Luciana Alvarez (6E)
Biopolitics, life and body: some considerations from a Latin-American point of view
We intend to get a close look at Foucault’s work on biopolitics with the aim of contrasting some
of its aspects with the developments linked to the emancipatory and liberating potential of the
notion of life (living corporeality) within the framework of Enrique Dussel’s Latin American
Political Philosophy. We are interested on these theoretical approaches (Foucault’s biopolitics
and Dussel’s Liberation Politics) given the political implications and prominence they grant to
the notions of body and life in contemporary societies.
According to Foucault, the notion of biopolitics refers to a determined form of political
rationality or way of governing which emerged in Western societies in the mid-18th-Century
asserting the need to include natural life within the mechanisms and calculations of State power.
After the emergence of biopolitics, biological life and the human species as such have come into
play within the political power’s own strategies and thus become a part of the juridical,
institutional, technological, scientific, and police mechanisms that are exerted by the State in
order to control population.
From Dussel’s Latin American Political Philosophy standpoint, it is possible to find the grounds
of politics within the notion of life, in the sense that the production, reproduction and
development of human life, for each human being, constitute an ethical-political obligation.
Therefore, human life -its production, reproduction and development- constitutes the liberation
horizon that bestows meaning upon emancipatory sociopolitical practices.
The works we are interested to contrast present different standpoints: in the first one, life is
related to the exercise of political power, whereas in the second one its approach concentrates on
political emancipation processes. We believe, however, that it is possible to find convergence
points between them that allow us to explain, to a certain extent, the importance of the notion of
life in contemporary societies. For this purpose, we will carry out an analysis of the notion of
“counter behaviors”, a concept that Foucault briefly developed to explain how life has not been
thoroughly integrated to technologies that dominate it or run it but instead escapes them
ceaselessly...
Judith Andre (5A)
Hope as a Civic Virtue: Ernst Bloch and Lord Buddha
Hope is rarely mentioned as a secular virtue. It is at most a vaguely appreciated personality trait,
sometimes welcome, sometimes dangerous. A virtue must be more: it must be an acquired
disposition, shaped by reflection; a civic virtue must serve the good of the community. I assume
here that spiritual and political traditions often contain moral insights that can be useful even
when separated from the framework in which they are presented; they often help to open up a
concept, calling attention to various facets. Here I begin by examining Buddhism, which in most
interpretations repudiates hope, considering it a source of suffering (pain in living with what
reality requires). A more careful look finds material within Buddhism for a carefully limited
virtue of hope: the habit of noticing what is good, acknowledging the transience of bad (as well
as good) and the certainty that the future holds some kind of good (as well as bad). This learned
disposition shields one against the devastation of despair. But it is highly general and entirely
passive. We need more.
I turn then to the political hope of Ernst Bloch, filled with energy and always specific; he sees
human life as partly constituted by a yearning toward a better future. His position raises
interesting metaphysical questions about the sense (if any) in which one can speak of the present
reality of future possibility. Bloch’s hope also raises disquieting moral problems. The future for
which he hoped was apparently Soviet Communism, a deeply problematic goal. Does the pursuit
of something so problematic count as virtuous? (Similar issues arise with courage and
perseverance, which can also be directed at mistaken goals.) Robert C. Roberts suggests a
distinction between substantive virtues and, roughly, instrumental virtues. The distinction may
help us preserve mistaken hope as a virtue of a specific kind.
Both Bloch and Buddha offer help in constructing a civic virtue of hope. Citizens need to work
toward a better future; for this they need energy and vision. But citizens also need to beware of
hoping for the wrong things. One way of being mistaken is hoping for what is in fact impossible,
and the result can be cynicism or despair. (Unrealistic hopes about what Obama would, or could,
do are a good recent example.) A Buddhist foundation is protective here: No matter what specific
desires are thwarted, some good, of some kind, is certain. Bloch provides a necessary
supplement. He frees up, by honoring it, zeal toward a better future. But his life underlines the
caution required by virtuous hope: we must be very careful about the particular futures to which
we commit ourselves.
Corwin Aragon (5D)
Moral Responsibility for Structural Injustice
The present social world is deeply unjust. Millions of people throughout the world suffer in
situations of acute deprivation while many others grow increasingly more affluent. The radical
inequalities that characterize the present global situation are neither natural nor inevitable; rather,
they are caused by prevailing systems of social interaction. These radical inequalities are
structural injustices and, by definition, generate moral responsibilities to remedy their harms.
However, it is difficult to identify which agents bear these responsibilities. Social structures are
amorphous, far-reaching, and often unintended, making it extremely difficult to conceive of the
agent’s relation to and responsibility for structural injustice. This paper begins to answer the
question of which agents are morally responsible for structural injustice by locating the moral
basis of this specific type of moral responsibility. Specifically, I argue that an agent’s
structurally-mediated social connection to specific injustices makes her morally complicit in
those injustices, and this complicity is the only theoretically adequate account of the moral basis
of her responsibility.
My paper proceeds in four parts. First, I briefly explain my conception of structural injustice and
how structural injustices generate moral responsibilities. Structural injustices occur when
dynamic, yet enduring systems of social relationships harm some groups of people by
positioning them in oppressive social relationships. And these injustices generate individual
moral responsibilities, or structural responsibilities, for agents to work toward their remedy.
Second, I critically examine four principles offered in the philosophical literature on
responsibility for injustice as possible bases of structural responsibilities. I argue that each of
these principles, on its own, provides an inadequate basis, or ground, of structural responsibility.
However, I also argue that each principle highlights a different manifestation of an underlying
ground of structural responsibility, namely structurally-mediated social connection. Third, I
argue that an agent’s structurally-mediated social connection to specific structural injustices
makes her morally complicit for them, and her complicity generates structural responsibilities for
her to work to remedy those injustices. Further, I argue that an agent’s complicity in specific
injustices is the only theoretically-adequate moral ground of her structural responsibilities.
Finally, I suggest how my account of complicity and social connection can guide individual
agents in working to discharge their structural responsibilities.
Thomas Atchison (8D)
False Consciousness Reconsidered
For several decades the idea of false consciousness has been reviled and rejected on a variety of
grounds by empirically-minded social scientists, by skeptical philosophers of several bents, and
by activists. This paper attempts to provide a clarification and qualified defense of the concept
as a tool of critical social theory, broadly understood as a social theory that aims to be useful to
people who are oppressed or disadvantaged.
I suggest that there is a concept of false consciousness that is common to writers representing
diverse social movements (not only Marxists, but also feminists, gay liberationists, anticolonialists, etc.). False consciousness typically involves four elements: It is false; it is
produced by an oppressive social system and, in turn, it supports or reinforces that system; it
conceals or misidentifies people's real interests; and it is typical of the state of mind of some
significant social group. Each of these elements is problematic and requires some explication.
I argue that 1) it is possible to identify a form of consciousness as false or ideological without
presupposing any objectionable Enlightenment metaphysics or grand narratives of progress; 2)
contrary to the sort of feminism that insists that 'every women's experience is valid', it is not
necessarily arrogant or offensive to say that someone is mistaken; 3) contrary to an over-simple
Humean picture of the mind, it is wrong to think of desires, wants, needs, etc., as unmotivated
and uncriticizable; 4) contrary to those who claim that any use of a concept of 'real' or 'objective
interests' must be arbitrary or authoritarian or essentialist, the notion can be explained in a
suitably pluralistic and contextual way. Real interests cannot be identified with preferences
(however idealized or informed) nor with needs or capabilities (a la Aristotle or Nussbaum), but
they can be approached through Elizabeth Anderson’s so-called “rational attitude” theory of
value. However, this does require an acknowledgement that dogmatic and over-simple
identifications of class interests or the interests of women, for example, cannot be supported.
And I argue throughout that critical theories betray their emancipatory intentions and undermine
the epistemic grounds for attributing false consciousness, if their methods are not participatory or
dialogical (as opposed to manipulative or even educative).
Bat-Ami Bar-On (2C)
What Shall We Do with these People?
Between 1946 and 1948, Britain, committed to liberal-democratic values, the institutionalization
of a new human rights regime, and refugee relief, interned 52,000 Jews on the Island of Cyprus,
all of whom were survivors of an unprecedented genocidal anti-Jewish-anti-Semitism, though
not necessarily of death camps. The internment was a means of population and border control.
What the British were trying to regulate was the flow of Jewish immigration to Palestine. When
it announced its plans for internment, the British government was careful to offer its sympathy
for Jewish suffering, yet asserted its rights and duties as the Mandatory Power in Palestine to
decide the legality and illegality of Jewish immigration to Palestine. The British, obviously, had
the means to carry out and implement what they took to be their Mandatory rights and duties.
But, were they right to do so? In my paper, I will analyse the British claim of rights and duties in
light of (i) mid 20th century common practices with respect to asylum seekers, (ii) debates
regarding mandates and mandatory powers that took place since their creation by the League of
Nations after WWI, (iii) current ethico-political discourses of refugee rights that highlight the
normative conflict between the rights of sovereignty and those of asylum seekers. My analysis
aims to elucidate the complexity of the far from perfect situation of post-war transitional justice
for asylum seekers and those from whom asylum is sought and so contribute to a non-ideal yet
still normatively demanding understanding of the possible rights and duties of both sides. I am
emphasizing the mix of the non-ideal and normative demandingness because I believe (with
Marx, Arendt, and Ignatieff) that rights make no sense as immaterial abstractions and also (with
Ignatieff and Brown) that within the limitations of a liberal-democratic framework that at present
cannot be practically overcome or replaced, rights can also serve as a normative horizon that can
define future possibilities and modify present actions.
Jennifer Benson (9B)
Freedom as Going off Script
Freedom is central to democracy and philosophies of liberation and yet it is a troubling concept.
Historically it is often joined with an individualistic conception of the subject who is imagined in
a pre-social form. Therein, freedom is an essential quality of the subject. Yet this approach to
freedom has been set aside by certain contemporary feminists for at least two reasons. First, our
most widely espoused conceptions of oppression demonstrate quite convincingly that
subjectivity is always already forged in a social field of interacting institutions. Second, the
individual subject so forged is at once oppressor and oppressed. In search of better resources for
addressing social divisions like race and gender, many anti-racist and post-colonial feminists
have turned away from the language of freedom.
In my paper I argue that instead of abandoning freedom, we require a new conception of
freedom. Working from Lugones’s analysis of multiplicitous or curdled subjectivity I craft a
conception of freedom suited to subjects who are both oppressor and oppressed. In order to
affirm the interlocking nature of oppression and the social character of multiplicitous
subjectivity, I explore an example in which an over-privileged white woman encounters two
young black men in a parking garage stairwell. This becomes a case study which frames the
question, how should we understand the concept of freedom when we are simultaneously
oppressors and oppressed?
Exploring the encounter in the stairwell is useful because, in American culture, it is a thoroughly
rehearsed, both in popular and academic analysis, to demonstrate the persistent psychological
influence of racialization, the scripted threat of black men as well, and the scripted fragility and
femininity of white women. For my purposes, this example makes it difficult to usefully employ
the concept of freedom as it is conceived in the liberal tradition; however, the stairwell helps to
clarify the need for a concept of freedom suited to our complex and divided reality.
The interlocking networks of gender and racial oppression collude in the stairwell. Two axioms
are central to the oppressive script that lies before these subjects: The hetero-patriarchal axiom
that women are not safe alone at night and the racist axiom that black men, especially young
ones, are dangerous. These axioms are intended to insure a practical conclusion—white women
and black men are supposed to avoid each other—thereby conceding to the white, male, heteropatriarchal order. In such situations, completing the script would reinforce the fracture lines
designed to keep different social groups from recognizing each other as similarly grafted and
manipulated subjectivities or even as potential allies. If this is the performance of oppression, we
must ask, what is the performance of freedom?
Freedom, I argue, is the practice of allowing and encouraging a subject’s multiple selves to
interact so that one may devise and pursue courses of action that have been strategically hidden
by systems of domination designed to cultivate pliant agency. This conception of freedom is
intended to augment the accounts of multiplicitous or “curdled” subjectivity expressed in certain
post-colonial literatures. While this literature has offered enormous help in clarifying the
interlocking operations of oppression and the enduring possibilities for resistance, a robust
conception of freedom remains absent and yet necessary if we seek feminist and anti-racist
futures that are not so configured by oppression.
Samantha Bertrand (1A)
The Taming of the Cyclops
Modern political thought is the story of the rise of individualism. Machiavelli started the fire
when he severed man from his eternal context, and narrowed the focus of political inquiry to the
ruler’s maintaining of power, right or wrong. This energy released from this fission propelled
man into the Enlightenment, and fuelled his self-image as an autonomous individual. From an
Aristotelian perspective, modern self-legislation could be characterized as living ‘Cyclopsfashion’, isolated from the natural society in which man flourishes and dominated by base selfinterest. It is my view that the liberal tradition, rooted in modern era’s individual-centered
rejection of the tradition of the Medievals and ancients, unwittingly created a monster out of
man, but created such within a framework that rendered him quite harmless. That is, in stark
contrast to the Aristotelian notion of a polis which enables the ‘good life’ and flourishing of
citizens, the modern state, which enables self-preservation and comfort, and values stability more
than anything, weakens and drains its citizens.
One area in which this draining comes out is the development of the modern conception and
promotion of tolerance. As philosophy marched to Enlightenment and beyond, its focus shifted
from traditional concerns to a fixation of development of individual freedom and self-protection,
at the expense of adopting a thin, widely agreeable notion of the good which would
accommodate a wide range of moralities. That is, rather than looking for the ideal city in which
the (objectively) good man can flourish, the goal of political inquiry became finding the
minimum requirements for social structuring to protect my interests, and enable my good,
understood as naturally independent from and frequently at odds with the common good.
While the promotion of tolerance was thus originally deemed a requirement for the protection of
individuals, it soon became a counter to rising individualism—something to prevent freedom
from getting out of hand. Unfortunately, due to its confused origins (explained below) it is
arbitrary in its restrictions, as individual freedom divorced from the good is arbitrary in its aims.
In short, ‘tolerance’ is a band-aid for injustice at best, a mask for tyranny at worst.
This paper will explore the rise (and inevitable fall) of individualism-driven-tolerance—how it
came to be valued in modern political thought, to what extent that reasoning is justified, and the
degree to which contemporary understanding and practice of tolerance in political society
accords with or departs from that of the concept’s original defenders will be addressed. I intend
to show that the contemporary version of tolerance—which results in the rigid intolerance of
certain groups and individuals, rather than limitation of the state—is a natural consequence of
modern political philosophy which, in placing utmost importance on the individual nature of
man, makes him into a lawless Cyclops that needs to be tamed and controlled, rather than
liberated, by the constitution.
Joe Betz (7C)
Serving in the Present U.S. Military Threatens One’s Moral Integrity
First, the usual conscientious objectors to military service are absolute pacifists, those who
eschew violence and refuse to bear arms in war and to injure or kill with them. This paper is not
about them. Second, our laws completely stymie the selective conscientious objectors who
want to pick and choose the wars in which they will fight. These principled resistors refuse to
grant that the American government has just cause for going to war. They believe that our
government lacks jus ad bellum for its war. This paper is not about them. Rather, knowing the
facts about the American military and wars of more than the last half century forces one to
distinguish a third sort of war resistor and this paper is about them. These conscientious
objectors to American militarism believe that human rights are expanded, protected and
remedied through armed force, and are willing to bear and use arms both in private personal and
in domestic public service in that protection. But this sort of objector is not willing to join with
the U.S. military in international actions in which our government claims to be expanding,
protecting, or remedying the violation of human rights. These claims are not creditable.
A host of reasons from both the jus ad bellum and jus in bello norms of just war theory explain
why one should not become the supporter, servant, or pawn of today’s American militarism in
any way. That is, Americans should conscientiously refuse to serve in today’s U.S. military.
Some of these reasons are: 1) Virtually all of our wars violate jus ad bellum. 2) The United
States refuses to fight wars (e.g. to stop genocides) approved by, or even demanded by, jus ad
bellum. 3) Although good soldiers risk themselves both to protect both their civilians and enemy
civilians, our policy is to carry on our wars abroad where our civilians could not possibly be
involved or threatened. Once abroad, we armor and arm our soldiers so that they aim at and
attack enemies from a safe distance. These enemies are both among and indistinguishable from
enemy non-combatants whom our safely distant soldiers indiscriminately kill and injure. Many
more examples of our normal but aberrant policies are offered here, policies that make our
military men and women cooperators in great evils.
Alisa Bierria (9B)
The Sociality of Agency and the Politics of Making Sense
In the slave narrative, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, Harriet Jacobs recounts her
experiences as an enslaved black woman in 19th century Virginia who immerses herself in a
project of self-emancipation. Jacobs devises elaborate plots to elude sexual assault from her
legal owner (identified as "Flint" in the narrative) and to ultimately escape bondage, leading
herself through a series of anticipations, strategic choices, and calculated actions. In her
narrative, Jacobs intends to circumvent the threat of rape within a social context that constructs
her as inherently sexually violable. She makes plans to escape slavery within a legal context that
defines flight from her circumstances as criminal. She purposefully acts in order to lay claim to
her own body within an economic context that systematically entrenches the idea that her body
belongs to others. While Jacobs constructs intentions that give her actions purpose, her
intentions fail to be socially recognized or acknowledged. The dominant political and cultural
context in which she attempts to exercise her agency warps the way in which her actions are
interpreted and her intentions are surmised by others. What can consistent, systematic, and
politically charged incongruities between what an agent intends her actions to mean and how
others interpret the meaning of her actions tell us about human agency?
In this paper, I contend that Jacobs is an agent, but the way others interpret her actions reveals a
critical social feature of agency. In social action, we act in such a way to be understood by
others, to make sense, in order to carry on in a social world. Usually, we animate our intentions
through our actions, rendering acts communicative when occurring under the observation of
others. This social dialectic of agency generally works well in most cases in which there is little
dispute about the intention of our social actions as we go about the business of recognizing,
understanding, and cooperating with others. It is also true that people make errors in this
process; there are good faith misunderstandings and misinterpretations. But how do we explain
scenarios in which there are consistent and systematic incongruities between what the agent
intends her actions to mean and how others interpret the meaning of her actions? In Jacobs’
case, for example, there seems to be a more fundamental rupture in the usual process of social
uptake and good faith interpretation of an agent's actions. Jacobs' experiences suggest that, for
the social dialectic of agency to function as usual, agents must be enfranchised into a shared set
of institutionally reinforced meanings that others to make sense of her actions. To make sense to
others, then, is a political status, rather than an evaluation of how rational one's actions are or are
not.
Philip Brewer (8E)
Pollution, Purification, and the Scapegoat in the Trial of Socrates
This essay treats the presence of miasma (religious pollution) in the Euthyphro as a “leading
clue” for an illumination of a certain institution at work in Athens’ democracy and, as I will
argue, also at play in the trail of Socrates. I propose that consideration of this institution—
namely, pollution concern—along with some of the traditions associated with it, will deepen our
understanding of the political story that Plato tells about the trial and death of his teacher. In
particular, I connect the trial of Socrates with the Athenian traditions of religious purification and
scapegoating violence—both of which, I argue, are expressions of Athens’ primary commitment
to an ethic of violence and retribution. In working out this relationship between Athens’ fear of
pollution and Athens’ commitment to retributive violence and, in turn, how these are both wound
up in the execution of Socrates, I think we deepen our understanding of the motivations behind
the indictment. In the final analysis, I submit that the symbolism at play in the Apology casts
Socrates as a source of both pollution and purification and thus hints at the presence of
oppositional purifications at work in the trial—one designed by philosophy, the other by the
polis.
Nina Brewer-Davis (3B)
Partiality and the Significance of Shared History
In a recent pair of articles, Niko Kolodny has argued that our response to some relationships
(specifically, those that are “histories of encounter”) should resonate with the proper response to
the discrete encounters of which the relationships are composed. Thus we have reason for
partiality in relationships whose discrete encounters also call for partiality. Kolodny’s account is
a significant contribution to work on partiality, but it leaves important questions unanswered,
including: what is it about a discrete encounter that calls for partiality? And why think any
relationships are best understood in terms of accumulated encounters? In this paper, I build on
Kolodny’s resonance theory with a theory of what it is about discrete encounters that has
normative significance. This provides us with a theoretical framework for analyzing some of the
relationships Kolodny draws on to illustrate his resonance theory, such as parents and children,
members of a shared culture, and how they differ from racist solidarity.
I propose that particular encounters are important in the way and extent that the actors
reciprocally change one another and are changed by the encounter, especially their mental states
such as their beliefs, desires, and values; in other words, the way they become “psychologically
connected.” Sometimes the change is slight, and sometimes it is profound. When two people
have a history of such encounters, they have had an extended impact on each other’s mental
states—they have each contributed to making the other the person that she is. This mutual
influence, both in individual encounters and in histories of encounter, has normative
implications, in that it gives each person reasons of both gratitude and responsibility toward the
other, proportional to the significance of the influence. These are reasons of partiality.
The psychological connectedness account gives us a framework for analyzing relationships,
including those that Kolodny discusses. This theory coincides with and adds to Kolodny’s
interpretation of some relationships, such as that adoptive parents have reasons of partiality
toward their children. In other cases, the theory indicates interpretations that differ from
Kolodny’s. It suggests that members of a shared culture may be connected to each other through
a chain of encounter, contrary to Kolodny’s claim. It also exposes a sense in which racist
solidarity is not only immoral but also mistaken, to the extent that it presupposes a shared history
that never happened, while ignoring shared histories that do call for partiality.
Adam Burgos (10A)
The Normative and the Natural in Rousseau’s Second Discourse
This paper is an attempt to draw out a theory of human nature from Rousseau’s Discourse on the
Origin and the Foundations of Inequality Among Men (D2). This is the starting point of a larger
project of investigating how that theory of human nature can also be found underlying the
political institutions described in The Social Contract, as well as in the educational project in
Emile.
My overall claim is that, given the way that Rousseau explains the difference between the natural
and the social, any theorizing about the truth of the natural is, with one exception, an
impossibility. That is, through his multiple explanations for the life of human beings in the state
of nature, Rousseau shows that actual knowledge concerning pre-social/pre-institutional
humanity is not possible. Rousseau comes to this conclusion about the impossibility of
theorizing the true essence of humanity in the state of nature because of the way that our social
and political institutions are able to shape how we think about and learn from our surroundings.
The above-mentioned exception is then the normative stance from which we can strive for
goodness against the backdrop of our distinctly human faculty of self-perfection. This is the only
way in which we can be said to properly theorize about “natural man” without falling into the
problem that Rousseau sees in Hobbes and Locke: “They spoke of Savage man and depicted
Civil man” (D2 132).
If this is true, then the consequence is that we must both begin and end with social humanity,
making the problem of the social the central issue for Rousseau’s philosophy. Backing up this
claim entails making three inter-connected points that emerge from close readings of passages
from the second Discourse: (1) how Rousseau articulates the split between the natural and the
social, and in doing so (2) shows that any theorizing about “natural” humanity must be
retrospective theorizing. That is, we cannot avoid starting from the present, with all of the
baggage—and knowledge—that comes along with that position. This backward theorizing is not
fruitless, however, if, as I argue in (3), the imperative of this backward theorizing is to make
normative claims about the possibilities of human perfectibility and goodness.
Once these points have been made, it will be clear that nature for Rousseau can only be
understood in a broad sense of that which can be seen and reflected upon by us as social beings.
It serves as an umbrella term that would include both what he refers to as “Savage man” and
“Civil man.” The varying iterations of “Savage man” show us how different conceptions of
humanity can present themselves to one another, not quite as fact, but as something more akin to
myth. We can look to these myths for inspiration, for guidance or advice, or perhaps for lessons,
but in whatever manner we look at them, we are unable to replicate them; we can only use them
as normative starting points for thinking about the future.
A.L.A. Buys (2E)
A Critical Comparison between Alfred Whitehead and Jonathan Edwards Regarding the
Concept of Beauty in Society
Jonathan Edwards was primarily a philosophical theologian, where Whitehead was a philosopher
who had profound influence on theology via the process theology. Edwards saw beauty as
consent to being, while Whitehead’s definition of beauty has to do with the perfection of
harmony of the subjectivity of an occasional experience. A thorough comparison between these
two concepts of beauty reveal that it has much to say for the current global questions about
virtues in civil society, as well as the question about unity and divisions within societies. Both
Whitehead and Edwards connect the beauty concept with truth, although they profoundly differ
on what truth is. This aspect has an impact on the theory of value that is part and parcel of the
democratic debate.
Edwards grounds his concept of beauty firmly in the Augustinian tradition of what good is as
well as the relevant points of covenantal theology. He sees good as the intra Trinitarian consent
of God. Whitehead’s places the focus on process, and he sees God as becoming. The unique
occasionalist view of Edwards on theosis and its implications for human society as a whole is a
serious partner in the philosophical debate. Primarily where process is seen within the
Whiteheadian framework as God-becoming – a viewpoint that has on its part a determining
factor on how societies value systems is perceived as a whole.
Consent to being is beauty - with this definition Edwards gives a serious Calvinist challenge to
the very basis of the post-modern view(s) on society in which we live today, marked by the clash
of civilizations and the debate about the universal definition for democracy as virtue. The
relevance of this debate could be shown even with regard to the potential influence on this
definition by the current sweeping Arab spring, as well as the post Tiananmen square debate
about the definition of democracy in China, where the influence of the Whiteheadian philosophy
is also on the rise.
Alisa Carse (and Lynne Tirrell) (4D)
Reconciliation as a Civic Pursuit
Since the late twentieth century, there has been a proliferation of political reconciliation
efforts seeking to secure stability and peace in the aftermath of civil conflict, genocide, and
systematic human rights abuses. Situating reconciliation at the center of peace-building efforts in
divided societies marks an important historical turn, reflecting hope that we might break cycles
of violence and destruction in ways that exceed fragile forms of stability grounded in coercion,
threat, or fear. At the same time, history demonstrates that the prospects for peace through
political reconciliation remain bleak. Violence and crime have surged in many countries after
apparent transitions to “peace.” Often, what is today called “peace and reconciliation” in large
scale political contexts like South Africa, Northern Ireland, and Rwanda secures at best a fragile
order.
Our analysis focuses on reconciliation in response to grave moral harms, including
prolonged human rights abuses, wanton violence, and genocide, in cases where former
adversaries must continue to live in close proximity. On a social and political level, grave harms
undermine the rule of law, leave institutions in disarray, and destroy confidence in the possibility
of finding norms and practices able to secure a safe and decent world. For societies in transition
away from civil strife and grave violence, overcoming histories of enmity in a context in which
distrust and hostility persist is no easy feat. Without strong and legitimate institutions
safeguarding the rule of law and human rights, sustainable peace is impossible. But legal and
political measures alone are insufficient. We argue that, in the aftermath of grave wrongs,
political reconciliation efforts must be joined to widespread efforts of what we call relational
reconciliation. Relational reconciliation involves personal relationships, to be sure, but crucially
requires shared civic undertakings as well, which are too often ignored in discussions of
reconciliation – undertakings through which former adversaries join forces at the local level in
pursuit of common, concrete, and measurable ends, such as building an efficient water system,
opening a health clinic, or establishing local procedures for cooperative conflict mediation.
Through shared civic pursuits, distinct kinds of personal, social, and civic virtues – most
crucially rudimentary trust and what we call “moral curiosity” – can take root, allowing former
adversaries to begin to establish and abide by shared norms of mutual respect and decency.
For societies in transition, pursuing reconciliation ultimately requires contending with
disparate and conflicting accounts of “shared” history and moral responsibility. So too, as
peacemaker Padraig O’Malley points out, it often entails mourning for a loss of identity tied to
hatred and resentment, and confusion about the demands of loyalty and justice. The coordination
of efforts undertaken in the local lives of ordinary citizens is crucial to the achievement of longterm stability and eventual peace. The development of reparative virtue and a culture of civic
engagement is required in initiating a process of reconciliation; it is also, more fundamentally, a
constitutive part of the reconciliation process.
In developing our analysis, we focus on current reconciliation efforts in Northern Ireland
and post-genocidal Rwanda.
Lisa Cassidy (8A)
What Happens to Abortion when Fetal Transplantation and Adoption is Possible?
This interactive presentation evaluates the question posed in its title, what happens to abortion
when fetal transplantation and adoption is possible. The methods of the presentation will include
briefly reviewing existing literature, sketching a hypothesis, and discussing the merits of it with
the audience.
Philosophers and bioethicists have been seriously contemplating the implications of ectogenesis
– human fetal gestation outside a uterus – since at least the 1980s (Murphy 1989; Geland and
Shook 2006). While previous considerations of ectogenesis may help guide us, I think fetal
transplantation and adoption is a very real, debatable prospect in our lifetime. I define that
procedure as a pregnant woman electing to remove a fetus from her uterus for immediate
transplantation into another woman’s uterus (which is subsequently adopted by the fetal
transplant recipient or by another). My presentation will focus particularly on the ethics of
abortion in this not-too-distant future.
Assume for the sake of argument that fetal transplantation and adoption will someday be
possible. When that day comes it will be a great temptation for many pro-choice feminists to
insist that ethically speaking, nothing has changed with respect to women’s reproductive rights,
and abortion is still a genuine choice which women should be able to exercise. While the second
contention seems right to me, the first seems wrong. I think the ethical landscape will change
significantly in that fetal adoption and transplantation will become an ethically better choice than
abortion, although abortion still should be considered a reproductive right. There are a number
of ethical theories one might use to justify the preference for fetal adoption and transplantation; I
am particularly drawn to a care ethics/utilitarian analysis, à la Joan Tronto (1993).
I anticipate participants will enjoy the speculative nature of the project, and hope to learn from
participants how the work can be enhanced by considering its global implications for poor
women and women for whom abortion will continue remain inaccessible due to political
constraints.
Martin Chamorro (6A)
Proportional Curtailment: A New Theory of Open Borders
Christopher Wellman has recently argued that legitimate political states are morally entitled to
self-determination and this includes the right to unilaterally design and enforce their own
immigration policies, even if such policies include closed borders. An important premise of his
pro tanto case for the right of exclusion is that the freedom of association, which is an integral
component of self-determination, entitles one to not associate with others. Wellman argues that
freedom of association is integral because without it outsiders who become members may exert
enough political influence that the citizens of a legitimate state might no longer be able to shape
the future of their state. While Wellman stresses that he is arguing for a deontological right of
exclusion, others have argued that the grounds upon which the necessity for freedom of
association rest depend on the consequentialist concerns of citizens about the future shape of
their state.
In this paper I will argue that because Wellman's argument critically depends on these
consequentialist concerns, it fails to entail the right of a state to close its borders. Instead, it can
only entail what I call the proportional curtailment theory of open borders. This theory defines
proportional curtailment in the following way: immigration may only be curtailed in proportion
to the consequentialist concerns permissible in liberal theory that exclusive membership is
designed to address. This theory suggests that nearly all proposed closed border theories,
including Wellman's, advocate disproportionate restrictions on membership for potential
immigrants. These restrictions are disproportionate because while they are able to address the
consequentialist concerns of citizens, they do it in such a way that they inflict more harm on
immigrants (by denying them membership) than is required. In contrast to those theories, the
proportional curtailment theory of open borders suggests that there are alternative ways to
address consequentialist concerns that do not require closing the borders and at the same time
inflict far less harm to potential immigrants. Additionally, this theory allows for meeting the
demands of two important freedoms simultaneously: the freedom of movement and the freedom
of association. It satisfies the former by granting membership to potential immigrants who are
willing to do what it takes to address the liberally permissible consequentialist concerns citizens
may have. The theory also meets the demands of freedom of association by permitting legitimate
states to set liberally permissible rules that immigrants must meet before becoming members.
Thus, the theory addresses the consequentialist concerns that constituents of legitimates states
have about opening their borders. By satisfying these concerns in a proportional and sufficient
way, the theory allows constituents to maintain a high degree of control over the future shape of
their state.
David Chan (9D)
Self-Defense and Possible Threats
The moral justification for killing in self-defense has been debated with the goal of providing an
account that explains why the prohibition against homicide does not forbid such killing. The
favored approach to this issue is to justify self-defensive killing as a right. I argue that such an
account is flawed in requiring someone under threat to know more about the threat than she
might know. What if one cannot tell whether there is a culpable motive behind the threat, or
whether the perceived threat is really a threat? For instance, if an airliner strays and the pilots
are unreachable by radio, should the military have the right to shoot it down when it enters a
restricted zone?
I argue that the best way to evaluate responses to possible threats is not in terms of the right of
self-defense. Instead, I suggest an alternative approach derived from agent-centered ethics. An
account of self-defense can focus either on facts about the person who is targeted in an act of
self-defense or on facts regarding the person who carries out the act of self-defense. Virtue
ethics provides an agent-centered approach that determines what the agent may do on the basis
of her character and motivations. A virtuous agent would not take pleasure in killing and would
avoid needless killing. A difference in response to a possible threat compared to an actual threat
can be described in terms of how a choice is made by a person who reasons well. When faced
with an actual and culpable threat, killing may be the right choice. But the response has to be
calibrated differently when she is uncertain whether there is a threat and whether the threat is
culpable. I explain how this works better than the rights-based approach.
Shanti Chu (7A)
Challenging the Dichotomy of Interiority and Exteriority through Alcoff’s and Ahmed’s
Examination of Embodiment and Flesh
Both Linda Martín Alcoff and Sara Ahmed give complex accounts of embodied experience in
terms of its implications on knowledge, our interactions with others, and our understandings of
our selves. Both Alcoff and Ahmed go beyond the dichotomy of self/other and internal/external
through discussing how the body is an “openness” and is not a self-contained entity.
More specifically, they understand embodiment as “interembodiment” as something that
simultaneously separates and opens oneself to the world. The skin is an elucidation of this
“interembodiment” by simultaneously acting as a border of the body and as an integral part of
the body’s contact with the world. I will argue that we cannot understand the relationship
between embodiment, experience, and the self, without understanding how an account of flesh
problematizes the interiority and exteriority of the self and in turn challenges the self-other
dichotomy. Instead, we should understand the skin as a simultaneous sight of materialization of
experience while being an openness through connection and divisiveness. Flesh is that which
protects, separates, opens, and touches.
