Christine Bratu

In this paper, I develop an expressive account of disrespect according to which an action becomes disrespectful in virtue of making an explicitly or implicitly demeaning statement about its target’s moral standing. On my reading, we act disrespectfully whenever we (in word or deed) spread the falsehood that some people can be treated worse than they in fact can be given the correct account of what we owe to each other. After elaborating on the content that renders an action disrespectful and explaining how disrespectful actions come to acquire their distinctive content in the first place, I go on to defend my account against rival approaches and stress its usefulness in detecting a previously disregarded moral phenomenon, namely, the risk of causing moral confusion. I do so by arguing that, given our nature as social cognisers, disrespectful actions are particularly well-suited to pollute our beliefs about what we owe to each other and what is owed to us.

In this article, I argue for the following three claims: (I) Currently, our understanding of compatibility is under-complex and requires philosophical clarification. (II) Against the background of a philosophically informed understanding of compatibility, there is good reason to doubt that compatibility can be achieved at all for untenured faculty members through the usual measures. (III) If we want to create compatibility in a philosophically informed sense for untenured faculty members, we must modify the merit principle and also understand the task of creating compatibility as a task for the entire academic community. The central point of my argument is the assumption that academic performance is time-sensitive, so that those who invest more time in their work are likely to have more and better academic achievements. However, academics with care responsibilities can only invest a limited amount of time in their academic work, and this amount will usually be significantly smaller than what academics without care responsibilities can and probably will invest, and cannot be increased further. However, the only permanent positions in the German academic system, full professorships, are awarded according to the merit principle, which means that the requirements for a successful application - i.e. the quantity or quality of academic achievements that must be presented in order to have a realistic chance of obtaining such positions - are determined by those whose achievements are the best. Taken together, these factors mean that academics with care responsibilities have no realistic chance of competing with those without when applying for professorships. However, as I argue, this implies that there is no compatibility for academics with care responsibilities.

Standard conceptions of discrimination cannot account for all that is morally wrong about discrimination, as they cannot explain how individual acts of discrimination wrong not only their direct target but also all members of the targeted social group. In response to this lacuna, I develop a comprehensive account according to which discrimination consists of two interdependent wrongs: to discriminate against B, A must, first, treat B worse than C in a way that is grave enough to make this differential treatment morally wrong; and second, A must do so in a way that is disrespectful to B and to the social group B is perceived to belong to.

Despite the increasing concern for the issue of respect for persons displayed over the last decades by political philosophers, human-right thinkers, social and ethical theorists, a comprehensive treatment of the problem at stake from a historical-philosophical perspective is conspicuously absent. The present collection of essays aims to contribute to the fulfillment of this gap by offering a reconstruction of the seminal passages in the history of philosophy which testify to the evolution of the idea of respect for persons and the rich array of conceptual specifications that such an idea acquires across the centuries. By analysis of pivotal texts of ancient and modern contemporary philosophy, the volume will try to offer an articulated account of respect which, starting from its primeval connection with the search for esteem and the pursuit of human excellence, gradually evolves towards the recognition of the political status of each citizen and culminates into a true politics of human rights. Bringing together the expertise of classicists and scholars specialized in modern and contemporary philosophy, the volume is especially intended for scholars working in the fields of the history of philosophy, ethical and political theory.

In recent years, a number of authors have claimed that we can wrong each other simply by having certain beliefs—in particular sexist, racist, ableist etc. beliefs—about each other. So far, those who argue for the possibility of so-called doxastic wronging have tried to defend this idea by focusing on issues of doxastic control and coordination. In this paper, I raise a distinctly moral challenge against the possibility of doxastic wronging. I show that the idea of doxastic wronging runs afoul of the liberal principle according to which all moral obligations have to be justifiable vis-à-vis those they presume to bind. In addition, I argue that there is a better way to account for the fundamental intuition driving the debate: instead of assuming the possibility of doxastic wronging and the morally grounded epistemic duty it implies, we should conceptualize what is morally problematic about bigoted beliefs in terms of the harm they constitute for their targets.

In this paper, we have two goals. First, we argue for a blueprint for hermeneutical injustice that allows us to schematize existing and discover new varieties of hermeneutical injustices. The underlying insight is that Fricker provides both a general concept of hermeneutical injustice and a specific conception thereof. By distinguishing between the general concept and its specific conceptions, we gain a fruitful tool to detect such injustices in our everyday lives. Second, we use this blueprint to provide a further example of hermeneutical injustice that draws our attention to yet another distinction: Some hermeneutical injustices result from a lack or distortion in the collective conceptual resource and some are due to problems in the application of existing concepts. We argue that to combat hermeneutical injustices, we have to make sure not only that individuals have accurate concepts at their disposal but that they have the capabilities to use these concepts adequately.

In this paper, I develop an expressive account of disrespect according to which an action becomes disrespectful in virtue of making an explicitly or implicitly demeaning statement about its target’s moral standing. On my reading, we act disrespectfully whenever we (in word or deed) spread the falsehood that some people can be treated worse than they in fact can be given the correct account of what we owe to each other. After elaborating on the content that renders an action disrespectful and explaining how disrespectful actions come to acquire their distinctive content in the first place, I go on to defend my account against rival approaches and stress its usefulness in detecting a previously disregarded moral phenomenon, namely, the risk of causing moral confusion. I do so by arguing that, given our nature as social cognisers, disrespectful actions are particularly well-suited to pollute our beliefs about what we owe to each other and what is owed to us.

