sexta-feira, 28 de fevereiro de 2014

Lançamento: Law Ethics and Philosophy (LEAP)

O primeiro número do periódico Law, Ethics and Philosophy (LEAP) já está disponível on-line. O journal (aberto) é dedicado a publicações nas áreas de ética contemporânea, teoria do direito e filosofia política. O conselho editorial é composta pelos filósofos Andrew Williams e Paula Casal. A primeira edição conta com uma troca de artigos entre Thomas Pogge e Lippert-Rasmussen a respeito das responsabilidades dos países ricos pela injustiça global. Trata-se de uma ótima opção para quem pensa em submeter trabalhos em inglês nessas áreas. 




Abstract
On Pogge’s view, we —people living in rich countries— do not just allow the global poor to die. Rather, we interfere with them in such a way that we make them die on a massive scale. If we did the same through military aggression against them, surely, it would be permissible for these people to wage war on us to prevent this. Suppose Pogge’s analysis of the causes of global poverty is correct, and assume the moral permissibility of self-defence by poor people in the hypothetical military action scenario just mentioned. If these assumptions are correct, poor countries could start just and, even possibly, morally permissible redistributive wars against us provided various additional conditions are met. To avoid misunderstanding, I should stress that my main claim is the conditional equivalence claim, namely that if Pogge’s analysis of the causes of global poverty is correct, our relation to poor countries is morally equivalent to one in which we each year killed many of the global poor by military means. I do not claim (i) that Pogge’s analysis is correct; (ii) that as a matter of fact, it is morally permissible for poor countries to wage redistributive wars against rich countries; (iii) that it is not the case that anything that is impermissible for poor countries to do in the latter situation involving military aggression —e.g. deliberately targeting rich civilians— is impermissible in redistributive wars as well.

Keywords
Doing vs. allowing harm, global justice, just ad bellum, just cause, poverty, proportionality, Thomas Pogge.


Abstract
Citizens of affluent countries bear a far greater responsibility for world poverty than they typically realise. This is so because poverty is more severe, more widespread and more avoidable than officially acknowledged and also because it is substantially aggravated by supranational institutional arrangements that are designed and imposed by the governments and elites of the more powerful states. It may seem that this analysis of world poverty implies that citizens of affluent countries have forfeited their right not to be killed in the course of a redistributive war and that such a war would be both just and permissible. In fact, however, it has none of these three implications. This finding should be welcomed insofar as violence and macho talk of violence are in our world highly counterproductive responses to the injustice of poverty.

Keywords
Forfeiture of rights, human rights, inequality, infringement of rights, injustice, just war theory, liability to violence, Lippert-Rasmussen, negative responsibility, redistributive war, remote hypotheticals.

quarta-feira, 26 de fevereiro de 2014

50 Anos do Golpe

A partir desta semana o centro acadêmico do curso de Filosofia (CAF) da USP organizará, em parceria com a editora Boitempo, uma série de palestras e exibições de filmes tendo por tema os 50 anos do golpe militar no Brasil. Entre os destaques da programação, alguns filmes e documentários raros ou até pouco tempo atrás inacessíveis como o documentário censurado Você também pode dar um presunto legal de Sérgio Muniz e Brazil a Report on Torture uma chocante reconstrução das torturas no país de Saul Landau e Haskell Wexler. 

(Infelizmente o evento não conta com um site)




segunda-feira, 24 de fevereiro de 2014

Ensaios e Resenhas de Bernard Williams (1959-2002)

Acaba de sair pela Princeton Press o livro Bernard Williams: Essays and Reviews (1959-2002) contendo a produção jornalística de um dos mais importantes filósofos do último século. Ao longo de toda sua carreira Williams participou ativamente nos principais debates políticos e culturais da Inglaterra  - a ponto de ser nomeado presidente do comitê parlamentar sobre obscenidade e censura, conhecido hoje como "Williams Committee". Ao todo são 71 artigos publicados ao longo de mais de quarenta anos, incluindo resenhas célebres (como a resenha de O Liberalismo Político de Rawls e Razões e Pessoas de Parfit) e uma série de ensaios publicados no final de sua carreira sobre a natureza da atividade filosófica.

- Williams: "A Fair State"

- Williams: "On Hating and Despising Philosophy" 



Bernard Williams: Essays and Reviews (1959-2002)
Foreword by Michael Wood

Bernard Williams was one of the most important philosophers of the last fifty years, but he was also a distinguished critic and essayist with an elegant style and a rare ability to communicate complex ideas to a wide public. This is the first collection of Williams's popular essays and reviews, many of which appeared in the New York Review of Books, the London Review of Books, and the Times Literary Supplement. In these pieces, Williams writes about a broad range of subjects, from philosophy and political philosophy to religion, science, the humanities, economics, socialism, feminism, and pornography.

