Julian F. Mueller

Populism has taken root almost everywhere in the West. It is crucial to understand how it has come about, where its antagonistic worldview, its nativism, its illiberalism and its anti-pluralism will take us, and how we should seek to fend off this threat to liberal democracy. In particular, what could liberal answers look like? This book is a collection of essays written by young and senior scholars in various fields from philosophy to economics. Part I explores populism’s nature and causes, shedding light on the lure of sovereignty, the perceived representation gap and the process of radicalization, and human psychology. Part II is dedicated to observations inside the political arena, pitting liberalism and populism in a historical perspective, analyzing the risk of democratic backsliding, and asking how liberals should navigate the political need to make compromises. In Part III, the focus turns to liberal responses such as rules-based public deliberation, a liberal ethics attending to civic virtues, improved representation through the blockchain, and polycentric migration policies. Part IV, finally, houses critical engagements with influential relevant authors such as Foucault, Laclau, Berlin, and Harrington.

Even though human smuggling is one of the central topics of contention in the political discourse about immigration, it has received virtually no attention from moral philosophy. This article aims to fill this gap and provide a moral analysis of commercial human smuggling. The article accomplishes this by analyzing whether the moral outrage against human smugglers during the European refugee crisis can be justified. To do this, the article first analyzes whether (commercial) human smuggling is inherently wrong. Answering this question in the negative, this article then asks whether the wholesale condemnation of human smuggling in the European case can nevertheless be justified by recourse to a nation-state’s purported right to political self-determination.

Zunächst einmal möchten wir klären, was der Begriff ökonomischer Bildung umfasst, um in einem zweiten Schritt klären zu können, welche Teilaspekte von ökonomischer Bildung möglicherweise verbindlich gelehrt werden sollten – und welche Teilaspekte etwa auch nur Teil von Spezialausbildungen sein könnten. Wir werden dabei zu dem Schluss kommen, dass vor allem die Politische Ökonomie – also ein Fach, das einen Schwerpunkt auf ordnungsökonomische und ordnungsethische Problemstellungen legt – ein Kandidat für die allgemein verbindliche Ausbildung an deutschen Schulen ist. Im zweiten Schritt möchten wir diskutieren, inwiefern sich die Einführung eines Faches Politische Ökonomie rechtfertigen ließe. Eine Rechtfertigung im philosophischen Sinne muss dabei zeigen können, dass die Einführung eines Fachs Politische Ökonomie nicht nur bestimmten Interessen – z.B. wirtschaftlichen Lobby-Gruppen dient –, sondern von einem gesellschaftlichen Konsens getragen werden könnte.

"Ubuntu is the African idea of personhood: persons depend on other persons in order to be. This is summarised in the expression: umuntu ngumuntu ngabantu, that is, a person is a person through persons. This edited collection illustrates the power of fictionalised representation in reporting research conducted on Ubuntu in Southern Africa. The chapters insert the concept of Ubuntu within the broad intellectual debate of self and community, to demonstrate its intellectual and philosophical value and theoretical grounding in known practices emanating from the African continent, and indeed how it works to unsettle some of our received notions of the self. The contributors look at Ubuntu from an array of viewpoints, illustrated by its applicability in different contexts and facets explored in the four research clusters of African literature, law, political science and theology"--

In this article, the two authors, academics from different contexts and both aware of their whiteness, focus on their own vulnerable selves. The aim is to reflect on their specific agency in this project and to create awareness for subjectivity in research. What are the challenges of two white academics – the one from a first world country with a baggage of colonialism, and the other from South Africa with the apartheid baggage? On the one hand, they are not ‘vulnerable’ selves but indeed very privileged selves. On the other hand, there is an awareness of the fact that this very privilege puts researchers in a vulnerable situation, especially in doing research on Ubuntu in an African context.

Since the collapse of the Soviet Union, there is a wide consensus in society and science that a modern society cannot do without a market economy. The current political and academic debate revolves primarily around the question of what kind of social system a modern society needs. This question includes important normative as well as instrumental aspects. In this essay, we want to pursue the question of how modern societies can best achieve progress in both dimensions. The standard response — both politically and academically — is that we can improve our social system best through piecemeal engineering. According to the standard view, the improvements of our social system should be both democratically legitimizced and put into effect nationwide. In this essay, we want to oppose this consensus and raise the question whether a competition between decentralized social systems would not be a more apt means to reach shared goals. The motivating idea behind this essay is not to pesent a fully-fledged theory, but to question some of the standard presumptions for piecemeal engineering that is often directed against institutional compctition in the realm of social systems.

