Current political debates in many countries concern not just questions about the redistribution of resources but are also about the very nature of these countries, and about who belongs to them. Yet while these might seem like questions which have a social-ontological dimension to them, social ontology as a discipline has tended to focus on other types of social entities than nations or countries. This paper explores an anti-realism about such social entities coupled with a fictionalism about them (and possibly many other social entities as well), but where the reality of so-called sociomaterial assemblages is still recognized. On this approach, something like a politics of interpretation is an ever-present feature of social constructions like nations and countries. And while social fictionalism does not tell us which way to go on these political issues, it does help open them up for possible alternatives to dominant narratives.

In discussions about the possibly ideological character of ideal theory in liberal political philosophy, one worry concerns the underlying social ontology and how it can serve to make important structural injustices less visible. More recently, similar concerns have begun to appear within social ontology itself, with several authors arguing for a shift from more traditional models to different forms of nonideal or critical social ontology instead. This article develops a conception of ideal theory applicable to both social ontology and political theory, and it is then argued we should take seriously worries about ideal theory playing an ideological role. One consequence of how the ideal/nonideal distinction is understood here, however, is that the line between ideal and nonideal theory is not sharp. What we have is rather a continuum ranging from the strongly ideal to the strongly nonideal, and where the balance then needs to shift away from the former.

Although digital breast tomosynthesis has higher sensitivity than digital mammography and at least as high specificity, digital mammography remains the most common method for conducting mammographic screening. At the same time, mammography systems are now delivered "DBT-ready" and can be used for either digital mammography or digital breast tomosynthesis. In this paper, we ask whether it is ethically permissible to use such equipment for digital mammography, given its lower sensitivity. We argue it is not, and that clinics are ethically required to use their DBT-ready equipment to screen with digital breast tomosynthesis whenever this is practically possible. Our argument relies on a comparison between digital breast tomosynthesis and a hypothesized improvement in the image quality of digital mammography. CRITICAL RELEVANCE STATEMENT: Women may lose out on the benefits of screening with digital breast tomosynthesis when DBT-ready equipment is used to screen with digital mammography; we argue that this practice is ethically problematic. KEY POINTS: Digital breast tomosynthesis finds more cases of breast cancer than digital mammography. Mammography equipment can often be used to screen with both digital breast tomosynthesis and digital mammography. When they can, clinics are ethically required to use existing equipment to screen with digital breast tomosynthesis instead of digital mammography.

Abstract Many contemporary defenders of paternalist interventions favor a version of paternalism focused on how people often choose the wrong means given their own ends. This idea is typically justified by empirical results in psychology and behavioral economics. To the extent that paternalist interventions can then target the promotion of goals that can be said to be our own, such interventions are prima facie less problematic. One version of this argument starts from the idea that it is meaningful to ascribe to us preferences that we would have if were fully rational, informed and in control over our actions. It is argued here, however, that the very body of empirical results that means paternalists typically rely on also undermines this idea as a robust enough notion. A more modest approach to paternalist interventions, on which such policies are understood as enmeshed with welfare-state policies promoting certain primary goods, is then proposed instead.

Social ontologists commonly think that our ideas about social entities, and about other people also inhabiting the social realm, play an important role in making those entities into what they are. At the same time, we know that our ideas are often indeterminate in character, which presumably would mean that this indeterminacy should carry over to the social realm. And yet social indeterminacy is a neglected topic in social ontology. It is argued that this neglect can be traced to how a particular approach that favors ahistorical reconstructions in making sense of social entities has come to dominate social ontology. If we think beyond the parameters set by this approach, however, we can see that recognizing indeterminacy as a pervasive phenomenon in the social realm might open up new interpretative possibilities in relation to different social categories. This argument is at least partly in line with recent calls for a move towards nonideal social ontology.

Liberal political theory is often understood as being underpinned by an individualistic social ontology, and it is sometimes objected that this type of ontology makes it difficult to address injustices that involve social groups and informal forms of privilege. It is argued here that, to the extent that liberals do fail to properly address such structural injustices, the main problem can instead be understood to lie with a rules-centric understanding of institutions – one which is actually out of line with a proper ontological individualism. If institutions are instead understood as distributions of right and duties, held by individuals, it becomes much more straightforward to identify institutional privilege in terms of inequalities in those distributions. The relevant rights and duties can be explicated in terms of informal Hohfeldian incidents and it is argued that patterned distributions of such incidents can come to exist, and be maintained, through how we develop a largely intuitive sense of where our interpersonal boundaries run and form social expectations about which kinds of behaviour will typically receive pushback in some form.

