February 2011

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OPR IV.13 The Reasons One Has

Monday, 28 February 2011 in Books, Posts, Reading Group by John Thrasher | 3 comments

As Keith pointed out in his last post, Section 13 is one of the most important, and likely to be one of the most controversial, sections of The Order of Public Reason.  Although there have been a lot of controversial points made in earlier sections, much of the last several sections may have seemed more descriptive than normative and, therefore, less threatening.  This, however, is the section where the normative rubber hits the descriptive road.  The account that Gaus develops here represents a continuity that goes all the way back to at least Value and Justification and is continued in Justificatory Liberalism, those that are familiar with these earlier works will find much that is familiar here, though often in a different or expanded form.  There is a lot in this section so I won’t necessarily be discussing everything, only the most important points.  If there is something that I leave out that is important, we can definitely expand on those points in the comments.  I will spend most of my post today presenting Gaus’ view and save my critical remarks for Wednesday’s post, but feel free to bring up any critical issues that you may have in the comments.

Gaus begins this section by noting that the idea of social morality that he has been advancing seems to rely on an internalist conception of reasons.  As he claims, the debate between internal and external reasons has become a kind of obsession.   Gaus’ conception of reasons stakes out a position in that debate in opposition to what Joseph Raz has called the Classical View of external reasons as facts about properties of action.  On the Classical View, internal reasons are merely beliefs about facts, not reasons themselves.  The internalist, however, argues that reasons for action must be connected to the motivational set of an agent, that is, to her beliefs and desires about the action in question.   The debate between internal and external reasons has, according to Gaus, become confused.  The debate is really about what reasons there are or what reasons exist.  It is, therefore, really a question about the ontology of reasons.  But, as we have seen throughout the Order of Public Reason, social morality in a world of constrained and embodied reasoners is about what reasons we have, not with what reasons there are.  Gaus’ theory then is only inconsistent with externalism if the externalist also holds an externalist theory of what it means to have a reason, basically that to have a reason is for there to be an external reason that applies to that person.  Gaus rejects this form of externalism, the externalist view of having a reason, as implausible.

Externalism about having reasons is implausible because “it misconstrues the relation between having a reason and being a rational agent.” (233) Consider Aristotle, for instance.  The externalist is committed to saying that Aristotle had a reason to accept the truth of particle physics; but surely, Gaus argues, to think that Aristotle had a reason to embrace particle physics is to make a serious mistake.   Reasons are justificatory, but there is no way that Aristotle could be justified in believing particle physics.  Similarly, to claim that a person or a group have a certain moral reason even though that reason is totally inaccessible to them, in the same way that Aristotle’s reason to accept particle physics is inaccessible, is to not only misuse the language of reasons but, more importantly, to misunderstand and “undermine the point of discourse about reasons and rationality.”(235) We use the idea of having a reason, according to Gaus, to make the actions and intentions of other people intelligible.  The externalist view of having a reason severs the idea of a reason from its role in explaining and justifying action.

Rejecting the externalist view of having a reason does not, however, commit Gaus to, what he calls, the Reason Affirmation Thesis that to have a reason is to affirm that one has that reason.  Affirming a reason is neither necessary nor sufficient to having a reason.   The neurotic may affirm reasons that they do not, in fact, have–crazy beliefs, that the world will end if one blinks for instance, do not provide reasons.  Affirmation is also not necessary to have a reason, all that is required is that there be, in the words of Bernard Williams, “a sound deliberative route” from the subjective motivational set that one has to the reason.  We might think of the Reason Affirmation Thesis as the idea that only the reasons that an agent actually claims to have at any time can justify action.  The rejection of the Reason Affirmation Thesis means that Gaus is committed to some amount of idealization of rational agents.  If we notice that we need to go beyond the actual reasons that agents claim to have, we need another standard of what counts as a reason.  The problem is that once we begin to idealize, we move closer and closer to the externalist view of having a reason.  Gaus cites Steve Wall who argues that once we begin to idealize we realize that “a fully rational person will affirm all, and only, the (external) reasons that apply to her.” (237) If Wall is correct; we will have backed into the externalist view of having a reason merely by idealizing.

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Call for Papers – 9th Pavia Graduate Conference in Political Philosophy

Monday, 28 February 2011 in Notices by Emanuela Ceva | No comments

On the 22nd and 23rd of September 2011, the Human Development, Capability and Poverty International Research Centre of the Institute for Advanced Study of Pavia and the Faculty of Political Science of the University of Pavia (Italy), under the joint patronage of the Italian Society for Political Philosophy and the Italian Society for Analytic Philosophy, will host the 9th edition of the Pavia Graduate Conference in Political Philosophy. This two-day conference is meant to offer graduate students an opportunity to present papers, get helpful feedback in a friendly atmosphere, and exchange ideas both with peers and with leading academics in the field of political philosophy. In addition to parallel sessions devoted to students’ presentations, there will also be two plenary sessions. Plenary speakers in past editions have been: Hillel Steiner, Peter Jones, Gianfrancesco Zanetti, Jonathan Wolff, Michele Nicoletti, Philippe Van Parijs, Sebastiano Maffettone, Giovanni Giorgini, Andrew Williams, David Miller, Alessandro Ferrara, Michael Otsuka, Nadia Urbinati, Valeria Ottonelli, Adam Swift. This year’s keynote speakers will be:

Anna Elisabetta Galeotti (Università del Piemonte Orientale, Vercelli), speaking on Autonomy and Double Standards

Gerald Gaus (University of Arizona), speaking on Public Reason as an Equilibrium Concept

Graduate students interested in giving papers should send their contributions (max 2500/3000 words – in English) accompanied by an abstract (max 300 words – in English) and a short CV, by Sunday 29th May 2011. Papers may focus on any area within political philosophy, and presentations should take no longer than twenty minutes to allow at least another twenty minutes of discussion. Please note that the 29th of May is also the deadline for registration for anyone who wishes to attend the conference without presenting a paper.

Conference registration is free of charge. Paper givers will be offered accommodation at reasonable prices in local university colleges. Accommodation fees and details will be arranged individually. Anyone who wishes to attend the conference without presenting a paper can write to check availability. Details about meal arrangements and conference programme to follow.

Please address all correspondence (including paper submissions and additional inquiries) to the conference email address: graduate.conference@iusspavia.it

Updated information will shortly be available on the conference website:
www.iusspavia.it/hdcp

OPR IV.12: Moral Emotions and Moral Autonomy

Saturday, 26 February 2011 in Books, Posts, Reading Group by Keith Hankins | 1 comment

My apologies for posting this a little bit late. I came down with something and couldn’t get the comments put together as quickly as I had hoped and then ran into some compatibility issues with Word Press and my browser. Anyway, on to section 12.

If sections 4 – 11 have been primarily descriptive, section 12 is where the book begins to take a distinctly normative turn. Having sketched over the last three sections an account of how his positive and normative projects relate to one another, in section 12 Gaus expands the discussion he left us with at the end of section 11 in order to bring his descriptive work to bear on some of the questions he set out at the beginning of the book.

As I pointed out in my earlier comments, Gaus concludes section 11 with a brief discussion of the relationship between guilt, moral authority, and moral autonomy and as I said above, section 12 is primarily dedicated to developing this discussion further. Gaus emphasizes that guilt is part of the mechanism through which we internalize moral rules and on his view this is important for two closely related reasons:

(i) When an individual feels guilty for violating a moral rule, that guilt carries with it an implicit recognition of the authority of those who make demands on her that she comply with the rules of social morality. In this way, guilt complements resentment and indignation in Gaus’s Strawsonian account of how the moral emotions constitute the practice of social morality; guilt being the mechanism that gives standing to others to make demands on us, whereas resentment and indignation are (among) the mechanisms through which we make the actions of others our business. This is Gaus’s focus in 11.4.

(ii) By facilitating and ultimately manifesting our internalization of moral rules, guilt expresses our moral autonomy. When it is directed at a moral rule (and not simply a taboo), guilt typically indicates that an individual accepts the authority of the rule over her and is capable of appreciating the reasons why the rule applies to her. This, as opposed to (i), is Gaus’s focus in section 12.

Although Gaus spends a lot of time discussing the importance of guilt, he begins section 12 by discussing the moral emotions more generally. In particular he emphasizes that the moral emotions have built in appropriateness conditions, meaning that they typically require (or at least entail) that the person subject to a moral emotion has certain beliefs about the person towards whom her reactive attitude is directed (12.1). As we saw in section 11, on Gaus’s view the moral emotions are a constitutive part of our social morality and in this section he argues that this insight, combined with evidence from moral psychology undermines the rationalistic picture of morality on which reason allows us to overcome our passions. Gaus’s emphasis on the appropriateness conditions of the moral emotions though distinguishes him from ‘the new sentimentalists’ who argue that our moral judgments and practices are grounded primarily in our affect and that our moral emotions do not (and more importantly, need not) carry a substantial amount of cognitive content. On Gaus’s view, both reason and affect are important, and more important still is that our emotions engage our reason in the right sort of way. Ultimately Gaus will argue that it is only when this is true, that our practice of social morality can be consistent with our nature as free and equal moral persons.

In emphasizing the importance of our emotions engaging our reasons, Gaus’s point is not that beliefs about those whom our emotions are directed towards are always prerequisites of the moral emotions, but rather that they are typically required in order for our emotions to be sustained. To illustrate this Gaus directs us towards the concept of responsibility, asking what sorts of beliefs and emotions are required to sustain our practice of holding one another accountable to the demands of social morality. Gaus argues that responsibility requires more than just the ability to identify that a moral rule has been broken and the capacity to blame others for violating those rules. Specifically it requires that the individual being held responsible has certain beliefs and that we know her to have these beliefs. It is hard to sustain blame (and similarly hard to maintain resentment) if we come to doubt that the person we are blaming lacked either the requisite knowledge of the moral rule in question, recognition that the rule applies to her, or an understanding that her actions in fact violated that rule.

