The term, "objectionable commemorations”, refers to a broad category of public artefacts – such as, and especially, memorials, monuments and statues – that are regarded as morally problematic in virtue of what or whom they honour. In this regard, they are a special class of public artefacts that are subject to public contestation. In this paper, we survey the general ethical and political issues on this topic. First, we categorise the arguments on offer in the literature, concerning the objectionable nature (...) of such commemorations. Second, we review common political responses to objectionable commemorations. Finally, we identify fruitful areas for further philosophical inquiry on this topic. (shrink)

Political theory is contextualist when factual claims about context are part of the justification of normative political judgments. There are different kinds of contextualism depending on whether context is relevant for the formulation and justification of political principles, whether principles themselves are contextually specific, or whether context is only relevant for the application of principles. An important challenge to contextualism is the problem of critical distance: how can theories ensure a critical perspective if facts about the context to be evaluated (...) are also part of the justification for the normative judgments? Tariq Modood and Simon Thompson have defended what they call iterative contextualism, which combines elements of all three kinds of contextualism in an attempt to avoid the problem of critical distance. The present paper discusses Modood and Thompson’s iterative contextualism and whether it manages to avoid the problem of critical distance. (shrink)

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 (...) the ‘applied morality’ approach to political theory that realists oppose. Instead, realism should be methodologically orientated around what I term ‘empirically constitutive political realities’ - enduring features of real political contexts that are systematically consequential in their normative implications. Realists can persuasively argue that such empirically constitutive political realities must be attended to in political theory-building, and not merely treated as a context in which independently formulated moral theories are simply applied. This framing of realism accords real politics a genuinely foundational theoretical role, but without requiring any contentious metaethical stance about a non-moral political normativity. I explain some methodological implications that follow for realism – in particular the need to prioritise empirically grounded theorisation of real political contexts over abstract and rather essentialist claims about ‘the political’. I also argue that such a framing of realism helps engender a more accurate, less divisive, and more pluralist conception of methodological debates within political theory. (shrink)

In A Theory of Justice John Rawls proposes that the two principles of justice should be realized through a four-stage sequence of institutional action that starts with a constitution agreed upon by delegates to a constitutional convention. A largely overlooked aspect of this proposal is that delegates are taken to hold conflicting opinions about justice. Their disagreement is one of the factors that determine their institutional choices. This paper employs Bernard Williams’s theory of the political value of liberty to explain (...) and vindicate the role assigned to disagreement at the constitutional convention. Constitutional norms ought to be sensitive to the fact that the functioning of a political order, even one suitably ordered by the most reasonable conception of justice, inevitably involves loss of a precious liberty; the factoring of disagreement into the constitutional convention can fruitfully be understood as a way of modelling this requirement. This exegetical exercise enriches our understanding of the point of constitutions. At the same time it suggests that Rawls may not be as guilty of the cardinal sin of moralism that Williams famously accused him of. (shrink)

This article investigates the Neo-Confucian project of “reverse moral economy,” which aims to restore the ideal congruence between political power and moral virtue, by examining a political debate on the selection of the new Crown Prince and the incumbent ruler’s subsequent abdication that took place in Korea during the formative period of the Chosŏn 朝鮮 dynasty in light of the so-called “the Mencian trouble,” a compromise between Mencius’ ideal vision of Confucian virtue politics and his realistic concern with political stability. (...) After discussing how Korean Neo-Confucians were able to justify their choice of a more virtuous candidate in violation of the Lineage Law, which upheld father-son transmission as the constant norm, by judiciously balancing between the candidate’s virtue and the incumbent ruler’s recommendation, it articulates the Korean Neo-Confucian project of reverse moral economy from the standpoint of the constitutionality of the new dynasty. (shrink)

