In this article I wish to show how care ethics puts forward a fundamental critique on the ideal of independency in human life without thereby discounting autonomy as a moral value altogether. In care ethics, a relational account of autonomy is developed instead. Because care ethics is sometimes criticized in the literature as hopelessly vague and ambiguous, I shall begin by elaborating on how care ethics and its place in ethical theory can be understood. I shall stipulate a definition of (...) care ethics as a moral perspective or orientation from which ethical theorizing can take place. This will mean that care ethics is more a stance from which we can theorize ethically, than ready-made theory in itself. In conceiving care ethics in this way, it becomes possible to make clear that, for instance, a moral concept of autonomy is not abandoned, but instead is given a particular place and interpretation. In the final part of this article I will show how ‘relational autonomy’ can be applied fruitfully in the practice of psychiatric care. (shrink)

Truthmakers have come to play a central role in David Armstrong's metaphysics. They are the things that stand in the relation of truthmaking to truthbearers. This chapter focuses on the relation. More specifically, it discusses a thesis Armstrong holds about truthmaking that is of special importance to him; namely, the thesis that truthmaking is an internal relation. It explores what work this thesis is supposed to do for Armstrong, especially for this doctrine of the ontological free lunch, raising questions and (...) pointing out difficulties along the way. At the end of the chapter, it is shown that Armstrong's preferred truthbearers generate a serious difficulty for his thesis that the truthmaking relation is internal. (shrink)

The adoption of personalisation as the principle on which policy and practices for social care in England should be developed has been hailed as marking a fundamental transformation in the nature of social care and the experiences of service users. This article examines both the discourse of personalisation and the practices that are being adopted to implement this from an ethic of care perspective. It adopts an approach based on Sevenhuijsen's ‘Trace’ analysis to trace the normative frameworks in key policy (...) documents (in particular Putting People First), noting that critics of care have largely succeeded in relegating care to a marginal position within policy discourse and that a relational sensibility is largely absent within this. The article considers the practices associated with personalisation in relation to the moral principles of an ethic of care and conceptions of the ‘individual’ within these. It addresses the implications of this approach for broader political and policy issues: the universality of provision, collective responsibility for welfare and well-being, and broader issues of social justice in conditions of vulnerability. (shrink)

It is sometimes argued that contextualism cannot explain (dis)agreements concerning matters of personal taste because it treats sentences involving predicates of taste as indexical. I aim to weaken this charge. Given the idea that people sometimes use indexical sentences to express (dis)agreements about taste, two kinds of (dis)agreement are distinguished, namely doxastic and non-doxastic. Taste (dis)agreements are better explained in terms of the later kind, in which case they become amenable to contextualist treatment. It is argued that if something instantiates (...) a taste property (like being tasty for A), it has to instantiate a corresponding attitudinal property (like being liked by A). Based on this, utterances of taste sentences express propositions that concern tastiness of something (e.g., that X is tasty for A) and these propositions entail other propositions that concern non-doxastic attitudes the speakers bear toward something (e.g., that X is liked by A). One speaker is claimed to (dis)agree with another speaker provided their respective entailed propositions feature (in)compatible non-doxastic attitudes. Although this explanation is similar to hybrid accounts that are currently growing in popularity, it departs from them in some notable respects. (shrink)

In the Netherlands there is a growing debate over the possibility of introducting ‘compassionate interference’ as a form of good psychiatric care. Instead of respecting the autonomy of the patient by adopting an attitude of non‐interference, professional carers should take a more active and commited role. There was a great deal of hostile reaction to this suggestion, the most commonly voiced criticism being that it smacked of ‘modern paternalism’. Still, the current conception of care leaves us with a paradox. On (...) the one hand patients are regarded as individuals who have a strong interest in ( and a right to) freedom and non‐interference; on the other hand many of them have a desperate need for flourishing, viable relationships. In fact, part of their problem is that they cannot relate very well with other people. This creates a dichotomy, because respecting patients' autonomy often means that they cannot be given the help they so desperately need. In this respect current care practices do not answer the caring needs of these patients.The criticism on care practices is to be considerd as important. It invites us to reexamine and reevaluate the current conception of caring relationships and its main values. In line with this reexamination an alternative perspective on care is introduced in this paper, a perspective in which `compassionate interference' is not so much a threat to autonomy, but a means of attaining autonomy. For this we need a different definition of autonomy than that commonly used in current care practice. (shrink)

