The concept of exploitation is often invoked in situations where relatively impoverished people are treated unfairly in economic and social contexts. While the claim that exploitation involves taking unfair advantage is broadly accepted, there is little consensus about what fairness requires and whether unfairness is seriously wrong in the context of exchanges. One family of accounts claims that exploitation involves the maldistribution of resources, either because exploitative transactions result in distributions that violate substantive norms of fairness, or because procedural flaws in the way exploitative transactions come about entail that their outcomes are unfair.
A second, domination-based approach to exploitation claims that the moral flaw embodied by exploitative relations is the exploiter’s disrespectful use of his power over the exploitee. While exploiters’ domination of others may lead to maldistributions, defenders of the domination-based approach argue that distributive unfairness is neither necessary nor sufficient for exploitative relations.
These approaches both face two kinds of challenges. The first concerns the scope. Neither appears to provide necessary and sufficient conditions that are adequate to capture all and only cases commonly described as exploitation. The second concerns the normative status. Exploitation is typically assumed to be morally impermissible, yet neither approach seems to satisfactorily explain how exploitations that nevertheless generate significant welfare gains for both parties can be wrong.
Article
Exploitation
Benjamin Ferguson
Article
Family and Justice in Political Philosophy
Serena Olsaretti
Political philosophers’ interest in the family—understood as a unit in which one or more adults discharge a socially and legally recognized role as primary carers of their children—has given rise to a rich and multifaceted body of literature. Some of the questions philosophers address concern justice and the family, specifically, that is, they concern the competing claims of individuals once it is acknowledged that, as well as being citizens, individuals have all been members of families as infants, and may be members of families as parents, and that how the family is structured and run has a profound impact on the prospects and opportunities of infants and of their parents, and on some interests of society as a whole. Two main sets of questions about the family and justice are as follows.
The first set of questions concerns what the family owes society as a matter of justice, that is, how the family can and should help realize, or how it may hinder the achievement of, independently formulated demands of justice. One such demand is that of equality of opportunity: philosophers have debated whether the existence of the family necessarily threatens pursuit of equality of opportunity for children, and what may, or should, be done about this. They have offered a variety of diagnoses of the problem and solutions to it, depending on their views about the legitimacy of parental partiality and about the value of the parent–child relationship. Another demand of justice that may be in tension with the family is the demand not to diminish the fair shares of one’s fellow-citizens. Whether prospective parents must constrain their freedom to found and raise a family in light of considerations about the environmental impact that their having and rearing children will have for future generations, for example, is a growing concern among philosophers.
The second set of questions about the family and justice concern what society owes families—that is, what citizens owe to one another as a matter of justice, insofar as they are actual or potential members of families. While there is widespread agreement that adults have a right to parent—and to parent their biological children, in particular—and that children have a right to be raised in families and typically by their biological parents, there is a wealth of different views regarding the grounds of these rights. The views differ depending on whether they appeal to people’s interests in freedom, or in well-being, or both, in order to justify access to the family. Whether, besides having the right to access the family, parents also have claims to having society share in the costs of having and raising children, is a further question that political philosophers have examined and on which they have offered diverging answers.
Article
Freedom in Political Philosophy
Andreas T. Schmidt
Freedom is among the central values in political philosophy. Freedom also features heavily in normative arguments in ethics, politics, and law. Yet different sides often invoke freedom to establish very different conclusions. Some argue that freedom imposes strict constraints on state power. For example, when promoting public health, there is a limit on how far the state can interfere with individual freedom. Others, in contrast, argue that freedom is not just a constraint but also an important goal of state power and collective action. Good public health policy, for example, promotes people’s freedom. Of course, different arguments often draw on different theories of freedom. So, to evaluate such arguments, we need to analyze these different theories and their implications and assess their plausibility.
