• Relatively advanced technical competence regarding WordPress, blogging, the ability to write/fix code, etc.
• Commitment to academic political philosophy/theory.
• General togetherness, punctuality, reliability, etc.

There is little prospect of any meaningful remuneration, but it should provide the opportunity to become more involved in the political philosophy community and play an important role in interesting new initiatives. Since the website is international, you needn’t be located in the US. I’d be especially interested if some graduate students located at a single institution were to work together to keep things ticking along smoothly, although it shouldn’t be an onerous responsibility for a single person.

If you’re interested, please send me a CV, some evidence regarding your technical expertise, and any feasible ideas/thoughts you may have about how the website could be improved. Ideally, I’d like to sort this out by the end of the month.

Speakers: Jean Grondin, Paul H. Fry, Carsten Dutt, Dieter Teichert, Mark Bevir, John G. Gunnell, Michael Freeden, Michael L. Frazer, Pamela Anderson, Terrell Carver, Elizabeth Frazer, James Martel, Lasse Thomassen, Joshua Foa Dienstag, Al P. Martinich, Terence Ball, David Boucher, Stanley Rosen, David Weinstein, and James Connelly. A short report on the conference can be found here. For the podcasts, please check itunes here.

Matthew Noah Smith has written the following open letter from the faculty of US universities and colleges to to their chancellors and presidents regarding the use of violence against student protesters. If you would like to add your name to the letter, please email Matthew at matthew.noah.smith [at] yale.edu

Open Letter to Chancellors and Presidents of American Universities and Colleges From Your Faculty

We have witnessed, over the past two months, police departments using significant amounts of force against individuals peacefully participating in the Occupy movement. But during the week of November 13 – November 19, there was an astonishing escalation of the violence used by municipal police departments against non-violent protesters.

We hoped that even as politicians and municipal police violently responded to the Occupy movement, college and university campuses would remain safe locations for non-violent political dissent. But that has not been the case. In fact, universities and colleges appear to be using the same tactics in their interactions with unarmed, non-violent members of the university community as we have seen municipal police use against the broader Occupy movement.

In particular, we are concerned with the actions by police associated with two University of California campuses. At UC Berkeley, police beat faculty and students who were peacefully attempting to establish an Occupy camp on Sproul Plaza. At UC Davis, police casually pepper sprayed protesting students who were peacefully sitting with their arms linked. The message sent by university officials is clear: if you engage in non-violent political protest on the university campus, you run the risk of being assaulted by university police.

We condemn this and any deployment of violence by university officials against members of the university community who are non-violently expressing their political views.

We condemn university officials using violence or the threat of violence in order to limit political dissent to the narrow confines of print and university-sanctioned events.

We condemn university officials using violence and the threat of violence to prevent members of the university community from peacefully assembling.

For more than three generations, American university and college campuses have been crucial locations in which inspiring and important political activity has occurred. From the founding of SNCC at Shaw University and the Free Speech Movement at Berkeley in the 1960’s, to the divestment movements across American college campuses in the 1980s, to the establishment of student labor alliances in the 1990’s, American college campuses have pulsed with hopeful and positive forms of dissent and visions of alternatives. This admirable tradition is being threatened by the use of violence by university officials against their own students and faculty who are acting within this tradition.

We therefore call on chancellors and presidents of universities and colleges throughout the United States to declare publicly that their campuses are Safe Protest Zones, where nonviolent, public political dissent and protest will be protected by university police and will never be attacked by the university police.

We call on these chancellors and presidents to commit publicly to making their campuses safe locations for peaceful public assembly.

We call on these chancellors and presidents to institute immediately policies that reflect these commitments, and to instruct their police and security forces that they must abide by these policies.

We believe that this action is necessary for the protection of one of the principal virtues of our higher education system, namely that it is an environment that cultivates an active and engaged political imagination.

We call on the leaders of America’s universities and colleges to stand with us.

