IDEAS EXPLAINEDTM Daoism Explained, Hans-Georg Moeller Frege Explained, Joan Weiner Luhmann Explained, Hans-Georg Moeller Heidegger Explained, Graham Harman Atheism Explained, David Ramsay Steele Sartre Explained, ...

Is there a principled way to understand what liberal democratic states owe, as a matter of justice, to the victims of disasters? This article shows what is normatively special and distinctive about disasters and argues for the view that there are substantial duties of justice for liberal democratic states. The article rejects both a libertarian and a utilitarian approach to this question and, based on broadly Rawlsian principles, argues for a ‘political definition’ of disasters that is concerned with the restoration (...) of citizens' dignity and their capacities for effective citizenship. (shrink)

What can Hannah Arendt's writings offer to current thinking on the environment? Although there are some obvious connections between her work and current issues in environmental ethics, not very much has been written on the topic. This article argues that Arendt's philosophy is particularly fruitful for environmental thinking because she explicitly links the material and biological conditions of human existence with the political conditions of human freedom. This is articulated in the article as the requirement of both constrained consumption and (...) unconstrained deliberation. The article elaborates these notions before concluding that Arendt's philosophy uniquely combines the existential task of self-understanding with the practical task of confronting our environmental challenges. (shrink)

This chapter interrogates the role that liberalism plays in Immanuel Wallerstein’s grand and sweeping narrative of modern history. From liberalism’s beginnings as an ideological response to the French Revolution in 1789, to its apotheosis in the global hegemony of the USA after the Second World War, to its final dissolution in the collapse of Soviet communism, liberalism is the analytical thread that animates Wallerstein’s World-Systems Analysis of the modern period. The chapter examines the idea of liberalism as ideology and sets (...) out Wallerstein’s thoughts on what lies beyond liberalism. It ends with a few critical comments and reflections. (shrink)

For Rawls, the demands of justice compete with moral and religious obligations that are part of citizens’ comprehensive doctrines. The ways we love are shaped by our comprehensive doctrines; however, love can also stand in opposition to our moral and religious beliefs. I will argue that love – spousal, familial and associational – constitutes its own register of values along with its own set of obligations. For this reason love confronts not only our moral and religious beliefs, it also confronts (...) the demands and requirements of justice. Rawls has worked out a negotiated peace between the obligations of justice and the demands of citizens’ comprehensive doctrines in the form of an overlapping consensus on a free-standing political conception of justice. I will argue that in Rawls’s philosophy, justice has not yet made peace with love. (shrink)

In this paper I set out a conception of hope that is distinctively political and that makes hope for a just and democratic society reasonable, by showing how political hope can bridge the gap between an ideal of a just and democratic society and the obvious ways in which our actual world falls short of this ideal. Furthermore, I show how hope functions as a necessary epistemic support for reasons to aim for justice despite the distance prospect of its achievement. (...) Political hope thus bridges both a normative and an epistemic gap, each of which threatens the legitimacy of democratic regimes. I identify three orders of political hope and make the argument that democratic hope, correctly understood, requires that any normative conception of democracy must contain, as a matter of analytical necessity, a corresponding conception of hope. (shrink)

The meaning of privacy has been frequently disputed in the philosophical and -/- legal literature since Warren and Brandeis first argued for it as a distinct and -/- important personal and social value. Nevertheless, while the meaning of privacy -/- is held to be vague, there is general agreement that Warren and Brandeis were -/- correct in their assessment of its value. Theorists of democracy, on the other hand, -/- have been ambivalent towards the realm of the private. This paper (...) interrogates the -/- intersection between privacy and democracy, questioning the place of privacy as a -/- distinctly democratic value. (shrink)

Political philosophy has been under the sway of a certain picture since Rawls's A Theory of Justice was published in 1971. This picture com- bines the idea that the problem of justice should be approached from the direction oi ideal normative theory, and that there are some anchor- ing ideas that secure the justificatory role of a hypothetical agreement. I think this picture and the hold it has over political philosophy is beginning to fragment. This fragmentation I think is most (...) evident in the skepticism that has become a routine response to the Kantian idea that 'we' can 'discover' the terms of an agreement that has both a categorical force and a universal scope. But as the picture fragments we are still left with the framework and vocabulary of Rawls's difficult and elaborate theory. The major difficulty confronting the Rawlsian project (the problem of pluralism as I will argue below) is itself defined in terms of Rawls's conceptual language. And this serves only to obscure the real challenge and keep us 'bewitched' by Rawls's nar- row way of seeing issues. In being bewitched in this way we do not see that the problem of pluralism confronts Rawls's project as a whole, rather than requiring adjustments and accommodations. (shrink)

