Abstract‘Counterspeech’ is often presented as a way in which individual citizens can respond to harmful speech while avoiding the potentially coercive and freedom-damaging effects of formal speech restrictions. But counterspeech itself can also undermine freedom by contributing to forms of social punishment that manipulate a speaker’s choice set in uncontrolled ways. Specifically, and by adopting a republican perspective, this paper argues that certain kinds of counterspeech candominatewhen they contribute to unchecked social norms that enable others to interfere arbitrarily with speakers. (...) The presence of such domination can pose just as much a threat to freedom of speech as unchecked formal restrictions by threatening an individual’s discursive status, revealing a problem for those who defend counterspeech as a freedom-protecting alternative. Rather than rejecting both counterspeech and legislation outright, however, this paper argues that the republican principle ofparsimonyought to be exercised when deciding on appropriate harmful speech response. While the principle of parsimony allows for suitably-checked formal punishment for some of the most egregious forms of harmful speech, citizen-led counterspeech must be guided by a reliable set of norms against the use of social punishment where those who do engage in social punishment face certain costs. The presence of robust, widely-known, and reliable norms thus supports both formal and informal responses to harmful speech while maintaining a secure discursive status for all. (shrink)

ABSTRACTAccording to many governments and educationalists, education should aim to develop dispositions conducive to political participation and solidarity, because democratic citizenship presupposes participation and solidarity. But there are radically different views on the nature of good citizenship. We examine the implications of this dissensus for citizenship education. Education, we contend, should involve and develop autonomy and open-mindedness. We argue that this requires a more critical approach than is possible when political participation and solidarity are conceived of as goals of education.

In the post-War decades political science in the United States has been animated by two seemingly incompatible aims. On the one hand, the discipline is committed to scientific inquiry interpreted in largely positivist terms. On the other hand, the discipline aspires to generate knowledge that might improve democratic politics. I start by sketching pragmatist interpretations of social and political inquiry, of democratic politics, and of how the two are related. Problems of complexity and visibility emerge as central to those interpretations. (...) I then indicate how Edward Tufte’s theoretical analysis of data graphics and the visual politics of the aids activist group ACT UP offer examples of how it is possible to envision complex social and political phenomena in ways that might sustain a democratic relation between inquiry and politics. (shrink)

Politics is full of people who don’t care about the facts. Still, while not caring about the facts, they are often concerned to present themselves as caring about them. Politics, in other words, is full of bullshitters. But why? In this paper I develop an incentives-based analysis of bullshit in politics, arguing that it is often a rational response to the incentives facing different groups of agents. In a slogan: bullshit in politics pays, sometimes literally. After first outlining an account (...) of bullshit (Section 1), I discuss the incentives driving three different groups of agents to bullshit: politicians, the media, and voters (Section 2). I then examine several existing proposals to combat bullshit in politics, arguing that each will fail because they ignore the relevant underlying incentives (Section 3). I conclude somewhat pessimistically that a certain amount of bullshit in politics is inevitable (Section 4). (shrink)

ABSTRACT Twenty years ago Leif Lewin made the case that altruistic motives are more common than selfish motives among voters, politicians, and bureaucrats. We propose that motives and beliefs emerge as reactions to immediate feedback from technical-causal, material-economic, and moral-social aspects of the political task environment. In the absence of certain kinds of technical-causal and material-economic feedback, moral-social feedback leads individuals to the altruism Lewin documents, but also to righteousness (moralized regard for the in-group and disregard for the out-group) and (...) myopia (disregard for distant consequences). The mix of altruism, righteousness, and myopia increases the focus on winning the next high-stakes election rather than on discovering or enforcing socially productive institutions. (shrink)

One way of responding to the question of what PPE is involves mobilizing the tools that PPE involves. That is the exercise attempted in this article. The object is to use PPE as a method to analyze PPE as a subject matter. PPE is, whatever else, an interdisciplinary enterprise; so the point of departure involves analyzing the role and properties of disciplines within the institutional organization of enquiry. The basic idea is that enquiry is governed by a ‘division of epistemic (...) labour’ in Adam Smith’s sense, and that that division of labour depends for its working on institutions for the reliable certification of claims. Disciplines are such ‘institutions’. As such, they are indispensable. But they impose centripetal forces within the organization of enquiry that stand against interdisciplinary work. Understanding these forces offers some hope of securing an ‘optimal’ compromise between the benefits and costs that disciplines entail. Examples are offered from each of the disciplines involved in PPE separately, and some observations are offered about the architecture of the three disciplines’ interrelationships. (shrink)

This article defends deliberative democracy against the problem of tacit knowledge. It has been argued that deliberative democracy gives a privileged position to linguistic communication and therefore excludes tacit forms of knowledge which cannot be expressed propositionally. This article shows how the exclusion of such knowledge presents important challenges to both proceduralist and epistemic conceptions of deliberative democracy, and how it has been taken by some to favour markets over democratic institutions. After pointing to the limitations of market alternatives, deliberative (...) democracy is defended by arguing that tacit knowledge can be brought into deliberation through the mechanism of trust in testimony. By trusting the testimony of a speaker, deliberators are able to act on knowledge even without it being explicitly expressed. The article then goes on to discuss the implications of this defence for deliberative theory, and particularly, the forms of reason which deliberative democrats must see as legitimate. (shrink)