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OPR IV.11: Moral Demands and the Moral Emotions

Tuesday, 22 February 2011 in Books, Posts, Reading Group by Keith Hankins | 1 comment

Now that we’re moving into the fourth chapter of the book (and the second month of the reading group) I thought that it would be helpful to begin my comments by briefly summarizing the ground that we’ve already covered. Doing so will hopefully make it clearer how Gaus’s arguments in Chapter 4 fit into the rest of the book, remind us of what Gaus has done so far, and orient us towards where we still have to go.

Gaus’s big question is: what sort of social order is appropriate for a society comprised of free and equal persons? The goal of the book then is to provide a framework for gaining critical leverage on our idea of social morality and its attendant practices. Gaus spends the Preface and Chapter 1 laying out the idea of social morality and making the case that social morality is both critically necessary, but at the same time, not an entirely rosy affair. As a result, he argues that our practices call for both normative justification and positive explanation. Chapter 2 began that task by looking at instrumentalist accounts of morality which, Gaus tells us, provide a promising framework for justifying and explaining social morality. Unfortunately, Gaus argues, instrumentalism fails, meaning that we can’t simply reason our way into morality. Chapter 2 leaves us with an explanatory project then that Gaus takes up in chapter 3. There he asks us to look at our actual practices, psychologies, and commitments and, drawing on work in evolutionary game theory, anthropology, and psychology, among other things, he directs our attention to the importance of deontic reasoning, the need for moral/social rules, and the necessity of having a community in which individuals are not merely disposed to follow the rules, but to enforce them as well.

As J. Brennan pointed out in his comments two weeks ago, Gaus’s discussion in sections 7 and 8 of Chapter 3 of how and why something that looks like social morality might develop left us with a number of questions about the normative significance of the descriptive account Gaus offers. I think it’s now clear though that, having left us with these questions, the latter half of chapter 3 is where Gaus begins to offer answers. In sections 9 and 10 Gaus provides us with an account of the rationality of rules and draws our attention to the relationship between positive and true social morality. As Ian Ward emphasized in his comments last week, a core part of Gaus’s story is the idea that an account of true or appropriate social morality must necessarily be constrained by a society’s positive social morality. On Gaus’s view we can gain critical leverage on our practices (in part through employing “transcendent moral concepts”), but that criticism must always proceed from within our existing practices.

In chapter 4 Gaus continues to develop the normative/explanatory project that he began in chapter 3 focusing on how our emotions (sections 11 and 12) and our reasons (section 13) respectively fit into our moral practices. In the rest of these comments I’ll focus on section 11 where Gaus discusses the relationship between our emotions, the concept of moral standing, and our practices of enforcing morality. Later this week I’ll turn my attention to section 12 where Gaus discusses the relationship between our emotions and our concepts of moral autonomy and moral personhood.

Comments on Section 11:

We’ve now seen in several places that an important feature of social morality is that it makes one’s actions the business of others. Section 7′s discussion of the importance of rule-following punishers gave us an account of why this is an important part of social morality, but in section 11 Gaus returns to this important feature of morality, reminding us that we still need an explanation of where the authority to make demands on others comes from. In order to provide this explanation Gaus directs us to two fundamental features of a system of rules populated by rule-following punishers: (i) that we normally display a concern with the conformity of others, and with enforcing this conformity and (ii) a recognition on the part of individuals that the rules normally override one’s own goals, values, and ends (p. 187). Gaus then point us towards our psychology and in particular our emotions in order to explain both (i) and (ii).

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CFP: MANCEPT Workshops in Political Theory 2011

Monday, 21 February 2011 in Calls for Papers, Conferences, Notices by Rebecca Reilly-Cooper | No comments

Eighth Annual Conference: August 31-September 2nd 2011

http://manceptworkshops.wordpress.com/

Final Call for Convenors – Deadline for Submission: 28th February 

From 2011, the Manchester Centre for Political Theory (MANCEPT) in Politics at the University of Manchester will be organizing the annual Political Theory Workshops. Over the last seven years, participants from over twenty countries have come together in a series of workshops concerned with issues in political theory/philosophy widely construed. This note is a call for convenors for the 2011 workshops.

Workshop Structure  

Convenors organize a workshop which can have between 3 and 12 paper-givers.  The reading of these papers takes place over four sessions, each lasting three and a half hours. For workshops with just 3 paper givers this normally requires only one session, with 6 papers 2 sessions and so on. In most cases, paper-givers will be asked to speak for 30 minutes, and will then field questions and comments for a further 30 minutes. However, workshop convenors are free to organize the length of the presentation and question time as they see fit.  In short, a workshop can last for one session, or it may extend through all four sessions. For example, some may find it convenient to squeeze four paper-givers into one session or use 2 sessions with 2 papers read per session. Also, if a workshop has, say, 5 paper-givers, the second session can finish an hour early. On occasion workshop convenors in the past have had a ’round table’ discussion about a particular topic. This could have up to six speakers and would normally last for only one session.

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OPR III.10: Moral Rules as Social Rules

Friday, 18 February 2011 in Books, Posts, Reading Group by Ian Ward | 9 comments

Chapter 9 concluded with the requirement that an adequate account of social rules must be able explain how rule-based reasons can generally override, and yet be somehow responsive to, the other kinds of normative reasons we consider in our deliberations.  If this is required of an account purporting to explain how social rules can be rational, what is required of an account that purports to explain their specifically moral character?

