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Ethical relations to the past demand a conscious confrontation of the past. In this sense we will examine the close connection between past events and moral concepts and their influence on current ...

The article sets a goal to clarify the problem of moral universalism in J.S. Mill’s philosophy as an important element of his methodology in ethics. The starting point of the study is Mill’s requirement: in order to do the right thing, we need to take into account the traditions, values, and moral norms, i.e., universal prescriptive judgments developed in society. The article analyzes Mill’s method of finding maximum utility and achieving general happiness. It is shown that, in this method, universality is the property of moral rules and values to be universally addressed, and this property is based on our common experience as a species. The reverse side of this genesis is the impossibility of absoluteness of these norms and values, due to incompleteness of species experience, which always has specific historical character. Therefore, such rules are subject to change and, while they remain standard in man’s activity, we also have to take them critically. Effective inclusion of moral norms in our search for maximum utility is indirectly confirmed by (a) the example of methodological difficulties in discourse ethics, similar to utilitarianism in the way it seeks rational explication of moral acts, (b) the history of economics as a discipline largely formed under the influence of utilitarianism. In both cases, researchers come to the conclusion that it is necessary to take into account supra-individual experience in decision-making and its influence on the individual. Since species experience is multilevel communication, we can note similarities between the methodology of Mill’s utilitarianism and communicative ethics. It is concluded that the problem of moral universality in Mill’s ethical methodology is revealed as a problem of maximizing communication as the basis of maximizing utility.

Humans display a puzzling cross-population variation in the ability to cooperate with out-group members. One hypothesis is that impartial institutions substituting kith and kin as risk-buffering providers would favor the expansion of cooperative networks. Here I propose a research design that overcomes the endogeneity between institutions and preferences, making it possible to isolate the causal effects of institutional quality on out-group cooperation. I study a land tenure reform implemented as a randomized control-trial in hundreds of Beninese villages. The reform reduces the village community’s discretion in regulating members’ access to land by granting formal legal protection to individual rights-holders. Using a lab-in-the-field incentivized experiment, I show that the reform significantly increases participants’ cooperation with anonymous strangers from other villages. The results illustrate how humans' investments in in-group and out-group relationships are sensitive to cost-benefit evaluations, and emphasize that the institutional environment is a key driver of large-scale human cooperation.

The criticisms of the falsity of universal recognition carried out by leftists, led by Karl Max, and the queries of its desirability proposed by rightists, represented by Friedrich Nietzsche, raise challenges to Francis Fukuyama’s theory of “the end of history” from two opposite directions. At present, Chinese-style political meritocracy based on the party state is a political form that combines these left-wing and right-wing challenges and has the potential to move beyond “the end of history”. However, whether it can truly surpass “the end of history” depends on whether it can form a desirable and stable alternative political form under modern conditions. To this end, Chinese-style political meritocracy must respond positively to the three challenges it faces under modern conditions: the tension between “debichengwei” (one’s virtue must have a matching position, 德必称位) and moral universalism, the corrosion of social justice from the hierarchical social structure caused by “weibichenglu” (one’s position must have a matching salary, 位必称禄), and the threat of social indoctrination to individual autonomy. The “introversive political meritocracy” jointly shaped by “advocating morals for the public,” “arete based on altruism,” and “introversive self-cultivation” is a desirable political form that can successfully respond to these three challenges.

Human rights have become the language of justice in our globalizing world. Yet, curiously, despite many rounds of debate over moral versus political conceptions, little attention has been paid to the meaning of human rights as international legal concepts. The specific normative significance of the fact that human rights are legal norms of the international legal order and the implications this has for the nature and justice of that order has gotten lost in the fray. This article addresses Patrick Macklem’s excellent attempt to fill that gap. He is right that a key function of international human rights law is to mitigate the injustices of an international legal order that distributes sovereignty to states. A legal conception of human rights is indeed needed to get at the distinctive normative role international human rights documents play as law. But I argue that, while such an analysis can and must supplement other approaches, no adequate understanding of human rights as international legal norms can dispense with moral justifications of them. Otherwise, the purpose and specificity of human rights as distinct from the rights of corporations and other non-human entities gets obscured and the priority of the human rights of human persons, vis-à-vis other legal persons, is undermined.

In his recent analysis of multiculturalism, Tom Beauchamp has argued that those who implement multicultural reasoning in their arguments against common morality theories, such as his own, have failed to understand that multiculturalism is neither a form of moral pluralism nor ethical relativism but is rather a universalistic moral theory in its own right. Beauchamp’s position is indeed on the right track in that multiculturalists do not consider themselves ethical relativists. Yet, Beauchamp tends to miss the mark when he argues that multiculturalism is in effect a school of thought that endorses a form of moral universalism that is akin to his own vision of a common morality. As a supporter of multiculturalism, I would like to discuss some aspects of Beauchamp’s comments on multiculturalism and clarify what a multicultural account of public bioethics might look like. Ultimately, multiculturalism is purported as a means of managing diversity in the public arena and should not be thought of as endorsing either a version of moral relativism or a universal morality. By simultaneously refraining from the promotion of a comprehensive common moral system while it attempts to avoid a collapse into relativism, multiculturalism can serve as the ethico-political framework in which diverse moralities can be managed and in which opportunities for ethical dialogue, debate and deliberation on the prospects of common bioethical norms are made possible.

