•  13
    This book poses the question: How can we organize society in such a way that our disagreement about facts and norms works to the benefit of everyone? In response, it makes the argument for polycentric democracy, a political arrangement consisting of various political units that enjoy different degrees of independence. It is argued that to progress towards justice, we first need to change our attitude towards reasonable disagreement. Theorists have always viewed reasonable disagreement as nuisanc…Read more
  •  13
    An Epistemic Account of Populism
    Episteme 1-22. forthcoming.
    The genus problem of populism presents one of the most vexing conceptual questions across the social sciences: Some theorists believe that populism is nothing more than an assembly of discursive patterns, while others maintain that populism is a strategy to gain political power. Then there are those that argue that populism is a thin ideology that lacks a coherent set of guiding principles. The paper intervenes in this debate in two ways: First, it offers a methodological apparatus for evaluatin…Read more
  •  10
    An egalitarian challenge to increasing epistemic value in democracy
    with Amin Ebrahimi Afrouzi
    Synthese 202 (3): 1-10. 2023.
    The epistemic value of a political procedure—such as democracy or a civil trial system—depends on how well it performs in arriving at decisions that are correct by some independent standard. A core assumption in the literature on epistemic democracy is that boosting the epistemic value of such a procedure makes it better overall. Even though this assumption seems innocuous (and hence has not been discussed in much detail), we will argue that it is not beyond the pale of reasonable disagreement. …Read more
  •  29
    Should Manual Driving be (Eventually) Outlawed?
    with Jan Gogoll
    Science and Engineering Ethics 26 (3): 1549-1567. 2020.
    In recent years, tech evangelists have made headlines predicting that in the future manual driving will be outlawed. This essay will investigate the question whether a ban of human driven cars can be defended on moral grounds in a future scenario in which autonomous cars are going to be significantly safer than manually driven cars. This article will argue that in such a future scenario manually driven cars, for moral reasons, indeed should be banned from participating in regular traffic. Since …Read more
  •  27
    Epistemic Democracy: Making Pluralism Productive
    Episteme 20 (3): 667-684. 2023.
    What, if anything, is the import of Hayek to epistemic democracy? Although Hayek is revered by epistemic democrats for his insights into the epistemic aspects of the market sphere, it is generally believed that his theory is moot with respect to democratic reason. This paper aims to challenge this verdict. I argue that a Hayekian analysis of inclusive public deliberation contributes at least three valuable lessons: (1) Hayek makes the case that under certain conditions even unbiased deliberators…Read more
  •  1
    Unfolding Narratives of Ubuntu in Southern Africa (edited book)
    with John Eliastam
    Routledge. 2018.
    "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 a…Read more
  •  3
    Cordon Sanitaire: Epistemische Geschlossenheit als Wagnis
    In Elif Özmen (ed.), Wissenschaftsfreiheit Im Konflikt, Springer Berlin Heidelberg. pp. 105-122. 2021.
    Die politische Errichtung eines Cordon Sanitaire um populistische Parteien führt auf gesellschaftlicher Ebene zu einer Praxis, in der die Anliegen, Argumente und Ängste von Populisten und ihren Sympathisanten zu einem gewissen Grad tabuisiert werden. Da die Errichtung eines Cordon Sanitaire den epistemischen Zielen der Wissenschaft widerspricht, kommt es notwendig zu einem Spannungsverhältnis, wenn der Cordon Sanitaire auf die Hallen der Wissenschaft ausgedehnt wird. Dieser Beitrag setzt sich au…Read more
  •  14
    Polycentric democracy: using and defusing disagreements
    Erasmus Journal for Philosophy and Economics 10 (1): 150-153. 2017.
  •  7
    Facing our whiteness in doing Ubuntu research. Finding spatial justice for the researcher
    with Sheila Trahar
    HTS Theological Studies 72 (1). 2016.
    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 p…Read more
  •  12
  •  58
    Epistemic democracy: beyond knowledge exploitation
    Philosophical Studies 175 (5): 1267-1288. 2018.
    This essay criticizes the current approach to epistemic democracy. Epistemic democrats are preoccupied with the question of how a society can best exploit a given stock of knowledge. This article argues that the problem-solving capability of a society depends on two factors rather than one. The quality of decision-making depends both on how a democracy is able to make use of its stock of knowledge and on the size of the knowledge stock. Society’s problem-solving capability over time is therefore…Read more
  •  29
    The ethics of commercial human smuggling
    European Journal of Political Theory 20 (1): 138-156. 2018.
    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...
  • 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.…Read more
  •  37
    Polycentric Democracy
    Dissertation, TU Munich. 2015.
    Persistent disagreement is perhaps one of the defining features of modern liberal democracy. Disagreement, though, is not merely a philosophical nuisance, but a source of friction and conflict. The goal of this work is to inquire, whether we can conceive of a political order that might be judged superior to our current modus vivendi arrangements for settling conflict from a diverse set of normative standards or perspectives. In this essay we develop the concept of Polycentric Democracy.
  •  309
    Autonomous Cars: In Favor of a Mandatory Ethics Setting
    with Jan Gogoll
    Science and Engineering Ethics 23 (3): 681-700. 2017.
    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 v…Read more
  • Large-scale social experiments in Experimental Ethics
    In Hannes Rusch & Matthias Uhl (eds.), Experimental Ethics, Palgrave. 2014.
    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 interes…Read more
  •  60
    Order Ethics: Bridging the Gap Between Contractarianism and Business Ethics
    with Christoph Luetge and Thomas Armbrüster
    Journal of Business Ethics 136 (4): 687-697. 2016.
    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…Read more
  •  114
    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 u…Read more
  •  16
    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 mo…Read more
  • Wettbewerb der Solidarsysteme
    Jahrbuch für Recht Und Ethik (22): 329-348. 2014.
    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 — b…Read more