In the decade that followed 1972, the journal _boundary 2_ consistently published many of the most distinguished and most influential statements of an emerging literary postmodernism. Recognizing postmodernism as a dominant force in culture, particularly in the literary and narrative imagination, the journal appeared when literary critical study in the United States was in a period of theory-induced ferment. The fundamental relations between postmodernism and poststructuralism were being initially examined and the effort to formulate a critical sense of the postmodern (...) was underway. In this volume, Paul A. Bové, the current editor of _boundary 2_, has gathered many of those foundational essays and, as such, has assembled a basic text in the history of postmodernism. Essays by noted cultural and literary theorists join with Bové’s contemporary preface to represent the important and unique moment in recent intellectual history when postmodernism was no longer seen primarily as an architectural term, had not yet come to describe the wide range of culture it does now, but was finding power and place in the literary realm. These essays show that the history of postmodernism and its attendant critical theories are both more complex and more deeply bound with literary criticism than often is acknowledged today. _Early Postmodernism_ demonstrates not only the significance of these literary studies, but also the role played by literary critical postmodernism in making possible newer forms of critical and cultural studies. _Contributors_. Barry Alpert, Charles Altieri, David Antin, Harold Bloom, Paul A. Bové, Hélène Cixous, Gerald Gillespie, Ihab Hassan, Joseph N. Riddel, William, V. Spanos, Catharine R. Stimpson, Cornel West. (shrink)

Preface -- Prolegomenon : Hayek's three unsettling theses -- Beyond human nature -- Beyond moral justification -- Beyond human governance -- Three enquiries on the open society -- The rise of a normative species -- A natural history of moral order -- The "starting point" -- The egalitarian revolution -- Self-interest, reciprocity and altruism -- Internalized, enforced, social rules -- The other side of morality -- Cultural evolution -- Part I : the rise and fall of inequality -- A complex (...) moral species -- The diversity and self-organized complexity -- Liberalism and the open society -- Understanding diversity -- Autocatalytic diversity -- Diversity and complexity -- Too much complexity? -- The morality of self-organization -- The social contract -- A self-organization model -- Moral diversity In the open society -- Part II: the complexities of self-governance -- Self-governance -- Macro control -- Macro structure -- Strategic dilemmas and polycentricity -- Meso-level goal pursuit -- Sectoral policy -- Self-governance from the bottom-up : simplifying the problems of governance -- Our moral nature and governance in the open society -- Liberal democracy -- Epilogue -- Appendix A -- Appendix B. (shrink)

This important new book takes as its points of departure two questions: What is the nature of valuing? and What morality can be justified in a society that deeply disagrees on what is truly valuable? In Part One, the author develops a theory of value that attempts to reconcile reason with passions. Part Two explores how this theory of value grounds our commitment to moral action. The author argues that rational moral action can neither be seen as a way of (...) simply maximising one's own values, nor derived from reason independent of one's values. Rather, our commitment to the moral point of view is presupposed by our value systems. The book concludes with a defense of liberal political morality. (shrink)

This chapter contains sections titled: The Concept of Neutrality Liberal Moral Neutrality Liberal Political Neutrality The Implications of Liberal Political Neutrality Notes.

Most critiques of modernity rest on an inadequate understanding of its complexity. Modernity should be seen in terms of the question that guides modern thought. 77ns is the question of divine omnipotence that arises out of the nominalist destruction of Scholasticism. Humanism, Reformation Christianity, empiricsim, and rationalism are different responses to this question.

This accessible, college-level introduction to the major theories of public morality begins with a discussion of why we should seek a publicly justified public morality and how we might go about publicly justifying social principles. The latter part of the volume considers the basic principles of public morality, evaluating the concepts of J.S. Mill, Jeremy Bentham, Thomas Hobbes, John Locke, David Hume, John Rawls, David Gauthier, and Joel Feinberg, as well as contemporary philosophers. Theories addressed include game theory, social choice (...) theory, and the ideas of rational action, rational bargaining, and public good. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR. (shrink)

In this paper I argue for a special kind of injustice I call “trust injustice.” Taking Miranda Fricker's work on epistemic injustice as my starting point, I argue that there are some ethical constraints on trust relationships. If I am right about this, then we sometimes have duties to maintain trust relationships that are independent of the social roles we play.

