Are societies required to pursue continual economic growth as a matter of justice? In "The Value of Economic Growth", Julie Rose considers three arguments in favor of the need for continual economic growth, each of which revolves around the instrumental value of economic growth for promoting an important good that is needed for a just society. In each case, Rose argues that there are mechanisms other than economic growth that could allow a society to deliver the relevant goods, and thus meet the demands of justice with respect to those goods. I raise a set of issues for Rose's argument that put pressure on the normative significance of her discussion. At the heart of these issues are ones about which possibilities Rose considers and which idealizations she makes. These issues tie into more general questions about the aims and methodology of normative work in social/political philosophy. Thus, in addition to being a contribution to the debate over the politics of economic growth, this paper can be understood partly as a case study in how reflection on these kinds of issues – ones about modality, idealization, and methodology – can matter to how we evaluate specific arguments in social/political philosophy.
Many legal positivists have argued that legal antipositivists, due to the central explanatory role they grant authoritatively normative facts, end up saddled with deep problems in their proposed epistemology about how we learn about the law, problems which positivists (and especially "exclusive" legal positivists) can avoid. In this chapter, I put forward a version of this kind of argument. I argue that there is an explanatory challenge tied to the epistemology of law that positivist theories are, in general, better equipped to deal with than antipositivist theories. This issue concerns explaining how people (including not only legal officials, such as judges, but also legal anthropologists, legal historians, and ordinary citizens etc.) are reliable in forming the correct judgments about legal content that they do in fact form. Reflection on this issue about reliability in our legal judgments lends support to positivism. It also, I argue, suggests reasons to favor exclusive legal positivism over inclusive legal positivism.
n infant begins to drown in a neighborhood pool.Anne-the local on-duty lifeguard-jumps in, pulls the infant out, and performs standard CPR.The infant dies.The infant would have survived had Anne performed a different CPR procedure-the one designed for infants.Why did Anne not perform the correct procedure?She did not know about it.And she did not know about the special procedure for infant CPR because, during her training, Anne left early to take a smoke.Anne knew that important information might be shared during the ten minutes she was gone, but took the risk anyway.1 Anne was thus knowingly reckless and culpable for her ignorance.Anne's recklessness, moreover, at least partially explains why she failed to save the infant.Does this mean that Anne is culpable to some degree for failing to save the infant's life?Let us clarify this question with a distinction.2Benighting acts are those acts in which the culpably ignorant agent culpably fails to remedy her ignorance or risks missing out on some morally important information that might help guide her future decisions.Anne's act of sneaking out for a cigarette was a benighting act.The unwitting wrongful act is the later, objectively wrong act that the culpably ignorant agent performs out of their ignorance.Anne's unwitting wrongful act was her failure to save the infant's life.Culpably ignorant agents, by definition, are culpable for their benighting acts.But there is disagreement over whether culpably ignorant agents are also culpable for their unwitting wrongful acts.Liberals think they are not.Conservatives and moderates believe they are culpable to at least some degree for their unwitting wrongful acts.The difference is that while conservatives believe agents are fully culpable for their unwitting wrongful acts, moderates believe 1 This case is inspired by Smith, "Culpable Ignorance," 552. 2 This terminology is introduced in Smith, "Culpable Ignorance."
In previous work, we have developed the idea that, in some disputes, speakers appear to use (rather than mention) a term in order to put forward views about how that term should be used. We call such disputes "metalinguistic negotiations". Herman Cappelen objects that our model of metalinguistic negotiation makes implausible predictions about what speakers really care about, and what kinds of issues they would take to settle their disputes. We highlight a distinction (which we have emphasized in prior work) between the question of which disagreements speakers have vs. which disagreements are immediately expressed in a given linguistic exchange. Once this distinction is clear, we can appreciate that speakers who are engaged in a metalinguistic negotiation (where certain issues in conceptual ethics are immediately expressed) can also disagree about other issues, including both other issues in conceptual ethics and "object-level" issues that aren't about words or concepts. In many metalinguistic negotiations, speakers (we think correctly) care more about these other issues than they do about ones concerning the meaning of a word. Because of this, Cappelen's objection fails to identify any data that challenge our model.
e say things like "Enron's greed led to catastrophe for many investors" and "the Eighty-Second Airborne was very brave."This language suggests that we believe that groups are capable of virtues and vices.It is hard to know what to make of this idea, however.Humans have virtues and vices due in part to our mental capacities, but attributing mental capacities to groups can sound absurd, like invoking vaguely Hegelian group spirits who work over and above their human members.1 Pressure to avoid such results can lead to summative views of virtues and vices: on such views, a group's virtue or vice is just a result of "summing up" the same trait in its members.(So perhaps the Eighty-Second Airborne was brave just because most of its members were.)Unfortunately, this safely reductive view suffers from counterexamples, such as Lahroodi's example of a church committee that is closed-minded due to social pressures despite being made up of open-minded individuals.2If we want to understand how groups can have important traits such as greed, bravery, and open-mindedness, we need a credible view that avoids the implausibility of Hegelian group minds and the counterexamples to summativism.Or so we think, anyway; and even if some readers think those Scylla and Charybdis safer than we do, we hope they will agree that there is room to attempt a middle course.Here, we set out a view that does just that."Imitationism" is a kind of nonreductive theory that explains how a virtue can be genuinely collective without requiring collective minds.3We articulate and defend Imitationism can, then, deliver robustly agential virtues even given theories of intentional content that accord great importance to phenomenal consciousness, all while eschewing Hegelian group minds.32
Abstract This chapter discusses two different issues about the relationship between legal positivism and robust normativity (understood as the most authoritative kind of normativity to which we appeal). First, the chapter argues that, in many contexts when discussing “legal positivism” and “legal antipositivism”, the discussion should be shifted from whether legal facts are ultimately partly grounded in moral facts to whether they are ultimately partly grounded in robustly normative facts. Second, the chapter explores an important difference within the kinds of arguments that legal philosophers give for the (purported) truth of legal positivism. The difference concerns whether (purportedly) robustly normative facts are appealed to as premises in those arguments or not. (A closely connected issue is whether (purportedly) normative facts that bear one or more important connections to robustly normative facts are appealed to in premises to those arguments.) The chapter argues that thinking about this dividing line helps people better situate the positivist/antipositivist dispute, better understand the space of views in legal philosophy, better evaluate those views, and avoid having merely verbal disputes.
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