you are: either you already had your operation and it was the longest such operation ever performed, lasting ten hours, or else you are the other patient in which case your operation is imminent, but will last only one hour. 1. I wish to thank Sarah Broadie for comments on a version of this paper and Derek Parfit for conversations on this subject. (shrink)

This article discusses the aesthetic concept of boringness, of which there has been relatively little philosophical discussion, especially along its objective, nonpsychological dimensions. I begin by confronting skepticism about the validity of judgments about boringness and rebut suggestions to the effect that these judgments are inevitably compromised by mistakes or vices of the audience. The article then develops an account focused on certain kinds of reasonable expectations we form in a given aesthetic context. I go on to confront the question (...) of whether boringness is inevitable given the internal imperatives of works of art and illustrate the discussion with Richard Wagner's Ring cycle. Although I focus on art, I conclude by drawing some connections with the boring in everyday life. (shrink)

Drawing on an analysis of German national cybersecurity policy, this paper argues that cybersecurity has become a key site in which states mobilize science and technology to produce state power. Contributing to science and technology studies work on technoscience and statecraft, I develop the concepts of “territorialization projects” and “digital territory” to capture how the production of state power in the digital age increasingly relies on technoscientific expertise about information infrastructure, shifting tasks of government into the domain of computer scientists (...) and network engineers. The notion of territorialization projects describes states’ ongoing struggle to mobilize science and engineering in order to transform globally distributed information infrastructure into bounded national territory and invest it with patriotic meaning: making digital territory. Digital territory, in other words, is nationalized information infrastructure: it includes building and monopolizing infrastructure as well as normative ideas about nation—who is a digital citizen, and who isn’t; or what constitutes “good” and “bad” digital citizens. Nationalizing information infrastructure and placing statecraft into the hands of scientists and engineers might indicate an emerging form of “techno-nationalism”—a combination of nationalist and technocratic tendencies—raising urgent questions for STS scholarship to investigate the consequences of territorialization projects for justice, democracy, and civic life. (shrink)

abstract Even though much research has been devoted to studies of safety, the concept of safety is in itself under‐theorised, especially concerning its relation to epistemic uncertainty. In this paper we propose a conceptual analysis of safety. The paper explores the distinc‐tion between absolute and relative safety, as well as that between objective and subjective safety. Four potential dimensions of safety are discussed, viz. harm, probability, epistemic uncertainty, and control. The first three of these are used in the proposed definition (...) of safety, whereas it is argued that control should not be included in a reasonable definition of safety. It is shown that strictly speaking, an objective safety concept is not attainable. Instead, an intersubjective concept is proposed that brings us as close as possible to an objective concept. (shrink)

Polygamy, forced marriage, female genital mutilation, punishing women for being raped, differential access for men and women to health care and education, unequal rights of ownership, assembly, and political participation, unequal vulnerability to violence. These practices and conditions are standard in some parts of the world. Do demands for multiculturalism — and certain minority group rights in particular — make them more likely to continue and to spread to liberal democracies? Are there fundamental conflicts between our commitment to gender equity (...) and our increasing desire to respect the customs of minority cultures or religions? In this book, the eminent feminist Susan Moller Okin and fifteen of the world’s leading thinkers about feminism and multiculturalism explore these unsettling questions in a provocative, passionate, and illuminating debate. Okin opens by arguing that some group rights can, in fact, endanger women. She points, for example, to the French government’s giving thousands of male immigrants special permission to bring multiple wives into the country, despite French laws against polygamy and the wives’ own bitter opposition to the practice. Okin argues that if we agree that women should not be disadvantaged because of their sex, we should not accept group rights that permit oppressive practices on the grounds that they are fundamental to minority cultures whose existence may otherwise be threatened. In reply, some respondents reject Okin’s position outright, contending that her views are rooted in a moral universalism that is blind to cultural difference. Others quarrel with Okin’s focus on gender, or argue that we should be careful about which group rights we permit, but not reject the category of group rights altogether. Okin concludes with a rebuttal, clarifying, adjusting, and extending her original position. These incisive and accessible essays — expanded from their original publication in Boston Review and including four new contributions — are indispensable reading for anyone interested in one of the most contentious social and political issues today. The diverse contributors, in addition to Okin, are Azizah al-Hibri, Abdullahi An-Na’im, Homi Bhabha, Sander Gilman, Janet Halley, Bonnie Honig, Will Kymlicka, Martha Nussbaum, Bhikhu Parekh, Katha Pollitt, Robert Post, Joseph Raz, Saskia Sassen, Cass Sunstein, and Yael Tamir. (shrink)

