Artikkelen fokuserer på hvilken rolle egeninteresse spiller i The Wealth of Nations av Adam Smith. Grunnlaget for diskusjonen vil være et bestemt syn på den vitenskapelige idealiseringen. I henhold til dette synet hevder Smith at aktørene på markedet er motivert av egeninteresse på tross av at han selv vet at dette ikke nødvendigvis er tilfellet. Selv om denne påstanden kan begrunnes pragmatisk, det ...

Say a jury is going to decide who wins a competition. First, each member evaluates all the competitors by grading them; then, for each competitor, a collective grade is derived from all the judgments of all the members; finally, the jury chooses as the winner the competitor with the highest collective grade. This is <i>collective grading</i>. The grades that are used might typically be numerical ...

Metoobevegelsen har ført til et økt fokus på kulturelle og strukturelle forhold som bidrar til å opprettholde og usynliggjøre seksuell trakassering og diskriminering i arbeidslivet og andre sektorer i samfunnslivet. Artikkelen er en diskusjon av ulike former for urettferdighet som bidrar til å skape en slik kultur, mer presist, <i>epistemisk urettferdighet</i> og <i>implisitt bias</i>. Disse formene ...

Habermas’ ‘ethics of citizenship’ raises a number of relevant concerns about the dangers of a secularistic exclusion of religious contributions to public deliberation, on the one hand, and the dangers of religious conflict and sectarianism in politics, on the other. Agreeing largely with these concerns, the paper identities four problems with Habermas’ approach, and attempts to overcome them: (a) ...

In this article, I consider Bernard Suits’ Utopia where the denizens supposedly fill their days playing Utopian sports, with regard to the relevance of the thought experiment for understanding the sports we currently play and have played. I argue that the thought experiment is irrelevant for understanding our current and past sports, i.e. human sports. I identify two views on games and sports in ...

The paper offers a philosophically infused analysis of Cormac McCarthy’s The Road. The main idea is that McCarthy’s novel is primarily a statement on the meaning of life. Once this idea is argued for and endorsed, by using a parallel between The Road and a 19th century Hungarian dramatic poem, The Tragedy of Man, the paper goes on to argue that the most plausible – although admittedly not the only ...

It isn’t saying much to claim that morality is demanding; the question, rather, is: can morality be so demanding that we have reason not to follow its dictates? According to many, it can, if that morality is a consequentialist one. This paper takes the plausibility and coherence of this objection – the Demandingness Objection – as a given. Our question, therefore, is how to respond to the Objection. ...

The aftermath of the European refugee crisis can be said to have sparked a crisis of solidarity. Despite abundant demonstrations of solidarity with refugees and asylum seekers, what many saw as an exercise of their duty to help was made illegal. The critical term that emerged to refer to this conjuncture was “criminalization of solidarity”. In order to include this term in the academic debate, this ...

This essay discusses Cyril Ghosh’s analysis of the notion of ‘gay covering’ as an act of downplaying one’s gayness in the face of public expectations, and its countermove of ‘reversing cover’. I acknowledge, along with Ghosh, that both the demands to ‘cover’ and ‘reverse cover’ are problematic from the perspective of LGBT+ authenticity. I aim to show, however, that such acts of covering, and reversing ...