Pluralist Account Research Articles

‘If we want things to stay as they are, things will have to change’: Rethinking order and justice in international society

This article argues that conceptualising the ethical/moral possibilities of international society can be enhanced by utilising the distinction between positive and negative duties rather than order versus justice. The main argument of the article targets the traditional pluralist account and claims that within this account far greater moves towards justice are possible, which can be seen through the lens of order versus justice. More specifically, it argues that a pluralist international society need not be indifferent to global injustices such as poverty, if the range of negative duties is expanded.

A Pluralistic Account of Religious Upbringing in Islamic Religious Education: Fundamentals and Perspectives

The ability to deal with the plural relationship in Europe and to rethink the position of other religions in Islamic theology is a particular challenge for Islamic religious education.In view of th...

Permission, Blame, and Forgiveness

ABSTRACT I contend that Miranda Fricker’s ambitious new pluralist account of forgiveness is too inclusive and counts as forgiveness practices that are psychologically and normatively quite different. I raise three worries: First, her account of proleptic Gifted Forgiveness as temporally displaced Moral Justice Forgiveness seems to allow for Preemptive Forgiveness. Second, proleptic Gifted Forgiveness seems to resemble communicative blame more than forgiveness. Finally, an alternative account of forgiveness—explained in terms of reasons to forswear blame—seems capable of meeting Fricker’s desiderata for an adequate theory (e.g., giftedness, pluralism, ambivalence, and genealogy), while avoiding the inclusivity worry.

II—Two Routes to Radical Racial Pluralism

Quayshawn Spencer (2019) argues for radical racial pluralism, the position that there is a plurality of natures and realities for race in the United States. In this paper, I raise two difficulties for Spencer’s argument. The first is targeted narrowly at his response to a potential objection to his argument, and the second is a more general difficulty to do with how the argument handles the social consequences of the authoritative categorization of people. Although the second difficulty is more serious than the first, neither is insurmountable. I then sketch an alternative argument for radical racial pluralism, one that would be likely to succeed in the event that Spencer’s argument turned out to fail. Considering these two contrasting routes to radical racial pluralism highlights the fact that radical racial pluralism is a rather more modest metametaphysical position than it may have initially appeared to be. In virtue of this, I suggest that we should develop and assess a more radically pluralist metametaphysical account of race, which I term ‘ultra-radical racial pluralism’.

Sideways at the entrance of the cave: A pluralist footnote to Plato

The idea of a ‘true’ account of pluralism is ultimately contradictory. Liberal political philosophers often fell prey to a special version of this fallacy by presupposing that there might be only one correct argument for justifying the acceptance of pluralism as the core of a liberal democratic polity. Avoiding this trap, Rawls’s ‘political liberalism’ has offered a more sophisticated view of reasonable pluralism as linked with the ‘burdens of judgement’. His philosophical agenda, however, left some questions underexplored: What is the relation of pluralism to relativism? How can a conception of pluralism (epistemic, moral and political) avoid being either one view among others with no special claim to truth, or a foundationalist claim? If pluralism is a fact, in what sense can it bind us? These questions – crucial for grasping the distinctiveness of ‘political’ liberalism – are addressed by revisiting Plato’s simile of the cave, in order to make it accommodate the groundbreaking Rawlsian notion of the ‘reasonable’.

Reading “Canadian” management in context: development of English and French education

PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to explore the pluralist contours of Canadian management “knowledge” using the discourse “official” bilingualism – the English and French languages – to understand the impact of socio-historical-political differences on the development of management knowledge production.Design/methodology/approachDrawing upon an archival collection of management textbooks as historical data, the authors critically explore and analyze the development of Canadian “schools” and management theory. Using narrative analysis and critical hermeneutics, the paper considers the socio-historical-political context of the various “Canadian” scholars that sought to establish a unique business academy distinct but paradoxically akin to the management schools in the USA.FindingsMirroring the struggle of Francophones in a dominant English imperative, French management textbooks appeared decades later than English titles. When French texts began to disseminate, it remained in the shadows of American management ideologies.Research limitations/implicationsAs only Canadian organizational behavior texts published within the previous 50 years were used as data in this study, it may be incautious to draw broader conclusions. The empirical element of this research relied upon convenience sampling of textbooks.Practical implicationsManagement educators weld a considered level of socio-political power that they may or may not knowingly possess, especially in terms of selecting a textbook and other course materials. Regardless of background, management students are somewhat a “tabula rasa;” open to learning new content to make sense of the world. This “open state” places a great deal of responsibility on the professorate in shaping management students’ theoretical understanding of everyday life in organizations. The authors suggest practitioners be reflexive, aware of how textbooks serve as an important vehicle in education that in times past, have promoted or reified mono-cultural agendas.Originality/valueThe research in this paper builds on recent research that considers the role of socio-historical-political context in how management knowledge and theory is performed, as well as contributes to understanding textbooks in how they may shape a pluralist account of Canadian management “knowledge”.

The Many Evils of Inequality: An Examination of T. M. Scanlon's Pluralist Account

AbstractWhy Does Inequality Matter? is the long-awaited book-length development of T. M. Scanlon's views on objectionable inequality, and our obligations to eliminate or reduce it. The book presents an impressively nuanced and thoughtful analysis as well as succinct explanations of different objections to various forms of inequality. It is not only set to further cement Scanlon's influence on philosophical debates about equality but also makes a good guide to the problems of inequality for the nonspecialist reader. The book is not without faults, however. Even within a pluralist approach to inequality such as Scanlon's, it is not sufficiently clear what, if anything, his specific objections to status inequality, and to control over other people's lives, have in common with his other egalitarian objections to inequality of political influence, opportunity, and income and wealth—or whether, in the case of control, the objection is egalitarian at all.

Maria Kronfeldner, What's Left of Human Nature? A Post-Essentialist, Pluralist, and Interactive Account of a Contested Concept

Maria Kronfeldner, What's Left of Human Nature? A Post-Essentialist, Pluralist, and Interactive Account of a Contested Concept

On Anger, Silence, and Epistemic Injustice

AbstractIf anger is the emotion of injustice, and if most injustices have prominent epistemic dimensions, then where is the anger in epistemic injustice? Despite the question my task is not to account for the lack of attention to anger in epistemic injustice discussions. Instead, I argue that a particular texture of transformative anger – a knowing resistant anger – offers marginalized knowers a powerful resource for countering epistemic injustice. I begin by making visible the anger that saturates the silences that epistemic injustices repeatedly manufacture and explain the obvious: silencing practices produce angry experiences. I focus on tone policing and tone vigilance to illustrate the relationship between silencing and angry knowledge management. Next, I use María Lugones's pluralist account of anger to bring out the epistemic dimensions of knowing resistant anger in a way that also calls attention to their histories and felt textures. The final section draws on feminist scholarship about the transformative power of angry knowledge to suggest how it might serve as a resource for resisting epistemic injustice.

Is pleasure all that is good about experience?

Experientialist accounts of wellbeing are those accounts of wellbeing that subscribe to the experience requirement. Typically, these accounts are hedonistic. In this article I present the claim that hedonism is not the most plausible experientialist account of wellbeing. The value of experience should not be understood as being limited to pleasure, and as such, the most plausible experientialist account of wellbeing is pluralistic, not hedonistic. In support of this claim, I argue first that pleasure should not be understood as a broad term to describe valuable experiences generally. I then analyze responses to the main argument against a monistic view on the value of experience: the philosophy of swine objection. I argue that such responses deviate from the central hedonistic view that only pleasure and pain matter for wellbeing. I then argue that the argument can be avoided on a pluralistic account, and formulate a plausible candidate for an account of pluralistic experientialism, in which, besides pleasure, non-hedonic aspects of experience like novelty, compassion, and aesthetic value also contribute to wellbeing.

