The article Can a Good Person be a Good Trader? An Ethical Defense of Financial Trading, written by Marta Rocchi and David Thunder, was originally published Online First without Open Access. After publication in volume 159, issue 1, page 89-103 the authors decided to opt for Open Choice and to make the article an Open Access publication. Therefore, the copyright of the article has been changed to (c) The Authors 2017 and the article is forthwith distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made.

One of the central problems of contemporary political and moral thought is how to reconcile the cultural and social roots of morality with its objectivity or rational warrant, whether in the personal or political sphere. David Golemboski's reconstruction of Adam Smith's impartial spectator (European Journal of Political Theory, onlinefirst February 23rd 2015) provides a useful first approximation to this problem. What interests me is not whether Golemboski's critique of Smith's impartial spectator hits the mark, but rather, to what extent Golemboski's reconstruction of Smith's impartial spectator succeeds at addressing the problem of moral parochialism, as Golemboski claims. I shall argue in what follows that upon examination, Golemboski's reconstructed impartial spectator, far from resolving the problem of moral parochialism, actually exposes the limits of the value of impartiality as a resource for overcoming parochial prejudice, and the necessity of framing the problem of parochialism less as a matter of social and cultural bias than as a matter of the conditions of possibility of sound moral judgment.

In a 2015 article entitled ¿The Irrelevance of Ethics,¿ MacIntyre argues that acquiring the moral virtues would undermine someone¿s capacity to be a good trader in the financial system and, conversely, that a proper training in the virtues of good trading directly militates against the acquisition of the moral virtues. In this paper, we reconsider MacIntyre¿s rather damning indictment of financial trading, arguing that his negative assessment is overstated. The financial system is in fact more internally diverse and dynamic, and more reformable, than suggested by MacIntyre¿s treatment. The challenge at the heart of MacIntyre¿s claims can be crystallized in the question, ¿under which conditions, if any, can a person be an effective trader and simultaneously live a worthy human life?¿ We conclude that there are realistic possibilities of integrity and growth in moral virtue for those who work in the financial sector, at least for those operating in a work environment minimally permissive toward virtue, provided they possess characters of integrity and genuine aptitude for the skills and attitudes required in their professional tasks.

What sort of contribution to the public weal constitutes a natural extension of the goals and values of humanities scholarship, and what sort a betrayal? This essay aims to shed light on this question by restating one historically influential conception of humanities scholarship and speculating about how humanities scholarship thus understood might play a positive role in society without betraying its own distinctive mission. The view of humanities scholarship adopted here is inspired by a broad humanistic tradition developed by thinkers like Wilhelm von Humboldt, John Henry Newman, and Karl Jaspers. This tradition views humanistic scholarship not only as the soul of the university, but also as a promoter of high culture and truth in society at large. In the context of the increasingly fashionable notion of ¿public humanities,¿ this essay offers a restatement of the traditional view of humanities scholarship and a brief discussion of the challenges of ¿doing public humanities¿ while honouring a broadly Humboldtian ideal of humanistic research and teaching.

In a recent article in Political Theory (40, 5: 573¿601), entitled ¿Human Rights, Freedom, and Political Authority,¿ Laura Valentini proposes a ¿freedom-centered¿ account of human rights. On this account, ¿human rights are derived from the universal right to freedom, namely each person¿s innate right to a sphere of agency within which to pursue her ends and goals without being subject to the will of others¿ (574). In spite of its prima facie appeal, I argue that Valentini¿s theory does not do a good job at explaining some of our settled convictions about the content of human rights and that she offers an implausibly restrictive view of our reasons for respecting human rights. I conclude by very briefly presenting the main elements of a broader perfectionist and dignitarian account of human rights, which seems more consistent with our settled convictions on these matters.

