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  1. Realism in the ethics of immigration.James S. Pearson - 2023 - Philosophy and Social Criticism 49 (8):950-974.
    The ethics of immigration is currently marked by a division between realists and idealists. The idealists generally focus on formulating morally ideal immigration policies. The realists, however, tend to dismiss these ideals as far-fetched and infeasible. In contrast to the idealists, the realists seek to resolve pressing practical issues relating to immigration, principally by advancing what they consider to be actionable policy recommendations. In this article, I take issue with this conception of realism. I begin by surveying the way in (...)
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  • Restraining the fox: Minimalism in the ethics of war and peace.Lonneke Peperkamp - 2022 - Journal of International Political Theory 18 (1):110-122.
    Peace plays a central role in the ethics of war and peace, but this proves to be an enormous challenge. In a recent article, Elisabeth Forster and Isaac Taylor grapple with this important topic. They argue that certain concepts in just war theory—aggression, legitimacy, and peace—are essentially contested and susceptible to manipulation. Because the rules are interpreted and applied by the very states that wage war, it is as if the fox is asked to guard the chicken coop—a recipe for (...)
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  • Hannah Arendt and International Relations.Shinkyu Lee - 2021 - In Nukhet Sandal (ed.), Oxford Research Encyclopedia of International Studies. Oxford University Press. pp. 1-30.
    International relations (IR) scholars have increasingly integrated Hannah Arendt into their works. Her fierce critique of the conventional ideas of politics driven by rulership, enforcement, and violence has a particular resonance for theorists seeking to critically revisit the basic assumptions of IR scholarship. Arendt’s thinking, however, contains complexity and nuance that need careful treatment when extended beyond domestic politics. In particular, Arendt’s vision of free politics—characterized by the dualistic emphasis on agonistic action and institutional stability—raises two crucial issues that need (...)
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  • Supported Decisions as the Patient’s Own?Leslie Pickering Francis - 2021 - American Journal of Bioethics 21 (11):24-26.
    Peterson, Karlawish and Largent offer a defense of supported decision making in health care for people with dynamic and diminishing capacity. They are to be warmly commended for bringing sup...
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  • From Moral Principles to Political Judgments: The Case for Pragmatic Idealism.Pierre-Étienne Vandamme - 2021 - Moral Philosophy and Politics 8 (2):261-283.
    Political judgments usually combine a normative principle or intuition with an appreciation of empirical facts regarding the achievability of different options and their potential consequences. The interesting question dividing partisans of political idealism and realism is whether these kinds of considerations should be integrated into the normative principles themselves or considered apart. At first sight, if a theorist is concerned with guiding political judgments, non-ideal or realist theorizing can seem more attractive. In this article, however, I argue that ideal theorizing (...)
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  • Ideální konsenzus, reálná diverzita a výzva veřejného ospravedlnění: k limitům idealizace v liberální politické teorii [Ideal Consensus, Real Diversity, and the Challenge of Public Justification: On the Limits of Idealisation in Liberal Political Theory].Matouš Mencl & Pavel Dufek - 2021 - Acta Politologica 2 (13):49–70.
    The paper deals with the methodological clash between idealism and anti-idealism in political philosophy, and highlights its importance for public reason (PR) and public justification (PJ) theorising. Upon reviewing the broader context which harks back to Rawls’s notion of a realistic utopia, we focus on two major recent contributions to the debate in the work of David Estlund (the prototypical utopian) and Gerald Gaus (the cautious anti-utopian). While Estlund presents a powerful case on behalf of ideal theorising, claiming that motivational (...)
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  • Fair machine learning under partial compliance.Jessica Dai, Sina Fazelpour & Zachary Lipton - 2021 - In Jessica Dai, Sina Fazelpour & Zachary Lipton (eds.), Proceedings of the 2021 AAAI/ACM Conference on AI, Ethics, and Society. pp. 55–65.
