A moral compromise is a compromise on moral matters; it is agreement in the face of moral disagreement but where there is agreement on the importance of consensus -namely that it secures a morally desirable outcome. It is distinguishable from other forms of agreement, and an important distinction between moral compromise with public agreement and moral compromise with public disagreement is also made. Circumstances in which the former might be permissible are outlined, and the sense in which it is allowed (...) all things considered to agree is made clear. The relevant discussions of Dan Brock and Mary Warnock on the role of the philosopher to public policy are critically reviewed. Finally, a brief list is offered of the considerations relevant to an estimation of whether and, if so, when such compromise is allowed. (shrink)

The theory of rights is crucial as a means of relieving the tension between basic rights and democracy, and as a means of resolving the problem of allocating competence between the constitutional court and the legislature. To some theorists, no tension between basic rights and democracy exists, for the latter presupposes the former. To others, among whom I include myself, tension does exist, for basic rights, in lending protection to certain persons and groups, limit the possibilities of political decision. In (...) this connection it is important to take up the problem of the necessary conditions for realizing basic rights. One of these conditions concerns the delimiting of the scope of institutional action that is found, so to speak, in the space between the constitutional justices and the legislature, the latter as representative of the popular will. (shrink)

Tolerance is treated as a virtue and a key principle in liberal theories of the state and human rights. Critics of liberalism have already addressed limitations of tolerance, and the United Nations introduced broader and more inclusive human rights and non-discrimination norms. Yet, tolerance is still invoked in human rights advocacy, and the UN promotes teaching tolerance as a means to protect human rights. However, there is an asymmetrical relationship between the “tolerant” and the “tolerated,” which must be questioned for (...) its human rights implications. The paper contends that tolerance does not ensure non-discrimination, freedom from persecution, or ending violence. Instead, it can be complicit in violence against lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender persons. As an illustrative case, it examines Turkey—a country that has pursued the liberal policy of tolerance by not criminalizing homosexuality—during a reform period that involved further liberalization of law but not the protection of LGBT rights. (shrink)

In this article I analyze the justification of rawlsian anti-perfectionism, present in both A Theory of Justice and Political Liberalism. My aim is to show how justice as fairness, Rawls's conception of justice, lacks stability because of it. As an alternative to his anti-perfectionism, I propose, in the second part, the idea of progress as practical perfectionism by John Dewey. I argue that a perfectionist liberalism of this kind does not undermine reasonable pluralism as Rawls argued. Also I argue that (...) it is indispensable to establish a liberal society that is stable. In the end, I briefly show how the private sphere could be affected once the idea of progress is part of a conception of liberal justice. (shrink)

En este artículo analizo el concepto de la democracia como un sistema de justicia procedimental en contraste con la democracia como mecanismo de toma de decisión y ejercicio del poder político de Schumpeter. La idea de la democracia como un sistema de justicia procedimental que expongo está vinculada al pensamiento de John Rawls. Al final del artículo muestro cómo esta conceptualización, en el contexto de las sociedades plurales, garantiza en mejor medida las libertades y la igualdad generando condiciones de estabilidad (...) institucional. (shrink)

We provide a new wrinkle to the Argument from Unfair Advantage, a rather popular one in the ethics of doping in sports discussions. But we add a new argument that we believe places the moral burden on those who favor doping in sports. We also defend our position against some important concerns that might be raised against it. In the end, we argue that for the time being, doping in sports ought to be banned until it can be demonstrated that (...) our concerns can be satisfied. (shrink)

I argue that, in analysing the structure and development of moral traditions, MacIntyre relies primarily on Kuhn's model of scientific tradition, rather than on Lakatos' model. I unpack three foci of Kuhn's conception of the sciences, namely: the ‘crisis’ conception of scientific development, what I call the ‘systematic conception’ of scientific paradigms, and the view that successive paradigms are incommensurable. I then show that these three foci are integrated into MacIntyre's account of the development of moral traditions with a surprising (...) degree of faithfulness to Kuhn. And crucially, I argue against the overall cogency of his account, given the disparities I pinpoint between scientific and moral traditions. My overall critique is, however, fundamentally friendly, since nothing I have to say invalidates the very notion of a moral tradition, and all I am calling for are less problematic construals of that notion. (shrink)