There is an obvious, perhaps even trite, argument against getting married which deserves our attention. Reduced to a crude sketch, the argument is simply that, most of us view the prospect of being married in the absence of mutual love with something like horror or at least great antipathy; the mutual love between us and our spouse existing at the inception of our marriage may very well fail to persist; and hence when we marry we are putting ourselves in the (...) position of quite possibly ending up in a loveless marriage of the sort we acknowledge to be undesirable, and this is a mistake. (shrink)

This paper addresses two questions: first, when making decisions about what to do, does the mere fact that we will feel regretful or guilty or proud afterward give us reason to act? I argue that these emotions of self-assessment give us little or no reason to act. The second question concerns emotional valence--how desirable or undesirable our emotions are. What is it that determines the valence of an emotion like regret? I argue that the valence of emotions, and indeed of (...) feelings like pain more broadly, is a function of the sensations they involve. As I suggest, understanding the point about emotional valence helps us answer the first question about anticipated emotions. The paper concludes with a discussion of death-bed regrets, and of whether teenagers should listen to their annoying parents. (shrink)

The call for transparency is one of the main slogans of the political present. While Anita Möllering, following the agenda of the “Piraten-Partei”, mostly addresses the demand for transparency to political actors and relates it to democratic procedures, Claus Leggewie discusses the downsides of this fundamentally democratic demand. From this point of view, the central conflict concerns the fixation of the “Piraten-Partei” on a transparent state, while the users of social media hardly reflect on the intransparency of its private commercial (...) operators in a critical way. (shrink)

Quantum computing technologies have become a hot topic in academia and industry receiving much attention and financial support from all sides. Building a quantum computer that can be used practically is in itself an outstanding challenge that has become the ‘new race to the moon’. Next to researchers and vendors of future computing technologies, national authorities are showing strong interest in maturing this technology due to its known potential to break many of today’s encryption techniques, which would have significant and (...) potentially disruptive impact on our society. It is, however, quite likely that quantum computing has beneficial impact on many computational disciplines. In this article we describe our vision of future developments in scientific computing that would be enabled by the advent of software-programmable quantum computers. We thereby assume that quantum computers will form part of a hybrid accelerated computing platform like GPUs and co-processor cards do today. In particular, we address the potential of quantum algorithms to bring major breakthroughs in applied mathematics and its applications. Finally, we give several examples that demonstrate the possible impact of quantum-accelerated scientific computing on society. (shrink)

Résumé Les philosophes ont longtemps peiné à expliquer le décalage entre les émotions et leurs objets à travers le temps, comme lorsque nous cessons de pleurer ou de ressentir de la colère malgré la persistance de la cause sous-jacente. Je défends une approche sceptique qui soutient que ces changements émotionnels manquent souvent d’adéquation rationnelle. L’observation clé est que nos émotions doivent périodiquement se réinitialiser pour des raisons purement fonctionnelles qui n’ont rien à voir avec cette adéquation. Je compare ce point (...) de vue à l’approche sceptique de Hume en matière de croyance, et je conclus que la résistance à cette approche repose sur une confusion similaire à celle qu’il identifie. (shrink)

This article investigates the relationship between popular sovereignty, populism, and deliberative democracy. My main thesis is that populisms resurrect the polemical dimension of popular sovereignty by turning “the people” against the “powerbloc” or the “elite”, and that it is crucial thatthis terrain not be ceded to authoritarian distortions of this basic contestatory grammar. Furthermore, I contend that populist forms of politics are compatible with a procedural and deliberative conception of democracy. Ifirst engage with the assumption that populism and a procedural (...) model of democracy are incompatible, demonstrating that this assumption relies on a conservative bias which tiesthe exercising of communicative power to a “duty of civility”. I then engage with radical-democratic reconstructions of the procedural notion of popular sovereignty which emphasize the unleashing and diversification of peoplehood in communication circuits and the mutual permeability of constitutional politics, parliamentary legislation, and the public sphere. Thirdly, I conclude that populisms are an essential part of communicative power in modern democracies and part of its dialectical structure. (shrink)

