Liberal Political Philosophy Research Articles

Godność człowieka w koncepcji Immanuela Kanta a doświadczenie Auschwitz

The aim of this article is to analyze the Kantian concept of human dignity, which in the history of philosophy, especially after the Holocaust experience, has undergone significant changes. The three concepts presented here, created by Immanuel Kant, Edith Stein, and Martha Nussbaum are representative examples of this evolution. Kant recognizes dignity as a value and defines it by referring to specifically human features: rationality and freedom. In the conceptions of Stein and Nussbaum, not reason alone but also other human powers of mind and capabilities establish the foundation of the dignity of human being, for example, emotions or imagination. In addition, Nussbaum defines dignity on the basis of liberal political philosophy as a concept used to justify citizens' claims addressed to the state. The liberal approach unites freedom and dignity of a man, as the state and its institutions are recognized here as a result of the choice made by individuals, thus combining individual responsibility for their own choices with the responsibility for the constitutional structure of the state. Indeed, the evolution of the notion of dignity in the history of philosophy consists in the change from the attitude of admiration for the values of human reason and freedom to the respect for human rights and capabilities as expressed in rational and free political action.

Imperial Vision, Colonial Prisons:

Prison construction was among the most important infrastructural changes brought about by British rule in nineteenth-century India. Informed by the extension of liberal political philosophy into the colony, the development of the British colonial prison introduced India to a radically new system of punishment based on long-term incarceration. Unlike prisons in Europe and the United States, where moral reform was cited as the primary objective of incarceration, prisons in colonial India focused on confinement as a way of separating and classifying criminal types in order to stabilize colonial categories of difference. In Imperial Vision, Colonial Prisons: British Jails in Bengal, 1823–73, Mira Rai Waits explores nineteenth-century colonial jail plans from India's Bengal Presidency. Although colonial reformers eventually arrived at a model of prison architecture that resembled Euro-American precedents, the built form and functional arrangements of these places reflected a singularly colonial model of operation.

Political Liberalism and Christian Political Theology: A Review of Two Works by Liberals that Can Enhance Prospects for Dialogue

This review article assesses the usefulness of two substantial recent books on religion by liberal political philosophers, Cécile Laborde and Aurélia Bardon (eds), Religion in Liberal Political Philosophy, and Cécile Laborde, Liberalism’s Religion. It opens by situating these books against the landscape of UK-based work on the place of public religion in liberal democracy by both liberal political philosophers and Christian political theologians. Noting the relative paucity—by comparison with those from North America—of contributions on the theme from both quarters, it welcomes these books as providing important clarifications for political theologians of how many of the precise tensions between religion and liberal democracy might be better understood and how debate between the two disciplines might thereby be enhanced.

At the Original Position as a Fetus: Rawlsian Political Theory, Human Rights, and the Pro-Life Imperative

The approach of liberal political philosopher John Rawls on the issue of abortion relied on his construct of “public reason,” in which citizens in a pluralistic democracy restrict the use of deliberative arguments and reasons which are drawn from their “irreconcilable comprehensive doctrines,” including their religious worldviews. From this reasoning, Rawls concludes that a just society is one which includes the legal right to abortion. However, I contend that the use of another of Rawls’s theories — “justice as fairness” — leads to an alternate conclusion: that legally sanctioned abortion represents the unjust persecution of a specific population — the unborn. This theoretical approach lends itself to the conclusion that a just society ought to protect the fetus as a uniquely vulnerable position in society.

Are Cities Illiberal?

One of the main characteristics of today’s democratic societies is their pluralism. As a result, liberal political philosophers often claim that the state should remain neutral with respect to different conceptions of the good. Legal and social policies should be acceptable to everyone regardless of their culture, their religion or their comprehensive moral views. One might think that this commitment to neutrality should be especially pronounced in urban centres, with their culturally diverse populations. However, there are a large number of laws and policies adopted at the municipal level that contradict the liberal principle of neutrality. In this paper, I want to suggest that these perfectionist laws and policies are legitimate at the urban level. Specifically, I will argue that the principle of neutrality applies only indirectly to social institutions within the broader framework of the nation-state. This is clear in the case of voluntary associations, but to a certain extent this rationale applies also to cities. In a liberal regime, private associations are allowed to hold and defend perfectionist views, focused on a particular conception of the good life. One problem is to determine the limits of this perfectionism at the urban level, since cities, unlike private associations, are public institutions. My aim here is therefore to give a liberal justification to a limited form of perfectionism of municipal laws and policies.

