While it is uncontroversial to point to the liberal roots of feminism, a major issue in English-language feminist political thought over the last few decades has been whether feminism's association with liberalism should be relegated to the past. Can liberalism continue to serve feminist purposes? This book examines the positions of three contemporary feminists - Martha Nussbaum, Susan Moller Okin and Jean Hampton - who, notwithstanding decades of feminist critique, are unwilling to give up on liberalism. This book examines why, (...) and in what ways, each of these theorists believes that liberalism offers the normative and political resources for the improvement of women's situations. It also brings out and tries to explain and evaluate the differences among them, notwithstanding their shared allegiance to liberalism. In so doing, the books goes to the heart of recent debates in feminist and political theory. (shrink)

The vision of legendary criminologist Cesare Lombroso to use scientific theories of individual causes of crime as a basis for screening and prevention programmes targeting individuals at risk for future criminal behaviour has resurfaced, following advances in genetics, neuroscience and psychiatric epidemiology. This article analyses this idea and maps its ethical implications from a public health ethical standpoint. Twenty-seven variants of the new Lombrosian vision of forensic screening and prevention are distinguished, and some scientific and technical limitations are noted. Some (...) lures, biases and structural factors, making the application of the Lombrosian idea likely in spite of weak evidence are pointed out and noted as a specific type of ethical aspect. Many classic and complex ethical challenges for health screening programmes are shown to apply to the identified variants and the choice between them, albeit with peculiar and often provoking variations. These variations are shown to actualize an underlying theoretical conundrum in need of further study, pertaining to the relationship between public health ethics and the ethics and values of criminal law policy. (shrink)

What is counter-finality? Who, or what, is the agent of counter-finality? In the Critique of Dialectical Reason , Sartre employs a complicated and multivalent notion of counter-finality, the reversal of the finality intended by an agent in different contexts and at different levels of complexity. Sartre's concept of counter-finality is read here as an attempt to rethink and broaden the traditional Marxist notion of commodity fetishism as a tragic dialectic of human history whose final act has yet to play out. (...) The article analyses and explicates Sartre's complex concept of counter-finality, focusing on material antipraxis. (shrink)

A garden has always been associated with dreams about the existence of places of happiness. A garden — Paradise — Eden, was a place of affluence and wellbeing both in the beliefs of the Sumerians, in Egypt as well as in the Bible, in Japan and even in the beliefs of the Maya and Zapotecans, and also in Islam. Gardens, at first closed and accessible only to elites, were transformed during the centuries into public gardens, and the monastery “hortus medicus” (...) into modem botanical gardens. Modem botanical gardens in which the beauty of nature can be admired and bring a plant closer to man, also play the function of a bank of genes, they have laboratories and scientific departments, in which the most important research issues relating to animated matter are worked out. Contemporary methods of plant (seed) storing in liquid nitrogen are used, atomic energy is used to create mutations, cloning and contemporary achievements of molecular biology and genetical engineering are used. Environment protection and ecology work is conducted on a particularly broad extent. Their results point to the necessity of creating and implementing a new ecophilosophy ensuring pro-ecological activity of man. (shrink)

In this essay I critically examine David Graeber’s concept of “everyday communism.” Graeber claims that that all societies are ultimately based and founded upon what he calls the “communism of the senses.” This “two-level” version of social reality, as I intend to show in what follows from a Marxian standpoint, should be rejected, as it operates with a descriptive concept of society that posits as the center or “essence” of society its universal and ahistorical “human” base, on top of which (...) hierarchical and economic relations are posited as “superstructures.” Graeber favors a theory that posits an ahistorical base underneath the historical. As a consequence, society disappears underneath an empty and abstract concept of the ethical. This image of society, I will argue with Marx and Engels, overlooks the categorical form of social relations, which cannot be reduced to an empty and abstract concept of sociality as “human” ethical relations. This is especially visible in the case of capitalist socialization. (shrink)

Geocentrism and late-modernity are closely related. Geographical thought connects in often overlooked ways with other contemporary ideas that play important roles in politics, economics and society. Thus the exploitation of geographical ideas to serve political purposes has been a fixture of international relations from manifest destiny to National Socialism, the Cold War to globalization. David T. Murphy compellingly captures the historical moment (Weimar Germany) in which natural law and territoriality were first dealt with as geopolitics, becoming a significant tool for (...) understanding modern social and political life. Geopolitics made it possible to sidestep the divisive specifics of political organization and…. (shrink)