Abstract Bernard Williams’s account of regret contains a lacuna with respect to the appropriate emotion for contributors to feel in response to faultless group harms. While he delineates ‘agent-regret’ for agents faultlessly causing harm and ‘spectator-regret’ for observers, neither suffices for individuals who unintentionally or unforeseeably contribute to harms resulting from group actions. This paper investigates the fitting emotion for such cases. I contend that contributors occupy ‘as-if positions’ in that they are quasi-agents in virtue of their own contributions and quasi-spectators owing to others’ roles. This dual standpoint generates a ‘biperspective’ that calls for a distinct form of regret, which is reducible to neither agent-regret nor spectator-regret but synthesises elements of both. I term this distinct form ‘biperspectival regret’. Taking the appropriateness of emotions to depend on their formal objects, I formulate the formal object of biperspectival regret as the ‘comparative disvalue of group harm to which one faultlessly contributed’. Because this formal object corresponds to the defining features of faultless group harms, I argue that biperspectival regret is the warranted emotion for contributors to experience in such scenarios.
Let me take up the second of the two questions first, about whether the asymmetries associated with a representative system might answer to values other than tempering inferiority. As Beitz observes, my stance is already pluralistic. In addition to claims against inferiority, there are also rights against invasion and claims to improvement. So, it remains open to me to grant that representative institutions reflect a compromise between noninferiority and other values. The idea would be, in other words, that the move from direct to representative democracy involves some cost in terms of inferiority, but this is compensated for by the gain in noninvasion and improvement, as well as perhaps still other values. Indeed, the move from direct to representative democracy, while involving a cost in terms of inferiority along one dimension, may alleviate inferiority along another dimension, such as if representative democracy leads to better protections against discrimination.
Niko Kolodny’s The Pecking Order includes a ‘book-length treatment’ of the idea of an ‘equal say’ (6) that is ubiquitous in commonplace talk and philosophical reflection about democracy. 1 In this commentary I concentrate on the account of political representation that forms a main part of the ‘treatment’. That account places democratic representative institutions within a larger framework animated by the thought – a ‘positive conjecture’ – that we have non-derivative claims against being placed in ‘untempered relations of inferiority’ (126) with individuals who wield the power and authority of the state. The principal challenge is to identify conditions under which we might regard these relations as sufficiently tempered to be unobjectionable. Kolodny’s book offers a doctrine of ‘primary’ and ‘secondary tempering factors’ whose satisfaction is claimed to render hierarchical social relations like those that constitute political representation acceptable, or as much so as we might reasonably expect.
Abstract This article offers a new interpretation of moral knowledge in Wang Yangming’s 王陽明 philosophy, emphasizing its embodied foundations and practical significance. I advance two central claims. First, although moral knowledge ( liangzhi 良知) is often construed as an internal mental sense to know right from wrong, Wang’s writings reveal its deeper grounding in bodily perception, particularly in the perception of pain. Second, while the extension of moral knowledge ( zhi liangzhi 致良知) is typically understood as an inward process of correcting one’s mental states, Wang understands it more fundamentally as the practice of recognizing the affective interconnectedness and mutual resonance between oneself and other beings. Drawing on close readings of Wang’s key texts, informed by comparative and interdisciplinary perspectives, I argue that this embodied and relational account both deepens our understanding of the unity of knowledge and action in Wang’s thought and enriches contemporary discussions of moral motivation.
Much in our interior mental lives and in our exterior social structures presupposes that we, human beings, are conscious of social hierarchy, of differences in rank and status. We are ‘conscious’ of hierarchy in both senses of the word: ‘aware’ of and ‘anxious’ about. This consciousness seems rooted in our natural history. Many social animals are likewise preoccupied with ‘pecking order’. These animals include not only chickens, who literally peck, but also our closest primate relatives. And this consciousness of hierarchy, transformed by our species’ special bent for symbol and self-reflection, has driven much of our non-natural history. The main chapters of the human story might be defined by the prevailing answers to the questions of who among us, if anyone, would be above, and who, if anyone, would be below. For most of the career of Homo sapiens , we appear to have lived in societies that were predominantly and often vigilantly egalitarian, at least for adult men. At various times and places, this was eventually upended, with the great many being subordinated, in enduring ways, to the very few. The birth of enduring hierarchy was no easy delivery, apparently having to be midwifed by the coordinated manipulation of superstition and the control, by violence, of food stores. Modernity, albeit not without precedents, is in large part the tale – at times inspiring, at times cautionary – of our experiments with reconciling the equality of individuals with the differentiation of roles and concentrations of power and authority of large-scale, complex societies – with, in one sense of the word, civilization. If we take the longest historical view, therefore, the questions that this has been exploring may be among the first questions of politics. These questions are: First, what is social hierarchy? Second, do we have an objection to being set beneath another in a social hierarchy – standing in a relation of inferiority to another – as such? Third, if there is such an objection, how then do we reconcile ourselves to a social world that seems rife with hierarchy? That is, if complex, large-scale society – if, in one sense of the word, civilization – requires a differentiation of roles and a concentration of power and authority, can it be reconciled with the equality of standing that was guarded so jealously before? The Pecking Order seeks to bring these questions into more explicit, philosophical reflection. This precis tries to convey a bit of what the book has to say about these questions as well as to note some second thoughts and responses to a few specific criticisms.
