Ongoing Projects
Hermeneutical Injustice in Urban Design
By Tea Lobo
The modern conundrum of how to build just cities for the many is gaining urgency with rapidly increasing urbanization rates around the world. The aim of the United Nations is “cities for all”. But should cities be for all people? Or for all living beings on their territory? How do we build cities that do justice to vulnerable human groups, as well as animals, plants and perhaps even micro-organisms? Given that today’s decisions in urban design will impact our highly urban future in 30 years, it is important to ask such fundamental questions. While there has been progress in making urban design more inclusive of women or the disabled, there are still epistemic blind spots. These include urban dwellers with a radically different form of life, like urban foragers, who depend on their knowledge of local ecological systems rather than global supply chains, as well as the non-human. The need for ethical scrutiny of the production of knowledge of what is just for urban inhabitants is growing as increasingly dense living conditions dissolve urban boundaries, merge cities into each other, and make radically different forms of life collide, some of which are systematically overlooked even as it is not clear how to include non-human beings in urban planning.
This project will use a significantly extended concept of hermeneutical injustice (Fricker 2007; 2017) to analyze the epistemic blind spots in urban design pertaining to vulnerable alternative human forms of life and non-human urban inhabitants. Fricker’s framework provides an apt starting point to investigate the normative dimensions of our (self-) interpretative practices. We will apply it to analyze how purported knowledge of what is just for urban inhabitants has ethical implications in that it can exclude or distort the needs of particular groups. The project’s extended approach to epistemic injustice transcends Fricker’s focus on the human world and asks how epistemic practices may also wrong other beings, such as plants, animals and marginal cases like micro-organisms. It thereby also connects hermeneutical injustice to questions of environmental and social injustices.
Reasons, Responsibility and the Ethics of Climate Change
By Franz Altner
The research project investigates the question whether groups, such as corporations and states, can be thought of as agents that act autonomously and can participate in moral discourse or whether we should think of them more like tools that we set up to serve certain purposes. Should we conceive of corporations, whose institutional aim is taken to be profit maximization, as moral persons that can be held accountable for their actions, and what does this mean for our fight against climate change? In answering these questions, the project develops a functionalist, narrative account about agency and draws from recent work in social choice theory.
Related to these inquiries is the more general question of the nature of our reasons. Do our reasons depend on our social circumstances and roles? If they do, then how can we reach agreement with regard to tackling global, collective action problems, like man made climate change, given the underlying plurality of values and moral standpoints?
To answer this latter set of questions, the project applies Habermas’ discourse theory and recent concepts from social ontology.
Future persons in Kantian contractualism
By Jens Gillessen
It is now widely accepted that persons not yet born and possibly living far in the future must be taken into account in action. But how is this consideration to be concretised? Do present persons have duties of justice with regard to future persons? If so, what is the weight and scope of these duties when they collide with duties towards already existing persons? The project aims to clarify whether a theory of the type of so-called Kantian contractualism can be conceived and defended, with the help of which these questions can be answered systematically and convincingly. In particular, it will be clarified what such a theory is capable of achieving in the field of climate ethics.