Summary The concept of autonomy has played a pivotal role in bioethics discourse since the 1970s. Yet, prior to the emergence of bioethics, autonomy had received scant mention in twentieth-century philosophy and was conspicuous by its absence from discussions of healthcare. The term was not even mentioned in the 1967 edition of the Encyclopedia of philosophy . The emergence of bioethics in the early 1970s coincided with increased attention across the western world to civil and human rights; with the rise of this new discipline the liberal emphasis on individual rights was recast in terms of respect for patient autonomy. Although its legal appeal was based on the ease with which autonomy was operationalized in the doctrine of informed consent, the power of the concept of autonomy lay in what it symbolized: the right of an individual to resist coercion or compulsion in the context of a relationship of power. Most commentators in the field of bioethics are familiar with autonomy as one of the four principles of biomedical ethics laid down by Beauchamp and Childress in their canonical text, The principles of biomedical ethics (1979) . ‘Principlism’ is a mid-level theoretical tool, which has had broad appeal in facilitating analysis of ethical dilemmas in biomedicine, grasped in the abstract as conflicts between two or more of the four principles. Yet the principle of autonomy, which has had such an extraordinary influence in contemporary bioethics bears only, passing resemblance to the concept of autonomy, which emerged in early modern philosophy. Although the bioethical redrawing of autonomy owes a large debt both to the philosophical tradition and to the social upheavals of the twentieth century, the relationship between contemporary interpretations of the concept of autonomy in bioethics and its historical origins is rarely examined. The purpose of this paper is to trace the evolution of the concept of autonomy from its emergence in modern moral theory to contemporary debates about its relevance for bioethical analysis. The roots of the principle of autonomy can be traced back to the political theory of ancient Greece. Originally used to describe the capacity of the Greek polis or city-state to govern itself, the concept of autonomy received its first modern expression – and its first application to the individual – in the moral theory of Immanuel Kant. For Kant, autonomy stood for the ideal of free will: a human will be driven to action, not by appetite or desire, but by identification with a ‘higher’ or rational self. At the heart of Kant's ethics is the close association of moral action with human rationality; for Kant, autonomous action – action which is deliberately and self-consciously motivated by moral reasons – is the quintessential expression of human rationality. Although the moral universalism Kant sought to defend is no longer philosophically tenable, his insights about many of the core features of autonomous action remained influential until well into the twentieth century. This paper falls into four parts: in the first section I will explore the contextual factors which influenced the emergence of autonomy as a principle appropriate for bioethical analysis. From there, I will examine the hugely influential definition of autonomy put forward by Beauchamp and Childress in the Principles of biomedical ethics and trace the philosophical foundations of this concept. I will then provide a brief account of the concept of autonomy so central to Kant's moral theory and I will conclude by examining recent accounts of personal autonomy in contemporary philosophy with the aim of arriving at a richer understanding of autonomy, which can perhaps be of greater service to bioethics.

In the present interview, Jürgen Habermas answers questions about his wide-ranging work in philosophy and social theory, as well as concerning current social and political developments to whose understanding he has made important theoretical contributions. Among the aspects of his work addressed are his conception of communicative rationality as a countervailing force to the colonization of the lifeworld by capitalism and his understanding of philosophy after Hegel as postmetaphysical thinking, for which he has recently provided a comprehensive historical grounding. The scope and relevance of his ideas can be seen from his reflections on current issues, ranging from the prospects of translational democracy at a time of resurgent nationalism and populism, to political developments in Germany since reunification, to the role of religion in the public sphere and the impact of the new social media on democratic discourse.

Feministyczna etyka troski, której głównymi twórczyniami są Carol Gilligan i Nel Noddings, to stanowisko pod wieloma względami przeciwstawne w stosunku do dominujących paradygmatów moralnych o charakterze racjonalno-uniwersalistycznym. Etyka troski proponuje partykularyzm moralny, zarówno w odniesieniu do międzyludzkich interakcji (kwestia „ja – inny”), jak i do moralnych dylematów – tak teoretycznych, jak i praktycznych. Etyka troski podkreśla, że ujmowanie dylematów jako skontekstualizowanych, nie zaś abstrakcyjnych, sprzyja wzbudzaniu postawy empatii, łagodzi ostrość sądów moralnych, a przede wszystkim pomaga w znajdowaniu realnych, możliwych do zastosowania w praktyce rozwiązań. To właśnie może stanowić o jej przewadze w stosunku do stanowisk o charakterze uniwersalistycznym.

EnglishThe purpose of the commemoration of the bicentenary of the work of Kant Toward Perpetual Peace, Habermas proposes a discursive reconstruction of cosmopolitanism challenging the renewal of realistic objections of Carl Schmitt, whereby only the return to the jus publicum Europaeum enables limitation wars while the moral universalism, led to a confusion of values ​​the political (friend/enemy) with the moral (good/bad) and served as the basis for the cosmopolitan organization transformed the particular interests of a party to the universal values ​​of humanity and deny the other party, causing the criminalization of the enemy and causing the total wars. However, Habermas notes that this fundamentalism of human rights can only be avoided by a discursive reconstruction shows that human rights are not moral rights and that the formation of a cosmopolitan democracy is the only one capable of allowing a procedural application of human rights. portuguesA proposito da comemoracao do bicentenario da obra de Kant Rumo a paz perpetua, Habermas apresenta uma proposta de reconstrucao discursiva do cosmopolitismo que contesta a renovacao das objecoes realistas de Carl Schmitt, segundo a qual so o retorno ao jus publicum Europaeum possibilita a limitacao das guerras, enquanto o universalismo moral, conduziu a uma confusao dos valores do politico (amigo/inimigo) com os da moral (bem/mal) e serviu de fundamento para que a organizacao cosmopolita transformasse os interesses particulares de uma das partes em valores universais da humanidade e os negasse a outra parte, provocando a criminalizacao do inimigo e originando as guerras totais. Contudo, Habermas observa que este fundamentalismo dos direitos humanos somente pode ser evitado por uma reconstrucao discursiva que mostra que os direitos humanos nao sao direitos morais e que a formacao de uma democracia cosmopolita, e a unica capaz de permitir uma aplicacao procedimental dos direitos humanos.