The broadly liberal tradition views freedom as being about external options. Such theories typically start with an account of when someone has a specific freedom or unfreedom to do something. For example, some argue that only a narrow set of interpersonal interferences count as constraints on freedom. Others argue that a far broader set of factors, including ill health and natural constraints, can reduce one’s freedom.
Since the 1980s and 1990s, scholarship has increasingly recognized that to use liberal freedom in normative arguments, one must move beyond specific freedom and unfreedom. Most laws and policies both subtract and add specific freedoms. What matters is how a person’s freedom is affected overall. Philosophers and economists have thus engaged in intricate debates about how to measure overall freedom. Moreover, policies and law affect not only one person at one point in time but also multiple persons across time. So, liberal freedom-based arguments also require distributive criteria for intertemporal and interpersonal distributions of freedom.
In the early 21st century, republicanism has developed into a prominent alternative to liberal theories. Republicans argue that being a free person is not just, or not even primarily, about liberal option-freedom. Freedom requires being free from dominating power. Republicans and liberals have engaged in a lively debate on who offers the better theory. In developing the republican ideal, republicans also engage in intramural debates. For example, is domination primarily an interpersonal or structural phenomenon? And what economic institutions does republicanism imply?
Theorizing around freedom has become richer and moved from narrower questions regarding specific freedom and unfreedom to overall freedom and to republican theories of nondomination. But recent theorizing also seeks to extend its focus and scope. Historically, theorizing started with the freedom of able-bodied male citizens within nation states. Recent theorizing shifts the focus to include issues around gender, disability, freedom at the international level, and the freedom of nonhuman animals and future generations. Beyond fascinating implications of existing theories, a more inclusive focus is likely to also yield important lessons on how current theories can be improved.
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Freedom of Speech
Jonathan Riley
John Stuart Mill is a liberal icon, widely praised in particular for his stirring defense of freedom of speech. A neo-Millian theory of free speech is outlined and contrasted in important respects with what Frederick Schauer calls “the free speech ideology” that surrounds the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution, and with Schauer’s own “pre-legal” theory of free speech. Mill cannot reasonably be interpreted to defend free speech absolutism if speech is understood broadly to include all expressive conduct. Rather, he is best interpreted as defending an expedient policy of laissez-faire with exceptions, where four types of expression are distinguished, three of which (labeled Types B, C, and D) are public or other-regarding, whereas the fourth (labeled Type A) is private or self-regarding. Types C and D expression are unjust and ought to be suppressed by law and public stigma. They deserve no protection from coercive interference: they are justified exceptions to the policy of letting speakers alone. Consistently with this, a moral right to freedom of speech gives absolute protection to Type B public expression, which is “almost” self-regarding. Type A private expression also receives absolute protection, but it is truly self-regarding conduct and therefore covered by the moral right of absolute self-regarding liberty identified by Mill in On Liberty. There is no need for a distinct right of freedom of expression with respect to self-regarding speech. Strictly speaking, then, an expedient laissez-faire policy for public expression leaves the full protection of freedom of private expression to the right of self-regarding liberty.
An important application of the neo-Millian theory relates to an unjust form of hate speech that may be described as group libel. By creating, or threatening to create, a social atmosphere in which a targeted group is forced to live with a maliciously false public identity of criminality or subhumanity, such a group libel creates, or significantly risks creating, social conditions in which all individuals associated with the group must give up their liberties of self-regarding conduct and of Type B expression to avoid conflict with prejudiced and belligerent members of society, even though the libel itself does not directly threaten any assignable individual with harm or accuse him or her of any wrongdoing of his or her own. This Millian perspective bolsters arguments such as those offered by Jeremy Waldron for suppressing group libels. America is an outlier among advanced civil societies with respect to the regulation of such unjust hate speech, and its “free speech ideology” ought to be suitably reformed so that group libels are prevented or punished as immoral and unconstitutional.
