How children seek knowledge and evaluate claims may depend on their understanding of the source of knowledge. What shifts in their understandings about why scientists might disagree and how claims about the state of the world are justified? Until about the age of 41/2, knowledge is seen as self-evident. Children believe that knowledge of reality comes directly through our senses and what others tell us. They appeal to these external sources in order to know. The attainment of Theory of Mind (...) (ToM) at this age is commonly seen as the significant shift in development in understanding disagreements in knowledge claims. Children attaining ToM understand that someone exposed to incorrect or incomplete information might have false beliefs. Disagreement, then, is still attributed to objective sources of knowledge. The current study examines the later developing Interpretive Theory of Mind (iToM) as the basis for children’s understanding of how people with access to the same information might disagree and what this means for how to provide justification for a knowledge claim. Fourteen 2nd graders with the most iToM responses to four tasks and 14 with the fewest iToM responses were selected from a larger sample of 91. In analyses of interviews about a story in which two experts make different claims about a scientific phenomenon, those in the high iToM group noted subjective perspective and processes as the source of disagreement and suggested the need for investigation as the means to knowing. In contrast, those in the low iToM group mostly could not explain the source of disagreement and held that knowledge is acquired from external sources. A comparison of the interviews regarding the science story 2 years later allows for a qualitative description of the development. Those in the low iToM group showed more general recognition of subjective and constructive processes in knowing whereas those in the high iToM group identified interpretive processes and the relativity of perspectives with implications for how observations were conducted and interpreted. Only those in the high iToM group referred to the importance of evidence as a basis for knowledge claims at either point in the study. (shrink)

Abstract: Debates about the possibility of global democracy and justice are plagued by a fallacious assumption made by all parties. That assumption is that there is a "naturalness" to relations among fellow nationals to which a global demos could never aspire. In fact, nation builders employed a great many tools that mobilized the psychological and moral susceptibilities of individuals in order to create a sense of solidarity out of initially heterogeneous elements. Two such tools are described and then applied to (...) the global sphere: first, appeals to prudence through the sometimes artificial engineering of Hobbesian situations, and second, uses of philosophically inferior but motivationally optimal moral argument. The applicability of these strategies to the global sphere suggests that cosmopolitans would be well advised to examine further the nation builder's toolbox for other devices through which a global demos might be motivated. (shrink)

Simon May has argued that the notion of a principled compromise is incoherent. Reasons to compromise are always in his view strategic: though we think that the position we defend is still the right one, we compromise on this view in order to avoid the undesirable consequences that might flow from not compromising. I argue against May that there are indeed often principled reasons to compromise, and that these reasons are in fact multiple. First, compromises evince respect for persons that (...) we have reason to think of as our epistemic peers, and acknowledgement of our own finitudes as moral reasoners. Second, compromises are often made morally necessary by the shortfalls that unavoidably separate democratic institutions from democratic ideals. Third, compromises express a desirable form of democratic community. And fourth, compromises are often justified from a consequentialist point of view, in that they allow for the realization of values that would not be realized as well by the failure to compromise. (shrink)

Many of the problems that would be faced in setting up transnational institutions mirror problems that have already been addressed by appropriate institutional mechanisms in the establishment of the modern nation-state.

Substantive theorists of secession face a problem explaining why the international community ought on their view to withhold recognition from secessions which involve a loss in terms of the substantive criteria they privilege; this is so because the normal electoral politics giving rise to such a loss should not in their opinion meet with any adverse international reaction. The substantive theory of David Miller uses criteria for the legitimacy of secessions which give rise to strangely amoral consequences. A procedural theory (...) of secession is to be preferred on both moral and pragmatic grounds; this is one which that countenance secession when appropriate procedural hurdles are cleared, regardless of the substance of the claims put forward by secessionists to justify secession. (shrink)

Freedom of Conscience and Freedom of Religion should be taken to protect two distinct sets of moral considerations. The former protects the ability of the agent to reflect critically upon the moral and political issues that arise in her society generally, and in her professional life more specifically. The latter protects the individual's ability to achieve secure membership in a set of practices and rituals that have as a moral function to inscribe her life in a temporally extended narrative. Once (...) these grounds are distinguished, it becomes more difficult to grant healthcare professionals' claims to religious exemptions on the basis of the latter than it is on the basis of the former. While both sets of considerations generate ‘internal reasons’ for rights to accommodation, the relevant ‘external’ reasons present in the case of claims of moral conscience do not possess analogues in the case of claims of religious conscience. However, the argument applies only to ‘irreducibly religious’ claims, that is to claims that cannot be translated into moral vocabulary. What's more, there may be reasons to grant the claims of religious persons to exemptions that have to do not with the nature of the claims, but with the beneficial effects that the presence of religious persons may have in the context of the healthcare institutions of multi-faith societies. (shrink)

