W.E.B. Du Bois’s Constructivist Theory of Justice

This essay presents the normative foundation of W.E.B. Du Bois’s constructivist theory of justice in three steps. First, I show that for Du Bois the public sphere in Anglo-European modern states consists of a dialectical interplay between reasonable persons and illiberal rogues. Second, under these nonideal circumstances, the democratic ideal of autonomy grounds reasonable persons’ deliberative openness, an attitude of public moral regard for others which is necessary to construct the terms of political rule. Though deliberative openness is the essential vehicle of construction, reasonable persons only have a pragmatic political obligation to forge ties of deliberative reciprocity with likeminded persons whom they trust will listen and not harm them. Finally, I present Du Bois’s defense of black suffragists’ support of the 19th Amendment to illustrate pragmatic political obligation in action. I sketch successful democratic engagement that reconstitutes a nonideal public sphere.

Caliphate; is it Theological Inevitability or Sociological Experimentation?

The main objective of this study was to investigate the ontological status of the caliphate as a sociological experimentation. The study was a library research which adopted a descriptive analytical method through reading various literatures with a philosophical historical approach. The data were obtained from a variety of credible literature and other various supporting information then presented with a strong analytical instrument based on the normative foundation and thoughts of the figures to generate a deeper elaboration of ideas. The result showed that the relationship between religion and the state was a matter of pure contact with public reason. The absence of religious sharih texts in state matters, including models and singular forms of state practice, is an indisputable reason for the profanity of the Khilafah. The state practices exemplified by the Prophet and Companions were nothing more than sociological experiments. The experiment of the Prophet and purely sociological relative is not a theological necessity. The state is in principle an institution designed to realize benefit as the highest moral principle and locus of the view of the universal will. As an alternative to the caliphate model which is outdated and impossible to revive, a democratic state is a realistic choice because it is in accordance with the development of modern life and is an effort to approach universal human values

‘Good administration’ and the ‘Good’: The normative foundation for the protection of legitimate expectations

An idea that has gained significant traction in both case law and academic commentary as a justification for the protection of legitimate expectations is the concept of ‘good administration’. Going beyond the usual criticisms of the concept’s ambiguity, this article aims to highlight an additional set of difficulties with the invocation of ‘good administration’ as the normative justification for the doctrine. This article’s central argument is that the concept of ‘good’ invoked by the idea of ‘good administration’ inevitably falls to be substantiated by a particular conception of what the ‘good’ requires as a matter of political philosophy. And given that there are multiple competing conceptions of what ‘good’ law and government are, this magnifies the challenges of coming to a landing on the precise content of ‘good administration’. This article will illustrate that the various formulations of the normative foundation of the doctrine track closely with four different conceptions of ‘good’ law and government and will explore the implications of this diagnosis for the formulation of the proper justification for the protection of legitimate expectations.

Habermas on Rawls and the normative foundations of democracy

The debate between Jürgen Habermas and John Rawls concerns the question of how to do political philosophy under conditions of cultural pluralism, if the aim of political philosophy is to uncover the normative foundation of a modern liberal democracy. Rawls’s political liberalism tries to bypass the problem of pluralism, using the intellectual device of the veil of ignorance, and yet paradoxically at the same time it treats it as something given and as an arbiter of justification within the political conception of justice. Habermas argues that Rawls not only incorrectly operationalizes the moral point of view from which we discern what is just but also fails to capture the specificity of democracy which is given by internal relations between politics and law. This deprives Rawls’s political philosophy of the conceptual tools needed to articulate the normative foundation of democracy.

A general analysis of boundedly rational learning in social networks

We analyze boundedly rational learning in social networks within binary action environments. We establish how learning outcomes depend on the environment (i.e., informational structure, utility function), the axioms imposed on the updating behavior, and the network structure. In particular, we provide a normative foundation for quasi‐Bayesian updating, where a quasi‐Bayesian agent treats others' actions as if they were based only on their private signal. Quasi‐Bayesian updating induces learning (i.e., convergence to the optimal action for every agent in every connected network) only in highly asymmetric environments. In all other environments, learning fails in networks with a diameter larger than 4. Finally, we consider a richer class of updating behavior that allows for nonstationarity and differential treatment of neighbors' actions depending on their position in the network. We show that within this class there exist updating systems that induce learning for most networks.

