Political short-termism costs the global economy hundreds of billions to trillions of dollars annually, and leads to many millions of deaths from disasters and suboptimal spending. In this paper, I propose a futures assembly explicitly incentivised to promote the interests of future generations as a promising strategy to ameliorate short-termism. The assembly I propose is governed by citizens randomly selected from among the populace, who are rewarded in the future to the extent that they successfully promote the welfare of (...) future generations. The most initially promising such retrospective accountability mechanism is an iterated mechanism, in which each generation of policymakers rewards the previous generation for their policy choices and for their own evaluation of the previous generation. Such an assembly, supplemented with the duties, powers, and tools that I describe, and with appropriate support from archivists and experts, may manage to represent generations many years into the future. (shrink)

Accountability of the elected leaders is one of the key factors in a representative democracy. Bangladesh restored a democratic ruling system in 1991 but has struggled to create an effective institutional mechanism to hold the political leaders before the citizens. Information has often been called the oxygen of democracy because of its power to bring accountability through transparency and public disclosure. With the boom of news media organisations and the emergence of the movement for the right to (...) and freedom of information in the early 2000s, many argued that information institutions could build the mechanism for political accountability. On that background, Bangladesh enacted the Right to Information Act in 2009 and established a few key public information institutions including the Information Commission (IC) and Access to Information Programme hoping that the freedom of information would not only challenge the culture of secrecy and veil but also encourage the elected leaders to be answerable to the citizens. But did it really happen? Why? I looked for the answers in this study though the conceptual and analytical lens of freedom of information, proactive disclosure and accountability. For this study, I mainly used the data and cases gathered from secondary sources namely policy papers, reports, newspapers, journals, books and online spaces. I also utilised my own experience of working with a few state organisations. I analysed the current status of accountability mechanisms in Bangladesh focusing mainly on the political accountability (often called the vertical accountability). I also examined a few recent cases in order to understand the role of the information institutions in bringing the political accountability in the current fragile democracy in Bangladesh. Considering the poor democratic practices in the recent years, findings of this study suggest that the accountability of the political leaders has increased to a certain considerable extent. I argue that this is partly because of the increased transparency and proactive disclosure in the formal and informal institutional mechanisms, and mostly because of the leading active role of the mass media organisations. I conclude with the argument that despite having this increased transparency and freedom of information, this improved accountability is not sustainable without an effective democratic institutional mechanism. (shrink)

Concerns about emerging and re-emerging infectious diseases have given a new lease of life to quarantinist measures: a series of time-honoured techniques for controlling the spread of infectious diseases through breaking the chain of human contagion. Since such measures typically infringe individual rights or privacy their use is subject to legal regulations and gives rise to ethical and political worries and suspicions. Yet in some circumstances they can be very effective. After considering some case studies that show how epidemics (...) are unique, fluid and affected by a multitude of contingent factors, it is argued that the legal and ethical guidelines may not always be the best approach to discipline the use of quarantinist measures. An alternative model based on ex-post political accountability for reasonableness is proposed. This model restores the centrality of political decision and expert judgement in situations characterized by high risk, uncertainty and contingency. It is argued that such alternative model affords quicker and more flexible responses to serious outbreaks of infections, while providing adequate protection against abuses. (shrink)

Rawls's theory of political obligation attempts to avoid the obvious flaws of a Lockean consent model. Rawls rejects a requirement of consent for two reasons: First, the consent requirement of Locke’s theory was intended to ensure that the liberty and equality of the contractors was respected, but this end is better achieved by the principles chosen in the original position, which order the basic structure of a society into which citizens are born. Second, "basing our political ties upon (...) a principle of obligation would complicate the assurance problem." Instead, Rawls offers a duty-based account, whereby we are duty-bound to support and comply with just institutions that apply to us. A. John Simmons argues that Rawls cannot meet the particularity requirement of establishing political obligation to only one state. I assess the response that this requirement can be met by the political constructivist element of Rawls's theory. I conclude that there are fatal flaws in this response. (shrink)

There is an emerging consensus among political philosophers that state legitimacy involves something more than—or perhaps other than—political obligation. Yet the principle of fair play, which many take to be a promising basis for political obligation, has been largely absent from discussions of the revised conception of legitimacy. This paper shows how the principle of fair play can generate legitimate political authority by drawing on a neglected feature of the principle—its stipulation that members of a cooperative (...) scheme must reciprocate specifically by submitting to the scheme's rules. (shrink)

Mobsters and others engaged in risky forms of social coordination and coercion often communicate by saying something that is overtly innocuous but transmits another message ‘off record’. In both ordinary conversation and political discourse, insinuation and other forms of indirection, like joking, offer significant protection from liability. However, they do not confer blanket immunity: speakers can be held to account for an ‘off record’ message, if the only reasonable interpreta- tions of their utterance involve a commitment to it. Legal (...) liability for speech in the service of criminal behavior displays a similar profile of significant protection from indirection along with potential liability for reasonable interpretations. Specifically, in both ordinary and legal contexts, liability depends on how a reasonable speaker would expect a reasonable hearer to interpret their utterance in the context of utter- ance, rather than on the actual speaker’s claimed communicative intentions. (shrink)