Israel Scheffler is the pre-eminent philosopher of education in the English-speaking world today. This volume collects seventeen original, invited papers on Scheffler's philosophy of education by scholars from around the world. The papers address the wide range of topics that Scheffler's work in philosophy of education has addressed, including the aims of education, cognition and emotion, teaching, the language of education, science education, moral education, religious education, and human potential. Each paper is followed by a response from Scheffler himself. (...) The collection is essential reading for anyone concerned with contemporary scholarship in philosophy of education, or with the place of this singularly important author in it. (shrink)

ABSTRACT Recent writings by philosophers such as David Miller and Yael Tamir have undertaken to provide nationalism with a normative foundation, a task which has been all but ignored by post‐War English‐language political philosophy. I identify and criticise three lines of argument which have been deployed in their writings. First, it is argued by Miller that the universalism and abstraction of rationalist moral theories have made them suspicious of ‘particularisms’ such as nationalism, but that they stem from a faulty metaethics. (...) Against this I argue that abstraction and universality need not be grounded in a universalist metaethics, but can be derived pragmatically from the ethical needs of multicultural societies. Second, it is argued that liberal policies such as taxation and material redistribution, restrictions on immigration, as well as liberal concepts such as political obligation, presuppose the validity of the nationalist point of view. Against this I hold that nationalism never provides the strongest moral grounds for these policies and concepts, and that, in the specific case of distributive justice, it can even undermine them. And third, I examine the argument that the historical excesses of which nationalists have been guilty are actually the product of a narrow, ‘ethnic’nationalism, in contrast to which we can articulate a categorically distinct, open, ‘civic’nationalism, which would be broadly compatible with liberal political morality. I argue that the concept of civic nationalism is unstable, and that under fairly plausible and widespread empirical conditions, it either collapses back into a form of ethnic nationalism, or else becomes devoid of any recognisably nationalist content. (shrink)

The political philosophy of health care has been characterized by considerable conceptual inflation in recent years. First, the concept of health that lies at its core has come to encompass ever-increasing aspects of individuals’ existences. And second, the emergence of the public health perspective has increased the range of resources relevant to health equity. This expansion has not been without cost. The decision to include more rather than less within the ambit of "health" is ultimately a moral/political rather than an (...) ontological or metaphysical one, and there are several ethical reasons to define the scope of theories of distributive justice in health narrowly. (shrink)

The debate that raged in the interwar period between the Austrian economists and socialist economists was, narrowly conceived, a debate in positive economics. What was being discussed was certainly not the morality of capitalism or of socialism. Nor, strictly speaking, was the debate even about society's economic well-being under socialism; it concerned the ability of central planners to make decisions that take appropriate account of relevant resource scarcities, in the light of consumer preference rankings. To be sure, the extraordinary interest (...) which surrounded the debate and the passions that lurked barely below its surface testified to the powerful implications of the debate for crucial issues in welfare economics. The Austrians were not merely exploring the economies of socialism; they were in effect demonstrating that, as an economic system attempting to serve the needs of its citizens, socialism must inevitably fail. But, even if the debate is interpreted in its broadest terms, as a debate in welfare economics, it represented a sharp break widi traditional polemics relating to the socialism-capitalism issue. Traditionally the arguments for or against capitalism had, until 1920, been deeply involved in ediical questions. Mises's 1920 challenge to socialism, in contrast, was explicit in making no attempt to address any claims concerning the alleged moral superiority of socialism. He simply argued that, as an economic system, socialism was inherendy incapable of fulfilling the objectives of its proponents; central planners are unable to plan centrally. (shrink)