Throughout the Western world, people’s policy preferences are correlated across domains in a strikingly similar fashion. Based on a simple model, we propose that what partly explains the particular internal structure of political ideology is heterogeneity in moral universalism: the extent to which an individual’s altruism and trust remain constant as social distance increases. In representative surveys with 15,000 respondents, we measure universalism using structured choice tasks. In the data, heterogeneity in universalism descriptively explains a substantial share of desired government spending levels for welfare, affirmative action, environmental protection, foreign aid, health care, military, border control, and law enforcement. Moreover, the canonical left-right divide on issues such as the military or redistribution reverses depending on whether participants evaluate more or less universalist versions of these policies. These patterns hold in the United States, Australia, Germany, France, and Sweden, but not outside the West. We confirm the idea of higher universalism among the Western political left by estimating the universalism of U.S. regions using large-scale donation data and linking this measure to local vote shares.

The 'Westphalian' era in European politics began at a time when new nation states wanted to curb the power of religious bodies precisely so as to create a system of law and equity open to all citizens. Some religious representatives dismiss the entire idea of 'rights' as an improper language for radically dependent and interdependent creatures the right of self-determination. The paradox of human rights is that it is in one sense profoundly secular while also being profoundly respectful of convictions derived from non-political, even non-'worldly' sources. Religious conviction is the oldest and arguably strongest such phenomenon; accepting its role in the state and its security from the state's defining control is the beginning of an authentic political pluralism. A better understanding of how the law as a matter of fact deals with religious diversity and conscientious reservation will help; so will admission that moral universalism has a history, and one in which religious categories have played a decisive role.

Universal human rights and particular cultural identities, which are relativistic by nature, seem to stand in conflict with each other. It is commonly suggested that the relativistic natures of cultural identities undermine universal human rights and that human rights might compromise particular cultural identities in a globalised world. This article examines this supposed clash and suggests that it is possible to frame a human rights approach in such a way that it becomes the starting point and constraining framework for all non-deficient cultural identities. In other words, it is possible to depict human rights in a culturally sensitive way so that universal human rights can meet the demands of a moderate version of meta-ethical relativism which acknowledges a small universal core of objectively true or false moral statements and avers that, beyond that small core, all other moral statements are neither objectively true nor false.

Contents: Introduction Part I Pluralism, Rights and Fairness: Basic moral values: a shared core, Frances V. Harbor Morality and foreign policy, George F. Kennan Moral skepticism and international relations, Marshall Cohen International ethics and international law, Terry Nardin The law of peoples, John Rawls Human rights and capabilities, Amartya Sen Reciprocity in international relations, Robert O. Keohane Covenants with and without a sword: self-governance is possible, Elinor Ostrom, James Walker and Roy Gardner. Part II Just War?: Just war and human rights, David Luban The slippery slope to preventive war, Neta C. Crawford Political action: the problem of dirty hands, Michael Walzer Terrorism without intention, David Rodin. Part III Intervention: The politics and ethics of military intervention, Stanley Hoffmann Humanitarian intervention: an overview of the ethical issues, Michael J. Smith The responsibility to protect, Gareth Evans and Mohamed Sahnoun. Part IV Nuclear Ethics: Force and diplomacy in the nuclear age, Henry A. Kissinger NPT: the logic of inequality, Joseph S. Nye Jr. Part V Human Rights and Citizenship: The relative universality of human rights, Jack Donnelly Patriotism and cosmopolitanism, Martha C. Nussbaum Aliens and citizens: the case for open borders, Joseph H. Carens. Part VI Ethical Globalization: Moral universalism and global economic justice, Thomas W. Pogge International liberalism and distributive justice: a survey of recent thought, Charles R. Beitz Debate: global poverty relief: more than charity: cosmopolitan alternatives to the 'Singer solution', Andrew Kuper and Peter Singer An equal-opportunity approach to the allocation of international aid, Humberto G. Llavador and John E. Roemer Fairness considerations in world politics: lessons from international trade negotiations, Ethan B. Kapstein Name index.

Commentary on Judith Shklar's skepticism has ranged from the claim that it was not the central characteristic of her thought to the argument that it seriously hobbled her thinking about justice. In fact Shklar's uniqueness as a thinker resides precisely in the fact that she combined a sweeping skepticism with a strong commitment to liberal justice. Skepticism interacted with her liberal moral commitments to inspire her account of injustice, without which her views about justice are impossible to grasp. Shklar's skepticism produced her laser-like focus on sources of injustice and oppression for the individual, whom she perceived to be potentially threatened no less by tribe, nation, family, or a democratic citizens' community than by the state itself. It produced not only her highly original insights into the inadequacy of all existing models of justice, but also her subtle yet concerted effort to render democracy safe for liberalism in political theory while at the same make liberalism more egalitarian.

Siendo Muguerza un gran conocedor de Kant, sus críticas a la moral kantiana han ido creciendo con el tiempo. Muguerza ha disentido del principio kantiano de universalización, ha primado el principio de autonomía y ha criticado el reino de los fines para, finalmente, ha elaborado una concepción propia del individualismo moral, basada en la alternativa del disenso. En este artículo se comentan algunas de las críticas de Muguerza a Kant, sobre todo las que atacan el carácter universalista e imperativo de la moral kantiana. Asimismo se comentan otras objeciones al universalismo kantiano, provenientes de las éticas feministas y de la neuroética. Se concluye que el individualismo ético de Muguerza sigue siendo válido, aunque ha de ser reformulado en algunos aspectos. Al final se propone una interpretación axiológica de la moral kantiana, según la cual los principios que afirman Kant y Muguerza son valores que se contraponen entre sí, dando lugar a diferentes concepciones del individualismo ético según se prioricen unos u otros valores.

Normative political theory over recent decades has focused mainly on what ought to be done as far as migration policies are concerned. It faces a basic challenge, which stems from two competing, yet equally fundamental, ideals underpinning liberal democratic societies: a commitment to moral universalism and the exclusionary requirement of democracy. The objective of this special issue, ‘New Challenges in Immigration Theory’, is to provide a conceptual overview of (some) immigration theories and to highlight the challenges new streams of immigration pose for normative (political) theory and liberal democratic practice. The issue will consider how to reconcile state-based exclusion with a commitment to equal moral concern for all persons, by focusing on the non-standard immigration questions that have so far been ‘neglected’ by normative political theory. In line with this objective, the issue will discuss some of the inadequacies of the dominant political theories of immigration and show how such theories ...

