Jennifer Rubenstein

ABSTRACT Empirical scholars describe a ‘virtuous circle’ (VC) wherein effective governance, empir... more ABSTRACT
Empirical scholars describe a ‘virtuous circle’ (VC) wherein effective governance, empirical legitimacy, and citizens’ obedience are mutually reinforcing. This essay offers a normative perspective on the VC by bringing it into conversation with the literature on political resistance, which focuses on how citizens improve
governance by resisting governmental authority. It is argued that the VC, and the concept of ‘limited statehood’ with which it is sometimes paired, obfuscate the potential for citizens’ political resistance (PR) to improve governance. Interpreting the VC in a way that emphasizes citizens’ political judgement, and situating
the VC within a broader framework that includes PR, reduces this obfuscation and clarifies the VC’s contributions to democratic theory.

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Political and ethical action in the age of Trump

by Jennifer Rubenstein, Suzanne Dovi, and Deva Woodly

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The Lessons of Effective Altruism

A review essay on Singer, _The Most Good You Can Do_ and MacAskill, _Doing Good Better_.

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What are the "Dos and Don'ts" of International Donating?

Response to Peter Singer on Effective Altruism in the Boston Review

Emergency Claims and Democratic Action

The straightforward normative importance of emergencies suggests that empirically engaged politic... more The straightforward normative importance of emergencies suggests that empirically engaged political theorists and philosophers should study them. Indeed, many have done so. In this essay, however, I argue that scholars interested in the political and/or moral dimensions of large-scale emergencies should shift their focus from the study of emergencies to the study of emergency claims. Building on Michael Saward’s model of a “representative claim,” I develop an account of an emergency claim as a claim that a particular (kind of) situation is an emergency, made by particular actors against particular background conditions to particular audiences, which in turn accept or reject that claim. Emergency politics, in turn, consists of many different actors making and not making, accepting, and rejecting, a wide range of overlapping and competing emergency claims. I argue that scholars should shift their focus to emergency claims because doing so helps us see the fraught implications of emergency politics for marginalized groups. I examine three such implications: emergency claims are often “Janus-faced,” meaning that they function simultaneously as “weapons of the weak” and weapons of the strong; they are often regressive, including by discriminating against victims of chronic bad situations, and they often perpetuate and exacerbate existing social hierarchies. Noticing these troubling features of emergency politics raises a question that I do not address here: What might plausible alternatives to emergency politics look like?

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