The recent financial crisis has revealed not only market failure and regulatory failure, but also failure of the narratives that inform the rules of financial law. The term ‘narrative’ is used to mean the deep structures of assumption which inform legal rules, but which are not always fully articulated in them, and which are most fully articulated in the case law. This article identifies three such narratives, namely the arm’s length, fiduciary and consumerist narratives. It finds that they are both (...) inconsistent in practice and inherently limited in their ability to deliver virtuous outcomes, and thereby to command the imaginative assent of the regulated community. A possible new narrative, relating to the netting arrangements on which the derivatives markets rely, and based on the concept of mutuality, is recommended for the future development of financial law. (shrink)

Niniejszy tekst jest próbą ukazania kim są w dzisiejszym świecie ludzie wykluczeni. Ponieważw kulturze Zachodu możemy obserwować coraz większą niechęć wobec Obcych, jakimisą uchodźcy, migranci, w moim tekście staram się pokazać, czym jest ta obcość i dlaczegouchodźcy traktowani są jako niechciani i zagrażający Inni. Odwołując się do takich badaczy,jak Will Kymlicka, Aleksander Betts, Amin Maalouf i Benjamin Barber, pokazuję, w jaki sposóbjęzyk uprzedzeń czy pewien mit obcości zaczyna konstytuować nasze myślenie. Odrzucenieinnego, stygmatyzacja uchodźcy równocześnie oznacza konieczność przepracowaniasamej Inności i (...) naszego stosunku do wykluczenia. We współczesnym świecie coraz bardziejpotrzebne jest nam zrozumienie Obcego i budowanie dialogu oraz inkluzji. (shrink)

In recent years, a new generation of activists has reinvigorated debate over the public commemorative landscape. While this debate is in no way limited to statues, it frequently crystallizes around public representations of historical figures who expressed support for the oppression of certain groups or contributed to their past or present oppression. In this paper, I consider what should be done about such representations. A number of philosophers have articulated arguments for modifying or removing public monuments. Joanna Burch-Brown (2017) (...) grounds her argument for removal in what I call the “honorific” function of such representations—the ways in which they express and tend to cultivate admiration for their subjects. In the first two sections of the paper, I develop a novel argument for modifying these representations based on this insight. I argue that leaving such representations unmodified in the public space tends to undermine the dignity of members of oppressed groups as well as their assurance that society and government are committed to their rights and constitutional entitlements. In the paper’s third section, I develop a “balancing test” for determining whether the relevant moral and pragmatic considerations favor making a particular representation inaccessible to the public, or recontextualizing it for public consumption. Unlike some of the existing philosophical treatments of honorific representations that focus on particular monuments, this balancing test is designed for general application to any honorific representation that satisfies the presumptive case for modification. To conclude, I offer some reasons why weak forms of recontextualization that do not involve altering institutional context may often be an insufficient remedy for the problems I describe. (shrink)

In the paper we discuss criticisms against David Armstrong’s general theory of truthmaking by Gonzalo Rodriguez-Pereyra, Peter Schulte and Benjamin Schnieder, and conclude that Armstrong’s theory survives these criticisms. Special attention is given to the problems concerning Entailment Principle, Conjunction Thesis, Disjunction Thesis and to the notion of explanation.

Résumé éditeur : This book tells two intertwined stories, centered on twentieth-century moral philosophers Elizabeth Anscombe, Mary Midgley, Philippa Foot, and Iris Murdoch. The first is the story of four friends who came up to Oxford together just before WWII. It is the story of their lives, loves, and intellectual preoccupations; it is a story about women trying to find a place in a man's world of academic philosophy. The second story is about these friends' shared philosophical project and their (...) unintentional creation of a school of thought that challenged the dominant way of doing ethics. That dominant school of thought envisioned the world as empty, value-free matter, on which humans impose meaning. This outlook treated statements such as “this is good” as mere expressions of feeling or preference, reflecting no objective standards. It emphasized human freedom and demanded an unflinching recognition of the value-free world. The four friends diagnosed this moral philosophy as an impoverishing intellectual fad. This style of thought, they believed, obscured the realities of human nature and left people without the resources to make difficult moral choices or to confront evil. As an alternative, the women proposed a naturalistic ethics, reviving a line of thought running through Plato, Aristotle, and Aquinas, and enriched by modern biologists like Jane Goodall and Charles Darwin. The women proposed that there are, in fact, moral truths, based in facts about the distinctive nature of the human animal and what that animal needs to thrive.". (shrink)

The description for this book, The Conquest of Politics: Liberal Philosophy in Democratic Times, will be forthcoming.