Teacher-led codeswitching: Adorno, race, contradiction, and the nature of autonomy

Drawing on respective ideas from within both liberal political philosophy and Frankfurt School critical theory, this paper seeks to examine claims about autonomy and empowerment made on behalf of educational policies such as teacher-led codeswitching; a policy that seeks to empower students from racially marginalised groups by facilitating their proficiency in the language and cultural expressions of societally dominant groups. I set out to evaluate such claims by first sketching two competing formulations of autonomy; namely, (a) liberal autonomy concomitant to political power, and (b) autonomy that arises out of the practice of critical self-reflection. I proceed by testing codeswitching within each formulation to reveal how – in this case – these two conceptualisations of autonomy are educationally incompatible with each other. I conclude by suggesting that educational interventions such as codeswitching may ultimately be complicit in the longer term processes of racialisation and marginalisation that they seek to diminish, not only because they carry the potential to damage minority students’ self-integrity, but also because they limit possibilities for both majority and minority students to engage in dialectical encounters that may open avenues to new principles of social and political organisation.

Humane Philosophy as Public Philosophy

Public philosophy is typically conceived as philosophical engagement with contemporary social and political issues in the public sphere. I argue that public philosophy should also aim to engage with existential issues that arise from the human condition. In other words, we should engage in “humane philosophy.” In the first section I fill out and show the attractions of this humane conception of philosophy by contrasting it with a rival scientistic conception. In the second section I demonstrate how the practice of humane philosophy is important for engaging with contemporary social and political issues and how it offers the best path for religious engagement with these issues. Contra John Rawls and other liberal political philosophers, I argue that public engagement with controversial issues such as abortion, assisted suicide, and genetic engineering requires engaging competing existential stances and I show how this can be done.

Political liberalism and political emotions – an unlikely alliance? On Martha Nussbaum’s approach to stability

The paper offers a type of internal criticism of Martha Nussbaum’s liberal political philosophy. On the one hand, Nussbaum’s claims to political liberalism (as defined by Rawls) are questioned. It is argued that her capabilities-based liberalism remains committed to a broader, primarily Aristotelian account of the human condition. As a result, it exceeds the limits imposed by political liberalism with its focus on citizenship and non-comprehensive foundations of political regimes. On the other hand, the paper argues that Nussbaum’s project can meet the basic normative objective of political liberalism. That is to say, it offers a convincing solution to the question: how can liberal values be stable in a society, given that liberalism endorses the plurality of acceptable normative doctrines? Nussbaum is able to address this issue, because her rich philosophical commitments allow her to complement liberal tenets with a compatible account of practical reasoning complementary. The paper focuses on one of the elements of this conception, i.e. Nussbaum’s theory of emotions and their role in a political culture.

The Historical Injustice Problem for Political Liberalism

Liberal political philosophers have underestimated the philosophical relevance of historical injustice. For some groups, injustices from the past—particularly surrounding race, ethnicity, or religion—are a source of entrenched social inequality decades or even hundreds of years later. Rawls does not advocate the importance of redressing historical injustice, yet political liberalism needs a principle of historical redress. Rawls’s principle of fair equality of opportunity, which is designed to prevent the leveraging of class privilege, could be paired with a supporting principle of historical redress that would contend with partiality and bias in open access to positions.

Equal Opportunity and the Family: Levelling Up the Brighouse‐Swift Thesis

AbstractAlthough liberal political philosophers have long recognised the tension between equal opportunity and the family, most have assumed there is little society can do to mitigate it. Brighouse and Swift argue, by contrast, that an analysis of the value of the family reveals limits on the rights of parents to benefit their children and hence points to a way to reconcile the family with equal opportunity. Their solution for resolving the tension between equal opportunity and the family, however, leads to some untenable conclusions. A better solution for promoting equal opportunity in the family is to level up the opportunities that less advantaged parents have to promote the development and wellbeing of their children so that they are on par with the opportunities of the most advantaged parents. Five strategies are outlined for achieving this goal. Once society has provided all parents with real opportunities to fulfil their fiduciary duties, Brighouse and Swift's argument for limited parental partiality can be applied without contradiction. The result is an alternate solution for mitigating the conflict between equal opportunity and the family in liberal political philosophy.