Clinical ethicists tend to see themselves as moral experts to be called in when clinicians encounter a particularly difficult moral problem. Drawing on a naturalized moral epistemology, we argue that clinicians already have the moral knowledge they need—the norms and values that guide clinical practice are built right into the various health care professions. To reflect on their practice, clinicians need to (a) be aware of their own professional norms and values; (b) be able to express them to their colleagues, (...) their patients, and the patients' families; and (c) work together with these other actors to provide ethically responsible care. The ethicist's job is to use her own training in three kinds of philosophical reflection as the basis for teaching clinicians how to think about what they do. (shrink)

It is possible to construct situations (with a suitable kind of setting) in which one speaker utters ‘This is tasty’ and another speaker responds with ‘That’s not true’. The aim of this paper is to motivate the idea that typical (broadly) expressivist accounts of taste disagreements are not in a position to explain such situations (although some of them can successfully explain disagreements in which another kind of dissent phrase—like ‘Nuh-uh’—is employed). This is because utterances of ‘That’s not true’ are (...) typically used to ascribe falsehood to propositions. Taste expressivism has it, however, that when one utters ‘This is tasty’, one typically manifests her evaluative attitude (which is non-propositional) toward something rather than describes what attitude she bears toward the thing. Another aim of the paper consists in proposing an alternative account of taste disagreements. It is close to taste expressivism when it comes to the explanation of disagreements in which speakers respond with ‘Nuh-uh’ to utterances of ‘This is tasty’, but departs from it in situations in which they respond with ‘That’s not true’. The account is developed within a contextualist framework according to which taste utterances express contextually enriched propositions that contain judges who evaluate things as tasty or not. (shrink)

The T-biconditionals, also known as T-sentences or T-equivalences, play a very prominent role in contemporary work on truth. It is widely held that they are so central to our understanding of truth that conformance with them is indispensable to any account of truth that aspires to be adequate. Even “deflationists” and “inflationists” tend to agree on this point; their debate turns largely on just how central a role these biconditionals can play in a theory of truth. In the present paper, (...) I want to bracket this debate about their “theoretical role” and focus on the T- biconditionals themselves. They are typically presented as entirely unproblematic, as models of simplicity, clarity, and obviousness. I confess that I find them rather more puzzling than that. The main purpose of the paper is to reflect on some of these biconditionals and to survey and explore some doubts one might have about their virtues. (shrink)

This paper enquires into the possibility of establishing a causal link between social performance (SP) and financial performance (FP) in corporate social responsibility (CSR). It shows that this endeavour is limited by several biasing factors (such as time horizons, sample choices and the tools chosen to measure SP and FP) and faces the logical fallacy post hoc ergo propter hoc (after this, therefore because of this), which indicates that a sequence of events does not necessarily establish a causal link. The (...) paper contributes to the methodological literature in CSR currently focused on empirical tests aiming to discern the linkages between SP and FP, both by emphasising the interest in interpreting and justifying SP and by suggesting a redirection of empirical efforts towards the understanding of entrepreneurial preference for a specific type of SP. (shrink)

