PPESextonPhil2025

I have some half-baked, lingering questions from our discussion with Prof. Varden and would love to hear what you guys think (or if you have your own questions). Prof. Hurley, if we gather enough questions, maybe we could reach out to her for a follow-up if she's open to it? On Omnilateral Will: I might be wrong that omnilateral will is a tool of legitimacy within the framework, but we discussed quite a bit on how omnilateral will is so deeply polluted by isms and such. Given that, I’m struggling to understand why we are still so drawn to it. If it’s not epistemically viable / instrumentally productive (no matter how accurate it may be according to Kant's definition of "will"), how legitimating can it be? On Moral Agency: Prof. Varden noted that some situations have no morally viable choices to pick from. I can’t really think of an example in real life where that’s the case. Isn’t there always a lesser evil to choose from? Isn’t this where moral agency should step in ...

I found it very interesting to apply Toole’s standpoint epistemology to strengthen Kantian political theory, as it is described by Varden. This post attempts to clearly do that, and discusses how it conflicts with distorting omnilateral will.  As interpreted by Varden, Kantian political philosophy holds that the legitimacy of public authority is derived from its foundation in the omnilateral will, the collective will that determines general laws of freedom that could be universally willed by all rational agents​. This raised a key question for me: If all rational agents must contribute to the establishment of universal laws, can Kant’s framework accommodate the insights of marginalized groups who, as standpoint epistemology suggests, may have privileged epistemic access to certain injustices? Toole’s discussion of standpoint epistemology argues that social location shapes epistemic access to injustice, with marginalized individuals often possessing an epistemic advantage that allow...

     Take a situation in which you make a choice that limits freedom in one way but expands it in another, for example, mandatory military service. It forces you into a certain occupation, but the security it provides guarantees your freedom and the freedom of others after your service. This action -- if done by an individual -- would not be "right" under the universal principle of right. If done by the state, it seems to be permissible because "the state must, and have a right to, put in place (through public right/law) even though private individuals do not have the corresponding authority" (8).  That right comes from the state reconciling its monopoly on coercion with a citizen's right to freedom. Mandatory service (use of coercion) is reconciled because it protects the general populace's freedom, making it permissible under Kant's framework. However, reconciling by valuing a larger amount of freedom over a smaller loss of freedom doesn't seem to ...

 Hello!  My main post is my response to Aaria and Sophia, but I still have a short thought about Varden's idea of pockets. I generally strongly agree that Varden "made Kant cool." It was a bit humbling to read how well she summarized criticisms of Hobbs, Locke, and Rousseau that I wasn't even able to begin to put into words. It could just be semantic, but I'm curious if characterizing existing as pockets is still overly binary for how we think about the development of our society towards Kant's ideal principle of politics. I feel like relegating the injustices of societies to mere pockets of anarchism, barbarism, or despotism makes them seem like we can analyze our aspects of our society as either being entirely anarchic, barbaric, or despotic, when in reality these negative states could be better represented as ever present drives within our psyche that can either be allowed to develop or repressed. This framework can enable us to better self-examine our own ...

Varden advocates for a spectrum reading of Kant, rather than a binary. Varden thinks that liberal republic states should be evaluated on a spectrum between the state of nature and civil society. I would like to connect Varden and Shelby’s arguments and argue that where a state falls on this spectrum is directly proportional to what level of obedience is morally obligated to the government.  Tommie Shelby writes that “the victims of social injustice, having been denied their fair share of the benefits of social cooperation, have a reduced obligation to obey the law” (235). Shelby bases this on the principle of reciprocity in which in a society which does not uphold justice the oppressed in said society are not morally required to obey societal sutures.  Similarly, I think Varden would argue that we are not morally required to be unconditionally loyal to the government. Varden writes that governmental institutions have “condoned, facilitated, and even participated” in systemic o...

In Leaving the State of Nature, Varden seeks to reevaluate misrepresentations of Kant’s political philosophy regarding the role of civil society and the state of nature in relation to humanity. To do this, she juxtaposes the theories of justice/social contract Hobbes, Locke and Rousseau propose against the Kantian rendition.   Kant builds on the ideas of his predecessors, but the key distinction Varden seeks to highlight is the “false dichotomy” that Hobbes, Locke and Rousseau create between the State of Nature and Civil Society. For Hobbes, security is contingent on leaving the state of nature and entering into civil society. Locke holds a similar sentiment in that the natural progression of humanity is movement from the state of nature into civil society--except in this case the entrance into civil society is a means toward securing just interactions between individuals in the development of property ownership. Rousseau takes a different angle, framing the entrance into civil soc...