In this article, I distinguish boycotts from other kinds of superficially similar types of actions, and argue that boycotts involve at least coordinated activity on the part of the members of a group to abstain on moral grounds from otherwise normal interaction with the members of another group. Boycotts in their minimal forms do not face high justificatory hurdles, since they involve the exercise of freedom of speech, along with the exercise by members of the boycotting group of basic rights (...) and freedoms, such as the right to associate, freedom of movement, and the like. The justificatory hurdles are greater, though not insurmountable, when boycotts involve the coercion of members of the boycotting group who either disagree with the grounds for boycott, or with the appropriateness of boycotting as a strategy to bring about a morally desirable change, or when they involve defeating the reasonable expectations of members of the boycotted group. I describe the justificatory challenges in both these cases, as well as the ways in which they can be met. (shrink)

I outline Rawls's theory of justification, highlighting its philosophical and pragmatic conditions. I argue that the theory has remained essentially unchanged since his earliest methodological writings, and that his recent writings have sought to show how "justice as fairness" can satisfy these conditions, given Rawls's new construal of the "fact of pluralism" which theories of justice designed for modern Western liberal democracies must address. I argue that neither Rawls's revised conception of reflective equilibrium, based on the "fixed points" of such (...) societies' political cultures rather than on individuals' "considered moral judgments" nor the newer notion of "overlapping consensus", succeed in justifying "justice as fairness" according to the terms of Rawls's theory of justification. (shrink)

Recent defenders of nationalism have pointed to the fact that most people feel that their obligations towards their compatriots are either more numerous or more stringent than those which bind them to people from other countries. They point to this fact as evidence that something is seriously amiss with the universalism which allegedly underpins liberal theory. That people believe quite strongly that they have such special obligations is taken as a datum for which different theories of justice must somehow offer (...) an account. It is taken to be a measure of the theoretical success of a theory of justice that what we might call the "special-obligations thesis" can be derived from it. (shrink)

Pour certains philosophes pluralistes politiques, accepter la thèse de pluralisme des valeurs entraîne le rejet de l’autonomie libérale en faveur d’une forme de libéralisme fondée sur l’idéal de la tolérance. Cette idée est fausse. D’abord le pluralisme des valeurs partage avec le relativisme la difficulté inhérente à toute tentative de tirer une conclusion normative d’une thèse descriptive. Chercher à soutenir l’argument en comblant les prémisses manquantes montre que le pluralisme des valeurs est plus naturellement lié au libéralisme autonomiste qu’à un (...) libéralisme fondé sur la tolérance. C’est parce que les individus doivent posséder une capacité de choix autonome pour que le pluralisme puisse les concerner. (shrink)

Brutus wanted to kill Caesar. He believed that Caesar was an ordinary mortal, and that, given this, stabbing him (by which we mean plunging a knife into his heart) was a way of killing him. He thought that he could stab Caesar, for he remembered that he had a knife and saw that Caesar was standing next to him on his left, in the Forum. So Brutus was motivated to stab the man to his left. He did so, thereby killing (...) Caesar. (shrink)

This paper seeks to provide an overview of some of the main areas of debate that have emerged in recent years at the interface between theories of justice and health care. First, the paper consi- ders various positions as to what the index of justice with respect to health ought to be. It warns on practical and principled grounds against conceptual inflation of the notion of "health" as it appears in theories of distributive justice. Second, it considers how various standards (...) according to which goods ought to be distributed in a just society apply to debates within health care. (shrink)

First published in 1963, this title considers the philosophical problems encountered when attempting to provide a clear and general explanation of scientific principles, and the basic confrontation between such principles and experience. Beginning with a detailed introduction that considers various approaches to the philosophy and theory of science, Israel Scheffler then divides his study into three key sections – Explanation, Significance and Confirmation – that explore how these complex issues involved have been dealt with in contemporary research. This title, (...) by one of America’s leading philosophers, will provide a valuable analysis of the theory and problems surrounding the Philosophy of Science. (shrink)

RÉSUMÉ: Je maintiens dans cet essai que l'argument développé par Thomas Hurka sur la base de son perfectionnisme aristotélicien en faveur d'une forme modérée de perfectionnisme d'État échoue. Je tente de démontrer que son perfectionnisme sousdétermine les types d'activités que l'État aurait à promouvoir afin de réaliser les valeurs perfectionnistes qu'il défend. Je soutiens également que Hurka opère avec une conception caricaturale de la doctrine de la neutralité libérale. Selon lui, l'État libéral serait réduit à l'inaction par cette notion. Je (...) démontre que l'État libéral peut promouvoir les biens et les activités qui font partie d'une «conception libérale du bien» tout en respectant l'exigence de neutralité. Ces biens et ces activités sont ceux que recoupent déjà les conceptions raisonnables de la vie bonne, ainsi que ceux qui sont présupposés, que cela soit pour des raisons empiriques ou conceptuelles, par de telles conceptions raisonnables. (shrink)