Article
The Free Market
Jason Brennan
Market-based economies outperform the alternative forms of economic organization on almost every measure. Nevertheless, this leaves open what the optimal degree of government regulation, government-provided social insurance, and macroeconomic adjustment is. Most economists seem to favor mostly, but not completely, free markets. Although regulation can in principle correct certain market failures, whether it will do so in practice depends in part on how pervasive and damaging corresponding government failures will be.
Philosophers, unlike economists, tend to think that questions about the value of the free market are not settled entirely by examining how well free markets function. Some philosophers even claim that markets are intrinsically unjust. In their view, markets encourage wrongful exploitation, lead to excessive economic inequality, and tend to induce people to treat each other in inhumane ways.
Among those philosophers who are more sanguine about markets, one major question concerns the moral status of economic liberty. Some philosophers, such as John Rawls, hold that economic liberty is purely of instrumental value. Citizens should be granted a significant degree of economic freedom only because this turns out, empirically, to produce good consequences. However, other philosophers, such as Robert Nozick and John Tomasi, argue that economic freedom is valuable in part for the same reasons that civil and political liberties are valuable—as a necessary means to respect citizens’ autonomy.
Article
Gender and Religiosity in the United States
Mirya R. Holman and Erica Podrazik
Religiosity is a combination of public and private religious practices, beliefs, and experiences. While diversity exists in how religiosity is measured, three central components are consistent across the scholarship: organizational religious engagement, non-organizational religious activities, and subjective religiosity. To measure organizational religious engagement, scholars frequently look at church attendance and participation in congregational activities. Non-organizational religious activities include frequency of prayer, reading the Bible or other religious materials, or requesting others to pray for you. Subjective or intrinsic religiosity includes self-assessed religiousness (where respondents are asked, “How religious would you consider yourself?”) or strength of affiliation, as well as specific beliefs, such as views of the afterlife, hell, and whether the Bible is the literal word of God.
Various groups express different levels of religiosity. One of the most well-documented and consistent group-based differences in religiosity is that women, including white women and women of color, are more religious than are men across religions, time, and countries. Women report higher rates of church attendance, engagement in religious practices (including prayer and reading the Bible), and more consistent and higher levels of religious interest, commitment, and engagement. Many explanations for these gaps in religiosity exist including differences in personality and risk aversion, gendered socialization patterns, and patriarchal structures within churches. Scholars have engaged in robust debates around the degree to which explanations like risk assessment or gender role theory can account for differences in religious behavior between men and women. Yet unresolved, these discussions provide opportunities to bring together scholarship and theories from religious studies, sociology, gender studies, psychology, and political science.
Religiosity shapes a variety of important political and social attitudes and behaviors, including political ideology and participation. The effects of religiosity on political attitudes are heterogeneous across men and women—for example, highly religious women and men are not equally conservative, nor do they equally oppose gay rights. The process by which religiosity shapes attitudes is also gendered; for example, the effects of women’s religiosity on political attitudes and participation are mediated by gendered attitudes. And while religiosity increases political participation, the effects are not even for men and women, nor across all groups of women. Future research might examine the differing effects of religiosity on subgroups of men and women, including evaluations of how intersecting social categories like race, gender, and class shape both levels of religious engagement and the degree to which religiosity influences other political and social behavior.
Article
Historical Injustice
Robert Huseby
Historical injustice generally refers to theories that claim that past wrongs may have implications for current distribution. While it is not self-evident how to define historical injustice, many theorists reserve the term for wrongs whose perpetrators and victims are now both dead. Historical injustice thus concerns the potential claims that the descendants of the victims have against the descendants of the perpetrators. An example is the potential claims descendants of slaves in the United States have against the descendants of slave owners (or perhaps descendants of all non-slaves). While many find claimsbased on historical injustice intuitively compelling, such claims have also been subject to criticism on a wide range of theoretical grounds.
