Contemplating One’s Nagel

This critical notice of Nagel’s The View from Nowhere argues that Nagel runs two distinct conceptions of objectivity together, in a way that unsettles many of the main conclusions of his book. The ‘Hegelian conception’ involves stepping back from our view of the world to a new conception about the relation between that view and the world so viewed. The ‘absolute conception’ requires us to eliminate from our view of the world any element which can be seen as a product of one’s own perspective. If one tries to combine these two conceptions, the result is likely to be unstable.

Human Dignity and Proportionality

The relation between proportionality analysis and human dignity is one of the most contested questions in the debate over the normative structure of human dignity. Two conceptions stand in opposition: an absolute and a relative conception. According to the absolute conception, the guarantee of human dignity counts as a norm that takes precedence over all other norms in all cases. Taking precedence over all other norms in all cases implies that proportionality analysis, and with it, balancing is precluded. According to the relative conception, proportionality analysis is necessary in order to determine whether human dignity is violated or not. Alexy’s thesis in this dispute is, first, that only the relative conception satisfies the requirements of rationality, and second, that it by no means leads to a devaluation of human dignity.

Realism and the Absolute Conception

This essay is concerned with Bernard Williams’ argument for the possibility of an absolute conception of reality, that is to say a conception of reality that is not from any point of view. The primary aim of the essay is to see what we can learn from this argument about its underlying realism, which Williams expresses as follows: ‘knowledge is of what is there anyway’. To accept such realism—it is claimed in the essay—is to adopt a conceptual structure that involves, among other things, a commitment to the unity of reality. This helps Williams to express and to motivate his opposition to realism about ethics, where realism about ethics, despite its name, is quite different from realism tout court: realism about ethics is the view that the best reflective explanation of our having the ethical knowledge we have serves as a direct vindication of that knowledge.

Remembering the Victims

This chapter engages with Claudia Card claim that we can only ever understand evil by focusing on its victims to insist that evils are reasonably foreseeable intolerable harms produced by inexcusable wrongs. From this, the chapter identifies that her analysis works on two distinct, but related, levels: Conceptually speaking, Card maintains that good and evil are distinct, but evil is distinguished from lesser wrongs, and all are defined by degrees. Experientially speaking, she recognises that agents often find themselves in situations that require actions that are not clearly good or evil. She develops this through Primo Levi’s notion of ‘grey zones,’ which entail the creation of extremely stressful spaces or relationships wherein victims become perpetrators of evil against other victims. This brings her analysis into the socio-political realm, and so is reminiscence of Arendt’s approach, while, by linking grey zones to diabolical evil, she departs from Kant’s rejection of the latter form of evil: for Card, there is an absolute, diabolical form of evil entailing evil done for its own sake. In positing this notion, she returns us to an absolute conception of evil that had long been downplayed by secular theories of evil.

Moral Perception, Thick Concepts, and Perspectivalism

This chapter examines the implications of Iris Murdoch’s distinctive conception of value experience for the possibility of a value objectivism and what is sometimes called the ‘absolute conception’, which is implicit in many contemporary debates about thick evaluative concepts. It argues for a robust realist reading of the claim that the salient concepts of an individual’s life-world can be revelatory of value without appeal either to Platonism or value constitutivism. The chapter distinguishes two readings of the concept of ‘non-perspectival value’, an epistemic and a non-epistemic one, and argues that commitment to the thesis that value is in some sense always ‘value for us’ does not as such rule out value’s being non-perspectival in the sense of existing independently of any actual world views or perspectives in the non-epistemic sense. What is needed is a separate argument that speaks to the practicality of thick moral concepts as action-guiding concepts.

Raimond Gaita e a compreensão da moralidade a partir do reconhecimento da realidade do outro

Explora-se no presente artigo a função que o reconhecimento do outro desempenha para a moralidade no âmbito da obra Good and Evil: An Absolute Conception, de Raimond Gaita, a partir da centralidade da noção de remorso, entendido como a recordação do significado moral para o agente daquilo que ele fez. Serão resgatados os exemplos partir dos quais Gaita pretende enfatizar o peso da moralidade e o significado de se fazer o mal moralmente para alguém. Não se pode compreender, segundo o filósofo, uma situação como moralmente problemática se não for inteligível que quem a realizou deveria sentir um remorso genuíno diante constatação do mal gerado a partir de suas ações.

HUMAN DIGNITY AND PROPORTIONALITY ANALYSIS / A DIGNIDADE HUMANA E A ANÁLISE DA PROPORCIONALIDADE

The relation between proportionality analysis and human dignity is one of the most contested questions in the debate about the normative structure of human dignity. Two conceptions stand in opposition: an absolute and a relative conception. According to the absolute conception, the guarantee of human dignity counts as a norm that takes precedence over all other norms in all cases. Taking precedence over all other norms in all cases implies that balancing is precluded. This, in turn, means that each and every interference with human dignity is a violation of human dignity. Thus, justified interference with human dignity becomes impossible. By contrast, proportionality analysis is intrinsically connected to the distinction between justified and unjustified interferences. A proportional interference is justified and is, therefore, constitutional. The opposite applies in the case of disproportional interference. The absolute conception is incompatible with this conceptual framework. For this reason, it is incompatible with proportionality analysis. According to the relative conception, precisely the opposite is true. The relative conception says that the question of whether human dignity is violated is a question of proportionality. With this, the relative conception is not only compatible with proportionality analysis, it presupposes it.

Foi, é e será? Usos da fórmula da eternidade para falar do tempo na filosofia pré-socrática

The so called Eternity Formula is found both in Homer and Hesiod. The speeches of a seer and of the muses are said to inform the things “that are, will be and were”. Versions of this formula were also used by presocratic philosophers to describe the temporal aspect of central concepts within their cosmologies. Generally, they use it to convey the eternity of an entity by the affirmation of its existence throughout past, present and future. That is the case of fire in Heraclitus’ linear and reciprocal conception of time, of hate and love in the cyclical time of Empedocles, of the intelligence living in an eternal now in Anaxagoras’ cosmos, and of the eternal being in Melissus and Parmenides. Nonetheless, each use of the formula has its own peculiarities. The aim of this article is to make a comparative analysis of them, both within the thought of each philosopher as in face of one another. At the end I will propose a general formula of eternity in the presocratic philosophy that points towards an absolute conception of time. Furthermore, I hope to show that such an absolute treatment of time ends up by denying it implicitly or explicitly in a particular type of eternal present.

Methodology of the Regional Poverty Level Assessment (on the Example of the Samara Region)

The article states the necessity to improve the methodology of assessing the level of poverty, including the regional one. The analysis of poverty level in the Samara region is based on the absolute conception of establishment of a poverty line, structure of the regional consumer basket and energy value of food products constituting it. The structure of households consumer expenses is investigated. The authors offer to use an integrated indicator for poverty measuring covering monetary and not monetary one-aspect indicators. Along with indicators of income and expenses of the population the presented system of private indicators includes the characteristic of the labor market condition, access to education services, health care and housing. The methodology the poverty level assessment is tested on information arrays of Privolzhsky Federal District (PFD). The article provides typologization of subjects of PFD dependent on the level of poverty problem sharpness.