Dr Sean Cordell
Group Virtues: Backwards with Collectivism!
4 June 2014

Some contemporary work in ethics and epistemology argues that certain social groups can themselves bear virtues and vices: morally or epistemically valuable traits which we normally attribute to the character of individual agents. Focusing on two different accounts of distinctly collective group virtues as examples, I argue that the project faces a basic problem. On one hand, characteristics of social groups which look most like character virtues are explained by features of individuals, thus undermining the explanatory power of the collective picture. On the other hand, insofar as some group characteristic is irreducibly social and not explicable in terms of features of individuals – collective par excellence – it fails to meet minimal conditions of a character virtue. So the more like a character virtue a social feature appears, the less it is distinctively collective: and the more distinctly collective a group characteristic is, the less it is like a character virtue.

This shows only that the project of distinctly collective virtues is misguided, not that a conception of the virtues of groups per se is flawed or redundant. The positive upshot of the problem is that we can only understand group virtues in terms of the mutually dependent conditions of a) the purpose of or practice embodied in a particular group and b) the group-oriented attitudes and actions of individuals. This implies that neither the group nor the individual has explanatorily privilege as the starting point for group virtues. One level cannot get going without the other: there are no group-orientated virtue generating features of individuals without a group, and there is no such group virtue without such appropriately oriented individuals.  If this is generally true of relations between individual features and social collectives (I think it is), then maybe we should resist such prioritization in any case.

Dr Kathleen Stock, University of Sussex
Sexual objectification, perception and images
7 May 2014

On the face of it, to ‘sexually objectify’ someone is to treat them ‘as a sexual object’; but what does this mean, exactly? Within feminist literature on notions of sexual objectification, there are several different approaches to this question. Significant disagreement apparently exists about number of key issues, in a way that seems puzzling given the apparent aim of analyzing a single phenomenon. After describing three prominent sorts of contribution to this field, I will focus on apparent areas of disagreement. I will then argue that the appearance of genuine disagreement here is in fact illusory. This will help clarify both the state of the current debate about the nature of objectification, and my eventual contribution to it. In the final part of my paper, I will argue for a conception of objectification which helps us understand how non-pornographic images can be objectifying: namely, objectification as seeing someone in a way which de-emphasises their minded features.

Dr Thom Brooks, Durham Law School
The Capabilities Approach and Political Liberalism
2 April 2014

John Rawls argues that A Theory of Justice suffers from a “serious problem”: the problem of political stability. His theory failed to account for the reality that citizens are deeply divided by reasonable and incompatible religious, philosophical, and moral comprehensive doctrines. This fact of reasonable pluralism may pose a threat to political stability over time and requires a solution. Rawls proposes the idea of an overlapping consensus among incompatible comprehensive doctrines through the use of public reasons in his later Political Liberalism. Rawls’s proposed solution to the problem of political stability has received much criticism. Some, such as Kurt Baier, Brian Barry, George Klosko, and Edward McClennen, argue that an overlapping consensus is relatively unnecessary. Rawls should have acknowledged existing resources in his account that might secure political stability over time without major changes to his original views about justice. Others, including Kent Greenawalt, Michael Sandel, Leif Wenar, and Iris Marion Young believe that an overlapping consensus is too fragile to secure political stability. Rawls correctly identifies a major problem for his original account, but he fails to provide a satisfactory solution.

I believe these objections rest on a mistake easily overlooked. Each objection claims that, for Rawls, the possibility of future political stability is to be guaranteed by an overlapping consensus alone. This perspective fails to recognize the central importance of the social minimum in securing political stability. There is, in fact, more resources to secure political stability than Rawls or his critics have recognized. My discussion will begin with a brief explanation of why the problem of political stability raises an important challenge to Rawls’s views on justice and why he argues for an overlapping consensus as a solution to it. I will next consider the more important objections to Rawls’s solution and why these fail. I will argue that the social minimum might better support political stability if it is broadly understood in terms of the capabilities approach. This approach is compatible with Rawls’s political liberalism and it provides a more robust understanding of a just social minimum. Political stability does not rely upon an overlapping consensus alone — and it may be better secured where the capabilities approach plays a more central role. Therefore, Rawls does provide an illuminating solution to the problem of political stability that is more compelling if we incorporate the capabilities approach into political liberalism, but in a novel way.