Herlinde Pauer-Studer

The way in which the main part of contemporary moral philosophy presents itself has been questioned for some time now. The objections from communitarian and feminist philosophers have become especially prominent. A good deal of their criticism has been directed against Kant’s moral theory and its successor models. Communitarians doubt the adequacy of Kant’s definition of the moral point of view and his concept of the moral subject for empirical beings “embedded” in social contexts.1 And feminist philosophers regard the strong emphasis on purely formal principles in most modern ethics, which is due to Kant’s influence, as partly responsible for the fact that moral philosophers up to now have not properly considered what it means to include women among moral subjects, and have hardly addressed issues of women’s discrimination

This article discusses some basic assumptions of Ernst Tugendhat’s moral theory. I try to show that Tugendhat’s rejection of a Kantian conception of reason and an unconditional ought is in tension with his criticism of contractualism. Tugendhat argues that contractualism provides a plausible answer to the moral motivation problem, but does not offer a convincing answer to the justification of moral principles. My claim is that Tugendhat’s arguments against contractualism commit him to those Kantian ideas and principles which he criticizes as implausible. Finally, I suggest a way of rejecting a purely self-interest based contractualism that does not commit us to a dogmatic form of rationalism.

This paper explores the question whether perfectionism amounts to a political doctrine that is more attractive than liberalism. I try to show that an egalitarian liberalism that is open to questions of value and that holds a conception of limited neutrality can meet the perfectionist challenge. My thesis is that liberalism can be reconciled easily with perfectionism read as a moral doctrine. Perfectionism as a political doctrine equally stays within the value framework of liberalism. Finally, I try to show that liberalism can give an account of civic virtue that is a sufficient basis for developing the normative guidelines of a rich and meaningful social life.

This article explores Darwall’s second-­‐personal account of morality, which draws on Fichte’s practical philosophy, particularly Fichte’s notions of a summons and principle of right. Darwall maintains that Fichte offers a philosophically more appealing account of relations of right than Kant. Likewise, he thinks that his second-­‐personal interpretation of morality gives rise to contractualism. I reject Darwall’s criticism of Kant’s conception of right. Moreover, I try to show that Darwall’s second-­‐personal conception of morality relies on a Kantian form of contractualism. Instead of accepting Darwall’s claim that contractualism depends upon a second-­‐personal account of morality, I will argue that contractualism provides the foundations not only for second-­‐personal moral relations, but also for first-­‐personal moral authority.

In his ground‐breaking study Complicity, Christopher Kutz introduces the notion of ‘participatory intentions’ (individual intentions whose content is collective) to explain an agent's complicity with groups or organisations. According to Kutz, participatory intentions allow us to hold individuals morally accountable for collective wrongs independent of their causal contribution to the wrong and its ensuing harm. This article offers an alternative account of complicity. Its central claim is that an agent's complicity might be due to the dependence of his professional role on the normative principles that make up the organisation or institution in whose practices he partakes. In other words, there might arise a constitutive failure in an agent's attempt to ascribe to himself a non‐complicit professional identity. I use the case of SS‐Judge Konrad Morgen in order to illustrate this understanding of complicity.

Neo-Kantian accounts which try to ground morality in the necessary requirements of agency face the problem of “bad action”. The most prominent example is Christine Korsgaard’s version of constitutivism that considers the categorical imperative to be indispensable for an agent’s self-constitution. In my paper I will argue that a constitutive account can solve the problem of bad action by applying the distinction between constitutive and regulative rules to the categorical imperative. The result is that an autonomous agent can violate the categorical imperative in so far as it amounts to a regulative rule of morality; however, an agent cannot call into question the categorical imperative as a constitutive rule of the practice of morality without losing her or his identity as a moral agent. The paper then compares this approach to bad action with the one Korsgaard provides and outlines also a new way of grounding the categorical imperative.

Since Edmund L. Gettier's famous paper a series of counterexamples has been raised against the traditional analysis of knowledge in terms of justified true belief. Some of these (not only Gettier-type) counterexamples can be ruled out by adding a fourth condition to the traditional account which demands a causal connection between the belief of a person and the fact the person believes. This causal connection is specified in a particular way so that counterexamples put forward against causal accounts of knowledge are likewise eliminated.

Ausgehend von der These, daß jeder Versuch einer Klärung der Struktur transzendentaler Argumente Kants entsprechende Ausführungen berücksichtigen muß, erfolgt zunächst eine Rekonstruktion von Kants Auffassung transzendentaler Beweise. Im folgenden wird St. Körners Kritik an Kants transzendentalen Deduktionen diskutiert und argumentiert, daß Körners Zurückweisung dieser Beweisformen eine Kant nicht ganz angemessene Interpretation transzendentaler Deduktionen zugrundeliegt. Dennoch sind transzendentale Beweisversuche nicht erfolgreich

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.

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 ..

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.

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.