My aim in this paper is to argue that justification should not be conceived of in purely objective terms. In arguing for that conclusion I focus in particular on Paul Robinson’s presentation of that position, since it is the most sophisticated defense of the objective account of justification in the literature. My main point will be that the distinction drawn by Robinson between objective and subjective accounts of justification is problematic, and that careful attention to the role played by reasonableness (...) in subjectivist accounts of justification reveals that the apparent puzzles Robinson raises for subjectivism are merely apparent. I will suggest that we ought to be reasonable subjectivists about justification, where “reasonableness” is understood in a particular manner. This has consequences for various other issues, including how we make sense of mistaken justification, and I will have something to say about those issues as they arise along the way. (shrink)

Nicholas Wolterstorff and Christopher J. Eberle have defended the view that the ethics of liberal citizenship allows citizens to publicly support the passage of coercive laws based solely on their religious convictions. They also develop positive conceptions of virtuous citizenship that place moral limits on how citizens may appeal to their religion. The question I address in this essay is whether the limits they impose on citizens’ appeals to their religion are adequate. Since Eberle’s “ideal of conscientious engagement” provides us (...) with the most extensive statement of these limits, it is the primary focus of my attention here. My conclusion is that in its current form, Eberle’s ideal is not constraining enough. In the first section, I argue that Eberle’s ideal does not require citizens to be self-critical enough about their religious and political commitments. In the second section, I highlight a conflict between Eberle’s ideal and the need for citizens to respect the religious freedom of their fellow citizens. I argue that the way to resolve this conflict is to adopt a more fine-grained conception of religious reasons and to hold that citizens should not rely on religious reasons of certain kinds. In the final section, I argue that laws punishing or discouraging homosexual conduct (which Eberle’s ideal would apparently allow) violate what Wolterstorff calls “the Idea of liberal democracy” and so are not the kind of proposal that virtuous citizens can defend. (shrink)

Public reasoning is widely thought to be essential to democracy, but there is much disagreement about whether such deliberation should be constrained by a principle of public reason, which may seem to conflict with important democratic values. This paper denies that there is such a conflict, and argues that the distinctive contribution of public reason is to constitute a relationship of civic friendship in a diverse society. Acceptance of public reason would not work against mutual understanding, learning, or compromise, nor (...) does the principle involve any violation of political equality. The real threat to democracy is not public reason, but the framing of public reason by a presumption against state action. (shrink)

In an often-quoted passage, Richard Rorty wrote that “J.S. Mill’s suggestion that governments devote themselves to optimizing the balance between leaving people’s lives alone and preventing suffering seems to me pretty much the last word.” In this article, I show why, for Rorty, maintaining a strong public-private divide that cordons off final vocabularies – the religious, racial, ethnic, sexual, gender, philosophical, and other terms so important for citizens’ private pursuits of self-creation and self-perfection – from public political discourse is a (...) crucial means to accomplishing both of these goals in post-secular liberal democracies. Public political justifications should instead be articulated in the foundation-neutral terms of a shared national vocabulary. Like paintbrushes and crowbars, final and shared vocabularies are different tools for different purposes, and a strong public-private divide helps ensure that no harm comes from their misuse. (shrink)

Many problems of inequality in developing countries resist treatment by formal egalitarian policies. To deal with these problems, we must shift from a distributive to a relational conception of equality, founded on opposition to social hierarchy. Yet the production of many goods requires the coordination of wills by means of commands. In these cases, egalitarians must seek to tame rather than abolish hierarchy. I argue that bureaucracy offers important constraints on command hierarchies that help promote the equality of workers in (...) bureaucratic organizations. Bureaucracy thus constitutes a vital if limited egalitarian tool applicable to developing and developed countries alike. (shrink)

It is universally agreed that involuntary unemployment is an evil for unemployed individuals, who lose both income and the non-pecuniary benefits of paid employment, and for society, which loses the productive labor that the unemployed are unable to expend. It is nearly as widely agreed that there is at least a prima-facie case for alleviating this evil – for reasons of justice and/or benevolence and/or social order. Finally, there is little doubt that the evils of involuntary unemployment cannot be adequately (...) addressed in contemporary societies without state intervention – whether through monetary or fiscal policies, cash payments or other subsidies to the unemployed, direct provision of employment by the state, or some combination of these measures. (shrink)