    Typically, fair machine learning research focuses on a single decision maker and assumes that the underlying population is stationary. However, many of the critical domains motivating this work are characterized by competitive marketplaces with many decision makers. Realistically, we might expect only a subset of them to adopt any non-compulsory fairness-conscious policy, a situation that political philosophers call partial compliance. This possibility raises important questions: how does partial compliance and the consequent strategic behavior of decision subjects affect the allocation outcomes? (...)
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  • Why immanent critique?Sanford Diehl - 2021 - European Journal of Philosophy 30 (2):676-692.
    European Journal of Philosophy, Volume 30, Issue 2, Page 676-692, June 2022.
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  • Individualism Under Constraining Social Norms: Conceptualizing the Lived Experiences of LGBT persons.Jesper Ahlin Marceta - 2021 - AVANT. Trends in Interdisciplinary Studies 1 (12):1-22.
    Value conflicts between individualism and collectivism are common. In philosophy, such conflicts have been conceptualized as conflicts between individuality and conformity, among other things. This article develops a more detailed conceptual framework by combining philosophical analysis with empirical observations. The focus is on value conflicts pertaining to LGBT (lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender) factors in a non-individualist society (Georgia). Conservative or traditional norms sometimes constrain LGBT individuals by influencing them to adapt to social expectations. The phenomenon is intuitively clear and (...)
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  • Feasibility beyond Non-ideal Theory: a Realist Proposal.Ilaria Cozzaglio & Greta Favara - 2021 - Ethical Theory and Moral Practice 25 (3):417-432.
    Some realists in political theory deny that the notion of feasibility has any place in realist theory, while others claim that feasibility constraints are essential elements of realist normative theorising. But none have so far clarified what exactly they are referring to when thinking of feasibility and political realism together. In this article, we develop a conception of the realist feasibility frontier based on an appraisal of how political realism should be distinguished from non-ideal theories. In this realist framework, political (...)
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  • (1 other version)Thinking About Justice: A Traditional Philosophical Framework.Simon Rippon, Miklos Zala, Tom Theuns, Sem de Maagt & Bert van den Brink - 2020 - In Trudie Knijn & Dorota Lepianka (eds.), Justice and Vulnerability in Europe: An Interdisciplinary Approach. Northampton: Edward Elgar Publishing Ltd. pp. 16-36.
    This chapter describes a philosophical approach to theorizing justice, mapping out some main strands of the tradition leading up to contemporary political philosophy. We first briefly discuss what distinguishes a philosophical approach to justice from other possible approaches to justice, by explaining the normative focus of philosophical theories of justice – that is, a focus on questions not about how things actually are, but about how things ought to be. Next, we explain what sorts of methods philosophers use to justify (...)
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  • Distinctively Political Normativity in Political Realism: Unattractive or Redundant.Eva Erman & Niklas Möller - 2021 - Ethical Theory and Moral Practice 25 (3):433-447.
    Political realists’ rejection of the so-called ‘ethics first’ approach of political moralists, has raised concerns about their own source of normativity. Some realists have responded to such concerns by theorizing a distinctively political normativity. According to this view, politics is seen as an autonomous, independent domain with its own evaluative standards. Therefore, it is in this source, rather than in some moral values ‘outside’ of this domain, that normative justification should be sought when theorizing justice, democracy, political legitimacy, and the (...)
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  • Political Realism as Methods not Metaethics.Jonathan Leader Maynard - 2022 - Ethical Theory and Moral Practice 25 (3):449-463.
    This paper makes the case for a revision of contemporary forms of political realism in political theory. I argue that contemporary realists have gone awry in increasingly centring their approach around a metaethical claim: that political theory should be rooted in a political form of normativity that is distinct from moral normativity. Several critics of realism have argued that this claim is unconvincing. But I suggest that it is also a counterintuitive starting point for realism, and one unnecessary to avoid (...)
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  • Deontic Logic and Ethics.Shyam Nair - forthcoming - In Gabbay, John Horty, Xavier Parent, Ron van der Meyden & Leon van der Torre (eds.), Handbook of Deontic Logic and Normative System, Volume 2. College Publications.
