Kant develops his political philosophy in the context of a teleological conception of both nature and human history. For Kant, political thought must be undertaken in the context of a progressive historical view of humanity’s place in nature. For this reason Kant would strongly agree with John Rawls’s claim that one of the key roles that political philosophy plays in a society’s political culture is that of ‘probing the limits of practicable political possibility. In this role, we view political philosophy (...) as realistically utopian’ (Rawls 2007, pp. 10-11). The fact that political philosophy has this public role helps to explain the close links that exist between politics and teleology in Kant’s work. Teleology is the study of ends and of the purposiveness of both nature and history. One of the key roles of political philosophy is, for Kant, to probe what politics and human societies more generally can, will and should become in the context of the historically developing and purposive natural systems of which humans are part. Politics must be understood in its natural and historical context, but nature (especially human nature) and history must in turn be understood from a progressive political perspective. For Kant, the historical outcome of this purposive natural system, the end of history, is the full development of humanity’s predispositions for the use of reason within a moral and just society. This volume explores these issues. (shrink)

In Why Tolerate Religion?, Brian Leiter argues against the special legal status of religion, claiming that religion should not be the only ground for exemptions to the law and that this form of protection should be, in principle, available for the claims of secular conscience as well. However, in the last chapter of his book, he objects to a universal regime of exemptions for both religious and secular claims of conscience, highlighting the practical and moral flaws associated with it. We (...) believe that Leiter identifies a genuine and important contemporary legal and philosophical problem. We find much to admire in his reasoning. However, we raise questions about two claims that are crucial for his argument. The first claim is that it is not religion as such, but conscience that deserves toleration and respect. The second claim is that respect for religion and conscience demands ‘principled toleration’ but does not entail stronger policies of legal exemptions. Against the first claim, we argue that Leiter does not successfully distinguish religious belief from secular conscience and morality; and he does not explain why secular conscience deserves respect. Against the second claim, we argue that the most promising theories of legal exemptions are not classical theories of liberal toleration. (shrink)

Ethical issues in healthcare and biomedical research are often a matter of public debate. This entry will explore several prominent views on how such debate should be conducted within pluralistic democratic societies. It begins by considering John Rawls’s account of public reason. It then examines how this account applies to the controversial issues of abortion and physician-assisted suicide, where one can see why some have objected to this view, especially with regard to the way it requires citizens to bracket their (...) comprehensive moral, religious, and philosophical doctrines. Next, this entry will consider some alternative approaches that endorse more expansive forms of public reason that allow greater room for appeals to comprehensive doctrines. While one might expect that many of the controversial issues in bioethics will continue to be a matter of public debate going forward, it will be seen that a necessary step towards making progress in these debates is to get clear on how such debate should be conducted. (shrink)

The volume Applied Ethics. Perspectives from Romania is the first contribution that aims at showing to the Japanese reader a sample of contemporary philosophy in Romania. At the same time a volume of contemporary Japanese philosophy is translated into Romanian and will be published by the University of Bucharest Press. -/- Applied Ethics. Perspectives from Romania includes several original articles in applied ethics and theoretical moral philosophy. It is representative of the variety of research and the growing interest in applied (...) ethics in the last few years in Romania. The philosophy practised here is at the same time an international activity, but also a kind of research deeply involved in Romanian realities. The contributors to the volume are Romanian philosophers from the most important Universities in the country, including members of the Romanian Academy, but also junior researchers. -/- This volume was made possible thanks to the relationship established between the Applied Ethics Centres of the University of Bucharest, Romania, and Hokkaido University, Japan. (shrink)