This chapter focuses on developing an experimental technique for inducing flow and creating instances of effortless action in the laboratory. The effort to experimentally induce flow involves two conditions which are correlated with the flow state: The firstis the idea that the challenges of a given task are well within one’s capabilities; the other involves perceived goals and immediate feedback from the given task. The chapter explores these factors along with other contextual factors, including autonomy and distractions, to experimentally induce (...) flow and demonstrate instances of effortless action in the laboratory. One of the most extensively used approaches for experimental induction of flow in the laboratory involves exploring difficulty levels of video games. (shrink)

The last two decades have witnessed a wide-ranging and global discussion of the theory and structure of human and constitutional rights. This debate initially focused on the principle of proportionality and subsequently on the related ideas of the ‘culture of justification’ and the ‘right to justification.’ There is now a far-reaching agreement that both proportionality and justification in human and constitutional rights law are concerned with the reasonableness, alternatively the justification in terms of public reason, of the act under consideration. (...) Thus, reasonableness and/or public reason have assumed a, perhaps the, central place in the theory of human and constitutional rights. (shrink)

In the jurisprudence of constitutional courts around the world, there is an emerging trend towards an autonomy-based understanding of constitutional rights: increasingly, rights are interpreted as being about enabling people to live autonomous lives, rather than disabling the state in certain ways. This article investigates the conception of autonomy employed by courts by presenting two candidates and examining which of them explains the current practice of constitutional rights law better. The first, labelled the excluded reasons conception of autonomy, claims that (...) a person’s autonomy is violated if he is treated on the basis of certain impermissible—in particular, moralistic or paternalistic—reasons. It is concluded that, while this is a coherent understanding of autonomy, it cannot explain many of the rights that are widely accepted today. The second, the protected interests conception, argues that a person has autonomy interests in controlling certain domains of her life, and offers a scale on which the importance of the various autonomy interests can be assessed. The article demonstrates that this conception is coherent and adequately explains the current practice. The final section briefly explores some implications of this result for a comprehensive reconstructive theory of constitutional rights. (shrink)

Many philosophers believe that just as moral reasons do not diminish in force across space, so they do not diminish across time, and that we should accordingly be neutral between the interests of present people and future people. This allows them to make the plausible claim that we should not discount the interests of future generations when making decisions about things like consuming scarce resources.1 However, when this outlook is combined with a small number of fairly weak assumptions, it becomes (...) difficult to resist answering the title-question in the affirmative.2 By analogy, it also becomes hard to deny that we should delay aid intended to prevent suffering short of death as well. Although I will be arguing that we should take this view seriously, my goal is to explain it, not to vindicate it. (shrink)

The Bachelor's Argument against marriage, as I described it in this journal,1 says that marriage involves taking an imprudent risk of finding oneself committed to a relationship with someone one does not love. The evidence indicates that many people who marry eventually find themselves without the feelings for the other person which made a marital relationship seem worthwhile in the first place; and were that to happen to us, it would seem highly undesirable nonetheless to be locked into a relationship (...) with our spouse as a result of the commitment we made when we married. I went on to argue that several obvious responses to this argument fail. In particular, if we enter into marriage without genuinely intending to keep our promise of maintaining a relationship with our spouse, we will be making an insincere promise. Alternatively, if our promise is sincere, but the morality of promise-keeping is such that when our feelings for the other person fade away the moral force of our commitment is canceled, then the commitment itself seems otiose. However, I did not consider all of the possible responses to the argument, and Iddo Landau has recently made an interesting suggestion about how to interpret the marriage commitment in a way that does not render it immoral or pointless.2 His proposal is that what we are committing ourselves to when we marry is ‘to invest work in performing certain acts that are likely to sustain the. (shrink)

:Debates about libertarianism and redistribution often revolve around self-ownership. There are two main reasons for this: first, self-ownership is often featured in Lockean accounts of property that endow us with a claim to the resources that are up for redistribution. Second, self-ownership has sometimes been mustered as a way of resisting the additional labor that is said to be required by redistributive schemes. In this essay, I argue that these appeals to self-ownership are misguided. However, unlike most critics of these (...) appeals, I don’t wish to claim that redistribution is therefore vindicated. On the contrary, my main goal is to show that there are alternatives to invoking self-ownership that are more effective and that better capture the core intuition behind libertarian objections to redistribution. (shrink)