    Though there have been productive interactions between moral philosophers and deontic logicians, there has also been a tradition of neglecting the insights that the fields can offer one another. The most sustained interactions between moral philosophers and deontic logicians have notbeen systematic but instead have been scattered across a number of distinct and often unrelated topics. This chapter primarily focuses on three topics. First, we discuss the “actualism/possibilism” debate which, very roughly, concerns the relevance of what one will do at (...)
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  • Apocalypse Without God: Apocalyptic Thought, Ideal Politics, and the Limits of Utopian Hope.Ben Jones - 2021 - New York: Cambridge University Press.
    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 (...)
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  • Police Ethics after Ferguson.Ben Jones & Eduardo Mendieta - 2021 - In Ben Jones & Eduardo Mendieta (eds.), The Ethics of Policing: New Perspectives on Law Enforcement. New York: NYU Press. pp. 1-22.
    In 2014, questionable police killings of Eric Garner, Michael Brown, and Tamir Rice sparked mass protests and put policing at the center of national debate. Mass protests erupted again in 2020 after the brutal police killing of George Floyd. These and other incidents have put a spotlight on a host of issues that threaten the legitimacy of policing—excessive force, racial bias, over-policing of marginalized communities, historic injustices that remain unaddressed, and new technology that increases police powers. This introduction gives an (...)
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  • Justice as Non-maleficence.Vittorio Bufacchi - 2020 - Theoria: A Journal of Social and Political Theory 67 (162):1-27.
    The principle of non-maleficence, primum non nocere, has deep roots in the history of moral philosophy, being endorsed by John Stuart Mill, W. D. Ross, H. L. A. Hart, Karl Popper and Bernard Gert. And yet, this principle is virtually absent from current debates on social justice. This article suggests that non-maleficence is more than a moral principle; it is also a principle of social justice. Part I looks at the origins of non-maleficence as a principle of ethics, and medical (...)
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  • (1 other version)Ending Sex-Based Oppression: Transitional Pathways.Holly Lawford-Smith - 2020 - Philosophia 49 (3):1021-1041.
    From a radical feminist perspective, gender is a cage. Or to be more precise, it’s two cages. If genders are cages, then surely we want to let people out. Being less constrained in our choices is something we all have reason to want: theorists in recent years have emphasized the importance of the capability to do and be many different things. At the very least, we should want an end to sex-based oppression. But what does this entail, when it comes (...)
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  • Bright Lines in Juvenile Justice.Amy Berg - 2021 - Journal of Political Philosophy 29 (3):330-352.
    Journal of Political Philosophy, EarlyView.
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  • (1 other version)Alienation. Recuperating the Classical Discussion of Marx et al.Asger Sørensen - manuscript
    After years of neglect, alienation has again reached the agenda of critical thought. In my case, I recognize alienation as a challenge for education in contemporary societies. To obtain conceptual resources to overcome this challenge, I have revisited the comprehensive 20 th century discussion of alienation. Today, alienation is naturally discussed as an existential condition of human being, but still in the 1980s, there was a strong Marxist current that claimed alienation to be implied by capitalism, in particular by the (...)
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  • Dealing with Disagreement: Towards a Conception of Feasible Compromise.Friderike Spang - 2017 - Dissertation, University of Western Ontario
    The goal of this dissertation is to specify the feasibility conditions of compromise. More specifically, the goal of this dissertation is to specify the conditions of increasing the feasibility of compromise. The underlying assumption here is that feasibility is a scalar concept, meaning that a socio-political ideal can be feasible to different degrees (Lawford-Smith 2013). In order to specify the conditions of increasing the feasibility of compromise, it is necessary to first identify potential feasibility constraints. The main chapters of this (...)
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  • On the Uselessness of the Distinction between Ideal and Non-Ideal Theory (at least in the Philosophy of Language).Herman Cappelen & Joshua Dever - 2021 - In Rebecca Mason (ed.), Hermeneutical Injustice. Routledge.