There are at present two ways in which to evaluate religiously-based claims to accommodation in the legal context. The first, objective approach holds that these claims should be grounded in « facts of the matter » about the religions in question. The second, subjective approach, is grounded in an appreciation by the courts of the sincerity of the claimant. The first approach has the advantage of accounting for the difference between two constitutional principles : freedom of conscience on the one (...) hand, and freedom of religion on the other. It has the disadvantage of transforming courts into expert bodies on religious matters. The subjective approach has a harder time accounting for the distinction. It also risks giving rise to a proliferation of claims. A plausible synthesis between the two approaches requires that we uncover the normative grounds justifying the granting by liberal democracies of religious accommodation. An analogous argument to that put forward by Kymlicka in the case of minority nations identifies the interest that citizens have in being able to exercise their « cultural agency » : the creative reappropriation and reinterpretation of the rituals, practices and norms of religious traditions.Il existe à l’heure actuelle dans le contexte juridique deux principales approches à l’évaluation de la légitimité des demandes d’accommodement pour des motifs religieux. La première, objective, affirme que ces demandes doivent pouvoir s’appuyer dans des faits concernant la religion en question. La seconde, subjective, s’appuie sur l’appréciation de la sincérité de la demande faite par le requérant. La première approche a l’avantage de rendre compte de la distinction entre les deux principes constitutionnels que sont, d’une part, la liberté de conscience, et de l’autre, la liberté de religion. Elle a l’inconvénient de tendre à ériger les tribunaux en « experts » sur des questions religieuses. L’approche subjective rend plus difficilement compte de la distinction entre les deux principes, et de plus risque de donner lieu à une prolifération de demandes. Pour atteindre une synthèse plausible de ces deux approches, il nous faut identifier les fondements normatifs justifiant l’intérêt que les démocraties libérales ont à reconnaître une telle catégorie d’accommodements. En prenant appui dans le célèbre argument de Kymlicka justifiant les droits de nations minoritaires, nous pouvons identifier un intérêt que ces types d’État ont à protéger les conditions permettant aux citoyens de manifester leur « agentivité culturelle », leur capacité à s’identifier en se les réappropriant et en les réinterprétant les normes, pratiques et rites issues de traditions religieuses. (shrink)

First published in 1991, _In Praise of Cognitive Emotions_ comprises fourteen of Scheffler's most recent essays - all of which challenge contemporary notions of education and rationality. While defending the ideal of rationality, he insists that rationality not be identified with a mental faculty or a mechanism of inference but taken rather as the capactity to grasp principles and purposes and to evaluate them in the light of relevant reasons. Examining a broad range of issues - from computers in school (...) to math education, from metaphor to morality - these essays are unified by Scheffler's conviction of the primacy of critical thought in education. Scheffler is especially concerned to promote a broad interpretation of rationality to counteract the narrowing of vision accompanying the technological revolution now sweeping education. Addressing three specific areas of curriculum, the work offers a critique of computer applications to education, develops a notion of strategic rationality in understanding mathematical reasoning, and, contrary to prevalent notions of moral education, connects reason with care, thus emphasizing the intimate connection between emotion and reason and challenging the dominant perception of the two as oppositional. (shrink)

In her book, Conscience and Conviction, Kimberley Brownlee argues that there is nothing undemocratic about the robust, primary right to civil disobedience that she devotes most of her argument to defending. To the contrary, she holds that there is nothing paternalistic about civil disobedients opposing the will of democratic majorities, because, inter alia, democratic majorities cannot claim particular epistemic superiority, and because there are flaws inherent to democratic procedures that civil disobedience addresses. I hold that Brownlee’s arguments fail. In particular, (...) her argument fails because it does not properly construe the nature of the epistemic claim that can be made either by democratic procedures or by civil disobedients, and because it illegitimately conflates the concern about permanent minorities that has been a constant thorn in the side of democratic theorists, with a concern with all outvoted minorities, whether permanent minorities or not. (shrink)

