The Freedom(s) within Collective Agency: Tuomela and Sartre

In this paper, the goal is to investigate the nature of freedom enjoyed by participants in collective agency. Specifically, we aim to address the fol- lowing questions: in what respects are participants in collective agency able to exercise freedom in some weaker or stronger sense? In what ways is such col- lective or common freedom distinct from the freedom ascribed to individuals? Might there be different sorts of freedoms involved in and tolerated by collec- tive agency, each of which has its own role in determining the nature and effi- cacy of the bond uniting its participants? Clarification of just what such free- dom may involve and how it subsists within collective agency is not only im- portant for being able to demonstrate the instrumental value of social ontology to contemporary political debates. It may likewise contribute an important di- mension to the descriptive psychology of collective agency and shared inten- tionality, which is an approach deserving of more attention. Here, such clari- fication is undertaken via a comparison to the notions of freedom at stake in the respective accounts of sociality and collective agency provided by Raimo Tuomela and Jean-Paul Sartre

The Content of Thought Experiments and Philosophical Context

Thought experiments are one common method of trying to make a philosophical point. However, there is the question of how useful thought experiments are in telling us about the world: what does thinking about killing a king tell us about actually killing a king? Timothy Williamson offers an account of thought experiments based upon a general cognitive capacity to consider counterfactuals. Anna-Sara Malmgren is critical of such a capacity. This work assess both accounts in the context of common philosophical thought experiments and finds Williamson\u27s could be sharpened by considerations from philosophical context and facts from cognitive science

Emotional Common Sense as Constitutional Law

In Gonzales v. Carhart the Supreme Court invoked post-abortion regret to justify a ban on a particular abortion procedure. The Court was proudly folk-psychological, representing its observations about women\u27s emotional experiences as self-evident. That such observations could drive critical legal determinations was, apparently, even more self-evident, as it received no mention at all. Far from being sui generis, Carhart reflects a previously unidentified norm permeating constitutional jurisprudence: reliance on what this Article coins emotional common sense. Emotional common sense is what one unreflectively thinks she knows about the emotions. A species of common sense, it seems obvious and universal to its holder - but this appearance is misleading. This Article articulates and evaluates the Court\u27s reliance on emotional common sense in constitutional law. It demonstrates that emotional common sense sometimes imports into law inaccurate accounts of the world. Justices of every ideological orientation invoke it in a manner that comports with their desired ends. Emotional common sense colors interpretation of evidence, manifests in selective perspective-taking, and shapes jurisprudential choices. Common-sense evaluation of the emotions also necessarily embodies underlying beliefs and values; enforcing them on others under the guise of simple truth silently forces a false consensus. Emotional common sense has a limited place in constitutional law. It may be cautiously embraced where an emotional phenomenon is relatively basic and universal. In all other cases the embrace should be withheld. Evaluating isolated instances in which the Court has looked beyond emotional common sense, the Article shows that a superior path exists

Emotional Common Sense as Constitutional Law

n Gonzales v. Carhart the Supreme Court invoked post- abortion regret to justify a ban on a particular abortion procedure. The Court was proudly folk-psychological, representing its observations about women\u27s emotional experiences as self-evident. That such observations could drive critical legal determinations was, apparently, even more self-evident, as it received no mention at all. Far from being sui generis, Carhart reflects a previously unidentified norm permeating constitutional jurisprudence: reliance on what this Article coins emotional common sense. Emotional common sense is what one unreflectively thinks she knows about emotions. A species of common sense, it seems obvious and universal to its holder-but this appearance is misleading. This Article articulates and evaluates the Court\u27s reliance on emotional common sense in constitutional law. It demonstrates that emotional common sense sometimes imports inaccurate accounts of the world into the law. Justices of every ideological orientation invoke it in a manner that comports with their desired ends. Emotional common sense colors interpretation of evidence, manifests in selective perspective-taking, and shapes jurisprudential choices. Common-sense evaluation of emotions also necessarily embodies underlying beliefs and values; enforcing them on others under the guise of simple truth silently forces a false consensus. Emotional common sense has a limited place in constitutional law. It may be cautiously embraced where an emotional phenomenon is relatively basic and universal. In all other cases, the embrace should be withheld. Evaluating isolated instances in which the Court has looked beyond emotional common sense, this Article shows that a superior path exists

Poverty lines across the world

National poverty lines vary greatly across the world, from under $1 per person per day to over$40 (at 2005 purchasing power parity). What accounts for these huge differences, and can they be understood within a common global definition of poverty? For all except the poorest countries, the absolute, nutrition-based, poverty lines found in practice tend to behave more like relative lines, in that they are higher for richer countries. Prevailing methods of setting absolute lines allow ample scope for such relativity, even when nutritional norms are common across countries. Both macro data on poverty lines across the world and micro data on subjective perceptions of poverty are consistent with a weak form of relativity that combines absolute consumption needs with social-inclusion needs that are positive for the poorest but rise with a country’s mean consumption. The strong form of relativism favored by some developed countries -- whereby the line is set at a fixed proportion of the mean -- emerges as the limiting case for very rich countries.Rural Poverty Reduction,Regional Economic Development,Achieving Shared Growth,Poverty Lines

