scholarly journals The Value of Technological Idealisations to Future Ethical Thinking

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
◽  
Adam Kelly
Keyword(s):  
Political Theory ◽  
Technological Development ◽  
Thought Experiments ◽  
Human Enhancement ◽  
Ideal Theory ◽  
Related Field ◽  
Political Reality ◽  
Ethical Debate ◽  
Political Conditions ◽  
Theoretical Issues

<p>This thesis focuses on what I have called “technological idealisations”, and how they are valuable to many current and future ethical debates. Technological idealisations refer to a methodology of using technology thought experiments to contribute to ethical debates. I do not claim this to be a new idea, and in fact will go on to give many examples of technological idealisation that already exist in the philosophical literature. The term describes the purposeful effort to collate these examples into a specific methodological framework; one which gives a particular kind of evidence which can ignore concerns of practicality and critically focus on the theoretical issues in a given debate.  In order to explore this idea I will first be looking at past, better known, examples of idealisations to facilitate understanding of my own. I will look at Rawlsian ideal theory as a template for my own idealisations, as well as to explain how they can be valuable in contributing to debates (in Rawls’ case political and in my case ethical). Rawls’ split up the field of political theory into ideal and non-ideal theory. Non-ideal theory is practical and works within the constraints of current political reality. Ideal theory idealises the political conditions to allow theorising regarding perfect political theory. The same can be done for ethics and for technology as it relates to ethics, as is my goal. Following on from this, I also examine Johann Roduit’s use of ideal theory in the closely related field of human enhancement, in which he develops an interesting methodology of using ideals to guide human enhancement programmes.  However, rather than being concerned with Roduit’s practical aim, my goal is theoretical. I want to take the ethical principles and theories themselves as ideals for technological development; in doing so technologies will be created, through the use of thought experiments, which agree with the theoretical aims of the theory or principle. These technologies can then be ethically examined and the resulting evidence can contribute (and has in the past contributed) to the ethical debate of those concepts and theories. The kind of evidence I see technological idealisations as offering ignores practical concerns and in doing so is also immune to criticisms of impracticality. This allows for more closely focused scrutiny of the ethical theories and principles themselves, undistracted by appeals to practicality which either argue for accepting a theory due to its utility or argue for rejecting a theory due to its impracticality.</p>

scholarly journals The Value of Technological Idealisations to Future Ethical Thinking

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
◽  
Adam Kelly
Keyword(s):  
Political Theory ◽  
Technological Development ◽  
Thought Experiments ◽  
Human Enhancement ◽  
Ideal Theory ◽  
Related Field ◽  
Political Reality ◽  
Ethical Debate ◽  
Political Conditions ◽  
Theoretical Issues

<p>This thesis focuses on what I have called “technological idealisations”, and how they are valuable to many current and future ethical debates. Technological idealisations refer to a methodology of using technology thought experiments to contribute to ethical debates. I do not claim this to be a new idea, and in fact will go on to give many examples of technological idealisation that already exist in the philosophical literature. The term describes the purposeful effort to collate these examples into a specific methodological framework; one which gives a particular kind of evidence which can ignore concerns of practicality and critically focus on the theoretical issues in a given debate.  In order to explore this idea I will first be looking at past, better known, examples of idealisations to facilitate understanding of my own. I will look at Rawlsian ideal theory as a template for my own idealisations, as well as to explain how they can be valuable in contributing to debates (in Rawls’ case political and in my case ethical). Rawls’ split up the field of political theory into ideal and non-ideal theory. Non-ideal theory is practical and works within the constraints of current political reality. Ideal theory idealises the political conditions to allow theorising regarding perfect political theory. The same can be done for ethics and for technology as it relates to ethics, as is my goal. Following on from this, I also examine Johann Roduit’s use of ideal theory in the closely related field of human enhancement, in which he develops an interesting methodology of using ideals to guide human enhancement programmes.  However, rather than being concerned with Roduit’s practical aim, my goal is theoretical. I want to take the ethical principles and theories themselves as ideals for technological development; in doing so technologies will be created, through the use of thought experiments, which agree with the theoretical aims of the theory or principle. These technologies can then be ethically examined and the resulting evidence can contribute (and has in the past contributed) to the ethical debate of those concepts and theories. The kind of evidence I see technological idealisations as offering ignores practical concerns and in doing so is also immune to criticisms of impracticality. This allows for more closely focused scrutiny of the ethical theories and principles themselves, undistracted by appeals to practicality which either argue for accepting a theory due to its utility or argue for rejecting a theory due to its impracticality.</p>

scholarly journals Innovation, Territory and industrial development in Portugal

Finisterra ◽  
2012 ◽  
Vol 31 (62) ◽  
Author(s):  
Maria Lucinda Fonseca ◽  
Jorge Gaspar ◽  
Mário Vale
Keyword(s):  
Human Resources ◽  
Industrial Development ◽  
Development Process ◽  
Innovation Policy ◽  
Technological Development ◽  
Regional Economies ◽  
Economic Competition ◽  
Manufacturing Activity ◽  
Theoretical Issues ◽  
The Eu

Innovation holds an important role in the economic development process. The competitive potential of national and regional economies is based on the ability to manage the changing technological process. Economic competition does no longer exclusively depend on the factor costs, which vary geographicaly, because technology can now eliminate the territory disadvantages. Productivity is the crucial element in the competitive capacity of any economy. Productivity, as can easily be proved, is deeply dependent on technological development; this is only possible if there is constant innovation. This paper starts with a brief discussion on the theoretical issues regarding innovation in relation to regional economies. In the second section the Portuguese R&D system is analised in terms of finance and human resources. Particular attention is paid to the entrepreneurial R&D effort, namely in manufacturing activity. Finally, some limitations of the innovation policy in the EU are pointed out, together with its consequences for the least favoured regions.

scholarly journals JUSTICE, FEASIBILITY, AND IDEAL THEORY: A PLURALIST APPROACH

2016 ◽  
Vol 33 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 32-54 ◽  
Author(s):  
Andrew Mason
Keyword(s):  
Political Theory ◽  
Ideal Theory ◽  
Political Values ◽  
Privileged Position ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
Pluralist Approach

Abstract:A qualified pluralism is defended that recognizes value in a variety of forms of political theory and resists arguments that purport to show that one particular approach should occupy a privileged position. Against realists, it is argued that abstract analyses of political values that bracket a wide range of facts about people and their circumstances can be both coherent and important, whereas against those who think “ideal theory” or the identification of ultimate principles should come first, it is argued that the case for always giving priority to either one of these is weak.

Introduction

2012 ◽  
Author(s):  
Edward D. Mansfield ◽  
Helen V. Milner
Keyword(s):  
Political Economy ◽  
Historical Perspective ◽  
Domestic Politics ◽  
Trade Agreements ◽  
Economic Effects ◽  
Central Argument ◽  
Political Conditions ◽  
Preferential Trading Arrangements ◽  
Theoretical Issues

This introductory chapter begins with a discussion of what preferential trading arrangements (PTAs) are and why they are important. It covers the economic effects of PTAs, political and security effects of PTAs, PTAs in historical perspective, and the effects of domestic politics on PTAs. It then sets out the book's central argument, that trade agreements are often motivated by domestic political conditions. The book seeks to explain why leaders choose to enter these agreements. The next section discusses how the present analysis of the domestic sources of PTA formation bears on a host of important theoretical issues in the fields of international relations and political economy. An overview of the subsequent chapters is also presented.

Bridging Ideal and Non-Ideal Theory

2017 ◽  
Vol 66 (4) ◽  
pp. 887-902 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alexandru Volacu
Keyword(s):  
Political Theory ◽  
Ideal Theory ◽  
Two Dimensional ◽  
Current State ◽  
The World ◽  
Normative Models ◽  
The Ideal

Many of the recent methodological debates within political theory have focused on the ideal/non-ideal theory distinction. While ideal theorists recognise the need to develop an account of the transition between the two levels of theorising, no general proposal has been advanced thus far. In this article, I aim to bridge this conceptual gap. Towards this end, I first reconstruct the ideal/non-ideal theory distinction within a simplified two-dimensional framework, which captures the primary meanings usually attributed to it. Subsequently, I use this framework to provide an algorithm for the bidirectional transition between ideal and non-ideal theory, based on the incremental derivation of normative models. The approach outlined illuminates the various ways in which principles derived under highly idealised assumptions might be distorted by the circumstances of our current world and illustrates the various paths which we can pursue in moving from our current state of the world to an ideal one.

scholarly journals Principles, practices and disciplinary power struggles in political theory

2019 ◽  
Vol 19 (2) ◽  
pp. 270-280
Author(s):  
Janosch Prinz
Keyword(s):  
Political Theory ◽  
Ideal Theory ◽  
Good Source ◽  
Power Struggles ◽  
Disciplinary Power ◽  
The Future

The Practical Turn in Political Theory sounds like the monograph political theorists have been waiting for – a monograph that identifies ‘practices’ as a uniting theme that runs through several recently influential debates on non-ideal theory, practice dependence, realism and pragmatist theories of legitimacy and democracy, and then discusses the promise and limits of this uniting theme for the future of political theory. However, The Practical Turn is driven by selective portrayals, omissions and misrepresentation, and hence is not a good source to turn to for understanding the debates it surveys or whether they manifest a ‘practical turn in political theory’ or not; rather, it serves as a warning of how struggles over power can influence and even structure seemingly the most purely intentioned of practices.

scholarly journals When the people are not reasonable: Multiculturalism and realistic normative theory in the contemporary era

Ethnicities ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 20 (2) ◽  
pp. 265-292
Author(s):  
Phil Parvin
Keyword(s):  
Political Theory ◽  
Political Liberalism ◽  
Normative Theory ◽  
First Century ◽  
Political Reality ◽  
The People ◽  
Early Twenty ◽  
Twenty First Century ◽  
Anglo American ◽  
Feasible Solutions

In this piece, I offer an original and fundamental critique of a range of approaches to multiculturalism that have dominated the field of Anglo-American political theory since first-wave debates conducted in the 1990s/2000s. I suggest that the politics of the early twenty-first century, and especially the widespread rise of anti-immigrant and anti-minority sentiments among citizens of liberal democratic states throughout the world, requires political theorists who seek feasible solutions to real-world political problems to reject these theories. I focus on two approaches in particular: political liberalism and the politics of difference. Neither offers a vision of politics that is tenable in the early twenty-first century, I argue, as they both require citizens to deliberate about political matters in ways that they cannot. In discussing these approaches, and finding them wanting, it is revealed that political theorists face a choice. They can present a theory which is realistic in the sense that it takes account of political reality and offers a strategy which might be used to genuinely inform a process of reform. Alternatively, they can abandon realism and also the desire to produce an operational normative theory which can resolve real problems in actually existing states. I lay out the nature and importance of this choice and explain some of its implications for the discipline and for our current political predicament. I suggest that the choice is unavoidable and that making it requires political theorists to make a more fundamental decision about the purposes of normative political theory itself.

Idealization and Abstraction in Models of Injustice

Hypatia ◽  
2017 ◽  
Vol 32 (2) ◽  
pp. 329-346
Author(s):  
Leif Hancox‐Li
Keyword(s):  
Political Philosophy ◽  
Philosophy Of Science ◽  
Political Theory ◽  
Ideal Theory ◽  
Formal Models ◽  
Nonideal Theory ◽  
Political Theories ◽  
Gender Based ◽  
And Gender

Charles Mills has argued against ideal theory in political philosophy on the basis that it contains idealizations. He calls for political philosophers to do more nonideal theory, namely political theory that pays more attention to the most visible oppressions in society, such as those based on race, gender, and class. Mills's argument relies on a distinction between idealization and abstraction. Idealizations involve adding false assumptions to one's model, which is unacceptable, whereas abstractions merely leave out details without undermining descriptive power. By studying formal models of injustice, I argue that the idealization/abstraction distinction is unhelpful. Either the distinction exists only relative to one's modeling purposes, or all models in political theory contain idealizations. Either way, the distinction does not help Mills's cause. Furthermore, there are arguments from philosophy of science for the epistemic benefits of idealizations. However, Mills's call for greater emphasis on the most visible mechanisms of oppression can be supported without relying on an idealization/abstraction distinction. I provide three alternative reasons for why we should prefer political theories that place more emphasis on race‐, class‐, and gender‐based oppression.

The Political Creed of Thomas Cromwell

1956 ◽  
Vol 6 ◽  
pp. 69-92 ◽  
Author(s):  
G. R. Elton
Keyword(s):  
Political Theory ◽  
Golden Age ◽  
The Other ◽  
The Political ◽  
Political Views ◽  
The Law ◽  
Theoretical Issues

TWO views are current concerning the political views of Thomas Cromwell. One—the more common—holds that he believed in absolute monarchy and desired to establish it in England. The Abbé Constant, summarizing (as was his wont) other people's views in language free from other people's reservations, stated it most starkly: he thought that Cromwell aimed at making Henry ‘tout-puissant’ and that his ministry was the golden age of Tudor despotism. Quite recently, an ingenious theory, buttressed with a misunderstood document, based itself on this general conviction. This view has suffered curiously little from the growing realization that the Henrician Reformation rested on conscious co-operation with Parliament and that the propagandists of the time never produced a theory of absolute monarchy. Pollard, the defender of Henry VIII's constitutionalism, seems to have held that, though the king had no ambitions for a genuine despotism, Cromwell certainly harboured such ideas. The other view, recently given support by Dr. Parker, holds that Cromwell did not bother at all about theoretical issues, that his ‘resolutely Philistine type of mind’ despised political theory, and that he never thought beyond the establishment of a sovereign monarchy. Thus, too, Mr. Baumer thought that Cromwell saw in Parliament ‘only a means of executing the royal will’, but also that he ‘had no theoretical views whatever about the relation of the king to the law’—passages hard to reconcile but suggestive of Dr. Parker's views rather than M. Constant's.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document