ABSTRACT In Billionaires in World Politics Peter Hägel considers how the experience of wealth accumulation shapes billionaires’ political agency. To understand the agentic power billionaires exercise in world politics, he proposes that we should examine (1) personality traits that dispose people to participate in politics and (2) connections between capacity and intentions. In this paper, I argue that Hägel’s account of billionaires’ agency in world politics depends on two assumptions. The first is an implied meaning of world politics and the (...) second is the imagination that billionaires have equal access to social and cultural goods that guarantee meaningful engagement in world politics. I analyze these assumptions to argue that Hägel’s account of billionaire agency fails to take adequate notice of the dialectical relationship between corporate power and billionaire agency. A robust account of the agency of billionaires in world politics, I argue, must take this dialectical relationship as its foundation. (shrink)

Public deliberation, highly valued by many African societies, becomes the cornerstone of a new system of African political philosophy in this brilliant, highly original study. In Deliberative Agency, philosopher Uchenna Okeja offers a way to construct a new political center by building it around the ubiquitous African practice of public deliberation, a widely accepted means to resolve legal matters, reconcile feuding groups, and reestablish harmony. In cities, hometown associations and voluntary organizations carry out the task of fostering deliberation (...) among African groups for different reasons. In some instances, the deliberation aims to settle disputes. In others, the aim is to decide the best action to take to address unfortunate incidents such as death. Through a measured, comparative analysis, Deliberative Agency argues that the best way to reimagine and harness the idea of public deliberation, based on current experiences in Africa, is to see it as performance of agency. Building a new political center around the practice places agency at the core of a new political life in Africa. (shrink)

The central issue addressed in this paper is the demand for improvements in the space granted to African philosophy in African universities. I offer and elaborate on the most basic reasons for this demand, which includes amongst others: 1) the obsoleteness of the reasons given for the current trend of focusing on Western philosophy 2) the fact that very few teachers of philosophy in Africa are focused mainly or only on Western philosophy in their academic productivity and 3) the disparity (...) between the premises and the conclusion of the arguments in favour of the current pride of place accorded to Western philosophy. These, and some other reasons of practical and strategic nature, make the maintenance of the current status quo of philosophy education in African universities either hypocritical or unjustified in their unwillingness to face the challenge that the evidence on the ground points to. (shrink)

Deliberation is central to the pursuit of justice in African societies. In practices variously called palaver, public meetings or village assembly, attempts are made to do justice through deliberation. When parties disagree during a deliberation, they may choose to go their separate ways, or they may agree to reconvene on another date. Notwithstanding the positive senses in which otherness may be conceived, in this paper I consider the challenge negative constructions of otherness pose for the pursuit of justice through deliberation. (...) Is justice realizable through deliberation, if one or more parties to the deliberation regard other parties as absolute others, that is, as embodiment of everything abhorrent or aberrant? Through consideration of two models of deliberation – irenic and agonistic deliberation – I argue that the nature of a deliberation determines whether it must contend with the challenge of otherness. More generally, I argue that deliberation as a means to justice ultimately is contin... (shrink)

This book focuses on the normative questions raised by the postulation and declaration of a global ethic. Its scope covers the questions “why do we need a global ethic?”, “what kind of global ethic do we need and what sort of normative justification does it imply?” The book considers the imperative of global ethic to be plausible because it demands consistency in the application of the rule or standard of moral behavior.

Can a society, as a collective, be evaluated morally? In this paper, I attempt to answer this question against the background of the discourse on development. Specifically, I undertake three explorations. I begin with 1) discussion of the ways we attribute responsibility to collectives in relation to some problems associated with globalisation. This is followed by 2) consideration of some of the debates in philosophy regarding the nature and possibility of collective responsibility. Lastly, I examine 3) an attractive but underexplored (...) possibility in the growing literature on Ubuntu. On the basis of Ubuntu moral insights, I will attempt to defend the thesis that the collective responsibility of developing societies in relation development is grounded by the imperative to care about the humanity of other people. (shrink)

