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This paper considers the right to be acknowledged as the first inventor of a new technology. Technological inventions usually result from accumulative research and development, conducted by different people over decades and centuries. Moreover, sometimes several people arrive at the same invention almost simultaneously. Nevertheless, only one person is usually perceived as the "inventor," and gets all the credit and honor associated with the invention. Hence, the right to be considered as the first inventor can have profound significance for one's professional reputation and career. This paper focuses on the legal systems of Germany and the United States of America. These systems have developed in substantially different philosophical and cultural climates. Specifically, while the German legal system has been deeply influenced by Kantian and Hegelian thought, the US-American legal system has been inspired by the liberal ideas of John Locke, Adam Smith and others. These two schools of philosophical thought have different perspectives on the relationship between personal identity and work; while the German tradition emphasizes the deeply personal relation between individuals and their work, the Anglo-Saxon approach is, as a general rule, more instrumentalist and utilitarian. One way in which these differences express themselves is the different ways in which the right to be acknowledged as the first inventor is regulated. This right is deeply connected with one's identity as a professional, whether an engineer, technician, or scientist. On the other hand, this right does not necessarily have pecuniary significance. Hence, the protection of the right to be considered as the first inventor allows a glimpse into the different visions of identity and work found in these legal systems. This paper examines to what extent German and US-American legal systems recognize and protect the right to be perceived as the first inventor. It focuses on different aspects of this right, in the framework of patent law and beyond. The paper demonstrates that the two legal systems indeed differ profoundly in the ways they perceive and protect the right to be considered as the first inventor. True to its visions on professional dignity, German law carefully protects this right, independently from any pecuniary interests. In contrast, American law grants a remarkably weak protection to the right to be considered as the first inventor, focusing primarily on the monetary aspects of this right. Hence, one can here discover different visions of the role of individuals in society, and specifically of the role of individuals as creators and not just consumers. What is at stake here is the question of whether or not questions of honor, dignity, and symbolic property, above and beyond material benefits, are recognized as playing a role in the economic system.

This paper takes a social epistemology perspective on markets in general and trade deals in particular. Normatively, it is based on considerations of democratic accountability and contestation. Empirically, it is based on the assumption that all markets are embedded in institutional frameworks. Knowledge plays an important role in the institutional framework of markets: it matters both at the level of content – which knowledge has to be processed in what way, according to the market rules? – and at the level of process – whose knowledge counts in setting the rules? While these considerations apply to both domestic and international markets, there are good reasons to allocate certain epistemic tasks to the frameworks of international markets, for example trade deals. While the TTIP and CETA negotiations fell short of democratic standards about transparency, the debate about them indicates growing public awareness of the importance of the institutional frameworks for international trade.

Joseph Heath argues that we should reject the idea of a ‘just wage’ because market prices are supposed to signal scarcities and thereby to promote overall efficiency, rather than reward contributions. This argument overlooks the degree to which markets are institutionally, socially, and culturally embedded. Their outcomes are hardly ever ‘pure’ market outcomes, but the result of complex interactions of economic and other factors, including various forms of power. Instead of rejecting moral intuitions about wage justice as misguided, we can often understand them as pointing towards questions about the embeddedness of markets, or lack thereof. At least in some cases, changes in the framework of markets can both increase efficiency (or at least not reduce it) and get us closer to conventional notions of fair wages, e.g. when gender discrimination is reduced. Thus, while an abstract notion of a ‘just wage’ remains problematic, we can and should recognize that some wages are unjust.

This article reintroduces a long-forgotten argument into the debate about social justice: Durkheim's argument from “organic solidarity,” as presented inThe Division of Labor in Society. “Organic solidarity” is solidarity based on differentiation. According to Durkheim, it grows out of the division of labor, but only if the latter happens “spontaneously.” Social inequality creates obstacles to such spontaneity because it distorts prices, such that they are perceived as unjust, and it undermines equality of opportunity. Hence, Durkheim's argument connects commutative justice and distributive justice. The article argues that Durkheim's argument is plausible, interesting, and relevant for today. After presenting the argument, discussing its structure and methodology, and evaluating its plausibility by drawing on related contemporary debates, it focuses on the problem of theperceptionof social justice and the possibility of ideological distortions. It concludes by sketching the research program that follows from Durkheim's argument.

