Strokes of Luck

Author(s):  
Gerald Lang

Strokes of Luck offers a large-scale treatment of the role of luck in our judgements about blameworthiness and responsibility, in moral philosophy, and in principles of distributive justice, in political philosophy. It takes an ‘anti-anti-luckist’ stance on these matters, and is opposed to the influential ‘anti-luckist’ views which hold that judgements of blameworthiness, or distributive relations, should be adjusted to annul or neutralize differential luck. It provides a new reading of Bernard Williams’s famous essay ‘Moral Luck’ which emphasizes the dissimilarity of Williams’s aims from the aims of Thomas Nagel and his intellectual descendants. It contends that luck egalitarianism is a structurally flawed programme, and it argues for a revised understanding of John Rawls’s justice as fairness that interprets Rawls’s hostility to factors that are ‘arbitrary from a moral point of view’ in a novel way stationed more closely to his contractarian apparatus, and less closely to luck egalitarian concerns.

1993 ◽  
Vol 35 ◽  
pp. 95-106
Author(s):  
Anthony Quinton

My title, as it stands, is not very informative. The two terms that occur in it are so commonly conjoined, in the philosophical world, at any rate, that it can be no surprise to find them together. My aim, however, is to go some way, at least, towards disconnecting them. My thesis is, to put it briefly, that it is a mistake to see political philosophy as a subordinate part of moral philosophy and thus to suppose that the characteristic problems of the former are of the same kind as those of the latter. More concretely, the problems of politics itself are not generally or primarily, let alone exclusively, moral in nature. We all know that political problems are not, to any great extent, approached by those involved with them, from a moral point of view. I shall argue that it is not reasonable that they should be. But the philosophical habit of running the two things together encourages a kind of moral absolutism in political thinking, and from time to time in political practice, which has bad results, not necessarily morally bad, just bad.


Author(s):  
Angela Dranishnikova

In the article, the author reflects the existing problems of the fight against corruption in the Russian Federation. He focuses on the opacity of the work of state bodies, leading to an increase in bribery and corruption. The topic we have chosen is socially exciting in our days, since its significance is growing on a large scale at all levels of the investigated aspect of our modern life. Democratic institutions are being jeopardized, the difference in the position of social strata of society in society’s access to material goods is growing, and the state of society is suffering from the moral point of view, citizens are losing confidence in the government, and in the top officials of the state.


Author(s):  
Daniel Halliday

This chapter reviews and criticizes varieties of the luck egalitarian conception of justice. It begins with the ‘naïve’ distinction between choice and circumstance, on which inequalities are permissible insofar as they depend on the former rather than the latter. The bulk of the chapter discusses more sophisticated versions of luck egalitarianism, which either supplement the naïve view with some countervailing principle (e.g. by appeal to personal prerogatives) or by constraining its scope (e.g. by focusing on the mediating effects of institutions). Later parts of the chapter evaluate other contemporary oppositions to inherited wealth grounded in interpretations of reciprocity and a concern about the role of inheritance in enabling freeriding. The chapter ends with a discussion of Ronald Dworkin’s views, which bear a formal resemblance to the position defended in the following two chapters.


2017 ◽  
Vol 20 (30) ◽  
pp. 17-37
Author(s):  
Santiago Álvarez García

El presente artículo muestra cómo la crítica humeana a los fundamentos del racionalismo moral y a sus consecuencias en el terreno de las ideas educativas propició un cambio significativo en la comprensión de los objetivos de la educación moral que pasaron de buscar el perfeccionamiento de la agencia, a perseguir la perfección y el refinamiento de las capacidades del individuo como espectador y evaluador moral imparcial. Esta trasformación de la finalidad y del currículo de la educación moral será la solución que Hume ofrezca a los problemas de parcialidad derivados de la historicidad y la caducidad del general point of view como criterio último para el juicio moral. La exposición constante del educando a todas las formas históricas de la belleza, junto con la poesía, la literatura, el estudio de la historia y la filosofía, constituirán para Hume la base de esta revolución pedagógica.


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Enrico Moiso ◽  
Paolo Provero

Alteration of metabolic pathways in cancer has been investigated for many years, beginning way before the discovery of the role of oncogenes and tumor suppressors, and the last few years have witnessed a renewed interest in this topic. Large-scale molecular and clinical data on tens of thousands of samples allow us today to tackle the problem from a general point of view. Here we show that trancriptomic profiles of tumors can be exploited to define metabolic cancer subtypes, that can be systematically investigated for association with other molecular and clinical data. We find thousands of significant associations between metabolic subtypes and molecular features such as somatic mutations, structural variants, epigenetic modifications, protein abundance and activation; and with clinical/phenotypic data including survival probability, tumor grade, and histological types. Our work provides a methodological framework and a rich database of statistical associations, accessible from https://metaminer.unito.it, that will contribute to the understanding of the role of metabolic alterations in cancer and to the development of precision therapeutic strategies.


