Este artigo tem como propósito básicoexplicitar a compreensão adorniana de arte e arelação desta com a sociedade. Num primeiromomento aborda-se, tendo como referência a obraDialética do esclarecimento, a inserção e cooptaçãoda arte pela industria cultural e, posteriormente, onovo papel atribuído por Adorno à instância artística,o de uma "nova to~dade ético-veritativa"distinta da realidade social vigente.

Every human activity has its characteristic features, the general tendencies that are often difficult to perceive for those engaged in the activity. Such general tendencies are of special concern to those managing in such activities, whether one is coaching soccer or running a corporation, for only with knowledge of such tendencies can one engage in intelligent managing and, more important, intelligent moral action. For the activity of business is not value-neutral, and if one is to manage morally in business, one (...) must come to understand its general tendencies insofar as they affect values. (shrink)

This essay examines Arendt’s interpretation of Hobbes as it develops from “Expansion and the Philosophy of Power” (1946) and The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951) to The Human Condition (1958) by focusing on the role of the concept of process, and the reductive concept of life as “the life-process” in order to highlight an important way in which Arendt sees Hobbes as contributing to the valorization of the life-process in modernity. By reconstructing Arendt’s interpretation of Hobbes as it develops in these (...) texts, I aim to expand our understanding of Hobbes’s importance for Arendt’s analysis of modernity by showing that Hobbes is not only the philosopher of an original “expansionist” concept of power and a political-economic imperialist state but also, on account of the centrality of the notion of process within it, key to the elevation of life as the highest value in the modern vita activa. (shrink)

This book considers the arguments for and against the implementation of in vitro meat technology. Rachel Robison-Greene argues that in light of emerging technology, we should rethink the ethical dimensions of what makes something “edible.”.

This paper examines the role of the Morton Thiokol engineers in the decisions surrounding the launch of the Challenger, particularly with reference to an analysis of this event by Edward Tufte. The engineers at Morton Thiokol recommended against the launch of Challenger because the projected launch temperature between 26°F to 29°F was far outside their field database of successful launches. The engineers had asked for, but not received, data necessary to determine the cause of massive blow-by on the launch the (...) previous January, and they had informed their managers and NASA that continuing flights could be catastrophic if the cause of the problems with the launches was not discovered. The authors conclude that the engineers thus did what they were ethically as well as professionally obligated to do. (shrink)

This contribution to a symposium on Samantha Frost’s Lessons from a Materialist Thinker considers Frost’s interpretation of Hobbesian Man and the connection between man and the Commonwealth. Particular attention is paid to Frost’s interpretation of man as an interdependent and intersubjective living creature and the relationship between living embodiment and agency. Through this focused examination, this contribution aims to elucidate the critical questions raised by Lessons and identify promising avenues for future Hobbes scholarship by highlighting the key insights that reshape (...) our understanding of his enduring influence on modern political thought. (shrink)

Engineering begins with a design problem: how to make occupants of vehicles safer, settle on an inter-face for an x-ray machine, or create more legible road signs. In choosing any particular solution, engineers must make value choices. By focusing on the solving of these problems, Ethics Within Engineering: An Introduction shows how ethics is at the intellectual core of engineering. Built around a number of engaging case studies, it presents real examples of engineering problems that everyone, engineer or not, will (...) recognize, ranging from such simple artifacts as toasters and the layout of burners and knobs on a stove top to the software responsible for the Colombia airliner crash. (shrink)

Suppose an accountant discovers evidence of shady practices while ex amining the books of a client. What should he or she do? Accountants have a professional obligation to respect the confidentiality of their cli ents' accounts. But, as an ordinary citizen, our accountant may feel that the authorities ought to be informed. Suppose a physician discov ers that a patient, a bus driver, has a weak heart. If the patient contin ues bus driving even after being informed of the heart (...) condition, should the physician inform the driver's company? Respect for patient confidentiality would say, no. But what if the driver should suffer a heart attack while on duty, causing an accident in which people are killed or seriously injured? Would the doctor bear some responsibility for these consequences? Special obligations, such as those of confidentiality, apply to any one in business or the professions. These obligations articulate, at least in part, what it is for someone to be, say, an accountant or a physician. Since these obligations are special, they raise a real possibility of con flict with the moral principles we usually accept outside of these spe cial relationships in business and the professions. These conflicts may become more accentuated for a professional who is also a corporate employee-a corporate attorney, an engineer working for a construction company, a nurse working as an employee of a hospital. (shrink)

Students all across the country have recently found new motivation to be interested in philosophy—NBC’s The Good Place, which aired its final episode on January 30, 2020. The series explicitly engages with philosophy through the storyline of one of the central characters—Chidi Adagonye—who was, in life, a philosophy professor. In the afterlife, Chidi teaches ethics to a group of wayward souls who, as the show progresses, become the best of friends. Chidi provides a useful narrative vehicle for direct discussion of (...) philosophy. Even in the absence of Chidi’s philosophical explanations, the show is inherently philosophical. It demonstrates that, rather than being an exclusively scholarly pursuit, living philosophically is part of what it is to be a flourishing person. (shrink)