Informal political representation—the phenomenon of speaking or acting on behalf of others although one has not been elected or selected to do so by means of a systematized election or selection procedure—plays a crucial role in advancing the interests of groups. Sometimes, those who emerge as informal political representatives (IPRs) do so willingly (voluntary representatives). But, often, people end up being IPRs, either in their private lives or in more public political forums, over their own protests (unwilling (...) representatives) or even without their knowledge (unwitting representatives)—that is, they are conscripted. None of the few theories of informal political representation extant accommodate conscripted IPRs. The account detailed here introduces the phenomenon of conscripted informal political representation and explains its place in a complete theory of informal political representation. Conscripted IPRs can, like their voluntary counterparts, come to have significant power to influence how various audiences regard those for whom the conscripted IPRs speak or act. Upon attaining such power to influence, conscripted IPRs, like their voluntary counterparts, come to have pro tanto duties to those they represent—duties that arise despite IPRs’ unwittingness or unwillingness. Understanding the phenomenon of conscripted informal political representation allows us to surface essential normative questions about informal political representation that are otherwise occluded. (shrink)

This paper outlines an account of political realism as a form of ideology critique. Our focus is a defence of the normative edge of this critical-theoretic project against the common charge that there is a problematic trade-off between a theory’s groundedness in facts about the political status quo and its ability to consistently envisage radical departures from the status quo. To overcome that problem we combine insights from three distant corners of the philosophical landscape: theories of legitimacy by (...) Bernard Williams and other realists, Frankfurt School-inspired Critical Theory, and recent analytic epistemological and metaphysical theories of cognitive bias, ideology, and social construction. The upshot is a novel account of realism as empirically-informed diagnosis- critique of social and political phenomena. This view rejects a sharp divide between descriptive and normative theory, and so is an alternative to the anti- empiricism of some approaches to Critical Theory as well as to the complacency towards existing power structures found within liberal realism, let alone mainstream normative political philosophy, liberal or otherwise. (shrink)

The question of forgiveness in politics has attained a certain cachet. Indeed, in the fifty years since Arendt commented on the notable absence of forgiveness in the political tradition, a vast and multidisciplinary literature on the politics of apology, reparation, and reconciliation has emerged. To a novice scouring the relevant literatures, it might appear that the only discordant note in this new veritable symphony of writings on political forgiveness has been sounded by philosophers. There is a more-than-healthy cynicism (...) directed at what many philosophers see as an uncritical promotion of forgiveness, which – they fear – risks distorting and cheapening forgiveness as a moral ideal, on the one hand, and ignoring the moral and political values of justice, accountability and the cessation of harmful relationships, on the other. Are philosophical fears about the dangers of thinking about forgiveness in political terms warranted – or do they perhaps depend in part on conceptual conservatism regarding what exactly political forgiveness might be? I argue that most, if not all, standard objections to political forgiveness emerge from theoretical reliance on a picture of forgiveness I will call the Emotional Model. Once we make conceptual space for descriptions of forgiveness in performative and social terms, the concept is more easily adapted to a political account without at least some of the risks feared by philosophers. (shrink)

Sometimes, political bald-faced lies pass for truth. That is, certain groups of people behave according to them – behave as if the political bald-faced lies were true. How can this phenomenon be explained? I argue that to explain it we need to take political bald-faced lies to be performative utterances whose goal is to bring about a worldly state of affairs just in virtue of making the utterance. When the former US-President tweeted ‘we won the election’, people (...) stormed Capitol Hill to protest election fraud and some were killed. In this way, the bald-faced lie was successful in passing for truth. My performative view of political bald-faced lies is to be preferred over various other views such as the contempt for truth view (Lynch 2021), the deception view (Lackey 2013), and the value-signaling view (Stanley 2012). These alternative views fail to adequately account for how political bald-faced lies pass for truth. (shrink)

Certain non-voluntarists have recently defended political authority by advancing two-part views. First, they argue that the state, or the law, is best (or uniquely) capable of accomplishing something important. Second, they defend a substantive normative principle on which being so situated is sufficient for de jure authority. This paper uses widely accepted tenets to show that all such defenses of authority fail.

Politics is full of people who don’t care about the facts. Still, while not caring about the facts, they are often concerned to present themselves as caring about them. Politics, in other words, is full of bullshitters. But why? In this paper I develop an incentives-based analysis of bullshit in politics, arguing that it is often a rational response to the incentives facing different groups of agents. In a slogan: bullshit in politics pays, sometimes literally. After first outlining an account (...) of bullshit (Section 1), I discuss the incentives driving three different groups of agents to bullshit: politicians, the media, and voters (Section 2). I then examine several existing proposals to combat bullshit in politics, arguing that each will fail because they ignore the relevant underlying incentives (Section 3). I conclude somewhat pessimistically that a certain amount of bullshit in politics is inevitable (Section 4). (shrink)

This paper examines the differences between moralist, realist, and pragmatist approaches to political legitimacy by articulating their largely implicit views of judgment. Three claims are advanced. First, the salient opposition among approaches to legitimacy is not between “moralism” and “realism.” Recent realist proposals for rethinking legitimacy share with moralist views a distinctive form, called “normativism”: a quest for knowledge of principles that solve the question of legitimacy. This assumes that judging legitimacy is a matter of applying such principles to (...) a case at hand. Second, neither Rawls nor Habermas is a normativist about political legitimacy. The principles of legitimacy they proffer claim to express rather than adjudicate the legitimacy of a liberal-democratic regime, and thus cannot solve the question of legitimacy at a fundamental level. But perhaps we should question the normativist aspiration to theoretically resolving the problem to begin with. My third claim is that a “pragmatist” approach enables us to rethink political legitimacy more deeply by shifting focus from the articulation of principles to the activity of judging. Implicit in Rawls’s and Habermas’s theories I then find clues towards an alternative account of judgment, in which the question of legitimacy calls not for theoretical resolution but for ongoing practical engagement. (shrink)

