The purpose of this thesis is to offer a comparative study of Michael Walzer and Will Kymlicka¡¦s theories on citizenship. By comparing their different perspectives on conception of person and political equality, I demonstrate that due to their differing views on the significance of culture, they, as a result, have divergent theories of citizenship. Looking from a liberal multiculturalist perspective, Kymlicka defends the centrality of personal autonomy and sees cultures as important references that allow persons to choose their respective ideal ways of life. Walzer, on the other hand, faults liberalism for its hyper-individualist assumptions and misunderstanding of the significance of culture to human agency. Walzer insists that culture is not a resource/object for humans to appropriate but a constitutive part of human self-understanding that cannot be disregarded in human actions. These two distinct ideals of citizenship, I maintain, can therefore be seen as a continuation of the liberal-communitarian debate in the 1980s.

Can you force a child to sucess, and when do the supportiv corset become a straitjacket? In this essay you can read about several ways to get a child to feel worthy as a person and use its own will in several ways. It's viewed from several different aspects but most of all it's about children who play musical instruments and parents who wants there kids to get sucessful. I have interviewed four musicians and musicteatchers to see how they were raised and how it has affected the way they are teatching there own students today. My little inquiry shows that people have a stong will and that you can come far if you hade supportive people around you.

Through evaluating Hilary Bok’s argument from her essay Freedom and Practical Reason, I hope to shed light on the overall question of whether we can have free will if determinism is true. In the first two chapters I will fully explain and break down Bok’s argument for genuine epistemic alternatives. In chapter three I will evaluate the success of Bok’s arguments. Specifically, I will offer a variety of intuitive examples to show that epistemic unpredictability is not enough to make our alternatives genuine. I will then use more examples to consider the relative importance of unpredictability and endorsement to free will.

Loin de se cantonner à la notion triviale de simple séparation Église/État, la laïcité classique, selon Marcel Gauchet, est plutôt le mouvement propre de l'autonomie participative du corps politique. Ce mouvement, se dédoublant en État et société, autorise tant l'autonomie de l'État, face à toute idéologie (laïcité), que celle des individus de la société civile (libertés politiques et civiques.). Or, un avatar de cette laïcité, la laïcité sociale, tentant de repenser l'autonomie politique, selon un rapport de proportionnalité, entre l'État et les individus, exige, sur le modèle de la négociation marchande, comme l'illustre, avec beaucoup d'à-propos la réflexion éthique de David Gauthier, que l'autonomie de tout un chacun émane non plus de la généralité de la participation politique mais, plutôt, de la reconnaissance juridique de chaque singularité. La question s'est alors posée de savoir, si le modèle prévalent de la laïcité devrait désormais se penser comme forme politique ou réalité sociale. Autrement dit, la laïcité classique, structure politique de la cité, doit-elle céder le pas à cette matière sociale, en constante renégociation, selon la transposition des principes de la société de marché, qu'est la laïcité sociale? On a bien tenté de concilier ces deux formes de laïcité, sous le concept de citoyenneté différenciée, comme s'y est ingénié Will Kymlicka, mais l'autonomie, étant un concept exclusif, les deux formes de laïcité, politique et sociale, parce que régies par deux ordres différents de rapports à l'autonomie, relation participative, pour la laïcité classique, analogie de proportionnalité, pour la laïcité sociale, s'avèrent incompatibles. De plus, nous rappelant que toute société est immédiatement politique, Julien Freund nous apparaît faire cause commune avec Gauchet et répudier toute admission de quelque version sociale de la laïcité. Car, la laïcité, étant forme politique d'une matière sociale, qu'elle unifie et clôture, ne peut tolérer, sans se nier, le fractionnement ou la démultiplication de cette matière, comme la reconnaissance juridique des singularités individuelles nous y conduit, ainsi qu'y aspire la laïcité sociale, sans compromettre la stabilité et l'existence même du corps politique. Ainsi, le plaidoyer de Gauchet pour la laïcité classique, forme politique de la cité, est-il conforté dans ses droits. La laïcité est, donc, l'expression unique du dédoublement autonome du corps politique, en État et en société. En outre, l'autonomie politique, consacrée par ce dédoublement, s'offre à elle-même son propre a-venir, en tant qu'auto-nome ou pro-jet. De sorte que, loin de se pétrifier en forme politique abstraite, la laïcité classique est bien plutôt le gage dynamique de la survie et de la stabilité de toute cité démocratique. ______________________________________________________________________________ MOTS-CLÉS DE L’AUTEUR : Gauchet, Laïcité, Freund, Multiculturalisme, Kymlicka.