Global climate change raises profound questions for social and political theorists. The human impacts of climate change are sufficiently broad, and generally adverse, to threaten the rights and freedoms of existing and future members of all countries. These impacts will also exacerbate inequalities between rich and poor countries despite the limited role of the latter in their origins. Responding to these impacts will require the implementation of environmental and social policies that are both environmentally effective and consistent with the equality (...) and liberty of populations to which they are applied. This article considers whether global emissions trading, namely, the creation of a global market for tradable allowances conferring the right to emit a certain amount of greenhouse gas over a specified time period, is normatively defensible from a liberal egalitarian perspective. After a brief review of the theory and practice of emissions trading, a number of normative objections to the international trade in emissions allowances are analysed. These objections appeal to one, or a combination, of two claims. First, emissions trading schemes are likely to produce undesirable outcomes, such as environmental neglect, in the further future. I call these ‘instrumental objections’. Second, emissions trading schemes violate non‐consequential norms of justice and fairness. I call these ‘intrinsic objections’. It is argued that, when combined, instrumental and intrinsic objections indicate that instituting a global network of emissions trading schemes, as envisioned by a number of parties to the Kyoto Protocol and Copenhagen Accord, would be illegitimate in absence of significant procedural and consequential safeguards. (shrink)

Three public opinion studies examined public attitudes toward prevalence reduction (PR; reducing the number of people engaging in an activity) and harm reduction (HR; reducing the harm associated with an activity) across a wide variety of domains. Studies 1 and 2 were telephone surveys of California adults’ views on PR and HR strategies for a wide range of risk domains (heroin, alcoholism, tobacco, skateboarding, teen sex, illegal immigration, air pollution, and fast food). “Moral outrage” items (immoral, disgusting, irresponsible, dangerous) predicted (...) preference for PR over HR, with disgust the most important predictor. In contrast, preferences were not predicted by whether the risk behavior was common, no one else’s business, or harmless. Study 3 explored whether there are domains where liberals might reject HR. A sample of liberal students preferred HR > PR for heroin, but PR > HR for ritual female circumcision; path analysis suggested that this reversal was explained by moral outrage rather than consequentialist judgments of harm to self and harm to others. (shrink)

In this article I analyze Rawls' and Habermas' accounts of the role of religion in political deliberations in the public sphere. After pointing at some difficulties involved in the unequal distribution of deliberative rights and duties among religious and secular citizens that follow from their proposals, I argue for a way to structure political deliberation in the public sphere that imposes the same deliberative obligations on all democratic citizens, whether religious or secular. These obligations derive from the ideal of mutual (...) accountability that is supposed to guide political deliberation in a deliberative democracy. The main advantage of this proposal is that it recognizes the right of all democratic citizens to adopt their own cognitive stance (whether religious or secular) in political deliberation in the public sphere without giving up on the democratic obligation to provide reasons acceptable to everyone to justify coercive policies with which all citizens must comply. (shrink)

The “Cartesian” model of the rational subject is central to the political philosophy of Hobbes and Locke and is “transcendentally” affirmed in Kant's account of ethics and legality. An influential body of Hegelian inspired critique has suggested, however, that the dialectical deficiencies of the dominant models of Liberalism in late modernity inhere in this “atomistic” or “self-supporting” characterisation of the individual. The “atomistic” perspective appears as an obstacle not only to the coherent articulation of the compatibility of liberty and equality, (...) but also to the attempt to express the mutuality of recognition between agents that might offer a genuinely communal conception of constitution and subject. Employing as a frame of reference Alan Brudner's analysis of these issues in his comprehensive Constitutional Goods it is argued that legal and political theory might usefully adopt an understanding of Hegel's notion of “recognition” in this regard without drastic phenomenological reconstruction of the Cartesian or Kantian subject. (shrink)

In this article I propose a new interpretation of David Hume’s position on social contract theory. First, and acknowledging Hume’s critical stance on contractualism, I reject the reasons usually adduced to explain his position: empiricist methodology and utilitarianism. Instead, I argue that to fully understand Hume’s position on contractualism, one must take into account both a psychological methodology and a normative outlook. Second, I highlight Hume’s constructive proposals on the origin and foundation of government and justice, as well as the (...) philosophical approach that he suggested when discussing politics, i.e., mediating between parties. As I argue in this article, these latter aspects of Hume’s political philosophy, often disregarded when examining his reasons against contractualism, are nevertheless essential to understand his views on social contract theory. (shrink)

