En este artículo se desarrollará un análisis, delimitado al contexto europeo, sobre cómo las expulsiones colectivas representan una vulneración de derechos humanos, cuál es su impacto y cuál su tratamiento jurídico y jurisprudencial. Para ello se analizarán tres aspectos concretos: en primer lugar, el devenir de la “securitización” de las políticas de control migratorio y su externalización. En segundo lugar, se realizará un estudio de las expulsiones en general, como política de control migratorio, para analizar el caso específico de las (...) expulsiones colectivas. Y, en tercer lugar, se analizará la política migratoria concretada a partir de la firma de convenios de readmisión de la UE o los Estados miembros con países de tránsito y origen, haciendo una breve mención al convenio bilateral firmado por España con Marruecos, con especial atención a la puesta en práctica y la regulación normativa de las devoluciones en caliente. (shrink)

Este trabajo presenta seis ponencias en torno a los problemas que atraviesan distintos sectores de la población en situación de vulnerabilidad social en el goce de sus derechos humanos en el contexto de la pandemia global de COVID-19. Las exposiciones reflexionan sobre los prejuicios y vulnerabilidades que atraviesan las personas adultas mayores; las violencias de género en contextos de aislamiento; las personas en contextos de movilidad excluidas de las medidas de protección; el tratamiento y priorización de las personas con discapacidad (...) en los centros de derivación de COVID-19; la protección de las garantías penales en la administración de justicia durante los juicios de lesa humanidad llevados en forma remota; y el avance de las causas por crímenes de lesa humanidad durante la pandemia. (shrink)

The mobilization cycle that began in October 2019 represented a crucial moment in the Chilean democratic trajectory. What began as a protest for the rise of 30 Chilean pesos in the Santiago Metro, quickly took on national demand as the horizon exceeded that specific bid, and became a systemic and structural criticism of the democratic institutions and the constitutional, economic, social and cultural structure inherited from the dictatorship. This social awakening in October not only implied transformations associated to material life. (...) Also the conceptual and theoretical tools that were used to understand social phenomena from spaces of intellectual exercise, such as universities were modified. One of these categories is precisely space and territory, which from the nineties with supported and growing socio-environmental movements, was installed in the repertoire of popular demands. A dimension that was also strongly glimpsed in the October protests: the defence of territories as spaces for life. Based on this, a two-dimensional journey is proposed, first a theoretical conceptual debate and on the other hand a historical approach dealing with the emergence of the concept in recent Chilean history, with the interest of understanding a socio-territorial and historical dimension of what happened in October 2019. (shrink)

The traditional teaching style in which the teacher is in control and there is a submissive attitude in students is predominant in Mexico. The development of identity in preadolescence is subjected to social groups, which could develop interpersonal difficulties through the controlling teaching style. Although the fear of negative evaluation in students and competitive sport has been studied in education, relatively little research has been done in the area of physical education in relation to the controlling style. The purpose of (...) this study was to investigate the correlation and predictive relationship between controlling teaching and the fear of negative evaluation mediated by the frustration of the basic psychological needs, controlled motivation, and individualism/competitiveness through the theoretical framework of self-determination theory. Participants were 1132 students in the fifth and sixth grades in public elementary schools in the state of Chihuahua, Mexico, with ages between 10 and 13. Results indicate the perceived controlling teaching style positively predicted the fear of negative evaluation in students of this study through BPN frustration, that is positively related to low-quality motivation, which is related to a higher level of individualism/competitiveness. This, in turn, is proven to be a predictor of the fear of negative evaluation. The results also discuss the promotion of the autonomy support style, avoiding the controlling teaching style, for the minimization of negative results related to the perception of fear and the development of student well-being both within and beyond the school context. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Images >> Good HopeCarla Liesching Click for larger view View full resolution[End Page 111]Carla Liesching is an interdisciplinary artist working across photography, writing, collage, sculpture, bookmaking, and design. Grounded in experiences growing up in apartheid South Africa, she considers the intersections of representation, knowledge, and power, with a focus on colonial histories and enduring constructions of race and geography. Carla's ongoing project, Good Hope, was published by (...) MACK in 2021, and was shortlisted for the 2022 Aperture Paris Photo First Book Award, and the Arles 2022 Prix du Livre in the Photo-Text Category. An excerpt from Good Hope is also featured in On Whiteness, by SPBH Editions. Carla was a 2021 winner of the Open Walls Arles competition presented by The British Journal of Photography and exhibited work during Rencontres d'Arles Festival in 2021 and 2022. She is a 2021 Light Work Grant recipient and the 2022 recipient of the Silver Eye Fellowship, culminating in a photo-sculptural installation at Silver Eye Center for Photography in Pittsburgh. Carla was recently named a Foam Talent, with exhibitions at Foam Museum in Amsterdam, the Deutsche Börse Foundation in Frankfurt, along with a solo exhibition of Good Hope through PhMuseum in Bologna. Carla lives between South Africa and Ithaca. In Ithaca, she works as Visiting Critic in Cornell University's Art Architecture and Planning Department; as Lecturer in the Art, Art History and Architecture Department at Ithaca College; as faculty at the International Center of Photography; and as coordinator of the School of Criticism and Theory at Cornell. As part of her socially engaged practice, Carla is also a youth educator focused on image-making, visual literacy, and self-publishing as vehicles for expression and empowerment. [End Page 112] Click for larger view View full resolution'As soon as you are in a proper stage of defence you shall search for the best place for gardens, the best and fattest ground in which everything planted or sown will thrive.' Click for larger view View full resolution—Instructions from the Dutch East India Company inscribed on a yellowing sheet of parchment, 1651.1[End Page 113] Click for larger view View full resolution Click for larger view View full resolution[End Page 114]iYes, there are facts and figures to account for, timelines to trace, but have I told you of today's newspapers? Headlines like: 'Land Justice', 'Expropriation without Compensation', 'Revolution or Reform?' Have I told you of the monuments removed in the 'riots'? Or the groundsmen in green overalls scrubbing graffiti, repairing broken fountains, collecting debris? Black men White bosses still call 'boys'? Have I told you of the doves cooing gently, perched atop the sleeping bodies of migrant families on the lawns? Have I told you of the White children from the Cape of Good Hope Seminary dressed in their afternoon 'civilian clothes'? Or of the more racially integrated group from Mseki High in their grey-and-turquoise uniforms surrounding me on the main steps leading to the garden? The cacophony of lunch-time chatter, chip packets crinkling, the flap-flap of wings as seagulls scavenge for tasty morsels? Have I told you of the signs pointing to the Scientific Pleasure Garden? Or of the gift store filled with locally sourced flower oils, handmade candles, Delft-blue china tea-sets and postcards depicting the early colony? And what of Cecil John Rhodes cast in greening bronze, flanked by a Madagascar Cycad and a Queen Palm, announcing: Your Hinterland is There? Have I told you of the small rock in the corner of the vegetable garden with a label hidden beneath weeds? The arrival of the Dutch to establish a refreshment station, providing fresh produce for the ships plying the spice route, marked the end of a free and independent existence for the native Gorinhaiqua Khoikhoi. And what of the large label at the stone-walled entrance? A story of how a garden in 1654 brought together continents and affected the course of history. A story of how plants in the form of pepper, nutmeg, cloves and cinnamon changed the world economy. Have I told you the garden is the cause of it all? [End... (shrink)