Almost 40 years ago, when I was doing fieldwork in Poland, the word Solidarity was on everyone’s lips. One of the popular rallying cries, here and elsewhere in the region, was that of “rejoining Europe”. Similar ebullience was found in many Western countries at the time, justified by the increasingly progressive politics of the European Economic Community (as it was known at the time) and by the intellectual vogue for “civil society” as a key component of the continent’s liberal Enlightenment heritage. Today, in Poland and elsewhere in Europe, scepticism toward the idea of solidarity at the level of the EU runs deep. Populist politicians thrive and liberal civil society struggles. Why is this happening? Where else in the contemporary world can solidary solutions to the problems of the planet be forged? The answer given in this lecture will be radically Eurosceptic. Without denying the remarkable accomplishments of Europe since classical antiquity, it is necessary to place them in wider contexts. The landmass should be conceived as Eurasia, of which Europe is an important macro-region; it is an equivalent of China, not of Asia. The lecture will touch briefly on Axial Age theory, when social solidarities emerged on an unprecedented scale across the landmass, accompanied by ideas of moral universalism. It will also expound Jack Goody’s thesis concerning “alternating leadership” between East and West since the urban revolution of the Bronze Age. If we follow Goody by abandoning the rhetoric of a “European miracle” and look instead to Eurasian commonalities over the last three millennia, we shall be in a better position to create the geopolitical and moral solidarities urgently needed by humanity.

This article explores L. T. Hobhouse's transformation of liberal internationalism at the beginning of the twentieth century. It argues that Hobhouse's thought contributes to understanding dilemmas within the frame of liberal internationalism and the emergence of international functionalism. Using a philosophical approach, Hobhouse tackled international concerns throughout his life, alongside J. A. Hobson, Gilbert Murray, James Bryce, H. N. Brailsford, Norman Angell, and G. L. Dickinson. He restated a belief in human progress and association in ever-greater circles. But he noted,contraformer hopes, that nationalism furthered democracy only briefly, and that liberal democracy remained incapable of bringing about effective international cooperation and moral universalism. In order to resolve this impasse, Hobhouse suggested substituting political with economic democracy on an international scale. The aim was to create an international functional organisation consisting of vocational and civic associations and states, which would allow individuals to entertain multiple, overlapping, and transnational loyalties. He thus anticipated proposals for global reform that became increasingly popular after the end of World War II. However, in spite of his concern with domestic social equality and his borrowing from international socialism, Hobhouse failed to qualify his internationalism with an analogous interest in equality.

This paper provides a commentary on the papers in this special feature, and on the conceptualisation of scale and moral regulation in the sociological and geographical traditions more generally. It uses three recent monographs on empire and moral regulation to illustrate the current challenge to assumptions of scale embedded in the methodological nationalism characteristic of some comparative historical sociology. In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, key moral regulation projects were in fact developed in transnational and imperial spaces, exhibiting a place-transcending moral universalism that was at the same time productive of space, particularly insofar as it remade the moral scale of the nation. The attention paid here to these dynamic, scalar, moral geographies informs the discussion of the different, though complementary, ways in which the topic of moral regulation is approached in the preceding papers. It is argued that the remapping of the moral terrain demonstrated here suggests that the various scales involved (self, body, home, nation, empire, the universal) are the negotiated and contested products, rather than the preconditions, of moral regulation.

Although Heidegger was influenced by a number of thinkers, above all ancient Greeks and nineteenth-century Germans, the fragments of the pre-Socratic philosophers Heraclitus and Parmenides exerted a particular fascination on Heidegger. Revolted by what he considered the superficiality of bourgeois life and the spiritual decline of the West, Heidegger wanted to demolish that society, looked to the Nazis to effect a revolution in politics, and drew inspiration for his Nazism from the pre-Socratics. In the process, he rejected the moral universalism of Kant, distorted Nietzsche’s thinking, and marshaled the pre-Socratics in support of his call on Germans to accept their destiny and undertake their mission to struggle for glory and for spiritual rejuvenation. Heidegger’s interpretation of Heraclitus and Parmenides was, thus, an integral component of his particular brand of Nazism.

RECENT WORK ON EMPIRE IN THE HISTORY of political thought has been much concerned with the connections between various forms of moral universalism and projects of conquest. This work, especially on the “mutually constitutive” relationship between liberalism and empire, has asked: What sorts of universalism have accompanied imperial expansions, whether to justify them or to reflect critically on them? 1 Is moral universalism inherently imperial? What was it about nineteenth-century liberalism, in particular, that made it so hospitable to imperial ambitions? 2 Liberalism has all too often had a parochializing effect on the European imagination, thanks in large part to a linear view of progress that figured European civilization as the vanguard or the telos of world history, as at once unique and a model for the rest of the world. Even as it came to understand itself in global terms, then, Europe “diminished its own ethical possibilities.” 3 Paradoxically, scientific and scholarly attention to global phenomena in the nineteenth century was in part driven by, and can be said to have contributed to, European parochialism, as Europe came into an understanding of itself as an entity with global reach and global significance, both because of its outsized power and because of the apparent uniqueness of European progress in human history. This process is particularly striking in the field of inter

I analyse what exactly is being addressed when the notion of ‘literacy inequalities’ is cited in the context of international policy with regard to education in general and literacy in particular. Whilst literacy statistics are used as indicators of social inequality and as a basis for policy in improving rights, educational attainment, etc., I question to what extent literacy levels (or various accounts of ‘lack of literacy’) can be taken as offering a valid account of ‘inequality’ in the larger international context. Recent work on literacy from an ethnographic perspective has questioned the international categorisation of a single uniform thing called ‘literacy’, from which consequences can be drawn and has instead focused on local meanings and cultural variations in what counts. In particular I take issue with arguments rooted in economic generalisation on the one hand, by such authors as Amartya Sen, and on the other in moral universalism, in the work of such authors as Nussbaum. I argue that an ethnographic perspective offers two major contributions to this debate: (1) that ethnographic perspectives and an understanding of literacy practices as multiple and culturally varied, can help avoid simplistic and often ethnocentric claims regarding the consequences of literacy based on one-dimensional and culturally narrow categories and definitions and (2) that an ethnographic perspective can sensitise us to the ways in which the power to name and define is a crucial component of inequality. I will elaborate on these two ‘contributions’ with reference both to theoretical debates in the field in recent years and to examples of practice in literacy programmes in different international contexts.

