{"title":"Issue Information - NASSP page","authors":"","doi":"10.1111/josp.12480","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/josp.12480","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":46756,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Social Philosophy","volume":"54 3","pages":"437"},"PeriodicalIF":0.8,"publicationDate":"2023-09-19","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/josp.12480","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"50138412","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
<p>By affecting work, resources, organizations, and people's lives, automation processes can be disruptive of the basic structure of society. Nonetheless, we may benefit from this disruption, as automation may offer opportunities to make social cooperation fairer. Just as philosophers have addressed the problem of which values and principles should regulate the distribution of goods, so we may consider the problem of the values and principles guiding technological change with regard to work. Indeed, automation is often addressed from a distributive perspective. A prevailing concern in the debate is about making sure that the technologically unemployed will not lose access to income through unconditional redistributive policies, while some have suggested policies like a “robot tax” to disincentivize companies' investment in labor-saving devices. While crucial given the massive increase in profits afforded by automation and the inequalities that go with it, concerns about income are not the only ones raised by automation. Without underestimating their relevance, in this article I leave aside problems about income to focus on automation from the perspective of work. That is, my concern here is on social cooperation from the perspective of <i>contribution</i> instead of <i>distribution</i>, within a framework that may be called technological contributive justice. If UBI advocates expect everyone to benefit from automation in their income, the contributive perspective postulates that everyone should benefit from automation in their work.</p><p>There are three main reasons behind this shift. First, even in a world in which income were unconditionally accessible to all, there would be the problem of how to fairly organize the un-automated socially necessary labor (e.g., waste collection, care work, etc.). I call this the “somebody's got to do it” problem. It cannot be solved by merely reallocating income, because it concerns the division of labor itself and its norms. Second, by conceptualizing social cooperation only as a matter of markets and distribution but not production, we are not able to see what happens with regard to what people <i>do</i> besides what they <i>own</i>. But this matters too when it comes to pursuing our life plans (see Section 4) as well as the effects on our aims, aspirations, and character (see Section 3.1). Finally, even if work were completely automatable, we would most likely still consider it undesirable to fully automate certain tasks, such as child care or teaching.</p><p>On the other hand, normative thinking about automation often takes the form of utopias of “full automation.” Recent examples include ideas of “fully automated luxury communism” (Bastani, <span>2019</span>) or “post-work” views. A fully automated world, Danaher (<span>2019b</span>) argues, would allow us to pursue a life free from the pressures of economic demands and to enjoy activities for their own sake, much like playing games. From the premise that
{"title":"Labor automation for fair cooperation: Why and how machines should provide meaningful work for all","authors":"Denise Celentano","doi":"10.1111/josp.12548","DOIUrl":"10.1111/josp.12548","url":null,"abstract":"<p>By affecting work, resources, organizations, and people's lives, automation processes can be disruptive of the basic structure of society. Nonetheless, we may benefit from this disruption, as automation may offer opportunities to make social cooperation fairer. Just as philosophers have addressed the problem of which values and principles should regulate the distribution of goods, so we may consider the problem of the values and principles guiding technological change with regard to work. Indeed, automation is often addressed from a distributive perspective. A prevailing concern in the debate is about making sure that the technologically unemployed will not lose access to income through unconditional redistributive policies, while some have suggested policies like a “robot tax” to disincentivize companies' investment in labor-saving devices. While crucial given the massive increase in profits afforded by automation and the inequalities that go with it, concerns about income are not the only ones raised by automation. Without underestimating their relevance, in this article I leave aside problems about income to focus on automation from the perspective of work. That is, my concern here is on social cooperation from the perspective of <i>contribution</i> instead of <i>distribution</i>, within a framework that may be called technological contributive justice. If UBI advocates expect everyone to benefit from automation in their income, the contributive perspective postulates that everyone should benefit from automation in their work.