This research project analyzes a strategy for teaching philosophy in secondary school inspired by Socratic dialogue, which aims at the creation and effective management of cognitive dissonance as a tool for promoting critical thinking, called Socratic Challenge (SC). The research originates from workshops held in the years 2016/2019 in a technical and vocational institute in the province of Varese, in which I participated as the creator and conductor, involving the voluntary participation of about 150 students. The research questions are: What (...) are the characteristics of the Socratic Challenge? Can it constitute a teaching methodology to be proposed? Under what conditions? Within what project framework? The empirical research is qualitative, naturalistic, and exploratory (Lumbelli, 1984), specifically a self-study (Hamilton & Pinnegar 2009), divided into two phases. In the first phase, data regarding motivation and perceptions of training impact were collected through in-depth interviews of students (16) and analyzed using the criteria of reflective thematic analysis (Braun & Clarke 2019). In the second phase, the workshops were repeated remotely in technical and vocational institutes in Milan and the province, involving 113 students who were surveyed with a qualitative questionnaire. The workshops were recorded and the discussion interactions were analyzed according to a qualitative inductive approach that refers to Constructivist Grounded Theory (Charmaz, 2006). Results show how this dialogical instructional strategy in philosophy teaching can be considered an effective alternative to the historical-philosophical approach predominant in the Italian tradition (Illetterati 2007). (shrink)

After the U.S. dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in Japan in 1945, both nations experienced a profound need for a new and encompassing story of what it meant to be Japanese, and to be American, in the permanent nuclear age. This article is a thought experiment to juxtapose the writings and personas of two people who helped their respective societies answer those needs and questions during the early Cold War: Takashi Nagai—medical radiologist, and survivor of the American atomic (...) bombing of Nagasaki, and Albert Wohlstetter—leading American civilian nuclear strategist for the RAND Corporation in the 1950s. Using a combination of mythopeic analysis, biography and illuminative juxtaposition, the study discovers surprising similarities and analogies between the two cases. They each enact and propose interesting variations of sacrificial causalities—claims that human nuclear sacrifices past or promised can bring peace by deterrence now or peace by abolition soon enough. This is an important study now, as both Japan’s nuclear pacifism and the American nuclear umbrella in Northeast Asia are coming under more severe questioning than perhaps ever before. (shrink)

This thesis focuses on what I call the question of exclusion. This question, I argue, is one that poses serious challenges to social contract approaches to justice and political legitimacy. In an intuitive way, the exclusion of some individuals seems to be a corollary of the social contractualist approach, which ascribes justice or legitimacy to a social arrangement insofar as it can be regarded as the product of the (actual – expressed or tacit – or hypothetical) consent of specified parties. (...) Consequently, this approach excludes those whose consent is not required in order to view an arrangement as legitimate or just. Given the enormous and continuing influence of John Rawls’s social contract theory, I take the Rawlsian view as my primary focus, concentrating on the way in which the question of exclusion raises challenges for Rawlsian contractualism. According to Rawls’s theory, those who participate in the hypothetical contract and to whom political power ought to be justifiable are reasonable and rational. They are reasonable in the sense that they understand and are willing to comply with the requirements of justice and they are rational in that they have the capacity to form, revise, and pursue a conception of the good. This gives rise to two categories of exclusion. In the first part of the thesis, I examine the exclusion of those who will develop the two moral powers sufficiently only if those who are represented in the social contract act (or refrain from acting) in certain ways. This category includes children, foetuses, and unreasonable citizens. Intuitively, justice issues in requirements in at least some of these cases, but it is hard to make sense of this on the Rawlsian approach. In the second part of the thesis, I address the question of exclusion regarding those who will never develop the two moral powers to the requisite degree, such as individuals with severe cognitive disabilities and non-human animals. Again, intuitively, justice issues in requirements here, but their justification is not clear on the contractualist approach. My conclusion is threefold. First, I argue that the problems the question of exclusion poses cannot be addressed by a single solution. Second, I safeguard Rawlsian contractualism by showing how each problem can be resolved. Third, I offer policy-prescriptions on a number of issues, such as education, abortion, and the criminal justice system. (shrink)

The need to re-examine established ways of thinking about secularism and its relationship to feminism has arisen in the context of the confluence of a number of developments including: the increasing dominance of the ‘clash of civilizations’ thesis; the expansion of postmodern critiques of Enlightenment rationality to encompass questions of religion; and sustained critiques of the ‘secularization thesis’. Conflicts between the claims of women's equality and the claims of religion are well-documented vis-à-vis all major religions and across all regions. The (...) ongoing moral panic about the presence of Islam in Europe, marked by a preoccupation with policing Muslim women's dress, reminds us of the centrality of women and gender power relations in the interrelation of religion, culture and the state. Added to postmodern and other critiques of the secular-religious binary, most sociological research now contradicts the equation of modernization with secularization. This article focuses on the challenges that these developments pose to politically oriented feminist thinking and practice. It argues that non-oppressive feminist responses require a new critical engagement with secularism as a normative principle in democratic, multicultural societies. To inform this process, the author maps and links discussions across different fields of feminist scholarship, in the sociology of religion and in political theory. She organizes the main philosophical traditions and fault lines that form the intellectual terrain at the intersection of feminism, religion and politics in two broad groups: feminist critiques of the Enlightenment critique of religion; and feminist scholarship at the critical edges of the Enlightenment tradition. The author argues that notwithstanding the fragmented nature of feminist debates in this area, common ground is emerging across different politically oriented approaches: all emphasize ‘democracy’ and the values that underpin it as the larger discursive frame in which the principle of secularism can be redefined with emancipatory intent in a neo-secular age. (shrink)

In this essay I address the difficult question of how citizens with conflicting religious and secular views can fulfill the democratic obligation of justifying the imposition of coercive policies to others with reasons that they can also accept. After discussing the difficulties of proposals that either exclude religious beliefs from public deliberation or include them without any restrictions, I argue instead for a policy of mutual accountability that imposes the same deliberative rights and obligations on all democratic citizens. The main (...) advantage of this proposal is that it recognizes the right of all democratic citizens to adopt their own cognitive stance in political deliberation in the public sphere without giving up on the democratic obligation to provide reasons acceptable to everyone to justify coercive policies with which all citizens must comply. (shrink)

In Why Tolerate Religion?, Brian Leiter argues against the special legal status of religion, claiming that religion should not be the only ground for exemptions to the law and that this form of protection should be, in principle, available for the claims of secular conscience as well. However, in the last chapter of his book, he objects to a universal regime of exemptions for both religious and secular claims of conscience, highlighting the practical and moral flaws associated with it. We (...) believe that Leiter identifies a genuine and important contemporary legal and philosophical problem. We find much to admire in his reasoning. However, we raise questions about two claims that are crucial for his argument. The first claim is that it is not religion as such, but conscience that deserves toleration and respect. The second claim is that respect for religion and conscience demands ‘principled toleration’ but does not entail stronger policies of legal exemptions. Against the first claim, we argue that Leiter does not successfully distinguish religious belief from secular conscience and morality; and he does not explain why secular conscience deserves respect. Against the second claim, we argue that the most promising theories of legal exemptions are not classical theories of liberal toleration. (shrink)