Congenital hip dysplasia is an abnormal formation of the hip socket that can cause painful arthritis of the joints. Early intervention is essential to ensure proper development of the bones that make up the hip joint, because the longer the condition goes undetected and untreated, the more difficult it is to correct. The assessment test to detect congenital hip dysplasia in newborns was first described by Marino Ortolani, an Italian pediatrician.Marino Ortolani was born in 1904 in Altedo, a small town (...) between Bologna and Ferrara in northeastern Italy. His parents were agricultural workers. He studied medicine at the University of Bologna and, after graduating in 1929, was awarded a medal for being the first.. (shrink)

A collection of articles originally presented at two conferences, the first at Ventura Hall, Stanford, in April 1998; and the second at the University of Bologna in September 1999.

The papers collected here comprise the proceedings of a Workshop in honor ofMerrilee and Wes Salmon, held in Florence on May 17-18, 1996. The aim of the meeting was to pay homage to these two American scholars, whose contact with Italian and European Universities and Institutes had a major influence on "Continental" thought in the field of epistemology and probability. In fact, Merrilee and Wes spent various periods lecturing at the Universities of Bologna, Florence, Rome, Trieste, Catania and Pisa, (...) as well as in the University of Constance, where they helped to build a strong cultural "bridge" with the Pittsburgh Center for the Philosophy of Science. The Florence Center for the History and Philosophy of Science is particularly thankful to the Salmons for their ongoing cooperation and frequent visits. We must not forget that Wes Salmon was in the Florence Center and at the Philosophy Department of Florence, as visiting scholar, on many occasions, and that he made important contributions which have later appeared in Italian journals, such as Iride and Rivista di jilosojia. Merrilee was a speaker at the Conference on "Genetics, Linguistics, and Archaeology" (May 20-24,1991), organized by the Florence Center. Both Wes and Merrilee often enlivened the arguments of the initiatives they took part in. (shrink)

