“Conceptions of Time in the Rhetoric of Political Legitimation” by Nomi Claire Lazar (Mar 19)

This paper draws from my book manuscript How Time Frames: Temporal Rhetoric in the Politics of Legitimation, which engages the striking correlation between calendar reform and legitimacy crises. Why, at such moments would a political leader expend resources on a seemingly technical exercise? From Kinich Yax Kuk Mo’s time monuments in Mayan Copan, to Khubilai Khan’s Yuan calendar revision, and from the Julio-Augustan reform to French revolutionary time and Stalin’s five day week, I draw on empirical cases to develop a general theory of time technologies as political tools of legitimation.

For the workshop, I focus on the theory of conceptions of the flow of time, which underlies the argument of the book as a whole. I argue that time is the sort of thing which can be made to serve political aims because, first, time can never be experienced as such and hence there is no objective, independent measure of temporal accuracy. Our only experience of time is of time shaped by technologies, found or made. We simultaneously employ a variety of technologies (conceptual and mechanical), because we have a number of distinct uses for time. Hence, we are always open to multiple conceptions of the flow of time and we continually oscillate between nature- and technology- generated marks of accuracy. Because accuracy is necessarily aim-dependent, these can never be reconciled. This makes time always ripe for reform, and hence for political use. I will conclude with a summary of those political uses time can fruitfully serve.

Philosophy Seminar Series
Date: Thursday, 19 Mar 2015
Time: 2pm – 4pm
Venue: AS3 #05-23
Speaker: Nomi Claire Lazar, Yale-NUS College
Moderator: Dr. Qu Hsueh Ming

About the Speaker:

LazarNomi Claire Lazar is Associate Professor of Social Sciences and Acting Head of Study, PPE at Yale-NUS College. She is a political theorist at work on problems which manifest when the ‘hedges’ of political institutions don’t or can’t fix political agents in their way. This work spans the history of political thought, contemporary philosophy, and public policy. In addition to a number of scholarly articles, she is the author of States of Emergency in Liberal Democracies (Cambridge, 2009) and is completing revisions to a new book, How Time Frames. Professor Lazar holds a Ph.D in Political Science from Yale, an MA from the School of Public Policy, University College, London, and a HonBA in philosophy from Toronto, where she was the recipient of the Douglas Bond Symons Prize in philosophy. Before beginning the PhD, she worked in the Criminal Law Policy section of the Department of Justice, Canada. And before joining Yale-NUS, she served as Harper-Schmidt Collegiate Assistant Professor at the University of Chicago, as Associate Professor in the Graduate School of Public and International Affairs at the University of Ottawa, and as Canadian Bicentennial Visiting Fellow at Yale University.

“Procedural Fairness and the veil of Ignorance” by Anantharaman Muralidharan (15 Apr)

Rawls’s veil of ignorance is supposedly justified because it makes the initial choice situation procedurally fair. It supposedly does this by preventing parties from using morally irrelevant information about the persons they represent to obtain an unfair bargaining advantage over others. The success of this argument rests crucially on the idea that at least some rational mutually disinterested parties without a veil of ignorance would in fact successfully use information about the persons they represent to obtain an unfair bargaining advantage over other parties. I will argue in this paper that even in a choice situation identical to Rawls’s Original Position except for the lack of a veil of ignorance, no party has any bargaining advantage over the other. I analyse the notion of a bargaining advantage in terms of the best alternative to negotiated agreement (BATNA) and the propensity towards unacceptable outcomes. A difference in BATNA between two parties is necessary in order for there to be a bargaining advantage of one over the other. Also, plausibly, outcomes that are unacceptable to only some of the parties contra-indicates equality of bargaining power. I show that all parties in a choice situation without a veil of ignorance have equally bad BATNA. I will show that the veil of ignorance is neither necessary nor sufficient to prevent unacceptable conceptions of justice from being agreed to in the Original Position. If the analysis of the Original Position is correct, there is no reason to think that a choice situation without a veil provides some parties a bargaining advantage over others. The analysis of Rawls’s argument also suggests an alternative justification of the veil of ignorance: that it is an appropriate simplification of another choice situation which would necessarily deliver the correct principles of justice.

