ABSTRACT Aristotle's analysis of stasis in Book V of the Politics offers a striking example of “distinctively political thought,” as advocated by Bernard Williams's political realism, and in contrast to the moralist approach exemplified by John Rawls. Aristotle identifies disputes over justice, driven by partial and conflicting conceptions of equality, as a principal cause of civil conflict, advocating institutional measures to manage such disagreements rather than relying on citizens converging on a correct understanding. This focus on stability as the first function of politics, aimed at preventing constitutional breakdown, parallels Williams's “first political question” and emphasizes the pragmatic safeguarding of order to avert catastrophe. By contrast, Rawls treats politics primarily as a means to realizing justice, positing that stability depends on an overlapping consensus. The paper critiques Rawls's neglect of the historical‐institutional foundations of liberalism, his underestimation of the durability of modi vivendi, and his ideal‐theoretic abstraction from the circumstances of politics. Aristotle's realist alternative provides a more plausible framework for understanding the relationship between justice and politics—a necessary corrective to Rawlsian political moralism.
ABSTRACT In The Democratic Marketplace , Lisa Herzog offers a damning indictment of democratic capitalism. Among other things, she argues that capitalism has led to increased inequality, fosters an unhealthy culture of competition, that it is bad for the environment, and that it is ultimately bad for democracy itself. To save democracy we must pursue various reforms: we need to address economic inequality; we must abjure the unsustainable pursuit of economic growth and instead democratically determine the functions of the economy; and we should give citizens more time for meaningful civic engagement. In this review essay I push back in defense of democratic capitalism, arguing that while Herzog overstates the negative aspects of capitalism, she also greatly understates its many benefits. Additionally, I show that her own distinctive proposals for how to democratize the economy face serious issues that should not be overlooked. Overall, expanding the scope of democratic politics is not as promising as many seem to think, while democratic capitalism is unjustifiably underappreciated.
I argue that indoctrination undermines voter competence, and that widespread indoctrination thereby compromises the legitimacy of otherwise free and fair elections. Drawing on recent work in virtue epistemology, I provide an epistemic account of indoctrination according to which one is indoctrinated only if they hold an epistemically impactful belief with an intellectually vicious dogmatic attitude. After clarifying these notions, I show that politically indoctrinated subjects lack epistemic agency with respect to their vote, rendering them incompetent as voters. Therefore, if indoctrinated voters successfully elect a candidate, then the result is illegitimate, even if the election is otherwise free and fair. More speculatively, I suggest that this problem is not merely contingent, but structural: under conditions of low-cost distribution of information, democracy incentivizes widespread indoctrination as a political strategy, thereby incentivizing a practice that undermines its own legitimacy.
In recent years, discourse on freedom of speech has shifted away from exclusive focus on the state and towards societal threats to speech. Amidst this change, the notion of "self-censorship" has gained increased prominence. Not only has self-censorship emerged as a common reference point, several recent studies identify it as embodying a corrosion of speech-related values. Despite this, the term self-censorship lacks a clear and settled definition, and the normative status of self-censorship isn't self-evident. While it can be troubling if people feel unable to speak openly, judicious silence is often a virtue, and sometimes morally required. Against this backdrop, I offer an account of a central bad-making dimension of self-censorship that helps us distinguish benign from pernicious forms. On this view, self-censorship is pernicious to the extent that it involves acquiescing to others' judgments of acceptable speech or belief. Identifying what is pernicious about certain forms of self-censorship in turn helps us sort between the types of social penalties on speech and belief that we ought to be more or less concerned about.
Kate Phelan's defense of feminism as a movement exclusively concerned with sex-based oppression rests on two interlocking moves: a sharp division between women as women and women as members of other oppressed groups, and a "sex-right" framework that is supposed to entail an abolitionist conclusion about prostitution. This reply argues that both moves fail, and that they fail together. The attempt to isolate sex-based oppression as a separable object of feminist concern proves unstable once the intersectional constitution of women's oppression is acknowledged: the characteristics that make sex-based oppression recognizable as such cannot be cleanly separated from class, race, and other axes of domination. The same instability undermines Phelan's sex-right argument: the inference from the existence of prostitution to the persistence of unconditional male entitlement does not hold once rape has been criminalized and sexual access has been made legally conditional on consent. The line-drawing to which Phelan attributes such importance is, in the end, both theoretically imprecise and politically unnecessary for the ends she wishes feminism to pursue.