El artículo busca mostrar que existe un grupo de filósofos y una filósofa en Chile que recepcionaron, tradujeron y explicaron la fenomenología de una manera más bien histórico-filológica que sistemático-problemática. Esta situación se explica, por varias razones, porque efectivamente estaban accediendo a un pensar que no tenía una larga tradición; que esas reflexiones fueron planteadas en textos originalmente en idioma alemán, lo que exigía múltiples esfuerzos de traducción; pero que también se debe a un modo de hacer filosofía en Chile, (...) más bien centrado en un canon filosófico, que en el desarrollo del pensamiento propio y original. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:THE DOMINICAN SCHOOL OF SALAMANCA AND THE SPANISH CONQUEST OF AMERICA: SOME BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTES THOMAS F. O'MEARA. O.P. University of Notre Dame Notre Dame, Indiana SALAMANCA, northwest of Madrid and Avila and not far from Spain's border with Portugal, preserves the atmosphere of a medieval, Renaissance, and Baroque university even as it develops the schools and clinics of a contemporary center of studies. There are associations with Teresa of (...) Avila, who spent the night there just after her reform was approved by Rome, with the young Cervantes, with Luis de Leon and Ignatius Loyola, and with John of the Cross, who was a student there. A bridge from the time of Trajan spans the river Tormes, and the Romanesque cathedral still reserves a chapel for the Mozarabic rite. The University of Salamanca The city brings to mind sixteenth century Dominicans like Francisco de Vitoria, often called the founder of international law, and Domingo Bafiez, confessor to Teresa of Avila. The Order of Friars Preachers, however, came to Salamanca in 1222 at the same time that Dominic's missions were taking root in·Paris and Bologna; the friars founded a priory and soon a school under the patronage of St. Stephen (San Esteban). The " Dominican School of Salamanca " means formally the line of great theologians reaching from Diego de Deza at the end of the fifteenth century to Tomas de Lemos, a main protagonist in Rome in 1607 in the controversy over grace entitled De Auxiliis. Today, after seven and a half centuries of existence, the Salamancan SSS 556 THOMAS F. o'MEARA, O.P. Dominicans remain a vital community, active m teaching, research and publishing. My attention was directed to the Dominicans at Salamanca by two volumes of essays reporting on congresses concerning the "Dominicans and the Discovery of the New World." My interest was not church history but the history of theologies of how grace might exist outside of explicit faith and sacramental baptism. The following report is a bibliographical survey of recent research on a theological era and school. Focusing on the thought of the theologians stimulated by the experiences of the missionaries in the Indies, it treats the Dominicans during the first decades after the voyages of Columbus. In the 1480s, as it entered its golden age, the University of Salamanca had a hundred professors and almost 7000 students. University records begin late, but they show that in 1546/47, one hundred thirty-four Dominicans were studying at the university, and in 1598/99, eighty. J. L. Espinel has written. a historical guide to the Dominican buildings and institutions.1 The great period of the Dominican school at the University began with Diego de Deza ( 1480-1486), professor and archbishop of Seville, and Matias de Paz (1518-1519), a professor of Scripture. Francisco de Vitoria (1526-1546) and Domingo de Soto (15321549 ) were its most gifted thinkers, but the school's achievements continued with Melchior Cano (1546-1552), Juan de la Pefia (1561-1565) and Domingo Banez (1581-1604). These t San Esteban de Salamanca, Historia y Gufa, Siglos, XIII-XX (Salamanca: Editorial San Esteban, 1978); see also R. Hernandez, "Convento y estudio de San Esteban," La Universidad de Salamanca (Salamanca: Universidad, 1989), pp. 369ff.; A. Martin Melquiades, "La Escuela de teologia de Salamanca," Atti del Congresso internazionale, Tommaso d'Aquino nel suo settimo centenario, Tommaso d'Aquino nella storia del pensiero, 1 :2 (Naples: Edizione Domenicane Italiane, 1975), pp. 242ff. A Salamancan Dominican of the 1930s, Vicente Beltran de Heredia, pioneered research in the history of the university and in the writings of the Dominican speculative masters. His writings can be found in past issues of Ciencia Tomista (CT), and some of his books and several recent collections of his most important essays are available from Editorial San Esteban. Similarly initial research in the United States can be found in the writings of Lewis Hanke. SALAMANCA AND THE SPANISH CONQUEST 557 are joined by lesser figures like Pedro de Sotomayor (15601564 ), Mancia de Corpus Christi (1564-1576), and Bartolome de Medina (1576-1581). The occupants of the chair in theology of the liturgical hour of prime from Vitoria in 1526 to Bafiez's... (shrink)

Constructivism in ethics is the view that insofar as there are normative truths, for example, truths about what we ought to do, they are in some sense determined by an idealized process of rational deliberation, choice, or agreement. As a “first-order moral account”--an account of which moral principles are correct-- constructivism is the view that the moral principles we ought to accept or follow are the ones that agents would agree to or endorse were they to engage in a hypothetical (...) or idealized process of rational deliberation. As a “metaethical account” – an account of whether there are any normative truths and, if so, what they are like – constructivism holds that there are normative truths. These truths are not fixed by facts that are independent of the practical standpoint, however characterized; rather, they are constituted by what agents would agree to under some specified conditions of choice. In working to provide a more precise definition of constructivism in metaethics, the focus of this entry, one faces two main difficulties. The first difficulty is that constructivism comes in several varieties, each of which claims a different niche within metaethics, and some claim no space at all. The second difficulty concerns where to place constructivism on the metaethical map in relation to realism and anti-realism. These are terms of art, and it is highly contested which views count as realist and which as antirealist. These two difficulties will be addressed in what follows by focusing on the distinctive questions that constructivist theories are designed to answer. Section §1 defines the scope of constructivism in ethics, in contrast to constructivism in political theory. Sections §§2-5 illustrate the main varieties of metaethical constructivism, which are designed to account for the nature of normative truths and practical reasons. Section §6 presents the main varieties of constructivist accounts of the justification of moral judgments of right and wrong. Section §7 discusses the metaethical status of constructivism, and its distinctive import. (shrink)

European Journal of Philosophy, Volume 29, Issue 3, Page 646-663, September 2021.

