Does anyone have any idea why the word “mercantalism” is not in the discourse of American politics?

 I would like to thank Alon for his comments on Chapter 7, especially given the importance of his own work on the topic of the chapter.  My conversations with him on this subject also have helped me to clarify my own thinking.  Nonetheless, there are some important points of disagreement.

Alon rejects the balancing approach when it comes to majoirtarian violations of many basic rights.  Although Alon leaves open the question of whether there might be such balancing in some cases, in his view, often when a majority violates basic rights that majority decision has no weight in terms of democratic legitimacy.  Alon gives us an example for instance of a plebiscite that would prohibit Corey Brettschneider from studying political science.  He argues that such laws not only violate rights but that there is no sense in which they are democratic.  He needs to make this last claim to show that such decisions have no weight or value on democratic grounds.

I am tempted to agree with Alon about this specific example.  But it seems to me that this example is a particular distinct kind of rights violation.  Namely, this law has the ad hoc character of the special laws that I argued in chapter 2 violated the most basic requirements of the rule of law in self-government.  Such a decision does not even result in the making of law, the most basic task of legislatures and plebiscites in a democracy.  Therefore such a policy has no weight because it does not even have the status of law.

Read the rest of this entry »

Thanks to Alex for his thoughtful and helpful post on this chapter.  His comments are especially helpful in thinking through how my account might respond to a kind of libertarian or “classically liberal” challenge. Specifically, Alex develops such a potential challenge from within the context of democratic contractualism. In particular, Alex wonders whether I am overly statist in my approach to welfare rights.  Citing Skocpol, he suggests that state involvement in welfare provision might weaken incentives of civil society groups to provide charity.  Why, he asks, should democratic contractualism rely on the state rather than charity to provide basic welfare rights?

I acknowledge the logical possibility that private markets might provide the kind of minimal welfare guarantees I defend in this chapter.  But absent any government involvement, I am skeptical that this logical possibility is likely.  More importantly, I have another worry about purely private provision of charity as a way of meeting these goals.  Although, Locke speaks of a right to “charity,” I worry that a system of purely private provision absent any state guarantees might undermine the notion that a guarantee of a minimum level of goods is in fact a right. Charity is often seen as a moral duty, but not a right required for political legitimacy.  On my account, however, it is important that these entitlements are, like the other democratic rights I defend,  necessary conditions for a legitimate state.  In sum, I acknowledge the logical possibility that these rights might be met be a market without a government safety net.  But I worry both that this is an unlikely empirical possibility and that such a system would weaken the claim that  a minimum provision of goods as a democratic right.

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I’ve been very negligent in replying to Ben’s and Andy’s excellent comments on my PPPS democratic leadership paper.  It being Christmas Eve, I’ve finally found time to hastily write up my thoughts!  They’re lengthy, so I’ve followed the pattern and uploaded them as PDF.  Here they are.  All further thoughts are, of course, not only welcome but greatly and enthusiastically appreciated.

(Have a good holiday, everyone.)

Sorry to all for my first post ever on the site being an advertisement, but the APT this year is trying to spread the word about next year’s conference as widely as we can.

The APT Conference 2009
Texas A&M University, College Station, Texas
October 22-24, 2009
CALL FOR PAPERS
Proposals due February 15, 2009

The Association for Political Theory (APT) invites proposals for its seventh annual conference to be held October 22–24, 2009 at Texas A&M University in College Station, Texas. The APT is an interdisciplinary organization devoted to supporting political theory and political philosophy. We recognize that scholars in a range of disciplines are doing important critical work on social and political questions. We welcome their participation in this conference. The APT Conference provides a collegial setting for scholars of various professional ranks, institutional affiliations and theoretical approaches to engage one another in fruitful discussions of their work. To learn more about the Association and its annual conference, please visit the APT Gateway website.

The full text of the call for papers is now available on the APT website. Visit the APT homepage, or click here to download a printer-friendly pdf of the Call.

Paper and panel proposals can be submitted any time on the APT website.
Proposals are due by February 15, 2009.

You can download and print .pdf posters (color, or black and white) from the APT website announcing the call for papers. Visit the APT website and click on “APT Conferences,” or just click here to download them directly: the color version, the black and white version.

I’ve written some fairly extensive comments on the podcast that Paul Gowder posted a few weeks ago (or, more precisely, on the written paper (.pdf)).  Since they’re several pages long, I’ve decided to link to them as a .pdf rather than taking up oodles of space in a web post. I do think the paper is very exciting, and I hope that these comments will spur further discussion either here or below Paul’s original post.

