This reply to Giles Scofield's critique of the authors' article in the June 2008 issue of the Kennedy Institute of Ethics Journal highlights two main topics. First, contrary to what Scofield suggests, using the terms "ethics" and "morality" interchangeably constitutes an oversimplification that blurs important distinctions. Second, in a representative democracy, ethical expertise and consultation need not generate a "tragic choice" of the kind Scofield has in mind.

Die Erforschung Kants ist langst zu einem weltumspannenden Unternehmen geworden. Welch reiche Frucht der Wissenschaft dadurch zufallt, zeigen die Beitrage dieser Festschrift, die dem Nestor der deutschen Kantforschung, Norbert Hinske, gewidmet ist. Bekannte Vertreter der italienischen, japanischen, russischen und deutschen Kantforschung kommen zu Wort. Von besonderer Bedeutung fur die - in diesem Punkt ganzlich neu zu schreibende - Lebens- und Entwicklungsgeschichte Kants ist ein neu entdeckter, erstmals im Faksimile abgedruckter Brief von J. E. Biester an J. N. Tetens, der (...) belegt, dass der preussische Kultusminister v. Zedlitz zunachst nicht etwa Kant, sondern Tetens nach Halle berufen hat. Hinskes vollstandige Bibliographie rundet den Band ab - und zeigt eindrucksvoll, wie viel die Kantforschung weltweit gerade ihm zu verdanken hat. The study of Kant has long been a global undertaking. The articles in this Festschrift for the leading German expert on Kant, Norbert Hinske, show how richly productive this has been for scholars. Leading Italian, Japanese, Russian and German representatives of research on Kant have provided contributions to it. What is particular significant for the history of Kant's life and development, which has to be completely rewritten in this regard, is a newly discovered letter, reprinted in facsimile for the first time, from J. E. Biester to J. N. Tetens, which proves that Prussian Minister of Culture v. Zedlitz initially did not appoint Kant but rather Tetens to the position in Halle. Hinske's complete bibliography is included in the volume and is impressive evidence of how much Kant research worldwide owes to him. (shrink)

This work has been selected by scholars as being culturally important and is part of the knowledge base of civilization as we know it. This work is in the public domain in the United States of America, and possibly other nations. Within the United States, you may freely copy and distribute this work, as no entity has a copyright on the body of the work. Scholars believe, and we concur, that this work is important enough to be preserved, reproduced, and (...) made generally available to the public. To ensure a quality reading experience, this work has been proofread and republished using a format that seamlessly blends the original graphical elements with text in an easy-to-read typeface. We appreciate your support of the preservation process, and thank you for being an important part of keeping this knowledge alive and relevant. (shrink)

La loi, dans la pensée politique de Rousseau, engage nécessairement une détermination du citoyen et de la démocratie. Cette caractéristique ne repose pas seulement sur l'affirmation de la souveraineté du peuple, mais bien plutôt sur une double définition paradoxale de la citoyenneté. En effet, Rousseau fonde la loi sur la nécessité de citoyens silencieux. Sous cet aspect, l'État rousseauiste se présente sous le trait d'une communauté de promeneurs solitaires, où la vie et l'opinion publiques semblent être absentes. Mais Rousseau dégage, (...) notamment dans les Lettres écrites de la montagne , une autre caractéristique du citoyen fondée sur la nécessité d'une communication des citoyens, devant former, comme l'affirme Rousseau « la voix du public ». A partir de cette détermination d'un citoyen à la fois silencieux et loquace, notre problème est : pourquoi Rousseau sollicite-t-il ces deux déterminations de la citoyenneté pour caractériser la loi ?The law, in Rousseau's political thought necessarily involves a definition of the citizen and of democracy. This isn't only founded on the assertion of the sovereignty of the people, but also on the double paradoxical definition of citizenship. Indeed, Rousseau founds the law on the necessity of silent citizens. In this regard, Rousseau's State takes the shape of a community of solitary walkers who seem to be devoid of any public life and opinion. But Rousseau draws, notably in the Lettres écrites de la montagne another characteristic of the citizen, founded on the necessity for citizen to communicate. And this communication is for Rousseau “the voice of the public”. From this definition of the citizen as both silent and loquacious, our problem is now why Rousseau solicits these two determinations of citizenship to found the law? (shrink)