I will argue for this by first explaining Alcoff’s conceptualization of visible identities in her
introduction and chapter “Real Identities” from Visible Identities in order to provide the
framework of the importance of visible identities upon one’s own identity and experiences
within the world. Sex, gender, race, and ethnicity are the most prominent visible identities for
Alcoff because they cannot be masked in the way other identities sometimes can be. They are
tied to our embodiment and it is our embodiment that is tied to how others perceive and receive
us and in turn how we understand ourselves. I will then focus upon the specific aspect of visible
identity, that is, the concept of skin/flesh in order to elucidate its relation to embodiment and its
salience to how we are received by others and how we experience the world through examining
Alcoff’s claims in “Merleau Ponty and Feminist Theory on Experience”1 in terms of how
specifically flesh interacts with our experiences in the world in relation to Ahmed’s claims in
Strange Encounters regarding the divisiveness of skin. Both Alcoff and Ahmed focus on the
simultaneous openness and interiority of skin/flesh. After their conceptualizations of flesh/skin
in relation to one another, we can understand how both of their accounts of flesh/skin are
fundamental to challenging the misunderstood self/other dichotomy.
1
This will henceforth be referred to as “Merleau Ponty”.
Emily Crookston (8D)
Exploitation, Moral Harm, and Civic Virtue
In this paper I explore one controversial aspect of a dilemma regarding a fundamental conflict
among democratic values that is as old as democratic theory itself: the question of how best to
respond to moral harms that arise as a result of the free choices of autonomous individuals. In
particular, I focus on the rational choices of individuals who, due to some background injustice,
find themselves in an inferior bargaining position relative to others. More specifically, I answer
the following question: if an agent can rationally regard some exploitative transaction, e.g.,
surrogacy, prostitution, polygamy, as increasing her overall welfare because she is choosing
from an inferior bargaining position, either due to injustice in the basic structure of her society or
because of some other injustice that limits her options, then is a democratic regime justified in
preventing her from choosing such a transaction merely because it is morally harmful to her?
Answering this question requires, first, disambiguating the harm of exploitative transactions
from the motivation for socially or politically prohibiting them. I argue that if exploitation is at
all harmful in mutually advantageous exploitative situations, then the harm involved must be
moral harm. In other words, there must be something about a wrongful exploitative act that sets
back the moral interests of the exploitee. But even if mutually beneficial exploitative
transactions, such as the one described above, are wrong in this way, the claim that democratic
governments are justified in prohibiting such transactions requires further argument. And any
argument to this end will depend upon a certain account of civic virtue.
So, after showing how exploitative transactions can be mutually beneficial, but nonetheless,
morally harmful to the exploitee, I examine the plausibility of accounts of civic virtue that justify
institutional interference to prevent such transactions between autonomous individuals. There are
two methods by which democratic leaders can promote civic virtue: (a) by removing
opportunities for wrongful choices and (b) by empowering citizens to make present choices that
will lead to the flourishing of opportunities for autonomy in the future. Whereas the first method
encourages members of the most vulnerable groups in society to think of themselves as victims,
the second method serves to protect and to increase individual self-respect, which is important
for members of the most vulnerable groups. Ultimately, I argue that rather than preventing
mutually beneficial exploitative transactions between citizens, democratic governments ought to
focus on promoting civic virtue especially in the form of individual self-respect encouraging
citizens increasingly to avoid morally harmful transactions, but doing so in a way that serves to
promote their autonomy.
Margaret Crouch (1B)
Diversity, Gender, and Neoliberalism in Higher Education in a Global Context
In this presentation, I will extend my work examining neoliberalism in higher education and its
effects on diversity, particularly gender diversity, in higher education in general, and in the
discipline of philosophy in particular, beyond the U.S.
On one understanding of neoliberalism, it is committed to the principle that the market is the best
means of producing and distributing resources. When this framework is applied to higher
education, the consequences are significant. One of the most important is a fundamental shift in
values, from the notion that higher education contributes to the common good, to the conception
of knowledge as a commodity and students as individual consumers of that commodity who
benefit as individuals. This shift in values leads to further changes in funding, structure,
curriculum, and in the concern for fair access to the good of higher education.
The comparative analysis undertaken in this presentation will consider both higher education in
countries other than the U.S.—for example, the effects of the Bologna Agreement on diversity in
higher education in the EU--and the effects on diversity in higher education in the U.S. of the
recent focus on attracting more and more “foreign” students to U.S. institutions.
Adam Cureton (6B)
Some Virtues of Disability
The disability rights movement made substantial progress in improving the freedoms,
opportunities and political status of persons with disabilities, but there is a growing recognition
that law and justice are not enough to ensure that people with disabilities are treated
appropriately. Disabled people seek to be respected, appreciated and regarded as full members
of society in education, sports and personal relationships. Unfortunately, they continue to face
an uphill battle in these respects – disabled people are often silently ridiculed, portrayed as
monstrous or gruesome in popular media and public policy, people with disabilities also tend to
be pitied, stigmatized and disrespected, often in subtle ways by well-meaning people who have
no intention to be insulting. For example, we may notice an aging parent, for example,
struggling with some activity, so we immediately rush in to provide assistance, but our wellintentioned efforts may turn out to be somewhat disrespectful by inadvertently undermining or
impugning the person’s own self-respect. This paper takes up the question: when we are in
everyday social settings, what does it take to show people with disabilities proper respect and
appreciation, and what does it take for them to have these attitudes towards themselves? I
distinguish and partially characterize the attitudes of respect and appreciation in general and then
consider what these attitudes imply about three paradigmatic examples involving moderately
disabled people, one who is blind, one requiring the use of a wheelchair, and one in the early
stages of dementia. Respecting someone, I claim, involves a refusal to undermine or infringe on
the self-respect of that person; it also involves accepting someone as a full member of society,
with its constitutive rights, liberties and prerogatives. Appreciating someone, I argue, involves
looking for and valuing the good aspects of her. Like most people, disabled people tend to base
their self-worth on the opinions and attitudes of others, so when we (perhaps inadvertently) make
a disabled person feel useless or unhelpful by rushing in to perform some task for them, for
example, we may not show her proper respect. When we focus on the impairments of a disabled
person instead of looking past those features to the good aspects of her, we fail to appreciate that
person as we well. But people with disabilities should also strive to overcome any
embarrassment they may have about their condition that the expressed attitudes of others may
elicit, they should be grateful for the perhaps misplaced help of others, and they should try to
appreciate themselves by paying closer attention to their own valuable qualities and by working
to improve them.
Annaleigh Curtis (3A)
Epistemic Injustice and Moral Knowledge
In this paper I examine the most common cluster of methods in contemporary analytic ethics and
social/political philosophy, and suggest that they are inadequate by their own lights. This cluster
of methods is perhaps best described as ‘moral liberalism,’ a term I borrow in this context from
Theresa Tobin (2007). One feature of moral liberalism is the assumption that a lone individual
can, at least in large part, undertake the project of moral reasoning. Even when moral liberalism
allows for some collaboration in moral reasoning, it is typically collaboration among
philosophers, who consider themselves to be experts. This is not to say that moral liberalism is
committed to the claim that moral reasoning ought to take place only among philosophers (or
other individuals), but that it is committed to the claim that moral reasoning is typically
unproblematic under these conditions. I show that one minimum desideratum on the legitimacy
of a moral claim within moral liberalism is that a judgment have taken account of all the
relevant, accessible moral reasons that apply to the issue at hand. I then argue that this is
practically impossible (or simply incredibly unlikely) under the sort of closed conditions moral
liberalism allows. In doing this, I draw on recent work by Miranda Fricker (2007) on epistemic
injustice, as well as a deep literature in feminist moral epistemology, to show that any particular
moral agent will be unable to access and evaluate all the moral reasons relevant to the issue
under consideration. That is, the individualism implicit in moral liberalism results in violations
of the requirement that a justified moral claim take account of all relevant, accessible moral
reasons.
Paul Cynar (10D)
Redefining Consent: A Robust Notion of Consensual Obligation
An almost universally accepted aspect of consent is the inability to oblige oneself to unjust
actions. I claim this potential prima fascia impossibility of obligation undermines the concept of
the power of individual obligation. It is thought that the institution of promise keeping grounds
obligation generated through consent, yet disallowing the creation of moral bonds in instances
where the act required is claimed to be immoral devalues and erodes the foundational moment of
the promise. Proponents of contractual obligation are bound to accept one of two possibilities;
either the promise has power to create moral obligation, and thus the object of that promise is of
no consequence in regards to obligation; or one’s obligation to preceding moral duties
supersedes the promise and disallows obligation to unjust actions. I argue that if one accepts the
latter, as most consent theorists do, then the action of consent is undermined in its ability to
generate obligation. It must be shown rather that for consent to have a place in political
obligation the former must be accepted, even if acceptance does not allow for avoidance of the
possibility of obligation to unjust actions or states.
Through an appeal to John Simmons’ two components of legitimate voluntaristic consent
(knowingly and willingly), which he considers to be necessary for political obligation, this paper
will attempt to redefine the classic notion of consent. Claiming that there are no prima fascia
moral boundaries which constrict our ability to obligate through consent, but rather it is solely
the consensual action which holds any ability to create moral or political bonds. Although
attempting to create a positive reformulation of consent, it will be seen as a necessary component
of this positive account that prima fascia moral obligations do not prohibit a moral bond
originated by consent. This obligation, although open to concerns about its “perfect” or
“imperfect” nature, must nonetheless always be considered a real and legitimate obligation.
Roit Dahan (10A)
New Social Order: Marcuse’s Critique of Freud
In his text Eros and Civilization, Marcuse relates to Freud’s position regarding the emancipation
of reason. According to Freud, man attains autonomy first and foremost via reason and by the
creation of a rational foundation for his existence. Marcuse’s main argument is that it is possible
for the individual to attain freedom by basing his way of life on rationalism. But Freud’s concept
of rationalism, according to Marcuse, is rooted in the same social, political and economic order
that created the oppression! Thus, Marcuse claims that we must re-examine the concept of
rationalism in order to establish a reality that will facilitate freedom and happiness.
Marcuse believes that reason in its accepted sense in Western philosophy does not confer
immunity from manipulation of consciousness. Reason’s advanced achievements do not lead to
liberation—in fact, they lead to destruction, unnecessary oppression and suffering. (This is due to
widespread use of advertisements and the mass media, as well as technological developments
that lead to excessive killing, oppression, and more.) Thus we must search for real freedom in a
completely different dimension, one that will be the basis for a new social order and for the
reorganization of society.
In this lecture I will argue that Marcuse’s ideas regarding a new social order are not necessarily
utopian. According to Marcuse, we are not required to dismantle existing technological
achievements or their resulting products. Instead, we need to harness them in order to achieve
freedom and establish the re-organization of social practices (such as employment). At the same
time, Marcuse does not invalidate Freud’s discussion of the individual and his doctrine of
instinctual drives, but instead integrates them in his discussion of the likelihood of founding a
new social order in which the index for evaluating life is not in materialistic terms or in the
consumption of luxury items. He proposes an order that aspires to reduce the time spent on
alienating work and the necessity of work, alongside enlarging leisure time and interpersonal
relations. This kind of change in the conception of a rational life style is necessary for the
achievement of liberty and happiness. A social change in this direction will create, according to
Marcuse, possible conditions for freedom and peace.
Yuanfang Dai (3D)
Challenging the Particularity Argument
Critics of feminist literature of the sixties and seventies argued that some writers were over
generalizing about the problems women suffer as a result of male domination and therefore also
about the goals of feminist politics. Both analytical and normative issues were formulated
through a challenge to essentialism. We can identify certain kinds of argument that were
developed under this heading. One has to do with claims about the particularity of women’s
contexts, one has to do with issues about the nature of thought itself (postmodernist category
skepticism), and one introduces a strategic approach to essentialism. None of these approaches
adequately balances the need to respect diversity among women’s oppression and goals while
retaining some understanding of the commonalities that bind women together and make the idea
of feminist solidarity a meaningful ideal.
In this paper, I analyze the claims made by the line of the particularity of women’s contexts and
indicate the main claims they make about the analysis of women’s oppression and about a
feminist politics. I critically examine the particularity argument, as a form of “difference
critique” developed by Elizabeth Spelman and Kimberlé Crenshaw. They assert that feminist
resistance should be demonstrated in localized, regional, specific struggles, which represent the
interests of particular women or groups of women. I argue that the particularity argument
addresses the interlaced oppression of underprivileged women but fails to avoid the separability
of social categories. That is, the particularity approach is not a satisfactory way to generalize
women because it does not elaborate among their particularity what connects women. The
particularity argument leads to the divide of women into different categories thus fails to
construct a useful category of women for helping with women’s collective resistance to
structural oppression. I begin by critically examining Spelman’s argument about “inessential
woman,” in which she argues that claiming “womanness” is essentialism. Then I further explore
the limitations of the particularity argument by examining Crenshaw’s defense of the theory of
intersectionality, in which she argues that women should be generalized at the intersection of
gender and race. I conclude that the particularity argument dissolves feminist struggles into
fragmented struggles despite of its virtues.
Brandon Davis-Shannon (1D)
The Depressed Ethicist: What Vulnerability to Depression Reveals about the Frailty of
Moral Reasoning
Recent work in neuroethics suggests that moral judgments are much like any other kind of
judgment: they are primarily the result of unconscious affective processes, while reasoning is
often only a secondary, after-the-fact way to justify these judgments. Many ethicists, including
Joshua Greene and Peter Singer, have responded to these revelations by reaffirming the need to
prioritize the rational processes of judgment. According to this point of view, the fact that our
natural inclinations are towards intuitive, unreflective judgments is a danger to the very practice
of morality itself. As a result, this traditionalist view claims that we should tie ourselves to a
supposedly wholly rational moral theory, like consequentialism. While there is good reason to
doubt the coherence and strength of judgments emerging from affective processes, I argue that
responding to the affective nature of moral judgments by giving greater credence to a traditional
rationalist moral theory like consequentialism is precisely the wrong approach.
In stark contrast, I hold that an effective response to the insights of neuroethics must allow a
greater, not lesser, role for emotion in moral judgments. A more honest and rigorous evaluation
of moral judgments requires that the affective process be given greater priority than it has in the
past. I argue for this by appealing to recent research on vulnerability to depression and its
relationship to dual processing. This research has revealed, perhaps unsurprisingly, that
vulnerability to depression corresponds with a negative bias in an individual’s affective process.
More important for the question of moral judgment, this same work has shown that this affective
vulnerability cannot generally be overcome by engaging the afflicted individuals' rational
processes through reflection and critical engagement. I argue that this insight holds for moral
judgment, as well as vulnerability to depression. As a consequence of this, ethical approaches
like social intuitionism and feminist naturalism—which emphasize the importance of
relationships, context, and other potentially affective phenomena—are better suited than more
traditional rational models to making sense of and assessing everyday moral judgments.
Barry DeCoster (8A)
Honesty and Resistance: Tensions Between Clinical Virtues
Honesty as an ethical virtue has a long and complicated philosophical history. When connected
to the broader concept of truth telling, honesty is frequently considered to be a fundamental civic
virtue. That is to say, honesty is foundational to successful social interactions. In the framework
of Alasdair MacIntyre (After Virtue), we might consider honesty to be an internal good required
for the success of many practices, including the practice of medicine. After a brief overview of
the importance of the virtue, this paper will focus on identifying the complicated limits of
honesty. In particular, I will argue that if our analysis of honesty begins by taking seriously
unequal or oppressive power dynamics, the lives of many people require a reinterpretation of
honesty.
Bioethics literature often identifies honesty as a required virtue for the ‘good patient’ within
medicine. Much theorizing has questioned the nature of patients’ duties to their physicians. The
concept of ‘honesty’ is frequently repeated in this literature as required of all patients. Patient
honesty has deep roots, going back to the earliest codes of ethics of the American Medical
Association (alongside internal goods like the timely paying of bills, and following agreed upon
treatment plans). The rationale, in the rare moments when provided, often relies on arguments
that medicine cannot proceed if patients are not honest with care givers. Physicians cannot do
their work properly, it is argued, if patients are dishonest or withhold information. The practice
of medicine, to successfully allow patients to be treated by physicians, demands patients’ honest
involvement.
Beginning with the assumed power imbalance fundamental to the doctor-patient relationship, I
challenge assumptions about honesty by beginning with the lives of
lesbian/gay/bisexual/transgender (LGBT) patients within the practice of medicine. I argue that
here, patients who debate whether to “come out” to physicians face a complex moment in
understanding how to be honest, while at the same time allowing for the flourishing of patients.
The structural analysis encouraged by a MacIntyrian analysis of the virtue of honesty requires a
focus on the social-temporal locations that allow the virtue of honesty to be enacted. As such,
oppressive forces may not allow for (fully) honest interaction between clinician and patient. Such
limits are not only rational, they are appropriate first to ensure patient safety. Second, since
patients’ self-interest in seeking good care may come into conflict with the political critique of
physicians, who themselves may be participants in oppressive practices. In addition, I take up the
richer question raised against MacIntyre’s concept of practice: can we distinguish between
successful practices that resist oppressive norms, versus those that rely upon and re-inscribe
oppressive norms?
Thus, being a virtuous patient requires a complex set of activities in order to foster their own
activities of self-preservation, resistance, flourishing. Patients, in deciding whether to come out
to physicians, must become judges about the clinical setting: how to know when and how much
honesty is appropriate for a doctor-patient relationship, rather than assuming it is required.
Philip Deen (1B)
Inquiry and Virtue: An Argument for Civic Education
Liberal democracy has always had an unsteady relationship to virtue. Its republican strand has
emphasized the centrality of civic virtue as a bulwark against faction and tyranny and the place
of civic engagement in the good life. At the same time, its liberal strand makes sacred the scope
of private freedom and the right to design one’s own image of what constitutes a good life.
However, if liberal democracy is to survive, its citizens must have certain virtues.
Liberal-democratic societies then face the difficulty of reconciling their central commitment to
toleration with the need to cultivate liberal-democratic virtues in their citizens. After Rawls, this
has been framed as the difficulty of publicly justifying liberal virtues without appealing to liberal
comprehensive accounts of the Good. Democratic authority rests on the reasoned consent of the
governed yet, as we become ever more pluralist, it is unreasonable to expect consensus on
substantive moral ends. This makes the justification of civics education in public schools
difficult. Specifically, liberal- democratic societies must justify coerced, public education of
liberal virtues in a way that respects the various moral tradition of students’ families.
Drawing from the pragmatist philosophy of Charles Peirce and John Dewey, I argue that liberal
virtues such as courage, openness, toleration and inclusiveness may be justified as the necessary
conditions for good inquiry. These virtues are cultivated not because they are elements of a
particular moral tradition’s account of human excellence, but because they are necessary to
successfully solve problems, a need felt by any moral tradition. Democratic norms and virtues
may then be derived not by appeal to one substantive conception of the Good, but from the
nature of moral inquiry itself. The result is a public justification of civic education—the
cultivation in children certain democratic virtues— that does not violate the liberal
commitments. I conclude by applying this argument to the case of civic education and its
religious objectors.
Candice Delmas (7D)
Political Resistance as Samaritan Duty
What are our obligations in the face of injustice? Contemporary political philosophers have
neglected this question, focusing instead on what they call the “problem of political obligation,”
that is, whether subjects of just and nearly just societies have a moral duty to obey the law
because it is the law. Theorists remain largely silent about what we ought to do under unjust
political conditions. When contemplating civil disobedience, they only consider whether it may
be morally justified, as a permission or right, in nearly just societies—never whether it may be
morally required. This neglect is surprising given that famous practitioners of civil disobedience,
including Henry David Thoreau and Martin Luther King, Jr., whom theorists hail as paragons,
treated resistance to injustice as a matter of moral obligation.
In this paper, I consider the possibility of duties to disobey unjust laws and resist injustice; and I
do so using a particular theory of political obligation. Consent, gratitude, the principle of
fairness, and the natural duty of justice are among the familiar bases of the duty to obey the law.
Here, I focus on a novel, promising ground, recently put forth by Christopher H. Wellman: the
Samaritan duty. The Samaritan duty requires us to aid persons in peril or dire need when we can
do so at no unreasonable cost to ourselves. Wellman claims that the state is justified in coercing
its citizens in order to rescue all from the perilous circumstances of the state of nature. He then
submits that each of us is bound to obey the law, as the state demands, because all of us have a
responsibility to help rescue others when this assistance is not unreasonably costly. My argument
is that where egregious injustices imperil people, Samaritan duties of rescue arise that support
obligations of political resistance and civil disobedience.
The discussion proceeds as follows. First, I lay out Wellman’s Samaritan account of state
legitimacy and political obligation. Second, focusing my argument on the concrete historical case
of Jim Crow, I contend that southern states’ authorities failed to generate political obligation, and
constituted a perilous environment for African-Americans. I go on to construct an argument for a
duty to partake in the effort to resist racial violence as one’s fair share of the communal
Samaritan chore of rescuing others from the perils of life in the state.
Cristian Dimitru (3C)
Global Justice and the Odious Debt Doctrine
According to a popular view, world poverty is a moral problem because wealthy countries have
failed to assist the distant needy, or because of human rights violations. But there is a much more
pervasive problem that is currently affecting the world’s destitute, and that requires urgent
attention: odious debts. Odious debt is a legal theory which holds that the national debt incurred
by a regime for purposes that do not serve the best interests of the nation should not be
enforceable. Such debts are thus considered by this doctrine to be personal debts of the regime
that incurred them and not debts of the state. Given that most of the developing countries debt is
to a great extent odious, and that this debt creates a huge burden on them, declaring them
illegitimate would bring about much more progress on these countries than any other possible
reform.
I will try to show in Section (I) why odious debts are illegitimate, and why they should not be a
burden for present and future generations. The crucial point is that there is a threshold below
which any political action cannot plausibly count as legitimately made by the rulers in the name
of the citizens.
This may persuade readers that some debts are not binding. However, it could still be possible to
minimize their impact on developing countries on two different grounds. First, one might argue
that the set of debts which are in fact odious is minimal in comparison with the set of debts
which are legitimate. On this view, which has been put forward by global justice scholars such as
Pogge and Cohen, the problem of odious debts affect autocratic governments only (and not
democratically elected ones). A second objection the sceptic might appeal to says that states
ought to honour their commitments, even when affected by odious debts. On this view, countries
are morally entitled to repudiate their debts, but the principle of pacta sunt servanda overrides
their moral claims.
So simply showing why some debts are illegitimate may not convince them that the problem of
odious debts is something that we should worry about. An effort should be made to show that
odious debts had a pervasive impact on the development of countries which goes beyond the
limits of what is usually thought. In order to carry out this task, I will show in Section (II) the
reasons why odious debts are a far reaching and pervasive injustice. This implies showing that
democratic governments are also affected by odious debts, and that exceptions to the principle
that states ought to honour their commitments should be made in the case of odious debts.
Michael Doan (7D)
Nonideal Theory and Complacency
How are theorists of social justice to make sense of significant barriers to, lapses in, and outright
failures of moral motivation and action? Several phenomena can be bundled under this category,
including indifference, apathy, hopelessness, resignation and despair. Yet complacency seems to
be one of the most ubiquitous. It is also a concept that moral philosophers have for the most part
ignored, save for a handful of brief treatments that raise as many important questions as they
answer (Unwin 1985; Crisp & Cowton 1994; Kawall 2006). Because we do not yet have a clear
sense of what complacency is, we cannot possibly have a very good sense of how to go about
remedying it. Thus I take it that there is philosophical work to be done as part of an effort to
better understand and successfully grapple with complacency in our everyday lives.
In this paper I situate my inquiry into complacency with respect to ongoing debates concerning
the respective aims of, and proper relationships between, ideal and nonideal theories of social
justice. At one end of the spectrum, several theorists depict ideal theory as playing indispensable
epistemic and practical roles, arguing that it ought to have priority in the order of investigation
(Rawls 1971, 1993, 1999, 2001; Murphy 2000; Cohen 2003, 2008; Mason 2004; Robeyns 2008;
Stemplowska 2008; Swift 2008; Valentini 2009; Simmons 2010). At the other end of the
spectrum, various theorists cast ideal theory as unnecessary and even pernicious, primarily
because it provides poor and indeterminate, if not also potentially damaging practical guidance
under current circumstances (Phillips 1985; Baier 1985; Goodin 1995; Walker 2003, 2007; Mills
2005; Pateman and Mills 2007; Farrelly 2007; Schwartzman 2006, 2009; Sreenivasan 2007; Sen
2006, 2011; Jaggar 2009; Tessman 2010; Schmidtz 2011). After offering a critical overview of
these debates, I proceed to engage in a closer examination of the problems that fall under the
aegis of nonideal theory. These include unfavourable historical and economic conditions which
make it difficult to achieve a “well-ordered society,” and the noncompliance of persons and
institutions with the regulative principles that would govern such a society (Rawls 1971, 1999).
Setting unfavourable conditions aside, I argue that the “problem of noncompliance” presents two
distinct yet related tasks for nonideal theory, the second of which has been largely neglected.
One task is to determine how we ought to conduct ourselves in circumstances where
noncompliance is an ongoing source of concern. The second task is to get a better grip on the
various cognitive and motivational factors that contribute to noncompliance in a given society.
Because complacency appears to underlie some of the most readily amendable forms of
noncompliance, as well as variable, often faltering levels of compliance, I argue that
understanding complacency is a vital part of this second, neglected task of nonideal theory.
Understanding complacency will also inform work on the first task, which requires determining
how best to grapple with our own complacency, and how to work constructively in helping to
navigate the complacency of others.
Matthew Drabeck (4C)
Understanding Opposition to Same-Sex Marriage
The dialogue between supporters and opponents of same-sex marriage has not been productive.
At times it scarcely exists. I think this state of affairs is due in large part to a lack of
understanding of opposition to same-sex marriage. Many supporters of same-sex marriage rely
on a classical liberal understanding of individuals and equal rights, an understanding that does
not capture the underlying concerns of same-sex marriage opponents. I call this understanding
the ‘equality model’ and question the equality model’s assumptions about opposition to same-sex
marriage. Defenders of the equality model take the same-sex marriage debate to be about the
equal rights of individuals or social groups. But what is at the core of the arguments against
same-sex marriage presented by academic philosophers? Is it possible to improve the state of
dialogue between supporters and opponents of same-sex marriage?
I’ll argue that the concerns of those who are opposed to same-sex marriage are
phenomenological concerns framed in terms of how types of relationships are experienced by
people in their daily lives. While objections to same-sex marriage are diverse, one important
common feature is that they involve speculation on how the legalization of same-sex marriage
will open up new relationship options to the general public and how social norms and institutions
will change. I’ll show that these arguments are about how people experience gay people and gay
relationships rather than about equality. My purpose will be to diagnose and understand samesex marriage opposition.
If I can establish that the equality model misses something important about the concerns of
same-sex marriage opponents, we can hopefully have a more constructive debate between
thoughtful, non-bigoted camps. To show this, I’ll present a variety of arguments against samesex marriage. In the case of each argument, I’ll show that the phenomenological concerns are
core features of the argument. I divide the various arguments into two camps: arguments
unsympathetic to gay people and arguments sympathetic to gay people. Arguments
unsympathetic to gay people are those that do not show any special concern for the rights of gay
people or the challenges they face. Arguments sympathetic to gay people do show such concern.
Indeed, many who take the sympathetic approach are gay or lesbian philosophers themselves.
Rick Duchalski (8C)
That’s the Snuff: Dimensions of Moral Horror
Perhaps to the surprise of very few, there is an easy availability of violent and degrading images
or video on the internet. Captured on hidden cameras, cellphone video, cctv, or others, a nonexhaustive list would include decapitations; beheadings; suicides by hanging, electrocution, or
gun; prison rape; military ‘surgical’ strikes; not to mention ‘common’ assaults, execution by
stoning, and many others. In fact, more than just found on the internet, there are sites dedicated
to presenting such things as titillating, if not outright entertaining. And so my initial question is
this: are the entertainment-seeking viewers of these sorts of events doing something wrong,
morally speaking?
This paper works toward a claim about the significance of experiencing a specifically moral kind
of horror in response to images or events that are otherwise understood to be degrading,
repulsive, or terrible. But if the response is supposed to be a distinctly moral kind of shock or
alarm, what exactly are we being horrified by? If we are witnessing the murder of an innocent,
and gratuitously so, what is it about that event that should horrify us?
To get at these questions though, I first examine some more common responses to the problem.
The first involves a fairly straightforward virtue-ethical claim about the deleterious effects on the
character of a person who is seeking (and finding) entertainment in experiences of this sort. A
second response I call the “market-forces” approach, which argues that the consumption of
morally dubious items spurs on future production, and so a market dynamic evolves in which the
entertainment seeker is asserting the value of the product by continuing to be a part of its market
demand.
Finding both of these moves to be only partially satisfactory, I then suggest a third way of
understanding the problem by probing the relationship between the entertainment seeker and the
victim(s) in the image or video. Overcoming the difficulties of being removed from the event by
both space and time, the paper argues that those who fail to be horrified by the horrible—who
seek and see it as entertaining— are failing in an obligation to assert a specific basic value with
respect to the victim they are witnessing.
Rochelle Duford (7D)
Saintly Supererogation and Structural Injustice
In Supererogation David Heyd argues that the ethical theory best suited to accommodate a
concept of supererogation is a liberal contract theory, utilizing Rawls’ A Theory of Justice as a
the exemplar of this model. I argue that Heyd never explicitly argues that an egalitarian theory of
justice, based on a contract model, cannot serve this function. If justice requires an absolutely
equal distribution of benefits and burdens, then Heyd has mischaracterized the concept of the
saint, and her supererogatory acts. I argue that this mischaracterization obscures the fact that
saintly acts are the supererogatory response to structural injustice; if there are no poor, or needy,
there is no need for individuals to take it upon themselves to rectify the effects of this distributive
injustice. This argument shows that the possibilities for saintly actions are nearly proportionate to
structurally created inequality. This is based on the argument that the need for extraordinary
action arises through ‘natural’ bad luck, in the case of heroism, or ‘unnatural’ bad luck, in the
case of saintly action.
After this, I develop brief sketches of a revised category of saintly supererogation, based on an
egalitarian theory of justice. I develop a characterization of the saint for an ideal world, one in
which absolutely equal distributions of benefits and burdens have been achieved. This involves
what kinds of saintly supererogatory acts are still possible, when charity and beneficence are no
longer candidates for this typology. Also, I present two possibilities for understanding saintly
supererogation in non-ideal circumstances. The first is an optimistic presentation of possibility,
characterizing the saint as a social justice worker having the good of all as her end. The second is
a pessimistic presentation of this possibility, taking seriously the possibility that one cannot do
more good than is required by justice, if one cannot achieve justice first.
Nathan Eckstrand (5E)
Toward a Phenomenology of the White Body
In the last couple of years, a renaissance of studies on the role of whiteness has occurred as more
and more academics are beginning to recognize the importance of theorizing what it means to be
white as part of the larger project of undermining the systemic racism plaguing our society. I
argue that an important part of this task is to complement the work of people like Franz Fanon
and Linda Martin Alcoff2 - known for their phenomenologies of race – by conducting a
phenomenology of whiteness. While this process already begun through the work of people like
Sara Ahmed and Peggy McIntosh,3 one area that has yet to receive proper attention is the place
of the white body. The purpose of this paper is to continue the phenomenological study of
whiteness by relocating its focus to the place of the white body.
In the vein of phenomenologists like Heidegger and Fanon, this study will examine the white
body in its average everydayness while taking specific care to understand the structures and
schemas that perpetuate anti-black whiteness. The white body will be examined as a
phenomenon constructed by the motions of whiteness rather than as an object in the world, and
will be looked at through the manifold connections it has to the phenomena of racial embodiment
(as discussed by thinkers like Alcoff, George Yancy, and Judith Butler). Borrowing from Sara
Ahmed’s claim that whiteness is an orientation, I will examine how the white body helps enable
the orientation that whiteness promotes.
I intend to show that the white body functions as an ensurer of continuity by identifying nonwhite bodies as interruptions and thus dangerous. The white body orients itself in the world as a
standard-bearer and as a cataloguer of other bodies, which provides it with the agency needed to
schematize non-white bodies as abnormal. Additionally, I will show that the white body
positions itself as an occupier of the world whereas other bodies are interveners into the world.
White bodies appear at home in the world through a variety of gestures and intimations, which
alternatively conditions the reality of other bodies appearing as visitors at all times. Finally, I
will show how the white body – even when not present – leaves a trace that works to erase the
traces left by other bodies, and that this characteristic helps enable the phenomenon of normative
whiteness.
I am here thinking of Fanon’s Black Skins, White Masks and Alcoff’s “Toward a Phenomenology of Racial
Embodiment”
3
See Ahmed’s “A Phenomenology of Whiteness” and McIntosh’s “White Privilege”
2
Barrett Emerick (4D)
On the Obligation to Forgive
Forgiveness is an important part of everyday moral life; not only does it matter to us whether we
are forgiven when we act wrongly, it also plays a role in determining whether our reparative
obligations are satisfied. Furthermore, whether we are forgiven helps to determine our social
location within a larger moral community. As Kathryn Norlock and Luc Bovens have argued,
when you forgive someone you return them to full moral standing, removing the stigma that once
attached to them as wrongdoer.
Forgiveness is equally important at the social or institutional level. Consider the role that
forgiveness played in the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission, in which victims
of Apartheid were strongly encouraged by Archbishop Desmond Tutu to forgive those who had
wronged them. Tutu argued that the country needed such forgiveness in order to move forward
and achieve reconciliation.
However, many philosophers have argued that forgiveness is always supererogatory, both at the
interpersonal and institutional level. Cheshire Calhoun, for instance, has argued that forgiveness
is a gift that we may choose to give, but is never something that is morally required of us. But, if
forgiveness is supererogatory, if it is always a gift to be voluntarily given, then Tutu’s urging
was unjustified (and seen by some victims of Apartheid to itself be wrong).
In this paper I will argue for a more nuanced view and defend the claim that although
forgiveness is sometimes supererogatory, there are some cases in which forgiveness is
obligatory, in which it would be positively wrong for you to fail to forgive. I will proceed in
three parts. First, I will briefly analyze forgiveness. Then, I will describe a simple case in which
forgiveness is obligatory. Finally, I will conclude by exploring why philosophers have been
inclined to believe that forgiveness is always supererogatory, and work to assuage some of the
concerns that have given rise to that belief.
Ovadia Ezra (3C)
Global Distributive Justice: An Environmental Perspective
The attempts to give a convincing moral justification for applying distributive justice at the
global sphere range from a pure ethical approach which uses humanitarian arguments, to claims
about applying the principles of domestic social justice on the global level, to claims for an
international mutual obligation to assure basic human rights to every individual on earth, to
claims about moral universalism, and even to arguments based on institutional cosmopolitanism.
In this paper I want to briefly present the more familiar approaches to global distributive justice,
and then suggest a new one which connects global distributive justice with the pressing current
environmental need to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.
