In the contemporary society with the rapid development of science and technology, the instrumental value of science and technology has been brought into full play. At the same time, a series of ethical dilemmas of science and technology have also been highlighted, which seriously affect the social development order and the quality of human existence. This paper focuses on the ethical dilemma of science and technology, analyzes its realistic representation and deep roots by philosophical thinking, and puts forward a targeted philosophical construction path combining the dialectical relationship between instrumental rationality and value rationality. Firstly, it expounds the background and significance of scientific and technological ethics research, and clarifies the research ideas and methods; secondly, it combs the realistic manifestations of scientific and technological ethics dilemma, and discusses it from three dimensions: right conflict, responsibility ambiguity and value imbalance; Finally, from three aspects of value rationality regression, ethics subject reconstruction and ethics norm perfection, this paper puts forward the philosophical construction strategy of science and technology ethics system, summarizes the research conclusion and looks forward to the future development. The research aims to provide philosophical theoretical support for solving the ethical dilemma of science and technology, realizing the coordinated development of science and technology and humanities, and promoting the healthy development of science and technology in the direction of human common interests.
This commentary on Immigration and Freedom explores its relationship to border abolitionist perspectives and expresses puzzlement concerning the state as the site of the ideal of a free society.
A claimed epistemic condition on legitimate authority appears in numerous academic debates. Yet the condition admits multiple specifications and is asked to serve numerous roles in each debate. Work in the democratic legitimacy and authority allocation debates in which the condition is most often invoked rarely intersects. This article argues that a plausible account of the epistemic condition should generalize across both debates. It then offers desiderata for any account that can so generalize and a substantive proposal that can meet the desiderata. On the proposed account, the epistemic condition is a threshold condition on which legitimate authorities must be suitably competent in the sense of reliably reaching correct decisions better than individuals would on their own. Epistemic considerations also provide guidance above the threshold. Yet they remain non-dispositive for most authority questions. These results minimally demonstrate that attending to authority allocation questions provides additional support for existing views from the democratic legitimacy debate defending a threshold condition and hybrid accounts of legitimate authority on which epistemic and non-epistemic conditions apply. However, they also challenge common assumptions in the democratic legitimacy debate and provide support for an approach many in that debate quickly dismiss.
In this paper, I provide an argument in favor of flexible partisanship in response to concerns about the shortcomings of contemporary partisanship. I develop a taxonomy of four democratic tasks for partisanship based on existing accounts of its democratic value and argue that these tasks stand in tension under contemporary circumstances. I then distinguish between two forms of flexibility, policy and identity flexibility, and argue that the two can be complementary and reenforcing in some cases. I use this account of partisan flexibility to raise concerns about some of the standards proposed by preexisting accounts of partisanship, which I argue are overly constraining in their prescriptions of specific forms of comprehensiveness and integrity, and distinguish flexibility from related notions of deliberative and collusive partisanship. I then demonstrate how the concept of flexible partisanship can provide useful action guidance in response to current partisan dysfunction with both institutional and interpersonal means of enacting flexible partisanship.
Institutions typically construct 'access thievery', the practice of disabled people gaining access 'illegitimately', as irrational or immoral behaviour. This paper explores the conditions where such behaviour is not only moral, but also a legitimate political strategy. I engage with distinctions between ideal and non-ideal, as well as distributive and non-distributive, theories of justice. The non-ideal approach provides justification on grounds of fair cooperation. The non-distributive approach forces us to question the validity of scarcity assumptions. This leads to an altered set of conditions to what has typically been engaged with, and therefore altered conclusions. I argue that, under certain conditions of injustice, lying to gain access is rational, and that there is a political imperative to do so.
In Immigration and Freedom, Chandran Kukathas provides sophisticated and empirically informed arguments that it is impermissible and inadvisable to forcibly restrict immigration. In this essay, I focus on Kukathas's chapter on the state, arguing that he is unduly skeptical of a legitimate state's right to political self-determination. Even if I am correct, though, Kukathas may be right to warn us that the grave costs of attempting to limit immigration are not worth the putative benefits. In the end, what makes Immigration and Freedom distinctive and distinctively valuable is Kukathas's core claim that the real threat to freedom comes from attempting to control immigration.
This paper explores the relationship between economic precarity and freedom of expression. As the influential liberal philosopher John Stuart Mill observed, financial insecurity can have a stifling effect on expression, as it pressures people of modest means to remain muted in order to avoid social punishments such as firing and ostracism that can undermine their ability to meet their basic material needs. In light of the fact that fears of economic hardship can generate self-censorship, it is argued that universal basic income (UBI) policies ought to be viewed as potent mechanisms for bolstering freedom of expression and stimulating productive public discourse. Such policies are equipped to establish a baseline of material wellbeing that can shield individuals and groups from financial turmoil in the event that they publicly express views that are controversial or strongly disfavoured. Moreover, by reducing the stress associated with economic precarity, guaranteed income policies may deescalate social tensions and create greater opportunity for people to participate in constructive communication with interlocutors whose worldviews are different from their own. This case for UBI is developed further by noting that such policies can benefit public discourse by challenging the dominance that economic elites often exert over the media marketplace and the conversations facilitated therein. Guaranteed income policies can help prevent worthwhile perspectives from being crowded out of the media marketplace by large firms that are owned and directed by highly affluent individuals who may be disconnected from the interests of large swaths of society.
In this commentary, I explore what Chandran Kukathas means by freedom in his book Immigration and Freedom. His understanding of freedom has three dimensions, freedom as liberty rights, freedom as conditions for being free, and freedom as a social ethos. I argue that freedom in the context of this book has a collective nature, which is inconsistent with Kukathas's objection to the self-determination argument for the state's right to exclude.
