The purpose of this paper is to examine the direction which the Japanese welfare state has pursued and what it has left behind, by contrasting the points of view of two representative approaches in economics: the traditional income approach and the capability approach which has been newly proposed by Amartya Sen. In extracting the structure of the tax-social security system, the paper refers to the framework of John Rawls, precepts of “common sense of justice” and their higher principles in his theory of justice. The main conclusion is that Japanese welfare state has followed universal liberalism based on continuity, the essential characteristic of the income approach, and has left behind the equality of the differences. This paper indicates that the capability approach which makes it possible to analyze the discontinuity within an individual’s life by focusing on her doings and beings is also suitable for understanding the differences among individuals.

Although technological progress has greatly created the possibilities for the expanded reach of risk management, its newly manufactured uncertainty may bring about a big scale of catastrophe. In order to control risk of the nature, the human ironically may create a hybrid monster that the human cannot control. The Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster also can be described as a hybrid monster, in which natural and technological elements combine to produce uncontrollable risks that may have disastrous consequences. This article scrutinizes the politics of the boundary between calculable risks and unpredictable uncertainty as well as the politics of the boundary between misfortune and injustice by focusing upon the lineage of a hybrid monster such as the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster. Following the check of implications of a hybrid monster, we will interrogate historical lineage. Third we will examine the way in which technocratic politics of <risk/uncertainty> would influence the boundary between misfortune and injustice. Fourth we will scrutinize problems with the probabilist way of thinking, which tends to suppress the risk of nuclear technology. Finally we shed a light on technocratic governance forcing the people to become resilient.

Focusing on the March 2011 Fukushima nuclear accident, this article argues that there is or can be a form of reciprocity between the victims of a catastrophe and society at large to the extent that victims become the occasion and rationale for social reforms. The victims’ contribution to society in this case is the simple fact of being victims. Such a form of reciprocity requires a particular relation to time which Jean-Pierre Dupuy has recently analyzed. In the case of modern risks such as nuclear risk, the contribution of the victims is not only to a better future, but also takes place in the present by rendering patent risks which, as Ulrich Beck argued, though they are known tend to remain socially invisible.

This article illustrates how Japanese national identity continues to be imagined along ethnic lines in the aftermath of the ‘triple disasters’ of March 11, 2011 (hereafter 3/11). It critically examines the ‘new’ discourse of tabunka kyōsei which seeks to incorporate migrants and other ethnic minorities in the nation through an emphasis on cultural difference and argues that the stress on the insurmountability of cultural difference reifies the identities of migrant and minority populations. This in turn allows the State to treat them as homogenous groups with different interests which can be accommodated through the provision of public services at a local level, while effectively excluding them from the national level. In a post-3/11 context, the myth of an ethnically ‘homogenous’ nation is reproduced through the discourse of Ganbarō Nippon with profund implications for the human security of migrant and minority populations.

The aim of this paper is to show that science, understood as pure research, ought not to be affected by non-epistemic values and thus to defend the traditional ideal of value-free science. First, we will trace the distinction between science and technology, arguing that science should be identified with pure research and that any non-epistemic concern should be di­rected toward technology and technological research. Second, we will examine different kinds of values and the roles they can play in scientific research to argue that science understood as pure research is mostly (descriptively) and in any case ought to be (normatively) value-free. Third, we will consider and dismiss some widespread arguments that aim to defend, especially at a normative level, the inevitable value-ladenness of science. Finally, we will briefly return to the connections among science, technology, and values.

The article examines the moral sources and the cultural codifications of civil religion in Greece as this has been shaped by a series of historical contingencies and social forces. It identifies a certain developmental process from a “sponsored” by state and church civil religion (1830–1974) to an autonomous civil religion (1974–today). This development was not the result of an automatic process of social differentiation, but a cultural mutation caused by historical contingencies and the presence of charismatic social elites that instigated the change. Following the premises of the theory of multiple modernities, the analysis identifies foundational cultural patterns on which both sponsored and autonomous civil religions are based upon, patterns that can be traced back to Orthodox religious ontological and cosmological principles as well as visions of the moral self. These premises became the modality of a modern and secular, yet, schismogenetic civil religion that functions simultaneously as a force of social cohesion and of social rupture.