After presenting Singer's well known argument for imposing a moral duty to support poor
countries based on humanitarian consideration, I will briefly discuss arguments employing
principles and considerations of retributive justice to establish this duty, and finally discuss
arguments applying principles of global distributive justice, in order to impose a moral duty on
the rich countries to help poor countries.
Many of the arguments that wish to establish the obligation to help poor countries based on
principles of global distributive justice, challenge the exclusive rights of countries to benefit
from the resources which are found within their territories, and demand that at least part of the
benefits from these resources should be distributed globally. Some of these arguments make an
analogy between domestic distributive justice to the global sphere, and maintain that just as we
reject the arbitrariness of the current distribution of wealth within states, we oppose the
arbitrariness of the distribution of resources, that affect wealth in the global sphere (such as oil,
for example). These arguments call for at least a minimal global share of benefits and burdens,
considering many of them to be owned by all people on earth. Rich countries (as well as many
libertarian theorists) have difficulties accepting or even to understanding this type of argument.
In the proposed paper I want to suggest an environmental argument which aids in the
understanding of the idea of a global share of burdens and benefits which comes from natural
resources. A similar argument was raised in the past, together with the demand for the restraint
of deforestation in Brazil, for example, even though the rain forests are natural resources located
in its territory. The argument I suggest regards the atmosphere as well as greenhouse gas
emissions as common, and hence, its distribution should be grounded on considerations of global
justice. If rich countries think that they are sovereign to do whatever they like with natural
resources which are within their territories, then poor countries should have the right to do the
same with greenhouse gas emissions to the atmosphere above their territories, and consequently
make an uninhibited and unrestrained use of these resources. Rich countries who reject this idea
have to accept the idea that they should share part of their wealth with poor countries, from
which they ask for restrained development.
William Falcetano (10C)
Habermas on the Post Secular Society
Max Weber long ago propounded the link between rationalization and disenchantment, i.e.,
between the growing influence of science and the wide-spread implementation of rational
efficiencies on the one hand, and the declining credibility and prestige of religion, mythology,
and magical thinking on the other. This has been called the secularization thesis: modernization
(in the form of social and intellectual rationalization) leads to secularization. Yet this link seems
to have been broken by the recent world-wide resurgence of religious militancy. Jürgen
Habermas, arguably the greatest German social theorist after Weber himself, and one of the most
prominent philosophers in the world today, has issued a series of calls for a “post-secular
society”. He contends that the recent resurgence of religion has shown that the so-called
“secularization thesis” propounded by Weber, and at the core of the Enlightenment project, is no
longer valid and should be repudiated. In his quest to promote a multi-cultural society Habermas
summons us to abandon the secular agenda of the Enlightenment and to welcome adherents of
religion to participate in public discourse on topics of mutual social and political concern without
invidious considerations. What does Habermas’s abandonment of this core objective of the
Enlightenment say about contemporary philosophy, and does it represent the optimal response
philosophy can muster to the apparent failure of the secularization thesis? I contend that
Habermas – along with much of the intellectual establishment – had been caught off guard by the
rise of religion since the 1970s, and that his response to it has been flat-footed, ham-handed, and
hobbled by excessive political correctness: flat-footed because it has been slow and disoriented;
ham-handed because he still relies on an obsolete model of structural sociology which originated
with Talcott Parsons in the 1950s; and hobbled because it bends over backward to avoid the
impression of criticizing religious minorities without ever seriously confronting the dangers of
religious militancy.
At the core of the problem is Habermas’s understanding, or
misunderstanding, of secularization itself, which he views on the model of communism as the
eradication of religious belief from society. But according to the sociologist Steve Bruce this is a
misconception of what secularization actually is: secularization is not about the triumph of
atheism but is a measure of the declining influence of religion on society (especially politics), not
the disappearance of religious beliefs as such. Habermas’s failure to confront and account for
one of the most pressing dangers facing the world today points to a larger failure of education in
general and of philosophy in particular to stem the tide of religious militancy.
John Fantuzzo (8E)
Awe in the Cave: Social Deviance and Wordsworth’s Vision of Urban Sublimity
Social deviants are often perceived as indicators of social division. In his influential study
Outsiders: Studies in the Sociology of Deviance (1966) Howard S. Becker argues that the
individuals responsible for creating social rules are also responsible for this negative perception;
in other words, Becker argues that rule makers create rule breakers, and thus the perception of
social division. In this essay, I provide an account of how Wordsworth reimagines the social
deviant beyond rule makers. Much more than an effect of the rule maker’s decree, I argue that
Wordsworth envisions the social deviant to be a harbinger of urban sublimity. Focusing on the
figure of the beggar in “The Old Cumberland Beggar” and The Prelude, I show that the beggar
precipitates Wordsworth’s vision of urban sublimity in two respects: first, by guiding the poet, as
a child, towards a reception of natural sublimity; and second, by enabling the poet to locate
sublimity amidst an immense but undifferentiated urban crowd. I conclude by considering the
message at work in Wordsworth’s vision of urban sublimity, which portrays the social deviant,
and the social order at large, without the moral and political divisions constituting the rule
maker’s domain.
Rebecca Farinas (2E)
Radicalizing the Commonplace through Film: Pierre Bourdieu's Praxiology in Defiance of
Elite Culture
Pierre Bourdieu’s critique of modern/contemporary popular culture exerts lasting influence on
the philosophy of art. However, his analysis of the importance of an artist’s detached viewpoint
in difference to a popular common place of everyday interests can be read paradoxically to his
distrust of “disinterestedness,” which is for Kant a fundamental criterion for autonomous
creativity. Bourdieu sees the free exchange of artists as the singularly effective tool for
overthrowing dominating norms of social capital in relation to cultural production, yet to protect
this exchange artists most often separate themselves from mainstream practices. Yet, for
Bourdieu, the very advent of social change is in innovation within embodied experience, and by
emphasizing this concept of habitus, he clears the way for individual agency as improvisational
within practice amidst dominate societal structures. This seemingly paradoxical disjuncture is
controversially debated by Bourdieu’s strongest interlocutors, such as Fowler, Shusterman and
LaMonte, who find that Bourdieu did not think of everyday experience as a stage for meaningful
art, being that the common place of society is not radical enough to facilitate habitual resistance
of authoritative fields of play. But, by revisiting Bourdieu’s theories of the practice of agency,
keeping in mind the advent of contemporary trends of the critique of institutionalization, I have
found that Bourdieu indeed voices an urgency to artistic vision and production, within the
phenomenon of common place culture. This perspective is made clear in his writings on
middlebrow art and in interviews with artists. I suggest that several contemporary works of art,
that are made for mass audiences, such as the episodic television programs ”The Decalogue” and
“The Wire,” as well as the relational art video work of Philippe Parreno, add a particularly
focused hermeneutic presentation of Bourdieu’s ideals in regard to the effectiveness of common
place art. While I agree that there continues to be forms of symbolic violence, by the privileged
beneficiaries of culture and that this affects a dispossession of artistic skills and motivation in the
common place, yet it is through the connectedness of Bourdieu’s notions of praxiology that
popular art gains ground toward redeeming an indebtedness to everyday experience from an
increasingly challenging, authoritative and elitist landscape.
Jeremy Fischer (2D)
Race and Pride
Many discussions of group pride conflate several questions that are worth distinguishing. In this
paper, I discuss what is usually referred to as “racial pride” and distinguish between the
following questions: (1) whether racial pride accurately represents the object of pride as worthy
of pride, (2) whether racial pride is virtuous or vicious, and (3) whether racial pride is rational. I
draw on a general account of pride that I have elsewhere defended in order to sketch the
considerations that are relevant to answering these questions, in particular questions (1) and (2). I
also distinguish between two types of racial pride that correspond to the emotion of pride and the
character trait of pride. Although most of the philosophical literature devoted to racial pride
concerns the emotion of pride, I suggest that possession of the virtuous trait of pride in the face
of racialized oppression is also worthy of philosophical attention.
To address the first of the three questions outlined above, I consider a widely read essay that is
critical of the supposed value of racial pride, in which Randall Kennedy argues as follows: “I
eschew racial pride because of my conception of what should properly be the object of pride for
an individual: something that he or she has accomplished. I can feel pride in a good deed I have
done or a good effort I have made. I cannot feel pride in some state of affairs that is independent
of my contribution to it... I did not achieve my racial designation.”1 Kennedy’s argument
concerns the emotion of pride (in particular, the first of the three questions that I identified
above) and relies on the claim that racial pride takes as its intentional object one’s racial
designation.
In this paper, I motivate and critically evaluate both Kennedy’s claim that the object of racial
pride is one’s racial designation and that racial pride misrepresents it object as an
accomplishment. In so doing, I note that an important critical response to Kennedy’s article
misidentifies these two central claims. Yalonda Howze and David Weberman take as the critical
target of their paper that Kennedy “treats pride in others as irrational on the grounds that it is a
kind of category mistake.”2 They proceed to offer forceful arguments for the conclusion that
pride taken in fellow members of one’s racial group may be rational. However, Kennedy does
not discuss the matter of rationality, nor does he consider pride taken in others; rather his
concern with the representational accuracy of pride taken in one’s racial designation. Howze and
Weberman conflate the first question that I identified above with the third question and, in so
doing, fruitfully raise additional issues that require philosophical attention. After showing this, I
briefly evaluate Howze and Weberman’s account of the rationality of the emotions and find it
wanting.
Norman Fischer (2E)
How Philosophical Reconstruction of Historical Novels of Civil Liberties Illuminates Civic
Virtue and Republican Democracy in Divided Societies
I will argue for the importance of aesthetic and literary understanding of such civil virtues as
commitment to free speech and due process, particularly when those virtues must function
within societies divided by class and religion. Georg Lukács’ account of the historical novel in
the anti fascist period of the thirties gives us a basis for understanding the aesthetic and literary
interpretation of the civic virtue of commitment civil liberties.
This is a contemporary issue. The propaganda used in the so called”war on terror” since 9/11,
against due process and free speech, sheds new light on the theme of civil liberties in Lukács’
study of the historical novel, and the writers that he concentrated on: Walter Scott, Lion
Feuchtwanger and Heinrich Mann.
Historical civil liberties novels illuminate in different ways the difficulties of commitment to free
speech and due process in societies divided by class and religious strife. In each case the novel’s
civil libertarian hero is seen to move from private virtue to civic virtue, at the same time
struggling to follow his civic virtue in troubling times dominated by class and religious divisions.
The concept of civic virtue is closely tied to the philosophy of classical republicanism, both in its
democratic and aristocratic form, and some have argued that it cannot be achieved in divided
societies. But each of the heroes of these novels function in class divided and religiously divided
secretes, and yet achieve the civic virtue of commitment civil liberties. Lukács’general method
holds within it the possibility of uniting both civic virtue and understanding of divided societies,
because his Hegelianism emphasized civic virtue, and his Marxism emphasized class division.
Lukács’ own favorite novel of the anti fascist period in which he was writing was Heinrich
Mann’s Young Henry on Navarre /King Henry of France. As the King of France who
proclaimed the greatest degree of religious liberty and free speech of his time, with the Edict of
Nantes. Henry’s civic virtue developed out of a twenty five year struggle to bridge the gap
between Wealth and poverty, protestantism and Catholicism. Henry of France is a real figure of
the late sixteenth century, but Scott’s Henry Morton in The Tale of Old Mortality. A novel that
Lukács did not analyze fictionally seems to represent both the real John Locke and the real
William of Orange, as they use their republican civic virtue and commitment to civil liberties to
bring civil liberates to Britain during the Glorious revolution. Finally, Feuchtwanger’s trilogy,
also not analyzed by Lukács presents Benjamin Franklin and Beaumarchais in Proud Destiny,
Goya in This is the Hour, and Rousseau in “tis Folly to be Wise:” The Death and Transfiguration
of Jean Jacques Rousseau as republican democratic heroes turning their private emotions toward
civic virtue and civil liberties, as they strive to transcend class division in late eighteenth century
France, Spain and America.
Karin Fry (10C)
The Democratic Dilemma of Religion and Politics
Some of the most contentious political debates within the United States concern the conflict
between Christian Conservatives and secular atheists. Throughout my study of popular pundit
literature, what became increasingly clear is that the most adamant proponents of these issues
from the Conservative Christian Right and secular Left fail to have a clear idea of the content of
their opponents’ claims. Failing to address their opponents’ stated positions, pundits produced
endless rancorous political debates that proceeded down a false path. Some notable figures in the
Christian Right movement like Jerry Falwell, Pat Robertson, Sean Hannity and Mike Huckabee,
and many others have accused the secularists on the Left of being amoral relativists. New
atheists such as Sam Harris and Christopher Hitchens, as well as secular humanist groups and
some academics and journalists, accuse the Religious Right of being theocrats who want to
abolish church/state lines based on an irrational belief in religion. This discussion occurs
throughout the best-selling political literature of recent years, despite the fact that the most
popular voices on the Right and Left on these issues are not arguing for moral relativism or
theocracy. The fact that the discussion lacks accuracy is a serious hindrance to democracy.
This paper begins to sort out the difference between some of the common arguments used by
pundits, as opposed to the stereotypes produced by their opponents, in order to begin to identify
actual common conceptual differences and similarities between these groups. Moreover, I
challenge the idea that there are only “two” sides to this issue and reject the media driven binary
opposition between Conservative Christians and secular, atheist Liberals. By challenging the
simplicity of the discussion and seeking more accuracy concerning the issues, I seek to point the
way toward a more fruitful political policy debate.
David Garren (7E)
Truth: A Civic Virtue
The liberal democratic state exists in order to protect the lives and liberties of its citizens, not to
perfect them. Yet in order to protect those lives and liberties, the liberal democratic state must
call upon its citizens to fulfill a number of civic obligations--to vote, to serve on juries, to serve
in the military, perhaps even to hold public office--which means that it cannot be indifferent to
the moral and intellectual development of its citizens, nor neutral with respect to competing
conceptions of the good. Rather, it must cultivate in its citizens certain virtues which will enable
them if not to perfect themselves than at least to fulfill their civic obligations. In this paper I will
explore just what those virtues are and how they are to be cultivated consistent with liberal
democratic commitments, with special attention paid to the virtue of truth, the virtue most
essential to the long-term survival of the liberal democratic state and thus the lives and liberties
of its citizens.
Shelby Giaccarini (and Matthew Silliman) (3E)
Nature’s Voice: Environmental Literature as Applied Ethics
Investigation of civic virtues can sometimes afford to proceed at a deliberate pace. For example,
a discussion about ethical principles in the legal profession might properly unfold without a great
sense of urgency, since the threat of deferred justice is partially offset by the substantial risk of
hasty change and unintended consequences. The current state of our environmental crisis,
however, affords us no such temporal luxury; our species and its planet are almost certainly on
the cusp of a self-made apocalypse, and a failure to act effectively and with alacrity on the best
understanding that science and applied ethics can give us will be as culpable as genocide.
But how to effect the necessary change? In particular, how can we hope to break the logjam of
entrenched interests and attitudes, and the sheer unimaginability of the scale on which we are
bringing about climatic change? Arguably language, and its apotheosis literary imagination, is
the human technological development most instrumental in bringing us to this crisis. Without the
power of the written word to solidify organizational structures and coordinate activity, and more
importantly to imagine counterfactual possibilities and inspire them into realization, humanity
would probably never have managed to bring the Holocene to a screeching halt. It is therefore at
least poetically just that we call upon the power of writing to give nature a voice. Moreover,
literary inspiration is likely to produce a more democratic and humane process of political,
behavioral, and technological adaptation than are autocratic or technocratic alternatives.
We argue, therefore, that literary creativity is an indispensable component to addressing our
environmental crisis. Since nature largely lacks a voice with which to advocate for itself, we
must craft new and more effective narratives on its behalf if we are to foster healthier
relationships with it. Speaking through us by the powerful means of literature and other art
forms, the natural world of which we are a part could help break through fixed habits of thought
and behavior in ways that economic and technological responses have not done. Using a literary
medium, ethicists, scientists, and others with relevant understanding must go beyond theory to
apply and disseminate their ideas to the world, and they need to do this with a timeliness and
persuasive power commensurate with the urgency of the threat. Moreover, their modes of
expression and narrative images must speak most compellingly, if not to everyone, then at least
to very many of those not already convinced of the need for change.
Notwithstanding the difficulties of prescribing artistic criteria, and the pitfalls of any moralizing
literary endeavor, the authors explore in this dialogue the parameters and challenges of a new
environmental literature designed to slow the rising tide of global catastrophe.
Abigail Gosselin (2B)
Gender Justice and Globalization of Mental Disorders
The globalization of western medical and psychological understandings of mental disorder has
had profound effects on nonwestern women. While western scientific approaches to diagnosing
and treating disorder have done much good for women across the world by reducing suffering
and saving lives, these approaches nevertheless have a strong potential to perpetuate gender
injustices through hegemonic institutional practices. In this essay I will examine case studies of
two mental disorders, anorexia and postpartum depression, in a global context to show that the
medical framework for understanding and treating mental disorders causes at least two types of
harm to nonwestern women who have experiences identified as mental disorder. These harms
constitute gender injustices.
One harm occurs when western medical approaches replace local cultural beliefs and practices
that are supportive of women, so that women lose the support and protection that these local
approaches provided. As a transcultural comparison of postpartum depression shows, the western
medical approach reframes experience as a pathology of the individual as opposed to a problem
of the community. This justifies replacing the family and social support that are part of some
communities’ traditions with individualistic medical treatment. While medical treatment can be
effective, it can also be harmful to women when they benefit from the social support systems that
are part of some cultural and religious traditions.
Another harm occurs when the medical framework smuggles into its understanding of a disorder
westernized gender norms and norms which enable success in the global political economy, and
then unfairly pathologizes behavior and experiences that fail to meet these norms—even when
this failure is due at least partly to how women are situated politically and economically. The
increased prevalence of anorexia nervosa in parts of the world becoming more globalized
illustrates the connection between globalization—with its politico-economic norms about control
and autonomy and its gender norms about being good caretakers, docile, and attractive (as
essentially for others)—and increased pathology in women. While the tension between politicoeconomic and gender norms resulting from globalization is unfair to all women who are subject
to these norms, it is especially unfair to nonwestern, who on one hand try to adopt the
westernized norms they are exposed to and on the other hand seem to be punished for doing so.
These harms constitute institutional injustices because they result from unjust institutions which
distribute epistemic authority unfairly. Just distribution of epistemic authority requires
transparency about values embedded in diagnostic criteria and treatment practices so that such
values can be examined, assessed, and changed; and inclusion of marginalized voices in the
global institutional (medical, therapeutic, and corporate) practices that sustain scientific
approaches to disorder. Because women across the world have less political voice than men
similarly situated, and because they are more vulnerable to violence, exploitation, and abuse,
nonwestern women in particular must have the capability to define their experiences and to
propose the best responses to those experiences, whether that be medical treatment, counseling,
social and family support, celebration, spiritual seeking, or other.
Kevin Graham (3D)
Questioning Ethnicity
Since 1990, philosophical interest in the concepts of race and racial identity has stepped out of
the margins and into a more central space in the field of social philosophy. Social philosophers
have begun to devote a good deal of attention to the questions of what race and racial identity
are, if they are anything at all, and how, if at all, we ought to use these concepts in order to
counter racism and racial oppression. More recently, since about 2000, social philosophers have
begun to devote similar attention to the concepts of ethnicity and ethnic identity. The
philosophical literature about ethnicity is not nearly so diverse or well-developed as the literature
about race and racial identity. Nonetheless, it is possible to identify competing positions about
the nature of ethnicity that one could broadly characterize as anti-realist (in the work of J. L. A.
Garcia and Anthony Appiah), realist (in the work of Susana Nuccetelli), and family theory (in
the work of Jorge J. E. Gracia).
While each of these approaches to the philosophical study of ethnicity and ethnic identity has its
appeal, each of them also has serious shortcomings. In this essay, I will argue that any adequate
conception of ethnicity or ethnic identity needs to meet several criteria, including the following.
First, it needs to distinguish clearly between ethnicity and race. Second, it needs to be sensitive
to the complex history of racial formation in the US and elsewhere, a history in which the
concept of ethnicity has played a crucial role in enabling some groups to assimilate into the white
race and preventing others from doing the same. Third, it needs to represent adequately the
experience and social situation of the groups to which it is intended to apply, whatever those
groups may be.
In the closing section of the essay, I will apply these three criteria to anti-realist, realist, and
family theory approaches to the concepts of ethnicity and ethnic identity in order to illustrate the
shortcomings of each approach. I will illustrate the shortcomings of each approach by applying it
to the social group whose identity has sparked much of the recent philosophical interest in
ethnicity and ethnic identity, namely, Latinos.
Martin Gunderson (6C)
Human Rights and the Virtue of Political Civility
Political civility, as distinguished from mere politeness, is a core civic virtue of citizens in
pluralistic democracies. It is a character trait that includes tolerance of diverse political views,
openness to reasons offered by others at least in civic matters, willingness to seek compromise in
an effort to find workable political solutions, and a readiness to limit one’s individual interests
for the public good when there are adequate reasons for doing so.
Various writers have noted a tension between rights and civility. Insofar as rights trump general
considerations of community welfare and entail claims that can be demanded, an emphasis on
individual rights and standing on one’s rights arguably undermines the sort of civility that is
required for political compromise. Similarly it is arguable that an emphasis on civility might
require refraining from standing on rights when doing so is at the expense of the good of the
community. Notwithstanding this tension, I argue that human rights and civility have a
symbiotic relationship. In this respect I defend a version of the republican liberalism advocated
by Richard Dagger in Civic Virtues: Rights, Citizenship, and Republic Liberalism, though I
extend his argument. In particular I argue that civility is important for determining the scope of
human rights as they are implemented in the legal systems of various states. In addition, I argue
that human rights have an important role to play in shaping the virtue civility.
Human rights are highly abstract, as they must be in order to apply cross culturally. In
international law they are given specificity through being interpreted by individual sates in the
creation of specific entitlements that can be legally enforced. Translating abstract human rights
into particular entitlements in various states requires political compromise and negotiation. This
is most obvious regarding socioeconomic rights such as the right to an adequate standard of
living, but it is also true of civil and political rights such as the determination of just what
procedures will constitute due process. This process is facilitated by the virtue of civility.
Hence, the virtue of civility has a crucial role to play in enabling the political processes that are
necessary for translating human rights into concrete entitlements in particular legal systems and
thereby determining the scope of human rights within particular legal systems.
Human rights also shape the scope of civility in important ways. When human rights are clearly
being violated, seeking compromise and acting civilly may be inappropriate. If Aristotle is right
that virtue is a mean between extremes that are vices, then acting “civilly” in the face of rights
violations is not an expression of the virtue of civility, but the vice of its excess. Hence, human
rights help to determine the mean where the virtue of civility resides.
Gina Helfrich (4B)
Navigating Ambivalence: Gender-Inclusivity and the Contemporary Feminist Movement
With the recent political battles over abortion, contraception, and women’s healthcare taking
place in a Congress that is 83% male, feminists have renewed the call for women to unite with
one another against these attacks on their civil rights. If women had better representation in
Congress, they argue, we would not face such blatant attacks on women’s rights and
reproductive freedoms. Consider, however, staunchly anti-feminist women in politics like
Phyllis Schlafly, Ann Coulter, or Sarah Palin. Not just in politics, but also in business, women
cannot be relied upon to support one another on the basis of “sisterhood.” Studies show that
women often judge other women more harshly and against a higher standard than their male
counterparts (Correll, Benard, and Paik, American Journal of Sociology, 2007). Clearly, the
identity politics calculus that “more women = more equality” is flawed.
This presentation seeks to sketch the ambivalence and complexity of gender-inclusivity in the
contemporary feminist movement. On the one hand, it seems absolutely crucial that people of all
genders embrace feminist values and perspectives in order to advance the cause of full gender
equality. On the other hand, focusing energies and attention on consciousness-raising with men
seems to dilute the power of the movement and reenact the cooptation of women’s energies in
the service of men. Symbolically, too, as higher education institutions, centers, and departments
change their names from “Women’s Studies” or “Women’s Centers” to “Women’s and Gender
Studies” or “Gender Centers,” the potential consequences of losing focus on women generates a
certain amount of anxiety amongst feminist scholars and activists.
I argue that despite the valid concerns that prompt this anxiety, the continued transformation of
society towards gender equality depends crucially (though not solely) on men. The idea that
feminism is for everybody, for people of all genders, is by no means a new idea. Over a decade
ago now, bell hooks made this argument compellingly and concisely in Feminism is for
Everybody (South End Press, 2000). If the ultimate goal of feminism is the fundamental
transformation of society, then men’s lives as well as women’s will be changed. Unless men
have a role in shaping that transformation, we can reasonably expect misunderstanding,
resentment, and backlash. Therefore, for pragmatic as well as principled reasons, I argue that we
must welcome men into feminist community. We should not merely tolerate feminist men as
silent supporters, or accept them at the margins, or support them in forming their own profeminist communities, but we ought to integrate men into feminist community and encourage
them to fully take up the work of transforming society in partnership with feminist women.
I conclude by arguing that the inclusion of men in the feminist movement is advantageous also
through its benefit to the LGBTQ community, creating a more welcoming environment for trans
people and gender non-conformists. By making feminist spaces safe for masculinity, we make
the community safe for all kinds of expressions of masculinity (that of cisgendered men, butch
lesbians, transmen, gender-queers, etc.).
Matthew Hewes (and Patricia Illingworth) (8C)
The Ethics of iDemand: A Call for Due Diligence
Apple, Inc. is currently one of the most successful businesses in American history. Their stock
price is reaching new heights almost daily, and they are one of only six companies to surpass
$500 billion in market capitalization. Their success, however, has not been without human cost:
employees throughout Apple’s supply chain are routinely subjected to unfair labor practices, and
poor and unsanitary living conditions.
The failure to prepare for increased demand has been identified by Apple as one cause of the
human rights violations suffered by a majority of employees in factories assembling their
products. It is our position that if marketers are responsible, even if not exclusively, for creating
demand, then they are morally culpable for any harms resulting from that demand. In this case,
the harms consist in the violation of rights as spelled out in the Universal Declaration of Human
Rights, including: involuntary labor, underage labor, and unfair compensation for labor.
Though a strict correlation between a particular advertising campaign and its effect on sales is
difficult to prove, we believe there is enough evidence to establish, at least partial, responsibility
for the creation of demand. Interestingly, an ability to do this is one of a marketer’s own selling
points. Because they are, at the very least, complicit in, creating the demand which demands
unsustainable supply, marketers should be morally required to exercise due diligence while
practicing their trade. This is because the marketers’ actions are a violation of the strict negative
duty to cause no harm. Marketers are engaged in, and profiting from, a system which currently
thrives on abuse. For this reason alone, their behavior should change.
In the spirit of John Ruggie’s Guidelines for Business and Human Rights, we establish a
framework which a marketing firm can adopt. Our thesis is that a “reasonable and prudent”
marketing firm should, on the consideration of Ruggie’s Guidelines, and due diligence, never be
engaged in the advertising of products for which demand cannot humanely be met. Because
marketers are in violation of the negative duty to cause no harm, it is up to the marketing firm to
determine which products can, and cannot, be produced should a dramatic increase in supply
occur as a result of a given campaign.
Attempts to blame other parties are, in our opinion, vastly inadequate. For one, the consumer
does not have the resources of a marketing firm, nor the ability to pass along costs. Additionally,
a producer, such as Apple, cannot always be trusted to provide adequate transparency regarding
supplier relations. Because the marketer is an independent agent, sometimes representing
competing firms, they are in a unique position to act as a liaison between the demand and supply
actors in economics.
Ultimately, it is the abuses which have occurred, and the unique public relations position of the
marketer that force this moral obligation on them. Though we believe that no actor is free of
guilt, we feel that the marketer is in a good position to take the figurative first step.
Dan Hicks (1C)
Rawls’ Rationalist Conception of Justice
In dealing with a serious objection to the account of justice as fairness that he presented in A
Theory of Justice, John Rawls developed what he called a political conception of personhood. In
this paper, I argue that Rawls’ conception of person- hood is rationalist, that is, that it includes
only what I call rational capabilities and does not include other, non-rational capabilities that
should be included. My discussion focuses on two non-rational capabilities, which I call
affective and pragmatic capabilities — capabilities to form and maintain families and networks
of friends and capabilities to manipulate and create material objects in purposive ways. I argue
that these capabilities should be included by considering the basic structure of a well-ordered
society. For each of the rational, affective, and pragmatic capabilities, I show that they are
“connected,” in a relevant sense, to a social institution of the basic structure. Roughly, these
social institutions are required for the functioning of the well-ordered society, and individuals
with these capabilities are required for the functioning of these institutions; hence these
capabilities are required for a well- ordered society. Therefore they should be included in the
conception of persons who live inhabit this society.
I then consider some implications for the original position when these non- rational capabilities
are included. I give some reasons to believe that their inclusion seriously disrupts the argument
from the original position; however, these reasons are not conclusive, so overall I am suggesting
a puzzle or problem rather than giving decisive objections. Both objections turn on the possible
ways in which the parties in the original position represent citizens’ capabilities. This
representation can be either direct or indirect. For example, the parties directly represent citizens’
powers of theoretical reason by using this power themselves; in particular, they reason causally
about the likely consequences of various proposed principles of justice. On the other hand, they
only indirectly represent citizens’ capabilities to have an effective conception of justice. The
parties themselves are self-interested, and do not have an effective conception of justice. But
features of the original position — especially the veil of ignorance — require them to reason in a
way that respects the interests of others.
For both affective and pragmatic capabilities, the parties cannot represent them directly: as selfinterested they do not care (in any sense) for others, and as pure deliberative agents they do not
make or do anything in a material sense. Thus, if the parties can represent these kinds of
capabilities, it is only indirectly. But, Rawls thinks, indirectly represented capabilities have
priority over directly represented capabilities. This is the sense in which justice is prior to the
good: indirectly represented justice serves as a constraint on directly represented self-interest.
This would imply that caring for friends and family and working with material objects are prior
to an individual’s self-interest. But, it seems to me, this is absurd: they are part of, not prior to,
one’s self-interest. Hence the parties in the original position cannot indirectly represent these
capabilities either.
Zachary Hoskins (9D)
Hard Times after Hard Time: A Critique of Restrictive Policies Targeting Ex-offenders
Roughly 700,000 people are released each year from state and federal prisons in the United
States.4 Upon release, they face the daunting task of reentering their communities after years,
sometimes decades, behind bars. Finding a place to live and a job, rebuilding networks of family
and friends, and in general learning to cope on the outside — all can be significant challenges for
former prisoners. And all of these challenges are exacerbated by a number of federal and state
policies that restrict ex-offenders’ access to employment, housing, public assistance, the vote,
and other goods. Although some restrictions apply only to ex-offenders still on parole, many
policies impose longer-lasting restrictions, often lifetime bans.
Are restrictive policies on ex-offenders morally justified? The question has received little
attention from philosophers. This is surprising, given how much philosophical consideration has
been devoted to questions of whether criminal punishment itself is justified. If punishment itself
needs justification, then presumably so do the various burdens that, in current practice, continue
to be imposed on individuals even after their formal punishments have ended.
We often describe offenders who complete their punishments as having “paid their debt to
society.” If we mean what we say, if punishment represents payment of the debts that offenders
incur through their criminal acts, then there is a presumptive case for treating those who have
paid their debts as restored to full standing in the communities they rejoin — and thus as entitled
to the same opportunities as everyone else. So what, then, might justify the sorts of restrictions
we currently impose on ex-offenders?
Once we scrutinize the case for various sorts of ex-offender restrictions, most turn out either to
be unjustified or to be justified in a much narrower range of cases than we find in current
practice. I first discuss some of the most prominent restrictions faced by ex-offenders, such as on
employment, housing, public assistance, and the vote. Next I lay out a presumptive case for
regarding ex-offenders as entitled to the same opportunities as other community members to
secure employment, housing, and other goods — thus, a presumptive case against ex-offender
restrictions in general. I then consider a number of defenses that have been offered of the various
ex-offender restrictions. Of these, only considerations of risk prevention are persuasive. In a
limited range of cases, much more limited than we see in current practice, these considerations
will be sufficient to override the presumptive case in support of equal opportunities for exoffenders. But even in such cases, ex-offenders’ entitlement to equal opportunities is only
overridden, not canceled entirely. This has important implications regarding the community’s
obligations to ex-offenders: namely, the community may be obliged to compensate ex-offenders
in various ways for restricting, in the interests of risk prevention, their access to the opportunities
that other community members enjoy.
Paul Guerino, Paige M. Harrison, and William J. Sabol, “Prisoners in 2010,” Bureau of Justice Statistics report,
December 2011, p. 5. Available online at http://bjs.ojp.usdoj.gov/index.cfm?ty=pbdetail&iid=2230 (accessed Feb.
14, 2012).
4
Patricia Illingworth (and Matthew Hewes) (8C)
The Ethics of iDemand: A Call for Due Diligence
Apple, Inc. is currently one of the most successful businesses in American history. Their stock
price is reaching new heights almost daily, and they are one of only six companies to surpass
$500 billion in market capitalization. Their success, however, has not been without human cost:
employees throughout Apple’s supply chain are routinely subjected to unfair labor practices, and
poor and unsanitary living conditions.
The failure to prepare for increased demand has been identified by Apple as one cause of the
human rights violations suffered by a majority of employees in factories assembling their
products. It is our position that if marketers are responsible, even if not exclusively, for creating
demand, then they are morally culpable for any harms resulting from that demand. In this case,
the harms consist in the violation of rights as spelled out in the Universal Declaration of Human
Rights, including: involuntary labor, underage labor, and unfair compensation for labor.
Though a strict correlation between a particular advertising campaign and its effect on sales is
difficult to prove, we believe there is enough evidence to establish, at least partial, responsibility
for the creation of demand. Interestingly, an ability to do this is one of a marketer’s own selling
points. Because they are, at the very least, complicit in, creating the demand which demands
unsustainable supply, marketers should be morally required to exercise due diligence while
practicing their trade. This is because the marketers’ actions are a violation of the strict negative
duty to cause no harm. Marketers are engaged in, and profiting from, a system which currently
thrives on abuse. For this reason alone, their behavior should change.
In the spirit of John Ruggie’s Guidelines for Business and Human Rights, we establish a
framework which a marketing firm can adopt. Our thesis is that a “reasonable and prudent”
marketing firm should, on the consideration of Ruggie’s Guidelines, and due diligence, never be
engaged in the advertising of products for which demand cannot humanely be met. Because
marketers are in violation of the negative duty to cause no harm, it is up to the marketing firm to
determine which products can, and cannot, be produced should a dramatic increase in supply
occur as a result of a given campaign.
Attempts to blame other parties are, in our opinion, vastly inadequate. For one, the consumer
does not have the resources of a marketing firm, nor the ability to pass along costs. Additionally,
a producer, such as Apple, cannot always be trusted to provide adequate transparency regarding
supplier relations. Because the marketer is an independent agent, sometimes representing
competing firms, they are in a unique position to act as a liaison between the demand and supply
actors in economics.
Ultimately, it is the abuses which have occurred, and the unique public relations position of the
marketer that force this moral obligation on them. Though we believe that no actor is free of
guilt, we feel that the marketer is in a good position to take the figurative first step.
Kyle Johannsen (1C)
Cohen on Rawls: Personal Choice and the Ideal of Justice
With the exception of his work on luck egalitarianism, G.A. Cohen is perhaps best known within
contemporary political philosophy for claiming that distributive justice extends to personal
choice, i.e., that a just society requires an ethos which motivates citizens’ behaviour throughout
their daily lives.5 This claim originally emerged within a critique of Rawls’s allowance for
economic incentives, as citizens’ acceptance of incentive payments is in tension with their being
committed to the elimination of unnecessary inequalities.6 What’s more, it also challenges the
basic structure restriction, as it entails that principles of justice apply not only to the design of a
society’s institutional structure, but to the choices made within it as well. 7
In his more recent work, Cohen has also claimed that justice is an ideal and that Rawls’s
conception confuses it with regulatory rules.8 Regulatory rules, Cohen claims, are adopted for
the purpose of shaping social reality, and do so by prescribing certain forms of behaviour and
institutional design. As a result, they must be sensitive to various practical considerations, e.g.,
those pertaining to the feasibility of implementation. What’s more, regulatory rules must also
take into account the sometimes competing concerns of different values. Ultimate normative
principles, in contrast, don’t prescribe specific acts or policies, nor are they the kind of thing we
adopt or choose in the way we adopt or choose a rule. Ultimate norms represent the values
whose demands must be balanced, and thus apply to behaviour and institutions indirectly by
supplying rules of regulations with their normative basis.9
The purpose of this paper is to explore the relationship between these claims. It argues that the
first claim, depending on how it’s interpreted, is either vindicated or undermined by the latter.
More specifically: if one takes the claim that justice extends to personal choice to mean that it
would do so if conceived of as an ideal, then Cohen is on firm ground. This is so because, ideals,
unlike regulatory rules, can be expected to apply across contexts. If, however, it’s also taken to
mean that Rawls’s difference principle should be extended to personal choice even when
conceived of as a regulatory rule (which is in fact what Cohen has in mind),10 then Cohen’s
characterization of said rules effectively blocks it. As I’ll argue near the end, the personal
prerogative constraint Cohen invokes to blunt the demands of his extension only works if one
conceives of the difference principle as an ideal.
In Rescuing Justice and Equality, Cohen brings together various lines of criticism he’s developed over the years. I
refer to it for the most part over the course of this abstract, as his treatment of arguments he’s already published on
closely reflects the original texts. For a description of Cohen’s ethos of justice, see G.A. Cohen. 2008. Rescuing
Justice and Equality. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Page 15.
6
Cohen. Rescuing Justice and Equality. Pages 121-122.
7
Cohen. Rescuing Justice and Equality. Pages 133-137.
8
Cohen. Rescuing Justice and Equality. Pages 277-278.
9
Cohen. Rescuing Justice and Equality. Pages 276-279.
10
G.A. Cohen. 2011. On the Currency of Egalitarian Justice, and Other Essays in Political Philosophy. Princeton:
Princeton University Press. Pages 252-253.
5
Kibujjo Kalumba (6D)
Four Problems with Current Attempts to Democratize Traditional African Communities
Nationalist-ideological philosophy is the fourth trend of Oruka’s four-fold classification of
African philosophy. The trend comprises the pro-independence, anti-colonial literature produced
by such political philosophical thinkers as Ghana’s Kwame Nkrumah, Senegal’s Leopold
Senghor, Tanzania’s Julius Nyerere, and Guinea’s Sekou Toure. Convinced that Africa’s
liberation from colonial rule had to be at once political, economic, cultural, these leaders sought
to build the post independence African nations on the principles of communalism, regarded as a
unique type of socialism, whose principles they claimed to have guided Africa’s traditional (precolonial) communities. In seeking to ground modern African nations on the principles that they
took to have guided their traditional African communities, the pro-independence, anti-colonial
thinkers saw themselves as not only ennobling their pre-colonial past, but also as retrieving
valuable lessons from it. Even though the dream of constructing communalistic-grounded
African nations appears to have faded in the minds of most contemporary African political
philosophical, the ideologues’ general strategy of retrieving important lessons from Africa’s past
to address the continent’s current problems continues to preoccupy many of them. A major
rallying ingredient of traditional African communities for many of these thinkers has been what
they have described as a brand of non-adversarial democracy which is motivated by the desire to
reach consensus among all the concerned parties. The main purpose of this paper is underscore
four major problems that afflict these efforts at democratizing Africa’s past: 1) confusing the
descriptive meaning of democracy with its emotive meaning, this being a root cause for the other
problems; 2) blindness to both the institutionalized exclusion of women in the decision-making
processes of Africa’s traditional political systems, and to how this exclusion has a “dedemocratization” impact; 3) misunderstanding the role of institutionalized political parties in
Western societies, taking them to be essential ingredients of “Western” democracies, a
misunderstandings many Western thinkers are not innocent of; 4) adopting an unrealistic view of
consensus, not only as a desirable goal but also as it relates to Africa’s past and contemporary
contexts.
Shawn Kaplan (7C)
Punitive Warfare
This paper will address whether punitive warfare can be justified within our contemporary
international order and in light of contemporary security threats. First I will characterize the two
sides of the contemporary debate. On the one hand, the current “legalist paradigm” within Just
War Theory has largely eliminated the traditionally accepted just cause of punishing
‘wrongdoers’ whose military acts may fall short of the standards for international aggression.
The legalist paradigm’s prohibition of punitive warfare is generally based upon the presumption
that individual states always lack proper authority to punish others international agents given the
existence of international legal institutions (ILIs) that can adjudicate and punish in a less biased
fashion. On the other hand, opponents of the prohibition on punitive warfare not only question
the effectiveness and willingness of contemporary ILIs to remedy offenses in an unbiased way
but, also, point to the changing nature of international conflicts and security risks to support the
justice of punitive warfare. First, they argue that since ILIs are ineffective, or otherwise
deficient, states have legitimate authority to punish ‘wrongdoers’ or those who violate
international law. Second, given that states are today often attacked in periodic fashion by nonstate militant or terrorist groups, their military responses cannot be easily characterized as a
defensive repulsion of ongoing or imminent aggression but must take a retaliatory form by
responding punitively to the past offense. Since the question of proper authority is the primary
barrier to punitive warfare being justifiable, I will outline arguments from the Scholastics,
Grotius and Locke that aim to establish the proper authority of states to punish other
international agents. As the success of each justification will depend upon how accurately each
conception of state authority to punish non-citizens reflects our current international order, my
aim will be to highlight the corresponding images of international order presumed within each
account. I shall argue that while the ineffectiveness of contemporary ILIs makes justifications
for punitive warfare conceivable, our imperfect international legal order fits an image
somewhere between the Grotian international legal order and the Lockean international ‘state of
nature’. I will conclude by considering how each interpretation of the current international order
affects the justifiability of four types of punitive warfare: belligerent reprisals, targeted killings,
punitive interventions (e.g. when enforcing UN resolutions), and full-scaled punitive war.
Ali Kashani (9E)
The Question of Radical Generosity: Ethics and Politics of Cosmopolitanism
My project titled The Question of Radical Generosity: Ethics and Politics of Cosmopolitanism,
argues that a practice of radical generosity is necessary for the possibility of cosmopolitanism as
a political ethic. The argument proposes a conception of ethics and politics, which includes a
cosmopolitan worldview that is not based on self-interest. Such a cosmopolitan worldview—
conceived as an approach for living with others in the world—demands a rethinking of
citizenship in an era of global challenges (e.g., immigration, inequality, abuse of human rights).
In rethinking citizenship beyond self-interest, the project focuses on the practice of radical
generosity, as a way of life to resituate the individual within historical and social processes. This
project views cosmopolitanism as a practice, and the argument rests on two important claims:
a. The practice of radical generosity is a way of life that is not merely an individual act
or virtue, but must become constitutive of both the individual and the social world.
b. It proposes a transformational ethics that redefines cosmopolitanism away from the
liberal conception found in such thinkers as Kant and Habermas.
Classical approaches to ethics—deontological, utilitarian, and virtue ethics—develop a
normative ethics that emphasizes individual deliberation, autonomous decision-making, choice,
duty, and obligation as a way of dealing with the issue of the other. Recent approaches to
cosmopolitanism are conceptualized in one of two directions: a ‘juridical-political’ view and a
‘post-normative’ view. The ‘juridical-political’ conception (e.g., Kant, Habermas) while
necessary fails to address important ethical considerations. It lacks motivation regarding ethical
practices for the possibility of cosmopolitanism. It must be recognized that ethical practices
cannot be written into law and constitution, and enforced by law. The ‘post-normative’ approach
(e.g., Derrida and Levinas) while it recognizes the need to go beyond the ‘juridical-political’
discourse towards ethics perpetually defers an adequate political formulation and remains
underdetermined.
Aristotle in Nicomachean Ethics Book IV, defines generosity as a virtue, which is cultivated as a
character, namely a habit to give to others. The giving is to be based on deliberate choice and
according to right reason, and is appropriate to one’s means and circumstance without selfserving motives, but just for the pleasure that the act of generosity brings to the giver and
receiver. Aristotle suggests that the act of generosity must be a noble act in itself, rather than a
means to some other end. For him, it is not the value of the gift that matters, but rather the desire
for a noble act itself is what is valuable (Nicomachean Ethics, trans. Terence Irwin, 1985, 1119a
25-1122a 15). The Aristotelian conception of generosity as a virtue, is situated in the realm of
individual excellence and character, and does not explicitly address the social and political
implications of a generous act. Concrete social relations define human life, and in order to
change social relations we must be engaged in radical practices that transform social relations.
The practice of radical generosity has such a transformational aspect and must change social and
political practices.
Jamie Kelly (10D)
Epistemic Perfectionism and Democratic Paternalism
In this paper we examine the relationship between epistemic forms of paternalism and
utilitarianism in the justification of policies. We begin by discussing some of the basic
similarities and differences between paternalist and utilitarian justifications in general, i.e.,
between justifications structured in terms of the good of the coerced and in terms of the common
good, respectively. Then, we contrast paternalist and utilitarian justifications framed specifically
in terms of epistemic goods. Finally, we apply these distinctions to Robert Talisse’s theory of
democracy (Democracy and Moral Conflict, Cambridge University Press, 2009) for the purpose
of getting clearer on the sort of justification that would be necessary to implement the kind of
“epistemically perfectionist state” (p. 156) that he defends.
Talisse’s case for such a perfectionist state is grounded in his epistemic justification of
democracy. According to Talisse, we are all committed to certain epistemic norms, simply in
virtue of thinking and believing things. These norms, in turn, commit us to the deliberative
practices of free speech and reason-exchange characteristic of liberal democracies (pp. 123-4).
However, these practices also place a heavy epistemic burden on the citizen—a burden that
public ignorance data, moreover, suggests that the public fails to meet. The proper response,
Talisse argues, is not to conclude that democracy is unjustified, but that the state needs to engage
in an epistemically perfectionist project, promoting the epistemic capabilities that the public
needs in order to engage in fruitful moral and political deliberation (p. 172).
In this paper, we use Talisse’s perfectionism as a springboard for considering just what sort of
justification is necessary for the kinds of epistemic reforms needed to make fruitful moral and
political deliberation possible. In particular, we consider whether the requisite justifications
should be considered paternalistic or utilitarian. We argue that, while Talisse has reason to prefer
a soft paternalist strategy on which the state intervention can assist in people realizing their
epistemic agency, the perfectionist policies required for Talisse’s justification of democracy to
work can only be motivated on utilitarian grounds that leave room for some people being made
epistemically worse off for the greater epistemic good. In light of this, we argue that Talisse’s
original appeal to universally accepted epistemic norms is inert—and that his argument, in fact,
relies on a potentially far more controversial utilitarian cost-benefit analysis.
Katherine Kim (5B)
Islamic Law, Political Membership, and Legitimate Coercion
In November 2010, the voters of Oklahoma approved an amendment that prohibits the state
courts from considering Islamic law in deliberations. On January 10, 2012, a federal appeals
court blocked the implementation of the amendment on grounds that the state failed to
demonstrate a compelling reason for religious discrimination. An anti-Shariah campaign
appears to be gaining momentum in the United States; more than a dozen states are preparing
legislation that would bar Shariah from carrying weight in any proceedings. The Oklahoma case
demonstrates a democratic dilemma. On the one hand, if Islamic law were applied in
government courts, then judicial decisions might undermine the fundamental value of equality in
a democratic society. Granted that Islam – like many religions – is “tilted against women,” a
government court may enforce a ruling from a religious tribunal that fails to give women equal
concern and respect. On the other hand, if Islamic law were barred from government courts,
then judicial decisions might impose undue restriction on religious liberty and thereby violate the
First Amendment. Given that the aspect of Shariah at stake is family law rather than criminal
law and the family enjoys presumptive protection from government interference, government
courts should defer to religious tribunals to resolve family disputes in cases where the parties
consent.
This paper addresses the dilemma regarding the role of Shariah in government courts. The
dilemma will be addressed not by ranking the values of equality and liberty, but rather, by
examining the relationship between the state and Muslim immigrants to whom Shariah generally
applies. Citizens of a democratic society enjoy a relation of reciprocity with the state. Citizens
respect the claims of authority generated by the state’s coercive institutions and the state respects
citizens’ equal rights, an important one of which is the right to political participation. However,
the state and non-naturalized immigrants do not enjoy a reciprocal relationship; they are
prohibited from participating in the political process. Immigrants in the US are not granted
membership in the political community. This paper will argue that the legitimacy of coercive
measures exercised in a pluralist democratic society lies in the reciprocal relationship between
the state and the individuals who are subject to coercion. Legitimate coercion does not lie in the
virtue of the institutions that carry out the requirements of justice because there is a reasonable
disagreement on these requirements. Since immigrants do not have the opportunity to shape the
institutions that exercise coercive measures against them, the claims of authority issued by the
state’s institutions should also be limited with respect to immigrants. Without the reciprocal
relationship necessary for legitimate coercion, the state should restrict its reach into the private
lives of immigrants.
Michael Krom (8A)
Jocelyn Maclure and Charles Taylor’s Religious-Minded Secularism: Assessing a LiberalPluralist approach to the HHS Mandate
As the United States makes its grueling, exciting and sometimes painful march toward election
season, an issue has arisen that may even have surpassed the theatrics of the debates among
Republican contenders for the presidency: the Department of Human Health Services’ (HHS)
mandate that private insurance policies cover contraceptives. The rhetoric on both sides has
been increasingly polarizing, and threatens to deepen the divisions between fellow Americans.
One camp decries this decision as an attack on religious liberty, the other lauds it as a victory for
women. Is it possible to hear both voices, or even third or more? Does this issue reveal the
inadequacy of the modern liberal democratic creed to remain neutral on moral matters? While
Michael Sandel and others may be correct to point to this as yet another case of how liberalism’s
prioritizing of the right over the good leads us into such quagmires, a recent and timely work by
Jocelyn Maclure and Charles Taylor, Securalism and Freedom of Conscience (henceforth
‘Secularism’)11, may prove helpful. This works stands out for its civil tone, and clear respect for
all participants of good will in the civic discourse. Rather than exacerbate and increase
divisions, they seek to bridge and reach across them. While they do not explicitly take up the
subject of universal access to health care and religious liberty, they provide a theoretical
framework that acknowledges the need to make prudential decisions unique to the particularities
of each circumstance.
This paper shows how the “liberal-pluralist” theory of Secularism can be used to examine the
HHS mandate, and ultimately argues that Maclure and Taylor’s thesis must be revised in order to
be of assistance. The first part of this paper provides an analysis of Secularism; the second
summarizes the key issues in the debate over the HHS mandate, and applies the insights gleaned
from the first part; the third part argues that Maclure and Taylor’s thesis needs to be
supplemented with a strong account of the virtues needed to sustain the civic discourse they
envision, and also with considerations of the role of the various levels of government (from local
up to national); by way of conclusion, this article returns to the possibility that even this valiant
effort to revamp the modern liberal approach to politics fails, that the language of rights,
secularism, etc. may be too impoverished to help us think through just what is at stake.
11
Maclure, Jocelyn and Charles Taylor, Secularism and Freedom of Conscience (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard UP,
2011).
Christa Lebens (7A)
Curdling Trans Identities?
Radical women of color feminists have developed a large body of work theorizing enmeshed
identities of gender and race. What do analyses by radical women of color bring to the question
of theorizing transgender identities? How is the racialized gender binary enforced? Centering on
the analysis of the coalescence of gender and race developed by María Lugones, I will explore
the implications of the intersectional/enmeshed model of identities for those resisting the gender
binary.
One of the more challenging claims I have encountered in both scholarly and popular discussions
of trans identities is the seeming dismissal of the importance of the physical body in establishing
gender identity. The influence of postmodern theorists on trans theory has supported the idea that
the meaning of the body is socially constructed, not fixed and determined by one’s anatomy. The
reasoning underlying this concept of gender identity addresses important concerns about the
medicalization of trans bodies and the politics of determining gender identity by one’s “status” as
“post-op” or “pre-op.” But this concept also leads to claims that one is, for example, a man with
a vagina (e.g., a trans man is both a man and female-bodied) or a woman with a penis (e.g., a
trans woman). Furthermore, policy issues arise when addressing concerns about, for example,
residence hall room assignments or access to domestic violence shelters for women, and when
confronting violence against trans people targeted for their gender variant presentation.
María Lugones, a woman-of-color feminist philosopher, has developed an analysis of identities
that theorizes the liminal space between binary categories. She contrasts a logic, or theoretical
framework, in which categories are mutually exclusive (the logic of purity) and a logic, or
theoretical framework, in which categories are distinct yet non-exclusive, allowing for a liminal
space in between (the logic of curdling). Consider a biracial or bi-cultural person who is not
“only” Asian, and not “only” African-American, for example. The confluence of cultures
produces a “curdled being” who is both/and. This concept of curdled logic has been further
articulated by other scholars, but not yet applied to trans identities.
In my paper I will reconsider gender identities through this framework developed by Lugones.
My paper will raise consideration of an analysis that is distinctly lacking in trans theory right
now: that of theorizing gender identity enmeshed with other social identities such as race and
class.
Steven Lee (9C)
Rawls and the Current Crisis of Democracy
Democracy in the United States is clearly in a state of crisis, and the crisis is economic at its
heart. Our democratic form may mask what is in fact an oligarchy or a plutocracy. The most
visible aspects of this crisis are the great increase in inequality in recent decades and the ever
growing role of money in politics. It was likely Rawls’s recognition of this that led him to
emphasize in his late work Justice as Fairness the importance of what he called Property
Owning Democracy (POD). Rawls juxtaposed POD to what he called Welfare State Capitalism
(WSC), and he saw in WSC a failure to achieve: (a) the fair value of political liberties; (b) fair
equality of opportunity; and (c) the reciprocity characteristic of the difference principle. These
failings would clearly place WSC at odds with the principles of justice. In contrast, POD would
avoid these problems. The most important features of POD is that capital would be dispersed
widely in the population, rather than being concentrated as it has become under WSC, and that
this would be achieved largely through blocking the intergenerational transfer of wealth. The
major difference between POD and WSC is that POD is based on an ex ante distribution of
capital, while WSC is based on an ex post redistribution of wealth. In my paper, I will explore
some arguments recently proposed by Martin O’Neill and others regarding the extent to which
POD is necessary to avoid the three failures indicted above, that is, whether WSC might, despite
appearances, have the resources to more adequately embody the principles of justice. I will
explore some problems with POD and make a case that the three failures can largely be avoided
within the context of a WSC. I will then offer some brief reflections on what these results imply
for our current crisis.
Emily Lee (3A)
Fanon and Outlaw and the Question of the Inferiority Complex: The Epistemic Value of
Experience
Before the language of racial and gender stigma, a similar phenomenon was described to in the
language of the inferiority complex. Like most psychological phenomena, the existence of an
inferiority complex and whether any particular individual has the inferiority complex remains in
dispute. Frantz Fanon and Lucius Outlaw, in their separate autobiographical accounts, disagree
on the existence of an inferiority complex in black subjectivity. Does their disagreement
demonstrate the speciousness of knowledge claims based on experience? I argue that accepting
both conclusions does not forego acknowledging the epistemic significance of experience.
Philosophers have long contested experience’s relation to epistemology--ranging from centrally
positioning experience in epistemic claims, to thoroughly doubting experience’s contribution to
any epistemic claims. To defend both Fanon’s and Outlaw’s opposing conclusions on the
inferiority complex in black subjectivity and the epistemic value of experience, this paper
phenomenologically explores the ontological structure of experience through the works of
Maurice Merleau-Ponty.
Merleau-Ponty recognizes three features in the structure of experience: 1. the world in its
materiality and its meaning-structures; 2. the subject; and 3. the temporality of all three features.
But more interestingly, Merleau-Ponty also locates three distances inherent in the structure of
experience in the interstices among its three features. The following three distances are
embedded in the structure of experience: 1. the distance between the subject and the world that is
always conditioned by time; 2. the distance between undergoing and understanding the
experience; and 3. the distance between the experience and the language with which to
understand or communicate the experience. Because of these three distances, experience’s
contribution to epistemology is not determinate. Yet experience has epistemic value in its
ambiguous, contextual, and open structure--an epistemic value that encompasses human beings’
existential powers. Hence Fanon and Outlaw’s disagreement in regards to the existence of the
inferiority complex in black subjectivity need not be read as a challenge against the epistemic
value of experience, but as forwarding two different existential projects.
Pierre LeMorvan (2A)
Skepticism as a Civic Virtue and Civic Vice
This paper articulates and explores a conception of skepticism as a civic virtue and civic vice.
It’s a conception with considerable promise of being relevant to important social concerns in a
way that typical philosophical discussions of skepticism are not. If I am right, skepticism should
be of interest not just to epistemologists, but to social philosophers as well.
Patti Lenard (2A)
Severely Divided Societies, Trust and the Struggle for Democracy
There is ample social science evidence that points to the challenges that trust faces in western,
democratic, multicultural societies and these struggles are amplified in severely divided
societies, ranging from Northern Ireland to Nigeria to Israel/Palestine. This paper considers the
special “trust dilemmas” faced by severely divided societies. I begin by offering an account of
what distinguishes a severely divided society from a multicultural society. I then turn to an
assessment of the prospects for democracy in severely divided societies: I argue that they are dim
in the absence of trust relations between citizens. In the absence of trust, even the most basic
features of democratic practice are difficult to sustain: political parties are reluctant to give up
power; the representative system fails to offer generalized representation; and protection for
minority communities is unreliable. I conclude by offering some thoughts on the strategies that
can serve to rebuild the broken trust that persists in severely divided societies. These strategies
aim to minimize the vulnerability that is at the heart of extending and reciprocating trust and
therefore aim to allow citizens of divided societies to act “as if” they trust others. On the basis of
positive these “trust-like” interactions, trust between citizens may eventually grow.
Ann Levey (10B)
Public Space, Civility and Exclusion
This paper is motivated by what appears to be an ongoing war over the downtown that is being
waged between on the one hand, the visibly homeless or marginalized and on the other hand
proponents of revitalizing downtowns and restoring civic order. Those who are homeless or
marginalized wage the war with their bodies by occupying the contested spaces, while the
proponents of revitalization use the weapons of by-laws, re-development and commercialization.
Both sides employ a common weapon—the language of inclusion and exclusion. The homeless
and their advocates argue that the by-laws and redesign have the effect of excluding the
homeless from the redesigned spaces. The proponents of revitalization argue that by
redeveloping and imposing order, they are reclaiming the downtown as public space. The
implication of these claims is that space being used by the homeless is not open to others and that
redeveloped space is not open to the homeless. Thus each side claims that the other makes public
space less accessible in the sense of less open to (at least some) public. This prompts the question
of what makes public space inclusive. In this paper I start to take up that question, both in
general and in specific case of the contest between the homeless and the revitalizers.
In the first part of the paper I distinguish public space from public ownership and flesh out what I
take to be an intuitive and uncontroversial notion, namely that what makes a space public is
accessibility. I then look at how factors like regulations, design and informal norms and social
expectations serve to restrict access to space for some people. In particular, I focus on how
normative expectations can serve to effectively privatize (or partially privatize) a space. Spaces
thus become less public, on this view, by being less normatively accessible for some potential
user of the space. This account suggests a plausible way in which both proponents of downtown
revitalization projects and those who are pushed out of those projects can use the language of
exclusion. At the heart of the arguments for revitalization claims about eliminating uncivil
behavior along with the claim that anyone is welcome in a space provided that they act in accord
with these norms. On closer investigation, however, the norms in question turn out to be
normative prohibitions on doing in public the kinds of activities that constitute the very
possibility of existence for those who have no private space of their own. The prohibited uncivil
behaviors typically include things like side walk sitting, lying down on benches and urinating in
public. I conclude that what appear to be a fairly standard case of contested public space has
serious implications for the very possibility of recognizing the existence of the homeless as
normatively valid. I conclude the paper with a brief look at the value of public space and the
implications of these divisions over space for the possibilities of democratic interaction.
Alice MacLachlan (4D)
Gendering the Public Apology
Recent academic research into the relationship between apologies and gender has begun to
disrupt the widespread stereotype that women apologize more than men. Schumann and Ross
(2010), for instance, argue that the salient gender differences lie in the threshold for perceived
offense, not subsequent willingness to apologize; women are likely to report more offenses, their
studies conclude. Others have noted that the stereotype may arise from gendered tendencies to
employ apologetic language (e.g. ‘sorry’, ‘excuse me’, ‘pardon’) as performative softeners or
expressions of sympathy and relational concern, rather than as intentional expressions of
culpability and regret.
Yet, it would be a mistake to underestimate the significance of gender for analysis of apologies –
and this is especially true in this case of publicly performed apologies, i.e. official apologies by
heads of state, government, corporations or NGOs, as well as publicly-enacted personal
apologies by public figures. In particular, those concerned to provide normative accounts of
public apology must attend to the ways in which some of the moral norms governing practices of
apology are importantly gendered norms. In my presentation, I consider public apologies from a
feminist perspective. I argue that considerations of gender both raise questions about the
significance of emotional expression in public apologies, and highlight the importance of
evaluating acts of apology contextually. Careful attention to the gender of public apologies
should leave us skeptical about the possibility of any one paradigm for the ‘ideal’ public
apology.
My discussion has two parts. First, I claim that philosophical accounts of apology must make
room for gender analysis. I do this in part by analyzing how theoretical discourses of apology are
already implicitly gendered, for example, in the figure of the ‘ideal’ apologizer, or in their
reliance on moral individualist and even atomist frameworks, in tension with relational
understandings of agency and responsibility. This is especially relevant for public apologies,
where the relationships in question are multiple (and often constitutive of the apologizer and
recipients’ identities). In my analysis, I focus on the role that emotions are expected to play in
conveying sincerity, commitment and remorse (taken to be norms of good apology), and the role
of gender in emotional uptake.
In the second part, I look to public apologies whose occasion or content is itself significantly
gendered. While there are far fewer examples of public apologies performed by women than
men, I focus on cases where women are apologized – or not apologized – to, where the
wrongdoing in question has a gendered aspect. I discuss two very different types of cases: first,
the question of apology by the Japanese government to former WWII ‘Comfort Women’.
Second, I consider the example of the ‘ever-forgiving’ political spouse – or, more accurately,
political wife: namely, the female figure who stands silently besides her partner, as that partner
apologizes to a broader public for offenses arguably committed against her. These cases reveal
another insight: the need for theories of apology to consider the role of (and interactions
between) audience and witness, as well as apologizer.
Alistair MacLeod (9C)
Divided Societies: Economic Inequality and Inequality of Opportunity
Societies can be deeply divided along many different lines – linguistic, cultural, ethnic, and
racial, for example – but one of the deepest divides in many contemporary societies is economic.
Indeed, in many societies, especially the most affluent, the widening gulf between the rich and
the poor, or between the super-rich and the rest, is threatening to be the most divisive. While
there is recognition in many quarters – among at least some politicians as well as some members
of the general public – of the potential seriousness of the threat this sort of economic divide
poses to the sense of solidarity that is crucial for the health and prosperity of a society, there
continues to be disagreement both about how far economic inequality is indeed open to moral
objection and also about what precisely might make it objectionable.
On one side of these ongoing debates, there is the claim that at least a good deal of the economic
inequality we find in most societies is not exposed to any moral objection because it is an
altogether benign (as well as expected) consequence of the implementation of familiar (even if
also controversial) views of distributive justice -- such views as that the distribution of income
and wealth in society should reflect the personal deserts of the individual members or that the
voluntary interaction that is the hallmark of life in a truly free society is bound to generate a good
deal of economic inequality. On the other side, the claim that the existence of economic
inequality in any of the forms it takes violates an important ideal of distributive justice is in
competition with an assortment of more nuanced egalitarian claims, claims that seek to ground
the objection to certain kinds of economic inequality in their morally problematic historical
origins or in the adverse impact they have on the realization of a number of non-economic justice
ideals.
In discussing some of these disagreements, I want to argue not only (1) that familiar desert-based
and libertarian defenses of economic inequality are deeply flawed, in part because the equality of
opportunity that is a crucial condition of the viability of these defenses typically doesn’t so much
as exist, but also (2) that would-be egalitarians are ill-advised to sponsor the ideal of economic
equality, not only because it’s a mistake to regard economic equality as such as a requirement of
distributive justice but also because adoption of this view presents anti-egalitarians with a target
they can easily demolish. For egalitarians who favor a more nuanced approach, there are of
course compelling reasons for opposition to many familiar forms of economic inequality,
including those that serve to create deep divisions in society. However, it is an opposition that is
grounded in other versions of the ideal of equality. If we abstract from arguments against
economic inequality that look to the question how it has come about and attend to those that
focus on the adverse impact it can have on the achievement and maintenance of such valued
forms of equality as equality under the law, political equality, social equality, and equality of
educational and employment opportunity, impressive justice-related arguments can be identified
that condemn economic inequality in many of its commonest forms. It is to the sponsorship and
refinement of these arguments that egalitarians should commit themselves. (3) The third claim
for which I want to argue in this paper is that there’s a strong case for regarding all these
arguments as reducing, in the end, to the argument that the economic inequalities to which there
is a justice-based objection are those that are at odds with the right human beings all have to an
equal opportunity to live their lives in satisfying and fulfilling ways. If this third claim can be
established, then, for principled as well as polemical reasons, the battle against economic
inequality can be represented as a battle for equality of opportunity.
Michelle Maiese (8C)
Embodied Social Cognition & Participatory Sense-Making: Implications for Online
Learning
In Pedaogy of the Oppressed, Freire (1970) recommends what he calls a “problemposing” model of education, which involves educational practices that center on critical
engagement and dialogue, and which treat the learner as a co-creator of knowledge. Part of the
goal is to increase students’ understanding of complex social problems by enlarging the scope of
their perception and allowing them to engage one another as active learners. This goal is very
much in line with Catholic colleges and universities whose stated mission is to transform
students’ lives, and also with most philosophy departments’ emphasis on dialogue and critical
thinking.
These goals also mesh with Gallagher’s (2008) proposed account of social cognition,
interaction theory (IT), which emphasizes the importance of embodied interaction and direct
perception. In ordinary social interactions, I typically come to understand others via perceptionaction loops and through the various things I am doing with or in response to
others.1 Communication often takes place in an embodied manner, via individuals’ postures,
gestures, and facial expressions. Likewise, according to Ratcliffe (2007), engaging with
another as a person involves adopting a personal stance, comprised of affective and bodily
relatedness2; and according to Colombetti (2010), I can perceive others’ desires and feelings on
the basis of their expressions and movements, to which I become attuned by way of a “bodily
cognitive-emotional form of understanding.”3 This sort of bodily attunement, through which one
enters into a reciprocal relationship with others, ensures that intersubjectivity is essentially a
matter of intercorporeality.4
Moreover, social cognition is enactive in the sense that parties “do not passively receive
information from their environments, which they then translate into internal representations
whose significant value is to be added later,” but instead actively participate in the generation of
meaning.5 And they do so not in isolation, but instead via ongoing engagement
and coordination with their interaction partners. Examples of coordination in the realm of human
activity include synchronization, mirroring, anticipation, imitation, and emotional contagion.
Through this ‘natural pairing’ of bodily behavior, parties are able to share meanings and
understand each other. During “participatory sense-making,”6 the cares, concerns, and
perspective of each party shift, the bodily dynamics of individual interactors become
coordinated, and the way that each party attends to his or her surroundings is modulated by the
perspective of the other(s).
Classroom interactions are a striking example of participatory sense-making. What
occurs during classroom interaction, including gestures, utterances, facial expressions, and
intonation, can steer the encounter and either facilitate its continuation or cause it to break
down. A good philosophy discussion becomes a sort of social dance in which many actors
participate and there are fluid patterns of communication and response. In cases with particularly
high levels of participation, sense-making becomes a shared activity and students in the
classroom engage in what might even be described as a process of joint cognition. This sort of
attunement paves the way for increased empathy and the capacity for perspective-taking, which
allows students to “increase the scope of their perceptions [and] begin to direct their observations
towards previously inconspicuous phenomena.”7
To the extent that it involves disembodied social engagement, online learning severs
these interactive links between students, and also between students and teacher. I will argue that
because the sort of participatory sense-making I have described is not possible in online classes,
such learning environments are likely to be far less successful at bringing about the sort critical
engagement and transformation that many colleges and universities emphasize.
Shaun Gallagher, (2008). “Inference or Interaction: Social Cognition Without Precursors,” pp.
163-174 inPhilosophical Explorations, (11:3,.
1
2
Matthew Ratcliffe, (2007). Rethinking Commonsense Pyschology: A Critique of Folk
Psychology, Theory of Mind, and Simulation, Palgrave MacMillan.
Givoanna Colombetti, (2010) “Enaction, Sense-Making and Emotion,” in J. Stewart, O.
