Ce texte est un ambitieux programme qui se résume en trois idées-forées. Nourri aux sources d'Aristote, de Kant et de Habermas, l'article s'offre avant tout comme un effort de reconstruction-réhabilitation du champ de la pratique face à l'invasion de la rationalité technique. Sur la base de cette reconstruction, il tente une transformation de la philosophie de la technique qui prend ici la dénomination de praktische Philosophie der Technik. Fort de ce qui précède, l'article ambitionne de déterminer les tâches de la (...) praktische Philosophie der Technik qui se réduisent à trois principales : d'abord proposer une définition systématique de la technique qui prenne en compte la spécificité de la technique contemporaine ; ensuite, élaborer une méthode d'approche du phénomène technique et enfin, évaluer la technoscience.This text is an ambitious programme which can be summed up in three idées-forces. Originated from the sources of Aristotle, Kant and Habermas, this paper is first of all an effort of reconstruction-rehabilitation of the practice field with regard to the invasion of the technical rationality. On the basis of this reconstruction, this text attempts a transformation of the philosophy of technology which we may call praktische Philosophie der Technik. In consideration of what precedes, the paper intends to determine the works of praktische Philosophie der Technik that come to three main point: first, to propose a systematic definition of the technology which really takes into account the specificity of the contemporary technology, then to work out an approach method of the technical phenomenon and finally to evaluate the technoscience. (shrink)

I try to show that agent responsibility is an inadequate basis for the attribution of liability, by discrediting the Risk Argument and showing how the Responsibility Argument in fact collapses into the Risk Argument. I have concentrated on undermining these as philosophical theories of self-defense, although I at times note that our theory of self-defense should not be predicated on assumptions that are inapplicable to the context of war. The potential combatant, I conclude, should not look to the agency view (...) to ease his conscience about the killing he will do in war. If he is to fight without violating rights, then he will need a different theory of self-defense; if there are no more defensible theories, then he must either accept pacifism—which I think is a live possibility—or seek to identify stronger countervailing reasons, which can override the great force of his victims’ rights to life. (shrink)

One of the most profound interactions that can occur between people, apologies have the power to heal humiliations, free the mind from deep-seated guilt, remove the desire for vengeance, and ultimately restore broken relationships. With On Apology, Aaron Lazare offers an eye-opening analysis of this vital interaction, illuminating an often hidden corner of the human heart. He discusses the importance of shame, guilt, and humiliation, the initial reluctance to apologize, the simplicity of the act of apologizing, the spontaneous generosity (...) and forgiveness on the part of the offended, the transfer of power and respect between two parties, and much more. Readers will not only find a wealth of insight that they can apply to their own lives, but also a deeper understanding of national and international conflicts and how we might resolve them. The act of apologizing is quite simply immensely fulfilling. On Apology opens a window onto this common occurrence to reveal the feelings and actions at the heart of this profound interaction. (shrink)

Consider the following claim: given the choice between saving a life and preventing any number of people from temporarily experiencing a mild headache, you should always save the life. Many moral theorists accept this claim. In doing so, they commit themselves to some form of ‘moral absolutism’: the view that there are some moral considerations that cannot be outweighed by any number of lesser moral considerations. In contexts of certainty, it is clear what moral absolutism requires of you. However, what (...) does it require of you when deciding under risk? What ought you to do when there is a chance that, say, you will not succeed in saving the life? In recent years, various critics have argued that moral absolutism cannot satisfactorily deal with risk and should, therefore, be abandoned. In this paper, we show that moral absolutism can answer its critics by drawing on—of all things—orthodox expected utility theory. (shrink)

Why does it matter that those who fight wars be authorized by the communities on whose behalf they claim to fight? I argue that lacking authorization generates a moral cost, which counts against a war's proportionality, and that having authorization allows the transfer of reasons from the members of the community to those who fight, which makes the war more likely to be proportionate. If democratic states are better able than non-democratic states and sub-state groups to gain their community's authorization, (...) this means that some wars will be proportionate if fought by democracies, disproportionate if not. (shrink)

Many of us think we have agent-centred options to act suboptimally. Some of these involve favouring our own interests. Others involve sacrificing them. In this paper, I explore three different ways to accommodate agent-centred options in a criterion of objective permissibility. I argue against satisficing and rational pluralism, and in favour of a principle built around sensitivity to personal cost.

