Papers by Paulus Kaufmann
Concepts of Philosophy in Asia and the Islamic world
Concepts of Philosophy in Asia and the Islamic world
CAPE Studies in Applied Philosophy and Ethics Series, 2014
D of the state of nature had, as is well known, a great impact on European philosophy and politic... more D of the state of nature had, as is well known, a great impact on European philosophy and political thought in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Thinkers like Hobbes, Locke, and Rousseau included such depictions in their philosophical writings and used them to support their particular accounts of legitimate political authority. It is much less well known that political thinkers of the same period in Japan also developed ideas about the state of nature. Ogyū Sorai, Dazai Shundai, Yamagata Daini, Andō Shōeki, and Fujita Tōko, among others, likewise used such accounts to promote their theories about political power and good government. In this paper I will present their ideas of the state of nature and analyse how these ideas are employed in their respective political theories. The depictions of the state of nature I am interested in are methodological tools employed in political argument.1 It is not really surprising
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Papers by Paulus Kaufmann
discussions of moral philosophy, and in Applied Ethics diverse practices are judged by asking if they involve the use of persons. The common employment and broad acceptance of the prohibition notwithstanding, there are still a number of intriguing questions that have to be answered: First, we have to know what practices actually fall within the scope of the prohibition against using people. Second, it is unclear what exact role the prohibition can play within moral theory. Third, it still needs to be explained why using people is morally wrong. This book pursues the aim of giving coherent answers to these three questions about the scope, the role and the justification of the prohibition against using people.
In pursuing these aims, at many points in my argument I will stress that the common sense concept of using people is already a rich and fascinating notion. The common sense notion cannot answer our questions by itself, though, and needs to be improved and rearranged by moral theory. The first philosopher who picked up this notion was Immanuel Kant. Kant gave the notion a central position in his moral theory and almost all existing analyses of the notion of using people refer at some point to Kant's theory. My book summarises Kant's account of using people and evaluates the most important contemporary attempts to understand the prohibition against using people.
I will argue that all current interpretations of the prohibition against using people are problematic and do not solve the questions about the prohibition's scope, role and justification yet. My own proposal therefore takes a new approach and clearly distinguishes between two kinds of moral principles: In moral theory we need very general principles that tell us what morality is all about. But at the same time we need rules that refer to particular contexts and help us to draw conclusions about what to do in a particular situation. I believe that the existing ideas about using people have to be rearranged according to these two levels: Kant and so called value-based accounts of using people offer an attractive general principle, telling us that we must not treat persons with unconditional value as if they only had instrumental value. Common sense morality, on the other hand, contains a clear idea of what it means to use a person. It is the conclusion of my book that this common sense idea provides the concrete moral rules that we need to draw particular conclusions from the general value-based understanding of morality. Understood in this way the prohibition against using people has a clear scope, plays an important role in moral theory and is justified by the powerful idea that every person possesses unconditional value.