In The Handmaid’s Tale and The Testaments, Margaret Atwood vividly portrays a dystopia from a woman’s point of view. The themes she explores are familiar, they are not shocking fictional devices designed to keep readers surprised and engaged. Instead, the stories describe how our own world might have been or, even worse, how it might be. It explores the dangers of treating women’s bodies as resources to be regulated and commodified. The series emphasizes the value of autonomy and highlights the (...) ways in which it can be eroded by oppression until it no longer exists in any meaningful way. This chapter will explore the theme of autonomy as it arises in The Handmaid’s Tale and The Testaments. It will situate these stories as part of a long philosophical tradition of sorting members of society into groups based on their perceived skills and abilities, allowing no room for transcendence or self-creation. It will explore how manipulation of love and relationships, religion, the use of language, and opportunities to think critically can, without bars or shackles, imprison a population by diminishing their capacity for self-determination. The story of The Handmaid’s Tale and The Testaments is cautionary. This chapter will explore the nature of the lesson that story teaches. (shrink)

This paper argues that hume's discussion of personal identity in treatise i.Iv.6 is misinterpreted and overrated. Far from seeking a justification for ascribing identity to persons, Hume dismissed all such ascriptions as mistaken; his 'account' in i.Iv.6 is an attempt to explain how the supposed mistake arises. His own criteria of unity/identity, On the strength of which he excludes persons, Are themselves ill-Founded: they are criteria for individuating etc., 'things', The only ones hume, Who failed to grasp locke's point that (...) identity goes with classified items, Was able to find. (shrink)

Hume was accused of partiality as soon as the first volume of his Histories reached the public. No better test can be found for whether he was partial than by looking at how he writes of Queen Elizabeth I. If his history is biased, we would expect her sex to make a difference to the history. We shall find, however, that Hume treats Elizabeth as a rational being who is a sovereign, and that he achieves, insofar as he describes her (...) reign, the general point of view appropriate to the impartiality demanded of historians. We shall also find evidence that he did not give up on his grand project to provide the foundations for ?a compleat system of the sciences? after the Treatise failed to excite a murmur. His Histories , using the method of causal analysis common to all his works, illustrate not only his moral theory but also, for instance, his claim that we can find laws in political systems as certain as those of physics. (shrink)

Both professors and institutions of higher education benefit from a vision of academic life that is grounded more firmly in myth than in history. According to the myth created by that traditional vision, scholars pursue research wherever their drive to knowledge takes them, and colleges and universities transmit the fruits of that research to contemporary and future generations as the accumulated wisdom of the ages. Yet the economic and social forces operating on colleges and universities as institutions, as well as (...) on the interests of faculty members within them, are making the myth embodied in the traditional ideal of the academy more and more difficult to sustain. Questions about what an institution of higher education ought to be, about what professors ought to do, and about what relations professors ought to have to the institutions which employ them are being raised and pushed to the fore. These are not theoretical questions, but practical questions of immediate import that must be answered relatively quickly -- and wisely -- if institutions of higher education and professors are not to find themselves inextricably in the grip of forces they cannot change. The myth of disinterested academic research-however beautiful -- and however beneficial -- is under siege. (shrink)

It is intuitive that, under certain circumstances, it can be disrespectful or patronizing to excuse someone for an attitude. While it is easy enough to find instances where it seems disrespectful to excuse an attitude, matters are complicated. When and why, precisely, is it disrespectful to judge that someone is not responsible for his attitude? In this paper, I show, first, that the extant philosophical literature on this question is underdeveloped and overgeneralized: the writers who address the question suggest quite (...) strikingly that it is always disrespectful to excuse a sane, rational agent for his attitude, and their arguments rely on false generalizations about what is involved in excusing an attitude. I then sketch an account of respect to explain when and why it is disrespectful to excuse an attitude. Using this account, I show that one can coherently excuse an attitude even in some cases where that attitude was produced by a responsiveness to reasons. (shrink)

What minimal role—if any—must consciousness of morally significant information play in an account of moral worth? According to one popular view, a right action is morally worthy only if the agent is conscious (in some sense) of the facts that make it right. I argue against this consciousness condition and close cousins of it. As I show, consciousness of such facts requires much more sophistication than writers typically suggest—this condition would bar from moral worth most ordinary, intuitively morally worthy agents. (...) Moreover, I show that the attraction to this flavor of consciousness condition rests on mistaken assumptions about what is required for a right act to be non-accidentally right and attributable to the agent. Drawing some lessons from the discussion, I defend a Value-Secured Reliability Theory of Moral Worth and show how a minimal yet indispensable role for consciousness falls out from it. On this independently plausible theory, an action can be morally worthy even when the agent is unaware of the right-making features of her action. (shrink)