It is well known that Hegel’s earliest explicit mention of Adam Smith is to be found in the first set of the Jenaer Systementwurfe, a text previously known under J. Hoffmeister’s title Jenenser Realphilosophie I. In this text, Hegel sums up the example by which Smith illustrates the division of labor: the manufacturing of pins. In a marginal note to this exposition, the name “Smith” appears with a page reference. It is quite significant that his first reference to Smith is (...) not to some marginal or merely historical point of Smith’s analysis, but to the crucial treatment of the division of labor, upon which, as a modern commentator put it, “the discipline of economics was nurtured.” Other indications of the importance which Hegel ascribed to Smith’s treatment are. (shrink)

In this paper I show why Norbert Hoerster's plea for atheism is rather unconvincing.

Francisco Suárez (1548-1617) publicou em 1597 sua obra-prima em metafísica, as Disputationes metaphysicae. Na trigésima terceira Disputa – o objeto deste artigo – Suárez defende primeiramente a substância sobtrês aspectos: como “ens per se” (uma entidade independente), como o que permanece no tempo, e como o suporte fundamental de acidentes. Secundariamente, ele utiliza três distinções com o objetivo de articular a noção de substância: substâncias completas e incompletas, substâncias perfeitas e imperfeitas, e a distinção entre substância primeira e substância segunda. (...) Uma gota d’água, por exemplo, é uma primeira substância completa, mas relativamente imperfeita. Em comparação com ela, a alma humana é uma primeira substância incompleta, mas mais perfeita. A regra é: quanto mais perfeita, tanto mais incompleta. Por trás dessas distinções, Suárez elabora um aspecto dinâmico da substância. A abordagem é aristotélica, sem incluir aspectos de filosofia social ou filosofia existencial. (shrink)

God is the creator of the laws of nature and therefore he is able to change and to irrupt them. The suspension of one norm is completely consistent with the affirmation of the law as a whole; and therefore the miracle underlines the eternal law as valid and the fidelity of God.

Im zweiten Buch seiner rechtstheologischen Summe De legibus ac Deo legislatore aus dem Jahre 1612 entwickelt Francisco Suárez seine Theorie des Naturrechts. Dabei gelingt Suárez die kritische Überarbeitung der lex-naturalis-Theorien des Augustinus und Thomas von Aquin und damit eine kritische Kontinuität mittelalterlicher Rechtstheologie. Suárez formuliert aber darüber hinaus eine für das frühe 17. Jahrhundert eigenständige Konzeption, die als innovatives Modell von Naturrecht mit den Entwürfen Hugo Grotius’ und Thomas Hobbes’ zu konkurrieren vermag. Die Einflüsse dieses genuin politisch-theologischen Naturrechtskonzepts reichen bis (...) zu Pufendorf und Wolff. Der Band erschließt diesen Schlüsseltext des frühneuzeitlichen Naturrechts im Sinne eine kooperativen Kommentars. Mit Beiträgen von Oliver Bach, Nobert Brieskorn, Simon Eultgen, Holger Glinka, Frank Grunert, Dominik Recknagel, Stefan Schweighöfer, Kurt Seelmann und Gideon Stiening. (shrink)

While the opposing paradigms of globalization and fragmentation compete in often bloody and destructive ways in the world today, this book convincingly reminds us of the importance of finding out more about the complex and changing ways in which we are connected. The authors demonstrate that the more we understand our connectedness and deal with its consequences, the less dependent and helpless we become. The critical, multidisciplinary perspectives they offer cover a wide range of subjects, from the world wide web (...) to medieval poetry, nations and gender, cancer narratives and money, emotion management and the financial markets, and the American civilizing process and the repression of shame. The contributions bear witness to Elias's innovative achievements while the authors continue his stunning explorations, extending them into other areas of the humanities and the sciences, and presenting their own wide-ranging and penetrating insights into our mutual dependence. Contributors are Jorge Arditi, Godfried Van Benthem Van Den Bergh, Reinhard Blomert, Stephen Guy-Bray, Thomas M. Kemple, Hermann Korte, Helmut Kuzmics, Stephen Mennell, Thomas Salumets, Thomas J. Scheff, Ulrich C. Teucher, Annette Treibel, and Cas Wouters. (shrink)