The paper offers five desiderata on a realist normative theory of politics: that it should avoid moralism, deontologism, transcendentalism, utopianism, and vanguardism. These desiderata argue for a theory that begins from values rooted in a people’s experience; that avoids prescribing a collective deontological constraint; that makes the comparison of imperfect regimes possible; that takes feasibility and sustainability into account; and that makes room for the claims of democracy. The paper argues, in the course of exploring the desiderata, that a neo-republican (...) philosophy of government does pretty well in satisfying them. (shrink)

As part of recent epistemic challenges to democracy, some have endorsed the implementation of epistemic constraints on voting, institutional mechanisms that bar incompetent voters from participating in public decision-making procedures. This proposal is often considered incompatible with a commitment to political equality. In this paper, I aim to dispute the strength of this latter claim by offering a theoretical justification for epistemic constraints on voting that does not rest on antiegalitarian commitments. Call this the civic accountability justification for (...) epistemic constraints on voting. On this view, voters stand to one another in a normative relation of reciprocal accountability that requires them to uphold an epistemically responsible conduct. Modest epistemic constraints on voting are justifiable because they secure that participation in voting is conforming to this normative requirement. Thanks to its distinctive features, the civic accountability justification can overcome two problems that egalitarians commonly associate with the idea of epistemic constraints on voting: the disrespect problem and the hierarchy problem. (shrink)

ABSTRACTIn this article, we explore the debate on corporate citizenship and the role of business in global governance. In the debate on political corporate social responsibility it is assumed that under globalization business is taking up a greater political role. Apart from economic responsibilities firms assume political responsibilities taking up traditional governmental tasks such as regulation of business and provision of public goods. We contrast this with a subsidiarity-based approach to governance, in which firms are seen as (...) intermediate actors who have political co-responsibilities in society endowed upon them by national governmental institutions. We argue that both approaches face conceptual and empirical problems, and do not make clear the content and scope of political corporate responsibility. Based on Iris Marion Young’s account of political responsibility we argue that corporate actors and governmental actors have a shared responsibility to tackle societal problems. Taking political corporate responsibility not only entails engaging in private action or engaging in public–private partnerships, but it also includes aiding governmental actors to remedy injustice or even create public institutions where they do not yet exist. By adding this perspective we contribute to the debate on responsibility in corporate citizenship and clarify the political role business can play in global governance. (shrink)

One of the main challenges faced by realists in political philosophy is that of offering an account of authority that is genuinely normative and yet does not consist of a moralistic application of general, abstract ethical principles to the practice of politics. Political moralists typically start by devising a conception of justice based on their pre-political moral commitments; authority would then be legitimate only if political power is exercised in accordance with justice. As an alternative to (...) that dominant approach I put forward the idea that upturning the relationship between justice and legitimacy affords a normative notion of authority that does not depend on a pre-political account of morality, and thus avoids some serious problems faced by mainstream theories of justice. I then argue that the appropriate purpose of justice is simply to specify the implementation of an independently grounded conception of legitimacy, which in turn rests on a context- and practice-sensitive understanding of the purpose of political power. (shrink)

Political parties have been the subject of a recent resurgent interest among political philosophers, with prominent contributions spanning liberal to socialist literatures arguing for a more positive appraisal of the role of parties in the operation of democratic representation and public deliberation. In this article, I argue for a similar re-evaluation of the role of political parties within contemporary republicanism. Contemporary republicanism displays a wariness of political parties. In Philip Pettit’s paradigmatic account of republican democracy, rare (...) mentions of political parties often stress their tendency to lead to factionalism or corruption. Others working in the republican tradition such as Richard Bellamy and Ian Shapiro provide more extended discussion of the role of parties, but limit their theoretical function to enabling electoral competition. I argue that political parties play a far more significant role in promoting non-domination than this. In addition to enabling electoral competition, I show that political parties are also essential to the effective operation of two other components of republican democracy: contestation and interest-formation. I further argue that understanding political parties in these terms is compatible with republican democracy more generally, addressing the worry that parties will produce factional rather than common-good oriented public decisions. (shrink)

Standard definitions represent political authority as the power to give reasons (or pro tanto duties) by using speech. But the giving of reasons (or pro tanto duties) is routine among ordinary folk. Why, then, is establishing the reason-giving powers of the state not the very same problem as establishing the reason-giving powers of ordinary people? This article (i) shows that the literature does not have the resources to answer, (ii) develops a pragmatist answer, and then (iii) closes by suggesting (...) that, properly understood, the problem of political authority calls not for more permutations of, say, consent theory, but concrete, genuinely democratic political systems. (shrink)

A phronetic approach takes into account everything possible. By this, the phronetic researcher ought to be better-informed of the practical—that which is readily available in order to solve localized political problems and to direct political participants to think in terms of value-rational understanding and action. Phronetic knowledge ought to be of utility to the citizenry—and not only to academia. It does not only explain phenomena, but also provides for altering the outcomes associated with political phenomena by integrating (...) value judgments and broader ethical precepts into the analysis. This is instrumental in producing knowledge that provides for practical application of problem solving that can be deemed good or better, and provides a means for ascertaining the bad or worse in a given political scenario. This paper examines how knowledge is produced by the phronetic approach, what knowledge can be known by the phronetic approach, and whether there are inherent limitations to the phronetic approach to understanding. (shrink)