Here are podcasts from a lecture series on the state, which took place recently at the University of Oxford. The lectures are by Stefan Bird-Pollan (University of Kentucky), Nadia Urbinati (Columbia University), Thomas Pogge (Yale University), Erika de Wet (University of Pretoria), Paul Guyer (University of Pennsylvania), and Quentin Skinner (Queen Mary, University of London). Please follow this link: http://beta.podcasts.ox.ac.uk/series/state-state

Cheers, Reidar Maliks

Watch us here.

Foundations of a Nonideal Theory of Justice 

This paper systematically extends John Rawls’ original position to nonideal theory, showing how the parties to a “nonideal original position” ought to prioritize four types of nonideal primary goods over Rawls’ principles and priority relations, and then agree to five lexically ordered principles for distributing those goods under nonideal conditions.  All five principles (and their orderings) are also shown to fare very well in reflective equilibrium, cohering with a number of pretheoretic moral intuitions.

Here is the paper: Foundations of a Nonideal Theory of Justice.

I write to announce a new podcast, New Books in Philosophy. Carrie Figdor (U of Iowa) and I co-host the podcast, and each episode features an in-depth interview with an author of a newly-published philosophy book. Interviews will be posted on the 1st and 15th of each month. The inaugural interview, posted today, is with Eric Schwitzgebel (UC Riverside), author of Perplexities of Consciousness (MIT Press). An interview with Jerry Gaus (Arizona), author of The Order of Public Reason (Cambridge University Press), will be posted on July 1st. Upcoming podcasts include interviews with Robert Pasnau, Sandy Goldberg, Carolyn Korsmeyer, Fabienne Peter, Jason Brennan, Allen Buchanan, Elizabeth Anderson, and others. Please click over to the NBiP site, and check out what we’re doing.

Here’s a link to the interview with Eric Schwitzgebel.

Cheers,
–Robert Talisse

The 2011 APT Program Committee has selected Martha Nussbaum’s Not for Profit: Why Democracy Needs the Humanities as the subject of discussion.  We believe that the themes of the book connect to the professional, pedagogical, and political concerns that are of interest to many members of the organization, and we hope that Not for Profit will serve as a launching pad for a broader discussion in the profession.

APT members can participate in the VRG at http://aptvrg2011.blogspot.com/ , by submitting comments to the blog (please note that comments cannot be anonymous). Each week, from June 6-August 5, 2011, participants will discuss a new chapter of the book.  All members of APT are invited to participate in virtual discussion.  The VRG will culminate in a round-table session at the annual conference in October featuring Fred Dallmayr (University of Notre Dame) and Arlene Saxonhouse (University of Michigan).  Both the virtual reading group and the round-table session will be co-chaired by Lisa Ellis and Peyton Wofford of Texas A&M University.

Our conversations will get started each week by a guest commentator who will post some reflections and provocations about the chapter.  Then, APT members are invited to participate in the reading group by reading the relevant chapters and posting on the blog.

[APT membership is free; to join, please click this link.]

The schedule is below the fold:

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Suppose an academic were to (a) succumb to Apple’s marketing prowess and (b) invest a great deal of time and energy researching/discovering the best ways to make use of his/her new iPad 2, what would be the most valuable information s/he would learn, particularly regarding which apps to get?

I’m primarily interested in using the iPad to read and take notes on books and journal articles, and take it that iAnnotate is (one of) the best apps for that. But I’m also interested in suggestions about the iPad’s capabilities that are not so obvious, i.e., things someone who doesn’t have much time for (b) wouldn’t even think to look for.

Discussion and Review

The very first sentence of the Conclusion is illustrative: “The philosopher’s stone that transforms individual goal pursuit into social restraints on goal pursuit is, like other alchemical projects, enticing but misguided” (547). Let’s reflect for a moment on why Gaus begins the conclusion of this 550-page book in this way. Wasn’t this point merely one of many made along the way? Isn’t this just part of the point of the book?

