Author Archives: Cat Wayland

Dr Clare Chambers – The Neutralist Dilemma

PTRG – 28th March 2018

This week the Political Theory Research Group welcomed Dr Clare Chambers of the University of Cambridge to discuss her paper, ‘Reasonable disagreement and the neutralist dilemma: Abortion and circumcision in Matthew Kramer’s Liberalism with Excellence.’

By tracing the logical implications of the liberal state’s commitment to neutrality, the paper subtly reveals the limits of the neutralist project in liberalism. Through the cases of abortion and circumcision, it shows that sometimes, the state cannot avoid violating its commitment to neutrality. It has to implement a policy with which a party would reasonably disagree on the basis that it violates freedom and equality. In the case of abortion, there is reasonable disagreement about whether the foetus is a person. If the state takes the position that the foetus is not a person, it should permit abortion because to do otherwise would be to deny the bodily autonomy of pregnant people who want to terminate their pregnancy. If the state takes the position that the foetus is a person, the state should prohibit abortion because allowing it would be murder, violating the freedom and equality of the foetus. But taking a position on whether the foetus is a person violates neutrality because it is a point about which people reasonably disagree due to the burdens of judgement.

Dr Chambers’ paper provoked vigorous debate for the duration of the session. The choice of cases lent themselves to extensive discussion, as did the setup of the neutralist dilemma itself. Participants were particularly keen to explore the ramifications of state neutrality for parenting. Questions arose regarding parental intervention and the range of possible future lives that parents inevitably prevent their children from living, and the extent to which parents should be allowed to (irreversibly) modify the bodies of their children for cultural, or even cosmetic, reasons. In addition to this, the function of state neutrality and its capacity to bolster or diffuse racist or otherwise prejudicial attitudes was considered. There were also lively exchanges regarding the questions of adults’ regret for their parents’ actions, the value of bodily integrity, and the importance of one’s sense of cultural belonging, both as a child and adult.

Elinor Mason – The Silencing of Sexual Refusal

Content note: academic discussion of consent, rape, and sexual harassment

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PTRG 25/10/17

This week we welcomed Dr Elinor Mason from the University of Edinburgh’s Department of Philosophy. Elinor presented her paper entitled ‘Rape, Harassment, and the Silencing of Sexual Refusal’, which takes as its point of departure a well-known debate in the philosophy of language regarding the effect that mainstream pornography has on women’s rejections of sexual advances: this is the idea that pornography, along with other cultural representations of women’s sexuality, somehow renders the refusing ‘no’ ineffective, either by distorting its meaning or the credibility of the refuser. Continue reading

Louis Fletcher – From Civilization to Globalism: The Spatial Imaginary of Arnold Toynbee and Quincy Wright

PTRG 18/10/2017

Edinburgh doctoral candidate Louis Fletcher presented his paper on civilization and globalism at this week’s PTRG. A work in intellectual history, Louis’ paper charts the decline of civilization as an organizing concept in global political thought, and the birth of globalism in the interwar years in Europe. Drawing on the work of two liberal internationalists who wrote extensively on civilization and the emergent global order following the First World War, Louis explores how these thinkers, Arnold Toynbee and Quincy Wright, eschewed ‘civilization’ as a temporal achievement eventually reached by all cultures, embracing instead a cyclical understanding of the fortunes of history’s many civilizations. The twilight of the European empires and the catastrophe of war heralded a new era for Toynbee and Wright, as institutions such as the League of Nations and seismic shifts in the balances of power across Europe, the Americas, Russia, India and the Antipodean colonies transformed the global political order in this exceptional period. Continue reading