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.
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…)
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.
Stanford Center for Ethics in Society Post-Doctoral Fellowships
Professor in Philosophy, Politics, and Economics, University of Warwick
Lecturer in Politics (open to political theory applicants), University of York
Department Lecturer in Political Theory, University of Oxford
Departmental Lecturer in Ethics, University of Oxford
Political theory hasn’t been neglected by the podcast boom, but it’s not always easy to know where to go. Here, I list (with links) the best political theory/philosophy related content in the podverse. (There are also some iTunes U courses and related suggestions below).
There is currently a lot of attention on the UK’s “housing crisis”. One issue here is 
the quantity of available housing. There are commitments to address the shortage of housing in the 2017 manifestos of both the Labour Party and the Conservative Party. Another issue is the quality of housing. On this issue, the Labour Party have restated the commitment they made in a 2015 Homes Bill to require that all homes meet the standard of being “fit for human habitation”. In this post, I explore the reasons in favour of this commitment.
Lecturer in Moral or Political Philosophy, University of Leeds
Assistant Professor in Political Theory, Durham University
Max Weber Post-Doctoral Fellowships (open to political theory/philosophy applications), European University Institute
Have a few thousand bankers made the world more equal than it had been for a hundred years? In this blog post, I will investigate the distributive impact of the 2008 financial crisis and show that today’s inequalities are more complex than we think: if political philosophers want to understand the repercussions of the crash, they need to team up with economists and track down the hidden divides in post-crisis societies.
It was on 14 September 2007 that the general public first noticed that something was wrong. Hundreds of desperate customers queued in front of the branches of mortgage lender Northern Rock, fearing that their savings were already gone. (more…)
The Centre for the Study of Global Ethics at Birmingham is pleased to announce its 4th annual conference, on the theme of A Post-liberal World?
Conference website: globalethics2018.weebly.com
Call for Papers:
The conference will specifically focus on the question whether we are on our way to a post-liberal world. We welcome abstract submissions addressing this theme as well as abstract submissions on a wide range of topics within global ethics.
Abstracts should be 500 words maximum and include three to five keywords. They should be send to globalethicsevents@contacts.bham.ac.uk. The deadline for submissions is 10 February 2018.
For more information on the Call for Papers, please visit the CFP section on the conference website: http://globalethics2018.weebly.com/cfp.html
Beyond Primary Goods
How should we distribute atypical goods of justice?
The Third Munich Workshop in the Philosophy of Institutions
February 14th – 16th, 2018
International Graduate Student Workshop at the Technical University of Munich/ Bavarian School of Public Policy, Munich, Germany
