Die egalitaristische Position in der Debatte um distributive Gerechtigkeit wird üblicherweise so verstanden, dass sie die These enthält, der Relation der Gleichheit komme ein intrinsischer Wert zu. Diese These ist dem Levelling-down-Einwand ausgesetzt. Unter dem Eindruck dieses Einwandes ist vielfach argumentiert worden, Gerechtigkeit sei kein relationaler Begriff; Gerechtigkeit herrsche vielmehr dann, wenn nicht-relationale moralische Standards erfüllt seien. Ich versuche zu zeigen, dass Gleichheit zwar tatsächlich keinen intrinsischen Wert besitzt, dass Gerechtigkeitsstandards jedoch nicht mit den non-relationalen Standards, auf die die Kritiker (...) des Egalitarismus verweisen, identisch sind. Es geht, so meine These, bei der Frage nach der gerechten Verteilung nämlich um die höherstufige Frage, ob die basalen non-relationalen moralischen Standards für alle gleichermaßen erfüllt sind. Gerechtigkeit besitzt auch ein genuines normatives Gewicht, das sich – wie auch das Gewicht der basalen moralischen Standards – aus bestimmten Präferenzen speist. Während die basale Moral im Mitleid fundiert ist, gründet die Gerechtigkeit in generalisiertem Neid. Neid jedoch ist von Missgunst zu unterscheiden, er fordert – anders als letztere – nicht levelling down, sondern levelling up. Der intrinsische Wert liegt somit nicht in der Gleichheit, sondern in der Angleichung nach oben. (shrink)

Der Aufsatz greift ein in eine Grundsatzdebatte, die in jüngster Zeit ins Zentrum der politischen Philosophie gerückt ist: Es geht um den Status des Egalitarismus in der Theorie der Verteilungsgerechtigkeit. Der Autor argumentiert, dass soziale Chancengleichheit ein unreduzierbarer Standard der Verteilungsgerechtigkeit sei, und nimmt dabei die Egalitaristen gegen die Non-Egalitaristen in Schutz. Defizite sieht er jedoch auch bei den Egalitaristen, die den Begriff der Gleichheit oft redundant verwendeten. Gegen Vertreter beider Parteien macht der Autor geltend, dass der wichtigste normative (...) Gesichtspunkt zur Einschränkung von Ungleichheit nicht die Gleichheit, sondern die Optimierung für jeden und vor allem die besondere Berücksichtigung der sozial Schwachen ist. (shrink)

Buddhist concepts of personal life and responsibilities.

The concluding chapter lays down the essential conditions for any genuine understanding between East and West, which can only come through the work of those who have attained, at least in some degree, to the realization of 'wisdom uncreate' ...

QUALITY AND QUANTITY are fairly generally regarded as complementary terms, although the profound reason for their comple- mentarism is often far from being understood, this reason lying in the 'polar' correspondence referred to toward ...

This article introduces a non‐cognitivist account of metaphysical explanation according to which the core function of judgements of the form ⌜x because y⌝ is not to state truth‐apt beliefs. Instead, their core function is to express attitudes of commitment to, and recommendation of the acceptance of certain norms governing interventional conduct at contexts.

Description: Contents: Preface 1. General Remarks on the Vedanta 2. Fundamental Distinction Between The Self and the Ego 3. The Vital Centre of the Human Being, Seat of Brahma 4. Purusha and Prakriti 5. Purusha Unaffected by Individual Modifications 6. The Degrees of Individual Manifestation 7. Buddhi or the Higher Intellect 8. Manas or the Inward Sense : The Ten External Faculties of Sensation and Action 9. The Envelopes of the Self ; The Five Vayus or Vital Functions 10. The (...) Essential Unity and Identity of the Self in all the States of the Being 11. The Different Conditions of Atma in the Human Being 12. The Waking State or the Condition of Vaishwanara 13. The Dream State or the Condition of Taijasa 14. The State of Deep Sleep or the Condition of Prajna 15. The Unconditioned State of Atma 16. The Symbolical Representation of Atma and its Conditions by the Sacred Monosyllable Om 17. The Posthumous Evolution of the Human Being 18. The Reabsorption of the Individual Faculties 19. Differences in the Posthumous Conditions According to the Degrees of Knowledge 20. The Coronal Artery and the Solar Ray 21. The Divine Journey of the Being on the Path of Liberation 22. Final Deliverance 23. Videha-mukti and Jivana-mukti 24. The Spiritual State of the Yogi : The Supreme Identity. (shrink)

This essay is a discussion of the philosophical and foundational issues that arise in non-relativistic quantum theory. After introducing the formalism of the theory, I consider: characterizations of the quantum formalism, empirical content, uncertainty, the measurement problem, and non-locality. In each case, the main point is to give the reader some introductory understanding of some of the major issues and recent ideas.