The dominant normative theories of politics - ideal theory and non-ideal theory - remain blind to the possibility of irreversible political, economic, and social collapse. Both share the assumption that no crisis is beyond remedy and that a return to the previous status quo is always possible. The refusal to acknowledge the possibility of such collapse, and the corresponding avoidance of this subject, I call dystopophobia. Drawing an analogy with Estlund's critique of utopophobia, this article argues that the dichotomy between ideal and non-ideal theory must be supplemented with a third element: anti-ideal theory. Anti-ideal theory begins precisely where non-ideal theory ends - with a world in which reforms aimed at restoring political, economic, and social order have become impossible due to irreversible catastrophe, such as climate collapse. I define four guiding principles-axiology of the minimum, the new political subject, situational ethics, and procedural acceptability over legitimacy-which constitute the normative foundation of anti-ideal theory, and I juxtapose them with the assumptions underlying ideal and non-ideal theory.
In his recent book Immigration and Freedom, Chandran Kukathas offers a powerful defense of the open society, which he characterizes in terms of two dimensions of freedom - freedom of immigration and freedom of integration. However, we question whether these two dimensions of freedom are always compatible. In contrast to Kukathas, we suggest that societies without limits on immigration and no pressures of integration may be less free than societies that find the right balance between the freedom of immigration and the freedom of integration. If our analysis is correct, then the ideal of the open society may not actually support open borders.
In a plural democracy, the question of whether the police should use technology for the purposes of investigating crime and detecting offenders is one that does not permit a simple answer. In this paper, we argue that where technology can secure a degree of freedom for citizens by protecting them from crime, not only should the police use it but that there is a duty to do so. However, with the adoption of technology, the police acquire power, which if not adequately controlled, will pose a threat to citizens' freedom. We use republican political theory to explain the source of this duty, the nature of the threat, and how the state can discharge the duty while minimising the risk that in doing so it also undermines citizens' freedom.
Irreversible and inevitable climate change will, and already has, negatively affected the lives, livelihoods, and health of many communities around the world as well as of future generations. Yet, climate-affected communities often have little responsibility for bringing about these consequences. This has led some scholars to argue that climate-affected communities, now and in the future, have a 'right to climate adaptation:' the right to demand adaptive assistance and freedom. In this paper, I ask what normative commitments that should be respected when implementing the right to climate adaptation within national and international climate policy and legislation. In particular, I identify three core normative commitments of the right to climate adaptation, namely (i) a commitment to conceptualizing socioeconomic justice in multi-dimensional terms, taking into account the context-sensitivity of climate-vulnerabilities and adaptive needs; (ii) a commitment to intergenerational justice, both forward-looking in order to anticipate adaptation needs of future generations, but also backwards-looking by recognizing the historical injustices that have brought about current climate-vulnerabilities and thus to provide reparations for past harms; and (iii) the commitments to provide basic adaptation and to respect autonomous adaptation.
In this response to critics, I address three categories of questions. A first set of questions relates to the role of class analysis in the book's framework. A second set of questions probes my account of popular sovereignty as anachronistic or insufficiently attentive to emancipatory dimensions. Finally, critics are interested in the implications of the proposed account of imperial democracy and self-and-other determination for contemporary politics, reactionary and emancipatory alike. In addressing these questions, I first justify the study of racial possessive attachments and consumption as acomponent of twentieth-century capitalism, a point that Du Bois makes in the early 20th century and Marcuse expands on in the 1960s and 1970s. Based on this, I revisit the promise of popular sovereignty in light of the critiques and, finally, consider which collective actors could be best positioned to contest imperial capitalism in its contemporary instantiation.
Nozick famously suggests that we conceive of utopia as a meta-utopia, but how does that insight support libertarianism? In my interpretation, the emphasis is more on 'meta' than on 'utopia.' The point of Nozick's thought-experiment is to draw our attention to the importance of community in general, and the need for many, diverse sub-communities, lest we end up trapped in someone else's dream. This suggests an argument for libertarianism from freedom of community. The first step is to recognize that, given the importance of sub-communities that are inevitably both coercive and incompatible, we should recognize a right to choose your own community at the meta-level. The second step is to see that a state that both recognizes and requires others to recognize such a right amounts to libertarianism.
According to longtermism, present persons should promote the value of the far future. While this view has so far been primarily discussed within a consequentialist normative framework, less has been said about what longtermism entails from a deontological perspective. This paper aims to address this shortcoming. I argue that, from a deontological standpoint, distant future people have a present moral status qua 'expected persons'. Therefore, they have at least some present rights qua moral status-holders. But distant future people do not have equal moral status at the present time. Therefore, their present rights are not as stringent as those of present persons, other things being equal. However, I demonstrate that the most fundamental longtermist concerns do not rest on a commitment to intergenerational moral equality: even if distant future people are not our moral equals, respecting their present rights should be a key moral priority of our time.
In what follows, I formulate three interrelated challenges in response to the powerful critique of imperial popular sovereignty and the vision of anti-imperial popular sovereignty that In & eacute;s Valdez develops in Democracy and Empire: 1) In addition to the critique of the dominant imperial form of popular sovereignty and self-determination, more empirical and theoretical attention should be paid to informal, disobedient, eruptive, and revolutionary forms of popular self-determination and their complex genealogies. 2) Migration, understood not just as world-historical event but as world-historical force, or in Marx's words, real movement, provides an empirically and theoretically significant limit case for this alternative genealogy and form of self-determination. 3) The reality of migration forces us to ask how the alternative form of anti-imperial popular sovereignty envisioned in the final part of the book could emerge and develop in a world of capitalist markets and nation-states.