A recent judgment by a lower court in Germany brought the problem of ritual male circumcision to the consciousness of the wider public and legal academia. This essay weighs in on this emerging discussion and argues that ritual male circumcision is not covered by parental authority. It first considers and dismisses the best interest of the child test, which is the most widely used test of parental authority in legal practice. Instead, the essay proposes what it terms the autonomy conception (...) of parental authority, according to which parental authority must be exercised such as to ensure that the child will become an autonomous adult. While parents may raise their child in line with their ethical, including religious, convictions, respect for his autonomy requires that this be done in a way that allows the child to later distance himself from these values; this implies, among other things, that irreversible physical changes are impermissible. (shrink)

There is probably no conceptualization of rights more famous than Ronald Dworkin’s claim that they are “trumps.” This seems to stand in stark contrast to the dominant, proportionality-based strand of rights discourse, according to which rights, instead of trumping competing interests, ultimately have to be balanced against them. The goal of this article is to reconcile Dworkin’s work and proportionality and thereby make a contribution to our understanding of both. It offers a critical reconstruction of Dworkin’s theory of rights which (...) does away with the misleading label of rights as “trumps” and shows that, far from being in conflict with proportionality, properly understood Dworkin’s work supports and supplements that doctrine and provides a much-needed account of its moral foundation as being about human dignity, freedom, and equality. (shrink)

Modern democratic polities regularly operate at several political levels. In the case of the EU at the level of the member-states and the EU itself, and in addition at federal, regional, and municipal levels. Is there any democratic rule to determine which level is more legitimate than the others? The article argues that from a majoritarian perspective there is none. Individual citizens may have quite different preferences with regard to the level that is of particular political importance for them. The (...) article critically analyses different concepts, from sovereignty to demos, subsidiarity, and the judicial review of competences, and tries to show that none of them can provide a solution to the dilemma. Instead, democratic theory has to assume that in the co-evolutionary process of institutions and societies at different political levels, the question of the final say has to be left open. (shrink)

:Following Locke, philosophical discussion of private property has tended to focus on the acquisition of natural resources as central. In this paper I first pursue the idea that the resource paradigm doesn't apply to most developed economies, and show how this creates problems for many accounts of property. My second ambition is to draw a normative conclusion by showing that redistribution of wealth generated in the context of services is more difficult to justify compared with the natural resource paradigm philosophers (...) have often focused on. (shrink)

Drawing on Arnold Schönberg’s seminal opera “Moses and Aron”, the comment focuses on the role of holistic politics in Andrew Arato’s and Jean L. Cohen’s “Populism and Civil Society”. It argues that their anti-populist stance is too quick in dismissing a politics which is driven by representing and re-constituting the whole of the social order. Against this backdrop, a rejuvenation of the political left may not consist in a rejection of holism as such but in a popular politics which relies (...) on functional equivalences. (shrink)

It is natural for those with permissive attitudes toward abortion to suppose that, if they have examined all of the arguments they know against abortion and have concluded that they fail, their moral deliberations are at an end. Surprisingly, this is not the case, as I argue. This is because the mere risk that one of those arguments succeeds can generate a moral reason that counts against the act. If this is so, then liberals may be mistaken about the morality (...) of abortion. However, conservatives who claim that considerations of risk rule out abortion in general are mistaken as well. Instead, riskbased considerations generate an important but not necessarily decisive reason to avoid abortion. The more general issue that emerges is how to accommodate fallibilism about practical judgment in our decision-making. (shrink)

Antoine Berman became well known for his contribution to translation studies with his ’thirteen deformation tendencies’, recognized as his major work and published in 1985. This article sustains that in 1983, in the text Bildung et Bildungsroman, Berman found the fundamentals for his theory in the German Bildung. The cultural formation of mankind as the emergence to humankind and the translation as one of its principal agents, therefore, manifests its centrality for Berman ́s proposal of translation as a shelter of (...) the far-away (l ́auberge du lointain). (shrink)

Recently, theorists have pointed to the role of improvisation in practical reasoning and in gaining new moral knowledge. Laura and François Schroeter have gone even further by suggesting an account of competence with evaluative terms based on holistic improvisation. I argue, however, that they fail in their task. Through a challenge of their key claim against Allan Gibbard’s alternative account, I demonstrate that Schroeter and Schroeter provide only partial constraints on competence, and thus that their account lacks the content to (...) provide an alternative to substantive accounts in metaethics such as minimalism and neo-descriptivism. (shrink)

Many who believe that human embryos have moral status are convinced that their use in human embryonic stem cell (hESC) research can be morally justified as long as they are discarded embryos left over from fertility treatments. This is one reason why this view about discarded embryos has played such a prominent role in the debate over publicly funding hESC research in the United States and other countries. Many believe that this view offers the best chance of a compromise between (...) the different sides in this debate. This paper focuses on what seems to be the most plausible argument for this view about discarded embryos. It shows that this argument is unsound regardless of how one understands the claim that embryos have moral status. It also discusses the implications of this conclusion for attempts to use this argument as a basis for public policy. (shrink)

In 2003, Ruth Faden and eighteen other colleagues argued that a.

