Philosophy & Social Criticism, Volume 48, Issue 9, Page 1226-1246, November 2022. In this study, we claim that political liberalism, despite harsh criticism, is still the best option available for providing a just and stable society. However, we maintain that political liberalism needs to be revised so as to be justifiable from the perspective of not only the “reasonable” in a Rawlsian sense but also the ones whom Rawls labels as “unreasonable.” To support our claim, going beyond (...) Rawls’s original account, we unpack the concept of unreasonableness and identify three different subsets that we label as the “partially reasonable,” the “non-reasonable,” and the “unreasonable.” We argue that both the “fully” reasonable and the “partially reasonable” would be included into the constituency of public justification; more specifically, we claim that the latter would support liberal institutions out of their reasons: we define these reasons as mutually intelligible reasons and claim that they allow to acknowledge the importance of a convergence approach to public justification. As for the “non-reasonable” and “unreasonable,” we claim that they cannot be included in the constituency of public justification, but they nonetheless could be compliant with liberal institutions if political liberalism offers them some reasons to comply: here, we claim that political liberalism should include them through engagement and propose reasoning from conjecture as an effecting way of offering reasons for compliance. In particular, we claim that through reasoning from conjecture, the “non-reasonable” could find conciliatory reasons to comply with liberal institutions on a stable base. With regard to the “unreasonable” in the strict sense, we claim that through reasoning from conjecture, their unreasonableness could be contained and they could find reasons—even if just self-interested—for complying with liberal institutions rather than defying them. In our discussion, we consider the different subsets not as “frozen” but as dynamic and open to change, and we aim to propose a more complex and multilayered approach to inclusion that would be able to include a wider set of people. To strengthen our argument, we show that the need for a wider public justification and for broader inclusion in liberal societies is grounded in respect for persons both as equal persons and as particular individuals. In particular, we claim that individuals’ values, ends, commitments, and affiliations activate demands of respect and can strengthen the commitment to the liberal–democratic order. Through a reformulation of the role of respect in liberal societies, we also show a kind of social and communitarian dimension that, we claim, is fully compatible with political liberalism and opens it up to “civic friendship” and “social solidarity,” which are constitutive elements for the development of a sense of justice and for the realization of a just and stable society. (shrink)

Philosophy & Social Criticism, Volume 48, Issue 9, Page 1226-1246, November 2022. In this study, we claim that political liberalism, despite harsh criticism, is still the best option available for providing a just and stable society. However, we maintain that political liberalism needs to be revised so as to be justifiable from the perspective of not only the “reasonable” in a Rawlsian sense but also the ones whom Rawls labels as “unreasonable.” To support our claim, going beyond (...) Rawls’s original account, we unpack the concept of unreasonableness and identify three different subsets that we label as the “partially reasonable,” the “non-reasonable,” and the “unreasonable.” We argue that both the “fully” reasonable and the “partially reasonable” would be included into the constituency of public justification; more specifically, we claim that the latter would support liberal institutions out of their reasons: we define these reasons as mutually intelligible reasons and claim that they allow to acknowledge the importance of a convergence approach to public justification. As for the “non-reasonable” and “unreasonable,” we claim that they cannot be included in the constituency of public justification, but they nonetheless could be compliant with liberal institutions if political liberalism offers them some reasons to comply: here, we claim that political liberalism should include them through engagement and propose reasoning from conjecture as an effecting way of offering reasons for compliance. In particular, we claim that through reasoning from conjecture, the “non-reasonable” could find conciliatory reasons to comply with liberal institutions on a stable base. With regard to the “unreasonable” in the strict sense, we claim that through reasoning from conjecture, their unreasonableness could be contained and they could find reasons—even if just self-interested—for complying with liberal institutions rather than defying them. In our discussion, we consider the different subsets not as “frozen” but as dynamic and open to change, and we aim to propose a more complex and multilayered approach to inclusion that would be able to include a wider set of people. To strengthen our argument, we show that the need for a wider public justification and for broader inclusion in liberal societies is grounded in respect for persons both as equal persons and as particular individuals. In particular, we claim that individuals’ values, ends, commitments, and affiliations activate demands of respect and can strengthen the commitment to the liberal–democratic order. Through a reformulation of the role of respect in liberal societies, we also show a kind of social and communitarian dimension that, we claim, is fully compatible with political liberalism and opens it up to “civic friendship” and “social solidarity,” which are constitutive elements for the development of a sense of justice and for the realization of a just and stable society. (shrink)

