Ascriptions of Responsibility Given Commonplace Relations of Power

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Marina Oshana
Keyword(s):  
Moral Responsibility ◽  
Standard Approach ◽  
Responsible Agent ◽  
The Status ◽  
Relations Of Power ◽  
Responsible Party

In most contemporary analyses of responsibility, attention has been directed exclusively to the specific conditions that must be met by the presumed responsible agent in order to be able to account for her actions. More attention needs to be paid, however, to the dynamics between the presumed responsible party and those who judge her responsible. Specifically, the standard approach pays little attention to the status of the party positioned to hold another responsible relative to that of the party from whom an account is expected. This oversight is problematic, because, depending on the practices associated with holding a person responsible, individuals may be sanctioned in ways that are quite harsh. This chapter expands an analysis of moral responsibility as a form of accountability to attend to these dynamics of power. While ascriptions of responsibility remain expectations that an account be forthcoming from the actor, this is too myopic a picture.

Animal rights – Jewish perspectives

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ronen Pinkas
Keyword(s):  
Moral Responsibility ◽  
Animal Rights ◽  
Golden Rule ◽  
The Other ◽  
Jewish Tradition ◽  
Strict Adherence ◽  
The Status ◽  
The Face ◽  
Pain And Suffering ◽  
Paradigmatic Change

This article raises the question why is it that, despite Jewish tradition devoting much thought to the status and treatment of animals and showing strict adherence to the notion of preventing their pain and suffering, ethical attitudes to animals are not dealt with systematically in the writings of Jewish philosophers and have not received sufficient attention in the context of moral monotheism. What has prevented the expansion of the golden rule: »Love your fellow as yourself: I am the LORD« (Lev 19,18) and »That which is hateful to you do not do to another« (BT Shabbat 31a:6; JT Nedarim 30b:1) to animals? Why is it that the moral responsibility for the fellow-man, the neighbor, or the other, has been understood as referring only to a human companion? Does the demand for absolute moral responsibility spoken from the face of the other, which Emmanuel Levinas emphasized in his ethics, not radiate from the face of the non-human other as well? Levinas’s ethics explicitly negates the principle of reciprocity and moral symmetry: The ›I‹ is committed to the other, regardless of the other’s attitude towards him. Does the affinity to the eternal Thou which Martin Buber also discovers in plants and animals not require a paradigmatic change in the attitude towards animals?

scholarly journals The Pastness of the Past: Some Reflections on the Politics of Historization and the Crisis of Historicist Pastness

2021 ◽  
Vol 31 (4) ◽  
pp. 65-94
Keyword(s):  
Historical Context ◽  
Historical Consciousness ◽  
Professional Communities ◽  
Empirical Observation ◽  
The Past ◽  
The Status ◽  
Relational Concept ◽  
Relations Of Power ◽  
British Philosopher

Berber Bevernage’s thinking is centered on the concept of the pastness of the past, which is the basis of historicism. The need to rethink this concept has become evident because of the crisis in historical consciousness proclaimed by a number of theorists of history and because the boundaries between the past and the present became blurred when the presentist “broad present” (Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht’s term) became dominant. The author does not demand a complete break with historicism, which can be both repressive and emancipatory in nature. He does insist distinguishing the past from simple chronological precedence and on considering it strictly as a “relational concept,” i.e. as dependent on the perception of the present, which should not be reduced to simple empirical observation. The pastness of the past always depends on understanding the present as a coherent historical context; in other words, it presupposes the idea of the present’s contemporaneity to itself. However, Bevernage relies on the works of the British philosopher Peter Osborne to argue that it is possible to speak about the “fiction of the contemporary” which is not confirmed by any empirical experience. At the same time, that fiction is not a mere illusion because it fulfills a pragmatically motivated and politically significant performative function. Bevernage would apply the concept of the pastness of the past in exactly the same way. He sees the attribution of the sign of pastness to one phenomenon or another as something that can be disputed because it always attempts to justify the existing relations of power. Historians are not the only ones responsible for creating the status of pastness. The author allows that other professional communities, particularly artists and lawyers can also take part in attributing pastness. The sense of the past that prevails in a culture arises from a multitude of locally produced senses of the past.

Thinking about the Liar, Fast and Slow

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Robert Barnard ◽  
Joseph Ulatowski ◽  
Jonathan M. Weinberg ◽  
Bradley Armour-Garb
Keyword(s):  
Moral Responsibility ◽  
Free Will ◽  
Liar Paradox ◽  
The Past ◽  
Liar Sentence ◽  
The Status ◽  
The Liar ◽  
The Liar Paradox

In the past, experimental philosophers have explored the psychological underpinning of a number of notions in philosophy, including free will, moral responsibility, and more. But prior to this chapter, although a number of philosophers have speculated on how ordinary folks might, or should, think about the liar paradox, no one had systematically explored the psychological underpinnings of the Liar itself. The authors take on this task. In particular, the chapter investigates the status of a liar sentence, L = ‘Sentence L is false’. The thesis, arrived at by interpreting the data the authors have accrued, is that reflective thinkers (some of whom possess a modicum of philosophical expertise) judge L to be neither true nor false (as opposed to false or true), and the authors see this as some evidence for the claim that L is neither true nor false.