This paper has two aims: to explore the affective dimensions of moral shock and the way it relates to normative marginalization of those furthest from dominant society and also, more specifically, to articulate the trans experience of constantly being under moral attack because the dominant ‘world’ normatively defines trans individuals out of existence. Toward these ends, I build on Katie Stockdale's recent work on moral shock, arguing that moral shock needs to be contextualized to ‘worlds’ of sense to understand how (...) marginalized people affectively experience shocking events. My focus is the trans experience of moral shock due to the way trans people are positioned outside of dominant society, which creates the conditions to experience cyclical, chronic shock. These affective conditions point to a collective responsibility to ease the affective stress that the most marginalized experience. (shrink)

Trans existence has recently been plagued by two different explanations: a natural, “born this way,” necessity and a social, often-thought perverted, choice. These contrasting explanations of necessity and choice create an explanatory false dichotomy and political double-bind. This talk constructs an alternative explanation for why people transition, one that centralizes the role of desire while recognizing the necessity of choice that arises from that desire. Toward this end, I present a moral psychology of desire. An explanation that recognizes the role (...) desire plays, not just in our actions, but in our perception. This desire is made apparent when one perceives the option to transition as a salient possibility. Once this desire is recognized, it functions as what Bernard Williams calls a categorical desire, a desire that partly constitutes one’s ethical identity and thus makes following through on that desire a matter of practical necessity that adds meaning to our lives. I argue that this explanation eschews the explanatory false dichotomy and evades the political double-bind. (shrink)

On Kant's view, the feeling of respect is the mark of moral agency, and is peculiar to us, animals endowed with reason. Unlike any other feeling, respect originates in the contemplation of the moral law, that is, the idea of lawful activity. This idea works as a constraint on our deliberation by discounting the pretenses of our natural desires and demoting our selfish maxims. We experience its workings in the guise of respect. Respect shows that from the agent's subjective perspective, (...) morality is the experience of being bound and necessitated, but also of being free and emancipated from inclinations. (shrink)

People with mental illness are subjected to stigma and discrimination and constantly face restrictions in the exercise of their political, civil and social rights. Considering this scenario, mental health, ethics and human rights are key approaches to advance the well-being of persons with mental illnesses. The study was conducted to review the scope of the empirical literature available to answer the research question: What evidence is available regarding human rights and ethical issues regarding nursing care to persons with mental illnesses? (...) A scoping review methodology guided by Arksey and O’Malley was used. Studies were identified by conducting electronic searches on CINAHL, PubMed, SCOPUS and Hein databases. Of 312 citations, 26 articles matched the inclusion criteria. The central theme which emerged from the literature was “Ethics and Human Rights Boundaries to Mental Health Nursing practice”. Mental health nurses play a key and valuable role in ensuring that their interventions are based on ethical and human rights principles. Mental health nurses seem to have difficulty engaging with the ethical issues in mental health, and generally are dealing with acts of paternalism and with the common justification for those acts. It is important to open a debate regarding possible solutions for this ethical dilemma, with the purpose to enable nurses to function in a way that is morally acceptable to the profession, patients and members of the public. This review may serve as an instrument for healthcare professionals, especially nurses, to reflect about how to fulfil their ethical responsibilities towards persons with mental illnesses, protecting them from discrimination and safeguarding their human rights, respecting their autonomy, and as a value, keeping the individual at the centre of ethical discourse. (shrink)

According to the standard objection, Kantian constructivism implicitly commits to value realism or fails to warrant objective validity of normative propositions. This paper argues that this objection gains some force from the special case of moral obligations. The case largely rests on the assumption that the moral domain is an eminent domain of special objects. But for constructivism there is no moral domain of objects prior to and independently of reasoning. The argument attempts to make some progress in the debate (...) by defending a robust conception of construction, which names a distinctive view of practical reasoning as transformative. (shrink)

Ethical constructivism holds that truths about the relation between rationality, morality, and agency are best understood as constructed by correct reasoning, rather than discovered or invented. Unlike other metaphors used in metaethics, construction brings to light the generative and dynamic dimension of practical reason. On the resultant picture, practical reasoning is not only productive but also self-transforming, and socially empowering. The main task of this volume is to illustrate how constructivism has substantially modified and expanded the agenda of metaethics by (...) refocusing on rational agency and its constitutive principles. In particular, this volume identifies, compares and discusses the prospects and failures of the main strands of constructivism regarding the powers of reason in responding to the challenges of contingency. While Kantian, Humean, Aristotelian, and Hegelian theories sharply differ in their constructivist strategies, they provide compelling accounts of the rational articulation required for an inclusive and unified ethical community. (shrink)

This chapter aims to situate Kant’s account of practical reason in metaethical debates. First, it explains the reasons why it is legitimate and instructive to discuss Kant’s relevance in contemporary metaethics, hence addressing some issues about the intended scope of metaethics and its relation to practical reason and psychology. Second, it defends an interpretation of Kant’s conception of autonomy, which avoids some paradoxes traditionally associated with self-legislation. Third, it shows that constructivism best captures Kant’s conception of practical reason and of (...) its authority. Kantian constructivism is defended as a self-standing metaethical theory, which is designed to account for the objectivity and unconditional authority of practical knowledge, on the basis of standards congruent with shared subjective experience. This version of constructivism, adopting a “dialogical” interpretation of the autonomy of rational will, explains how finite rational agents are obligated and bound by the moral law. (shrink)