The paper aims to weaken a widespread argument against indexical contextualism regarding matters of personal taste. According to indexical contextualism, an utterance of “T is tasty” (where T is an object of taste) expresses the proposition that T is tasty for J (where J is a judge). This argument suggests that indexical contextualism cannot do justice to our disagreement intuitions regarding typical disputes about personal taste because it has to treat conversations in which one speaker utters “T is tasty” and (...) another responds with “T is not tasty” (referred to as ‘judge-non-specific conversations’ in this paper) as being on a par with conversations in which one speaker utters “T is tasty to me” and another responds with “T is not tasty to me” (referred to as ‘judge-specific conversations’). The argument has it that judge-specific conversations, unlike judge-non-specific conversations, do not contain disagreement between speakers. To defend indexical contextualism, some philosophers have proposed accounts (here referred to as ‘dual-proposition theories’) according to which utterances of “T is tasty” are used to communicate both the above kinds of semantically expressed proposition and some other kinds of proposition (like superiority propositions or metalinguistic propositions) that could be used to explain disagreements about taste. The paper defends two claims: First, it is argued that judge-specific conversations, or at least some of them, do contain disagreement between speakers, contrary to what the anti-indexical-contextualist argument supposes. Second, it is argued that dual-proposition indexical-contextualist theories fail to explain judge-specific conversations that are intuitively interpreted as containing disagreement. (shrink)

The neo-liberal upsurge of the last twenty years and the neo-liberal case against the welfare state has gained much of its emotional force from a sub-text which is highly gendered. Whereas social liberalism had contained the promise of more autonomy within the private sphere and more caring values in the public sphere, neo-liberalism depicts the results of social liberalism as a loss of self reliance – through ‘over-protection’ by the state in the public sphere and usurpation of male roles in (...) the private sphere. The identification of the welfare state as female (the ‘nanny state’) helps fuel resentment on the part of those already confused by rapidly changing gender roles. This paper tracks the sex change which took place in the image of the liberal state as it evolved out of the night watchman state – the link between the women's suffrage movement and social regulation, maternal principles of distribution and demands for the public organization of caring. It examines the neo-liberal rejection of the breast and neo-liberal claims that the maternal state is incompatible with ‘self-reliance’ and a barrier to competitiveness in the world market. (shrink)

The paper presents an argument against referential treatment of definite descriptions' semantics. Referentialism with respect to semantics of definite descriptions claims that when descriptions are used referentially, then they are semantically referring expressions. It is argued that this picture does not lead to a satisfactory representation of propositions expressed by utterances involving definite descriptions. For if propositions are what primarily enters the relation of entailment, then referentialism is commited to the view that (i) some inferences usually taken as valid are (...) claimed to be invalid; (ii) some inferences usually taken as invalid are claimed to be valid; (iii) some inferences that are by no means trivially valid must be taken to be such. It is argued that Russellian‐ism with respect to definite descriptions gives us a better representation of propositions expressed by utterances involving descriptions. (shrink)

Critical statements, if true, bear ontological commitments to fictional entities. A well-known version of fictionalism about fictional characters tries to eliminate these ontological commitments by proposing that we understand critical statements as prefixed by a special sentential operator, such as ‘according to a fictional realist theory’. The aim of the present paper is to show that fictionalism about fictional characters is underdeveloped as it stands because it can be shown to be systematically inadequate. Because the fictionalist’s paraphrases of critical statements (...) suggest that fictional realists affirm the propositions expressed by critical statements, the fictionalist mistakenly attributes to fictional realists an expertise in matters that pertain to literary criticism. Importantly, this problem of misattributed expertise paves the way to other issues that might be much more devastating to the fictionalist project. It can be shown that, because she wrongly attributes expertise to fictional realists, the fictionalist unintentionally portrays fictional realist theories in a way that renders them inconsistent and self-defeating. This undermines fictionalism about fictional characters because it leaves no workable fictional realist account in which to ground a fictionalist explanation. This is why the fictionalist about fictional characters should try to eliminate the problem of misattributed expertise and its related issues. At the end of the paper, I sketch some of the available options in this regard. (shrink)

Creationism is an ancient worldview that was incorporated into ancient religious doctrines and survived in the western world due to its domination by religious institution such as the Catholic and Protestant Churches. Slowly, with the development of democratic political systems and science, the church lost its power of dominance over intellectual enterprises, and evolution became accepted by the majority as the inherent process in nature. Nevertheless, creationism is still very much alive among various fundamentalist churches and their organizations in the (...) United States. This article discusses the premises of the creationist movement, its varieties, and confronts it with the basic premises, characteristics, and modus operandi of the scientific enterprise. (shrink)

