Johan Brännmark
Biographic Data
| ID | 873490 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Johan Brännmark |
| GIVEN NAMES | Johan |
| FAMILY NAME | Brännmark |
| SIGNATURE | BRÄNNMARK J |
| AFFILIATIONS | Lund University |
| ORCID | 0000-0001-6123-479X |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 21 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 19 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 21 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1999 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 3 |
Ideal Theory in Social Ontology as Ideology
In discussions about the possibly ideological character of ideal theory in liberal political philosophy, one worry concerns the underlying social ontology and how it can serve to make important structural injustices less visible. More recently, similar concerns have begun to appear within social ontology itself, with several authors arguing for a shift from more traditional models to different forms of nonideal or critical social ontology instead…
Three sources of social indeterminacy
Social ontologists commonly think that our ideas about social entities, and about other people also inhabiting the social realm, play an important role in making those entities into what they are. At the same time, we know that our ideas are often indeterminate in character, which presumably would mean that this indeterminacy should carry over to the social realm. And yet social indeterminacy is a neglected topic in social ontology. It is argued …
Patriarchy as Institutional
In consideringpatriarchyas potentially institutional and as a characteristic also of contemporary Western societies, a fundamental issue concerns how to make sense of largely informal institutions to begin with. Traditional accounts of institutions have often focused on formalized ones. It is argued here, however, that the principal idea behind one commonly accepted conception of institutions can be developed in a way that better facilitates an e…
Rawlsian Constructivism
Many normative theorists want to contribute to making the world a better place. In recent years, it has been suggested that to realise this ambition one must start with an adequate description of real-life practices. To determine what should be done, however, one must also fundamentally criticise existing moral beliefs. The method of reflective equilibrium offers a way of doing both. Yet, its practical usefulness has been doubted and it has been …
Principles of justice and the idea of practice-dependence
In recent years, several political theorists have argued that reasonable principles of justice are practice-dependent. In this paper it is suggested that we can distinguish between at least two main models for doing practice-dependent theorizing about justice, interpretivism and constructivism, and that they can be understood as based in two different conceptions of practices. It is then argued that the reliance on the notion of participants that…
Institutions, Ideology, and Nonideal Social Ontology
Analytic social ontology has been dominated by approaches where institutions tend to come out paradigmatically as being relatively harmonious and mutually beneficial. This can however raise worries about such models potentially playing an ideological role in conceptualizing certain politically charged features of our societies as marginal phenomena or not even being institutional matters at all. This article seeks to develop a nonideal theory of …
Social positions and institutional privilege as matters of justice
Liberal political theory is often understood as being underpinned by an individualistic social ontology, and it is sometimes objected that this type of ontology makes it difficult to address injustices that involve social groups and informal forms of privilege. It is argued here that, to the extent that liberals do fail to properly address such structural injustices, the main problem can instead be understood to lie with a rules-centric understan…
Regulating Compensatory Paternalism
Some recent arguments for paternalist government interventions have been based in empirical results in psychology and behavioral economics that would seem to show that adult human beings are far removed from the ideals of rationality presupposed by much of philosophical and economic theory. In this paper it is argued that we need to move to a different conception of human decision-making competence than the one that lies behind that common line o…
Rawlsian Constructivism and the Assumption of Disunity
Patients as Rights Holders
Autonomy and consent have been central values in Western moral and political thought for centuries. One way of understanding the bioethical models that started to develop, especially in the 1970s, is that they were about the fusion of a long‐standing professional ethics with the core values underpinning modern political institutions. That there was a need for this kind of fusion is difficult to dispute, especially since the provision of health ca…
Respect for Persons in Bioethics
Human rights have increasingly been put forward as an important framework for bioethics. In this paper, it is argued that human rights offer a potentially fruitful approach to understanding the notion of Respect for Persons in bioethics. The idea that we are owed a certain kind of respect as persons is relatively common, but also quite often understood in terms of respecting people’s autonomous choices. Such accounts do however risk being too nar…
Moral Disunitarianism
This paper puts forward and develops a position called moral disunitarianism, according to which moral generalities, to the extent that they exist, are at best domain-specific. Unlike the particularist, the disunitarian is open to some forms of ethical theorizing, although such theorizing will always have to be specialized and divided into distinct areas, e.g., biomedical ethics, business ethics, the ethics of war (and so on). Two main arguments …
Future generations as rightholders
Many people believe that we have obligations with respect to future generations concerning the state of the environment that we pass on to them. Apart from the practical problem of people not really acting on such beliefs, there are also conceptual or philosophical issues that make these obligations problematic. The so-called non-identity problem is especially difficult: depending on which courses of action we adopt, different people will be born…
Ethical theory and the philosophy of risk