</p><p>There are three main reasons behind this shift. First, even in a world in which income were unconditionally accessible to all, there would be the problem of how to fairly organize the un-automated socially necessary labor (e.g., waste collection, care work, etc.). I call this the “somebody's got to do it” problem. It cannot be solved by merely reallocating income, because it concerns the division of labor itself and its norms. Second, by conceptualizing social cooperation only as a matter of markets and distribution but not production, we are not able to see what happens with regard to what people <i>do</i> besides what they <i>own</i>. But this matters too when it comes to pursuing our life plans (see Section 4) as well as the effects on our aims, aspirations, and character (see Section 3.1). Finally, even if work were completely automatable, we would most likely still consider it undesirable to fully automate certain tasks, such as child care or teaching.</p><p>On the other hand, normative thinking about automation often takes the form of utopias of “full automation.” Recent examples include ideas of “fully automated luxury communism” (Bastani, <span>2019</span>) or “post-work” views. A fully automated world, Danaher (<span>2019b</span>) argues, would allow us to pursue a life free from the pressures of economic demands and to enjoy activities for their own sake, much like playing games. From the premise that ","PeriodicalId":46756,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Social Philosophy","volume":"55 1","pages":"25-43"},"PeriodicalIF":0.8,"publicationDate":"2023-08-25","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/josp.12548","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42612734","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"A couple of reasons in favor of monogamy","authors":"Kyle York","doi":"10.1111/josp.12544","DOIUrl":"10.1111/josp.12544","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":46756,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Social Philosophy","volume":"55 1","pages":"106-123"},"PeriodicalIF":0.8,"publicationDate":"2023-08-23","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42606014","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Critical theory, ideal theory, and conceptual engineering","authors":"A. Sangiovanni","doi":"10.1111/josp.12545","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/josp.12545","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":46756,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Social Philosophy","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.8,"publicationDate":"2023-08-22","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46984711","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
<p>Corporate responsibility is the view that certain groups, and not just their members, can be responsible for their causal impact on the world. And in the moral sense I shall consider, these groups, and not just their members, are seen as appropriate targets of reactive attitudes like resentment and gratitude. A key challenge for defenders of corporate responsibility is to show how a group's actions may be unexplainable strictly in terms of individual actions, and that we instead should attribute the actions to the group itself. They will then have grounds for arguing that there is a class of actions for which the group itself, and not necessarily its members, is responsible. Such an argument will imply that an individualist view leaves some responsibility unaccounted for—we get a responsibility void—and that we need to hold the group itself responsible to avoid a deficit in our ascription of responsibility.</p><p>Pettit (<span>2003</span>, <span>2007a</span>) takes on this challenge in his defense of corporate responsibility (see also List & Pettit, <span>2011</span>: ch. 7). He ascribes responsibility particularly to groups acting on attitudes, or beliefs and desires, formed in a procedure aggregating the group members' attitudes. But when members make consistent attitudes toward a set of logically interconnected propositions, such as {<i>p</i>, <i>p</i> → <i>q</i>, <i>q</i>}, the majority attitudes might be inconsistent. To avoid inconsistency, the group therefore needs the capacity to adopt attitudes most of its members reject. It can thus form its own irreducible attitudes. And when the group acts on these attitudes, we cannot assign full responsibility to the group members, who do not hold these attitudes. We must instead hold the group itself responsible as an agent in its own right. Otherwise, Pettit warns us, group agents will be let off the hook too easily; “there will be cases where no one is held responsible for actions that are manifestly matters of agential responsibility” (Pettit, <span>2007a</span>: 197).</p><p>Here, we should note that Pettit focuses primarily on cases where the issues on the agenda are clearly connected. We shall see that his example of a workers' committee is one such case. In what follows, I also focus on this type of case, and I shall also give little attention to cases where the connection between issues is less clear, and where individuals have a weaker understanding of the consequences of their actions. But it also seems less plausible that individualist explanations leave responsibility voids in such cases. If the problem of seeing how issues are connected is due to poor organizational design, then individuals high up in the organization's hierarchy might be responsible.<sup>1</sup> Of course, even well-organized groups can make decisions without a clear understanding of the effects on future decision making. But when individuals' actions have consequences they cannot be reasonably expected to fores