I. Hayek and the Social Contract Tradition

I suggest that if we take Jerry at his word, we can shed light on the deepest themes in the book. First, note that this claim in effect rejects the entire basis of the social contract tradition, a tradition one might easily think that Jerry is defending and extending rather than rejecting. In some sense, Jerry rejects the contract metaphor. The idea that our interest in social morality can ground our reasons to follow social-moral rules (the idea that arguably lies at the heart of the contractarian tradition) must be rejected; and Jerry has tried to show why at great length. Instead, we must adopt an entirely distinct philosophical anthropology, one that is at root deeply Hayekian, for as Jerry says, “Our reason did not produce social order - we did not reason ourselves into being followers of social rules. Rather, the requirements of social order shaped our reason.” This just is Hayek, who wrote:

Man is as much a rule-following animal as a purpose-seeking one. And he is successful not because he knows why he ought to observe the rules which he does observe, or is even capable of stating all these rules in words, but because his thinking and acting are governed by rules which have by a process of selection been evolved in a society in which he lives, and which are thus the product of the experience of generations (LLL, 11).

Many of you know Hayek the classical liberal, but Jerry is following Hayek the social theorist, who attempted to integrate the rationality of rule-following into his philosophical anthropology at the deepest level. Jerry has argued throughout the book that the conception of the person employed within public reason liberalism and liberalism broadly speaking must move in this Hayekian direction. If public reason liberals follow Jerry’s lead, the fundamental structure of public reason and even the nature of the social contract theorists’ project must substantially change. In short, political justification must not begin with deriving the rationality of rule-following from a teleological conception of practical reason. Instead, it must begin with an understanding of the nature of human beings who are already rule-followers and the nature of the moral emotions and cooperative activities that accompany such rule-following. It is in this way that Jerry moves most forcefully away from Hobbesian conceptions of public reason. He goes further by arguing that even the Kantian conception of the person he endorses cannot be constructed out of practical reason alone. Instead, human nature contains Kantian elements for thoroughly Humean-Hayekian-evolution reasons. Our rule-following nature is contingent on our social development (though no less contingent than our goal-seeking nature).

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In 25.1 Jerry comments on the quotation from Green that opens the chapter. At the end of the rich passage, Green says “That, however, is the beginning, not the end, of the state. When once it has come into being, new rights arise in it and further purposes are served by it.” Green was not as adverse about the further purposes as we might be. Jerry wishes to examine what further purposes states may serve after it has assumed the role “as interpreter and protector of social morality”. Might there be a function of states as “providers of services and goods that are not morally required”? In our time, ever since the rise in the influence of economics or what used to be called political economy, the first task that comes to mind is the provision of public goods or, more colloquially, the remedying of “market failures” (i.e., externalities). With what are known technically as public goods, the benefits accrue to people independently of their contribution to their production. They thus create what is called a “collective action problem”, which often approximates an n-person PD. The two defining features of a public good are indivisibility (once produced it is available at no additional cost to anyone) and nonexcludability (it is not feasible or efficient to exclude people from enjoying the good). The thought is that states may or should step in and facilitate the production of the good, taxing people for the costs. If all goes well, the result will be mutually beneficial for all or, more colorfully, progress towards the Pareto frontier.

Jerry rightly points out that there are alternative institutions and communities capable of addressing many public goods problems. Given how dangerous state action can be — and I would add, clumsy — Jerry argues that we should seek assistance first in non-statist approaches. But he concedes that there are “times when the state and its coercive power appear to be the only viable way to cope with some problems. In these cases, the provision of public goods is, at least in principle, capable of publicly justifying state coercion” (533). He rightly points out that the costs of providing the good in question must considered when raising the question.

25.2 considers a problem with this abstract case for the state provision of public goods, namely, “that few goods are purely public”. If some Members of the Public prefer no good to particular packages of goods and costs, then no proposal for producing the good will pass. The result is constraining, “a severe restriction on the range of justifiable public policy.”

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Sects 24 and 25 are likely to be as controversial as the others in this chapter. In 24, “Private Property and the Redistributive State”, Jerry defends a three basic propositions:

- Private property rights are justified in Jerry’s theory at a relatively early stage, and this constrains what is to follow.

