Playing Kant at the Court of King Arthur

This article contrasts the sense in which those whom Bernard Williams called ‘political realists’ and John Rawls are committed to the idea that political philosophy has to be distinctively political. Distinguishing the realist critique of political moralism from debates over ideal and non-ideal theory, it is argued that Rawls is more realist than many realists realise, and that realists can learn more about how to make a distinctively political vision of how our life together should be organised from his theorising, although it also points to a worrying tendency among Rawlsians to reach for inappropriately moralised arguments. G. A. Cohen’s advocacy of socialism and the second season of HBO’s The Wire are used as examples to illustrate these points.

On the significance of the basic structure: a priori baseline views and luck egalitarianism

This paper uses the exploration of the grounds of a common criticism of luck egalitarianism to try to make an argument about both the proper subject of theorising about justice and how to approach that subject. It draws a distinction between what it calls basic structure views and a priori baseline views, where the former take the institutional aspects of political prescriptions seriously and the latter do not. It argues that objections to luck egalitarianism on the grounds of its harshness can in part be explained by this blindness to relevant features of institutions. Further, it may be that luck egalitarianism cannot regard its own enactment as just. A related objection to Dworkin’s equality of resources, which claims that it cannot pick a particular institutional background to set the costs of resources and so is radically indeterminate, is also presented. These results, I argue, give us good reason to reject all a priori baseline views.

Rawls and Rousseau: 'amour-propre' and the strains of commitment

In this paper I try to illuminate the Rawlsian architectonic through an interpretation of what Rawls’ Lectures on the History of Political Philosophy say about Rousseau. I argue that Rawls’ emphasis there when discussing Rousseau on interpreting amour-propre so as to make it compatible with a life in at least some societies draws attention to, and helps explicate, an analogous feature of his own work, the strains of commitment broadly conceived. Both are centrally connected with protecting a sense of self which is vital for one’s own agency. This allows us to appreciate better than much of the literature presently does the requirement for Rawls that justice and the good are congruent, that a society of justice does not disfigure citizens’ ability to live out lives relatively unmarked by relations of domination. Some comments on G. A. Cohen’s critiques of Rawls are made.

Social connection and practice-dependence: some recent developments in the global justice literature

This review essay discusses two recent attempts to reform the framework in which issues of international and global justice are discussed: Iris Marion Young’s ‘social connection’ model and the practice-dependent approach, here exemplified by Ayelet Banai, Miriam Ronzoni and Christian Schemmel’s edited collection. I argue that while Young’s model may fit some issues of international or global justice, it misconceives the problems that many of them pose. Indeed, its difficulties point precisely in the direction of practice dependence as it is presented by Banai et al. I go on to discuss what seem to be the strengths of that method, and particularly Banai et al.’s defence of it against the common claim that it is biased towards the status quo. I also discuss Andrea Sangiovanni and Kate MacDonald’s contributions to the collection.

Obfuscation and Strict Online Anonymity

I consider the case for genuinely anonymous web searching. Big data seems to have it in for privacy. The story is well known, particularly since the dawn of the web. Vastly more personal information, monumental and quotidian, is gathered than in the pre-digital days. Once gathered it can be aggregated and analyzed to produce rich portraits, which in turn permit unnerving prediction of our future behavior. The new information can then be shared widely, limiting prospects and threatening autonomy. How should we respond? Following Nissenbaum (2011) and Brunton and Nissenbaum (2011 and 2013), I will argue that the proposed solutions—consent, anonymity as conventionally practiced, corporate best practices, and law—fail to protect us against routine surveillance of our online behavior. Brunton and Nissenbaum rightly maintain that, given the power imbalance between data holders and data subjects, obfuscation of one’s online activities is justified. Obfuscation works by generating “misleading, false, or ambiguous data with the intention of confusing an adversary or simply adding to the time or cost of separating good data from bad,” thus decreasing the value of the data collected (Brunton and Nissenbaum, 2011). The phenomenon is as old as the hills. Natural selection evidently blundered upon the tactic long ago. Take a savory butterfly whose markings mimic those of a toxic cousin. From the point of view of a would-be predator the data conveyed by the pattern is ambiguous. Is the bug lunch or potential last meal? In the light of the steep costs of a mistake, the savvy predator goes hungry. Online obfuscation works similarly, attempting for instance to disguise the surfer’s identity (Tor) or the nature of her queries (Howe and Nissenbaum 2009). Yet online obfuscation comes with significant social costs. First, it implies free riding. If I’ve installed an effective obfuscating program, I’m enjoying the benefits of an apparently free internet without paying the costs of surveillance, which are shifted entirely onto non-obfuscators. Second, it permits sketchy actors, from child pornographers to fraudsters, to operate with near impunity. Third, online merchants could plausibly claim that, when we shop online, surveillance is the price we pay for convenience. If we don’t like it, we should take our business to the local brick-and-mortar and pay with cash. Brunton and Nissenbaum have not fully addressed the last two costs. Nevertheless, I think the strict defender of online anonymity can meet these objections. Regarding the third, the future doesn’t bode well for offline shopping. Consider music and books. Intrepid shoppers can still find most of what they want in a book or record store. Soon, though, this will probably not be the case. And then there are those who, for perfectly good reasons, are sensitive about doing some of their shopping in person, perhaps because of their weight or sexual tastes. I argue that consumers should not have to pay the price of surveillance every time they want to buy that catchy new hit, that New York Times bestseller, or a sex toy.

