“When can ever be justified in banning a religious practice? This paper focusses on Martha Nussbaum’s capabilities approach. Certain religious practices create a clash between capabilities where the capability to religious belief and expression is in conflict with the capability of equal status and nondiscrimination. One example of such a clash is the case of polygamy. Nussbaum argues that there may be circumstances where polygamy may be acceptable. On the contrary, I argue that the capabilities approach cannot justify polygamy in any circumstance. Her approach rules out polygamy, but may not rule out all non-monogamous relationships, such as polyamory. Finally, I conclude that the capabilities approach would benefit from a more robust understanding of recognition.”

I would be very interested to hear from readers whether they agree or where the paper could be improved more. Any comments most appreciated!

Abstract:  

This paper challenges the common assumption that democracy requires majority rule. I assume that we can adopt a contractualist approach to uncover the demands of political equality and argue that contractors would not necessarily accept majority rule to make decisions in their society. I first reject broadly consequentialist arguments, arguing that firstly no procedure guarantees ideally best outcomes, secondly that in cases of pluralism there is no need to suppose there is a uniquely best outcome, and thirdly that we need to be fair between different individuals. I develop this need for fairness into a case for weighted lotteries, drawing on the Taurek-Scanlon ‘saving the greater number’ debate. This leads to my conclusion that democratic ideals can be realized by selecting a random vote to determine the outcomes of decisions.

1. Assumption: Libertarians agree that any existing states must be legitimate and some states should exist.
2. Assumption: Libertarians hold that for any existing states to be legitimate they must only exercise coercive force over (rights respecting) individuals to protect these individuals’ liberty.
3. From Simmons’ argument in “Consent theory for libertarians”: Libertarians should agree that for state to be legitimate, they must secure their subjects’ autonomous consent.
4. For states to secure their subjects autonomous consent, they must do what they can to enable their subjects to secure sufficient autonomy to autonomously consent to its rules.
5. To secure this autonomy most people (in all states) must be able to secure some minimal amount of healthcare, food, water, and shelter.
6. So, states must do what they can to enable most of their subjects to secure some minimal amount of healthcare, food, water, and shelter.
7. Implicit premise: If libertarians must agree that states must do what they can to enable most of their subjects to secure some minimal amount of healthcare, food, water, and shelter, they must be (some kind of) welfare liberals.
8. So libertarians should be (some kind of) welfare liberals.

Thoughts?

Thanks, -Nicole

I’ve been accumulating a long file of writing notes and references since SPEP that do not appear in the current version of the paper; I suspect that I will end up with a second paper that goes into much greater detail on the efficiency arguments (as distinct from the rhetorical structure of the TTB scenario). But I am interested in what folks who have an interest in the topic think about the paper as it stands; part of my motivation in posting the current draft is to get myself kick-started into working on the next iteration.

Gordon

Hi everyone,

I have been working for a while on a paper, which was provoked by the cartoons of Muhammad that were published in Denmark in 2005 and created an international uproar. In the Danish public debate about the cartoons there were a number of dividing lines, but the one I find of particular interest from the perspective of political theory is one drawn between standing firm on Enlightenment values (freedom of expression and democracy) versus giving in to the demand for respect for religious feelings. In my paper I relate this contrast to Galston’s contrast between Enlightenment and Reformation Liberalism, autonomy and diversity. In short, I reject Galston’s dichotomy and argue that the Enlightenment value of autonomy is not the culprit; it is not this principle that is to blame for the lack of respect for Muslims in the Danish cartoon controversy. To make this argument I distinguish different ways in which “autonomy” may be used. In particular, I am concerned with how autonomy is used in justifications for freedom of expression and whether these uses are incompatible with respect for diversity. I argue that if we understand the autonomy that freedom of expression is justified with reference to not as a character ideal that has to be promoted but as a capacity we presuppose everyone has, then this principle rather than creating hierarchies among forms of life is an indispensable principle for grounding equal respect. Properly understood, a commitment to autonomy is not a threat to respect for difference but its precondition.

I am very interested in any thoughts on whether my argument success. In particular, I am not quite satisfied with the concluding section (sec IV) in which I try to respond to objections.

Best,

Christian

Lysander Spooner, the foremost legal theorist of 19th century American radical liberalism, might seem to have defended two distinct and incompatible theories of the relation between liberal legal norms and positive law. In early works such as The Unconstitutionality of Slavery (1846), liberal legal norms appear to emerge from considerations immanent within the positive law; but in later works like Natural Law, or the Science of Justice (1882), liberal legal norms appear instead to function as an external constraint on the legitimacy, and indeed the legality, of positive statutes. I argue, drawing on earlier natural law tradition as well as on more recent analytic theories of language, and applying Spooner’s canons of interpretation to his own texts, that Spooner’s apparently distinct formulations yield a single consistent approach, a defensible and attractive radical liberal natural-law jurisprudence that transcends the internal/external distinction.