Anyway: here are the comments.

Moral and political philosophers are concerned with how we ought to act, as both individuals and collectivity as societies.  So we ask questions like: What makes an action right or wrong?  What constitutes the “good life”?  How should society distribute the benefits and burdens of social cooperation (like wealth, and rights and freedoms)?

As philosophers, it is not surprising that we turn to the history of philosophy to help us grapple with these timeless normative questions.  So we turn to intellectual giants like Aristotle, Kant, Mill and Marx for guidance on how we can sensibly deliberate about the demands of morality and justice.  More recently, moral and political philosophers have engaged (and still do) in many a spirited debate relating to John Rawls’s theory “justice as fairness”, and topical applied topics like multiculturalism, animal rights, deliberative democracy and cosmopolitanism.  These are all interesting issues, topics I myself have published on and currently teach.  But something vital is missing…. 

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Many thanks to Jim Wilson for an excellent discussion of Chapter V, “The Rights of the Punished.”  I will focus on two issues raised by his comments.  Both concern the relationship between my own theory and more traditional accounts of punishment, in particular concerns about whether punishment deters future crime as well as the possible place of my account of punishment within the retributivist tradition.

First, Jim perceptively elaborates on Hobbes’ account of punishment and asks whether it might be more compatible with my own arguments than I allow.  In particular, he asks whether a defense of capital punishment on general deterrence grounds might be brought within the scope of democratic contractualism.  As Jim makes clear, it is important for Hobbes that any account of capital punishment cannot be justified within the contractual relationship between the condemned and the state.  The ties of the social contract are severed in cases of capital punishment because the state’s sole aim is to protect life.  Capital punishment fails to meet that goal for the condemned and therefore any justification of it must sever the tie of that relationship.  The result is that for Hobbes capital punishment is justified for the state and resistance is justified for the condemned.  But this kind of justification is distinct from those that take place within social contract.  Read the rest of this entry »

Spring 2009 PPPS CFP: 19 December 2009

I’m extending the deadline for submissions for the Spring 2009 podcast symposium until Friday 19 December — SCM.

Continuing with the format that we have experimented with this semester, I’d like to invite submissions for the next Political Philosophy Podcast Symposium to be held over the Spring semester of 2009. Please submit a 300-500 word abstract of a paper, in a pdf file and prepared for blind review, to admin at publicreason.net by Friday 19 December 2009. As with this semester’s symposium, a committee of members of the website, not including myself, will choose between the abstracts.

Those who submit an abstract commit themselves to having a full draft of the paper ready by 19 January 2009, so we can get the papers out to people to comment as soon as possible. Please also include a CV if you would be willing to comment on someone else’s paper. Even if you don’t want to submit a proposal, but would be interested in commenting, please send a CV along, with your interests and areas of expertise clearly stated. Graduate students are also welcome to submit abstracts. Anyone who presents a paper in the symposium will become a member of the site, whether they have a Ph.D. or not.

Comments are open in this thread if anyone would like to make suggestions about the symposium. Alternatively, you can email me at the above email address.

Hi all,

I just joined Public Reason (having met Simon at a conference) and am looking forward to participating.  I’ve already seen lots of terrific material, and realize that I should have joined long ago.

I have what may seem a strange problem.  I’ll be teaching an undergraduate lecture course in Political Ethics next Spring quarter, as I have in the past.  This is a conceptual rather than a practical course, it covers not bribes and whistleblowing, but the basic theoretical works relevant to political ethics issues (though we will treat a few actual cases).  We’ll be reading Pitkin on representation, Machiavelli’s Prince, Weber’s “Politics as a Vocation”–and a bit of moral philosophy on an introductory level: utilitarianism, deontology, Bernard Williams on integrity and personal projects and shooting one to save ten, that sort of thing.  While the course is nominally upper level, there are no prerequisites (UCLA’s bureaucracy won’t allow it), and UCLA has no core requirements in moral and political philosophy such that I can count on students’ knowing some.   Nor is this a course for philosophy (or political theory) majors.  The students are political science or public policy majors interested in the substantive issues, not in ethical theory.

My problem is Kant.  When I’ve taught the course in the past, I’ve tried teaching Kant through the Grounding and a few of the writings on lying, but it hasn’t worked out.  The students find my lectures clear; they like Korsgaard on the right to lie; they get the murderer at the door stuff and enjoy debating it–but the Grounding is just over their head.  Spending two weeks on it (out of ten) doesn’t help: that’s of course not enough time, and it’s not the right students, and they’re just not able to take it in.  But I don’t really know how else to teach Kantianism.  “Theory and Practice” is lovely but deceptively allusive and not on the main topics of deontology; the same is true in spades of “Towards Perpetual Peace.”