The key concern here is what the normative authority of moral rules consists in.  Gaus identifies two conditions that such rules must satisfy:

1) The justification condition: the rule must pass justificatory muster from the perspective of free and equal persons addressing each other; and
2) The minimal effectiveness condition: the rule must already command some degree of compliance among a significant number of members of the group to which it is taken to apply.

The requirement that a moral rule satisfy both conditions, in turn, places certain constraints on the business of moral theorizing.  Gaus has already claimed that especially austere and rigorist forms of deontolotical ethics that neglect what we might call the holistic character of moral deliberation – the ways in which deontic (rule-based) reasons interact with other species of normative reasons (here Gauss focuses primarily on reasons of the instrumentalist/consequentialist variety; a full account would presumably specify the role of aretaic reasons as well) in context of our reasoning on ethical and political matters.  At the same time, his account of the “strong” character of the relevant rules signals a concern about ethical theories that reduce certain moral concepts to how they are understood within the concept of a particular conceptual scheme, cultural order, or set of social conventions.

Moral rules, and the deontic reasons they generate, must be exhibit some degree of responsiveness to the traditions and practices of a given group:

Unless our analysis of “true morality” connects up with what actual agents see as morality, our philosophical reflections will not address our pretheoretical worries. We come to philosophy worried about the nature of morality, moral relations between free and equal people, and the justification of moral claims. If we develop a philosophical account of morality that tells us what is “right and wrong” that treats moral and conventional rules the same, or sees morality as just another form of prudence, or insists that morality is entirely a matter of reason and so emotion is simply a threat to sound moral judgment – then our account is too far distant from our actual moral concepts to enlighten us about our initial concerns (OPR 174).

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Journal of Moral Philosophy launches new submission system

Wednesday, 16 February 2011 in Academia, Calls for Papers, Journals by Thom Brooks | No comments

I am delighted to announce that the Journal of Moral Philosophy has launched our new online electronic submission system. Please either visit our online submission page to submit new work: http://www.editorialmanager.com/jmpbrill/

The JMP normally reviews papers in 6-8 weeks or less. Our acceptance rate is under 8%. We are a quarterly journal of philosophy publishing volume 8 in 2011. For more information, visit our homepage: http://www.brill.nl/jmp

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Extended Deadline – Summer University on Justice: Theory and its Applications

Wednesday, 16 February 2011 in Academia, Conferences, Notices, Seminars by Zoltan Miklosi | No comments

The CEU Summer University: JUSTICE: THEORY AND ITS APPLICATIONS

July 4-15, 2011 Budapest, Hungary;
Faculty:

  • Peter Vallentyne, University of Missouri-Columbia, Department ofPhilosophy, Columbia, USA;
  • Andrew Williams, Universitat Pompeu Fabra, Catalan Institute of Researchand Advanced Studies, Barcelona, Spain;
  • Matthew Clayton, University of Warwick, Department of Politics and International Studies, Coventry, UK;
  • Greg Bognar, New York University, NYU Center for Bioethics, NewYork, USA;
  • Janos Kis, Central European University, Department of Political Science, Budapest, Hungary;
  • Kasper Lippert-Rasmussen, Aarhus Universitat, Institut for Statskundskab, Århus C, Denmark;

Course Directors:

  • Andres Moles, Central European University, Departments of Political Science and Philosophy, Budapest, Hungary.
  • Zoltan Miklosi, Central European University, Department of Political Science, Budapest, Hungary

The problem of justice occupies a special place in contemporary political philosophy. In the words of its most influential figure, Rawls, “justice is the first virtue of social institutions”. That view seems to be shared by a majority of authors and theories. However, there is no comparable agreement regarding what justice demands, from whom and to whom. These questions have utmost relevance for political philosophers. However, their importance spills over to other disciplines. Given that many choices policy makers make are distributive in nature, it is not surprising that issues of justice appear in many other spheres. In addition to dealing with purely theoretical issues, the course will revise some contexts which raise important questions about justice: education, healthcare, environmental issues, taxation. Applications are invited from graduate students, postdocs, young faculty in Philosophy, Political Science, Public Policy, Law and Economics, familiar with Anglo-American political theory, especially with theories of justice.

Application deadline: 1st March, 2011. For further academic information on the course and on eligibility criteria and funding options please visit: http://www.summer.ceu.hu/justice. CEU Summer University* P.O.Box: Budapest 5, P.f.: 1082, H-1245((36 1)327 3811, Fax: (36-1) 327-3124

Announcement/CFP: Postgraduate Conference on Rights and Cultural Diversity (University of Stirling)

Tuesday, 15 February 2011 in Calls for Papers, Conferences, Grad Conferences, Notices by Ben Saunders | No comments

4th Postgraduate Conference in Law and Philosophy, University of Stirling: 28-29 May 2011

CFP: 25 March 2011 

Keynote Speakers
Professor Andrew Simester, Fellow, Wolfson College, University of Cambridge and Professor of Law, National University of Singapore
Professor David Archard, Professor of Philosophy and Public Policy, Lancaster University

Submission Deadline 25 March 2011

We are now inviting postgraduate students in philosophy, political theory, international relations and other related areas to submit high quality papers on the theme Rights and Cultural Diversity, broadly construed. Each postgraduate presentation should be of a maximum of 30 minutes, and will be followed by a 10 minute reply before an open discussion. Each session will last 90 minutes.