Gapenne, and E. DiPaolo, eds. Enaction: Towards a New Paradigm for Cognitive
science. Cambridge, MA: MIT University Press.
3
4
Giovanni Stanghellini, (2004). Disembodied Spirits and Deanimated Bodies: The
Psychopathology of Common Sense, New York: Oxford University Press.
Hanne De Jaegher and Ezequiel Di Paolo, (2007). “Participatory Sense-making: An Enactive
Approach to Social Cognition,” pp. 485-507 in Phenomenology and Cognitive Science, (6:), p.
488.
5
6
ibid.
7
Paulo Friere, Pedagogy of the Oppressed, 1970.
Jean Marie Makang (8B)
Divided Identities and the Democratic Society: Revisiting W.E.B. Du Bois’ Theory of
Double Consciousness in the 21st Century
At the dawn of the twentieth century, W.E.B. Du Bois stated that the problem of the twentieth
century is the problem of the color line, a problem which he saw as seriously undermining
democracy in America and all over the world (The Souls of Black Folk, 1903). Alongside this
observation, Du Bois spelled out his theory of “double consciousness.” The latter is both a
portrayal of the peculiar condition of people of African descent in America and Du Bois’ own
conception of what the identity of African Americans entails. Central to the theory of “double
consciousness” was Du Bois’ concern for democratic inclusion and racial justice in the American
divided society, as Du Bois knew it.
This paper revisits—almost one hundred and ten years since the publication of The Souls of
Black Folk—Du Bois’ theory of “double consciousness” for the twenty-first century.
Specifically, the paper revisits Du Bois’ discussion of the implication of the color line on
democratic inclusion and its application to current democracies—especially to current U.S.
democracy—as it is brought to light by conflicts of racial, ethnic, religious, and cultural
identities as well as by conflicts of sexual orientation and gender identities.
The first part of the paper critically examines Du Bois’ solution to the problem of racial, ethnic,
and cultural exclusion as well as his theory of group identity in a racially, ethnically, and
culturally diverse society. Special attention is paid to Du Bois’ emphasis on separate identities.
The second part of the paper examines the claims of post-racialism as well as the implications of
such claims for our striving for democratic inclusion. The third part is a discussion of ways in
which conflicts of identity in today’s society can be constructively resolved by way of
deliberative democracy. In this third part, we also examines whether by increasing
communication and democratic participation deliberative democracy can effectively help to
promote the democratic inclusion of diverse people and groups in our society and whether it can
allow us to put an end to political, economic, and cultural marginalization.
Seth Mayer (5C)
The Dilemma of Democratic Informal Politics
Democracy, I will argue, makes normative demands on not just the formal sphere of organized
political institutions, but also the informal sphere—the realm of customs, social norms, and
collective presuppositions, among other things. These anonymous background normative
structures, which claim a sort of decentralized authority over people’s action and understanding,
matter for whether people are able to attain the status of free and equal political citizenship.
Informal social status reverberates into the formal sphere. Consequently, no plausible theory of
democracy can avoid normatively requiring something of the informal sphere; democracy cannot
eschew democratic informal politics.
The demand for democratic informal politics seems to generate a dilemma, though.
Reforming the informal sphere threatens to be practically impossible and morally objectionable.
The instability and pluralism of modernity makes it uncertain how we could develop any longlasting, improved informal politics. Moreover, the mechanisms a society might use to pursue
such progress are unclear. There are also reasons to worry that such informal political reforms
will be exclusionary, in addition to being oppressively imposed. The notion of pursuing change
in a realm as delicate as the informal sphere, which involves so many everyday practices and
shared modes of understanding, may be deeply misconceived, even if undertaken with good
intentions. If so, democratic ideals demand something that can and should not be pursued.
In response to this apparent dilemma, I will show that what I call a procedural democratic
informal politics offers hope of avoiding these pitfalls. On this view, the way democratic
disagreement is resolved must respect individuals’ status as free and equal in both the formal and
informal spheres. Proceduralism only makes normative demands insofar as informal life shapes
individuals’ inclusion in democratic processes, though. It doesn’t force all components of
informal life to maximize democracy or unify around some substantive comprehensive
viewpoint. The view asks whether particular informal structures are consistent with
democratically resolving questions or if such structures introduce problematic status relations
that undermine such aims. The scope of democracy becomes broader than the formal sphere, but
only targets politically relevant normative structures, rather than pursuing any deep ethical unity.
As a result, the view can avoid this apparent dilemma of democracy. Procedural democratic
informal politics does not deny the informal sphere’s instability, but seeks democratic ways of
managing it. Proceduralism can also appeal to things like education, civil associations, and the
law as realistic mechanisms for shaping the informal sphere. In terms of moral permissibility, the
view is expressly structured to be non-exclusionary. The mechanisms proposed for pursuing it
also indicate that it need not become an oppressive political project.
Given the contingent, empirical nature of these issues, my argument can only give us
hope that democratic informal politics is achievable in a permissible, realistic way. Philosophical
argument cannot guarantee this project’s accomplishment. The hope that we can avoid this
dilemma of democratic informal politics ultimately prompts further questions for democratic
theory. The nature of the relationship between particular conceptions of democracy and the
informal sphere requires further exploration.
Christopher McCammon (10D)
How to Be an Instrumentalist about Political Legitimacy
Political legitimacy is that property of states in virtue of which they have authority over
their citizens; that is, the moral right to expect that their citizens will regard their commands as
protanto obligations, with an attendant right of the state to enforce compliance. This paper
examines an instrumentalist story of how a state could justifiably claim legitimacy so construed.
Instrumentalists claim that recognizing the authority of the right kind of states is instrumentally
necessary to discharging certain obligations binding on all moral agents.
I think instrumentalism is a promising way to think about political legitimacy, but that
instrumentalism needs certain neo-republican insights in order to fulfill its promise. So, first of
all, I will examine a form of instrumentalism Jonathan Quong calls the duty-based conception of
legitimate authority (DBC hereafter). Devotees of the DBC (including Quong) hold that a state
has legitimate authority when its citizens are more likely to fulfill their natural duties of justice
if they accept the commands of that state as binding, etc. But the DBC represents a wrong way
to be an instrumentalist, because the DBC legitimates too much authority. So long as the actions
of any fellow citizen make it more likely that I will deliver on some natural duty of mine, I must
regard that citizen as a legitimate authority, and her coercive activities as justified. But this is
implausible. I motivate this claim with cases, the upshot of which is that vigilantes and bullies
are not legitimate authorities, even when their actions are instrumentally necessary to the
performance of our duties.
So, the DBC fails, but for an interesting reason. What the DBC misses is that the
authority relation between state and subject cannot be merely unilateral if it is to be legitimate: A
can have no legitimate authority over B unless B has a certain form of authority over A. Recent
republican theorizing shows us how to think about this reciprocal authority, and why we need
just states in order to actualize it. A central contention of neo-republicans is that if A has the
capacity to interfere with B’s choices on an arbitrary basis, B is not free. B is not free, on the
standard republican vocabulary, because A dominates B. If B is to avoid domination from A, it
must be the case that A is subject to B’s discursive control. For B to have discursive control over
A, it must be the case that effective avenues are available to B by which B may contest A’s
interference with B’s choices. Unpacking republican ideas about domination and non-domination
as discursive control provide the resources to explain why bullies and vigilantes cannot, but the
right kind of state can possess legitimate authority. In brief, I will show how bullies and
vigilantes lack legitimacy because they are not subject to the discursive control of those they
bully, but that sufficiently just states may possess legitimacy when they are instrumentally
necessary to fulfilling our moral obligations to create and maintain the institutional conditions of
discursive control.
Ed McGushin (6E)
Derrida and Foucault on the Constitution of Ethical Subjects
One of the deepest problems of a pluralistic, liberal democracy is how to reconcile individual
liberty and self-government with the common or public good. The problem of reconciling
individual freedom with a notion of the good that transcends self-interest gives rise to the
question: what kind of ethics is possible, and perhaps necessary, in a pluralistic, democratic
context? To put the problem in terms of the theme of the conference: what is the possibility for
a genuine notion of civic virtue in a divided democracy?
This question lies at the heart of the later work of both Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida. I
propose that we read Derrida’s deconstructive “genealogy of responsibility” in The Gift of Death
and Foucault’s 1982-1984 Collège de France lectures on the “care of the self” as forming a
critical dialogue on the problem of ethics. For Derrida, the ethical subject is the one who is
shaken by her awareness of her infinite responsibility to others. For Foucault, on the other hand,
the ethical subject is the one who is devoted to a lifelong practice of the care of herself, whose
life is organized according to the imperative to establish and maintain the right relationship of
the self to itself.
While Derrida’s emphasis on the responsibility to the other seems to be opposed to Foucault’s
focus on the relationship to the self, the two approaches share a common aim. Both Derrida and
Foucault argue that the free, self-governing self is in fact constituted in and through facing the
basic problem of ethics (in Derrida’s case, responsibility to the other and in Foucault’s case the
care of oneself); that is, insofar as one constitutes oneself as an ethical subject. Consequently,
rather than try to present ethics as a theoretical response to the question, “what should I do” or
“how should I live”, Derrida and Foucault insist on the urgency of the question itself. It is only
through the dual questioning of myself in the face of my responsibilities to others and my
relationship to myself that I first genuinely assume the stance of a self-governing self.
Confronting the problem of ethics would thus be the constitutive activity of a free, selfgoverning self and central to the life of a liberal democracy.
Catherine McKeen (4E)
Political Agreement in Plato’s Republic
Michael Merry (9A)
Segregation and Possibility of Civic Virtue
Virtue refers to dispositions, habits and actions whose excellence promotes individual and
collective well-being. But civic virtue arguably is challenged, compromised and possibly
undermined when societies are deeply segregated along social, economic and cultural lines.
Indeed, some hold the view that such segregation militates against the possibility of civic virtue
by undermining the political trust necessary for binding fellow citizenships together and working
toward a common civic project. The dilemma, then, is that we live in societies in which the fruits
of civic virtue appear too meagre to surmount segregation.
After examining the harmful effects of some forms of segregation, I set out to defend the
following prima facie argument, viz., civic virtue is not dependent on integration, it need not
reduce to political virtue, nor must it conform to liberal models of public deliberation which
ignore the presence of counter publics. I aim to demonstrate that civic virtue can and does take
place under conditions of involuntary segregation, but that voluntary separation – as a response
to segregation – is a more effective way to facilitate it. In short, contrary to certain liberal ideals,
I will show that integrated settings are not the only fertile ground on which the harvest of civic
virtue depends.
My argument unfolds as follows. I first examine the notion of civic virtue before turning my
attention to the phenomenon of segregation. While segregation and disadvantage commonly
coexist, spatial concentrations, particularly when there is a strong voluntary aspect present, make
other forms of civic virtue possible. Voluntary forms of separation in particular often aid in
fostering civic virtue. Accordingly, so long as separation provides the conditions necessary for
the promotion of civic virtue, integration is not an irreducible good. I further argue that while
civic virtue typically begins with the local, this need not limit one’s capacity to think beyond the
local. In the second half of the paper I respond to specific challenges to my argument. These are:
ethnocentrism, deliberation and stratification. Each in its own way holds that segregation of any
sort is undesirable and that voluntary separation in particular is wrong-headed.
Paul Morrow (5C)
Varieties of Norm Transformation in Transitional Justice
In her 2000 book Transitional Justice Ruti Teitel introduces the notion of ‘normative
shifts’ in order to capture a distinctive feature of liberalizing political transitions. Such shifts, she
claims, affect particularly “the principles underlying and legitimating the exercise of state
power” (Teitel 2000, 213). Despite the proliferation of publications on transitional justice over
the ensuing decade, Teitel’s book remains a touchstone for both critics and proponents of this
interdisciplinary research program (Hinton 2010, Bell 2009, Dyzenhaus 2003). Recently, Derk
Venema has called for the modification of the analytic frameworks employed by Teitel and other
leading scholars of transitional justice, arguing that these frameworks should be expanded in
order to include notions of justice employed in non-liberal, and particularly anti-liberal, political
transitions (Venema 2012). In order to reach this expanded framework, Venema suggests that
scholars of transitional justice should set aside their normative political commitments, such as
characteristically liberal commitments to the equality of persons and the importance of
democratic procedures. By doing so, he contends, scholars will be better able to appreciate the
great variety of normative shifts that can and do occur during political transitions. While I agree
with Venema that Teitel’s notion of normative shifts should be expanded to countenance the
kinds of shifts that occur in non-liberal political transitions, I argue that both Teitel and Venema
fail to address a number of important meta-normative questions which must be answered if the
notion of normative shifts is to be a useful tool for making sense of either liberalizing or nonliberal political transitions. In particular, I demonstrate the importance of distinguishing between
different kinds of norms that may be rejected, restored, or otherwise altered during political
transitions. I focus on three main categories of norms: legal norms, moral norms, and social
norms. After providing evidence for the claim that these different kinds of norms are commonly
conflated within the various branches of the transitional justice literature, I draw on recent work
by Cristina Bicchieri, Nicholas Southwood, and others in order to highlight different ways in
which these three categories of norms can be distinguished and different proposals for
understanding their interrelations (Bicchieri 2006, Southwood 2010; 2011). I conclude by
drawing on the existing social scientific literature on transitions and transitional justice to
provide examples of transformations to each of these particular kinds of norms during actual
historical liberal and non-liberal political transitions.
Melissa Mosko (2B)
Democracy, Deliberation and the (so called) War on Women
Seyla Benhabib has argued that claims to political legitimacy are made on the basis of “free and
unconstrained public deliberation of all about matters of common concern,” (p.68, “Toward a
Deliberative Model of Democratic Legitimacy,” in Democracy and Difference: Contesting the
Boundaries of the Political, ed. Benhabib). Granting that such free and unconstrained
deliberation is ideal, Behnabib admits that the closer our democratic deliberation comes to this
ideal, the more legitimate the policies and procedures will be that result from such deliberation.
Drawing on recent high-profile debates concerning women’s health and related issues (the
renewal of the Violence Against Women Act, the recent federal mandate for no-cost hormonal
birth control coverage by employers and the defunding of Planned Parenthood), I argue that
public debate has undermined the possibility of democratic deliberation, that is, public debate
that passes itself off as democratic deliberation has undermined the very conditions for
democratic deliberation to occur. Benhabib argues that democratic deliberation serves multiple
functions: one, it creates knowledge and informs citizens, two, it encourages the expression and
revision of values and interests, and three, it encourages public articulation and criticism of
reasons and conclusions. Benhabib is sensitive to the fact that at the level of the institutions that
promote and house deliberation, there must be maintained and encouraged “multiple,
anonymous, heterogeneous network(s) of many publics and public conversations,” (pg. 87). I
argue that such an institutional ideal is compromised not only by actual mediums of public
debate, but also by the political disenfranchisement of certain groups within the public. In short,
because women and women’s interests are devalued and underrepresented politically, women’s
interests and women’s voices cannot break through the institutional barriers to deliberation that
such a model would require. Furthermore, and as is forewarned by Benhabib, public discourse
about women’s health and related issues has come at the cost of collective identity and interests,
even in a very weak sense. Women’s interests, and women themselves, have been pitted against
national and economic interest, the place of women in society has been called into question, and
women along with their interests are accused of further catalyzing increased political
polarization. In making these arguments, I draw on feminist critiques of deliberative democracy
and participation, those offered by Benhabib herself as well as by Iris Marion Young. These
arguments ultimately challenge the legitimacy of deliberation about the interests of political
disenfranchised groups.
Gordon Mower (10E)
Confucianism and Civic Virtue
This paper argues that understanding within the western tradition of civic virtue can be
supplemented in important ways by giving attention to the same tradition as it developed in
classical Chinese philosophy.
The western tradition of civic virtue originates in the context of the small city-state
political dynamics of Athens and Florence. As a result of this developmental context, the
traditional civic virtues themselves are geared to the ends associated with small states. Since the
smaller state is often under military threat, there was an emphasis on martial virtues. As western
states have grown increasingly larger, the traditional civic virtues have, to some extent become
antiquated. That has left philosophers scrambling to determine which personal characteristics are
necessary for the perpetuation of a modern industrialized state holding a commitment to the wellbeing of the body-politic. The one feature of the modern state that has figured predominantly in
the discussion of civic virtue has been the democratic element, and this feature too has its origins
in small state dynamic. This means that the discussion in civic theory has been dominated by talk
of participatory and public spirited virtues that hearken back to the small state dynamics out of
which the western civic tradition was born.
Considerable recent attention has been given to a possible relation between Confucianism
and democracy. While this may fit with the current concern in western civic theory for
participatory virtues, the general philosophical context of classical China really gave no space to
a philosophy of democracy. I will argue that the possible contribution of Confucianism to civic
theory lies elsewhere. The various strands of classical Chinese thought shared commitments to
large state political dynamics, including a realistic appraisal of the role of bureaucracy The idea
shared by the Confucians and the legalists is that a large state is perpetuated by its ministries, and
we might think this holds true in large modern democratic states as well. Not only, however, are
large state dynamics associated with a diminished participation, it is also noted that the largeness
of state leads to a sense of citizen alienation. The Confucians maintained a civic theory that tied
civic virtues in the people with their own well-being and with the well-being of the state. The
civic virtues necessary for a large state, then, including competence and humanity, are those
associated more with the bureaucracy, than with democracy, of making the bureaucracy function
properly while at the same time helping citizens to feel at home in a large state. The suggestions
here is that civic theory in the modern world can be advanced by learning from the classical
Chinese civic theorists what civic virtues they associated with large state dynamics while
simultaneously maintaining the western commitment to democratic ideals.
Steve Nathanson (4C)
Conceptual Poverty as a Cause of Political Polarization in the United States
In this paper, I suggest that the political disagreements in the United States about the role that
government should or (should not) play in the economy are exacerbated by the impoverished set
of concepts that are available for distinguishing different types of economic/political systems. I
then describe a richer set of concepts that could improve political debate and that, if widely
diffused, might help to diminish the intensely polarized divisions in U.S. politics. A richer set of
concepts would show that we do not face an either/or choice between capitalism and socialism
but instead have a spectrum of many different, less extreme options.
The role of different philosophical views in blocking government action on the economy
was cited by President Obama in his first news conference in February 2009. Referring to those
who opposed his proposals for government action in the wake of the economic crisis, President
Obama noted that “You have some people, very sincere, who philosophically just think the
government has no business interfering in the marketplace.” A second indicator of both the
philosophical basis of the opposition and the poverty of our conceptual scheme for thinking
about these issues is the way that President Obama’s opponents describe his views. He is seen as
a socialist who wants to undermine the capitalist, free market system in the United States. One of
several recent books that use this language is called Radical-in-Chief: Barack Obama and the
Untold Story of American Socialism.
The labeling of President Obama as a socialist rests on a simplistic conceptual scheme
that recognizes only two possibilities: capitalism and socialism. Since these are widely separated
views, any debate on these issues will necessarily be sharply polarized. One striking omission
from this conceptualization is the welfare state. Even though the current U.S. system is a welfare
state rather than a pure form of capitalism or socialism, the concept of a welfare state plays little
role in public debate. Including it would at least create three options rather than two and, as a
middle position, could slightly decrease polarization.
Even this three-way conceptualization is rather crude. It fails to capture the fact that there
is a spectrum of many possible political/economic systems (and corresponding views). I will
briefly describe a sample of different types of capitalist systems and different types of welfare
state. While I won’t evaluate these systems in this paper, I think a richer set of concepts would
help us to do so. Rather than being faced with an either/or choice between capitalism and
socialism, if we had a richer set of concepts that highlighted a spectrum of possible relations
between government and the economy rather than an either/or all or nothing choice, political
debates might be less polarized and more productive.
Mark Navin (3D)
The Diversity of Privilege
In recent decades, philosophers and social scientists have encouraged people to think about
oppression in terms of the benefits that accrue to members of oppressor groups. They have
argued that attention should be paid to the topic of ‘privilege’, where a privilege is an (apparent)
good that is generally possessed by members of oppressor groups, but not generally possessed by
members of oppressed groups. For example R.W. Connell claims that we should think of sexism
as the source of a “masculinity dividend,” and David Wellman suggests that we should think of
racism a “system of advantage based on race.”
Focusing on ‘privilege’ is supposed to yield epistemic and moral goods. It is supposed to reveal
ways in which members of oppressor groups participate in oppression and in which they benefit
from it, even when they are not motivated by bigotry or prejudice. Focusing on privilege is
supposed to highlight potential targets for awareness-raising and activism, and it is supposed to
motivate members of oppressor groups to engage in social struggles against privilege (and,
thereby, against oppression).
In this paper, I take for granted these general claims about the usefulness of the concept of
‘privilege’. However, I argue that, in order to fulfill its promise, we need to further specify and
distinguish particular forms of privilege. Building on the work of Peggy McIntosh, who
distinguished between ‘positive’ and ‘negative’ forms of privilege, I aim to develop a ‘taxonomy
of privilege’. I introduce four categories of privilege, and I argue that morality and justice may
obligate members of oppressor groups to respond differently to privileges from different
categories:

Vicious Permissions provide powers to commit interpersonal wrongs without appropriate
consequences. They may include the power to commit sexual harassment or to engage in
workplace racial discrimination without significant risk of retribution.

Exploitative Inequalities are different from vicious permissions, because it is not
necessarily immoral to use the powers this sort of privilege provides. However, like
vicious permissions, no one should possess the powers that exploitative inequalities make
possible. They may include a male student’s power to command more of his teacher’s
attention than his female fellow students can command.

Non-universal Rights are like exploitative inequalities (and different from vicious
permissions) because it is not immoral to use the powers they provide. However, they are
different from exploitative inequalities because they are not intrinsically unjust. Instead,
these privileges ought to be possessed by all. They include the ability to go shopping
without being followed and the ability to be open about one’s sexuality without fear of
losing one’s job.
Suspicious Holdings are neither intrinsically unjust nor immoral to use. Furthermore, they are not
universal entitlements. However, the fact that these goods are unequally distributed may make
them the target of further inquiry. They may include the ability to turn on the television and see
members of my race widely represented, or to have my potential sexual partners expect my
genitals to look roughly similar to the way they do.
Clara Nisley (3B)
Concerns with Associative Political Obligations
Associative theories of political obligations argue that duties to obey the law are best
explained by membership in political societies. The most sophisticated account for this type of
obligation is given by John Horton. Horton’s account suggests that when an association
instantiates some particular value for people to identify with, they can become obligated to
participate and support their political society. The moral obligations one has arise from reliance
on the institute’s values. Horton’s account is expressed in two arguments. The Hobbesian
argument states that the relationship between individuals and their polities relies on the trust the
individuals have to their polities that enable polities to impose their coercive power. The ability
to impose its coercive power on its members is the polity’s generic good. The associative
argument claims that people stand in a special relationship to their polities, which give rise to
moral bonds. The argument is that political obligations arise through cultural identity that
members of society have to their particular polity. As members of a political community, we
find ourselves shaped by our society, through which we share a common moral bond. The
associative argument connects our association to polities with our association to our families.
Our common moral bonds, which comes about from our sense of identity entails that we
acknowledge that we have an obligation to our families as well as to obey the laws of our
polities.
In this paper, I raise two difficulties for the associative argument. The issues I raise are
with the subjective view of membership. It is the subjectivity of attitudes and moral sentiments,
which binds one to her particular family and polity. However, with membership into a family,
one can repudiate her identity, yet, she may continue to be morally obligated to her family. This
is unlike membership into a polity. One can give up her citizenship to the United States, and her
membership to the United States government changes, along with her moral obligations.
Moreover, the associative theory does not answer the question of conflicting membership. I can
freely choose to be a member of a group that is in conflict with my political membership. The
obligations I have as a member of a particular social, religious group may be stronger than my
obligations to my polity. Therefore, the moral obligation to obey the laws of my polity may be
in conflict with the moral obligations I have to another group.
John Ifeanyi Okpala (6D)
Education and Politics in Africa: The Imperative of Critical Pedagogy
Education is essentially a political process whose basic aim is the production of a democratic
egalitarian society. It is for this reason that an educated subject would usually be described as
disciplined, cultivated, noble of character etc. Societies in ancient Greece and during the
medieval as well as through the modern period had deep and fervent regard for educated citizens.
It is perhaps due to the essential democratic culture that education gives the task of managing
democracy as leaders.12
In our time, the democratic aim of education has been obstructed by the marginalization of social
groups as promoted most especially by racism, which operates as cultural handicaps, and sexism
that operates as culturally viewed biological inadequacies. It is within this perspective that one
could design the relevance of a critical pedagogy.
Critical education would assume the role of facilitating a discursive and experiential
understanding of life forces in the society such that, within such a framework, it would be
possible to provide, for the citizens, a critical assessment of those categories other than those
erected by the official culture. In this sense, critical education involves the articulation of
strategic life models and interpersonal rapport schedules within a context animated by culturally
diverse alternative viewpoints. It is perhaps in this regard that Giroux had intended the returns of
multicultural educational practice. 13
The value of critical pedagogy of democratic public life designs itself the more one understand
the intrinsic relation between politics, ethics and democracy. In itself, democracy is a project of
possibilities, which unfold as dynamics of freedom and human dignity, while education strictly
refers to an intimate historical engagement with the problems and possibilities of the subjects. It
is within this engagement that education becomes a means for the expansion of human
potentials. In this light, it becomes possible to interrogate the status of education within African
life-worlds in so far as education should be expected to impact on the political life of the citizens.
Such interrogation becomes even fundamental in the face of the current democratic openings in
most African States.
This presentation undertakes to render explicit the fundamental ideas of critical
pedagogy/education with the intent to demonstrate its value to democratic public life in Africa.
This is done at the background of the conviction that the ideal of education is not only the
production of knowledge but more importantly the production of public subjects. It is in this
context of this conviction that it would become imperative to define and establish the
interconnections between education and democratic requirements in Africa.
The goal of this study is to indicate that education should serve the provision of the effective
framework for the articulation of the appropriate public sphere of citizens who would be capable
of exercising power over their political, economic and cultural lives as well as over the relevant
conditions of knowledge production and acquisition. This implies the creation of concretely
lived experience of empowerment for the significant majority.
12
Plato, The Republic: Translated by A.C. Miller. (New York: Random House, 1978), P. 167 - 179
Giroux, H.A., Postmodernism, Feminism and Cultural Politics. (Albany: State University of New York Press,
1991), p.46
13
Jessica Otto (7A)
Theorizing through the Skin: Merleau-Ponty and Fanon
“I am overdetermined from without. I am the slave not of the idea that others have of me but of
my own appearance” (Fanon, 1952, p. 116). When Frantz Fanon wrote these words he might
have had Merleau-Ponty's Phenomenology of Perception in mind. In Black Skins, White Masks
Fanon argues that the universal ontology prescribed by Merleau-Ponty14 does not capture the
lived, embodied experience of being black. Fanon draws a parallel of being black to being
Jewish, however, he notes that for a Jewish person whose appearance is immediately like that of
her/his Aryan oppressor, s/he can conceal, for at least a moment, her/his Jewishness because
her/his Jewishness is but a collection of objective facts about her/him; that is, s/he is from
Warsaw, from the ghetto or that her/his name is Goldstein. The Jew appears to white others
immediately as they are, another white person, in other words, a human. “Fanon concludes that
for a black person there is no such possibility in an antiblack world because a black person is
immediately caught out there by white eyes in the visual field of human perception as either
hypervisible or invisible...” (Manhendran, 2007, p. 193). It is precisely this issue of racial
embodiment that I wish to explore in this paper.
In this paper I will explore Fanon's critique of Merleau-Ponty's phenomenology focusing
on the works of Dilan Manhendran and Linda Alcoff. Manhendran argues that Merleau-Ponty's
corporeal schema can, and does, account for the historic-racial and racial-epidermal schemata
that Fanon articulates throughout Black Skins, White Masks. Alcoff (2006) argues that “the
visible is not merely an epiphenomenon of culture, and thus precisely lies its value for
racialization” (p. 192). In addition to explicating the tension between Fanon and Merleau-Ponty,
I will also advance the argument that Fanon may have overlooked some key areas of MerleauPonty's works which specifically address the issues of race and racism thus resulting in an
erroneous appropriation and critique of Merleau-Ponty's phenomenology. Finally, I will explore
the argument advanced by Sara Ahmed in which she believes that what Merleau-Ponty writes
about human sexuality can be of use in discussing how race is played out in everyday
orientations.
14
Fanon's critique is a critique of all Western phenomenology because he believes that it is based on the
white European man and as such cannot account for the lived experience of the black individual. While Fanon never
cites or names Merleau-Ponty specifically, it his phenomenology that Fanon focuses on due to the importance of the
body within Merleau-Ponty's phenomenological theory.
Richard Oxenberg (1B)
Philosopher Kings and the Kingdom of Ends: On the Need for a Moral Civic Pedagogy
“If a nation expects to be ignorant and free, in a state of civilization, it expects what
never was and never will be.”
(Thomas Jefferson, 1816)
The Athenian statesman Pericles makes one of the first, and most eloquent, statements
concerning the meaning of democracy in his funeral oration of 430 B.C.E.:
Our constitution is called a democracy because power is in the hands not of a minority
but of the whole people. When it is a question of settling private disputes, everyone is
equal before the law; when it is a question of putting one person before another in
positions of public responsibility, what counts is. . . the actual ability which the man
possesses. . . Taking everything together then. . . I declare that in my opinion each single
one of our citizens, in all the manifold aspects of life, is able to show himself the rightful
lord and owner of his own person.
Eloquent as this statement is, it conceals a paradox: How is it possible for each citizen to be “lord
and owner of his own person” while power is vested in the hands of “the whole people”? Who
exactly is ‘the whole people’? In what possible sense can sovereignty of ‘the whole people’ and
sovereignty of the individual be thought to coincide?
My paper will explore two responses to this paradox that may appear, on the surface, at odds, but
that, I will argue, are actually complementary: Plato’s conception of the Philosopher-King in the
Republic and Kant’s conception of the Kingdom of Ends in the Groundwork. My thesis is that in
order for democracy to function it must inculcate in each of its citizens something of the selftranscending moral and intellectual virtues of Plato’s Philosopher-King, who identifies his own
personal good with the universal good. Only thereby can Kant’s ideal of the ‘Kingdom of Ends,’
in which each citizen functions as both sovereign and subject through the categorical imperative,
be realized.
The alternative to this, as Plato well understood, is a society of appetitively driven individuals
competing with one another for personal power, wealth, and glory, in which those most skillful
at the arts of grasping will eventually dominate over everyone else. In this way, as Plato foresaw,
democracy degenerates into tyranny.
What this implies is that a robust program of moral and civic education is a requisite of a healthy
democracy. Democracy requires the cultivation of ‘democratic citizens,’ willing and able to
concern themselves with the good of the whole. But this raises another problem: By what right
can a secular state, committed to moral and religious freedom, mandate the cultivation of a
particular set of moral principles and virtues? My paper will attempt to address this question, as
well as sketch out the rudiments of the moral-civic education I believe necessary.
Anne Ozar (2A)
Civic Distrust and Fear of the So-called ‘Free Rider’
The collective action and citizen participation needed to successfully address many of the
large scale social challenges we currently face, such as the environmental crisis, requires greater
civic trust than our present social and political dealings with one another exhibit. Following
Karen Jones, Carloyn McLeod, and others, I take trust to refer to an affective attitude of
optimism about the motivations and competence of others in the domain over which that trust
extends. By civic trust, then, I have in mind such an attitude of optimism not only about the
competence and motivations of government officials — which would entail, at a minimum, that
they are likely to be motivated by the norms of moral integrity appropriate to public office — but
also, and more importantly for my purposes, a mutually shared optimism on the part of citizens
about the likelihood that other citizens will be motivated by the norms of moral integrity
characteristic of citizenship.
The social, political, and economic obstacles that stand in the way of cultivating greater
civic trust (along with its necessary correlate, civic trustworthiness) are numerous. The
possibility of the second form of civic trust described above, for example, requires at least a
minimally shared conception of the purpose of citizenship and the values it promotes. Existing
social and economic inequalities present serious challenges to such a shared sense across the
spectrum of citizenship. Moreover, as necessary as it is, mere commonality about the nature and
norms of citizenship is not a sufficient condition for civic trust to be justified. Indeed, certain
culturally prominent conceptions of the purpose of citizenship, even if initially shared among
citizens, are essentially antithetical to the establishment of justified civic trust. In this paper, I
shall focus on the dangers of one such conception, namely, that the purpose and value of citizens
lies in their capacity for economic production.
More specifically, my analysis will center on what I take to be an increasing and
unhealthy obsession with so-called “free-riders.” The frequent use of the term “free-rider” as a
political weapon not only reflects our current level of civic distrust, but serves to further cultivate
it by blocking any attempt to repair trust through shared experience and invitations for
reconceptualization. The moral and social force the idea of the “free-rider” has come to represent
in political discourse in the United States presupposes a particularly dangerous conception of our
role and status as citizens. Moreover, it serves to exclude as untrustworthy the first-person
experience and input of anyone who, simply by virtue of finding themselves in need of
assistance, is so labeled. One labeled as a “free-rider” is thereby also labeled as a defector, as no
longer part of the social contract, and perhaps most problematically, as untrustworthy. As a
result, any appeal to the first-person experience necessary to shed light on the limits of such a
conception of the purpose and value of citizenship or on the way it prevents civic trust will be
rejected in advance as lacking credibility.
Bill Pamerleau (4C)
Why Everyone Thinks They’re Right: A Heideggerian Analysis of Political Impasse
Everyone is aware of how virulent the political climate has become in the past few years. When
we view how partisans defend their positions, it’s clear that political divisions are not merely due
to differences in strategies or priorities but to more fundamental differences in the way the world
works. They are differences about what is true. In confronting someone of opposing political
alignment, our natural response is to insist that our own view is true while our opponent’s is
false. Sometimes it does boil down to facts, and pointing out error is appropriate. But often, as
in the case of ideology, the “facts” support multiple interpretations: it might be quite possible,
especially at levels of high abstraction, where political ideology is always rooted, that multiple
and competing interpretive accounts are prima facie plausible. Why can’t we all except this,
agree to disagree, and get on with finding what common ground we can?
In fact, the very nature of how we view “the truth” is such that most of the time we are inclined
not to view it in this contingent manner. At least, that’s how Heidegger understands us. By
examining Heidegger’s notion of truth (or better, “unconcealment”) as it is developed both in
Being and Time and in later essays such as “On the Essence of Truth,” my intent in this paper is
to provide a phenomenological account of how we come to see what is true about the world. The
very nature of how we reveal particular facts and events simultaneously conceals other
interpretations. Moreover, the very means of revealing a truth makes it difficult to notice that it
is our act of revealing it which makes it true in the first place. That is, our natural tendency is to
be in “error” about the very fact that it is through us that particular things obtain their character.