- Socialism will not figure in the eligible set.

- A variety of redistributive frameworks will also be rejected.

I’ll start with the first (subsect. 24.1). Jerry starts by reminding us that in 18.3 he established private property when considering public justification in conditions of evaluative diversity. There, following a suggestion of an early John Gray, Jerry argues that a jurisdictional conception of private property rights are what “deeply pluralistic social order[s]” need to handle their disagreements. A jurisdictional conception of private property rights understands property as “a sphere in which one’s evaluative standards have great authority for others” (374). [Small point: The name of this account, used by Eric Mack in his interesting account of rights, can mislead if one comes to think that the authority of the property owner rivals the state’s jurisdictional rights. If one wanders onto the land of the US federal government, that is, the land it owns, then one is subject to its authority (in the sense above). But even on one’s own land in the US one is subject to the jurisdictional authority of American government (at different levels), or so the latter claim. US law is supposed to determine what counts as ownership, etc. The state’s authority is jurisdictional in a more elementary sense, I think, than the Mack-Gaus one.]

Jerry grants that property rights depend more on the state than other rights. “… the right to private property must be interpreted and developed, but to a far greater extent than other abstract rights, is definition depends on the state” (509). This is largely true, though Jerry could have used a less misleading word than ‘definition’. And it is always worth remembering that there was a great deal of property prior to the rise of modern states. [The political conditions of medieval life typically defy being categorized as either “states” or “states of nature”.] Again, on the next page: “Thus, far more than other basic rights, the political order determines our rights of property.”

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The symposium comprises my introduction and the following papers:

• Anna Stilz,”On the Relation between Democracy and Rights“
• Eric Beerbohm, “Democracy as an Inflationary Concept“
• Loren King, “A Democratic Right to Privacy: Political or Perfectionist?“
• James Lindley Wilson, “Getting Personal with Citizens and Criminals: Comments on Democratic Rights and Punishment“
• Alex Zakaras, “Against Democratic Contractualism“
• Alon Harel, “Judicial Review and the Value Theory of Democracy“
• Corey Brettschneider, “Defending the Value Theory of Democracy: A Response to Six Critics“

I’m going to structure my discussion of this section a little differently. I’m also going to be a bit polemical about it. Perhaps this treatment will galvanize some discussion about this section, which I believe is rather significant for Gaus’ argument.

In the preface to the book, Gaus decries the tendency of political philosophers to turn into hedgehogs, each championing one among many potential political creeds (liberal egalitarianism, libertarianism, Marxism, communitarianism, etc.). Gaus then announces his attention to take a different, “foxier” path, one that does not endorse a particular political philosophy, but asks how we should think about the moral order—including the political order—in a world lacking reasonable agreement about many basic moral questions. In doing so, he eschews any desire to champion, hedgehog-style, any single political philosophy—including libertarianism, a philosophy with which he is prominently associated (p. xv). I distinctly remember reading this passage months ago and saying to myself, the philosopher doth protest too much. And lo and behold, many months later, I am not surprised to see that Gaus’ in-depth examination of the nature of morality is yielding libertarian political conclusions.

I should be clear here—I don’t think there’s anything wrong with Gaus attempting to defend libertarianism in this book. If something like reflective equilibrium is a legitimate method for producing valid moral claims, one would expect Gaus, a libertarian, to endorse a libertarian political system, and to argue that the moral situation in which we find ourselves today calls for libertarian principles. If his analysis of morality had yielded the conclusion that communism was the only acceptable economic system, one would expect Gaus to go over the argument seven or eight hundred times until he had found the problem with it. Again, let me repeat—there is nothing illegitimate about this as a method of argument. But it is a little disingenuous of Gaus to act as though he is merely following the argument where it goes, and the fact that it leads to pro-libertarian conclusions is just some sort of happy accident.