Love, Will, and the Intellectual Ascents

Augustine’s accounts of his so-called mystical experiences in conf. 7.10.16, 17.23, and 9.10.24 are puzzling. The primary problem is that, although in all three accounts he claims to have seen “that which is,” we have no satisfactory account of what “that which is” is supposed to be. I shall be arguing that, contrary to a common interpretation, Augustine’s intellectual “seeing” of “being” in Books 7 and 9 was not a vision of the Christian God as a whole, nor of one of the divine persons, each of whom is equally God, according to Augustine. This becomes clear when we attend to the fact that Augustine is appropriating a specific meaning of “that which is” or “being” used by Plotinus in his account of the lover of Beauty. This resolution, however, leads to a second question. Is there anything distinctively Christian about any, or all, of Augustine’s ascents? On the one hand, it would be odd if there were not, given that the Confessions are addressed to the Christian God. On the other hand, upon close inspection we find that the allegedly specific “Christian” characteristics that modern commentators have identified in the ascents of conf. 7 and 9 also occur in the Neoplatonists. I will argue that there is in fact one important difference between Augustine and the Neoplatonists here that has not been pointed out in these prior interpretations

Cosmopolitan Justice and Rightful Enforceability

The liberal debate on global justice has long been polarized between cosmopolitans, who champion global equality, and statists, who defend global sufficiency. Interestingly, little attention has been given to what these outlooks have in common: a focus on justice. Justice differs from other types of values in that it sets out rightfully enforceable entitlements. Once this is appreciated, however, cosmopolitanism and statism can be shown to offer inadequate accounts of global justice. Since the principles they advocate are reasonably contested, directly enforcing them on dissenting others would violate the liberal commitment to equal respect for persons. When the demands of justice are reasonably disagreed upon, as they are at the global level, conflicts over them need to be procedurally adjudicated. The chapter concludes that taking the enforceability of justice seriously leads us to advocate global outcome sufficiency, and global procedural equality, thereby steering a middle course between statism and cosmopolitanism

A sense of self-suspicion: global legal pluralism and the claim to legal authority

Legal pluralism has become common currency in many contemporary debates on law and globalization. Its main claim is that a form of global legal pluralism represents both the most accurate description of law in times of globalization and the best normative option. On the descriptive level, global legal pluralism is considered more reliable than state-based accounts. On the normative level, global legal pluralism is understood as a possibility to open up the legal realm to previously unheard voices. This article assesses these claims against the background of classic legal-pluralist scholarship. After reconstructing the emergence of global legal pluralism and then examining its epistemic and normative versions, the last two sections identify the shortcoming of this approach by underlining the absence of what the authors call ‘a sense of self-suspicion’ in drawing the map of legalities in the global sphere. The main argument put forward is that global legal pluralism is oblivious of a few key insights offered by the founding fathers of classic legal pluralism

From diversity to difference: structural dilemmas of identity politics

The main purpose of this paper is to critically assess some problems affecting the structure of a number of arguments advocating what has been named as identity politics or the politics of difference, and especially those formulated by Iris Marion Young. While such accounts have claimed recognition of different identities as ground for demanding a fundamental reform of the current perceived dominant liberal framework, they have yet to solve a number of issues that pertain to the structure itself of these arguments. Despite some valid criticisms related to the way in which identity indeed plays a crucial role in the contemporary power and legitimacy contexts, these accounts, through their normative discourse of culture and difference, seem to reinforce the very reasons they have identified for those problems. Furthermore, by focusing on culture and group identity as their primary concern, instead of on individuals, such accounts have replaced the modern subjects of political justification without clearly assuming or justifying this move. The politics of difference also needs to offer a better explanation of how the underlying common framework for pluralism can be preserved. Finally, such accounts are invoking the concept of "culture": notoriously indeterminate, it undermines their efforts to offer formal criteria of what cultures are, what membership consists in, and which legal rights should correspond to different contexts

Three Mistakes About Interpretation

The single most important word in modem constitutional theory is interpretation. The single most confusing word in modem constitutional theory is interpretation. What accounts for this unhappy state of affairs? I will try to show that Barry Friedman\u27s assertions, as well as others that are but rephrasings of the same basic ideas, are not the common sense truths that so many constitutional theorists assume them to be, but are instead the products of an extraordinarily confused and ultimately incoherent set of assumptions regarding the interpretation of language