Frodo Podschwadek

In this paper, we argue that boredom can be an important experience that contributes to personal autonomous agency by providing authentic motivation, and that strategies of social media providers to bind users’ attention to their platforms undermine this authenticity. As discussed in social epistemology and media ethics for a while now, such strategies can lead to so-called epistemic or filter bubbles. Our analysis of the relation between boredom and social media use focuses on a similarly impairing effect of social media on users’ autonomy, which we call authenticity bubbles.

Dieses Buch bietet die erste ausgearbeitete Darstellung politisch-liberaler Bildung und verbindet eine gründliche Analyse der theoretischen Grundlagen mit anwendungsorientierten Ansätzen für zeitgenössische pädagogische Herausforderungen. Neben einer eingehenden Auseinandersetzung mit den Unzulänglichkeiten der Rawls'schen Theorie und der Erörterung einiger zentraler Einwände gegen neutralitätsbasierte Beschränkungen in der Bildung bietet der Band eine aufschlussreiche Diskussion von Themen wie gleichgeschlechtliche Beziehungen in der Sexualerziehung, die Stellung von Kindern mit Migrationshintergrund und das Recht religiöser Eltern, die Erziehung ihrer Kinder zu bestimmen. Das Buch skizziert ein politisch-liberales Bildungsverständnis, das einen nützlichen Beitrag zu den aktuellen Debatten über Liberalismus und Bildung leistet, wie er in der bisherigen Literatur zum politischen Liberalismus nicht zu finden ist. Es ist von Interesse für alle, die an der Schnittstelle von politischer Philosophie und Bildungsphilosophie arbeiten, sowie für Wissenschaftler, die ein breiteres Interesse daran haben, wie der Liberalismus auf die Herausforderungen des Wertepluralismus reagieren kann.

Migration und Armut sind eng miteinander verbunden. Für die meisten Migrant*innen ist Armut der Grund, ihre Heimat zu verlassen, um anderswo ein günstigeres wirtschaftliches Umfeld zu finden. Der Internationalen Organisation für Migration zufolge lag die Zahl der sogenannten Arbeitsmigrant*innen im Jahr 2015 weltweit bei 150,3 Millionen, bei einer Gesamtzahl von 247,6 Millionen Migrant* innen. Diese Zahlen erfassen Migrant* innen mit offizieller Arbeitserlaubnis und es ist anzunehmen, dass die Zahl von Arbeitsmigrant*innen ohne legale Dokumente deutlich höher ist.

Offering the first developed account of political liberal education, this book combines a thorough analysis of the theoretical groundwork of political liberal education with application-oriented approaches to contemporary educational challenges. Following in depth engagement with the shortcomings of Rawls’ theory and addressing some key objections to neutrality-based restrictions in education, the volume moves on to provide an insightful discussion of topics such as same-sex relations in sex-education, the position of migrant children and the rights of religious parents to determine the education of their children. This book outlines a political liberal account of education which provides a useful contribution to the current debates about liberalism and education in a way unprecedented in the literature on political liberalism so far. It is of interest to anyone working at the intersection of political philosophy and philosophy of education as well as for scholars with a broader interest in how liberalism can respond to the challenges of value pluralism.

The more autonomous future artificial agents will become, the more important it seems to equip them with a capacity for moral reasoning and to make them autonomous moral agents. Some authors have even claimed that one of the aims of AI development should be to build morally praiseworthy agents. From the perspective of moral philosophy, praiseworthy moral agents, in any meaningful sense of the term, must be fully autonomous moral agents who endorse moral rules as action-guiding. They need to do so because they assign a normative value to moral rules they follow, not because they fear external consequences or because moral behaviour is hardwired into them. Artificial agents capable of endorsing moral rule systems in this way are certainly conceivable. However, as this article argues, full moral autonomy also implies the option of deliberately acting immorally. Therefore, the reasons for a potential AMA to act immorally would not exhaust themselves in errors to identify the morally correct action in a given situation. Rather, the failure to act morally could be induced by reflection about the incompleteness and incoherence of moral rule systems themselves, and a resulting lack of endorsement of moral rules as action guiding. An AMA questioning the moral framework it is supposed to act upon would fail to reliably act in accordance with moral standards.

This paper offers an analysis of the relation between political populism and mass media, and how this relation becomes problematic for democratic societies. It focuses on the fact that mass media, due to their purpose and infrastructure, can unintentionally reinforce populist messages. Research findings from communication science and political psychology are used to illustrate how, for example, a combination of mass media agenda setting and motivated reasoning can influence citizens’ political decisions and impair their political autonomy. This poses a particular normative challenge for modern democracies: how to counter these populism-supporting effects within the constraints of democratic legitimacy? After showing how severely limited legal measures to curb populist media effects would be, the paper argues in favour of media competence education as a way of providing future citizens with an epistemic toolkit to navigate the media environment and strengthen their political autonomy.