This article analyzes the idea of creativity due to its relevance in our habits and lifestyles. Until recent times the creativity was only a skill of artist, but now it has became in a normal activity for the rest of society. We must be creative. This is the new creative ethos.The core of article insist on the axial origin of this idea. And it intends to remember the reasons that explain its emergence and to re-think the outcomes of the axial revolutions, specially, the ideas of creativity and transcendence without the help of myth of secularization. The Thought of second degree will ocuppy a central place in this article in order to explain the importance of axial cultures for the future of the human history

I defend some of Gilbert’s central claims about our capacity jointly to commit ourselves, and what follows from an exercise of it. I argue that, to explain these claims, we do not need to suppose, as Gilbert does, that we ever are jointly committed, that is, jointly in a state of being committed. I offer a diagnosis of why the gratuitousness of this supposition has been overlooked.

In this paper we outline a theory of human deontology from a naturalistic perspective. In doing so we aim to explain how human beings deal with deontic relations (like obligations and rights) thanks to a specialised psychological infrastructure, which evolved to support human cooperation. This infrastructure includes a repertoire of emotions that play a crucial role in evaluating the conformity of actions relative to a deontic relation, in displaying an agent’s attitude toward their own actions or those of their deontic partners, and in motivating suitable behavioural responses. Finally we discuss the special case of interpersonal deontology, analysing its properties and relating it to Gilbert’s concept of joint commitment.

Gilbert (1989) and Gilbert and Priest (2013) have argued that paradigmatic conversations involve a collectivity of the conversers who participate in the conversation, in the sense that the conversers put forth and negotiate proposals of propositions to be collectively believed by them. Here I explore the plausibility of this Negotiated Collective Belief (NCB) thesis. I begin by supporting a more basic claim, that the nature of conversation itself entails that a conversation always involves a collectivity of the conversers. I then endorse and supplement Gilbert and Priest’s argument for the NCB thesis. I trace resistance to the thesis to the view that collective belief plays no important role in two primary social ends of conversation, exchanging information and making personal connections. I concede that this is so, but I endorse the view (with roots in Taylor 1985) that collective belief does play an important role in a different primary social end of conversation, the creation of a public space of thought. Thus, the NCB thesis is supported by argument and contributes to an explanation of how conversation fulfills one of its primary social ends.

This article engages critically with Margaret Gilbert’s proposal that joint commitments are necessary for collective emotions. After introducing Gilbert’s concept of joint commitment (Section 2), and the joint commitment account of collective emotions (Section 3), we argue in Section 4 that research from developmental psychology challenges the necessity of joint commitments for collective emotions. In that section, we also raise a more principled objection to Gilbert’s account, independently of developmental considerations. Section 5 develops a complementary line of argument, focused on the notion of mutual recognition. While we agree with Gilbert that mutual recognition has an important role to play in an account of collective emotions, we take issue with her attempt to analyse face-to-face based mutual recognition in terms of the concept of joint commitment. We conclude by sketching an alternative analysis of collective emotions that highlights the role of interpersonal identification and socially mediated self-consciousness.

For almost three decades, Margaret Gilbert has introduced a new account of social facts taking “joint commitments”, not only explicit but also implicit, as the cement of sociality properly understood. Gilbert has used this original account of collective phenomena to clarify a variety of issues, both in the philosophy of rights and in the philosophy of the social sciences. This paper focuses on the latter domain; it argues that although Durkheim and Mauss are central references in her pioneering work, On Social Facts, Gilbert’s model has been underestimated in the fields of sociology and anthropology. This may come from the fact that Gilbert provides the reader with only imaginary examples. To overcome this difficulty, Bouvier investigates several historical examples in two related domains:, the political and the religious. Another reason for this relative lack of interest may come from Gilbert’s very unconventional interpretation of the Durkheimian explanation of social beliefs. Although, on the one hand, her “contractualist” (or Rousseauist) interpretation permits a sharp illumination of certain social facts, it may, on the other hand, impede the recognition of the specificity of other kinds of beliefs, which sociologists and anthropologists—including Durkheim—usually consider as collective beliefs. Bouvier, by contrast, introduces alternative models, illustrating them with similar, although ultimately distinct from previous, historical examples.