Theorizing distributive justice and the practice of post-disaster housing recovery

ABSTRACTThis paper examines the implications of contemporary conceptions of distributive justice for post-disaster recovery programmes. The question asked in this paper is essentially theoretical: what does a concern with distributive justice entail when developing and evaluating post-disaster recovery programmes? Housing recovery programmes are employed to provide a contextual grounding for the discussion. We present a review of the disaster recovery literature and recent programmes of post-disaster housing recovery to map the ways in which distributive justice have been theorized, interpreted, debated and put into practice. We reflect on what different principles of distributive justice imply for post-disaster recovery programmes in terms of their impact on opportunities for individuals and communities to recover from disasters, and also on their realizing possibilities of advancing justice in the post-disaster society. The paper concludes by outlining a number of dimensions of a pluralist account of distributive justice. Using these dimensions and taking into account tensions within and between them, we attempt to offer a framework for reflecting on and assessing distributive arrangements of disaster recovery programmes.

Does IBE Require a ‘Model’ of Explanation?

Abstract In this article, I consider an important challenge to the popular theory of scientific inference commonly known as ‘inference to the best explanation’ (IBE), one that has received scant attention.1 The problem is that there exists a wide array of rival models of explanation, thus leaving IBE objectionably indeterminate. First, I briefly introduce IBE. Then, I motivate the problem and offer three potential solutions, the most plausible of which is to adopt a kind of pluralism about the rival models of explanation. However, I argue that (i) how ranking explanations on this pluralistic account of IBE remains obscure and (ii) pluralism leads to contradictory results. In light of these objections, I attempt to dissolve the problem by showing why IBE does not require a ‘model’ of explanation and by giving an account of what explanation consists in within the context of IBE. 1IBE and the Plentitude Problem2Three Potential Solutions 2.1Solution 1: Primitivism2.2Solution 2: Accomodationism2.3Solution 3: Pluralism3Two Problems for Pluralism 3.1Difficulties with ranking explanations3.2The inevitability of conflicting verdicts4Dissolving the Plentitude Problem 4.1The explanatory virtues screen-off the model of explanation4.2The virtue-centric conception of explanation5Concluding Remarks

We are no Plural Subject

In On Social Facts (1989) and subsequent works, Margaret Gilbert has suggested a plural subject account of the semantics of ‘we’ that claims that a central or standard use of ‘we’ is to refer to an existing or anticipated plural subject. This contrasts with the more general approach to treat plural pronouns as expressions referring to certain pluralities. I argue that (i) the plural subject approach cannot account for certain syntactic phenomena and that (ii) the sense of intimacy, which Gilbert cites as evidence for her plural subject account, has a different source than the existence of joint commitments constituting a respective plural subject. Moreover, (iii) there is a wide variety of phenomena in the linguistic record, which, while not constituting conclusive evidence against the plural subject account, nevertheless, are dealt with better by the plurality account. ‘We’ thus refers to pluralities, which may or may not be plural subjects. The precise analysis of ‘we’ thus reveals a multi-layered ontology of groups.

On Mushroom Individuality

Genidentity coupled with material continuity is proposed as a minimum conception of biological individuality, and then theoretical individuation is employed to identify multiple kinds of biological individuals in a single example from mycology, a patch of chanterelle mushrooms. Of the many candidate materially continuous genidenticals found in a mushroom patch, only those with functional roles in biological theory are notable as biological individuals. Evolutionary and physiological theories pick out multiple kinds of functional individuals in mushrooms, so a pluralistic account of mushroom individuality is warranted.

Caring: A Pluralist Account

AbstractIn this paper, I argue that care ethics should be understood as a form of value pluralism. Writers on the ethics of care tend not explicitly to address issues in the theory of value, although much of what has been written about care ethics may be taken to suggest that it endorses some form of value monism. I argue against this conception of care ethics by showing that the practical reality of caregiving is more accurately represented by a pluralist account of value. Practices of care are plausibly guided by a number of distinct and potentially conflicting values. These include quality of life, autonomy, dignity, personal development, and the value of nurturant relationships. Whilst caring takes each of these values to be important in its own right, they are not always jointly realisable, and carers are sometimes forced to promote one such value at the expense of another. The possibility of conflict between values is, of course, precisely what a pluralist conception of value tells us to expect. In this respect, then, value pluralism more faithfully reflects the reality of caregiving than does value monism, and care ethicists ought for this reason to endorse it.

