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The broad scope of my study is the encounter of Christian theology and democratic social theory. Within this area I relate as well as compare to each other the thoughts of the theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer and the political thinker István Bibó. The possibility of the comparison is supported by the fact that both thinkers elaborated a characteristic understanding and concept of freedom on whose basis they investigated a viable political order for post-war Europe. Their understanding of freedom was significantly different and this difference became manifest in the manner of the political reconstruction they proposed. In my analysis of some early writings and wartime considerations of the two thinkers, my main concern is to reveal the relationship of thelogical reasoning and political argumentation, both within the two thinkers' own thoughts and in their encounter. In the first chapter I create an elementary map of the development of the mutual influence of Christianity and democracy. Here I venture to understand democracy from a Christian point of view as tradition, vision, system and process. In the second chapter I show the relationship between Bibó's concept of freedom and his democratic theory. The third and the fourth chapters are devoted to an analysis of Bonhoeffer's theology that was determined by definite political values already at their roots. I conclude that despite several converging elements in their thinking and understanding of the challenge of the times, some fundamental differences remain in the political theories of Bibó and Bonhoeffer, which have their roots in their opposing understanding of freedom.

There is a problem within contractarian ethics that I wish to resolve. It concerns individualpreferences. Contractarianism holds that morality, properly conceived, can satisfy individualpreferences and interests better than amorality or immorality. W hat is unclear, however, iswhether these preferences are those individuals actually hold or those that they should hold. The goal of my thesis is to investigate this question. I introduce a version of contractarian ethicsthat relies on ind ividual preferences in a manner more stringent than has been in the literatureto date.

Previous research has noted that members of research ethics committees are unclear about the extent of their roles. In this study, research amongst members of independent ethics committees (IECs) about how the ‘expert’ and ‘lay’ roles are understood and operationalized offers an explanation for this lack of clarity. IECs were selected for study because they have only addressed one type of research (Phase 1 ‘healthy volunteer’ studies) and this limited remit suggested that it would be in such committees that the member roles would have become most pronounced. Drawing on findings from the sociology of professions and employing a phenomenological approach to understanding, 20 semi-structured interviews with both expert and lay members of these committees revealed that a number of members were not only unclear about the roles, but unclear too whether they, or certain of their colleagues, were in which membership category. Notwithstanding this fact, and paradoxically, the ‘expert’ designation was seen as granting its members a privileged position on the committees. The expert member was seen to be either a medically qualified member or one tightly associated with the medical model. Such a repository of expertise being with the medical model privileges this model in ethics review such that other matters formally to be scrutinized by ethics committees become marginalised. Participant safety was the prime concern of the ethics review for IEC members. This relegated other matters including the adequacy of the insurance arrangements, the readability of the consent forms, the fairness of the inclusion criteria, and so forth, into areas of lesser concern. That this occurs though when the science, the safety and the methodology of the trials are already – separately - subject to an independent analysis by a body of experts, whose statutory role is to concern itself with these issues such that no trial may occur without their sanction, is of significance. IEC members were cognizant of this duplication of role but unable to resolve it. The situation could be accounted for as due to capture by the medical model and a cognitive dissonant process. Members’ training and education were found to have been neglected because under the medical professions’ gaze no other type of knowledge was considered necessary in ethics review. The study revealed that the medical profession’s dominance of such committees accounts for the members’ role uncertainty and as such allies itself to Freidson’s theory of professional dominance. If such a concept has been thought to be an obsolete one, this study suggests such a notion of the status of the theory is premature. The medical model’s status is implicitly accepted such that nothing else need be considered. The research calls for further studies to corroborate such findings in other research ethics settings and for a debate about what society wants its ethics committees to focus upon in their review.