The legitimacy of putting public activities – such as providing education and welfare, but also running prisons or providing military services – into the hands of private companies is hotly contested. In The Privatized State, Chiara Cordelli puts forward an original argument, from a Kantian perspective, for why it is problematic: it replaces the omnilateral will of all citizens, which is realized through public institutions, with the unilateral will of agents to whom these activities have been delegated. While adding an important dimension to the debate, I am not fully convinced that private institutions always fail to realize the omnilateral will, and that this is the only, or always most central, normative problem of privatization. Instead, many concrete cases of privatization seem normatively overdetermined in their wrongness. Nonetheless, Cordelli’s brilliant discussion invites us to rethink these phenomena from an important angle and helps us to better understand what an ideal civil service would look like.

This article makes a positive case for an ethnographic sensibility in political theory. Drawing on published ethnographies and original fieldwork, it argues that an ethnographic sensibility can contribute to normative reflection in five distinct ways. It can help uncover the nature of situated normative demands (epistemic argument); diagnose obstacles encountered when responding to these demands (diagnostic argument); evaluate practices and institutions against a given set of values (evaluative argument); probe, question and refine our understanding of values (valuational argument); and uncover underlying social ontologies (ontological argument). The contribution of ethnography to normative theory is distinguished from that of other forms of empirical research, and the dangers of perspectival absorption, bias and particularism are addressed.

The paper develops a responsibility-based account of professional ethics in banking. From this perspective, bankers have duties not only toward clients—the traditional focus of professional ethics—but also regarding the prevention of systemic harms to whole societies. When trying to fulfill these duties, bankers have to meet three challenges: epistemic challenges, motivational challenges, and a coordination challenge. These challenges can best be met by a combination of regulation and ethics that aligns responsibilities, recognition, and incentives and creates what Parsons has called “integrated situations”. Professional associations play an important role for this purpose, especially as spaces in which peer recognition is earned. But financial incentives equally need to be brought in line, for example, through deferred bonuses or claw backs. Such measures can create a new culture of accountability in banking.

At present, the majority of the proposed Deep Learning (DL) methods provide point predictions without quantifying the models uncertainty. However, a quantification of the reliability of automated image analysis is essential, in particular in medicine when physicians rely on the results for making critical treatment decisions. In this work, we provide an entire framework to diagnose ischemic stroke patients incorporating Bayesian uncertainty into the analysis procedure. We present a Bayesian Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) yielding a probability for a stroke lesion on 2D Magnetic Resonance (MR) images with corresponding uncertainty information about the reliability of the prediction. For patient-level diagnoses, different aggregation methods are proposed and evaluated, which combine the single image-level predictions. Those methods take advantage of the uncertainty in image predictions and report model uncertainty at the patient-level. In a cohort of 511 patients, our Bayesian CNN achieved an accuracy of 95.33% at the image-level representing a significant improvement of 2% over a non-Bayesian counterpart. The best patient aggregation method yielded 95.89% of accuracy. Integrating uncertainty information about image predictions in aggregation models resulted in higher uncertainty measures to false patient classifications, which enabled to filter critical patient diagnoses that are supposed to be closer examined by a medical doctor. We therefore recommend using Bayesian approaches not only for improved image-level prediction and uncertainty estimation but also for the detection of uncertain aggregations at the patient-level., Comment: 21 pages, 13 figures

The article reviews the recent debate about workplace democracy. It first presents and critically discusses arguments in favor of democratizing the firm that are based on the analogy with states, meaningful work, the avoidance of unjustified hierarchies, and beneficial effects on political democracy. The second part presents and critically discusses arguments against workplace democracy that are based on considerations of efficiency, the difficulties of a transition towards democratic firms, and liberal commitments such as the rights of employees and owners to work for or invest in nondemocratic firms. The conclusion summarizes the debate and argues that experiments with democratic workplaces as what Erik Olin Wright calls "real utopias" could deliver new insights and thus move the discussion forward.

This chapter concludes the book by sketching a vision of what it would take to re-embed organizations in a just society. In doing so, it connects to a number of recent debates in political philosophy. It calls for a rethinking of the corporate form and the privileges and responsibilities that come with it. It points to the distribution of access to knowledge as a field that has an enormous impact on how easy or difficult it is to induce change or to defend the status quo. It discusses worries about the division of labour and meaningful work. To address the imbalance of power between individuals and organizations, it calls for experiments with more democratic forms of governance. These various levers could contribute to ‘reclaiming the system’ both in theory and in practice.

The Introduction sets out the problem this book addresses: organizations, in which individuals seem to be nothing but ‘cogs’, have become extremely powerful, while being apparently immune to moral criticism. Organizations—from public bureaucracies to universities, police departments, and private corporations—have specific features that they share qua organizations. They need to be opened up for normative theorizing, rather than treated as ‘black boxes’ or as elements of a ‘system’ in which moral questions have no place. The Introduction describes ‘social philosophy’ as an approach that addresses questions at the meso-level of social life, and situates it in relation to several strands of literature in moral and political philosophy. It concludes by providing a preview of the chapters of the book.

The world of wage labour seems to have become a soulless machine, an engine of social and environmental destruction. Employees seem to be nothing but ‘cogs’ in this system—but is this true? Located at the intersection of political theory, moral philosophy, and business ethics, this book questions the picture of the world of work as a ‘system’. Hierarchical organizations, both in the public and in the private sphere, have specific features of their own. This does not mean, however, that they cannot leave room for moral responsibility, and maybe even human flourishing. Drawing on detailed empirical case studies, Lisa Herzog analyses the nature of organizations from a normative perspective: their rule-bound character, the ways in which they deal with divided knowledge, and organizational cultures and their relation to morality. She asks how individual agency and organizational structures would have to mesh to avoid common moral pitfalls. She develops the notion of ‘transformational agency’, which refers to a critical, creative way of engaging with one’s organizational role while remaining committed to basic moral norms. The last part zooms out to the political and institutional changes that would be required to re-embed organizations into a just society. Whether we submit to ‘the system’ or try to reclaim it, Herzog argues, is a question of eminent political importance in our globalized world.

This chapter turns to the topic of organizational cultures and their relation to morality. Although a somewhat elusive topic, organizational cultures deserve to be taken seriously from a moral perspective, because they can make it more or less difficult for individuals in organizations not to violate basic moral norms. For example, by influencing ‘sensemaking’ in organizations, they can make the moral dimensions of decisions more or less visible to them. But organizational cultures often change, especially when individuals send signals that are reinforced in ‘spirals’ of repeated actions that can lead to ‘slippery slopes’. Often, the best strategy for maintaining a morally supportive culture is a firm commitment to moral principles. However, the importance of organizational culture for an organization’s moral life also points to the importance of opportunities of dialogue about this culture.

This chapter discusses the features of organizations that will be analysed, from a normative perspective, in this book. Drawing on the ‘theory of the firm’, it argues that the rationale of organizations is the coordination of divided labour through hierarchies. This organizational form can be found in numerous, otherwise very different, organizations in the public and private realms. It creates the potential for specific forms of moral wrongs: in addition to moral wrongs of which organizations are the site, there are also moral wrongs of which organizations are the source. As is explained in the chapter, the four themes that will be discussed in Chapters 5 to 8—rules, knowledge, culture, and roles—are connected to organizations not by chance, but because the organizational form as such creates moral risks in these areas.

This chapter asks whether we can hold on to the picture of the morally responsible subject as we knew it in the face of evidence from social psychology about the impact of contexts on human behaviour. Some theorists have taken this to present a major challenge to moral theorizing. However, the chapter argues that, while we should acknowledge the malleability of human behaviour, we should not give up the notion of responsible agency. Rather, we need to broaden our theoretical horizon in order to include individuals’ co-responsibility for the contexts in which they act. This argument is a general one, but it is of particular relevance for organizations: it is our shared responsibility to turn them into contexts in which moral agency is supported rather than undermined.

