According to linguistic conventionalism, necessities are to be explained in terms of the conventionally adopted rules that govern the use of linguistic expressions. A number of influential arguments against this view concerns the ‘Truth-Contrast Thesis’. This is the claim that necessary truths are fundamentally different from contingent ones since they are not made true by ‘the (worldly) facts’. ...

All persons have a right to seek and find asylum. Arguably, the international community, or the states that comprise it, have a duty to provide such asylum. In the present circumstances, such rights of refugees, or the duties of the receiving states, are not always fulfilled. Not everyone is able to seek, let alone find, asylum, and many refugees, all deserving of asylum, are left unprotected, ...

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 LGBTQ+ community has over the past fifty years gone from being a severely oppressed group of people, where most people lived closeted lives, to become a well known minority group that many people associate with celebration, bravery and pride. This is not to say that the circumstances have completely changed for the LGBTQ+ community. They are still subjected to a high level of threat when it comes ...

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. We take the plausibility and coherence of this objection – the Demandingness Objection – as a given and are also not concerned with finding the best response to the Objection. Instead, our main aim is to explicate the intuitive background of the Objection ...