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46 results

Page 1 of 3

  • 5 - Reconciling the Cultural Claims of Majorities and Minorities

  • Edited by Liav Orgad, European University Institute, Florence, Ruud Koopmans, Wissenschaftszentrum Berlin für Sozialforschung
  • Book:
    Majorities, Minorities, and the Future of Nationhood
    Published online:
    12 November 2022
    Print publication:
    24 November 2022, pp 129-150

  • Summary

    Many responses to the resurgence of “majority nationalism” assume that that there is nothing normatively significant to the claims of national majorities. They accordingly seek to blunt the force those claims – or simply redescribe them in ways that do not account for majority nationalists’ central commitments or concerns. The very arguments used to ground minority rights in Kymlicka’s works appear to equally justify at least some majority cultural rights. Where a group possesses majority status by reasonably benign means and yet faces threats to its culture through the operation of, for example, globalization, Kymlickean arguments for minority rights grounded in cultural vulnerability equally justify majority cultural rights. In “Nationhood, Multiculturalism, and the Ethics of Membership,” Kymlicka presents justice-based reasons to think that majority rights claims should nonetheless be neutralized. Yet his arguments assume that majority and minority rights claims will only be made within the boundaries of a nation-state and that rights recognition in those circumstances will be a “zero sum” game. This assumption too is unwarranted in a globalized world. The issue of majority rights claims is at least more complicated than what Kymlicka allows.

  • 19 - Cities, Psychosis, and Social Defeat

  • from Part II - Applications
  • Edited by Laurence J. Kirmayer, McGill University, Montréal, Carol M. Worthman, Emory University, Atlanta, Shinobu Kitayama, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, Robert Lemelson, University of California, Los Angeles, Constance A. Cummings
  • Book:
    Culture, Mind, and Brain
    Published online:
    18 September 2020
    Print publication:
    24 September 2020, pp 450-460

  • Summary

    Three broad social factors – childhood adversity, immigration, and urban living – are robustly associated with an increased risk of schizophrenia. To date, however, there is no consensus on what it is about these phenomena that raises the risk of psychotic illness. In 2005, J. P. Selten and E. Cantor-Graae proposed a “social defeat” hypothesis according to which the social determinants of schizophrenia are best characterized as experiences of social subordination. In recent years, the social-defeat hypothesis has been broadened to include experiences of social exclusion. In this chapter, we review the different versions of the social defeat hypothesis and argue that it fails to account for the urban effect. We further argue for the potential utility of paying greater attention to social science when theorizing about the social determinants of schizophrenia.

  • Natural Law and Public Reason in Kant's Political Philosophy

  • Daniel M. Weinstock
  • Journal:
    Canadian Journal of Philosophy / Volume 26 / Issue 3 / September 1996
    Published online by Cambridge University Press:
    01 January 2020, pp. 389-411

  • My intention in this essay will be to explore the role that consent-based arguments perform in Kant's political and legal philosophy. I want to uncover the extent to which Kant considered that the legitimacy of the State and of its laws depends upon the outcome of intersubjective deliberation. Commentators have divided over the following question: Is Kant best viewed as a member of the social contract tradition, according to which the legitimacy of the state and of the laws it promulgates derives from the consent of those people over whom it claims authority, or should he be read as having put forward a secularized version of natural law theory, according to which the state and its laws are legitimate to the extent that they are attained by standards of sound reason and supported by an objective account of the human good?

  • CORRUPTION IN ADVERSARIAL SYSTEMS: THE CASE OF DEMOCRACY

  • Daniel M. Weinstock
  • Journal:
    Social Philosophy and Policy / Volume 35 / Issue 2 / Winter 2018
    Published online by Cambridge University Press:
    09 May 2019, pp. 221-241
    Print publication:
    Winter 2018

  • In this essay I argue that adversarial institutional systems, such as multi-party democracy, present a distinctive risk of institutional corruption, one that is particularly difficult to counteract. Institutional corruption often results not from individual malfeasance, but from perverse incentives that make it the case that agents within an institutional framework have rival institutional interests that risk pitting individual advantage against the functioning of the institution in question. Sometimes, these perverse incentives are only contingently related to the central animating logic of an institution. In these cases, immunizing institutions from the risk of corruption is not a theoretically difficult exercise. In other cases, institutions generate perverse or rival incentives in virtue of some central feature of the institution’s design, one that is also responsible for some of the institution’s more positive traits. In multi-party democratic systems, partisanship risks giving rise to too close an identification of the partisan’s interest with that of the party, to the detriment of the democratic system as a whole. But partisanship is also necessary to the functioning of such a system. Creating bulwarks that allow the positive aspects of partisanship to manifest themselves, while offsetting the aspects of partisanship through which individual advantage of democratic agents is linked too closely to party success, is a central task for the theory and practice of the institutional design of democracy.

  • 194 - Rules (two concepts of)

  • from R
  • Edited by Jon Mandle, State University of New York, Albany, David A. Reidy, University of Tennessee, Knoxville
  • Book:
    The Cambridge Rawls Lexicon
    Published online:
    05 February 2015
    Print publication:
    11 December 2014, pp 750-752

  • Summary

    John Rawls is usually thought of as a stalwart critic of utilitarianism in all of its forms. It might therefore come as a surprise that Rawls devoted an entire early essay to providing utilitarianism with philosophical ammunition with which to deflect one of the most common objections to that theory, which is that, given certain empirical sets of circumstances, it can require morally quite counterintuitive behavior. As a theory which views the good-making properties of actions as residing solely in their consequences, and which views consequences in a purely aggregative way, utilitarianism can yield prescriptions that are startling in their distributive implications.

    Utilitarianisms since John Stuart Mill have responded to this concern by claiming that the theory is best thought of as applying not to individual actions, but rather to rules. “Rule-utilitarianism” would have us focus not on the consequences of each particular instance of a kind of behavior X, but rather on a general practice of X-ing. Many counterintuitive consequences are thought to dissolve if the focus of the theory is changed in this manner. What may be justified in the individual case (lying, deceit, torture, etc.) ceases to be so justified when a general rule recommending this kind of behavior is envisaged.

    Rule-utilitarianism has been viewed as inadequate by orthodox utilitarian such as J. J. C. Smart. They have accused rule-utilitarians of being “rule-fetishists,” that is, of cleaving to rules even in individual cases in which the agent can plainly see that breaking the rule would best conduce to general utility.

  • 217 - Toleration

  • from T
  • Edited by Jon Mandle, State University of New York, Albany, David A. Reidy, University of Tennessee, Knoxville
  • Book:
    The Cambridge Rawls Lexicon
    Published online:
    05 February 2015
    Print publication:
    11 December 2014, pp 838-841

  • Summary

    Toleration is a paradoxical political virtue. To tolerate the morally odious smacks of moral weakness. Yet to speak of toleration in the case of beliefs or practices that are morally acceptable also seems to speak poorly of the individual or group that practices toleration. To tolerate is to prescind from using the power one has to condemn or prohibit a practice of which one disapproves. But if the practice being tolerated is morally acceptable, then on the face of it there is no reason to disapprove of it in the first place. Thus the paradox: a political virtue that has been widely praised throughout history ends up being difficult to spell out without making the tolerators either morally spineless or overly censorious.

    Rawls’s forays into the discussion of toleration begin with the first of these two apparently unattractive postures. The question he asks, in an early essay on “Constitutional Liberty and the Concept of Justice,” and then again in A Theory of Justice, is whether “tolerant sects” have the right to suppress “intolerant sects,” where intolerance is defined as the rejection of the principle of equal liberty. Rawls argues that they do not. In his view, the widely held thought that the intolerant can be suppressed stems from a fallacious inference. Though it is true, Rawls claims, that the intolerant do not have a legitimate claim against those that would suppress them, it does not follow that the tolerant have the right to suppress them. Whether that right exists should be determined on the basis of principles of justice, rather than on the presence or absence of a legitimate claim on the part of the intolerant that they not be suppressed.

  • 20 - Berlin, Isaiah

  • from B
  • Edited by Jon Mandle, State University of New York, Albany, David A. Reidy, University of Tennessee, Knoxville
  • Book:
    The Cambridge Rawls Lexicon
    Published online:
    05 February 2015
    Print publication:
    11 December 2014, pp 63-64

  • Summary

    Isaiah berlin (1909–1997) was a Latvian-born political theorist and historian of political ideas. He was the Chichele Professor of Social and Political Theory at Oxford University between 1957 and 1967. Though the bulk of his writing had to do with the political ideas of thinkers of the Enlightenment and of the Counter-Enlightenment, he is perhaps best known among political philosophers for a relatively small number of essays that were published in the volume Four Essays on Liberty (Berlin 1969).

    In these essays, Berlin defended a view of political life that emphasized the irreducible plurality of ends legitimately pursued by human agents. In Berlin’s view, pluralism puts paid to certain forms of political rationalism, according to which reason militates in favor of one of these values, or a small subset thereof. He viewed this kind of rationalism as insuficiently attentive to the plurality of ends, and as potentially politically noxious since the belief in a single rational end can fuel tyrannical political forms aimed at “freeing” human subjects from the hold that illusory desires and ends have upon them.

    Pluralism is one of the grounds of Berlin’s preference for a negative as opposed to a positive conception of liberty. Negative liberty obtains when no one stands in the way of my doing what I want to do, whereas positive liberty has to do with the quality of my will, and with whether I truly want what I rationally ought to want. Some critics have urged that Berlin’s espousal of both pluralism and negative liberty is inconsistent, since a real pluralist would be indifferent as between the two conceptions (Gray 1996; Weinstock 1997).

  • 38 - Communitarianism

  • from C
  • Edited by Jon Mandle, State University of New York, Albany, David A. Reidy, University of Tennessee, Knoxville
  • Book:
    The Cambridge Rawls Lexicon
    Published online:
    05 February 2015
    Print publication:
    11 December 2014, pp 119-125

  • Summary

    The term “communitarianism” refers to the writings of a number of political theorists who, in the 1980s and early 1990s, sought to critique what they saw as the excessively individualistic aspects of liberal theory in general, and of Rawls’s arguments in particular.

    Beyond this very general characterization, it is hard to identify a core set of substantive claims to which all of the theorists who have been described as communitarians subscribe. The claims of communitarians are addressed at diverse dimensions of the liberal project, from the putative metaphysical assumptions that lie at the basis of the liberal project, to the substantive policy prescriptions to which liberalism allegedly gives rise.

    While it is clearly not exhaustive, the following list of claims is at the heart of what came in the 1980s to be known as the “liberal/communitarian” debate.

  • (1) The metaphysics of the self. According to some communitarians, most notably Michael Sandel (Sandel 1982), liberals go wrong by placing a deicient conception of the moral and political agent at the core of their theories. Liberals, the argument goes, see the self as “unencumbered,” that is as related to its cultural and historical entanglements in a contingent rather than a constitutive manner. According to the view attributed to liberals by communitarians, the self is metaphysically “prior” to its ends, and to the conceptions of the good that are prevalent in its community.

  • 147 - Objectivity

  • from O
  • Edited by Jon Mandle, State University of New York, Albany, David A. Reidy, University of Tennessee, Knoxville
  • Book:
    The Cambridge Rawls Lexicon
    Published online:
    05 February 2015
    Print publication:
    11 December 2014, pp 571-573

  • Summary

    Rawls was concerned with the conditions underlying the objectivity of moral and political judgment from the very beginning of his philosophical career. His first published essay, “Outline of a Decision Procedure for Ethics,” represents a first attempt at delineating the conditions that must be satisfied both by the competent judge and by the judgments that she reaches if they are to be deemed objective.