Q 1: How is it possible for a competent subject to detect the irrationality of a belief that p, to form and maintain his belief that not-p against weighty or conclusive evidence to the contrary?

Killing civilians is worse than killing soldiers. If any moral principle commands near universal assent, this one does. Few moral principles have been more widely and more viscerally affirmed. And yet, in recent years it has faced a rising tide of dissent. Political and military leaders seeking to slip the constraints of the laws of war have cavilled and qualified. Their complaints have been unwittingly aided by philosophers who, rebuilding just war theory from its foundations, have concluded that this principle (...) is at best a useful fiction. Sparing Civilians aims to turn this tide, and to vindicate international law, and the ruptured consensus. In doing so, Seth Lazar develops new insights into the morality of harm, relevant to everyone interested in normative and applied ethics. (shrink)

Recent years have seen a resurgence of interest, among both philosophers, legal scholars, and military experts, on the ethics of war. Due in part due to post 9/11 events, this resurgence is also due to a growing theoretical sophistication among scholars in this area. Recently there has been very influential work published on the justificaton of killing in self-defense and war, and the topic of the ethics of war is now more important than ever as a discrete field. -/- The (...) 28 commissioned chapters in this Handbook will present a comprehensive overview of the field as well as make significant and novel contributions, and collectively they will set the terms of the debate for the next decade. Lazar and Frowe will invite the leading scholars in the field to write on topics that are new to them, making the volume a compilation of fresh ideas rather than a rehash of earlier work. The volume will be divided into five sections: Method, History, Resort, Conduct, and Aftermath. The contributors will be a mix of junior and senior figures, and will include well known scholars like Michael Walzer, Jeff McMahan, and David Rodin. (shrink)

Vivian Liska, German-Jewish Thought and Its Afterlife: A Tenuous Legacy, Bloomington, University of Indiana Press, 2017 Lazar Atanasković.

How should deontologists concerned with the ethics of killing apply their moral theory when we don’t know all the facts relevant to the permissibility of our action? Though the stakes couldn’t be higher, and uncertainty is endemic where killing is concerned, few deontologists have an answer to this question. In this paper I canvass two possibilities: that we should apply a threshold standard, equivalent to the ‘beyond a reasonable doubt’ standard applied for criminal punishment; and that we should fit our (...) deontological ethical theory into the apparatus of decision theory. I show that the first approach faces insurmountable obstacles, while the second holds much more promise for deontologists than they might first have assumed. (shrink)

How does a subject who is competent to detect the irrationality of a belief that p, form her belief against weighty or even conclusive evidence to the contrary? The phenomenon of self-deception threatens a widely shared view of beliefs according to which they do not regularly correspond to emotions and evaluative attitudes. Accordingly, the most popular answer to this question is that the belief formed in self-deception is caused by an intention to form that belief. On this view, the state (...) of self-deception is taken to be a calculated outcome involving a person's intentional manipulation of her own thoughts. I argue that this answer is false and forms an impediment towards making sense of self-deception. I show that, contrary to philosophical prejudice, emotions and desires exert vast and systematic effects on the formation of beliefs. In this, and other, sections of the article, the results of experimental work are brought forward. Self-deception is portrayed here as resembling numerous instances of belief formation which are regularly affected by motivational factors. I argue that self-deceptive beliefs are direct expressions of the subject's wishes, fears and hopes. Qua beliefs which mostly correspond to such factors (rather than to evidence), self-deceptive states are a kind of fantasy. (shrink)

