Spinoza recognizes that in a democracy, ideals of freedom and equality shape our thoughts about ourselves as human beings. This paper examines Spinoza’s concept of equality in the Theological-Political Treatise, and considers its complexi­ties and ambiguities in light of his theories of freedom and democracy there and in the Ethics. Because Spinoza takes human beings to have unequal power, he does not believe we are naturally or intrinsically equal. Nor does he think equality is good in itself. (...) Equality is good to the extent that it promotes human flourishing. The kind of equality Spinoza endorses is economic equality, which encourages human beings to become more powerful, virtuous, and free. I demonstrate this with reference to Spinoza’s discussion of the state of nature, democracy, and the Hebrew state in the Theological-Political Treatise and his remarks on charity, economic exchange, and their associated affects in the Ethics. (shrink)

What limits ought there be on a state’s ability to create a homogeneous society, to increase or perpetuate non-diversity, or to create hierarchies within existing diversity? This article examines those questions with reference to the Lieberman Plan—which proposes to transfer populated territories from Israel to the Palestine in exchange for Jewish settlements on the West Bank— as an abstract exercise in demographic transformation by the state. First the article considers if the Lieberman plan would “work”: Would it create the (...) alterations it proposes, and would those changes achieve a stable, peaceful, perhaps even just settlement? It finds that though there is debate about the range of effect, there is little doubt that transfer would alter the state’s demography. It then turns to the international standards that might govern the transfer of territory and the denaturalization of citizens, to see how they would characterize such a plan. It finds that comparisons to ethnic cleansing are inapposite, and that norms protecting citizenship are considerably more complex than they first appear—even allowing ethnically targeted denaturalization in some cases. The article then analyzes the loyalty provisions of the Lieberman Plan, and notes that, contrary to the usual normative assumption that citizenship is tied to the state, the foundations of citizenship are actually a habitual or formative link to a given territory, which in turn creates a right to citizenship not in any particular state, but in the one that incidentally is sovereign over that territory. This interaction of citizenship and territory, when considered together with norms requiring equal protection for all citizens, suggests that the polity has an interest in defining its own territorial scope, and thereby its membership. The legal regime is ambiguous, and therefore deliberations about this question are in the realm of politics. The article demonstrates how transfer’s assimilation to existing norms suggests a novel interpretation of selfdetermination with far-reaching consequences for both sides of the conflict. Finally, the article notes that international law, though it polices excesses, is largely silent on the principal determinant of demography: the fact of state control over territory. (shrink)

We present a minimal pragmatic restriction on the interpretation of the weights in the “Equal Weight View” regarding peer disagreement and show that the view cannot respect it. Based on this result we argue against the view. The restriction is the following one: if an agent, $$\hbox {i}$$ i, assigns an equal or higher weight to another agent, $$\hbox {j}$$ j,, he must be willing—in exchange for a positive and certain payment—to accept an offer to let a completely rational (...) and sympathetic $$\hbox {j}$$ j choose for him whether to accept a bet with positive expected utility. If $$\hbox {i}$$ i assigns a lower weight to $$\hbox {j}$$ j than to himself, he must not be willing to pay any positive price for letting $$\hbox {j}$$ j choose for him. Respecting the constraint entails, we show, that the impact of disagreement on one’s degree of belief is not independent of what the disagreement is discovered to be. (shrink)

This article argues that Hannah Arendt’s controversial essay “Reflections on Little Rock,” when situated within her analysis of Jewish assimilation, has an astute insight: racial integration and the decrease of the racial gaps in material inequality, without taking seriously the political project of building a world in common, only intensify racism in racist polities. This occurs because attempts to extend formal equality to the racially dominated give rise to the rule of racial common sense, a result of a clash (...) between the political structures of equality and the racial inequality practiced in quotidian interracial exchanges occurring in civil society. Though Arendt’s work on racism echoes criticisms of racial integration leveled by racial realist and pessimistic accounts of the Civil Rights struggle, her work points to a more expansive practice of “the political” that calls for the institutional design of formal politics as an important strategy against racism. (shrink)

According to Critical-Level Views in population axiology, an extra life improves a population only if that life’s welfare exceeds some fixed ‘critical level.’ An extra life at the critical level leaves the new population equally good as the original. According to Critical-Range Views, an extra life improves a population only if that life’s welfare exceeds some fixed ‘critical range.’ An extra life within the critical range leaves the new population incommensurable with the original. -/- In this paper, I sharpen some (...) old objections to these views and offer some new ones. Critical-Level Views cannot avoid certain Repugnant and Sadistic Conclusions. Critical-Range Views imply that lives featuring no good or bad components whatsoever can nevertheless swallow up and neutralise goodness or badness. Both classes of view entail that certain small changes in welfare correspond to worryingly large differences in contributive value. -/- I then offer a view that retains much of the appeal of Critical-Level and Critical-Range Views while avoiding the above pitfalls. On the Imprecise Exchange Rates View, the quantity of some good required to outweigh a given unit of some bad is imprecise. This imprecision is the source of incommensurability between lives and populations. (shrink)

This chapter wagers that dance holds a singular, irreducible place in Nancy's work, that it cannot be reduced to thought about dance, and that it provides a way to understanding Nancy's approach to visual culture in general, to equality, and to the circulation of sense in terms of what he calls singular plural being. The chapter takes its starting point from Nancy's discussions of dance in the as yet untranslated Allitérations, a series of email exchanges from 2003 and 2004 (...) followed by transcriptions of face-to-face exchanges between Nancy and choreographer Mathilde Monnier loosely addressing the question of the relation between philosophy and dance, and a conversation between Nancy, Monnier and film-maker Claire Denis. In the first half of the book Nancy raises two questions, each presenting a pair of seemingly irreconcilable demands: 1. How can we understand dance as something open to everyone while retaining the privilege of professional expertise? 2. How can we understand dance in a way that maintains its uniqueness, not reducing it to an example of thought or a vehicle for thought, and yet still allowing for a relation between dance and thought? Both questions invite us to think the privilege of dance together with its openness; its singularity together with its plurality. As Nancy and Monnier grapple with these seemingly contradictory demands in Allitérations, their conversation opens up onto a fresh way to think political equality, and a different way to understand – or ‘catch’, a much more suitable term that I shall introduce later in this chapter – the sense of the world. It is by taking a detour via ‘The Image: Mimesis and Methexis’ that we can also see how Nancy's approach to dance can open to a new way of engaging with visual culture in general. -/- The point in this chapter is not simply to use dance as an example or illustration that helps us better to understand Nancy's approach to visual culture or the Nancean singular plural or his notion of ‘sense’, for in considering dance in terms of art, singular plurality and sense, we shall also be drawn to reassess sense, art and the singular plural in terms of dance. (shrink)

I develop a conception of voluntary exchange and its value that helps us understand the fundamental source of difficulty with voluntary exchange. We can make a great deal of progress in understanding the promise and the perils of voluntary exchange by elaborating an analogy between voluntary exchange and democracy. To be sure, this is a hazardous activity since there are many differences between these areas. But a careful effort here will illuminate the domain of voluntary (...) class='Hi'>exchange in both normative and descriptive dimensions. I argue that there is a fundamental tension between the normative principle that applies to voluntary exchange and the basic mechanism by which voluntary exchange operates. The fundamental normative principle, I will argue, is the principle that power over the making of an agreement with another ought to be proportioned among the persons to the interests each person has at stake in the making of the agreement. The fundamental mechanism of voluntary exchange, on the other hand, is that power is inversely proportioned to the stakes someone has in making the agreement. The more interests I have at stake in making an agreement, the more say over the content of the agreement I should have, and, yet, the more my interests hang on an agreement, the less bargaining power I have and so the less say I have in the making of the agreement. Hence, the inherent tendency of voluntary exchange is to work against the realization of the fundamental normative principle that regulates voluntary exchange. Hence, we have a deep and pervasive opposition between fact and norm in the very nature of voluntary exchange. All is not entirely hopeless, however, since there is a unique point where this opposition does not appear and that is in equality in the background conditions of exchange. (shrink)

