Bringing to the top again since the deadline is this Friday — SCM.

The Society for Applied Philosophy 2009 annual conference will be held at the University of Leeds from 26-28 June 2009. The conference will have no specific theme.

Proposal abstracts should be submitted .doc or .rtf file format (300 word limit) and with the email subject line SAP AC2009 Abstract by email by Friday 9 January 2009. All applicants will be notified of a decision by early February 2009

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Alon rejects the balancing approach when it comes to majoirtarian violations of many basic rights.  Although Alon leaves open the question of whether there might be such balancing in some cases, in his view, often when a majority violates basic rights that majority decision has no weight in terms of democratic legitimacy.  Alon gives us an example for instance of a plebiscite that would prohibit Corey Brettschneider from studying political science.  He argues that such laws not only violate rights but that there is no sense in which they are democratic.  He needs to make this last claim to show that such decisions have no weight or value on democratic grounds.

I am tempted to agree with Alon about this specific example.  But it seems to me that this example is a particular distinct kind of rights violation.  Namely, this law has the ad hoc character of the special laws that I argued in chapter 2 violated the most basic requirements of the rule of law in self-government.  Such a decision does not even result in the making of law, the most basic task of legislatures and plebiscites in a democracy.  Therefore such a policy has no weight because it does not even have the status of law.

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I acknowledge the logical possibility that private markets might provide the kind of minimal welfare guarantees I defend in this chapter.  But absent any government involvement, I am skeptical that this logical possibility is likely.  More importantly, I have another worry about purely private provision of charity as a way of meeting these goals.  Although, Locke speaks of a right to “charity,” I worry that a system of purely private provision absent any state guarantees might undermine the notion that a guarantee of a minimum level of goods is in fact a right. Charity is often seen as a moral duty, but not a right required for political legitimacy.  On my account, however, it is important that these entitlements are, like the other democratic rights I defend,  necessary conditions for a legitimate state.  In sum, I acknowledge the logical possibility that these rights might be met be a market without a government safety net.  But I worry both that this is an unlikely empirical possibility and that such a system would weaken the claim that  a minimum provision of goods as a democratic right.

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(Have a good holiday, everyone.)

The APT Conference 2009
Texas A&M University, College Station, Texas
October 22-24, 2009
CALL FOR PAPERS
Proposals due February 15, 2009

The Association for Political Theory (APT) invites proposals for its seventh annual conference to be held October 22–24, 2009 at Texas A&M University in College Station, Texas. The APT is an interdisciplinary organization devoted to supporting political theory and political philosophy. We recognize that scholars in a range of disciplines are doing important critical work on social and political questions. We welcome their participation in this conference. The APT Conference provides a collegial setting for scholars of various professional ranks, institutional affiliations and theoretical approaches to engage one another in fruitful discussions of their work. To learn more about the Association and its annual conference, please visit the APT Gateway website.

The full text of the call for papers is now available on the APT website. Visit the APT homepage, or click here to download a printer-friendly pdf of the Call.

Paper and panel proposals can be submitted any time on the APT website.
Proposals are due by February 15, 2009.

You can download and print .pdf posters (color, or black and white) from the APT website announcing the call for papers. Visit the APT website and click on “APT Conferences,” or just click here to download them directly: the color version, the black and white version.

Anyway: here are the comments.

As philosophers, it is not surprising that we turn to the history of philosophy to help us grapple with these timeless normative questions.  So we turn to intellectual giants like Aristotle, Kant, Mill and Marx for guidance on how we can sensibly deliberate about the demands of morality and justice.  More recently, moral and political philosophers have engaged (and still do) in many a spirited debate relating to John Rawls’s theory “justice as fairness”, and topical applied topics like multiculturalism, animal rights, deliberative democracy and cosmopolitanism.  These are all interesting issues, topics I myself have published on and currently teach.  But something vital is missing…. 

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First, Jim perceptively elaborates on Hobbes’ account of punishment and asks whether it might be more compatible with my own arguments than I allow.  In particular, he asks whether a defense of capital punishment on general deterrence grounds might be brought within the scope of democratic contractualism.  As Jim makes clear, it is important for Hobbes that any account of capital punishment cannot be justified within the contractual relationship between the condemned and the state.  The ties of the social contract are severed in cases of capital punishment because the state’s sole aim is to protect life.  Capital punishment fails to meet that goal for the condemned and therefore any justification of it must sever the tie of that relationship.  The result is that for Hobbes capital punishment is justified for the state and resistance is justified for the condemned.  But this kind of justification is distinct from those that take place within social contract.  (more…)

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.

I just joined Public Reason (having met Simon at a conference) and am looking forward to participating.  I’ve already seen lots of terrific material, and realize that I should have joined long ago.

I have what may seem a strange problem.  I’ll be teaching an undergraduate lecture course in Political Ethics next Spring quarter, as I have in the past.  This is a conceptual rather than a practical course, it covers not bribes and whistleblowing, but the basic theoretical works relevant to political ethics issues (though we will treat a few actual cases).  We’ll be reading Pitkin on representation, Machiavelli’s Prince, Weber’s “Politics as a Vocation”–and a bit of moral philosophy on an introductory level: utilitarianism, deontology, Bernard Williams on integrity and personal projects and shooting one to save ten, that sort of thing.  While the course is nominally upper level, there are no prerequisites (UCLA’s bureaucracy won’t allow it), and UCLA has no core requirements in moral and political philosophy such that I can count on students’ knowing some.   Nor is this a course for philosophy (or political theory) majors.  The students are political science or public policy majors interested in the substantive issues, not in ethical theory.