This study examined whether cultural values predict individuals’ moral attitudes. The main objective was to shed light on the moral universalism and relativism debate by showing that the answer depends on the moral issues studied. Using items from the Morally Debatable Behaviours Scale (MDBS) fielded in the World Value Survey (WVS), we found that moral issues can be differentiated cross-culturally into attitudes towards (1) dishonest–illegal and (2) personal–sexual issues. Drawing upon evolutionary and cultural theories, we expected that the former moral domain is not related to cultural values, whereas the latter is influenced by cultural conceptions of the self (i.e. independent versus interdependent selves). We used multilevel modelling with Schwartz’ cultural values as the independent variables and the two moral domains as assessed through the MDBS as dependent variables to test our hypothesis. After controlling for individual-level differences in moral attitudes as well as the socio-economic development of countries, our findings confirmed that attitudes towards dishonest–illegal issues were not related to cultural values whereas attitudes towards personal–sexual issues were predicted by the Autonomy–Embeddedness value dimension. We conclude that our study sheds not only light on the universalism and relativism debate, but also on the discriminant validity of cultural values. Copyright # 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Cosmopolitanism is frequently criticised for overlooking the situatedness of morality and the importance of solidarity in their aspiration to global justice. A number of thinkers take these criticisms seriously and pursue ‘a communitarian path to cosmopolitanism’. Four such approaches are considered. All four view morality and justice as grounded in a specific social setting and hold that justice is more likely to result if there is some ‘we-feeling’ among people, but are simultaneously committed to expanding the realm of justice and moral concern to beyond national boundaries. To enable the theorisation of an expanded realm of situated justice and moral concern, community is conceived as not necessarily corresponding to political boundaries and the moral the self is seen as able and eager to loosen some of its traditional moral connections and to form new ones. Unfortunately, these approaches are likely to exclude significant segments of the world's population from the expanded realm of moral concern they theorise, most notably, a large proportion of the world's poor. It is suggested that the thought of Emmanuel Levinas might offer a way of reducing the gap between solidarity and moral universalism.

Human rights do not represent an absolute truth. Otherwise, they would represent ideology, which is contradictory to the basic idea of human rights itself. Consequently, there is a need for redefinition of the main presuppositions of modern conception of human rights represented in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. This paper argues that Rawls's conception of human rights is significant for the refiguration of human rights. It represents the path towards postmodern idea of human rights and the recognition of difference.

Modern politics is at times a balancing act between universal claims about the human (equal rights, dignity, and respect) and political actions which may seem to violate these claims (torture, just wars, repudiation of certain cultural practices, tacit discrimination). An exploration of some of the philosophical roots of the modern understanding of the person, when it was the subject of debate, provides a perspective at the origin of Modernity from which to evaluate the tenuous relationship between moral universalism and alterity at the heart of this tension. The debates at Valladolid in 1550–51 between Las Casas and Sepúlveda, arguing their conceptions of the human, can shed light on how and why arguments for inequality creep back into the modern discourse on alterity. The lessons from Valladolid, therefore, might help to limit or clarify recourse to such arguments.

Foucault’s anti-modern effect - According to the author, two different approaches to modernity are now competing. The first one (coming from Schopenhauer and Nietzsche) underlines the irrational and voluntaristic nature of any moral code and political power. The second one (coming from Rousseau and Kant) grounds progress and legitimacy upon democratic, legal and moral universalism. Foucault's philosophy of life belongs to the first of these approaches. This is where the clash with Habermas, belonging to the second approach, becomes poignantly significant. At first, for Foucault, the power of sovereignty represses life, whereas insanity and madness preserve a transcendent meaning of liberation. Later on, life moulds the inside like a pleat of the outside, subjectivity becomes an effect of power. In Foucault's anti-humanism, Man and God die together like far gone delusions that are recaptured into nature. Schopenhauer's compassion becomes sharp diagnosis of the many tortures inflicted upon man's body, whereas Zarathustra's heroism becomes on the one hand neo-stoical aesthetics of existence and on the other political revolutionary anarchism.

Trata-se de revisitar a formulação habermasiana do universalismo moral de forma a evitar as aporias do naturalismo e do relativismo cultural, segundo uma perspectiva pragmáticoformal capaz de fazer jus ao complexo fenômeno da religião em um mundo pós-secular pluralista, onde crentes, ateus e agnósticos podem coexistir e participar ativamente da construção de uma sociedade mais justa e tolerante.

The Neo-Aristotelian ethical naturalism of Philippa Foot and Rosalind Hursthouse purports to establish a naturalistic criterion for the virtues. Specifically, by developing a parallel between the natural ends of nonhuman animals and the natural ends of human beings, they argue that character traits are justified as virtues by the extent to which they promote and do not inhibit natural ends such as self-preservation, reproduction, and the well-being of one’s social group. I argue that the approach of Foot and Hursthouse cannot provide a basis for moral universalism, the widely-accepted idea that each human being has moral worth and thus deserves significant moral consideration. Foot and Hursthouse both depict a virtuous agent as implicitly acting in accord with moral universalism. However, with respect to charity, a virtue they both emphasize, their naturalistic criterion (especially in the more elaborate form developed by Hursthouse) at best provides a warrant for a restricted form of charity that extends only to a limited number of persons. There is nothing in the natural ends of human beings, as Foot and Hursthouse understand these, that gives us a reason for having any concern for the well-being of human beings as such.

