One of the weirder aspects of Arthur Ripstein’s recent book on Kant’s Political Philosophy, Force and Freedom, was the emphasis given to unwanted touching as a rights-violation. Now when a Canadian gives an exposition of a Prussian it isn’t altogether clear whose culturally-bounded norms might be infecting their normative intuitions. But I was immediately reminded of the discussion when I read Simon Kuper's column in this weekend’s Financial Times. Kuper’s piece is based around Raymonde Carroll’s account of American and French cultural differences in her Cultural Misunderstandings . Well, read the whole thing , as they say.
From the category archives:
Political Theory/Political Philosophy
Just listened to an interesting bloggingheads exchange between our Henry and Robert Farley on Egypt and zombie international relations.
Two responses: Robert Farley reads a WSJ piece on Egypt and suggests, in effect, that the effect of internet social networking might not be to allow for more connections between protesters – ‘just connect’, as the slogan might be – but to enable aggregate overwhelming of the security response; which, in the end, couldn’t be quite ‘dexterous’ to be in enough places, with enough force, at once. I have no idea whether this is right or not but, as a thesis, it deserves a name, which will obviously be ‘Denial of Service Attack’, DoS for short. Denial of Security Service, that is.
Then they are on to zombies, and Drezner’s book
Just when you think “he can’t possibly be saying that, there’s an obvious objection” – he anticipates, and replies … great stuff. From some time in the late 1980s.
<em>Feminist Philosophers</em> has for some years been conducting a gendered conference campaign, a campaign against conferences where all speakers are men. I support this campaign. A conference in which all speakers are men is undesirable in terms of its outcomes: it gives a biased representation of the field, the likelihoods are that wo/men cover different topics and/or use different methodologies, we don’t want to put off (female) grad students by giving them the implicit message that the field is not welcoming to them, and we want women scholars to be given an opportunity to present their work. A conference with only male speakers is also likely to be the result of a biased process in which the organisors have given free hand to gendered stereotypes that influence us when thinking about who the ‘interesting speakers’ in the respective fields may be; although the evidence on these kind of implicit bias processes is by now vast, I still regularly come across instances where conference organisors have not given this any thought.
Now it seems like we’ll have to extent this campaign to include Summerschools: to my surprise, I received a call for participation for a Summerschool on ‘Justice: Theory and Applications’ yesterday, which includes six teachers, all male. Theories of justice belong to my own area of specialisation, and I thus can say with some confidence that there are plenty of interesting, excellent contributors out there who are female. In fact, in my Research Master Course ‘Contemporary Theories of Justice’, one student remarked that he had never had a philosophy course with so many female authors on the reading list.
Clearly there may be additional hurdles: for example, it may be the case that female scholars are more likely to refuse an invitation. Or there may be areas where it really is much more difficult, bordering at the level of the impossible, to find female teachers. But that’s definitely not the case for theories of justice.
In the UK we are being treated to a rich and enjoyable series of programmes on Justice featuring Michael Sandel . No doubt there will be quibblers, but I think he’s done a great job so far. Last night’s episode discussed Bentham, Kant and Aristotle and, for my money, both utilitarians (in the shape of Peter Singer) and various German Kant-fans came across as slightly unhinged. The moment that most summed this up, however, was discussion of the German Constitutional Court’s Kant-inspired dismissal of a law that would allow the federal authorities to shoot down a hijacked airliner destined to crash into a city with catastrophic loss of life. Judgement here . According to these Kantians, even if the passengers are doomed to die in the next few minutes and shooting-down the plane will save many lives on the ground, to attack the airliner would show a lack of respect for their human diginity, purposiveness, endiness etc. and so is forbidden. For me, that looks like a reductio.
These aren’t exact new thoughts, but versions of them have been expressed hereabouts of late, and G. K. Chesterton puts them amusingly and very quotably. So I quote, again, from What’s Wrong With The World? Which I’ve decided is altogether more amusing than Orthodoxy, with longer stretches of complete sanity which, when that grows stale, is punctuated by protests against women’s suffrage and such. [click to continue…]
This was made by some 15 year-old schoolkids in the UK. Having got the link I, mercifully, watched it before sending to my philosophy students. They get the philosophy pretty much right. PARENTAL ADVISORY though, it is very rude (I have not sent it to my students, though I suppose some of them probably read CT).
Windsor and Maidenhead Council (UK) is planning a reward scheme (supermarket tokens and the like) for volunteers to help implement David Cameron’s “Big Society”:
bq. it is likely residents would get a loyalty card similar to those available in shops. Points would be added by organisers when cardholders had completed good works such as litter-picking or holding tea parties for isolated pensioners. The council says the idea is based on “nudge theory” – the thought that people don’t automatically do the right thing but will respond if the best option is highlighted. Points would be awarded according to the value given to each activity. Users could then trade in their points for vouchers giving discounts on the internet or high street.
Maybe the Council should have read more widely, since according to another body of literature (Bruno Frey, Sam Bowles ), they risk sending out a signal that only a mug performs good works for no reward. An interesting natural experiment, to be sure, but not one that I’d wish on the residents of Windsor and Maidenhead.
A friend tells me that Edna Ullmann-Margalit, the well-known philosopher and political theorist has passed away.
Matt Yglesias and Brad DeLong have argued that this graph, from Lane Kenworthy, shows that we shouldn’t be too critical of Labour’s performance with respect to inequality over their 12 years of government in Britain.