An abstract of 700 words (prepared for blind review) should be sent via email to kth1@stir.ac.uk by 25 March 2011 along with a separate cover letter containing the following information: author’s name, title of paper, institutional affiliation and contact information (email, phone number, mailing address). Selected participants will be required to send a full draft of their paper for review by 22 April 2011.

Please refer to the website http://dl.dropbox.com/u/2417815/L_P/Law_and_Philosophy/Welcome.html for details regarding the conference schedule, dinner, fees and accommodation.

Organizing Committee
Brian Ho kth1@stir.ac.uk
Ruth E Lowe rl332@st-andrews.ac.uk

Egyptian protest and political theorist Gene Sharp

Tuesday, 15 February 2011 in Politics, Posts by John Meyer | 1 comment

Colleagues, my first post to public reason…

As a political theorist, I was surprised to read, in the article below in the NYT, of the influence of Gene Sharp, a political theorist (with a D.Phil from Oxford and a lengthy academic career) as a key influence upon the non-violent strategy and tactics of the protesters in Egypt.  I suspect I’m not alone among the members of this site in confessing that I’m not familiar with the work of Professor Sharp.  http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/14/world/middleeast/14egypt-tunisia-protests.html?scp=1&sq=Egypt%20Sharp&st=cse

This raises several questions in my mind, but I’ll pose two, for now:

1) For those who are familiar with Sharp’s work, would you be willing to offer a brief synopsis of how it might be situated within other strains of contemporary political and democratic theory?

2) What ought we conclude from the observation that Professor Sharp’s work is apparently quite influential among democratic activists in Eastern Europe and the Middle East, yet, it seems to me, goes largely unnoticed among professional political theorists in (at least) the U.S.?

Sincerely,

John Meyer

OPR III.9: The Rationality of Rules

Monday, 14 February 2011 in Books, Posts, Reading Group by Ian Ward | 2 comments

Human beings are social and rule-following creatures.  Gaus has been arguing that our status as rule-followers is central to explaining our social character – that the development of cheater detection and punishment was necessary for the evolution of complex social orders.

The preceding chapter closed with the claim that the relevant evolutionary and psychological literatures have disclosed a kind of pluralism to our rule-following: we operate with many kinds of rules, acquired at different points in our ethical and social formation, which interact with our affective and cognitive equipment in different ways.  This is something which, he claimed, philosophy must take into account.

This accounting begins with how we understand the rationality of rule-following behavior.  Here Gaus puts a new spin on an old philosophical problem, that of the insight of Hobbes’ Fool: “that reason can only tell us how to achieve our own goals and, so, reason can never instruct us to set aside our concerns to conform to social rules” (OPR, 132).  The family of responses to this problem with which Gaus takes issue are those that explain the rationality of social rules through reference to their modally instrumental and morally consequentialist character: the rationality of rules inheres in their instrumentality to the achievement of our preferred outcomes.  Gaus’ concern is that such strategies cannot account for specifically deontic forms of rule-following that are both necessary for social cooperation and resistant to explication in instrumentalist and consequentialist terms.  Hobbes’ old problem now serves as the starting point for a new one: how we can understand a plurality of moral rule-following behaviors (comprising both instrumental/consequentialist and deontic forms) as rational.

Gaus approaches the problem in four steps:

First, an argument that specifically deontic rules are indeed resistant to explanation in insturmentalist and consequentialist terms;

Second, an argument that deontic rules provide us, in nonmysterious ways, with reasons to act;

Third, an argument that the rationality of both instrumental/consequentialist and deontic/nonconsequentialist rules can be encompassed within one over-arching account of rule-following (although this is not Gaus’ preferred view); and

Fourth, a claim that (I thru III) tell us something important about the social character of morality.

(I) Here Gaus considers three strategies that seek to explain deontic rules in instrumental terms, i.e. in terms of their relationship to an individual’s goals, ends and purposes.  The first casts rules as rational conditional policies that agents might adopt as a means to goal pursuit over the long-term.  For Gaus, such policies are “weak rules” that can override short-term goals within the context of an agent’s deliberations.  But they do not require an agent to abandon an agent’s best, long-term, all-things-considered reasons to do what one thinks best.  The “weak” status of such conditional policies, he claims, fail to capture the roles played by social rules in a “stronger” sense that demand compliance even when this does not promote an agent’s goals.

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CfP: 7th CEU conference in Social Sciences

Wednesday, 9 February 2011 in Calls for Papers, Notices by Andres Moles | No comments

CfP: 7th CEU conference in Social Sciences:

The Normative Significance of the Crisis

Chair: Andres Moles (molesa@ceu.hu), Central European University

We are as yet uncertain of the effects the recent crisis will have. We have even less certainty about  the extent to which it will challenge some of our normative views about what the global order should be or about how we should organize  domestic political institutions. The panel reflects on how recent changes in the political arena impact on our normative views, and how our normative views can direct whatever changes need to be made to existing institutions and practices.