{"title":"Against corporate responsibility","authors":"Lars J. K. Moen","doi":"10.1111/josp.12547","DOIUrl":"10.1111/josp.12547","url":null,"abstract":"<p>Corporate responsibility is the view that certain groups, and not just their members, can be responsible for their causal impact on the world. And in the moral sense I shall consider, these groups, and not just their members, are seen as appropriate targets of reactive attitudes like resentment and gratitude. A key challenge for defenders of corporate responsibility is to show how a group's actions may be unexplainable strictly in terms of individual actions, and that we instead should attribute the actions to the group itself. They will then have grounds for arguing that there is a class of actions for which the group itself, and not necessarily its members, is responsible. Such an argument will imply that an individualist view leaves some responsibility unaccounted for—we get a responsibility void—and that we need to hold the group itself responsible to avoid a deficit in our ascription of responsibility.</p><p>Pettit (<span>2003</span>, <span>2007a</span>) takes on this challenge in his defense of corporate responsibility (see also List & Pettit, <span>2011</span>: ch. 7). He ascribes responsibility particularly to groups acting on attitudes, or beliefs and desires, formed in a procedure aggregating the group members' attitudes. But when members make consistent attitudes toward a set of logically interconnected propositions, such as {<i>p</i>, <i>p</i> → <i>q</i>, <i>q</i>}, the majority attitudes might be inconsistent. To avoid inconsistency, the group therefore needs the capacity to adopt attitudes most of its members reject. It can thus form its own irreducible attitudes. And when the group acts on these attitudes, we cannot assign full responsibility to the group members, who do not hold these attitudes. We must instead hold the group itself responsible as an agent in its own right. Otherwise, Pettit warns us, group agents will be let off the hook too easily; “there will be cases where no one is held responsible for actions that are manifestly matters of agential responsibility” (Pettit, <span>2007a</span>: 197).</p><p>Here, we should note that Pettit focuses primarily on cases where the issues on the agenda are clearly connected. We shall see that his example of a workers' committee is one such case. In what follows, I also focus on this type of case, and I shall also give little attention to cases where the connection between issues is less clear, and where individuals have a weaker understanding of the consequences of their actions. But it also seems less plausible that individualist explanations leave responsibility voids in such cases. If the problem of seeing how issues are connected is due to poor organizational design, then individuals high up in the organization's hierarchy might be responsible.<sup>1</sup> Of course, even well-organized groups can make decisions without a clear understanding of the effects on future decision making. But when individuals' actions have consequences they cannot be reasonably expected to fores","PeriodicalId":46756,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Social Philosophy","volume":"55 1","pages":"44-61"},"PeriodicalIF":0.8,"publicationDate":"2023-08-18","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/josp.12547","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44873138","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
<p>Under which conditions can we make a state responsible for an action? For example, is the United States (and not only Bush and his Cabinet) responsible for declaring war against Iraq? And is there any justification to make citizens contribute collectively to the reparation or compensation of the damages produced by the action? That is, should United States citizens shoulder the burdens and pay restitution to Iraq for destroying civil infrastructure during the military campaign? After reviewing some theories, I develop a framework to answer these kinds of questions.</p><p>While the idea of state responsibility has long been under discussion within both political philosophy and international legal theory, no agreement has yet been reached regarding what it is and how it can impact on ordinary citizens. The first problem lies in the difficulty of determining what states are and whether they can perform actions. For example, whereas some prominent theorists take states to be (corporate) agents, with the capacity to form and act upon intentions (e.g., Collins, <span>2019</span>; List & Pettit, <span>2011</span>), some others resist extending the notion of agency to anything other than individuals (e.g., Gilpin, <span>1984</span>; Miller, <span>2002</span>).</p><p>Additionally, there remains a controversy as to when and to what extent it is possible to distribute collective responsibility amongst citizens for the wrongful actions of their state. For instance, whereas Lawford-Smith (<span>2019</span>) argues that (unlike officials) citizens are not <i>culpable</i> for state action, and so they cannot be punished for its bad consequences, Pasternak (<span>2021</span>) and Stilz (<span>2011a</span>) hold that they can indeed be responsible if they are <i>intentional participants</i> or their state satisfies a <i>democratic authorisation principle</i>, respectively.</p><p>Although these views have revealed important aspects of state responsibility, they are not exempt from criticism. With the purpose of introducing a more compelling alternative, I discuss in this paper some crucial challenges to these accounts and then suggest another way to move forward, viz., to analyze state agency, state action, and state responsibility in terms of proxy agency, proxy action, and proxy responsibility.</p><p>I structure the paper as follows. I begin in Section 2 by motivating the analysis of three major approaches to state responsibility: Lawford-Smith's, Pasternak's, and Stilz's. Then, in Sections 3–5, 3–5, I discuss each of them in some detail and show that, despite their best efforts, they all fail at providing an adequate account of state responsibility. In particular, I argue that by focusing only on the culpability of officials, Lawford-Smith creates a normative gap between citizens and their state; that by appealing to an “intentional participation” condition, Pasternak (falling short of her own goals) blocks out the mechanism for attributing responsibilit