I’d welcome any suggestions: an unknown piece of Kant (e.g. a public lecture) that I’m not familiar with?  (If it’s in German only and not too long, fine: I’ll happily translate for the class and with luck for publication in Teaching Ethics or something.)  A standard introductory piece on Kantianism, with a few key quotations and some down-to-earth yet serious explication?

In this I may be handicapped by never having taken an introductory ethics course myself.  I took a whole course on the First Critique and read lots of Kant’s (and others’) ethical works in advanced-undergraduate and graduate seminars, but never had to learn as an undergraduate what I’m now supposed to convey.  (The famous Justice class at Harvard doesn’t count: I’m looking to convey a bit more than is expected in that entertaining but not egregiously substantive course.)

To some extent, Mill’s Utilitarianism, while nowhere as baffling as Kant, is also hard to teach in such a context, and I’d welcome suggestions for substitutes or supplements to that too.

Many thanks in advance,

Andy.

Hi.  I’m Paul Gowder, a Ph.D. candidate in Stanford’s Political Science department.  This paper arose out of another paper that I have in progress.  The other paper, a critique of Rawls’s idea of public reason and an attempt to develop a broadly proceduralist alternative that can meet the stability and justification concerns driving the original idea without constraining democratic debate, was foundering on the rocks of my inability to articulate a normative principle to ground the fundamental objection to that kind of constraint.  This paper is my first, preliminary, attempt to make some sense of the intuition behind that objection — the idea of the value of citizen moral advocacy, qua citizen moral advocacy, in a democracy.

In this paper, I’m trying the following general approach: we imagine that certain things (justice, democracy, public welfare) are virtues of states, and we can say that a) a citizen is virtuous as a citizen (as a matter of democratic values, or civic values more generally) to the extent the citizen promotes those state virtues; and b) we ought to support those behaviors that ordinarily make up civic virtue.  By support, I mean that the state ought to permit them (and even encourage them to some extent), and our normative theorizing ought to do the same.  Most of the paper is an argument to the effect that a notion of citizen leadership centered on transformative moral advocacy does have a general tendency to promote the virtues of states, and, thus, is a form of civic virtue.  To get there, I primarily offer a fairly ambitious argument about the role of instability in what we might call the evolution of virtuous states.

All of this is very tentative: the paper should be understood as something like a very early working paper, which is still full of the bad ideas and overlooked problems that characterize papers in this stage of the academic life cycle (much more moth than butterfly).  I’m somewhat (rather) dissatisfied with it as it stands.  In particular, the argument about stability needs a lot more work, and I’m considering it for a full-size standalone research program, or a dissertation, or something like that.  So I’d particularly appreciate thoughts on how that line of thinking (section II.B) can be developed.

With no further ado, the paper is here.   As it’s fairly long, I created an abbreviated version for podcasting purposes, here.  Ben Saunders was kind enough to give the commentary, which is here. (I have some extensive replies to some of his comments, which I’ll be posting in dribs and drabs over the next few days.) To listen to the podcast, you can click below.

My apologies for the rough condition of the draft (missing citations, formatting glitches, etc.)  Thanks to Ben for the comments, and to Simon for organizing this event.

 

 Making Space for Rosa Parks: Democratic Authorship as Political Autonomy: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

CB argues for a value theory of democracy as an alternative to procedural and epistemic theories. The three core values which underlie democracy are: equality of interests, political autonomy and reciprocity. These values are implicit in the practices and institutions of contemporary democracies. They are central to democracy because they facilitate and sustain the idea of democratic citizens as free, equal and reasonable rulers. These values are understood to be not merely important and central values for a just state but central to democratic governance. A careful articulation of these values reveals that these values require respect for both majoritarian procedures - procedures which guarantee meaningful participation in decision-making — and an effective protection of substantive rights. Much of CB’s book is devoted to an examination of the conclusions which follow from the value theory of democracy. CB identifies what substantive rights individuals have and establishes the ways in which the three core values identified by him support these rights.

