Symposia

I’ve been very negligent in replying to Ben’s and Andy’s excellent comments on my PPPS democratic leadership paper.  It being Christmas Eve, I’ve finally found time to hastily write up my thoughts!  They’re lengthy, so I’ve followed the pattern and uploaded them as PDF.  Here they are.  All further thoughts are, of course, not only welcome but greatly and enthusiastically appreciated.

(Have a good holiday, everyone.)

I’ve written some fairly extensive comments on the podcast that Paul Gowder posted a few weeks ago (or, more precisely, on the written paper (.pdf)).  Since they’re several pages long, I’ve decided to link to them as a .pdf rather than taking up oodles of space in a web post. I do think the paper is very exciting, and I hope that these comments will spur further discussion either here or below Paul’s original post.

Anyway: here are the comments.

Spring 2009 PPPS CFP: 19 December 2009

I’m extending the deadline for submissions for the Spring 2009 podcast symposium until Friday 19 December — 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 Friday 19 December 2009. As with this semester’s symposium, a committee of members of the website, not including myself, will choose between the abstracts.

Those who submit an abstract commit themselves to having a full draft of the paper ready by 19 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.

Hi.  I’m Paul Gowder, a Ph.D. candidate in Stanford’s Political Science department.  This paper arose out of another paper that I have in progress.  The other paper, a critique of Rawls’s idea of public reason and an attempt to develop a broadly proceduralist alternative that can meet the stability and justification concerns driving the original idea without constraining democratic debate, was foundering on the rocks of my inability to articulate a normative principle to ground the fundamental objection to that kind of constraint.  This paper is my first, preliminary, attempt to make some sense of the intuition behind that objection — the idea of the value of citizen moral advocacy, qua citizen moral advocacy, in a democracy.

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.

 

 Making Space for Rosa Parks: Democratic Authorship as Political Autonomy: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

I got the idea for this paper while teaching a course on dictatorships and revolutions. The course had little political philosophy content (by design), but we did talk about whether democratic regimes are always to be preferred to non-democratic regimes, and I had a section on “transitional justice” at the end of the trimester. Teaching the course  crystallized a certain dissatisfaction with the emphasis of much recent political theory on questions about the justification of constitutional democracy. The problem was not that I had any objections to the justification of constitutional democracy, but that such discussions seemed to be of little help in evaluating the many kinds of political regimes that actually exist in the world today, and which can be imperfect in a bewildering variety of ways. As a native of Venezuela, I also wondered whether the emphasis of recent political theory on democracy obscured more than it illuminated the ways in which political regimes promote or fail to promote certain values and interests.

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)

 

 Unhappy Families: Three Ways of Thinking about Imperfect Political Regimes: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

This paper was motivated by a dissatisfaction with the move to justify armed humanitarian intervention to deal with widespread and systematic human rights violations. I’m skeptical of arguments that defend a right or duty of armed intervention for a few reasons, but prominent among these is their failure to engage adequately with the empirical literature to determine whether armed intervention is an effective means to bringing about long-term progress on human rights performance. Some recent studies suggest that it’s not.

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.

 

 Standard Podcast: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

The expensive tastes objection constitutes a familiar argument against egalitarian (and other) theories of distributive justice that require redistribution of resources from those whose aims are relatively cheap to pursue to those whose aims are relatively expensive to pursue just in virtue of the difference in the costs of pursuit. It’s based quite straightforwardly on the common intuition that we simply ought not to endorse such redistributions. Often, the expensive tastes objection is seen as sufficient by itself to ground the rejection of those theories of distributive justice that are vulnerable to it.

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.

 

 Distributive Subjectivism, Liberal Neutrality, and the Expensive Tastes Intuition: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

I’m grateful for the opportunity to participate in this forum, and thank Simon May and Public Reason for the work in organizing this symposium.

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]

 

 Coercion as Enforcement: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

It seems that governments sometimes act in ways that are good, but not required by any plausible conception of justice.  Think of the lovely flowers on the highway median, or the block party thrown in your town each year, or the grant you received last summer.  Or, more controversially, consider the victim compensation fund set up by the U.S. Congress after the September 11th attacks, or maybe even the $700 billion bailout of the U.S. financial industry going on right now.

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.

 

 Is Government Supererogation Possible?: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

Here is my contribution to this podcast symposium; I’d like to add my thanks to Simon May for organizing this online event.

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

 

 "Does the Government Need to Know Your Sex?": Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

Hi everybody,

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.

 

 WolfendaleTortureLite: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

Hi everyone. My name is Kevin Vallier. I’m a fourth year graduate student at the University of Arizona. My primary work is in political philosophy, but I have strong interests in ethics, philosophy of economics and philosophy of religion. I’m currently writing my dissertation. In short, I’m attempting to give a justificatory liberal account of the role of religion in politics. The article I’m reading to you in many ways form the template for my dissertation.

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.

 

 Three Errors: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

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

The paper evolved as a side project to my doctoral dissertation on the theoretical and practical factors factors that ought to determine a just immigration policy. I was reading an article in the New York Times on immigration in Europe and was struck by some remarks made Nyamko Sabuni, Swedish minister for integration and gender equality:

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:

 

 What Immigrants Owe Society: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

I’m very happy to announce that the Fall 2008 Political Philosophy Podcast Symposium will commence this Friday. Each week, for the next ten weeks of the semester, we will have a paper podcasted on the site along with comments from a responder. The ten papers were chosen from a number of submitted abstracts through a process of blind review by four members of the website.

Part of the purpose of the symposium is to create a forum in which political philosophers around the world can attend and participate in a weekly political philosophy talk, albeit virtually. The authors have been asked to podcast their papers as a way to approximate the conditions of an in-person talk as closely as possible. Each post will contain an mp3 audio file, a pdf document of the paper, as well as a pdf document containing the responder’s comments. Thus, it will be possible to read the paper as the speaker is talking through it.

We hope to have more such symposia in the future. There is no reason why political philosophers should not be able to listen and respond to a quality political philosophy talk every week. Naturally, we are not audio experts, so we may not quite sound like a professional radio station as we proceed. But we should be able to work out problems and make improvements as we gain experience with the medium. All suggestions for improvement are welcome.

You can listen to the podcasts, either directly at the site, or by downloading them through iTunes. You can subscribe to Public Reason podcasts on iTunes by following this link. This way you can download the audio files to your mp3 player and listen to the talks in your car, train, favourite coffee shop, etc. (Whilst you are at it, you can also subscribe to Public Ethics Radio and Ethics Bites.)

This semester’s schedule is over the fold:

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