{"title":"Making the state responsible: A proxy account of legal organizations and private agents acting for the state","authors":"Miguel Garcia-Godinez","doi":"10.1111/josp.12546","DOIUrl":"10.1111/josp.12546","url":null,"abstract":"<p>Under which conditions can we make a state responsible for an action? For example, is the United States (and not only Bush and his Cabinet) responsible for declaring war against Iraq? And is there any justification to make citizens contribute collectively to the reparation or compensation of the damages produced by the action? That is, should United States citizens shoulder the burdens and pay restitution to Iraq for destroying civil infrastructure during the military campaign? After reviewing some theories, I develop a framework to answer these kinds of questions.</p><p>While the idea of state responsibility has long been under discussion within both political philosophy and international legal theory, no agreement has yet been reached regarding what it is and how it can impact on ordinary citizens. The first problem lies in the difficulty of determining what states are and whether they can perform actions. For example, whereas some prominent theorists take states to be (corporate) agents, with the capacity to form and act upon intentions (e.g., Collins, <span>2019</span>; List & Pettit, <span>2011</span>), some others resist extending the notion of agency to anything other than individuals (e.g., Gilpin, <span>1984</span>; Miller, <span>2002</span>).</p><p>Additionally, there remains a controversy as to when and to what extent it is possible to distribute collective responsibility amongst citizens for the wrongful actions of their state. For instance, whereas Lawford-Smith (<span>2019</span>) argues that (unlike officials) citizens are not <i>culpable</i> for state action, and so they cannot be punished for its bad consequences, Pasternak (<span>2021</span>) and Stilz (<span>2011a</span>) hold that they can indeed be responsible if they are <i>intentional participants</i> or their state satisfies a <i>democratic authorisation principle</i>, respectively.</p><p>Although these views have revealed important aspects of state responsibility, they are not exempt from criticism. With the purpose of introducing a more compelling alternative, I discuss in this paper some crucial challenges to these accounts and then suggest another way to move forward, viz., to analyze state agency, state action, and state responsibility in terms of proxy agency, proxy action, and proxy responsibility.</p><p>I structure the paper as follows. I begin in Section 2 by motivating the analysis of three major approaches to state responsibility: Lawford-Smith's, Pasternak's, and Stilz's. Then, in Sections 3–5, 3–5, I discuss each of them in some detail and show that, despite their best efforts, they all fail at providing an adequate account of state responsibility. In particular, I argue that by focusing only on the culpability of officials, Lawford-Smith creates a normative gap between citizens and their state; that by appealing to an “intentional participation” condition, Pasternak (falling short of her own goals) blocks out the mechanism for attributing responsibilit","PeriodicalId":46756,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Social Philosophy","volume":"55 1","pages":"62-80"},"PeriodicalIF":0.8,"publicationDate":"2023-08-14","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/josp.12546","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45292063","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Rawls's idea of human rights revisited","authors":"Rex Martin","doi":"10.1111/josp.12539","DOIUrl":"10.1111/josp.12539","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":46756,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Social Philosophy","volume":"55 2","pages":"336-351"},"PeriodicalIF":0.8,"publicationDate":"2023-08-09","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43855111","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