Technically, of course, Gaus’ argument does not unambiguously endorse any particular political order. But Gaus’ analysis of morality most definitely tilts in a libertarian-friendly direction. Reasonable people who aim to settle upon a political order, says Gaus, will consider which principles they could reasonably accept as the basis for such an order. They will do so on a principle-by-principle basis; they can do this, because Gaus eschews any efforts at evaluating competing political orders as a whole. Of course, Gaus says, they will endorse all the standard things that libertarians like to endorse—basic rights to life, liberty, and property. But will they endorse anything else? It should be clear that there will be a very serious obstacle to their doing so. Endowing the political order with any further powers will only be morally legitimate if every reasonable moral citizen would agree to such endowment. And there is an important class of people—libertarians like Gaus himself—who can be expected to object to any such expansions of state authority. In effect, libertarians can reasonably count upon other citizens endorsing a set of principles which, considered all by themselves, constitute the libertarian ideal point. Not surprisingly, libertarians will be reluctant to endorse any move away from this ideal point, and their endorsement is necessary in order for any such move to be legitimate.

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Overview of §22

Chapter VIII of Gaus’ book is entitled “The Moral and Political Orders.” Appropriately enough, it takes up the topic of the relationship between the moral and the political order. Section 22 deals with the place of political authority in a broader story about moral authority. Section 23 discusses coercion in relation to moral and political authority.

Section 22 (“The Authority of the State”) begins by contrasting Gaus’ position with that of the social contract tradition. The latter, Gaus argues, holds that “There is no role for social morality as a distinct and independent source of moral authority” (p. 450). In order to reject this position, Gaus examines what he calls the “Comparative Procedural Justification Principle,” which states that “If the Members of the Public have available two procedures for selecting from the optimal eligible set, O and P, and P is itself publicly justifiable, while O is not, P should be employed” (p. 450). This principle is weaker than the Procedural Justification Requirement, which he discusses earlier. The former, unlike the latter, does not demand a uniquely justified optimal principle; it just demands a publicly justifiable principle be used. Gaus agrees that certain institutional arrangements (basically, those of modern representative democracies) may be good ways to protect basic individual rights (p. 452). This is why “Constant included political rights among the rights of the moderns” (p. 452). But this is “insufficient to yield the justification of a system of governance,” because there are many possible institutional arrangements that might accomplish this goal (p. 455). Hence the Comparative Procedural Justification Principle “does not support political authority over informal social authority, for political authority too relies on informal social-moral authority—an evolution of a political-moral culture leading to the selection of one of a wide range of acceptable political systems” (p. 455).

Gaus then investigates the nature of political authority. Following Thomas Christiano, he distinguishes between three different ideas of political authority. The first, which Gaus endorses, recognizes that states have a blameless liberty to coerce people into obeying its rules. There are good reasons why reasonable people would endorse such rules. Any society will possess people who simply do not respond to moral rules (e.g., psychopaths). Such people can respond to strategic incentives, however, and so if the harms that violations of moral rules can produce are to be avoided, then the state ought to have permission to align incentives appropriately (through threats and, presumably, offers; p. 463). Second, the state has the ability to push people (i.e, through incentive alignment) to participate in a particular moral equilibrium. Gaus holds that in doing so, the state is doing more than just providing a focal point upon which people can coordinate. For “the authority of the state allows us to make the implicit claim that should there be controversy or uncertainty about our claim, there is an authoritative answer that we all have reason to endorse”—the answer provided by the state (p. 466). I’m not really clear on what Gaus is driving at here, but it seems to be a second-order claim that the dictates of the state in resolving conflicts about moral equilibria creates a distinct moral reason for endorsing the resolution. It’s not just that the equilibria would in fact be an equilibria, and that it seems to be the one everyone is moving (thanks to the state) to accept. In addition, there is a moral obligation to do what the state says when it tries to do this. Without this additional moral obligation, the state is serving merely as a focal point, for everyone except psychopaths unable to respond to moral reasons. The third notion of authority is the idea that states have a “right to rule” (p. 468). Gaus takes this idea to mean that when states create rules, people have obligations to the states themselves to obey them. Gaus rejects this idea, and claims that whatever obligations people have to obey moral rules is owed to their fellow citizens. This is compatible with my interpretation of Gaus’ second notion of political authority; one can believe both that it is morally wrong not to accept the moral equilibria generated by states, and that if I commit this moral wrong, I am wronging my fellow citizens, not the state itself.

