According to event-causal libertarianism, an action is free in the sense relevant to moral responsibility when it is caused indeterministically by an agent’s beliefs, desires, intentions, or by their ...occurrences. This paper attempts to clarify one of the major objections to this theory: the objection that the theory cannot explain the relevance of indeterminism to this kind of freedom (known as free will). Christopher Evan Franklin (2011, 2018) has argued that the problem of explaining the relevance of indeterminism to free will (which he calls “the problem of enhanced control”) arises because it is difficult to see how indeterminism could enhance our abilities, and disappears when we realize that beside the relevant abilities free will requires opportunities. In this paper, I argue that the problem occurs not because of the focus on abilities, but because of the difficulty to explain how indeterminism could contribute to the satisfaction of the sourcehood condition of free will in the framework of event-causal theory of action.
Dass die politische Ordnung der Moderne tragisch verfasst sei, ist eine Diagnose, die sich wie ein roter Faden durch die Ideengeschichte der politischen Philosophie zieht. Sie wurde aber kaum je mit ...dem anderen dramatischen Gattungsmodell der Poetik kontrastiert: der Komödie. Auf Grundlage einer demokratietheoretischen Lektüre der Ästhetik Hegels, der die Komödie als höchste Form des Dramas ausweist, erschließt das Buch von Leonie Hunter das Verhältnis poetischer Ordnungsbildung zur demokratischen Moderne auf überraschende Weise neu. Hegels Differenzierung zwischen Tragödie und Komödie bedeutet, dass auch auf demokratietheoretischer Ebene zwischen zwei Modellen unterschieden werden muss: der tragischen Handlungsordnung der politischen Gegenwart und der komischen Zukunft einer selbstreflexiven Demokratie. Ein Blick auf die Poetik Hegels zeigt eine strukturelle Parallele zwischen seiner Gattungslehre und der radikaldemokratischen Bestimmung politischer Differenz. Politische Transformationsprozesse beruhen ebenso auf Momenten der Störung, der Subversion und daran anschließenden Prozessen der Neuformierung wie die poetischen Gattungen: Von Epos und Lyrik bis zum Drama, in Tragödie und Komödie aufgegliedert, lassen sie sich als unterschiedliche Modelle der Unordnung subjektiver Freiheit (als dem Politischen) und den Normen, Formen und Gesetzen der objektiv geltenden Ordnung (als der Politik) verstehen. Leonie Hunter zeigt, wie bei Hegel Gattungsformen und Vollzüge politischer Differenz Hand in Hand gehen. Dadurch eröffnen sich neue Perspektiven sowohl für die politische als auch für die ästhetische Theorie.
The starting point is the conviction that publicity is central to Kantian political thought as part of the wider relationship between politics and morality. In this sense the book aims to outline ...subjective and objective limits of the public control of power, which must be structurally guaranteed from a juridical point of view and that citizens/subjects have to put into practice. But from a Kantian point of view publicity is also linked to education and to the public use of reason, that individuals must have the courage to realize. The individual dimension and the collective/institutional one are tightly linked to answer the question: according to Kant, is it possible an education to publicity?
»Freiheit« findet als politisch-rechtliche Leitidee der Moderne weitreichende Zustimmung. Bei näherem Hinsehen zeigen sich gleichwohl höchst unterschiedliche Deutungen und Akzentuierungen. Darüber ...hinaus ist der Freiheitsbegriff semantischen Umkehrungen ausgesetzt, die sogar darauf hinauslaufen können, faktische Unfreiheit als höchste Freiheit auszugeben. Die interdisziplinären Beiträge sprechen sich für ein anspruchsvolles Freiheitsverständnis aus und legen ihr Augenmerk nicht zuletzt auf die relationale Dimension von Freiheitspraxen.
Nationalists hold that the state derives its territorial rights from the prior claim of a cultural nation to territory. This article develops an alternative account: the legitimate state theory. This ...view holds that a state has rights to territory if it meets the following four conditions: (a) it effectively implements a system of law regulating property in that territory; (b) its subjects have a legitimate claim to occupy the territory; (c) the state’s system of law “rules in the name of the people,” by protecting basic rights and providing for political participation; and (d) the state is not a usurper.
This essay diagnoses the condition of contemporary liberal democracies. It assumes that the current crisis of democracy is not the result of an external ideological threat, but it is the result of ...the lack of a coherent vision of democracy itself. The author recognises that the key symptom of the contemporary crisis is the decreasing involvement of citizens in public life and their growing reluctance to participate in public debate. He claims that the reason for this is the increasing social polarisation. The article considers two forms of polarisation: vertical (on the line: politicians–voters) and horizontal (on the line of ideo- logical social divisions). The first form is illustrated by Colin Crouch’s considerations, while the second one by Fareed Zakaria’s thoughts. What finds its manifestation in both cases is the phenomenon of citizens’ resignation from participation in the public debate; in the first case it is because of the lack of faith in the effectiveness of this type of opinion- giving mechanism, while in the second case it is because of the lack of recognition of other political and ideological options in society. These reflections are concluded in the postu- late that the basic task facing democracy today is to maintain the public sphere as open as possible, i.e. not excluding any ideological position in advance. This kind of conclusion is illustrated with the concepts of Chantal Mouffe (political perspective) and Helmuth Pless- ner (philosophical-anthropological perspective).
The paper is focused on the issue of connecting the minimum freedom and human nature in the ideas of Isaiah Berlin. Its content is conceived as an attempt to express the position of minimal freedom ...in the Berlin concept and as analysis of the typology of human nature using the concept of R. A. Kocis. Since Berlin does not define the essence of human nature in his work, the aim of this study is to search for out a potential explanation of what can be understood under the concept of human nature and what role it fulfills in the need to secure an inviolable part of human freedom. For Berlin, the minimum freedom is a key aspect of promoting the idea of securing an area that no one has the right to interfere with. This is because the loss of this component would destroy human personality.
In order to be exercised meaningfully, political freedom requires the capacity to actually identify available policy options. To ensure this, society ought to engage in deliberation as a discussion ...oriented towards mutual learning. In order to highlight this issue, I define deliberation in terms of the participants’ openness to preference change, i.e. the delibera- tive stance. In the context of the systemic approach to deliberative theory, I find several factors causing the atrophy of such a deliberative stance. I note that this state can occur not only when debaters are representatives or are in the presence of an audience, but also when they face the prospect of a binding decision. It is the latter effect that is a serious challenge to the micro-deliberative strategy, one that strives towards decisional powers being granted to deliberative minipublics. Presenting my findings, I propose—as an alter- native to the power-oriented ‘ladder of participation’—a distinction between traditional co-decision and deliberative consultation, the latter one being (in certain systemic con- texts) an environment that is more conducive to deliberative stance. This new typology highlights factors that lead to preference petrification and allows for the appreciation of the non-decisional character of micro-deliberation. All of it leads to the conclusion that, in order to preserve their deliberative character in the systemic context, deliberative min- ipublics should not always be required to have decision-making powers.
In many countries, the political backlash against neoliberalism has mainly been a retreat from democracy, with a decline in independence of the judiciary and the monetary authorities, increased ...control of the media, and manipulation of elections for purposes of authoritarian control. The economic dynamics and the impact of neoliberalism, i.e. deregulation and liberalized markets, is just one cause of this authoritarian shift. The contributors to this volume examine the impact of neoliberal economic policies in relation to cultural and political factors and how these have promoted the recent authoritarian turn, as well as probing the economic policies and performance of the illiberal regimes.
