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Abstract
The contemporary methodological debate about justice has centered around a dispute about the value of so-called ideal theory. I argue that justice performs a social-guiding function, which explains how people should respond to their limited and fallible abilities to realize justice institutionally. My argument helps to re-orientate the contemporary methodological debate. The obvious disagreement between many prominent supporters and skeptics of ideal theory obscures the fact that they are united by a false assumption: the practical value of justice exclusively consists of its institution-guiding function. To capture the overlooked social-guiding function, a richer normative theory of justice is required; I show how such a theory can be supplied by “ideal-transitional” principles.
Abstract
Both in everyday life and in moral philosophy, many think that our own past wrongdoing can undermine our standing to indignantly blame others for similar wrongdoing. In recent literature on the ethics of blame, we find two different kinds of explanation for this. Relative moral status accounts hold that to have standing to blame, you must be better than the person you are blaming, in terms of compliance with the norm. Fault-based accounts hold that those who blame others for things of which they are also guilty exhibit familiar moral faults, such as making an exception of oneself, and that these faults explain why they lack standing. I argue in support of relative moral status accounts, showing that they both better trace our practice of dismissing blame on the basis of lack of standing, and that they have more explanatory resources than have been appreciated.
Abstract
Book 6 of Eusebius’ Church History contains a fascinating fragment of Porphyry’s Against the Christians in which the latter lambasts Origen’s allegorical reading of the Jewish Scriptures. Though many aspects of this text have received abundant scholarly attention, relatively little has been written on the theory underlying the critique, that is, why exactly Porphyry thought Christian allegories were illegitimate. Furthermore, among the few scholars who have treated this topic at any length, there is no consensus about the precise nature of Porphyry’s objection. In this article I will argue that Porphyry denies the legitimacy of Christian allegories because he thinks the texts they exegete are clear and simple. They are not, for Porphyry, full of the mysteries and enigmas that indicate allegorical exegesis is appropriate. Consequently, Porphyry understands Christian allegories as an attempt to save a text that is plainly immoral rather than genuinely mysterious.
Abstract
This paper proposes an empirical research agenda for investigating the practices of biosecuritization of wild animal threats in modern society. Previously mostly studied on the lofty biopolitical level of directives on combatting invasive species or culling pests, we outline the conceptual and methodological points of entry for bringing the on-the-ground work of culling out-of-place, unwanted, individual animals and populations. This means a focus on necropolitics as constituted by the norms, everyday professional practices, vernaculars of killing, and identity work by pest controllers in the city and hunters on the countryside. Borrowing from research in the domestic animal killing context, we nevertheless show how wild animal killing is imbued with more spontaneity, remorse, aesthetics, public stigma, and multispecies entanglements, requiring adapted research protocols.
Abstract
In his book, Disagreement, Deference, and Religious Commitment, John Pittard presents and critiques what he calls the “master argument for disagreement-motivated religious skepticism.” This argument purports to show, using only higher-order reasoning and facts about religious disagreement, that nobody’s religious outlook is justified (at least, nobody aware of the argument). The master argument presupposes that any attempt to vindicate one’s religious outlook must employ dispute-independent reasons. Pittard objects to this assumption and argues, instead, for rationalist weak conciliationism: the view that partisan justification can be had when (and only when) one has rational insight into the claim in question. In this paper, I raise a challenge for rationalist weak conciliationism; in short, it is difficult to explain why only rational insight provides partisan justification while maintaining that a wide range of beliefs, including religious beliefs, can be justified in a partisan way.
Abstract
Husserl argued that psychology needs to establish an abstraction that is opposite to the abstraction successfully established in the natural sciences. While the natural sciences abstract away the psychological or subjective, psychology must abstract away the physical or worldly. However, Husserl and other phenomenologists such as Iso Kern have argued that there is a crucial systematic disanalogy between both abstractions. While the abstraction of the natural sciences can be performed completely, the abstraction of psychology cannot. In this context, Husserl argues that the psychological reduction leads to paradoxes. In this paper, I critically discuss whether it is true that the natural sciences can successfully abstract away the subjective. Or more precisely, I raise the question of whether they should.