In this article, I assess the prospects for the limitarian thesis that someone has too much wealth if they exceed a specific wealth threshold. Limitarianism claims that there are good political and/or ethical reasons to prevent people from having such ‘surplus wealth’, for example, because it has no moral value for the holder or because allowing people to have surplus wealth has less moral value than redistributing it. Drawing on recent literature on distributive justice, I defend two types of limitarian (...) principles of justice. First, limitarian midlevel principles draw on the limitarian thesis to specify normative commitments for guiding institutional design and individual actions. Second, the limitarian presumption draws on that thesis to specify what a just allocation of wealth requires under epistemic constraints. Such a presumption says that without substantive reasons to the contrary, we should regard a distribution as unjust if some people’s wealth exceeds the limitarian threshold. Furthermore, I will argue that we must reject a possible but implausible interpretation of limitarianism as an ideal distributive pattern. Yet both as a midlevel principle and as a presumption, limitarianism can play an important role in theorizing about justice in the real world. (shrink)

Principles of justice, David Estlund argues, cannot be falsified by people’s unwillingness to satisfy them. In his Utopophobia, Estlund rejects the view that justice must bend to human motivation to deliver practical implications for how institutions ought to function. In this paper, I argue that a substantive argument against such bending of justice principles must challenge the reasons for making these principles sensitive to motivational limitations. Estlund, however, provides no such challenge. His dispute with benders of justice is therefore a (...) verbal one over the true meaning of justice, which need not worry those with the intuition that justice should perform a function that requires bending. By focusing on John Rawls’s reasons for bending his justice principles, I point towards a substantive critique of bent justice. (shrink)

Apocalypse, it seems, is everywhere. Preachers with vast followings proclaim the world's end and apocalyptic fears grip even the non-religious amid climate change, pandemics, and threats of nuclear war. But as these ideas pervade popular discourse, grasping their logic remains elusive. Ben Jones argues that we can gain insight into apocalyptic thought through secular thinkers. He starts with a puzzle: Why would secular thinkers draw on Christian apocalyptic beliefs--often dismissed as bizarre--to interpret politics? The apocalyptic tradition proves appealing in part (...) because it theorizes a special relation between crisis and utopia. Apocalyptic thought points to crisis as the vehicle to bring the previously impossible within reach, thus offering apparent resources for navigating challenges in ideal theory, which tries to imagine the best and most just society. By examining apocalyptic thought's appeal and risks, this study arrives at new insights on the limits of ideal theory and utopian hope. (shrink)

It is common in political theory and practice to challenge normatively ambitious proposals by saying that their fulfillment is not feasible. But there has been insufficient conceptual exploration of what feasibility is, and very little substantive inquiry into why and how it matters for thinking about social justice. This paper provides one of the first systematic treatments of these issues, and proposes a dynamic approach to the relation between justice and feasibility that illuminates the importance of political imagination and dynamic (...) duties to expand agents’ power to fulfill ambitious principles of justice. (shrink)

The contemporary methodological debate about justice has centered around a dispute about the value of so-called ideal theory. I argue that justice performs a social-guiding function, which explains how people should respond to their limited and fallible abilities to realize justice institutionally. My argument helps to re-orientate the contemporary methodological debate. The obvious disagreement between many prominent supporters and skeptics of ideal theory obscures the fact that they are united by a false assumption: the practical value of justice exclusively consists (...) of its institution-guiding function. To capture the overlooked social-guiding function, a richer normative theory of justice is required; I show how such a theory can be supplied by “ideal-transitional” principles. (shrink)