Graduate Seminar Series.
Date: Tuesday, 15 Apr 2014
Time: 2 pm – 3 pm
Venue: Philosophy Resource Room (AS3 #05-23)
Speaker: Anantharaman Muralidharan

About the Speaker:

murali anna 2Murali’s thesis is concerned with trying to find a more general justification for the Rawlsian framework. He isinterested in broadly trying to derive and defend a free-standing theory of justice. At the same time he isinterested in democracy and justifications for it. He is also interested in social epistemology and its implications for democracy.

 

“Reasonableness in Rawls’ Political Liberalism” by Nicholas Cai (8 Apr)

The idea of reasonableness is one of the key ideas in Rawls’ Political Liberalism. I begin by highlighting Rawls’ main aim in the latter and some key features of his political conception of justice, followed by a brief exposition of three aspects of reasonableness. Specifically, I will elaborate on the rarely mentioned aspect of reasonable persons as having the desire to act from reasonableness and to be recognized (by other reasonable persons) as reasonable. I attempt to show the coherence of reasonableness with other aspects of Rawls’ Political Liberalism, and the role it plays within it. By doing so, I hope to indicate how we can begin responding to the usual worries about the possibility and relevance of Rawls’ Political Liberalism.

Graduate Seminar Series.
Date: Tuesday, 8 Apr 2014
Time: 3 pm – 4 pm
Venue: Philosophy Resource Room (AS3 #05-23)
Speaker: Nicholas Cai
Moderator: Philippe Major

About the Speaker:

nicNick’s primary interests are in the areas of Political Philosophy and the history of Political Philosophy. His honors thesis was a Rawlsian defense of Liberal Neutrality, focusing on the notion of Public Reason. His other research interests include Moral philosophy, German Idealism and Ancient Greek Philosophy, especially the connection between Politics, Religion, and Philosophy.

“A Critique of the use of public political culture in Rawls’ Political Liberalism” by Li Qingyi (8 Apr)

John Rawls argues in Political Liberalism that a conception of justice has to be freestanding, and theorizing ought to begin from the public political culture of a democratic society: a shared fund of fundamental ideas that is implicitly affirmed by the citizens in a democratic state. Conceptions of justice based on one comprehensive moral or philosophical doctrine will be oppressive to people who do not share that particular comprehensive doctrine.

In this presentation, I will offer criticisms against Rawls’s use of the public political culture in his theory. I argue that (i) Rawls is unable to offer any justification for liberalism in states that needs liberalism most, (ii) Rawls makes problematic assumptions about the fundamental ideas of a democratic society, and (iii) Rawls’s liberal prescriptions are already assumed when the fundamental ideas are drawn from a democratic society. The success of my arguments will pave the way for the possibility of establishing moral foundations for public reason liberalism.

Graduate Seminar Series.
Date: Tuesday, 8 Apr 2014
Time: 2 pm – 3 pm
Venue: Philosophy Resource Room (AS3 #05-23)
Speaker: Li Qingyi
Moderator: Melvin Ng

About the Speaker:

croppedQingyi is working towards his M.A. in Philosophy and his area of interest is in political philosophy. His dissertation project examines the moral foundations of political philosophy, more specifically liberal neutrality. Other topics of interest in political philosophy include: liberal theory, methodological concerns in political philosophy, distributive justice and global justice. His interests also extend to moral philosophy.

“A Proposal for the European Voters” by Elena Ziliotti (1 Apr)

In May, the citizens across the 28 European countries will elect their new 751 representatives at the European Parliament. What the Europeans will decide in May and in the near future is more than ever crucial for the Continent. Europe indeed needs to solve difficult issues, such as a stagnant GDP, high youth unemployment, together with diverging economic trajectories among the member states. The thorny situation can be solved only by specific, efficient and tough decisions, but are the European voters ready to do their duty? A recent survey casts doubt on the competence of the European voter.