ABSTRACT Genevieve Lloyd argues that when we follow Spinoza in understanding reason as a part of nature, we gain new insights into the human condition. Specifically, we gain a new political insight: we should respond to cultural difference with a pluralist ethos. This is because there is no pure universal reason; human minds find their reason shaped differently by their various embodied social contexts. Furthermore, we can use the resources of the imagination to bring this ethos about. In my (...) response, I offer a friendly challenge to Lloyd’s characterisation of the lessons of Spinoza’s philosophy. I argue that Lloyd’s Spinoza remains excessively unpolitical, even in the moment that he is brought to bear on contemporary politics. An unpluralistic attitude may well be rationally inferior, but is it really explained by insufficient or inappropriate imagination? To the contrary, a properly Spinozist account of reason must include an account of the concrete determinants of reason’s imperfect realisation in the world. In Spinoza’s own oeuvre, this is carried out through an ever-increasing—and ever more sociological—interest in the political structures within which individual reason flourishes or withers. (shrink)

The paper makes a twofold contribution. Firstly, it advances a preliminary account of the conditions that need to obtain for constitutional rights to be democratic. Secondly, in so doing, it defends precommitment-based theories from a criticism raised by Jeremy Waldron—namely, that constitutional rights do not become any more democratic when they are democratically adopted, for the people could adopt undemocratic policies without such policies becoming democratic as a result. The paper shows that the reductio applies to political rights, yet (...) not to non-political rights, such as reproductive, environmental, or privacy rights. The democratic status of the former is process-independent. The latter, by contrast, are democratic precisely when they are adopted by democratic means. (shrink)

How should broadly liberal democratic societies stop illiberal and antidemocratic views from gaining influence while honouring liberal democratic values? This question has become particularly pressing after the recent successes of right-wing populist leaders and parties across Europe, in the US, and beyond. This book develops a normative account of liberal democratic self-defence that denounces the failures of real-world societies without excusing those supporting illiberal and antidemocratic political actors. This account is innovative in focusing not only on the role of (...) the state but also on the duties of nonstate actors including citizens, partisans, and municipalities. Consequently, it also addresses cases where the central government has at least been partly captured by illiberal and antidemocratic agents. Gabriele Badano and Alasia Nuti's approach builds on John Rawls's treatment of political liberalism and his awareness of the need to 'contain' unreasonable views, that is, views denying that society should treat every person as free and equal through a mutually acceptable system of social cooperation where pluralism is to be expected. The authors offer original solutions to vexed problems within political liberalism by putting forward a new account of the relation between ideal and non-ideal theory, explaining why it is justifiable to exclude unreasonable persons from the constituency of public reason, and showing that the strictures of public reason do not apply to those suffering from severe injustice. In doing so, the book further politicizes political liberalism and turns it into a framework that can insightfully respond to the challenges of real politics. (shrink)

This paper presents a conception of corruption informed by epistemic democratic theory. I first explain the view of corruption as a disease of the political body. Following this view, we have to consider the type of actions that debase a political entity of its constitutive principal in order to assess corruption. Accordingly, we need to consider what the constitutive principle of democracy is. This is the task I undertake in the second section where I explicate democratic legitimacy. I (...) present democracy as a procedure of social inquiry about what ought to be done that includes epistemic and practical considerations. In the third section, I argue that the problem of corruption for a procedural conception of democracy is that the epistemic value of the procedure is diminished by corrupted agents’ lack of concern for truth. Corruption, according to this view, consists in two deformities of truth: lying and bullshit. These deformities corrupt since they conceal private interests under the guise of a concern for truth. In the fourth section, I discuss the difficulties a procedural account may face in formulating solutions to the problem of corruption. (shrink)

Political theorists have recently sought to replace the liberal, contractual theory of the firm with a political view that models the authority relation of employee to firm, and its appropriate regulation, on that of subject to state. This view is liable to serious difficulties, however, given existing discontinuities between corporate and civil authority as to their coerciveness, entry and exit conditions, scope, legal standing, and efficiency constraints. I here inspect these, and argue that, albeit in some cases significant, (...) such discontinuities fail to undermine the firm/state analogy, either because they are not significant enough to do so or because the particular trait on which they hinge is not decisive for how authority, in the state and in the firm, should be regulated to be legitimate. A pro tanto requirement exists, I thus argue, that corporate authority be held to regulatory norms comparable to those legitimate states abide by, including civil liberties, rule-of-law constraints, and accountability to subjects. (shrink)

Kant’s discussion of the highest good is subject to continuous disagreement between the proponents of two interpretations of this concept. According to the secular interpretation, Kant conceived of the highest good as a political ideal which can be realized through human agency alone, albeit only from the Critique of the Power of Judgement onwards. By way of contrast, proponents of the theological interpretation find Kant’s treatment of the highest good in his later works to be wholly coherent with the (...) discussions of this concept found in the second Critique. In their view, however, Kant never conceived of the highest good as a political ideal, and some go as far as to argue that it is the work of God alone. In this article, I defend a theologico-political account of the highest good that avoids the pitfalls of both readings. (shrink)