The dissertation attempts to answer the question of how to theorize resistance from within the philosophy of social science. To answer this question we must consider more than just the philosophy of social science; we also must look to political and moral philosophy. Resistance to the social norms of one’s community is possible to theorize from within the philosophy of social science once we develop a sufficiently nuanced account of social and moral communities, according to which membership in a community (...) is not defined by sharing judgments, conceptual frameworks, or comprehensive worldviews, but by sharing terms of discourse so that discussion about judgments, conceptual frameworks, and comprehensive worldviews is possible. Understanding the structure of one’s moral community is not the same as to endorsing that structure. This suggests that contestation is already present within communities about what ‘we’ do, up to and including who ‘we’—as a ‘community’—are. Challenging communitarian understandings of what makes a community a community, I argue that communities are best understood as forming around common concerns or perceptions of problems. This contestation plays a major role in determining the identities of communities, and these identities are constantly shifting. (shrink)

Many political theorists think about how to make societies more just. In recent years, with interests shifting from principles to their institutional realization, there has been much debate about feasibility and the role it should play in theorizing. What has been underexplored, however, is how feasibility depends on the attitudes and perceptions of individuals, not only with regard to their own behaviour, but also with regard to the behaviour of others. This can create coordination problems, which can be described as (...) “feasibility gridlocks”. These problems are interesting from a normative perspective, not only because they arguably play an important role for the feasibility of institutions, but also because they contain a normative element themselves: individual might be willing to cooperate in order change the “feasibility frontier” Political ideals and the feasibility frontier. Econ Philos), but only if others are also willing to do their bit, which contains a judgment about the fair distribution of burdens. Beliefs about the selfish nature of human beings, however, can make feasibility gridlocks more likely. This is why what I call, for the sake of brevity, “economic ideology”, i.e. an account of human nature as fundamentally self-interested, can be harmful. Finding a way out of such equilibriums therefore is an important task for political theorists and social reformers. (shrink)

Debates about justice in political philosophy often ask which distributive end state is normatively desirable. The economic mechanisms that generate the ‘pie’ that is to be distributed are usually left unexplored. Mark R. Reiff’s new book, in contrast, asks what justice means within economic processes, and how changes in the framework of the economy could lead to more justice, including justice in the distributive sense. As such, Reiff’s account is in a line with other recent accounts such as Dietsch’s discussion (...) of competition and its effects on distribution, or the debates about property-owning democracy ; these are all attempts to open up the ‘black box’ of markets, as Dietsch puts it, and to think about justice before or while the pie is being baked.Reiff returns to an age-old idea: the idea of a just price, which he revives by developing a highly original account of exploitation as the use of intolerably unfair prices. Al .. (shrink)

Recent theories of territorial rights could be characterized by their growing attention to environmental concerns and resource rights (understood as the rights of jurisdiction and/or ownership over natural resources). Here I examine two: Avery Kolers’s theory of ethnogeographical plenitude, and Cara Nine’s theory of legitimate political authority over people and resources. While Kolers is a pioneer in demanding ecological sustainability as a minimum requirement for any viable theory of territorial rights – building a bridge between environmental and political philosophy – (...) Nine highlights a crucial distinction when looking at territorial rights from a global justice perspective, namely that between jurisdictional powers and ownership rights over resources. Daring and innovative at first glance, I claim that both theories present, however, deep ambiguities and retreat from their radical implications which, if taken seriously, would lead to a massive redrawing of current territorial borders. (shrink)

The modern social world is unjust. It is also complex. What does this latter fact imply about the kind of approach that should be used in ameliorating the injustice expressed in the former fact? One answer, recently put forth by Jacob Barrett, is that _ideal theory_, which he understands as being fundamentally defined by the identification and subsequent pursuit of an aspirational macro-level institutional goal, lacks a place in social reform. The reason he thinks ideal theory lacks a place has (...) to do with its inability to deal with complexity. _Pace_ Barrett, I argue that ideal theory, suitably understood, can play a valuable role in social reform in a complex world. While some ideal theorists have underappreciated the extent to which complexity considerations complicate social reform, this does not mean that there is no place for it. This paper surveys the resources ideal theory has available to cope with what I call _the challenge of complexity_. Although the coping techniques will be successful to varying degrees, I believe, in aggregate, a compelling case can be made that ideal theory can combat the challenge of complexity. Still, one may worry that even if ideal theory can adequately deal with complexity, it cannot adequately deal with ever-changing social circumstances. Call this _the dancing landscape objection_. A static ideal theory cannot overcome it, but a _dynamic ideal theory_ could. In sum, dynamic ideal theory can contribute to social reform in a complex and mutable social world. (shrink)

