This paper defends the view that a nation is justified in undertaking a defensive war — conceived of in terms of collective personal self-defense — against mitigated aggression. A nation committing mitigated aggression conditionally threatens — rather than imminently threatens — the lives of the citizens and soldiers of the victim nation in that it will employ lethal military force if and only if the victim nation does not submit to the invasion, the purpose of which is only to conquer and rule. What mitigated aggression threatens is a nation’s political sovereignty and cultural integrity, in short, a nation’s common way of life.

I was led to write this paper after reading David Rodin’s award winning book War and Self-Defense (Oxford 2002), where he argues that while mitigated aggression is immoral and against international law, a nation is not justified in responding to this kind of aggression with lethal force, for such force is disproportionate. The right of lethal self-defense doesn’t extend to everything that’s valuable. If a robber threatens to kill you if you don’t hand over your car, or if you don’t allow him to take what he wants from your house (he will let you live if you give him what he wants), it’s not clear that you are permitted to kill him. Killing the robber would be disproportionate.

In this paper I give an account of why a nation’s common way of life, by itself, is sufficiently valuable to defend via lethal force [incidentally, Jeff McMahan (cf. “War as Self-Defense”, Ethics and International Affairs 18, 2004) and Thomas Hurka (cf. “Proportionality in the Morality of War”, Philosophy and Public Affairs 33, 2005) argue that a nation’s common way of life by itself is insufficiently valuable to lethally defend but that a defensive war against mitigated aggression is nonetheless permissible. McMahan’s article can be accessed here. Hurka’s article can be accessed here]. I start by asking, what exactly, other than our own lives, is sufficiently valuable such that we can lethally defend it? I argue that our “primary” interests, because they are indispensably necessary for our well-being, are worth lethally defending. Following David Archard and Joel Feinberg, I discuss two kinds of primary interests: our central and our welfare interests. Our central interests (e.g. being autonomous) define who and what we are fundamentally and are central to our self-concept. Our welfare interests (e.g. minimal level of income) are necessary for the realization of our more ulterior goals in life, the realization of which is constitutive of our well-being. I then show that our interest in participating in our national community (or common way of life), an interest that mitigated aggression seriously sets back, can be characterized as both a central and welfare interest.

A copy of the paper can be found here.

Colleen Murphy’s comments on the paper can be accessed here.

An audio version of the paper can be found below.

I look forward to receiving any comments you may have!

The European Court of Human Rights is by far the most effective and best-tested model of a supra-national judiciary. As such, its practices and findings will surely influence similar institutions as they become more globally accepted. One of the central lessons of the court’s history is that decisions often explicitly or implicitly involve a certain “margin of appreciation” which the court grants sovereign governments with respect to administering their own nation. For example, in the “little red schoolbook” case the court granted England the right to determine what kind of material it considered unseemly for school children somewhat independently of the court’s enforcement of the human right to freedom of speech. According to some, allowing such a margin of appreciation is a sensible recognition of diversity, to others it is inappropriately deferential to dated notions of sovereignty. Article 15 of the Convention allows that signatory nations may derogate from their obligations regarding certain (non-fundamental) human rights in times of war or national emergency.

It is my project to explore what role a “margin of appreciation” should play in considering whether a signatory nation has allowably derogated from those rights under Article 15. Should the court allow a measure of discretion to the government in adducing the existence of a national emergency or not? The question addresses an issue right at the cusp between international normative obligations created exclusively by agreement, and international obligations which owe their normative force to some substantive supra-national moral conception of human rights. I will address the issue in two ways. First, we will consider the reasoning and decisions of the court with respect to the two cases which have invoked Article 15. As we will discover, the court’s decisions leave much to be desired regarding clarity in this area. Second, I will consider, with the help of a broad analogy, what might be the appropriate standard from a more conceptual point of view.

I much recommend the movie format of the paper presentation found below. I have included a slide show highlighting important pieces of text as well as images which I hope bring a little life to what can be a dry subject. For those who prefer to read the paper a pdf version may be found here.

I want to heartily thank Basak Cali for the commentary which may be found here.

Below the movie version and an audio only version as well. Enjoy!

My name is Emanuela Ceva and I’m a political philosopher based at the University of Pavia (Italy). The paper I’d like to discuss with you is an attempt to address (and hopefully provide an answer to) a well-known challenge to proceduralism about justice: if procedural theories of justice were genuinely open-ended, they might lead to controversial outcomes which, by definition, could not be disputed, because they had been produced by a just procedure. On the other hand, if they were committed to ruling out some outcomes by virtue of their inherent qualities, their very procedural nature would be jeopardised.

Those who endorse this position also think that it could be used to declare the implausibility of entirely procedural theories of justice.

As someone who has spent a few years trying to argue that proceduralism is at least a plausible (if not necessary, under certain conditions) alternative to substantivism, I have decided to take up this challenge, and devote this paper to showing that a qualified version of proceduralism may be developed, which is equipped to rebut the critique above.