How to Normatively Theorize Immigration? Demographic Politics in a Constitutional Democracy

In this paper, I focus on the how question of theorizing immigration. One of its central aims is to demonstrate clear limitations of the traditional liberal political philosophy in providing us with adequate tools to deal with the immigration issue. In the first part, I will briefly examine the main tenets of the open borders view, as exposed by one of its most well-known proponents, Joseph Carens. I will argue that, taken to its logical consequences, this profoundly liberal approach commits its exponents to challenge the legitimacy of the existing system of national borders. However, neither Carens nor other advocates of this view seems to be ready to do so, thereby effectively legitimizing the opposite approach which takes as its starting point the receiving state perspective. In the second part of the paper I will briefly assess Miller’s case for the controlled borders, which is sensitive both to the physical location of immigrants and to different sorts of their admission claims. While also framing his approach in terms of justice, Miller is primarily interested in justifiable restraints of a host state’s immigration regime. Once requirements stemming from justice are met, states are at liberty to devise immigration policies as they find fitting their other objectives. Miller’s justice-driven approach demonstrates, however, that some of its key tenets – for instance, that a host state must offer protection to all those present on its territory – can be more successfully defended within a communitarian/liberal-nationalist framework than within a standard liberal theoretical picture. On the other hand, it places a potentially large area of public policies under the sovereign discretion of host states, thereby leaving them under the radar of theoretical scrutiny. In the third part of the paper, I will argue that the immigration regime should be examined as part of a broader set of measures and policies, which can be labeled “demographic politics”. This politics include, but is not limited to entry regulations; integration policies, granting and withdrawing citizenship; family and pro-natalist policies; urban planning and settlement policies. Since this politics could embrace not only population numbers and growth but also its distribution and characteristics, this raises a profound question of what should be the guiding principles, disposable means and outer limits of one such demographic politics of a constitutional democracy. In the fourth part of the paper, I will try to show that we need a revised heuristic framework for addressing this profound problem of political morality, because political philosophy in the liberal tradition has at best a mixed record of saying something relevant on the issues of “culture” and “nationhood” which are at the heart of the immigration debate. In the last part of the paper, I will argue that the concept of “constitutional identity” can serve as one such alternative framework for theorizing demographic politics in a constitutional democracy.

Rancière, Human Rights and the Limits of a Politics of Process

In thinking about Ranciere and Law, as this collection exhorts us to do, I have turned my attention to one of the most well-known areas of Ranciere’s writings, the Rights of Man. In “Who is the Subject of the Rights of Man?” (Ranciere 2004b), Ranciere aimed a broadside at the rights-scepticism which can be traced in much of critical theory to the writings of Hannah Arendt (on the left), and an older tradition on the right exemplified by Edmund Burke and Jeremy Bentham. Ranciere’s writings and thought cover a wide range of areas, but it is the famous focus on rights which interests me here, as it brings to bear the problematisation of the ‘subject’ which Ranciere develops in his writings. Ranciere does not take an ontological view of the subject. Ranciere’s writings on human rights attempt to get out of an ontological trap he sees being promulgated in relation to them (Ranciere 2004b, p.302). These writings on rights and the subject illustrate Ranciere’s conception of politics as a process, which emphasises a dynamic staging of conflicts and the impossibility of stepping outside that discussion and conflict. My starting point is Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe. This eighteenth century piece of literature is key for the discussion about the subject of human rights, and the paradoxes which those rights contain. This novel was used in United Nations debates to justify parts of the drafting of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR). In basing the subject of human rights in part on the eponymous hero of the same novel, the drafting committee (advertently or inadvertently) constructed a vision of the human subject which conflated the figures of man and citizen. The subject of human rights was not a natural man, but intimately connected and indivisible from the society in which he was living. I connect Arendt’s critique of the right to have rights to these debates at the United Nations, illustrating how they lend support to Arendt’s criticisms of human rights. I then outline Ranciere’s counter-critique of Arendt, and his defence of politics and rights. I show how Ranciere’s distinction between politics and the police envisions a subject which is created through ‘dissensual’ acts. These acts of ‘dissensus’ are the very divisions, the strife or the conflict which constitutes the stage on which politics occurs (Ranciere 2009, pp.114-115, 122). Ranciere’s subject does not need to act politically in an existing public sphere where individuals recognise each other as equal and distinct. Rather, the acts they commit help contest the very meaning of rights and politics; a politics which always entails the verification of equality as such. I want to turn to the consequences of this processual politics. I use Ranciere’s writings on politics and his defence of rights to illustrate how, in his schema, political subjects can be formed and new subjects hitherto unrecognised can be created through dissensual acts. I argue that in Ranciere, any judgment on the quality of a political act, and the subject it can create, is necessarily made ex post facto. Ranciere’s separation of politics from ethics forces us to avoid pre-judgments of the political nature of acts. This carries the risk that the reader of Ranciere will interpret only the acts they are already sympathetic towards as ‘political’ and dissensual. The political remains in the eye of the beholder. As a result, this processual politics must be supplemented with a later judgment to be able to differentiate between potential political acts. In treating Ranciere as a serious thinker of modernity and of rights, we need a way to distinguish between an act which is, for example, carried out by racists or those who oppress rights, and an act carried out by a demonstrator or as an act of resistance against hegemony. I argue that it is possible, following Ranciere, to conceive of both as acts of dissensual politics potentially giving rise to political subjects. This in turn highlights the key issue for me in relation to Ranciere’s thought. How can we distinguish between the quality of actors who act politically, without falling back on a presumed political sphere (as in Arendt) or modern liberal political philosophy? I conclude that a stronger questioning of the types of judgment needed to differentiate between political acts is required to avoid Ranciere’s thought being used to justify forms of action the reader finds sympathetic.

