This article examines the ethical significance of suffering through Theodor W. Adorno’s critical theory, focusing on his concept of the somatic addendum, an embodied moral impulse that resists suffering and fosters solidarity. Drawing on Adorno’s post-Auschwitz moral philosophy and his notion of a “new categorical imperative,” the paper develops a non-instrumental conception of moral response emerging within a dialectic of mimetic relations. It contends that ethical attention to suffering requires not only rational reflection but also embodied receptivity to others’ pain, a responsiveness often suppressed by the normative coldness of contemporary social orders. Drawing on Judith Butler’s account of normative framing, the article shows how embodied responsiveness is socially conditioned in advance, structured by frames that determine whose suffering is recognisable and grievable. In light of this framing, I argue that Adorno’s concept of mimesis, understood as a historically mediated and socially imbricated mode of relation, explains how such responsiveness can both be organised into domination and, at moments, exceed the frames that seek to contain it. The result is a conception of solidarity as a mimetically structured, affectively charged, and critically reflective relation to suffering that resists both formal moral rationalism and the political capture of embodied response.
Kant published no more than a couple of pages on cosmopolitan right. Some Kant scholars argue that the treatment of cosmopolitan right is incomplete and that Kant omitted to infer cosmopolitan right from the innate right to the surface of the Earth, the right he mentions in connection with cosmopolitan right. In this article, I question this omission thesis. A more charitable reading, I argue, is that cosmopolitan right is the formulation in public right of the private right to the surface of the Earth. In this reading the two rights are equivalent. An inference is not required and hence not omitted by Kant. In the second part of the article, I specify this equivalence reading against the background of the persistent disagreement in the literature about the scope of cosmopolitan right.
This paper argues for a much modified version of Martin Buber’s relational ethics, drawing on his philosophical anthropology as well as Alfred Schütz’s phenomenology of social relations. I recast Buber’s famous I-Thou, I-It dichotomy as a threefold distinction between an I-Thou, an I-You, and an I-It based on three phenomenological primitives: other-object relation, time-duration, and space-proximity. This reformulation addresses several problems plaguing Buber’s dialogical ethics, including mystical rhetoric and an overdrawn distinction between I-Thou and I-It with an attending narrowing of ethical life. The proposed framework is a relational phenomenology that speaks to the full range of our ethical experience, puts a Buberian ethics on more secure foundations, offers an alternative phenomenology of relations to that of Levinas, and complements other approaches including the second person and the ethics of care.
An environmental organization recently sued Shell, demanding that it reduce CO₂ emissions to prevent climate harm. Shell defended itself by claiming that reducing its emissions would make no difference, since competitors would step in to satisfy consumer demand. This paper challenges such “corporate switching defenses.” Drawing on a distinction between switching cases—where an agent merely redirects harm—and preemption cases—where an agent causes harm despite the presence of backups—we argue that cases like Shell’s are not genuine switching cases but are better understood as preemption cases. Even if competitors would step in, Shell’s continued operations make climate harms more secure: they move the world further from a situation where climate harm is averted or lessened. We introduce the notion of security to explain this difference and show why it matters for assigning responsibility. This account strengthens the rationale for imposing a reduction obligation on Shell even when global emissions remain unchanged. More broadly, switching defenses arise in other contexts—for example, garment firms claiming that better labor standards will only lead others to undercut them. The same reasoning applies in such cases, offering a principled basis for rejecting switching defenses.
Reputational damage from others’ speech can profoundly shape what we can do in the world, influencing whether our words receive uptake, the opportunities available to us, and whether we can credibly contest the characterisations made of us. Yet debates about reputational rights typically frame reputation and free speech as competing individual interests, asking when reputational harm crosses a threshold sufficient to justify restricting speech. Drawing on adjacent literatures including hate speech, defamation, privacy, and epistemic injustice, such accounts also tend to treat reputation as effectively synonymous with social standing. This paper challenges both moves. First, drawing on Gloria Origgi’s social-interactionist account, I argue that reputation is conceptually distinct from standing and should be understood as the speech about us that circulates within our communities, which profoundly shapes standing without being identical to it. I then extend this view to defend a modified dignity-based conception of reputation (MDCR) that attends to both the external dimension of reputational damage (one’s standing among others) and the internal dimension (how individuals experience their perception of themselves). Reputational wrongs, on this view, are defined not by falsehood, disesteem, or identity-based hostility, but by the imposition of a social identity over which the individual has limited influence, constraining their capacity for self-authorship. Drawing on theories of relational autonomy, I then argue against the view that reputation and free speech are competing interests. Rather, they are co-constitutive relational goods, such that protecting either requires attending to the social and material conditions that sustain both.
