In The Shadow of God, Michael Rosen argues that modern moral philosophy in the tradition of German Idealism is profoundly shaped by religious views these thinkers could not overcome. However, a closer look at Rosen’s critique of Kant’s and Kantian conceptions of morality raises the possibility that Rosen’s view may itself be haunted by the shadow of God. In particular, Rosen appears to believe that a moral imperative of respect for human dignity necessarily requires a religious-transcendent grounding, such that there (...) is no purely moral answer to the question of why such respect is owed. In relegating morality to an impersonal realm that alienates us from our personal understandings of the good, Rosen fails to recognize not only that Kantian morality is meant to alienate us from certain ends (e.g., racist or sexist), but that it is also meant to overcome alienation. This is because Kantian morality is not so much impersonal, as it is interpersonal: it recognizes us as belonging to a community of free and equal persons, who are autonomous when we morally reflect on, or even reject, certain ends. (shrink)

In Rawls’s political liberalism, legitimate exercises of political power must be publicly justifiable to reasonable citizens on grounds each can coherently accept, where citizens count as “reasonable” only if they can accept certain values of public culture. Other citizens have no say in public justification, or no equal say. For Rawls, then, legitimate political power must accord with a subset of cultural values, and can be legitimate even if it is not (equally) justifiable to people who cannot accept them. Does (...) this mean that Rawls permits that such people be dominated? What kind of domination, if any, would this involve, and would it involve “cultural” domination? This chapter takes its lead from these questions. It offers a reading of the role of public justification in political liberalism that foregrounds differences in the discursive standing of reasonable and unreasonable people, and interpret these differences in domination-theoretic terms. I suggest that there is reason to believe that Rawls’s view would subject the unreasonable–a mixed group that also includes respectable people–to forms of discursive and political domination, and this in a manner that attracts the worry that cultural domination is involved. (shrink)

Alienation has been recently revived as a central theme in critical theory. Current debates, however, tend to focus on normative rather than on explanatory issues. In this paper, I confront the latter and advance an account of alienation that bears on the mechanisms that bring it about in order to locate alienation as a distinctive social and psychological fact. In particular, I argue that alienation can be explained as a disruption induced by social factors in the sense of mental ownership (...) that comes with the first personal awareness of being a subject of attitudes, emotions, and actions, and outline how social factors can play a structuring causal role in the process that brings it about. In the first section, I introduce the theme and explain why it is important to focus on the mechanisms that underlie alienation. In the second section, I maintain that understanding how alienation works is crucial to make sense of false consciousness. In the third section, I consider the relevance of mental ownership to explaining alienation and discuss existing evidence about whether and how it can fail. In the final section, I argue that disturbances in the simulation routines that support social cognition might underpin alienation, and outline how social factors might play a structuring causal role in this connection. (shrink)

Efficient markets are alienating if they inhibit us from recognizably caring about one another in our productive activities. I argue that efficient market behaviour is both exclusionary and fetishistic. As exclusionary, the efficient marketeer cannot manifest care alongside their market behaviour. As fetishistic, the efficient marketeer cannot manifest care in their market behaviour. The conjunction entails that efficient market behavior inhibits care. It doesn’t follow that efficient market behavior is vicious: individuals might justifiably commit to efficiency because doing so serves (...) the common good. But efficient market systems nevertheless have significant opportunity costs. The discussion yields a range of desiderata for non-alienated economic organization. (shrink)

This chapter explores Rainer Forst’s justification-centric view of nondomination toleration. This view places an idea of equal respect and a corresponding requirement of reciprocal and general justification at the core of non-domination toleration. After reconstructing this view, this chapter addresses two issues. First, even if this idea of equal respect requires the limits of non-domination toleration to be drawn in a manner that is equally justifiable to all affected people, equal justifiability should not be understood in terms of Forst’s requirement (...) of reciprocal and general acceptability. Second, for the equal justifiability of relevant constraints to ensure non-domination outcomes, discursive equality must be understood in substantive, purchase-sensitive terms. This means that a justification-centric view of non-domination toleration stands or falls with the participation value of what it regards as the standards of justification. This places reasonably contested matters of value at the heart of such views. (shrink)

The discussion develops the view that public justification in Rawls’s political liberalism, in one of its roles, is actualist in fully enfranchising actual reasonable citizens and fundamental in political liberalism’s order of justification. I anchor this reading in the political role Rawls accords to general reflective equilibrium, and examine in its light the relationship between public justification, pro tanto justification, political values, full justification, the wide view of public political culture and salient public reason intuitions. This leaves us with the (...) question of how a more plausible, post-Rawlsian political liberalism should understand the commitment to discursive respect and robust discursive equality that is reflected in its view of actualist and fundamental public justification. (shrink)

Public justification in political liberalism is often conceptualized in light of Rawls’s view of its role in a hypothetical well-ordered society as an ideal or idealizing form of justification that applies a putatively reasonable conception of political justice to political matters. But Rawls implicates a different idea of public justification in his doctrine of general reflective equilibrium. The paper engages this second, more fundamental idea. Public justification in this second sense is actualist and fundamental. It is actualist in that it (...) fully enfranchises actual reasonable citizens. It is fundamental in that political liberalism qualifies conceptions of political justice as reasonable to begin with only if they can be accepted coherently by actual reasonable citizens. Together, these features invite the long-standing concern that actualist political liberalism is objectionably exclusionary. I argue that the exclusion objection, while plausible, is more problematic in own right than it seems if actualist and fundamental public justification hypotheticalizes and discursive respect is compatible with substantive discursive inequality. This leaves proponents and critics of political liberalism with deeper questions about the nature of permissible discursive inequality in public justification. (shrink)

Book review: Giraldo, J.. Marx después del marxismo. Medellín: Editorial Universidad de Antioquia.