People often think that their special relationships with family, friends, comrades and compatriots, can ground moral reasons. Among these reasons, they understand some to be duties – pro tanto requirements that have genuine weight when they conflict with other considerations. In this paper I ask: what is the underlying moral structure of associative duties? I first consider and reject the orthodox Teleological Welfarist account, which first observes that special relationships are fundamental for human well-being, then claims that we cannot have (...) these relationships, if we do not recognise associative duties, before concluding that we should therefore recognise associative duties. I then introduce a nonteleological alternative, grounded in the Appropriate Response approach to ethical theory. (shrink)

Optimism about our ability to enhance societal decision‐making by leaning on Machine Learning (ML) for cheap, accurate predictions has palled in recent years, as these ‘cheap’ predictions have come at significant social cost, contributing to systematic harms suffered by already disadvantaged populations. But what precisely goes wrong when ML goes wrong? We argue that, as well as more obvious concerns about the downstream effects of ML‐based decision‐making, there can be moral grounds for the criticism of these predictions themselves. We introduce (...) and defend a theory of predictive justice, according to which differential model performance for systematically disadvantaged groups can be grounds for moral criticism of the model, independently of its downstream effects. As well as helping resolve some urgent disputes around algorithmic fairness, this theory points the way to a novel dimension of epistemic ethics, related to the recently discussed category of doxastic wrong. (shrink)

The aim of this research is to find the relationship between self efficacy and work performance of marketing employee refers to a person’s evaluation of his or her ability or competency to perform a task and reach a goal. Work performance is personal outcome that he or she performs in an organization. The participant for this study is 35 marketing employee of X Company. Using Pearson Correlation Product Moment, the result shows that there is a positive relationship between marketing employee (...) self efficacy and their work performance.  . (shrink)

El propósito del trabajo es exponer las reflexiones epistemológicas hechas por investigadores que integran un grupo interdisciplinario y que elaboran un diagnóstico durante la primera fase de una Investigación Acción Participativa (IAP). El proyecto se centra en la atención a la salud integral de cuatro comunidades en estado de alta y muy alta marginación, ubicadas en la Meseta Comiteca-Tojolabal, Chiapas, México, durante el periodo 2021-2022. Este artículo, de corte cualitativo, descriptivo y crítico reflexivo, permite repensar la investigación fundada en las (...) relaciones lineales. Se entiende que, una filosofía de la educación transdisciplinar, delinea una praxis compleja que genera transformaciones sociales. Primero, se define el método de IAP y sus desafíos. Luego, se exponen los retos experimentados por los investigadores, desde que planean acciones para atender a las solicitudes de la convocatoria emitida por el Consejo Nacional de Ciencia y Tecnología (CONACYT), hasta el momento de una segunda reflexividad en el que comprenden lo que hicieron en tanto hicieron (Giddens, 2011). Los principales resultados revelan que el acercamiento y diálogo constante entre el cuerpo de investigadores y de éstos con las comunidades genera sensibilidad intercultural cuando coexisten diferentes epistemologías y formas plurales de entenderlas. Lo anterior, favorece la proyección de diversas estrategias metodológicas que tejen esfuerzos a favor del bienestar comunitario y permite que el investigador asuma una actitud socialmente responsable. (shrink)