as Problem mit der normativen Konzeption von Ludwig von Mises ist, dass sie sich zu den Hauptkategorien der Politischen Philosophie querstellt. Sie passt in keine der üblichen Schubladen, ist weder deontologisch noch klar konsequentialistisch, weder kommunitarisch noch Vertragstheorie. In diesem Essay soll es deswegen zuerst darum gehen, die Schwierigkeiten auszuloten, die eine Einordnung der Mises‘schen Sozialphilosophie in das Kategorisierungssystem der Politischen Philosophie mit sich bringt. Im zweiten Abschnitt soll in kurzen Strichen eine Systematik dargelegt werden, innerhalb derer die Sozialphilosophie von Mises in Verbindung zur restlichen Politischen Philosophie gebracht werden kann. Im dritten Abschnitt soll die Liberalismus-Konzeption von Mises anhand der entwickelten Systematik dann in ein Verhältnis zu den großen Liberalismus-Konzeptionen von Bentham, Mill und Locke gesetzt werden. Konkret soll dafür argumentiert werden, dass klassische Liberalismus-Theorien zuerst die normative Frage klären, um dann politische und ökonomische Struktur ableiten zu können. Mises¬ – und viele politisch-ökonomische Konzeptionen nach ihm – gehen, so möchte ich argumentieren, den umgekehrten Weg. Wie das funktionieren kann, soll anhand der Mises’schen Liberalismus-Theorie in Abschnitt vier gezeigt werden. In Punkt fünf möchte ich abschließend meine Einordnung der Mises’schen Theorie in die Politischen Philosophie gegen die von Murray Rothbard, Mises‘ Meisterschüler, verteidigen.

The recent progress in the development of autonomous cars has seen ethical questions come to the forefront. In particular, life and death decisions regarding the behavior of self-driving cars in trolley dilemma situations are attracting widespread interest in the recent debate. In this essay we want to ask whether we should implement a mandatory ethics setting for the whole of society or, whether every driver should have the choice to select his own personal ethics setting. While the consensus view seems to be that people would not be willing to use an automated car that might sacrifice themselves in a dilemma situation, we will defend the somewhat contra-intuitive claim that this would be nevertheless in their best interest. The reason is, simply put, that a PES regime would most likely result in a prisoner’s dilemma.

In this article, I argue that experimental ethics – like experimental economics – should also concern itself with field experiments. In particular, I defend two claims: a) that philosophers in normative ethics could considerably narrow down their disputes if they could agree on a wider range of socio-economic facts; and that b) the socio-economic facts that would be needed for this could only be generated by deliberate large-scale social experimentation. This essay normatively grounds my interest in special administration zones.

Contract-based approaches have been a focus of attention in business ethics. As one of the grand traditions in political philosophy, contractarianism is founded on the notion that we will never resolve deep moral disagreement. Classical philosophers like Hobbes and Locke, or recent ones like Rawls and Gaus, seek to solve ethical conflicts on the level of social rules and procedures. Recent authors in business ethics have sought to utilize contract-based approaches for their field and to apply it to concrete business dilemmas. However, the application of contractarianism to management contexts can cause difficulties. Our article discusses this conceptual problem of contractarian business ethics and presents the idea of order ethics as an alternative. Order ethics, as we argue, can make a difference by conceptually bridging the gap between contractarianism and business ethics.

Ziel dieses Papiers ist es die Ordnungsethik – einen bereichsethischen Ansatz, der derzeit vor allem für wirtschaftsethische Fragestellungen benutzt wird – als eine universelle Methode zur Analyse von bereichsethischen Fragestellungen vorzustellen. Um das Vorhaben handhabbar zu machen, muss es in zweierlei Hinsicht eingeschränkt werden. Zum einen kann es sich hier natürlich nicht um eine voll ausgearbeitete Methodologie für die Analyse von bereichsethischen Fragestellungen handeln, sondern nur um eine methodische Skizze. Zum anderen soll es in diesem Papier im Wesentlichen um solche bereichsethischen Fragestellungen gehen, deren Lösung die Implementierung von formellen wie informellen Regeln erfordert.

The migration debate highlights a crucial shortcoming of non-ideal theory. Non-ideal theory, this essay argues, is in a sense still too ideal. The open border approach to minimal global justice reveals that non-ideal theory is missing the appropriate tools for engaging moral problems that are brought about by a thorough lack of empathy. To remedy this flaw, I conceptualize a two-tier approach to nonideal theory. The basic idea behind the two-tier approach is adding the toolset of instrumental morality to non-ideal theory. Instrumental morality, I argue, should take center stage whenever standard non-ideal theory fails to accomplish its task. Applying the approach to global justice, the article will make the case for charter cities. The policy of creating charter cities is built on the insight that in a world plagued by limited empathy, justice must be advanced in accordance with and not against the existing interests.