How minds and selves are made

2005 ◽  
Vol 6 (1) ◽  
pp. 21-34
Author(s):  
Martin Kusch
Keyword(s):  
Conceptual Clarification ◽  
Responsible Agent ◽  
Freedom Of The Will ◽  
The Status ◽  
The Will ◽  
Made In

This paper aims at a conceptual clarification of some of the mechanisms that are involved when human selves are made in interactions with each other. Four such broad mechanisms are distinguished: socialisation, classification of self and others, the deference-emotion system, and the attribution and manipulation of the status of the responsible agent. The first two mechanisms are modelled with simple mechanical machines like clocks and signalling devices. Regarding the status of the responsible agent, the paper offers a proposal as to why we have conflicting intuitions about freedom of the will.

scholarly journals The position of mayor within local authority relations in Hungary and Poland in a comparative perspective

2021 ◽  
pp. 71-88
Author(s):  
Lucyna Rajca
Keyword(s):  
Local Authority ◽  
Comparative Method ◽  
Local Authorities ◽  
Local Leadership ◽  
Historical Method ◽  
Factors Influencing ◽  
The Status ◽  
Relations Of Power ◽  
Executive Body

The study aims to compare the position of Hungarian and Polish mayors in horizontal relations of power, considering the changes taking place in this area over the last few years. The article presents the institutional and legal conditions of local leadership in Hungary and Poland, as well as the role of councils with regard to the executive body. It also describes the systems of election to legislative bodies, which is one of the factors influencing the status of councils and relations within a local authority. The results of the analyses show that there are differences in the positions of Hungarian and Polish mayors and that the relations within local authorities in both countries have been affected by convergent and divergent trends. The study uses the comparative method and an institutional-legal approach, as well as the historical method.

scholarly journals Pedagogika moralna Immanuela Kanta jako wyraz wychowania do odpowiedzialności

2019 ◽  
pp. 87-100
Author(s):  
Anna Nowicka
Keyword(s):  
Moral Responsibility ◽  
Moral Education ◽  
A Priori ◽  
Categorical Imperative ◽  
Moral Principles ◽  
The Status ◽  
Responsible Attitude ◽  
Kant's Ethics

The author discusses I. Kant’s pedagogical views and beliefs related to moral education. In particular, the author attempts to prove the thesis that, for Kant, all education and proper upbringing was ultimately linked with moral education and that moral education, in turn, was just education to responsibility. After a presentation of the main assumptions of Immanuel Kant’s ethics, the author proceeds to discuss the status of pedagogy within its framework as a science that aims at educating people and forms attitudes that were understood to involve meeting of one’s obligations expressed in the formula of the categorical imperative, and precisely based on making one to the influence of a priori moral principles and on practicing skills of making everyday use of them in different life situations. The author characterizes notions that are related in Kant’s philosophy to the problems of prospective and positive moral responsibility, and discusses how this philosophy responds to the problem of feasibility and ways of developing a responsible attitude in man. Further on, the author discusses in detail Kant’s pedagogy, i.e. attempts to discover the connective concepts necessary to understand how Kant perceived the educational reality within the context of responsibility, attempts to answer what its goal and essence are and what measures are to be taken to successfully achieve the goal. The considerations on the notion of responsibility and pedagogy in Kant’s thought are summarized in a brief presentation of its essential significance for the pedagogy of morality.

The Ethics and Law of Omissions

2017 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Moral Responsibility ◽  
Legal Liability ◽  
Legal Aspects ◽  
The Self ◽  
Sense Of Control ◽  
Evaluative Judgment ◽  
The Status ◽  
The Law

This volume explores the moral and legal aspects of omissions, with a view to understanding the principles that govern moral responsibility and legal liability for omissive conduct. Omissions are puzzling because, first, they appear to be nonentities, and, second, it appears paradoxical that one could be responsible or liable for something that, in some sense, doesn’t exist and that one might not even be aware of at the time it occurs. Many of this book’s contributors try to make sense of the possibility of moral responsibility for omissions, including those that occur unwittingly. The disagreements among them concern the grounds of moral responsibility in these cases: the constellation of states and traits that constitute the self, or the quality of one’s will, or exercises of evaluative judgment, or the ability and opportunity to avoid the omission, or the tracing back to a time when one had the witting ability to take steps to avoid future omission. Some contributors consider whether omissions need to be under one’s control if one is to be morally responsible for them, as well as which sense of “control” is relevant, if it is, to the question of moral responsibility. Yet others consider whether it is possible for an agent to be morally responsible for an omission that she could not have avoided. On the legal side, the volume also considers various issues concerning the status of omissions in the law.