This essay is part of a special issue celebrating 50 years of Political Theory. The ambition of the editors was to mark this half century not with a retrospective but with a confabulation of futures. Contributors were asked: What will political theory look and sound like in the next century and beyond? What claims might political theorists or their descendants be making in ten, twenty-five, fifty, a hundred years’ time? How might they vindicate those claims in their future contexts? How (...) will the consistent concerns of political theorists evolve into the questions critical for people decades or centuries from now? What new problems will engage the political theorists (or their rough equivalents) of the future? What forms might those take? What follows is one of the many confabulations published in response to these queries. (shrink)

I aim to explain why majority voting can be assumed to have an epistemic edge over lottery voting. This would provide support for majority voting as the appropriate decision mechanism for deliberative epistemic accounts of democracy. To argue my point, I first recall the usual arguments for majority voting: maximal decisiveness, fairness as anonymity, and minimal decisiveness. I then show how these arguments are over inclusive as they also support lottery voting. I then present a framework to measure accuracy so (...) as to compare the two decision mechanisms. I go over four arguments for lottery voting and three arguments for majority voting that support their respective accuracy. Lottery voting is then shown to have, compared to majority voting, a decreased probability of discrimination. That is, I argue that with lottery voting it is less probable under conditions of normal politics that if the procedure selects X, X is reasonable. I then provide two case scenarios for each voting mechanism that illustrate my point. (shrink)

The article argues that the possibility of an unlimited gap in income and wealth between the top and bottom segments of society is incompatible with a democratic commitment to political equality. T...

In this essay I critique two influential accounts of rational autonomy in common schooling that conceive liberalism as an ideal form of life, and I offer an alternative approach to democratic education that views liberal theory as concerned with coexistence among rival ways of living. This view places moral agency, not rational autonomy, at the heart of schooling in liberal societies—a moral agency grounded in initiation into dynamic traditions that enable self-definition and are accompanied by exposure to life-paths other than (...) one’s own. This alternative challenges the tendency in large diverse democracies (such as those of the US and the UK) to prefer common to particularistic schools, thereby placing many types of faith and secular schools on a more equal footing and providing moral justification for education in the national cultures of small liberal republics (such as Denmark, Israel and Lithuania) that maintain special relationships to particular groups while acknowledging the rights of all citizens. I call this approach the pedagogy of difference. (shrink)

The argument of this article is that the dual-nature thesis is not only capable of solving the problem of legal positivism, but also addresses all fundamental questions of law. Examples are the relation between deliberative democracy and democracy qua decision-making procedure along the lines of the majority principle, the connection between human rights as moral rights and constitutional rights as positive rights, the relation between constitutional review qua ideal representation of the people and parliamentary legislation, the commitment of legal argumentation (...) to both authoritative and non-authoritative reasons, and the distinction between rules as expressing a real “ought” and principles as expressing its ideal counterpart. All of this underscores the point that the dual nature of law is the single most essential feature of law. (shrink)

There are two fundamentally different conceptions of the nature of constitutional rights: a positivistic conception and a non-positivistic conception. According to both, constitutional rights are part of the positive law. The difference is that in the positivistic conception, constitutional rights are only or exclusively positive law, whereas in the non-positivistic conception positivity represents but one side of constitutional rights, that is to say, their real or factual side. Over and above this, constitutional rights, according to the non-positivistic conception, also have (...) an ideal or critical dimension. This is not without reason. For as with all law, constitutional rights necessarily raise, in connection with principles theory, a claim to correctness. This claim to correctness leads to a necessary connection between constitutional rights understood as positive rights and human rights understood as moral rights, and, with this, to the dual nature of constitutional rights. (shrink)

The skeptical challenge to politics is that if knowledge is in short supply and it is a condition for the proper use of political power, then there is very little just politics. Cicero’s Republicanism is posed as a program for political legitimacy wherein both citizens and their states are far from ideal. The result is a form of what is termed negative conservatism, which shows political gridlock in a more positive light.