Tongdong Bai’s ambitious book, Against Political Equality: The Confucian Case, aims to not only draw on classic Confucianism to shed light on contemporary issues but also make Confucianism universally applicable to the human conditions widely shared around the globe. Bai’s Confucian political theory carries distinctive merits in both its innovative approach and comprehensive scope, but there are still ambiguities of which he owes us more explanation. In this review article, I offer a brief summary of Bai’s book and critically engage (...) with three aspects of his account: the acceptability of the Confucian hybrid regime, its relationship with Confucian compassion, and hierarchical international order. First, Bai’s pursuit of service to the people as an end result makes it difficult to apply to societies that champion political equality and participation. Second, neither the supremacy of the Confucian value of compassion nor the hybrid regime’s ability to carry it through is self-evidently clear. Third, the Confucian idea of unity among all-under-heaven undermines Bai’s advocacy of patriotic allegiance to a particular state and hierarchical inter-state order where the multiplicity of states, albeit unequal, is preserved. (shrink)

The established view in Confucian scholarship today is that Confucian political order serves to promote the material and moral well-being of ordinary people. Loubna El Amine turns this view on its head by arguing that Confucian political order revolves not around the interest of the people but the demands of security, stability, and prosperity. Min are expected to be virtuous only to the extent that they help to sustain such an order. As such, Confucian politics does not follow from ethics (...) in any straightforward manner. In this article, I argue against her revisionist reading. I argue that her account not only lacks arguments for her core thesis of the ethics/politics division, but also goes against Confucians’ concern over the universality of humanity, popular welfare, and the integrity of Confucian thought. I also draw on discussion on political realism to flesh out the sense in which classic Confucianism is realist. (shrink)

ZusammenfassungDie bestehende Praxis der Allokation postmortaler Organspenden ist in mehrfacher Hinsicht ethisch bedenklich. Vor dem Hintergrund einer Kritik dieser Praxis fragt der Artikel, wie eine moralisch akzeptablere Verteilungspraxis aussehen könnte. Dabei wird herausgestellt, dass es sich bei der Verteilungsproblematik um ein Gerechtigkeitsproblem handelt, das keine allgemein konsensfähige Lösung zuzulassen scheint. Dies wird anhand der Gerechtigkeitstheorie von Rawls erläutert, deren Mängel zum Projekt einer realistischen Theorie der Politik führen. Der politische Realismus macht deutlich, dass es einer Demokratisierung der Allokationspraxis bedarf. Der (...) Artikel endet mit dem Plädoyer, Spenderorgane nach dem Zufallsprinzip zu allozieren. (shrink)

This paper explores two different versions of ‘the realist turn’ in recent political theory. It begins by setting out two principal realist criticisms of liberal moralism: that it is both descriptively and normatively inadequate. It then pursues the second criticism by arguing that there are two fundamentally different responses among realists to the alleged normative inadequacy of ideal theory. First, prescriptive realists argue that the aim of realism is to make political theory more normatively adequate by making it more realistic. (...) Interpretative realists, on the other hand, argue that realist theorising should detach itself from such an aspiration, and instead aim at theoretical understanding rather than normative prescription. After some further elaboration of what interpretative realism might look like, it is acknowledged that both approaches still need to address the question of political normativity. (shrink)

Realism criticizes the idea, central to what may be called ‘the priority view’, that philosophy has the task of imposing from the outside general norms of morality or standards of reasonableness on politics understood as the domain of power. According to realism, political philosophy must reveal the specific standards internal to the political practice of handling power appropriately and as it develops in actual circumstances. Framed in those terms, the debate evokes the idea that political power itself is lacking normativity (...) until such time as norms are devised that govern its use. In contrast, this essay identifies a normative dimension internal to power. Power depends on recognition and support in the form of belief. This dependence explains how an interest in power introduces a responsiveness to normative considerations into the domain of politics. (shrink)

Although often cast by realists as an exemplar of moralist or rationalist thinking, Jürgen Habermas and certain commentators on his work reject this characterisation, highlighting elements of his thought that conflict with it. This article will examine dimensions of Habermas’s work that relate to many realist concerns in political theory. I argue that while he escapes the commonplace caricature of an abstract thinker who is inattentive to real world affairs, Habermas’s claims in relation to communication, historical and empirical context, and (...) the development of rights in history, reveal a narrow consideration of what defines context and a progressivist narrative of history that fails to address seemingly outdated beliefs and political forces. An analysis of these issues can serve to inform understandings of these topics in realist thought and in political theory more broadly. (shrink)

The paper defends the theoretical strength and consistency of Rawls's constructivism, showing its ability to articulate and convincingly weave together several key ethical ideas; yet it questions the political relevance of this admirable normative architecture. After having illustrated Rawls's conception of moral agency and practical reason, the paper tackles two criticisms raised by Scheffler. First the allegation of naturalism based on Rawls's disdain of common sense ideas on desert is rebutted. It is then shown that, contrary to Scheffler's contention, Rawls (...) takes proper account of our moral sentiments in the process of constructing his normative theory. Finally, the second criticism is assessed, namely the inability of Rawls's theory to increase consent around liberal policies. Despite disagreement with details of Scheffler's argument, it is suggested that the failure of recent normative liberal theories to have a political impact belies their inability to take into proper consideration the reality of politics. A more realistic appraisal of political life and of historical events and developments are called for if political philosophy wants to be something more than an academic exercise. (shrink)

The present article aims at investigating the political aspects of Wittgenstein’s later philosophy, focusing mainly on the Philosophical Investigations. This theme remains rather marginal within Wittgensteinian scholarship, facing the key challenge of the sparsity of explicit discussions of political issues in Wittgenstein’s writings. Based on the broader anthropological and synecdochic character of Wittgenstein’s later philosophy, the main objective of the article is to make explicit the implicit political import of some of the main themes of the Philosophical Investigations. This is (...) done by correlating them with certain political concepts and issues, such as reification, mystification, emancipation, self-institution and the common. In such a way, a new light is shed on Wittgenstein’s influence on and his relevance to contemporary political theory, while at the same time the first steps are taken for the enrichment of the discussion regarding personal and social autonomy and the critique of late capit... (shrink)

Bernard Williams is a sceptic about the objectivity of moral value, embracing instead a qualified moral relativism—the ‘relativism of distance’. His attitude to blame too is in part sceptical. I will argue that the relativism of distance is unconvincing, even incoherent; but also that it is detachable from the rest of Williams's moral philosophy. I will then go on to propose an entirely localized thesis I call the relativism of blame, which says that when an agent's moral shortcomings by our (...) lights are a matter of their living according to the moral thinking of their day, judgements of blame are out of order. Finally, I will propose a form of moral judgement we may sometimes quite properly direct towards historically distant agents when blame is inappropriate—moral-epistemic disappointment. Together these two proposals may help release us from the grip of the idea that moral appraisal always involves the potential applicability of blame, and so from a key source of the relativist idea that moral appraisal is inappropriate over distance. (shrink)

If we grant that there can be no ethical validation that is external to our own ethical outlook, does this mean that we can only engage in internal piecemeal reflection, or could we still reflect on the whole of our outlook? In this paper I argue that the latter is possible, and that it is necessary if we face an ethical outlook that is wrong as a whole.

The later Rawls attempts to offer a non-comprehensive, but nonetheless moral justification in political philosophy. Many critics of political liberalism doubt that this is successful, but Rawlsians often complain that such criticisms rely on the unwarranted assumption that one cannot offer a moral justification other than by taking a philosophically comprehensive route. In this article, I internally criticize the justification strategy employed by the later Rawls. I show that he cannot offer us good grounds for the rational hope that citizens (...) will assign political values priority over non-political values in cases of conflict about political matters. I also suggest an alternative approach to justification in political philosophy (that is, a weak realist, Williams-inspired account) that better respects the later Rawls’s concern with non-comprehensiveness and pluralism than either his own view or more comprehensive approaches. Thus, if we take reasonable pluralism seriously, then we should adopt what Shklar aptly called ‘liberalism of fear’. (shrink)

One problem faced by teachers of citizenship is that 'politics' is negatively valued. The concept is actually ambiguous in value. The paper sets out a neutral, a negative, and a positive meaning of the term. It then goes on to explore the way that even on the positive construction there can seem to be ethical problems with politics. This explains both aspects of numerous projects to 'depoliticise' society and government, and to depoliticise citizenship education. But, the alternatives mean that we (...) lose important political values. (shrink)