Rawls and Health Care

John Rawls’s A Theory of Justice (1971), his first major work articulating his theory of justice as fairness, was immediately recognized as a fundamental contribution to political philosophy in the twentieth century. Working within the tradition established by previous philosophers such as Kant and Locke, Rawls employed the contract theory approach. Taking it to a higher order of abstraction, he sought to determine not what the structure of social organization would be, but what the principles which governed social institutions would be under a hypothetical contracting situation. Rawls uses this contract theory approach to construct a society in which the morally irrelevant contingencies of nature and social arrangements are mitigated by principles of justice which govern the basic institutions of society. A common observation has been that Rawls left out any discussion of health care and how it might fit into his conception of a just society. Several philosophers have articulated expansions of the theory to account for health care. In the chapters that follow I will continue this tradition and consider how justice as fairness might be expanded to account for just health care allocation. In doing so, I hope to answer a particularly strong critique of the theory brought up by Amartya Sen and Martha Nussbaum, and to argue for a broadened conception of health care which takes into account the complex causal relationship between society and human health.

Justiça distributiva aplicada a realidade brasileira: um estudo teórico

O presente trabalho tem por objetivo analisar a aplicação da justiça distributiva na realidade brasileira. A fim de se ter uma perspectiva histórica dos conceitos de justiça e justiça distributiva, ao longo da filosofia moral e política antiga e contemporânea, procurou-se mostrar a evolução do princípio geral de justiça com relação a sua construção e fundamento, bem como a introdução do estudo da justiça distributiva na psicologia social. Analisou-se os estudos e pesquisas empíricas realizadas pelos psicólogos sociais brasileiros e pela comparação de pesquisas e estudos de outros países, procurou-se concluir sobre a aplicação das normas de justiça distributiva na realidade brasileira. Concluiu-se, que se faz necessário uma atuação mais sistemática dos psicólogos sociais no estudo dessa área, devido a exiguidade de estudos e pesquisas nacionais.

Max Stirner, o único e o que lhe é próprio: uma interpretação e(m) algun(s) ensaio(s)

This work has a study object the main thinking work of Johan Kaspar Schmidt well known as Max Stirner (1806-1856) - originally titled (in German), Der Einzige und sein Eigentun, and translated into Portuguese by the Portuguese publisher Antígona in 2004, under the title The Unique and its Ownership. This book was known in 1844 although its publication dated 1845 seen that the censor of that time rejected the publication request in that year - saying that ( ) in concrete passages of that work, not only God, Christ, the church and the religion are usually object of proposal blasphemy, but also because all social order, the state and the government are defined as something that should not exist simultaneously as one justifies the lie, perjury, the murder and suicide and denies the ownership right. After this first attack and rejection by its bearing the unique come to be others target, due practically to all the philosophical political thinkers its time including thinkers like Ludwig Feuerbach and Karl Marx & Friedrich Engels in spite of, on the other hand, having inspired formulations and reformulations of many of those thinkers that were against then in their times, as well as those thinkers that came after then such as Nietzsche himself. Even though this work was be victim of powerful attempts of erasing it of history, it has shown a great repercussion power and that is the main reason that led us to ask the following questions what is its big originality? , how could his author arrive at a so impactant perspective? What is its most legitimate political place? We endeavored in elaborate answers to those questions trough the exegesis of its text, taking in account both the scholarship environment where the author produced his intellectual life set - and the detailed reading of texts linked to discussion in focus, where this reading is always based upon the meaning and senses traced by the texts and its contexts as a precaution against the limits and the traps of the readings which shed light markedly on strict letter of the phrases constructs. Ours conclusions point at to the idea that a work like this , that subverts the characteristic ways of thought of the modernity, completely, continues being a utter odds, without rank in the history of thought and the moderns political practices, finding parallel possibility only, in a very special way, with a certain autharchic perspective of Ancient Greece

Herbert Marcuse - anticapitalismo e emancipação

Marcuse teve no Brasil na década de 1970 uma recepção unilateral, sendo visto unicamente como guru da contra-cultura. Contra esse equívoco o artigo mostra a relação intrínseca entre teoria e prática na filosofia de Marcuse, caracterizada como uma filosofia política cuja preocupação central é a transformação radical da sociedade capitalista.

A propriedade intelectual no mundo contemporâneo no contexto geral das relações de propriedade

Pós-graduação em Ciências Sociais - FFC

A crítica nietzscheana à democracia moderna

Coordenação de Aperfeiçoamento de Pessoal de Nível Superior (CAPES)

As paixões humanas em Thomas Hobbes: entre a ciência e a moral, o medo e a esperança

Coordenação de Aperfeiçoamento de Pessoal de Nível Superior (CAPES)