Hors du temps d’Alain Boyer est l’un de ces livres qui prêtent volontiers à la critique et à la discussion, non seulement en raison des thèses soutenues par l’auteur, qui sont, de son propre aveu, controversées, mais à cause également du ton employé, souvent polémique, parfois même irrévérencieux ou iconoclaste. Et sans doute l’un des buts essentiels de l’ouvrage consiste-t-il à déboulonner une statue, non pas tant celle du philosophe Kant, dont l’auteur reconnaît le génie et l’importance, mais celle d’un (...) certain Kant élevé au rang de chantre des modernes ou d’apôtre du pluralisme, de la liberté d’expression et du dialogue intersubjectif. Bien qu’il ne conteste pas complètement la vision poppérienne d’un Kant Aufklärer, Alain Boyer entend néanmoins la nuancer: maints aspects de la philosophie de Kant s’éloignent effectivement de l’Aufklärung. Il s’agira pour lui de montrer que Kant est un philosophe tant de l’ordre que de la liberté et que bien qu’il soit le père du criticisme, il n’en est pas moins lui-même un métaphysicien dogmatique cherchant avant tout à sauver la morale et la religion du péril que lui font courir ses principaux ennemis: les sceptiques empiriques, les rêveurs délirants ou les librespenseurs. Il entend également dénoncer l’imposture de certains interprètes de Kant qui passent volontiers sous silence les aspects les plus problématiques de sa pensée pour ne retenir que ce qui s’accorde avec leurs propres convictions, projetant ainsi sur sa pensée, de manière anachronique, leurs propres idées. Parmi les thèses kantiennes que l’on tente prudemment d’écarter se trouvent entre autres la condamnation absolue du mensonge, le refus du droit de résistance, la liberté intelligible ou encore l’énigmatique chose en soi. (shrink)

Résumé Nous entendons démontrer dans cet article l’importance souvent méconnue que revêt dans la morale kantienne l’analogie entre la nature sensible et la nature morale. Nous y soutiendrons en effet que sans la présence d’une telle analogie, il serait impossible pour le jugement pratique de déterminer pour des cas particuliers quelles sont les actions qu’autorise l’impératif catégorique. A cet égard, la typique du jugement pur pratique s’avérera déterminante en ceci qu’elle fournira à la loi morale le prolongement intuitif nécessaire pour (...) que soient subsumées sous elle des actions particulières. Bien qu’elle esquisse un pont entre la nature et la liberté, la typique ne saurait se réduire, comme le suggère néanmoins Yovel, à n’être qu’une forme inférieure de la synthèse achevée de la moralité et du bonheur, telle qu’on la retrouve dans le concept du souverain bien. Son caractère incontournable pour le jugement moral s’illustre en outre dans le recours systématique à ce principe par Kant lui-même lors de la discussion et de la solution des quatre dilemmes moraux présentés dans les Fondements de la métaphysique des mœurs. (shrink)

Notre intention dans cet article est de montrer qu’il existe deux versions différentes du souverain bien politique chez Kant et de déterminer laquelle est la plus cohérente avec l’ensemble de sa philosophie pratique. Ayant d’abord soutenu une version forte et étatique du Völkerbund conçu comme un Völkerstadt, Kant s’en éloigne progressivement jusqu’à soutenir une version non étatique de l’ordre juridique et politique international sous la forme d’une association d’États libres. Les arguments d’ordre moral avancés par Kant pour soutenir cette nouvelle (...) version de la Société des Nations ne sont rationnellement acceptables que si nous convenons qu’il a désormais abandonné l’analogie individu / État qui se trouvait pourtant à la base de l’argumentation visant à rendre nécessaire l’institution d’un ordre international. La faillite de l’analogie individu / État annonce que le modèle vers lequel doit s’orienter l’ordre politique international n’est pas l’État de droit coercitif et légal, mais l’idéal de la communauté éthique qui repose sur l’autonomie et l’intention morale des États.The purpose of this article is to determine which of the two representations of the highest political good in Kant’s philosophy is the more consistent with his whole practical philosophy. After having defended a strong version of the highest politicaI good, in which the Völkerbund was more like a Völkerstadt, Kant went on to affirm a non-state version of the international political and juridical order, now conceived as an association of free states. The arguments Kant proposes to ground his new conception of the international political order cannot be very convincing unless we admit that he has definitively abandoned the earlier analogy he made between the individual and the state. The collapsing of this analogy, which he had first proposed in order to justify a legalization of the international political order, shows that the model he has in mind for the highest political good is not the power of the national state but the ideal of an ethical commonwealth which relies only on the autonomy and the moral intentions of the states. (shrink)

