Journal of Social Philosophy最新文献

Increased international coordination after the Second World War saw both the creation of more multilateral institutions but also the deepening of existing institutions' authority. Since then, many international institutions have faced criticism from both civil society and state representatives (e.g. Zürn et al., 2012) which has intensified in recent years. Yet, addressing global problems such as poverty or climate change requires greater international collaboration than ever. So, how should we evaluate the authority of international institutions that demand compliance? When are such institutions legitimate? The question of state legitimacy has been at the core of political philosophy, and the concept and standards of legitimacy in respect of international institutions have recently garnered much attention (e.g. Adams et al., 2020; Besson, 2014; Buchanan & Keohane, 2006; Christiano, 2012; Sandven & Scherz, 2022). However, one aspect has largely been neglected in this debate, namely how and when legitimate authority is able to bind not only individuals but also states.

The concept of legitimacy is traditionally applied to state institutions, though questions of legitimacy also arise for international institutions as soon as they demand compliance. International institutions seek to bind and therefore demand compliance primarily of states through their rules or agreements, while they do so of individuals only secondarily through their states. It remains unclear how normative conceptions of legitimacy apply to states. Therefore, it is important to understand how legitimacy is applicable internationally to bind states.

This paper tackles precisely this question: Under what circumstances should states comply with international institutions? It is generally assumed that legitimate authority can demand compliance of subjected individuals also in cases when compliance conflicts (or is seen to conflict) with their self-interest according to normative considerations such as the common good, rights, or moral reasons. Yet, for states, such normative considerations are often seen as naïve and thus quickly abandoned for realist international relations theories. Therefore, the legitimate authority of international institutions is often challenged on the basis of state sovereignty. On the other hand, if the normative side is taken seriously, state consent is criticized for as a legitimacy standard. Can states be bound in order to solve global problems or to comply with human rights even without their consent? If individuals have a right to “personal pursuits” (Tan, 2004) based on their freedom or autonomy, then states might have a similar right to decide for themselves and only be subjected to the authority of international institutions to which they have explicitly consented. However, the use of such “domestic analogies” has often been critici

Political philosophy often focuses on what the state may legitimately do to, or in the name of, its citizens. Yet, how well a society lives up to political-philosophical ideals arguably also depends on the decisions that individuals make in their daily lives regarding, for instance, how to treat others, what to work with, and how to spend their free time. Many contemporary social movements for increased justice hence seem to focus less on reforming institutions and laws, and instead attempt to change the values and principles that individuals accept and act on. In political-philosophical terms, these movements are less interested in the “basic structure” of a society, and more intent on changing its “ethos.”¹ Part of this change could happen by influencing what people think are reasonable principles of justice, but the efforts to reform what is seen as acceptable behavior often also involves individuals monitoring each other and issuing positive and negative sanctions in response to each other's actions. Recent years have seen social media and other technological developments boosting the power of such sanctions, allowing millions of strangers to join in the criticism of particular wrongdoers. More recently, the COVID-19 pandemic brought these kinds of social mechanisms to the center of attention, as decentralized and informal monitoring and sanctioning of people's response to pandemic-related regulations appeared to be at least as important as more classical forms of state enforcement. This article assumes that there are, indeed, moral demands on individuals to act in certain ways not only in times of crisis but also in order to further a just society, and sets out and defends an account of the concept of ethos that helps to conceptualize how individual compliance with these demands can be encouraged, or enforced.

The assumption that the degree of justice in a society does not only depend on how its institutions are set up is closely associated with philosopher G. A. Cohen's influential critique of John Rawls. The core of their disagreement is that, while Rawls suggests that principles of justice apply primarily to the major political and economic institutions of a society—its basic structure—Cohen argues that principles of justice would also shape a social ethos that inspires citizens to act in particular ways in their daily lives. Specifically, Cohen is skeptical of Rawls's willingness to accept as just equality-upsetting economic incentives that motivate individuals to work productively. Rejecting authoritarian attempts to coerce people to contribute, Cohen suggests that justice rather requires an egalitarian ethos that inspires and motivates individuals to make certain decisions about how much to work and with what.² Such an ethos, Cohen suggests, is a “moral climate,”³ or “… a structure of response lodged in the motivations that inform everyday life …,”⁴ that somehow influences individual