In telling the utterer enters into a relationship with an addressee. This relationship appears to be a normative one, i.e., it entails that an utterer has certain obligations to the addressee. But how can an act of telling create such obligations? In this paper, I propose what I call a collectivist account of telling. On this account, the core notion of telling is that of an utterer’s contribution to a joint action. Margaret Gilbert’s rich work on joint action emphasizes the obligations agents of joint action have to one another. This normatively robust view of joint action, coupled with the conception of core telling as a participatory act, points toward the possibility of explaining the obligations speakers have to their addressees as, at least in some cases, the sort of obligations participants in joint action quite generally have to each other to act in a way appropriate to the joint activity.

There are two opposite views about the relation of collective emotions and normativity. On the one hand, the philosopher Margaret Gilbert (1997, 2002, 2014) has argued for years that collective emotions are by constitution normative as they involve the participants’ joint commitment to the emotion. On the other hand, some theorists especially in sociology (Durkheim 2009, 2013a; Collins, 2004) have claimed that the values of particular objects and/or social norms originate from and are reinforced by collective emotions that are intentionally directed or associated with the relevant objects or actions. In this chapter, I discuss these opposing views about the relation of collective emotions and normativity, defending the latter view. While collective emotions typically emerge in situations in which some shared value or concern of the participants is at stake, I suggest that collective emotions may also ontologically ground norms in the manner suggested by Durkheim. I present support for this view from a recent sociological case study on the emergence of punitive norms in the social movement Occupy Geneva.

Is a social complex identical to many united people or is it a group entity in addition to the people? For specificity, I will assume that a social complex is a plural subject in Margaret Gilbert’s sense. By appeal to my theory of Aspects, according to which there can be qualitative difference without numerical difference, I give an answer that is a middle way between metaphysical individualism and metaphysical holism. This answer will enable answers to two additional metaphysical questions: (i) how can two social complexes have all the same members and (ii) how can there be a social complex of social complexes?

Margaret Gilbert (1990) argues that although the rationality of the agents in a standard coordination problem does not suffice for their coordination, a social convention of coordination, understood as the agents’ joint acceptance of a principle requiring their coordination, does the job. Gilbert’s argument targets agents rational in the game-theoretic sense, which following Sobel (1994: Chap. 14), I call hyperrational agents. I agree that hyperrational agents may fail to coordinate in some cases despite the obvious benefits of coordination. However, I add that fully rational agents, who rationally exercise rationality’s permissions, may coordinate in these cases without jointly accepting a principle of coordination. I make this point using a model that adopts common simplifying assumptions about agents and their coordination problems.

In On Social Facts (1989) and subsequent works, Margaret Gilbert has suggested a plural subject account of the semantics of ‘we’ that claims that a central or standard use of ‘we’ is to refer to an existing or anticipated plural subject. This contrasts with the more general approach to treat plural pronouns as expressions referring to certain pluralities. I argue that (i) the plural subject approach cannot account for certain syntactic phenomena and that (ii) the sense of intimacy, which Gilbert cites as evidence for her plural subject account, has a different source than the existence of joint commitments constituting a respective plural subject. Moreover, (iii) there is a wide variety of phenomena in the linguistic record, which, while not constituting conclusive evidence against the plural subject account, nevertheless, are dealt with better by the plurality account. ‘We’ thus refers to pluralities, which may or may not be plural subjects. The precise analysis of ‘we’ thus reveals a multi-layered ontology of groups.

Margaret Gilbert’s ‘Three Dogmas about Promising’ is a paradigm-shifting contribution to the literature, not only for its account of promissory obligation based on joint commitment, but for its equally important focus on two properties of such obligation, which her account uniquely and elegantly captures: first, that the duty to keep a promise is necessary—the obligation stands regardless of the content or morality of the promise—and, second, that it is directed, with the promisee having unique standing to demand performance. A related point, implied by Gilbert’s argument, is that moral requirements, alone, can never have those properties. Here I challenge that point, arguing that moral requirements, under the right circumstances, can give rise to necessary and directed obligations, after all, and I propose one such moral obligation of which the duty to keep a promise may well be an instance. Nevertheless, I conclude, it may not provide as plausible a basis of promissory obligation as joint commitment.