Oxford Studies in Political Philosophy Volume 6

2020 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Political Philosophy ◽  
Political Theory ◽  
Moral Theory ◽  
Personal Space ◽  
Coarse Grained ◽  
Moral Theories ◽  
Special Relationships ◽  
The Right ◽  
The University ◽  
Past Injustices

This consists of eight papers in political philosophy that were presented at the Sixth Annual Workshop for Oxford Studies in Political Philosophy, at the University Pavia, Italy, in June 2018. In Part I: Rights and Wrongs, Kimberley Brownlee analyses how wrongs can create new rights. Zofia Stemplowska argues that it is possible to mitigate some past injustices done to those who are no longer alive. Japa Pallikkathayil develops an account of how our bodily rights constrain the right to free speech. In Part II: Immigration and Borders, Valeria Ottonelli defends the right to stay where one lives, on the basis of the right to control one’s body and one’s personal space. Nils Holtug argues that the equality required by justice has global scope and that open borders can be expected reduce global inequality. Johann Frick argues that special relationships among members of a group (e.g. one’s compatriots) cannot justify strong forms of partiality, unless the boundaries of this group can also be justified. In Part III: Other Matters, Christian List and Laura Valentini argue that the normative facts of political theory belong to a higher—more coarse-grained—level than those of moral theory and that, consequently, some questions that moral theories answer are indeterminate at the political level. Aart van Gils and Patrick Tomlin explore the issue whether weaker claims can be aggregated in order to collectively defeat stronger claims, and they focus on the limited aggregation view, according to which this is sometimes, but not always so.

What Normative Facts Should Political Theory Be About?

2020 ◽  
pp. 185-220
Author(s):  
Christian List ◽  
Valentini Laura
Keyword(s):  
Political Theory ◽  
Moral Theory ◽  
Coarse Grained ◽  
The Political ◽  
Similar Question ◽  
Inadmissible Evidence ◽  
Public Reasoning ◽  
Moral Theories ◽  
Different Levels ◽  
Normative Political Theory

Just as different sciences deal with different facts—say, physics versus biology—so we may ask a similar question about normative theories. Is normative political theory concerned with the same normative facts as moral theory or different ones? By developing an analogy with the sciences, this chapter argues that the normative facts of political theory belong to a higher—more coarse-grained—level than those of moral theory. The latter are multiply realizable by the former: competing facts at the moral level can underpin the same facts at the political one. Consequently, some questions that moral theories answer are indeterminate at the political level. This proposal offers a novel interpretation of John Rawls’s idea that, in public reasoning, we should abstract away from comprehensive moral doctrines. The chapter contrasts its distinction between facts at different levels with the distinction between admissible and inadmissible evidence, and discusses some implications for the practice of political theory.

scholarly journals The Concept of Feasibility: A Multivocal Account

Res Publica ◽  
2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Daniel Guillery
Keyword(s):  
Political Philosophy ◽  
Political Theory ◽  
Moral Theory ◽  
Common View ◽  
The World ◽  
Common Objection ◽  
The Common

AbstractA common objection to a proposal or theory in political philosophy is that it is not feasible to realise what it calls for. This is commonly taken to be sufficient to reject a proposal or theory: feasibility, on this common view, operates as a straightforward constraint on moral and political theory, whatever is not feasible is simply ruled out. This paper seeks to understand what we mean when we say that some proposal or outcome is or is not feasible. It will argue that no single binary definition can be given. Rather, there is a whole range of possible specifications of the term ‘feasible’, each of which selects a range of facts of the world to hold fixed. No single one of these possible specifications, though, is obviously privileged as giving the appropriate understanding of ‘feasibility’ tout court. The upshot of my account of feasibility, then, will be that the common view of feasibility as a straightforward constraint cannot be maintained: in order to reject a moral theory, it will not be sufficient simply to say that it is not feasible.

