Books

I just wanted to announce the publication of my book with David Schmidtz, A Brief History of Liberty.

It’s something of an unusual book for philosophers, because it’s as much a genuine history (and economics, psychology, law, and sociology) book as it is a philosophy book. I’d summarize our motivation for the project as follows: Dave and I note that historically, philosophers and regular people have used the word “liberty” to refer to a wide range of related things. When philosophers debate what the word “liberty” refers to, or which kind of liberty is most important, they often have a background assumption that liberty, whatever that is, is to be promoted by government in a particular way. But that’s not a good assumption. What role government, or any institution, ought to play in promoting a particular kind of liberty is determined not by conceptual analysis, but by investigating (empirically) what government and other institutions are likely to accomplish. What value any kind of liberty has is also for the most part contingent—we need to see what having certain kinds of liberties does to people, and what happens to people when those liberties are absent. Again, this goes beyond philosophy and requires empirical work. Also, what relationship different kinds of liberty with one another requires empirical work. For instance, while people might debate whether negative or positive liberty is more important, we instead note that empirically, it looks like protecting negative liberty has a long and non-accidental historical track record of promoting positive liberty.

Here’s the table of contents:

Introduction: Conceptions of Freedom.

1. A Prehistory of Liberty: Forty Thousand Years Ago.

2. The Rule of Law: AD 1075.

3. Religious Freedom: 1517.

4. Freedom of Commerce: 1776.

5. Civil Liberty: 1954.

6. Psychological Freedom, the Last Frontier: 1963.

Veniamin Zatsepin

University of Melbourne, Faculty of Education

Table of Contents - Part 2:

Personality types as the elements of anthroposystem

What is human nature?

Where is the concept of evil human nature from?

Afterword

Acknowledgments

References

Personality types as elements of the anthroposystem

The anthroposystem and the social system are two aspects of the same developed human society. Both of them represent humankind as a single whole and both of them are organized and structured. But their structural and organizational elements, and consequently the objects of their attention, are different. The social system’s constructive elements are social institutions, each performing their specific functions of maintaining and regulating economic, political, legal, moral and other relations. The anthroposystem’s “cells”, the “points of references”, are informal social-psychological groups of personality types. The anthroposystem and social system are closely tangled, so these two systems influence each other, but at the same time they still remain relatively independent.

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Veniamin Zatsepin

University of Melbourne, Faculty of Education

Table of Contents - Part 1:

Preface

Creation of the concept of the social system

The social system in Marxist philosophy

Post-Marxist concepts of the social systems

Testing the social system theories

Into the fabric of social institutes

The basic personality types

Psychopath (sociopath)

Authoritarian personality

Machiavellian personality

“Technocratic”, “practical” or “hoarding” personality

Amiable, friendly or agreeable personality

Altruistic personality

Creative personality

Part 2:

Personality types as the elements of anthroposystem

What is human nature?

Where is the concept of evil human nature from?

Afterword

Acknowledgments

References

Preface

It has always made me feel uneasy reading or hearing someone trying to explain people’s inhumane acts, and even brutish violence, by recourse to the concept of “human nature”. On this explanation, there are really only two possibilities: either one is a criminal (or at least a potential criminal) or one is simply not a human being. At the same time, I still find it bewildering that our primeval ancestors, the illiterate people of the stone and bronze ages (and our contemporaries, the Aborigines of Australia and the Americas), while poorly versed in the theory of nature’s laws, knew and expressed in their everyday lives closer kinship with nature than do even the most educated of us today. Their attitude to each and every part of nature was more humane and respectful than that of the majority of our contemporaries, despite the fact that these people burned trees for fire and killed animals for food. So what has happened to modern people, to society? Does civilization, indeed, spoil us? Why have we been breaking our contracts or mutual understanding with the animate natural world? What has been pitting us against each other and why do we degrade and eliminate other people? Is it true that mankind is a malignant tumor of the body that is earth? Are we, human beings, indeed evil from our very childhood? And who and what exactly are ‘we’?

These are the questions that the following discussion is concerned with.

Read the rest of this entry »

Continuum Ethics
A series of books exploring key topics in contemporary ethics and moral philosophy.

Continuum Ethics presents a series of books that will bridge the gap between new research work and undergraduate textbooks. They will provide close examination of key concepts in contemporary moral philosophy. Aimed largely at upper-level undergraduates and research students, they will also appeal to researchers in the field. Authors will be expected to combine philosophical sophistication with an accessible style that can engage the educated reader.
Each volume will introduce its subject within the context of recent developments in moral philosophy. Each book will cover the major thinkers and their key ideas, outline questions raised within the area of concern, and explore possible answers to those questions. Authors will be encouraged to argue for a particular view or views and each volume will present an original contribution to the field. Each book will explore - either throughout the text or in the final chapter(s) - the future of the topic in contemporary ethics and other research areas.

The authors of individual volumes will be experienced teachers of the subject, based in respected departments and will possess a good, accessible written style. Each volume will also feature a brief preface from the series editor.

