It only takes two to tango: against grounding morality in interaction

Most Kantian constructivists try to ground universal duties of interpersonal morality in certain interactions between individuals, such as communication, argumentation, shared action or the second-person standpoint. The goal of this paper is to present these, which I refer to as arguments from the second-person perspective, with a dilemma: either the specific kind of interaction that is taken as a starting point of these arguments is inescapable, but in that case the argument does not justify a universal principle of interpersonal morality. Or interaction does have a principle of interpersonal morality among its necessary conditions of possibility, but such forms of interactions are merely optional. I argue that proponents of arguments from the second-person perspective have failed to provide a convincing response to this dilemma and that this failure is systematic. This suggests that the success of Kantian constructivism depends on the success of arguments from the first person

Reflections inside an elliptical dielectric lens antenna,”

Abstract: The reflections inside the elliptical lens of a typical millimetre wave antenna are investigated. In particular, it is seen that these reflections may significantly affect the input impedance of a radiating element which is located at the lens focus, owing to the presence there of a point caustic of doubly reflected rays. The presence of a caustic prevents the field prediction inside the lens by a direct application of geometrical optics. Consequently, the field inside the lens is calculated by means of the physical optics currents associated with singly and doubly reflected rays

Development of large radii half-wave plates for CMB satellite missions

The successful European Space Agency (ESA) Planck mission has mapped the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) temperature anisotropy with unprecedented accuracy. However, Planck was not designed to detect the polarised components of the CMB with comparable precision. The BICEP2 collaboration has recently reported the first detection of the B-mode polarisation. ESA is funding the development of critical enabling technologies associated with B-mode polarisation detection, one of these being large diameter half-wave plates. We compare different polarisation modulators and discuss their respective trade-offs in terms of manufacturing, RF performance and thermo-mechanical properties. We then select the most appropriate solution for future satellite missions, optimized for the detection of B-modes.Comment: 16 page

Thinking About Justice: A Traditional Philosophical Framework

This chapter describes a philosophical approach to theorizing justice, mapping out some main strands of the tradition leading up to contemporary political philosophy. We first briefly discuss what distinguishes a philosophical approach to justice from other possible approaches to justice, by explaining the normative focus of philosophical theories of justice – that is, a focus on questions not about how things actually are, but about how things ought to be. Next, we explain what sorts of methods philosophers use to justify theories of justice. Following this, in the longest section, we highlight major questions about justice that have drawn the attention of philosophers, and indicate how competing conceptions of justice have arisen from differing answers to these questions. The goal here is not to answer but to elucidate some of the larger questions about justice, as well as to establish a framework for understanding and distinguishing different kinds of claims about justice and some of the relations between them

Facts, Principles, and (Real) Politics

Should our factual understanding of the world influence our normative theorising about it? G.A. Cohen has argued that our ultimate normative principles should not be constrained by facts. Many others have defended or are committed to various versions or subsets of that claim. In this paper I dispute those positions by arguing that, in order to resist the conclusion that ultimate normative principles rest on facts about possibility or conceivability, one has to embrace an unsatisfactory account of how principles generate normative political judgments. So political theorists have to choose between principles ostensibly unbiased by our current understanding of human motivation and political reality, or principles capable of reliably generating political judgments. I conclude with wider methodological observations in defence of the latter option, and so of a return to political philosophy’s traditional blend of normative and descriptive elements

Korsgaard’s Other Argument for Interpersonal Morality: the Argument from the Sufficiency of Agency

Christine Korsgaard’s (1996, 2009) argument for the claim that one should not only value one’s own humanity but also the humanity of all other persons, ‘the publicity of reasons argument’, has been heavily criticized and I believe rightly so. However, both in an early paper (1986) and in her most recent work (forthcoming), Korsgaard does not rely on controversial, Wittgensteinian ideas regarding the publicity of reasons, but instead she uses a different argument to justify interpersonal morality, which I will refer to as ‘the argument from the sufficiency of agency’. The goal of this paper is to evaluate whether the argument from the sufficiency of agency can succeed where the publicity of reasons argument fails. I will argue that although the argument from the sufficiency of agency is potentially more promising, it fails to justify a categorical and universal principle of interpersonal morality. I argue, however, that this failure has less to do with the argument from the sufficiency of agency itself and more with Korsgaard’s specific version of it. This leaves open the possibility that other Kantian constructivist arguments from the sufficiency of agency might be more successful