Cet article plaide en faveur de l’unité de la philosophie kantienne de l’histoire qui apparaît trop souvent scindée en deux lectures antagonistes : l’une qui fait de l’histoire le lieu du développement continu de la disposition morale de l’homme, l’autre qui ne perçoit au contraire dans l’histoire qu’un progrès politique et juridique. Notre intention sera alors de présenter l’histoire comme le lieu où s’effectue chez Kant la réconciliation entre la moralité et la politique. Nous verrons à cet égard que la (...) position intermédiaire qu’occupe l’histoire lui confère par rapport au développement de l’espèce humaine une dimension pédagogique indéniable. A travers l’établissement d’un État de droit, l’histoire favoriserait donc l’émergence d’une culture de l’autonomie et de la liberté, préparant l’homme à réaliser sa tâche morale qui consiste dans l’accomplissement d’une communauté éthique du genre humain. (shrink)

It is generally agreed that using lethal or otherwise serious force in self-defense is justified only when three conditions are satisfied: first, there are some grounds for the defender to give priority to his own interests over those of the attacker (whether because the attacker has lost the protection of his right to life, for example, or because of the defender’s prerogative to prefer himself to others); second, the harm used is proportionate to the threat thereby averted; third, the harm (...) is necessary to avert that threat. The first and second conditions have been exhaustively discussed, but the third has been oddly neglected. Meanwhile a prominent school of thought has arisen, in the ethics of war, which seeks to ground the justification of killing in war in principles of individual self-defense. They too have failed to offer any substantive analysis of necessity, while at the same time appealing to it when it suits them to do so. In this paper, I attempt a detailed analysis of the necessity constraint on defensive force, and explore the implications of that analysis for the attempt to transpose principles of individual self-defense into the context of warfare. (shrink)

Wars are large-scale conflicts between organized groups of belligerents, which involve suffering, devastation, and brutality unlike almost anything else in human experience. Whatever one’s other beliefs about morality, all should agree that the horrors of war are all but unconscionable, and that warfare can be justified only if we have some compel- ling account of what is worth fighting for, which can justify contributing, as individu- als and as groups, to this calamitous endeavour. Although this question should obviously be central (...) to both philosophical and politi- cal discussion about war, it is at the forefront of neither. In recent years, philosophical discussion of warfare has bloomed, but the debate has focused on whom we may kill, on the assumption that our aims are justified.1 Political debate, meanwhile, is more concerned with matters of prudence, international law, and public justification, than with reassessing what is worth fighting for. For wars of intervention to halt or prevent massive humanitarian crises, this gap is not so troubling. When warfare is the only means to prevent the mass killing or enslavement of the innocent, the purposes of military force are clear enough (though undoubtedly many other problems remain). The problem is more pressing, how- ever, for the justification of national defence.3 Although common-sense morality and international law view national defence as the paradigm case of justified warfare, grounding this consensus is surprisingly difficult.4 We typically believe that any state is justified in using lethal force to protect its territory against any form of uninvited military incursion by any other state. And yet we lack a good argument to explain why this should be so. In this chapter, I explain why one familiar and otherwise plausible approach to the justification of killing in war cannot adequately ground common-sense views of permissible national defence.5 Reductionists believe that justified warfare reduces to an aggregation of acts that are justified under ordinary principles of interpersonal morality.6 The standard form of reductionism focuses on the principles governing killing in ordinary life, specifically those that justify intentional killing in self- and other-defence, and unintended but foreseen (for short, collateral) killing as a lesser evil. Justified warfare, on this view, is no more than the coextension of multiple acts justified under these two principles. Reductionism is the default philosophical approach to thinking through the ethics of killing in war. It makes perfect sense to ask what principles govern permissible kill- ing in general, before applying them to the particular context of war. If it cannot deliver a plausible set of conclusions about when national defence is permitted, then we must either revise our beliefs about which conclusions count as plausible, or else face the significant challenge of developing a different theoretical model for justifying war- fare—an exceptionalist model, which views war as an exception to the regular moral landscape, to which principles apply which apply to nothing else but war.7 We must show, in other words, that there is something worth fighting for in wars of national defence, which is not engaged when we use force in any other context. The chapter proceeds as follows. Section 2.2 sets out the argument against reduc- tionism.8 Section 2.3 considers and rebuts one common response to the argument, which has often been thought sufficient grounds to disregard its conclusion. Section 2.4 then asks whether a modified reductionism would survive unscathed by the argu- ment. Finally, section 2.5 sets out some desiderata on a plausible exceptionalist alterna- tive. Section 2.6 concludes. (shrink)