This paper is concerned with organic conceptions of socio-political life and is concerned with the rehabilitation of organicism as a positive social ontology. It demonstrates that: organicism does not necessarily imply the negation of individuality by a monolithic society, and; that G. W. F. Hegel’s references to the state as organic do not imply social holism. With Hegel’s organicism, as with Idealist organicism generally, what is found is a relational rather than a holistic social ontology. This relational ontology is one (...) that addresses the tension between individualism and holism by theorizing the reciprocal or recursive nature of social relations; thus neither society nor the individuals within it can be seen as either purely determined or purely determining, each contributes to the constitution of the other. In making this case the paper provides both: a conceptual articulation of relational organicism which shows that it is an instructive and coherent positive social ontology, and; a historical account of its emergence into Idealist thought in the work of Immanuel Kant and G. W. F. Hegel. Through developing this account of the organic relation this paper seeks to offer a conception of socio-political life that provides resources for thinking through both the tension between holism and atomism in social theory and the tension between liberal individualism and communitarian collectivism in political theory. (shrink)

This comment argues for the importance of global institutions to regulate nuclear power. Nuclear power presents challenges across national borders irrespective of whether plants are maintained safely. There are international agreements in place on the disposal of nuclear waste, an issue of great concern in terms of environmental and health effects for any nuclear power policy. However, there remains a pressing need for an international agreement to ensure the safe maintenance of nuclear facilities. Safe nuclear power beyond waste disposal should (...) receive more attention. Nuclear power policy is often a matter of pure state interest with national governments alone responsible for regulating the safe maintenance of nuclear facilities. It ought not be left to national governments alone to regulate the safe administration of nuclear power given the many threats to environmental safety and public health. This comment argues that global institutions may best address this problem. The comment concludes with recommendations on how nuclear power policy might be regulated. (shrink)

Immanuel Kant is rarely appreciated for his contributions to public philosophy. This is unsurprising, given his dry, technical style, criticism of the popular German philosophy movement, and prolonged silence on religious topics following censorship threats from Frederick William II. Yet Kant’s underappreciation vis-à-vis public philosophy is curious: Not only was he a vocal supporter of the early French Revolution, but he also said much on the public and political value of enlightenment. These ideas come across indirectly in his systematic writings (...) and explicitly in writings for the learned public. This paper focuses on the question as to whether Kant should be viewed as a public philosopher, drawing from recent contributions in Kant scholarship to argue for the affirmative, though in an admittedly qualified sense. (shrink)

In this paper, it is argued that even though the concept of community does not play a significant role in Marxist theory, Marxism needs a notion of community, and the paper sets out to theorize how to make sense of this concept in a Marxist theoretical setting. The paper claims that Althusser’s philosophy, especially his elaboration of the concept of practice, may assist us in this task, and it sets out to explore what can be gained by redefining community in (...) terms of practice. In Althusser’s theory, practice and ideology are very closely linked. While recognizing the importance of Althusser’s theory of ideology, the paper then subsequently explores an alternative configuration of the concepts community and ideology. Finally, it is claimed that this analysis may help us to better understand ideologies such as racism and nationalism. (shrink)

This paper considers the UN efforts to introduce a legally binding Treaty on corporate accountability for human rights impacts in the context of other proposed legislation at country level, on the one hand, and existing voluntary initiatives like the UN Guiding Principles (2011), on the other. What we are interested in is whether the proposed Treaty signals a transition from voluntary initiatives (based on moral commitments) to law (that is, a focus on compliance), and the extent to which it might (...) stimulate or hinder links between judicial and non-judicial initiatives. The scholars who have explicitly addressed these two divides are – Michael Sandel, on theory v. practice; and Amartya Sen, on law v. morality. We engage with their views, in sections II and III respectively, seeking to build an integrated approach to help us overcome these dualisms. We further consider John Ruggie’s “principled pragmatism”, a strategy that he uses to build the Protect, Respect and Remedy (henceforth, PRR) Framework; and we invoke arguments from casuistry as well as a practice-focused deontology (Thomas Donaldson’s) in favour of an ethics ‘beyond cognition’, which we consider better suited than either utilitarian or principle-based theories to guide the debate on human rights. This is because it allows us to take non-rational factors into account (such as emotions and personal affiliations), when judging the kind of common good we consider worth pursuing. In the last section of the paper, we investigate whether and how might the Treaty illustrate the two divides, trying to (a) distinguish between purely legal elements and those of a wider nature, to do with morality; and (b) understand what might help bridge the gap between theoretical commitments to the universality of human rights and various practical challenges. Our aim is not to evaluate the Treaty, from a legal viewpoint, or suggest improvements to it (lawyers are better placed to do that); rather, we seek to investigate the way in which the proposed Treaty – which is the first attempt to address the challenge of transnational business and human rights in international law – combines moral and legal aspects, and what this tells us about the world we live in. (shrink)