Parce que, perché, porque dans les langues romanes médiévales : l’utilité des études sur corpusNous proposons ici une réflexion sur l’utilité du corpus pour les linguistes, diachroniciens en particulier. Afin de montrer que le corpus est le complément idéal des outils traditionnels de la philologie (grammaires et dictionnaires de référence), nous étudions les conjonctions de subordination par / por ce que, perché et porque en français, italien et espagnol médiévaux, en deux temps : d’abord à partir des outils philologiques, puis (...) avec une étude sur corpus. Cette dernière nous permet d’émettre une hypothèse sur les différences observées dans le comportement des trois conjonctions, à savoir les emplois intersubjectifs de perché et porque et l’absence de tels emplois pour par / por ce que. (shrink)

It is widely believed that environmental conservation has to be guided by respect for the ‘rights’ of future generations. But it is argued in this chapter that it may not be plausible to think in terms of the ‘rights’ of future generations in general or their rights to any specific environmental assets. Future generations may well have rights when they come into existence, but these will only be rights that can be satisfied at the time. But ‘rights’ do not exhaust (...) the whole of morality, and future generations will certainly have interests, which means that we are under moral obligation to take account of them and of the effect that our environmental policies may have on them. Thus, the problem is to predict what the main interests of future generations will be and how to weigh them up against the interests of people alive today. It is argued that this approach will lead to a very different ranking of priorities among our moral obligations to future generations. (shrink)

The fragmentary state of Cicero’s De Republica makes it difficult to see how it is a unified work. In this article, I argue that Cicero uses ring composition to unify the dialogue as a polemic against the Epicurean prohibition on political involvement. Cicero is following Plato in his use of ring composition, and just as Plato uses ring composition in the Republic to express his views about philosophical method, so does Cicero. Ring composition turns out to be central to a (...) plausible skeptical reading of the De Republica, in which Cicero both tries to induce suspension of belief in the Epicurean prohibition on political involvement, as well as prevent the reader from unreflectively adopting his own provisionally held views, both consistent with his commitment to the pedagogical aims of Academic skeptical philosophy. (shrink)

The close of an era.--The shifting of the centre of significance in the evolutionary hypothesis. The principle of projected efficiency.--The position in modern thought.--The phenomenon of western liberalism.--The problem.--The ascendency of the present.--The passing of the present under the control of the future.--The development of the great antinomy in western history.--The modern world-conflict.--Towards the future.--Appendix.

Le cinéma, contrairement à ce qui a été beaucoup dit, a régulièrement évoqué et montré la guerre d'Algérie avant même la fin de celle-ci. Cinéma d'émotion, cinéma du refus, cinéma politique et sensible, ces films qui traitent de la guerre d'Algérie, après avoir ignoré les Algériens, les « indigènes », ont somme toute développé une palette riche de cette mémoire d'une guerre cruelle à propos de laquelle de nombreux héritiers continuent à débattre. Contrary to much-repeated opinion, the Algerian war has (...) often been evoked and portrayed in films, even before it came to an end. Brimming with emotion, rejection, politics and sensitivity, films that deal with the Algerian war, having first ignored the Algerians themselves - the "native population" - have developed a varied palette that draws richly on memories of a cruel war whose legacy is still very much present. (shrink)

Though much philosophical and theological debate centres on various aspects of religious life, the very definition of a religious life in any given tradition is often unclear. This paper focuses on Christianity and asks, what does it mean to be a Christian? Kierkegaard‟s authorship offers an insightful conception of Christian being. An ontological account of being in „correct relation‟ and an ethical imperative to imitate Christ and love one‟s neighbour constitute Kierkegaard‟s idea of what it means to be a Christian. (...) This paper will also discuss whether Kierkegaard over-emphasises the individual aspect of religious life at the expense of the communal aspect. What will be affirmed throughout is that Kierkegaard‟s ontological and ethical conception of Christian being illuminates the issue today as it did for 19th century Danish religion. (shrink)

Graphical AbstractIdentifying the properties and molecules of the intestinal microbiome may help our understanding of various diseases and therefore facilitate their treatment; from excluding pathogens to manipulation of the immune system and regulation of non-intestinal sites.

