To prepare for potential human infection challenge studies involving SARS-CoV-2, we convened a multidisciplinary working group to address ethical questions regarding whether and how much SAR...

:In this essay, I argue against the bright-line distinction between ideal and nonideal normative political theory, a distinction used to distinguish “stages” of theorizing such that ideal political principles can be deduced and examined before compromises with the flawed political world are made. The distinction took on its familiar form in Rawls and has enjoyed a resurgence of interest in the past few years. I argue that the idea of a categorical distinction — the kind that could allow for a (...) sequencing of stages of theorizing — is misconceived, because wholly “ideal” normative political theory is a conceptual mistake, the equivalent of taking the simplifying models of introductory physics and trying to develop an ideal theory of aerodynamics. Political organization and justice are about moral friction in the first instance. I examine both logical and epistemological arguments for the position that we need the uniquely idealizing assumptions of ideal theory in order to arrive at, or to know, a genuine theory of justice or political morality; and I find them wanting. Such assumptions as full compliance, consensus, and the publicity principle of universal knowledge about consensus can sometimes be useful, if used carefully and with justification; but they are not categorically different from other idealizing and abstracting assumptions in generating normative theory. What is referred to as “nonideal” theory is all that there is, and it is many kinds of theory, not one — the many ways in which we learn about justice and injustice, and seek to answer questions of practical reason about what ought to be done in our political world. (shrink)

This book offers an original account of the history of liberal thought, one grounded in an institutional history of medieval pluralism and the early modern rationalizing state, and explores the deep tensions that liberal political thought rests upon.

Abstract The liberalism of fear urged by Judith Shklar emphasizes the dangers of political violence, cruelty, and humiliation. Those dangers clearly mark ethnic and cultural conflicts, so the liberalism of fear is an especially appropriate political ethic for an age marked by such conflicts. A multiculturalism of fear keeps its attention on those central political dangers while also noting that some kinds of cruelty and humiliation might not be appreciated without reference to the larger ethnic and cultural context, and that (...) treating ethnicity and culture as completely outside of politics is not the best way to prevent cruelty. (shrink)

This article diagnoses and critiques pervasive forms of teleological thought about basic structures of political organization in modern and contemporary political thought: arguments that the sovereign state, the nation-state, or some variant of a cosmopolis both represents the unfolding of history’s moral logic and offers us full moral personhood, agency, and maturity. Despite the received wisdom that modern political thought broke with teleology, I argue that early modern social contract theory was deeply teleological. The emergence of the normatively self-contained sovereign (...) state from the state of nature represented both decisive historical-moral progress from the medieval European non-state polities and the possibility of true moral personhood, thanks to the unity of will and judgment created by a unified authority structure. The article then argues that this overattachment to unity, both as an historical culmination and as a prerequisite to full personhood, was carried over into subsequent nationalist and cosmopolitan thought, where we see over-moralizations of historical processes, excessive claims for the teleological causal force of moral progress, and critiques of the immaturity of those persons who do not live in the recommended political form. The article closes with a sustained critique of both historical and individual-moral teleologies of these sorts. (shrink)

This article diagnoses and critiques pervasive forms of teleological thought about basic structures of political organization in modern and contemporary political thought: arguments that the sovere...

In this article, part of a symposium on David Miller's Global Justice and National Responsibility, I first focus on an area of disagreement: Miller‘s attempt to attribute to nations responsibility that I think ought to be generally attributed to states. I then sketch a theory that disregards nations more or less completely, and yet issues in a two-level theory like Miller‘s, sanctioning important differences between intrastate and interstate distribution. It is only like Miller‘s, because the distinction between states and nations (...) is one with a very real difference indeed. Moreover, I think that Miller aims to build up the moral and historical prestige of the nation-state to make it a viable competitor with the claims of universal morality, whereas I will engage in a kind of deflation that teaches us not to expect contingent forms of political organization to instantiate great moral truths. But this results in an account that is perhaps more like his than either is like cosmopolitanism visions, whether egalitarian or libertarian. (shrink)