The bereaved Christian faces not only the difficult task of grief, but also the morally charged evaluations of the grief process: whether it should be fast or slow, whether God is necessary or unhelpful, and whether grief is “proper” for Christians in light of their call to “not grieve as others do who have no hope”.1 This article showcases these tensions involved in defining a “proper” Christian approach to grief, retrieves resources born in the engagement of similarly problematic tensions in (...) the field of grief theory, and conscripts these resources in order to read the book of Job through a new lens, which relieves some of the tensions which arise in Christian considerations of grief. In sum, Christians commonly read the book of Job through the “stage model” of grief –- as if Job's experience throughout the book conforms to and requires a logically sequential grief-progress. Conversely, a “trajectory model” of grief, a new advancement in grief theory, opens the door for reading each pericope in Job as supplying a unique and independently legitimate path for grief that does not require any preceding or subsequent stages. In the same way that Job accommodates these variegated trajectories of grief, so also the Christian faith entertains equally legitimate grief trajectories, each appropriate for the various felt needs of the bereaved. (shrink)

According to conventional wisdom, the causes of economic inequality under capitalism are different in kind from those operating in a socialist system. In socialist societies today the distribution of wealth and income is determined by political authority, whereas in capitalism it is thought to arise mainly from the choices of individuals freely transferring goods and services in the competitive market. Robert Nozick's account of the workings of a ‘free society’ expresses this view clearly:There is no central distribution, no person or (...) group entitled to control all the resources, jointly deciding how they are to be doled out. What each person gets, he gets from others who give to him in exchange for something, or as a gift. In a free society, diverse persons control different resources, and new holdings arise out of the voluntary exchange and actions of persons … The total result is the product of many individual decisions which the different individuals involved are entitled to make. (shrink)

This chapter contains sections titled: Postscript: Exchange with Peter Singer References.

One of Prof. Walzer's most fascinating contributions to the field of political theory is his introduction of the concept of `complex equality'.In Spheres of Justice, he defines this concept as follows: “In formal terms, complex equality means that no citizen's standing in one sphere or with regard to one social good can be undercut by his standing in some other sphere, with regard to some other good. Thus, citizen X may be chosen over citizen Y for political office, (...) and then the two of them will be unequal in the sphere of politics. But they will not be unequal generally so long as X's office gives him no advantage over Y in any other sphere – superior medical care, access to better schools for his children, entrepreneurial opportunities, and so on” .To achieve a situation of complex equality, Prof. Walzer proposes a system of blocked exchanges: it should be avoided that goods obtained in one sphere are exchanged to obtain goods in another sphere. For instance, the money person X has acquired in the economic sphere should not be used to `buy' power and influence in the political sphere.Prof. Walzer states that this system of complex equality will lead to a more egalitarian distribution of social goods. Maybe in each sphere distinct inequalities will persist, but given the plurality of spheres, eventually every person will acquire goods in one sphere or another. This line of reasoning reminds us to some extent of the traditional pluralist argument as it was formulated by Robert Dahl .Dahl asserts that in contemporary American society, no single group actually dominates political decision-making, since the power of even very influential groups is limited to a few policy arenas. Even underprivileged groups have enough access to proper channels to let their voice get heard in political decision-making. (shrink)

This paper examines the prospects for social justice in a democratic community that is justified through the idea of contractual exchange as a cooperative scheme for mutual advantage. Common assumptions concerning the narrow institutional range of the mutual advantage framework are argued against, clearing away certain tensions between exchange and markets and equality and the welfare state. However, it is maintained that the principle of equality must further condition institutional formation beyond efficiency to satisfy the requirements (...) of social justice. It is further advanced that the interest-based motivation in the idea of efficient exchange can be maintained in an egalitarian framework, when the shared interests and expectations of citizenship constitute an equal political baseline, from which universal social entitlement can be justified. (shrink)

The characters in this epistolary exchange are from the book-length dialogue Sentience and Sensibility: A Conversation about Moral Philosophy. Manuel Kant is a student of philosophy from Cuba and Northern India, who is in the United States seeking what he calls “philosophical asylum.” His interlocutor, Harriet Taylor, is a former student of philosophy and biology, now working for the Immigration and Naturalization Service in Boston. In this exchange, they make and try to reconcile cases for and against the (...) conceptual coherence and efficacy of equality as a moral concept, leaving it to the reader to settle the question. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:WITTGENSTEIN: AN EXCHANGE In his review 1 of my The Argument of the 'Tractatus ': its Relevance to Contemporary Theories of Logic, Language, Mind and Phil,osophical Truth,2 John Churchill claims that my " eccentric " (C 171) 3 interpretation " does not persuade " (C 171). My interpretation is eccentric for, as Churchill himself stresses, there is a "fundamental point at which McDonough differs from virtually every other (...) reader of the Tractatus '', namely that " one can construct explicit logical argumentation, constituting a philosophical system, leading from [Wittgenstein's] 'fundamental idea' to certain explicit, systematic conclusions about ontology, mind, meaning, and so on" (C 171). In oppo· sition to my program Churchill writes, "By attributing to Wittgen· stein an argument or doctrine (in the sense just mentioned) he con· tradicts those commentators who have understood Wittgenstein to be earnestly requiring real silence about philosophy and to be asserting seriously that the Tractatus is a self-refuting treatise, to be kicked aside, once its lessons are learned" (C 166). My mistake, it seems, is to "make [LW's] system consistent" since, if we "take [LW] at genstein's "self-refuting treatise", that I sought an escape from this his word " it is " deep[ly] inconsistent " (C 171). Churchill regards himself as expressing the standard interpretation of " the plain sense of what [LW] wrote " (C 171). However, Black reports that Wittgenstein felt that the Tractatus "was misunderstood by Russell, Moore, Frege.. • and even Ramsey " 4 and so is even led to say that" there can he no question here of any definitive reading." 5 More recently, Pears has even said that the ideas in Wittgenstein's 1 Churchill, John, The Thomist 52, no. 1 (January, 1988). 2 McDonough, Richard M., The Argument of the ' Tractatus ': its Relevance to Contemporary Theories of Logic, Language, Mind, and Philosophical Tr1ith (State University of New York Press, 1986). The Thomist incorrectly stated the title of my book, substituting " Trust" for " Truth " in the subtitle. ain the text of my reply I have used the notation (Cai) and (My), respectively, to designate p. ai and p. y in Churchill's review and my book. 4 Black, Max, A Companion to Wittgensttin's 'Traotatus' (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1974), p. 1. s Ibid., p. vii. 819 320 RICHARD MCDONOUGH books do not even appear to "repeat the familiar patterns of Western thought ".6 Similar comments abound in most of the serious commentators. It is against this background, rather more pessimistic than Churchil's cheery vision of the universally acknowledged "plain sense" of Witt· genstein's "self-refuting treatise", that I sought an escape from this interpretative deadlock. If a definitive interpretation is to be established, then instead of indulging in the common practice of selectively removing remarks from the Tractatus to suit one's own fancies, one must found the interpretation on the remarks which Wittgenstein himself identified as its "fundamental ideas". Accordingly, the interpre· tative burden of my project falls on the plausibility of attributing this argument to the text. Churchill only mentions this 200+ page argument in the one dismissive sentence quoted above. But is it legitimate to dismiss the argument on such grounds? Let us assume that the Tractatus enjoins "real" silence "once its lessons are learned." The question is, when are its lessons learned? Churchill makes his own interpretative claims, and then insists (conveniently ) that one must he thereafter he silent. But perhaps its lessons are learned in digesting the argument of the Tractatus. The point is that one must still decide the correctness of the interpretation independently. Any interpreter can invoke the injunction to silence with equal justice, namely none, to enforce his own view. My interpretation is as consistent with such an injunction to silence as any other. Similar remarks apply to Churchill's dismissal of my interpretation on the grounds that it attributes a " doctrine " to Wittgenstein. Just as Churchill chooses not to view his own interpretative pronouncements as violations of the silence doctrine, while mine are violations, he also chooses not to view his own ascriptions to the Tractatus as doctrines, while, again, mine are. This kind of verhalism has infected far too much of the commentary on Tractatus. If it is... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Equal Freedom and Utility: Herbert Spencer’s Liberal Utilitarianısm by David WeinsteinDaniel PalmerDavid Weinstein. Equal Freedom and Utility: Herbert Spencer’s Liberal Utilitarianısm. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998. Pp. xii + 235. Cloth, $69.95.Herbert Spencer, though influential and widely read in the nineteenth century, has been largely neglected by contemporary philosophers. David Weinstein argues that this neglect is unjustified, and that Spencer’s moral and political thought deserves the same attention (...) that has been afforded to Spencer’s contemporary John Stuart Mill. The comparison with Mill is particularly important for Weinstein. Indeed, he claims that, like Mill, Spencer was a liberal utilitarian who attempted to preserve a place for strong moral rights within a broadly utilitarian framework.A large part of Weinstein’s study is devoted to delineating the precise nature of Spencer’s utilitarianism. Weinstein argues that Spencer is both more consistently utilitarian and more systematic than has often been alleged. In the first two chapters he discusses Spencer’s utilitarianism in relation to his metaphysical principles and his account of moral psychology. Weinstein convincingly demonstrates that Spencer’s liberal utilitarianism follows from his views on social evolution. Spencer viewed evolutionary processes as leading to increasing differentiation among phenomena, which implied for Spencer a trend towards greater individuation of persons as societies evolve. Evolutionary principles also led Spencer to view happiness as largely dependent upon the exercise of faculties. Together, these views lend support to what Weinstein sees as the centerpiece of Spencer’s liberal utilitarianism, his principle of equal freedom, or the claim that “each shall have as much liberty to pursue his ends as consists with maintaining like liberties to pursue their ends by others” (38). The increasing individuation of individuals coupled with the dependence of happiness upon the free exercise of our faculties guaranteed for Spencer that the greatest happiness will be generated through the adoption of the principle of equal freedom.Weinstein’s central argument is that Spencer’s moral philosophy offers a distinctive version of indirect utilitarianism. In chapters 3 through 5 he outlines the main contours of Spencer’s liberal utilitarianism and its relevance to contemporary discussions, maintaining that Spencer accepted the utilitarian principle as the ultimate criterion of actions. However, much like Mill, and in reaction to Bentham, he argued that any direct pursuit of the greatest happiness is self-defeating. Spencer’s indirect utilitarianism sought to promote the conditions upon which happiness is founded through the principle of equal freedom. Moral rights were for him merely corollaries of the principle that flesh out its empty formalism, providing the basis for deliberation. Concrete moral rights such as property rights, contract rights, and exchange rights are therefore the basis for our primary obligations and yet find their ultimate justification in the principle of utility.Spencer’s two-tiered account of our moral obligations is thus remarkably similar to Mill’s account of moral rights in Chapter 5 of Utilitarianism. The difference between them concerns the stringency of moral rights. While Mill saw moral rights as important, but ultimately defeasible, Spencer viewed them as indefeasible. While Mill’s position seems more plausible from the utilitarian perspective, Weinstein shows that Spencer’s stronger position must be judged in terms of his beliefs about the exercise of human [End Page 685] faculties. Weinstein correctly shows that if Spencer is wrong, it is not because, as critics have charged, his position is logically inconsistent, but because he held mistaken views about human nature and society.While the heart of Equal Freedom and Utility concerns the relation between utility and moral rights in Spencer’s work, the final two chapters are devoted to metaethics and applied ethics respectively. Weinstein marshals strong textual support to show that Spencer never simply defined the good as happiness and that G. E. Moore’s use of Spencer in Principia Ethica as an example of someone who committed a glaring version of the naturalistic fallacy was not justified. Spencer simply avoided prolonged treatments of such metaethical concerns. In the last chapter Weinstein argues that Spencer’s evolving views on land nationalization reveals both the general nature of Spencer’s derivation of moral rights from the principle... (shrink)