This essay presents a new way of conceptualizing the problem of political obligation. On the traditional ‘normativist’ framing of the issue, the primary task for theory is to secure the content and justification of political obligations, providing practically applicable moral knowledge. This paper develops an alternative, ‘pragmatist’ framing of the issue, by rehabilitating a frequently misunderstood essay by Hanna Pitkin and by recasting her argument in terms of the ‘pragmatic turn’ in recent philosophy, as articulated by Robert Brandom. From this (...) perspective, the content and justification of political obligations cannot be determined in a way that is in principle separable from their application. This casts ‘political obligation’ not as a problem to be philosophically resolved, but as a political predicament that calls for a kind of practical engagement. The merit of this perspective is to draw our attention toward the conditions under which the problem appears as a lived predicament. (shrink)

This special edition brings together (1) the recent methodological worries of the moralism/realism and ideal/non-ideal theory debates with (2) the soaring ambition of work in international or global political theory, as found in, say, theories of global justice. Contributors are as follows: Chris Bertram, Jonathan Floyd, Aaron James, Terry MacDonald, David Miller, Shmulik Nili, Mathias Risse and Matt Sleat.

Rawls’ primary legacy is not that he standardised a particular view of justice, but rather that he standardised a particular method of arguing about it: justification via reflective equilibrium. Yet this method, despite such standardisation, is often misunderstood in at least four ways. First, we miss its continuity across his various works. Second, we miss the way in which it unifies other justificatory ideas, such as the ‘original position’ and an ‘overlapping consensus’. Third, we miss its fundamentally empirical character, given (...) that it turns facts about the thoughts in our head into principles for the regulation of our political existence. Fourth, we miss some of the implications of that empiricism, including its tension with moral realism, relativism, and conservatism. (shrink)

This article takes a new idea, ‘normative behaviourism’, and applies it to global political theory, in order to address at least one of the problems we might have in mind when accusing that subject of being too ‘unrealistic’. The core of this idea is that political principles can be justified, not just by patterns in our thinking, and in particular our intuitions and considered judgements, but also by patterns in our behaviour, and in particular acts of insurrection and crime. The (...) problem addressed is ‘cultural relativism’, understood here not as a meta-ethical doctrine, but as the apparent ‘fact’ that people around the world have culturally varying intuitions and judgements of a kind that lead them to affirm different political principles. This is a problem because it seems to follow (1) that global agreement on any substantial set of political principles is impossible, and (2) that any political theory in denial of this ‘fact’ would be, for that reason, deeply unrealistic. The solution argued for here is that, if domestic political principles (i.e. principles intended to regulate a single state) could be justified by normative behaviourism, and in reference to culturally invariant behaviour, then an international system supportive of such principles is justifiable by extension. (shrink)

This paper distinguishes two ways in which to think about the freedom of extremists. Non-pluralists claim to have identified the general rule for resolving moral conflicts, and conceptualize freedom as liberty of action in accordance with that rule. It follows, if extremist violence breaks the rule in question, removing this option does not infringe the freedom of extremists. In contrast, for pluralists there is no one general rule to resolve moral conflicts, and freedom is simply the absence of interference. I (...) argue here that pluralism provides a principled defense of freedom, as it allows us to see that removing options from extremists is worse, on prima facie grounds, than not doing so. Also, non-pluralists cannot show that they have identified the general rule for resolving moral conflicts, and in particular, are forced to rely on quite different principles altogether when justifying paternalistic responses to extremism. (shrink)

A number of academic disciplines are seeking to rearticulate the distinction between the natural and the normative by rethinking the position humans occupy within nature. This article surveys this interdisciplinary debate in which the possibility of understanding humans as normative beings is often called into question. The aim of this survey is to identify the stakes involved in such debates and to reveal the underlying policy dimension of current discussions about human nature. This article concludes by arguing that the main (...) target of the current battles for recognition between disciplines is the `public', which is becoming the ultimate epistemic authority in a game with high political stakes. Key Words: humanity • normativity • performativity • political theory • public understanding of science. (shrink)