According to a traditional account, moral cognition is an achievement gained over time by sharing a practice under the guidance and the example of the wise, in analogy with craft and apprenticeship. This model captures an important feature of practical reason, that is, its incompleteness, and highlights our dependence on others in obtaining moral knowledge, coherently with the socially extended mind agenda and recent findings in empirical psychology. However, insofar as it accords to exemplars’ decisive authority to determine the standard (...) of correctness for moral cognition, the model does not offer protection against arbitrariness and discrimination. The article argues that to understand the socially distributed nature of practical knowledge, we have to discard the notion of exemplars and reconceive of others as having equal normative standing. This claim allows us to revisit the conception of autonomy as key to distributed practical knowledge. While autonomy does not amount to selfsufficiency and self-reliance, it does demand independence of judgement and stands in contrast to servility, submission, and other sorts of defective ways of relying on others. The requirement of equal standing provides the basis for distinguishing between proper and improper reliance on others. Keywords: autonomy, Aristotle, exemplarism, extended mind, constructivism, practical knowledge, equal standing. (shrink)

Emotions shape our mental and social lives, but their relation to morality is problematic: are they sources of moral knowledge, or obstacles to morality? Fourteen original articles by leading scholars in moral psychology and philosophy of mind explore the relation between emotions and practical rationality, value, autonomy, and moral identity.

This essay introduces the novel category of “disclaimers” – distinctive normative acts which challenge third-party attributions of responsibility in a community governed by norms of mutual accountability. While the debate focuses on evasive and wrongful refusals to take responsibility for one’s wrongs, this essay argues that disclaimers are fundamental modes of exercising normative powers, whose main functions are demanding recognition, responding to wrongs, voicing disagreement, exiting alienating conditions, and calling for a fair redistribution of specific responsibilities. In particular, understood as (...) disclaimers, denials of responsibility are shown to be key modes of ethical and political empowerment, which play a significant role in producing normative changes and directing societal transformations. (shrink)

This paper argues that moral distress is a distinctive category of reactive attitudes that are taken to be part and parcel of the social dynamics for recognition. While moral distress does not demonstrate evidence of wrongdoing, it does emotionally articulate a demand for normative attention that is addressed to others as moral providers. The argument for this characterization of the deontic power of moral distress builds upon two examples in which the cognitive value of the victim’s emotional experience is controversial: (...) the case of micro-aggression, and the case of misplaced distress. In contrast to appraisal and perceptual models of distress, it is argued that its epistemic and normative value is dialogical rather than evidential, in that it presses claims that engage the audience in a normative discussion about the normative standing of the claimant, the proper grounds of the attitude, and the normative standards used to assess them. (shrink)

This article argues that immoralists do not fully enjoy autonomous agency because they are not capable of engaging in the proper form of practical reflection, which requires relating to others as having equal standing. An adequate diagnosis of the immoralist’s failure of agential authority requires a relational account of reflexivity and autonomy. This account has the distinctive merit of identifying the cost of disregarding moral obligations and of showing how immoralists may become susceptible to practical reason. The compelling quality of (...) reason should not be represented as the capacity to force them to abide by morality on pain of incoherence. Rather, its authority (and objectivity) is shown when it presents them with the prospect of a transition that makes sense for them to undertake. (shrink)

The main factor of intelligence is defined as the ability tocomprehend, formalising this ability with the help of new constructsbased on descriptional complexity. The result is a comprehension test,or C- test, which is exclusively defined in computational terms. Due toits absolute and non-anthropomorphic character, it is equally applicableto both humans and non-humans. Moreover, it correlates with classicalpsychometric tests, thus establishing the first firm connection betweeninformation theoretical notions and traditional IQ tests. The TuringTest is compared with the C- test and the (...) combination of the two isquestioned. In consequence, the idea of using the Turing Test as apractical test of intelligence should be surpassed, and substituted bycomputational and factorial tests of different cognitive abilities, amuch more useful approach for artificial intelligence progress and formany other intriguing questions that present themselves beyond theTuring Test. (shrink)

Should officeholders be held individually responsible for submitting to systemically corrupt institutional practices? We draw a structural analogy between individual action under coercive threat and individual participation in systemic corruption, and we argue that officeholders who submit to corrupt institutional practices are not excused by the existence of a systemic coercive threat. Even when they have good personal reasons to accept the threat, they remain individually morally assessable and, in the circumstances, they are also individually blameworthy for actions performed in (...) their institutional capacity. (shrink)

This article argues that cruelty, as a willingness to see or orchestrate the suffering of others, is not an unfortunate side-effect of neoliberal theories put into practice but is constitutive of the neoliberal project from its theoretical inception. Drawing on Lisa Duggan’s concept of ‘optimistic cruelty’ and treating the canonical texts of neoliberal economic theory as literary artefacts, the article develops this argument through a close reading of one of the central architects of the neoliberal project, the philosopher and economist (...) Friedrich Hayek. The first part of the article examines how Hayek attempts to justify the brutality of the market order he imagines – the catallaxy – by arguing that this brutality is the natural consequence of the spontaneous evolutionary processes that move civilisation forward. The second part brings to the fore the eugenicist undertones that suffuse this vision, despite Hayek’s apparent rejection of Social Darwinism. I analyse how Hayek’s market order operates through a series of disciplinary and biopolitical technologies that use pain, frustration, punishment and stigmatisation to eliminate bad habits, practices and subjectivities. These cruel mechanisms enable the catallaxy to sort between productive and unproductive lives to ensure that available resources are directed towards the former – even if it means that the others might be left to die. As such, cruelty is an affective atmosphere that permeates the catallaxy. (shrink)