The fact that persecution is seriously wrong should be obvious. Many of the worst events in human history were acts of persecution. During the reign of the Roman Empire, Christians were beaten, murdered, and forced to fight with wild animals. Until recently, Black Americans were hunted down by mobs and lynched by their compatriots.¹ They were often publicly hanged, but some were also burned alive, thrown from tall buildings, and dismembered. The centuries long persecution of Jewish people culminated in the terroristic policies of Nazi Germany and the murders of over six million Jews between 1941 and 1945. These individuals were violently targeted for their perceived membership in a particular social, religious, or political group. We know already, then, that persecution is a terrible injustice. What is not obvious, however, is why exactly this is the case. This might immediately seem like a ridiculous proposition: persecution often involves discrimination, cruelty, extreme violence, and mass murder. Surely we know that persecution is wrong precisely because it involves acts of the worst possible kind? This paper argues that the entire picture of the wrongness of persecution cannot be understood by pointing to these individual elements alone. To put it more strongly, persecution is wrong not only when (or because) it includes these other wrongs. Instead, I argue that part of the wrongness of persecution is located in the condition that it creates for the persecuted, but also for society more generally. In doing so, I follow two similar interventions from David Sussman (2004) on torture and Lea Ypi (2013) on colonialism.² Both papers begin with the intuition that such acts are serious wrongs. Their aim is to offer a new way of understanding why this is so. Like Ypi's, my title does not include a question mark. I ask you to accept that there is something wrong with persecution. My aim is to offer a new way of understanding what that something is.

As such, I will not consider whether persecution is ever justified. There are (at least) two political philosophers who maintain that persecution is compatible with legitimate governance. For St. Augustine (395AD), heretical persecution is “righteous” when the Church inflicts it upon “the impious.” This is what he calls “persecution in the spirit of love.”³ Such persecution was therefore viewed as a legitimate way of punishing those who have strayed from God (Christenson, 1968).⁴ For Hobbes, persecution is a necessary power of the Sovereign, best described as an extension of the rights of war. Hobbes distinguishes between punishment and persecution: punishment being for misdemeanors committed within the boundaries of the commonwealth and persecution being suffered by those outside it. This “right of nature to make war” extends to all individuals who refuse to be subjected under the sovereign, even citizens. P

When Charles de Brosses first coined the term ‘fetishism’ in On the Worship of Fetish Gods (1760), it was in a rather misled attempt to demonstrate the immaturity of ‘primitive’ religious cults (de Brosses, 1760; see Iacono, 1992, 51). Yet a little more than a hundred years later, Marx had turned the concept into one of the most deep-probing tools which social philosophy can bring to the study of capitalism.

The German philosopher-cum-economist had noticed the way in which his European contemporaries would still sneer at the West African religious habit of treating social objects as ‘independent figures endowed with a life of their own’, and he realized he could turn the joke on them: they themselves did the same with their own ‘immense collection of commodities’ (Capital I, 165 and 125; see also Iacono, 1992, 79–80, Heinrich, 2012, 179–81 and Graeber, 2005).

The ‘joke’, importantly, was a rather pointed one, and has remained so to this day. Just as Marx hoped to spur his contemporaries out of capitalism, the contemporary literature uses the concept of commodity fetishism to mount a radical critique of the capitalist market. Two main conceptions can be distinguished. According to the first conception, the concept of commodity fetishism alerts us to a form of market ideology that plays a crucial role in the reproduction of market domination (Cohen, 2000; Elster, 1986). On the second conception, by contrast, commodity fetishism refers to market domination itself, understood as a form of structural domination with a specific profit-maximizing logic (Roberts, 2017, Vrousalis, 2017, Ripstein, 1987).

In recent years, mainly thanks to the efforts of Roberts (2017), drawing on Arthur Ripstein (1987), the market domination conception seems to have taken precedence. This is unfortunate, I believe. Granted, the market domination conception has the undeniable benefit of emphasizing the profit-maximizing logic that distinguishes market domination from other forms of structural domination. But at a time when the detrimental effects of this logic have become well-known, the concept can provide a better ‘basis for resistance’, as Sally Haslanger would put it (cf. 2020, 36), by focusing less on market domination itself than on the exact workings of its ideological reproduction.

In this paper, therefore, I attempt to go against the grain. As we will see, this requires developing an innovative theoretical framework for understanding ideology—one which not only adapts to the market the influential account which Haslanger and others have offered in relation to racism and sexism (2012, 2017c; see also Celikates, 2016, Einspahr, 2010), but which also refines this account by showing how acknowledging the influence which