1、DEBATES IN CONTEMPORARYPOLITICAL PHILOSOPHYDebates in Contemporary Political Philosophy is a comprehensive collection of inuentialessays that presents a balanced survey of the major ideas that have come out of this areaof study in the past two decades. Each article has been carefully chosen to enabl
2、e anystudent of political philosophy to grasp the main debates within the topic.The book is divided into seven parts. Parts 1 to 3 deal with fundamental philosophical issues:the philosophy of social explanation, distributive justice and liberalism and communi-tarianism. Parts 4 to 7 contain seminal
3、papers in more specic areas: citizenship and multi-culturalism, nationalism, democracy and punishment.Readings from the following thinkers are included:Brian Barry Harry Frankfurt Robert Nozick Elliott SoberG.A. Cohen Amy Gutmann Bhikhu Parekh Charles TaylorJoshua Cohen Andrew Levine Derek Part Andr
4、ew von HirschAntony Duff Steven Lukes John Rawls Michael WalzerJon Elster Alasdair MacIntyre Michael Sandel Erik Olin WrightDaniel Farrell David Miller Roger Scruton Iris Marion YoungThe readings represent a range of views and demonstrate the richness of the philosophicalcontribution to political th
5、ought. Each part has an introduction by the editors that situatesthe papers in the ongoing debate, and further reading sections feature at the end of eachpart.Debates in Contemporary Political Philosophy will be an essential resource for any studentstudying a course in political philosophy.Derek Mat
6、ravers is Senior Lecturer at the Open University. He is the author of Art andEmotions (1998). Jon Pike is Lecturer and Staff Tutor at the Open University and is theauthor of Aristotle to Marx (1999). Together with Nigel Warburton they are joint editors ofReading Political Philosophy (Routledge, 2001
7、).11112345111678910123111451116789201111234511167893012345678940111DEBATES INCONTEMPORARY POLITICALPHILOSOPHYAn anthologyEdited by Derek Matravers and Jon Pike1111234511167891012311193012345678940111in association withFirst published 2003by Routledge in association with the Open University11 New Fet
8、ter Lane, London EC4P 4EESimultaneously published in the USA and Canadaby Routledge29 West 35th Street, New York, NY 10001Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor tel. +44 (0)1908 653231, email ces-genopen.ac.uk. Alternatively, you may visit the Open University web site at http:/www.open.ac.uk where yo
9、u can learn more about the wide range of courses and packs offered at all levels by the Open UniversityThis edition published in the Taylor and Francis e-Library, 2005.“To purchase your own copy of this or any of Taylor it has institutional forms too. Some of the best articlespublished in journals s
10、uch as Ethics are in political philosophy, and their equivalent inPhilosophy and Public Affairs are in ethics. In many respects, political philosophy has movedcloser to moral philosophy as it has moved away from any ambition to provide a quasi-sociological explanatory framework. Instead, applied eth
11、ics, including debates aroundabortion and bio-medical ethics, and the nest of issues around afrmative action, came tothe foreground in American campuses, rocked by protests against US intervention in Viet-nam in the late 1960s. Rawls account of justice also emerged in this immensely fertileclimate.