<p>Alongside lively philosophical debate about human dignity (Etinson, <span>2020</span>; Rosen, <span>2012</span>), several philosophers have begun asking whether “dignity” could also illuminate our moral relations with nonhuman animals (e.g., Abbate, <span>2020</span>; Anderson, <span>2005</span>; Gruen, <span>2014</span>; Humphreys, <span>2016</span>; Nussbaum, <span>2006</span>; Ortiz, <span>2004</span>). Increasing talk of animal dignity is also occurring in public and even legal discourse (Kotzmann & Seery, <span>2017</span>). For example, in a recent habeas corpus hearing for a Bronx Zoo elephant, a Judge declared that the elephant is “a dignified creature” but “there is nothing dignified about her captivity” (Wilson, <span>2022</span>, p. 4). Such language is perhaps beginning to resonate more with people than it once did.</p><p>Nonetheless, some philosophers seriously doubt that dignity is a coherent and useful moral idea (Zuolo, <span>2016</span>). Dressing circus-kept animals in human clothes and laughing at them may strike modern people as cruelly demeaning to those nonhumans. Yet for critics, these apparent assaults on “dignity” are ethically trivial or else merely <i>indirect</i> wrongs—objectionable only because such treatment could upset human witnesses or generally promote animal exploitation (Martin, <span>2019</span>, p. 94). According to dignity's critics, other moral concepts can far better explain what is wrong with that treatment.</p><p>Dignity is a complex notion and providing lucid accounts is challenging. Furthermore, philosophical analysis of <i>animal</i> dignity is relatively limited. It warrants greater attention. In this paper, I explore an understanding of animal dignity that seems to be irreducible to a range of other moral concepts and to some other conceptions of dignity. The understanding I explore appears to be a <i>sui generis</i> notion that involves a special kind of non-natural harm and assault upon animals. This special or distinctive harm and assault is related to the cognate notions of defiling, degrading, demeaning, dishonoring, and honoring treatment.</p><p>Presenting this <i>sui generis</i> understanding requires examining arguably the most compelling current account of animal dignity on offer—a “relational” conception of dignity as <i>social respect</i> or <i>status</i>. Although very important, I shall ask whether there is also another “relational” way of understanding dignity that is irreducible even to that account—although importantly it might complement and deepen it. This suggests that more than one ethically important way of conceiving of dignity is possible.</p><p>In the following, I outline criticisms of animal dignity with a focus on reductionist attacks, identify a social conception of dignity, reflect on some key examples of human behavior that seem to facilitate understanding of animal dignity, briefly introduce positive forms of irreducible dignity, and consider several objections,
{"title":"An irreducible understanding of animal dignity","authors":"Simon Coghlan","doi":"10.1111/josp.12543","DOIUrl":"10.1111/josp.12543","url":null,"abstract":"<p>Alongside lively philosophical debate about human dignity (Etinson, <span>2020</span>; Rosen, <span>2012</span>), several philosophers have begun asking whether “dignity” could also illuminate our moral relations with nonhuman animals (e.g., Abbate, <span>2020</span>; Anderson, <span>2005</span>; Gruen, <span>2014</span>; Humphreys, <span>2016</span>; Nussbaum, <span>2006</span>; Ortiz, <span>2004</span>). Increasing talk of animal dignity is also occurring in public and even legal discourse (Kotzmann & Seery, <span>2017</span>). For example, in a recent habeas corpus hearing for a Bronx Zoo elephant, a Judge declared that the elephant is “a dignified creature” but “there is nothing dignified about her captivity” (Wilson, <span>2022</span>, p. 4). Such language is perhaps beginning to resonate more with people than it once did.</p><p>Nonetheless, some philosophers seriously doubt that dignity is a coherent and useful moral idea (Zuolo, <span>2016</span>). Dressing circus-kept animals in human clothes and laughing at them may strike modern people as cruelly demeaning to those nonhumans. Yet for critics, these apparent assaults on “dignity” are ethically trivial or else merely <i>indirect</i> wrongs—objectionable only because such treatment could upset human witnesses or generally promote animal exploitation (Martin, <span>2019</span>, p. 94). According to dignity's critics, other moral concepts can far better explain what is wrong with that treatment.</p><p>Dignity is a complex notion and providing lucid accounts is challenging. Furthermore, philosophical analysis of <i>animal</i> dignity is relatively limited. It warrants greater attention. In this paper, I explore an understanding of animal dignity that seems to be irreducible to a range of other moral concepts and to some other conceptions of dignity. The understanding I explore appears to be a <i>sui generis</i> notion that involves a special kind of non-natural harm and assault upon animals. This special or distinctive harm and assault is related to the cognate notions of defiling, degrading, demeaning, dishonoring, and honoring treatment.</p><p>Presenting this <i>sui generis</i> understanding requires examining arguably the most compelling current account of animal dignity on offer—a “relational” conception of dignity as <i>social respect</i> or <i>status</i>. Although very important, I shall ask whether there is also another “relational” way of understanding dignity that is irreducible even to that account—although importantly it might complement and deepen it. This suggests that more than one ethically important way of conceiving of dignity is possible.</p><p>In the following, I outline criticisms of animal dignity with a focus on reductionist attacks, identify a social conception of dignity, reflect on some key examples of human behavior that seem to facilitate understanding of animal dignity, briefly introduce positive forms of irreducible dignity, and consider several objections,","PeriodicalId":46756,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Social Philosophy","volume":"55 1","pages":"124-142"},"PeriodicalIF":0.8,"publicationDate":"2023-07-24","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/josp.12543","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43940394","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