Human beings have always used technology to navigate the world around them. Some of it has had devastating consequences for the environment. In particular, technology that made industrial animal agriculture possible has led to climate change, deforestation, loss of biodiversity, pollution of water, and soil desertification among other environmental impacts. Cell cultured or in vitro meat has the potential to satisfy the same demand while reducing impacts on the environment. Many of the moral arguments offered in favor of in vitro (...) meat have been consequentialist in nature. Some of the main arguments against it have been motivated by virtue theory. This paper will defend in vitro meat on virtue theoretic grounds. The first section of the paper addresses arguments that have been offered and those that might potentially be offered against in vitro meat on the basis of virtues such as reverence for life, temperance, respect for nature, and simplicity. The second section provides an argument for curiosity as an environmental virtue and emphasizes the importance of using the Indian concept of ahimsa to guide our thinking about how to be curious virtuously. I argue that developing in vitro meat is an example of this kind of curiosity. (shrink)

Hume is generally thought to hold that spatial contiguity is essential to the causal relation. Indeed, Pears, in his recent "Hume's System", adds to Hume's system the claim that perceptions must exist somewhere--have, that is, spatial coordinates--so that, he claims, we can identify them as well as solve the problem of sorting out one person's perceptions from another. Pears fails to accomplish his aims in this attempt, but, more seriously, he fails to understand Hume's commitment to some perceptions being the (...) sorts of things that do not have spatial coordinates. He thus fails to understand that Hume is attempting to displace a conception of causal relations which makes it impossible to have a unified theory of causation for everything that exists in the world. But Hume does not hold that all perceptions have spatial coordinates, and since he does hold that anything can be the cause of anything else, he holds that some causal relata are not spatially located. My willing to raise my arm is an instance of such a causal relation for Hume. (shrink)

Hume argues that priests feign knowledge of the strange theological country they supposedly represent and so are hypocrites, conceited because they think themselves better than the multitude whose minds they fill with superstitions and keep in ignorance to encourage their veneration as envoys from God. They thus work against the public interest in having an informed and educated citizenry. The nub of his concern, as he wrote in Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion, was that when we consider theological matters, we have (...) moved beyond “the more solid and natural arguments, derived from the senses and experience,” and must be more than “apprehensive, that we have here gone quite beyond the reach of our faculties.”. (shrink)

What marks the traditional privacy torts of disclosure, intrusion, false light, and appropriation is that they require an invasion, an intrinsic harm caused by someone doing something to us without our consent. But we are now voluntarily giving up information about ourselves--to our physicians, for instance--that is being gathered into databases that are brought and sold and that can be appropriated by those who wish to assume our identities. The way in which our privacy is put at risk is different, (...) and this leads to a new understanding of the concept of privacy. Others appropriate our identities, treating us as objects; by doing so, our standing as autonomous moral agents, controlling how we present ourselves to the world, is thus denied. (shrink)

An understanding of the ethical problems that have arisen in the funding of scientific research at universities requires some attention to doctrines that have traditionally been held about science itself. Such doctrines, we hope to show, are themselves central to many of these ethical problems. It is often thought that the questions examined by scientists, and the theories that guide scientific research, are chosen for uniquely scientific reasons, independently of extra-scientific questions of value or merit. We shall argue that this (...) is an illusion. It is an illusion to think, especially in the present era, that science can even have a coherent direction apart from extra-scientific considerations. (shrink)

ABSTRACT Advocates of Bitcoin and Modern Monetary Theory present their ideas as radical utopian alternatives to the neoliberal dominant, but these claims neglect the utopian strain in neoliberal monetary theory itself. This strain manifests in that theory’s faith in the capacity of markets to perfect human society. Bitcoin and Modern Monetary Theory express this same faith. After a brief survey of the older, more radical money utopias of More and Proudhon, this article traces the origins of Bitcoin and MMT in (...) the more conventional monetary theories of metallism and chartalism and then analyzes the utopian discourse of both movements, revealing that Bitcoin sees state intervention as the only obstacle to properly functioning markets, while MMT blames disfunction on an inadequate mobilization of labor, proposing state intervention as the remedy. In both cases, their policies only seek to enable the utopian potential of the market, falling in line with neoliberal orthodoxy. The conclusion offers some speculation about what the emergence of these two theories might tell us about the future of neoliberalism. (shrink)

It seems commonly assumed that presenting data is value-neutral. The data is what it is, and it is for those assessing it to make judgments of value. So a chart of earnings just tells us what a company has earned. The chart does not tell us whether the earnings are a good or bad sign. That valuation is to be made by those looking at the chart and is independent of the chart itself. This view of the relation between presentations (...) of data and value judgments is mistaken. Presentations are value-laden in at least two ways. How we choose to represent data is itself an ethically loaded value-judgment, and, second, presentations cause responses, including value-laden judgments. We shall first look at how hard it can be to get inside a profession to be able to understand the problems those in that profession face so we can represent it properly. We shall then examine a case where a failure to understand the problem led to a mistaken moral judgment that has taken on a life of its own because of the power of how the problem is mistakenly presented. (shrink)