This essay examines two different modes of reasoning about justice: an individual mode in which each individual judges what we all ought to do and a social mode in which we seek to reconcile our judgments of justice so that we can share common rules of justice. Social contract theory has traditionally emphasized the second, reconciliation mode, devising a central plan to do so. However, I argue that because we disagree not only in our judgments of justice but also about (...) the degree of reconciliation justice calls for, the social contract presupposes a single, controversial, answer to the proper degree of reconciliation. In place of the social contract’s ‘top-down’ approach, this article explores the idea of self-organizing moral systems, in which each individual, acting on her own views of justice, responds to the decisions of others, forming systems of shared justice. Several basic agent-based models are explored to begin to understand the dynami... (shrink)

Philosophy, Politics, and Economics offers a complete introduction to the fundamental tools and concepts of analysis that PPE students need to study social and political issues. This fully updated and expanded edition examines the core methodologies of rational choice, strategic analysis, norms, and collective choice that serve as the bedrocks of political philosophy and the social sciences. The textbook is ideal for advanced undergraduates, graduate students, and nonspecialists looking to familiarize themselves with PPE's approaches.

Since each term only has significance in contrast to its negation, the distinction between the noumenal and the phenomenal is a Kantian philosophical postulation that is as arbitrary as any binary (e.g., presence–absence) when submitted to Jacques Derrida’s method of deconstruction. According to Noumenism – a philosophy founded on the non-dualistic reinscription of phenomena and noumena – works of art possess elements which are simultaneously sense-data, and no data to any mind. This paradoxical status is achieved by means of an (...) artist-invented mechanism which allows its generative workings to run amok. The mechanism itself is a ‘compound-image’ formed by the paranoiac-critical activity of abolishing the mutual exclusivity of two or more different systems (i.e., the organization of related elements into complex wholes, methods, procedures, techniques, etc.). To illustrate this, an analysis of ‘No. 6’ from Noumenist poet Jason Johnson’s Hymns from Purgatory is undertaken. As they develop, refine or adopt their own philosophies of art, today’s artists and tomorrow’s are challenged to reckon with the ideas put forward in this article. (shrink)

Under free institutions the exercise of human reason leads to a plurality of reasonable, yet irreconcilable doctrines. Rawls's political liberalism is intended as a response to this fundamental feature of modern democratic life. Justifying coercive political power by appeal to any one (or sample) of these doctrines is, Rawls believes, oppressive and illiberal. If we are to achieve unity without oppression, he tells us, we must all affirm a public political conception that is supported by these diverse reasonable doctrines. The (...) first part of this essay argues that the free use of human reason leads to reasonable pluralism over most of what we call the political. Rawls's notion of the political does not avoid the problem of state oppression under conditions of reasonable pluralism. The second part tries to show how justificatory liberalism provides (1) a conception of the political that takes seriously the fact that the free use of human reason leads us to sharply disagree in the domain of the political while (2) articulating a conception of the political according to which the coercive intervention of the state must be justified by public reasons. (shrink)

This chapter sketches a reading that confirms John Rawls's view that the stability argument of Part Three of Theory of Justice (TJ) was crucial for the success of TJ as a whole, that it was indeed flawed, and that fundamental ideas of Political Liberalism (PL) can be traced to the wide‐ranging consequences of recognizing the flaw in that argument. In Rawls's political liberalism, one can find at least two accounts of the way in which stability considerations enter into justificatory arguments (...) – one repairs the account in TJ and is similarly structured, while another pushes political liberalism in a more radical direction. The chapter briefly discusses how the thin theory of the good is employed in Rawls's stability analysis. It is not “the fact of pluralism” but the “fact of reasonable pluralism” that motivates Rawls's political turn; reasonable pluralism is the result of our best exercise of free practical reason. (shrink)

