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book reviews

1. Social Theory and Practice: Volume > 40 > Issue: 4
Catherine Frost

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2. Social Theory and Practice: Volume > 40 > Issue: 4

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3. Social Theory and Practice: Volume > 40 > Issue: 4

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4. Social Theory and Practice: Volume > 40 > Issue: 3
Andrés Luco

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This essay proposes and defends a descriptive definition of morality. Under this definition, a moral system is a system of rules, psychological states, and modes of character development that performs the function of enabling mutually beneficial social cooperation. I shall argue that the methodologies employed by two prominent moral psychologists to establish a descriptive definition of morality only serve to track patterns in people’s uses of moral terms. However, these methods at best reveal a nominal definition of morality, since moral appraisers may be ignorant about the referents of their moral terms. I propose a real definition of morality that characterizes moral systems as a natural kind—more precisely, a copied kind. I explain what it takes for a moral system to satisfy this definition, and I identify the sorts of evidence needed to distinguish moral systems from value systems of other kinds.

5. Social Theory and Practice: Volume > 40 > Issue: 3
Michael Kates

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Ought some individuals be required to do more to combat injustice simply because others have done less? My thesis in this paper is that in order to answer thisquestion in a theoretically compelling manner, it is necessary to distinguish the social obligations that citizens have towards one another in virtue of their institutional ties or special relationships from the natural duties that all persons share simply in virtue of their status as equal moral agents. What justice demands of individuals in nonideal circumstances will ultimately depend, I argue, on the comparative scope or range of application of these two different types of moral requirement.

6. Social Theory and Practice: Volume > 40 > Issue: 3
Christie Hartley

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Social cooperation based on reciprocity is the cornerstone of many theories of justice. However, what is central to social cooperation based on reciprocity? How does basing social cooperation on reciprocity structure and constrain theories of justice? In this paper, I consider what is central to reciprocity. I argue that the purpose of reciprocal exchange among persons is important for determining the appropriateness of reciprocal exchanges and that sustaining mutually advantageous relations is not always the point or the only point of reciprocity. This has important implications for theorizing about justice. I show this by outlining two conceptions of justice as reciprocity.

7. Social Theory and Practice: Volume > 40 > Issue: 3
Robert S. Taylor

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Is “liberal socialism” an oxymoron? Not quite, but I will demonstrate here that it is a much more unstable and uncommon hybrid than scholars had previously thought and that almost all liberals should reject socialism, even in its most attractive form. More specifically, I will show that three leading varieties of liberalism—neutralist, plural-perfectionist, and deliberative-democratic—are incompatible with even a moderate form of socialism, viz., associational market socialism. My paper will also cast grave doubt on Rawls’s belief that justice as fairness is consistent with liberal socialism.

8. Social Theory and Practice: Volume > 40 > Issue: 3
Rebecca Reilly-Cooper

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This paper aims to strengthen the liberal theory of public justification defended by John Rawls and his followers, by arguing that advocates of political liberalism can have more to say about how citizens can come to endorse and give priority to liberal justice than has been commonly supposed. The political conception of the person, complete with the two powers of moral personality, contains within it all the resources we need to illustrate why reasonable persons would have at least one good reason to endorse and uphold liberal justice, and to make it regulative of their pursuit of their conceptions of the good. This is achieved by citizens’ feelings of care and affective concern toward their higher-order interests—their sense of justice, and their conception of the good.

9. Social Theory and Practice: Volume > 40 > Issue: 3
David Birks

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In this paper, I consider the view that paternalism is wrong when it demeans or diminishes the paternalizee's moral status (the Moral Status Argument). I argue that we should reject the Moral Status Argument because it is both too narrow and too broad. It is too narrow because it cannot account for the wrongness of some of the most objectionable paternalistic interventions, namely, strong paternalistic interventions. It is too broad because it is unable to distinguish between wrongful paternalistic acts that are plausibly considered more wrong than other wrongful paternalistic acts.