Contemporary psychological research has shown that if we are judged by the standards of classical models of rationality our decision-making abilities can be seriously questioned. We are more or less irrational. The article investigates how this 'fact of irrationality' affects the way normative ethical theories should be formulated and the extent to which currently dominant ethical theories can be taken seriously as normative ideals of actual huma…
The Constitution of Agency
Normative Ethics
Particularism in Question
Jonathan Dancy works within almost all fields of philosophy but is best known as the leading proponent of moral particularism.Particularism challenges "traditional" moral theories, such as Contractualism, Kantianism and Utilitarianism, in that it denies that moral thought and judgement relies upon, or is made possible by, a set of more or less well-defined, hierarchical principles.During the summer of 2006, the Philosophy Departments of Lund Univ…
Moral Repair
Excellence and Means
Leading Lives
In contemporary moral philosophy, the standard way of understanding the constituents of the human good is in terms of a fairly limited number of features that contribute to our happiness independently of how they are situated in our lives. Even when this approach is supplemented by Moorean ideas about organic wholes, it still cannot do justice to the deep importance of how things are situated and even when meaning is seen as an important factor, …
Rules and Exceptions
Over the last decades the traditional emphasis on moral rules, or principles, has been attacked by particularists like Jonathan Dancy. I argue that particularists are correct in rejecting traditional attempts at moral codification, but that it is still possible to have a rule‐oriented approach to morality if we distinguish between different ways in which features can be morally relevant. I suggest that there are first a limited number of features…
Institutions, Ideology, and Nonideal Social Ontology
Analytic social ontology has been dominated by approaches where institutions tend to come out paradigmatically as being relatively harmonious and mutually beneficial. This can however raise worries about such models potentially playing an ideological role in conceptualizing certain politically charged features of our societies as marginal phenomena or not even being institutional matters at all. This article seeks to develop a nonideal theory of …
Future generations as rightholders
Many people believe that we have obligations with respect to future generations concerning the state of the environment that we pass on to them. Apart from the practical problem of people not really acting on such beliefs, there are also conceptual or philosophical issues that make these obligations problematic. The so-called non-identity problem is especially difficult: depending on which courses of action we adopt, different people will be born…
Leading Lives
In contemporary moral philosophy, the standard way of understanding the constituents of the human good is in terms of a fairly limited number of features that contribute to our happiness independently of how they are situated in our lives. Even when this approach is supplemented by Moorean ideas about organic wholes, it still cannot do justice to the deep importance of how things are situated and even when meaning is seen as an important factor, …
Excellence and Means
Patriarchy as Institutional
In consideringpatriarchyas potentially institutional and as a characteristic also of contemporary Western societies, a fundamental issue concerns how to make sense of largely informal institutions to begin with. Traditional accounts of institutions have often focused on formalized ones. It is argued here, however, that the principal idea behind one commonly accepted conception of institutions can be developed in a way that better facilitates an e…
Principles of justice and the idea of practice-dependence
In recent years, several political theorists have argued that reasonable principles of justice are practice-dependent. In this paper it is suggested that we can distinguish between at least two main models for doing practice-dependent theorizing about justice, interpretivism and constructivism, and that they can be understood as based in two different conceptions of practices. It is then argued that the reliance on the notion of participants that…
Social positions and institutional privilege as matters of justice
Liberal political theory is often understood as being underpinned by an individualistic social ontology, and it is sometimes objected that this type of ontology makes it difficult to address injustices that involve social groups and informal forms of privilege. It is argued here that, to the extent that liberals do fail to properly address such structural injustices, the main problem can instead be understood to lie with a rules-centric understan…
Rawlsian Constructivism and the Assumption of Disunity
Ethical theory and the philosophy of risk
Contemporary psychological research has shown that if we are judged by the standards of classical models of rationality our decision-making abilities can be seriously questioned. We are more or less irrational. The article investigates how this 'fact of irrationality' affects the way normative ethical theories should be formulated and the extent to which currently dominant ethical theories can be taken seriously as normative ideals of actual huma…
Rules and Exceptions
Over the last decades the traditional emphasis on moral rules, or principles, has been attacked by particularists like Jonathan Dancy. I argue that particularists are correct in rejecting traditional attempts at moral codification, but that it is still possible to have a rule‐oriented approach to morality if we distinguish between different ways in which features can be morally relevant. I suggest that there are first a limited number of features…
Leading Lives
In contemporary moral philosophy, the standard way of understanding the constituents of the human good is in terms of a fairly limited number of features that contribute to our happiness independently of how they are situated in our lives. Even when this approach is supplemented by Moorean ideas about organic wholes, it still cannot do justice to the deep importance of how things are situated and even when meaning is seen as an important factor, …
Normative Ethics
Particularism in Question
Jonathan Dancy works within almost all fields of philosophy but is best known as the leading proponent of moral particularism.Particularism challenges "traditional" moral theories, such as Contractualism, Kantianism and Utilitarianism, in that it denies that moral thought and judgement relies upon, or is made possible by, a set of more or less well-defined, hierarchical principles.During the summer of 2006, the Philosophy Departments of Lund Univ…
Moral Repair