Included here are reviews of major books such as John Rawls's Theory of Justice, Robert Nozick's Anarchy, State, and Utopia, Alastair MacIntyre's After Virtue, Richard Rorty's Consequences of Pragmatism, and Martha Nussbaum's Therapy of Desire. But many of these essays extend beyond philosophy and together provide an intellectual tour through the past half century, from C. S. Lewis and Umberto Eco to Noam Chomsky. No matter the subject, Williams probes and challenges arguments, teases out their implications, and connects them to the wider intellectual scene. At the same time, readers see a first-class mind grappling with landmark books in "real time," before critical consensus had formed and ossified.

In his foreword, Michael Wood discusses Williams's style and sensibility and his concern that philosophy contribute to the larger intellectual conversation.

Bernard Williams was Knightbridge Professor of Philosophy at the University of Cambridge (1967-1979) and Provost of King's College. He held the Monroe Deutsch Professorship of Philosophy at the University of California, Berkeley (1998-2000) and was White's Professor of Moral Philosophy at the University of Oxford (1990-2003). He was Fellow of All Souls College, Oxford until his death in 2003.




Bolsa de mestrado no University College

O Instituto das Américas sediado no UCL (Londres) abriu um processo seletivo para alunos de mestrado do Brasil e outros 6 países da América Latina. O valor da bolsa é de 5 mil libras e engloba 6 áreas diferentes dentro do instituto (ver a relação de áreas abaixo). O início da bolsa é setembro de 2014 e o deadline para submissão é 1 de março.



UCL - Institute of the Americas (UCL-IA) is delighted to announce the Santander Universities Award of a £5,000 scholarship for our MA and MSc Programmes. This award is for International Students applying from Argentina, Brazil, Colombia, Chile, Mexico, Puerto Rico, Uruguay in September 2014, for these programmes:
The Santander Universities Master's Scholarships (funded by Santander Universities), aims to assist the most academically able students from leading universities to pursue a Master's programme. UCL is one of the top universities in the world and the Institute of the Americas has the largest teaching programme on the Americas in the UK.
Further information here to be updated shortly.



To Qualify Candidates must: 
  • Be residents of one of the Santander Universities network countries listed above.
  • Be expected to obtain, or already possess, a Bachelors' degree
  • Applications must be made to one of the masters programmes listed above by 1 March 2014 to be considered for the Santander Universities award

Successful applications:
Successful applicants will be notified by March 15, 2014
For more information contact UCL-IA's Postgraduate Officer, Laura Tunstall.

segunda-feira, 17 de fevereiro de 2014

A religião de Dworkin

Micheal Rosen (Harvard) publicou um ensaio na The Nation no qual faz um balanço da carreira de Dworkin a partir de sua última obra, Religion Without God. (o livro já foi matéria no nosso blog). Rosen procura entender a relação entre a (suposta) discussão sobre teologia e uma das teses centrais de sua obra, a objetividade dos valores morais. Segundo Rosen, contrariando as tendências naturalistas da filosofia norte-americana contemporânea, Dworkin corou sua carreira com uma reapresentação forte - porém honesta - das premissas de sua filosofia (agradeço a Roberto Merrill pela matéria!). 


[...]

I think Dworkin took something like Rorty’s position when he published Taking Rights Seriouslyin 1977. But thirty-six years later, by the time of Religion Without God, he held a different and far stronger view: human beings do indeed have a special value that can’t be overridden (religious thinkers commonly call it “human dignity”), though not because it comes from God. To the contrary, values exist independently of God.
If morality were just a matter of God’s will, then presumably whatever God willed would be good for that reason and no more. But if God is indeed just, it must be possible for human beings to recognize independently why his commands are good. Of course, goodness is essential to God, so he could not conceivably will anything that was not good—but, still, it is not his willing something that makes it good. As Seneca once wrote, “I do not obey God; I agree with him.” So, Dworkin argues, any reasonable religion must acknowledge the priority of value over the will of the Deity. But in that case, the supernatural narrative of creation, revelation and prophecy that surrounds the moral teachings of religion is dispensable.
Dworkin still wants to call his attitude “religious” because, although he does not believe in the existence of God, he “accepts the full, independent reality of value” and hence rejects the naturalistic view that nothing is real except what is revealed by the natural sciences or psychology.
Yet if values exist as “fully independent,” how can we have access to them? As Dworkin admits, there are no experiments we can conduct to confirm their existence. Dignity—the “God particle” that sustains the existence of human rights—will not be detected by any scientist. On the contrary, the realm of value is “self-certifying,” so the only evidence for the existence of values is the truth of the things that we say about them. And the evidence for that truth is what, exactly—that we agree about values? But disagreement about values is where we came in. Even if we accept that we carry within ourselves an inner kernel of transcendental value, would it give us a way of telling where the claims of the collective end and the prerogatives of the individual begin?
Dworkin is always wonderfully clear and honest about what is involved in his position—it is part of what makes his book such a pleasure to read—and he concludes his discussion of the nature of value by explaining its limitations:
I will not have convinced some of you. You will think that if all we can do to defend value judgments is appeal to other value judgments, and then finally to declare faith in the whole set of judgments, then our claims to objective truth are just whistles in the dark. But this challenge, however familiar, is not an argument against the religious worldview. It is only a rejection of that worldview. It denies the basic tenets of the religious attitude: it produces, at best, a standoff. You just do not have the religious point of view.
This expresses precisely my own reaction. I cannot see that describing the target of our disagreements about value as existing in a fully independent, objective realm is anything more than religion lite: the religious idea of eternal goodness without the miraculous elements of omnipotent divine will and personal immortality. Yet I am at one with Dworkin in thinking that even a fully secular individual should contemplate the universe not just with curiosity and wonder but with reverence and gratitude. Still, behind me I hear a voice—a Nietzschean one, perhaps—that tells me that what Dworkin and I are looking at is no more than a penumbra, the few rays that remain in the sky after the sun of revealed religion has set. If that is so, then the coming night may be dark indeed.