Killing in War presents the Moral Equality of Combatants with serious, and in my view insurmountable problems. Absent some novel defense, this thesis is now very difficult to sustain. But this success is counterbalanced by the strikingly revisionist implications of McMahan’s account of the underlying morality of killing in war, which forces us into one of two unattractive positions, contingent pacifism, or near-total war. In this article, I have argued that his efforts to mitigate these controversial implications fail. The reader (...) is left stranded: to reach plausible conclusions, Walzer deployed an implausible conception of our rights to life; McMahan’s more rigorous account of those rights generates untenable conclusions. Absent new developments, it seems that the prospects for grounding the ethics of war in individual rights are poor: any theory of our rights to life that is sufficiently indiscriminate to work in the chaos of war is not discriminating enough to be a plausible theory of our rights to life. Perhaps by rejecting the ideal of the rights-respecting war altogether we might develop an alternative theory of justified warfare, which marries theoretical soundness with conclusions that we can more confidently support. (shrink)

this paper advances a novel account of part of what justifies killing in war, grounded in the duties we owe to our loved ones to protect them from the severe harms with which war threatens them. It discusses the foundations of associative duties, then identifies the sorts of relationships, and the specific duties that they ground, which can be relevant to the ethics of war. It explains how those associa- tive duties can justify killing in theory—in particular how they can (...) justify overrid- ing the rights to life of some of those who must be killed to win a war. It then shows how these duties can be operationalised in practice: first, showing how soldiers who fight on behalf of their community can act on reasons that apply to the members of that community; second, showing that the argument from associative duties does not prove too much—in particular, that it does not license the intentional killing of noncombatants in war. (shrink)

Soldiers sign contracts to obey lawful orders; they also swear oaths to this end. The enlistment contract for the Armed Forces of the United States combines both elements: -/- '9a. My enlistment is more than an employment agreement. As a member of the Armed Forces of the United States, I will be: (1) Required to obey all lawful orders and perform all assigned duties … (4) Required upon order to serve in combat or other hazardous situations.' -/- We standardly think (...) that these oaths and contracts give soldiers new moral reasons to fight. Many also think that soldiers who are ordered to fight by legitimate states have moral reasons to obey those orders, just in virtue of their provenance. -/- We generate these reasons through our voluntary decisions—to sign the contract or swear the oath; to form the institutions and give the orders. They are therefore additional moral reasons, on top of the reasons that we have prior to those voluntary decisions. Simply because they are additional, these reasons seem limited in force and scope. In particular, they arguably cannot override pre-existing commitments. For example, if I already have a duty not to kill an innocent person, my promising to breach that duty seems irrelevant to whether doing so is permissible. Similarly for orders issued by legitimate states: the citizens of a legitimate state have pre-existing moral reasons not to kill the innocent; by what alchemy could their state's orders allow combatants to override those reasons? If additional reasons could make prohibited acts permissible, as Sidgwick observed, ‘we could evade any moral obligation by promising not to fulfil it, which is clearly absurd’ (Sidgwick 1981). -/- We might conclude that the contracts soldiers sign, the oaths they take and the orders they receive have weight only when they pertain to acts that soldiers are already allowed to do. Perhaps these additional reasons can require actions that would otherwise be merely permissible, but they cannot license otherwise prohibited actions. If this is right, then it radically limits the relevance of contracts, oaths and authority to the ethics of war, since almost all conflicts involve soldiers breaching some pre-existing moral duties. -/- This is obviously true for soldiers fighting on the unjust side in a war, since almost all the killing they do is unjust. But in all actual wars soldiers on the just side also kill at least some innocent victims, whether as part of an unjust subordinate aim, as ‘collateral damage’, or simply because their adversaries are not sufficiently responsible for unjustified threats to be liable to be killed. If additional reasons cannot make otherwise prohibited acts permissible, then they are practically irrelevant to the ethics of killing in war, at least in this sense: if fighting is impermissible without regard to the contract, oath and authority of their state, then fighting is simply impermissible. -/- This is a tempting conclusion. In this paper, however, I argue that even if it is true at the level of objective permissibility, it is false for subjective permissibility. And since subjective permissibility is where (at least some of) the action is in the ethics of war, this is a significant result. I explain first why additional reasons can make otherwise subjectively prohibited acts permissible, then why just war theorists should care more than they seem to about subjective permissibility. Although I focus throughout on the ethics of war, my arguments generalise to all kinds of additional reasons. (shrink)

