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Displaying: 1-20 of 41 documents


1. Social Theory and Practice: Volume > 36 > Issue: 4
Kasper Lippert-Rasmussen Scanlon on the Doctrine of Double Effect
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In recent work, T.M. Scanlon has unsuccessfully challenged the doctrine of double effect (DDE). First, comparing actions reflecting faulty moral deliberations and involving merely foreseen harm with actions reflecting less faulty moral deliberations involving intended harm suggests that proponents of DDE do not confuse the critical and the deliberative uses of moral principles. Second, Scanlon submits that it is odd to say to a deliberating agent that the permissibility of the actions she ponders depends on the intention with which she will act. I argue that this can be explained without appeal to the claim that intentions are irrelevant to permissibility.
2. Social Theory and Practice: Volume > 36 > Issue: 4
Carlo Filice Libertarian Autonomy and Intrinsic Motives
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This paper suggests that libertarians should avail themselves of a system of natural and autonomy-friendly motivational foundations—intrinsic motives. A psyche equipped with intrinsic motives could allow for some degree of character-formation that is genuinely and robustly autonomous. Such autonomy would rest on motives that are one’s own in the most direct way: they are part of one’s natural make-up. A model with intrinsic motives can help libertarians in multiple ways: to deal with skeptics regarding the very idea of robust self-making; to explain the importance of autonomy (it helps explain how the agent can set her dominant life-goals on the basis of her own motives); to explain why an artificially induced, albeit rational, autonomy is less than genuine (it would not rely on the agent’s own motives).
3. Social Theory and Practice: Volume > 36 > Issue: 4
Jason Raibley Well-Being and the Priority of Values
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Leading versions of hedonism generate implausible results about the welfare value of very intense or unwanted pleasures, while recent versions of desire satisfactionism overvalue the fulfillment of desires associated with compulsions and addictions. Consequently, both these theories fail to satisfy a plausible condition of adequacy for theories of well-being proposed by L.W. Sumner: they do not make one’s well-being depend on one’s own cares or concerns. But Sumner’s own life-satisfaction theory cannot easily be extended to explain welfare over time, and it makes mistaken (autonomous, informed) self-assessment impossible. A new account of well-being based on the stable realization of personal values enjoys the advantages claimed for these subjective theories while avoiding these problems.
4. Social Theory and Practice: Volume > 36 > Issue: 4
Christopher A. Callaway Religious Reasons in the Public Square: A Virtue-Ethical Response to the Exclusivist/Inclusivist Debate
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This essay surveys some of the problems facing theories of public deliberation that are “exclusivist” insofar as they account for good participation in terms of a citizen’s refusal to use certain kinds of reasons. It then argues for a more promising alternative: one that focuses on citizens’ character rather than the content of their reasons. More specifically, it is possible to distinguish good participation from bad by considering the extent to which the citizen possesses and demonstrates the virtue of reasonableness. This virtue-based account avoids the problems facing exclusivism, while still providing a basis for evaluating civic participation.
5. Social Theory and Practice: Volume > 36 > Issue: 4
Nathan Placencia Am I Who I Say I Am? Social Identities and Identification
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This paper aims at further elucidating our understanding of social identities. It does so by focusing on a kind of subjective attachment people have to their social statuses, e.g., their race, ethnicity, gender, familial roles, and other social roles. Specifically, the kind of subjective attachment at issue is identification. Some philosophers have argued that we identify with our social statuses when we self-consciously adopt them as our own. This paper argues against this view and instead suggests that we identify with our social statuses when we care about them. Moreover, it theorizes care as a kind of emotional attunement to our social statuses that sometimes operates below the surface of self-reflective awareness.
6. Social Theory and Practice: Volume > 36 > Issue: 4
Glen Pettigrove, Nigel Parsons Palestinian Political Forgiveness: Agency, Permissibility, and Prospects
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It is often suggested that the resolution of the Israel-Palestine conflict will require forgiveness on the part of both Palestinians and Israelis. This paper looks at what such forgiveness might involve for one party to the conflict. It begins by offering an account of political forgiveness in which both collective actions and collective emotions play a significant role. It then explores whether there is a collective Palestinian agent capable of forgiving as well as whether it would be permissible for such an agent to forgive. It concludes with a discussion of key conditions that, if met, could facilitate Palestinian forgiveness.
review essay
7. Social Theory and Practice: Volume > 36 > Issue: 4
Michael J. Monahan Liberalism and the Challenge of Race: Two Views
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Derrick Darby’s Rights, Race, and Recognition and Ronald R. Sundstrom’s The Browning of America and the Evasion of Social Justice are two recent efforts to answer the challenges that race and racism pose to liberal theory. Darby draws upon civil rights and abolitionist discourse to advance an “externalist” account of political rights, while Sundstrom explores the strains placed upon liberalism by recent demographic trends. In this review essay, I provide a brief account of their overall arguments, and offer some further critical considerations.
