Government

Few debates in political theory are challenged as much by the constant change of their empirical subject as those about democracy in the European Union. With A Republican Europe of States, Ric...

Political corruption is a contested concept. Both terms in the concept are the object of controversies in political theory, and concern what corruption is and how it is a politically relevant phenomenon. Political corruption has been contested across time, space, cultures, and philosophical traditions. Usually, political corruption is assumed to involve an exchange between a private corruptor and a public official who pursues her personal interest by abusing her power of office. While this account may be true with respect to (...) some such instances as bribery, some significant uncertainties affect its plausibility. Practices such as patronage or state capture might escape this account either because they do not involve a corruptor or because the corrupted officer does not pursue her personal interest but, say, that of her party or faction. Interestingly, despite or perhaps in reason of this semantic uncertainty, political corruption is generally perceived as a disease of the public function, something which any sensible political theory of the good state should want to avoid. Why is such a negative intuition about the nature of political corruption so widespread? A growing debate in political theory is now starting to inquire into the exact nature of the wrongness of political corruption. In this timely book, Robert Sparling engages with such an important but still developing debate. (shrink)

Governments have previously sought to reduce climate-change-inducing concentrations of carbon dioxide in the earth’s atmosphere through mitigation and adaptation activities, with limited success. New approaches are being explored, such as negative emissions technologies, including carbon dioxide removal, as well as solar geoengineering, also known as solar radiation management, or modification. This article outlines these emerging technologies focusing on bioenergy, carbon capture and storage, and stratospheric aerosol injection, and explores some of the challenges they pose. Prevention of emissions and their reliable, (...) safe, and environmentally benign removal remain the best options. Robust governance systems and a careful, unbiased, and knowledge-driven assessment of the risks of these emerging technologies are required before they are implemented any further. (shrink)

Governments are increasingly using randomized controlled trials (RCTs) to evaluate policy interventions. Such studies are often understood to provide the highest quality evidence regarding the causal efficacy of an intervention. While randomization plays an essential epistemic role in the context of policy RCTs however, it also plays an important distributive role. By randomly assigning participants to either the intervention or control arm of an RCT, people are subjected to different policies and so, often, to different types and levels of benefits. (...) In this paper, I aim to identify a set of conditions under which it is permissible, in the context of government policy experiments, for investigators to randomly assign participants to intervention and control arms of policy RCTs. I argue first that random assignment is permissible in cases where investigators occupy a state of genuine equipoise regarding all arms of the experiment and the policy to which citizens have a claim of justice to be subject. I then defend a set of conditions under which random assignment is permissible in cases where investigators know that one or more arms of a policy RCT are either superior or inferior to this policy. (shrink)

Journal of Social Philosophy, EarlyView.

Journal of Social Philosophy, EarlyView.

Journal of Social Philosophy, EarlyView.

Philosophy &Public Affairs, Volume 47, Issue 4, Page 412-424, Fall 2019.

Some African thinkers have argued that the governance system in traditional pre-colonial African societies were democratic, and the kind of democracy they practiced was consensual democracy (Wiredu, 2012; Wamala, 2004; Teffo, 2004). It was democratic, because it ensured the maximal participation of all members in the governance of the society; and it was consensual because it involved the rational deliberation of issues where decisions were primarily reached by consensus. The aim of this paper is to examine, on the one side, (...) the nature of the demos and kratos in traditional African system of governance that warrants characterizing it as democratic; and, on the other side, the decision-making procedure that marks it as a distinctive form of democracy – consensual democracy. The question of democracy in relation to the traditional African system of governance should be pursued, I will argue, not from how it cherishes consensual decision making, but by how it uniquely conceptualizes the demos and kratos in the political experiences of African societies. (shrink)

Is there a human right to be governed democratically – and how should we approach such an issue philosophically? These are the questions raised by Joshua Cohen’s 2006 article, ‘Is There a Human Right to Democracy?’ – a paper over which I have agonised since I saw it in draft form, many years ago. I am still uncomfortable with its central claim, that while justice demands democratic government, the proper standard for human rights is something less. But, as I hope (...) to show, the reasons for that discomfort are occasioned less by the thought that democracy may not be a human right than by the very significant gaps in our understanding of rights which debates about the human rights status of democracy exemplify. (shrink)

In ‘Bureaucratic respectful equality’, Christopher Nathan puts forward two challenges for the author’s claim that basic equality can be grounded in a form of ‘opacity respect’ appropriately shown b...