Ok so this response will be a medley of some thoughts I had in response to Aria’s blog as well as some unrelated thoughts I had.   To start off - super cool blog Aria! I don’t disagree with the notion that our will is influenced by social/economic/cultural factors and as I read your post, I think that essentially you’re getting at a similar idea to Aiden last week in determining wether or not we have free will at all since these factors influence our decisions. As we unpacked in seminar last week, I’m not sure that it entirely matters wether or not we have free will or full autonomy or not because at the end of the day, we still make decisions based on the world we’re in and the information available. Definitely a cool point that I’m excited to talk about more.   The other note of your post I briefly wanted to touch on was your assertion that “the majority of, if not all, belief is transient” because while I agree that widely held beliefs shift over time in accordance with new...

     Kant believes, according to Varden, that freedom takes primacy in legal-political philosophy, and is the only original human right “insofar as it can coexist with the freedom of every other in accordance with a universal law” (7). Thus, the maxim or principle on which an action is based must be one that everyone could act upon without contradiction. As we know, Kantian freedom is defined as independence from being constrained by the arbitrary will of another. This forms the nucleus of Kant’s ideal theory of rightful freedom, which (as Varden displays) transforms and synthesizes Hobbes’s proposed conception of a sovereign, Locke’s laws of nature, and Rousseau’s general will into a Kantian, ideal public authority that “represents the citizens by determining general laws of freedom to regulate and secure our actual interactions” (8). It is only because this authority is driven by an omnilateral will (t he idea that legitimate authority must act in accordance with a col...

 (This is a response to Sophia's blog post, but Blogger told me my comment was "too long" whatever that means...) Hey Sophia!! I wanted to post about this topic as well, so my comment will initially just build on your observations. However, I also want to raise a few points about this account that trouble me (which are semi-related to Aidan’s blog post). To preface, I am NOT a libertarian by any means, nor am I a huge Nozick fan: these comments are not at all meant to claim that libertarianism provides a better framework. However, I want to push further on the libertarian-Ripstein tension because I am confused on why we pick and choose what counts as constraints on individual action and, more importantly, what the implications of this are on state coercive action.  Some preliminary thoughts:  First, as you identify, true individual freedom for Kant is not just about autonomy. Libertarians would assert that individual autonomy = individual freedom, justifying minimal inter...

I completely get the argument that private property needs public access to exist. But, I'm not entirely convinced that roads qualify as the kind of "public" access that's really needed for this idea to work. Ripstein outlines an important problem—not only that your neighbor is entitled to determine whether you can cross their property or not, but that they therefore determine whether one person can enter into voluntary agreements with another. He then outlines the solution: “roads, understood as a system of public rights of way, guaranteeing that there is a path from every piece of privately held land to every other” (248). He furthers it, saying, "The system as a whole must make it possible to get from any piece of land to any other...public in the sense of being open to all as a matter of right, rather than available only to some specific person or group of persons."(249) But here's the thing: aren't roads really only accessible to those who can af...

I want to examine libertarianism—particularly Nozick’s account—against Ripstein’s conception of freedom, because to be honest, I think Ripstein gives a pretty compelling and solid response to the libertarian. Libertarians argue that a minimal state is necessary to secure individual freedom and Nozick in particular makes the implied assumption that private property exists prior to the state. Nozick, for instance, claims that the state’s primary role is to enforce justice in rectification—stepping in only when someone violates the principles of justice in acquisition or transfer. But Ripstein flips this idea on its head, arguing that private property is only legitimate within the framework of public right. In this sense, the state needs to have a robust public domain so that it can secure the public conditions in which our entitlements to private property are legitimate.  At the heart of Ripstein’s argument is the Kantian notion that to be free and independent means being able to use...

 Im on the plane :D 

Ripstein's Kantian argument is developed through considering the protection of everyone's freedom as the basis for rights. I have long been confused about how to think about freedom and liberty, but since it is so important to Ripstein's account it feels less chicken-shitty than usual to discuss here. I generally think about the world in a deterministic framework. Not in that some divine being decided what will happen, but more so in the sense that things have been set in motion that can not be undone based on the laws of physics. Since we are just atoms bouncing around, there is only one possible future, and as such, there is technically no free will. We choose to consider ourselves as having free will such that we can hold each other accountable and enjoy a feeling of personal agency in our lives, but this is taken aside from the reality that we ultimately have no control over what we do. And while this generally fits with how we think about the world, it makes it difficu...

In describing the valid functions of prisons, Shelby writes that "it is, unfortunately, sometimes necessary to rely on incarceration to incapacitate highly dangerous individuals" (The Idea of Prison Abolition, 52). And while this intuitively makes sense, it makes me wonder what methodologies are valid in determining whether we have the right to judge someone a danger to others. There are the more obvious cases when one expresses intent to harm others, but how do we think about the cases when we incapacitate someone because we think they are lying about their intent? In some way, we must be denying their ability to make rational and moral judgement. Shelby responds to this issue by saying the use "of hard treatment, a form of preventative force, is neither dehumanizing nor unfair, at least not when prisons are humane and courts operate justly. Forewarned by the public legal proscription and equipped with the capacity for rational and free action, offenders had an adequate...

