A collage of images, featuring most prominently a person holding a sign reading "no justice no peace"

Monthly Archive: November 2017

Distribution / Economics

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Sufficiency on Political Inequality

If you consider yourself a political philosopher, it seems that you must be doing political philosophy. What does this political constraint imply? To me, it does certainly not imply that you are not allowed to used farfetched hypothetical thought-experiments, or that you take a specific stand on ideal contra non-ideal theory. Nor does it imply that it is morally impermissible for us to raise certain philosophical questions, if we foresee a reasonable chance that answering these questions could make the world worse or more unjust, as some activists claim. What it implies is that you should acknowledge the political relevance of your philosophical work, and that you have a commitment to make this relevance explicit.

For an excellent example, see Lisa Herzog’s recent post on the blog. But I wish here to briefly present an analysis of my own on the reasons for concern with political inequality (“What is Our Real Concern with Real Inequality?”, Policy Studies Journal).

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Academia

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Recent Vacancies in Political Theory/Philosophy/Ethics

Associate Professorship of Political Theory, University of Oxford (closing 7/12/17)

Assistant Professor in Political Theory, Carleton University (closing 1/12/17)

Lecturer in Philosophy (30 months fixed term), University of Birmingham (closing 29/11/17)

Tenure-track position in Business Ethics, KU Leuven (closing 31/01/18)

Doctoral Scholarships (open to political theory/philosophy/ethics applicants), Central European University (closing 01/02/18)

General

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Durkheim on social justice (or: why political theorists should read sociology)

As part of my long-term project to convince political theorists that they can benefit from cooperating with empirical social scientists (see also here), I’ve recently written a paper on an intriguing argument about social justice that I found in the writings of Émile Durkheim, who is widely regarded as one of the founding fathers of sociology. I here present a short summary; the full paper can be found here.

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Democracy / Duties

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Should ‘We’ Take Seriously the Worries of Voters of the Alternative For Germany?

September’s general elections have brought Germany its own Brexit/Trump moment. For the first time since 1945 a far right nationalist party is part of the German national parliament. The Alternative for Germany, AfD, gained 12,6 % of German votes. Given the AfD’s increasing popularity in the polls and the resurging nationalism over the last years this wasn’t a shock moment in the way that Brexit or Trump’s election was. Yet, there is something particularly troubling about seeing Nazis back in the German parliament. One common response is that ‘we need to take the worries of the AfD voters more seriously’. They have been overlooked and here we are. But: What does it mean ‘to take seriously’? And who is this ‘we’ that is supposed to take seriously? (more…)

Academia / Climate

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Climate Justice in Global Perspective

I recently wrote a review for an introductory philosophy text on climate justice. I thought it was a good book. The only criticism of it that I raised felt somewhat unfair, and hypocritical, since it is really a criticism that applies to the book’s field rather than the book itself – and to myself as somebody who works within this field. Namely, that discussions of climate justice in analytic philosophy (of the kind that I was schooled in, at least) have a tendency to be problematically insular, or even exclusionary. My worry is that a lot of the literature I read on climate justice is written by people like me, and (implicitly or explicitly) addressed to people like me. Roughly speaking: academics working in the tradition of analytic ethics and political philosophy; writing in English; located in Europe, North America, or Australia; and relatively privileged in terms of their resources, opportunities for consumption, and low vulnerability to climate change.

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