PLP Graduate Forum Seminars

“Recently, relational egalitarians have come to raise responsibility-sensitivity as one of the distributive implications of relational equality. This requires us to revisit the classical luck egalitarian debate on where the responsibility-cut should be drawn, but now from the perspective of relational equality. This chapter thus answers the following question: in the distributive domain, to what extent should relational egalitarians hold individuals responsible for their choices based on their preferences? Drawing on the weak-substantive view of relational autonomy, I propose a middle-way between the two existing luck egalitarian approaches (i.e., the preference approach associated with Ronald Dworkin and the control approach mainly associated with Gerald Cohen), which I call the self-respect approach. This novel approach holds that individuals should be held responsible for their choices only to the extent that their preferences are not formed on the basis of self-respect undermined by inegalitarian relationships entered through no fault of their own (e.g., gender oppression, racial discrimination). I argue that it is a more coherent position for the responsibility-sensitive distribution grounded in relational equality, compared to the other two approaches. This, I further argue, is a hitherto unarticulated distributive implication of relational equality.”

“Most of us believe it is at least sometimes both possible and desirable to repair moral wrongdoing in interpersonal relationships. A dominant strain of philosophical thought has cast interpersonal moral repair as a problem of redistributive justice: a matter of compensating the victim of wrongdoing for losses unfairly incurred. I argue this approach confronts serious and unacknowledged difficulties that render it untenable. Taking as my starting point the notion of communicative repair developed within conversation analysis and sociolinguistics, I propose an alternative conception of repair as the pursuit of mutual understanding. My account highlights repair’s agential demandingness and collaborative character, but also its profound creative potential: the pursuit of mutual understanding provides resources for discovering and negotiating interpersonal norms and values anew, and thus demonstrates the value, not just the cost, of our mutual vulnerability.”

“This article defends methodological historicism in political philosophy, arguing that a-historicist approaches are unreliable. In developing this view, I argue against the most natural interpretation of historical inquiry’s importance for political theorising – that it supplies philosophers with historical facts needed to ensure their theory’s fact-sensitivity. Drawing on the work of Charles Mills, Quentin Skinner, Raymond Geuss, Bernard Williams, and others, I argue that the primary epistemic function of historical inquiry to political inquiry is that it prompts perspectival shifts in how philosophers interpret and evaluate their subjects of inquiry. Without historical fluency, political philosophers are prone to embedding oversimplified assumptions in their normative theorising—assumptions inherited from past frameworks but rarely scrutinised. I argue that the distinctiveness of this perspectival recalibration is best appreciated by viewing historical inquiry as a form of hermeneutical inquiry—an approach that contrasts with the verdictive mode of theorising dominant in analytic political philosophy.”

“According to Raz, an exclusionary reason is a reason not to act for certain reasons. The concept plays a significant role in explaining authoritative directives and in elucidating the nature of decisions, obligations, and rules in general. Yet many theorists challenge the existence of exclusionary reasons, arguing that one cannot refrain from acting for a reason for an exclusionary reason. This paper defends the existence of exclusionary reasons understood in the motivational sense and shows how, on this account, such reasons can appropriately guide agents’ actions: they guide by directing agents to act for the right reasons, and agents comply by exercising epistemic guidance control over their beliefs and motivations.”

“This paper argues that normative realism faces a characteristic set of underdetermination puzzles that question the possibility of ascribing determinate and stable contents to normative predicates. Failure to meet these challenges undermines the theory’s semantic plausibility and carries revisionary consequences for its metaphysics. The paper identifies and articulates some salient semantic challenges facing normative realism, discusses a prominent metasemantic solution advanced on its behalf, and assesses the merits of that solution.”

“This paper argues that states bear duties to criminalize certain moral wrongs because they are obligated to uphold individuals’ rights. Given epistemic limits and resource constraints, some of these wrongs must be criminalized overinclusively — proscribing acts only some tokens of which cause, or threaten to cause, the wrong the law targets — if they are to be criminalized substantively. Legal officials therefore bear moral duties to implement overinclusive offences, contrary to the wrongness constraint.”

“This paper locates the distinct moral wrong of treason in the undermining of the ability of the traitor and their co-nationals to fulfil political obligations. Against scepticism about treason as a distinctive wrong, and without relying on the intuitive idea that treason involves a betrayal, it argues that on several attractive non-anarchist accounts of political obligation treason is distinctively and seriously wrong because it undermines our ability to fulfil important political obligations, and it draws out some implications of this view.”

“It is a common idea in the theory of action that in order to act intentionally, the agent needs to know why they act (Anscombe, 1957 and her contemporary followers). In this essay, I argue for a novel challenge to this doctrine. Some of our intentional actions are uncertain, i.e., done without knowing why we’re acting. I discuss various ways of resolving this tension arguing that they all fail. Knowing-why and acting intentionally respond differently to contextual features such that we can act intentionally without knowing why.”

“This paper argues for a moral duty of compensation for derivative harm on the basis of outcome responsibility. It aims to explore the possibility of a duty of compensation in the absence of wrongdoing, which has not got much exploration and is a challenge to the principle of ‘no wrongdoing, no compensation’ in the common law of tort.”

“The prolonged containment which people arriving on the Greek hotspot islands experience can be shortened or expedited with the intervention of a vulnerability transfer to the mainland. Following the transfer of five women from Samos, the author evaluates whether ‘vulnerability’ is substantively freeing those identified for protection, or further reinstating the lack of protection for ‘others’.”

“Contractual inflationists claim that contracts are noninstrumentally valuable. For Dori Kimel that is because they promise to free us from traditional social relations, the value he calls ‘personal detachment’. I argue that this view faces political challenges, which we avoid only by deflating it.”

“For quite some time (pure) Subjectivism and Objectivism have dominated the meta-normative debate about what makes a consideration a reason for action. Ruth Chang changed this by presenting a hybrid theory of reasons, her Hybrid Voluntarism. I think the hybrid path is the right one, but only if we go properly hybrid.”