Drawing on real-life examples and the philosophical literature on moral rules, this chapter discusses the problems that can arise because organizations are rule-based structures. From a moral perspective, rules are double-edged: there are good moral reasons to obey them, especially in organizational contexts, but they are blunt tools that can do injustice to the underlying social reality, which is far more fine-grained and complex than rules could ever grasp. In addition, rules have a psychological dimension, especially when they are tied to incentives: they can refocus our attention, and crowd out the intrinsic motivation to do the right thing. To live with the ‘iron cage’ of organizational rules, individuals and organizations need to remain attentive to their double-edged character, and install mechanisms for preventing injustice to atypical cases. This analysis also throws light on the use of ‘codes of ethics’ in organizations.

This chapter asks what changes should be made, in the here and now, to improve the moral balance sheet of organizations. It introduces the notion of ‘bottom-up’ requirements on the basic structure of a society, which stem from the inner life of organizations and which aim at minimizing the risk of violations of basic moral norms. Two such ‘non-ideal’ proposals are discussed: first, improvements in the protection of individual rights against organizations, and second, a better match between organizational forms, and the pressures that come with them, and organizations with different kinds of task. For example, some organizations should be shielded from financial pressures in order to fulfil their tasks, such as care for patients, without creating grave moral risks. This is a matter of market regulation, but also of the line between public and private organizations.

This chapter discusses the relationship individuals have to their organizational roles. Based on two real-life examples, it discusses the pitfalls of complete identification with, but also of complete psychological separation from, one’s organizational role. Organizational roles need to be integrated into processes of moral reflection and moral learning. The chapter introduces the notion of ‘transformational agency’ for describing how individuals can remain committed to basic moral norms and put the results of their reflections about their organizational roles into practice. Drawing on Albert Hirschman’s notions of ‘exit’ and ‘voice’, various transformational strategies are discussed. Together, they lead to an attitude of critical loyalty towards organizations. Finally, the chapter asks how organizations can support moral reflection and transformational agency on the part of individuals.

This chapter analyses the challenges for a responsible handling of knowledge in organizations, in which, as spaces of divided labour, divided knowledge needs to be integrated into processes of joint work. Gaps in the transmission of knowledge can create dangerous moral challenges. Another moral challenge, however, is the disrespect often shown to individuals as bearers of knowledge. The hierarchical structures of organizations present obstacles both to the smooth transmission of knowledge, and to a culture of respect for various kinds of knowledge. These two issues are closely intertwined, making ‘knowledge management’ a deeply moral affair, and creating the imperative to develop and maintain a supportive epistemic culture in organizations.

This chapter sets out the normative foundations on which the book is based. It starts by defending the case for the ‘pervasiveness’ of morality: no social sphere is ‘beyond’ morality, even if there is some degree of institutional ‘division of labour’. Next, it states and explains the moral norms this study is based on: the norm to respect all individuals as moral equals, and norms about the avoidance of individual harm, and about avoiding contributing to collective harm. These norms lie within an ‘overlapping consensus’ of different moral theories and worldviews. In pluralist societies, we should focus on such a consensus—even if it may sometimes be hard to delineate—when reflecting on the moral dimensions of organizations.

The evaluation of labour markets and of particular jobs ought to be sensitive to a plurality of benefits and burdens of work. We use the term 'the goods of work' to refer to those benefits of work ...

Background/Aims: Topical corticosteroid concerns (TCC) are an important issue in patients with atopic dermatitis, leading to non-adherence with poor disease control and increased health care costs. However, neither the prevalence of TCC in a more comprehensible dermatological population nor the impact of patient information on topical corticosteroids given by clinicians is known. Therefore, we assessed the prevalence, characteristics, and sources of TCC in a dermatological population and the impact of written and oral patient information on TCC. Methods: A total of 643 outpatients with various skin diseases answered a 12-item questionnaire while waiting for the doctor's visit. Patients with TCC quantified their concerns on a discrete visual analogue scale before and after patient information, which consisted of written and oral information about topical corticosteroids (TCS) given by dermatologists. Results: The prevalence of TCC was 41.5%, and that of TCC-related non-adherence was 28.3%. TCC was positively associated with age Conclusions: TCC are highly prevalent in dermatological patients. Patient information may lower TCC in almost every second patient.

