Showing papers in "Journal of Political Philosophy in 2012"

Prescribing Institutions Without Ideal Theory

Abstract: rev REG 30,8,10 Prescribing Institutions Without Ideal Theory ∗ D AVID W IENS Philosophy, University of Michigan I. PRELIMINARIES Political philosophers are not shy to prescribe ways to design social and political institutions so as to eradicate or at least mitigate various actual injustices. The conventional wisdom is that such prescriptions are the province of nonideal theory but that ideal theory is required as a guide for nonideal theory. On this view, our first task is to specify fully just principles of regulation—that is, principles that regulate the constitution of fully just institutional arrangements. 1 These principles subsequently guide and constrain our attempts to prescribe institutional solutions to address actual injustices. 2 Call this the ideal guidance approach to institutional design. This view is

Liberal Neutrality: A Reinterpretation and Defense†

Abstract: AFTER a brief ascendancy in the 1970s and 1980s, the idea of liberal neutrality has fallen out of favor in recent years. A growing chorus of liberal writers has joined anti-liberal critics in arguing that there is something confused and misguided about the insistence that the state be neutral between rival conceptions of the good. Assuming we can even make sense of the idea of neutrality, these writers contend, it is a mistake to think that there is anything in liberal principles that commits the liberal state to neutrality. With a number of former neutralists softening their support for the idea, the rejection of neutrality is quickly becoming a consensus position, even amongst liberal political philosophers. According to one writer, all that remains to be done is an “autopsy” on the idea of state neutrality. Much of the critique of neutrality has proceeded on the basis of four assumptions. The first contrasts neutrality with perfectionism. To defend state neutrality is to deny that the state can legitimately use its power to encourage ways of life that it supposes to be valuable or to discourage ones that it regards

Meaningful Work: Arguments from Autonomy*

Abstract: THE idea of “meaningful work” has attracted relatively little attention during the past decades. Most contemporary social and political theories—not only of the liberal variety—hold it to be either superfluous or impossible to conceptualize something like the value, the meaning, or the normative or evaluative content of work. The liberal version of the argument usually goes that in a context of value pluralism—in liberal democratic societies—it is not up to the state to determine whether or not work should be a central source of value in an individual’s life; rather, individuals should be free to choose their particular source of value and meaning from a range of sources, such as family, relations of love and friendship, religion, sport, artistic pursuits, and so on. Furthermore, the question of what should and what should not count as meaningful work will always be disputed in a liberal democracy. But not only liberal theories appeal to individual autonomy and value pluralism within modern liberal democracies to argue against a normative theory of meaningful work: theories of recognition employ the same sort of arguments with the same results. Value pluralism and the difficulty to neutrally, uncontestedly conceptualize meaningful work lead to the conviction that a normative theory of the content of work is neither necessary nor feasible.

The Right to Parent One's Biological Baby*

Abstract: IT is generally accepted that individuals have a number of parenthood-related moral rights, suchas the right todecidewhether,withwhom,whenandhowoften to procreate, and to decide on many important aspects of how their children are raised. These moral rights have legal counterparts, often codified in national and international legal documents. One of them is the presumptive moral right of individuals to keep and raise their biological children. This right is undisputed, and legally protected, as long as parents meet certain criteria which deem them to be adequate parents. However, its philosophical justification is far from clear. It depends on answers to the questions: what makes parenting in general legitimate and how do individuals acquire the right to parent a particular baby? The importance of these questions became particularly salient as the traditional conception of what is a child—and, implicitly, of parenting—lost its grip. The right to keep and raise one’s biological baby is part of a bundle of various parenthood-related rights, grounded in a long philosophical tradition. Children have been conceptualised as unfinished human beings with interests of their own (including qua future adults) and, at the same time and somewhat contradictorily, as being their parents’ property. The first feature of this traditional conception provided an answer to the question concerning the legitimacy of parenthood, the second to the question concerning the acquisition of parental rights with respect to particular babies. The understanding of children as incomplete adults, with interests of their own, originated in Aristotle and Locke. It generates legitimate paternalism—the idea that children need parents and that parenthood involves a

Fuzzy Citizenship in Global Society

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Human Rights as Demands for Communicative Action