Article
Human Rights
Kimberley Brownlee and Rowan Cruft
Human rights are claims that all human beings have to the protection of fundamental human needs, interests, and freedoms. Debates about human rights consider whether such rights exist, and if they do, whether they are necessarily institutional norms codifiable in law and correlated with government duties or are instead preinstitutional or natural in some sense. Debates about human rights focus on the moral and practical grounds for such rights, the subjects of human rights, the types of human rights—civil, political, social, material, collective—and the precise lists of rights that fall within these broad, overlapping types. Debates also address objections against human rights as a conceptual, normative, and practical framework. Objections focus on issues such as ethnocentricity, cultural imperialism, forfeitability, individualism, claimability, and an adversarial ethos, among others.
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Ideal and Nonideal Theory in Political Philosophy
Christopher Thompson
The distinction between ideal and nonideal theory is an important methodological concern in contemporary political theory. At issue is the extent to which political theorizing is a practical endeavor and, consequently, the extent to which real-world facts should either be factored into political theorizing or else be assumed away.
The distinction between ideal theory and nonideal theory was first introduced by John Rawls in his classic A Theory of Justice. Rawls’s ideal theory is an account of the society we should aim for, given certain facts about human nature and possible social institutions, and involves two central assumptions. First, it assumes full compliance of relevant agents with the demands of justice. Second, it assumes that historical and natural conditions of society are reasonably favorable. These two assumptions are individually necessary and jointly sufficient for his ideal theory. For Rawls, nonideal theory primarily addresses the question of how the ideal might be achieved in practical, permissible steps, from the actual, partially just society we occupy.
The account of ideal and nonideal theory advanced by Rawls has been subject to criticism from different directions. Amartya Sen accepts Rawls’s distinction between ideal and nonideal theory but argues that Rawlsian-style nonideal theory is too ideal. Given the many and severe injustices we face we do not need to know what ideal (or “transcendental”) justice looks like; our focus should not be on how to transition toward this ideal. Instead, the advancement of justice requires a comparative judgment which ranks possible policies in terms of being more or less just than the status quo. G. A. Cohen, by contrast, argues that Rawlsian-style ideal theory is not really ideal theory as such, but instead principles for regulating society. Our beliefs about normative principles should, ultimately, be insensitive to matters of empirical fact; genuine ideal theory is a form of moral epistemology (an exercise of identifying normative truths).
Article
Impartiality in Moral and Political Philosophy
Charlotte Newey
The concept of impartiality is frequently invoked in moral and political debates. In moral theories, impartiality features prominently in both Act and Rule Consequentialism, Kantian ethics, the Humean general point of view, and Ideal Observer theory. In political theory, impartiality is frequently connected with justice and a commitment to equality. The connection of impartiality with moral and political theories is clear. In the personal realm, impartiality directs an agent not to act selfishly or unfairly toward others. In the political realm, impartiality requires that the structure of society and its institutions should not be rigged, for morally irrelevant reasons, to favor some groups over others by giving them benefits and opportunities that are not open to all.
However, there is prolonged disagreement both in moral and political theory between impartialists, who accord significant weight to the value of impartiality, and partialists, who emphasize the value and importance of close personal relationships, meaningful life projects, autonomy, allegiance to one’s country and conationals, and duties of a state toward its citizens. Yet others see the quest for impartiality as a distraction from other more pressing concerns, such as the abuse of power, and domination. For all, this disagreement concerns the nature and extent to which impartiality should influence moral and political thought and actions.
The debate may remain intractable because, in many situations, morality itself seems to demand partiality. Is the impartialist notion that everyone matters equally from the moral point of view compatible with widely held intuitions that agents are morally permitted to devote more of their time, energy, and other resources to people and projects whose value depends on their relationship to the agent? If not, so much the worse for impartial moral theory, because most people think parents are not merely permitted, but likely required—depending on the size of the harms and benefits involved—to attend to their own children’s needs ahead of helping the child of a stranger, or that a person who never placed their friend ahead of others when allocating their time, concern, and resources has not grasped the meaning of the term “friendship.” People tend to agree that a life devoid of meaningful projects is impoverished.