In an age of global capitalism, pandemics, far-flung biobanks, multinational drug trials and telemedicine it is impossible for bioethicists to ignore the global dimensions of their field. However, if they are to do good work on the issues that globalisation requires of them, they need theoretical resources that are up to the task. This paper identifies four distinct understandings of ‘globalised’ in the bioethics literature: a focus on global issues; an attempt to develop a universal ethical theory that can transcend (...) cultural differences; an awareness of how bioethics itself has expanded, with new centres and journals emerging in nearly every corner of the globe; a concern to avoid cultural imperialism in encounters with other societies. Each of these approaches to globalisation has some merit, as will be shown. The difficulty with them is that the standard theoretical tools on which they rely are not designed for cross-cultural ethical reflection. As a result, they leave important considerations hidden. A set of theoretical resources is proposed to deal with the moral puzzles of globalisation. Abandoning idealised moral theory, a normative framework is developed that is sensitive enough to account for differences without losing the broader context in which ethical issues arise. An empirically nourished, self-reflexive, socially inquisitive, politically critical and inclusive ethics allows bioethicists the flexibility they need to pick up on the morally relevant particulars of this situation here without losing sight of the broader cultural contexts in which it all takes place. (shrink)

Fregean thoughts (i.e. the senses of assertoric sentences) are structured entities because they are composed of simpler senses that are somehow ordered and interconnected. The constituent senses form a unity because some of them are ?saturated? and some ?unsaturated?. This paper shows that Frege's explanation of the structure of thoughts, which is based on the ?saturated/unsaturated? distinction, is by no means sufficient because it permits what I call ?wild analyses?, which have certain unwelcome consequences. Wild analyses are made possible because (...) any ?unsaturated? sense that is a mode of presentation of a concept together with any ?saturated? sense forms a thought. The reason is that any concept can be applied to any object (which is presented by a ?saturated? sense). This stems from the fact that Frege was willing to admit only total functions. It is also briefly suggested what should be done to block wild analyses. (shrink)

An exploration of the legacy of Michael Servetus to the development of a new type of theological inquiry which ultimately helped lead to the development of critical biblical studies.

Cieľom state je navrhnúť systematickú a vyčerpávajúcu klasifikáciu definícií. Táto klasifikácia vychádza z typológie, ktorú vypracoval Richard Robinson vo svojej knihe o definíciách, no v rôznych aspektoch ju ďalej dopracováva. Nová klasifikácia je založená na dvoch kritériách, a to kritériu predmetnosti a kritériu ilokučnej sily. Podľa kritéria predmetnosti možno definovať výrazy, pojmy, resp. objekty ; podľa kritéria ilokučnej sily možno zase rozlíšiť definície, ktoré opisujú existujúci systém, a definície, ktoré transformujú daný systém na nový systém. Napokon sa podľa týchto dvoch (...) kritérií vyhodnocujú niektoré známe druhy definícií. (shrink)

Roderick Chisholm appears to agree with Kant on the question of the existence of synthetic a priori knowledge. But Chisholm’s conception of the a priori is a traditional Aristotelian conception and differs markedly from Kant’s. Closer scrutiny reveals that their agreement on the question of the synthetic a priori is merely verbal: what Kant meant to affirm, Chisholm denies. Curiously, it looks as if Chisholm agreed on all substantive issues with the empiricist rejection of Kant’s synthetic a priori. In the (...) end, it turns out that Chisholm disagrees with both, empiricism and Kant, over a fundamental question: whether mere understanding of the contents of our thoughts must always remain within the circle of our own ideas or can provide us with genuine knowledge of matters of fact. (shrink)