MacIntyre’s critique of liberalism relies crucially on a distinctive moral particularism, for which morality and rationality are fundamentally tradition-constituted. In light of this, some have detected in his work a moral relativism, radically in tension with his endorsement of a Thomist universalism. I dispute this reading, arguing instead that MacIntyre is a consistent universalist who pays due attention to the moral-epistemic importance of traditions. Analysing his teleological understanding of rational enquiry, I argue that this approach shows how it is possible, dialectically, to reconcile the particularity of our starting-points with the assertion of universal truths. What MacIntyre offers, I contend, is a moral universalism that avoids the pitfalls of its liberal counterpart, and invites an important meta-theoretical shift with respect to the scope for toleration and social critique and toleration in contemporary pluralist society.

In his book, World Poverty and Human Rights, Pogge sets out to articulate an approach to basic justice that is inversal and cosmopolitan. This notion of justice is to be articulated through the language of human rights. Pogge’s arguments about justice, moral universalism and cosmopolitanism are impressive and reward serious study. It is to be hoped. indeed, that many aspects of his argument might be adopted by the elite ruling classes of world politics; they have much to offer in the project of creating a world that is humane for all.

Feminist ethics is a branch of moral philosophy. Its concerns range across meta-ethics (the question of how feminist moral principles and values may be grounded or legitimated), moral theory (the articulation of substantive feminist moral principles and values), and applied ethics (the application of feminist moral principles and values to specific areas of practice such as health, education, reproduction, war, and so forth). (1) Yet although it is a branch of moral philosophy, there is a sense in which feminist ethics has always unsettled and subverted the morality/politics binary that helps to define the business of modern moral philosophy in the Western academy. According to this mainstream thinking (reflected also in much commonsense usage) morality may ground, orient, or be applied as a corrective to politics, but nevertheless a clear line is (must be) drawn between them. (2) Morality is defined as being about values and principles that transcend the particularities of any specific human life, whereas politics is about the struggles and negotiations through which those particularities are constructed, sustained, challenged, and managed. The subversion of this binary takes different forms in different strands of feminist ethics. But one common thread that runs through all feminist ethics is the argument that the moral theories, religious and philosophical, that have dominated thinking about morality from ancient times to modernity in the West are fundamentally political in one key sense. All of them purport to be the revelation of God or outcome of reason (or both), but all of them turn out, in whole or in part, to be about the reflection and maintenance of relations of power in which women are systematically oppressed, excluded, and silenced. However, feminist ethicists differ in the extent to which they interpret the latter as a problem in principle or in application and in the extent to which they turn the same skeptical eye upon their own moral discourse. (3) As a result of this, ongoing debates within feminist ethics have been less to do with the substantive accounts of justice and the good on offer and more to do with the question of whether feminist claims about justice and the good have any authoritative foundation or can achieve universal reach across different women in different times and places. For feminist critics of moral universalism, feminist ethics risks assimilating and/or silencing different women, thus reproducing the same oppressive politics as the patriarchal mainstream in which morality operates as a mask for power. For feminist universalists, their critics risk reducing morality to politics in the sense of making all moral claims contingent on specificities of power and culture and thereby losing the possibility of making the moral critique of women's oppression that is needed to underpin feminism as a political project. Within the context of feminism as a transnational movement, which reaches across barriers of state and culture, the question of authoritative foundation and universal reach for the claims of feminist ethics is particularly salient. For example, most feminist ethics in the Western tradition has tended to focus either on abstract meta-ethical issues or on the application of feminist insights to issues that particularly affect women within Western liberal states. (4) Even where specifically international contexts or issues are in question (e.g., global distributive justice, human rights, and war) there has been a tendency to take an ethical position worked out in relation to the context of a Western liberal state and apply it to the international domain. (5) This tendency has increasingly become subject to challenge by non-Western feminists, who argue for the irrelevance or inapplicability of the concerns of Western feminist ethics to the lives and experiences of women in nonliberal states and/or non-Judeo-Christian cultures. (6) In this article, my concern is with a response to the feminist dilemma between moral universalism and moral pluralism--a response that appears to offer a particularly promising route forward for a feminist ethics that is specifically concerned with international, transnational, or global political contexts and issues. …

driven by a deeply-held belief in personhood as the defining, and universal, basis for legal entitlement. The argument is attractive and is hard to fault as the normative underpinning for a theory of law and politics. The internationalism which is at its core is appealing to academics, and others, who can avail of the opportunities created by the new cosmopolitan world order. Beyond these considerations there are sound reasons of principle in support of the moral universalism which guides the human rights movement. The evidence is stacked not against universal principles (now widely reflected in international legal instruments), but against the ability to translate these into practical action. The reality for large numbers of the world's marginalized groups is of a tightly regulated public space where the chance to develop an autonomous life is seriously impeded. In many parts of the world, access is denied to the resources which might guarantee an autonomous life. As a result people move, or at least attempt to do so. Movement is also triggered by the threat of persecution, or other serious human rights abuses. Forced migration thus reflects a basic failure of the human rights movement to achieve its international objectives. It is the initial abuse of human rights (social, economic, civil, political or cultural) which is the principal problem and the prime injustice. Exile is not a romantic condition.1

Moral universalism centrally involves the idea that the moral assessment of persons and their conduct, of social rules and states of affairs, must be based on fundamental principles that do not, explicitly or covertly, discriminate arbitrarily against particular persons or groups. This general idea is explicated in terms of three conditions. It is then applied to the discrepancy between our criteria of national and global economic justice. Most citizens of developed countries are unwilling to require of the global economic order what they assuredly require of any national economic order, for example, that its rules be under democratic control, that it preclude life-threatening poverty as far as is reasonably possible. Without a plausible justification, such a double standard constitutes covert arbitrary discrimination against the global poor.