I aim in this paper to demonstrate the moral problem of expatriate employment in developing countries. To determine how best to construe the moral problem in this context, I first examine four arguments, namely, that in developing countries, expatriate employment is morally wrong because it 1) entrenches the injustice of wage discrimination; 2) produces undesirable outcomes; 3) disregards contextual aspirations and historical memory and 4) is a tool of external domination and control. I analyse these arguments to show that they (...) are insufficient frameworks for understanding the moral impropriety of expatriate employment in developing countries. To this end, I provide an outline of a plausible framework and argue that the moral problem of expatriate employment in this context is unequal or arbitrary distribution of power among employees. The moral wrong in this, I argue, consists in the failure to respect the universal moral equality of people. (shrink)

ABSTRACT This is a response to the comments by Filipe Campello, Julian Culp, Klaus Dingwerth and Julian Eckl, Indira Latorre, and Uchenna Okeja within the present book symposium discussing my book Billionaires in World Politics. While disagreeing with some critiques, I welcome most of the comments as invitations for theoretical refinement and further research. I start with questions about conceptual delineations and the structural background, arguing that ‘political modernity’ is a concept that is too broad to capture the (...) specific context that allows billionaires to exercise power on the world stage. Then I address questions of agency, which are about the relationships between individual billionaires and collective actors, and the associated issue of legitimacy. The connection between billionaires and their corporations receives special attention, and is discussed in relation to legal innovations that establish individual accountability. I end with thoughts about neo-feudalism, a concept that I reject, because the political agency of billionaires remains wedded to capitalism. (shrink)

ABSTRACTThis article contributes to the discussion of the nature of just war, by appealing to some overlooked perspectives in sub-Saharan ethics. By drawing on the moral thought of one of the most...

This case raises questions of what “trauma-informed care” (TIC) means to the medical team caring for Maurice and how they embrace a TIC approach. There are established principles of trauma-informed...

Berger and Miller argue that cultural competency as an educational tool for physicians-in-training fails to address structural inequality and systemic oppression. Instead, it focuses on “cul...

Reverse mathematics is a program in mathematical logic that seeks to give precise answers to the question of which axioms are necessary in order to prove theorems of "ordinary mathematics": roughly speaking, those concerning structures that are either themselves countable, or which can be represented by countable "codes". This includes many fundamental theorems of real, complex, and functional analysis, countable algebra, countable infinitary combinatorics, descriptive set theory, and mathematical logic. This entry aims to give the reader a broad introduction to (...) the history, methodology, and results of the reverse mathematics program, with a particular focus on its connections to foundational programs such as finitism, constructivism, and predicativism. (shrink)

Offers an analysis of three strongly contrasting primitive civilizations, showing how behavior is influenced by custom and tradition.

For all their various disagreements, one point upon which rights theorists often agree is that it is simply part of the nature of rights that they tend to override, outweigh or exclude competing considerations in moral reasoning, that they have ‘peremptory force’, making ‘powerful demands’ that can only be overridden in ‘exceptional circumstances’, Philosophical Foundations of Human Rights, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2016, p. 240). In this article I challenge this thought. My aim here is not to prove that the (...) traditional view of rights’ stringency is necessarily false, nor even that we have no good reason to believe it is true. Rather, my aim is only to show that we have good reason to think that the foundation of the traditional position is less stable than we might have otherwise supposed and that an alternative conception of rights—one which takes the stringency of any given right as particular to the kind of right it is—is both viable and attractive. In short, to begin to move us towards a more ‘particularist’ conception of rights’ standing in moral reasoning and judgement. (shrink)

We reject the concept of a default option of withdrawal as proposed by Syltern and colleagues, and will outline here potential consequences on parental trust, particularly in historically marginali...