Comments welcome!

Also, I see that my 2004 article “Aristotle’s Egalitarian Utopia: The polis kat’ euchen” is now online in its entirety at Google Books, as a result of the relevant number of Acts of the Copenhagen Polis Centre’s being online in part.  It explores what Aristotle’s theory of natural slavery, his merit-based system of constitutional classification, and his account of the role of philosophic contemplation in the good life might have to tell us about the character of Aristotle’s ideal state.

The work is still under some revision, so I’d be happy for any feedback I can get. If you think it’s a useful resource for your students, please feel free to share it with them (and I’d be happy to hear about it!). If you think it’s horribly biased, poorly written, conceptually sloppy, etc., I guess I’d be happy in some sense to hear that too.

The article is not up yet on IEP, but can be accessed off of SSRN: http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1069042.

Thanks!

Locke, The Waste Proviso, and the Moral Justification of Intellectual Property

It’s long - aside from the usual typo cleanup, one of the main things I’ll be working on before sending it out is concision. Another will be reading and including some of the papers mentioned in the waste thread. In any case, comments are welcome. What follows is the first page or so of the paper, which should serve as an abstract/guide for where I’m going.

ABSTRACT:

Defenders of strong intellectual property rights or of a non-utilitarian basis for those rights often turn to Locke for support. Perhaps because of a general belief that Locke is an advocate of all things proprietary, this move seldom receives careful scrutiny. That is unfortunate for two reasons. First, as I will argue, Locke does not issue a blank check in support of all property regimes, and the application of his reasoning to intellectual property would actually result in a substantially limited rights regime. Second, the attempt to understand intellectual property as an instance of Lockean property, though admittedly anachronistic, offers an opportunity to further our understanding of Locke’s own thought. My major claim will thus be twofold: on the one hand, intellectual property would be an almost paradigmatic case of Lockean property; on the other hand, Locke’s provisos - specifically the widely neglected spoilage proviso - would sharply limit the scope of such entitlements. My secondary claim will be that the spoilage proviso’s neglect is undeserved, and that it deserves a more central place in our understanding of Locke.

The paper proceeds as follows. In the first part, I will examine Locke’s own writings on English print licensing law, which formed the backdrop against which the original copyright statute was developed. In part 2, I attempt to resurrect the spoilage proviso. Part 3 explains why intellectual property would be a paradigm case of Lockean property more broadly. On the basis of the preceding textual work, part 4 attempts a conceptual clarification of waste in Lockean terms, and part 5 applies that analysis to some contemporary intellectual property issues.

This is my first post here and I hope I am playing it right.

I noticed recently that people are not writing much on the right or obligation to revolution anymore. At first this seemed to be because those who advocate revolution seem to suffer from a kind of half-hilarious Sartrean bad faith (I am thinking here of the members of the various Trotskyite and other sectarian organizations selling Socialist This and Workers’ That papers) and so not many really wanted to associate themselves with talk about revolution. This seemed to be a shame.

But, then I started looking more closely at the literature of philosophical anarchists and noticed that there has been some ink spilled on arguments against revolution.

So, I decided to write a paper suggesting that we re-think this rejection of revolution, and start to look for new grounds for a right to revolution. I hereby submit for comment and discussion to the readers of Public Reason a little paper about this.

One thing I leave out is empirical data - I don’t know much beyond what I’ve learned from my own college days of living with some of those bad faith Trotskyites (well, a lot of them had bad faith — I know one who is the real deal) and a quick glance at Wikipedia. So, I welcome contributions of empirical data!

Here’s the paper: Rethinking Revolution.

-Matt

Hi,
So I have this argument I’ve been thinking about for the conclusion that, theoretically, it is quite possible that Fair Trade will offer Pareto superior improvements for the poor. I’d love any thoughts. The argument makes the standard economic assumptions about competitive markets and consumers and producers trying to maximize profit and utility respectively and tries to show that Fair Trade will offer Pareto superior improvements for the poor if the consumer does not change the amount of goods she purchases and will continue to buy Fair Trade goods into perpetuity.

Here’s the thought:

Suppose that a consumer is trying to decide whether or not to buy Fair Trade bananas and will either purchase bananas from a Fair Trade source for (say) $2 a bag or non-Fair Trade source for $1 a bag. If the consumer buys from a Fair Trade source the poor people who receive her money would, without her money, either have gone out of business or not. If the poor people she supports would otherwise have gone out of business they would have either gone into a more profitable business (than the regular banana business) or not. If not, then the consumer has benefited them. If the poor people the consumer supports would have otherwise gone into a more profitable business (say sugar) then they have done better to make Fair Trade bananas, otherwise they would have gone into sugar. The poor people this consumer supports are, thus, better off with Fair Trade. The consumer knows that she has helped the poor people who make her Fair Trade bananas.

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