My central aim in the dissertation is to defend an account of the epistemic condition of moral responsibility that distinguishes culpable ignorance from non-culpable ignorance. The view that I defend is that ignorance is culpable just when an agent flouts or ignores moral reasons that underlie her epistemic norms or obligations. This view is a quality-of-will theory of moral responsibility that emphasizes the agent’s reasons-responsiveness. It holds that only relevant epistemic obligations are those that require acts of investigation or reflection. In the dissertation, I examine extant theories of culpable ignorance and suggest that they all fall short in some important respect. Then, I propose and defend an account in which epistemic norms play a leading role. I analyze the nature of epistemic norms and their normativity, and I argue that agents who ignore or flout actional investigative norms and then act on subsequent false beliefs are connected to the wrongness of their action in a way that establishes their blameworthiness. I also argue that epistemic norms that require agents to hold certain beliefs or make certain inferences are not relevant to culpable ignorance. Finally, I explore the implications of my view for certain interesting cases of moral ignorance. I discuss ignorance that results from an agent’s social or historical circumstances, ignorance that stems from pure moral deference, and ignorance that is explained by epistemic difficulty of getting certain moral facts right. There are two striking outcomes of my research. The first is that reflection on the epistemic condition shows that one cannot think deeply about moral responsibility without also engaging issues in epistemology relating to the nature and normativity of belief, and issues in normative ethics relating to what our moral obligations actually are. The second striking outcome is that bringing these rather disparate topics together, as I attempted to do, reveals that much of our ignorance is actually non-culpable, and that many of our beliefs about the blameworthiness of ignorant agents are unwarranted.

In this paper I consider a recent objection to compatibilism—the manipulation argument. This argument relies on two plausible principles: a manipulation principle that holds that manipulation precludes free will and moral responsibility, and a ‘no difference principle’ that holds that manipulation is relevantly similar to determinism. To respond to this argument, the compatibilist must reject either the manipulation principle or the ‘no difference principle.’ I argue that rejecting the manipulation principle offers the compatibilist the most compelling response to the manipulation argument. Incompatibilists claim that this strategy is implausible because it requires that some victims of manipulation are free and responsible. I aim to show that this consequence is not as implausible as it might initially appear.

Galen Strawson’s Basic Argument is an attempt to prove that no agent can meet the demands for true moral responsibility. The Basic Argument proceeds on the assumption that, in order for an agent to be truly morally responsible for her actions, she must be truly responsible for her reasons for performing those actions, which Strawson contends is impossible since it requires an infinite regress of truly responsible decisions to have the reasons one has. In my thesis, I take issue with the Basic Argument. I argue that, contrary to Strawson’s claims, the Basic Argument is not persuasive to those who reject that one’s reasons cause one’s actions. For those who are willing to overlook this shortcoming, I then argue that it is possible for an agent to evade the threat of infinite regress, particularly in situations where two simultaneous choices (at least partially) explain each other.

In pursuit of a just political order, Will Kymlicka has defended a liberal conception of multiculturalism. The persuasive appeal of his argument, like that of secular-liberalism more generally, is due to presenting liberalism as a neutral and universal political project. Utilizing Charles Taylor’s genealogy of ‘exclusive humanism’ in A Secular Age, this thesis attempts to re-read Kymlicka in order to make certain theological commitments in his work explicit. Here I argue that Kymlicka, in order to make his conception of multiculturalism plausible, relies on a theologically-thick and controversial humanism operating under secular conditions of belief. By committing himself to a particular conception of the human and specific conditions of belief, Kymlicka’s liberal multiculturalism is rendered provincially incoherent because it fails to treat in a neutral manner certain theological commitments.

Brian Leiter is one of the few Nietzsche interpreters who argue that Nietzsche rejects all forms of free will. Leiter argues that Nietzsche is an incompatibilist and rejects libertarian free will. He further argues that since Nietzsche is an epiphenomenalist about conscious willing, his philosophy of action cannot support any conception of free will. Leiter also offers deflationary readings of those passages where Nietzsche seemingly ascribes free will to historical figures or types. In this paper I argue against all of these conclusions. In the first section I show that, on the most charitable interpretation, Nietzsche is not an epiphenomenalist. In the second section I trace Nietzsche’s alleged incompatibilism through three of his works and offer reasons to be skeptical of the claim that Nietzsche was a committed incompatibilist. Finally, I argue that Nietzsche is not being sarcastic or unacceptably revisionary when he makes positive ascriptions of free will.

This thesis explores the merits and limits of John Hawthorne’s contextualist analysis of free will. First, I argue that contextualism does better at capturing the ordinary understanding of ‘free will’ than competing views because it best accounts for the way in which our willingness to attribute free will ordinarily varies with context. Then I consider whether this is enough to conclude that the contextualist has won the free will debate. I argue that this would be hasty, because the contextualist, unlike her competitors, cannot tell us whether any particular agent is definitively free, and therefore cannot inform any practices that are premised on whether a particular agent is morally responsible. As such, I argue that whether the contextualist “wins the free will debate” depends on whether it is more important to capture the ordinary understanding of ‘free will’ or more important to inform our practices of ascribing moral responsibility.