Hobbes’s Lesser Evil Argument for Political Authority

Scientific Authority in Islam’s Political Thought

In Islam’s political thought, principles of “preserving Muslims’ dignity” and “negating domination of foreigners” are of especial importance. Scientific authority is an important necessity for those principles. This article is aimed at clarification of the process of scientific jihad and study of position and infrastructures of scientific authority in Islam’s political thought. Taking Islam’s p...

Political Liberalism, Political Independence, and Moral Authority

As I use the term here, the central component of political liberalism holds that political institutions are not to be guided by substantive principles of the good about which reasonable people may disagree. If a particular policy or institutional action is a requirement of justice, this cannot be because this policy or action promotes human welfare, well-being, or flourishing. Morality, on the ...

Persuasive Political Argument

In this paper we discuss how a computational version of argumentation involving practical reasoning can be applied to the domain of e-democracy. We discuss our previous work which proposed an argument scheme and associated critical questions to make use of presumptive reasoning in order to justify a proposal for action. We explain how this proposal can be made computational for use by BDI agent...

[Complications of endomyocardial biopsy after heart transplantation: a lesser evil].

Endomyocardial biopsy is still the principal method for diagnosing cardiac allograft rejection. However, this procedure can be associated, albeit rarely, with potentially serious complications. We describe the case of a patient with extensive anterior myocardial infarction without revascularization, who developed cardiogenic shock and required heart transplantation. Post-transplantation, a coro...

Rational Actors , Political Argument , and Democratic Deliberation