This paper offers a metaethical analysis of so-called political moralism’s metaethical assumptions and proposes shifting away from them. It does so by taking migration ethics’ methodology as a case study of the field. First, the paper shows political moralism’s commitment to moral monism and moral overridingness. Second, it explains how such commitments are likely to lead to the formulation of toy theories - and, hence, moral regress. Third, it proposes the recognition of prudential normativity and normative pluralism as a way (...) to avoid the toy theory problem. And, fourth, it deals with two objections to this proposal. (shrink)

Poco más de dos décadas después de la publicación de Political Liberalism del filósofo estadounidense John Rawls, Thom Brooks y Martha Nussbaum se dieron la tarea de editar una compilación de seis ensayos que muestran la actualidad de este libro. Los escritos que participan en esta recopilación se aproximan al texto rawlsiano de manera variopinta, tanto a nivel disciplinar como en lo referido a la finalidad con la cual lo abordan. A grandes rasgos, estos se dividen en tres grupos: el (...) primer grupo, cuya pretensión es realizar una revisión crítica de la obra o de conceptos medulares de esta ; el segundo conjunto, donde se realiza una labor exegética capaz de responder a múltiples críticas que ha enfrentado el texto desde su publicación y, finalmente, un artículo ―el tercer grupo― que muestra la consistencia práctica en el modo en que Rawls concibió el derecho constitucional estadounidense. (shrink)

Journal of Applied Philosophy, EarlyView.

This paper argues against the claim that liberal democratic societies’ commitment to political equality requires them to offer a path to citizenship to temporary migrant workers (i.e. the democratic justice argument). I advance two arguments against this claim: (i) that access to citizenship is neither sufficient nor necessary to reduce temporary migrant workers’ exploitation and (ii) the democratic justice argument hinges on an untenable conception of status inequality. The paper fleshes out these two reasons in detail to then present an (...) adequate analysis of the status difference that temporary labor migration programs (TLMPs) give rise to. I conclude that TLMPs’ restriction of their participants’ rights and access to citizenship can be compatible with democratic principles and, particularly, with political equality. (shrink)

We propose a semantics for a connexive conditional based on the Lewis-Stalnaker conditional. It is a connexive semantics that is both classical and intuitive.

We propose a method of learning indicative conditional information. An agent learns conditional information by Jeffrey imaging on the minimally informative proposition expressed by a Stalnaker conditional. We show that the predictions of the proposed method align with the intuitions in Douven, 239–263 2012)’s benchmark examples. Jeffrey imaging on Stalnaker conditionals can also capture the learning of uncertain conditional information, which we illustrate by generating predictions for the Judy Benjamin Problem.

An extensive literature has demonstrated that encoding information in a self-referential manner enhances subsequent memory performance. This ‘self-reference effect’ is generally elicited in paradigms that require participants to evaluate the self-descriptiveness of personality characteristics. Extending work of this kind, the current research explored the possibility that explicit evaluative processing is not a necessary precondition for the emergence of this effect. Rather, responses to self cues may enhance item encoding even in the absence of explicit evaluative instructions. We explored this hypothesis (...) by testing memory for items encoded in either an evaluative or relational context. The relational context was achieved by requesting participants to report the spatial relationship between target stimuli, and visual or verbal referent cues. The results revealed a self-referent memory advantage, regardless of the encoding context or triggering cue. The theoretical implications of these findings are considered. (shrink)

In this paper we argue that the formalisms for decoherence originally devised to deal just with closed or open systems can be subsumed under a general conceptual framework, in such a way that they cooperate in the understanding of the same physical phenomenon. This new perspective dissolves certain conceptual difficulties of the einselection program but, at the same time, shows that the openness of the quantum system is not the essential ingredient for decoherence. †To contact the authors, please write to: (...) Mario Castagnino, CONICET-IAFE, Universidad Nacional de Buenos Aires, Casilla de Correos 67, Sucursal 28, 1428 Buenos Aires, Argentina; Roberto Laura, IFIR-Universidad Nacional de Rosario, Av. Pellegrini 250, 2000 Rosario, Argentina; Olimpia Lombardi, CONICET-Universidad Nacional de Buenos Aires, C. Larralde 3440, 6°D, 1430, Buenos Aires; e-mail: [email protected]. (shrink)