This paper explores the view that, beyond particular wrongs committed by Zionism, the Zionist project was itself inherently wrong. I argue that the most plausible basis for this claim is the contention that Zionism disrespected the territorial rights of the local Arab population. By examining leading contemporary theories of territorial rights - specifically those of Miller Moore and Stilz - I demonstrate that none provide a strong foundation for this view. At the onset of Zionist immigration, the Arabs of Palestine did not meet the criteria required to possess territorial rights under these theoretical frameworks.
Many of the most pressing moral problems we face involve collective harms generated by large numbers of individually insignificant actions. Unlike triggering cases-where a threshold exists such that a single act could be decisive-non-triggering cases lack any such sharp cutoff. In these cases, no individual act appears to make a difference to whether harm occurs, and it may be metaphysically indeterminate whether a given aggregate is harmful or whether a marginal contribution plays any causal role at all. I argue that standard approaches to moral responsibility, which rely on difference-making or expected outcomes, struggle to provide action-guiding reasons in these contexts. Drawing on the security-dependence account of causation, I argue that agents have pro tanto moral reasons to refrain from actions that make harm more secure, even when those actions neither determine outcomes nor probabilistically influence them in any straightforward sense. Doing so explains how individual actions can remain morally relevant under conditions of overdetermination and metaphysical indeterminacy.
Philanthropy has an uneasy relationship with democracy. It distributes decision-making power plutocratically, in proportion to wealth. It allows unelected, unaccountable, and often untrustworthy individuals to shape social outcomes. And it does so in domains where democracy should be authoritative. Yet, at the same time, philanthropy does much good, and hardly anyone would claim we should eliminate it altogether. So how can we make philanthropy consistent with democracy? In this article, I propose a new answer to this question. I argue that while democratic critics are right to worry about much current philanthropy, there is an important class of philanthropy that is not only highly beneficial, but that also, so far from undermining or conflicting with democracy, can complement or even enhance it. I call this "philanthropy for the disenfranchised," and argue that we can resolve the tension between philanthropy and democracy by encouraging this sort of philanthropy while discouraging forms of philanthropic abuse and folly. I also outline a program for social reform that involves differentiating the institutions surrounding philanthropy to make them better perform this role, which I contrast with the more familiar programs of democratization and effective altruism.
Part III of Anarchy, State, and Utopia defends the minimal state as a framework for utopia. On Bader's reconstruction, this defense contains two justificatory strands: a common ground argument, which shows the minimal state to be compatible with the widest range of utopian associations, and an approximation argument, which holds it to be the framework most likely to generate such associations in practice. I argue that the convergence of these two strands on the minimal state depends on the associational menu being exogenous to institutional structure. Once we recognize that founding has the structure of a public goods problem, this assumption fails: the menu is shaped by the incentive environment a framework creates for potential founders, and a minimal state that does nothing to coordinate founding may produce a narrower and less representative range of associations than the approximation argument supposes. Combined with the rights-based justification of the minimal state in Parts I and II, this divergence generates a three-way trade-off that Nozick's framework does not resolve.