To this aim, I shall unpack the first horn of the dilemma presented above into a twofold challenge, according to which proceduralism risks (i) fostering an “anything-goes” attitude towards justice and (ii) condemning agents to a “deaf and blind” acceptance of any outcome. In order to refute (i), I shall show that it is possible to construct a version of proceduralism that combines open-endedness with cogent prescriptions on justice. Addressing (ii), I shall concede that, for proceduralists, the outcomes of a just procedure cannot be disputed as unjust. However, this does not imply that a genuine procedural theory of justice may not allow some (admittedly limited, but still significant) space for contesting the substance of outcomes on the ground of values other than justice.

I should mention that I shall not offer an argument here explaining why a theory of justice should go procedural in the first place (a task which I’ve tried to carry out elsewhere - see E. Ceva, ‘Plural Values and Heterogeneous Situations. Considerations on the Scope for a Political Theory of Justice‘, European Journal of Political Theory, vol.6 (3), 2007, pp. 359-375). I shall, rather, focus on a more restricted defence of the plausibility of proceduralism against the dilemma outlined above.

For those who cannot cope with my dodgy accent, the pdf of the paper is available here.

David Lefkowitz’s discussion of the paper may be found here.  I thank David for his thoughtful comments, to which I shall post replies by Monday at the latest.

In the podcast (below), I read the full paper (and have added a brief commentary on the tables) but not the footnotes - which I have kept to a minumun, anyway.

Last but not least, I’d like to thank Simon for setting up this great virtual venue for seminars. I hope you’ll enjoy the paper and I very much look forward to any comments or suggestions on it.

Best, emanuela

I’m interested developing a novel pure procedualist deliberative democratic theory. So I wrote this paper as part of a general interest in tackling extant objections in the literature. The same general interest got me involved in responding to some of Corey Brettschneider’s arguments against pure proceduralisms in the reading group (on his book) on this blog last semester.

*in Journal of Political Philosophy, 2002, 10: p.153-174 - and subsequently anthologized widely.

C’mon out and join the discussion!

Paper: Jordan Dodd. On Gutmann and Thompson’s Arguments…’

Comments: Simon May. Comments on Dodd’s ‘On Gutmann and Thompson’s Arguments…’

I was originally led to write this paper by a combined interest in the concept of freedom and the influence of morality on intuitions.

I would love to hear your comments so please join in the discussion.

See the video presentation

Paper:Jonathan Phillips. Freedom: Morality and Folk Intuitions

Comments:Matt Zwolinski. Comments on Phillips’ Folk Conception of Freedom

PowerPoint: Freedom: Morality and Folk Intuitions

In this paper, I’m trying the following general approach: we imagine that certain things (justice, democracy, public welfare) are virtues of states, and we can say that a) a citizen is virtuous as a citizen (as a matter of democratic values, or civic values more generally) to the extent the citizen promotes those state virtues; and b) we ought to support those behaviors that ordinarily make up civic virtue.  By support, I mean that the state ought to permit them (and even encourage them to some extent), and our normative theorizing ought to do the same.  Most of the paper is an argument to the effect that a notion of citizen leadership centered on transformative moral advocacy does have a general tendency to promote the virtues of states, and, thus, is a form of civic virtue.  To get there, I primarily offer a fairly ambitious argument about the role of instability in what we might call the evolution of virtuous states.

All of this is very tentative: the paper should be understood as something like a very early working paper, which is still full of the bad ideas and overlooked problems that characterize papers in this stage of the academic life cycle (much more moth than butterfly).  I’m somewhat (rather) dissatisfied with it as it stands.  In particular, the argument about stability needs a lot more work, and I’m considering it for a full-size standalone research program, or a dissertation, or something like that.  So I’d particularly appreciate thoughts on how that line of thinking (section II.B) can be developed.

With no further ado, the paper is here.   As it’s fairly long, I created an abbreviated version for podcasting purposes, here.  Ben Saunders was kind enough to give the commentary, which is here. (I have some extensive replies to some of his comments, which I’ll be posting in dribs and drabs over the next few days.) To listen to the podcast, you can click below.

My apologies for the rough condition of the draft (missing citations, formatting glitches, etc.)  Thanks to Ben for the comments, and to Simon for organizing this event.

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)

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.

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]

When the government provides for these things, it may be engaging in what we can call government supererogation.  Which acts we’d label as examples of government supererogation will depend on which theories of justice and goodness we accept.  While there is disagreement over these theories, and thus disagreement over which specific acts are supererogatory, I believe most people would identify some acts as fitting into the category.  Taken together, these acts may consume a substantial amount of public resources and attention.

In my contribution to the Political Philosophy Podcast Symposium, I argue that the kinds of acts that seem to be examples of government supererogation are only apparently supererogatory.  Because of the kind of agent government is, the category of supererogation is unavailable to it.  Acts of apparent government supererogation, I argue, are instead either wrong or required by justice, and for most such acts the latter option is implausible.

This paper is related to a larger project of mine on questions about the agency of justice.  Some of these questions have to do with the agency of the state, since the state is typically thought of as the prime agent of justice.  Other questions concern other possible agents of justice, such as private citizens and voluntary associations.