First-generation students are more likely to feel misplaced and struggle at university than students with university-educated parents. We assumed that the shutdowns during the Coronavirus-pandemic would particularly threaten FGS due to obstructed coping mechanisms. Specifically, FGS may show lower identification with the academic setting and lower perceived fairness of the university system. We investigated whether FGS and CGS used different defenses to cope with the shutdown threat in a large sample of German-speaking students. Using Structural Equation Modeling, we found that (...) for all students, independent of academic parental background, high levels of system justification were associated with perceiving the learning situation as less threatening, better coping with failure, and less helplessness. However, in comparison to CGS, FGS showed small but significant reductions in system justification and relied more on concrete personal relationships with other students as well as their academic identity to cope with the threatening situation. We discuss implications for helping FGS succeed at university. (shrink)

This article argues that the passage to world society proliferates a structural transformation of constitutionalism. It is argued that its postdemocratic character is mainly rooted in a process where substantial policy objectives are constitutionalized on a higher-ranking level. While the first part of the article elaborates this diagnosis by combining systems-theoretical and post-marxist insights, the second part turns to a critique of contemporary theories about transnational constitutionalism. It reveals the shortcomings of cosmopolitan, societal and popular-sovereignty approaches in overcoming these postdemocratic (...) structures. Finally, it is argued that – in the light of such a new constitutionalism – the notion of constituent power must be replaced by the figure of a destituent power which attempts to free the constitution as a form from the selective policy objectives. (shrink)

The article takes the world’s first exhibition on the geological and philosophical concept of the Anthropocene, »Welcome to the Anthropocene «, Deutsches Museum (2014-2016), as a starting point for initial theoretical reflections on the potential and limitations of exhibitions as media and designers of the Mediocene. On the basis of a discussion of image deployment, use of space and the materiality of objects, exhibitions are analyzed as ›slow media‹.

Safety is an important topic for a wide range of disciplines, such as engineering, economics, sociology, psychology, political science and philosophy, and plays a central role in risk analysis and risk management. The aim of this thesis is to develop a concept of safety that is relevant for decision-making, and to elucidate its consequences for risk and safety research and practices. Essay I provides a conceptual analysis of safety in the context of societal decision-making, focusing on some fundamental distinctions and (...) aspects, and argues for a more complex notion than what is commonly given. This concept of safety explicitly includes epistemic uncertainty, the degree to which we are uncertain of our knowledge of the situation at hand. It is discussed the extent to which such a concept may be considered an objective concept, and concluded that it is better seen as an intersubjective concept. Some formal versions of a comparative safety concept are also proposed. Essay II explores some consequences of epistemic uncertainty. It is commonly claimed that the public is irrational in its acceptance of risks. An underlying presumption in such a claim is that the public should follow the experts’ advice in recommending an activity whenever the experts have better knowledge of the risk involved. This position is criticised based on considerations from epistemic uncertainty and the goal of safety. Furthermore, it is shown that the scope of the objection covers the entire field of risk research, risk assessment as well as risk management. Essay III analyses the role of epistemic uncertainty for principles of achieving safety in an engineering context. The aim is to show that to account for common engineering principles we need the understanding of safety that has been argued for in Essays I-II. Several important principles in engineering safety are analysed, and it is argued that we cannot fully account for them on a narrow interpretation of safety as the reduction of risk. An adequate concept of safety must include not only the reduction of risk but also the reduction of uncertainty. (shrink)