This paper investigates whether a relational egalitarian defense of democracy at the state level can ground a parallel case argument for workplace democracy. I argue that it can in two ways. First, I evaluate the arguments of a prominent relational egalitarian (Niko Kolodny) who believes it cannot and show that his arguments are mistaken in ways that lead him to underestimate the strength of the parallel case. Second, I develop a positive model of the connection between relational equality and democracy – the proportionality model – that clearly and strongly supports the case for democracy at the state and workplace levels.
Many realist political theorists have sought to stress the central role of institutions in securing order, stability, and legitimacy. Although explicit on the functions of institutions and their influence on the justice of societies, the realist position is theoretically limited with respect to the nature of the social structures at the core of its argument. Yet any normative account of an institutional setup Δ depends, at least in part, on Δ’s make-up, efficacy, and aims. This article begins to address this deficiency by making space for the idea that attention to how institutions act shows a) that they can hardly be distanced from persons or ends; b) that an action-centred account of institutions extends and refines existing realist agendas; and c) that emphasising their causal efficacy reorients principles of institutional design. The upshot is twofold: (i) bringing social ontology into political theory to clarify the actional structure of institutions (as realists claim institutions matter but lack the ontology to explain how they act); (ii) persuade methods-oriented theorists (1st order) and design-engaged theorists (2nd order) to be more perceptive to causal analysis.
What does it mean to be complicit, particularly in diffuse collective wrongs like environmental damage or structural racism, and what responsibilities are entailed by complicity? Moral philosophers have typically understood complicity to consist in some degree of inherited culpability, arising from knowing contributions to wrongs inflicted by others; some trace complicity to individuals’ intentions to join in wrongful collective activity. But these theories fail to explain many plausible cases of complicity, particularly in diffuse wrongs and structural injustices. If we are going to use this concept fruitfully across a range of moral contexts, then we need to understand complicity differently. This article demonstrates that four unnecessary assumptions render existing theories of complicity unable to explain the range of cases they ought to, focusing particularly on complicity in structural injustice. I motivate a unified reconceptualization that can support efforts to identify and respond to complicity across contexts. The Participation View (PV) asserts that complicity is participation in collectively perpetrated wrongs, and that complicity does not entail culpability, although one is certainly answerable for it.
Are we as members of a group obliged to remember the past? Are there certain historical events that we as members of a group must not forget? These questions are particularly pertinent for the conception of collective memory. I will argue that we must distinguish between the duty to remember and memory work. The distinction plays a role as to prevent misuses of collective memory. Avishai Margalit’s idea that we are obliged to remember certain historical events and people quickly leads to memory-conservatism and traditionalism, which as a paradigm for collective memory is problematic. Conversely, if we delink the embedded valorization and the inherent affectivity tied to cultural heritage from the process of collective remembering, we end up with an instrumental view of the ethical role of memory, as can be found in Jonathan Lear’s idea of collective mourning. In the attempt to find a middle ground between these two positions, I consider Bernard Williams’s discussion of valuing what is simply important with regards to the transmission of values for future generations. Williams’ idea offers a constructive antidote to both traditionalism and instrumentalism with regards to collective memory.
Functionalist theories of territorial legitimacy have long been criticized for their inability to explain why states that perform morally imperative functions may still lack legitimacy in relation to unilaterally annexed territories. While currently popular solutions to this problem tend to rely on some notion of collective self-determination to explain the distinctive wrongness of unilateral annexations, this article argues that annexing states’ illegitimacy can alternatively be grounded in the principle of ex injuria jus non oritur, which identifies states’ unjust ascent to dominance as a distinct injustice. Thus understood, I suggest that the problematic feature of functionalism is best interpreted as a problem about rectifying historical injustices. I argue that adequate respect for the victimhood of those injured by historical injustices demands a rectificatory scheme that, under certain circumstances, permits individual holdouts against the majority’spreference for rectifying the injustices committed in the course of annexation.
