Contemporary political theory (CPT) has approached questions of plurality and diversity by drawing rather implicitly on anthropological accounts of difference. This was the case with the ‘cultural turn’, which significantly shaped theories of multiculturalism. Similarly, the current ‘ontological turn’ is gaining influence and leaving a marked impact on CPT. I examine the recent turn and assess both the possibilities it offers and the challenges it poses for decentering CPT and opening radical, decolonial avenues for thinking difference otherwise. I take Paul (...) Nadasdy's critique of the ontological turn as an invitation to reflect on the methodological precepts that inform how the field frames the scope and limits of comparison. In pursuit of this, I examine the Zapatistas’ notion of a ‘world of many worlds’, which provides a way of approaching difference that captures the generative aspects of the ontological turn while avoiding the pitfalls of relativism and political inertia. I argue that the Zapatistas’ insights offer ethical guidance towards social and ecological thriving. Ultimately, my goal is to move CPT towards a more capacious form of making sense of what is out there in the world, and thus make room for better ways of inhabiting the Earth. (shrink)

What is wrong with government whistleblowing and when can it be justified? In my view, ‘government whistleblowing’, i.e., the unauthorized acquisition and disclosure of classified information about the state or government, is a form of ‘political vigilantism’, which involves transgressing the boundaries around state secrets, for the purpose of challenging the allocation or use of power. It may nonetheless be justified when it is suitably constrained and exposes some information that the public ought to know and deliberate about. Government whistleblowing (...) should then be viewed, along the lines of civil disobedience, as a collective cognition- and legitimacy-enhancing device. (shrink)

Political theory and philosophy need to widen their view of the space in which what matters politically takes place, and I suggest that integrating the conditions of sustainability of all affected—that is, all participants in nature's relations—is a necessary first step in this direction. New materialists and posthumanists have challenged how nature and politics have traditionally been construed. While acknowledging the significance of their contributions, I critically examine the ethical and political implications of their ontological project. I focus particularly on (...) how the decentering of human agency that they advocate for raises a set of concerns that need to be addressed in developing an appropriate ecological ethics. I argue that the latter must be attuned to the vulnerability of living beings who participate in relationships that sustain life on earth. This brings me to conclude that qualitative distinctions between the worlds ofbiosandtechneare necessary. This is because we need to think critically about ways of evaluating types of relationships so that we can assess them and establish which are worth nurturing and protecting and which are not. (shrink)

Is hactivism the new civil disobedience? I argue that most recent hacktivism isn't, and shouldn't be shoehorned into the category of civil disobedience. I sketch instead a broad matrix of electronic resistance, attentive to the many shapes and goals of hacktivism and I locate five clusters on it, briefly sketching possible dimensions of normative assessment for each: vigilantism, whistleblowing, guerrilla communication, electronic humanitarianism, and electronic civil disobedience.

Joseph Raz’s much discussed service conception of practical authority has recently come under attack from Stephen Darwall, who proposes that we instead adopt a second- personal conception of practical authority.1 We believe that the best place to start understanding practical authority is with a pared back conception of it, as simply a species of normative authority more generally, where this species is picked out merely by the fact that the normative authority in question is authority in relation to action, rather (...) than belief. We do not wish to deny that there might be properties of practical authority (as distinct from the species of authority that is concerned with belief) that are peculiar to it, but, unlike both Raz and Darwall, we do not believe that such features play a role in defining or delimiting practical authority. (shrink)

Is the civic duty to report crime and corruption a genuine moral duty? After clarifying the nature of the duty, I consider a couple of negative answers to the question, and turn to an attractive and commonly held view, according to which this civic duty is a genuine moral duty. On this view, crime and corruption threaten political stability, and citizens have a moral duty to report crime and corruption to the government in order to help the government’s law enforcement (...) efforts. The resulting duty is triply general in that it applies to everyone, everywhere, and covers all criminal and corrupt activity. In this paper, I challenge the general scope of this argument. I argue that that the civic duty to report crime and corruption to the authorities is much narrower than the government claims and people might think, for it only arises when the state (i) condemns genuine wrongdoing and serious ethical offenses as “crime” and “corruption,” and (ii) constitutes a dependable “disclosure recipient,” showing the will and power to hold wrongdoers accountable. I further defend a robust duty to directly report to the public—one that is weightier and wider than people usually assume. When condition (ii) fails to obtain, I submit, citizens are released of the duty to report crime and corruption to the authorities, but are bound to report to the public, even when the denunciation targets the government and is risky or illegal. (shrink)