The thesis aims at analyzing the concepts of risk and safety as well as the class of concepts to which they belong, thick concepts, focusing in particular on the normative aspects involved. Essay I analyzes thick concepts, i.e. concepts such as cruelty and kindness that seem to combine descriptive and evaluative features. The traditional account, in which thick concepts are analyzed as the conjunction of a factual description and an evaluation, is criticized. Instead, it is argued that the descriptive and (...) evaluative aspects must be understood as a whole. Furthermore, it is argued that the two main worries evoked against non-naturalism – that non-naturalism cannot account for disagreement and that it is not genuinely explanatory – can be met. Essay II investigates the utilization of the Kripke/Putnam causal theory of reference in relation to the Open Question Argument. It is argued that the Open Question Argument suitably interpreted provides prima facie evidence against the claim that moral kinds are natural kinds, and that the causal theory, as interpreted by leading naturalist defenders, actually underscores this conclusion. Essay III utilizes the interpretation of the Open Question Argument argued for in the previous essay in order to argue against naturalistic reduction of risk, i.e. reduction of risk into natural concepts such as probability and harm. Three different normative aspects of risk and safety are put forward – epistemic uncertainty, distributive normativity and border normativity – and it is argued that these normative aspects cannot be reduced to a natural measure. Essay IV provides a conceptual analysis of safety in the context of societal decision-making, and argues for a notion that explicitly includes epistemic uncertainty, the degree to which we are uncertain of our knowledge of the situation at hand. Some formal versions of a comparative safety concept are also proposed. Essay V puts forward a normative critique against a common argument, viz. the claim that the public should follow the experts’ advice in recommending an activity whenever the experts have the best knowledge of the risk involved. The importance of safety in risk acceptance together with considerations from epistemic uncertainty makes the claim incorrect even after including plausible limitations to exclude ‘external’ considerations. Furthermore, it is shown that the scope of the objection covers risk assessment as well as risk management. Essay VI provides a systematized account of safety engineering practices that clarifies their relation to the goal of safety engineering, namely to increase safety. A list of 24 principles referred to in the literature of safety engineering is provided, divided into four major categories. It is argued that important aspects of these methods can be better understood with the help of the distinction between risk and uncertainty, in addition to the common distinction between risk and probability. (shrink)

Boethius’ adaption of the myth of Circe and Odysseus (cons. 4 carm. 3) is an anthropologically based manifesto for self-assertion. Following the example of the ars vivendi, which is established in the text, a human being who is in distress can harden himself against inner (mental) anguish by keeping outer (physical) dangers at a distance. However, a poetic transformation is needed to convey this technique: It is only through the poetic treatment of the disenchanted myth that the world order which (...) is out of joint is restored and the human being regains his place in the cosmos. In this poem, Boethius expresses in figurative language how a narrated myth functions as a rational means of establishing order. Thus, he sets the genuinely aesthetic powers of poetry apart from the modes of display used in philosophical prose. (shrink)

Consider our attitude toward painful and pleasant experiences depend- ing on when they occur. A striking but rarely discussed feature of our attitude which Derek Parfit has emphasized is that we strongly wish painful experiences to lie in our past and pleasant experiences to lie in our future. Our asymmetrical attitudes toward future and past pains and pleasures can be forcefully illustrated by means of a thought-experiment described by Derek Parfit which I will paraphrase as follows.

En este trabajo se indaga en el comportamiento de la atenuación en los verbos que expresan duda, presentes en el corpus AMERESCO de conversaciones coloquiales de Santiago de Chile. Se describen las funciones de la atenuación de estos verbos de acuerdo con (1) el tipo de acto de habla, (2) la actividad de imagen y (3) algunas características sintáctico-discursivas. Los principales hallazgos demuestran que la atenuación se manifiesta a través de verbos doxásticos (_creer_, _parecer_, _cachar_, etc.), verbos modales (_poder_, _deber_) (...) y el verbo “saber” con polaridad negativa (“_no sé_”). Esta surge cuando se presenta lo dicho como una duda, bien para suavizar una opinión contraria o crítica, en cuyo caso su significado es de opinión, bien para informar sobre un estado de cosas, cuando su significado es epistémico. En el reconocimiento de su carácter atenuante, resultan clave el tipo de acto de habla en el que ocurren, el rol proyectado por el hablante en la conversación, la gestión de las imágenes y sus características sintáctico-discursivas, elementos que determinan si estas construcciones verbales expresan mayor o menor atenuación. (shrink)

Sometimes there is evidence about what we would decide to do from an improved deliberative position—one in which we have better information, say, or are subject to less bias, or are able to consider the relevant facts with greater vividness. I argue that in such situations we should act on that evidence, and that there are some important ethical and prudential applications for this idea. Following through with this suggestion allows us to respond to the fact that we are prone (...) to error by making the appropriate adjustments in our decision-making. A secondary goal is to explore the neglected role of vividness in our decision-making. (shrink)