John Rawls famously argues that in order to arrive at a plausible conception of what justice requires politically, we ought to proceed in two steps (Rawls, 1971, pp. 245–246). First, we ought to develop an “ideal theory of justice” that lays out what principles of justice can be justified if we imagine them to govern a society that is unlike ours in that certain limitations are removed. Developing such a theory, Rawls argues, is necessary to allow us to grasp the correct conception of justice. In a second step, we can then use this conception to find out what we must do in our actual, nonideal circumstances. The idea that we need to refer to a utopian, ideal state of affairs in order to understand which conception of our most basic political concepts we ought to endorse is one of the features of Rawls's thought that has attracted the most commentary (see Robeyns, 2008; Simmons, 2010; Valentini, 2012). Realist opponents of ideal theory in this sense sometimes argue that ideal theory pays too little attention to questions of feasibility, that it does not take the limitations of human nature seriously enough, and that it is ill-equipped to guide us when thinking about necessary trade-offs (Farrelly, 2007; Galston, 2010; Nagel, 1995). In this article, I will examine arguments of a different nature that have historically emerged from the tradition of radical social thought and critical theory. These arguments do not object to ideal theorizing on the grounds that it leads to unrealistic demands or that it is insufficiently constrained by a realistic conception of human nature. Rather, these arguments assume that, given the nonideal circumstances in which current political theorists find themselves, they face limitations to their epistemic, imaginative, and conceptual capacities that distort the ideals they formulate and thereby take them in a direction that accommodates the status quo too much. Received: 7 December 2022 Revised: 6 April 2023 Accepted: 7 July 2023
{"title":"Beyond the nonideal: Why critical theory needs a utopian dimension","authors":"Titus Stahl","doi":"10.1111/josp.12542","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/josp.12542","url":null,"abstract":"John Rawls famously argues that in order to arrive at a plausible conception of what justice requires politically, we ought to proceed in two steps (Rawls, 1971, pp. 245–246). First, we ought to develop an “ideal theory of justice” that lays out what principles of justice can be justified if we imagine them to govern a society that is unlike ours in that certain limitations are removed. Developing such a theory, Rawls argues, is necessary to allow us to grasp the correct conception of justice. In a second step, we can then use this conception to find out what we must do in our actual, nonideal circumstances. The idea that we need to refer to a utopian, ideal state of affairs in order to understand which conception of our most basic political concepts we ought to endorse is one of the features of Rawls's thought that has attracted the most commentary (see Robeyns, 2008; Simmons, 2010; Valentini, 2012). Realist opponents of ideal theory in this sense sometimes argue that ideal theory pays too little attention to questions of feasibility, that it does not take the limitations of human nature seriously enough, and that it is ill-equipped to guide us when thinking about necessary trade-offs (Farrelly, 2007; Galston, 2010; Nagel, 1995). In this article, I will examine arguments of a different nature that have historically emerged from the tradition of radical social thought and critical theory. These arguments do not object to ideal theorizing on the grounds that it leads to unrealistic demands or that it is insufficiently constrained by a realistic conception of human nature. Rather, these arguments assume that, given the nonideal circumstances in which current political theorists find themselves, they face limitations to their epistemic, imaginative, and conceptual capacities that distort the ideals they formulate and thereby take them in a direction that accommodates the status quo too much. Received: 7 December 2022 Revised: 6 April 2023 Accepted: 7 July 2023","PeriodicalId":46756,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Social Philosophy","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.8,"publicationDate":"2023-07-20","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42611505","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
<p>A central idea in John Rawls's theory of justice as fairness is that basic political liberties should be afforded fair value in a just liberal democratic society.<sup>1</sup> In this article, I argue that an important guideline for guaranteeing the fair value of voting rights, that is, the usefulness to citizens of their right to vote, is to make it easier not harder to exercise this basic political liberty.<sup>2</sup> This entails that just societies with a constitutional commitment to equal protection, and the value of equality more broadly, have a duty to secure unencumbered access to the ballot absent narrowly tailored compelling state interests for restricting it (hereafter <i>Unencumbered Access</i>). Where there are such interests—and this is important—the burden imposed on voting must accord with the basic priority of voting rights. This argument shifts the burden of justification from liberals to present sufficient evidence of voter suppression to conservatives, who are currently pushing restrictive voter ID and other laws, to produce compelling evidence supporting their reasons for doing so (chief of which is fraud prevention and deterrence). They must also demonstrate that these laws are carefully crafted to remedy the alleged problem. Because these conditions have not been met these laws are unjustified.