The present research is a historical perspective on luxury during 1781-1933. The major stake is represented by the response of the ecclesiastical authority to luxury, the rejection/blaming/damning of luxury; subsequently the acceptance of it. We notice here the church's incapacity to stop the 'illegitim' consumption, that kind of consumption which was beyond the possibilities of a common person, and the taxation of luxury - the one who had more than he/she needed had to donate to the Church, meaning to the (...) poor. The secular authority did the same - luxury would be progressively taxed, which led to a certain synchronization between Church and State. We also analyse the link between orthodoxy and consumption from sociological perspective. The excess is perceived as being a sin. That is why the Church undertakes the role of prescriptor/controller of consumption, be it dressing, food etc. We detect here stages in the process of modernizing of the Romanian cultural space, the social changing and stratification. Luxury was a benchmark in social comparison, a reason of frustration, of indignation, of philosophical reflection. Luxury is a key for understanding the struggle between old and new, between ethics promoted by the Church and that of liberalism, about the tension between traditional consumption (home-made, predictable, swimming with the stream) and the one generated by the circulation of goods, by the industrial revolution. (shrink)

It is sometimes claimed that there are disagreements about matters of personal taste that are faultless; in such a case, the disputing speakers believe incompatible propositions about taste while both of them are correct in what they believe. The aim of the paper is to show that it is rather difficult to find such a notion of disagreement that would permit faultlessness in the required sense. In particular, three possible notions of disagreement are discussed; neither of them is found to (...) be satisfactory to those who would like to make room for faultless disagreements. The first notion is derived from ordinary instances of disagreement about matters of fact; it is claimed that no faultless disagreement is possible if disagreement is understood along these lines. The second notion is based on certain ideas derived from relativism about truth; it is argued that, though permitting faultlessness, it leads to counterintuitive results. More precisely, certain cases classified as disagreements in this sense would be, rather, taken as instances of agreement from an intuitive viewpoint and certain cases that are not classified as disagreements in this sense are, intuitively, instances of disagreement. The third notion is derived by omitting one feature of the second notion; it is argued that the resulting notion is so weak that it cannot capture what is essential to disagreement proper. (shrink)

The main aim of the paper is to reject the idea that predicates of personal taste express normative meanings. According to a recent theory proposed by Daniel Gutzmann, predicates of personal taste express both a truth-conditional content and a use-conditional content, the latter being normative. The purported normativity of predicates of personal taste is supposed to consist in that when producing utterances containing such predicates, their speakers suggest how other people ought to experience the objects of taste under discussion. The (...) paper provides a bunch of evidence to show there are utterances containing predicates of personal taste that cannot be used normatively in this sense. In particular, it is claimed that one can make such an utterance and then add a related normative piece of information without doing anything redundant; one can also make such an utterance and then deny the related normative piece of information without generating any contradiction or infelicity. At the same time, it is admitted there are situations in which the speakers do communicate something normative by producing utterances containing predicates of personal taste. We thus need an explanation to cope with such cases. Although the paper does not offer one, it provides some reasons to the effect that a correct explanation has to be pragmatic rather than semantic. (shrink)

Zhuānzì 專字 are often defined as graphs representing a “special meaning” of a word, manifest in the choice (i.e., addition or alteration) of a semantic component. This article approaches the zhuānzì phenomenon in the broader context of the logographic nature of the Chinese writing system. It first identifies and discusses several thematic categories of zhuānzì, including both historical examples from unearthed and transmitted corpora and instances from the Chinese script as used in the linguistic environment of modern Mandarin. The article (...) then seeks to compare and describe different kinds of information conveyed by different zhuānzì and suggests a terminological shift toward defining zhuānzì as “representing a subset of the word’s denotation,” a phrasing more suited to the complex reality of the phenomenon in question. (shrink)

Murray N. Rothbard and Hans-Hermann Hoppe build their libertarian theory of justice on two axioms concerning self-ownership and homesteading, which are bolstered by two key arguments: reductio ad absurdum and performative contradiction. Each of these arguments is designed to demonstrate that libertarianism is the only theory of justice that can be justified. If either of these arguments were valid, it would prove the libertarian claim that the state is an unjust political arrangement. Giving due weight to the importance of the (...) libertarian anarchist claim, this article exposes and criticizes the arguments that substantiate it. (shrink)