The question addressed by chapter 7 is what institutional structures reflect best the core values and how these institutions ought to operate. Such an institutional structure ought to respect people’s autonomy by protecting participation, protecting equality of interests and instantiating reciprocity. Determining what the ideal institutional structure is requires examining hard cases, namely cases in which the decisions generated by majoritarian procedures (and, by virtue of this fact, decisions that are congenial to some of the democratic core values) are incompatible with the substantive rights (whose protection is also congenial to the core values). When majoritarian procedures yield decisions which violate substantive rights there is always an inevitable loss to democracy. If such decisions are allowed to stand, substantive rights are violated to the detriment of the core values; if, on the other hand, these decisions are overruled by the courts, majoritarian procedures are defied to the detriment of the core values. CB believes that given such conflicts the right decision is the decision which minimizes the aggregate or overall loss to the core values. Determining what the right decision is requires therefore comparing or balancing the loss to core values resulting from an anti-majoritarian rights-respecting decision and the loss to core values resulting from a majoritarian rights-violating decision.

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I got the idea for this paper while teaching a course on dictatorships and revolutions. The course had little political philosophy content (by design), but we did talk about whether democratic regimes are always to be preferred to non-democratic regimes, and I had a section on “transitional justice” at the end of the trimester. Teaching the course  crystallized a certain dissatisfaction with the emphasis of much recent political theory on questions about the justification of constitutional democracy. The problem was not that I had any objections to the justification of constitutional democracy, but that such discussions seemed to be of little help in evaluating the many kinds of political regimes that actually exist in the world today, and which can be imperfect in a bewildering variety of ways. As a native of Venezuela, I also wondered whether the emphasis of recent political theory on democracy obscured more than it illuminated the ways in which political regimes promote or fail to promote certain values and interests.

In the paper I do two things: first, I develop an analysis of the general idea of a “political regime” that is general enough to apply to existing political regimes (democratic and non-democratic), and flexible enough to capture their differences. I claim that a political regime can be thought of as a system for the division of the labor of political decisionmaking (just as markets are systems for the division of economic labor). The second thing I do is to explore - rather tentatively, it should be said - three criteria that I believe have been historically important in evaluating complex political regimes. The first criterion focuses on the resources and qualities of political decisionmakers. The second focuses on the interests promoted and protected through the operation of systems for the division of political labor. And the third focuses on the stability of such systems with respect to the kinds of characters that they help create and that sustain them.

The paper is perhaps more appropriately seen as a conceptual exploration than as a sustained argument for a particular thesis. To the extent that there is a sustained argument, it is a negative one: none of these criteria for evaluating political regimes is sufficient by itself as a basis for evaluating political regimes, and judgments of political regimes based on one criterion are not necessarily congruent with judgments based on another. All justified regimes may be alike, but all unhappy regimes are unhappy in their own way.

Since this is a relatively long paper, I have abridged it for the podcast presentation; the more detailed written version is here. (A written version of the abridged presentation, which is still a bit long, is here).

Thom Brooks’ useful comments are here. I also look forward to your comments. (Thom’s comments are now up — SCM)

 

 Unhappy Families: Three Ways of Thinking about Imperfect Political Regimes: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

In Chapter Six, Corey Brettschneider sets out to argue that citizens of ideal democracies are entitled to basic “welfare guarantees.”  In the two previous chapters, he has argued that democratic citizens are owed certain “negative rights” against state interference; here, he shifts his attention to what he calls the “positive rights of individuals to be given some particular good by the state” (114).  The argument of the chapter develops in three steps.  First, Brettschneider argues that private property in its modern form depends, for its very existence, on state coercion.  Second, he argues that private property must therefore be justifiable to all citizens (using the canons of justification he has defended so far in the book).  Third, he holds that any plausible justification of property must involve a guarantee of welfare rights to citizens.

Brettschneider begins by arguing that private property is best understood as a “bundle of rights” that fall into two categories: “vertical” and “horizontal” rights.  Vertical rights describe the owner’s relationship to the property itself and include her right to use, trade, destroy, and conserve that property.  Horizontal rights, on the other hand, describe the relationship between the property owner and other people.  The most basic of these horizontal rights is the right to exclude others, to prevent non-owners from exercising any control over one’s own property.  This right to exclude, says Brettschneider, requires the power of coercion.

Does this power of coercion necessarily implicate the state? Brettschneider acknowledges that there is some disagreement between liberals and libertarians on this question.  It is conceivable, he grants, to argue that owners could exercise such coercion themselves, or contract with others to provide it.   Such is not, however, the case in contemporary societies, where property ownership depends on state enforcement.  The duty to respect others’ property, and the corresponding right to exclude, are now enforced by law.  They must therefore be justified publicly.

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This paper was motivated by a dissatisfaction with the move to justify armed humanitarian intervention to deal with widespread and systematic human rights violations. I’m skeptical of arguments that defend a right or duty of armed intervention for a few reasons, but prominent among these is their failure to engage adequately with the empirical literature to determine whether armed intervention is an effective means to bringing about long-term progress on human rights performance. Some recent studies suggest that it’s not.