This article start from two opposing intuitions in the environmental duties debate. On the one hand, if our lifestyle causes environmental harm, then we have a duty to reduce that impact through lifestyle changes. On the other hand, many people share the intuition that environmental duties cannot demand to alter our lifestyle radically for environmental reasons. These two intuitions underlie the current dualism in the environmental duties debate: those arguing for lifestyle changes and those arguing that our duties are limited (...) to promoting just environmental institutions. The paper has two goals: first, to grasp the underlying reasons for the two intuitions, and, second, to provide a proposal that integrates both intuitions. The paper consists of two main parts. The first part examines the ‘our-duties-should-be-limited’ intuition. Two interpretations are discussed, one under the title ‘what I do make no difference’, dealing with causality and collective action, and one under the title ‘my duty cannot be to change my lifestyle completely’, which discusses demandingness, fairness and value conflict. The second part shows how the ‘lifestyle-matters’ intuition can still play an important role. This part consists of two sections, one on ‘how to make a difference’, which deals with the idea of a cooperative ethos, and the other with ‘why lifestyle matters’, discussing expressive rationality and integrity. These ideas allow giving an important place to lifestyle duties, while avoiding the possible counterproductive effect of a private duties account. (shrink)

Although emissions trading is embraced as a means to curb carbon emissions and to incentivize the use of renewable energy, it is also heavily contested on ethical grounds. We will assess the main fundamental objections and possible counterarguments. Although we sympathize with some of these arguments, we argue that they are unpersuasive when an emissions trading system is well designed: emissions should be accounted ‘upstream,’ on the production rather than the consumer level. Moreover, allowances should be auctioned, and regulatory measures (...) could instigate the right kind of behavior towards the environment. (shrink)

Authority figures permeate our daily lives, particularly, our political lives. What makes authority legitimate? The current debates about the legitimacy of authority are characterised by two opposing strategies. The first establish the legitimacy of authority on the basis of the content of the authority’s command. That is, if the content of the commands meet some independent normative standard then they are legitimate. However, there have been many recent criticisms of this strategy which focus on a particular shortcoming – namely, its (...) seeming inability to account for who can legitimately command whom. This is the basis of the second strategy, which attempts to characterize the normative relationship that underlies and makes possible authoritative commands. The central point of Part I is that these two strategies are, in fact, not opposed and both raise questions which a theory of legitimacy must answer. If this is the case, then we need to ask: how ought we to determine the legitimacy both of the content of commands as well as who can command whom? Part II will answer this question. Starting with the question of standing, I argue that we ought not to look for normative principles outside of the institutions in which authority is embedded. Rather, one ought to start by elaborating the ontology of institutions in which a sui generis form of normativity arises. A joint commitment account of social ontology provides the tools necessary to see how the direction obligations emerge concurrently with the formation of institutions. Similarly, the question of content can be answered by paying close attention to the social ontology of institutions. We need not look beyond the internal constitutive standards of the institution itself. The constitutive standards provide an internal criterion by which the legitimacy of commands can be established. (shrink)

This article gives an overview of the debate about the “restraint principle” that political liberals urge on those who are inclined to use distinctive moral and theological doctrines in public square debates about politics. It clarifies such central concepts as “public reason” while surveying the main arguments and highlighting three different proposals for possible convergence in this conflict.