The theory of human moral evolution elaborated in the later work of Jürgen Habermas represents one of the most challenging and provocative of recent, linguistically inspired attempts to reinterpret our understanding of Western history. In critically examining this theory, the present article identifies some major problems with Habermas's reinterpretation of the history of the formation of Western civilization as the universal pragmatic process of the evolution of human moral communicative competences. Drawing on the works of Norbert Elias and Michel (...) Foucault, the article seeks to show how the formal grounding of Habermas's evolutionary theory in the categories of his universal pragmatic conception of communicative action ultimately prevents him from grasping the radically embodied nature of human discursive practice and its implications for the historical process of the formation of human moral will. (shrink)

This paper explores the relevance of the debate about ethical expertise for the practice of clinical ethics. We present definitions, explain three theories of ethical expertise, and identify arguments that have been brought up to either support the concept of ethical expertise or call it into question. Finally, we discuss four theses: the debate is relevant for the practice of clinical ethics in that it (1) improves and specifies clinical ethicists' perception of their expertise; (2) contributes to improving the perception (...) of moral competence of non-ethicists; (3) gives insight into complementary styles of argumentation of ethicists and non-ethicists; and (4) contributes to the awareness of the problem of profession-building of (clinical) ethicists. (shrink)

Elias wrote in both English and German, and in all his work runs to 14 books and around 90 other essays, along with poems and numerous interviews. The 18 volumes of the collected works contain many writings not previously published in English, and a small number never published before. All of the texts have thoroughly checked and revised, by editors who have a deep knowledge of Elia's thinking; they have inserted many clarifications, cross-references and explanatory notes.

In this book, Norbert Wiley offers a new interpretation of the nature of the self in society.

Carey's book on conceptual change and the accompanying argument that children's biology initially is organized in terms of naïve psychology has sparked a great detail of research and debate. This body of research on children's biology has, however, been almost exclusively been based on urban, majority culture children in the US or in other industrialized nations. The development of folkbiological knowledge may depend on cultural and experiential background. If this is the case, then urban majority culture children may prove to (...) be the exception rather than the rule, because plants and animals do not play a significant role in their everyday life. Urban majority culture children, rural majority culture children, and rural Native American children were given a property projection task based on Carey's original paradigm. Each group produced a unique profile of development. Only urban children showed evidence for early anthropocentrism, suggesting that the co-mingling of psychology and biology may be a product of an impoverished experience with nature. In comparison to urban majority culture children even the youngest rural children generalized in terms of biological affinity. In addition, all ages of Native American children and the older rural majority culture children gave clear evidence of ecological reasoning. These results show that both culture and expertise play a role in the development of folkbiological thought. (shrink)

This article challenges E.P. Thompson's definition of ‘moral economy’ as a traditional consensus of crowd rights that were swept away by market forces. Instead, it suggests that the concept has the potential of improving the understanding of modern civil society. Moral economy was a term invented in the eighteenth century to describe many things. Thompson's approach reflects only a minor part of this conceptual history. His understanding of moral economy is conditioned by a dichotomous view of history and by the (...) acceptance of a model according to which modern economy is not subject to moral concerns. It is on principle problematic to confine a term conjoining two concepts as general as ‘moral’ and ‘economy’ to a specific historical and social setting. Recent approaches that frame moral economy as an emotively defined order of morals are also misleading since they do not address economic issues in the way they are commonly understood. The most promising current approaches appear to be those that consider t.. (shrink)