Excellence and Means
The Constitution of Agency
Ethical theory and the philosophy of risk
Contemporary psychological research has shown that if we are judged by the standards of classical models of rationality our decision-making abilities can be seriously questioned. We are more or less irrational. The article investigates how this 'fact of irrationality' affects the way normative ethical theories should be formulated and the extent to which currently dominant ethical theories can be taken seriously as normative ideals of actual huma…
Future generations as rightholders
Many people believe that we have obligations with respect to future generations concerning the state of the environment that we pass on to them. Apart from the practical problem of people not really acting on such beliefs, there are also conceptual or philosophical issues that make these obligations problematic. The so-called non-identity problem is especially difficult: depending on which courses of action we adopt, different people will be born…
Moral Disunitarianism
This paper puts forward and develops a position called moral disunitarianism, according to which moral generalities, to the extent that they exist, are at best domain-specific. Unlike the particularist, the disunitarian is open to some forms of ethical theorizing, although such theorizing will always have to be specialized and divided into distinct areas, e.g., biomedical ethics, business ethics, the ethics of war (and so on). Two main arguments …
Patients as Rights Holders
Autonomy and consent have been central values in Western moral and political thought for centuries. One way of understanding the bioethical models that started to develop, especially in the 1970s, is that they were about the fusion of a long‐standing professional ethics with the core values underpinning modern political institutions. That there was a need for this kind of fusion is difficult to dispute, especially since the provision of health ca…
Respect for Persons in Bioethics
Human rights have increasingly been put forward as an important framework for bioethics. In this paper, it is argued that human rights offer a potentially fruitful approach to understanding the notion of Respect for Persons in bioethics. The idea that we are owed a certain kind of respect as persons is relatively common, but also quite often understood in terms of respecting people’s autonomous choices. Such accounts do however risk being too nar…
Social positions and institutional privilege as matters of justice
Liberal political theory is often understood as being underpinned by an individualistic social ontology, and it is sometimes objected that this type of ontology makes it difficult to address injustices that involve social groups and informal forms of privilege. It is argued here that, to the extent that liberals do fail to properly address such structural injustices, the main problem can instead be understood to lie with a rules-centric understan…
Regulating Compensatory Paternalism
Some recent arguments for paternalist government interventions have been based in empirical results in psychology and behavioral economics that would seem to show that adult human beings are far removed from the ideals of rationality presupposed by much of philosophical and economic theory. In this paper it is argued that we need to move to a different conception of human decision-making competence than the one that lies behind that common line o…
Rawlsian Constructivism and the Assumption of Disunity
Principles of justice and the idea of practice-dependence
In recent years, several political theorists have argued that reasonable principles of justice are practice-dependent. In this paper it is suggested that we can distinguish between at least two main models for doing practice-dependent theorizing about justice, interpretivism and constructivism, and that they can be understood as based in two different conceptions of practices. It is then argued that the reliance on the notion of participants that…
Institutions, Ideology, and Nonideal Social Ontology
Analytic social ontology has been dominated by approaches where institutions tend to come out paradigmatically as being relatively harmonious and mutually beneficial. This can however raise worries about such models potentially playing an ideological role in conceptualizing certain politically charged features of our societies as marginal phenomena or not even being institutional matters at all. This article seeks to develop a nonideal theory of …
Rawlsian Constructivism
Many normative theorists want to contribute to making the world a better place. In recent years, it has been suggested that to realise this ambition one must start with an adequate description of real-life practices. To determine what should be done, however, one must also fundamentally criticise existing moral beliefs. The method of reflective equilibrium offers a way of doing both. Yet, its practical usefulness has been doubted and it has been …
Patriarchy as Institutional
In consideringpatriarchyas potentially institutional and as a characteristic also of contemporary Western societies, a fundamental issue concerns how to make sense of largely informal institutions to begin with. Traditional accounts of institutions have often focused on formalized ones. It is argued here, however, that the principal idea behind one commonly accepted conception of institutions can be developed in a way that better facilitates an e…
Three sources of social indeterminacy
Social ontologists commonly think that our ideas about social entities, and about other people also inhabiting the social realm, play an important role in making those entities into what they are. At the same time, we know that our ideas are often indeterminate in character, which presumably would mean that this indeterminacy should carry over to the social realm. And yet social indeterminacy is a neglected topic in social ontology. It is argued …
Ideal Theory in Social Ontology as Ideology
In discussions about the possibly ideological character of ideal theory in liberal political philosophy, one worry concerns the underlying social ontology and how it can serve to make important structural injustices less visible. More recently, similar concerns have begun to appear within social ontology itself, with several authors arguing for a shift from more traditional models to different forms of nonideal or critical social ontology instead…
Political science (18 works) · Sociology (18 works) · Philosophy (16 works) · Law (15 works) · Epistemology (14 works) · Computer Science (8 works) · Law (8 works) · Philosophy (8 works) · Political Philosophy and Ethics (8 works) · Politics (7 works)