Social contract theory imagines political societies as resting on a fundamental agreement, adopted at a discrete moment in hypothetical time, that binds individual persons together into a polity and sets fundamental rules regarding that polity's structure and powers. Written constitutions, adopted at real moments in historical time, dictating governmental structures, bounding governmental powers, and entrenching individual rights, look temptingly like social contracts reified. Yet something essential is lost in this slippage between social contract theory and the practice of constitutionalism. Contractarian (...) blinders lead us to look for greater individualism, social unity, and coherence of principles than should be expected. Real constitutional orders appropriate, incorporate, and channel the histories and divisions of the societies they govern. Treating them as social contracts flattens and distorts them, making those engagements with the past or with social plurality appear anomalous and encouraging their minimization. Accordingly this article redirects attention to non-contractarian strands within constitutionalism's intellectual inheritance and lived practice. (shrink)

The liberty of the woman is at stake in a sense unique to the human condition and so unique to the law. The mother who carries a child to full term is subject to anxieties, to physical constraints, to pain that only she must bear. That these sacrifices have from the beginning of the human race been endured by woman with a pride that ennobles her in the eyes of others and gives to the infant a bond of love cannot (...) alone be grounds for the State to insist that she make the sacrifice. Her suffering is too intimate and personal for the State to insist, without more, upon its own vision of the woman's role ….For years, Jehovah's Witnesses have posed a challenge to the medical profession. Bound by religious belief to refuse blood and blood products, they can frustrate physicians who, since World War II, have utilized transfusions when indicated in the course of treatment. (shrink)

The liberty of the woman is at stake in a sense unique to the human condition and so unique to the law. The mother who carries a child to full term is subject to anxieties, to physical constraints, to pain that only she must bear. That these sacrifices have from the beginning of the human race been endured by woman with a pride that ennobles her in the eyes of others and gives to the infant a bond of love cannot (...) alone be grounds for the State to insist that she make the sacrifice. Her suffering is too intimate and personal for the State to insist, without more, upon its own vision of the woman's role ….For years, Jehovah's Witnesses have posed a challenge to the medical profession. Bound by religious belief to refuse blood and blood products, they can frustrate physicians who, since World War II, have utilized transfusions when indicated in the course of treatment. (shrink)

For most of the century and a half that began roughly with the later works of John Stuart Mill, the most important divide within liberal political thought was that between classical liberalism and welfare liberalism. The questions that were important to the socialist/liberal debate also became important for debates within liberalism: What is the relationship between property and freedom? Between free trade and freedom? Is freedom of commercial activity on a moral par with other sorts of freedom? Is the alleviation (...) of poverty or material need a more important political goal than freedom? How do freedom and equality fit together in a liberal understanding of justice? What degree of state economic planning, or state taxation and expenditure, is compatible with liberal freedom? (shrink)

This edited volume focuses on the use of ?necessary condition counterfactuals? in explaining two key events in twentieth century history, the origins of the ...

Colonialism and Its Legacy brings together essays by leading scholars in both the fields of political theory and the history of political thought about European colonialism and its legacies, and postcolonial social and political theory. The essays explore the ways in which European colonial projects structured and shaped much of modern political theory, how concepts from political philosophy affected and were realized in colonial and imperial practice, and how we can understand the intellectual and social world left behind by a (...) half-millennium of European empires. (shrink)

The transition from a relatively federal to a relatively centralized constitutional structure in the United States has often been identified with the shift from classical to welfare liberalism as a matter of public philosophy. This article argues against that distinction. The liberal argument for federalism is a contingent one, built on approximations, counterbalancing, and political power. A more federalist constitution is not automatically a freer one on classical liberal understandings of freedom. Neither is a more centralized constitution automatically a better (...) match with the ideals of welfare liberalism. The article sketches a constitutional history of federalism from the founding, through an era in which centralization was aligned with skepticism about liberal constitutionalism (for both meanings of liberal), to an era in which centralization was aligned with increases in liberal freedom (for both meanings of liberal). (shrink)

The Politics of Belonging represents an innovative collaboration between political theorists and political scientists for the purposes of investigating the liberal and pluralistic traditions of nationalism. Alain Dieckhoff introduces an indispensable collection of work for anyone dealing with questions of identity, ethnicity, and nationalism.