book reviews
8. Social Theory and Practice: Volume > 36 > Issue: 4
Sarah Broadie The Constitution of Agency: Essays on Practical Reason and Moral Psychology
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9. Social Theory and Practice: Volume > 36 > Issue: 4
Robert K. Fullinwider The Oxford Handbook of Philosophy of Education
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10. Social Theory and Practice: Volume > 36 > Issue: 4
Lisa J. McLeod Toward a Political Philosophy of Race
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11. Social Theory and Practice: Volume > 36 > Issue: 4
Books Received
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12. Social Theory and Practice: Volume > 36 > Issue: 4
Index to Volume 36
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13. Social Theory and Practice: Volume > 36 > Issue: 3
Michael Bacon Breaking Up is Hard to Do: John Gray’s Complicated Relationship with the Liberal Project
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This paper examines the issue that has taken center stage in the writings of John Gray, the bankruptcy of the Enlightenment project and its implications for liberal political theory. The paper outlines Gray’s critique, showing that elements of his argument against what he calls “the liberal project” apply equally to his own value-pluralist position. It suggests that Gray equivocates between rejecting the Enlightenment liberal project and offering a value-pluralist version of that project because of a fear of moral relativism, a fear that, it is argued, is misplaced.
14. Social Theory and Practice: Volume > 36 > Issue: 3
Stefan Rummens The Semantic Potential of Religious Arguments: A Deliberative Model of the Postsecular Public Sphere
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This paper introduces a distinction between three different kinds of religious arguments. On the basis of a deliberative model of democracy, it is argued that autonomy and identity arguments should be acceptable in public debate, whereas authority arguments should be rejected. This deliberative approach is clarified by comparing it with the exclusionist position of John Rawls on the one hand and the inclusionist position of Nicholas Wolterstorff on the other. The paper concludes with some general remarks about the relation between reason and religion that explain the sense in which a postsecular public sphere also remains a secular one.
15. Social Theory and Practice: Volume > 36 > Issue: 3
Sonya Charles How Should Feminist Autonomy Theorists Respond to the Problem of Internalized Oppression?
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In “Autonomy and the Feminist Intuition,” Natalie Stoljar asks whether a procedural or a substantive approach to autonomy is best for addressing feminist concerns. In this paper, I build on Stoljar’s argument that feminists should adopt a strong substantive approach to autonomy. After briefly reviewing the problems with a purely procedural approach, I begin to articulate my own strong substantive theory by focusing specifically on the problem of internalized oppression. In the final section, I briefly address some of the concerns raised by procedural theorists who are leery of a substantive approach.
16. Social Theory and Practice: Volume > 36 > Issue: 3
Michael Huemer Is There a Right to Immigrate?
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Immigration restrictions violate the prima facie right of potential immigrants not to be subject to harmful coercion. This prima facie right is not neutralized or outweighed by the economic, fiscal, or cultural effects of immigration, nor by the state’s special duties to its own citizens, or to its poorest citizens. Nor does the state have a right to control citizenship conditions in the same way that private clubs may control their membership conditions.
17. Social Theory and Practice: Volume > 36 > Issue: 3
Norvin Richards Lives No One Should Have To Live
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Prospective parents centainly ought to avoid creating a child whose life would be so terrible that no one should have to live it. However, those who sought to avoid it would risk making a serious moral error, if their reasoning did follow a certain pattern.The error would be failure to respect autonomy, which includes a claim to judge for oneself whether one's life is worth living. I explain how this applies to a decision about whether someone is to exist at all, and what difference it would make if prospective parents paid autonomy the respect it merits.
18. Social Theory and Practice: Volume > 36 > Issue: 3
Danny Scoccia Physician-Assisted Suicide, Disability, and Paternalism
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Some disability rights (DR) advocates oppose physician-assisted suicide (PAS) laws like Oregon’s on the grounds that they reflect ableist prejudice: how else can their limit on PAS eligibility to the terminally ill be explained? The paper answers this DR objection. It concedes that the limit in question cannot be defended on soft paternalist grounds, and offers a hard paternalist defense of it. The DR objection makes two mistakes: it overlooks the possibility of a hard paternalist defense of the limit, and it confuses terminal illness, which is at best one type of disability, with disability itself.
review essay
19. Social Theory and Practice: Volume > 36 > Issue: 3
Kok-Chor Tan Global Justice and Global Relations
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In Globalizing Justice, Richard Miller offers a novel understanding of the grounds and scope of the demands of global justice. Miller argues that our duties to the global poor should be conceived relationally, that is, as deriving from the very complex and substantial relationships that we, members of rich countries, have with members of poor countries. In this review essay, I ask whether a relational approach to justice is necessary for the kinds of global duties Miller wishes to advance (that fall short of an egalitarian distributive duty). Indeed, so I argue, the global relations Miller describes go beyond grounding a duty to assist the needy, but are sufficient to generate more substantial global egalitarian obligations.
book reviews
20. Social Theory and Practice: Volume > 36 > Issue: 3
Angela M. Smith Who Knew? Responsibility Without Awareness
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