The question of what role social and political practices should play in the justification of normative principles has received renewed attention in post-millennium political philosophy. Several current debates express dissatisfaction with the methodology adopted in mainstream political theory, taking the form of a criticism of so-called ‘ideal theory’ from ‘non-ideal’ theory, of ‘practice-independent’ theory from ‘practice-dependent’ theory, and of ‘political moralism’ from ‘political realism’. While the problem of action-guidance lies at the heart of these concerns, the critics also share a (...) number of methodological assumptions. Above all, their methodology is practice-dependent in the sense that an existing practice is assumed to put substantial limitations on the appropriate normative principles for regulating it. In other words, we cannot formulate and justify an appropriate principle without first understanding the practice this principle is supposed to govern. The aim of this paper is to map out and analyze the common denominators of these debates with regard to methodological commitments. We will investigate how this practice-dependent method may be understood and motivated. In particular, we point to challenges that must be met in order for the position to remain both distinct and attractive. (shrink)

In response to the democratic boundary problem, two principles have been seen as competitors: the all-affected interests principle and the all-subjected principle. This article claims that these principles are in fact compatible, being justified vis-à-vis different functions, accommodating different values and drawing on different sources of normativity. I call this a ‘function-sensitive’ view. More specifically, I argue that the boundary problem draws attention to the decision functions of democracy and that two values are indispensable when theorizing how to regulate these (...) functions: procedural fairness and political autonomy. While the value of procedural fairness is best promoted through a version of the all-affected interests principle, applied to decision making generally, it is argued that political autonomy is best promoted through a version of the all-subjected principle, applied to coercive decision making specifically. The article concludes by drawing out some practical implications of the function-sensitive view for the case of immigration and border controls. (shrink)

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 (...) like. For realists the question about a distinctively political normativity is important, because they take the fact that politics is a distinct affair to have severe consequences for both how to approach the subject matter as such and for which principles and values can be justified. Still, realists have had a hard time clarifying what this distinctively political normativity consists of and why, more precisely, it matters. The aim of this paper is to take some further steps in answering these questions. We argue that realists have the choice of committing themselves to one of two coherent notions of distinctively political normativity: one that is independent of moral values, where political normativity is taken to be a kind of instrumental normativity; another where the distinctness still retains a justificatory dependence on moral values. We argue that the former notion is unattractive since the costs of commitment will be too high, and that the latter notion is sound but redundant since no moralist would ever reject it. Furthermore, we end the paper by discussing what we see as the most fruitful way of approaching political and moral normativity in political theory. (shrink)

The starting point regarding consent has to be that it is both extremely important, and that it is often suspicious. In this article, the author tries to make sense of both of these claims, from a largely liberal perspective, tying consent, predictably, to the value of autonomy and distinguishing between autonomy as sovereignty and autonomy as nonalienation. The author then discusses adaptive preferences, claiming that they suffer from a rationality flaw but that it's not clear that this flaw matters morally (...) or politically. What matters is whether they suffer from an autonomy flaw. To answer this question, the author develops an account of autonomy failure, according to which a preference is nonautonomous if an injustice played an appropriate role in its causal history. The author then discusses the moral implications—and in an initial way, the political ones as well—of proclaiming a preference, or consent based on it, nonautonomous in this way. (shrink)

‘The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing’. -Archilochus quoted in Berlin, The Hedgehog and the Fox, 22The fragment from the Greek poet Archilochus, quoted in Isaiah Berlin’s essay ‘The Hedgehog and the Fox’, serves as a metaphor for the long-standing contrast and rivalry between two radically different approaches to public ethics, each of which is couched in a radically different vision of the structure of moral value. On the one hand, the way of the hedgehog (...) corresponds to the creed of value monism, reflecting a faith in the ultimate unity of the moral universe and belief in the singularity, tidiness and completeness of moral and political purposes. On the other hand, the way of the fox corresponds to the nemesis of monism, the philosophical tradition of value pluralism, to which this collection of essays is devoted. This dissenting countermovement, which emerges most clearly in the writings of Isaiah Berlin, Stuart Hampshire, Bernard Williams and John Gray, is fuelled by an appreciation of the perpetuity of plurality and conflict and, correspondingly, by the conviction that visions of moral unity and harmony are incoherent and implausible. In the view of the value pluralists, ‘there is no completeness and no perfection to be found in morality’. (shrink)

Thomas Hobbes has recently been cast as one of the forefathers of political realism. This article evaluates his place in the realist tradition by focusing on three key themes: the priority of legit...

