This article critically discusses of Ben Berger’s , making two main claims. First, I argue that his conceptual distinctions ought to be further developed in order to be able to distinguish between, on the one hand, politically legitimate moral ends (i.e., ones that are suitable objects of political engagement) and, on the other hand, other moral ends that ought to be pursued only through social engagement. To help with this task I consider the significance of the difference between what I refer to as ethical reasoning and justice reasoning, and I sketch a fourfold distinction between types of justice. Second, I argue that Berger does not give adequate emphasis to the government side of the task of making political engagement more efficacious. In addition to his worthwhile recommendations for increasing the social capital of the many, we should also be concerned to determine how best to limit, or, better, remove, the now massive political influence of the financial capital of America’s wealthiest.

Hope as a virtue is an acquired disposition, shaped by reflection; as a civic virtue it must serve the good of the community. Ernst Bloch and Lord Buddha offer help in constructing such a virtue. Using a taxonomy developed by Darren Webb I distinguish open hope from goal-oriented hope, and use each thinker to develop the former. Bloch and Buddha are very different (and notoriously obscure; I do not attempt an exegesis). But they share a metaphysics of change, foundational for making any sense of hope.Buddhism would seem to repudiate hope; it is a source of suffering (i.e., pain in living with reality). Seen more deeply, however, Buddhism offers material for a carefully limited virtue of hope: the habits of noticing good and acknowledging transience. This disposition, acquired through Buddhist practice among other ways, shields one against despair. The habit also frees up energy that would otherwise be wasted. Ernst Bloch gives us insight into how to use that energy, teaching us to value the yearning implicit throughout culture. Open hope becomes a civic virtue when it concerns civic matters; it can be threatened by hyperbolic discourse in political life.

As developed by Sabel, Dorf and Cohen, and John Dewey before them, democratic experimentalism is based on the premise that current democratic practices are no longer able to deal with central and pressing social and political problems. Beginning with the criticism of democracy as command and control, Dorf and Sabel show how current democratic practices are part of the problem rather than the solution. Even as democratic experimentalists have successfully explored democracy beyond the state in the European Union, I argue that they have not fully transnationalized democracy or fully appreciated “the new circumstances of politics.” With the emergence of pervasive forms of interdependence, Rousseau’s conception of democracy as self legislation is no longer adequate, despite its cogent normative assumptions. Instead, the new transnational circumstances of justice suggest a stronger conception of democracy as self determination. In order to minimize domination and maximize self determination, cross-cutting constituencies must achieve a shared democratic minimum, through which democracy may once again become a means to justice.

In this article I assert that deliberative democratic theory, as articulated by Jürgen Habermas and Seyla Benhabib, explicitly fails to live up the demands of its discourse-ethical foundation when we examine undocumented immigrants who live in any given nation. In the case of undocumented immigrants, there is a gap which exists between a moral imperative to include those affected by a norm in discourse, and legal structures which actualize this imperative. I offer the following account in an effort to show how one might bridge this gap. First, virtual representation of undocumented interests by the citizens of a bounded community is not sufficient to correct the dilemma of deliberative democracy. Second, I will claim (contra Habermas) that the rhetorical power of personal testimony from marginalized individuals is required for a responsible judgment in discourse. Finally I will discuss practical forums for this participation which can potentially solve the dilemma of deliberative democracy. Through direct confrontation with those who are unjustly marginalized, we can cross the divide that exists between a moral imperative to respect the undocumented and a legally-recognized right to participate in discourse.

In this review I argue that while Berger makes out a good argument that the language of civic engagement covers too much (and hence too little) and that education plays a vital role in developing civic-minded sensibilities, I am less sanguine that the strategies for the reform of our “attention deficit democracy” will achieve the desired effect in a political society dominated by the corrupting influence of corporations who actively seek to undermine just such sensibilities as anathema to their objectives. As corporate objectives become more and more wedded to the state, so too reform becomes less and less likely to be successful. An excellent example of this is the power wielded by the current incarnation of the fossil fuel empire and it’s influence over law-making concerning hydraulic fracturing in Pennsylvania. While I applaud Berger’s objectives, I am no longer convinced that pragmatism and not a more revolutionary approach can fulfill Berger’s—and my own—democratic ideals.