Transgender individuals and families throw existing taxonomic classification systems of identity into perplexing disarray, illuminating sociolegal dilemmas long overdue for critical sociological inquiry. Using interview data collected from 50 cisgender women from across the United States and Canada, who detail 61 unique partnerships with transgender and transsexual men, this work considers the pragmatic choices and choice-making capacities of this social group as embedded within social systems, structures, and institutions. Proposing the analytic constructs of “normative resistance” and “inventive pragmatism” to situate (...) the interactional processes between agency and structure in the everyday lives of this understudied group of cisgender women, this work theorizes the liminal sociolegal status of an understudied family form. In so doing, it exposes the increasingly paradoxical consolidation and destabilization of sociolegal notions of identity, marriage, normativity, and parenthood—challenging, contributing to, and extending current theoretical and empirical understandings of agency and structure in twenty-first-century families. (shrink)

This paper posits that differences in corporate governance structure partly result from differences in institutional arrangements linked to business systems. We developed a new international triad of business systems: the Anglo-American, the Communitarian and the Emerging system, building on the frameworks of Choi et al. (British Academy of Management (Kynoch Birmingham) 1996, Management International Review 39, 257–279, 1999). A common factor determining the success of a corporate governance structure is the extent to which it is transparent to market forces. Such (...) transparency is more than pure financial transparency; as it can also be based on factors such as governmental, banking and other types of institutional transparency mechanism. There may also be a choice for firms to adopt voluntary corporate disclosure in situations where mandatory disclosure is not established. The Asian financial crisis of 1997–1999 and the more recent corporate governance scandals such as Enron, Andersen and Worldcom in the United States and Ahold and Parmalat in Europe show that corporate governance and business ethics issues exist throughout the world. As an illustration we focus on Asia’s emerging1 markets, as, both in view of the pressure of globalization and taking into account the institutional arrangements peculiar to the emerging business system, these issues are important there. Particularly for those who have to find an accommodation between the corporate governance structures and disclosure standards of the Emerging system and those of the Anglo-American and Communitarian systems. (shrink)

The evolution of sexual reproduction is a striking case of explanatory pluralism, meaning that one needs to refer to more than one explanation in order to adequately account for it. I develop the concept a domain of phenomena in order to analysis this pluralism. Pluralism exists when a phenomenon can be included in more that one homogeneous domain or in a heterogeneous domain. I argue that in some cases domain partitioning can be used to decrease pluralism, but that in the (...) case of sex domains are overlapping and interconnecting, or in other words bear an orthogonal relationship to one another, and hence cannot be partitioned in such a way as to eliminate pluralism. (shrink)

This paper argues that to understand the varieties of wrongs done in coercion, we should examine the dynamic normative relation that the coercer establishes with the coerced. The case rests on a critical examination of coercion by threat, which is proved irreducible to psychological inducement by overwhelming motives, obstruction of agency by impaired consent or deprivation of genuine choice. In contrast to physical coercion, coercion by threat requires the coercee’s participation in deliberation to succeed. For this kind of coercion to (...) be successful, there must be a normative relation established by the coercer and the coercee, in which they recognize each other as rational agents. In such cases, the coercee is wronged in the exercise of her deliberative powers. As a consequence, this form of coercion does not cancel the coercee’s moral responsibility for coerced action. Reclaiming the coercee’s responsibility for action under threat does not diminish the visibility and gravity of the coercer’s wrongdoing. On the contrary, it allows us to capture some features of the coercive relation that otherwise remain unfocused and thus identify the distinctive ways in which the coercee is wronged. (shrink)

Are the emotions relevant for the theory of value and normativity? Is there a set of morally correct arrangements of emotions? Current debates are often structured as though there were only two theoretical options to approach these questions, a sentimentalist theory of some sort, which emphasizes the role of emotions in forming ethical behaviour and practical thought, and intellectualist rationalism, which denies that emotions can help at all in generating normativity and contributing to moral value, hence also denying that they (...) may have any role to play in moral agency and moral thinking. In what follows, I will offer a Kantian account of ‘practical reason’ as the seat of moral agency, which recognizes a diversified and complex relation between reason and sensibility. (shrink)

Humean constructivists object to Kantian constructivism that by endorsing the constitutivist strategy, which grounds moral obligations in rational agency, this position discounts the impact of cont...

This paper takes a constitutivist approach to self-deception, and argues that this phenomenon should be evaluated under several dimensions of rationality. The constitutivist approach has the merit of explaining the selective nature of self-deception as well as its being subject to moral sanction. Self-deception is a pragmatic strategy for maintaining the stability of the self, hence continuous with other rational activities of self-constitution. However, its success is limited, and it costs are high: it protects the agent’s self by undermining the (...) authority she has on her mental life. To this extent, self-deception is akin to alienation and estrangement. Its morally disturbing feature is its self-serving partiality. The self-deceptive agent settles on standards of justification that are lower than any rational agent would adopt, and thus loses grip on her agency. To capture the moral dimension of self-deception, I defend a Kantian account of the constraints that bear on self-constitution, and argue that it warrants more discriminating standards of agential autonomy than other contemporary minimalist views of self-government. (shrink)