In this paper I analyze interpersonal and institutional recognition and discuss the relation of different types of recognition to various principles of social justice (egalitarianism, meritarianism, legitimate favouritism, principles of need and free exchange). Further, I try to characterize contours of good autonomous life, and ask what kind of preconditions it has. I will distinguish between five kinds of preconditions: psychological, material, cultural, intersubjective and institutional. After examining what the role of recognition is among such preconditions, and how they (...) figure in the work of Axel Honneth, Nancy Fraser and Charles Taylor, I suggest a somewhat complex and hopefully rich picture of interpersonal and institutional recognition as a precondition of autonomous good life. (shrink)

At least since Benjamin Constant gave a speech on the subject in 1819 at the Athenee Royal in Paris, there has been occasional debate over the exact character of ancient democracy. This debate lives on today in a spirited and lively exchange going on largely among ancient historians over the character of Athenian democracy, particularly on its political and theoretical articulations. The purpose of this paper is to investigate two specific aspects of this debate, namely the understanding Athenian citizens (...) - and particularly democratically inclined Athenian citizens - had of equality and liberty of speech, and their linkage in the Athenian mind. It is argued that the Athenian notion of equality and free speech were linked with liberty, and are not entirely dissimilar to modern understandings of the same concepts. (shrink)

Spectrum Exchangeability, Sx, is an irrelevance principle of Pure Inductive Logic, and arguably the most natural extension of Atom Exchangeability to polyadic languages. It has been shown1that all probability functions which satisfy Sx are comprised of a mixture of two essential types of probability functions; heterogeneous and homogeneous functions. We determine the theory of Spectrum Exchangeability, which for a fixed languageLis the set of sentences ofLwhich must be assigned probability 1 by every probability function satisfying Sx, by examining separately the (...) theories of heterogeneity and homogeneity. We find that the theory of Sx is equal to the theory of finite structures, i.e., those sentences true in all finite structures forL, and it emerges that Sx is inconsistent with the principle of Super-Regularity. As a further consequence we are able to characterize those probability functions which satisfy Sx and the Finite Values Property. (shrink)

This essay is a reply to Martha Nussbaum's “Capabilities and Disabilities.” It endorses Nussbaum's critique of the social‐contract tradition and proposes that it might be productively contrasted with Michael Walzer's critique of John Rawls in Spheres of Justice. It notes that Nussbaum's emphasis on surrogacy and guardianship with regard to people with severe and profound cognitive disabilities poses a challenge to disability studies, insofar as the field tends to emphasize the self‐representation of people with disabilities and to concentrate primarily on (...) the aesthetic and political representation of physical disability. The essay concludes with an account of a recent exchange with Peter Singer on the question of our social expectations of people with Down syndrome. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The Uses of EqualityThe following exchange between Judith Butler (who at the time was in Irvine, California) and Ernesto Laclau (in Essex, England) took place during the months of May and June of 1995. Ernesto Laclau, born in Argentina, is well known for his Hegemony and Socialist Strategy, published in 1985 in collaboration with Chantal Mouffe. The work starts off by critically examining the concept of “hegemony” within (...) a Marxist tradition, and it ends by proposing a socialist strategy that not only takes into account the criticism posited against the Marxist tradition of the last three decades, but also the emergence of new social and political fronts. Hegemony manifests a motive that is felt in the background of the following discussion: a politics of “radical democracy” (a term introduced in the book) should aspire to preserve the conflictive character of all social processes if it intends to avoid becoming a totalitarian system. In other words, a politics of a “radical democracy” should remain faithful to the dictum stated by the German poet Paul Celan: “build on inconsistencies.” It is evident that Laclau and Judith Butler, the North American author of Gender Trouble (1990) and its sequel, Bodies That Matter (1993), share this position. In these works, Butler advocates the reactivation of the concept of “interpellation” in order to expose the ways in which any given subject is “engendered.” The performative constitution of a subject, according to Butler, is defined through a reiterative convocation or “interpellation,” which continuously exhorts the subject to adhere to a gender norm. Not all sequences and efforts at interpellation, however, are completely successful; hence the need for notions of “deviations” in contrast to the norm. This theoretical standpoint facilitated a deconstruction of social gender norms and addressed issues raised by the gay and lesbian communities. In Bodies That Matter, however, a growing emphasis was placed on the articulation of the task at hand within a broader field of the democratic claims of minorities. Here, references to Mouffe and Laclau and to the concepts of “articulation” and “hegemony” were increasingly necessary.The link between Butler and Laclau was extended by the dialogue that follows. An example of this is the notion that all identities constitute themselves by differentiation. However, differentiation immediately implies antagonism. Identities exist because there are differences in strength, antagonism, and finally, in hegemony. According to both Butler and Laclau, the social constitutes itself as the space in which hegemonic relations unfold. Nevertheless, it is characteristic of any hegemonic position to never gain stability: any hegemonic position is always exposed to the risk of being subverted. Thus the recurrence of two issues that play a role in the following discussion: the existence of hegemonic relations and, hence, exclusion, found in the social domain. But since no particular exclusion is based on “the nature of things,” or can be ultimately justified, no exclusion can be definite, and no politics can achieve a final form. It is within the gap between the recognition that exclusion always exists in the social domain, and the rupture it provokes—that is to say, between the affirmation that no situation is purely structured and that no structure formation is ever complete—that perhaps the program of radical democracy unfolds.Equality, as a signifier and as a thing—if it exists—was the topic proposed to Butler and Laclau: their dialogue exceeds our original expectations.Reinaldo Laddaga [End Page 3]What’s the political value, today, of the use of the signifier “equality”? Considering the poststructuralist elaboration of “difference,” how does “equality” work today in gender and/or race politics? “Difference” has been, for more than a decade, the key word for a certain number of programs related to radical democracy. Certainly, “difference” has given space to the constitution of new types of social solidarity. Recently, however, some reservations on the extension of the term have been published. Chantal Mouffe—in her introduction to Dimensions of Radical Democracy—has stated that “all differences cannot be accepted” in order “for pluralism to be made compatible with the struggle against inequality.” Mouffe doesn’t clarify, in this particular text, the criteria with which to discriminate between “acceptable” and “nonacceptable” (or, maybe, “pertinent” and... (shrink)