G. A. Cohen is well known within contemporary political philosophy for claiming that the scope of principles of justice extends beyond the design of institutions to citizens’ personal choices. More recently, he’s also received attention for claiming that principles of justice are normatively ultimate, i.e., that they’re necessary for the justification of action guiding principles (regulatory rules) but are unsuitable to guide political practice themselves. The purpose of this paper is to explore the relationship between these claims as they’re applied in criticism of John Rawls. It argues that ascribing normative ultimacy to justice entails its application to personal choice. However, it also argues that if Cohen is right about Rawls’s difference principle being regulatory rather than ultimate, then his earlier claim that Rawls must extend it to personal choice on pain of inconsistency is refuted.

Deliberative democratic theory as developed by Jürgen Habermas struggles in its applicability to particular political communities due to its ideality and abstractness. However, philosophers who level this critique against deliberative theory also find in it resources for addressing the legitimacy of live political discourse as it aims towards rationality. This paper takes up the procedural requirement that legitimacy is provided through, as Seyla Benhabib writes, “the free and unconstrained public deliberation of all about matters of common concern.” Using deliberative theory, I develop a test for judging the success and failure of public discourse, and apply this test to political debates in the United States in 2011–2012 concerning women’s lives: the Violence Against Women Act, the birth control mandate in the Affordable Care Act, the censuring of two female legislators in Michigan, and the congressional testimony of a fetus in Ohio. A central piece of my argument is that the knowledge produced about women’s interests and about women’s epistemic authority undermines their participation in public discourse, thus challenging the legitimacy of the decisions resulting from these instances of deliberation.

Despite the minimal attention paid by philosophers to gardening, the activity has a myriad of philosophical implications—aesthetic, ethical, political, and even edible. The same could be said of community food security and struggles for food justice. Two of gardening’s most significant practical benefits are that it generates communal solidarity and provides sustenance for the needy and undernourished during periods of crisis. In the twentieth century, large-scale community gardening in the U.S. and Canada coincided with relief projects during war-time and economic downturn. More recently, small-scale gardening projects have emerged in schools, blighted urban areas, and communities of activists committed to increasing food security and resisting neo-liberal city planning policies. It is therefore surprising that pragmatist philosophers, who typically work at the nexus of theory and practice, have remained relatively silent about the relationship between gardening and food security. If more were to take up the challenge, they would find considerable guidance from several contemporary scholars working in diverse disciplines, from cultural geography to community studies, who explore the topic in a number of non-philosophical, though equally effective and imaginative, ways (e.g., ethnographic and action research). In this paper, I propose a tentative pragmatist model for understanding how gardens make our food system more secure—a model inspired by John Dewey’s writings on school gardening, which I call the pragmatic pyramid.

The pairing of “whiskey” and “women” may at times be seen as an instance of what I call conspiratorial vices. Conspiratorial vices, I argue, are phenomena that, when working together, inform each other in a way that sets their content. Taken individually, the elements of the conspiracy are, at best, ambiguous with regard to their moral status. The conjoining of the concepts yields the status as “vice” and points to something deemed a threat to the social fabric. Through the use of two cases, I examine possible ways that this instance of conspiratorial vice might be seen as a multifaceted political tool that both contributes to oppression and creates a site for resistance.

As popular food writers and activists urge consumers to express their social, political, and ethical commitments through their food choices, the imperative to ‘vote with your fork’ has become a common slogan of emerging food movements in the US. I interrogate the conception of responsibility embedded in this dictate, which has become a de facto model for how to comport ourselves ethically with respect to food. I argue that it implicitly endorses a narrow and problematic understanding of responsibility. To contextualize this claim, I utilize Iris Marion Young’s critique of a “liability model” of responsibility to demonstrate that voting with one’s fork is insufficient as model for taking responsibility for food-related injustices. Instead, I suggest that Young’s social connection model of responsibility is best suited for taking stock of responsibility for food and agriculture related injustices since they are structural and systemic ones. I conclude that although consumer choices and purchases may be important dimensions of our conduct with respect to food and eating, imagining responsibility to be centered on this type of conduct—consumer behavior—is detrimental to attempts to develop a more just food system.

