distributive justice

Deadline for submissions: April 1^st, 2012

Tentative publication date: Winter 2012

About the Journal

Raisons Politiques is a well-established journal of political thought currently building an international reputation with the support of Sciences Po, the French renowned research institute for social sciences. The journal endeavors to provide a forum where scholars from various backgrounds and traditions can fruitfully engage with contemporary social and political issues. By contrast with publications intended to a particular discipline, Raisons Politiques adopts a thematic approach and welcome contributions from all branches of social sciences. It encourages submissions in English or French, from both established academics and aspiring members of the scientific community.

Among notable contributors are Pierre Bourdieu, Judith Butler, Gerald Allan Cohen, Mitchell Cohen, Ronald Dworkin, Norman Daniels, Clifford Geertz, Robert E. Goodin, Jürgen Habermas, Martha Nussbaum, Thomas Nagel, Philip Pettit, Ian Shapiro, Quentin Skinner, Judith Jarvis Thomson, Michael Walzer and Iris Marion Young.

Raisons Politiques is available online through CAIRN, the French portal for social sciences. For more information about the journal, please visit the editor’s website.

Special Issue in English on “Global Justice & Practice-Dependence”

Over the last few years, a new generation of political theorists working in the field of global justice has come to endorse a practice-dependent view about justice. In this view, the content of a given conception of justice depends on the nature of the practices it is intended to regulate, where “practices” refer to existing institutions and every system of formal or informal rules defining the rights and duties of agents involved. Global social and political practices would thus not be governed by the same conception of justice that applies to domestic practices, dramatically different in nature, and that would help to account for the normative discontinuity between the domain of nation-states, where strong egalitarian standards of justice prevail, and the world beyond national borders, where requirements of justice seem closer to a humanitarian moral minimum.

This special issue of Raison Politiques aims to assess the legitimacy of the practice-dependent approach as well as to explore the conclusions that might be drawn from it in the debate on global justice. Authors are thus invited to submit:

-       Articles arguing in favor of the practice-dependent approach from a Rawlsian perspective or within a wider constructivist framework;

-       Articles offering a non-constructivist foundation for the practice-dependent approach;

-       Articles discussing different types of practice-dependence, such as conventionalism, institutionalism and functionalism;

-       Articles exploring whether the practice-dependent approach is supported by a particular view about the nature of justice;

-       Articles rejecting the methodological commitment to practice-dependence and offering reasons to favor an alternative approach to global justice;

-       Articles endorsing the practice-dependent view to develop a substantial account of global justice.

Submission Process

Manuscripts must be 1.5-spaced and no longer than 7,000 words, including footnotes and a 150-word summary. All bibliographical references must come in footnotes, formatted as follow:

-       David Miller, National Responsibility and Global Justice (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007).

-       Thomas Hylland Eriksen, “Formal and Informal Nationalism”, Ethnic and Racial Studies (16/1), 1993, 1-25.

-       Kok-Chor Tan, “The Problem of Decent Peoples”, in David Reidy and Martin Rex (eds.), Rawls’s Law of People. A Realistic Utopia (Oxford: Blackwell, 2006), 76-94.

To facilitate blind review, please remove author-identifying information from the text and provide in a separate file a short biographical note (up to 80 words) specifying your title, current affiliation, research interests and relevant publications within the last three years. Send your manuscript and the file containing your personal information in Microsoft Word or Rich Text Format to hugo.elkholi@sciences-po.org.

All manuscripts are anonymously peer-reviewed by two referees within a two months delay – typically, one member of the editorial board and one external expert. Note that works under simultaneous consideration for publication elsewhere and works that have already been published in any form will not be considered.

In talking with people about questions of distributive justice, one often encounters a peculiar sort of conflict or tension. It’s not just that different people hold different views on the question. Rather, each individual person seems somehow to be pulled in a number of different directions.

In an exciting new paper in Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, Christopher Freiman and Shaun Nichols report an experimental study that helps to shed light on this sort of conflict. Subjects were randomly assigned either to receive an ‘abstract’ question or a ‘concrete’ question.

Subjects assigned to the abstract version were told:

Suppose that some people make more money than others solely because they have genetic advantages.

Subjects assigned to the concrete version were told:

Suppose that Amy and Beth both want to be professional jazz singers. They both practice singing equally hard. Although jazz singing is the greatest natural talent of both Amy and Beth, Beth’s vocal range and articulation is naturally better than Amy’s because of differences in their genetics. Solely as a result of this genetic advantage, Beth’s singing is much more impressive. As a result, Beth attracts bigger audiences and hence gets more money than Amy.

All subjects were then asked whether it was fair for the genetically advantaged individuals in the scenario to make more money. Surprisingly enough, subjects in the abstract cases said that the genetically advantaged did not deserve more money, while subjects in the concrete cases said that the genetically advantaged actually did deserve more money.

Freiman and Nichols suggest that this study might be getting at a fundamental conflict between two different aspects of the way people ordinarily think about questions of distributive justice. They then raise a difficult philosophical question: if our intuitions in the abstract case differ from those in the concrete case, which sort of intuition should we trust when we are actually doing philosophy?

So, I’ve been thinking about utilitarianism and non-ideal theory. Although what I’ve come up with may be quite obvious, I’d be interested in reflections on the thought.

It seems to me that there are times when we might do best (even on utilitarian grounds) not to do what would maximize utility in non-ideal circumstances. Consider an instance in which this point may have practical bite. Some argue against ending child labor because the children we prohibit from working may suffer more for our good intentions. Child prostitution may be their second best option. But that this would be so, holding everything else fixed, does not mean we should not try to end child labor. What it shows is that we should try to end child labor and help educate the children we liberate. If one says that we do not have the resources to do this then we should reply that we can and need to find the resources — that is what justice requires. Even for a utilitarian, there are times when we should not do what might initially seem to maximize utility because doing that will only maximize utility conditional on facts that we can and should change. Perhaps there is reason to worry about doing non-ideal theory in some circumstances. Or, more precisely, that we have to be careful about what kind of non-ideal theory we are doing. Consider another example to support the point. Aid organizations spend a great deal of time and money figuring out how to allocate scarce resources. For instance, the WHO tries to prioritize health interventions to maximize the number of disability adjusted life years (or whatever) that it can save with its resources. But if the global distribution of medical resources is unjust and can be changed, the WHO might better spend its time trying to change the global distribution of medical resources.