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Overview of §21

The Deliberative Model, as is now familiar, is indifferent between the various rules in the socially optimal eligible set as possible bases of equilibrium.  It doesn’t select one of the rules as the favoured basis of an equilibrium.  The lesson of §19-20 is that it does select one of the rules as the favoured basis of an equilibrium once it is in actual fact the basis of an equilibrium.  Since the Deliberative Model, according to Gaus, “explicates the moral point of view” (425), that raises questions about the power of the moral point of view to ground criticism of moral orders.  In §21, Gaus explains the extent to which the moral point of view does have that power, and why, to the extent that it doesn’t, that isn’t an objection to it.  (more…)

Overview of §20

In §20, Gaus explores the idea—foreshadowed in §19—that not only can a selection from the socially optimal eligible set of rules be justified as a result of convergence in a ‘Kantian Coordination Game’ (see §19.2), so that “[c]oordination on a morality can occur even though no procedure of coordination has itself been publicly justified” (410), but “the process of arriving at a publicly justified morality may well be a social evolutionary one, in which people gradually come to coordinate on a common set of moral rules” (410).   (more…)

Overview:
As I read it, section 19 attempts to lay down one of the foundation stones for GG’s larger effort to reconcile two apparently opposed ways of thinking about the authority of moral rules:

(1) the ‘instrumentalist’ (Hobbesian, Humean, Gauthierian) view that ‘social morality is necessary for human cooperation and social life’ and
(2) the ‘deontological’ (Rousseau, Kant, Strawson, Rawls, Darwall) view that moral requirements are irreducibly constituted by relations among agents who recognize their mutual standing as free and equal persons.

Earlier in the book, GG has said that ‘both are correct’ (193): social morality is both a ‘device’ of social coordination and a body of rules deriving its authority from its consistency with respect for the freedom and equality of all agents. In this section, GG starts to explain how they are integrated and, moreover, why both are necessary. According to GG, taking (1) more seriously than contemporary Kantians often do is the key to overcoming the threat of ‘indeterminacy’ that hangs over the public reason idea.

The ‘indeterminacy’ involved arises because there are, in principle, many alternative sets of moral rules that are consistent with the ‘rights of agency’ and the ‘abstract’ idea of ‘jurisdictional rights’ GG has defended in earlier chapters. Even if these general entitlements can be publicly justified, agents must still settle on a scheme of rules that all can regard as having requisite moral authority. Without such a settlement, it will be impossible to reach agreement on how exactly the more general entitlements of ‘free and equal’ persons should be interpreted in particular cases. Each of these more specific schemes of moral expectations is publicly justified, yet so far no one has sufficient reason to accept any of them as uniquely publicly justified.

One is tempted to suggest here that a uniquely publicly justified scheme can be identified only if it is selected by a collective decision rule that is itself publicly justified. The main point of this section is to deny that this ‘Procedural Justification Requirement’ (392) is necessary. This is good news, according to GG, because he appears to believe that that requirement is impossible to satisfy without resorting to highly artificial – and hence reasonably rejectable – redescriptions of the choice situation (as with Rawls’s Original Position).

In the body of the section, GG attempts to explain how it is possible for a uniquely justified set of social/moral rules to emerge automatically through interaction between agents who are at all times acting only on reasons that reflect their own commitments. To establish the possibility of such a solution, GG relies on a series of game-theoretic coordination models. These are intended to illustrate how the bare, even random, fact of convergence (within iterated interaction) on one of a pair of alternative moral schemes can be (1) an equilibrium solution and (2) in large N-person cases generate a bandwagon effect. As a result of iterated interaction, players in these games find themselves in situations in which they acquire sufficient reason to accept schemes of rules just because others have already opted for them; as more and more do so, we reach a point at which everyone has sufficient reason to go along with the option around which convergence is occurring.

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