In actuarial parlance, the price of an insurance policy is considered fair if customers bearing the same risk are charged the same price. The estimate of this fair amount hinges on the expected value obtained by weighting the different claims by their probability. We argue that, historically, this concept of actuarial fairness originates in an Aristotelian principle of justice in exchange (equality in risk). We will examine how this principle was formalized in the 16th century and shaped in (...) life insurance during the following two hundred years, in two different interpretations. The Domatian account of actuarial fairness relied on subjective uncertainty: An agreement on risk was fair if both parties were equally ignorant about the chances of an uncertain event. The objectivist version grounded any agreement on an objective risk estimate drawn from a mortality table. We will show how the objectivist approach collapsed in the market for life annuities during the 18th century, leaving open the question of why we still speak of actuarial fairness as if it were an objective expected value. (shrink)

Careerism refers to an individual’s propensity to achieve their personal and career goals through nonperformance-based activities. We investigated the role of several dispositional predictors of careerism, including Five-factor model personality traits, primary psychopathy, and exchange ideology. Based on data from 131 respondents, as expected, we observed that emotional stability was negatively correlated with careerism. Primary psychopathy and exchange ideology explained additional variance in careerism after accounting for FFM traits. Relative importance analyses indicated that psychopathy and exchange ideology (...) were equally important in predicting careerism. We highlight the need for future research efforts investigating the combined effects of contextual factors—particularly, human resource practices—and individual differences to understand careerism in the workplace. (shrink)

This paper presents a new solution to the well-known exchange paradox, or what is sometimes referred to as the two-envelope paradox. Many recent commentators have analyzed the paradox in terms of the agent’s biased concern for the contents of his own arbitrarily chosen envelope, claiming that such bias violates the manifest symmetry of the situation. Such analyses, however, fail to make clear exactly how the symmetry of the situation is violated by the agent’s hypothetical conclusion that he ought to (...) switch envelopes on the assumption that his own envelope contains some specific amount of money. In this paper, I offer an explanation of this fact based on the idea that the agent’s deliberations are not only constrained by the epistemic symmetry reflected in the agent’s uniform ignorance as to the contents of the two envelopes, but also by a deeper methodological symmetry that manifests itself in the intuition that the two envelopes constitute equally legitimate sources of potential information. I interpret this intuition as implying that the agent’s final decision should reflect a point of rational equilibrium arrived at through an iterated process of counterfactual self-reflection, whereby the agent takes account of what he would have thought had he instead chosen the other envelope. I provide a formal model of this method of counterfactual self-reflection and show, in particular, that it cannot issue in the paradoxical conclusion that the agent ought to switch regardless of how much money is in his envelope. In this way, by correcting for the bias in the agent’s reasoning, the paradox is resolved. (shrink)

In just proportional exchange, under Aristotle's theory of reciprocal justice, superior sharers in a community materially assist the weaker, and receive honour as a reward. Aristotle's economic thought is represented with a system of 18 formulae. Explained are: (1) What Aristotle means when he says that it is impossible for two sharers or their erga to be commensurable; (2) The extent to which the variables in Aristotle's proportions can be quantified. (3) What diagonal pairing ( ?ατ δ? ??τ?o? σ (...) ??????) is; (4) How need makes sharers and their erga ?sufficiently' commensurable; and (5) Aristotle's theory of what is just in exchange. (shrink)

The theory of the just price is commonly assumed to have three sources: Political philosophy of Greek antiquity, scholastic ethics of the High Middle Ages, and the Roman law of obligations of late antiquity. While closer inspection confirms this holds for the first two worlds of thought the latter assumption seems ultimately unfounded. The paper claims that the evidence notoriously presented on behalf of that assumption – two rescripts attributed to Roman emperor Diocletian, namely Codex Iustinianus 4.44.2 and 4.44.8 – (...) ultimately points in another direction. Offering both an analysis and an alternative reading of the rescripts an integrated interpretation is given that reconciles them with the “liberalistic spirit of Roman law”. Also, it is explained why, from the point of view of legal and social philosophy, the fact that Roman law refrains from introducing a moral aspect to the institute of price fixing speaks in favour of Roman law rather than against it. [in German]. (shrink)

It has recently been suggested that research in neuroscience of art has failed to bring art into focus in the laboratory. Two general arguments are brought to bear in the regard. The common perceptual mechanisms argument observes that neuroscientists working within this field develop models to explain art relative to the ways that artworks are fine-tuned to the operations of perceptual systems. However, these perceptual explanations apply equally to how viewers come to recognize and understand art and nonart objects and (...) events. Therefore these explanations fail to disambiguate artworks from other things. They fail to locate art. This observation points to a deeper problem. What interests us in art is how what we perceive has been used to show us what the work represents. Our understanding of art is governed by a range of productive and evaluative normative conventions that govern how we ought to look at a work and evaluate how it was made. The normative dimension of appreciation argument suggests that these aspects of our engagement with artworks lie outside the scope of neuroscientific explanations of art. This chapter provides a sketch of a diagnostic recognition framework for engaging art that resolves both problems and helps explains how artworks function within the social institution of the artworld to facilitate a communicative exchange between artists and consumers. (shrink)

The philosophical debate concerning political exchange has largely been confined to debating the desirability of vote trading; where individuals can sell their votes or buy votes from others. However, I show that the vote credit systems prevalent in public choice theory entirely avoid the common objections to political exchange that afflict vote trading proposals. Namely, vote credit systems avoid equality concerns and inalienability concerns. I offer an alternative critique to formal mechanisms that encourage political exchange by (...) drawing on the role that impartiality and impartial moral judgements play in democratic and electoral institutions. (shrink)

I argue for an egalitarian conception of market exchange that places the idea of equal power at the center of a procedural evaluation of markets. I explain the fundamental concept of equal power in markets and show that the egalitarian conception gives us a remedial basis for society shaping markets so that they allow a significant place for worker participation in firms. I use the phrase “worker participation” to mean that workers participate in the authoritative direction of the firm. (...) This can include collective bargaining and worker management to introduce the kind of flexibility that is desirable in regulating market economies. Worker participation is a remedy to the presence of rigidities in markets that strongly favor authoritarian firms and that follow from and maintain unequal power in markets. The argument differs from the traditional argument that draws a parallel between state and firm, and so does not entail a general requirement of worker participation. It allows for some degree of participation of owners of capital also in the governance of firms. (shrink)