This collection of essays offers thoughtful discussions of major challenges confronting the theory and practice of citizenship in a globalized, socially fragmented, and multicultural world. The traditional concept of citizenship as a shared ethnic, religious, and/or cultural identity has limited relevance in a multicultural world, and even the connection between citizenship and national belonging has been put in jeopardy by increasing levels of international migration and mobility, not to mention the pervasive influence of a global economy and mass media, whose symbols and values cut across national boundaries. Issues addressed include the ethical and practical value of patriotism in a globalized world, the standing of conscience claims in a morally diverse society, the problem of citizen complicity in national and global injustice, and the prospects for a principled acceptance by practising Muslims of a liberal constitutional order. In spite of the impressive diversity of philosophical traditions represented in this collection, including liberalism, pragmatism, Confucianism, Platonism, Thomism, and Islam, all of the volume¿s contributors would agree that the crisis of modern citizenship is a crisis of the ethical values that give shape, form, and meaning to modern social life. This is one of the few edited volumes of its kind to combine penetrating ethical discussion with an impressive breadth of philosophical traditions and approaches.

This book articulates and defends what I call an integrationist ideal of citizenship, meaning an ideal of citizenship firmly grounded in the value of ethical integrity, i.e. the wholehearted pursuit of a worthy life. Typically, political philosophers ground citizenship in the values of justice and social order, but have little to say about the potential contribution of citizenship to an honorable or worthy human life. Some, such as Niebuhr and Rawls, are even hostile to any attempt to establish deep continuity between the ethical and political standpoints. But without a more articulate sense of the place of citizenship in a worthy life, we cannot expect to bring the responsibilities of citizenship into equilibrium with the responsibilities of our other roles and relationships. Furthermore, unless citizens grasp the ethical value of their civic roles, their commitment to constitutional democracy is likely to waver in hard times. Thus, developing an integrationist ideal of citizenship is not only relevant to the ethicist, but to political philosophers who care about the future of constitutional democracy.

The thesis I wish to defend here, albeit in a preliminary manner, is threefold. First, I argue that if we go along with the myth of popular sovereignty and accept that the governmental functions of a political community are comprehensive or nearly comprehensive in their scope and are exercised by one agency on behalf of the whole people, then the ideal of popular self-government does as much to obscure as illuminate our understanding of governance processes in the real world. Second, I contend that the myth of the sovereign, self-governing people, besides constituting a misleading representation of social and political reality, has highly undesirable practical consequences as a political ideology; in particular, it suppresses or inhibits many forms of associative freedom that do not fit within the boundaries of the sovereigntist narrative. Third, I suggest that if we are willing to rethink self-government in a polycentric, consociational manner, and conceptualize the national community as united by a shared commitment to basic norms of civility and justice rather than by submission to a putatively `sovereign¿ government or state, then we can recover a more empirically workable and normatively attractive concept of the self-governing people.

In this essay I wish to examine some of the challenges of governance in a highly complex and interdependent society, using moderate to large-scale modern cities as a sort of laboratory to prime our imagination and explore some potential strategies for tackling these challenges.

The chapter presents a balanced assessment of the merits of seeking conscience-based exemptions to general legal obligations as a strategy for fighting injustice when one happens to find oneself in a community that dissents from the conventions and practices of the majority or ruling party.

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For better or for worse, abortion has become a touchstone for the so-called ¿culture wars¿ between liberals and secularists on one side, and conservatives and religious believers on the other. One need not embrace any particular view of abortion to recognize that this issue has the potential to divide society into conflicting factions and corrode citizens¿ capacity for mutual cooperation and trust, as accusations, resentment, and frustration accumulate in the face of what would appear to be insurmountable moral and philosophical differences. In this essay, I investigate whether an ideal of public reason might have have something constructive to say about the abortion controversy. I argue for two principal claims: first, that the highly influential Rawlsian ideal, with its focus on epistemic constraints and contractual virtues such as toleration and fairness, can neither settle the abortion dispute, nor significantly mitigate the social and political dangers associated with it. Second, I argue that the Rawlsian ideal should be supplanted by a virtue-ethical ideal, which relaxes Rawls¿s epistemic constraints and draws on a richer canon of virtue. The virtue-ethical ideal of public reason, though unable to decide policy outcomes directly, may have the potential to mitigate some of the political distrust and conflict that divides prochoice and prolife citizens, and to facilitate cooperation and trust in less contested political domains.