Abstract: A key issue with human rights is how to allocate duties correlative to rights claims. But the philosophical literature, drawing largely on naturalistic or interactional accounts of human rights, develops answers to this question that do not illuminate actual human rights problems. Charles Beitz, in recent work, attempts to develop a conception of human rights more firmly rooted in, and helpful for, current practice. While a move in the right direction, his account does not incorporate the domestic practice of human rights, and as a result remains insufficiently instructive for many human rights challenges. This paper addresses the problem of allocating correlative duties by taking the practices of domestic courts in several countries as a normative benchmark. Upon reviewing how courts in Colombia, India, South Africa, Indonesia, and elsewhere have allocated duties associated with socio-economic rights, the paper finds that courts urge parties to move from an adversarial to an investigative mode, impose requirements that parties argue in good faith, and structure a public forum of communication. The conclusion argues that judicial practice involves requiring respondents to engage in communicative, instead of strategic, action, and explores the implications of this understanding of human rights.

Ethical Progress as Problem‐Resolving

Abstract: ELECTION night 2008 marked a historic moment in US history. Not only did the US elect its first African-American president, but it did so at a time when Jim Crow was still within living memory. At the time of President Obama’s birth the Civil Rights Act of 1964 was still three years away and his parents, a white woman and black man, were forbidden from marrying in much of the country. So juxtaposed, the election of Obama seems all the more remarkable as it was made possible by extraordinary moral and political change in a relatively short time. Many Americans, no doubt, spent election night reflecting on the ways that our society is clearly better today in comparison to fifty years ago. I take the public understanding of Obama’s election to be a story about ethical progress. But in bringing a philosophical outlook to this sort of story we must ask whether it is really compelling—is genuine ethical progress actually possible? What makes us think that the changes to our beliefs, values, and practices regarding race which have occurred since the time of Jim Crow are actually improvements and not mere changes of mind or taste? In what follows I want to vindicate our sense that events like the election of the first black President of the United States can indeed be ethically progressive by positing and defending a particular way of conceiving of progress in the domain of values. Before laying out my argumentative strategy, I want to discuss the motivation of such a project. Why should we focus on a notion of evaluative progress? Answers having to do with confidence in our own values and our ability to understand ourselves as having made and rectified ethical mistakes come quickly to mind. For instance, if we cannot vindicate the idea that some ethical values are better than others, then we seem to lose all ground for thinking that our current racially (more) egalitarian beliefs and practices are preferable to Jim Crow beliefs and practices.

Debate: Taking Human Rights Seriously*

Abstract: THE two core values of international political philosophy are state sovereignty and human rights. Traditionally, of course, the former has dominated: we have hoped that each state will conscientiously protect its constituents’ rights, but we have been reluctant to intervene in a country’s internal affairs even when it fails spectacularly in this task. Recently, however, our priorities have shifted. We now take human rights more seriously and are correspondingly less deferential to state sovereignty, so a central question of contemporary international ethics is how to adjudicate the tension between state sovereignty and human rights. In this article I argue that, if we take human rights as seriously as we should, then even a legitimate state has no principled objection to outsiders’ intervening in its internal affairs if this interference will prevent just a single human rights violation. I defend this stark view by, among other things, showing that it (surprisingly) leaves adequate room for state sovereignty.

Fiduciary Representation and Deliberative Engagement with Children

Abstract: Recent work on “fiduciary representation” has opened up a useful avenue for understanding how state leaders should navigate their representative roles in democratic political systems and for specifying the ethical duties that come with political office Political theorists throughout the ages have generally thought of the democratic representative as either a “delegate” of the constituent-principal on the one hand, or as a “trustee” for the constituent on the other Simply put (and put in an overly simplistic dichotomy), the “delegate” works under very strict control with instructions from constituents that need to be executed; the “trustee” has a wide berth of discretion to act within her authority to decide political matters on behalf of her constituents Yet, as we will show, both idealized forms of democratic representation are subspecies of the fiduciary form Although some political theorists have noticed the fiduciary status of rulers in democracies (and especially so when trying to make sense of how to represent children in democracies), few have the legal training to elaborate and specify what might be entailed as a consequence of a political representative’s fiduciary status Fiduciary law provides some hints about how representatives should perform their role responsibilities and understand their relationships with those they governSection I introduces and refines the concept of fiduciary representation Section II explores what we call a fiduciary requirement of “deliberative engagement” Although the standard fiduciary duties in the private law arena do not obviously impose this dialogic imperative, we show its latency in fiduciary law — and why it is essential as a principle of democratic political morality in relationships of political representation Section III then applies the lessons of fiduciary representation to the domain of the political representation of children