This article argues that secularism is not neutral. Secularization is a process, the secular state is a structure, whereas secularism is a political philosophy. Secularism takes two main forms: first, a “benevolent” secularism that endeavours to treat all religious and nonreligious belief systems even-handedly, and, second, a “hostile” kind that privileges unbelief and excludes religion from the public sphere. I analyze the European Court of Human Rights decision in Lautsi v Italy, which illustrates these types. The article concludes that secularism (...) as a political philosophy cannot be neutral, and the secular state is not neutral in its effects, standpoint, governing assumptions or treatment of religious truth claims. (shrink)

Thomas Jefferson’s famous proposal; whereby a state’s constitution should be re-enacted every 19 years by a majority vote; purports to solve the intergenerational problem caused by perpetual constitutions: namely that laws which were enacted by people who are already dead bind living citizens without their consent. I argue that the model fails to fulfil its own normative consent-based aspirations. This is because it produces two groups of people who will end up living under laws to which they did not give (...) their consent: citizens who reach the voting age after the re-enactment process; citizens who did not assent to being obliged by the majority vote’s results. I reject possible responses to my argument by showing that they result in making the model either impractical or redundant. The remainder of the paper discusses whether implementing the model would enhance the consent-based legitimacy of the modern state. (shrink)

Standard accounts of civil disobedience include nonviolence as a necessary condition. Here I argue that such accounts are mistaken and that civil disobedience can include violence in many aspects, primarily excepting violence directed at other persons. I base this argument on a novel understanding of civil disobedience: the special character of the practice comes from its combination of condemnation of a political practice with an expressed commitment to the political. The commitment to the political is a commitment to engaging with (...) others as co-members in the on-going political project of living together. I show how such an understanding of civil disobedience is superior to the Rawlsian strain of thought, which focuses on fidelity to law. Rawls was concerned with civil disobedience solely in the context of overriding political obligation. The project of characterizing a contestatory political practice that can be distinguished and used in a wider variety of contexts than Rawls is concerned with, including under illegitimate regimes, beyond the nation-state, or on behalf of anarchism, requires a different understanding of civil disobedience. (shrink)

We ask whether it is reasonable to delay or refuse to take COVID-19 vaccines that have been shown in clinical trials to be safe and effective against infectious diseases. We consider two kinds of vaccine hesitancy. The first is geared to scientifically informed open questions about vaccines. We argue that in cases where the data is not representative of relevant groups, such as pregnant women and ethnic minorities, hesitancy can be reasonable on epistemic grounds. However, we argue that hesitancy is (...) not reasonable if a vaccine has passed well-conducted clinical trials. The second kind of hesitancy is to do with beliefs about the institutions offering a successfully trialled vaccine and the justifiability of cooperating with those institutions. For example, in the UK, distrust of the UK Government or the National Health Service is identified as a factor in the vaccine hesitancy of minority ethnic populations. We ask whether this sort of hesitation is reasonable given normative requirements of fair co-operation, both with those institutions and the wider population. We suggest that the answer is not straightforward. Sometimes the hesitation is unreasonable but understandable. -/- . (shrink)

In many countries worldwide, especially in Sub-Saharan Africa, a shortage of physicians limits the provision of lifesaving interventions. One existing strategy to increase the number of physicians in areas of critical shortage is conditioning medical school scholarships on a precommitment to work in medically underserved areas later. Current practice is usually to demand only one year of service for each year of funded studies. We show the effectiveness of scholarships conditional on such precommitment for increasing physician supplies in underserved areas. (...) Then we defend these scholarships against ethical worries that they constitute slavery contracts; rely on involuntary, biased, or unauthorized early consent by a young signatory; put excessive strains on signed commitments; give rise to domination; and raise suspicion of slavery contracts. Importantly, we find that scholarships involving far longer commitment than current practice allows would also withstand these worries. Policymakers should consider introducing conditional scholarships, including long-term versions, as a means to increasing the supply of physicians to medically underserved areas. (shrink)

