Josh Cohen

Jürgen Habermas is a radical democrat. The source of that self‐designation is that his conception of democracy—what he calls “discursive democracy”—is founded on the ideal of “a self‐organizing community of free and equal citizens,” coordinating their collective affairs through their common reason. The author discusses three large challenges to this radical‐democratic ideal of collective self‐regulation: 1) What is the role of private autonomy in a radical‐democratic view? 2) What role does reason play in collective self‐regulation? 3) What relevance might a radical‐democratic outlook have for contemporary democracies? The author addresses these questions by considering Habermas' answers, and then presenting alternative responses to them. The alternatives are also radical‐democratic in inspiration, but they draw on a richer set of normative‐political ideas than Habermas wants to rely on, and are more ambitious in their hopes for democratic practice.

Religious freedom has many roots, and no simple story can explain the contours of its appropriate protections, but there is an important democratic strand in the case for religious freedom. That strand is about enabling the members of a political society, with their conflicting fundamental convictions, to reason together as political equals. Focusing on the First Amendment’s establishment clause, I argue that strong protections of religious freedom are not only about protecting religious conviction, conscience, and conduct from intrusive government regulation. They also are about the inclusion of equals in the enterprise of self-government. That inclusion presents a central challenge to pluralist democracies, but also lies at the heart of their moral promise.

This chapter discusses three central preoccupations in Okin's writing: the relationship between feminism and traditional political theory, the relationship between the family and women's position in society, and the public/private distinction. Okin thought that much traditional political theory was rendered implausible once women were taken into account; she believed that principles of justice must be applied to the family itself; and she accepted—to some extent—a public/private distinction. This chapter critically explores each of these ideas.

Aim: To examine how physicians’ life stances affect their attitudes to end-of-life decisions and their actual end-of-life decision-making.Methods: Practising physicians from various specialties involved in the care of dying patients in Belgium, Denmark, The Netherlands, Sweden, Switzerland and Australia received structured questionnaires on end-of-life care, which included questions about their life stance. Response rates ranged from 53% in Australia to 68% in Denmark. General attitudes, intended behaviour with respect to two hypothetical patients, and actual behaviour were compared between all large life-stance groups in each country.Results: Only small differences in life stance were found in all countries in general attitudes and intended and actual behaviour with regard to various end-of-life decisions. However, with regard to the administration of drugs explicitly intended to hasten the patient’s death , physicians with specific religious affiliations had significantly less accepting attitudes, and less willingness to perform it, than non-religious physicians. They had also actually performed PAD less often. However, in most countries, both Catholics and Protestants reported ever having made such a decision.Discussion: The results suggest that religious teachings influence to some extent end-of-life decision-making, but are certainly not blankly accepted by physicians, especially when dealing with real patients and circumstances. Physicians seem to embrace religious belief in a non-imperative way, allowing adaptation to particular situations

Disruptive societal changes following from emerging science and technology have recently led to a growing interest in developing ethical frameworks. Responsible Research and Innovation (RRI) is such a framework that aims to improve the relationship between science and society. Now a decade after its conceptualization, it still seems to suffer from conceptual unclarity and lack of implementation. Since responsibility in research and innovation practice remains as important as ever, we propose to revive the normative potential of RRI by approaching it as a matter of collective democratic experimentation. To further develop this approach, we propose a pragmatist conceptualization inspired by John Dewey, his work on democracy as an ethical way of life and his attention to the contextual nature of responsibility. Furthermore, we show how his interest in social inquiring publics provides a particularly apt foothold from which to operationalize collective democratic experimentation with RRI. We will illustrate the utility of this approach, with specific attention to the social, experimental and public character of social inquiry, by connecting it to the recent call to use social labs methodology to experiment with RRI. From this we draw lessons for future collective democratic experimentation with responsibility in research and innovation practice.

This article proposes literature and psychoanalysis as forms of critical education, putting in urgent question the market-driven, instrumental models of learning that currently dominate higher education policy. In psychoanalytic terms, it argues, the primary mechanism at work in such a policy is what psychoanalysis calls splitting, which involves above all a kind of banishment of doubt and a rigid assurance in the rightness of the status quo that precludes meaningful change or transformation in the self and the world. The article goes on to identify in psychoanalysis and literature more ‘unsplit’ modes of thinking that refuse the reduction of the human being to a purely functional value. It ends with a reading of Kazuo Ishiguro's Never Let Me Go as a critical meditation on this reductive tendency.