Self-Ownership, Freedom and Equality is G.A. Cohens attempt to rescue something of the socialist outlook on society from the challenge of libertarianism, which Cohen identifies with the work of Robert Nozick in his famous book, Anarchy, State, and Utopia. Sympathizing with the leading idea that a person must belong to himself, and thus be unavailable for forced redistribution of his efforts, Cohen is at pains to reconcile the two. This cannot be done – they are flatly contrary. Moreover, (...) class='Hi'>equality is a nonsense principle, calling for such things as equal distribution of natural resources. But resources, as goods, are not natural: all require work to utilize. The only thing exchanged on markets is services, and estimates of value received are relevantly made only by those party to the exchanges in question. Imposition from above on voluntary exchange can only be socially counterproductive. (shrink)

Axel Honneth is best known for his critique of modern society centered on a concept of recognition. Jacques Rancière has advanced an influential theory of modern politics based on disagreement. Underpinning their thought is a concern for the logics of exclusion and domination that structure contemporary societies. In a rare dialogue, these two philosophers explore the affinities and tensions between their perspectives to provoke new ideas for social and political change. -/- Honneth sees modern society as a field in which (...) the logic of recognition provides individuals with increasing possibilities for freedom and is a constant catalyst for transformation. Rancière sees the social as a policing order and the political as a force that must radically assert equality. Honneth claims Rancière's conception of the political lies outside of actual historical societies and involves a problematic desire for egalitarianism. Rancière argues that Honneth's theory of recognition relies on an overly substantial conception of identity and subjectivity. While impassioned, their exchange seeks to advance critical theory's political project by reconciling the rift between German and French post-Marxist traditions and proposing new frameworks for justice. (shrink)

In Political Liberalism and the essay "The Idea of Public Reason Revisited" John Rawls argues that citizens must refrain from introducing sectarian values intopolitical debate over fundamental political questions unless the positions they are endorsing can be supported by public reasons. I will argue that this duty allows for a more limited use of non-public ideas and values than is suggested in Rawls's discussion. ln addition, I will argue that reconciliation between citizens and the reinvigoration of free exchange and (...) debate both call for an extension of this duty to debate over issues that are of immediate concern to citizens. I argue that public reason requires citizens to support only those public policies which can be defended by appeal to liberal political values (values such as comity, social stability, equality, happiness), and to sincerely affirm liberal political values as the ultimate justification of the use of state power to implement the public policies they support. (shrink)

The theory of surplus value contrasts ‘pay for labour power’ and ‘pay for labour services’. Unlike labour services but like all commodities, labour power has a specific economic value and it exchanges at this value. Unlike that of other commodities, the consumption of labour power results in the creation of more value than the commodity itself contains. Surplus value arises from the gap between the labour needed to sustain a day’s work, to keep the worker going for a day, and (...) the labour performed in that same time. By the labour theory of value, the amount of labour needed to sustain a day’s work confers one value on the means of subsistence the worker requires, and thereby on the labour power the worker sells to her employer, whereas the day’s work itself confers another larger value on the product marketed by the employer. (shrink)

The theory of surplus value contrasts ‘pay for labour power’ and ‘pay for labour services’. Unlike labour services but like all commodities, labour power has a specific economic value and it exchanges at this value. Unlike that of other commodities, the consumption of labour power results in the creation of more value than the commodity itself contains. Surplus value arises from the gap between the labour needed to sustain a day’s work, to keep the worker going for a day, and (...) the labour performed in that same time. By the labour theory of value, the amount of labour needed to sustain a day’s work confers one value on the means of subsistence the worker requires, and thereby on the labour power the worker sells to her employer, whereas the day’s work itself confers another larger value on the product marketed by the employer. (shrink)

Food security is one of the major concerns in the Philippines. Although livestock and poultry production accounts for a significant proportion of the country’s agricultural output, smallholder households are still vulnerable to food insecurity. The current study aims to examine how livestock production and selling difficulties affect smallholder households’ food-insecure conditions. For this objective, Bayesian Mindsponge Framework (BMF) analytics was employed on a dataset of the Food and Agriculture Organization’s Data in Emergencies Monitoring (DIEM) system. We found that production and (...) selling difficulties significantly adversely affect food insecurity in the Philippines. However, their effects vary according to the severity of food insecurity. In particular, production and selling difficulties affect the households’ likelihood of eating less healthy and nutritious food equally. However, the production difficulties have more negligible impacts on the possibility of skipping meals and even ambiguous impacts on the likelihood of not eating for a whole day compared to the effects of selling difficulties. Moreover, we also found that the market plays a crucial role in facilitating not only livestock trading but also livestock production (e.g., purchase of feed and medicines). Based on these findings, we suggest that the livestock market needs to be expanded and regulated to maintain the balancing prices between livestock products and products and services used for livestock production, and facilitate the product-exchanging mechanism. (shrink)

The discussion about human enhancement technologies has primarily focused on exchanging views about the dangers and benefits of these interventions. However, the debate could benefit from a systematic attempt to move beyond pro et contra exchange. Thus, in this paper, I analyze key issues in the human enhancement debate, and I outline a set of methodological guidelines that could help to progress future research. I propose that we should pay special attention to the following conditions: (i) whether a particular (...) enhancement project is plausibly coherent, feasible, and effective; (ii) whether it conflicts with fundamental moral values and norms; and (iii) whether it is compatible with or promotes socio-political goals of equality and justice. This approach should help us minimize normative ambiguity and facilitate the moral assessment of different enhancements and their particular applications. (shrink)

In Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle discusses the relation between teachers and students during his treatment of “non-uniform friends.” These friends exchange goods differing in kind. Such friendships depend on the needs of the friends, and we are invited to ask whether some need induces a philosopher to teach a not-yet-philosophical student. In this paper I argue that the philosophical teacher does not approach his pupil out of need nor as he would approach a contemplative friend who is an equal. The (...) teacher chooses to benefit students as a morally virtuous human being would, although not as if his happiness depends upon their success in learning. A teacher is not an ordinary benefactor, intent upon seeing his power made actual in some other person. Aristotle’s philosophical teachers seem to be simultaneously more generous and less interested in their students. (shrink)

This article is an email conversation between the artist Thomas Hirschhorn and the philosopher Jacques Rancière that took place from December 2009 to February 2010. The images of ‘The Bijlmer Spinoza-Festival’, an artwork by Thomas Hirschhorn that occurred in the outskirts of Amsterdam in 2009, portray the levels of engagement by the local participants and the interaction with invited speakers and performers. The interview with Jacques Rancière addresses the problem of classifying collaborative art projects within the conventional categories of art (...) and politics. It explores the vital function of artistic presence and the possibility of establishing a mode of aesthetic exchange that proceeds from the experience of equality. (shrink)

The Virginia School's economics of natural equals makes consent critical for policy. Democracy is understood as government by discussion, not majority rule. The claim of efficiency unsupported by consent, as common in orthodox economics, appeals to social hierarchy. Politics becomes an act of exchange among equals where the economist is only entitled to offer advice to citizens, not to dictators. The foundation of natural equality and consent explains the common themes of James Buchanan and John Rawls as well (...) as Ronald Coase and the Fabian socialists. What orthodox economics treats as efficient racial discrimination violates the fair chance entitlement to which people consent in a market economy. The importance of replication stressed by Gordon Tullock, developing themes from Karl Popper, is another expression of natural equality since the foresight of replication induces care into research. The publication of previously unpublished correspondence and documentation allows the reader to judge recent controversy. (shrink)

Varying degrees of symmetry can exist in a social network's connections. Some early online social networks (OSNs) were predicated on symmetrical connections, such as Facebook 'friendships' where both actors in a 'friendship' have an equal and reciprocal connection. Newer platforms -- Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook's 'Pages' inclusive -- are counterexamples of this, where 'following' another actor (friend, celebrity, business) does not guarantee a reciprocal exchange from the other. -/- This paper argues that the basic asymmetric connections in an OSN (...) leads to emergent asymmetrical behaviour in the OSN's overall influence and connectivity, amongst others. This paper will then draw on empirical examples from popular sites (and prior network research) to illustrate how asymmetric connections can render individuals 'voiceless'. -/- The crux of this paper is an argument from the existentialist viewpoint on how the above asymmetric network properties lead to Sartrean bad faith (Sartre, 1943). Instead of genuine interpersonal connection, one finds varying degrees of pressure to assume the Sartrean 'in-itself' (the en soi) mode-of-being, irregardless of the magnitude of 'followers' one has. -/- Finally, this paper poses an open question: what other philosophical issues does this inherent asymmetry in modern social networking give rise to? (shrink)

