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

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

In recent years, tech evangelists have made headlines predicting that in the future manual driving will be outlawed. This essay will investigate the question whether a ban of human driven cars can be defended on moral grounds in a future scenario in which autonomous cars are going to be significantly safer than manually driven cars. This article will argue that in such a future scenario manually driven cars, for moral reasons, indeed should be banned from participating in regular traffic. Since (...) the moral argument for outlawing manually driven cars will likely be met by resistance by car-aficionados, in the final part of the paper, we are devising a proposal for reconciling the strong moral case for a ban of manually driven cars with the widespread fondness of manual driving. (shrink)

This essay criticizes the current approach to epistemic democracy. Epistemic democrats are preoccupied with the question of how a society can best exploit a given stock of knowledge. This article argues that the problem-solving capability of a society depends on two factors rather than one. The quality of decision-making depends both on how a democracy is able to make use of its stock of knowledge and on the size of the knowledge stock. Society’s problem-solving capability over time is therefore a (...) function of its ability to develop its knowledge exploitation mechanisms and the growth rate of its knowledge stock. Based on this enhanced model of social problem-solving, this essay compares two different political ideal types: experimental democracy, as commonly defended by epistemic democrats; and polycentric democracy, a model defended most commonly by political economists. (shrink)

Even though human smuggling is one of the central topics of contention in the political discourse about immigration, it has received virtually no attention from moral philosophy. This article aims...

What, if anything, is the import of Hayek to epistemic democracy? Although Hayek is revered by epistemic democrats for his insights into the epistemic aspects of the market sphere, it is generally believed that his theory is moot with respect to democratic reason. This paper aims to challenge this verdict. I argue that a Hayekian analysis of inclusive public deliberation contributes at least three valuable lessons: (1) Hayek makes the case that under certain conditions even unbiased deliberators are permanently unable (...) to converge on the best available policy option. Call this the problem of ‘persistent hidden policy champions’. (2) He demonstrates that to unlock hidden policy champions, reasonable minority factions need the opportunity to act on their own evidential standards. (3) He challenges epistemic democrats to think more carefully about how to design the “epistemic basic structure” (Kurtulmus and Irzik 2017) of society in order to account for persistent hidden policy champions. (shrink)

At the University of Pretoria the author, a practical theologian, experiences a fruitful soil for the development of an interdisciplinary process. He referred to concrete examples of cooperation, but used the article to reflect on best practices for the interdisciplinary dialogue. He came to the conclusion that it probably made more sense to talk of Practical-theological alternatives rather than to describe the subject in a single fixed manner of understanding and action. Our goal should rather be to open up the (...) boundaries between Practical Theology, Human, Social and Natural Sciences. (shrink)

This article forms part of a study which was inspired by the ever-growing need for significance expressed both by my life coaching and pastoral therapy clients as well as the need for existential meaning reported both in the lay press and academic literature. The study reflected on a life that matters with a group of co-researchers in a participatory action research relationship. The study has been positioned within pastoral theology and invited the theological discourse into a reflection of existential meaning. (...) Adopting a critical relational constructionist epistemology, the research was positioned within a postmodern paradigm. The implications for meaning and research were explored and described. This article tells the story of how spirituality was positioned in the narratives of meaning by my fellow researchers. (shrink)

The genus problem of populism presents one of the most vexing conceptual questions across the social sciences: Some theorists believe that populism is nothing more than an assembly of discursive patterns, while others maintain that populism is a strategy to gain political power. Then there are those that argue that populism is a thin ideology that lacks a coherent set of guiding principles. The paper intervenes in this debate in two ways: First, it offers a methodological apparatus for evaluating and (...) developing contested concepts such as populism. Second, it puts forward and defends the claim that populism can be fruitfully understood as a coherent ideology that rests on four foundational principles. These principles, I will argue, are necessary for explaining the paradigmatic beliefs and dispositions exhibited by exponents of populism. One of the key characteristics of populism, on the account developed in this paper, is its peculiar epistemic stance. (shrink)

The epistemic value of a political procedure—such as democracy or a civil trial system—depends on how well it performs in arriving at decisions that are correct by some independent standard. A core assumption in the literature on epistemic democracy is that boosting the epistemic value of such a procedure makes it better overall. Even though this assumption seems innocuous (and hence has not been discussed in much detail), we will argue that it is not beyond the pale of reasonable disagreement. (...) For it is possible to increase the epistemic value of a political procedure in ways that give rise to egalitarian objections. (shrink)

