Volume 64, Issue 2

This paper offers a general approach to the concept of progress, illustrating it by two examples. The first focuses on the least controversial instance of progress, in the domain of the natural sciences. The second considers the notion of ethical progress, a notion viewed as fundamental to the understanding of social progress. At the heart of my approach is a distinction between the ambitious idea of teleological progress, and a more modest concept of pragmatic progress. The last two sections turn to the concept of social progress, identifying the spread of capacities for an autonomously chosen valuable life as the key. Standard economic measures of progress are often poor guides to social progress in my sense, and there are serious questions about whether contemporary socio-economic institutions are antipathetic to social progress.

In the political philosophy of Thomas Hobbes – as in William Shakespeare’s historical dramas – even the most powerful individuals can never be sure of their power. Fundamentally, power is grounded in imagination. It refers to the future, not to the present time; but the future is, in Hobbes’ own words, “a fiction of the mind”. Moreover, in a circular process, power rests on the “reputation of power”; it is based on social recognition. For both reasons, individual power is fragile, bringing about an undercurrent of fear. Following Hobbes’ approach, these characteristics may consistently be applied to the concept of money. This paper argues that by conceiving power on a very abstract level, Hobbes might have unintentionally developed the fundamentals of a theory of money as the dominant power in the emerging capitalist society.

Kant did not explain the method of his foundation of ethics expressly. However, we can comprehend it as the demonstration of the originality of morality. For morality cannot be derived from anything non-moral – such a relation of derivation would destroy it. Therefore, there cannot be a justification or proof of morality in the strong sense, there can only be a “groundwork”, as the term “Grundlegung” is normally translated in English. This groundwork or grounding consists in disclosing the place or topos and the turn or trope of its originating. According to Kant, the first is the will as practical reason; the latter is the turn of the will towards itself as autonomy. The result of such groundwork is, first, the evidence of the authenticity of morality and, hence, its unconditional validity – since such original validity is not conditioned on anything extra-moral. Second, we get a normative criterion for the contents of morality, which in Kant takes the form of the Categorical Imperative. The article seeks to defend the view that there is no alternative to Kant’s method of the foundation of ethics. However, by describing this method in a purely formal way, the author aims to open up the possibility to implement it in another way and with other results than Kant does.

This paper argues that a notion of responsibility understood as a general duty to justify our actions to each other can be a useful tool in criticising neo-liberal uses of this concept – especially the idea of self-responsibility – as self-contradictory and misguided. In order to make this case, I will first present a discursive understanding of responsibility. Against this backdrop I will then outline how this conception can underpin a critique of a neo-liberal understanding of responsibility. I show that this understanding amounts to misuse of this concept as it is deployed to make claims that are based on partial interests, and this is only possible due to responsibility being dissociated from those discursive practices that it presupposes.

The attribution of responsibility in world society is increasingly a field of contestation. On the one hand, the perceptions of far-reaching causal and moral links between spatially and temporally distant events are ever more explicitly pronounced; on the other hand, the very complexity of these links often engenders a fragmentation of responsibility in law as well as in moral commitment. Identifying three competing conceptualisations of responsibility, namely a turn to virtue ethics, processes of juridification, and processes of moralisation, this article explores their different temporal and social dimensions, and the effects they each have on the relation between those held responsible and those affected by the situation that is to be accounted for.

In this paper, I argue that history deserves a more central place in jurisprudential thinking. The argument rests on an understanding of law as having a fundamental institutional dimension, as well as being a product of social power and interests. Since law realises itself in terms of intersecting institutional arrangements and since these change over time, institutional history is central to the very idea of law which jurisprudence aspires to illuminate. The argument is pursued through a case study in special jurisprudence: an analysis of the trajectory of ideas of criminal responsibility in English law since the 18 th century. While a broad family resemblance among ideas of responsibility in different eras can be identified, the variations on those ideas, and their relative importance and impact, depend fundamentally on historically contingent constellations of ideas, institutions and interests.

Most conceptual analyses of responsibility fail to sufficiently account for the historicity of the concept – bothwithin philosophical reflections and within non-philosophical practices. Three frequently encountered problems are: First, “responsibility” is often read retrospectively in texts where the concept is not present; second, the necessary and sufficient conditions that account for responsibility’s meaning are often derived from contemporary usage alone; and third, the non-philosophical usage of “responsibility” is often dismissed as “defective” too quickly. To avoid all three problems, I argue for a Foucauldian analysis of practices in which “responsibility” is used.

Much of the discussion of the definition and criteria of death occurs within the framework of what James Bernat has called the “paradigm of death” – a set of conditions and assumptions that defines the nature of the phenomena and its conceptual boundaries. Two assumptions in this paradigm are that death is “an immutable and objective biological fact and not fundamentally a social contrivance” and that “‘death’ can be applied directly and categorically only to organisms” and not to persons (persons can die in only a “metaphorical” sense). I challenge these assumptions and argue that defining death is not simply a biological matter but also a matter for metaphysical, moral, and cultural reflection. When it comes to deciding among non-brain, whole-brain or higher-brain formulations of death, biological considerations are insufficient. Disagreement among proponents of these formulations can be traced to disagreements over the nature of the kind of being we are or to moral, social or cultural differences. This is illustrated by a critical analysis of the position taken by the U. S. President’s Council on Bioethics in its White Paper, Controversies in the Determination of Death (2008). Thus, while it may be false in some contexts to say that Elvis ain’t dead until we say so, insofar as defining death involves metaphysical, moral, and cultural considerations, Elvis ain’t dead until we say so.