Office Hours
PHIL 407
July 12th
- Is Blake doing basically a social-contract type move with his concept of coercion, that we sacrifice our autonomy for a coercive scheme which only applies to us? I feel like there’s something different but I don’t really know what.
- To what extent is this similar to the “multipliers” view espoused by Goodin as an example?
- Why so strong a focus on legal institutions? Isn’t this hindering economic forms of coercion too? Isn’t Blake’s assumption of autarky actually totally noninstitutional?
- Brian Barry: no degree of economic interaction can form the moral equivlanet of the relational web between citizens of a modern state.
- Trying to understand why, it seems obvious that economic domination is coercion – and one could even be a good Hegelian/Marxist and show that the purpose of the state is to serve economic interests, and at root economic domination is first.
- Blake talks about membership before justification: firstly, we restrict ourselves to citizens, and then we justify why the coercive state applies to them. But why not the other way around, first stage is seeing who needs to be justified to via coercive action, and then second stage is seeing who is a member as such?
- For the story of the Bordurians and the Syldavians, are the Bordurians then obligates to accept a Syldvian as a citizen if they are willing to be coerced?
- So what do histories of colonialization mean and do?
- The rebuttals put out by Beitz, O’Neill, Young, etc. are pretty strong. How would miller respond?
- Is Young’s conception of structural injustice consequentialist?
- Young’s reasoning is different, but it seems that in the end you get something like Singer?
July 5th
- Getting clear on Goodin
- Goodin says “In the present world system, it is often-perhaps ordinarily-wrong to give priority to the claims of our compatriots.” In what sense does this comport with his argument?
- Foucault and Marx – Where do they fall here? How to square off continental and analytic philosophy?
- Pogge: To what extent does this square off with what Marx is saying?
- How do Marx, Foucault, etc. fit into the matrix we’ve set up throughout class?
- Marxist/Foucauldian ethical systems or analytics
- Decolonial scholars? Gayatri Spivak, Edward Said, etc.
- Would it be fair to say that Miller is saying that we can’t take the position of the subjectivity-less subject in the Rawlsian sense?