    Despite changes in emphasis and restrictions of scope (by the time of his final writings, he makes it clear that he is interested exclusively in political objectivity),certain themes remain as constants throughout Rawls’s writings on objectivity. The first of these themes is that objectivity emerges from the taking up by moral and political judges of a certain standpoint. That standpoint is elaborated through the exclusion of those kinds of particularities that might incline otherwise competent judges to partiality. The original position, the situation of choice from which principles of justice are chosen, embodies this set of constraints. To quote Rawls in A Theory of Justice, “its stipulations express the restrictions on arguments that force us to consider the choice of principles unencumbered by the singularities of the circumstances in which we find ourselves” (TJ 516).

  • Prospects for Transnational Citizenship and Democracy

  • Daniel M. Weinstock
  • Journal:
    Ethics & International Affairs / Volume 15 / Issue 2 / September 2001
    Published online by Cambridge University Press:
    28 September 2012, pp. 53-66

  • Many political theorists believe that the extension of democratic institutions beyond the nation-state would inevitably be deleterious to the possibility of meaningful citizenship and to the functioning of democratic institutions. It is argued here that many of the problems that would be faced in setting up transnational institutions mirror problems that have already been addressed by appropriate institutional mechanisms in the establishment of the modern nation-state.

Philosophy in an Age of Pluralism
  • The Philosophy of Charles Taylor in Question
  • Edited by James Tully, Daniel M. Weinstock
  • Published online:
    05 June 2012
    Print publication:
    24 November 1994
  • This is the first comprehensive evaluation of Charles Taylor's work and a major contribution to leading questions in philosophy and the human sciences as they face an increasingly pluralistic age. Charles Taylor is one of the most influential contemporary moral and political philosophers: in an era of specialisation he is one of the few thinkers who has developed a comprehensive philosophy which speaks to the conditions of the modern world in a way that is compelling to specialists in various disciplines. This collection of specially commissioned essays brings together twelve distinguished scholars from a variety of fields to discuss critically Taylor's work. The topics range from the history of philosophy, to truth, modernity and postmodernity, theism, interpretation, the human sciences, liberalism, pluralism and difference. Taylor responds to all the contributions and re-articulates his own views.

  • A Neutral Conception of Reasonableness?

  • Daniel M. Weinstock
  • Journal:
    Episteme / Volume 3 / Issue 3 / October 2006
    Published online by Cambridge University Press:
    03 January 2012, pp. 234-247

  • Much liberal theorizing of the past twenty years has been built around a conception of neutrality and an accompanying virtue of reasonableness according to which citizens ought to be able to view public policy debates from a perspective detached from their comprehensive conceptions of the good. The view of “justificatory neutrality” that emerges from this view is discussed and rejected as embodying controversial views about the relationship of individuals to their conceptions of the good. It is shown to be based upon a “protestant” assumption according to which conceptions of the good can be cashed out in terms of propositional beliefs. An alternative conception of reasonableness, grounded in the stable disposition of individuals to prefer social peace over conflict is described. It is argued that it better satisfies the neutralist requirement than do theories of justificatory neutrality.

  • Making Sense of Mill*

  • Daniel M. Weinstock
  • Journal:
    Dialogue: Canadian Philosophical Review / Revue canadienne de philosophie / Volume 35 / Issue 4 / Fall 1996
    Published online by Cambridge University Press:
    13 April 2010, pp. 791-804

  • Wendy Donner's The Liberal Self: John Stuart Mill's Moral and Political Philosophy is an important and thought-provoking addition to the growing body of literature seeking to rescue Mill's practical philosophy from the rather lowly place it occupied in the estimation of many philosophers earlier this century, and to present him as a philosopher whose views form a coherent, systematic whole that can still contribute significantly to numerous moral and political debates. The book proposes an interpretation of the whole of Mill's practical philosophy, and attempts to reveal how aspects of Mill's thought, hitherto considered incompatible, actually mutually support one another. At the same time, Donner sets many of Mill's positions in the context of contemporary moral and political philosophical debates, and finds that on a number of important issues, his thought stands up rather well against more recent work.

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