The Chairman's Problem

1961 ◽  
Vol 55 (2) ◽  
pp. 368-372 ◽  
Author(s):  
Bertrand de Jouvenel
Keyword(s):  
Political Philosophy ◽  
Political Theory ◽  
Simple Problem ◽  
Equal Opportunities ◽  
Practical Application ◽  
Long Time ◽  
The Right ◽  
Equal Right

One of the major obstacles to the progress of political theory lies in the fact that people speak of rights without paying attention to the feasibility of their exercise. I propose to raise here some elementary problems relating to the right of speech. It is one of the basic tenets of our democratic political philosophy that all people (over a given age) have an equal right of speech. Making this right operational however gives rise to difficulties which have not been faced.I shall start out with a very simple problem, which moreover has the advantage of evoking familiar pictures: this is the chairman's problem. I find myself chairman of an assembly, and regard all participants as formally equal, which commits me to treating them equally. Feeling bound by this principle, I decide as follows: the duration of the meeting is m, the number of participants n: I shall give the floor to each participant for a time m/n; thus the equal right of speech will receive practical application. Assume that the meeting is to be crowned by a vote (the time of actual voting not figuring in m): before the participants cast their equal votes, they will have had equal opportunities to influence the voting, i.e., they shall have had, insofar as depends upon me, equal voices.Now if m the duration of the meeting (in speaking time) is three hours, and if n the number of participants is 12, my procedure is susceptible of being applied: it grants the floor to each participant for a quarter of an hour. This is not a long time but still it may be enough.

MALCOLM’SLEVIATHAN: HOBBES’S “THING”

2014 ◽  
Vol 12 (1) ◽  
pp. 95-120
Author(s):  
JEFFREY COLLINS
Keyword(s):  
Political Philosophy ◽  
Political Theory ◽  
Intellectual History ◽  
Theoretical Basis ◽  
Thomas Hobbes ◽  
Natural Laws ◽  
General Editor ◽  
Fourth Decade ◽  
Influential Book ◽  
The University

The publication of the Clarendon edition of theWorks of Thomas Hobbesrecently entered its fourth decade. The monumental project has unfolded against shifting methodologies in the practice of intellectual history, and the edition's own history exemplifies these shifts. Its first general editor was Howard Warrender, who died in 1985 after a distinguished career as a professor of political theory at the University of Sheffield. Warrender was best known for thePolitical Philosophy of Hobbes: His Theory of Obligation. This influential book offered a deontological interpretation of Hobbes's theory of obligation, according to which the Hobbesian natural laws were to be understood as divine commands. Warrender's book appeared in 1957 and was resolutely textualist in its approach, exploring Hobbes's arguments in isolation and with considerable interpretive charity. His subject was the “theoretical basis” of Hobbes's writing, the importance of which might not be “historically conspicuous.”

The World Is Not Enough: A Political Dark Ecology

2019 ◽  
Vol 29 (5) ◽  
pp. 103-116
Keyword(s):  
Political Philosophy ◽  
Global Warming ◽  
Political Theory ◽  
Social Order ◽  
Main Concept ◽  
Political Crises ◽  
The Social ◽  
Space Action ◽  
The Right ◽  
Dark Ecology

Timothy Morton’s dark ecology is positioned as an aesthetic and ethical study which is far removed from political theory. Although Morton touches upon actual political crises connected with global warming and on climate change skepticism and also deploys such fundamental concepts of political philosophy as territory, space, action and solidarity, he describes his approach as ontological rather than political. The author finds that dark ecology’s own foundations have been inherited from political theory. However, that does not make it inconsistent; on the contrary, under the right conditions it enables a different apprehension of both ecology and political philosophy. The author asks how politics would proceed in a world of uncertainty and proposes viewing Morton’s theory as a treatise on a political theory that addresses the problem of collective action. This is the main concept of any political philosophy out of which its description of the social order is constructed. Dark ecology denies any possibility of action by emphasizing uncertainty and the impossibility of predicting an action’s consequences, and this opens up new possibilities for conceptualizing action. It is precisely uncertainty that permits segregating action from the guilt that motivated Morton to divorce dark ecology from political philosophy. This is a narrative about the transformation of Morton the emancipator into a law-giver, about how political theory has evolved in parallel with the onset of the Anthropocene, about what will happen to the Leviathan in the age of global warming, and how to change the perception of the political from ontological categories to ethical ones.