Our research focuses on the perception of difference in the evaluations of positive and negative options. The literature provides evidence for two opposite effects: on the one hand, negative objects are said to be more differentiated, on the other, people are shown to see greater differences between positive options. In our study, we investigated the perception of difference between fictitious political candidates, hypothesizing greater differences among the evaluations of favorable candidates. Additionally, we analyzed how positive and negative information affect (...) candidate evaluation, predicting further asymmetries. In three experiments, participants evaluated various candidate profiles presented in a numeric and narrative manner. The evaluation tasks were designed as individual or joint assessments. In all three studies, we found more differentiation between positive than negative options. Our research suggests that after exceeding a certain, relatively small level of negativity, people do not see any further increase in negativity. The increase in positivity, on the other hand, is more gradual, with greater differentiation among positive options. Our findings are discussed in light of cognitive-experiential self-theory and density hypothesis. (shrink)

_The Liberty Option_ advances the idea that for compelling moral as well as practical reasons it is the free society -- with the rule of law founded on the principles of private property rights, its complete respect for individual sovereignty and properly limited legal authorities -- not one or another version of statism that serves justice best, is most prosperous and encourages the greatest measure of individual virtue on the part of the citizenry. The work shows why this is so (...) and lays out some of the most crucial implications of the idea. While the book presents a principled approach to politics, it is firmly grounded in the best and most up to date understanding of human community life and history as well as many of its complications, challenges, adversities and prospects. (shrink)

In Democracy for Realists, Christopher Achen and Larry Bartels argue that the depressingly well-established fact that people are woefully ignorant on politically relevant matters renders democratic ideals mere “fairy tales.” However, this iconoclasm stands in deep tension with the prescriptions they themselves end up offer-ing towards the end of the book, which coincide to a surprising extent with those that have been offered by democrats for decades. This is a problem because, if we take seriously the type of data that (...) Achen and Bartels rely on —data that should make us realists in the sense of the book’s title—it is not clear that democracy in any recognizable sense remains an option for the realist. (shrink)

The author examines the religious-political slogan »Option für die Armen« in patterns of oeconomic questions. In his view this slogan doesn't make any sense. Along with the autor offers reflections concerning practical competence of Christian ethics in modern societies.

We simultaneously live in two worlds—our internal world of thoughts, values, desires, and experiences; and our external world in which we are born, and perform actions. Modernity, despite successfully developing our external world, has failed to develop our internal world. This has resulted in our lower nature being unleashed and a crisis of morals and values taking over society. This paper, drawing from the “science of consciousness” as detailed in the Indian tradition, looks at the nature of modernity and how (...) we can address the challenges being posed by it, by training our consciousness to higher levels. (shrink)

We sometimes violate social norms in order to express our views and to trigger public debates. Many extant accounts of social norms don’t give us any insight into this phenomenon. Drawing on Cristina Bicchieri’s work, I am putting forward an empirical hypothesis that helps us to understand such norm violations. The hypothesis says, roughly, that we often adhere to norms because we are systematically blind to norm-violating options. I argue that this hypothesis is independently plausible and has interesting consequences. It (...) implies, e.g., that some experimental paradigms for investigating social norms have hitherto unnoticed shortcomings. (shrink)

Reviving the ancient political wisdom of St. Augustine in combination with insights drawn from contemporary political theorist John Rawls, Joseph Rivera grapples with the polarizing nature of religion in the public square. Political theology, as a discipline, tends to argue that communitarianism remains the only viable political option for religious practitioners in a complex, pluralist society. Unsurprisingly, we are increasingly accustomed to think the religious voice is anti-secular and illiberal. On the contrary, Christian theology and (...) political liberalism, Rivera argues, are not incompatible. Political Theology and Pluralism challenges the longstanding antithesis between theology and political liberalism by asking his readers to focus not on difference, but on our common humanity. Outlining real strategies for public dialogue in a liberal state, Rivera offers the opportunity to discover what it means to practice civic friendship in pluralist context. (shrink)

