Articles by Andrew Jason Cohen

Ah, Fall.  Classes here have started already!  Probably because of what I am teaching this semester I started thinking about the questions we (members and subscribers to this blog and potential members and subscribers of this blog) address.  It seems to me there are three basic questions of our field(s).

1. What should the social world be like?
This, I think, is the domain of social philosophy, properly understood.  One part of that domain, I think, is the political—leading to questions 2 and 3.  The domain of the social, though, is broader and includes how people act in social situations—i.e., here is where we should probably place questions about (non-governmental) power differentials and such (the parenthetical, of course, implies that we can differentiate between governmental and non-governmental power).  I suspect that those that call themselves “political theorists” are often more interested in other aspects of social philosophy than are those that call themselves “political philosophers.”  I’d be interested in knowing if others think that is right or wrong.

2. Should there be a government?
Perhaps this is the primary question of political philosophy.  If the answer is “no,” then the third question might not be asked.  (It might be asked even if the answer is “no” though since even if we should not have a government, we may not have a choice in the matter and would want to determine the best option possible.)  In any case, I think there are a number of elements to this question: Can anyone have a right to rule?  Does anyone have that right? Does anyone have a duty to obey?

3. What sort of government should we have?  This has, I think, 3 sub-questions:
a. Who, of those in a society, should rule?
b. What should the government have the power to do?
c. How should the powers be codified? Are they codifiable? How are the codifications to be understood and interpreted? (philosophy of law)

For completeness, I think we might also say:
The first question “What should the social world be like?” is a part of a broader question: “How should we be and what should we do?”  That, I think, means that Social Philosophy is properly conceived of as part of Ethics—which strikes me as right.  With that addition, we can recognize this tree (or something like it) where each lower field is a branch of the field above it:

Philosophy
Value Theory (as well as Metaphysics and Epistemology and …)
Ethics (as well as aesthetics and …)
Social Philosophy (as well as Normative Ethics, meta-Ethics, and applied ethics)
Political Philosophy (as well as race theory, gender theory, and …)
Philosophy of Law (as well as … )

What do people think about all of this?

I had to take a break from this but am back at it full force. What do people think of the following as a definition of waste? I think it gets around some of the problems people pointed out earlier (here and here). I’m sure it invites new ones.

Waste is “either (a) any process wherein something useful ceases to be useful or becomes less useful or (b) the output of such a process.”

Since my first post on this topic, I’ve toyed with different ways to define waste (I was trying to do only conceptual analysis, leaving the normative work for later) and seem to be ending with “the under-usage of something we should use.”  It may seem an unexciting definition, but I’ve yet to find or think of a better one.  So, I’m interested to see what people think of it.

Consider Simon’s example of the rich heiress who buys a $3000 dress, wears it once, then hangs it in her storage closet to be forgotten and buys another for the next occasion, and repeats the process indefinitely.  I think we could say here that the heiress is under-using the dress that she should use (because she bought it).  I think we could also say that the resources that went into creating the dress were under-used (and plausibly should be used).  Still, I have to admit that if the definition is right, it means waste is necessarily normative.  This is so in two ways: not only in the second part, where we explicitly say that the item in question is something “we should use,” but also in the first part, where we reference “the under-usage of something.”  If that is an accurate understanding of waste, we will need some standard to determine if a particular use is under-usage or proper usage and this will (usually) be normative.  I think we should accept that there is this double normativity in the proper understanding of waste. But I’m curious to hear what people think.

ROME: 8-10 August 2008 | CFP: 1 March 2008 

The Center for Values and Social Policy in the Philosophy Department at the University of Colorado, Boulder is pleased to invite paper proposals for the first annual ROME congress August 8-10, 2008. Papers from all areas of ethics and political theory are invited.

With a “Young Ethicist Prize of $500 for most meritorious submission.”

Deadline for submission: March 1, 2008. See the website.

We’ve been noticed. See Leiter.

Also the Garden. And, of course, Levy and Brooks. And, as Simon notes, Solum.

And now Al’s notepad , Dinner Table Donts, and Balkinization.

We’ve also been added to several other Blogrolls. Pretty good, I think.

First, I want to thank Simon for starting this blog. I think its a great idea and suspect it will flourish.

Now, my first post:

I’ve long considered writing a paper about Waste and now have an extrinsically important reason to do so.

People have thought that Locke’s (first) proviso–the requirement that there must be “enough, and as good, left in common for others”–can’t be satisfied in the modern world. People seem to think Locke’s second (waste or spoilage) proviso–the requirement that we must “make use of” that which we want to claim as property “before it spoils”–is settled by the existence of a means of exchange (money) as it allows us to store value so that nothing need spoil.

I think this is backward. I think David Schmidtz has shown that the first proviso is easily settled (and far from limiting property, sometimes requires that we take property). I think the second proviso is too often ignored. Nozick only calls it a “further condition.” It seems to me that “waste” must be understood normatively. I’m not inclined to spend much time doing textual exegesis to determine what Locke meant by the term “spoilage” though that might be part of the project. More interesting to me is determining the best way to understand the term and, with that in place, the best way to understand the proviso. The next question would be: should we take the waste proviso as providing an inherent limit to property? I’m inclined to think we should (and to think there is a moral duty not to waste).

OK. There’s the project. Now the question: any suggestions for reading? I believe Jeremy Waldron was working on something like this at one point but I don’t recall anything in print. Any ideas? There is a recent piece in Locke Studies by Helga Varden¹ and a 1993 piece by Bernard Baumrin in the J of Social Philosophy,² but I haven’t found much else.

Comments and suggestions very much welcome!

1. Helga Varden, “Locke’s Waste Restriction and his Strong Voluntarism,” Locke Studies, vol. 6, 2006: 127-42 [↩]
2. Bernard Baumrin, “Waste,” Journal of Social Philosophy, vol. 24, #3, Winter 1993: 5-18 [↩]