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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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)

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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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.

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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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.

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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]

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 Monday 1 December 2009. As with this semester’s symposium, a committee of members of the website, not including myself, will choose between the abstracts. I think we should be able to select twelve or so papers for inclusion in the symposium, although that depends on some other considerations.

Those who submit an abstract commit themselves to having a full draft of the paper ready by 1 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.

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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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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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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