This essay argues that gun control in America is a philosophical as well as a policy debate. This explains the depth of acrimony it causes. It also explains why the technocratic public health argument favored by the gun control movement has been so unsuccessful in persuading opponents and motivating supporters. My analysis also yields some positive advice for advocates of gun control: take the political philosophy of the gun rights movement seriously and take up the challenge of showing that a (...) society without guns is a better society, not merely a safer one. (shrink)

This paper explicates the influential Confucian view that “people” and not “institutional rules” are the proper sources of good governance and social order, as well as some notable Confucian objections to this position. It takes Xunzi 荀子, Hu Hong 胡宏, and Zhu Xi 朱熹 as the primary representatives of the “virtue-centered” position, which holds that people’s good character and not institutional rules bear primary credit for successful governance. And it takes Huang Zongxi 黃宗羲 as a major advocate for the “institutionalist” (...) position, which holds that institutional rules have some power to effect success independently of improvements in character. Historians have often called attention to this debate but left the major arguments and positions relatively unspecified. As I show, the Confucian virtue-centered view is best captured in two theses: first, that reforming people is far more demanding than reforming institutional rules; second, that once the rules have reached a certain threshold of viability, further improvements in those rules are unlikely to be effective on their own. Once we specify the theses in this way, we can catalogue the different respects and degrees to which the more virtue-centered political thinkers endorse virtue-centrism in governance. Zhu Xi, for example, turns out to endorse a stronger version of virtue-centrism than Hu Hong. I also use this account of the major theses to show that Huang Zongxi, who is sometimes regarded as historical Confucianism’s foremost institutionalist, has more complicated and mixed views about the power of institutional reform than scholars usually assume. (shrink)

Journal of Social Philosophy, EarlyView.

Volume 48, Issue 1, March 2019, Page 1-7.

In response to the republican revival of the ideal of freedom as non-domination, a number of ‘radical’, ‘labour’ and ‘workplace’ republicans have criticised the limitations of Philip Pettit’s accou...

In times of a prevailing sense of crisis and disorder in modern politics, there is a growing sentiment that anger, despair or resignation are more appropriate attitudes to navigate the world than hope. Political philosophers have long shared this suspicion and shied away from theorising hope more systematically. The aim of this article is to resist this tendency by showing that hope constitutes an integral part of democratic politics in particular. In making this argument I draw on Kant’s conceptualisation of (...) hope as a psychological condition on action under circumstances where the chances of making a difference are dim. Given that the Kantian agent avoids the threat of despair in the pursuit of political goals by placing trust in her fellow citizens, hope has the potential to positively transform democratic practices. (shrink)

The paper evaluates the claims of Kwame Gyekye and Kwasi Wiredu that the Akan traditional governance structures are just as democratic or even more democratic that Western style representative democracies.