« Lorsque la philosophie peint sa grisaille dans la grisaille, une manifestation de la vie achève de vieillir. On ne peut pas la rajeunir avec du gris sur du gris, mais seulement la connaître. Ce n’est qu’au début du crépuscule que la chouette de Minerve prend son vol. » G. F. W. Hegel, Principes de la philosophie du droit La métaphore de Hegel concernant le retard de la philosophie sur le réel pourrait s’appliquer aussi au cas de l’anthropologie du socialisme (...) réel qui émerge comme champ de t.. (shrink)

Researching with Care is a book about how to guide research practices with feminist ethics of care. It poses fundamental questions about what motivates the research that we do, how we nurture resea...

Impliziert Wittgensteins Kritik der Metaphysik eine Absage an absolute Werte und Wahrheiten? Dies ist weitgehend Konsens in der Wittgensteinforschung. Die Ursünde der Metaphysik: Sie beruht auf einer mangelhaften Sichtung der Alltagssprache. Bestimmte Aspekte unseres Sprechens werden erst ohne hinreichende Gründe privilegiert - und dann in einer Theorie als absoluter Grund gesetzt - oder vergessen. Die führenden Wittgensteinianer führen zurecht vor, wie einige metaphysische Theorien über das Absolute als Resultat so einer Verwirrung gedeutet werden können. Sie wiederholen aber die Ursünde der (...) Metaphysik, wenn sie auf dieser Basis den Bezug auf das Absolute schlechthin verwerfen, da sie wichtige Aspekte jener ethischen Sprachspiele vergessen, in denen ursprünglich das Absolute vorkommt. Wittgensteins eigentliches Ziel ist es nicht, mit der Kritik der Metaphysik den Bezug auf das Absolute zu zerstören, sondern ihn wieder neu einzuordnen, gerade um ihn nicht zu verletzen. Für Leser mit Interesse an der aktuellen Wittgensteinforschung, an der Möglichkeit der Metaphysik und an den Kriterien für Wahrheit und Wirklichkeit. (shrink)

The author first used the neologisms mediot and mediotism in a series of 1973 essays. Both anagrams of “media idiot”, they base on the Greek idiotes in its meaning of “non-specialist” or “ignorant” rather than mentally backward. The terms basically refer to recipients of printed, electronic and digital media-press readers, TV viewers, radio listeners and internauts. Mediots uncritically accept all the media say, will-lessly allowing them to mould their minds and souls like plasticine. As if hypnotized, they readily submit to (...) every fashion, stereotype or snobbery the media propagate.Mediotism is a limitation and sign of contemporary humanity’s spiritual and intellectual weakness. At the same time, it constitutes an enormous challenge. Mediotism symptoms are easy to spot—they appear in all social classes and professions and on all education levels; its closest relatives are functional illiteracy and Erich Fromm’s “consumer idiot”.It is worth noting that mediotism and mediot have become commonly used terms in public (especially political) debate thanks to author’s two book publications and radio appearances. (shrink)

Environmental economics is a policy science. Environmental economists, however, find that their policy recommendations are often neglected by political officials. Some of them react to this neglect by reproaching public authorities with lack of efficiency: this so-called inefficiency is considered to be a manifestation of government failure. Others propose a redefinition of environmental economics in order to make it fit better with actual political objectives. After briefly outlining the case for an economic paradigm that differs from conventional environmental economics, I (...) argue that an alternative paradigm demands a different interpretation of economic ‘objectivity’. I claim that economic ‘objectivity’ ultimately comes down to a non-neutral common consent within a particular community of economic scientists. This interpretation leaves room for a multiplicity of 'objective', but non-neutral economic theories. The fact that the inevitable value ideas underlying a particular theory cannot be made fully transparent, urges us to accept a different conception of the theory's political relevance. Environmental economic theory should be considered not so much a provider of political 'instruments', as of scientific 'insights'. It should not simply be considered a theory that responds to actual political objectives, but one that inspires political objectives. These two latter suggestions of mine are only preliminary recommendations, which require further conceptual analysis. (shrink)