Similar tensions arise in the political realm. Should political theories treat the good of all people everywhere as equally important, or should they make space for a state’s special duty to its own citizens and to allow compatriots to favor each other? What if we cannot agree on what constitutes “the good” of the people? The debate between impartialists and partialists looks set to continue unless progress is made in elucidating a concept of impartiality that can accommodate the concerns of both. Several authors agree that the concept of impartiality is underexplored, with the result that each side ends up talking past the other. To make progress, a deeper understanding of impartiality and the role it can play in moral and political thought is needed.
Article
Injustice and Inequalities in Health
Gopal Sreenivasan
Serious inequalities in health abound the world over. For example, there are marked differences in average life expectancy both between and within countries. Individual life expectancy varies by more than 30 years between the highest national average and the lowest. Even worldwide, average life expectancy lags more than 10 years below the highest national average. Within single countries, inequalities in life expectancy between the top and bottom groups of men, for example, have been recorded at 7 years in England and Wales and at almost 15 years in the United States, albeit using rather differently constituted groups.
Intuitively, these inequalities in health will strike many observers as unjust. But why are they unjust, if they are? Are inequalities in health unjust per se? If not, what makes some inequalities in health unjust, but not others?
According to an influential analysis, inequalities in health are unjust when they are avoidable, unnecessary, and unfair. Thus, if an inequality in health is inevitable, it is not unjust. Following this analysis means that answering these questions requires a combination of empirical and normative understanding. On the empirical side, some understanding of the socially controllable causes of health is required. On the normative side, various dimensions of fairness have to be understood. In addition, some appreciation of the interaction between these two sides is needed..
Each side of the question is fairly complicated. With respect to the requirements of fairness, three subsidiary controversies can be distinguished. To begin with, should a general principle of equality be applied directly to the case of health? An alternative approach traces the injustice of avoidable inequalities in health to the independent injustice of their social causes instead. Next, should inequalities be defined across social groups (such as class or race within countries or, indeed, countries themselves)? If so, which groups? An alternative is to define inequalities across individuals. Finally, should equality be defined in comparative terms (as is traditional)? An alternative is to define the requirements of fairness non-comparatively (as a matter of “priority” to the worst off). Even if a given inequality in health is avoidable, some resolution of all three controversies is needed to decide whether that inequality is unfair.
Article
International Justice
Fredrik Dybfest Hjorthen
International justice is about the principles of justice that set out what states may and must do in relation to other states and with respect to the people that inhabit them. Theories of international justice often assume that states are the most central agents for justice beyond the domestic realm. Even if the moral value of states is ultimately reducible to that of their inhabitants, states are the most central agents through which individuals act when it comes to international questions. Questions of international justice often involve one or more of the following justice concerns: distributive justice, rectificatory justice, and remedial justice. This is clearly seen in some of the most central topics of international justice, such as trade, climate change, colonialism, and war. International justice provides a framework for thinking about the rights and duties of states with respect to these topics.
The principles that set out the rights and duties of states with respect to these issues sometimes come into conflict. This raises a question whether it is better to treat topics in isolation or whether an integrated approach is preferable. Moreover, there is a question about the extent to which states are permitted to give greater weight to its own interests. Finally, there are questions about the extent to which principles of international justice should be action guiding—that is, to what extent they should take into account the feasibility constraints that state leaders face when making decisions.