Hume's account of belief is understood to be inspired by allegedly incompatible motivations, one descriptive and expressing Hume's naturalism, the other normative and expressing Hume's epistemological aims. This understanding assumes a particular way in which these elements are distinct: an assumption that I dispute. I suggest that the explanatory-naturalistic aspects of Hume's account of belief are not incompatible with the normative-epistemological aspects. Rather, at least for some central cases of belief formation that Hume discusses at length, S's coming to believe (...) thatpcan be explained in a way that vindicates S's belief thatp. (shrink)

Dwellings of Enchantment probes literature and cues humans to experience awe, love, and respect for our wonderfully complex, multispecies home. Interweaving new materialist, postcolonial, ecopoetic, ecofeminist,and ecopsychological approaches, it delves into various ontologies, literary modes, and tropes framing our coevolution within the oikos.

In recent years, there has been increasing recognition of both the philosophical questions engendered by the idea of a human right to health and the potential of philosophical analysis to help in the formulation of better policy. In this article, I attempt to locate recent work on the moral right to health in a number of historically established conceptions, with the aim of providing a map of the conceptual landscape as to the claims expressed by such a right.

This article asks about the conditions of a sociological operationalization of the capability approach developed by Amartya Sen and Martha Nussbaum. Raising the question of freedom and social opportunities, the capability approach has so far mainly been discussed by economists and philosophers. In order to adopt this approach for a sociological and pragmatist perspective, it engages with methodological and theoretical issues. Whereas capabilities have until now mainly been studied within quantitative frameworks, the author opts for a qualitative method of inquiry (...) that draws on a pragmatist and configurational approach. Such a shift towards qualitative inquiry is a key condition for a better sociological understanding of notions like freedom and opportunities that stand at the core of the capability approach. (shrink)

We argue for the addition of trauma informed awareness, training, and skill in clinical ethics consultation by proposing a novel framework for Trauma Informed Ethics Consultation (TIEC). This approach expands on the American Society for Bioethics and Humanities (ASBH) framework for, and key insights from feminist approaches to, ethics consultation, and the literature on trauma informed care (TIC). TIEC keeps ethics consultation in line with the provision of TIC in other clinical settings. Most crucially, TIEC (like TIC) is systematically sensitive (...) to culture, history, difference, power, social exclusion, oppression, and marginalization. By engaging a neonatal intensive care ethics consult example, we define our TIEC approach and illustrate its application. Through TIEC we argue it is the role of ethics consultants to not only hold open moral spaces, but to furnish them in morally habitable ways for all stakeholders involved in the ethics consultation process, including patients, surrogates, and practitioners. (shrink)

To say health is 'special' is to say that it has a moral significance that differentiates it from other goods (cars, say or radios) and, as a matter of justice, warrants distributing it separately. In this essay, I critique a new justification for the specialness thesis about healthcare (STHC) recently put forth by Engster. I argue that, regrettably, Engster's justification of STHC ultimately fails and fails on much the same grounds as have previous justifications of STHC. However, I also argue (...) that Engster's argument still adds something valuable to the debate around STHC insofar as it reminds us that the moral significance of healthcare may be wider than simply its effect on the incidence of disability and disease: one further reason we may think healthcare is morally significant is because it concerns the treatment and care of those who are already unwell. (shrink)

"Characterized by breadth of coverage, a refreshingly balanced approach to controversial issues, & a highly readable style."-Theological Studies.

Issues of methodology are central to the philosophy of moral progress. However, the idea that effective moral methodology, as well as being instrumental to progress, might also constitute progress has not been adequately explored. This paper will critically assess the merits of this idea – what I call ‘pure proceduralism about moral progress’ – taking Philip Kitcher's recent theory of ‘democratic contractualism’ (2021) as a test case. An epistemology of pure procedural moral progress will be sketched: namely, a naturalised epistemology (...) of paradigmatic instances of moral progress. Assuming an ideal procedure exists and has been at least approximately instantiated (an empirical claim), we learn about its form by studying paradigms of historical moral progress. From this epistemological method will be derived theoretical constraints on what can count as a theory of moral progress per se: it must capture the core semantic constraints on the term ‘moral progress,’ those features without which we would not recognise a change as moral progress. While this poses a tougher challenge for pure proceduralism than for more traditional approaches to moral methodology, it will be concluded that the potential of pure proceduralism as a viable metaethics of moral progress remains an exciting open question. (shrink)