sexta-feira, 14 de fevereiro de 2014

A ética da imigração

O professor de ciência política da Universidade de Toronto, Joseph Carens publicou neste mês pela  coleção de teoria política da Oxford Press seu livro The Ethics of Immigration. O livro é o resulto de quase 3 décadas de pesquisa (e militância) acerca dos problemas de imigração nos EUA e na Europa. Para Carens, o suposto direito do Estado democrático de controlar as fronteiras e o fluxo de pessoas dentro das fronteiras nacionais não é discricionário do ponto de vista moral. Ao contrário, porque fazem parte, de fato, da sociedade  temos boas razões para estender permanentemente os benefícios da cidadania a novos habitantes - sejam eles nossas crianças ou imigrantes de outros países. Escute abaixo a entrevista do autor para o blog Newbooks: 






Joseph Carens

In The Ethics of Immigration, Joseph Carens synthesizes a lifetime of work to explore and illuminate one of the most pressing issues of our time. Immigration poses practical problems for western democracies and also challenges the ways in which people in democracies think about citizenship and belonging, about rights and responsibilities, and about freedom and equality. 

Carens begins by focusing on current immigration controversies in North America and Europe about access to citizenship, the integration of immigrants, temporary workers, irregular migrants and the admission of family members and refugees. Working within the moral framework provided by liberal democratic values, he argues that some of the practices of democratic states in these areas are morally defensible, while others need to be reformed. In the last part of the book he moves beyond the currently feasible to ask questions about immigration from a more fundamental perspective. He argues that democratic values of freedom and equality ultimately entail a commitment to open borders. Only in a world of open borders, he contends, will we live up to our most basic principles. 

Many will not agree with some of Carens' claims, especially his controversial conclusion, but none will be able to dismiss his views lightly. Powerfully argued by one of the world's leading political philosophers on the issue, The Ethics of Immigration is a landmark work on one of the most important global social trends of our era.

quarta-feira, 12 de fevereiro de 2014

Robert Dahl morre aos 98 anos

Professor emérito de politica ciência de Yale Robert Dahl faleceu aos 98 anos na última semana. Dahl é considerado um dos teóricos da democracia mais importantes do século XX. Sua obra Poliarquia (traduzida pela EDUSP) causou uma pequena revolução nos estudos empíricos dos regimes democráticos - ou "poliárquicos" na linguagem de Dahl. Regimes democráticos não seriam definidos pelo governo do "povo", mas sim pelo processo de competição eleitoral (e contestação pública) entre diferentes grupos políticos. Além disso Dahl ofereceu uma das defesas mais influentes da democracia em A Democracia e Seus Críticos (publicado pela Martins Fontes). Veja abaixo os obituários do NY Times e do Washington Post. 


Robert Dahl 





Robert A. Dahl Dies at 98; Yale Scholar Defined Politics and Power

Robert A. Dahl, a political scientist who was widely regarded as his profession’s most distinguished student of democratic government, died on Wednesday in Hamden, Conn. He was 98.

His stepdaughter Sara Connor confirmed the death.

In 2002, The New Yorker said Professor Dahl was “about as covered with honors as a scholar can be” and quoted the Cornell scholar Theodore J. Lowi as calling him “the foremost political theorist of this generation.”

Professor Dahl, who taught at Yale for 40 years, provided a definition of power that became a standard: “A has power over B to the extent that he can get B to do something that B would not otherwise do.”

In two dozen books and hundreds of articles, Professor Dahl wrote about foreign policy, Congress, welfare, the Constitution and more. He was an early proponent of using real-world data and empirical analysis in the study of politics, but did not shrink from making judgments on large issues.

“Over decades when political scientists focused on increasingly narrow and often technical questions, he’s the one person who brought everybody back to the big picture, the big questions,” James S. Fishkin, a professor of communications and political science at Stanford, said in an interview on Friday. “What is the form of democracy that will live up to democratic aspirations?”