At the heart of liberalism lie two seemingly conflicting ideals: a commitment to robust individual rights and an ideal of equal opportunity. The former offers rights-holders discretion in terms of with whom to cooperate, who to hire, admit, and so forth. The latter is often understood to require policies of affirmative action. This conflict is visible in the recent US Supreme Court Decision Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard University, which firmly decided the matter on behalf of liberal rights. However, such a resolution shifts the burden of injustice on those who are negatively affected by it. And this seems unfair. At the same time, affirmative action threatens to shift these burdens entirely to employers and other applicants. And liberal rights are meant to protect us from being made to bear such burdens. This essay offers a solution to this problem by formulating a rights-based defense of affirmative action policies. According to this argument, affirmative action policies are fair when they realign the actual (injustice-tainted) distribution of opportunities with the distribution to which people are entitled as a matter of their social positions. This solution is fair since rights-holders have no just claims against lacking opportunities they had no right to enjoy in the first place, and victims of injustice have no more claim to redress than what their rights were supposed to yield. The argument justifies significant policies of affirmative action with respect to hiring, admissions, and so forth, in ways that remain fully consistent with even the strongest form of liberal rights.
Liberal political morality prizes the freedom to enter and exit intimate associations, and romantic relationships are often treated as paradigmatic sites of this freedom. Yet when romantic partners are also coparents, exit can deprive children of established caregiving structures on which their welfare, security, and developing autonomy depend. This paper argues that children hold positive associational rights to the continuity of such structures once they have been conferred. These rights generate defeasible relational obligations for coparents to sustain a joint caregiving partnership, even at significant personal cost. Crucially, the obligations defended here are not grounded in biological parenthood or in mere interests in an intact family from the outset. They arise only in cases of deprivation, where a child's life has already been organized around a shared caregiving framework, and not in cases of mere absence. By distinguishing relational obligations from other parental duties, the paper develops a liberal yet child-centered account of romantic exit, according to which children's claims to continuity can justifiably constrain adults' freedom to disassociate.
This paper defends a provocative thesis: namely, that the present structure and composition of the academy undermine democratic legitimacy. Political philosophers have often stressed that universal suffrage by itself is not sufficient for such legitimacy. In these critiques, they have focused on the disproportionate power of the wealthy to shape politics and public discourse. I argue here that there is a deeper and relatively unnoticed problem in this vein: the university system exerts enormous power in shaping the perspectives of the public through a variety of means. Yet, the academy is democratically unaccountable for all practical purposes. Moreover, as has been documented in a range of empirical work, it is politically homogeneous. As a result, I argue, this asymmetric power undermines the legitimacy of the political system, viewed as a whole. This can be seen from within three influential accounts of democratic legitimacy: republicanism, public reason liberalism, and consent theories. The paper concludes by exploring some potential remedies in the service of moving towards democratic legitimacy.
Most countries legally recognize the right and duty to raise the child one has carried and given birth to, (i) reflecting a traditional legal presumption (despite widespread abuse and neglect) that parents should be granted wide-ranging legal rights with respect to their minor children. What interests me here is the moral aspect of the right to childrearing: does childrearing have a value that is objective, and if so, why? In this paper, I explore a theory of intrinsic value that is consistent with an objective stance on childrearing. The theory enables us to make sense of the belief that something can be objectively good as an end-in-itself even if a person derives no pleasure from it, thus grounding the distinction between the good of childrearing and the pleasure one might gain from it. This paper is divided into three parts. Section 1 explores the concept of intrinsic goodness. I explain what I mean by 'childrearing' as distinguished from procreation, and argue that childrearing is both an objective and intrinsic good. Section 2 clarifies how this works, maintaining that the intimate relationship between parent and child makes the parent's life richer and more worthwhile. (ii) I argue further that childrearing is a component of well-being rather than an instrumental cause of it. Section 3 sketches three types of theories outlined by Derek Parfit (iii) regarding what is good for a person: hedonistic theories, desire-fulfilment theories, and objective-list theories (iv).
One of the most prominent minority groups today is trans people. Those who see themselves as fighting for trans rights have tended to take these to include a right to legal recognition by the state, and social treatment by fellow citizens, as the sex of identification. These rights claims have been given substantial legal and institutional uptake. If trans people's full inclusion in public life requires legal recognition and social treatment as the sex of identification, then this is merely a description of things being as they should be. But if trans people's inclusion within the liberal state does not require these things, then this may be a description of a violation of liberal neutrality, the enforcement by the state of a contested and controversial conception of the good; and a tyranny of the majority, the weight of social opinion being pressed against those who want to talk about (what they see as) the fact that things are not as they should be. One way to gain some clarity on whether things are as they should be or not is to carefully consider the principles that liberal democratic states have used to secure the full inclusion in public life of other minority groups, and their application to trans people. I'll consider in particular toleration , collective and individual exemptions , and full accommodation ; as they have applied to religious minorities, women, sexual orientation minorities, black people, and people with physical disabilities.