This book argues that the major traditions in the philosophy of language have mistakenly focused on highly idealized linguistic contexts. Instead, it presents a non-ideal foundational theory of language that contends that the essential function of language is to direct attention for the purpose of achieving diverse social and political goals. Philosophers of language have focused primarily on highly idealized linguistic contexts in which cooperative agents are working toward the shared goal of gaining information about the world. This approach abstracts (...) away from important issues like power, ideology, social position, and diversity of goals which are crucial to explaining linguistic phenomena both at the semantic and pragmatic levels. This book begins by examining the work of some of the pioneers of this tradition--primarily David Lewis, Paul Grice, and Robert Stalnaker. The author shows that various problems have their source in idealizations made at the foundational level of linguistic theory and proposes to rebuild from the ground-up. She presents a non-ideal foundational theory of language which retains the major insights of traditional frameworks while rejecting the social idealizations that guide them. Then, she explores the social and political applications of her account to issues such as dog whistling, propaganda, slurs and racist speech, silencing, and manipulation. Non-Ideal Foundations of Language will appeal to researchers and advanced students in philosophy of language who are interested in the social and political applications of language, as well as traditional metasemantic theory. (shrink)

The objective of this study is twofold: to examine the patterns that govern social reporting with reference to an Islamic framework and to identify the moral legitimacy factors that influence them. We select 146 publicly listed Sharia‐compliant companies and classify the disclosures in their annual reports according to an Islamic framework that categorises items as either Required, Expected or Desired to indicate the degree of importance each item carries from an Islamic perspective. Based on this framework, we then analyse moral (...) legitimacy factors, specifically the type of Sharia screening body and the proportion of Muslims in the population, that may influence the prioritisation of the different categories of social reporting. We find that disclosures that fall into the Required category of our framework—especially those that relate to companies’ involvement in “haram” activities (activities not permissible in Islam)—are still few among the companies studied. Our research also reveals that both moral legitimacy factors under investigation influence the three categories of social reporting, although in different ways. This research contributes to the existing literature by empirically examining how organisations prioritise their disclosure of virtues and the moral legitimacy factors that influence that prioritisation. (shrink)

Acts are functions from states of nature into finite-support distributions over a set of ‘deterministic outcomes’. We characterize preference relations over acts which have a numerical representation by the functional J(f)=min>∫u∘ f dP¦PϵC where f is an act, u is a von Neumann-Morgenstern utility over outcomes, and C is a closed and convex set of finitely additive probability measures on the states of nature. In addition to the usual assumptions on the preference relation as transitivity, completeness, continuity and monotonicity, we (...) assume uncertainty aversion and certainty-independence. The last condition is a new one and is a weakening of the classical independence axiom: It requires that an act f is preferred to an act g if and only if the mixture of f and any constant act h is preferred to the same mixture of g and h. If non-degeneracy of the preference relation is also assumed, the convex set of priors C is uniquely determined. Finally, a concept of independence in case of a non-unique prior is introduced. (shrink)

This article shows why it is important to not "hastily condemn the condemnation of Gutiérrez by ecclesiastical authorities, [instead] we should learn from those censures". Then the essay shows why the last two Popes, John Paul the Great and Pope Bendict were sceptical of liberation theology. Nonetheless, this mode of theological praxis is now pervasive throughout global and Indian academia. The last part of this long essay contextualises how liberation theology has concetreley shaped the Indian Church and also, to an (...) extent, Hinduism. -/- . (shrink)

Recently there have emerged an assortment of theorems relating to the ‘absoluteness of emerged events,’ and these results have sometimes been used to argue that quantum mechanics may involve some kind of metaphysically radical non-absoluteness, such as relationalism or perspectivalism. However, in our view a close examination of these theorems fails to convincingly support such possibilities. In this paper we argue that the Wigner’s friend paradox, the theorem of Bong et al and the theorem of Lawrence et al are all (...) best understood as demonstrating that if quantum mechanics is universal, and if certain auxiliary assumptions hold, then the world inevitably includes various forms of ‘disaccord,’ but this need not be interpreted in a metaphysically radical way; meanwhile, the theorem of Ormrod and Barrett is best understood either as an argument for an interpretation allowing multiple outcomes per observer, such as the Everett approach, or as a proof that quantum mechanics cannot be universal in the sense relevant for this theorem. We also argue that these theorems taken together suggest interesting possibilities for a different kind of relational approach in which _interaction_ states are relativized whilst observed events are absolute, and we show that although something like ‘retrocausality’ might be needed to make such an approach work, this would be a very special kind of retrocausality which would evade a number of common objections against retrocausality. We conclude that the non-absoluteness theorems may have a significant role to play in helping converge towards an acceptable solution to the measurement problem. (shrink)