This paper explores two apparently-unrelated forms of authenticity. One, “restaurant authenticity,” is a subcategory of the larger category of authentic objects, focused specifically on food and especially on ethnic cuisines. “Personal authenticity” refers to a set of traits or qualities in oneself. Contrary to appearances, I argue that the two forms of authenticity intertwine in ways that merit thoughtful attentiveness. I suggest that approaching the question of the authenticity of a cuisine with an attitude of flexibility  and responsiveness can, in turn, constitute an activity that cultivates personal authenticity, understood as “wholehearted living.” As Diana Meyers might put it, it is itself a practice of authenticity.

Agricultural crops developed using the tools of genetic engineering (so-called “GMOs”) have become socially institutionalized in three ways that substantially compromise the inherent potential of plant transformation tools. The first is that when farming depends upon debt finance, farmers find themselves in a competitive situation such that efficiency-enhancing technology fuels a trend of bankruptcy and increasing scale of production. As efficiency increasing tools, GMOs are embedded in controversial processes of social change in rural economies. The United States, at least, has chosen not to undertake policy interventions to slow or reverse this trend. The second institutionalization of GMOs is found in the way that agricultural science has become divided between two camps, one focused on efficiency and total global production, the other focused on maintaining soil and water ecosystems in the face of both population growth and climate change. GMOs have been strongly supported by the first camp and regarded as irrelevant (at best) to the goals of the second. Finally, GMOs have become symbolic markers in the global debate over neoliberal institutions for trade and the protection of intellectual property. While there may be agronomic arguments for favoring GMO technology, the way that it has become situated in each of these social debates insures that it will be subject to strong opposition without regard to its biological risks and potential benefits.

In “Farming Made Her Stupid,” Lisa Heldke suggests that those who inhabit the metrocentric position participate in the marginalization of rural people and farmers through a process of “stupidification.” Rural people and farmers become “stupid,” a status that, on Heldke’s account, is worse than ignorant because “stupid people” are thought to be constitutionally incapable of knowing the right sorts of things (urban things) because they know the wrong sorts of things (rural things). It seems reasonable, I suggest in this paper, to think that contemporary urban agriculture movements can serve to mitigate the harms which Heldke argues arise from practices of stupidification. However, I argue that, insofar as such movements rely on and perpetuate the image of the Idyllic Farmer—an image constituted by early, romantic versions of agrarianism—they cannot serve this function. This is because the Idyllic Farmer, which is to agricultural ethics as the Ecological Indian is to environmental ethics, is both descriptively and prescriptively problematic. As such, any urban agricultural movement that takes this image as its guide—which, I argue, some important elements of the movement do—will not help to undermine stupidification and the harms it causes.

This essay argues, drawing from both philosophical and scientific work on disgust, that since disgust is a universal human emotion with roots in evolutionary adaptation, and since capitalism inevitably produces disgusting food, a critique of capitalism based upon the category of disgust and centered on the food system may be more practically effective than traditional critiques of capitalism. This critique forms the basis of what I call a critical theory of food.

In this paper, I will consider the moral considerations surrounding our food choices, including whether those choices are sustainable. Sustainability means preserving ecological integrity for current and future generations, and includes cultural sustainability which embodies values like justice and care for current and future generations as well as non-human animals. I will explore the widely accepted view that buying local is morally superior. In considering the moral reasons for buying local, I will investigate Peter Singer’s arguments against buying local, which he supports by our duty to aid those suffering immediate harm. Singer’s arguments force us to examine our duties to aid those in developing nations versus duties to support local economies. I will argue that our duties in regard to food purchases are complex and impinge on multiple values, including supporting local communities, ecological integrity, and concern for fair global food practices.