12、Philosophers became increasingly willing to write articles and papers with directimplications for public policy. This phenomenon has reinforced and reinvigorated the disci-pline. So, the development of political philosophy in the decades since 1971 has seen areconguration of the critique of liberali
13、sm, and, at the same time, a normative turn. Whatare the results of these developments?There are some welcome results: there is still considerable disagreement but this is notnormally over the rules of argument, and there is a relative absence of accusations of badfaith. But the normative turn has h
14、ad theoretical consequences. In particular, philosophersINTRODUCTION2have asked themselves how, in the absence of commonly agreed moral foundations, is thereto be reasonable argument about the grounding of norms?Focusing on the grounds of normativity highlights the perspective that the moral agentis
15、 able to take on those norms: are our normative commitments something that we canstand outside of ourselves and assess, or are we in some way constituted by our norma-tive attachments? Whether we nd the relatively abstract and quasi-Kantian approach ofRawls attractive (focusing on the construction o
16、f principles of justice), or whether we seekto root normativity in existing communities and traditions, we have to answer tough ques-tions. The rst approach just edges back the search for foundations for normativity onestage: the principles of justice are constructed, but from what materials? The se
17、cond, socalled communitarian, approach seems to leave us without the resources to defend ourfound normativity against the criticism that the result is unacceptably relativist.The questions that underlie the debate on whether or not we can stand outside ofourselves and assess our normative commitment
18、s are important not least because our actualpolitical locations, identities, and conceptions of the good are important. Who and what wethink we are, what we can loosely call the politics of identity, has come to the forefrontof political debate, and it is not surprising that political philosophy ree
19、cts this.It would be wrong, however, to claim that political philosophy had become concernedsolely with rst order concerns about the grounds of normativity, or with the politics of iden-tity. It is also the case that new work has been done on old topics. Distributive justice hasbeen a concern of pol
20、itical philosophers since Aristotle, and there is widespread acceptancethat some sort of equal respect for individual human beings needs to be reected in themechanisms for securing justice. Again, this debate stems from Rawls and in particular fromhis suggestion that, as people do not deserve their
21、natural talents, they do not deserve thewealth that springs from them. However much there has been a shift of focus away fromquestions of resource inequality, and towards relations between dominant and subordinategroups delineated in quite different ways, the normative critique of inequality remains
22、.Indeed it would be absurd to insist that justice required equality between groups unless wehad answers to questions about what we meant by groups and what we meant by equality.Our three opening sections, then, cover three key questions. To what extent does theindividualism characteristic of liberal
23、ism provide a satisfactory explanatory strategy? In whatways is the notion of the unencumbered self central to liberal thought, and what are theconsequences of its supposed centrality? What place is there for equality in our thinkingabout the just society?Each of the next four sections covers topics
24、 on which there are direct implications forpublic policy, and where the philosophical debates arise from public concern themselves.They also represent areas where the liberal concern that, ceteris paribus, all are equallydeserving, is under strain. Whilst Marxists took to task liberalism in many way
25、s, they sharedliberalisms universalist ambitions. The recongured critique does not. Ideas of nationalidentity, and the conception of patriotism as a political virtue seem obviously to conict 11112345678910123111451116789201111234511167893012345678940111INTRODUCTION3with liberal universalism and with
26、 standard views about the constituency of the moral. Theyalso stand opposed to the increasing geopolitical drive towards supranational identities andinstitutions that accompanies the trend towards an increasingly interconnected world.Penal policy stands at the centre of a number of different issues.
27、 There are public policydebates, which deal with matters such as increasing prison populations and questions aboutthe efcacy of punishment. These draw on philosophical debates about the nature of penaljustice, whether punishment is compatible with the philosophical tradition underlying muchcontempor
28、ary liberal thought the Kantian notion of respect for persons and the extentto which any justication of punishment needs to be communitarian. Responses to thisdebate focus on the question of the grounding of norms referred to above.Again, it used to be the case that a bespoke critique of liberal dem
29、ocracy was available:democracy was only formal and not real so long as it left deep structural economic inequal-ities untouched. The contemporary debate about democracy recongures this critique; itaddresses questions such as what sort of democratic accounting can prevent the domi-nance of self-inter
30、est and generate something closer to Rousseaus notion of the generalwill? And given that in some respects they will conict what can be done to resolve thetensions between liberalism (particularly a commitment to rights which cannot be infringedby a powerful majority) and democracy (which vests polit
31、ical power and legitimacy in thehands of the majority)?Last, the very basis of liberal universalism can be criticised. The shift of focus from theeconomic terrain to the terrain of identity and culture has been a reection of the way inwhich such areas have become the prime sources of conict in liber
32、al democracies. Debatesover multiculturalism, and the extent to which group rights, cultural differences and polit-ical representation of racial minorities should affect our notion of the just society, will bewith us for many years to come. Close engagement with the texts we have selected will,we ho
33、pe, enable readers to engage with those debates within a thriving discipline, andbeyond.AcknowledgementsWe would like to thank Jackie Rossi, the course manager for Issues in Contemporary PoliticalPhilosophy, the Open University course for which this book is a Reader, Siobhan Pattinsonat Routledge, a
34、nd Professor Jo Wolff at University College London, as well as the anony-mous publishers readers who commented on our selections.INTRODUCTION4Part 1THE PHILOSOPHY OFSOCIAL EXPLANATION11112345111678910123111451116789201111234511167893012345678940111IntroductionTHE FIRST READING IN THIS PART is an exc
35、erpt from a book called Individualism, which wasrst published in 1973. In the book, Stephen Lukes traces the semantic history of individu-alism, before distinguishing some separate ways in which the term can be taken. It is worthbearing in mind the multiplicity of doctrines that fall under this gene
36、ral label, and Lukesdistinguishes eleven distinct strands. They are: the dignity of man, autonomy, privacy, self-development, the abstract individual, political individualism, economic individualism,religious individualism, ethical individualism, epistemological individualism, and nally ourconcern m
37、ethodological individualism.Lukes identies four types of predicates of individuals on a continuum from the least tothe most social: 1) those that refer only to physical properties, 2) those that refer to mentalstates, and presuppose consciousness, 3) those that refer to minimally social and relation
38、alpredicates and 4) those that refer to social institutions, or rely for their meaning on socialinstitutions. He argues that to privilege the rst set of predicates against the last is arbitrary.He outlines a series of views with which methodological individualism is sometimes con-ated: truistic soci
39、al atomism, a theory of meaning, a theory of ontology, a denial of thetruth of sociological laws and a normative doctrine about individual ends.Lukes view is, that construed in one way, methodological individualism is false, becauseit arbitrarily rules out perfectly reasonable explanations of social
40、 phenomena that are notreducible to individual level explanation. Construed in another way, the notion is true, buttrivially so. If Lukes is right, the task of the proponent of methodological individualism iseither to accept this trivial status1or to outline a construal of methodological individuali
41、smthat is both true and substantial.The nal part of the reading brings methodological individualism back into contact withsome of the other strands of individualism. I have suggested above that it is important torecognise the distinctiveness of methodological individualism from normative claims abou
42、tthe individual, but, as Lukes indicates, the explanatory notion has afnities with a series ofother claims about the value of individuals. These can be depicted as below:111123456789101231114511167892011112345111678930123456789401117Table 1 Afnities between normative and methodological commitmentsNo
43、rmative commitment Explanatory approachLiberalism Methodological individualismAnti-liberalism (Marxism, conservatism) Holism/functionalismThe arrows in Table 1 indicate the directions of afnity, which are suggested in the nalparagraphs of Lukes text. Note that the word afnity means a connection that
44、 is quiteweak a much weaker connection than logical entailment. It conveys something like theidea of sitting well with or having a family resemblance to.Since methodological individualism is normally thought to have an afnity with liberalism,linking it with explicitly Marxist modes of explanation is
45、 surprising. In Chapter 3, Jon Elsterargues for methodological individualism, without which grand Marxist claims . . . remain atthe level of speculation. However, rather than presenting a straight case for methodolog-ical individualism, he argues that it is necessary to avoid the mistakes of functio
46、nalexplanation (and he cites a series of examples in which functional explanations go awry). Afunctional explanation is one in which the existence of an entity or process is explained bythe functions that it carries out. In functional explanations, the why-question is answeredby identifying a functi
47、on.Suppose that I wish to hang a picture in my living room. In order to do this, I need toput a screw in the wall, and in order to do that, I need to use a screwdriver. So, I get thescrewdriver and bring it into the living room. Suppose I am asked why is the screwdriverin the living room? It would b
48、e true, although more than a little odd, for me to answer thatthe screwdriver is in the living room because it is functional for the task of hanging pictures.Its being in the living room helps to satisfy the need for hanging pictures. The function ofthe screwdriver the fact that it is good at doing
49、something that needs to be done, explainsits spatio-temporal location. This is the general form of functional explanations: the func-tion of an institution, activity, and so on, is what explains its existence.What, though, was odd about the answer above? It was that the explanation made noreference to my deciding to hang a picture, and fetching the screwdriver. The functionalbenets of the screwdriver are explanatory, but only indirectly only through my desire tohang a picture and my belief that a screwdr