    There’s an interesting debate in moral and political philosophy about the nature of, and relationship between, ideal and non-ideal theory. In this paper we discuss whether an analogous distinction can be drawn in philosophy of language. Our conclusion is negative: Even if you think that distinction can be put to work within moral and political philosophy, there’s no useful way to extend it to work that has been done in the philosophy of language.
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  • Reconceptualizing Women for Intersectional Feminism.Youjin Kong - 2019 - Dissertation, Michigan State University
    This dissertation addresses the question of how to reconceptualize “women” in order to do a more intersectional feminism. Intersectionality—the idea that gender, race, class, sexuality, and so on operate not as separate entities but as mutually constructing phenomena—has become a gold standard in contemporary feminist scholarship. In particular, intersectionality has achieved success in showing that the old conception of women as a single, uniform concept marginalizes women and others who exist at the intersecting axes of multiple oppressions (e.g., women of (...)
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  • The Case for Ideal Theory.Laura Valentini - 2018 - In C. Brown and R. Eckersley (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of International Political Theory. pp. 664-676.
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  • On the Messy “Utopophobia vs Factophobia” Controversy.Laura Valentini - 2017 - In Kevin Vallier & Michael Weber (eds.), Political Utopias: Contemporary Debates. New York, NY: Oup Usa. pp. 11-31.
    In recent years, political philosophers have been fiercely arguing over the virtues and vices of utopian vs realistic theorizing. Partly due to the lack of a common and consistently used vocabulary, these debates have become rather confusing. In this chapter, I attempt to bring some clarity to them and, in doing so, I offer a conciliatory perspective on the “utopian vs realistic theorizing” controversy. I argue that, once the notion of a normative or evaluative theory is clearly defined and distinguished (...)
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  • Refugees and the limits of political philosophy.Sarah Fine - 2020 - Ethics and Global Politics 13 (1):6-20.
    One thing that has to be considered in this process is the place of philosophy itself (Williams 2011 [1985], 4). Politicians often argue that they have no right to keep their hands clean, and that...
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  • Algorithmic Fairness from a Non-ideal Perspective.Sina Fazelpour & Zachary C. Lipton - 2020 - Proceedings of the AAAI/ACM Conference on AI, Ethics, and Society.
    Inspired by recent breakthroughs in predictive modeling, practitioners in both industry and government have turned to machine learning with hopes of operationalizing predictions to drive automated decisions. Unfortunately, many social desiderata concerning consequential decisions, such as justice or fairness, have no natural formulation within a purely predictive framework. In efforts to mitigate these problems, researchers have proposed a variety of metrics for quantifying deviations from various statistical parities that we might expect to observe in a fair world and offered a (...)
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  • Anti-Immigration Backlashes as Constraints.Lorenzo Del Savio - 2020 - Ethical Theory and Moral Practice 23 (1):201-222.
    Migration often causes what I refer to in this paper as ‘anti-immigration backlashes’ in receiving countries. Such reactions have substantial costs in terms of the undermining of national solidarity and the diffusion of political distrust. In short, anti-immigration backlashes can threaten the social and political stability of receiving countries. Do such risks constitute a reason against permissive immigration policies which are otherwise desirable? I argue that a positive answer may depend on a skeptical view based on the alleged constraints that (...)
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  • Incomplete Ideal Theory.Amy Berg - 2019 - Social Theory and Practice 45 (4):501-524.
    What is the best way to make sustained societal progress over time? Non-ideal theory done on its own faces the problem of second best, but ideal theory seems unable to cope with disagreement about how to make progress. If ideal theory gives up its claims to completeness, then we can use the method of incompletely theorized agreements to make progress over time.
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  • (1 other version)Respect the Author: a Research Ethical Principle for Readers.Jesper Ahlin Marceta - 2019 - Journal of Academic Ethics 19 (2):175-185.