Political philosophers frequently claim that political ideals can provide normative guidance for unjust and otherwise nonideal circumstances. This is mistaken. This paper demonstrates that political ideals contribute nothing to our understanding of the normative principles we should satisfy amidst unjust or otherwise nonideal circumstances.

The paper is an intervention in the dispute about the moralism of the recent realist trend in political philosophy. It is particularly focused on analysing the debate on this subject between Niklas Erman and Eva Möller (2015a; 2015b) and Robert Jubb and Enzo Rossi (2015a; 2015b). Examining the main arguments of both parties, I argue that realists (i.e., Jubb and Rossi) lost the debate, that realism is, in fact, moralism in disguise, and that its main methodological request – giving up (...) „pre-political” moral principles and values in political philosophy – is „unrealistic” (i.e., unfeasible). (shrink)

Nietzsche’s self-proclaimed ‘anti-political’(EH ‘wise’ 3; cf. TI 8.4) stance is often ignored.1 Commentators, that is, often interpret Nietzsche’s texts as responding to familiar issues within political philosophy, and as furnishing a novel position therein. This could indeed be the appropriate hermeneutic response. Dismissing one of Nietzsche’s proclamations is, on a variety of different grounds, hermeneutically reasonable. In this particular case, given all that Nietzsche has to say about sociality and the roles of public institutions in modern life, dismissal might even (...) seem compelling. Here, however, I wish to recuperate Nietzsche’s anti-political stance. That is, I shall argue that Nietzsche’s self-proclamation does in fact reflect his deep commitments, and thus compels a reassessment of the political interpretations of his thought. (shrink)

The Aristotelian Society’s Virtual Issue is a free, online publication, made publically available on the Aristotelian Society website. Each volume is theme-based, collecting together papers from the archives of the Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society and the Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society Supplementary Volume that address the chosen theme. This year's Virtual Issue includes a selection of papers from across the Society’s fourteen decades, each accompanied by a specially commissioned present-day response. The aim of the volume is to aid reflection (...) on how to go about doing moral and political philosophy, by bringing together papers that bear on their epistemology and methodology. In some cases this involves pieces whose declared focus is on one of those areas, as is the case with Margaret MacDonald’s 1941 essay ‘The Language of Political Theory’ and Mary Midgley’s 1974 article ‘The Neutrality of the Moral Philosopher’. In other cases the editor, Ben Colburn, selected papers whose primary focus is elsewhere, but which include some interesting epistemological or methodological reflections or implications along the way. The contributions from our present-day commentators vary similarly in how far their explicit attention is methodological. Nevertheless, there is throughout a concern on how to ‘be an honest reasoner’, to borrow a phrase from the late Dudley Knowles. (shrink)

The paper's two theses are: First, that the historical and philosophical roots of argumentation are in ethics and politics, and not in any formal ideal, be it mathematical, scientific or other. Furthermore, argumentation is a human invention, deeply tied up with the emergence of democracy in ancient Greece. Second, that argumentation presupposes and advances concurrently humanistic values, especially the autonomy of the individual to think and decide in a free and uncoerced manner.

In this essay we criticise Rainer Forst's attempt to draw a connection between power and justification, and thus ground his normative theory of a right to justification. Forst draws this connection primarily conceptually, though we will also consider whether a normative connection may be drawn within his framework. Forst's key insight is that if we understand power as operating by furnishing those subjected to it with reasons, then we create a space for the normative contestation of any exercise of power. (...) He calls this the noumenal understanding of power. Against the conceptual connection between power and justification, we argue that (i) on most plausible accounts of political freedom, some freedom-restrictions commonly attributed to the successful exercise of power would perplexingly count as failures of power on Forst's view, and that (ii) on the most plausible account of reason-recognition, namely an appropriateness of response account, a justification relation is only a sufficient but not necessary condition for recognition. Against the normative connection, we argue that (iii) Forst can establish the existence of a right to justification only if he reconsiders the transcendental aspirations of his theory. (shrink)