This article examines the uneven welfare support accorded to Black and white women at the end of the twentieth century. The author analyzes the generosity of Aid to Families with Dependent Children benefits in the 48 contiguous U.S. states in 1970, 1980, and 1990 to determine if the state is less supportive of Black than white women. The author argues that the race-biased policies and procedures implemented with the inception and expansion of the welfare state remained throughout the program, resulting (...) in uneven levels of support for Black and white families. More specifically, the author demonstrates that the generosity of AFDC is lower in states with a larger proportion of Black single mothers and higher in states with a larger proportion of white single mothers. These findings are relevant in the current period because such institutionalized race inequalities perpetuate white privilege and Black women's poverty. (shrink)

Everyone agrees that killing a fully developed person is normally wrong. And there is similar agreement that death is bad for the one who dies, though philosophers have been puzzled about how to explain this.2 But how is the wrongness of killing related to the badness of dying? The trivial answer is that killing is wrong precisely because it inflicts the badness of death upon the victim. Or, to put it another way, killing is wrong because it harms the victim (...) by causing all that is bad about death. This is the harm-based view of the morality of killing. This view can seem platitudinous once we consider the link between the wrongness of killing and the badness of dying. Rejecting the harm-based view seems to involve severing that link, whereas many people are initially inclined to imagine that there must be some important connection between the two. Nonetheless, the harm-based view has several rivals.3 According to one of these, the respect-based view, killing is wrong not because of the harm it causes, but. (shrink)

Thick concepts provide a focal point for several important issues in ethical theory. Separatists argue that the descriptive and evaluative elements of a thick concept can be separated out. Non-separatists deny this and claim that there are no descriptive boundaries delimiting a thick concept. A common strategy for both camps in the debate has been an appeal to armchair intuitions of various everyday thick concepts. My alternative strategy consists in a closer study of the professional practice of risk analysis. As (...) a well-developed practice, it provides substantial material for analysis. Moreover, its central concepts of risk and safety are typically seen as scientific concepts fitting the separatist analysis. Still, I argue that there are several evaluative aspects in risk and safety ascription that are hard to account for on a separatist analysis. I consider three separatist strategies, and conclude that they all fail. The result is a corroboration of the general non-separatist thesis put forward by theorists such as John McDowell and Bernard Williams. (shrink)

Political realists’ rejection of the so-called ‘ethics first’ approach of political moralists, has raised concerns about their own source of normativity. Some realists have responded to such concerns by theorizing a distinctively political normativity. According to this view, politics is seen as an autonomous, independent domain with its own evaluative standards. Therefore, it is in this source, rather than in some moral values ‘outside’ of this domain, that normative justification should be sought when theorizing justice, democracy, political legitimacy, and the (...) like. For realists the question about a distinctively political normativity is important, because they take the fact that politics is a distinct affair to have severe consequences for both how to approach the subject matter as such and for which principles and values can be justified. Still, realists have had a hard time clarifying what this distinctively political normativity consists of and why, more precisely, it matters. The aim of this paper is to take some further steps in answering these questions. We argue that realists have the choice of committing themselves to one of two coherent notions of distinctively political normativity: one that is independent of moral values, where political normativity is taken to be a kind of instrumental normativity; another where the distinctness still retains a justificatory dependence on moral values. We argue that the former notion is unattractive since the costs of commitment will be too high, and that the latter notion is sound but redundant since no moralist would ever reject it. Furthermore, we end the paper by discussing what we see as the most fruitful way of approaching political and moral normativity in political theory. (shrink)

An intensified discussion on the role of normative ideals has re-emerged in several debates in political philosophy. What is often referred to as “ideal theory,” represented by liberal egalitarians such as John Rawls, is under attack from those that stress that political philosophy at large should take much more seriously the nonideal circumstances consisting of relations of domination and power under which normative ideals, principles, and ideas are supposed to be applied. While the debate so far has mainly been preoccupied (...) with defending or rejecting ideal theory through a defense or rejection of a specific ideal theory, this paper instead focuses on a number of general philosophical concerns on which the critique relies. More specifically, it brings up for scrutiny, and ultimately rejects, three charges against ideal theory: the charge that ideal theory is not action-guiding, that ideal theory is impossible, and that ideal theory is distorting. By investigatingthese charges in tandem, the paper shows that the criticism against ideal theory is premised on assumptions about the relationships between thought and action and between concepts and the world for which there is little or no support. (shrink)