This paper probes theories of justice underpinning the concept of equity to deconstruct the term and ascertain how best to equitably support refugee and asylum-seeking youth in U.S. schools. Building upon theories posited by John Rawls, Michael Sandel, and Amartya Sen, the paper aims to extend beyond ideal theory into a theoretical framework of equity with operationalizing potential. Recognizing refugee and asylum-seeking youth as part of the U.S. social contract and therefore bound to government support, the paper represents that equitable (...) education for these young people in our globalized world is essential from both a human rights and economic perspective. Such equitable education will only be achieved when universal minimum standards are offered to everyone and made inclusive, so that all are invited to fully participate as culturally respected learners and knowledge producers in academic spaces. (shrink)

ABSTRACTSome suggest that the duty of humanitarian intervention should be discharged by states that are historically responsible for the occurrence of violence. A fundamental problem with this suggestion is that historically responsible states might be ill-suited to intervene because they are unlikely to enjoy support from the local population. Cécile Fabre has suggested a way around that problem, arguing that responsible states ought to pay for humanitarian interventions even though they ought not to take part in the military operations. We (...) claim that Fabre’s idea is subject to two concerns. First, the duty to perform might not be appropriately transferrable from the historically responsible state to another state because it would allow the primary duty bearer to escape the worst costs of intervention. Second, an intervention might be as unlikely to generate local support when a historically responsible state pays for an intervention as when it performs it. These problems are enough to cast doubt on Fabr... (shrink)

Many believe that a citizen who engages in civil disobedience is not exempt from the sanctions that apply to standard law-breaking conduct. Since he is responsible for a deliberate breach of the law, he is also liable to punishment. Focusing on a conception of responsibility as answerability, I argue that a civil disobedient is responsible (i.e. answerable) to his fellows for the charges of wrongdoing, yet he is not liable to punishment merely for breaching the law. To support this claim, (...) I defend an account of political obligation framed in terms of respect for (rather than mere obedience to) the law, and argue that the mere illegality of civil disobedience does not suffice to establish wrongdoing. I then discuss and reject three objections to my argument. (shrink)

There is a kind of power no one should have over anyone else, even if they don’t do anything with this power, or even if they only use this power for good. The republican tradition of political philosophy calls this kind of power domination. Here, I develop a theory of domination, and use this theory to advance our understanding of political legitimacy and justification. My account of domination refines recent neo-republican attempts to identify dominating social power with the capacity to (...) interfere arbitrarily with the choices of others. I argue that this capacity is not sufficient for domination. Instead, domination requires that one agent possess “impositional” power over someone else: power enough to make their refusal to cooperate more costly than cooperation across a wide range of forms that cooperation might take. But not all impositional power is domination; impositional power is domination to the extent that those wielding it do so in “deliberative isolation”—in accord only with their own sense of what’s best. The nature of domination, what it takes to minimize it, and its connection to deficits in political values like freedom and equality, are the subject of Chapter 2. The remainder of the dissertation uses the results of that chapter to construct a non-voluntarist alternative to the standard liberal account of how to reconcile political power with freedom and equality. Chapters 3 and 4 show how consent—actual or hypothetical—is not necessary to legitimize political power. What is necessary is that such power enable us to fulfil our duties against dominating others, while remaining accountable to us so that the state does not itself become a source of domination. How duties against domination can legitimize states is the primary subject of Chapter 3. Chapter 4 turns to the question of what we owe our fellow citizens as we cooperate together in the task of holding the state accountable. The answer to this question amounts to a repurposing and reformulation of public reason liberalism. Adviser: Joseph Mendola. (shrink)

This article considers Critchley's Infinitely Demanding and his essay "The Catechism of the Citizen" in relation to the theory-practice debate and the work of Jean-Jacques Rousseau. It considers what these texts say about the relation between politics and religion on one hand and reason and sensuousness on the other. The focus is the way the latter text takes up a quasi-religious response to the motivational deficit in secular liberal democratic life thematized in Infinitely Demanding.