So, on the one hand we are by nature inclined to latch onto a view of what is true and thereby
oppose competing views. On the other hand we tend to be in error about the contingency of that
truth and the role we play in revealing it.
Ideological beliefs, like those found in politics and religion, certainly affect the way we are
“attuned” to the world, as Heidegger would say. The fact that very different ideological
positions can support the same empirical encounters means that we should expect different
claims about what is true; but if Heidegger is right, it is our very all-too-human nature to take
that truth for granted and remain oblivious to our complicity in making it true. This allows us to
see how much of the intractability of recent political differences may be due to the human
condition. We come by it naturally. However, Heidegger’s notion of authenticity, whereby we
do acknowledge the role we play in revealing what we find true, suggests a way forward.
Serena Parekh (2C)
Democracy for Refugees
When philosophers discuss refugees, they tend to focus on a single question: namely, what
ethical obligations, if any, do wealthy Western countries have to refugees? Many, following
Michael Walzer, have argued that democratic societies have a right to limit membership because
of the importance of community to one’s identity. Others, following people like Joseph Carens,
argue that it is not morally justifiable to turn refugees away if we are committed to universal
moral equality. While there is no consensus on this issue, one thing that is agreed upon is the
terms of the debate: the question “do we have an obligation to let in refugees?” is the central
ethical question.
I argue in this paper that the way the debate around our obligations to refugees is framed
obscures a number of important features of contemporary global displacement, and, as such,
hinders our ethical analysis. In particular, what is obscured by this discussion is the reality of the
situation of the forcibly displaced around the globe. The vast majority of the almost 50 million
people who aredisplaced from their homes spend decades, sometimes generations, in some form
of camp or other space of containment; they are almost always outside the law of their host
country; and their rights – especially the right to life – is determined almost entirely by
humanitarian organizations. Though this has been the reality of life for the majority of the
forcibly displaced for several decades, philosophers have failed to theorize this situation and
bring ethical norms to bear on it.
Once the reality of forced displacement becomes clear, we will see that new ethical questions are
raised. The ethical question is not “how many refugees are we obliged to take in” but rather, how
can we ethically “manage” people who are unwanted by any state? That is, we need to move
beyond whether democracies are obliged to take in refugees, to a discussion of ethical
responsibility for this given reality: 50 million forcibly displaced people who live more or less
permanently in camps outside their homelands who are, de--facto, managed by
humanitarianorganizations.
I will argue that our obligations are both to support the host states in developing countries where
the vast majority of the displaced live, and to advocate for change in how the displaced are
treated. In particular, long--term displaced people should have a right to democratic structures
within their camps. Using the work of Hannah Arendt, I argue that what is needed by refugees
who are in semi-- permanent refugee camps is democracy, the opportunity to speak and be listed
to, and to be part of self--determining community, however limited. In so doing, I hope to show
that ethical debate over refugees may be reframed and broadened.
Jessica Payson (5D)
Shared Responsibility for Justice: Distancing Shared Agency from Causal Models of
Responsibility
Responsibility for structural justice is necessarily a shared responsibility. Structural
injustices are only brought about through the concerted actions of millions of individuals;
likewise, structural justice can only be achieved through a great many individuals’ changes in
awareness and routines. The fact of shared responsibility for justice, however, makes it difficult
to talk about the content of any given individual responsibility. Given that no particular
individual is to blame for structural injustices and that no individual alone can achieve
substantive structural change, what must an individual agent do in order to take responsibility for
justice? Drawing from literature that addresses the sort of shared responsibility that derives from
shared agency, I claim that responsibility for structural justice is misrepresented in a “causal”
model of responsibility, and resembles more closely a “role-based” responsibility. What
individuals should do, in their efforts towards justice, is not determined by what they have done
in the past, nor by what they could empirically in the future bring about; rather, it depends upon
normative expectations associated with agents’ roles in structural processes. I claim also,
however, that the shared-responsibility-from-shared-agency literature ultimately still follows too
much a causal model and the ability to “track” isolated agents’ particular contributions towards
an immediately achievable outcome. As such, the literature is not applicable to the large-scale,
complicated shared agency involved in social justice movements. I argue that in order to apply a
broadly “role-based” model of responsibility to shared efforts towards structural justice, “roles”
should be understood to refer not necessarily to causally significant agents within established
procedures but instead to agents structurally invested with the ability to respond to injustice,
given their particular social positioning and resources accorded that positioning. I conclude with
an implication of this account of responsibility for suggestions found in some liberal accounts of
structural injustice (such as Thomas Pogge’s) that individuals can meet their responsibilities for
justice through monetary donations or taxes.
Miguel Paz (7B)
The Democratic Dilemma of the Legitimacy of Violence in a Divided Society: a Latin
American Approach based on the ‘Ethics of Liberation’ and its Shortcomings
The legitimacy of the use of violence to solve social problems is one of the most classical topics
that Social Philosophy has tried for centuries to tackle with. One of the most recent approaches
to this matter (and one of the most successful in present-day Latin America) is the so-called
“Ethics of Liberation” designed by Enrique Dussel (who chose such a name in a clear attempt of
establishing a clear reminiscence of the famed “Theology of Liberation”, with which it
undoubtedly bears significant resemblances). The Ethics of Liberation pleads for three criteria
that every social movement ought to fulfill if it wants to use violence in a legitimate way.
The first of those criteria is the “formal criterion”, and it essentially takes after the ideal dialogue
situation endorsed by Karl-Otto Apel and Jürgen Habermas in their respective social
philosophies. Hence, according to this criterion, a social movement makes a legitimate use of
violence in case it is possible to defend such a use at a fair argumentation that involves all the
parts concerned.
The second criterion required by Dussel’s Ethics of Liberation for a legitimate social use of
violence is the material criterion. It is defined as the upshot of an acceptable welfare for all
individuals. In situations where a society fails to bestow a minimum level of happiness for its
members, it might be legitimate for those members to use violence in order to achieve it, in case
that is the most available means to do so.
Finally, the third point required by the Ethics of Liberation is the feasibility criterion. It grants
legitimacy to a revolution, revolt or any other social use of violence if and only if it has a
reasonable possibility of succeeding in its goals. Utopian or not deeply thought proposals for
social change are thus not legitimate according to this view.
After briefly exposing Dussel’s defense of these ideas, our paper embraces the opposite view that
each of these three criteria is usually uncongenial to violence. Dussel thus gets involved in
multiple contradictions as he aims to justify the social use of violence relying upon them.
According to our view, revolutionary violence is alien to an “ideal dialogue situation”, rarely
increases the happiness of a divided society and becomes less and less feasible in today’s world.
Other social uses of violence imply similar problems if we want (as Dussel does) to justify them
trusting on the above cited criteria. The Ethics of Liberations looks as a failed attempt, thus, to
solve the dilemma of when, where and how to accept the use of violence in our societies.
Tove Petersen (9B)
Simone de Beauvoir’s Ethics of Freedom and Contemporary Society
The French philosopher Simone de Beauvoir (1908–1986) is most renowned for her
groundbreaking book The Second Sex (1949), where she exposes and analyzes the oppression of
women. This philosophical work has had major impact on how we organize, as well as how we
conceptualize the relations between men and women in Western societies. Less well known is
her ethics of freedom, developed in her earlier essays on moral philosophy, namely Phyrrhus and
Cineas (1944) and The Ethics of Ambiguity (1947). Beauvoir’s ethics serves as the normative
foundation of The Second Sex. It provides the philosophical arguments for why discrimination
and objectification are wrong, arguments that propelled several changes affecting women’s
situation. In this presentation, I will argue that the social and political potential of Beauvoir’s
ethics goes beyond defying gender oppression. My claim is that her ethic has validity across
different forms of oppression and segments of society, and may contribute substantively with
regard to our understanding of dilemmas and challenges in contemporary societies.
The main thesis of Beauvoir's ethics is that each individual must assume moral
responsibility for her own freedom, and for the freedom of others. Beauvoir's ethics is a personal
ethics with political consequences. Politically, her view on freedom does not lead towards
liberalism or liberertarianism. Rather, it encourages us to fight the oppression of self, as well as
of others. To live ethically, is to act against oppression and to work for liberation. This holds true
whether oppression is caused by coercion, ignorance, poverty or bad faith, and whether it is
based on gender, ethnicity, nationality, sexual orientation or socio-economic position: Having
one’s freedom unjustifiably restricted, is morally reprehensible.
This is still a valid imperative, not at all a species of outdated idealism. The political
brunt of Beauvoir’s ethics is to avoid the comfort of indifference, and to take action to alleviate
the oppression of others. Her focus on the necessity of finding one’s own way and making
independent choices remains highly relevant, whether one lives in a totalitarian, undemocratic
regime or a neo-liberalist, postmodern part of the world. But most importantly, Beauvoir’s ethics
show us the manner in which our own freedom is connected with the freedom of others, and that
the freedom to choose one’s own way of life must extend to all, and not be reserved for the
privileged few.
Andrea Pitts (6A)
A Care Ethics of Immigration: Its Promises and Limitations
While many feminist care ethicists have extended the scope of their respective theories to
address issues pertaining to military intervention, just warfare, economic globalization, and
universal human rights, few theorists have directly approached the topic of immigration from a
care perspective.15 This appears as an odd lacuna within the philosophical and political literature
on care. One would think that a care perspective on the status and treatment of unauthorized
immigrants would be a fruitful avenue to explore as an alternative or complement to justicerelated concerns within this area of inquiry. For example, a care theorist could choose to focus on
how personal and social relationships, mutual dependencies, shared responsibilities, or affective
dimensions of multiculturalism influence or ought to influence the current debates on
unauthorized immigration. However, surprisingly, such an approach has not yet taken hold in the
literature. Given this gap in the current writings on immigration and care ethics, I hope to begin
to explore the relationship between these two discourses.
In this paper, I ask what a care perspective has to offer philosophers and political
theorists as a framework for understanding the ethics of immigrant rights and immigration
policy. To explore this question, I first examine Joseph Carens’s writings on the rights of
unauthorized immigrants to see whether taking a care perspective might be a useful tool within
this contemporary discussion. Then, in the second half of the paper, I take a brief look at two
approaches within the care ethics literature, that of Daniel Engster and that of Eva Kittay, to
examine some potential limitations in their views that pertain to the issue of immigrant rights and
immigration policy. I conclude that, despite these limitations, a critical ethics of care can provide
helpful resources for thinking through the ethics of immigration and immigrant rights.
15
See, for example, Held 2006, Tronto 1993, Robinson 1999, Engster, 2007, Gould 2004, and Sevenhuijsen 1998 on
the former topics. The only article I have been able to locate that explicitly addresses immigration and care ethics is
Baier 1995, which I address in the paper.
Gail Presbey (6D)
Challenges of Civic Society in Africa: Philosophical and Novelistic Explorations
Back in 1976, Prof. H. Odera Oruka of University of Nairobi (widely recognized as one of the
pioneering figures in contemporary African philosophy, d. 1995) had a sabbatical, and he spent it
visiting Sweden, England, and Nigeria. He wrote a book length, semi-autobiographical novel
(never published) about his experiences, which are filled with wry remarks and insightful
comments about bureaucratic systems gone awry. His book is an angry exposé of malfunctioning
African systems, and yet the “really existing” social democracy of Sweden was considered by
him to be proof that African societies as well could organize themselves in a humane and
communitarian way. The influence of his professor and mentor from Uppsala University,
Ingemar Hedenius, impressed upon Oruka the importance of addressing people’s physical needs
while respecting their freedom and rights. This little known novelistic work of Oruka’s will be
related to his philosophical essays on social ethics to help fill out our understanding of both his
criticisms of corrupt African systems as well as his proposed alternative governance for
independent African countries. A later part of the paper will connect Oruka’s insights of the
1970’s to his later writings in the 1990’s and the current problems that continue to plague Kenya.
Maura Priest (10C)
Democracies and the Necessity of Dogmatism: A Plural-Subject Approach
I argue for an account of Democracy in terms of a plural-subject conception of collective
belief, with particular focus on political parties. According to the plural subject account, if a
group G believes p it is not necessary any individual member of G to believe p. In democracies,
problems arise when a political party comes to collectively belief p, and yet not all group
members individually believe p. Members are thus dissatisfied with a belief of which they
collectively but not personally assented. Nonetheless, each is beholden to the group belief.
Understanding partisan positions in terms of collective belief explains three important
phenomena: (1) severe criticism of party members that speak against the party line; (2) the
prevalence of (1), despite many party members admitting that they are not personally committed
to the party line in all circumstances. (3) The impasse political parties face when attempting to
compromise.
Consider the United States Republican Party. Many would say that the Republican Party
is committed to the following principle: “Do not raise taxes, not even on the wealthy.” I posit
that the commitment to this principle is best explained in terms of collective belief: members of
the Republican Party jointly committed themselves to the belief that one should not raise taxes.
As such, they are obligated to always speak and act as if such principle is true. Failing to do so
subjects oneself to rebuke from other group members. Imagine the following conversation
between two Republican Party members, X and Y.
X: I can’t believe Candidate Z said it is okay to raise taxes in certain circumstances.
Y: But don’t you think that there are some circumstances where this may be necessary?
X: Sure. But that’s not the point. As Republicans we are committed to not raising taxes.
If Candidate Z is already wavering on this now, there is no way we can trust him to do the right
thing in office.
Two things are going on here. First, X is rebuking Candidate Z for going against the party
line. Z’s violates a collective belief of which the Republican Party is jointly committed. When Z
reneged on his obligation, his fellow party member acted on his standing to rebuke. Second, the
group member who issued the rebuke did not himself personally believe what the group
believed. But this did not change either his standing or inclination to rebuke. What matters is not
that Candidate X spoke against something that he, X, personally believed, but rather that Z
violated a commitment of which both X and Y were committed.
Understanding partisan politics in terms of collective belief explains why it is so difficult for
members of a political party to say anything contrary to traditional party views. Because such
beliefs are collective and not personal, they are not unilaterally rescindable. Until the belief is
jointly changed, the standing to criticize group members that speak or act against it remains. The
result is tightknit political parties that are hard pressed to ever compromise.
Alison Reiheld (4C)
The Limits of Civility: The Impact of the Culture Wars and a Morally Diverse Society
In a morally diverse society, disagreements are inevitable. Sometimes, they are
incommensurable. It is the perception—and sometimes the reality—of incommensurability that
underlies the Culture Wars raging in America over health care reform, contraception, abortion,
the expansion of marriage, the teaching of evolution in schools, and numerous other topics.
Culture warriors such as Andrew Brietbart and Keith Olberman, as well as related movements
and organizations such as Occupy Wall Street and Focus on the Family, often attempt to justify
behavior deemed to be uncivil. One recent example is the use of pejorative terms by Rush
Limbaugh against Georgetown University law student Sandra Fluke, an attack which she
described as “beyond the bounds of civil discourse” and which he apologized for part of as both
“sinking to their [the Liberal/Progressive] level” and an unfortunate “distraction” from his main
point about mandatory insurance coverage of birth control.
Frameworks of civility, such as that developed by P.M. Forni during his time at the Johns
Hopkins Civility Project, can provide us with both useful and justifiable guidelines for handling
our disagreements with each other. However, literature on civility often allows room for
violations of civility when the stakes are high; to require civility in all cases with no exceptions
regardless of the particulars can result in a society whose members relate to each other and to its
government in a Hobbesian state of near-perfect obedience to the sovereign or a Lockean state of
allowing the majority to hold sway except in the most extraordinary of circumstances.
Violations of civility which are sometimes argued to be permissible range from drawing a line
beyond which we need no longer be charitable in our interpretation of others’ remarks, to
allowing aggression—even revolution—in the defense of a righteous cause. Moderate forms of
aggression include name-calling and ad hominem attacks; at the extreme end we see many a
“civil war”, both in American history and globally. In the Culture War as in historical instances
of perceived righteous cause, incivility and even violence are justified as warranted violations of
accepted rules of civil behavior.
In this paper, I investigate the challenge that a morally diverse society and the Culture
Wars pose for civility, and whether the Culture Wars in particular might be exactly the sort of
circumstance under which “culture warriors” can justify incivility as warranted even by reference
to existing civility frameworks. I seek to refine the criteria for how we ought, generally, to cope
with disagreement in a morally diverse society and, specifically, for when—if ever—members of
a body politic are justified in violating some or all aspects of civility.
Walter Riker (6C)
How do Rawls’s Benevolent Absolutisms Honor Human Rights? A Defense of Rawls
In The Law of Peoples (1999), Rawls describes the principles of the foreign policy platform of a
well-ordered liberal democratic society. Rawls identifies five types of societies, each of which
presents its own foreign policy challenge. One type he identifies is the benevolent absolutism
(LP 4, 63, 92). Rawls spends little time on benevolent absolutisms, because they are not a major
concern for democracies. Commentators have asked whether Rawls should describe benevolent
absolutisms as “honoring” human rights. If not, then benevolent absolutisms deserve more
scrutiny from democracies than Rawls realizes. I defend Rawls’s position.
Rawls describes benevolent absolutisms are non-aggressive societies that honor most basic
human rights. Since they possess these characteristics, they have a right to wage war in selfdefense. Nevertheless, they are not well-ordered, since they do not give members any role in
political decision-making. This means that benevolent absolutisms do not deserve full and good
standing in the international community. Still, Rawls thinks they represent a minor problem for
democracies.
Critics argue that since members of benevolent absolutisms have no political participation rights,
the content of other rights is supplied only contingently and not as a matter of right. The
delivery of this content is not secured, but instead depends on the benevolence of the ruler. This
leaves members open to Pettit’s “domination,” i.e., susceptible to arbitrary exercises of control or
force by others (Pettit 1999; see also Shue 1996). Such domination is prevented by securing
rights through the institutionalization of political processes, as Rawls claims consultation
hierarchies secure rights in decent societies (LP 71). But this makes Rawls’s stance toward
benevolent absolutisms puzzling. They are said to honor rights, even though they do not have
political institutions that secure rights. Hence, Reidy claims, Rawls cannot mean the benevolent
absolutisms honor rights as rights (2006: 176). Or, as Voice argues, Rawls’s position may be
incoherent (2011: 179).
Roughly, this objection claims that Rawls can offer no principled distinction between benevolent
absolutisms and outlaw states that violate the rights of their own minorities. (Rawls describes
these outlaw states in LP 90n1 and 93n6). I offer two responses. First, societies without
political rules regulating individual/state interaction are not necessarily societies that do not have
any rules regulating such interaction. There may be rules, not properly categorized as political
rights, that nonetheless restrain rulers. This may distinguish benevolent absolutisms from outlaw
states.
Second, Rawls claims that political institutions like the decent consultation hierarchy provide
“the institutional basis for protecting the rights and duties of the members of a people” through
the restrictions they place on rulers (LP 71). If benevolent absolutisms lack such political
institutions, how can they honor rights? If Rawls means that the consultation hierarchy is
sufficient to secure rights through pressure it puts on rulers, then Rawls is mistaken. But this
may not be what Rawls means. The consultation hierarchy itself depends on prior recognition of
a cluster of rights. That is, it will not work to secure the interests of all if those in charge of the
consultation hierarchy do not already have some respect for others. But this implies that rights,
or at least a kind of respect for others ingredient in rights, exists prior to institutions like the
consultation hierarchy. This respect is arguably a nascent set of rights that may distinguish
benevolent absolutisms from outlaw states.
Select Bibliography.
Hart, H. L. A. 1997. The Concept of Law. (Oxford UP)
Pettit, Philip. 1999. Republicanism: A Theory of Freedom and Government. (Oxford UP)
Rawls, John. 1999. The Law of Peoples. (Harvard UP)
Reidy, David. 2006. “Political Authority and Human Rights.” In D. Reidy and R. Martin (eds.),
Rawls’s Law of Peoples: A Realistic Utopia? (Wiley-Blackwell), pp. 169-188.
Shue, Henry. 1996. Basic Rights. (Princeton UP)
Voice, Paul. 2011. Rawls Explained: From Fairness to Utopia. (Open Court)
Lisa Rivera (2D)
Three Varieties of Pride
Two types of pride are well-known to arise within political contexts. The first is national pride.
The second is group-identity pride, for example gay pride. Both of these types of pride involve
membership in a socially defined group. Group-identity pride is sometimes seen as a corrective
to the shame and humiliation inflicted by oppression. Some group members who embrace group
identity pride strategically may not experience it as a feeling. However, intentional attempts to
experience membership in an oppressed group as pride can succeed in evoking emotive pride.
Both group-identity pride and national pride have the potential to be morally neutral; neither is
hubristic or wrong by its very nature, even if versions of both can be criticized. Some may also
argue that group membership is not a legitimate reason for authentic pride. This paper adds a
third type of pride—status pride—to the picture. Status pride is interdependent of these other two
kinds of pride and underlies emotional responses toward fellow citizens, particularly when it is
threatened or wounded. Status pride is always pernicious; it arises only when its possessor
believes in his or her superiority over others within a status hierarchy. Because it involves
rejection of the fundamental equality of others, status pride is necessarily subject to moral
criticism and, often, those who feel it attempt to conceal it from others and may be self-deceived
about the cause of their feelings. Status pride dovetails with national pride because some national
pride arises out of the mistaken belief in the intrinsic superiority of one’s nation and in the
mistaken belief that this superiority also accrues to oneself with respect to others. However,
status pride does not arise primarily out of a sense of group membership even if race, gender,
sexual orientation, and class determine the status it is based upon. Further, status pride, when it is
married with national pride, is potentially threatened by group identity pride because some
critiques raised by oppressed groups question the status hierarchy and may seem to imply that
occupying a higher rung within the hierarchy is undeserved or even dishonorable. In these cases,
status pride can become wounded and the response is sometimes anger towards members of
groups that appear to challenge the secure possession of one’s social status.
Stephanie Rivera-Berruz (10B)
Inhabiting Philosophical Space: Whose Space? What Bodies?
In advancing a philosophical discussion about the topic of divided societies I seek to
consider where the discussion of philosophy as a 'society' is situated. Philosophy is a space
constituted through different mechanisms of power that constitute its dimensions as dominantly
male, white, and heterosexual. Thus, philosophy is a space whose dominant societal actors are
coded in these terms and render any identities and their discursive productions as marginal,
silent, and invisible. It will be the goal of this paper to advance an argument dedicated to
elucidating the ways in which philosophy can be understood as a space, namely a 'space of
flows' (a term I borrow from the work of Manuel Castells) that necessarily entails the
marginalization of both non-white identities and the philosophical fields concerned with those
identities, namely fields like Latin American philosophy and Caribbean philosophy.
Drawing on the works of Manuel Castells and David Harvey I first intend to launch an
investigation on how we can think about philosophy as a space. Philosophy as a practical field of
study and employment has been constructed, thus far, as one which anyone (if trained properly)
can engage in regardless of race, gender, sexuality, etc. However, the demographics of the field
at this moment seem to suggest that philosophy is simply a white male heterosexual terrain
which can only be infiltrated at the margins should one choose not to engage in theoretical
practices that necessarily call one to distance self identity from philosophical practice. I contend
that Constructing philosophy as a space will illuminate the ways in which the relationships of
power seep through and constitute a field that claims impartiality. Thus, bringing into focus the
fact that the even the space carved out by philosophy carries with it an implicit bias, determined
through mechanisms of power, that entails the perpetual sustaining of white and male privilege.
Thinking of identity as constituted in terms of flows, instability, and indeterminacy what
it means to be Latin American or Caribbean troubles the very inflexible, yet simultaneously
unstable, white gendered identity that inhabits philosophical space. As political philosophy seeks
to address divisions that trouble society it is of utmost importance that we apply the same critical
analysis to our own field given that it too constructs a social space which is critically fragmented.
Jordy Rocheleau (7C)
What A Little War Could Do
The 2011 intervention by the United States and its allies in Libya is being hailed as a
success, at least for the time being. A relatively small military commitment was able to tip the
balance of power, contributing to the ousting of an unjust, dictatorial regime and preventing, at
least probably and on balance, a significant violation of human rights. The relatively small
intervention in form of aerial support was a relief to American and European citizens tired of the
blood and treasure spent in Afghanistan and Iraq. The lack of an invading and occupying
ground force also appears to reduce the risk of fueling prolonged conflict that we have seen with
the occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan. Finally, this form of intervention leaves the future of
Libya to Libyan actors to settle without ongoing coercion. For all these reasons, the intervention
has been hailed by politicians, military officials, and some just war theorists, as a blueprint for
the future use of U.S. power to pursue justice.
Yet the Libyan intervention does not fit easily into the traditionally accepted just causes
for war. It was not, of course, a war of national defense by the allied forces, even of the
preventive sort. It follows more closely the model of humanitarian intervention. However,
while most accept some such wars, it has been normally reserved for extreme situations describe
as “crimes that shock the conscience of humanity.” These have been taken to include
paradigmatically, and for many exclusively, genocide or other mass killing or enslavement.
While the prospect of a Gaddafi victory at Benghazi threatened serious abuses of human rights, it
arguably falls short of the level of crime traditionally required to justify armed intervention into a
sovereign state’s affairs. In any case many do not view the justification of the intervention as
hinging on the hypothetical assertion that Gaddafi would have slaughtered thousands in
Benghazi. And we can imagine similar cases in which a repressive dictator poses no massive
threat to human rights but is opposed by an uprising and an intervention to tip the balance in
favor of democracy and human rights. The Libyan case may suggest a model of using force to
spread democracy abroad. It revives the interventionism of the 1990’s while learning from the
experiences of Kosovo, Afghanistan and Iraq.
What seems to be going on is that a small intervention – one without ground forces,
relatively short in duration, likely to succeed, and unlikely to lead to large negative side effects –
is viewed as more readily justified that a traditional large scale invasion. There is a lowering of
the bar for just cause to allow these interventions for practical reasons and not without
supporting moral reasons, as discussed above.
I am wary of this extension of just cause. It amounts to collapsing just cause into
proportionality, such that any war which is thought likely to have positive consequences is
viewed as justifiable. This contravenes the moral principle that war should only be fought
against those who have committed particularly grave crimes in order to prevent the carrying out
of these crimes. The adoption of this lowered standard can also be expected to undermine
stability and lead to more harm than good. I defend a strict view of just cause and discuss its
relation to the other jus ad bellum principles.
Alex Rosenberg (4E)
Metics and the Divided Society in Plato’s Laws
Plato's Laws is the non-ideal sequel to the ideal-theory in Republic. This late dialogue avoids many of the dificulties of Republic, but contains its own share of
flaws. One of the most significant changes in Plato's policy from Republic to the Laws regards
who can count as a citizen: in the Laws, only the virtuous are citizens. Where producer
class was made up of citizens in Republic, the Laws' merchants and craftsmen are resident foreigners subject to many strict regulations. The Laws' city, much like that of
Republic, features a strict division of classes according to virtue, and much of the policy
of the Laws is established to allow for the greatest development of virtue by the citizen
class. In what I call the \Allegory of the Family," Plato suggests a primary goal for
the Laws' lawgiver: the reconciliation of the unjust and the just under the rule of law.
Such reconciliation allows both sorts to live together and live the best lives of which
they are capable { though each aspires to a quite diferent conception of the good life.
This allegory implicitly denies that it is possible to take the unjust and simply make
them just. However, Plato fails to consistently uphold this division between virtuous citizens and
metics, particularly when he assigns metics to be teachers of virtue.
Plato endorses hiring foreigners to come to the city and give both virtuous citizens
and vicious metics a proper education in war, music, and everything else necessary
for virtue. Placing metics in this role is inconsistent with the rest of Plato's policies,
however, for the Laws rests on the assumption that metics are unalterably corrupt by their very
nature. For them to be good teachers, the lawgiver would have to either
discover virtuous metics or teach vicious ones to become virtuous. The Allegory of the
Family and the rest of the Laws tells strongly against either possibility. Taking the
Allegory of the Family seriously as a genuine reflection of Plato's views, I demonstrate
that Plato violates his strong commitments to the strict division of society according
to virtue when he assigns metics to be teachers of virtue. Following an examination of
metics as both traders and teachers and a consideration of the Laws' overall position
of virtue and vice, I conclude that Plato's commitment to the Allegory of the Family
and the strict division of society that it implies is firm, and we must view his policy
on metic teachers as a mistake. In making the Laws' system of education consistent
with Plato's views on virtue and vice, it becomes clear that he is committed to an even
stricter division of society than his stated policies imply.
Mark Rosner (1A)
On the Virtue of Tolerance
Scepticism about the virtue of tolerance has often focused on its ostensibly paradoxical
character – how can it be virtuous to tolerate that which one, perhaps justifiably, judges to be
without merit? Indeed, how can one stand by while a pernicious belief or practice becomes
pervasive and influential in one’s own society? The coherence of the concept is seemingly
undermined by the fact that it supports incompatible attitudes in an agent – and if tolerance as a
personal virtue is impossible, the prospects of successfully fostering a climate of tolerance at the
social and political level seem dim.16
However we respond to this paradox, scepticism regarding the value and nature of
tolerance often stems from another direction. Focus on the phenomenology of the relationship
between tolerator and toleratee has suggested to some that the attitude and expression of
tolerance is (almost) never a morally admirable quality. For example, it is often said that ‘being
tolerated’ is at most a second-best experience which can be condescending and even hurtful for
the individual/group being tolerated. Expressions of tolerance, on this view, frequently provide
justifiable grounds for resentment; consequently, tolerance’s status as a candidate virtue is put
into doubt.17
In this paper I defend tolerance’s status as a morally admirable personal virtue against
these criticisms. I claim that some of this scepticism can be accounted for by attending more
closely to tolerance’s status as a virtue. I argue that there is an important similarity between
tolerance as a virtue and other ‘self-effacing’ virtues such as modesty and generosity.18 For these
virtues, announcing “I am modest!’ is often taken to be especially telling evidence that one either
lacks the virtue or is not adequately displaying it. Tolerance, on my view, is similar. Proper
expressions of tolerance require focusing on the kinds of facts that are not captured by
announcing ‘I tolerate you’. Rather, they are seen in expressions such as ‘There is something to
be said for that position, even though I don’t share it’. Moreover, appraising ‘x’ as tolerant will
make use of the concept in a different register than those first-personal pronouncements.
Attending to different ways the virtue of tolerance manifests itself in 1st, 2nd and 3rd-personal
contexts helps to explain why some view tolerance as a poor candidate for a personal virtue and
why some expressions of justified tolerance nonetheless wound.
But this is only part of the story. We must also note the symmetrical interpersonal
relationship that the virtue aspires to realize. In particular, emphasizing the fact that proper
exercises of the virtue of tolerance require that we reduce or eliminate asymmetrical
relationships of power as much as possible in order to affirm the common bond that underlies our
differences highlights, I claim, the value of tolerance as an individual virtue. While this does not
settle how tolerance is to be instituted at the social level, it will hopefully lessen some scepticism
For a version of this form of scepticism see Bernard Williams, “Toleration: An Impossible Virtue?” in Heyd, D.
ed., Toleration (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996), pp. 18-27.
17
For some recent statements of these criticisms see Anna Elisabetta Galeotti (2001), “Do we need toleration as a
moral virtue?”, Res Publica 7: 273–292 and Angela Smith, “The Trouble with Tolerance” in Wallace, R., Kumar, R.
and Freeman, S., eds., Reasons and Recognition: Essays on the Philosophy of T.M. Scanlon, (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2011), pp. 179-194.
18
On so-called ‘self-effacing’ virtues, see Bernard Williams, Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy (Cambridge:
Harvard University Press, 1986), pp. 10-11 and Richard Moran (1993), “Impersonality, Character, and Moral
Expressivism”, The Journal of Philosophy 90: 578-595.
16
about the virtue and show why the personal attitude is necessary to any adequate social treatment
of the topic.
Sally Scholz (7B)
Iris Young on Responsibility: Violence that Crosses and Secures Borders
Just before her untimely death, Iris Young was working on a social connection model of
responsibility. This model examines the responsibilities for poverty across boundaries of states.
In a related book on global issues, Young also takes a stand against military intervention except
in extreme cases like genocide. In this paper, I blend these two in an effort to explicate a social
connection model of responsibility for violence. Young’s earlier writings on violence and
oppression, and her arguments against military intervention, indicate a fairly strong position
against violence. But the statement regarding intervention in cases of genocide, and arguably
other gross violations of human rights, indicates that there may be more subtlety to her position
on violence—especially state violence—than at first appears.
The essays by Bat-Ami Bar On, Margaret Denike, and Claudia Card in Dancing with Iris
each take up the question of violence in Young’s political theory. Each takes a different focus
but together they help to uncover some of the strengths and weaknesses of Young’s position
regarding violence and, I will argue, responsibility for violence.
I begin with an account of the violent enemies we constitute as well as the violence, wellintended or otherwise, which we perpetrate. In other words, I extend the social connection
model of responsibility for poverty to responsibility for violence. I then suggest a number of
tenets for a Youngian theory of violence built from the confluence of insights from the social
connection model, the argument against military intervention, and the role of violence in
oppression. These tenets suggest a richer understanding of her statement that military
intervention “must be limited to situations of genocide or impending genocide and where the war
actually makes rescue possible” (Young 2007, 136-37).
Mark Schranz (9E)
Republicanism and Internal Minorities
In this paper I shall examine the contribution that civic republican political
philosophy has to make to debates surrounding multiculturalism. More specifically, I
shall examine the republican notion of Freedom as Nondomination to see whether it is
helpful in solving the problem of internal minorities - or in solving the problems
associated with the conflict between, on the one hand, extending extending specific
protections to minority groups so as to reduce the inequality between those groups and
majority groups, and, on the other hand, ensuring that members of internal minorities
within such minority groups are not unduly endangered.
I shall argue that the republican notion of liberty (or the republican notion of
Freedom as Nondomination) gives us an excellent theoretical basis for theorizing the
problem of internal minorities. Freedom as Nondomination is able to do this not only
because it offers excellent guidance for evaluating what Will Kymlicka calls ‘internal
restrictions’ (or restrictions that the powerful within minority cultures seek to place on the
freedom of their own members) and ‘external protections’ (or group-specific rights that
protect the minority culture as a whole from the impact of the external decisions of the
majority). More specifically, Freedom as Nondomination gives a robust, attractive, and
consistent account of what makes some internal restrictions worse than other internal
restrictions and what makes external protections generally both acceptable and necessary.
