A blog about philosophical explorations supported by the Barcelona Institute of Analytic Philosophy (BIAP)
This is a post by Gregory C. Keating (USC Gould School of Law).
In his excellent blog post Does Tort Law Really Care About You?, Diego Papayannis addresses a fundamental question of tort law and challenges my view of the matter as he understands it from my book Reasonableness and Risk (OUP 2022). The role of the law of torts is to secure us against harm at each other’s hands as we go about our lives in civil society. How then should the law of torts respond to unavoidable harm?
This is a post by Diego M. Papayannis (University of Girona).
Imagine you live just 50 meters away from a massive cement plant. The plant operates lawfully and takes every reasonable precaution, yet its dust emissions still cause severe damage to your property and health. Because the economic activity carried out by the plant is of utmost importance to your town, the court refuses to issue an injunction to put an end to the nuisance. Instead, it awards you permanent damages to compensate for all the harm suffered. Problem solved?
This is a post by Constant Bonard (University of Bern), Filippo Contesi (University of Cagliari) and Teresa Marques (University of Barcelona).
Propaganda is so ubiquitous a phenomenon in contemporary societies of all types that there would seem to be no problem in us understanding what it is. Still, we apparently continue to fall for it so often that perhaps we are not very good at recognizing it. It may be because we don’t really understand what propaganda is. Can the philosophical debate about how to define propaganda provide any help?
This is a post by Andrei Bespalov (Pompeu Fabra University).
In liberal democracies, citizens must respect one another as free and equal partners in self-government. According to public reason liberals, the idea of civic respect entails that policies can be enforced by the state only if they are reasonably justified to all citizens. But what should count as a reasonable justification in a public whose members disagree with one another on the basic matters of morality, philosophy, and religion?
This is a post by Iñigo González-Ricoy (University of Barcelona) and Pablo Magaña (Pompeu Fabra University).
If you have ever wondered why you have a say over who gets elected to your city council, your children’s school board, or the parliament of your country but not to the board of the company you work for, then you are not alone. In recent years, lawmakers across the political spectrum, from Elizabeth Warren to Theresa May, international institutions, from the European Parliament to the International Labour Organization, and workers in Europe, the Americas, and elsewhere have entertained similar thoughts.
Open Philosophy 