Following, the recent commentary in WordPost, “Should Voters be tested?”, co-written with Prof. Daniel Bell, I propose to introduce a multiple choice test in order to improve the political knowledge of the European voters. I then i) defend our proposal from two objections, the “Communitarian argument” and the “Egalitarian argument”, and ii) explain some of the advantages of the test over two alternative solutions.

Graduate Seminar Series.
Date: Tuesday, 1 Apr 2014
Time: 3 pm – 4 pm
Venue: Philosophy Resource Room (AS3 #05-23)
Speaker: Elena Ziliotti
Moderator: Jane Loo

About the Speaker:

IMG_0878Elena is a PhD student in the Join Program between NUS and King’s College London. Elena holds an M.A. in Analytic Philosophy from University of Barcelona UB (Spain) and an M.A. in Philosophy from University of Parma (Italy). As an undergraduate, she studied philosophy at the University of Parma and was a visiting student at the Radboud University in Nijmegen (Netherlands). Elena’s main area of research is Political Philosophy. Her PhD dissertation will focus on Political Meritocracy, investigating the relation among this form of governance and the main strains of thought in Western political philosophy.

“On the Selection of Good Leaders in a Political Meritocracy” by Daniel Bell (24 Oct)

In this talk, I will assume that (1) it is good for a political community to be governed by high-quality rulers; (2) China’s one party political system is not about to collapse; (3) the meritocratic aspect of the system is partly good; and (4) it can be improved. On the basis of these assumptions, I will put forward suggestions about which qualities matter most for political leaders in the context of large, peaceful, and modernizing (non-democratic) meritocratic states, followed by suggestions about mechanisms that increase the likelihood of selecting leaders with such qualities. I will use the philosophical theory about the best possible political meritocracy in the context of a large, peaceful, and modernizing state as a standard for evaluating China’s actually-existing meritocratic system. I will argue that China can and should improve its meritocratic system: it needs exams that more effectively test for politically relevant intellectual abilities, more women in leadership positions to increase the likelihood that leaders have the social skills required of effective policy-making, and more systematic use of a peer review system to promote political officials motivated by the desire to serve the public.

Philosophy Seminar Series.
Date: Thursday, 24 Oct 2013
Time: 2pm – 4pm
Venue: Philosophy Resource Room (AS3 #05-23)
Speaker: Daniel A. Bell, Center for International and Comparative Political Theory, Tsinghua University
Moderator: Dr. Ben Blumson

About the Speaker:

Daniel A. Bell is Visiting Professor, Depts of Philosophy and Political Science, NUS. He is Professor of Ethics and Political Theory, and Director of the Center for International and Comparative Political Theory, Tsinghua University (Beijing). He taught at NUS from 1991-94. He has authored and edited 15 books, of which the latest (coedited with Li Chenyang) is The East Asian Challenge for Democracy: Political Meritocracy in Comparative Perspective (Cambridge University Press, 2013). He is currently writing a book on political meritocracy. He is a regular contributor to leading media outlets in China and the West and his works have been translated into 23 languages.

“What Is Choice Sensitivity? A Dilemma for Luck Egalitarianism” by Micha Glaeser (10 Oct)

Luck egalitarians hold that inequalities between individuals are unjust when they are the result of differences in unchosen circumstances but not when they reflect differences in the choices made by those individuals. A just distribution is one that is both luck insensitive and choice sensitive. In this paper I argue that the idea of choice sensitivity is ambiguous between two different interpretations, both of which are problematic. The first interpretation renders luck egalitarianism intuitively implausible. The second interpretation threatens to undercut the fundamental moral significance of choice on which the luck-egalitarian project turns. I then suggest a reinterpretation of the significance of choice, one that both renders luck egalitarianism intuitively attractive and preserves choice as a fundamental justificatory consideration.

