Journal of Social Philosophy 

About: Journal of Social Philosophy is an academic journal published by Wiley. The journal publishes majorly in the area(s): Democracy & Politics. It has an ISSN identifier of 0047-2786. Over the lifetime, 1147 publications have been published receiving 11249 citations.

How Do I Live in This Strange Place

Abstract: This paper is an attempt to critically reflect upon what it is to be white in a country like South Africa. Despite the efforts of politicians and public relation officials to persuade its citizens otherwise, South Africa is still a visibly divided and suspicious land. All South Africans are required to feel pride in their country, and expats are urged to return to build the nation and participate in the miracle that the early post-Apartheid days made not impossible to believe in. At the same time, our equally famous history of stupefying injustice and inhumanity feels still with us: its effects press around us every day, in the visible poverty, the crime that has affected everyone, the child beggars on the pavements, the de facto racial segregation of living spaces, in who is serving whom in restaurants and shops and in homes. South Africa is a strange and morally tangled place to live in. My title is taken from Bernoldus Niemand’s song “Reggae Vibes is Cool,” off the album Wie is Bernoldus Niemand? Rian Malan uses this as the motto for his book, My Traitor’s Heart (London: Vintage, 1991). And there are many ways of being white, here or elsewhere; I talk from a personal, but what I hope is still a fairly representative position. While I am not an Afrikaner and so have escaped the taint that identity brings with it, I am a white South African, undeniably a product of the Apartheid system and undeniably still benefiting from it. In an influential paper, Linda Martin Alcoff asked, “What Should White People Do?”; I want to ask how white people can be and live well in such a land, with such a legacy. What is it like to live here as a white person? What is the morally appropriate reaction to one’s situation of privilege? Is it possible to live well? And more broadly, in such a context how can we understand—can we understand—a conception of the moral life as a private and inward-directed process guided by an ideal of the good? For despite our context, no life and no self is only political; no one can think of herself as only a citizen or as only and essentially constituted by factors external to her. The concern with the quality of the self that is so central in the origins of the western philosophical tradition seems even more important in a land that has denied the privacy and nonpolitical reality of individual lives. Part of eradicating racism would be to eradicate the forced identification of oneself as a particular public and political product. But how is this realization to be lived and justified in a strange place like South Africa, in which the self is so thoroughly saturated by histories of oppression or privilege? For whites in South Africa, now that at least de jure power has been removed from them, the personal project might be the most exigent and the most

Personal Autonomy and Society

Abstract: Soulevant le paradoxe de la neutralite de l'etat en matiere de vie bonne et la reconnaissance publique de certaines vertus intrinseques a la vie humaine, l'A. se propose de repondre aux objections d'incoherence et de non-substantialite opposees au liberalisme contemporain, en soulignant l'ideal d'autonomie qui fonde la neutralite liberale, d'une part, et en en deduisant les vertus necessaires a la realisation d'une vie florissante, d'autre part. Defendant une conception minimale de l'autonomie consideree comme ideal politique et ideal individuel, l'A. montre que l'autonomie personnelle contribue a la definition du bien et participe de la moralite meme du liberalisme