I look forward to getting your thoughts on the paper.  Thanks for listening / reading.  Thanks also to Simon for setting up the Symposium, and to Helena de Bres for her very helpful comments.

Click here to read the paper.

Click here to read Helena de Bres’s comments on the paper.

In a number of states and countries, transgender activists and scholars are challenging the rules and regulations for altering one’s sex status on official documents and records.  In this presentation, I explore why each person must have an official or legal sex, and why these identities are subject to the control of our governments.

I include below links to an audio file, as well as presentation slides, with and without the same audio, so you can listen and read along at the same time.  I also include a link to the text of my presentation.   Lori Gruen’s helpful comments are linked below my text.

Presentation slides with embedded audio

Presentation slides without audio

Text

Lori Gruen’s comments

The paper I am presenting for this podcast symposium is part of an ongoing research interest of mine in how torture becomes institutionalized in military forces that are (in theory at least) committed to the prohibition against torture. I am particularly interested in how the processes of rationalization and normalization contribute to the use of torture, and how language, training, and torture methods effect the moral attitudes of those involved in the authorization and use of torture.

I was inspired to write this paper after noticing that the term “torture lite” was turning up quite frequently in the public debate about torture, used both by those who argue against torture and by those arguing that torture might sometimes be justified. I was interested in how the use of this phrase (and similar phrases such as “enhanced interrogation”) shaped the debate about torture, and in whether this term does pick out a set of torture techniques that are generally or always less severe than more violent torture methods. In particular, I began to wonder how the techniques described as torture lite (for example, extended sleep deprivation, forced standing, noise bombardment, isolation, and manipulation of heat and cold) shaped torturers’ (and others’) moral perception of what is being done to the victims and who is responsible for it. It struck me that so-called torture lite techniques share certain features that tend to mask the effects of these methods on the victims and minimize the torturer’s role in causing the victims’ suffering, and that this might play an important role in making such forms of torture seem more palatable to liberal democracies than would otherwise be the case.

I hope you find the paper interesting to read/listen to. I look forward to reading your comments, and many thanks to Simon May for organizing this symposium.

I haven’t included the footnotes in the podcast of the paper, and I have left some material out in order to make it a manageable length, but you can read the full version of the paper here

David Sussman’s excellent comments are available here

You can listen to the podcast below.

I of course wrote this article with my dissertation advisor and world-class political philosopher Jerry Gaus. The article was originally an invitation to Jerry to write an article that would be part of a symposium on public reason and religion in Philosophy and Social Criticism. Jerry and I had been talking about these issues for nearly a year, so he was magnanimous enough to invite me to be a co-author.

The article I’m reading to you today has the incredibly unwieldy title: “The Roles of Religious Conviction in a Publicly Justified Polity: The Implications of Convergence, Asymmetry, and Political Institutions.” I place the blame for this title squarely on Jerry’s shoulders. The delightful and razor-sharp John Quong will be our commenter. Thank you, John for your able criticisms.

I read the entire paper on the podcast, but I don’t read the footnotes. If you listen to the podcast, you’ll want to see the footnotes in the paper if you had additional questions.

With that said, thank you all for joining me and thanks to Simon May for putting together this very cool, very hip, very innovative and yes, very cheap philosophy conference.

Here’s the PDF.

Here are Jon Quong’s excellent comments.

I’ll post replies on Monday and Tuesday.

Incidentally, we’re hoping to get Jerry in on this, but he will be at a conference over the weekend going on about T. H. Green. (What? You don’t know who T. H. Green is? Well, you should!) I will pester him, but posting provocative comments will help draw him in!

The podcast is below. Enjoy my melodious Southern accent. The file is large (~6 MB) so patience while loading. Its probably better to download it to your computer or MP3 player.

Note: Please do not cite this article without permission from the authors.

A lot of people misread their rights,” [Sabuni] said recently. “They think that freedom of religion means they can do anything in the name of religion, or that human rights mean that they can act however they want against others.” Not true, she said. “If they want to live here, have kids, have grandchildren, they must make an effort to adapt to the society where they live.”

On one hand, her remarks appear almost banal — of course immigrants have adapt, at least in the sense of obeying the law, respecting entrenched norms and values and contributing to various public goods. (It is also the case that larger societies have to adapt to immigrant groups.) On the other hand, it struck me that she might be requiring something quite radical, namely that immigrants abandon substantial parts of their culture. The word “adapt” is ambiguous and says little about what immigrants’ precise moral obligations are.

While it seemed to me that many people agree that immigrants have some obligations to adapt, I found it extremely difficult to identify the grounds for this belief. What is troublesome is that longstanding groups within societies such as aboriginal groups, national minorities and even people who have chosen an “alternative” lifestyle do not have these obligations. Why should recent immigrants be in a different position, particularly if one values liberal autonomy and rights such as freedom of conscience, freedom of religion and freedom of association?

Working out these issues (or attempting to work them out!) led me to write this paper.

My paper can be downloaded here.

Matt Lister’s comments on the paper are available here.

You can listen to the podcast by clicking the arrow below: