This short article provides an introduction to the special issue “Gosseries on Intergenerational Justice,” so as to guide interested readers. In the first half of the article, we provide a short introduction to Axel Gosseries’s book What Is Intergenerational Justice? where we distill the essence of each chapter. In the second half, we succinctly summarize the main points in each...
Elections are the most visible expression of democracy, yet their functioning, particularly the staffing and organization of polling stations, remains understudied. Departing from this gap in the literature, this paper examines the use of lottery-based recruitment of poll workers as a mechanism to strengthen democratic legitimacy, impartiality, and civic equality. By comparing...
This paper analyses the moral structure of claims to religious exemptions that appeal to the logic of balancing, or the idea that one’s higher-order interests are unequally burdened relative to other parties’ higher-order interests and this burden requires easing through exemptions. In particular, I discuss whether the logic of balancing can justify a religious exemption in an...
David Benatar’s asymmetry argument for anti-natalism has been a subject of long-standing scrutiny. I shall focus on a crucial yet surprisingly overlooked structural flaw in his use of Inference to the Best Explanation (IBE) arguments. Benatar’s argument begins with the procreation asymmetry, which implies that some procreative cases are morally wrong, whereas others are not. He...
An influential tradition within democratic theory holds that democracy involves not only electoral procedures, but also the participation and representation of individual citizens in the formation of collective opinion in the public sphere. Perhaps surprisingly, however, several prominent accounts of how the global order ought to be democratised reject the core assumption from...
We address the question of when it is permissible to interfere in the “transformative choices” of others—choices whether or not to undergo experiences that provide us with knowledge we can only get by undergoing them, and which as a result transform our core values and preferences. In doing so, we criticise Farbod Akhlaghi’s recent (2023) claim to have discovered a new moral...
On one level, the idea here is simple: organise people into small groups and see how they react to different ways of doing politics. On another, it is more challenging: evaluate different political principles by seeing how people behave when they have to work with them. Do they, for example, become more or less engaged as we alter the number of chairing roles, debates, and votes...
Joseph Raz’s service conception of authority grounds the moral justification of authority in its capacity to help agents do what they have most reason to do. Critics of the service conception have argued that the service conception is inadequate as a conception of democratic authority because it cannot accord due weight to the role of democratic procedures in the justification of...
Axel Gosseries considers, and partly defends, several strategies to address the non-identity problem (NIP). We engage critically with two strategies endorsed by Gosseries: the severance strategy and the overlap strategy. The latter comprises two different sub-strategies: the containment sub-strategy and the indirect sub-strategy. We believe that severance is less promising than...
This introduction and the contributors to this volume advance the debate on the normative relevance of historical injustice. This introduction shows that discussions on this topic should consider four aspects: first, the temporal dimension of justice; second, the connection between current claimants for reparations and the putative duty-bearers with the original perpetrators and...
Welfare capitalism is going through a deep crisis, and alternative models to welfare state capitalism such as liberal socialism and property-owning democracy are once again becoming prominent in public debates. The aim in this article is to compare the merits and the limits of liberal socialism and of property-owning democracy through the specific case of the distribution of...
This paper explores anti-natalism and attitudes towards environmental preservation. Anti-natalisms of a certain kind, what I call “compassion-based anti-natalisms”, adhere to the principle of minimising suffering, and this goes hand-in-hand with the common belief that protecting the environment from destruction is the right thing to do. However, I argue that environmental...
Legislative gridlocks, driven by social partisan sorting, pose a significant threat to contemporary democracies. In this paper, I argue that this problem can be addressed by replacing geographic electoral constituencies, which group voters by area of residence, with heterogeneous electoral constituencies, which are based on random assignment and thus reflect the diversity of the...
Should answers to fundamental questions of political philosophy be ‘convincing’ and ‘meaningful’ to real people with vested interests? Normative behaviourists argue that they should, and this can be achieved by avoiding the use of intuitions in our normative theorizing and instead relying on long-term empirical evidence of human behaviour. In this paper, I argue that to obtain...
Two important methodological debates in political theory concern (i) the place of historical research and interpretation in normative inquiry; and (ii) the importance of comparing different cultural traditions of political thought. The first question animates a long-standing controversy over the relative importance of ‘history of political thought’ versus ‘philosophy’ in...
A variety of mental disorders—including ASD, ADHD, major depression, and anxiety disorder, among others—may directly impact what an agent notices or fails to notice. A recent debate has emphasised the potential significance of such “impairment-derived ignorance,” and argued that failure to account for certain compelling cases would seriously undermine theories which intend to...
The debate on bottom-up approaches in political theory has been recently enriched by Jonathan Floyd’s “normative behaviourism”, an approach that starts from and refers to actual behaviours so as to let normative concerns emerge and political responses be found. Despite its merits, I argue that normative behaviourism suffers from three weaknesses: the tip of the iceberg, the...
The last two decades have seen an increasing interest in exploring philosophical questions using methods from empirical sciences, i.e., the so-called experimental philosophy approach. Political philosophy has so far been relatively unaffected by this trend. However, because political philosophers typically rely on traditional philosophical methods—most notably reflective...
Liberal democracies face the challenge of elite capture. Mounting empirical evidence indicates that a small socioeconomic elite has vastly more influence on policy outcomes than ordinary citizens. In this essay, I explore how political reformers should address this issue by harnessing insights from the realist tradition in political theory. By placing empirics front and centre, I...
What is the relevance of experimental philosophy (X-Phi) to theory acceptance in political philosophy? To answer this question, the paper distinguishes between four views, to wit: (i) X-Phi as a systematic method to avoid or reduce biases in our moral intuitions—The De-Biasing View; (ii) X-Phi as a tool for assessing the fruitfulness or consequences of various concepts—The...
Despite their theoretical attractiveness, global egalitarian arguments for open borders face the worry that open borders would in fact exacerbate inequality. In this paper, I offer a response to such egalitarian consequentialist concerns. I argue that they fail to attend to the larger political and economic forces that create and maintain inequality. Even in cases where...
Focusing on ‘real actions’ of ‘real people’, normative behaviourism turns facts about observable patterns of behaviour into grounds for specific normative political principles. For this reason, this way of doing normative political theory has strong political realist credentials, given its methods, values and ambitions. In fact, according to its supporters, normative behaviourism...