Spring 2009 Political Philosophy Podcast Symposium
The schedule for the Spring 2009 Political Philosophy Podcast Symposium is as follows:
27 February: Jonathan Phillips (UNC): “Freedom: Morality and Folk Intuitions.” Comments by Matt Zwolinski (USD).
Positive and negative theories of liberty hold drastically different accounts of the role for value judgments in regard to freedom. This paper discusses the implications of one special type: moral judgments, and considers how moral judgments may affect ordinary intuitions about freedom in particular. This ‘ordinary’ concept of freedom contrasts both positive and negative theories of liberty and has some interesting implications of its own.
13 March: Jordan Dodd (Syracuse), “On Gutmann and Thompson’s Arguments that Deliberative Democrats Shouldn’t be Pure Proceduralists.” Comments by Simon May (Virginia Tech).
Gutmann and Thompson have argued that deliberative democrats must not be pure proceduralists. I argue that their arguments are unsuccessful. If my arguments work they also indicate where debates over the prospects of pure proceduralism should head.
27 March: Emanuela Ceva (Pavia), “Just Procedures with Controversial Outcomes.” Comments by David Lefkowitz (UNC Greensboro).
It is often argued that if procedural theories of justice were genuinely open-ended, they might lead to controversial outcomes impossible to contest as produced by accepted procedures. I shall concede that, for genuine proceduralism, the outcomes of just procedures cannot be contested as unjust, because justice is a virtue of procedures rather than of outcomes. However, an analysis of acts of conscientious objection shall reveal that procedurally just outcomes remain nonetheless contestable on the ground of such values other than justice as someone’s religious/ethical allegiances.
10 April: Wally Siewert (UCSB), “Margin of Appreciation.” Comments by Basak Cali (UCL)
Article 15 of the European Convention on Human Rights is one of its most controversial. It allows signatories to the Convention to derogate from some of its obligations thereunder in a “time of war or other public emergency threatening the life of the nation.” However, it is very unclear, from both the convention itself and the decisions based on Article 15, whether it allows for a margin of appreciation regarding the existence of such a threat. Must the derogating government have merely reasonably believed such a threat existed (and should the court therefore presume in the government’s favor within some larger or smaller margin of appreciation)? Or must the threat actually exist? Is there no margin for a government’s perceptions? Using both the text of two court decisions on the 15th article as well as some independent analogical conceptual analysis I explore the issues surrounding this question.
24 April: Jake Blair (UCSB), “Why a Defensive War Against Mitigated Aggression Can be Proportionate.” Comments by Colleen Murphy (Texas A&M).
Assume that a nation exercising its right of national-defense just is the people of that nation collectively exercising their right of personal self-defense. Since the right of self-defense doesn’t extend to everything that’s valuable, there’s a question of whether a nation’s common way of life is sufficiently valuable to defend via lethal force. In this paper I give an account of why it is the people of a nation can lethally defend their common way of life.