Kant

This chapter’s argument is that for Immanuel Kant, empirical guilt requires determination of responsibility, where responsibility involves free agency. It argues that empirical guilt could only be justified for Kant in the final analysis if the agent is responsible and consequently guilty for his or her own “original sin” or radical evil (ontological guilt), where this responsibility and guilt imply an intelligible free deed, a position Kant defends in his Religion within the Boundaries of Mere Reason. It is here that Kant can be seen to put forward a transcendental argument from (ontological) guilt to intelligible freedom. The chapter concludes by arguing that Kant, however, does not ultimately succeed in showing why guilt (empirical and ontological) is justified and that even though he can be seen to approach the idea of the subject as causa sui that later thinkers endorse, he does not embrace it fully.

Uberization of translation

Digital labour platforms, encompassing on-demand translation work via apps and websites, have grown exponentially in recent years and have significant consequences for translation workers. This study explores the critical literature on digital labour platforms from a labour studies perspective and submits the findings of a quantitative survey of 70 translation workers residing in Turkey and working on/for digital labour platforms. Our research suggests that the introduction of digital labour platforms into translation production and business networks has not yet provided a significant contribution to the working conditions of translation workers in Turkey. Instead, we argue that their working conditions have been rearranged and reorganized in accordance with the uberization of (translation) work. According to the survey findings, engaging in such work on/for digital labour platforms exposes translation workers to risks related to employment status, income level, work-life balance, social protections, free agency, bargaining power, dependence on the platform, allocation of risks and rewards, and data collection, protection and privacy.

The Rule of the System of Technology and Its Algorithms and the Problem of Moral Responsibility

The article offers an analysis of the problems of technology in the context of exercising power in an organization. The power of the system today is addressed in terms of the “rule of numbers,” based on the impersonal authority of the algorithms which is an extension of the modern concept of the instrumental reason. In keeping with the rules of efficiency the employees manifest modes of behavior analogous to those characterizing the functioning of technology and specifically emphasized by Max Horkheimer and Jacques Ellul. In the author’s view, the rule of the algorithm-based technological systems leads to the atrophy of the moral responsibility and the loss of agency. Attempting to defend the idea of man’s free agency in the context of the algorithm-based technological system, the author invokes Hans Jonas’s theory of moral responsibility and refers to the concept of “ethical anarchism” as proposed by Emmanuel Lévinas.

Metaphysical Foundations of Causation: Powers or Laws of Nature?

In this article, I discuss Richard Swinburne’s case for the conception of substance causation, identified with the substances-powers-liabilities (SPL) account of causation, versus the conception of event causation, identified with alternative accounts. I specify the place of Swinburne’s argument in the debates about agent causation, and uncover reasons to be sceptical about the claims that substance causation is a genuine alternative to event causation, and that it helps to comprehend the specifics of the causation involved in free agency. I also advance considerations in favour of the relations-between-universals (RBU) account of causation that can make it preferable to the SPL account.

‘Animals run about the world in all sorts of paths’: varieties of indeterminism

In her seminal essay ‘Causality and Determination’, Elizabeth Anscombe very decidedly announced that “physical indeterminism” is “indispensable if we are to make anything of the claim to freedom”. But it is clear from that same essay that she extends the scope of that claim beyond freedom–she suggests that indeterminism is required already for animal self-movement (a position recently called ‘agency incompatibilism’ by Helen Steward). Building on Anscombe’s conception of causality and (in)determinism, I will suggest that it extends even further: life as such already requires physical indeterminism. Furthermore, I show that we can, on this basis, arrive at the idea of varieties of (in)determinism, along with a corresponding variety of incompatibilist theses. From this Anscombean vantage point, the free will discussion takes on a quite different outlook. The question whether free agency can coexist with determinism on the level of blind physical forces, which preoccupies the philosopher of free will, turns out to conflate a whole series of compatibility questions: not just whether life is compatible with physical determinism, but also whether animal self-movement is compatible with ‘biological determinism’, and whether free agency is compatible with ‘animal determinism’.

1835–1860

Twain was reared in Hannibal, a very religious small town in Missouri by a Presbyterian mother and a freethinking father. The “Presbyterian conscience” he developed as a youth deeply affected him throughout his life. Twain’s experiences in Sunday school and church and difficult childhood that included the loss of his father and two older siblings, fear of dying, and observations of drownings, murder, and mayhem are featured in many of his writings. Both Twain and many scholars have misrepresented the Calvinism that was preached and taught in antebellum Hannibal by portraying it as denying human free agency, preaching a prosperity gospel, damning the vast majority of people to perdition, and focusing on hell. Twain was especially affected by the death of his younger brother Henry as a result of a steamboat explosion when Twain was 22.

Sensibility First

In the practical realm just as in the theoretical realm, everything comes down to human sensibility as an equally empirical and non-empirical primitive starting point that constitutively motivates, intentionally pervades, and intentionally structures our innately-specified yet also “human, all-too-human” capacities for theoretical and practical rationality, all the way up. Strong Kantian non-conceptualism says that according to Kant, the faculty of human intuition or Anschauung, that is, human inner and outer sense perception, together with the faculty of imagination or Einbildungskraft, jointly constitute this sensible starting point for objective cognition and theoretical reason; and Kantian non-intellectualism says that according to Kant, human affect, desire, and moral emotion—in a word, the human heart—jointly constitute this sensible starting point for free agency and practical reason. Conjoined, they provide what I call the Sensibility First approach, which, in a nutshell, says that human rationality flows from the groundedness of our discursive, intellectual, and embodiment-neutral powers in our sensible, non-intellectual, and essentially embodied powers, without in any way reducing the former to the latter. If I’m correct about all this, then the result is a sharply non-classical and unorthodox, hence “shocking,” nevertheless fully unified and textually defensible approach to Kant’s proto-Critical philosophy (i.e., from 1768 to 1772), Critical philosophy (i.e., from 1781 to 1787) and post-Critical philosophy (i.e., from the late 1780s to the late 1790s) that encompasses his theoretical philosophy and the practical philosophy alike.