This work has been selected by scholars as being culturally important and is part of the knowledge base of civilization as we know it. This work is in the public domain in the United States of America, and possibly other nations. Within the United States, you may freely copy and distribute this work, as no entity (individual or corporate) has a copyright on the body of the work. Scholars believe, and we concur, that this work is important enough to be (...) preserved, reproduced, and made generally available to the public. To ensure a quality reading experience, this work has been proofread and republished using a format that seamlessly blends the original graphical elements with text in an easy-to-read typeface. We appreciate your support of the preservation process, and thank you for being an important part of keeping this knowledge alive and relevant. (shrink)

This essay responds to the thoughtful essays on the Order of Public Reason (OPR) by Elvio Baccarini, Giulia Bistagnino and Nenad Miscevic. All three essays interrogate OPR’s understanding of moral theory - “meta” matters about the nature of morality, reasons and modeling within moral theories. I first turn to the general understanding of the moral enterprise underlying OPR, explaining why it takes a view at odds with the contemporary mainstream in moral philosophy. I then explain the idea of moral truth (...) in OPR: when it comes to social morality, moral truth is necessarily a function of what can be endorsed by some collectivity. Th is leads to a fundamental worry about theories of public reason: why is the endorsement of the public so important? And if some sort of public endorsement is really so terribly important, how can a theory of public reason withstand the fact that it advances its own controversial claims that cannot be publicly endorsed? After considering when public endorsement is necessary, and when public reason theories can make controversial claims, I close by considering in what way OPR does, and in what way it does not, employ a thought experiment, and the complexities of that. (shrink)

The problem of collective action is that each member of a group wants other members to make necessary sacrifices while he or she 'free rides', reaping the benefits of collective action without doing the work. Inevitably the end result is that no one does the work and the common interest is not realized. This book analyses the social pressure whereby groups solve the problem of collective action. The authors show that the problem of collective action requires a model of group (...) process and cannot be deduced from simple models of individual behaviour. They employ formal mathematical models to emphasize the role of small subgroups of especially motivated individuals who form the 'critical mass' that sets collective action in motion. The book will be read with special interest by sociologists, social psychologists, economists and political scientists. It will also be of concern to those in industrial relations and communications research working on issues in collective action and rational choice. (shrink)

John Taurek famously argued that, in ‘conflict cases’, where we are confronted with a smaller and a larger group of individuals, and can choose which group to save from harm, we should toss a coin, rather than saving the larger group. This is primarily because coin-tossing is fairer: it ensures that each individual, regardless of the group to which he or she belongs, has an equal chance of being saved. This article provides a new response to Taurek’s argument. It proposes (...) that there are two possible types of unfairness that have to be avoided in conflict cases, as far as possible: ‘selection unfairness’, which is the unfairness of not giving individuals an equal chance of being saved; and ‘outcome unfairness’, which is the unfairness of not actually saving them, when others are saved. Since saving the greater number generates less outcome unfa-irness than coin-tossing, it is argued that, in many conflict cases, fairness demands that we save the greater number. (shrink)

It is a plausible and compelling theoretical assumption that epistemic rationality is just a matter of having doxastic attitudes that are the correct responses to one’s epistemic reasons, or that all requirements of epistemic rationality reduce to requirements on doxastic attitudes. According to this idea, all instances of epistemic rationality are instances of rational belief. Call this assumption, and any theory working under it, _belief-centered_. In what follows, I argue that we should not accept belief-centered theories of epistemic rationality. This (...) is an argument in three acts. In the first, I present counterexamples that problematize the belief-centered assumption: cases whose protagonists (i) fail to meet any plausible requirements on belief but (ii) nevertheless appear epistemically rational. In the second act, I consider alternative explanations of the counterexamples, friendly to the belief-centered theorist, and find them wanting. In the third and final act, I show that there are significant theoretical benefits to acknowledging a distinct agent-centered dimension of epistemic rationality and sketch a candidate agent-centered approach: a view that grounds an agent’s epistemic rationality in the possession of _good epistemic policies_. In the end, we see that a complete theory of epistemic rationality is as much of a theory of rational _agents_ as it is of rational _belief_. (shrink)