Este artículo pretende mostrar la necesidad de pensar un concepto de justicia global que vaya más allá de los paradigmas tradicionales de la filosofía. Si queremos una justicia global que incluya a cada sí mismo, es necesario repensar la perspectiva tradicional que domina la discusión sobre derecho internacional. Necesitamos una reflexión crítica sobre la modernidad y la globalización actual. Esta crítica permitirá proponer una nueva Ilustración donde lo global pueda vincularse con el cosmopolitismo y el universalismo moral. El reto será construir una globalización justa con todos y cada uno de los individuos que conforman la nueva ciudadanía global.

I briefly reprise a few themes of my book Moral Understandings in order to address some questions about responsibility and justification. I argue for a thoroughly situated and naturalized view of moral justification that warns us not to take moral universalism too easily at face value. I also argue for the significance of reports of experience, among other kinds of empirical evidence, in testing the habitability of moral forms of life. Claudia Card and Lorraine Code are two philosophers whose achievements in ethics, epistemology, and feminist philosophy I greatly admire, and from whose work I have learned so much for many years. They have provided a precise and sympathetic reading of my book Moral Understandings in a collaborative but also thought-provoking way. The questions they raise are difficult and deep. Without trying to respond to their concerns point for point, I will put in focus some central themes of the book so that I can address some of their questions about responsibility and justification. Moral Understandings is a work in metaethics. Its critique of the "theoreticaljuridical" model of moral philosophy is meant to clear space for an "expressivecollaborative" one. The expressive-collaborative model isn't another normative moral theory-it's a guiding picture of how we could look at morality in order to better serve two goals of moral inquiry that I assume many moral philosophers share: giving adequate description and illuminating analysis of what morality

This article is a critical examination of MacIntyre’s notion of morality in reference to Kant’s deontological moral theory. The examination shows that MacIntyre (a) criticizes Kant’s moral theory to defend virtue ethics or neo-Aristotelian ethics with a weak notion of morality; (b) favors the idea of local morality, which does not leave any room for moral assessment and reciprocity in an intercultural domain; and (c) fails to provide good arguments for his moral historicism and against Kant’s moral universalism.

Throughout human history the idea of moral universalism has repeatedly appeared, but always in some less than universalistic, and hence morally compromised, form: in the religious imagination and culture, in the ideologies of liberalism and official socialism and in the liberal theory of the state, and in the informing worldview of the modern human and social sciences, especially anthropology. This discussion raises the question whether, and poses the possibility that, despite all the travails which globalization processes are unleashing worldwide (and perhaps even unknown to, and despite the political preferences of, many of globalization's more ardent champions), the present era of advancing globalization may be ushering in a truly historical moment and change in the history of the human moral imagination. By producing for the first time, no matter how unevenly, a single, interdependent humankind and, in prospect if not yet in actuality, a single worldwide human community, globalization processes may be...

The doctrine of the right of national self-determination has been pernicious in its effects. And let no one doubt that the proclamation of the so-called “right” by Wilson and Lenin, and its widespread validation, including for that matter by sundry scholars,55 has encouraged people to take up arms on be-half of the nation. Ideas are not without their effects, and bad ideas are apt to have bad effects. While no set of ideas can solve problems absolutely, the widespread abandonment of the doctrine of the right of national self-determination might well have a salutary and pacifying effect in certain troubled areas, removing at the same time at least one source of violations of human rights.56 The question of tyranny, which constitutes the one exception to the proscription of secession, cannot be put to use in the service of this doctrine, which remains incompatible with the moral universalism of Natural Law.

Several years ago Jürgen Habermas wrote a short answer to the question: “Does Hegel's Critique of Kant apply to Discourse Ethics?” The gist of his short answer is, “no”. Insofar as Hegel's criticisms of the formalism and abstract universalism of the moral law never even applied to Kant's moral theory in the first place, they also fail to apply to discourse ethics. Insofar as Hegel's criticisms of the rigorism of the moral law and of Kant's conception of autonomy do hit the mark, discourse ethics successfully draws their sting by reconceiving Kant's moral standpoint along the following lines. 1. Kant wrongly undertakes to establish the moral law as a “fact of reason”: discourse ethics derives the moral standpoint from two premises — one formal, a rationally reconstructed logic of argumentation, and one material, namely our intuitions about how to justify utterances. 2. Kant wrongly contends that we must be able to think of ourselves as both intelligible characters, inhabiting a noumenal world, and as empirical characters inhabiting the world of appearances: discourse ethics allows that in everyday contexts of action and in the context of moral discourse we have one character that has real needs and interests. 3. Kant is also mistaken in arguing that moral autonomy requires human beings to abstract away from their needs and interests and to will universalizable maxims for the sake of their universal form: discourse ethics understands moral autonomy to consist in the free adoption of a standpoint from which conflicts of interest can be impartially regulated, by giving special weight to the satisfaction of universalizable interests. 4. Kant misconceives the categorical imperative as an objective test of universalizability that is applied by individual wills in isolation: discourse ethics reconceives the moral universalism as an ideal of intersubjective agreement of participants in discourse. On the differences between the principles of discourse ethics and Kant's categorical imperative Habermas is wont to cite McCarthy's summary of his — Habermas' — position: “Rather than ascribing as valid to all others any maxim that I can will to be a universal law, I must submit my maxim to all others for the purposes of discursively testing its claim to universality. The emphasis shifts from what each can will without contradiction to be a general law, to what all can will in agreement to be a universal norm” (MCCA 67).

If we are allowed to make an analytical distinction between nature - particularly human nature — and values, we can detect at least three forms of political universalism in the European tradition. First, there is a moral or political universalism based on the assumption that the highest moral standards — such as justice -are the same for all regardless of time and place. Second, there is a political universalism based on the assumption that by nature all human beings — especially when it comes to their rational capacities — are identical with each other regardless of spatiotemporal conditions. Third, there is a political universalism based on the assumption that people are absolutely equal in terms of their value and worth. Roughly speaking, these forms of political universalism — universalism of moral standards, universalism of human nature, and universalism of worth — have developed historically in sequence so that new dimensions are added to the previous ones without necessarily replacing them. In Stoicism, for instance, it was thought that the highest values are common to all human beings in the world and that people are identical by nature, but not that people are absolutely equal with each other. In early modern and modern declarations of human rights, on the other hand, it is implied that the highest moral standards are the same, that people are — more or less — identical with each other, and that they are absolutely equal when it comes to their worth as living beings.