The organizers provide hotel accommodation (two nights) and meals for all presenters,

Refer to ceuconf2011@yahoo.com for further inquiries. Abstracts should be sent to the panel chair (molesa@ceu.hu)

Deadline for paper proposals: March 1, 2011.

More about the conference: http://ceuconf2011.wordpress.com/panels/

Brave New World 2011: Call for Papers

Tuesday, 8 February 2011 in Calls for Papers, Conferences, Grad Conferences, Notices by Jonathan Quong | No comments

CALL FOR PAPERS – Deadline for submission of abstract: 11th April 2011

Brave New World 2011, the Fifteenth Annual Postgraduate Conference organised under the auspices of the Manchester Centre for Political Theory (MANCEPT), will take place on Monday 27th and Tuesday 28th June 2011 at the University of Manchester.

We are pleased to announce that our guest speakers this year are:

Joseph Raz (University of Oxford)

Andrea Sangiovanni (King’s College London)

The Brave New World conference series is now established as a leading international forum dedicated exclusively to the discussion of postgraduate research in political theory. The conference offers a great opportunity for postgraduates from many different countries and universities to share experiences, concerns and research interests, to exchange stimulating ideas and to make new friends – all in a financially accessible and highly informal setting. Participants will also have the chance to meet and talk about their work with eminent academics, including members of faculty from the University of Manchester and guest speakers, who will deliver keynote addresses at the event.

Guest speakers in previous years have included Brian Barry, Simon Caney, G.A. Cohen, Roger Crisp, Cecile Fabre, Jerry Gaus, Peter Jones, Chandran Kukathas, Kasper Lippert-Rasmussen, Susan Mendus, David Miller, Onora O’Neill, Michael Otsuka, Bhikhu Parekh, Carole Pateman, Anne Phillips, Thomas Pogge, Quentin Skinner, Adam Swift, Philippe Van Parijs, Leif Wenar, Andrew Williams, and Jonathan Wolff.

Papers focusing on any area of political theory or political philosophy are welcome. If you would like to present a paper, please send a 300-word, anonymised abstract, including the title of the paper, to Brave.New.World@manchester.ac.uk, no later than 11th April 2011. Please also include in your email your name and institutional affiliation. Please note that the conference is self-financed and participants are responsible for seeking their own funding. For further details please contact Dean Redfearn at Brave.New.World@manchester.ac.uk

OPR III.8: Deontic Reasoning

Tuesday, 8 February 2011 in Books, Posts, Reading Group by Jason Brennan | 1 comment

Society depends upon rules—we cannot live together successfully without some shared set of social rules. But what exactly is a rule, and how do people act upon them?Quoting Gaus, “Rules…identify certain general characteristics or properties, and issue directives for actions with these properties. A fully specified social rule identifies (i) a set of persons to whom the prescription is addressed, (ii) a property of actions, (iii) a deontic operator such that actions with that property may, must, or must not be performed and (iv) a statement of the conditions under which the connection between (ii) and (iii) is relevant.” (123)

To illustrate the import of (iv), Gaus brings up two different rules:

1.     In our school, you will not speak without first raising your hand and being called upon.

2.     In our school, you will not pull another student’s hair.

Gaus says that psychological studies indicate that though the surface grammar of these rules is the same, children understand them differently. They understand 1 as merely a conventional rule, which may or may not hold in other schools or other places. Though 2 also begins with “In our school”, they understand 2 as a moral rule, which applies in all places. So they see factor (iv)—the conditions under which the property and deontic operator are relevant—as different between these two rules. Read the rest of this entry »

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Legitimacy 2.0 – E-democracy and Public Opinion in the Digital Age

Tuesday, 8 February 2011 in Calls for Papers, Conferences, Notices by Massimo Cuono | No comments

Call for Papers

Special Workshop at the World Congress of Philosophy of Law (IVR)
Frankfurt, 15-19 August 2011

Short summary

E-democracy aims for broader and more active Internet-enhanced citizenship involvement but can there be any “democracy” after representative democracy? Should we understand it in terms of deliberative and/or participative democracy? How is e-government impacting on transparency and accountability? What role does institutionalized mediation play in ICTs? What kind of e-governance processes can enhance legitimacy in complex legal systems?

E-democracy has been cutting the edge a while, yet we need to integrate the current state of the art with the toolkit of the analytical and normative perspectives of legal and political theory. The purpose of the workshop is to go beyond the polarization between the apologists that hold the web to overcome the one-to-many architecture of opinion-building in traditional democratic legitimacy, and the critics that warn cyberoptimism entails authoritarian or paternalistic technocracy.

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MA Programmes in Political Philosophy at the University of York (UK) (funded places available)

Monday, 7 February 2011 in Notices by Martin O'Neill | No comments

I would be most grateful if readers of Public Reason could draw this posting to the attention of any current finalists or recent graduates who might be interested in pursuing graduate study in Political Philosophy.