Philosophy Seminar Series.
Date: Thursday, 10 Oct 2013
Time: 2pm – 4pm
Venue: Philosophy Resource Room (AS3 #05-23)
Speaker: Micha Glaeser, Harvard University
Moderator: Dr. Ben Blumson

About the Speaker:

Micha Glaeser is a Ph.D. candidate in philosophy at Harvard University. As an undergraduate he studied at the University of Bayreuth, Germany, and the University of California, Berkeley. His research interests are in moral, political, and legal philosophy. In his dissertation he defends an account of the relation between law and morality that transcends the positivist-natural law dichotomy. He currently resides in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, for reasons of love.

“Taking up Space on Earth: Theorizing Territorial Rights, the Justification of States and Immigration from a Global Standpoint” by Mathias Risse (15 Aug)

The debate about the right to rule over territory has recently taken a prominent place among political philosophers. Yet, the three most prominent views on the right to rule over territory – a Kantian, a Lockean, and a nationalist view – unduly neglect the global dimensions that the debate about territory should integrate. They proceed as if one could assess the right to rule one state at a time. However, in my 2012 book On Global Justice, I present a theory of global justice that gives pride of place to humanity’s collective ownership of the earth. In this article, I argue that we can overcome the shortcomings of the Kantian, Lockean, and nationalist perspectives by applying my theory of global justice to the question of territorial rule.  Specifically, I argue for the following theses. My theory provides us with the necessary conditions of a state’s right to rule that theorize any given state’s right to rule in a global perspective. Moreover, we also need to reconsider the core rationales for the existence of states articulated by the Lockean and Kantian approaches to the right to rule. Once we do so, we end up with an overall more plausible account of legitimate ways of taking up space on earth, one that theorizes territorial rights, the justification of states, and immigration from a unified and global standpoint.

Philosophy Seminar Series.
Date: Thursday, 15 Aug 2013
Time: 2pm – 4pm
Venue: Philosophy Resource Room (AS3 #05-23)
Speaker: Mathias Risse, Professor of Philosophy and Public Policy, John F. Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University
Moderator: Dr. Ben Blumson

About the Speaker:

Mathias Risse is Professor of Philosophy and Public Policy at the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University, and currently NUSS Visiting Professor at the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy at the National University of Singapore. He works mostly in social and political philosophy and in ethics. His primary research areas are contemporary political philosophy (in particular questions of international justice, distributive justice, and property) and decision theory (in particular, rationality and fairness in group decision making, an area sometimes called analytical social philosophy.) His books On Global Justice and Global Political Philosophy were published in 2012. His articles have appeared in journals such as Ethics; Philosophy and Public Affairs; Nous; the Journal of Political Philosophy; and Social Choice and Welfare. Risse studied philosophy, mathematics, and mathematical economics at the University of Bielefeld, the University of Pittsburgh, the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and Princeton University. He received his BA, BS and MS in mathematics from Bielefeld, and his MA and PhD in philosophy from Princeton.

[Public Lecture] The Perilous Seduction of the Ideal: Why We should Resist the Allure of Moral Homogeneity by Dr. Gerald Gaus (14 Aug)

Political philosophers are accustomed to conceiving of their activity as a philosophical elaboration and defense of a specific theory of justice. We seek the one, best, theory of justice — or account of moral social life — by which to order our common existence. Like Plato, who continues to cast a spell over our profession, the deep conviction is that the best state would, in a deep sense, be a morally homogenous one. Our current, real-world communities, characterized by disagreement and moral dispute, may be the best we can attain, but fall far short of the ideal or perfect. Like Plato, we see the moral community as a person writ large; if a just person is moved by a well-thought out and consistent theory of justice, so too must a just community. And the most just community would be one that is moved by the best theory of justice.