I argue that Tomasi’s most fundamental “bleeding heart libertarian” insights are not adequately served by Rawls’s lexical framework and his idealized theory of institutional choice. Perhaps paradoxically, using Rawls’s lexical framework to articulate Tomasi’s declared concerns for both economic liberty and “social justice” gives the latter concern very little weight. For that reason, Tomasi’s own objections against classical liberalism would ultimately apply to his own positive contribution as well: the satisfaction of a distributional adequacy condition is secured on purely contingent (...) grounds. Furthermore, Tomasi’s endorsement of Rawls’ conception of the first tasks of political philosophy might render his case for laissez-faire forms of capitalism immaterial. This is because Rawls fails to appreciate the very narrow theoretical relevance of identifying institutional arrangements purely as a matter of “ideal theory”. Feasibility concerns have always been an important element in the classical liberal critique of interventionist and redistributive politics. Yet they have invariably failed to be featured, in any theoretically prominent way, within the most philosophically oriented defenses of the classical liberal order. A formulation of bleeding heart libertarianism along Rawlsian lines would be equally wanting in this regard. (shrink)

This essay argues that David Miller's criticisms of global egalitarianism do not undermine the view where it is stated in one of its stronger, luck egalitarian forms. The claim that global egalitarianism cannot specify a metric of justice which is broad enough to exclude spurious claims for redistribution, but precise enough to appropriately value different kinds of advantage, implicitly assumes that cultural understandings are the only legitimate way of identifying what counts as advantage. But that is an assumption always or (...) almost always rejected by global egalitarianism. The claim that global egalitarianism demands either too little redistribution, leaving the unborn and dissenters burdened with their societies' imprudent choices, or too much redistribution, creating perverse incentives by punishing prudent decisions, only presents a problem for global luck egalitarianism on the assumption that nations can legitimately inherit assets from earlier generations – again, an assumption very much at odds with global egalitarian assumptions. (shrink)

Is there any moral obligation to improve oneself, to foster and develop various capacities in oneself? From a broadly Kantian point of view, Self-Improvement defends the view that there is such an obligation and that it is an obligation that each person owes to him or herself. The defence addresses a range of arguments philosophers have mobilized against this idea, including the argument that it is impossible to owe anything to yourself, and the view that an obligation to improve onself (...) is overly 'moralistic'. Robert N. Johnson argues against Kantian universalization arguments for the duty of self-improvement, as well as arguments that bottom out in a supposed value humanity has. At the same time, he defends a position based on the notion that self- and other-respecting agents would, under the right circumstances, accept the principle of self-improvement and would leave it up to each to be the person to whom this duty is owed. (shrink)

The annual cost of healthcare in the United States reached $2.5 trillion in 2009 (about 17.6% of GDP) with projections to 2019 of about $4.5 trillion (about 20% of likely GDP).

In this paper, we give an account of some of the necessary conditions for an effectively functioning public sphere, and then explore the question of whether these conditions allow for the expression of ideas and values that are fundamentally incompatible with those of liberalism. We argue that speakers who advocate or glorify violence against democratic institutions fall outside the parameters of what constitutes legitimate public debate and may in fact undermine the conditions necessary for the flourishing of free speech and (...) public dialogue more generally. (shrink)

Commercial republicanism is the idea that a properly-structured commercial society can serve the republican end of minimizing the domination of citizens by states (imperium) and of citizens by other citizens (dominium). Much has been written about this idea in the last half-century, including analyses of individual commercial republicans (e.g., Adam Smith and Immanuel Kant) as well as discussions of national traditions of the same (e.g., in America, Britain, France, the Netherlands, and Italy). In this chapter, I review five kinds of (...) arguments that have been historically offered for how commercial society so understood advances the republican ideal of non-domination: first, by simply realizing non-dominating relationships in the marketplace itself (Instantiation); second, by encouraging the growth of a wide middle class that can offer a counterweight to other, dominating classes (Internal Check-and-Balance); third, by increasing the wealth and power of republics vis-à-vis other, dominating states in the international arena (External Check-and-Balance); fourth, by helpfully nurturing bourgeois-civic virtues in republican citizens (Cultivating Virtue); and finally, by transforming dangerous passions into more readily regulable, even socially beneficial material interests (Sublimating Vice). I end the chapter by briefly considering commercial republicanism’s prospects as a continuing research program. (shrink)