My problem is Kant.  When I’ve taught the course in the past, I’ve tried teaching Kant through the Grounding and a few of the writings on lying, but it hasn’t worked out.  The students find my lectures clear; they like Korsgaard on the right to lie; they get the murderer at the door stuff and enjoy debating it–but the Grounding is just over their head.  Spending two weeks on it (out of ten) doesn’t help: that’s of course not enough time, and it’s not the right students, and they’re just not able to take it in.  But I don’t really know how else to teach Kantianism.  “Theory and Practice” is lovely but deceptively allusive and not on the main topics of deontology; the same is true in spades of “Towards Perpetual Peace.”

I’d welcome any suggestions: an unknown piece of Kant (e.g. a public lecture) that I’m not familiar with?  (If it’s in German only and not too long, fine: I’ll happily translate for the class and with luck for publication in Teaching Ethics or something.)  A standard introductory piece on Kantianism, with a few key quotations and some down-to-earth yet serious explication?

In this I may be handicapped by never having taken an introductory ethics course myself.  I took a whole course on the First Critique and read lots of Kant’s (and others’) ethical works in advanced-undergraduate and graduate seminars, but never had to learn as an undergraduate what I’m now supposed to convey.  (The famous Justice class at Harvard doesn’t count: I’m looking to convey a bit more than is expected in that entertaining but not egregiously substantive course.)

To some extent, Mill’s Utilitarianism, while nowhere as baffling as Kant, is also hard to teach in such a context, and I’d welcome suggestions for substitutes or supplements to that too.

Many thanks in advance,

Andy.

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.

The question addressed by chapter 7 is what institutional structures reflect best the core values and how these institutions ought to operate. Such an institutional structure ought to respect people’s autonomy by protecting participation, protecting equality of interests and instantiating reciprocity. Determining what the ideal institutional structure is requires examining hard cases, namely cases in which the decisions generated by majoritarian procedures (and, by virtue of this fact, decisions that are congenial to some of the democratic core values) are incompatible with the substantive rights (whose protection is also congenial to the core values). When majoritarian procedures yield decisions which violate substantive rights there is always an inevitable loss to democracy. If such decisions are allowed to stand, substantive rights are violated to the detriment of the core values; if, on the other hand, these decisions are overruled by the courts, majoritarian procedures are defied to the detriment of the core values. CB believes that given such conflicts the right decision is the decision which minimizes the aggregate or overall loss to the core values. Determining what the right decision is requires therefore comparing or balancing the loss to core values resulting from an anti-majoritarian rights-respecting decision and the loss to core values resulting from a majoritarian rights-violating decision.

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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)

Brettschneider begins by arguing that private property is best understood as a “bundle of rights” that fall into two categories: “vertical” and “horizontal” rights.  Vertical rights describe the owner’s relationship to the property itself and include her right to use, trade, destroy, and conserve that property.  Horizontal rights, on the other hand, describe the relationship between the property owner and other people.  The most basic of these horizontal rights is the right to exclude others, to prevent non-owners from exercising any control over one’s own property.  This right to exclude, says Brettschneider, requires the power of coercion.

Does this power of coercion necessarily implicate the state? Brettschneider acknowledges that there is some disagreement between liberals and libertarians on this question.  It is conceivable, he grants, to argue that owners could exercise such coercion themselves, or contract with others to provide it.   Such is not, however, the case in contemporary societies, where property ownership depends on state enforcement.  The duty to respect others’ property, and the corresponding right to exclude, are now enforced by law.  They must therefore be justified publicly.

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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.

The Faculty of Philosophy at the Erasmus University in Rotterdam presents a workshop on Gender in Social and Political Philosophy. The workshop will take place on 3 December 2008. The programme is below the fold:

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The Association for Legal and Social Philosophy will be holding its 2009 conference at the University of Edinburgh from 203 July 2009. From the website:

The last two decades have seen profound social and economic changes in all areas of our lives. To name but a few: borders have become both more open and more closed. We have witnessed unprecedented levels of technological development: from new medical technologies such as genetic engineering and cloning, to communication technologies such as the internet and new modes of warfare. Environmental degradation and climate change are now a daily reality.

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Via Simon Kirchin:

The 2009 British Society for Ethical Theory Conference will be held at the University of Reading from 13-15 July 2009. The subject area is open within metaethics and normative ethics. Papers on topics in applied ethics or the history of ethics may also be considered provided they are also of wider theoretical interest. The deadline for submissions is 12th December, 2008. Papers and accompanying particulars should be emailed to Dr. Bart Streumer. Note that ONLY electronic submissions will be accepted.

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An announcement from Matthew Festenstein:

‘Deliberative democracy’ has become a dominant, if contested, paradigm in democratic thought. Political philosophers have investigated the conceptual shape and normative desirability of deliberation, rationality, procedural fairness. Empirical political scientists have explored the forms and availability of deliberation in relation to international negotiations, mediation processes, regional and national legislative processes, and various experimental settings. Among practitioners, the dea of deliberative democracy inspired a surge of experimentation with techniques of public participation in policy making, including citizens’ juries, participatory budgeting, electronic town halls, and many other models in environmental, development, health, and planning decisions around the world. Indeed, much empirical work on deliberative democracy has tended to focus on these micro processes, or ‘minipublics’, and to overlook the larger, macro issues which originally inspired the deliberative democracy project. More generally, political enthusiasm for mechanisms such as citizens’ juries has arguably not kept pace with developing conceptual, normative and empirical research.

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