In considering patriarchy as potentially institutional and as a characteristic also of contemporary Western societies, a fundamental issue concerns how to make sense of largely informal institutions to begin with. Traditional accounts of institutions have often focused on formalized ones. It is argued here, however, that the principal idea behind one commonly accepted conception of institutions can be developed in a way that better facilitates an explication of informal institutions. When applied to the phenomenon of patriarchy, such an approach can then also allow us to ontologically make sense of gray areas and hierarchies of authority, as well as the intersectionality of social positions.

Many normative theorists want to contribute to making the world a better place. In recent years, it has been suggested that to realise this ambition one must start with an adequate description of real-life practices. To determine what should be done, however, one must also fundamentally criticise existing moral beliefs. The method of reflective equilibrium offers a way of doing both. Yet, its practical usefulness has been doubted and it has been largely ignored in the recent practical turn of normative theorising. This paper offers a complementary methodology to the method of reflective equilibrium, referred to as Rawlsian constructivism, which brings forth its practical merits. With the support of Rawlsian constructivism, the method of reflective equilibrium becomes a tool for public reasoning about practical problems which aims to facilitate shared solutions. The process of reflective scrutiny is used, not in the search of moral truth, but rather to highlight what stands in the way of solutions to problems agents face in different domains of social life. The practical value lies in scrutinising reasons for action that are taken for granted, explicating new rationales for action and highlighting neglected points of agreement. The paper exemplifies this approach with a process of justifying individual obligations to combat climate change. Normative theorists who share the practical agenda have correctly noted the importance of bottom-up investigations of subject domains. This paper argues that the next step should be to utilise this version of the method of reflective equilibrium to explore the potential for morally progressive solutions to these problems.

Analytic social ontology has been dominated by approaches where institutions tend to come out paradigmatically as being relatively harmonious and mutually beneficial. This can however raise worries about such models potentially playing an ideological role in conceptualizing certain politically charged features of our societies as marginal phenomena or not even being institutional matters at all. This article seeks to develop a nonideal theory of institutions, which neither assumes that institutions are beneficial or oppressive, and where ideology is understood as a structuring and stabilizing phenomenon that helps maintain specific distributions of rights and duties by conferring perceived legitimacy onto them.

In recent years, several political theorists have argued that reasonable principles of justice are practice-dependent. In this paper it is suggested that we can distinguish between at least two main models for doing practice-dependent theorizing about justice, interpretivism and constructivism, and that they can be understood as based in two different conceptions of practices. It is then argued that the reliance on the notion of participants that characterizes interpretivism disables this approach from adequately addressing certain matters of justice and that a better way of developing the idea of practice-dependence can be found in a constructivism that starts from the Rawlsian idea of overlapping consensus, but which shifts the focus of that approach from societies to a more open-ended category of domains, and which understands the parties to a possible overlapping consensus as stakeholders in a certain set of interconnected practices.

This paper discusses the relation between medical ethics and general moral theory, the argument being that medical ethics is best seen as independent from general moral theory. According to this independence thesis, here explicated in terms of what is called a disunitarian stance, the very idea of applied ethics, which is often seen as underlying medical ethics (as well as many other more specific fields of ethics), is misguided. We should instead think of medical ethics as a domain-specific ethical inquiry among other domain-specific ethical inquiries. On this alternative kind of picture, such ethical inquiries should start with looking at the particularities of the domain under consideration and then proceed from there. Some possible consequences of this idea for medical ethics are then identified and discussed.

Some recent arguments for paternalist government interventions have been based in empirical results in psychology and behavioral economics that would seem to show that adult human beings are far removed from the ideals of rationality presupposed by much of philosophical and economic theory. In this paper it is argued that we need to move to a different conception of human decision-making competence than the one that lies behind that common line of philosophical and economic thinking, and which actually still lies in the background of some of these recent approaches to paternalist interventions. An alternative picture of human decision-making competence is outlined and four criteria for identifying areas where paternalist interventions have a basic moral and political legitimacy are then identified on the basis of this picture.

