Articles by David Lefkowitz

ISME San Diego: 29-30 January 2009 | CFP: 19 September 2008

Those of you with an interest in the morality of war (of that are looking for an excuse to visit San Diego in January) might be interested in giving a talk at the ISME’s 2009 Symposium. I’ve pasted their call for papers below; as you can see, the conference themes are broad enough that even those that do not typically write on war may find it a congenial place to present some of their work. I really enjoyed last year’s symposium - the participants included not only philosophers but also political scientists, legal scholars, historians and serving and retired military officers of varying ranks (many of whom had, or were working toward, advanced degrees in philosophy or political science). The non-philosophers’ knowledge of other domains (e.g. the law of armed conflict or the U.S. Uniform Code of Military Justice), and especially the military personnel’s experience in Iraq, Afghanistan, Kuwait and elsewhere, more than compensates for the frustration that sometimes results from sharing one’s philosophical work with those not trained in philosophy.

I particularly want to encourage those that participated in or followed the discussion of David Estlund’s book on democratic authority to submit papers on the (possible) tensions between the morality and legality of war - not least because I’m partly to blame for the conference adopting this theme. As some of you probably know, Estlund has already written on this topic; see “On Following Orders in an Unjust War,” Journal of Political Philosophy 15:2 (June 2007).

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Procrastinating a bit this morning, I stumbled upon another blog that may be of interest to many readers of Public Reason.  The blog is called Opinio Juris, and it focuses on international law: the URL is www.opiniojuris.org.  I found a recent reading group on Peter Spiro’s new book Beyond Citizenship: American identity After Globalization quite thought-provoking.  This introduction from Spiro should be enough to whet your appetite:

“I thought I’d lead off with three developments each of which poses a serious challenge to American identity going forward.
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(I’ve switched the last two posts around, so that David E’s response to the chapter 6 discussion is now beneath David L’s chapter 7 discussion. Please don’t overlook the former. SCM)

In chapter VII, ‘Authority and Normative Consent,’ Estlund takes up the challenge of justifying one agent’s authority over another. X enjoys a morally justified claim to authority over Y if and only if the mere fact that X instructs Y to f provides Y with a (prima facie or defeasible) moral duty to f. Estlund seeks to offer a novel justification for authority, which he labels normative consent. On this view, if an agent acts wrongly in refusing to consent to another’s authority, then that refusal is void and the situation is as it would have been had the agent consented to the other’s authority. For example, if for some reason I act wrongly in refusing to consent to your determining how I should spend my afternoon, then my failure to consent is null and the situation is as if I had consented - or in other words, I have a duty to acknowledge your authority by spending my afternoon as you direct me to do.

I focus here on the three main tasks Estlund undertakes in this chapter: (1) making the case for normative consent as a (but not necessarily the only) genuine source of authority; (2) a defense of normative consent against some objections likely to be made to it; and (3) a brief description of how a normative consent argument for authority might encompass (and so improve?) some other arguments for authority extant in the literature on political obligation.

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UNCG: 29 February - 2 March 2008

The UNCG Philosophy Department will be hosting a conference on ethics and risk February 29th to March 2nd. Details - including titles for the papers to be presented and a list of participants - are available at http://www.uncg.edu/phi/2008symp.html. I realize that this notice is likely too late for anyone with an interest in ethics and risk to make arrangements to attend the conference, and I apologize for not publicizing it here sooner. Nevertheless, I thought some might find it useful to learn of work currently being done on this subject. If you would like to attend and are able to do so, however, please let me know.