Category Archives: Volume 7, no. 2 (2012)

Conference Papers from the Winter Symposium “Towards a New Ethical Imagination: Political and social values in a cosmopolitan world society”, Turku, Finland, 10-12 February 2012

This collection of papers contains some of the best papers from the winter meeting of the study group “Towards a New Ethical Imagination: Political and social values in a cosmopolitan world society” of the Nordic Summer University.

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Social bases of self-esteem: Rawls, Honneth and beyond

This paper discusses Rawls’s thesis that the social basis of self-respect is one of the primary social goods. While the central element of the social basis consists in the attitudes of others (e.g. respect or esteem) the social basis may include also possession of various goods. Further, one may distinguish, following Honneth, universalistic basic respect from differential esteem and from loving care. This paper focuses on esteem, and further distinguishes three important varieties thereof (anti-stigmatization; contributions to societal goods, projects of self-realization), which all differ from recognition of cultural identity. The normative implications will differ in these different contexts.

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Alienation, language and freedom. A note on Bildung in Hegel’s writings

The concept of Bildung1 occupies a central place in the work of Hegel. In the Phenomenology of Spirit from 1807 it is clear that Bildung has a general meaning, which transcends educational contexts. Soon after the publication of the Phenomenology, however, Hegel became the rector of the humanistic Gymnasium2 in Nürnberg, and this position he kept until 1816. From this period we have some less well known writings, which explicitly discuss Bildung and relate it to educational use. These texts were written at the hight of his philosophical maturity from, when he was working on The Science of Logic and the Encyclopedia, and they therefore deserve being taken seriously. When all these sources are brought together, however, an idea of Bildung often associated with Hegel, namely that Bildung is the result of productive work, seems to be mistaken. I first give a brief account of the general argument,3 secondly add some details from the Phenomenology to support the argument, and finally conclude with a few general remarks.

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Axel Honneth: The law of freedom – Institutionalization of freedom in modern societies – A reconstruction and some remarks

This paper reconstructs the argument of Axel Honneth’s recent book Das Recht der Freiheit as a theory of the institutionalization of freedom in modern society. In particular, it looks at Honneth’s argument for the realization of freedom in law and morality that is proposed as a contemporary re-interpretation of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right. Then I discuss Honneth’s argument for the reality of freedom in the ethical spheres of civil society, in particular in the family, the market and in democracy. Finally, the paper proposes some critical remarks to Honneth’s theory.

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Outline of a taxonomy of approaches to aggregation

What limits on what can be done to individuals in pursuit of some “greater good” are morally permissible, and under what sorts of circumstances? This depends largely on one’s approach to interpersonal aggregation — that is, summing different goods (or harms) affecting different persons and weighing them against other similarly attained aggregates. I outline four approaches: non-aggregationism (e.g. John Taurek, 1977); asymmetric aggregationism (e.g. Peter Singer in many specialist writings, Alistair Norcross); symmetric aggregationism (e.g. Singer in popular writings); and weak aggregationism (e.g. T.M Scanlon). I conclude by briefly suggesting that the weak approach is the “least worst” one.

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Considerable Life Extension versus Immortality

The ethical desirability of considerable life extension by medical technology has become an increasingly discussed topic in bioethics during recent years. Immortality can be seen as a maximum of life extension. Because of this, many authors use the term ‘immortality’ for referring to a lifespan that is considerably longer than our current one. However, being literally immortal would be very different from living for hundreds, or even thousands, of years. The arguments that have been made about the metaphysical questions about immortality need to be clearly distinguished from the bioethical discussion on life extension. What is true of immortality is not necessarily true of a considerably extended human life. In this paper it is argued that immortality in its literal sense should be separated from the discussion on the ethical desirability of considerable life extension more explicitly than is done at the moment. Referring to immortality not only causes conceptual confusion but sometimes affects the argumentation as well.

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Taming the Climate Emergency: Geoengineering and Ethics

In this article, we shed some light into two questions with regard to te idea of climate emergency and dangerous climate change: Presuming that the negative effects of climate change can occur abruptly we want to investigate, in particular, whether there is any kind of rational basis to the conclusion that a state of climate emergency would require geoengineering implementations such as solar radiation management (SRM). Related to this, we will pose the question whether there can be exemptions from conventional morality justified by climate emergency for instance to use such largely untested geoengineering methods like SRM. We will take a look at SRM from an ethical point of view and analyze the concept of climate emergency and its policy relevance in order to assess the moral justification for the implementation of SRM.

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The Dialectics of Democracy

”Thinking publicly otherwise” is one of the foundations of democracy. The task of the opposition in a democratic system is to express distrust, to criticize the actions of the government and to provide an alternative. The opposition institutionalizes distrust, and, paradoxically, the presence of this institutionalized distrust is, for the citizens, one important reason to trust the democratic system. The claim defended here is that the relationship between the government and the opposition can be understood in terms of Hegel’s dialectics. Although Hegel’s political theory as formulated in his Philosophy of Right emphasizes the unifying role of the State, his earlier philosophy contains more democratic potential.

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Where Categorizations of Self and Others Meet. Some Remarks on Erik Allardt’s Theory of Struggles for Recognition between Ethnic Groups

In my paper I argue that Allardt’s use of a recognition-theoretical vocabulary is not only of interest because it precedes the Honnethian and Taylorian reference points of today’s discourse on recognition by one and a half decades, but also because it contains elements that seem unique and fruitful from the perspective of the contemporary debates on multiculturalism and conflicts of recognition. Furthermore it might be of interest in the context of an NSU Study Group that there has been a Scandinavian theory of recognition, which was worked out decades prior to our own contributions to this field of research.

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From Pericles to Plato – from democratic political praxis to totalitarian political philosophy

Plato is normally taken as one of the founders of Western political philosophy, not at least with his Republic. Here, he constructs a hierarchy of forms of governments, beginning with aristocracy at the top as a critical standard for the other forms of governments, and proceeding through timocracy and oligarchy to democracy and tyranny at the bottom. Following Karl Popper, the paper argues that Plato’s is a totalitarian philosophy that emphasizes the similarities between democracy and tyranny, which it considers to be the two worst forms of government. Plato’s denigration of democracy has dominated the tradition of political philosophy until recent times. This paper, however, shows that political philosophy in fact originates in democracy, especially as developed by the sophists and that philosophy is only a form of sophism with a similar origin in ancient Greek democracy. A discussion of Pericles’ funeral oration is used to show that Pericles presented a democratic political philosophy that can serve as a counterpoint to Plato’s political philosophy in the Republic.

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