Article
Judgment as the Imagination of Futures: Practical Rationality in Decisions on Complex Issues
Michael J. Mazarr
The field of judgment and decision making has seen an explosion of research and analyses since the 1990s, notably in five closely related fields: Rational choice and its variants, the concept of intuition, “dual process” theories, the “heuristics and biases” literature, and the concept of “naturalistic” decision making. Yet none of these theories captures—by design or because of the limits of the approach—the actual mechanism by which emergent judgment occurs on complex decisions. Such decisions are non-optimizable and guided by multiple and often conflicting objectives and values; their outcomes will flow from the nonlinear interaction of many variables whose causal relationships are poorly understood. As a result, critical assumptions of many classical decision making models cannot be met in such situations, and the default approach relies not so much on calculative decision making as on instinctive judgment. This term implies a mechanism that is less calculative and consequentialist that it is imaginative, creative, and unconscious. Emergent, largely intuitive judgment is the only mechanism appropriate to such complex, nonlinear situations in which both an objective maximization of utilities and an accurate assessment of likely consequences are impossible. The concept of judgment broadly defined, as a form of unconscious, emergent, and imaginative interpretation of facts and events, offers the best model for how decision makers approach non-optimizable situations.
Article
Justice Between Generations
Tim Meijers
A wide range of issues in moral, political, and legal philosophy fall under the heading of “intergenerational justice,” such as questions of justice between the young and the old, obligations to more-or-less distant past and future generations, generational sovereignty, and the boundaries of democratic decision-making.
These issues deserve our attention first because they are of great social importance. Solving the challenges raised by aging, stable pension funding, and increasing healthcare costs, for example, requires a view on what justice between age groups demands. Climate change, resource depletion, environmental degradation, population growth, and the like, raise serious concerns about the conditions under which future people will have to live. What kind of world should we bequest to future generations?
Second, this debate has theoretical significance. Questions of intergenerational justice force reconsideration of the fundamental commitments (on scope, pattern, site, and currency) of existing moral and political theories. The age-group debate has led to fundamental questions about the pattern of distributive justice: Should we care about people’s lives considered as whole being equally good? This has implausible implications. Can existing accounts be modified to avoid such problematic consequences?
Justice between nonoverlapping generations raises a different set of questions. One important worry is about the pattern of intergenerational justice—are future generations owed equality, or should intergenerational justice be cast in terms of sufficiency? Another issue is the currency of intergenerational justice: what kind of goods should be transferred? Perhaps the most puzzling worry resulting from this debate translates into a worry about scope: do obligations of justice extend to future people? Most conventional views on the scope of justice—those that focus on shared coercive institutions, a common culture, a cooperative scheme for mutual advantage—cannot easily be extended to include future generations. Even humanity-based views, which seem most hospitable to the inclusion of future generations, are confronted with what Parfit called the nonidentity problem, which results from the fact that future people are mostly possible people: because of the lack of a fixed identity of future people, it is often impossible to harm them in the comparative sense.
Article
Law and Political Philosophy
Jens Damgaard Thaysen
Modern states pursue most of their (domestic) ends by creating law and acting in accordance with the law they create. Moreover, many believe states ought to pursue most of their ends this way. If a state ought to do something, then chances are it ought to do it by creating, abolishing, changing, upholding, or enforcing some law. Therefore, almost any kind of political philosophy with bearing on what states should do has bearing on what law should be like. Justifying the legal proscription of some conduct involves more than just showing that citizens ought to refrain from that conduct. Legally restricting conduct is an exercise of coercion and must be justified as such. Criminal prohibitions in particular require special justification, as they are not only coercive but also commit the state to deliberately inflict the harm and stigma of punishment on some of its own citizens. Nevertheless, if the state must coerce its citizens, it ought generally to do so through a law that conforms to the rule of law. Law conforms to the rule of law if it is capable of guiding the citizens as they act and plan for the future. This the law can do only if it is open, clear, prospective, and stable, such that citizens can know what it demands now and predict with reasonable certainty what it will demand in the future. Conformity to the rule of law promotes freedom and is required to respect human dignity. Much of the debate about the justification and scope of legal coercion revolves around several principles that advance claims about what considerations are relevant to the justifiability of law. These principles all have the following structure: The fact that a legal restriction of a certain kind is related in a certain way to a certain type of conduct has a certain impact on whether that restriction is justifiable. Common principles include (a) legal moralism, according to which it is always a good reason to criminalize conduct that the conduct is wrongful; (b) the wrongness constraint, according to which criminalizing morally permissible conduct is never justified; (c) liberalism, according to which it is always a good reason to criminalize conduct that the conduct is either harmful or seriously offensive to others, and criminalizing conduct that is neither harmful nor offensive is never justified; (d) the public wrong principle, according to which it is always a good reason to criminalize conduct that the conduct is a public wrong, and criminalizing conduct is never justified unless the conduct is a public wrong; (e) the sovereignty principle, according to which the only legitimate restrictions on conduct are those that secure independence. Which, if any, of these principles one should accept is the subject of an extensive and sophisticated academic debate.