ZusammenfassungHumes Enquiry concerning Human Understanding entfaltet eine Konzeption von Freiheit und Verantwortlichkeit, der zufolge beides mit der These der »Notwendigkeit« vereinbar ist. Hume wirft dabei die Frage auf, ob ein Mensch oder Gott für moralisch böses Handeln dieses Menschen verantwortlich ist, wenn Gott existiert und als Schöpfer der Welt auch das Handeln von Menschen bestimmt. Der Aufsatz untersucht, welche Antwort Hume auf diese Frage gibt und welche Folgen sich aus seiner Antwort für eine angemessene Konzeption von menschlicher Freiheit und Verantwortlichkeit (...) ergeben. Wie deutlich wird, legt Hume sich darauf fest, dass in dem Fall, den er beschreibt, sowohl der Mensch als auch Gott frei und verantwortlich Handelnde sind. Wenn das zutrifft, müssen die Kriterien für Freiheit und Verantwortlichkeit grundsätzlich anders aufzufassen sein, als es der Forderung nach einem »ersten« oder »absoluten« Anfang oder einer »letzten« oder »wahren« Verantwortlichkeit entspricht. Humes Diskussion verdeutlicht, dass wir diese Forderung in Frage stellen sollten. (shrink)

This book, first published in 1992, attempts to unify the economic analysis of the production process in order to understand the effects of technical change. It is both an analytical representation of the production process, taking into account the temporal, organizational, and qualitative dimensions of production, and a fact-finding model for studying the economic effects of technical change. The inclusion of temporal and organizational aspects allows the author to examine the analytical implications of research on the nature of firms and (...) the characteristics of technical change, whilst the model is used to analyse technical changes that involve variations of scale or degrees of flexibility. This book deals with themes much discussed in research in industrial economics and management studies and is an important contribution to bringing these two areas of research closer together, providing a general framework for the study of production processes. (shrink)

The autopoietic theory and the enactive approach are two theoretical streams that, in spite of their historical link and conceptual affinities, offer very different views on the nature of living beings. In this paper, we compare these views and evaluate, in an exploratory way, their respective degrees of internal coherence. Focusing the analyses on certain key notions such as autonomy and organizational closure, we argue that while the autopoietic theory manages to elaborate an internally consistent conception of living beings, the (...) enactive approach presents an internal tension regarding its characterization of living beings as intentional systems directed at the environment. (shrink)

... presented as "the'tirst ph'uosopher who attempte'd to be both exact and in tune with the science of his day. Certain rules of philosophical method are ...

This article applies Bakhtinian dialogism and the idea of centripetal and centrifugal forces in struggle to critical discourse studies to analyse how powerful and marginalised discourses are brought into competition in political language to justify paradigm changes. I analyse German chancellor Olaf Scholz’s Zeitenwende (‘watershed’) speech, which he gave as a response to the Russian invasion of Ukraine, announcing a radical armament programme and change in foreign policy, paradigm shifts that had previously been unthinkable in German politics. Based on a (...) qualitative analysis using the Appraisal Theory strategies Attitude and Engagement, I identify how Scholz aligns himself with particular powerful discourses, centring some and marginalising others, to construct an existential threat for Germany and a ‘watershed’ moment, a new situation which casts his policies of armament as without alternative. I use a dialogic approach to analyse how the speech responds to and anticipates past (already-spoken) and future (not-yet-spoken) discourses, to position itself both in terms of the immediate and the historical function of a policy statement. The paper demonstrates the strength of Bakhtinian analysis of how utterances are shaped by past and envisaged future uses of particular discourses and of dialogically contractive and expansive strategies in critical discourse studies. (shrink)