Karoline Reinhardt

Liebe Leserinnen und Leser! Wir freuen uns, die zweite Ausgabe 2025 der Zeitschrift für Praktische Philosophie vorlegen zu können. Neben den Beiträgen in der offenen Sektion veröffentlichen wir in diesem Heft drei Schwerpunkte. Diese widmen sich der Klimakrise (herausgegeben von Daniel Lucas, Joseph Conrad und Stefan Knauß), der Philosophie der Migration (herausgegeben von Karoline Reinhardt und Gottfried Schweiger) und Thomas von Aquin (herausgegeben von Kathi Beier). Wir danken den Autor:innen und insbesondere den Gutachter:innen, die sich die Mühe machen, die eingereichten Texte gründlich zu lesen und zu kommentieren, und auf diese Weise sicherstellen, dass die ZfPP ihren hohen Qualitätsansprüchen gerecht wird. Wir danken dem Open-Access-Publikationsfonds der Universität Salzburg für die finanzielle Unterstützung zur Herausgabe der Zeitschrift für Praktische Philosophie. Wir freuen uns über Einreichungen zu geplanten Schwerpunkten ebenso wie über Vorschläge für künftige Themenschwerpunkte für die Jahre 2027 und 2028. Mit dieser Ausgabe verabschieden wir Birgit Beck aus dem Kreis der Herausgeber:innen und danken ihr für viele Ideen, reichlich Engagement und Arbeit für die ZfPP. Die Herausgeber:innen Birgit Beck, Karoline Reinhardt,Gottfried Schweiger & Michael Zichy.

Ten years after the so-called “refugee crisis,” this introduction frames migration as a persistent and multifaceted philosophical challenge. It aims to offer a systematic overview of key debates and theoretical approaches in migration ethics, ranging from liberal and cosmopolitan theories to communitarian, critical-theoretical, feminist, postcolonial, and phenomenological perspectives. Rather than presenting these approaches in isolation, the article highlights their respective strengths, blind spots, and points of convergence. Particular attention is given to the heterogeneity of migration experiences, intersecting forms of vulnerability, questions of epistemic justice, and emerging challenges posed by digital border technologies, new regimes of migration control, and the ethical implications of climate-induced migration.

Immanuel Kant's The Dispute between the Faculties (1798) contains a footnote referencing four utopian states — Atlantis, Utopia, Oceana, and Severambia. This passage has largely been overlooked in Kantian scholarship. This paper revisits this neglected passage to explore Kant's engagement with utopian literature and its implications for his philosophy of history and political thought. The footnote, though brief, sheds light on Kant's views regarding the feasibility of ideal states and their connection to revolutionary change. It reveals Kant's nuanced perspective on the role of utopian visions in shaping political ideals and the duties of individuals and governments in realizing such ideals. While Kant acknowledges these utopias as “sweet dreams,” he also questions their practicality and warns against revolutionary approaches to achieving them. This paper examines how Kant's references to these utopian constructs reflect his broader philosophical concerns about progress and reform, emphasizing that progress must occur through gradual, lawful reform rather than through revolutionary upheaval. By analyzing Kant's treatment of these literary fictions, the paper aims to illuminate his complex relationship with utopian thought and its place within his broader theoretical framework.

The increasing relevance of AI systems paired with their repeatedly observed opacity gave rise to the field of explainable artificial intelligence (XAI). Methods of XAI are being developed and evaluated based on whether they overcome said opacity by providing explanations, thereby apparently pursuing an epistemic end. What is commonly sidestepped, however, is the distinction between the ability and the obligation to explain: In which specific cases and under what specific circumstances is there a moral obligation to give an explanation? We address this issue by first arguing that apart from their epistemic virtues, explanations can be ethically relevant and hence subject to moral considerations. Further, we build on Kantian theories to provide a framework that systematizes in which instances there is a moral obligation to explain and in which instances there is none. We relate our framework both to Forst's "right to justification" and to the "right to explanation" as codified in recent legislation. Finally, we show that our framework does not only close a gap in clarifying when explanations of AI systems are required, but that it also paves the way for concrete suggestions regarding the design of XAI methods.

It is commonplace by now that moral philosophy has a long history of gender biases, not only regarding the pertinent moral issues but also regarding the development of concepts and theories. This insight from feminist philosophy, however, has not yet received sufficient attention in the debate on supererogation. That is not least surprising, since we all are familiar with the phenomenon that what is morally expected of an agent is not gender-neutral but at least to some extent relates to gender roles and social expectations. Therefore, the main aim of this chapter is to build on theoretical and methodological insights from feminist philosophy to carve out this research gap and to map the field for future research. It will be argued that feminist approaches can only be ignored within the debate on supererogation at the cost of philosophical rigor since they do not only give rise to novel perspectives and insights on questions already discussed, but also make matters visible that would have been overlooked otherwise. Thereby this chapter seeks essentially to contribute to a more extensive understanding of the social, political, and epistemic dimensions of supererogation that have hitherto been neglected.

