Christel Johanna Fricke

We are often pressed to forgive or in need of forgiveness: Wrongdoing is common. Even after a perpetrator has been taken to court and punished, forgiveness still has a role to play. How should a victim and a perpetrator relate to each other outside the courtroom, and how should others relate to them? Communicating about forgiveness is particularly urgent in cases of civil war and crimes against humanity inside a community where, if there were no forgiveness, the community would fall apart. Forgiveness is governed by social and, in particular, by moral norms. Do those who ask to be forgiven have to fulfil certain conditions for being granted forgiveness? And what does the granting of forgiveness consist in? We may feel like refusing to forgive those perpetrators who have committed the most horrendous crimes. But is such a refusal justified even if they repent their crimes? Could there be a duty for the victim to forgive? Can forgiveness be granted by a third party? Under which conditions may we forgive ourselves? The papers collected in the present volume address all these questions, exploring the practice of forgiveness and its normative constraints. Topics include the ancient Chinese and the Christian traditions of forgiveness, the impact of forgiveness on the moral dignity and self-respect of the victim, self-forgiveness, the narrative of forgiveness as well as the limits of forgiveness. Such limits may arise from the personal, historical, or political conditions of wrongdoing or from the emotional constraints of the victims.

Kant is famous for his doctrine of moral universalism. But in his writings on anthropology, physical geography, and history, he distinguished between four different human races, claiming that only members of the white, European race had developed the capacity for rational and moral agency to a high degree of perfection. The question of how his apparent moral universalism relates to his racial moral particularism has led to a controversial debate. Was he an inconsistent moral universalist or a consistent moral particularist? Lu-Adler has convincingly argued that Kant’s defence of white moral supremacy is not incompatible with his moral universalism. What does this mean for the authority of his normative moral theory? Must we reject Kant’s moral theory and remove his writings from our reading lists? Or can we stand by him and trust that his racist views do not undermine the core of his claims about the necessary and objective moral duties we have? As I will argue, the structural racism that persists even among those who are committed to moral universalism and the equal worth of all human beings reveals a weakness in Kant’s ethics of conviction that should not be overlooked.

Jane Austen has long been recognized as a moral thinker. Below the surface of romance there is in her novels a moral message. I focus on Pride and Prejudice. Certain passages of this novel have been traced to Adam Smith’s Theory of Moral Sentiments before. But Jane Austen did not only borrow two short passages from Adam Smith and inserted them into the text of her novel. My claim is that Jane Austen relied much more extensively on the Theory of Moral Sentiments as a source of inspiration for this novel. Indeed, she used it, and in particular book VI.iii., the chapter on ‘self-command’ in the TMS, as a source of inspiration for designing the plot of this novel, for shaping some of the main characters, and for composing the moral message in the sub-text of this novel. By inviting her readers to share the point of view of the heroine, Elizabth Bennet, she involves them in a process of learning to be virtuous that bears strong resemblance to this process as Adam Smith described it in his moral theory.

We read Adam Smith's Theory of Moral Sentiments as a critical response to David Hume's moral theory. While both share a commitment to moral sentimentalism, they propose different ways of meeting its main challenge, that is, explaining how judgments informed by (partial) sentiments can nevertheless have a justified claim to general authority. This difference is particularly manifest in their respective accounts of ‘moral optics’, or the way they rely on the analogy between perceptual and moral judgments. According to Hume, making perceptual and moral judgments requires focusing on frequently co-occurring impressions (perceptions of objects or reactive sentiments) for tracking an existing object with its perceptual properties or an agent's character traits. Smith uses visual perception for the purpose of illustrating one source of the partiality of the sentiments people feel in response to actions. Before making a moral judgment, people have to disregard this partiality and accept that they are all equally important. Smith and Hume's different ways of relying on the same analogy reveals the still-overlooked and yet profound differences between their moral theories.

This collection examines the instrumental role of intersubjectivity in Husserl's philosophy and explores the potential for developing novel ways of addressing and resolving contemporary philosophical issues on that basis. This is the first time Iso Kern offers an extensive overview of this rich field of inquiry for an English-speaking audience. Guided by his overview, the remaining articles present new approaches to a range of topics and problems that go to the heart of its core theme of intersubjectivity and methodology. Specific topics covered include intersubjectivity and empathy, intersubjectivity in meaning and communication, intersubjectivity pertaining to collective forms of intentionality and extended forms of embodiment, intersubjectivity as constitutive of normality, and, finally, the central role of intersubjectivity in the sciences. The authors' perspectives are strongly influenced by Husserl's own methodological concerns and problem awareness and are formed with a view to applicability in current debates - be it within general epistemology, analytic philosophy of language, philosophy of mind, meta-ethics or philosophy of science. With contributions written by leading Husserl scholars from across the Analytic and Continental traditions, Husserl's Phenomenology of Intersubjectivity is a clear and accessible resource for scholars and advanced students interested in Husserl's phenomenology and the relevance of intersubjectivity to philosophy, sociology, and psychology.