Curiosity seems, in principle, like a morally good motivation to travel—like a motivation conducive to good travel. However, being motivated by curiosity can cause or fail to prevent different forms of harm to local populations. Standard accounts of curiosity do not adequately address these risks. I look instead at the role of feminist curiosity, which is a reframed form of curiosity as a relational stance that resists instrumentalization, foregrounds context, and embraces flexibility and uncertainty. Feminist curiosity is then a good motivation to travel, but it is not sufficient for good travel, given that the requirements of feminist curiosity may interact with other morally relevant considerations.
The badness of death is often understood in counterfactual terms: a person’s death is bad for her to the extent that it deprives her of the benefits of life, which she otherwise would have enjoyed. However, things that are bad in this sense do not always seem to be misfortunes or worthy of negative emotional responses. Kaila Draper (1999) raises a challenge for proponents of this counterfactual understanding of badness: given that both death and, say, not winning the lottery are bad in the same way, explain why only the former is a misfortune. The first aim of this paper is to argue, despite the ingenuity of suggested solutions, that the solutions fail. Second, I show that the discussion of death’s misfortune teaches us valuable lessons about the concept of harm: parallel to Draper’s challenge, a new challenge targets the prominent Counterfactual Comparative Account of Harm (CCA).
In his landmark essay, “Freedom and Resentment,” P.F. Strawson articulated a certain kind of objection to libertarian theories of moral responsibility. In Strawson’s words, the libertarian seeks to provide an “external justification” of our practices of moral responsibility—something Strawson claims cannot be provided, but more importantly, something that he claims is simply not needed. “Inside the general structure or web of [reactive] attitudes,” Strawson explains, “there is endless room for modification, redirection, criticism, and justification.” But, he continues, “questions of justification are internal to the structure…. The existence of the general framework of attitudes itself is something we are given with the fact of human society. As a whole, it neither calls for, nor permits, an external ‘rational’ justification.” Various subsequent authors have developed this theme to provide a certain kind of argument for compatibilism. One such author—Gary Watson—has called the argument in question the “normative framework” argument. And David Beglin has built on similar themes to articulate the sense in which, for the “Strawsonian”, the facts about moral responsibility depend on the practice of moral responsibility. The purpose of this paper is to examine these Strawsonian themes at least somewhat more closely. As I aim to bring out, it is unclear that the libertarian does or must provide any such “external justification” at all. This paper is most fundamentally a reply to this persistent Strawsonian theme.
The cluelessness argument implies that consequentialists are unable to know the moral status of any of their actions. Even trivial actions could be identity-affecting and are thus vulnerable to massive causal ramification. For such actions, we cannot – according to the proponent of the argument – even estimate the value of consequences; we are clueless. In this paper, I discuss two under-explored responses. First, it is open for consequentialists to simply accept widespread ignorance, and contend that this does not detract from the truth of the theory. Second, the argument does not affect “closed scenarios”: cases described in such a way to make massive causal ramification impossible. If such cases are possible, then they provide instances where consequentialists can make moral evaluations. While I do not think many will be satisfied with these responses, our dissatisfaction may be informative about what we demand from a moral theory.
In the academic debate on gender categorization in elite sport, three main positions are typically distinguished: Anatomists, Identifiers, and Abolitionists. In brief, Anatomists argue that gender categories in professional sport are necessary and should be based on sex assigned at birth. Identifiers maintain that categorization should follow an athlete’s self-identified gender. Abolitionists, by contrast, advocate for eliminating gender divisions in sport altogether. In this paper, the authors introduce a fourth position: the Constructivist. They argue that gender categories in elite sport should be preserved, but grounded in an understanding of gender as a social kind. This position is based on the conviction that fairness is a fundamental value in sport and that, at least in our society, an athlete’s social gender significantly influences their opportunities in competition. The main aim of the paper is to present and defend an argument for the superiority of the Constructivist approach over competing conceptions, namely the Unfair Psychological Advantage argument. This argument holds that the Constructivist account provides the best available proxy for identifying unfair psychological advantages that men may hold over women.