Cimatti and Salzani have put together a rich collection of essays on animal studies that provides an exhaustive overview of how Italian contemporary philosophers are engaging with animal ethics, antispeciesism, posthumanism, ecofeminism, and biopolitics. This edited volume represents an important development in the “animal turn” in the humanities, particularly because it is published in English, allowing for a more efficient dialogue between “Italian theory” and philosophers around the world. This is, in fact, the first collection that will give an international (...) audience access to the rich and varied contribution of Italian contemporary philosophy in the burgeoning field of animal studies. It is also important to point out that all the authors—who are either well-established erudite thinkers or bright and innovative new voices in the panorama of Italian philosophy—effectively engage with recent and prominent scholarship in the fields of animal studies, posthumanism, and biopolitics, such as the work of Zizek, Esposito, Hardt, Calarco, Braidotti, and Wolfe.The volume is clearly intended for an academic audience: professors, scholars, and graduate students studying not only philosophy, Italian studies, environmental humanities, and animal ethics, but also political science, ethology, comparative literature, art history, and religious studies. In addition, the book could also find an audience in animal rights and environmental activists who are interested in the philosophical aspects and ethical and political implications of their actions.The division of the book into three sections (“Animality in the Italian Tradition,” “Animality in Perspective,” and “Fragments of a Contemporary Debate”) provides the reader a clear trajectory from the Italian philosophical tradition to the current debate on “animality.” In the first section, in fact, the authors engage with the rich and complex tradition of both Italian animal philosophy and advocacy. In the three essays that make up this section, the authors provide a compelling historical perspective of the anti-Cartesian and antidualistic aspects of Italian thought, tracing its pre-Cartesian origin and post-Cartesian developments through the work of Francis of Assisi, Dante Alighieri, Giordano Bruno, Giambattista Vico, and Giacomo Leopardi, among others. This section also includes essays outlining the development of animal bioethics in Italy, which emerged from the work of animal advocacy pioneer Aldo Capitini and continued to have an important impact on Italian culture thanks to the antispeciesist movement and debate, of which the third essay of this section provides an exhaustive intellectual history.The second section of the volume, comprised of six essays, provides an overall view of the ongoing philosophical debate on animality that traverses Italian posthumanism, feminism, theology, biopolitics, environmental ethics, and Marxist thought. Here the authors engage with some of the prominent voices in the contemporary Italian philosophical landscape, such as Giorgio Agamben, Roberto Esposito, Roberto Marchesini, Antonio Negri, Maria Turchetto, Adriana Caravero, Luisa Muraro, and Paolo De Benedetti. As pointed out by the editors in their introduction, this section does not intend to offer a complete account of the extensive and heterogenous exchanges occurring inside the Italian biological turn, but instead aims at investigating its most compelling approaches and effectively links them to the ongoing transnational debate.The rich historiography and analysis of the first two sections is complemented, in the third section of the volume, by the speculative approach that strongly characterizes all five final essays. Here we can find some of the most exciting and original developments in Italian scholarship on animal philosophy. This section is, therefore, the most effective in presenting the distinctive approach of contemporary Italian philosophers in rethinking animality and the human-animal interplay, in particular inside the historical and epistemological frame of the Anthropocene. For instance, Massimo Filippi explores how slaughterhouses have become exemplary spaces to investigate the calculation that adds, subtracts, multiplies, and divides humans and animals, which removes animality and excises the other, which forcefully bans any imagining of the monstrously other, of the other-than-human, and that produces, among others and besides It-Self, the Woman, the Homosexual, the Abnormal, the Migrant, the Criminal, and the Animal. (p. 225)Structuring his argument on the real and metaphorical “mathematics of sacrifice” at work in the slaughterhouse (p. 226), Filippi engages with the processes that enable human ontological privilege, with intraspecific and interspecific mechanisms of discrimination, and with philosophical, political, and ethical implications of meat production.For a second and final example, ethologist Roberto Marchesini—one of the most original and prominent voices in animal studies—focuses on redefining the paradigm of “animality.” In his essay, Marchesini questions behaviorism and the automatism of learning, key aspects that have been prominent in defining animality in many fields, from biology to philosophy. Building from his groundbreaking and extensive work in ethology and zooanthropology, he argues for an “elaborative model” of animality (animal as subject) against the fallacy of the “automatism-based model” (animal as mechanism): Subjectivity is the implicit condition of the animal being, an expressive dimension that may also be unconscious but that precedes from (i) a constructivist conception of behavior, which we could explain by considering it a work in progress, always open and never predetermined, but equally never imposed and nonetheless always co-factorial to external contributions, and (ii) a propositional view of the individual, or rather from being supported by verbal structures such as to delight, to fear, to want, which join themselves to modal predicates declined according to context, but which likewise render the individual the protagonist. (p. 247)Animal studies has established itself as one of the most exciting areas of research inside the biological turn of the humanities worldwide and, by collecting such a large number of compelling and provocative theories from Italian contemporary philosophy, the impact of Cimatti and Salzani's volume will be twofold: It will enrich and expand a developing discussion in the environmental humanities and in animal studies while establishing the centrality of Italian thought in such an important and, in the Anthropocene era, necessary debate. (shrink)

This collection of 24 essays, written by eminent philosophers and political theorists, brings together fresh debates on some of the most fundamental questions in contemporary political philosophy, including human rights, equality, constitutionalism, the value of democracy, identity and political neutrality. Presents fresh debates on six of the fundamental questions in contemporary political philosophy Each question is treated by a pair of opposing essays written by eminent scholars Lively debate format sharply defines the issues, invites the reader to participate in (...) the exchange of arguments and paves the way for further discussion Will serve as an accessible introduction to the major topics in political philosophy, whilst also capturing the imagination of professional philosophers Offers the unique opportunity to observe leading philosophers engaging in head-to-head debate. (shrink)

In communicative exchanges one of the most familiar phenomena is _accommodation_, which enables the addressee to incorporate a missing piece of information into her own view of the common ground. A less familiar, but equally important, phenomenon is what I call _discommodation_, whose main feature consists in the fact that the missing piece of information, although essential to the comprehension of the utterance, _cannot_ be shared by the addressee because it sounds problematic or even false to her. In such cases (...) it is possible to open a ‘presuppositional slot’ to take into account the assumptions that serve to select the reference of the noun phrase, but that are not incorporated into the revised context. One of the main purposes of the paper is to propose a definition of truth that does not ignore the role of discommodation when different views of the common ground are involved. 1. (shrink)

The article argues that by the 17th century, despite the increased intellectual exchanges of the time, two different kind of individualism were developing across the Channel — one labeled here as ‘centripetal’, the other one as ‘centrifugal’. On the French side, one witnesses a focus on forum internum, as the only site of uniqueness and authenticity. On the British side, the emphasis switched to forum externum and the equality of wills. The article explores the consequences of these different self-apprehensions (...) of the individual in terms of different understandings of political representation. I claim that, despite today’s general consensus, representing ‘the people’ was not naturally assimilated with an ascending theory of representation. ‘The people’, understood as a whole, was apprehended in France as still higher than its representatives — kings, Estates, or Parlements. The idea of individuals willingly delegating their rights and/or authority to a representative remained for more than a century a peculiar British development. The consequences of this ascending understanding of representation are to be seriously reevaluated. (shrink)

In Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle discusses the relation between teachers and students during his treatment of “non-uniform friends.” These friends exchange goods differing in kind . Such friendships depend on the needs of the friends, and we are invited to ask whether some need induces a philosopher to teach a not-yet-philosophical student. In this paper I argue that the philosophical teacher does not approach his pupil out of need nor as he would approach a contemplative friend who is an equal. (...) The teacher chooses to benefit students as a morally virtuous human being would, although not as if his happiness depends upon their success in learning. A teacher is not an ordinary benefactor, intent upon seeing his power made actual in some other person. Aristotle’s philosophical teachers seem to be simultaneously more generous and less interested in their students. (shrink)