In addition I shall argue that Freedom as Nondomination is not only useful for
thinking about these problems, but that it is also superior to the available liberal
alternatives. I shall demonstrate this by first showing that if the ideal of freedom has any
substantive role to play in solving the problem of internal minorities, conceptions of
freedom less theoretically robust than the republican one are ill-suited to the task: The
traditional ‘negative’ understanding of freedom, in other words, seems unable to give a
suitable account of how to evaluate various internal restrictions and external
protections. In the second place, I shall attempt to show that the republican
understanding of freedom is superior to the liberal alternatives because the republican
notion can generate its solution to the problem of internal minorities without having to
bring in any other foundational values, and in particular without substantive notions of
equality.
Katharine Schweitzer (1A)
Compromise and Toleration as Practices of Reciprocity and Respect
Toleration and compromise are two responses when conflicts between incommensurable
values and beliefs arise. Tolerance has received much philosophical attention from liberal
political philosophers in the last twenty-five years, beginning with Susan Mendus’s 1988 edited
volume Justifying Toleration and 1989 monograph Toleration and the Limits of Liberalism.
Many theorists, including John Rawls and Jürgen Habermas, argue that democratic political
communities should practice toleration as a way of recognizing and respecting pervasive,
reasonable disagreement about political issues. Andrew Shorten writes, “Toleration is often
described as the quintessential liberal virtue.” In contrast, compromise has been largely ignored
as a philosophical issue. The few philosophers who discuss compromise tend to be skeptical that
principled moral reasons for compromise in political contexts can be given. Simon May, for
example, argues that compromise is a less-than-ideal process for constructing a fair outcome,
although he recognizes that resolving reasonable disagreements through compromise may be
instrumentally valuable.
In this paper I argue that the justifications for toleration apply equally to compromise;
therefore, political liberals who endorse toleration should also endorse compromise. Toleration
and compromise bear a close relation. Both activities involve a component of rejection and a
component of acceptance. We tolerate only those values and beliefs that we dislike or judge to
be false. When we compromise in order to resolve a disagreement about a matter of principle,
we make concessions that under other circumstances we would prefer not to make. Both
activities are conceptually complex and morally ambiguous. Nevertheless toleration and
compromise require that members of a political community cooperate with each other in the
project of democratic self-governance. Members must set aside purely self-interested and selfregarding reasons and instead seek generally acceptable reasons when resolving conflicts about
which policies should govern the community’s collective life.
If I am correct that 1) compromise and toleration require similar practices of reciprocity
and respect for people who hold values and beliefs that are incommensurable with one’s own and
that 2) the moral reasons for compromise and toleration are the same, then liberal political
philosophers who maintain that democracy and toleration reciprocally entail the other ought to
endorse the activity of compromise. Willingness to make mutual concessions in order to achieve
consensus on policies that govern the life of a community should be considered a civic virtue
rather than a challenge to a person’s moral integrity. We should thus consider Heinz Paetzhold’s
claim that “the virtue of toleration consists in integrating divergent and conflicting attitudes, such
as acceptance and rejection, ambivalence and distinctness, into one fragile whole,” as equally
applicable to the virtue of compromise. Having an account of principled compromise can help
democratic theorists understand better the process of democratic deliberation about matters that
permit reasonable disagreement.
Devora Shapiro (6B)
Should Pregnancy Be Considered a Disability?
Individuals with disabilities face significant challenges, both physically and socially. To claim a
disability, therefore, is not something one ought to do lightly. Pregnancy, however, presents a
very difficult and interesting case. Pain, discomfort, and inconvenience is often a daily aspect of
pregnancy, and pregnancy itself can cause physical, as well as social, impediments that can
substantially interfere with one’s day to day work life. In practice, based on our current laws
concerning family leave, pregnancy can be cited as a temporary disability in certain
circumstances. Succeeding in securing this diagnosis, though, can prove quite difficult in
practice. Further, the kind of “pregnancy related disability” that is built in to such leave policies
and laws falls short of addressing the real question of whether pregnancy itself, rather than
certain conditions brought on by pregnancy, ought to be understood as a temporary disability.
In this paper I consider both the positive and the negative implications of conceptualizing
pregnancy as a temporary disability. I illustrate a variety of cases ranging from football injuries
to cerebral palsy, concluding that these cases provide strong support for identifying pregnancy as
a temporary disability. I move on to consider the double-edged sword generated by support
through protected political group identity; I acknowledge the paradoxical effect that creating
social and political protections for disadvantaged or vulnerable groups can create (it can further
stigmatize while creating protected status, and it may force the non-identified to identify without
their consent). I also consider the negative impact that asking for disabled status can create, as
well as the danger that labeling pregnancy a temporary disability poses to those who endure
other kinds of disability.
Finally, I consider the possibility that many might find self-identifying as “disabled”
disempowering. It is difficult enough, one might argue, to be a woman in the workforce – to be
taken seriously and respected – especially in male-dominated professions. One might, after all,
fear that labeling pregnancy a disability would be akin to identifying being female as a disability,
as well. Having weighed the costs and benefits of seeking the social identification “temporarily
disabled,” I conclude that though there are strong arguments on both sides, the pendulum may
ultimately swing, for now, towards seeking protected status. Though one might hope that such
status would not be permanently necessary, it may, temporarily, be best to identify pregnancy as
a temporary disability.
Rushda Siddiqui (5B)
Contemporizing Religion: Providing Successful Reinterpretation of Social Philosophies
Fundamentalists, especially successful ones, are known to us as deeply committed religious
people who are poised to take leadership in the pursuit of justice and the building of peaceful
communities. They operate not only in the villages and cities but also on national and
transnational levels. In convincing secular policymakers, educators, and people at the
foundations, these fundamentalists hold a key to success. The fundamentalists take the roots of
religion, and reinterpret the social aspect of the religion in a manner that it fits the socio-political
milieu they represent. The success or the failure of the fundamentalist depends on the manner in
which the propagated social change is sold to the target audience. The manner by which the
message is spread takes more importance than the variables addressed, as it decides the
uniqueness of the movement set in motion by the fundamentalist leader. Successful the
leadership is able to acquire political power and subsequently turn the revised social philosophy
into a holistic ideology, which would allow the fundamentalist idea to compete in both, social
change and state formation processes.
The attempt in this paper is to take two Islamist movements, the Muslim Brotherhood of Egypt
and the Taliban of Afghanistan, demonstrate how the ideas of social and political change of its
leaders, are two extremely successful movements of social and political change that transcend
local boundaries to regional and international arenas. The roots of the change needed in Islamic
social philosophy, of both the movements can be traced to the Deoband school of India. Both
movements drew their strength from the proselytizing call of the religion. By sifting the public
from the personal, the movements re-interpreted the social obligation and demands of the
religion to meet the challenges of the times. They re-structured the curricula of the proselytizing
groups to include political messages for social change. From their constituencies they demanded
that the social obligations be prioritized over and above the personal practices demanded by the
religion.
The two movements are linked in content and practice in many ways. What is more important
however, is the fact that the Taliban can be seen as a culmination of the movement of
fundamentalist imagination that began with the Muslim Brotherhood. Both movements are seen
as anti-colonial and reactionary to the change proposed by modernity and globalization. While
the Brotherhood opted to work with the National Union party to fulfill its political ambitions, the
Taliban chose to work alone. The success of the Taliban in forming a government and staying in
power is a realization of the fundamentalist imagination of re-interpreting the concept of an
Islamic state. Its success represents an evolution as well as poses a challenge to the concept of
Islamic states practiced by the religion based states in West and South Asia.
The paper would look at the re-interpretation of the social call of religion proposed by the two
movements and its political implications in a local and regional context.
Matthew Silliman (and Shelby Giaccarini ) (3E)
Nature’s Voice: Environmental Literature as Applied Ethics
Investigation of civic virtues can sometimes afford to proceed at a deliberate pace. For example,
a discussion about ethical principles in the legal profession might properly unfold without a great
sense of urgency, since the threat of deferred justice is partially offset by the substantial risk of
hasty change and unintended consequences. The current state of our environmental crisis,
however, affords us no such temporal luxury; our species and its planet are almost certainly on
the cusp of a self-made apocalypse, and a failure to act effectively and with alacrity on the best
understanding that science and applied ethics can give us will be as culpable as genocide.
But how to effect the necessary change? In particular, how can we hope to break the logjam of
entrenched interests and attitudes, and the sheer unimaginability of the scale on which we are
bringing about climatic change? Arguably language, and its apotheosis literary imagination, is
the human technological development most instrumental in bringing us to this crisis. Without the
power of the written word to solidify organizational structures and coordinate activity, and more
importantly to imagine counterfactual possibilities and inspire them into realization, humanity
would probably never have managed to bring the Holocene to a screeching halt. It is therefore at
least poetically just that we call upon the power of writing to give nature a voice. Moreover,
literary inspiration is likely to produce a more democratic and humane process of political,
behavioral, and technological adaptation than are autocratic or technocratic alternatives.
We argue, therefore, that literary creativity is an indispensable component to addressing our
environmental crisis. Since nature largely lacks a voice with which to advocate for itself, we
must craft new and more effective narratives on its behalf if we are to foster healthier
relationships with it. Speaking through us by the powerful means of literature and other art
forms, the natural world of which we are a part could help break through fixed habits of thought
and behavior in ways that economic and technological responses have not done. Using a literary
medium, ethicists, scientists, and others with relevant understanding must go beyond theory to
apply and disseminate their ideas to the world, and they need to do this with a timeliness and
persuasive power commensurate with the urgency of the threat. Moreover, their modes of
expression and narrative images must speak most compellingly, if not to everyone, then at least
to very many of those not already convinced of the need for change.
Notwithstanding the difficulties of prescribing artistic criteria, and the pitfalls of any moralizing
literary endeavor, the authors explore in this dialogue the parameters and challenges of a new
environmental literature designed to slow the rising tide of global catastrophe.
Rory Smead (10A)
Social Dilemmas and the Evolution of Other-Regarding Preferences
Social dilemmas are situations where individual interests and the collective interest are at odds.
The economic study of game theory provides a way of systematically studying social interaction
and hence, social dilemmas. Game theory traditionally assumes that individuals are rational and
self-interested. Studies in game theory have revealed numerous examples where individual
rationality interferes with cooperation, hinders the social good, or otherwise leads to tragic
outcomes. Some classic examples of these cases are the Prisoner's Dilemma and the Tragedy of
the Commons.
However, recent work in evolutionary theory has shown that there are both social and individual
advantages to irrational and non-selfish behavior. Evolutionary game theory can help us
understand how and why non-selfish, other-regarding motives have come about. This paper
surveys some of this recent work and presents a game theoretic model of the evolution of otherregarding preferences.
The basic setup of the model is as follows. Agents are facing a certain social game and will
behave in that game according to their preferences. But, individuals vary in terms of the
preferences for the outcomes, this leads to differences in behavior. Some individuals may have
preferences that match the “true” evolutionary values to the outcomes and others may have
preferences that distort the game in some way, possibly taking into account the benefits to other
agents. We then consider whether there is any evolutionary advantage to having other-regarding
preferences. Using this model we can illustrate some circumstances (which include some social
dilemmas) that can give rise to other-regarding preferences which underlie attitudes of altruism,
fairness and envy.
One way to think about these results is that evolution may have led to distorted perceptions of
social situations (or irrational responses to social situations). This means that we may not always
be able to accurately recognize what social game we are playing. Furthermore, this distorted
perception (or irrationality) can be a good thing in that they may facilitate cooperative social
behavior and prevent individuals from being exploited by others. However, other-regarding
preferences are not always a good thing. Sometimes, those preferences may help bring about
cooperation and fairness, but those same preferences may generate spiteful or harmful behavior
in other circumstances.
These results also have implications for solving social dilemmas. Solving social dilemmas will
involve introducing mechanisms or adopting policies which change the incentives in some way.
Understanding the circumstances in which individuals are likely to react in spiteful or altruistic
ways can help illuminate what incentive changes may be most effective in bringing about
desirable states.
Michael J. Smith (5F)
Spinoza on Democratic Self-Destruction and Movement-Building
The recent near collapse of the global financial sector has sparked a proliferation of populist
outrage. In the United States, for example, both the Tea Party and Occupy movements agree that
a culture of cupidity has corroded the civic virtues necessary for the proper functioning of
democracy. Though at opposite ends of the political spectrum, they both believe that this moral
decay threatens to bring about the breakdown of American society. Many political theorists
would concur: thinkers as diverse as Plato, Gibbon, and Toynbee agree that the deterioration of a
society starts with the individual moral corruption of its citizens. Spinoza, however, attempts to
provide a radically different view, and it is the aim of this paper to explore the implications of his
social psychology for the problem of the decline of civic virtue and the potentially selfdestructive propensities of states. In particular, Spinoza thinks that the tendency to view
individual human beings as autonomous moral agents causes us to ridicule, bemoan, and
execrate them instead of attempting to understand the rich variety of causes that have brought
about their behavior. We are not moral or political atoms, but rather distinct parts of a greater
moral and political whole. More specifically, it will be shown that Spinoza’s social psychology
emphasizes the embeddedness and mutual penetrability of minds as well as bodies, and
institutions as well as individuals. This permeability makes us radically vulnerable to external
forces, opening the way to the transmission of all kinds of excessive desires and sad passions.
On the social level, this gives rise to the possibility of ideology—or superstition in 17th century
terms—since it leaves one’s mind open to being colonized by powers and ways of thinking that
are adverse to one’s own interests. Our fundamental interdependence and vulnerability, in other
words, can be manipulated so that we seek our own servitude as though it were our salvation. As
a result, what might at first glance seem like nothing more than self-destructive or morally
corrupt individual behavior might well turn out to be the result of the internalization of foreign
and malign mental and emotional habits. On the other hand, however, this understanding of
human interdependence also offers a useful theoretical basis for grass-roots, democratic
movement-building by providing insight into the potentially constructive capacities of these
social aspects of desire. By relinquishing their focus on individual moral agency and
responsibility, contemporary populist movements might actually enhance their ability to organize
collective action and expression. One consequence of accepting this thesis is to underscore the
often overlooked importance of Spinoza for democratic political philosophy. Another
consequence is to elevate the significance of institutional, as opposed to individual, responsibility
for understanding the decline or flourishing of societies.
William Smith (9D)
Parfit’s Profoundest Problem
In On What Matters, Derek Parfit calls the need for a defense of morality against immorality
“the Profoundest Problem” (Parfit 2011, 141-149), which he defines as the problem of whether
“we … sometimes have … reasons to act wrongly … and, if [we do], what further conclusions
we should draw” (Parfit 2011, 144). He believes that we need a stronger response to it than some
have offered, citing Sidgwick’s Weak Moral Rationalism, on which reasons are always permit
choosing a moral option over all immoral options, but we are not always required to do so (Ibid.,
144). Parfit is disturbed by the bleak implications of Sidgwick’s view: “It would be bad if, in …
cases [where other norms conflict with morality], we and others would have sufficient reasons to
act wrongly” (Ibid., 143).
To avoid these implications, Parfit proposes the following desiderata of a response to the
Profoundest Problem: “Morality might have supreme importance … since we might always have
decisive reasons to do our duty, and to avoid acting wrongly” (Ibid., 148). But shortly after
outlining this desiderata, Parfit turns to a discussion of the positive content of morality because
to consider the possibility of a conflict between morality and another source of reasons, we have
to first specify the content of morality (Ibid., 148-149). His response to the Profoundest Problem
will be to defend a substantive account of morality on which we have decisive reason to do what
we morally ought to do.
Unfortunately, Parfit’s substantive account of morality fails on these terms. Ultimately, Parfit
defends a reconciliation of Kantianism, contractualism, and rule consequentialism. His
reconciliation of these theories begins by specifying what he finds to be the best version of
Kantianism, on which the supreme principle of morality is the Kantian Contractualist Formula
(KCF). The KCF holds that “everyone ought to follow the principles whose universal acceptance
everyone could rationally will, or choose” (Ibid., 342). He then uses this formula as a premise in
justifying Scanlonian contractualism and rule consequentialism on Kantian grounds.
Unfortunately, as I will argue, Parfit is only entitled to understanding the KCF as a principle
which claims that “everyone ought to follow the principles whose universal acceptance everyone
would have sufficient reason to choose,” rather than that “everyone ought to follow the principles
whose universal acceptance everyone would have decisive reason to choose.” So understood, this
principle not only fails to respond to the Profoundest Problem in the way that Parfit intended, but
also commits Parfit’s substantive moral view to the Weak Moral Rationalism that he found so
bleak.
In this paper, I will first defend my reading of Parfit’s response to the Profoundest Problem
before showing that it is incompatible with the KCF. Unfortunately, the Profoundest Problem
turns out to be a deep problem for Parfit.
Trevor Smith (4B)
Roundtable: What is the Role of Men in Contemporary Feminism?
The central question that this panel will to address is what the role of men is in contemporary
feminism. Many feminist discussions about the role of men in feminism came about due to
specific discussions within the discipline. Care ethics, especially in its early formulation as
espoused by Noddings, raised many challenging questions about the role of men in natural
caring, the role of fatherhood, and value of masculinity. Much like care ethics, standpoint theory
privileged the unique experience of women and thus posed important questions about the
possible role of men in feminism. While these remain important and central discussions,
feminism and the projects of contemporary feminists have evolved new questions and new
challenges for the role of men in feminism. Thus, we feel it is important and timely to again ask,
“what is the role of men in contemporary feminism?”
Adam Smith (7E)
Tolerance and Truthfulness
Habermas recommends discourse to secure legitimacy for the laws that govern pluralistic
societies. “Discourse” for him means argumentation that thematizes validity claims to truth
(about the objective world) and rightness (about the social world). It does not directly involve
claims to truthfulness, which are about the subjective world. Arguments about discourse get
caught up in the question whether it structures debates between conceptions of the good, or
whether it is itself a conception of the good. This question, which asks whether the “right” or the
“good” has priority, is important, and not only for theorists. To cite the most obvious example, it
lies at the heart of popular debates about the relationship between church and state. The
importance of the question, however, is well-matched by its complexity. It would appear that our
disagreements as to the status of discourse are an instance of the same incommensurability (to
use MacIntyre’s term) that discourse is supposed to navigate. Starting with Habermas’ threedimensional schema of validity claims, my suggestion is that if as citizens we do wish to
navigate incommensurability with a view to securing legitimacy, then the the third validity
dimension is actually crucial. My paper proposes that “truthfulness” is undertheorized (by
Habermas), and could be developed in a way that helps us “bypass” the question about the status
of discourse. At the end of this development, truthfulness could be described as a central and
uniquely democratic virtue.
Nicholas Smyth (1D)
Ethical Evaluation After Situationism
It has been suggested that situationism in social psychology makes trouble for the ethical concept
of character, and in this paper, I aim to resist this conclusion. I argue that the best explanation of
the experimental results obtained in various situationist experiments is that human psychology
contains a powerful mechanism which makes us very responsive to perceived role-occupation.
The operation of this mechanism, which I will term a role schema, is central to what Peter
Railton has called normative guidance, the capacity of human beings to unthinkingly perceive
and adapt to changing normative standards. This, along with other considerations, suggests that
people are strongly responsive to reasons generated by perceived role-occupation. I argue that
strong responsiveness to these reasons implies that we will be generally disposed to conform to
the normative standards associated with the social roles we have internalized, and a
philosophically defensible conception of our character can simply make reference to this pattern
of behaviour. I conclude there is a plausible interpretation of situationist results which does not
necessarily undermine the notion of character. However, my conclusion will offer little comfort
to virtue ethicists, as a role-based conceptualization of character cannot form the basis of a virtue
ethical theory.
Nancy Snow (5A)
Hope as a Civic Virtue
In Against Paranoid Nationalism (2003), Ghassan Hage convincingly argues that
societies can create nations of worriers or nations of carers. Nations of worriers flirt with
“paranoid nationalism,” fostering hatred, exclusivity, and fanatical attachments to land, culture,
and traditions. Nations of carers, by contrast, are inclusivist, sympathetic to the plight of
outsiders (such as immigrants), and open to changes in culture and tradition wrought by the
influx of new people and ideas. Societies create nations of carers, Hage (2003) maintains, by
distributing social hope. In part I of this essay, I draw upon Hage (2003) and other sources to
examine what it means to distribute social hope in a society, marking parallels and similarities
with American pragmatist visions of social hope and the roles it plays in democratic societies. In
part II, I sketch the argument that social hope as conceptualized by Hage (2003) and pragmatists
such as Richard Rorty and Walt Whitman can be considered an Aristotelian-type civic virtue.
Finally, in part III I note societal problems indicative of a lack of social hope, including those
created by transnational capitalism, and suggest ways in which “local” social hope can be
fostered despite the disempowering effects of transnational capitalism on some governments and
societies.
Elizabeth Sperry (8D)
Adaptive Preferences, Human Flourishing, and Personal Identity
What are inappropriate adaptive preferences, and what can be done to overcome them?
Oppression often is caused by external conditions; but inappropriate adaptive preferences are
internal. Agents who have inappropriate adaptive preferences (IAPs) seem to desire their own
oppression.
Sen’s and Nussbaum’s Capabilities Approach attempts a middle path between conceiving
of IAPs as objectively wrong desires, and valorizing all desires as legitimate preferences.
Nussbaum contends that human beings share an objective nature, with correlated capacities for
flourishing. Desires that promote flourishing merit fulfillment, while those that undercut
flourishing do not. The Capabilities Approach is not paternalistic, since humans desire to
flourish, meaning that at some level agents desire the elimination of their IAPs. An additional
advantage of the capabilities approach is its adaptability: the capabilities are fixed, yet the means
to fulfill them are not. However, human cultures are sufficiently diverse that the capabilities
may not be objective.
Serene Khader’s Adaptive Preferences and Women’s Empowerment (2011) improves on
the Capabilities Approach, requiring that the capabilities be cross-culturally deliberative, and that
the flourishing-compatibility of preferences be determined in deliberation with each agent. The
former alteration protects against cultural imperialism, and the latter eliminates paternalism and
ignorance. Khader says she bases her approach on objective human nature and an objective
conception of the good.
I argue that Khader is largely correct, but that IAPs should be conceived using solidaristic
rather than objective conceptions of human nature and flourishing. Human nature is
ontologically and epistemologically inter-subjective, as is human flourishing. This approach
enables an improved understanding of adaptive preferences. It is common to contrast the agent’s
adaptive preferences with her “authentic desires,” meaning the desires she would have had if she
had not been socialized. But agents develop preferences only in relation to other people, to their
cultural settings, and to the options available to them. All preferences are adaptive.
Thus many apparent IAPs are not: if agents have available to them only options that
undercut flourishing—a common situation for the oppressed—then their preference for the leastproblematic of those is not inappropriate. We might call these problematic adaptive preferences
(PAPs) rather than IAPs. The agent is working to maximize her flourishing under the
circumstances available, but the circumstances are bad. An advantage of seeing such preferences
as PAPs rather than as IAPs is that it clarifies the source of trouble: unlike other accounts of
IAPs which place the responsibility on the agent to alter her preferences, my account does not
hold agents responsible for having no access to good choices. Where agents have PAPs,
circumstances need improvement.
Building on Khader’s account, IAPs are preferences inconsistent with flourishing, formed
in conditions that impeded flourishing, and that would persist even if circumstances improved.
But a puzzle remains: why would any agent willingly desire her own non-flourishing once
flourishing-compatible choices become available? Again, the answer comes from
acknowledging agents’ social natures. Once effected, socialization is not easily renounced.
Matthew Stewart (5E)
Frustrated Alterities, (Im)Possible Ethics: Levinas, Kristeva, and the Subaltern in Crisis
The inescapability of globalization has been sustained by a strategic biopolitical abjection
of transnational subjects through a technology of (in)visibility. By exposing this transnational
abjection and despite that ethics appears to be collapsing, I argue for an ethics across borders, for
a response to what I call the frustrated alterity of the irreducible subaltern in crisis. With
attention to the biopolitics of subalternity, I complicate notions of (in)visibility for reimagining a
responsibility for-the-other amid such negative cosmopolitanisms. Through existential
phenomenology and feminist psychoanalysis, I address globalization’s specific abjection of
women and girls across borders, contextualizing subalternity not as a universal experience but as
an irreducible lived situation with inimitable intersections of race, sex, and class. Central to my
argument is the paradoxical condition in which the subaltern must be both present and absent,
visible and invisible, in order to function as the expendable sustainer of neocolonial capitalism.
As Bhabha suggests, it is the coveted presence of the coerced subaltern that sutures the
hegemonic structures of biopolitical marginalization and transnational abjection. In this way, I
turn to (in)visible spaces that help sustain globalization; thus my project focuses on the
experiences of women and girls in garment factories, coerced labor in the prison industrial
complex, and expendable workers in “free trade” zones. I suggest that this biopolitics of the
(in)visible subaltern is largely sustained by a biopolitics of alterity and a rejection of ethics. In
response to this transnational abjection, I take up a Levinasian phenomenology of the face and a
Kristevan psychoanalytic of social politics to theorize an ethics of alterity vis-à-vis globalization.
I specifically address the (in)visible face-of-the-subaltern-other as a localization of an absentpresent ethics whereby the absent presence of the subaltern evokes an ethics that is always
already there. Traversing Levinas’ Totality and Infinity, Sartre’s Being and Nothingness, and
Kristeva’s Hatred and Forgiveness, I insist that the very conditions of (im)possibility open up
spaces for engaging an ethical response to a “frustrated” alterity, to the subaltern in crisis.
Katie Stockdale (9A)
How Groups Resent: Indigenous and Settler Relations in the Canadian Context
In this paper, I bring together contemporary literature on restorative justice, resentment
and collective responsibility by examining the nature of resentment in situations of social and
political injustices. I argue that moving beyond conceptions of resentment that focus on the
individual toward theories of collective resentment is crucial for understanding the normative
force of the emotion in these contexts. In the first section, I draw upon Alice MacLachlan’s
“Unreasonable Resentments” and Margaret Urban Walker’s chapter “Resentment and
Assurance” in Moral Repair to show how resentment can be about social and political
circumstances in addition to distinct moral injuries. I then build on their work, developing an
account of collective resentment that explains how norms, beliefs, and social position can give
rise to shared experiences of the emotion. Next, I illustrate what collective resentment looks like,
by focusing specifically on the resentment of both indigenous and settler Canadians in the
context of the Residential School System in Canada. I then show why an understanding of
collective resentment is crucial for making sense of what each group is communicating, and
suggest that the failure of settler Canadians’ apologies to restore relations with indigenous
Canadians is in part a failure to take responsibility and give uptake to the reasons grounding their
resentment. In the final section, I consider Jan Narveson’s concern that the concept of collective
responsibility is dangerous, entailing the mistreatment of individual people. I respond by
pointing out how Narveson’s worries seem to capture many settler Canadians’ attitudes toward
responsibility for the Residential School System; in particular, how many of us resent being
burdened with responsibility for past harms when it is unclear how we can be individually
blamed. I then suggest that our resentment is problematic, and represents the need for a theory of
collective responsibility rather than objection to it. Giving uptake to indigenous groups’
resentment, understanding our responsibilities as settler Canadians, and re-thinking the reasons
grounding our shared resentment is crucial for restoring relations and moving toward
reconciliation.
Velimir Stojkovski (5F)
Making Sense of ‘Needs’ in Hegel’s Philosophy of Right
Hegel’s Philosophy of Right is an account of the emergence of a rational state, what
Hegel calls ‘Objective Spirit,’ where the classical political tradition is reconciled with the
modern one. Embedded in the discussion is treatment of human needs and how they are to be
satisfied; what Hegel refers to as ‘The System of Needs.’ Interestingly enough, his account
wavers between a conception of needs which makes needs means to an end, and a conception
which reduces needs to wants. This conceptual confusion seems to rest on Hegel’s anthropology
of the human being, which is a mixture of the classical and modern understanding. On the one
hand he wants to say that when one steps into society needs are multiplied to infinity, each taking
on a social character by virtue of the fact that human beings are social creatures who imbue the
world with meaning, thus collapsing the distinction between needs and wants, and on the other
hand he want to preserve a teleological account of needs by which we can understand needs as
means to an end. The purpose of this paper will be to sort through this conceptual confusion,
arguing that there is a way to give a robust account of what needs are using the tools that are
present within Hegel’s own work. This will involve an explanation of what he sees as the final
end of the state and an explanation of his account of education (Bildung). This will allow us to
see needs in the teleological manner, as means to an end, and yet preserve Hegel’s intuition that
all of our needs take on a social meaning.
Jennifer Szende (2C)
On Human Rights and the Stateless
An increasing number of human rights theories understand human rights as fitting within
what Pogge terms an ‘institutional’ approach. That is, human rights are defined as something that
states guarantee or fail to guarantee to individuals. The motivation is clear. Defining human
rights in this way serves several purposes in debates regarding human rights. First, it helps to
disentangle human rights from moral rights. Secondly, it defines responsibility for human rights
and human rights failures as falling on the apparatus of the state: governments, police, and a
judiciary. In the cases of human rights failures or violations, it also opens the door to human
rights enforcement through international actions that target the state: ejection from international
treaty organizations, embargoes, and even humanitarian intervention can serve to sanction a state
for its human rights failures. The concern of this paper, however, is about how to maintain the
connection between human rights guarantees and the rights of human individuals when human
rights are framed in this way. The worry is examined through examples of the stateless.
Individuals may become stateless for a variety of reasons, and in a variety of ways. They
may leave a state as refugees or emigrants, and yet may not find themselves under the protection
of a new state. They may find themselves in a failed state, and hence effectively stateless. Or
they may be denied the status associated with membership in a state, for example through
rendition or political exile.
This paper argues that Beitz and other theorists of human rights make a mistake when they
define human rights in statist terms. The scope of a theory of human rights must include all
human beings, even if not simply in virtue of their humanity. The aspiration for human rights to
be political and not metaphysical is interesting and admirable, but the human scope of human
rights must be retained in order for human rights to retain their critical force.
Erin Tarver (2D)
Sports Fandom and Democratic Communities
Despite the fact that sporting events occupy a significant place in the social lives and
organizations of many people, philosophers—even social philosophers—have for the most part
neglected to give sport much attention in our work. What little work there is on the Philosophy
of Sport is almost exclusively focused on the questions of agency or ethics raised by the playing
of sports. Such work, for example, may focus on the function of athletics as a discipline, or the
ethical obligations of teammates. While this is important work, its focus leaves unaddressed the
import and function of sport for the majority of those persons in whose social worlds sport
operates. This work, in other words, does not address sport as a social phenomenon that is
participated in not only by athletes, but also by fans—for whom sporting events are not merely
incidental, but often an extremely salient component of their identities.
In this paper, I will argue that in spite of this neglect, sports fandom is an important subject for
philosophical inquiry, particularly because it is a social practice that functions both to reinforce
regional and communal identities at the expense of idealized national or universal democratic
ones, and because its rhetoric (of winning, losing, ‘beating’, etc.) tends to spill over into political
discourse, shaping perceptions of and involvements in that realm. My claim, however, is not that
sports fandom is straightforwardly negative, or even in tension with democratic practice. Indeed,
as I will suggest, the pride in one’s region or community that sports fandom tends to reinforce
may illustrate the extent to which the prioritization of regional or community identities—
especially marginalized ones—is necessary for truly democratic political organization at the
national level. Insofar as sports fandom makes this possible, it is valuable, and philosophical
ignorance of it is remiss.
My argument will proceed as follows: first, looking at a particularly salient example—LSU fans
in south Louisiana—I will argue that (contra the language of “spectating”) sports fandom is a
practice that resembles what Foucault calls a technology of self. That is, it is instrumental in
producing and maintaining particular forms of identity. Secondarily, in at least some instances,
this assertion of identity constitutes a form of resistance through revaluation for marginalized
communities and groups. Next, drawing on Nancy Fraser’s work on the importance of multiple
and dissenting publics (rather than a singular Public) for democratic practice, I will argue that the
forms of identity thus produced may in fact be valuable for democracy. Finally, however, I’ll
suggest that the sociological literature on the role of gender and race in contemporary practices
of sports and sports fandom in the United States show that these phenomena are not an
unmitigated good, insofar as they often function to entrench oppressive patterns of social
hierarchization, particularly along racial lines. My conclusion, however, will be that this fact
speaks to the need for philosophers and others to address how to make our practices of sports
fandom more ethical and anti-oppressive, rather than to the need to eliminate them entirely.
Ashley Taylor (10E)
Solidarity
Solidarity is a normative social concept with a multitude of uses and no preferred
account. For the notion to be of use we must first isolate a sense of solidarity that is useful for
moral, social and political thinking. The leading accounts of solidarity seek to discover what
solidarity is within the context of more specific questions such as, “What does solidarity against
oppression look like?” or “What is feminist solidarity?” Hence, most accounts of solidarity
emphasize different salient features. As a result there looks to be greater conflict among accounts
than there actually is.
As I want an account of the phenomenon itself I ask directly, “What is solidarity?” and offer
an explanatory account. To this aim, I begin with examples of solidarity and loosely characterize
the relation. I enquire into the similarities of the different accounts drawing from theorists such
as Feinberg and Shelby. I next seek to articulate what I take to be the four definitive conditions
of solidarity. These are a shared joint interest, identification with the group, a disposition to
empathy and mutual trust. I discuss each of these constitutive conditions in detail drawing on
analysis from philosophy of mind, action theory, epistemology and ethics. After establishing
what is necessary for solidarity I explain how it is that solidarity is normative. I focus on the
obligations generated by membership in a solidarity group. Drawing on joint action theorists
Alonso and Bratman and some analysis from Scanlon, I offer an account of these obligations that
hinges on the mutual reliance that is necessary for the mutual trust that already marks the
solidary relation. I conclude that though obligations are generated within the solidary group,
obligations that can easily be taken to be and sometimes are moral, solidarity itself is not a moral
obligation and neither are the obligations it generates.
Lisa Tessman (1D)
Moral Sociality
This paper will examine the social/political implications of recent work in neuroscientific
moral psychology. Unlike some of the researchers carrying out and interpreting these studies
(such as Joshua Greene), who take them to support a monist moral system such as
consequentialism, I take the empirical work to indicate that human morality is deeply and
ineliminably dilemmatic.