Deleuze opposes ethics to Morality. He claims that an ethics develops immanent criteria to evaluate modes of existence, while a Morality imposes transcendent principles. This thesis explores the question of ethics, and I investigate the possibilities of an ethics of the pre-individual. Consequently this enterprise involves the development of an alternative ontology of becoming corresponding to a philosophy of difference. By taking this trajectory, I seek to show that an anti-human humanism is possible and demonstrate how this might work. Deleuze and Guattari always emphasise the practical and concrete nature of philosophy; therefore, in order to situate their concepts I begin the thesis with an examination of different theoretical approaches to the question of difference. However, I suggest that difference and heterogeneity cannot be simply affirmed in and of themselves since new forms of domination also affirm difference. My next chapter follows up on this idea by interrogating the allegation that philosophies of difference have made a political covenant with global capitalism. I draw on a distinction between power (potentia) and Power (Potestas) in order to explain how different modes of social organisation and domination can minimise the creative and transformational capacities of humans. By analysing a number of theoretical accounts of capitalism I demonstrate how and why it differs from other social formations. Nonetheless, I conclude that philosophy can indeed be distinguished from capitalism. Philosophy, as the art of inventing concepts, develops the conditions for real experimentation and new ways of thinking, being and existing. By turning to Spinoza's Ethics I propose that by thinking about the human differentially, as a part of nature, we can develop an immanent ethics. I explain how Spinoza's ontology operates especially in terms of its renovated conception of the human.In generating an ontology that is not centred on the individuated individual but grasps instead the individual as both relational and a degree of power, the pre-individual and transindividual dimensions of the human are emphasised and she is opened up to her non-human becomings. Simondon's account of metastable being explores this in greater detail. He argues that we have tended to extrapolate from the individuated individual in order to try to understand its conditions of existence. Alternatively, we have relied upon a principle of individuation that pre-exists the process of individuation. By intertwining his focus on the process of individuation with his idea that being is more than unity, more than identity and fundamentally incompatible with itself, I present Simondon's account of an ontology of becoming and his correlative conception of a pre-individual field. Residing at the core of his endeavour is a theory of difference and disparateness that understands identity to be emergent, partial, relative and derivative. Simondon's emphasis on disparateness recurs in Deleuze's work 'Difference and Repetition' mobilise this idea in order to distinguish between a created possible and a realisable possible, and to elucidate the ethico-political implications of this distinction. The concept of the 'image of thought' that rests on a series of non-philosophical pre-suppositions helps us to critique dominant modes of thinking and acting. In addition to critique, I seek to construct other ways of thinking and existing. Once again I focus upon the preindividual and transindividual dimensions of the human when in my concluding chapter I map the different conceptions of ethics and subjectivity, that emerge once we transform our understanding of ontology. An ethics of the pre-individual relies on immanent criteria for evaluating modes of existence, does not fetishise the human, and ultimately constructs the possibility, of things being otherwise.

The thesis asks the following question: If determinism cannot give an adequate account of freedom, but conversely, an appeal to freedom as such is unacceptable to determinism, how to formulate an alternative philosophy that would be acceptable to both? What are the conditions such an alternative would have to meet? It is within this overall problematic that we situate the though of Fichte and Bergson. A first step to the solution Fichte finds in Kant’s appeal to a original and synthetic act of consciousness, something said to be a necessary transcendental condition of experience. We situate this appeal to something both original and synthetic as motivated by the perceived failure of a radically reductivist empiricist project (i.e., determinism). But Kant was criticised for not having supplied a proof for such a principle. Fichte takes up this challenge but not in the way his project has ordinarily been understood. Fichte tries to show that a foundational synthetic act can only ever be adequately understood when taking the form of an opposition of I and notI. The I and notI are cogenetic in that they must be seen to stand in a relation of reciprocal determination. We are then able to demonstrate that the three principles of the Foundations (selfpositing, opposition and reciprocal determination) are simultaneous and not successive. For all their differences and for all his critique of Kant, Bergson is confronted with a similarly structured problem. Departing from an experience that is said to be continuous (duration), how now to account for the very real difference of the organised and the unorganised? Bergson will have to show that, although life/experience is continuous progress, this can only take the form of an opposition of “that which is making” and “that which is already made”, between habit and effort. Fichte and Bergson may be discussed in one thesis because both give a very sustained account of how to think relationally. They prioritise the question of the Verhältnis (dynamic relation, reciprocity) of subject and object as something that precedes the question of the Beziehung (directed relation, intentionality) of subject and object. The second question already assumes subject and object and is therefore dependent on the first. For Fichte and Bergson to understand subject and object means to understand them as different activities, different temporalities, different forms of organisation, as parts of a relation. Such a relational thought is what ultimately allows us to mediate the conflict of determinism and freedom.

The aim of this thesis is to defend an account of dirty hands theory and to establish it as a unique, but pervasive, species of inescapable wrongdoing. The thesis examines and attempts to solve a troubling practical implications associated with the problem of dirty hands and politics, namely, the issue of collective responsibility for politicians who dirty their hands. Includes bibliographical references.

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This thesis is an attempt to answer the following question: Do our moral commitments commit us to constraints on what meta-ethical theories we find attractive? In order to answer this question, I first demonstrate that meta-ethical theories can be criticised on moral grounds. I then argue that correctness conditions for moral claims imply the thesis of explanatory moral realism. I do not claim that this is an argument for the truth of explanatory moral realism. Rather, I claim that this is an argument that moral realism is a moral commitment. I then look at two objections to the claim that moral claims can have built in commitments to a meta-ethical theory that takes a stand on the issue of moral realism. The first of these is a set of arguments that Simon Blackburn gives for quasi-realism. The second objection is a set of arguments given by Ronald Dworkin that attack the presuppositions of debates about realism in meta-ethics.