When do data provide good evidence for a hypothesis, evidence that warrants an inference to the hypothesis? Standard answers either reject the legitimacy of induction or else allow warranted inference from data to hypothesis when there are suitable relationships between and among the data and hypotheses. The severity account rejects all of these, maintaining instead that the good evidence relation concerns not only relations between data and hypotheses but also the methods for obtaining the data and the sensitivity of these (...) methods to detecting falsehood. So, for example, the severity account allows two rival hypotheses to fit the data equally well, even to the point of having the same prior and posterior probabilities relative to those data, while the data nonetheless favour one hypothesis over the other by virtue of those data providing a severe test of one hypothesis and not the other. The contributions to Error and Inference variously trace the genesis of the severity account from statistics-oriented sciences, elaborate upon the account’s details, apply the account to various philosophical issues, and offer challenges to the account’s adequacy and replies to major criticisms. The editors have developed the severity account in detail elsewhere, and this anthology is an effort …. (shrink)

In Political Liberalism and the essay "The Idea of Public Reason Revisited" John Rawls argues that citizens must refrain from introducing sectarian values intopolitical debate over fundamental political questions unless the positions they are endorsing can be supported by public reasons. I will argue that this duty allows for a more limited use of non-public ideas and values than is suggested in Rawls's discussion. ln addition, I will argue that reconciliation between citizens and the reinvigoration of free exchange and (...) debate both call for an extension of this duty to debate over issues that are of immediate concern to citizens. I argue that public reason requires citizens to support only those public policies which can be defended by appeal to liberal political values (values such as comity, social stability, equality, happiness), and to sincerely affirm liberal political values as the ultimate justification of the use of state power to implement the public policies they support. (shrink)

In 1991, Ukrainian independence opened an important theoretical channel for debating the status of its women. The people's collective memory of an ancient matriarchy generated a neo-matriarchal mythology which has been transformed into a delusional ideology that legitimizes female subordination, in the name of her alleged empowerment. Fieldwork in Ukraine – annual visits, including travel from one end of the country to another in official capacities, and many extended stays in Ukraine, as a scholar, researcher, educator and participant in key (...) events, provided opportunities for exchanging views with countless people from many walks of life throughout the country. Participation in a host of programs – television ‘specials’ on gender, seminars, retreats, workshops and conferences, designed to raise the consciousness of women and men alike – provided an array of opportunities to observe at first hand the way that today's women construct individual identity. Extensive research in the press (many runs of daily newspapers, including Den’, in Kyiv, and Vysoky Zamok in Lviv, and women's journals such as the widely read Zhinka, among others) added further insights. Television viewing, popular publications collected habitually during my numerous visits to Ukraine, copies of documents contributed by my Ukrainian friends and colleagues, outdoor advertising, posters and intimate gatherings at the homes of likeminded women, all played a part in the formation of my impressions of Ukrainian women's inferior status. In this paper I use my findings to explore the conflicting discourses on women's alleged empowerment, and the essentialist constraints on their self-realization, together with measures adopted to date on changing gender stereotypes and promoting equal rights and opportunities. (shrink)

Preference utilitarians are concerned to maximize the autonomous choices of individuals; for this reason, they argue that nurses ought to advocate for those patients who desire assistance with ending their lives. This approach prompts us to consider, then, the moral validity of nursing involvement in measures intended to end the lives of patients. In this article, the terms of preference utilitarianism are set out and considered in order to determine whether this approach offers sufficient philosophical support for sanctioning a role (...) for nursing in euthanasia. Ultimately, it is found that preference utilitarianism is lacking in this respect, as well as in its fitness for guiding nursing activity in general. In particular, it is found that nurses are required to exchange a handmaiden relationship with the medical profession for an equally undignified relationship with patients. If nursing involvement in measures intended to end the lives of patients is to find sufficient philosophical support, then we need to look elsewhere. (shrink)

Each of us has written about the importance of reframing the debate over public health paternalism. Our individual explorations of the many and varied paths forward from libertarian “nanny state” objections to the “new public health” have been intimately informed by collaboration. This article represents a summary of our current thinking — reflecting the ground gained through many fruitful exchanges and charting future collaborative efforts.Our starting point is that law is a vitally important determinant of population health, and the interplay (...) among law, social norms, cultural beliefs, health behaviors, and healthy living conditions is complex. Anti-paternalists’ efforts to limit the scope of public health law to controlling only the proximal determinants of infectious diseases are utterly unjustifiable in the face of so much preventable death, disability, and disparity. Equally important, the anti-paternalism push is deeply counter-majoritarian and undemocratic, threatening to disable communities from undertaking measures to improve their own well-being. (shrink)