    Much of contemporary research ethics was developed in the latter half of the twentieth century as a response to the unethical treatment of human beings in biomedical research. Research ethical considerations have subsequently been extended to cover topics in the sciences and technology such as data handling, precautionary measures, engineering codes of conduct, and more. However, moral issues in the humanities have gained less attention from research ethicists. This article proposes an ethical principle for reading for research purposes: Respect the (...)
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  • Being realistic and demanding the impossible.Enzo Rossi - 2019 - Constellations 26 (4):638-652.
    Political realism is characterised by fidelity to the facts of politics and a refusal to derive political judgments from pre- political moral commitments. Even when they are not taken to make normative theorising impossible or futile, those characteristics are often thought to engender a conservative slant, or at least a tendency to prefer incremental reformism to radicalism. I resist those claims by distinguishing between three variants of realism—ordorealism, contextual realism, and radical realism—and contrasting them with both non-ideal theory and utopianism. (...)
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  • Reasoning about Development: Essays on Amartya Sen's Capability Approach.Thomas R. Wells - 2013 - Dissertation, Erasmus University Rotterdam
    Over the last 30 years the Indian philosopher-economist Amartya Sen has developed an original normative approach to the evaluation of individual and social well-being. The foundational concern of this ‘capability approach’ is the real freedom of individuals to achieve the kind of lives they have reason to value. This freedom is analysed in terms of an individual’s ‘capability’ to achieve combinations of such intrinsically valuable ‘beings and doings’ (‘functionings’) as being sufficiently nourished and freely expressing one’s political views. In this (...)
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  • Aiming for Moral Mediocrity.Eric Schwitzgebel - 2019 - Res Philosophica 96 (3):347-368.
    Most people aim to be about as morally good as their peers—not especially better, not especially worse. We do not aim to be good, or non-bad, or to act permissibly rather than impermissibly, by fixed moral standards. Rather, we notice the typical behavior of our peers, then calibrate toward so-so. This is a somewhat bad way to be, but it’s not a terribly bad way to be. We are somewhat morally criticizable for having low moral ambitions. Typical arguments defending the (...)
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  • Experimental philosophy and the fruitfulness of normative concepts.Matthew Lindauer - 2020 - Philosophical Studies 177 (8):2129-2152.
    This paper provides a new argument for the relevance of empirical research to moral and political philosophy and a novel defense of the positive program in experimental philosophy. The argument centers on the idea that normative concepts used in moral and political philosophy can be evaluated in terms of their fruitfulness in solving practical problems. Empirical research conducted with an eye to the practical problems that are relevant to particular concepts can provide evidence of their fruitfulness along a number of (...)
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  • Social freedom as ideology.Karen Ng - 2018 - Philosophy and Social Criticism 45 (7):795-818.
    This article explores objections made against ideal theorizing in political philosophy by two prominent contemporary critical theorists: Axel Honneth and Charles Mills. In Freedom’s Right, Honneth...
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  • Beyond Moral Fundamentalism: Dewey’s Pragmatic Pluralism in Ethics and Politics [preprint].Steven Fesmire - 2017 - In The Oxford Handbook of Dewey [Intro available free from OUP]. Oxford, UK and New York: Oxford University Press. pp. 209-234.
    Drawing on unpublished and published sources from 1926-1932, this chapter builds on John Dewey’s naturalistic pragmatic pluralism in ethical theory. A primary focus is “Three Independent Factors in Morals,” which analyzes good, duty, and virtue as distinct categories that in many cases express different experiential origins. The chapter suggests that a vital role for contemporary theorizing is to lay bare and analyze the sorts of conflicts that constantly underlie moral and political action. Instead of reinforcing moral fundamentalism via an outdated (...)
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  • A Non-Ideal Authenticity-Based Conceptualization of Personal Autonomy.Jesper Ahlin Marceta - 2019 - Medicine, Health Care and Philosophy 22 (3):387-395.