A central element of Richard Peters’ philosophy of education has been his analysis of ‘education as initiation’. Understanding initiation is internally related to concepts of community and what it may mean to be a member. The concept of initiation assumes a mutually interdependent, dynamic relationship between the individual and community that claims to be justified on cognitive, moral and practical grounds. Although Peters’ analysis is embedded in a different discourse, his insights are relevant to current discourse on the individual in (...) community. A fruitful conversation can be developed between Peters’ account of the learner’s ‘initiation’ into ‘bodies of knowledge and awareness’ and Alasdair MacIntyre’s concept of ‘practices’; and how both assume a notion of ‘tradition’ within partly overlapping accounts of ‘community’. Secondly, I will consider how ‘initiation’ touches the concept of ‘social justice as membership’ developed by current philosophers, Michael Sandel and Michael Walzer, and what import Peters’ analysis has for different degrees of active and passive membership and participation. Thirdly, I will consider Charles Taylor’s ‘social imaginary’ as a contextual framework for processes surrounding ‘education as initiation’. This article does not argue that Peters’ concept of initiation cannot be contested at some points but rather that it can inform, and be informed by, the conversation with those who contend that community is itself a good essential for human flourishing. (shrink)

This thesis takes a critical approach to dominant ways of understanding leadership. The context for the study is UK local government where leadership has been popularised as a key feature of the latest phase of public sector modernisation. By drawing on the linguistic turn inherent in poststructuralism, and in particular the work of Jacques Derrida, the thesis challenges the orthodox assumption that leadership is a neutral and stable pre-linguistic phenomenon. In contrast it suggests that any given 'truth' of leadership can (...) be seen as an attempt to control a linguistic system that is inherently undecidable. It is an attempt to 'write' the world in a particular way, which is then forgotten. The thesis begins by considering orthodox approaches to the role of language in theorising organising in general, and also reviews a range of alternative perspectives that have gone some way towards engaging more fully with its epistemological, ontological and normative-ethical deficits. It then justifies the distinctive contribution to these debates made by the radicalised view of language found in poststructuralism in general, and the work of Jacques Derrida in particular. A review of the leadership literature suggests that it is dominated by an assumption that language is representational. Leadership is also depicted unquestioningly as an individualistic and impartial phenomenon. It is thus argued that the field is ripe for a more detailed focus on the politics of the language of leadership. The implications of Derrida's work for reading and writing texts, and the possibility of a poststructuralist methodology, are discussed in some detail. In particular, I highlight the need to reflexively problematise the textuality of the truth of this thesis. This is addressed by means of a deconstruction of the assessment criteria for a PhD thesis, which is included in the Appendix. An analysis of the linguistic decisions I made in order to stage an exemplary chapter betrays the discipline exerted by the academy. The main empirical work is based on a variety of texts from the case study organisation, including interviews with putative leaders, and formal documentation, such as a statement of leadership competences. These are subject to close reading in the spirit of what has been termed 'deconstruction', focusing on how and with what consequences the popularised truth of leadership is organised through language. Each reading concentrates in turn on one aspect of the leadership truth being promoted in the case study organization, namely leadership that is 'visible', 'strong', 'understanding' and 'shared'. I suggest that 'leadership' is an unsuccessful attempt to stabilize the play of language around individualism, specific aspects of which serve to privilege the productive power of the person of the office holder as part of local government modernisation. The study concludes by suggesting that the very instability of the truth offers opportunities for rethinking both leadership and public sector reform, in ways that are more open to the other. (shrink)