Constituent power and people-as-the-governed: About the ‘invisible’ people of political and legal theory

2015 ◽  
Vol 4 (2) ◽  
pp. 137-156 ◽  
Author(s):  
GENEVIÈVE NOOTENS
Keyword(s):  
Legal Theory ◽  
The State ◽  
Popular Sovereignty ◽  
Modern Concept ◽  
Constituent Power ◽  
The Core ◽  
The People ◽  
The Status ◽  
State Relations ◽  
Relations Of Power

AbstractThe core promise of the modern concept of constituent power is to make the people-as-the-governed active participants in the shaping and ruling of political regimes. Its development was related to the consolidation of the modern state. Current circumstances, though, raise the issue of the possibility of a non-state based concept of constituent power, and of appropriate constituencies. The article argues that dominant views have made the people-as-the-governed capacity to act dependent upon state sovereignty, whereas the latter actually was informed by theses antithetical to popular sovereignty. In order to show how a non-state based concept of constituent power may be articulated, the article builds on a critique of Martin Loughlin’s attempt to capture the structure of beliefs that frames the idea of the state and the function of constituent power within that structure. The first part of the article focuses on the main elements of such a theory in order to situate its basic assumptions about constituent power. The second discusses the issues raised by such a conception, amongst other things as to the status granted to the structure of beliefs that frames the idea of the modern polity in Loughlin’s perspective; this discussion opens the way to an alternative conception of constituent power, one that stresses that the core fact of the political is that people are always already embedded in relations of power that are not restricted to the state, relations in the course of which they strive to achieve their civic freedom. Political power is not necessarily made public until the people-as-the-governed, in challenging the boundaries of the polity, claim it.

scholarly journals Moral Luck and the Question of Responsibility

2015 ◽  
Vol 5 (2) ◽  
pp. 37-49
Author(s):  
Gargi Goswami
Keyword(s):  
Moral Responsibility ◽  
Moral Luck ◽  
Moral Judgments ◽  
The Other ◽  
Moral Problem ◽  
Thomas Nagel ◽  
Standard Practice ◽  
Responsible Agent ◽  
Apparent Conflict ◽  
Proper Theory

The problem of moral luck is a genuine moral problem faced by all of us where the conflict arises on how and upon whom one should place the burden of moral responsibility when the situation is beyond one‟s control. On one hand, people commonly think that a person cannot be justly praised or blamed for his actions unless he controls them. On the other hand, ordinary moral judgments of persons routinely vary based on the actual consequences caused by the person, even when partly or wholly beyond his control. The problem lies in the apparent conflict between the idea that a morally responsible agent must control his actions and the standard practice of blaming people more simply for causing worse results even when the factors are beyond his control. My paper will focus on the various types of moral luck as explained by Thomas Nagel and analyze that the seemingly hopeless situations in the various cases of moral luck can be satisfactorily resolved by a proper theory of moral responsibility.

The study of interfacial reactions of nickel thin films on GaAs

1983 ◽  
Vol 41 ◽  
pp. 156-157
Author(s):  
L.J. Chen ◽  
Y.F. Hsieh
Keyword(s):  
Thin Films ◽  
Integrated Circuits ◽  
Interfacial Reactions ◽  
Metal Contacts ◽  
Nickel Thin Films ◽  
Thin Foils ◽  
The Status ◽  
Si Doped ◽  
Electron Microscopes

One measure of the maturity of a device technology is the ease and reliability of applying contact metallurgy. Compared to metal contact of silicon, the status of GaAs metallization is still at its primitive stage. With the advent of GaAs MESFET and integrated circuits, very stringent requirements were placed on their metal contacts. During the past few years, extensive researches have been conducted in the area of Au-Ge-Ni in order to lower contact resistances and improve uniformity. In this paper, we report the results of TEM study of interfacial reactions between Ni and GaAs as part of the attempt to understand the role of nickel in Au-Ge-Ni contact of GaAs.N-type, Si-doped, (001) oriented GaAs wafers, 15 mil in thickness, were grown by gradient-freeze method. Nickel thin films, 300Å in thickness, were e-gun deposited on GaAs wafers. The samples were then annealed in dry N2 in a 3-zone diffusion furnace at temperatures 200°C - 600°C for 5-180 minutes. Thin foils for TEM examinations were prepared by chemical polishing from the GaA.s side. TEM investigations were performed with JE0L- 100B and JE0L-200CX electron microscopes.

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