Collective Responsibility for Oppression

Many contemporary forms of oppression are not primarily the result of formally organized collective action nor are they an unintended outcome of a combination of individual actions. This raises the question of collective responsibility. I argue that we can only determine who is responsible for oppression if we understand oppression as a matter of social practices that create obstacles for social change. This social practice view of oppression enables two insights: First, that there is an unproblematic sense in which groups can bear irreducible collective responsibility for oppression. Second, that there are derived forms of individual responsibility for members of dominant groups

Fundamental Hope and Practical Identity

This article considers the question ‘What makes hope rational?’ We take Adrienne Martin’s recent incorporation analysis of hope as representative of a tradition that views the rationality of hope as a matter of instrumental reasons. Against this tradition, we argue that an important subset of hope, ‘fundamental hope’, is not governed by instrumental rationality. Rather, people have reason to endorse or reject such hope in virtue of the contribution of the relevant attitudes to the integrity of their practical identity, which makes the relevant hope not instrumentally but intrinsically valuable. This argument also allows for a new analysis of the reasons people have to abandon hope and for a better understanding of non-fundamental, ‘prosaic’ hopes

Verbrecher, Revolutionäre und Schöne Seelen. Hegel über die Pathologien sozialer Freiheit

Hegels Begriff der Freiheit, zugleich Fundament und Schlussstein des Gebaudes einer Philosophie, wird oft als Signatur der problematischen Konstellation "Moderne" gelesen, die Hegel nach eigenem Anspruch mit seiner Philosophie "in Begriffe fassen" wollte. Hegels Werk ist durchzogen von "falschen" oder irrtumlichen Vorstellungen, die sich Subjekte und Kollektive von Freiheit machen konnen, so dass man sagen kann, Hegel habe mehr Zeit und Muhe in die Kritik zu kurz greifender Freiheitsbegriffe als auf die Ausarbeitung eines positiven Begriffs moderner Freiheit verwandt. Dies nicht einfach nur deshalb, weil Kritik eine wesentliche Aufgabe der Arbeit des Negativen und damit des Begriffs darstellt, sondern weil diese Irrtumer auch wesentliche Momente der modernen Idee der Freiheit sind. Die in diesem Band versammelten Beitrage diskutieren zentrale Formen der in Hegels Augen unvollstandigen Momente der modernen Freiheit in Recht, Moral, Kunst und Religion und werfen die Frage nach den Bedingungen und Grenzen von Hegels Freiheitsbegriff auf

Soziale Gerechtigkeit und institutionelle Macht

This paper argues that liberal theories of justice cannot satisfactorily deal with institutional power. They set out to compare different institutional structures based on criteria which presume an institution-independent ontology of rights and goods. But as soon as it is acknowledged that many properties of goods and rights which are normatively relevant depend ontologically on the existence of particular institutions, and that such institutions necessarily involve specific structures of power, it can be argued that not judgments about rights, equality or welfare, but an assessment of the justice of power relations is the most important task for theories of social justice. The paper explores several strategies for providing such an assessment

Criticizing Social Reality from Within: Haslanger on Race, Gender, and Ideology

A critical discussion of the account of social externalism and ideology critique in Sally Haslanger's "Resisting Reality.

What is Immanent Critique?

This working paper examines the notion of "immanent critique", a central methodological commitment of critical theories of society. In the first part, I distinguish immanent critique - a critique which reconstructs norms immanent in a social practice which point beyond the normative self-understanding of its members - from both external and internal critique and examine three questions that a theory of immanent critique has to answer (a social ontological, an epistemological and a justificatory question). After surveying some of the classic accounts of immanent critique in part two, I then distinguish two varieties of immanent critique, a hermeneutic and a practice-theoretic approach. Drawing on theories in recent analytic philosophy, I finally argue for a practice-theoretic approach to immanent critique that locates the relevant norms in a practice constituted by mutual recognition

Ideologiekritik

Artikel „Ideologiekritik“ (erscheint in Quante, Michael; Schweikard, David: Marx-Handbuch. Metzler: 2015, S. 238–252

The Metaethics of Critical Theories

Critical theories, from their beginning in Marx’s philosophy to the Frankfurt School with its different generations, have always been characterized by a certain ambivalence toward moral questions. They often conceive themselves as an alternative to traditional moral philosophy, which is criticized both for separating context-free normative justification and empirical descriptions too strictly and for its seeming commitment to moral and normative standards developed independently from historical and social contingency. The different generations of critical theory have all attempted to develop a theory of normative judgment which is appropriately critical but which nevertheless does not require any commitment to naive moral naturalism or context-free realism. In the chapter, the author traces this through the different stages of the development of critical theories, and argues that at least some of the answers we can find in this tradition do not fit into the usual division between realist and antirealist theories in contemporary metaethics

Indiscriminate mass surveillance and the public sphere

Recent disclosures suggest that many governments apply indiscriminate mass surveillance technologies that allow them to capture and store a massive amount of communications data belonging to citizens and non-citizens alike. This article argues that traditional liberal critiques of government surveillance that center on an individual right to privacy cannot completely capture the harm that is caused by such surveillance because they ignore its distinctive political dimension. As a complement to standard liberal approaches to privacy, the article develops a critique of surveillance that focuses on the question of political power in the public sphere