Why do American ghettos persist? Decades after Moynihan’s report on the black family and the Kerner Commission’s investigations of urban disorders, deeply disadvantaged black communities remain a disturbing reality. Scholars and commentators today often identify some factor―such as single motherhood, joblessness, or violent street crime―as the key to solving the problem and recommend policies accordingly. But, Tommie Shelby argues, these attempts to “fix” ghettos or “help” their poor inhabitants ignore fundamental questions of justice and fail to see the urban poor (...) as moral agents responding to injustice. (shrink)

Too often, identifying practices of silencing is a seemingly impossible exercise. Here I claim that attempting to give a conceptual reading of the epistemic violence present when silencing occurs can help distinguish the different ways members of oppressed groups are silenced with respect to testimony. I offer an account of epistemic violence as the failure, owing to pernicious ignorance, of hearers to meet the vulnerabilities of speakers in linguistic exchanges. Ultimately, I illustrate that by focusing on the ways in which (...) hearers fail to meet speaker dependency in a linguistic exchange, efforts can be made to demarcate the different types of silencing people face when attempting to testify from oppressed positions in society. (shrink)

Journal of Political Philosophy, EarlyView.

Philosophy &Public Affairs, Volume 48, Issue 1, Page 40-78, Winter 2020.

What, if anything, is problematic about gentrification? This article addresses this question from the perspective of normative political theory. We argue that gentrification is problematic insofar as it involves a violation of city-dwellers’ occupancy rights. We distinguish these rights from other forms of territorial rights and discuss the different implications of the argument for urban governance. If we agree on the ultimate importance of being able to pursue one’s located life plans, the argument goes, we must also agree on limiting (...) the impact of gentrification on peoples’ lives. Limiting gentrification’s impact, however, does not entail halting processes of gentrification once and for all. (shrink)

This paper investigates the epistemic powers of democratic institutions through an assessment of three epistemic models of democracy: the Condorcet Jury Theorem, the Diversity Trumps Ability Theorem, and Dewey's experimentalist model. Dewey's model is superior to the others in its ability to model the epistemic functions of three constitutive features of democracy: the epistemic diversity of participants, the interaction of voting with discussion, and feedback mechanisms such as periodic elections and protests. It views democracy as an institution for pooling widely (...) distributed information about problems and policies of public interest by engaging the participation of epistemically diverse knowers. Democratic norms of free discourse, dissent, feedback, and accountability function to ensure collective, experimentally-based learning from the diverse experiences of different knowers. I illustrate these points with a case study of community forestry groups in South Asia, whose epistemic powers have been hobbled by their suppression of women's participation. (shrink)

This essay argues that the systemic turn in deliberative democracy has opened up avenues to think about disabled citizenship within discursive processes. I highlight the systemic turn’s recognition of the interdependence of individuals and institutions upon each other in a system as key to this project. This recognition has led to three transformations: a more generous account of deliberative speech acts and behaviors; recognition of the role of enclaves; and incorporating the role of discursive representatives. These changes normalize the participation (...) of cognitively disabled individuals and suggest institutional opportunities for more effective participation. (shrink)

Abstract:Enlightenment era optimism that technological and educational developments offer a progressive path to plenty and liberation supports a hope that human toil may be progressively reduced. The Development Thesis defended by G. A. Cohen is a piece of that Enlightenment optimism. The Development Thesis holds that productive forces tend to develop throughout history. The tendency for such an increase in productive forces to occur is, according to Cohen’s argument, due to persistent facts about human nature. If Cohen is correct, there (...) is a tendency toward progress of an important sort, and this progress is due in significant part to human nature. But the development of productive forces also destroys nonhuman natural value. In the era of the Anthropocene this is occurring on a planetary scale. The simultaneous development and destruction entails that claims of progress must rely on an all-things-considered judgment. But due to the plurality of the relevant values, which cannot be compared according to a common metric, rational disagreement about the existence of progress and our progressive nature can be expected to persist. (shrink)

Deliberative democracy grounds its legitimacy largely in the ability of speakers to participate on equal terms. Yet theorists and practitioners have struggled with how to establish deliberative equality in the face of stark differences of power in liberal democracies. Designers of innovative civic forums for deliberation often aim to neutralize inequities among participants through proportional inclusion of disempowered speakers and discourses. In contrast, others argue that democratic equality is best achieved when disempowered groups deliberate in their own enclaves before entering (...) the broader public sphere. Borrowing from each perspective, the authors argue that there are strong reasons to incorporate enclave deliberation among the disempowered within civic forums. They support this claim by presenting case study evidence showing that participants in such forums can gain some of the same benefits of deliberation found in more heterogeneous groups, can consider a diversity of viewpoints rather than falling into groupthink and polarization, and can persuade external stakeholders of the legitimacy of the group’s deliberations. (shrink)

While there has been considerable philosophical attention given to injustices surrounding work, there has been much less on those injustices that pertain specifically to workers’ commutes. In this paper, I argue that commutes are important parts of people’s working lives, and thus deserve attention as sites of potentially considerable injustice. I evaluate commutes in terms of their impact on people’s work, their rest, the control they exercise over their lives outside of work, and their ability to meet the demands of (...) democratic citizenship. In the second half, I offer some proposals that could reform commuting, while recognizing the ways in which commuting injustice is not incidental to structures of contemporary capitalism, especially with regards to housing, but is rather a structural and constitutive feature. As a result, remedying the injustices of the commute might require a more radical restructuring of current modes of urban development. (shrink)