Sieyès and Republican liberty

In On the People’s Terms, Philip Pettit incorporates the Sieyèsian notion of constituent power into his constitutional theory of non-domination. In this article, I argue that Emmanuel Sieyès’s understanding of liberty precludes such an appropriation. While a republican, his conceptualisation of liberty in the face of commercial society stood apart from theories of civic vigilance, preferring instead to disentangle individuals from politics and maximise what he understood to be their non-political freedoms. Sieyès saw that liberty was heightened through relations of representation and commercial dependency. This conception of liberty was pivotal to the identity of the nation, and so allowed Sieyès to assess forms of collective injustice committed by the French nobility. It also provided the normative foundation of his theory of constituent power. For Sieyès, constituent power guarded against legislative excess in a decidedly minimal sense, intending instead to separate citizens from the political sphere so they were not burdened with ongoing participation or public vigilance.

THE DYNAMICS OF EPISTEMOLOGICAL DECOLONISATION IN THE 21ST CENTURY: TOWARDS EPISTEMIC FREEDOM

The problem of the 21st century in the knowledge domain is best rendered as the ‘epistemic line’. It cascades directly from William E B Dubois’s ‘colour line’ which haunted the 20th century and provoked epic struggles for political decolonisation. The connection between the ‘colour line’ and the ‘epistemic line’ is in the racist denial of the humanity of those who became targets of enslavement and colonisation. The denial of humanity automatically disqualified one from epistemic virtue. This conceptual study, therefore explores in an overview format, how Africa in particular and the rest of the Global South in general became victims of genocides, epistemicides, linguicides, and culturecides. It delves deeper into the perennial problems of ontological exiling of the colonised from their languages, cultures, names, and even from themselves while at the same time highlighting how the colonised refused to succumb to the ‘silences’ and fought for epistemic freedom. The article introduces such useful analytical concepts as ‘epistemic freedom’ as opposed to ‘academic freedom’; ‘provincialisation’; ‘deprovincialisation’; ‘epistemological decolonisation’; ‘intellectual extroversion’; and ‘epistemic dependence’. It ends with an outline of five-ways-forward in the African struggles for epistemic freedom predicated on (i) return to the base/locus of enunciation; (ii) shifting the geo-and bio-of knowledge/moving the centre; (iii) decolonising the normative foundation of critical theory; (iv) rethinking thinking itself; and finally (v) learning to unlearn in order to relearn.

Human Rights and Human Dignity: A Case Against Separating the Conjoined Twins

Doris Schroeder asserts that the received view according to which human rights are derived from the inherent dignity of the human person must be rejected. She appeals to separate these conjoined twins (human dignity and human rights) by offering three knockdown arguments respectively captioned as “the justification paradox”, “Kantian cul-de-sac” and “hazard by association”. This paper submits a case for preserving the conjoined twins, both by refuting Schroeder’s arguments and at the same time proposing a positive appraisal of human dignity as foundational to human rights. The distributive account of a foundation, on which Schroeder’s arguments are premised, requires that a normative foundation must underpin every single human rights claim. Human rights claims, as diverse as they are, admit plurality of normative foundations (understood in the distributive sense) and human dignity directly underpins only a subset of the most basic human rights. There is another sense in which human dignity can be conceived as foundational to human rights, precisely as the general moral standing of human beings as holders of the bundle of moral human rights. Foundation as moral standing is consistent with the view that not every human rights-claim has its normative foundation in human dignity; thus, Schroeder is mistaken in thinking that failing to be a foundation in the distributive sense defeats the accepted view that human rights derive from human dignity.

Ethics, justice and policing

This chapter explores ethical issues that are raised by procedural justice approaches to policing. Both in individual contacts between police and public and at a societal level, problems can result from the use of low-visibility techniques for securing compliance. There is a risk that people’s choices about compliance with the law are being reshaped by stealth: their autonomy as citizens may be eroded when police officers manage them into compliance through a display of civility and respect. At a societal level, the appearance of the police as an even-handed and fair institution can serve as an ‘ideological cloak’ that hides from public view structural inequality and unfairness. The chapter argues that these risks can be mitigated if police commit to the normative foundation of procedural justice, and do not simply focus on the instrumental benefits of the approach. They need to recognise their duty to treat citizens fairly and with respect.