Philosophy

Must principles of justice be practical? Some political philosophers, the “implementers,” say yes. Others, the “idealists,” say no. Despite this disagreement, the implementers and idealists agree on what “practical” means, subscribing to the “implementation-prediction” (IP) conception of practicality. They also seem to agree that principles of so-called “ideal theory” need not be (and often are not) IP-practical. The implementers take this as a reason to reject ideal theory as an approach to principles of justice, while the idealists do not. In this paper, I argue that we should reject the IP conception of practicality. The implementers make a mistake, then, by requiring principles of justice to be IP-practical. But the idealists make a mistake, too, by rejecting in general the requirement that principles of justice be practical. For there is a plausible alternative conception of practicality that political philosophers should accept: the “experimentation-learning” (EL) conception. ...

In this paper I argue that when thinking about justice, political philosophers should pay more attention to social norms, not just the usual subjects of basic principles, rights, laws, and policies. I identify two widely-endorsed ideas about political philosophy that interfere with recognizing the importance of social norms-ideas I dub ‘compulsoriness’ and ‘institutionalism’-and argue for their rejection. I do this largely by focusing on questions about who can and should be an agent of justice. I argue that careful reflection on these questions supports a kind of pluralism that reveals the importance of social norms, three types of which I discuss.

There are two perspectives available from which to understand an agent's intention in acting. The first is the perspective of the acting agent: what did she take to be her end, and the means necessary to achieve that end? The other is a third person perspective that is attentive to causal or conceptual relations: was some causal outcome of the agent's action sufficiently close, or so conceptually related, to what the agent did that it should be considered part of her intention? Recent goods based views in ethics are divided as to whether only the first person perspective, or a mix of both perspectives, are necessary to understand intention and action. But resolution of the issue is necessary if goods based views are to be able to deploy to principle of double effect; for that principle requires an account of how to distinguish what is genuinely a matter of intention in human action from what is not. I argue that the pure first person account is better than the mixed account.

The core of liberalism, as a political philosophy, involves the recognition that human persons are free and equal, and that the state and its activities should respect these two correlative features of persons. The way in which these features are to be respected varies, of course, sometimes radically: think of the difference between what it means for Locke, and what it means for Rousseau, for a state to respect the freedom and equality of persons (see Locke, 1986; Rousseau,1997). But this core recognition is at the basis of both Locke and Rousseau’s thought; it is similarly at the basis of Kant’s political thought (Kant,1970); and it continues to play an essential—even the essential—role in the liberal political thought of the twentieth century, especially in the work of that century’s preeminent political theorist, John Rawls (Rawls,1971,1996).

The geography of the debate concerning practices destructive of the youngest members of the human species is by now rather well worked out. Of the questions to be answered, there is first the following: are you, the readers of this essay, and I, the author, and others substantially like us, essentially human beings, living biological organisms of the species Homo sapiens? Or are we some other kind of entity, a person, perhaps, or a mind, a brain, or a soul? This is a question of metaphysics.1

In John McDowell's recent Woodbridge Lectures at Columbia University, he characterizes Wilfrid Sellars's ‘master thought’, in Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind, as drawing a line between two types of characterizations of states that occur in people's mental lives: “Above the line are placings in the logical space of reasons, and below it are characterizations that do not do that” (McDowell, 1998, p. 433). In this essay, I ask what would be required for ethics to be “above the line.” More precisely, what would be necessary to characterize episodes as actions, and persons as agents, so as for them to be answerable to moral criticism in light of rationally relevant considerations. The requirements are twofold: that practical reason motivate in virtue of the content of its deliverances; and that there be a will which is sensitive to those deliverances, and which chooses freely. A widespread procedural account of practical reason is examined and found insufficient to place ethics above the line; and a suspicion is raised that McDowell himself, and Jonathan Dancy, do not have a robust enough conception of will to avoid the below the line ethics they accuse their opponents of defending.