Although this paper was motivated by this worry, I don’t actually talk about humanitarian intervention here. Rather, I simply assume that we should look for alternatives to addressing human rights atrocities and proceed to consider how we might go about reforming the institution of sovereignty to deal with this problem. I don’t actually articulate any positive reform proposals here; I’m not in a position to do that yet. So this paper begins to lay the groundwork for a positive proposal.

I try to do three things in this paper. First, I discuss the role of non-ideal theory in political philosophy and try to work out an account of the sorts of considerations a theory of sovereignty must take into account if the theory is to serve as a basis for feasible reform proposals. The result is an account of what I’m calling pragmatic theory. I then use this account to evaluate Allen Buchanan’s (2004) theory of recognitional legitimacy, concluding that the view isn’t realistic enough to provide practical political guidance. Finally, I provide a preliminary framework for pragmatic moral theorizing about state sovereignty, concluding that such theorizing is limited to proposing ways to reform the sovereignty institution that restructure political relationships so that the interests of political leaders become aligned with the protection of individuals’ human rights.

I should note that I’ve been rethinking the sections on non-ideal and pragmatic theory since I sent the paper to Simon Caney for comments and am confident that I’ve mischaracterized the distinction between ideal and non-ideal theory and, as a result, misconstrued the relationship between non-ideal theory and pragmatic theory. I don’t think the problems here are fatal; I think the important distinction for the rest of the paper still holds. I just think the picture should be cast differently than I’ve done here. All this is to say: if you’re looking for a place to zero in on, this is a section one which I’m particularly interested in getting feedback. I’ve got some sketchy ideas on what to say, but I’d like to hear others’ thoughts on this.

Thanks to Simon May for organizing this symposium. Thanks to Simon Caney for his comments.

Here’s the paper.

Here are Simon’s comments.

 

 Standard Podcast: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

Erasmus University: 3 December 2008

The Faculty of Philosophy at the Erasmus University in Rotterdam presents a workshop on Gender in Social and Political Philosophy. The workshop will take place on 3 December 2008. The programme is below the fold:

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ALSP: 2-4 July 2009 | CFP: 1 February 2009

The Association for Legal and Social Philosophy will be holding its 2009 conference at the University of Edinburgh from 203 July 2009. From the website:

The last two decades have seen profound social and economic changes in all areas of our lives. To name but a few: borders have become both more open and more closed. We have witnessed unprecedented levels of technological development: from new medical technologies such as genetic engineering and cloning, to communication technologies such as the internet and new modes of warfare. Environmental degradation and climate change are now a daily reality.

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BSET: 13-15 July 2009 | CFP: 12 December 2008

Via Simon Kirchin:

The 2009 British Society for Ethical Theory Conference will be held at the University of Reading from 13-15 July 2009. The subject area is open within metaethics and normative ethics. Papers on topics in applied ethics or the history of ethics may also be considered provided they are also of wider theoretical interest. The deadline for submissions is 12th December, 2008. Papers and accompanying particulars should be emailed to Dr. Bart Streumer. Note that ONLY electronic submissions will be accepted.

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SAP: 26-28 June 2009 | CFP: 9 January 2009

The Society for Applied Philosophy 2009 annual conference will be held at the University of Leeds from 26-28 June 2009. The conference will have no specific theme.

Proposal abstracts should be submitted .doc or .rtf file format (300 word limit) and with the email subject line SAP AC2009 Abstract by email by Friday 9 January 2009. All applicants will be notified of a decision by early February 2009

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University of York: 24-26 June 2009

An announcement from Matthew Festenstein:

‘Deliberative democracy’ has become a dominant, if contested, paradigm in democratic thought. Political philosophers have investigated the conceptual shape and normative desirability of deliberation, rationality, procedural fairness. Empirical political scientists have explored the forms and availability of deliberation in relation to international negotiations, mediation processes, regional and national legislative processes, and various experimental settings. Among practitioners, the dea of deliberative democracy inspired a surge of experimentation with techniques of public participation in policy making, including citizens’ juries, participatory budgeting, electronic town halls, and many other models in environmental, development, health, and planning decisions around the world. Indeed, much empirical work on deliberative democracy has tended to focus on these micro processes, or ‘minipublics’, and to overlook the larger, macro issues which originally inspired the deliberative democracy project. More generally, political enthusiasm for mechanisms such as citizens’ juries has arguably not kept pace with developing conceptual, normative and empirical research.

