Target Centred Virtue Ethics and Role Ethics

The development of ‘virtue jurisprudence’ (a neo-Aristotelian virtue ethics for law) has highlighted the importance of virtue in legal ethics. Yet it has been criticized because it cannot account for “robust” role differentiation. In this chapter I argue that Target Centred Virtue Ethics can account for two features which constitute the ‘Role Dilemma’: (a) There is robust role differentiation; that is, role differentiation as conceived by the Standard Conception of law (and, e.g., business).(b) Occupiers of legal roles are not permitted to act immorally (except perhaps in “tragic” dilemmas).Virtue ethics and Standard Conceptions of law (and, e.g., business) are standardly thought to be incompatible. This may be true where virtue ethics is conceived in “orthodox” neo-Aristotelian terms. I reject this version of virtue ethics for role ethics and show that Target Centred Virtue Ethics can subscribe to both horns of the dilemma (a) and (b) above.

Robert White and the Study of Lives

Robert Winthrop White was an important psychologist and personality researcher at Harvard University during the middle years of the 1900s. First as a student and then chief lieutenant and colleague of Henry A. Murray at the Harvard Psychological Clinic, White became a leading proponent of Murray’s intensively case study-oriented “personological” approach to personality analysis and description. This approach emphasized that personality is not a fixed entity but a constantly changing and developing configuration of many different factors, which must be appreciated as a whole and is best conveyed in the context of individual life histories. Although sometimes overshadowed by both Murray and Harvard personality psychologist Gordon Allport, who both promoted the life study approach, White became the most prolific and skilled early practitioner of that approach. His early case study of “Earnst” was the only one selected to illustrate the Murray project’s personological approach in the seminal 1938 work Explorations in Personality. As the “caretaker” director of the clinic in the late 1930s and early 1940s, White oversaw the collection of numerous further case histories, several of which became the foundations of four highly influential books: The Abnormal Personality, Lives in Progress, Opinions and Personality, and The Enterprise of Living. In 1959, White made important contributions to the theory of motivation by asserting that the standard conception of motives as tension-reducing instincts or drives was severely limited and should be complemented by an innate “effectance” motive: an innate tendency to seek rather than reduce tension while achieving “competence” in dealing with the outside world.

Morals from rationality alone? Some doubts

Contractarians aim to derive moral principles from the dictates of instrumental rationality alone. It is well-known that contractarian moral theories struggle to identify normative principles that are both uniquely rational and morally compelling. Michael Moehler’s recent book, Minimal Morality, seeks to avoid these difficulties by developing a novel ‘two-level’ social contract theory, which restricts the scope of contractarian morality to cases of deep and persistent moral disagreement. Yet Moehler remains ambitious, arguing that a restricted version of Kant’s categorical imperative is a uniquely rational principle of conflict resolution. We develop a formal model of Moehler’s informal game-theoretic argument, which reconstructs a valid argument for Moehler’s conclusion. This model, in turn, enables us to expose how a successful argument for Moehler’s contractarian principle rests on assumptions that can only be justified by subtle yet significant departures from the standard conception of rationality. We thus extend our understanding of familiar contractarian difficulties by showing how they arise even if we restrict the scope of contractarian morality to a domain where its application seems both promising and necessary.

Are the categorical laws of ontology metaphysically contingent?

Are the categorical laws of ontology metaphysically contingent? I do not intend to give a full answer to this question in this paper. But I shall give a partial answer to it. In particular, Gideon Rosen, in his article “The Limits of Contingency” (2006), has distinguished a certain conception of metaphysical necessity, which he calls the Non-Standard conception, which, together with the assumption that all natures or essences are Kantian, is supposed to entail that many laws of ontology are metaphysically contingent (Rosen 2006: 20, 27). Now, the argument Rosen gives supports the conclusion that all categorical laws of ontology are contingent. I shall argue that the Non-Standard conception and the thesis that all natures are Kantian are incompatible with each other and that, if the Non-Standard conception is true, there must be at least one metaphysically necessary categorical law of ontology, and I shall identify such a law. Thus my contribution to the question of the title of the paper will be that not all categorical ontological laws can be contingent if the Non-Standard conception is true.