Neuroscientific research into moral decision-making shows a role for both of two
cognitive processes: an automatic intuitive process, and a conscious reasoning process. Some
theorists respond to these empirical findings by arguing that the judgments arising from only one
of these two systems—the reasoning system—count as moral judgments, and then point to the
fact that the reasoning system yields typically consequentialist moral judgments as evidence that
consequentialism is justified. Morality, in this view, consists of impartially optimizing overall
good—a task that engages the reasoning system. Intuitively based judgments, these
consequentialists argue, fail to be moral because they are 1) not impartial, and 2) based on
empathic responses that do not count as moral because they are the result of an evolutionary
history that favors fitness-enhancing traits instead of moral traits. I argue for a more expansive
view of morality, as including a plurality of (potentially conflicting) socially enforced pro-social
traits or practices that help us solve social problems or secure social goods. Given this
understanding of morality, other social species (e.g. chimpanzees) can be said to have a version
of morality, built on a neurobiological platform that supports empathy, altruism, and trust.
Human intuitive moral judgments emerge in part from this (shared) platform; while they are an
indispensible part of human morality, they are also limited, because empathy is markedly
stronger for in-groups than out-groups (and may be coupled with out-group hostility), and can
support inequality and domination. The much more developed reasoning process that humans
engage in allows us to also extend moral commitments to a wider circle of others and critically
resist injustice, and to recognize reasons for doing so. However, I argue, this does not suggest
that we could or should do away with intuitive moral judgments, or classify them as not moral;
like other social species that form strong attachments, humans need to be treated by at least some
other people in the ways that are prompted by the other people’s intuitive moral judgments, and,
as suggested by an ethics of need, these needs give rise to moral requirements.
Thus both the intuitive process and the reasoning process are necessary for full human morality,
and neither is sufficient; however, the two processes often yield conflicting moral judgments.
These conflicts constitute genuine moral dilemmas whenever the moral requirement that is
defeated in a conflict is one that is “non-negotiable”—it cannot be negotiated away in, for
instance, a cost-benefit analysis, because its associated value can be neither substituted nor
compensated by any other value. I will conclude by reflecting on not just the demands, but also
the difficulties, of a moral life in which one faces such dilemmas.
Adam Theron-Lee Rensch (4E)
The Tyranny of Philosophy
The primary relationship established in Plato's Republic—namely, between the psūchê (ψυχή)
and the pólis (πόλις), or the individual soul and the city—is in a number of readings of the text
fairly transparent: taking the word of Socrates at face value, the city is simply a magnifed, living
organism, a kind of outgrowth of the soul. It retains the latter's structural proportions, and is what
allows Socrates to claim that a corrupted soul will refect necessarily in the corruption of the
political order, or that conversely one can articulate the ills of the soul through a critical
examination of the empowered regime. The problem, however, is that this leads to the seemingly
contradictory conclusion that true justice exists only in a city that oppresses its citizens and
erects a kind of totalitarian dystopia: the philosopher-king banishing poetry and proliferating “a
great lie;” the bonds of family dissolving into a crude egalitarianism of shared property; a rigid,
caste-like class system with little room to transcend one's given role in society. Many have tried
to rescue this reading through Socratic irony: it is a satire, an educational tool. While there is
certainly truth to this, there is another reading, I argue, which understands these “satirical”
assertions as arising from a fundamental problematic that grounds political philosophy: how to
establish a functional, harmonized community of individuals in light of the 'gaps' that constitute
and separate the needs of the One and the Many. The ideal city-soul relation of the Republic,
which effectively “closes” this gap, functions as a condition of possibility for true justice—the
question has less to do with the practical “actualization” of such a city, but rather what such an
ideal can tell us about “being with others.” Plato's Republic, then, can be read as a text grappling
with what it means to be a good citizen in a seemingly always-already corrupted society.
My aim in this paper is to explore this conceptual “gap,” what I argue is the void from
which political philosophy arises. First, I will turn to Book IV, which primarily concerns the
nature of the soul. Following this, I will look at the figures of the tyrant and philosopher-king,
who represent, respectively, the perfectly unjust and just soul (and likewise form of government).
It is these two figures which fully embody the contradictions of the political sphere. The tyrant's
love of power and the philosopher's love of knowledge situate each ruler “against” the needs of
the city, though in different respects: the madness of the tyrant's particularity enslaves his
citizens; the philosopher, meanwhile, in his willingness to “see through” to the realization of
justice, is a different kind of threat, a lover of truth who will insist the only path to happiness and
virtue is to sacrifce one's desires for the greater good. Indeed, that a lover of truth must
paradoxically tell a “great lie” reveals the difficulty in any political philosophy: namely, of “what
to do about the other.”
Krista Thomason (9A)
Kant on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples
Discussions of Kant’s cosmopolitan right have been on the rise in the scholarship of
political philosophy for the past decade.19 In particular, Kant’s critique of colonialism has
generated the most recent interest. Setting himself apart from Hobbes and Locke, Kant argues
both in the Metaphysics of Morals and in “Toward a Perpetual Peace” that countries have no
right to subjugate native populations in the process of forming new settlements.20 Such a
condemnation offers the possibility that Kantian political philosophy is friendlier to the
promotion of multiculturalism than traditional liberal theories are usually assumed to be.
Contemporary writers have, however, stopped short of claiming that Kant can fully
accommodate group rights for indigenous peoples. Waligore, for example, uses the cosmopolitan
right to argue that Kant has conceptual space to claim that indigenous peoples ought to be
respected as groups and as such can enjoy a kind of separateness from new settlers. 21 But he
believes that a problem occurs once indigenous peoples and new settlers come into contact.22
Since Kant argues that humans have the enforceable obligation to leave the state of nature, it
appears as though indigenous peoples cannot refrain from joining the settlers in a newly formed
state. As such, it is thought that Kant’s critique of colonialism is not enough to secure the kinds
of rights to self-sovereignty frequently advocated by current indigenous peoples.
In this paper, I argue instead that Kant can make sense of the rights of indigenous
peoples. Most philosophers appeal to Kant’s cosmopolitan right in order to ground the
conceptual possibility for these rights. The cosmopolitan right, however, only addresses new
settlements and foreign travel. This right is largely silent on the question of what to do when
aggression has already occurred. As such, I argue that we must look to Kant’s remarks on just
war and rightful relations between nations in order to construct a justification for indigenous
peoples’ rights. I argue that indigenous peoples can be considered proto-states and as such the
wrongs done during colonialism can be understood under the same framework as a war between
independent states. It follows, then, that indigenous peoples are not required to form a state with
colonists. Combining Kant’s discussion of just war, relations between nations, and the
cosmopolitan right, I suggest that Kant can reasonably defend the right to self-sovereignty for
indigenous peoples.
Bohman, James and Lutz-Bachmann, Matthias (ed.). (1997) Perpetual Peace: Essays on Kant’s Cosmopolitan Ideal.
Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
20 Kant, Immanuel. (1996) Practical Philosophy, Mary Gregor (trans.). Cambridge: Cambride University Press.
The relevant passages appear in the Doctrine of Right (490; 6:353) and Perpetual Peace (329; 8:358)
21 Waligore, Timothy. (2009) “Cosmopolitan Right, Indigenous Peoples, and the Risks of Cultural
Interaction” Public Reason 1 (1): 27-56. This claim appears on p. 48
22 Ibid., p. 46
19
Kyle Thomsen (6A)
Crossing the Divide: Marginalized Populations and the Dilemma of Deliberative
Democracy
Deliberative democratic theory is facing a crisis. While this political model demands that
all groups who are affected by the application of a law have a voice in the creation of said law, it
explicitly fails to live up to its own demands when we move our gaze outside of a nation’s
officially recognized members (i.e. citizens). I am specifically referring to marginalized
populations who live within a nation and are affected by the laws of that nation, but have no
voice in the application or creation of these laws. A particularly pressing example of such a
marginalized population would be undocumented immigrants. While proponents of deliberative
democracy such as Jürgen Habermas and Seyla Benhabib believe we have a moral obligation to
include the undocumented in discourse, both acknowledge that deliberative democracy provides
no clear legal avenue for this inclusion. The undocumented are not officially recognized
members of the nation in which they live, and as such have no legal right to participate in
political discourse. Without this legal component, the claims of this marginalized group can be
ignored without consequence. It is this gap between a moral imperative to include the
marginalized and the legal enforcement of this claim that I see as the most pressing dilemma of
deliberative democracy. It is the goal of my work to cross this divide.
I will offer the following account in order to move towards the legal realization of a
moral imperative for including undocumented immigrants in relevant discourse. First, virtual
representation of undocumented interests by the citizens of a bounded community is not
sufficient to correct the dilemma of deliberative democracy. Not only do the interests of citizens
and the undocumented fail a fungibility test, but this non-descriptive representation stands in the
way of truly adopting the perspective of the oppressed. Second, I will claim (contra Habermas)
that the rhetorical power of personal testimony from marginalized individuals is required for a
responsible judgment in discourse. These direct appeals in informal discourse have the ability to
mobilize support for the legal emancipation of marginalized populations, and can channel the
formal discourses which create and apply the law. Finally I will discuss practical forums for this
participation which can potentially solve the dilemma of deliberative democracy. Through direct
confrontation with those who are unjustly marginalized, we can cross the divide that exists
between a moral imperative to respect the undocumented and a legally recognized right to
participate in discourse.
Lynn Tirrell (and Alisa Carse) (4D)
Reconciliation as a Civic Pursuit
Since the late twentieth century, there has been a proliferation of political reconciliation
efforts seeking to secure stability and peace in the aftermath of civil conflict, genocide, and
systematic human rights abuses. Situating reconciliation at the center of peace-building efforts in
divided societies marks an important historical turn, reflecting hope that we might break cycles
of violence and destruction in ways that exceed fragile forms of stability grounded in coercion,
threat, or fear. At the same time, history demonstrates that the prospects for peace through
political reconciliation remain bleak. Violence and crime have surged in many countries after
apparent transitions to “peace.” Often, what is today called “peace and reconciliation” in large
scale political contexts like South Africa, Northern Ireland, and Rwanda secures at best a fragile
order.
Our analysis focuses on reconciliation in response to grave moral harms, including
prolonged human rights abuses, wanton violence, and genocide, in cases where former
adversaries must continue to live in close proximity. On a social and political level, grave harms
undermine the rule of law, leave institutions in disarray, and destroy confidence in the possibility
of finding norms and practices able to secure a safe and decent world. For societies in transition
away from civil strife and grave violence, overcoming histories of enmity in a context in which
distrust and hostility persist is no easy feat. Without strong and legitimate institutions
safeguarding the rule of law and human rights, sustainable peace is impossible. But legal and
political measures alone are insufficient. We argue that, in the aftermath of grave wrongs,
political reconciliation efforts must be joined to widespread efforts of what we call relational
reconciliation. Relational reconciliation involves personal relationships, to be sure, but crucially
requires shared civic undertakings as well, which are too often ignored in discussions of
reconciliation – undertakings through which former adversaries join forces at the local level in
pursuit of common, concrete, and measurable ends, such as building an efficient water system,
opening a health clinic, or establishing local procedures for cooperative conflict mediation.
Through shared civic pursuits, distinct kinds of personal, social, and civic virtues – most
crucially rudimentary trust and what we call “moral curiosity” – can take root, allowing former
adversaries to begin to establish and abide by shared norms of mutual respect and decency.
For societies in transition, pursuing reconciliation ultimately requires contending with
disparate and conflicting accounts of “shared” history and moral responsibility. So too, as
peacemaker Padraig O’Malley points out, it often entails mourning for a loss of identity tied to
hatred and resentment, and confusion about the demands of loyalty and justice. The coordination
of efforts undertaken in the local lives of ordinary citizens is crucial to the achievement of longterm stability and eventual peace. The development of reparative virtue and a culture of civic
engagement is required in initiating a process of reconciliation; it is also, more fundamentally, a
constitutive part of the reconciliation process.
In developing our analysis, we focus on current reconciliation efforts in Northern Ireland
and post-genocidal Rwanda.
Theresa Tobin (7B)
The Moral Significance of Spiritual Violence
‘Spiritual violence’ refers to the use of religious teachings, symbols, texts, and rituals to damage
a person in her capacity for healthy spirituality. The term ‘spiritual violence’ has emerged in
Christian women’s and LGBTQ groups, as well as organizations advocating for victims of clergy
sexual abuse to name harms perpetrated against people by members of their own faith
community. In ordinary usage, ‘violence’ typically picks out the use of pronounced physical
force to inflict material harm,2 but this is not the kind of harm spiritual violence names. My
working hypothesis is that spiritual violence is a form of violence insofar as it constitutes a
violation of persons, which harms them by inhibiting their psychological capacity for spiritual
development. It is distinctively spiritual both in terms of its typical means—religious teachings
and rituals, for example—and in terms of its target—one’s spiritual identity. I understand
spiritual harm to be a unique psychological harm, which affects the particular psychological
capacity for self-transcendence and for establishing and maintaining a relationship with the
sacred. Examples of spiritual violence perpetrated against women and LGBTQ persons with
Christian faith traditions include clergy sexual abuse, use of religious teachings to disparage
homosexual relationships, and a recent Vatican statement condemning attempts to ordain women
as a crime against the sacraments.
In this paper I examine the moral significance of spiritual violence. To the extent that spiritual
violence violates persons through extensive psychological harm it is surely morally significant.
However, I argue that disabling or impairing peoples’ ability to pursue a healthy spiritual life is a
moral harm not reducible to the psychological harms spiritual violence inflicts. I argue that
spirituality is a good that for many people contributes deeply to human flourishing. Spiritual
violence is morally wrong in part because violating a person through her spiritual identity
curtails her psychological freedom to pursue this good. The first part of the paper explains what
spiritual violence is and discusses some examples. The second part of the paper defends the
moral significance of healthy spirituality and argues that by undermining a person’s capacity to
pursue this good spiritual violence constitutes a unique moral harm.
Oliver Tosky (3C)
Questioning Affluence within the Literature on Moral Demandingness
The literature on moral demandingness has sought to reconcile morality with its cost to
the lives of moral agents, typically by dichotomizing moral and self-interested
motivations, while granting weight to both. This paper questions the features of
affluence that appear to be assumed within the literature, specifically in considerations of
affluent people’s so-called acts of beneficence toward the global poor.
I will begin by analyzing the language used by philosophers such as Garrett Cullity,
Samuel Scheffler, and Liam Murphy, to show how this language characterizes the moral
situation by emphasizing the idea of sacrifice. I will then argue that in formulating the
question of moral demandingness via this language, not only do these theorists assume
that the goods “sacrificed” by morality start out as the legitimate possessions of the moral
agent, but also, that there is no prior relationship between moral agent and beneficiary.
Therefore, in conceiving of the question in such a manner, the literature on moral
demandingness overlooks an important possibility: that the position of the affluent is
related to the destitute position of the beneficiary.
A brief examination of Thomas Pogge’s work will help to ground the claim that there is
indeed such a relationship, and I will show that ignoring this possibility is a fundamental
flaw in the literature, one that, if accepted, would drastically reconfigure the moral claim
that has been charged with being overly demanding. If the prior relationship between the
affluent and the beneficiary is taken into account, then the appeal to cost, which
undergirds the charge of over-demandingness, will appear irrelevant. Acts of
beneficence that supposedly require a moral agent to sacrifice at a high cost will be
reconfigured as moral requirements stemming from principles of remuneration and
reparative justice, since, as I will show, the good that was to be sacrificed was in fact
acquired in complicity with the destitution of another.
Matthew Waldschlagel (4D)
Apology as a Form of Moral Repair: Why—and When—We apologize
The human being is a repairing animal. When things break – or when we find people and
institutions to be broken – we have to choose whether or not to do what we can to put them back
together, to make them whole again. Sometimes our relationships require repair of a uniquely
moral kind. Margaret Urban Walker analyzes moral repair as the “process of moving from the
situation of loss and damage to a situation where some degree of stability in moral relations is
regained.” Apologizing for the wrong or harm we cause is one way of facilitating moral repair.
But exactly how the spoken word of an apology can figure in morally reparative action appears
mysterious. In this paper, I examine a distinction between offering an apology and apologizing,
which I argue can be supported by a critical analysis of J. L. Austin’s work on speech theory. I
further show how this distinction is crucial in understanding the role that apology plays in the
process of moral repair.
Margaret Urban Walker (5D)
Civic Integrity and Historical Accountability
I begin with the idea that societies bear an obligation to be “historically accountable,” to
aim at preserving a truthful version of events in their own history. In line with contemporary
international standards that victims of human rights abuses have a “right to the truth,” the
histories in question are ones of grave wrongs and systemic injustices, and those with a right to
this truth are the members of the community whose history this is, as well as the society as a
whole. My point here is not, however, to appeal directly to an international norm, but rather to
the understanding out of which this norm has evolved: that there are both additional harms that
befall victims when gross wrongs are not acknowledged, and that there are dangers and injustices
inherent in societies that resist an honest accounting of their past.
If societies bear an obligation to be historically accountable, what is the role of individual
citizens? I argue that a kind of civic virtue is the appropriate category for thinking of citizens’
relationships to their societies’ obligations to be historically accountable. I call the virtue in
question “civic integrity.” Integrity is the virtue of accountability relations. Integrity is the firm
habit in thought, feeling, and action of being appropriately responsive to demands for
accountability. Civic integrity, in its broadest sense, is a firm disposition of citizens in thought,
feeling, and action, to insist that their society is accountable to them, as they are to it, under basic
standards of honesty and truthfulness, and so to disapprove actively of hypocritical, dishonest,
evasive, or corrupt activities of their society. The aspect of civic integrity that concerns me in
particular here is a firm desire to want a truthful history and to be open to both welcome and
unwelcome findings, and the settled disposition to value and support the institutions and social
practices that engage in the search for truthful histories. In other words, it is that aspect of the
citizen’s integrity with respect to her society’s historical accountability. This aspect of civic
integrity is a valuable disposition for a citizen, and in particular, for a citizen of a democratic and
pluralistic society, to have.
Historical accountability matters because of its impact on our interpersonal, social, and
political relationships. If societies refuse to be accountable for a truthful history, they fail in their
obligations to their members. When citizens resist this same knowledge, they show a lack of
civic virtue of a particular kind and fail in a kind of commitment to their community’s shared
understanding, and may undercut the respect they should show to fellow citizens. I believe that
civic integrity, and the aspect of it that concerns social truthfulness and historical accountability,
is a distinctive virtue of citizens in a liberal society.
Lauren Weis (3A)
Bias and Civic Responsibility: Critical Objectivity as a Civic Virtue
Philosophers have a renewed interest in the phenomenon of bias, both as an epistemological
problem, and a social phenomenon that demands philosophical interrogation. Feminists claim
that traditional epistemology privileges an androcentric ideal of detached, disembodied, valueneutral impartiality, while feminist epistemologists argue that we must reject this Cartesian ideal
as falsely impartial, for it is founded on a value-laden privileging of biased androcentric norms.
However, a dilemma arises, which Louise Antony calls the “bias paradox,” when philosophers
reject this ideal of impartiality. Antony argues that objective impartiality is not a defensible ideal
for epistemic practice; rather, all epistemic practices are partial (biased). Thus, as we lack
impartial criteria to judge the epistemic worth of conflicting biases, it seems we must accept that
all biases are equal.23 While Antony frames the problem uniquely, many philosophers have tried
to address this apparent tension between absolute objectivity and relativism.24 Put another way,
if we reject the Cartesian ideal of detached, impartial objectivity, what epistemic tools remain
that will allow us to justify the kinds of value claims essential to social criticism? On what
grounds can we argue that the oppression of women or any other group within society is real, and
morally objectionable?25
In this paper I will argue that it is deficient to articulate bias simply as epistemic partiality
conceived as antithetical to impartiality, for bias takes multiple forms. Bias is a multilayered,
dialectical phenomenon; an inescapable result of the polymorphism of human consciousness,
which produces divided societies. Biases result when the needs, desires and interests of
spontaneous human intersubjectivity interrupt or interfere with the development of reasonable
human intelligence.
I will argue that this interruption is the result of a flight from critical objectivity, a contextual
epistemic practice which does not demand an impartiality detached or distanced from
subjectivity, but places the responsibility to address and correct biases both upon the individual
knower and social groups. We can correct individual and group biases by engaging in
subjective, attentive, interested, and objective acts of judgment. Thus, critical objectivity offers
compelling means to unravel the paradox, between supposed impartial objectivity and subjective
relativism, which feminists and other social critics face in our attempts to philosophically
challenge real and pernicious social bias. Ultimately, I will argue that as an epistemic practice,
critical objectivity shifts the social order away from malicious bias toward a spirit of attentive
and interested critical inquiry and reflection, and thus provides a normative epistemic foundation
for civic virtue.
23
See Antony, Louise. 'Quine as Feminist', in Louise M. Antony and Charlotte Witt (eds), A Mind of One's Own,
Westview Press, Boulder, Colorado, pp. 185-225.
24 For a discussion of the breadth of this debate see Heikes, Deborah K. “The Bias Paradox: Why It's Not Just for
Feminists Anymore.” Synthese 138(3), 315-335.
25
Feminists propose diverse remedies to this problem. For example, some feminist empiricists affirm that we must
attend to the social context, norms and values out of which knowledge claims arise, while some standpoint theorists
argue that knowledge is socially situated, and one’s social standpoint as an outsider, or member of an under-valued
or represented group, may produce an epistemic advantage. For more on this topic see Intemann, Kristen. 25 Years
of Feminist Empiricism and Standpoint Theory: Where Are We Now? Hypatia, 25(4), 778-796).
Ian Werkheiser (3E)
Local Knowledge: Toward and Ecologically Motivated Dissensus
As climate change destabilizes broad weather patterns that have existed throughout
human history, affecting flora, fauna, sea levels, and a host of other variables we are only slowly
coming to understand, we are increasingly moving toward a period of disparate micro-climes.
Further, the effect of our civilization on the environment is very irregular; the damage generated
by our global culture is not spread equally over the face of the Earth. This further fragments our
world into often very small environmental regions, each with its own unique problems and
opportunities.
I argue in this paper that the correct response to this is for those local land-based
communities to become the loci of understanding, caring for, and responding to the environment,
part of which would include doing local science. I will show that communities can and should be
able to do “good science” in addition to working with professionals to do studies that are
important to the community.
This widely-distributed, location and interest-specific knowledge would not only be a
benefit for the local community that created it, but would also lead to a fruitful epistemological
dissensus. Other groups would be able to enter into dialogue with the knowledge produced by
different communities, and negotiate a translation of the parts they find useful into their own
contexts. We often conceive of “divided societies” as a problem to be overcome, but division and
dissensus, if it is divisions not between individuals but between epistemological groups, has the
advantage of diversity. This rich diversity, much like biological diversity, would accelerate the
pace of discoveries and increase local adaptability, both important goals in an unstable future. It
has the added advantage of doing this important work while simultaneously increasing
participatory democracy, social and epistemic justice, and community groundedness.
Christine Wieseler (6B)
Disruption of Embodied Ableism
In this paper, I argue that accounts of the embodied experiences of people with
disabilities need to be included when discussing embodied encounters between people with
disabilities and people without disabilities within the context of university courses with the goal
of challenging ableist26 perceptual practices. I focus on two courses described by Jessica Robyn
Cadwallader in “Stirring up the Sediment: The Corporeal Pedagogies of Disability.”27
Cadwallader is interested in the pedagogical capacity of “corporeal engagement with the disabled
other”28 to draw attention to ableist29 assumptions and the habitual styles of being-in-the-world
of students without disabilities. I contend that Cadwallader does not adequately take into account
the experiences of people with disabilities in her discussion of encounters between her ablebodied students and people with disabilities. As a result, her approach threatens to privilege the
very perceptual practices she seeks to disrupt by making the perceptions of people without
disabilities the sole concern.
I consider Cadwallader’s recognition of the centrality of embodiment for learning,
generally, and, more specifically, for challenging perceptions of disability to be an important
insight. Drawing upon the work of Linda Martín Alcoff and Merleau-Ponty, she highlights ways
that perceptual practices become sedimented through habituation. Cadwallader claims that it is
“almost impossible” to change how one perceives; yet, she maintains that her students do change
how they perceive people with disabilities after analyzing their previous interactions with people
with disabilities.30 Though I do not wish to deny that some of Cadwallader’s students may reform their past perceptions of people with disabilities, it is unclear to me how this activity is
sufficient to motivate students to undertake the “almost impossible” task of changing their
perceptual practices in a long-term, meaningful way.
I discuss two ways that engagement with the narratives of actual people with disabilities
would adapt Cadwallader’s approach so that it is better aligned with her goal of to challenging
students’ perceptual practices by attending to their embodied interactions with people with
disabilities. First, understanding the ways that people with disabilities experience being
“Ableism is the term used to refer to discrimination against people with disabilities. Ableists hold that people
with disabilities are inferior to those without disabilities and tend to focus solely upon individual bodies as
sources of any difficulties that people with disabilities may encounter rather than societal obstacles” (Wieseler,
Christine “A Philosophical Investigation: Interrogating Practices and Beliefs about Disability” Social
Philosophy Today, Vol. 28, September 2012). In addition, ableist practices tend to treat able-bodied people as
the standard and maintain that there is a clear, natural divide between people categorized as either “normal” or
“disabled.”
27
Cadwallader, Jessica Robyn. “Stirring up the Sediment: The Corporeal Pedagogies of Disabilities” in
Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education. Vol. 31, (4). October 2010, pp. 513-526.
28 Ibid., 514.
29
“Ableism is the term used to refer to discrimination against people with disabilities. Ableists hold that
people with disabilities are inferior to those without disabilities and tend to focus solely upon individual bodies
as sources of any difficulties that people with disabilities may encounter rather than societal obstacles”
(Wieseler, Christine “A Philosophical Investigation: Interrogating Practices and Beliefs about Disability”
Social Philosophy Today, Vol. 28, September 2012).
26
Cadwallader, Jessica Robyn. “Stirring up the Sediment: The Corporeal Pedagogies of Disabilities” in
Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education. Vol. 31, (4). October 2010, p. 519.
30
constructed as a problem through ableist perceptual practices could help students to recognize
their own potential to impact others in positive and negative ways. Secondly, Cadwallader’s
recognition that that human interactions are intercorporeal, i.e., they involve embodied subjects,
seems to require consideration of the experiences of both parties. By limiting the classroom
discussion to the perceptions of able-bodied students, Cadwallader’s method also seems to leave
behind the importance of the embodied nature of interaction with others in favor of a purely
cognitive analysis. Engagement with flesh and blood people with disabilities31 would maintain
the focus on the centrality of embodiment for human interactions and the pre-cognitive nature of
perception.
Finally, I provide suggestions for development of a course that draws upon
Cadwallader’s insights about ableist perceptual practices and incorporates narratives of people
with disabilities.
I am thinking both of María Lugones’ suggestion that feminist women of color are interested in ending
racism, not engaging in theoretical debates and Mariana Ortega’s assertion that white women cannot
adequately theorize about women of color without practical engagement with flesh and blood women of color.
See Lugones, María. Pilgrimages/Peregrinajes: Theorizing Coalition against Multiple Oppressions. Lanham,
MD: Rowman & Littlefield. 2003.p. 74. See also Ortega, Mariana “Being Lovingly, Knowingly Ignorant:
White Feminism and Women of Color” in Hypatia. Vol. 21 (3) Summer 2006., p. 68.
31
Joan Woolfrey (8B)
With Gratitude to Bayard Rustin: Another Look at Institutional Injustice
On the centennial of Bayard Rustin’s birth, it is worthwhile connecting his considerable
intellectual talents to the legacy of ideas to come out of the civil rights movement. If feminist
philosophy and philosophy of race have the roots of their ideas in the social upheaval in the U.S.
of the 1950s-70s, then we owe a debt of gratitude to Rustin, amongst many others. While not
molded significantly through traditional academic channels, Rustin developed a perhaps clearer
understanding than most scholars of, for instance, the concept of institutional injustice—a topic
still not given sufficient philosophical attention. He also observed, developed and articulated
clear ideas around the phenomena that we have more recently labeled implicit bias or, relatedly,
social priming, and stereotype threat. And, I would like to illustrate connections between
Rustin’s first-hand accounts and the more theoretical work being done today on this topic. This
paper will trace how the lived experience of the organizational and intellectual force behind the
1963 March on Washington (namely Rustin) provided the tools for developing a deep
understanding of how the cultural conditioning of institutions (especially economic institutions)
shapes our collective consciousness.
I will 1) connect Rustin’s ideas to Iris Young’s version of institutional injustice, 2) use several of
Rustin’s own descriptions of the world with which he actively engages to unpack the notion of
implicit bias (or social priming) as he (would have) understood the phenomena. And 3) seek
insight into protections against or repairs to the conditions that create stereotype threat from the
activist work in which Rustin was engaged. His own analysis of the conditions in which the
oppressed find themselves provides the keys for (at least some of) the work that needs to be
done.
This paper also (hopefully) does some of the work of undoing implicit bias as studies have been
suggesting that the more positive exemplars from diminished social categories we’re exposed to,
the weaker our biases become.
Jason Wyckoff (3E)
Speciesism as Ideology: Human Linguistic Practices and the Construction of Animality
Most people seem to believe that it is wrong to cause needless suffering and death to non-human
animals, and yet most people also contribute to the needless suffering and death of a great many
animals. If speciesism is understood as a psychological prejudice—the tendency of an individual
human agent to disregard the interests of animals—then this fact is extremely difficult to explain.
Many philosophical defenses of animals do in fact take speciesism to be a prejudice; Peter
Singer, for example, writes that “[t]he racist violates the principle of equality by giving greater
weight to the interests of members of his own race when there is a clash between their interests
and the interests of those of another race. The sexist violates the principle of equality by favoring
the interests of his own sex. Similarly the speciesist allows the interests of his own species to
override the greater interests of members of other species. The pattern is identical in each case.”
But in focusing on “the racist,” “the sexist,” and “the speciesist,” Singer fails to recognize that
racism, sexism, and speciesism are institutions, and that they cannot be reduced to psychological
states of human actors. I argue that once speciesism is understood structurally—as a matter of
injustice rather than a matter of interpersonal wrongdoing or individual prejudice—the project of
explaining how so many humans are implicated in animal suffering becomes much more
tractable. I then draw on the work of feminist theorists such as Sally Haslanger and Catharine
MacKinnon, as well as sociologists such as David Nibert and Bob Torres, to argue that humans’
linguistic practices (a) play an important role in the construction of non-human animals’
subordination, (b) play an ideological role in masking the injustice of animals’ oppression. I
suggest that the best approach to theorizing animals’ oppression is a dominance approach
analogous to the approach adopted by Catharine MacKinnon in theorizing gender.
In sum, the key claims I defend are:
1. The structural character of animals’ oppression creates a “buffer” between human actors
and animals, so that consumption of animal products is not seen as connected to the
suffering and death of particular animals.
2. Human discursive practices involving animals play an important ideological role in
masking what would otherwise be visible injustices.
3. Our linguistic practices (as well as our legal institutions, including the property status of
animals) play a role in the discursive construction of animals as subordinate to humans.
In other words, these practices are used to categorize animals as subordinate, and this
conception of animals in turn reinforces the linguistic practices and legal institutions
themselves.
Melissa Yates (10B)
Strangers in the Public Sphere
One of the most important things about political relationships is that they exist principally
between strangers. In our everyday lives filled with family, friends, and co-workers, our political
relationships with fellow citizens challenge us to relate to each other as strangers, where you
can’t take for granted that tastes in humor, art, or food are common, that cultural or religious
references are shared, or that consensus can be anticipated on behalf of others. Despite these
gaps, accounts of deliberative democracy depend on strangers engaging in public discussions
about very difficult matters — about our cherished political values and their appropriate
ordering, about the conception of personhood (when it begins, when it ends, and the rights that
go with it at different stages), about the fair distribution of economic and social goods, and about
our country’s global obligations and interests.
Opportunities and incentives to engage in such deliberation with strangers in the public sphere
have shifted in the last two decades with our increasingly digitally tethered and mediated lives.
In some ways we appear to come into contact with more “strangers” online than elsewhere,
opening rural locations to interactions with people all over the world. In other ways we minimize
contact with people in our societies; we increasingly do our shopping online without interacting
with others, we travel plugged into our phones, laptops, and iPods; and we prefer to find small,
familiar niches in our online communities, where one-time strangers become part of our webbased relations. However we understand the ways technology has reshaped our stranger
relations, proponents of democracy have good reason to be attentive to these shifts.
This paper evaluates challenges posed to the proper functioning of public spheres by recent
empirical analyses of our mediated, online lives. Physical public spheres have become
transformed as we walk through streets plugged into our devices. Online public spheres, once
thought to hold promise for democratic ideals, have become increasingly inegalitarian and
hierarchically organized. The political blogs that receive the vast majority of page views are run
by an unrepresentative and homogenous group of ten bloggers – all are white, all but one are
male, all have advanced degrees. We increasingly rely on search engines to interact with
information and other people online, and those search engines are filtering our results in ways
that intentionally limit our interaction with materials predicted to be disagreeable to us. Facebook
filters our news feeds to eliminate political opinions divergent from those it anticipates we hold.
Our exposure to difference and disagreement, let alone to strangers in a democratic public
sphere, has significantly declined. This paper demonstrates ways these findings bear on the two
most significant claims advanced by theories of deliberative democracy: that public deliberation
plays a crucial role in legitimating democratic power, and that the public sphere is uniquely
suited to promoting public learning. This should underscore the importance of public political
deliberation, and highlight the significant loss to any democratic state that fails to support or
incentivize public deliberation.
Willie Young (6E)
Listening in the Political Realm
Listening has become a central dimension of recent theories of deliberative and participatory
democracy. As such, it has become necessary to rethink the relationship between listening and
obedience. Given that listening and obedience are often conflated, this essay seeks to clarify the
crucial difference between them through a critical examination of the auditory politics of
Theodor Adorno and Michel Foucault. For both, the technological and political regimes of
modernity operate through forms of obedience. For Adorno, obedience takes hold of the social
through the technological imposition of mass communication and the accompanying
“regression” of listening. Popular music, especially jazz, exemplifies this music, especially when
played via the radio. Foucault, on the other hand, takes obedience to be central to the pastoral
governmentality which the state adopts from the Christian tradition, effacing the techniques of
listening which constitute a philosophical care of the self. He contrasts this sharply with the
ascetic disciplines of listening found in stoic and epicurean philosophy. The cultivation of
alternative modes of listening is thus a central element of their political projects. However, I will
argue that their definitions of listening and the accompanying modes of resistance which they
advocate fall short of democratic listening, remaining deaf to modes of civic receptivity which
might have more redemptive and transformative political effects. Audiences may use popular
music in innovative and improvisatory ways, generating new forms of critical reflection and
solidarity. Effective political listening also may involve greater attention to affect and sensation
than a stoic approach would allow. Thus, even as Foucault and Adorno highlight the significance
of listening for developing an alternative democratic politics, it becomes necessary to rethink
listening beyond the limits of their approaches.