Both Matt and Brad are pushing back against Chris's post below, which argued that Labour had done very little about equality. (Although in his remark on my comment on his post, Brad now seems to suggest that his post was a pre-emptive strike against what Chris would go on to write in comments.) There’s a natural rejoinder on behalf of Chris, which has been well made in both Matt and Brad’s comments threads. Namely, if the graph really showed that things had gotten better, equality-wise, the Gini coefficient for the UK would have fallen. But in fact it rose, somewhat significantly, over Labour’s term. Indeed, the IFS Report that the graph is based on shows quite clearly that it rose markedly towards the end of Labour’s term.
So I got to thinking about how good a measure Gini coefficients are of equality. I think the upshot of what I’ll say below is that Chris’s point is right – if things were really going well, you’d expect Gini coefficients to fall. But it’s messy, particularly because Gini’s are much more sensitive to changes at the top than the bottom.
In May this year, I did an interview with Amartya Sen in Cambridge (the British one) on the Quality of Life. The concrete occasion for this interview was a workshop/conference I was involved in, organized by the Dutch National Science Foundation, on the Quality of Life.
Sen couldn’t come to give a talk at this conference, but was happy being interviewed by me. So if you fancy watching 22 minutes of Sen’s views on how to conceptualise and measure the quality of life, on the Sarkozy report on the measurement of economic progress (Mismeasuring Our Lives: Why GDP Doesn’t Add Up
I’ve just completed Arthur Ripstein’s Force and Freedom, his rather excellent book on Kant’s political philosophy. When I say excellent, I mean that Ripstein is clear, precise and does his best to present Kant in an appealing light. I doubt that a better account of Kant’s views will be published in English. Clarity of exposition, however, has two sides to it. And in me it induced both the belief that this was what Kant believed and a revulsion at the implications of such a system. I detected rather more affection in Ripstein’s own response, in fact, I rather get the impression that he believes that something close to Kant’s views are true.[fn1] I, by contrast, have had my respect for Rousseau, Hume, Hegel, Marx, Mill and Nietzsche enhanced, especially insofar as they are all prepared to pay at least _some_ attention to welfare, anthropology, and psychology – all of which Kant (officially) disdains in favour of the sparse metaphysics of freedom-as-non-domination.
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Of course we should fight for social justice. Justice is good. And it’s social. Broadly speaking. So I’m asking about the term, not the thing. I ask because I see that Senator Gregg has come out against justice. Near as I can figure.
Normally I would say it is a bad idea to drop a term just because someone like Glenn Beck gets everyone wound up about it. But I tend to think ‘social justice’ just means justice. Of course people have different ideas about what justice is, but ‘social justice’ doesn’t really express those differences. It’s vaguely associated with 1960’s-style stuff and socialism, but not in a way that sheds any light. Not in a way that really says anything.
Example. I’ve finally gotten around to reading Erik Olin Wright, Envisioning Real Utopias, on Harry’s recommendation. I’m not that far yet, but near the start there’s a section on ‘social justice’ then a section on ‘political justice’. Honestly, I can’t tell the difference. [click to continue…]
James Scott is at Cato Unbound this month, talking about problems with the state. I’d have _much preferred_ to have seen him stirring it up a little bit, by arguing against markets along the lines that he does in a recent interview elsewhere on the internets.1
bq. It seems to me that large-scale exchange and trade in any commodities at all require a certain level of standardization. Cronon’s book _Nature’s metropolis,_ which is a kind of ecological history of Chicago, has a chapter on the futures market for grain. There exists a tremendous natural variety in the kind of corn, soya and wheat that were grown, but they all have to be sorted into two or three grades in the great granaries, and to be shipped abroad in huge cargo ships–the impetus to standardize in the granaries found its way back to the landscape and diversity of the surroundings of Chicago, reducing the entire region to monocropping.
bq. It’s the same principle at work as I describe in _Seeing like a State_ with regards to the _Normalbaum_ in German scientific forestry. Agricultural commodities become standardized as they move and bulk in international trade. If you build a McDonalds or Kentucky Fried Chicken franchise, they tell you architecturally exactly how to construct it, you have to buy the equipment that is standardized, it all has to be placed in the same relationship to the other things in the floor plan, so it’s all worked out in detail, and it is worked out in such detail to produce a standardized burger or standardized fried chicken. And because it is standardized, the person who comes from the corporate headquarters can come with a kind of checklist in which every place is more or less the same, and they can check on cleanliness, quality, productivity and conformity to the corporate standard. This is the kind of control over distance that is required for industrial purposes. In the end, what is the assembly line? It is an effort to standardize the unit of labor power. The processes are not so different for grain production, burgers, or cars—as are the effects on diversity. Contract farming is then an instance to adapt agriculture to post-Fordist conditions with a higher emphasis on demand.
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I recently had the pleasure of attending the European Society for Philosophy and Psychology conference in Bochum, Germany . The highlight for me was attending a talk by Michael Tomasello of the Max Planck Institute, Leipzig on pre-linguistic communication. Getting home, I ordered a copy of Tomasello’s Why We Cooperate in which he argues, on the basis of detailed empirical work with young children and other primates, that humans are hard-wired with certain pro-social dispositions to inform, help, share etc and to engage in norm-guided behaviour of various kinds. Many of the details of Tomasello’s work are controversial (the book is essentially his Tanner Lectures and contains replies by Silk, Dweck, Skyrms and Spelke) and I lack the competence to begin to adjudicate some of the disputes. But this much is, I think, clear: that work in empirical psychology and evolutionary anthropolgy (and related fields) doesn’t – quelle surprise! – support anything like the Hobbesian picture of human nature that lurks at the foundations of microeconomics, rational choice theory and, indeed, in much contemporary and historical political philosophy.
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