Pro-Fil – An Internet Journal of Philosophy

Mark Coeckelbergh: Digital Technologies, Temporality, and the Politics of Co-Existence

2024-01-28T18:40:26+01:00

Book Review

Gewirthian Prudence, Generic Agency, and Moral Rights

2024-03-04T10:20:10+01:00

Much critical attention has been given to Alan Gewirth’s argument concerning agents’ move from prudential to moral right-claims. Less ink has been spilled on the question of why prudent agents should claim rights to goods needed by agents in general rather than to goods needed for the realization of their individual and particular purposes. In this paper, I intend to show that Gewirth’s concept of prudence makes it necessary for agents to identify with the role of a generic agent and that this identification provides them with rationally valid reasons not only to claim prudential rights to freedom and well-being but also to recognize a moral principle stating that all agents have these rights. More generally, my argument points to the central role played by the concept of prudence in his theory.

A Critical Analysis of Moral Contractarianism: Towards a Revised Framework

2024-04-03T10:43:57+02:00

This paper critically examines moral contractarianism, a moral theory centred on rational agreements among self-interested individuals to establish moral rules and social norms. It explores the challenges faced by moral contractarianism while also highlighting its strengths. Major issues, such as accommodating justice and fairness within the contractarian framework, are discussed, along with other challenges. Additionally, the paper provides a brief discussion of moral contractualism (a theory similar to moral contractarianism in certain aspects), highlighting its strengths in addressing some of the challenges faced by moral contractarianism while also discussing its limitations. The paper concludes by offering a revised framework of moral contractarianism that provides solutions to the major problems of injustice and partiality that the theory faces.

The Problem of Teaching Virtue Between the Protagoras and the Phaedrus

2023-08-22T10:06:00+02:00

Socrates’ final argument in the Protagoras is premised on the surprising identification of the pleasant with the good and argues that virtue is the “art of measurement” that can be easily taught to the Many. The view that virtue can be taught is also espoused by Socrates elsewhere, notably in the Phaedrus. However, while the Protagoras identifies virtue with the art of calculating the greatest pleasure, which is identified with the greatest good, in the Phaedrus virtue is shown to consist in the ceaseless search for the good. I argue that the picture of virtue presented in the Protagoras is in agreement with that of the Phaedrus in that the Protagoras depicts the first stage of the process of learning genuine virtue, which is outlined as a whole in the Phaedrus. The argument of the Protagoras then works as a protreptic: it teaches an elementary way of thinking about the ends of one’s actions and opens up the way toward genuine virtue.

Identifying the Possible Implications of the Concept of the Anthropocene for the Philosophical-Anthropological Thought

2024-02-01T18:09:17+01:00

The paper focuses on identifying the possible, and assumed, implications of the concept of the Anthropocene for thinking about the human in a philosophy that accepts the transition from Holocene to Anthropocene thinking. The aim of the paper is to produce a systematic treatment of the philosophical-anthropological presuppositions of the concept of the Anthropocene. Illuminating the relationship between the concepts of the Earth System, the planetary boundaries and the Anthropocene has to be the focus if we are to delineate the basic anthropological issues so that they can be further conceptually elaborated from a philosophical-anthropological perspective. Such an approach aims to highlight the various interpretive disagreements not only in understanding the concept of the Anthropocene but also in understanding the meaning of the concept of humanity as a geobiophysical force.

On State Toleration of Hate Speech in Pluralist Democracies

2024-04-23T10:00:44+02:00

MacIntyre’s ‘liberal’ view of the state’s toleration of hate speech may seem surprising given his radical rejection of liberalism. It appears liberal because MacIntyre agrees with some classical liberal conclusions, as formulated by Locke, concerning the requirement of evaluative neutrality of the state. This seems to be the main reason why MacIntyre argues that the hate speech toleration at the governmental level should not be ‘content-based’, i.e. it should be strictly ‘context-based’. The paper argues that MacIntyre’s ‘context-based’ approach seems problematic because it does not take the relevance of different political contexts seriously enough and should be modified towards the ‘regime-based’ model, in which hate speech bans are justified only by the insufficient quality of a given democratic society.