"In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content: -/- This excellent collection, edited by Julian Young, features ten essays on the topic of Nietzsche’s valuation of the individual and the implications this has for notions of community. The book features contributions from some of the most respected contemporary Nietzsche scholars, and each essay displays rigorous analysis while being written in an engaging style. -/- Many of these contributions are evidently written in response to Young’s own (...) provocative reading of Nietzsche as a communitarian thinker in Nietzsche’s Philosophy of Religion (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), and Young presents aspects of this reading in the opening essay. He argues that Nietzsche’s “liberal communitarianism” (8) stems from his intellectual inheritance from Wagner of a distinctly Hegelian project, that of synthesizing the need for common meaning with the desire for liberal individual rights. Young provides a close reading of Wagner, identifying the liberal aspect of Wagner’s communitarianism in a form of “soft power” (9)—namely, the capacity to inspire, rather than coerce, the collective toward a shared ideal. This soft power opens the space for reconciliation between the desires of the individual and the goals of the community at large. Young contends that Wagner’s early Hegelianism “appears virtually word for word” in Nietzsche’s Birth of Tragedy (16). More controversially and less convincingly, he extends this liberal communitarianism across Nietzsche’s entire corpus. In particular, for Young, we should understand Nietzsche’s free spirits as “agents of change” (25), exemplary individuals who both establish and question the evaluative boundaries of the collective ethical imperative. -/- Hans Sluga’s chapter investigates Nietzsche’s call for a new “great politics” (32). Drawing comparisons with Plato, Sluga argues that Nietzsche views the lack of a socially recognized order of rank, a corollary of modern democratic pluralism, as the inception of political nihilism. Sluga locates this diagnosis in Human, All Too Human, where Nietzsche’s critique of modern democracy inaugurates his concern with the tensions between political processes and the prospect of cultural flourishing. For Sluga, however, it is in Beyond Good and Evil that Nietzsche floats the possibility of reconciliation between the two, with the prospect of exceptional individuals instigating a new political relationship. Sluga argues that Nietzsche sees the European notion of the nation-state as something that should and will be abolished. While taking Nietzsche’s recommendation to be problematic, Sluga concludes that his diagnosis is profound. [End Page 469] -/- How convincing one takes Sluga’s argument to be depends on the literalness one thinks should be placed on the phrase “great politics.” By Beyond Good and Evil, is it not employed purely as a metaphor? This would accord with Ken Gemes and Chris Sykes’s approach in the following essay. Like Young, Gemes and Sykes emphasize Nietzsche’s kinship with Wagner, identifying the problem of meaning as central to both. Nietzsche is identified as conducting an anthropology of communities’ answers to the problem of meaning, or, rather, their creations of illusions to act as semblances of meaning. In his early works they take Nietzsche to hold that the foundations for the kind of cultural consecration necessary for the provision of collective meaning can be provided through myth, in the place of metaphysics. But, contra Young, Gemes and Sykes argue that Nietzsche develops away from his early communitarianism: first, toward an (ultimately pessimistic) investigation into the possibility of a scientific culture that provides meaning, and then by advocating a narrower individualism. For Gemes and Sykes, then, Nietzsche’s aspiration for communitarian cultural flourishing died at Bayreuth, and with Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Nietzsche makes a final attempt to provide a life-affirming “mythology” (72) for the flourishing of his intended recipients, now of a far more limited scope—namely, only truly exemplary individuals. -/- Here one might wonder whether Nietzsche’s thought of the eternal recurrence might better fit this need for the provision of a mythology. Although Nietzsche marks out Zarathustra as the jewel of his oeuvre (EH P:4), he also declares the eternal recurrence, which receives...". (shrink)

In democratic political systems, political equality is often defined as an equality of opportunity for influence. But inequalities in resources and status affect the capacity of disadvantaged citiz...

For nearly half a century John Stuart Mill was a major critic of the forms of electoral corruption prevalent in Victorian England. Yet this political commitment has been largely overlooked by schol...

The idea of the rule of law is central in the European Union’s conception of itself, and stands as one of the most important political criteria of the enlargement process. Some clarification of this core concept is essential if it is to play a meaningful role in enlargement and, indeed, if we are able to make a judgement about whether the criterion is substantive or merely rhetorical. In other words, what purpose must the rule of law serve within a state, (...) beyond the rather trite beliefs that the law rather than individuals rule, and that no one is above the law, if a state is to be admitted to the European Union of states? I want to suggest that its principal purpose has been to guard against arbitrary rule, and if the rule of law is to be a substantive criterion for expansion of the European Union it must be cognizant of what the criterion entails, and face up to the implications for admitting states with cultures where the rule of law has not featured significantly in their political and social landscapes. The article looks at one of the most sophisticated attempts to delineate the ideal character of the rule of law in recent philosophy, namely that of Michael Oakeshott, to clarify the meaning that it has in its use in modern European history and in relation to the modern European state. (shrink)

By freedom, classical liberals meant non-interference, independence from the state, the personal and proprietary liberty of the governed. It is negative freedom as the antithesis both to absolutism and anarchy. In the republican interpretations, the freedom of a free political community is made possible and guaranteed by the institutionalization of the liberty of the political community. Political liberty is the medium, stage and precondition for the freedom of its members. That, in turn, is conditional upon the readiness of its members (...) to protect the liberty of their community and themselves, i.e. upon the virtue of the free citizen. In this article I engage with four different interpretations of both kinds of liberty concepts in different discourses of the 20th-century UK and US and 20th—21st-century Hungary. (shrink)