The question of the universality of human rights has much in common with the question of the universality of ethics. In the form of a multidisciplinary reflexive survey, the aim of this article is to show how human rights discourses derive from more basic principles related to basic needs. These needs are the universal grammar for moral principles, which will be distinguished from ethical norms. Ethical norms, I will argue, are rules that develop in social groups to put into effect moral principles through communicative action and therefore develop as culturally specific norms, which guide behaviour within these social groups. This will explain why ethical norms contain some universal principles, but are largely culturally specific. In order to shed some light on the universality debate, I will show how moral principles translate into ethical norms and might manifest through communicative action in human rights law. For this purpose the article develops a socio-legal account on social norm-creation that bridges moral universality and legal universality via ethical pluralism, which in effect explains why despite the universality of moral principles, the outcomes of ethical rationales can vary extremely.

Previous psychological investigations revealed that sacred values (SVs; the belief that certain values are nonsubstitutable and may not be traded off, in particular, against secular economic values) modulates moral decision making depending on the type of SV infringement involved. Extending this research, we compared neurofunctional correlates determined from fMRI measurements during decision making in 3 different trade-off types (taboo, tragic, and routine) with psychological measures obtained from the same 2 participant groups characterized by either high SV (SVH) or low (SVL)scoring values. Congruent with previous studies showing that outright SV violation tends to provoke profound moral indignation, in accordance with the surmise that SVs serve as a heuristic under these (taboo trade-off) conditions, and in conformity with previous reports on neurofunctional changes observed in volunteers confronted with moral norm transgressions, we found increased blood oxygenation level-dependent (BOLD) signals in the left anterior temporal lobe and bilateral amygdalae, as well as significant correlation between right amygdala BOLD signals and moral disgust ratings, in the taboo trade-off condition for the SVH (compared with the SVL) group. The results are discussed in relation to previous research suggesting a close association of SVs with a deontological focus of moral universalism, as well as regarding mechanisms supposed to play a key role in overcoming barriers to the resolution of deep-seated conflicts.

The field of bioethics continues to struggle with the problem of cultural diversity: can universal principles guide ethical decision making, regardless of the culture in which those decisions take place? Or should bioethical principles be derived from the moral traditions of local cultures? Ten Have and Gordijn (Medicine, Health Care and Philosophy 14:1-3, 2011) and Bracanovic (Medicine, Health Care and Philosophy 14:229-236, 2011) defend the universalist position, arguing that respect for cultural diversity in matters ethical will lead to a dangerous cultural relativity where vulnerable patients and research subjects will be harmed. We challenge the premises of moral universalism, showing how this approach imports and imposes moral notions of Western society and leads to harm in non-western cultures.

In The Republic Socrates distinguishes between the conflicts that arise among Greeks and those that arise between Greeks and barbarians: enslaving the conquered, looting corpses, and burning houses are prohibited in conflicts with Greeks but permitted in warfare against barbarians.' We are appalled. Our morality allows no such distinction among persons. Our moral rules seem to be universal and impartial with respect to race or nationality. Let us use the term 'moral universalism' to refer to the characteristic of morality that it extends moral concern or moral protection impartially to all living human persons. Our moral culture is universalist in the sense that at least some of our norms are understood as applying impartially to all persons irrespective of nationality. Yet we have many particular commitments: to particular friends and family, perhaps to a school, neighborhood, ethnic group, or country, and often to a profession, religion, or sense of purpose of our own lives. Much recent discussion in moral philosophy has been devoted to the question of whether the particular commitments that make us who we are can be reconciled with the universalist moral philosophies that have dominated the academy for the past two hundred years. This article concerns the problems raised by one sort of particular commitment, the commitment to social norms governing conduct in groups that are narrower in scope than all of humanity: the norms governing the social life of a particular family, the shared norms of a religious or ethnic community, or the dominant social and legal norms of a nation. Each set of such norms constitutes a social morality.

Notes on Contributors vii Preface xi Paul Standish Introduction Reading R. S. Peters on Education Today Stefaan E. Cuypers and Christopher Martin 1 I. The Conceptual Analysis of Education and Teaching 1 Was Peters Nearly Right About Education? Robin Barrow 6 2 Learning Our Concepts Megan Laverty 24 3 On Education and Initiation Michael Luntley 38 4 Ritual, Imitation and Education in R. S. Peters Bryan Warnick 54 5 Transformation and Education: the Voice of the Learner in Peters Concept of Teaching Andrea English 72 II. The Justification of Educational Aims and the Curriculum 6 R. S. Peters Normative Conception of Education and Educational Aims Michael Katz 94 7 On the Worthwhileness of Theoretical Activities Michael Hand 106 8 Why General Education? Peters, Hirst and History John White 119 9 The Good, the Worthwhile and the Obligatory: Practical Reason and Moral Universalism in R. S. Peters Conception of Education Christopher Martin 138 10 Overcoming Social Pathologies in Education: On the Concept of Respect in R. S. Peters and Axel Honneth Krassimir Stojanov 156 III. Aspects of Ethical Development and Moral Education 11 Reason and Virtues: The Paradox of R. S. Peters on Moral Education Graham Haydon 168 12 Autonomy in R. S. Peters Educational Theory Stefaan E. Cuypers 185 IV. Peters in Context 13 Richard Peters and Valuing Authenticity Mike Degenhardt 205 14 Vision and Elusiveness in Philosophy of Education: R. S. Peters on the Legacy of Michael Oakeshott Kevin Williams 219 Index 237