In a number of works, I have argued that social morality—a system of internalized “social-moral rules”—is fundamental to human social cooperation. Russell Hardin disputed this, arguing instead for the primacy of conventions, based largely on self-interest, in developing cooperative social order. This chapter considers three challenges for my view raised by Hardin. The chapter commences by considering small-scale cooperation; I believe that the evidence indicates that even in very small groups of face-to-face cooperators, the internalization of moral rules is fundamental (...) to their cooperation and cheater suppression. I then consider Hardin’s charge that accounts of social cooperation based on moral rules, in which individuals act on the rules despite their interests, are stuck with invoking a variety of somewhat dubious and weak “claims of moral commitment or shared values through [to] Rawls’s magical ‘addition of the sense of justice and moral sentiment’ to make justice work at a large scale.” I argue that the evidence in support of internalized rule compliance, even in the face of high costs to personal interests, is impressive, and the underlying mechanisms are not mysterious. Lastly, I briefly turn to the fundamental issue of how social morality functions in large-scale settings and, importantly, whether it is largely displaced by formal legal and political institutions. (shrink)

Uwe Steinhoff’s The Ethics of War and the Force of Law contains an extended critique of ‘moral fundamentalism’, or the project of uncovering an individualist ‘deep morality’ of war governed by the same moral principles and rules that govern ordinary moral life, as well as a more positive account of war that depicts it as a social practice. Much of Steinhoff’s account is indebted to a series of claims involving the standing to blame, reciprocity, and the necessity and proportionality conditions (...) on self-defence. On all these claims, Steinhoff is open to challenge. First, he is arguably over-dependent on ‘standing to blame’ considerations. Second, his commitment to reciprocity is under-explained. Third, the necessity condition does not clearly explain how conventional elements explain the formation of defensive standards. Fourth, there are problems in explaining how the distinct defensive conventions adopted by distinct communities can actually be made to get on to the same page when these communities go to war with each other. (shrink)

In an important essay Charles Larmore tells us that Kant and Mill sought to justify the principle of political neutrality by appealing to ideals of autonomy and individuality. By remaining neutral with regard to controversial views of the good life, constitutional principles will express, according to them, what ought to be of supreme value throughout the whole of our life.1 On Larmore’s influential reading, Mill defended what we might call first-level neutrality: Millian principles determining justified legal (and, we might add, (...) social) intervention are neutral between competing conceptions of the good life. However, Larmore insists that Millian neutral political principles do not posses second-level neutrality: they do not have a neutral justification. The problem with Mill’s valuebased defense of liberalism,” Larmore insists, is that because the value of individuality is “far from uncontroversial,” 2 Mill’s case liberalism is open to reasonable objection. In contrast Larmore and, of course, John Rawls, seek to develop a “political liberalism” that defends liberal neutrality without appeal to a “general ‘philosophy of man’ or a ‘comprehensive moral ideal’.”3 The justification of liberal principles “must be acceptable by reasonable people having different views of the good life, not just those who share, for example, Mill’s ideal of the person.”4 Liberals, argues Larmore, need “a neutral justification of neutrality.”5.. (shrink)

