Anton Leist

“Having a moral right” in private and public debates probably is one of the most important arguments to bring some foundation to one’s claims. Within international law and politics, for example, one easily falls back on universal “human rights”, especially if neither a more subtle moral argument nor prudential reasons find a hold. But in some contrast to this agreement on the strong practical relevance of rights, both the conceptual analysis and normative justification of rights are rather controversial in moral philosophy. There is, perhaps, a consensus on a constructivist understanding of rights, that is that rights have to be constructed from a basis of more “elementary parts” of morality. There is no agreement, however, on the exact character of these parts and their normative import within an overall construction of rights. It seems to be clear somehow that rights have to secure and promote interests — of a human and animal kind. Not so clear is the kind of foundation rights can be given within the sphere of interests, especially if this is understood in a reductive sense. Nevertheless, because the function of rights is to secure interests, the construction of rights from an understanding of interests seems to suggest itself. It is in the interest of all beings to have their interests secured and furthered by rights. Therefore, an “interest theory of rights” provides itself as a primary option — meaning thereby the justificatory, and not the directive side of rights

Myers' offer of cooperation as a medicine for ailing moral theories is welcomed as potentially helpful, even if his handling of it is diagnosed as implicitly one-sided consequentialist. His search for an ethically “substantive way of engaging with others” is shown as not coherent with his remarks on the tasks cooperation as an ethical concept has to fulfil. Instead, it is proposed that the concept be disentangled from the micro- problems Myers' wants it to solve, and that it be read more freely, from the perspective of Rawls' conception of cooperation.

The degradation of natural resources in the environment is, technically speaking, a form of depleting a public good. Public goods are notorious for free-riding among egoists, but the marginality of individual contributions provides no less an obstacle, both to moral duty and motivation. This article discusses the problems of minimized and missing causal involvement on the empirical side; and, in the applicability of classical moral arguments, on the ethical side. It. suggests that individual responsibility is derived on the basis of implicit advantage-taking from participation in collective action.

During the last years Anglosaxon discussion about Marx and Marxism has been characterized by an intensified interest in historical materialism as a general theory of history. The most extensive, careful and analytically rigorous among several new treatments is the one by G.A. Cohen, which is the subject of four critical articles in the present issue of Analyse & Kritik. To make these articles and Cohen’s project understandable to the German reader, an attempt is made in the following to summarize the main arguments of Cohen’s defence of historical materialism and of the ensuing comprehensive and detailed discussion.

It is not easy to give up on a tradition that promises to rationalize, explain, and thereby ultimately help improve, society. This article narrates the history of Critical Theory in three stages, following the dynamics of its own self-criticism during distinct historical periods and within different societies. Horkheimer/adorno, Habermas and Honneth are read as participating in a philosophical project of societal rationalism which can be criticized by appeal to a pragmatist view of social theories, and specifically the ‘pragmatic maxim’. In spite of its post-metaphysical announcements, Critical Theory overextends itself when it seeks to reconcile fully the normative and the empirical. An alternative, and more explicitly ethical and empirically controllable, scheme for critical theories (plural!) is suggested.

Since Hobbes' Leviathan was published in 1651, the 'problem of order' has been known for some time. Despite this long gestation period for social theory even today we do not have a universally agreed upon answer to this 'problem'. One of the reasons behind this lacuna may be the overly dispersed work being done in the economic and sociological traditions. Whereas one tradition favours 'collective action' as a central answer, the other thinks of the problem itself being dissolved by the acceptance of 'socialized man'. Here, an attempt is made to offer the phenomenon of 'cooperation' as a promising middle ground for both traditions. To underline the importance of cooperation as an elementary social activity, first, cooperation is shown as working in tandem with its rival 'competition'. Secondly, several conceptual analyses of what is included in collective action and cooperation are offered. These analyses, thirdly, are deepened by an overview of the motivational bases potentially advancing cooperation. Overall, an awareness of the self-creating character of cooperation is explored, and put forward as the most feasible way of answering the classical problem of order.

This critical review concentrates on four important parts of Raimo Tuomela’s analytical theory of social action. It examines the book’s reconstructions of social action, of practical reasoning in this context, of social norms and it investigates its claim to a conceptual individualism. The result is critical in several aspects. Tuomela’s most original idea in the analysis of joint action, that of we-intentions, is not broad enough to cover more than a part of social action in the commonly understood sense. His ‘social’ practical reasoning incorporates an implausible premiss. The game-theoretical reconstruction of social norms strikes one as unlikely to be fulfilled in social reality. Hardly any of these analyses back up the individualist claims of Tuomela’s project.

Ernst Fehr’s experimental research on altruistic behaviour aims at superseding the classical homo oeconomicus in micro-economic behaviour theory. This essay discusses Fehr’s results from two points of view: first, in regard to the understanding of social action associated with the term “altruism”; second, in regard to the ‘anthropological’ strategy of research that is based on the laboratory method. Against the emphasis on altruism it will be argued that it misleads into providing a distorted description of social acting, and that, due to insufficient clarity about motives for acting, Fehr’s empirical results give evidence not of altruism but rather of phenomena of social recognition. The objection against the anthropological strategy will be that it makes visible only local phenomena within prevailing social conditions and that it thus assumes more than it explains.