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The University of Montreal’s Centre de recherche en éthique (CREUM) is proud to announce its senior fellowship grant. We are inviting applications of professor-researchers for residential fellowships which can vary in length according to individual circumstances. Fellowships up to 40 000 $ will be awarded for the academic year 2009-2010.

CREUM’s mission is to contribute to interdisciplinary research and graduate training in the areas of fundamental and applied ethics.

We encourage applications from researchers working in the principal research domains of CRÉUM : fundamental ethics, ethics and politics, ethics and health, ethics and economy, ethics and the environment. We also accept applications from different domains, inasmuch as their research has a direct link with ethics.

The University of Montreal is a francophone institution. Applicants are expected to have at least a working knowledge of French.

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Many thanks to Eric for another stellar set of insightful and challenging comments. Eric suggests that there is more potential for conflict between the substantive and procedural aspects of democracy than in less robust theories of self-government. I largely bracket this challenge for most of the book.  My first ambition is to establish an account of democratic justification to which those coerced by law are entitled and then to think about the basic rights that are required by it.  The first six chapters seek only to demonstrate that substantive rights are a part of the ideal of democracy.  But Eric’s question moves us in the inevitable direction from ideal to non-ideal theory.  Ideally any democratic procedure would affirm substantive democratic rights and there is a loss to the democratic ideal when they do not.  But as Eric points out actual democratic procedures which are themselves justifiable on the grounds of democratic contracutalism might not guarantee democratic rights.  He asks, can the conflict between democratic procedure and democratic substance be resolved by democratic contractualism?  The question seeks to reframe our earlier discussion about the tension between substantive and procedural aspects of democracy with reference to democratic contracualism, the framework I present for applying the core values to rights controversies.   Read the rest of this entry »

In Chapter 5 of Democratic Rights, Corey Brettschneider continues his project of showing how the value theory of democracy generates support for individual rights that serve as substantive limits on the outcomes of democratic procedures.  In this chapter, he asks how a democracy might justify the punishment of criminals, one of the most dramatic and severe forms of state coercion.  In the course of answering this question, Brettschneider concludes that there are some forms of punishment that a democratic citizen reasonably could reject.  A commitment to democracy, therefore, entails substantive limits on the state’s right to punish convicted criminals.

In this engaging chapter, Brettschneider elegantly and economically covers a lot of ground.  The various arguments about the limits on the right to punishment are interesting in their own right, but they also usefully illuminate the wider theory of democratic contractualism.  By following Brettschneider’s discussions of punishment, we get a better view of the kind of justificatory strategies his theory permits or denies.  In the course of my discussion, I’ll try to raise questions not only about Brettschneider’s specific conclusions, but also about the wider theoretical issues that have already been nicely laid out by the discussants of the earlier chapters.

The basic question of the chapter is to what extent a democracy may legitimately punish convicted criminals.  (We assume, for purposes of this chapter, that the procedures leading to conviction are just, and are as accurate as we can reasonably expect.)  Following his general theory of democratic contractualism, Brettschneider approaches this question primarily by asking “which punishment a criminal qua citizen reasonably could accept” (97).  The test for legitimate punishment is hypothetical, reasonable acceptance–not actual acceptance by criminals.  Criminals are entitled to justification (on which more below), but not to an absolute veto.  Consistently with Brettschneider’s broader emphasis on democratic citizens’ status as free and equal, he argues here that “this account of justification requires rights of criminals against punishments that undermine their status as citizens” (98).

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The expensive tastes objection constitutes a familiar argument against egalitarian (and other) theories of distributive justice that require redistribution of resources from those whose aims are relatively cheap to pursue to those whose aims are relatively expensive to pursue just in virtue of the difference in the costs of pursuit. It’s based quite straightforwardly on the common intuition that we simply ought not to endorse such redistributions. Often, the expensive tastes objection is seen as sufficient by itself to ground the rejection of those theories of distributive justice that are vulnerable to it.

Because of this, and because—as I argue in first half of the paper attached to this post—it turns out to be crucial even to objections which don’t explicitly appeal to it, the intuition in question (call it ‘the expensive tastes intuition’) is hugely important in debates about the ‘currency of egalitarian justice’. Yet it’s surely somewhat troubling that so central a plank in the case against the kinds of theories that are vulnerable to the expensive tastes objection should rest on one bare intuition—and one about societal arrangements with which we’re utterly unacquainted, at that.