    Respect for autonomy is a central moral principle in bioethics. The concept of autonomy can be construed in various ways. Under the non-ideal conceptualization proposed by Beauchamp and Childress, everyday choices of generally competent persons are autonomous to the extent that they are intentional and are made with understanding and without controlling influences. It is sometimes suggested that authenticity is important to personal autonomy, so that inauthenticity prevents otherwise autonomous persons from making autonomous decisions. Building from Beauchamp and Childress’s theory, (...)
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  • The General Theory of Second Best Is More General Than You Think.David Wiens - 2020 - Philosophers' Imprint 20 (5):1-26.
    Lipsey and Lancaster's "general theory of second best" is widely thought to have significant implications for applied theorizing about the institutions and policies that most effectively implement abstract normative principles. It is also widely thought to have little significance for theorizing about which abstract normative principles we ought to implement. Contrary to this conventional wisdom, I show how the second-best theorem can be extended to myriad domains beyond applied normative theorizing, and in particular to more abstract theorizing about the normative (...)
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  • The externalist challenge to conceptual engineering.Steffen Koch - 2021 - Synthese 198 (1):327–348.
    Unlike conceptual analysis, conceptual engineering does not aim to identify the content that our current concepts do have, but the content which these concepts should have. For this method to show the results that its practitioners typically aim for, being able to change meanings seems to be a crucial presupposition. However, certain branches of semantic externalism raise doubts about whether this presupposition can be met. To the extent that meanings are determined by external factors such as causal histories or microphysical (...)
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  • Nonideal Justice as Nonideal Fairness.Marcus Arvan - 2019 - Journal of the American Philosophical Association 5 (2):208-228.
    This article argues that diverse theorists have reasons to theorize about fairness in nonideal conditions, including theorists who reject fairness in ideal theory. It then develops a new all-purpose model of ‘nonideal fairness.’ §1 argues that fairness is central to nonideal theory across diverse ideological and methodological frameworks. §2 then argues that ‘nonideal fairness’ is best modeled by a nonideal original position adaptable to different nonideal conditions and background normative frameworks (including anti-Rawlsian ones). §3 then argues that the parties to (...)
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  • For an Impure, Antiauthoritarian Ethics.Michael D. Doan - 2018 - Apa Newsletter on Feminism and Philosophy 18 (1):8-12.
    My commentary deals with the fourth chapter of Against Purity, entitled “Consuming Suffering,” where Shotwell invites us to imagine what an alternative to ethical individualism might look like in practice. I am particularly interested in the analogy she develops to help pull us into the frame of what she calls a “distributed” or “social” approach to ethics. I will argue that grappling with this analogy can help illuminate three challenges confronting those of us seeking a genuine alternative to ethical individualism: (...)
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  • A World of Possibilities: The Place of Feasibility in Political Theory.Eva Erman & Niklas Möller - 2020 - Res Publica 26:1-23.
    Although the discussion about feasibility in political theory is still in its infancy, some important progress has been made in the last years to advance our understanding. In this paper, we intend to make a contribution to this growing literature by investigating the proper place of feasibility considerations in political theory. A motivating force behind this study is a suspicion that many presumptions made about feasibility in several current debates—such as that between practice-independence and practice-dependence, ideal and non-ideal theory, and (...)
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  • Democratic Enfranchisement Beyond Citizenship: The All-Affected Principle in Theory and Practice.Annette Zimmermann - 2018 - Dissertation, Oxford University
    This is a collection of four papers about the All-Affected Principle (AAP): the view that every person whose morally weighty interests are affected by a democratic decision has the right to participate in that decision. -/- The first paper (“Narrow Possibilism about Democratic Enfranchisement”) examines how we should distribute democratic participation rights: a plausible version of AAP must avoid treating unlike cases alike, which would be procedurally unfair. The solution is to distribute participation rights proportionately to the risk that a (...)