A long-standing and passionate divide among sports fans concerns whether the team’s success or failure can justifiably impact the fan’s loyalty. May one be a fair-weather fan or even a foul-weather fan, or one must be a more loyal, “all-weather” fan who will root for the team regardless of whether it experiences success or failure? Recent arguments contend that fair- and foul-weather fandom are virtuous in certain ways that all-weather fandom is not. This article defends the all-weather fan along two dimensions. First, it argues that the virtues of the fair- and foul-weather fan, including moral resistance, humility, and resilience, are also available to the all-weather fan. Second, all-weather fandom is shown to enjoy special virtues. In addition to already established virtues such as loyalty, this article articulates a previously unexplored virtue of the all-weather fan: by aligning the fan’s first-order allegiance to the team with a second-order commitment to the first-order allegiance itself, the all-weather fan’s vulnerabilities are vertically integrated. In this way, all-weather fandom looks much like the fullest forms of friendship and love.
In Chapter 5 of Utilitarianism, John Stuart Mill contends that the roots of justice lie in two key elements: the belief that harm has been done to an individual and the desire to punish the wrongdoer. This second impulse arises from two emotional capacities shared with many nonhuman animals: the desire to defend oneself against aggression and sympathy, what we now commonly refer to as "empathy." In this paper, I take up the challenge of providing a more detailed account of Mill's remarks by appealing to the philosophical literature on moral emotions and animal morality. I concentrate on two capacities possessed by several mammalian and avian species: recognition of intentional action in others and empathy. More precisely, I argue that (1) many animals can recognize when individuals intentionally cause suffering to another and that (2) their empathy could track the badness of others' suffering. These two capacities enable them to (3) recognize the wrong-making features of intentionally causing suffering. To defend this thesis, I first summarize Mill's views on the origins of justice (Sect. 1) I expand on these three elements (Sects. 2-4), respond to two possible objections or reservations (Sect. 5) and conclude with some remarks on how sympathy could give rise to the desire to punish wrongdoers (Sect. 6).
This paper focuses on how photographs that depict violence and suffering (PVS) may morally impact us, and what we should do with them in the present age. Specifically, through a critical discussion of the works of Susan Sontag, I argue that we have two imperfect duties towards PVS. Firstly, I argue that we have a duty to keep our exposure to PVS to a moderate amount. I echo the early Sontag’s worry that overexposure to PVS may desensitize the viewers, but I also argue, by analogy to Nussbaum’s account of moral novels, for Sontag’s later view that some familiarity with PVS is important for our moral development. Consequently, I maintain that we have an imperfect duty to make ourselves familiar with some PVS, but we also ought to prevent ourselves from being overexposed to PVS. Secondly, I discuss Sontag’s skepticism of the ethical capacity of PVS to change our moral beliefs. I first argue in support of Sontag’s claim that photographs lack any inherent moral meaning. I then claim, in partial agreement with a recent objection to Sontag by Susie Linfield, that if photographs have no inherent moral meaning, then it is plausible to claim that the viewers have a moral duty to actively engage with PVS and construct their moral meaning. Pace Linfield, however, I argue that this duty can only be an imperfect duty, as such a perfect duty is too demanding.
The value of human life has a central importance in bioethics and in the Thomistic natural law tradition, but its meaning is often ambiguous. It can refer to the value of human life itself, the value of a person’s life, or the value of the person whose life it is. These are different kinds of value, but they are often overlooked or conflated in the literature. This article aims to clarify and develop natural law ethics by analyzing two goods associated with the value of life: well-being and dignity. It critiques the mainstream welfarist axiology that makes well-being the sole fundamental good, and it proposes an alternative axiology consisting of two intrinsic goods: well-being and dignity. It argues that this dual value theory is a better account of the value of life, the value of persons, the moral equality of human beings, and the metaphysics of goodness.