The thesis that republicanism was only suited for small states was given its decisive eighteenth-century formulation by Montesquieu, who emphasized not only republics' need for homogeneity and virtue but also the difficulty of constraining military and executive power in large republics. Hume and Publius famously replaced small republics' virtue and homogeneity with large republics' plurality of contending factions. Even those who shared this turn to modern liberty, commerce and the accompanying heterogeneity of interests, however, did not all agree with or (...) know about Publius' institutional responses to the problems of executive and military power. Throughout the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, and on both sides of the Atlantic, it remained a live question whether large states could be stable moderate republics, with responses ranging from embraces of Montesquieuian limited monarchy, to denials that there was any real large-republic problem at all, with a variety of institutional solutions in between for those who thought there was a real but soluble large-republic problem. (shrink)

This article summarizes the theory of federalism as non-domination Iris Marion Young began to develop in her final years, a theory of self-government that tried to recognize interconnectedness. Levy also poses an objection to that theory: non-domination cannot do the work Young needed of it, because it is a theory about the merits of decisions not about jurisdiction over them. The article concludes with an attempt to give Young the last word.

This article summarizes the theory of federalism as non-domination Iris Marion Young began to develop in her final years, a theory of self-government that tried to recognize interconnectedness. Levy also poses an objection to that theory: non-domination cannot do the work Young needed of it, because it is a theory about the merits of decisions not about jurisdiction over them. The article concludes with an attempt to give Young the last word.

Prospect theory is an alternative theory of choice under conditions of risk, and deviates from expected utility theory by positing that people evaluate choices with respect to gains and losses from a reference point. They tend to overweight losses with respect to comparable gains and engage in risk-averse behavior with respect to gains and risk-acceptant behavior with respect to losses. They also respond to probabilities in a non-linear manner. I begin with an overview of prospect theory and some of the (...) evidence upon which it is based, and then consider some of the implications of the theory for American politics, international relations, and the law. I end with a brief discussion of some of the conceptual and methodological problems confronting the application of prospect theory to the study of politics. (shrink)

This comprehensive volume contains much of the important work in political and social philosophy from ancient times until the end of the nineteenth century. The anthology offers both depth and breadth in its selection of material by central figures, while also representing other currents of political thought. Thucydides, Seneca, and Cicero are included along with Plato and Aristotle; Al-Farabi, Marsilius of Padua, and de Pizan take their place alongside Augustine and Aquinas; Astell and Constant are presented in the company of (...) Locke, Rousseau, and Wollstonecraft. -/- The editors have made every effort to include translations that are both readable and reliable. Every selection has been painstakingly annotated, and each figure is given a substantial introduction highlighting his or her major contribution within the tradition. In order to ensure the highest standards of accuracy and accessibility, the editors have consulted dozens of leading academics during the course of the anthology's development (a number of whom have contributed introductory material as well as advice). The result is an anthology with unparalleled pedagogical benefits, and one that truly breaks new ground. -/- . (shrink)

This volume features a careful selection of major works in political and social philosophy from ancient times through to the present. Every reading has been painstakingly annotated, and each figure is given a substantial introduction highlighting his or her major contribution to the tradition. The anthology offers both depth and breadth in its selection of material by central figures, while also representing other currents of political thought. Thirty-two authors are represented, including fourteen from the 20th century. The editors have made (...) every effort to include translations that are both readable and reliable. In order to ensure the highest standards of accuracy and accessibility, the editors have consulted dozens of leading academics during the course of the volume’s development . The result is an anthology with unparalleled pedagogical benefits; The Broadview Anthology of Social and Political Thought sets the new standard for social and political philosophy instruction. (shrink)

The second volume of this comprehensive anthology covers the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. The anthology is broad ranging both in its selection of material by figures traditionally acknowledged as being of central importance, and in the material it presents by a range of other figures. The material in this volume is presented in three sections. The first, “Power and the State,” includes selections by such figures as Goldman, Lenin, Weber, Schmitt, and Hayek. Among those included in the “Race, Gender, (...) and Colonialism” section are de Beauvoir, Gandhi, Fanon, and Young. The third and by far the longest section, “Rights-Based Liberalism and its Critics,” focuses on the many interrelated directions that social and political philosophy has taken since the publication of John Rawls’s ground-breaking _A Theory of Justice_ in 1971. In order to better meet the needs of today’s students, the editors have made every effort to include accurate and accessible translations of the readings. Additionally, every selection has been painstakingly annotated, and each figure is given a substantial introduction highlighting her or his major contributions within the tradition. For figures of central importance, the editors have included extended introductions that place the figure in the context of intellectual history as well as of political thought. In order to ensure the highest standards of accuracy and accessibility, the editors have consulted dozens of leading academics during the course of the volume’s development. The result is an anthology with unparalleled pedagogical benefits; _The Broadview Anthology of Social and Political Thought_ sets the new standard for social and political philosophy instruction. (shrink)