In this paper I am interested in the question of whether and why states should prioritize child refugees over adult refugees in cases where they are not able to grant refuge to all those who are entitled to it. In particular I discuss three grounds on which such a prioritization could be based: (a) vulnerability, (b) efficiency and (c) life phase and life span. As can be shown, these grounds also apply, to some extent, to particular groups of adults such (...) as women, the elderly, or people with special needs. Based on this I conclude that states should invest significant resources into filtering out those who are the most needy and vulnerable although there are several limitations to doing that. Only if such a selection process were impossible, or so costly and time-consuming that it would result in significantly fewer refugees being admitted, would states have good moral reasons to prioritize children without further screening. (shrink)

In the aftermath of the ‘Brexit’ referendum two pieces of campaign material used by the successful Leave campaign proved controversial: a slogan on the side of a bus fallaciously implying that leaving the EU would necessarily free up £350 million a week for the NHS; and a poster stating that Britain was at “Breaking Point” – purportedly due to an influx of migrants – that was redolent of Nazi propaganda. This paper analyses and develops some criticisms that were levelled at (...) the Leave campaigners who authorised these from the perspective of political liberalism. It concludes that those behind the Breaking Point poster could justifiably have been subject to non-criminal sanction by institutions such as the Electoral Commission, but that this is not the case for the NHS bus. The Breaking Point poster warrants sanction because it belongs to a category of hateful speech that propagates false and discriminatory beliefs about its targets. Where these are disseminated by those in authority or of high status, such as political campaigns, they can strengthen these beliefs amongst the rest of the population. This can lead to members of the targeted group being unable to deliberate effectively as they are not treated with adequate respect in political discussions, which in turn undermines the process of public justification. As a result, it undermines public justification in a way that false factual claims do not, eventhough in this case the NHS slogan appears to have had a greater effect on the referendum result. (shrink)

Thema dieses Essays sind Fragen nach dem Verhältnis theoriegeleiteter empirischer Forschung und systematischer Analyse, Rekonstruktion und Bewertung von in pädagogischen Konstellationen unweigerlich auftretenden ethischen Fragestellungen und Problemen. Ziel des Beitrags ist es, am Beispiel von aktuellen bildungstheoretischen Debatten über den normativen Gehalt des Bildungsbegriffs Möglichkeiten des Umgangs mit einigen der zentralen methodologischen Herausforderungen einer sozialwissenschaftlich informierten und anwendungsorientierten Ethik zu skizzieren. Dabei wird nicht beansprucht, die entsprechenden Fragen abschließend zu klären, sondern es werden am Beispiel von Problemvorgaben einer Ethik der (...) Bildung Wege und Perspektiven der Argumentation und Analyse sondiert, die bis dato insbesondere in der deutschsprachigen Erziehungs- und Bildungsphilosophie eher unterrepräsentiert sind. Zu diesem Zweck werde ich zunächst grundsätzliche Fragen zur Ein- und Abgrenzung der Zuständigkeit, des Anwendungsbereichs und der Aufgaben Pädagogischer Ethik diskutieren, um sodann in kritischer Absicht aktuelle Probleme mit ethischen Positionierungen im Rahmen erziehungsund bildungswissenschaftlicher Forschung darzulegen. Darauf aufbauend werde ich am Beispiel der Kontroverse über die normativen Grundlagen von Kollers transformatorischer Bildungstheorie methodologische Probleme einer Ethik der Bildung analysieren, die sich auf das Verhältnis von theoretischer Konzeptualisierung und der empirischen Rekonstruktion von Einzelfällen und ihrer ethischen Bewertung beziehen. Abschließend werde ich aus einer allgemeineren Perspektive Möglichkeiten, Probleme und Herausforderungen einer empirisch informierten Pädagogischen Ethik vorstellen. (shrink)