Traditionally, philosophers have focused on whether and how emotions threaten autonomy, insofar as they lie outside the sphere of rational agency. That is, they have conceptualized emotional vulnerability as passivity. Second, they have considered how emotions are insensitive to rational judgment, focusing on cases in which emotions are dissonant or recalcitrant. Third, in recognizing the motivational force of emotions, philosophers have tracked their negative impact on rational deliberation. Indeed, emotions are often contrastive elements in rational deliberation. They appear to defeat (...) deliberative judgments about what to do, survive rational deliberation or preempt the very possibility of rational deliberation. But there are more interesting cases in which it is apparent that emotions bear a rather complicated relation to autonomy. Love and shame provide powerful examples of the ambivalences and complexities of such a relation. In analyzing such complexities, my aim is to present a case for appreciating various dimensions of vulnerability and, correspondingly, for exposing the importance of emotional vulnerability for agential autonomy. This view is rooted in a general account of agential autonomy marked by mutual respect and recognition of others, as a normative response to constitutive vulnerability, understood as the capacity to affect and be affected by others as well as by external agentive and non-agentive causes. (shrink)

Developments in the field of neuroscience, according to its proponents, offer the prospect of an enhanced understanding and treatment of addicted persons. Consequently, its advocates consider that improving public understanding of addiction neuroscience is a desirable aim. Those critical of neuroscientific approaches, however, charge that it is a totalising, reductive perspective–one that ignores other known causes in favour of neurobiological explanations. Sociologist Nikolas Rose has argued that neuroscience, and its associated technologies, are coming to dominate cultural models to the extent (...) that 'we' increasingly understand ourselves as 'neurochemical selves'. Drawing on 55 qualitative interviews conducted with members of the Australian public residing in the Greater Brisbane area, we challenge both the 'expectational discourses' of neuroscientists and the criticisms of its detractors. Members of the public accepted multiple perspectives on the causes of addiction, including some elements of neurobiological explanations. Their discussions of addiction drew upon a broad range of philosophical, sociological, anthropological, psychological and neurobiological vocabularies, suggesting that they synthesised newer technical understandings, such as that offered by neuroscience, with older ones. Holding conceptual models that acknowledge the complexity of addiction aetiology into which new information is incorporated suggests that the impact of neuroscientific discourse in directing the public's beliefs about addiction is likely to be more limited than proponents or opponents of neuroscience expect. (shrink)

The reform of the health care system will include a mandate: Individuals are required to purchase health insurance provided that affordable options are available. But what is affordable health insurance? Three accounts of affordability of health coverage have been advanced. The first two accounts are empirical. The third account is needs-based. All three accounts are inadequate. I propose a fourth, the reasonable tradeoff account, according to which individuals should only be required to make reasonable tradeoffs in order to pay for (...) their health coverage. That is, health insurance is affordable if in order to pay for it one does not to have to sacrifice other benefit(s) that are comparable in importance to the benefits of health coverage. (shrink)

On a standard interpretation, the aim of the formula of universal law is to provide a decision procedure for determining the deontic status of actions. By contrast, this chapter argues for the practical significance of the CI centering on Kant’s account of the dynamics of incentives. This approach avoids some widespread misconceptions about how the CI operates and false expectations about what it promises and delivers. In particular, it explains how it differs from deductive practical inferences. The CI is the (...) supreme form of morality, and yet not in the sense that particular categorical principles can be derived deductively from it, once the relevant details are supplied. The efficacy of practical reasoning primarily concerns agents, and consists in their reorientation toward the right end. Moral knowledge is knowledge about what we ought to do, but it is also a distinctive variety of self-knowledge, that is, knowledge of ourselves as rationally efficacious agents. (shrink)

In this chapter, I examine the concept of vulnerability as a complex constitutive feature of human agency and argue that it is both a constraint on and a resource for practical reasoning. When discussed as an ontological feature of human agency, vulnerability is primarily understood as an aspect of embodiment, which is problematic in different respects. First, in relation to the situatedness of human agency, vulnerability indicates that human agents are subjected to contextual contingencies. Second, in relation to temporality, vulnerability (...) indicates that agents act in time and under the pressure of time. They are finite and produce finite and perishable actions, even though the longlasting effects of an action may survive the action itself. Third, in relation to corporal feature of agency, vulnerability is associated to suffering and frailty, insofar as bodily needs and desires represent both springs of and hindrances to rational action. Finally, in relation to the social nature of human animals, vulnerability indicates the susceptibility to be harmed, obstructed, undercut or manipulated by other agents These varieties of vulnerability are constituive features of human agency, which cannot be removed without removing what is peculiar and specific to human agency. Theories of practical reason are primarily concerned with constitutive vulnerability as a defect, and presume to offer normative guidance by adopting an idealized account of rational agency, which corrects or merely cancels the defective features of human agency. By contrast, theories of bounded rationality understand practical reasoning instrumentally, and thus are concerned with cognitive limitations of practical rationality, in particular with partial and perspectival information. However, the notion of “partial information” is inadequate to capture the complexities and significance of vulnerability, even in its restricted cognitive sense, which has to do with the agent’s situatedness. On the view I propose, instead, vulnerability is declined as a constitutive constraint on practical reasoning. Susceptibility to time constraints makes sense of the agents’ engagement in action and of their distinctive deliberative perspective. Susceptibility to bodily needs and desires tracks the normative relation between motivations and reasons for action, as well as the corporal roots of the agents’ efficacy in a perceived context. Susceptibility to others makes possible to broaden the scope and the modes of individual agency, by way of inter-action and shared agency. Rather than the source of problems and issues for rational agency, I take vulnerability to name the cluster of constitutive constraints that shape practical reasoning. According to the distinctive variety of Kantian constructivism I defend, practical reason is incomplete, rather than imperfect or defective. The completion of practical reason does not aim to correct or dissolve vulnerability, but deploys vulnerability as a resource to build up autonomy. This view accounts for autonomy as a normative relation among vulnerable agents, which develops in time. (shrink)