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  • Proxy Battles in Just War Theory: Jus in Bello, the Site of Justice, and Feasibility Constraints.Seth Lazar & Laura Valentini - 2017 - In David Sobel, Peter Vallentyne & Steven Wall (eds.), Oxford Studies in Political Philosophy, Volume 3. Oxford University Press. pp. 166-193.
    Interest in just war theory has boomed in recent years, as a revisionist school of thought has challenged the orthodoxy of international law, most famously defended by Michael Walzer [1977]. These revisionist critics have targeted the two central principles governing the conduct of war (jus in bello): combatant equality and noncombatant immunity. The first states that combatants face the same permissions and constraints whether their cause is just or unjust. The second protects noncombatants from intentional attack. In response to these (...)
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  • Norms, Evaluations and Ideal and Nonideal Theory.Robert Jubb - 2016 - Social Philosophy and Policy 33 (1-2):393-412.
    -/- This essay discusses the relation between ideal theory and two forms of political moralism identified by Bernard Williams, structural and enactment views. It argues that ideal theory, at least in the sense Rawls used that term, only makes sense for structural forms of moralism. These theories see their task as describing the constraints that properly apply to political agents and institutions. As a result, they are primarily concerned with norms that govern action. In contrast, many critiques of ideal theory (...)
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  • The feasibility issue.Nicholas Southwood - 2018 - Philosophy Compass 13 (8):e12509.
    It is commonly taken for granted that questions of feasibility are highly relevant to our normative thinking – and perhaps especially our normative thinking about politics. But what exactly does this preoccupation with feasibility amount to, and in what forms if any is it warranted? This article aims to provide a critical introduction to, and clearer characterization of, the feasibility issue. I begin by discussing the question of how feasibility is to be understood. I then turn to the question of (...)
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  • Contractualism for Us As We Are.Nicholas Southwood - 2018 - Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 99 (3):529-547.
    A difficult problem for contractualists is how to provide an interpretation of the contractual situation that is both subject to appropriately stringent constraints and yet also appropriately sensitive to certain features of us as we actually are. My suggestion is that we should embrace a model of contractualism that is structurally analogous to the “advice model” of the ideal observer theory famously proposed by Michael Smith (1994; 1995). An advice model of contractualism is appealing since it promises to deliver a (...)
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  • What’s a Political Theorist to Do?Susan Orr & James Johnson - 2018 - Theoria: A Journal of Social and Political Theory 65 (154):1-23.
    John Rawls famously distinguishes between ideal and nonideal theory, according priority to the former. He depicts his own efforts to articulate the conception of justice as fairness as an instance of ideal theory. Subsequent political theorists have taken Rawls’s distinction as a template for how we should understand the tasks of political theory. Yet they also have struggled to clarify the underlying distinction with notable lack of success. We argue that Rawls himself does not abide by the distinction between ideal (...)
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  • Why Public Reasoning Involves Ideal Theorizing.Blain Neufeld - 2017 - In Political Utopias: Contemporary Debates. pp. 73-93.
    Some theorists—including Elizabeth Anderson, Gerald Gaus, and Amartya Sen—endorse versions of 'public reason' as the appropriate way to justify political decisions while rejecting 'ideal theory'. This chapter proposes that these ideas are not easily separated. The idea of public reason expresses a form of mutual 'civic' respect for citizens. Public reason justifications for political proposals are addressed to citizens who would find acceptable those justifications, and consequently would comply freely with those proposals should they become law. Hence public reasoning involves (...)
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  • Shared intentions, public reason, and political autonomy.Blain Neufeld - 2019 - Canadian Journal of Philosophy 49 (6):776-804.
    John Rawls claims that public reasoning is the reasoning of ‘equal citizens who as a corporate body impose rules on one another backed by sanctions of state power’. Drawing on an amended version of Michael Bratman’s theory of shared intentions, I flesh out this claim by developing the ‘civic people’ account of public reason. Citizens realize ‘full’ political autonomy as members of a civic people. Full political autonomy, though, cannot be realised by citizens in societies governed by a ‘constrained proceduralist’ (...)
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