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Normative Thinking (normative + thinking)

Distribution by Scientific Domains
Humanities and Social Sciences100%

Selected Abstracts

Environmental Justice and Normative Thinking

ANTIPODE, Issue 1 2009
Gordon Walker
No abstract is available for this article. [source]

Radical Geography and its Critical Standpoints: Embracing the Normative

ANTIPODE, Issue 1 2009
Elizabeth Olson
Abstract:, This paper throws down a challenge to radical geography and invites a selection of leading geographers to respond. It proposes that radical or critical geography cannot escape normative foundations in terms of some conception of the human good or flourishing, and that this is not necessarily at odds with the descriptive and explanatory aims of social science. Various attempts to define and justify critical thought without such a conception are shown to be deficient, and incapable of distinguishing oppression from well-being. Objections that such a project will be subjective, ethnocentric, essentialist and implicitly authoritarian are discussed and rejected. Normative thinking needs to go beyond liberal concern with freedom, to address what Sen and Nussbaum term "capabilities",the range of things people need to be able to have and do to flourish. The power of this kind of normative thinking is illustrated by reference to examples from development studies. The paper concludes with some basic questions for radical geographers. [source]

WHAT ,EMPIRICAL TURN IN BIOETHICS'?

BIOETHICS, Issue 8 2010
SAMIA HURST
ABSTRACT Uncertainty as to how we should articulate empirical data and normative reasoning seems to underlie most difficulties regarding the ,empirical turn' in bioethics. This article examines three different ways in which we could understand ,empirical turn'. Using real facts in normative reasoning is trivial and would not represent a ,turn'. Becoming an empirical discipline through a shift to the social and neurosciences would be a turn away from normative thinking, which we should not take. Conducting empirical research to inform normative reasoning is the usual meaning given to the term ,empirical turn'. In this sense, however, the turn is incomplete. Bioethics has imported methodological tools from empirical disciplines, but too often it has not imported the standards to which researchers in these disciplines are held. Integrating empirical and normative approaches also represents true added difficulties. Addressing these issues from the standpoint of debates on the fact-value distinction can cloud very real methodological concerns by displacing the debate to a level of abstraction where they need not be apparent. Ideally, empirical research in bioethics should meet standards for empirical and normative validity similar to those used in the source disciplines for these methods, and articulate these aspects clearly and appropriately. More modestly, criteria to ensure that none of these standards are completely left aside would improve the quality of empirical bioethics research and partly clear the air of critiques addressing its theoretical justification, when its rigour in the particularly difficult context of interdisciplinarity is what should be at stake. [source]