The Politics of German Idealism reconstructs the political philosophies of Kant, Fichte and Hegel against the background of their social-historical context. Christopher Yeomans' guiding thought is to understand German Idealist political philosophy as political, i.e., as a set of policy options and institutional designs aimed at a broadly but distinctively German set of social problems. 'Political' here refers to use of the state's power to enforce law, and 'social' to the norms and groups which are regulated (...) by that enforcement, but which also antedate or exceed that enforcement. Because the power to enforce law is very much still being actualized by state-building in the period at issue, 'political' refers quite narrowly to a certain kind of practical legal project rather than to a perennial set of problems from the history of philosophy. By way of method, Yeomans claims that to reveal the political nature of German Idealist political philosophy requires understanding German Idealism as both taking place in and conceptualizing its own historical present--this is the sense in which it is not only political, but political philosophy. The most important general feature of the historical present of the German Idealists is the way in which the period from 1770 to 1830 was a transitional period between early and late modernity, a so-called saddle period (Sattelzeit) in which the metaphor is of a Bergsattel or shallow valley between two mountain peaks. (shrink)

Democracy is commonly associated with political equality and/or majority rule. This essay shows that these three ideas are conceptually separate, so the transition from any one to another stands in need of further substantive argument, which is not always adequately given. It does this by offering an alternative decision-making mechanism, called lottery voting, in which all individuals cast votes for their preferred options but, instead of these being counted, one is randomly selected and that vote determines the outcome. This (...) procedure is democratic and egalitarian, since all have an equal chance to influence outcomes, but obviously not majoritarian. (shrink)

In this essay some proposals for discussion are made which deal with the question whether and how an “Option for the Poor” can be realized in jurisprudence. Do legal scientists have a special social and political responsibility? How can be argued for that responsibility? First of all I shall draw the ethical and scientific-ethical framework, which is necessary to deal with these questions. Then I shall present the main points of such an approach to jurisprudence. Finally I shall (...) demonstrate concrete possibilities for realizing an “Option for the Poor” in jurisprudence. (shrink)

Introduction. Regardless of the perturbations and transformations of the external, a person realizes himself and presents himself to others in the direction of the so-called subjectivity. The topic of subjectivity, including the social identity of the subject, is widely represented in modern academic discourses. However, already in the first decade of the XXI century in the context of social and humanitarian reflections on the subject, the idea of the so-called digital subject was raised. In comparison with its biosociocultural counterpart, the (...) digital subject occupies a specific position, a position between the real world of physical objects and the information space. Therefore, reflections on the social identity of a modern person are brought into the digital space, into those of its variants where the digital subject “dwells” and creates narratives about himself. The definitions of “social identity” and “digital subject” proposed in the article will be taken as basic. The purpose of the article is to identify and analyze the key variants of social identity that are presented today in the Internet. Methods. The study is based on general scientific methods, analysis and synthesis, induction, deduction, abstraction. The analysis of variants of social identity in the Internet was carried out primarily on the basis of content analysis, the method of interpretation and a systematic approach. Scientific novelty of the study. The article presents options for designing social identity in the digital space, e-mail and instant messengers, contextual advertising, social networks; the specifics of designing in each of the named options are analyzed. Results. The exposition of options for designing social identity on digital material opens up a spectrum of different forms of being a subject in the Internet. To the greatest extent, these forms are associated with the communicative nature of a person. Increasingly, the social subject is turning to digital communication options, which include instant messengers, social networks and e-mail. It seems that in the 21st century, when the Internet has its own specific signs, including emoji, the so-called literacy qualification, the ability to communicate via the Internet, is available to anyone. At the same time, the real subject not only leaves its unique imprint on the network; the information he receives from the Internet leaves its mark on his decisions, in a series of diverse elections, from a grocery store to a political leader. Conclusion. In modern academic reflections on the specifics of human existence in the Internet, the idea of a digital subject has taken shape. In the discourses of domestic and foreign researchers, the digital subject is usually represented as a prefabricated construct. It has a connection with the real subject and social groups, but its origin is ideological. According to its purpose, it carries some idea that inclines the real subject to make just such a decision, not another. Hence, digital research acquires epistemological value, more precisely, the search and analysis of options through which a person realizes his identity in the network. (shrink)

"Scholar of the humanities" is not a title of honor; it is only a choice of profession. Hence, those "erstwhile scholars" who have already gone into politics or business are not discussed in the present article. Instead of touching on such hot topics as professors selling meat pies, buying and selling automobiles, entering people's political consultative conferences, or taking government posts, this article considers the destiny and possible options of scholars who are willing to engage in humanity studies and (...) are still doing so, for the latter are more perplexed and more at loss and deserve more understanding and sympathy. (shrink)

Sustainable development calls for choices among alternative policy options. It is a common view that such choices can be justified by appealing to an evaluative ranking of the options with respect to how their consequences affect a broad range of prudential and moral values. Three philosophically motivated proposals for analysing evaluative rankings are discussed: the measured merits model (e.g. Chang), the ordered values model (e.g. Griffin), and the permissible preference orderings model (Rabinowicz). The analysis focuses on the models’ potential for (...) making transparent how an evaluative ranking can contribute to a justified choice among options, particularly in situations that involve diverse values as typically found in debates on sustainable development. Such transparency plays a crucial role when policy rankings are going to be used as arguments in political decision processes. The measured merits model is found to have questionable consequences for the concept of sustainability, while the ordered values model calls for an axiological framework that cannot plausibly be spelled out for sustainability. The permissible preference orderings model is more promising. Its formal structure and its ability to deal with value-pluralism provide an interesting re-structuring of the problem of justifying choices in sustainability issues. (shrink)

This book intervenes in contemporary debates about the threat posed to democratic life by political emergencies. Must emergency necessarily enhance and centralize top-down forms of sovereignty? Those who oppose executive branch enhancement often turn instead to law, insisting on the sovereignty of the rule of law or demanding that law rather than force be used to resolve conflicts with enemies. But are these the only options? Or are there more democratic ways to respond to invocations of emergency politics? Looking (...) at how emergencies in the past and present have shaped the development of democracy, Bonnie Honig argues that democracies must resist emergency's pull to focus on life's necessities because these tend to privatize and isolate citizens rather than bring us together on behalf of hopeful futures. Emphasizing the connections between mere life and more life, emergence and emergency, Honig argues that emergencies call us to attend anew to a neglected paradox of democratic politics: that we need good citizens with aspirational ideals to make good politics while we need good politics to infuse citizens with idealism.Honig takes a broad approach to emergency, considering immigration politics, new rights claims, contemporary food politics and the infrastructure of consumption, and the limits of law during the Red Scare of the early twentieth century. Taking its bearings from Moses Mendelssohn, Franz Rosenzweig, and other Jewish thinkers, this is a major contribution to modern thought about the challenges and risks of democratic orientation and action in response to emergency. (shrink)

This book intervenes in contemporary debates about the threat posed to democratic life by political emergencies. Must emergency necessarily enhance and centralize top-down forms of sovereignty? Those who oppose executive branch enhancement often turn instead to law, insisting on the sovereignty of the rule of law or demanding that law rather than force be used to resolve conflicts with enemies. But are these the only options? Or are there more democratic ways to respond to invocations of emergency politics? Looking (...) at how emergencies in the past and present have shaped the development of democracy, Bonnie Honig argues that democracies must resist emergency's pull to focus on life's necessities because these tend to privatize and isolate citizens rather than bring us together on behalf of hopeful futures. Emphasizing the connections between mere life and more life, emergence and emergency, Honig argues that emergencies call us to attend anew to a neglected paradox of democratic politics: that we need good citizens with aspirational ideals to make good politics while we need good politics to infuse citizens with idealism.Honig takes a broad approach to emergency, considering immigration politics, new rights claims, contemporary food politics and the infrastructure of consumption, and the limits of law during the Red Scare of the early twentieth century. Taking its bearings from Moses Mendelssohn, Franz Rosenzweig, and other Jewish thinkers, this is a major contribution to modern thought about the challenges and risks of democratic orientation and action in response to emergency. (shrink)

According to luck egalitarianism, inequalities are justified if and only if they arise from choices for which it is reasonable to hold agents responsible. This position has been criticised for its purported harshness in responding to the plight of individuals who, through their own choices, end up destitute. This paper aims to assess the Harshness Objection. I put forward a version of the objection that has been qualified to take into account some of the more subtle elements of the luck (...) egalitarian approach. Revising the objection in this way suggests that the Harshness Objection has been overstated by its proponents: because luck egalitarians are sensitive to the influence of unequal brute luck on individuals’ choices, it is unlikely that there will be any real world cases in which the luck egalitarian would not have to provide at least partial compensation. However, the Harshness Objection still poses problems for the luck egalitarian. First, it is not clear that partial compensation will be sufficient to avoid catastrophic outcomes. Second, the Harshness Objection raises a theoretical problem in that a consistent luck egalitarian will have to regard it as unjust if any assistance is provided to the victim of pure option luck, even if such assistance could be provided at no cost. I consider three strategies the luck egalitarian could pursue to accommodate these concerns and conclude that none of these strategies can be maintained without either violating basic luck egalitarian principles or infringing upon individual liberty. (shrink)

In this paper we argue that John Rawls’s account of political liberalism requires a conception of mutual respect that differs from the one advanced in A Theory of Justice. We formulate such a political liberal form of mutual respect, which we call ‘civic respect.’ We also maintain that core features of political liberalism – in particular, the ideas of ‘the burdens of judgment’ and ‘public reason’ – do not commit political liberalism to an ideal of personal (...) autonomy, contrary to claims made by various commentators. Furthermore, we maintain that teaching the idea of ‘public reason’ to students in civic education courses does not threaten their ‘ethical integrity.’ On the basis of these points, we maintain – against political and educational theorists like Eamonn Callan and Amy Gutmann – that political liberalism permits a wider range of educational policy options, including some ‘school choice’ policies, than most forms of comprehensive liberalism. We conclude the article by considering some such policies. (shrink)

People value highly the digital technologies that are so pervasive in everyday life and work, certainly as measured by economists. Yet there are also evident harms associated with them, including the likelihood that they are affecting political discourse and choices. The features of digital markets mean they tend toward monopoly, so great economic and political power lies in the hands of a small number of giant companies. While tougher regulation may be one way to tackle the harms they (...) create, it does not get at the structural problem, which is their advertising-driven business model. The hunt for people's attention drives algorithmic promotion of viral content to get ever-more clicks. An alternative policy intervention to reclaim public space would be to create a public service competitor that could drive competition along other dimensions. Online space must be reclaimed as a public space from the privately-owned US and Chinese digital giants. (shrink)

Social reformers necessarily proceed, after the fashion of Rousseau, ‘taking men as they are and laws as they can be’. Thus it has been since the founding of political science in the nineteenth century. But the lessons of the behavioural revolution in political science are that taking people ‘as they are’ might be more constraining that we ever imagined; and the lessons of the policy sciences are that there are far fewer ways that institutions ‘can be’ than we (...) ever supposed. All told, it might make more sense to start with the limited number of institutional options, rather than starting with a value‐driven wish list and searching for institutions that might more or less fill that bill. (shrink)

This study presents a series of theoretical aspects and empirical results obtained after some scientific research conducted on values (instrumental, terminal and religious) and on the political involvement of students from the university. The study was conducted using the statistical survey method in the aftermath of the general elections that took place in November 2008, among the student body of “Al. I. Cuza” University of Iasi, Romania. The analysis underlined the fact that pupils placed a great importance on values (...) and, considering the way they were ranked, the students are believed to have transmitted a specific signal on behalf of a social category that is struggling to be noticed in the context of the present Romanian society. The analysis also highlights the fact that the students’ political participation is not significantly correlated on a statistical level to the extent of their adhesion to the values studied in the survey. (shrink)

After so much scholarship has been devoted to the dispute between the defenders and critics of liberalism, it is reasonable to ask whether the topic has been exhausted or, at the very least, if the rival and incommensurable options have been so thoroughly defined that one simply has to pick a side. John Christman's new book, The Politics of Persons, demonstrates that this intuition is flawed. The central concern of this compelling work is to outline an alternative conception of autonomy (...) that incorporates a wide range of insights provided by the critics of liberalism. What emerges is not only a plausible philosophical compromise but also a politically relevant model for understanding how the policies and .. (shrink)

George Klosko rejects the standard assumption that political obligations, at least insofar as they are conceived as moral requirements to obey the law, must be content-independent. He thereby neglects the familiar distinction between obedience to and mere compliance with legal norms. The present article insists on this distinction by identifying a plausible alternative to the understanding of content-independence that Klosko correctly, even if not for the most obvious reason, dismisses and mistakenly, though not unreasonably, attributes to several philosophers with (...) whose work it is actually incompatible. Given Klosko’s failure to examine this further option, which is consistent with nearly all, including skeptical, theories of political obligation, his case against the necessity of content-independence must be deemed unsuccessful. (shrink)

Generative artificial intelligence has given us synthetic media that are increasingly easy to create and increasingly hard to distinguish from photographs and videos. Whereas an existing literature has been concerned with how these new media might make a difference for would-be knowers—the viewers of photographs and videos—I advance a thesis about how they will make a difference for would-be communicators—those who embed photos and videos in their speech acts. I claim that the presence of these media in our information environment (...) reduces our ability to show one another things, even as it may increase our resources for telling. And I argue that this has consequences beyond the disruption of knowledge acquisition; showing is a way that we preserve relational equality through superficial asymmetries in political communication, and thereby express respect for our audiences. If synthetic media reduce our options for showing, they then interfere in the way that we manage our relationships in the context of collective political action. (shrink)

Democratic theorists often place deliberative innovations such as citizen's panels, consensus conferences, planning cells, and deliberative polls at the center of their hopes for deliberative democratization. In light of experience to date, the authors chart the ways in which such mini-publics may have an impact in the “macro” world of politics. Impact may come in the form of actually making policy, being taken up in the policy process, informing public debates, market-testing of proposals, legitimation of public policies, building confidence and (...) constituencies for policies, popular oversight, and resisting co-option. Exposing problems and failures is all too easy. The authors highlight cases of success on each of these dimensions. (shrink)

Human enhancement issues are not merely academic: the technologies and trends involved give rise to new needs and social demands, provide opportunities for individuals and society, and present new risks. They also challenge crucial cultural notions, social concepts and views of the human condition, and may cause new forms of social pressure and social exclusion. This chapter reports on a systematic attempt by the European Technology Assessment Group (ETAG), conducted on behalf of the Science and Technology Options Assessment (STOA) panel (...) of the European Parliament, to suggest policy options on the issue of human enhancement. It outlines and discusses a number of strategies for dealing with the issue in a European policy context, identifying a reasoned pro‐enhancement approach, a reasoned restrictive approach, and a systematic case‐by‐case approach as viable options. (shrink)

In this study there are presented a series of aspects concerning the religious behavior of the Romanian population. By using quantitative analysis we have identified a series of religious key factors which can be used by parties and politicians to obtain votes during election campaigns. The obtained results highlight the fact that people with a lower level of education are more receptive to the political messages transmitted by religious means. Also, the influence of political actions and messages having (...) a religious character is more powerful at the level of the population with a lower standard of living. By means of quantitative analysis we have also evaluated the impact of religious and ethnical fractionalization on the political representation in the national parliament. (shrink)

Should our factual understanding of the world influence our normative theorising about it? G.A. Cohen has argued that our ultimate normative principles should not be constrained by facts. Many others have defended or are committed to various versions or subsets of that claim. In this paper I dispute those positions by arguing that, in order to resist the conclusion that ultimate normative principles rest on facts about possibility or conceivability, one has to embrace an unsatisfactory account of how principles generate (...) normative political judgments. So political theorists have to choose between principles ostensibly unbiased by our current understanding of human motivation and political reality, or principles capable of reliably generating political judgments. I conclude with wider methodological observations in defence of the latter option, and so of a return to political philosophy’s traditional blend of normative and descriptive elements. (shrink)

ABSTRACTIn this paper I defend a form of epistocracy I call limited epistocracy – rule by institutions housing expertise in non-political areas that become politically relevant. This kind of limited epistocracy, I argue, isn't a far-off fiction. With increasing frequency, governments are outsourcing political power to expert institutions to solve urgent, multidimensional problems because they outperform ordinary democratic decision-making. I consider the objection that limited epistocracy, while more effective than its competitors, lacks a fundamental intrinsic value that its (...) competitors have; namely, political inclusion. After explaining this challenge, I suggest that limited epistocracies can be made compatible with robust political inclusion if specialized institutions are confined to issuing directives that give citizens multiple actionable options. I explain how this safeguards citizens’ inclusion through rational deliberation, choice, and contestation. (shrink)