It is commonly held that political ignorance is rational, a response to the high costs and low benefits of acquiring political information. But many recent critics of the claim that political ignorance is rational instead urge that it is a simple consequence of agents not concerning themselves with the acquisition of political information whatsoever. According to such critics, political ignorance is inadvertent radical ignorance rather than a rational response to the incentives faced by agents in (...) democracies. And since political ignorance is not a response to incentives, these critics urge, it cannot be ameliorated by incentivizing the acquisition of political information. This paper has two goals. First, I show that these seemingly competing accounts of political ignorance are in fact complementary, together explaining much political ignorance. Indeed, there is a sense in which political ignorance can be both rational and radical at the same time. Second, I more closely examine the relationship between incentives, kinds of political ignorance, and the acquisition of political information. On the one hand, from the fact that political ignorance is rational it does not follow that it can be overcome by incentivizing the acquisition of information. On the other hand, from the fact that political ignorance is radical it does not follow that it cannot be overcome by incentivizing the acquisition of information. Lastly, the complexity of the information in question is more relevant to determining whether ignorance can be overcome than whether such ignorance is rational or radical. (shrink)

I argue that there is nothing in Kant’s moral theory that legitimates condemnation of same-sex relations and that the arguments from natural ends Kant relies on in doing so are unjustified by the constraints placed upon morality to avoid the empirical determination of judgments. In order to make clear why same-sex activity does not contradict the requirements of the moral law, we need to understand Kant’s account of legitimate sexual activity. I provide this reconstruction in the first section, drawing upon (...) the Lectures on Ethics and Metaphysics of Morals. In the second section, I critique the first kind of argument that grounds Kant’s assessment, that from natural ends. I show how it is based upon underlying teleological premises and raise doubts concerning Kant’s reliance on “regulative ideas” in making a consistent ethical theory. In the third section, I argue that same-sex activity that conforms to the conditions of the moral law, especially given the concepts of consent and reciprocity, are in conformity with Kant’s formal requirement of the law of pure practical reason, and therefore cannot justifiably be condemned on those grounds. Finally, I conclude with some discussion about Rawls and political liberalism. I hope to show how the present Kantian revival in ethical theory can place itself in opposition to the conservative and homophobic hysteria surrounding debates on political and legal issues such as same-sex “marriage.”. (shrink)

According to political liberalism, laws must be justified to all citizens in order to be legitimate. Most political liberals have taken this to mean that laws must be justified by appeal to a specific class of ‘public reasons’, which all citizens can accept. In this paper I defend an alternative, convergence, model of public justification, according to which laws can be justified to different citizens by different reasons, including reasons grounded in their comprehensive doctrines. I consider three objections (...) to such an account—that it undermines sincerity in public reason, that it underestimates the importance of shared values, and that it is insufficiently deliberative—and argue that convergence justifications are resilient to these objections. They should therefore be included within a theory of political liberalism, as a legitimate form of public justification. This has important implications for the obligations that political liberalism places upon citizens in their public deliberations and reason-giving, and might make the theory more attractive to some of its critics, particularly those sympathetic to religious belief. (shrink)

The political philosophy originates from the reflections of crisis, risks and threats which society faces to. The author understands environmentalism as a tendency of current political philosophy which starts from the reflections of causes and possible effects of global environmental crisis as one of the most serious threats to the existential preconditions of current political system and global civilization at all. Considering the changes in social, technological and environmental starting conditions of the existence of economic-political system (...) – that are consequences of the transition from stable geologic-climate era of Holocene to unstable era of anthropocene – it is necessary to reconsider once more the basic premises, imperatives and conceptual frames of current economic-political system. The outlines of current economic-political system in philosophical frame were laid out by founders of modern political thinking while we can identify some of basic premises of environmentalism and also concepts relevant to the reflection of current threats and risks in some of their works. Author considers the concept of civil and human rights, the concept of natural state and the concept of social contract to be suitable for the reflection of the crisis of current economic-political system regarding environmentalism. Afterwards, the author formulates in what meanings are these concepts actual also for anthropocene. In conclusion, the author´s hypothesis is that the political philosophy of 21st century must reflect the environmental preconditions and limits of existence and forms of economic-political system and, at the same time, it must take into account that any economic and social activities have influence on the quality and sustainability of environment. (shrink)

Political polarization is one of the most discussed challenges facing contemporary democracies and is often associated with a broader epistemic crisis. While inspiring a large literature in political science, polarization’s epistemic problems also have significance for normative democratic theory, and this study develops a new approach aimed at understanding them. In contrast to prominent accounts from political psychology—group polarization theory and cultural cognition theory—which argue that polarization leads individuals to form unreliable political beliefs, this study focuses (...) on system-level diversity. It argues that polarization’s epistemic harms are best located in its tendency to reduce the diversity of perspectives utilized in a democratic system and in how this weakens the system’s ability to identify and address problems of public concern. Understanding such harms is also argued to require a greater consideration of the political dynamics of polarization and issues of elite discourse, alongside political psychology. (shrink)

Positive political theorists typically deny the possibility of collective agents by understanding aggregation problems to imply that groups are not rational decision-makers. This view contrasts with List and Pettit’s view that such problems actually imply the necessity of accounting for collective agents in explanations of group behaviour. In this paper, I explore these conflicting views and ask whether positive political theorists should alter their individualist analyses of groups like legislatures, political parties, and constituent assemblies. I show how (...) we fail to appreciate the significance of strategic voting and agenda control by treating groups as agents. I, therefore, conclude that positive political theorists should cling to their individualist approach and maintain that groups are not agents. (shrink)

I defend a neo-republican account of the right to have political rights. Neo-republican freedom from domination is a sufficient condition for the extension of political rights not only for permanent residents, but also for temporary residents, unauthorized migrants, and some expatriates. I argue for the advantages of the neo-republican account over the social membership account, the affected-interest account, the stakeholder account, and accounts based on the justification of state coercion.