In this paper, I provide an account of subjective epistemic obligations. In instances of peer disagreement, one possesses at least two types of obligations: objective epistemic obligations and subjective epistemic obligations. While objective epistemic obligations, such as conciliationism and remaining steadfast, have been much discussed in the literature, subjective epistemic obligations have received little attention. I develop an account of subjective epistemic obligations in the context of worldview disagreements. In recent literature, the notion of worldview disagreement has been receiving increasing (...) attention, and I discuss how understanding worldview disagreements through different classes of beliefs might clarify our understanding of subjective epistemic obligations. I first distinguish between three classes of beliefs, by virtue of their justificatory functions within worldviews: fundamental, crucial and incidental. I then discuss four kinds of worldview disagreements based on this account. Finally, I argue that each disagreement results in different subjective epistemic obligations for each disputant. I conclude by discussing some implications this analysis has for issues such as defeat, peerhood, and epistemic injustice. (shrink)

The Rawls–Habermas debate is having a revival. In this article I argue that both philosophers develop different freestanding conceptions of political legitimacy, and show how they diverge when it comes to how political legitimacy can be justified. Habermas is looking for a deeper justification than Rawls will allow for. I then proceed to show how the different meta-ethical positions yield two different versions of democratic theory, focusing in particular on rights and popular sovereignty. I demonstrate how both conceive of the (...) co-originality of private and public autonomy, and subsequently take issue with Habermas’ reading of Rawls. I argue that Rawls should not be understood as a natural rights theorist, that Habermas misunderstands the role of the original position, and that Rawls cannot be considered a strong constitutionalist. Thus, the real difference between Rawls and Habermas revolves around their different conceptions of political legitimacy. (shrink)

This article examines the methodology of a core branch of contemporary political theory or philosophy: “analytic” political theory. After distinguishing political theory from related fields, such as political science, moral philosophy, and legal theory, the article discusses the analysis of political concepts. It then turns to the notions of principles and theories, as distinct from concepts, and reviews the methods of assessing such principles and theories, for the purpose of justifying or criticizing them. Finally, it looks at a recent debate (...) on how abstract and idealized political theory should be, and assesses the significance of disagreement in political theory. The discussion is carried out from an angle inspired by the philosophy of science. (shrink)

This is the most comprehensive book ever published on philosophical methodology. A team of thirty-eight of the world's leading philosophers present original essays on various aspects of how philosophy should be and is done. The first part is devoted to broad traditions and approaches to philosophical methodology. The entries in the second part address topics in philosophical methodology, such as intuitions, conceptual analysis, and transcendental arguments. The third part of the book is devoted to essays about the interconnections between philosophy (...) and neighbouring fields, including those of mathematics, psychology, literature and film, and neuroscience. (shrink)

John Rawls thinks republicanism is compatible with his political liberalism. Philip Pettit insists that the two conflict in important ways. In this paper, I make sense of this dispute by employing David Chalmers’s method of elimination to reveal the meaning underlying key terms in Rawls’s political liberalism and Pettit’s republicanism. This procedure of disambiguating terms will show how the two theories defend the same institutional arrangement on the same grounds. The procedure thus vindicates Rawls’s view of the two theories being (...) compatible. The reason for this compatibility is that both theories are politicized—that is, they are constructed to attract the compliance of all reasonable members of a modern, pluralistic society. (shrink)

Using both Confucian texts and the work of American pragmatist John Dewey, this book offers a distinctly Confucian model of democracy.

„Kann das Anthropozän gelingen?" Der Begriff „Anthropozän" fungiert in aktuellen Debatten als Chiffre für eine mehrfache Krise. Empirisch wird der Begriff verwendet, um den von Menschen verursachten Bruch mit dem stabilen Zeitalter des Holozäns zu bezeichnen. Normativ wird er gebraucht, um zu Neuanfängen aufzufordern: beim Verständnis und bei der praktischen Ausgestaltung menschlicher Verhältnisse zur Natur. Zugleich gerät der Begriff zunehmend selbst in die Kritik: dass er mit seinem Bezug auf ‚den Menschen‘ die tatsächlichen Verantwortlichkeiten für die aktuellen Natur- und Klima-Katastrophen (...) verdecke. Der Band macht sich das Schillern des Anthropozän-Begriffs zunutze. In interdisziplinärer Perspektive – aus der Philosophie, Theologie, Geographie, sowie den Literatur-, Politik-, Sozial- und Klimawissenschaften – verbindet er kritische und affirmativ-konstruktive Debatten: Welche Menschenbilder, Motive, Macht- und Gewaltstrukturen bestimmen die gesellschaftlich vorherrschenden Naturverhältnisse? Was wären alternative Vorstellungen des menschlichen Lebens mit der Natur als Teil der Natur? Wie sind die Praktiken der Nachhaltigkeit zu beurteilen, die von den Regierungen, auf dem kapitalistischen Markt und in der Zivilgesellschaft gebahnt werden? (shrink)