Empowerment through religion: religion’s survival strategies in democratic politics

In contemporary Western world religion has long lost its status of a default legitimating formula and has been relegated, in liberal political philosophy, to the private sphere. Institutionally, religious organizations have been largely separated from government institutions. Despite these adverse circumstances, religion – both as a system of ideas, values and norms and in its institutional expression – has adopted effective survival strategies guarding it from social and political marginalization. Religion has been accorded special status among other ideologies. In science, it results in a sort of methodological agnosticism, which treats religious and scientific statements as belonging to two incommensurable spheres. In politics, religious organizations are often granted special legal status among other political actors and religious freedom has been constitutionalized as a special case of general freedom of expression. As judicature and political practice show, religious arguments can often trump non-religious claims when fundamental value conflicts arise. In their political activity, religious organizations have used strategies characteristic for other political actors (lobbying, mass mobilization etc.), thereby gaining democratic legitimacy, as well as unique, religion-specific strategies. Armed with these and other empowering tools, religion can continue to influence democratic political systems in significant ways.

LIBERALIZMO FILOSOFIJOS PARADOKSAI

Straipsnyje siekiama įrodyti, kad po Johno Rawlso Politinio liberalizmo pasirodymo būtina naujai pažvelgti į liberalizmo filosofijos tapatumą. Liberalai neturi savarankiškos moralės ir politikos filosofijos. Jų filosofinis tapatumas grindžiamas ne pozityvia doktrina, bet oponentų kritika. Norint suprasti liberalizmo filosofiją, reikia išsiaiškinti jos santykį su neliberaliomis doktrinomis. Liberalų moralės ir politikos filosofija priklauso nuo neliberalių pažiūrų kritikos. Liberalizmo filosofija susiduria su neįveikiamais paradoksais: 1) politinis liberalizmas sulygina liberalus ir neliberalus, taip neleisdamas užtikrinti liberalizmo politinės filosofijos išskirtinumo, 2) iš liberalų pripažįstamo moralinio individualizmo nebūtinai seka liberalizmo moralės filosofija, 3) liberalų moralės filosofija pasižymi esminiais trūkumais, kuriuos įmanoma įveikti tik remiantis neliberaliomis moralės filosofijomis, 4) savo idėjinį tapatumą liberalai gali užtikrinti tik pasitelkdami ideologiją, o ne filosofiją. Tai, kas vadinama liberalizmo filosofija, yra pilietinės religijos variantas.

Rawls’s Political Liberalism

The contribution that John Rawls has made to political philosophy, and liberal political philosophy more specifically, should not be underestimated. His two key texts, A Theory of Justice (1971), and Political Liberalism (1993), not only reinvigorated social contract theory, but set the foundation for much of the contemporary debate surrounding the nature of the liberal democratic state given the fact of reasonable pluralism. If the European philosophical tradition, as noted by Alfred North Whitehead, should be seen as a series of footnotes to Plato, then contemporary Anglo-American political philosophy, especially if it intersects with aspects of liberal political philosophy, could be seen as a footnote to Rawls.