Liberal political theory is all too familiar with the divide between classical and welfare-state liberals. Classical liberals, as we all know, insist on the importance of small government, negative liberty, and private property. Welfare-state liberals, on the other hand, although they too stress civil rights, tend to be sympathetic to “positive liberty,” are for a much more expansive government, and are often ambivalent about private property. Although I do not go so far as to entirely deny the usefulness of this (...) familiar distinction, I think in many ways it is misleading. In an important sense, most free-market liberals are also “welfare-state” liberals. I say this because the overwhelming number of liberals, of both the pro-market and the pro-government variety, entertain a welfarist conception of political economy. On this dominant welfarist view, the ultimate justification of the politico-economic order is that it promotes human welfare. Traditional “welfare-state liberals” such as Robert E. Goodin manifestly adopt this welfarist conception. But it is certainly not only interventionists such as Goodin who insist that advancing welfare is the overriding goal of normative political economy. J. R. McCulloch, one of the great nineteenth-century laissez-faire political economists, was adamant that “freedom is not, as some appear to think, the end of government: the advancement of public prosperity and happiness is its end.” To be sure, McCulloch would have disagreed with Goodin about the optimal welfare-maximizing economic policy: the welfarist ideal, he and his fellow classical political economists believed, would best be advanced by provision of a legal and institutional framework — most importantly, the laws of property, contract, and the criminal code — that allows individuals to pursue their own interests in the market and, by so doing, promote public welfare. In general, what might be called the “classical-liberal welfare state” claims to advance welfare by providing the framework for individuals to seek wealth for themselves, while welfarists such as Goodin insist that a market order is seriously flawed as a mechanism for advancing human welfare and, in addition, that government has the competency to “correct market failures” in the provision of welfare. (shrink)

:Some understand utopia as an ideal society in which everyone would be thoroughly informed by a moral ethos: all would always act on their pure conscientious judgments about justice, and so it would never be necessary to provide incentives for them to act as justice requires. In this essay I argue that such a society is impossible. A society of purely conscientiously just agents would be unable to achieve real justice. This is the Paradox of Pure Conscientiousness. This paradox, I (...) argue, can only be overcome when individuals are prepared to depart from their own pure, conscientious, judgments of justice. (shrink)

This two-part article examines whether Sartre's final interviews, recorded in L'Espoir maintenant [ Hope Now ], indicate a final turn to belief through an overview of his engagement with the idea of God throughout his career. In Part 1 we examine Sartre's early atheism, but note the pervasive nature of secularised Christian metaphors and concepts in his religion of letters and the centrality of man's desire to be God in Being and Nothingness . His theoretical writings seek to refute the (...) idea of God, but in doing so God is paradoxically both absent and present. In Part 2 we assess his anti-theism and consider his final encounter with theism in L'Espoir maintenant, arguing that it is part of Sartre's long-term engagement with the idea of God. (shrink)

Consider a stylized contrast between medical and business ethics. Both fields of applied ethics focus on a profession whose activities are basic to human welfare. Both enquire into obligations of professionals, and the relations between goals intrinsic to the profession and ethical duties to others and to the society. I am struck, however, by a fundamental difference: whereas medical ethics takes place against a background of almost universal consensus that the practice of medicine is admirable and morally praiseworthy, the business (...) profession is embedded within the framework of firms in a capitalist market economy, and for the last century and a half there has been sustained debate about the moral and economic justifiability of such an economy. To be sure, even under socialism there might be an “ethics of socialist managers,” and there would be some overlap between such an ethic and contemporary business ethics. Nevertheless, many of the characteristic problems of business ethics — e.g., what are the obligations of a corporation to its shareholders? — arise only in the context of a private property-based market economy. This raises a deep problem for business ethics: can one develop an account of ethical practices for an activity (i.e., business) while ignoring that the context in which this activity occurs (i.e., capitalism) is morally controversial? It is as if the work in medical ethics proceeded in the midst of widespread disagreement whether medicine was a good thing. Another way of thinking about the problem is: if one teaches business ethics, does this commit you to accepting that business can be ethical? And doesn’t this commit you to accepting that capitalism is justifiable?1 I suspect that this is a serious problem for many teachers of business ethics. Many were trained in academic philosophy, and within academic philosophy there are many who think — or at least suspect — that capitalism is basically unjust, or perhaps that only a greatly modified capitalism would be acceptable.. (shrink)