Introduction

This introduction presents the articles contained in this special issue of Philosophy and Social Criticism on the topic of populism. It does so by placing them in the field of discussions that the standard conception of populism as ‘illliberal democracy’ has stimulated in many areas of the populism-research that was produced in response to the recent increase in populist governments in established constitutional democracies world-wide. Following the methodological canon of studies in the field, it presents the individual contributions roughly in three segments according to leading questions they focus on. In each segment, the introduction attempts to indicate the degree to which the articles depart and provide reasons for departing from the initial standard conception and thereby point to new relevant directions for further work. The first segment (articles 1. -4.) consists of essays that take on the definitional and empirical question of what and where populism is, and which varieties of it there are. The second segment (articles 5. -8.) presents new work focusing on the diagnostic question of what conditions and institutional conditions enable contemporary populism in established liberal constitutional representative democracies. They thus also aim at explaining or at least providing insight into the structures on the supply side (party politics) that make populism popular as an `outsider option'. The third and largest segment (essays 9. -15.) comprises essays that present various approaches to answering the therapeutic question what democratic political systems and societies can do to confront, absorb or internalize the lessons from populist challenges.

The Usage of What Country: A Critical Analysis of Legal Ethics in Transnational Legal Practice

This article maintains that the standard conception of legal ethics – the so-called ‘theory of amorality’ – is highly dependent on context and cannot be consistently applied to transnational legal practice. After defining in some detail the basic tenets of the standard conception, I identify its main assumptions, namely, (i) that a legal relation is an agency relation in which both lawyer and client are individual moral agents, (ii) that such relation is connected to a litigation process, and (iii) that such relation takes place within the framework of a decently well-functioning rule of law system. Using as a paradigmatic example the BTC pipeline case– a set of contracts and international treaties signed by a consortium of private companies and several sovereign states during the first decade of the 21st century to regulate the building and operation of a transnational oil pipeline – I analyze one by one these three assumptions to conclude that they are at the very least highly problematic in the context of global legal practice. Additionally, I consider the counter-argument that a lawyer who moves beyond the standard conception is actually usurping the role of the judge, an argument that loses much of its appeal on the transnational context. In a brief concluding remark I inscribe these problems within the more general post-Westphalian paradigm shift in law and jurisprudence.

Can Animals Be Persons?

According to the standard conception of persons, an individual qualifies as a person if it satisfies four conditions, broadly construed. First, the individual is conscious, in the sense that there is something it is like to be it. Second, it is rational, in the sense that it can execute at least some rational inferences and possesses the required materials for such inferences, such as beliefs and desires. Third, the individual must be self-aware, aware of itself as an individual persisting through time. Finally, it must be other-aware, aware of the mindedness of others. This book argues that many animals can satisfy all of these conditions and so qualify as persons. Unlike recent debates that concern whether we should extend personhood as far as the great apes, it is argued that personhood extends quite widely through the animal kingdom.

Formal versus Bounded Norms in the Psychology of Rationality: Toward a Multilevel Analysis of Their Relationship

It is often claimed that formal and optimizing norms of the standard conception of rationality and the heuristics of the bounded rationality approach are at odds with one another. This claim, I argue, is an overly complex one. In order to discuss it adequately, I introduce two sets of distinctions: (a) a system of different kinds of relations between conceptions of rationality, namely relations of elimination, compatibility, and complementarity, and (b) three different levels of possible relations between rules of different theories of rationality—the levels of empirical explanation, normative justification, and normative prescription. I argue that formal and bounded rules are compatible and complementary at the levels of explanation and justification, but probably not so at the level of prescription.

Naturalizing Epistemology

Quine’s naturalism admits of both a positive and a negative characterization. Positively, naturalism can be defined as the view that reality is to be identified and described within science. Negatively, Quine defines naturalism as the rejection of first philosophy. This chapter offers a reconstruction of Quine’s argument against first philosophy, an argument which is routinely perceived as an argument from despair. According to this standard conception, Quine rejects first philosophy because all attempts to reconstruct our scientific theories in terms of sense experience have failed. This chapter shows that this picture is inaccurate and that Quine’s argument against first philosophy is considerably stronger and subtler than this received view suggests. For Quine, the first philosopher’s quest for transcendental foundations is useless; there is no science-independent perspective from which to validate science.