This article illustrates the practical usefulness of transdisciplinary work for practical theology by showing how input from an occupational therapist informed my understanding and interpretation of the story of Hannetjie, who had been sexually abused as a child. This forms part of a narrative practical theological research project into the spirituality of female adult survivors of childhood sexual abuse. Transdisciplinary work is useful to practical theologians, as it opens possibilities for learning about matters pastors have to face, but may not (...) have knowledge about. A short retelling of Hannetjie’s story is given to provide information about the context of the research. Next, the transdisciplinary process that was followed is mentioned, and the questions that the transdisciplinary team had to respond to are discussed. Following that, I focus more specifically on the occupational therapist’s answers, and the knowledge gained from her contribution, as an example of how a co-researcher from a divergent discipline can inform a theological study. In this case, knowledge was shared about sensory integration and how the brain processes traumatic stimuli, such as sexual abuse. Lastly, the interrelationship between Hannetjie’s body stories, mind stories and spirit stories is discussed to show how the learning received from occupational therapy affected my thinking about Hannetjie’s stories and the relationships between them. Thus, it is concluded that transdisciplinary work has great value for practical theology, especially in the pastor’s daily work with people who are struggling with difficult stories, because we cannot listen to people’s spirit stories in isolation. They are inextricably intertwined with all our stories about ourselves. (shrink)

Die politische Errichtung eines Cordon Sanitaire um populistische Parteien führt auf gesellschaftlicher Ebene zu einer Praxis, in der die Anliegen, Argumente und Ängste von Populisten und ihren Sympathisanten zu einem gewissen Grad tabuisiert werden. Da die Errichtung eines Cordon Sanitaire den epistemischen Zielen der Wissenschaft widerspricht, kommt es notwendig zu einem Spannungsverhältnis, wenn der Cordon Sanitaire auf die Hallen der Wissenschaft ausgedehnt wird. Dieser Beitrag setzt sich aus der Warte der Politischen Philosophie mit diesem Spannungsverhältnis auseinander. In nuce wird argumentiert, (...) dass die Universität gut beraten ist, das Primat der Wahrheitssuche in ihrem eigenen Geltungsbereich offensiv und selbstbewusst zu verteidigen. In der Wissenschaft darf nur das bessere Argument zählen. Weiter wird der Forderung inner-universitäre Gremien einzurichten, die zentral über die Einladung von heterodoxen Denkern/innen entscheiden, eine Absage erteilt, da solche Gremien den Sinn der Wissenschaftsfreiheit untergraben. (shrink)

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

Persistent disagreement is perhaps one of the defining features of modern liberal democracy. Disagreement, though, is not merely a philosophical nuisance, but a source of friction and conflict. The goal of this work is to inquire, whether we can conceive of a political order that might be judged superior to our current modus vivendi arrangements for settling conflict from a diverse set of normative standards or perspectives. In this essay we develop the concept of Polycentric Democracy.

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

Die Grundthese der Arbeit ist der Nachweis, dass zum Verständnis dessen, was Frömmigkeit bei Schleiermachers beinhaltet, die Struktur von Zeit zu berücksichtigen ist. Das Zeitverständnis Schleiermacher wird hauptsächlich anhand der Lehnsätze aus der Ethik in der Glaubenslehre entwickelt, die These der Arbeit dann exemplarisch an den Lehrstücken von Wiedergeburt und Heiligung und damit an Schleiermachers Rechtfertigungslehre überprüft. Dabei wird deutlich, dass die Zeitthematik keine nur von außen an die Glaubenslehre herangetragene Perspektive darstellt, sondern deren Grundanlage und inhaltliche Durchführung überhaupt bestimmt. (...) Die Arbeit bietet so zum einen eine Rekonstruktion bislang wenig beachteter Lehrsätze der Schleiermacherschen Glaubenslehre und eröffnet zum anderen am Leitfaden der Zeitthematik einen neuen Zugang zum Verständnis des theologischen Denkens von Friedrich Daniel Ernst Schleiermacher. (shrink)