PTRG Programme Term II 2017

 

18 January, 3 pm, CMB 2.15

Chiming Zhong (PIR), On the Methodology of Rights Theory

 

25 January, 3 pm, CMB 2.15

Cian O’Driscoll (Glasgow), Victory in the Just War Tradition

 

1 February, 3 pm, CMB 2.15

Masa Mrovlje (PIR), Judging Violent Resistances

 

8 February, 3 pm, CMB 2.15

Anca Gheaus (Pompeu Fabra), The Best Available Parent

 

15 February, 3 pm, CMB 2.15

Kerri Woods (Leeds), TBA

 

1 March, 3 pm, CMB 2.15

Chandran Kukathas (LSE), TBA

 

8 March, 3 pm, CMB 2.15

Hugh McDonnell (PIR), TBA

 

15 March, 3 pm, CMB 2.15

Thomas Fossen (Leiden), Legitimacy, Judgment, and Utopia 

 

22 March, 3 pm, CMB 2.15

Lorna Finlayson (Essex), False Consciousness and the Politics of Austerity

 

29 March, 3 pm, CMB 2.15

Joe Carens (Toronto), TBA

 

5 April, 3 pm, CMB 2.15

Matthew Festenstein (York), TBA

 

26 April, 3 pm, CMB 2.15

Raúl Madrid, (Pontifical Catholic University, Chile), Is academic freedom a relative notion? 

 

3 May, 3 pm, CMB 2.15

Matthew Chrisman (Philosophy), The Speech Act of Protest

 

10 May, 3 pm, CMB 2.15

Tim Hayward (PIR), TBA

 

17 May,3 pm, CMB 2.15

Cormac Mac Amhlaigh, (Law), (Suprastate) Constitutionalism as Ideal Theory

 

22 May, time and location TBC

Amy Allen (Penn State), Joint lecture PTRG and GENDERPOL

 

24 May, 3 pm, CMB 2.15

Cat Wayland (PIR), TBA

 

31 May, 3 pm, CMB 2.15

Philip Cook (PIR), TBA

 

7^th of June, 3 pm, CMB 2.15

Jill Poeggel, TBA

 

14 June, 3 pm, CMB 2.15

Monica Brito Vieira (York), TBA 

 

21^st of June, 3 pm, CMB 2.15

Kieran Oberman (PIR) TBA

 

5th of July, 3 pm, CMB 2.15

Alia Al-Saji (McGill University) Glued to the Image: A phenomenology of racialization through works of art (Joint event PTRG, Philosophy, Centre for Cultural Relations)

 

This is a write-up of the weekly meeting of the Political Theory Research Group, 19th October

A Jakarta Slum (Credit Jonathon McIntosh (CC BY 2.0))

Christina presented a draft of the final chapter of her PhD, ‘Need and the Demands of Justice’. What is need, and what kind of moral obligations does it place on us? Christina argues that agents with the ability to meliorate the existentially urgent needs of humans have a duty to help, up to the threshold of sacrificing things of significant cost to themselves. Even agents without that ability, however, have a duty to respond to the existentially urgent needs of others, such that they acknowledge the gravity of their plight. This chapter focuses upon the concrete nature and extent of those duties. In order for agents to effectively discharge their duties in the face of an immensely complicated picture of global suffering, Christina argues that agents have a duty of coordination. This permits the organisation of a division of labour according to a strategic plan that identifies high priority areas. In many ways, this is a vision with an affinity to the research and organisation of ‘effective altruism’, scaled-up to the level of global institutional coordination. Christina emphasises that responsive actions should be attentive to context, focus on net impact, and undergo iterative learning. She also defends a pro tanto duty of enforceability in which states are licensed to enforce a system of coordinated, global harm-reduction.

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This is a write-up of the meeting of the Political Theory Research Group, 5th October 2016

For many, the modern predicament is defined by our epistemological inability to formulate absolutist ethical criteria, and our practical inability to bring about a political consensus in their absence. In this paper, Vogler contends that a suitably reflexive form of judgement, augmented in the social world that all humans share with one another, provides one compelling escape route. In making this argument, he calls for the improbable meeting of two disparate figures: Hannah Arendt and Margaret Archer. For Arendt, the traditions which once anchored judgement have fragmented, leaving a gaping lacuna into which the dehumanising tendencies of the first half of the twentieth century stepped. In this situation, our ‘common sense’ – the way in which judgement transcends individuals to find intersubjective validity, forming a shared universe through which politics can be negotiated – has to be resuscitated without succumbing to either thoughtlessness (Eichmann) or absolutism (Plato). The solution, Arendt argues, is to cultivate a reflexive way of thinking. First, through a disinterested perspective which enables us to consider issues independent of our immediate needs. Second, through enlarging our mentality, so that we are able to ‘go visiting’ and imagine the perspectives of others.

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