The authors in this symposium on Sparing Civilians gave me much to think about; their criticisms have helped me to strengthen the argument for moral distinction, and enhance the moral protection of civilians in war. In this response I address their objections thematically, focusing in turn on each chapter of the book.

_How constructions of time shape political beliefs about what is possible—and what is inevitable_ To secure power in a crisis, leaders must sell deep change as a means to future good. But how could we know the future? Nomi Claire Lazar draws on stories across a range of cultures and contexts, ancient and modern, to show how leaders use constructions of time to frame events. These frames carry an implicit promise to secure or subvert an expected future, shaping belief in (...) what is possible—and what is inevitable. “Ranging imaginatively across history and geography, this elegant book probes temporal sources of order and transformation. Its analytical wisdom discloses how calendars and representations of time shape political legitimacy, dispositions, and action.”—Ira I. Katznelson, author of _Fear Itself: The New Deal and the Origins of Our Time_ “Great political leaders, for good or ill, seek to shape our daily lives by playing with time itself. That is the central insight of this elegant, erudite volume, one that means I will henceforth listen to speeches and manifestos with new ears and new tools to rebut them.”—Anne-Marie Slaughter, President and CEO, New America “Nomi Lazar gives us a fascinating exploration of the political construction of time itself, as structured by calendars, dating systems, and other mechanisms used for legitimation, revolution, and a myriad of other political purposes. A memorable and endlessly interesting book.”—Adrian Vermeule, Harvard Law School. (shrink)

Deontologists have been slow to address decision-making under risk and uncertainty, no doubt because the standard approaches to non-moral decision theory appear superficially similar to consequentialist moral reasoning. I identify some central tenets of simple decision theory and show that they should not put deontologists off, before showing where we should go next to develop a comprehensive deontological decision theory.

The responsibility account of permissible killing in war states that only those responsible for unjustified threats may be intentionally killed in war. In recent papers, Jeff McMahan and Bradley Strawser have defended the responsibility account against an objection that it leads either toward pacifism, according to which force is nearly always unjustified, or towards total war in which combatants need not even respect noncombatant immunity, depending on how much responsibility is required for liability to be killed. This chapter rebuts their (...) counterarguments with the challenge that defensive forces are unable to discern to what extent individuals are responsible for the threats they pose, and hence whether they are liable to defensive force. (shrink)

The temple is a pivotal event in the religious life of the different cultures. In the article some aspects of the experience of the temple as sacred space are addressed. Qualitative dimensions of sacred space in Christianity and Islam as their directionality, hierarchy and dynamics are analyzed. In this perspective, it attempts to shed light on the genesis and the different meaning of the bell tower and the minaret as specific configurations of the sacred architecture of Christianity and Islam.Key words: (...) sacred architecture, space of the temple, bell tower, minaret. (shrink)