This article analyzes Adam Smith’s endorsement of economic growth and asks what it might mean for a scenario of low or zero growth in the Western economies. It distinguishes two models of economic growth in Smith’s writing. The first, a “trickle down” scenario, plays a marginal role; Smith’s main focus is on a model in which the growth of productive capital and of jobs reinforce one another. There are three desiderata that this second model of growth achieves: a distribution that benefits the worst-off and leads to more equality in the long run, the harmonization of individual interests and societal interests, and the strengthening of the independence of citizens from employers, and of the political sphere from economic influences. To achieve these desiderata in a low or zero growth scenario, institutional reforms are needed, but such a scenario need not be as bleak as Smith imagined, as arguments by John Stuart Mill show.

This chapter explores the history of philosophy as a resource for interdisciplinary research, drawing on the author’s work on Smith and Hegel for illustration. It briefly sketches some aspects of the relation between political philosophy and economics, and then describes a ‘post-Skinnerian’ approach to the history of philosophy that enters into a dialogue with historical thinkers, taking seriously their historical context but ultimately aiming at answering systematic questions. This approach allows us to garner the insights of thinkers who reflected in an integrated way about questions that today belong to different disciplines. It can help us to uncover implicit assumptions or theoretical gaps in contemporary approaches that are made invisible by the separation of research into different disciplinary fields. The chapter concludes by suggesting that the history of philosophy can inspire us to question the boundaries of disciplines and explore new avenues of research.

Der Aufsatz untersucht, wie neuere Ansätze der Kritischen Theorie von Axel Honneth (2011, 2015) und Hartmut Rosa (2016a) sich zur Strömung der nicht-idealen Theorie in der angelsächsischen politischen Theorie verhalten. Honneth und Rosa legen mit "sozialer Freiheit" und "Resonanz" zwei Schlüsselbegriffe vor, die sich zwar in vielen Hinsichten unterscheiden, jedoch die Strukturmerkmale dessen teilen, was hier als 'Wesentlichkeitsbegriffe' charakterisiert wird. Sie beschreiben Zielpunkte gelingenden Lebens innerhalb von Institutionen, die typischerweise im persönlichen Nahbereich stattfinden, ohne dabei inhaltliche Vorgaben zu machen, und ohne dass diese Zielpunkte institutionell erzwungen werden könnten. Vielmehr können sie durch einen geeigneten institutionellen Rahmen ermöglicht werden; die genaue Ausgestaltung dieses Rahmens bleibt bei Honneth und Rosa jedoch vage, während sie in nicht-idealen Theorien im Mittelpunkt steht. Zwischen den beiden Theoriesträngen herrscht somit ein Komplementaritätsverhältnis, insbesondere in Bezug auf formale Institutionen und informelle soziale Normen, die bei beiden für das Zustandekommen "moralischer Revolutionen" im Sinne Appiahs (2011) zentral sind., The article discusses the relation between new approaches in Critical Theory by Axel Honneth (2011, 2015) and Hartmut Rosa (2016a), and non-ideal approaches in anglophone political theory. With the notions of "social freedom" and "resonance", Honneth and Rosa suggest two core concepts that differ in many respects, but share the structures of what is here characterized as 'essentiality notions'. They describe the goal of a flourishing life within an institutional framework, which typically takes place in interpersonal relations, without any commitments as to content, and without assuming that these goals could be institutionally enforced. Rather, the institutional framework can enable them; but the details of how this framework should be designed remain vague in Honneth's and Rosa's theories, while they are the central focus of non-ideal theories. Thus, the two strands of theorizing stand in a relation of complementarity, in particular with regard to the relation between formal institutions and informal social norms, both of which are central for successful "moral revolutions" as described by Appiah (2011).

This paper discusses Adam Smith's views of social justice. It first describes Smith's optimistic view of markets, for example with regard to the absence of negative externalities, which implies that he considered certain normative problems to be the exception rather than the rule. Then, Smith's views on redistribution are discussed: although he is sympathetic to progressive taxation, his main focus remains on free markets, which can partly be explained by his distrust of politicians. If one takes a closer look as Smith's views of markets, however, it turns out that one of the reasons why he endorses them is their distributive features. He saw them as an antidote to the inequalities of the feudal age, offering all individuals an opportunity to work their way up to a decent standard of living and leading to more equality in the long run. Thus, Smith's account, while out-dated in certain ways, can serve as an inspiration for thinking about distributive justice not only as a question of redistributive taxation but also as a question of the institutional design of markets.