<sup>3</sup></p><p>John Rawls affirms the importance of political liberties as a normative ideal in the abstract by including them on the list of equal basic liberties along with the liberties of thought, conscience, association, and those associated with the rule of law in his liberal egalitarian conception of justice as fairness. However, less abstractly, the principle of equal political liberty is also identified with the principle of equal participation within the constitutionally defined political process of a just democratic society.</p><p>Rawls has been criticized for not being entirely clear about why political liberties are included on this list,<sup>4</sup> and for failing to offer a detailed argument for their special status and a proposal for how it can be captured institutionally.<sup>5</sup> Yet there is no question that the liberty to political participation on equal terms is meant to carry the abstract normative commitment to equality modeled in the original position—where parties are selecting common principles from a position of equality—to the constitutional stage where they collectively participate in “the highest-order system of social rules for making rules” by participating in the vital political process of lawmaking.<sup>6</sup> Taking the constitution to be foundational, as the highest-order system of rules regulating and controlling all other institutions of society's basic structure, Rawls concludes that satisfying the principle of equal participation in practice affords all persons with access to the political process “common status of equal citizens.”<sup>7</sup></p><p>Having affirmed the importance of
{"title":"The fair value of voting rights","authors":"Derrick Darby","doi":"10.1111/josp.12541","DOIUrl":"10.1111/josp.12541","url":null,"abstract":"<p>A central idea in John Rawls's theory of justice as fairness is that basic political liberties should be afforded fair value in a just liberal democratic society.<sup>1</sup> In this article, I argue that an important guideline for guaranteeing the fair value of voting rights, that is, the usefulness to citizens of their right to vote, is to make it easier not harder to exercise this basic political liberty.<sup>2</sup> This entails that just societies with a constitutional commitment to equal protection, and the value of equality more broadly, have a duty to secure unencumbered access to the ballot absent narrowly tailored compelling state interests for restricting it (hereafter <i>Unencumbered Access</i>). Where there are such interests—and this is important—the burden imposed on voting must accord with the basic priority of voting rights. This argument shifts the burden of justification from liberals to present sufficient evidence of voter suppression to conservatives, who are currently pushing restrictive voter ID and other laws, to produce compelling evidence supporting their reasons for doing so (chief of which is fraud prevention and deterrence). They must also demonstrate that these laws are carefully crafted to remedy the alleged problem. Because these conditions have not been met these laws are unjustified.<sup>3</sup></p><p>John Rawls affirms the importance of political liberties as a normative ideal in the abstract by including them on the list of equal basic liberties along with the liberties of thought, conscience, association, and those associated with the rule of law in his liberal egalitarian conception of justice as fairness. However, less abstractly, the principle of equal political liberty is also identified with the principle of equal participation within the constitutionally defined political process of a just democratic society.</p><p>Rawls has been criticized for not being entirely clear about why political liberties are included on this list,<sup>4</sup> and for failing to offer a detailed argument for their special status and a proposal for how it can be captured institutionally.<sup>5</sup> Yet there is no question that the liberty to political participation on equal terms is meant to carry the abstract normative commitment to equality modeled in the original position—where parties are selecting common principles from a position of equality—to the constitutional stage where they collectively participate in “the highest-order system of social rules for making rules” by participating in the vital political process of lawmaking.<sup>6</sup> Taking the constitution to be foundational, as the highest-order system of rules regulating and controlling all other institutions of society's basic structure, Rawls concludes that satisfying the principle of equal participation in practice affords all persons with access to the political process “common status of equal citizens.”<sup>7</sup></p><p>Having affirmed the importance of ","PeriodicalId":46756,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Social Philosophy","volume":"55 2","pages":"209-220"},"PeriodicalIF":0.8,"publicationDate":"2023-06-28","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/josp.12541","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48415181","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
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