The Department of Politics at the University of York has a long-established international reputation as a centre for postgraduate study in political philosophy. We typically welcome 20+ postgraduate students each year to read for our two interlinked MA programmes, in Political Philosophy and Political Philosophy (The Idea of Toleration). Full details of the two MA degrees are available online here: http://bit.ly/yorkmapolphil

Our postgraduate students come from all over the world, as well as from a variety of institutions in the U.K. The size of our MA programme means that we always have a lively community of graduate students in political philosophy, with events such as the biweekly Morrell Political Theory Workshop providing a focus for staff and students working in the area.

We are a distinctively pluralistic department, which means that students on our MA degrees in Political Philosophy and Political Philosophy (The Idea of Toleration) have the opportunity to pursue a broad range of interests, from the history of early modern political thought, to contemporary political philosophy and philosophy of law, international political theory, recent European political thought, and democratic theory.

Through the generosity of the C & JB Morrell Trust, we have up to eight studentships available for 2011-12 to students reading for the MA in Political Philosophy (The Idea of Toleration). These studentships cover home/EU fees, plus a contribution of £2000 towards living costs. There is no separate application for Morrell funding: applicants to the MA in Political Philosophy (The Idea of Toleration) should simply indicate on their application that they wish to be considered for this funding. (NB. These studentships are only available for this degree, and are not available to those applying to our other MA course in Political Philosophy.)

Any enquiries relating to these MA degrees can be directed to the course convenor, Dr Martin O’Neill, at martin.oneill [AT] york.ac.uk

Tulane Center for Ethics and Public Affairs Fellowships

Monday, 7 February 2011 in Fellowships, Notices by Simon Cabulea May | No comments

New application deadline: 7 March 2011

The deadline for the 2010-11 fellowships at Tulane’s Center for Ethics and Public Affairs has been extended until 7 March 2011. Please also note that the fellowship amount is $60,000 for the two semesters. There are no teaching requirements. Fellows participate in faculty seminars and other events every week or so. This year (at least) there is also a regular reading group comprising the fellows and the resident value theorists at Tulane. Fellows each have an office in the Center, which is directly across St. Charles Avenue from Audubon Park. Anyone working in ethics or political philosophy, or on moral questions in other disciplines, should definitely consider applying. Plus you get to spend a year in New Orleans.

OPR, Ch. 3.7: The Evolution of Rule-Following Punishers

Monday, 7 February 2011 in Books, Posts, Reading Group by Jason Brennan | 3 comments

Social cooperation is good—we do better with it than without. But social cooperation depends upon trust—we need to be able to count on others being cooperative and disinclined to cheat, break the rules, take advantage of us, and so on. In the kinds of game-theoretic situations that best model society, cooperation and conformity to useful social rules will form a stable equilibrium provided people possess a strong enough conditional preference for following such rules, i.e., provided they prefer to cooperate with cooperators for its own sake, and provided they prefer for its own sake to follow rules when others follow rules.

Gaus asks, “But how could rational individuals develop an independent ‘preference’ or reason to follow a rule?” (103)  He claims to have shown that individual cannot reason themselves into being devoted to such rules, because such devotion might cause them to follow rules even when doing so does not best promote their values. (I am not convinced by Gaus’s arguments; I’ll say more on this below).  We could just posit that people have a preference for following generally-followed rules, but this is unsatisfying, even if it turns out to be true. (Cf: Some economists explain voter turnout—which seems irrational—by positing that voters just have a preference for voting, much like some people have a preference for playing golf. This is unsatisfying, even if true.)  The preference for conditional rule-following is widespread, so a satisfying account would explain why this is so, rather than leave this as a happy accident of human psychology. To explain this preference, Gaus turns to sociobiology, evolutionary psychology, and related fields.

People do not simply have a preference to cooperate and follow generally-followed social rules. They also have a preference for punishing defectors, even at their personal expense. For an instance, consider the ultimatum game (see here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ultimatum_game). If the second player in the ultimatum game had entirely non-tuistic preferences and were indifferent to social rules, we’d expect her to accept whatever money she gets. But, in fact, the second player tends to reject low offers from the first player, thus losing a potential monetary gain. One common explanation for this behavior, and similar behaviors in related games, is that players prefer to punish bad behavior from other players, even at personal expense. (Some economists might be inclined to say that if a player prefers to punish defectors, then by definition punishing defectors is part of that player’s self-interest. I am assuming everyone here understands why that’s a mistake.) When Gaus turns to evolution to explain our preferences for cooperation, he will also explain why the preference to punish is widespread.

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OPR, Ch. 2.6: Orthodox Instrumentalism

Thursday, 3 February 2011 in Books, Posts, Reading Group by Peter Vanderschraaf | 2 comments

Summary

We saw in section 2.5 that Gaus gives his refutations of attempts to derive principles of morality with revisionist accounts of rational choice in interactive contexts (again, game theoretic contexts). In section 2.6 Gaus considers what he takes to be the remaining option for the instrumentalist program. Here Gaus starts by claiming that if the instrumentalist employs the orthodox account of rational choice in games, then in order to try to explain moral norms as the product of instrumental rationality she needs to consider repeated interactions. In game theoretic parlance, the instrumentalist needs to employ the folk theorem.