Over 90% of the organs transplanted in China before 2010 were procured from prisoners. Although Chinese officials announced in December 2014 that the country would completely cease using organs harvested from prisoners, no regulatory adjustments or changes in China’s organ donation laws followed. As a result, the use of prisoner organs remains legal in China if consent is obtained. We have collected and analysed available evidence on human rights violations in the organ procurement practice in China. We demonstrate that the (...) practice not only violates international ethics standards, it is also associated with a large scale neglect of fundamental human rights. This includes organ procurement without consent from prisoners or their families as well as procurement of organs from incompletely executed, still-living prisoners. The human rights critique of these practices will also address the specific situatedness of prisoners, often conditioned and traumatized by a cascade of human rights abuses in judicial structures. To end the unethical practice and the abuse associated with it, we suggest to inextricably bind the use of human organs procured in the Chinese transplant system to enacting Chinese legislation prohibiting the use of organs from executed prisoners and making explicit rules for law enforcement. Other than that, the international community must cease to abet the continuation of the present system by demanding an authoritative ban on the use of organs from executed Chinese prisoners. (shrink)

Many contemporary ethicists use case-based reasoning to reach consistent beliefs about ethical matters. The idea is that particular cases elicit moral intuitions, which provide defeasible reasons to believe in their content. However, most proponents of case-based moral reasoning are not very explicit about how they resolve inconsistencies and how they abstract principles from judgments about particular cases. The aim of this article is to outline a methodology—called Consistency Reasoning Casuistry—for case-based reasoning in ethics. This methodology draws on Richmond Campbell and (...) Victor Kumar’s naturalistic model for the resolution of inconsistencies between the content of intuitions about particular cases. I argue that reasons similar to those that motivate their model also support a more abstract form of moral reasoning that goes beyond mere resolutions of inconsistencies between case judgments and demands the formulation of more abstract moral norms. Consistency Reasoning Casuistry, it is argued, is a good candidate for a methodology for case-based moral reasoning that is in harmony with paradigms of contemporary moral psychology and that can accommodate the methodology implicit in the work of many contemporary ethicists. (shrink)

This article elaborates on the relation between ethical casuistry and common law reasoning. Despite the frequent talk of casuistry as common law morality, remarks on this issue largely remain at the purely metaphorical level. The article outlines and scrutinizes Albert Jonsen and Stephen Toulmin’s version of casuistry and its basic elements. Drawing lessons for casuistry from common law reasoning, it is argued that one generally has to be faithful to ethical paradigms. There are, however, limitations for the binding force of (...) paradigms. The most important limitations—the possibilities of overruling and distinguishing paradigm norms—are similar in common law and in casuistry, or so it is argued. These limitations explain why casuistry is not necessarily overly conservative and conventional, which is one line of criticism to which casuists can now better respond. Another line of criticism has it that the very reasoning from case to case is extremely unclear in casuistry. I suggest a certain model of analogical reasoning to address this critique. All my suggestions to understand and to enhance casuistry make use of common law reasoning whilst remaining faithful to Jonsen and Toulmin’s main ideas and commitments. Further developed along these lines, casuistry can appropriately be called “common law morality.”. (shrink)

What should we do if climate change or global injustice require radical policy changes not supported by the majority of citizens? And what if science shows that the lacking support is largely due to shortcomings in citizens’ individual psychology such as cognitive biases that lead to temporal and geographical parochialism? Could then a plausible case for enhancing the morality of the electorate—even against their will –be made? But can a democratic government manipulate the will of the people without losing democratic (...) legitimacy? This paper explores the problems that governmental manipulation of voters pose for democratic legitimacy and the tensions between non-manipulated input and morally acceptable output. These venerable issues of political theory resurface in light of recent suggestions to tackle today’s global mega-problems by Ingmar Persson and Julian Savulescu. They suggest that to avert the looming catastrophe, governments should alter psychological traits of the citizenry through biomedical means, from pharmaceuticals to genetics. However, we argue that a government cannot rule with democratic legitimacy if elected by a will of the people it manipulated before. Normatively, conferring power from the governed onto governors is a one-directional relation that is incompatible with manipulation. But while it is tempting to rebut suggestions to morally enhance the people as antithetical to essential ideas of democracy, swift rebuttals tend to overlook the deeper challenge: Majoritarian decision-making may lead to inacceptable outcomes. The dilemma between input and output runs through major works in political theory. Rather than wishfully ignoring the dangers of democracy, democratic theory has to provide answers. (shrink)