Author(s):  
Serap Serin Karacaer

Activities, which include events that are not all intangible, include large-scale service components, and hence, their marketing includes service marketing. From this point of view, it is possible to state that it is very difficult to market activities that the participants cannot take home and consume physically. In this context, it is very important that the event marketing activities convey the feeling to the target audience that they will have fun and be entertained. Therefore, social media is one of the most important tools used in the effective transfer of the organization to the target audience within the scope of event marketing activities. As the most effective current communication and interaction tool, social media has become the most important tool for event marketers who are trying to appeal to large audiences and promote a certain destination, product, or service.


2016 ◽  
Vol 12 (4) ◽  
pp. 867-884 ◽  
Author(s):  
RICARDO F. CRESPO

AbstractThis paper introduces Aristotle's conception of agency, habits and institutions as a way of contributing to some current discussions about the definition, nature and theory of institutions. Aristotle developed a theory of human action, where we can find a place for ‘agency’. His views on habits are linked to his theory of virtue and art (skill). Concerning institutions, Aristotle provides a sound social and political philosophy that encompasses the nature and role of institutions. The paper will subsequently present Aristotle's ideas on these three notions – agency, habits and institutions – and will finally establish which of the current accounts of institutions involved in the discussion sparked by Hindriks and Guala's recent paper (2005a) he would support. Given that some realities tackled in the paper are nowadays radically different from Aristotle's times, the paper tries to keep an ‘Aristotelian-minded’ point of view – that is, analysing current topics based on Aristotelian concepts.


1990 ◽  
Vol 28 ◽  
pp. 223-237
Author(s):  
Peter Winch

So is this it: I must recognize certain authorities in order to make judgments at all? (OC, 493)I want in this paper to consider Wittgenstein's great posthumous work On Certainty in a different perspective from the usual: from the point of view of certain deep questions in political philosophy. These questions concern the nature of the state's authority and the citizen/s obligation to it; the notion of legitimacy and the role of consent in this context. Such issues have many dimensions; but they arise in part out of difficulties in reconciling the application of such concepts with our understanding of human rationality, especially practical rationality. I think it has been, and remains, characteristic of the main tradition of discussion of such issues to leave certain important questions about the nature of practical rationality unasked. I believe that these questions are asked, though in a different context, in Wittgenstein's On Certainty.


Hypatia ◽  
1989 ◽  
Vol 4 (2) ◽  
pp. 87-103 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sara T. Fry

The development of nursing ethics as a field of inquiry has largely relied on theories of medical ethics that use autonomy, beneficence, and/or justice as foundational ethical principles. Such theories espouse a masculine approach to moral decision “making and ethical analysis. This paper challenges the presumption of medical ethics and its associated system of moral justification as an appropriate model for nursing ethics. It argues that the value foundations of nursing ethics are located within the existential phenomenon of human caring within the nurse/patient relationship instead of in models of patient good or rights-based notions of autonomy as articulated in prominent theories of medical ethics. Models of caring are analyzed and a moral-point-of-view (MPV) theory with caring as a fundamental value is proposed for the development of a theory of nursing ethics. This type of theory is supportive to feminist medical ethics because it focuses on the subscription to, and not merely the acceptance of, a particular view of morality.


2019 ◽  
Vol 86 (3) ◽  
pp. 69-79
Author(s):  
В. М. Давидюк

The legislative regulation of using confidants in Ukraine, as well as the moral aspects of confidential cooperation between individuals and law enforcement agencies have been analyzed. Some reasons that contributed to the regulation of confidential cooperation at the legislative level have been revealed in the historical retrospective; the correlation of the terms of “assistance” and “cooperation” used in the operative and search legislation has been demonstrated. It has been substantiated that in the course of studying the activities of special forces of operative and search activity it is advisable to use a narrower term of “cooperation”, which reflects the specifics of the activity of such forces. The norms of not secret normative legal acts have been outlined, which enshrined the conceptual bases of work with confidants. The emphasis has been made on the need to regulate not only the rights of the confidants, but also their obligations. A comparative analysis of the society’s attitude to confidential cooperation in different countries has been conducted. The moral and ethical grounds for involving persons into confidential cooperation have been studied. The author has outlined the essential role of the ideological component in the work of the state apparatus, which influences the attitude of society to confidential cooperation. The interdependence of moral and legal aspects of confidential cooperation has been proved. It has been established that the involvement of persons, from a moral point of view, into confidential cooperation is determined by: the voluntary nature of such involvement; public duty; perception of appropriate cooperation as the assistance to the community for its proper functioning; compulsory use of confidants for the prevention and detection of latent crimes; counteracting aggressive protection of criminal interests; guaranteeing the public interests by saving the costs for law enforcement function, since the use of confidants is more financially effective than attracting additional law enforcement forces and means.


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