This book – or booklet, with 100 pages of large print – has not been written for an academic audience. While we should cherish the fact that philosophers write for a broader audience, in this case the merits are decidedly mixed. While its style is vivid and elegant, the book’s arguments are incomplete, some are set up against strawmen, and many are technically correct, but hardly relevant to today’s social and political circumstances. Frankfurt ignores essential pieces of scholarship, which makes him a poor ambassador for philosophy in the public sphere. And he seems oblivious to the way in which his book might be used by political actors who pursue policies that are diametrically opposed to what he claims to want. For philosophers who have followed Frankfurt’s writings, his arguments are not new; portions of them have been published in papers in 1987 (BEquality as a Moral Ideal^, Ethics 98(1), 21–43) and 1997 (BEquality and Respect^, Social Research 64(1), 3–15). Since then, the philosophical debate has moved on, and the world has changed dramatically. Frankfurt’s views, it seems, haven’t. Frankfurt presents a series of arguments in order to show that from a moral (rather than political or social, cf. 8) perspective, we should care more about everyone having enough than about individuals having equal amounts of money. For example, he criticizes arguments for equality based on the principle of diminishing marginal utility by pointing out, in a somewhat technical discussion, that there can be interdependencies between goods that imply that utility functions are often discontinuous, and that the utility function of money is likely to be different from that of other goods (17 ff.). He uses an example in which a certain threshold of resources is needed to survive to argue against a distribution that would be equal, but would let nobody survive (34 ff.); this is correct, but also too obvious to be worth insisting on. He also argues that if we are satisfied with life, we have no reason to strive for more – neglecting questions about whether money might, in a society without a social safety net, nonetheless be worth getting as a safety cushion against life’s misfortune. Against Isaiah Berlin, he holds that a presumption in favour of equality when dividing a cake results from the importance of Ethic Theory Moral Prac (2016) 19:823–825 DOI 10.1007/s10677-015-9678-1

This chapter explores whether the notion of desert can be applied to labor incomes earned in financial markets, a claim sometimes made in order to justify the extraordinarily high labor incomes generated there. It draws on the philosophical debate about desert in order to defend an institutional notion of desert that is related to the justice of institutions, and argues that it can be applied to markets, but does not exclude redistributive taxation. To apply this notion to markets, however, markets have to fulfill a certain role within a broader set of just institutions. The chapter therefore asks whether today’s financial markets fulfill this role, and argues that problems of market failure and of social dysfunctionality undermine the idea that incomes generated in today’s financial markets could be called deserved, even on a modest, institutional notion of desert.

The introductory chapter explains some basic mechanisms of financial markets and how they were traditionally justified by economic theory. It introduces some of the questions about financial markets that can be asked from a perspective of justice. Financial markets have often been treated as the prototype of well-functioning markets, but they deviate from textbook models in a number of ways: their products are legal artifices often at some distance from the real economy; their participants often do not carry the full risk of their behavior and instead of always tending toward an equilibrium they can develop destabilizing dynamics. The case for reform both from an economic perspective and from a perspective of justice is therefore strong. The introduction concludes by providing an overview of the chapters of the volume.

John Rawls wurde dafur beruhmt, dass er Gerechtigkeit als die faire Verteilung der Nutzen und Lasten sozialer Kooperation beschrieb. In modernen Gesellschaft en ist eine der zentralen Formen sozialer Kooperation die bezahlte Arbeit. Die meisten von uns mussen arbeiten, um ihren Lebensunterhalt zu verdienen, und dies nimmt viel Zeit in Anspruch. Der unvermeidbare und zeitintensive Charakter von Arbeit impliziert, dass die Struktur von Arbeitsmarkten in mehreren Hinsichten gerechtigkeitsrelevant ist: Die meisten Menschen konnen bezahlte Arbeit nicht vermeiden, deswegen muss sichergestellt werden, dass sie nicht ihre Moglichkeit unterminiert, ein angemessenes Leben zu fuhren.