Journal of Political PhilosophyVolume 27, Issue 1 p. 48-66 Original Article Rawlsian Constructivism and the Assumption of Disunity† Johan Brännmark, Johan Brännmark Global Political Studies, Malmö UniversitySearch for more papers by this authorEric Brandstedt, Eric Brandstedt Philosophy, Lund UniversitySearch for more papers by this author Johan Brännmark, Johan Brännmark Global Political Studies, Malmö UniversitySearch for more papers by this authorEric Brandstedt, Eric Brandstedt Philosophy, Lund UniversitySearch for more papers by this author First published: 27 February 2018 https://doi.org/10.1111/jopp.12157Citations: 3 † Johan Brännmark's work on this article has been enabled by a position as Research Fellow granted by the Royal Swedish Academy of Letters, History, and Antiquities. Eric Brandstedt's work was supported by the Swedish Research Council under grant number 437-2014-6692. Many thanks to two anonymous referees, as well as to the editor, for the helpful comments they provided on an earlier version of the article. Read the full textAboutPDF ToolsRequest permissionExport citationAdd to favoritesTrack citation ShareShare Give accessShare full text accessShare full-text accessPlease review our Terms and Conditions of Use and check box below to share full-text version of article.I have read and accept the Wiley Online Library Terms and Conditions of UseShareable LinkUse the link below to share a full-text version of this article with your friends and colleagues. Learn more.Copy URL Share a linkShare onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditWechat Citing Literature Volume27, Issue1March 2019Pages 48-66 RelatedInformation

A significant part of contemporary social ontology has been focused on understanding forms of collective intentionality. It is suggested in this paper that the contested nature of some institutional matters makes this kind of approach problematic, and instead an alternative approach is developed, one that is oriented towards a micro-level analysis of the institutional constraints that we face in everyday life and which can make sense of how there can be institutional facts that are deeply contested and yet still real. The model is applied to two main examples, sexism and racism, and it is argued that on this approach it can make sense to understand both of them as institutions in our societies.

Some contemporary paternalists argue in favor of government interventions based on how experimental psychologists and behavioral economists have found that our behavior often diverges from what would be predicted by rational-choice models. In this article it is argued that these findings can, more specifically, be used to identify decisional trouble spots where paternalist interventions may be legitimate. It is further argued that since the epistemic legitimacy of government paternalism ultimately rests on centralized decision-making having a comparative advantage, it also depends on the possibility of such interventions being governed by an ideal of evidence-based policy-making. The article asks how stringently this requirement should be understood, and to what extent government can legitimately engage in what might be called experimental policy-making of a paternalistic character.

Human rights have increasingly been put forward as an important framework for bioethics. In this paper, it is argued that human rights offer a potentially fruitful approach to understanding the notion of Respect for Persons in bioethics. The idea that we are owed a certain kind of respect as persons is relatively common, but also quite often understood in terms of respecting people's autonomous choices. Such accounts do however risk being too narrow, reducing some human beings to a second-class moral status. This paper puts forward a political approach to our standing as persons and a strongly pluralistic account of human rights that lays the ground for a more broadly applicable conception of Respect for Persons. It is further argued that this model also provides an example of a more general approach to philosophical ethics, an approach which is here called taxonomical pluralism. When it comes to Respect for Persons specifically, this principle is developed in terms of five distinct core concerns (autonomy, dignity, integrity, privacy, and vulnerability).

Since G. E. Moore introduced his concept of organic unity there has been some discussion of how one should best understand this notion and whether there actually are any organic unities in the Moorean sense. Such discussions do however often put general questions about part-whole relations to the side and tend to focus on interpreting our intuitive responses to possible cases of organic unity. In this paper the focus lies on the part-whole relation in valuable wholes and it is suggested that we should distinguish between two kinds of wholes, collections and complex unities, where the latter can involve values that do not pass on their value to the greater whole in which they are included. Given this distinction we are then able to distinguish between two kinds of organic unity phenomena, the first involving a form of goodness that emerges on the level of the whole, the second involving a form of goodness that is embedded on the level of parts. In order to properly understand the latter form of goodness, there is also a need to distinguish final value from inherent value.