The Shifting Border Between Perception and Cognition

AbstractThe distinction between perception and cognition has always had a firm footing in both cognitive science and folk psychology. However, there is little agreement as to how the distinction should be drawn. In fact, a number of theorists have recently argued that, given the ubiquity of top‐down influences (at all levels of the processing hierarchy), we should jettison the distinction altogether. I reject this approach, and defend a pluralist account of the distinction. At the heart of my account is the claim that each legitimate way of marking a border between perception and cognition deploys a notion I call ‘stimulus‐control.’ Thus, rather than being a grab bag of unrelated kinds, the various categories of the perceptual are unified into a superordinate natural kind (mutatis mutandis for the complimentary categories of the cognitive).

Deliberative freedoms and the asymmetric features of anti-discrimination law

In a series of papers, Sophia Moreau has offered an original and important account of the value underlying anti-discrimination law, which we call ‘the deliberative freedoms account.’ According to this account, anti-discrimination law exists to protect people’s ‘deliberative freedoms’ – that is, their freedom to make decisions about how to live their lives without having to take into account, as a cost, characteristics such as their gender, race, and age. Viewing anti-discrimination law in this way, Moreau suggests, helps explain why the law treats a discriminatory act as a personal wrong against the complainant. It also reveals an underlying unity between different areas of anti-discrimination law, such as direct discrimination, indirect discrimination, and special accommodation requirements. Despite its strengths, we argue that the deliberative freedoms account does not fit well with asymmetrical features of anti-discrimination law – that is, ways in which the law provides protection to one group (for example, people with a disability) but not to an associated group (for example, people without a disability). In particular, we contend that Moreau cannot account for the recognition by anti-discrimination law of legitimate affirmative action policies. This, we argue, provides a powerful reason to reject the deliberative freedoms account. We also consider more recent, largely unpublished work in which Moreau suggests that she may be moving towards offering a pluralist account of anti-discrimination law, according to which the protection of deliberative freedoms is only one of the aims, or values underlying, this area of law. We argue that the difficulties we have identified with the deliberative freedoms account are likely to apply also to a pluralist theory that accords significant weight to the protection of deliberative freedoms.

Contentless basic minds and perceptual knowledge

Assuming a radical stance on embodied cognition, according to which the information acquired through basic cognitive processes is not contentful (Hutto and Myin, 2013), and assuming that perception is a source of rationally grounded knowledge (Pritchard, 2012), a pluralistic account of perceptual knowledge is developed. The paper explains: (i) how the varieties of perceptual knowledge fall under the same broader category; (ii) how they are subject to the same kind of normative constraints; (iii) why there could not be a conflict between the different varieties of perceptual knowledge; and (iv) why the traditional epistemological inquiry is inclined to overestimate the role of propositional perceptual knowledge. Keywords: Radical enactivism, perceptual knowledge, knowledge-how, knowledge-that.

Social Cognition, Empathy and Agent-Specificities in Cooperation

In this article, I argue for cooperation as a three-dimensional phenomenon lying on the continua of (i) a cognitive, (ii) a behavioural, and (iii) an affective axis. Traditional accounts of joint action argue for cooperation as involving a shared intention. Developmental research has shown that such cooperation requires rather sophisticated social cognitive skills such as having a robust theory of mind - that is acquired not until age 4 to 5 in human ontogeny. However, also younger children are able to cooperate in various ways. Moreover, the coordinated behaviours of the agents can be more or less complex. Finally, phenomenological considerations and findings from social psychology illustrate that (shared) affective states and agent-specificities may play a central role in cooperative activities. I end with discussing the implications of my analysis that speak in favour of a pluralist account of social cognition.

A pluralistic account of epistemic rationality

In this essay, I motivate and defend a pluralistic view of epistemic rationality. The core of the view is the notion that epistemic rationality is essentially a species of (teleological) practical rationality that is put in the service of various epistemic goals. First, I sketch some closely related views that have appeared in the literature. Second, I present my preferred, pluralistic version of the view, and I sketch some of its benefits. Third, I defend the view against a prominent objection recently offered against a class of closely related views by Selim Berker. Last, I raise some distinct, lingering worries, and I sketch some possible ways one might address them.