Saving Pragmatist Democratic Theory (from Itself)

Deweyan democracy is inherently comprehensive in the Rawlsian sense and therefore unable to countenance the fact of reasonable pluralism. This renders Deweyan democracy nonviable on pragmatic grounds. Given the Deweyan pragmatists’ views about the proper relation between philosophy and politics, unless there is a viable pragmatist alternative to Deweyan democracy, pragmatism itself is jeopardized. I develop a pragmatist alternative to Deweyan democracy rooted in a Peircean social epistemology. Peircean democracy can give Deweyan pragmatists all they should want from a democratic theory while avoiding the anti-pluralistic implications of Dewey’s own democratic theory. After presenting the arguments against Deweyan democracy and for Peircean democracy, I address a criticism of Peircean democracy recently posed by Matthew Festenstein

Epistemic Abstainers, Epistemic Martyrs, and Epistemic Converts

An intuitive view regarding the epistemic significance of disagreement says that when epistemic peers disagree, they should suspend judgment. This abstemious view seems to embody a kind of detachment appropriate for rational beings; moreover, it seems to promote a kind of conciliatory inclination that makes for irenic and cooperative further discussion. Like many strategies for cooperation, however, the abstemious view creates opportunities for free-riding. In this essay, the authors argue that the believer who suspends judgment in the face of peer disagreement is vulnerable to a kind of manipulation on the part of more tenacious peers. The result is that the abstemious view can have the effect of encouraging dogmatism

Semantic Descent: More Trouble for Civility

Civility is widely regarded as a duty of democratic citizenship. This Article identifies a difficulty inherent within the enterprise of developing an adequate conception of civility. Challenging the idea civility is the requirement to remain calm, peaceable, or dispassionate in political debate, it is argued that that civility is instead the requirement to address one’s political arguments to one’s interlocutors. In this way, civility is a second-order requirement, a norm governing our conduct in political disagreement. From there, a conceptual problem for civility so understood is raised, the problem of semantic descent. It is argued that any plausible conception of civility is prone to being “weaponized,” transformed into a partisan device for incivility. The general upshot is that as important as civility is for a well-functioning democracy, its usefulness as a diagnostic tool for repairing political dysfunctions is limited

Sustaining democracy: the moral burden of citizenship

When debates become polarised, it can be tempting to treat political opponents as obstacles rather than fellow citizens. Yet as Robert B. Talisse explains, this refusal to engage with the other side not only carries negative implications for democracy, but also produces ineffective, conformist coalitions that are incapable of realising their political aims. If citizens want to achieve their goals in a democracy, they must find a way to work with their opponents

Market Virtues and Respect for Human Dignity

Luigino Bruni and Robert Sugden have provided a normative defense of markets from a virtue ethics perspective. They interpret market exchange as being a practice in the sense of Alasdair MacIntyre. For Bruni and Sugden, the telos of a market is mutual benefit and a market virtue is a character trait or disposition that contributes to the realization of this benefit. They regard market virtues as embodying a moral attitude towards market interactions that is characterized by reciprocity. For MacIntyre, this is a partial account of a virtue. To qualify as a virtue, it is also necessary that it contributes to the good of an individual’s life taken as a whole and to the social tradition in which both practices and individuals are embedded. We adopt MacIntye’s understanding of a virtue and consider the extent to which Bruni and Sugden’s account of market virtues is compatible with respecting the fundamental human good of dignity in Kant’s sense of this term.https://larc.cardozo.yu.edu/faculty-chapters/1106/thumbnail.jp

Bruni and Sugden on Market Virtues

According to classical liberalism, markets are instruments for the mutually advantageous voluntary exchange of goods and services among individuals who have conflicting interests. Some critics have used a virtue ethics understanding of behavior in markets to call for moral limits to markets because this classical view does not respect the internal value of human practices and the intrinsic motivations of individuals. In response, Luigino Bruni and Robert Sugden have offered a virtue ethics defense of markets, thereby “reclaiming virtue ethics for economics.” We argue that their account needs further elaboration and clarification before it is possible to assess the soundness of their virtue-theoretic understanding of markets