Liberalism generally holds that legitimate political power is limited and is to be impartially exercised, only for the public good. Liberals accordingly assign political priority to maintaining certain basic liberties and equality of opportunities; they advocate an essential role for markets in economic activity, and they recognize government's crucial role in correcting market breakdowns and providing public goods. Classical liberalism and what I call “the high liberal tradition” are two main branches of liberalism. Classical liberalism evolved from the works of (...) Adam Smith and the classical utilitarian economists; its major 20th century representatives include Friedrich Hayek and Milton Friedman. The high liberal tradition developed from John Stuart Mill's works, and its major philosophical representatives in the 20th century are John Dewey and, later, John Rawls. This paper discusses the main distinguishing features of the classical and the high liberal traditions and their respective positions regarding capitalism as an economic and social system. Classical liberals, unlike high liberals, regard economic liberties and rights of private property in productive resources to be nearly as important as basic liberties. They conceive of equality of opportunity in more formal terms, and regard capitalist markets and the price system as essential not only to the allocation of production resources, but also as the fundamental criterion for the just distribution of income, wealth, and economic powers. High liberals, by contrast, regard the economic liberties as subordinate to the exercise of personal and civic liberties. They are prepared to regulate and restrict economic liberties to achieve greater equality of opportunities, reduce inequalities of economic powers, and promote a broader conception of the public good. And while high liberals endorse markets and the price system as essential to allocation of productive resources, they do not regard markets as the fundamental criterion for assessing just distributions of income, wealth, and economic powers and positions of responsibility. The paper concludes with some reflections upon the essential role that dissimilar conceptions of persons and society play in grounding the different positions on economic justice that classical and high liberals advocate. (shrink)

Philosophy strives to give us a firmer hold on our concepts. But what about their hold on us? Why place ourselves under the sway of a concept and grant it the authority to shape our thought and conduct? Another conceptualization would carry different implications. What makes one way of thinking better than another? This book develops a framework for concept appraisal. Its guiding idea is that to question the authority of concepts is to ask for reasons of a special kind: (...) reasons for concept use, which tell us which concepts to adopt, adhere to, or abandon, thereby shoring up—or undercutting—the reasons for action and belief that guide our deliberations. Traditionally, reasons for concept use have been sought either in timeless rational foundations or in concepts’ inherent virtues, such as precision and consistency. Against this, the book advances two main claims: that we find reasons for concept use in the conceptual needs we discover when we critically distance ourselves from a concept by viewing it from the autoethnographic stance; and that sometimes, concepts that conflict, or exhibit other vices such as vagueness or superficiality, are just what we need. By considering not what concepts are absolutely best, but what concepts we now need, we can reconcile ourselves to the contingency of our concepts, determine the proper place of efforts to tidy up thought, and adjudicate between competing conceptions of things,—even things as contested as liberty or free will. A needs-based approach separates helpful clarification from hobbling tidy-mindedness, and authoritative definition from conceptual gerrymandering. (shrink)

In this article, I discuss the location of the sources of global poverty and injustice. I take it as granted that the members of the globally lowest income group live in unacceptable conditions and suffer from injustice. Yet the source of this injustice is a debatable question. Often the existing global institutions are seen as major causes behind this injustice. By taking the World Trade Organization (WTO) negotiations as a practical example, I aim to show that blaming the institutions as (...) such can lead to misguided conclusions. The WTO, in fact, is quite just if one merely analyses its institutional structure. I argue that the major source of injustice are rather the prevailing power structures and the conduct of individual governments within this institutional framework, in other words the metaprocedural unfairness in the trade negotiations. I further argue that applications of Rawlsian theory of justice tend to be misleading at the global institutional level, as they focus disproportionately on the institutional structure, and tend to underestimate the relevance of the conduct of governments and the existing power structures, which allow powerful countries to use the institutional framework unjustly in their favour. (shrink)