While much of politics is about making decisions, machine learning is about making predictions. Despite this diverging focus, machine learning is increasingly deployed in politically sensitive fields. This chapter focuses on the tension arising from this deployment. We specifically address the question of whether machine learning-based political decision making can be justified and how this question of justification interrelates with considerations about epistemological aspects of machine learning. To that end, we evaluate the epistemic state that individual decision makers can reach when relying on machine learning systems and assess when this state can be considered justified. We then broaden this first-person perspective and turn to political justification. By employing the so-called public justification principle, we investigate whether epistemic justification transmits to political justification in applications of machine learning. We argue that in light of the epistemological considerations, a series of problems arise concerning the political justification of deploying these models.

In the context of digitalization, processes of constant data evaluation are increasingly influencing people's identity/identities. In digitality, people act from within a subject position that can be understood as increasingly ‘relational’ (i.e., permanently linked with others) and thus also determined by others. This pattern induced by information technology has become an anthropological phenomenon in its own right and represents a challenge for philosophy. This chapter gives an overview of humans' somewhat diminished individuality, or their perception thereof, in the age of digitality with its all-abundant processes of data analysis and hence categorization, looks at human identity and how it is negotiated in digital contexts, and analyzes what forms of socialization and dominion are linked with it.

Vertrauen ist ein wesentlicher Bestandteil menschlichen Lebens und menschlicher Interaktionen. Der vorliegende Schwerpunkt untersucht, ob Digitalisierung und Künstliche Intelligenz neue Vertrauensfragen aufwerfen, ob das Konzept des Vertrauens auf digitale Technologien angewandt werden kann und inwiefern es modifiziert werden muss, um den begrifflichen wie praktischen Herausforderungen, die mit dem Einsatz dieser Technologien verbunden sind, gerecht zu werden. Die Einleitung stellt einführend dar, wie Vertrauen bislang in der philosophischen Debatte verstanden wurde und welche neuen Fragen durch digitale Technologien aufgeworfen werden. Es wird herausgearbeitet, dass, obwohl Vertrauen schon lange ein Thema der Philosophie war, insbesondere im Bereich digitaler Technologien Unsicherheit und Verletzbarkeit neue Formen annehmen, die Implikationen für Vertrauensbeziehungen haben und die es philosophisch zu reflektieren gilt. Die Beiträge des Themenschwerpunkts befassen sich dabei gleichermaßen mit übergreifenden Fragen zu Vertrauen im Kontext digitaler Technologien, wie auch mit Fragen des Vertrauens in konkreten Anwendungsfeldern wie der Medizin und Blockchaintechnologien.

Liebe Leserinnen und Leser! Wir freuen uns, die zweite Ausgabe 2023 der Zeitschrift für Praktische Philosophie vorlegen zu können. In der offenen Sektion sind vier Beiträge versammelt: Andreas Cassee und Sabine Hohl legen eine Kritik der allgemeinen Dienstpflicht vor, Anita Horn schreibt über Dissoziation als Konzept der Ethik und Sozialkritik, der Text von Bastian Ronge widmet sich Simon Weils Verständnis der Arbeitsteilung und Miriam Schröder hat einen Beitrag über Natur und Nichtidentität mit Blick auf Theodor W. Adorno und Donna J. Haraway verfasst. Der Schwerpunkt in dieser Ausgabe wurde von Janina Loh und Michael Kühler betreut und enthält sechs Texte zu philosophischen Fragen der Polyamorie. Wir danken den Autor:innen und insbesondere den Gutachter:innen, die sich die Mühe machen, die eingereichten Texte gründlich zu lesen und zu kommentieren, und auf diese Weise sicherstellen, dass die ZfPP ihren hohen Qualitätsansprüchen gerecht wird. Wir danken dem Open-Access- Publikationsfonds der Universität Salzburg für die finanzielle Unterstützung zur Herausgabe der Zeitschrift für Praktische Philosophie. Mit dieser Ausgabe verabschieden wir Sarah Bianchi aus dem Kreis der Herausgeber:innen. Wir danken ihr herzlich für ihr Engagement für die ZfPP und wünschen ihr alles Gute für die Zukunft. Die Herausgeber:innen Birgit Beck, Karoline Reinhardt Gottfried Schweiger & Michael Zichy.

Diversity matters – theoretically and practically, within philosophy and beyond. It is less clear, however, how we are to conceive of diversity. In current debates it is quite common to discuss diversity as a diversity of social identities. In this paper, I will raise five major concerns with regard to this approach from a philosophical perspective. All of them cast doubt on the flexibility and openness to ambiguity of identity-based concepts of diversity. Contrary to an identity-based concept of diversity, I will propose a perspective that stresses ambiguity and fluidity. In pursuing my argument, I will, after an introduction in §1, outline in §2 how the term ‘diversity’ is commonly used and how social identities come into the picture. In §3, I describe the dangers of an identity-based diversity concept. In my critique I will build on Adorno's thoughts on the formation of concepts and on Appiah's reflections on identity. I will illustrate my critique with examples from a growing field of Applied Ethics, data ethics. In §4, I will sketch an alternative understanding of human diversity, taking up considerations by Thomas Bauer on ambiguity and ambiguity tolerance.