Recover it from the facts as we know them

In Andrea Sangiovanni’s words, practice-dependent theorists hold that “[t]he content, scope, and justification of a conception of [a given value] depends on the structure and form of the practices that the conception is intended to govern”. They have tended to present this as methodologically innovative, but here I point to the similarities between the methodological commitments of contemporary practice-dependent theorists and others, particularly P. F. Strawson in his Freedom and Resentment and Bernard Williams in general. I suggest that by looking at what Strawson and Williams did, we can add to the reasons for adopting one form or another of practice-dependence. The internal complexity of the practices we hope our principles will govern may require it. However, this defence of practice-dependence also puts pressure on self-identified practice-dependence theorists, suggesting that they need to do more work to justify the interpretations of the practices their theories rely on

The real value of equality

This paper investigates how political theorists and philosophers should understand egalitarian political demands in light of the increasingly important realist critique of much of contemporary political theory and philosophy. It suggests, first, that what Martin O'Neill has called non-intrinsic egalitarianism is, in one form at least, a potentially realistic egalitarian political project and second, that realists may be compelled to impose an egalitarian threshold on state claims to legitimacy under certain circumstances. Non-intrinsic egalitarianism can meet realism’s methodological requirements because it does not have to assume an unavailable moral consensus since it can focus on widely acknowledged bads rather than contentious claims about the good. Further, an appropriately formulated non-intrinsic egalitarianism may be a minimum requirement of an appropriately realistic claim by a political order to authoritatively structure some of its members' lives. Without at least a threshold set of egalitarian commitments, a political order seems unable to be transparent to many of its worse off members under a plausible construal of contemporary conditions

Participation in and responsibility for state injustices

This paper discusses the criteria for acceptably holding citizens partly responsible for wrongs their state or its agents commit. Some proposed criteria are not, it argues, appropriately sensitive to the particular coercive relation between state and citizen. Others, which are, conceive of it wrongly and fail to match our judgments about a range of cases. Alternative criteria of breadth and joint authorship, built around Christopher Kutz's account of participation, better match these considered judgments as well as linking them to a more powerful theoretical framework. Understanding citizens' responsibility will mean understanding these criteria more fully

Norms, evaluations and ideal and non-ideal theory

This paper discusses the relation between ideal theory and two forms of political moralism identified by Bernard Williams, structural and enactment views (Williams 2005). It argues that ideal theory, at least in the sense Rawls used that term, only makes sense for structural forms of moralism. These theories see their task as describing the constraints which properly apply to political agents and institutions. As a result, they are primarily concerned with norms which govern action. In contrast, many critiques of ideal theory are structured and motivated by their commitment to an enactment model of political theorising. This instead sees political agents and institutions as instruments for producing or promoting better states of affairs. Enactment models treat the evaluations which rank different states of affairs as justificatorily basic, rather than norms governing action on which structural models focus. This reveals an important feature of debates about ideal theory. Whether ideal theory is capable of appropriately guiding action will depend on what the criteria for appropriately guiding action are, about which different theorists have importantly different views. For example, some popular strategies for defending ideal theory fail, while it may be much less clear that some alternatives to ideal theory can provide action-guidance than their advocates claim

Taking back control

Contemporary egalitarian political philosophy has become increasingly interested in the ways the international order may protect or undermine states’ capacities to deliver domestic egalitarianism. Yet it has not always thought through the complexity or dynamism of interactions between domestic and international politics. These problems can be usefully understood through the problematic the intellectual historian István Hont called jealousy of trade and used to understand eighteenth century European political and philosophical debates. Isaac Nakhimovsky’s work on Johann Gottlieb Fichte’s closed commercial state is particularly helpful given the similarity of some of Fichte’s commitments to those of contemporary internationalising egalitarians

Political Norms and Moral Values

Is genuinely normative political theory necessarily informed by distinctively moral values? Eva Erman and Niklas Möller (2015) answer that question affirmatively, and highlight its centrality in the debate on the prospects of political realism, which explicitly eschews pre-political moral foundations. In this comment we defend the emerging realist current. After briefly presenting Erman and Möller’s position, we (i) observe that freedom and equality are not obviously moral values in the way they assume, and (ii) argue that a non-moral distinction between politics and sheer domination can give us a distinctively political normativity. The two points are related but freestanding

Disaggregating political authority: what's wrong with Rawlsian civil disobedience?

Contemporary philosophical and theoretical discussions of civil disobedience hope to contribute to significant political debates around when and in which forms political dissent, protest and resistance is appropriate. In doing so, they often focus on and criticize John Rawls' work on civil disobedience. However, ignoring the frame in which Rawls discusses civil disobedience has led critics to wrongly attack his theory for being too restrictive when it is more likely to be too permissive. That permissiveness depends on treating any political order which does not come close to fulfilling his theory of justice as absolutely illegitimate. In this sense, Rawls’ theory of political authority is binary and demanding. The problems his theory shares with most others, including his critics’, show that political authority needs to be disaggregated to make sense of the conditions under which different forms of protest and resistance are appropriate

On what a distinctively political normativity is

Realists in normative political theory aim to defend the importance of “distinctively political thought” as opposed to the applied ethics they believe characterizes much contemporary political theory and causes it to misunderstand and make mistakes about its subject matter. More conventional political theorists have attempted to respond to realism, including Jonathan Leader Maynard and Alex Worsnip, who have recently criticized five supposedly realist arguments for a distinctive political normativity. However, while Leader Maynard and Worsnip's arguments are themselves less decisive than they suppose, the problem with their response may lay elsewhere. Their response supposes that more conventional political theory could, in principle, be defended at an abstract general level. This may not be possible though, given the difficulty of arriving at agreed interpretations of the concepts involved and the desiderata for a successful normative political theory. It also risks missing the point of realism, which is to use different forms of normative inquiry to explore questions which have not always been central to conventional normative political theory. Judith Shklar's excellent work on vices and the liberalism of fear nicely illustrates this problem

Accessibility, sustainability, excellence: How to expand access to research publications. Executive summary

This article is a summary, by the authors, of a 140-page report prepared in 2012 by the UK Working Group on Expanding Access to Published Research Findings, chaired by British sociologist and academic administrator Janet Finch, DBE. The Working Group was charged with recommending how to develop a model that would be effective and sustainable over time, for expanding access to the published fi ndings of research. The whole report, which can be accessed at http://www.researchinfonet.org/wp-content/uploads/2012/06/Finch-Group-report-FINAL-VERSION.pdf [http://tinyurl.com/d2lxqks], has been published under a Creative Commons License Attribution 3.0 Unported. This is the fi rst of a series of Perspectives articles devoted to the Open Access Initiative that will be published in INTERNATIONAL MICROBIOLOGY. Our journal already published an Editorial on the topic in 2004 (Guerrero R & Piqueras M, Int Microbiol 7:157-161), and strongly supports open access. [Int Microbiol 2013; 16(2):125-132