Rossian Ethics

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
David Phillips
Keyword(s):  
Moral Theory ◽  
Prima Facie ◽  
Philosophical Interpretation ◽  
Moral Theories ◽  
Prima Facie Duty ◽  
The Right

This book has two connected aims. The first is to interpret and evaluate W. D. Ross’s ethics, focusing on the key elements of his moral theory: his introduction of the concept of prima facie duty, his limited pluralism about the right, and his limited pluralism about the good. The second is to articulate a distinctive view intermediate between consequentialism and absolutist deontology, “classical deontology.” According to classical deontology the most fundamental normative principles are principles of prima facie duty, principles which specify general kinds of reasons. Consequentialists are right to think that reasons always derive from goods; and ideal utilitarians are right, contra hedonistic utilitarians, to think that there are a small number of distinct kinds of intrinsic goods. But consequentialists are wrong to think that all reasons have the same weight for all agents. Instead there are a small number of distinct kinds of agent-relative intensifiers: features that increase the importance of certain goods for certain agents. It is argued that classical deontology combines the best elements of the moral theories of Ross and of Sidgwick, and that the best philosophical interpretation of Ross is that he is a classical deontologist.

scholarly journals Why helping the victims of disasters makes me a better person: Towards an anthropological theory of humanitarian action

Human Affairs ◽  
2016 ◽  
Vol 26 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Eleni M Kalokairinou
Keyword(s):  
Virtue Ethics ◽  
Moral Theory ◽  
Developmental Process ◽  
Theoretical Framework ◽  
Virtuous Person ◽  
Humanitarian Action ◽  
Anthropological Theory ◽  
Moral Theories ◽  
The Right ◽  
Difficult Situations

AbstractIn this paper I examine which is the most appropriate moral theory for dealing with disaster bioethics contexts. It is pointed out that, contrary to what is usually believed, moral theories of right action cannot actually guide us in such difficult situations. Instead, it is claimed that a virtue ethics theory of an Aristotelian version, which gives emphasis not only on the virtuous person but also on the relevant developmental process of becoming virtuous, can provide us with the right theoretical framework for coping with the problems which the victims of such disastrous situations face.

Justice and Punishment: The Rationale of Coercion. By Matt Matravers. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000. 286p. $70.00.

2002 ◽  
Vol 96 (1) ◽  
pp. 188-189
Author(s):  
Jean Bethke Elshtain
Keyword(s):  
Political Philosophy ◽  
Political Theory ◽  
Moral Theory ◽  
Oxford University ◽  
Adequate Theory ◽  
Oxford University Press

Justice and Punishment begins promisingly. Matt Matravers notes that the question—“Why and by what right, do some people punish others?”—is “not a new question. The problem of punishment is one of the most enduring in political theory” (p. 1). But over the years, punishment theory has been separated from moral and political philosophy more generally. The upshot is that both punishment theory and moral and political philosophy have suffered. To put things right, Matravers avers, any adequate theory of punishment “must be rooted in a broader moral theory, and that broader moral theory will be … constructivist” (p. 1). It is the task of his book to explore why and how this is so.

Constructive Ethical Pragmatism

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Henry Richardson
Keyword(s):  
Moral Theory ◽  
Moral Authority ◽  
The Other ◽  
Right Action ◽  
Moral Theories ◽  
The Face ◽  
Conception Of The Good ◽  
The Right

This chapter motivates the book’s exploration of the moral community’s moral authority by setting out the attractions of an approach to moral theory that presupposes the existence of such authority—namely, constructive ethical pragmatism (CEP). Setting aside the anodyne form of consequentialism popular among defenders of the possibility of consequentializing all moral theories, the text reconstructs, in the face of their skepticism the Rawlsian distinction between the right and the good. In that light, CEP can be distinguished from a more substantial consequentialism that defines right action in light of a fixed conception of the good and from deontological views, which define right action in terms of fixed principles of right. CEP views the right and the good as each being revisable in light of the other. It is argued to be better able to guide deliberation than its rivals, in part because of its flexibility in responding to contingent conflicts among incommensurable considerations.

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