There has not been a sustained application of communitarian ethical theory to the topic of disasters, as far as I am aware. While there is an occasional reference to communitarian ethics in disaster management discussions, this does not amount to a philosophical treatment of either the contribution that communitarian ethics might make to the complex moral problem of disasters, nor does it amount to an examination of its philosophical difficulties and weaknesses. The aim of this chapter is to take a (...) step towards filling this gap in the literature. (shrink)

Drone warfare disrupts the generally understood experience of war, and drone operators’ distance from the battlefield has called into question the authenticity of their experiences as participants in conflict. This article examines the autobiographies of three US military drone operators, analysing how the narration is discursively oriented to particular spatial and ideological perspectives. It argues that the linguistic construction of point of view in each text reflects a dynamic and sometimes paradoxical relationship between drone operators and their distance from the (...) battlefield. Observing the position and shifting of deictic centres, the analysis draws parallels between spatial perspective, ideology, and the social identities of drone operators and victims of drone strikes. It concludes by reflecting on the variety of discursive strategies employed across these texts, and considers this variation itself to be an emerging trend in the discourse of drone warfare. (shrink)

This paper argues that the categorical authority of love’s imperatives is derived from a sentimental contract. The problem is defined and the paper argues against two recent attempts to explain the authority of love’s demands by Velleman and Frankfurt. An argument is then set out in which it is shown that a constructivist approach to the problem explains the sources of love’s justifications. The paper distinguishes between the moral and the romantic case but argues that the sources of authority are (...) paralleled in each. The paper ends by asking what we are to say when the demands of morality and the demands of love conflict. (shrink)

The paper is a response to Russell Daylight’s “In the Name of Democracy”. I argue that Daylight’s postmodernist approach to the question of democracy is flawed in several respects. First, he interprets the claim that the meaning of democracy is open to entail that there can be no closure when democratic norms are in dispute. I argue that normative closure is not only essential but also necessary to democratic practice, in particular for democratic legitimacy. I reject the claim that normative (...) closure requires transcendental truths or dubious metaphysical commitments. Second, I critically examine Daylight’s positive proposal for “language-citizens.” I end by offering a sketch of a theory of democratic legitimacy that I believe evades the charges that Daylight and postmodernists offer against normative democratic theory. (shrink)

This book argues for moral contractarianism, the view that moral justification rests on the idea of agreement. It critically appraises the views of contemporary contractarians such as John Rawls, David Gauthier, and Thomas Scanlon. It argues for a theory of moral justification that is based on a hypothetical agreement of restricted scope between strangers in the circumstances of justice and that is bound by historical place and circumstance.

In this paper I argue that David Gauthier’s answer to the Why be moral? question fails. My argument concedes the possibility of constrained maximization in all the senses Gauthier intends and does not rely on the claim that it is better to masquerade as a constrained maximizer than to be one. Instead, I argue that once a constrained maximizer in the guise of "economic man" is transformed through an affective commitment to morality into a constrained maximizer in the guise of (...) the "liberal individual," then a purely rational justification for morality must become invisible to the latter. If I can show this, then I can show that rational justification can have no motivational power for the "liberal individual" and that Gauthier fails to answer the problem of moral motivation. (shrink)

In this paper I argue that noise is a significant source of social harm and those harmed by noise often suffer not merely a misfortune but an injustice. I argue that noise is a problem of justice in two ways; firstly, noise is a burden of social cooperation and so the question of the distribution of this burden arises. And, secondly, some noises, although burdensome, are nevertheless just because they arise from practices that are ‘reasonable’. I offer a number of (...) distinctions, between necessary and unnecessary noise, between public and private noise and between reasonable and unreasonable noise. What justice requires will differ according to what kind of noise we consider. My purpose is to give normative urgency to the problem of noise by understanding certain instances of it as not merely annoyances and nuisances but instances of injustice. (shrink)