While I find Shelby’s framework compelling, I’m a bit confused on the practicality of its implementation. My personal take on the idea of transferring resources to disadvantaged communities through institutions is that it assumes a level of political will and societal consensus that I find to be unrealistic currently. Additionally, without the interpersonal connections and shared experiences that integration can foster, it would be difficult (if not impossible) to generate the broad-based support necessary for such resource transfers. Generally speaking, I find that his framework's lean towards Marxist materialism would be self-defeating in this way. In the same way, I feel the reforms he calls for in our prisons as similarly difficult to put in place. Going along with this idea, Shelby’s rejection of forced integration as a duty of justice feels almost like a paradox. On one hand, he insists that Black communities shouldn’t bear the sacrificial burden of integration, and that forc...

Shelby argues that an unjust state lacks the moral authority to condemn certain crimes, especially those with roots in systemic distributive injustice, yet it must enforce laws to protect vulnerable citizens. His argument seperates condemnation against those who break the law from enforcement and damnation of those same people. His goal in this is to prevent the state from hypocritically blaming those it effectively engendered to law-breaking, while still protecting society from their law-breaking activities.  Yet, Shelby's moral argument has an unintended consequence--something akin to a "moral vacuum." The state is still imposing punishment, but not claiming the moral high-ground for condemnation, creating a vacuum of what is "right" and "wrong." This vacuum, I think, is filled by informal networks of community justice that do pass moral judgments that are enforced through extralegal pathways. Because Shelby's unjust state can not rightly blame o...

While I’m confident that there are influences of Marx that could be found throughout Shelby’s work, there was one section on page 105 that was particularly interesting to me.  Shelby describes how it “might be more promising to attribute a master function to prisons.” Some may be tempted to label a direct motivation to racial dominate, economic exploit, political repress, or obscure social problems to prisons. However, Shelby instead suggests that prisons perform a stabilizing function which by doing so causes the issues mentioned above.  Shelby describes how this stabilizing function is necessary because the injustice our society is built upon is inherently unstable. I thought this was similar to Marx who argues that societal structure is constantly evolving in relationship to the means of production and is thus constantly unstable. In Shelby’s argument, the prison system is a byproduct of the ruling ideology, and prisons persists because the ruling ideology reinforces its ex...

I was really interested in Shelby’s rejection of the role of punishment as retribution. He is very clear that “nothing [he] say[s] here about ‘punishment’ or ‘penalties’ should be construed as endorsing retributive ideas” (52). This is also why, when he lays out the principles of nonideal theory in Dark Ghettos , crime control (the third family of principles) is not part of the corrective justice framework: punishment and penalties have nothing to do with retribution, corrective action, or moral penalization. I am a little troubled by the view that punishment should solely be about deterrence, particularly because I think it may dilute the implementation of rehabilitative programs. Deterrence, as a primary goal, operates on the logic that fear of punishment will prevent individuals from committing crimes. This means that, when determining the ‘burden’ of suitable punishment, it will be whatever is most effective and least costly (when I speak of ‘cost,’ I mean in terms of justice; as S...

I want to explore the implications of Shelby’s argument in Chapter 8, where he asserts that “the victims of social injustice, having been denied their fair share of the benefits of social cooperation, have a reduced obligation to obey the law” (235). Shelby grounds this claim in the principle of reciprocity, by discussing that when a society fails to uphold justice, those burdened by systemic injustices are not bound to uphold its legal framework in the same way that those who are not are. Importantly, Shelby maintains that a state in an unjust society still has the right to penalize actions that are wrongs in themselves (mala in se) since it would be justifiably needed to protect innocent civilians.  While Shelby’s account is discussed in the context of the ghetto poor, he does acknowledge in the introduction that he’s also concerned with gender and class (although not the specific topic of discussion in this book) since they are all interconnected. As a result, I think it’s inter...

I feel as though Shelby's perspective on the question of the prison can be generally summed up in this: "The root of the problem is not the existence of prisons but pervasive and deeply unjust socioeconomic disadvantage more broadly" (82 IPA). He acknowledges that the prisons we have today are morally apprehensible and are a failure on so many different levels, but he maintains that their existence, or at least incarceration,  is entirely necessary for society. In order to make this claim while simultaneously recognizing the intense injustice that the prison system facilitates must have an extraordinary faith in reform. Considering his use of nonideal theory and egalitarian pluralism in Dark Ghettos  I take that his reform ultimately comes in the form of radical changes in the basic structure of society which, I imagine, would include reform to the prisons themselves. I completely agree with Shelby on the notion that prisons themselves are a manifestation of a deeply unju...