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EMERGENCY CLAIMS AND DEMOCRATIC ACTION
The straightforward normative importance of emergencies suggests that empirically engaged political theorists and philosophers should study them. Indeed, many have done so. In this essay, however, I argue that scholars interested in the political and/or moral dimensions of large-scale emergencies should shift their focus from emergencies to emergency claims. Building on Michael Saward’s model of a “representative claim,” I develop an account of an emergency claim as a claim that a particular (kind of) situation is an emergency, made by particular actors against particular background conditions to particular audiences, which in turn accept, ignore, or reject that claim. Emergency politics, in turn, consists of many different actors making and not making, accepting, and rejecting, a wide range of overlapping and competing emergency claims. I argue that scholars should shift their focus to emergency claims because doing so helps us see the fraught implications of emergency politics for marginalized groups. I examine three such implications: emergency claims are often “Janus-faced,” meaning that they function simultaneously as “weapons of the weak” and weapons of the strong; they are often regressive, including by discriminating against victims of chronic bad situations, and they often perpetuate and exacerbate existing social hierarchies. Noticing these troubling features of emergency politics raises a question that I do not address here: What might plausible alternatives to emergency politics look like?
Journal Article
The Lessons of Effective Altruism
Carol Sue Snowden worked for thirty years as a librarian at the Columbus Metropolitan Library in Columbus, Ohio. She led a quiet, frugal life, spending money mostly on books, which were her passion. When she died, she donated the money she had saved—over $1 million—to the Columbus library and seven local schools. Most of us would look upon this generosity with admiration, but according to a new movement called Effective Altruism (EA), Snowden got it wrong. While she was right to donate her money, she should have instead directed it to an organization that does the most good overall.
Journal Article
Small Money Donating as Democratic Politics
Since 2008, the number of people in the United States making small monetary donations to political causes, both within and beyond electoral politics, has skyrocketed. While critics of “big money” in politics laud these donations because they are small, proponents of small-scale democratic political action eye them suspiciously because they are monetary. Neither group interrogates whether the monetariness of these donations might be a source of their democratic potential. Building on Wendy Brown’s conceptual distinction between monetization and economization, I argue that small-money political donations are potentially democratic not only because they are small, but also because they are monetary. More specifically, the mobility, divisibility, commensurability, and fungibility of money help make small-money political donations potentially democratic, by making them potentially accessible, non-intrusive, and collective. Money is the coin of the economic realm, but it can also be a currency of democratic politics.
Journal Article
Pluralism about Global Poverty
Theorists have identified a wide range of reasons why individual and collective actors have a moral responsibility to help alleviate global poverty. There is now widespread agreement that several of these reasons are valid. From the perspective of the poverty opponent, it might seem that the more reasons there are to alleviate poverty, the better. The difficulty is that different reasons for alleviating poverty point to different poverty-alleviating activities. This situation generates questions about both how actors should set priorities among different poverty-alleviating activities (‘actor-centred’ questions) and who should have primary responsibility for alleviating particular cases of poverty (‘case-centred’ questions). This article explains why actor-centred and case-centred questions are worth asking and sketches a promising way of responding to them.
Journal Article
Accountability in an Unequal World
According to the “standard model” of accountability, holding another actor accountable entails sanctioning that actor if it fails to fulfill its obligations without a justification or excuse. Less powerful actors therefore cannot hold more powerful actors accountable, because they cannot sanction more powerful actors. Because inequality appears unlikely to disappear soon, there is a pressing need for “second-best” forms of accountability: forms that are feasible under conditions of inequality, but deliver as many of the benefits of standard accountability as possible. This article describes a model of second-best accountability that fits this description, which I call “surrogate accountability.” I argue that surrogate accountability can provide some of the benefits of standard accountability, but not others, that it should be evaluated according to different normative criteria than standard accountability, and that, while surrogate accountability has some benefits that standard accountability lacks, it is usually normatively inferior to standard accountability.
Journal Article
Democratic Inclusion Beyond the State?
Much of what political theorists have written about democracy over the past several decades presupposes, implicitly or explicitly, that democratic theorists need be concerned only with the ways in which citizens participate in the decision-making of their own states. In the last decade or so, however, this framework has become subject to increasing critical attention. The visibility of immigration as a public issue has brought into view the fact that every democratic state contains people who live within its boundaries but who are not citizens. Issues like climate change and the globalization of economic activities make it harder to assume that a given state’s decisions only affect its own citizens. Finally, various factors have made it harder to ignore the fact that non-state actors like corporations and NGOs often exercise great collective power within and across state boundaries. Whose interests and views should be taken into account in a collective decision? In what ways should their interests and views be taken into account? Why? These are the fundamental questions that Rainer Bauböck has tried to address in a recent book that draws together decades of his thinking and writing about these topics. His original essay was already the subject of several responses in the volume in which it appeared, and this Critical Exchange, which grew out of a panel at the American Political Science Association meeting in 2018, seeks to extend that conversation further. The exchange begins with a brief summary by Bauböck of the book’s main themes. This is followed by critical challenges from Sean Gray, Jennifer Rubenstein and Melissa Williams. The exchange concludes with a response from Bauböck to his critics.
Journal Article
Political and ethical action in the age of Trump
What implication, if any, does Donald Trump’s election have for democratically oriented ethical and political action in the United States – including by scholars of politics? The contributors to this Critical Exchange offer strikingly varied responses to this question, rooted in their diverse scholarly interests and differing perspectives on the inflection points of U.S. democracy. The contributors engage each other on three main issues. First, what challenges or dangers, if any, does Trump’s election pose to U.S. democracy? While none of the contributors think that Trump’s election poses an existential threat to U.S. democracy, they disagree about the severity and distinctiveness of the challenges it poses to democratic institutions, practices, and attitudes. Second, how should these challenges be characterized? Is the main issue Trump himself, the tactics he uses, the people who support him, or more structural aspects of U.S. politics, such as the decline of political parties? Finally, how should these challenges be met? Should ethical and political action in response to Trump be focused on electoral politics or social movements? Should it involve principled stand-taking or compromise? Humor or sincerity? Competition or cooperation and solidarity?
Journal Article