The Presumption of Punishment: A Critical Review of its Early Modern Origins

Our conversations about punishment have been constrained by the presumption that crimes ought to be punished. This presumption does not entail that crimes must be punished, but rather that punishment occurs as a natural response to wrongdoing instead of as a conventional creation. As a consequence, the challenges for punishment’s justification have been reduced to the problems of purpose, opportunity and form, leaving unaddressed the question of the authority of a certain polity to impose this form of treatment on a given individual. In order to present and criticize this presumption, the article traces its origins by revisiting the debate about the nature of punishment that took place during the emergence of liberal political philosophy. After evaluating the main arguments of this debate the article concludes by arguing that liberal theories of punishment should give up this presumption.

The Presumption of Punishment: A Critical Review of its Early Modern Origins

Our conversations about punishment have been constrained by the presumption that crimes ought to be punished. This presumption does not entail that crimes must be punished, but rather that punishment occurs as a natural response to wrongdoing instead of as a conventional creation. As a consequence, the challenges for punishment’s justification have been reduced to the problems of purpose, opportunity and form, leaving unaddressed the question of the authority of a certain polity to impose this form of treatment on a given individual. In order to present and criticize this presumption, the article traces its origins by revisiting the debate about the nature of punishment that took place during the emergence of liberal political philosophy. After evaluating the main arguments of this debate the article concludes by arguing that liberal theories of punishment should give up this presumption.

Brief aus Griechenland

Abstract Our letter focuses on the present status of Modern Greek philosophy as a discipline and an activity (mainly exercised within its academic setting). We attest the continuous growth of academic philosophy during the last thirty years, especially in the fields of Ancient and Byzantine philosophy, analytical philosophy, liberal political philosophy, bioethics, hermeneutics and Critical Theory. In the two last fields as well as in the case of Kant and German Idealism the dialogue with German philosophy is distinct. Generally, the Greek philosophical community seeks to discard its former scholastic character by orienting itself towards participating in contemporary international debates. In Greece however, philosophy is rarely understood as a field of confrontation between conflicting ideas. Institutional philosophers are reluctant to undertake the role of an active critical intellectual, even though the current economic and social crisis has a strongly negative impact on universities and philosophical research.

Same-Sex Marriage and the Queer Politics of Dissensus

In many liberal polities, there is an emerging “common sense” that it is unjust to deny same-sex couples the right to marry, if they so choose. This popular conception of things could certainly claim support in the liberal political philosophy of John Rawls and others. Yet, as many queer critics have noted, the rights won through “marriage equality” are also caught up with significant dangers and difficulties, including the displacement of what, drawing on the work of Jacques Rancière, I call a queer politics of “dissensus” by a new “homonormative” consensus. In itself, however, a straightforward rejection of same-sex marriage, along with the norms and normativities it doubtless helps reproduce, would do little to contest the operations of power that animate them, as even marriage's most trenchant queer critics recognize. I argue that the recent rapid rise in support for same-sex couples' access to the rights marriage confers partly derives from the precariousness experienced in these times of political economic crisis, which follow the widespread elimination of less privatized forms of security by decades of neoliberalism. As such, a queer politics of dissensus today would need to entail processes of “de-individualization” and the production of new collective political subjects capable of demanding rights shareable in ways that create space for queer forms of life, including those illegible to the institution of marriage.

Debating Brain Drain: An Overview

Abstract In my chapters in Debating Brain Drain, I offer some reasons for thinking that states may not seek to prevent the emigration of their own citizens – even when those citizens have rare and desirable skills, and might use those skills to improve the lot of their fellow citizens. These arguments are developed in response to those contrary arguments given by Gillian Brock in her own chapters. I try to establish my conclusions by arguing against the empirical and philosophical bases of arguments in favor of the right to prevent exit. I suggest, on the former front, that suppression of the right to exit might well work against the interests of the poor, rather than in their favor. On the latter front, I argue that any proposals for “compulsory service” are both unfair and illiberal. States are not entitled to perpetual allegiance; rather, they must justify their uses of coercive power with reference to the interests and rights of those over whom that power is exercised. Preventing the emigration of a citizen is, on the best understandings of liberal political philosophy, morally prohibited.