The moral psychologist Joshua Greene has proposed a number of arguments for the normative significance of empirical research and for the unreliability of deontological intuitions. For these arguments, much hinges on the combination of various components of Greene's research – namely the dual-process theory of moral judgement, ‘personalness’ as a factor in moral decision-making, and his functional understanding of deontology and consequentialism. Incorporating these components, I reconstruct three distinct arguments and show that the Personalness Argument for the claim that empirical (...) research can advance normative ethics and the Combined Argument against deontology are both sound and interesting in themselves. They do not, however, cast doubt on traditional deontology or reserve a specific role for neuroscience. The Indirect Route argument overcomes some of the other arguments’ limitations. It is, however, invalid. I conclude by pointing out the broader philosophical relevance of Greene's arguments as shedding light on second-order morality. (shrink)

This paper deals with the question of the logicality of modal logics from a proof-theoretic perspective. It is argued that if Dos̆en’s analysis of logical constants as punctuation marks is embraced, it is possible to show that all the modalities in the cube of normal modal logics are indeed logical constants. It will be proved that the display calculus for each displayable modality admits a purely structural presentation based on double-line rules which, following Dos̆en’s analysis, allows us to claim that (...) the corresponding modal operators are logical constants. (shrink)

The idea that thinking is a form of talking to oneself was discussed in classical Greece, analyzed by the Medievals and treated as a central issue by the American pragmatists. But whether inner speech is a language unto itself, distinct from outer language, has not been determined. To this end I ask how Saussure's defining ideas about language apply to inner speech. I show that Saussure's ideas, while partly usable, are mainly a poor fit. Inner speech is a variety of (...) language, or perhaps of dialect, with its own unique structure. Given that it is a unique window into human consciousness, I briefly discuss some of the research areas on which it sheds light. (shrink)

The law serves functions that are not often taken seriously enough by ethicists, namely feasibility and practicability. A consequence of feasibility is that most laws do not meet the demands of ideal ethical theory. A consequence of practicability is that law requires elaborated and explicit methodologies that determine how to do things with norms. These two consequences form the core idea behind this book, which employs methods from legal theory to inform and examine debates on methodology in applied ethics, particularly (...) bioethics. It is argued that almost all legal methods have counterparts in applied ethics, which indicates that much can be gained from comparative study of the two. The author first outlines methods as used in legal, focusing on deductive reasoning with statutes as well as analogical reasoning with precedent cases. He then examines three representative kinds of contemporary ethical theories, Beauchamp and Childress’s principlism, Jonsen and Toulmin’s casuistry, and two versions of consequentialism—Singer’s preference utilitarianism and Hooker’s rule-consequentialism—with regards to their methods. These examinations lead to the Morisprudence Model for methods in applied ethics. (shrink)

The purpose of the presented paper is to showcase the links between Hans-Hermann Hoppe’s libertarian argumentation ethics and Karl-Otto Apel’s transcendental pragmatics with a special reference to the consensus theory of truth proposed by the latter thinker. More specifically, the author contends that Hoppe’s theory is logically contingent on Apel’s views on truth in that some crucial gaps in Hoppe’s grounding of the so-called “a priori of communication and argumentation” are filled by Apel’s original arguments. Additionally, the paper provides a (...) case for interpreting Hoppe's ethics as a theory of rational conflict-freedom, which seems to cohere best with the transcendental-pragmatist approach. Finally, the author offers a few remarks on how the most common objections against Hoppe's theory can be overcome on the basis of the transcendental pragmatics and the conflict-freedom principle. (shrink)