The decades following the Second Vatican Council witnessed Catholic theology's break from classicism. Deductive, classical theology was replaced by an empirical, historically minded theology. The result was moral confusion and intellectual controversy whose effects are still felt by the Church. Benedict Ashely agreed that some revision in moral theology was necessary after Vatican II to formulate and integrate the mysteries of the Catholic faith. The question was how such teachings could be reformulated while preserving their substantive content. Ashley presents (...) a method of theological reflection that challenges the subjectivity, relationality, and language of historical mindedness with a tradition focusing on Scripture, the Magisterium, sound natural science, and a considered relationship between subjectivity and objectivity. This volume also contains commentary by four distinguished scholars: Matthew McWhorter provides an intellectual biography of Ashley, examining the development of this thought before and after Vatican II. Rev. Cajetan Cuddy, OP, reviews Ashley's philosophical theology in its principles, especially as grounded in natural law philosophy. Matthew Minerd assesses Ashley's approach to the authority of the Catholic Magisterium, the papacy, and the formation of conscience. Rev. Nicanor Pier Giorgio Austriaco, OP, evaluates Ashley's application of his moral theology to beginning- and end-of-life decision-making. (shrink)

Moral revolutions are rightly coming to be recognised as a philosophically interesting and historically important mode of moral change. What is less often acknowledged is that the very characteristics that make a moral change revolutionary pose a fundamental challenge to the possibility of moral progress. This is because moral revolutions are characterised by a diachronic form of deep moral disagreement: moral agents on either side of a moral revolution adopt different standards for assessing the merits of a moral argument, and (...) according to the standards they adopt, agents on neither side of the revolution ought to accept the arguments being put forward by those on the other. This threatens to undermine the progressive status of many of our most celebrated historical examples of moral revolutions: if a moral revolution only looks progressive in light of a change in evaluative standards it itself brought about, then moral progress seems relative to a particular historical perspective; if prior to a moral revolution taking place the moral arguments in its favour fall short of the relevant standards, moral revolutions can never be the outcome of rational argumentation. This apparent relativism and irrationality sits uncomfortably alongside our common-sense intuition that the moral revolutions upon which our contemporary moral worldview rests count as genuine moral progress. In this paper, I deepen currently popular Kuhnian-inspired accounts of moral revolution by incorporating Wittgensteinian ideas from _Philosophical Investigations_ and _On Certainty_. The result is an original way of thinking about deep moral disagreements, moral revolutions, and moral progress. (shrink)

Contending that concern over the ethical dimensions of these and other like issues are no longer just in the domain of those involved in medical practice, the ...

The increasing pressure from different facets of society exerted on multinational companies to become more philanthropic and claim ownership of their impacts is now becoming a standard practice. Although research in corporate social responsibility has arguably been recent, the application of activities taking a voluntary form from MNCs seem to vary reflecting a plethora of factors, particularly one obvious being the backwater local communities of developing countries where most of the natural extraction projects are located. This chapter examines views of (...) two Papua New Guinea local communities hosting large-scale mining operations and explains the demands arising from situational relativities, which are becoming too conspicuous for mine developers not to ignore. The research undertaken with several assertions highlights the perceived imperativeness allowing companies to integrate the CSR into the essential management pursuits of running mines in PNG. (shrink)

Reverse mathematics studies which subsystems of second order arithmetic are equivalent to key theorems of ordinary, non-set-theoretic mathematics. The main philosophical application of reverse mathematics proposed thus far is foundational analysis, which explores the limits of different foundations for mathematics in a formally precise manner. This paper gives a detailed account of the motivations and methodology of foundational analysis, which have heretofore been largely left implicit in the practice. It then shows how this account can be fruitfully applied in the (...) evaluation of major foundational approaches by a careful examination of two case studies: a partial realization of Hilbert’s program due to Simpson [1988], and predicativism in the extended form due to Feferman and Schütte. -/- Shore [2010, 2013] proposes that equivalences in reverse mathematics be proved in the same way as inequivalences, namely by considering only omega-models of the systems in question. Shore refers to this approach as computational reverse mathematics. This paper shows that despite some attractive features, computational reverse mathematics is inappropriate for foundational analysis, for two major reasons. Firstly, the computable entailment relation employed in computational reverse mathematics does not preserve justification for the foundational programs above. Secondly, computable entailment is a Pi-1-1 complete relation, and hence employing it commits one to theoretical resources which outstrip those available within any foundational approach that is proof-theoretically weaker than Pi-1-1-CA0. (shrink)