Article
Legitimacy and European Union Politics
Achim Hurrelmann
Political scientists use the concept of legitimacy to assess the rightfulness of political rule. Their research can approach legitimacy from two perspectives: When taking a normative approach, political scientists develop and justify their own evaluation of the rightfulness of political arrangements. When taking an empirical approach, they study how other people—such as political elites or citizens—evaluate the rightfulness of political rule.
Both approaches have been used in research on the European Union. Scholarly discussions that approach the EU’s legitimacy from a normative perspective revolve around the question of which standards of rightfulness are appropriate for the EU. These depend largely on how the EU polity is conceptualized: as a technocratic regulatory agency, an intergovernmental organization, a federation, a demoi-cracy, or a system of multilevel governance. Since the EU is hybrid polity that possesses elements of each of these models, and is therefore difficult to classify, no consensus has emerged in this debate.
Scholarship that approaches the EU’s legitimacy as an empirical phenomenon examines political attitudes and discourses in European society, asking whether, and why, societal actors treat the EU as legitimate. A diverse set of research methods—including public opinion surveys, content analysis of different kinds of texts, and qualitative interviews with citizens—have been applied to shed light on this question. While this research has not provided clear evidence of a “legitimacy crisis” of the EU, it does show that many Europeans relate to the EU with a sense of diffuse unease and skepticism, in part because they find it opaque and difficult to understand.
Article
LGBT Rights and Theoretical Perspectives
Francis Kuriakose and Deepa Kylasam Iyer
The question of LGBT rights was first examined as part of gender and sexuality studies in the 1980s, predominantly in the United States. This was a result of the LGBT movement that had articulated the demand for equal rights and freedom of sexual and gender minorities a decade before. Since then, the examination of LGBT rights has traversed multiple theoretical and methodological approaches and breached many disciplinary frontiers. Initially, gay and lesbian studies (GLS) emerged as an approach to understand the notion of LGBT identity using historical evidence. GLS emphasized the objectives of the LGBT movement in articulating its identity as an issue of minority rights within the ambit of litigation and case law. However, the definition of LGBT identity as a homogeneous and fixed category, and the conceptualization of equality rights as the ultimate project of emancipation, was critiqued on grounds of its normative and assimilationist tendencies. Queer theory emerged in the 1990s as a counter-discourse to GLS, using the individual-centric postmodern technique of deconstruction as the method of analysis. This approach opened up scope for multiple identities within the LGBT community to articulate their positionality, and reclaim the possibilities of sexual liberation that GLS had previously obscured.