I think that it is. Nevertheless, I share the intuition. So, in the second half of the paper, I try to uncover a plausible basis for it. To this end, I argue that what underlies the appeal of the metrics that render a distributive theory vulnerable to the expensive tastes objection—namely ‘distributive subjectivism’, which cedes authority in the assessment of what is good for individuals to the individuals themselves—can’t ultimately perform the task for which it is intended. The task for which is it is intended is that of avoiding appeals to values not shared by all in the justification of our political arrangements: the task of attaining the liberal ideal of legitimacy. I argue, however, that claims to redistribution in putative cases of expensive taste cannot, on subjectivist metrics, ultimately be insulated from appeals to individuals’ own values. So, distributive subjectivism is unacceptable to liberals seeking legitimate principles of justice.

I end by suggesting that the argument I’ve offered can be viewed as the theoretical support for the expensive tastes intuition, enabling that intuition to bear the weight that’s placed upon it. So, the expensive tastes objection is vindicated.

The PDF of the paper, for those who don’t want to subject themselves to my peculiar accent, is here.

Zofia Stemplowska’s comments are here (Zofia’s comments are now up — SCM).

I should mention that I recorded the podcast for this symposium before I presented the paper at the Manchester Workshop in Political Theory last month. This, and no other reason, is why I haven’t incorporated into the version I post here the many helpful suggestions and revisions that were recommended to me by the participants there.

Many thanks to Zofia for her discussion and to Simon May for organising everything. Thanks also to Nat Stein for loaning me his agreeable baritone for the quotations in my podcast.

I look forward to reading all of your comments, and appreciate your making the time to offer them.

 

 Distributive Subjectivism, Liberal Neutrality, and the Expensive Tastes Intuition: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

According to the value theory advanced so far, democracy is best understood in terms of three core values: equality of interests, political autonomy, and reciprocity. These values ground democratic rights of citizens, most obviously rights associated with the rule of law, on the one hand, and familiar freedoms of conscience and expression on the other. These rights, and the values they express, take seriously our status as free citizens who are, in equal measure, the willing authors and subjects of the laws.

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I’m grateful for the opportunity to participate in this forum, and thank Simon May and Public Reason for the work in organizing this symposium.

My paper provides a positive account of coercion that responds to difficulties I have found in many recent writings about coercion.  It enters these debates through what seems a bit of an off-hand distinction that some have made, between coercion via threat, and uses of direct force or violence for similar purposes (such as to constrain an agent from being able to act).  Some philosophers have made a big deal of the claim that coercion has to go “through the will” of the coercee, and thus direct force is not coercive.  By and large, though, most recent writers have simply assumed this to be so, as though it were obvious. This seems to me quite at variance with older notions of coercion, so this change is worth remarking upon.

I argue in this talk, the dispute over whether there are two sorts of coercion here or one points up a problem with accounts that identify coercion with the way threats put “pressure on the will,” giving little or no attention to the kinds of powers and activities that make it possible for coercers to issue credible threats.  I claim that in order to reasonably regard a particular communication (say, a “threat”) as coercive, the threat maker must be drawing upon the sorts of powers that explain why the coercee should take such threats as credible.  These would include relational facts that explain why the coercee does not in turn threaten the coercer back, disarm or disable him, evade the threatened consequence, ignore the threat, or otherwise proceed contrary to the way the threat-maker demands.  When one agent demonstrates a willingness and ability to use powers such as force and violence, unchecked, against another, this powerful agent is in a position to greatly restrict the possibilities for action of his target.  The powerful agent can thereby make demands of the target, the fulfillment of which become necessary means to virtually anything the target of the demand might wish to do.  Without such powers over the target, it becomes somewhat mysterious why the target should accede to the demands of the would-be coercer.

In this podcast, I am only able to outline the two different ways of thinking about coercion (what I call the “enforcement approach”, contrasted with what I call the “pressure-on-the-will approach”), and give some reasons to think that the enforcement approach is more fundamental.  In a longer version of this paper, I consider a variety of objections that might be raised to the central account presented here. If you are interested in the longer version of this paper, you can find it at this link

I am grateful also to William Edmundson for taking time to respond to this paper, and look forward to a lively discussion in the comments. [Bill’s comments are available here — SCM]

 

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Conference: Whose Opportunities? A Critique of Equality 

When? 29, 30, 31 October 2009

Where? Lisbon

Organization

Centre for Humanistic Studies, University of Minho (CEHUM)

Centre for the History of Culture, New University of Lisbon (CHC)

Call For Papers: Equality of Opportunity 2009. Submission Deadline: 1^st of March 2009