According to the ?story model? a juror constructs an implicit mental model of a story telling what happened as the basis for the verdict choice. But the explicit justification of a verdict choice could take the form of a story (knowledge telling) or the form of a relational (knowledge-transforming) argument structure that brings together diverse, non-chronologically related pieces of evidence. The study investigates whether people tend towards knowledge telling or knowledge transforming, and whether use of these argument structure types are (...) related to skilled argument and epistemic understanding. A sample of people on jury duty chose and justified verdicts in two abridged cases. Participants tended to display the same argument structure and argument skill across cases. Those using knowledge-transforming structures were more successful at the juror argument skills task and had a higher level of epistemic understanding. The discussion suggests that jurors approach their task with an epistemic orientation towards knowledge telling or knowledge transforming. (shrink)

La recherche de la sécurité comme objet de politique publique exige que des compromis soient faits avec d’autres buts légitimes de politique publique , et que des limites soient imposées à certains droits individuels. Comment penser de manière systématique au type de compromis que les membres d’une démocratie seraient disposés à effectuer, et aux coûts qu’ils seraient prêts à assumer en termes de droits ? Adaptant une proposition faite par Ronald Dworkin pour penser ce type de question dans le cas (...) de la santé, je définis une situation hypothétique de choix qui, à travers les conditions épistémiques et conatives qu’elle impose aux participants, est susceptible de nous guider sur ces deux questions.The adoption of security as a goal of public policy requires that compromises be made with other legitimate goals of policy , and that limits be imposed upon certain individual rights. How can we think in a principled manner about the kinds of compromises that citizens in a democracy would be ready to accept, and about the costs they would be ready to bear in terms of rights? A proposal made by Ronald Dworkin to address analogous questions in the case of health-care is adapted to the case of security: I define a hypothetical choice situation that imposes the kinds of epistemic and motivational constraints upon participants that are required to address these questions. (shrink)

Nature and civilisation -- Climate and the forms of the atmosphere -- Surface and the forms of the land -- Living forms -- The forms of metabolism -- Humans - anatomical and cultural forms -- City forms -- The forms of information, energy and ecology -- Emergence.

My intention in this essay will be to explore the role that consent-based arguments perform in Kant's political and legal philosophy. I want to uncover the extent to which Kant considered that the legitimacy of the State and of its laws depends upon the outcome of intersubjective deliberation. Commentators have divided over the following question: Is Kant best viewed as a member of the social contract tradition, according to which the legitimacy of the state and of the laws it promulgates (...) derives from the consent of those people over whom it claims authority, or should he be read as having put forward a secularized version of natural law theory, according to which the state and its laws are legitimate to the extent that they are attained by standards of sound reason and supported by an objective account of the human good? (shrink)

There is an underappreciated disconnect between the ultimate values that lie at the heart of contemporary theories of distributive justice, and the practice of state institutions. State institutions deliver “intermediate goods” – goods such as health-care, education, housing, transportation, and the like – that are instrumental to a society being distributively just, but that do not in an of themselves constitute criteria of justice. Researchers who have emphasized the “social determinants of health” provide an insight that, when generalized, point us (...) in a direction that theorists of distributive justice should follow, that of attending not just to the instrinsic value of intermediate goods, but also to their causal contributions to realizing the values that theories of distributive justice make central. “Platforms”, which represent principle-driven attempts at designing compossible policies that attend both to the causal and to the intrinsic value of intermediate goods, should be given more importance within theories of distributive justice if such theories are to be policy-relevant, for they connect the ultimate values of these theories to the practices of state institutions. (shrink)

The post-confinement phase of the COVID-19 pandemic will require that governments navigate more complex ethical questions than had occurred in the initial, ‘curve-flattening’ phase, and that will occur when the pandemic is in the past. By looking at the unavoidable harms involved in the confinement and quarantine methods employed during the initial phase of the pandemic, we can develop a harm reduction approach to managing the phase during which society will be gradually reopened in a context of managed risk. The (...) principles that are at the heart of such an approach include a reckoning with all of the harms involved in policy choice, including harms that might be given rise to by policy implementation itself; a focus on the harms to which already vulnerable populations are susceptible; and a strong preference for policies that economize on the use of prohibitions and of coercive state enforcement, and that instead emphasize the agency of citizens in realizing health-promoting behavior change. This framework is applied to a policy proposal that has been discussed in policy circles in a number of countries, that of immunity ‘passports’, and to policies that emphasize the creative use of space and time to achieve physical distancing goals. (shrink)