Subsequent scholarship has critiqued GLS and queer theory for incomplete theorization and inadequate representation, based on four types of counter-argument. The first argument is that queer theory, with its emphasis on self as an alternative for wider social interaction, concealed constitutive macrostructures such as neoliberal capitalism, as well as the social basis of identity and power relations. The second argument highlights the incomplete theorization of bisexual and transgender identities within the LGBT community. For example, understanding bisexuality involves questioning the universalism of monosexuality and postmodern notions of linear sexuality, and acknowledging the possibility of an integrated axis of gender and sexuality. Theorization of transgender and transsexual rights requires a grounded approach incorporating new variables such as work and violence in the historiography of transgender life. The third critique comes from decolonial scholarship that argues that intersectionality of race, gender, class, caste, and nationality brings out multiple concerns of social justice that have been rendered invisible by existing theory. The fourth critique emerged from family studies and clinical psychology, that used queer theory to ask questions about definitions of all family structures outside the couple norm, including non-reproductive heterosexuality, polyamorous relationships, and non-marital sexual unions. These critiques have allowed new questions to emerge as part of LGBT rights within the existing traditions, and enabled the question of LGBT rights to be considered across new disciplinary fronts. For example, the incorporation of the “queer” variable in hitherto technical disciplines such as economics, finance, and management is a development of the early-21st-century scholarship. In particular, the introduction of LGBT rights in economics to expand human capabilities has policy implications as it widens and mainstreams access of opportunities for LGBT communities through consumption, trade, education, employment, and social benefits, thereby expanding the actualization of LGBT rights.
Article
Liberalism
Samuel Freeman
Liberalism in politics is associated with nonauthoritarianism, the rule of law, constitutional government with limited powers, and the guarantee of civil and political liberties. A liberal society is tolerant of different religious, philosophical, and ethical doctrines and allows individuals to freely form and express their conscientious convictions and opinions on all matters and live according to their chosen purposes and life paths. In economic terms, liberalism is associated with an unplanned economy with free and competitive markets, as well as private ownership and control of productive resources.
The basic institutions that are characteristic of a liberal society are constitutionalism and the rule of law; equal basic rights and liberties; formal equality of opportunity; free, competitive markets with private property in means of production; government’s obligation to provide public goods and a social minimum; and the fiduciary nature of political power to impartially provide for the public good. Liberals interpret these basic institutions differently. Classical liberalism regards extensive property rights and economic liberties as basic, while libertarians see all rights as property rights and as absolute. High liberalism regards economic liberties as subordinate to personal and political liberties and subject to regulation, with redistribution of income and wealth to mitigate gross inequalities and provide all citizens with adequate resources to guarantee the worth of their basic liberties and opportunities.
Article
Libertarianism
Bas Van Der Vossen
Libertarianism is a theory in political philosophy that strongly values individual freedom and is skeptical about the justified scope of government in our lives. Libertarians see individuals as sovereign, as people who have a right to control their bodies and work, who are free to decide how to interact with willing others, and who cannot be forced to do things against their will without very strong justification.
For some, the argument in support of this view hinges on the principle of self-ownership. To them, individual rights are morally foundational, the basic building blocks of their theory. Many others, however, take a broader view, arguing that societies flourish when they offer people large degrees of freedom in both personal and economic matters.
As a result, libertarianism sees the state as playing at most only a very limited role in matters concerning distributive justice. Libertarians are skeptical about calls to reduce material inequality for its own sake, strongly favor free trade, and defend opening borders for migrants. They see policies that violate these commitments as inevitably involving wrongs against free and equal persons.
Article
Luhmann and Systems Theory
Mathias Albert
The German sociologist Niklas Luhmann has provided one of the most elaborate theories of society available, as well as numerous works on specific aspects of society. Commonly labeled as “systems theory,” this is but a shorthand description of Luhmann’s theory. In fact, the theory rests on at least three main theoretical pillars. In addition to systems theory, a theory of social evolution and a theory of social differentiation play important roles. The present article introduces these three pillars and describes Luhmann’s theory of politics in this context. It outlines the crucial difference between a theory of politics as part of a theory of society on the one hand, and political theory as a reflective theory within the political system on the other hand. More specifically, it introduces Luhmann’s accounts of the notions of political power, differentiation, the state, political steering, and the self-description of the political system. The contribution concludes with some observations on the fact that Luhmann’s theory has tended to overlook the dimension of international politics, but that his theory provides opportunities to account for it in innovative ways.