The Centre for Humanistic Studies of the University of Minho (CEHUM) and the Centre for the History of Culture of the New University of Lisbon (CHC) are sponsoring an international conference on the ideal of equality of opportunity which will take place in Lisbon the 29^th, 30^th and 31^st of October 2009. Participants to the conference include: Richard Arneson (University of California, San Diego), Vincent Bourdeau (University of Besançon), Matthew Clayton (University of Warwick ), Marc Fleurbaey (Cerses, CNRS), Axel Gosseries (Hoover Chair, University of Louvain-la-Neuve), Cécile Laborde (University College London), Ruwen Ogien (Cerses, CNRS), Martin O’Neill (MANCEPT, University of Manchester), Patrick Savidan (Sorbonne-Paris IV University), Adam Swift (Centre for Social Justice, University of Oxford), Bertil Tungodden (Norwegian School of Economics and Business Administration), Daniel Weinstock (CRÉUM, University of Montreal), Jonathan Wolff (University College London).

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Consider the following case:

Tanya lives in a small, newly created country in Eastern Europe. Perhaps the most important issue in the region is the treatment of a disenfranchised minority that lives throughout the country. Tanya truly dislikes the minority and wants to further damage them if she can. While public opinion concerning the minority varies greatly, the government has taken the side of the minority. Consequently, a ban has been placed on any action or public speech that is intended to hurt the disenfranchised minority. In other words, the government has made laws against hurting the minority, but Tanya wishes she could hurt them.

Now ask yourself: ‘To what extent do these laws diminish Tanya’s freedom?’

Once you have thought of an answer to this question, consider a case that is exactly the same except that Tanya wants to help the disenfranchised minority:

Tanya lives in a small, newly created country in Eastern Europe. Perhaps the most important issue in the region is the treatment of a disenfranchised minority that lives throughout the country. Tanya truly cares about the minority and really wants to help them if she can. While public opinion concerning the minority varies greatly, the government has sided against the minority. Consequently, a ban has been placed on any action or public speech that is intended to help the disenfranchised minority. In other words, the government has made laws against helping the minority, but Tanya wishes she could help them.

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So far Democratic Rights has forced a choice for theorists developing a conception of democracy. We can accept an austere procedural ideal or an expansive basket of substantive rights. Positions that fall in between are prone to instability. Ronald Dworkin famously exploited this instability in his criticism of proceduralism in Law’s Empire. He thinks that we misconstrue the concept of democracy when we identify it with the mere presence of majoritarian institutions. To make good on this claim, he treats democracy as an interpretive concept. We can get at its inner structure by constructively interpreting the practice where the concept “lives.” What follows is a method for resolving disputes about the content of the concept of democracy. We identify that values that make democracy worthwhile. The interpretation that casts democracy in its best light will yield its concept.

I hope this sets the stage for Chapter 3 of Democratic Rights. It is here that the distinctiveness and ambition of the Brettschneider’s view is fully on display. The chapter aims to put into place the pieces for a position that is considerably more expansionist than Dworkin’s. The idea is that democratic citizens – given their liability to coercion from a system of law – are owed much more than the rights traditionally associated with democracy. It is not enough to extract freedoms of speech and the rule of law from a concept of democracy. We can extend this approach to yield a package of substantive claims normally associated with a theory of distributive justice. The rights defended in Chapters 4 – 7 – including rights to privacy, basic assistance, and not to be executed by one’s state – aren’t understood to follow from ordinary usages of the bare idea of democracy.

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Many thanks to Anna for another very careful summary and an important set of questions.  In Chapter One and our discussion about it I emphasized why the value theory forces proceduralists to make a choice: Either they can acknowledge that there are values and outcomes that constrain procedures or they must give up on the idea that there are democratic rights that cannot be jettisoned.  It strikes me that Habermas tries to avoid this dilemma in his repeated insistence that his is a procedural account of democracy at the same time that he proclaims the importance of rights of addressees. Anna suggests that Habermas’ notion that “legal form” and the “discourse principle” are co-original might suggest that he is close to my own view that democratic procedures are at times constrained by some democratic outcomes.  On such a reading Habermas would have to give up on procedure as the normative grounding of democracy.  I think that this is likely the best reconstructed reading of Habermas, but it is a concession that many Habermasians do not want to make. On such a reading, procedure has a role in but it cannot serve as the fundamental normative grounding of a theory of democracy. Charles Larmore’s piece “The Foundations of Modern Democracy: Reflections on Jurgen Habermas,” is on point here and suggestive of why Habermas himself tries to resist such a move. I would be interested in hearing from others whether they read Habermas as endorsing something like the value theory or whether he might go the kind of route that Jordon Dodd was suggesting in our discussion of the previous chapter.

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