continent. 1.4 (2011): 253—278. A Sense of French Politics Politics itself is not the exercise of power or struggle for power. Politics is first of all the configuration of a space as political, the framing of a specific sphere of experience, the setting of objects posed as "common" and of subjects to whom the capacity is recognized to designate these objects and discuss about them.(1) On April 14, 2011, France implemented its controversial ban of the niqab and burqa , commonly (...) referred to as the Islamic veil, in public places. On the coattails of the 2004 prohibition of religious artifacts, including the less concealing hijab or Islamic headscarves, in schools, the veil ban sparked equal outrage across both political and theological spectra, and many on both sides of the debate were quick to inquire about enforcement. As Steven Erlanger reports, “The police do not have the authority under the law to remove full veils, only to fine or require citizenship lessons for those who violate the new law.”(2) While the legal and social implications of this interdiction are ripe for study, the reprisals for breaking the law, notably compulsory citizenship classes, illuminate the strategic governmentality underlying the French government's targeting of the Muslim community, particularly those elements it considers affiliated with fundamentalist factions and/or terrorist organizations, if only through fashion—an integral component of French citizenship. Indeed, in allowing the (fashion) police to mandate instructional courses in citizenship for offenders, France implies that any Muslim choosing to wear the niqab or burqa , perhaps even for those who are already citizens, must not be aware of the subtle nuances of dress indicative of the French citizenry within public space. Furthermore, the degree of instruction requisite to citizenship, which clearly can and must be updated as the state sees fit, cements the imagined relation between citizens and states within the discourses on the veil ban. As Sharma contends, “Concepts of citizenship are the ideological glue that bonds the nation to the state. Citizenship provides the legal framework through which the state performs its role as ruler for the nation.”(3) Speaking for/as the state, French President Nicolas Sarkozy declared in a 2009 presentation before members of the government and other citizens that the burqa “is not welcome on the territory of France.”(4) Although there is nothing unique, especially recently, about a nation-state taking extreme measures to guard itself against what it deems to be threats to its sovereignty, the way in which the ongoing discourses on hijab have (d)evolved, which coincide with recent pronouncements by governmental leaders in Germany, Britain, and France that policies of multiculturalism have “failed,”(5) points toward nationalist reterritorializations, which is also to say physical and ideological re-appropriations, of public space within democratic milieux, which remain predicated upon the mediation of spaces. As Panagia deduces from Rancière, “Democracy […] is not an institutional form of government […], but an appearance whose visibilities and audibilites arise out of the dissonant blur of the everyday.”(6) Ultimately, the veil ban represents a calculated move to regulate the every day, which is to say the micropolitics of, that which is visible and invisible within French society, which makes it nothing short of a struggle to manage (the sensation of) bodies. Re-situating the political within the context of sense, Rancière argues that the fundamental essence of politics lies within the distinction between consensus and dissensus , and whereas most consider politics proper as fundamentally concerned with the fluid operations of the state— consensus , Rancière actually locates the political within events that disrupt the normative sensory order of things— dissensus . He explains, “Politics revolves around what is seen and what can be said about it, around who has the ability to see and the talent to speak, around the properties of spaces and the possibilities of time.”(7) This reformulation of politics centers on agency and, albeit perhaps unintended, representationality and offers a useful formulation for spatializing the discourses surrounding the Islamic veil, which are mired within seemingly senseless policies and practices of objectification. Instituting a normative “regime of visibility,” the French veil ban encapsulates the political economy of agency, now both mediated and representational, under the rule of nationalist governmentalities in increasingly transnational contexts.(8) Adjudicating presence within public space signals a concern with the sensory aspects of agency itself—what Rancière terms the “distribution of the sensible,” which is “a matrix that defines a set of relations between sense and sense: that is, between a form of sensory experience and an interpretation which makes sense of it.”(9) To be concerned with sense is to focus upon the body, and this somatic repositioning of the (fashionable) citizen within the territory of the state augurs the resurgence of nationalist bio-politics within Europe, since, as Hage explicates, “Nationalism, before being an explicit practice or a mode of classification, is a state of the body. It is a way of imagining one's position within the nation and what one can aspire to as a national.”(10) The French government's attempt to make (bodily) sense of public space for its citizens by and through policies aimed against a burqa-clad Muslim minority, which might only apply to “less then 400 to fewer than 2,000” women(11), reveals the necessary, yet mercurial, transmutation of public space into national space through bio-political strategies of sense-making, which, as Hage observes, denotes that “nationalists perceive themselves as spatial managers.”(12) At the center of this concern over public space is the equally contentious dimension of governing female Islamic identity, which has become one of the main critiques levied against Islam from outsiders who view the veil in its various forms as a clear sign of the religion's actual and symbolic violence against women, even if such critiques remain ensconced within nationalist discourses. As Halim and Meyers argue, “Although Western news media may focus their coverage of Muslim women on the debate over whether and the extent to which the veil may by oppressive to the women who wear it, they have exhibited little interest in the physical oppression of violence against women in Islamic countries.”(13) While it falls outside of the scope of this analysis to arbitrate all of the dimensions of this debate, understanding some of the issues related to female identity and hijab within public space are crucial to this study. As these topics are extraordinarily complex, even and perhaps especially within the Muslim community, it is necessary to provide some context concerning the value, purpose, and meaning of the Islamic veil, which has a rich and arduous history. The Art of the Veil At present, there are only two countries, Iran and Saudi Arabia, that require women to wear hijab , which is a decidedly problematic term and concept whose locus is itself caught within a struggle of sensation. Noting the strategic reterritorialization of the term, Berger explains: The choice of the name, hijab , now widely adopted to designate the “Islamic veil,” it itself interesting, although the semantic shift it operates is not directly commented upon by its users. Although the design (both the cut and the symbolic function) of the hijab and the Iranian chador are indeed the same, as opposed, for instance, to the traditional Algerian haik , the word hijab has come to replace the term chador popularized by the Iranian revolution, as a properly Arabic (hence Koranic) designation. This discursive shift points to the successful reclaiming of the national revolution in Iran by a transnational pan-Islamic movement, whose language of reference can only be Koranic Arabic.(14) While the hijab is certainly a point of contention within various countries dealing with immigrant Islamic populations (of which France has the largest in Europe as part of its colonial legacy in Algeria), it is clear that the veil is a historically contextualized artifact of Muslim identity with a variety of manifestations, even as forces outside of and within Islam seek to codify its actual and symbolic value. Ultimately, the varieties of hijab , including the full-faced burqa and niqab , are complex assemblages of meaning that speak to the multitudinous flows of Islamic identities over time and space. As Gökariksel and McLarney observe, “Wearing a certain style of veil may simultaneously be a disciplinary practice crucial to the cultivation of piety (Mahmood 2005; Gokariksel 2009) and a gendered performance of social distinction in terms of class, taste, and urbanity (White 1999; Navaro-Yashin 2002; Gokariksel and Secor 2009) or of ethnicity and race (Dwyer 1999).”(15) The ideological marketplace from which the varieties of hijab ebb and flow serves both as a reflection of the ever-present materiality and dynamic functionality of spiritual economies, which are derivative of the equally ubiquitous flows of transnational capital driving agency and representationality within our historical moment. Keeping these dual, yet deeply interconnected, capital ecologies as the site of exploration for how the veil is represented within public space, one might begin to sense what lurks behind such veiled agendas. Examining the symbolic and representational nature of the Islamic “veil” in its various forms, this project situates the decidedly political contestations of public space at stake in the French ban alongside recent condemnations of multiculturalism as calculated efforts to re-distribute the sensible so as to valorize national identity within increasingly transnational and globalized socio-economic spaces, which collapse exchange values between distinct, yet interwoven, economies of (cultural/material/spiritual) capital. As the discourses on the veil rely upon representational imag(in)ings, it seems fitting to explore the political economy and art of the veil through the phenomenon of street art, which, much like hijab , is a complex assemblage of meaning of sensation mired in representationality and capital exchange. As street artists have taken up hijab in various forms, the movement offers a lens with which to situate critical responses to the veil debate across both spiritual and material economies. Situating this street art both aesthetically and historically, Lewisohn explains, “'Street art' is a sub-genre of graffiti writing and owes much to its predecessor. Though there is a good deal of crossover between the genres, they are distinct and separate in their own right.”(16) Evolving out of the graffiti explosion of the late 1970's and 1980's, street art broke the unspoken rules of the artistic underground by challenging and re-examining one's sensory experience of art in public space by experimenting with both content and form in ways that harken back to the Situationist International, which as a collective challenged one's experience of urban space through various media and experiential phenomena. Again, Lewisohn observes, “It's important to note street art's break with the tradition of the tag, and its focus on visual symbols that embrace a much wider range of media than graffiti writers would use.”(17) From stencils to prints and murals to one-liners, street artists developed a reputation for critical social and political commentary, and while it is certainly the case that not all street art is intentionally political, in challenging the normative “regime of visibility,” as Rancière puts it, of public space, street artists—even if unconsciously—call into question the common sensory experience of the politics underlying the formation of (nationalist) space.(18) Indeed, Rancière refers to the partisan sensory managers as “police,” who ultimately forge “the rules governing the circulation of appearances, of their visibility and audibility, and the proper distribution of bodies therein.”(19) As such, one can sense that street art's relationship with the police is tenous for a variety of reasons. Writing about his own experience as a street artist, Shepard Fairey observes, “With street art, there's no committee deciding whether I can put my work up on the street, there's no censorship, and I have total freedom of expression, and that concept of freedom is expressed just by using the street as a medium.”(20) As Fairey and other street artists demonstrate, the medium, to paraphrase Marshall McLuhan, is the most glaring aspect of street art's message, and even as it now finds itself in galleries and usurped by private collectors, the ethos of the movement remains relavent to politics as it is, first and foremost, concerned with the configuration and experience of space. Just as examining the punishments for breaking the veil ban can map the terrain of French politics, a representational genealogy of street artist's deployment of hijab and female Muslim identity can assist in mining the depths of public space as a site of bio-political control and contestation in light of recent events in France and the rising tide of anti-multiculturalist rhetoric across Europe, even though the Islamic presence there is radically heterogenous. Using the work of Shepard Fairey, Princess Hijab, br1, and Banksy, this paper sets out to answer a number of key questions concerning the deployment of hijab, and female Islamic identity in particular, within street art as a movement now integral to and critical of the economies of exchange underlying global capitalism, which as a force of influence cannot be underestimated as a driver in the resurgence of nationalist biopolitical governmentalities. Although there exists a litany of artists to choose from, the aforementioned quartet of designers integrate hijab into their work in a seminal and critical fashion, and all have been working with the veil in some way prior to the French ban, which grants some additional context to their usage of it as a symbol in regards to the breakdown of multiculturalism across Europe, even if unconsciously. Although each artist depicts various amalgamations of hijab in their respective corpus, they share common tropes that raise significant questions concerning the veil debate, namely: what are the conditions of possibility for hijab to become a marker of Islamic identity within public space? How can we make sense of the representational topologies within street art's utilization of the hijab and female Islamic identity in light of the French ban? How might these aesthetic imag(in)ings simultaneously inhabit and combat normative discourses concerning hijab , multiculturalism, female Islamic identity, and public space? With these considerations as a backdrop, it is first necessary to outline more fully the hijab as a representative marker of female Islamic identity. The (Veiled) Writing on the Wall

shrink)