Herlinde Pauer-Studer

This paper proposes a new account of the relationship between Kant’s ethics and Kant’s philosophy of right. I reject the claim of some philosophers that Kant’s Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals cannot offer a foundation for Kant’s philosophy of right. While I agree that the basic principles of Kant’s philosophy of right cannot be deduced from Kant’s ethical Categorical Imperatives, I try to show that we find in Kant’s Groundwork the normative resources for grounding his philosophy of right. My thesis is that Kant’s conception of a realm of ends, as he develops it in the Groundwork, provides a common normative source for Kant’s ethical Categorical Imperatives, on the one hand, and the Universal Principle of Right, on the other. Agreement on common universal principles, which is crucial for Kant’s notion of a realm of ends provides, I will argue, a justification of the ethical Categorical Imperatives and the Universal Principle of Right.

Norms, Values, and Society is the second Yearbook of the Vienna Circle Institute, which was founded in October 1991. The main part of the book contains original contributions to an international symposium the Institute held in October 1993 on ethics and social philosophy. The papers deal among others with questions of justice, equality, just social institutions, human rights, the connections between rationality and morality and the methodological problems of applied ethics. The Documentation section contains previously unpublished papers by Rudolf Carnap, Philipp Frank, Charles W. Morris and Edgar Zilsel, and the review section presents new publications on the Vienna Circle. The Vienna Circle Institute is devoted to the critical advancement of science and philosophy in the broad tradition of the Vienna Circle, as well as to the focusing of cross-disciplinary interest on the history and philosophy of science in a social context. The Institute's Yearbooks will, for the most part, document its activities and provide a forum for the discussion of exact philosophy, logical and empirical investigations, and analysis of language.

This set of extended and intellectually nuanced interviews with a broad range of contemporary philosophers working in the fields of moral and political philosophy invites readers to participate in the dialogue. We observe philosophers think as they speak, trying to clarify their views, and we watch them argue with each other, in the process revealing answers to some of the puzzles their writings provoke. The contributors are: Seyla Benhabib, Ronald Dworkin, David Gauthier, Christine M. Korsgaard, Martha C. Nussbaum, Michael J. Sandel, Thomas M. Scanlon, Amartya Sen, and Michael Walzer. Pauer-Studer invites her contributors to talk about major issues from different theoretical perspectives—liberalism and communitarianism, Hobbesianism and rational choice theory, utilitarianism and Kantianism, Critical Theory and neo-Aristotelianism. She also gets them to discuss the relevance of their views to such issues as feminism, abortion, animal rights, ecology, immigration, welfare, and multiculturalism. The interview format creates a much more accessible account of complex philosophical ideas and problematic aspects of the contributors’ works than found in the works themselves.

This critical note concerns John Broome's bookRationality through Reasoning(2013). Broome claims that rationality amounts to satisfying rational requirements as opposed to responding correctly to reasons. My critique focuses on two issues. First, I try to show that Broome's account of rational requirements, in particular his answer to the so-called ‘symmetry-problem’, presupposes that responding correctly to reasons is part of rationality. Secondly, in discussing Broome's account of reasoning I criticize his claim that first-order reasoning involves no appeal to reasons and, hence, no normative thoughts on behalf of the reasoner.

The main impetus for organizing this event was the publication, in 2011, of Philip Pettit’s and Christian List’s book, *Group Agency*. List and Pettit argue that interpreting institutions like commercial corporations, governments, political parties, trade unions, churches, and universities as group agents offers a better understanding of their internal working and their effects on social life. Pettit and List base their account of group agency on a so-called “functionalist account of agency” which assumes that an agent is constituted by a method of transforming representational and motivational states into actions. They reject essentialist conceptions of collective willing by claiming that group attitudes supervene on the individual attitudes of the group members.The invited speakers were asked to consider the following issues arising out of List’s and Pettit’s work: Can and should we consider groups as agents? What normative commitments come with such an assumption? What model of agen ..

In Anglo-American legal theory the lack of morality was often considered as the main problem of Nazi law. Bringing law and morality together thus seems to meet the challenge posed by the Nazi legal system. In this paper I argue that the mere unification of law and morality is not sufficient to cope with the distortions of Nazi law. By discussing the framework of the SS-jurisdiction and the case of the SS-judge Konrad Morgen I try to show that in the Nazi legal system morality is so deformed that in such circumstances a judge’s aiming for justice has equivocal implications. My conclusion is that we should consider law and morality as two distinct normative spheres and approach the issue of Nazi law using a conception of legality that captures basic requirements of a rule-of-law system.