I. Non-Trivial Counterpossibles On Lewis’ account, a subjunctive of the form ‘if it were the case that p, it would be the case that q’ (represented as ‘p → q’) is to be given the following rough meta-linguistic truth-conditions1.

Within the last 20 years, the US has mounted amassive campaign against invasions bynon-indigenous species (NIS) such as zebramussels, kudzu, water hyacinths, and brown treesnakes. NIS have disrupted native ecosystemsand caused hundreds of billions of dollars ofannual damage. Many in the scientificcommunity say the problem of NIS is primarilypolitical and economic: getting governments toregulate powerful vested interests thatintroduce species through such vehicles asships' ballast water. This paper argues that,although politics and economics play a role,the problem is primarily one of scientificmethod. (...) Even if commercial interests werewilling to spend the necessary funds to controlNIS, and even if government were willing toregulate them, ecological theory is notadequate to provide clear direction for eithereffort. The paper argues there is nocomprehensive, predictive theory ofinvasibility, as part of a larger theory ofcommunity structure, that might guideecological decision making regarding NIS, andfor at least three reasons. (1) There is nofirm definition of NIS, native, exotic,and so on, and ecologists do not use the termsconsistently; as a result, biologists debatingvarious accounts of community structure andecological explanation often do not even makelogical contact with each other. (2) Thedominant theory used to understandinvasibility, island biogeography, has noprecise predictive power and is unable toclarify when NIS might promote biodiversity andwhen they might hinder it. (3) There are nofirm, empirical generalizations that revealwhen a colonizer or a NIS might be likely totake over a new environment, and when it mightnot succeed in doing so. As a result,scientists have only rough rules of thumb toshore up their arguments against NIS. Given theincompleteness of current ecological theory,the paper closes with several suggestions forways that study of NIS might enhanceunderstanding of basic commmunity structuresand vice versa. (shrink)

This paper analyses the logical structure of the balancing of conflicting normative arguments, and asks whether non-monotonic logic is adequate to represent this type of legal or practical reasoning. Norm conflicts are often regarded as a field of application for non-monotonic logics. This paper argues, however, that the balancing of normative arguments consists of an act of judgement, not a logical inference, and that models of deductive as well as of defeasible reasoning do not give an adequate account of its (...) structure. Moreover, it argues that as far as the argumentation consists in logical inferences, deductive logic suffices for reconstructing the argumentation from the internal point of view of someone making normative judgements. (shrink)

Sartre's concept of ‘non-thetic awareness’ must be understood as equivalent to the concept of ‘nonconceptual content’ currently discussed in anglophone epistemology and philosophy of mind, since it could not otherwise play the role in the structure of ‘bad faith’, or self-deception, that Sartre ascribes to it. This understanding of the term makes sense of some otherwise puzzling features of Sartre's early philosophy, and has implications for understanding certain areas of his thought.

The human enhancement debate has over the last few decades been concerned with ethical issues in methods for improving the physical, cognitive, or emotive states of individual people, and of the human species as a whole. Arguments in favour of enhancement defend it as a paradigm of rationality, presenting it as a clear-eyed, logical defence of what we stand to gain from transcending the typical limits of our species. If these arguments are correct, it appears that adults should in principle (...) be able to make rational and informed decisions about enhancing themselves. In this paper, however, we suggest that a rational and informed choice to enhance oneself may in some cases be impossible. Drawing on L. A. Paul’s work on ‘transformative experience’, we argue that some enhancements—such as certain moral or cognitive modifications—may give rise to unbridgeable epistemic gaps in key domains. Importantly, such gaps could prove to be not merely contingently unbridgeable due to a lack of information at a given moment, but radically unbridgeable, making someone in a non-enhanced state inherently unable to conceive of what it would be like to be enhanced in a particular way. Where this experience is key to understanding what values are being pursued by the enhancement itself, it may prove impossible for a person to be sufficiently informed, and to make a rational decision about whether or not to enhance herself. This poses a challenge for human enhancement proponents in general, and for transhumanists in particular. (shrink)