This volume contains many of the most important texts in western political and social thought from the sixteenth to the end of the nineteenth century. A number of key works, including Machiavelli’s _The Prince_, Locke’s _Second Treatise_, and Rousseau’s _The Social Contract_, are included in their entirety. Alongside these central readings are a diverse range of texts from authors such as Mary Wollstonecraft, Sojourner Truth, and Henry David Thoreau. The editors have made every effort to include translations that are both (...) readable and reliable. Each selection has been painstakingly annotated, and each figure is given a substantial introduction highlighting his or her major contributions within the tradition. The result is a ground-breaking anthology with unparalleled pedagogical benefits. (shrink)

There are few philosophical questions to which Charles Taylor has not devoted his attention. His work has made powerful contributions to our understanding of action, language, and mind. He has had a lasting impact on our understanding of the way in which the social sciences should be practised, taking an interpretive stance in opposition to dominant positivist methodologies. Taylor's powerful critiques of atomist versions of liberalism have redefined the agenda of political philosophers. He has produced prodigious intellectual histories aiming to (...) excavate the origins of the way in which we have construed the modern self, and of the complex intellectual and spiritual trajectories that have culminated in modern secularism. Despite the apparent diversity of Taylor's work, it is driven by a unified vision. Throughout his writings, Taylor opposes reductive conceptions of the human and of human societies that empiricist and positivist thinkers from David Hume to B.F. Skinner believed would lend rigour to the human sciences. In their place, Taylor has articulated a vision of humans as interpretive beings who can be understood neither individually nor collectively without reference to the fundamental goods and values through which they make sense of their lives. The contributors to this volume, all distinguished philosophers and social theorists in their own right, offer critical assessments of Taylor's writings. Taken together, they provide the reader with an unrivalled perspective on the full extent of Charles Taylor's contribution to modern philosophy. (shrink)

The stratum-specific treatment effect function is a random variable giving the average treatment effect (ATE) for a randomly drawn stratum of potential confounders a clinician may use to assign treatment. In addition to the ATE, the variance of the stratum-specific treatment effect function is fundamental in determining the heterogeneity of treatment effect values. We offer a non-parametric plug-in estimator, the targeted maximum likelihood estimator (TMLE) and the cross-validated TMLE (CV-TMLE), to simultaneously estimate both the average and variance of the stratum-specific (...) treatment effect function. The CV-TMLE is preferable because it guarantees asymptotic efficiency under two conditions without needing entropy conditions on the initial fits of the outcome model and treatment mechanism, as required by TMLE. Particularly, in circumstances where data adaptive fitting methods are very important to eliminate bias but hold no guarantee of satisfying the entropy condition, we show that the CV-TMLE sampling distributions maintain normality with a lower mean squared error than TMLE. In addition to verifying the theoretical properties of TMLE and CV-TMLE through simulations, we highlight some of the challenges in estimating the variance of the treatment effect, which lack double robustness and might be biased if the true variance is small and sample size insufficient. (shrink)

The peer commentaries on our Target Article, “Promoting Ethical Payment in Human Infection Challenge Studies,” offer a number of insights that will help advance the co...

Movies and narratives are increasingly utilized as stimuli in functional magnetic resonance imaging, magnetoencephalography, and electroencephalography studies. Emotional reactions of subjects, what they pay attention to, what they memorize, and their cognitive interpretations are all examples of inner experiences that can differ between subjects during watching of movies and listening to narratives inside the scanner. Here, we review literature indicating that behavioral measures of inner experiences play an integral role in this new research paradigm via guiding neuroimaging analysis. We review (...) behavioral methods that have been developed to sample inner experiences during watching of movies and listening to narratives. We also review approaches that allow for joint analyses of the behaviorally sampled inner experiences and neuroimaging data. We suggest that building neurophenomenological frameworks holds potential for solving the interrelationships between inner experiences and their neural underpinnings. Finally, we tentatively suggest that recent developments in machine learning approaches may pave way for inferring different classes of inner experiences directly from the neuroimaging data, thus potentially complementing the behavioral self-reports. (shrink)