Political judgments usually combine a normative principle or intuition with an appreciation of empirical facts regarding the achievability of different options and their potential consequences. The interesting question dividing partisans of political idealism and realism is whether these kinds of considerations should be integrated into the normative principles themselves or considered apart. At first sight, if a theorist is concerned with guiding political judgments, non-ideal or realist theorizing can seem more attractive. In this article, however, I argue (...) that ideal theorizing might be considered valuable even by theorists moved by a pragmatic concern because it is less exposed to conservatism. I nonetheless contend that the aim to guide action in the world as it is should not be abandoned. Therefore, I outline a four-step method for proceeding from abstract moral principles to concrete political judgments and apply it to a test case. (shrink)

This essay diagnoses the condition of contemporary liberal democracies. It assumes that the current crisis of democracy is not the result of an external ideological threat, but it is the result of the lack of a coherent vision of democracy itself. The author recognises that the key symptom of the contemporary crisis is the decreasing involvement of citizens in public life and their growing reluctance to participate in public debate. He claims that the reason for this is the increasing social (...) polarisation. The article considers two forms of polarisation: vertical and horizontal. The first form is illustrated by Colin Crouch’s considerations, while the second one by Fareed Zakaria’s thoughts. What finds its manifestation in both cases is the phenomenon of citizens’ resignation from participation in the public debate; in the first case it is because of the lack of faith in the effectiveness of this type of opiniongiving mechanism, while in the second case it is because of the lack of recognition of other political and ideological options in society. These reflections are concluded in the postulate that the basic task facing democracy today is to maintain the public sphere as open as possible, i.e. not excluding any ideological position in advance. This kind of conclusion is illustrated with the concepts of Chantal Mouffe and Helmuth Plessner. (shrink)

Old-age income protection is provided in wealthy democracies by publicly funded defined-benefit pensions. Budgetary challenges have forced policy makers to consider private alternatives to these traditional systems. I consider the shortcomings of private saving arrangements in duplicating the advantages of public pensions. Some shortcomings can be overcome by introducing compulsory elements into private saving plans. Worker contributions into such plans could be mandatory; some or all worker accumulations in the plans could be converted to annuities at retirement; and workers’ investment (...) choices could be narrowly circumscribed. These restrictions do not eliminate the biggest weakness of private saving plans. Fluctuations in asset prices make it hard even for well-informed savers to select an affordable saving rate and an investment strategy that will assure decent income in old age. Public pension systems partly insulate workers against economic and financial market risks by sharing those risks broadly across workers, retirees, and taxpayers in multiple generations. (shrink)

The British Prime Minister Tony Blair has appealed to the other members of the European Union to engage constructively with the Bush administration as a means of working towards peace in a perilous world. The combination of highly developed destructive capacity, relative economic decline, diplomatic incompetence, and continuing political divisions among a frustrated and resentful population that is deeply ignorant of the wider world and subject to recurrent bouts of collective paranoia does indeed make the United States a dangerous (...) international agent. One of the main ways, in particular, in which the U.S. represents a particular menace to world peace at the moment is that it has come to be in Washington's short-term interest to make the world a place in which the quick recourse to violence, and the constant threat of violence, is accepted as part of normal practice in international relations. The use of military power presents itself as an increasingly attractive option primarily because the U.S. is becoming weaker and weaker economically and politically, and force is one of the few means U.S. politicians can deploy that offer any hope whatever of allowing them to advance or protect what they think are their vital interests. (shrink)

The British Prime Minister Tony Blair has appealed to the other members of the European Union to engage constructively with the Bush administration as a means of working towards peace in a perilous world. The combination of highly developed destructive capacity, relative economic decline, diplomatic incompetence, and continuing political divisions among a frustrated and resentful population that is deeply ignorant of the wider world and subject to recurrent bouts of collective paranoia does indeed make the United States a dangerous (...) international agent. One of the main ways, in particular, in which the U.S. represents a particular menace to world peace at the moment is that it has come to be in Washington's short-term interest to make the world a place in which the quick recourse to violence, and the constant threat of violence, is accepted as part of normal practice in international relations. The use of military power presents itself as an increasingly attractive option primarily because the U.S. is becoming weaker and weaker economically and politically, and force is one of the few means U.S. politicians can deploy that offer any hope whatever of allowing them to advance or protect what they think are their vital interests. (shrink)

