Suchergebnisse

Inspired by Chris's recent photo-blogging post, I thought I'd share a less well known little gem about (the original) Ravenna: not a byzantine church interior full of mosaics, but the submerged crypt of an early medieval Church (the Basilica of San Francesco), populated by goldfish (and the inevitable coins thrown in for good luck). Incidentally, […]

A post I wrote last week sparked a lively debate, and one strand of that debate was whether it is appropriate to use the term "privilege" ("cis privilege" in particular) to describe the phenomena I was talking about. I identified mainly two clusters of objections, but please do let me know in the comments if […]

Saying that being cis-gender – i.e. having a gender identity that corresponds with the sex/gender one was assigned at birth – comes with privileges need not mean erasing the lived experiences, real challenges, and specific struggles of cis-gendered people (and especially of those cis-gender people who are otherwise disadvantaged and marginalised in other dimensions). It […]

I work at a very large University. I am the parent of a child who has just started secondary school, and of one in the middle of their primary school journey. I am currently taking what in the UK is called a Level 2 Adult Education course. In all four of those domains – and […]

This is a midsummer short and light hearted post, but I find that Summer is often the time when I am most reminded of my bodily existence, and of how naïve us philosophers are in forgetting (de facto, if not in principle) how much our thoughts and beliefs are embedded in our bodily experience. Indeed,often […]

In his latest book, Technofeudalism, the maverick academic-turned unlikely Minister of Finance-turned enfant terrible of European politics Yanis Varoufakis argues that capitalism has ended. It has not, however, been destroyed by the workers of the world – it has been killed by capital itself. The idea, in a nutshell, is the following. As a response […]

Michela Murgia – a very fine writer, and probably the most widely known feminist public intellectual within the Italian cultural landscape of the last couple of decades – died at the beginning of last month. She wasn't very well known abroad, not even simply as a writer (her most widely acclaimed and awarded novel, […]

AbstractAccording to speech-act theory, we do things with words every time we speak. The most striking thing one can do with words is to exercise authority over others, such as when a judge issues a guilty verdict in a criminal trial. Some speakers hold this kind of authority without good reason; this kind of speech constitutes an unjust imposition of authority, and thus arguably harms in a direct, non-metaphorical sense; it would seem, therefore, that it should not be protected by freedom of speech. The problem in these cases, however, does not lie in the words that harmful speakers utter, but in the things they have the power to do with them. It is this power, it seems, that must be dismantled: in speech-act terms, we must tackle felicity conditions, not locutions. This paper defends this insight. By providing an account of the (alleged) authority of pornographers as both epistemic and informal, I claim that the presumption against censoring porn is not lifted even if the speech-act argument succeeds in showing that pornography can be constitutive of harm. This does not mean that such harms should not be countered, but they should be countered as the specific kinds of harms that they are.

According to much of self-labelled coercion theory, the state is both the ground of egalitarian demands of distributive justice, and the (sole) domain to which such demands apply, in virtue of its exercise of coercive power which only distributive equality can justify. This article argues that, when properly unpacked in its theoretical commitments, coercion theory has surprising implications both within and beyond borders. Within borders, coercion is either *fully* justified by its necessity for autonomy; or it is not, in which case egalitarian distributions cannot do the trick, either – although *political* equality might. Beyond borders, the view turns out to have significantly demanding global implications, contrary to how it is often presented. It indeed differs from global egalitarianism simpliciter, but it gives rise to an interesting, complex set of cross-border obligations which reach far beyond the 'global sufficiency, domestic equality' picture. This surprising account of the implications of coercion theory rests on a crucial insight: when closely examined, the view turns out to be grounded in a natural duty of justice account of political obligation.

Abstract:Recently, republicans have been increasingly arguing that the ideal of nondomination can ground both a more plausible account of global justice and better insights for global institutional design than liberal egalitarianism does. What kind of global institutions, however, does nondomination require? The essay argues that a global institutional blueprint based on the republican ideal of nondomination is a multifaceted endeavor. Republican institutions should aim to fulfill three different desiderata: 1) avoiding excessive concentration of power; 2) bringing informal asymmetrical power under institutional control; 3) furthering an active, vigilant citizenry. The three desiderata often pull in different directions. At the global level in particular, they do not converge on a verdict over whether we should switch to a cosmopolitan institutional order, stick to a world of states, or opt for something altogether different. As a result, there is no straightforward pathway leading from the vindication of nondomination as the central principle of global justice to a clear vision for a global institutional order. The issue is, instead, a matter of careful balancing.

Should the EU be a federal union or an intergovernmental forum? Recently, demoicrats have been arguing that there exists a third alternative. The EU should be conceived as a demoicracy, namely a "Union of peoples who govern together, but not as one (Nicolaïdis)." The demoi of Europe recognize that they affect one another's democratic health, and hence establish a union to guarantee their freedom qua demoi – which most demoicrats cash out as non-domination. This is more than intergovernmentalism, because the demoi govern together on these matters. However, if the union aims at protecting the freedom of the different European demoi, it cannot do so by replacing them with a "superdemos," as federalists want. This paper argues that demoicracy does possess distinctive normative features; it claims, however, that an institutional choice between intergovernmentalism and federalism is necesary. Depending on how we interpret what the non-domination of demoi requires, demoicracy will either ground a specific way of practicing intergovernmentalism or a specific form of federalism. It cannot, however, ground an institutional model which is genuinely alternative to both.

Should the EU be a federal union or an intergovernmental forum? Recently, demoicrats have been arguing that there exists a third alternative. The EU should be conceived as a demoicracy, namely a 'Union of peoples who govern together, but not as one' (Nicolaïdis). The demoi of Europe recognise that they affect one another's democratic health, and hence establish a union to guarantee their freedom qua demoi – which most demoicrats cash out as non-domination. This is more than intergovernmentalism, because the demoi govern together on these matters. However, if the union aims at protecting the freedom of the different European demoi, it cannot do so by replacing them with a 'superdemos', as federalists want. This paper argues that demoicracy does possess distinctive normative features; it claims, however, that an institutional choice between intergovernmentalism and federalism is necessary. Depending on how we interpret what the non-domination of demoi requires, demoicracy will either ground a specific way of practicing intergovernmentalism or a specific form of federalism. It cannot, however, ground an institutional model which is genuinely alternative to both.

The continuing ramifications of the financial crisis of 2007–2008 have forced social scientists to raise fundamental questions about the relationship between capitalism, democracy and inequality. In particular, Thomas Piketty's Capital and Wolfgang Streeck's Buying Time focus on, respectively, the economic and the political contradictions of capitalistic societies. Piketty argues that capitalism naturally tends towards the exacerbation of rent-based wealth inequality, whereas Streeck suggests that capitalism and democracy are ultimately incompatible. A striking feature of these two contributions is that their authors are social democrats, not Marxists or radical anti-capitalist thinkers. In this review article, I illustrate how the combination of social democratic convictions and the acknowledgment that capitalism cannot be tamed generates interesting tensions between the diagnosis offered by the two monographs and the solutions that are proposed. I end the piece by raising two remarks on the implications that this tension might have for normative political theory. On the one hand, it is time for theory to do more work on political action and agency. On the other, liberal egalitarian theorists might have to acknowledge that they are in the same predicament as Piketty and Streeck: social democracy is their ideal, yet it is perhaps unattainable. If this is the case, liberal egalitarians might be committed to adopt a more confrontational attitude towards capitalism: they might have to become reluctant radicals.