Unlike his theory of justice as fairness, John Rawls’s political liberalism has generally been spared from critiques regarding what is due to the disabled. This paper demonstrates that, due to the account of the basic ideas of society and persons provided by Rawls, political liberalism requires that the interests of numerous individuals with disabilities should be put aside when the most fundamental issues of justice are settled. The aim is to accommodate within public reason the due concern for (...) the disabled while upholding political liberalism. To achieve this aim, a revision of the basic ideas of persons and society is proposed. The idea of persons should be regarded as more fundamental than that of social cooperation, and persons should be defined in terms of minimal moral powers. (shrink)

Standard accounts of civil disobedience include nonviolence as a necessary condition. Here I argue that such accounts are mistaken and that civil disobedience can include violence in many aspects, primarily excepting violence directed at other persons. I base this argument on a novel understanding of civil disobedience: the special character of the practice comes from its combination of condemnation of a political practice with an expressed commitment to the political. The commitment to the political is a commitment (...) to engaging with others as co-members in the on-going political project of living together. I show how such an understanding of civil disobedience is superior to the Rawlsian strain of thought, which focuses on fidelity to law. Rawls was concerned with civil disobedience solely in the context of overriding political obligation. The project of characterizing a contestatory political practice that can be distinguished and used in a wider variety of contexts than Rawls is concerned with, including under illegitimate regimes, beyond the nation-state, or on behalf of anarchism, requires a different understanding of civil disobedience. (shrink)

Informal political representation can be a political lifeline, particularly for oppressed and marginalized groups. Such representation can give these groups some say, however mediate, partial, and imperfect, in how things go for them. Coeval with the political goods such representation offers these groups are its particular dangers to them. Mindful of these dangers, skeptics challenge the practice for being, inter alia, unaccountable, unauthorized, inegalitarian, and oppressive. These challenges provide strong pro tanto reasons to think the practice morally (...) impermissible. This paper considers the question: On what conditions is the informal political representation of oppressed and marginalized groups permissible? By responding to skeptics’ challenges, I develop a systematic account of moral constraints that, if adopted, would make such representation permissible. The account that emerges shows that informal political representatives (IPRs) must aim to fulfill two sets of sometimes conflicting duties to the represented: democracy within duties, which concern how the representative treats and relates to the represented, and justice without duties, which concern how the representative’s actions advance the aims of the representation. (shrink)

Against the enthusiasm for dialogue and deliberation in recent democratic theory, the Italian philosopher Roberto Esposito and French philosopher Jacques Rancière construct their political philosophies around the nondialogical figure of the third person. The strikingly different deployments of the figure of the third person offered by Esposito and Rancière present a crystallization of their respective approaches to political philosophy. In this essay, the divergent analyses of the third person offered by these two thinkers are considered in terms of (...) the critical strategies they employ. Contrasting Esposito’s strategy of “ethical dissensus” with Rancière’s strategy of “aesthetic dissensus,” it is argued that Esposito’s attempts to recruit the figure of the third person to dismantle the dispositif of the person are politically problematic, while Rancière’s alternative account of the third person is more promising for political theory and practice. (shrink)

The conciliationist and steadfast approaches have dominated the conversation in the epistemology of disagreement. In this paper, drawing on Jennifer Lackey’s justificationist approach and the casuistry paradigm in medical ethics, I will develop a more contextual epistemology of political disagreement. On this account, a given political disagreement’s scope, domain, genealogy, and consequence can be helpful for determining whether we should respond to that disagreement at the level of our confidence, beliefs, or with policy. Though some may argue that (...) responding with policy is a practical consideration instead of an epistemic matter, I argue that even policy responses to disagreements have an epistemic dimension to them that we should not ignore. (shrink)

The contemporary political philosopher John Rawls considers himself to be part of the social contract tradition of John Locke, Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Immanuel Kant, but not of the tradition of Locke's predecessor, Thomas Hobbes. Call the Hobbesian tradition interest-based, and the Lockean tradition right-based, because it assumes that there are irreducible moral facts which the social contract can assume. The primary purpose of Locke's social contract is to justify the authority of the state over its citizens despite the fact (...) that those citizens are naturally free and equal. I assume that this task is of central importance to all right-based social contract theories: in chapter one I lay out the general problems faced by all contract theories, and in chapter two, three and four I examine in depth the accounts of political obligation offered by Locke, Rousseau, and Rawls. I conclude that all members of the right-based social contract tradition fail to provide an account of obligation that can explain the bond between a citizen and her state. (shrink)