The series will benefit from a coherent series look, a striking design and effective marketing.
Possible Topics:

Duty
Error Theory
Expressivism
Freedom and Morality
Global Justice
Just War
Moral Knowledge
Moral Motivation
Moral Narrative and Personality
Moral Psychology and Character
Moral Realism
Punishment
Reasons and Rationality
Rights
Utility
Virtue

Anyone interested in contributing to this series should contact the series editors:

Thom Brooks (Newcastle) (t.brooks@newcastle.ac.uk)

Simon Kirchin (Kent) (S.T.Kirchin@kent.ac.uk)

Announcing two new book series with Edinburgh University Press:

STUDIES IN GLOBAL JUSTICE AND HUMAN RIGHTS
Series Editor: Thom Brooks

“Global justice and human rights” is perhaps the hottest topic today. Studies in Global Justice and Human Rights is a new book series published by Edinburgh University Press. The series aims to publish groundbreaking work in this increasingly popular field. This series will publish leading monographs and edited collections on key topics in the area of global justice and human rights that will be of broad interest to theorists working in politics, international relations, philosophy, and related disciplines.

Topics of particular importance are democracy, global gender justice, global justice, global poverty, human rights, international environmental justice, and just war theory amongst others. This series aspires to publish the leading work in this area with broad interdisciplinary appeal.

TEXTBOOKS IN GLOBAL JUSTICE AND HUMAN RIGHTS
Series Editor: Thom Brooks

“Global justice and human rights” is perhaps the hottest topic today. Textbooks in Global Justice and Human Rights is a new book series published by Edinburgh University Press. The series aims to publish groundbreaking work in this increasingly popular field. This series will publish leading introductory textbooks on key topics in the area of global justice and human rights that will be of broad interest to both undergraduate and graduate students in politics, international relations, philosophy, and related disciplines.

We are particularly interested in publishing work in the fields of

• global justice
• human rights
• women and global justice
• global justice and global poverty
• international environmental philosophy

This series aspires to publish the leading textbooks in this area with broad interdisciplinary appeal.

Expressions of interest for BOTH series are most welcome and should be directed to the series editor, Thom Brooks (email: t.brooks@newcastle.ac.uk).

Edinburgh University Press website: http://www.eupjournals.com/
Global Justice and Human Rights Group: http://www.psa.ac.uk/spgrp/glbljst/Glbjst.aspx

Via an email from CUP:

Columbia University Press is pleased to announce the publication of Sibyl Schwarzenbach’s On Civic Friendship: Including Women in the State.

In this innovative new work Schwarzenbach argues that women have performed the vast majority of often unpaid friendship labor for centuries. Embodying the freedom, equality, and ideals of the Constitution, civic friendship emerges as a necessary condition for genuine justice. Through a critical examination of social and political relationships from ancient times to today, Sibyl Schwarzenbach develops a truly innovative, feminist theory of the democratic state.

You can find out more about the book here.

James P. Sterba at the University of Notre Dame praises the text:
“Sibyl Schwarzenbach’s attempt to show the importance of women’s experiences and feminist theory for the justification of the democratic state is the most successful I have seen. Its achievement should be widely recognized and commented upon by feminist political philosophers and, hopefully, by political philosophers more generally, attracting as much attention as Susan Okin’s Justice, Gender, and the Family.”

A quick interruption to let PRers know that my book Democracy and Moral Conflict (Cambridge University Press)  has just come out. Here are few endorsements from the back cover:

‘Talisse sees profound moral and religious conflict in our political life that threatens democracy, and makes impossible effective defenses by appeal to shared values. He advances an important alternative: our common commitment to sound beliefs should lead us all to endorse democratic politics. This is a fine work of public philosophy in the tradition of J. S. Mill and John Dewey.’ –Gerald Gaus, University of Arizona

‘Robert Talisse has provided us with a timely, original, and unapologetic defense of constitutional democracy. It is, he says, the only form of government suited to persons who are already committed in their everyday lives to giving reasons for their beliefs. Artfully blending careful philosophical analysis with contemporary illustrations and accessible prose, Democracy and Moral Conflict makes an authentically democratic and powerfully reasoned case for democracy.’ –John C. P. Goldberg, Harvard University

‘Robert Talisse argues that democracy comes closer than any other political system to instantiating the norms of the folk epistemology which all citizens share. Insofar as we care about the truth, we have a reason to remain committed to democracy, even when the stakes are highest. An engaging read, this book makes an important contribution to the growing discussion of democracy’s epistemic virtues.‘ –David A. Reidy, University of Tennessee

The Stanford political science department, in conjunction with the Ethics in Society Center and other campus programs, is hosting a special event on Friday, October 16 at 4pm.  It is open to the public.

The occasion is the release of a new edited book on the work of our late colleague Susan Moller Okin, Toward a Humanist Justice.

The event will also feature some brief remarks by Kavita Ramdas, the president of the Global Fund for Women, an organization Susan worked with and to which go all proceeds from the sale of the book.

Please feel free to share this invitation with others.

