I attended a webinar the other night with the journalists Pankaj Mishra and Ben Rhodes on “Gaza, Israel, and the American Left,” organized by The New York Review of Books. Since the anti-war movement came up during the talk, I asked Mishra and Rhodes if they had any advice to offer the movement. To my surprise, both claimed not to, on the grounds that it would be “presumptuous” of them to do so. It struck me as a pretty odd thing to say. Here were two world-class journalists who’d just spent the previous hour offering up advice to the world’s most powerful governments. Rhodes, in fact, isn’t just a journalist, but was Deputy National Security Adviser during the Obama Administration. And here they were, for all that worldly wisdom, expressing timidity about the prospect of giving advice to a bunch of college students and faculty. Continue reading
Tag Archives: politics
No One is to Advocate Anything Until I Blow This Whistle
The New York Times has a click-baitish headline about Hamas on the front page, except that unlike most click-bait headlines, this one happens both to be click-bait and true.
“Pro-Palestinian Group at Columbia Now Backs ‘Armed Resistance’ by Hamas”
It’s true. They do. Of course, at this point, a headline like that is a bit like one ca. 1943 that said:
“Pro-Jewish Group at Columbia Now Backs ‘Armed Resistance’ by Stalin’s Red Army”
Or, how about, ca. 1944: Continue reading
Vote Like It Matters
It’s become a cliché of philosophical commentary on the ethics of voting that voting is prima facie irrational. If you vote as an individual, your vote represents a mere 1/n of the totality of the election, where n represents the total number of voters in the election. If we consider, say, national elections in the United States, then n will be a very large number. Since it is, 1/n represents a tiny number. The tiny number represents a given individual’s contribution to the overall electoral result, the implication being that each individual’s contribution is, qua individual, de minimis. It’s so small that it seems irrational to bother with it. The effort you put in is not worth the result that comes out. Continue reading
Arrested Princeton Students’ Statement on Court Appearance
Princeton, New Jersey
5 months ago, 15 of us were arrested for protesting the University’s complicity in the ongoing genocide against the people of Gaza. 2 of us—both graduate students—were arrested on the 25th of April minutes after the launch of the Gaza Solidarity Encampment. 13 of us—Princeton students, researchers, and affiliates—were arrested on the 29th of April for participating in a peaceful protest in a University administrative building. At the time of our arrests, the university barred us from campus and evicted us from university housing, all without formal disciplinary charges. Weeks later, the university conducted a “disciplinary investigation” and sanctioned us with four years of disciplinary probation. One of us, postdoctoral researcher Sam Nastaste, remains barred from campus. These measures are far harsher than Princeton’s response to previous campus protests.
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Understanding Rightwing vs. Leftwing
I have spent my whole adult life as a libertarian or classical liberal of one kind or another. And throughout this long period—for I am not young—I have been puzzled as to whether I should think of myself as leftwing or rightwing or centrist, or whether I should, like many libertarians, reject the conventional left–right political spectrum altogether. So now, herewith I propose to try to sort this out.
Continue readingFirst Thoughts on Pettit’s Republicanism
I want to get some basic thoughts on Philip Pettit’s book, Republicanism: A Theory of Freedom and Government, on the record. Pettit’s ideas have the virtue of being not so far out in left field (from my own perspective) as to be hopeless, yet strange enough to be difficult to grapple with. What follows really are just some first thoughts, not very elegantly expressed, and not very certain.
Continue readingREPUBLICAN FREEDOM WITHOUT NON-DOMINATION?
How much of republicanism can we get without making any essential reference to domination? Maybe quite a lot.
First, whatever job the government has, if carrying out this job requires substantial power that is liable to abuse, then part of your political ideal should be republican democracy (and you should be very leery of even putatively ideally benevolent dictators). In particular, you might want a high level of assurance, born in part through moral recognition, that the government or government officials will not behave like the criminals that they are supposed to protect us against (supposing that this, at least, is part of the job that governments have). Just say no to a charter city run by Elon Musk or whatever.
Sunstein versus Hayek on the Rule of Law
We’ve been doing some philosophy of law in the PoT reading group lately, and a recent piece came up by Cass Sunstein on “The Rule of Law.” The abstract claims that “this [Sunstein’s] account of the rule of law conflicts with those offered by (among many others) Friedrich Hayek and Morton Horwitz, who conflate the idea with other, quite different ideas and practices.” This statement caught my attention because Sunstein’s account of the rule of law seems very sensible. It is in fact quite similar to the account given by our current reading group book author Lon Fuller (that’s how Sunstein’s piece came up), which also seems sensible. At the same time, I am a strong admirer of Hayek. So, if the sensible Sunstein/Fuller account of the rule of law conflicts with Hayek’s, what’s the conflict? What “different ideas and practices” does Hayek “conflate” the rule of law with? Essentially none, it turns out. Sunstein’s, Fuller’s, and Hayek’s conceptions of the rule of law are largely the same. Sunstein misunderstands Hayek’s argument that the rule of law requires economic freedom. At least, so I will argue in what follows.
Continue readingA Dilemma for Reasonable Acceptability?
Estlund’s Democratic Authority makes much of the idea of acceptability requirements for political justification. Acceptability requirements come in different versions, and one respect in which those versions can differ is what they are requirements for. They might be requirements for laws, policies, procedures, constitutional structures, the kinds of reasons that citizens or certain officials can give in certain public fora, and so on; they might also require acceptability as a condition for justification quite broadly, for political or legal authority more narrowly, or for political legitimacy — i.e., the moral permissibility of a government’s enforcement of its laws by coercive or punitive means. For Estlund, as for many, the most important application of acceptability requirements is to legitimacy, since coercion raises peculiarly urgent questions of justification. The rough idea of an acceptability requirement on legitimacy is that laws backed by coercion must be acceptable to the citizens that they purport to govern, and must be acceptable to them despite their deep moral, religious, and philosophical disagreements.
Discussing the views of Joshua Cohen, Estlund writes:
For Cohen the fundamental tenet of a deliberative account of democratic legitimacy is the principle that coercive political arrangements and decisions are morally illegitimate unless they can be justified in terms that can be accepted by citizens with the wide range of reasonable moral, religious, and philosophical views likely to emerge in any free society. (Democratic Authority, 91)
Earlier in the book, Estlund cites Rawls describing what he calls the “liberal principle of legitimacy”:
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Free Speech for the Mum
Consider the following scenario, a commonplace of academic life. A professor decides to devote part of his ethics class to the ethics and economics of higher education, with readings on the value of the BA degree, and on the place of athletics in higher education. To focus the conversation, the professor cites examples drawn from the students’ experience at their home institution. In the course of doing so, the students give voice to complaints about the institution. The professor acknowledges the complaints, not necessarily agreeing or disagreeing with them.
Taking the acknowledgement as agreement, students give voice to their grievances against the university on social media, citing what they take to be their professor’s support for those grievances. The university’s administration, sensitive to PR issues, catches wind of the student’s claims, and notes the apparent support for those claims offered by members of the faculty. The faculty member is then called before the Dean and a witness to give an accounting of the affair. Continue reading