The purpose of this dissertation is to design a conception of political poverty that can address the loss of the experience of political freedom. This form of political poverty is described as separate from poverty of resources and opportunities, and poverty of capabilities required for participation. The study aims to make intelligible how a person or a group can suffer from a diminishing and fracturing of social experience, which can lead to the inability to experience oneself as (...) a capable and credible political agent, political engagement as a meaningful field of action, and democratic politics as a meaningful avenue for changing things for the better. This is a phenomenon which has been heretofore neglected by political theorists. -/- The study presents a heuristic diagnosis of political poverty as loss of experiential freedom that involves four aspects of experience that have specifically political relevance: loss of trust, loss of expressivity, loss of a sense of access to the public world, and the loss of future temporality in experience. Diminishing and fracturing of these aspects of social experience can lead to politically impoverished persons and groups to become complicit in their own marginalisation by remaining unmotivated to challenge it. These aspects of social experience are approached through phenomenological portraits, chosen from literature on social exclusion and poverty. The diagnosis remains open to further development through exploration of other aspects of experience. -/- The study draws on the thinking of Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Hannah Arendt to present an account of political freedom as only experienced in co-existence with others. Through a critical discussion of their work, a more comprehensive account of political agency is developed. The experience of having political agency involves not just the cognitive and communicative capacities of the subject, but also the entire perceptual and motor intentionality of their lived body. The experience of meaningfulness is approached by exploring the intersubjective constitution of the self in a dialectical process with their social environment. This experience is described as a form of faith in oneself as an agent and in the meaningfulness of political engagement. Such faith is a practical, meaning-giving intentional relationship of a lived body to their social environment. -/- This study emphasizes the experience of being a capable and credible political agent, and experiencing politics as a meaningful field for engagement, as important aspects of political freedom that should be considered alongside inclusivity of democratic processes, the equality of opportunity to participate, and the equality of the cognitive and communicative capabilities required for effective participation. In order to discuss political poverty as the loss of experiential freedom, we must go beyond objectivist models of social critique and approach the problem with the tools of existential phenomenology. (shrink)

The conventional interpretation of Hannah Arendt's accounts of forgiveness considers them secularistic. The secular features of her thinking that resist grounding the act of forgiving in divine criteria offer a good corrective to religious forgiveness that fosters depoliticization. Arendt's vision of free politics, however, calls for much more nuance and complexity regarding the secular and the religious in realizing forgiveness for transitional politics than the secularist rendition of her thinking allows. After identifying an area of ambiguity in Arendt's thoughts that (...) invites further investigation of religious forgiveness, this study seeks to relieve her misgivings about religion's role in politics by engaging with Dietrich Bonhoeffer's theology, which emphasizes worldliness and altruism in religious faith. Through constructive engagements with both thinkers, the article presents a balanced Arendtian position that is neither solely secularist nor complacent about religion in politics. (shrink)

The main aim of this article is to use the resources of relevant-alternatives contextualism to provide an account of an unrecognized form of epistemic injustice that I call irrelevance-injustice. Irrelevance-injustice occurs either when a speaker raises an alternative that is not taken seriously when it should be, or when a speaker raises an alternative that is taken seriously when it should not be. Irrelevance-injustice influences what alternatives are perceived to be relevant and patterns of knowledge ascriptions in ways that are (...) unfair. Asymmetries in whose alternatives are taken seriously affect how many alternatives members of different groups must rule out prior to being ascribed knowledge. Because knowledge ascriptions have socially valuable functions, asymmetries in whose alternatives are taken seriously mean asymmetries in who gets to do socially valuable things with knowledge ascriptions. (shrink)

Politics abounds with bad language: lying and bullshitting, grandstanding and virtue signaling, code words and dogwhistles, and more. But why is there so much bad language in politics? And what, if anything, can we do about it? In this paper I show how these two questions are connected. Politics is full of bad language because existing social and political institutions are structured in such a way that the production of bad language becomes rational. In principle, by modifying these institutions (...) we can reduce the prevalence of bad language. However, as I show, such practical efforts are fraught with difficulties. After first outlining an account of bad language (Section 1), I examine the rationality of three different types of bad language: inaccurate language, insincere language, and unclear language (Section 2). Next, I discuss the possibility of implementing institutional reforms to improve the quality of political discourse (Section 3). However, I then outline and discuss two serious complications for institutional reforms—namely, they create risk of abuse, and they could preclude instances of seemingly bad language that, in fact, are socially beneficial (Section 4). I conclude with some thoughts about how to pursue institutional reform in an appropriately circumspect manner (Section 5). (shrink)

This work examines the development and performance of federal independent regulatory bodies in Canada in the period up to 1979, with particular attention to the operation of legislative schemes that include executive review and appeal powers. The author assesses the impact of the exercise of these powers on the administrative law process, and proposes new models for the generation, interpretation, implementation, review, and enforcement of regulatory policy. The study includes a series of representative case studies based on documentation and extensive (...) interviews with individuals drawn from government, agencies, and other parties, including counsel for public interest groups. This enables author, writing from her experience as a participant-observer embedded in the public interest legal sector, to draw on the experiences and perspectives of a broad range of participants in the regulatory process, including but not limited to those dealing with the regulated energy, transportation, communications, and foreign investment sectors. Legal principles identified as emergent in leading judicial decisions in administrative law are used to assess the powers and practices used in executive reviews and appeals. The author finds those powers and practices to be flawed and proposes changes. The proposed models are designed to accord with emerging legal principles and avoid flaws of the types identified in the review and appeal provisions. This work, written under contract with the Administrative Law Project of the Law Reform Commission of Canada, formed one part of a comprehensive study of administrative law at the federal level in Canada. (shrink)

Should our factual understanding of the world influence our normative theorising about it? G.A. Cohen has argued that our ultimate normative principles should not be constrained by facts. Many others have defended or are committed to various versions or subsets of that claim. In this paper I dispute those positions by arguing that, in order to resist the conclusion that ultimate normative principles rest on facts about possibility or conceivability, one has to embrace an unsatisfactory account of how principles generate (...) normative political judgments. So political theorists have to choose between principles ostensibly unbiased by our current understanding of human motivation and political reality, or principles capable of reliably generating political judgments. I conclude with wider methodological observations in defence of the latter option, and so of a return to political philosophy’s traditional blend of normative and descriptive elements. (shrink)