This article deals with the relationship between the attractiveness of political parties and the younger generation. A recent survey of the attitudes of 15 to 25 year-olds revealed that young people are both interested in political issues and willing to assume responsibility through participation. Due to the increasing individualisation in our society, the offers of political organisations must match the needs of the younger generation. Lesser options should be developed that offer a multitude of opportunities in different (...) spheres of participation, and these options must be carried into the relevant media of young people with sufficient information. An instrument in the form of an evaluation model is offered to the political organisations to help them excercise control. (shrink)

Egalitarian thinkers have adopted Ronald Dworkin’s distinction between brute and option luck in their attempts to construct theories that better respect our intuitions about what it is that egalitarian justice should equalize. I argue that when there is no risk-free choice available, it is less straightforward than commonly assumed to draw this distinction in a way that makes brute-luck egalitarianism plausible. I propose an extension of the brute-luck–option-luck distinction to this more general case. The generalized distinction, called the (...) ‘least risky prospect view’ of brute luck, implies more redistribution than Dworkin’s own solution (although less than called for by some of his other critics). Moreover, the generalized brute-luck–option-luck distinction must be parasitical on an underlying non-egalitarian theory of which sets of options are reasonable. The presupposed prior theory may be inimical to the claim that justice requires equality rather than some other distributive pattern. (shrink)

Mourning, especially melancholic mourning, has recently emerged as a significant site of expressing and addressing loss in feminism. While feminism’s hard-won successes in achieving institutional power globally have brought exuberance over achievement, they have also come with an acute sense of despondency and loss; one that is not easily mourned or relinquished. The institutionalization of feminism in governmental, non-governmental and academic sites has precipitated this sense of loss in India, wherein the discussion of this article is located. In exploring the (...) politics of loss in contemporary feminist discourse in India, feminist melancholia is seen to condition a fetishized attachment to the past, and to past modes of knowledge, action and consciousness in ways that demand the generational reproduction of feminism rather than its renewal in times of perceived crisis. Present-day anxieties over the ‘co-option’ and resultant depoliticization of the Indian women’s movement constitute a narrative of loss in which a politically more ‘authentic’ past functions as a normative standard for feminist politics in the present, and as a prescriptive model of feminism’s future. Advancements in Women’s Studies and activist (now ‘NGOized’) practice that are seen to be deviating from the redemption of such an idealized past are thus deemed apolitical. In interrogating contemporary anxieties about feminism’s present and impending future (that resonate beyond the bounds of India), the article demonstrates how melancholic loss can inform a potentially conservative politics that seeks to contain feminism in a once loved but now lost ‘home’. (shrink)

This article argues that to advance the struggle for access to essential medicines, it is necessary to identify the global and local regimes that shape the rules that give impetus to particular policy options, while undermining others. In exploring the role of law and politics in this process, the author first outlines the globalization of a standardized, corporate-inspired, intellectual property regime. Second, the author uses the example of the HIV/aids pandemic to demonstrate how the stability of this new regime came (...) under pressure, both locally and globally. Finally, it is argued that while the global HIV/aids pandemic and the social movements that emerged in response to government inaction have effectively challenged the TRIPS regime, this complex contestation has reached an unsustainable stalemate in which development aid, corporate, and non-governmental philanthropy is simultaneously providing increased availability to drugs while precluding a more lasting solution to the crisis of access to essential medicines in developing countries. (shrink)

Wallis draws on his experience in urban ghettos to show why traditional liberal and conservative options that emphasize either social justice or personal values fall short. He looks outside the traditional corridors of power to find solutions. Foreword by Garry Wills Preface by Cornel West.

How can we live together in the midst of our differences? This is one of the most pressing questions of our time. Tolerance has been the bedrock of political liberalism, while proponents of agonistic political thought and radical democracy have sought an answer that allows a deeper celebration of difference. Kristen Deede Johnson describes the move from tolerance to difference, and the accompanying move from epistemology to ontology, within political theory. Building on this 'ontological turn', in search (...) of a theological answer to the question, she puts Augustine into conversation with recent political theorists and theologians. This theological option enables the Church to envision a way to engage with contemporary political society without losing its own embodied story and practices. It contributes to our broader political imagination by offering a picture of rich engagement between the many different particularities that constitute a pluralist society. (shrink)