The critique that rap causes violence (causal claim) goes back as far as the 1980s, but today drill rappers are having their freedoms restricted based on instances of a causal claim. Police in the UK regularly remove drill videos from social media and streaming platforms, and drillers are being restricted from making music and associating with people via criminal behavior orders based on the claim that drill music causes serious violence. If this causal claim is true, it provides potential grounds for such restrictions on drillers. This paper argues against censoring drill on the assumption that it causes violence for three reasons. First, even according to the most charitable rendition of the causal claim, there is insufficient evidence to support it. Second, there are less speech-restrictive and more effective approaches to violence reduction than censorship-oriented approaches. Third, critics should not be advancing the causal claim due to its racist public meaning.
In Lockean social contract theory, the state exercises its authority over territory through property rights. The state has territorial authority over the property it and its citizens claim. This authority is legitimate when the state has the consent of the governed and effectively governs. In this paper, I argue that there is an irreconcilable tension between these concepts of authority and legitimacy. I argue that because Locke's view is property-based, his view cannot justify more than a piecemeal territory. A piecemeal territory, however, makes the government's job of protecting life, liberty, and property nearly impossible. If we push to have a unified account of territory, the consent of the governed is undermined. Either the Lockean loses legitimacy by failing to protect life, liberty, and property, or they lose legitimacy by failing to have the consent of the governed. If I am correct, then the Lockean has to give up either legitimacy or territorial authority—neither of which is a workable option. This leaves us with having to either look elsewhere to justify territorial authority, give up the idea of territorial authority, or explore political alternatives to the state.
Social contract theory is one of the most popular approaches to political justification. While the state of nature account in social contract theory is generally invoked to justify the state's authority, I argue in this paper that no extant account succeeds in doing so. The primary reason, I argue, is that extant state of nature theories fail to capture an empirically plausible account of human life under stateless conditions. This failure undermines the justificatory force of these theories. Instead, I argue that extant state of nature accounts are best understood as attempts to justify morality or authority in general.
When aiming to justify the infliction of harm upon a culpable wrongdoer, the notion of desert most readily finds its home within the context of punishment. Thus, according to one dominant theory of punishment, retributivism, a wrongdoer deserves the hard treatment constitutive of punishment. In this paper, I argue that desert can play a role in helping justify certain types of defensive action. Specifically, I aim to show how desert-based reasons can help justify seemingly futile defensive efforts. Importantly, this justification does not stem from the idea that the victim of an attack may “draw against punishment” in seeking to avert a threat, but rather from the belief that culpable aggressors deserve to be resisted.
Status is a positional good constituted by the positive approval of others on some evaluative dimension. Skeptics say that pursuing status is ultimately unfulfilling, that it mistakes what we want now for our own final good, that it confuses the approval of others with objectively valuable achievement, and that it puts us into relations of enmity with other humans. I believe these objections are mistaken, and that interrogating them turns up some meaningful virtues of status. Achieving status can confer narrative value. A moment of triumph can change the evaluative valence of the struggles and failures that preceded it. It can also alleviate pressure on future uses of one's agency. With security against sources of identity threat, agents have more latitude for exploration and risk-taking. Status can thereby help redeem the past as well as open up the future.
Relational egalitarians oppose social hierarchy. Or, more precisely, they oppose intolerable social hierarchy. Stigma is often included among those unequal forms of relating that relational egalitarians ought to oppose, but there are circumstances in which stigmatizing behaviors or group identities might be strategically important for opposing social inequalities. Working through different responses to this puzzle, in this paper I advance the view that stigma is neutral, such that relational egalitarians should only oppose forms of it that are unwarranted.