This article provides a survey of Walker Percy's criticism of what Pope Benedict XVI calls “scientificity,” which entails a constriction of the dynamic interaction of faith and reason. The process can result in the diminishment of ethical considerations raised by science's impact on public policy. Beginning in the 1950s, Percy begins speculating about the negative influence of scientificity. The threat of a political regime using weapons of mass destruction is only one of several menacing developments. The desacrilization of human life (...) from cradle to grave leads Percy to assert that modern science's impact is often radically incoherent. In The Moviegoer, Percy finds his existential and theistic voice that would enable him to advance his critique of science. (shrink)

The following case study utilizes in-depth qualitative interviews and participant observation data in order to examine how color-blindness operates in a diverse Christian fraternity. The color-blind ideology functions in two distinct ways: to authenticate the fraternity’s collective religious identity as an inclusive Christian community and to obscure within-group racial inequalities reproduced through tokenizing racist jokes aimed at its non-white members. Color-blind statements allow members to attribute their organization’s racial diversity to their accepting religious doctrine, while also making problems of race (...) within the organization difficult to address. This article provides a theoretical contribution by highlighting the dire implications of ignoring race in diverse religious groups, particularly problematic within the “edgy” joking subculture of Christian fraternities. (shrink)

Environmental Ethics and Behavioural Change takes a practical approach to environmental ethics with a focus on its transformative potential for students, professionals, policy makers, activists, and concerned citizens. Proposed solutions to issues such as climate change, resource depletion and accelerating extinctions have included technological fixes, national and international regulation and social marketing. This volume examines the ethical features of a range of communication strategies and technological, political and economic methods for promoting ecologically responsible practice in the face of these crises. (...) The central concern of the book is environmental behaviour change: inspiring, informing and catalysing reflective change in the reader, and in their ability to influence others. By making clear the forms of environmental ethics that exist, and what each implies in terms of individual and social change, the reader will be better able to formulate, commit to, articulate and promote a coherent position on how to understand and engage with environmental issues. (shrink)

Witold Gombrowicz, novelist, essayist, and playwright, was one of the most important Polish writers of the twentieth century. A candidate for the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1968, he was described by Milan Kundera as “one of the great novelists of our century” and by John Updike as “one of the profoundest of the late moderns.” Gombrowicz’s works were considered scandalous and subversive by the ruling powers in Poland and were banned for nearly forty years. He spent his last years (...) in France teaching philosophy; this book is a series of reflections based on his lectures. Gombrowicz discusses Kant, Hegel, Schopenhauer, Kierkegaard, Sartre, and Heidegger in six “one-hour” essays and addresses Marxism in a shorter “fifteen-minute” piece. The text—a small literary gem full of sardonic wit, brilliant insights, and provocative criticism—constructs the philosophical lineage of his work. (shrink)

As a metaphysical theory, radical ontic structural realism is characterised mainly in terms of the ontological primacy it places on relations and structures, as opposed to the individual relata and objects that inhabit these relations/structures. The most popular criticism of ROSR is that its central thesis is incoherent. Bain attempts to address this criticism by arguing that the mathematical language of category theory allows for a coherent articulation of ROSR’s key thesis. Subsequently, Wüthrich and Lam and Lal and Teh have (...) criticised Bain’s arguments and claimed that category theory fares no better than set theory in coherently articulating the main ideas of ROSR. In this paper, we defend Bain’s main arguments against these critiques, and attempt to elaborate on the sense in which category theory can be seen as providing a coherent articulation of ROSR. We also consider the relationship between ROSR and Categorical Quantum Mechanics. (shrink)

Caring for hospitalized patients with COVID-19 raises ethical dilemmas in which clinicians must weigh the unknown value of an intervention against the unknown risk of viral transmission. Current guidelines for delivering high-value care in the time of the COVID-19 pandemic do not directly address ethical dilemmas that arise from the unique concerns of individual patients. We propose an “ethical pause” in which clinicians address ethical dilemmas by taking time to ask three questions that invoke the major bioethical principles of beneficence, (...) nonmaleficence, and distributive justice: will this intervention help my patient? Could this intervention harm my patient? Could this intervention harm or help others? Using two exemplar cases, we demonstrate how the process of deliberately asking and answering structured ethical questions is a mindful problem-solving strategy that facilitates delivery of high-value care. (shrink)

In their recent article, Brummett and Muaygil reject Bishop et al.’s framing of the debate over standardization in clinical ethics consultation (CEC) “as one between pro-credentialing procedural and anti-credentialing phenomenological,” claiming that this framing “amounts to a false dichotomy between two extreme approaches to CEC.” Instead of accepting proceduralism and phenomenology as a binary, Brummett and Muaygil propose that these two views should be seen as the extreme ends of a spectrum upon which CEC should be done. However, as evidenced (...) by several inconsistencies within their article, they have failed to fully appreciate the concern animating Bishop et al.’s proposal. Additionally, because of this failure, they do not seem to realize that credentialing ethicists for CEC will only create different problems in Saudi Arabia even as it possibly solves some of the current problems they identify. In this commentary, we highlight and clarify Brummet and Muaygil’s five misunderstandings of Bishop et al. This leads us to conclude that while they claim to be advocating a middle way between proceduralism and phenomenology, in fact they would like for us to standardize another proceduralism, albeit one that incorporates some of the “qualitative” values of American bioethics. (shrink)