Hunger strikes are commonly repressed in prison and seen as disruptive, coercive, and violent. Hunger strikers and their advocates insist that incarcerated persons have a right to hunger strike, which protects them against repression and force-feeding. Physicians and medical ethicists generally ground this right in the right to refuse medical treatment; lawyers and legal scholars derive it from incarcerated persons’ free speech rights. Neither account adequately grounds the right to hunger strike because both misrepresent the hunger strike as noncoercive and (...) nonviolent. I articulate an alternative, dual account of the right to hunger strike. On the remedial argument, the right to hunger strike should be legally protected as a right to petition for redress, in light of incarcerated people’s structural vulnerability to abuse and given inadequate grievance mechanisms. The constructive argument derives the right to hunger strike from the right to resist oppression and stresses the normative permissibility of the use of coercive tactics to defend one’s liberty interests in the face of carceral oppression. -/- . (shrink)

In France, some institutions seem to call for the engineer’s sense of social responsibility. However, this call is scarcely heard. Still, engineering students have been given the opportunity to gain a general education through courses in literature, law, economics, since the nineteenth century. But, such courses have long been offered only in the top ranked engineering schools. In this paper, we intend to show that the wish to increase engineering students’ social responsibility is an old concern. We also aim at (...) highlighting some macro social factors which shaped the answer to the call for social responsibility in the French engineering “Grandes Ecoles”. In the first part, we provide an overview of the scarce attention given to the engineering curriculum in the scholarly literature in France. In the second part, we analyse one century of discourses about the definition of the “complete engineer” and the consequent role of non technical education. In the third part, we focus on the characteristics of the corpus which has been institutionalized. Our main finding is that despite the many changes which occurred in engineering education during one century, the “other formation” remains grounded on a non academic “way of knowing”, and aims at increasing the reputation of the schools, more than enhancing engineering students’ social awareness. (shrink)

Society typically shows conscientious objectors more deference than civil disobedients, on the grounds that they appear more conscientious and less strategically minded than the latter. Kimberley Brownlee challenges this standard picture in Conscience and Conviction: The Case for Civil Disobedience, where she claims that civil disobedience is more conscientious than conscientious objection, in virtue of its communicativeness. Brownlee conceives of conscientious conviction as necessarily communicative, and distinguishes it from ‘conscience’—the set of practical moral skills involved in adequately responding to complex (...) situations. This review article argues that Brownlee’s account of conviction is too narrow, as it excludes many core beliefs which we would want to classify as convictions although they violate one or more of the criteria of communicativeness, while her account of conscience is incomplete, because it ignores some of the persistent obstacles for the development of conscience produced by structural injustice. The article identifies these obstacles and offers some strategies for protecting against them, namely, vigilance, self-scrutiny, empathy and collaborative ambivalence. (shrink)

This article presents the ethical issues of the professional practice of engineers.

This book aims to overcome the disconnect between human and ecological concerns in political theory and political philosophy.

Delmas successfully guides us to reconsider the traditional “wisdom” of civil disobedience. She also makes a strong case for expanding the notion of political obligation, which has been narrowly construed as mere obedience, to encompass a duty to resist. Principled disobedience, either civil or uncivil, includes a wide range of tools to tackle different forms of injustice, such as education campaigns, peaceful protests, graffiti street art, whistleblowing, vigilante self-defense, and political riots. We may question to what extent the violent (...) disobedience can be justified, as it is always good to be careful about violence that risks harming the innocent, but other forms of civil or uncivil disobedience may rightly be demanded in realistic circumstances. As I see it, these, along with the general warning to not unwittingly serve the status quo by dismissing social movements merely because of “incivility” and the proposal of the civic virtues of vigilance and open-mindedness, are significant contributions to the literature and could also benefit a politically interested general audience greatly. (shrink)

The COVID-19 crisis has highlighted the considerable challenge of sourcing expertise and determining which experts to trust. Dissonant information fostered controversy in public discourse and encouraged an appeal to a wide range of social indicators of trustworthiness in order to decide whom to trust. We analyze public discourse on expertise by examining how social indicators inform the reputation of Dr. Didier Raoult, the French microbiologist who rose to international prominence as an early advocate for using hydroxychloroquine to treat COVID-19. (...) To comprehend how these indicators came to inform his reputation, we outline Dr. Raoult's rise to fame based on discourse about hydroxychloroquine. We then discuss why we trust in experts like scientist-practitioners. This is followed by an examination of how social indicators of trust like status, epistemic authority, influence and values have informed Dr. Raoult's reputation. We conclude with recommendations for how to improve the selection and evaluation social indicators of trust and reputations. Our aim here, instead of making a claim about the efficacy of hydroxychloroquine or Dr. Raoult's reputation per se, is to outline through this case study how social indicators of trust inform reputation and the challenge they present to evaluating expertise. (shrink)