In this lecture I suggest that this ancient pursuit of the ideal, while seductive, is perilous. The moral life of a society is better understood as normative system of a very different type: what I call a “complex normative system,” in which the very diversity and disagreements of the participants sustain the community’s moral life. I argue that societies that do not concur on the best theory (or principles) of justice are better able to sustain a “moral constitution” that all can endorse than those that have settled on what they see as the one, best or true, theory.

Public Lecture.
Date: Tuesday, 14 August 2012
Time: 4-6pm
Venue: Philosophy Resource Room (AS3 Level 5)
Speaker: Gerald Gaus, James E. Rogers Professor of Philosophy, University of Arizona

About the Speaker: Gerald Gaus is the James E. Rogers Professor of Philosophy at the University of Arizona, where he directs the program in Philosophy, Politics, Economics & Law. He is the author of a number of books, including On Philosophy, Politics, and Economics (2008), Contemporary Theories of Liberalism (2003), Justificatory Liberalism (1996) and Value and Justification (1990). He was a founding editor of Politics, Philosophy and Economics. His most recent book is The Order of Public Reason, published by Cambridge in 2011. His main area of work is social and political philosophy, though he rejects the dominant highly idealized and objectivist moral suppositions of the field. His work focuses on how a society can achieve a public moral framework that is freely endorsed by diverse normative perspectives. For more, see his website www.gauz.biz.

A series of talks by Joseph Chan (16, 18, 19 Nov 2010)

A series of lectures by Joseph Chan,Professor, Department of Politics and Public Administration and Associate Director of the Centre for Civil Society and Governance, The University of Hong Kong

Seminar 1: Interplay between ideal and nonideal thinking in early Confucian political thought (Tuesday, 16 November, 2010, 2-3:45 p.m.)

Seminar 2: Confucian ideal conception of the ruler-ruled relationship (Thursday, 18 November, 2010, 2:00-3:45p.m.)

Seminar 3: Confucians today and the roles and functions of human rights in ideal and non-ideal conditions (Friday, 19 November, 2010, 2-3:45p.m.)

Abstract: This seminar series examines early Confucian political thought and its contemporary relevance from a perspective that explores the intricate interplay between political ideal and reality. The series develops two tracks of theorizing—one track is to explain or justify a Confucian conception of social and political order on the ideal level, bracketing practical questions of feasibility and compliance; another track is to develop a non-ideal conception of the order that addresses those practical questions. The challenge of this two-track theorizing is two-fold: to justify keeping the ideal conception even though it is not likely to work in the real world and show how a feasible non-ideal conception of order still tallies with the Confucian ideal conception and keeps its aspiration. In other words, the challenge is to maintain a proper interplay between ideal and reality in the two-track theorizing.

The first seminar of the series introduces the interplay between ideal and nonideal thinking in early Confucian political thought. The second and third seminars apply that general perspective to political relationships and human rights respectively. The second seminar describes the Confucian ideal conception of the ruler-ruled relationship and discusses whether there are non-ideal political institutions that can maintain a proper interplay between ideal and reality. The third seminar discusses how Confucians today should understand the roles and functions of human rights in ideal and non-ideal conditions.

chanAbout the Speaker: Joseph Cho Wai Chan received his B.Soc.Sc in politics from the Chinese University of Hong Kong and M.Sc. and D.Phil. in political philosophy from the LSE and Oxford University respectively. He is Professor at the Department of Politics and Public Administration and Associate Director of the Centre for Civil Society and Governance, The University of Hong Kong. His recent research interests include Confucian political philosophy, contemporary liberalism and political perfectionism, the theory and practice of human rights, and civil society and social cohesion. He is working on a book tentatively titled Confucian Political Philosophy: A Critical Reconstruction for Modern Times.

More information on the Philosophy Seminar Series can be found here.

Professor, Department of Politics and Public Administration and

Associate Director of the Centre for Civil Society and Governance

The University of Hong Kong