Imagine a two-person distributive case in which Ernest's choices yield X and Bertie's choices yield X + Y, producing an income gap between them of Y. Neither Ernest nor Bertie is responsible for this gap of Y, since neither of them has any control over what the other agent chooses. This is what Susan Hurley calls the “Boring Problem” for luck egalitarianism. Contrary to Hurley's relatively dismissive treatment of it, it is contended that the Boring Problem poses a deep problem (...) for standard luck egalitarianism. To counter it, luck egalitarianism needs to be recast as a baseline-relative theory. This new version of luck egalitarianism is then put to work against some significant problems that have been encountered by luck egalitarianism: Saul Smilansky's “Paradox of the Baseline,” the “Partiality Worry,” and the “Pluralism Worry.” But baseline-relative luck egalitarianism is not without problems of its own. (shrink)

First published in 1983. The primary argument of this book is that there is a coherent tradition of liberal thinking that extends from L. S. Mill, through liberals like T. H. Green, Bernard Bosanquet, L. T. Hobhouse and John Dewey to John Rawls. The author places Rawls within a longstanding tradition of liberal thinking, while also arguing that Green and Hobhouse are not simply of historical interest but represent genuine and interesting attempts to develop a modern liberal theory. It is (...) argued that modern liberal theory centres on a conception of human nature; that modern liberals have sought to harmonise the pursuit of individuality with participation in social and communal life. Although the book focuses on six modern liberals, the discussion proceeds topically rather than according to author, thus highlighting similarities and disagreements and providing a comprehensive study of modern liberalism. (shrink)

An extensive scholarly literature, written in the past century holds that in ancient Greek and Roman thought history is understood as circular and repetitive - a consequence of their anti-temporal metaphysics - in contrast with Judaeo-Christian thought, which sees history as linear and unique - a consequence of their messianic and hence radically temporal theology. Gerald Press presents a more general view - that the Graeco-Roman and Judaeo-Christian cultures were fundamentally alien and opposed cultural forces and that, therefore, Christianity's (...) victory over paganism included the replacement or supersession of one intellectual world by another - and then shows that, contrary to this view, there was substantial continuity between "pagan" and Christian ideas of history in antiquity, rather than a striking opposition between cyclic and linear patterns. He finds that the foundation of the Christian view of history as goal-directed lies in the rhetorical rather than the theological motives of early Christian writers. (shrink)

An extensive scholarly literature, written in the past century holds that in ancient Greek and Roman thought history is understood as circular and repetitive - a consequence of their anti-temporal metaphysics - in contrast with Judaeo-Christian thought, which sees history as linear and unique - a consequence of their messianic and hence radically temporal theology. Gerald Press presents a more general view - that the Graeco-Roman and Judaeo-Christian cultures were fundamentally alien and opposed cultural forces and that, therefore, Christianity's (...) victory over paganism included the replacement or supersession of one intellectual world by another - and then shows that, contrary to this view, there was substantial continuity between "pagan" and Christian ideas of history in antiquity, rather than a striking opposition between cyclic and linear patterns. He finds that the foundation of the Christian view of history as goal-directed lies in the rhetorical rather than the theological motives of early Christian writers. (shrink)

An extensive scholarly literature, written in the past century holds that in ancient Greek and Roman thought history is understood as circular and repetitive - a consequence of their anti-temporal metaphysics - in contrast with Judaeo-Christian thought, which sees history as linear and unique - a consequence of their messianic and hence radically temporal theology. Gerald Press presents a more general view - that the Graeco-Roman and Judaeo-Christian cultures were fundamentally alien and opposed cultural forces and that, therefore, Christianity's (...) victory over paganism included the replacement or supersession of one intellectual world by another - and then shows that, contrary to this view, there was substantial continuity between "pagan" and Christian ideas of history in antiquity, rather than a striking opposition between cyclic and linear patterns. He finds that the foundation of the Christian view of history as goal-directed lies in the rhetorical rather than the theological motives of early Christian writers. (shrink)