Mit ihrem Buch Was schulden wir künftigen Generationen? Herausforderung Zukunftsethik leistet Kirsten Meyer einen wichtigen Beitrag zu einer Diskussion, die nicht nur akademisch, sondern vor allem lebensweltlich relevant ist. Grundlegende Einsicht des Buches ist dabei, dass wir in der Zukunftsethik einen deontologischen Perspektivenwechsel vollziehen und uns fragen sollten, “welche Rechte oder Ansprüche künftige Personen uns gegenüber haben" (P 134), und nicht, welcher Weltzustand besser ist. Meyers Argumentation ist durchwegs klar und überzeugend, so dass die nachfolgenden Bemerkungen (die sich allesamt auf den zweiten Teil des Buchs beziehen) eher als Klärungsnachfragen denn als kritische Kommentare zu verstehen sind.

In the contemporary debate about respect, the writings of Immanuel Kant constitute an important point of reference. I argue that Kant distinguishes between two different kinds of respect: reverentia is a feeling that a person experiences towards whatever is morally warranted and that will lead her to do what is morally warranted, provided that she has cultivated a calm state of mind. In contrast, observantia consists in a set of actions she has to perform in response to certain morally relevant features of persons, for instance their dignity. So both kinds of respect are different stances and directed towards different objects. What they have in common is that they both consist in the acknowledgment of some morally relevant feature. But while in the case of reverentia this acknowledgment takes place on the level of feelings and motivations, in the case of observantia it takes place on the level of actions.

This paper addresses the question whether there is a rational connection between self-respect and the disrespect of others by engaging with the so-called Stoic View (SV) presented by Colin Bird. According to SV, there is no such connection because the disrespect other people show us can never provide us with a reason to lose our self-respect. This essay argues that SV is correct only from a third-personal perspective and false from a first-personal one. Since we are social cognizers, we use how other people treat us as evidence, for instance, about our moral status, and we are justified in doing so if we have no reason to dismiss them as untrustworthy. Distinguishing between the first-and third-personal perspectives is important to avoid victim-blaming. I show this by discussing an example from literature in which the protagonist concludes that she does not have equal moral status and thus lacks in self-respect without any mistake in her reasoning simply because she has been given false information about her moral status.

In this paper I argue against a cognitivist understanding of sexist action, according to which an action is sexist insofar as it can be traced back to the agent’s belief that some people have a subordinate social position in virtue of their gender. We see this conception at work whenever people defend themselves against the charge of sexism by saying, e.g., that it is impossible for them to act in a sexist way as they do not subscribe to a sexist worldview. I contend that we should reject this conception because it cannot make sense of the intuition that sexist actions wrong their targets. To do so, proponents of the cognitive conception would have to assume that there is doxastic morality in the strict sense, i. e., that we can wrong each other simply in virtue of the beliefs we entertain about each other. But at least against the backdrop of liberal moral philosophy, we cannot make this assumption as it conflicts with our freedom of thought.

The aim of this paper is twofold: In its first part, we work out the key features of constitutivism as presented by Christine Korsgaard. This reconstruction serves to clarify which goals Korsgaard wants to achieve with her account and which of its central claims she has to defend in particular. In the second part, we discuss whether Korsgaard can vindicate constitutivism's most central claim. To do this, we analyse two important arguments - the argument from unavoidability and the argument from the abstract constitutive principle - that have been made in support of constitutivism. We show how both these arguments go amiss and conclude that at least for now, constitutivism's most central claim has not been successfully argued for.

Der Liberalismus ist eine normative Theorie dazu, was sich Menschen wechselseitig schulden, d. h. was ihnen im Umgang miteinander erlaubt, ver- und geboten ist. Als solche normative Theorie des wechselseitigen Miteinanders kann der Liberalismus sowohl Aussagen dazu beinhalten, welche Rechte und Pflichten Personen gegenüber anderen Personen haben, als auch dazu, wie das politische Miteinander gestaltet sein sollte, d. h. welche Pflichten und Ansprüche der Staat gegenüber seinen Bürger*innen hat bzw. die Bürger*innen gegenüber dem Staat haben. Denn in vielen modernen Gesellschaften schreiben Personen die Regeln ihres wechselseitigen Miteinanders (etwa dass man andere nicht körperlich schädigen oder bestehlen darf) öffentlich fest, indem sie diese in kodifiziertes und vom Staat sanktioniertes Recht überführen.

In recent years, a number of authors have claimed that we can wrong each other simply by having certain beliefs—in particular sexist, racist, ableist etc. beliefs—about each other. So far, those who argue for the possibility of so-called doxastic wronging have tried to defend this idea by focusing on issues of doxastic control and coordination. In this paper, I raise a distinctly moral challenge against the possibility of doxastic wronging. I show that the idea of doxastic wronging runs afoul of the liberal principle according to which all moral obligations have to be justifiable vis-à-vis those they presume to bind. In addition, I argue that there is a better way to account for the fundamental intuition driving the debate: instead of assuming the possibility of doxastic wronging and the morally grounded epistemic duty it implies, we should conceptualize what is morally problematic about bigoted beliefs in terms of the harm they constitute for their targets.