P.J. Markie tries to solve the so-called particularity problem of natural duty accounts of political obligation, a problem which seems to make natural duty accounts implausible. I argue that Markie at best “dissolves” the problem: while his own natural duty account of political obligation still does not succeed in ensuring particularity, this is not an implausible but an entirely plausible implication of his account, thanks to the weakness of his concept of political obligation. The price for this, (...) however, is that his approach has little to do with political obligation and the particularity problem as discussed in the literature. (shrink)

Reshaping our methodological research tools for adequately capturing injustice and domination has been a central aspiration of feminist philosophy and social epistemology in recent years. There has been an increasingly empirical turn in recent feminist and political theorization, engaging with case studies and the challenges arising from conducting research in solidarity with unequal partners. I argue that these challenges cannot be resolved by merely adopting a norm and stance of deference to those in the struggle for justice. To conduct (...) philosophical research in an engaged and solidaristic manner, I suggest that deference be supplemented by three methodological and normative principles: 1) epistemic humility, 2) accountability, and 3) co-producing knowledge. I situate these principles within contemporary philosophical work on solidarity, and show how they might help confront power imbalances and other methodological hazards that arise when conducting research in solidarity with others. I arrive at these principles in part by critically reflecting on my own attempt to conduct research in solidarity with women’s rights activists in Senegal. (shrink)

In the center of the fifth book of the Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle elliptically characterizes political justice as a form of reciprocal rule that exists between free and equal persons pursuing a common life directed toward self-sufficiency under the rule of law. My dissertation analyzes Aristotle's thematic treatments of political justice in the Nicomachean Ethics and Politics in order to elucidate its meaning, clarify its relationship to the other forms of justice that he also discusses, and compare it to (...) contemporary neo-Aristotelian accounts of justice. ;The first chapter examines the unclear and disputed passages of Ethics V.6--7 and explains why Aristotle discusses political justice in his ethical treatise. The second chapter makes use of Aristotle's juxtaposition of political justice to household justice on the one hand and despotic justice on the other hand in order to explicate the necessary conditions of political justice, namely, freedom, equality, commonality, self-sufficiency, and the rule of law. To make sense of these concepts, the chapter explores such topics as Aristotle's understanding of the household, his notion of the self and his political criticisms of Socrates. The third chapter examines political justice or reciprocal rule in the Politics in order to understand how political justice can be both a human virtue and an institutional arrangement of offices. The fourth chapter offers a critique of Fred Miller's reconstruction of Aristotelian natural rights. Although Miller is correct to say that Aristotle recognized and understood "rights claims," he is mistaken in claiming that they are an integral part of Aristotle's practical philosophy. Aristotle understood the problems for political compromise posed by rights conceived as "trumps," and he rejects rights as philosophically fundamental on the grounds that they are an inadequate solution to both the political problem of justice and the stability of flourishing political institutions. (shrink)

In this paper we argue that political envy is central to unraveling the racial dynamics in Spike Lee's Do The Right Thing. Building upon Sara Protasi’s taxonomy of envy and, in particular, from her analysis of some DTRT scenes, we conduct a more thorough interrogation of how political emotions, most notably envy, shape race relations in the film. We start by summarizing Protasi’s account of envy and then review two alternative accounts of political emotions. After elucidating what (...) envy is and how it becomes politically valenced, we analyze three key scenes that are the most emblematic of political envy: 1) a discussion between three Black characters on the street corner, 2) an exchange between the film’s main character, Mookie, and his racist co-worker, Pino; and 3) the film’s climactic riot sequence. Our analysis of these three scenes, in addition to complementing previous readings of Do The Right Thing, highlight envy’s potential to either impede or promote political action. (shrink)

The primary objective of this book is to open space for rethinking the relationship between art and politics. It seeks to combat one of the fundamental assumptions that has plagued many of the previous debates on this issue: that art and politics are distinct entities definable in terms of common properties, and that they have privileged points of intersection, which can be determined once and for all in terms of an established formula. This common sense assumption is rooted in a (...) transcendent illusion according to which there are more or less fixed characteristics that unify our terms, concepts, and practices in such a way as to guarantee their meaning. Against this substantialist approach, Radical History & the Politics of Art argues for a praxeological account that begins the other way around by analyzing specific cultural practices without presupposing a conceptual unity behind them. Such an orientation is radically historicist in the sense that it recognizes that all of our practices—be they linguistic, theoretical, aesthetic or political—are historically constituted and that they are necessarily part of a temporal dynamic. Hence the contingent nature of the labels used to classify various practices or even identify ‘practice’ as such. Radical history thereby proposes a significant departure from the extant debates on art and politics by maintaining that there is no ‘art’ or ‘politics’ in general, nor a singular relation between them. There are only historically constituted practices in various conjunctures, some of which have been labeled, through practical acts of denomination, as ‘artistic’ or ‘political.’ Instead of proposing one more response to the oft-repeated question ‘what is the relationship between Art and Politics?’ this book seeks to overcome the presuppositions that plague such a question. It thereby changes the very nature of the investigation by asking: ‘how do the diverse aspects of practices identified as ‘aesthetic’ and ‘political’ overlap, intertwine and sometimes merge in precise socio-historical force fields of action? (shrink)