The most distinctive feature of Murdoch's philosophical project is her attempt to reclaim the exploration of moral life as a legitimate topic of philosophical investigation. In contrast to the predominant focus on action and decision, she argues that “what we require is a renewed sense of the difficulty and complexity of the moral life and the opacity of persons. We need more concepts in terms of which to picture the substance of our being” (AD 293).1 I shall argue that to (...) fully appreciate the novelty of this proposal we need to recognize some elements of continuity with analytic methods of philosophical inquiry and themes that belong to continental traditions. On Murdoch's view, the most important question facing moral philosophy is that of whether and how we can become better. In order to describe moral progress and failure, struggle and ascent, we need ethical concepts capable of capturing mental events such as change in mind, self-examination, and redescription. These concepts are presently unavailable, and this lack seriously undermines our attempts to understand the phenomena of morality. Because of this conceptual loss, we succumb to the mistaken idea that moral life coincides with its scattered outer manifestations, i.e. public acts. Instead, Murdoch urges us “the moral life […] is something that goes on continually, not something that is switched off in between the occurrence of explicit moral choices” (SG 37).2 Murdoch's point is that we need to conceive the locus of agency more broadly if we want to understand the complicated machinery of action. But perhaps more importantly, she points out that we may be morally active while entertaining a contemplative attitude, which does not issue in action. The grain of moral life, she argues, is constituted by the.. (shrink)

According to a traditional account, moral cognition is an achievement gained over time by sharing a practice under the guidance and the example of the wise, in analogy with craft and apprenticeship. This model captures an important feature of practical reason, that is, its incompleteness, and highlights our dependence on others in obtaining moral knowledge, coherently with the socially extended mind agenda and recent findings in empirical psychology. Insofar as it accords to exemplars decisive authority to determine the standard of (...) correctness for moral cognition, however, the model does not offer protection against arbitrariness and discrimination. The article argues that to understand the socially distributed nature of practical knowledge, we have to discard the notion of exemplars and reconceive of others as peers, i.e. having equal normative standing. This claim allows us to revisit the conception of autonomy as key to distributed practical knowledge. While autonomy does not amount to self-sufficiency and self-reliance, it does demand independence of judgment and stands in contrast to servility, submission, and other sorts of defective ways of relying on others. The requirement of equal standing provides the basis or distinguishing between proper and improper reliance on others. (shrink)

This entry concerns Kant's conception of moral recognition, mutual recognition, and dignity.

The purpose of this paper is to demonstrate that Leibniz’s form/matter defense of omnipotence is paradoxical, but not irretrievably so. Leibniz maintains that God necessarily must concur only in the possibility for evil’s existence in the world (the form of evil), but there are individual instances of moral evil that are not necessary (the matter of evil) with which God need not concur. For Leibniz, that there is moral evil in the world is contingent on God’s will (a dimension of (...) divine omnipotence), with the result that even though it is necessary that God exerts his will, there are particular products of his will that are contingent and unnecessary—including human moral evil. If there are instances of evil which are contingent on God’s will and yet unnecessary, then the problematic conclusion for Leibniz’s view must be that human evil depends upon divine concurrence, not just for its possibility in the world (which is necessary) but for its instance (which is contingent). If the form/matter defense of omnipotence contains a true paradox, then God concurs in the form as well as the matter of evil. To assuage this difficulty for Leibniz, I will argue that he could either give up an Augustinian notion of evil, or rely upon a distinction between *potenta absoluta* and *potenta ordinate*, which was popular among important thinkers in the medieval period. (shrink)

This paper provides evidence for a radically enactive, embodied account of remembering. By looking closely at highly context-dependent instances of memorizing and recalling dance material, I aim at shedding light on the workings of memory. Challenging the view that cognition fundamentally entails contentful mental representation, the examples I discuss attest the existence of non-representational instances of memory, accommodating episodic memory. That being so, this paper also makes room for content-involving forms of remembering. As a result, it supports the duplex vision (...) of mentality advanced by the REC framework. Building on research on the enactive imagination, I suggest that contentless forms of remembering act below content-involving forms. In addition, contentless and contentful forms of remembering a movement are revealed as the product of culturally scaffolded engagements with others and the environment, in which direct perception and mirroring play a fundamental role. It is argued that many of the practices of remembering a movement are best explained as enactments or re-enactments of such direct ecological perceptions. In the process, the dance studio proves to be a paradigm of the extensive mind. This paper is also intended as an invitation to the REC framework to extend the family and explicitly embrace research on sociocultural practices as an equal partner, including dance studies. Given the fundamental role that sociocultural practices play in REC’s understanding of cognition, it is only natural that further radicalization goes along those lines. (shrink)