Okin Book Event

Would anyone here would be interested in taking part in a reading group on Amartya Sen’s new book, The Idea of Justice?  If so, I would be interested in starting it up in January 2010.

Josh Cohen and Tom Nagel have a piece in the TLS and Times Online on Rawls’s senior thesis on sin and faith. The piece is part of a longer introduction to A Brief Inquiry into the Meaning of Sin and Faith, which also includes Rawls’s 1997 piece, “On My Religion.” I’ve shared the uneasiness felt by some about the posthumous publication of a senior thesis, but from what Cohen and Nagel discuss there are a number of interesting anticipations of ideas later worked out in a secular form in Theory and Political Liberalism, particularly the rejection of teleology and a vivid sense of the arbitrariness of merit.

Also by Cohen, Boston Review have forwarded two recent pieces on libertarianism and on the technology, journalism, and democracy that may be of interest to people.

Hi public reasoners. So, as you all know, GA Cohen let rip an attack against the fact-sensitivity of fundamental political principles in his 2003 PPA article, “Facts and Principles,” and then in his book Rescuing Justice and Equality.  People have responded to this in a number of ways (e.g., Thomas Pogge’s essay in response to Cohen, found in a special issue of Ratio dedicated to Cohen’s book is both excellent and hilarious).

Well, I am going to throw my hat in the ring. What I’ve appended here is a thought-piece - something I am just throwing out there - for discussion.   It’s a little long for a blog post, so it’s in paper format.  I’d like to get people’s take on this stuff.  So, I hope that people will read it and start commenting. The basic idea is this: As a conceptual matter, it could be the case that political principles are fact-sensitive.  Cohen never considers this option.  So his argument fails pretty badly - more or less right out of the gate.  I hope folks will be interested enough in this to read it and offer some discussion pointers.

Thanks,Matt.

fact-sensitivity.pdf

Over at my other blog, I’m hosting a book symposium this week that I think will be of interest to Public Reason readers.  It’s on Nancy Rosenblum’s new book On the Side of Angels; she is taking part along with respondents including Patrick Deneen, Henry Farrell, Mara Marin, Andrew Rehfeld, Melissa Schwartzberg, Nadia Urbinati, and me.  I describe and introduce the symposium at http://jacobtlevy.blogspot.com/2009/01/on-side-of-angels-symposium.html , and the whole thing can be found at http://jacobtlevy.blogspot.com/search/label/Rosenblum-symposium .  At this posting, Rosenblum’s first entries are up; the first responses will be posted this afternoon.  Commentators are welcome and encouraged to take part in the conversation that unfolds over the course of the week.

 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.

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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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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 »

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 »

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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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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Summary:

Corey Brettschneider argues in Chapter 2 of Democratic Rights that citizens’ status as rulers in a democracy entitles them to claim individual rights based on the core elements of the value theory—equality of interests, political autonomy, and reciprocity.  These democratic rights are substantive rights and not just rights of participation.  After elaborating how the value theory works to ground substantive rights, Brettschneider closes by considering how two fundamental democratic rights—to the rule of law and to freedom of speech—might be argued for from the perspective of the value theory.

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Welcome to the first installment of our reading group on Corey Brettschneider’s Democratic Rights: The Substance of Self-Government. This post will focus on Chapter 1, The Value Theory of Democracy.

Summary

This chapter begins by describing the view, commonly held among liberal theorists, that there is a conflict between democracy and individual rights. On this view, democracy is defined by a set of political procedures, whereas rights are substantive, or “procedure-independent,” constraints on the outcomes of those procedures. This view leads to the following puzzle in democratic theory:  If democratic procedures confer legitimacy on their outcomes – because the people who are subject to those outcomes have also authorized them – then how can those outcomes be limited by a set of procedure-independent, or substantive, rights? This is what Brettschneider calls the “problem of constraint” (8). Read the rest of this entry »

This is just a friendly reminder that our virtual reading group on David Estlund’s Democratic Authority will be starting on January 14 with a discussion of chapter 1. Hope to see lots of you there!

I’m very happy to announce that, starting in January, we’ll be having a virtual reading group on David Estlund’s new book, Democratic Authority: A Philosophical Framework. We’ll read one chapter a week, and each week someone will post a brief summary of the chapter, as well as provide a few questions or comments to help kick-start the discussion. Those who want to participate can then use the comments function to discuss the chapter. I hope that lots of people, not just the initial list of contributors below, will decide to join in. We have a great group of contributors, and David has also very kindly agreed to participate in the discussion and provide his own post at the end. Below is a schedule for the reading group, which lists each chapter as well as the person who will start the discussion that week. See you in January! Read the rest of this entry »

If I may be allowed a chance to make a brief announcement, I am delighted to say that my new monograph, Hegel’s Political Philosophy: A Systematic Reading of the Philosophy of Right, is hot off the press. It is published by Edinburgh University Press and distributed in the United States by Columbia University Press. (It can be found at Amazon.co.uk. Orders in North America can be made here [or now at Amazon.com here — SCM].)

For a taster: Read the rest of this entry »