This article deals with English causal subordinate clauses introduced by since or as. Both these markers may convey different meanings according to contextual variations, and can express temporal relations, from which their causal value is derived. The semantic closeness between as and since whenever they express a causal relation makes it necessary to harvest a large number of attested examples in order to compare and contrast them. The recourse to large on-line corpora such as the British National Corpus gives rise (...) to specific practical difficulties, however, especially as far as as is concerned; because of the high frequency of the subordinators in question, one is confronted to thousands of examples, few of which turn out to have a clear causal value in the case of as, hence the recourse to other means in order to make up a large enough corpus of examples.The concept of presupposition is examined, as it has often been argued that causal since subordinates, unlike as subordinates, introduce a presupposed content. But when confronted to a large number of examples, this criterion falls short of accounting for the subtle differences between the two conjunctions. A more theoretical approach is required; thanks to the tools provided by A. Culioli’s Theory of Enunciative and Predicative Operations, it becomes possible to formalise the hypothesis that a since causal relationship is presented as unproblematic and is addressee-oriented, whereas an as causal relationship is felt as unproblematic, and is speaker-oriented.This difference can be felt in the fact that it seems to be easier to find examples of causal as clauses in the press, while the causal use of since is more widespread in general, and does not seem to be specific to a genre in particular. In order to put this impression to the test, I have resorted to the multi-lingual parallel corpus Intercorp. (shrink)

In this article I seek to establish what, if anything, might be morally troubling about morally enhancing oneself through biomedical means. Building on arguments by Harris, while simultaneously acknowledging several valid counter-arguments that have been put forth by his critics, I argue that taking BMEs necessarily incurs at least one moral cost in the restrictions they impose on our freedom. This does not necessarily entail that the use of BMEs cannot be overall justified, nor that, in certain cases, their costs (...) may not be forestalled. It does show, however, that their use is not morally neutral. There is a cost to such technologies and, as such, the onus will always be on their defenders to show that these costs can compensated for. (shrink)

This paper responds to a proposal for an intersectional approach to the clinical encounter between patient and medical provider. We agree that an intersectional framework offers new insights and information in the clinical encounter. Intersectionality involves awareness of the physician-patient dynamic, and understanding the various privileges and disadvantages of all parties involved, at a micro and macroscopic level. Yet, this analysis alone is insufficient to aid in the clinical encounter and risks harm. We worry about a clinician making assumptions about (...) her patient’s race, gender, economic status, and how these influence the patient’s own views of her life and health. We argue that a narrative supplement is a necessary element of intersectional clinical encounters. Prioritizing patient narrative curtails assumptions, builds trust, and improves care. (shrink)

Abstract In recent debates, both physicalist and anti-physicalist philosophers of mind have come to agree that understanding the nature of phenomenal concepts is key to understanding the nature of phenomenal consciousness itself. Recently, however, Derek Ball (2009) and Michael Tye (2009) have argued that there are no such concepts. Their case is especially troubling because they make use of a type of argument that proponents of phenomenal concepts have typically found persuasive in other contexts; namely, arguments much like those that (...) Tyler Burge used to motivate a certain form of externalism about mental content. The goal of this paper is to defend phenomenal concepts against this line of attack. Burge-style arguments, I contend, cannot be successfully used to make the case that there are no phenomenal concepts. As such, phenomenal concepts must remain central to understanding the nature of phenomenal consciousness. (shrink)