10. Social Theory and Practice: Volume > 40 > Issue: 3
Will Jefferson, Thomas Douglas, Guy Kahane, Julian Savulescu

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Opponents of biomedical enhancement frequently adopt what Allen Buchanan has called the “Personal Goods Assumption.” On this assumption, the benefits of biomedical enhancement will accrue primarily to those individuals who undergo enhancements, not to wider society. Buchanan has argued that biomedical enhancements might in fact have substantial social benefits by increasing productivity. We outline another way in which enhancements might benefit wider society: by augmenting civic virtue and thus improving the functioning of our political communities. We thus directly confront critics of biomedical enhancement who argue that it will lead to a loss of social cohesion and a breakdown in political life.

book reviews

11. Social Theory and Practice: Volume > 40 > Issue: 3
Kelly McCormick

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12. Social Theory and Practice: Volume > 40 > Issue: 3
George Schedler

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13. Social Theory and Practice: Volume > 40 > Issue: 2
Eldon Soifer, David Elliott

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Observation by nonstandard observers (such as cats) has different implications for privacy than observation by ordinary human beings. This seemingly trivial point yields important insights about privacy. Searching for the characteristic that explains this difference reveals that privacy is importantly related to our interest in how others see us, and the derivative interest in controlling the information upon which others’ perceptions are based. This also casts light on the important relationships between privacy, autonomy, and the development of public personae.

14. Social Theory and Practice: Volume > 40 > Issue: 2
Thomas M. Besch

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Constructivism often expresses a commitment to discursive respect. The paper explores interdependencies between three dimensions of discursive respect, namely, its depth, scope, and purchase. It identifies challenges for constructivist attempts to locate discursive respect in the normative space defined by these dimensions, and considers whether there can be a coherent conception of discursive respect that is plausibly deep, inclusive in scope, and meaningfully rich in purchase. I suggest that locating discursive respect within the matrix of discursive inclusion is a task partly beyond constructivism, especially if discursive respect, or the constitutive discursive standing that it accords, is an important good.

15. Social Theory and Practice: Volume > 40 > Issue: 2
Iñigo González-Ricoy

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The republican case for workplace democracy (WD) is presented and defended from two alternative means of ensuring freedom from arbitrary interference in the firm—namely, (a) the right to freely exit the firm and (b) workplace regulation. This paper shows, respectively, that costless exit is neither possible nor desirable in either perfect or imperfect labor markets, and that managerial discretion is both desirable and inevitable due to the incompleteness of employment contracts and labor legislation. The paper then shows that WD is necessary, from a republican standpoint, if workers’ interests are to be adequately tracked in the exercise of managerial authority. Three important objections are finally addressed—(i) that WD is redundant, (ii) that it is unnecessary provided that litigation and unionism can produce similar outcomes, and (iii) that it falls short of ensuring republican freedom compared to self-employment.

16. Social Theory and Practice: Volume > 40 > Issue: 2
Paul Morrow

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Mass atrocities are commonly explained in terms of changes in legal or moral norms. This paper examines the role that changes in social norms can play in precipitating or prolonging mass atrocities. I focus specifically on manipulative transformations of social norms. I first distinguish between the manipulative introduction and the manipulative activation of social norms. I then explain how both forms of manipulation can contribute to mass atrocities. Finally, extending a line of thought first suggested by Hannah Arendt, I present a case study of the manipulative introduction and activation of language rules amongst the Nazis during World War Two.

17. Social Theory and Practice: Volume > 40 > Issue: 2
Ewan Kingston

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Many suggest that we should look backward and measure the differences among various parties’ past emissions of greenhouse gases to allocate moral responsibility to remedy climate change. Such backward-looking approaches face two key objections: that previous emitters were unaware of the consequences of their actions, and that the emitters who should be held responsible have disappeared. I assess several arguments that try to counter these objections: the argument from strict liability, arguments that the beneficiary of harmful or unjust emissions should pay, and arguments from distributive justice. I argue that none of these successfully justify a backward-looking approach to the temporally remote portion of the climate burden.

18. Social Theory and Practice: Volume > 40 > Issue: 2
Tamar Meisels

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The purpose of this article is twofold. First, it presents the urgent case of civil war, relatively undertheorized by just war theorists, along with the normative issues that pertain to this type of conflict and its participants specifically. Second, it suggests that this civil war perspective offers fresh support for the traditional “independence thesis”— separating just cause for war from the rules of its conduct—which is often criticized by contemporary moral philosophers.

book reviews

19. Social Theory and Practice: Volume > 40 > Issue: 2
Christine M. Koggel

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20. Social Theory and Practice: Volume > 40 > Issue: 2
Linda Nicholson

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