The folk theorem, or folk theorems (some authors use the singular, other the plural), is actually a body of results in game theory. What these theorems tells us is that in a game repeated indefinitely often, if the players’ probabilities of continued play are sufficiently high (probabilities known as discount factors), then any outcome where their payoffs are all at least as great as their payoffs at a minimax point can be sustained in equilibrium. The minimax point is an outcome where all try to keep their partners’ payoffs as low as possible, and one can think of this as an outcome of “mutual punishment”. If, for example, the base game is the 2-player Prisoners’ Dilemma (and C is cooperate and D is defect) with appropriately bounded payoffs, then all outcomes where the players’ payoffs are at least as great as the payoffs of the outcome (D,D) can be part of an equilibrium of the indefinitely repeated game. A special and particularly famous case is the outcome where a pair of fixed partners in a repeated Prisoners’ Dilemma follow the “tit for tat” strategy. (A “tit for tat” player follows C on the first round of play and then always follows the choice the partner made at the previous round.) Given appropriate discount factors, if both follow “tit for tat” then they are at an equilibrium of the repeated game where each follows C at each round, although of course of course C is never part of an equilibrium of the one shot Prisoners’ Dilemma.

The folk theorem gets its name because game theorists discussed a number of these results informally before the first relevant theorems were published. As a historical tidbit, John Nash appears to have been the first to discover a folk theorem that shows that cooperation can be sustained in equilibrium in a repeated Prisoners’ Dilemma. Nash shared this result in an unpublished 1950 correspondence. Several authors, including Sugden (Evolution of Rights, Cooperation and Welfare 1986), Skyrms (‘The Shadow of the Future’ 1998) and Binmore (Natural Justice 2005) attribute proto-folk theorem reasoning to Hobbes in his response to the Foole in Leviathan 15 and to Hume in his analysis of promises in Treatise 3.2.5. (This may make it more apparent why I connected sections 2.5 and 2.6 to the so-called reconciliation project in the post on section 2.5.) The folk theorems look like exceptionally powerful results for the instrumentalist program, and in a certain sense they are. They tell us that the members of a community can follow an equilibrium in their repeated interactions where each must follow a cooperative strategy (like C in Prisoners’ Dilemma) with those who are in “good standing” and follow a punishing strategy (like D in Prisoners’ Dilemma) with those in “bad standing”, and this appears to vindicate the instrumentalist claim that norms of social morality really are the product of instrumental rationality. Indeed, some authors even claim that Hobbes’ system of natural law is at bottom a set of rules for following equilibria of the appropriate repeated games!

However, the folk theorems are only existence theorems. They tell us that in repeated games there are equilibria of mutual cooperation, but they tell us nothing regarding how we might start to follow these equilibria. Moreover, in a sense the folk theorems prove “too much”, because they also show that in repeated interactions there are a host of other equilibria besides equilibria of mutual cooperation, and at many of these equilibria some actually exploit others a significant amount of the time. Why should rational agents settle into “nice” equilibria of mutual cooperation rather than more “nasty” equilibria where some take advantage of others or even “state of nature” equilibria where no one cooperates with anyone else?

The instrumentalists who appeal to the folk theorem turn to evolution, and more specifically cultural evolution, as a means of explaining the appropriate equilibrium selection in the repeated games. As Gaus notes, Axelrod brought this idea to prominence in his pioneering study Evolution of Cooperation (1984). As Gaus also notes, many mistakenly concluded from Axelrod’s findings that “tit for tat” is the “correct” strategy for playing repeated Prisoners’ Dilemmas. In fact, no one strategy can be the uniquely rational strategy for playing repeated Prisoners’ Dilemma. There is not even a unique strategy for following a cooperative equilibrium of repeated Prisoners’ Dilemma. Gaus notes that the “grim” strategy also characterizes a cooperative equilibrium. In fact, there are many other strategies besides “tot for tat” and “grim” that characterize cooperative equilibria.

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Conference: Property, Markets, and Morality

Wednesday, 2 February 2011 in Conferences, Notices by Bas van der Vossen | No comments

PROPERTY, MARKETS, AND MORALITY

18-20 March, University of North Carolina Greensboro

Speakers:

  • Hillel Steiner (University of Manchester), “Greed and Fear”
  • Richard Arneson (UC San Diego), “What is Wrong with Working for a Boss?”
  • Daniel Russell (Wichita State University), “Capabilities, Redistribution, and Ownership”
  • Michael Munger (Duke University), “Euvoluntary Exchange and the Difference Principle”
  • Julian Lamont (University of Queensland), “University Education, Economic Rents, and Distributive Justice”

Commentators:

  • Eric Mack (Tulane University)
  • Geoffrey Brennan (UNC Chapel Hill / Australian National University)
  • Jonathan Quong (University of Manchester)
  • Daniel Shapiro (West Virginia University)
  • Bas van der Vossen (UNC Greensboro)

This symposium is hosted by the philosophy department at the University of North Carolina Greensboro and the BB&T program in Capitalism, Markets and Morality.

All welcome. Attendance free, but registration required.

To register and for more information, please contact Bas van der Vossen: b_vande2 [at] uncg.edu